The Conscious Lovers (1722). This last play is “remarkable because it resumes in brief all Steele's best ideas on life and character. We have the sketch of servants whose natural freshness is being gradually tainted by the corrupt and contagious air of lackeydom; we have satire on marriages of convenience, duelling, and the chicanery of the law; a glance at the opposition between the hereditary gentry and the rising commercial class; while, in Bevil junior, Steele portrays his ideal of a gentleman, chivalrous and honorable to women, considerate to men, respectful to his father and self-controlled amid the riotous pleasures of the capital." No plays were more important than these of Steele in the transition from the Restoration comedy of manners to the drama of the middle of the eighteenth century; yet, "if Steele led the way to moral reform, he also led the way to dramatic decay. The appeal of Steele's sentimental comedy to the emotion of pity became with inferior playwrights a false emotional motive; " 10 and, as has been suggested, "the moral reform of English drama was won at the expense of almost half a century during which Comedy bowed her head in the presence of Sentimentality." 62. Joseph Addison. The distinguished essayist of the Spectator (1672-1719), a staunch classicist, was essentially a critic of manners and literature, and not primarily a creative dramatist; nevertheless he produced at least one play that calls for mention in a review of the drama of the period. At Drury Lane, April 14, 1713, appeared Cato, a play built on the theme of the last stand of a patriot against the usurpation of Caesar. The year was that • Routh: "Steele and Addison," in C. H. E. L., IX, 71-72. 10 Nettleton, 165. of the Peace of Utrecht, and the time one of great political excitement. Both Whigs and Tories made capital of the drama, and it was acted in London five times a week for a month to crowded houses. "It pictures the last of the Roman republicans, a statuesque outline magnanimous and unmoved, surrounded by a treachery which is baffled by the loyalty of his sons and Juba, accepting death rather than dishonor, and, in his last moments, taking thought for those around him. The plot is twofold. Side by side with the study in public virtue and high politics, a drama of the tender passion occupies the stage. When Cato's son Marcius dies gallantly fighting against the traitor Syphax, his brother wins the hand of Lucia, for which they had both been honorable rivals, and Juba, the once rejected suitor of Marcia, Cato's daughter, romantically rescues her from the clutches of Sempronius in disguise and finds that she has loved him all the time." " Cato is marked by stately rhetoric and cold dignity, and the characters are not lifelike; nevertheless, as the play united the "grandiose projection of characters" that the public admired in Milton with the "sentimental chivalry of a French romance," it was a success. To modern taste, however, the style is too declamatory and the plot full of improbabilities; so that the work remains a solitary production without much influence on the later drama. Along with Addison might be remarked two other men who represented the influence of French tragedy upon English, and especially the influence of Racine-Edmund Smith and Ambrose Philips. Smith's Phaedra and Hippolytus was adapted from Phèdre and Philips's The Distrest Mother from Andromaque. For the first of these "Steele and Addison," in C. H. E. L., IX, 71. 11 Routh: plays Addison wrote the prologue, and for the second the epilogue. The Distrest Mother was exceptionally popular for a number of years. 63. Nicholas Rowe.-A final and important figure in the transition was Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), who carried over into tragedy something of Steele's sentimentalism in comedy, and who, while largely influenced by classic theory and method, is outstanding among the dramatists of the period for his interest in Elizabethan subjects. In 1709 he published his famous six-volume edition of Shakespeare, the first really critical edition of the dramatist, and from 1715 until his death he served as poet laureate. He was an accomplished scholar, a translator of merit, and a man of engaging personality who enjoyed great esteem for his talents. The Fair Penitent (1703), an adaptation from The Fatal Dowry of Massinger and Field, was one of the most successful tragedies of the century. Of this production Dr. Johnson said, "There is scarcely any work of any poet so interesting by the fable and so delightful in the language." The play is now primarily interesting, however, as an eighteenth century version of Elizabethan dramatic methods. The story is that of the downfall of the wife of Young Charalois (Rowe's Altamont) by her love for Young Novall (Rowe's Lothario). This story, which Massinger so tells as to gain respect and sympathy for the husband, in the hand of Rowe shifts interest to the villain. Young Novall, "a contemptible dandy, who triumphs rather by his cunning than by his personal charm or power of fascination," 12 becomes in Lothario a lover "whose seductive charm is exploited with every lavish 12 Hart: Introduction to The Fair Penitent and Jane Shore, xlii. device of rhetoric." The heroine, Calista, in Rowe's play indeed satisfies poetic justice by her death, but this she seems to meet without any real inner sense of regeneration. The Fair Penitent turns its plot, that of a tragedy, very largely on the discovery of a letter and really completes its action at the end of the fourth act. In spite of any technical shortcomings, however, the play was not without its effective scenes and undoubtedly held the secret of appeal to an audience. The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), professedly "written in imitation of Shakespeare's style," deals with the sad story of the generous-hearted woman who unhappily became the love of Edward IV. The characters in the play are to some extent drawn from Richard III, but there the resemblance to Shakespeare ends. Jane Shore, however, is more deeply penitent than Calista; and in general Rowe's plays were much favored by great performers, and held their own on the stage well into the nineteenth century. Tamerlane (1702), originally intended as a compliment to William III, with a caricature of Louis XIV as Bajazet, was regularly performed in London on November 5, the day of William's anniversary and the Gunpowder Plot, until 1815. CHAPTER IX THE ERA OF SENTIMENTALISM 1 で • frising rammer ocz 64. The New Age. Drama vs. Novel. The second quarter of the eighteenth century was marked by many conflicting forces, in the drama as in other forms of literature and life. In her political life never was England more complacent-more inert-than under the first two Georges and Walpole. The period of Classicism was ascendant, but passing; that of Romanticism had not yet reached its height; and realism and deism were in the air. For the moment in England perhaps no one fully perceived the drift of contending forces. Form and rule were being cast aside, it is true; but something very like artistic chaos had come. The effect of complacency and liberalism on the drama was inevitable. "As the democratic ideas of the Reformation more and more prevailed in English life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the drama came under their influence; and before Richard 1In the general period covered by the present chapter the work of two American scholars is outstanding. Professor Nettleton, of Yale, the pioneer who has done most to give outline to the period, contributed "The Drama and the Stage" to Volume X of the Cambridge History of English Literature. This discussion he afterwards revised and enlarged in his book, English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, to which reference has already been made. In 1915 appeared The Drama of Sensibility, by Dr. Ernest Bernbaum, of Harvard and the University of Illinois, which book has the importance of studying an important phenomenon through the entire course of its development. 160 |