FullReads

‘But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.’ The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse. If it be said that Shakspeare’s is the very highest art, the answer is, that what they hated in him was not his high art, but his low art, the foul and horrible elements which he had in common with his brother play-writers. True, there is far less of these elements in Shakspeare than in any of his compeers: but they are there. And what the Puritans hated in him was exactly what we have to expunge before we can now represent his plays. If it be said that they ought to have discerned and appreciated the higher elements in him, so ought the rest of their generation. The Puritans were surely not bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and brother poets did not see. And it is surely a matter of fact that the deep spiritual knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare’s plays (and them alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all men and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612, has assigned to him.

‘I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men’s witty labours, especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr. Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood.’

While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing in Shakspeare beyond the same ‘happy and copious industry’ which he sees in Dekker and Heywood,–while Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real genius in Charles the First’s reign, places Fletcher’s name ”Twixt Jonson’s grave and Shakspeare’s lighter sound,’ and tells him that

‘Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fool’s replies.
* * * * *
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.
* * * * *
Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility;’ {4}

while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare’s marvellous lyrical sweetness, ‘his native wood-notes wild’; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not discover the stork among the cranes?

An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments’ consideration. It is said, ‘the grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.’ Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster’s plays, seems inclined to exalt this habit into a virtue. After saying that the licentious and debauched are made ‘as odious in representation as they would be if they were actually present’–an assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the case of Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to forget that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be, keeps stoutly on the side of virtue–Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that ‘perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless of words, and only considerate of actions.’