5 10 you see something promising that it will come to pass. Thirdly, the Catastasis, called by the Romans, Status, the height and full growth of the play: we may call it properly the counterturn, which destroys that expectation, embroils the action in new difficulties, and leaves you far distant from that hope in which it found you; as you may have observed in a violent stream, resisted by a narrow to passage, it runs round to an eddy, and carries back the waters with more swiftness than it brought them on. Lastly, the Catastrophe, which the Grecians called Avous, the French le dénouement, 15 and we the discovery, or unraveling of the plot there you see all things settling again upon their first foundations, and, the obstacles which hindered the design or action of the play once removed, it 20 ends with that resemblance of truth and nature, that the audience are satisfied with the conduct of it. Thus this great man delivered to us the image of a play; and I must confess it is so lively, that 25 from thence much light has been derived to the forming it more perfectly into acts and scenes; but what poet first limited to five the number of the acts, tragedies it was only some tale derived from Thebes or Troy, or at least something that happened in those two ages; which was worn so thread-bare by the pens of all the epic poets, and even by tradition itself of the talkative Greeklings (as Ben Jonson calls them), that before it came upon the stage, it was already known to all the audience; and the people, so soon as ever they heard the name of Edipus, knew as well as the poet, that he had killed his father by a mistake, and committed incest with his mother, before the play; that they were now to hear of a great plague, an oracle, and the ghost of Laius; so that they sat with a yawning kind of expectation, till he was to come with his eyes pulled out, and speak a hundred or more verses in a tragic tone, in complaint of his misfortunes. But one Edipus, Hercules, or Medea, had been tolerable; poor people, they escaped not so good cheap; they had still the chapon bouillé [boiled chicken] set before them, till their appetites were cloyed with the same dish, and, the novelty being gone, the pleasure vanished; so that one main end of dramatic poesy in its definition, which was to stroyed. I know not; only we see it so firmly 30 cause delight, was of consequence deestablished in the time of Horace, that he gives it for a rule in comedy: - Neu brevior quinto, neu sit productior actu [Let it be neither shorter nor longer than five acts]. So that you see the Grecians 35 cannot be said to have consummated this art; writing rather by entrances, than by acts, and having rather a general indigested notion of a play, than knowing how, and where to bestow the particular 40 graces of it. In their comedies, the Romans generally borrowed their plots from the Greek poets; and theirs was commonly a little girl stolen or wandered from her parents, brought back unknown to the city, there got with child by some lewd young fellow, who, by the help of his servant, cheats his father; and when her time comes to cry Juno Lucina, fer opem [Help me, O goddess of childbearing]! one or other sees a little box or cabinet which was carried away with her, and so discovers her to her friends, if some god do not prevent it, by coming down in a machine, and taking the thanks of it to himself. But since the Spaniards at this day allow but three acts, which they call jornadas, to a play, and the Italians in many of theirs follow them, when I con- 45 demn the ancients, I declare it is not altogether because they have not five acts to every play, but because they have not confined themselves to one certain number; it is building a house without a 50 who would willingly, before he dies, see model; and when they succeeded in such undertakings, they ought to have sacrificed to Fortune, not to the Muses. Next, for the plot, which Aristotle called to puòs, and often rшν прауμάтшν 55 σúvleois, and from him the Romans Fabula, it has already been judiciously observed by a late writer, that in their By the plot you may guess much of the characters of the persons. An old father, his son well married; his debauched son, kind in his nature to his mistress, but miserably in want of money; a servant or slave, who has so much wit to strike in with him, and help to dupe his father; a braggadocio captain, a parasite, and a lady of pleasure. As for the poor honest maid, on whom the story is built, and who ought to be one of the principal actors in the play, she is commonly a mute in it; she has the breeding of the old Elizabeth way, which was for maids to be seen, and not to be heard; and it is enough you know she is willing to be married, when the fifth act requires it. si court [This is making good use of so short a time], says the French poet, who furnished me with one of the observations and almost all their tragedies will afford us examples of the like nature. It is true, they have kept the continuity, or, as you called it, liaison des scènes, somewhat better: two do not perpetually come in together, talk, and go out togeth These are plots built after the Italian mode of houses, you see through them 10 er; and other two succeed them, and do all at once; the characters are indeed the imitations of nature, but so narrow, as if they had imitated only an eye or an hand, and did not dare to venture on the lines of a face, or the proportion of a 15 body. the same throughout the act, which the English call by the name of single scenes; but the reason is, because they have seldom above two or three scenes, properly so called, in every act; for it is to be accounted a new scene, not only every time the stage is empty, but every person who enters, though to others, makes it so; because he introduces a new business. 20 Now the plots of their plays being narrow, and the persons few, one of their acts was written in a less compass than one of our well-wrought scenes; and yet they are often deficient even in this. To go no farther than Terence, you find in the Eunuch, Antipho entering single in the midst of the third act, after Chremes and Pythias were gone off in the same play you have likewise Dorias beginning the fourth act alone; and after she has made a relation of what was done at the Soldier's entertainment (which by the way was very inartificial, because she was presumed to speak directly to the audience, and to acquaint them with what was necessary to be known, but yet should have been so contrived by the poet, as to have been told by persons of the drama to one another, and so by them to have come to the knowledge of the people), she quits the stage, and Phædria enters next, alone likewise: he also gives you an account of himself, and of his returning from the country, in monologue; to which unnatural way of narration Terence is subject in all his plays. In his Adelphi, or Brothers, Syrus and Demea enter after the scene was broken by the departure of Sostrata, Geta, and Canthara; and indeed you can scarce look into any of his comedies, where you will not presently discover the same interruption. But in how straight a compass soever they have bounded their plots and characters, we will pass it by, if they have regularly pursued them, and perfectly o observed those three unities of time, place, and action; the knowledge of which you say is derived to us from them. But, in the first place, give me leave to tell you, that the unity of place, however 25 it might be practised by them, was never any of their rules: we neither find it in Aristotle, Horace, or any who have written of it, till in our age the French poets first made it a precept of the stage. The 30 unity of time, even Terence himself, who was the best and most regular of them, has neglected: his Heautontimorumenos, or Self-punisher, takes up visibly two days, says Scaliger; the two first acts 35 concluding the first day, the three last the day ensuing; and Euripides, in tying himself to one day, has committed an absurdity never to be forgiven him; for in one of his tragedies he has made 40 Theseus go from Athens to Thebes, which was about forty English miles, under the walls of it to give battle, and appear victorious in the next act; and yet, from the time of his departure to 45 the return of the Nuntius, who gives the relation of his victory, Ethra and the Chorus have but thirty-six verses; which is not for every mile a verse. The like error is as evident in Terence 50 his Eunuch, when Laches, the old man, enters by mistake into the house of Thais; where, betwixt his exit, and the entrance of Pythias, who comes to give ample relation of the disorders he has 55 raised within, Parmeno, who was left upon the stage, has not above five lines to speak. C'est bien employer un temps But as they have failed both in laying of their plots, and in the management, swerving from the rules of their own art, by misrepresenting nature to us, in which they have ill satisfied one intention 5 both French and English, ought to give place to him? I fear (replied Neander) that, in obeying your commands, I shall draw some envy on myself. Besides, in performing them, it will be first necessary to speak somewhat of Shakspere and Fletcher, his rivals in poesy; and one of them, in my opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his to superior. of a play, which was delight; so in the instructive part they have erred worse: instead of punishing vice, and rewarding virtue, they have often shown a prosperous wickedness, and an unhappy piety: they have set before us a bloody image of revenge in Medea, and given her dragons to convey her safe from punishment; a Priam and Astyanax murdered, and Cassandra ravished, and the lust and murder ending in the victory of him who acted them. In short, there is no indecorum in any of our modern plays, which, if I would excuse, I could not shadow with some authority from the 15 ancients. And one further note of them let me leave you: tragedies and comedies were not writ then, as they are now, promiscuously, by the same person; but he who 20 found his genius bending to the one, never attempted the other way. This is so plain, that I need not instance to you that Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, never, any of them, writ a tragedy; 25 Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca never meddled with comedy. The sock and buskin were not worn by the same poet. Having, then, so much care to excel in one kind, very little is 30 to be pardoned them if they miscarried in it. And this would lead me to the consideration of their wit, had not Crites given me sufficient warning not to be too bold in my judgment of it; because, 35 the languages being dead, and many of the customs and little accidents on which it depended lost to us, we are not competent judges of it. But though I grant that, here and there, we may miss the 40 application of a proverb or a custom, yet a thing well said will be wit in all languages; and, though it may lose something in the translation, yet to him who reads it in the original, 't is still the 45 same he has an idea of its excellency, though it cannot pass from his mind into any other expression or words than those in which he finds it. * To begin then with Shakspere. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cup ressi. [As the cypresses tower above low-growing shrubs.] The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eton say, that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better done in Shakspere; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him, Fletcher and Jonson, never equaled them to him in their 50 esteem and in the last king's court, when Ben's reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakspere far above him. As Neander was beginning to examine The Silent Woman, Eugenius, earnestly regarding him: I beseech you, Neander (said he), gratify the company, and me in particular, so far as, before you speak 55 of the play, to give us a character of the author; and tell us frankly your opinion, whether you do not think all writers, Beaumont and Fletcher, of whom I am next to speak, had with the advantage of Shakspere's wit, which was their precedent, great natural gifts, improved by study; Beaumont especially being so As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon him while he was himself (for his last plays him; but something of art was wanting to the drama, till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him 5 making love in any of his scenes, or endeavoring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such a height. Humor was his proper sphere; and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them: there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times, whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like 2 monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers he so represents old Rome to us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in his language, it was, that he weaved it too closely and laboriously, in his comedies especially perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them; wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours. If I would compare him with Shakspere, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakspere the greater wit. Shakspere was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I were but his dotages), I think him the 45 love Shakspere. To conclude of him; as most learned and judicious writer which any theater ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself, as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, he has given us the most correct plays, so in the precepts which he has laid down in his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting the stage, but rather that he was frugal of it. In 50 as any wherewith the French can furnish his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit and language, and humor also in some measure, we had before us. (1667) 55 DANIEL DEFOE (1661-1731) Defoe was the son of a nonconformist butcher, and attended a dissenting school, where, according to his own account, he received a sound training in English and other modern languages as well as in the classics; his master, Morton, was a man of advanced ideas in education, and afterwards became vice-president of Harvard University. Defoe took part in the rebellion of Monmouth, engaged unsuccessfully in trade, and welcomed the Revolution. When William III was attacked as a foreigner, Defoe took up his defence in a satirical poem, The True-born Englishman, which ran through twenty-one editions and was sold in thousands in the streets. He published a number of political pamphlets, and one of them, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, was so successful in its irony that it deceived both parties into accepting it as a serious plea for high church principles. When it became known that the author was a dissenter and that the tract was really a plea for toleration, the high church party were furious at the fraud practised upon them, and the dissenters were too sore and bewildered to defend him. Defoe was fined, imprisoned, and condemned to be exposed to public derision in the pillory (1703). But the people covered the pillory with flowers, drank his health, and bought copies of his Hymn to the Pillory, in which he denounced his antagonists as 'scandals to the times,' who are at a loss to find his guilt, and can't commit his crimes.' Defoe was not kept long in prison, and in 1704 he began the publication of the Review, which was continued till 1713 and marks an important advance in the development of journalism. As a journalist Defoe showed unwearied diligence, unsurpassed enterprise and resourcefulness, and a keen sense of popular interest. There are few features of the modern newspaper which are not represented in his writings. He wrote sometimes for one party, sometimes for another, and for some years he conducted Tory papers in the interests of the Whig government, by which he was employed in the secret service. His style is remarkably simple and direct, and the 'stories' he invented can hardly be distinguished from genuine narratives. Of his numerous works, which would make a considerable library if reprinted, the one which has earned most enduring popularity is Robinson Crusoe (1720), a realistic autobiography of a sailor cast away upon a desolate island. It has been translated into almost every literary language and has been followed by countless imitations. |