of hell, in the form of a dragon's mouth, through which the devils made their entrances and exits. There is something at once shocking and ludicrous in the blasphemous absurdity of these productions. The following passage, though selected for its decorum, will give some idea of the tone in which these holy personages treated topics the most sacred. It is taken from a mystery entitled "The Conception." It is Joseph who speaks : It may be thought that there is more of naïveté than profaneness in this curious monologue; but there are other passages so explicitly gross, and in so unequivocal a tone of impious pleasantry, as to leave no doubt but the two extremes of superstition and infidelity had met in the monasteries; however the sacredness of the subject, and the authority of the performers, may have imposed on the multitude. Nor is this meeting of extremes unnatural or infrequent. Why they should endeavour to bestialize the common reason of mankind is no less easily accounted for. It is the policy, if not the instinct, of all tyranny, spiritual and temporal, to bow down the slaves of its power, in very wantonness, to the lowest abasement. This profane buffoonery at length gave such public scandal, as to call for the interference of the civil magistrate: and, soon after, some advances were made towards introducing a better taste. LAZARE BAIF, a gentleman of Anjou, who had studied the Greek poets in Italy under the celebrated scholar MUSURUS, early in the 16th century, gave translations in French verse of the Electra of Sophocles and the Hecuba of Euripides. Several other translations from the Greek drama quickly followed. But the first who introduced any thing approaching to regular tragedy on the stage was Jodelle. His Cleopatra, the earliest tragedy in the language, was acted with prodigious applause at the palace of Rheims, in 1552, before Henry II. and a splendid court. The Queen of Egypt was represented by the poet himself, then only 20 years of age, and the other characters by the nobles of the court. Jodelle is regarded as the inventor of the tragic art in France. He was celebrated in his life-time as " a famous child of the Muses," and figured in " the poetic pleiad" of his contemporary and friend Ronsard. The extent to which the dramatic genius of Jodelle was honoured by the poets of his day, and the influence which the Greek drama had already gained in France, may be collected from a curious circumstance related in the obscure memoirs of the time ---An assemblage of scholars and poets, among whom was Jodelle himself, being attracted to Arcueil by the celebration of the Carnival, in 1552, took occasion, in the spirit of the season, to celebrate the recent triumph of their companion, after the manner of the Greeks. They raised a temple to Bacchus; dithyrambics were composed and sung, in imitation of the ancient festivals of the god. A goat, decked out in due form with fillets and flowers, was produced for sacrifice at the altar. But the priests of the Muse, in their Pagan enthusiasm, were humane; and the votive goat, after merely the semblance of a bloody offering, was dismissed with life and liberty. They were themselves much nearer being made the victims of their own sacrifice. The clergy raised a persecuting cry of impiety and idolatry against the performers of this harmless masquerade. The French would consign to eternal ridicule the man who suggested the revival of the Cleopatra of Jodelle. But such a play, and of such a date, in the English language, would throw our dramatic virtuosos into an ecstasy. They who can discover truth, force, simplicity, freedom, in the rude language, gross manners, and capricious extravagance of an uncultivated age, and who mistake its figurative appetite of giant coarseness and capaciousness for power of imagination, would place Jodelle, were he English, among the satellites of Shakspeare. The following lines may be given as a specimen of his manner. The scene is historical. It is that in which Seleucus charges Cleopatra, in the presence of Octavius Cæsar, with secreting part of her treasure. Cleopatra, boxing and kicking him, says, *Ah, faux meurdrier! ah, faux traistre! arrache Que plust aux dieux que ce fust la cervelle! Puissant Cæsar! retiens la doncq. (Cleopatre à Seleuque.) Voila Tous mes bienfaits-ha! le deuil qui m'efforce Donne à mon cœur languoreux telle force, (Octavien à Cleopatre.) O quelle grinsant courage! Mais rien n'est plus furieux que la rage D'un cœur de femme. Hé bien! quoi! Cleopatre, (A Seleuque.) Fuy-t'-en, amy, fuy-t'-en. Shakspeare's play on the same subject was written near half a century after that of Jodelle; and between the genius displayed in the one and in the other the distance is immense. The memorable description of Cleopatra sailing down the Cydnus, and some passages of sublimity and pathos, as the drama assumes the tone and cast of adversity, are made for the admiration of mankind. But there is a close and lamentable resemblance between the two Cleopatras. The scene just cited is in exact colouring and keeping with that in which Shakspeare's Cleopatra, striking the messenger, says-- "Hence, Horrible villain! or I'll spurn thine eyes, Thou shalt be whipped with wire, and stewed in brine, that other scene, in which she swears Ah! false villain, false traitor, I'll tear the hair off thy cruel head. Would the gods it were thy brain I dashed out. (Cleopatra to Seleucus.) See the fruits of all my bounty. Ah! the grief I suffer gives to my languid heart such force, that methinks I could beat thy bones to powder with my fists, and tread on thee till thy loins burst beneath my feet. (Octavius.) Oh! what a devilish (teeth-gnashing) spirit! but nothing is so furious as the heart of an enraged woman.-(To Cleopatra) Eh! how! Cleopatra, han't you yet had your stomach-full of beating him?-(To Seleucus) Begone, begone, my friend. "By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth, that scene of deplorable buffoonery between Cleopatra, on the eve of suicide, and the clown, who brings her the aspic; and but too many other passages, which are read with pain and humiliation, by all who regard the glory of the English stage, and admire Shakspeare with discernment. Jodelle, who was familiar with the Greek poets, copied their regularity and simplicity of plot; but so inartificially, that it makes his play only the more flat and tedious. It opens with the ghost of Antony complaining that the gods, envious of his glory, had made him the slave of love for his ruin; and announcing, that Cleopatra, by his command, conveyed to her in a dream, was to slay herself that day at his tomb. The queen next appears, surrounded by her female attendants, and occupied with this dream. She devotes herself to death, in obedience to the command of her lover's ghost, to avoid being chained to the triumphal car of his victorious rival. The following verses, in which she vows the sacrifice of her life, siderable force. * Que plutost cette terre au fond de ses entrailles possess con There is, in imitation of the Greeks, a chorus of Alexandrian women, who descant upon the vanity of human affairs; the glory and the fall of Troy; the wrongs and sorrows of Medea; the beauty of the rose, which endures but for a day; and, finally, the disastrous loves of Marc Antony and Cleopatra. He wrote several other pieces, among which "The Passion of Dido," dramatized from Virgil, is the most endurable; all, however, exhibiting glimpses of great natural talent, in the midst of rudeness, negligence, and haste. "The composition of a tragedy," says La Mothe, "never cost him above ten mornings." He died at an early age, miserable and neglected, after having been the delight of two sovereigns--one among many examples of the ingratitude of kings, and of the sensibility and weakness of the poetic character under disappointment. In the extreme of poverty and sickness, he reminds (in vain) Charles Sooner may this earth engulf me in its bowels, sooner may the torturing pincers of the avenging sisters, that spread horror over the infernal lake, tear my vitals, than I counsel me to this, or let the fear of death find passage through my ear. IX. of inhuman memory, that "he who makes use of the lamp should at least supply it with oil"---“ Qui se sert de la lampe, au moins de l'huile y met." But what seems to have broken his heart was the failure of a grand spectacle, founded on the Argonautic expedition, which he undertook to have represented under his own immediate direction at court. He had employed, in the preparation of it, all the resources of his skill, which was remarkable, in architecture and scenic painting. But on the eventful day, the performers, musicians, scene-shifters---all conspired, by their blunders, to ruin his hopes. "Where," says he, I had ordered two rocks, I beheld advancing two bells” (au lieu de deux rochers que j'avais commandés, je vis arriver deux clochers). The following beautiful stanza is from a Funeral Ode on his wretched end, written by one of his friends: * Jodelle est mort de pauvreté. HORACE, BOOK III. ODE XIII. Of scatter'd flowers and sweetest wine! A kid to-morrow shall be thine, Whose budding horns threat love and war Falsely, alas! poor wantoner! To-morrow with his heart's red tide Visits with unrelenting day : * Jodelle hath had his death-stroke from poverty. Poverty hath had power over the treasure of France. O God! how cruel. Heaven gave Jodelle a spirit other than human-France denied him a morsel of bread, so much was she a cruel mother. [This closely literal version can give to the mere English reader no idea of the simplicity, tenderness, and turn of phrase, in the original.] |