Meliora.

THE

THE OLD DRAMATISTS ON DRINK.

HE dramatic literature of England, taken for all in all, is characterised by force, intelligence, and personality. Its early producers were great men, great Englishmen, full of the hardy vitality of the race from which they sprung. As Hazlitt has said, 'They were truly English. They did not look out of themselves to see what they should be; they sought for truth and nature, and found it in themselves. There was no tinsel

and but little art; they were not the spoiled children of affectation and refinement, but a bold, vigorous, independent race of thinkers, with prodigious strength and energy, with none but natural' grace, and heartfelt unobtrusive delicacy. They were not at all sophisticated. The mind of their country was great in them, and it prevailed. With their learning and unexampled acquirement, they did not forget that they were men: with all their endeavours after excellence they did not lay aside the strong original bent and character of their minds.' These poets, knowing the irregularity and might of human passion, saw in the representative form of the drama an effective instrument for the exposition of thought-of thought gifted with the grace, power, and attractiveness of life; and trusting to their own judgments they produced visions of life, pictures of history, expositions of the workings of passion, and lessons on the philosophy of events, which have placed the dramatic literature of England in the foremost files of the products of thought, and enabled Bacon, the great compeer of Shakespeare, to say, Dramatica poesis est veluti Historia spectabilis.' 'Dramatic poetry is, as it were, visible history.' It was because they themselves lived and translated their own life into thought that they were able to exhibit to others the threads of causation running from the passionate heart of man along the mazes of circumstance to the production of results. The fancy, the affections, the passions, and the reasonings of men, in all their strength and with all their Vol. 10.-No. 37.

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ardour, were looked on and experienced by them with observant eyes, and turned to account at once as illustrations or instructions. Hence the realism of the Elizabethan drama and its vraisemblance; and hence it is that the wit, humour, brilliancy of thought, briskness of fancy, and dexterity of phrase never seem superfluous, or merely ornamental, and are accepted as part of the characters which defile before us upon imagination's broad and ample stage. They are impassioned persons, not personified passions; they are neither allegories, symbols, nor types, but plain realities invested with a life beyond life by the master spirits of that age of vivid conception, ardent feeling, and glowing thought.

In the Elizabethan era, dramatic literature had a peculiar suitability to the state of society. The practical mind of England revolted from abstract thought and persisted in having things put in the concrete. Intelligence had, indeed, been enfranchised from its bondage to ritual theology and scholastic philosophy; but it could not readily divest itself of the taste for scenic effect imbibed from the former, or the inclination to search into the secret operations of thought induced by the latter. The theatre combined both, yet secularised each, and added besides a sort of experimental philosophy of the passions which harmonised with the tendencies of the time. But it had also a higher utility. It popularised thought. It educated the people. It supplied object lessons' in history, social life, and morals for the masses. It diffused throughout society the best ideas of the best thinkers in the most attractive forms, and with the most effective urgency and agencies. In an unreading age it provided intellectual excitement and secular instruction. united in its own functions for that age what we now diversely effect by our galleries of painting and sculpture, our concerts and conversaziones, our lectures and clubrooms, our museums and athenæums, our public libraries and reading-rooms, and our magazines and newspapers. The drama was, indeed, an essential element in the life of a transitional age, in which great mental activity and intense passion were combined with scarcity of books and inability to read, as well as with tastes for enjoying life in common, and a deficiency of home accommodations and comforts to make such enjoyment possible at the citizen's fireside. Looked at thus, the drama, in the age of its highest development, justifies its existence as a form at once of literature and of life.

It

The drama represents action in the line of causation, not of appearance. Painting shows only a state, the action of a moment; but the drama displays to us the forward movement

of quick life-life passing amid the possibilities and probabilities of passion and event, as a constantly changing present rooted in the past and growing towards the future, the denouement. The drama is not only imitative but instructive; life so exhibited as to give pleasure; it is, in one word, imaginative. It is not like dialogue, a dull and changeless discourse, shared in by several interlocutors; nor stately narrative like an epic; nor all emotion-fraught like lyric poetry. It possesses, indeed, animated dialogue and conversation briskened by feeling; it has a story in the origin, movement, and issue; and it gains interest and intensity from the energy of the emotion which it represents; but all these are realised and invested with life. They thus acquire a zest and relish; and impart a vitally animal delight by their sensuousness, which gives them a power over the spirit far more lively and enduring than either could possess singly and apart. Hence, the drama busied men's brains, stirred their hearts, quickened public opinion, and excited zeal, for it was the mirror of human life constructed by genius.

upon,

So lusty was the life of the early dramatists, that their thoughts took shape, vitality, and individuality. They hunger and thirst, rejoice and are sorrowful, act and are acted have lawless imaginations and tormenting desires, both fate and metaphysical aid' surround them, yet they are real. We do not find them

Playing with words and idle similes,

but creating persons, setting in motion causes, and bringing about effects. This overflowing life, this boisterousness of animal vivacity and spendthriftness of fancy, make the biographies of our dramatists often as full of incident as their own plays, and as interesting as many modern romances. They are all tinctured with a spirit of adventure, and almost all of them have an unsaintly touch of sin on their souls, indicating a sort of hunger and thirst after unrighteousness. Vicissitudes, dangers, excitements, were common with them. It was seldom that with any of them 'it savoured of meat and drink;' but when it did they made the best amends they could for a year of abstinence and toil by a week of merriment and convivial indulgence.' From these men, brimful of the experiences of life, we wish to draw a lesson, and to learn what they thought of that vice of drunkenness in which they too often revelled, and from which they frequently suffered. We intend, by induction of instances' taken from their writings, to show what the old dramatists thought of drink, and in what spirit they spoke of that bane of men, cities, and societies.

This is a quarry yet unwrought in the temperance cause. There has, indeed, appeared in The Scottish Review' an able paper on The Sots of Shakespeare,' and in our own pages (October, 1861) an endeavour was made to interest our readers in Shakespeare's opinions on Wine.' We venture to open a much more extensive and exhaustive investigation; and to endeavour to bring before the reader the verdict of the old dramatists on drink. That we are not unlikely, in the course of our quest, to find some distinct expressions of opinion on this subject may be indicated by a quotation or two from an old author, whose power seems to come nearer to the fine vigour and impassioned form of thought, the illustrative terseness, the deep reach of feeling, and profound philosophy of Shakespeare than any other dramatist among his compeers; although in his own time,

His Fame unto that pitch was only raised,
As not to be despised, nor overpraised.

Of Cyril Tourneur the only authentic fact known is that in 1613 he carried letters to Brussels for King James I., and was rewarded for this service with ten pounds. He is reputedly the author of three plays-The Nobleman, a tragi-comedy,' The Atheist's Tragedy,' and 'The Revenger's Tragedy.' The first is lost; from the second we have read a few extracts; the third is the only one we know; and we quite endorse the late Professor Craik's opinion of it. Both in the development of character and the conduct of the action, it evinces a rare dramatic skill, and the dialogue in parts is wonderfully finenatural and direct as real passion, yet ennobled by the breathing thoughts and burning words of a poetic imagination, by images and lines that plough into the memory and the heart.' Amongst these we need not hesitate to quote the following expressive phrases, which we commend to the notebook and mind of temperance advocates. The play from which they are taken was published in 1606. Spurio, the illegitimate son of the Duke, complains:

I was begot

After some gluttonous dinner, some stirring dish
Was my first father, when deep healths went round,
And ladies' cheeks were painted red with wine,
Their tongues as short and nimble as their heels,
Uttering words sweet and thick; and when they rose
Were merrily disposed to fall again.

In such a whispering and withdrawing hour,
When base male-bawds kept sentinel at stair heads,
Was I stolen softly; oh, damnation meet,
The sin of feasts-drunken adultery.
I feel it swell me! my revenge is just!
I was begot in impudent wine and lust.
Stepmother, I consent to thy desires;
I love thy mischief well, but I hate thee.

His honestly born half-brother, Vindici, speaks of—
Drunken procreation! which begets so many drunkards.
Well, if anything be damned,

It will be twelve o'clock at night; that twelve
Will never 'scape.

It is the Judas of the hours, wherein

Honest salvation is betrayed to sin.

This same Vindici, with a skull in his hand, says

Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble;

A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo them,
To suffer wet damnation to run through them.

Luxurioso, asking for a person, gets as his reply from Hippolito

Luxurioso.

Your good lordship

Would have a loathsome sight of him, offence;
He's not in case now to be seen, my lord,
The worst of all the deadly sins is in him :—
That beggarly damnation-Drunkenness.
Then he's a double slave.

Vindici, too, when this double slave is to be murdered in his drunken sleep for his mighty revenge, avers

He that dies drunk, falls into hell fire like a bucket of water, qush, qush!

Here, having drawn our bow almost at a venture, in a single play we have found a goodly number of strong, pertinent words, which show that Cyril Tourneur had seen, perhaps felt, the terrible woes of addiction to that vice and sin which another dramatist affirms will be employed

To be hell's advocate 'gainst their own souls.

England's old dramatists, although possessed of nimble fancy, delectable wit, and 'brave sublunary' intelligence, were also for the most part endowed with strong passions and given to evil habits. They would 'continue quaffing, carousing, and surfeiting' for days together on the proceeds of a successful play; and thereafter, overwhelmed by the distresses arising from their excesses, would hide out of sight from friends for shame, from duns for debt, and from foes for terror, often being noticed, as an old rhymer has it—

Now strutting in a silken suit,
Then begging by the way.

It was a wild, coarse, dissolute life they led for the most part; we except their head and chief, for reasons given in a paper (Meliora,' April, 1864) on The Moral Character of Shakespeare.' They were most of them men whom accident or folly had thrown out of the right grooves of progress; and