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JAMES SHIRLEY.

[SHIRLEY was born in London about the year 1596, and lived through the Civil War and Commonwealth into the Restoration, dying in 1667. His copious dramatic activity began in 1625, in which year he produced the comedy entitled Love's Tricks. Before this, in 1618, he had published an imitation of Venus and Adonis under the title of Echo. His plays were produced in rapid succession up to 1641. In 1646 he published a volume of poems, chiefly erotic, and two small volumes of Masques etc in 1653 and 1659.]

Shirley was essentially an imitative not an original genius. His claim to a place among the great poets of his age rests solely upon his wonderful manipulative dexterity, his power of assimilating and reshaping the creations of his great predecessors. Towards the close of a grand period, perhaps even while its leading spirits are in full creative swing, two distinct tendencies manifest themselves. Men of independent mind separate themselves from the main current, and cast about for fields which the masters have left unoccupied. Men of more pliant and docile intellect follow humbly in the footsteps of the masters, and seize freely upon the wealth which they have accumulated. Shirley belonged to the latter class. He did not try to invent new types, or to say what had not been said before; but stored his mind with the thoughts and the imagery of his predecessors, and reproduced them with joyous facility. We may admire the fluency, the elegance, and the force of Shirley's verse, the ease and naturalness of his dramatic situations, but the attentive reader of his predecessors is never called upon to admire anything new. Fletcher was his chief model and exemplar, but he laid them all freely under contribution. The chief critical pleasure in reading him is the pleasure of memory.

W. MINTO.

A LULLABY.

[From The Triumph of Beauty, a Masque, 1646.}

Cease, warring thoughts, and let his brain
No more discord entertain,

But be smooth and calm agair..

Ye crystal rivers that are nigh,
As your streams are passing by
Teach your murmurs harmony.
Ye winds that wait upon the Spring
And perfumes to flowers do bring,
Let your amorous whispers here
Breathe soft music to his ear.
Ye warbling nightingales repair
From every wood, to charm this air,
And with the wonders of your breast

Each striving to excel the rest,

When it is time to wake him, close your parts, And drop down from the tree with broken hearts

THE GARDEN.

[From Poems, 1646.]

This garden does not take my eyes,
Though here you show how art of men
Can purchase nature at such price

Would stock old Paradise again.
These glories while you dote upon,
I envy not your spring nor pride;
Nay boast the summer all your own,
My thoughts with less are satisfied.
Give me a little plot of ground,
Where might I with the sun agree,
Though every day he walk the round
My garden he should seldom see.

Those tulips that such wealth display
To court my eye, shall lose their name,
Though now they listen, as if they
Expected I should praise their flame.

But I would see myself appear
Within the violet's drooping head,
On which a melancholy tear
The discontented morn hath shed.

Within their buds let roses sleep
And virgin lilies on their stem,
Till sighs from lovers glide and creep
Into their leaves to open them.

I' th' centre of my ground compose
Of bays and yew my summer-room,
Which may, so oft as I repose,
Present my arbour and my tomb.

No woman here shall find me out,
Or if a chance do bring one hither,
I'll be secure, for round about
I'll moat it with my eyes' foul weather.

No birds shall live within my pale,
To charm me with their shames of art,
Unless some wandering nightingale
Come here to sing and break her heart;

Upon whose death I'll try to write
An epitaph, in some funeral stone,
So sad and true, it may invite
Myself to die, and prove mine own.

THE MIGHT OF DEATH.

[From Cupid and Death, a Masque, 1653.]

Victorious men of earth, no more

Proclaim how wide your empires are;

Though you bind in every shore,
And your triumphs reach as far

As night or day.

Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey,
And mingle with forgotten ashes when
Death calls ye to the crowd of common men
Devouring Famine, Plague, and War,
Each able to undo mankind,
Death's servile emissaries are;

Nor to these alone confined
He hath at will

More quaint and subtle ways to kill;
A smile or kiss, as he will use the art,
Shall have the cunning skill to break a heart.

A DIRGE.

[From The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, printed 1659.]

The glories of our blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things;

There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:

Sceptre and crown
Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade. Some men with swords may reap the field, And plant fresh laurels where they kill; But their strong nerves at last must yield; They tame but one another still:

Early or late

They stoop to fate,

And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, poor captives, creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow,

Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon Death's purple altar now

See, where the victor-victim bleeds:

Your heads must come

To the cold tomb,

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

THOMAS RANDOLPH.

[THOMA! RANDOLPH was born in the summer of 1605, at Dodford, Ir Northamptonshire, and died at Blatherwick. in the same county, in March 163. His drama of The Jealous Lovers was printed in 1632; the remainder of his works appeared posthumously in 1638.]

It seems probable that in the premature death of Randolph, English literature underwent a very heavy loss. He died unexpectedly when he was only twenty-nine, leaving behind him a mass of writing at once very imperfect and very promising. The patronage of Ben Jonson, it would seem, rather than any very special bias to the stage, led him to undertake dramatic composition, and though he left six plays behind him, it is by no means certain that he would have ended as a dramatist. His knowledge of stage requirements is very small indeed; it would be impossible to revive any of his pieces on the modern boards on account of the essential uncouthness of the movement, the length of the soliloquies, and the thinness of the plot. His three best dramas are distinguished by a vigorous directness and buoyancy of language, and by frequent passages of admirable rhetorical quality, but they are hardly plays at all, in the ordinary sense. His master-piece, The Muses' Looking Glass, is a moral essay in a series of dialogues, happily set in a framework of comedy; the Jealous Lovers is full, indeed, of ridiculous stratagems and brisk humorous transitions, but it has no sanity of plot; while Amyntas is a beautiful holiday dream, aery and picturesque, and ringing with peals of facry laughter, but not a play that any mortal company of actors could rehearse. Intellect and imagination Randolph possessed in full measure, but as he does not seem to have been born to excel in play-writing or in song-writing, and as he died too early to set his own mark on literature, we are left to speculate down what groove such brilliant and energetic gifts as his would finally have

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