As Old Fortunatus is a romance transformed into a morality, so The Honest Whore is a morality presented in a romantic dress. This play shares with The Woman Killed with Kindness the distinction of furnishing the earliest example of those abstract and paradoxical moral situations which were afterwards more highly developed by Massinger and Ford. But in Dekker, as in Heywood, the moral element prevails over the dramatic. The startling title of the play seems to have been deliberately retained by the dramatist, in the face of objections made at the time; for a portion of the second edition has for its headline The Converted Courtezan, a name which is really more descriptive of the plot. In the first part, Bellafront, the heroine, is converted from her evil life by the eloquent pleadings of Hippolito: the second part represents Bellafront defending the position she has gained against the assaults of Hippolito himself, who has fallen away from his former lofty standard of virtue. The honesty of Dekker's motive is transparent; in its own abstract sphere the moral, in the first part, is most forcibly presented by Hippolito's fidelity to the memory of the mistress whom he supposes to be dead; and, in the second, by the loyalty of Bellafront to her detestable husband, Matheo. The scene in which Bellafront, under the influence of her love for Hippolito, penetrates into his chamber in the dress of a page, is most nobly imagined, and the eloquence of its expression does the highest honour to Dekker's head and heart : HIPPOLITO. Hence guard the chamber: let no more come in ; Beshrew thee, thou dost make me violate The chastest and most sanctimonius vow That e'er was entered in the court of heaven! I was on meditation's spotless wings Upon my journey thither like a storm Thou beat'st my ripened cogitations Flat to the ground and like a thief dost stand, To steal devotion from the holy land. BELLAFRONT. If woman were thy mother; if thy heart Let my tears soften it, to pity me: HIP. I do beseech thee, do not thus with scorn Woman, I beseech thee, Get thee some other suit; this fits thee not: I cannot love thee, nor I must not. The copy of that obligation, See, Where my soul's bound in heavy penalties.1 BELL. She's dead you told me; she'll let fall her suit. HIP. My vows to her filed after her to heaven. Were thine eyes clear as mine, thou mightst behold her, How I observe them: should I break my bond, This board would rive in twain, these wooden lips I ha' set thee in the path: is't not a sign I love thee, when with one so most most dear HIP. If you turn Turk again : oh, do it not! The soul that, leaving Chastity's white shore, So long as Dekker's abstract and romantic imagination can move in a congenial region, he exhibits high powers of conceiving and expressing character. His ideal contrasts are admirable, as the above extract shows, and, in the second part of The Honest Whore, equal skill is displayed in the portraits of Matheo, the selfish gambling husband of Bellafront, and her honest old father, Orlando Friscobaldo. The vast interval between Shakespeare and Dekker only makes itself apparent when we consider the poetry of the latter on its dramatic side. Dekker altogether lacked both the genius to conceive an 1 Hippolito keeps a skull in his chamber to remind him perpetually of his dead mistress. 2 Dekker's Dramatic Works, vol. ii. pp. 58-59. VOL. IV Q imaginary situation as a whole, and the art to present it on the stage in a lifelike and consistent action. Wishing to raise the imagination of the spectators above the level of common experience, he lays, in Shakespeare's manner, the scene of The Honest Whore in foreign parts, and borrows striking situations from the plays of his great predecessor. The opening scene, for example, is clearly suggested by Romeo and Juliet, and Hippolito's moralisations on the skull which reminds him of mortality are inspired by the recently acted Hamlet. But Dekker took no more pains than Heywood to make his audience believe that imaginary events would necessarily have followed each other in the order represented, or that the characters speak and act as they do, because it is in accordance with their nature. Everything in the play is detached and unconnected. The interior of the house of the Milanese courtesan is very exactly painted in such a way as to represent manners in London. One of the scenes is laid in a madhouse, merely in order that the audience may be pleased with a "realistic" view of Bedlam. The underplot, exhibiting the "humours of the patient man and the longing wife," has nothing whatever to do with the main plot. Nor is there any more consistency in the development of the characters. Bellafront, who appears as a ribald in one scene, is a saint in the next: the Duke, who orders Hippolito to be poisoned to prevent a marriage between him and his daughter, appears at the close of the play as a just and virtuous ruler: Orlando Friscobaldo, after allowing his daughter Bellafront to continue in her evil courses for many years, suddenly conceives the idea of entering her service in the disguise of a servant, in order to bring about her reformation. Improbabilities of this kind afford a measure, not only of the difficulties attending any attempt on the part of a playwright to expand the Morality into a regular drama, but also of the extraordinary genius which Shakespeare displayed in harmonising the rude taste of his audiences with the severest rules of ideal art. Thomas Middleton, a fellow-labourer with, and in some respects an imitator of, Dekker, was born like him in London, at some date not long after 1570. He was the son of a gentleman, William Middleton. In 1593 he seems to have been admitted a member of Gray's Inn, and his experience at the Bar accounts for the large number of allusions in his plays to the practice of the law. It has been supposed from a passage in The Old Law that he began to write for the stage in 1599,' but his name first appears as a dramatist in 1602, in which year he is mentioned in Henslowe's Diary as joint author of a play called Two Harpies, and in which he produced his comedy entitled Blurt, Master Constable. His most fertile and characteristic period of dramatic composition was between 1607 and 1611, during which years he wrote Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Family of Love, Your Five Gallants, A Mad World my Masters, and The Roaring Girl. All these were comedies based on the representation of contemporary manners. In his later plays he conformed his style to the change of the public taste, and imitated the Spanish manner brought into vogue by Fletcher; while at the same time, like so many of his contemporaries, he found a fresh opening for employment in the production of City Pageants. The climax of his fame or notoriety was reached in 1624, when he took advantage of the state of public opinion, after the rupture of the Spanish match in the previous year, to satirise the King of Spain and his ambassador, Gondomar, in a dramatic allegory called A Game of Chess, in which the leading statesmen of Europe are represented by the different pieces on a chess-board. This play was so popular that the Spanish ambassador complained to the King, the performance was stopped, and the players and playwright were threatened with imprisonment. Middleton died in 1627. This dramatist carried the realistic style of Dekker in the only direction still open to one whose main object was to provide the theatre with some new mode of entertain1 See Dyce's edition of Middleton's Works, p. xvi. ment. Dekker had endeavoured honestly to emphasise his abstract moral, by contrasting it with the repulsive exhibition of actual vice and folly: Middleton dropped morality almost entirely, and obtained the popular favour by the close imitation of real manners. His plays are a treasure house for the antiquary. Possessing a knowledge of life in London only rivalled by that of Dekker, he knew how to reproduce his own experience in a dramatic form. Bawds, pandars, harlots, usurers, pawnbrokers, gulls, gallants, gamblers, doctors, judges, linen-drapers, and apprentices, crowd and bustle through the dialogue of his comedies with a vigorous zest which must have been highly palatable to the spectators of the time, and perhaps no English dramatist has inherited so much of the prosaic imitative spirit of the New Comedy at Athens. But as his highest aim was to gratify the vulgar curiosity of a somewhat brutal audience, Middleton's genius never rose into the regions of true art. There seems to be be justice in Ben Jonson's judgment on him: "Markham (who added his Arcadia) was not of the company of the faithful, and was a base fellow and such were Day and Middleton." 1 Form, beauty and nobility are buried out of sight in his conceptions beneath the flowing waves of depravity. In the structure of his plays he borrows with intelligence from the practice of others what he finds useful for stage-effects, and endeavours to unite the invention of Shakespeare with the "humours" of Ben Jonson and the romance of Dekker. 2 His plots, good enough for his purpose and for his audience, want the consistency and probability required for genuine comedy, whether of intrigue or character. In Blurt, Master Constable the hero, without any rational cause, 1 Heads of Conversation with Drummond. 2 The dénouement of Blurt, Master Constable was suggested by that of All's Well that Ends Well; the plan of The Phanix by Measure for Measure; in The Witch Middleton imitates Macbeth; the character of the Mayor of Quinborough, in the play of that name, was suggested to him by Simon Eyre in The Shoemakers' Holiday; while in his general mode of representing real life he plainly follows in the footsteps of Ben Jonson. |