A Brief History of English Comedy Up to the Time of Ben Jonson

A Brief History of English Comedy Up to the Time of Ben Jonson

Miracle or Mystery plays. The earliest dramatic representation in England is believed to have been the performance of a Latin play in honour of St. Katherine in 1110. Drama originated from the rich symbolic ceremonial of the Church. It was the work of priests who used it as a means of conveying the truths of their religion to the illiterate masses. To begin with, the Church had this drama completely under control. Performances were given inside the Church buildings, and the priests were the actors. This form of drama was known as the Miracle or Mystery plays, and the material for it was drama from the Bible. Miracles consisted of the stories of saints in whose honour they were acted Gradually, the venue of the performances shifted from the Church premises to the village green or the city street. Laymen began to take part in the performances, and soon they superseded the priests entirely.

The comic elements in the Miracle plays.

 While the basis of these plays was the Bible, the treatment was a free one. Particularly in the direction of humour the popular imagination began to fill in details. Noah's wife was, for instance, made a comic figure, for she was shown very realistically as a scolding woman, refusing to enter the Ark and ridiculing Noah's prophecy of destruction. Into the scene where the shepherds watch their flocks by night on Christmas eve there was introduced a comic sheep-stealing episode. Herod was a ranting figure of melodrama. Where Satan appeared there was plenty of horse-play, with the yelling and belabouring of devils whose parts were taken by small boys.

The Miracle plays are characterized by an elementary characterization, a good deal of vigour, and abundant rough humour. But they show little sense of structure, and are very far from drama as it finally developed. Plot, form and appropriate expression were yet to be discovered.

Morality plays.

 The medieval dramatists made an advance towards modern drama, however, in the Morality plays. These plays too were didactic in purpose, but the characters in these, instead of being taken from the Bible or from the legends of saints, were personified abstractions. All kinds of men- tal and moral qualities appeared on the stage as characters in this kind of play- Patience, Perseverance, Free Will, the Five Senses, the Seven Deadly Sins, Good and Bad Angels, etc. Among such personifications there was generally a place for the Devil who had held a prominent position in the Miracle plays The Morality plays marked an advance upon the Miracle plays in so far as they made an approach towards a unity of construction, instead of being series of somewhat disconnected pageants.

The comic elements in Morality plays.

A later introduction of much importance in these plays was the so-called Vice, who was a humorous personification of evil taken on the comic side. Vice was the recognized fun- maker of the piece. This character often scored a tremendous popular success by jumping on the Devil's back, sticking thorns into him, beating him with a stick and making him roar with pain. This figure of Vice is the ancestor or direct for-runner of the Elizabethan clown.

The Interludes.

By the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the Moralities had reached a transitional stage. Human figures were mixed with allegorical figures. As a result we have plays which, according to their dominant tone, may be called Comedy Moralities, Tragedy Moralities and History Moralities. Some of the shorter of these transitional Moralities are called Interludes. The interludes are particularly associated with the name of John Heywood (1497- 1580) whose plays dropped the allegory and didacticism of the Moralities and were intended for the aristocracy, not for the middle and lower classes.

The comic elements in the Interludes.

 As their name suggests, the Interludes served to provide entertainment in the intervals of a banquet or other great occasion, and so they were both short and amusing. Being short they had little plot, but centered round a single incident, and relied largely on dialogue. Heywood's best-known Interlude is the Four P's: a' Poticary, a Pardoner, and a Palmar dispute before a Pedlar as judge, which can tell the biggest of the Palmer wins, for he says that he never knew "any one woman lot of patience". Such an interlude might be described as the dramatization of a joke.

The beginning of regular comedy and tragedy.

These early experi ments in play-writing are of great importance historically, because they did much to prepare the way for the regular drama. It was however, under the direct influence of the Renaissance (the Revival beginning) that English.com- edy and tragedy passed out of the preliminary phases of their development into forms of art. Men went back to the classics for inspiration and example in the drama as in other form of literary enterprise, though it was the work of the Latin noted Greek, play-wrights that they took as their modeis. Plautus and Seneca provided the inspiration for the writing of comedy and tragedy respectively.

The first real English comedy.

The earliest regular English comedy is Gammer Gurton's Needle the authorship of which is not known. It was writ- ten about 1550 and acted not long after that date at Christ's College, Cam- bridge. It is a realistic farce, often coarse and in long rhyming lines. It centres round an incident-the loss and finding of the Gammer's needle which leads to many misunderstandings and confusion of the kind found in the plays of Plautus. The characterization is lively.

"Ralph Roister Doister".

The second regular English comedy was Ralph Roister Doister, also written about 1550, by Nicholas Uddal who had been headmaster of Eton. In his prologue the author appeals to the authority of Plautus and Terence. The play is divided into acts and scenes, and is written in rhyming couplets, the normal line containing, as a rule, twelve syllables. The action is cleverly developed, the dialogue is on the whole sprightly; and the plot, though simple, is more complicated than that of an Interlude. It is a board vigorous comedy, and consists of the fooling of Ralph, a boastful empty- headed fool who is wooing a widow already engaged to another. As is natural in such a farce, the characterization is slight, but it is true. In general effect, despite the classical academic inspiration and its story of the Plautian kind, it has an entirely English vigour and freedom from pedantry. Less farcical and less coarse than its predecessor, it is also a better play.

The university wits.

 The quarter century or so, which followed, was a period of vast experimentation in the English drama. There was a conflict between those who insisted on the classical tradition and those who wanted to cater to the strong national taste of the English public. In the end the national taste won, and just before Shakespeare began his career as a playwright the romantic form of drama (as distinguished from the classical type) was defi- nitely established. The establishing of this romantic drama was the achieve- ment of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors, a group of university men commonly known as "university wits" They included John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nash.

John Lyly (1544-1606).

His dramatic work consists of eight comedies, of which the best are Campaspe, Endymion and Gallanthea. Their interest depends not on plot or characterization, but on language, wit ingenuity, and grace of the dialogue. Lyly helped to give comedy an intellectual tone. In his skill in repartee, puns, conceits and all sorts of verbal fire-works, he anticipated Shakespeare. In comedy Lyly was undoubtedly Shakespeare's first master. His greatest service to the drama consists in his writing plays in prose. His sparkling dialogue gave Shakespeare an excellent model to follow.

George Peele (1558-1597).

 Among the several plays written by him is The Old Wives' Tale which is built round a fairy tale. It is an amusing hurly- burly of farcical incidents, with an interest for its ridicule of Gabriel Harvey It may be regarded as the first dramatic literary satire in English, and it points the way to such a play as The Knight of the Burning Pestle,† which is simi- larly both a romantic play and a burlesque. (But Peele's finest drama is the tragedy David and Bethsabe. The other university wits contributed nothing to the development of English comedy, Thomas Kyd's best play being a tragedy called The Spanish Tragedy, and Christopher Marlowe being a great writer of tragic plays, the finest of which is Dr. Faustus).

Shakespeare (1564-1616).

Shakespeare's comedies begin with the bright, froliccome Love's Labour's Lost, full of jests and light hearted merriment. The play abounds in witty dialogue, and there is much satire on affectations. There are in it many ingenious conceits too, and the play is more in Lyly's style than any other of Shakespeare's dramas. The Comedy of Errors is a bustling farce linked to a pathetic story of sea-sorrow. Much of the humour is due to the confusion arising from mistaken identity. A Midsummer Night's Dream is another "comedy of errors", of a less boisterously farcical more imaginative and delicate kind. Henry IV (Part I) and Henry IV (Part II) are comedy as well as history. The comedy of Falstaff, who is the central figure of the mirth, is continued in broad, noisy prose, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the fat knight is brought by vanity and greed into all sorts of ridiculous positions. The Merchant of Venice is the first of Shakespeare's great romantic comedies. It is the monument of Portia's wit, Antonio's friend- ship, and Shylock's cruel and perfectly natural hatred. The humour here is more refined than before, not thrust upon us for the obvious purpose of amus- ing, but arising naturally out of the progress of events. Much Ado About Noth- ing is remarkable for the wit of Beatrice and Benedick and the humour of the immortal Dogberry and his friends. There is a marked tragic element in this play, as in The Merchant of Venice. Two more comedies, mingling romance with wit and humour are As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

The romantic qualities of Shakespeare's comedies.

Shakespeare's comedies are essentially Romantic comedies, not only because of the min- gling in them of romantic love interest with mirth and fun but because they are also a mixture of serious, and even tragic elements, and comic elements, and further, because they do not observe any of the classical unities (of time, place and action). They are rich in characterization both as regards range or variety and depth.

Ben Jonson (1573 - 1637). 

The classical qualities of Jonson's comedies. In a different key altogether are the comedies of Ben Jonson. Not only did Jonson call for an observance of the three classical unities, but he made war upon the fantastic and extravagant qualities of romantic imagination, trying to replace them with classical sanity and restraint. In one respect at least the classical quality of Jonson's comedies gives them an interest that is permanent, and an influence that was far-reaching. One difference between the romantic spirit and the classic is that the former tends toward escape from the actual conditions of life, while the latter tends to work realistically within them. This appears when we compare Twelfth Night with Every Man in His Humour. Shakespeare's comedies are full of glancing imagination and irresponsible fancy, Jonson's move in the hard light of every-day London. This realism, the vivid picture of London life, makes his comedies among the most informative plays of the period. From Jonson's comedies alone it would be possible to reconstruct whole areas of Elizabethan society. A study of them is indispensable if we have to get acquainted with the brilliant and amusing surface of the most colourful era in English history. At least one of Jonson's comedies, too, gives this close and realistic study of manners with a gaiety and grace fairly rivalling Shakespeare: The Silent Woman is one of the most sparkling comedies ever written, full of splendid fun, and with a bright, quick movement which never flags.

Jonson's comedies of "humours".

 Another peculiarity of Jonson's comic art is indicated by the title Every Man in His Humour. The word "humour" was a cant term in his day, meaning "whim" or "foible". Jonson endowed each of his characters with some particular whim or affectation. some ludicrous exaggeration of manner, speech, or dress, and he pushed for- ward this single odd trait to such an extent that all others might be lost sight of. This device was employed by Jonson not only in the above named play but also in his two great comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist. In Volpone he studied, not a foible or whim, but a master passion, the passion of greed, as it affects a whole social group. In The Alchemist he made an elaborate study of human gullibility. There is doubtless something mechanical in this method of going to work according to a set programme. Shakespeare too devoted whole plays to the study of a master passion in Othello that of jealousy, in Macbeth that of ambition. But he does this in a very different way from Jonson; he does it with much more surprise, variety, and free play of life. Jonson has, as it were, a thesis to illustrate, and exhibits one character after another, as a logician presents the various parts of his argument. In other words, he always, or nearly always, lets us see the machinery. But what he loses in spontaneity, he gains in intellectual unity and in massiveness of purpose.

*Plantus (254-184 B.C.)- a celebrated Roman comic dramatist. Several of his plays were imitated by Moliere, Shakespeare and others.

*Senees (died 65 A. D.)- a tragic playwright who exercised great influence in medieval play- wrights. Gorbodic is a good example of a Senecan tragedy in Englini. Terence (190-159 B. C.) a Roman comic writer, author of six plays.

*Gabriel Harvey (1545-1630) made various attempts at literature, both in Latin and English, of little value. A good scholar and a diligent if pedantic student, he was one of the most active of the "reformers" of English verse of his time Later in life Harvey, involved in disputes with much acuter writers than himself, was mercilessly scoffed at for the tortures he had inflicted on his native tongue, but in the beginning he was respected and loved by his friends for his gifts of learning and his culture.

†The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a comic play by Beaumont and Fletcher. It is at once a burlesque of knight errantry and of Thomas Heywood's The Four Prenticer of London, and thus the first of English parody plays, and a comedy of manners.