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lady whom we know by his description to be Clarisia. Conditions has discovered that his mistress is equally in love with Lamphedon; all which circumstances are described and not rendered dramatic: and then Conditions, for his own advantage, brings the two lovers together, and they plight their troth, and are finally married. The lost brother, Sedmond, next makes his appearance under the name of Nomides; and with him a Phrygian lady, Sabia, has fallen in love. But her love is unrequited; she is rejected, and the uncourteous knight flies from her. Lamphedon and Clarisia are happy at the Duke's court; but Conditions, as it obscurely appears, wanting to be travelling again, has irritated the Duchess against her daughter-in-law, and they both, accompanied by Conditions, fly to take ship for Thracia. They fall in with pirates, who receive them on ship-board, having been secretly promised by Conditions that they will afford a good booty. We soon learn, by the appearance of Lamphedon, that they have thrown him overboard, and that he has lost his lady; but the pirates, who are by no means bad specimens of the English mariner, soon present themselves again, with a sea-song, which we transcribe; for assuredly it was fitted to rejoice the hearts of the playgoers of a maritime nation :—

66

Lustily, lustily, lustily, let us sail forth;

The wind trim doth serve us, it blows from the north.

All things we have ready and nothing we want
To furnish our ship that rideth hereby;
Victuals and weapons they be nothing scant;
Like worthy mariners ourselves we will try.
Lustily, lustily, &c.

Her flags be new trimmed, set flaunting aloft;
Our ship for swift swimming, oh, she doth excel :
We fear no enemies, we have escaped them oft:

Of all ships that swimmeth, she beareth the bell.
Lustily, lustily, &c.

And here is a master excelleth in skill,
And our master's mate he is not to seek;
And here is a boatswain will do his good will,
And here is a ship, boy, we never had leak.

Lustily, lustily, &c.

If Fortune then fail not, and our next voyage prove,
We will return merrily and make good cheer,

And hold all together as friends link'd in love;

The cans shall be filled with wine, ale, and beer.
Lustily, lustily, &c."

The action of this comedy is conducted for the most part by description; an easier thing than the dramatic development of plot and character. Lamphedon falls in with the pirates, and by force of arms he compels them to tell him of the fate of his wife. She has been taken, it seems, by Conditions, to be sold to Cardolus, an island chief; and then Lamphedon goes to fight Cardolus, and he does fight him, but finds not the lady. Conditions has however got rid of his charge, by persuading her to assume the name of Metræa, and enter the service of Leosthines. Hardship must have wonderfully changed her; for after a

time her brother, Sedmond, arrives under his assumed name, and becomes a candidate for her affections. The good old man under whose protection she remains has adopted her as his daughter. Lamphedon is on the way to seek her, accompanied by Conditions; and thus by accident, and by the intrigues of the knavish servant, all those are reunited who have suffered in separation for Leosthines is the banished father. How Conditions is disposed of is not so clear. He is constantly calling himself a little knave, and a crafty knave, a parasite, a turncoat; and he says,

"Conditions? nay, double Conditions is my name, That for my own advantage such dealings can frame."

It is difficult to discover what advantage he derives from his trickiness, yet he has always a new trick. It is probable that he was personated by some diminutive performer, whose grimaces and ugliness would make the audience roar with delight. The tinkers in the first scene say they know not what to do with him, except to "set him to keep crows." The object of the writer of the comedy, if he had any object, would appear to be to show that the purposes of craft may produce results entirely unexpected by the crafty one, and that happiness may be finally obtained through the circumstances which appear most to impede its attainment. This comedy is remarkable for containing none of the ribaldry which was so properly objected to in the plays of the early stage. It is characterised, also, by the absence of that melo-dramatic extravagance which belonged to this period, exhibiting power, indeed, but not the power of real art. These extravagances are well described by the author of The Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres;' although his notion that an effort of imagination, and a lie, are the same thing is very characteristic:-" The writers of our time are so led away with vain glory that their only endeavour is to pleasure the humour of men, and rather with vanity to content their minds than to profit them with good ensample. The notablest liar is become the best poet; he that can make the most notorious lie, and disguise falsehood in such sort that he may pass unperceived, is held the best writer. For the strangest comedy brings greatest delectation and pleasure. Our nation is led away with vanity, which the author perceiving, frames himself with novelties and strange trifles to content the vain humours of his rude auditors, feigning countries never heard of, monsters and prodigious creatures that are not as of the Arimaspie, of the Grips, the Pigmies, the Cranes, and other such notorious lies." Sidney, writing of the same period of the drama, speaks of the apparition of "a hideous monster with fire and smoke."+ And Gosson, having direct reference to some romantic dramas formed upon romances and legendary tales, as Common Conditions' was, says, "Sometimes you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from country to country for the love of his lady, encountering many a terrible monster made of brown paper; and at his return is so wonderfully changed, that he cannot be known but by some posy in his

* A leaf or two is lost of the original copy, but enough remains to let us see how the plot will end. We learn that Nomides repents of his rejection of Sabia.

+ Defence of Poesy.'

tablet, or by a broken ring, or a handkerchief, or a piece of a cockle-shell.” * When the true masters of the romantic drama arose, they found the people prepared for the transformation of the ridiculous into the poetical.

If there was amongst that audience at Stratford, in 1580, witnessing the performance of 'Common Conditions,' one in whom the poetical feeling was rapidly developing, and whose taste had been formed upon better models than anything which the new drama could offer to him—such a one perhaps was there in the person of William Shakspere-he would perceive how imperfectly this comedy attained the end of giving delight to a body of persons assembled together with an aptitude for delight. And yet they were pleased and satisfied. There was in this comedy bustle and change of scene; something to move the feelings in the separation of lovers and their re-union; laughter excited by grotesqueness which stood in the place of wit and humour; music and song; and, more than all, lofty words and rhymed cadences which sounded like poetry. But to that one critical listener the total absence of the real dramatic spirit would be most perplexing. At the moment when he himself would be fancying what the characters upon the scene were about to do,— how their discourse, like that of real life, would have reference to the immediate business of the action in which they were engaged, and explain their own feelings, passions, peculiarities, the writer would present, through the mouth of some one of these characters, a description of what some one else was doing or had done; and thus, though the poem was a dialogue, it was not to his sense a drama; it did not realize the principle of personation which his mind was singularly formed to understand and cultivate. The structure of the versification, too, would appear to him altogether unfit to represent the thoughts and emotions of human beings engaged in working out a natural train of adventures. Some elevation of style would be required to distinguish the language from that of ordinary life, without being altogether opposed to that language; something that would convey the idea of poetical art, whilst it was sufficiently real not to make the art too visible. He had diligently read The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex ;' and the little volume printed in 1571, containing that play "as the same was showed on the stage before the Queen's Majesty, about nine year past, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple," was a precious volume to him; for it gave to him the most complete specimen of that species of verse which appeared fitted for the purposes of the higher drama. The speeches were indeed long, after the model of the stately harangues which he had read in his 'Livy' and 'Sallust;' but they were forcible and impressive; and he had often upon his lips those lines on the causes and miseries of civil war of which our history had furnished such fearful examples :—

"And thou, O Britain! whilom in renown,
Whilom in wealth and fame, shalt thus be torn,
Dismember'd thus, and thus be rent in twain,
Thus wasted and defac'd, spoil'd and destroy'd:
These be the fruits your civil wars will bring.

Plays Confuted.'

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Hereto it comes, when kings will not consent
To grave advice, but follow wilful will.
This is the end, when in fond princes' hearts
Flattery prevails, and sage rede hath no place.
These are the plagues, when murder is the mean
To make new heirs unto the royal crown.
Thus wreak the gods, when that the mother's wrath
Nought but the blood of her own child may 'suage.
These mischiefs spring when rebels will arise,
To work revenge, and judge their prince's fact.
This, this ensues, when noble men do fail

In loyal truth, and subjects will be kings.
And this doth grow, when, lo! unto the prince,
Whom death or sudden hap of life bereaves,
No certain heir remains; such certain heir
As not all only is the rightful heir,

But to the realm is so made known to be,

And truth thereby vested in subjects' hearts."

Even this versification he would think might be improved. The entire play of Ferrex and Porrex,' was to him monotonous and uninteresting; it seemed as if the dramatic form oppressed the undoubted genius of one of the authors of that play. How inferior were the finest lines which Sackville wrote in this play, correct and perspicuous as they were, compared with some of the noble bursts in the Induction to A Mirror for Magistrates'! Surely the author of the sublime impersonation of War could have written a tragedy that would have filled the heart with terror, if not with pity!

"Lastly stood War in glittering arms yclad,

With visage grim, stern looks, and blackly hued:

In his right hand a naked sword he had

That to the hilts was all with blood imbrued;
And in his left (that kings and kingdoms rued)
Famine and Fire he held, and therewithal

He razed towns, and threw down towers and all.”

Still, he wondered that the example which Sackville had given of dramatic blank verse had not been followed by the writers of plays for the common theatres. He saw, however, that a change was taking place; for the First Part of Promos and Cassandra,' of which he had recently obtained a copy, was wholly in rhyme; while in the Second Part Master George Whetstone had freely introduced blank verse. In the little book which Stephen Gosson had just written against plays, his second book in answer to Thomas Lodge,— which had been lent him to read by a zealous minister of the church who disapproved of such vanities, he found an evidence that the multitude most delighted in rhyme: "The poets send their verses to the stage, upon such feet as continually are rolled up in rhyme at the fingers' ends, which is plausible to the barbarous and carrieth a sting into the ears of the common people."* And yet, from another passage of the same writer, he might collect that even the refined and learned were delighted with the poetical structure of the common

*Plays Confuted, in Five Actions."

dramas: "So subtle is the devil, that under the colour of recreation in London, and of exercise of learning in the universities, by seeing of plays, he maketh us to join with the Gentiles in their corruption. Because the sweet numbers of poetry, flowing in verse, do wonderfully tickle the hearers' ears, the devil hath tied this to most of our plays, that whatsoever he would have stick fast to our souls might slip down in sugar by this enticement, for that which delighteth never troubleth our swallow. Thus, when any matter of love is interlarded, though the thing itself be able to allure us, yet it is so set out with sweetness of words, fitness of epithets, with metaphors, allegories, hyperboles, amphibologies, similitude; with phrases so picked, so pure, so proper; with action so smooth, so lively, so wanton; that the poison, creeping on secretly without grief, chokes us at last, and hurleth us down in a dead sleep." It was difficult to arrive at an exact knowledge of the truth from the description of one who wrote under such strong excitement as Master Stephen Gosson. The controversy upon the lawfulness of stage-plays was a remarkable feature of the period which we are now describing; and, as pamphlets were to that age what newspapers are to ours, there can be little doubt that even in the small literary society of Stratford the tracts upon this subject might be well known. The dispute about the Theatre was a contest between the holders of opposite opinions in religion. The Puritans, who even at that time were. strong in their zeal if not in their numbers, made the Theatre the especial object of their indignation, for its unquestionable abuses allowed them so to frame their invectives that they might tell with double force against every description of public amusement, against poetry in general, against music, against dancing, associated as they were with the excesses of an ill-regulated stage. A Treatise of John Northbrooke, licensed for the press in 1577, is directed against “äicing, dancing, vain plays, or interludes." Gosson, who had been a student of Christchurch, Oxford, had himself written two or three plays previous to his publication, in 1579, of 'The School of Abuse, containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such-like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth.' This book, written with considerable ostentation of learning, and indeed with no common vigour and occasional eloquence, defeats its own purposes by too large an aim. Poets, whatever be the character of their poetry, are the objects of Gosson's new-born hostility: Tiberius the Emperor saw somewhat when he judged Scaurus to death for writing a tragedy; Augustus when he banished Ovid; and Nero when he charged Lucan to put up his pipes, to stay his pen, and write no more." Music comes in for the same denunciation, upon the authority of Pythagoras, who condemns them for fools that judge music by sound and ear." The three abuses of the time are held to be inseparable :-" As poetry and piping are cousin-germans, so piping and playing are of great affinity, and all three chained in links of abuse." It is not to be thought that declamation like this would produce any great effect in turning a poetical mind from poetry, or that even Master Gosson's contrast of the "manners of England in old time" and "New England" would go far to move a patriotic indignation against modern refinements. We have, on one hand, Dion's description how Englishmen "went naked and were

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