The old English dramatists — A Closer Reading

ays past, wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk foolishly Till that were cancelled; and, when that was gone, We left an air behind us which alone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty; though but downright fools, more wise.”

This air, which Beaumont says they left behind them, they carried with them, too. It was the atmosphere of culture, the open air of it, which loses much of its bracing and stimulating virtue in solitude and the silent society of books. And what discussions can we not fancy there, of language, of diction, of style, of ancients and moderns, of grammar even, for our speech was still at school, and with license of vagrant truancy for the gathering of wild flowers and the finding of whole nests full of singing birds! Here was indeed a new World of Words, as Florio called his dictionary. And the face-to-face criticism, frank, friendly, and with chance of reply, how fruitful it must have been! It was here, doubtless, that Jonson found fault with that verse of Shakespeare’s,--

“Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause,”

which is no longer to be found in the play of “Julius Cæsar.” Perhaps Heminge and Condell left it out, for Shakespeare could have justified himself with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome’s favorite Greek quotation, that nothing justified crime but the winning or keeping of supreme power. Never could London, before or since, gather such an academy of genius. It must have been a marvellous whetstone of the wits, and spur to generous emulation.

Another great advantage which the authors of that day had was the freshness of the language, which had not then become literary, and therefore more or less commonplace. All the words they used were bright from the die, not yet worn smooth in the daily drudgery of prosaic service. I am not sure whether they were so fully conscious of this as we are, who find a surprising charm in it, and perhaps endow the poet with the witchery that really belongs to the vocables he employs. The parts of speech of these old poets are just archaic enough to please us with that familiar strangeness which makes our own tongue agreeable if spoken with a hardly perceptible foreign accent. The power of giving novelty to things outworn is, indeed, one of the prime qualities of genius, and this novelty the habitual phrase of the Elizabethans has for us without any merit of theirs. But I think, making all due abatements, that they had the hermetic gift of buckling wings to the feet of their verse in a measure which has fallen to the share of few or no modern poets. I think some of them certainly were fully aware of the fine qualities of their mother-tongue. Chapman, in the poem “To the Reader,” prefixed to his translation of the Iliad, protests against those who preferred to it the softer Romance languages:--

“And for our tongue that still is so impaired By travailing linguists, I can prove it clear, That no tongue hath the Muses’ utterance heired For verse and that sweet Music to the ear Strook out of rime, so naturally as this; Our monosyllables so kindly fall, And meet, opposed in rhyme, as they did kiss.”