Essays on Elizabethan Drama by T. S. Eliot

Author:T. S. Eliot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Well, madam, we may meet with him in time yet.

I’ve given thee blind mate twice.

There is hardly anything truer in Elizabethan drama than Bianca’s gradual self-will and self-importance in consequence of her courtship by the Duke:

Troth, you speak wondrous well for your old house here;

’Twill shortly fall down at your feet to thank you,

Or stoop, when you go to bed, like a good child,

To ask you blessing.

In spite of all the long-winded speeches, in spite of all the conventional Italianate horrors, Bianca remains, like Beatrice in The Changeling, a real woman; as real, indeed, as any woman of Elizabethan tragedy. Bianca is a type of the woman who is purely moved by vanity.

But if Middleton understood women in tragedy better than any of the Elizabethans—better than the creator of the Duchess of Malfy, better than Marlowe, better than Tourneur, or Shirley, or Fletcher, better than any of them except Shakespeare alone—he was also able, in his comedy, to present a finer woman than any of them. The Roaring Girle has no apparent relation to Middleton’s tragedies, yet it is agreed to be primarily the work of Middleton. It is typical of the comedies of Middleton, and it is the best. In his tragedies Middleton employs all the Italianate horrors of his time, and obviously for the purpose of pleasing the taste of his time; yet underneath we feel always a quiet and undisturbed vision of things as they are and not “another thing.” So in his comedies. The comedies are long-winded; the fathers are heavy fathers, and rant as heavy fathers should; the sons are wild and wanton sons, and perform all the pranks to be expected of them; the machinery is the usual Elizabethan machinery; Middleton is solicitous to please his audience with what they expect; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. The Roaring Girle is as artificial as any comedy of the time; its plot creaks loudly; yet the Girl herself is always real. She may rant, she may behave preposterously, but she remains a type of the sort of woman who has renounced all happiness for herself and who lives only for a principle. Nowhere more than in The Roaring Girle can the hand of Middleton be distinguished more clearly from the hand of Dekker. Dekker is all sentiment; and, indeed, in the so admired passages of A Fair Quarrel, exploited by Lamb, the mood if not the hand of Dekker seems to the unexpert critic to be more present than Middleton’s. A Fair Quarrel seems as much, if not more, Dekker’s than Middleton’s. Similarly with The Spanish Gipsie, which can with difficulty be attributed to Middleton. But the feeling about Moll Cut-Purse of The Roaring Girle is Middleton’s rather than anybody’s. In Middleton’s tragedy there is a strain of realism underneath, which is one with the poetry; and in his comedy we find the same thing.

In her recent book on The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy, Miss Kathleen Lynch calls attention to the gradual transition from Elizabethan-Jacobean to Restoration comedy.

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