He himself confesses:--
And since the Comic Muse
Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try
If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. [17]
But he is nothing if not satirical. The persons that are to enliven his
tragedies are not filled with the true breath of life. They are mere
phantoms or puppets of schoolcraft, laboriously put together by a
learning drawn from old folios. In his tragedies, 'Sejanus' and
'Cataline,' he seeks to describe Romans whose whole bearing was to be
in pedantically close harmony with the time in which the dramatic
action occurs. Only a citizen from a certain period of ancient Rome
would be able to decide whether this difficult but thankless problem
had been solved. These cold academic treatises--for such we must,
practically, take them to be--were not relished by the public. There
is no vestige of human passion in the bookish heroes thus put on the
stage. For their sorrows the audience has no feeling of fear or anguish
and no tear of compassion.
Jonson, indignant at the small estimate in which his arduously composed
works were received, ill-humoured by their want of success, looked
enviously upon Shakspere, who had not been academically schooled; who
audaciously overthrew the customs of the antique drama; who made his
own rules, or rather, who made himself a rule to others; who created
metrics that were peculiarly his; who chose themes hitherto considered
non-permissible, and unusual with Greeks and Romans; who flung the
'three unities' to the winds; and who, nevertheless, had an unheard-of
success!
This favourite of the public, Jonson seems to have looked upon as the
main obstacle barring the way to his own genius.
Pages:
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152