an onyx." The heirs are stupefied with disappointment, and Mosca drives them off with insults. He says to Corvino : "Why should you stay here? with what thought, what promise? Corbaccio. I am cozen'd, cheated, by a parasite slave; Mosca. Are not you he that have to-day in court Profess'd the disinheriting of your son ? Perjur'd yourself? Go home, and die, and stink." 1 Volpone goes out disguised, comes to each of them in turn, and succeeds in wringing their hearts. But Mosca, who has the will, acts with a high hand, and demands of Volpone half his fortune. The dispute between the two rascals discovers their impostures, and the master, the servant, with the three would-be heirs, are sent to the galleys, to prison, to the pillory-as Corvino says, to “Have mine eyes beat out with stinking fish, Bruis'd fruit, and rotten eggs.-'Tis well. I'm glad, "2 No more vengeful comedy has been written, none more persistently athirst to make vice suffer, to unmask, triumph over, and to punish it. Where can be the gaiety of such a theatre ? In caricature and farce. There is a rough gaiety, a sort of physical, external laughter which suits this combative, drinking, blustering mood. It is thus that this mood relaxes from war-waging and murderous satire ; the pastime is appropriate to the manners of the time, excellent to attract men who look upon hanging as a good joke, and laugh to see the Puritan's ears cut. Put yourself for an instant in their 2 Ibid. v. 8. 1 Volpone, v. I. place, and you will think like them, that The Silent Woman is a masterpiece. Morose is an old monomaniac, who has a horror of noise, but loves to speak. He inhabits a street so narrow that a carriage cannot enter it. He drives off with his stick the bearleaders and sword-players, who venture to pass under his windows. He has sent away his servant whose shoes creaked; and Mute, the new one, wears slippers "soled with wool," and only speaks in a whisper through a tube. Morose ends by forbidding the whisper, and makes him reply by signs. He is also rich, an uncle, and he ill-treats his nephew Sir Dauphine Eugenie, a man of wit, but who lacks money. We anticipate all the tortures which poor Morose is to suffer. Sir Dauphine finds him a supposed silent woman, the beautiful Epicone. Morose, enchanted by her brief replies and her voice, which he can hardly hear, marries her, to play his nephew a trick. It is his nephew who has played him a trick. As soon as she is married, Epicone speaks, scolds, argues as loud and as long as a dozen women:— "Why, did you think you had married a statue? or a motion only? one of the French puppets, with the eyes turn'd with a wire? or some innocent out of the hospital, that would stand with her hands thus, and a plaise mouth, and look upon you?"1 "12 She orders the servants to speak louder; she opens the doors wide to her friends. They arrive in shoals, offering their noisy congratulations to Morose. Five or six women's tongues overwhelm him all at once with compliments, questions, advice, remonstrances. A friend of Sir Dauphine comes with a band of music, who play all together, suddenly, with their whole force. Morose says, "O, a plot, a plot, a plot, a plot, upon me! This day I shall be their anvil to work on, they will grate me asunder. 'Tis worse than the noise of a saw.' A procession of servants is seen coming, with dishes in their hands; it is the racket of a tavern which Sir Dauphine is bringing to his uncle. The guests clash the glasses, shout, drink healths; they have with them a drum and trumpets which make great noise. Morose flees to the top of the house, puts a whole nest of night-caps" on his head and stuffs up his ears. Captain Otter cries, "Sound, Tritons o' the Thames! Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero.” “ Villains, murderers, sons of the earth and traitors,” cries Morose from above, "what do "} there? you The racket increases. Then the 1 Epicæne, iii. 2. 66 2 Ibid. iii. 2. captain, somewhat "jovial," maligns his wife, who falls upon him and gives him a good beating. Blows, cries, music, laughter, resound like thunder. It is the poetry of uproar. Here is a subject to shake coarse nerves, and to make the mighty chests of the companions of Drake and Essex shake with uncontrollable laughter. "Rogues, hell-hounds, Stentors! . . . They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen throats!" Morose casts himself on his tormentors with his long sword, breaks the instruments, drives away the musicians, disperses the guests amidst an inexpressible uproar, gnashing his teeth, looking haggard. Afterwards they pronounce him mad, and discuss his madness before him.1 The disease in Greek is called uavía, in Latin insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica, that is, egressio, when a man ex melancholico evadit fanaticus. . . But he may be but phreneticus yet, mistress; and phrenetis is only delirium, or so." They talk of the books which he must read aloud to cure him. They add by way of consolation, that his wife talks in her sleep, "and snores like a porpoise." "O redeem me, fate; redeem me, fate!" cries the poor man.2 "For how many causes may a man be divorc'd, nephew?" Sir Dauphine chooses two knaves, and disguises them, one as a priest, the other as a lawyer, who launch at his head Latin terms of civil and canon law, explain to Morose the twelve cases of nullity, jingle in his ears one after another the most barbarous words in their obscure vocabulary, wrangle, and make between them as much noise as a couple of bells in a belfry. Following their advice he declares himself impotent. The wedding-guests propose to toss him in a blanket; others demand an immediate inspection. Fall after fall, shame after shame; nothing serves him; his wife declares that she consents to "take him with all his faults." The lawyer proposes another legal method; Morose shall obtain a divorce by proving that his wife is faithless. Two boasting knights, who are present, declare that they have been her lovers. Morose, in raptures, throws himself at their knees, and embraces them. Epicone weeps, and Morose seems to be delivered. Suddenly the lawyer decides that the plan is of no avail, the infidelity having been committed before the marriage. "O, this is worst of all worst worsts that hell could have devis'd! marry a whore, and so much noise!" There is Morose then, declared 1 Compare M. de Pourceaugnac in Molière. 2 Epicone, iv. I, 2. impotent and a deceived husband, at his own request, in the eyes of the whole world, and moreover married for ever. Sir Dauphine comes in like a clever rascal, and as a succoring deity. "Allow me but five hundred during life, uncle," and I free you. Morose signs the deed of gift with alacrity; and his nephew shows him that Epicone is a boy in disguise.1 Add to this enchanting farce the funny parts of the two accomplished and gallant knights, who, after having boasted of their bravery, receive gratefully, and before the ladies, flips and kicks.2 Never was coarse physical laughter more adroitly produced. In this broad coarse gaiety, this excess of noisy transport, you recognize the stout roisterer, the stalwart drinker who swallowed hogsheads of Canary, and made the windows of the Mermaid shake with his bursts of hu mor. V. 6 Jonson did not go beyond this; he was not a philosopher like Molière, able to grasp and dramatize the crisis of human life, education, marriage, sickness, the chief characters of his country and century, the courtier, the tradesman, the hypocrite, the man of the world. He remained on a lower level, in the comedy of plot, the painting of the grotesque,5 the representation of too transient subjects of ridicule, too general vices. If at times, as in the Alchemist, he has succeeded by the perfection of plot and the vigor of satire, he has miscarried more frequently by the ponderousness of his work and the lack of comic lightness. The critic in him mars the artist; his literary calculations strip him of spontaneous invention; he is too much of a writer and moralist, not enough of a mimic and an actor. But he is loftier from another side, for he is a poet; almost all writers, proseauthors, preachers even, were so at the time we speak of. Fancy abounded, as well as the perception of colors and forms, the need and wont of enjoying through the imagination and the eyes. Many of Jonson's pieces, the Staple of News, Cynthia's 1 Epicæne, v. 2 Compare Polichinelle in Le Malade imaginaire; Géronte in Les Fourberies de Scapin. 3 Compare l'Ecole des Femmes, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois-gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire, Georges Dandin. Compare les Fourberies de Scapin. 6 Compare les Précieuses Ridicules. 5 Compare les Fâcheux. Compare the plays of Destouches. 1 Revels, are fanciful and allegorical comedies like those of Aristophanes. He there dallies with the real, and beyond the real, with characters who are but theatrical masks, abstractions personified, buffooneries, decorations, dances, music, pretty laughing whims of a picturesque and sentimental imagination. Thus, in Cynthia's Revels, three children come on "pleading possession of the cloke" of black velvet, which an actor usually wore when he spoke the prologue. They draw lots for it; one of the losers, in revenge, tells the audience beforehand the incidents of the piece. The others interrupt him at every sentence, put their hands on his mouth, and taking the cloak one after the other, begin to criticize the spectators and authors. This child's play, these gestures and loud voices, this little amusing dispute, divert the public from their serious thoughts, and prepare them for the oddities which they are to look upon. We are in Greece, in the valley of Gargaphie, where Diana1 has proclaimed "a solemn revels." Mercury and Cupid have come down, and begin by quarreling; the latter says: "My light feather-heel'd coz, what are you any more than my uncle Jove's pander? a lacquey that runs on errands for him, and can whisper a light message to a loose wench with some round volubility? One that sweeps the gods' drinking-room every morning, and sets the cushions in order again, which they threw one at another's head over night?" 2 They are good-tempered gods. Echo, awoke by Mercury, weeps for the "too beauteous boy Narcissus : "That trophy of self-love, and spoil of nature, The courtiers and ladies drink thereof, and behold, a sort of a review of the follies of the time, arranged, as in Aristophanes, in an improbable farce, a brilliant show. A silly spendthrift, 2 Cynthia's Revels, i. 1. 1 By Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant. 8 Ibid. |
