The pre-commonwealth tragicomedies of Sir William D'Avenant

Item Type text; Thesis-Reproduction (electronic)

Authors Myers, James P., 1941-

Publisher The University of Arizona.

Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Download date 26/09/2021 21:21:12

Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/317874 THE PEE-COMMONWEALTH TRAGICOMEDIES

OF SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT'

by

James Phares Myers, Jr.

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED:

APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR

This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:

RICHARD HOSLEY Date Professor of English ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I wish to thank Professors Harry F* Robins and Drew B» Pallette for reading this essay and making several suggestions which later led to its improvemento To Professor Richard Eosley I am especially grate­ ful, for without his patience, encouragement, and valuable criticism the inelegancies and inaccuracies would have been more numerous than they are.

iii CONTENTS

Page

Chapter

I. TRAGICOMEDY: THE PROBLEM OF A DEFINITION...... 1

II. TRAGICOMEDY: AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION ...... 12

(1) TRAGICOMEDY IN RENAISSANCE CRITICISM (2) THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRAGICOMEDY IN ENGLAND

III. DAVENANT’S PRE-COMMONEEALTH PLAYS ...... 31

(1) THE PROPER TRAGICOMEDIES (2) THE PROBLEMATICAL TRAGICOMEDIES (3) THE TRAGEDY

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... - 59

iv ABSTRACT

Between the years c* 1626 and 16393 Sir William Davenant, often cited as a transitional figure in the development of seventeenth- century English drama9 wrote ten, or possibly eleven, plays, six of which reveal his predilection for the /tragicomic mode0 It is the assertion of the essay that, inasmuch as he directed into the mainstream of seventeenth-century English drama a number of continental dramatic innovations which adumbrated the Restoration heroic drama,

Davenant was, indeed, a transitional figure» In order to demonstrate his importance as an informing influence upon the development of

English tragicomedy, I have provided first a brief discussion of the critical background of English Renaissance tragicomedy and secondly a careful examination, in the light of this background, of the six of Davenant1s plays which partake of the tragicomic tradition--

The Just Italians Love and Honour, The Platonic Lovers? The Fair

Favourite, The Unfortunate Lovers, and The Distresses— showing, where possible, the manner in which Davenant^modified the tradition and anticipated the Restoration heroic drama»

v CHAPTER I

TRAGICOMEDY: THE PROBLEM OF A DEFINITION

The term tragicomedy is generally used in two ways: on the one hand to denote any mixture of tragic and comic elements, and on

the other to signify a specific admixture of tragic and comic ingredi­ ents. Since, in their Renaissance contexts, both references imply an understanding of Renaissance tragedy and comedy, a brief summary of the distinctive features of the two genres may prove helpful in apprehending the nature of the tragicomedy.

In general a tragedy is a dignified and serious kind of play

in which at least the protagonist encounters death, though more usually other characters also die, and in which the phenomenon of human suffering and the problem of evil (moral or metaphysical) are given prominent treatment. Concerning the tragedy of the English

Renaissance, Madeleine Doran has recognized three general manifesta­

tions: De casibus tragedy, Italianate tragedy of intrigue, and domestic 1 tragedy. Because the sentimental domestic tragedy was a short-lived phenomenon, which exerted almost no influence upon the drama of the

Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, 1963), p. 115= The following discussion of De casibus tragedy and the Italianate tragedy of intrigue draws heavily upon Doran's observations; see pp. 116-28 and 128-42, respectively.

1 period and, in fact, is represented only by a handfal of extant plays,

it may conveniently be excluded from this examination of Renaissance

tragedy.

Be casibus tragedy has the palace for its main setting; it

deals with people of high estate who through some fault of their own

or through the operation of a metaphysical force, fall from their

high estate and undergo suffering and eventual death; and it is con­

cerned with evil. The fall from greatness, moreover, is often causally

related to both the political instability rampant in the protagonist's

country and to the personal ambition and quest for power of one or more of the characters. Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606) is an excellent

example of Be casibus tragedy, for in this play a noble and heroic

general repudiates his honor by murdering his king, usurps the

letter's crown, and subsequently falls from his high estate, endures

suffering, and is finally killed by the legitimate heir to the kingdom.

With the usurper's death and the crowning of the rightful prince,

political stability is restored.

Italianate tragedy of intrigue, like Be casibus tragedy,

emphasizes evil and involves people of high degree who fall from their

high position and undergo suffering and death. An example of this

type, Othello (1604?), reveals the way in which Italianate tragedy of

intrigue differs from Be casibus tragedy; a heroic general is led by

a slighted and jealous subordinate to doubt his wife's fidelity, kills

his wife, and, on learning that he had been deceived, takes his own

life. Italianate tragedy of intrigue, it will be noticed, depends more upon the sensational and melodramatic for its dramatic impact than does De casibus tragedy and, more importantly, dramatizes not so much ambition and the quest for political power as personal revenge and crimes of passion.

Both Macbeth and Othello reveal admixtures of the comic, the former in its famous Porter scene, the latter chiefly in lago’s gulling of Boderigo. In this admixture the two plays are rather typical of

English Renaissance tragedy. Daniel's Cleopatra (1593), on the other hand, examplifies a tragedy devoid of any comic element. In this play, a queen, having lost her lover and her kingdom because of her own emotional shortsightedness and her involvement in political machina­ tions too complicated for her to cope with, commits suicide in order to prevent the victorious general1s final triumph. Although the two themes are rather closely wedded in Cleopatra, the political theme characteristic of De casibus tragedy is given prominence over the emotional entanglements proper to Italianate tragedy of intrigue.

As compared with tragedy, comedy is a kind of dramatic repre­ sentation ending happily and exposing through laughter the follies and vices found in human nature. The characters of comedy are of low and middle degree, and the setting is domestic (that is, of the street and/or the household). Since love is usually the most prominent part of the action, this type of play will conclude with either a marriage or the promise of one. Needless to say, deaths and even threats of death are absent from comedy. Gascoigne's Supposes (1566), a transla­ tion of Ariosto's Gli Suppositi (1508), is a convenient example of comedy. In The Supposes, the action is directed in part by such low­ life figures as a parasite and servants; and aside from working towards 4

a happy and "domestic" conclusion in which the lovers receive parental

consent to marry and in which a father is reunited with his long-lost

son, the action accomplishes its satiric end primarily by subjecting

an amorous old man to comic criticism, thus compelling him to realize

his follies and pretensions.

In general, tragicomedy combines the features of the other two 2 dramatic genres. Its characters represent different social classes,

and persons of low degree often figure as prominently in the plot as

kings and dukes. Similarly, the action is usually serious or tragic

in tone, involving threats of death and even occasionally the deaths

of minor characters. In some cases, villainous characters, figuring

prominently in the action, meet with death (see, for example. James IV

below, p. 24): this feature characterizes a type of tragicomedy known

as "tragedy with a happy ending" (tragedia de felice fine). Tragicomedy

is frequently set in both the palace and the country, and therefore it

often combines a political motif with a pastoral theme. The pastoral

convention, moreover, provides a medium in which the playwright can mingle kings and shepherds without violating decorum and into which

he can easily introduce that Renaissance embodiment of the satiric

spirit, the "satyr." Finally, the language of tragicomedy is usually

O For a more detailed and yet brief description of tragicomedy, see ibid., pp. 190-203. something between the high, rhetorical diction of tragedy and the low o idiom of comedy.

These generalizations were usually employed by Renaissance literary critics in evaluating or discussing tragicomedies, and as such they can be said to describe tragicomedy "proper." In common usage, however, tragicomedy frequently referred (and refers) to any loose combination of tragic and comic qualities. For example, a play with a comic and a tragic action or simply a drama combining sentiment with low humor could have been designated tragicomedy in Renaissance

England. For the sake of convenience and clarity, then, the term tragicomic play will be used in referring to that kind of drama which merely mingles tragic and comic elements but which cannot be said to mingle them in such a way as to constitute tragicomedy proper, that is, a play fitting the general formula presented above,

Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (>1610) is a good example of what is meant by tragicomedy proper. This play dramatizes the love of Philaster (rightful heir to the recently deposed king of Sicily) and Arethusa (daughter of the usurping king); but although Philaster concludes happily with the bestowal of a nuptial blessing upon the two lovers by Arethusa's father, the action frequently looks as though it might end tragically--as for example when Philaster wounds Arethusa and her supposed lover in a forest (Eugene M. ffaith recognizes this

3 Marvin T. Herrick discusses the diction of tragicomedy in "The Revolt in Tragicomedy Against the Grand Style,11 in Thd Rhetorical Idiom, ed. Donald C. Bryant (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), pp. 271-80. ■ fr forest as “reflecting pastoral Sicily™ ) or when Philaster stands to be executed for his crimes. In addition, serious complications follow from the high scene itself: Philaster has been prevented from assuming his inheritance--and, indeed is also reluctant to do so— and

Arethusa is nearly compelled by her father to marry for political reasons the despicable Prince of Spain, Pharamond. It takes a revolt of the populace, who are incensed at Philaster’s mistreatment, and the revelations that Arethusa and Beliario have not been killed, as had been presumed, and that Arethusa?s page and supposed lover,

Bellario, is actually the daughter of an eminent courtier to avert the foreshadowed tragic catastrophe.

Inasmuch as Philaster is a serious play in which there is almost no admixture of the comic, and in which people of high estate are brought close to disaster but are saved from the anticipated tragic catastrophe at the last minute, it neatly fits the formula of tragicomedy proper. As is characteristic of many of Beaumont and

Fletcher's tragicomedies, the happy ending is made possible primarily through the exposure as false of a hypothesis accepted by both audience and dramatis personae as true: Bellario could not be

Arethusa's lover because “he™ is really a woman.

Each of the plays discussed has been chosen as an effective example of its genre. However, the majority of English Renaissance plays fall far short of their generic ideal. Indeed, throughout the

^The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher. Yale Studies in English, GXX (New Haven, 1952), p. 16. English Renaissance, plays occasionally appeared which not merely defied

classification by contemporary critics but which have also baffled,

or at least perplexed, the modern reader as well. This curious fact

is borne out by the critical histories of Volpone, Troilus and Gressida.

and The Malcontent.

5 Volpone (1605) is essentially a comedy: nearly all the

situations which ramify from the central action are domestic or are

at least proper to the street; the characters are of sufficiently

ordinary station; comic intrigue exposes human vice, even that of the

arch-manipulators themselves, Volpone and Mosca; and comic justice is

upheld in the conclusion when the vicious and the virtuous receive

their due rewards. The difficulty here is that in his treatment of

human vice, Jonson has reduced the play's comic focus by giving promi­

nence to that which is more proper to tragedy— evil.

The History of Troilus and Gressida (1602) was first published

in a quarto dated 1609. In a prefacb to the reader appearing in this

quarto, an anonymous writer speaks of the play as a comedy. In the

Folio of 1623, however, the play is classified as a tragedy. This

contradiction in nomenclature may be understood as springing from the

double-action structure of Troilus. The love story of Troilus and

Gressida is a type of satiric comedy; and the plot concerned with the

Trojan Mar itself, involving the deaths of Hector and Patroclus and the

prophecy of inevitable disaster for Troy, approximates De casibus

^Robert Ornstein treats the play within the tradition of comedy in "Volpone and Renaissance Psychology." N&Q, CGI (1956), 471-2. tragedy. In this mixing of a satirical and a tragical action, the play

resembles the tragicomic play more closely than it does either tragedy

or tragicomedy proper or comedy. Even so, Troilus should be regarded

primarily as a double-action play constituted of a comic and a tragic

plot.

For the purposes of this essay, the problem concerning the clas­

sification of Marston's Malcontent (1604) is perhaps the most pertinent

and interesting. The Malcontent was entered in the Stationers8

Register on July 5, 1604, as "an enterlude called The Malcontent.

tragiecomedia. B u t Marston himself, in the short preface to the

1604 quarto, contradicts the classification found in the Stationers'

Register: "I have my selfe, therefore, set forth this Comedy" (sig. A4).

Thus, with its bitterly satiric overtone, its pervading sense of evil

and imminent destruction, and its rather forced, happy ending. The

Malcontent was considered a comedy by its author and a tragicomedy by

its licenser and censor; and this ambivalence has persisted into our

own era. Madeleine Doran (p. 212) and Henry W. Wells,^ for example, 8 feel that the play is basically a tragicomedy, while Felix E. Schelling

sees it as exemplary of the comic mode. As far as I have been able to

determine, no one considers it a tragedy.

W. Greg, ed., A Biblidgraphy of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939-59), I, no. 203.

^Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (New York, 1939), p. 26.

^Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642 (Boston and New York, 1908), II, 182. The prime difficulty in endeavoring to place The Malcontent within its proper tradition (and thus enabling the reader to approach it within its correct frame of reference) hinges on the nature of the > mixture of tragic and comic elements, and on the degree of emphasis given to each by the playwright. While tragicomedy usually reveals a closer proximity to tragedy than to comedy, in the instance of The

Malcontent (assuming for the moment that it is a tragicomedy), this relationship becomes almost inverted. Aside from the large amount of

Juvenalian satire present in the comic stratum, its most noteworthy feature is the use of intrigue in a setting which for four acts (and especially in the third and fourth) is tragical. The sinister Mendoza initiates a series of intrigues by which he hopes to become duke; and, indeed, he would have succeeded in his design had not the Malcontent,

Malevole, out-maneuvered him at his own game. The intrigue, which is subtly amusing and ultimately of comic origin, mitigates the gravity which characteristically pervades tragicomedy proper; and when the intrigues of Mendoza and Malevole confront one another, something of ' . ; 9 comic interest is actually imparted to the play. Marvin T. Herrick has noticed that in the absence of a general catastrophe, the villain, whose actions warrant a more severe punishment, is subjected to the fate

" i ' ■ of the comic rogue (or comic scapegoat)--he is humiliated and, to use

Alfred Harbage traces the intrigue in tragedy to its comic origin in "Intrigue in Elizabethan Tragedy," in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honour of Hardin Graig. ed. Richard Hosley (London, 1963), pp. 37-44. 10 10 Herrick’s phrase, "kicked out," Finally, although the intrigue and

the handling of the "villain” offset the tragic aura of the play,

Malevole’s role as a satirist, that is, as a Renaissance "satyr"

determined to purge the sin-infested court by means of his sharp,

biting wit, also reduces the play’s tragic tone and, according to Waith, 11 cinches the play’s categorization as a tragicomedy (pp. 66-70).

Because of its satiric bent, its dependence upon a type of comic

intrigue for its main interest, and its happy conclusion. The Malcon­

tent, then, suggests a comedy; but because of its tragical and rather

serious undertone, it cannot be said to be a true one. It is, of

course, a tragicomedy, but an unusual one in that it stands closer to

its comic ancestry than to its tragic origin.

To see how the plays mentioned thus far relate to one another

and to their genres, it may prove helpful to visualize them as arranged

on a scale which has for its two terminal points "tragedy” and "comedy"

and for its medial point "tragicomedy."

Tragedy______Tragicomedy_____.______Comedy

CLEO.—Mac.—Oth.———————PHIL.——Mai.————Vol.—-——SUB.

T&C T&C (as story of Hector) (as story of T&C)

•^Tragicomedy; Its Origin and Development in Italy. France, and England (Urbana, 1962), p. 245. Cf. Volpone. 11 Alvin Kernan discusses Malevole’s role as a satirist in The Cankered Muse. Yale Studies in English, CXLII (New Haven, 1959), 211-19. 11

Three difficulties involved in the general study of English

Renaissance tragicomedy can now be summarized: (1) The English

Renaissance term tragicomedy had not so univocal and strict an applica­ tion as might at first be supposed. (2) We can, in fact, distinguish two approximate degrees of reference denoted by the term, for although frequently abused and misused on a popular level, in some instances tragicomedy denoted a specific admixture of comic and tragic elements

(the type of play I have called tragicomedy proper), and not merely any play possessing a hodgepodge of tragical and comical qualities (the tragicomic play). And (3) tragicomedy, while often closer in general tone to the tragical mode, may actually stand at almost any point between tragedy and comedy depending on the degree and nature of the admixture of comic and tragic elements. CHAPTER II

TRAGICOMEDY; AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

(I) TRAGICOMEDY IN RENAISSANCE CRITICISM

Published in 1595, Sir Philip Sydney’s Apology for Poetry directs our attention to the difficulty in determining precisely what it was that constituted tragicomedy "proper" in English Renaissance drama. In a fam­ ous passage in the essay, Sidney denounces the non-academic dramatists of his day:

But besides these grosse absurdities, how all theyr Playes be neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies; mingling Kings and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in Clownes by head and shoulders, to play a part in maiesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion:. So as neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by their mungrell Tragy-comedie obtained.1

Sidney’s use of the term tragicomedy in a perjorative sense is significant in that it defines a type of drama which is neither tragic nor comic, but rather a crude, mechanical mingling of the two, a mixed drama which unabashedly represents "Hom-pypes and Funeralls” during I ' the course of the same play* The literature of the period reveals numerous examples of the ^mungrell Tragy-comedie11 Sidney speaks of— to name but two of the more noteworthy, Cambyses * A Lamentable Tragedy mixed ful of pleasant mirth (1569^) and The New Tragical Comedy of

Appius and Virginia (1560?)«, It may be pointed out that both Cambyses

^Elizabethan Critical Essays« ed„ G* Gregory Smith (London, 1904), I, 199. and Annius and Virginia, in their mixing of tragical and comical matter, represent a native tradition which has its roots in the medieval drama»

Frank Ristine has shown that Sidney did not condemn the whole 2 species of mixed drama, for, in speaking of various combinations which occur in literature, Sidney says:

Now in his parts, kindes, or Species (as you list to terme them), it is to be noted that some Poesies haue coupled together two or three kindes, as Tragicall and Comical1, wher-vpon is risen the Tragi-comicall. . „ . But that commeth all to one in this question, for, if seuered they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful1.

In these two passages, Sidney is speaking then of two somewhat different kinds of drama, which, nevertheless, bear a similarity to one another: in one he is condemning what Ristine has distinguished as

"tragi-farce" (p. 70) and in the other he is commending what is in effect tragicomedy proper. Reduced to its basic essentials, Sidney's criticism refers to the popular vernacular drama as it existed in his contemporary England and to a certain type of mixed dramatic representa­ tion which, in 1583, was yet to be encountered in England.

Giambattista Guarini's The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry

(II compendio della poesia tragieomica. pr. 1601), in addition to being the most important defense of his pastoral tragicomedy II Pastor Fido

(c. 1581), is also the most significant single Renaissance contribution to tragicomic theory. For not only was The Compendium the first treatise to defend modern tragicomedy as a legitimate third genre of

^English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New York, 1910), p. 71, n. 12.

Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 175* 14 dramatic expression, but it also drew together the various arguments and theories already implicit in the development of tragicomedy and presented them in a highly articulate and intelligent manner.

At the outset of the apology, Guarini makes it evident that the species he is defending is not an incongruous juxtaposing of two plots, one comic and the other tragic, and that it is not merely a tragic play relieved throughout with comic scenes or a comedy similarly constructed.

Rather, it is a drama in which the tragic and comic have been so united as to create a distinct, third genre:

As to the first [mixed dramaj, it must be considered that tragicomedy is not made up of two entire plots, one of which is a perfect tragedy and the other a perfect comedy, connec­ ted in such a way that they can be disjoined without doing injury to either. Nor should anyone think that it is a tragic story vitiated with the lowliness of comedy or a comic fable contaminated with the deaths of tragedy, for neither of these would be a proper component; for he who makes a tragi­ comedy does not intend to compose separately either a tragedy or a comedy, but from the two a third thing that will be perfect of its kind and may take from the others the parts that with most verisimilitude can stand together. Therefore, in judging it, one does not need to confound the terms mixed and double, as do those of little understanding who do not realize that nothing can be mixed if it is not one and if its parts are not so mingled that one cannot be independently recognized or separated from the other.^

It is not unreasonable, Guarini continues, to suppose that tragic and comic elements can be united, so long as the playwright bears in mind that one sensibility is not merely entering into the other’s realm, but that the union modifies the two constituents, pro­ ducing a third poem. ' Ancient practice proves the feasibility of such

^Translated from the Italian by Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Bryden. ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit, 1962), p . 507. 15 a minglings Euripides1 satyr play. The Cvclops. for example, combines the comical action of the drunken Cyclops with the tragical story of

Odysseus’s plight; similarly, Plautus’s Amphitryon mixes the low humor of Mercury with “persons of importance”--Amphitryon and Jupiter; and

Terence’s Self-Tormentor mingles pity (felt for Menedemus’s self­ punishment) with the humorous main action. Moreover, in nature, in politics, and in music and painting one can discern a harmonious blending of contradictory entities. But it is only by an artistic altering that the tragic and comic can be so united as to produce a coherent tragicomic structure, which, since it does not permit the excesses of either of its constituents, is actually the highest form of dramatic art.

According to Aristotelian theory, the end of comedy is to represent common (“private”) people and by delineating their shortcom­ ings and deficiencies ”to move us to laughter”; and the end of tragedy is the purgation of “terror and compassion” by the imitation of a

“horrible and pitiable” action. But what, then, asks Guarini, is the function of tragicomedy?

. . . I shall answer that it is to imitate with the resources of the stage an action that is feigned and in which are mingled all the tragic and comic parts that can coexist in verisimilitude and decorum, properly arranged in a single dra­ matic form, with the end of purging with pleasure the sadness of the hearers. This is done in such a way that the imitation, which is the instrumental end, is that which is mixed, and represents a mingling of both tragic and comic events. But the purging, which is the architectonic end, exists only as a single principle, which unites the two qualities in one purpose, that of freeing the hearers from melancholy. (P. 524) 16

As a corollary to this, Guarini adds that it seems evident that

the poet must establish that his play is to be a tragicomedy by care­

fully presenting the initial situation he will later exploit and by controlling the tone of the opening scenes with equal artistry. If he.is to arouse the emotions proper to tragicomedy, the playwright should not leave ambiguous the type of play he is presenting.

Tragicomic style, he continues, is something located midway between the grand diction of tragedy and the low speech of comedy:

“Since it deals with great persons and heroes, humble diction is unfit­ ting, and since it is not concerned with the terrible and the horrible, but rather avoids it, it abandons the grave and employs the sweet, which modifies the greatness and sublimity that is proper to pure tragedy" (p. 525).

Having demonstrated that ancient playwrights (Euripides, Plau­ tus, and Terence) did allow mixtures of various types, and that

Aristotle, in his discussion of tragedy with a double ending, did, in fact, recognize tragicomedy (the "tragedy with a happy ending"),

Guarini next discusses the Terentian practice of grafting a secondary comic plot onto a primary one, a technique which augments the dramatic complexity of a non-tragic action. In adapting the Terentian technique to his own needs, the tragicomic poet should be better able to enrich

the action and structure of his play.

The final pages of The Compendium deal with the nature of pas­

toral drama, which along with the satyr drama (for example. The Cyclops) , was thought by many Renaissance critics and playwrights to have been one of the prototypes of tragicomedy. The pastoral adds the "action of - 17

shepherds” and hence can contribute as many as three actions to a play—

the tragic, the comic, and the pastoral--since shepherds themselves

remain as shepherds but can be portrayed as either noble (f’kingly”)

or ordinary (’’private”) figures.

As conveniently summarized by Madeleine Doran, Guarini1s main

contributions to Renaissance tragicomic theory were his realizations

that the constituents of a play are "mutually modifying, that the diverse

parts must be so handled as to contribute to total unity, and that a

listener’s or reader’s satisfaction can only come from a fulfillment of 5 expectations aroused.” In addition, within a well-articulated essay,

he marshalled the several arguments implicit in the development of the

genre, citing various classical plays in which a mixture of tone and/or

social classes occur, recalling that Aristotle provided for a tragedy

with a happy ending, and arguing (against those who still obstinately maintained that classical drama permitted no dramatic genres apart from

tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play) that there was no need to be

restricted by ancient models.

It is difficult to ascertain precisely the impetus Guarini‘s

treatise had upon the later development of tragicomedy in England.

However, that II Pastor Fido itself.should have- gone through twenty

Italian editions by 1602 and fifty more in the seventeenth century, and

that it should have been translated into French (probably as early as

1593), Spanish (1602), English (1602), German, Greek, Polish, Dutch,

"’Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, 1963), p. 208. 18

Swedish, Latin, and even Hindu and Persian (Ristine, p„ 44), would seem to indicate that its critical background was at least as well-known as the play itself— if not more so. In this respect, Ristine observes,

“During this time the fame of Pastor Fido spread, and grew to be quite commensurate with the critical discussion that it has aroused11 (ibid.).

Lope de Vega’s The Hew Art of Making Comedies (El arte nuevo de hacer comedias) first appeared in 1609. It was not nearly so signi­ ficant or influencial a work as Guarin-i ’s Compendium; but, indeed, its primary values lie not only in the insight it gives into the mind of an avowed classicist who discerned the futility of adhering to classical rules in the face of popular opposition,^ but also in its formal pre­ sentation of the elements necessary for a play to achieve popular acclaim. Lope’s attitude is at once cynical and pragmatic: "I lock the rules away with six keys; I remove Terence and Plautus from my study that they may not cry out at me, for the truth in silent books is wont to scream, and I write in the manner of those devisers who aspired to the acclaim of the crowd; for since it is the crowd that pays, it 7 is proper to speak to it stupidly in order to please.”

He suggests that the "vile chimera," the new kind of comedy, should concern kings, much as Plautus’s Amphitryon does. and, following the example of nature, should also be a mixture of the tragic:(the

"grave”) and the comic (the "absurd") in order to impart delight to the

^Olga Marx Perlzweig, Literary Criticism, p. 540.

^Translated from the Spanish by Olga Marz Perlzweig, ibid., P o 542 © 19

audience. Care should be taken, however, to insure that this mingling

does not destroy the simple, non-episodic action which the comedy must

also have. In addition, the playwright who would be popular should not

fail to give honor and virtue a place of prominence, the former because

it moves "everyone forcefully," the latter since it "is beloved every­

where." v

Concerning the plot, Lope feels that the first act should state

the case, while the second should "entangle the incidents in such a way

that until the middle of the third act no one can even guess at the

solution"(p. 5 4 6 ) To accomplish the deception and entanglement, the

playwright should rely on equivocal language, for the "uncertainty

arising from the ambiguous has always held a great place with the crowd"

(p. 547).

Lope's apology is not so much for a distinct, third genre, tragi­

comedy, as was Guarini's, but for the already extant drame libre, the

famed "cloak and sword" drama (comedia de capo y espada) . which accented

plot and intrigue at the expense of characterization and which empha­

sized sentiment and romance over the purely comic and tragic. The direct

effect Lope had upon the course of English tragicomedy was apparently

negligible, but by defending his drama forcefully and pragmatically,

and by producing a prodigious number of plays, he gave such great vimpetus to his native drama, and subsequently to that of France, that

by the Jacobean and Caroline eras an extremely large body of continental

^Lope is speaking here, of course, of the conventional three- act Spanish drama. 20 romantic and tragicomic drama was readily available to the English playwrights.

Fletcher's pastoral tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherdess encount­ ered failure when it was first presented on the popular stage, most probably in 1608 or 1609.^ Irritated by this reception, Fletcher prefaced the undated quarto^"® with a short critical note entitled "To the Reader." In this well-known and often-quoted preface, the playwright endeavors to define the correct form of tragicomedy:

A tragie-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and kil­ ling, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedies yet brings some neer it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie, and meane people as in a comedie. (Sig. <®2V)

This definition seems obviously formulated for those who were still demanding the "mungrell Tragy-comedie" attacked so vehemently by

Sidney. Ristine has noticed that Fletcher speaks here of a type of tragicomedy unknown in the previous English drama (with the possible exception of Daniel's Queen's Arcadia.(1605) and at the same moment reveals his debt to Guarini's conception of a tempered union of tragedy and comedy (p. 107). Moreover, Fletcher, in his abridgement of

Guarini's definition, ascribes a certain prominence to the mingling of persons of varied social classes and to the happy conclusion of a play which is potentially tragic. Both these characteristics were to become

%F.®. Greg, ed., A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939-59), I, no. 287b.

l^Greg fixes the date c. May 1610; see ibid. 21 keynotes of the so-called Fletcherian style, though by no means the exclusive ones. Madeleine Boran points out that Fletcher's explication and advertisement of the term tragicomedy failed to cause any widespread or immediate use of it on title-pages in England; in fact, Fletcher himself never subsequently used it in classifying his own tragicomedies

(p. 209). The most important effect of Fletcher's preface seems to have been little more than an increased awareness of the independent status of tragicomedy (ibid.).

Although Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy first appeared in

1668, over sixty years after publication of The Faithful Shepherdess, it nonetheless remains of significant utility in determining the nature of some of the assumptions underlying English tragicomedy of the first half of the seventeenth centtiry. In this essay Dryden appears to support the more popular notion that tragicomedy is merely a mingling of tragic and comic elements, thus perhaps making possible the inference that the

Guarini-Fletcher concept had come to be held in disrepute or had even been forgotten by the time of the Restoration.

During the course of this well-known debate over the excellences and deficiencies of various types and periods of drama, Lisideius, the advocate for the classical perfections of the contemporary French theater, is made to utter a condemnation of English tragicomedy which at once reveals a debt to the neoclassical tradition represented by

Sidney; "There is no theater in the world has any thing so absurd as the English tragi-comedy; 'tis a drama of our own invention, and the fashion of it is enough to proclaim it so; here is a course of mirth. 22 there another of sadness, and a third of honor and a duel; thus, in two hours and a half we run through all the fits of Bedlam.

That Dryden feels that at least the essence of Lisideius’s description is accurate becomes evident when the author's apparent spokesman, Neander, defends the tragicomedy attacked by Lisideius: according to Neander, the same French dramatists Lisideius had lauded as having maintained unity of tone in their plays, have, since the time of Richelieu, been praised for mixing mirth in their serious plays

(p. 629). Furthermore, the theatrical excellence of English drama derives in part from this very mingling of moods:

A scene of mirth, mixed with tragedy, has the same effect upon us which our music has betwixt the acts; which we find a relief to us from the best plots and language of the stage, if the discourses have been long. I must therefore have stronger arguments ere I am convinced that compassion and mirth in the same subject destroy each other; and in the meantime cannot but conclude, to the honor of our nation, that we have ' invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the stage than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation, which is tragi-comedy. (Pages 629-30)

Aside from testifying to the perseverance of this less sophisti­ cated species of tragicomedy, both passages cited also apparently endorse what must surely have been a popular concept--the creation of tragi­ comedy by English dramatists. In any event. Dryden's support of the tragicomic play suggests that the general impact of Fletcher's preface was negligible and that no matter how well Fletcher was able to imple­ ment his theories in his own plays, his tragicomedies were not generally considered to constitute a third species of drama, distinct from either

Literary Criticism, pp. 61952-0. 23 comedy or tragedys but were rather'believed to be either tragedies or comedies possessing an addition of comic or tragic elements.

(2) THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRAGICOMEDY IN ENGLAND

The beginnings of English tragicomedy are difficult to ascer­ tain precisely, and doubtless a more detailed account than the present one would have to consider the influence of the classical drama, of the native medieval drama, and of the tragical comedies of the

Christian Terence. Such an account would also need to discuss the i existence during the early English Renaissance of the tragicomic play and would have to traceithe influence exerted upon the development of tragicomedy proper by the romantic comedies of George Feele and John

Lyly„ In presenting a short outline, as it were, of the significant developments in the history of English tragicomedy, it is more economi­ cal to begin with Robert Greene, a figure considered by at least two critics 12 to have first developed a play recognizable as a proper tragicomedy,

Greene's Scottish History of James IV (c, 1591) was first printed in a quarto of 1598, and although the title-page adds that the

"history" is "Entermixed with a pleasant Gomedie," it is in the main action that its tragicomic features occur, James IV, a tragedy with a happy ending, is important in that it exhibits most of the particulars

12 Marvin T, Herrick, Tragicomedy; Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana, 1962), p, 237, and Ristine, p, 80, r which were ultimately to characterize the dramatic romances and romantic

tragicomedies of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher* Its improbable plot (which is accentuated by a quasi-historical setting in medieval

Scotland) is of the high scene^ portrays the virtuous in conflict with and often at the mercy of the evil characters, and turns upon certain political developments resulting from the temporary superiority of the villainous characters* In addition, a sense of impending disaster, realized in the promised deaths of the villains at the end, pervades

the action: the anticipated catastrophe, however, is obviated by a series of timely revelations. In each of these characteristics,

James IV adumbrates Fletcherian tragicomedy, but aside from this fact, a study of the playfs sources reveals that it demonstrated more artis­

tically than any of its English prototypes the manner in which the prime materials of dramatic romance--the Italian novella and Italian tragedy-- 13 could be adapted to the requirements of English tragicomic dramatists.

Three of Shakespeare's earlier plays, The Merchant of Venice

(1596), Much Ado about Nothing (1598-9), and Measure for Measure (1604),

are an important link between Greene and Beaumont and Fletcher. Although

these plays are essentially comedies, they do exhibit the artistry with which their author interwove tragic and comic elements, thus perfecting

the work initiated by such playwrights as Feele and Lyly and improved upon by Greene. "In this respect," Ristine remarks, "they prepare the

Herrick,notes that the source for James IV is Cinthio's "Tale of Arrenopia,u but points out that there is some evidence, small though it is, for assuming that Greene may possibly have been acquainted with Cinthio's tragedy with a happy ending, Arrenopia (1553); see ibid. 25

way for the perfected form of tragicomedy that was to emerge later with

the revival of romantic drama in the work of Beaumont and Fletcher"

(p. 87). The appearance of Philaster in about 1610 marked the emergence

Ristine alludes to, but whether this play actually appeared before,

after, or between Cymbeline (1609-10) and The Winter *s Tale (1611) is

something of a moot point.

Cymbeline--classified interestingly enough in the 1623 Folio as

a tragedy--contains most of the salient characteristics of tragicomedy proper: a highly improbable plot, pastoral and high scenes, threats of

a tragic catastrophe, the conflict and balancing of virtuous characters with villainous ones, and the satisfying of poetic justice. But since

the action also involves the deaths of two relatively important charac­

ters, the play tends in the direction of tragedy; and that the editors of the First Folio did group it with the tragedies suggests, that they possibly considered it a tragedy with a happy ending.

Doubtless, The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s best tragicomedy

in that it is both considerably removed.from the tragedy with a happy

ending and in closer proximity to pastoral tragicomedy than his other plays. On the one hand, the action is pregnant with tragic possibili­

ties: a queen is imprisoned by her jealous husband and subsequently

dies; a royal child is given away for exposure; the only remaining heir

to the throne also dies; and a minor character is killed. But as the play concludes (a number of years having passed), the king’s child who was supposed to have been exposed is discovered to be alive and is

reunited with her repentant father, and the queen is restored to life.

Shepherds, moreover, are given a prominent part in the action, and in 26 the conventional presentation of their idyllic way of life, a contrast with the unhappiness of court life is established.

Both these plays reflect the Jacobean interest in the dramatic romance with its improbable story, and under the guidance of Beaumont and Fletcher, the dramatic romance, primarily manifest in tragicomedy, was to achieve its highest degree of perfection in England. Following the initial failure of The Faithful Shepherdess (1608-9)— a play more important for its position in the general history of tragicomedy than in the development of the genre in England because its influence in England was negligible— Fletcher, in collaboration with. Francis Beaumont, pro­ duced Philaster (^1610) and A King and No King (1611). Both plays embody the salient features of Fletcher's subsequent tragicomedies.

As was indicated earlier, the significance of Philaster lies in the creation by Beaumont and Fletcher of a world in which the primary evil seems to be genuine enough, but which is, in fact, the result of a false and easily dissipated hypothesis. This same portrayal of a

"world, of seeming evil" (to use Waith's phrase) also helps to establish the tragicomic mood in A King and No King. In this play, the central action involves a king who has fallen in love with his supposed sister, and the utmost in emotional tension is wrung by the playwrights from this situation. Shen it looks as though a tragic catastrophe is inevi­ table, however, the King not only learns that he is unrelated to his beloved but also that he is not even a king. Whereas in tragedy the stress given to such a phenomenon as incest would be extremely serious and grave (cf. Oedipus the King. The Duchess of Malfi. and The Genci). the emphasis in A King and No King is as often satiric as not, and the 27

King is frequently made a fool of because of his unfortunate predicament.

As it turns out, moreover, the incestuous relationship of the King and

his "sister” has no genuine basis, for it is nothing more than a device utilized by the playwrights as a topic for a dramatic (albeit inconclu­

sive) debate: nothing is really affirmed in the play concerning the moral implications of incest. As in Philaster, the aim of A King and Ho

King is almost purely entertainment, and this end is largely achieved

by means of a suspenseful, romantic, exotic, happily-concluded story.

Various critics have endeavored to define the peculiar contribu­

tion of Fletcherian tragicomedy to the more general growth of English

tragicomedy. Their findings, although often failing to point to some­

thing really unique, are nonetheless valuable in that they help to

describe tragicomedy as it found its perfection in the hands of the two

dramatists.

Frank Ristine believes that the "peculiar attribute" of Fletch­

erian tragicomedy is, in general terms, the "absolute concealment of the

character of the denouement," or, more specifically, the use of the

unforeshadowed happy denouement in a play which is suspenseful and tragic

in tone (p. 123). Eugene M. Waith feels that A King and No King completes

the pattern of Fletcherian tragicomedy begun by Fletcher in The Faithful

Shepherdess. After analyzing A King and No King. Waith suggests eight

headings which he believes help to define the Fletcherian mode: (1) the

imitation of a world (especially that of gentlemen) well-known to the

audience; (2) a remote setting; (3) a complicated, intricate plot;

(4) an "improbable hypothesis"; (5) a pervading aura of evil; (6) "Pro­

tean characters"; (7) "lively touches of passion" (as Dryden expressed it); and (8 ) emotional language (pp» 36-40). In addition to these N characteristics5, Waith sees the play studded with touches of both the pastoral and satiric spirits--two of the several informing elements in

Renaissance tragicomedy.^

Herrick takes exception to both views. Admitting the value of

Waith^s analysis* he points out that since numerous English* French* and

Italian tragicomedies and tragicomic plays can be made to reveal any or several of the items comprising Waith9s pattern* the elements cannot be considered to be uniquely Fletcherian (p. 263). Similarly* Herrick indicates that many French and Italian plays also show an absolute concealment of the type of denouement to be achieved* and that of the

English dramatists* Ben Jonson (in Volpone and Epicoene* for example) tfcould have taught Beaumont and Fletcher how to conceal their denouements until the very end11 (p. 262). Instead of searching for the distinctive or unique qualities of Fletcherian tragicomedy* Herrick denies that this kind of play possesses anything genuinely unique at all (p. 264)=

Herrick8s criticism of Ristine and Waith seems a little unfair in view of the limited scope of each writer. Although it is true that

Waith8s analysis fails to provide a truly comprehensive discussion of the particular English tragicomedies antecedent to Beaumont and Fletcher which can also be more or less characterized by the formula he sets forth* his observations should not be considered as pertaining to the general history of tragicomedy. Furthermore* Waith9s formula certainly does characterize a type of tragicomedy which can be described as

l^See Waith5s chapter "Satyr and Shepherd*" in The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher, Yale Studies in English* CXX (New Haven* 1952)* pp. 43-85. 29

"Flefccherian,11 if only for the simple reason that Beaumont and Fletcher perfected this kind and do not, as Waith seems to insist and Herrick denies, uniquely represent it. Similarly, Ristine’s work is limited to an examination of English, not European, tragicomedy; and although it is certainly possible that Beaumont and Fletcher may have learned from

Jonson the perfected use of the unforeshadowed denouement, Jonson's utilization was comic, not tragicomic, and thus has little identity as an actual innovation made in English tragicomedy. I think, then, that we can accept both Waith*s and Ristine’s descriptions of Fletcherian tragicomedy as. being generally valid, remembering as we do so that the term Fletcherian tragicomedy refers to a type of play epitomized in the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, not one uniquely represented by their plays.

By the late Jacobean era, tragicomedy had become an extremely popular form of dramatic representation. The romantic story, neither strictly tragic nor comic, fulfilled the demands of the tragicomic playwrights since its rather "neutral" focus facilitated the unification of comical and tragical temperaments in such a way as to create a third dramatic mood, the "middle mood.11"*'^ The plots of Jacobean or Fletch­ erian tragicomedies are highly improbable and involved, the characters often artificial, and the settings pseudo-historical and exotic.

Opposed to instructing by tragic or comic example, the end of Fletch­

erian tragicomedy seems to have been primarily to entertain, and only

a discussion of the "middle mood," see Una Ellis Fermor, The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London,.1936), pp. 201-26. 30

secondarily to teach. And mainly because the emphasis upon the non-

didactic end of tragicomedy was to increase, the salient features of

the genre as exemplified in Fletcher were to become, under the Caroline

dramatists, proportionately more pronounced and exaggerated. More

than anything, perhaps, the widespread popularity of the tragicomic mode during the period immediately preceding the Commonwealth under­

scores the gradual crumbling of the tragic and comic delineations in

drama that was occurring and marks one of the major transitions between

the more or less conventional drama of pre-Commonwealth England and the

heroic play of the Restoration; in almost every respect Davenantes

pre-Commonwealth plays epitomize the excess, artificiality, and

improbability of the drama of this period. CHAPTER III

DAVENANT'S PEE-COMMGNEEALTH PLAYS

Bavenanfc’s extant pre-Commonwealth plays are ten in number. Two of these. The Wits (1633/4) and News from Plymouth (1635), testify to

Davenant1s successful experimentation with Jonsonian comedy of manners but have no practical bearing on a study of his tragicomedies. Two more, Albovine (1626?) and The Cruel Brother (1626/7). are tragedies written in the romantic vein Davenant was to exploit more successfully in his later plays, for both are replete with intricate plots, exotic and pseudo-historical settings, extremely hyperbolic language, stereo­

typed characters motivated by destructive passions, and bloody denouements. The Cruel Brother met with little applause on its 1 1 2 presentation, and Albovine was never even performed. Had these

tragedies originated some ten or fifteen years earlier, during the vogue of Italianate tragedy of revenge, they might have encountered a more enthusiastic reception than they did. Davenant8s other tragedy,

The Unfortunate Lovers (1638), merits some discussion in the present

essay because it exhibits many similarities to his tragicomedies.

^Alfred Harbage, Sir William Davenant. Poet Venturer, 1606-1668 (Philadelphia, 1935), p. 41. 2 Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1941-56), III, 198. 32

Because it is a tragedy and because of its relatively late date, it is

treated at .the end of this chapter.

This essay is concerned with the remaining five plays. Love and

Honour (1634), The Platonic Lovers (1635), and The Fair Favourite (1638)--

all "proper" tragicomedies--are treated in the section immediately

following. The Just Italian (1629) and The Distresses (1639), both of which I consider to be basically proper tragicomedies, are discussed

separately since various critics have been unable to agree on their

genre.

In addition to these ten pre-Commonwealth play?, TQavenant may have written an eleventh, for on July 22, 1629, a play entitled The

3 Colonel was entered under his name in the Stationers6 Register.Since no play of this title has survived, one of two things must be true:

either The Colonel is a lost play, or it was published under a different

title. Herbage^ and Greg-” have both attempted to identify The Colonel, but their endeavors are only guesses. If extant under another title.

Greg, ed., A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London, 1939-59), II, @37.

^Harbage identifies it with The Siege, first mentioned in the Stationers9 Register on September 9, 1653 (Greg, II, 927, no. 833), on the grounds that a colonel appears in The Siege. But since the colonel is a very minor character, Harbage argues that the protagonist of The Siege. Florello, could have been designated a colonel in the earlier version. See note, p. 228.

"5 Greg feels that Love and Honour (1634) may possibly be the same play as The Colonel inasmuch as a colonel figures prominently in the comic background of this play. Furthermore, Greg recalls the fact that Bavenant was evidently uncertain of a title for Love and Honour since he seems to have considered such alternatives as The Courage of Love and The Matchless Maids, or The Nonnareilles. See II, 37. however9 The Colonel is not at present identifiable with any degree of certainty»

(1) TEE PROPER TRAGICOMEDIES

Love and Honour (1634) was the most successful of Bavenant8s tragicomedies? and it has often been cited as the precursor of the 6 English heroic drama= Although this assertion fails to consider other prototypes, it is true that the theme of love and honor, so often the keynote of the Restoration serious drama, does underlie the action of this play. Love and Honour tells the story of Evandra, daughter of the

Duke of Milan, who has been captured by the victorious army of Milan's enemy, Savoy, and who is loved by three men. The Duke of Savoy's brother had presumably been killed by the Milanese in a previous war, and the

Duke now intends to take his revenge on Milan by executing Evandra.

Before he can give the final command for Evandra*s death, however, his brother is discovered to be alive, and the play ends happily with avowals of friendship and promised marriages. The rather insignificant subplot satirizes the idealistic sentiments which accompany the love-interest of the main actions in a series of scattered scenes, old soldiers and would-be gallants (all of whom are low-life figures) undergo a number of comic love-involvements with shrews, servants, and hags captured during the sack of Milan.

i . - • "

^See, for example, Arthur Nethercot, Sir William D'Avenant. Poet Laureate and Playwright-Manager (Chicago, 1938), p. 121. 34

As is characteristic of many of the so-called "love and honor" plays, the conflict of personalities, goals, and ideals provides the main interest in the play as well as serving to complicate the story to the point of confusion. Evandra is loved by three men whose senses of honor (and it is mainly honor, not love) compel them to offer their own lives in exchange for hers. Their situation is made difficult by a number of facts: the Duke is determined that Evandra shall die; one of the men, Alvaro, is the Duke of Savoy's son; another, Prospero, is the soldier who captured Evandra and also Alvaro's best friend; and the third, Leonell, is a paroled Milanese soldier whose life has been spared by Prospero. The honor, gratitude, and friendship which bind the men together are thus brought into conflict because all have.the same goals.

Furthermore, Evandra, who loves Alvaro, is obligated both to Prospero, because he has treated her so honorably, and to Leonell, because he had personally defended her during the sack of Milan. Her seeming sense of honor makes it impossible for her to allow the men to sacrifice themselves in her stead, and she resigns herself to the Duke of Savoy's cruel punishment— but not before her confidant, Melora, protests that she is the real Evandra and also gives herself up. As it turns out, however, the two women are not motivated by ethical convictions but rather by a curious desire to achieve the immortal glory they believe their unjust executions will bring them.

The conflict of love and honor results from a suspension of the faculty of reason and may, therefore, indicate Davenant's growing inter­ est in French drama with its stressing of the rational. For example, when Alvaro learns that Prospero has captured Evandra, he criticizes his 35

friend’s lack of reason:

*„<,<, Had’st thou been learn’d. And read the noble deeds of gentle knights, Reason had check’d thy rage, thy valour would Have been more pitiful than to have led

A virgin into harsh captivity. 7 (Act I; Works. Ill, 109)

Later, just before Evandra gives herself up, she is so overwhelmed by

Alvaro’s honorable behavior towards her that she exclaims:

I ’ve lost my reason, and I want the courage To entertain your kindness as I ought. (Act II; Works. Ill, 122) ! and then proceeds to allow herself to become deeply involved with Alvaro.

When Leone11 discovers that, in having promised Evandra not to desert

his post as guard over the imprisoned Alvaro and Prospero, he will be

unable to prevent Evandra from surrendering herself to the Duke, he too

curses his lack of reason:

Furies and fiends seize on my senses straightJ What have I promis’d in the rashness of My dull and inconsiderate love? (Act III; Works, III, 151).

Throughout the play, it is not so much the conflict of love, honor and

reason which creates interest as it is the struggles of each of the main

characters to re-establish the delicate balance between the three which

has in some way or other been upset. As Herrick says, "Reason, love, and

honor, as in seventeenth-century French tragicomedy, are all-important

All citations from Davenant's plays are from The Dramatic Works of Sir William D'Avenant. with Prefatory Memoir and Notes. ed. J. Maid- ment and W.H. Logan, 5 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1872-4). In citing speech-headings I have changed the large and small capitals to italics. 36 possessions ['sicj and must co-exist in harmony before the noble characters can be happy.,"®

Apart from the possible French influence, the play fits the

Caroline tragicomic pattern almost perfectly; a series of incidents and complications, tragic in implication, are heaped upon one another until it becomes impossible to complicate matters further without actually bringing death to one or more of the characters of high estate; when .this extremity is reached, the play’s happy ending is effected by means of a sequence of revelations and disclosures which succeed in removing the original false hypothesis. The way in which the false hypothesis is exposed borders on the ludicrous. In order to advertise his cruelty, the Duke of Savoy grants the Milanese permission to send two ambassadors to witness the execution. However, at the crucial moment,

Leone11 throws off his disguise and admits that he is the Prince of

Parma, whose

. . . valiant father took Your (the Duke1 § brother, prisoner, and presented him Where he receiv’d his death: my father that So oft hath humbled you in war, and made His victories triumph almost upon The ruins of your state. (Act V; Works. Ill, 179-80)

The Duke, of course, vows that Leone11 shall die in place of the two women claiming to be Evandra. But one of the ambassadors pulls off his beard and admits to being none other than the Duke of Milan himself, and, subsequent to this discovery, the second ambassador, the Duke of Savoy’s brother, also, plucks off his beard. The Duke’s brother, it seems.

^Tragicomedy; Its Origin and Development in Italy. France, and England (Urbana, 1962), p. 306. 37 discovering that he was able to pursue without restriction his beloved studies as a prisoner among the Milanese (in contrast to his situation among the Savoyards), let it be known that he had been executed. This excuse--the entire scene, in fact--patently demonstrates how strained, improbable, and sensational a dramatic device the unforeshadowed denouement had become in Davenant1s hands.

In several other ways, the play mirrors the decadence towards which the drama of the period tended. An instance is Davenant*s handling of the love rivalry. After discovering his brother's well-being and - undergoing a complete change in character, the Duke of Savoy attempts to resolve the love-conflict by pairing off Melora with Alvaro (since

Alvaro had at one time loved Melora) and Evandra with Leonell. Prospero, also having undergone a sudden transformation, which leaves him satisfied with this arrangement, vows to pursue his original military calling.

Indeed, one must agree with a modern editor of Davenant, James ¥. Tupper, that in giving Evandra three lovers, Davenant "creates distraction rather than interest," and that in bestowing her upon Leonell, he is guilty of a gross injustice to Alvaro who, we expect, will ultimately win her.^ To Tupper?s observations, one may add that the audience's sense of comic justice is also disregarded inasmuch as Davenent failed to construct the play so as to provide Prospero1with a bride.

The passivity with which Evandra, Melora, Alvaro, and Prospero are willing to forego their original objectives and accept the arrange­ ments provided for them would, however, seem to suggest that the

^"Love and Honour", and "The Siege of Rhodes" by Sir William B'Avenant,(Boston. 1909), p. xxxiv. 38

disproportionate and somewhat egocentric emphasis each had previously

placed upon love or honor has now been rectified. This fact is clearly

evident in the instance of Prospero, whose acceptance of a military

career is in keeping with the warlike figure presented in the opening

scenes of the play. The Duke’s change in character, moreover, can also'

be accounted for by this re-establishing of a balance between love,

honor, and reason. And finally, the relationship of this restoring of

an equilibrium to the play’s happy ending is most evident in the instance

J ' of the Duke’s brother? whose selfish disregard for love and honor-- manifest in his self-imposed anonymity--originally upset the balance and

whose reappraisal is the initial force by which the equilibrium is \ - ultimately restored.

The characterization in Love and Honour is also something of a

defect, but one which is again in keeping with the general quality of

the drama of the time. The characters rarely rise.above personifica­

tions of principles or types of behavior, and, as has been suggested

already, they are sometimes drawn inconsistently. The good characters,

from whose lips lofty sentiments constantly fall, are unrealistically

self-sacrificing and honorable. The villain, on the other hand, is so

completely evil that he is willing even to execute his own son should

the latter endeavor to prevent Evandra’s execution; yet his transforma­

tion from villain to benefactor occurs in a matter of seconds.

Love and Honour typifies the strained, improbable, highly

romantic tragicomedy which exaggerated the salient features of Fletch-

erian drama. In addition, its emphasis upon the necessity of a balance

between love, honor, and reason may indicate the presence of a French 39 influence. In later years, Davenant definitely directed French and other continental literary innovations into the mainstream of seventeenth- century English literature, but even as early as the writing of Love and

Honour, he appears to be shaping his tragicomedies more closely along

French lines than along Fletcherian. The relative insignificance of the satiric subplot may also emphasize, as it were, Davenant's growing concern over the necessity for maintaining in his plays the unity of action insisted upon so emphatically by the neoclassical critics, the majority of whom at this time were French: eventually, the comic subplot was to disappear altogether from his serious plays. Love and

Honour, then, marks an important step in the direction of the English heroic play, which had its roots in the neoclassical drama of France and in the Fletcherian drama of the pre-Gommonwealth period: and in the play which follows, the movement away from the native English tradition is even more evident.

The Platonic Lovers (1635), licensed for acting on November 16,

1635, a year after the licensing of Love and Honour, was first printed 10 in 1636. Although one might infer from the title that the theme of platonic love constitutes the main interest of the play, the inference would be only partly correct. The Platonic Lovers is actually something of a dramatic debate in which the various aspects of platonic and sen­

sual love are disputed among the principal characters.

Because of the patronage of Charles I's French Queen, Henrietta

Maria, platonic love became fashionable in courtly circles during the

■^Greg, I, no. 506. 40 era immediately preceding the Commonwealth. Platonic Love, of course, had been a recurrent theme in English literature since the early English

Renaissance, when Italian courtesy-books, epitomized by Castiglione’s

Cortegiano. first began to exert an influence in England. In an amusing letter to Philip Warwick, dated June 3, 1834, James Howell provides a broad definition of platonic love: "The Court affords little News at present, but that there is a Love call'd Platonick Love, which much sways there of late; it is a Love abstracted from all corporeal gross

Impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and 11 Ideas of the Mind, not in any carnal Fruition." What Howell's definition fails to make clear is that by the Caroline era the earlier manifestation of platonic love (to which his definition could be easily applied), with its intellectual approach to the subject of love and its emphasis upon delicate and noble manners and upon skillful and witty debate, had undergone a degeneration. Alfred Horatio Upham conveniently summarizes the salient features which characterize this later develop­ ment :

Naturalness to a great degree gave way to affectation. Women became strong-minded pedants, claiming a pretentious part in public affairs and parading their supposed learning. Platonic wooing became an exaggerated prudery combined with coquetry, a love relation not always pure, a series of intricate maneuvers according to false standards, one of which proclaimed marriage a mere slavery. Assumed names, as well as periphrases for

Epistolae Ho-Elianae: The Familiar Letters of James Howell. Historiographer Royal to Charles II. ed. Joseph Jacobs (London, 1892), I, 317-18. Interestingly enough, it is often thought that this passage, which later speaks of a masque of platonic love to be presented at court, refers to Davenant's Temple of Love (1634/5); see Bentley, III, 216-18. 41

all simple statements, became a necessity, and the language of the elect grew into a strange jargon.

Most English poets and courtiers did not accept the French tra­ dition of platonic love without modifying it, and it seems that a convention developed in England which required that poets and courtiers maintain a cynical and somewhat gallant attitude towards platonic love

(ibid., p. 331), A recognition of this convention is important in that it not only helps to account for Davenant's criticism of platonic love in this play but also assists in fixing The Platonic Lovers within its proper tradition. At least two critics (Harbage, p. 236, and

Nethercot, p. 129) point out that Davenant frequently satirizes this kind of love and ascribe as the reason for the satire Davenant’s pragmatic frame of mind; however, their reason is largely biographical and fails to account for the tradition within which Davenant was writing.;

In the main action of the play, Duke Theander is in love with

Eurithea, the sister of Duke Phylomont; Phylomont, moreover, loves

Theander*s sister, Ariola. Theander*s love for Eurithea is as purely platonic as Phylomont*s love for Ariola is sensual. The plot is extremely complicated, but by the play’s conclusion, Theander and

Eurithea realize the unnaturalness and impracticality of their love and promise to view their relationship more realistically in the future.

Dangerous complications appear throughout the play. Fredeline, "Creature to Theander," conceives a lustful passion for Eurithea and, in order to

l^The French Influence in English Literature, from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration (New York, 1908), p. 314, 42 obtain access to her, so manipulates Theander that the latter marries

Eurithea. Later, Fredeline convinces Theander that Eurithea has com­ mitted adultery, but Phylomont, refusing to believe the accusation, demands that the credulous Theander apologize, When Theander refuses, the threat of war develops; but before war can actually break out,

Fredeline*s intrigues are exposed, and the play concludes happily with the bestowal of nuptial blessings upon Phylomont and Ariola,

Fredeline*s selfish lust contrasts sharply with both types of love exhibited by the two pairs of lovers, Davenant achieves further contrast in the comic subplot wherein a bragging soldier falls in love and subsequently becomes a court-fop through affecting platonic love.

By the end of the play, the soldier is compelled to see his pretensions and to adopt a more reasonable attitude.

The action of The Platonic Lovers, then, is what we have come to expect as being characteristic of tragicomedy proper: characters of high estate are brought close to disaster and are only saved from the anticipated tragedy at the last moment; the conclusion, in addition, does not merely avert tragedy but very positively fulfills the comic convention by means of reconciliations and a marriage. The Platonic

Lovers does not, however, exemplify Fletcherian tragicomedy in the same way as Love and Honour, for in a number of respects it exhibits features which are indicative of an influence apart from the Fletcherian, The fact of Eurithea's chastity, for example, is never concealed from the audience, and, indeed, of the dramatis personae only Theander appears to put any credence in Fredeline's accusation. Yet it is the acceptance by Theander of Eurithea's adultery as fact which provides the possibility 43 of a tragic denouement. Manifestly, Davenant has not resorted to the unforeshadowed denouement in The. Platonic Lovers as a means of achieving

suspense and a feeling of impending disaster. It might be argued that

in allowing Buonateste to give Fredeline an aphrodisiac, Davenant has,

indeed, resorted to the unforeshadowed denouemeht and the false hypothesis. In reply, one might indicate that Buonateste’s intelligence and high ethical convictions are stressed throughout the play and that,

therefore, there is never any question of Buonoateste's permitting so

lecherous a figure as Fredeline to accomplish his ends by providing him with the means to do so. In connection with my next point, it is tempt­

ing to suppose that Davenant deliberately avoided the unforeshadowed denouement for the very reasons it was usually employed.

A careful reading of The Platonic Lovers reveals that the play’s

action is of only secondary importance and that it is the dialogue which

creates, as it were, the primary interest, for the play is not only

a dramatic debate but also a literary device by means of which Davenant

explicates and discusses the essences of various kinds of love, whether platonic, affected-platonic, or sensual, or Whether altruistic or

selfish. Herrick has observed that because the coherence of the play

results more from the structure imparted by the debates and discussions

than from the action, The Platonic Lovers resembles French pastoral

tragicomedy (p. 305), a genre conspicuous for its lack of action and for

its argumentative treatment of certain topics, not the least of which was love. And certainly, that Davenant was at least experimenting with

pastoral tragicomedy in this play becomes quite explicit in Act II when

Theander and Eurithea don the costumes of shepherds and meet in a nearby 44 woods in order to discuss their love. The following lines spoken by

Theander sufficiently indicate the type of pastoral resorted to by

Davenant:

.... Come forth. My princely shepherdess! and leave thy lambs Less gentle than thyself, whilst we a while Grow pensive in this gloomy shade.

* * it i< -k it ‘k i? ic * Vc Yf * it it it it it it it it This_green,and,fragrant palace.tempts our stay. Here sit, where fragrant nature made the sharper scented briar, And luscious jes’mine meet to qualify And reconcile their diff'ring smells within The honey woodbine's weak and slender arms. (Act III; Works. II, 58)

The pastoral as frequently manifest in French or later English pastoral tragicomedy differs from conventional pastoral; instead of presenting a world of shepherds and shepherdesses in order to comment, usually in a satirical vein, upon the ills of society in general or of court life in particular, the dramatist of pastoral tragicomedy has the alternative of presenting noble ladies and gentlemen who disguise themselves as shepherds and shepherdesses and who remove to the country­ side in order to engage in "long-winded amorous debates" (Herrick, ■ 13 p. 170).

Although Davenant's presentation of the two primary, manifesta­ tions of love tends to be impartial, he cannot avoid getting in an occasional satiric stab at piatonic love. The Prologue, for example, humorously states that Davenant had been commanded "T' interpret what he scarce doth understand" (Works. II, 6). And in the play, both

1 O For a study of the pastoral convention, see W.E. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London, 1906). 45

Fredeline and Buonateste satirically comment upon the platonic love of

Theander and Eurithea, Thus, when Fredeline, who is thought to love

Eurithea, is questioned about his recent attempts to get Eurithea and

Theander married, he replies.

That's the platonic way; for so The balls, the banquets, chariot, canopy, And quilted couch, which are the places where This wise new sect do meditate, are kept, Not at the lover's but the husband's charge. And it is fit; for marriage makes him none. Though she be still of society.

* * * * * * # * it it *k * * * "k it it it it it it it

W e r e Eurithea married, I would teach Her the true art: she is unskilful yet* (Act III; Works, II, 52)

And Buonateste, who apparently represents Davenantfs norm, also criti­

cizes the contemporary manifestations of platonic love in a humorous

though less cynical vein:

My Lord, I still beseech you not to wrong My good old friend Plato, with this Court calumny; They father on him a fantastic love He never knew, poor gentlemano Upon My knowledge sir, about two thousand years Ago, in the high street yonder At Athens, just by the corner as you pass To Diana$s conduit,--a haberdasher8s house. It was, I think,"-*"he kept a wench!

it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it

I could say more; my friend was lewdly given. (Act II; Works. II, 38)

In connection with this conventional satiric emphasis, it should

be pointed out that inasmuch as Theander and Eurithea are made to recog­

nize that their noble ideal concerning love fails to square with the facts

of thehuman condition, Davenant has patently demonstrated with which

kind of love his sympathies lie. 46

The Platonic Lovers, then, exhibits more clearly than Love and

Honour the influence of the French drama. This influence is most notable in Davenant's reliance on dramatic debate as a structural principle and also in the particular kind of pastoral incorporated into the play. The subplot of Love and Honour was said to be relatively unimportant; in the instance of The Platonic Lovers. on the other hand, the subplot is not so much diminished in significance as it is more carefully integrated into the main action. This integration imparts to the play a semblance, at least, of having something of the dramatic unity insisted upon by the neoclassical critics.

Appearing three years after The Platonic Lovers. The Fair

Favourite (1638) clearly demonstrates the manner in which Davenant exploited some of the devices already employed in both Love and Honour and The Platonic Lovers. Although the plot is not nearly so improbable as that of Love and Honour, it surely must have satisfied the esthetic predilections of Davenant1s audience. The Fair Favourite tells the following story: because of political reasons, a king is compelled to marry the heiress of a neighboring country. After the marriage, how­ ever, the King refuses to consummate the union and, instead, elevates to the position of "fair favourite" Eumena, the woman who had been his

"platonic" mistress before the marriage. Popular rumor asserts that

Eumena is the King’s mistress in more than a platonic sense, and Eumena1s brother, Oramont, accepts the assertion as true. To complicate matters,

Oramont1s friend, Amadore, is in love with Eumena, and when Oramont threatens to punish his sister, Amadore champions her in an off-stage duel with his friend. Later, it is rumored that Amadore has been slain. 47 bramont next threatens his sister's life, but is apprehended by the

King's men and sentenced to be executed for Amadore's death. The sen­ tence, of course, is never carried out because Amadore reveals himself to be alive and forgives Oramont for his irrational behavior. With the false hypothesis thus exposed, the King bestows nuptial blessings upon

Amadore and Eumena and, moved at last by his wife's suffering and genuine affection, promises to reform his ways. The tragicomic formula is again explicit: in at least three instances--Amadore;*6 supposed death, Oramont's attempt to kill his sister, and Oramont's impending execution--a tragic catastrophe is adumbrated for some of the play's characters of high estate;, but, through the exposure of the play's false hypothesis--Amadore's death--the cause for the impending tragedy is removed, and the play concludes according to the satisfaction of the characters.'

The Fair Favourite nulls together and unifies, as it were, several of the conspicuous traits in Love and Honour and The Platonic

Lovers. In characterization. The Fair Favourite more closely resembles

Love and Honour, for, in the tradition of Caroline romantic tragicomedy, the dramatis personae are personifications of principles or types of behavior. The Queen and Eumena, sacrificing and virtuous in the extreme, remind the reader of Evandra; Oramont, impetuous, militant, and short­ sighted, recalls Prospero; Amadore, chivalrous and noble, suggests

Alvaro; and the King, tyrannical, temperamental, and protean, brings to mind the Duke of Savoy. The conflict of love and honor also figures conspicuously in the action of The Fair Favourite: Oramont is not merely

Amadore's best friend— he owes his very life to him. Eumena, aside from 48

being the King’s platonic mistress, is also the Queen’s close friend and

later becomes enamored of Amadore„ The King has been married (albeit

against his will), loves Eumena (in a very unplatonic manner, it must

be said), and is obligated to Oramont for certain military sacrifices

rendered for the preservation of the kingdom. And the Queen loves the

King, but endeavors to remain a friend to her rival, Eumena, as well.

In complexity, the network established in this play by theconflict of

interests, obligations, and desires falls just short of the similar maze in Love and Honour.

Since platonic love is a prominent theme in The Fair Favourite,

if is not surprising to discover that the dramatic concomitant of platonic love, the dramatic debate, also figures in the play. Thus, for

example, when the King suddenly appears in Eumena*s chamber at an unseemly hour, she takes him to task for jeopardizing her honor, but

the chastisement soon becomes a debate on the true essence of honor:

Eume. ’Tis equal, sure, To have no honour, and to have the world Believe that it is lost. Honour’s a rich, A glorious upper vestment, which we wear To please the lookers on, as well as to Delight our selves. King. Honour’s a word, the issue of the voice. Eume. The voice. Sir, was ordain’d to satisfy And fill the ears of others, not our own. King. Where is the courage of thy virtue fled, When, valiant with thine own integrity. Thou dids't with thine own to slight opinion as The vulgar doom? Oft hast thou said, honour Doth dwell within, and cannot live abroad; For, like extracted spirits in A viol shut, it keeps the vulgar whilst ’Tis close retain’d, but, when dispers’d and mix’d With open air, the virtue so evaporates. That all its value is for ever lost. Eume. 0 that the world cou’d be instructed thus! But the severe mistake on women’s honours, 49

Mast last like other heresies, and be Too strong for truth or reason's force, because 'Tis popular and old. (Act II; Works. IV, 230-1.)

And so on for two more pages.

In The Platonic Lovers Davenant's point of view towards platonic

love is slightly satiric; in The Fair Favourite the emphasis' is any­

thing but satiric. The absence of satire on platonic love may be accounted for by Davenant's caustic satire of courtiers and courtly

advisers and by his desire, therefore to augment the impact of this criticism upon the audience by providing but one target.

The conflict of love and honour, the theme of platonic love, the

dramatic debate— all evident in The Fair Favourite— suggest the continued

influence of the French drama which I have previously attempted to delin­ eate. Furthermore, whereas the subplot is relatively unimportant in

Love and Honour and is carefully integrated with the main action in

The Platonic Lovers, in The Fair Favourite it completely disappears. In

this respect, Herrick has observed that The Fair Favourite "was even

closer to the neoclassical French type of tragicomedy" than The Platonic

Lovers (p. 305).

Nethercot attributes the satire to Davenant's personal dislike for courtiers, an attribution which is based upon the murder of a tapster, Thomas Warren, by William Davenant in February of 1632/3 and on the supposed adversity Davenant encountered from a certain group at court when he endeavored to obtain the King's pardon; see p. 165. Although it may be true that Davenant, an individual of middle-class background, aroused the envy of his social superiors by his quick rise to favor, J.P. Feil has convincingly argued that the real murderer of Thomas Warren was one of the playwright's distant cousins and namesakes; see MLR. LVIII (1963), 335-42. 50

Of these three plays. The Fair Favourite best exemplifies

Davenant1s handling of the tragicomic mode, for in it he has fused the outstanding characteristics of the other two tragicomedies— the unity of plot and the rhetorical and platonic interest of The Platonic Lovers with the love-honor emphasis and the dramatically effective and suspense­ ful action of Love and Honour. And it is primarily because of this taking the best from each play that The Fair Favourite stands in closer proximity to The Siege of Rhodes and other plays of the heroic mode than do either The Platonic Lovers orLove and Honour.

(2) THE PROBLEMATICAL TRAGICOMEDIES

Davenant*s third play. The Just Italian (1629) was published in

1630, only a year after its licensing. This fact alone would suggest that the play was a theatrical failure, and, indeed, Davenant, in his dedication, and William Hopkins and Thomas Carew, in their commendatory verses, attest to the play's adverse reception. Remembering that

Davenant * s first two plays, Albovine and The Cruel Brother, were also failures, it seems apparent that the playwright had not as yet attained a mastery of dramatic technique. In one respect, The Just Italian is significant, namely, in that it marks a transition between his earlier and later plays, for it combines something of the horror and loose structure of his tragedies with the sentiment of his later tragicomedies.

The plot of The Just Italian is as follows. Confronted with a nagging, rebellious wife, Altamont pretends to take on a mistress,

Scoperta, who is in reality his sister. Alteza, his wife, not to be ■ 51 outdone, introduces iiito the household a bravo, Sciolto, who poses as her paramour. Losing patience with Alteza, Altamont vows to revenge himself upon her, and when he has reason to believe that Scoperta has become sexually involved with Sciolto, he also includes her in his scheme, Altamont provokes Sciolto into fighting a duel, after which, it is later said, Altamont dies of a mortal wound. Even as he dies, how­ ever, Altamont conceives of a way in which to punish.Alteza^ for as proof of her repentance, innocence, and love, his last wish is that his wife be held responsible for the executions of Scoperta and Sciolto, Because

Sciolto stands to be executed for his murder anyway, Alteza condemns, him to be executed; but she refuses to pass judgement upon the innocent

Scoperta and substitutes herself instead for the intended victim. At

this point, of course, Altamont, unmasks himself and proves to be the

"just Italian11 by accepting his wife's promises to mend her ways and by consenting to the marriage of his sister and Sciolto, The subplot, which is loosely connected with the main action, satirizes such figures as the court-fop and the amorous fool, both types being personified

in. the person of Dandolo, the Count of Milan,

The main action of The Just Italian fulfills most of the require­ ments of the tragicomic formulas until the last scene, it is uncertain whether the serious intrigue will terminate catastrophically as suggested

in the first four acts or whether it will end in the tradition of tragi­

comedy with reconciliations and marriages. In addition, the suspense

and ambiguity as to the type of conclusion to be achieved explicitly

results from the false hypothesis of Altamont8s death. In one signifi­

cant respect, however, Davenant8s handling of tragicomic materials 52 differs from his treatment in the three proper tragicomedies, namely in his utilization of the domestic scene and the people of high-middle degree of comedy rather than the political-domestic scene and the figures of high estate of tragicomedy. It is probably for this reason that

Harbage (p. 203) and Herrick (p. 303) consider The Just Italian a comedy, albeit a serious one resembling tragicomedy in its threats of death and timely aversion of bloodshed. But, granted the fact that the principal characters are of high-middle estate and that the scene is domestic, one cannot discover in the main action any of the other features (such as characters of low degree, satire, or even a comic realization of his follies or vices by a character) which would justify classifying the play as a comedy. That The Just Italian partakes of two dramatic genres— the comic and the tragic— is fairly obvious; and since, there­ fore, its tragicomic features prevail over its comic qualities, it should perhaps be understood as a tragicomedy which resembles comedy more than most tragicomedies. Concerning this characteristic, Ristine's description of the play as a tragicomedy of ’’Italian domestic life"

(p. 140) proves valuable in properly categorizing The Just Italian as a

"domestic" tragicomedy.

If The Just Italian is a tragicomedy of Italian domestic life, then The Distresses (1639), which appeared ten years later, is one of

Spanish domestic life. It is now generally accepted that The Distresses was originally licensed November 30, 1639, as The Spanish Lovers, a title which describes the play very appropriately (Bentley, p. 202).

The action of this play is more complicated than that of any of

Davenant's other pre-Commonwealth dramas, and in this respect the 53

tragicomedy exhibits the extent to which Davenant had come to,depend almost totally upon a series of improbable situations and complications

for his dramatic interest. Herrick’s summary of the plot does as well

as any in succinctly and clearly describing what could easily fill

several pages:

It begins with a brawl in which the brother of one heroine is wounded. There is a duel in the second act between another brother of the same heroine and a suitor. An attempted elope­ ment, a kidnapping, various disguises, and still another duel take place before the/ end of the fourth act. In the last act, two brothers, ignorant of their blood-relationship, become rivals in love and prepare for mortal combat, but discover their identities in time to avoid bloodshed. (P. 304)

The play, moreover, concludes to the satisfaction of all the characters with the reconciliation of relatives and friends, and with the promised marriages of the various lovers.

Notwithstanding the duels, the numerous threats of death and

the patently serious tone of The Distresses, most critics prefer to

think of the play as a comedy. Thus, HarjStage speaks of it as a "social

comedy" (p. 243), Herrick as a romantic comedyapproaching tragicomedy

(p. 203) and Nethercot as an "intrigue comedy" (p. 174). None of these

critics justifies his categorization, but, doubtless, each must have

been disturbed by the general domestic, bourgeois tone of the play.

Although admitting the pronounced middle-class emphasis, I cannot see

that The Distresses approximates the comic ideal in any other respect,

for the main action is serious and lacks satire as well as characters

of low estate. Ristine classifies the play as a tragicomedy (p. 212),

and, indeed, The Distresses exhibits most of the salient features of

this genre: although the complication proceeds to the brink of tragedy. a timely revelation succeeds in averting the anticipated catastrophe.

In addition, inflated sentiment, so characteristic of love and honor drama, permeates the dialogue of The Distresses. As in the instance of

The Just Italian, it would, therefore, be more proper to think of The

Distresses as being a tragicomedy of domestic life.

(3) THE TRAGEDY.

Although it is a tragedy. The Unfortunate Lovers (1638) exhibits a striking similarity to Davenant's tragicomedies. The action revolves upon the intrigues of the villain, Galeotto. Eager to secure the hand of Duke Altophil for his daughter, Amaranta, Galeotto falsely accuses

Altophil's beloved, Arthiopa, of unchastity and succeeds in having her confined to the “purgation” house. However, Ascoli, Prince of Verona, discovers Galeotto's scheme, banishes him, and then releases Arthiopa, with whom he immediately falls in love. After failing to win Arthiopa*s love by entreaty, Ascoli abducts her and places Altophil under house arrest. Up to this point (the beginning of the third act), the play could either continue in the direction of tragedy or, as noted by Marvin

T. Herrick (p. 303), could conclude in the tradition of tragicomedy since the situation could be resolved easily enough. But when the ruth­ less Lombard King, Heildebrand, assisted by Galeotto, captures Verona and later rapes Arthiopa, a tragic denouement becomes certain fact.

Amaranta, who is in love with Altophil, helps the latter to kill her father and, not desiring to stand between Altophil and Arthiopa, as well as being remorseful over her part in her father's death, commits suicide

Altophil murders Heildebrand and is himself mortally wounded; and 55

Arthiopa dies of a broken heart„ Like Love and Honour. The Unfortunate

Lovers also has a minor action which is loosely attached to the main plot and in which a social-type--the bankrupt soldier--is satirized.

The first two acts are manifestly in the tradition of English tragicomedy; a villain manipulates certain main characters and brings the action close to tragedy, but before he can cause any genuine harm, his intrigues are exposed. Similarly, an essentially virtuous character repudiates his honor by descending to the level of an intriguer and enacts a sequence of events which, although they need not do so, might well end tragically. 'The reader’s interest, furthermore, focuses not so much upon the manner in which the tragical catastrophe will be achieved as upon the way in which the conflict of love and honor will be resolved. Also reminiscent of Bavenant’s tragicomedies are the charac­ ters presented in these first two acts. In Albovine and The Cruel

Brother the dramatis personae represent either total dedication to evil or goodness corrupted by an evil environment. To these stereotypes,

Davenant adds the virtuous and honorable characters of his tragicomedies.

The self-sacrificing altruism of Arthiopa and Amaranta, for example, remind one of the idealistic relationships of Eumena and the Queen in

The Fair Favourite and of Alvaro, Prospero, and Leone11 in Love and

Honour. In addition, the degree to which.each of the virtuous figures dwells upon his own predicament in a highly sentimental idiom, giving vent to exclamations of self-pity whenever an occasion is presented, also recalls the characterization in the tragicomedies. By thus con­ trasting the brutality of Galeotto and Heildebrand with love, honor, and sentiment and by fusing the satiric action of the subplot with the main ■ 56

action, Davenant prevents the unadulterated horror of his earlier

tragedies from overpowering all else in the play.

In the first two acts, then, Davenant adumbrates the possibility of a tragicomic conclusion.. However, when Galeotto, Heildebrand, and

their crimes are introduced into the third act, it becomes patently

impossible for The Unfortunate Lovers to conclude tragicomically.

Given this interesting structure, one is tempted to make the paradoxical observation that The Unfortunate Lovers is a tragicomedy which fully

realizes its tragic potential.

(4) CONCLUSION

A summary of the matter in this chapter may prove helpful in precisely apprehending Davenant * s development as a tragicomic dramatist.

In The Just Italian. Davenant revealed that although he was able

to handle the tragicomic formula with some competence^ he still had

not surmounted the dramatic deficiencies of his earlier tragedies.

Love and Honour proved to be the most successful of his tragicomedies,

and in this play Davenant clearly demonstrated his debt to Beaumont and

Fletcher. At the same time, however, the prominent position he gave to

love, honor, and reason in this play suggests a French influence; and .

indeed, with The Platonic Lovers, a play in the tradition of French

pastoral tragicomedy, it is quite apparent that Davenant had a more than

superficial interest in the French theater. Davenant returned to the

native English tradition in The Fair Favourite, but that this tragi­

comedy exhibits the play of love and honor and the unified structure of

the neoclassical critics, suggests that the influence of the French 57 drama still persisted. The Unfortunate Lovers, although a tragedy, showed that JDavenant had fully mastered the art of the unforeshadowed denouement inasmuch as the play, until around the middle of the third act, could as easily end tragicomically as tragically. In his final play before the closing of the theaters. The Distresses, Davenant, although returning to the domestic tragicomedy of The Just Italian, gave this play the love-honor interest and the unity of action charac­ teristic of French tragicomedy.

Davenant's development as a tragicomic dramatist did not cease, of course, with the closing of the theaters in 1642, for during the

Commonwealth, he wrote, produced, and published The Siege of Rhodes

(1656), a dramatic representation which has the dubious honor of being, if not the first English heroic play and opera, then certainly the closest approximation of heroic drama to appear before the Restoration.

And during the Restoration, when his own originality appears to have declined, he combined in one play. The Law Against Lovers (1661/2), the plots of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Much Ado about Nothing; and, in The Rivals. (1664) he substantially rewrote Shakespeare and

Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen, increasing where possible the tragicomic features of the plays (Herrick, p. 308).

Compared with such figures as those of Greene, Beaumont and

Fletcher, and Shakespeare, Davenant's contribution to the development of tragicomedy in England was insignificant: he simply lacked the genius essential for initiating new trends and developments. In one respect, however, he does merit recognition, namely, in that he was usually keenly sensitive to the dramatic climate of his times, even to the point of anticipating certain dramatic vogues, such as that of the French drama.

If anything can be said of his accomplishments as a tragicomic drama­ tist, it must be that under him English tragicomedy acquired "some measure of French ’regularity*11 (ibid., p„ 312). A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS REFERRED TO

!„ BENTLEY, Gerald Bades. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. 5 vols.. Oxford, 1941-56.

2. DAVENANT, Sir William. The Dramatic Works of . . . with Prefatory Memoir and Notes, ed. J. Maidment and W.H. Logan. 5 vols. Edinburgh and London, 1872-4.

3. DORAN, Madeleine. Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama. Madison, 1963.

4. DRYDEN, John. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in no. 17, pp. 601-58.

5. ELLIS-FERMOR, Una. The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation. London, 1936.

6. FEIL, J.P. "Davenant Exonerated." MLR. LVIII (1963), 335-42.

7. GREG, W.W. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama. 4 vols. London, 1939-59«

8 . ------— . Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama. London, 1906.

9. GUARINI, Giambattista. The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, trans. from the Italian by Allan H. Gilbert, in no. 17, pp. 505-33.

10. HARBAGE, Alfred. "Intrigue in Elizabethan Tragedy," in Essays On Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honour of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley. London, 1963, pp. 37-44.

11. ------. Sir William Davenant. Poet Venturer. 1606-1668. Philadelphia, 1935.

12. HERRICK, Marviri T. "The Revolt in Tragicomedy against the Grand Style," in The Rhetorical Idiom, ed. Donald C. Bryant. Ithaca, N. Y., 1958, pp. 271-80. -

13. . Tragicomedy; Its Origin and Developmentin Italy. France, and England. Urbana, 1962. -

14. HOWELL, James. Epistolae Ho-Elianae; The Familiar Letters of James Howell, Historiographer Royal to Charles II, ed. Joseph Jacobs. 2 vols. London, 1892.

15. KERNAN, Alvin, The Cankered Muse. Yale Studies in English, CXLII. New Haven, 1959T

59 60

16. Literary Criticism; Plato to Drvden. ed. Allan H. Gilbert. Detroit. 1962.

17. LOPE DE VEGA, Felix Garino. The New Art of Making Comedies, trans. from the Spanish by Olga Marx Perlzweig, in no. 17, pp. 541-8.

18. NETHERCOT, Arthur H. Sir William D'avenant. Poet Laureate and Playwright Manager. Chicago, 1938.

19. ORNSTEIN, Robert. “Volpone and Renaissance Psychology,H N&Q, CGI (1956),. 471-2.

20. RISTINE, Frank Humphrey. English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History. New York, 1910.

21. SCHELLING, Felix Emmanuel. Elizabethan Drama. 1558-1642. 2 vols. Boston and New York, 1908.

22. SIDNEY, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith. London, 1904. I, 150-207. t 23. TUPPER, James W., ed. “Introduction,H “Love and Honour" and “The Siege of Rhodes" by Sir William D'Avenant. Belles-Lettres Series. Boston, 1909, pp. xi-xlvii.

24. UPHAM, Alfred Horatio. The French Influence in English Literature. from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration. New York, 1908. "

25. WAITH, Eugene M. The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher. - Yale Studies in English, CXX. New Haven, 1952.

26. WELLS, Henry W. Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights. New York, 1939.