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ELIZABETHAN DRAMATIC
CRITICISM |
ENGLISH
literary criticism is derived partly from the ancients, and partly
from the Italian scholars. Recent research has revealed many
Italian sources drawn upon by Sidney and Jonson.
The earliest formal treatise touching upon literature in England
is Leonard Coxe's Arte or Crafte of Rhetoryke, written
about 1524; this was derived in part from Melanchthon. Thomas
Wilson's Arte of Rhetorike followed in 1553. More important
still is Roger Ascham's Scholemaster (1570) which contains
the first reference in English to Aristotle's
Poetics. George Whetstone's Dedication to Promos
and Cassandra (1578) is a curious criticism of the drama
of other nations and an attempt to reconcile Platonism and the
drama. The English stage was at several times the subject of
controversies between the dramatists and their adherents, and
the Puritanical element. The first of these controversies called
forth a number of interesting attacks and defenses, among them
three or four of some value as criticism of the drama. In 1577
John Northbrooke published his Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing,
vaine Playes or Enterluds, with other idle Pastimes, &c.,
commonly used on the Sabaoth Day, and reproued by the Authoritie
of the Word of God and auntient Writers. Then followed Stephen
Gosson's The School of Abuse (1579), another attack. Thomos
Lodge replied in his Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays
(1579). Later in the same year Gosson published his A Short
Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse, etc. Henry Durham's A
Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres
appeared in 1580. Gosson's Playes confuted in five Actions,
etc., was published about 1582. About this time Sir Philip Sidney
wrote his Defence of Poesy, or Apologie for Poetry
(published 1595), a reply to the Puritan attacks on the stage.
Three further attacks may be mentioned; Philip Stubbes' The
Anatomie of Abuses (1583), George Whetstone's A Touchstone
for the Time (1584), and William Rankins' A Mirrour of
Monsters (1587). William Webbe's A Discourse of English
Poetrie (1586) is a more ambitious formal treatise on writing,
while Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589) furthered
the work of classification and introducing foreign -- chiefly
Italian -- meters and forms. Sir John Harington's Apologie
of Poetry (1591) was, like Sidney's similar work, a
defense against the Puritan attacks. When Sidney's Defence
was published in 1595, it was already fairly well known, as it
had circulated in manuscript for some years. It is rigidly classical
in its sections on the drama, and follows the Italian Renaissance
scholars in requiring greater verisimilitude, and an adherence
to the Unities. It is curious to note the absence of any such
declaration of independence as Lope
de Vega's New Art among the Elizabethan dramatists,
most of whom were opposed in practice to all formulas. The greatest
critical treatises of the period were classic in tendency, and
the two most important -- Sidney's and Jonson's -- are directed
against current practices in playwriting. Bacon's remarks on
the drama -- in the Essays, the Advancement of Learning,
and the De Augmentis -- could be condensed into one or
two pages. The dramatists themselves had comparatively little
to say of their art; a dozen Dedications and a few Prologues
of Jonson, Chapman,
Fletcher,
Marston, Middleton, Heywood,
Webster,
and Field, are practically all that have direct bearing upon
the subject. Ben Jonson's Discoveries closes the
period. This work (published in 1641) is of prime importance,
though unfortunately it is, as has been said, not a representative
apology or explanation of the current practice, but an attack
upon it.
This article was originally
published in European Theories of the Drama. Barrett H.
Clark. Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd Company, 1918.
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