]
* * * * *
In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. Some of his plots, that
of the Alchemist, for example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and
Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not
have come near Shakspeare; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man
after Shakspeare in that age of dramatic genius.
The styles of Massinger's plays and the Sampson Agonistes are the two
extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may
oscillate. Shakspeare in his great plays is the midpoint. In the Samson
Agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet
something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable: in Massinger
the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible,
from animated conversation by the vein of poetry.
There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspeare round, that we cannot
even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and,
when I had done, I found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and
Massinger instead. It is really very curious. At first sight, Shakspeare
and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike: nothing
so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has
ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakspearian
idiom.
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