English drama -- Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 -- History and criticism
Of Tourneur's two elegies on the death of Sir Francis Vere and of Henry
Prince of Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman's
work of the same order: and it may be added that his first editor has
shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent
in his denunciation of what he assumes to be insincere and sycophantic
in the elegiac expression of the poet's regret for a prince of such
noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and
fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common
courtesy, would not dream of reflecting in terms of such unqualified
severity on the lamentation of Lord Tennyson for the loss of Albert the
Good: and the warmest admirer of that loudly lamented person will
scarcely maintain that this loss was of such grave importance to England
as the loss of a prince who might probably have preserved the country
from the alternate oppression of prelates and of Puritans, from the
social tyranny of a dictator and the political disgrace of the
Restoration.
The existence of a comedy by the author of "The Revenger's Tragedy," and
of a comedy bearing the suggestive if not provocative title of "Laugh
and Lie Down," must always have seemed to the students of Lowndes one of
the most curious and amusing pieces of information to be gathered from
the "Bibliographer's Manual"; and it is with a sense of disappointment
proportionate to this sense of curiosity that they will discover the
non-existence of such a comedy, and the existence in its stead of a mere
pamphlet in prose issued under that more than promising title: which
yet, if attainable, ought surely to be reprinted, however dubious may be
its claim to the honor of a great poet's authorship. In no case can it
possibly be of less interest or value than the earliest extant
publication of that poet--"The Transformed Metamorphosis." Its first
editor has given proof of very commendable perseverance and fairly
creditable perspicacity in his devoted attempt at elucidation of this
most astonishing and indescribable piece of work: but no interpretation
of it can hope to be more certain or more trustworthy than any possible
exposition of Blake's "Jerusalem" or the Apocalypse of St. John. All
that can be said by a modest and judicious reader is that any one of
these three effusions may unquestionably mean anything that anybody
chooses to read into the text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola,
that a Renan is no safer than a Cumming, from the chance of confutation
as a less than plausible exponent of its possible significance: but
that, however indisputable it may be that they were meant to mean
something, not many human creatures who can be trusted to go abroad
without a keeper will be likely to pretend to a positive understanding
of what that significance may be. To me, the most remarkable point in
Tourneur's problematic poem is the fact that this most monstrous example
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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