Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to experimentation. In Coriolanus" class="md-crosslink">Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot (not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots of 1607. Timon of Athens" class="md-crosslink">Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles" class="md-crosslink">Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10), The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest" class="md-crosslink">The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical perspective on fortune and suffering. (Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen" class="md-crosslink">The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own disillusionment. Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theatres in 1642. The prevailing manner of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh, “Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes, spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society at large. Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s; they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s deformities,” the language, habits, and humours of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings; but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice. Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616 Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made a hard-won return to the theatres. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub (1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce. Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as the dominant modes of social interaction. His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehaviour that Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of circumstance.