The English Metaphysical Poets and Poetry

Introduction:

The term “metaphysical” as applied to Donne and his followers is, more or less, a misnomer. However, it has come to stick. It was Dryden who first applied the term in relation to Donne’s poetry. “He affected,” complained Dryden, “the metaphysics, not only in his satires but in his amorous verses.” Dr. Johnson borrowed Dryden’s ideas, and in his “Life of Cowley” called Cowley a poet of the metaphysical school of Donne.

He derided Cowley’s pedantic exhibition of his learning and vocabulary in his poems. But the exhibition of their learning was only one of the many characteristics of the metaphysical poets. Their love of daring imagery, enigmatic expression, a peculiar sensualism uneasily wedded to a mystical conception of religion, their intellectualism and taste for the expression of novel ideas in a novel manner, were some other qualities. The term “metaphysical” denotes, according to Saintsbury, “the habit, common to this school of poets, of always seeking to express something after, something behind, the simple, obvious first sense and suggestion of a subject.” In this way Donne and his followers strike a note of variance from Spenser and the Spenserians and Elizabethan poetry in general.

Composite Quality:

According to Grierson, metaphysical poetry, in the full sense of the term, is a poetry which like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust“has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and of the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.” It arises when the physical world loses its stability, and the people lose faith in the orthodox patterns of thought and belief. At such times sensitive poets turn their attention inwards, and through self-analysis aim at better understanding of themselves, their situation in the world, and their relation to a philosophic or idealised “otherworld.” The age in which Donne lived witnessed a gradual crumbling ?: the old order of things, the disturbing progress of science, and the scepticism which went with it. “The new philosophy”, said Donne, “calls all in doubt”. The realisation that the earth is not the centre of the universe, and the inference that man is not the greatest of all :reatures, dealt a rude blow to the orthodox Christian complacency. Donne’s search for some principle of coherence in a world of chaos led ~.im to the reconciliation of opposites-resolution of doubts and the :-.tegration of the world of reality with the world of the imagination, of sensual cynicism and highflown mysticism, and even of carnal and spiritual longings. This led him surely to the employment of what have been dubbed “metaphysical conceits” and an occasional display of rot-of-the-way, recondite learning. The subtler points of his feeling found outlet quite often in obscure and enigmatic expression which has been the delight of some, and the despair of many readers. In spite of Donne’s obscurity and persistent intellectualism it may be said to his credit as a love poet that he imported into English love poetry a vigorous element of hard realism (which sometimes amounts even to cynicism). In this respect he scored a big advance over Spenser and his school who glorified Platonic love and celebrated almost unearthly and highly conventional mistresses of the Petrarchan tradition. Donne’s “ead was accepted by a large number of poets succeeding him. Among them may be mentioned Herbert, Vaughan, Carew, Crashaw, Trasherne, early Milton, and Cowley. These poets are often classed together as “metaphysicals” or “metaphysical poets”. Apart from them the influence of Donne and his school may also be discerned in the work of a sizable number of poets who flourished in the Caroline period. In fact the metaphysical vein was in evidence as a major current in the stream of English poetry till the age of Dryden, when it gave place to nee-classicism ushered in by him.

Now let us consider some salient characteristics of the poetry of the metaphysical school.

“Undissociated Sensibility”:

The most important characteristic of the metaphysicals is their possession of, or striving after, what T. S. Eliot calls “undissociated sensibility” (the combination of thought and feeling) which Milton was to “split” later. However, Prof. L. C. Knights in his essay “Bacon and the Dissociation of Sensibility” in Explorations puts forward the view that sensibility came to be dissociated much earlier by Bacon. The metaphysicals are “constantly amalgamating disparate experiences” and forming new wholes out of materials so diverse as “reading Spinoza, falling in love and smelling the dinner cooking.” Donne has the knack of presenting together different objects which have between them a quite remote though undeniable similarity. He connects the abstract with the concrete, the remote with the near, the physical with the spiritual, and the sublime with the commonplace and sometimes during moments of the most serious meditation breaks into a note of sardonic humour or pathetic frivolity. This juxtaposition and, sometimes, interfusion of apparently dissimilar or exactly opposite objects often pleasantly thrills us into a new perception of reality. And Donne, says Hayward, is a “thrilling poet.” Donne wrote :

Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one,
Inconstancy naturally hath begot
A constant habit.

These “contraries” meeting in Donne’s poetry “vex” not only the poet but also, sometimes, his readers. His successors handled these contraries rather crudely, with very unpleasant effects.

Metaphysical Wit and Conceits:

Dr. Johnson was the first critic to point out the tendency of the metaphysical poets to yoke radically different images forcibly together. This tendency arose, according to T. S. Eliot, from their undissociated sensibility. But it may be objected that Donne and his followers do not really seem to be serious and spontaneous in the tendency noted by Dr. Johnson. When Donne compares a pair of lovers to a pair of compasses, is he not speaking with his tongue in cheek? Such a tendency is a true manifest ation of the metaphysical wit. Hobbes in his Leviathan defined wit as the capability to find out similarities between things which may look very dissimilar. When Carew said that Donne

ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarchy of wit

He was most probably referring to wit in this sense. All the metaphysicals have an incorrigible aptitude for witty comparisons, juxtaposition, and imagery, and what may be called “the metaphysical conceit”‘….some strained or far-fetched comparison or figure of speech. Dr. Johnson defined the wit of the metaphysicals as a kind of discordia concors, combination of dissimilar images. Let us consider some instances of this discordia concors. In Donne’s Twicknam Garden we meet with the expression “spider love.” Now, we are used to splendid, decorative, or moving images in connexion with the subject of love; but the word “spider” is quite contrary to our expectation. In the same poem the lover’s tears are called the wine of love. The poet invites lovers to come equipped with phials to collect his tears! In another poem we have the very quaint line:

A holy, thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

The word “holy” is highly serious, “thirsty” stands for a simple revsical need, and “dropsy”…the name of a disease…has a clinical tKcTig. Again, consider the lines :

Go tell court-huntsmen, that the king will ride; 
Call country ‘ants to harvest offices.

See how the king and country ants are juxtaposed.

Learnedness:

The poetry of the metaphysicals has the impress of very vast learning. Whatever be the demerits of the metaphysical poets, even Dr. “rhnson had to admit that for writing such poetry it was at least -ecessary to think and read. However, it may be said that this poetry is r-ain-sprung, mot heart-felt. It is intellectual and witty to a fault. Dr. “onnson noted, that the metaphysical poets sometimes drew their conceits from “recesses of learning not very much frequented by common readers rf poetry.” Learning is an asset for a poet. Our quarrel with the -netaphysicals is not that they are learned but that, sometimes, they show off their learning just to impress the reader. An imaginative and learned writer, says Edmund Blunden, “calls for annotation, but the object of his difficult a’llusions is to give shape to his ideas of the world, of the soul, not to de/cide matters of astronomy, physics, geography and natural history/’ Many of Donne’s followers do not always prove so “imagin ative.”

Paradoxical Ratiocination:

According to Grierson, the hallmarks of metapjhysical poetry are pftssionate feeling and paradoxical ratiocination. The same critic observes that the metaphysicals “exhibited deductive reasoning carried to a high pitch.” Too often does Donne state at the beginning of a poem a hopelessly insupportable proposition, which he defends soon after. Consider the poem “The Indifferent” which opens as below:

I can love both fair and brown.

Whatever qualities a woman has are made into so many reasons for loving her! Again, note this in his poem “The Broken Heart”:

He is stark mad, who ever says, 
That he hath been in love one hour.

With his tremendous ratiocinative ability Donne defends this proposition. In “The Flea” the proposition presented to his mistress is:

This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed. and marriage temple is.

It seems an unpromising subject, but there are twenty-seven lines of packed argument to drive it home. This excessive intellectualism not unoften makes for obscurity. See, for instance, the following clever lines:

You that are she and you, that’s doubk she, 
In her dead face half of yourself shall see.

Commenting on these, Tucker Brooke says: ‘Tte meaning can be made out, but the satisfaction of his mental ingenuity in so doing is the only reward the reader will receive.” Lucas compla’ns: “Donne treats poetry as a trapeze for mental frisks.” Clay Hunt disapproves such “pyrotechnics of wit.”

Diction and Versification:

In style and versification Donne and his followeis reacted against the cloying sweetness and harmony of the school of Spenser. The metaphysicals deliberately avoided conventional poetic expressions as they had lost their meaning through O’eruse. According to Wordsworth the language of poetry should “the natural language of impassioned feeling.” The metaphysicals employed very “prosaic” words as if they were scientists or shopkeepers. The result is that in’their work we often stumble against ragged and unpoetic words we seldom expect in serious poetry.The versification of the metaphysicals is also, like their diction, coirse and jerky in contrast to the honeyed smoothness of much of Elizabethan poetry. Their revolt, according to Grierson, is due to tvo motives:

(i)         The desire to startle; and

(ii)        the desire to approximate poetic to direct, unconv         entional colloquial speech.

Donne could “sing” whenever he liked, but often he seems to be bending and cracking the metrical pattern to the rhetoric of direct and vehement utterance.” He very often throws all prosodic considerations to the winds and distributes his stresses not according to the metre but according to the sense. “In his work”, say Tucker Brooke, “the Pierian flood is no clear spring: it is more like a Yellowstone geyser: overheated, turbid, explosive, and far from pure.” Donne and other metaphysicals’ metrical infelicity has been adversely commented upon by all.-But, to be fair, we may say that Donne writes as one who will say what he has to say without regard to the conventions of poetic diction or smooth verse; but what he has to say is subtle and surprising and so are often the metrical effects with which it is presented.

Religious Poetry of the Metaphysicals:

Most of the metaphysical poets wrote on religion. Indeed, we owe most of our good religious poetry to them. It must be emphasised that all the metaphysicals do not write exactly alike. All of them are strongly marked individuals. The English metaphysical poetry from Donne to Traherne should be treated not as a type but as a movement. Donne’s religious poetry has all the qualities we have detailed above. Herbert followed Donne in most respects. He has been called the “saint” of the metaphysical school. His approach to God and Christ is full of, what Edmund Gosse calls, “intimate tenderness.” But he does use the imagery and conceits of the Donnean type. His Temple was the most popular Anglican poem of the age. Herbert had two distinguished followers—Vaughan and Crashaw. They acknowledged their debts to Herbert, but they had tempers fundamentally their own. Vaughan is temperamentally a mystic though he uses conceits after the manner of Donne and Herbert-conceits such as “stars shut up shop” when the arrival of the morning is described. He is at his best while dealing with such themes as childhood, communion with nature, and eternity. His thoughts concerning childhood, in his poem The Retreat are largely echoed by Wordsworth in the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Childhood.His poem The World has a daring image:

I saw eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
All calm as it was bright.

Crashaw’s poetry is uneven work. Whereas Herbert is a gentle stream, Crashaw is an impetuous torrent. He is quite undisciplined and given to moods of religious exaltation and excitement. He has a taste for daiing images and metaphysical conceits. The eyes of Mary Magdalene in The Weeper are described as

Two walking baths; two weeping motions; 
Potable and compendious oceans.

“He sings”, says a critic, “the raptures of soul visited by divine love in terms as concrete and glowing as any human lover has ever used to celebrate an earthly passion.” Herein, again, his debt to Donne is discernible. It is the mystic vein in Thomas Traherne which tempts a critic to classify him with Vaughan among the metaphysicals. Traherne is not a great poet, however. He contemplates the beauty of God’s universe till it stirs in him a mystic response. Like Vaughan he idealises childhood as the age in which a human being is nearest God. Crashaw was the only Roman Catholic among the metaphysical poets; and Andrew Marvell, Milton’s secretary, the only Puritan. Unlike most Puritans. Marvell was not a hide-bound fanatic; rather he appears in the colour of a Christian humanist dating from the Elizabethan age. He as a poet has been assigned a quite high status by the school o modern critics led by F. R. Leavis. But in him we find English poetry already on its way to the neo-classicism of Dryden’s school. His greatest poem “To His Coy Mistress” is secular (and not religious) in theme and execution. He urges his “coy” mistress to shed her coyness and make the best of the opportunity granted by Time to them to make merry.

Had we but world enough, and time, 
This coyness, lady, were no crime… 
But at my back I always hear 
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; 
And yonder all before us lie 
Deserts of vast eternity.

The following lines have tragic pathos wedded to a metaphysical conceit:

The grave’s a fine and private place, 
But none, I think, do there embrace.

The Contribution of the Metaphysical Poets to English Literature:

(1)                 The metaphysical poets have given to the English language its best religious poetry. The moods of incisive introspection and mysticism could best be expressed not through commonplace, conventional poetic images and language but unconventional and bold imagery which would jolt the mind and spirit of the reader into an
intimate rapport with the mood of the poet. Herbert, Donne, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Traherne are the most important among the religious English poets of all ages.

(2)                 In the field of love poetry, too, the contribution of the metaphysicals is considerable and quite important from the historical point of view. When Donne appeared on the stage, Spenser and his followers were following the Petrarchan tradition of highly sentimental and idealised love poetry which had not mueh to do with reality. Donne demolished this claptrap and started a vein of highly realistic, frankly sensual, and sometimes,downright cynical, amatory verse. He was critical of the Elizabethan sonneteers and lyricists who
put their mistresses, real or imaginary, on the pedestal of a deity, and pretended to woo them as their “servants,”‘ dying or living in accordance with their moods of rejection or acceptance of their supplications. Donne was frank enough.

Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use 
To say which have no mistress but their Muse.

Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do

(3)                 Even in the ruggedness and occasional vulgarity of their r-ction and versification the metaphysicals did some service to English poetry in that they made the poets realise that the “smoothness of rrmbers” alone does not make for great poetry. What was needed was a hard core of sense and deft handling of experience related to the poet hrmself who reserved for himself the liberty to employ whatever diction and style he thought was eminently suitable for his purpose. After Donne and his followers the mere music of poetry could not capture for it any appreciative audience.

(4)                 The intellectualism of the metaphysical poetry and the compositeness of its imagery, and even the crabbed nature of its style, secured for it a continuous stream of readers from generation to generation. In the modern times all these qualities appear agreeable to a large number of readers. The modern poets, particularly T. S. Eliot, living in an age of crumbling values (like the age of Donne), have found a guide and a source of inspiration in Donne. It is not surprising, then, that in the modern critical canon Donne is rated as one of the best English poets.

Leave a commentDecember 27, 2010 Literary and Critical Essays

The Origin and Liturgical Plays:

Briefly stated, the drama in England developed from the liturgical play to the miracle play to morality, from the morality play to the interlude, and from that to the “regular’ drama of the Elizabethan age. The story of this development is, however, not so simple as it may wrongly appear. There are overlappings, aberrations, and missing links.

As in Greece and many other countries, the drama in England had a religious origin. It sprang from church service as the ancient Greek tragedy had sprung out of the ceremonial worship of Dionysus. As a critic well puts it, the “attitude of religion and drama towards each other has been strikingly varied. Sometimes it has been one of intimate alliance, sometimes of active hostility, but never of indifference.” In England the church was, in the beginning, actively hostile to drama and all along during the Dark Ages (the 6th century to the 10th) there is missing any record of dramatic activity. Only in the ninth century there were tropes or additional texts to ecclesiastical music. These tropes sometimes assumed a dialogue form. They were, like church service, couched in Latin. They were later detached from the regular service and presented by themselves on religious festivals such as”Easter and Christmas. By and by they took the form of “liturgical plays” after becoming somewhat more complex. They were dramatisations of the major events of Christ’s life, such as the Birth and the Resurrection, and were enacted by priests right in the church. These plays enjoyed a vast popularity. Thus, as Sir Ifor Evans observes, “while at the beginning of the Dark Ages the church attempted to suppress the drama, at the beginning of the Middle Ages something very much like the drama was instituted in the church itself.”

The Miracle and Mystery Plays:

The next stage of development comes with miracle and mystery plays. The early liturgical drama assumed the more developed form of the miracle and mystery plays sometime in the fourteenth century, though, of course, there is evidence that the first representation of a miracle play took place in Dunstable as early as 1119. In England the “miracle plays” and “mystery plays” are often considered svnonvmous. but technicallv there is a difference between the two. The miracle plays dealt with the lives of saints (non-scriptural matter), whereas the mystery plays handled incidents from the Bible (scriptural themes). The miracle and mystery plays differ from the early liturgical drama in their slightly more developed sense of drama and better dialogue. They were both written and enacted by ecclesiastics and had for their obvious object the instruction of the people in scripture history. They treated of such themes from the Bible as the Creation, the Flood, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection of the Saviour. But they had an element of entertainment too. in the form of crude grotesqueries which may appear to the modern reader as outright profanities.

With the development of the early liturgical play into the miracle and mystery, there were significant changes of locale and players. The place of performance shifted from the inside of the church to the churchyard, and from the churchyard to the market-place, because vast crowds, especially at the time of fairs, had to be accommodated. The clergy could not go to the market-place to perform and in 1210 there was a papal edict forbidding their appearance on the stage. The performance therefore fell in the hands of laymen who were amateurs. With the change of the locale and the performers, the strictly religious nature of the performances underwent a shift towards secularization. It was in the thirteenth century that professional troupes took over the job of performing and, consequently, there was a marked improvement in stage techniques and overall performance. There are four “cycles” of miracle plays extant today. These are  York, Towneley, Chester, and Coventrycycles. Each of these cycles embraces the main events of biblical history from the Fall of Satan to the Day of Judgement.

The Morality Plays:

The next stage in the secularization of drama comes with the morality plays which developed out of the miracle and mystery plays. The morality play, as David Daiches observes, “has more direct links with Elizabethan drama.” The difference between the miracle and mystery plays on the one hand and the morality plays on the other is that whereas the former deal with, as we have pointed out above, biblical events or the lives of saints, the latter have characters of an allegorical or symbolic nature, such as the personifications of various vices and virtues or other abstract qualities like Science, Perseverance, Gluttony, Sloth. Despair and Everyman (symbolising mankind). The personified vices and virtues are generally shown as fighting among themselves for man’s soul. The moralities intended to convey moral lessons for the better conduct of human life. The writer of the morality play enjoyed a greater freedom than that of the miracle of mystery play, as he was not bound by a particular chain of events presented by the Bible or popular legend which he had to adhere to. It may be pointed out that personified abstractions had already appeared along with scriptural figures in some miracle plays. The function of the morality play was to detach these abstractions from their religious setting and employ them in a new kind of drama. The best known among the morality play are The Castle of Perseverance and Everyman. In the former, allegory is almost identical with that of the second book of The Faerie Oueene where the castle of Alma is besieged by the Passions. It also reminds one of The Pilgrim’s Progress as regards its central significance. Everyman appeared at the end of the fiteenth century and enjoyed vast popularity right till the end of the sixteenth. Its story is given by David Daiches as follows:

“Everyman is summoned by Death to a long journey from which there is no return. Unprepared, and unable to gain a respite, he looks for friends to accompany him, but neither Fellowship nor Goods nor Kindred will go; Good Deeds is willing to act as guide and companion, but Everyman’s sins have rendered her too weak to stand. She recommends him to her sister Knowledge, who leads Everyman to Conffession.and after he has done penance Good Deeds grows strong enough to accompany him, together with Strength, Discretion, Five Wits and Beauty. But as the time comes for Everyman to creep into his grave, all the companions except Good Deeds decline to go with him. Knowledge stands by to report the outcome while Everyman enters the grave with Good Deeds. An Angel announces the entry of Everyman’s soul into the heavenly sphere, and a ‘Doctor’ concludes by pointing the moral.”

Of all the stock characters employed in the morality plays the most amusing were Vice and the Devil. The former, arrayed in grotesque costume and armed with a wooden sword or dagger, was the prototype of the Fool of Shakespearean drama, and seeriis chiefly to have been employed for belabouring the Devil who appeared generally with horns, a lona beard, and a hairy chest.

Interludes:

The interlude signifies the important transition from symbolism to realism. It appeared towards the end of the fifteenth century but it could not displace the morality which continued enjoying popularity, as we have pointed out above, till the end of the sixteenth century. It dispensed with the allegorical figures of the morality play almost completely and effected a complete break with the religious type of drama, even though retaining some of its didactic character. It was purely secular and fairly realistic, though quite crude and somewhat grotesque. The most notable writer of interludes was John Heywood (14977-1580?) whose interludes are of the nature of light playlets in which, as David Daiches observes, “the emphasis is more on amusement than instruction.” In his The Four P’s, for instance, he light-heartedly satirises shrews and impatient women. The four P’s are a Pardoner, a Palmer, a Pothycary, and a Pedlar who engage themselves in a kind of lying competition in which the most flagrant Her is to be awarded the palm. The Palmer wins the prize by saying that out of half a million women that he has met so far, not one was seen by him to be out of patience! In The Play of Weather Jupiter is presented as listening to the complaints of the people regarding weather, and confused by conflicting opinions and demands he decides to give the mortals all kinds of weather. Most of Heywood’s other interludes are farcical playlets which are, however, full of wit and humour and very realistic portrayal of men and manners.

Another well-known interlude writer was John Rastell whose interlude The Four Elements is of the nature of a Humanist morality play. Various allegorical figures are represented as teaching Humanity science and geography, and “Sensual Appetite” is shown as obstructing the efforts of “Studious Desire.” The Four Elements is typical of a class of plays which are quite near the morality but have been classed as interludes. However, strictly speaking, an interlude signifies, in the words of W. H. Hudson, “any short dramatic piece of a satiric rather than of a dkectly religious or ethical character, and in tone and purpose far less serious than the morality proper.”

The Beginning of Regular Tragedy:

In between 1530 and 1580 the drama in England underwent a “dramatic” change. With the dawn of the Renaissance in this period English dramatists started looking back to the ancient “Greek and Roman dramatists. It is interesting to note that they were more influenced and impressed by the work of Roman dramatists (who were themselves imitators of the Greek dramatists before them) than that of the Greek. The tragedies of Aeschylus. Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes influenced them less than the tragedies of Seneca and the comedies of Plautus and Terence. The tragedies of Seneca are “closet-tragedies”, that is, they are meant to be read only, not to be acted. All of them (some ten in number) have revenge as their leitmotif. Further, they are characterised by excessive bloodshed, long rhetorical speeches, and the inclusion of the Ghost as an inevitable member of the dramatis personae. Instead of the element of fear or terror as in the Greek tragedy, we have a superabundance of horror in Senecan tragedy.

The first English tragedy based evidently,and rather unthinkingly, on the Senecan model was Gorboduc (or, later, Ferrex andPorrex)written by Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) and Thomas Norton (1531-84). It was acted in 1561-62 before Queen Elizabeth at White-hall. We have in it the same excessive bloodshed, the device of narration by some characters, long rhetorical speechification, the revenge motive, and the chorus between the acts which characterised Seneca’s tragedies. The plot of the play reminds one of that ofKing Lear. Gorboduc is the king of England who in his lifetime divides his kingdom between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. One brother murders the other, and in revenge is killed by his mother. But the people rise and murder both the king and the queen. The nobles assemble and kill the assassins, but then a civil war ensues between the nobles themselves and the whole of the country is ruined. One important feature of Gorboduc is its employment of blank verse which makes it the first English play to use that measure. Further, the play is divided, after the Roman model, into five acts—a practice which became from then onwards universal for tragedy.

Some other Senecan tragedies which followed Gorboduc were Thomas Hughes’ The Misfortunes of Arthur (Gray’s Inn, 1588), Robert Wilmot’s Tragedie ofTancred and Gismund (Inner Temple, 1567-68), and George Gascoigne’s Jocasta (Gray’s Inn, 1566).

The Beginning of Regular Comedy:

Plautus and Terence influenced English comedy to a lesser extent than Seneca the English tragedy, for the reason that English comedy had a well-rooted native tradition. The first regular English comedy wasRalph Roister Doister written about 1550 by Nicholas Udall, head-master of Eton. It combined well the native comic tradition with the Roman comedy of Plautus and Terence. It is written in rhyming couplets and divided into acts and scenes after the Latin plays. The plot is laid in London, and with some humorous dialogue and a tolerable variety of character, affords a representation of the manners and ideas of the middle classes of the time. The hero of the comedy Ralph Roister is a vainglorious fellow of the nature of Plautus’s Miles Gloriasis. He imagines a merchant’s wife to be in love with him and is confirmed in his stupid belief by the pranks of Matthew Marrygreek. After many misadventures and follies he comes to his senses and recognises the harsh reality. Broadly speaking, the comedy of the play turns on the same pivot as that of The Merry! Wives of Windsor. The play has the merits of racy dialogue and delightful unfolding of comedy, but its versification lacks the vigour of Hevwood’s metre in The Four P ‘s.

Greatly inferior to Roister Doister is the comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle dated about 1553, and generally ascribed to John Still. It is a crude presentation of low country life. It does not have a well-organised plot, which turns on a single incident-the loss of her needle by the country housewife Gammer Gurton. In search of her needle she disturbs the peace of the entire village. Peace comes back when she discovers her missing needle stuck in the breeches of Hodge, her farm-servant. The whole thing is crudely farcical. There is nothing Plautine about the play except its Latin structure. What recommends the play to us today is, in the words of Ifor Evans, “a rough, native realism.”

Conclusion:

From such works as Gorboduc, Ralph Roister Doister, andGammer Gurton’s Needle it is evident how far the drama has advanced from its state of the liturgical play. We find in the progress of the drama, especially comedy, a gradual gravitation towards the realities of the life of the day. What is lacking still is not arresting vitality but literary power and grace. These qualities were to be supplied later by “the University Wits”.