Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/452

432 (1634) composed one of the loftiest ar.d loveliest of English poems. Comus has been judged and condemned as a drama, unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential to the species. Nor need its history in England have here been referred to, were it not so inseparably connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that our later poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to invest with a new significance, a form of so proved a flexibility as the poetic mask. e later The annals of our drama proper in the period reaching za- from the closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the han great Revolution include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare s contemporaries and successors there is, however, but one who by the energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary career, stands in a position of undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson (1573-1635), to whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the regular igedy drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success ; the weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as they are, his tragic works 1 stand almost, though not quite, alone in this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper. G. Chapman (1557 or 1559-1634) treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French history, 2 always with vigour, and at times with genuine effectiveness; but though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the supreme art of fully developing a character by means of the action. Mention has already been made of Ford s isolated effort in the direction of historic tragedy and of those excursions into the still popular domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker, and others, which are to be regarded as nothing more than retrogres sions. With the great body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which fill our literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme ranging from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance of equally astonishing variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been constantly on the increase. Besides Italian, Spanish, and French fiction, original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists clustered round Lope de Vega and Calderon supplied a whole arsenal of plots, incidents, and situations among others to Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And in addition to these materials, a new field of resources was at hand since our dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of English domestic life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. 1 Sejanus his Fall; Catiline his Conspiracy. 2 liussy d Ambois; The Revenge of B. d A.; The Conspiracy of Duron; The Trarjcdy ofL.; Chabot, Admiral of France (with Shirley). [ENGLISH. Domestic tragedy of this description was indeed no novelty on the English stage ; Shakespeare himself may have touched, with his master-hand, more than one effort of this kind ; 3 but T. Heywood (c. 1570-c. 1605) may be regarded as the first who achieved any work of considerable literary value of this class, 4 to which some of the plays of T. Dekker (c. 1570-c. 1640), T. Middleton, and others like wise more or less belong. Yet in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of motives employed at least as a rule in the tragic drama of this period was comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the diversity of subjects among the tragic dramas of such writers as Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford, and Shirley, an impression of sameness is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Politic ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled masculine passion, such are the motives which constantly recur in the Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is heightened by the want of moderation, by the excess of passion, which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally amenable to this charge; in J. Webster 5 (d. c. 1650), master as he is of the effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford r> (1586-c. 1640), surpassingly seductive in his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those marvellously sud den and subtle touches through which their tragic genius creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of passion which F. Beaumont (1586-161 6) and J. Fletcher (1576-1625) undoubtedly exhibit be confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic characters and situations in a degree unequalled by any of their contemporaries a power seconded by a beauty of diction and softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest pinnacle of popularity, and which entitles them in their conjunction, and Fletcher as an inde pendent worker, to an enduring pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment which ennobles the rhetorical genius of P. Massinger (1584- 1640), and the gift of poetic illustration which entitles J. Shirley (1595-1666) to be remembered as something besides the latest and the most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked, but not capable of obscuring the distinctive features in its individual writers which it is the highest function of criticism to discover and establish. In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the in- Cornea; sight of Jonson pointed the way to a steady and legitimate Ben advance. His theory of "humours" (which found the Jonso "- most palpable expression in two of his earliest plays 7 ), if translated into the ordinary language of dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of the creation of distinctive human types. In the actual creation of these it was impossible that Jonson should excel Shakespeare ; but in the consciousness wHh which he recognized and indicated the highest sphere of a comic dramatist s labours, he rendered to the drama a direct service which Shakespeare had left unperformed. By the rest of his con temporaries and his successors, some of whom (such as Brome) were content avowedly to follow in his footsteps, Jonson was only occasionally rivalled in individual 3 A rclen of Faversham; A Yorkshire Tragedy. 4 A Woman killed with Kindness. 6 Vittoria Coromboni; The Dvchcss of Malfi. e Tis Pity She s a Whore; The Broken Heart.

7 Every Man in his Jlitmour; Every Man out of his Humour.