Shakespeare's lifetime was coincident with a period of extraordinary activity and achievement in the drama. By the date of his birth Europe was witnessing the passing of the religious drama that had held its course for some five centuries, and the creation of new and mixed forms under the incentive of classical tragedy and comedy. These new forms were at first mainly written by scholars and performed by amateurs, but in England, as everywhere else in western Europe, the growth of a class of professional actors was threatening to make the drama popular, whether it should be new or old, classical or medieval, literary or farcical. Court, school, organizations of amateurs, and the strolling actors were all rivals in supplying a widespread desire for dramatic entertainment; and no boy who went to a grammar school could be ignorant that the drama was a form of literature which gave glory to Greece and Rome and might yet bestow its laurels on England.

When Shakespeare was twelve years old the first public playhouse was built in London. For a time literature held aloof from this public stage. Plays aiming at literary distinction were written for schools or court, or for the choir boys of St. Paul's and the royal chapel, who, however, gave plays in public as well as at court. But the professional companies prospered in their permanent theaters, and university men with literary ambitions were quick to turn to these theaters as offering a means of livelihood. By the time that Shakespeare was twenty-five, Lyly, Peele, and Greene had made comedies that were at once popular and literary; Kyd had written a tragedy that crowded the pit; and Marlowe had brought poetry and genius to triumph on the common stage—where they had played no part since the death of Euripides. A native literary drama had been created, its alliance with the public playhouses established, and at least some of its great traditions had been begun.

The development of the Elizabethan drama for the next twenty-five years is of exceptional interest to students of literary history, for in this brief period, in connection with the half-dozen theaters of a growing city and the demands of its varied population, we may trace the beginning, growth, florescence, and decay of many kinds of plays, and of many great careers. Actors, audiences, and dramatists all contributed to changes in taste and practice and to a development of unexampled rapidity and variety. In every detail of dramatic art there was change and improvement, a constant addition of new subject-matter, a mastery of new methods of technic, and an invention of new kinds of plays. The popular successes of Marlowe and Kyd Elizabethan Dramaand the early plays of Shakespeare himself seemed old-fashioned and crude to the taste of twenty years after, yet the triumphs of Shakespeare's maturity failed to exhaust the opportunities for innovation and advance. We are amazed to-day at the mere number of plays produced, as well as by the number of dramatists writing at the same time for this London of two hundred thousand inhabitants. To realize how great was the dramatic activity, we must remember further that hosts of plays have been lost, and that probably there is no author of note whose entire work has survived. By the time, however, that Shakespeare withdrew from London to Stratford the drama had reached its height. The dozen years from 1600 to 1612 included not only Shakespeare's great tragedies, but the best plays of Jonson, Chapman, and Webster, and the entire collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher. The only other decades comparable with this in the history of the drama are that which heard plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes and that other which saw the masterpieces of Racine and MoliÈre.

The greatness of the drama, however, by no means ended with the retirement and death of Shakespeare. Some of those who had been his early associates continued to write for the stage, and younger men, as Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley, carried on the traditions of their predecessors. If, as in other forms of literature, there was decline and decadence during the next twenty-five years, the drama also retained initiative, poetry, and intellectual force until the end. It was not dead or dying when the outbreak of the Civil War cut short its course; in fact, its plays, its traditions, even some of its theaters, actors, and dramatists survived the suppression of twenty years and helped to start the drama of the Restoration. Had Shakespeare lived to the age of seventy-eight he would have seen the closing of the theaters, and his lifetime would have covered the crowded history of the drama's development from such semi-moralities as Cambises and The Nice Wanton to the last plays of Massinger and Shirley.

For nearly a quarter of a century he was a sharer in this dramatic movement, working in London as actor, manager, and playwright. While no playwright was more desirous than he to find in the stage full opportunity for his genius, he was as keen as any in gauging the immediate theatrical demand and in meeting the varying conditions of a highly competitive profession. As we have already noted, he began by imitating those who had won success, and to the end he was adroit in taking advantage of a new dramatic fashion or discovery. Like his fellows, he often took his plots from novels, histories, or other narratives; but his very choice of stories might be determined by the theatrical taste of the moment, and in his treatment of those stories he shows in person, situation, or scene, a consideration of current practices, traditions, and conventions. In every field of literature, a writer is conditioned by the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and this Beginnings of the Dramadependence on current taste is especially important in the drama, where practice tends to fix itself in convention, and where innovation to be successful requires coÖperation from the actors and approval from the audience as well as genius from the author. Though Shakespeare is for all time, he is part and parcel of the Elizabethan drama. If his plays are Elizabethan in their defects and limitations, such as their trivial puns and word-play, their overcrowded imagery, their loose and broken structure, their paucity of female rÔles, their mixture of comic and tragic, their reliance on disguise and mistaken identity as motives, their use of improbable or absurd stories; they are Elizabethan also in the qualities of their greatness, their variety of subject, their intense interest in the portrayal of character, the flexibility and audacity of their language, their noble and opulent verse, the exquisite idealism of their romantic love, and their profound analysis of the sources of human tragedy.

The Elizabethan drama was a continuation of the medieval drama transformed by the influence of classical models, especially the comedies of Terence and Plautus and the tragedies of Seneca. In England, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Miracle and Mystery plays were declining and were soon to disappear. The most common type of drama for the next sixty years was the Morality, which symbolized life as a conflict of vices and virtues or of the body and the soul. The drama was rapidly changing from long out-door performances to brief plays that could be given almost anywhere by a few actors. The term Interludes became common for all such entertainments, and allegorical frameworks served to contain a wide variety of matter, farce, pedagogy, politics, religion, history, or pageant. Close imitations of the classical forms were soon attempted by scholars and men of letters; but as the professional actors grew in importance the development of a national comedy and tragedy went on without much direction from critics or theorists, but rather in response to the demands of actors and audiences and to the initiative of authors.

The developments of comedy were numerous. Allegory gradually disappeared, and the Morality ceased to exist as a definite type, though its symbolization of life and its concern with conduct were handed along to the later drama. The plays of Robert Wilson, about 1580, show an interesting use of allegory for the purposes of social satire, and realism and satire long continued to characterize Elizabethan comedy, though for a time confined mostly to incidental scenes. Common and incidental also was farce, which is found in most plays of the century whether tragic, comic, or moral in their main purpose. Further, it was soon discovered that the Plautian scheme of comedy was well suited to farcical incident, as in Gammer Gurton's Needle (1552).[6] The classical models or their Italian imitations also produced Influence of Plautusother and less domestic imitations, as in Gascoigne's translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi (pr. 1566) and Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1540); a little later, Lyly's Mother Bombie, Munday's Two Italian Gentlemen, and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Indeed such adaptations continued much later and resulted in some of the best farces, or realistic comedies of intrigue, as Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (1598), Heywood's Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), Jonson's Epicene (1609) and Alchemist (1610).

The Plautian model, however, was far more influential than can be indicated by these close adaptations or by any list of direct imitations or borrowings. For the Elizabethan it offered a standard of comedy, and its plots, persons, and devices were freely used in all kinds of plays, romantic as well as realistic, sentimental as well as satirical or farcical. The plots of Plautus and Terence offer a series of tricks in which the complications are often increased by having the trickster tricked. Certain fixed types of character play the parts of gulls or gullers, as the old parents, the young lovers, the parasite, the braggart soldier, and the clever slave. The intrigue is forwarded by the use of disguise, mistaken identity, and most surprising coincidences; and it is accomplished by dialogue, often gross and abusive, but usually lively. This model served every nation of western Europe, reappearing with prolonged vitality in the inventions of Lope de Vega, the "commedia del arte" of Italy, and in the masterpieces of MoliÈre. Much in its scheme that seems artificial and theatrical to-day was, we must remember, accepted without question by Europe of the sixteenth century as essential and desirable in comedy, especially in realistic comedy of intrigue or manners.

The plots of Terence, notably that of the Andria, also gave some encouragement to the modern fondness for adventure and sentimental love, and some classical sanction to the abundant romantic material that was knocking at the doors of comedy. If by romantic we mean what is strange and removed from ordinary experience and what has the attractions of wonder, thrill, and idealization, then for the Elizabethan the world of romance was a wide one. It included the medieval stories of knights and their gests, and also the fresher tales of classical mythology; the Americas and Indies of contemporary adventure and the artificial Arcadias of humanist imitators of Virgil and Theocritus. Ovid and Malory, Homer and Boccaccio, Drake and Sanazzaro, were all contributors. The union of this romance with comedy on the stage began in two ways, and principally under the innovation of two writers, Lyly and Greene.

The taste for pageants, processions, and tableaux grew and flourished under the patronage of the court; and music, dancing, and spectacle were combined with dialogue in various court exhibitions and plays given by the child actors. John Lyly, writing for these choir boys, developed this type of entertainment into a distinct Lyly and Greenespecies of comedy. Of his eight plays, written at intervals from 1580 to 1593, all but one were in prose, and all except the Plautian Mother Bombie adhere loosely to a common formula. Classical myth or story, with pastoral elements, and occasionally an allegory of contemporary politics, furnish the basis of plots with similar love complications. Gods, goddesses, nymphs, fairies, and many others add to the spectacle and mingle in the love intrigue, and all rise to a graceful dialogue, which quickens to brisk repartee when the pages or servants appear. The witty page supersedes the rude buffoon of earlier plays, and everything is graceful and ingenious, slight in serious interest, but relieved by movement and song.

This is the form of comedy which Shakespeare adopted for Love's Labour's Lost and perfected in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. But Lyly's contribution should not be defined merely by this type of drama, original as it is in its departure from medieval or classical precedents. He showed how comedy might be a courtly and literary entertainment and also the playground of fancy and wit.

The second development of romantic comedy came through the dramatization of stories of love, adventure, and marvels. To such stories Robert Greene gave a heightened charm through the idealization of his heroines. His Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1590) is a magic play with an historical setting; but the interest gathers and centers on the love story of Margaret, the Keeper's daughter. In James IV (c. 1591) the pseudo-historical setting frames the stories of the noble Ida and the wronged but faithful Dorothea. In the incidents of the plot, with its woman disguised as a page, the faithless lover, and the final reconciliation, and also in the sweetness, modesty, and loyalty of the heroine, the play reminds us of Shakespeare's comedies and is indeed very close to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which he was clearly adopting Greene's formula.

Tragedy naturally lagged somewhat behind comedy as a form of popular entertainment. So far as we can judge from the extant plays, there was until the appearance of Kyd and Marlowe no real union between Senecan imitations like Gorboduc (1562), Jocasta (1566), and The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), on the one hand, and popular medleys of morality, tragedy, and farce like Cambises (1565), Horestes (pr. 1567), and Appius and Virginia (1563), on the other. Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1587) was an epoch-making play because it brought to the popular drama true poetry and genuine passion; but it and its successors also established a new type of tragedy. Marlowe made no effort to retain the structure or themes of classical tragedy; on the contrary, he made his plays loosely connected series of scenes dealing with the life and death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action. In this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that pleased the theaters. But each play Marlowe and Kydcenters its dramatic interest on a mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their inevitable disappointment. With the spectacle and sensation, the rant and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and their direful catastrophes. These plays set the key for all Elizabethan tragedy, including Shakespeare's Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. They were immediately followed by dozens of imitators. All blank verse echoed Marlowe's mighty line, and tragedy was filled with ranting conquerors like Tamburlaine, monstrous villains like Barabbas, and murders like that of Edward II. Shakespeare was his pupil in the 2 and 3 Henry VI, mastered his methods in Richard III, and still wrote in emulation, though no longer in imitation, in Richard II and The Merchant of Venice.

Within a few months of Tamburlaine, appeared a play of almost equal influence on subsequent drama, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Kyd was a student of Seneca, a translator of Garnier's Cornelia, a Senecan imitation; and he adapted some elements of classical tragedy to the English stage. The ten plays ascribed to Seneca were the accepted models of tragedy in the Renaissance. Their presentation of the more horrible stories of Greek tragedy, their rhetorical and aphoristic style, their moralizing and their psychology, were all greatly admired. They were believed by the Elizabethans to have been acted, and their murders and violence seemed to warrant such action on the modern stage; though the Elizabethans found less adaptable their use of the chorus, the restriction of the number of persons speaking, their long monologues, and the limitation of the action to the last phase of a story. Kyd modeled his rhetoric on Seneca and retained a vestige of the chorus, long soliloquies, and some other traits of Senecan structure; but his main borrowing was the essential story of a crime and its punishment. He thus brought to the Elizabethan stage the classical theme of retribution. In his Spanish Tragedy, a murder is avenged under the direction of a ghost, by a hesitating and soliloquizing protagonist, who is driven through doubt and speculation almost to madness, and then to craft, with which he outwits the wily villain and brings all the leading dramatis personÆ to a final slaughter.

Blood revenge was established as the favorite motive of tragedy; the conflict of craft between protagonist and villain made up the action, and the speculations of the avenger gave a chance for wisdom and eloquence. One other play, probably by Kyd, the lost Hamlet, also presented these features and later formed the basis for Shakespeare's tragedy. Other plays, as Soliman and Perseda, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and Locrine immediately adopted Kyd's theme and technic; indeed the stage for half a dozen years abounded in avenging heroes, diabolical villains, shrieking ghosts, and long soliloquies on fate, death, retribution, and kindred themes. Titus Andronicus is quite in the English History PlaysKydian vein. Many plays combined the salient traits of Marlowe and Kyd, and henceforth no one wrote tragedy without paying homage to their inventions.

We have now noticed the most important developments in comedy and tragedy made by the time that Shakespeare began writing for the theaters; and he made quick use of the progress accomplished by Plautian and Lylyan comedy, by Greene's romances, and by the tragedies of Kyd and Marlowe. There were other plays not easily classified under these names and of less service to Shakespeare. But to the critical playgoer of 1590 few plays would have seemed either 'right comedies' or 'right tragedies.' The majority were mere dramatizations of story without close construction or selection of material, seeking merely varied and abundant action. They drew their material from all kinds of narrative sources, Italian novelle, current pamphlets, Latin historians, or English chronicles; and, whether historical or fictitious, were usually known as Histories, i.e., stories.

The patriotic interest in English history fostered the presentation of its scenes upon the stage. The chronicles of Halle and Holinshed furnished abundant material; and embassies, processions, and pitched battles filled the stage with movement. Historical plays might, indeed, draw from classical history or from current foreign history, but from 1590 to 1603 a very large number of plays give scenic representation to the reigns of English kings.

Some of these form a distinct class, since, however mixed with comic matter, they imitate Kyd or Marlowe and recast the chronicle of a reign to fit the accepted subjects of tragedy, the downfall of a prince, the revenge for a crime, the overthrow of a tyrant, or the retribution brought upon a conspirator or usurper. Conceived under Marlowe's influence, and perhaps owing something to his hand, is the tetralogy that includes the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.

Those history plays, however, that do not follow the formulas for tragedy, are a heterogeneous group not easily classified. They usually keep to the loose chronicle method that presented a series of scenes without much regard to unity or coherence. Farce, comedy, magic, spectacle, heroics, and everything that might have happened was permissible in these plays, and perhaps the only thing indispensable was a pitched field with opposing armies. Biographical, comic, popular, patriotic, or what not, these plays brought a variety of scenes to the theaters, but offered only a loose and flexible form rather than any dramatic direction or model to the creator of Falstaff.

The early deaths of Greene and Marlowe and the retirement of Lyly left Shakespeare the heir of their inventions. Though his plays were at first imitative, he soon surpassed his predecessors in gift of expression, in depiction of character, and in deftness of dramatic technic. The years from 1593 to near the turn of the century are particularly lacking in records of Shakespeare's Leadershipplays or theaters; but it seems clear that the main developments of the drama were in romantic comedy and chronicle history; and it is also clear that Shakespeare was the unquestioned leader in both of these forms.

In comparison with his associates, he was now the master, relying on his own experience rather than on their innovations. Neither the crude but popular Mucedorus (1595) nor Dekker's poetical extravagance, Old Fortunatus (1596), could contribute to his development of romantic comedy; and domestic comedy could not instruct the inventor of Launce and Launcelot. Incidental relationships may indeed be noted. As You Like It, for example, dramatizes a pastoral novel with the addition of scenes that recall Robin Hood's forest life, and may owe something to the suggestion of two Robin Hood plays by Chettle and Munday, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598). But, on the whole, the indebtedness was on the other side, and imitations indicate that men of Shakespeare's day realized that romantic comedy and history could not be carried farther.

In fact, a certain reaction set in against these forms of drama. Near the close of the century new tendencies became manifest. Comedy tended to become more realistic and satiric. Chapman, Marston, Middleton, and Jonson, all began writing romantic comedy, but changed shortly to realistic. Jonson, in his Every Man in His Humour (1598), announced his opposition to the lawless drama which had preceded—whether romantic comedy or chronicle history—and proposed the creation of a new satirical comedy of manners. He was moved partly by a desire to break from past methods in order to bring comedy closer to classical example, and partly by a desire for realism, a faithful presentation, analysis, and criticism of current manners. The growth of London and the increase in luxury and immorality seem to have encouraged such a movement, and for the decade after 1598 there were many comedies of London life, mostly satiric, and nearly all realistic. Many varieties are to be found, from gross representation of the seamy side of city life to serious discussion of social questions, and from sympathetic picturing of certain trades to satiric exposure of the evils of society.

Jonson's emulation of Aristophanes led him into arrogant personal satire in the Poetaster (1601), and there ensued the so-called war of the theaters, in which Marston, Dekker, and, according to report, Shakespeare were Jonson's opponents. If Shakespeare, indeed, had a share in this war, he showed only slight interest in the prevailing comedy. Measure for Measure uses the device of a spying duke employed in Marston's Malcontent, and discusses sexual relationships somewhat in the tone of the time, while the scenes dealing with houses of ill fame are not unlike similar scenes in the contemporary plays of Middleton, Webster, and others. Troilus and Cressida, also, show more of a satiric temper Realistic Comedythan is usual in Shakespeare. But neither of these plays partakes to any extent of the prevailing satire on contemporary London. Wide as was the range of Shakespeare's genius, it seems to have avoided the field of satire.

A review of the drama must, however, at least remark the importance of this development of realistic comedy which flourished in the decade after 1598 and continued to the end. Jonson's comedy of 'humors' includes Volpone (1605), which overstepped the bounds of comedy in its denunciation of evil, the Alchemist (1611), perhaps the best English play on the Latin model, and Bartholomew Fair (1614), most original and English of them all. Dekker's fine drama of middle class life, The Honest Whore (1604), and Heywood's masterpiece, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play suggesting both the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century and the problem play of to-day, also belong to this very remarkable era of domestic themes and serious realism.

If Shakespeare did not turn to satire or realism or current social problems, he did turn away from chronicle history plays and romantic comedies. As we saw in the last chapter, for a period of eight or nine years, from Julius CÆsar to Antony and Cleopatra, he gave his best efforts of his maturity to tragedy. The day for mere imitation of Seneca, Kyd, or Marlowe, was past; and scholars like Jonson and Chapman as well as Shakespeare sought in the tragedy of the public theater, an opportunity for wisdom and poetry and a criticism of life.

For models, Shakespeare did not need to go back farther than his own Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, nor to imitate any other than himself. Yet his great plays may have seemed to his contemporaries to adopt rather than to depart from current dramatic practices. They belong to the Elizabethan 'tragedy of blood'; against a background of courts and battles they present the downfall of princes; they rest on improbable stories that end in fearful slaughter; they invariably set forth great crimes, compact of murder, lust, villainous intrigue, and ferocious cruelty. Some of them follow Kyd in recounting a story of blood vengeance presided over by ghosts, or discover the retribution due for crime in physical torments. Nearly all follow Marlowe in centering the tragic interest in the fate of a supernormal protagonist who is swayed by an overpowering emotion, and in elevating these human desires and passions into tremendous forces that work their waste of devastation and ruin on character and life.

The contemporary tragedy is brought closest to Shakespeare in the relations of the revenge plays to Hamlet. The type, introduced by Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet, underwent a special development in Marston's Antonio's Revenge (1598) and several other plays appearing from 1598 to 1603, that dealt with the blood vengeance of a son for a father. At the same time Shakespeare turned to the Tragedyremaking of the old Hamlet and to a new treatment of the old theme, yet retained many of the old accessories. Marston reproduces the essential story of blood vengeance, presided over by a ghost, crossed by both lust and sentimental love, commented on by long soliloquies, and accompanied by pretended madness. Chettle, in Hoffman, amplifies the horrors and villainy and brings the story of the mad girl into closer juncture with the main plot than is the case in Hamlet. Tourneur, writing independently of Shakespeare, introduces, among all sorts of horrors, a Christian ghost who forbids blood vengeance and commands submission to Providence. Ben Jonson, in his additions to the old Spanish Tragedy, gives fine imaginative interpretation of the wavering moods of meditation, irony, and frenzy with which Kyd had dealt only crudely. The later development of this type proceeded without much regard to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but rather in the direction started by Marston's tragedies and his influential tragi-comedy, The Malcontent. While Hamlet may be described as centering attention on a meditative and high-minded avenger, Tourneur, Webster, Middleton, and later dramatists found greater interest in the study of villainy and intrigue. Revenge is born of depravity rather than duty, and given a setting of physical horrors and unnatural lust. Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy (1606) and Webster's White Devil (1610) and Duchess of Malfi (1611) represent the culmination of this play of revenge, lust, and horror, and supply a sort of standard for tragedy until the Civil War. Webster, it must be added, was hardly less interested than Shakespeare in character and motive, though he chose to study these in a chamber of horrors.

Shakespeare's Roman tragedies also suggest comparison with contemporary plays, those either on Roman or on contemporary foreign history. Tragedies dealing with Roman history had preceded Julius CÆsar, but that play doubtless stimulated Jonson's Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). Both these plays attempted an approach to classical structure and a thorough study and digest of classical history. This effort to make tragedy a serious and authoritative interpretation of history was also shared by Chapman in his plays dealing with contemporary French history, 1 and 2 Bussy D'Ambois (1601-1607) and 1 and 2 Biron (1608). While Jonson strove to free his style from the abundance of conceits, figures, and passages of description that had characterized earlier drama, Chapman used every chance to crowd his verse with far-stretched figure and weighty apothegm. At its worst it is peculiarly representative of Elizabethan confusion and bombast; at its best it is closest of all in its resemblance to Shakespeare's. Like Jonson and Chapman, Shakespeare sought historical backgrounds for his characters and found a fascination in the interpretation of the motives of the great protagonists of the world of antiquity. It is worthy of note, however, that he seems to have taken no interest in another class of subjects much Beaumont and Fletcherfavored by his contemporaries. Contemporary crimes treated with an excess of realism and didactic conclusions are common in drama from Arden of Feversham (1590) on, and engaged the services of Jonson, Webster, Ford, Dekker, and others.

About 1607 a new departure appeared in the work of the dramatic collaborators, Beaumont and Fletcher. After some experiments, they won, in their tragi-comedies, Philaster (1608) and A King and No King (1610), and their tragedy, The Maid's Tragedy (1609), great theatrical successes, and in these and similar plays established a new kind of dramatic romance. The realistic comedies of Jonson and Middleton, which, along with the great tragedies of Shakespeare, crowd the stage history of the preceding ten years, had offered nothing similar to these romances which joined tragic and idyllic material in scenes of brilliant theatrical effectiveness, abounding in transitions from suspense to surprise, and culminating in telling dÉnouements. This new realm of romance is an artificial one, contrasting pure love with horrid entanglements of lust, and ever bringing love in conflict with duty, friendship, or the code of honor. In its intriguing courts, or in nearby forests where the idyls are placed, love of one kind or another is the ruling and vehement passion, riding high-handed over tottering thrones, rebellious subjects, usurping tyrants, and checked, if checked at all, only by the unexampled force of honor. Romance, in short, depends on situation, on the artificial but skilful juxtaposition of emotions and persons, and on the new technic that sacrifices consistency of characterization for surprise. Characterization tends to become typical, and motives tend to be based on fixed conventions, such as the code of honor might dictate to a seventeenth-century gentleman; but the lack of individuality in character is counterbalanced by the vividness with which the lovers, tyrants, faithful friends, evil women, and sentimental heroines are presented, and by the fluent and lucid style which varies to any emotional requirement and rises to the demands of the most sensational situations.

Cymbeline in its plot bears some close resemblances to Philaster, and it seems likely that Shakespeare was adopting the methods and materials of the new romance. At all events, he turned from tragedy to romance, and in Cymbeline and the far more original and successful Winter's Tale and Tempest produced tragi-comedies that, like Beaumont and Fletcher's, rely on a contrast of tragic and idyllic and on surprising plots and idealized heroines. After Beaumont's retirement in 1611 or 1612, it seems probable that Fletcher and Shakespeare collaborated together on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

There is ample evidence that the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher won a great popular renown, surpassing for a time those of Shakespeare and all others. Beaumont did not live long after he ceased to write for the stage, dying at thirty, in the same year as Shakespeare. Jonson Tragi-Comedyhad given up dramatic writing for the time, and Fletcher was left the chief writer for Shakespeare's old company and the undoubted leader of the theater. Including the plays written in collaboration with Beaumont, Shakespeare, and later with Massinger, he left some sixty dramas of many kinds, varying from farcical comedy of manners to the most extreme tragedy. The comedies of manners present the affairs of women, and spice their lively conversation and surprising situations with a wit that often reminds one of the Restoration; indeed they carry the development of comedy nearly to the point where Wycherley and Congreve began. The tragi-comedies, which display the qualities already noted as belonging to the romances, have the technical advantage that the disentanglement of their rapid plots and sub-plots is left hanging in the balance until the very end. The happy ending to tragic entanglements won a favor it has never lost on the English stage, and tragi-comedy of the Fletcherian type continued the most popular form of the drama until Dryden.

It is unnecessary here to dwell long over the drama after Shakespeare's death. Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, and Webster wrote from time to time, and Middleton devoted his versatile talent to whatever kind of play was in vogue, now rather to Websterian tragedy and Fletcherian tragi-comedy than to realistic comedy. Yet, in collaboration with Rowley, he produced the powerful tragedy, The Changeling, and the much-admired tragi-comedy, A Fair Quarrel. After Fletcher's death in 1625, Massinger took his place as leader of the stage, and his work, with that of Ford and Shirley, carry on the great traditions of the drama to the very end. A host of minor writers, as Brome, D'Avenant, Suckling, Cartwright, offer little that is new; but no survey of the drama, however brief, can neglect to mention the skilful exposition, admirable psychology, and sound structural principles that characterized the best of Massinger's many plays, the unique and amazing dramatic genius shown in Ford's masterpieces, The Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and the ingenuity in plot, adroitness in characterization, and genuine poetic gifts of Shirley.

Comedies from 1616 to 1642 reveal two chief influences; they are realistic and satiric, following Jonson, or they are light-hearted, lively combinations of manners and intrigue, after Fletcher. In the former class are Massinger's two great comedies, The City Madam and A New Way to Pay Old Debts. To the latter class belong most of the comedies of Shirley. Tragi-comedies follow Fletcher with the variations due to the authors' ingenuity, and include perhaps the most attractive plays of Massinger and Shirley. Tragedies usually mingle lust, devilish intrigue, physical horror, after the fashion of Webster and Tourneur, but now often with romantic variation on the theme of love, and a technic of suspense and surprise similar to Beaumont and Fletcher. These are the main tendencies in the last twenty years of the drama, and Pastoral and Masquecharacterize in the large the work of the greater men as well as of the less. Shakespeare's influence is widespread, but appears incidentally in particular scene, situation, character, or phrase, rather than as affecting the main course and fashions of the drama. After the publication of his plays in 1623, this incidental influence increased, and is distinctly noticeable in the plays of Ford and Shirley.

A glance must suffice for two dramatic forms that had only slight connection with the public theaters, the Pastoral Play and the Court Masque. Pastoral elements are found in many early entertainments and in the plays of Lyly and Peele. Later, in imitation of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, attempts were made to inaugurate a pastoral drama, presenting a full-fledged dramatic exposition of the golden age. Daniel's Queen's Arcadia (1605) and Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess (1609) had many later followers, but the form won no permanent hold on the popular taste. Traces of its influence, however, may often be seen, as in Shakespeare's As You Like It, or Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster. The masque, originally only a masquerade, soon acquired some dramatic accompaniment, and in the court of James I developed into an elaborate form of entertainment. The masked dance of the ladies and gentlemen of the court was merely the focus for dialogue, elaborate setting, spectacle, music, and grotesque dances by professionals. These shows, costing vast sums for staging, costumes, and music, depended for their success mainly on the architect Inigo Jones, but in some degree also on Ben Jonson, who was the creator of the Court Masque as a literary form. Such expensive spectacles were far beyond the reach of the public theater, but provoked considerable imitation, as in Shakespeare's Tempest, or several of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. Later Milton immortalized the form in Comus.

The most hasty review of the Elizabethan drama must suggest how constantly Shakespeare responded to its prevailing conditions. There are, of course, great variations in the signs which different plays offer of contemporary influence and peculiarity. So it is with most of his fellow dramatists. Lear and Othello were perhaps written within the same year, yet Othello, in its unity, its technical excellence, and its depiction of character, is the most modern of the tragedies, while Lear, with its impossible story, its horrors, its treatment of madness, its likeness to the chronicle plays, its prolonged passage from crisis to catastrophe, in its very conception, is the most Elizabethan, though perhaps the most impressive of the tragedies. Twelfth Night is suited to any stage, but Troilus and Cressida and Pericles are hardly conceivable except on the Elizabethan. Despite such variations, however, Shakespeare's relations to the contemporary drama were manifestly constant and immediate. If it was rarely a question with him what the ancients had written, it was always a question what was being acted and what was successful at the Shakespeare and His Contemp­orariesmoment. His own growth in dramatic power goes step by step with the rapid and varied development of the drama, and the measure for comparison must be, not by decades, but by years or months.

A study of the Elizabethan drama may help to excuse some of the faults and limitations of Shakespeare, but it also enforces his merits. Both faults and merits are often to be understood in the efforts of lesser men to do what he did. We admire his triumphs the more as we consider their failures. Yet they often had admirable success, and their triumphs as well as his are due in part to the dramatic conditions which gave the freest opportunity for individual initiative in language, verse, story, and construction. Noble bursts of poetry, richness and variety of life, an intense interest in human nature, comic or tragic—these are the great merits of that drama. That in a superlative degree they are also the characteristics of Shakespeare is not due solely to his exceptional genius, but to the fact that his genius worked in a favorable environment.