their inventive powers to
introduce surprises to interest the audience. Here was a marked
departure from Shakespeare's later method. He plans _Macbeth_ so as to
have his audience forecast the logical result. Consequences of the
most tremendous import, beside which Beaumont and Fletcher's surprises
seem trivial, follow naturally from Macbeth's actions. In his greatest
plays, Shakespeare, unlike the later dramatists, never relies on
illogical surprises to sustain the interest. The witch queen in one of
the plays of Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) suddenly exclaims:--

"...fetch three ounces of the red-haired girl
I kill'd last midnight."

Shakespeare's witches suggest only enough of the weird and the
horrible to transfix the attention and make the beholder realize the
force of the temptation that assails Macbeth. Charles Lamb truly
observes that Middleton's witches "can harm the body," but
Shakespeare's "have power over the soul."

Middleton could, however, write a passage like the following, which
probably suggested to Milton one of the finest lines in _Lycidas_:--

"Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
Upon a bashful rose."

Large Number of Playwrights.--Beaumont and Fletcher were only two of
a large number of dramatists who were born in the age of Elizabeth,
and who, with few exceptions, lived into the second quarter of the
seventeenth century. Their work was the result of earlier Elizabethan
impulses, and it is rightly considered a part of the great dramatic
movement of the Elizabethan age. The popularity of the drama continued
to attract many authors who in a different age might have produced
other forms of literature.

George Chapman (1559?-1634), who is best known for his fine
translation of Homer's _Iliad_, turned dramatist in middle life, but
found it difficult to enter into the feelings of characters unlike
himself. His best two plays, _Bussy D'Ambois_ and _The Revenge of
Bussy D'Ambois_, are tragedies founded on French history. Thomas
Middleton, gifted in dramatic technique and dialogue and noted for
his comedy of domestic manners, was the author of _Michaelmas Term_,
_A Trick to Catch the Old One_, _The Changeling_ (in collaboration
with William Rowley, 1585?-1640?). John Marston (1576?-1634) wrote
_Antonio and Mellida_, a blood and thunder tragedy, and collaborated
with Jonson and Chapman t