hat he
remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he
pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert
without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of
judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in
particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as
supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a
sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him
in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in
self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he
had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like
a flower of spring, and where Othello's noble nature had suffered and
sinned.

Forms of the later Elizabethan drama.

The pastoral drama.

By the numerous body of poets who, contemporary with Shakespeare or in
the next generation, cultivated the wide field of the national drama,
every form commending itself to the tastes and sympathies of the
national genius was essayed. None were neglected except those from which
the spirit of English literature had been estranged by the Reformation,
and those which had from the first been artificial importations of the
Renaissance. The mystery could not in England, as in Spain, produce such
an aftergrowth as the _auto_, and the confines of the religious drama
were only now and then tentatively touched.[186] The direct imitations
of classical examples were, except perhaps in the continued efforts of
the academical drama, few and feeble. Chapman, while resorting to use of
narrative in tragedy and perhaps otherwise indebted to ancient models,
was no follower of them in essentials. S. Daniel (1562-1619) may be
regarded as a belated disciple of Seneca,[187] while experiments like W.
Alexander's (afterwards earl of Stirling) _Monarchicke Tragedies_[188]
(1603-1605) are the mere isolated efforts of a student, and more
exclusively so than Milton's imposing _Samson Agonistes_, which belongs
to a later date (1677). At the opposite end of the dramatic scale, the
light gaiety of the Italian and French farce could not establish itself
on the English popular stage without more substantial adjuncts; the
Englishman's festive digestion long continued robust, and he liked his
amusements solid. In the pastoral drama and the mask, however, many
English dramatists found special opportuni