ng; and as long as that rigmarole was practised frankly for the
sake of its pleasantness, it was readable and speakable. It lasted until
Shakespear did to it what Raphael did to Italian painting; that is,
overcharged and burst it by making it the vehicle of a new order of
thought, involving a mass of intellectual ferment and psychological
research. The rigmarole could not stand the strain; and Shakespear's
style ended in a chaos of half-shattered old forms, half-emancipated new
ones, with occasional bursts of prose eloquence on the one hand,
occasional delicious echoes of the rigmarole, mostly from Calibans and
masque personages, on the other, with, alas! a great deal of filling up
with formulary blank verse which had no purpose except to save the
author's time and thought.

When a great man destroys an art form in this way, its ruins make
palaces for the clever would-be great. After Michael Angelo and Raphael,
Giulio Romano and the Carracci. After Marlowe and Shakespear, Chapman
and the Police News poet Webster. Webster's specialty was blood:
Chapman's, balderdash. Many of us by this time find it difficult to
believe that pre-Ruskinite art criticism used to prostrate itself before
the works of Domenichino and Guido, and to patronize the modest little
beginnings of those who came between Cimabue and Masaccio. But we have
only to look at our own current criticism of Elizabethan drama to
satisfy ourselves that in an art which has not yet found its Ruskin or
its pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the same folly is still academically
propagated. It is possible, and even usual, for men professing to have
ears and a sense of poetry to snub Peele and Greene and grovel before
Fletcher and Webster--Fletcher! a facile blank verse penny-a-liner:
Webster! a turgid paper cut-throat. The subject is one which I really
cannot pursue without intemperance of language. The man who thinks The
Duchess of Malfi better than David and Bethsabe is outside the pale, not
merely of literature, but almost of humanity.

Yet some of the worst of these post-Shakespearean duffers, from Jonson
to Heywood, suddenly became poets when they turned from the big drum of
pseudo-Shakespearean drama to the pipe and tabor of the masque, exactly
as Shakespear himself recovered the old charm of the rigmarole when he
turned from Prospero to Ariel and Caliban. Cyril Tourneur and Heywood
could certainly have produced very pretty rigmarole plays if they had
begun where Shake