pectator.
In one of John Ford's tragedies the situation which in _A King and No
King_ is only apparent becomes real, and incest is boldly made the
subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character
and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His
best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of
the feelings.

Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama
with the exception of Jonson's fragment, the _Sad Shepherd_. Its choral
songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole
poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. The _Knight of the
Burning Pestle,_ written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first
burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and
Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or
Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and
feminine endings.

In John Webster the fondness for abnormal and sensational themes, which
beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the
terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere--as in the great murder
scene in _Macbeth_--is a pure passion; but in Webster it is mingled with
something physically repulsive. Thus his _Duchess of Malfi_ is presented
in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told that it is the hand of
her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of mad-men and, "behind a
traverse, the artificial figures of her children, appearing as if
dead." Treated in this elaborate fashion, that "terror," which Aristotle
said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its
dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about
them:

She would not after the report keep fresh
As long as flowers on graves.

We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world I
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most
Shaksperian of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams
of beauty among his dark horrors which light up a whole scene with some
abrupt touch of feeling.

Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young,

says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and
stands before the corpse. _Vittoria Corombona_ is described in the