nal and lively dramatic story on the somewhat arid soil of the
Morality and Interlude, and, on the other, the abortive attempt to
introduce the regular Senecan tragedy--an attempt which almost immediately
broke down and disappeared, whelmed in the abundance of chronicle-play and
melodrama. And finally we shall show how the two rival schools of the
university wits and the actor playwrights culminated, the first in Marlowe,
the second in the earlier and but indistinctly and conjecturally known work
of Shakespere. A second chapter will show us the triumph of the
untrammelled English play in tragedy and comedy, furnished by Marlowe with
the mighty line, but freed to a great extent from the bombast and the
unreal scheme which he did not shake off. Side by side with Shakespere
himself we shall have to deal with the learned sock of Jonson, the proud
full style of Chapman, the unchastened and ill-directed vigour of Marston,
the fresh and charming, if unkempt grace of Dekker, the best known and most
remarkable members of a crowd of unknown or half-known playwrights. A third
division will show us a slight gain on the whole in acting qualities, a
considerable perfecting of form and scheme, but at the same time a certain
decline in the most purely poetical merits, redeemed and illustrated by the
abundant genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Middleton, of Webster, of
Massinger, and of Ford. And the two latest of these will conduct us into
the fourth or period of decadence where, round the voluminous work and
still respectable fame of James Shirley, are grouped names like Brome,
Glapthorne, Suckling, and others, whose writing, sometimes remarkable and
even brilliant, gradually loses not only dramatic but poetical merit, till
it drops into the formless plots, the unscannable verse, the coarseness
unredeemed by passion, the horrors unlit by any tragic force, which
distinguish the last plays before the closing of the theatres, and reappear
to some extent at a period beyond ours in the drama (soon to be radically
changed in almost every possible characteristic) of the Restoration. The
field of survey is vast, and despite the abundant labour which has been
bestowed upon it during the nineteenth century, it is still in a somewhat
chaotic condition. The remarkable collection of old plays which we owe to
Mr. A. H. Bullen shows, by sample only and with no pretence of being
exhaustive, the amount of absolutely unknown matter which still exists. The