t of a short and definite period of
production in one well-defined kind approached in value the interest of the
Elizabethan drama. Other periods and other countries may produce more
remarkable work of different kinds, or more uniformly accomplished, and
more technically excellent work in the same kind. But for originality,
volume, generic resemblance of character, and individual independence of
trait, exuberance of inventive thought, and splendour of execution in
detached passages--the Elizabethan drama from Sackville to Shirley stands
alone in the history of the world. The absurd overestimate which has
sometimes been made of its individual practitioners, the hyperbole of the
language which has been used to describe them, the puerile and almost
inconceivable folly of some of their scholiasts and parasitic students,
find a certain excuse in this truth--a truth which will only be contested
by those who have not taken the very considerable trouble necessary to
master the facts, or who are precluded by a natural inability from
savouring the _gout du terroir_ of this abundant and intoxicating wine.
There are those who say that nobody but an enthusiast or a self-deceiver
can read with real relish any Elizabethan dramatist but Shakespere, and
there are those who would have it that the incommunicable and
uncommunicated charm of Shakespere is to be found in Nabbes and Davenport,
in Glapthorne and Chettle. They are equally wrong, but the second class are
at any rate in a more saving way of wrongness. Where Shakespere stands
alone is not so much in his actual faculty of poetry as in his command of
that faculty. Of the others, some, like Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, had
the art without the power; others, like Chapman, Dekker, Webster, had
flashes of the power without the art. But there is something in the whole
crew, jovial or saturnine, which is found nowhere else, and which, whether
in full splendour as in Shakespere, or in occasional glimmers as in
Tourneur or Rowley, is found in all, save those mere imitators and
hangers-on who are peculiar to no period.

This remarkable quality, however, does not show itself in the dramatic work
of our present period until quite the close of it. It is true that the
period opens (according to the traditional estimate which has not been much
altered by recent studies) with three plays of very considerable character,
and of no inconsiderable merit--the two comedies already named and the
tragedy of