A History of English Literature

alone or to Fletcher and other collaborators. The scholarship of our day
agrees with the opinion of their contemporaries in assigning to Beaumont
the greater share of judgment and intellectual power and to Fletcher the
greater share of spontaneity and fancy. Fletcher's style is very
individual. It is peculiarly sweet; but its unmistakable mark is his
constant tendency to break down the blank verse line by the use of extra
syllables, both within the line and at the end. The lyrics which he
scatters through his plays are beautifully smooth and musical. The plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher, as a group, are sentimentally romantic, often in an
extravagant degree, though their charm often conceals the extravagance as
well as the lack of true characterization. They are notable often for their
portrayal of the loyal devotion of both men and women to king, lover, or
friend. One of the best of them is 'Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding,'
while Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess' is the most pleasing example in
English of the artificial pastoral drama in the Italian and Spanish style.
The Elizabethan tendency to sensational horror finds its greatest artistic
expression in two plays of John Webster, 'The White Devil, or Vittoria
Corombona,' and 'The Duchess of Malfi.' Here the corrupt and brutal life of
the Italian nobility of the Renaissance is presented with terrible
frankness, but with an overwhelming sense for passion, tragedy, and pathos.
The most moving pathos permeates some of the plays of John Ford (of the
time of Charles I), for example, 'The Broken Heart'; but they are abnormal
and unhealthy. Philip Massinger, a pupil and collaborator of Fletcher, was
of thoughtful spirit, and apparently a sincere moralist at heart, in spite
of much concession in his plays to the contrary demands of the time. His
famous comedy, 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' a satire on greed and cruelty,
is one of the few plays of the period, aside from Shakspere's, which are
still occasionally acted. The last dramatist of the whole great line was
James Shirley, who survived the Commonwealth and the Restoration and died
of exposure at the Fire of London in 1666. In his romantic comedies and
comedies of manners Shirley vividly reflects the thoughtless life of the
Court of Charles I and of the well-to-do contemporary London citizens and
shows how surprisingly far that life had progressed toward the reckless
frivolity and abandonment which after the interval of Puritan rule were to
run riot in the Restoration period.
The great Elizabethan dramatic impulse had thus become deeply degenerate,
and nothing could be more fitting than that it should be brought to a
definite end. When the war broke out in 1642 one of the first acts of
Parliament, now at last free to work its will on the enemies of Puritanism,
was to decree that 'whereas public sports do not well agree with public
calamities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation,' all
dramatic performances should cease. This law, fatal, of course, to the
writing as well as the acting of plays, was enforced with only slightly
relaxing rigor until very shortly before the Restoration of Charles II in
1660. Doubtless to the Puritans it seemed that their long fight against the
theater had ended in permanent triumph; but this was only one of many
respects in which the Puritans were to learn that human nature cannot be
forced into permanent conformity with any rigidly over-severe standard, on
however high ideals it may be based.
SUMMARY. The chief dramatists of the whole sixty years of the great period
may be conveniently grouped as follows: I. Shakspere's early
contemporaries, about 1580 to about 1593: Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd,
Marlowe. II. Shakspere. III. Shakspere's later contemporaries, under
Elizabeth and James I: Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton,
Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster. IV. The last group, under James I
and Charles I, to 1642: Ford, Massinger, and Shirley.