He is one of the most equable and literary of the dramatists of the age; he has a decided fanciful turn; he is a close observer and critic of the life of the time, and a dramatist who on a few occasions can rise to the heights of greatness. His most powerful play, which has been much praised by Lamb and others, is _The Changeling_ (1624); others are _Women beware Women_ (1622), _The Witch_, which bears a strong resemblance to _Macbeth_, and _The Spanish Gipsy_ (1623), a romantic comedy suggesting _As You Like It_. Along with Dekker he wrote _The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cutpurse_ (1611), which is a close dramatic parallel to the earliest novels. =7. Thomas Heywood (1575–1650)= was born in Lincolnshire about 1575, was educated at Cambridge, and became an author and dramatist in London. He himself asserts that he had a hand (“or at least a main finger”) in two hundred and twenty plays, of which twenty-three survive. Like so many more dramatists of the time, he excelled in his pictures of London life and manners. He was a rapid and light improviser, an expert contriver of stage situations, but otherwise content with passable results, and caring little about the higher flights of the dramatist. His best play is _A Woman Killed with Kindnesse_ (1603), which contains some strongly pathetic scenes; _The English Traveller_ (1633) is only slightly inferior. Other plays of his are _The Royall King_ (1600), _The Captives_ (1624), and a series of clumsy historical dramas, including _King Edward the Fourth_ (1600) and _The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth_ (1605). =8. John Webster=, who flourished during the first twenty years of the seventeenth century, excels his fellows as a tragical artist. Next to nothing is known regarding his life, and much of his work has been lost, but what remains is sufficient to show that he was a writer of no mean ability. Selecting themes of gloomy and supernatural horror, of great crimes and turbulent emotions and desires, he rises to the height of his argument with an ability equal to his ambition. In several respects--in bleak horror and in largeness of tragical conception--he resembles Marlowe; but he is terse and precise when Marlowe is simply turgid; his plots have the inexorable march of Fate itself; and he far excels Marlowe in brief and almost blinding flashes of sorrow and pity. His two great plays are _The White Devil_ (1612) and _The Duchess of Malfy_ (1623). Other and inferior plays ascribed to him are _The Devil’s Law Case_ (1623) and _Appius and Virginia_. =9. Cyril Tourneur= (1575–1626) seems to have been a soldier and to have served in the Low Countries. He took part in Buckingham’s disastrous expedition to Cadiz, and on his return died in Ireland.