Now since it has ceased to be performed, what is the value of the old drama, as literature, as a body of reading plays? Of the 200 known writers for the theatre, ten at least were men of creative genius, Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger. At least a dozen more were men of high and remarkable talents, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marston, Ford, Heywood, Shirley, Tourneur, Kyd, Day, Rowley, Brome. Scarcely one of them but has contributed single scenes of great excellence, or invented one or two original and interesting characters, or written passages of noble blank verse and lovely lyrics. Even the poorest of them were inheritors or partakers of a great poetic tradition, a gift of style, so that, in plays very defective, as a whole, we are constantly coming upon lines of startling beauty like Middleton’s Ha! what art thou that taks’t away the light Betwixt that star and me? or Marston’s Night, like a masque, has entered heaven’s high hall, With thousand torches ushering the way. or Beaumont’s Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young. But when all has been said, and in spite of enthusiasts like Lamb and Hazlitt and Swinburne, I fear it must be acknowledged that, outside of Shakespeare, our old dramatists produced no plays of the absolutely first rank; no tragedies so perfect as those of Sophocles and Euripides; no comedies equal to Molière’s. Nay, I would go further, and affirm that not only has the Elizabethan drama—excluding Shakespeare—nothing to set against the first part of Goethe’s “Faust,” but that its best plays are inferior, as a whole, to the best of Aristophanes, of Calderon, of Racine, of Schiller, even perhaps of Victor Hugo, Sheridan and Beaumarchais. It is as Coleridge said: great beauties, counterbalanced by great faults. Ben Jonson is heavy-handed and laborious; Beaumont and Fletcher graceful, fluent and artistic, but superficial and often false in characterization; Webster, intense and powerful in passion, but morbid and unnatural; Middleton, frightfully uneven; Marlowe and Chapman high epic poets but with no flexibility and no real turn for drama. Yet unsatisfactory as it is, when judged by any single play, the work of the Elizabethans, when viewed as a whole, makes an astonishing impression of fertility, of force, of range, variety, and richness, both in invention and in expression. ----- [8] “Every Man in his Humor” lasted well down into the nineteenth century on the stage. And here are a few haphazard dates of late performances of Elizabethan plays: “The Pilgrim,” 1812; “Philaster,” 1817; “The Chances,” 1820; “The Wild Goose Chase,” 1820; “The City Madam,” 1822; “The Humorous Lieutenant,” 1817; “The Spanish Curate,” 1840. PRINTED BY E. L. HILDRETH & COMPANY, BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, U. S. A. TRANSCRIBER NOTES