The history of the Elizabethan drama is the history of the formation of an English dramatic convention. The questions are what it was, and what were its merits. These questions are not settled by the answer that Shakespeare was the greatest of dramatists. That he would have been in any case. What is greatest in him--his universal sympathy with all nature and his unerring truth to life--was wholly personal. He shared it with nobody. If the Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare, and a ring of men whom we are content to know wholly by “beauties,” which beauties, again, are lyric poetry and not drama, then it is quite superfluous to treat it as dramatic literature at all. The Bible does not belong to a class, and neither does Shakespeare in those qualities which raise him above all others. We must look at him as standing apart; and as for the others, if that for which they are worth studying is their lyric poetry, or their mighty line, or this or that touch of genuine pathos or fine interpretation of character in flashes, it is unnecessary to consider them as writers of plays. If there was an Elizabethan dramatic literature in any other sense than this, that many poets wrote for the stage and put noble poetry into a machinery not essentially dramatic, it must be studied apart from what was purely Shakespeare. And that is not difficult to do. On his predecessors he could have no effect, and it is only necessary to turn from him to any contemporary or successor to see how little they shared with him in all that was not mere language and fashion of the time. [SN: _The dramatic quality._]