The drama had become conventionalized. The dramatists were no longer searching for new themes and characters in a wide range of stories; they were inventing their plots but were restricted in their materials. The ingredients of early plays served Shirley's purpose, and by a few new devices or changes in motive he gave his fashionable ladies, his lustful monarchs, scheming favorites, and exiled heroes new names and adventures, and so produced a play. The cleverness of the plot occupies your attention, or occasionally a beautiful passage or a fine conception of character arrests the mind, but at the close you are at a loss to separate the play from a dozen similar ones. In Shirley, as in Massinger, the most representative plays, and certainly those most satisfactory to our taste, are the tragicomedies. Bloodshed and horror and grossness of language and situation may all be absent, and the story of love and intrigue, even if it does not exalt the mind or purify the passions, may be altogether delightful. In "The Royal Master," one of the best, the rôle of the lustful monarch is assumed for a single scene, only to cure a really charming heroine of her infatuation for royalty; and the intriguing favorite is foiled, the banished noble vindicated, and two love matches completed with gracefulness of language and dexterity of plot. Unfortunately Shirley's land of romance is rarely so wholesome as here or the inhabitants so agreeable. His tragedies mainly conform to the hackneyed models, no matter what the sources may be or how large his own invention may seem. The earliest, "The Maid's Revenge," relating a Spanish story of the rivalry in love of two sisters that ends in a fatal duel between brother and lover, is wholly in the tone of romantic melodrama. "The Politician," a more ambitious effort, combines the villain play with the Beaumont-Fletcher romance. Gotharius, the politician, is the villain; Marpisa, the evil woman, is his mistress and about to be married to the king; Albina, the loyal and long-suffering heroine, is the villain's wife; Turgesius is the prince and hero; and Olaus, a blunt soldier, is his faithful friend. There is an insurrection, as so often in Fletcher; and after a long intrigue the villain and the evil woman perish, and the prince marries the heroine. In "Love's Cruelty," a more original conception is worked out with telling realism and a good deal of dramatic truth. Clariana becomes infatuated with her husband's friend Hippolito; and, even after the guilty lovers have been permitted to go unpunished by the husband, her passion continues until her jealousy at her lover's approaching marriage to Eubella drives her to his murder. Rarely elsewhere in the Elizabethan drama is the story of illicit love told with less of glamour and more veracity. These merits are perhaps counterbalanced by the extreme realism of the language and the stage action.