Decadence is more manifest in the restriction and conventionalizing of the material of tragedy. The love for the impossible, the craving for stupendous emotions and supernormal passions had given place to theatrical court intrigues. The daring attempts of Marlowe and Shakespeare to depict the great round of the emotions had given way to a continual harping on illicit love. Dramatists were no longer striving to give beautiful expression to the terrible, heroic, or pitiable in story, but seeking to construct acting plays out of stock situations and stock characters. There was a lack of fresh impulse. French romance and Spanish drama seem to have encouraged no marked innovations, and French classicism was only just making itself heard at the closing of the theatres. A man of original genius like Ford staggered under the recognition of the greatness of earlier achievement and turned to the abnormalities and excesses of passion for his themes. Shirley, more typical of the period, devoted talents of a high order to repeating familiar models. Yet there was progress as well as stagnation. Dramatists had shaken off the medieval adherence to sources and learned to invent, though their invention unhappily followed current theatrical fashions rather than fresh creative impulses. The art of making plays had advanced, not as Shakespeare had pointed the way, by making construction dependent upon character, but as Beaumont and Fletcher had fashioned, by making character subordinate to a varied and rapid action. There is more complication, more coherence in plot, more ingenuity in situation, and a far greater use of surprise than in the early plays, but no great gain in consistent motivation. Yet many of the early absurdities have disappeared; and in discovering what is to be acted and what not, in the quick excitement of the spectator's interest, and in the careful integration of the various lines of action, the dramaturgy is, in comparison with the period before Shakespeare, noticeably modern.