In the main Restoration tragedy must be regarded as a continuation and development of Elizabethan. The influence of Beaumont and Fletcher continued in the heroic plays and their after-effects. The wane of the heroic plays brought a return to the Elizabethans, and, notably in Lee, to some of the most characteristic features of the later revenge plays. The increasing influence of Shakespeare was felt not only in the worthy emulation of "All for Love" and in the various adaptations, but also in the debates of the critics and through the whole warp and woof of tragedy. But what were preëminent in many of Shakespeare's contemporaries as in Shakespeare himself, poetry, passion, and characterization, were beyond the reach of any of the playwrights except Dryden, Lee, and Otway at their best. The worst excesses, the most undesirable conventions of the Elizabethans, excited imitation as much as their excellences. The Elizabethan bloom had gone to seed in unfavorable soil. It is not strange that after the horrors, bloodshed, and supernaturalism of Lee and Otway, and after the gross buffoonery that spoils tragedies otherwise so noble as "Don Sebastian," "Venice Preserved," and "The Fatal Marriage," there should have followed in the opening years of the next century a marked reaction to the decencies of French tragedy. In the Restoration period, however, the French influence, though manifest in the great vogue of the heroic plays and in a wide adoption of French ideas of structure and propriety, won only a partial triumph in checking and modifying the Elizabethan tradition. Its effect in supplying fresh incentives for worthy endeavor was slight, indeed, hardly discernible unless in the influence of Racine upon Otway. Tragedy, then, as handed down to the eighteenth century, was not a fixed and definite form, though measurably more so than a century before. It was still a conglomerate of various forms and tendencies, mingling relics of the medieval stage with reminiscences of Shakespeare and the manners of the court of Louis XIV. The sentimental tragedies of Southerne and Otway, telling stories of distressed womanhood and exciting pity without any accessories of grandeur, were perhaps the most independent achievements of Restoration tragedy; the preservation of Shakespearean influence was its most important. But, in comparison with a century before, the changes in tragedy that were most noticeable and permanent were the restriction of themes, the narrowing of structure, and the conventionality and artificiality that extended to character and language as well as to themes and plots. NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY