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en Weerwrack, a vigorous but bombastic and melodramatic version of the Titus Andronicus story, which the Dutch poet may have derived from Shakespeare's play. If he did he was careful to exclude the poetry with which Shakespeare relieved his painful scenes. The impression which this melodramatic piece produced was due to the fact that, so far as it goes, melodrama is drama, which stately pageants, long speeches, and choral odes are not. The taste of scholars was not shocked by horrors which Seneca had taught them were appropriate to tragedy so long as crime ended in punishment, and learned and unlearned alike enjoyed the interest of incident and suspense. But Aran en Titus indicated unmistakably the failure of the effort inaugurated by the Eglantine-the miscarriage of the Dutch drama. The popular and the scholarly had failed to blend in a living and cultured drama. The classical remained a school drama, the romantic degenerated rapidly. Vos's Medea, with which the second new theatre in Amsterdam was opened in 1662, was a melodrama furnished with elaborate stage-effects, and "Konst en vliegh-werck" were soon reckoned to be of more importance than characters and poetry. It is unnecessary to speak of slipshod translations from Spanish and French. The society whose motto was "Nil volentibus arduum" spoke much in the closing years of the century about the reform of the stage; but their vanity was greater than their genius, and they did not rise above translation.

It fared a little better with that vigorous native

growth, the farce, the coarseness and general slack morality of which shows how much of a Later Comedy. popular growth it continued to be. One of Brederoo's closest imitators was Willem Diederickz. Hooft, author of five farcical pieces; but the best writers of comedy and farce in the latter years of the century were Dr Pieter Bernagie (1650-1699), who wrote some fifteen tragedies and comedies, “free and natural pictures of the native manners of his time," which have not yet disappeared from the stage, and Thomas Asselijn, whose Jan Klaaszen (1682), Stiefmoer (1684), Stiefvaar (1690), and Spilpenning (1690), are brilliant comic pictures of life and manners in the last days of the century. Jan Klaaszen of Gewaande Dienstmaagd is his masterpiece, inferior in comic spirit to Brederoo's best work, but superior in construction, owing, doubtless, in some measure to the beneficial influence of Molière. Asselijn and Langendijk, who followed, lie somewhat outside the period covered in this volume.

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HIS THEORY
COMEDIES-

COMEDY-EARLIER COMEDIES-TRAGEDIES-MATURE

LAST PLAYS-MASQUES-'SAD SHEPHERD'-ACHIEVEMENT-MARSTON

-DEKKER-MIDDLETON-HEYWOOD-WEBSTER-HIS TWO TRAGEDIES
-TOURNEUR-BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER-LAST PHASE OF ELIZA-
BETHAN DRAMA-SENTIMENTAL TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE-COMEDY
OF INCIDENT AND MANNERS-MASSINGER-FORD-SHIRLEY-LESSER
DRAMATISTS-CONCLUSION.

THE first ten years of the century witnessed the crowning splendour of the Elizabethan drama.1 The genial and mature comedies and heroic Introductory. histories with which Shakespeare had illumined the closing years of the sixteenth century

1 Minto, Characteristics of English Poets, Edin., 1885; Saintsbury, Elizabethan Literature, Lond., 1887-1903; Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, Lond., 1891; Mezières, Predecesseurs et Contemporains de Shakespeare, Paris, 1894, and Contemporains et Successeurs de Shakespeare, 1897; Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. iv., Lond., 1903; Jusserand, Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglais, Paris, 1904; Emil Koeppel, Quellen-studien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marston's und Beaumont's und Fletcher's, Erlangen und Leipzig, 1895; Id. zu den Dramen George Chapman's, Philip Massinger's, und John Ford's, Strassburg, 1897; Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society, 1874-92; Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare - Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1865-1905; Englische Studien, Heilbronn, 1877-1906; Anglia, Halle, 1878-1906; Dictionary of National Biography, Lond.

were succeeded by the great tragedies of thought and passion; and when the second decade opened he was taking farewell of the stage in the more slightly constructed romances, full of pathos and poetry, in which we can trace not only an alteration in the poet's mood, but it may be also that more general change in taste to which the romantic and sentimental drama of Beaumont and Fletcher conduced and ministered. During these same years Jonson was working with all the vigour of his gigantic powers; and the best plays of Chapman, Marston, Dekker, Middleton, and Webster date from this decade or a few years later. The ruling spirits of the next two decades are Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is in the work of their followers and imitators -Massinger, Ford, and Shirley-that the flame which had been kindled by Marlowe and the other "university wits" burned itself out in the years immediately preceding the close of the theatres.

Shakespeare is, by the plan of this series, excluded from the scope of the present volume, so that it remains to sketch briefly the work of the other dramatists who flourished during the years from 1600 to 1640.

The oldest of them all was the veteran scholar, poet, and dramatist, George Chapman1. Born some

1 The Comedies and Tragedies of George Chapman, with Notes and a Memoir, 3 vols., London, 1873 (a literal reprint from the old copies); The Works of Chapman, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 3 vols., London, 1874-5; All Fools and the "Bussy" and "Byron " plays, ed. W. L. Phelps of Yale College, in Mermaid Series, London, 1895. Text in all these corrupt. The "Bussy plays have been edited carefully by F. S. Boas, Belles Lettres Series, Boston and London, 1905.

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eight years before Shakespeare, educated at Oxford, Chapman does not come before our notice

Chapman.

as a poet until 1594, as a dramatist until 1595-96. How he spent the interval we do not know. There may be truth in Mr Swinburne's conjecture that he visited the Low Countries, with which he seems familiar, not, like Jonson, trailing a pike, but with the actors who went over in "Lecester's tijen," from which the peasants in Dutch comedy frequently date events, as the same comedies contain repeated reference to such companies. In 1598 he is mentioned by Meres as one of the best writers of comedies and tragedies, which would point to his being the author of plays now lost. Of plays certainly written before the close of the century we have only the worthless Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598) and A Humorous Day's Mirth (1599), with the fine, though exaggerated and grotesque, adaptation from Terence's Heautontimorumenos, the comedy of All Fools (1600), so eloquently praised by Mr Swinburne. The majority of the plays which have survived belong to the early years of the new century. They include the comedies The Gentleman Usher (1606), Monsieur D'Olive (1606), May Day (1611), and The Widow's Tears (1612), with the tragedies Bussy D'Ambois (1607), Byron's Conspiracy, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1613), to which falls to be added the later published tragedy of Cæsar and Pompey (1631) and The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France (1639). If Shirley had any hand in the latter, it was probably confined to the pathetic

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