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among the London playwrights, the Romantic Drama in its several species-Comedy, Italian Novella, Roman History, English Chronicle, Masque, Domestic Tragedy, Melodrama-had achieved its triumph over the Classical Drama of the scholars. Rhyme had been discarded, and blank verse adopted as the proper vehicle of dramatic expression. Shakspere's greatness consisted in bringing the type established by his predecessors to artistic ripeness, not in creating a new type. It may even be doubted whether Shakspere was born to be a playwright-whether it was not rather circumstance which led him to assume his place as coryphæus to the choir of dramatists. The defects of the Romantic form were accepted by him with easy acquiescence, nor did he aim at altering that form in any essential particular. He dealt with English Drama as he dealt with the materials of his plays; following an outline traced already, but glorifying each particular of style and matter; breathing into the clayfigures of a tale his own creator's breath of life, enlarging prescribed incident and vivifying suggested thought with the art of an unrivalled poet-rhetorician, raising the verse invented for him to its highest potency and beauty with inexhaustible resource and tact incomparable in the use of language.

At the same time, the more we study Shakspere in his own works, the more do we perceive that his predecessors, no less than his successors, exist for him; that without him English dramatic art would be but second rate; that he is the keystone of the arch, the justifier and interpreter of his time's striving impulses. The forms he employs are the forms he found in

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common usage among his fellow-craftsmen. But his method of employing them is so vastly superior, the quality of his work is so incommensurable by any standard we apply to the best of theirs, that we cannot help regarding the plays of Shakspere as not exactly different in kind, but diverse in inspiration. Without those predecessors, Shakspere would certainly not have been what he is. But having him, we might well afford to lose them. Without those successors, we should still miss much that lay implicit in the art of Shakspere. But having him, we could well dispense with them. His predecessors lead up to him, and help us to explain his method. His successors supplement his work, illustrating the breadth and length and depth and versatility of English poetry in that prolific age.

It is this twofold point of view from which Shakspere must be studied in connection with the minor dramatists, which gives them value. It appears that a whole nation laboured in those fifty years' activity to give the world one Shakspere; but it is no less manifest that Shakspere did not stand alone, without support and without lineage. He and his fellow playwrights are interdependent, mutually illustrative; and their aggregated performance is the expression of a nation's spirit.

VII.

That the English genius for art has followed two directions, appears from the revolution in literature which prevailed from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. Shakspere represents the one type, which preponderated in the reigns of Elizabeth

and the first two Stuarts. Ben Jonson represents the other, less popular during the golden age of the Drama, but destined to assert itself after the Civil Wars. Jonson was a learned, and aimed at being a correct, poet. He formed a conception of poetry as the proper instrument of moral education, to which he gave clear utterance in his prose essays, and which was afterwards advocated by Milton. He taught the propriety of observing rules and precedents in art. Under the dictatorships of Dryden and Pope this subordination of fancy to canons of prescribed taste and sense was accepted as a law. The principles for which Jonson waged his manful but unsuccessful warfare triumphed. The men who adopted those principles and insured their victory were of like calibre and quality with Jonson-Titans, as the case has been well put, rather than Olympians.

The object of these remarks is to point out that the Elizabethan Drama contained within itself, in the work of our second greatest playwright, the germ of a new type of art, which only flourished at a later period. The critic must not neglect the difference between Jonson's method and that of his contemporaries, while at the same time he shows to what extent Jonson submitted to the spirit that controlled his age. What that spirit was, cannot in this place be described. Its analysis may more fitly be reserved for the conclusion of these studies. Yet some broad points can here be briefly indicated. It was a spirit of civil and religious freedom, in the interval between discomfited Romanism and Puritan victory; a spirit of nationality mature and conscious, perplexed as yet by no deeply reaching

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political discords such as those which later on confused the hierarchy of classes and imperilled the monarchical principle. It was a spirit in which loyalty to the person of the sovereign was at one with the sense of national independence. A powerful grasp on the realities of life was then compatible with romantic fancy and imaginative fervour. The solid earth The solid earth supported the poet; but while he never quitted this firm standing-ground, he held a wand which at a touch transmuted things of fact into the airy substance of a vision. Contempt for studied purity of style and for the artificial delicacies of sentiment was combined with extraordinary vigour and vividness in the use of language, running riot often in extravagance and verbose eccentricity, and also with the most sensitive perception of emotional gradations, the most hyperbolical enthusiasms. The moral sense was sound and homely; insight into character, acute; aptitude for observing and portraying psychological peculiarities, unrivalled in its elasticity and ease. These are some of the distinctive qualities shared in common by our playwrights. It should also be added that their intolerance of rules, indifference to literary fame, and haste of composition exposed them all, with one or two illustrious exceptions, to artistic incompleteness.

VIII.

This chapter in our literature properly closes with the fall of Charles I. from power. The inspiration of Marlowe and Shakspere, the true Elizabethan impulse, had worn itself out. Judging by the latest products of the Caroline age, I cannot resist the belief that even

had the Puritans not dealt a death-blow to the stage, that impulse could scarcely have yielded another succession of really vital works.

After the Restoration, Dryden and Otway, Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh partly refined upon some comic and tragic motives, suggested by the latest of their predecessors, and partly succeeded in creating a novel style in sympathy with altered social customs. No one will dispute the piquancy of Congreve's dialogue, the effectiveness of the domestic scenes from town and country life depicted on that glittering theatre. Yet this brilliant group of playwrights stands apart; isolated by differences of thought and sentiment, method and language, from their Elizabethan predecessors; hardly less isolated from their few worthy successors of the Georgian age.

Far more significant than the vamped-up dramas of the eighteenth century are the novels which now take their rise, and which preserve the old dramatic genius of the English in an altered form. Our time, which offers so many parallels to that of Elizabeth, shows its literary character in no point more distinctively than in its cultivation of prose romance. Instead of dramas written to be acted, we have novels written to be read. These are produced in such profusion, with such spontaneous and untutored licence, so various in quality and yet upon the whole so excellent, that the Victorian period vindicates the survival of that dramatic aptitude which glorified the period of Elizabeth.

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