The old English dramatists

COMPLETE WORKS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. New _Riverside Edition_. In same style as the _Riverside Editions_ of Longfellow’s and Whittier’s Works. With Portraits, Indexes, etc. 11...

The pity of it! That unfinished Belshazzar of his was a bitter sarcasm on our self-conceit. Among _us_, it was unfinishable. Whatever place can draw together the greatest amount...

“Come, Sleep: O Sleep! the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, The indifferent judge between the hig...

There are, properly speaking, no characters in the plays of Marlowe--but personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know them, but only to know what they do and say. The nea...

And this is apt to be the only view we take of that Golden Age, as we call it fairly enough in one, and that, perhaps, the most superficial, sense. But it was in many ways rude...

In the trial scene the defiant haughtiness of Vittoria, entrenched in her illustrious birth, against the taunts of the Cardinal, making one think of Browning’s Ottima, “magnific...

In saying that the sense of “one line is prodigiously expanded into ten,” Dryden certainly puts his finger on one of Chapman’s faults. He never knew when to stop. But it is not...

How early the two poets came to London is uncertain. They had already made Ben Jonson’s acquaintance in 1607. Their first joint play, “Philaster, or Love lies a-bleeding,” was p...

To me Massinger is one of the most interesting as well as one of the most delightful of the old dramatists, not so much for his passion or power, though at times he reaches both...