Act i opens at the court of Roberto, King of Sicily,

who, after much eloquent solicitation, permits his natural brother Bertoldo to lead an expedition against Gonzaga, a knight of Malta, who is relieving Sienna, captured by Ferdinand, Duke of Urbin, in his effort to win the duchess by force. Camiola, the maid of honor, after some buffoonery on the part of Sylli, a Malvolio-like wooer, has a parting interview with Bertoldo and confesses that his vow as a knight of Malta is the only bar to her acceptance of his offers of marriage. In act ii, after some further buffoonery by Sylli, who serves throughout as a comic contrast to Camiola's other suitors, Fulgentio, the King's minion, solicits Camiola, but is tartly repulsed, and threatens to slander her. The scene changes to Sienna, the camp of Gonzaga, and then to the citadel held by Ferdinand. Bertoldo and his followers are defeated and made prisoners, Gonzaga tearing the cross from Bertoldo's breast. In act iii all the prisoners are released by ransom, except Bertoldo, who thereupon bewails the falseness of his brother the King. The scene changing to Sicily, Adorni, a faithful follower of Camiola's father, soliloquizes on his love for her and his intention to take vengeance on Fulgentio. Later he appears wounded before Camiola and presents the minion's recantation, but is blamed by her for his presumption in assuming a task proper only for her lover. Upon the arrival of news of Bertoldo's plight, Camiola, who is as energetic as loyal, decides to sacrifice her fortune to pay her lover's ransom, and summons Adorni to act as her agent in freeing Bertoldo. Adorni dutifully undertakes the mission that promises to ruin his hopes. In act iv the Duchess Aurelia arrives at Sienna and Ferdinand surrenders. Bertoldo in prison reads Seneca, soliloquizes on suicide, falls on the ground, and threatens to rend the bowels of the earth, quite in Kydian fashion. Adorni enters, and Bertoldo, upon hearing of Camiola's sacrifice, blesses her name and promises marriage. It is now Adorni's turn to soliloquize on suicide. Bertoldo is brought before Aurelia, who, suddenly enamored, offers him herself and duchy. After some resistance he yields. Adorni now begins to hope. In Sicily Camiola has convinced the King of Fulgentio's worthlessness. In act v Camiola receives from Adorni the news of Bertoldo's fickleness, but she still scorns Adorni and resolves to seek redress from the King. Accordingly, at the marriage of Bertoldo and Aurelia, she breaks in, states her case with eloquence and temper, and appeals to the King. Aurelia suddenly feels all her love quenched, and Bertoldo pleads for pity. All await the fulfillment of Camiola's promise that she will declare whom she will marry, and are astonished when Father Paula announces that she has decided to become the bride of the church. Before taking the veil, she obtains Fulgentio's pardon, gives one half of her wealth to the faithful Adorni, and commands Bertoldo to resume the cross of Malta.

In his six tragedies there is less of romantic love and more of the blacker passions. "The Unnatural Combat," "The Duke of Milan," "The Fatal Dowry" (in collaboration with Field), and "The Roman Actor" deal with lust and revenge in the quantity and quality long prescribed. In the last named, however, Massinger broke away from the conventional treatment and made his protagonist neither the cruel tyrant nor the lustful queen, but a dignified and noble representative of the actor's profession, and took the opportunity of effectively expanding the old device of a play within a play. The other two tragedies present still more originality of conception and treatment: "Believe As You List," dealing with the fortune of a rightful claimant to the crown, and "The Virgin Martyr," perhaps a revision of an early play by Dekker, returning to the old material of the Miracles, the story of a martyrdom that converts the persecutors. In each of these tragedies, as in "The Maid of Honor," a number of stories are organized into a single action, introduced by admirable exposition, and usually carried through with direct and logical progress. In the treatment of catastrophe, always heightened, prolonged, and sometimes full of surprise after Fletcher's fashion, Massinger is less competent. Massinger could not keep to the inevitable development of character as did Shakespeare, nor could he sacrifice character to situation as light-heartedly as did Fletcher. In consequence he falls between two stools; and his fifth act is usually clumsy and unconvincing.

Massinger's art was not only less reckless than Fletcher's; it was linked to a serious moral view of human affairs. He always worked under a sense of responsibility both as a dramatic artist and as a preacher of political and personal morality. Neither the heedlessness of Fletcher nor the perversion of Ford is discoverable in his plays. Bad and good are clearly differentiated, despite the improbabilities of the romantic vicissitudes; and poetic justice is administered with decision. Following his venturesome and nimble master, he pursues his pathway gravely, judicially, somewhat heavily. His careful art and sincere morality lack the leaven of dramatic genius. The orator and the rhetorician are always elbowing the dramatist off the scene. His style, never splendid, never excessively figurative, is always contained and clear. At its best in sustained declamation, it often descends to a tone approaching prose and rarely rises to the more stirring or impelling emotions. His abundant inventiveness also fails him in the great crises of passion. Again and again when the heroine is at bay, or the hero within the jaws of ruin, Massinger resorts to oratory. As in "The Maid of Honor," eloquence is the _deus ex machina_ which solves the difficulties of the plot. In consequence, the characterization, though involving subtle and penetrating conceptions of human nature, and often logical and consistent, rarely results in living beings. An exception must be made of some of his men, whose virility and dignity are akin to his own temper and can be made real through his favorite rhetorical means. The women, with few exceptions, of whom Camiola is chief, are, for reverse reasons, bad failures. Chastity cannot be revealed by an oratorical appeal, and the evil women only grow impossible when they add rhetoric to lust.

The passing of the greatness of the Elizabethan drama is manifest in Massinger as in his contemporaries. He retains, to be sure, most of the external characteristics of his predecessors; he writes constantly in the light of their achievements; he would restrain Fletcher's theatricality by a more cautious and responsible art. Like Shakespeare he maintains a moral standard despite the exigencies of a romantic plot. But the old fervor as well as the old extravagance of diction have gone; and a careful dramaturgy now finds itself incompetent to meet the requirements of great tragic crises. His tragedies recapitulate what has been done before, without important advance or departure, and without attaining one unforgettable phrase or one moment that electrifies the reader with an undeniable conviction of its dramatic truth.

In Ford the results of servile imitation and original genius were curiously combined. The first dramatist to feel the overshadowing effect of Shakespeare's tragedies, he borrowed freely from "Lear," "Othello," and "Romeo and Juliet," and he was hardly less indebted to Beaumont and Fletcher and the school of Webster. As a playwright he was, in fact, usually imitative and often unskillful. As a poet his consciousness of the greatness of earlier dramatists now chilled him to bald copying and now incited him to a unique development of some of the old tragic motives. With Dekker and Rowley he collaborated on "The Witch of Edmonton," a tragicomedy dealing with a contemporary crime and linking itself with the domestic tragedies. "Perkin Warbeck," a revival of the chronicle history, is without battles or pageants, and is less concerned with the scenic presentation of history than with the delineation of the character of the claimant. His other tragedies, "Love's Sacrifice," "The Broken Heart," and "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," are at once both more in accord with prevailing modes in the drama and more characteristic of Ford's imaginative temperament. In spite of their worthless comic scenes, their conventional material, and their melodramatic situations, they present tragic passion with an intensity and truth possible only to dramatic genius.

Love is the theme, and an excess of sentiment and passion in conflict with friendship, right, or natural law, is the particular province that Ford makes his own. A favorite in love with the wife of his lord, a brother in love with a sister, are the situations over which his genius casts an oppressive melancholy that lasts until the final heart-breaks. The monarch, his favorite, a buffoon or two, and lords and ladies, love-sick or passion-inflamed, play with the casuistry of love and mingle dances and revels with bloodshed and horror. Villany and revenge appear but are not very essential. The seeds of fatal passions have been already sown when the play begins; it is the stifling hothouse in which they luxuriate. The end is inevitable, though it may be long held in suspense and attained through some surprise in the final act.

"The Broken Heart" is the most healthy of his plays. Orgilus, whose life has been blighted because Penthea has married Bassanio through the intervention of her brother, the great General Ithocles, pursues his revenge upon Ithocles in spite of much delay and apparent reconciliation. Finally he stabs Ithocles to death just as Ithocles is to be married to the princess Calantha, and just as Penthea dies of madness and starvation. The familiar round of revenge, madness, and torture here reappears, but it is told in a story full of romantic sentiment and human passion, and not without sunshine as well as shadow. It is the final scenes, however, which every reader remembers. Calantha is dancing when the tidings of the deaths of her father and her lover are brought to her, and she dances on, hiding her grief and playing her part nobly, until, duty accomplished, her heart is free to yield to its bursting sorrow.

It is in scenes like these, showing passion restrained or overborne for the moment, or the strain and suspense preceding the crash, that Ford is at his best. The marvelous parting scene between brother and sister in "'Tis Pity" is perfection itself. His imagination dissolves the horrible story into the very language of the breaking heart. His verse, lacking both the old rhetorical artificiality and the vivacity and adaptability of Fletcher's, possesses a restraint and moderation of language and a complex and beautiful melody all its own. At times it is the thinnest of translucent veils "through which passion is burning as the radiant lines of morning."

One may find in him somewhat of the perverse inquisitiveness of Donne. A wayward and solitary searcher in the realms of poetry, he voyaged only to regions unexplored or forbidding. But, as we have seen, his imagination, wayward though it was, took direction from his contemporaries, and he was representative of much in current tragedy. Though Ford's ethical attitude is perhaps more non-committal than that of any of his contemporaries, yet his casuistical interest in moral problems, and the emphasis which he places on such problems at the expense of his stories, are traits common in the drama of the time, and especially in the collaborative work of Middleton and Rowley. His absorption with questions of sex, his searching for new sensation, his attempt to bestow on moral perversion the enticements of poetry correspond with what is most decadent in Fletcher and Shirley. Like his fine-spoken and well-mannered courtiers and impulsive ladies, Ford imagined in an atmosphere of unhealthy emotion. His plays are immoral because their passion is so often morbid and their sentiment mawkish. His power to reveal character and passion, which rank him with the greatest of the Elizabethans, was discovered in his searching the by-paths of the abnormal and pathological. Pathos for him was a flower plucked from a poisonous exotic.

Beginning about 1625 and extending to the Civil War, Shirley's dramatic career overlapped and continued Massinger's as Massinger's did Fletcher's. After leaving the university he took orders, but shortly became converted to Catholicism, and then, after a volume of poems, turned to the public theatres for employment. The last of the brilliant series of poets who made the London stage the home of poesy and contributed to the great period of the English drama, at the closing of the theatres he was the dean of his profession. His thirty odd plays, while naturally continuing the methods and types of Massinger and of Fletcher, his avowed master, and while reminiscent of much in earlier writers, especially Webster and Shakespeare, also reflect about all the characteristics manifest in the drama during the reign of Charles I.

Shirley's remarkable talents challenge comparison with his predecessors. He had a share of Massinger's seriousness of purpose and painstaking art, and of Fletcher's freshness of fancy and sprightliness of style. In invention he is hardly less ingenious than either, and in careful construction and theatrical craftsmanship he approaches Massinger's undoubted mastership. His verse seems modeled on Fletcher's, but it often has a spontaneity of movement and a richness of decoration that recall Elizabethan style in its early flights. Little of early aphorism, however, or of the later obscurity and confusion remains; these are replaced, sometimes indeed by a hackneyed declamation, but often by natural and fluent dialogue.

Yet, in spite of his talents, Shirley's own position and his contribution to the drama are difficult of definition, because he is so constantly reminiscent of his predecessors and so constantly approaching, though never quite equaling, their preëminent models. His plays, like Massinger's, seem to the reader of to-day repetitions of one another. Each coalesces in the mind with other comedies of manners, or other tragedies of blood, or with the tragicomedies of Massinger and Fletcher. Whatever the species, love is the theme, lust is pursuing, chastity is tried by intrigue and by declamation; but the real interest is in the plot, the tricks, disguises, subterfuges, villains, and surprises that end--as the case may be--in the discomfiture of the fools, or the marriage of the lovers, or the downfall of a dynasty.

The drama had become conventionalized. The dramatists were no longer searching for new themes and characters in a wide range of stories; they were inventing their plots but were restricted in their materials. The ingredients of early plays served Shirley's purpose, and by a few new devices or changes in motive he gave his fashionable ladies, his lustful monarchs, scheming favorites, and exiled heroes new names and adventures, and so produced a play. The cleverness of the plot occupies your attention, or occasionally a beautiful passage or a fine conception of character arrests the mind, but at the close you are at a loss to separate the play from a dozen similar ones.

In Shirley, as in Massinger, the most representative plays, and certainly those most satisfactory to our taste, are the tragicomedies. Bloodshed and horror and grossness of language and situation may all be absent, and the story of love and intrigue, even if it does not exalt the mind or purify the passions, may be altogether delightful. In "The Royal Master," one of the best, the rôle of the lustful monarch is assumed for a single scene, only to cure a really charming heroine of her infatuation for royalty; and the intriguing favorite is foiled, the banished noble vindicated, and two love matches completed with gracefulness of language and dexterity of plot. Unfortunately Shirley's land of romance is rarely so wholesome as here or the inhabitants so agreeable.

His tragedies mainly conform to the hackneyed models, no matter what the sources may be or how large his own invention may seem. The earliest, "The Maid's Revenge," relating a Spanish story of the rivalry in love of two sisters that ends in a fatal duel between brother and lover, is wholly in the tone of romantic melodrama. "The Politician," a more ambitious effort, combines the villain play with the Beaumont-Fletcher romance. Gotharius, the politician, is the villain; Marpisa, the evil woman, is his mistress and about to be married to the king; Albina, the loyal and long-suffering heroine, is the villain's wife; Turgesius is the prince and hero; and Olaus, a blunt soldier, is his faithful friend. There is an insurrection, as so often in Fletcher; and after a long intrigue the villain and the evil woman perish, and the prince marries the heroine. In "Love's Cruelty," a more original conception is worked out with telling realism and a good deal of dramatic truth. Clariana becomes infatuated with her husband's friend Hippolito; and, even after the guilty lovers have been permitted to go unpunished by the husband, her passion continues until her jealousy at her lover's approaching marriage to Eubella drives her to his murder. Rarely elsewhere in the Elizabethan drama is the story of illicit love told with less of glamour and more veracity. These merits are perhaps counterbalanced by the extreme realism of the language and the stage action.

In this play the deceived husband dies of grief, but Eubella, who had earlier resisted the lustful duke, is solaced after the death of her betrothed by a promise of marriage from the duke himself. Both "The Politician" and "The Duke's Mistress," a tragedy along hackneyed lines, end with reward for the virtuous and punishment only for the vicious. Such application of poetic justice had been earlier expounded by Ben Jonson in defense of the punishments inflicted in his comedy, "Volpone." The applications of the doctrine in Shirley and Massinger were, however, probably due not so much to theoretical criticism as to the popular preference for the restriction of the catastrophe to the bad, a preference recorded by Aristotle and evidently shared by a generation in which romantic tragicomedy was the most popular dramatic form.

Shirley's tragic masterpieces, however, offered no alleviation of horror and bloodshed. "The Traitor" and "The Cardinal" are plays of revenge, lust, intrigue, and villany, in which all the accretions of this kind of tragedy from Kyd and Marlowe down to Webster and Massinger seem to be represented. The villains are as black as Barabas and as crafty as those of Webster; plots are as intricately entangled with counterplots as in Tourneur; and surprises follow as rapidly as in Fletcher. The corpse kissed by the repentant duke is again presented; there is attempted rape and assumed madness; in each play a bridegroom is murdered as he takes his place in the wedding procession; and in each revenge strews the final scene with the dead. But the old motives still had power to convey poetic inspiration, and the examples of all his predecessors summoned Shirley to his best efforts. Perhaps in no other plays does he so constantly recall their work; certainly in no others do the poetic quality of his language, the vigorous delineation of character, and the dramatic depiction of passion so worthily maintain what were even for men of his day the great traditions of English tragedy.

Tragedies by minor writers during the years from 1620 to 1642 offer little that is distinctive. Occasionally, as in the anonymous "Nero" of 1624, we have a play spontaneous in phrase and lifelike in characterization, worthy of the best days of the drama; but in the main the plays only repeat what is to be found in Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. In spite of the vogue of tragicomedy, tragedy was by no means neglected, nearly fifty tragedies being preserved from the twenty years, in addition to those by the authors mentioned. These include several by Suckling, Glapthorne's pastoral tragedy, "Argalus and Parthenia," and his worthless "Wallenstein," May's plays on classical history, and others by Killigrew, Davenant, Carlell, Heming, Davenport, and less known men.

The large majority conform to the later type of revenge play as exemplified in Massinger and Shirley. Sometimes the romantic love element supersedes the intrigue and horrors, but oftener the horrors have full sway. A double plot, usually with an elaborate surprise in the fifth act, revolves about lust and revenge with some attention to untarnished honor and unconquered chastity. The lustful duke and his intriguing favorite, or the tyrannical usurper and the rightful prince alternate at the centre of the stage along with the evil woman, perhaps a Lady Potiphar, and a distressed maiden, likely to be disguised as a boy. Madness is frequently represented, eyes are plucked out, brains dashed upon the stage, and many of the old horrors reproduced, but ghosts rarely appear. The action consists largely of adultery, seduction, and rape; and these are represented with a horrid detail that rivals Marston. When chastity is preserved it is often by a device similar to that used in "Measure for Measure," although occasionally there is an exchange of men instead of women. Tragedy is for the most part confined to stories of crime. The monstrous politicians and libertines differ from their sixteenth century predecessors chiefly in the greater ingenuity and complexity of their intrigue, their subordination of ambition or other motives to those of love or lust, and in the prosaic flatness of their blank verse.

Often there are manifest borrowings, and occasionally a dramatist evidently strove to include everything that had ever been known on the tragic stage. "The Rebellion," by Thomas Rawlins, presents Machiavel, a villain, whose soliloquies might be burlesques on Barabas and Richard III, two mad scenes, a nurse from "Romeo and Juliet," a Moor, who is another villain, attempted rape, and frequent bursts of poetry:--

"The lazy moon has scarcely trimm'd herself To entertain the sun; she still retains The slimy tincture of the banish'd night."

On the other hand, the usual type of tragedy, with reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, sometimes shows a genuine poetic gift, as notably in Lord Falkland's "The Marriage Night." The most marked trait, however, of these minor tragedies is their eagerness to out-Herod Herod and to make good their weakness in dramatic truth by means of stage horrors or rant. "The Valiant Scot," a tragedy dealing with the career of Wallace, represents the cutting out of the tongue of one English ambassador and the putting out of the eyes of another. In "Mirza" the protagonist kills his seven-year-old daughter,--"Takes Fatima by the neck, breaks it, and swings her about." The taste for atrocities seems to have been most highly developed at Oxford, where the students acted Goffe's outrageous plays and a Samuel Harding published "Sicily and Naples," a medley introducing revenge for a father, a maiden disguised as a boy, a villain-favorite, the Mariana device, and combining rape, murder, madness, and incest in a fashion not equaled since "Titus Andronicus."

Absurd plays of this sort were common enough from the days of "Cambyses," and cannot be fairly taken as evidences of the drama's decadence. Nor do the main differences that are apparent between tragedy after 1620 and that of the early or of the Shakespearean period point to decadence as unmistakably as critics are wont to assume. There is a waning of poetic power; blank verse descends to prose, and its flowers have a jaded air; but there is poetic imagination in Glapthorne as well as in Shirley, noble rhetoric in Massinger, and sheer poetry in Ford. The ethical tone has in general suffered deterioration. The moral insight of Shakespeare or even of Webster is not maintained; courtly and sophisticated ideals ring false; the language becomes gross; the vulgarities of the early plays are replaced by mawkish sentimentality or lewd suggestiveness. There seems to be increasing difficulty in presenting persons normally good. The reiteration of scenes of rape and seduction bespeak an unhealthy moral atmosphere. Yet tragedy, though at tunes perverse or forgetful, still clings to its moral standards. It still endeavors to expose and chastise sin and to incite to virtue.

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.

The differences which distinguish the different periods do not conceal the essential unity of the entire development from 1562 to 1642. The changes that take place in the prevailing types are of degree and not of kind. Nearly all the tragedies might be called tragedies of blood, for nearly all deal with crime and bloodshed. A narrower division like that of the tragedy of revenge keeps its integrity from Kyd onward, the hesitation motive finding transformation in "Hamlet," the union of revenge, intrigue, and madness finding a different development in Webster and others, and remaining until the end the most prevalent type of tragedy. A majority of Elizabethan plays are romantic rather than classical or realistic, though the romance is of many kinds and drawn from many widely different sources, as Boccaccio, D'Urfé, or Lope de Vega. For a time it is mainly confined to romantic comedy, but it soon enters into tragedy and tragicomedy. In tragedy it plays a fitful part, but in tragicomedy it conquers the theatres. The course of tragedy from its inception in an amalgamation of medieval and classical elements, through its establishment by Marlowe, its development of types and methods, the transformation of these by Shakespeare into a dramatic form that changed and enlarged the meaning of tragedy for the centuries since then, the further development of types and methods under the innovations of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the splendid contribution that tragedy still received from Webster, Middleton, Ford, and Massinger,--all this was comprised within a single century; all that was most significant, within a single lifetime.

Tragedy throughout this development remained popular. Less than the ballad but more than any other form of literature prior to the pamphlet, novel, and newspaper, the drama was the result of popular taste, thought, and desire. Tragedy early shook off the bonds of classical tradition, and it never ceased to aim first at pleasing the audiences. Shakespeare as well as Dekker or Shirley was their servant. Even in the later days when increasing Puritanism alienated a large portion of the public from the theatres, literary standards failed to overthrow the sovereignty of the people, though, as the dramatists paid allegiance to a restricted and less representative audience, the drama waned. Without a guiding criticism, without any reliance on authority or tradition, appealing first to the public theatre and only secondly to court or culture or posterity, tragedy at its best was not distinguished by impeccability of literary art. It lacked simplicity of theme and precision of treatment; it was fantastic in design and language. It lacked refinement; it was vulgar in diction and scene; it was revolting in its horrors and bloodshed. It lacked reserve and definiteness of literary purpose; it was sensational, incongruous, or naïve in its address to the intelligence. But from the same conditions that gave rise to its faults and excesses came its excellences. A delight in verbal felicity, a welcome for diverse excitement, and a craving for story on the part of the public made possible the wealth of incident and character, the varied emotional appeal, and the fervid poetry of Elizabethan tragedy. It was free to avail itself of every resource of poet or playwright in order to present human passion of all kinds, human individuals of many varieties. Its virtues as well as its faults are summed up in Shakespeare. After his death it developed in dramatic dexterity rather than in the comprehensiveness of its mirror of life. Yet, without Shakespeare, the fabrics of its vision comprise

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself."

Even without him, the legacy of Elizabethan tragedy is an unfaded pageant of the greatness and the pain, the passion and the poetry of our little life.

NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ward, Fleay, Schelling, and the bibliographies in the Shakespeare _Jahrbuch_ continue to be the best guides. Dyce's admirable edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (11 vols., 1843-46) has long been the standard, but two new complete editions of their works are now in progress, one under the general editorship of A. H. Bullen (London, 1904-), the other edited by A. Glover and A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905-). The discussion in this chapter is in part based on my _Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare_ (1901) and my edition of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_ in the _Belles-Lettres Series_ (Boston, 1906). I must refer to the latter for a full bibliography of both texts and critical works. Miss Hatcher's _John Fletcher_ (Chicago, 1905) should be added. Webster has been well edited by Dyce and Hazlitt; and his two principal tragedies by M. W. Sampson in the _Belles-Lettres Series_, with full bibliography. E. E. Stoll's monograph, _John Webster_, referred to in chapter v, has been drawn upon in the discussion in this chapter. Tourneur has been edited by J. Churton Collins (1878); Middleton by A. H. Bullen; Massinger very poorly by Gifford (2d ed., 1815); Ford by Gifford (1827, revised by Dyce, 1869); and Shirley by Dyce (1833). Editions of selections from all these dramatists will also be found in the _Mermaid Series of Old Dramatists_, with introductions of varying value. Bibliographical references to all dramatists of this period will be found in Ward and Schelling, and in general more comprehensive discussion of their plays than are to be found elsewhere. Of especial value in the study of sources are E. Koeppel's two volumes, _Quellen Studien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marston's und Beaumont und Fletcher's_ (1895) and _Quellen Studien zu den Dramen George Chapman's, Philip Massinger's und John Ford's_ (1897).

Among the critical appreciations of the dramatists of this and the preceding chapters are: Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_, Hazlitt's _Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth_, Jeffrey's _Essay on Ford_, Lowell's _Old English Dramatists_, G. C. Macaulay's _Francis Beaumont_ (1883), Swinburne's _Ben Jonson_ (1889), and his essays on other dramatists.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] Elizabethan has been used to designate the whole period of the drama from 1559 to 1642.

[23] For a somewhat different view of the play, emphasizing its crudity as a drama, see Mr. William Archer's "Webster, Lamb, and Swinburne," _New Review_, January, 1893.

[24] See Coleridge, _Notes on Beaumont and Fletcher_, for a characteristic and valuable criticism of the play.