o produce _Eastward Hoe_, an excellent comic
picture of contemporary life. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ of Thomas
Dekker (1570?-1640) is also a good comedy of London life and manners.
Philip Massinger (1584-1640), a later collaborator with Fletcher,
wrote _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, a play very popular in after
times. Thomas Heywood (1572?-1650), one of the most prolific
dramatists, claimed to have had "either an entire hand or at the least
a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays. His best work is _A
Woman Killed with Kindness_, a domestic drama that appealed to the
middle classes.

A Tragic Group.--Three dramatists: John Webster (1602-1624),
Cyril Tourneur (1575?-1626), and John Ford (1586-1640?), had a
love for the most somber tragedy. In tragic power, Webster approaches
nearest to Shakespeare. Webster's greatest play, _The Duchess of
Malfi_ (acted in 1616), and _The White Devil_, which ranks second,
show the working of a master hand, but Webster's genius comes to a
focus only in depicting the horrible. He loves such gloomy metaphors
as the following:--

"You speak as if a man
Should know what fowl is _coffined_ in a baked meat
Afore you cut it open."

Tourneur's _The Atheist's Tragedy_ is in Webster's vein, but far
inferior to _The Duchess of Malfi_.

Ford's _The Broken Heart_ is a strong, but unpleasant, tragedy. He is
so fascinated with the horrible that he introduces it even when it is
not the logical outcome of a situation. His best but least
characteristic play is _Perkin Warbeck_, which is worthy of ranking
second only to Shakespeare's historical plays.

End of the Elizabethan Drama.--James Shirley (1596-1666), "the
last of the Elizabethans," endeavored to the best of his ability to
continue the work of the earlier dramatists. _The Traitor_ and _The
Cardinal_ are two of the best of his many productions. He was hard at
work writing new plays in 1642, when the Puritans closed the theaters.
He was thus forced to abandon the profession that he enjoyed and
compelled to teach in order to earn a livelihood.

The drama has never since regained its Elizabethan ascendancy. The
coarse plays of the Restoration (1660) flourished for a while, but the
treatment of the later drama forms but a minor part of the history of
the best English literature. Few plays produced during the next two
hundred years are much read or acted to-day. _She Stoops to Conquer_
(1773), by Oliver Goldsmith, and _The Rival