ng, growth, florescence, and decay of many kinds of plays, and of
many great careers. Actors, audiences, and dramatists all contributed to
changes in taste and practice and to a development of unexampled
rapidity and variety. In every detail of dramatic art there was change
and improvement, a constant addition of new subject-matter, a mastery of
new methods of technic, and an invention of new kinds of plays. The
popular successes of Marlowe and Kyd and the early plays of Shakespeare
himself seemed old-fashioned and crude to the taste of twenty years
after, yet the triumphs of Shakespeare's maturity failed to exhaust the
opportunities for innovation and advance. We are amazed to-day at the
mere number of plays produced, as well as by the number of dramatists
writing at the same time for this London of two hundred thousand
inhabitants. To realize how great was the dramatic activity, we must
remember further that hosts of plays have been lost, and that probably
there is no author of note whose entire work has survived. By the time,
however, that Shakespeare withdrew from London to Stratford the drama
had reached its height. The dozen years from 1600 to 1612 included not
only Shakespeare's great tragedies, but the best plays of Jonson,
Chapman, and Webster, and the entire collaboration of Beaumont and
Fletcher. The only other decades comparable with this in the history of
the drama are that which heard plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aristophanes and that other which saw the masterpieces of Racine and
Moliere.

[Page Heading: Elizabethan Drama]

The greatness of the drama, however, by no means ended with the
retirement and death of Shakespeare. Some of those who had been his
early associates continued to write for the stage, and younger men, as
Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley, carried on the traditions of
their predecessors. If, as in other forms of literature, there was
decline and decadence during the next twenty-five years, the drama also
retained initiative, poetry, and intellectual force until the end. It
was not dead or dying when the outbreak of the Civil War cut short its
course; in fact, its plays, its traditions, even some of its theaters,
actors, and dramatists survived the suppression of twenty years and
helped to start the drama of the Restoration. Had Shakespeare lived to
the age of seventy-eight he would have seen the closing of the theaters,
and his lifetime would have covered the crowded history