's genius, it seems to have avoided
the field of satire.

[Page Heading: Realistic Comedy]

A review of the drama must, however, at least remark the importance of
this development of realistic comedy which flourished in the decade
after 1598 and continued to the end. Jonson's comedy of 'humors'
includes _Volpone_ (1605), which overstepped the bounds of comedy in its
denunciation of evil, the _Alchemist_ (1611), perhaps the best English
play on the Latin model, and _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), most original
and English of them all. Dekker's fine drama of middle class life, _The
Honest Whore_ (1604), and Heywood's masterpiece, _A Woman Killed with
Kindness_ (1603), a play suggesting both the sentimental comedy of the
eighteenth century and the problem play of to-day, also belong to this
very remarkable era of domestic themes and serious realism.

If Shakespeare did not turn to satire or realism or current social
problems, he did turn away from chronicle history plays and romantic
comedies. As we saw in the last chapter, for a period of eight or nine
years, from _Julius Caesar_ to _Antony and Cleopatra_, he gave his best
efforts of his maturity to tragedy. The day for mere imitation of
Seneca, Kyd, or Marlowe, was past; and scholars like Jonson and Chapman
as well as Shakespeare sought in the tragedy of the public theater, an
opportunity for wisdom and poetry and a criticism of life.

For models, Shakespeare did not need to go back farther than his own
_Romeo and Juliet_ and _Richard II_, nor to imitate any other than
himself. Yet his great plays may have seemed to his contemporaries to
adopt rather than to depart from current dramatic practices. They belong
to the Elizabethan 'tragedy of blood'; against a background of courts
and battles they present the downfall of princes; they rest on
improbable stories that end in fearful slaughter; they invariably set
forth great crimes, compact of murder, lust, villainous intrigue, and
ferocious cruelty. Some of them follow Kyd in recounting a story of
blood vengeance presided over by ghosts, or discover the retribution due
for crime in physical torments. Nearly all follow Marlowe in centering
the tragic interest in the fate of a supernormal protagonist who is
swayed by an overpowering emotion, and in elevating these human desires
and passions into tremendous forces that work their waste of devastation
and ruin on character and life.

[Page Heading: Tragedy]

The contemporary t