en has passed
away. To an inner circle of students, to the 500 or so who really care
for English literature, the Elizabethan dramas may appeal with a power
greater than any of these literary products I have mentioned. We
recognise in them a wealth of imaginative power, an ease in dealing with
the higher issues of life, which is not shown even in those
masterpieces. But the fact remains, and remains to be explained, that
the Elizabethans do not appeal to the half a million or so among English
folk who are capable of being touched at all by literature, who respond
to the later masterpieces, and cannot be brought into _rapport_ with the
earlier masters. Why is this?

Partly, I think, because owing to the Italianisation of the Elizabethan
Drama the figures whom the dramatists drew are unreal, and live in an
unreal world. They are neither Englishmen nor Italians, nor even
Italianate Englishmen. I can only think of four tragedies in the whole
range of the Elizabethan drama where the characters are English:
Wilkins' _Miseries of Enforced Marriage_, and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_,
both founded on a recent _cause celebre_ of one Calverly, who was
executed 5 August 1605; _Arden of Faversham_, also founded on a _cause
celebre_ of the reign of Edward VI.; and Heywood's _Woman Killed by
Kindness_. These are, so far as I remember, the only English tragedies
out of some hundred and fifty extant dramas deserving that name.[25] As
a result of all this, the impression of English life which we get from
the Elizabethan Drama is almost entirely derived from the comedies, or
rather five-act farces, which alone appear to hold the mirror up to
English nature. Judged by the drama, English men and English women under
good Queen Bess would seem incapable of deep emotion and lofty
endeavour. We know this to be untrue, but that the fact appears to be so
is due to the Italianising of the more serious drama due to Painter and
his school.

[Footnote 25: Curiously enough, two of the four have been
associated with Shakespeare's name. It should be added, perhaps,
that one of the _Two Tragedies in One_ of Yarington is English.]

In fact the Italian drapery of the Elizabethan Drama disguises from us
the significant light it throws upon the social history of the time.
Plot can be borrowed from abroad, but characterisation must be drawn
from observation of men and women around the dramatist. Whence, then
comes the problem, did Webster and the rest