derive their portraits of
their White Devils, those imperious women who had broken free from all
the conventional bonds? At first sight it might seem impossible for the
gay roysterers of Alsatia to have come into personal contact with such
lofty dames. But the dramatists, though Bohemians, were mostly of gentle
birth, or at any rate were from the Universities, and had come in
contact with the best blood of England. It is clear too from their
dedications that the young noblemen of England admitted them to familiar
intercourse with their families, which would include many of the _grande
dames_ of Elizabeth's Court. Elizabeth's own character, recent
revelations about Mistress Fitton, Shakespeare's relations with his Dark
Lady, all prepare for the belief that the Elizabethan dramatists had
sufficient material from their own observation to fill up the outlines
given by the Italian novelists.[26] The Great Oyer of Poisoning--the
case of Sir Thomas Overbury and the Somersets--in James the First's
reign could vie with any Italian tale of lust and cruelty.

[Footnote 26: The frequency of scenes in which ladies of high
birth yield themselves to men of lower station is remarkable in
this connection.]

Thus in some sort the Romantic Drama was an extraneous product in
English literature. Even the magnificent medium in which it is composed,
the decasyllabic blank verse which the genius of Marlowe adapted to the
needs of the drama, is ultimately due to the Italian Trissino, and has
never kept a firm hold on English poetry. Thus both the formal elements
of the Drama, plot and verse, were importations from Italy. But style
and characterisation were both English of the English, and after all is
said it is in style and characterisation that the greatness of the
Elizabethan Drama consists. It must however be repeated that in its
highest flights in the tragedies, a sense of unreality is produced by
the pouring of English metal into Italian moulds.

It cannot be said that even Shakespeare escapes altogether from the ill
effects of this Italianisation of all the externalities of the drama. It
might plausibly be urged that by pushing unreality to its extreme you
get idealisation. A still more forcible objection is that the only
English play of Shakespeare's, apart from his histories, is the one that
leaves the least vivid impression on us, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_.
But one cannot help feeling regret that the great master did