as great in the theatre as in poetry.
Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. _The Alchemist_ is a brilliant
heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of
Jonson's songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the
excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy
which survive in his dialogue, his _Sweet Content_ is worth all the purely
dramatic work he ever wrote.

One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human
nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too
little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even so
good a play as _The Duchess of Malfi_ is marred by inadequacy of motive on
the part of the duchess's persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman's _Bussy
d'Ambois_, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines.
Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of
motive--the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in
part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of _King Lear_
as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the
other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. _Othello_ breaks
free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of
the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was
Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists
again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was
natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on
pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader,
accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish
that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither
fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals,
but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees--resting against the
base of Shakespeare's colossal statue.

Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of
Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have
added to one's enjoyment of them. His _Chapman_ gives us a portrait of a
character. Several of the chapters in _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_,
however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than
the s