stage. It was the performance of
a mask by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies at Whitehall which had
some years previously (1632) been thought to have supplied to the
invective of _Histrio-Mastix_ against the stage the occasion for
disloyal innuendo; and it was for the performance of a mask in a great
nobleman's castle that Milton--a Puritan of a very different cast--not
long afterwards (1634) wrote one of the loftiest and loveliest of
English poems. _Comus_ has been judged and condemned as a
drama--unjustly, for the dramatic qualities of a mask are not essential
to it as a species. Yet its history in England remains inseparably
connected with that of the Elizabethan drama. In later times the mask
merged into the opera, or continued a humble life of its own apart from
contact with higher literary effort. It is strange that later English
poets should have done so little to restore to its nobler uses, and to
invest with a new significance, a form so capable of further development
as the poetic mask.

The later Elizabethan drama.

The annals of English drama proper in the period reaching from the
closing years of Elizabeth to the outbreak of the great Revolution
include, together with numerous names relatively insignificant, many
illustrious in the history of our poetic literature. Among Shakespeare's
contemporaries and successors there is, however, but one who by the
energy of his genius, not less than by the circumstances of his literary
career, reached undisputed primacy among his fellows. Ben Jonson, to
whom in his latter days a whole generation of younger writers did filial
homage as to their veteran chief, was alone in full truth the founder of
a school or family of dramatists. Yet his pre-eminence did not (whatever
he or his followers may have thought) extend to both branches of the
regular drama. In tragedy he fell short of the highest success; the
weight of his learning lay too heavily upon his efforts to draw from
deeper sources than those which had sufficed for Shakespeare. Such as
they are, his tragic works[192] stand almost, though not quite, alone in
this period as examples of sustained effort in historic tragedy proper.
G. Chapman treated stirring themes, more especially from modern French
history,[193] always with vigour, and at times with genuine
effectiveness; but, though rich in beauties of detail, he failed in this
branch of the drama to follow Shakespeare even at a distance in the
supreme art o