f fully developing a character by means of the action.
Mention has been made above of Ford's isolated effort in the direction
of historic tragedy, as well as of excursions into the still popular
domain of the chronicle history by T. Heywood, Dekker and others, which
cannot be regarded as anything more than retrogressions. With the great
body of the English dramatists of this and of the next period, tragedy
had passed into a phase where its interest depended mainly upon plot and
incident. The romantic tragedies and tragi-comedies which crowd English
literature in this period constitute together a growth of at first sight
astonishing exuberance, and in mere externals of theme--ranging as these
plays do from Byzantium to ancient Britain, and from the Caesars of
ancient Rome to the tyrants of the Renaissance--of equally astonishing
variety. The sources from which these subjects were derived had been
perennially augmenting. Besides Italian, Spanish and French fiction,
original or translated, besides British legend in its Romance dress, and
English fiction in its humbler or in its more ambitious and artificial
forms, the contemporary foreign drama, especially the Spanish, offered
opportunities for resort. To the English, as to the French and Italian
drama, of both this and the following century, the prolific dramatists
clustering round Lope de Vega and Calderon, and the native or
naturalized fictions from which they drew their materials supplied a
whole arsenal of plots, incidents and situations--among others to
Middleton, to Webster, and most signally to Beaumont and Fletcher. And,
in addition to these resources, a new field of supply was at hand since
English dramatists had begun to regard events and episodes of domestic
life as fit subjects for tragic treatment. Domestic tragedy of this
description was indeed no novelty on the English stage; Shakespeare
himself may have retouched with his master-hand more than one effort of
this kind;[194] but T. Heywood may be set down as the first who achieved
any work of considerable literary value of this class,[195] to which
some of the plays of T. Dekker, T. Middleton, and others likewise more
or less belong. Yet, in contrast to this wide variety of sources, and
consequent apparent variety of themes, the number of _motives_
employed--at least as a rule--in the tragic drama of this period was
comparatively small and limited. Hence it is that, notwithstanding the
diversity of subjects am