ong the tragic dramas of such writers as
Marston, Webster, Fletcher, Ford and Shirley, an impression of sameness
is left upon us by a connected perusal of these works. Scheming
ambition, conjugal jealousy, absolute female devotion, unbridled
masculine passion--such are the motives which constantly recur in the
Decameron of our later Elizabethan drama. And this impression is
heightened by the want of moderation, by the extravagance of passion,
which these dramatists so habitually exhibit in the treatment of their
favourite themes. All the tragic poets of this period are not equally
amenable to this charge; in J. Webster,[196] master as he is of the
effects of the horrible, and in J. Ford,[197] surpassingly seductive in
his sweetness, the monotony of exaggerated passion is broken by those
marvellously sudden and subtle touches through which their tragic genius
creates its most thrilling effects. Nor will the tendency to excess of
passion which F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher undoubtedly exhibit be
confounded with their distinctive power of sustaining tenderly pathetic
characters and irresistibly moving situations in a degree unequalled by
any of their contemporaries--a power seconded by a beauty of diction and
softness of versification which for a time raised them to the highest
pinnacle of popular esteem, and which entitles them in their
conjunction, and Fletcher as an independent worker, to an enduring
pre-eminence among their fellows. In their morals Beaumont and Fletcher
are not above the level of their age. The manliness of sentiment and
occasionally greater width of outlook which ennoble the rhetorical
genius of P. Massinger, and the gift of poetic illustration which
entitles J. Shirley to be remembered not merely as the latest and the
most fertile of this group of dramatists, have less direct bearing upon
the general character of the tragic art of the period. The common
features of the romantic tragedy of this age are sufficiently marked;
but they leave unobscured the distinctive features in its individual
writers of which a discerning criticism has been able to take note.

In comedy, on the other hand, the genius and the insight of Jonson
pointed the way to a steady and legitimate advance. His theory of
"humours" (which found the most palpable expression in two of his
earliest plays[198]), if translated into the ordinary language of
dramatic art, signifies the paramount importance in the comic drama of
the presentatio