bster's 'Duchess of
Malfi.' Other instances might be given of concessions to that
blood-and-thunder style of dramatic writing for which our ancestors had
a never-failing appetite. But, as a rule, Massinger inclines, as far as
contemporary writers will allow him, to the side of mercy. Instead of
using slaughter so freely that a new set of actors has to be introduced
to bury the old--a misfortune which sometimes occurs in the plays of the
time--he generally tends to a happy solution, and is disposed not only
to dismiss his virtuous characters to felicity, but even to make his
villains virtuous. We have not been excited to that pitch at which our
passions can only be harmonised by an effusion of blood, and a mild
solution is sufficient for the calmer feelings which have been aroused.

This tendency illustrates Massinger's conception of life in another
sense. Nothing is more striking in the early stage than the vigour of
character of most of these heroes. Individual character, as it is said,
takes the place in the modern of fate in the ancient drama. Every man is
run in a mould of iron, and may break, but cannot bend. The fitting
prologue to the whole literature is provided by Marlowe's Tamburlaine,
with his superhuman audacity and vast bombastic rants, the incarnation
of a towering ambition which scorns all laws but its own devouring
passion. Faustus, braving all penalties, human and divine, is another
variety of the same type: and when we have to do with a weak character
like Edward II., we feel that it is his natural destiny to be confined
in a loathsome dungeon, with mouldy bread to eat and ditch-water to
drink. The world is for the daring; and though daring may be pushed to
excess, weakness is the one unpardonable offence. A thoroughgoing
villain is better than a trembling saint. If Shakespeare's instinctive
taste revealed the absurdity of the bombastic exaggeration of such
tendencies, his characters are equally unbending. His villains die, like
Macbeth and Iago, with their teeth set, and scorn even a deathbed
repentance. Hamlet exhibits the unfitness for a world of action of the
man who is foolish enough to see two sides to every question. So again,
Chapman, the writer who in fulness and fire of thought approaches most
nearly to Shakespeare, is an ardent worshipper of pure energy of
character. His Bussy d'Ambois cannot be turned from his purpose even by
the warnings of the ghost of his accomplice, and a mysterious spir