aborator,
Dekker, with a hardly mistakable mark; but his verse is nervous, well
proportioned, well delivered, and at its best a noble medium. He was by
general consent utterly incapable of humour, and his low-comedy scenes are
among the most loathsome in the English theatre. His lyrics are not equal
to Shakespere's or Fletcher's, Dekker's or Shirley's, but they are better
than Massinger's. Although he frequently condescended to the Fletcherian
license of the redundant syllable, he never seems to have dropped (as
Fletcher did sometimes, or at least allowed his collaborators to drop)
floundering into the Serbonian bog of stuff that is neither verse nor
prose. He showed indeed (and Mr. Swinburne, with his usual insight, has
noticed it, though perhaps he has laid rather too much stress on it) a
tendency towards a severe rule-and-line form both of tragic scheme and of
tragic versification, which may be taken to correspond in a certain fashion
(though Mr. Swinburne does not notice this) to the "correctness" in
ordinary poetry of Waller and his followers. Yet he shows no sign of
wishing to discard either the admixture of comedy with tragedy (save in
_The Broken Heart_, which is perhaps a crucial instance), or blank verse,
or the freedom of the English stage in regard to the unities. In short,
Ford was a person distinctly deficient in initiative and planning genius,
but endowed with a great executive faculty. He wanted guidance in all the
greater lines of his art, and he had it not; the result being that he
produced unwholesome and undecided work, only saved by the unmistakable
presence of poetical faculty. I do not think that Webster could ever have
done anything better than he did: I think that if Ford had been born twenty
years earlier he might have been second to Shakespere, and at any rate the
equal of Ben Jonson and of Fletcher. But the flagging genius of the time
made its imprint on his own genius, which was of the second order, not the
first.

The honour of being last in the great succession of Elizabethan dramatists
is usually assigned to James Shirley.[62] Though last, Shirley is only in
part least, and his plays deserve more reading than has usually fallen to
their lot. Not only in the general character of his plays--a character
hardly definable, but recognisable at once by the reader--but by the
occurrence of such things as the famous song, "The glories of our blood and
state," and not a few speeches and tirades, Shi