When dreadful deeds are done they are described not with that authentic and lurid vividness which throws light on the working of the human heart in Shakespeare or Webster but in tedious rhetoric.  Resignation, not fortitude, is the authors’ forte and they play upon it amazingly.  The sterner tones of their predecessors melt into the long drawn broken accent of pathos and woe.  This delight not in action or in emotion arising from action but in passivity of suffering is only one aspect of a certain mental flaccidity in grain.  Shakespeare may be free and even coarse.  Beaumont and Fletcher cultivate indecency.  They made their subject not their master but their plaything, or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their own powers of figure and rhetoric.

Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be said than they carried one step further the faults of their masters.  Emotion and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn sentiment.  Tragedy takes on the air of a masquerade.  With them romantic drama died a natural death and the Puritans’ closing of the theatre only gave it a coup de grace.  In England it has had no second birth.

(4)

Outside the direct romantic succession there worked another author whose lack of sympathy with it, as well as his close connection with the age which followed, justifies his separate treatment.  Ben Jonson shows a marked contrast to Shakespeare in his character, his accomplishments, and his attitude to letters, while his career was more varied than Shakespeare’s own.  The first “classic” in English writing, he was a “romantic” in action.  In his adventurous youth he was by turns scholar, soldier, bricklayer, actor.  He trailed a pike with Leicester in the Low Countries; on his return to England fought a duel and killed his man, only escaping hanging by benefit of clergy; at the end of his life he was Poet Laureate.  Such a career is sufficiently diversified, and it forms a striking contrast to the plainness and severity of his work.  But it must not lead us to forget or under-estimate his learning and knowledge.  Not Gray nor Tennyson, nor Swinburne—­perhaps not even Milton—­was a better scholar.  He is one of the earliest of English writers to hold and express different theories about literature.  He consciously appointed himself a teacher; was a missionary of literature with a definite creed.

But though in a general way his dramatic principles are opposed to the romantic tendencies of his age, he is by no means blindly classical.  He never consented to be bound by the “Unities”—­that conception of dramatic construction evolved out of Aristotle and Horace and elaborated in the Renaissance till, in its strictest form, it laid down that the whole scene of a play should be in one place, its whole action deal with one single series of events, and the time it represented as elapsing be no greater than the time it took in playing.  He was always pre-eminently an Englishman of his own day with a