36 EVOLUTIONAKY PRINCIPLES 



progression discernible between the few examples of the earlier 

 Romantic Drama we possess, and ' Macbeth ' or ' Measure for 

 Measure.' The germ has simply grown and effloresced. 



At the side of Shakespeare stands Ben Jonson, in whom 

 we observe an interesting example of the literary hybrid. 

 Jonson did not succeed in freeing himself altogether from 

 the influences of his race and age. His plays belong in large 

 measure to the Romantic type, Yet his humanistic training 

 warped him to such an extent that he stood outside the circle 

 of his compeers, protesting in theory and in practice against 

 the genius of Romantic Drama. 



After this point, it remains to notice how the dramatic 

 form, fixed by Marlowe and perfected by Shakespeare, begins 

 to break up. It has realised itself and reached completion. 

 What followed was a stage of gradual disintegration. Motives 

 suggested by the supreme masters were elaborated in their 

 details by men like Webster, Tourneur, Ford. We trace an 

 effort to extract its last capabilities from the type. The 

 complex is reduced to its constituents, and these are handled 

 separately. Poetry runs over into eloquence and rhetoric in 

 the work of Fletcher and his kind, who display a lack of 

 artistic conscientiousness nowhere hitherto observable. Plays 

 are made by pattern, as in the case of Massinger and Shirley. 

 A new generation, without creative force, continue the tradi- 

 tion of their predecessors by exaggeration of motives, isola- 

 tion of elements, facile and conscious imitation. 



Soon this stage of decadence leads to one of decrepitude. 

 The incoherences of Davenant, Crowne, and Wilson, illumi- 

 nated here and there by flashes of the old fire, prove that 

 those elements of weakness which the Romantic Drama con- 

 tained in its infancy, but which were controlled by strenuous 

 force in the periods of adolescence and maturity, have reasserted 

 themselves in its senility. To advance further, to save the type 

 from ruin was impossible. The Romantic Drama had been 

 played out. All its changes had been rung ; the last drop of 

 its vital sap had been exhausted. Even if the Puritans had 

 refrained from ostracising actors, the Elizabethan theatre 

 could not have been continued. 



