the archaistic austerities of his style, are his alone. He was too moral for the morbidity of the others, and too dispassionate for their gloom. He was not interested in the same feelings. But his mind delighted in the same intricate convolutions of thought and half-absurd, serious paradoxes. And occasionally he strikes into those queer horrors that delighted Donne and Marston, and Tourneur and Webster and Shakespeare. He never made a great success of drama, because he thought in a literary and rhetorical rather than dramatic way. He is good reading, but he would not be good seeing. There are two ways of displaying character in literary drama, through words and through action. Chapman has only the first; Webster had something of the second too. Webster revered Chapman, but he was not much influenced by him. Ben Jonson also is at first sight apart from the spirit of this period, although his best work belongs to it. His theories of tragedy prevented him from contributing to the Marston-Tourneur-Webster type of play. He would have condemned the atmosphere which is their great virtue as unclassical. They probably did so we know Webster did so themselves. But he is very relevant, all the same. In the first place that attitude of professionalism in art and respect for the rules

which he stood for all his life, was a great factor in raising the dignity of drama and the standard of the dramatists. But Jonson's chief influence and achievement in English drama was in founding the Comedy of Humours; and both this kind. of play and his examples fit in with the rest of the time. It is so far from sentimentalism, such a breaking with romantic comedy, this boisterous personification of the "humours" of mankind, with its heartiness and rough strength. It has the life of the time. Jonson brought comedy home to England and to men. The characters in his comedy were not complete men, but they were human caricatures, the right stuff for farce and loud laughter. Their vigour grew amazing under his handling. In result he gave the stage the best comedies of all the age. Their coarse splendour of life was never approached till twenty years or more had passed, and his influence again was strong, in the work of some of his "sons." There, comedy survived the floods of sweetness under which tragedy utterly perished.

But if Epicoene and The Alchemist are admirably complementary in this Pantheon to Sophonisba and The Duchess of Malfi and Timon of Athens and Macbeth, other works of Jonson are something more. It is probable that the additions to the 1602, The Spanish Tragedy,

are Jonson's. If so, he is responsible for some of the finest scenes of imaginative horror in that literature. These few pages (written in 1600) contain most of the terror and splendour of the next ten years. They set the tune unfalteringly. And Jonson did also what Marston never quite succeeded in doing, he wrote a good comedy which had more of this seventeenth century pungency in it than any tragedy, a comedy that is a real companion to the tragedies of Webster. The mirth of Tourneur is horrible; Languebeau Snuffe poises one sickly between laughter and loathing. Volpone is like one long laugh of Tourneur's, inspired by a tenfold vitality. It is amazing, one of the few complete works of genius of the Elizabethan age. The hot cruelty and vigorous unhealthiness of it! Its very artistic perfection is frightening and exotic.

But perhaps the main current of strength in the drama during these years, and certainly the most important for this essay, is that which ran through Marston and Tourneur to Webster. Donne was in connection with it, too, from the side of poetry and thought. The relation of Shakespeare with the whole of this period, of which he, then at his greatest, was, to our eyes, the centre, is curious. His half-connections, the way he was influenced and yet transmuted the

influences, would require a good deal of space to detail. But in this, his "dark period"-whatever it was, neuralgia, a spiritual crisis, Mary Fitton, or literary fashion, that caused it-he was not unique or eccentric in the kind of his art. His humour was savage, he railed against sex, his tragedies were bloody, his heroes meditated curiously on mortality. It was all in the fashion. His gloom was not conspicuous in the general darkness. He had, in Hamlet especially, affinities with this Marston-Webster group. His terrific and morbid studies of madness influenced theirs.

Marston is one of the most sinister, least understood, figures in Elizabethan literature. More than anybody else, he determined the channels in which the great flood of those ten years was to flow. His life was curious. He started, like so many of them, by writing vivid, violent, crabbed satire. He went on to play-making, which he pursued for eight years with great success. He was much admired and very influential, but he always presented himself to the world with a typical, passionate ungraciousness. At the end of the eight years he renounced the applause that he so liked disliking, and went into the Church. He had a queer lust for oblivion. His tombstone bears Oblivioni Sacrum. It was his personality

rather than his powers that was the most stupendous thing about him. To us he seems nearly always just not to bring his effects off; but his contemporaries, whatever they thought, could not escape him.

He started the movement of this period by resuscitating the old blood-and-thunder revenge tragedy. It was precisely what was needed, but he clothed it with his own peculiar temperament of violent and bloody satire. It was this that really attracted the writers of the time. He gave them several plays steeped in it, both comedies and tragedies by the ordinary classifications, really only of one kind. The horror and inhuman violence of his laughter lit up those years like a vivid flash of lightning. He is responsible for that peculiar macabre taste, like the taste of copper, that is necessary to, if it is not the cause of, their splendour. But he was of his age in its strength as well as in its morbidity.

"My God's my arm; my life my heaven, my grave
To me all end,"

says Syphax.

Chapman could scarcely have

equalled the strong nobility of it.

Marston's chief passion was for truth. He preferred it if it hurt; but he loved it anyhow? It comes out in the snarling speculations and