pedantic persons—the extreme Puritans were opposed to the stage on principle, and may be left out of the question—could never have portrayed life with the fulness and freedom which is the glory of the drama of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. From Marlowe to Shirley, the English dramatists owed this freedom to the protection extended to them against Puritan mayors by the Court, and to the fact that the audience for which they wrote was the Court and the populace, not the serious middle classes. They were thus enabled to portray life without squeamishness, and without the too oppressive intrusion of didactic purpose. What pressure there was in this direction came from pedantry rather than respectability.
This volume has dealt only with the English playwrights of the second class, the first being occupied by Shakespeare alone. But perhaps the freshness and greatness of the lesser Elizabethans, as we may still call them, are more readily acknowledged when that overshadowing figure is temporarily excluded. To do justice to Jonson and Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, not to mention Dekker, Middleton, Massinger, and Ford, let a reader take them up, not immediately after studying Shakespeare, but after a course, say, of the lesser Dutch and French dramatists, their contemporaries. He will find the latter trying to do the same thing, to dramatise the same or similar Italian and Spanish novellas; and he cannot fail to realise the difference in the handling, the difference between the colourless atmosphere, the stock characters, the style banale or precious on the one
