Thus considered, the stages through which the drama now passed may be said to have been four, three of which occurred chiefly during the life of the poet, the fourth after his death. The first of these periods witnessed the early manhood of Shakspeare, and closes about 1593. Among his immediate predecessors and coadjutors were Marlowe and Greene. The plays of Marlowe (1562-1593) are stately tragedies, serious in purpose, energetic and often extravagant in passion and in language, and richly and pompously imaginative. His "Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" is one of the finest poems in the language. The productions of Greene are loose, legendary plays of a form exemplified in Cymbeline.
To the first period of the dramatic life of Shakspeare (1564-1616) belong the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," the "Comedy of Errors," and "Love's Labor's Lost," which show that the mighty master, even in these juvenile essays, had taken a wide step beyond the dramas of the time. Pure comedy had no existence in England until he created it, and in these comedies it is evident that everything is juvenile, unripe, and marvelously unlike the grand pictures of life which he soon afterwards began to paint. But if he was more than a student in this first stage of his progress, he was a teacher and model ever after. The second period for Shakspeare and the drama closes with the year 1600. During this most active part of his literary life, he produced eight comedies, and re-wrote "Romeo and Juliet." But the most elevated works of these six years were his magnificent series of historical plays. The series after 1600 began with the great tragedies, Othello, Hamlet (recomposed), Macbeth, and Lear, followed by Henry VIII., the three tragedies on Roman subjects, and the three singular pieces, "Timon of Athens," "Troilus and Cressida," and "Measure for Measure," apparently of the same date. "Cymbeline" and the "Winter's Tale" were probably composed after he had retired from the turmoil of his profession to the repose of his early home. In the "Tempest." doubtless his last work, he peopled his haunted island with a group of beings whose conception indicates a greater variety of imagination, and in some points a greater depth of thought than any others which he has bequeathed to us.
The name of Shakspeare is the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near him in creative power—no man had ever such strength combined with such variety of imagination. Of all authors, he is the most natural in his style, and yet there is none whose words are so musical in arrangement, so striking and picturesque in themselves, or contain so many thoughts. Every page furnishes instances of that intensifying of expression, where some happy word conveys a whole train of ideas condensed into a single luminous point—words so new, so full of meaning, yet so unforced and natural, that the rudest mind intuitively perceives their meaning, and yet which no study could improve or imitate. This constitutes the most striking peculiarity of the Shakspearean language, and while it justifies the almost idolatrous veneration of his countrymen, renders him, of all writers, the most untranslatable. Of all authors, Shakspeare has least imitated or repeated himself. While he gives us, in many places, portraits of the same passion, the delineations are as distinct and dissimilar as they are in nature; all his personages involuntarily, and in spite of themselves, express their own characters. From his works may be gleaned a complete collection of precepts adapted to every condition of life and every conceivable circumstance of human affairs. His wit is unbounded, his passion inimitable, and over all he has thrown a halo of human sympathy no less tender than his genius was immeasurable and profound.
The effect of Shakspeare's influence on his contemporaries was predominating in everything but the moral aspect of his plays. The licentiousness, begun in the earlier years of the seventeenth century, increased with accelerated speed down to the closing of the theatres by the Civil War.
Highest by far, in poetical and dramatic value, stand the works of Beaumont (1586-1615) and Fletcher (1576-1625). Many of them are said to have been written by the two jointly, a few by the former alone, and a large number by the latter after he had lost his friend; such alliances in dramatic poetry were common in England at this period. But the looseness of fancy which deformed the drama, and which degenerated at last into deliberate licentiousness, is nowhere so glaring as in these finest and most imaginative productions of their day, and which are poetically superior to all of the kind in the language, except those of Shakspeare.
The classical model was closely approached by Ben Jonson (1574-1637) in both tragedy and comedy, and he deserves immortality for other reasons than his comparative purity of morals. He was the one man of his time besides Shakspeare who deserves to be called a reflective artist, who perceived the rules of art and worked in obedience to them. His tragedies are stately, eloquent, and poetical; his comedies are more faithful poetic portraits of contemporary English life than those of any other dramatist, Shakspeare excepted.
Jonson wrote for men of sense and knowledge; Beaumont and Fletcher for men of fashion and the world. A similar audience to that of Jonson may have been aimed at in the stately tragedies of Chapman, and the other class would have relished the plays of Middleton and Webster.
Among the dramatists of the commonalty may be named Thomas Heywood, one of the most moral play writers of his time, who has sometimes been called the prose Shakspeare, and Decker, a voluminous writer, who cooperated in several plays of more celebrated men, especially those of Massinger.
The closing period of the old English drama is represented by Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. Massinger (1584-1640) is by some critics ranked next to Shakspeare. The theatres have retained unaltered his "New Way to Pay Old Debts," and his "Fatal Dowry" is preserved in Rowe's plagiarism from it, in the "Fair Penitent." But the low moral tone of the time is indicated in all these works, in which heroic sentiments, rising often even to religious rapture, are mingled with scenes of the grossest ribaldry.
By Ford, incidents of the most revolting kind are laid down as the foundation of his plots, upon which he wastes a pathos and tenderness deeper than is elsewhere found in the drama; and with Shirley vice is no longer held up as a mere picture, but it is indicated, and sometimes directly recommended, as a fit example. When the drama was at length suppressed, the act destroyed a moral nuisance.