If we are to take it for granted that after the year 1597, when he bought one of the best houses in his native town for his residence, Shakespeare spent his life there, except during the theatrical season, the greater part of his last nineteen years would be passed in the quiet of his country home. We may then settle his Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labours Lost, All's Well that Ends Well, Richard II. and Richard III., King John, Titus Andronicus (if his), the first part of Henry IV., and Romeo and Juliet, as produced in the bustle of his London life. But the far greater part, and the most magnificent and poetical, of his dramas were composed in the pleasant retirement of his native scenes; namely, the second part of Henry IV., Henry V., A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Merchant of Venice, in 1598 and 1600; the second and third parts of Henry VI., Merry Wives of Windsor, 1601; Hamlet, 1602; Lear, 1608; Troilus and Cressida and Pericles, 1609; Othello (not published till after the author's death, which was the case, too, with all his other plays, though brought on the stage in his lifetime), The Winter's Tale, As You Like It, King Henry VIII., Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare died in 1616. Of the envy which the unexampled splendour of Shakespeare's genius produced amongst inferior dramatic writers, we have an amusing specimen in the words of Robert Greene: "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakscene in a country."
Amongst the most remarkable dramatic contemporaries of Shakespeare, or those who immediately followed him, were Chapman, Ben Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Marston, Taylor, Tourneur, Rowley, Ford, Heywood, Shirley, and Beaumont and Fletcher. George Chapman (born, 1557; died, 1634) wrote sixteen plays, and, conjointly with Ben Jonson and Marston, one more, as well as three in conjunction with Shirley. The tragedies of Chapman are written in a grave and eloquent diction, and abound with fine passages, but you feel at once that they are not calculated, like Shakespeare's, for acting. They want the inimitable life, ease, and beauty of the great dramatist. Perhaps his tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois is his best, and next to that his Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. Of his comedies, the best are, Eastward Ho! partly composed by Jonson and Marston, Monsieur d'Olive, and his All Fools. But Chapman's fame now rests on his translation of Homer, which, with all its rudeness of style and extreme quaintness, has always seized on the imagination of poets, and has been declared to be the best translation of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" that we possess. Pope was greatly indebted to it, having borrowed from it almost all the felicitous double epithets which are found in him.
The most celebrated of Webster's tragedies, The Duchess of Malfi, was revived by Richard Hengist Horne, and put on the stage at Sadler's Wells by Phelps with considerable success. He was the author of three tragedies, Appius and Virginia, Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil, or, Vittoria Corombona; a tragic comedy, The Devil's Law Case, or, When Women Go to Law, the Devil is full of Business, besides two comedies in conjunction with Rowley, and two others in conjunction with Dekker. Webster exhibits remarkable power of language, and an imagination of wonderful vigour, but rather too fond of horrors. Undoubtedly he was one of the best dramatists of his age, and seemed fully conscious of it. That he had a true poetic vein in him is evidenced by such passages as the "Dirge of Marcello," sung by his mother, which reminds one of the like simple homely ditties in Shakespeare:—
"Call for the robin red-breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To raise him hillocks that shall keep him warm,