In Shirley, as in Massinger, the most representative plays, and certainly those most satisfactory to our taste, are the tragicomedies. Bloodshed and horror and grossness of language and situation may all be absent, and the story of love and intrigue, even if it does not exalt the mind or purify the passions, may be altogether delightful. In "The Royal Master," one of the best, the rôle of the lustful monarch is assumed for a single scene, only to cure a really charming heroine of her infatuation for royalty; and the intriguing favorite is foiled, the banished noble vindicated, and two love matches completed with gracefulness of language and dexterity of plot. Unfortunately Shirley's land of romance is rarely so wholesome as here or the inhabitants so agreeable.
His tragedies mainly conform to the hackneyed models, no matter what the sources may be or how large his own invention may seem. The earliest, "The Maid's Revenge," relating a Spanish story of the rivalry in love of two sisters that ends in a fatal duel between brother and lover, is wholly in the tone of romantic melodrama. "The Politician," a more ambitious effort, combines the villain play with the Beaumont-Fletcher romance. Gotharius, the politician, is the villain; Marpisa, the evil woman, is his mistress and about to be married to the king; Albina, the loyal and long-suffering heroine, is the villain's wife; Turgesius is the prince and hero; and Olaus, a blunt soldier, is his faithful friend. There is an insurrection, as so often in Fletcher; and after a long intrigue the villain and the evil woman perish, and the prince marries the heroine. In "Love's Cruelty," a more original conception is worked out with telling realism and a good deal of dramatic truth. Clariana becomes infatuated with her husband's friend Hippolito; and, even after the guilty lovers have been permitted to go unpunished by the husband, her passion continues until her jealousy at her lover's approaching marriage to Eubella drives her to his murder. Rarely elsewhere in the Elizabethan drama is the story of illicit love told with less of glamour and more veracity. These merits are perhaps counterbalanced by the extreme realism of the language and the stage action.
In this play the deceived husband dies of grief, but Eubella, who had earlier resisted the lustful duke, is solaced after the death of her betrothed by a promise of marriage from the duke himself. Both "The Politician" and "The Duke's Mistress," a tragedy along hackneyed lines, end with reward for the virtuous and punishment only for the vicious. Such application of poetic justice had been earlier expounded by Ben Jonson in defense of the punishments inflicted in his comedy, "Volpone." The applications of the doctrine in Shirley and Massinger were, however, probably due not so much to theoretical criticism as to the popular preference for the restriction of the catastrophe to the bad, a preference recorded by Aristotle and evidently shared by a generation in which romantic tragicomedy was the most popular dramatic form.
Shirley's tragic masterpieces, however, offered no alleviation of horror and bloodshed. "The Traitor" and "The Cardinal" are plays of revenge, lust, intrigue, and villany, in which all the accretions of this kind of tragedy from Kyd and Marlowe down to Webster and Massinger seem to be represented. The villains are as black as Barabas and as crafty as those of Webster; plots are as intricately entangled with counterplots as in Tourneur; and surprises follow as rapidly as in Fletcher. The corpse kissed by the repentant duke is again presented; there is attempted rape and assumed madness; in each play a bridegroom is murdered as he takes his place in the wedding procession; and in each revenge strews the final scene with the dead. But the old motives still had power to convey poetic inspiration, and the examples of all his predecessors summoned Shirley to his best efforts. Perhaps in no other plays does he so constantly recall their work; certainly in no others do the poetic quality of his language, the vigorous delineation of character, and the dramatic depiction of passion so worthily maintain what were even for men of his day the great traditions of English tragedy.
Tragedies by minor writers during the years from 1620 to 1642 offer little that is distinctive. Occasionally, as in the anonymous "Nero" of 1624, we have a play spontaneous in phrase and lifelike in characterization, worthy of the best days of the drama; but in the main the plays only repeat what is to be found in Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. In spite of the vogue of tragicomedy, tragedy was by no means neglected, nearly fifty tragedies being preserved from the twenty years, in addition to those by the authors mentioned. These include several by Suckling, Glapthorne's pastoral tragedy, "Argalus and Parthenia," and his worthless "Wallenstein," May's plays on classical history, and others by Killigrew, Davenant, Carlell, Heming, Davenport, and less known men.
The large majority conform to the later type of revenge play as exemplified in Massinger and Shirley. Sometimes the romantic love element supersedes the intrigue and horrors, but oftener the horrors have full sway. A double plot, usually with an elaborate surprise in the fifth act, revolves about lust and revenge with some attention to untarnished honor and unconquered chastity. The lustful duke and his intriguing favorite, or the tyrannical usurper and the rightful prince alternate at the centre of the stage along with the evil woman, perhaps a Lady Potiphar, and a distressed maiden, likely to be disguised as a boy. Madness is frequently represented, eyes are plucked out, brains dashed upon the stage, and many of the old horrors reproduced, but ghosts rarely appear. The action consists largely of adultery, seduction, and rape; and these are represented with a horrid detail that rivals Marston. When chastity is preserved it is often by a device similar to that used in "Measure for Measure," although occasionally there is an exchange of men instead of women. Tragedy is for the most part confined to stories of crime. The monstrous politicians and libertines differ from their sixteenth century predecessors chiefly in the greater ingenuity and complexity of their intrigue, their subordination of ambition or other motives to those of love or lust, and in the prosaic flatness of their blank verse.
Often there are manifest borrowings, and occasionally a dramatist evidently strove to include everything that had ever been known on the tragic stage. "The Rebellion," by Thomas Rawlins, presents Machiavel, a villain, whose soliloquies might be burlesques on Barabas and Richard III, two mad scenes, a nurse from "Romeo and Juliet," a Moor, who is another villain, attempted rape, and frequent bursts of poetry:—
"The lazy moon has scarcely trimm'd herself
To entertain the sun; she still retains
The slimy tincture of the banish'd night."
On the other hand, the usual type of tragedy, with reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, sometimes shows a genuine poetic gift, as notably in Lord Falkland's "The Marriage Night." The most marked trait, however, of these minor tragedies is their eagerness to out-Herod Herod and to make good their weakness in dramatic truth by means of stage horrors or rant. "The Valiant Scot," a tragedy dealing with the career of Wallace, represents the cutting out of the tongue of one English ambassador and the putting out of the eyes of another. In "Mirza" the protagonist kills his seven-year-old daughter,—"Takes Fatima by the neck, breaks it, and swings her about." The taste for atrocities seems to have been most highly developed at Oxford, where the students acted Goffe's outrageous plays and a Samuel Harding published "Sicily and Naples," a medley introducing revenge for a father, a maiden disguised as a boy, a villain-favorite, the Mariana device, and combining rape, murder, madness, and incest in a fashion not equaled since "Titus Andronicus."
Absurd plays of this sort were common enough from the days of "Cambyses," and cannot be fairly taken as evidences of the drama's decadence. Nor do the main differences that are apparent between tragedy after 1620 and that of the early or of the Shakespearean period point to decadence as unmistakably as critics are wont to assume. There is a waning of poetic power; blank verse descends to prose, and its flowers have a jaded air; but there is poetic imagination in Glapthorne as well as in Shirley, noble rhetoric in Massinger, and sheer poetry in Ford. The ethical tone has in general suffered deterioration. The moral insight of Shakespeare or even of Webster is not maintained; courtly and sophisticated ideals ring false; the language becomes gross; the vulgarities of the early plays are replaced by mawkish sentimentality or lewd suggestiveness. There seems to be increasing difficulty in presenting persons normally good. The reiteration of scenes of rape and seduction bespeak an unhealthy moral atmosphere. Yet tragedy, though at tunes perverse or forgetful, still clings to its moral standards. It still endeavors to expose and chastise sin and to incite to virtue.