Marston specialized in violent and melodramatic tragedies, which do not lack a certain impressiveness, but which are easily parodied and no less easily lead to abuse. They impressed his own generation, who rated him with Jonson. For a later age they are spoiled to a great extent by exaggeration, rant, and excessive speeches. Typical of them are Antonio and Mellida (1602) and Antonio’s Revenge (1602), which were ridiculed by Jonson in The Poetaster.
5. Thomas Dekker (1570–1641) was born in London, where his life was passed as a literary hack and playwright. His plays, chiefly comedies, have an attraction quite unusual for the time. They have a sweetness, an arch sentimentality, and an intimate knowledge of common men and things that have led to his being called the Dickens of the Elizabethan stage. His plots are chaotic, and his blank verse, which very frequently gives place to prose, is weak and sprawling. The best of his plays are Old Fortunatus (1600), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600), and Satiromastix (1602). He collaborated with other playwrights, including Ford and Rowley, with whom he wrote The Witch of Edmonton (about 1633), and Massinger, in The Virgin Martyr (1622).
6. Thomas Middleton (1570–1627) was born in London, wrote much for the stage, and in 1620 was made City Chronologer.
He is one of the most equable and literary of the dramatists of the age; he has a decided fanciful turn; he is a close observer and critic of the life of the time, and a dramatist who on a few occasions can rise to the heights of greatness. His most powerful play, which has been much praised by Lamb and others, is The Changeling (1624); others are Women beware Women (1622), The Witch, which bears a strong resemblance to Macbeth, and The Spanish Gipsy (1623), a romantic comedy suggesting As You Like It. Along with Dekker he wrote The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cutpurse (1611), which is a close dramatic parallel to the earliest novels.
7. Thomas Heywood (1575–1650) was born in Lincolnshire about 1575, was educated at Cambridge, and became an author and dramatist in London. He himself asserts that he had a hand (“or at least a main finger”) in two hundred and twenty plays, of which twenty-three survive.
Like so many more dramatists of the time, he excelled in his pictures of London life and manners. He was a rapid and light improviser, an expert contriver of stage situations, but otherwise content with passable results, and caring little about the higher flights of the dramatist. His best play is A Woman Killed with Kindnesse (1603), which contains some strongly pathetic scenes; The English Traveller (1633) is only slightly inferior. Other plays of his are The Royall King (1600), The Captives (1624), and a series of clumsy historical dramas, including King Edward the Fourth (1600) and The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1605).
8. John Webster, who flourished during the first twenty years of the seventeenth century, excels his fellows as a tragical artist. Next to nothing is known regarding his life, and much of his work has been lost, but what remains is sufficient to show that he was a writer of no mean ability. Selecting themes of gloomy and supernatural horror, of great crimes and turbulent emotions and desires, he rises to the height of his argument with an ability equal to his ambition. In several respects—in bleak horror and in largeness of tragical conception—he resembles Marlowe; but he is terse and precise when Marlowe is simply turgid; his plots have the inexorable march of Fate itself; and he far excels Marlowe in brief and almost blinding flashes of sorrow and pity. His two great plays are The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfy (1623). Other and inferior plays ascribed to him are The Devil’s Law Case (1623) and Appius and Virginia.
9. Cyril Tourneur (1575–1626) seems to have been a soldier and to have served in the Low Countries. He took part in Buckingham’s disastrous expedition to Cadiz, and on his return died in Ireland.
In the work of Tourneur we have horrors piled on horrors. His two plays The Revenger’s Tragedy (1600) and The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) are melodramatic to the highest degree. He attempts much, but achieves little. He does not lack a certain poetic sensibility; but he lacks grip, method, and balance, and he is weakest where Webster is strongest.