Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess is the best English pastoral drama with the exception of Jonson's fragment, the Sad Shepherd. Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his Comus. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings.
In John Webster the fondness for abnormal and sensational themes, which beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere—as in the great murder scene in Macbeth—is a pure passion; but in Webster it is mingled with something physically repulsive. Thus his Duchess of Malfi is presented in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told that it is the hand of her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of mad-men and, "behind a traverse, the artificial figures of her children, appearing as if dead." Treated in this elaborate fashion, that "terror," which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about them:
She would not after the report keep fresh
As long as flowers on graves.
We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world I
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most Shaksperian of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams of beauty among his dark horrors which light up a whole scene with some abrupt touch of feeling.