Such are the touching and poetical figures which these poets introduce in their dramas, or in connection with their dramas, amidst murders, assassinations, the clash of swords, the howl of slaughter, striving against the raging men who adore or torment them, like them carried to excess, transported by their tenderness as the others by their violence; it is a complete exposition, as well as a perfect opposition of the feminine instinct ending in excessive self-abandonment, and of masculine harshness ending in murderous inflexibility. Thus built up and thus provided, the drama of the age was enabled to bring out the inner depths of man, and to set in motion the most powerful human emotions; to bring upon the stage Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia, the death of Desdemona and the butcheries of Macbeth.
[393]"The very age and body of the time, his form and pressure."—Shakespeare.
[394]Ben Jonson, "Every Man in his Humour"; "Cynthia's Revels."
[395]"The Defence of Poesie," ed. 1629, p. 562.
[396]"Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Julius Cæsar."
[397]Strype, in his "Annals of the Reformation" (1571), says: "Many now were wholly departed from the communion of the church, and came no more to hear divine service in their parish churches, nor received the holy sacrament, according to the laws of the realm." Richard Baxter, in his "Life," published in 1696, says: "We lived in a country that had but little preaching at all.... In the village where I lived the Reader read the Common Prayer briefly; and the rest of the day, even till dark night almost, except Eating time, was spent in Dancing under a Maypole ana a great tree, not far from my father's door, where all the Town did meet together. And though one of my father's own Tenants was the piper, he could not restrain him nor break the sport. So that we could not read the Scripture in our family without the great disturbance of the Taber and Pipe and noise in the street."
[398]Ben Jonson, "Every Man in his Humour."
[399]"The Chronicle" of John Hardyng (1436), ed. H. Ellis, 1812, Preface.
[400]Act IV. sc. 2 and 4. See also the character of Calypso in Massinger; Putana in Ford; Protalyce in Beaumont and Fletcher.