Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/105

Rh were succeeded by the great tragedies of thought and passion; and when the second decade opened he was taking farewell of the stage in the more slightly constructed romances, full of pathos and poetry, in which we can trace not only an alteration in the poet's mood, but it may be also that more general change in taste to which the romantic and sentimental drama of Beaumont and Fletcher conduced and ministered. During these same years Jonson was working with all the vigour of his gigantic powers; and the best plays of Chapman, Marston, Dekker, Middleton, and Webster date from this decade or a few years later. The ruling spirits of the next two decades are Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is in the work of their followers and imitators—Massinger, Ford, and Shirley—that the flame which had been kindled by Marlowe and the other "university wits" burned itself out in the years immediately preceding the close of the theatres.

Shakespeare is, by the plan of this series, excluded from the scope of the present volume, so that it remains to sketch briefly the work of the other dramatists who flourished during the years from 1600 to 1640.

The oldest of them all was the veteran scholar, poet, and dramatist, George Chapman. Born some