Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/116

96 life of the past in the manner of later historical novelists. Were Jonson's Roman plays still acted, there would be justification for the antiquarian accuracy somewhat irrelevantly lavished by managers on those of Shakespeare.

With the accession of James began Jonson's work as a prolific and popular writer of learned and fanciful masques and entertainments. This did not, however, interrupt the steady development of his dramatic and comic art. Between 1605 and 1616 the poet produced five comedies and a tragedy, and of the comedies four—Volpone acted in 1605, The Silent Woman in 1609, The Alchemist in 1610, and Bartholomew Fair in 1614—are the crown and flower of Jonsonian art. In them the poet achieved at last a complete mastery over comedy as he had himself conceived and planned it. The plot is no longer a mere series of incidents, in the course of which various "humours" are deployed and overthrown, but a curiously and compactly built story, full, from the first line to the last, of the bustle and stress of action. The characters are clearly conceived, and elaborated with fierce energy and an overwhelming accumulation of learned and observant detail. "Shakespeare wanted art," Jonson told Drummond, and one begins to understand his point of view when studying these plays, of which a strenuous, obvious, all-controlling art is the principal feature. Jonson is a savage satirist. Every critic has pointed to the obvious fact that his unremitting satiric intention has destroyed the