Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/135

Rh The two plays are thus stories of terrible crimes—sins of lust and hate, and of dire and overwhelming vengeance; and through each runs a vein of bitter comment on princes and women. They are studied and elaborate works. Like Jonson, Webster pleads the character of his audience as excuse for not having written a regular tragedy, "observing all the critical laws, as height of style and gravity of person, enriched with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, livening death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius." None the less he had the Senecan model in view. The mocking and bitter comment of Flamineo and Bosola supply the chorus; dumb-show takes the place of the nuntius' relation; and the poet aims at unity and definiteness of plot structure, propriety of character, and height of style.

As regards the plot, indeed, the studied care with which Webster endeavoured to make it include the crime and its punishment has prevented his obtaining the concentration and proportion which give to Shakespeare's plots essential unity. That essential unity is to be sought in the spiritual history of the protagonists. A tragedy achieves artistic unity when every incident is subordinate and auxiliary to the vivid presentation of what these said and did as they passed through some great and fatal crisis. Shakespeare—when not, like lesser men, drawn aside by the temptation to write a taking scene—proportions with wonderful art the degree to which the different characters