Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/154

134 Jonson and Fletcher—Richard Brome, Thomas Randolph, William Cartwright, Jasper Mayne, Henry Glapthorne, Sir John Suckling, and Sir William Davenant, as well as others whom Mr Bullen has rescued from oblivion, it would be impossible in the space at my disposal to attempt distinct characterisation. There are few in which it is not possible to find good things—poetry and humour,—but none are dramatists of real merit, and none struck out any new line. The old themes are repeated in a hackneyed and worn-out style, and in a verse which tends to disappear altogether. The period of buoyant vitality and of development in the Elizabethan drama closed with the death of Fletcher.