regular in external form, but animated by no living internal principle; artful, but not artistic; ingenious schemes, not organic growths; and conveying the same kind of pleasure we experience in inspecting other mechanical contrivances. His method is neither the method of nature nor the method of art, but the method of artifice. A drama of Shakespeare may be compared to an oak; a drama by Jonson to a cunningly fashioned box, made of oak-wood, with some living plants growing in it. Jonson is big; Shakespeare is great.

Still we say, "O rare Ben Jonson!" A large, rude, clumsy, English force, irritable, egotistic, dogmatic, and quarrelsome, but brave, generous, and placable; with no taint of a malignant vice in his boisterous foibles; with a good deal of the bulldog in him, but nothing of the spaniel, and one whose growl was ever worse than his bite; he, the bricklayer's apprentice, fighting his way to eminence through the roughest obstacles, capable of wrath, but incapable of falsehood, willing to boast, but scorning to creep, still sturdily keeps his hardwon position among the Elizabethan worthies as poet, playwright, scholar, man of letters, man of muscle and brawn; as friend of Beaumont and Fletcher and Chapman and Bacon and Shakespeare; and as ever ready, in all places and at all times, to assert the manhood of Ben by tongue and pen and sword.

MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.

IN

N the present chapter we propose to consider six dramatists who were more immediately the contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have the precedence in time, and three of them, if we may believe some critics, not altogether without claim to the precedence in merit, of Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. These are Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, and Chapman.

They belong to the school of dramatists of which Shakespeare was the head, and which is distinguished from the school of Jonson by essential differences of principle. Jonson constructed his plays on definite external rules, and could appeal confidently to the critical understanding, in case the regularity of his plot and the keeping of his characters were called in question. Shakespeare constructed his, not according to any rules which could be drawn from the practice of other dramatists, but according to those interior laws which the mind, in its creative action, instinctively divines and spontaneously obeys. In his case, the appeal is not to the understanding alone, but to the feelings and faculties

which were concerned in producing the work itself; and the symmetry of the whole is felt by hundreds who could not frame an argument to sustain it. The laws to which his genius submitted were different from those to which other dramatists had submitted, because the time, the circumstances, the materials, the purpose aimed at, were different. The time demanded a drama which should represent human life in all its diversity, and in which the tragic and comic, the high and the low, should be in juxtaposition, if not in combination. The dramatists of whom we are about to speak represented them in juxtaposition, and rarely succeeded in vitally combining them so as to produce symmetrical works. Their comedy and tragedy, their humor and passion, move in parallel rather than in converging lines. They have diversity; but as their diversity neither springs from, nor tends to, a central principle of organization or of order, the result is often a splendid anarchy of detached scenes, more effective as detached than as related. Shakespeare alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable materials of his drama, to organize this anarchy into a new and most complex order, and to make a world-wide variety of character and incident consistent with oneness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his work this organic form, put forth his whole strength to

give it mechanical regularity, every line in his solidest plays costing him, as the wits said, "a cup of sack." But the force implied in a Shakespearian drama, a force that crushes and dissolves the resisting materials into their elements, and recombines or fuses them into a new substance, is a force so different in kind from Jonson's, that it would, of course, be idle to attempt an estimate of its superiority in degree. And in regard to those minor dramatists who will be the subjects of the present essay, if they fall below Jonson in general ability, they nearly all afford scenes and passages superior to his best in depth of passion, vigor of imagination, and audacious self-committal to the primitive instincts of the heart.

The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of these dramatists, was Thomas Heywood, of whom little is known, except that he was one of the most prolific writers the world has ever seen. In 1598 he became an actor, or, as Henslowe, who employed him, phrases it, 66 came and hired himself to me as a covenanted servant for two years." The date of his first published drama is 1601; that of his last published work, a General History of Women, is 1657. As early as 1633 he represents himself as having had an "entire hand, or at least a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays, of which only twenty-three were printed. True it is, he says, "that my plays are not exposed to the world in

volumes, to bear the title of Works, as others: one reason is, that many of them, by shifting and change of companies, have been negligently lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print; and a third, that it was never any great ambition in me to be in this kind voluminously read." It was said of him, by a contemporary, that "he not only acted every day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every day for several years; but many of his plays being composed loosely in taverns, occasions them to be so mean." Besides his labors as a playwright, he worked as translator, versifier, and general maker of books. Late in life he conceived the design of writing the lives of all the poets of the world, including his contemporaries. Had this project been carried out, we should have known something about the external life of Shakespeare; for Heywood must have carried in his brain many of those facts which we of this age are most curious to know.

Heywood's best plays evince large observation, considerable dramatic skill, a sweet and humane spirit, and an easy command of language. His style, indeed, is singularly simple, pure, clear, and straightforward; but it conveys the impression of a mind so diffused as almost to be characterless, and incapable of flashing its thoughts through the images of imaginative passion. He