The Listener, 26 (18 Dec 1941) 825-26
We expect a period of artistic or literary greatness, in any age or country, to be roughly divisible into three stages: that of its rise, that of its perfection, and that of its decline. It is convenient also when we can find three men, each of whom will represent one of these stages. This is possible in what we call Elizabethan drama – so-called because we must remember that some of the greatest plays of this drama, and all of those of its third period, were written and produced in the reign of King James I. For the first two periods of Elizabethan drama there is no difficulty in choosing our representative authors. Christopher Marlowe is unquestionably the greatest dramatistpoet of the first, Shakespeare of the second. But when we come to the third period, it is not immediately quite so clear why we should elect John Webster, instead of Beaumont and Fletcher, or Middleton, or Massinger, or Tourneur; or, having done so, why we should choose The Duchess of Malfyas his greatest play. 2 In talking about Webster, I do not propose to give you any of the historical facts. [: these you can get better from books, especially the monumental edition of Webster’s plays by Mr. F. L. Lucas of Cambridge. Of critical essays on Webster, I would mention one by Swinburne, one by Rupert Brooke, and Mr. Lucas’s introduction to his edition: I recommend these because their approach to Webster is in some ways very different from my own. 3 All that I intend to do now, is to try to explain why we put John Webster so high in his period, and why we put The Duchess of Malfyat the head of his plays.]
First of all, however, it is worth while to say something about the general characteristics of the drama of this third period, which may be said to have begun while Shakespeare was still writing, and to have gone on into the reign of Charles I, only to end abruptly with the closing of the theatres after the Civil War. 4 There are two aspects under which we may consider the development of Elizabethan drama: that of the development of plot and characterisation, and that of the verse style. If you look at an early play like Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, you find a loose kind of sensational plot, in which the emphasis is on exciting action, rather than on character. 5 It is melodrama, and strikes us as somewhat childish. The great advance in mental 204maturity shown by Marlowe, in his greatest plays, is due to his interest in character: his plays are equally violent and exciting, but they become serious tragedy because the character of the hero shows development according to circumstance – the tragedy, as is all true tragedy, is in the man’s soul as well as in outward events. Shakespeare not only portrayed a much wider range of character than did Marlowe: he went very much farther, as far as any dramatist has gone, in showing the interaction and influence of different characters upon each other. At the same time, he developed his blank verse in such a way as to be able to express not only more emotions, but more subtle shades of emotion: Marlowe, though he was the first to turn melodrama into tragedy, yet remains a specialist in the more melodramatic moments, rather than a dramatist of the whole of life.
It is easy to understand why Shakespeare is so much the greatest; it is easy to appreciate Marlowe as a forerunner; but it is impossible to justify drama in decline unless we can show that it does something original. When we look at the dramatists who came after Shakespeare we are apt to notice at first only their inferiority. Take the plot, for instance. Except in his chronicle plays, Shakespeare is apt to set his plays in some remote place or time in early Britain, as in Learor Macbethor...
