has been told that the heir for whom he longs can only be born if the veiled woman whom he meets as he goes from the temple is put to death. The woman is Ordella. Against all verisimilitude the king talks with this, his dearly loved young wife, for quite a long time without recognizing her voice; but out of the improbable situation the authors snatch wonderful poetry. Ordella is very young and very heroic: to die for her husband is easier than to live with him. Lamb gives the whole scene in his " Specimens." Nearly all that Ordella says is exquisitely touching. The king has said to her:

Was there e'er woman yet, or may be found,
That for fair Fame, unspotted memory,

For virtue's sake, and only for it self sake
Has, or dare make a story?'

And she answers with dignity:

KING. "Tis terrible."

ORDEL. "'Tis so much the more noble."
KING. "Tis full of fearful shadows."

ORDEL." So is sleep, sir,

Or any thing that's merely ours, and mortal; We were begotten gods else; but those fears Feeling but once the fire of nobler thoughts, Flie, like the shapes of clouds we form, to nothing.” KING. "Suppose it death." ORDEL. "I do."

With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness,
With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay

reason,

For in the silent grave, no conversation,

No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,
No careful fathers' counsel, nothing's heard,

Nor nothing is, but all oblivion,

Dust and an endless darkness, and dare you woman
Desire this place?

It is after that that the dramatist shows he lacks Shakespeare's fine instinct. Ordella answers that it is better to die young than to wait

"Till age blow out their lights, or rotten humours Bring them dispersed to the earth."

The real Ordella would not have thought concretely of such things.

Of the plays written by the dramatists alone, Fletcher's "Bonduca" and his " Faithful Shepherdess " may be taken as typical. Bonduca" is a series of studies of the attitude to the idea of honour of a great number of people. Bonduca is Boadicea, and the scene is laid in Roman Britain. We have various examples of the Roman soldier's thirst for honour, impatience of having another set over him, and despair when his insubordination has led to the shame of himself and his legion. We have the British soldier who will accept no assistance from trickery and is prepared to sacrifice his country rather than give up the glory of fighting against odds. There is also the heroic child. The most interesting figures in the play, however, are the three women, Bonduca and her two daughters. The mother and the elder girl decide on suicide rather than submission to the Romans, the younger is only induced to join them by the memory and fear of outrage. The play should be compared with Shakespeare's Roman plays: it brings out the way in which the Jacobeans identified the Romans with this conception of honour and throws some light, therefore, upon the angle from which Shakespeare's plays were written.

"The Faithful Shepherdess," it has been said, is more a masque than an ordinary play, and it clearly gave many hints for the writing of "Comus." It is a Pastoral and has much beautiful lyric poetry. It is spoilt by insistence on the contrary vice of the chastity which is supposed to be its subject.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle" has been recently acted with conspicuous success. It is chiefly aimed at a kind of play of which no really typical examples seem to have survived. They were apparently accounts of the marvellously successful careers of city boys, uniting the wonders of fairyland with the familiar magnificence of London prosperity. A grocer and his wife came to the theatre to see a play of this sort, and insist that their favourite apprentice Ralph shall be given a part in it. He is finally allowed to improvise a story of knight-errantry which is loosely attached to the original play. In that part all the absurdities of stage conventions are exaggerated. At intervals the grocer or his wife are outraged by the course of events on the stage and interfere. Ben Jonson used this type of induction in a more scholarly but infinitely less amusing manner. One understands Shakespeare's objection to it. The main play becomes as wearisome to us as it does to the grocer's wife, and successful as the whole thing is, it belongs rather clearly to the Decadence.

Although "The Maid's Tragedy" had to be altered before it could be presented in the vicious Court of Charles II, yet Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, both in what they say and in what they leave unsaid, show the influence of a far less wholesome moral atmosphere. Shakespeare may be a little ridiculous, and even once or twice artistically wrong, in marrying off all his young people at the end of a play, but it is certainly more pleasing than the sentimental disparagement of natural human relations, which begins to appear in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. The middle-aged woman of vicious character was probably suggested, curious as it sounds, by Sidney in the "Arcadia," but Beaumont and Fletcher are responsible for the dramatization of the type, and it became common in their successors.

It is also remarkable that the twin dramatists' audiences seem to have preferred a happy ending. They

have a good many plays of the Romance type, the entanglement is so serious that a tragic catastrop looks inevitable, but it is ultimately averted as by miracle. An example of the sort of thing is the plot "King and No King." The hero and heroine belie themselves to be brother and sister, and are horrified find themselves in love with each other. In the e they are discovered to be unrelated. The interest o play like this is rather of the nature of a modern dete tive novel, while what emotional analysis there is, is a to be unpleasant. Shakespeare, of course, used t miraculous dénouement, but with him the miraculous seen to be a necessary part of life, the top of the hum ladder, which reaches from earth to heaven; wi Beaumont and Fletcher it is a dramatic subterfuge

CHAPTER IX

THE DECADENTS

MASSINGER, MIDDLETON, WEBSTER, AND FORD

T

HE post-Shakespearean drama might have warned a careful statesman of the approach of civil strife. Much of the Comedy is a commentary on the text of Hamlet's words, "The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe." There is endless satire of the social aspirations of the wives and daughters of the wealthy citizens and of the needy and generally vicious knights and lesser nobility who are forced by their debts into marriage with them. There is still a tendency, it is true, to represent the worst of these gentlemen as being swindlers impersonating their betters, but glorification of the thrifty middle-class is a curiously common sentiment. This is remarkable because it was in this class that the strength of the Puritan party was supposed to lie and the stage was under the Puritan ban. Massinger's work, however, seems to suggest that the stage was making an effort to redeem its reputation. In his "Roman Actor" the hero Paris makes a long defence of the stage before the Senate, and claims that by making vice ugly and finally punished and virtue attractive the actors "may put in for as large a share of usefulness" as all the sects of the philosophers.

The City Madam " is a good example of the sort of play. A wealthy citizen, Sir John Frugal (the signifi