EPILOGUE

E have now seen the Elizabethan drama run its course. Shirley affords some scenes of interest, but it is clearly drama kept alive, so to speak, by artificial respiration. As soon as the Puritan party gained control they closed the theatres. That was in 1642. During the interregnum Sir William Davenant, who prided himself on his connexion with Shakespeare, in his efforts to find a drama which would meet Puritan views evolved something like modern opera. He also seems to have invented the modern stage. When after the Restoration the theatres reopened, a subtle change had taken place in taste. Congreve is perhaps the best dramatist to read to appreciate this fact. His one tragedy, "The Mourning Bride," is the Restoration substitute for "Romeo and Juliet"; his "Way of the World" is the substitute for "As You Like It." England has never since produced really great drama.

What were the causes of the decline? It is sometimes implied that the closing of the theatres was in itself sufficient, but in fact the decline is clearly marked before that. It is likely enough that a literary form, like any other growth, carries its seed of mortality within it. But all really great art, and drama surely more than any other, must be nourished by intimate association with the great mass of the people. Early Elizabethan drama was a thing almost extemporized by the people for the people, and essentially among the people. Shakespeare himself might carp at the groundling, but he never forgot his needs and he had certainly

begun as his poet. And then the Stuart dynasty drew to itself this miraculous incarnation of a people's genius, which was Shakespeare, and drama came to be written more and more for a narrow intellectual or aristocratic circle. May-games and Whitsun Pastorals were frowned on by the Puritans, and the suppression of the pure folkdrama, which had been the seedling garden of the literary drama, was a far more serious blow than any closing of the sophisticated theatres. Middleton and Ford and Webster may stress a democratic morality, but they are clearly not addressing country-folk or humble artisans, and it seems to be a law that to appeal to these is the condition of immortality.

Friar Bacon and Friar Bun- Knight of the Burning Pestle,