SOURCE: "The Jacobean Drama," in The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation, revised edition, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1958, pp. 1-27.

In the following chapter from her frequently cited critical study of Jacobean drama, originally published in 1936, Ellis-Fermor emphasizes the "sense of defeat" that characterized drama of the Jacobean period in contrast with the "vitality" of the Elizabethan era. She notes the increasingly unresolved treatment of evil and the sense of a decaying civilization that characterized the era and asserts that Jacobean drama anticipated a changing collective worldview in its separation of poetry, philosophy and science from the realm of religion.

The mood of the drama from the early Elizabethan to the late Jacobean period appears to pass through three phases, each reflecting with some precision the characteristic thought, preoccupation or attitude to the problems of man's being of the period to which it belongs. That of the Elizabethan age proper, the...