SOURCE: Bowers, Fredson Thayer. “The Decadence of Revenge Tragedy.” In Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642, pp. 217-58. 1940. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959.

In the following excerpt, Bowers argues that Shirley's works transcend the decadence into which revenge tragedy had fallen in his time.

The dramatists of the fourth period of revenge tragedy in the last decade of theatrical activity before the Commonwealth were perforce imitators. Almost every source for dramatic invention had been exploited; almost every situation had yielded its last combination and every type of character its ultimate modification. There were seemingly no more worlds to conquer, and the huge weight of accumulated dramatic tradition lay heavily on any aspirant to originality. Moreover, the high imagination of the Renaissance which had animated Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare had given way to second thoughts which were invariably cynical. The age, in its literature as well as its mood, had lost...