DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.  It was inevitable that the drama should decline after Shakespeare, for the simple reason that there was no other great enough to fill his place.  Aside from this, other causes were at work, and the chief of these was at the very source of the Elizabethan dramas.  It must be remembered that our first playwrights wrote to please their audiences; that the drama rose in England because of the desire of a patriotic people to see something of the stirring life of the times reflected on the stage.  For there were no papers or magazines in those days, and people came to the theaters not only to be amused but to be informed.  Like children, they wanted to see a story acted; and like men, they wanted to know what it meant.  Shakespeare fulfilled their desire.  He gave them their story, and his genius was great enough to show in every play not only their own life and passions but something of the meaning of all life, and of that eternal justice which uses the war of human passions for its own great ends.  Thus good and evil mingle freely in his dramas; but the evil is never attractive, and the good triumphs as inevitably as fate.  Though his language is sometimes coarse, we are to remember that it was the custom of his age to speak somewhat coarsely, and that in language, as in thought and feeling, Shakespeare is far above most of his contemporaries.

With his successors all this was changed.  The audience itself had gradually changed, and in place of plain people eager for a story and for information, we see a larger and larger proportion of those who went to the play because they had nothing else to do.  They wanted amusement only, and since they had blunted by idleness the desire for simple and wholesome amusement, they called for something more sensational.  Shakespeare’s successors catered to the depraved tastes of this new audience.  They lacked not only Shakespeare’s genius, but his broad charity, his moral insight into life.  With the exception of Ben Jonson, they neglected the simple fact that man in his deepest nature is a moral being, and that only a play which satisfies the whole nature of man by showing the triumph of the moral law can ever wholly satisfy an audience or a people.  Beaumont and Fletcher, forgetting the deep meaning of life, strove for effect by increasing the sensationalism of their plays; Webster reveled in tragedies of blood and thunder; Massinger and Ford made another step downward, producing evil and licentious scenes for their own sake, making characters and situations more immoral till, notwithstanding these dramatists’ ability, the stage had become insincere, frivolous, and bad.  Ben Jonson’s ode, “Come Leave the Loathed Stage,” is the judgment of a large and honest nature grown weary of the plays and the players of the time.  We read with a sense of relief that in 1642, only twenty-six years after Shakespeare’s death, both houses of Parliament voted to close the theaters as breeders of lies and immorality.