alongside Shakespeare and at his heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre.  The influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better men than themselves.  One of the worst of these—­he is also one of the most typical—­was John Marston, a purveyor of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose tragedy Antonio and Mellida was published in the same year as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Both plays owed their style and plot to the same tradition—­the tradition created by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy—­in which ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy.  Nothing could be more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his age than a comparison of the two.  The style of Antonio and Mellida is the style of The Murder of Gonzago.  There is no subtlety nor introspection, the pale cast of thought falls with no shadow over its scenes.  And it is typical of a score of plays of the kind we have and beyond doubt of hundreds that have perished.  Shakespeare stands alone.

Beside this journey-work tragedy of revenge and murder which had its root through Kyd and Marlowe in Seneca and in Italian romance, there was a journey-work comedy of low life made up of loosely constructed strings of incidents, buffoonery and romance, that had its roots in a joyous and fantastic study of the common people.  These plays are happy and high-spirited and, compared with the ordinary run of the tragedies, of better workmanship.  They deal in the familiar situations of low comedy—­the clown, the thrifty citizen and his frivolous wife, the gallant, the bawd, the good apprentice and the bad portrayed vigorously and tersely and with a careless kindly gaiety that still charms in the reading.  The best writers in this kind were Middleton and Dekker—­and the best play to read as a sample of it Eastward Ho! in which Marston put off his affectation of sardonical melancholy and joined with Jonson and Dekker to produce what is the masterpiece of the non-Shakespearean comedy of the time.

For all our habit of grouping their works together it is a far cry in spirit and temperament from the dramatists whose heyday was under Elizabeth and those who reached their prime under her successor.  Quickly though insensibly the temper of the nation suffered eclipse.  The high hopes and the ardency of the reign of Elizabeth saddened into a profound pessimism and gloom in that of James.  This apparition of unsought melancholy has been widely noted and generally assumed to be inexplicable.  In broad outline