its causes are clear enough, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”  The Elizabethans were, if ever any were, hopeful travellers.  The winds blew them to the four quarters of the world; they navigated all seas; they sacked rich cities.  They beat off the great Armada, and harried the very coasts of Spain.  They pushed discovery to the ends of the world and amassed great wealth.  Under James all these things were over.  Peace was made with Spain:  national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne.  Sir Walter Raleigh, a romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was beheaded out of hand by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive.  The Court which had been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and none of their virtues.  Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.  The bright day was done and they were for the dark.  The uprising of Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife darkened the temper of the time.

The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, which because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly reflects soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people.  The onslaughts of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable enemies of the theatre, became more virulent and envenomed.  What a difference between the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the dark animosity of The Atheists’ Tragedy with its Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any villainy proposed to him!  “I speak sir,” says a lady in the same play to a courtier who played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted, “conceited” love passage in the vein of Much Ado, “I speak, sir, as the fashion now:  is, in earnest.”  The quick-witted, light-hearted age was gone.  It is natural that tragedy reflected this melancholy in its deepest form.  Gloom deepened and had no light to relieve it, men supped full of horrors—­there was no slackening of the tension, no concession to overwrought nerves, no resting-place for the overwrought soul.  It is in the dramatist John Webster that this new spirit has its most powerful exponent.

The influence of Machiavelli, which had given Marlowe tragic figures that were bright and splendid and burning, smouldered in Webster into a duskier and intenser heat.  His fame rests on two tragedies, The White Devil and The Duchess of Malf.  Both are stories of lust and crime, full of hate and hideous vengeances, and through each runs a vein of bitter and ironical comment on men and women.  In them chance plays the part of fate.  “Blind accident and blundering mishap—­’such a mistake,’ says one of the criminals, ‘as I have often seen in a play’ are the steersmen