Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess is the best English pastoral drama with the exception of Jonson’s fragment, the Sad Shepherd.  Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his Comus.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle, written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling.  Beaumont and Fletcher’s blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe’s or Shakspere’s, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings.

In John Webster the fondness for abnormal and sensational themes, which beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the terrible into the horrible.  Fear, in Shakspere—­as in the great murder scene in Macbeth—­is a pure passion; but in Webster it is mingled with something physically repulsive.  Thus his Duchess of Malfi is presented in the dark with a dead man’s hand, and is told that it is the hand of her murdered husband.  She is shown a dance of mad-men and, “behind a traverse, the artificial figures of her children, appearing as if dead.”  Treated in this elaborate fashion, that “terror,” which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its dignity.  Webster’s images have the smell of the charnel house about them: 

  She would not after the report keep fresh
  As long as flowers on graves.

  We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
  That, ruined, yield no echo. 
                         O this gloomy world I
  In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
  Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!

Webster had an intense and somber genius.  In diction he was the most Shaksperian of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams of beauty among his dark horrors which light up a whole scene with some abrupt touch of feeling.

  Cover her face:  mine eyes dazzle:  she died young,

says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and stands before the corpse. Vittoria Corombona is described in the old editions as “a night-piece,” and it should, indeed, be acted by the shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to punctuate the speeches.  The scene of Webster’s two best tragedies was laid, like many of Ford’s, Cyril Tourneur’s, and Beaumont and Fletcher’s, in Italy—­the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination.  It was to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenge and ferocious cunning; subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; parricides, atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and delicate varieties of sin.

But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in 1666, and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of Charles I. and the Commonwealth.