They are less great individually than in the mass.  If they are giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs.  They prop one another up.  There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by Wordsworth is.  The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays.  The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets by destiny and dramatists by accident.  It is conceivable that the greatest of them apart from Shakespeare—­Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and Dekker—­might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never existed.  Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry.  Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so. The Alchemist is a brilliant heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of Jonson’s songs.  As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy which survive in his dialogue, his Sweet Content is worth all the purely dramatic work he ever wrote.

One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human nature.  There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast.  Even so good a play as The Duchess of Malfi is marred by inadequacy of motive on the part of the duchess’s persecutors.  Similarly, in Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois, the villains are simply a dramatist’s infernal machines.  Shakespeare’s own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive—­the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part the revenge of Iago.  But, if we accept the first act of King Lear as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. Othello breaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way.  Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists again.  Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world.  The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat again.  Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither fate.  They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees—­resting against the base of Shakespeare’s colossal statue.