It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be provisionally grouped as follows. (_a_) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the latter of treatises and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in _Old Fortunatus_ (1600) and _The Honest Whore_, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as in his _English Traveller_ and _Woman killed with Kindness_ (acted 1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (_b_) Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like _The Old Law_, that turns on some exquisite point of honour--"the moral sense of our ancestors"; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness and lust, like those in _The Changeling_ and _Women beware Women_. He and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in _The Changeling_ and Bosola in _The Duchess of Malfi_ (whose "pity," when it came, was "nothing akin to him"). In Webster's other principal play, _Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil_ (produced about 1616), the title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors, distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism, without Shakespeare's ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril Tourneur, in _The Revenger's Tragedy_, is even more of a poet than Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment. These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark province, (_c_) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight. The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with his vein of Cervantesque mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and _The Maid's Tragedy_. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like _Bonduca_, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic; but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare's heroines. These faults are present also in Philip Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence which is like a high table-land without summits. _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_ (1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside Shakespeare's, and one of the best. Massinger's interweaving of impersonal or political conceptions, as in _The Bondman_ and _The Roman Actor_, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely an artist of the decline, (_d_) A mass of plays, of which the authorship is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name, baffle classification. There are domestic tragedies, such as _Arden of Feversham_; scions of the vindictive drama, like _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_; historic or half-historic tragedies like _Nero_. There are chronicle histories, of which the last and one of the best is Ford's _Perkin Warbeck_, and melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are realistic citizen comedies akin to _The Merry Wives_, like Porter's refreshing _Two Angry Women of Abingdon_; there are Jonsonian comedies, vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field's and many more. Few of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the dramatic or poetic instinct. (_e_) Outside the regular drama there are many varieties: academic plays, like _The Return from Parnassus_ and _Lingua_, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or entertainments in the Italian style, like _The Faithful Shepherdess_; versified character-sketches, of which Day's _Parliament of Bees_, with its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is the master, and Milton, in his _Comus_, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas made only to be read, like Daniel's and Fulke Greville's; and Latin comedies, like _Ignoramus_. All these species are only now being fully grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted. Entry: 1601