The tragedies
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare’s age find their highest expression in
his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested
and found wanting, and all society’s latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband
against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he uncrowns kings, levels the
nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. Already in the early experimental tragedies
Titus Andronicus (1589–94), with its spectacular violence, and Romeo and Juliet (1594–96),
with its comedy and romantic tale of adolescent love, Shakespeare had broken away from the
conventional Elizabethan understanding of tragedy as a twist of fortune to an infinitely more
complex investigation of character and motive, and in Julius Caesar (1599) he begins to turn the
political interests of the history plays into secular and corporate tragedy, as men fall victim to the
unstoppable train of public events set in motion by their private misjudgments.
In the major tragedies that follow, Shakespeare’s practice cannot be confined to a single
general statement that covers all cases, for each tragedy belongs to a separate category: revenge
tragedy in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601), domestic tragedy in Othello (1603–04), social tragedy in King
Lear (1605–06), political tragedy in Macbeth (1606–07), and heroic tragedy in Antony and
Cleopatra (1606–07). In each category Shakespeare’s play is exemplary and defines its type; the
range and brilliance of this achievement are staggering. The worlds of Shakespeare’s heroes are
collapsing around them, and their desperate attempts to cope with the collapse uncover the
inadequacy of the systems by which they rationalize their sufferings and justify their existence.
The ultimate insight is Lear’s irremediable grief over his dead daughter: “Why should a dog, a
horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” Before the overwhelming suffering of these
great and noble spirits, all consolations are void, and all versions of order stand revealed as
adventitious. The humanism of the Renaissance is punctured in the very moment of its greatest
single product.
Shakespeare’s later works
In his last period Shakespeare’s astonishingly fertile invention returned to
experimentation. In Coriolanus (1608) he completed his political tragedies, drawing a
dispassionate analysis of the dynamics of the secular state; in the scene of the Roman food riot
(not unsympathetically depicted) that opens the play is echoed the Warwickshire enclosure riots
of 1607. Timon of Athens (1605–08) is an unfinished spin-off, a kind of tragic satire. The last
group of plays comprises the four romances—Pericles (c. 1606–08), Cymbeline (c. 1608–10),
The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest (1611)—which develop a long, philosophical
perspective on fortune and suffering.
(Another work, The Two Noble Kinsmen [1613–14], was written in collaboration with
John Fletcher, as perhaps was a play known as Cardenio [1613, now lost].) In these plays
Shakespeare’s imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical
themes—wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of
people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the
romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance, loss, and unkindness, and
Shakespeare’s subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which
alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is
maintained between the artist’s delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own
disillusionment.
Playwrights after Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s perception of a crisis in public norms and private belief became the
overriding concern of the drama until the closing of the theaters in 1642. The prevailing manner
of the playwrights who succeeded him was realistic, satirical, and antiromantic, and their plays
focused predominantly on those two symbolic locations, the city and the court, with their typical
activities, the pursuit of wealth and power. “Riches and glory,” wrote Sir Walter Raleigh,
“Machiavel’s two marks to shoot at,” had become the universal aims, and this situation was
addressed by city comedies and tragedies of state. Increasingly, it was on the stages that the
rethinking of early Stuart assumptions took place.
On the one hand, in the works of Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, John Day, Samuel
Rowley, and others, the old tradition of festive comedy was reoriented toward the celebration of
confidence in the dynamically expanding commercial metropolis. Heywood claimed to have
been involved in some 200 plays, and they include fantastic adventures starring citizen heroes,
spirited, patriotic, and inclined to a leveling attitude in social matters. His masterpiece, A Woman
Killed with Kindness (1603), is a middle-class tragedy. Dekker was a kindred spirit, best seen in
his Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599), a celebration of citizen brotherliness and Dick Whittington-like
success; the play nevertheless faces squarely up to the hardships of work, thrift, and the contempt
of the great. On the other hand, the very industriousness that the likes of Heywood viewed with
civic pride became in the hands of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas
Middleton a sign of self-seeking, avarice, and anarchy, symptomatic of the sicknesses in society
at large.
Jonson
The crucial innovations in satiric comedy were made by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s
friend and nearest rival, who stands at the fountainhead of what subsequently became the
dominant modern comic tradition. His early plays, particularly Every Man in His Humour (1598)
and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), with their galleries of grotesques, scornful
detachment, and rather academic effect, were patently indebted to the verse satires of the 1590s;
they introduced to the English stage a vigorous and direct anatomizing of “the time’s
deformities,” the language, habits, and humors of the London scene. Jonson began as a self-
appointed social legislator, socially conservative but intellectually radical, outraged by a society
given over to inordinate appetite and egotism, and ambitious through his mammoth learning to
establish himself as the privileged artist, the fearless and faithful mentor and companion to kings;
but he was ill at ease with a court inclined in its masques to prefer flattery to judicious advice.
Consequently, the greater satires that followed are marked by their gradual accommodations with
popular comedy and by their unwillingness to make their implied moral judgments explicit: in
Volpone (1606) the theatrical brilliance of the villain easily eclipses the sordid legacy hunters
whom he deceives; Epicoene (1609) is a noisy farce of metropolitan fashion and frivolity; The
Alchemist (1610) exhibits the conjurings and deceptions of clever London rogues; and
Bartholomew Fair (1614) draws a rich portrait of city life parading through the annual fair at
Smithfield, a vast panorama of a society given over to folly. In these plays, fools and rogues are
indulged to the very height of their daring, forcing upon the audience both criticism and
admiration; the strategy leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions while liberating
Jonson’s wealth of exuberant comic invention, virtuoso skill with plot construction, and mastery
of a language tumbling with detailed observation of London’s multifarious ephemera. After 1616
Jonson abandoned the stage for the court, but, finding himself increasingly disregarded, he made
a hard-won return to the theaters. The most notable of his late plays are popular in style: The
New Inn (1629), which has affinities with the Shakespearean romance, and A Tale of a Tub
(1633), which resurrects the Elizabethan country farce.
Other Jacobean dramatists
Of Jonson’s successors in city comedy, Francis Beaumont, in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle (1607), amusingly insults the citizenry while ridiculing its taste for romantic plays. John
Marston adopts so sharp a satirical tone that his comic plays frequently border on tragedy. All
values are mocked by Marston’s bitter and universal skepticism; his city comedy The Dutch
Courtezan (1605), set in London, explores the pleasures and perils of libertinism. His
tragicomedy The Malcontent (1604) is remarkable for its wild language and sexual and political
disgust; Marston cuts the audience adrift from the moorings of reason by a dizzying interplay of
parody and seriousness. Only in the city comedies of Thomas Middleton was Jonson’s moral
concern with greed and self-ignorance bypassed, for Middleton presents the pursuit of money as
the sole human absolute and buying and selling, usury, law, and the wooing of rich widows as
the dominant modes of social interaction.
His unprejudiced satire touches the actions of citizen and gentleman with equal irony and
detachment; the only operative distinction is between fool and knave, and the sympathies of the
audience are typically engaged on the side of wit, with the resourceful prodigal and dexterous
whore. His characteristic form, used in Michaelmas Term (1605) and A Trick to Catch the Old
One (1606), was intrigue comedy, which enabled him to portray his society dynamically, as a
mechanism in which each sex and class pursues its own selfish interests. He was thus concerned
less with characterizing individuals in depth than with examining the inequalities and injustices
of the world that cause them to behave as they do. His The Roaring Girl (c. 1608) and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside (1613) are the only Jacobean comedies to rival the comprehensiveness of
Bartholomew Fair, but their social attitudes are opposed to Jonson’s; the misbehavior that
Jonson condemned morally as “humours” or affectation Middleton understands as the product of
circumstance.
Middleton’s social concerns are also powerfully to the fore in his great tragedies, Women
Beware Women (c. 1621) and The Changeling (1622), in which the moral complacency of men
of rank is shattered by the dreadful violence they themselves have casually set in train, proving
the answerability of all men for their actions despite the exemptions claimed for privilege and
status. The hand of heaven is even more explicitly at work in the overthrow of the aristocratic
libertine D’Amville in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (c. 1611), where the breakdown
of old codes of deference before a progressive middle-class morality is strongly in evidence. In
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), now generally attributed to Middleton, a scathing attack on
courtly dissipation is reinforced by complaints about inflation and penury in the countryside at
large. For more traditionally minded playwrights, new anxieties lay in the corrupt and sprawling
bureaucracy of the modern court and in the political eclipse of the nobility before incipient royal
absolutism.
In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) Machiavellian statesmen abound, while George Chapman’s
Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) drew on recent French
history to chart the collision of the magnificent but redundant heroism of the old-style aristocrat,
whose code of honour had outlived its social function, with pragmatic arbitrary monarchy;
Chapman doubtless had the career and fate of Essex in mind. The classic tragedies of state are
John Webster’s, with their dark Italian courts, intrigue and treachery, spies, malcontents, and
informers. His The White Devil (1612), a divided, ambivalent play, elicits sympathy even for a
vicious heroine, since she is at the mercy of her deeply corrupt society, and the heroine in The
Duchess of Malfi (1623) is the one decent and spirited inhabitant of her world, yet her noble
death cannot avert the fearfully futile and haphazard carnage that ensues. As so often on the
Jacobean stage, the challenge to the male-dominated world of power was mounted through the
experience of its women.
