lyrics and high doctrine, and were imitated by Milton. But a masque was the ances-
tor of modern opera and ballet, a show not always requiring intelligent attention.Tr a g e d y
Jacobean tragedy continued the vein of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy of a generation
earlier. The best ofJohn Marston(?1575–1634),Cyril Tourneur(?1575–1626),
John Webster(c.1578–c.1632) and Thomas Middleton (c.1580–1627) is sometimes
read with Shakespeare’s tragedies. Typically, the revenger, a man of unrecognized
talent, is hired to avenge a private wrong involving both murder and sexual honour.
Perverse crimes are horribly punished; virtue, its oppressors, and the revenger die.
Like films about the Mafia, the revenge play has a recipe: take one incestuous
Cardinal, one malcontent avenger, poison the skull of the Duke’s murdered
mistress/her Bible/his saddle-bow; set to simmer in Mantua for two hours; add a
good lady to taste. These intensely dark plays are lit by candle flames of virtue and
moments of passion in language that briefly recalls Shakespeare, but is more stylized
and less serious. Vice bubbles on the hob of the court of a foreign Catholic power.
(This horror-Gothic drama is the ancestor of the horror-Gothic fiction of the late
eighteenth century.) In comparison,Hamlet, which transcends the Revenge formula,
is a large and various play.
The best of the revenge tragedies is Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, with a strong hero-
ine in its widowed Duchess. Her secret marriage to her steward makes her brothers,
a Duke and a Cardinal, try to drive her mad. When their ingenious cruelties fail, she
faces execution calmly. The Duke, her twin, says after she has been strangled: ‘Cover
her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.’
The revenge plays are successfully frightening, but their forty-year popularity
suggests a fascination with human malignity which calls for explanation. Old ideas
of human nature had been shaken by the imposition of four religious regimes in
four decades. If comedy is social, showing the challenge to old social values from
new mercantile values,tragedy is metaphysical. Theology is relevant here: Thomas142 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700
Stuart dramatists to 1642With best-known plays and approximate date of first performance.
George Chapman (?1559–1634), Bussy D’Ambois (1607)
Thomas Dekker (?1570–1632), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599)
Thomas Heywood (?1574–1641), A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603)
John Marston (?1575–1634), The Malcontent (1604)
Cyril Tourneur (?1575–1626), The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611)
John Webster (c.1578–c.1632), The White Devil (1609), The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13)
John Fletcher (1579–1625) with Shakespeare, Henry VIII (1613) and Two Noble Kinsmen
(1613–14); several plays with Beaumont
Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), (?)The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), The Changeling (1622, with
Rowley), A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and A Game at Chess (1624), Women beware Women
(1620–7)
Philip Massinger (1583–1649), The Fatal Dowry (1618), A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625)
Sir Francis Beaumont (1584–1616), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (?1607), The Maid’s
Tragedy (c.1610, with Fletcher)
John Ford (1586–after 1639), ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (1633)