The truth is that, outside of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Elizabethan comedy was frequently not comedy at all, the name being given to plays of which the action and character, if not absolutely tragic, were at least profoundly serious, the comic passages being either wholly subordinate in them or altogether absent from them. In fact, these pieces approach most closely to what are now called comedy-dramas-plays in which the serious and lighter elements of life are intermingled, and so arranged as to give mutual relief. Not until the Restoration did English dramatists return to the true style of comedy, as typified in such works as The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Fox, works in which wit and humour were either the principal or only elements with which the writers worked. * A comedy, written by Francis Beaumont in ridicule of the old romances, and said to have suggested to Buckingham the idea of his Rehearsal. CHAPTER III. FROM SHAKESPEARE TO DRYDEN. Elizabethan and Caroline Comedy-Thomas Randolph'Amyntas'-Richard Brome-'The Antipodes'-Henry Glapthorne Wit in a Constable'-Barten Holyday— 'Tobacco-Sir John Suckling- The Pining Lover'—Sir John Mennis-Sir John Suckling's Campaign'-John Donne-the 'Satires'-Epigrams-Joseph Hall-the 'Satires-John Cleveland-The Long Parliament' "The Puritan'-John Corbet-Journey into France'Francis Quarles-Hey, then, up go we'-the 'Emblems' -Abraham Cowley-The Chronicle'-Robert Herrick - The Invitation'-Epigrams. CHAPTER III. FROM SHAKESPEARE TO DRYDEN. THE chasm between the comedy of men like Shirley and the truer work (of its kind) of men like Etherege and Congreve may be said to have been happily bridged over by two or three dramatists who flourished under the first two Stuart kings of England. In the works of Randolph and of Brome we see a nearer approach to purely comic motive and treatment than was made by the majority of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Randolph especially has considerable fancy; considerably more, for instance, than his master, Jonson, some of whose learning he possessed, and by whom he was liberally lauded. His touch has ease and lightness; his mind altogether seems to have been more flexible and dainty than those of many of his predecessors; and one can understand the attraction that he had for his enthusiastic annotator, Leigh Hunt. Take the play by which he is remembered-The Muses' Looking-Glass. Its purpose may be roughly noted as didactic; yet its lessons are so agreeably told that the reader cannot but be charmed by them. Take, again, his faëry pastoral, Amyntas. A favourable specimen of his style may be found in the scene in which a young rogue named Dorylas persuades a foolish country gentleman named Jocastus that he (Dorylas) and his companions are Oberon and his attendants, and contrives in this way to despoil Jocastus' orchard. The passage is highly fanciful, but brightly humorous, especially in the part played in the affair by Bromius, Jocastus' servant, who is not so credulous as his master. The urchins have climbed the fruit-trees, and are singing snatches of song. Enter Jocastus and his man : * The Muses' Looking-Glass was published in 1668, Amyntas in 1638.. Randolph died in 1634, |