The tragedies of the seventeenth century are, on the whole, as
questionable as the comedies. That there are noble plays among them
here and there, no one denies--any more than that there are
exquisitely amusing plays among the comedies; but as the staple
interest of the comedies is dirt, so the staple interest of the
tragedies is crime. Revenge, hatred, villany, incest, and murder
upon murder are their constant themes, and (with the exception of
Shakspeare, Ben Jonson in his earlier plays, and perhaps Massinger)
they handle these horrors with little or no moral purpose, save that
of exciting and amusing the audience, and of displaying their own
power of delineation in a way which makes one but too ready to
believe the accusations of the Puritans (supported as they are by
many ugly anecdotes) that the play-writers and actors were mostly men
of fierce and reckless lives, who had but too practical an
acquaintance with the dark passions which they sketch. This is
notoriously the case with most of the French novelists of the modern
'Literature of Horror,' and the two literatures are morally
identical. We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought
against the School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply
to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding the civil wars.

This public appetite for horrors, for which they catered so greedily,
tempted them toward another mistake, which brought upon them (and not
undeservedly) heavy odium.

One of the worst counts against Dramatic Art (as well as against
Pictorial) was the simple fact that it came from Italy. We must
fairly put ourselves into the position of an honest Englishman of the
seventeenth century before we can appreciate the huge praejudicium
which must needs have arisen in his mind against anything which could