Charles I, the Civil War broke out. In three years the Puritan Parliament
was victorious, and in 1649 the extreme minority of the Puritans, supported
by the army, took the unprecedented step of putting King Charles to death,
and declared England a Commonwealth. But in four years more the
Parliamentary government, bigoted and inefficient, made itself impossible,
and then for five years, until his death, Oliver Cromwell strongly ruled
England as Protector. Another year and a half of chaos confirmed the nation
in a natural reaction, and in 1660 the unworthy Stuart race was restored in
the person of the base and frivolous Charles II. The general influence of
the forces which produced these events shows clearly in the changing tone
of the drama, the work of those dramatists who were Shakspere's later
contemporaries and successors.

BEN JONSON. The second place among the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists
is universally assigned, on the whole justly, to Ben Jonson, [Footnote:
This name is spelled without the _h_.] who both in temperament and in
artistic theories and practice presents a complete contrast to Shakspere.
Jonson, the posthumous son of an impoverished gentleman-clergyman, was born
in London in 1573. At Westminster School he received a permanent bent
toward classical studies from the headmaster, William Camden, who was one
of the greatest scholars of the time. Forced into the uncongenial trade of
his stepfather, a master-bricklayer, he soon deserted it to enlist among
the English soldiers who were helping the Dutch to fight their Spanish
oppressors. Here he exhibited some of his dominating traits by challenging
a champion from the other army and killing him in classical fashion in
single combat between the lines. By about the age of twenty he was back in
London and married to a wife whom he later described as being 'virtuous but
a shrew,' and who at one time found it more agreeable to live apart from
him. He became an actor (at which profession he failed) and a writer of
plays. About 1598 he displayed his distinguishing realistic style in the