And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
life into the outworn form.
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