Excerpt from Shakespeare to Shaw: Studies in the Life's Work of Six Dramatists of the English Stage There is in this book, and there was in fact, a very long interval between the Shakespeare group and the Congreve constellation Shakespeare and his immediate successors, who were really his contemporaries, for he stopped work early, were so good and so real that they frightened the country, who really did not know what was going to happen, and feared, perhaps, that folk would soon begin writing modern plays! There is sometimes almost the same sort of feeling in the air now. So theatrical performances were first curtailed and then stopped altogether, and silenced for a while the wonderful Shakespearean group containing Ben J onson, Marston, Heywood, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher and the gloomy J ohn Webster about whom so little is known, and who is considered by some critics to be the greatest dramatist after the Master himself. When the theatres reopened at the Restoration it was not to admit a great dramatist, although it did admit a very great man. J ohn Dryden preferred popularity to immortality, and luxury to poverty, and frankly wrote plays to please the public. He was apparently a great and wonderful landmark in his time, a tree that towered above all others, but has not weathered the storms of the centuries. Practically nothing is known, seen, or heard of his dramatic work nowadays, outside the circle of those interested in the theatre or literature. And inside these circles practically all that is known of his exploits as a dramatist is that he wrote a play called All for Love, which was a poor version of Antony and Cleopatra. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.