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Post-Shakespearean Dramatists and declining of drama during post-Shakespeare period

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Post-Shakespearean Dramatists
Introduction -

Post Shakespearean drama/Jacobean drama (that is, the drama of the age of James 11603-1625) was a decadent form of the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The Elizabethan age was the golden age of English drama.With the turn of the century the drama in England also took a turn. It does not mean that there were no dramatists left. There certainly was a large number of them, but none of them could come anywhere near Shakespeare.Just as after Chaucer, poetry in England suffered a decline, similarly after Shakespeare had given his best (that is, after the sixteenth century) drama also suffered a decline. With the passage of time it grew more and more decadent, till with Shirley in the …show more content…

The blank verse of Beaumont and Fletcher is similarly inclined to a free use of weak and feminine endings. The “mighty line” of Marlowe and terse verse of
Shakespeare in the prime are lost. As the fifteenth century followers of Chaucer failed to retain the charm of their master’s versification, so the later dramatists were quite unable to recapture the vital quality of dramatic blank verse.

7) Poor Characterisation – The post-Shakespearean dramatists had little skill in creating characters.

They could not create new characters. They had certain stock-characters which they represented again and again in their plays. The whore, the lustful king, the adventurous panderer, were their wooden characters and they repeated them with mechanical regularity in their plays.
8) Other Channels of Expression – Dramatic literature suffered a setback due to the growing popularity of poetry and novels as medium of expressing literary thoughts. These two forms of literature proved more fascinating to authors, and instead of diverting their energy to drama which was on its way to decline, they directed their thoughts and ideas to the field of poetry and fiction.
9) Opposition by the Puritans – The Puritan opposition to drama is also responsible for the decline of drama during this age. Since the

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