GENERAL

How, in this matter of sex and bawdiness, does Shakespeare compare with other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists? With the Restoration playwrights? And with those who come later?

Of all the dramatists flourishing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Shakespeare is the wittiest, profoundest, most idealistic yet most cynical, and, proportionally to the corpora operum, the most abundant: Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene-Ben Jonson, Webster, Tourneur, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, Middleton, Beaumont & Fletcher: all these men are inferior, in all those respects, to Shakespeare, and only Jonson in his comedies and Beaumont & Fletcher, whether in comedy or in tragicomedy, are as smutty; but unfortunately the smut of Ben Jonson, as of the collaborators, is less witty, Jonson’s tending to be thought up and thought out, the collaborators’ inclining to the shop-walkers’ snigger (‘I couldn’t find those ribbons in your drawers, Miss Jones’) and to the foppish courtiers’ apparent inability to be other than innuendoish.