William Shakespeare "As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds," Francis Meres declared in "Palladis Tamia" (1598). The resolution is complete in Shakespeare’s latest plays" (Ellis-Fermor, 1958 pp 1-4). That of the Elizabethan age proper, the drama of Greene, Kyd, Peek, Marlowe and the early work of Shakespeare, is characterized by its faith in vitality, its worship of the glorious processes of life, an expansion and elation of mind which corresponds directly to the upward movement of a prosperous and expanding society.These things then were the heritage of the Jacobean drama on the threshold of its growth: spiritual uncertainty springing in part from the spreading of Machiavellian materialism emphasized by Marlowe’s tragic thought and in still greater degree from the cause which has reproduced it today for us, fear of the impending destruction of a great civilization.After the spiritual nadir of the middle years of the period a slow return to equilibrium sets in.giving place to a mood that is sometimes serenity, sometimes indifference, but, in either case, that of an age that has ceased to live in touch with catastrophe. "The mood of the drama from the early Elizabethan to the late Jacobean period appears to pass through three phases, each reflecting with some precision the characteristic thought, preoccupation or attitude to the problems of man’s being of the period to which it belongs. Jacobean plays comprise the period from 1603 to 1625, during the reign of James I. Copy by Aernout van Buchel (1565-1641) of a drawing by Johannes de Witt The Swan theater was the site of Jacobean plays.
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