For about a decade longer poetic tragedy continued to contend for the theatre. Its main hope lay in Macready, and its hey-day was during his two periods of management of Drury Lane, 1837-39 and 1841-42. After the success of "Werner" ("Marino Faliero" had been earlier produced in 1821), "Sardanapalus" was brought out by Macready in 1833-34; and "The Two Foscari" later. Knowles's "Alfred the Great" and his "Bridal," an adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy," won considerable success; and "The Pledge," a version of Victor Hugo's "Hernani," in 1831 heralded new support for romantic poetry in the drama. In the years 1836-37 Macready introduced three new writers in the "Ion" of Talfourd, "Strafford" of Browning, and the "Duchess de la Vallière" of Bulwer-Lytton. Talfourd's tragedies, including two, "The Athenian Captive" and "Glencoe," later acted by Macready, are stiff and wooden, contributing little to the drama. Bulwer-Lytton's later plays, "The Lady of Lyons" (1838) and "Richelieu" (1839), were extremely successful and surpassed any preceding efforts of the romanticists to adapt poetry to the stage. "Richelieu" is by no means a great poem or free from claptrap, but it has the merit of being written to be spoken and in having its characters designed as parts of the action. The interest is not in the poetry--it reads much better with the omissions made for acting--but in the development of the character of the cardinal through the incidents. The failure of "The Blot on the 'Scutcheon" in 1843 marks the end of Macready's management and the end of romantic tragedy on the stage.
Many of these acted plays gained what suitability they had for the stage by accident rather than design. Milman's "Fazio" was published several years before it was acted, and his later tragedies were decidedly closet dramas. Miss Mitford's "Julian" made little impression on the stage, and her other tragedies, except "Rienzi," still less. Byron's tragedies, which succeeded largely no doubt because of his reputation, were acted against his wish or after his death. And the various poetic tragedies that were written at about the same time as Byron's and Shelley's were mostly composed without thought of stage presentation. The surpassing genius of the greater poets has thrown into obscurity the work of these other young men, who in the decade after Waterloo faced the world with thin volumes of verse. But there have been few times in our literary history when the Muses have been so alluring, and Melpomene had her share of devotees. In John Wilson's "City of the Plague" (1816) a young naval officer wanders about plague-stricken London, through its bacchanals and horrors, buries his mother, discovers his betrothed, the ministering angel of the afflicted, and at last finds rest with her in the terrible crowded churchyard. The poem is grandly conceived and beautifully written in verse, occasionally Wordsworthian but without affectation or over-ornament. Two other closet dramatists offer rather less sincerity and impressiveness of conception but even more of poetic beauty. "Joseph and his Brethren" (1823), by Charles Wells, for a time the friend of Keats, was published when the author was twenty-three, and fifty years later revived and rewritten because of the appreciation of Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne. Like the plays of Thomas Wade, it shows the influence of Marlowe in verse and plan. Long drawn out and in the main undramatic, there is imagination everywhere, especially in the remarkable scenes that depict the passion-inflamed Phraxanor, Potiphar's wife. Of the Elizabethans, too, was Beddoes, who studied Webster and Tourneur as well as Shelley and Keats, and whose verse at times fairly surpasses his masters. His "Bride's Tragedy" (1821), written when he was nineteen, is a play only in name, but it is a poem that joins terror and fascination as scarcely another since Webster and Ford. Here, as in his incompleted dramas and his "Death's Jest Book," published much later, loveliness masks with madness and death, and mockery with passion. It seems as if he were lavishing over strange juxtapositions of beauty and decay all the sensuous fascination of Keats and the lingering suggestiveness of Shelley's lyrics. One's admiration for his genius is tempered only by the thought of the greater things he might have done.