In this play the deceived husband dies of grief, but Eubella, who had earlier resisted the lustful duke, is solaced after the death of her betrothed by a promise of marriage from the duke himself. Both "The Politician" and "The Duke's Mistress," a tragedy along hackneyed lines, end with reward for the virtuous and punishment only for the vicious. Such application of poetic justice had been earlier expounded by Ben Jonson in defense of the punishments inflicted in his comedy, "Volpone." The applications of the doctrine in Shirley and Massinger were, however, probably due not so much to theoretical criticism as to the popular preference for the restriction of the catastrophe to the bad, a preference recorded by Aristotle and evidently shared by a generation in which romantic tragicomedy was the most popular dramatic form.
Shirley's tragic masterpieces, however, offered no alleviation of horror and bloodshed. "The Traitor" and "The Cardinal" are plays of revenge, lust, intrigue, and villany, in which all the accretions of this kind of tragedy from Kyd and Marlowe down to Webster and Massinger seem to be represented. The villains are as black as Barabas and as crafty as those of Webster; plots are as intricately entangled with counterplots as in Tourneur; and surprises follow as rapidly as in Fletcher. The corpse kissed by the repentant duke is again presented; there is attempted rape and assumed madness; in each play a bridegroom is murdered as he takes his place in the wedding procession; and in each revenge strews the final scene with the dead. But the old motives still had power to convey poetic inspiration, and the examples of all his predecessors summoned Shirley to his best efforts. Perhaps in no other plays does he so constantly recall their work; certainly in no others do the poetic quality of his language, the vigorous delineation of character, and the dramatic depiction of passion so worthily maintain what were even for men of his day the great traditions of English tragedy.
Tragedies by minor writers during the years from 1620 to 1642 offer little that is distinctive. Occasionally, as in the anonymous "Nero" of 1624, we have a play spontaneous in phrase and lifelike in characterization, worthy of the best days of the drama; but in the main the plays only repeat what is to be found in Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. In spite of the vogue of tragicomedy, tragedy was by no means neglected, nearly fifty tragedies being preserved from the twenty years, in addition to those by the authors mentioned. These include several by Suckling, Glapthorne's pastoral tragedy, "Argalus and Parthenia," and his worthless "Wallenstein," May's plays on classical history, and others by Killigrew, Davenant, Carlell, Heming, Davenport, and less known men.