His dirge in the _Duchess of Malfi_, Charles Lamb thought worthy to be set beside the ditty in _The Tempest_, which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father.

"As that is of the water, watery, so this is of the earth, earthy." He has earned his place among the greatest of our dramatists by his two plays, the theme of which matched his sombre genius and the sombreness of the season in which it flowered.
But the drama could not survive long the altered times, and the voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end.
They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama.

Decadence is a term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which keeps the work a coherent and intact whole.

Poetry is decadent when the sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper implications.

Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of O'Shaughnessy's "We are the music-makers, We are the dreamers of dreams," decadent because it conveys nothing but the mere delight in an obvious rhythm of words, or such a poem as Morris's "Two red roses across the moon;" because a meaningless refrain, merely pleasing in its word texture, breaks in at intervals on the reader.