Shakespeare may be free and even coarse.

Beaumont and Fletcher cultivate indecency.

They made their subject not their master but their plaything, or an occasion for the convenient exercise of their own powers of figure and rhetoric.
Of their followers, Massinger, Ford and Shirley, no more need be said than they carried one step further the faults of their masters.

Emotion and tragic passion give way to wire-drawn sentiment.

Tragedy takes on the air of a masquerade.