Jonson's scholarship was thorough, but sweetened and ventilated by his activities as poet and dramatist.
The answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is seldom a Shakespeare.
The genius for story-telling is just the genius which is incapable of being a fine dramatist.
This, unfortunately, could not, in the sense in which the word "good" was then meant, be said of most modern dramatists.
Throughout the present discussion, I have insisted on the point that the great dramatists have always written primarily for the many.
Novelists and dramatists put hitherto taboo dialogue into the mouths of characters whose real counterparts would be unlikely to use it.
Yet, paradoxically, through utilizing melodramatic convention, dramatists were able to focus attention on the plight of the child worker.
But the natural-sounding dialogue written by a good novelist or dramatist is not really natural at all, but is actually highly artificial.
