construction that holds the interest through one suspense to another up to the unravelling at the very end, and on the naturalness, felicity, and vigour of the poetry.

“Beaumont and Fletcher have no emotions too fleeting or too profound for utterance, no perplexing tangle of thought that defies expression in decasyllabics; and they had no desire to make their style sententious, weighty, philosophical. They had no doubt about what they wanted to say, and they said it clearly and rapidly. They had room for ornament and rhetorical device but none for eccentricity or obscurity.”⁴

All this work Beaumont treated with an unusual sense of the irony of life, that is, the contrast between the largeness of the result and the pettiness of the cause; with much humorous observation of character, and often with much sympathetic insight. Indeed, in contrast with Fletcher, it may be said that he cared more for rounded and consistent characterisation, although he is not impeccable in this respect.

Did these two young men, then, present in these collaborative plays life as they saw it? Surely it would rather seem that they agreed with George Chapman: “And for the auntenticall truth of eyther person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a Poeme, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth.” All this work is not far removed as dramatic writing from what to-day we call “refined melodrama.” Yet, was even this high order of melodrama the spontaneous outpouring of the artistic impulses of these two men? Hardly, it is to be suspected. In the first place, their work shows that they were under the influence of both Shakespeare and Jonson. They knew and had studied the successes of these dramatic masters. There is evident imitation of both in The Woman-Hater and elsewhere in the early works. In that play Beaumont, and just possibly Fletcher, seem to be feeling their way hesitatingly toward individual expression. Moreover, the critical sense that usually renders wholehearted adherence to romance impossible was not wanting in Beaumont, nor was critical dramatic sense lacking in Fletcher. The proof of this lies in The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Faithful Shepherdess. In each play the dramatist, though hoping to please his audience, wrote primarily to please himself. In neither case did the public approve the play. The Knight girds at all the absurdities of popular dramatic romance, as seen, for instance, in the plays of Marston and Heywood. Yet romance was just as rampant in this collaborative work of Beaumont and Fletcher, though it was of a somewhat different kind and its absurdities were disguised by better stage-craft, a larger amount of really fine poetry, and more effective characterisation. Moreover, in the swifter movement of this newer romance an auditor had no time to hesitate and discover flaws. Quickly aroused emotionally by striking action at the beginning of the play, he was swept on by constantly varied and exciting incident, unable to criticise before the end was reached, and perhaps not even then. Beaumont too clearly recognised the faults inherent in such work and too evidently half despised the public for their devotion to mere romance not to see the fundamental unrealities in his own work. Fletcher, too, shows his critical sense in The Faithful Shepherdess: in it, for strictly artistic ends, he exercised a restraint practically unknown in his popular plays. “Fletcher on the other hand conceived of the pastoral as artistically remote from actual life, and even to please his audience would not make it `a play of country- hired shepherds with curtailed dogs in strings.’ That Fletcher felt this aloofness of the form is evident from the fact that in using it he adopted a treatment distinct in almost every point from that which he followed in his other plays. Not only does he introduce a different metrical scheme, but here, as nowhere else, he subordinates the plot interest to subtler considerations and effects, keeps down his predilection for complications and conventions, except such as will harmonise with the central idea, and even omits much of the plot of his Italian source—the Pastor Fido, which, in his search for material, would usually offer a strong appeal to him—all in order that he may obtain a simplicity of impression and unity of tone. That he also realised the small possibilities of stage effectiveness in the method which he followed is practically certain from his constant attention in other plays to stage success, as well as from the fact that he appears to have kept this play in its early form in spite of its utter failure on its first presentation. If such an inference is justifiable, The Faithful Shepherdess becomes interesting as apparently the only instance of Fletcher’s fidelity to a high artistic instinct when it was weighed in the balance against stage success.”⁵

Does not all this look as if two men whose educated critical sense revealed to them the weaknesses of popular dramatic romance said to themselves: “Romantic story-telling the public will have; to contend