against this is useless. Very well, then, it is as well that we should entertain them as another. But we will tell our extraordinary or impossible stories so that they shall seem as lifelike as possible, and shall have as much literary quality as we can give them”? That attitude is certainly not unknown at the present day. These two men did not believe in their romance-land, but for their own amusement and the delight of the public pretended to believe in it. Peele, Greene, Shakespeare, believing in their romance, turn it for us into reality.

With this theory, that Beaumont and Fletcher wrote in half-amused contempt of their public, yet gave their artistic best in producing what they conceived it wanted, it is easier to understand Beaumont’s quitting of the theatrical world in 1611. His was quite a different mood from that of Shakespeare or Thomas Heywood, who could unite in saying—

Born a gentleman, by environment and education a thoroughly cultivated man, Beaumont had given his literary instincts expression in a way that satisfied the general public. He had gratified youthful ambition and vanity by proving that he could win the suffrages of a public whose taste he despised, and at the same time lift it to appreciation of better art than they usually acclaimed. So, too, the outpouring of praise for Beaumont at his early death is easier to understand, if we may believe that the critical part of the public recognised in him not merely a charming personality and a rich poetic gift, but the man who had done the chief part in re-establishing romance in the drama, and a romance different in kind from that of 1580 to 1600.

Certainly, in the last few years students of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama have been recognising more and more that it is Beaumont rather than Fletcher who is the real creator of this new romance and is consequently the real forerunner, rather than Fletcher, of the heroic drama of the Restoration period. The romantic methods worked out in collaboration with Beaumont, Fletcher, so far as he was able, maintained. Through him they pass on to Massinger and D’Avenant, and from these to the Restoration period. While it is of course true that France through such romances as those of Calprenède and Mlle. de Scudéry, and through the drama of Corneille and Racine, had its effect on our heroic drama of 1660 to 1690, these influences found a soil thoroughly prepared by the romantic drama of Beaumont and his successors. Misled by the fact that D’Avenant and Dryden acknowledge their debt in heroic drama to Fletcher, we have failed till recently to note that Fletcher in his tragedies merely continues, as his equipment permits, what he had done in collaboration with Beaumont. The high-flown ideas of friendship between man and man such as we see in Melantius and Amintor in The Maid’s Tragedy become the stock-in-trade of the Restoration heroic drama. The heroines of the collaborative plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and later of Fletcher working by himself, are prepared to sacrifice all for love and hold the world well lost. As every one knows, the heroic drama in the Restoration turns on the struggle between love and honour, with the emotional scales tipping always on the side of love. Moreover, these plays of the newer romance show a straining of the situations that will in the hands of less competent men produce the excesses in the so-called tragedy of 1620 to 1642 and of the Restoration. Absurdity is often grimacing behind a mask in Beaumont and Fletcher, and especially in Fletcher’s own work: only the skill of the characterisation within the scene and consummate stage-craft save the day. In the heroic drama of the Restoration all these tendencies break loose, and absurdity reigns, except for an audience of the time hypnotised into delighted attention by the literary and dramatic conventions of the hour.

Beaumont’s position, then, in our drama is unique. Richly poetic, thoughtful, genuinely humorous, a belated Elizabethan working in the early years of James I., he is the chief creator of a new dramatic romance which leads in unbroken sequence to the heroic drama fifty years later.

Fletcher as a dramatist works for about twenty years. We attribute to him wholly or in part at least thirty- eight plays in which Beaumont is not held to have shared. As we have seen, they probably wrote together some eight or ten plays. That is, he seems to have been connected with some fifty extant plays, certainly a large product for twenty years. He collaborated with Massinger, Shakespeare, and it is said with Field