of situations, tragic or romantic, and even comic, as when they mock, in A King and no King,' the niceties of honour adapted to arrant cowards. Their efforts on the side of reason are especially marked in Fletcher and his later coadjutor Massinger. In The Custom of the Country,' the conversion of an arrogant duellist is moralised; in 'The Lovers' Progress,' the duel between bosom friends and their seconds, and the duel thrust upon a temperate man with fatal results to his opponent and remorse and danger to himself, are both made as odious as precept, characterisation, and effective situations can make them; while in 'A Very Woman,' now credited to Fletcher as well as Massinger, Cardenes, after being schooled in honour of the right stamp' by almost fatal wounds, asks of his enemy in return for his wounds and 'honour in the general report Tainted and soil'd,'

"This satisfaction-that you would forgive
My contumelious words and blow, my rash
And unadvised wildness first threw on you.'

To read Beaumont and Fletcher's plays is to sojourn in a world in which all these elements muster and contend-bravery and feasting, and their children debauchery and riot; hot blood and strained notions of honour, bringing grave or tragic consequences out of trifling causes; above all, the inevitable sex intrigue of undisciplined times. Subtle adventuresses, such as Lelia in 'The Captain,' begin in the pages of Arthur Wilson as victims of parental waste:

'Many .. young gentlewomen (whom their Parents debaucheries drive to necessities) made their Beauties their fortunes, coming to London to put them to sale; and some of them had so good Markets, that they obtained great Pensions during their lives, and afterwards were married to men of eminent parts, and fortunes, aecounted wise, gallant and heroical spirits.'*

'Plots and contrivances for lust, acted in dark corners' led to crime and suspicion of crime in high places in the age as on the stage, which truly reflects the time in its representation of base and blood-stained intrigue. The tendency to represent the agonies resulting from poisonas in the frightful scenes which display Valentinian, in

* See instances in Wilson, op. cit. p. 146.

the earlier stages of suffering, witnessing in another the course that his own tortures will take, or those in which Thierry waits for death, sleepless as a hooded hawk' through his mother's crime-are no doubt an outcome of the suspicions of poison and spells that were abroad, and of actual crimes, of which the supreme instance is the murder of Overbury in 1613. It is characteristic of Fletcher to vary and repeat situations of this kind in tragi-comedy. So, in 'The Custom of the Country,' the heroine is relieved of a wasting spell by the relenting pity of her rival; and, in ‘A Wife for a Month,' poison tortures but cures a sick and melancholy prince.

However corrupt a society may be, there are always shining exceptions; and no doubt strong contrasts in actual life encouraged Beaumont and Fletcher to carry the delineation of character out of its simpler and more natural range, and to attempt the exhibition of ideal types of virtue, courage, loyalty, as opposed to their contraries; but neither these nor other related effects can be wholly attributed to the authors' surroundings, however susceptible their youth and social position may have rendered them. Behind them was an established tradition, a long roll of achievement, which, while it gave them unexampled facility, at the same time made it difficult to provide the public with anything novel on the old lines, and put them upon drawing characters in extremes, at the expense of probability and true representation of life. Similarly, the search for new situations and surprising turns of plot, combined with the growing distaste for tragic endings, not only introduced improbabilities into dramatic fable, but had much to do with the inconsistencies admitted into ordinary characters, and the violent conversions of base or even monstrous persons at convenient moments, such as that of Lelia in The Captain,' or Rodrigo in 'The Pilgrim.' The cause was probably twofold; for it is an acute observation of J. A. Symonds * that reversions from one temper to its opposite, which are unnatural now, may not have been unnatural then.

In Fletcher, the survivor by about ten years, the professional playwright with his inventive faculties in constant demand, such tendencies as those mentioned in the

last paragraph naturally reach a climax; but the sound judgment traditionally ascribed to Beaumont by no means excluded them from the plays of their co-operation. Fletcher's plots are sometimes full of marvels and adventure far removed from the comparative regularity and verisimilitude of Philaster' and 'The Maid's Tragedy '-we may instance the mixture of true divinity and cheating oracle, of extravagant passion and ideal brotherly love in The Mad Lover,' and that of shipwrecked pirates, treasure and bloodshed, would-be cannibals, and Amazonian refugees in 'The Sea Voyage -but the joint play 'Cupid's Revenge' foreshadowed the first of these combinations in its resort to supernatural machinery. To Fletcher belong the most persistent attempts to outdo previous characterisation by drawing ideal types of virtues and their opposites, and also many highly wrought conflicts between love and honour-features which point forward to the themes and characters of the heroic plays of the Restoration, and backward to the Sophonisba' of Marston, where the dilemma of noble natures between these feelings conceived as inviolable principles and passions had been finely portrayed in the characters of Massinissa and Sophonisba. 'The Wonder of Women or The Tragedie of Sophonisba,' in which the author, profiting by Jonson's lesson in The Poetaster,' has purified his barbarous language, is styled in the Cambridge History of English Literature 'the crudest of Marston's performances.' Notwithstanding its revolting realism and its straining after horrors in certain scenes, this judgment is too harsh.

But, granted that Fletcher's later work is most open to criticism in the features described, he is only developing, not introducing, new methods. The union of devoted love with complete self-abnegation is ideal in Bellario; and Arbaces, in ‘A King and no King,' 'still stands out as the finest character of the impossible type which the heroic play requires.' Mr Alden,* who makes this true remark about Arbaces, points out at the same time that he is, if not precisely plausible, at any rate a genuine character study.' In 'Philaster,' Megra, the meanest figure in the whole gallery of magnified examples of lust

*Introduction, p. xxviii.

and villainy in woman, is as completely vile in her own plane as any that follow; and the more monstrous but greater Bacha in 'Cupid's Revenge' is only outdone by Brunhalt in 'Thierry and Theodoret.' As at first romantically introduced, she has, however, a fleeting charm, and recalls Shakespeare's Cleopatra in her astute handling of Prince Leucippus at their parting (Act ii, sc. 1):

BACHA. 'Nay, you may stay now;

You should have gone before: I know not now
Why I should fear you: All I should have kept
Is stol'n: Nor is it in the power of man
To rob me farther: if you can invent,
Spare not; No naked man fears robbing less
Than I doe: now you may for ever stay.'

In the case of one passion-loyalty-Fletcher has in some respects modified, in later presentments, its earliest expression. Amintor in 'The Maid's Tragedy' is at once an attempt at the superlative in type and a creation of 'the temper of the times; wherein men made themselves less than men, by making kings little less than gods.'* The opposite of this submissive temper, which co-existed in the nation and showed itself more and more as time went on, is, in the same play, impartially personified in Melantius, whose punishment of royal injuries refutes criticism of the dramatists as servile subjects, but does not exonerate them from the charge of representing a noble passion in a way that robs it of all beauty and respect. But Fletcher, both when writing alone and in later partnerships, introduces into his conception of loyal sufferance the claims of the State. Aëcius in Valentinian,' when he warns Maximus against avenging his ravished wife, thus excuses his own attitude (iii, 3, ad fin.):

'And I must tell ye truth, were it not hazard,
And almost certain loss of all the Empire,

I would join with ye. . . .

But as the rule now stands, and as he rules,
And as the Nations hold in disobedience,

One pillar failing, all must fall; I dare not.'

In 'The Bloody Brother' it is the claims of the State that dictate to Aubrey (who fears not to restrain his Duke

and kinsman by word and action) the cold-blooded policy of condoning the murder of Otto, in contrast with the generous and self-destructive indignation of the Chancellor and the Tutor. Even the old soldier Archas (in 'The Loyal Subject'), whose active loyalty not even persistent injustice and the rack can diminish, speaks in a temper and language far removed from that of Amintor r; and in A Wife for a Month,' where Amintor's situation is repeated in a more eccentric and yet similar form, Valerio preserves a dignity in his submission, which is also more reasonably accounted for. In this play, Evanthe herself reappears, under her own name, with the same intrepid and sensual nature, blunt in expression and coarse in anger, but this time conditioned by a true and lawful affection. Fletcher, like Shakespeare, reproduces characters and situations, disguising the fact by skilful variation.*

In other ways also the responsibility of Beaumont for a share in defects of judgment appears. It is in 'Philaster' that honourable and noble persons are made to act most out of character. The hero wounds his mistress, and afterwards his boy, to save himself,' as Dryden says; and the case is much worse there than in the other instances which he cites from 'The Faithful Shepherdess.' Moreover, Dion, in 'Philaster,' falsely confirms Megra's assertion of Arethusa's unchastity on the evidence of his own eyes, that Philaster may believe it as he himself most credulously does. In 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle' the love-story of Jasper and Luce is spoilt by Jasper's particularly ill-timed love-test (Act iii, scene 1); † while, in The Woman-Hater,' the strained situations and

* Tonie, King Frederick's Knavish fool,' in this play appeals against a slip of memory in 'The Cambridge Hist. of Lit.' vi, 130, where the fool in 'The Mad Lover' is said to be the only character of the kind in Beaumont and Fletcher's plays.'

+ There are possibly slender links between this play and 'The Merry Devil of Edmonton.' In both the scene is sometimes placed at Waltham; the lovers escape through the forest by night; the hosts are keen to appreciate and promote a joke. Moreover, the uncommon name of the keeper, Brian, in ‘The Merry Devil,' is used in 'The Knight of the Burning Pestle,' ii, 1.

Now usually attributed wholly to Beaumont, though the heroine Oriana has the daring and initiative, the insensitiveness to blackguard language, characteristic of the more prominent Fletcherian type of maiden, and is as persistent in her whimsical pursuit of the misogynist as is her namesake in her serious pursuit of Mirabel in 'The Wild Goose Chase.'