With the Wits BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER THE Cambridge University Press has brought us no better gift these latter years than the complete works of Beaumont and Fletcher, "those renowned twins of poetry," exactly edited by the care of Arnold Glover and A. R. Waller.1 No one now would style these volumes, as James Shirley styled the first folio edition, "without flattery, the greatest monument of the scene that time and humanity have produced"; but they contain an inexhaustible body of entertainment, and, as Shirley said to the reader in that "tragical age where the theatre [had] been so much out-acted," so we may say to the reader in these times of gathering trouble: "Congratulate thy own happiness, that, in this silence of the stage, thou hast a liberty to read these inimitable plays, to dwell and converse in these immortal groves, which were only showed our fathers in a conjuring glass, as suddenly removed as represented." Beaumont may have been a sentimentalist and Fletcher may be a shocking example of prostituted genius, 1 The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Ten volumes. The Cambridge University Press. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1905-12. but they were of their age, and together they are the typical masters of the mature Elizabethan drama, which, with all its sins of omission and commission, is still the most extraordinary, if not the greatest, achievement of English literature. The earlier Elizabethan tragedies had as a rule (not invariably) been based on a single master passion, which by its excess led both the persons possessed by it and their victims into acts of blood and madness. Comedy meanwhile had been largely a thing of adventure and amusement, an escape from fact and fatality into a world of happier fancy, until, by introducing the master passion in the form of humours, Jonson changed fancy into satire and set comedy on a parallel with tragedy. That was a change important alike for literature and philosophy; but about the same time another step, no less notable in its consequences, was taken, or followed, by Beaumont and Fletcher. Hitherto tragedy and comedy, when united in the same play, had, for the most part, stood together as mere alternations from one genre to another. A more essential union of the two was prepared when our twin dramatists (if we may give them all the credit) altered the theme of tragedy from a single master passion to a number of loosely coördinated passions, thus relaxing the rigidity of the tragic structure and |