permitting the fancy to play more intimately through all the emotions. Such, in a general way, would seem to be the origin of the new form, which lay in germ in some of the earlier plays, but was developed in the first decade of the seventeenth century into the well-marked genre of the romantic drama.1 Its influence, direct and indirect, from that day to this has been incalculable.

The possible beauty of this new form of drama is familiar to us from The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, if not from the work of other writers; it is of a kind, indeed, to appeal with peculiar cogency to ears accustomed to modern romance. But with the faults inherent in the genre it is different. Ethically these are so involved in the obscure currents of the age that their real source and gravity are likely to be overlooked, and æsthetically we have become more or less blunted to them by long familiarity. Yet there has been no lack of individual protests against the sudden conversions of character and quick shiftings of motive which are the most striking manifesta

1 In his monograph on The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, Prof. A. H. Thorndike has brought together a mass of evidence to show that Beaumont and Fletcher were the creators of this genre and that Shakespeare was the imitator. The argument is persuasive, if not entirely conclusive. It might have been better in this case to have separated the "twins," and to have sought the origin of the romantic drama in the peculiar genius of Beaumont alone.

tions of a deep-lying corruption. There are still readers and spectators who, however they may be borne along by the magic of Shakespeare's style, are brave enough to admit that they are disconcerted by the inartistic abruptness of such changes in passion as those of Leontes in The Winter's Tale; and one critic at least, who followed not long after the efflorescence of the romantic drama, was so bold or, if you will, so insolent, as to enlarge the censure of these faults into virulent abuse of the whole Elizabethan stage.

There is an offensive undertone of buffoonery in old Thomas Rymer's diatribe against The Tragedies of the Last Age; his taste was vitiated by an insensibility to things beautiful in themselves and by a hard pseudo-classic canon of decorum, but one is bound to admit that his criticism of The Maid's Tragedy (not to say of Othello) finds the weak points of the play with diabolical shrewdness. "This may be Romance, but not Nature," he exclaims, after setting forth the irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs. And he is justified. Consider, for example, the speeches of a single actor in that tangle of lust and love, loyalty and effrontery. We first become acquainted with Evadne in a scene (II, i) characteristic of the age, when her ladies are disrobing her after her marriage to Amintor. Here she displays delicacy of feeling which might befit a

Desdemona; yet immediately afterwards, to repulse her husband, she avows her lust, her engagement to the King, and her acceptance of Amintor merely as "one to father children":

Alas, Amintor, think'st thou I forbear

To sleep with thee, because I have put on
A maiden's strictness? Look upon these cheeks,
And thou shalt find the hot and rising blood
Unapt for such a vow. No; in this heart
There dwells as much desire and as much will
To put that wish'd act in practice as e'er yet
Was known to woman; and they have been shown
Both. But it was the folly of thy youth

To think this beauty, to what land soe'er
It shall be called, shall stoop to any second.
I do enjoy the best, and in that height

Have sworn to stand or die; you guess the man.

To the King himself (III, i) she admits only her calculating pride, declaring that she loves with her ambition, not with her eyes, and that if he were thrust from his throne she would forsake him for his supplanter. Later, though she had expressed a certain pity for Amintor (II, i), she is heard laughing with the King over the way they have cozened him. In the great scene (IV, i) in which her brother charges her disgrace upon her and demands the death of her paramour, there is perhaps justification for her deep repentance; certainly in the magnificent sweep of the emotions here portrayed the reader is not likely to feel anything false to nature, if such exists, even in her

transition from abject self-abasement to a kind of self-pity:

Here I swear it,

And all you spirits of abused ladies

Help me in this performance.

But the same cannot be said of her words to the King when she prepares to murder him in his bed-chamber (v, ii). There is something in her "mere joy" in killing that jars with her previous mood of chastened grief, and when one considers her avowed reasons for deceiving Amintor, one has almost a feeling of revulsion at the tone of her accusation:

I am as foul as thou art, and can number
As many such hells here. I once was fair,
Once I was lovely; not a blowing rose

More chastely sweet, till thou, thou, thou, foul canker, (Stir not) didst poison me.

Chaste and sweet- if the lady and the dramatist have forgotten her first confession to Amintor, the reader certainly has not. Nor can the reader quite stomach her next mood of sudden and overwhelming love for Amintor (Iv, i), however deep her aversion to the King may have become.

The simple fact is, here are but a succession of womanly passions, each indeed cunningly conceived and expressed, but giving us in the end nothing we can grasp as a whole and comprehend

no woman at all, unless mere random passion

ateness can be accounted such. And this sense of incoherence would be magnified if we should analyse Amintor and the other persons of the drama in the same way. To the dramatist in his abuse of passions as the occasion of the plot permits or drives him, we are tempted to apply the words of Rowley in All's Lost by Lust :

Time's ancient bawd, opportunity,

Attends us now, and yet our flaming blood
Will scarce give leave to opportunity.

Evadne is presumably the creation of Beaumont. For the typical work of Fletcher in this genre we may turn to Valentinian. If there is anything in reputable literature more revolting to the ethical sense (as the Greeks conceived êthos) than the conclusion of that play, I cannot now recall it. All through the first four acts we see Maximus and his friend Aecius acting as high-minded Romans. The Emperor Valentinian, a base, libidinous creature, lures the beautiful and chaste wife of Maximus to the court, and there ravishes her. Nothing could be nobler in the old heroic sense than the first scene of the third act, in which the two friends learn of her ruin and part from her as she goes out with the determination to purify her stain by death:

Lucina. Farewell for ever, Sir.
Maximus. That's a sad saying,

But such a one becomes ye well, Lucina.

And yet methinks we should not part so lightly;