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 litera ture. 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 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 |