[In the following essay, originally published in 1936, Fermor places Beaumont and Fletcher in the context of Jacobean drama, addressing questions of genre, character construction, and thematic development.]

The work of Beaumont and Fletcher escapes from the tyranny of Jacobean incertitude into a world of its own creating. It is bound neither by the weight and horror which oppresses the tragedy nor by the compensatory pragmatism which binds the comedy to realistic portraiture. It evades the great questions (except as debating topics) and it endows with remoteness all emotions, so that the strongest passions fail to engulf us, however, fiercely the characters seem to be shaken by them. Through the tragi-comedies and the early joint tragedies in particular, there is transfused a colour of such singular beauty that we accept enchantment as we do a dream or a fairy-tale, not seeking in these plays, as in the great Jacobean tragedies, implicit answers to our urgent doubts, but escaping into them as into the moonlit stage of an exquisite opera-set, become suddenly real and co-extensive with life itself. Upon this stage and in this clear, remote radiance all the events of life take part and types of character of nearly as wide a range as can be found in all the rest of the Jacobean drama; the air is full of reverberant rhetoric melting cadences of word and music, clear, sweet pathos and sentiment more noble than can be readily found in the world outside. So bright is it, so self-contained, this sanctuary from the agonies of spiritual tragedy and the cynicism of observant comedy, that it dims the real world, bewilders our faculties and comes near to laying asleep in us the uneasy sense of sleep-walking illusion.

The names of Beaumont and Fletcher are often associated so closely with tragi-comedy that their work and that form of play are loosely spoken of as if they were co-extensive. This, which is obviously not the case, since there are at most only five surviving tragi-comedies of their joint workmanship, is yet one of those absurdities more literally than fundamentally untrue. For Beaumont and Fletcher's collaboration covers most of the short career of Beaumont and of the early and formative period in Fletcher's professional life, and, coming at the moment when the tragic mood of the early part of the century was at its climax and very near its end, it gave, by its originality (not only of form but of temper) and by its immense popularity, an impression so deep that most of the subsequent drama bears testimony to it. The large body of plays published in the second folio of 1679 under the name of Beaumont and Fletcher is directly of their fathering and much of the work of Fletcher's later contemporaries only less so. If we agree to regard the element of romance, the withdrawal from the pursuit of reality, as the distinctive quality of this tragi-comedy and the essential difference which separates them from their predecessors in tragedy or comedy, then perhaps we are not far wrong in deriving from them a large proportion of the extensive late Jacobean drama (whether tragi-comedy, tragedy or, in some cases, comedy) which is similarly characterized by this element. In this respect, then, the body of tragi-comedy and the work of Beaumont and Fletcher and of Fletcher in collaboration with others can be connected, so that the old association of terms continues to hold significance.

When Beaumont and Fletcher escaped at once from the tragic oppression and the analytic comedy of their predecessors they did, in fact, create something not only in a new mood but in a new kind. For their intimate blending, not only of the elements of tragedy and comedy but also of the emotions belonging to each kind, led, in their case, to an emotional type totally different not only from either of these others, but even from the earlier, Elizabethan combinations. The artistic contrast between the world of comedy and of tragedy or potential tragedy had been perceived some twenty years back, as early as Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and indicated by the simple juxtaposition of the two in plots almost entirely separate. Shakespeare's use of potential tragedy to enhance and ripen the mood of his late comedies, even in Much Ado and The Merchant of Venice, still leaves them distinct and separable. At the same time, the serious plot remains to some degree realistic and reasonably probable and the springs of the motives are those of everyday men, even if their fortunes lead them to the Forest of Arden or cast them upon the sea-coast of Illyria. The fortunes are different and there is a corresponding modification of bearing in the characters, but at no point are we aware, as so often with Beaumont and Fletcher, of a difference of mental process resulting from their romantic or tragic surroundings. In the mixed plays of Middleton, from The Phoenix to The Old Law, and still more in Chapman's Gentleman Usher and Monsieur d'Olive, there has been some development away from the Elizabethan kind. The blending of the two kinds of action is closer; in The Gentleman Usher, the romantic story of Vincentio and Margaret and the devices by which Vincentio manipulates the gullable Bassiolo are not two plots, but separate aspects of one. But the characters are rooted in normality; even Strozza, who changes so rapidly from a vigorous, practical man of action to an almost prophetic mystic, does so on just such terms as did many of Chapman's contemporaries, most notably Ralegh himself, and each phase is understandable and reconcilable alike to the events which have prompted it and to the personalities by which he is surrounded. This phase of Chapman's romantic comedy links indeed the middle comedy of Shakespeare with the tragi-comedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, but the likeness to its successors is a matter of structural technique rather than of thought or word.

Fletcher's definition of tragi-comedy (in the Address to the Reader prefixed to the first edition of The Faithful Shepherdess in 1609), though it was hardly an adequate description of the new form that he had already set going, shows that he had in mind something more than Chapman had reached in The Gentleman Usher; he carried the definition straight over from his Italian predecessors in this form, perhaps without realizing that his own creation was, or was about to be a further development of theirs:

A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kinde of trouble as no life be question'd, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie, and meane people as in a comedie.

That Fletcher has not specified all the characteristics of his new dramatic type here may be shown by a random application of the formula to some play which conforms to what is set down and yet is quite other than the specialized Jacobean tragi-comedy. Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside, to take perhaps the most incongruous that could be chosen, 'wants deaths' and yet 'brings some near it'; it is 'representative of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned'; it does indeed hover on the borderline between tragedy and comedy, but no reader would hesitate for an instant to reject it from the category of plays which Fletcher had in mind. It has a grim sense of moral law, an unsparing realism of portraiture, an immediacy which Fletcher's have not; it lacks the romantic vicissitudes, the romantic love plots and the exotic or at least foreign setting, the cunning succession of events, surprises and quick turns of plot which all or nearly all of his possess. It is clear then that the distinctive characteristic of Fletcher's new tragi-comedy was not the mixture of ingredients or the relatively greater closeness of the mixture, not even the refusal to go to the extreme in either direction, though these are necessary corollaries if we once accept the main characteristic, that of the non-realistic and romantic approach to the material. It is the mood of the play which is of so great importance, a mood which lies, as Fletcher suggests, somewhere between the light-heartedness of unshadowed comedy and the apprehension of shock and mystery which attend a tragic catastrophe. If this indeed be the fundamental distinction between tragi-comedy and the other two kinds (and Fletcher is careful to tell us that it is no mere mixture of the elements that he has in mind), then it is the creation of this middle mood which is the contribution of Beaumont and Fletcher to the subsequent drama.

Directly we think in terms of this distinction of mood, this creation of an imagined world neither tragic nor comic which yet, taking something from each, resulted in something different again from either, we are prepared to admit that a well-marked technique was likely to result from it and that the mood, once clearly created, could be introduced into any play, irrespective of formal distinctions between tragedy, tragi-comedy and comedy. This assumption is, indeed, confirmed early in the joint careers of the two authors. The plays which conform to Fletcher's definition, such as Philaster and A King and No King, are not essentially different in respect of mood, characterization or style from those, like The Maid's Tragedy and Cupid's Revenge, which, by reason that they do not 'want deaths', are classed as tragedies. It is, I think, impossible, up to the moment at which Evadne murders the king, to gather from the tone of the play that catastrophe will, in this case, touch the characters instead of, as in Philaster, just missing them. There is no stronger sense of horror than might be felt at the situation offered in A King and No King. There are no stronger apprehensions of immanent evil than there. And in Cupid's Revenge the opening is deceptively light-hearted; even when Urania and Leucippus are stabbed we expect that it will turn out to be but a wound (as with Bellario and Philaster before them) and that they will rise and walk away unharmed to the happy inheritance of the kingdom. It takes the stage directions to convince us they are dead. Something, then, in the mood which is the peculiar creation of Beaumont and Fletcher has disabled us from distinguishing, in the world we are now moving in, the characters, emotions and events that will lead to tragedy from those that will lead through romantic stress to escape. What, then, are those further implications in this mood?

Whatever be suggested in the phrase 'It wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy', we cannot therefrom assume that Fletcher supposed the converse, that deaths necessarily constituted tragedy. Dramatists had not yet touched the type of tragedy which dispenses with the catastrophe of death, and the practice of the whole body of contemporary work is witness that 'deaths', whether or not the individual writer supposed them to constitute tragedy, were at least regarded as an inseparable part of it. What is, rather, borne out by the immediate practice of these two tragi-comedy writers (and is equally in harmony with Fletcher's theory) is the desire to escape from the weight and profundity of tragic thought no less than from the accuracy and exactness of comic portraiture. They were minded equally to let the great questions rest and to refuse the painstaking research into human nature to which the work of Ben Jonson pointed them. Irresponsibility then is an essential part of their attitude, the irresponsibility which creates fairy-tales either as an escape from what is threatening to overwhelm the mind, or as a welcome and reasonable reaction against an over-long period of strain, or as an extension of the domain of imaginative experience. And the mood in which Beaumont and Fletcher approached their early plays seems to have something in it of all three and to be that of the pure romance or fairy-tale, not referable to any criteria but of artistic satisfaction and effectiveness, not concealing under its narrative a hidden or secondary series of moral implications, not at all concerned to preach, however far debating of the issues of their conduct may preoccupy some of the characters.

It is moreover characteristic of a certain type of fairy-tale (not necessarily of all) that the characters themselves are affected by the atmosphere in which they move, so that they do not necessarily act like those of everyday life, and the rare and strange events that befall them beget emotions and motives that are themselves a little strange, a little unaccountable. They do not do what ordinary people in such circumstances, illuminated by the light of common day, would do, but, more happily for the author (and for the reader if he be of like mind), what he would, in a kind of dream-world, have them do, in order that such and such further situations might arise. They do not, when once he has begotten them, take charge of him and his tale and dictate to him what he shall write; rather, he foresees situations which he will enjoy exploring, plans for them emotions and experiences in which he will enjoy watching them and then sets them therein. There is, of course, enough consistency of character to make it superficially convincing; even a fairy-tale fails of its consummation if there is no sufficient evidence that these things are happening to people reasonably like those we know. The emotions must be strange enough to give us the sense of escape, but the people who experience them must be like enough to persuade us that it is we in them who achieve that escape. And so the fairy-world of Beaumont and Fletcher is, even at its most fanciful, peopled by beings who act plausibly most of the time and only rarely strain our credulity. But the distinction between them and those other people of the earlier Jacobean drama is that, with Beaumont and Fletcher, we have an impression that the motives have been supplied after the situations and emotional crises have been determined upon; they have been thought-out carefully and articulated delicately but, nevertheless, they are only part of the apparatus of illusion, made to conceal the real springs of the machine, which are situation and action. When there is a difficulty in making them co-operate, it is the situation or emotional crisis that is preserved, while the motivation shows unmistakable signs of patching. When Leucippus (in the fourth act of Cupid's Revenge) deliberately insists in a moment of danger on trusting his life to the word of Timantus (a man of whom he has hitherto known nothing but evil and who has always been associated with his enemies), can there be any reason but that it is necessary for the conduct of the narrative that he should be lured back into the power of those enemies? Can any amount of noble sentiment conceal the innate absurdity of his action and the sudden disappearance of normal motivation? Ismenus, his friend, has protested, very reasonably, at this sudden and hazardous credulity:

Leu. Peace, peace for shame, thy love is too suspitious, 'tis a way offer'd to preserve my life, and I will take it: by my Guide Timantus and do not mind this angry man, thou know'st him: I may live to requite thee.

Ism. … Sir, for wisdoms sake court not your death, I am your friend and subject, and I shall lose in both….

Leu. So much of man, and so much fearful; fie, prethee have peace within thee: I shall live yet many a golden day to hold thee here dearest and nearest to me: Go on Timantus….

Not even the attempt of the author to forestall criticism by putting that very criticism into the mouth of the outraged friend, Ismenus, can cover up the joinery here. Either Leucippus is too fantastically wrong-headed to hold our sympathy, or, a far likelier alternative, he is not a homogeneous and continuous human being, but a series of imperfectly associated groups of responses to the stimulus of carefully prepared situations. He is in this only one of a number of heroes similarly constituted and similarly circumstanced, and the same inconsistency is likely to creep into them all; even Philaster defers and plays into the hands of his opponent in a way which reveals that the guiding principle of the play is not the revelation of his character in event, but the celebration of event itself.

Less obvious, but no less significant, I think, is the sacrifice of consistency of behaviour not immediately, for the sake of plot, but, less directly, for the development of the action through some improbable but persistent attribute in the character. The fantastic loyalty, nobility and scrupulousness of the heroes in the early plays again and again fills us with impatience if we come to them fresh from the fundamental veracity of Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Tourneur or Webster. Philaster procrastinates and so does Hamlet, but in Hamlet the putting off of a doubtfully noble task is a part of his being, springing from certain well attested and openly recognized qualities of his mind, admitted and commented on by himself and others, while in Philaster it is part of a vague, incoherent fastidiousness, inexplicable alike to his friends and to the audience. Hamlet has scruples about accusing his mother, genuine, fundamental and natural scruples which deflect the action of the play as they would in common life; Leucippus has scruples too, but of so fantastic, ungrounded and strained a loyalty that he submits with patience and reverence to the insults, hostility and plotting of his own cast mistress Bacha simply because, by hoodwinking the old king Leontius, she has married him and become Leucippus's queen and mother. Here is a character rooted in unreality, with motives that seem to rest upon words only, with no perception of the nature of fact ('la verità effetuale della cosa'), paying a ridiculous respect to a woman who, for seducing his own father, should be doubly hideous to him, and for her plans to undo the kingdom should be stamped out like any other contagious disease. The salt of common sense that meets us on every page of Ben Jonson, and that stayed by the major Jacobean dramatists at all but their wildest moments, has vanished from the fairy-land of Beaumont and Fletcher.

This unmanly acquiescence, this enchanted passivity, sinking back upon endurance and eschewing action cannot with any justice be laid to Hamlet's charge; it is not even a bastard of his begetting, but is the child of that same mood of fairy-tale unreality in which motive is strained beyond credulity in order that accumulated stresses may fall into a preconceived place in a crucial scene.

Less extreme cases, because better concealed and set in greater beauty of sentiment, situation and speech, are the better known figures of Evadne and Philaster. The speeches of Evadne immediately after her interview with Melantius (IV, i) and in the scene (V, i) in which she murders the king are, though not difficult for an actress to portray effectively, hard to believe when they are read. Something there is, perhaps, of Bonduca in her tigerish resolve, something of Webster's masculine women, Julia and Vittoria, something it might be of Lady Macbeth and again of Goneril. But with all of these it is possible to identify ourselves, provided the play has been followed to that point with an alert imagination. With Evadne, no amount of imaginative submission to the earlier part of the play seems to avail us anything. She seems to move suddenly on to another plane of being. The springs of motive do not seem to like our own, nor the processes of the mind. This does not suggest a momentary failure, confusion or weakness of imagination, but rather a break in the continuity. Approaching it with the memory of such a play as Cupid's Revenge clear in the mind (a play inferior in beauty and technical skill to this), we are inclined to attribute the difficulty here to the same cause that was so patent there. The situation required the murder, and some violation of the character, albeit subtly concealed and delicately overlaid, was the inevitable outcome of the clash of interests between character and plot. Philaster fills us with the same uneasiness (and we may be forgiven if we trace it to the same cause) when he suspects Arethusa and Bellario (III, ii), accepting the words of court gossips rather than their own straightforward statements.

From this weakness of motivation, then, this wanton interference with character in the interests of plot and situation, comes the pervading atmosphere of falseness and unreality which spreads through the early plays, a fundamental unsoundness which from time to time builds beauty of sentiment and conduct on insecure foundations or lends the exquisite descriptive poetry of The Faithful Shepherdess to a story in which chastity, like the player-queen, doth protest too much.

But these are avowedly the weak points in this fairy-tale tragi-comedy and its descendants, the inevitable indications of the unreal world into which the drama, with Beaumont and Fletcher, has escaped. A measure of unreality is perhaps inseparable from such an escape. It is generally easier to trace first in the weaker plays (like Cupid's Revenge) because it is only when the workmanship falls a little below the excellence they usually maintain that we can see the strain imposed by a structure that subordinates character to situation in a serious play.

But in general we abandon quite early the demand for homogeneousness of mood, thought and character, abandon the unsuitable effort to think of the plays as organic growths or to see in each its individual spatial form and look instead at the bewildering variety of beauty in situation, episode, sentiment and language. We are bewildered, dazzled, intoxicated by cadence, variation, unexpected change of action, of sentiment, of tempo until we lose the power of integrating this magic world into which we have strayed and surrender ourselves to a beauty which, however it be rooted in falsity, bears again and again a singular and lovely flower. Whether it be the excellence of the structure, the rapidity and variety of the movement in comedy and the sudden breathless turns of fate in the serious plays; whether it be the vigour and effectiveness of the characters in the later tragedies, the brilliance and variety of those in the comedies, the perfumed beauty of certain isolated, pathetic figures in the tragi-comedies and tragedies; whether it be the solid vigour of individual speeches, the long passages of sustained dialogue or the poignant snatches of verse and image; whether it be the spellbound atmosphere that holds the romances or the gaiety and geniality of the comic plots and comic interludes, enough is here to satisfy us—once we have admitted the dispersal of the elements, the disintegration of mood, character and thought, which sets these writers and those who entered their territory apart from the strict Jacobean tragedy and comedy.

Since much has been sacrificed to structure in the art of Beaumont and of Fletcher, it is fitting that that structure should be good. It is indeed superlatively good. It surpasses that of any other Jacobean dramatist in its own kind, combining the complexity of Jonson with the ease with which Middleton manipulated his somewhat simpler machinery. And this is true whether the play be tragedy, tragi-comedy or comedy, whether we examine the conduct of the whole intrigue, the relations of tempo and mood of adjoining scenes, the original use of old devices and the development of fresh ones, or the minutiae of stage conduct, the very exits and entries of the characters. All that can be regarded as strictly structural (not as belonging to the domain of the relations of character and structure) is beyond cavil, and would, I believe, prove itself so in action. What, for neatness of comedy plotting, for variety without confusion and proportioning of the phases of intrigue and its resolution, could be better theatre-work than, say, The Coxcomb upon the one side or The Wild-Goose-Chase upon the other? Or than the clear, easily followed and yet unexpected developments of the tragic action of The Maid's Tragedy, Bonduca or Valentinian? Or, if we choose a tragi-comedy, how excellently do the authors control, not only the action but the relations of tempo and mood in, say, A King and No King, Philaster, Two Noble Kinsmen. This is not merely a matter of intrigue only, but is clearly seen in the conduct of individual scenes. To the crucial scene between Mardonius and Arbaces they have given some of the best of their skill in this kind. First comes the natural dialogue between the two friends, Arbaces again and again approaching his confession and as often flinging away from it, while Mardonius grows more and more aware of his agony. Then, after the slow, hesitant and stumbling approach, follows the rush of words, the outburst of passion, with which the fact comes out, and the withdrawal of Mardonius into a matter-of-fact plainness (indicated by the subtle passage from verse to prose) designed to sober the passionate Arbaces. This is interrupted abruptly by the entry of the comic figure Bessus. In the quick dialogue that follows, the callous lightness of this trivial creature serves, as no serious admonitions of Mardonius could, to reveal the depth of moral misery in which Arbaces' mind is struggling. The same skill is to be found in the disclosure at the end of the play, where the unravelling, though just slow enough for us to follow readily and delivered piecemeal so that suspense is maintained, is yet rapid enough for apprehension to wait upon event and not outrun it. How skilful again (to consider a detail of theatrecraft) is Fletcher's handling of the battle scenes in Bonduca where he ranges over the whole of his wide and flexible Elizabethan stage, using its magnificent possibilities to the full, so that, by his manipulation of its different resources, we may follow both the conduct of the fight as a whole and the fortunes of the individual fighters in whom we are most nearly interested. In all this, it is the theatre that is the authors' main concern; not the content of the play, the underlying thought or implicit commentary, but the effectiveness of the successive and related episodes. And just as this skilful handling of the course of the plot evidences at every turn their keen sense of the theatre, of its demands at once and its facilities, so do the individual situations, and they also remain sharp in our memory. In the comedies they are reached, like Middleton's comic climaxes, on the crest of a swiftly moving wave of action and are rich in implications drawn from the preceding action. Nor are they essentially different in the serious plots: ever and again the characters fall into a striking, often an unexpected grouping; the group dissolves and, as suddenly, another takes its place, pauses for the length of a scene or half-scene and melts away again. A series of brilliant tableaux or episodes remains; the interim, confusion and it may even be inconsequence. There is no attempt at the presentation of a continuous growth of circumstance or event like the inevitable growth of one of Shakespeare's tragedies to its inevitable end, nor at the solid, articulated architecture of Ben Jonson's plots. At its best it is more like the sequence of groupings in a ballet; even when the workmanship falters a little the splendid episodes emerge and impress themselves on the memory. What we recall is the dialogue at the central moment or the finely moulded and detachable set speeches that form the climax of the scene; the words in which Philaster at last speaks out his long-repressed indignation and denounces the king at the same time as, with a magnificent gesture, he offers to make sacrifice of his own life; the long soliloquies of Maximus torn between honour and vengeance; the convulsive conflicts of Arbaces and the dialogues between him and Panthea; the passionate pleading of Edith with Rollo for her father's life and the later scene in which she avenges herself for that father's murder; the battle speeches of Suetonius and Caratach; the grave deportment of the dialogue between Ordella and Thierry; speech after speech of vigorous emotion, solid and well defined, sometimes in crisp quick dialogue or soliloquy, sometimes touched with beauty and gravity of sentiment.

For the handling of a single dramatic moment, the sudden check of the action, as it were, in full career and the turn which carries it, sometimes in a single sentence, from unsuspecting geniality into tragic intention, nearly every play written at the height of their powers gives evidence. To Melantius, fresh from the scene with Amintor, when he has at last been persuaded of his sister's adultery with the king, comes in his younger brother Diphilus full of the merry mood of the wedding celebrations and utterly unsuspicious alike of Melantius's knowledge and of the tragic motive which has enveloped him and Amintor and is waiting to overspread the laughter of the court.

In the ease and economy of this there is consummate skill; with this check Melantius swings round the career not only of his brother but of the whole action of the play.

Single characters, in the same way, detach themselves from the background; some, especially in those plays which Fletcher is generally considered to have written alone, are refreshingly free from the inexplicable motives that interfere with our full acceptance of the tragi-comedy and early tragedy heroes. Aecius in Valentinian (and, up to a point, Maximus), Aubrey in the Bloody Brother, Petillius, Caratach, Penyus and Suetonius in Bonduca, and many more, are all coherent, clearly drawn figures. There is no pretence at undue nobility of sentiment or super-normal sensitiveness, but there is plenty of good sense and workmanlike treatment side by side with passages of no mean degree of percipience. Being mainly involved in action, they need not be drawn minutely, but the proportions are true and the drawing by no means always rough. Caratach is in fact a kind of touchstone of good sense, practical capacity and manly steadiness of conduct, balanced by the same qualities in the Roman general Suetonius and contrasted with the hysteria of Bonduca. His longer speeches, even on the eve of battle, are temperate and sane; his affection for the child Hengo never threatens to become mawkish; his respect for his foe is as genuine as his determination to beat him if he can, and both stop short of hyperbole. Indeed, in this and other plays of the kind, Fletcher develops a plain manliness of style and treatment which seems to be carried over from Mardonius, Melantius and Ismenus, the straightforward soldiers whose presence in the earlier group threw into relief the gusty passions or melancholy inertia of the other characters. Just such another is Aecius, a man with the gift of moderate, sane speech (upon all but the dangerous, debatable topic of kingship) and with a certain innate decency of demeanour whatever vicissitudes he passes through:

While Fletcher can create and maintain characters like this, and they are relatively numerous in the middle and later plays, even when there is inconsistency in the mood of the rest of the play, it is idle to suggest that theatre romance pervaded the whole of his work. There are in fact plays in which it only occurs sporadically, when his sense of the theatre is revealed in a very different way, in the effectiveness with which he groups, in striking situations and in rapid action, characters which are natural, unpretentiously drawn and yet strongly coloured and distinct.

There is, finally, one group of characters in the serious plays in whom the romantic conception appears with almost unflawed beauty, the characters whose fates, temperaments, sentiments, even the very cadences of their speech, are instinct with a clear pathos upon which no other responsibility is laid than to run like a minor melody, through the action of the play. Even the memory of the great tragic figures of the earlier drama cannot destroy the haunting beauty of the slight figures of Aspatia, Arethusa, Bellario, Spaconia, Panthea and their kindred, though they demand a double share of the willing suspension of disbelief, and even as we accept their control over our authors we know that we are entering a cloud-cuckoo land of sentiment. These characters are generally clear in their main lines, not subtle or complicated, but simple and limpid. Indeed, Aspatia is perhaps too transparent; she seems, after a time, to lack colour and definition. But the clear note of simple pathos persists, brings with it its own cadences, its own lucid and gentle imagery and often a quiet plainness of utterance, empty of any imagery at all, that reappears later as one of the characteristic marks of the work of Middleton. In Lysippus' description of Aspatia's melancholy, in Arethusa's speeches when Philaster disowns her, in some of Philaster's own at the nadir of his fortunes, in Spaconia's and Panthea's scenes together, and most movingly of all, in Bellario's words with Philaster, the same mood runs. Often these scenes, like that in which, at the beginning of Philaster, Arethusa finds her way out of the tangled events besetting her, ring true for the duration of a whole dialogue and have a note, like the pathetic cadences of Ford, to which the habitual readers of the tragi-comedy respond unconsciously it may be unintentionally, no matter in what setting it occurs:

Not a line could be cut out of this without loss; it is an emotional study, though only episodic, that is simple, definite and self-absorbed. Such passages are in nearly every serious play and where they are not sustained as here, they break through in sudden, poignant snatches of verse or in potent or pithy summaries:

Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms,
[The Maid's Tragedy]

'some man Weary of life that would be glad to die', [Philaster] I did hear you talk Far above singing', 'the Night Crowned with a thousand stars and our cold light'. [The Maid's Tragedy] The spellbound pathos that holds the earlier plays like an enchantment and appears again and again in snatches in the later is summed up in that scene in which Philaster, not recognizing Euphrasia under the disguise of Bellario, threatens to kill her as the betrayer of Arethusa. The scene is heavily fraught already; the burden of unrequited love, of hearing continually Philaster's longing for Arethusa and of acting as messenger between the lovers while hiding her own breaking heart, have laid upon Euphrasia such accumulated sorrow that death at Philaster's hands is, as for so many of Beaumont and Fletcher's love-crossed maidens, more joy than sorrow:

It is in scenes like these that the finest flowering of the tragi-comedy romantic mood is to be found, working in its own proper medium and uncontaminated by incongruous association, moral or aesthetic, uncontaminated, too, by reference to that world of tragic doubt and horror or satiric exposure that was the Jacobean tragedy and comedy. Beaumont and Fletcher have escaped alike from Vindice and from Volpone before them and from Sir Walter Whorehound and from de Flores who are yet to come. A new world has been discovered, and though Middleton and Webster (and such of their contemporaries as survive) never enter it, even when, like Middleton, they seem most nearly to do so, it is a world irresistibly desirable to a generation that no longer needs to live at the edge of eternity or in whom that habit has not been too deeply grained to be laid aside.

The comic plots and the comic episodes in the serious plays, whether long or brief, seem to belong to another world; they are rooted in reality, resting on commonplace motives and emotions. When the comic mood takes possession, with Beaumont and Fletcher, alone or jointly, the fairy-land of romantic feeling or inflated sentiment vanishes. Brief snatches of dialogue between the courtiers in Philaster or Valentinian, glimpses of life behind the scenes at a court festival in The Maid's Tragedy or The Bloody Brother drop at once to the same matter-of-fact, merry or cynical level of everyday feeling as the more broadly comic elements of the comedies from The Woman Hater to The Noble Gentleman. The soldier scenes of Bonduca and The Loyal Subject, the sailors in The Sea Voyage, the talk of the citizens in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the excellently comic, detachable character of Bessus in A King and No King, the absurdities of Lazarello in The Woman Hater, above all the crowds in Philaster, A King and No King, Cupid's Revenge and The Knight of the Burning Pestle again, have a vulgar, hearty, Rabelaisian geniality which witnesses to the love and keen observation of London life with its variety of types and matter.

In all this, the lighter and gayer side of their work, there is the same excellent familiarity with the types they draw from and the treatment they give them. They range from the satirical-farce of Beaumont's earliest play, through delicate mixture of romance and broad comedy in The Coxcomb and the delicate, fanciful mockery of The Wild-Goose-Chase to the vigorous breadth of low life in The Beggar's Bush or the mixture of romance and Aristophanic laughter in The Humourous Lieutenant. The variety of range in characters is enormous. Few, if any, are profoundly drawn. All are effective either by their natural vitality and frankness, by a kind of straightforward originality of conduct (like that of Mercury in The Coxcomb), by sharp, satiric observation (like that of The Little French Lawyer) or by a kind of spirited honesty found in many of the women, Honora, Celia, Oriana, Rosalura and many more.

The mood of the tragi-comedy very seldom (and then only slightly) invades these characters or the plays to which they belong, and it might seem at first that they differed in no essential (except in the finer finish, the easier grace and lightness of movement) from the main body of Jacobean comedy. Indeed, in some of the plays which, like The Woman Hater at the beginning or The Little French Lawyer towards the end, border in part on Jonsonian humour studies, it is hard to distinguish them from the comedy now of Marston, now of Jonson, and especially of Middleton. But upon nearer view it appears that the total result of the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher is different; we miss the painstaking research of Jonson and the detached photographic record of Middleton, and we find, as a rule, a total effect of geniality and gaiety too unchequered to belong to the older Jacobean world where ugly and discordant jars forced themselves in and must be reckoned with in the orchestration. This would not be noticeable in one play, I think. It is only when it is perceived in several, or in similar sections in several plays, that it becomes of account. In the crowd scenes, for instance, whether in the early studies of city crowds in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Philaster, A King and No King, Cupid's Revenge or in the rather later studies of soldiery in Bonduca and The Loyal Subject, it may occur to us after a time that there is a persistent assumption of good-will and right-headedness in these groups which is not there with certain other mobs such as Shakespeare's, that the intervention of these genial, hearty, Rabelaisian citizens and soldiery is too uniformly felicitous, that all tends to work together too consistently for the best for it to be the same stuff of which the background of Jacobean comedy is made. With Shakespeare's mobs increasingly, from that led by Jack Cade to that led by the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, there is a sinister implication behind the voluble excitement; it may be touched in so lightly that the atmosphere is hardly disturbed, but it still gives a veracity and soundness to Shakespeare's pictures which meets the test of repeated reading in widely varying moods. Here is, perhaps, another manifestation, indirect and hardly at once perceptible, of the deep inhering tendency of Beaumont and Fletcher to use as their base a transparent wash of romance in the composition even of those scenes whose colouring seems least associated with it.

It has been suggested that Beaumont and Fletcher, with their excellent sense of the theatre upon the one hand and of the appetite for romance in their audience upon the other, were content to avoid the great questions which, in their profundity, trouble the form and sometimes confuse the substance itself of the earlier Jacobean tragedy. This, with some qualification, is often true; they do not raise, by the implications of the material they choose and the passions they stir, those issues touching the meaning of life and the destiny of man which run through those tragedies. But alongside this there is a marked increase in explicit statement and in discussion, if not of the main tragic issues, of topics of still living and immediate concern; the nature of kingship, of friendship, of honour (particularly of woman's honour), of the conduct proper to a gentleman. They bring the claims of these deliberately into conflict in the serious plays, so that, in the central scenes, they may be debated between the characters in all the heat of immediate experience. They make of a situation, of an episode, a test case upon which the cause of both claimants may be tried; Amintor's honour over against his loyalty, Melantius's friendship against his duty to his sister's good name; Maximus is divided in just such a way as Amintor, and Aecius between his friendship for Maximus and his loyalty to Valentinian. Like motifs in a pattern, they are grouped and regrouped, always with the practical case as the foundation of the debate. It reads as though it would be well within the reach of an intelligent audience, even though hearing it for the first time; it is not profound and it is never confused; it is original only so far as a definite, explicit statement of what has long been in many men's minds bears claim to originality; it is a little like wit as Pope understood it and has most of the stimulating effects we associate with that wit; it must have given its audience a pleasant sense of being abreast of the newest thing that was being thought and discussed. What it does not do, on the other hand, is to fill the mind with images from which the hearer could deduce his own reflections; to provide, as Shakespeare does, an imaginative experience from which conclusions could be drawn, without specifically drawing them. Beaumont and Fletcher do not, partly for the very reason that Shakespeare has already done it, build up a group of closely connected history plays, which, with the help of some later tragedies, lay before us almost every relevant experience connected with statecraft and government, approached in turn from the point of view of almost every relevant group or individual in the state and interspersed with the brief comments inevitable to men whose lives are mainly engaged upon these things. Instead, they give us the crucial situations (those test cases that Shakespeare for some reason so seldom seems to meet) which introduce clearly the conflict between two views on kingship, and let it be debated to and fro, sometimes in a running series of scenes, between Amintor and Melantius, Maximus and Aecius, Rollo and Aubrey, the problem resolving itself into a series of points set over against each other: private honour against public loyalty, reverence for the monarch against hatred of the man, the rights of the individual against the demands of the State.

Akin to this, and in some degree perhaps arising out of it, is the tendency to group characters in series, repeating, often with only slight modifications, the same type in one play after another: the blunt but faithful friend (Mardonius, Ismenus, Melantius, Dion); the virtuous hero, wronged and long-suffering (Leucippus, Amintor, Philaster); the wronged maid or wife (Euphrasia, Urania, Aspatia, Arethusa, Spaconia), who often takes to a page's disguise to serve her lover; the wicked, scheming woman (Bacha or Brunhalt); the tyrannous (often usurping) king and the plotting villain.

Yet in all this body of plays, though written for the most part by three men (but, in the later years of Fletcher's more various collaboration, undoubtedly by several more), there is a kind of consistency, whether we are considering the joint work of Beaumont and Fletcher, the single-handed work of Fletcher or that body in which he, in collaboration with Massinger, still manages to preserve much that was characteristic of his early tragi-comedy. All three of the main contributors must have been consuminate dramatic journalists; there is balance and ease and a sense of contact with the audience throughout. Other Jacobeans may protest that their work was for the theatre only, but none were so completely its children, or knew so well how simultaneously to obey and lead the public taste. 'Shakespeare, to thee, was dull.' We can well believe it.

For this seems as nearly perfect theatre-work as is possible to imagine. The characters are distinct, varied, unencumbered with the subtle modulations that are wasted on the stage, shallow enough to be grasped quickly by a few salient qualities, well-enough proportioned to sustain their parts and hold the attention fast through five acts of playing; all inconsistency or rough workmanship is lost in the heat of rhetoric and the brilliance of sentiment. The plots are delicately articulated; no confused undercurrent of philosophic thought breaks up the action or disturbs the balance of interest; they are full of suspense, surprises, recoveries, disguisings, sudden turns of fate and fortunate disclosures. The sentiment, which plays an important part here, as in all English plays with a strong sense of the theatre, has just enough reflection behind it to give at first hearing an impression of profundity without effort. It adds colour to event and character, suggesting, like the shadows on a back-cloth, that the play has the threedimensional quality of life itself; the topics that are debated are popular and they are boldly and freshly handled, like a good leading article in a paper catering for a good, average public. The very language is easy to follow, but not so empty as to seem trivial. Imagery, metre and diction are always of the kind which could be fully appreciated when heard; they do not, like Shakespeare's, demand familiarity and re-reading before anything like full appreciation can be approached. The diction of Beaumont and Fletcher seems to reach the height of exquisite stage speech and there is nothing there to which the theatre cannot do full justice. Above all, the balance of all the elements, whether for comedy, tragi-comedy or tragedy, shows the finest theatrical tact, the discrimination that can control or release at need passions, events, descriptions, sentiment, poetry and verbal music, keeping the proportions of the whole truly balanced, providing the necessary variety in what is yet a happy synthesis; storm of mind and calm, vicissitudes of fortune, exotic and familiar scenes; the foaming torrent of accident and passion or the slow, enchanted embassy of death.