nsitive on the point of honor. They are far
superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration
comedy. Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher's
plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with
the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William
Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his
tract, _The {129} Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked the stage, in
1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an offense for which
he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped.
Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He had the
healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's
pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language
and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a
fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could
not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a bodily
accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.

Among the best of their light comedies are _The Chances_, _The Scornful
Lady_, _The Spanish Curate_, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. But
far superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, _The
Maia's Tragedy_, _Philaster_, _A King and No King_--all written
jointly--and _Valentinian_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_, written by
Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont. The
tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is _The Maid's Tragedy_, a
powerful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon
its authors' dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward
royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which
grew up under the Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a
mistress of the king, who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his
court, {130} because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding
night,

"I must have one
To father children, and to bear the name
Of husband to me, that my sin may be
More honorable."

This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole
range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king
as her paramour, Amintor exclaims:

"O thou hast named a word that wipes away
All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name
'The king' there lies a terror. What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let th