etcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable reading
than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and without that
consistency in the development of their characters which distinguished
Jonson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of graceful
dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the Restoration
two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or Jonson's
throughout the year, and he added that they "understood and imitated the
conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and
quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done."
Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere,
nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are
gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous,
courteous--according to the fashion of their times--and sensitive 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 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 Maid'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 onl