spe who preferred Apelles--these are some of the themes.
Astrologers, Amazons, fairies, sirens, witches, ghosts, are some of the
personages who appear along with the singing pages and Olympian deities.
Of course, these persons and these marvels are impossible on any stage,
most of all by daylight in the roofless public theaters of Shakspere's
London. But neither audience nor dramatist thought of impossibility.
They tried everything on their stage, even their wonderlands.

When Shakspere began to write plays, the stage was well used to romance.
It was the comedies of Lyly and Greene, with their beautiful and
unselfish maidens, their wonders and shows, their witty dialogs and
jesters, their lovers' crosses and final happiness, their Utopias and
fairies, which prepared the way for Shakspere's 'Two Gentlemen of
Verona' and 'Love's Labor's Lost,' and for his great series of romantic
plays from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' to 'Twelfth Night.' But by 1600,
both dramatists and audiences had become somewhat sophisticated and
tired of romance, and the theaters turned to plays of a different
fashion, to tragedies that searched the ways of crime and punishment,
and to comedies that treated contemporary folly and vice with realism
and satire. From the date of 'Twelfth Night,' 1601, to that of
'Cymbeline,' 1609, it is difficult to find a romantic-comedy on the
London stage. There are no more marvels and magic, no charming
princesses disguised as pages, no moonlit forests and terraces, no
rescues and reconciliations, not much sentiment and no fun except what
may be found on the seamy side of reality. Shakspere seems to have had
little taste for satire and he wrote no satirical and realistic plays of
the sort temporarily in fashion. But during these eight years, his
comedies, like 'Measure for Measure,' have no romantic charm, and his
energies are given to tragedy. He is occupied with the pomp and majesty
of human hope and with the inevitable waste and failure of human
achievement; but for his Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus and the
rest, there were no forests of Arden and no enchanted islands. Like his
associates, he seems to have forsaken romance.

What turned his imagination from tragedy back to romance? In my opinion
it was the success of two brilliant young dramatists, Beaumont and
Fletcher, who, in a series of remarkable dramas made romance again
popular on the London stage. Their romantic plays employ many of the old
incide