ful to remind us) did Mrs
Pepys, take "any manner of pleasure in" the bold indelicacy of Dryden,
Etherege, or Sedley.

When we ask what sort of pieces Pepys appreciated, we seem to be faced
by further perplexities. His highest enthusiasm was evoked by certain
plays of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger. Near
the zenith of his scale of dramatic excellence he set the comedies of
Ben Jonson, which are remarkable for their portrayal of eccentricity
of character. These pieces, which incline to farce, give great
opportunity to what is commonly called character-acting, and
character-acting always appeals most directly to average humanity.
Pepys called Jonson's _Alchemist_ "a most incomparable play," and he
found in _Every Man in his Humour_ "the greatest propriety of speech
that ever I read in my life." Similarly, both the heroic tragedies and
the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, of which he saw no less than
nineteen, roused in him, as a rule, an ecstatic admiration. But of all
dramatic entertainments which the theatre offered him, Pepys was most
"taken" by the romantic comedy from the pen of Massinger, which is
called _The Bondman_. "There is nothing more taking in the world with
me than that play," he writes.

Massinger's _Bondman_ is a well-written piece, in which an heroic
interest is fused with a genuine spirit of low comedy. Yet Pepys's
unqualified commendation of it presents a problem. Massinger's play,
like the cognate work of Fletcher, offers much episode which is hardly
less indecent than those early specimens of Restoration comedy of
which Pepys disapproved. A leading character is a frowsy wife who
faces all manner of humiliation, in order to enjoy, behind her elderly
husband's back, the embraces of a good-looking youth.

Pepys is scarcely less tolerant of Fletcher's more flagrant
infringements of propriety. In the whole of the Elizabethan drama
there was no piece which presented so liberal a mass of indelicacy as
Fletcher's _Custom of the Country_. Dryden, who was innocent of
prudery, declared that there was "more indecency" in that drama "than
in all our plays together." This was one of the pieces which Pepys
twice saw performed after carefully reading it in his study, and he
expressed admiration for the rendering of the widow's part by his
pretty friend, Mistress Knipp. One has to admit that Pepys condemned
the play from a literary point of view as "a very poor one, methinks,"
as "fully