art, while
Euphrasia's _incognito_ is preserved till the fifth act, and then
disclosed by an accident. This kind of mystification and surprise was
a trick below Shakspere. In this instance, moreover, it involved a
departure from dramatic probability. Euphrasia could, at any moment,
by revealing her identity, have averted the greatest sufferings and
dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for
her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly
shame at her position. Such strained and fantastic motives are too
often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher's
tragi-comedies. Their characters have not the depth and truth of
Shakspere's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their plays with
pleasure and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry, or a
noble or lovely trait. But their characters, as wholes, leave a fading
impression. Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever
forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?

The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a
play as _A King and No King_. Here Arbaces falls in love with his
sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs
to his guilty passion. He is rescued from {133} the consequences of
his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister.
But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the
_denouement_ to chance, and not to those moral forces through which
Shakspere always wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the
piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every
right-feeling spectator. In one of John Ford's tragedies, the
situation which in _A King and No King_ is only apparent, becomes real,
and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the
morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes
than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a
prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings.

Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama.
Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of
the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. _The
Knight of the Burning Pestle_, written by Beaumont and Fletcher
jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is
excellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but
less masculine tha