le method is
ignored. We are not aware that Shakspere ever followed it except in
writing historical plays. Battles and armies are left out. This comedy,
like others by the same cunning hand, presents a series of contrasted
and interesting situations leading up to a startling climax. Need we
call to mind the rash contract of the merchant, and its almost tragic
result, the game of the caskets, the trial and defeat of the clamorous
Shylock? The by-plot assists the main action, else why does Jessica keep
house for Portia while she goes to play "A Daniel come to judgment"?
There is the use of tragi-comedy in the ruin of the merchant, in the
whetting of the Jew's knife for the heart of his assured victim. If
these "traits" characterize the "romances" of Beaumont and Fletcher,
they are possibly more likely to have been the "imitators," because
"Shylock" was created in 1596 or 1597, some years before "Philaster" was
exhibited as a stage decoration.

It is urged further that in the "romances" of Beaumont and Fletcher "the
characters are not individuals, but types," and that those types are
repeated until they became conventionalized. There is always a very bad
and a very good woman, a very generous and noble man and one so bad as
to seem a monster. There is the type of the "love-lorn maiden," of "the
lily-livered" hero, of the faithful friend, of the poltroon. It is
supposed by many that such types repeated in play after play do not mark
the highest original power, but rather poverty of invention, weak and
shadowy conception, indistinctness of coloring. Professor Thorndike,
however, cannot too much commend this style, because it gives such wide
scope for intense passion, startling situation, and successful stage
effect, and proceeds to seek for similar types in Shakspere's "romances"
as further proof that he "imitated" "Philaster." In his view, the
characters show "surprising loss of individuality." Imogen's character
"fails to supply really individual traits"; "Perdita and Miranda have
even less marks of individuality than Imogen." They are like Beaumont
and Fletcher's heroines who appear in the same stage costumes, wearing
the same masks, differing only in stage postures and dialogue. More than
this: Professor Thorndike would reduce the "creations" of Viola and
Rosalynd to the conventional type of the "love-lorn" maiden, to mere
adaptations for the stage, because they dressed in boy's clothes; of
Perdita, to an "imitation" of