SOURCE: "The Emergence of the Pattern," in The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher, Yale University Press, 1952, pp. 1-42.

In the following essay, Waith provides a detailed critical survey of Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedies, finding in them an essential "pattern of dramatic entertainment."

The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are almost never performed today, in spite of a reawakened interest in the drama of the seventeenth century. The few readers who eventually turn to Beaumont and Fletcher out of curiosity, because they have enjoyed Jonson, Webster, Tourneur, or Ford, are inclined to dismiss the plays as trivial and decadent—a debauchery of what is best in Jacobean drama. This prevalent attitude poses a major critical problem, for we are confronted with the contempt or, far more devastating, the neglect of playwrights once rated the equals if not the superiors of Shakespeare and Jonson. Nor can the shift...