SOURCE: "Beaumont and Fletcher," in Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, The University Press of Virginia, 1972, pp. 38-51.

In the following essay, Kirsch considers the display of dramaturgical artifice in the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, finding it beneficial to the comedies, but detrimental to the dramatists' tragedies and tragicomedies.

Indebted to both Guarini and Jonson, the theatrical style which Beaumont and Fletcher and their collaborators created at once encompasses and dilutes the polarities of romance and satire. Fletcher's actual definition of tragicomedy reads very much like Guarini's, from which it was clearly borrowed. "A tragie-comedie," he wrote in the preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), "is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with...