SOURCE: "Beaumont and Fletcher: Jacobean Absolutists," in Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont & Fletcher, Kennikat Press, 1952, pp. 152-83.

In the following essay, Danby explores the ways in which Philaster reflects the concerns and tastes of an aristocratic audience.

After all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Shakespeares and Sidneys.

C. LAMB, Specimens of an English Dramatic
Poetry. Note on Maid's Tragedy

Charles Lamb's judgment is not likely to be reversed however much the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are re-read or re-assessed. But something less than justice is done them if the Shakespeare comparison is made prematurely or in the wrong way. In any such comparison they will naturally come out on the wrong side; and they have rarely been read without the motive of comparison in mind. Coleridge, for example, wrote [in his Lectures on Shakespeare]:

The plays of Beaumont...