Changed Moral Ideals.—­Under Elizabeth’s successors the Puritan spirit increased and the most religious part of the community seldom attended the theater.  The later dramatists pay little attention to the moral development of character and its self-revelation through action.  They often merely describe character and paint it from the outside.  We have seen that Shakespeare’s great plays are almost a demonstration in moral geometry, but Beaumont and Fletcher are not much concerned over the moral consequences of an action.  The gravest charge against them is that they “unknit the sequence of moral cause and effect.”  After reading such plays, we do not rise with the feeling that there is a divinity that shapes our ends.

[Illustration:  JOHN FLETCHER.]

Coleridge says, “Shakespeare never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher.”  Much of the work of their contemporary dramatists is marred by such blemishes.  Unpleasant as are numbers of these plays, they are less insidious than many which have appeared on the stage in modern times.

Love of Surprises.—­The dramatists racked their inventive powers to introduce surprises to interest the audience.  Here was a marked departure from Shakespeare’s later method.  He plans Macbeth so as to have his audience forecast the logical result.  Consequences of the most tremendous import, beside which Beaumont and Fletcher’s surprises seem trivial, follow naturally from Macbeth’s actions.  In his greatest plays, Shakespeare, unlike the later dramatists, never relies on illogical surprises to sustain the interest.  The witch queen in one of the plays of Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) suddenly exclaims:—­

“...fetch three ounces of the red-haired girl
I kill’d last midnight.”

Shakespeare’s witches suggest only enough of the weird and the horrible to transfix the attention and make the beholder realize the force of the temptation that assails Macbeth.  Charles Lamb truly observes that Middleton’s witches “can harm the body,” but Shakespeare’s “have power over the soul.”

Middleton could, however, write a passage like the following, which probably suggested to Milton one of the finest lines in Lycidas:—­

  “Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
  The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
  Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
  Upon a bashful rose.”

Large Number of Playwrights.—­Beaumont and Fletcher were only two of a large number of dramatists who were born in the age of Elizabeth, and who, with few exceptions, lived into the second quarter of the seventeenth century.  Their work was the result of earlier Elizabethan impulses, and it is rightly considered a part of the great dramatic movement of the Elizabethan age.  The popularity of the drama continued to attract many authors who in a different age might have produced other forms of literature.