The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere’s example until the theaters were closed by Parliament, in 1642.  Of the Stuart dramatists the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I. These were fifty-three in number, but only thirteen of them were joint productions.  Francis Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere, and died a few years before him.  He was the son of a judge of the Common Pleas.  His collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of London, was five years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine years.  He was much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some forty plays.  Although the life of one of these partners was conterminous with Shakspere’s, their works exhibit a later phase of the dramatic art.  The Stuart dramatists followed the lead of Shakspere rather than of Ben Jonson.  Their plays, like the former’s, belong to the romantic drama.  They present a poetic and idealized version of life, deal with the highest passions and the wildest buffoonery, and introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic.  But, while Shakspere seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature, his successors ran into every license.  They sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of their audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character, unnatural lusts, subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess.

Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays are much easier and more agreeable reading than Ben Jonson’s.  Though often loose in their plots and without that consistency in the development of their characters which distinguished Jonson’s more conscientious workmanship, they are full of graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry.  Dryden said that after the Restoration two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere’s or Jonson’s throughout the year, and he added that they “understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done.”  Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher.  Their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous—­according to the fashion of their times—­and sensitive on the point of honor.  They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration comedy.  Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his tract, The Unloveliness of Lovelocks, attacked the stage, in 1633, with Histrio-mastix:  the Player’s Scourge; an offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped.  Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse,