Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
  Worthy your noble thoughts.  ’Tis not a life,
  ’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.

Beaumont and Fletcher’s love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly, but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural pathos—­the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character—­of that one brief question and answer in King Lear.

  Lear.  So young and so untender?

  Cordelia.  So young, my lord, and true.

The disguise of a woman in man’s apparel is a common incident in the romantic drama; and the fact that on the Elizabethan stage the female parts were taken by boys made the deception easier.  Viola’s situation in Twelfth Night is precisely similiar to Euphrasia’s, but there is a difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic of a distinction between Shakspere’s art and that of his contemporaries.  The audience in Twelfth Night is taken into confidence and made aware of Viola’s real nature from the start, while Euphrasia’s incognito is preserved till the fifth act, and then disclosed by an accident.  This kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakspere.  In this instance, moreover, it involved a departure from dramatic probability.  Euphrasia could, at any moment, by revealing her identity, have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position.  Such strained and fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragi-comedies.  Their characters have not the depth and truth of Shakspere’s, nor are they drawn so sharply.  One reads their plays with pleasure, and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry, or a noble or lovely trait, but their characters, as wholes, leave a fading impression.  Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?

The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a play as A King and No King.  Here Arbaces falls in love with his sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs to his guilty passion.  He is rescued from the consequences of his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister.  But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it.  It leaves the denouement to chance, and not to those moral forces through which Shakspere always wrought his conclusions.  Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator.  In one of John Ford’s tragedies the situation which in A King and No King is only apparent becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play.  Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher.  His best play, the Broken Heart, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings.