time true Englishmen, and above all true Elizabethans; which is as much as to say that, borne along by the eager, strenuous spirit of their time, reaching out toward new sensations and impressions, new countries and customs, and dazzled by the romanesque and fantastic, they took up this exotic material and made it acceptable to the English mind.  They satisfied the curiosity of their time, and expressed its surface ideas and longings.  This accounts for their great popularity, which in their day eclipsed even Shakespeare’s, as it accounts also for their shortcomings.  They skimmed over the surface of passion, they saw the pathos and the pity of it but not the terror; they lacked Shakespeare’s profound insight into the well-springs of human action, and sacrificed truth of life to stage effect.  They shared with him one grave fault which is indeed the besetting sin of dramatists, resulting in part from the necessarily curt and outline action of the drama, in part from the love of audiences for strong emotional effects; namely, the abrupt and unexplained moral revolutions of their characters.  Effects are too often produced without apparent causes; a novelist has space to fill in the blanks.  The sudden contrition of the usurper in ‘As You Like It’ is a familiar instance; Beaumont and Fletcher have plenty as bad.  Probably there was more of this in real life during the Middle Ages, when most people still had much barbaric instability of feeling and were liable to sudden revulsions of purpose, than in our more equable society.  On the other hand, virtue often suffers needlessly and acquiescingly.

In their speech they indulged in much license, Fletcher especially; he was prone to confuse right and wrong.  The strenuousness of the earlier Elizabethan age was passing away, and the relaxing morality of Jacobean society was making its way into literature, culminating in the entire disintegration of the time of Charles II., which it is very shallow to lay entirely to the Puritans.  There would have been a time of great laxity had Cromwell or the Puritan ascendancy never existed.  Beaumont and Fletcher, in their eagerness to please, took no thought of the after-effects of their plays; morality did not enter into their scheme of life.  Yet they were not immoral, but merely unmoral.  They lacked the high seriousness that gives its permanent value to Shakespeare’s tragic work.  They wrote not to embody the everlasting truths of life, as he did; not because they were oppressed with the weight of a new message striving for utterance; not because they were aflame with the passion for the unattainable, as Marlowe; not to lash with the stings of bitter mockery the follies and vices of their fellow-men, as Ben Jonson; not primarily to make us shudder at the terrible tragedies enacted by corrupted hearts, and the needless unending sufferings of persecuted virtue, as Webster; nor yet to give us a faithful picture of the different phases of life in Jacobean London, as Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and others.  They wrote for the very joy of writing, to give vent to their over-bubbling fancy and their tender feeling.