4th. They presented a series of contrasted and interesting situations leading up to a startling climax.
5th. The by-plots assist the main action.
6th. There is the use of tragi-comedy.
Does any attentive reader of Shakspere's comedies, whether called romantic or tragi-comic, or by whatever other name, need to be told that many of them contain all these traits? General review is impossible, but take "The Merchant of Venice" as an illustration:
The unities are not observed. We think it is generally thought that Shakspere was in the habit of disregarding them. The chronicle method is ignored. We are not aware that Shakspere ever followed it except in writing historical plays. Battles and armies are left out. This comedy, like others by the same cunning hand, presents a series of contrasted and interesting situations leading up to a startling climax. Need we call to mind the rash contract of the merchant, and its almost tragic result, the game of the caskets, the trial and defeat of the clamorous Shylock? The by-plot assists the main action, else why does Jessica keep house for Portia while she goes to play "A Daniel come to judgment"? There is the use of tragi-comedy in the ruin of the merchant, in the whetting of the Jew's knife for the heart of his assured victim. If these "traits" characterize the "romances" of Beaumont and Fletcher, they are possibly more likely to have been the "imitators," because "Shylock" was created in 1596 or 1597, some years before "Philaster" was exhibited as a stage decoration.
It is urged further that in the "romances" of Beaumont and Fletcher "the characters are not individuals, but types," and that those types are repeated until they became conventionalized. There is always a very bad and a very good woman, a very generous and noble man and one so bad as to seem a monster. There is the type of the "love-lorn maiden," of "the lily-livered" hero, of the faithful friend, of the poltroon. It is supposed by many that such types repeated in play after play do not mark the highest original power, but rather poverty of invention, weak and shadowy conception, indistinctness of coloring. Professor Thorndike, however, cannot too much commend this style, because it gives such wide scope for intense passion, startling situation, and successful stage effect, and proceeds to seek for similar types in Shakspere's "romances" as further proof that he "imitated" "Philaster." In his view, the characters show "surprising loss of individuality." Imogen's character "fails to supply really individual traits"; "Perdita and Miranda have even less marks of individuality than Imogen." They are like Beaumont and Fletcher's heroines who appear in the same stage costumes, wearing the same masks, differing only in stage postures and dialogue. More than this: Professor Thorndike would reduce the "creations" of Viola and Rosalynd to the conventional type of the "love-lorn" maiden, to mere adaptations for the stage, because they dressed in boy's clothes; of Perdita, to an "imitation" of Lady Amelia in "Palamon and Arcyte" because she gathered flowers prettily and was commended by the Queen. He makes the surprising statement that the three heroines in "Cymbeline," the "Tempest" and "Winter's Tale" have on the stage "few qualities to distinguish them from almost any of Beaumont and Fletcher's." It is difficult to discuss such generalizations with the temperance of criticism. They can be true only if Professor Thorndike's theory is correct,—that the delineation of character is solely for stage effect. There is another theory announced and recorded by Shakspere himself, and illustrated in every drama he wrote,—that the sole end and aim of the stage itself and of the characters it represents, is "to hold the mirror up to nature," and therefore his characters are not "types"; they are men and women who were born, not manufactured; each is a separate, individual human being; each different from every other. We know them, for they have entered our houses, sat at our tables, talked with us, laughed and wept with us, made us shudder at crime and exult in the triumph of virtue.
Therefore, there is but one "Lear": his madness was never imitated outside of Bedlam; but one Lady Macbeth, and we have seen her walking in her awful dream. Beaumont and Fletcher in six romances delineate "love-lorn maidens," "conventionalized types," who differ little from each other, except that three of them "masquerade in boy's clothing" and three do not. They have "little individuality," "are utterly romantic," "utterly removed from life"; all are presented to produce novel situations leading up to a startling climax.
Imogen is not like Miranda or Perdita; neither is a "type" of the "love-lorn" maiden; all are living, acting individuals, differing from each other like those we know, resembling each other only as one beautiful and pure woman resembles another. Professor Thorndike, who is the advocate of Beaumont and Fletcher, may keep his personal opinion that Imogen lacks "individual traits," but we respectfully decline to take his opinion as a critic that she is like Arethusa in "Philaster." For us and for all men and women, Shakspere has created the character of Imogen, as of Perdita and Miranda, and her "individual traits" are clear enough, to those who have had the happiness of her acquaintance, to show that neither in feature or dress, neither in manners or morals, did she "imitate" any of the heroines of Beaumont and Fletcher. But even as a critic we must differ from Professor Thorndike; he accuses Miranda of unpardonable indelicacy, and says she "proposed" to Ferdinand! He gives her language from "Tempest," and remarks with satisfaction that it sounds "very much like one of Beaumont and Fletcher's heroines," meaning of course Arethusa, and so draws the obvious conclusion that Shakspere in this remarkable instance clearly "imitated" the "creators" of the "heroic romantic drama." The difficulty with this statement first of all is, that it is not true: Miranda does not "propose" to Ferdinand; before her sweet confession of love, Ferdinand had given all lovers the best form of proposal ever spoken, in this language:
"I,
Beyond all limit of what else i' the world,
Do love, prize, honor you."
Arethusa does "propose" to Philaster, and therefore her "proposal" does not "sound very much like" the proposal in "Tempest," or, if it does, it tends strongly to show that Beaumont and Fletcher attempted an "imitation" from "The Tempest." Professor Thorndike the critic has here been misled by his zeal as the partisan: [isn't] it just possible that the like zeal has misled him in the conclusion that "Cymbeline" was an imitation of "Philaster"?