In spite of its many echoes from his own plays, Shakespeare cannot have failed to appreciate the talent displayed in this drama. The gentleness and charm of the women in the works of both young poets must have appealed to him, offering as they did so marked a contrast to those of Chapman and Marlowe, neither of whom had any appreciation of womanliness or power to depict it. The best of Chapman's tragedies can have contained little that would attract Shakespeare. The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, Marshall of France, was rather a ten-act epic than a drama. His comedies, too, even Eastward Hoe, with its wonderful picture of the London of the day to which Ben Jonson and Marston contributed their share, must have repelled him by a realism which he always avoided in his own work. Beaumont and Fletcher laid their scenes in Sicily, or rather in some imaginary country, whose abstract poetry, more in accordance with the Romance nation's manner of representing men and their passions, cannot have been unsympathetic to Shakespeare, especially at this period of his life.
A King and no King, the play which in all probability immediately succeeded Philaster, contains the same merits and defects as the latter, and here also Shakespeare might find reminiscences of his own work. When the king's mother kneels before her son, and is raised by him (Act iii. sc. I), we are reminded of Volumnia kneeling to Coriolanus, and we feel that the same scene was in the mind of the two young poets. The comic character of the play is one Bessus, a soldier by profession, and an arrant coward in spite of his captaincy. He is a braggart, liar, and, if occasion offers, a pander, being equally diverting in all these capacities. Considerable humour is displayed in the elaboration of his character, but the mighty figure of Falstaff is plainly discernible in the background. The authors even go to the length of appropriating some distinctly Falstaffian expressions. A fencing-master says of Bessus (Act iv. sc. 3):
"It showed discretion, the better part of valour."[4]
In Philaster we were shown a strong passion consumed by groundless jealousy. In A King and no King we have a still stronger passion, that of the young Arbaces for Princess Panthea, leading to confusion and disaster. Throughout the whole play Arbaces never doubts for a moment that they are brother and sister. The secret of his birth is not discovered until the last scene, just as Bellario's sex is not made known until the end of Philaster. Spaconia discovers that King Tigranes, who is as her very life to her, is in love with Panthea; whereupon she assumes much the same position towards him that Euphrasia did towards her love. But there is profounder study of character in the new play. Arbaces, a mixture of vanity and boastfulness with really excellent qualities, makes an extremely complex personality, though not an unnatural or unsympathetic one, and we are given a study of complicated passion in no way inferior to that in Racine's Phèdre, the instinct of love violently and irresistibly aroused, but constantly met by the fear and horror of incest. The subject is treated with great pathos and power of language.[5]
In 1609-10 Fletcher reached the zenith of his fame as sole author and as collaborator with Beaumont. That sweet and fresh pastoral play The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher's unassisted work, must have been written before the spring of 1610, for Sir William Skipworth, to whom, amongst others, it is dedicated, died in the May of that year. The theme was peculiarly suited to the fresh and delicate grace of Fletcher's lyrical gift, and here again Shakespeare may have perceived a distinct imitation of his Midsummer Night's Dream. Here also the lovers are metamorphosed, and Perigot embraces Amaryllis in the form of Amoret, believing her to be his love; he also wounds Amoret as Philaster wounds Arethusa. A still earlier version of the play may be found in Spenser's Shepherds Calendar. Darley has observed that Fletcher imitated several lines from the same source, and among them, oddly enough, some which had been appropriated by Spenser from Chaucer, whose verses greatly surpass either of the later poets in charm. In The Faithful Shepherdess, for example, we have (v. 5):
"Sort all your shepherds from the lazy clowns
That feed their heifers in the budded brooms."
In Spenser's Shepherds Calendar it stands:
"So loytering live you, little herd grooms,
Keeping your beasts in the budded brooms."
But in Chaucer's House of Fame we find the following verse (iii. 133):
"And many a floite and litlyng home
And pipis made of grenè corne
As have these litel herdè-groomes
That kepen bestis in the bromes."