"O thou hast named a word that wipes away
All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name
'The king' there lies a terror. What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when, let us
Suffer and wait."
And the play ends with the words
"On lustful kings,
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent,
But cursed is he that is their instrument."
Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he, by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakspere's Ophelia. All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion, {131} a "gentle forlornness" under wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness. In Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster—who is in love with Arethusa—puts on the dress of a page and enters his service. He employs her to carry messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in Twelfth Night, is sent by the Duke to Olivia. Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword. Afterward, convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia replies,
"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 Elisabethan stage the female parts were taken by boys, made the deception easier. Viola's situation in Twelfth Night is precisely similar to Euphrasia's, but there is a {132} 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 {133} 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.