look in vain for in the tragi-comedy of France or Holland. Such is Castiza's cry when her mother would be her betrayer—
"I cry you mercy! lady, I mistook you;
Pray, did you see my mother? which way went she?
Pray God I have not lost her;"—
and Vendice's
"joy's a subtle elf,—
I think man's happiest when he forgets himself."
The lines in The Atheist's Tragedy which describe the drowned soldier will find a place in every anthology gathered from the Elizabethans.
If, as seems to have been the case, Jonson to some extent eclipsed Shakespeare in the eyes of those who Beaumont and
Fletcher. affected Scholarship and "art," the inheritors of his popularity were undoubtedly Beaumont and Fletcher.[1] They belonged to a higher rank socially than the generality of the dramatists. John Fletcher, the elder, was the son of a president of a Cambridge College who was subsequently Dean of Peterborough, Bishop of Bristol, and Bishop of London. Francis Beaumont's father was a landed proprietor in Leicestershire, and a judge of the
- ↑ The first folio (containing thirty-four plays and a masque) appeared in 1647, the second (containing fifty-one plays, a masque, and the Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in one) in 1679. The commendatory verses prefixed to the first are an eloquent testimony to their popularity. The standard edition is that of Dyce (11 vols.), 1876, now difficult to obtain. New editions by A. H. Bullen, Lond., 1904, and Arnold Glover, Cambridge, 1905, are in course of appearing. Select plays in the Mermaid Series. Critical notices are numerous, from Dryden's to Mr Swinburne's (Studies in Prose and Poetry). Dr E. Koeppel and others have inquired into sources.
