Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/142

122 in style and versification are easily detected, but for literary history are less important than the community of spirit which made the work of the two so vivid a reflection of one aspect of the age—of the taste, not of the great body of the English people, but of the exquisites of the court, whose handsome faces and brilliant costumes are preserved for us on the canvasses of Vandyke, and who were soon to be brought into conflict with the sterner temper of the Puritan middle classes. At the same time, they were not above catering for a citizen audience as in The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher were enormously popular with the audience whose taste they reflected. Compared with their sparkling "modernity," Shakespeare seemed to Cartwright and to Suckling old-fashioned and coarse; and the opinion of Cartwright and Suckling and Herrick is reiterated by Dryden, after the Restoration had brought back the taste and morality of the court. "Their plays are now," he says, "the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's. The reason is because there is a certain gaiety in their comedies and pathos in their more serious plays which suits generally with all men's humours." What Dryden indicates is not difficult to find. All the attractive qualities of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramatic work are heightened and obvious—sentiment, eloquence, sweetness of verse, gaiety of dialogue. The best of the more serious