Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/147

Rh The Spanish Curate, The Scornful Lady, and Monsieur Thomas are excellent plays of incident and dialogue. The tone is often licentious, and neither the situations nor the dialogues show much depth of humour or brilliancy of wit if closely scrutinised. But the reader is not tempted to scrutinise them closely. Everything is, as Scott says, set to a good tune. One is borne easily along by the rapid stream of incidents and sparkling, natural conversation.

Of Fletcher's pastoral drama, The Faithful Shepherdess (1609-10), it is usual to speak in very high terms, and it has undoubtedly all the beauty of Fletcher's language in description and song. But the soul of the play appears to me cold and even repulsive. Not only are some of the characters vile beyond words, but a frigid sensual conception of love runs through the whole play, marring the intended idealisation of chastity, a theme more congenial to Milton than to Fletcher.

Fletcher's most important colleague after the death of Beaumont, and the principal dramatist of the Twenties and early Thirties, was Philip Massinger. His father was a servant in the household of the Earl of Pembroke. He was at Oxford for a short time, but left abruptly, and came