Dryden said that after the Restoration
two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or Jonson's
throughout the year, and he added that they "understood and imitated the
conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and
quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done."
Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere,
nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are
gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous,
courteous--according to the fashion of their times--and sensitive on the
point of honor. They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of
Dryden and the Restoration comedy. Still the manners and language in
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, and it is not
hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the
Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of
the cavaliers in his tract, _The Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked
the stage, in 1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an
offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears
cropped. Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He
had the healthy coarseness of nature herself.
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