He is rescued from 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.
Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama
with the exception of Jonson's fragment, the _Sad Shepherd_. Its choral
songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole
poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. The _Knight of the
Burning Pestle,_ written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first
burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and
Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or
Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and
feminine endings.
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