Love of Surprises.--The dramatists racked their inventive powers to introduce surprises to interest the audience. Here was a marked departure from Shakespeare's later method. He plans _Macbeth_ so as to have his audience forecast the logical result. Consequences of the most tremendous import, beside which Beaumont and Fletcher's surprises seem trivial, follow naturally from Macbeth's actions. In his greatest plays, Shakespeare, unlike the later dramatists, never relies on illogical surprises to sustain the interest. The witch queen in one of the plays of Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) suddenly exclaims:-- "...fetch three ounces of the red-haired girl I kill'd last midnight." Shakespeare's witches suggest only enough of the weird and the horrible to transfix the attention and make the beholder realize the force of the temptation that assails Macbeth. Charles Lamb truly observes that Middleton's witches "can harm the body," but Shakespeare's "have power over the soul." Middleton could, however, write a passage like the following, which probably suggested to Milton one of the finest lines in _Lycidas_:-- "Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth, The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn Upon a bashful rose." Large Number of Playwrights.--Beaumont and Fletcher were only two of a large number of dramatists who were born in the age of Elizabeth, and who, with few exceptions, lived into the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Their work was the result of earlier Elizabethan impulses, and it is rightly considered a part of the great dramatic movement of the Elizabethan age. The popularity of the drama continued to attract many authors who in a different age might have produced other forms of literature.