Fletcher had a part with Shakespeare in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen,' and he wrote also in conjunction with Massinger, Rowley, and others; Shirley, too, is believed to have finished some of his plays. Leaving aside Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are the best dramatic expression of the romantic spirit of Elizabethan England. Their luxurious, playful fancy delighted in the highly colored, spicy tales of the Southern imagination which the Renaissance was then bringing into England. They drew especially upon Spanish material, and their plays are rightly interpreted only when studied in reference to this Spanish foundation. But they are at the same time true Englishmen, and above all true Elizabethans; which is as much as to say that, borne along by the eager, strenuous spirit of their time, reaching out toward new sensations and impressions, new countries and customs, and dazzled by the romanesque and fantastic, they took up this exotic material and made it acceptable to the English mind. They satisfied the curiosity of their time, and expressed its surface ideas and longings. This accounts for their great popularity, which in their day eclipsed even Shakespeare's, as it accounts also for their shortcomings. They skimmed over the surface of passion, they saw the pathos and the pity of it but not the terror; they lacked Shakespeare's profound insight into the well-springs of human action, and sacrificed truth of life to stage effect. They shared with him one grave fault which is indeed the besetting sin of dramatists, resulting in part from the necessarily curt and outline action of the drama, in part from the love of audiences for strong emotional effects; namely, the abrupt and unexplained moral revolutions of their characters. Effects are too often produced without apparent causes; a novelist has space to fill in the blanks. The sudden contrition of the usurper in 'As You Like It' is a familiar instance; Beaumont and Fletcher have plenty as bad. Probably there was more of this in real life during the Middle Ages, when most people still had much barbaric instability of feeling and were liable to sudden revulsions of purpose, than in our more equable society. On the other hand, virtue often suffers needlessly and acquiescingly.