The tragedies differ from those preceding in structure as well as in material. Their main purpose is theatrical effectiveness; their means of securing it the constant use of surprise. Beaumont and Fletcher did not follow their narrative sources closely; they invented their own stories or used old ones as the frame for their favorite situations and characters. The tragic, idyllic, and sensational matter is skillfully constructed into a number of theatrically telling situations which lead by a series of suspenses and surprises to very effective climaxes or catastrophes. All signs of the epic methods of construction found in the early drama have disappeared, and the interest in the action is maintained at fever heat. In "The Maid's Tragedy," the climax of the play comes at the end of the fourth act with the murder of the king by his mistress, Evadne, the wife of Amintor. But in the fifth act the main action absorbs the sub-plot and continues its course of thrills and surprises until the very end. In "A King and No King," the love of Arbaces for his supposed sister furnishes many entanglements, and it is not until the end of Act V that we know that the princess is not his sister, and the tragedy of incest is resolved into romance. There is no inevitableness in the action of these plays. Usually, until the last moment there is a chance for either a happy or an unhappy ending, and in every case the _dénouement_ or catastrophe is elaborately planned and complicated. From the nature of their material and treatment there is little difference between the tragedies and tragicomedies. Tragicomedy as a species had up to this time hardly been recognized in the English drama, although there are sporadic instances of the use of the term and although romantic comedy usually offered tragic elements. Fletcher's definition (borrowed from Guarini) in the preface to "The Faithful Shepherdess," may be taken as sufficiently distinguishing the form from other species,--"A tragicomedy is not so called in respect to mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy." The example of Beaumont and Fletcher, moreover, gave popularity and importance to this class of plays. Borrowing motives familiar in romantic narrative and the preceding drama, they yet created a departure from preceding romantic comedy, both in the constant emphasis which they place upon the contrast between the tragic and idyllic elements of their plots and in the especial attention they pay to surprising and complicated _dénouements_. They aim not merely at a mixture of the sentimental and tragic but at involving every one in a tangle of disastrous complications, resolved only by a series of final surprises.