The two famous plays that were the results of Middleton's collaboration with Rowley have somewhat different characteristics. Rowley, a playwright used to rude and fantastic comedy, and the author of "All's Lost by Lust," a clumsy tragedy of revenge, wrote most of the comic scenes and had some share in the serious plots. In "The Fair Quarrel," the hesitation of Captain Ager to defend the honor of his mother unless convinced of her purity; and in "The Changeling," the entanglement of Beatrice with the loathed follower whom she has persuaded to murder her accepted suitor, offer situations novel and ingenious. In both plays, the opportunity for mere melodrama with sudden conversions of character is refused, and the series of startling situations made the basis for a study of human motive. It is this which gives "The Fair Quarrel," in spite of its absurdities, superiority over most of the tragicomedies of the time. In "The Changeling," one may easily imagine what havoc Fletcher would have made of the characterization in order to over-emphasize situations, sensational enough in themselves; but Middleton and Rowley followed the best tradition of Webster. The rash and pampered Beatrice retains our sympathies even in her degradation, and remains convincingly alive, whether in her incipient love for De Flores or her final cry for forgiveness. De Flores, clear-headed and well-motived, is the most powerful and individual of the post-Shakespearean villains. The comic relief supplied by the mad scenes spoils the tragic unity of the play. But, except in Shakespeare and Webster, the old combination of murder, revenge, sinful love, villany, madness, and ghosts had never been made so consistently the result of human motive and so effective in its appeal to our sympathies. Massinger's dramatic career, ranking in productiveness with Shakespeare's or Fletcher's, extended from the time of Shakespeare's withdrawal from the theatre to within a few years of the Civil War. For ten years he was mainly occupied in collaborating with Fletcher for the king's men; and of the nineteen plays usually classed as his own, none were acted before 1622. His work, therefore, falls roughly into two periods, the first when he was the assistant of Fletcher, the second when he had succeeded Fletcher as the main reliance of the leading London company.