Like the tragicomic plays, Fletcher's lighter comedies _The Chances_, _The Mad Lover_, _The Wild-Goose Chase_, _Women Pleased_, escape a moral catastrophe by walking round the issue. The heroes are amorous gallants, irresponsible adventurers, adroit scapegraces, devil-may-care rapier-tongued egoists and opportunists. The heroines are "not made for cloisters"; when they are not already as conscienceless as the heroes in performance or desire, they are airy lasses, resourceful in love, seeming-virtuous but suspiciously well-informed of the tarnished side of the shield,--always witty. Fletcher _can_ portray the innocence and constancy of woman; but he rarely takes the pains. "To be as many creatures as a woman" is for him a comfortable jibe. The charm of romantic character and subtly thickening complication did not much attract him. He sets over in contrast the violent, insane, tragic, or pathetic with the ludicrous or grotesque; he indulges a careless, loose-jointed, adventitious humour. That he could, on occasion, avail himself of the laughter of burlesque is abundantly proved by the utterances of his Valentine in _Wit Without Money_, the devices of the inimitable Maria in _The Tamer Tamed_, and of the _Humorous Lieutenant_. But for that comic irony of issues by which the wilful or pretentious or deluded,--foes or fools of convention and born prey of ridicule,--are satisfactorily readjusted to society, he prefers to substitute hilarity, ribaldry, the clash of wits, the battledore and shuttlecock of trick, intrigue, of shifting group and kaleidoscopic situation. The idiosyncrasies of the crowd delight him; but the more actual, the more boisterous and bestial. His populace feeds upon "opinions, errors, dreams." His facile verse and limpid dialogue flash with fancy. The gaiety of gilded youth ripples down the page; but the more clever, the more irrelevant the swirling jest,--and, to say the least, the more indelicate. Life is a bagatelle; its most strenuous interest--love; and love is volatile as it is sudden. The attitude of sex toward sex is as obvious to the level-headed animal, who is cynic in brain and hedonist in blood, as its significance is supreme: it is that of the man-or-woman hunt; the outcome, a jocosity, more or less,--whether of fornication or cuckoldry, or of tame, old-fashioned, matrimonial monochrome.