Before discussing the theory of Shakespeare's indebtedness to _Philaster_ and its "Beaumont-Fletcher" successors, I should like to file a two-fold protest; first, against the use of the word 'romance' for any kind of dramatic production, whatever. 'Romance' applies to narrative of heroic, marvellous, and imaginative content, not to drama. _The Maides Tragedy_ and _Cupid's Revenge_ are not romances; they are romantic tragedies. _Philaster_, _A King and No King_, and _Cymbeline_ are, of course, romantic; but specifically they are melodramatic tragicomedies of heroic cast. _Pericles_, _The Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_ are romantic comedies of marvel or adventure. Nothing is gained in criticism by giving them a name which applies, in English, strictly to narrative, or by regarding them as of a different dramatic species from the romantic dramas of Greene and Shakespeare that preceded them. I object, in the second place, to the grouping of the six plays said to constitute "a distinctly new type of drama" under the denomination "dramatic romances of Beaumont _and_ Fletcher"; for in some of them Beaumont had no hand, and in others, the most important, Fletcher's contribution of romantic novelty is altogether secondary, mostly immaterial. With _Thierry and Theodoret_, for instance, thus loosely called a "Beaumont-Fletcher romance," it is not proved that Beaumont had anything to do. The drama displays nothing of his vocabulary, rhetoric or poetry. It is a later production by Fletcher, Massinger, and probably one other; and is the only play of this tragic-idyllic-romantic type attempted by Fletcher after Beaumont had ceased writing. In three of the _Foure Playes in One_, Beaumont does not appear. He may possibly be traced in three scenes of _The Triumph of Love_; but with no certainty. Fletcher, on the other hand, had very little to do with the three great dramas of sensational romance which form the core of the group in question, _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_, and _A King and No King_. As I have shown, he contributed not more than four scenes to _Philaster_, four to _The Maides Tragedy_, and five to _A King and No King_. And, with the exception of two spectacularly violent scenes in _The Maides Tragedy_, his contribution, so far as writing goes, is supplementary dialogue and histrionic by-play. Whatever is essentially novel, vital, and distinctive is by Beaumont. To _Cupid's Revenge_ Beaumont's contribution was slighter in volume, but without it the play would lack its distinctive quality. If we must cling to the misnomer 'romance' for any group of plays which may have influenced Shakespeare's later comedies, let us limit the group to its Beaumont core, and speak of the 'Beaumont romance.'