" Similarly, both the heroic tragedies and
the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, of which he saw no less than
nineteen, roused in him, as a rule, an ecstatic admiration. But of all
dramatic entertainments which the theatre offered him, Pepys was most
"taken" by the romantic comedy from the pen of Massinger, which is
called _The Bondman_. "There is nothing more taking in the world with
me than that play," he writes.
Massinger's _Bondman_ is a well-written piece, in which an heroic
interest is fused with a genuine spirit of low comedy. Yet Pepys's
unqualified commendation of it presents a problem. Massinger's play,
like the cognate work of Fletcher, offers much episode which is hardly
less indecent than those early specimens of Restoration comedy of
which Pepys disapproved. A leading character is a frowsy wife who
faces all manner of humiliation, in order to enjoy, behind her elderly
husband's back, the embraces of a good-looking youth.
Pepys is scarcely less tolerant of Fletcher's more flagrant
infringements of propriety. In the whole of the Elizabethan drama
there was no piece which presented so liberal a mass of indelicacy as
Fletcher's _Custom of the Country_.
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