however ill-guided such revisions may seem now, they made sense to the period's dramatists and audiences. the dramatists approached shakespeare not as bardolators, but as theater professionals. unlike beaumont and fletcher, whose "plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage", according to dryden in 1668, "two of theirs being acted through the year for one of shakespeare's or jonson's", shakespeare appeared to them to have become dated. yet almost universally, they saw him as worth updating. though most of these revised pieces failed on stage, many remained current on stage for decades; thomas otway's roman adaptation of "romeo and juliet", for example, seems to have driven shakespeare's original from the stage between 1680 and 1744. it was in large part the revised shakespeare that took the lead place in the repertory in the early 18th century, while beaumont and fletcher's share steadily declined.