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By permission of the Right Hon. Lord Sackville, G. C. M. G.
PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BEAUMONT
From the original painting at Knole Park
Francis Beaumont: Dramatist
A Portrait
WITH SOME ACCOUNT
OF HIS CIRCLE, ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN,
AND OF HIS ASSOCIATION WITH
JOHN FLETCHER
BY
CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.
Professor of the English Language and Literature
in the University of California
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
1914
Copyright, 1914, by
The Century Co.
Published, February, 1914
TO MY WIFE
PREFACE
In this period of resurgent dramatic creativity when
once more the literature of the stage enthralls the
public and commands the publisher, it is but natural
that playwright, play-lover, and scholar alike should
turn with renewed and enlightened interest to the
models afforded by our Elizabethan masters of the age
of gold, to the circumstances of their production and
the lives of their imperishable authors. Very close to
Shakespeare stood Beaumont and Fletcher; but, though
during the past three centuries books about Shakespeare
have been as legion and studies of the "twin
literary heroes" have run into the hundreds, to
Fletcher as an individual but one book has been devoted,
and to Beaumont but one.
A portrait of either Beaumont or Fletcher demands
indeed as its counterpart, painted by the same brush
and with alternating strokes, a portrait of his literary
partner and friend. But in spirit and in favour the
twain are distinct. In this book I have tried to present
the poetic and compelling personality of Francis
Beaumont not only as conjoined with, and distinguished
from, the personality of Fletcher, but as seen
against the background of historic antecedents and
family connections and as tinged by the atmosphere
of contemporary life, of social, literary, and theatrical
environment. No doubt the picture has its imperfections,
but the criticism of those who know will assist
one whose only desire is to do Beaumont justice.
I take pleasure in expressing my indebtedness to the
authorities of the Bodleian Library and the British
Museum, to those of the National Portrait Gallery
(especially Mr. J. D. Milner), to our own Librarian
of the University of California, Mr. J. C. Rowell,
for unfailing courtesy during the years in which this
volume has been in preparation; to Mr. J. C. Schwab,
Librarian of Yale University, for the loan of rare and
indispensable sources of information, and to my colleague,
Professor Rudolph Schevill, for reading proof-sheets
and giving me many a scholarly suggestion. I
deplore my inability to include among the illustrations
carefully made by Emery Walker, of 16 Clifford's
Inn, a copy of the portrait of Beaumont's friend, Elizabeth,
Countess of Rutland, which hangs at Penshurst.
On account of the recent attempt to destroy by fire
that time-honored repository of heirlooms as precious
to the realm as to the family of Sidney, the Lord de
L'Isle and Dudley has found it necessary to close his
house to the public.
Charles Mills Gayley.
Berkeley, California,
December 15, 1913.
CONTENTS
|
|
|
|
|
PART ONE |
BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS CAREER AS POET AND DRAMATIST |
CHAPTER | | PAGE |
I | THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA | 3 |
II | BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS: GRACE-DIEU, OXFORD | 10 |
III | AT THE INNS OF COURT AND CHANCERY; THE POEMS ASSIGNED TO THESE EARLIER YEARS | 29 |
IV | THE VAUX COUSINS AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT | 46 |
V | FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH | 62 |
VI | SOME EARLY PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND OF FLETCHER | 72 |
VII | THE "BANKE-SIDE" AND THE PERIOD OF THE PARTNERSHIP | 95 |
VIII | RELATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, AND OTHERS IN THE THEATRICAL WORLD | 114 |
IX | THE "MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE": THE PASTORALISTS, AND OTHER CONTEMPORARIES AT THE INNS OF COURT | 124 |
X | AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT | 145 |
XI | BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER; RELATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE | 150 |
XII | BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING FAMILY | 172 |
XIII | THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION OF BEAUMONT | 190 |
XIV | TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM | 206 |
XV | A FEW WORDS OF FLETCHER'S LATER YEARS | 211 |
PART TWO |
THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER |
CHAPTER | | PAGE |
XVI | STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM; CRITICAL APPARATUS | 225 |
XVII | THE DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD | 236 |
XVIII | THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF BEAUMONT | 243 |
XIX | FLETCHER'S DICTION | 260 |
XX | FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT | 277 |
XXI | BEAUMONT'S DICTION | 281 |
XXII | BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT | 291 |
XXIII | THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS | 300 |
XXIV | "THE WOMAN-HATER," AND "THE KNIGHT" | 307 |
XXV | THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS | 332 |
XXVI | THE LAST PLAY | 368 |
XXVII | THE DRAMATIC ART, PRINCIPALLY OF BEAUMONT | 378 |
XXVIII | DID THE BEAUMONT "ROMANCE" INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE? | 386 |
XXIX | CONCLUSION | 396 |
APPENDIX |
| Table | A | 419 |
| " | B | 420 |
| " | C | 421 |
| " | D | 422 |
| " | E | 423 |
| INDEX | | 425 |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Francis Beaumont | Frontispiece |
| FACING
PAGE |
The Ruins of Grace-Dieu Nunnery | 22 |
Ruins of Grace-Dieu | 26 |
A Priory, Ulveston, Extant in 1730 | 26 |
Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset | 66 |
The Temple | 96 |
The Globe Theatre, with St. Paul's in the Background | 104 |
Ben Jonson | 120 |
Francis Bacon | 146 |
George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and Family | 160 |
John Selden | 170 |
The Beaumont of the Nuneham Portrait | 192 |
Michael Drayton | 202 |
John Fletcher | 226 |
John Earle, Bishop of Worcester and Salisbury | 244 |
Don Diego Sarmiento, Count Gondomar | 372 |
[1]
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
PART ONE
BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS
CAREER AS POET AND DRAMATIST.
[2]
[3]
BEAUMONT,
THE DRAMATIST
CHAPTER I
THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
"Among those of our dramatists who either were
contemporaries of Shakespeare or came after
him, it would be impossible to name more than three
to whom the predilection or the literary judgment
of any period of our national life has attempted
to assign an equal rank by his side. In the Argo
of the Elizabethan drama—as it presents itself to
the imagination of our own latter days—Shakespeare's
is and must remain the commanding figure.
Next to him sit the twin literary heroes, Beaumont
and Fletcher, more or less vaguely supposed to be
inseparable from one another in their works. The
Herculean form of Jonson takes a somewhat disputed
precedence among the other princes; the rest of these
are, as a rule, but dimly distinguished." So, with
just appreciation, our senior historian of the English
drama, to-day, the scholarly Master of Peterhouse.
Sir Adolphus Ward himself has, by availing
of the inductive processes of the inventive and indefatigable[4]
Fleay and his successors in separative criticism,
contributed not a little to a discrimination between the
respective efforts of the "twin literary heroes" who
sit next Jason; and who are "beyond dispute more
attractive by the beauty of their creations than any
and every one of Shakespeare's fellow-dramatists."
But even he doubts whether "the most successful series
of endeavours to distinguish Fletcher's hand from
Beaumont's is likely to have the further result of enabling
us to distinguish the mind of either from that
of his friend." Just this endeavour to distinguish not
only hand from hand, but mind from mind, is what I
have had the temerity to attempt. And still not, by
any means, a barefaced temerity, for my attempt at
first was merely to fix anew the place of the joint-authors
in the history of English comedy; and it has been
but imperceptibly that the fascination of the younger
of them, of Frank Beaumont, the personality of his
mind as well as of his art, has so grown upon me as
to compel me to set him before the world as he appears
to me to be clearly visible.
In broad outline the figure of Beaumont has been,
of course, manifest to the vision of poet-critics in the
past. To none more palpably than to the latest of
the melodious immortals of the Victorian strain. "If
a distinction must be made," wrote Swinburne as early
as 1875, "if a distinction must be made between the
Dioscuri of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont
was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux
was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than Castor
can it be said that on any side Beaumont was a
poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but[5]
so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and
ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a
distinction without a difference. Few things are
stranger than the avowal of so great and exquisite a
critic as Coleridge, that he could trace no faintest
line of demarcation between the plays which we owe
mainly to Beaumont and the plays which we owe
solely to Fletcher. To others this line has always
appeared in almost every case unmistakable. Were
it as hard and broad as the line which marks off, for
example, Shakespeare's part from Fletcher's in The
Two Noble Kinsmen, the harmony would of course
be lost which now informs every work of their common
genius.... In the plays which we know by evidence
surer than the most trustworthy tradition to be
the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher there is
indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible
admixture as leaves the greatest example of romantic
tragedy ... an unique instance of glorious imperfection,
a hybrid of heavenly and other than heavenly
breed, disproportioned and divine. But throughout
these noblest of the works inscribed generally with
the names of both dramatists we trace on every other
page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every turn
the note of a deeper voice, than we can ever recognize
in the work of Fletcher alone. Although the beloved
friend of Jonson, and in the field of comedy his loving
and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his
freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthiest
and the closest follower of Shakespeare.... The
general style of his tragic or romantic verse is as
simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity[6]
of outline as that of Fletcher's is by comparison lax,
effusive, exuberant.... In every one of the plays
common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not
to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch
of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every
such play, and above all of their two masterpieces,
Philaster and The Maid's Tragedy, it should be clear
to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has
not to do with the author of Valentinian [Fletcher]
and The Double Marriage [Fletcher and Massinger].
In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more
fluid, more feminine.... But in those tragic poems
of which the dominant note is the note of Beaumont's
genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper
key of emotion is touched, than ever was struck by
Fletcher. The lighter genius is palpably subordinate
to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the impression
of a loftier spirit. It is true that this distinction
is never grave enough to produce a discord;
it is also true that the plays in which the predominance
of Beaumont's mind and style is generally perceptible
make up altogether but a small section of the work
that bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true
that within this section the most precious part of that
work is comprised."
The essay in which this noble estimate of Beaumont
occurs remains indeed "the classical modern
criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher," and although
recent research has resulted in "variety of opinion
concerning the precise authorship of some of the plays
commonly attributed to those writers" its value is
substantially unaffected. The figure as revealed in[7]
glorious proportions to the penetrative imagination
and the sympathy of poetic kinship, remains, but by
the patient processes of scientific research the outlines
have been more sharply defined and the very lineaments
of Beaumont's countenance and of Fletcher's,
too, brought, I think, distinctly before us. Though
Swinburne attributes, almost aright, to Beaumont
alone one play, The Woman-Hater, and ascribes to
him the predominance in, and the better portions of
Philaster and The Maid's Tragedy, and the high interest
and graduated action of the serious part of A King
and No King, and also justly associates him with
Fletcher in the composition of The Scornful Lady, and
gives him alone "the admirable study of the worthy
citizen and his wife who introduced to the stage and
escort with their applause The Knight of the Burning
Pestle," and implies his predominance in that play, he
does not enumerate for us the acts and scenes and
parts of scenes which are Beaumont's or Fletcher's, or
Beaumont's revised by Fletcher, in any of these plays;
and consequently he points us to no specific lines of
poetic inspiration, no movements distinctively conceived
by either dramatist and shaped by his dramatic
pressure, no touchstone by which the average reader
may verify for himself that "to Beaumont his stars
had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and
passion, of tender power and broad strong humour,"
and that "to Fletcher had been allotted a more fiery
and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and
swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness
of bright exuberant speech." Though he is right
in discerning in the homelier emotion and pathetic[8]
interest of The Coxcombe, and of Cupid's Revenge
the note of Beaumont's manner, he couples with the
former The Honest Man's Fortune in which it is
more than doubtful whether Beaumont had any share.
To speak of Arbaces in A King and No King as
Beaumont's, is mainly right, but not wholly, and to
assign to him the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and
his swordsmen, is to assign precisely the scenes that
he did not compose. To speak of Beaumont's Triumph
of Love is perhaps defensible; but, with grave
reluctance, we now question the attribution. He is
justified in withdrawing "the noble tragedy of
Thierry and Theodoret" from the field of Beaumont's
coöperation and ascribing it to Fletcher and Massinger;
but he is undoubtedly wrong when he fails to couple
the latter's name with that of Fletcher as author of
Valentinian. Writing as Swinburne did after a study
of Fleay's first investigations into the versification
of Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger, the wonder
is not that once or twice, as a critic, he makes an
incorrect attribution, but that his poetic instinct so
successfully defied the temptation to enumerate in
detail the respective contributions of Beaumont and
Fletcher on the basis of metrical tests par excellence,—so
surprisingly novel and seductively convincing were
the tests then recently formulated. Swinburne's mistakes
are of sane omission rather than of supererogation.
By his judgments as a critic one can not
always swear; but here he is, in the main, marvelously
right, and a thousand times rather to be followed
than some of the successors of Fleay who have
swamped the personality of Beaumont by heaping on[9]
him, foundered, sods from a dozen turf-stacks which
he never helped to build.
But the chorizontes—those who would separate
every scene and line of the one genius from those of
the other—are not lightly to be spoken of. It is only
by combining their methods of analysis with the intuitions
of the poet-critics that one may hope to see
Frank Beaumont plain: "the worthiest and closest
follower of Shakespeare in the tragic field; the earliest
as well as ablest disciple of Ben Jonson in pure comedy,
varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody."
The labour is well bestowed if by its means lovers of
poetry and the drama, while not ceasing to admire
the elder dramatist, Fletcher, may be led to accede
at last to the younger his due and undivided honour,
may come to speak of him by unhyphenated name—a
personality of passion and of fire, a gracious power
in poetry, of effulgent dramatic creativity;—if, like
the ancients, they may protest occasionally in the name
of Pollux alone.
[10]
CHAPTER II
BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS: GRACE-DIEU,
OXFORD
Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, came of
the younger line of an ancient and distinguished
family of Anglo-Norman descent in which there had
been Barons de Beaumont from the beginning of the
fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century.
They lived, as did the dramatist later, in the forest of
Charnwood in Leicestershire,—part of the old forest
of Arden. And it is of a ride to their family seat that
John Leland, the antiquary, speaks when in his itinerary,
written between 1535 and 1543, he says:
"From Leicester to Brodegate, by ground well
wooded three miles.... From Brodegate to Loughborough
about a five miles.... First, I came out of
Brodegate Park into the forest of Charnwood, commonly
called the Waste. This great forest is a twenty
miles or more in compass, having plenty of wood....
In this forest is no good town nor scant a village;
Ashby-de-la-Zouche, a market town and other villages
on the very borders of it.... Riding a little further
I left the park of Beau Manor, closed with stone walls
and a pretty lodge in it, belonging of late to Beaumonts....
There is a fair quarry of alabaster stone
about a four miles from Leicester, and not very far[11]
from Beau Manor.[1]... There was, since the Bellemonts
[Beaumonts], earls of Warwick, a baron
[at Beaumanoir] of great lands of that name; and the
last of them in King Henry the Seventh's time was a
man of simple wit. His wife was after married to the
Earl of Oxford."[2] These barons "of great lands,"
living in Charnwood Forest,—where, as another old
writer tells us, "a wren and a squirrel might hop from
tree to tree for six miles; and in summer time a traveler
could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good
twelve miles, without seeing the sun,"—these barons
are the de Beaumonts, from the fourth of whom,
John, Lord Beaumont, who died in 1396, our dramatist
was descended.
The barony ran from father to son for six generations
of alternating Henries and Johns, c. 1309 to 1460.
John, fourth Baron; was grandson of Alianor, daughter
of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, and so descended
from Henry III and the first kings of the House of
Plantagenet. The second Baron, husband of Alianor
of Lancaster, was through his mother, Alice Comyn,
descended from the Scotch Earls of Buchan, and thus
connected with the Balliols and the royal House of
Scotland; through his father, Henry, the first Baron
de Beaumont, who died in 1343, he was great-grandson
of John de Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem,
1210-1225.[3] In a quaint tetrastich in the church of
Barton-upon-Humber, the memory of these alliances is
thus preserved:
[12]
Rex Hierosolymus cum Bellomonte locatur,
Bellus mons etiam cum Baghan consociatur,
Bellus mons iterum Longicastro religatur,
Bellus mons ... Oxonie titulatur.[4]
The sixth Baron became, in 1440, the first Viscount
of English creation; he married a granddaughter of the
Lord Bardolph of Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV; but with
his son "of simple wit," who died in 1507, the viscounty
died out. Beaumanoir to the east of Charnwood
is seven miles north of Leicester and nine from
Coleorton where, west of the Forest, an older branch
of the Beaumont family of which we shall hear, later,
continued to live and is living to-day; and the old
barony was revived, in 1840, in a descendant of the
female line, Miles Thomas Stapleton, as ninth Baron
Beaumont.
The grandfather of the dramatist, John Beaumont,
was in the third generation from Sir Thomas Beaumont,
the younger son of the fourth Lord Beaumont.
John evidently had to make his way before he could
establish himself near the old home in Leicestershire;
but he must have had some competence and position
from the first, for he was admitted early, in the reign of
Henry VIII, a member of the Inner Temple; in 1537
and 1543 he performed the learned and expensive
functions of Reader, or exponent of the law in that
society, and later was elected treasurer or presiding
officer of the house. He started brilliantly in his
profession. In 1529 he was counsellor for the corporation
of Leicester; and, by 1539, he had means or[13]
influence sufficient to secure for himself the old Nunnery
of Grace-Dieu in Charnwood Forest, which, as an
ecclesiastical commissioner he had four years earlier
helped to suppress. That he entered into possession,
however, only with difficulty, is manifest from a letter
which he wrote in 1538 to Lord Cromwell, enclosing
£20 as a present and beseeching his lordship's intercession
with the king that he may be confirmed in his
ownership of the "demenez" as against the cupidity
of George, first Earl of Huntingdon, who "doth labour
to take the seyd abbey ffrom me; ... for I do ffeyre
the seyd erle and hys sonnes do seeke my lyffe."[5] He
occupied various important legal and administrative
positions in the county, and, shortly before the death
of Edward VI, was appointed to the high office of
Master of the Rolls, or Judge of the Court of Appeal.
A year or two later, however, early in 1553,
he was removed from his seat on the bench, for
defalcation and other flagrant breach of trust. He
was imprisoned and fined in all his property,
and died the next year. His vast estates were bestowed
on Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, by Edward
VI, but soon afterward, as a result of legal manœuvre
and by the assistance of that Earl and his eldest son,
the widow of the Master of the Rolls contrived to
retain the manor of Grace-Dieu; and it long continued
to be the country seat of the Beaumonts.[6] This prudent,
strenuous, and high-born lady, Elizabeth Hastings,[14]
was the daughter of Sir William Hastings, a
younger son of the incorruptible William, Lord Hastings,
whom in 1483 Richard of Gloucester had decapitated.
Her grandmother, Catherine Nevil, was
daughter to the Earl of Salisbury, who died at Pomfret,
and sister to Richard, Earl of Warwick, the King-maker.
Elizabeth's aunt, Anne Hastings, was the wife
of George Talbot, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, and her
uncle, Edward, was the second Lord Hastings. Edward's
children, our Elizabeth's first cousins, were
Anne, Countess to Thomas Stanley, second Earl of
Derby, and that George, first Earl of Huntingdon,
whom, with certain of his five sons, the master of
Grace-Dieu "ffeyred."[7] We may conjecture that the
feud expired with the marriage of Elizabeth Hastings
and John Beaumont, or with the death of the first Earl
in 1544; and that the policy of his successors, Francis
and Henry, in securing to the Huntingdon family the
reversion of the forfeited estates of the Master of the
Rolls and, later, releasing a portion of them to Elizabeth,
was dictated by cousinly affection.
The great Francis, second Earl of Huntingdon, lived
in the castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, about an hour's
walk from Mistress Beaumont's, and had, in 1532,
allied himself to royalty by marrying Katherine Pole,
niece of the Cardinal, and great-granddaughter of
that George, Duke of Clarence (brother to Edward
IV), who was "pack'd with post-horse up to heaven"
by the cacodemon of Gloucester. When Edward
VI died, Francis declared for Lady Jane Grey and[15]
was for a time imprisoned. His daughter was
the beautiful Lady Mary Hastings who, being of
the blood royal, was wooed for the Czar, and
might have been "Empress of Muscovy" had she
pleased. From the Huntingdon family Elizabeth
Hastings introduced at least one new Christian
name into that of the Beaumonts. For the second
Earl, she named her oldest son Francis. One of her
daughters, Elizabeth, became the wife of William,
third Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in the adjoining
county of Northampton; and thus our dramatist,
through his aunt, was connected with another of the
proudest Norman families of England,—one of the
most devoted to the Catholic faith and, as we shall see,
active in Jesuit interests that during the dramatist's
life in London assumed momentous political proportions.
Aunt Elizabeth, Lady Vaux, died before our
Frank Beaumont was born; and her son Henry died
when Frank was but ten years of age,—but in an
entry in the State Papers of 1595 concerning "the entail
of Lord Vaux's estates on his children by his first
wife [John] Beaumont's daughter,"[8] several "daughters"
are mentioned. These, his cousins of Harrowden,
Frank knew from his youth up. In 1605 all
England was to be ringing with their names.
John and Elizabeth were succeeded at Grace-Dieu
by their son, Francis. He was a student at Peterhouse,
Cambridge; afterwards, at the Inner Temple,
where like his father before him, he proceeded Reader
and Bencher. In 1572 he sat in Parliament as member
for Aldborough; in 1589 he was made sergeant-at-law;[16]
and in 1593 was appointed one of the Queen's
Justices of the Court of Common Pleas. His method
of trying a case, technical and merciless, may be
studied in the minutes of the Lent assizes of 1595 at
which the unfortunate Jesuit priest, Henry Walpole,
was sentenced to death for returning to England.[9] His
career on the bench was both successful and honourable;
and he is described by a contemporary, William
Burton, the author of the Description of Leicestershire,
as a "grave, learned, and reverend judge." He married
Anne, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire knight, Sir
George Pierrepoint of Holme-Pierrepoint; and their
children were Henry, born 1581; John, born about
1583; Francis, the subject of this study, born in 1584
or 1585; and Elizabeth, some four years younger than
Francis.[10] That we know nothing of the life or personality
of this mother of poets, is a source of regret.
Her family, however, was of a notable stock possessed,
immediately after the Conquest, of lands in Sussex
under Earl Warren. Their estate of Holme-Pierrepoint
in Nottinghamshire they had inherited from
Michael de Manvers during the reign of Edward I.
Anne's ancestors had been Knights Banneret, and of
the Carpet and the Sword, for generations. Her
brother, Sir Henry Pierrepoint, born 1546, married
Frances, the eldest daughter of the Sir William Cavendish
who began the building of Chatsworth, and[17]
his redoubtable Lady, Bess of Hardwick, who finished
it. This aunt of the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu,
Lady Pierrepoint, was sister to William Cavendish,
first Earl of Devonshire in 1611 and forefather
of the present Dukes,—to Henry Cavendish,
the friend of Mary, Queen of Scots, and
son-in-law of her kindly custodian, George Talbot,
sixth Earl of Shrewsbury,—to Sir Charles Cavendish,
whose son, William, became Earl, and then
Duke of Newcastle,—to Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess
of Lennox, the wife of Henry Darnley's brother,
Charles Stuart, and the mother of James I's hapless
cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart,—and to Mary Cavendish,
Countess of Shrewsbury, wife of Gilbert, seventh
Earl. The son of Sir Henry and Lady Pierrepoint,
Robert, born in the same year as his cousin, Francis
Beaumont, the dramatist, married a daughter of the
Talbots, became in due time Viscount Newark and
Earl of Kingston, and was killed in 1643 during the
Civil War. From him descended Marquises of Dorchester
and Dukes of Kingston, and the Earls Manvers
of the present time. Through their mother, Anne
Pierrepoint, the Beaumont children of Grace-Dieu
were, accordingly, connected with several of the most
influential noble families of England and Scotland; and
in their comradeship with the cousins of Holme-Pierrepoint
they would, as of the common kin, be thrown into
familiar acquaintance with the children of the various
branches of these and other houses that I might mention.[11]
Holme-Pierrepoint is seventeen miles northeast[18]
of Grace-Dieu, near the city of Nottingham,
in the red sand-stone country along the River Trent.
The Park is but a two or three hours' drive from
Charnwood, and the old house to which Anne used to
take her children to see their grandparents still stands,
altered only in part from what it was in 1580. It
belongs to the Earl Manvers of to-day. In the church
is the tomb of the poet's uncle, Sir Henry Pierrepoint,
who died the year before Francis.
Since no entry of Francis' baptism has been discovered
it is uncertain whether he was born at Grace-Dieu.
The probabilities are, however, in favour of
that birth-place, since his father was not continuously
occupied in London until a later date. As to the exact
year of his birth, there is also uncertainty but I think
that the records indicate 1584. The matriculation
entry in the registers of Oxford University describes
him as twelve years of age at the time of his admission,
February 4, 1597 (new style), which would establish
the date of his birth between February 1584
and February 1585. The funeral certificate issued at
the time of his father's death, April 22, 1598, speaks
of the other children, Henry, John, and Elizabeth as,
respectively, seventeen, fourteen, and nine, years of
age, "or thereaboutes"; but of Francis as "of thirteen
yeares or more."
Justice Beaumont was a squire of considerable means.
When, in 1581, he qualified himself to be Bencher by
lecturing at the Inner Temple upon some statute or
section of a statute for the space of three weeks and
three days, his expenses for the entertainment at
table or in revels, alone, must have run to about[19]
£1500, in the money of to-day. He held at the time
of his death landed estates in some ten parishes of
Leicestershire, between Sheepshead on the east and
and Coleorton three miles away on the west, and scattered
over some seven miles north and south between
Belton and Normanton. In Derby, too, he had two
or three fine manors. His will shows that he was able
to make generous provision for many of his "ould and
faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing specifically
a handsome sum in money to his daughter Elizabeth.
He was a considerate and careful man, too,
for the morning of his death he added a codicil to
his will: "I have left somewhat oute of my will
which is this, I will that my daughter Elizabeth have
all the jewells that were her mother's." His sons are
not mentioned, for naturally the heir, Henry, would
make provision for John and Francis.[12] His chief
executor was Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, his kinsman,—worth
mentioning here; for at Coleorton another
cousin, Maria Beaumont, the mother of the
great Duke of Buckingham, had till recently lived as
a waiting gentlewoman in the household.
Grace-Dieu where the youth of these children was
principally spent, was "beautifully situated in what
was formerly one of the most recluse spots in the
centre of Charnwood Forest," within a little distance
of the turn-pike road that leads from Ashby-de-la-Zouch[20]
to Loughborough. It lies low in a valley, near
the river Soar. In his Two Bookes of Epigrammes
and Epitaphs, 1639, Thomas Bancroft gives us a picture
of the spot:
Grace-Dieu, that under Charnwood stand'st alone,
As a grand relicke of religion,
I reverence thine old, but fruitfull, worth,
That lately brought such noble Beaumonts forth,
Whose brave heroicke Muses might aspire
To match the anthems of the heavenly quire:
The mountaines crown'd with rockey fortresses,
And sheltering woods, secure thy happiness
That highly favour'd art (tho' lowly placed)
Of Heaven, and with free Nature's bounty graced.
And still another picture of it is painted, a hundred
and seventy years later by Wordsworth, the friend
of the Sir George Beaumont who in his day was possessed
of the old family seat of Coleorton Hall, within
half an hour's walk of Grace-Dieu:—
Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,
Rugged and high, of Charnwood's forest ground
Stand yet, but, Stranger! hidden from thy view,
The ivied Ruins of forlorn Grace-Dieu,—
Erst a religious house, which day and night
With hymns resounded, and the chanted rite:
And when those rites had ceased, the Spot gave birth
To honourable Men of various worth:
There, on the margin of a streamlet wild,
Did Francis Beaumont sport, an eager child:
There, under shadow of the neighboring rocks,
Sang youthful tales of shepherds and their flocks;
Unconscious prelude to heroic themes,
Heart-breaking tears, and melancholy dreams
[21]
Of slighted love, and scorn, and jealous rage,
With which his genius shook the buskined stage.
Communities are lost, and Empires die,
And things of holy use unhallowed lie;
They perish;—but the Intellect can raise,
From airy words alone, a Pile that ne'er decays.[13]
So far as the "youthful tales of shepherds" go,
Wordsworth is probably thinking of the verses of
Francis' brother, Sir John, which open:
A shepherdess, who long had kept her flocks
On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks,—
written long after both brothers had left boyhood
behind; indeed after Francis was dead; or he is attributing
to our Beaumont a share in Fletcher's Faithfull
Shepheardesse. Francis, himself, has given us
nothing of the pastoral vein, save sweet snatches in
the dramas "with which his genius shook the buskined
stage."
There is no doubt that from childhood up, the
brothers and, as I shall later show, their sister Elizabeth
breathed an atmosphere of literature and national
life. At an early age John was sufficiently confessed
a versifier to be assigned the Prelude to one of the
nobly patronized Michael Drayton's Divine Poems,
and there is fair reason for believing that the younger
brother Francis was writing and publishing verses in
1602, when he was barely eighteen years of age.
Their father was going to and fro among the great
in London who made affairs. The country-side all
about them was replete with historic memories and[22]
inspirations to poetry. In the Grey Friars' at Leicester,
eleven miles south-east, Simon de Montfort
allied by marriage to the first Anglo-Norman de Beaumonts,
Earls of Leicester, lay buried. There, too, until
his ashes were scattered on the waters of the Soar,
King Richard the Third. In the Blue Boar Inn of that
"toune,"—in our young Beaumont's day, all "builded
of tymbre,"—this last of the Plantagenets had spent
the night before the battle of Bosworth. The field itself
on which the battle was fought lies but eight
miles west of Leicester and about nine south of Grace-Dieu.
No wonder that Francis Beaumont's brother
John in after days chose Bosworth Field as the subject
of an heroic poem:
The Winter's storme of Civill Warre I sing,
Whose end is crown'd with our eternall Spring;
Where Roses joyn'd, their colours mixe in one,
And armies fight no more for England's Throne.
The Beaumonts were living in the centre of the counties
most engaged. Three of their predecessors had
fallen fighting for the red rose, John Beaumont of
Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at Northampton
in 1460, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton
in 1461. In his description of the battle, John introduces
by way of simile a reference to what may have
been a familiar scene about Grace-Dieu:
Here Stanley and brave Lovell trie their strength....
So meete two bulls upon adjoyning hills
Of rocky Charnwood, while their murmur fills
The hollow crags, when striving for their bounds,
They wash their piercing homes in mutuall wounds.
[23]
Lovell, himself, was a Beaumont on the mother's side.
And the poet takes occasion to pay tribute, also, to his
own most famous ancestor on the grandmother's side,
the "noble Hastings," first baron, whose cruel execution
in Richard III, Shakespeare had dramatized more
than twenty years before John wrote.
Steel Engraving by W. Finden
THE RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU NUNNERY
Just south of Charnwood Forest stood, in the day
of John and Francis, the Manor House in Bradgate
Park where Lady Jane Grey was born, and where she
lived from 1549 to 1552 while she was being educated
by her ambitious father and mother, the Marquis and
Marchioness of Dorset, "to occupy the towering position
they felt assured she would sooner or later be
called to fill"—that of Protestant queen of England.
Here it was that Roger Ascham, as he tells us in his
Schoolmaster, after inquiring for the Lady Jane of
the Marquis and his lady who were out hunting in
Charnwood Forest, came upon the twelve-year old
princess in her closet "reading the Phædon of Plato
in Greek, with as much delight as gentlemen read the
merry tales of Boccaccio." The grandmother of the
young Beaumonts, who was still alive in 1578, may
have lived long enough to take our Francis on her
knee and tell him of the hopes her Protestant kinsmen
of Ashby-de-la-Zouch had fixed upon the Lady
Jane, and of how her cousin, the Earl, Francis of
Huntingdon, had been one of those who in Royal
Council in June 1553, abetted the Dukes of Northumberland
and Suffolk in the scheme to secure
the succession of Lady Jane to the throne, and
how, with these dukes and the Archbishop of Canterbury,
and other lords and gentlemen (among[24]
them a certain Sir John Baker of Sissinghurst, Kent,
whose family later appears in this narrative), he
had signed the "devise" in accordance with which
Jane was proclaimed Queen. And the old lady
would with bated breath tell him of the cruel fate of
that nine-days' queen. Of how Francis of Huntingdon
was sent to the Tower with Queen Jane, she also
would tell. But perhaps not much of how he shortly
made his peace with Queen Mary, hunted down the
dead Jane's father, and brought him to the scaffold.
And either their grandmother or their father, the
Judge, could tell them of the night in 1569 on which
their cousin, Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon, had
entertained in the castle "rising on the very borders"
of the forest to the east, Mary, Queen of Scots, when
she was on her way to her captivity in the house of
another connection of theirs, Henry Cavendish, at Tutbury
in the county of Stafford, just east of them.
In the history of culture not only John and Francis,
but the Beaumonts in general are illustrious. In
various branches and for generations the poetic,
scholarly, and artistic vein has persisted. John
Beaumont's son and heir, the second Sir John, edited
his father's poems, and lived to write memorial verses
on Ben Jonson, and on Edward King, Milton's
"Lycidas"; and another son, Francis, wrote verses.
A relative and namesake of the dramatist's father,—afterwards
Master of Charterhouse,—wrote an Epistle
prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, 1598; and still another
more distant relative, Dr. Joseph, Master of Peterhouse,
and author of the epic allegory, Psyche, was
one of the poetic imitators through whom Spenser's[25]
influence was conveyed to Milton. The Sir George
Beaumont of Wordsworth's day to whom reference
has already been made was celebrated by that poet
both as artist and patron of art. And, according to
Darley,[14] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was of the
race and maiden name of our dramatist's mother,
Anne Pierrepoint. From which coincidence one may,
if he will, argue poetic blood on that side of the family,
too; or from Grosart's derivation of Jonathan Edwards
from that family, polemic blood, as well.
The three sons of Justice Beaumont of Grace-Dieu
were entered on February 4, 1597, at Broadgates
Hall, now Pembroke, which at that time was one of
the most flourishing and fashionable institutions in
Oxford. These young gentlemen-commoners were
evidently destined for the pursuit of the civil and common
law, since, as Dyce informs us, their Hall was
then the principal nursery for students of that discipline.
But one cannot readily visualize young Frank,
not yet thirteen, or his brother John, a year or so older,
devoting laborious hours to the Corpus Juris in the
library over the south aisle of St. Aldate's Church, or
to their Euclid, Strabo, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian.
We see them, more probably, slipping across St. Aldate's
street to Wolsey's gateway of Christ Church,
and through the, then unfinished, great quadrangle,
past Wolsey's tower in the southeast corner, and, by
what then served for the Broad Walk, to what now
are called the Magdalen College School cricket
grounds, and so to some well-moored boat on the
flooded meadows by the Cherwell. And some days,[26]
they would have under arm or in pocket a tattered
volume of Ovid, preferably in translation,—Turberville's
Heroical Epistles, or Golding's rendering of the
Metamorphoses,—or Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or
Fenton's Tragical Discourses out of Bandello, dedicated
to the sister of Sir Philip Sidney—Sir Philip,
whose daughter young Francis should, one day, revere
and celebrate in noble lines. Or they would
have Harington's Orlando Furioso to wonder upon;
or some cheap copy of Amadis or Palmerin to waken
laughter. And, other days, fresh quartos of Tamburlaine
and Edward II and Dido, or Kyd's Spanish
Tragedy and Lyly's Gallathea, or Greene's Frier Bacon
and James IV, or Shakespeare's Richard II, and
Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's
Lost. These, with alternate shuddering and
admiring, mirth or tears, to declaim and in imagination
re-enact. And certainly there would be mellow
afternoons when the Songs and Sonnettes known as
Tottel's Miscellany and The Paradyse of Daynty
Devises, with their poems of love and chivalry by
Thomas, Lord Vaux,—of which they had often heard
from their cousins of Harrowden,—and Chapman's
completion of Hero and Leander or Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis, and Drayton's fantastic but
graceful Endimion and Phoebe would hold them
till the shadows were well aslant, and the candles
began to wink them back to the Cardinal's quadrangle
and the old refectory, beyond, of Broadgates Hall.
For the Char and the boats were there then, and all
these El Dorados of the mind were to be had in
quarto or other form, and some of them were appearing[27]
first in print in the year when Frank and his brothers
entered Oxford.
View taken by Buck in 1730
RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU
Note: After Buck's time the ruins were "carried away to mend the roads"
See John Throsby, Select Views of Leicestershire, Vol. II, 461
Taken by Buck
A PRIORY, ULVESTON, EXTANT IN 1730
We may be sure, that many a time these brothers
and sworn friends in literature, and Henry, too, loyal
young Elizabethans,—and with them, perhaps, their
cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who was then at Oriel,—strolled
northwest from the Cherwell toward Yarnton,
and then Woodstock with its wooded slopes, to see the
island where Queen Elizabeth, when but princess, had
been imprisoned for a twelvemonth, and, hearing a
milk-maid singing, had sighed, "She would she were
a milkmaid as she was"; and that they took note of
fair Rosamund's well and bower, too. They may have
tramped or ridden onward north to Banbury, and got
there at the same cakeshop in Parsons Street the same
cakes we get now. Or, some happy Michaelmas,
they would have walked toward the fertile Vale of
Evesham, north, first, toward Warwickshire where at
Compton Scorpion Sir Thomas Overbury, the ill-fated
friend of their future master, Ben Jonson,
was born, and on by the village of Quinton but
six miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, toward
Mickleton and the Malvern Hills; and then, turning
toward the Cotswolds, to Winchcombe with its
ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south
of it Sudely Castle where Henry VIII's last wife,
the divorced Catherine Parr, had lived and died,—where
Giles, third Baron Chandos, had entertained
Queen Bess, and where in their time abode the
Lord William. With this family of Brydges, Barons
Chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in 1597
at any rate after 1602, when the fifth Baron, Grey,[28]
succeeded to the title. For, writing Teares on the
death of that hospitable "King of the Cotswolds,"
which occurred in 1621, John Beaumont describes him
with the admiration begotten of long intimacy,—"the
smoothnesse of his mind," "his wisdome and
his happy parts," and "his sweet behaviour and discourse."
Or,—and how could any young Oxonian fail of it?—they
started from Broadgates, down the High,
crossed Magdalen Bridge, where the boats were lazily
oaring below them, and set out for the climb to Rose
Hill; then down by sleepy ways to Littlemore, and to
Sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents to
Nuneham,—where now, in the fine old manor house,
hangs Frank's own portrait in oils,—one of the
two contemporary likenesses of him that exist to-day.
[29]
CHAPTER III
AT THE INNS OF COURT AND CHANCERY;
THE POEMS ASSIGNED TO THESE EARLIER YEARS.
The career of the Beaumonts at the University
was shortened by the death of their father, some
fourteen months after their admission. Henry had
been entered of the Inner Temple, November 27, 1597,
at his father's request. Some say with John, but I do
not find the latter in the Records. Francis may have
remained at Oxford until 1600. On November 3 of
that year, he, also, was admitted a member of the
Inner Temple, his two brothers acting as sponsors for
him. We notice from the admission-book that he was
matriculated specialiter, gratis, comitive,—because his
father had been a Bencher,—was excused from most
of the ordinary duties and charges, and was permitted
to take his meals and to lodge outside the Inn of Court
itself. I gather that, like other young students at the
time, he lodged and pursued his studies in one of
the lesser Inns, called Inns of Chancery, attached to the
Inner Temple and under its supervision: Clifford's
Inn across Fleet Street; or, across the Strand, Lyon's
Inn,—or, let us hope, by preference, Clement's Inn;
where had lain Jack Falstaff in the days when he was
"page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk," and[30]
was seen by lusty Shallow to "break Skogan's head
at the court-gate when 'a was a crack not thus high;"
where had boozed Shallow himself and his four
friends—"not four such swinge-bucklers in all the
Inns of Court again"; and where, no doubt, they were
talking in Beaumont's day "of mad Shallow yet."
In 1600, the Inns of Chancery lodged about a
hundred students each, and served as preparatory
schools for the Inns of Court. At one of these lesser
Inns[15] Beaumont would acquire some elementary
knowledge of civil procedure by copying writs of the
Clerks of Chancery, would listen to a reader sent over
by the Inner Temple to lecture, and would be
"bolted," or sifted, in the elements of law by the
"inner" or junior barristers; and he would attend
"moots" over which senior or "utter" barristers
presided. At the end of about two years or earlier,
if he proved a promising scholar, he would be transferred
to the Inn of Court, itself. We may assume
that about 1602, Beaumont would be sitting in Clerks'
Commons in the Hall of the Inner Temple. Bread
and beer for breakfast,—provided on only four days
of the week. At 12 o'clock he would be summoned to
dinner by the blowing of a horn,—"thou horne of
hunger that cal'st the inns a court to their manger."
For his mess of meat,—in Lent, fish,—on other occasions,
loins of mutton, or beef,—he would make
himself a trencher of bread. At 6 or 7 o'clock would[31]
come supper,—bread and beer again. After dinner,
and again after supper, he would enjoy bolts and exercises
conducted by the utter barristers, day in and
day out through nearly the whole year. As he advanced
in proficiency he would appear as a "moot-man"
in the arguments presented before the Benchers,
or governing fellows, seated as judges. And perhaps
he resigned himself, meanwhile, to the proper wear
within the Inn, which was cap and gown, "but the
fashion was to wear hats, cloaks or coats, swords,
rapiers, boots and spurs, large ruffs and long hair.
Even Benchers were found to sit in Term Time with
hats on."[16]
Whether Beaumont gave promise or not we are
ignorant. The routine of the Inn was impeccable;
but students and benchers were not. There were not
infrequently other exercises than "moots" after supper:
cards and stage-plays, revels and sometimes riots.
This much we know, that before young Frank could
have fulfilled his seven or more years as student and
"moot-man," he was already in the rank of poets
and dramatists. But, that by no means precludes his
continuance for several years, perhaps till 1608, in
the juridical university, or his intimate association
with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of
what would be his college,—the Inner Temple. And
for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere
was as poetic as juridical. The young man's fancy
was fired by the poetry and the drama that for centuries
had enlivened the graver pursuits of the Gothic
halls that rose between Fleet Street and the Thames,[32]
Whitefriars and Paget Place,—"the noblest nurseries
of humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as Ben
Jonson calls them in his dedication[17] to the Inns of
Court of Every Man out of his Humour, first published
in the year when Beaumont entered.
According to Aubrey, while the garden-wall of
Lincoln's Inn, close by, was building, a Bencher
of that society "walking thro' and hearing" a
young bricklayer "repeat some Greek verses out of
Homer, discoursed with him, and finding him to
have a witt extraordinary gave him some exhibition
to maintaine him at Trinity College, Cambridge."
That young bricklayer was, later, Beaumont's friend
and master, Ben Jonson. Lincoln's Inn had long been
a nursing mother to dramatic effort. At the beginning
of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was one of its
members, Richard Edwardes, who, as Master of the
Chapel Children, produced the "tragicall comedie"
Damon and Pythias, and the tragedy of Palamon and
Arcite, to the great edification of the Queen, and the
permanent improvement of the Senecan style of
drama by the fusion of the ideal and the commonplace,
of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous
in an appeal to popular interest. "He was highly
valued," this Edwardes, "by those that knew him," says
Anthony Wood, "especially his associates in Lincoln's
Inn." And it was in the Middle Temple, just fourteen
months after Beaumont joined the Inns of Court, that
Manningham, one of the barristers, witnessed the performance
for the Reader's Feast on Candlemas Day of
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. If Beaumont of the Inner[33]
Temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more
than the applause, he was not our Frank Beaumont.
We may be sure that he had sauntered through the
Temple Gardens many an afternoon, and knew the
spot immortalized by Marlowe and that same Shakespeare,
as the scene of the quarrel between Plantagenet
and Somerset when the white and red roses were
plucked, and that he would hear Shakespeare when he
could.
But much as the Middle Temple and Lincoln's
favoured the drama and costly entertainments on the
major feast-days, they were outdone in Christmas
revels and masques and plays by the closely affiliated
societies of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple. Between
these Houses, says Mr. Douthwaite, the historian
of the former, "there appears anciently to have
existed a kindly union, which is shown by the fact that
on the great gate of the gardens of the Inner Temple
may be seen to this day [1886] the 'griffin' of Gray's
Inn, whilst over the great gateway in Gray's Inn
Square is carved in bold relief the 'wingèd horse'
of the Inner Temple." The two societies had long
a custom of combining for the production of theatrical
shows; and as we shall see, they combined
some thirteen years after Beaumont entered the
Inner Temple in the production at Court of one of
the most glorious and expensive masques ever presented
in London, Beaumont's own masque for the
wedding of the Elector Palatine and the Princess
Elizabeth. They were influential as patrons of the
early drama, and as producers of amateur dramatists.
For centuries Gray's Inn had permitted "revels"[34]
after six o'clock supper of bread and beer; and when
Beaumont was of the Inner Temple close by, there
was a Grand Week at Gray's in every term. "They
had revels and masques some of which," as a member
of that society has recently said, "have never been
forgotten, and I think cannot be forgotten while English
history lasts."[18] From a very early date, perhaps
not long after the society was established in Edward
the Third's reign in the old manor of Portpool, "they
were addicted at the Christmas season to a great outburst
of revelry of every kind. The revelings began
at All Hallows; at Christmas a Prince of Portpoole
was appointed; who was also Lord of Misrule,
and he kept things gaily alive through Christmas and
until toward the end of January." These and other
disguises, masques, and mummeries, are lineal descendants
of the mummings of the Ancient Order of
the Coif, such as regaled King Richard II at Christmas
1389; and, amalgamated with St. George plays
and other folk-shows and even with sword-dances, they
influenced the course of rural drama throughout the
realm. It may be a bow drawn at a venture but I cannot
withhold the suspicion that the Lord of Pool of the
Revesby Sword-Play and of other popular compositions
derives from the historic Prince of Misrule of
the Gray's Inn Christmas revels. It was George Gascoigne
of Gray's Inn who by a translation from
Ariosto introduced the Renaissance treatment of the
Greek New Comedy and the Latin Comedy into England
with his Supposes in 1566, and in the same year,[35]
with Francis Kinwelmersh, produced at Gray's Inn
an English rendering of Ludovico Dolce's Giocasta,
a tragedy descended from Euripides' Phoenissae by
way of a Latin version. "Altogether," remarks
Professor Cunliffe,[19] "the play must have provided a
gorgeous and exciting spectacle, and have produced
an impression not unworthy of Gray's Inn, 'an
House', the Queen said on another occasion, 'she was
much beholden unto, for that it did always study for
some sports to present unto her.'" To this house
and to Gascoigne, Shakespeare, too, was beholden,
for from the Supposes proceeds more or less directly
the minor plot of The Taming of the Shrew. In
1588, Gray's Inn figures prominently again in the
career of the pre-Shakespearian drama, with the production
by one of its gentlemen, Thomas Hughes, of
a tragedy of English legend and Senecan type, The
Misfortunes of Arthur, played by the society before
the Queen at Greenwich. And, in 1594, Gray's Inn
connects itself with the Shakespearian drama directly
by witnessing in the great hall in the Christmas season
a play called A Comedy of Errors, "like to Plautus
his Menaechmus."
It is diverting to note that on the eve of just that
season of 1594, a very pious woman, the second wife
of Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the mother of Anthony
and Francis, is writing to the elder brother "I trust
that they will not mum nor sinfully make revel at
Gray's Inn." Anthony was not a very strict Puritan,
Francis still less so; and Francis, who had been of
Gray's Inn since 1575, was, till his fall from power,[36]
the keenest devotee and most ardent and reckless promoter
of masquing that Gray's Inn or, for that matter,
England, had ever known. According to Spedding,[20]
the speeches of the six councillors for the
famous court of the Prince of Purpoole in 1594 were
written by him and him alone. He furnished the
money and much of the device for gorgeous masques
before Queen Elizabeth; and under her successor he
was prime mover in many a masque, like that of the
Flowers, presented by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, in
1614, which, alone, cost him about £10,000 as reckoned
in the money of to-day. The masques by the
four Inns, in honour of the Elector Palatine's marriage,
the year before, are said to have cost £20,000,—five
hundred thousand dollars in the money of to-day!
And it would appear that much of this expense
was assumed by Sir Francis Bacon, who in the years
of his greatness as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General
retained intimate relations with the life of
Gray's Inn, and whom our Beaumont during the years
of studentship before 1603, when the gallant Sir Walter
Raleigh was consigned to the Tower, must many
times have seen strolling with Sir Walter in the walks
that Bacon himself had laid out for his fellow-benchers
of the Inn.
If Beaumont's family had deliberately set about
preparing him for his career of poet and dramatist,
especially of dramatist who, with John Fletcher, should
vividly reproduce the life, manners and conversation
of young men of fashion about town, they could not
have placed him in a community more favourable to[37]
these ends than that of the Inns of Court. As the
name itself implies the members were gentlemen of
the Court of the King. They must be "sons to persons
of quality"; they must be trained to the possibility
of appearance before the King at any time; they
must be ready not merely as a privilege, but as a function,
to entertain royalty upon summons. As Gray's
Inn had its flavour of romance, its literary and dramatic
history, its Sidney, its Bacon, its Gascoigne;
so also the "anciently allied House" of the Inner
Temple. There lingered the tradition, to say the
least, of Chaucer's stirring poetry; there the spirit of
Sir Francis Drake,—stirring romances of the Spanish
main; there the memory of the Christmas revels
of 1562 at which was first acted the Gorboduc of
Thomas Sackville (afterwards Earl of Dorset, and
connected by marriage with the Fletchers), and
Thomas Norton,—whose "stately speeches and well
sounding phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his
stile," whose national quality, romantic illumination
of classical form, impressive, and novel dramatic
blank verse were to influence imperishably the course
of Elizabethan tragedy. There, too, had been produced,
by five poets of the House, in 1568, "the first
English love-tragedy that has survived,"[21] Gismond of
Salerne, a distant but unmistakable forerunner in tempestuous
passion and pathos of plays in which young
Beaumont was to compose the major part, The Maides
Tragedy and A King and No King.
Here, in the intervals between moots and bolts in
the day time or during the long evenings about the[38]
central fire in Hall or in Chambers, a young man of
poetic proclivities would find ample opportunity to indulge
his genius. And, even after he ceased to be an
inmate, the Inner Temple would still be for him a
club, in which by the payment of a small annual fee
he might retain membership for life. And membership
in one 'college' of this pseudo-university implied
an honorary 'freedom' of the others.
Beaumont would know not only William Browne, the
poet of the Inner Temple from 1611 on, and all
Browne's poetic fellows in that House, but Browne's
less poetic friend, Christopher Brooke, counsel for
Shakespeare's company of King's Players, who earlier
in the century had entered Lincoln's Inn; and, also,
Brooke's chamber-fellow, John Donne, whose secret
marriage with the daughter of the Lieutenant of the
Tower, in 1609, got the young scapegraces into jail.
And at Gray's Inn Beaumont would be even more at
home. It was the 'House' of his kinsman, Henry
Hastings of Ashby,—in 1604 Earl of Huntingdon,—two
years younger than Frank, and admitted as early
as 1597; and of Robert Pierrepoint, who had come
down with Frank from Oxford and was entered of the
Inns at the same time; and, two years later, of Robert's
cousin, William Cavendish, afterwards second Earl of
Devonshire.
If we could be sure that a poem called The Metamorphosis
of Tabacco, a mock-Ovidian poem of graceful
style and more than ordinary wit, published in
1602, and ascribed by some one writing in a contemporary
hand upon the title-page, to John Beaumont,[39]
was John's we might regard the half dozen verses in
praise of "thy pleasing rime," signed F. B., and beginning,
My new-borne Muse assaies her tender wing,
And where she should crie, is inforst to sing,—
as young Francis' earliest effort in rhyme. The
dedication of the Metamorphosis to "my loving
friend, Master Michael Drayton," favours the conjectured
composition by John, for he is writing other
complimentary poems to Drayton in the years immediately
following 1602. But, though F. B.'s lines prefatory
to the Metamorphosis are not unworthy of
a fanciful youngster, they are negligible; as is
the evidence of their authorship. Certain flimsy
love-poems included in a volume published forty years
later, twenty-four years after Beaumont's death, as
of his composition, have also been attributed to his
boyhood at the University, or at the Inner Temple.
Most of them have been definitely traced to other authors,
and of the rest of this class still unassigned
there is no reason to believe that he was the author.
In the same volume, however, there appears as by
Beaumont a metrical tale based upon Ovid, called
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, of which we cannot
be certain that he was not the author. The poem was
first published, without name of writer, in 1602,[22] and
was not assigned to Francis Beaumont until 1639,
when Lawrence Blaiklock included it among the
Poems: By Francis Beaumont, Gent., entered on the
Stationers' Registers, September 2, and published,[40]
1640. Blaiklock evidently printed from John
Hodgets's edition of 1602, carelessly omitting here
and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical
mistakes. Either because he had private information
that Beaumont was the author, or because he wished
to profit by Beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as
to sign the initials, F. B., to the verse dedication, To
Calliope, and to alter the signature, A. F., appended to
an introductory sonnet, To the Author, so as to read
I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher.) These licenses, in
addition to the reckless inclusion in the 1640 volume
of several poems by authors other than Beaumont,
vitiate Blaiklock's evidence. On the other hand, the
original publisher, Hodgets, was the publisher also, in
1607, of The Woman-Hater, a play now reasonably
accepted as by Beaumont, originally alone; and, in
Hodgets's edition of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus,
one of the introductory sonnets is signed J. B.,
and another W. B. The 'J. B.' sonnet is not unworthy
of Beaumont's brother John. And if the
W. B. of the other verses, In Laudem Authoris,
is William Basse,—who in a sonnet, written after
Beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare Beaumont,"—there
is further justification for entertaining
the possibility of Beaumont's authorship of the Salmacis.
For Basse was one of the group of pastoralists
to which Francis' friend Drayton, and Drayton's
friend, William Browne, belonged,—a group with
which Francis must have been acquainted. But of
that we shall have more to say when we come to
consider Beaumont's later connection with Drayton,
and with the dramatic activities of the Inner Temple[41]
at a time when Browne and other pastoralists were
members of it. For the present it is sufficient to
say that Basse was himself issuing a pastoral romance
in the year of Salmacis, 1602; and that he was by way
of subscribing himself simply W. B.
The external evidence for Beaumont's authorship
of this metrical tale is, at the best, but slight. As
regards the internal, however, I cannot agree with
Fleay and the author of the article entitled Salmacis
and Hermaphroditus not by Beaumont.[23] Both diction
and verse display characteristics not foreign to
Beaumont's heroic couplets in epistle and elegy, nor
to the blank verse of his dramas,—though they do
not markedly distinguish them. The romantic-classical
and idyllic grace may be the germ of that which
flowers in the tragicomedies; and the joyous irony
is not unlike that of The Woman-Hater and The
Knight of the Burning Pestle. The poem is a voluptuous
and rambling expansion of the classical theme
"which sweet-lipt Ovid long agoe did tell." The
writer, like many a lad of 1602, has steeped himself
in the amatory fable and fancy of Marlowe, Chapman,
and Shakespeare; and the passionate imaginings are
such as characterize poetic lads of seventeen in any
period. It is not impossible that here we have Francis
Beaumont's earliest attempt at a poem of some proportions,
and that he was stirred to it by exercises
like The Endimion and Phoebe of Drayton, probably
by that time the friend of the Grace-Dieu family.
Francis, indeed, need not have been ashamed of such
a performance, for in spite of the erotic fervour and[42]
the occasional far-fetched conceits, the poet has visualized
clearly the scenes of his mythological idyl,
and enlivened the narrative with ingenuous humour;
he has caught the figured style and something of the
winged movement of his masters; and every here and
there he has produced lines of more than imitative
beauty:
Looke how, when Autumne comes, a little space
Paleth the red blush of the Summer's face,
Searing the leaves, the Summer's covering,
Three months in weaving by the curious Spring,—
Making the grasse, his greene locks, go to wracke,
Tearing each ornament from off his backe;
So did she spoyle the garments she did weare,
Tearing whole ounces of her golden hayre.
The earliest definite indication that I have found
of Beaumont's literary activity, and of his recognition
by poets, connects him with his brother John, and is
highly suggestive in still other respects. John had already
written, in 1603 or 1604, verses prefatory to
Drayton's poetic treatment of Moyses in a Map of his
Miracles, published in June of the latter year; and also,
in 1605, to Drayton's revision of the Barrons Wars.
On April 19, 1606, Drayton issued a volume entitled
Poems Lyrick and Pastoral, which included with other
verses a revision, under the name of Eglogs, of his
Idea, the Shepheard's Garland, first published in 1593.
In the eighth eclogue of this new edition, Drayton,
writing of the ladies of his time to whom "much
the Muses owe," adds to his praise of Sidney's (Elphin's)
sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, an encomium[43]
upon the two daughters of his early patron,
Sir Henry Goodere, Frances and Anne (Lady Ramsford);
then he celebrates a "dear Sylvia, one the best
alive," and
Then that dear nymph that in the Muses joys,
That in wild Charnwood with her flocks doth go,
Mirtilla, sister to those hopeful boys,
My lovèd Thyrsis and sweet Palmeo;
That oft to Soar the southern shepherds bring,
Of whose clear waters they divinely sing.
So good she is, so good likewise they be,
As none to her might brother be but they,
Nor none a sister unto them, but she,—
To them for wit few like, I dare will say:
In them as Nature truly meant to show
How near the first, she in the last could go.
The "golden-mouthed Drayton musical" had spent
his youth not many miles from "wild Charnwood,"
at Polesworth Hall, the home of the Gooderes, in
Warwickshire. The dear nymph of Charnwood is
Elizabeth Beaumont, in 1606 a lass of eighteen,—and
the "hopeful boys" who bring the southern shepherds
(Jonson, perhaps, and young John Fletcher, as
well as Drayton) to their Grace-Dieu priory by the
river Soar, are John, then about twenty-three, and
the future dramatist, about twenty-two.[24] Under the
pastoral pseudonym of Mirtilla, Elizabeth is again
celebrated by Drayton twenty-four years later, in his[44]
Muses Elizium. Since these Pastorals are in confessed
sequence with those of "the prime pastoralist
of England," and the pastoral Thyrsis and young
Palmeo have already sung divinely of the clear waters
of their native stream, it would appear that they too
are disciples at that time of Master Edmund Spenser
in his Shepheards Calender. And since these
brothers, so like in wit and feature, and in charming
devotion to their sister, are all the brothers that she
has, it is evident that this portion of the Eglog was
written after July 10, 1605; for up to that date, the
eldest of the family, Henry, was still living, and at
the manor house of Grace-Dieu. This friendship
between Drayton and the "hopeful boys" continued
through life; for, as we shall later note and more at
length, in 1627, the year of John's death, and many
years after that of Francis, the older poet still celebrates
the twain as "My dear companions whom I
freely chose My bosome-friends."
When James I made his famous progress from
Edinburgh to London, April 5 to May 3, 1603, "every
nobleman and gentleman kept open house as he
passed. He spent his time in festivities and amusements
of various kinds. The gentry of the counties
through which his journey lay thronged in to see him.
Most of them returned home decorated with the
honours of knighthood, a title which he dispensed with
a profusion which astonished those who remembered
the sober days of Elizabeth."[25] One of those thus
decorated was the poet's brother Henry, who was
dubbed knight bachelor at Worksop in Derbyshire, on[45]
the same day as his uncle, "Henry Perpoint of
county Notts," and William Skipwith of Cotes in the
Beaumont county—who appears later as a friend
of Fletcher. Two days afterwards, Thomas Beaumont
of Coleorton received the honour of knighthood
at the Earl of Rutland's castle of Belvoir.[26]
Sir Henry of Grace-Dieu did not long enjoy his
title. He died about the tenth of July 1605, and
was buried on the thirteenth. By his will, witnessed
by his brother Francis, and probated February 1606,
Sir Henry left half of his private estate to his sister,
Elizabeth "for her advancement in marriage," and
the other half to be divided equally between John and
Francis. He was succeeded as head of the family
by John,[27] who later married a daughter of John Fortescue—also
of a poetic race—and left by her a
large family. The sister, Elizabeth (Mirtilla) probably
continued to live at Grace-Dieu until her marriage
to Thomas Seyliard of Kent. And that Francis
occasionally came home on visits from London we have
other proof than that afforded by Drayton. The
provision of a competence made by Sir Henry's will
leads us to conjecture that the subsequent dramatic
activity of the younger brother was undertaken for
sheer love of the art; and that, while his finances may
have been occasionally at low ebb, the association in
Bohemian ménage with John Fletcher, which followed
the years of residence at the Inner Temple, was a
matter of choice, not of poverty.
[46]
CHAPTER IV
THE VAUX COUSINS AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT
Certain political events of the years 1603 to
1606 must have occasioned the young Beaumonts
intimate and poignant concern. Their own family was,
of course, Protestant, but it was closely connected by
blood and matrimonial alliance with some of the most
devoted and conspicuous Catholic families of England.
Some of their Hastings kinsmen, sons of Francis, Earl
of Huntingdon, were Catholics; and their first cousins,
the Vauxes, whose home at Great Harrowden near by
had been for over twenty years the harbourage of persecuted
priests, were active Jesuits. After the death
of his first wife,—Beaumont's aunt Elizabeth, who left
four children, Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne,—William,
Lord Vaux, had married Mary, the sister of
the noble-hearted and self-sacrificing Catholic, Sir
Thomas Tresham of Rushton in Northamptonshire;
and this lady had brought up her own children, George
and Ambrose, as well as the children of the first marriage,
in strict adherence to the Roman faith and practice.
Henry, the heir to the title, had been one of that
zealous band of young Catholic gentlemen who received
Fathers Campion and Persons on their arrival in
England in 1580.[28] Before 1594, Henry, "that blessed[47]
gentleman and saint," as Father Persons calls him, had
died, having resigned his inheritance of the Barony to
his brother George some years earlier in order to spend
his remaining days in celibacy, study, and prayer. In
1590, George, the elder son by the second marriage,
had taken to wife, Elizabeth Roper, also an ardent
Catholic, the daughter of the future Lord Teynham.
She was left a widow in 1594 with an infant son, Edward,
whom she educated to maintain the Catholicity
of the family. In 1595, the old Baron, Beaumont's
uncle, died—"the infortunatest peer of Parliament
for poverty that ever was" by reason of the fines and
forfeitures entailed upon him for his religious zeal.
Meanwhile, in 1591, we find the daughters of the first
marriage, Eleanor, whose husband was an Edward
Brookesby, of Arundel House, Leicestershire, and
Anne Vaux, concealing in a house in Warwickshire,
the well-known Father Gerard and his Superior,
Father Garnet, from priest-hunters, or pursuivants.
These two cousins of Beaumont are described in
Father Gerard's Narrative[29] as illustrious for goodness
and holiness, "whom in my own mind I often compare
to the two women who received our Lord." The
younger, Anne, "was remarkable at all times for her
virginal modesty and shamefacedness, but in the cause
of God and the defence of His servants, the virgo
became virago. She is almost always ill, but we have
seen her, when so weakened as to be scarce able to utter
three words without pain, on the arrival of the pursuivants
become so strong as to spend three or four hours
in contest with them. When she has no priest in the[48]
house she feels afraid; but the simple presence of a
priest so animates her that then she makes sure that no
devil has any power over her house." In the years
that follow to 1605, the Vauxes are identified as recusants
and as sympathizers with the untoward fortunes
of Fathers Southwell, Walpole, Garnet, and others.
In 1601, their kinsman and Frank Beaumont's, Henry
Hastings, nephew to George, fourth Earl of Huntingdon,
has joined the ranks and in 1602, we find him in a
list of Jesuits "to be sought after" by the Earl of
Salisbury,—"John Gerard with Mrs. Vaux and young
Mr. Hastings." Father Gerard's headquarters in fact
are from 1598 to 1605 with Mrs. Vaux and her son
Edward, the young Baron, at Great Harrowden, and
there others of the fifteen Jesuit fathers in England at
that time, and prominent Catholics, such as Sir Oliver
Manners, brother of Roger, Earl of Rutland, Sir
Everard Digby, and Francis Tresham, a first cousin
of Mrs. Vaux, were wont to foregather.
When James I came to the throne, the Catholics had
hope of some alleviation of the penalties under which
they laboured. Disappointed in this hope, the discontented,
led by two priests, Watson and Clarke, embarked
upon a wild scheme to kidnap the King and set
as the price of his liberty the extension to Catholics of
equal rights, religious, civil, and political, with the
Protestants. The plot was betrayed, the priests executed,
and the other leaders condemned to death,—then
reprieved but attainted. Among those thus reprieved
were Lord Grey de Wilton and "a confederate
named Brookesby." This Brookesby was Bartholomew,
the brother of Eleanor Vaux's husband. When[49]
new and more stringent measures were immediately
adopted for the repression of priests and recusants, the
indignation of the Catholics reached a climax. "They
saw," says Gardiner, "no more than the intolerable
wrong under which they suffered; and it would be
strange if there were not some amongst them who
would be driven to meet wrong with violence, and to
count even the perpetration of a great crime as a meritorious
deed."[30]
In 1603 Father Gerard took a new house in London
in the fields behind St. Clement's Inn,—just across the
Strand from the Inner Temple where Francis Beaumont
was living at the time. "This new house," says
Gerard, "was very suitable and convenient and had
private entrances on both sides, and I had contrived in
it some most excellent hiding-places; and there I
should have long remained, free from all peril or even
suspicion, if some friends of mine, while I was absent
from London, had not availed themselves of the house
rather rashly."[31] These friends were Robert Catesby,
a cousin of the Vauxes of Harrowden; his cousin,
Thomas Winter; Winter's relative, John Wright, and
Thomas Percy, a kinsman of Henry, ninth Earl of
Northumberland,—all gentlemen of distinguished
county families. In May 1604, these men with one
Guy Fawkes of York and Scotton, a soldier of fortune
and "excellent good natural parts," and, like the rest,
fanatic with brooding over the wrongs of the Catholic
Church, met at Father Gerard's house behind St.
Clement's Inn, swore to keep secret the purpose of[50]
their meeting, received in an adjoining room the Sacrament
from Father Gerard, an unwitting accomplice, in
confirmation of their oath; and then, retiring, learned
from Catesby that the project intended was to blow up
the Parliament House with gunpowder when the King
and the royal family next came to the House of Lords.
Within a few days "Thomas Percy hired a howse at
Westminster," says Fawkes in his subsequent Confession,
"neare adjoyning Parlt. howse, and there wee
beganne to make a myne about the XI of December,
1604." The rest of the story is too well-known to call
for repetition. How the gunpowder was smuggled
into a cellar running under the Parliament House;
how, when Parliament was prorogued to November
5th, 1605, the conspirators, running short of money to
equip an insurrection, added to their number a few
wealthy accomplices,—most significant to our narrative,
that old friend of the Vauxes, Sir Edward Digby,
and Francis Tresham, cousin of Catesby and the Winters,
and as I have said of the Vauxes themselves.[32]
How Tresham, recoiling from the destruction of innocent
Catholic Lords with the detested Protestants, met
Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes at White Webbs, "a
house known as Dr. Hewick's house by Enfield Chace,"
and laboured with them for permission to warn their
friends, especially his brothers-in-law, Lord Stourton
and Monteagle; and how, when permission was refused,[51]
he wrote an anonymous letter to Monteagle, begging
him "as you tender your life, to devise some
excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament;
for God and man hath concurred to punish the wickedness
of this time." How Monteagle informed the
Council and the King. How Guy Fawkes was discovered
among his barrels of gunpowder, and on the
fourth of November arrested as "John Johnson," the
servant of Thomas Percy, one of the King's Gentlemen
Pensioners. How "on the morning of the fifth,
the news of the great deliverance ran like wildfire along
the streets of London," and Catesby and Wright, Percy
and the brothers Winter, were in full flight for Lady
Catesby's house in Ashby St. Legers, Northamptonshire,
not far from Harrowden.
With the rest of the world Francis Beaumont would
gasp with amazement. But what must have been his
concern when on the first examination of "John Johnson,"
November 5th, the identity of that conspirator
was established not by any confession of his, but from
the contents of a letter found upon him, written by—Beaumont's
first cousin, Anne Vaux![33]
As intelligence oozed from the Lords of Council,
Beaumont would next learn that Anne's sister-in-law,
Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux of Harrowden had expected
something was about to take place, and that Father
Gerard and "Walley" [Garnet, the Father Superior
of the English Jesuits] "made her house their chief
resort"; and then that Fawkes had confessed that[52]
Catesby, the two Winters, and Francis Tresham—all
of the Vaux family connection—and Sir Everard
Digby of their close acquaintance, were implicated in
the Plot; and that the conspiracy was not merely to
blow up the older members of the royal family but to
secure the Princess Elizabeth, place her upon the
throne, and marry her to an English Catholic,[34]—therefore,
an enterprise likely to implicate his Catholic
cousins, indeed. His friend, Ben Jonson, is meanwhile
blustering of private informations, and Francis
would be likely to hear that Ben has written (November 8)
to Lord Salisbury offering his services to unravel
the web "if no better person can be found," and
averring that the Catholics "are all so enweaved in it
as it will make 500 gent. lesse of the religion within
this weeke." Then he is apprised that John Wright,
Catesby, Percy, etc., have been seen at "Lady" Vaux's
on the eighth. The next day, that these three and
Christopher Wright have been overtaken and slain; and
then that, on the ninth, Fawkes has confessed that they
have been using a house of Father Garnet's at White
Webbs as a rendezvous. Perhaps White Webbs means
nothing to Francis just yet, but it soon will. Three
days later, Tresham under examination acknowledges
interviews with his cousins, Catesby and Thomas Winter,
and with Fathers Garnet and Gerard; but says he
has not been at Mrs. Vaux's house at Harrowden for a
year. Soon afterwards, December 5, the Inner Temple
itself is shaken to the foundations by the intelligence
that Jesuit literature has been discovered by Sir
Edward Coke in Tresham's chamber,—a manuscript[53]
of Blackwell's famous treatise on Equivocation,
destined to play a baleful rôle in the ensuing examination
of certain of the suspects.
Meanwhile, Francis would observe with alarm that
his Vaux cousins are from day to day objects of
deeper suspicion. On November 13, Lord Vaux's
house at Harrowden is searched; his mother gives up
all her keys but no papers are found. She and the
young lord strongly deny all knowledge of the
treason; the house, however, is still guarded. On the
eighteenth, Elizabeth, Mrs. Vaux, is examined and says
that she does not know "Gerard, the priest"[!]; but
among the visitors at her house she mentions Catesby,
Digby, and "Greene" [Greenway] and "Darcy"
[Garnet], priests. She acknowledges having written
to Lady Wenman, the wife of Sir Richard, last Easter,
saying that "Tottenham would turn French," but fails
to explain her meaning. From other quarters, however,
it is learned that she bade that lady "be of good
comfort for there should soon be toleration for religion,"
adding: "Fast and pray that that may come
to pass which we purpose, which yf it doe, wee shall
see Totnam turned French." And Sir Richard, examined
concerning the contents of Mrs. Vaux's letter to
his wife, affirms that he "disliked their intercourse, because
Mrs. Vaux tried to pervert his wife." On
December 4, Catesby's servant, Bates, acknowledges
that he revealed the whole Plot to Greenway, the
priest, in confession, "who said it was a good cause,
bade him be secret, and absolved him." From Henry
Huddleston's examination, December 6, it appears
that Mrs. Vaux has not been telling the whole truth[54]
about Harrowden, for not only were the two other
priests most suspected, Garnet and Greenway, there
sometimes, but also Gerard, whom Huddleston has
met there. On January 19, Bates definitely connects
Gerard and Garnet with the proceedings; and all three
priests are proclaimed. Gerard cannot be found, but
from his own Narrative it appears that he had been
hiding at Harrowden before, that now he is concealed
in London, and Elizabeth Vaux knows where.[35] When
she is brought again before the Lords of Council and
threatened with death if she tell not where the priest
is, we may imagine the interest of the Beaumonts.
Francis, though no sympathizer with the Plot, cannot
have failed to admire the bearing of Elizabeth during
the examination:
"As for my hostess, Mrs. Vaux," writes Father
Gerard, "she was brought to London after that long
search for me, and strictly examined about me by the
Lords of the Council; but she answered to everything
so discreetly as to escape all blame. At last they produced
a letter of hers to a certain relative, asking for
the release of Father Strange and another, of whom I
spoke before. This relative of hers was the chief man
in the county in which they had been taken, and she
thought she could by her intercession with him prevail
for their release. But the treacherous man, who had
often enough, as far as words went, offered to serve
her in any way, proved the truth of our Lord's
prophecy, 'A man's enemies shall be those of his own
household!' for he immediately sent up her letter to
the Council. They showed her, therefore, her own[55]
letter, and said to her, 'You see now that you are entirely
at the King's mercy for life or death; so if you
consent to tell us where Father Gerard is, you shall
have your life.'
"'I do not know where he is,' she answered, 'and
if I did know, I would not tell you.'
"Then rose one of the lords, who had been a former
friend of hers, to accompany her to the door, out of
courtesy, and on the way said to her persuasively,
'Have pity on yourself and on your children, and say
what is required of you, for otherwise you must certainly
die.'
"To which she answered with a loud voice, 'Then,
my lord, I will die.'
"This was said when the door had been opened, so
that her servants who were waiting for her heard what
she said, and all burst into weeping. But the Council
only said this to terrify her, for they did not commit
her to prison, but sent her to the house of a certain
gentleman in the city, and after being held there in
custody for a time she was released, but on condition
of remaining in London. And one of the principal
Lords of the Council acknowledged to a friend that he
had nothing against her, except that she was a stout
Papist, going ahead of others, and, as it were, a leader
in evil."
What follows of Elizabeth's devotion to the cause,
would not be likely to filter through; but the Beaumonts
may have had their suspicions. According to
Father Gerard:—
"Immediately she was released from custody, knowing
that I was then in London, quite forgetful of herself,[56]
she set about taking care of me, and provided all
the furniture and other things necessary for my new
house. Moreover, she sent me letters daily, recounting
everything that occurred; and when she knew that I
wished to cross the sea for a time, she bid me not spare
expense, so that I secured a safe passage, for that she
would pay everything, though it should cost five thousand
florins, and in fact she sent me at once a
thousand florins for my journey. I left her in care
of Father Percy, who had already as my companion
lived a long time at her house. There he still remains,
and does much good. I went straight to Rome, and
being sent back thence to these parts, was fixed at
Louvain."[36] So much at present of Elizabeth. We
shall hear of her, as did Beaumont, during the succeeding
years.
In the tribulations of Anne Vaux, his own first
cousin, Francis must have been even more deeply interested.
That she was in communication with Fawkes
had been discovered, November 5. She was apprehended,
committed to the care of Sir John Swynerton,
but temporarily discharged. When Fawkes confessed,
November 9, that the conspirators had been using a
house of Father Garnet's at White Webbs, in Enfield
Chace, the house called "Dr. Hewick's" was searched.
"No papers nor munition found, but Popish books and
relics,—and many trap-doors and secret passages."
Garnet had escaped but, on examination of the servants,
it developed that under the pseudonym of "Meaze" he
had taken the house "for his sister, Mrs. Perkins,"—[and
who should "Mrs. Perkins" turn out to be but[57]
Anne Vaux!] The books and relics are the property
of "Mrs. Jennings,"—[and who should she be but
Anne's sister, Eleanor Brookesby!] "Mrs. Perkins
spent a month at White Webbs lately;" and "three
gentlemen [Catesby, Winter, and another] came to
White Webbs, the day the King left Royston" [October
31]. On November 27, Sir Everard Digby's servant
deposes concerning Garnet that "Mrs. Ann
Vaux doth usually goe with him whithersoever he
goethe." On January 19, as we have seen, warrants
are out for the arrest of Garnet. On January 30, he is
taken with another Jesuit priest, Father Oldcorne, at
Hindlip Hall, in Worcestershire, where for seven days
and nights they have been buried in a closet, and nourished
by broths conveyed to them by means of a quill
which passed "through a little hole in a chimney that
backed another chimney into a gentlewoman's chamber."
True enough, the deposition, that whithersoever
her beloved Father Superior "goethe, Mrs. Ann Vaux
doth usually goe"; for she is the gentlewoman of the
broths and quill,—she with Mrs. Abington, the sister
of Monteagle. Garnet and Oldcorne are taken prisoners
to the Tower; and three weeks later Anne is in
town again, communicating with Garnet by means of
letters, ostensibly brief and patent, but eked out with
tidings written in an invisible ink of orange-juice. On
March 6, Garnet confesses that Mrs. Anne Vaux, alias
Perkins, he, and Brookesby bear the expenses of White
Webbs. On March 11, Anne being examined says that
she keeps the place at her own expense; that Catesby,
Winter, and Tresham have been to her house, but that
she knew nothing of the Plot; on the contrary, suspecting[58]
some mischief at one time, she had "begged Garnet
to prevent it." Examined again on March 24, she says
that "Francis Tresham, her cousin, often visited her
and Garnet at White Webbs, Erith, Wandsworth, etc.,
when Garnet would counsel him to be patient and quiet;
and that they also visited Tresham at his house in Warwickshire."
Garnet's trial took place at Guildhall on
March 28, Sir Edward Coke of the Inner Temple acting
for the prosecution. Garnet acknowledged that the
Plot had been conveyed to him by another priest
[Greenway] in confession. He was convicted, however,
not for failing to divulge that knowledge, but for
failing to dissuade Catesby and the rest, both before
and after he had gained knowledge from Greenway.
He was executed on May 3. Of Anne's share in all
that has preceded, Beaumont would by this date have
known. One wonders whether he or his brother, John,
ever learned the pathetic details of the final correspondence
between Anne and the Father Superior. How,
March 21, she wrote to him asking directions for the
disposal of herself, and concluding that life without
him was "not life but deathe." How, April 2, he
replied with advice for her future; and as to Oldcorne
and himself, added that the former had "dreamt there
were two tabernacles prepared for them." How, the
next day, she wrote again asking fuller directions and
wishing Father Oldcorne had "dreamt there was a
third seat" for her. And how, that same day, with
loving thought for all details of her proceedings, and
with sorrow for his own weakness under examination,
the Father Superior sends his last word to her,—that[59]
he will "die not as a victorious martyr, but as a penitent
thief,"—and bids her farewell.
All this of the Harrowden cousins and their connection
with Catholicism and the Gunpowder Plot, I have
included not only because it touches nearly upon the
family interests and friendships of Beaumont's early
years, but also because it throws light upon the circumstances
and feelings which prompted the satire of his
first play, The Woman-Hater (acted in 1607), where
as we shall see he alludes with horror to the Plot itself,
but holds up to ridicule the informers who swarmed the
streets of London in the years succeeding, and trumped
up charges of conspiracy and recusancy against unoffending
persons, and so sought to deprive them, if
not of life, of property. It is with some hesitancy,
since the proof to me is not conclusive, that I suggest
that the animus in this play against favourites and intelligencers
has perhaps more of a personal flavour than
has hitherto been suspected. An entry from the
Docquet, calendared with the State Papers, Domestic,
of November 14, 1607, may indicate that John Beaumont,
the brother of Francis, though a Protestant, had
in some way manifested sympathy with his Catholic relatives
during the persecutions which followed the discovery
of the Gunpowder Plot:—"Gift to Sir Jas.
Sempill of the King's two parts of the site of the late
dissolved monastery of Grace-Dieu, and other lands in
Leicester, in the hands of the Crown by the recusancy
of John Beaumont." At first reading the John Beaumont
would appear to be Francis' grandfather, the
Master of the Rolls. But the Master lost his lands not[60]
for recusancy (or refusal on religious grounds to take
the Oath of Allegiance, or attend the State Church),
but for malfeasance in office, and that in 1552-3, while
the Protestant Edward VI was King. He had no
lands to lose after Mary mounted the throne,—even if
as a Protestant he were recusant under a Catholic
Queen. The recusancy seems to be of a date contemporaneous
with James's refusal, October 17, 1606, to
take fines from recusants, the King, as the State Papers
inform us, taking "two-thirds of their goods, lands,
etc., instead." The "two-thirds" would appear to be
the "two parts" of Grace-Dieu and other lands, specified
in the Gift; and that the sufferer was Francis Beaumont's
brother is rendered the more likely by the fact
that the beneficiary, Sir James Sempill, had been distinguishing
himself by hatred of Roman Catholics
from November 16, 1605, on; and that on July 31,
1609, he is again receiving grants "out of lands and
goods of recusants, to be convicted at his charges."
There is nothing, indeed, in the career of Beaumont's
brother, John, as commonly recorded, or in the temper
of his poetry to indicate a refusal on his part to disavow
the supremacy of Rome in ecclesiastical affairs,
or to attend regularly the services of the Protestant
Church. His writings speak both loyalty and Protestant
Christianity. But it is to be noted that not only
many of his kinsmen but his wife, as well, belonged to
families affiliated with Roman Catholicism, and that
his eulogistic poems addressed to James are all of later
years,—after his kinsman, Buckingham, had "drawn
him from his silent cell," and "first inclined the
anointed head to hear his rural songs, and read his[61]
lines"; also that it is only under James's successor that
he is honoured by a baronetcy. It is, therefore, not at
all impossible that, because of some careless or over-frank
utterance of fellow-feeling for his Catholic connections,
or of repugnance for the unusually savage
measures adopted after the discovery of the Gunpowder
Plot, he may have been accused of recusancy,
deprived of part of his estate, and driven into the seclusion
which he maintained at Grace-Dieu till 1616 or
thereabout.
[62]
CHAPTER V
FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH
The friendship between Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher may have commenced at any time
after Francis became a member of the Inner Temple,
in 1600,—probably not later than 1605, when Beaumont
was about twenty-one and Fletcher twenty-six.
The latter was the son of "a comely and courtly
prelate," Richard, Bishop, successively of Bristol,
Worcester, and London. Richard's father, also,
had been a clergyman; and Richard, himself, in his
earlier years had been pensioner and scholar of Trinity,
Cambridge (1563), then Fellow of Bene't College
(Corpus Christi), then President of the
College. In 1573 he married Elizabeth Holland at
Cranbrook in Kent, perhaps of the family of Hugh
Holland, descended from the Earls of Kent, who later
appears in the circle of Beaumont's acquaintance; became,
next, minister of the church of Rye, Sussex,
about fifteen miles south of Cranbrook; then, Chaplain
to the Queen; then, Dean of Peterborough.
While he was officiating at Rye, in December 1579,
John the fourth of nine children, was born. This
John, the dramatist, is probably the "John Fletcher
of London," who was admitted pensioner of Bene't
College, Cambridge, in 1591, and, as if destined[63]
for holy orders, became two years later a Bible-clerk,
reading the lessons in the services of the college
chapel. At the time of his entering college, his father
had risen to the bishopric of Bristol; and, later in
1591, had been made Lord High Almoner to the
Queen; he had a house at Chelsea, and was near the
court "where his presence was accustomed much to
be." By 1593 the Bishop had been advanced to the
diocese of Worcester; and we find him active in the
House of Lords with the Archbishop of Canterbury
in the proposal of severe measures against the Barrowists
and Brownists.[37] The next year he was
elected Bishop of London,—succeeding John Aylmer,
who had been tutor to Lady Jane Grey,—and was
confirmed by royal assent in January 1595. From
Sir John Harington's unfavourable account[38] it would
appear that the Bishop owed his rapid promotion to
the combination of great mind and small means which
made him a fitting tool for "zealous courtiers whose
devotion did serve them more to prey on the Church
than pray in the Church." But his will, drawn in
1593, shows him mindful of the poor, solicitous concerning
the "Chrystian and godlie education" of his
children and confident in the principles and promises
of the Christian faith,—"this hope hath the God of
all comforte laide upp in my breste."
We have no record of John's proceeding to a degree.
It is not unlikely that he left Cambridge for the city
when his father attained the metropolitan see. From
early years the boy had enjoyed every opportunity of[64]
observing the ways of monarchs and courtiers, scholars
and poets, as well as of princes of the Church.
Since 1576, his father had "lived in her highnes,"
the Queen's, "gratious aspect and favour." Præsul
splendidus, says Camden. Eloquent, accomplished,
courtly, lavish in hospitality and munificence, no wonder
that he counted among his friends, Burghley, the
Lord Treasurer, and Burghley's oldest son, Sir
Thomas Cecil, Anthony Bacon, the brother of Sir
Francis, and that princely second Earl of Essex,
Robert Devereux, who had married the widow of
Sir Philip Sidney, and with whom the lame but clever
Anthony Bacon lived. Sir Francis Drake also was
one of his friends and gave him a "ringe of golde"
which he willed to one of his executors. Another of
his "loveinge freindes," and an assistant-executor of
his will, was the learned and vigorous Dr. Richard
Bancroft, his successor as Bishop of London and
afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. As for immediate
literary connections, suffice it here to say that
the Bishop's brother, Dr. Giles Fletcher, was a cultivated
diplomat and writer upon government, and that
the sons of Dr. Giles were the clerical Spenserians,
Phineas, but three years younger than his cousin the
dramatist,—whose fisher-play Sicelides was acting at
King's College, Cambridge, in the year of John's
Chances in London, and whose Brittain's Ida is as
light in its youthful eroticism as his Purple Island is
ponderous in pedantic allegory,—and Giles, nine
years younger than John, who was printing verses
before John wrote his earliest play, and whose poem
of Christ's Victorie was published, in 1610, a year or[65]
so later than John's pastoral of The Faithfull Shepheardesse.
Bishop Fletcher could tell his sons stories
of royalty, not only in affluence, but in distress; for
when John was but eight years old the father as
Dean of Peterborough was chaplain to Mary, Queen
of Scots, at Fotheringay, adding to her distress "by
the zeal with which he urged her to renounce the
faith of Rome." It was he who when Mary's head
was held up after the execution cried, "So perish all
the Queen's enemies!"[39] He could, also, tell them
much about the great founder of the Dorset family,
for at Fotheringay at the same time was Thomas
Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards first Earl of
Dorset, who had come to announce to Mary, Queen
of Scots, the sentence of death.
From 1591 on, the Bishop was experiencing the
alternate "smiles and frowns of royalty" in London;
about the time that John left college more particularly
the frowns. For, John's mother having died about
the end of 1592, the Bishop had, in 1595, most unwisely
married Maria (daughter of John Giffard of
Weston-under-Edge in Gloucestershire), the relict of a
few months' standing of Sir Richard Baker of Sissinghurst
in Kent. The Bishop's acquaintance with
this second wife, as well as with the first, probably derived
from his father's incumbency as Vicar of the
church in Cranbrook, Kent, which began in 1555 and
was still existing as late as 1574. The young Richard
would often have shuddered as a child before Bloody
Baker's Prison with its iron-barred windows glowering
from the parish church, for Sir John hated the[66]
primitive and pious Anabaptists who had taken up their
abode about Cranbrook, and he hunted them down;[40]
and Richard would, as a lad, have walked the two miles
across the clayey fields and through the low-lying
woods with his father to the stately manor house,
built by old Sir John Baker himself in the time
of Edward VI, and have seen that distinguished
personage who had been Attorney-General and Chancellor
of the Exchequer under Henry VIII,—and who
as may be recalled was one of that Council of State,
in 1553, which ratified and signed Edward VI's 'devise
for the succession' making Lady Jane Grey inheritress
of the crown. And when young Richard returned
from his presidency of Bene't College, in 1573, to
Cranbrook to marry Elizabeth Holland, he would
have renewed acquaintance with Sir Richard, who had
succeeded the "bloody" Sir John as master of Sissinghurst,
sixteen years before. He may for all we
know have been present at the entertainment which
that same year Sir Richard made for Queen Elizabeth.
Maria Giffard was twenty-four years old, then.
Whether she was yet Lady Baker we do not know—but
it is probable; and we may be sure that on his
various visits to Cranbrook, the rising dean and bishop
had frequent opportunity to meet her at Sissinghurst
before his own wife's death, or the death of Sir Richard
in 1594. Since the sister of Sir Richard Baker,
Cicely, was already the wife of Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, when, in 1586-7, Buckhurst and Richard
Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, were thrown together
at Fotheringay, it is not unlikely that the closer[67]
association between the Fletchers and Lady Buckhurst's
sister-in-law of Sissinghurst grew out of this
alliance of the Sackvilles with the Bakers.
THOMAS SACKVILLE,
FIRST EARL OF DORSET
From the portrait in the possession of Lord Sackville,
at Knole Park
Lady Baker was in 1595 in conspicuous disfavour
with Queen Elizabeth, and with the people too; for,
if she was virtuous, as her nephew records,[41] "the more
happy she in herself, though unhappy that the world
did not believe it."[42] Certain it is, that in a contemporary
satire she is thrice-damned as of the most ancient
of disreputable professions, and once dignified as "my
Lady Letcher." Though of unsavoury reputation, she
was of fine appearance, and socially very well connected.
Her brother, Sir George Giffard, was in service
at Court under Elizabeth; and in Sackville, Lord
Buckhurst, she had a brother-in-law, who was kinsman
to the Queen, herself. But not only did the Queen
dislike her, she disliked the idea of any of her prelates,
especially her comely Bishop of London, marrying a
second time, without her express consent. For a year
after this second marriage the Bishop was suspended
from his office. "Here of the Bishop was sadly sensible,"
says Fuller, "and seeking to lose his sorrow in
a mist of smoak, died of the immoderate taking
thereof." Sir John Harington, however, tells us that
he regained the royal favour;—"but, certain it is that
(the Queen being pacified, and hee in great jollity
with his faire Lady and her Carpets and Cushions in
his bed-chamber) he died suddenly, taking Tobacco
in his chaire, saying to his man that stood by him,
whom he loved very well, 'Oh, boy, I die.'"
[68]
That was in 1596. The Bishop left little but his
library and his debts. The former went to two of
his sons, Nathaniel and John. The latter swallowed
up his house at Chelsea with his other properties.
The Bishop's brother and chief executor of the will,
Giles, the diplomat, is soon memorializing the Queen
for "some commiseration towards the orphans of the
late Bishopp of London." He emphasizes the diminution
of the Bishop's worldly estate consequent upon
his translation to the costly see of London, his extraordinary
charges in the reparation of the four
episcopal residences, his lavish expenditure in hospitality,
his penitence for "the errour of his late marriage,"
and concludes:—"He hath left behinde him 8
poore children, whereof divers are very young. His
dettes due to the Quenes Majestie and to other creditors
are 1400li. or thereaboutes, his whole state is but
one house wherein the widow claimeth her thirds, his
plate valewed at 400li., his other stuffe at 500li." Anthony
Bacon, who sympathized with the purpose of
this memorial, enlisted the coöperation of Bishop
Fletcher's powerful friend and his own patron, the
Earl of Essex, who "likewise represented to the Queen
the case of the orphans ... in so favourable a light
that she was inclin'd to relieve them;" but whether
she did so or not, we are unable to discover.[43]
What John Fletcher,—a lad of seventeen, when, in
1596, he was turned out of Fulham Palace and his
father's private house in Chelsea, with its carpets and[69]
cushions and the special "stayre and dore made of
purpose ... in a bay window" for the entrance of
Queen Elizabeth when she might deign, or did deign,
to visit her unruly prelate,—what the lad of seventeen
did for a living before we find him, about 1606 or
1607, in the ranks of the dramatists, we have no means
of knowing. Perhaps the remaining years of his boyhood
were spent with his uncle, Giles, and his young
cousins, the coming poets, or with the aunt whom his
father called "sister Pownell." The stepmother of
eighteen months' duration is not likely with her luxurious
tastes and questionable character to have tarried
long in charge of the eight "poore and fatherless
children." She had children of her own by her previous
marriage, in whom to seek consolation, Grisogone
and Cicely Baker, then in their twenties, and
devoted to her.[44] And with one or both we may surmise
that she resumed her life in Kent, or with the heir
of sleepy Sissinghurst, making the most of her carpets
and cushions and such of her "thirds" as she could
recover, until—for she was but forty-seven—she
might find more congenial comfort in a third marriage.
Her permanent consoler was a certain Sir Stephen
Thornhurst of Forde in the Isle of Thanet; and he,
thirteen years after the death of her second husband,
buried her in state in Canterbury Cathedral, 1609.
In 1603 her sister-in-law, Cicely (Baker) Sackville,
now Countess of Dorset and the Earl, her husband,
that fine old dramatist of Beaumont's Inner Temple,
and former acquaintance at Fotheringay of John[70]
Fletcher's father, had taken possession of the manor
of Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where their descendants
live to-day. Before 1609, Fletcher's stepsister
Cicely, named after her aunt, the Countess, had
become the Lady Cicely Blunt. Grisogone became the
Lady Grisogone Lennard, having married, about 1596,
a great friend of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
and of his Countess (Sir Philip Sidney's sister), Sir
Henry, the son of Sampson Lennard of Chevening and
Knole. The Lennard estate lay but three and a half
miles from that of their connections, the Dorsets, of
Knole Park. If young Fletcher ever went down to see
his stepmother at Sissinghurst, or his own mother's
family in Cranbrook, he was but twenty-six miles by
post-road from Chevening and still less from Aunt
Cicely at Knole. Beaumont, himself, as we shall see,
married the heiress of Sundridge Place a mile and a
half south of Chevening, and but forty minutes across
the fields from Knole. His sister Elizabeth, too, married
a gentleman of one of the neighbouring parishes.
The acquaintance of both our dramatists with Bakers
and Sackvilles was enhanced by sympathies literary and
dramatic. A still younger Sir Richard Baker, cousin
to John Fletcher's stepsisters, and to the second and
third Earls of Dorset, was an historian, a poet, and a
student of the stage—on familiar terms with Tarleton,
Burbadge, and Alleyn. And the literary traditions
handed down from Thomas Sackville, the author
of Gorboduc and The Mirror for Magistrates were
not forgotten by his grandson, Richard, third Earl
of Dorset, the contemporary of our dramatists,—for
whom, if I am not mistaken, their portraits, now hanging[71]
in the dining-room of the Baron Sackville at Knole,
were painted.[45]
I have dwelt thus at length upon the conditions antecedent
to, and investing, the youth of Beaumont and of
Fletcher, because the documents already at hand, if
read in the light of scientific biography and literature,
set before us with remarkable clearness the social
and poetic background of their career as dramatists.
When this background of birth, breeding, and family
connection is filled in with the deeper colours of their
life in London, its manners, experience, and associations,
one may more readily comprehend why Dryden
says in comparing them with Shakespeare,
"they understood and imitated the conversation of
gentlemen [of contemporary fashion] much better;
whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees,
no poet before them could paint as they have
done."
[72]
CHAPTER VI
SOME EARLY PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND OF FLETCHER
Beaumont and Fletcher may have been friends
by 1603 or 1604,—in all likelihood, as early as
1605 when, as we have seen, Drayton and other
"southern Shepherds" were by way of visiting the
Beaumonts at Grace-Dieu. In that year Jonson's
Volpone was acted for the first time; and one may
divine from the familiar and affectionate terms
in which our two young dramatists address the
author upon the publication of the play in 1607
that they had been acquainted not only with Jonson
but with one another for the two years past.
We have no satisfactory proof of their coöperation
in play-writing before 1606 or 1607. According to
Dryden,—whose statements of fact are occasionally
to be taken with a grain of salt, but who, in this instance,
though writing almost sixty years after the
event, is basing his assertion upon first-hand authority,—"the
first play that brought 'them' in esteem was
their Philaster," but "before that they had written
two or three very unsuccessfully." Philaster, as I
shall presently show, was, in all probability, first acted
between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610. Before
1609, however, each had written dramas independently,
Beaumont The Woman-Hater and[73] The
Knight of the Burning Pestle; Fletcher, The Faithfull
Shepheardesse, and maybe one or two other plays.
Our first evidence of their association in dramatic
activity is the presence of Fletcher's hand, apparently
as a reviser, in three scenes of The Woman-Hater,
which was licensed for publication May 20, 1607, as
"lately acted by the Children of Paul's." From contemporary
evidence we know, as did Dryden, that
two of these plays, The Knight and Faithfull Shepheardesse
were ungraciously received; and Richard
Brome, about fourteen years after Fletcher's death,
suggests that perhaps Monsieur Thomas shared "the
common fate."
The Woman-Hater was the earliest play of either
of our dramatists to find its way into print.
Drayton's lines, already referred to, about "sweet
Palmeo" imply that Beaumont was already known
as a poet, before April 1606. A passage in the
Prologue of The Woman-Hater seems, as Professor
Thorndike has shown, to refer to the narrow escape
of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston from having their
ears cropped for an offense given to the King by
their Eastward Hoe. If it does, "he that made this
play," undoubtedly Beaumont, made it after the publication
of Eastward Hoe in 1605. The title-page of
1607 says that the play is given "as it hath been
lately acted." The ridicule of intelligencers emulating
some worthy men in this land "who have discovered
things dangerously hanging over the State"
has reference to the system of spying which assumed
enormous proportions after the discovery of the Gunpowder
Plot in November 1605. An allusion to[74]
King James's weakness for handsome young men,
"Why may not I be a favourite in the sudden?" may
very well refer, as Fleay has maintained, to the restoration
to favour of Robert Ker (or Carr) of Ferniehurst,
afterwards Earl Somerset,—a page whom
James had "brought with him from Scotland, and
brought up of a child,"[46] but had dismissed soon after
his accession. It was at a tilting match, March 24,
1607, that the youth "had the good fortune to break
his leg in the presence of the King," and "by his
personal activity, strong animal spirits," and beauty,
to attract his majesty anew, and on the spot. The
beauty, Beaumont emphasizes as a requisite for royal
favour. "Why may not I be a favourite on the
sudden?" says the bloated, hungry courtier, "I see
nothing against it." "Not so, sir," replies Valore;
"I know you have not the face to be a favourite on
the sudden." The fact that James did not make a
knight bachelor of Carr till December of that year,
would in no way invalidate a fling at the favour bestowed
upon him in March. Indeed Beaumont's slur
in The Woman-Hater upon "the legs ... very
strangely become the legs of a knight and a courtier"
might have applied to Carr as early as 1603, for on
July 25 of that year James had made him a Knight of
the Bath,—in the same batch, by the way, with a certain
Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdonshire.[47] Without[75]
violating the plague regulations, as laid down by the
City, The Woman-Hater could have been acted during
the six months following November 20, 1606. A passage
in Act III, 2,[48] which I shall presently quote in full,
is, as has not previously been noticed, a manifest parody
of one of Antony's speeches in Antony and Cleopatra[49]
which, according to all evidence, was not acted before
1607. It would appear, therefore, that Beaumont's
first play was completed after January 1, 1607, probably
after March 24, when Carr regained the royal
favour, and was presented for the first time during the
two months following the latter date.
The Woman-Hater affords interesting glimpses of
the author's observation, sometimes perhaps experience,
in town and country. "That I might be turned
loose," says one of his dramatis personae, "to try my
fortune amongst the whole fry in a college or an inn
of court!" And another, a gay young buck,—"I
must take some of the common courses of our nobility,
which is thus: If I can find no company that likes
me, pluck off my hat-band, throw an old cloak over
my face and, as if I would not be known, walk hastily
through the streets till I be discovered: 'There goes
Count Such-a-one,' says one; 'There goes Count Such-a-one,'
says another; 'Look how fast he goes,' says
a third; 'There's some great matters in hand, questionless,'
says a fourth;—when all my business is to
have them say so. This hath been used. Or, if I
can find any company [acting at the theatre], I'll after
dinner to the stage to see a play; where, when I first
enter, you shall have a murmur in the house; every[76]
one that does not know, cries, 'What nobleman is
that?' All the gallants on the stage, rise, vail to
me, kiss their hand, offer me their places; then I pick
out some one whom I please to grace among the rest,
take his seat, use it, throw my cloak over my face, and
laugh at him; the poor gentleman imagines himself
most highly graced, thinks all the auditors esteem
him one of my bosom friends, and in right special
regard with me." And again, and this is much like
first-hand knowledge: "There is no poet acquainted
with more shakings and quakings, towards the latter
end of his new play (when he's in that case that he
stands peeping betwixt the curtains, so fearfully that
a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks somebody
hisses), than I am at this instant." And again,—of
the political spies, who had persecuted more than
one of Beaumont's relatives and, according to tradition,
trumped up momentary trouble for our young
dramatists themselves, a few years later: "This
fellow is a kind of informer, one that lives in ale-houses
and taverns; and because he perceives some
worthy men in this land, with much labour and great
expense, to have discovered things dangerously hanging
over the state, he thinks to discover as much
out of the talk of drunkards in tap-houses. He
brings me information, picked out of broken words
in men's common talk, which with his malicious misapplication
he hopes will seem dangerous; he doth,
besides, bring me the names of all the young gentlemen
in the city that use ordinaries or taverns, talking
(to my thinking) only as the freedom of their
youth teach them without any further ends, for dangerous[77]
and seditious spirits." Much more in this
kind, of city ways known to Beaumont; and, also,
something of country ways, the table of the Leicestershire
squire—the Beaumonts of Coleorton and
the Villierses of Brooksby,—and the hunting-breakfasts
with which Grace-Dieu was familiar. The hungry
courtier of the play vows to "keep a sumptuous
house; a board groaning under the heavy burden of
the beast that cheweth the cud, and the fowl that cutteth
the air. It shall not, like the table of a country-justice,
be sprinkled over with all manner of cheap
salads, sliced beef, giblets and pettitoes, to fill up room;
nor shall there stand any great, cumbersome, uncut-up
pies at the nether end, filled with moss and stones,
partly to make a show with, partly to keep the lower
mess [below the salt] from eating; nor shall my meal
come in sneaking like the city-service, one dish a quarter
of an hour after another, and gone as if they had
appointed to meet there and mistook the hour; nor
should it, like the new court-service, come in in haste,
as if it fain would be gone again [whipped off by the
waiters], all courses at once, like a hunting breakfast:
but I would have my several courses and my
dishes well filed [ordered]; my first course
shall be brought in after the ancient manner
by a score of old blear-eyed serving-men in
long blue coats."—And not a little of life at Court,
and of the favourites with whom King James
surrounded himself:—"They say one shall see
fine sights at the Court? I'll tell you what you
shall see. You shall see many faces of man's making,
for you shall find very few as God left them; and you[78]
shall see many legs too; amongst the rest you shall
behold one pair, the feet of which were in past times
sockless, but are now, through the change of time
(that alters all things), very strangely become the legs
of a knight and a courtier; another pair you shall see,
that were heir-apparent legs to a glover; these legs
hope shortly to be honourable; when they pass by they
will bow, and the mouth to these legs will seem to
offer you some courtship; it will swear, but it will lie;
hear it not."
Keen observation this, and a dramatist's acquaintance
with many kinds of life; the promise of a satiric
mastery, and very vivid prose for a lad of twenty-three.
The play is not, as a dramatic composition, of any
peculiar distinction. Beaumont is still in his pupilage
to the classics, and to Ben Jonson's comedy of humours.
But the humours, though unoriginal and boyishly
forced, are clearly defined; and the instinct for fun
is irrepressible. The Woman-Hater, obsessed by the
delusion that all women are in pursuit, is admirably
victimized by a witty and versatile heroine who has,
with maliciously genial pretense, assumed the rôle of
man-hunter. And to the main plot is loosely, but not
altogether ineffectually, attached a highly diverting
story which Beaumont has taken from the Latin treatise
of Paulus Jovius on Roman fishes, or from some
intermediate source. Like the Tamisius of the original,
his Lazarillo,—whose prayer to the Goddess of
Plenty is ever, "fill me this day with some rare delicates,"—scours
the city in fruitless quest of an umbrana's
head. Finally, he is taken by intelligencers,
spies in the service of the state, who construe his passion[79]
for the head of a fish as treason aimed at the head
of the Duke. The comedy abounds in parody of
verses well known at the time, of lines from Hamlet
and All's Well that End Well, Othello[50] and Eastward
Hoe[50] and bombastic catches from other plays. To me
the most ludicrous bit of burlesque is of the moment
of last suspense in Antony and Cleopatra (IV,
14 and 15) where Antony, thinking to die "after the
high Roman fashion" which Cleopatra forthwith emulates,
says "I come my queen,"—
Stay for me!
Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt [of Elysium] be ours.
So Lazarillo, in awful apprehension lest his love, his
fish-head, be eaten before he arrive,—
If it be eaten, here he stands that is the most dejected,
most unfortunate, miserable, accursed, forsaken slave
this province yields! I will not sure outlive it; no, I
will die bravely and like a Roman;
And after death, amidst the Elysian shades,
I'll meet my love again.
Shakespeare's play was not entered for publication till
May 20, 1608, but this passage shows that Beaumont
had seen it at the Globe before May 20, 1607.
I have no hesitation in assigning to the same year,
1607, although most critics have dated it three or[80]
four years later, Beaumont's admirable burlesque of
contemporary bourgeois drama and chivalric romance,
The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Evidence both
external and internal, which I shall later state, points
to its presentation by the Children of the Queen's
Revels at Blackfriars while they were under the business
management of Henry Evans and Robert Keysar,
and before the temporary suppression of the company
in March 1608. The question of date has been complicated
by the supposed indebtedness of the burlesque to
Don Quixote; but I shall attempt to show, when I consider
the play at length, that it has no verbal relation
either to the original (1604) or the translation (1612)
of Cervantes' story. The Knight of the Burning Pestle
is in some respects of the same boyish tone and outlook
upon the humours of life as The Woman-Hater,
but it is incomparably more novel in conception, more
varied in composition, and more effervescent in satire.
It displays the Beaumont of twenty-two or -three
as already an effective dramatist of contemporary
manners and humours, a master of parody, side-long
mirth, and ironic wit, before he joined forces with
Fletcher and developed, in the treatment of more
serious and romantic themes, the power of poetic characterization
and the pathos that bespeak experience
and reflection,—and, in the treatment of the comedy
of life, the realism that proceeds from broad and sympathetic
observation. The play, which as the publisher
of the first quarto, in 1613, tell us was "begot
and borne in eight daies," was not a success; evidently
because the public did not like the sport that it
made of dramas and dramatists then popular; especially,[81]
did not stomach the ridicule of the bombast-loving
and romanticizing London citizen himself,—was
not yet educated up to the humour; perhaps, because
"hee ... this unfortunate child ... was so unlike
his brethren." At any rate, according to Walter
Burre, the publisher, in 1613, "the wide world for
want of judgement, or not understanding the privy
marke of Ironie about it (which showed it was no ofspring
of any vulgar braine) utterly rejected it." And
Burre goes on to say in his Dedication of the quarto
to Maister Robert Keysar:—"for want of acceptance
it was even ready to give up the Ghost, and was in
danger to have bene smothered in perpetuall oblivion,
if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude)
had not bene moved both to relieve and cherish it:
wherein I must needs commend both your judgement,
understanding, and singular love to good wits."
The rest of this Dedication is of great interest as
bearing upon the date of the composition of the play;
but it has been entirely misconstrued or else it gives
us false information. That matter I shall discuss in
connection with the sources and composition of the
play.[51] Suffice it to say here that The Knight followed
The Travails of Three English Brothers, acted.
June 29, 1607, and that the Robert Keysar who rescued
the manuscript of The Knight from oblivion had,
only in 1606 or 1607, acquired a financial interest in
the Queen's Revels' Children, and was backing them
during the last year of their occupancy of Blackfriars
when they presented the play, and where only it was
presented.
[82]
In the same year, 1607, both young men are writing
commendatory verses for the first quarto of Ben Jonson's
Volpone, which had been acted in 1605. Beaumont,
with the confidence of intimacy, addresses Jonson
as "Dear Friend," praises his "even work,"
deplores its failure with the many who "nothing
can digest, but what's obscene, or barks," and implies
that he forbears to make them understand its merits
purely in deference to Jonson's wiser judgment,—
I would have shewn
To all the world the art which thou alone
Hast taught our tongue, the rules of time, of place
And other rites, deliver'd with the grace
Of comic style, which only is far more
Than any English stage hath known before.
But since our subtle gallants think it good
To like of nought that may be understood ...
... let us desire
They may continue, simply to admire
Fine clothes and strange words,
and offensive personalities.
Fletcher in a more epigrammatic appeal to "The
true master in his art, B. Jonson," prays him to forgive
friends and foes alike, and then, those "who
are nor worthy to be friends or foes."
Concerning Fletcher's beginnings in composition the
earliest date is suggested by a line of D'Avenant's,
written many years after Fletcher's death (1625),
"full twenty years he wore the bays."[52] It has been[83]
conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists
was in the field as early as 1604, with his comedy of
The Woman's Prize or The Tamer Tamed,—a well
contrived and witty continuation of Shakespeare's
Taming of the Shrew,—in which Maria, a cousin of
Shakespeare's Katherine, now deceased, marries the
bereaved Petruchio and effectively turns the tables
upon him. If acted before 1607, The Woman's
Prize was a Paul's Boys' or Queen's Revels' play. But
while the upper limit of the play is fixed by the mention
of the siege of Ostend, 1604, other references and the
literary style point to 1610, even to 1614, as the date
of composition or revision.[53]
It is likely that Fletcher was writing plays before
1608, but what we do not know. In that year was
acted the pastoral drama of The Faithfull Shepheardesse,
a composition entirely his own. This delicate
confection of sensual desire, ideal love, translunar
chastity, and subacid cynicism regarding "all ideas of
chastity whatever,"[54] was an experiment; and a failure
upon the stage. It has, as I shall later emphasize,
lyric and descriptive charm of surpassing merit, but
it lacks, as does most of Fletcher's work, moral depth
and emotional reality; and following, as it did, a literary
convention in design, it could not avail itself of
the skill in dramatic device, and the racy flavour which[84]
a little later characterized his Monsieur Thomas.
The date of its first performance is determined by the
combined authority of the Stationers' Registers (from
which we learn that the publishers of the first quarto,
undated, but undoubtedly of 1609,[55] were in unassisted
partnership only from December 22, 1608 to July 20,
1609), of a statement of Jonson to Drummond of
Hawthornden that the play was written "ten years"
before 1618, and of commendatory verses to the first
quarto of 1609, by the young actor-dramatist, Nathaniel
Field. If we may guide our calculations by
the plague regulations of the time, it must have been
acted before July 28, 1608.
On the appearance of the first quarto, in 1609,
Jonson sympathizing with "the worthy author," on
the ill reception of the pastoral when first performed,
says:
I, that am glad thy innocence was their guilt,
for the rabble found not there the "vices, which they
look'd for," I—
Do crown thy murder'd poem; which shall rise
A glorified work to time, when fire
Or moths shall eat what all these fools admire.
And Francis Beaumont writing to "my friend, Master
John Fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted wit"
and "art," and rejoices that, if they should condemn
the play now that it is printed,
Your censurers must have the quality
Of reading, which I am afraid is more
Than half your shrewdest judges had before.
[85]
In the first quarto two commendatory poems are
printed, the first by N. F., the second by the Homeric
scholar and well known dramatist, George Chapman.
The latter writes "to his loving friend, Master John
Fletcher," in terms of generous encouragement and
glowing charm. Your pastoral, says he, is "a poem
and a play, too,"—
But because
Your poem only hath by us applause,
Renews the golden world, and holds through all
The holy laws of homely pastoral,
Where flowers and founts, and nymphs and semi-gods,
And all the Graces find their old abodes,
Where forests flourish but in endless verse,
And meadows nothing fit for purchasers;
This iron age, that eats itself, will never
Bite at your golden world; that other's ever
Lov'd as itself. Then like your book, do you
Live in old peace, and that for praise allow.
If Jonson, Chapman, and Beaumont suspected the undercurrent
of satire in this Pastoral, and they surely
were not obtuse, they concealed the suspicion admirably.
As for Fletcher he continued to "live in
old peace." "When his faire Shepheardesse on the
guilty stage, Was martir'd between Ignorance and
Rage.... Hee only as if unconcernèd smil'd." An
attitude toward the public that characterized him all
through life.
The admiration of younger men is shown in the
respectful commendation of N. F. This is Nathaniel
Field. He was acting with the Blackfriars' Boys
since the days when Jonson presented Cynthia's Revels,[86]
and, as one of the Queen's Revels' Children, he
had probably taken part in The Faithfull Shepheardesse
when the undiscerning public hissed it. Field
came of good family, had been one of Mulcaster's pupils
at the Merchant Taylors' School, and was beloved
by Chapman and Jonson. He was then but twenty-two,—about
three years younger than Fletcher's
friend, Beaumont,—but for nine years gone he had
been recognized as a genius among boy-actors. That
the verses of so young a man should be accepted, and
coupled with those of the thunder-girt Chapman, was
to him a great and unexpected honour; and the youth
expresses prettily his pride in being published by his
"lov'd friend" in such distinguished literary company,—
Can my approovement, sir, be worth your thankes,
Whose unknowne name, and Muse in swathing clowtes,
Is not yet growne to strength, among these rankes
To have a roome?
Now he is planning to write dramas himself; and it
is pleasant to note with what modesty he touches upon
the project:
But I must justifie what privately
I censur'd to you, my ambition is
(Even by my hopes and love to Poesie)
To live to perfect such a worke as this,
Clad in such elegant proprietie
Of words, including a morallitie,[56]
So sweete and profitable.
He is alluding to his not yet finished comedy,[87] A
Woman is a Weather-cocke. The youth must have
been close to Beaumont as well as to Fletcher; he soon
afterwards, 1609-10, played the leading part in their
Coxcombe,—which, I think, was the earliest work
planned and written by them in collaboration; and
when, a little later, his own first comedy was acted
by the Queen's Revels' Children no auditor of literary
ear could have failed to detect, amid the manifest
echoes of Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare, the
flattering resemblance in diction, rhythm, and poetic
fancy to the most characteristic features of Beaumont's
style. This is very interesting, because in another
dramatic composition Foure Playes in One, written
in part by Fletcher, certain portions have so close
a likeness to Beaumont's work, that until lately they
have been mistakenly attributed to that poet and assigned
to this early period of his career. The portions
of The Foure Playes not written by Fletcher were
written by no other than Nat. Field. And since in
Field's Address to the Reader of the Weather-cocke,
licensed for publication November 23, 1611, he still
speaks as if the Weather-cocke were his only venture
in play-writing, we may conclude that The Foure
Playes in One was not put together before the end of
1611, or the beginning of 1612. That series need not,
therefore, be considered in the present place; all the
more so, since Beaumont had in all probability nothing
directly to do with its composition.[57]
Of the other dramas written by Fletcher alone and
assigned by critics to his earlier period, that is to
say before 1610, or even 1611, the only one beside[88]
The Faithfull Shepheardesse that may with any degree
of safety be admitted to consideration is a comedy
of romance, manners, and humours, Monsieur
Thomas. The romance is a delightful story of self-abnegating
love. The father, Valentine, and the son
Francisco, supposed to have been drowned long ago,
and now known (if the texts had only printed the
play as Fletcher wrote it) as Callidon, a guest of Valentine,
love the same girl, the father's ward. This
part of the play is executed with captivating grace.
It shows that Fletcher had, from the first, an instinct
for the dramatic handling of a complicated story, an
eye for delicate and surprising situations, an appreciation
of chivalric honour and genuine passion, and a
fancy fertile and playful. In the subplot the manners
are such as would appeal to a Fletcher not yet
thirty years of age; and the humours are those of a
student of the earlier plays of Ben Jonson, and of
Marston—who ceased writing in 1607. It has indeed
been asserted, but without much credibility, that "the
notion of the panerotic Hylas," who must always "be
courting wenches through key-holes," was taken from
a character in Marston's Parasitaster, of 1606.[58] The
name of this Captain, Hylas, was in the mouth of
Fletcher in those early days; he uses it again in his part
of the Philaster, written in 1609 or 1610, and elsewhere.
The snatches of song and the names of ballads
are those of contemporary popularity between 1606
and 1609; and in two instances they are those of
which Beaumont makes use in his Knight of the Burning
Pestle of 1607. The play was acted, too, apparently[89]
by the same company, the Queen's Revels' Children,
and in the same house as was Beaumont's. It
could not have been played by them at "the Private
House in Black Fryers" later than March 1608, unless
they squeezed it into that last month of 1609 which
serves as a telescope basket for so many of the plays
which critics cannot satisfactorily date.
For my present purpose, which is to show how
Fletcher, not assisted by Beaumont, wrote during his
youth, it makes little difference whether Monsieur
Thomas was written as early as 1608 or only before
1611. The fact is, however, that a line in the
last scene, "Take her, Francisco, now no more
young Callidon," shows clearly that Callidon, a name
not occurring elsewhere in the play, and necessary
to the dramatic complication, had been used by
Fletcher in his first version; and when we put the
names Callidon and Cellidée together (she is Francisco's
belovèd) we are pointed at once to the source
of the romantic plot—the Histoire de Celidée,
Thamyre, et Calidon at the beginning of the Second
Part of the Astrée of the Marquis D'Urfé.[59] The
First Part of this voluminous pastoral romance had
been published, probably in 1609, in an edition which
is lost; but a second edition, dedicated to Henri IV,
who died May 14, 1610, appeared that year. Some
of Fletcher's inspiration, as for the name and general
characteristic of Hylas, was drawn from the First
Part. The Second Part was not printed till later in[90]
1610. It would, therefore, appear that Fletcher
could not have written Monsieur Thomas before the
latter date. On the other hand, as Dr. Upham[60] has
indicated, the Astrée had been read as early as February
12, 1607, by Ben Jonson's friend, William
Drummond, who, on that day, writes about it critically
to Sir George Keith. If the First Part had been circulated
in manuscript, and read by an Englishman, in
1607, it is not at all unlikely that the Second Part,
too, of this most leisurely published romance, which
did not get itself all into covers till 1647, had been
read in manuscript by many men, French and English,
long before its appearance in print, 1610;—may be
by Fletcher himself, as early as 1608. Or he may
have heard the story, as early as that, from some one
who had read it. The fact that he alters some of
the names, follows the plot but loosely, characterizes
the personages not at all as if he had the original
before him, and uses none of their diction, would
favour the supposition that he is writing from hearsay,
or from some second hand and condensed version of
the story.
No matter what the exact date of composition,
Monsieur Thomas is the one play beside The Faithfull
Shepheardesse from which we may draw conclusions
concerning the native tendencies of the young Fletcher.
The subplot of Thomas, concocted with clever ease,
and furnished with varied devices appropriate to
comic effect—disguisings, mouse-traps, dupers duped,
street-frolics and mock sentimental serenades, scaling-ladders,
convents, and a blackamoor girl for a decoy-duck,—is[91]
conceived in a rollicking spirit and executed
in sprightly conversational style. Sir Adolphus Ward
says that "as a picture of manners it is excelled by few
other Elizabethan comedies." I am sorry that I cannot
agree; I call it low, or farcical comedy; and though
the 'manners' be briskly and realistically imagined,
I question their contemporary actuality,—even their
dramatic probability. Amusing scapegraces like the
hero of the title-part have existed in all periods of
history; and fathers, who will not have their sons
mollycoddles; and squires of dames, like the susceptible
Hylas. But manners, to be dramatically probable,
must reflect the contacts of possible characters in a
definite period. And no one can maintain that the
contact of these persons with the women of the play
is characterized by possibility. Or that these manners
could, even in the beginning of James I's reign, have
characterized a perceptible percentage of actual Londoners.
Thomas, whose humour it is to assume sanctimony
for the purpose of vexing his father, and blasphemy
for the purpose of teasing his sweetheart—racking
that "maiden's tender ears with damns and
devils,"—is no more grotesque than many a contemporary
embodiment of 'humour.' But what of his
contacts with the "charming" Mary who "daily hopes
his fair conversion" and has "a credit," and "loves
where her modesty may live untainted"; and, then,
that she may "laugh an hour" admits him to her bed-chamber,
having substituted for herself a negro wench?
And what of the contacts with his equally "modest"
sister, Dorothy, who not only talks smut with him and
with the "charming" Mary, but deems his fornication[92]
"fine sport" and would act it if she were a man? I
fear that much reading of decadent drama sometimes
impairs the critical perception. In making allowance
for what masquerades as historical probability one
frequently accepts human improbabilities, and condones
what should be condemned—even from the
dramatic point of view. I have found it so in my
own case. With all its picaresque quality, its jovial
'humours' and its racy fun, this play is sheer stage-rubbish:
it has no basis in the general life of the
class it purports to represent, no basis in actual manners,
nor in likelihood or poetry. Its basis is in the
uncritical and, to say the least, irresponsible taste of
a theatre-going Rump which enjoyed the spurious
localization, and attribution to others, of the imaginings
of its own heart.
The characters are well grouped; and the spirit of
merriment prevails. The reversals of motive and fortune,
the recognitions and the dénouement are as excellently
and puerilely absurd as could be desired of
such an amalgam of romance and farcical intrigue.
Richard Brome, writing in praise of the author for
the quarto of 1639, implies that the play was not well
received at its "first presenting,"—"when Ignorance
was judge, and but a few What was legitimate, what
bastard knew." That first presenting was between
1608 and 1612; and the few might have cared more for
Jonson's Every Man in his Humour or Volpone, or
something by Shakespeare, or soon afterwards for
Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster or A King and No
King. But, as Brome assures us, "the world's grown
wiser now." That is to say, it had learned by[93]
1639 "what was legitimate," and could believe that
in Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas and the like, "the
Muses jointly did inspire His raptures only with
their sacred fire." But even as transmogrified by
D'Urfey and others the play did not survive its century.
No better example could be afforded of the kind of
comedy that Fletcher was capable of producing in his
earlier period. It shows us with what ability he could
dramatize a romantic tale; with what license as a
realist imagine and portray an unmoral, when not immoral,
semblance of contemporary life. That was
either before Beaumont had joined forces with him;
or when Beaumont was not pruning his fancy; was
not hanging "plummets" on his wit "to suppress Its
too luxuriant-growing mightiness," nor persuading him
that mirth might subsist "untainted with obscenity,"
and "strength and sweetness" and "high choice of
brain" be "couched in every line." I am not claiming
too much for Beaumont. In his later work as in
his earlier there is the frank animalism, at times, of
Elizabethan blood and humour; but one may search
in vain his parts of the joint-plays as well as his youthful
Knight of the Burning Pestle and those portions
of The Woman-Hater which Fletcher did not touch,
for the Jacobean salaciousness of Fletcher's Monsieur
Thomas and the carnal cynicism which lurks beneath
the pastoral garb of innocence even in The Faithfull
Shepheardesse;—characteristics that find utterance
again, untrammeled, in the dramas written after the
younger poet was dead,—and Fletcher could no
longer, as in those earlier days,
[94]
wisely submit each birth
To knowing Beaumont e're it did come forth,
Working againe untill he said 'twas fit;
And make him the sobriety of his wit.[61]
During the years of Beaumont's apprenticeship to
Poetry cloaked as Law things had changed but little in
his world of the Inner Temple. In its parliament, Sir
Edward Coke, judicial, intrepid, and devout is still
most potent. The chamber, lodging, and rooms which
his father, Mr. Justice Beaumont, and his uncle Henry
had built and occupied near to Ram Alley in the north
end of Fuller's Rents are still held by Richard Daveys,
who as Treasurer moved into them in 1601. Dr.
Richard Masters is still Master of the Temple; and in
the church, where Francis was obliged to receive the
Sacrament at stated times, he, sitting perhaps by his
uncle Henry's tomb, would hear the assistant ministers,
Richard Evans and William Crashaw. The
sacred place was still the refuge of outlaws from
Whitefriars who claimed the privilege of sanctuary.
If Beaumont wished to steal, after hours, into the
Alsatia beyond Fuller's Rents, he must skirt or propitiate
in 1607 as in 1602 the same Cerberus at the
gates,—William Knight, the glover. Outside awaited
him the hospitality of the Mitre Inn, or of Barrow at
the "Cat and Fiddle," or of the slovenly Anthony
Gibbes in his cook's shop of Ram Alley.[62]
[95]
CHAPTER VII
THE "BANKE-SIDE" AND THE PERIOD OF THE PARTNERSHIP
As we shall presently see, Beaumont during his
career in London retained his connection with
the Inner Temple, which would be his club; and it
may be presumed that up to 1606 or 1607, his residence
alternated between the Temple and his brother's home
of Grace-Dieu. About 1609, however, he was surely
collaborating with his friend, Fletcher, in the composition
of plays. And we may conjecture that, in
that or the previous year, our Castor and Pollux were
established in those historic lodgings in Southwark
where, as Aubrey, writing more than half a century
later, tells us, they lived in closest intimacy. That
gossipy chronicler records the obvious in his "there
was a wonderfull consimility of phansey between him
[Beaumont] and Mr. Jo. Fletcher, which caused that
dearnesse of friendship between them";[63] but when
he proceeds "They lived together on the Banke-side,
not far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay
together (from Sir James Hales, etc.); had one wench
in the house between them, which they did so admire,
the same cloaths and cloake, etc., between them," we
feel that so far as inferences are concerned the account[96]
is to be taken with at least a morsel of reserve.
Aubrey was not born till after both Beaumont and
Fletcher were dead; and, as Dyce pertinently remarks,
"perhaps Aubrey's informant (Sir James Hales)
knowing his ready credulity, purposely overcharged
the picture of our poets' domestic establishment." To
inquire too closely into gossip were folly; but it is
only fair to recall that sixty years after Fletcher's
death, popular tradition was content with conferring
the "wench," exclusively upon him. Oldwit, in
Shadwell's play of Bury-Fair (1689) says: "I myself,
simple as I stand here, was a wit in the last age.
I was created Ben Jonson's son, in the Apollo. I knew
Fletcher, my friend Fletcher, and his maid Joan; well,
I shall never forget him: I have supped with him at
his house on the Banke-side; he loved a fat loin of
pork of all things in the world; and Joan his maid
had her beer-glass of sack; and we all kissed her, i'
faith, and were as merry as passed."[64] It is hardly
necessary, in any case, to surmise with those who sniff
up improprieties that the admirable services of the
original "wench," whether Joan or another, far exceeded
the roasting of pork and the burning of sack
for her two "batchelors."
To the years 1609 and 1610 may be assigned with
some show of confidence Beaumont and Fletcher's
first significant romantic dramas The Coxcombe and
Philaster. The former was acted by the Children
of her Majesty's Revels, I think before July 12, 1610.
If at Blackfriars, before January 4, 1610; if at
Whitefriars, after January 4. There are grounds for[97]
believing that it was the play upon which Fletcher
and Beaumont were engaged in the country when
Beaumont wrote a letter, justly famous, probably toward
the end of 1609, to Ben Jonson; and, since the
play was not well received, that it was one of the unsuccessful
comedies which as Dryden says preceded
Philaster. Philaster was acted at the Globe and
Blackfriars by the King's Men, for the first time, it
would appear, between December 7, 1609 and July
12, 1610. My reasons in detail for thus dating both
of these dramas are given later. But a word about
the Letter to Ben Jonson may be said here.
THE TEMPLE
From Ralph Agas's Map of London, about 1561
It was first printed at the end of a play called
The Nice Valour in the folio of 1647. Owing to a
careless acceptance of the rubric prefixed to it by the
publishers of that folio, historians have ordinarily
dated its composition at too early a period. The
poem itself mentions "Sutcliffe's wit," referring to
three controversial tracts of the Dean of Exeter,
printed in 1606; but Beaumont might jibe at the Dean's
expense for years after 1606. The rubic inscribed
a generation after the death of both our dramatists,
and therefore of but secondary importance, tells us
that the Letter was "written, before he [Beaumont]
and Master Fletcher came to London, with two of the
precedent comedies, then not finish'd, which deferr'd
their merry meetings at the Mermaid." We know
that the young men had been in London for years
before 1606. If the rubric has any meaning whatever,
it is merely that the customary convivialities at
the Mermaid, as described in the Letter, had been
interrupted by a visit to the country during which[98]
they were finishing two of the comedies which precede
The Nice Valour in the folio; and it indicates a date
not earlier than 1608, for the writing of the letter,
and probably not later than July 1610. For only
three of the fifteen plays which appear in the folio
before The Nice Valour could have been completed
during the career of Beaumont as a dramatist, and
none of the three antedates 1608. In two of these
Beaumont had no hand: The Captaine, which may
have been composed as late as 1611, and Beggars'
Bush,[65] which shows the collaboration of Massinger,
but Fletcher's part of which may have been written
in 1608. The only one of the "precedent comedies"
in which we may be sure that Beaumont collaborated
is The Coxcombe. If, as I believe, it was acted first
between December 1609 and July 1610[66] it may well
have been written in the country during the latter
half of 1609, while the plague rate was exceptionally
high in London. Both Beggars' Bush and The Coxcombe
abound in rural scenes; but the latter especially,
in scenes that might have been suggested by Grace-Dieu
and its neighborhood.
The rubric prefixed to the Letter by the publishers
is of negligible authority. The 'me' and 'us' of
the Letter itself do not necessarily designate Fletcher
as the companion of Beaumont's rustication: they stand
at one time for country-folk; at another for the Mermaid
circle, Jonson, Chapman, Fletcher, probably
Shakespeare, Drayton, Cotton, Donne, Hugh Holland,[99]
Tom Coryate, Richard Martin, Selden (of Beaumont's
Inner Temple), and other famous wits and poets;
at another for Jonson and Beaumont alone. The date
of the poem must be determined from internal evidence.
It is written with the careless ease of long-standing
intimacy. It is of a genial, jocose, and fairly
mature, epistolary style. It betrays the literary assurance
of one whose reputation is already established.
Beaumont is in temporary banishment from London,
for lack of funds—therefore, considerably later than
1606, when he was presumably well off; for in that
year he had just come into a quarter of his brother,
Sir Henry's, private estate. He longs now for the
stimulus of the merry meetings in Bread-street, as one
whose wit has been sharpened by them for a long
time past:
Methinks the little wit I had is lost
Since I saw you; for Wit is like a Rest
Held up at Tennis, which men do the best
With the best gamesters; ...
up here in Leicestershire "The Countrey Gentlemen
begin to allow My wit for dry bobs." "In this warm
shine" of our hay-making season, soberly deferring
to country knights, listening to hoary family-jests,
drinking water mixed with claret-lees, "I lye and
dream of your full Mermaid Wine":
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtill flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
[100]
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolv'd to live a foole, the rest
Of his dull life. Then, when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justifie the Town
For three daies past,—wit that might warrant be
For the whole City to talk foolishly
Till that were cancell'd,—and, when that was gone,
We left an Aire behind us, which alone
Was able to make the two next Companies
Right witty; though but downright fooles, more wise.
When he remembers all this, he "needs must cry,"
but one thought of Ben Jonson cheers him:
Only strong Destiny, which all controuls,
I hope hath left a better fate in store
For me thy friend, than to live ever poore,
Banisht unto this home. Fate once againe
Bring me to thee, who canst make smooth and plaine
The way of Knowledge for me, and then I,
Who have no good but in thy company
Protest it will my greatest comfort be
To acknowledge all I have to flow from thee.
Ben, when these Scaenes are perfect, we'll taste wine;
I'll drink thy Muses health, thou shalt quaff mine.
The Letter was written after Beaumont's Muse had
produced something worthy of a toast from Jonson,—the
Woman-Hater and the Knight, for instance (both
marked by wit and by the discipline of Jonson); but
not later than the end of 1612, for during most of
1613 Jonson was traveling in France as governor to
Sir Walter Raleigh's "knavishly inclined" son; and
after February of that year Beaumont wrote so far
as I venture to conclude but one drama,[101] The Scornful
Ladie; and that does not precede this Letter in the
folio of 1647; is not printed in that folio at all. Nor
was this Letter of a disciple written later than the
great Beaumont-Fletcher plays of 1610-1611, for then
Jonson was praising Beaumont for "writing better"
than he himself. If there is any truth at all in the
rubric to the Letter, the "scenes" of which Beaumont
speaks as not yet "perfect" were of The Coxcombe;
and evidence which I shall, in the proper place,
adduce convinces me that that was first acted before
March 25, 1610, perhaps before January 4. The
play would, then, have been written about the end of
1609.
I do not wonder that, as the Prologue in the first
folio tells us, it was "condemned by the ignorant
multitude," not only because of its length, a fault removed
in the editions which we possess, but because
the larger part of the play is written by Fletcher, and
in his most inartistic, and irrational, licentious vein.
Beaumont, though admitted to the partnership, had
not yet succeeded in hanging "plummets" on his
friend's luxuriance. He contented himself with contributing
to a theme of Boccaccian cuckoldry the subplot
of how Ricardo, drunk, loses his betrothed, and
finds her again and is forgiven,—a little story that
contains all the poignancy of sorrow and poppy of
romance and poetry of innocence that make the comedy
readable and tolerable.
As to the first production of the Philaster a word
must be said here, because the event marks the earliest
association, concerning which we have any assurance,
of the young dramatists with Shakespeare. Until[102]
about 1609 they appear to have written for the Paul's
Boys, who acted, probably in their singing-school, until
1607; and for the Queen's Revels' Children who,
under various managements, had been occupying
Richard Burbadge's theatre of Blackfriars since 1597.
Their association with the Paul's Boys would of itself
have brought them into touch with other Paul's
dramatists, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, and Chapman.
In their association with the Queen's Revels'
Children they had been thrown closely together with
Chapman again, with Jonson, and with John Day, all
of whom wrote for Blackfriars; and with Marston,
who not only wrote plays for the Children but had a
financial interest in the company. Some of these
dramatists,—Jonson, for instance, and Webster,—had
occasionally written for Shakespeare's company
during these years; but we have no proof that Beaumont
and Fletcher had any connection with the King's
Players of Shakespeare's company, as long as the
Children's companies continued in their usual course
at St. Paul's singing-school and Blackfriars. After
1606, however, the Paul's Boys were on the wane.
Perhaps they are to be indentified with the new Children
of the King's Revels, and an occupancy of Whitefriars,
in 1607; but that clue soon disappears. And as
to the Queen's Revels' Children, we find that in April
1608 they were suppressed for ridiculing royalty
upon the stage.[67] Their manager, Henry Evans, to
whom with three others Richard Burbadge had let
Blackfriars in 1600, now sought to be set free from[103]
the contract; and in August 1608, the Burbadges
(Richard and Cuthbert), Shakespeare, Heming, Condell,
and Slye of the King's Company, took over the
lease which still had many years to run.[68] Shakespeare's
company had been acting at the Burbadges'
theatre of the Globe since 1599,—as the Lord Chamberlain's
till 1603; after that, as his Majesty's Servants.
Now Shakespeare's company took charge of
Blackfriars, as well; and, under their management,
for about a month between December 7, 1609 and
January 4, 1610 the Queen's Revels' Children, being
reinstated in royal favour, resumed their acting at
Blackfriars. On the latter date, the Children as reorganized,
opened at Whitefriars under the management
of Philip Rossiter and others; and among the
first plays presented by them, there, were Jonson's
Epicoene and, I believe, Beaumont and Fletcher's
The Coxcombe.
But, in the process of readjustment at Blackfriars,
our young partners in dramatic production must have
been drawn into professional relationship with the
members of Shakespeare's company and undoubtedly
with Shakespeare himself. From the first quarto of
Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, published in 1620,
we learn that this, the earliest of their great tragicomedies,
was acted not by the Queen's Revels' Children,
but by the King's Players, and at the Globe.
From the second quarto, of 1622, we learn that it was
acted also at Blackfriars: it may indeed have been
first presented there. Our earliest record of the play[104]
shows that it was in existence before October 8, 1610.
The Scourge of Folly by John Davies of Hereford,
entered for publication on that date, contains an epigram
to "the well deserving Mr. John Fletcher,"
which runs—
Love lies a-Bleeding, if it should not prove
Her utmost art to show why it doth love.
Thou being the Subject (now), It raignes upon,
Raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention:
For this I love thee; and can doe no lesse
For thine as faire, as faithfull Sheepheardesse.
Since there is nothing in Philaster, or Love Lies
a-Bleeding, to indicate a date of composition earlier
than 1608, and since this is the first of Beaumont and
Fletcher's dramas to be performed by Shakespeare's
company, we may be fairly certain that the performance
followed the readjustment of affairs between the
Globe and Blackfriars in August of that year. Now,
there had been regulations for years past of the City
authorities and the Privy Council in accordance with
which theatre in the City proper and the suburbs
of Surrey and Middlesex were closed whenever the
number of deaths by plague exceeded a certain limit
per week. In and after 1608 this limit was set at
forty; and it is probable that, in accordance with a
still older regulation, the ban was not lifted until it
was evident that the decrease in deaths was more than
temporary.[69] That actors sometimes performed at
Court while the plague rate was still prohibitive in
and about the City, does not by any means justify us[105]
in assuming that they were ever allowed at such times
to play in theatres thronged by the public.[70] Between
August 8, 1608 and October 8, 1610, the only continuous
period in which plays might have been presented
by Shakespeare's company at the Globe or Blackfriars,
without violating the plague law, was from December
7, 1609 to July 12, 1610; and we therefore conclude
that it was during those months that Beaumont and
Fletcher's Philaster was first acted. The only other
abatement of the plague that might have given promise
of continuance was between March 2 and 23, 1609;
but on March 9 the rate of deaths rose again above
forty, and it is not likely that the authorities would
have permitted the theatres to resume operations during
those three weeks.[71]
THE GLOBE THEATRE, WITH ST. PAUL'S IN THE BACKGROUND
From Vischer's long view of London, 1616
With Philaster Beaumont and Fletcher leaped into
the foremost rank as dramatists. I have so much to
say of this tragicomedy in my discussion of the authorship
of its successive scenes, that but a word may
here be said concerning the reasons for its success.
Hitherto, practically Shakespeare alone had written for
the King's Servants romantic comedies of a serious
cast; and they were generally based upon some well-known
story. Here was a comedy of serious kind with
a romantic and original plot, by authors comparatively
new to the general public, written in a style refreshingly
unhackneyed, and played in the best theatres
and by the best company that London possessed. The
Hamlet-like hero seeking his kingdom and his princess—the[106]
daughter of the usurper—and, through misunderstandings
and misadventures, tragic apprehensions,
swiftly succeeding crises, bloodshed, riot, and
surprising reversals of fortune, attaining both birth-right
and love; the pathetic innocence and nobly futile
devotion of his girl-page; the triangular affair of the
affections; the humour of the secondary characters; the
allurements of spectacle and masque; the atmosphere
of the palace, heroic,—of the country, idyllic,—of
Mile-end and its roarers of the borough, somewhat
burlesque,—the diapason of the poetry from bourdon
to flute,—all combined to win immediate and long continuing
favour, both of the City and the Court. Beaumont
had, here, become to some extent "the sobriety
of Fletcher's wit"; he had restrained "his quick free
will,"—not, however, so much by pruning what
Fletcher wrote as by admitting him to but one-quarter
of the composition. Something of the intrigue, the
bustle, the spectacle, the easy conversation are Fletcher's;
and his, such sexual vulgarity—very little—as
stamps a scene or two. The rest is Beaumont's. As
in the two great romantic dramas which followed,
and in Beaumont's subplot of The Coxcombe, the
story is of the authors' own invention. It is not necessary
to trace the girl-page and her devotion to the
Diana of Montemayor, or to Bandello, or even to
Sidney's Arcadia. The girl-page was a commonplace
of fiction at the time; and the differences in the conduct
of this part of the story are greater than the
resemblances to any one of those sources. Much more
evidently is the devoted Euphrasia-Bellario a
younger sister of Shakespeare's Viola. But, in general,[107]
external influences bear upon details of character,
situation, and device, not upon the construction of the
play as a whole.
Toward the end of 1610 or early in 1611, the
partner-dramatists gave Shakespeare's company another
play,—in many respects their greatest,—The
Maides Tragedy. Here, again, the novelty of the
plot attracted, in a degree heightened even beyond that
of Philaster. The terrible dilemma of the duped husband
between allegiance to the King who has wronged
him and assertion of his marital honour, the astounding
effrontery of his adulterous wife, her gradual acquirement
of a soul and her attempted expiation of lust
by murder, the mingled nobility and unreason of her
brother and her husband, and the pathetic devotion
and self-provoked death of the hero's deserted sweetheart,
will be sufficiently discussed elsewhere. This
was the highly seasoned fare that the Jacobean public
desiderated, served in courses, if not more novel, at
any rate of more startling variety than even Shakespeare
had offered—whose devices, restrained within
limit, these young dramatists were exaggerating to
the n-th degree. As four-fifths of the composition of
this tragedy was Beaumont's, so, too, we may be sure,
four-fifths of the conception and invention of the
plot.[72] I have remarked, incidentally, that none of
the great Beaumont-Fletcher plots is borrowed.
Nearly every play, on the other hand, which Fletcher
contrived alone, or in company with others than
Beaumont, borrows its plot, major and minor, from
some well known source, classical, historical, French,[108]
Spanish, or Italian. Mr. G. C. Macaulay states the
bare truth, when he says that "in constructive faculty,
at least, Beaumont was markedly superior to his colleague."
Here there are traces, indeed, of external
suggestion: something of Aspatia's career in relation
to Amintor, who has deserted her, may be an echo of
Parthenia's in the Arcadia; and the quarrel of Melantius
and Amintor reminds one of that between Brutus
and Cassius in Julius Cæsar; but the plot has no
definite source.
The characterization and the poetry, "the strength
and sweetness, and high choice of brain" are Beaumont's;
so, too, the marvelous subtlety of dramatic
device. Save in that one-fifth to which Fletcher was
admitted. There Fletcher, in beauty and in tragic
power, is giving us the best that he has so far produced:
over-histrionic, to be sure, but of victorious
excellence. And that one-fifth, for the first and almost
only time in Fletcher's career as a dramatist is "untainted
by obscenity."
In an anecdote preserved by Fuller, who was seventeen
years of age when Fletcher died, we may fancy
that we catch a glimpse of our bachelors at work upon
this very play. The dramatists "meeting once in a
Tavern to contrive the rude draught of a Tragedy,
Fletcher undertook to Kill the King therein; whose
words being overheard by a listener (though his Loyalty
not to be blamed herein) he was accused of high
Treason, till the mistake soon appearing, that the plot
was only against a Drammatick and Scenical King,
all wound off in merriment."[73] History and fable have[109]
fastened similar stories upon famous men; but if
this one is authentic it undoubtedly refers to the writing
of The Maides Tragedy, for, as we shall see, the
killing of its King was one of the few scenes contributed
by Fletcher. And the story adds colour to
the ridicule which Beaumont in 1607 had heaped
upon the intelligencer that lives in ale-houses and taverns;
... "and brings informations picked out of
broken words in men's common talk."
The connection thus formed with Shakespeare's
company was continued by Beaumont, at any rate,
until 1612, and by Fletcher as long as he lived. Before
the end of 1611 the King's Players had presented
to the public the last of this trio of dramatic masterpieces,
A King and No King. In terrible fascination,
this story of a man and woman struggling against
love because they think they are brother and sister
is as powerful as The Maides Tragedy. In poetry
and in characterization, as well as in humour, it is
grander than Philaster. But in beauty and pathos its
subject did not permit it to equal either; and in
dénouement, tragicomic and perforce somewhat
strained, it is surpassed by the Tragedy. Of its defects
as well as merits, I have so much to say later,
that I must refrain now. The plot is as striking an
example of constructive invention as those that had
preceded. Some of the names are to be found in
Xenophon's Cyropædeia (Books III-VI) and in
Herodotus (Book VII); and hints for situation and
characterization may have been derived from these
sources, and the passion of Arbaces for his supposed
sister from Fauchet's account of Thierry of[110]
France,—but such indebtedness is naught.[74] Three-quarters
of the play is Beaumont's; and that large
portion includes the majestic passion and conflict, the
tragic irony and suspense, of A King and No King;
in fact,—the whole serious plot, and part of the humorous
by-play. Fletcher's slight contribution is
principally of complementary scenes and low comedy.
In these the curb upon his fanciful rhetoric and hilarious
wit has been somewhat relaxed. In the character
of the roaring Bessus, Beaumont himself gives rein
with the élan of the comic artist; for the Bessus of
Beaumont's scenes would have gone on a strike if
he had not been suffered to "talk bawdy" between
brags. Beaumont for all his sobriety and clean
mirth was not a prude; and he wasn't writing the
psalms of Robert Wisdom.
This play was as popular as those that had preceded.
The King's Players acted it at Court in December of
the year in which it had been first performed. And
between October 1612 and March 1613, assisting in
the festivities for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth
with the Elector Palatine, they presented before
royalty all three of the great Beaumont-Fletcher plays.
These were numbers in a series of thirteen that included,
as well, the Much Ado, Tempest, Winter's
Tale, Merry Wives, Othello, and Julius Caesar of
Shakespeare. They also presented about the same
time, in a series of six acted before the King (including
I Henry IV, Much Ado, and The Alchemist), one[111]
of Fletcher's comedies of manners and intrigue, The
Captaine, and a play utterly lost, called Cardenna, in
which it is supposed that Fletcher collaborated with
the Master himself.
That our dramatists, however, after their association
was formed with Shakespeare and his company,
by no means severed their connection with the company
for which they had written in their younger days, the
Children of the Queen's Revels, appears from the fact
that during the same festivities a tragedy written by
them about 1611, Cupid's Revenge, was played by
the Children three times, and their romantic comedy,
The Coxcombe twice; and that, in 1615 or the beginning
of 1616, the Children presented at the new
Blackfriars what was, probably, the last product of
the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership, The Scornful
Ladie.
Neither Cupid's Revenge nor The Scornful Ladie
(though the latter, at least, was very popular and had
a long life upon the stage) is a drama of high distinction.
The former is a blend of two stories from
Sidney's Arcadia,—the story of the vengeance of
Cupid upon the princess Erona (Hidaspes in the play)
who caused to be destroyed the images and pictures
of Cupid, and was consequently doomed to an infatuation
for a base-born man,—and the painful career
of Plangus (Leucippus in the play) who, having an
intrigue "with a private man's wife" (the monstrous
Bacha of the play) gave her up to his father, swearing
to her virtue, only to find that she should attempt to
renew her liaison with him and, failing, scheme his
downfall. The dramatists made considerable alteration,[112]
and added to the sources. But though the main
plot—that of Leucippus and Bacha—offered magnificent
possibilities, they fail of realization. Beaumont
wrote about one-half of the play, and it
is in his scenes that whatever there is of moral struggle
and sublimity, of pathetic irony and of poetry, appears.
The Scornful Ladie, which I assign to this late date
partly because of an allusion to the negotiations for
a Spanish marriage, 1614-1616, is principally of
Fletcher's composition. It is of the type of his earlier
and later comedies of intrigue. Like most of them
it is extremely well contrived for presentation upon
the stage and it was, as I have said, most successful.
The merit of the play lies, not in any element of
poetry or vital romance, but in humorous and realistic
characterization, easy dialogue, and clever device.
The dramatists deserve all credit for the ingenious
invention, for here again there is no known source.
Beaumont's contribution, about one-third, is distinguished
by the observation and the vis comica already
displayed in the Woman-Hater and the Knight of
the Burning Pestle and King and No King. But he
is not dominating the details. When they wrote a
comedy of intrigue, Fletcher sat at the head of the
table. It is possible, however, that some of the "rules
and standard wit" which Francis was so soon to leave
to his friend "in legacy" were here applied; for the
play is less exuberantly reckless in tone than several
which Fletcher wrote alone. The three masterpieces
of romantic drama, Beaumont controlled in composition,[113]
and revised. Of this play he did not finish the
revision. It was written about 1614 or 1615, after he
had settled in the country with his wife, and not long
before his death.[75]
[114]
CHAPTER VIII
RELATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, AND OTHERS
IN THE THEATRICAL WORLD
Though the young poets did not begin to write
for the King's Men before 1609, it is impossible
that they should not have met Shakespeare, face to
face, earlier in the century, whether at the Mermaid
in Bread-street, Cheapside, where perhaps befel those
"wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson," or about
the Globe in Southwark or the theatre in Blackfriars,—which,
though leased to the Revels' Children, belonged
to Shakespeare's friend Richard Burbadge,—or at
the lodgings with Mountjoy the tiremaker, on the
corner of Silver and Monkwell Streets, where the
master had lived from 1598 to 1604, and where, for
anything we know to the contrary, he continued to live
for several years more.[76] They would pass the house
on their way from the Bankside north to St. Giles,
Cripplegate, when they wished to observe what Juby
and the rest of the Prince's Players were putting on
at the Fortune, or on their way back to take ale with
Jonson at his house in Blackfriars, or to follow Nat.
Field or Carey, acting in one of their own or Jonson's
plays at the private theatre close by.
[115]
That the young poets, even during their discipleship
to Jonson were familiar with the poetry and dramatic
methods of Shakespeare the most cursory reader will
observe. Their plays from the first, whether jointly
or singly written, abound in reminiscences of his work.
But more particularly is he echoed by Beaumont. The
echo is sometimes of playful parody, as in the "huffing
part" which the grocer's prentice of the Knight of the
Burning Pestle steals from Hotspur:—
By heaven, methinks it were an easie leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd Moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the Sea,
Where never fathome line toucht any ground,
And pluck up drownèd honour from the lake of Hell;
or as in The Woman-Hater, where it looks very much
as if this stylist of twenty-two was poking fun at the
circumlocutions of Shakespeare's Helena in All's Well
that Ends Well. Labouring to say "two days" in accents
suitable to a monarch's ear, she had evolved:
Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring
Their fiery torches his diurnal ring,
Ere twice in murk and accidental damp
Moist Hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp;
Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass,
What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly.
In terms strikingly reminiscent of this, Beaumont's
courtier Valore instructs the gourmand of The
Woman-Hater, how to address royalty:[116]
You must not talk to him [the Duke]
As you doe to an ordinary man,
Honest plain sence, but you must wind about him.
For example: if he should aske you what o'clock it is,
You must not say, "If it please your grace, 'tis nine";
But thus, "Thrice three aclock, so please my Sovereign";
Or thus, "Look how many Muses there doth dwell
Upon the sweet banks of the learned Well,
And just so many stroaks the clock hath struck."
And when the Duke asks Lazarillo, thus instructed,
"how old are you?" we can imagine with what mirth
the graceless Beaumont puts into his mouth:
Full eight and twenty several Almanacks
Have been compiled all for several years,
Since first I drew this breath; four prentiships
Have I most truly served in this world;
And eight and twenty times hath Phoebus' car
Run out his yearly course since—.
Duke. I understand you, sir.
Lucio. How like an ignorant poet he talks!
Is it possible that associating with the literary school
of the day, his brother John, Drayton, Chapman, and
Ben Jonson, the young satirist, here vents something
like spleen? Or is this purely dramatic utterance?
Like parodies of phrases in Hamlet, Antony and
Cleopatra, and other Shakespearean plays ripple the
stream of Beaumont's humour. They are, however,
always good-natured. But if Beaumont laughs when
Shakespeare exaggerates, he also pays him in his later
plays the tribute of imitation in numerous poetic borrowings
of serious lines and telling situations: as[117]
where the King in Philaster tries to pray but, like the
kneeling Claudius, despairs—
How can I
Looke to be heard of gods that must be just,
Praying upon the ground I hold by wrong?—
or "in the Hamlet-like situation and character of
Philaster" himself; as, for instance, when to the usurping
King who has said of him, "Sure hees possest,"
Philaster retorts:
Yes, with my fathers spirit. Its here, O King,
A dangerous spirit! Now he tells me, King,
I was a Kings heire, bids me be a King,
And whispers to me, these are all my subjects.
Tis strange he will not let me sleepe, but dives
In to my fancy, and there gives me shapes
That kneele and doe me service, cry me king:
But I'le suppresse him: he's a factious spirit,
And will undoe me.
The resemblance of the controversy between Melantius
and Amintor to that of Brutus with Cassius has
already been noticed; and everyone will acknowledge
the resemblance of the "quizzical reserve" of his
Scornful Lady to Olivia's, of Aspatia's melancholy in
the Maides Tragedy to Ophelia's, and of Bellario's situation
in Philaster to that of Viola in Twelfth Night.[77]
This last play, indeed, acted, as we have seen, in the[118]
Middle Temple when Beaumont was a freshman in
the Inns of Court, affects Beaumont's method and
style, more than any other save the Pericles (1607,
or January to May 1608), which prepared the way
for the more important later romantic dramas of
Shakespeare himself as well as for those of Beaumont
and Fletcher.
During the years when Shakespeare's company was
producing their romantic dramas, they were breathing,
with Shakespeare, Burbadge, and Heming, the atmosphere
of the Globe and Blackfriars; and, after Shakespeare
had taken up a more continuous residence at
Stratford, in 1611, Fletcher, at any rate, not only kept
in touch with the remaining shareholders and actors
of the Globe but with the Master himself, and conversed
and wrote with him on various occasions.
These may have fallen either at the New Place at
Stratford, where the now wealthy country gentleman
was wont to entertain his friends, or when Shakespeare
came to town—as in May 1612. At that time
his former host, Mountjoy's, son-in-law was suing the
tiremaker for his wife's unpaid dower, and "William
Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon in the Countye of
Warwicke, Gentleman" who had helped to make the
marriage, was summoned as a witness.[78] Or between
July and November of that year, when the "base
fellow" Kirkham was bringing against Burbadge and
Heming a suit concerning the profits of the Blackfriars
theatre, in which as a shareholder Shakespeare,
too, must have been interested; and when Christopher[119]
Brooke of the pastoral poets in Beaumont's Inns of
Court was of the "councell" for Shakespeare's company.[79]
Or in March 1613, when Shakespeare was
negotiating for the house in Blackfriars which he
bought that month from Henry Walker. In the latter
year the King's Players performed two plays in the
writing of which there is reason to believe that Shakespeare
and Fletcher participated: The Two Noble
Kinsmen, first published as "by the memorable
worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr.
William Shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of 1634;
and a lost play licensed for publication as the "History
of Cardenio by Fletcher and Shakespeare," in
1653. Of the former, critics are generally agreed that
Fletcher wrote about a dozen scenes and that Shakespeare
in all probability wrote others. Maybe, however,
Fletcher, and perhaps later Massinger, merely
revised and completed Shakespeare's original draft of
the play left in the company's hands. That The Two
Noble Kinsmen borrows its antimasque from our
friend Beaumont's Maske of the Inner Temple, which
was presented in February 1613, may be construed
as indicating that he, too, still had some connection
with Shakespeare's company. But it is more likely
that he was now happily married and settled in Kent,
and didn't care what they did with his plays. Probably
the Shakespeare-Fletcher play was acted soon after
Beaumont's, and in the same year. With regard to the
authorship of the Cardenio we have nothing but the
publisher's statement; but we know that the play was
written after the appearance, in 1612, of the story[120]
upon which it is based, in Shelton's English translation
of the first part of Don Quixote; and that it was
acted at Court by Shakespeare's and Fletcher's company
in May and June 1613.
The partnership of Fletcher and Shakespeare in
the writing of these two plays has been questioned,
but as to their collaboration in a third, Henry VIII,
there is not much possibility of doubt. In the conception
of the leading characters Shakespeare is present,
and in many of their finest lines, and specifically
in at least five scenes; while Fletcher appears in practically
all the rest. The play was acted by the King's
Men at the Globe on June 29, 1613, and was included
as Shakespeare's by his judicious editors and intimate
friends, Heming and Condell, in the folio of 1623.
BEN JONSON
From the miniature belonging to Mr. Evelyn Shirley
During these years of fruition the friendship with
Jonson, who was writing at the time for both the
companies to which our young dramatists gave their
plays, continued apparently without interruption. It
is attested by commendatory verses written by Beaumont
for The Silent Woman, which was acted early
in 1610, and by verses of both Fletcher and Beaumont
prefixed to Jonson's tragedy of Catiline, published in
1611. On the latter occasion Beaumont commends
Jonson's contempt for "the wild applause of common
people," and declares that he is "three ages yet from
understood;" while Fletcher even more enthusiastically
avers,—
Thy labours shall outlive thee; and, like gold
Stampt for continuance, shall be current where
There is a sun, a people, or a year.
The generous and graceful response of Ben to the[121]
reverence of the younger of the twain appears in a
tribute the date of which is uncertain, but which was
included by the author among his Epigrams, entered
in the Stationers' Registers, 1612.
To Francis Beaumont.
How I doe love thee, Beaumont and thy Muse,
That unto me dost such religion use!
How I doe feare my selfe, that am not worth
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth!
At once thou mak'st me happie, and unmak'st;
And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st.
What fate is mine, that so it selfe bereaves?
What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives?
When even there, where most thou praisest mee,
For writing better, I must envie thee.
Since Jonson was not given to indiscriminate laudation
of his contemporaries in dramatic production, we
may surmise that this tribute to the art of Beaumont
follows rather than precedes the appearance of Philaster,
and of perhaps both The Maides Tragedy and A
King and No King. And whether there is any basis
or not for the tradition handed down by Dryden[80]
that Beaumont was "so accurate a judge of plays that
Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings
to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in
correcting, if not contriving, all his plots,"—there is
here evidence, sufficiently convincing, of the high esteem
in which "the least indulgent thought" and the
large "giving" of the brilliant and independent gentleman-dramatist
were held by the acknowledged
classicist and dictator of the stage.
[122]
From the various sources already indicated and
from contemporary testimony, later to be cited, it is
easy to derive a definite conception of the world of
dramatists and actors in which Beaumont and Fletcher
moved. They knew, and were properly appraised
by, Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, Shakespeare, Webster,
Dekker, Heywood, Massinger, Field, Daborne, Marston,
Day, and Middleton,—with all of whom they were
associated either in combats of poetry and wit or in
the presentation of plays at Blackfriars, Whitefriars,
or the Globe. Among actors their acquaintance included
Field, Taylor, Carey, and others of the Queen's
Revels' Children, and Richard Burbadge, Heming,
Condell, Ostler, Cook, and Lowin of the King's Company.
In what esteem they were held during these
years we have evidence in the verses already quoted
from Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, and Field. In
the generous dedication of The White Devil by John
Webster, in 1612, we find them ranked with the best:
"Detraction," says he, "is the sworne friend to ignorance.
For mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht
my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours,
especially of that full and haightened stile of Maister
Chapman: The labour'd and understanding workes of
maister Jonson: The no lesse worthy composures of
the both worthily excellent Maister Beamont and
Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without wrong last to
be named), the right happy and copious industry of
M. Shake-speare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood, wishing
what I write may be read by their light: Protesting
that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, I[123]
know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my
owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare (without
flattery) fix that of Martiall—non norunt, Haec
monumenta mori."
[124]
CHAPTER IX
THE "MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE": THE PASTORALISTS,
AND OTHER CONTEMPORARIES AT
THE INNS OF COURT
Of royal patronage we have had evidence in the
fact that during the festivities of October 16,
1612 to March 1, 1613, no fewer than five of the
Beaumont-Fletcher plays were presented at Court, by
the King's Servants and the Queen's Revels' Children,—some
of them two and even three times. Our
poets are accordingly regarded by the great as dramatists
of like distinction with Shakespeare, Jonson,
and Chapman, the authors of most of the other plays
then performed.
Of the esteem in which Beaumont individually was
held, not only at Court but by his fellows of the
Inner Temple, evidence is afforded by the fact that
when they were called upon, in company with the
gentlemen of Gray's Inn, to celebrate the marriage,
February 14, 1613, of the Princess Elizabeth to the
Elector Palatine, with a masque, they did not, like
the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, go out of their
own group of poets for a dramatist, but chose him.
The selection was but natural: he had already contributed
to The Maides Tragedy a masque of the
very essence of dreams, executed with singular grace
and melody.[125]
The subject decided upon for the present gorgeous
spectacle was the "marrying of the Thames to the
Rhine." The structure and stage machinery were
invented by Inigo Jones, who was, also, stage architect
for Chapman's rival masque of Plutus, presented
on February 15, by the gentlemen of the Middle
Temple and Lincoln's Inn. To the success of Beaumont's
production, that patron of masques, Sir Francis
Bacon, then his majesty's Solicitor-General, contributed
in large measure: "You, Sir Francis Bacon,
especially," says the author in his Dedication
of the published copy, "as you did then by your countenance
and loving affection advance it, so let your
good word grace it and defend it, which is able to
add value to the greatest and least matters." In a
contemporary letter of John Chamberlain to Mistris
Carleton, Bacon is called "the chief contriver" of the
spectacle; an attribution which leads us to infer that
he "advanced" it not solely by "loving affection"
but by funds for the tremendous expense. For, as
we have already observed, in other cases, as of the
Masque of Flowers, presented for a noble marriage
in 1614 by Gray's Inn, Bacon is not only patron but
purse, permitting no one to share expenses with him:
"Sir Francis Bacon," writes Chamberlain, "prepares
a masque to honour this marriage, which will stand
him in above £2,000."
Beaumont's masque, which was to have been performed
at Whitehall on Tuesday evening, the 16th,
had ill fortune on the first attempt. The gentlemen-masquers,
desiring to vary their pomp from that of
Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple, which had been[126]
on horse-back and in chariots, made a progress by
water from Winchester-House to Whitehall, seated
in the King's royal barge, "attended with a multitude
of barges and galleys, with all variety of loud music,
and several peals of ordnance; and led by two admirals."
The royal family witnessed their approach;
and, as Chamberlain in the letter mentioned above
says, "they were receved at the privie stayres: and
great expectation theyre was that they shold every
way exceed theyre competitors that went before them
both in devise daintines of apparell and above all in
dauncing (wherein they are held excellent) and esteemed
far the properer men: but by what yll planet
yt fell out I know not, they came home as they went
with out doing anything, the reason whereof I cannot
yet learne thoroughly, so but only was that the hall
was so full that yt was not possible to avoyde yt or
make roome for them; besides that most of the Ladies
were in the galleries to see them land, and could not
get in, but the worst of all was that the king was
so wearied and sleepie with sitting up almost two
whole nights before that he had no edge to yt. Whereupon
Sr Fra: Bacon adventured to interest his
maiestie that by this disgrace he wold not as yt
were burie them quicke; and I heare the king shold
aunswer that then they must burie him quicke for he
could last no longer, but with all gave them very
goode wordes and appointed them to come again on
saterday: but the grace of theyre maske is quite gon
when theyre apparell hath ben already shewed and
theyre devises vented, so that how yt will fall out,
God knows, for they are much discouraged, and out[127]
of countenance; and the world sayes yt comes to
passe after the old proverb—the properer men the
worse lucke."[81]
On that day, accordingly, the masque was presented,
"in the new Banketting-House which for a kind of
amends was granted to them"; and with marked success.
"At the entrance of their Majesties and their
Highnesses," writes the Venetian ambassador to the
Doge and Senate, May 10, 1613, "one saw the scene,
with forests; on a sudden half of it changed to a
great mountain with four springs at its feet. The
subject of the Masque was that Jove and Juno desiring
to honour the wedding and the conjunction
of two such noble rivers, the Thames and the Rhine,
sent separately Mercury and Iris, who appeared; and
Mercury then praised the couple and the Royal house,
and wishing to make a ballet suitable to the conjunction
of two such streames, he summoned from the
four fountains, whence they spring and which are fed
by rain, four nymphs who hid among the clouds and
the stars that ought to bring rain. They then danced,
but Iris said that a dance of one sex only was not a
live dance. Then appeared four cupids, while from
the Temple of Jove, came five idols and they danced
with the stars and the nymphs. Then Iris, after delivering
her speech, summoned Flora, caused a light
rain to fall, and then came a dance of shepherds.
Then in a moment the other half of the scene changed,
and one saw a great plateau with two pavilions, and[128]
in them one hundred and fifty Knights of Olympus,—then
more tents, like a host encamped. On the higher
ground was the Temple of Olympian Jove all adorned
with statues of gold and silver, and served by a number
of priests with music and lights in golden Candelabra.
The knights were in long robes of silk and
gold, the priests in gold and silver. The knights
danced, their robes being looped up with silver, and
their dance represented the introduction of the Olympian
games into this kingdom. After the ballet was
over their Majesties and their Highnesses passed into
a great Hall especially built for the purpose, where
were long tables laden with comfits and thousands of
mottoes. After the King had made the round of the
tables everything was in a moment rapaciously swept
away."[82]
Beaumont had introduced innovations—two antimasques,
or "subtle, capricious dances" accompanied
by spectacular or comic dumb-show, instead of one,
and new and varied characters in each, instead of the
stereotyped Witches, Satyrs, Follies, etc. His
Nymphs, Hyades, blind Cupids, and half vivified
Statuas from Jove's altar, of the first antimasque occasioned
great amusement, so that the King called
for them again at the end—"but one of the Statuas
by that time was undressed." And the May-dance
of the second, with its rural characters—Pedant,
Lord and Lady of the May, country clown and wench,
host and hostess, he-baboon and she-baboon, he-fool
and she-fool—stirred laughter and applause that[129]
drowned the music. The main masque was stately,
and fitly symbolic of the occasion. And one at least
of the songs, that sung by the twelve white-robed
priests, each playing upon his lute, before Jupiter's
altar, has the rare lyrical quality of Beaumont's best
manner,—
Shake off your heavy trance,
And leap into a dance,
Such as no mortals use to tread,
Fit only for Apollo
To play to, for the Moon to lead,
And all the Stars to follow!
We may be sure that the poet received his meed of
praise from King, Princess, and Elector, and from
officials of the Court—the Earl of Nottingham,
Lord Privy Seal, and Bacon, "the chief contriver";
and that he sat high at the "solemn supper in the
new Marriage-room" which the King made them on
the Sunday,—maybe "at the same board" with the
King who doubtless jested much at the expense of
Prince Charles and his followers. For they had to
pay for the feast, "having laid a wager for the charges,
and lost it in running at the ring."[83]
If it had not been customary for members of the
Inns of Court to retain connection with the Society
to which they belonged, even after they had ceased to
be in residence, especially if still living in the City,
we might infer from his authorship of this masque
that Beaumont had kept in touch with the Inner Temple.[130]
Though he had not professed the law, the quiddities
of its parlance enliven various passages of his
Woman-Hater and of the plays which he later wrote
with Fletcher. Whether he kept his name on the
books or not, the Inner Temple was in a social sense
his club for life; and it was to "those Gentlemen that
were his acquaintance there" that the publisher Mosely
turned for help when searching for his portrait in
1647. The students of his generation were by 1612,
many of them, utter barristers, ancients, and benchers:
he would affiliate with them; and that he should be
acquainted with the "Gentlemen who were actors"
in his masque goes without saying. This was an occasion
of tremendous moment to the members of the
allied Houses. They were conferring the highest
honour upon their poet, and every man on the books
of each Inn knew him by name and face. One of the
Fellows, John, afterwards Sir John, Fenner provides
a messenger "to fetch Mr Beaumont," and advances
10li. "toward the mask business." Another, Lewis
Hele is twice paid 70li. toward the same business.
From Chamberlain's letter, we learn that the passage
by water to Whitehall "cost them better than three
hundred pound,"—from two thousand to twenty-four
hundred pounds, in the money of to-day. From the
records of the Societies for "the 10th of King James,"
we find that "the charge in apparell of the Actors in
that great Mask at White-hall was supported" by
each Society; "the Readers at Gray's Inn being each
man assessed at 4l., the Ancients, and such as at that
time were to be called Ancients, at 2l. 10s. apiece,
the Barristers at 2l. a man, and the Students[131]
at 20s."; and that on May 4, 1613, the Inner
Temple is still indebted over and besides the contribution
of the House "for the late show and sports ...
not so little as 1200li.,"—that is to say, from seven to
nine thousand pounds according our present valuation.[84]
Beaumont in his Dedication of the quarto (published
soon afterwards) to the worthy Sir Francis Bacon
and the grave and learned Bench of the anciently-allied
Houses of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, is
addressing friends when he says "Yee that spared
no time nor travell in the setting forth, ordering, and
furnishing of this Masque ... will not thinke much
now to looke backe upon the effects of your owne care
and worke: for that whereof the successe was then
doubtfull, is now happily performed and gratiously
accepted. And that which you were then to thinke
of in straites of time, you may now peruse at leysure."
Of the gentlemen-masquers, and "the towardly
yoong, active, gallant Gentlemen of the same houses,"
who, as their convoy "set forth from Winchester-House
which was the Rende vous towards the Court,
about seven of the clock at night," on that occasion,
the most directly interested in the event would be a
group of literary friends of which the central figure
was William Browne of Tavistock. He had been
at Clifford's Inn, one of the preparatory schools for
the Inner Temple, on the other side of Fleet Street,
since about 1608, had migrated to the Inner Temple
in November 1611, and had been admitted a member[132]
in March 1612. He was some five years younger than
Beaumont, and, like Beaumont, was at just that time
on intimate terms of friendship with the last of the
Elizabethan pastoralists, Michael Drayton,—on terms
of reciprocal admiration and friendship also with
Beaumont's dramatic associates, Jonson and Chapman;
and he had himself, in 1613, been engaged for three
years upon the composition of the charming First
Book of his Britannia's Pastorals. In a letter written
some years later to a lover of the Pastoral,—the translator
of Tasso's Aminta, Henery Reynolds, Esq.,—Of
Poets and Poesy, and published in 1627, Drayton
couples William Browne so closely with Sir John
and Francis Beaumont that even if the trio were not,
in various ways, affiliated with the same legal Society
we could not escape the conclusion that the brothers
were near and dear to Browne. "Then," writes Drayton,
after mentioning other literary acquaintances,—
Then the two Beaumonts and my Browne arose,
My deare companions whom I freely chose
My bosome friends; and in their severall wayes,
Rightly borne Poets, and in these last dayes,
Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts,—
Such as have freely tould to me their hearts,
As I have mine to them.
We may proceed upon the assumption that it would
have been impossible for these bosom friends of Drayton,
members of the same club, not to have known
each other. Especially, if we recall that Browne was
a literary disciple of Fletcher in pastoral poetry, between
1610 and 1616, and that he had Beaumont's[133]
masque and poetic fame in mind when, in the Dedication
of his own Masque of Ulysses and Circe, presented
by the same Society of the Inner Temple not
quite two years later, January 13, 1615, he said, "If
it degenerate in kind from those other our Society
hath produced, blame yourselves for not seeking to
a happier Muse."
I am at pains thus to emphasize the acquaintance of
Browne and Beaumont, because our acquaintance with
the latter is enriched if we may regard him as familiarly
associated with the literary coterie of the Inns of
Court. Browne and Beaumont had friends in common
beside Drayton, Chapman, and Jonson. To, and
of, Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, Beaumont
writes, as we shall presently notice, in terms of
admiration and intimacy. And it is for Mary, the
sister of Sir Philip, that William Browne composes,
in or after 1621, the immemorial epitaph,
Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse:
Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Fair, and learn'd, and good as shee
Time shall throw his dart at thee.
To this Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl,
Browne dedicates the Second Book of the Pastorals,
1616, which contains the beautiful tribute to Sidney
and his Arcadia; and Pembroke shows his regard for
the young poet by appointing him tutor to a wealthy
ward, and later taking him into the service of his
own family at Wilton. In 1614 John Davies of Hereford[134]
wrote the third eclogue appended to Browne's
Shepherd's Pipe, in which he figures as old Wernock,
and Browne as Willy; and, in 1616, commendatory
verses to the Second Book of Browne's Pastorals,—beginning
"Pipe on, sweet swaine." He had already
in 1610, addressed "the most ingenious Mr. Francis
Beaumont" in an epigram of like familiarity and
devotion:
Some that thy name abbreviate, call thee Franck:
So may they well, if they respect thy witt;
For like rich corne (that some fools call too ranck)
All cleane Wit-reapers still are griping it;
And could I sow for thee to reape and use,
I should esteeme it manna for the Muse.[85]
Another of this little group of late Spenserian pastoralists
was, as we shall later see, an admirer of
Beaumont. This is William Basse, probably the composer
of the lines In Laudem Authoris, signed W. B.,
and prefixed to the 1602 edition of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.
With the commendatory verses of Davies,
George Wither, Thomas Wenman, and others
in Browne's Second Book of the Pastorals, appear
some again signed W. B. "It is just possible," according
to the most recent editor of Browne's poems,[86]
"that Basse and Browne were kinsmen." It is certain
that Basse was a retainer in the family of the
poetic Thomas Wenman who was Browne's contemporary
at the Inner Temple. Basse, himself, had[135]
published three pastoral elegies in 1602, and he was
still writing pastorals half a century later. Another
of this group, George Wither, had since 1606 been of
one of the adjoining Inns of Chancery. He is the
Roget, Thyrsis, Philarete of this pastoral field. In
1614, he wrote the third eclogue supplementary to
Browne's Shepherd's Pipe; and in 1615 he was a neighbor
of the Inner Temple poets, at Lincoln's Inn. In
that eclogue he speaks of a Valentine on "the Wedding
of fair Thame and Rhine" which he had composed
on the occasion of the royal marriage; and in
the first Epithalamium of the Valentine, he refers explicitly
to the masques of Chapman and Beaumont.
He must have known both those "Heliconian wits."
"I'm none," he says with self-depreciation,—
I'm none of those that have the means or place
With shows of cost to do your nuptials grace;
But only master of mine own desire,
Am hither come with others to admire.
I am not of those Heliconian wits,
Whose pleasing strains the court's known humour fits,
But a poor rural shepherd, that for need
Can make sheep music on an oaten reed.
This "faithful though an humble swain" was of distinctive
repute among Beaumont's associates by 1615:
no less for the lyric ease of his Shepherd's Hunting, or
of his
Shall I wasting in despair
Die because a woman's fair?—
than for the "plain, moral speaking" of the Abuses
Stript and Whipt that in 1613-14 had brought him a[136]
year's imprisonment in the Marshalsea. Jonson later
"personates" him as Chronomastix, or whipper of
the times, in a masque at Court; and Beaumont's, and
Fletcher's friend, Massinger, introduces him by allusion,
in his Duke of Milan, about 1620, "I have had
a fellow," says the Officer in Act III, ii, of that play—
That could endite forsooth and make fine metres
To tinkle in the ears of ignorant madams,
That for defaming of great men, was sent me
Threadbare and lousy.
Still another member of this circle of poets associated
with the Inns of Court is the Cuddy of the
pastoral poems, the intimate friend of Wither and
Browne,—Christopher Brooke, who, though he does
not cut much of a figure in his Elegies, or in his Ghost
of Richard III, was a lovable and hearty friend, and
a distinguished Bencher of Lincoln's Inn. That
Brooke was intimate with Shakespeare's company of
the King's Servants, at just the period that Beaumont
and Fletcher were most closely associated with that
company, we have already noticed. As one of the
barristers who, in 1612, defended Burbadge and Heming
against the bill of complaint brought by Kirkham
for recovery of profits in the Blackfriars theatre, he
had much to do with having the "plaintiff's bill cleerly
and absolutely dismissed out of this courte."[87]
This community of friendship with Browne and
Browne's circle gives us, by inference, a clue to an
extended list of the gentlemen of London with whom
Beaumont cannot have altogether failed to be acquainted.[137]
Browne succeeded Beaumont as poet of
the Inner Temple, and the friends of the former in
that Society would be known to the latter.
Among those who wrote verses laudatory of
Browne's Pastorals between 1613 and 1616, was his
"learned friend," John Selden, the jurist and antiquary,
whose "chamber was in the paper buildings
which looke towards the garden." He kept, says Aubrey,
"a plentifull table, and was never without
learned company": frequently that of Jonson, Drayton,
and Camden; and, we may be certain, of John
Fletcher, too; for on his mother's side, Selden as his
coat of arms and epitaph prove, and as Hasted tells us
in his History of Kent, was of the "equestrian" family
of Bakers to which Fletcher's stepsisters belonged.
Selden was of Beaumont's age to a year, and had been
of the Society since 1604. For Browne's book Edward
Heyward, also, wrote verses,—Selden's most
"devoted friend and chamber-fellow,"—to whom
(Aubrey again) "he dedicated his Titles of Honour,"
1614. Heyward came from Norfolk and was admitted
to the Inner Temple in 1604. And with Selden
must be also bracketed, Thomas Wenman, of Oxfordshire;
for so Suckling brackets him in the Session of
the Poets:
The poets met the other day,
And Apollo was at the meeting, they say....
'Twas strange to see how they flocked together:
There was Selden, and he stood next to the chaire,
And Wenman not far off, which was very faire.
Wenman came to the Inner Temple in 1613; he expresses[138]
in his complimentary verses to Browne his
wonder that the pastoralist can frame such worthy
poetry while as yet "scarce a hair grows up thy chin
to grace." Wenman was the son of that Sir Richard
whose wife was implicated in the Gunpowder Plot by
Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux. He succeeded to an Irish
peerage in 1640. There was, also, Thomas Gardiner,
the son of a rector in Essex. He came to the Inner
Temple in 1609, and in 1641 was knighted for his
loyalty to King Charles. There was, though not of
the Inner Temple, Browne's favourite companion, William
Ferrar, the Alexis of the pastoral circle. Ferrar
was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1610, and died
young. He must have been a graceful and lovable
youth, if we may judge from Wither's and Browne's
tributes to him. Through his father, "an eminent
London merchant, who was interested in the adventures
of Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh," Browne and
Beaumont might, if in no other way, have met with Sir
Richard and Sir Walter. There were, also, writing
praises to Browne, the brothers Croke, sons of Sir John
Croke of the King's Bench. They were both of
Christ's Church, Oxford, Charles and Unton; and they
became students of the Inner Temple in 1609. Charles
was something of a poet. In 1613 he was Professor
of Rhetoric at Gresham College; he took orders, and
became a Fellow of Eton College; and during the
Civil War fled to Ireland. Unton rose at the Bar,
became a member of Parliament, "aided the Parliamentarians
during the Civil War and enjoyed the favour
of Cromwell." And there was Browne's dear
friend, Thomas Manwood, who had entered the Inner[139]
Temple in 1611, and whose early death by drowning
Browne bewails in the fourth eclogue of the Shepherd's
Pipe,—an elegy somewhat fantastic but beautifully
sincere, and, in one or two of its fundamental
concepts, decidedly reminiscent of Beaumont's elegy
written the year before on the death of the Countess
of Rutland.
These are a few of the members of this Society
whom Beaumont met whenever he visited the Inner
Temple. It was such as they and their companions,
many more of whom are mentioned in the Inner Temple
Records, and described by Mr. Gordon Goodwin
in his edition of Browne's Poems, who set forth, ordered,
and furnished Beaumont's Masque of the Inner
Temple; and who, as gentlemen-masquers, sailed with
him in the royal barge to Whitehall, and happily performed
the masque before the King and Queen, the
Princess Elizabeth, and the Count Palatine, on Saturday,
the twentieth day of February 1613.
Beaumont's friends were Fletcher's; and Fletcher
must have known Browne. It has always seemed
strange to me that, when enumerating in his Britannia's
Pastorals the pastoral poets of England,—half
a dozen of them, his personal acquaintances,—Browne
should have omitted Fletcher to whom he was
deeply indebted for literary inspiration. Between
1610 and 1613 he had, in his First Book of Britannia's
Pastorals (Song 1, end; Song 2, beginning), borrowed
the story of Marina and the River-God, as regards
not only the main incident but also much of the poetic
phrase, from the Faithfull Shepheardesse—the scene
in which Fletcher's God of the River rescues Amoret[140]
and offers her his love. The borrowing is not at all
a plagiarism, but an elaboration of the Amoret episode;
and, as such, the imitation is indirect homage to
the quondam pastoralist living close by in Southwark.
I hesitate to enter upon quest of literary surmise. But
some young lion of research might be pardoned if he
should undertake to prove that the description of the
shepherd Remond which Browne introduces into his
first Song just before this borrowing from Fletcher's
pastoral drama is homage to Fletcher, pure and direct:
Remond, young Remond, that full well could sing,
And tune his pipe at Pan's birth carolling:
Who for his nimble leaping, sweetest layes,
A lawrell garland wore on holidayes;
In framing of whose hand dame Nature swore
That never was his like nor could be more.[88]
Conjectural reconstruction of literary relationships
is perilously seductive. But it is only fair to apprise
the young lion of the delightful certainty that though
the trail may run up a tree, it abounds in alluring
scents. He will find that no sooner has Browne's
Marina concluded the adventure borrowed from
Fletcher than she falls in with Remond's younger
companion, "blithe Doridon," who, in the Second
Book of the Pastorals, written in 1614-15, swears
fidelity to Remond—
Entreats him then
That he might be his partner, since no men
Had cases liker; he with him would goe—
Weepe when he wept and sigh when he did so;[89]
[141]
and that, in the second Song of the First Book,[90]
Doridon, who also is a poet, is described at
a length not at all necessary to the narrative, and in
terms that more than echo the description of the
beauty of Hermaphroditus in the poem of that name
which has been traditionally attributed to Beaumont.
This Doridon is a genius:
Upon this hill there sate a lovely swaine,
As if that Nature thought it great disdaine
That he should (so through her his genius told him)
Take equall place with swaines, since she did hold him
Her chiefest worke, and therefore thought it fit,
That with inferiours he should never sit....
He is "fairest of men"; when he pipes "the wood's
sweet quiresters" join in consort—"A musicke that
would ravish choisest eares." He is, as I have said,
a poet,—
And as when Plato did i' th' cradle thrive,
Bees to his lips brought honey from their hive;
So to this boy they came; I know not whether
They brought, or from his lips did honey gather....
He is also a master in the revels,
His buskins (edg'd with silver) were of silke ...
Those buskins he had got and brought away
For dancing best upon the revell day.
Browne, by the way, wrote the Prefatory Address to
this Book of Britannia's Pastorals, June 18, 1613, only
three months after Beaumont's Masque upon the[142]
"revel day" was acted; and the book was licensed for
printing, the same year, November 15.
Returning to our young lion, he will, I fear me,
exult (with lust of chase or laughter?) when in the
third song of this book, he notes that Doridon, overhearing
the love-colloquy of Remond and Fida, can
find no other trope to describe their felicity than one
drawn from Ovid, and from the so-called Beaumont
poem of 1602, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus,—
Sweet death they needs must have, who so unite
That two distinct make one Hermaphrodite.[91]
Lured by such scents as these, our beast of prey may
pounce—upon a shadow, or not?—when, having
tracked the meandering Browne to the second song
of the Second Book, he there hears him rehearse the
names of
What shepheards on the sea were seene
To entertaine the Ocean's queene,—
the poets of England: Astrophel (Sidney), "the
learned Shepheard of faire Hitching hill" (Chapman),
all loved Draiton, Jonson, well-languag'd Daniel,
Christopher Brooke, Davies of Hereford, and Wither,
Many a skilfull swaine
Whose equals Earth cannot produce againe,
But leave the times and men that shall succeed them
Enough to praise that age which so did breed them,—
and then, without interim, proceed:[143]
Two of the quaintest swains that yet have beene
Failed their attendance on the Ocean's queene,
Remond and Doridon, whose haplesse fates
Late sever'd them from their more happy mates.[92]
Browne, who had dropped these companion shepherds
of the "pastoral and the rural song" three songs back,
now needs them to scour the forests for the vanished
Fida of his fiction. If he had not needed them for
the narrative here resumed, might they not have attended
the Ocean's queen with the other poets of England,—all,
but Sidney, his personal friends,—as
Fletcher and Beaumont? This is precisely the way in
which Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Rafael introduced
into their frescoes the Tornabuoni and Medici of their
time. We may leave the inquisitive to follow them
to that realm where, forsaking mythical and pastoral
romance,
Many weary dayes
They now had spent in unfrequented wayes.
About the rivers, vallies, holts, and crags,
Among the ozyers and the waving flags,
They merely pry, if any dens there be,
Where from the Sun might harbour crueltie:
Or if they could the bones of any spy,
Or torne by beasts, or humane tyranny.
They close inquiry made in caverns blind,
Yet what they look for would be death to find.
Right as a curious man that would descry,
Led by the trembling hand of Jealousy,
If his fair wife have wrong'd his bed or no,
Meeteth his torment if he find her so.[93]
[144]
I cannot, however, refrain from pointing the venturesome
researcher,—with irony—may be not
Mephistophelian, but merely pyrrhonic,—to the dramatic
misfortunes of Bellario, Aspasia, and Evadne,
and other heroines of the dramatized romances in
which Beaumont and Fletcher's theatre of the Globe
was indulging at the time. And I would ask him
after he has read the sage advice of Remond to the
disconsolate shepherd, some two hundred lines further
down, to turn to Fletcher's poem of 1613 Upon an
Honest Man's Fortune, and decide whether the poet-philosopher
of the one is not very much of the same
opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other.[94]
[145]
CHAPTER X
AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT
Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's Inn enters
the circle of Beaumont's associates not only
as the advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in Shakespeare's
company of actors turn for counsel in an important
suit at law, and as the encomiast of Shakespeare
himself a year or two later:
He that from Helicon sends many a rill,
Whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men,[95]
but as one of the pastoralists of the Inns of Court.
He was also a friend of Beaumont's older associates,
Jonson, Drayton, and Davies of Hereford. From an
unexpected quarter comes information of Brooke's intimacy
with still others who at various points impinged
upon Beaumont's career,—with Inigo Jones,
for instance, who designed the machinery for Beaumont's
Masque, and with Sir Henry Nevill, the father
of the Sir Henry who, a few years later, supplied the
publisher Walkley with the manuscript of Beaumont
and Fletcher's A King and No King. When we let
ourselves in upon the elder Sir Henry carousing at
the Mitre with Brooke and Jones, and others known
to Beaumont as members of the Mermaid, in a famous
symposium held some time between 1608 and September
1611, we begin to feel that it was not by mere[146]
accident that the manuscript of A King and No King
fell into the hands of the Nevill family. Sir Henry
the elder, of Billingbear, Berkshire, was a relative of
Sir Francis Bacon, and a friend of Davies of Hereford,
and of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to Nevill about
1611 one of his most graceful epigrams; probably,
also, of Francis Beaumont's brother John, who wrote
a graceful tribute to the memory of one of the gentlewomen
of the family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill.
This Sir Henry was an influential member of Parliament,
a statesman, a courtier, and a diplomat, as well
as a patron of poets. He came near being Secretary
of the realm. It is his name that we find scribbled
with those of Bacon and Shakespeare, about 1597,
possibly by Davies of Hereford, the admirer of all
three, over the cover of the Northumbrian Manuscript
of "Mr. Ffrauncis Bacon's" essays and speeches.
Sir Henry did not die till 1615, and it is more than
likely that the play, A King and No King, which
was acted about 1611, and of which his family held
the manuscript, had his "approbation and patronage"
as well as that of Sir Henry the younger "to the
commendation of the authors"; and that both father
and son knew Beaumont and Fletcher well.
The Mitre Inn, a common resort of hilarious Templars,
still stands at the top of Mitre Court, a few yards
back from the thoroughfare of Fleet Street.
FRANCIS BACON
From the portrait by Paul Van Somer in the National Portrait Gallery, London
The symposium to which I have referred is celebrated
in a copy of macaronic Latin verses, entitled
Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium Philosophicum;[96] and I
may be pardoned if I quote from the contemporary[147]
translation by John Reynolds of New College, the
opening stanzas, since one is set to wondering how
many other of the jolly souls "convented," beside
Brooke and Jones and Nevill, our Beaumont knew.—
Whosoever is contented
That a number be convented,
Enough but not too many;
The Miter is the place decreed,
For witty jests and cleanly feed,
The betterest of any.
There will come, though scarcely current,
Christopherus surnamèd Torrent
And John yclepèd Made;
And Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe
To sup, his dinner will forgoe—
Will come as soon as bade.
Sir Robert Horse-lover the while,
Ne let Sir Henry count it vile
Will come with gentle speed;
And Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows
And John surnamèd Little-hose
Will come if there be need.
And Richard Pewter-Waster best
And Henry Twelve-month-good at least
And John Hesperian true.
[148]
If any be desiderated
He shall be amerciated
Forty-pence in issue.
Hugh the Inferior-Germayne,
Nor yet unlearnèd nor prophane
Inego Ionicke-pillar.
But yet the number is not righted:
If Coriate bee not invited,
The jeast will want a tiller.
In his edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives, Dr. Clark
supplies the glossary to these punning names. Torrent
is, of course, Brooke. Johannes Factus, or
Made, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's Inn,
John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent
in well known epistles of Henry Twelve-month-good,
the Sir Henry Goodere, or Goodeere,
who married Frances (Drayton's Panape), one of the
daughters of "the first cherisher of Drayton's muse."
Ne-let Sir Henry count it vile is the elder Nevill under
cover of his family motto, Ne vile velis. Inigo Jones,
Ionicke-pillar is even more thinly disguised in the
Latin original as Ignatius architectus, Hugh Holland
(the Inferior-Germayne) was of Beaumont's
Mermaid Club, the writer—beside other poems—of
commendatory verses for Jonson's Sejanus in 1605,
and of the sonnet Upon the Lines and Life of that other
frequenter of the Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare."
Holland's "great patronesse," by the way,
was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's
Inner Temple, whose daughter married Beaumont's
kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was by the great
Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced[149]
to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in
Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate, the "legge-stretcher
of Odcombe" without whose presence this
Convivium Philosophicum would "want its tiller."
Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard Martin (the
Pewter-waster). He was fond of the drama; had
organized a masque at the Middle Temple at the
time of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage; and it is
to him that Ben Jonson dedicates the folio of The
Poetaster (1616). In 1618, as Recorder of London,
he was the bosom friend of Brooke, Holland, and
Hoskins: he died of just such a "symposiaque" as
this, a few years later, and he lies in the Middle Temple.
Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic
Latin verses of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself
(surnamed Little-hose). He had been a freshman of
the Middle Temple in the year when Beaumont was
beginning at the Inner. He was an incomparable
writer of drolleries, over which we may be sure that
Beaumont many a time held his sides,—a wag whose
"excellent witt gave him letters of commendacion to all
ingeniose persons," a great friend of Beaumont's Jonson,
and of Raleigh, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Daniel.
Of the participants in Serjeant Hoskins's Convivium
Philosophicum, we find, then, that several were of
those who came into personal contact with Beaumont,
and that of the rest, nearly all moved in the field of
his acquaintance. Concerning a few, Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe
(Cranefield), Sir Robert Horse-lover
(Phillips), Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows (Conyoke
or Connock), and John Hesperian (West), I have no
information pertinent to the subject.
[150]
CHAPTER XI
BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER; RELATIONS
WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE
Glimpses of the more personal relations of
Beaumont with the world of rank and fashion,
and to some extent of his character, are vouchsafed
us in the few non-dramatic verses that may with certainty
be ascribed to him. Unfortunately for our purpose,
most of those included in the Poems, "by Francis
Beaumont, Gent.," issued by Blaiklock in 1640
and printed again in 1653, and among The Golden
Remains "of those so much admired Dramatick Poets,
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gents.," in
1660, are, as I have already said, by other hands than
his: some of them by his brother, Sir John, and by
Donne, Jonson, Randolph, Shirley, and Waller. Of
the juvenile amatory lyrics, addresses, and so-called
sonnets in these collections, it is not likely that a single
one is by him; for in an epistle to Sidney's daughter,
the Countess of Rutland, written when he was evidently
of mature years and reputation,—let us suppose,
about 1611, Beaumont says:
I would avoid the common beaten ways
To women usèd, which are love or praise.
As for the first, the little wit I have
Is not yet grown so near unto the grave
But that I can, by that dim fading light,
Perceive of what or unto whom I write.
[151]
Let others, "well resolved to end their days With a
loud laughter blown beyond the seas,"—let such
Write love to you: I would not willingly
Be pointed at in every company,
As was that little tailor, who till death
Was hot in love with Queen Elizabeth.
And for the last, in all my idle days
I never yet did living woman praise
In prose or verse.
A sufficient disavowal, this, of the foolish love songs
attributed to him by an uncritical posterity.
As for this "strange letter," as he denominates it,
from which I have quoted, the sincere, as well as
brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaintance
with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the
poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess
lived but twenty-five miles north-west of Charnwood,
and in the same country of Leicestershire. One
can see the towers from the heights above Grace-Dieu.
The Beaumonts undoubtedly had been at Belvoir,
time and again. "If I should sing your praises in
my rhyme," says he to her of the "white soul" and
"beautiful face,"
I lose my ink, my paper and my time
And nothing add to your o'erflowing store,
And tell you nought, but what you knew before.
Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swear,
Madam, I think you are) endure to hear
Their own perfections into question brought,
But stop their ears at them; for, if I thought
You took a pride to have your virtues known,
(Pardon me, madam) I should think them none.
[152]
Many a writer of the day agreed with Beaumont
concerning Elizabeth Sidney,—"every word you speak
is sweet and mild." She, said Jonson to Drummond
of Hawthornden, "was nothing inferior to her father
in poesie"; she encouraged it in others. But her husband,
Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, though a lover of
plays himself, does not appear to have favoured his
Countess's patronage of literary men. He burst in
upon her, one day when Ben Jonson was dining with
her, and "accused her that she kept table to poets."
Of her excellence Jonson bears witness in four poems.
Most pleasantly in that Epistle included in his The
Forrest, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he
says:
With you, I know my off'ring will find grace:
For what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit,
Were it to think, that you should not inherit
His love unto the Muses, when his skill
Almost you have, or may have, when you will?
Wherein wise Nature you a dowrie gave,
Worth an estate treble to that you have.
Beauty, I know is good, and blood is more;
Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what store
The world hath scene, which all these had in trust,
And now lye lost in their forgotten dust.
And in an Epigram[97] To the Honour'd —— Countesse
of ——, evidently sent to her during the absence
of her husband on the continent, he compliments her
conduct,—
Not only shunning by your act, to doe
Ought that is ill, but the suspition too,—
[153]
at a time when others are following vices and false
pleasures. But "you," he says,
admit no company but good,
And when you want those friends, or neare in blood,
Or your allies, you make your bookes your friends,
And studie them unto the noblest ends,
Searching for knowledge, and to keepe your mind
The same it was inspired, rich, and refin'd.
Among other admirers of the Countess of Rutland
was Sir Thomas Overbury, who, according to Ben
Jonson, was "in love with her." Beaumont would
have known the brilliant and ill-starred Overbury, of
Compton Scorpion, who was not only an intimate of
Jonson's, but a devoted admirer of their mutual
friend, Sir Henry Nevill of Billingbear.
And if Beaumont was on terms of affectionate
familiarity with Sidney's daughter, he could not but
have known Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke,
as well, the idol of William Browne's epitaph,
and of his old friend Drayton's eulogy, on the "Fair
Shepherdess,"
To whom all shepherds dedicate their lays,
And on her altars offer up their bays.
"In her time Wilton house," says Aubrey, "was
like a College; there were so many learned and
ingeniose persons. She was the greatest patronesse of
witt and learning of any lady in her time." And if
Beaumont knew the mother, then, also, William
Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the son, to whom his[154]
master, Jonson, dedicates in 1611, the tragedy of
Catiline, prefaced, as we have already observed, by
verses of Beaumont himself.
Whatever Rutland's objection may have been to his
Countess's patronage of poets, we may be sure that
that lady's attitude toward Beaumont and his literary
friends was seconded by her husband's old friend the
Earl of Southampton, with whom in earlier days Rutland
used to pass away the time "in London merely in
going to plaies every day." Southampton had remained
a patron of Burbadge, Shakespeare, and the
like. And when he died in 1624, we find not only
Beaumont's acquaintance, Chapman, but Beaumont's
brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his memory.
"I keep that glory last which is the best," writes
Sir John,
The love of learning which he oft express'd
In conversation, and respect to those
Who had a name in arts, in verse, in prose.
Since Southampton was "a dear lover and cherisher
as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves"[98]
we may figure not only the two Beaumonts
but their beloved Countess participating in such discussion
of noble themes,—if not in London, then at
Belvoir Castle or Titchfield House or Grace-Dieu
Priory. If at Belvoir, Leland, the traveler, helps us
to the scene. The castle, he says "standyth on the
very knape of an highe hille, stepe up eche way, partely
by nature, partely by working of mennes handes, as it
may evidently be perceived. Of the late dayes [1540],[155]
the Erle of Rutland hath made it fairer than ever it
was. It is straunge sighte to se be how many steppes
of stone the way goith up from the village to the
castel. In the castel be 2 faire gates, And its dungeon
is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a
place to walk yn, to se at the countery aboute, and
raylid about the round [waull, and] a garden [plot] in
the middle."[99] One sees Francis toiling up the "many
steps," received by his Countess and the rest, and rejoicing
with them in the view of the twenty odd family
estates from the garden on the high tower.
Returning to Francis Beaumont's epistle to the
Countess of Rutland, we observe that it concludes with
a promise:
But, if your brave thoughts, which I must respect
Above your glorious titles, shall accept
These harsh disorder'd lines, I shall ere long
Dress up your virtues new, in a new song;
Yet far from all base praise and flattery,
Although I know what'er my verses be,
They will like the most servile flattery shew,
If I write truth, and make the subject you.
The opportunity for "the new song" came in a manner
unexpected, and, alas, too soon. In August 1612,
but a brief month or so after she had been freed by
her husband's death from the misery of an unhappy
marriage, she was herself suddenly carried off by
some mysterious malady. According to a letter of
Chamberlain to Sir R. Winwood, "Sir Walter Raleigh[156]
is slandered to have given her certaine Pills that
despatch'd her." That, Sir Walter, even with the
best intent in the world, could not have done in person,
for he was in the Tower at the time. Perhaps the
medicine referred to was one of those "excellent receipts"
for which Raleigh and his half-brother, Adrian
Gilbert, were famous. The chemist Gilbert was living
in those days with the Countess of Rutland's aunt, at
Wilton.
Three days after the death of the lady whom he
so revered, Beaumont poured out his grief in verses
justly praised as
A Monument that will then lasting be
When all her Marble is more dust than she.
That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's
own death, some four years later, says of the Elegy
on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess
of Rutland. And so far as the elegy proper is
concerned,—that is to say, the first half of the poem,
ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians
who helped the Countess to her grave,—I fully agree
with Earle. Here is poetry of the heart, pregnant
with pathos, not only of the untimely event—she was
but twenty-seven years old,—but of the unmerited
misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her
existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy,—
Ere thou knewest the use of tears
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;
sorrow in her wedded life,[157]—
As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief,
There were enough to meet thee; and the chief
Blessing of women, marriage, was to thee
Nought but a sacrament of misery.
And then,
Why didst thou die so soon? Oh, pardon me!
I know it was the longest life to thee,
That e'er with modesty was call'd a span,
Since the Almighty left to strive with man.
In this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence,
we have our most definite revelation of Beaumont's
personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his
fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless
womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage
(Jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome
husband); his admiration of the chivalric great—as
of the hero whose life was ventured and generously
lost at Zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for
pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith
in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization
of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing
dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human
sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the
decree of "the wise God of Nature"; his acceptance
of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning
mercy:
I will not hurt the peace which she should have
By looking longer in her quiet grave,—
the consummation that all his heroines of tortured[158]
chastity, the Bellarios, Arethusas, Aspasias, Pantheas,
Uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. And as
a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more
for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this
elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence
as exists outside of Beaumont's dramatic productions.
It displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish
him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his preference
in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic
theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his
quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative
imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,—
Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse;
and "Thou art gone,"—
Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and we
May call that back again as soon as thee.
In still another way the lines on the death of Sidney's
daughter are instructive. Its noble tribute to
Sidney's Arcadia is payment of a debt manifest in
more than one of the dramas to which Beaumont had
contributed. Of Sir Philip, Beaumont here writes:
He left two children, who for virtue, wit,
Beauty, were lov'd of all,—thee and his writ:
Two was too few; yet death hath from us took
Thee, a more faultless issue than his book,
Which, now the only living thing we have
From him, we'll see, shall never find a grave
As thou hast done. Alas, would it might be
That books their sexes had, as well as we,
That we might see this married to the worth,
And many poems like itself bring forth.
[159]
The Arcadia had already brought forth offspring: in
prose, Greene's Menaphon and Pandosto, and Lodge's
Rosalynde; in verse, Day's Ile of Guls. It had
fathered, immediately, the subplot of Shakespeare's
King Lear,—and, indirectly, portions of the Winter's
Tale, and As You Like It, and of other Elizabethan
plays.[100] Within the twelve months immediately preceding
August 1612, it had inspired also, as we have
already observed, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's
Revenge, the finest scenes in which are Beaumont's
dramatic adaptation of romantic characters and motives
furnished by Sir Philip. And from that same
"faultless issue," the Arcadia, virtue, art, and beauty,
loved of all, had earlier still been drawn by Beaumont,
certainly for The Maides Tragedy, and, perhaps, for
Philaster as well.
The acquaintance with the Rutland family was continued
after the death of Francis by his brother
John, and his sister Elizabeth. The Nymph "of
beauty most divine ... whose admirèd vertues draw
All harts to love her" in John's poem, The Shepherdess,
is Lady Katharine Manners, daughter of Francis,
sixth Earl of Rutland, and now the wife of George
Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham; and the Shepherdess
herself "who long had kept her flocks On stony Charnwood's
dry and barren rocks," the country dame "For
singing crowned, whence grew a world of fame
Among the sheep cotes," is Elizabeth Beaumont of
Grace-Dieu, back on a visit from her Seyliard home[160]
in Kent. She had wandered into the summer place
of the Rutlands and Buckinghams near the Grace-Dieu
priory—"watered with our silver brookes," and
had been welcomed and had sung for them. And now
John repays the courtesy with indirect and graceful
compliment.
With the Villiers family, as I have earlier intimated,
the Beaumonts were connected not only by acquaintance
as county gentry but by ties of blood. Sir George
Villiers, a Leicestershire squire, had married for his
second wife, about 1589, Maria Beaumont, a relative
of theirs, who had been brought up by their kinsmen
of Coleorton Hall to the west of them on the other side
of the ridge. It will be remembered that one of those
Coleorton Beaumonts, Henry, was an executor of
Judge Beaumont's will in 1598. The father of the
Maria, or Mary, Beaumont whom Henry Beaumont
nurtured as a waiting gentlewoman in his household,
was his second cousin, Anthony Beaumont of Glenfield
in Leicestershire. While Maria was living at the Hall,
the old Knight, Sir George Villiers of Brooksby, recently
widowed, visited his kinswoman, Eleanor Lewis,
Henry's wife, at Coleorton, "found there," writes a
contemporary, Arthur Wilson, "this young gentlewoman,
allied, and yet a servant of the family," was
fascinated by her graces and made her Lady Villiers.
This Sir George Villiers was of an old and distinguished
family. Leland mentions it first among the
ten families of Leicestershire, "that be there most of
reputation."[101] And he says "The chiefest house of
the Villars at this time is at Brokesby in Leicestershire,[161]
lower by four miles than Melton, on the higher ripe
[bank] of Wreke river. There lie buried in the
church divers of the Villars. This Villars [of 1540]
is lord of Hoby hard-by, and of Coneham in Lincolnshire....
He is a man of but two hundred marks of
land by the year." This "Villars" was the father of
the Sir George who married Maria Beaumont.
Brooksby, near Melton Mowbray, is only two or three
hours' drive from Coleorton.
GEORGE VILLIERS, FIRST DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, AND FAMILY
From the painting by Honthorst in the National Portrait Gallery
The children of this marriage, John, George, and
Christopher, were but a few years younger than the
young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu; and there would
naturally be some coming and going between the Villiers
children of Brooksby and their Beaumont kin
of Coleorton and Grace-Dieu. George, the second son,
born in 1592, through whom the fortunes of the family
were achieved, was introduced to King James in August
1614. This youth of twenty-two had all the
graces of the Beaumont as well as the Villiers blood.
"He was of singularly prepossessing appearance," says
Gardiner, "and was endowed not only with personal
vigour, but with that readiness of speech which James
delighted in." It was his mother, Maria, now the
widowed Lady Villiers, who manœuvred the meeting.
Her husband's estates had gone to the children of the
first marriage: George was her favourite son and she
staked everything upon his success. James took to
him from the first; the same year he made him cup-bearer;
the next, Gentleman of the Bed-chamber, and
knighted him and gave him a pension. We may imagine
that Francis Beaumont and his brother John
watched the promotion of their kinsman with keen[162]
interest. But his phenomenal career was only then
beginning. In 1616, a few months after Francis had
died, Sir George Villiers was elevated to the peerage
as Viscount Villiers. By 1617 this devoted "Steenie"
of his "dear Dad and Gossop," King James, is Earl
of Buckingham, and now,—that Somerset has fallen,—the
most potent force in the kingdom; in 1618 he
is Marquis, and in 1623, Duke,—and for some years
past he has been enjoying an income of £15,000 a
year from the lands and perquisites bestowed upon
him. Meanwhile his brother, John, has, in 1617, married
a great heiress, the daughter of Sir Edward Coke
of Beaumont's Inner Temple, and in 1619 has become
Viscount Purbeck; his mother, the intriguing Maria,
has been created Countess of Buckingham, in her own
right; in due time his younger brother, the stupid
Christopher, is made Earl of Anglesey. And Buckingham
takes thought not for his immediate family
alone: In 1617 "Villiers' kinsman [Hen] Beaumont
was to have the Bishopric of Worcester, but failed";[102]
in 1622 his cousin, Sir Thomas Beaumont of Coleorton,
the son of the Sir Henry[103] who cared for Villiers'
mother in her indigence, is created Viscount Beaumont
of Swords; and in 1626, John Beaumont of Grace-Dieu
is dubbed knight-baronet.
In 1620, the Marquis of Buckingham had married
Katharine Manners, the daughter and sole heiress of
Francis, Earl of Rutland. It was a love match; and[163]
John Beaumont celebrated it with a glowing epithalamium,
praying for the speedy birth of a son
Who may be worthy of his father's stile,
May answere to our hopes, and strictly may combine
The happy height of Villiers race with noble Rutland's line.
Soon afterwards and before 1623, John Beaumont's
Shepherdesse, spoken of above, was written. Beside
the Nymph, the Marchioness of Buckingham, those
whom the poem describes as living in "our dales,"—and
welcoming Elizabeth Beaumont,—are the father
of the Marchioness, the Earl of Rutland, "his lady,"
Cicely (Tufton), the stepmother of Katharine Manners,—and
Another lady, in whose brest
True wisdom hath with bounty equal place,
As modesty with beauty in her face:
She found me singing Flora's native dowres
And made me sing before the heavenly pow'rs,
For which great favour, till my voice be done,
I sing of her, and her thrice noble son.
This other lady, so wise, and bounteous to John Beaumont,
is the Countess of Buckingham, who when
John and our Francis were boys, was poor cousin
Maria of the Coleorton Beaumonts. To the Marquis
of Buckingham, "her thrice-noble sonne," John writes
many poetic addresses in later years: of the birth of a
daughter, Mall, "this sweete armefull"; of the birth
and death of his first son; of how in his "greatnesse,"
George Villiers did not forget him:[164]
You, onely you, have pow'r to make me dwell
In sight of men, drawne from my silent cell;
and of how Villiers had won him the recognition of
the King:
Your favour first th' anointed head inclines
To heare my rurall songs, and read my lines.
George Villiers, is "his patron and his friend." In
writing to the great Marquis and Duke, John Beaumont
never recalls the kinship; but in writing to the
less distinguished brother, the Viscount Purbeck, he
delicately alludes to it.
In the fortunes of the Vauxes of Harrowden, the
Beaumonts would naturally have continued their interest.
Anne, imprisoned after the Gunpowder Plot,
was released at the end of six months. The family
persisted in its adherence to the Catholic faith and politics.
As late as Feb. 26, 1612, "Mrs. Vaux, Lord
(Edward) Vaux's mother, is condemned to perpetual
imprisonment, for refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance";
and we observe that on March 21, of the same
year, "Lord Vaux is committed to the Fleet" for a
like refusal.[104] Young Lord Vaux got out of the Fleet,
in time married, and lived till 1661.
Others of kin or family connection,—and of his own
age,—with whom Francis would be on terms of social
intercourse or even intimacy during his prime, were
his cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who by 1601 was in
Parliament as member for Nottingham, and in 1615
was High Sheriff of the shire; Henry Hastings, born[165]
in 1586, who since 1604 had been fifth Earl of Huntingdon,
and in May 1616 was to be of those appointed
for the trial of the Earl and Countess of Somerset;
Huntingdon's sister, Catherine (who was wife of
Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield), and his brother,
Edward, a captain in the navy, who the year after
Beaumont's death made the voyage to Guiana under
Sir Walter Raleigh; Huntingdon's cousin, and also
Beaumont's kinsman, Sir Henry Hastings, of whom
we have already heard as one of Father Gerard's converts
(a first cousin of Mrs. Elizabeth Vaux, and husband
of an Elizabeth Beaumont of Coleorton); Sir
William Cavendish, of the Pierrepoint connection, a
pupil of Hobbes, an intimate friend of James I, and a
leader in the society of Court, who was knighted in
1609, and in 1612 strengthened his position greatly by
marrying Christiana, daughter of Lord Bruce of Kinloss;
and that other young Cavendish, Sir William of
Welbeck, county Notts., who in 1611 was on his travels
on the continent under the care of Sir Henry
Wotton. With at least three of these scions of families
allied to the Beaumonts, Francis had been associated,
as I have already pointed out, by contemporaneity
at the Inns of Court.
Neither the epistle to Elizabeth Sidney nor the elegy
on her death was included by Blaiklock in his foolish
book of so-called Beaumont poems. From the elegy
on Lady Markham's death, in 1609, there included,
we learn little of the poet's self—he had never seen
the lady's face, and is merely rhetoricizing. From the
elegy, also included by Blaiklock, "On the Death of
the Lady Penelope Clifton," on October 26, 1613, almost[166]
as artificial, we learn no more of Beaumont's
personality,—but we are led to conjecture some social
acquaintance with the distinguished family of her
father, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, and
of her husband, Sir Gervase Clifton, who had been specially
admitted to the Inner Temple in 1607; and the
conjecture is confirmed by the perusal of lines "to the
immortal memory of this fairest and most vertuous
lady" included in the works of Sir John Beaumont.
He writes as knowing Lady Penelope intimately,—the
sound of her voice, the fairness of her face, her high
perfections,—and as regretting that he had neglected
to utter his affection in verse "while she had lived":
We let our friends pass idly like our time
Till they be gone, and then we see our crime.
These poems on Lady Penelope Clifton forge still
another link between the Beaumonts and the Sidneys,
for Penelope's mother, the Lady Penelope Devereux,
daughter of Walter, first Earl of Essex, was Sidney's
innamorata, the Stella to his Astrophel.
One may with safety extend the list of Beaumont's
acquaintances among the gentry and nobility by crediting
him with some of Fletcher's during the years in
which the poets were living in close association; not
only with Fletcher's family connections, the Bakers,
Lennards, and Sackvilles of Kent, but with those to
whom Fletcher dedicates, about 1609, the first quarto
of his Faithfull Shepheardesse: Sir William Skipwith,
for instance, Sir Walter Aston, and Sir Robert
Townshend. Of these the first, esteemed for his
"witty conceits," his "epigrams and poesies," was[167]
admired and loved not only by Fletcher but by Beaumont's
brother as well—to whom we owe an encomium
evidently sincere:
... A comely body, and a beauteous mind;
A heart to love, a hand to give inclin'd;
A house as free and open as the ayre;
A tongue which joyes in language sweet and faire, ...
and more of the kind. Sir William was a not distant
neighbour of the Beaumonts, and was knighted, as we
have seen, at the same time and place as Henry of
Grace-Dieu; one may reasonably infer that his "house
as free and open as the ayre" at Cotes in Leicestershire
harboured Fletcher and the two Beaumonts on
more than one occasion. Sir Walter Aston of Tixall
in Staffordshire, the diplomat, of the Inner Temple
since 1600, had been, since 1603,[105] the patron also of
Francis Beaumont's life-long friend, Drayton. And
that poet keeps up the intimacy for many years.
Writing, after 1627 when Sir Walter, now Baron
Aston of Forfar, was sent on embassy to Spain, he
says of Lady Aston that "till here again I may her
see, It will be winter all the year with me". In
1609 Sir Walter is a "true lover of learning," in
whom "as in a centre" Fletcher "takes rest," and
whose "goodness to the Muses" is "able to make a
work heroical." Of Sir Robert Townshend's relation
to our dramatists we know nothing save that
Fletcher says: "You love above my means to thank
ye." He came of a family that is still illustrious, and
for a quarter of a century he sat in Parliament.
[168]
Fletcher's closest friend, if we except Beaumont,
seems to have been Charles Cotton of Beresford, Staffordshire,
"a man of considerable fortune and high
accomplishments," the son of Sir George Cotton of
Hampshire. He owed his estates in Staffordshire, and
in Derbyshire as well, to his marriage with the daughter
of Sir John Stanhope. To him in 1639, as "the
noble honourer of the dead author's works and memory,"
Richard Brome dedicates the quarto of Fletcher's
Monsieur Thomas. "Yours," he says, "is the worthy
opinion you have of the author and his poems; neither
can it easily be determined, whether your affection
to them hath made you, by observing, more able to
judge of them, than your ability to judge of them
hath made you to affect them deservedly, not partially....
Your noble self (has) built him a more
honourable monument in that fair opinion you have
of him than any inscription subject to the wearing
of time can be." To this Charles Cotton, his cousin,
Sir Aston Cockayne, writes a letter in verse after
the appearance of the first folio of Beaumont and
Fletcher's plays, 1647, speaking of Fletcher as "your
friend and old companion" and reproaching him
for not having taken the pains to set the printers
right about what in that folio was Fletcher's, what
Beaumont's, what Massinger's,—"I wish as free you
had told the printers this as you did me." And it is
apparently to Cotton that Cockayne is alluding when,
upbraiding the publishers for not giving each of the
authors his due, he says, "But how came I (you
ask) so much to know? Fletcher's chief bosome-friend
informed me so." Elsewhere Cockayne describes[169]
Fletcher and Massinger as "great friends";
but the "bosome-friend" mentioned above cannot be
Massinger, for Massinger is one of those concerning
whose authorship "the bosome-friend" gives information.
Cotton was a friend of Ben Jonson, Donne, and
Selden, also. To him it is, as a critic, and not to his
son, who was a poet, that Robert Herrick, born seven
years after Beaumont, writes:
For brave comportment, wit without offence,
Words fully flowing, yet of influence,
Thou art that man of men, the man alone,
Worthy the publique admiration:
Who with thine owne eyes read'st what we doe write,
And giv'st our numbers euphonie and weight;
Tell'st when a verse springs high, how understood
To be, or not, borne of the royall-blood.
What state above, what symmetrie below,
Lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show.—[106]
And it is likely that Cotton did the same for Fletcher
and Beaumont.
Of Cotton, Fletcher's and, therefore, Beaumont's
friend, Lord Clarendon gives us explicit information:
"He had all those qualities which in youth raise men
to the reputation of being fine gentlemen: such a
pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness
and gentleness of nature, and such a civility and delightfulness
in conversation, that no man in the Court
or out of it appeared a more accomplished person; all
these extraordinary qualifications being supported by[170]
as extraordinary a clearness of courage, and fearlessness
of spirit, of which he gave too often manifestation."
In later life he was less happy in fortune and
in disposition, "and gave his best friends cause to
have wished that he had not lived so long." He passed
through the Civil War and died at the end of Cromwell's
protectorate, 1658.
And of Robert Herrick, we may say that he, too,
was surely an acquaintance of our poets. He writes
many poems to Ben Jonson. To their other friend,
Selden, Fletcher's connection by the Baker alliance,
and Beaumont's associate in the Inner Temple, he
writes appreciatively:
Whose smile can make a poet, and your glance
Dash all bad poems out of countenance.[107]
And of our dramatists themselves, he writes about
the same time that he is writing to Selden, in his
verses To the Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him
to Elizium,—
Amongst which glories, crown'd with sacred bayes
And flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies—
Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all eares
Listen while they, like syrens in their spheres,
Sing their Evadne.[108]
JOHN SELDEN
From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London
[171]
The Bohemian life on the Bankside, such as it was,
must have been brought to an end by Beaumont's marriage,
about 1613. By that time Beaumont had written
The Woman-Hater, The Knight of the Burning
Pestle, The Maske, and several poems; Fletcher, The
Faithfull Shepheardesse and three or four plays more;
the two in partnership, at least five plays; and Fletcher
had meanwhile collaborated with other dramatists in
from eight to eleven plays which do not now concern
us. As to the remaining dramas assigned to this period
and attributed by various critics to Beaumont and
Fletcher in joint-authorship, we shall later inquire.
Suffice it for the present to say that I do not believe
that the former had a hand in any of them, except
The Scornful Ladie.
[172]
CHAPTER XII
BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING
FAMILY
In the 1653 edition of the "Poems; By Francis
Beaumont, Gent." there is one, ordinarily regarded
as of doubtful authorship, which, in default of
information to the contrary, I am tempted to accept
as his and to attach to it importance, as of biographical
interest. It purports to bear his signature "Fran.
Beaumont"; it bears for me the impress of his literary
style. Writing before August 1612, to the Countess
of Rutland, Beaumont had, as we have remarked,
disclaimed ever having praised "living woman in
prose or verse." In The Examination of his Mistris'
Perfections, the poem of which I speak, the writer
praises with all sincerity the woman of his love:
Stand still, my happinesse; and, swelling heart,—
No more! till I consider what thou art.
Like our first parents in Paradise who "thought it
nothing if not understood," so the poet of his happiness—
Though by thy bountious favour I be in
A paradice, where I may freely taste
Of all the vertuous pleasures which thou hast
[I] wanting that knowledge, must, in all my blisse,
[173]
Erre with my parents, and aske what it is.
My faith saith 'tis not Heaven; and I dare swear,
If it be Hell, no pain of sence, is there;
Sure, 't is some pleasant place, where I may stay,
As I to Heaven go in the middle way.
Wert thou but faire, and no whit vertuous,
Thou wert no more to me but a faire house
Hanted with spirits, from which men do them blesse,
And no man will halfe furnishe to possesse:
Or, hadst thou worth wrapt in a rivell'd skin,
'T were inaccessible. Who durst go in
To find it out? for sooner would I go
To find a pearle cover'd with hills of snow;
'T were buried vertue, and thou mightst me move
To reverence the tombe, but not to love,—
No more than dotingly to cast mine eye
Upon the urne where Lucrece' ashes lye.
But thou art faire and sweet, and every good
That ever yet durst mixe with flesh and blood:
The Devill ne're saw in his fallen state
An object whereupon to ground his hate
So fit as thee; all living things but he
Love thee; how happy, then, must that man be
Whom from amongst all creatures thou dost take!
Is there a hope beyond it? can he make
A wish to change thee for? This is my blisse,
Let it run on now; I know what it is.
The poet of this tribute is not wooing, but worshiping
the woman won; reverently striving to comprehend
an ineffable joy. The poem is not of praises
such as Beaumont in his epistle Ad Comitissam Rutlundiae
contemns, praises "bestow'd at most need on
a thirsty soul." The writer, here, purports to examine[174]
into his Mistress's perfections, but, like the
author of the epistle to the Countess, he examines not
at all,—he observes the reticence for which Beaumont
there had given the reason,—
Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swear
Madam, I think you are) endure to hear
Their own perfections into question brought,
But stop their ears at them.
When the lines of the Examination are set beside the
undoubted poems of Beaumont, they appear, in rhetoric,
metaphor, and sentiment, to be of a type with
the two tributes to Lady Rutland; in vocabulary,
rhyme, and run-on lines, also, to be of one font with
them, and with the letter to Ben Jonson and the elegy
to Lady Clifton. When the lines are set beside those
of Beaumont's own phrasing in the dramas, one finds
that in their brief compass they echo the metaphor of
his Amintor, "my soul grows weary of her house,"—the
hyperbole of his Philaster, "I will sooner trust
the wind With feathers, or the troubled sea with
pearl,"—the passionate ecstasy of his Arbaces, "Here
I acknowledge thee, my hope ... a happinesse as
high as I could thinke ... Paradice is there!" The
tribute is a variant of those closing lines in A King
and No King,
I have a thousand joyes to tell you of,
Which yet I dare not utter, till I pay
My thankes to Heaven for um.
I date this poem, then 1612 or 1613, a year or two[175]
after the play just mentioned and the epistle to Lady
Rutland; and I imagine with some confidence that it
was written by Beaumont for Ursula Isley, whom he
married about this time.
Ursula's father, Henry Isley, belonged to a family
of landed gentry which had been seated since the reign
of Edward II in the parish of Sundridge, Kent. The
manor came to them from the de Freminghams in
1412. In 1554 Sir Harry Isley and his son, William,
who were prominent upholders of the reformed religion,
had joined hands with the gallant young Sir
Thomas Wyatt of Allington Castle—about seventeen
miles from Sundridge—in the rebellion which he
raised in protest against the proposed marriage of
Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. At Blacksole
Field, near Wrotham, half-way between Sundridge
and Allington, the Isley contingent was met and routed
by Sir Robert Southwell and Lord Abergavenny; and
the vast Isley estates were confiscated. A considerable
part was restored to William within a year or two.
But he falling into debt had to sell the larger portion;
and for the manor of Sundridge itself, he appears to
have paid fee farm rent to the Crown.
By will, probably September 3, 1599, William's son,
Henry, left all his "manners, lands, tenements, and
hereditaments, in the countie of Kent or else where
within the realme of England, unto Jane my lovinge
wief in fee simple, vizt to her and her heires for ever,
to the end and purpose that she maye doe sell or
otherwise dispose at her discretion the same, or such
parte or soe much thereof as to her shall seeme fitt,
for the payement of all my just and true debts ...[176]
and also for the bringing up and preferment in marriage
of Ursula and Una, the two daughters or children
of her the said Jane, my lovinge wief." That the
children were not, however, stepdaughters of Henry,
is pointed out by Dyce, who quotes the manuscript of
Vincent's Leicester, 1619: "Ursula, the daughter
and coheir [evidently with Una] of Henry Isley."[109]
In fact, Henry had named Ursula after his mother, the
daughter of Nicholas Clifford.
It will be remembered that Beaumont's sister Elizabeth
became the wife of a Thomas Seyliard of Kent.
The Seyliards were one of the oldest families in the
vicinity of Sundridge; and Thomas would be of
Brasted, which adjoins Sundridge westward, a quarter
of a mile from Sundridge Place and near the river
Darenth; or of Delaware at the south of the parish; or
of Gabriels about a mile from there and seven miles
south of Sundridge; or of Chidingstone close by; or
Boxley.[110] If Elizabeth was married before 1613, it
is easy to surmise that during some visit to her, Beaumont
was brought acquainted with Ursula Isley of
Sundridge Place. If not, we may refer the acquaintance
to sojournings with his friend, Fletcher, at Cranbrook
or at the Kentish homes of Fletcher's stepsisters,
or with their cousins, the Sackvilles.
We have no proof that Francis Beaumont wrote
more than one drama after the Whitehall festivities
of February 1613. Two plays in which he is supposed
by some to have had a hand with Fletcher, The
Captaine and The Honest Man's Fortune, were acted[177]
during that year; but I find no trace of Francis in the
latter and but slight possibility of it in the former.
We must conclude that from 1613 he lived as a country
gentleman. He would be much more likely to
take up his abode at Sundridge, which, as we have seen,
belonged to his wife and her sister, than at Grace-Dieu
Manor; for that was occupied by John Beaumont
who had four sons to provide for. It is, of
course, barely possible that one of his father's properties
in Leicestershire or Derby may have fallen to
him,—Cottons, for instance, in the latter county, or
that "Manner House of Normanton, and a close ther
called the Parke" mentioned in the Judge's will and
in which house-room was given by him to a "servaunte ... for
the tearme of eleaven yeares" beginning
1598. But the probabilities all point to the
manor house in Kent as the scene of Beaumont's closing
years.[111]
Sundridge Place lies, as we know, just south of
Chevening and west of Sevenoaks. The old manor
house in which, we may presume, Beaumont and Ursula
lived, and where his children were born, has long
since disappeared. But the old church, just north
of the Place, with its Early English and Perpendicular
architecture still stands much as in their day. The
old brass tablets to the Isleys of two centuries are
there, and the altar-tomb of the John Isley and his
wife who died a century before Beaumont was born.
Near this memorial we may imagine that Beaumont[178]
and Ursula sat of a Sunday; and through this same
picturesque graveyard, breathing peace, they would
pass home again. Some days they would take the
half-hour stroll across the forks of the Darenth, by
Combebank in the chalk hills and through the woods,
to Chevening House, and drink a cup with old Sampson
Lennard and his son, Sir Henry, and Fletcher's
stepsister Chrysogona (Grisogone), now Lord and
Lady Dacre, and make merry with their seven youngsters;
and, coming back by the Pilgrim's road that
makes for the shrine of the "holy blissful martir,"
Beaumont would quote, from Speght's edition of
Chaucer which had appeared but thirteen years before,
something merry of the
Well nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
Or sometimes they would tramp across to Squerries
and fish in the Darenth for the bream of which Spenser
had written; perhaps, visit their sister Seyliard that
same evening.
Another summer day, Francis would ride the ten
miles north toward Chislehurst (ashes of Napoleon
le petit!), and turn aside to pay his compliments to the
proprietor of Camden Place, Ben Jonson's friend the
antiquary. But we may suppose that more gladly and
frequently than to any other spot, this dramatist-turned-squire,
and settled down for health and leisure,
would head his horse for Knole; and, galloping the
hills through Chipstead and Sevenoaks up to the old[179]
church that crowns the height, would steady to a trot
along the stately avenue of the Park amid its beeches
and sycamores,—resting his eye on broad sweeps of
pasture-land and distant groves, and thinking poetry,—to
be greeted within one short half-hour from the
time he left the Place, by that most hospitable nobleman
of the day, the noblest patron of poetry and art,
Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. They would
pace—these two lovers of Ben Jonson, and worshippers
of the first dramatist-earl—the Great Hall,
together, talking of plays, of the burning of the Globe
while Henry VIII was on the boards, or of the opening
of the new Blackfriars, or of Overbury's poisoning,
and the scandalous marriage of Rochester and Lady
Essex, or of Sir Henry Nevill's chances in the matter
of the Secretaryship, or of Winwood's appointment, or
of Raleigh's grievances, or of the new favourite, young
Villiers of Brooksby, or of the long existing grievance
of Beaumont's Catholic cousins, in and after 1614 all
the more acute because of the hopes and fears thronging
that other subject of discussion which doubtless
would occupy a place in any conversation, the negotiations
of Don Diego Sarmiento for a Spanish Marriage.
Perhaps they would stretch their legs out to the fire
before the old andirons that had once been Henry
VIII's, and talk of the tragic romance of young William
Seymour and Lady Arabella Stuart, the cousin
alike of Robert Pierrepoint and his majesty, James I;
or of the indictment and fall of Somerset. Or they
would stroll to the chapel, and decipher the carvings
of the Crucifixion which Mary, Queen of Scots, had
given to the Earl's brother, now dead. Or the Earl[180]
would point out some new portrait of that wonderful
collection, then forming, of literary men in the dining-room,
and Beaumont would pass judgment upon
the presentment of some of his own contemporaries.
Then down the drive by which the sheep are browsing
and the deer, like Agag delicately picking their
way, and back to Sundridge of the Isleys, and to
Ursula; maybe to an afternoon of lazy writing on
scenes that Fletcher has called for—perhaps the
posset-night of Sir Roger and Abigail for the beginning
of The Scornful Ladie.
In 1614 or 1615, the poet's first child, a
daughter, was born and was appropriately named
after the two Elizabeths who had touched most closely
upon his life. But the days of wedded happiness—"This
is my blisse, Let it run on now!"—were brief.
On March 6, 1616, he died,—only thirty-one years
of age.[112]
The lines written to Lady Rutland, some five years
before,
What little wit I have
Is not yet grown so near unto the grave,
But that I can, by that dim fading light,
Perceive of what, or unto whom I write,
may have been conceived merely in humorous self-depreciation.
But when we couple them with the
epitaph written by John of Grace-Dieu "upon my
deare brother, Francis Beaumont,"[181]—
On Death, thy murd'rer, this revenge I take:
I slight his terrour, and just question make,
Which of us two the best precedence have—
Mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave.
Thou shouldst have followed me, but Death to blame
Miscounted yeeres, and measur'd age by fame:
So dearely hast thou bought thy precious lines;
Their praise grew swiftly, so thy life declines.
Thy Muse, the hearer's queene, the reader's love,
All eares, all hearts (but Death's), could please and move;—
when we couple the dramatist's own words of his
"wit not yet grown so near unto the grave" with
these of his brother which I have italicized, and reflect
that for the last three years Francis seems to
have written almost nothing, we are moved to conjecture
that his early death was not unconnected with
an excessive devotion to his art, and that his health
had been for some time failing. As Darley long ago
pointed out,[113] the lines of Bishop Corbet "on Mr.
Francis Beaumont (then newly dead)" may intend
more than a poetical conceit; and they would confirm
the probability suggested above.
He that hath such acuteness and such wit,
As would ask ten good heads to husband it;
He that can write so well, that no man dare
Refuse it for the best, let him beware:
Beaumont is dead; by whose sole death appears,
Wit's a disease consumes men in few years.—
And this conjecture is borne out by the portrait of
the weary Beaumont that now hangs in Nuneham.
[182]
Three days after his death the dramatist was buried
in that part of Westminster Abbey which, since Spenser
was laid there to the left of Chaucer's empty
grave, had come to be regarded as the Poets' Corner.
Beaumont lies to the right of Chaucer's gray marble
on the east side of the South Transept in front of
St. Benedict's chapel. In what honour he was held
we gather from the consideration that, of poets, only
Chaucer and Spenser had preceded him to a resting
place in the Abbey; and that of his contemporaries,
only four writers of verse followed him: his brother,
Sir John, who died some eleven years later, and lies
beside him; his old friend, Michael Drayton, in 1631;
Hugh Holland, in 1633; and that friend of all four,
Ben Jonson, in 1637. On the "learned" or "historical"
side of the transept, across the way from the
poets, lie also only three of Beaumont's generation:
Casaubon the philologist, Hakluyt the voyager,
and Ben Jonson's master and benefactor—"most
reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in acts,
all that I know,"—Camden the antiquary. "In the
poetical quarter," writes Addison, a hundred years
later, "I found there were poets who had no monuments,
and monuments which had no poets." Of
the former category is Beaumont; of the latter, the
alabaster bust of Drayton whose body lies under the
north wall of the nave, and the monument to Jonson,
who, having no one rich enough to "lay out funeral
charges upon him," stands, in accordance with his
own desire, on his "eighteen inches of square ground"
under a paving-stone in the north aisle of the nave,—and
the figure of their associate, Shakespeare, who,[183]
though there was much talk of transporting his body
from Stratford in the year of his death and Beaumont's,
did not, even in "preposterous" effigy, join
his compeers of the Poets' Corner till more than a
century had elapsed. Upon Beaumont's grave Dryden's
lofty pile encroaches. Above the grave rises
the bust of Longfellow; and not far from Beaumont,
Tennyson and Browning were lately laid to rest.
The verses, On the Tombs in Westminster, attributed
to our poet-dramatist, are of doubtful authorship,
but in diction and turn of thought they are
paralleled by more than one of the poems which we
have found to be his:—
Mortality, behold, and feare,
What a change of flesh is here!
Thinke how many royall bones
Sleep within these heap of stones:
Here they lye, had realmes and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands;
Where from their pulpits, seal'd with dust,
They preach "In greatnesse is not trust."
Here's an acre sown, indeed,
With the richest, royall'st seed
That the earth did e're suck in
Since the first man dy'd for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cry'd,
"Though gods they were, as men they dy'd";
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.
Here's a world of pomp and state
Buried in dust, once dead by fate.
If the lines are not by Francis, they still preach the[184]
calm, deterministic spirit of his poems and his tragedies;
and they are worthy of him.
Beaumont's surviving brother of Grace-Dieu continued
for many years to write epistolary, panegyric,
and religious poems, which won increasing favour
among scholars and at Court. They were collected
and published by his son, in 1629. Of his Battle of
Bosworth Field, which contains some genuinely poetic
passages, I have already spoken. In his lines to
James I Concerning the True Forme of English Poetry,
composed probably the year of Francis' death,
or the year after, he desiderates regularity of rhyme,
Pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober care
Of metaphors, descriptions cleare, yet rare,
Similitudes contracted, smooth and round,
Not vex't by learning, but with nature crown'd,—
strong and unaffected language, and noble subject.
They made an impression upon his contemporaries in
verse; and, though he was but a minor poet, he has
come to be recognized as one of the "first refiners"
of the rhyming couplet,—a forerunner, in the limpid
style, of Waller, Denham, and Cowley. His translations
from Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Prudentius
are done with spirit. His later poems set him before
us an eminently pious soul, kindly, courtly, and cultivated.
His greatest work, the Crowne of Thornes,
in eight books, is lost. It was evidently dedicated to
Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton, for in his elegy
on the Earl, 1624, he says:
Shall ever I forget with what delight
He on my simple lines would cast his sight?
[185]
His onely mem'ry my poore worke adornes,
He is a father to my crowne of thornes:
Now since his death how can I ever looke
Without some tears, upon that orphan booke?
That this poem was printed we gather also from the
elegy of Thomas Hawkins upon Sir John.
I have already said that John was raised by Charles
I, undoubtedly through the influence of the Duke of
Buckingham, to the baronetcy in 1626. He died only
a year or two later,[114] and was lamented in verse by his
sons, and by poets and scholars of the day. On the
appearance of his poetical remains, Jonson wrote
"This booke will live; it hath a genius," and "I confesse
a Beaumont's booke to be The bound and frontire
of our poetrie." And Drayton—
There is no splendour, which our pens can give
By our most labour'd lines, can make thee live
Like to thine owne.
In the commendatory poems, his friend, Thomas
Nevill,[115] praises his goodness, his knowledge and his
art. Sir Thomas Hawkins of Nash Court, Kent,—connected
through Hugh Holland and Edmund Bolton
with the circle of Sir John's acquaintances,—emphasizes
the modesty, regularity, moral and religious
devotion no less of his life than of his poetry.
His sons rejoice that "His draughts no sensuall[186]
waters ever stain'd." His brother-in-law, George
Fortescue of Leicestershire, and others swell the
chorus of affection. He was, says the historian of
Leicestershire who knew him well,—William Burton,
the brother of that rector of Segrave, near by, who
wrote the Anatomy of Melancholy,—he was "a gentleman
of great learning, gravity, and worthiness."
Sir John was succeeded at Grace-Dieu by John, his
oldest son, who fought during the Civil War for King
Charles, and fell at the siege of Gloucester, in 1644.
Other sons were Gervase, who died in childhood,
Francis, who became a Jesuit, and Thomas, who succeeded
in 1644 to the family title and estates. The
Manor of Grace-Dieu passed finally to the Philips family
of Garendon Park, about four miles from Grace-Dieu
and half a mile from old Judge Beaumont's
property of Sheepshead. The founder of this family
at Garendon in 1682 was Sir Ambrose Philips,[116] the
father of the Ambrose who wrote the Pastorals and
The Distrest Mother. From the Philipses the present
owners of Garendon and Grace-Dieu, the Phillipps de
Lisles, inherited. The old house is no longer standing.
But below the new Manor may be seen the ruins
of the Nunnery from which the Master of the Rolls
almost four centuries ago evicted Catherine Ekesildena
and her sister-nuns. It is interesting to note
that the name de Lisle, or Lisle, is but a variant of that
of Francis Beaumont's wife Isley (de Insula); and
that the present family came from the Isle of Wight
and Kent, Ursula Isley's native county. I have not,
however, yet been able to establish any direct connection[187]
between the Sundridge Isleys and the Phillipps
de Lisles who came into the Grace-Dieu estates
in 1777.
The sister of the Beaumonts, Elizabeth, was about
twenty-four years old at the time of Francis' marriage
to Ursula Isley of Kent. The date of her wedding
to Thomas Seyliard does not appear; but before 1619
she was settled in the same county, and within a few
miles of Chevening, Sundridge, and Knole. Of the
events of her subsequent life we know nothing. That
she cultivated poetry and the poets, however, may be
inferred, from various passages in Drayton's Muses
Elizium. In the third, fourth, and eighth Nimphalls,
written as late as 1630, the old poet introduces among
his nymphs,—singing in the "Poets Paradice," which,
I surmise, was terrestrially Knole Park,—the same
"Mirtilla" who in his eighth Eglog of 1606 was "sister
to those hopeful boys, ... Thyrsis and sweet
Palmeo." Only a year before the appearance of these
Nimphalls Drayton composed for the publication of
her elder brother's poems, a lament "To the deare
Remembrance of his Noble Friend, Sir John Beaumont,
Baronet." Mirtilla had outlived both Thyrsis
and Palmeo, but not the affection of their life-long admirer
and boon companion.
The widow of the dramatist bore a child a few
months after the father's death, and named her
Frances. In 1619 Ursula administered her husband's
estate;[117] and she probably continued to live with her
children at the family seat in Sundridge. The elder
daughter, Elizabeth, was married to "a Scotch colonel"[188]
and was living in Scotland as late as 1682.
Frances was never married. She seems to have cherished
her father's fame as her richest possession. It
was, indeed, probably her only possession, save a
packet of his poems in manuscript which, we are told,
she carried with her to Ireland, but unfortunately
"they were lost at sea"[118] on her return. In 1682
she was "resident in the family of the Duke of
Ormonde," then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.[119] She
appears to have attended the high-spirited and capable
Duchess, or other ladies of the Butler family, at the
Castle in Dublin, or the family seat in Kilkenny, as
companion. Under the protection of that loyal cavalier
and Christian statesman, James, Duke of Ormonde,
whose prayer was ever "for the relieving and
delivering the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed,"[120]
she must have known happiness, for at any rate a
few years. She was retired by the Duke, apparently
after the death of the Duchess, in 1684, on a pension
of one hundred pounds a year; and this competence we
learn that she still enjoyed in 1700, when at the age of
eighty-four she was living in Leicestershire,—let us
hope in her father's old home of Grace-Dieu. She
may have survived to see the accession of Queen Anne.
We know merely that she died before 1711. Her life
bridges the space from the day of her father, Shakespeare's
younger contemporary, to that of her father's
encomiast, Dryden, and further still to that of Congreve,
Vanbrugh, Farquhar, and Addison; and we are[189]
thus helped to realize that in the arithmetic of generations
Beaumont's times and thought are after all not
so far removed from our own. Two more such spans
of human existence would link his day with that of
Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne.
[190]
CHAPTER XIII
THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION
OF BEAUMONT
Our poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of
my scholarly friends, Professor Herford, judging
apparently from the crude engraving of 1711,[121]
or from that of 1812, sees him, "of heavy and uninteresting
features," but as Swinburne saw him, probably
in Robinson's engraving of 1840, "handsome
and significant in feature and expression alike ... with
clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and
strong aquiline nose with a little cleft at the tip; a
grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely-curved
lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and
the imperial head, with its 'fair large front' and
clustering hair, set firm and carried high with an
aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation";[122]
as we see him to-day in the soft and speaking
photogravure[123] recently made from the portrait at
Knole Park or in the reproduction of 1911[124] of the
portrait which belongs to the Rt. Hon. Lewis Harcourt
at Nuneham,—a courtly gentleman of noble[191]
mien, of countenance dignified, beautiful, and mobile,
and of dreamy eyes somewhat saddened as by physical
suffering, or by sympathetic pondering on the mystery
of life. The original at Knole was already there,
in the time of Lionel, seventh Earl of Dorset, 1711,
and in default of information to the contrary we may
conclude that it has always been in the possession of
the Sackville family, and was painted for Beaumont's
contemporary, and I have ventured to surmise friend
as well as neighbour, Richard, third Earl of Dorset,—who
had succeeded to the earldom in 1609—about the
year of Philaster. I have already shown that the Sackvilles
were connected with the Fletchers by marriage.
They were also patrons of Beaumont's friends, Jonson
and Drayton. While the third Earl was still living,
poor old Ben writes to son, Edward Sackville, a
grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. And to
the same Edward, as fourth Earl,[125] Drayton dedicated,
1630, the Nimphalls of his Muses Elizium, and to his
Countess, Mary, the Divine Poems, published therewith.
If, as others have conjectured, the Earl is himself
the Dorilus of the Nimphalls, the exquisite Description
of Elizium which precedes, may be, after
the fashion of the poets and painters of the Renaissance,
an idealized picture of Knole Park, where
Drayton probably had been received:
A Paradice on earth is found,
Though farre from vulgar sight,
Which, with those pleasures doth abound,
That it Elizium hight,—
[192]
of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its
daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon
the "cleeves," its ripening fruits:
The Poets Paradice this is,
To which but few can come;
The Muses onely bower of blisse,
Their Deare Elizium.
It was the widow of the third Earl, Anne (Clifford),
Countess of Dorset and, afterwards, of Pembroke and
Montgomery,[126] who erected the monument to Drayton
in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted
with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore,
in every way more than probable; and there
is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family
still retains, in the house which Beaumont probably
often visited, this noble presentment of the dramatist.
The portrait at Nuneham, which I have mentioned
above, is not so life-like as that at Knole: it lacks the
shading. But it is for us most expressive: it is that
of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow,
higher cheek-bones, and face falling away toward the
chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with
eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent
of illness. It is the likeness of Beaumont approaching
the portals of death.
By permission of Mr. Lewis Harcourt.
THE BEAUMONT
OF THE
NUNEHAM PORTRAIT
[193]
Of the personality of Beaumont we have already
had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic
poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed him
chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tolerant
of the "standing family-jests" of country gentlemen,
tired of "water mixed with claret-lees," "with
one draught" of which "man's invention fades," and
yearning for the Mermaid wine of poetic converse,
"nimble, and full of subtle flame." Other verses to
Jonson and to Fletcher express his scorn of "the
wild applause of common people," his confidence in
sympathetic genius and Time as the only arbiters of
literary worth. In still other poems, lyric, epistolary,
and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour,—unsophisticated,
somewhat ammoniac; and from
them have caught his habit of emotional utterance,
frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or indignation.
We have grown acquainted with his reverence
for womanly purity; with his religion of suffering,
his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and
yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the
countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave.
An amusing side-light is thrown upon his character
by Jonson who told Drummond of Hawthornden, that
"Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his
own verses." We are glad to know that a man of
Jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in
Beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic
superiority; that even this "great lover and praiser
of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for
whom Spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his
matter, and "Shakespeare wanted art,"—that even
this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in literature,
recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even[194]
he could not bully out of him. But we must not be
harsh in our judgment of Drummond's Ben Jonson,
for though he "was given rather to lose a friend
than a jest and was jealous of every word and action
of those about him," this is not the Ben who some
seven years earlier had written "How I do love thee,
Beaumont, and thy Muse"; this is Ben as Drummond
saw him in 1619—Ben talking "especially after
drink which is one of the elements in which he liveth."
That Beaumont's affection and geniality of
intercourse were reciprocated not only by Jonson, but
by others, we learn from lines written to, or of, him
by men of worth.
His judgment as a critic was recognized by his
contemporaries, as well as the poetic brilliance of the
dramas which he was creating under their eyes. His
language, too, was praised for its distinction while
he was yet living. In the manuscript outline of the
Hypercritica, which appears to have been filled in at
various times between 1602 and 1616, Bolton says:
"the books out of which wee gather the most warrantable
English are not many to my remembrance.... But
among the cheife, or rather the cheife, are
in my opinion these: Sir Thomas Moore's works; ... George
Chapman's first seaven books of Iliades; Samuell
Danyell; Michael Drayton his Heroicall Epistles
of England; Marlowe his excellent fragment of Hero
and Leander; Shakespeare, Mr. Francis Beamont,
and innumerable other writers for the stage,—and
[they] presse tenderly to be used in this Argument;
Southwell, Parsons, and some few other of that sort."
In the final version of the Hypercritica, prepared between[195]
1616 and 1618,[127] Bolton omits the later dramatists
altogether;[128] but that is not to be construed by
way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beaumont.
There is no doubt that Bolton knew the Beaumonts
personally, and appreciated their worth, and
as early as 1610;—for to his Elements of Armories
of that year, he prefixes a "Letter to the Author,
from the learned young gentleman, I. B., of Grace-Dieu
in the County of Leicestershire, Esquier,"[129]
who highly compliments the invention, judicial method,
and taste displayed in the Elements, and returns the
manuscript with promise of his patronage.
Further information of the esteem in which Francis
was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect,
written soon after his death by those who were near
enough to him in years to have known him, or to
assess his worth untrammeled by the critical consensus
of a generation that knew him not. The tender
tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, Dr.
Corbet, successively Bishop of Oxford, and of Norwich,
have already been quoted. A so-called "sonnet,"
signed I. F., included in an Harleian manuscript
between two poems undoubtedly by Fletcher, may
not have been intended for the dead poet; but I agree
with Dyce, who first printed it,[130] that it seems "very
like Fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate":—
[196]
Come, sorrow, come! bring all thy cries,
All thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes!
Burn out, you living monuments of woe!
Sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow!
Virtue is dead;
O cruel fate!
All youth is fled;
All our laments too late.
Oh, noble youth, to thy ne'er-dying name,
Oh, happy youth, to thy still-growing fame,
To thy long peace in earth, this sacred knell
Our last loves ring—farewell, farewell, farewell!
Go, happy soul, to thy eternal birth!
And press his body lightly, gentle Earth!
What the young readers of contemporary poetry
at the universities thought of him is nowhere better
expressed than in the lines written immediately after
the poet's death by the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old
John Earle;—he who was later Fellow of Merton;
and in turn Bishop of Worcester, and of Salisbury.
The ardent lad is gazing in person or imagination
on the new-filled tomb in the Poets' Corner, when he
writes:
Beaumont lyes here; and where now shall we have
A Muse like his, to sigh upon his grave?
Ah, none to weepe this with a worthy teare,
But he that cannot, Beaumont that lies here.
Who now shall pay thy Tombe with such a Verse
As thou that Ladies didst, faire Rutlands Herse?
A Monument that will then lasting be,
When all her Marble is more dust than she.
In thee all's lost: a sudden dearth and want
[197]
Hath seiz'd on Wit, good Epitaphs are scant;
We dare not write thy Elegie, whilst each feares
He nere shall match that coppy of thy teares.
Scarce in an Age a Poet,—and yet he
Scarce lives the third part of his age to see,
But quickly taken off, and only known,
Is in a minute shut as soone as showne....
Why should Nature take such pains to perfect that
which ere perfected she shall destroy?—
Beaumont dies young, so Sidney died before;
There was not Poetry he could live to, more:
He could not grow up higher; I scarce know
If th' art it self unto that pitch could grow,
Were 't not in thee that hadst arriv'd the hight
Of all that wit could reach, or Nature might....
The elegist likens Beaumont to Menander,
Whose few sententious fragments show more worth
Than all the Poets Athens ere brought forth;
And I am sorry I have lost those houres
On them, whose quicknesse comes far short of ours,
And dwelt not more on thee, whose every Page
May be a patterne to their Scene and Stage.
I will not yeeld thy Workes so mean a Prayse—
More pure, more chaste, more sainted than are Playes,
Nor with that dull supinenesse to be read,
To passe a fire, or laugh an houre in bed....
Why should not Beaumont in the Morning please,
As well as Plautus, Aristophanes?
Who, if my Pen may as my thoughts be free,
Were scurrill Wits and Buffons both to Thee....
Yet these are Wits, because they'r old, and now
[198]
Being Greeke and Latine, they are Learning too:
But those their owne Times were content t' allow
A thriftier fame, and thine is lowest now.
But thou shall live, and, when thy Name is growne
Six Ages older, shall be better knowne;
When thou'rt of Chaucers standing in the Tombe,
Thou shall not share, but take up all his roome.[131]
A panegyric liberal in the superlatives of youth but,
in view of passages to be quoted elsewhere, one of
the sanest as well as earliest appreciations of Beaumont's
distinctive quality as a dramatist; an appreciation
such as the historian might expect from a
collegian who, a dozen years later, was not only one
of the most genial and refined scholars of his generation
but, perhaps, the most accurate observer and
epitomist of the familiar types and minor morals of
his day,—a writer who in 1628 is still championing
the cause of contemporary poetry. In his characterization
of the Vulgar-Spirited Man "that is taken
only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses anything
too deep for him; that cries, Chaucer for his money
above all our English poets, because the voice has
gone so, and he has read none," the Earle of the
Microcosmographie is but repeating the censure of his
elegy on Beaumont in 1616.
About 1620, we find a contemporary of altogether
different class from that of the university student acknowledging
the fame of Beaumont, the Thames waterman,
John Taylor. This self-advertising tramp and[199]
rollicking scribbler mentions him in The Praise of
Hemp-seed with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and
others, as of those who, "in paper-immortality, Doe
live in spight of death, and cannot die." And not far
separated from Taylor's testimonial in point of time is
William Basse's prediction of a prouder immortality.
Basse who was but two years older than Beaumont,
and, as we have seen, was one of the pastoral group
with which Beaumont's career was associated, is writing
of "Mr. William Shakespeare" who had died
six weeks after Beaumont,—and he thus apostrophizes
the Westminster poets of the Corner:
Renownèd Spencer, lye a thought more nye
To learnèd Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye
A little neerer Spencer, to make roome
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.
To lodge all foure in one bed make a shift
Untill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift,
Betwixt this day and that, by Fate be slayne
For whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe.
The date of the sonnet of which these are the opening
lines can be only approximately determined. It must
be earlier, however, than 1623; for in that year Jonson
alludes to it in verses presently to be quoted. And
it must be later than the erection of the monument
to Shakespeare's memory in Trinity Church, Stratford,
in or soon after 1618, for in the lines which
follow those given above the writer apostrophizes
Shakespeare as sleeping "Under this carvèd marble
of thine owne." The sonnet contemplates the removal
of Shakespeare's remains to Westminster, and[200]
arranges the poets already lying there not in actual
but chronological order.[132]
To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in
the series of stanzas prefixed to the Shakespeare folio
of 1623,—To the memory of my beloved, the Author,
Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us.
Ben Jonson intends, however, no slight to Beaumont
and the other poets mentioned by Basse, when, in
his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the
peers of Shakespeare. On the contrary this lover at
heart, and in his best moments, of Beaumont, bestows
a meed of praise: they are "great Muses,"—Chaucer,
Spenser, Beaumont,—but merely "disproportioned,"
if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as
are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but
"thundering Æschylus," Euripides, and Sophocles,
Pacuvius, Accius, "him of Cordova dead," must be
summoned
To life againe to heare thy Buskin tread
And shake a Stage.
Therefore it is, that Jonson calls—
My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further to make thee a roome:
Thou art a Moniment without a toombe,
[201]
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses;
I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses.
That Beaumont was regarded by his immediate contemporaries
not as a professional, but literary, dramatist,—a
poet, and a person of social eminence,—appears
from Drayton's Epistle to Henery Reynolds,
Esq., Of Poets and Poesy, published 1627, from which
I have earlier quoted. Here the writer, appraising
the poets "who have enrich'd our language with their
rhymes" informs his "dearly loved friend" that he
does not
meane to run
In quest of these that them applause have wonne
Upon our Stages in these latter dayes,
That are so many; let them have their bayes,
That doe deserve it; let those wits that haunt
Those publique circuits, let them freely chaunt
Their fine Composures, and their praise pursue;
and thus, we may conjecture, he excuses the omission
of such men as Middleton, Fletcher, and Massinger.
Beginning with Chaucer, "the first of ours that ever
brake Into the Muses' treasure, and first spake In
weighty numbers," Drayton pays especial honour to
"grave, morall Spencer," "noble Sidney ... heroe
for numbers and for prose," Marlowe with his "brave
translunary things," Shakespeare of "as smooth a
comicke vaine ... as strong conception, and as cleere
a rage, As any one that trafiqu'd with the Stage,"
"learn'd Johnson.... Who had drunke deepe of[202]
the Pierian spring," and "reverend Chapman" for
his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom
he had loved, Alexander and Drummond, and concludes
the roll-call with his two Beaumonts and his
Browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and
"Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts."
This letter not only speaks the opinion of Drayton
concerning the standing of the two Beaumonts in
poetry, but incidentally asserts the popularity of their
work, for the author informs his correspondents that
he "ties himself here only to those few men"
Whose works oft printed, set on every post,
To publique censure subject have bin most.
By 1627 all of the dramas in which Francis had an
undoubted share, except The Coxcombe had been
printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early
as 1618 in a little volume that included also Drayton's
elegies on Lady Penelope Clifton and the three sons
of Lord Sheffield, and Verses by 'N. H.'
MICHAEL DRAYTON
From the portrait in the Dulwich Gallery
This volume is Henry Fitzgeffrey's Certayn elegies
done by sundrie excellent wits (Fr. Beau., M. Dr.,
N. H.), with Satyres and Epigrames. Fitzgeffrey,
by the way, was of Lincoln's Inn in Beaumont's time;
and so were others connected with this volume, by
dedications or commendatory verses: Fitzgeffrey's
"chamber-fellow and nearest friend, Nat. Gurlin";
Thomas Fletcher, and John Stephens, the satirist, who
had been entered member of the Inn in 1611. They
must all have been known by Beaumont when he was
writing his elegies. The 'N. H.' thus posthumously
associated with our dramatist was, I think, the mathematician,[203]
philosopher, and poet, Nicholas Hill[133]
Beaumont could not have failed to know him. He
was of St. John's College, Oxford; he wrote and
published a Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana to
which, mentioning him by name, Ben Jonson alludes
in his epigram (CXXXIV) Of The Famous Voyage
of the two wights who "At Bread-streets Mermaid
having dined and merry, Propos'd to goe to Holborne
in a wherry." He was the secretary and favourite of
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a good deal
of a wag, and well acquainted with our old friend
Serjeant Hoskyns of the Convivium Philosophicum.
He died in 1610.
Whether the anonymous writer on The Time Poets[134]
was a personal acquaintance of Beaumont we cannot
tell. The definite qualities of the poet which he emphasizes
are, however, as likely to be drawn from life
and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas.
The lines, apparently composed between 1620 and
1636, begin,
One night, the great Apollo, pleas'd with Ben,
Made the odde number of the Muses ten;
The fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense,
In complement and courtship's quintessence;
Ingenious Shakespeare, Massinger that knows
The strength of plot to write in verse or prose,—
and continue with "cloud-grappling Chapman" and
others, as of the ten Muses.
[204]
That Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, was a personal
friend,—we may be sure,—the kind of friend
who having a sense of humour did not resent Beaumont's
genial satire in The Knight of the Burning
Pestle upon his bourgeois drama of The Foure Prentises
of London. Writing as late as 1635, he remembers
Francis as a wit:
Excellent Bewmont, in the formost ranke
Of the rarest Wits, was never more than Franck.—
The touch of familiarity with which Heywood[135] causes
that whole row of poets, many of them then dead,
Robin Green, Kit Marlowe, the Toms (Kyd, Watson
and Nashe), mellifluous Will, Ben, and the rest, to
live for posterity as human, and lovable, gracefully
heightens the compliment for one and all.
We may surmise that one more eulogist of Beaumont,
his kinsman,[136] Sir George Lisle, a marvellously
gallant cavalier, who distinguished himself at Newberry,
and was shot by order of Fairfax about the
end of the Civil War, was old enough in 1616 to have
known our poet. Though Sir George, in his verses
for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, lays
special stress upon the close-woven fancy of the two
playwrights, he seems to have a first-hand information,
not common to the younger writers of these commendatory
poems, concerning Beaumont's share in at
least one of the tragedies. He ascribes to him, not
to Fletcher,—as we know by modern textual tests,[205]
correctly,—the nobler scenes of "brave Mardonius"
in A King and No King. One attaches, therefore,
more than mere literary, or hearsay, significance to
his selection for special praise of Beaumont's force,
when he says,
Thou strik'st our sense so deep,
At once thou mak'st us Blush, Rejoyce, and Weep.
Great father Johnson bow'd himselfe when hee
(Thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee.
[206]
CHAPTER XIV
TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM
What we learn from tradition, and from the
criticism of the century following Beaumont's
death, adds little to what we already have observed
concerning his life and personality. Concerning his
share in the joint-plays, it adds much, mostly wrong;
but of that, later. Mosely, in his address of The
Stationer to the Readers prefixed to the folio of 1647,
announces that knowing persons had generally assured
him "that these Authors were the most unquestionable
Wits this Kingdome hath afforded. Mr. Beaumont
was ever acknowledged a man of a most strong and
searching braine; and (his yeares considered) the
most Judicious Wit these later Ages have produced.
He dyed young, for (which was an invaluable losse
to this Nation) he left the world when hee was not
full thirty yeares old. Mr. Fletcher survived, and
lived till almost fifty; whereof the World now enjoyes
the benefit." The dramatist, Shirley, in his address
To the Reader of the folio, says "It is not so remote
in Time, but very many Gentlemen may remember
these Authors; and some familiar in their conversation
deliver them upon every pleasant occasion so
fluent, to talke a Comedy. He must be a bold man,"
continues he, with a prophetic commonsense, "that[207]
dares undertake to write their Lives. What I have
to say is, we have the precious Remaines; and as the
wisest contemporaries acknowledge they Lived a Miracle,
I am very confident this volume cannot die without
one." Shirley also reminds the Reader that but
to mention Beaumont and Fletcher "is to throw a
cloude upon all former names and benight Posterity."
"This Book being, without flattery, the greatest Monument
of the Scene that Time and Humanity have
produced, and must Live, not only the Crowne and sole
Reputation of our owne, but the stayne of all other
Nations and Languages." To such a pitch had the
vogue of our dramatists risen in the thirty years after
Beaumont's death! Not only Shakespeare and learnèd
Ben, but Sophocles and Euripides may vail to them.
"This being,"—and here we catch a vision from life
itself,—"this being the Authentick witt that made
Blackfriars an Academy, where the three howers spectacle
while Beaumont and Fletcher were presented,
were usually of more advantage to the hopefull young
Heire, than a costly, dangerous, forraigne Travell,
with the assistance of a governing Mounsieur, or
Signior, to boote. And it cannot be denied but that
the spirits of the Time, whose Birth and Qualitie made
them impatient of the sowrer ways of education, have
from the attentive hearing these pieces, got ground
in point of wit and carriage of the most severely employed
Students, while these Recreations were digested
into Rules, and the very pleasure did edifie."
So far as the plays printed in this folio are concerned,
not much of this praise belongs to Beaumont;
for, as we now know, not more than two of them,[208]
The Coxcombe and the Masque of the Inner Temple,
bear his impress. But Shirley is thinking of the reputation
of the authors in general; and he writes with
an eye to the sale of the book.
Since we shall presently find opportunity to consider
the trend of opinion during the seventeenth century
regarding the respective shares of the dramatists
in composition, but a word need be said here upon the
subject,—and that as to the origin of a tradition
speedily exaggerated into error: namely, that Beaumont's
function in the partnership was purely
of gravity and critical acumen. From the verses of
John Berkenhead, an Oxford man, born in 1615, a
writer of some lampooning ability and, in 1647 reader
in moral philosophy at the University, we learn that,
he, at least, thought it impossible to separate the
faculties of the two dramatists, which "as two Voices
in one Song embrace (Fletcher's keen Trebble, and
deep Beaumont's Base"); that, however, there were
some in his day who held "That One [Fletcher] the
Sock, th' Other [Beaumont] the Buskin claim'd,"
That should the Stage embattaile all its Force,
Fletcher would lead the Foot, Beaumont the Horse;
and that Beaumont's was "the understanding," Fletcher's
"the quick free will." Such discrimination, as I
have said, Berkenhead disavows; but he is of the
opinion, nevertheless, that the rules by which their art
was governed came from Beaumont:
So Beaumont dy'd; yet left in Legacy
His Rules and Standard-wit (Fletcher) to Thee.
[209]
And still another Oxford man, born four years before
Beaumont's death, the Reverend Josias Howe,
reasserting the essential unity of their compositions,
concedes with regard to Fletcher,—
Perhaps his quill flew stronger, when
'T was weavèd with his Beaumont's pen;
And might with deeper wonder hit.
These and similar statements of 1647, essentially correct,
concerning the force, depth, and critical acumen
of Beaumont had been anticipated in the testimonials
printed during his lifetime and down to 1640, especially
in those of Jonson, Davies, Drayton, and Earle.
A verdict, much more dogmatic, and responsible for
the erroneous tradition which long survived, proceeded
from one of the "sons of Ben," William Cartwright,
himself an author of dramas, junior proctor of the
University of Oxford in 1643, and "the most florid
and seraphical preacher in the university." He may
have derived the germ of his information from Jonson
himself, but he had developed it in a one-sided
manner when, writing in 1643 "upon the report of
the printing of the dramaticall poems of Master John
Fletcher," he implied that the genius of "knowing
Beaumont" was purely restrictive and critical,—telling
us that Beaumont was fain to bid Fletcher "be
more dull," to "write again," to "bate some of his
fire"; and that even when Fletcher had "blunted and
allayed" his genius according to the critic's command,
the critic Beaumont, not yet satisfied,
Added his sober spunge, and did contract
Thy plenty to lesse wit to make 't exact.
[210]
This distorted image of Beaumont's artistic quality
as merely critical lived, as we shall see, for many a
year. We shall, also, see that it is not from any
such secondary sources that supplementary information
regarding the poet himself is to be derived, but
from a scientific determination of his share in the
dramas ordinarily and vaguely assigned to an undifferentiated
Beaumont and Fletcher.
[211]
CHAPTER XV
A FEW WORDS OF FLETCHER'S LATER YEARS
Beside the dramas which there is any meritorious
reason for assigning to the joint-authorship
of the two friends, some dozen plays were produced
by Fletcher alone, or in collaboration with others,
before the practical cessation, in 1613, or thereabout,
of Beaumont's dramatic activity. After that time
Fletcher's name was attached, either as sole author
or as the associate of Massinger, Field, William Rowley,
and perhaps others, to about thirty more. From
1614 on, he was the successor of Shakespeare as dramatic
poet of the King's Players. Jonson's masques
delighted the Court, but no writer of tragedy or comedy,—not
Jonson, nor Philip Massinger, who was
now Fletcher's closest associate, nor Middleton or
Rowley, Dekker, Ford, or Webster,—compared with
him in popularity at Court and in the City. He is
not merely an illustrious personality, the principal author
of harrowing tragedies such as Valentinian, the
sole author of tragicomedies such as The Loyall Subject,
and long-lived comedies—The Chances, Rule a
Wife and Have a Wife, and several more,—he is a
syndicate: he stands sponsor for plays like The Queene
of Corinth and The Knight of Malta in which others
collaborated largely with him; and his name is occasionally[212]
stamped upon plays of associates, in which he
had no hand whatever. "Thou grew'st," says his
contemporary and admirer, John Harris,—
"Thou grew'st to govern the whole Stage alone:
In which orbe thy throng'd light did make the star,
Thou wert th' Intelligence did move that Sphear."
Dr. Harris, Professor of Greek at Oxford in the heyday
of Fletcher's glory, and a most distinguished divine,
writes, in 1647, as one who had known Fletcher,
personally,—observes his careless ease in composing,
his manner of conversation,
The Stage grew narrow while thou grew'st to be
In thy whole life an Exc'llent Comedie,—
and admires his behaviour:
To these a Virgin-modesty which first met
Applause with blush and fear, as if he yet
Had not deserv'd; till bold with constant praise
His browes admitted the unsought-for Bayes.
So, addressing the public, concludes this panegyrist,—
Hee came to be sole Monarch, and did raign
In Wits great Empire, abs'lute Soveraign.
It is of these years of triumph that another of "the
large train of Fletcher's friends," Richard Brome, Ben
Jonson's faithful servant and loving friend, and his
disciple in the drama, tells us:[213]
His Works (says Momus) nay, his Plays you'd say:
Thou hast said right, for that to him was Play
Which was to others braines a toyle: with ease
He playd on Waves which were Their troubled Seas....
But to the Man againe, of whom we write,
The Writer that made Writing his Delight,
Rather then Worke. He did not pumpe, nor drudge,
To beget Wit, or manage it; nor trudge
To Wit-conventions with Note-booke, to gleane
Or steale some Jests to foist into a Scene:
He scorn'd those shifts. You that have known him, know
The common talke that from his Lips did flow,
And run at waste, did savour more of Wit,
Then any of his time, or since have writ,
(But few excepted) in the Stages way:
His Scenes were Acts, and every Act a Play.
I knew him in his strength; even then when He—
That was the Master of his Art and Me—
Most knowing Johnson (proud to call him Sonne)
In friendly Envy swore, He had out-done
His very Selfe. I knew him till he dyed;
And at his dissolution, what a Tide
Of sorrow overwhelm'd the Stage; which gave
Volleys of sighes to send him to his grave;
And grew distracted in most violent Fits
(For She had lost the best part of her Wits) ...
"Others," concludes this old admirer unpretentiously,
Others may more in lofty Verses move;
I onely, thus, expresse my Truth and Love.
No better testimony to the character of the man
who, even though Jonson was still writing, became[214]
absolute sovereign of the stage after Shakespeare
and Beaumont had ceased, can be found than such
as the preceding. To Fletcher's innate modesty, other
contemporaries, Lowin and Taylor, who acted in many
of his plays, bear testimony in the Dedication of The
Wild-Goose Chase: "The Play was of so Generall
a receiv'd Acceptance, that (he Himself a Spectator)
we have known him unconcern'd, and to have wisht
it had been none of His; He, as well as the throng'd
Theatre (in despite of his innate Modesty) Applauding
this rare issue of his Braine." He was the idol
of his actors: "And now, Farewell, our Glory!"
continue, in 1652, these victims of "a cruell Destinie"—the
closing of the theatres at the outbreak of the
Civil War,—"Farewell, your Choice Delight, most
noble Gentlemen! Farewell, the grand Wheel that
set Us Smaller Motions in Action!"—The wheel of
Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger.—"Farewell,
the Pride and Life o' the Stage! Nor
can we (though in our Ruin) much repine that we
are so little, since He that gave us being is no more."
Fletcher was beloved of great men, as they themselves
have left their love on record, of Jonson, Beaumont,
Chapman, Massinger. If Shakespeare collaborated
with him, that speaks for itself. He was an
inspiration to young pastoralists like Browne, and to
aspiring dramatists like Field. He was a writer of
sparkling genius and phenomenal facility. He was
careless of myopic criticism, conscious of his dignity,—but
unaffectedly simple,—averse to flattering his
public or his patron for bread, or for acquaintance, or
for the admiration of the indolent, or for "itch of[215]
greater fame."[137] If we may take him at his word,
and estimate him by the noblest lines he ever wrote,—the
verses affixed to The Honest Man's Fortune
(acted, 1613),—the keynote of his character as a man
among men, was independence. To those "that can
look through Heaven, and tell the stars," he says:
Man is his own Star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early, or too late.
Our Acts our Angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;
And when the Stars are labouring, we believe
It is not that they govern, but they grieve
For stubborn ignorance.
That star is in "the Image of thy Maker's good":
He is my Star, in him all truth I find,
All influence, all fate;
and as for poverty, it is "the light to Heaven ...
Nor want, the cause of man, shall make me groan";
for experience teaches us "all we can: To work ourselves
into a glorious man." His mistress is not
some star of Love, with the increase to wealth or
honour she may bring, but of Knowledge and fair
Truth:
So I enjoy all beauty and all youth,
And though to time her Lights and Laws she lends,
She knows no Age, that to corruption bends....
Perhaps through all this, there echoes the voice of that[216]
præsul splendidus, his father, the Bishop, the friend
of Sir Francis Drake, of Burghley, and of the forceful
Bishop Bancroft,—a father solicitous, at any rate before
he fell into the hands of his fashionable second
wife and lost favour with the Queen, for the "Chrystian
and godlie education" of his children. However
that may be,—whether the noble idea of this confession
of faith is a projection from the discipline of
youth or an induction from the experience of life,
the utterance of Fletcher's inmost personality is here:
Man is his own Star, and that soul that can
Be honest, is the only perfect man.
Though, in the plays where Beaumont does not control,
Fletcher so freely reflects the loose morals of his
age, the gross conventional misapprehension of woman's
worth, even the cynicism regarding her essential
purity,—though Fletcher reflects these conditions in his
later plays as well as in his early Faithfull Shepheardesse,[138]
and though he, for dramatic ends, accepts
the material vulgarity of the lower classes and the
perverted and decadent heroics of the upper, there
still are "passages in his works where he recurs to a
conception which undoubtedly had a very vital significance
for him—that of a gentleman,"—to the
"merit, manners, and inborn virtue" of the gentleman
not conventional but genuine.[139] In Beaumont, that[217]
"man of a most strong and searching braine" whose
writings and whose record speak the gentleman, he
had had the example beside him in the flesh. What
that meant is manifest in the encomium of Francis
Palmer, written in 1647 from Christ Church, Oxford,
All commendations end
In saying only: Thou wert Beaumont's friend.
The engraving of Fletcher in the 1647 folio was
"cut by severall Originall Pieces," says Mosely
"which his friends lent me, but withall they tell me
that his unimitable Soule did shine through his countenance
in such Ayre and Spirit, that the Painters
confessed it was not easie to expresse him: As much
as could be, you have here, and the Graver hath done
his part." The edition of 1711 is the first to publish
"effigies" of both poets, "the Head of Mr. Beaumont,
and that of Mr. Fletcher, through the favour of the
present Earl of Dorset [the seventh Earl], being taken
from Originals in the noble Collection his Lordship
has at Knowles." The engravings in the Theobald,
Seward and Sympson edition of 1742-1750 are by G.
Vertue. The engravings in Colman's edition of 1778,
are the same, debased. Those in Weber's edition of
1812, are done afresh,—of Beaumont by Evans, of
Fletcher by Blood—apparently from the Knole originals.
They are an improvement upon those of earlier
editions. In Dyce's edition of 1843-1846, H. Robinson's
engraving of Beaumont has nobility; his attempt
at Fletcher does not improve upon Blood's. All these
are in the reverse. The Variorum edition of 1904-1905[218]
gives the beautiful photogravure of Beaumont
of which I have already spoken, by Walker and Cockerell,
from the original at Knole Park; and an equally
soft and expressive photogravure of Fletcher, by Emery
Walker, from the painting in the National Portrait
Gallery. For the first time the dramatists face as in
the originals: Beaumont, toward your left, Fletcher,
toward your right.
Fletcher's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
reveals a highbred, thoughtful countenance, large eyes
unafraid, wide-awake and keen, the nose aquiline and
sensitive, wavily curling hair, hastily combed back,
or through which he has run his fingers, a careless,
half-buttoned jerkin from which the shirt peeps forth,—all
in all a man of more vivacious temper, ready and
practical quality than Beaumont.
The authorities of the Gallery, especially through
the kindness of Mr. J. D. Milner, who has been good
enough to look up various particulars for me, inform
me that this portrait of John Fletcher, No. 420, was
purchased by the Trustees in March 1876, its previous
history being unknown. The painting is by a contemporary
but unknown artist, and is similar to the
portrait at Knole Park. It was engraved in the reverse
by G. Vertue in 1729. They also inform me
that another portrait of a different type belongs to
the Earl of Clarendon. This, I conjecture, must be
that which John Evelyn, in a letter to Samuel Pepys,
12 August, 1689, says he has seen in the first Earl of
Clarendon's collection—"most of which [portraits],
if not all, are at the present at Cornebery in Oxfordshire."
But Evelyn adds that "Beaumont and[219]
Fletcher were both in one piece." Yet another portrait
said to be of Fletcher, painted in 1625 by C.
Janssen, belongs to the Duke of Portland. This
Janssen is the Cornelius to whom the alleged portrait
of Shakespeare, now at Bulstrode, is attributed. Cornelius
did not come to England before Shakespeare's
death; and, consequently, not before Beaumont's.
Fletcher died in August 1625. According to Aubrey,
"In the great plague, 1625, a Knight of Norfolke
(or Suffolke) invited him into the Countrey. He
stayed but to make himselfe a suite of cloathes, and
while it was makeing, fell sick of the plague and
dyed. This I had [1668] from his tayler, who is
now [1670] a very old man, and clarke of St. Mary
Overy's." The dramatist was buried in St. Saviour's,
Southwark, the twenty-ninth of that month. Sir
Aston Cockayne's statement, in an epitaph on Fletcher
and Massinger, that they lie in the same grave, is
probably figurative. Aubrey tells us that Massinger,
who died in March 1640, and whose burial is recorded
in the register of St. Saviour's, was buried
not in the church, but about the middle of one of its
churchyards, the Bullhead, next the Bullhead tavern.
There are memorials now to both poets in the
church, as also to Shakespeare, and Beaumont, and
to Edward Alleyn, the actor of the old Admiral's company.
It is generally supposed that Fletcher was never
married. The name, John Fletcher, was not unusual
in the parish of St. Saviour's, and the records of
"John Fletcher" marriages may, therefore, not involve
the dramatist. But two items communicated to[220]
Dyce[140] by Collier, "more in jest than in earnest,"
from the Parish-registers, are suggestive, if we reflect
that, about 1612 or 1613, the ménage à trois, provided
it continued so long, would have lapsed at the time
of Beaumont's marriage; and if we can swallow the
stage-fiction of Fletcher's "maid Joan" in Bury-Fair
(see page 96 above), whole and as something digestible.
These are Collier's cullings from the Registers:
1612. Nov. 3. John Fletcher and Jone Herring
[were married]. Reg. of St. Saviour's, Southwark.
John, the son of John Fletcher and of Joan his wife
was baptized 25 Feb., 1619. Reg. of St. Bartholomew
the Great.
If this is our John Fletcher, his marriage would have
been about the same time as Beaumont's, and he may
have later taken up his residence in the parish of St.
Bartholomew the Great, on the north side of the river,
not far from Southwark. If Fletcher was married
in 1612, we may be very sure that his wife was
not a person of distinction. His verses Upon an
Honest Man's Fortune, written the next year, give us
the impression either that he is not married and not
likely to be, or that he has married one of low estate
and breeding, has concluded that the matrimonial
game is not worth the candle, and rather defiantly has
turned to a better mistress than mortal, who can compensate
him for that which through love he has not
attained, "Were I in love," he declares,[221]—
Were I in love, and could that bright Star bring
Increase to Wealth, Honour, and everything:
Were she as perfect good, as we can aim,
The first was so, and yet she lost the Game.
My Mistriss then be Knowledge and fair Truth;
So I enjoy all beauty and all youth.
We may be sure that when Fletcher wrote this poem
he had known poverty, sickness, and affliction, but not
a consolation in wedded happiness:
Love's but an exhalation to best eyes;
The matter spent, and then the fool's fire dies.
Since many of Collier's "earnests" turn out to be
"jests," why not the other way round? That is my
apology for according this "jest" a moment's whimsical
consideration.
Such is an outline in broad sweep of the activities
and common relations of our Castor and Pollux, and
a preliminary sketch of the personality of each. With
regard to the latter, who is our main concern, the
vital record is yet more definitely to be discovered
in the dramatic output distinctively his during the
years of literary partnership; and to the consideration
of his share in the joint-plays we may now turn.
[222]
[223]
PART TWO
THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
[224]
[225]
CHAPTER XVI
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM; CRITICAL APPARATUS
Much of the confusion which existed in the minds
of readers and critics during the period following
the Restoration concerning the respective productivity
of Beaumont and Fletcher is due to accident.
The quartos (generally unauthorized) of individual
plays in circulation were, as often as not, wrong in
their ascriptions of authorship to one, or the other,
or both of the dramatists; and the folio of 1647,
which, long after both were dead, first presented what
purported to be their collected works, lacked title-pages
to the individual plays, and, save in one instance,
prefixed no name of author to any play. The exception
is The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes-Inne
and the Inner Temple "written by Francis Beaumont,
Gentleman," which had been performed, Feb.
20, 1612-13, and had appeared in quarto without date
(but probably 1613) as "by Francis Beaumont, Gent."
In seven instances, Fletcher is indicated in the 1647
folio by Prologue or Epilogue as author, or author
revised, and in general correctly; but otherwise the
thirty-four plays included (not counting the Maske)
are introduced to the public merely by a general title-page
as "written by Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher, Gentlemen. Never printed before, And now[226]
published by the Authours Originall Copies." That
the public should have been deceived into accepting
most of them as the joint-product of the authors is
not surprising. Though it is not the purpose of this
discussion to consider plays in which Beaumont was
not concerned, it may be said incidentally that of
eleven of these productions Fletcher was sole author;
Massinger of perhaps one, and with Fletcher of eight,
and with Fletcher and others of five more; that in
several plays four or five other authors had a hand, and
that in at least five Fletcher had no share.[141]
Sir Aston Cockayne was, therefore, fully justified,
when, some time between 1647 and 1658, he thus upbraided
the publishers of the folio:
In the large book of Playes you late did print
In Beaumont's and in Fletcher's name, why in't
Did you not justice? Give to each his due?
For Beaumont of those many writ in few,
And Massinger in other few; the Main
Being sole Issues of sweet Fletcher's brain.
But how came I (you ask) so much to know?
Fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so.
I' the next impression therefore justice do,
And print their old ones in one volume too;
For Beaumont's works and Fletcher's should come forth,
With all the right belonging to their worth.
JOHN FLETCHER
From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown but contemporary
In still another poem, printed in 1662, but written not
long after 1647, and addressed to his cousin, Charles
Cotton, Sir Aston returns to the charge:
[227]
I wonder, Cousin, that you would permit
So great an Injury to Fletcher's wit,
Your friend and old Companion, that his fame
Should be divided to another's name.
If Beaumont had writ those Plays, it had been
Against his merits a detracting Sin,
Had they been attributed also to
Fletcher. They were two wits and friends, and who
Robs from the one to glorify the other,
Of these great memories is a partial Lover.
Had Beaumont liv'd when this Edition came
Forth, and beheld his ever living name
Before Plays that he never writ, how he
Had frown'd and blush'd at such Impiety!
His own Renown no such Addition needs
To have a Fame sprung from another's deedes:
And my good friend Old Philip Massinger
With Fletcher writ in some that we see there.
But you may blame the Printers: yet you might
Perhaps have won them to do Fletcher right,
Would you have took the pains; for what a foul
And unexcusable fault it is (that whole
Volume of plays being almost every one
After the death of Beaumont writ) that none
Would certifie them so much! I wish as free
Y' had told the Printers this, as you did me.
......
... While they liv'd and writ together, we
Had Plays exceeded what we hop'd to see.
But they writ few; for youthful Beaumont soon
By death eclipsèd was at his high noon.
The statements especially to be noted in these poems
are, first, that Fletcher is present in most of the work
published in the earliest folio, that of 1647, Beaumont[228]
in but a few plays, Massinger in other few. This
information Cockayne, who was but eight years of
age when Beaumont died, and seventeen at Fletcher's
death, had from Fletcher's chief bosom-friend, and
it was probably corroborated by Massinger himself,
with whom Cockayne and his family (as we know
from other evidence) had long been acquainted. Second,
that almost every play in the folio was written
after Beaumont's death (1616). This information,
also, Cockayne had from his own cousin who was a
friend and old companion of Fletcher. This cousin,
the chief bosom-friend, as I have shown elsewhere, was
Charles Cotton, the elder, who died in 1658, not the
younger Charles Cotton (the translator of Montaigne),—for
he was not born till five years after Fletcher
died. And, third, that not only is the title of the folio
"Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont
and John Fletcher, Gentlemen" a misnomer, but
that the bulk of their joint-plays, "the old ones" (not
here included) calls for a volume to itself. A very
just verdict, indeed,—this of Cockayne,—for (if I
may again anticipate conclusions later to be reached)
the only indubitable contributions from Beaumont's
hand to this folio are his Maske of the Gentleman of
Grayes Inne and a portion of The Coxcombe.
The confusion concerning authorship was redoubled
by the second folio, which appeared as "Fifty Comedies
and Tragedies. Written by Francis Beaumont
and John Fletcher, Gentlemen. Published by the Authors
Original Copies (etc.)" in 1679. There are
fifty-three plays in this volume; the thirty-five of the
first folio, and eighteen previously printed but not[229]
before gathered together. Beside those in which
Beaumont had, or could have had, a hand, the eighteen
include five of Fletcher's authorship, five in which he
collaborated with others than Beaumont; and one,
The Coronation, principally, if not entirely, by Shirley.[142]
As in the 1647 folio, the only indication of
respective authorship is to be found in occasional dedications,
prefaces, prologues and epilogues. But,
while in some half-dozen instances these name Fletcher
correctly as author, and, in two or three, by implication
correctly designate him or Beaumont, in other
cases the indication is wrong or misleading. Where
"our poets" are vaguely mentioned, or no hint whatever
is given, the uncritical reader is led to ascribe the
play to the joint composition of Beaumont and
Fletcher. The lists of actors prefixed to several of
the dramas afford valuable information concerning
date and, sometimes, authorship to the student of
stage-history; but the credulous would carry away the
impression that Beaumont and Fletcher had collaborated
equally in about forty of the fifty-three plays
contained in the folio of 1679.
The uncertainty regarding the respective shares of
the two authors in the production of this large number
of dramas and, consequently, regarding the quality
of the genius of each, commenced even during the
life of Fletcher who survived his friend by nine years,
and it has continued in some fashion down to the
present time. Writing an elegy "on Master Beaumont,
presently after his death,"[143] that is to say, in[230]
1616-17, John Earle, a precocious youth of sixteen,
at Christ Church, Oxford, is so occupied with lament
and praise for "the poet so quickly taken off" that
he not only ascribes to him the whole of Philaster and
The Maides Tragedy (in both of which it was always
known that Fletcher had a share) but omits mention
of Fletcher altogether. So far, however, as the estimate
of the peculiar genius of Beaumont goes, the
judgment of young Earle has rarely been surpassed.
Oh, when I read those excellent things of thine,
Such Strength, such sweetnesse, coucht in every line,
Such life of Fancy, such high choise of braine,—
Nought of the Vulgar mint or borrow'd straine,
Such Passion, such expressions meet my eye,
Such Wit untainted with obscenity,
And these so unaffectedly exprest,
But all in a pure flowing language drest,
So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon,
And all so borne within thyself, thine owne,
I grieve not now that old Menanders veine
Is ruin'd, to survive in thee againe.
The succeeding exaltation of his idol above Plautus
and Aristophanes, nay even Chaucer, is of a generous
extravagance, but the lad lays his finger on the real
Beaumont when he calls attention to "those excellent
things;" and to the histrionic quality, the high seriousness,
the "humours" and the perennial vitality
of Beaumont's contribution to dramatic poetry.
A year or so later, and still during Fletcher's lifetime,
we find Drummond of Hawthornden confusing[231]
in his turn the facts of authorship; for he "reports
Jonson as saying that 'Flesher and Beaumont, ten
years since, hath written The Faithfull Shipheardesse,
a tragicomedie well done,'—whereas both Jonson
and Beaumont had already addressed lines to
Fletcher in commendation of his pastoral."[144] By
1647, as Miss Hatcher has shown, the confusion had
crystallized itself into three distinct opinions, equally
false, concerning the respective contribution of the
authors to the plays loosely accredited to their partnership.
These opinions are represented in the commendatory
verses prefixed to the first folio. One was
that "they were equal geniuses fused into one by the
force of perfect congeniality and not to be distinguished
from each other in their work,"—thus put
into epigram by Sir George Lisle:
For still your fancies are so wov'n and knit,
'T was Francis Fletcher or John Beaumont writ;
and repeated by Sir John Pettus:
How Angels (cloyster'd in our humane Cells)
Maintaine their parley, Beaumont-Fletcher tels:
Whose strange, unimitable Intercourse
Transcends all Rules.
A second, the dominant view in 1647, was that "the
plays were to be accredited to Fletcher alone, since
Beaumont was not to be taken into serious account
in explaining their production." This opinion is expressed
by Waller, who, referring not only to the
plays of that folio (in only two of which Beaumont[232]
appears) but to others like The Maides Tragedy and
The Scornful Ladie in which, undoubtedly, Beaumont
coöperated, says:
Fletcher, to thee wee do not only owe
All these good Playes, but those of others, too; ...
No Worthies form'd by any Muse but thine,
Could purchase Robes to make themselves so fine;
and by Hills, who writes,—"upon the Ever-to-be-admired
Mr. John Fletcher and his Playes,"—
"Fletcher, the King of Poets! such was he,
That earn'd all tribute, claim'd all soveraignty."
The third view was—still to follow Miss Hatcher—that
"Fletcher was the genius and creator in the work,
and Beaumont merely the judicial and regulative
force." Cartwright in his two poems of 1647, as I
have already pointed out, emphasizes this view:
Though when all Fletcher writ, and the entire
Man was indulged unto that sacred fire,
His thoughts and his thoughts dresse appeared both such
That 't was his happy fault to do too much;
Who therefore wisely did submit each birth
To knowing Beaumont ere it did come forth;
Working againe, until he said 't was fit
And made him the sobriety of his wit;
Though thus he call'd his Judge into his fame,
And for that aid allow'd him halfe the name,
'T is knowne that sometimes he did stand alone,
That both the Spunge and Pencill were his owne;
That himselfe judged himselfe, could singly do,
And was at last Beaumont and Fletcher too.
[233]
A similar view is implied by Dryden, when, in his
Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668, he attributes the
regularity of their joint-plots to Beaumont's influence;
and reports that even "Ben Jonson while he lived
submitted all his writings to his censure, and 'tis
thought used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving,
all his plots."
This tradition of Fletcher as creator and Beaumont
as critic continued for generations, only occasionally
disturbed,[145] in spite of the testimony of Cockayne to
Fletcher's sole authorship of most of the plays in
the first folio, to the coöperation of Massinger with
Fletcher in some, and to the fact that there were
enough plays not here included, written conjointly
by Beaumont and Fletcher, to warrant the publication
of a separate volume, properly ascribed to both. To
the mistaken attributions of authorship by Dryden,
Rymer, and others, I make reference in my forthcoming
Essay on The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare,
Part Two.[146] The succeeding history of opinion
through Langbaine, Collier, Theobald, Sympson
and Seward, Chalmers, Brydges, The Biographia Dramatica,
Cibber, Malone, Darley, Dyce, and the purely
literary critics from Lamb to Swinburne, has been
admirably outlined by Miss Hatcher in the first chapter
of her dissertation on the Dramatic Method of John
Fletcher.
With Fleay, in 1874, began the scientific analysis[234]
of the problem, based upon metrical tests as derived
from the investigation of the individual verse of
Fletcher, Massinger, and Beaumont. His method has
been elaborated, corrected, and supplemented by additional
rhetorical and literary tests, on the part of
various critics, some of whom are mentioned below.[147]
The more detailed studies in metre and style are by
R. Boyle, G. C. Macaulay, and E. H. Oliphant; and the
best brief comparative view of their conclusions as regards
Beaumont's contribution is to be found in R. M. Alden's
edition of The Knight of the Burning Pestle
and A King and No King. To the chronology of the
plays serviceable introductions are afforded by Macaulay
in the list appended to his chapter in the sixth
volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature,
and by A. H. Thorndike in his Influence of Beaumont
and Fletcher upon Shakespeare.
Concerning the authorship of the successive scenes[235]
in a few of the plays undoubtedly written in partnership
by Beaumont and Fletcher a consensus of opinion
has practically been reached. Concerning others,
especially those in which a third or fourth hand may
be traced, the difference of opinion is still bewildering.
This divergence is due, perhaps, to the proneness of
the critic to emphasize one or more tests out of relation
to the rest, or to forget that though individual scenes
were undertaken now by one, now by the other of the
colleagues, the play as a whole would be usually
planned by both, but any individual scene or passage
revised by either. The tests of external evidence have
of course been applied by all critics, but as to events
and dates there is still variety of opinion. Of the
internal criteria, those based upon the peculiarities of
each partner in respect of versification have been so
carefully studied and applied that to repeat the operation
seems like threshing very ancient straw; but to
accept the winnowings of others, however careful, is
unsatisfactory. Tests of rhetorical habit and tectonic
preference have also been, in general, attempted; but
not, I think, exhaustively. And, though much has
been established, and availed of, in analysis, there remains
yet something to desire in the application of the
more subtle differentiæ yielded by such preliminary
methods of investigation,—what these differentiæ
teach us concerning the temperamental idiosyncrasies
of each of the partners in scope and method of observation,
in poetic imagery, in moral and emotional insight
and elevation, intellectual outlook, philosophical
and religious conviction.
[236]
CHAPTER XVII
THE DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD
The plays contained in the first folio of Beaumont
and Fletcher's Comedies and Tragedies, 1647,
are The Mad Lover, The Spanish Curate, The Little
French Lawyer, The Custome of the Countrey, The
Noble Gentleman, The Captaine, The Beggers Bush,
The Coxcombe, The False One, The Chances, The
Loyall Subject, The Lawes of Candy, The Lovers
Progresse, The Island Princesse, The Humorous Lieutenant,
The Nice Valour, The Maide in the Mill, The
Prophetesse, The Tragedy of Bonduca, The Sea Voyage,
The Double Marriage, The Pilgrim, The Knight
of Malta, The Womans Prize or The Tamer Tamed,
Loves Cure, The Honest Mans Fortune, The Queene
of Corinth, Women Pleas'd, A Wife for a Moneth,
Wit at Severall Weapons, The Tragedy of Valentinian,
The Faire Maide of the Inne, Loves Pilgrimage, The
Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes Inne, and the
Inner Temple, at the Marriage of the Prince and
Princesse Palatine of Rhene written by Francis Beaumont,
Gentleman, Foure Playes (or Moralle Representations)
in One.
Of these thirty-five, which purport to be printed
from "the authours originall copies," only one, as I
have already said, The Maske, had been published before.[237]
The second folio, entitled Fifty Comedies and Tragedies,
1679, contains, beside those above mentioned,
eighteen others, one of which, The Wild-Goose Chase,
had been published separately and in folio, 1652. The
remaining seventeen said to be "published from the
Authors' Original Copies," are printed from the quartos.
They are The Maides Tragedy, Philaster, A King
and No King, The Scornful Ladie, The Elder Brother,
Wit Without Money, The Faithfull Shepheardesse,
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Monsieur Thomas,
Rollo, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Night-Walker,
The Coronation, Cupids Revenge, The Two
Noble Kinsmen, Thierry and Theodoret, and The
Woman-Hater.
In addition to these fifty-three plays, one, The Faithful
Friends, entered on the Stationers' Registers in
1660, as by Beaumont and Fletcher, was held in manuscript
until 1812, when it was purchased by Weber
from "Mr. John Smith of Furnival's Inn into whose
possession it came from Mr. Theobald, nephew to the
editor of Shakespeare," and published.
According to the broadest possible sweep of modern
opinion, the presence of Beaumont cannot by any tour
de force be conjectured in more than twenty-three of
the fifty-four productions listed above. The twenty-three
are (exclusive of The Maske) The Woman-Hater,
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Cupids
Revenge, The Scornful Ladie, The Maides Tragedy,
A King and No King, Philaster, Foure Playes in One,
Loves Cure, The Coxcombe, The Captaine, Thierry
and Theodoret, The Faithful Friends, Wit at Severall
Weapons, Beggers Bush, Loves Pilgrimage,[238] The
Knight of Malta, The Lawes of Candy, The Nice Valour,
The Noble Gentleman, The Faire Maide of the
Inne, Bonduca, and The Honest Mans Fortune. With
regard to the last twelve of these plays beginning with
Thierry and Theodoret there is no convincing proof
that more than the first four were written before
February 1613, when after preparing the Maske for
the Lady Elizabeth's marriage to the Elector Palatine,
Beaumont seems (except for his share of The Scornful
Ladie which I date about 1614) to have withdrawn
from dramatic activity,—perhaps because of his own
marriage about that time and withdrawal to the country,
or because of failing health; and there is no generally
accepted historical or textual evidence that
Beaumont had any hand even in these four. Of the
eight remaining at the end of the list, four may be
dated before Beaumont's death in 1616: The Honest
Mans Fortune, which is said on manuscript evidence
to have been played in the year 1613, but probably
later than August 5;[148] Bonduca, which Oliphant asserts
is an alteration by Fletcher of an old drama of
Beaumont's, but which other authorities assign to
Fletcher alone; and, on slighter evidence, Loves Pilgrimage,
and The Nice Valour. The balance of proof
with regard to the other four, The Knight of Malta,
The Lawes of Candy, The Noble Gentleman, and The
Faire Maide of the Inne, is altogether in favour of
their composition after Beaumont's death.
In each of these twelve plays, however, beginning
with Thierry and ending with The Honest Mans Fortune,[239]
an occasional expert thinks that he finds a speech
or a scene in Beaumont's style, and concludes that the
play in its present form is a revision of some early
effort in which that dramatist had a hand. But where
one critic surmises Beaumont, another detects Beaumont's
imitators; and where one conjectures Fletcher
and Beaumont conjoined, half a dozen assert Fletcher,
assisted, or revised by anywhere from one to four
contemporaries,—Field or Daborne or Massinger,
Middleton or Rowley, or First and Second Unknown.
I have examined these plays and the evidence, as
carefully as I have those which have more claim to
consideration among the Beaumont possibilities, and
have applied to them all the tests which I shall presently
describe; and have come to the conclusion that
Beaumont had nothing to do with any of the twelve.
There remain, then, of the twenty-three plays enumerated
above as Beaumont-Fletcher possibilities, only
eleven of which I can, on the basis of external or
internal evidence, or both, safely say that they were
composed before Beaumont ceased writing for the
stage, and that he had, or may have had, a hand in
writing some of them. These are, in the order of their
first appearance in print: The Woman-Hater, published
without name of author in 1607; The Knight
of the Burning Pestle, also anonymous, published in
1613; Cupids Revenge, published as Fletcher's in 1615;
The Scornful Ladie, published in 1616, as Beaumont
and Fletcher's, just after the death of the former; The
Maides Tragedy, published, without names of authors,
in 1619; A King and No King, published as Beaumont
and Fletcher's in 1619; Philaster, published as Beaumont[240]
and Fletcher's in 1620; and Foure Playes in
One, Loves Cure, The Coxcombe, and The Captaine,
first published in the 1647 folio, without ascription of
authorship on the title-page, but as of the "Comedies
and Tragedies written by Beaumont and Fletcher," in
general. In the case of Loves Cure the Epilogue mentions
"our Author"; the Prologue, spoken "at the
reviving of this play," attributes it to Beaumont and
Fletcher. As for The Coxcombe, the Prologue for a
revival speaks of "the makers that confest it for
their own."
It is worthy of notice that three only of these eleven
possible "Beaumont-Fletcher" plays were printed
during Beaumont's lifetime,—The Woman-Hater,
The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Cupids Revenge,
and that on none of them does Beaumont's
name appear as author. The last indeed was ascribed,
wrongly, as I shall later show, to Fletcher alone. It
should also be noted that four other of the plays, beginning
with The Scornful Ladie and ending with
Philaster, were published before the death of Fletcher
in 1625; and that while three of them have title-page
ascriptions to both authors, one, The Maides Tragedy,
is anonymous.
To these eleven plays as a residuum I have given
the preference in the application of tests deemed most
likely to reveal the relative contribution and genius
of the authors in partnership. Beside the seven published
as stated above during Fletcher's life, two others
appeared which I do not include in this residuum,—The
Faithfull Shepheardesse and Thierry and
Theodoret. The former, printed between December[241]
22, 1608 and July 20, 1609, is of Fletcher's sole authorship,
and will be employed as one of the clues to
his early characteristics. The latter, attributed by
some critics to both authors was published without ascription
of authorship in a quarto of 1621. It does
not appear in the folio of 1647, but was printed in second
quarto as "by John Fletcher" in 1648, and again
as "by F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher" in 1649; and
was finally gathered up with the Comedies and Tragedies
which compose the folio of 1679. Oliphant and
Thorndike are of opinion that the play is a revision by
Massinger of an original by Beaumont and Fletcher,
but I cannot discover in the text evidence sufficient to
warrant its inclusion in the list of plays worthy to be investigated
as the possible product of the partnership.
The eleven Beaumont-Fletcher plays to which the
criteria of internal evidence may be applied with some
assurance of success, comprise in their number, fortunately
for us, three of which we are informed by
external evidence,—the contemporary testimony of
John Earle, dated 1616-1617,—that Beaumont was
concerned in their composition. These three, Philaster,
The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King,
are a positive residuum to which as a model of the
joint-work of our authors we may first, in the effort
to discriminate their respective functions when working
in partnership, apply the tests of style derived from a
study of the plays and poems which each wrote alone.
With this delimitation of the field of inquiry, we
are now ready for the consideration of the criteria
by which the presence of either author may be detected.
The criteria are primarily of versification; then, successively[242]
and cumulatively, of diction and mental
habit. Ultimately, and by induction, they are of dramatic
technique and creative genius.
[243]
CHAPTER XVIII
THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF BEAUMONT
I. In Plays Individually Composed.
The studies of the most experienced critics into the
peculiarities of Fletcher's blank verse as displayed
in productions of the popular dramatic kind,
indubitably written by him alone,[149] such as Monsieur
Thomas of the earlier period, ending 1613, The
Chances, The Loyall Subject, and The Humorous
Lieutenant of the middle period, ending 1619, and
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife of his latest period, indicate
that he indulges in an excessive use of double
endings, sometimes as many as seventy in every hundred
lines, even in triple and quadruple endings; in an
abundance of trisyllabic feet; and in a peculiar retention
of the old end-stopped line, or final pause,—occasionally
in as many as ninety out of a hundred lines.
Attention has been directed also to the emphasis
which he deliberately places upon the extra syllable
of the blank verse, making it a substantive rather
than a negligible factor: as in the "brains" and "too"
of the following:
Or wander after that they know not where
To find? or, if found how to enjoy? Are men's brains
[244]
Made nowadays of malt, that their affections
Are never sober, but, like drunken people
Founder at every new fame? I do believe, too,
That men in love are ever drunk, as drunken men
Are ever loving,—[150]
and to his fondness for appending words such as
"first," "then," "there," "still," "sir," and even
"lady" and "gentlemen" to lines which already possess
their five feet. It has also been remarked that
he makes but infrequent employment of rhyme.
Of this metrical style examples will be found on
pages in Chapter XIX, Section 2, below; or on any
page of Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, as
for instance the following from Act III, Scene 1,
14-23:
Altea. My life|, an in|nocent|!
Marg. That's it | I aim | at,
That's it | I hope | too; ¦ then ¦ I am sure | I rule | him;15
For in|nocents | are like | obe|dient chil|dren
Brought up | under a hard | ^ moth|er-in-law|, a cru|el,
Who be|ing not us'd | to break|fasts and | colla|tions,
^ When | they have coarse | bread of|fer'd 'em | are thank|full,
And take | it for | a fa|vour too|. Are the rooms |20
Made read|y to en|tertain | my friends|? I long | to dance now,
^ And | to be wan|ton. ¦ Let | me have | a song.
Is the great | couch up | the Duke | of Medi|na sent?
[245]
Here the first half of v. 14 is also the last of the preceding
line; seven out of ten verses have double endings;
one has a triple ending. One, v. 21, has a quadruple
ending; unless we rearrange by adding "made
ready" to v. 20, so as to scan:
And take 't | for a fa|vour too|. Are the rooms | made read|y
To en|tertain | my friends|? I long | to dance | now.—
Trisyllabic feet occur in nine; final pauses in nine;
stress-syllable openings and compensating anapæsts in
two; the feminine cæsura (phrasal pause within the
foot) in two. The pause in v. 15, after two strong
monosyllables of which the first is stressed, produces
a jolt, typically Fletcherian.
JOHN EARLE, BISHOP OF WORCESTER AND SALISBURY
From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
Now, these peculiarities of versification are not a
habit acquired by Fletcher after Beaumont ceased to
write with him. They are rife not only in the plays
of his middle and later periods, but in those of the
earlier period while Beaumont was still at his side.
As for instance in Monsieur Thomas, entirely Fletcher's
of 1607, or at the latest 1611. The reader may
be interested to verify for himself by scanning the
following passage from Act IV, 2 at which I open
at random: Launcelot is speaking:
But to the silent streets we turn'd our furies:
A sleeping watchman here we stole the shooes from,
There made a noise, at which he wakes, and follows:
The streets are durty, takes a Queen-hithe cold,
Hard cheese, and that choaks him o' Munday next:
Windows and signs we sent to Erebus;
A crew of bawling curs we entertain'd last,
[246]
When having let the pigs loose in out parishes,
O, the brave cry we made as high as Algate!
Down comes a Constable, and the Sow his Sister
Most traiterously tramples upon Authority:
There a whole stand of rug gowns rowted mainly,
And the King's peace put to flight, a purblind pig here
Runs me his head into the Admirable Lanthorn,—
Out goes the light and all turns to confusion.
No one, once acquainted with this style of blank verse,
with its end-stopped lines, double endings, stress-syllable
openings, feminine cæsuræ, trisyllabic feet, jolts,
and heavy extra syllables, can ever turn it to confusion
with the verse of any poet before Browning—certainly
not with that of Beaumont.
Our materials for a study of Beaumont's individual
characteristics in the composition of dramatic blank
verse appear at the first sight to be very scanty; for
the only example of which we have positive external
evidence that it was written by Beaumont alone, is
The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes Inne and the
Inner Temple, and unfortunately some critics have excluded
it from consideration because of its exceptionally
formal and spectacular character and slight dramatic
purpose. Written, however, at the beginning
of 1613, when the author's metrical manner was a
definitely confirmed habit, it affords, in my opinion,
the best as well as the most natural approach to the
investigation of Beaumont's versification. The following
lines may be regarded as typical:
Is great Jove jealous that I am imploy'd
On her Love-errands? ¦ She did never yet
[247]
Claspe weak mortality in her white arms,
As he hath often done: I only come
To celebrate the long-wish'd Nuptials
^ Here | in Olym|pia, ¦ which | are now | perform'd.
Betwixt two goodly rivers, ¦ that have mixt
Their gentle, rising waves, and are to grow
^ In | to a thou|sand streams | ^ great | as themselves.
In these nine verses there are no Fletcherian jolts, no
double endings. In only two lines trisyllabic feet
occur; in only two, final pauses. There are stress-syllable
openings in two, with the compensating anapæsts;
feminine cæsuræ, in three (dotted); and a stress-syllable
opening for the verse-section after the cæsura occurs
in but one, whereas there are at least three such in
the passage from Monsieur Thomas, quoted above.
Nothing could be more pronounced than the difference
between the metrical style of Fletcher's Monsieur
Thomas and Rule a Wife and that of Beaumont's
Maske, as illustrated here. Fletcher abounds in
double endings, trisyllabic feet, and end-stopped lines,
and such conversational or lyrical cadences; Beaumont
uses them much more sparingly. But while the
difference between the genuinely dramatic blank verse
of Fletcher and that of Beaumont is sometimes as pronounced
as this, it would be unscientific to base the
criterion upon comparison of a mature, conversationally
dramatic, composition of the former with a
stiffly rhetorical declamatory composition of the latter.
For a more suitable comparison we must set Beaumont's
Maske side by side with something of Fletcher's
written in similar formal and declamatory style,—The
Faithfull Shepheardesse, for instance, a youthful[248]
production in the pastoral spirit and form. Of this
a small part, but sufficient for our purpose, is composed
in blank verse; and I have cited in the next chapter
with another end in view, the opening soliloquy,—to
which the reader may turn. But as exemplifying
certain of Fletcher's metrical peculiarities, in a style of
verse suitable to be compared with Beaumont's in The
Maske, the following lines from Act I, 1, are perhaps
even more distinctive. "What greatness," says
the Shepherdesse,—
What greatness, ¦ or what private hidden power,
^ Is | there in me, | to draw submission
From this rude man and beast? Sure I am mortal,105
The Daughter of a Shepherd; ¦ he was mortal,
And she that bore me mortal: ¦ prick my hand,
And it will bleed; a Feaver shakes me, and
The self-same wind that makes the young Lambs shrink
Makes me | a-cold; | my fear says I am mortal.110
^ Yet have I heard | (my Mother told it me,
And now I do believe it), ¦ if I keep
My Virgin Flower uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair,
No Goblin, ¦ Wood-god, Fairy, Elf, or Fiend,
^ Sa|tyr, or oth|er power that haunts the Groves,115
Shall hurt my body, ¦ or by vain illusion
^ Draw | me to wan|der ¦ after idle fires.
We have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings,
nine final pauses (end-stopped verses), four stress-syllable
openings with compensating anapæsts, and
seven feminine cæsuræ. In every way this sample
even of Fletcher's more formal style displays, in its
salient characteristics, a much closer resemblance in[249]
kind to the sample of his later blank verse quoted
from Rule a Wife, above, than to that quoted from
Beaumont's Maske.
When we pass from samples to larger sections, and
compare percentages in the one hundred and thirty-one
blank verses of The Maske and the first one hundred
and sixty-three of The Shepheardesse, we find
that in respect of final pauses there is no great difference.
There are, in the former, more than is usual
with Beaumont—sixty per cent; in the latter, less
than is usual with Fletcher—fifty per cent. But in
other respects Beaumont's Maske reveals peculiarities
of verse altogether different from those of Fletcher,
even when he is writing in the declamatory pastoral
vein. In the one hundred and thirty-one lines of the
Maske we find but one double ending; whereas in
the first one hundred and sixty-three blank verses of
The Shepheardesse we count as many as fourteen. In
these productions the proportion of feminine cæsuræ
is practically uniform—about forty per cent. But
when we come to examine the more subtle movement
of the rhythm, we find that in The Maske not more
than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-syllable,
while in the blank verse of the Shepheardesse
fully thirty-five out of every hundred lines have that
opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical cadence
which pervades much of Fletcher's metrical composition.
In the matter of anapæstic substitutions, and
of stress-syllable openings for the verse-section after
the cæsura, Beaumont is similarly inelastic; while
the Fletcher of the Shepheardesse displays a marvellous
freedom. It follows that in the Maske we[250]
encounter but rarely the rhetorical pause, within the
verse, compensating for an absent thesis or arsis; while
in the pastoral verse of Fletcher we find frequent instances
of this delicate dramatic as well as metrical
device, and an occasional jolting cæsura.
We are not limited, however, to the material afforded
by the Maske in our attempt to discover Beaumont's
metrical characteristics when writing alone.
The Woman-Hater, included among the plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher in the folio of 1679, and
ascribed to both on the title-page of a quarto of 1649,
is assigned by the Prologue of the first quarto, 1607,
to a single author—"he that made this play." And,
though there is no attribution of authorship on the
title-page of the 1607 quarto, we know from the application
of verse-tests and tests of diction that, in all
but three scenes which have evidently been revised,[151]
the author was certainly not Fletcher. An examination
of the inner structure of the verse of The Woman-Hater,
reveals, except in those scenes, precisely the
peculiarities that distinguish Beaumont's Maske: the
same infrequency of stress-syllable openings, and of
anapæstic substitutions and of suppressed syllables
in metrical scheme. In respect of the more evident
device of the run-on line The Woman-Hater reaches
a percentage twice as high as that employed in
Fletcher's unassisted popular dramas; and in respect
of the double ending it has a percentage only one-quarter
as high. We notice also in this play a much
more frequent employment of rhyme than in any of[251]
Fletcher's stage plays, and a much larger proportion
of prose both for dialogue and soliloquy.
We should have further basis for conclusion concerning
Beaumont's metrical style in independent composition,
if we could accept the general assumption
that he was the author of the Induction to the Foure
Playes in One, and of the first two plays, The Triumph
of Honour and The Triumph of Love. But for reasons,
later to be stated, I agree with Oliphant that the
Induction and Honour are not by Beaumont; and I
hold that he can not be traced with certainty even in
the two or three scenes of Love that seem to be
marked by some of his characteristics. The hand of
a third writer, Field, is manifest in the non-Fletcherian
plays of the series.
But though we can not draw for our purpose upon
other plays as his unassisted work, we may derive help
from the consideration of two at least of Beaumont's
poems,—poems that have something of a dramatic
flavour. Though they are in rhyming couplets, they
display many of the characteristics of the author's
blank verse. In the Letter to Ben Jonson, which is
conversational, I count of run-on lines, thirty-eight in
eighty, almost fifty per cent, as compared with Fletcher's
sometimes ten or twenty per cent, in spite of the
superior elasticity of blank verse; and of stress-syllable
openings in the same letter twenty-four per cent
as compared with the thirty-five per cent of Fletcher's
more highly cadenced rhythm in the Shepheardesse.
In Beaumont's Elegy on the Countess of Rutland,
the last forty-four lines afford a fine example of dramatic
fervour—the indictment of the physicians.[252]
Here the run-on lines again abound, almost fifty per
cent; while the stress-syllable openings are but sixteen
per cent—much lower than one may find in
many rhymed portions of the Shepheardesse. With
regard to all other tests except that of double ending
(which does not apply in this kind of heroic
couplet), we find that these poems of Beaumont are
of a metrical style distinguished by the same characteristics
as his blank verse.[152]
2. In Certain Joint-Plays.
If we turn now to a second class of material available,—the
three plays indubitably produced in partnership,—and
eliminate the portions written in the
metrical style of Fletcher, as already ascertained, we
may safely attribute the remainder to the junior member
of the firm; and so arrive at a final determination
of his manner in verse composition.
The three plays, as I have said before, are Philaster,
The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King. A
passage, which in the opinion of nearly all critics[153] is
by all tests distinctively Fletcherian, may be cited
from the first of these as an example of that which
we eliminate when we look for Beaumont. It is from
the beginning of Act V, 4, where the Captain enters:
"Philaster, brave Philaster!" Let Philas|ter
Be deeper in request, my ding [a] dongs,
[253]
My paires of deere Indentures, ¦ Kings of Clubs,
^ Than | your cold wa|ter-cham|blets ¦ or | your paint|ings
^ Spit|ted with cop|per, ¦ Let | not your has|ty Silkes,10
^ Or | your branch'd cloth | of bod|kin, ¦ or | your ti|shues,—
^ Deare|ly belov'd | of spi|cèd cake | and cus|tards,—
Your Rob|in-hoods, |^ Scar|lets and Johns, |^ tye | your affec|tions
In darknesse to your Shops. No, dainty duc|kers,
^ Up | with your three|-piled spi|rits, ¦ your | wrought va|lors.15
And let | your un|cut col|lers ¦ make | the King feele
The measure of your mightinesse, Philas|ter![154]
Note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the
stress-syllable openings, the anapæsts, the feminine
cæsuræ (dotted), the two omissions of the light syllable
after the cæsural pause and the following accent at
the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of
line 13.
Of the non-Fletcherian part of Philaster, a typical
example is the following from Act I, Scene 2, where
Philaster replies to Arethusa's request that he look
away from her:
I can indure it: Turne away my face?
I never yet saw enemy that lookt
So dreadfully but that I thought my selfe
As great a Basiliske as he; or spake
So horrible but that I thought my tongue
[254]
Bore thunder underneath, as much as his,
Nor beast that I could turne from: shall I then
Beginne to feare sweete sounds? a ladies voyce,
Whom I doe love? Say, you would have my life;
Why, I will give it you; for it is of me
A thing so loath'd, and unto you that aske
Of so poore use, that I shall make no price.
If you intreate, I will unmov'dly heare.
Or the famous description of Bellario, beginning:
I have a boy,
Sent by the gods, I hope to this intent,
Not yet seen in the court—
from the same scene.
Or the King's soliloquy in Act II, Scene 4, containing
the lines:
You gods, I see that who unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be curst
In that which meaner men are blest withall:
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth.
The reader will at once be impressed with the regularity
of the masculine ending. Beaumont does not,
of course, eschew the double ending; but, as Boyle
has computed, the percentage in this play is but fifteen
in the non-Fletcherian passages, whereas the percentage
in Fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. The prevalence
of run-on lines is also noteworthy; and the
infrequency of the stress-syllable openings, anapæsts,
and feminine cæsuræ by which Fletcher achieves now
conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt.[255]
In The Maides Tragedy, such soliloquies as that of
Aspatia in Act V, Scene 4, with its mixture of blank
verse and rhyme:
This is my fatal hour; heaven may forgive
My rash attempt, that causelessly hath laid
Griefs on me that will never let me rest,
And put a Woman's heart into my brest.
It is more honour for you that I die;
For she that can endure the misery
That I have on me, and be patient too,
May live, and laugh at all that you can do—
are marked by characteristics utterly unlike those of
Fletcher's dramatic verse. Also unlike Fletcher are
the scenes which abound in lines of weak and light
ending, and lines where the lighter syllables of every
word must be counted to make full measure. Fletcher
did not write:
Alas, Amintor, thinkst thou I forbear
To sleep with thee because I have put on
A maidens strictness;
or
As mine own conscience too sensible;—
I must live scorned, or be a murderer;—
That trust out all our reputation.
Nor did Fletcher write, with any frequency, improper
run-on lines, such as III, 2, 135 (one of his
collaborator's scenes):[256]
Speak yet again, before mine anger grow
Up beyond throwing down.
In this play the percentage of run-on lines in
Fletcher's scenes is about nineteen; in the scenes not
written by him, almost twenty-seven. Fletcher's
double endings are over forty per cent; his collaborator's
barely ten.
In A King and No King similar Beaumontesque
characteristics distinguish the major portion of the
play from the few scenes generally acknowledged to
be written by Fletcher. In Fletcher's scenes[155] one
notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings,
and, consequently, of anapæstic substitutions,
the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not
infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after
the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the
beginning of the verse-section. While sometimes
these characteristics appear in the other parts of the
play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature
of the non-Fletcherian rhythm. A comparison of the
verse of Fletcher's Act IV, Scene 2, with that of his
collaborator in Act I, Scene 1, well illustrates this
difference. The recurrence of the feminine cæsura
measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers.
It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines; but of his
collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for instance,
wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the
second scene of Act IV:
^ Fool | that I am, | I have | undone | myself,
^ And | with mine own | hand ¦ turn'd | my for|tune round,
[257]
That was | a fair | one: ¦ I have child|ishly
^ Plaid | with my hope | so long, till I have broke | it,
And now too late I mourn for 't, ¦ O | Spaco|nia,
Thou hast found | an e|ven way | to thy | revenge | now!
^ Why | didst thou fol|low me, |^ like | a faint shad|ow,
To wither my desires? But, wretched fool,
^ Why | did I plant | thee ¦ 'twixt | the sun | and me,
To make | me freeze | thus? ¦ Why | did I | prefer | her
^ To | the fair Prin|cess? ¦ O | thou fool, | thou fool,
Thou family of fools, |^ live | like a slave | still
And in | thee bear | thine own |^ hell | and thy tor|ment,—
where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped
lines, already emphasized in preceding examples,
we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-syllable
openings with their anapæstic sequences, three
omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause
with the consequent accent at the beginning of the
verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine cæsuræ
(or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three
at least (vv. 2, 5, 10) are exaggerated jolts.
Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for
instance, Arbaces' speech beginning Act I, 1, 105, of
lines rippling with as many feminine cæsuræ. But,
utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen
of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only
two stress-syllable openings, only four anapæsts, one
omitted thesis after the cæsural pause, four end-stopped
lines. He is more frequently capable, as in[258]
the passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a
single feminine cæsura, but with several feminine (or
double) endings:
Tigranes. Is it the course of
Iberia, to use their prisoners thus?
Had Fortune throwne my name above Arbaces,
I should not thus have talkt; for in Armenia
We hold it base. You should have kept your temper,
Till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashion
Perhaps to brag.
Arbaces. Bee you my witness, Earth,
Need I to brag? Doth not this captive prince
Speake me sufficiently, and all the acts
That I have wrought upon his suffering land?
Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of ground
Within | his whole | realme ¦ that | I have | not past
Fighting and conquering?[156]
Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting
pause the cæsuræ are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly
at the end of the second and third feet.
In respect of the internal structure of the verse the
tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them
above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oliphant
have set the percentage in his verse at about
twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical
characteristics of those parts of Philaster, The
Maides Tragedy and A King and No King which do
not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are
well defined and practically uniform; since they are of
a piece with the metrical manner of The Woman-Hater,
which is originally, and in general, the work[259]
of one author—Beaumont; and since they are also
of a piece with the versification of the Maske, which
is certainly by Beaumont alone, and with that of his
best poems,—at least one criterion has been established
by means of which we may ascertain what other plays,
ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less
definite evidence, were written in partnership; and
in these we may have a basis for determining the
parts contributed by each of the authors.
Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional
criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of
Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose.
They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of
the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in
his later development Fletcher found that conversational
blank verse would answer all the purposes of
prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration
with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find,
on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages
in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics
of verse, display precisely the rhetorical
qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in
Act IV, Scene 2 of A King and No King, and the
prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical
tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's
Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of
Philaster, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and
iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same
scenes.
[260]
CHAPTER XIX
FLETCHER'S DICTION
The verse criterion is, however, not of itself a reagent
sufficient to precipitate fully the Beaumont
of the joint-plays. For there still exists the certainty
that in plotting plays together, each of the collaborators
was influenced by the opinion of the other; and
the probability that, though one may have undertaken
sundry scenes or divers characters in a play, the other
would, in the course of general correction, insert
lines in the parts written by his collaborator, and
would convey to his own scenes the distinguishing
rhythm, "humour," or diction of a definite character,
created, or elaborated, by his colleague. It, therefore,
follows that the assignment of a whole scene to
either author on the basis alone of some recurring
metrical peculiarity is not convincing. In the same
section, even in the same speech, we may encounter
insertions which bear the stamp of the revising colleague.
For instance, the opening of Philaster is
generally assigned to Beaumont: it has the characteristics
of his prose. But with the entry of the
King (line 89) we are launched upon a subscene in
verse which, on the one hand, has a higher percentage
of double endings (viz. 38) than Beaumont ever
used, but does not fully come up to Fletcher's usage;[261]
while on the other hand, it has a higher percentage of
run-on lines[157] (viz. 44) than Fletcher ever used.
The other verse tests leave us similarly in doubt. To
any one, however, familiar with the diction and characterization
of the two authors the suspicion occurs
that the scene was written by Beaumont in the first
instance; and then worked over and considerably
enlarged by his associate. In the first hundred lines
of Act II, Scene 4, similar insertions by Fletcher
occur, and in Act III, 2.[158]
Such being the case we may expect that an inquiry
into the rhetorical peculiarities and mental habit, first
of Fletcher, then of Beaumont, will furnish tests corrective
of the criterion based upon versification.
1. Fletcher's Diction in The Faithfull Shepheardesse.
Though rather poetic than dramatic, and composed
only partly in blank verse, The Faithfull Shepheardesse
affords the best approach to a study of Fletcher's
rhetoric; for, written about 1608 and by Fletcher
alone, it illustrates his youthful style in the period
probably shortly before he collaborated with Beaumont
in the composition of Philaster.
The soliloquy of Clorin, with which The Faithfull
Shepheardesse opens, runs as follows:
Hail, holy Earth, whose cold Arms do imbrace
The truest man that ever fed his flocks
By the fat plains of fruitful Thessaly!
Thus I salute thy Grave; thus do I pay
[262]
My early vows and tribute of mine eyes5
To thy still-loved ashes; thus I free
Myself from all insuing heats and fires
Of love; all sports, delights, and [jolly] games,
That shepherds hold full dear, thus put I off:
Now no more shall these smooth brows be [be] girt10
With youthful Coronals, and lead the Dance;
No more the company of fresh fair Maids
And wanton Shepherds be to me delightful,
Nor the shrill pleasing sound of merry pipes
Under some shady dell, when the cool wind15
Plays on the leaves; all be far away,
Since thou art far away, by whose dear side
How often have I sat Crowned with fresh flowers
For summers Queen, whilst every Shepherds boy
Puts on his lusty green, with gaudy hook20
And hanging scrip of finest Cordovan.
But thou art gone, and these are gone with thee
And all are dead but thy dear memorie;
That shall out-live thee, and shall ever spring,
Whilst there are pipes or jolly Shepherds sing.25
And here will I, in honour of thy love,
Dwell by thy Grave, forgetting all those joys,
That former times made precious to mine eyes;
Only remembring what my youth did gain
In the dark, hidden vertuous use of Herbs:30
That will I practise, and as freely give
All my endeavours as I gained them free.
Of all green wounds I know the remedies
In Men or Cattel, be they stung with Snakes,
Or charmed with powerful words of wicked Art,35
Or be they Love-sick, or through too much heat
Grown wild or Lunatic, their eyes or ears
Thickened with misty filme of dulling Rheum;
These I can Cure, such secret vertue lies
[263]
In herbs applyèd by a Virgins hand.40
My meat shall be what these wild woods afford,
Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes, on whose Cheeks
The Sun sits smiling.[159]
This passage, as we have observed in the preceding
section, does not display in full proportion or untrammeled
variety the metrical peculiarities of Fletcher's
popular dramatic blank verse. The verse is lyric
and declamatory: his purely dramatic verse whether
in the Monsieur Thomas of his earlier period, The
Chances of the middle period, or A Wife for a Month
and Rule a Wife of his later years, has the feminine
endings, redundant syllables, anapæstic substitutions,
the end-stopped and sometimes fragmentary lines, the
hurried and spasmodic utterance of conversational
speech. But, from the rhetorical point of view, this
soliloquy—in fact, the whole Faithfull Shepheardesse—affords
a basis for further discrimination between
Fletcher and Beaumont in the joint-plays; for
it displays idiosyncrasies of tone-quality and diction
which persist, after Beaumont's death, in Fletcher's
dramas of 1616 to 1625 as they were in 1607-1609:
sometimes slightly modified, more often exaggerated,
but in essence the same.
In Clorin's soliloquy, the reader cannot but notice,
first, a tendency toward alliteration, the fed and
flocks, fat and fruitful, fresh and fair, pleasing and
pipes,—alliteration palpable and somewhat crude, but
not yet excessive; second, a balanced iteration of
words,—"be far away, Since thou art far away"
(ll. 16-17), and, five lines further down, "But thou[264]
art gone and these are gone with thee," and in lines
31 and 32 "as freely give ... as I gained them
free"; and an iteration of phrases, rhetorical asseverations,
negatives, alternatives, questions,—"Thus I
salute thy grave; thus do I pay," "thus I free," "thus
put I off" (lines 4, 6, 9); third, a preference for
iteration in triplets,—"No more shall these smooth
brows," "No more the company," "Nor the shrill
... sound" (lines 10-14), "Or charmed," "or
love-sick," "or through too much heat" (lines 35
and 36); fourth, a fondness for certain sonorous
words,—"all ensuing heats ... all sports" (lines
7-8), "all my endeavours ... all green wounds"
(lines 32-33), and the "alls" of lines 16 and 23; fifth,
a plethora of adjectives,—"holy earth," "cold arms,"
"truest man," "fat plains"—many of them pleonastic—"misty
film," "dulling rheum"—some forty
nouns buttressed by epithets to twenty standing in their
own strength; and a plethora of nouns in apposition
(preferably triplets),—"all sports, delights, and jolly
games" (line 8), "Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes"
(line 42); sixth, an indulgence in conversational tautology:
for Fletcher is rarely content with a simple
statement,—he must be forever spinning out the categories
of a concept; expounding his idea by what the
rhetoricians call division; enumerating the attributes
and species painstakingly lest any escape, or verbosely
as a padding for verse or speech. Of this mannerism
The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords many instances
more typical than those contained in these forty-three
lines; but even here Clorin salutes the grave of her
lover in a dozen different periphrastic ways. To say[265]
that "all are dead but thy dear memorie" is not
enough; she must specify "that shall outlive thee."
To assert that she knows the remedies of "all green
wounds" does not suffice: she must proceed to the
enumeration of the wounds; nor to tell us that her
meat shall be found in the woods: she must rehearse
the varieties of meat. Her soliloquy in the last
thirty lines of the scene, not here quoted, is of the
same quality: it reminds one of a Henslowe list of
stage properties, or of the auctioneer's catalogue that
sprawls down Walt Whitman's pages.
And, last, we notice what has been emphasized by G. C.
Macaulay and others, that much of this enumeration
by division is by way of "parentheses hastily thrown
in, or afterthoughts as they occur to the mind."[160]
Even in the formal Shepheardesse this characteristic
lends a quality of naturalness and conversational
spontaneity to the speech.
2. In the Later Plays.
If now we turn to one of Fletcher's plays written
after Beaumont's death, and without the assistance
of Massinger or any other,—say, The Humorous
Lieutenant of about the year 1619,—we find on every
page and passages like the following.[161]—The King Antigonus
upon the entry of his son, Demetrius, addresses
the ambassadors of threatening powers:
Do you see this Gent(leman),
You that bring Thunders in your mouths, and Earthquakes,
[266]
To shake and totter my designs? Can you imagine
(You men of poor and common apprehensions)
While I admit this man, my Son, this nature
That in one look carries more fire, and fierceness,
Than all your Masters lives[162]; dare I admit him,
Admit him thus, even to my side, my bosom,
When he is fit to rule, when all men cry him,
And all hopes hang about his head; thus place him,
His weapon hatched in bloud; all these attending
When he shall make their fortunes, all as sudden,
In any expedition he shall point 'em,
As arrows from a Tartar's bow, and speeding,
Dare I do this, and fear an enemy?
Fear your great master? yours? or yours?
Here we have blank verse, distinctively Fletcherian
with its feminine endings and its end-stopped lines.
But, widely as this differs from the earlier rhythm of
The Faithfull Shepheardesse and its more lyric precipitancy,
the qualities of tone and diction are in the
later play as in the earlier. The alliterations may
not be so numerous, and are in general more cunningly
concealed and interwoven, as in lines 2 to 4;
but the cruder kind still appears as a mannerism, the
"fire and fierceness," "hopes," "hang," and "head."
The iterations of word, phrase, and rhetorical question,
and of the resonant "all," the redundant nouns
in apposition, the tautological enumeration of categories,
proclaim the unaltered Fletcher. The adjectives
are in this spot pruned, but they are luxuriant
elsewhere in the play. The triplets,—"this man, my
son, this nature,"—"admit," "admit," "admit," find
compeers on nearly every page:
[267]
Shew where to lead, to lodge, to charge with safetie,—[163]
Here's a strange fellow now, and a brave fellow,
If we may say so of a pocky fellow.—[164]
And now, 't is ev'n too true, I feel a pricking,
A pricking, a strange pricking.—[165]
With such a sadness on his face, as sorrow,
Sorrow herself, but poorly imitates.
Sorrow of sorrows on that heart that caus'd it![166]
In the passages cited above there happen to be, also,
a few examples of the elocutionary afterthought:
You come with thunders in your mouth and earthquakes,—
As arrows from a Tartar's bow, and speeding.—
To this device, and to the intensive use of the pronominal
"one" Fletcher is as closely wedded as to
the repetition of "all,"—
They have a hand upon us,
A heavy and a hard one.[167]
To wear this jewel near thee; he is a tried one
And one that ... will yet stand by thee.[168]
Other plays conceded by the critics to Fletcher
alone, and written in his distinctive blank verse, display
the same characteristics of style: The Chances[268]
of about 1615, The Loyall Subject of 1618 (like The
Humorous Lieutenant of the middle period), and
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife of the last period, 1624.
I quote at random for him who would apply the tests,—first
from The Chances,[169] the following of the repeating
revolver style:
Art thou not an Ass?
And modest as her blushes! what a blockhead
Would e're have popt out such a dry Apologie
For this dear friend? and to a Gentlewoman,
A woman of her youth and delicacy?
They are arguments to draw them to abhor us.
An honest moral man? 't is for a Constable:
A handsome man, a wholesome man, a tough man,
A liberal man, a likely man, a man
Made up by Hercules, unslaked with service:
The same to night, to morrow night, the next night,
And so to perpetuity of pleasures.
Now, from The Loyall Subject[170]—the farewell of
Archas to his arms and colours. I wish I could quote
it all as an example of noble noise, enumerative and
penny-a-line rhetoric:
Farewell, my Eagle! when thou flew'st, whole Armies
Have stoopt below thee: at Passage I have seen thee
Ruffle the Tartars, as they fled thy furie,
And bang 'em up together, as a Tassel,
Upon the streach, a flock of fearfull Pigeons.
I yet remember when the Volga curl'd,
The agèd Volga, when he heav'd his head up,
And rais'd his waters high, to see the ruins,
[269]
The ruines our swords made, the bloudy ruins;
Then flew this Bird of honour bravely, Gentlemen;
But these must be forgotten: so must these too,
And all that tend to Arms, by me for ever.
And from Act II, Scene 1, pages 101-102, for
triplets:
Fight hard, lye hard, feed hard, when they come home, sir....
To be respected, reckon'd well, and honour'd....
Where be the shouts, the Bells rung out, the people?...
And, for "alls," and triplets:
And whose are all these glories? why their Princes,
Their Countries and their Friends. Alas, of all these,
And all the happy ends they bring, the blessings,
They only share the labours!
Finally, from Rule a Wife, a few instances of the
iterations, three-fold or multiple, and redundant expositions.
In the first scene[171] Juan describes Leon:
Ask him a question,
He blushes like a Girl, and answers little,
To the point less; he wears a Sword, a good one,
And good cloaths too; he is whole-skin'd, has no hurt yet,
Good promising hopes;
and Perez describes the rest of the regiment,
That swear as valiantly as heart can wish,
Their mouths charg'd with six oaths at once, and whole ones,
[270]
That make the drunken Dutch creep into Mole-hills; ...
and he proceeds to Donna Margarita:
She is fair, and young, and wealthy,
Infinite wealthy, etc.
And then to Estefania who has tautologized of her
chastity, he tautologizes of his harmlessness:[172]
I am no blaster of a lady's beauty,
Nor bold intruder on her special favours;
I know how tender reputation is,
And with what guards it ought to be preserv'd, lady.
As a fair example of this method of filling a page,
I recommend the first scene of the third act; and of
eloquence by rhetorical 'division,' Perez's description
of his room in the next scene: all in terms of three
times three.
If now the reader will turn, by way of confirmation,
to The Triumph of Time and The Triumph of
Death of which the metrical characteristics are admittedly
Fletcher's, he will find that there, Fletcher,
before Beaumont's retirement from the partnership,
is already using in purely dramatic composition the
rhetorical mannerisms which mark both the lyrically
designed Shepheardesse of his early years and the
genuine dramas of the later.
3. Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures.
Beside the rhetorical mannerisms classified in the
preceding paragraphs I might rehearse a long list
of Fletcher's favourite expressions and figures of
speech. Of the former Mr. Oliphant[173] has mentioned[271]
'plaguily,' 'claw'd,' 'slubber'd,' 'too,'
'shrewdly,' 'stuck with,' 'it shews,' 'dwell round
about ye,' 'for ever,' 'no way,' (for 'not at all').
In addition I have noted the reiterated 'thus,' 'miracle,'
'prodigious' (in the sense of 'ominous')—'prodigious
star,' 'prodigious meteor'—'bugs,'
'monsters,' and 'scorpions'; 'torments,' 'diseases,'
'imposthumes,' 'canker,' 'mischiefs,' 'ruins,'
'blasted,' 'rotten'; 'myrmidons'; 'monuments' (for
'tombs'), 'marble'; 'lustre,' 'crystal,' 'jewels,' 'picture,'
'painting,' 'counterfeit in arras'; 'blushes,'
'palates,' 'illusion,' 'abused' (for 'deceived'),
'blessed,' 'flung off,' 'cloister'd up,' 'fat earth,' 'turtle,'
'passion,' 'Paradise.' Oliphant assigns to
Fletcher 'pulled on,' but I find that almost as frequently
in Beaumont. 'Poison,' 'contagious' and
'loaden,' also abound in Fletcher, but are sometimes
used by Beaumont. Fletcher affects alliterative epithets:
'prince of popinjays,' 'pernicious petticoat
prince,' 'pretty prince of puppets,'—and antitheses
such as 'prince of wax,' 'pelting prattling peace.' His
characters talk much of 'silks' and 'satins,' 'branched
velvets' and 'scarlet' clothes. They are said to
speak in 'riddles'; they are threatened with 'ribald
rhymes'; they shall be 'bawled in ballads,' or 'chronicled,'
'cut and chronicled.'
Another characteristic of Fletcher's diction is his
preference for the pronoun ye instead of you. This
was pointed out by Mr. R. B. McKerrow, who in
his edition of The Spanish Curate[174] notes that in
the scenes generally attributed, in accordance with[272]
other tests, to Fletcher, ye occurs 271 times, while
in the scenes attributed to Massinger it occurs but
four. That is to say, for every ye in Fletcher's part
there are but 0.65 you's; for every ye in Massinger's
part, 50 you's. Mr. W. W. Greg, applying the test
in his edition of The Elder Brother,[175] and counting
the y'are's as instances of ye, finds that the percentage
of ye's to you's in Fletcher's part is almost three times
as high as in Massinger's. In a recent article in The
Nation[176] Mr. Paul Elmer More communicates his independent
observation of the same mannerism in
Fletcher. Though he has been anticipated in part, his
study adds to McKerrow's the valuable information
that Fletcher uses the ye for you in "both numbers and
cases, and in both serious and comic scenes." Mr.
More's statistics favour the conclusion that the test
distinguishes Fletcher not only from Massinger, but
from other collaborators: Middleton, Rowley, Field,
Jonson, Tourneur. They do not carry conviction regarding
Shakespeare, whose habit as Greg and others
had already announced varies in a perplexing manner.
Nor does Mr. More arrive at any definite result
concerning the test "when applied to the mixed work
of Beaumont and Fletcher." For though the high
percentage of ye's in the third and fourth of the
Foure Playes confirms the general attribution of those
'Triumphs' to Fletcher, the low percentage in the
first two 'Triumphs' does not justify "the common
opinion which attributes them to Beaumont." Their
author, as I have elsewhere stated, was probably Field.[273]
"In the plays which are units," continues Mr. More,
"such as The Maid's Tragedy, Philaster, A King and
No King, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The
Coxcomb, this mark of Fletcher does not occur at all.
It should seem that the writing here, at least in its
final form, was almost entirely Beaumont's." I have
gone through all the plays which have been ordinarily
regarded as joint-productions of Beaumont and
Fletcher, and find that in this surmise Mr. More is
right. The Knight, to be sure, is Beaumont's alone;
but with regard to the other four plays mentioned
above, in which they undoubtedly coöperated, the suggestion
that the writing, at least in its final form, was
almost entirely Beaumont's, because of the practically
complete absence of ye's, is justified by the facts. It
is, also, helpful in the examination of plays not mentioned
in this list. It has, in connection with other
considerations, assisted me to the conclusion that
Fletcher went over two or three scenes of The Woman-Hater,
stamping them with his ye's after Beaumont
had finished it as a whole; and it has confirmed
me in the belief that The Scornful Ladie was one of
the latest joint-plays, only partly revised by Beaumont,—and
that, not long before his death. Fletcher's
preference for ye is a distinctive mannerism. His
usage varies from the employment of one-third as
many ye's to that of twice as many ye's as you's;
whereas Beaumont rarely uses a ye. Even more
distinctive is Fletcher's use of y'are, and of ye in the
objective case. The latter, Beaumont does not tolerate.
For figurative purposes Fletcher finds material[274]
most frequently in the phenomena of winter and
storm: 'frosts,' 'nipping frosts,' 'nipping winds,'
'hail,' 'cakes of ice,' 'icicles,' 'thaw,' 'tempests,'
'thunders,' 'billows,' 'mariners' and 'storm-tossed
barks,' 'wild overflows' of waters in stream or torrent;
in the phenomena of heat and light: 'suns,' the
'icy moon,' the 'Dog-star' or the 'Dog,' the 'Sirian
star,' the 'cold Bear' and 'raging Lion,' 'Aetna,' 'fire
and flames'; of trees: root and branch, foliage and
fruit; of the oak and clinging vine; of the rose or
blossom and the 'destroying canker'; of fever and
ague; of youth and desire, and of Death 'beating larums
to the blood,' of our days that are 'marches to
the grave,' and of our lives 'tedious tales soon forgotten.'
I have elsewhere called attention to the
numerous variations which he plays upon the 'story
of a woman.' His 'monuments' are in frequent
requisition and, by preference, they 'sweat'; men pursued
by widows fear to be 'buried alive in another
man's cold monument.' Other common images are
'rock him to another world,' 'bestride a billow,'
'plough up the sea.' He indulges in extended mythological
tropes as of the 'Carthage queen' and
Ariadne; is especially attracted by Adonis, Hylas
(whom he may have got either from Theocritus or
the Marquis D'Urfé's Astræan character), and Hercules;
and, in general, he levies more freely than Beaumont
on commonplace classical material. In his unassisted
dramas his fondness for personification seems
to grow: many pages are thick with capitalized abstractions;
and the poetry, then, is usually limited to
the capitalization. The curious reader will find most[275]
of Fletcher's predilections in image-making clustered
in three or four typical passages of the later and unassisted
plays, such as Alphonso's raving in A Wife
for a Month, IV, 4; and in passages, undoubtedly of
his verse and diction, in plays written conjointly with
Beaumont, such as that of Spaconia's outburst in
King and No King, IV, 2, 45-62.
Fletcher abounds in optatives: 'Would Gods thou
hadst been so blest!' 'Would there were any safety
in thy sex!' and the like. He is also given to rhetorical
interrogations and elaborate exclamations; more
so than Beaumont. He affects the lighter kind of
oath, the appeal to something sacred, in attestation—'Witness
Heaven!' In entreaty—'High Heaven, defend
us!' Or in mere ejaculation—'Equal Heavens!'
He varies his asseverations so that they appear less
bluntly profane: 'By my life!' 'By those lights, I
vow!'—or more appropriate to the emergency: 'By
all holy in Heaven and Earth!' He swears occasionally
'By the Gods,' but not so frequently as Beaumont,
for there was a puritanical reaction after
Beaumont's death. In the early joint-plays he affects
particularly 'all the gods,' 'By all those gods, you
swore by!' 'By more than all the gods!' In his imprecations
he is even more sulphurous than Beaumont:
'Hell bless you for it!' 'Hell take me then!' 'Thou
all-sin, all-hell, and last all-devils!'
In summary let us say of Fletcher's diction, that its
vocabulary is repetitious; its sentence-structure, loose,
cumulative, trailing: that its larger movement is, in
general, dramatic, conversational, abrupt, rather than
lyrical, declamatory, reflective. He writes for the[276]
plot—forward: not from the character—outward.
When he bestows a lyrical or descriptive touch upon
the narrative it is always incidental to conversation or
stage business. When he indulges in a classical reminiscence
he permits himself to embroider and bedizen;
but usually his ribbons (from a scantly furnished,
much-rummaged wardrobe) are carelessly pinned on.
While capable, especially in tragedy, of occasional
long speeches, he prefers the brief interchange of utterance,
the rapid fire and spasm of dialogue.
[277]
CHAPTER XX
FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT
From the study of Fletcher's unaided plays we
arrive at a still further criterion for the determination
of his share in the joint-plays,—his stock
of ideas concerning life, his view of the spectacle,
and his emotional attitude. His early pastoral comedy
The Faithfull Shepheardesse might be dismissed
from consideration as a conventionalized literary
treatment of conditions remote from actual experience,
were it not that other dramatic exponents of shepherds
and shepherdesses—Jonson, for instance, and
Milton—have succeeded in imbuing the pastoral
species with qualities distinctly vital; the former, with
rustic reality and genuine tenderness; the latter, with
profound moral significance. The Faithfull Shepheardesse,
on the other hand, with all its beauty of
artistic form is devoid of reality, pathos, and sublimity.
The author has no ideas worthy of the name
and, in spite of his singing praises of chastity, he has
his hand to his mouth where between fyttes there blossoms
a superb smile. He has in art no depth of conviction;
consequently, no philosophy of life to offer. The
Faithfull Shepheardesse strikes the intellectual keynote
of all Fletcher's unaided work. He is a playwright
of marvellous skill, a lyrist of facile verse and fancy,
but a poet of indifference—of no ethical insight or[278]
outlook when he is purveying for the public. His
tragedies, for instance Valentinian and Bonduca (the
two scenes of the latter that may not be his are
negligible), abound in sudden fatal passions and noble
diction. They involve moral conduct, to be sure, patriotism,
loyalty, chivalry, military prowess, insane lust
and vengeance, but they lack deep-seated and deliberate
motive of action, and they fail of that inevitability
of spiritual conflict which is requisite to a tragic
effect. The heroes of these, and of his tragicomedies
and romantic dramas, such as A Wife for a Month,
The Loyall Subject, The Humorous Lieutenant, The
Pilgrim, The Island Princesse, may be fearless and
blameless, but their courage and virtue are of habit
rather than of moral exigency. Their loyalty is frequently
unreasonable and absurdly exaggerated. One
or two of his virtuous heroines are at once charming
and real; but as a rule with Fletcher—the more
virtuous, the more nebulous. His villains have no
redeeming touch of humanity: their doom moves us
not; nor does their sleight-of-hand repentance convince
us. The atmosphere is histrionic. There is
scorn of Fate and Fortune, much talk of death and
the grave: and we "go out like tedious tales forgotten";
or we don't,—just as may suit the stage
hangings, the brilliance of the footlights, and the
sentimental uptake. There is, in short, in his unassisted
serious dramas little real pathos; little of
the grandeur and sudden imaginative splendour which,
we shall see, characterized Beaumont; none of Beaumont's
earnestness and philosophical spontaneity and
profundity.[279]
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,[280]
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.
These characteristics of the Fletcherian habit mark
all the author's independent plays from The Faithfull
Shepheardesse of 1607 or 1608 to Rule a Wife of
1624. The man himself, I think, was better than the
dramaturgic artist catering to the public market. For
his personal, nay noble, ideals, let the reader turn to the
poem appended to The Honest Mans Fortune, and
judge. The characteristics sketched above are of the
maker of a mimic world. Since I have elsewhere
discussed them in full,[177] and the marvellous success that
the dramaturge achieved in Shakespeare's Globe, this
brief enumeration must suffice. Fletcher's mental
habit affords an additional criterion for the determination
of authorship in the unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher
plays, and in the analysis of plays in which
the collaboration of the poets has been conjectured
but not so fully attested.
[281]
CHAPTER XXI
BEAUMONT'S DICTION
From a consideration of Beaumont's work in his
poems, in his Maske and Woman-Hater, and such
portions of the three unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher
plays as are marked by his idiosyncrasies of versification,
we may arrive at conclusions concerning his
diction, rhetorical and poetic.
1. Rhetorical Peculiarities in General.
Beaumont's frequent use in prose of the enclitics
'do' and 'did' has been observed by students of his
style. The same peculiarity marks his verse, and occasionally
enables the reader to determine the authorship
of passages where the metrical tests are inconclusive.
His rhetoric is sometimes of the repetitive
order, but, as Oliphant has indicated, rather for ends
of word-play and irony than for mere expansion as
with Fletcher. Such, for instance, is the ironical repetition
of a speaker's words by his interlocutor. I note
also a tendency to purely dramatic quotation, not common
in Fletcher's writing,—e. g., in The Woman-Hater:
"Lisping cry 'Good Sir!' and he's thine
own"; or "Every one that does not know, cries 'What
nobleman is that?'"—and in A King and No King
"That hand was never wont to draw a sword, But[282]
it cried 'Dead' to something." This test alone, if
we had not others of rhetoric and metre, would go
far to deciding the respective contributions of our authors
to the personality of Captain Bessus in the latter
play. The Bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly
Beaumont's, is resonant with such cries and conversational
citations; the Bessus of the last two, in a rôle
almost as extensive, uses the device but once. Beaumont
sometimes indulges in enumerative sentences;
but the enumerations are generally in prose and (it
will be recalled that he was a member of the Inner
Temple) of a mock-legal character, not mere redundancies
of detail such as we find in Fletcher. Among
other peculiarities of expression is his frequent employment
of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection.
2. Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures.
Beaumont is especially fond of the following words
and phrasal variations:—The 'basilisk' with his
'deaddoing eye,' 'venom,' 'infect,' 'infection' and
'infectious,' 'corrupt,' 'leprosy,' 'vild,' 'crosses' (for
'misfortunes'), 'crossed' and 'crossly matched,'
'perplex,' 'distracted,' 'starts' (for 'surprises' and
'fitful changes'), 'miseries,' 'griefs,' 'garlands,' 'cut,'
'shoot,' 'dissemble,' 'loathed,' 'salve' (as noun and
verb), 'acquaint' and 'acquaintance,' to 'article,'
'pull,' 'piece,' 'frail' and 'frailty,' 'mortal' and
'mortality,' 'fate' and 'destiny,' to 'blot' from
earth or memory, 'after-ages,' 'instruments' (for
'servants'). Of his repeated use of 'hills,' 'caves,'
'mines,' 'seas,' 'thunder,' 'beast,' 'bull,' we shall[283]
have further exemplification when we consider his
figures of speech.
He is forever playing phrasal variations upon the
words 'piece,' and 'little.' The former is a mannerism
of the day, already availed of by Shakespeare in
Lear, 'O ruined piece of nature,' and frequently in
Antony and Cleopatra, and later repeated in the
Tempest and Winter's Tale. So with Beaumont, Arethusa
is a 'poor piece of earth'; 'every maid in love
will have a piece' of Philaster; Oriana is a 'precious
piece of sly damnation,' 'that pleasing piece of frailty
we call woman.' Or the word is used literally for
'limb':—'I'll love those pieces you have cut away.'—Beaumont,
I may say in passing, delights in cutting
bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the
land.'—'Little' he affects, making it pathetic and even
more diminutive in conjunction with 'that': Euphrasia
would 'keep that little piece I hold of life.' 'It
is my fate,' proclaims Amintor,
To bear and bow beneath a thousand griefs
To keep that little credit with the world;
and so, 'that little passion,' 'that little training,' 'these
little wounds,' ad libitum. Somewhat akin is the
poet's use of 'kind': 'a kind of love in her to me';
'a kind of healthful joy.' His heroines good and
bad are given to introspection: they have 'acquaintance'
with themselves. 'After you were gone,' says
Bellario, 'I grew acquainted with my heart'; and
Bacha in Cupid's Revenge in a scene undoubtedly of
Beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'become[284]
another woman; one, methinks, with whom I want
acquaintance.'
While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his
figures of poetry, or tropes, are generally of the more
creative kind,—metaphor, personification, metonymy,—and
these are very often heightened into that figure
of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His comparisons
deal in a striking degree with elemental phenomena:
hills, caves, stones, rocks, seas, winds, flames,
thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are reminiscential of
country life. In each play some hero declaims of
'the only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason';
and inevitably enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined'
of beasts, and illustrates by custom and
passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull—especially bull.
When the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull
of Phalaris charges in. But Beaumont prefers nature:
his images are sweet with April and violets and
dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn
'moved with a stiff gale'—their heads bowing 'all
one way.' From the manufacture of books he borrows
two metaphors, 'printing' and 'blotting,' and
plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints'
wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her
'thoughts in lawn'; Amintor will 'print a thousand
wounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged
Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks
And make no man worthy for her to take.' With
similar frequency recur 'blotted from earth,' 'blotted
from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'
The younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently
as Fletcher, but in a more poetic way. He[285]
vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with figurative
verbs—'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'I feel a grief shoot
suddenly through all my veins' cries Amintor;
and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt into me.'
'I feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders
Arbaces. Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it
springs'; Amintor welcomes the hand that should
'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses
that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can
cut from man's remembrance.' Similar metaphorical
constructions abound, such as 'pluck me back from
my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus'
speeches in Beaumont's part of Cupid's Revenge; and
in a speech of Melantius 'I did a deed that plucked
five years from time' in The Maides Tragedy. Personified
grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural
with Beaumont:—'Nothing but a multitude of walking
griefs.' It is a mistake to suppose, as some do,
that passages written in Beaumont's metrical style are
not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger,
black Despair, Pride, Wantonness, figure in his verse
in The Woman-Hater; Chance, Death, and Fortune in
The Knight; Death, Victory, and Friendship, in The
Maides Tragedy; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality, Nature
in Philaster; and so on.
No dramatist since the day of Kyd and Marlowe
has more frequent or violent resort to hyperbole. His
heroes call on 'seas to quench the fires' they 'feel,'
and 'snows to quench their rising flames'; they will
'drink off seas' and 'yet have unquenched fires left'
in their breasts; they 'wade through seas of sins';
they 'set hills on hills' and 'scale them all, and[286]
from the utmost top fall' on the necks of foes, 'like
thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the
underworld the worth' of those they love. 'From his
iron den' they'll 'waken Death, and hurl him' on
lascivious kings. Arethusa's heart is 'mines of adamant
to all the world beside,' but to her lover 'a lasting
mine of joy'; her breath 'sweet as Arabian winds
when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two liquid ivory
balls.' Evadne will sooner 'find out the beds of
snakes,' and 'with her youthful blood warm their
cold flesh 'than accede to Amintor's desires. 'The
least word' that Panthea speaks 'is worth a life.'
'The child, this present hour brought forth to see
the world, has not a soul more pure' than Oriana's.
In one of Beaumont's verse-scenes of The Coxcombe,
Ricardo, reinstated in his Viola's esteem, would have
some woman 'take an everlasting pen' into her hand,
'and grave in paper more lasting than the marble
monuments' the matchless virtues of women to posterities.
And as for Bellario's worth to Philaster,—
'T is not the treasure of all Kings in one,
The wealth of Tagus, nor the rocks of pearl
That pave the court of Neptune, can weigh down
That virtue.
Echoes not of Kyd and Marlowe only, but of
Shakespeare from Romeo to Hamlet and Macbeth,
reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of Beaumont.
Beaumont has more ejaculations than Fletcher, but
fewer optatives. He is chary of rhetorical questions,
and his exclamations run by preference into some figured[287]
hyperbole. He appeals less frequently than
Fletcher to 'all the gods,' but very often to 'the gods,'
'good gods,' 'ye gods,' 'some god.' He refers, in
conformity with his deterministic view of life, with
particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers
that must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better
powers,' 'Heaven and the powers divine,' 'you heavenly
powers,' the 'powers that rule us'; and all these
he uses in attestation. An oath distinctive of him
is 'By my vexed soul!' In his hyperboles, Hell and
devils play their part; but not in oath so frequently
as with Fletcher.
3. Lines of Inevitable Poetry.
Similarly noticeable is Beaumont's faculty for 'simple
poetic phrasing.' The elevated passion, the sudden
glory,—and the large utterance of brief sentence and
single verse, have been remarked by critics from his
contemporary, John Earle, who wrote in commendation:
Such strength, such sweetness couched in every line,
Such life of fancy, such high choice of brain,
down to G. C. Macaulay, Herford, and Alden of the
present day. No reader, even the most cursory, can
fail to be impressed by the completeness of that one
line (in his lament for Elizabeth Sidney),
Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse,—
by the 'unassuming beauty' of Viola's loneliness (in
his subplot of The Coxcombe),[288]
All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower
Droops now as well as I;—
by the sublimity of those few words to the repentant
lover,
All the forgiveness I can make you is to love you;—
by the superb simplicity of Bellario's scorn of life, in
Philaster,
'T is but a piece of childhood thrown away,
and the finality of her definition of death (which, as
if in premonition of his too sudden fate, is characteristic
of Beaumont),—
'T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep;
A quiet resting from all jealousy,
A thing we all pursue; I know, besides,
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost;—
by the pathetic irony of Aspatia's farewell to love in
The Maides Tragedy,
So with my prayers I leave you, and must try
Some yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die;
and the heroism (in Cupid's Revenge, the final scene,
undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse) of Urania's confession
to Leucippus,
I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught;
by Panthea's cry of horror, in A King and No King,[289]
I feel a sin growing upon my blood;
and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify
the gloom of The Maides Tragedy: Amintor's
Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms;
and after Evadne's death,
My soul grows weary of her house, and I
All over am a trouble to myself;—
by the wounded Aspatia's
I shall sure live, Amintor, I am well;
A kind of healthful joy wanders within me;
and her parting whisper,
Give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down,
And cannot find thee.
This is Nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned
poetry of the human heartbreak. Where other than
in Shakespeare do we find among the Jacobean poets
such verse?
That a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm
is not surprising. Instances rare in wisdom and
phrasal conciseness are to be encountered on every
other page of Beaumont.
It may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical
and poetic diction, that, while the vocabulary may
not be more varied, it is more intimate, musical, and
reverberant than Fletcher's; that the periods, though[290]
sometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically
broken, as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical
and descriptive passages, both complex and
balanced of structure,—pregnant of ideas labouring
for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo
Shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution,
crowding of illustration and fresh insistent thought,
in a degree utterly foreign to the rhetoric of Fletcher;
and that his brief sentences are marked by a direct
and final resplendence and simplicity.
In the larger movements of composition the purely
poetic quality predominates over the narrative, dramatic
or conversational. This characteristic is especially
noticeable in declamatory speeches and soliloquies;
sometimes idyllic as in Philaster's description
of Bellario,—"I found him sitting by a fountain's
side,"—or in the well-known "Oh that I had been
nourished in these woods with milk of goats and
acorns"; often operatic, as in Aspatia's farewells to
Amintor and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively
surcharged. Beaumont's figures of rhetoric when not
hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his poetic tropes
are creative, vitalizing. His speakers are self-revelatory:
expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection.
Their utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely
loitering, rather than, by way of dialogue,
framed to further the action alone. And yet, when
they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary,
and abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation;
not simply, as with Fletcher, by giving opportunity
for stage-business, but by differencing the
motive that underlies the action.
[291]
CHAPTER XXII
BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT
From passages in the indubitable metrical manner
and rhetorical style of Beaumont we pass to a
still further test by which to determine his share in
doubtful passages—I mean his stock of ideas. Critics
have long been familiar with the determinism of his
philosophy of life. His Arethusa in Philaster expresses
it in a nutshell:
If destiny (to whom we dare not say,
Why didst thou this?) have not decreed it so,
In lasting leaves (whose smallest characters
Was never altered yet), this match shall break.—
We are ignorant of the 'crosses of our births.' Nature
'loves not to be questioned, why she did this or
that, but has her ends, and knows she does well.'
"But thou," cries the poet,—
But thou hadst, ere thou knew'st the use of tears,
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years.
'Tis the gods, 'the gods, that make us so.' They
would not have their 'dooms withstood, whose holy
wisdoms make our passions the way unto their justice.'
And 'out of justice we must challenge nothing.' The
gods reward, the gods punish: 'I am a man and dare[292]
not quarrel with divinity ... and you shall see me
bear my crosses like a man.' It is the 'will of
Heaven'; 'a decreed instant cuts off every life, for
which to mourn is to repine.'[178]
Similarly familiar is Beaumont's recurrent doctrine
of the divinity of kings. "In that sacred word,"
says his Amintor of The Maides Tragedy,—
In that sacred word
'The King,' there lies a terror: what frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when let us
Suffer and wait.
And again, to the monarch who has wronged him,
There is
Divinity about you, that strikes dead
My rising passions; as you are my King
I fall before you, and present my sword
To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.
Of 'the breath of kings' Beaumont's fancy constructs
ever new terrors: it is 'like the breath of
gods'; it may blow men 'about the world.' But when
a king is guilty, though he may boast that his breath
'can still the winds, uncloud the sun, charm down the
swelling floods, and stop the floods of heaven,' some
honest man is always to be found to say 'No; nor'
can thy 'breath smell sweet itself if once the lungs
be but corrupted.' Though the gods place kings
'above the rest, to be served, flattered, and adored,'
kings may not 'article with the gods'[293]—
On lustful kings
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from Heaven are sent;
But curs'd is he that is their instrument.
Of 'this most perfect creature, this image of his
Maker, well-squared man' Beaumont philosophizes
much. Again and again he reminds us that 'the only
difference betwixt man and beast is reason.' In the
moment of guilty passion his Arbaces of A King and
No King cries:
"Accursèd man!
Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate,
For thou hast all thy actions bounded in
With curious rules, when every beast is free."
And, in the moment of jealousy, Philaster laments,
Oh, that, like beasts, we could not grieve ourselves
With that we see not!
Beaumont knows of no natural felicity or liberty more
to be envied than that of the beast; and of no opprobrium
more vile than that which likens man to lustful
beast, or 'worse than savage beast.'
He is impressed with the frailty of mankind and the
brevity of life: 'Frail man' and 'transitory man'
fell readily from his lips who was to die so young.
He emphasizes the objective quality of evil: "Good
gods, tempt not a frail man!" prays Philaster; and
Arbaces struggling against temptation: "What art
thou, that dost creep into my breast; And dar'st not
see my face?" Once temptation has taken root, it
grows insidiously: Panthea "feels a sin growing
upon her blood"; and Arbaces moralizes[294]
There is a method in man's wickedness
It grows up by degrees.
It is natural, therefore, that Beaumont should frequently
fall back upon 'conscience' and its 'sensibility.'
And upon the efficacy of repentance. So Leucippus
in Beaumont's portion of Cupid's Revenge,
prays the gods to hold him back,—"Lest I add sins to
sins, till no repentance will cure me." Arbaces finds
repentance. Evadne knows that it is 'the best sacrifice.'
From this consciousness of uneasy greatness and
frail mortality the poet seeks refuge in descriptions of
pastoral life. His pictures of idyllic beauty and simplicity
are too well-known to warrant repetition here:
Bellario weaving garlands by the fountain's side; Philaster's
rhapsody in the woods; Valerio's "Come,
pretty soul, we now are near our home" to Viola in the
Coxcombe, and Viola's "what true contented happiness
dwells here, More than in cities!" The same conception
marks as Beaumont's the shrewdly humorous
conversation in prose between the citizens' wives in
A King and No King, beginning—
Lord, how fine the fields be! What sweet living 'tis in the country!—
Ay, poor souls, God help 'em, they live as contentedly as one of us.
Through the fourth act of Philaster, and wherever else
Beaumont portrays the countryside or country men
and women, there blows the fresh breeze of the Charnwood
forest in his native Leicestershire.[295]
But his most poetic themes are of the friendship of
man for man, and of the 'whiteness' of women's innocence,
the unselfishness of their love, their forgivingness,
and the reverence due from men who so little understand
them. "And were you not my King," protests
the blunt Mardonius to his hasty lord, "I should
have chose you out to love above the rest." "I have
not one friend in the court but thou," says Prince Leucippus;
and his devoted follower can only stammer
"You know I love you but too well." In that fine
summing up of Melantius to Amintor, one seems to
hear Beaumont himself:
The name of friend is more than family
Or all the world besides.
With woman's purity his darkest pages are starred.
She is 'innocent as morning light,' 'more innocent
than sleep,' 'as white as Innocence herself.' 'Armed
with innocence' a tender spotless maid 'may walk safe
among beasts.' Her 'prayers are pure,' and she is
'fair and virtuous still to ages.'[179] His fairest heroines
are philosophers of 'the truth of maids and perjuries
of men.' "All the men I meet are harsh and
rude," says Aspatia,
And have a subtilty in everything
Which love could never know; but we fond women
Harbour the easiest and the smoothest thoughts,
And think all shall go so. It is unjust
[296]
That men and women should be match'd together.
His Viola of the Coxcombe continues the contention:
Woman, they say, was only made of man
Methinks 'tis strange they should be so unlike;
It may be, all the best was cut away
To make the woman, and the naught was left
Behind with him.
And the philosophy of Beaumont's love-lorn maidens
she sums up in her conclusion:
Scholars affirm the world's upheld by love;
But I believe women maintain all this,
For there's no love in men.
Deserted by her lover, she finds 'how valiant and
how 'fraid at once, Love makes a virgin'; and, sought
again by him repentant, she epitomizes the hearts of
all Bellarios, Arethusas, Pantheas, Uranias:
I will set no penance
To gain the great forgiveness you desire,
But to come hither, and take me and it ...
For God's sake, urge your faults no more, but mend!
All the forgiveness I can make you, is
To love you: which I will do, and desire
Nothing but love again; which if I have not,
Yet I will love you still.
All man can do in return for such long-suffering mercy
is to revere: "How rude are all men that take the
name of civil to ourselves" murmurs the reformed
Ricardo; and then[297]—
I do kneel because it is
An action very fit and reverent,
In presence of so pure a creature.
So kneels Arbaces; and so, in spirit, Philaster and
Amintor.
Prayer is for Beaumont a very present aid. Of
his women especially the 'vows' and 'oblations' are
a poetic incense continually ascending. And closely
akin to the prayerful innocence of tender maids is
the pathos of their 'childhood thrown away.' Even
his whimsical Oriana of The Woman-Hater can aver:
The child this present hour brought forth
To see the world has not a soul more pure,
More white, more virgin that I have.
The bitterest experiences of humanity are sprung
from misapprehension,—"They have most power to
hurt us that we love,"—or from jealousy, slander, unwarranted
violence, unmerited pain. And for these
the only solace is in death. About this truth Beaumont
weaves a shroud of unsullied beauty, a poetry
that has rarely been surpassed. In nearly all that he
has left us the thought recurs; but nowhere better
expressed than in those lines, already quoted in full
from Philaster, where Bellario "knows what 'tis to
die ... a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jealousy."
His Arethusa repeats the theme; but with a
wistful incertitude:
I shall have peace in death
Yet tell me this: there will be no slanders,
No jealousy in the other world; no ill there?
[298]
"No," replies her unjustly suspicious lover.—And
she:—"Show me, then, the way!" No kinder mercy
to the tempted, misconceived heir of mortality has
been vouchsafed than to 'suffer him to find his quiet
grave in peace.' So think Panthea and Arbaces; and
so his Urania and Leucippus find. And so the poet
closes that rare elegy to his belovèd Countess of Rutland:
I will not hurt the peace which she should have,
By longer looking in her quiet grave.
But still more powerful in its blessing than 'sleep'
and the 'peace' of the 'quiet grave,' and more fearful
in its bane than the penalties of hell,—one reality
persists—the award of 'after-ages.' Bellario would
not reveal what she has learned, to make her life 'last
ages.' Philaster's highest praise for Arethusa is
"Thou art fair and virtuous still to ages." "Kill
me," says Amintor to Evadne,—
Kill me; all true lovers, that shall live
In after-ages crossed in their desires,
Shall bless thy memory.
Ricardo of the Coxcombe would have some woman
'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to posterities.'
Even the mock-romantic Jasper in the Knight
(which I am sure is all Beaumont) will try his sweetheart's
love 'that the world and memory may sing
to after-times her constancy.' As to evil, it meets
its punishment both in heredity and in the verdict
of generations yet to come. "I see," soliloquizes the
usurping King in a passage already quoted from Philaster:[299]
You gods, I see that who unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed
In that which meaner men are blest withal:
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth; if he have any child
It shall be crossly matched.
"Show me the way," cries Arbaces to his supposed
mother, and thinking of heredity, "to the inheritance
I have by thee, which is a spacious world Of impious
acts." And Amintor warns Evadne: "Let it not
rise up for thy shame and mine To after-ages....
We will adopt us sons; The virtue shall inherit and
not blood." "May all ages," prays the lascivious
Bacha in Cupid's Revenge, "May all ages,"—
That shall succeed curse you as I do! and
If it be possible, I ask it, Heaven,
That your base issues may be ever monstrous,
That must for shame of nature and succession,
Be drowned like dogs!
So, passim, in Beaumont—'lasting to ages in the
memory of this damnèd act'; 'a great example of
their justice to all ensuing ages.'
[300]
CHAPTER XXIII
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS
With the tests which have thus been described
we are equipped for an examination of the plays
written before 1616, which have, in these latter days,
been with some show of evidence regarded as the
joint-production of the "two wits and friends."[301][180]
While attempting to separate the composition of one
author from that of the other, we may determine
the dramatic peculiarities of each during the course
of the partnership, and obtain a fairly definite basis
for an historical and literary appreciation of the plays,
individually considered.
1.—Of the Foure Playes, or Morall Representations,
in One (first published as by Beaumont and Fletcher
in the folio of 1647, but without indication of first
performance or of acting company), the last two,
The Triumph of Death and The Triumph of Time,
are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedly Fletcher's
and have been assigned to him by all critics. The
Triumph of Death is studded with alliterations and
with repetitions of the effective word:
Oh I could curse
And crucify myself for childish doting
Upon a face that feeds not with fresh figures
Every fresh hour;
and with triplets:
What new body
And new face must I make me, with new manners;
and with the resonant "all":
Make her all thy heaven,
And all thy joy, for she is all thy happiness;
and with Fletcher's favourite words and his nouns in
apposition, rhetorical questions, afterthoughts, verbal
enumerations, and turgid exposition. The same may
be said of The Triumph of Time. As there is less[302]
of the redundant epithet than in The Faithfull Shepheardesse
(1609), but more than in Philaster (before
July 12, 1610), I am of the opinion that Fletcher's
contribution to the Triumphs falls chronologically between
those plays. As Fletcher matures he prunes
his adjectives.
The rest of these Morall Representations display
neither the verse nor the rhetoric of Fletcher. On
the basis of verse-tests Boyle assigns them to Beaumont.
Macaulay says, "probably,"—and adds the
Induction. But Oliphant, taking into consideration
also the rhetorical and dramatic qualities, gives the
Induction and The Triumph of Honour to a third
author, Nathaniel Field, and only The Triumph of
Love to Beaumont. As to the Induction and The
Triumph of Honour I agree with Oliphant. They
are full of polysyllabic Latinisms such as Field uses
in his Woman is a Weather-cocke (entered for publication
November 23, 1611) and Beaumont never
uses: 'to participate affairs,' 'torturous engine,' etc.;
and they are marked by simpler Fieldian expressions
'wale,' 'gyv'd,' 'blown man,' 'miskill,' 'vane,' 'lubbers,'
'urned,' and a score of others not found anywhere
in Beaumont's undoubted writings. A few
words, like 'basilisk' and 'loathed' suggest Beaumont,
as does the verse; but this may be explained by
vogue or imitation. Field was two or three years
younger than Beaumont, and had played as a boy
actor in one or more of the early Beaumont and
Fletcher productions. His Woman is a Weather-cocke
and his Amends for Ladies indicate the influence
of Beaumont in matters of comic invention,[303]
poetic hyperbole, burlesque and pathos, as well as in
metrical style. The Honour is a somewhat bombastic,
puerile, magic-show written in manifest imitation of
Beaumont's verse and rhetoric.
As to The Triumph of Love, I go further than Oliphant.
I assign at least half of it, viz., scenes 1, 2,
and 6, on the basis of diction, to Field. In scenes
3, 4, and 5, I find some trace of Beaumont's favourite
expressions, of his thoughts of destiny and death and
woman's tenderness, his poetic spontaneity, his sensational
dramatic surprises; but I think these are an
echo. The rural scene lacks his exquisite simplicity;
and some of the words are not of his vocabulary.
One is sorry to strike from the list of Beaumont's
creations the pathetic and almost impressive figure of
Violante. If it was originally Beaumont's, it is of
his earlier work revamped by Field; if it is Field's, it
is an echo simulating the voice, but missing the reality,
of Beaumont's Aspatia, Bellario, Urania. This criticism
holds true of both the Triumphs, Love and
Honour.
The commonly accepted date, 1608, for the composition
of the Foure Playes in One is derived from
Fleay, who mistakenly quotes a reference in the 1619
quarto of The Yorkshire Tragedy to the Foure Playes
as if it were of the 1608 quarto where the reference
does not appear.[181] While Fletcher may have written
the first draft of his contribution before the middle of
1610, it is evident from Field's Address To the Reader
in the first quarto of the Woman is a Weather-cocke[304]
(entered S. R., November 23, 1611), that Field's contribution
was made after November 23, 1611. In
that Address he makes it plain that this is his first
dramatic effort: "I have been vexed with vile plays
myself a great while, hearing many; now I thought
to be even with some, and they should hear mine too."
We have already noticed[182] that Field had not written
even his Weather-cocke, still less anything in collaboration
with Fletcher, at the time of the publication of
The Faithfull Shepheardesse (between January and
July, 1609); for in his complimentary poem for the
quarto of that "Pastorall," Field acknowledges his unknown
name and his Muse in swaddling clouts, and
timidly confesses his ambition to write something like
The Shepheardesse, "including a Morallitie, Sweete
and profitable." That Field's contribution to the
Foure Playes was not made before the date of the first
performance of The Weather-cocke by the Revels'
Children at Whitefriars, i. e., January 4, 1610 to
Christmas 1610-11 (when its presentation before the
King at Whitehall probably took place), further appears
from his dedication To Any Woman that hath
been no Weather-cocke (quarto, 1611) in which he
alludes not to The Triumph of Honour, or of Love,
but to Amends for Ladies, as his "next play," then
on the stocks, and, he thought, soon to be printed.[183]
The evidence, external and internal, amply presented
by Oliphant, Thorndike, and others, but with a view
to conclusions different from mine as to date and
authorship, confirms me in the belief that Fletcher's[305]
Time and Death, though written at least two years
earlier, were not gathered up with Field's Induction,
Honour, and Love, into the Foure Playes in One until
about 1612; and that the series was performed at
Whitefriars by Field's company of the Queen's Revels'
Children, shortly after they had first acted Cupid's
Revenge at the same theatre.
2.—Of the remaining ten plays in which, according
to the historical evidence adduced by various critics,
Beaumont could have collaborated, at least two furnish
no material that can be of service for the estimation
of his qualities. If Love's Cure was written as early
as the date of certain references in the story, viz.,
1605-1609, it is so overlaid by later alteration that
whether, as the textual experts guess, it be Beaumont's
revised by Massinger, or Fletcher's revised by Massinger
and others, or Massinger and Middleton's, or
Beaumont's with the assistance of Fletcher and revised
by Massinger, Beaumont for us is indeterminate.
Fleay, Oliphant, and others trace him in a few prose
scenes, and in two or three of verse.[184] But where the
rhetorical and dramatic manner occasionally suggest
him, or the metre has somewhat of his stamp, words
abound that I find in no work of his undisputed composition.
The servant, Lazarillo, like him of Beaumont's
Woman-Hater, is a glutton, but he does not speak
Beaumont's language. The scenes ascribed to Beaumont
reek with an excremental and sexual vulgarity
to which Beaumont never condescended, unless for
brief space, and when absolutely necessary for characterization.[306]
And there is little, indeed, that bespeaks
Fletcher. Love's Cure was first attributed to Beaumont
and Fletcher at a "reviving of the play" after
they were both dead; and it was not printed till 1647.
It is not unlikely, as G. C. Macaulay holds, that the
play was written by Massinger, in or after 1622.
3.—As to that comedy of prostitution, with occasional
essays on the special charms of cuckoldry, The
Captaine (acted in 1613, maybe as early as 1611,
and by the King's Company) there is no convincing
external proof of Beaumont's authorship. It is, on
the contrary, assigned to Fletcher by one of his
younger contemporaries, Hills, whose attributions of
such authorship are frequently correct; and its accent
throughout is more clearly that of Fletcher than of
any other dramatist. The critics are agreed that it is
not wholly his, however; and G. C. Macaulay in especial
conjectures the presence of Massinger. The
verse and prose of a few scenes[185] do not preclude the
possibility of Beaumont's coöperation; but I find in
them no vestige of his faith in sweet innocence; and
in only one,—the awful episode (IV, 5), in which
the Father seeks his wanton daughter in a house of
shame and would kill her,—his imaginative elevation
or his dramatic creativity.
[307]
CHAPTER XXIV
"THE WOMAN-HATER," AND "THE KNIGHT"
Four.—The Woman-Hater was entered in the
Stationers' Registers, May 20, 1607, and published
in quarto (twice, with but slight variation) the
same year "as lately acted by the Children of Paules."
Of the date of composition, probably the spring of
1607, I have written in Chapter VI, above. There is
no indication of authorship in either quarto; but the
Prologue assigns it to a single author—"he that made
this play." The quarto of 1648 prints it as "by J.
Fletcher Gent."; that of 1649, as by Beaumont and
Fletcher. The Prologue of 1649, however, written
by D'Avenant for an undated revival of the play and
addressed to the Ladies, definitely ascribes the authorship
to one "poet," who "to the stars your sex did
raise; for which, full twenty years he wore the bays."
The "twenty years" can apply only to Fletcher.
In the lines which follow, D'Avenant has been supposed
to credit the same author with the whole of
The Maides Tragedy, Philaster, and A King and No
King as well:
'T was he reduc'd Evadne from her scorn,
And taught the sad Aspatia how to mourn;
Gave Arethusa's love a glad relief;
And made Panthea elegant in grief.
[308]
We now know, from the application of metrical and
rhetorical tests, that but a small part of each of the
plays here alluded to was written by Fletcher. If
D'Avenant has attributed to Fletcher in these cases
plays of which the larger part was written by Beaumont,
he was but consistent in error when he ascribed
to Fletcher The Woman-Hater, in which there is very
little that betrays resemblance to Fletcher's style. If,
on the other hand, D'Avenant in the verses quoted
above intended to attribute to Fletcher merely individual
scenes of The Maides Tragedy, etc., he must
have had a knowledge of the respective authorship
of the dramatists hardly to be reconciled with the palpable
mistake of assigning The Woman-Hater to
Fletcher. For, by an odd coincidence, he has indicated
in the first and second verses two[186] of the five
scenes of The Maides Tragedy, and in the third, two[187]
of the five scenes of Philaster which our modern criticism
has proved to be Fletcher's. The reference in
the fourth line is more vague; but it has the merit of
indicating the only scene of A King and No King[188] in
which, according to our critical tests, Fletcher has
contributed to the characterization of Panthea. With
regard to The Woman-Hater, it would appear that
D'Avenant was carelessly following the mistaken
ascription of authorship on the title-page of the quarto
of 1648.
Fleay, Boyle, Macaulay, and Ward, with but slight
hesitation, pronounce The Woman-Hater to be an independent
production of Beaumont, written while he
was under the influence of Ben Jonson; but as I shall[309]
presently show, Fletcher has revised a few scenes.
Oliphant feels inclined to join the critics mentioned
above, but cannot blind himself "to the presence of
Fletcher in a couple of scenes." One of these is
III, 1.[189] In the quartos this scene is divided
into two. By the ye test the first half-scene, running
to Enter Duke, Etc., in which Oriana tempts Gondarino,
would be Fletcher's (15 ye's to 9 you's); but
the percentage of double endings is too low, and that
of run-on lines too high for him. I think that he is
revising Beaumont's original sketch. The second
half-scene and the rest of the act are, by the ye test
and all other criteria, Beaumont's. The metrical style
of the act as a whole is Beaumont's; so also the enclitic
'do's' and 'did's,' the Beaumontesque 'basilisk,'
'dissemble,' the mock-heroic prayers, and mock-legal
nicety of enumeration, the racy ironic prose, and the
burlesque Shakespearian echoes—"That pleasing
piece of frailty that we call woman," etc. The other
passage doubtfully assigned to Fletcher, by Oliphant—forty
lines following Enter Ladies in V, 5 (Dyce)—more
closely resembles his manner of verse, but is
not markedly of his rhetorical stamp. But by the ye
test (24 ye's to 39 you's) the whole of that scene, opening
Enter Arigo and Oriana is Fletcher's, or Fletcher's
revision of Beaumont. So, also, by the ye test is
another scene not before ascribed to Fletcher, IV, 2
(27 ye's to 25 you's), as far as Enter Oriana and her
Waiting-woman. In this and the other ye scenes, the
ye frequently occurs in the objective,—which is absolute[310]
Fletcher. The rest of this scene, constituting two
in the quartos, is pure Beaumont.—The play is, so
far as we can determine, Beaumont's earliest attempt
at dramatic production. Fletcher touched it up, and
his revision shows in the scenes mentioned above; that
is to say, in about sixteen out of the seventy pages as
printed in the Cambridge English Classics.
The manifestly exaggerated torments of Gondarino
"who will be a scourge to all females in his life,"
the amorous affectation of Oriana, the "stratagems
and ambuscadoes" of the hungry courtier in his pursuit
of "the chaste virgin-head" of a fish, the zealous
stupidity of the intelligencers are, as we have already
noted, of the humours school; and the work is that of
a beginner. But the "humours" are flavoured with
Beaumont's humanity; the mirth is his, genuine and
rollicking. The satire is concrete; and the play as a
whole, a promising precursor of the purple-flowered
prickly pear, next to be considered,—also undoubtedly
Beaumont's.
5.—Evidence, both external and internal, points to
the production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle
between July 10, 1607 and some time in March 1608.
Since the first quarto (1613) is anonymous, our earliest
indication of authorship is that of the title-pages
of the second and third (1635), which ascribe the play
to Beaumont and Fletcher; and our next, the Cockpit
list of 1639 where it is included in a sequence of five
plays in which one or both had a hand.
The dedication of the first quarto speaks in one
place of the "parents" of the play, and in others[311]
of its "father"; and the address prefixed to the second
quarto speaks of the "author." Critics when
relying upon verse-tests think that they trace the
hand of Fletcher in several scenes.[190] But in those
scenes, even when the double-endings might indicate
Fletcher, the frequency of rhymes, masculine and
feminine, is altogether above his usage; the number
of end-stopped lines is ordinarily below it; and the
diction, save in one or two brief passages,[191] is his
neither in vocabulary nor rhetorical device. The
verse is singularly free from alliteration; and the
prose, in which over a third of the play is written,
displays that characteristic of Fletcher in only one
speech,[192] and, there, with ludicrous intent. Though,
on the other hand, the verse is in many respects different
from that which Beaumont employed in his more
stereotyped drama, it displays in several passages his
acknowledged peculiarity in conjunction with a diction
and manner of thought undoubtedly his. The
prose is generally of a piece with that of his other
comic writing, as in The Woman-Hater more especially;
and the scenes of low life and the conversation
are coloured by his rhetoric as we know them in Philaster,
A King and No King, and The Coxcombe. Of
the portrayal of humours, mock-heroic and burlesque,
the same statements hold true. The verse of Jasper's
soliloquy:[193]
[312]
Now, Fortune, if thou beest not onely ill,
Shew me thy better face, and bring about
My desperate wheele, that I may clime at length
And stand,—
is in the usual manner of Beaumont. Luce's lament,
beginning:[194]
Thou that art
The end of all, and the sweete rest of all
Come, come, ô, Death! bring me to thy peace,
And blot out all the memory I nourish
Both of my father and my cruell friend,—
and ending:
How happy had I bene, if, being borne,
My grave had bene my cradle!
has both the diction and the point of view of Beaumont;
and its verse has not more of the double-endings
than he sometimes uses. The subject and the
mock-heroic purpose do not call for his usual dramatic
vocabulary: but we recognize his 'dissemble,' his
'carduus' and 'phlebotomy' (compare Philaster),
his 'eyes shoot me through,' his 'do's.' We recognize
him in the frequent appeals to Chance and Fortune,
in the sensational determination of Jasper to
test Luce's devotion at the point of the sword, and
in the series of sensational complications and dénouements
which conclude the romantic plot. In short,
I agree with the critics[195] who attribute the play, wholly
or chiefly, to Beaumont. Fletcher may have inserted
a few verses here and there; but there is nothing in
sentiment, phrase, or artifice, to prove that he did.
[313]
The diversity of metrical forms is but an evidence
of the ingenuity of Beaumont. He has used blank
verse with frequent double-endings to distinguish the
romantic characters and plot: as in the scenes between
Venturewell and Jasper, Jasper and Luce. He has
used the heroic couplet with rhymes, single and double,
to distinguish the mock-romantic of Venturewell and
Humphrey, Humphrey and Luce. For the mock-heroic
of Ralph he has used the swelling ten-syllabled
blank verse of Marlowe and Kyd, or the prose of
Amadis and Palmerin; for his burlesque of the Maylord
he has used the senarii of the antiquated interlude.
For the conversation of the Merrythoughts
and of the citizen-critics he has used plain prose; and
for the tuneful ecstasies of Merrythought senior, a
sheaf of ballads. This consideration alone,—that
the metrical and prose forms are chosen with a view
to the various purposes of the play,—should convince
the reader of the vanity of assigning to Fletcher verse
which evidently had its origin not in any of his proclivities,
but in the temper of Beaumont's Venturewell,
Jasper, and Luce.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle was written and
first acted between June 29, 1607 and April 1, 1608.
The upper limit is fixed, as Boyle has indicated,[196] by the
mention, in Act IV, 1, 46, of an incident in The Travails
of Three English Brothers, "let the Sophy of
Persia come and christen him a childe," concerning
which the 'Boy' remarks, I, 48-50, "that will not
do so well; 'tis stale; it has been had before at the
Red Bull." The Red Bull, Clerkenwell, had been[314]
occupied by Queen Anne's Men (whose plays Beaumont
is especially ridiculing), since 1604.[197] The Travails
was written hurriedly by Day, Rowley, and Wilkins
after the appearance, June 8, 1607, of a tract by
Nixon, on the adventures of the three Shirleys, and
was performed June 29, by the Queen's Men.[198] The
Travails dealt with a matter of ephemeral interest,
and would not long have held the public. It is, therefore,
likely that the allusion to it in The Knight of
the Burning Pestle was written shortly after June 29.
Since the play, according to its first publisher, took
eight days to write, we cannot assign any date earlier
than, say, July 10, 1607, for its first performance.
The lower limit is determined by the certainty that
The Knight was played by the Queen's Revels' Children
at Blackfriars; and that they ceased to act there
as an independent company some time in March 1608.
The play belonged in 1639 to Beeston's Boys, who had
it with four others of Beaumont and Fletcher from
Queen Henrietta's Men. None of these five plays
had ever been played by the King's Company; it is
likely that they had come to the Queen Henrietta's
from the Lady Elizabeth's Men with whom the
Queen's Revels' Children had been amalgamated in
1613.[199] One of these plays, Cupid's Revenge, had certainly
come down from the Queen's Revels' Boys in
that way.
That the original performance was by a company
of children appears from numerous passages in the[315]
text; and the only other children's company available
for consideration between 1603 and 1611, when the
manuscript fell into the publisher's hands, is that of
the Paul's Boys. That the Paul's Boys were not the
company performing is shown, however, by a passage
in the Induction, where the citizen-critic, interrupting
the Prologue of the "good-man boy," says:
"This seven yeares [that] there hath beene playes at
this house, I have observed it, you have still girds at
citizens." Now, at no date between the summer of
1608 and 1611 could it have been said of the Children
of Paul's that they had been acting seven years continuously
at any one "house." The career of the
Paul's Boys as actors at their cathedral school had
ended in the summer of 1608, when Robert Keysar,
Rossiter, and others interested in the rival company
of the Queen's Revels' Children had subsidized Edward
Pierce, the manager of the Paul's Boys, to cease
plays at St. Paul's.[200] If between that date and 1611
they acted, it was elsewhere, at Whitefriars perhaps,
and temporarily (not after 1609), and as the I King's
Revels' Children.[201] The citizen-critic, therefore, if
speaking after the summer of 1608, could not have
referred to Paul's Boys. If speaking of Paul's Boys
between 1603 and 1608, the only "house" that he
can have had in mind would be their school of St.
Paul's Cathedral; and to say that there had been plays
there for seven years would have been utterly pointless,[316]
for the Paul's Boys had been acting in their
school, or in its courtyard, for twenty, one might say
fifty years, more or less continuously. Fleay conjectures
wildly that they had occupied Whitefriars between
1604 and 1607, but that does not explain the
"seven yeares at this house"; to say nothing of the
fact that such occupancy is unproved. An old Whitefriars
inn-yard playhouse had been "pulled down"
in 1582-3. No other Whitefriars Theatre existed
till 1607, when a new Whitefriars "was occupied by
six equal sharers with original title from Lord Buckhurst."[202]
The company was not that of St. Paul's; and the
"house" was not a school-house, but a regularly constituted
theatre. Now, the only theatre, public or
private, that, at any rate between 1603 and 1611, had
been occupied by a boys' company for "this seven
yeares" was Blackfriars; and of Blackfriars the statement
could be made only at a date preceding January
4, 1610, and with reference to the Queen's Revels'
Children. On that date, as reorganized under Rossiter,
Keysar, and others, they received a Patent authorizing
them to open at Whitefriars, "or in any
other convenient place." For about a month before,
they had filled an engagement at Blackfriars, the lease
of which had reverted on August 9, 1608 to Burbadge
and Shakespeare's company of the King's Players.
They had ceased playing at Blackfriars as an independent
company in March 1608; the theatre had been[317]
tenantless after that for six months and then had been
closed until December 7, 1609, because of the prevalence
of the plague. The Citizen's complaint that
the boys have been girding at citizens "this seven
yeares there hath been playes at this house" would
lose all cogency if spoken of the Queen's Revels' Children
when they were acting during the month following
December 7, 1609, both because plays had been
then intermitted for the twenty months preceding,
and because in 1609 it was not seven but twelve years
since the boys had begun their occupancy of "this
house." It could not apply to the seven years between
1597, when they first occupied Blackfriars, and
1604, because The Knight of the Burning Pestle was
not written till after the Travails of Three English
Brothers appeared, June 29, 1607. But it does apply,
with all requisite dramatic and chronological accuracy,
to the seven years preceding the last date,—or the date
in March 1608, when, because of their scandalous
representation of the King of France and his mistress
in Chapman's Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron,
and because of plays caricaturing and vilifying King
James, the Queen's Revels' Children were prohibited
from playing, their principal actors thrown into prison,
and Blackfriars suppressed. On September 29, 1600,
Richard Burbadge had let Blackfriars on a twenty-one-year
lease to Henry Evans, the manager of the
Queen's Revels' Children, and under the organization
of that date they had by 1607-1608 been giving
plays exactly "this seven yeares at this house." We
are, as I have said, informed by the publisher of The
Knight that the play was written in eight days. It[318]
might have been staged in two or three. If the plague
regulations were enforced during 1607-8, as I have
no doubt they were, The Knight was acted between
July 10 and 23, 1607, or between December 26, 1607
and the Biron day in March 1608.
The internal evidence is all confirmatory of this
period of composition. The Queen Anne's Men of
the "Red Bull" mentioned in the play obtained their
title to the Red Bull from Aaron Holland about 1604.
The songs in the play were common property between
1604 and 1607; none of the romances ridiculed is of
a later date than 1607; and of the eight plays mentioned
or alluded to, all had been acted before June
1607 but The Travails; and that was played for the
first time June 29 of that year. The allusions to external
history such as that in Act IV, ii, 4, to the
Prince of Moldavia—who left London in November
1607—and the humorous jibe at the pretty
Paul's Boys of Mr. Mulcaster, who ceased teaching
them in 1608, are all for 1607-8.[203] Fleay marshals
an applausive gallery of conjectures for his conjecture
of 1610, but none of them appears to me to have
any substance; and in view of what has been said,
and of what will follow, I may dispense with their
consideration.
The history of the manuscript is, as has not been
noted before, also confirmatory of the 1607-8 date.
The Robert Keysar who rescued the play from "perpetuall
oblivion" after its failure upon the stage (as[319]
Burre says in the dedication of the first quarto) and
who "afterwards" (in 1610-11) turned it over,
"yet an infant" (i. e. unpublished) and "somewhat
ragged," to Burre for publication, is the same "Mr.
Keysar" who in February 1606, with "Mr. Kendall,"
also of the Blackfriars' management, had been
paid for "Apparrell" furnished for a performance
given by the Children of Westminster School.[204] He
at no period had any connection with the Paul's Boys.
He was, as Professor Wallace informs us, a London
goldsmith who "about this time (1606-7) acquired
an interest in the shifting fortunes of Blackfriars,
and became the financial backer of the Queen's Revels'
Children. He had cause to dislike King James
for oppression in wresting money from the goldsmiths."[205]
Hence probably the attacks of the Queen's
Revels' Children upon the King, which helped to bring
about their suppression at Blackfriars in 1608. Keysar
would inevitably know all about the plays performed
by his Children, The Knight of the Burning
Pestle among the rest, during the last year of
their occupancy of Blackfriars. And since, according
to Burre, he appreciated the merits of The Knight it
was but natural that he, and not some person unconnected
with the company, should have preserved the
manuscript,—perhaps with a view to having the Children
try the play again after they should re-open at
Whitefriars. With Rossiter, soon after March 1608,
he was making preparations for such a reorganization.[320]
When finally they did re-open at their new
theatre, in January 1610, they evidently did not take
up the play. Somewhat later, say 1611, Keysar sent
the manuscript to Burre for publication. Burre "fostred
it privately in his bosome these two yeares" and
brought it out in 1613.
The conclusion of Burre's dedicatory address to
Keysar in the first quarto, of 1613, has unnecessarily
complicated both the question of the date of composition
and that of the source of The Knight of the
Burning Pestle. "Perhaps," says he, "it [The
Knight] will be thought to bee of the race of Don
Quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his
elder above a yeare; and therefore may (by vertue
of his birth-right) challenge the wall of him. I doubt
not but they will meet in their adventures, and I hope
the breaking of one staffe will make them friends;
and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travell
through the world to seeke their adventures." This
denial of indebtedness to Cervantes has been generally
taken to refer to Shelton's English translation of Don
Quixote, entered S. R. January 19, 1611-12, and
printed 1612; and it has, therefore, been supposed by
many that The Knight was written and first acted in
1610 or 1611. But if Burre was dating The Knight
as of 1610 or 1611, he was ignorant of the fact, as
established above, that the play was the elder of Shelton's
printed Don Quixote, not merely "above a
yeare," but above four years. There are only two
other constructions to be placed upon Burre's statement:
either that the play was the elder above a year
of the first part of Don Quixote, issued in the Spanish[321]
by Cervantes in 1605,[206] or that it was the elder
above a year of Shelton's translation as circulated
among his friends in manuscript, at any rate as early
as 1609. If Burre was dating the play, according to
the former interpretation, as of 1604, he was ignorant
of the fact that it could not have been written till
after the appearance of The Travails of Three English
Brothers, June 29, 1607. The latter interpretation
would, if we could adopt it as his understanding
of the matter, not only comport with the date of the
production of The Knight in 1607-8, but also, somewhat
roughly, with his own statement that he had
had the manuscript already in a battered condition in
his "bosome" since 1610 or 1611.
If Burre, who was not a litterateur, did not know
that Shelton's translation of Don Quixote had been
going the rounds for years before it was printed in
1612, everybody else did. Shelton had announced
as much in his Epistle Dedicatorie to Theophilus, Lord
Howard of Walden, prefixed to the first quarto of
1612. He translated the book, as he says, "some
five or six yeares agoe"—that would be in 1607, for
he used the Brussels Reprint of that year as his text,—"out
of the Spanish Tongue into the English in
the space of forty daies: being thereunto more than
half enforced through the importunitie of a very deere
friende, that was desirous to understand the subject.
After I had given him once a view thereof, I cast it
aside, where it lay long time neglected in a corner,
and so little regarded by me as I never once set hand
to review or correct the same. Since when, at the[322]
entreatie of others my friends, I was content to let
it come to light, conditionally that some one or other
would peruse and amend the errours escaped"—because
he had not time to revise it himself. In other
words, Shelton had shown the manuscript translation
of Don Quixote to but one friend in 1607; and
it was not till "long time" had elapsed that he began
to circulate it among his other friends on condition
that they should correct its errors. The date of circulation
was, probably, about 1609, for in that year
we have our earliest mention of the reading of Don
Quixote by an Englishman,—by a dramatic character,
to be sure, but a character created by Ben Jonson.
In his Epicoene, acted in 1610, and written the year
preceding, that dramatist makes Truewit advise the
young Sir Dauphine to cease living in his chamber
"a month together upon Amadis de Gaule, or Don
Quixote, as you are wont." There is no ascription
of Spanish to Dauphine, who is a typical London gallant.
He would read Amadis in the French, or the
English translation; and the only translation of Don
Quixote accessible to him in 1609 would be Shelton's
manuscript of Part One.[207] Jonson may himself
have been one of the friends to whom Shelton submitted
the translation. There is no reason to believe
that Jonson had read Cervantes in the original;
for, as Professor Rudolph Schevill has conclusively
demonstrated,[208] his knowledge of Spanish was extremely
limited. "The Spanish phrases pronounced[323]
by the improvised 'hidalgo' in the Alchemist (of
1610) prove nothing." They were caught, as Professor
Schevill says, from the London vogue or may
have been supplied by some Spanish acquaintance.
Indeed, one may even doubt whether if he read Shelton's
manuscript Jonson did so with any care, for
not only in The Alchemist but elsewhere he uniformly
couples Don Quixote as if a character of chivalric
romance with Amadis, of whom and his congeners
Don Quixote is a burlesque.
As to Burre, however, I do not think that he had
been informed by Keysar of the exact provenience
of the manuscript of The Knight, or of the date of
first acting. I incline to believe that he had the Epistle
Dedicatorie of the newly printed Shelton before
him when, in 1613, he wrote his dedication of The
Knight to Robert Keysar; for he runs the figure of
the book as a "child" and of its "father" and "step-father"
through his screed as Shelton had run it in
1612; and he hits upon a similar diction of "bosome"
and "oblivion." But, though he may have been
gratuitously challenging the wall of Shelton's newly
printed Don Quixote in favour of The Knight as in
existence by 1610 or 1611, the only interpretation of
his "elder above a yeare" that would fit the fact is
afforded by the composition of the play, as already
demonstrated, in 1607-8, more than a year before
Shelton began to circulate his manuscript.
In spite of Burre's assertion of the priority of The
Knight of the Burning Pestle, nearly every editor or
historian who has touched upon The Knight informs
us that it is "undoubtedly derived from Don Quixote."[324]
If (as I am sure was not the case) the play
was written after 1608, Beaumont, or Beaumont and
Fletcher, could have derived suggestions for it from
Shelton's manuscript, first circulated in 1609. That
Beaumont, at any rate, was acquainted with the Spanish
hero by 1610, appears from his familiarity
with the Epicoene in which as we have observed, Don
Quixote is mentioned; for he wrote commendatory
verses for the quarto of that play, entered S. R.
September 20 of that year. If, on the other hand,
The Knight, as I hold, was written in 1607 or 1608,
the author or authors, provided they read Spanish,
could have derived suggestions from Cervantes' original
of 1605; or if they did not read Spanish, from
hearsay. The latter source of information would be
the more likely, for although sixteen of the ignorantly
so-called "Beaumont and Fletcher" plays have been
traced to plots in Spanish originals, there is not one
of those plots which either of the poets might not
have derived from English or French translation;
and in none of the sixteen plays is there any evidence
that either of the dramatists had a reading knowledge
of Spanish.[209] As to the possibility of information
by hearsay, other dramatists allude to Don Quixote
as early as 1607-8;[210] and, indeed, it would be virtually[325]
impossible that any literary Londoner could
have escaped the oral tradition of so popular and
impressive a masterpiece two years after its
publication.
All this supposition of derivation from Don Quixote
is, however, so far as verbal indebtedness goes, or
indebtedness for motifs, episodes, incidents and their
sequence, characters, machinery, dramatic construction,
manners, sentiments, and methods of satire, a
phantom caught out of the clear sky. So far as the
satire upon the contemporary literature of chivalry
is concerned, when the ridicule is not of English
stuff unknown to Cervantes it is of Spanish material
translated into English and already satirized by Englishmen
before Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote.
An examination of The Knight and of the Don in any
version, and of contemporary English literature, reveals
incontestibly not only that the material satirized,
the phrases and ideas, come from works in English,
but that even the method of the satire is derived from
that of preceding English dramatic burlesque rather
than from that of Cervantes.
The title of the play was suggested by The Knight
of the Burning Sword, an English translation, current
long before 1607, of the Spanish Amadis of
Greece, Prince and Knight of the Burning Sword.
Ten full years before 1607 Falstaff had dubbed his
red-nosed Bardolph "Knight of the Burning Lamp."
The farcical, but eminently sane, grocer's apprentice,
turned Knight for fun, grows out of Heywood's
Foure Prentises, and Day and Wilkins's Travails, and
the English Palmerins, etc. He has absolutely nothing[326]
in common with the glorious but pathetically
unbalanced Don of Cervantes. Nor is there any resemblance
between Ralph's Palmerin-born Squire
and Dwarf—and that embodiment of commonsense,
Sancho Panza.[211] The specific conception of The
Knight of the Burning Pestle, a satire upon the craze
of London tradesmen for romances of chivalry, for
"bunches of Ballads and Songs, all ancient," for the
bombast and sensationalism of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy,
Marlowe's True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of
York, even of Shakespeare's Hotspur, and of dramas
of bourgeois knight-errantry,—a burlesque of the civic
domestic virtues and military prowess of prentices
and shop-keepers,—is much more applicable to the
conditions and aspirations of contemporary Bow-Bells
and the affectations of the contemporary stage than
to those which begot and nourished the madness of
the Knight of La Mancha.
Beaumont may have received from the success of
the Don Quixote of 1605 some impulse provocative
to the writing of The Knight, but a dramatic satire,
such as The Knight, might have occurred to him if
Don Quixote had never been written; just as that
other dramatic satire upon the dramas of folk-lore
romance, The Old Wives Tale, had occurred to Peele
some fifteen years before Don Quixote appeared; and
as it had occurred to the author of Thersites to ridicule,
upon the stage, Greek tales of heroism and British
worthies of knighthood and the greenwood still
fifty-five years earlier. The puritan and the ritualist,
the country justice and the squire, the schoolmaster[327]
and the scribbling pedant, the purveyor of marvels of
forest and marsh, the knight-adventurer of ancient
lore or of modern creation, the damsel distressed or
enamoured of visionary castles, had, one and all,
awakened laughter upon the Tudor stage. The leisure
wasted, and the emotion misspent, over the Morte
d'Arthur and the histories of Huon of Bordeaux,
Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamptoun, or of
Robin Hood and Clim of the Clough, had been deplored
by many an anxious educator and essayist
of the day. Why was it not time and the fit occasion,
in a period when city grocers and their
wives would tolerate no kind of play but such as revamped
the more modern tales of chivalry, or tricked
tradesmen out in the factitious glory of quite recent heroes
of romance,—why was it not time for an attack
upon the vogue of Anthony Munday's translations of
the now offending cycles, Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin
de Oliva, Palmerin of England, and upon the vogue
of the English versions of The Mirror of Knighthood
with its culminating bathos of the Knight of the Sunne
and His Brother Rosicleer? These had, in various
instalments, befuddled the popular mind for thirty
years.
Ben Jonson already, in his Every Man out of
His Humour (1599), had satirized the common
affectation under the similitude of a country knight,
Puntarvolo, who, if not crazed, was at any rate
"wholly consecrated to singularity" by reason of
undue absorption of romances of chivalry, a singularity
of "fashion, phrase, and gesture" of the Anthony
Munday type and the type glassed in the Mirror
of Knighthood.[328] Sir Puntarvolo, who "sits a great
horse" and "courts his own lady, as she were a
stranger never encountered before,"—who feigns that
his own house is a castle, who summons with trumpet-blast
the waiting-woman to the window, and, saluting
her "after some little flexure of the knee," asks
for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties"
of the "lady" may shine on this side of the building,—who
"planet struck" by the "heavenly pulchritude" of
his long-suffering and much bewildered poor old
wife, conveys to her the information that he is a poor
knight-errant pursuing through the forest a hart "escaped
by enchantment," and that, wearied, he and his
servant make "suit to enter" her fair abode,—Sir
Puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fantastic
homage, what is he but a predecessor of Don
Quixote and Ralph alike, fashioned out of the materials
of decadent chivalric fiction common to both?
In 1600, Robert Anton had burlesqued in prose and
rhyme the romantic ballads of the day in his ludicrous
Heroical Adventures of the Knight of the Sea, where
"the queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and
apathetic cow into a knight-errant to do her business
in the world."[212] And in 1605, also before the appearance
of Cervantes' burlesque, Chapman, with
the collaboration of Jonson and Marston, had, in
Eastward Hoe, satirized that other kind of knight,
him of the city and by purchase, in the character of
Sir Petronel Flash; and, with him, the aspirations of
romance-fed merchants' daughters who would wed
knights and dwell in country-castles wrested from[329]
giants. Nor had these authors failed to specify the
sources of delusion, the Mirror of Knighthood, the
Palmerin of England, etc. That both Beaumont
and Fletcher were alive, without prompting from Cervantes,
to the mania of chivalric emulation which
obsessed the train-bands of London is attested by
the bombastic talk of "Rosicleer" which Fletcher
puts into the mouth of the city captain in Philaster,
a play that was written about two years later than
The Knight, in 1609 or 1610. There had been musters
of the City companies at Mile End as early as
1532, and again under Elizabeth in 1559, and 1585,
and 1599, when as many as 30,000 citizens were
trained there. But the muster in which Ralph had
been chosen "citty captaine" was evidently that of
1605, a general muster under James I.
Why, then, should we suppose that it was beyond
the genius of a Beaumont to conceive, as Peele, Jonson,
Chapman, Marston, and others had conceived,
a drama which should burlesque the devotees of such
romances as were the fad of the day? And to conceive
it without the remotest suggestion from Don
Quixote? Whether Beaumont read Spanish or not,
and there is no proof that he did read it; whether he
had heard of Don Quixote or not, and there is little
doubt that he had, there is nothing in The Knight
of the Burning Pestle that in any way presupposes
either verbal acquaintance with, or constructive dependence
upon, the burlesque of Cervantes.[213] In short,[330]
Professor Schevill, in the article cited above,
and following him Dr. Murch, in an admirable introduction
to his edition of The Knight, have shown that
Beaumont's conception of the hero, Ralph, not only
is not of a piece with, but is fundamentally different
from, Cervantes' conception of Don Quixote; and
they have demonstrated with a minuteness of chapter
and verse that need not be recapitulated here that
the motives, machinery and characters, ideas and
phrases are, in so far as they have relation to romances
of chivalry, drawn out of, or suggested by, the
English translations already enumerated. This demonstration
applies to the adoption of the squire, the
rescue of Mrs. Merrythought, the incident of the casket,
the liberation of the barber's patients, the mock-heroic
love-affair, as well as to the often adduced
barber's basin and the scene of the inn. Of the situations,
there is none that is not a logical issue of
the local conditions or the presuppositions of an original
plot; whereas there are, on the other hand, numerous
situations in Don Quixote, capable of dramatic
treatment, that the Elizabethan playwright of 1607-8
could hardly have refrained from annexing if he had
used that story as a source. The setting or background
of The Knight, as Professor Schevill has said,
in no way recalls that of the Don, "and it is difficult to
see how any inspiration got from Cervantes should
have failed to include at least a slight shadow of something
which implies an acquaintance with Rocinante[331]
and Sancho Panza." Beaumont, in addition, not only
satirizes, as I have said, the chivalric and bourgeois
dramas of Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You
Know Nobody, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel
like Mucedorus and the Travails, and parodies with
rare humour the rant of Senecan tragedy; he not only
ridicules the military ardour and pomp of the London
citizens, and pokes fun at their unsophisticated assumption
of dramatic insight and critical instinct,—with
all this satire of the main plot and of the spectator-gods
in the machinery, he has combined a romantic
plot of common life—Jasper, Luce, and Humphrey,—and
a comic plot of humours in which Jasper's father,
mother, and brother live as Merrythoughts should.
He has produced a whole that in drama was an innovation
and in burlesque a triumph. The Knight was
still an acting play in the last quarter of the seventeenth
century. During the past thirteen years it has
been acted by academic amateurs five times in
America.
[332]
CHAPTER XXV
THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS
Six.—The Coxcombe was first printed in the folio
of 1647. Our earliest record of its acting is
of a performance at Court by the Children of the
Queen's Revels in 1612.[214] The day was between
October 16 and 24. A list of the principal actors,
all Queen's Children, preserved in the folio of 1679,
indicates, however, that this was not the first performance;
for three of the actors listed had left that
company by August 29, 1611; one of them (Joseph
Taylor) perhaps before March 30, 1610. The list
was evidently contemporary with the first performance.
The absolute upper limit of the composition
was 1604, for one of the characters speaks of the
taking of Ostend. If the play, as we are dogmatically
informed by a credulous sequence of critics who
take statements at second-hand, principally from German
doctors' theses, were derived from Cervantes'
story, El Curioso Impertinente, which appeared in
the First Part of Don Quixote, printed 1605, or (since
we have no evidence that our dramatists read Spanish),
from Baudouin's French translation which was
licensed April 26, 1608[215] and may have reached England[333]
about June,—we might have a definite earlier
limit of later date. But there is no resemblance between
the motif of Cervantes' story, in which a
husband out of curiosity and an impudent desire to
heighten the treasure of his love would try his wife's
fidelity, and that of Beaumont and Fletcher's play,
where there is no question of a trial of honour. In
Beaumont and Fletcher, we have a revelation of lust
at first sight on the part of the husband's friend,
Mercury, of unnatural friendly pandering on the
part of that 'natural fool' the husband, Antonio, and
of easy acquiescence on the part of Maria, the wife,
in the cuckolding of her idiotic coxcomb, who with
the wool pulled over his eyes takes her back believing
that she is innocent. In Cervantes, the husband,
sure of his wife and adoring her, urges his
friend to make trial of her honour; the friend,
outraged at first by the suggestion, refuses, but
finally succumbs to passion and wins the wife, likewise,
at first, above suspicion; and all die tragically.
There is no resemblance in treatment, atmosphere,
incidents, or dialogue. The only community
of conception is that of a husband playing with fire—risking
cuckoldom. But Cervantes' character of the
husband is sentimentally deluded; Beaumont and
Fletcher's is a contemptible and willing wittol. If
Beaumont and Fletcher derived their plot from Cervantes,
all that can be said is that they have mutilated
and vulgarized the original out of all possibility of
recognition.[216]
[334]
Other English dramatists dealing with the theme
of The Curious Impertinent between 1611 and 1615
followed Cervantes more or less closely in the main
motif, in incident, and in dialogue: the author of
The Second Maiden's Tragedy, for instance, who
made use of Baudouin's translation; and Nathaniel
Field, who used either Baudouin or Shelton's publication
of 1612 in his Amends for Ladies. But Beaumont
and Fletcher in their tale of a husband cuckolded
and pommeled were drawing upon another
source, one of the many variants of Le Mari coccu,
battu et content, to be found in Boccaccio and before
him in Old French poems, and French and Italian
Nouvelles. If they derived anything from Cervantes,
whose theme is lifted from the Orlando Furioso,
it was merely the suggestion for a fresh drama of
cuckoldry. That their play was regarded by others
as thus inspired appears, I think, from a passage
in Ben Jonson's Alchemist, IV, vii, 40-41, where,
after Kastril has said to Surly, "You are a Pimpe,
and a Trig, and an Amadis de Gaule, or a Don Quixote,"
Drugger adds, "Or a Knight o' the curious
cox-combe, Doe you see?" Field and the rest, writing
in or after 1611, had uniformly referred to Cervantes'
cuckold as the Curious Impertinent. Jonson
wrote his Alchemist between July 12 and October 3,
1610, and up to that time the cuckold had been dramatized
as Coxcomb only by Beaumont and Fletcher.
The prefix 'Curious' indicates that in Jonson's mind
his friend's play is associated with Cervantes' novel;[335]
and the further prefix of 'The Knight' looks very
much like a reminiscence of "The Knight of the
Burning Pestle," which had been played some two
years before. This argument from contemporaneity
of inspiration and allusion inclines me to date the
upper limit of The Coxcombe about 1609, after Baudouin's
translation Le Curieux Impertinent had
reached England, and Shelton's manuscript had been
put in circulation.
If to this conjecture we could add a precise determination
of the period of Joseph Taylor's connection
with the Queen's Revels' Children, we should have a
definite lower limit for the performance of The Coxcombe
in which he took part. But I find it impossible
to decide whether Taylor had been with the
Queen's Revels up to about March 30, 1610, upon
which day his name appears among the Duke of York's
Players who were recently reorganized and had just
obtained a new patent; or had been up to that time
with the predecessors of the Duke of York's (Prince
Charles's) Company, and had left them shortly after
March 30 for the Queen's Revels' Children. In
favour of the former alternative are (1) that in the
list of the Queen's Revels' actors in The Coxcombe
he appears second to Field only, as if a player of
long standing with them and high in the company's esteem
at the time of the performance; (2) that he
does not appear among the actors in the list for
Epicoene which was presented first by the Queen's
Revels' Children between January 4 and March 25,
1610: Field is still first, Barkstead, who had been
eighth on the Coxcombe list, appears now second, as[336]
if promoted to Taylor's place, and Giles Carey is
third in both lists; (3) that in the March 30 patent
to the Duke of York's Players his name ranks only
fifth, as if that of a recent acquisition. On this basis
the lower limit would be March 25, 1610. In favour
of the latter alternative, viz., that Taylor joined the
Queen's Children from the Duke of York's, at a date
later than March 30, 1610, are the considerations: (1)
that when the new Princess Elizabeth's Company,
formed April 11, 1611, gives a bond to Henslowe on
August 29 of that year, Taylor's name appears with
two of the Queen's Revels' Children of March 1610,
as if all three had left the Queen's Revels for the
new company at the same time; and (2) that their
names appear close together after that of the principal
organizer as if not only actors of repute in the company
which they had left but prime movers in the
new organization. On this basis the lower limit for
the performance of The Coxcombe, at a time when
all three were yet Queen's Revels' Children, would
be August 29, 1611. Consulting the restrictions necessitated
by the plague rate, we have, then, an option
for the date of acting: either between December 7,
1609 and July 12, 1610, when Jonson had begun his
Alchemist, or between November 29, 1610 and July
1611. In the latter case Ben Jonson's "Knight o'
the curious coxcombe" would precede the performance
of Beaumont and Fletcher's play and could not
be an allusion. In the former, it would immediately
follow the acting of The Coxcombe, and would manifestly
be suggested by that play. I prefer the former
option; and date the acting,—on the assumption that[337]
Taylor left the Queen's Revels by March 30, 1610,—before
that date.[217] Since Fletcher's contribution to
the play has been mangled by a reviser it is impossible
to draw conclusions as to the date of composition
from the evidence of his literary style. But the characteristics
of Beaumont in the minor plot are those
of the period in which the Letter to Ben Jonson and
Philaster were written. The play as first performed
was condemned for its length by "the ignorant multitude."[218]
I believe that it was one of the two or three
unsuccessful comedies which preceded Philaster; and,
as I have said above, that it is the play referred to in
the Letter to Ben Jonson, toward the end of 1609.[219]
If the date of acting was before January 4, 1610, the
theatre was Blackfriars; if after, Whitefriars.
The Prologue in the first folio speaks of a revision.
But though the hand of one, and perhaps of another,
reviser is unmistakably present, the play is properly
included among Beaumont and Fletcher's works. In
the commendatory verses of 1647, Hills and Gardiner
speak of the play as Fletcher's, but all tests show
that Beaumont wrote a significant division of it,—the
natural, vigorous, tender, and poetic subplot of
Ricardo's desertion of Viola and his ultimate reclamation,—with
the exception of three scenes and parts
of two or three more. The exceptions are the first
thirty-five lines of Act I, which have been supplied
by some reviser; I, 3, in which also the reviser appears;
I, 5, the drinking-bout in the tavern, where[338]
some of the words (e. g. "claw'd") indicate Fletcher,—and
the gratuitous obscenity, Fletcher or his reviser;
and Act II, 2, where Viola is bound by the tinkers and
rescued by Valerio.[220] Perhaps, also, the last thirty-six
lines of Act III, 3, where Fletcher is discernible
in the afterthoughts "a likely wench, and a good
wench," "a very good woman, and a gentlewoman,"
and the hand of a reviser in the mutilation of the
verse; and certainly Act IV, 3, where Fletcher appears
at his best in this play.
The romantic little comedy of Ricardo and Viola
is so loosely joined with the foul portrayal of the
Coxcomb who succeeds in prostituting his wife to
his friend, that it might be published separately and
profitably as the work of Beaumont.[221] It is well
constructed; and it conveys a noble tribute to the
purity and constancy of woman, her grace of forgiveness,
and her influence over erring man. When
Viola speaks she is a living person, instinct with recklessness,
sweetness, and pathos. Few heroines of
Elizabethan comedy have compressed so much reality
and poetry into so narrow a compass. "Might not,"
she whispers when stealing forth at night to meet
Ricardo:—[222]
Might not God have made
A time for envious prying folk to sleep
Whilst lovers met, and yet the sun have shone?
And then:
[339]
Alas, how valiant and how fraid at once
Love makes a Virgin!
When she comes upon her lover staggering outside
the tavern with his sodden comrades,[223] with what simplicity
she shudders:
I never saw a drunken man before;
But these I think are so....
My state is such, I know not how to think
A prayer fit for me; only I could move
That never Maiden more might be in love!
When, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds
that her rescuer is even more a peril,[224] with what
childlike trust she appeals:
Pray you, leave me here
Just as you found me, a poor innocent,
And Heaven will bless you for it!
When again deserted, with what pathos she sighs:
"I'll sit me down and weep;
All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower
Droops now, as well as I!"
And, finally, when she has rediscovered Ricardo, and
conquered his self-reproach by her forgiveness, which
is "to love you," with what admirable touch of nature
and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude to her
story and herself:[225]
[340]
Methinks I would not now, for any thing,
But you had mist me: I have made a story
Will serve to waste many a winter's fire,
When we are old. I'll tell my daughters then
The miseries their Mother had in love,
And say, "My girls, be wiser"; yet I would not
Have had more wit myself.
Ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development
of personality; and the rural scenes and characters
are convincing.
In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever,
unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end
of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few
scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as
well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant
thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;[226]
and here and there, Rowley.[227] I should be sorry to
impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think
that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak
endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation,
and bad grammar have much nearer kinship
with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever
sins of supererogation his revisers may have been
guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's—in dramatizing
that story at all. To make a comedy out of
cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans:
for the pruriency of it we can make historical
allowance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero
successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is
nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife,[341]
and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual
gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse
even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and
therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of
technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have
made his contribution to this play worthy of literary
criticism.
Though The Coxcombe was not successful in its first
production before the "ignorant multitude," it was
"in the opinion of men of worth well received and
favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court
in 1612 in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's
approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth.
It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta
in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old
plays" presented in the City theatres after the Restoration,
and before 1682. In the revivals Beaumont's
romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant
position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a
comedy called The Fugitives, constructed by Richardson
and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792.
With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the
Ricardo of the original), and Mrs. Jordan as Julia
(alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran for a
dozen nights or more.
7.—Philaster or Love lies a-Bleeding was "divers
times acted at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his
Majesties Servants." Under the second title in the
Scourge of Folly, entered for publication October 8,
1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and
I have already stated my reasons as based upon the[342]
history of the theatres[228] for believing that its first
performance took place between December 7, 1609
and July 12, 1610.
We might have something like confirmation of this
date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of
Hereford's Scourge of Folly, if we could affirm that
they were arranged in the order of their composition.
For just before the epigram on Love lies a-Bleeding,
which, I think, without doubt, applies to Philaster,
appears one To the Roscius of these times, Mr. W.
Ostler, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now
Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's
Revels' Children,—most of them from thirteen to sixteen
years of age at the time,—in 1601 when Jonson's
Poetaster was acted. He could not have been more
than twenty-three years of age while still playing with
the Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly
not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that
age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Burbadge
and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning
the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,[229] before
Evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in 1608,
some of the Queen's Revels' Children "growing up
to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler,
were taken to strengthen the King's service; and the
more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing
out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt
for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we]
purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our
money, and placed men players, which were Hemings,[343]
Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this
deposition places the transference of Underwood,
Field, and Ostler to the King's Company between the
beginning of April 1608 when the Revels' Children
were temporarily suppressed and August of that year
when the Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and
others took over Evans's unexpired lease of Blackfriars
with a view to occupying it themselves. But
the deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made
till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described;
and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence
of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily
with, or under the supervision of, the King's Company
at Blackfriars between December 7, 1609 and
January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the
head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by
March 25, 1610, and does not appear in the lists of
the King's Men till 1616; and there is no record of
Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company
before the end of 1610, when they acted in
Jonson's Alchemist (after October 3). Since Underwood
and Ostler were not with the new Queen's
Revels after January of that year, it is probable that
Davies's epigram to the latter as "the Roscius of
these times" in the Scourge of Folly, entered for
publication on October 8, 1610, was written after
Ostler had attained distinction in Shakespeare's company,
the company of the leading actors of the day,
and that the grouping of the epigram to Ostler
with that of the epigram to Fletcher on Philaster
presented by that company indicates contemporaneity
in the composition of the epigrams,—that is[344]
to say, between January 4 and October, 1610.
Since, however, the epigrams in The Scourge of
Folly, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes
of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous
composition, do not follow a continuous
chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two
epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's
evidence to the direction of the wind. Of much
greater weight as confirming the date of Philaster,
as conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare's
Cymbeline not only in general features of
background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters,
romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in
specific detail. I shall presently attempt to show at
greater length that there is nothing in the Philaster
or the Cymbeline to indicate the priority of the former.
But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate
in this place though briefly the argument of a later
chapter.[230] For the Cymbeline, I accept the date assigned
by the majority of critics, 1609. Shakespeare
had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in
mind since he first introduced her, years before, as
a silent personage in Much Ado About Nothing (the
quarto of 1600). In execution the play is, with The
Winter's Tale and the Tempest, the dramatic sequel
of that first of his "dramatic romances,"—of which
the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a
wife or child,—the Pericles written in 1607 or 1608.
And since already in Pericles, Shakespeare had blazed
this new path, I cannot for a moment accept the[345]
hypothesis that he is in his Cymbeline borrowing profusely
from Philaster, a work of comparatively unestablished
dramatists who had but recently been
admitted to authorship for the company of which
Shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal,
almost the only, playwright. It is much more according
to human probability that the younger dramatists,
since about the beginning of 1610 associated with
the King's Company and its enterprises, should have
adapted their technical and poetic style of construction
to the somewhat novel—to them entirely novel—method
of the seasoned playwright of the King's
Servants, as tried and approved in Pericles and Cymbeline.
And still the more so when one reflects that,
in Pericles and Cymbeline, aside from the leading
conception, everything of major or minor detail had
been already anticipated by Shakespeare himself in
earlier romantic comedies from The Two Gentlemen
of Verona to As You Like It and Twelfth Night;
and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic
construction in Philaster, otherwise original and poetically
impressive as it is, which a study of those
earlier comedies and of the Pericles and Cymbeline
would not suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance
upon the conviction that Philaster was first
acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont
and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December
1609 and July 1610.
The play was first published in a quarto of 1620
which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto
of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In his epigram,
addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the[346]
well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears
to give that author credit for practically the
whole work,—"Thou ... raign'st in Arte, Judgement,
and Invention," and adds a compliment for
"thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick,
writing for the folio of 1647, mentions Love Lies
a-Bleeding among Fletcher's "incomparable plays";
and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely
the scene "when first Bellario bled." John
Earle, however, writing "on Master Beaumont, presently
after his death" comes nearer the truth when
he says:
Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared to thee,
In thy Philaster and Maids Tragedy!
Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray ...
for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes
and a few insertions or revisions by Fletcher,
Philaster is Beaumont's (and practically the same
holds true of The Maides Tragedy, and the Bessus
play—A King and No King). In Philaster
Fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by
metrical when they may be applied, are I, 1b (from
the King's entry, line 89—line 358,[231]—a revision and
enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2b
(from Enter Megra), II, 4b (from Megra above),
V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 was written
by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14 to
29 (from Enter Arethusa and Bellario to "how
brave she keeps him"). Similarly, the first draught[347]
of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34
(exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long
tirade) and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end).
But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we
find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical characteristics,
his alliterations, favourite words and ideas,
tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations,
triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." The last
three lines of that soliloquy are his:
Soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments
Where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat
And the cold marble melt;[232]
and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical
triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine
poetry of Philaster's accusation of Arethusa. "The
story of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow
quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten,—"these
sad texts"[233] Fletcher "to his last
hour" is never weary of repeating.
It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes
are elaborative, bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally
easy, at times bustling, at times spectacular,
but not vitally contributory to the business of the
play. They comprise the longest speeches of the
King, Pharamond, Philaster, Megra, and Bellario.
Some of these, such as the King's denunciation of[348]
Megra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar
rhetoric. The bawdy half-scene with its maid of
easy honour is his; the discovery of the low intrigue,
the simulated masque and the mob-scene are his.
They may display, but they do not develop, characters.
They are sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully
poetic as in V, 3, 83-84, where his "all your better
deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble" anticipates
Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic;
but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation
of Beaumont. The play, in fact, is not only
preponderatingly but primarily Beaumont's, from the
excellent exposition in the first act to the series of
sensational surprises which precede the dénouement in
the fifth. The conception of the characters and the
complication are distinctive of that writer's plots: the
impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence
toward the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and
his unwarranted suspicion of the honour of his mistress.
The subtle revelations of personality are
Beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric
pathos and beauty of Bellario, the nobler aspects of
Dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet bewilderments
and unmerited tribulations of Arethusa, the combination
of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization,
the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of
dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical insights,
and the memorable lines. His, too, the humour
of the rural sketches—the Country Fellow who has
"seen something yet," the occasional frank animality,
as well as the tender beauty of innocence. Not only
are the virtues of the play Beaumont's but some of[349]
its faults of conception and construction; and those
faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero
and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortuitous
succession of the crises, and the subordination of
Bellario in the dénouement.
The popularity of Philaster as an acting play, not
only at Court but in the city, is attested by contemporary
record. It was played after the Restoration
with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed
thirteen revivals,—the last at Bath on December 12
of the latter year, with Ward in the title-rôle and Miss
Jarmin as Bellario.[234]
8.—The Maides Tragedy, acted by the King's Men
during the festivities at Court, October 1612 to
March 1613, was known to Sir George Buc when,
October 31, 1611, he licensed an anonymous play as
"this second maiden's tragedy." It was acted by
the King's also at Blackfriars; and since it is in every
way a more mature production than Philaster, I think
that it followed that play, toward the end of 1610 or
in 1611. It was first published in 1619, in quarto
and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also anonymous;
that of 1630 gives the names of Beaumont and
Fletcher as authors. In the commendatory verses to
the folio of 1647, Henry Howard ascribes the scene
of Amintor's suicide to Fletcher; Waller assigns to
him "brave Melantius in his gallantry" and "Aspatia[350]
weeping in her gown"; Stanley, too, gives him the
weeping Aspatia; and Herrick, "Evadne swelling with
brave rage." These descriptions are as misleading
as blind. D'Avenant comes nearer the mark in his
Prologue to The Woman-Hater, already quoted,
where he indicates correctly an Evadne scene and an
Aspatia scene as of Fletcher's composition. Metrical
tests, corrected by the rhetorical, show that Fletcher's
contributions are limited to three scenes and two half-scenes.
The list opens with those to which D'Avenant
alludes: II, 2, in which Fletcher "taught the sad
Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, 1 (as far as line
200, "Prithee, do not mock me"), in which he "reduced
Evadne from her scorn"; and it includes, also,
the ten lines of V, 1, the larger part of V, 2 (to
Exit Evadne), and the perfunctory V, 3. As to
Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt can be entertained.
It is an admirable example of his double
endings (almost 40 per cent), his end-stopped lines
(80 per cent), anapæstic rhythms and jolts, as well
as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his incremental
second thoughts. I fail to see how any
critic can assign it to Beaumont.[235] As frequently with
Fletcher, Aspatia's mourning, though beautiful, is a
falsetto from the classics; more like one of Rossetti's
or Leigh Hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than a
first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. There
is likewise no doubt concerning the authorship of the
first part of Act IV, 1 (lines 1-189), in which Melantius[351]
convinces Evadne of sin and drives her to
vengeance upon the King. The latter part of the
scene, also, appears to have been written by Fletcher
in the first instance, and to have consisted of the first
six speeches after the entrance of Amintor (lines
190-200), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to
win belief" (247-254, 260-262), and the conclusion
(263-285). But between Amintor's supplication
"Prithee do not mock me" (line 200) and Evadne's
assertion of sincerity "I have done nothing good to
win belief" (line 247[236]), Beaumont has inserted four
speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy otherwise
histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest
passages of the play. In Evadne's "My whole
life is so leprous it infects All my repentance"—"That
slight contrition"—"Give me your griefs; you
are an innocent, A soul as white as Heaven"—"Shoot
your light into me"—"Dissembling with my tears"—"Cut
from man's remembrance," we hear the words,
phrases, and figures of Beaumont; and we trace him
in the repeated use of "do." We find him in Amintor's
"Seed of virtue left to shoot up"—"put a thousand
sorrows off"—"that dull calamity"—"that
strange misbelief"—and in
Mock not the powers above that can and dare
Give thee a great example of their justice
To all ensuing ages.[237]
And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration[352]
of sincere reform (255-259), we are thrilled by his
sudden magic and his poetic finality:
Those short days I shall number to my rest
(As many must not see me) shall, though too late,
Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,—
Since I can do no good, because a woman,—
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
The ground-work of this latter portion, from Amintor's
entrance, where Evadne cries "Oh, my lord,"
"My much abused lord," and he, "I may leap, Like
a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines 190-200);
and the last three speeches in general with
Amintor's "My frozen soul melts," and "My honour
falls no farther: I am well, then"; and with Evadne's
"tales" that "go to dust forgotten,"—the Niobe
weeping till she is water,—the "wash her stains
away," and
All the creatures
Made for Heaven's honours, have their ends, and good ones,—
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women—
They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,
Men pray against; ...
this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction,
to the scene as Fletcher originally wrote it.
When to these two scenes we add the first and third
of Act V, which are of no particular significance, and
the second (to the death of the King), we have
Fletcher's whole written contribution to this wonderful
tragedy. In the murder of the King he displays[353]
dramatic mastery of the grisly and shuddering; but
though the scene is characterized by the same rapidity
of conversational thrust and parry as the Fletcherian
dialogue between Melantius and Evadne, it is, like
it, marred in effect by violence physical rather than
spiritual, by brutality of vituperation and stage realism
with but scant relief of subtlety. Fletcher's
tragic scenes excel not in portrayal of personality
but in business; his contribution to Aspatia is not
pathos but the embroidery of grief.
The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's:
the cruel desertion of Aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration
and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation
of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery,
her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her,
its gradual recognition of the inevitable,—that unchastity
cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor
cleansed by blood,—and its true birth through love
desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment
of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance
and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author
of his wrongs,—yet idealized by virgin and wanton
alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the
conflict between honour and friendship, pride and
sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that
blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the pestilent
King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio
is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and
hopeless. These are Beaumont's; and his, too, the
wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthralling
exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the
masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive,[354]
and the psychic revolutions of movement in the
second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate
complication the fourth displays—in fact, all
that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense
and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations
that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the
catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the
poetic finality.
In his Tragedies of the Last Age, licensed in 1677,
Rymer attacked The Maides Tragedy violently for its
lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot,
and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as Rymer
insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play
might better have been called Amintor, or the Lustful
King, or The Concubine. But The Maides Tragedy
is a more attractive name, and it may be justified.
For I do not find that the action is double-centred.
It springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the
Maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be
'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic devotion of
Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's
tragic weakness, his hamartia. His failure to
act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward
Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him
the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first
flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile
as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from
his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly
slain the man to whom she had sold herself.
The Nemesis, too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the
King, but Aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten:[355]
I did that lady wrong. Methinks I feel
A griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins,—[238]
... The faithless sin I made
To faire Aspatia is not yet revenged;
It follows me.—[239]
His Nemesis is Aspatia, constant unto death,—and
in her death, awakening such remorse that he must
die to be with her: "Aspatia!" he cries—
The soule is fled forever, and I wrong
Myselfe so long to lose her company,
Must I talke now? Heres to be with thee, love![240]
Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,[241] of
"the irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs"
in the characterization and conduct of Evadne
have logicality of appearance, but are based upon
incorrect premises. The facts, as Beaumont gives
them, are that Evadne was "once fair" and "chastely
sweet,"—before she met the King; that she was already
corrupt when she took Amintor as her husband;
that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in
presence of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, is an assumed
delicacy; that she loves the King "with ambition
not with her eyes" (III, 1); that she "would
bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has
accepted Amintor as a screen, but speedily lusts for
him, and is willing to give herself to him if he will
forthright kill the King (II, 1, 179):
[356]
Wilt thou kill this man?
Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sin
Off from thy lips.
But Amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious,
not the kind of man to satisfy her new desire, and
ambition too. He could never win her by winning
the throne,—too lily-livered:
"I wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, "till I do know the cause";—
Then she, with passion "I wood thou wouldst."—But
she is a woman whose first behest is scorned; and with
sudden revulsion of contempt for this poltroon, as
she now conceives him—
Why, it is thou that wrongst me; I hate thee;
Thou shouldst have kild thy selfe.
Amintor has lost his evil chance. She despises him
and yet, in her better moments, with a kind of pity.
It follows that her prompt avowal of her liaison, and
her return to the King and insulting treatment of
Amintor are of a piece with the corrupted nature of
the woman,—a nature that she displays up to the
moment of her awakening and imagined repentance.
The facts are, too, that she does not, immediately
after she has sworn to her brother to let the foul soul
of the King out, develop (IV, 1), as Mr. More thinks,
a "mood of sudden and overwhelming love for Amintor."
She merely asks his pardon:
I doe appeare the same, the same Evadne,
Drest in the shames I liv'd in, the same monster,
[357]
But these are names of honour to what I am ... I am hell
Till you, my deare lord, shoot your light into me,
The beames of your forgivenesse.
The days that she shall number to her rest are short;
but she vainly imagines that, though but "one minute"
remains, she may "reach constantly at something that
is neare" the good. She is awakened to her husband's
whiteness of soul; but she makes no profession
of love, though love, this time not merely lust, be
stirred in her heart. She would not "let her sins
perish his noble youth." At last, in the moment of
mad exaltation after the murder of the King, when
she thinks that she has washed her soul clean in that
blood, the poor, misguided creature struggling toward
the light, but still, and consistently, enveloped in the
murk of her past, comes imploring the love of the
husband whom in the earlier days she had scorned.
She is still the passionate Evadne, who "was too foule
within to looke faire then," and "was not free till
now." Repulsed by Amintor, she dreams the one
sane madness of her career,—to win his love by taking
leave of life,—and kills herself.
I perceive no irrelevance of motive in the conduct
of Evadne; even in the scenes which are not Beaumont's—namely,
the expostulation of her brother,
and the murder of the King. Nor do I find in the
play as a whole what Mr. More calls an "incomprehensible
tangle of the passions."
The defect in the construction of the Maides Tragedy,
if there is one, lies in the failure of the Maid
and her deserter to meet between the first scene of[358]
the second act and the third of the fifth. That is
not unmotived, however; it is of Aspatia's own choosing
and of Amintor's hamartia. Aspatia kisses him
farewell, forgiving him, and saying that she "must
trie Some yet unpractis'd way to grieve and die."
He is, forthwith, entangled in the web of his wife's
adultery, his own shame and more shameful delusion
of allegiance. The girl whom he has so deeply
wronged passes from his distracted consciousness,
save for the sense that these troubles are his punishment.
And when, toward the end of the play, the
Maid comes in again, saying "this is my fatall houre,"
even we start at the remembrance that she had threatened
to kill herself. And, because the scene in which
she forces a duel upon Amintor is spirited and pathetic,
his contrition poignant, and the joy of their reunion in
the moment of death deeply tragic, we feel that we
have been unduly cheated of the company of this innocent
and resolute and surpassingly pathetic girl.
The play, with Burbadge in the rôle of Melantius,
was popular during the lives of the authors. It was
acted before the King and Queen in 1636 and it held
the stage until the closing of the theatres. It was
revived in 1660 and 1661. Pepys saw it at least five
times before the middle of May 1668, and found it
"too sad and melancholy" but still "a good play." It
was popular when Dryden in his Essay on Dramatick
Poesy, 1668, praised its "labyrinth of design." For
a time during the reign of Charles II it was proscribed,
possibly because the moral was too readily
applicable to the conduct of the "merry monarch";
but the play in its original form was on the stage again[359]
by 1677. Before 1685 Waller made at least two
attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy
by writing a new fifth act in which Evadne was
bloodlessly eliminated. In one of these sentimental
absurdities the King alone survived; in another the
King, preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving
Amintor and Aspatia from suicide and joined them
in marriage: but neither attempt, though made "to
please the Court," was crowned with success. The
play enjoyed several other revivals in the first half of
the eighteenth century with high popularity, notably
at the Haymarket in 1706 when Melantius was played
by Betterton, Evadne by Mrs. Barry, and Aspatia by
Mrs. Bracegirdle; and again in 1710 just before Betterton's
death. In 1742 Theobald writes, that the
famous controversy between Melantius and Amintor
is always "received with vehement applause." In
1837 the play was acted by Macready at the Haymarket,
with alterations by himself and three original
scenes by Sheridan Knowles, under the name of The
Bridal, and, as Dyce tells us, was very favourably received
by the public.[242]
9.—Though the tragedy of Cupid's Revenge was
printed in 1615 as the work of Fletcher alone, the
publication was unauthorized, and the attribution is
by a printer who acknowledges that he was not acquainted
with the author. The quarto of 1630 assigns
it correctly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The[360]
play is known to have been acted at Court by her
Majesty's Children of Whitefriars, the first Sunday
in January 1612; and as usual it must have been
tested by public presentation before that date. The
fact that the authors were, between 1610 and 1612,
writing for the King's Men does not preclude their
composing a play for the Queen's Children. It is
not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier
than 1611. Though the critics disagree concerning
the precise division of authorship in nearly every scene,
finding traces of alteration by Field, Massinger, and
others, they discern a definite substratum of both
Fletcher and Beaumont. It is unnecessary to specify
the minor scenes in which Beaumont coöperated. The
five which transfer the action from an atmosphere of
supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the
realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion
are by him.[243] In these his sententious sunbursts, his
verse, diction, hyperbole, portrayal by passive implication,
are indubitable. The infatuation of the princess
for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim
humility and cackling mirth of the latter. The lust of
Leucippus is transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to
oaths "bestowed on lies," by his horror of the discovered
baseness of his paramour, and the piety with
which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's
honour:
I desire you
To lay what trains you will for my wish'd death,
But suffer him to find his quiet grave
In peace.
[361]
The treacherous greed and malice of Bacha are tempered
by half-lights and shifting hues that make her
less a vampire when Beaumont depicts her. And the
final scene of tragedy in the forest is shot with pathos
by the "harmless innocence" of Beaumont's Urania
following Leucippus to save him
for love:—
I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught.
But the play as a whole lacks logical and natural motive,
moral vigor and vitality; and its history upon
the stage is negligible.
10.—Of the dates of A King and No King there
is no doubt. It was licensed in 1611, acted at Court
December 26 of the same year, and first published
in quarto in 1619 as by Beaumont and Fletcher. In
the commendatory verses of 1647, Henry Howard
gives Arbaces to Fletcher; Jasper Mayne gives him
Bessus; Herrick goes further: "that high design Of
King and No King, and the rare plot thine." Earle,
on the other hand, gives Bessus to Beaumont; and
Lisle gives him Mardonius. Of the attributions to
Fletcher, Herrick's alone has plausibility, since, like
Philaster and The Maides Tragedy, the play is derived
from no known source.[244] Still he was probably
wrong. It is not impossible that one of the dramatists
contrived the plot; but, considering that three-quarters
of the play was written by Beaumont, and that Fletcher's[362]
quarter contains but one scene at once of
high design and vital to the story, it is not very likely
that the contriving was by Fletcher unaided.
Modern critics display singular unanimity in their
discrimination of the respective shares of the composers.
With only one or two dissenting voices they
attribute to Beaumont the first three acts, the fourth
scene of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the
fifth. To Fletcher they assign the first three scenes
of the fourth act, and scenes one and three of the
fifth. The tests which I have already described lead
me to the same conclusion. Beaumont's contribution
is distinguished by a largeness of utterance and a
poetic inevitability, a diversity and mastery of characterization,
a philosophical reach, a realism both humorous
and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativity
and tension, equal to, if not surpassing, any parallel
elements or qualities to be found in the joint-plays.
Arbaces, in apparent design, is of a Marlowan temper,
moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brooking
no rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and
a tyrant, he is brave in fact, and in heart deluded by
the assumption that he is also modest. The combination
is Beaumontesque. That dramatist rarely creates
fixed or transparent character. Arbaces assumes that
he is single of nature and aim: an irresistible, passionless,
and patient soldier; but his failure to fathom
himself as his friend Mardonius fathoms him, is part
of his complexity. His headlong love for the woman
whom he believes to be his sister and the resulting
horror of apprehension and conflict of desire reveal
him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding[363]
revolutions of personality. "What are thou," he
asks of this devilish unexpected lust—
What are thou, that dost creep into my breast;
And dar'st not see my face?
When he will decree that Panthea be regarded as no
more his sister, and she remonstrates,—he thunders
"I will hear no more"; but to himself:—
Why should there be such music in a voice,
And sin for me to hear it?
When Tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister
in marriage, presumes to address her, with what majestic
inconsistency the king rebukes him:
The least word that she speaks
Is worth a life. Rule your disorder'd tongue
Or I will temper it!
And so, now struggling, now wading on in sin, till
that heart-rending crisis is reached in which he confesses
the incestuous love to his friend and faithful
general, Mardonius; nay, even tries to win the friend's
support in his lustful suit, and is gloriously defeated.
Then follow the easy compliance of Bessus with his
wish, and, with equal precipitancy, the revulsion of a
kingly sense of rectitude against the willing pander:
Thou art too wicked for my company,
Though I have hell within me, and mayst yet
Corrupt me further,
The climax in which Arbaces can no longer refrain
is of Beaumont's best:[364]
Nay, you shall hear the cause in short, Panthea;
And when thou hear'st it, thou will blush for me
And hang thy head down like a violet
Full of the morning's dew.
And she, recoiling, "Heaven forbid" and "I would
rather ... in a grave sleep with my innocence," still
kisses him; and then in a panic, nobler than self-suppression,
cries:
If you have any mercy, let me go
To prison, to my death, to anything:
I feel a sin growing upon my blood
Worse than all these!
By a series of sensational bouleversements, and in a
dramatic agony of suspense, we are keyed to the scene
in which relief is granted: the princess who now is
Queen is no sister to the King, who is now no King.
With the exception of a half-scene (Act IV, 2b)
of somewhat bustling mechanism and rant by Fletcher,
the whole of the King's portrayal is Beaumont's;
and with the exception of eighty lines written by
Fletcher (Act IV, 1) of dramatic dialogue containing
information necessary to the minor love-affair,
the story of the birdlike quivering, fond Panthea is,
also, entirely Beaumont's. The Mardonius of Beaumont,
in the first three acts and the fifth, is a
fine, honest, blunt, soldierly companion and adviser
to the King; but when Fletcher takes him in hand
(Act IV, 2b), he declines to a stock character wordy
with alliteration and commonplace. The Bessus of
Beaumont whose "reputation came principally by
thinking to run away" is, in Acts I-III, Falstaffian or[365]
Zagloban; the Bessus of Fletcher, in IV, 3 and V, 1
and 3, is a figure of low comedy, amusing to be sure,
and reminiscent of Bobadill, but a purveyor of sophomoric
quips and a tool for horse-play. The rural
scene with its graphic humours of the soil is Beaumont's.
Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly
play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue,
rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to
the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display
no spiritual insight; supply no development of character;
administer no dramatic fillip to the action and
no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one
rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers,
Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry.
To Beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in
the creation of A King and No King one of the most
intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean period,
one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one
of the most influential in the development of the heroic
play of the Restoration. That it did not survive the
eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful
nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it
is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as Dryden
says "end with a prosperous event." The conflict
of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed
the limits of artistic mediation. The play would better
have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering—that
highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable.
But though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is
not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy. That
error arises from a careless reading of the text. From[366]
the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists
are not brother and sister. And as for the
protagonists themselves,—when the King is suddenly
smitten by love (III, 1, 70-115) and rebels
against its power, he does not even know that the
object of his devotion is his supposed sister. When
he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea,
he revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when
the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance
they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility
of self-denial. In his struggle against what seems to
him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer,
he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of
what is right. His deepest despair is that he is "not
come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb
to worse temptation; and his last word before the
tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange
and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think
on." And when Panthea feeling the "sin growing
upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled
by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that
cries to him whom she thinks her brother, "Fly, sir,
for God's sake!"
A King and No King evidently won favour at
Court, for, as we have noticed, it was acted there both
in 1611 and in 1612-1613. It was presented to their
Majesties at Hampton Court in 1636. In 1661 Pepys
saw it twice. Before 1682 Nell Gwynn had made
Panthea one of her principal rôles. In 1683 Betterton
played Arbaces to Mrs. Barry's Panthea. It was
revived again in 1705, 1724, and 1788. Davies in
his Dramatic Miscellany tells us that Garrick intended[367]
to revive it, taking the part of Arbaces himself and
giving Bessus to Woodward, "but it was observed that
at every reading of it in the green-room Garrick's
pleasure suffered a visible diminution—at length he
fairly gave up his design." Mr. Bond, in the
Variorum edition, mentions a German adaptation of
1785, called Ethelwolf, oder der König Kein König.
[368]
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAST PLAY
Eleven.—The first quarto of The Scornful
Ladie, entered S. R., March 19, 1616, assigns the
play to Beaumont and Fletcher, and says that it "was
acted with great applause by the Children of Her Maiesties
Revels in the Blacke Fryers." The references in
Act V, 3, 4, to the Cleve wars show that it could not
have been written before March 25, 1609. The sentence,
"Marry some cast Cleve captain," is taken by
some to indicate a date as early as the spring of that
year, when James I "promised to send an English force
to aid the Protestant party,"[245] and when, undoubtedly,
"cast" captains of the English army were clamouring
for foreign service. In that case, the play was acted
before January 4, 1610, for by that date the children
of the Queen's Revels had ceased playing at Blackfriars.
Since the plague regulations closed the theatres
between March 9 and December 7, 1609, save
for a week in July, these arguments would fix the performance
in the Christmas month, December 7 to
January 4, 1610. To this supposition a reference in
Act I, 2 to binding the Apocrypha by itself, lends
plausibility, if, as Fleay thinks, the sentence points[369]
to the discussion during 1609-1610 concerning the inclusion
of the Apocrypha in the Douay version of the
Bible and its exclusion from the authorized version—both
in progress at the time, and both completed
in 1610.[246] But the Apocrypha controversy was continued
long after 1610.
A later date of composition than January 4, 1610,
is, however, indicated if a line, III, 1, 341, to which
attention has not previously been directed, in which
the Elder Loveless says of Abigail, who is acting
the termagant, "tie your she-Otter up, good Lady
folly, she stinks worse than a Bear-baiting," was
suggested by the termagant Mrs. Otter and her husband
of the Bear-garden, in Jonson's Epicoene, acted
between January 4 and March 10, 1610. And the
two sentences in which Cleve is mentioned, "There
will be no more talk of the Cleve wars while this
lasts" (V, 3), and "Marry some cast Cleve captain
[so italicized in the quarto], and sell Bottle-ale"
(V, 4), point to a date later than July 1610, when
actual fighting in Cleves-Juliers had barely begun. The
captains are not English soldiers seeking service in a
foreign army not yet mobilized, but Englishmen who
have been captains in Cleves, have seen service, and
been 'cast,' any time between July 1610 and the beginning
of 1616, when, according to the quarto, the play
had assuredly been performed. These considerations
make it probable that The Scornful Ladie in its original
form was presented first at Whitefriars while the
Queen's Children were acting there, between 1610 and
March 1613, or that it was one of the plays, old[370]
or new, presented by the Queen's Children (reorganized
in 1614) when they opened at Rossiter's
new Blackfriars in 1615-16.
Since active hostilities in Cleves were temporarily
suspended in 1613-14 during the negotiations which led
to the treaty of Xanten in November of the latter year,
and since there would not only be much "talk" rather
than fighting at the time, but also many captains 'cast'
from their regiments, the conviction grows that the
play was written between 1613 and the end of 1615.
If The Scornful Ladie had been written before March
1613, it would undoubtedly have shared with The
Coxcombe and Cupid's Revenge of the same authors,
then in the flush of popularity at Court, the honour of
presentation by the Queen's Revels' Children during
the festivities attending the marriage of the Princess
Elizabeth; for it was always a good acting play, and
it has far greater merit than Cupid's Revenge which
the Children performed three times before royalty in
the four months preceding the marriage.
Other evidence, not hitherto noticed, still further
confirms the conclusion that this was one of Beaumont
and Fletcher's later joint-productions, perhaps
the last of them. The conversational style is altogether
more mature than in the remaining output of
their partnership. It is the first work published under
both of their names, and it was licensed for publication
within two weeks after Beaumont's death, as one
might expect of a play with which he was associated
recently in the public mind. It is the only one of the
joint-plays which he did not himself copy out, or
thoroughly revise in manuscript, eliminating all or[371]
nearly all of Fletcher's distinctive ye's and y'are's,
and reducing to uniformity the nomenclature of the
dramatis personae. Of this, later. There is also a
sentence in Act III, 2, which points definitely to a
date of composition, 1613 to 1615. The Captain
speaking to Morecraft, the usurer, says, "I will stile
thee noble, nay Don Diego, I'le woo thy Infanta for
thee" (punctuation of the quarto). 'Diego' had, of
course, been for years a generic nickname for Spaniards;
but Morecraft is neither a Spaniard nor in any
way associated with Spaniards. There had been a
Don Diego of malodorous memory, who had offensively
"perfumed" St. Paul's and on whose achievement
the Elizabethans never wearied ringing the
changes.[247] But that Don Diego was of the years before
1597 when there was, of course, no talk of wooing
an Infanta; and the Captain here who comes to
borrow money of the usurer had no intention of insulting
him by likening him to the disgusting Spaniard
of St. Paul's.
By permission of Methuen & Co., Ltd.
DON DIEGO SARMIENTO,
COUNT GONDOMAR
From the portrait by G. P. Harding
The only provocation for styling Morecraft's
'widow' an Infanta in this scene of The Scornful
Ladie is that there was much interest in London at
the time in a proposed marriage between Charles,
Prince of Wales, and the second daughter of Philip
III of Spain, the Infanta Maria. And the conjunction
of the "Infanta" with a "Don Diego" has
reference to the activities of the astute Don Diego Sarmiento
de Acuña who had arrived as Spanish ambassador,[372]
in 1613, "with the express object of winning
James over from his alliance with France and the
Protestant powers."[248] During 1613 Queen Anne was
favouring the Spanish marriage. In February 1614,
Don Diego Sarmiento was sedulously cultivating the
acquaintance of the King's powerful minion, the Earl
of Somerset; and in May he was writing home of his
success. In the latter month, the Lord Privy Seal,
Northampton, was urging the marriage upon the
King; and the King soon after had signified to Sarmiento
his willingness to accept the hand of the Infanta
for Charles, provided Philip of Spain should
withdraw his demand for the conversion of the young
prince to Catholicism. In June Sarmiento was advising
Philip to close with James's offer. And a month
or so later the Spanish Council of State had voted in
favour of the match. Negotiations, broken off for a
time, were resumed a few weeks after the treaty of
Xanten was signed; and with varying success Don
Diego was still pursuing his object in December 1615.
The reference in The Scornful Ladie cannot possibly
be to negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles's
elder brother, Henry, who died in 1612, with one or
the other of King Philip's daughters;[249] as for instance
in 1604 or 1607, for the Cleves wars had not then begun;
or in 1611 and 1612, for no Don Diego had yet
arrived in England. The upper limit of the reference
[373]to Don Diego Sarmiento's negotiations is May 27,
1613. Gardiner tells us, moreover, that "for some
time" before Diego was created Count Gondomar in
1617 "he had been pertinaciously begging for a title
that would satisfy the world that his labours had been
graciously accepted by his master." This desire to be
"stiled noble" was undoubtedly known to many about
the Court. If Beaumont and Fletcher did not hear of
it by common talk, they might readily have derived
their information from Don Diego's acquaintance and
Beaumont's friend, Sir Francis Bacon, Attorney-General
at the time, or from a devoted companion of
John Selden of the Inner Temple, Sir Robert Cotton,
the antiquary, who in April 1615, was King James's
intermediary with Sarmiento. Taking, accordingly,
all these considerations into account in conjunction
with the fact that no Cleves captains had yet been
'cast' from their commands abroad before the
Queen's Revels' Children ceased playing at the old
Blackfriars in January 1610, I have come to the definite
conclusion that the play was written between
May 27, 1613 and the beginning of 1616, and first
acted after the Children reopened at the new Blackfriars
in 1615-1616. The probabilities are that it was
written after May or June, 1614, perhaps, as late as
April 1615, when public attention had been startlingly
awakened to Don Diego's personal and ambitious activity
in furthering the Spanish alliance by a royal
marriage; and that Beaumont's absence from London,
probably at his wife's place in Kent, or the failing
condition of his health, accounts for his subordinate
share in the authorship, as well as for the incomplete[374]
revision of the text—a task evidently assumed by him
in the preparation of the other plays planned and produced
in partnership with Fletcher.
The commendatory verses of Stanley and Waller in
the 1647 folio give the play to Fletcher; and the
greater part of it is Fletcher's. Beaumont has contributed
the vivid exposition of Act I, 1; Act I, 2, with
its legal phraseology and racy realism; and the jovial
posset-scene of Act II, 1, where Sir Roger's kindly
pedantry is developed and the minor love-affair of
Welford and Martha is introduced.[250] Act II, 1, has
been given by most critics to Fletcher because of the
feminine endings of its occasional verse; but Beaumont
could use feminine endings for humorous effect,
and the diction and metal habit are distinctly his. He
contributed also Act V, 2,[251] where the hero finally
tricks his scornful mistress into submission. The ye
test, which I have said does not yield results in the
case of other plays written by the two dramatists in
collaboration, is of positive value here as confirming
Beaumont's authorship of Act I, 1 and 2 and Act II,
1, and V, 2, for but a single ye (II, 1, l. 10) is to be
found in those scenes. The results are negative in Act
II, 2 and 3—no ye's—but the diction and verse are
Fletcher's. It is not unlikely that Beaumont revised
the play up to the end of Act II. With Act III, the
ye's are in evidence and continue to the end of the
play, except in Beaumont's V, 2. In Act III, 1, there
are but four; but two of them are in the objective[375]
case, a mark of Fletcher, not of Beaumont. On the
other hand though the diction and verse somewhat
resemble Fletcher's, the infrequency of the ye's heightens
the suspicion that unless the scene is Fletcher's,
revised imperfectly by Beaumont, it is the work of
some third author—perhaps, as R. W. Bond,[252] has
suggested, Massinger. Act III, 2, on the other hand,
not only has several ye's in the objective, but in proportion
to the you's twenty-five per cent of ye's
and y'are's, which approaches the distinctive habit of
Fletcher; and the verse, rhetorical triplets, and afterthoughts
are his. In all scenes of Acts IV and V,
except the second of the latter, Fletcher's ye's occur,
not in great number, but often enough in the objective
case to corroborate the other, metrical and stylistic,
indications of his authorship.
I have said that no ye's occur in Acts I and II, and
Act V, 2, the parts in which Beaumont's hand as
author or reviser appears. Another very interesting
confirmation of his authorship of Act I, 1, Act II, 1,
and Act V, 2, is afforded by the double nomenclature
of one of the characters, the amorous spinster who
serves as waiting-woman to the Scornful Lady. According
to the first three quartos (1616, 1625, 1630),
and the folio (1679) which follows the text of these,
whenever she appears in stage-direction or text before
the beginning of Act III (viz., in Beaumont's scenes),
she is called Mistress Younglove or Younglove, but
in Acts III, IV, V, she is uniformly called Abigal,
except in Beaumont's V, 2, where in the text and stage-direction
(line 263) she is again Younglove. In the[376]
speech-headings, she is Abig. or Abi., all through the
last three acts, for Fletcher has noticed that the abbreviation
Young, for her, occurring by the side of
Young Lo. for another character, Young Loveless, is
confusing. But Beaumont, who revised the first two
acts, has been less careful than his wont, for he occasionally
retains the Young., which stood for the name
by which he always thought of the waiting-woman.
Beaumont's Mistress Younglove of the earlier
scenes is vividly vulgar and amorous. Fletcher takes
her up and turns her into a commonplace stage lecher
in petticoats; but Beaumont, in the fifth act, restores
her to womanhood by giving her something of a heart.
The Scornful Lady of Beaumont's scenes is self-possessed
and many-sided, introspective and capable of
affection. In Fletcher's hands she is shrewd and
witty but evidently constructed for the furtherance
of dramatic business. The steward, Savil, of Beaumont's
Act I, appears not only to be honest but to be
designed with a view to a leading part in the complication;
in Act II, 2, Fletcher reduces him to drunkenness
and servility, with slight regard to the possibilities of
character and plot. The brisk but mechanical movement
of the action and the stagey characterization and
more animated scenes are Fletcher's; also the manœuvers
directed against the Lady's attitude of scorn,
except that by which she is overcome. Thorndike
calls this comedy "perhaps the best representation of
the collaboration" of these dramatists in that kind.
If this is the best of which they were capable in that
kind, it is as well that they did not produce more.
This was written after Beaumont had retired to Sundridge[377]
Place, and was giving very little attention to
play-writing. It was, however, a very popular play;
frequently acted before suppression of the theatres,
and in the decade succeeding the Restoration when it
was several times witnessed by Pepys. Later, it was
acted by Mrs. Oldfield; and, as The Capricious Lady
(an alteration by W. Cooke), with Mrs. Abington in
the heroine's part, it held the stage as late as 1788—some
six revivals in all. But, as Sir Adolphus Ward
says, it is "coarse both in design and texture, and
seems hardly entitled to rank high among English
comedies." It undoubtedly suggested ideas for Massinger's
tragicomedy, A Very Woman, licensed 1634,
but in which Fletcher may have had a share; and for
Sir Aston Cockayne's The Obstinate Lady of 1657.[253]
[378]
CHAPTER XXVII
THE DRAMATIC ART, PRINCIPALLY OF BEAUMONT
Of the eleven plays, then, from which one may
try to draw conclusions concerning the respective
dramatic qualities of Beaumont and Fletcher during
the period of their collaboration, we have found that
two, Loves Cure and The Captaine, do not definitely
show the hand of Beaumont, and one, The Foure
Playes, but the suspicion of a finger. Two, The
Woman-Hater and The Knight of the Burning Pestle,
are wholly or essentially of his unaided authorship.
The remaining six, The Coxcombe, Philaster, The
Maides Tragedy, Cupids Revenge, A King and No
King, The Scornful Ladie, are the Beaumont-Fletcher
plays. Others in which some critics think that they
have found traces of Beaumont, assuming that in their
present form they are revisions of earlier work, are
Thierry and Theodoret, The Faithful Friends, Wit
at Severall Weapons, Beggers Bush, Loves Pilgrimage,
The Knight of Malta, The Lawes of Candy, The
Honest Man's Fortune, Bonduca, Nice Valour, The
Noble Gentleman, The Faire Maide of the Inne.
These I have carefully examined, and can conscientiously
state that in no instance is there for me satisfactory
evidence of the qualities which mark his
verse and style. When in any of the suspected passages[379]
the verse recalls Beaumont, the style is not his:
I find none of his favourite words, phrases, figures,
ideas. When in any such passage a Beaumontesque
hyperbole appears, or an occasional word from his
vocabulary, or a line of haunting beauty such as he
might have written, his metre or rhythm is absent.
On the other hand, such passages display traits never
found in him but often found in some other collaborator
with Fletcher, or in some reviser of Fletcher's
plays, sometimes Massinger but more frequently
Field. The latter dramatist modeled himself upon
Beaumont, but though he caught, on occasion, something
of the master's trick, no one steeped in the style
of Beaumont can for a moment mistake for his even
the most dramatic or poetic composition of Field.
As to the scenes in prose supposed by some to have
been written by Beaumont, there is not one that bears
his distinctive impress, nor one that might not have
been written by Daborne, Field, or Massinger, or by
any of the half-dozen experts whose industry swelled
the output of the Fletcherian syndicate. There being
no evidence of Beaumont in any of these plays, it is
unnecessary to investigate, here, the vexed question of
the original date of each. Suffice it to repeat that
concerning none is there definite or generally accepted
information that it was written before Beaumont's
retirement from dramatic activity.
Passing in review, the qualities of Beaumont as a
dramatist we find that in characterization he is, when
at his best, true to nature, gradual in his processes,
and discriminating in delineation. He is melodramatic
at times in sudden shifts of crisis; but he is uniformly[380]
sensitive to innocence, beauty, and pathos,—contemptuous
of cowardice, braggadocio, and insincerity,—appreciative
of fidelity, friendship, noble affection,
womanly devotion, self-sacrifice, and mercy,
of romantic enterprise, and of the virile defiance of
calumny, evil soliciting, and tyranny. In the delineation
of lust he is frankly Elizabethan rather than
insidiously Jacobean. He portrays with special tenderness
the maiden of pure heart whose love is unfortunately
placed too high, a Bellario, Euphrasia,
or Urania,—or crossed by circumstance, a Viola,
Arethusa, Aspatia, Panthea. He distinctively appropriates
Shakespeare's girl-page; under his touch her
grace suffers but slight diminution, and that by excess
of sentimentality rather than by lack of individual
endowment. His love-lorn lasses are integral personalities.
No one, not maintaining a thesis, could
mistake Viola with her shrewd inventiveness and sense
of humour for Arethusa, or Arethusa with her swift
despairs for Bellario, or Bellario with her fearlessness
and noble mendacity for the countrified Urania, or
any of them for the lachrymose Aspatia, or the full-pulsed
Panthea. I find them as different each from
the other as all from the tormenting Oriana or that
seventeenth century Lydia Languish, Jasper's mock-romantic
Luce.
His most virile characters are not the tragic or romantic
heroes of the plays, but the blunt soldier-friends.
It has been said, to be sure, that "there is
scarcely an individual peculiarity among them."[254] But
Mardonius never deserts his King, Melantius does.[381]
And neither the Mardonius nor the Melantius of Beaumont
has the waggish humour of Beaumont's Dion.
His romantic heroes, on the other hand, are not so
distinct in their several characteristics; Amintor, Philaster,
Leucippus are generous, impulsive, poetic, readily
deluded, undecided, and in action indecisive.
The differentiation between them lies in the dramatic
motive. Of Amintor the mainspring is the doctrine
of the divinity of kings; he cannot be disloyal even
to the king who has duped him and made of him a
"fence" for his wife's adultery. Of Leucippus the
mainspring is filial piety—disloyalty would mean
surrendering his father to an incestuous and vengeful
woman. Of Philaster the mainspring is the duty of
revolt for the recovery of his ancestral throne. In
Philaster and Cupid's Revenge Beaumont's tyrants are
sonorific yet shadowy forms; but the king of the Maides
Tragedy is a thoroughly visualized monster, and Arbaces
in A King and No King stands as an epitome of
progressively developed, concrete personality, absolutely
distinct from any other figure on Beaumont's
stage. In the construction of Evadne and Bacha a
similar skill in evolution and individualization is displayed.
The latter is an abnormality grown from lust
to overweening ambition; the former never loses our
sympathy: in her depravity there is the seed of conscience;
through shame and love she wins a soul; the
crime by which at last she would redeem herself
leaves her no longer futile but half-way heroic; and
her pleading for Amintor's love, her self-murder, fix
her in memory among those squandered souls that
have known no happiness—whose misery or whose[382]
shame is merged and made beautiful in the pity of
it all.
Of his braggarts and poltroons Beaumont is profuse:
the best are Bessus and Calianax, so far as they
have not been reduced to horse-play by another hand.
For Pharamond we are indebted as much to Fletcher
as to Beaumont. The Jonsonian humours of Beaumont's
braggarts, excellent as they may be, are not
more clearly marked nor better drawn than those of
many of his other characters, the misogynist, the
retributive Oriana, and the gourmand-parasite, in his
youthful comedy of The Woman-Hater, or the devil-may-care
Merrythought, Luce, the grocer and his
wife, and in fact every convulsing caricature in his
matchless Knight of the Burning Pestle. Of Beaumont's
effectiveness in satire and burlesque, enough
has already been said. His laughter is genial but not
uproarious: he chuckles; he lifts the eyebrow, but seldom
sneers. With the Gascon he vapours; with the
love-lorn languishing, simpers; with the heroic Captain
of Mile End, whiffles and—tongue in cheek—struts
and throws a turkey-step; with the jovial roisterer
he hiccoughs and wipes his mouth. Homely wit,
bathos, and the grotesque he fixes as on a film, and
makes no comment; fustian he parodies; affectation
he feeds with banter. For the inflated he cherishes a
noiseless, most exiguous bodkin.
As to the matter of technique we have observed
that the clear and comprehensive expositions of the
joint-plays are generally Beaumont's,—for instance,
those of The Maides Tragedy, Philaster, King and No
King, and The Scornful Ladie; that in the tragedies[383]
and tragicomedies the sensational reversals of fortune,
as well as the cumulative suspenses and reliefs of the
closing scenes, are in nearly all cases his; and that in
the tragicomedies the shifting of interest from the
strictly tragic and universal to the more individual—pathetic,
romantic, and comic—emotions, is also
his. The conviction of Evadne by her brother is an
exception: that is the work of Fletcher; but her contrition
in the presence of Amintor is again Beaumont's.
What he was capable of in romantic comedy is shown
by his 'Ricardo and Viola' episode. He cared much
more for romance than for intrigue; and he found his
romance in persons of common life as readily as
among those of elevated station. In his share of the
comedies of intrigue he shows, as elsewhere, that he
was capable of Elizabethan bubukles, but ludicrous not
lecherous. Above all, he delighted in interweaving
with the romantic and sentimental that which partook
of the pastoral, the pathetic, and the heroic. And we
have noticed that, through the heroic and melodramatic,
his more serious plays pass into the atmosphere
of court life and spectacular display.
As for Fletcher's share in the dramas written in
partnership with Beaumont, little need be said by way
of summary. He bulks large in the comedies of intrigue,
The Scornful Ladie and The Coxcombe; and
especially in the sections of plot that are carnal,
trivial, or unnatural. He is in them just what he is
in his own Monsieur Thomas and his pornographic
Captaine—in the latter of which, if Beaumont had
any share at all it is unconvincing to me, save possibly
as regards the one appalling scene of which I have[384]
spoken some five chapters back. To the tragedies and
"dramatic romances" or tragicomedies Fletcher did
not contribute one-third as much as his co-worker.
As in the murder-scene of The Maides Tragedy he
displays the dramaturgy of spectacular violence, so
in the scene between Melantius and Evadne, the power
of dramatic invective. But his aim is not the furtherance
of interest by the dynamic unfolding of personality,
or by the propulsion of plot through interplay
of complicated motives or emotions, it is the
immediate captivation of the spectator by rapidity
and variety: by brisk, lucid, and witty dialogue, by
bustle of action and multiplicity of conventional device,
as in Cupids Revenge. Few of his scenes are
vital; most are clever histrionic inlays, subsidiary to
the main action, or complementary and explanatory,
as in Philaster and A King and No King. His characters
move with all the ease of perfect mechanism;
but they are made, not born. It follows that, in the
more serious of the joint-dramas, the principal personages
are much less indebted to his invention than
has ordinarily been supposed. In the comedies of
intrigue, on the other hand, conventional types of the
stage or of the theatre-going London world, especially
the fashionable and the Bohemian provinces thereof,
owe their existence chiefly to him. Blackguards,
wittols, colourless tricksters, roaring captains, gallants,
debauchees, lechers, bawds, libidinous wives, sophisticated
maidens who preen themselves with meticulous
virtue but not with virtuous thoughts, all these people
the scenes which Fletcher contributed to the joint-comedies.
And some of them thrust their faces into[385]
the romantic plays and tragedies as well. Fletcher's
most important contribution to the drama, his masterly
and vital contribution, is to be found in his later work;
and of that I have elsewhere treated,[255] and shall have
yet a word to say here.
Of the Beaumont-Fletcher plays the distinctive
dramaturgy as well as the essential poetry are Beaumont's,
and these are worthy of the praise bestowed
by his youthful contemporary, John Earle:
So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon,
And all so born within thyself, thine own.
The Maske, The Woman-Hater, and The Knight of
the Burning Pestle should appear in a volume bearing
Beaumont's name. And for the partnership of Beaumont
and Fletcher, perhaps, some day,
Some publisher will further justice do
And print their six plays in one volume too.
[386]
CHAPTER XXVIII
DID THE BEAUMONT 'ROMANCE' INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE?
Richard Flecknoe, in his Discourse of the
English Stage, 1664, thinking rather of the romantic
and ornamented quality of Beaumont and
Fletcher's plays, "full of fine flowers," than of any
anticipation in them of the love and honour of plays
of the Restoration, says that they were the first to
write "in the Heroick way." Symonds calls them
the "inventors of the heroical romance." And lately
Professor Thorndike[256] and others have conjectured
that the Shakespeare of Cymbeline, Winter's Tale,
and The Tempest was following the lead of the two
younger dramatists in what is attributed to them as
a new style of 'dramatic romance' in his dramas.
The argument is that Philaster (acted before October
8, 1610) preceded Cymbeline (acted between April
20, 1610 and May 15, 1611), and suggested to Shakespeare
a radical change of dramatic method, first manifest
in Cymbeline. And that five other "romances
by Beaumont and Fletcher," Foure Playes in One,
Thierry and Theodoret, The Maides Tragedy, Cupid's
Revenge and A King and No King, constituting with[387]
Philaster a distinctly new type of drama, were in all
probability acted before the close of 1611, and similarly
influenced the method of The Winter's Tale and
The Tempest, also of 1611.
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[388]
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.'
The express novelty in technique of the six arbitrarily
selected, so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances'
is supposed to lie in the dramatic adaptation of certain
sensational properties more suitable to narrative fiction;
especially in the attempt to heighten interest by
adding to the legitimate portrayal of character under
stress and strain (as in tragedy), or of character in[389]
amusing maladjustment with social convention (as
in comedy), the portrayal of vicissitudes of fortune;
and in the attempt to enhance the thrills appropriate
to tragic and comic appeal by such an amalgamation
of the two as shall cause the spectator to run up and
down the whole gamut of emotional sensibility. In
the realm of tragedy the accentuation of the possibilities
of suspense, whether by Beaumont or any
other, would be a novelty merely of degree. Cupid's
Revenge, and The Triumph of Death (in the Foure
Playes in One) could hardly have impressed the author
of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as in this respect
astounding innovations; and The Maides Tragedy
does not, so far as I can determine, sacrifice the unities
of interest and effect for enhancement and variety of
emotional thrill. In any case, it would be necessary
to date Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus, two or three
years later than the fact, if one desired to prove that
any Shakespearian tragedy was influenced by a Beaumont-Fletcher
exaggeration of suspense. Whatever
exaggeration may exist had already been practised by
Shakespeare himself. If a Beaumont-Fletcher novelty
influenced Shakespeare, that novelty must have
lain in the transference of tragic suspense to the realm
of romantic comedy with all its minor aesthetic appeals,
and it would consequently be limited to their
tragicomedies, Philaster and A King and No King.
The tragicomic masques in the Foure Playes in One,
that of Honour and that of Death, are too insignificant
to warrant consideration; and Beaumont had
nothing to do with them.
In determining the indebtedness, if any, of Cymbeline[390]
to Philaster we lack the assistance of authentic
dates of composition. The plays were acted about
the same time,—Philaster certainly, Cymbeline perhaps,
before October 8, 1610. Beaumont and Fletcher's
play may have been written as early as 1609;
Shakespeare's also as early as 1609 or 1608: in fact,
there are critics who assign parts of it to 1606. With
regard to the relative priority of Cymbeline and A
King and No King, we are more fortunate in our
knowledge. The former had certainly been acted by
May 15, 1611; the latter was not even licensed until
that year, and was not performed at Court till December
26. The probabilities are altogether in favour
of a date of composition later than that of Cymbeline.
But that Shakespeare's Cymbeline and his later romantic
dramas betray any consciousness of the existence
of Philaster and its succeeding King and No
King has not been proved. Save for the more emphatic
employment of the masque and its accessories of
dress and scenic display, of the combination of idyllic,
romantic, and sensational elements of material, and
the heightened uncertainty of dénouement, all naturally
suggested by the demands of Jacobean taste, no
variation is discoverable in the course of Shakespeare's
dramatic art. And in these respects I find
no extrinsic novelty, no momentous change—nothing
in Philaster and A King and No King that had not
been anticipated by Shakespeare. Cymbeline, The
Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are but the flowering
of potentialities latent in the Two Gentlemen of
Verona and As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing
and Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well[391]
and Measure for Measure—latent in the story of
Apollonius of Tyre, and unavoidable in its dramatization
as Pericles, a play that was certainly not influenced
by the methods of Philaster. If in his later romantic
dramas Shakespeare borrowed any hint of technique
from the Beaumont contribution to the 'romances,'
he was but borrowing back what Beaumont had borrowed
from him or from sources with which Shakespeare
was familiar when Beaumont was still playing
nursery miracles of the Passion with his brothers in
the Gethsemane garden at Grace-Dieu. Shakespeare's
later comedies are a legitimate development of his
peculiar dramatic art. Beaumont's tragicomedies,
with all their poetic and idyllic beauty and dramatic
individuality, are novel, so far as construction goes,
only in their emphasized employment of the sensational
properties and methods mentioned above.
Their characteristic, when compared with that of
Shakespeare's last group of comedies, is melodramatic
rather than romantic. They set, in fine, as did Chapman's
Gentleman Usher, and Shakespeare's Measure
for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, an example
which, abused, led to the decadence of Elizabethan
romantic comedy.
The resemblance between Philaster and Cymbeline,
such as it is, is closer than that between Philaster and
the Shakespearian successors of Cymbeline,—The
Winter's Tale and The Tempest. But the common
features of all these plays, the juxtaposition of idyllic
scenes and interest with those of royalty, the combination
of sentimental, tragic, and comic incentives
to emotion, the false accusations of unchastity and the[392]
resulting jealousy, intrigue, and crime, the wanderings
of an innocent and distressed woman in boy's
clothing, the romantic localization, did not appear first
in either Philaster or Cymbeline. Philaster and
Cymbeline follow numerous clues in the idyllic-comic
of Love's Labour's Lost and Midsummer-Night's
Dream; in the idyllic-romantic-pathetic of Two Gentlemen
of Verona, As You Like It, and Twelfth
Night; and for that matter in the materials furnished
by Greene, Lodge, Sidney, Sannazzaro, Montemayor,
Bandello, Cinthio and Boccaccio; and in the romantic
and tragicomic fusion already attempted in Much
Ado, All's Well, and Measure for Measure. For the
character and the trials of Imogen, Shakespeare did
not require the inspiration of a Beaumont. He had
been busied with the figure of Innogen (as he then
called her) as early as 1599; for in the 1600 quarto of
Much Ado she appears by sheer accident in a stage
direction as the wife of the Leonato of that play.
He had been using the sources from which Cymbeline
is drawn,—Holinshed and Boccaccio, and that early
romantic drama, Fidele and Fortunio,—before Philaster
was written. And it is much more likely that
the Belarius of Shakespeare and the Bellario of Beaumont
were both suggested by the Bellaria of Greene's
Pandosto, than that Shakespeare borrowed from
Beaumont. Nor is Shakespeare likely to have been
indebted to Beaumont's example for the sensational
manner of the dénouement in Cymbeline—the succession
of fresh complications and false starts by
which suspense is sustained. These are precisely the
features that distinguish those scenes of Pericles[393]
which by the consensus of critics are assigned to
Shakespeare; and Pericles was written by 1608, at
least as early as Philaster, and in all probability earlier.
In his story of Marina, Shakespeare is merely pursuing
the sensational methods of Measure for Measure
and anticipating those of The Winter's Tale. In
general, the plot lies half-way between the tragicomic
possibilities of the Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night,
All's Well, and Measure for Measure, and the romantic
manipulation of Cymbeline and the later plays.
In fine, there is closer resemblance between Cymbeline
and half a dozen of Shakespeare's earlier comedies,
than between Cymbeline and Philaster; and it
might more readily be shown that the author of
Philaster was indebted to those half-dozen plays, than
Shakespeare to Philaster. The differences between
the Beaumont 'romances' and Shakespeare's later
romantic comedies are in fact more vital than the
similarities. In Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and
A King and No King the central idea is of contrast
between sentimental love and unbridled lust, and this
gives rise to misunderstanding, intrigue, and violence.
In Shakespeare's later comedies the central motive
is altogether different: it is of disappearance and discovery.
The disappearance is occasioned by false
accusation or conspiracy. In Pericles, Cymbeline,
and The Winter's Tale, the dramatic interest revolves
about the pursuit of a lost wife or child, the wanderings
and trials of the heroine, and her recovery;[257] in
The Tempest, about the disappearance and discovery
of the ousted Duke and his daughter. There is no[394]
resemblance between Beaumont's love-lorn maidens
in page's garb pursuing the unconscious objects of
their affection and Shakespeare's joyous girls and
traduced wives. Nor is there in Shakespeare's later
comedies any analogue to the sensual passion of the
'Beaumont and Fletcher romances,' to their Bachas,
Megras, and Evadnes, their ultra-sentimental Philasters,
their blunt soldier-counselors and boastful poltroons.
Pisanio and Cloten have respectively no kinship
with Dion and Pharamond. What appears to
be novel in Pericles and its Shakespearian successors,
the somewhat melodramatic dénouement, is, as I
have said, but the modification of the playwright's
well-known methods in conformity with the contemporary
demand for more highly seasoned fare. But,
in essence, the dramatic careers of Imogen and Hermione,
are no more sensational than those of their
older sisters, Hero, Helena, and Isabella. And what
is most evidently not novel with Shakespeare in his
later romantic comedies,—the consistent dramatic
interaction between crisis and character,—is precisely
what the 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' do not
always possess. Beaumont's characterization at its
best, with all its naturalness, compelling pathos, poignancy,
and abandon is lyrical or idyllic rather than dramatic;
Fletcher's is expository and histrionic—of
manners rather than the man.
Beaumont did not influence Shakespeare. And if
not Beaumont, then certainly not Fletcher; for in the
actual composition of the core of the so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher
romances' Fletcher's share was altogether
subordinate; and since after the dissolution of[395]
the partnership he attempted but one romantic tragic
drama of that particular kind, Thierry and Theodoret,—and
that a clumsy failure,—it must be concluded
that in the designing of those 'romances' his share
was even less significant. But to appreciate the contribution
of Beaumont to Elizabethan drama, and his
place in literary history, it is fortunately not necessary
to assume that he diverted from its natural course the
dramatic technique of a master, twenty years his
senior and for twenty years before Beaumont began
to write, intimately acquainted with the conditions of
the stage,—the acknowledged playwright of the most
successful of theatrical companies and, in spite of
changing fashions, the most steadily progressive and
popular dramatic artist of the early Jacobean period.
With regard to Beaumont it is marvel sufficient, that
between his twenty-fifth and his twenty-eighth year
of age he should have elaborated in dramatic art,
even with the help of Fletcher, so striking a combination
of preceding models, and have infused into the
resulting heroic-romantic type such fresh poetic
vigour and verve of movement.
[396]
CHAPTER XXIX
CONCLUSION
Beaumont's poetic virtues are his peculiar
treasure; but the dramatic method of his heroic-romantic
plays lent itself lightly to imitation and debasement.
Not so much The Maides Tragedy and A
King and No King, which respect the unities of interest
and effect, as Philaster, The Coxcombe, and
Cupid's Revenge, to which Fletcher's contribution of
captivating theatrical 'business' and device was more
considerable. Some of these plays, and some of
Shakespeare's, too, and of Marston's, and Chapman's,
and Webster's, paved the way for the heroic play of
the Restoration—a melodramatic development of
tragicomedy and sentimental tragedy, in which philandering
sentiment, strained and histrionic passion,
took the place of romantic love and virile conflict,—a
drama in which an affected view of life tinged crisis
and character alike, an unreasoning devotion to royalty
or some other chivalric ideal obscured personal
dignity and moral responsibility, and the thrill of surprise
dissipated the catharsis, proper to art, whether
tragic or comic.
Upon the future of the comedy of intrigue and
manners, Beaumont exercised no distinctive influence.
In plays like The Coxcombe and The Scornful Ladie,[397]
the genius of Fletcher dominated the scenes of lighter
dialogue and comic complication. And it is through
comedies of intrigue and manners written by Fletcher
alone or in company with others, especially Massinger,
that Fletcher's individual genius exercised most
influence on the subsequent history of the drama. The
characteristics which won theatrical preëminence for
his romantic comedies, heroic tragicomedies and tragedies,
written after the cessation of Beaumont's activity,
were a Fletcherian vivacity of dialogue, a Fletcherian
perfection of 'business,' and a Fletcherian exaggeration
of the tragicomic spirit and technique of which,
in the days of the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership,
Beaumont had availed himself but which he, still, by
virtue of his critical faculty, had held somewhat in
restraint.
From the time of Prynne's Histriomastix, 1633,
there have been critics who have pointed to the gradual
deterioration of the stage which, beginning, say
some, with plays of Shakespeare himself, continued
through Beaumont and Fletcher to the drama of the
Restoration. Flecknoe, Rymer, Coleridge, Lamb,
Swinburne, Ward, have commented upon phases of
the phenomenon. And, recently, one of our most
judicious contemporary essayists has in a series of
articles developed the theme.[258] I heartily concur with
the scholarly and well-languaged editor of The Nation,
in many of his conclusions concerning the general
history of this decline; and I have already in this
book availed myself with profit of some of his suggestions.[398]
I agree with him that the downfall of
tragedy began when "the theme was altered from a
single master passion to a number of loosely coördinated
passions, thus relaxing the rigidity of tragic
structure and permitting the fancy to play more intimately
through all the emotions"; that this degeneration
may be traced to the time "when ecclesiastical
authority was broken by scepticism and knowledge,
and the soul was left with all its riches of imagination
and emotion, but with the principle of individual
responsibility discredited and the fibre of self-government
relaxed"; that "the consequences may be seen
in the Italy of the sixteenth century"; and that "the
result is that drama of the court which, besides its
frequent actual indecency, is at heart so often non-moral
and in the higher artistic sense incomprehensible."
But when he ascribes this alteration of the theme
of tragedy from a single master passion to a number
of "loosely coördinated passions" to our "twin
dramatists," and cites as his example The Maides
Tragedy in which, as he sees it, we have "but a succession
of womanly passions, each indeed cunningly
conceived and expressed, but giving us in the end nothing
we can grasp as a whole and comprehend";—and
says that Evadne is "no woman at all, unless
mere random passionateness can be accounted such,"
I shake my head in sad demurrer. First, because, as
I have tried to show above, Evadne is anything but
an incomprehensible embodiment of unmotived passions,
and The Maides Tragedy anything but a
"loosely coördinated" concern, and secondly, because
I disfavour this attribution of the decadence of[399]
tragedy, or of comedy, for that matter, to our twin
dramatists. To substantiate such a charge it would
be incumbent upon the critic to prove not only that
the decadence is indubitably visible in the joint-work
of Beaumont and Fletcher, but that it is specifically
visible in Beaumont's, as in Fletcher's, contribution
to that work, and also, that it was not already patent
in the dramatic productions of their seniors; that it
was not patent in Heywood's Royall King and Loyall
Subject, for instance; in the "glaring colours" of
Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, and in his Gentleman
Usher with its artificial atmosphere of courtly romance,
its melodramatic reverses and surprises, its
huddling up of poetic justice; in the sensational devices,
passionate unrealities and sepulchral action of
Marston's Malcontent, the sophistical theme and callous
pornography of his Dutch Courtezan, and in the
inhuman imaginings of his Insatiate Countess; that it
was not patent in the heartless irresponsibility and
indecency of Middleton, and in the inartistic warping
of tragic situations to comic solutions that characterize
his early romantic plays; that it was not patent in
the poisonous exhalations, the wildering of sympathy,
and the disproportioned art that characterize the
White Devil of their immediate contemporary, John
Webster.
The decadence was hastened by Fletcher; but not in
any distinctive degree by Beaumont. I second Mr.
More's commendation of Prynne's "philosophic criticism
of 1632 that 'men in theatres are so far from
sinne-lamenting sorrow, that they even delight themselves
with the representations of those wickednesses,'"[400]
but I deplore the application of that criticism
to Beaumont and Fletcher, as that "they loosed the
bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere
bundle of irresponsibilities."
Many of Fletcher's excesses and defects not only
in the plays written with Beaumont, but in plays written
after his death, have been conferred from the
day of Flecknoe to the present upon Beaumont.
There is very little "sinne-lamenting sorrow" in the
Valentinian of Fletcher, or of Fletcher and Massinger,
and very little in Fletcher's Wife for a Month;
but in many of Beaumont's scenes in The Maides
Tragedy, and A King and No King, and The Coxcombe
the genuine accents of "sinne-lamenting sorrow"
are heard. Fletcher certainly "loosed the
bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere
bundle of irresponsibilities," but not Beaumont. Let
the reader turn to that poet's scenes in the joint-plays
(two-thirds of the great ones) as I have indicated
them, or to what I have unrolled of Beaumont's mental
habit, and judge for himself.[259]
The concession of the essayist from whom, as a
representative of enlightened modern opinion upon
the subject, I have been quoting,—that "as Fletcher's
work stands, he may appear utterly devoid of conscience,
a man to whom our human destinies were
mere toys," I hail with delight, although I think that
Fletcher the man had more honest ideals than Fletcher
the dramatist. But, as a critic, I resent the surmise
that Fletcher "was by nature of a manlier, sounder
fibre than Beaumont." In the heroic-romantic comedy,[401]
The Humorous Lieutenant, Fletcher displays, indeed,
as Mr. More says, "a strain almost like that of
Shakespeare, upon whom he manifestly modelled himself
in everything except Shakespeare's serious insight
into human motives." But does that play reveal anything
of manlier, sounder fibre than Beaumont's A
King and No King?
Written in 1619 The Humorous Lieutenant has enduring
vitality, though not because of its tragicomic
presupposition; for the wars and rumours of war are
rhetorical or humorous, the devilish design of the
King upon the chastity of the heroine is predestined
to failure,—and the announcement of her death, but
a dramatic device which may impose upon the credulity
of her noble lover but not upon the audience. In
the MS. of 1625 it is styled "a pleasant comedie";
and such it is, of 'humour' and romantic love, upon
a background of the heroic. It is Fletcher's best
comedy of the kind; one of the best of the later Shakespearian
age. The conception of the Lieutenant,
whose humour is to fight when he is plagued by
loathsome disease and to wench when he is well, is
not original, nor is the character of the hero Demetrius;
but in the elaboration Fletcher has created these
characters anew, has surrounded them with half a
dozen other figures no less life-like, and has set them
in a plot, cunningly welded of comic, sentimental,
and martial elements, and captivatingly original.
Though the interest is partly in a wanton intrigue,
and the mirth grossly carnal even when not bawdy,
I think that the objectionable qualities are, for almost
the only time in Fletcher's career in comedy, not ineradicable.[402]
The wondrous charm, "matchless spirit,"
vivacity, and constancy of Celia render the machinations
of the procuress, Leucippe, and her "office of
concealments" futile,—so much dramatic realism to
be accentuated or mitigated at the will of the stage
manager;—and the alluring offers of the king are
but so many weapons for his own defeat. If the
Lieutenant were not an indissoluble compound of
hero, swashbuckler, shirker, and "stinkard," I fear,
indeed, that he would lose his savour. But the love
of Rabelaisian humour is, after all, ingrained in the
male of the species, and if the license be not nauseating
it is not necessarily damnable. This boisterous,
pocky rascal who "never had but two hours yet of
happiness," and who courts the battlefield to save
him "from the surgeon's miseries," held the stage
from the time of Condel, Taylor, and Lowin, to that
of Macready and Liston, and there is no reason
why his vitality should not be perennial. There are
few more laughable scenes in farcical literature than
those in which, having drained a philtre intended to
make Celia dote upon the King, the Lieutenant imagines
himself to be a handsome wench of fifteen,
wooes the King most fatuously, even kisses the royal
horses as they pass by. The meeting and the parting,
the trials and the reunion, of Celia and Demetrius
constitute the most convincing and attractive romantic-pathetic
love-affairs in Jacobean drama since Shakespeare
had ceased to write. Indeed, this "perilous
crafty," spirited, "angel-eyed" girl "too honest for
them all" who so ingeniously and modestly shames
the lustful monarch and wins her affianced prince is[403]
not unworthy of the master. Nor is Demetrius. The
play contains many genuinely poetic passages, and
some of those lines of meteoric beauty—"our lives are
but our marches to the grave"—in which Beaumont
abounded, and that Fletcher too rarely coined. With
all the rankness of its humour, the play has such literary
and dramatic excellence that one cannot but
regret the infrequency with which Fletcher produced
that of which he was capable.
But even this best of Fletcher's heroic-dramatic
plays contains, as Mr. More has observed, "one of
those sudden conversions which make us wonder
whether in his heart he felt any difference between a
satyr-like lust and a chaste love—the conversion of
the lecherous old king." I grant Fletcher's surpassing
excellence in comedy, especially the comedy of
manners and intrigue as, for instance, The Chances
and the Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and I have
elsewhere acknowledged his supremacy after Shakespeare
in that realm. But we are now considering not
that kind of composition or its technique, but the fibre
which might be expected to show itself in compositions
involving the element of seriousness. The Humorous
Lieutenant is of that kind,—it is called a tragicomedy
by some. Has it one tithe of the serious insight into
human life of any of Beaumont's plays involving ethical
conflict?
Inquiring further into the fibre of Fletcher, let us
pass in brief review another play, a genuine tragicomedy
this time, A Wife for a Month, written the
year before he died, of whose heroine Mr. More says
that "from every point of view, ethical and artistic,[404]
she is one of the most finely drawn and truest women
in the whole range of English drama." The complication,
here, assuredly affords opportunity for the display
of sound and manly fibre; and the tragicomedy
is instructive in more ways than one: it illustrates
Fletcher's skill in construction and his disregard of
probability; his sense of moral conflict and his insensibility
to moral beauty; his power to conceive
characteristic situations and his impotence to construct
natural characters; his capability of noble sentiment
and poetic expression and his beastly perverseness of
fancy, his prostitution of art to sordid sensationalism.
The story of the cumulative torments to which a lustful
usurper subjects the maiden, Evanthe, whom he
desires, and Valerio whom she loves, is graphically
estimated by one of the dramatis personae,—"This
tyranny could never be invented But in the school of
Hell: earth is too innocent." Beside it Zola's L'Assommoir
smells sweet, and a nightmare lacks nothing
of probability. Ugly, however, as the fundamental
assumption is: namely, that the tyrant should permit
a wedding on condition that at the end of a month
the husband shall suffer death,—and with provision
that meanwhile the honeymoon shall be surrounded
with restriction more intolerable than death itself;
and incredible as is the contrivance of the sequel,—kept
a-going by the suppression of instinct and commonsense
on the part of the hero, and withheld from
its proper tragic conclusion by miraculous cure, an
impossible conversion, and an unnatural clemency,—the
plot is after all deftly knit, and the interest sustained
with baleful fascination. But it would be[405]
difficult to instance in Jacobean drama a more incongruous
juxtaposition of complication morally conceived,
and execution callously vulgarized, than that
offered by the scene between Valerio and Evanthe on
their wedding-night. In the corresponding scene of
The Maides Tragedy (II, 1), Beaumont had created a
model: Amintor bears himself with dignity toward
his shameless and contemptuous bride. But in
Fletcher's play it is this "most finely drawn and truest
woman" that makes the advances; and she makes
them not only without dignity, but with an unmaidenly
persistence and persuasiveness of which any abandoned
'baggage' or Russian actress of to-day might
be ashamed. And, still, the dramatist is never weary
of assuring us that she is the soul of "honour mingled
with noble chastity," and clad in "all the graces"
that Nature can give. In the various other trying
situations in which Evanthe is placed it is requisite
to our conviction of reality that she be the "virtuous
bud of beauty": but the tongue of this "bud" blossoms
into billingsgate, she swears "something awful,"
and she displays an acquaintance with sexual pathology
that would delight the heart even of the most rabid
twentieth-century advocate of sex-hygiene for boys
and girls in coëducational public schools.
Two or three of the characters are nobly conceived
and, on occasion, contrive to utter themselves with
nobility. Valerio achieves a poetry infrequent in
Fletcher's plays when he says of the shortness of his
prospective joys:
"A Paradise, as thou art, my Evanthe,
Is only made to wonder at a little,
[406]
Enough for human eyes, and then to wander from,"—
and when he describes the graces of spiritual love.
And the Queen's thoughts upon death, though melodramatic,
have something of the dignity of Beaumont's
style. But the minds of the principal personages reflect
not only the flashing current but the turbid
estuaries of Fletcher's thought. The passion, save
for Valerio's, is lurid, and the humour latrinal. To
sketch the bestial even in narrative, however fleeting,
is inartistic; to fix it on canvas is offensive; to
posture it upon the stage is unpardonable. The last
is practically what Fletcher has done here; and the
wonder is that he appears to think that he is justifying
virtue.
No; Fletcher had not the fibre of Beaumont even
when he was writing with him; and he did not achieve
"a manlier, sounder fibre," after Beaumont had
ceased, and he had swung into the brilliant orbit which
he rounded as sole luminary of the stage.
I object again,—and the reader who has followed
the exposition of the preceding pages will, I hope, object
with me,—to the dictum of a German writer of
this latter day, that the reason of the degeneracy of
Beaumont and Fletcher, ethically, "seems to lie in the
narrowing of the drama from a national interest to
the flattery of a courtly caste." Mr. More opines that
such an explanation should not be pressed too far; and
he suggests that one reason why "we are unable to
comprehend many of the persons upon the stage of
Beaumont and Fletcher" is that we are similarly
unable to comprehend "the more typical men and
women who were playing the actual drama of the[407]
age." So far as Fletcher's dramatis personae are
concerned, there is truth in this; but why couple Beaumont
with him? If you omit a character or two in
The Woman-Hater, which was a youthful jeu d'esprit,
you shall find very few incomprehensible figures
among those of Beaumont's creation. And as to the
German mentioned above, Dr. Aronstein, what
"flattery of a courtly caste" can he possibly detect
in Beaumont's satire upon favourites in The Woman-Hater;
in that burlesque of bourgeois affectations,
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (the Court, too,
was still reading the literature there satirized); or
in his Philaster, who was a rebel; or in his Amintor of
The Maides Tragedy, whose fate hinged upon his
shuffling subservience to a king, or in the King himself
on whom God sends "unlookt-for sudden death," because
of his lust; or in his King Arbaces, whose general
has "not patience to looke on whilst you runne
these forbidden courses"; or in his scenes of Cupid's
Revenge, which scourge the vices of the Court; or in
his Sir Roger and Mistress Abigail and her scornful
Lady,—or in his Ricardo and Viola, who are just a
lover and his lass, and have never dreamed of Court
or King at all?
I wonder whether it may not be possible for us
henceforth to give to Fletcher, and the whole Fletcherian
syndicate,—the Massingers, Fields, Middletons
and Rowleys, Dabornes, and the rest,—the praise
and the blame for what they produced, but eliminate
Beaumont from the award. One grows weary of the
attribution to him of moral irresponsibilities and extravagances
in art of which he was, in all that we[408]
have learned of his breeding, life, and mental habit
the implicit opponent—very much like his brother
Sir John,—and of the opposite of which he was in
his poetic and dramatic output, as I have minutely
demonstrated, the professed exponent. In the broad
daylight of philological science and modern historical
criticism we should no longer regard Beaumont-and-Fletcher
as an indivisible pair of Siamese twins, constructing
with all four hands at once the fabric of
fifty-three plays, or even of ten, and tongue-and-grooving
the boards with such diabolic deftness that
each artisan shall for ever be credited with the merits
and defects of both. It is, at any rate, time that the
world of scholars,—and then the world of readers
may follow,—render unto Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar's.
As for Cæsar, we concede to him, John Fletcher,
once for all, as he may be read in his independent
work, by one even running, artistic virtues numerous
and brilliant:[260] gaiety, wit, sprightly dialogue; mastery
of stage-craft,—of all the devices of captivating
plot and rattling 'business,' and all the conventions
and theatrically legitimate clap-trap of dramatic types
and humours, hallowed by success, adored by the
actor, and darling to the public. We concede skill in
the weaving of romantic complications, captivatingly
cunning, and in the construction of situations irresistibly
ludicrous; remarkable inventiveness of sensational
adventure and spectacular scene and attractive setting;[409]
realism at every turn, and an ability to portray
manners, varied and minute. Above all, we admire,
and thankfully rejoice in, his smoothness of mechanism,
his lightness of touch, his contrivance and manipulation
of pure comedy—whether of manners or
intrigue,—and in his world of characters, not only
laughter-compelling, but endowed with humour themselves
and sworn to the enthronement of the Spirit
of Mirth.
On the other hand we read on every page of
Fletcher's independent contribution to English drama
what, perhaps, was not the man himself, but his dramaturgic
pose—still for the world the essence of the
Fletcher who ruled it from the stage:[261] we read his
"shallowness of moral nature," his acquiescence in
the ethical apathy and cynicism of the time; his indelicacy;
his indifference to, if not irreverence for, the
dramatic proprieties,—his subservience to popular
taste and favour in an age when "the theatre had
ceased to be the expression of patriotism and of the
national life and had become the amusement of the
idle gentleman and of such members of the lower
classes as were not kept away by the Puritan disapproval
of the stage." We witness with amusement
but with self-reproach his presentation of characters
superficial, and superficially refracting the evanescent
vanities and heartless vices of Jacobean London, as
if representative of actual and general life; his play
of emotions feigned or sentimental; his violent contrasts,[410]
unnatural conversions, impossible revolutions
of fortune; we discern the absence of subtle intuition,
the failure to effect profound and lasting impression,
the "lack of seriousness and of spiritual poise." We
note, in the heroic-romantic dramas, improbability
and extravagance; and, in the tragedies, such as Valentinian,
a total disregard of the unity of interest,—just
that muddling of motives of which the editor of
The Nation has written,—and therefore the failure
to realize unity of effect. There has been no moral
sequence: the suspense has been distracted by the variety
of emotions stirred. After the hours of strain
to which the spectator has imaginatively subjected
himself, the relief—what Aristotle calls the catharsis—is
not forthcoming: because the intellect has not
been clarified but fuddled; the will has not been braced;
the feelings appropriate to tragedy—of pity and of
fear—have not enjoyed an unthwarted, undiverted
outflow. The faculties have been tantalized by manifold,
deceptive, agonies of thirst. They should have
been centred in one yearning, conducted to one clear
spring of medicament, and purged by waters of truth,
justice, and sympathy. From Fletcher's Valentinian
and Bonduca despite the poetry and the onrush of
the dramatic action there proceeds no calm, "all passion
spent"; no beauty that is peace. And of the
tragicomedies, The Loyall Subject and A Wife for
a Month, this verdict may be even more readily pronounced.
Such are the excellences and defects of Fletcher.
Let us give him all the glory of the former: but stay
from burdening Beaumont, who had faults of his own,[411]
with responsibility for the latter,—with the unmorality
or immorality or extravagant artistry of Fletcher
when not associated with Beaumont. With the vices
and virtues of Fletcher's rocket, bursting in stellar
polychrome, Beaumont had nothing to do. To him
justice can be accorded only if he, after these three
centuries, be considered alone,—not for ever coupled
with Fletcher, but spoken and thought of, and known,
as dramatist, poet, man of far sounder fibre, and more
virile marrow,—of superior insight, imagination, and
art.
Next to Shakespeare, the most essentially poetic
dramatist of the early Jacobean period was Francis
Beaumont. He had not the learning of Jonson, nor
the long career, nor the dictatorial position; nor did
he attempt to rival him in comedy, or criticism. But
his great poem, The Maides Tragedy is a thousand
times more enthralling and poetic than Sejanus or
Catiline. Shakespeare always excepted, the only author
of tragedy in that day whose intuitions and lines
of astounding splendour at all compete with, sometimes
surpass, Beaumont's is Webster; but the fascination
of his Duchess of Malfy is lurid, miasmatic, stupefying;
that of The Maides Tragedy, breathless and
heart-breaking.
In the drama of mingled motive, Jonson produced
but one masterpiece that in poetry, valiancy of design,
and portrayal of the ridiculous, equals Beaumont's
A King and No King,—the Volpone; but that is not
tragicomedy, and it drips venom. All that stands between
A King and No King and artistic perfection is
the dénouement. If the lovers had died, their struggle[412]
against temptation still continuing, their passion unfulfilled,—if
in the moment of death, they had discovered
that their union were no incest after all, Beaumont
would have left behind him another consummate
tragedy. As it is, to find a parallel in Jacobean literature,
outside of Shakespeare, one must turn to Ford's
'Tis a Pity, She's a Whore. There again with poetic
effulgence the problem of incest is dramatized; but
how half-hearted the struggle, insincere the moral,—the
poetry, purple and unconvincing!
In romantic comedy, between 1603 and 1625, others
have produced plays which from the dramatic point
of view equal Philaster,—Dekker, Heywood, Marston,
Chapman, Middleton, and Rowley. Not all even of
Shakespeare's romantic comedies come up to Philaster
in literary or dramatic excellence; but only Shakespeare
has written what surpasses it.
In the comedy that delineates humours, The Woman-Hater,
as regards both poetry and technique, falls
below several plays of Dekker, Chapman, Marston,
Middleton, and Jonson, and below the earlier efforts
of Shakespeare; but in characterization it is as good
as some of Shakespeare's. There is no comic figure
in Love's Labour's Lost, the Two Gentlemen
of Verona, or the Comedy of Errors, that surpasses
Beaumont's Hungry Courtier; and the humorous dialogue
and the prose as a whole of The Woman-Hater
are more natural, and more intelligible to the modern
ear. With Shakespeare's later comedies that in any
degree avail themselves of the 'humours' element, or
with Jonson's masterpieces in this kind, The Woman-Hater,
of course, can not be placed in comparison.[413]
But if for the nonce, we consider Beaumont's Knight
of the Burning Pestle, merely in its 'humours' aspect,
we must acknowledge that its characters are as clear-cut,
as typical of the time and as provocative of laughter
as those of Every Man in his Humour, which
for all its historic significance most people nowadays
read, or might read, with a yawn; and that it is less
artificial in construction, more human in motive and
character, more modern in mirth than The Silent
Woman,—even though the object of its ridicule be
now caviare to the general.
To set Beaumont's burlesque as a comedy of manners
beside any of Shakespeare's comedies from 1594
down, would be futile, but of the early Shakespearian
plays mentioned above none shakes more with fun
than The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and not one
gives us the flavour of London,—its citizens, their affectations
and ideals, their reading, habits and life,—or
of England, that the Knight affords in every
scene. If Shakespeare instead of writing, say, the
Comedy of Errors had written The Knight of the
Burning Pestle, scholars would now be flooding us with
Variorum editions of it, women's literary clubs would
be likening him with fervour to Cervantes, and the public
might be so well educated to its allusions and ideas
that our Hebrew emperors of the theatrical world and
arbiters of dramatic vogue would be "starring" it
through the country to the delight of audiences
that wisely make a show of understanding and enjoying
everything that Shakespeare wrote. To what unrealized
extent the fate of plays hangs upon the tradition
of the green-room, the actor's whim, the[414]
manager's enterprise or ignorance, and luck, is material
for an essay in itself. I am not asserting that
The Knight of the Burning Pestle pretends to poetry,
as do all of Shakespeare's plays; but that for chuckling
and side-long mirth, and for manners and
insight into the life of a rarely interesting period, it
is fine comedy, while as burlesque it is equalled by
few of the kind in our language and excelled by none.
It may be true that burlesques lose their flavour with
the passing of their victims. But that does not hold
true of the drama of problems perennially recurring
and of emotions common to men of every age and clime.
Of such drama are The Maides Tragedy and A King
and No King. They are not antiquated. And I doubt
whether they are stronger meat than some of Shakespeare's
plays, all of which are more or less 'arranged'
before they are placed upon the modern stage. As
to strong meat, the difference between the Elizabethan
taste and the present Georgian is more a matter of
variety than of flavour. Our forefathers liked their
venison in gobbets, for three hours at a stretch, and
washed it down with a tun or two of sack. The theatre-going
public to-day likes its game just as high, but
it varies the meal with other dishes as highly seasoned,—and
washes it down with a foreign-labeled little bottle
of champagne. Our ancestors called a depraved
woman by a brief bad name, and put it into poetry.
We denominate her, if at all, by some euphemistic circumlocution,
in prose; but we none the less throng the
theatre to see Dalilah play, and we follow with apparent
gusto her sinuous enticements upon the stage.
We rejoice in problem-plays more erotic, and far[415]
more subtly perilous, than those which Shakespeare
and Beaumont beheld. We are of an age of uplift,
and meticulous reform. We would eliminate fornication
and adultery; but not from our plays. They
teem with—suggestion. There is nothing neurotic,
nothing insidious in The Maides Tragedy and A King
and No King. The grave of sin is wide open; and the
spade that digged it stands in plain view, and is called
a spade. On the whole I had rather have the Anglo-Saxon
bluntness and gleaming poetry of the Beaumont
than the whitewashed epigram and miching-mallecho
of the twentieth-century play I saw last night. There
is no reason why, properly cut and staged, Beaumont's
greatest plays should not yield delight to-day. And as
for the reader why should he not turn back to "the
inexhaustible treasures" of entertainment offered by
these plays. "They were," as says Mr. Paul Elmer
More, "they were to the Elizabethan age what the
novel is to ours, and I wonder how many readers three
centuries from now will go back to our fiction for
amusement as we to-day can go back to Beaumont and
Fletcher."
I began this book by quoting from an historian of
the drama of marked repute: "In the Argo of the
Elizabethan drama—as it presents itself to the imagination
of our own latter days—Shakespeare's is
and must remain the commanding figure. Next to
him sit the twin literary heroes, Beaumont and
Fletcher—more or less vaguely supposed to be inseparable
from one another in their works." And
also from the last great poet of the Victorian age:
"If a distinction must be made between the Dioscuri[416]
of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont
was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux
was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than
Castor can it be said that on any side Beaumont was
a poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but
so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and
ears to discern in the fabric of their common work
a distinction without a difference." If I have succeeded
in showing that in the fabric of their common
work the distinction between Beaumont and
Fletcher is measured by a wide and clearly visible
difference, I shall be happy. Others, to whom I have
repeatedly expressed my indebtedness even when disagreeing
with particulars of their criticism, have
cleared the way. If in this book anything has been
added to their services that may help the world to
distinguish these two dramatists not only hand from
hand but mind from mind, and to see Beaumont plain,
as I see him in the long gallery of his contemporaries,
I shall be happier still; but most amply rewarded if,
for the future, it may be fittingly recognized not only
that Beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth—the
Pollux, but why he was. Then, perhaps, the
world of sagacious readers may turn from talking
always of Beaumont-and-Fletcher, and protest occasionally
and with well-informed reason in the name
of Francis Beaumont alone.
[417]
APPENDIX
GENEALOGICAL TABLES
[418]
[419]
TABLE A.
PLANTAGENET, COMYN, BEAUMONT, AND VILLIERS.
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The Earls of Buchan |
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Henry III of England, b. 1207; d. 1272 |
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Agnes, heiress de Beaumont in Maine, m. Louis de Brienne |
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Alexander Comyn |
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Henry, Earl of Lancaster |
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Henry, 1 Baron de Beaumont, fl. 1309; d. 1341 |
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Alice Comyn |
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Alianor |
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John, 2 Baron de Beaumont, d. 1343 |
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Henry, 3 Baron de Beaumont, fl. 1363; d. 1370 |
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Thomas, Ld. Bardolph |
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John, 4 Baron de Beaumont, fl. 1384; d. 1397 |
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Joan, m. Sir Wm. Philip |
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Henry, 5 Baron de Beaumont, d. 1422 |
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Sir Thomas Beaumont, m. (1427) Philippa Maureward of Coleorton |
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Elizabeth |
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John, 6 Baron, and 1 Viscount Beaumont, d. 1460 |
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John Beaumont, d. 1460 |
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Sir John Villiers, d. 1506 |
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Son (Henry Beaumont, d. Towton, 1461?) |
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William, 2 Visc. and Lord Bardolph, d. 1511, s. p. |
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Joan, m. John, Lord Lovel |
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Richard B., d. 1539 |
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George B. |
William Villiers, d. 1558. |
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Son (John, fl. 1485?) |
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Francis, Viscount Lovel, d. 1487 |
Joan, m. Sir Bryan Stapleton |
Nicholas Beaumont |
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William |
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John Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, fl. 1529-1554; m. Elizabeth Hastings |
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|
|
|
|
|
|
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Present Barons de Beaumont |
Sir Henry, d. 1607 |
Sir Thomas, of Stoughton, d. 1614 |
Anthony, of Glenfield |
|
Francis, d. 1598 |
|
|
|
|
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|
Sir Thomas, 1622, 1 Viscount Beaumont, of Swords |
Present Baronets of Coleorton Hall |
Maria m. Sir Geo. Villiers |
Henry |
John |
Francis Beaumont 1584-1616 |
Elizabeth |
|
|
|
|
|
George, Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628 |
|
[420]
TABLE B
NEVIL, HASTINGS, BEAUMONT, TALBOT
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
Richard Nevil, Earl of Salisbury |
|
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|
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|
|
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|
Richard, Earl of Warwick |
|
Catherine Nevil |
== |
|
Sir William, 1 Baron Hastings, executed 1483 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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|
|
|
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|
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|
|
Isabel, m. Geo. Duke of Clarence, bro. of Edw. IV |
|
Anne, m. Richard III |
|
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|
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|
Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, m. Richard de la Pole |
|
Edward, 2 Baron Hastings d. 1507 |
|
Sir William Hastings, fl. 1490 |
|
Anne m. Geo. Talbot, 4 Earl of Shrewsbury |
|
|
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|
Henry de la Pole |
|
George, 1 Earl of Huntingdon, c. 1488-1544, m. Anne, dau. of Henry Stafford, 2 Duke of Buckingham |
|
Anne, m. Thos. Stanley, 2 Earl Derby |
|
Elizabeth Hastings, m. c. 1540 |
|
Francis, 5 Earl of Shrewsbury |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
John Beaumont, of Grace-Dieu, |
|
|
|
|
Katherine Pole |
== |
Francis, 2 Earl of Huntingdon 1514-1560 |
|
(Master of the Rolls, 1551, d. 1554) |
|
George, 6 Earl of Shrewsbury, d. 1590 |
|
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|
|
Henry, 3 Earl of Huntingdon 1539-1595 |
George, 4 Earl, d. 1604 |
Walter, m. Joyce Roper (aunt of Mrs. Elizab. Vaux) |
Lady Mary Hastings |
|
Francis, c. 1541-1598, the Justice, m. Anne Pierrepoint |
|
Henry, d. s. p. |
|
Elizabeth, m. William, S Ld. Vaux of Harrowden |
|
Gilbert, 7 Earl of Shrewsbury, m. Mary Cavendish, sister-in-law of Anne Pierrepoint Beaumont |
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|
Francis Hastings, d. 1595 |
Sir Henry Hastings, m. Elizab. dau. of Thos., 1 Visc. Beaumont of Swords |
|
|
Sir Henry, d. 1605 |
Sir John, 1583-1627 |
|
Henry Vaux, d. c. 1590 |
Eleanor Brookesby (alias Mrs. Jennings) |
Anne Vaux (alias Mrs. Perkins) fl. 1605 |
George, |
John, |
Mary, |
Althea |
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|
Henry, 5 Earl, 1586-1643, m. Elizab. dau. of Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby |
Catherine, m. Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield |
Edward, Captain under Sir Walter Raleigh, 1617 |
|
Sir John, d. 1644 |
Francis (a Jesuit) |
Sir Thomas |
|
[421]
TABLE C.
BEAUMONT. PIERREPOINT. CAVENDISH, TALBOT.
| |
| |
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| |
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| |
|
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|
|
Sir William Cavendish, m. 1541, Elizabeth Hardwick |
|
|
Sir George Pierrepoint, d. 1564 |
|
|
|
(afterwards wife of George Talbot, 6 Earl of Shrewsbury) |
|
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|
Anne Pierrepoint, b. c. 1550;
widow of Thos. Thorold of Marston; m. (2) Francis Beaumont,
the Justice, d. 1598 |
|
Sir Henry Pierrepoint, 1546-1615 |
== |
|
Frances Cavendish |
Elizabeth, m. Charles Stuart, Earl of Lenox, bro. of Henry Darnley |
Henry, m. Grace Talbot, dau. of Geo. 6 Earl of Shrewsbury |
William, 1 Earl of Devonshire, in 1611 |
Charles, of Welbeck, d. 1617 |
Mary, m. Gilbert Talbot 7 Earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1616) |
|
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|
Henry b. 1581 |
John b. 1583 |
Francis b. 1584 |
Elizabeth b. 1588 |
Robert Pierrepoint, 1584-1643,
1 Earl of Kingston, m. Gertrude, g-dau. of Geo. Talbot, 6 Earl of Shrewsbury |
|
Lady Arabella Stuart, cousin of James I. |
|
William, 1588-1679,
2 Earl of Devonshire; m. Christiana Bruce of Kinloss; Ancestor of the present
Dukes of Devonshire |
Sir Wm. Cavendish, 1592-1676. In 1665, 1 Duke of Newcastle |
|
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Henry Pierepoint, 1606-1680
2 Earl of Kingston, 1 Marq. Dorchester |
|
William Pierrepoint 1607-1678 |
|
Mary, m. Wm. Herbert, 3 Earl of Pembroke |
Althea, m. Thos. Howard, 2 Earl of Arundel |
|
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Robert, 3 Earl of Kingston; m. Elizab., dau. of Sir John Evelyn |
|
Present Dks of Norfolk |
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William, 4 Earl of Kingston |
|
Evelyn, 5 Earl of Kingston, 1690
Marq. Dorchester; Duke of Kingston, 1715 |
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Mary (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) 1689-1762 |
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William, Viscount Newark |
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Frances, m. Philip Meadows |
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Charles, 1 Earl Manvers, of Holme-Pierrepoint |
[422]
TABLE D
BEAUMONT, VAUX, TRESHAM, CATESBY
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| |
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| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
Nicholas, 1 Lord Vaux of Harrowden (1524) |
|
Sir Thomas Tresham, Grand Prior, Order of St. John, d. 1559 |
|
Anthony Catesby |
|
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
John Beaumont, Grace-Dieu, m. Elizabeth Hastings |
|
Thomas, the poet, 2 Lord Vaux, b. 1511 |
|
John Tresham |
|
== |
Eleanor |
|
Sir Robert Throckmorton |
|
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|
|
|
Francis Beaumont, d. 1598 |
|
Elizabeth Beaumont |
== |
|
William, 3 Lord Vaux d. 1595 |
== |
Mary Tresham |
Sir Thomas Tresham d. 1605 |
== |
dau. |
|
dau. m. Sir Wm. Catesby |
|
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|
John, 1583-1627 |
Francis, 1584-1616 |
|
Henry |
Eleanor, m. Edward Brookesby; fl. 1605 |
Anne Vaux (alias Mrs. Perkins), fl. 1605 |
|
|
Ambrose |
John, 1 Ld. Teynham |
|
Frances Tresham, the conspirator, d. 1605 |
Elizabeth m. Ld. Monteagle, bro. of Mrs. Abington |
Frances, m. Ld. Stourton |
|
Robert Catesby, the conspirator, d. 1605 |
|
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|
|
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
George Vaux,
d. 1594, m. Elizabeth Roper
the Mrs. (Elizabeth) Vaux of the Gunpowder Plot. |
Joyce, m. Walter Hastings |
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|
Edward, 4 Ld. Vaux c. 1591-1661 |
Katherine, m. Henry Nevill, 1 Ld. Abergavenny |
Mary, ancestress of the present Lord Vaux |
|
Sir Henry Hastings, m. Elizabeth Beaumont of Coleorton |
|
[423]
TABLE E
FLETCHER, BAKER, SACKVILLE
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
Richard Fletcher, Vicar of Cranbrooke, fl. 1555-1574 |
|
John Giffard, of Weston-under-Edge |
|
Sir John Baker, of Sissinghurst, c. 1490-1558 |
|
|
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|
Dr. Giles, the diplomat; c. 1549-1611 |
|
Richard, Bp. of London, m.
d. 1596; m. (1) Elizabeth Holland |
== (2) Maria, widow of == |
Sir Richard Baker, d. 1594 |
|
Cicely, m.
Richard Sackville, Ld. Buckhurst,
1 Earl of Dorset; (1536-1608) |
|
Mary, m. John Tufton, of Hothfield, who d. 1567 |
|
|
|
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|
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|
|
Phineas, 1582-1650 |
Giles, c. 1588-1623 |
John Fletcher, the dramatist, 1579-1625 |
no children |
|
|
Robert Sackville, 2 Earl of Dorset, d. 1609 |
|
Sir John Tufton, Bart., d. 1624 |
|
|
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|
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|
|
|
Grisogone m. c. 1595, Sir Henry Lennard (in 1611,
12 Lord Dacre, of Chevening and Knole) |
Sir Richard Baker |
Cicely Blunt |
|
|
|
Anne Tufton, m. Francis
Tresham, who d. 1605 |
|
Nicholas, 1 Earl of Thanet, in 1629 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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|
|
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Richard, 3 Earl of Dorset, c. 1599-1624 |
|
Edward, 4 Earl of Dorset, d. 1652 |
|
|
[424]
[425]
INDEX
[426]
[427]
INDEX
(The page-numbers refer to the foot-notes as well as to the
main body of the text.)
- Abington, Mrs., the actress, 377
- Abington (Habington), Mrs., sister of Lord Monteagle, 57
- Abuses Stript and Whipt, 135
- actors, lists preceding plays, 229
- Ad Comitissam Rutlundiae, 173
- Addison, Joseph, 188
- Aeschylus, 200
- afterthought-parentheses, 265, 350
- Alchemist, The, 110, 325, 334, 336, 343
- Alden, R. M., editions of The Knight and A King and No King, 110, 117, 234, 252, 258, 287, 300, 311, 312, 318, 361
- alliteration, 259
- All's Well that Ends Well, 79, 115, 390, 391, 392, 393
- Amadis de Gaule, 313, 322, 327
- Amends for Ladies, 302, 304, 334
- Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 186
- Anton, Robert, 328
- Antony and Cleopatra, 75, 79, 116, 283, 389
- Apocrypha, The, 369
- apothegms, 289
- Arcadia, 106, 108, 111, 133, 158, 159
- Ariosto, 34
- Aristophanes, 197, 230
- Aronstein, P., 407
- Ascham, Roger, 23
- Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 10, 23, et passim
- Aston, Sir Walter, 166, 167
- Astrée, D'Urfé, 89-90, 274
- 'Astrophel,' 166
- As You Like It, 159, 345, 390, 392
- Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed., A. Clark, 32, 95, 137, 153, 219
- Bacon, Sir Francis, 35, 36, 37, 125f., 129, 146, et passim
- Bacon, Sir Nicholas, and Anthony, 35, 64, 68
- Baker, Sir John of Sissinghurst, Kent, 24, 65ff.;
- Cicely, Countess of Dorset, 66, 69, 70;
- Cicely, Lady Blunt, 69, 70;[428]
- Grisogone, Lady Dacre, 69, 70, 178
- Baker family, 71, 137
- Baker, Sir Richard, 65, 66
- Baker, Richard, the historian, 67, 70
- Bancroft, Bishop, 64, 216
- Bancroft, Thomas, Two Bookes of Epigrammes and Epitaphs, 1639, 20
- Bandello, Thomas, 392
- Banke-Side, 95-96, 114, 170
- Barkstead, William, 335
- Barrons Wars, the, 42
- Basse, William, 40, 134, 199, 200
- Battle of Bosworth Field, The, 184, (22)
- Baudouin, Le Curieux Impertinent, 332
- Beau Manor, 10;
- Beaumont and Fletcher, portraits of, 190-192, 217-219;
- collaboration of (in general), 3-9, 223-416;
- the problem, 225-233;
- critical apparatus, 233-235;
- folios, 225-229, 236-239;
- quartos, 239-241, and under individual plays;
- editions, 217, 234, 244, 271, 318, 324, 338, 349, 359, 361, 368, 371, 377;
- delimitation of the field, 236-242;
- versification, 243-260;
- diction of Fletcher, 260-277, of Beaumont, 281-290;
- mental habit of Fletcher, 277-280, of Beaumont, 281-290;
- authorship of Foure Playes, Love's Cure, The Captaine, 300-306;
- of the Woman-Hater, 73, 307;
- of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 80, 310;
- of The Coxcombe, 337;
- of Philaster, 345;
- of The Maides Tragedy, 349;
- of Cupid's Revenge, 359;
- of A King and No King, 361;
- of the Scornful Ladie, 374;
- influence upon Shakespeare (?) 386, upon the drama, 396;
- Beaumont and Fletcher compared, 399-411
- Beaumont, Anthony, 160
- Beaumont, Barons and Viscounts de, 10-12
- Beaumont's diction, 281ff.
- Beaumont, Elizabeth, Lady Vaux, 15, 46
- Beaumont, Elizabeth, sister of the dramatist, Mrs. Seyliard, 43, 45, 46, 70, 159, 176, 187
- Beaumont, Elizabeth, daughter of the dramatist, 180, 187
- Beaumont, Frances, posthumous daughter of the dramatist, 187ff.
- Beaumont, Francis, the dramatist:
- his family, early years in Grace-Dieu, Oxford, 10ff.;
- at the Inns of Court, earliest poems, etc., 29ff.;
- the Vaux cousins and the Gunpowder Plot, 46ff.;
- some early plays of, 72ff.;
- period of partnership with Fletcher, 95ff.;
- relations with Shakespeare, Jonson, and others in the theatrical world, 114ff., 124ff., 145ff.;
- The Masque of the Inner Temple, 124-144;[429]
- the Pastoralists, and other contemporaries at the Inns of Court, 131-144;
- an intersecting circle of jovial sort, 145-149;
- the Countess of Rutland (Elizabeth Sidney), 150ff.;
- his marriage, death, surviving family, 172ff.;
- personality and contemporary reputation, portraits, 190ff.;
- versification, 246ff., 281ff.;
- stock words, phrases, and figures, 282ff.;
- lines of Inevitable Poetry, 287;
- his mental habit, 291ff.;
- his dramatic art, adaptation, etc., 378ff.;
- Did the Beaumont "romance" influence Shakespeare? 386ff.;
- not a leader in decadence, 396-401;
- Beaumont compared with Fletcher, 401-411;
- and with other dramatists, 411-415
- Beaumont, Francis, his Poems, 39, 40, 150ff., 172-174, 183, 230, 251, 292, 295, 298, 330
- Beaumont, Francis, the Justice, father of the dramatist, 15-19, 21, 24, 29
- Beaumont, Sir Henry, brother of the dramatist, 16, 18, 29, 44, 45, 99
- Beaumont, Sir Henry, of Coleorton, 19, 160
- Beaumont, Sir John, brother of the dramatist, 16, 18, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 38-40, 42-45, 59-61, 116, 132, 146, 150, 154, 159, 162-164, 166, 180, 182, 184-186, 195
- Beaumont, John, Master of the Rolls, 12-14, 59-60
- Beaumont, Maria, Lady Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, 19, 160-163
- Beaumont, Sir Thomas, 45, 162
- Beaumont's versification, 246ff.
- Beeston's Players, 314
- Beggers Bush, The, 98, 236, 237, 378
- Bell, H. N., 14
- Bellman of London, The, 98
- Belvoir Castle, 154
- Berkenhead, John, 208
- Betterton, Thomas, 366
- Biographia Dramatica, The, 233
- Birch, Mem. of Q. Elizabeth, 68
- Blackfriars Theatre, the, 80, 81, 85, 89, 96, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105, 114, 119, 122, 136, 179, 207, 314, 316, 317, 319, 342, 343, 368, 370, 373
- Blackwell's Treatise on Equivocation, 53
- Blaiklock, Lawrence, 39, 40, 150, 165, 295
- Blue Boar Inn, 22
- Boas, F. S., ed. of Philaster, 349
- Boccaccio, 101, 334, 392
- Bolton, Edmund, 185, 194
- Bond, R. Warwick, 367, 368, 371, 374;
- ed. of The Scornful Ladie, 377
- Bonduca, 236, 238, 278, 378, 410
- Bosworth, battle of, 22, (184)
- bouleversements, 364[430]
- Boyle, R., 234, 252, 254, 300, 302, 308, 374
- Bread-street, 99, 113, 203
- Brett, Cyril, Drayton's Minor Poems, 191
- Bridal, The, 359
- Britain's Ida, Phineas Fletcher, 64
- Britannia's Pastorals, 132-144
- Broadgates, 29
- Brome, Richard, 92, 168, 212, 213
- Brooke, Christopher, 38, 119, 136, 145, 147-149
- Brookesby, Bartholomew, 48, 57;
- Browne, William, 38, 40, 131-144, 153, 202, 214
- Browning, Robert, 183, 246
- Brydges, Egerton, 233
- Buc, Sir George, 349
- Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 19, 60, 159-164, 185
- Bullen, A. H., art. John Fletcher (D. N. B); gen. editor, Variorum Beaumont and Fletcher, 203, 234, 271, 272, 312, et passim
- Burbadge, Cuthbert, 103, 342, 343
- Burbadge, Richard, 102, 103, 114, 118, 122, 136, 154, 316, 317, 358
- Burre, Walter, 81, 319, 320, 322, 323
- Burton, William, 16, 186
- Bury-Fair, 96, 220
- Bussy D'Ambois, 399
- Butler, James, Duke of Ormonde, 188
- cadences, conversational and lyrical, 247
- caesurae, 244ff.
- Cambridge English Classics, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, 244, 263-270, et passim
- Camden, William, 137, 149, 178, 182
- Camden Miscellany, The, 66
- Campion, Father, 46
- Capricious Lady, The, 377
- Captaine, The, 98, 111, 176, 236, 240, 306, 378, 383
- Cardenio or Cardenna, 111, 119
- Carey, Giles, 114, 122, 336
- Carleton, Mistris, 125
- Carr (Ker) Robert, Earl of Somerset, 74, 75, 179, 372
- Cartwright, William, 209, 232
- Casaubon, Isaac, 182
- Catesby, Robert, 49, 50-53, 57, 58
- Catholics, and the "Catholic Cousins" of Beaumont, 46ff., 179
- Catiline, 120, 154, 411
- Cavendish, Henry, 17, 24
- Cavendishes, the, 16, 17, 38, 165
- Cavendish, Sir William, first Duke of Newcastle, 165
- Centurie of Praise, 200
- Cervantes, see Don Quixote
- Challoner, Missionary Priests, 16
- Chalmers, A., 185, 233
- Chamberlain, John, 125, 126, 155f.
- Chancery, Inns of, 29, 30, et passim;
- and see Inns of Court[431]
- Chances, The, 64, 211, 230, 236, 243, 244, 263, 267, 268, 279, 403
- Chapel Players, the, 32
- Chapman, George, 85, 86, 87, 98, 102, 116, 122, 124, 125, 132ff., 135, 142, 154, 182, 189, 194, 198, 200, 202, 203, 214, 317, 328, 329, 391, 396, 399, 412
- Charles I, 185, et passim
- Charles II, 358
- Charles, Duke of Byron, The Tragedie of, 317
- Charles, Prince of Wales, 371, 372
- Charnwood Forest, 10, 11, 13, 18, 20, 43, 151, 159
- Chaucer, Geoffrey, 37
- Chaucer, Speght's, 24, 178
- Cheapside, 99, 114, et passim
- Child, H. H., 43
- "chorizontes," the, 9
- Christ's Victorie, Giles Fletcher, 64
- Cicely Tufton, see Rutland
- Cinthio, 392
- Clarendon, Lord, 169
- Clark, Andrew, 147, 148, 192
- Cleves wars, the, 368-370, 372, 373
- Clifford, Anne, Countess of Dorset, of Pembroke and Montgomery, 192
- Clifford's Inn, 131
- Clifton, Sir Gervase, 166
- Clifton, Lady Penelope, 165f., 174, 202
- Cockayne, Sir Aston, 168, 219, 226, 228, 233, 377
- Coke, Sir Edward, 52, 58, 148, 162
- Coleorton, 12, 19, 45, 160, et passim
- Coleridge, S. T., 5, 397
- Collier, J. P., 102, 220, 233
- Collins, Peerage of England, 14, 17, 50, et passim
- Comedy of Errors, A, 35, 393, 412, 413
- Commendatory Verses, 94, 198, 229, 230, et passim
- Concerning the True Forms of English Poetry, 184
- Condell, Henry, 103, 120, 122, 343, 402
- Congreve, William, 188
- Convivium Philosophicum, 145-149, 203
- Conyoke or Connock, 149
- Cook, Alexander, 122
- Cooke, W., 377
- Coke, Sir Edward, 52, 58
- Corbet, Bishop, 181, 195
- Coriolanus, 389
- Coronation, The, 229, 237
- Coryate, Tom, 99, 149
- Cotton, Charles, the elder, 98, 168-170, 226-228
- couplet, 'heroic,' 252
- Cowley, Abraham, 184
- Coxcombe, The, 8, 87, 96-101, 103, 106, 111, 202, 208, 228, 236, 240, 273, 286, 287, 294, 296, 298, 311, 332-341, 370, 378, 383, 396, 400
- Cranefield, Arthur, 149
- Critics of Beaumont and Fletcher, 234
- Croke, Sir John, Charles, and Unton, 138
- Cromwell, Oliver, 74, 138, 170
- Crowne of Thornes, The, 184
- Cunliffe, J. W., 35, 37[432]
- Cupid's Revenge, 8, 111-112, 159, 237, 239, 240, 283, 285, 288, 294, 299, 305, 314, 359ff., 370, 378, 381, 384, 386, 387, 388, 389, 396, 407
- Curious Impertinent, The, El Curioso Impertinente, Le Curieux Impertinent, 332, 334, 335
- Custome of the Countrey, The, 236
- Cymbeline, 344, 345, 386-395
- Cynthia's Revels, 85, 96
- Cyropædeia, 109
- Daborne, Robert, 122, 239, 379, 407
- Damon and Pythias, 32
- Daniel, Joseph, 149
- Daniel, P. A., 349, 359
- Daniel, Samuel, 142, 194
- Darley, G., Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 25, 181, 233
- D'Avenant, William, 82, 307, 308, 350
- Davies, John, of Hereford, 105, 133, 142, 145, 146, 209, 342, 343, 346, 366
- Day, John, 102, 122, 159, 314, 325
- Dekker, John, 98, 102, 122, 211, 412
- Denham, Sir John, 184
- Description of Elizium, Drayton, 191
- Devereux, Lady Penelope, 166
- diction, 260ff., 275f., 281ff., and see Beaumont and Fletcher
- Diego Sarmiento, Don, Count Gondomar, 371ff.
- Digby, Sir Everard, 48, 50, 52, 53, 57
- Discourse of the English Stage, 386
- disputed plays, 300ff.
- Distrest Mother, The, 186
- Divine Poems, Drayton, 191
- Dolce, Ludovico, Giocasta, 35
- Don Diego, see Sarmiento de Acuña
- Donne, John, 38, 98, 148, 149, 150, 169
- Don Quixote, relation to The Knight of the Burning Pestle, esp. 321-331;
- 'Doridon,' 140ff.
- Douay, 369
- Douthwaite, W. R., Gray's Inn, etc., 30ff.
- Double Marriage, The, 6, 236
- Drake, Sir Francis, 37, 64, 138, 216
- Dramatic Miscellany, Davies, 366
- Drayton, Michael, 21, 26, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 72, 98, 116, 122, 132ff., 137, 145, 153, 182, 185, 187, 191, 192, 194, 201, 202, 209
- Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 84, 90, 152, 193, 194, 202, 230
- Dryden, John, 71, 72, 121, 188, 233, 358, 365
- Duchess of Malfi, The, 411
- Dugdale, G., 131
- Duke, H. E., Gray's Inn, 34ff.
- Duke of Milan, The, 136
- Duke of York, The, (Prince Charles's) Players, 335, 336
- D'Urfé, Marquis, 89-90, 274[433]
- Dutch Courtezan, The, 399
- Dyce, Alexander, Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 16, 19, 96, 195, 233, et passim
- Earle, John, Bishop, 156, 196-198, 209, 230, 241, 346, 385
- Eastward Hoe, 73, 79, 328
- Editions, also Folios and Quartos, see Beaumont and Fletcher
- Edwardes, Richard, 32
- Edwards, Jonathan, 25
- Eglogs, a revision of Idea, the Shepheard's Garland, Drayton, 42, 187
- Ekesildena, Catherine, 186
- Elder Brother, The, 237, 272
- Elegies, Brooke, 136
- (Certayn) Elegies—with Satyres and Epigrames, Fitzgeffrey, 202
- Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, 156, 251
- Elements of Armories, Bolton, 195
- Elizabeth Beaumont Seyliard, see Beaumont, Elizabeth
- Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, see Sidney, Elizabeth
- Elizabeth, Princess, 33, 52, 110, 124, 139, 149
- Elizabeth, Queen, 67
- Elton, Oliver, Michael Drayton, 43, 167, 192
- Endimion and Phoebe, 41
- end-stopped lines, 243ff.
- English Palmerin, see Palmerin
- Epicoene, 103, 120, 322, 324, 335, 369, 413
- Epigrams, Jonson, 121, 195, 203
- Epistle Dedicatorie, Shelton, 321, 323
- Epistle to Henery Reynolds, Drayton, 201
- Epithalamium, Wither, 135
- Equivocation, Blackwell's treatise, 53
- Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Dryden, 233, 358
- Ethelwolf, oder der König Kein König, 367
- Euripides, 35, 200, 207
- Evans, Henry, 80, 102, 317, 342
- Evelyn, John, letter to Pepys, 218
- Every Man in his Humour, 92, 413
- Every Man out of his Humour, 32, 327
- Examination of his Mistris' Perfections, 172-174
- extra syllables, 243
- Faire Maide of the Inne, The, 236, 238, 378
- Faithful Friends, The, 237, 378
- Faithfull Shepheardesse, The, 21, 65, 73, 83-88, 90, 93, 139, 166, 171, 216, 231, 237, 240, 247, 249, 252, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 270, 277, 280, 302, 304
- False One, The, 236
- (Of The) Famous Voyage, 203
- Farquhar, George, 188
- Fauchet, Thierry, 109
- Fawkes, Guy, 49, 52, 56
- feet, trisyllabic, 243[434]
- Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare, The, Gayley, 233, et passim;
- Fenner, Sir John, 130
- Ferrar, William, 138
- Fidele and Fortunio, 392
- Field, Nathaniel, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 114, 122, 211, 214, 239, 251, 272, 300, 302, 303, 304, 305, 335, 342, 343, 360, 379, 407
- Fifty Comedies and Tragedies, 288
- Fitzgeffrey, Henry, Elegies, Satires, and Epigrams, 202
- Fleay, F. G., Hist. Stage, Chron. Engl. Drama, etc., 4, 8, 41, 74, 84, 233, 234, 238, 252, 300, 303, 308, 316, 318 et passim
- Flecknoe, Richard, 386, 397
- Fletcher, John, ("I. F.") 40, 195;
- his family, his youth, 62ff.;
- some early plays of, 82ff.;
- period of partnership with Beaumont, 95ff.;
- relations with Shakespeare, Jonson, etc., 114ff., 124ff., 145ff.;
- later years, portraits, 211ff.;
- his versification, 243ff.;
- his diction, 260ff.;
- stock words, phrases, and figures, 270ff.;
- his mental habit, 277ff.;
- the Fletcher of the joint-plays, 383ff.;
- his dramatic art, 383-385, 399-411
- Fletcher, criteria, 243ff.; 260ff.;
- see Beaumont and Fletcher, diction, verse, Ye-test, etc.
- Fletcher, Richard, Bishop, 62-68
- Fletcher, Dr. Giles, 64, 68;
- Fletcher, Phineas, 64
- 'Fletcherian Syndicate, the,' 379, 407
- Flowers, The, 36, 125
- Folio, First, Beaumont and Fletcher's Comedies and Tragedies, 1647, (35 Plays), 236
- Folio, Second, Fifty Comedies and Tragedies, 1679 (53 Plays), 237
- Ford, John, 211, 412
- Forrest, The, Jonson, 152
- Fortescue, George, 186
- Foure Playes, or Morall Representations, in One, (see also Triumphs), 87, 236, 240, 251, 272, 301-305, 378, 386, 388, 389
- Foure Prentises, The, 204, 325
- Frederick, the Elector Palatine, 33, 36, 110, 124
- Fuller, Thomas, Worthies, 67, 108
- Gardiner, Robert, 337
- Gardiner, S. R. Hist. Engl., and Prince Charles, 44, 49, 74, 372ff., et passim
- Gardiner, Thomas, 138
- Garnet, Father Henry, 47, 51-54, 56-59
- Garrick, David, 366
- Gascoigne, George, Supposes, 34, 35, 37
- Gayley, C. M., The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare, Part Two, in Rep. Eng. Com., Vol. III, now in
press, 233, 300, 385, 408, 409, et passim[435]
- Gentleman Usher, The, 391, 399
- Gerard, Father John, 47-56, 165
- Ghost of Richard III, Brooke, 136
- Giffard, Maria, Lady Baker, Mrs. Fletcher, Lady Thornhurst, 65-71
- Gilbert, Adrian, 156
- Giocasta, Ludovico Dolce, 35
- Gismond of Salerne, 37
- Globe Theatre, the, 79, 97, 103, 105, 114, 118, 120, 122, 144, 179, 280
- Glover, A, and Waller, A. R., editors of Camb. Engl. Class., Beaumont and Fletcher, 244, 263-270, et passim
- Golden Remains, The, 150
- Goodere, Sir Henry, 43, 148;
- Goodwin, Gordon, 134, 139
- Gorboduc, 37, 70
- Grace-Dieu, 13, 17, 18, 20, 22, 45, 61, 72, 95, 98, 151, 159, 391, et passim
- Gray's Inn, 33, 34, 35, 37, 124, 125, 130f.
- Greene, Robert, Menaphon and Pandosto, 26, 159, 387, 392
- Greenstreet Papers, The, 103, 119, 136, 319
- Greg, W. W., 83, 159, 238, 272
- Grey Friars, at Leicester, 22
- Grey, Lady Jane, 23, 63, 66
- Grosart, A. B., art. in D. N. B., Sir John Beaumont's Poems, 16, 185, 187, 195, et passim
- Gunpowder Plot, the, 46-61, 73, 138, 164
- Gurlin, Nat., 202
- Guskar, H., 88
- Gwynn, Nell, 366
- Hakluyt, Richard, 182
- Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., 342
- hamartia, 354, 358
- Hamlet, 79, 116, 117, 286, 389
- Harcourt, the Rt. Hon. Lewis, 190
- Harleian MS. of Fletcher, 195
- Harington, Sir John, 63, 67
- Harris, John, 212
- Hasted, Hist. Kent, 50, 69, 71, 176, et passim
- Hastings, Edward, second Lord, 14;
- Elizabeth (grandmother of the dramatist), 13, 14;
- Sir Henry, 48, 165;
- Lady Mary, 14;
- William, first Lord, 14, 23;
- Sir William, 14
- Hastings, Earls of Huntingdon: George, first Earl, 13, 14;
- Francis, second Earl, 13-15, 23, 24, 46;
- Henry, third Earl, 14, 24;
- George, fourth Earl, 48;
- Henry, fifth Earl, 38, 164, 165
- Hatcher, O. L., John Fletcher, A Study in Dramatic Method, 231, 232, 233, 300, 408, 409, et passim;
- Hawkins, Sir Thomas, 138, 185
- Hele, Lewis, 130
- Heming, John, 103, 118, 120, 136, 342, 343
- Hemings, John, see Heming
- Henry IV, 110, 115[436]
- Henry VIII, 120, 179
- Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 42
- Herbert, William, third Earl of Pembroke, 133, 153
- Herford, C. H., 287
- Herodotus, 109
- Heroical Adventures of the Knight of the Sea, 328
- Herrick, Robert, 169, 170, 350, 361
- Herring, Joan, 220
- Hesperides, Herrick, 169, 170
- Heyward, Edward, 137
- Heywood, Thomas, 122, 204, 325, 331, 399, 412
- Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, The, 204
- Hill, H. W., 159
- Hill, Nicholas, 203
- Hills, G., 337
- Histoire de Celidée, Thamyre, et Calidon, 89
- Historical Portraits (Oxford), 190, 234ff.
- Histriomastix, 397
- History of Cardenio, by Fletcher and Shakespeare, 119
- Hodgets, John, 40
- Holinshed, 392
- Holland, Aaron, 318
- Holland, Elizabeth, 62, 66
- Holland, Hugh, 98, 148, 149
- Holme-Pierrepoint, 16, 17
- (Upon an) Honest Man's Fortune, 8, 144, 176, 215, 220, 236, 238, 280, 378
- Hoskins, John, his Convivium Philosophicum, 146ff., 149, 203
- Howard, Henry, 349, 361
- Howard of Walden, Lord, 321
- Howe, Josias, 209
- Hughes, Thomas, Misfortunes of Arthur, 35
- Humorous Lieutenant, The, 236, 243, 265, 268, 278, 279, 401-403
- Huntingdon, see Hastings
- hyperbole, 285
- Hypercritica, Bolton, 194
- Idea, the Shepheard's Garland, Eglogs, Drayton, 42
- If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, 331
- Ile of Guls, 159
- Imogen, Innogen, 392
- Inderwick, F. A., Calendar of Inner Temple Records, 30, 131, et passim
- In Laudem Authoris, 40, 134
- Inner Temple, 18, 29, 33, 37, 99, 124ff., 129, 131, 137, 138, 139, 162
- Inner Temple Records, 29-31, 131, 139, et passim
- Inns of Court and Chancery, 29, 32, 37, 118, 135, 145, et passim
- Insatiate Countess, The, 399
- Island Princesse, The, 236, 278
- Isley, Ursula, wife of the dramatist, 175-178, 180, 187
- Isleys, the, 175-177, 186
- iteration, 259
- James I, Progress of 1603, 44, 60, 74, 77, 91, 161, 162, 164, 165, 372
- joint-plays, 252ff., 400ff., etc.
- Jones, Inigo, 125, 145, 147, 148[437]
- Jonson, Ben, 3, 5, 9, 24, 32, 52, 72, 82, 84, 85, 86, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 110, 111, 114ff., 122, 124, 132ff., 136, 137, 142, 145, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 157, 169, 170, 174, 182, 185, 191, 193, 199, 200, 201, 205, 209, 211, 213, 214, 231, 272, 322, 327, 328, 329, 334, 335, 336, 342, 343, 369, 411, 412
- Jovius, Paulus, 78
- Juby, Edward, 114
- Julius Caesar, 108, 110
- Ker (Carr) Robert, Earl of Somerset, 74, 75, 179, 372
- Keysar, Robert, 80, 81, 315, 318, 320, 323
- Kinwelmersh, Francis, 35
- King, Edward, Milton's 'Lycidas,' 24
- King and No King, A, 7, 8, 37, 92, 109-110, 112, 121, 145, 146, 174, 205, 237, 239, 241, 252, 255, 258, 259, 273, 275, 288, 293, 294, 307, 308, 311, 346, 361-367, 378, 381, 382, 384, 386-396, 400, 401, 411, 414, 415
- King Lear, 159, 283
- King's Players, the, 38, 97, 102, 103, 105, 109, 110, 114, 119, 120, 122, 124, 136, 211, 306, 315, 316, 343, 345, 349, 360
- King's Bench, 138
- Kirkham, Edward, 118, 136
- Knight of Malta, The, 211, 236, 238, 239, 378
- Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 7, 41, 73, 79-81, 88, 93, 100, 112, 115, 171, 204, 237, 240, 273, 285, 310-332, 378, 382, 385, 407, 413, 414
- Knight of the Burning Sword, The, 325
- Knight of the Sunne and His Brother Rosicleer, The, 327
- Knole Park, Kent, 70, 187, et passim
- Knowles, Sheridan, 359
- Koeppel, E., 117
- Kyd, Thomas, 26, 200, 204, 285, 286, 313
- Lady Elizabeth's Players, 314
- Lamb, Charles, 233, 397
- Langbaine, G., 233, 332
- Lansdowne MS., 200
- Lawes of Candy, The, 236, 238, 378
- Leland, John, Itinerary, 10, 11, 154, 160, et passim
- Lennard, Sir Henry, twelfth Lord Dacre, 70, 71, 178
- Leonhardt, B., 117
- Letter to Ben Jonson, 97-101, 193, 251, 337
- Lincoln's Inn, 32, 124f., 135, 136, 145, 148
- Lisle, Sir George, 204, 231, 361
- Little French Lawyer, The, 236
- Lodge, Thomas, 159, 392
- Love Lies a-Bleeding, 103, etc., see Philaster
- Lovell, John, Lord, 22, 23
- Lovers Progresse, The, 236
- Loves Cure, 236, 240, 305, 378
- Love's Labour's Lost, 392, 412
- Loves Pilgrimage, 236, 237, 238, 378
- Lowin, John, 122, 214, 402[438]
- Loyall Subject, The, 211, 236, 243, 268, 278, 410
- Luce, Morton, 393
- Lyly, John, 26, 200
- Macaulay, G. C., Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study; Beaumont and Fletcher in Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit. 89, 108, 117, 226, 234, 252, 265, 287, 300, 302, 305, 308, 312, 337, 374, 409
- Macbeth, 286
- Macready, W. C., 359
- Mad Lover, The, 236, 279
- Maide in the Mill, The, 236
- Maides Tragedy, The, 6, 7, 107-109, 117, 121, 124, 159, 230, 232, 234, 237, 239, 240, 241, 252, 255, 258, 273, 285, 288, 289, 292, 308, 346, 349-359, 361, 378, 381, 382, 384, 386-395, 398, 400, 405, 407, 411, 414, 415
- Malcontent, The, 399
- Malone, Edmund, 233
- Manners, Lady Katharine (Villiers), Duchess of Buckingham, 159, 162, 163
- Manners, Roger, see Rutland
- Manningham, John, 32
- Manverses, the, 16-18
- Manwood, Thomas, 136
- Mari coccu, battu et content, Le, 334
- Markham, Lady, 165
- Marlowe, Christopher, 33, 194, 200, 201, 204, 285, 286, 313, 326, 362
- Marston, John, 73, 88, 102, 122, 328, 329, 396, 399, 412
- Martin, Richard, 99, 149
- Mary, Queen of Scots, 24, 65, 179
- Masque of the Inner Temple, The, 119, 124-139, 145, 208, 225, 228, 236, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 259, 281, 385
- Masque of Flowers, see Flowers
- Masque of Ulysses and Circe, The, 133
- Massinger, Philip, 6, 8, 98, 119, 122, 136, 168, 169, 201, 203, 211, 214, 219, 226, 228, 234, 241, 265, 272, 300, 305, 306, 326, 340, 379, 400, 407;
- authorities upon his style, 300
- Mayne, Jasper, 361
- McKerrow, R. B., 271, 272
- Measure for Measure, 391, 392, 393
- Menaechmus, 35
- Menaphon, 159
- Merchant Taylors' School, 86
- Mermaid Tavern, the, 97-99, 114, 145, 148, 149, 193, 203
- Merry Wives, The, 110
- Metamorphosis of Tobacco, 38
- Microcosmographie, 198
- Middle Temple, the, 118, 124f., 138
- Middleton, Thomas, 102, 122, 201, 211, 239, 272, 305, 324, 399, 407, 412
- Midsummer-Night's Dream, A, 392
- Milner, J. D., 218
- Mirror for Magistrates, The, 70
- Mirror of Knighthood, The, 327, 329
- 'Mirtilla', 43, 45, 187[439]
- Miseries of Enforced Marriage, The, 324
- Misfortunes of Arthur, The, 35
- Mitre Inn, The, 94, 145, 146
- Monsieur Thomas, 73, 84, 88-94, 168, 237, 243, 245, 247, 263, 383
- Montaigne, 228
- Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 25
- Monteagle, Lord, 50, 51, 57
- Montemayor, 392
- Moore, Sir Thomas, 194
- More, Paul Elmer, 272f., 355f., 397ff., 415
- Morris, John, Life of Father Gerard, 46-59 et passim
- Mosely, Humphrey, The Stationer to the Readers, 130, 206, 216, 217
- Morte d'Arthur, 327
- Mountjoy, Christopher, 114, 118
- Moyses in a Map of his Miracles, 42
- Mucedorus, 331
- Much Ado About Nothing, 110, 344, 390, 392
- Mulcaster, Richard, 86, 318
- Munday, Anthony, 327
- Murch, H. S., ed. of The Knight, 324, 330
- Murray, J. T., Eng. Dram. Comp., 104, 105, 315, 368
- Muses Elizium, 44, 187, 191
- Narrative of Father Gerard, 47, 54
- Nashe, Thomas, 154, 204
- Nevill, Sir Henry, the elder, 145-148, 153;
- Nice Valour, The, 97, 98, 216, 236, 238, 378
- Nichols, J., Collections, Hist. Leicestershire, Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, Progresses of James I, 12, 13, 19, 65, 131, 186, et passim
- Nimphalls, Drayton, 187, 191
- Night Walker, The, 237
- Noble Gentleman, The, 236, 238, 378
- Northumbrian MS. of Bacon, 146
- Norton, Thomas, Gorboduc, 37
- oaths, 275, 286
- Oath of Allegiance, The, 60, 164
- Obstinate Lady, The, 377
- Ode to Sir William Skipworth, 215
- Oldfield, Mrs., 377
- Old Wives Tale, The, 326
- Oliphant, E. H., 83, 117, 234, 241, 252, 270, 272, 281, 300, 302, 304, 309, 312, 337, 338, 340, 374
- On the Tombs in Westminster, 183
- optatives, 275, 286
- Orlando Furioso, 334
- Ostler (Osteler, Ostler, Osler), Wm., 122, 342, 343
- Othello, 79, 110
- Overbury, Sir Thomas, 27, 153, 179
- Ovid, 38, 41, 142
- Palamon and Arcite, 32[440]
- 'Palmeo', 43, 187
- Palmerin de Oliva, Palmerin of England, 313, 325, 327, 329
- Pandosto, 159, 392
- Parisitaster, 88
- Pastoralists, the, 124, 132-144, 145
- Pastorals, Ambrose Philips, 186
- Paul's Players, the, 73, 83, 102, 315, 316, 318
- Peele, George, 326, 329
- Pepys, Samuel, 218, 358, 366
- Percy, Thomas, 49-52
- Pericles, 118, 344, 345, 387, 391, 392, 393, 394
- Persons, Father, 46, 47
- Pettus, Sir John, 231
- Philaster, 6, 7, 72, 88, 92, 96, 97, 101-107, 109, 116, 121, 159, 191, 230, 237, 239, 240, 241, 252, 253, 258, 259, 260, 261, 273, 285, 294, 297, 298, 302, 307, 308, 311, 312, 329, 337, 341-349, 361, 378, 381, 382, 384, 386-396, 412, et passim.
- Philip III of Spain, 371, 372
- Philips, Sir Ambrose, 186
- Phillipps de Lisles, the present, 186
- Phillipps, J. O. Halliwell, 342
- Phillips, Sir Robert, 149
- Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana, 203
- Pierce, Edward, 315
- Pierrepoint, Anne, mother of the dramatist, 16-18, 25
- Pierrepoint, Sir Henry, 16, 18, 45
- Pierrepoint, Robert, first Earl of Kingston, 17, 27, 38, 164, 179
- Pilgrim, The, 236, 278
- Plautus, 35, 197, 230
- Plutus, 125
- Poems, The, of Beaumont, see Beaumont, Francis, The Poems
- Poems Lyrick and Pastoral, Drayton, 42
- Poetaster, The, 149, 342
- Poets' Corner, 182ff., 192, 196, 199
- Pole, Katherine, 14
- Portraits of Beaumont, Nuneham, 181, 190, 192;
- Portraits of Fletcher, Knole: Blood, 217;
- G. Vertue, 217;
- Evans, 217;
- Robinson, 217;
- Walker, 218;
- Earl of Clarendon's, 218;
- Janssen, 219
- 'Prince of Misrule', 34
- 'Prince of Portpoole', 34
- Prince's Players, the, 114
- Praise of Hemp-seed, The, 199
- Princess Elizabeth's Players, 336
- Prophetesse, The, 236
- prose-test, the, 259
- Prynne, William, 397, 399
- Purple Island, The, Phineas Fletcher, 64
- Queen Anne's Players, 314, 318
- Queene of Corinth, The, 211, 236[441]
- Queen Henrietta's Players, 314
- Queen's Revels' Children, the, 80, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 96, 102, 103, 111, 114, 122, 124, 304, 305, 314, 315, 317, 319, 332, 335-337, 342, 343, 360, 368-370, 373
- Raleigh, Sir Walter, 36, 100, 138, 149, 155, 165, 179
- Randolph, Thomas, 150
- Red Bull Theatre, the, 313, 318
- 'Remond' and 'Doridon,' query, Fletcher and Beaumont, 139-144
- Revesby Sword-Play, 34
- Reynolds, Henry, 132, 201
- Reynolds, John, 147
- rhyme, 250
- 'Ricardo and Viola,' 338, 383
- Richard III, 14, 22
- Rigg, J. M., 13ff., 19
- Rollo, 237
- 'romance,' 279, 394, et passim
- Romeo and Juliet, 286, 389
- Rosalynde, 159
- Rosenbach, A. S. W., 333
- Rossiter, Philip, 103, 315, 316, 319, 370
- Routh, H. V., 328
- Rowley, William, 211, 239, 272, 314, 407, 412
- Royall King and Loyall Subject, 399
- Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, 211, 237, 243, 244, 249, 263, 268, 269, 280, 403
- run-on lines, 174, 250, 255, 258ff., 261ff.
- Rutland, Roger Manners, fifth Earl, 48, 152-155;
- Francis, sixth Earl, 162, 163;
- Elizabeth, Countess of, see Sidney, Elizabeth;
- Cicely (Tufton), Countess of, 163
- Rymer, Thomas, 233, 354, 355, 397
- Sackville, Edward, fourth Earl of Dorset, 191
- Sackville, Lionel, seventh Earl of Dorset, 191, 217
- Sackville, Richard, third Earl of Dorset, 70, 179, 180, 191
- Sackville, Thomas, first Earl of Dorset, 37, 65-71
- Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 39, 40, 41, 134, 141, 142
- Sampson, M. W., 386
- Sannazarro, 392
- Sarmiento de Acuña, Don Diego, Count Gondomar, 371-373
- Schelling, F. E., 234, 295
- Schevill, Rudolph, 322f., 324, 330, 332
- Scornful Ladie, The, 7, 100, 111-113, 171, 180, 232, 237, 238, 239, 240, 273, 368-378, 382, 383, 396
- Scourge of Folly, The, 104, 342, 343, 344
- Sea Voyage, The, 236
- 'Second Maiden's Tragedy,' 334
- Sejanus, 148, 411
- Selden, John, 99, 137, 149, 169, 170
- Semphill, Sir James, 59-60
- Seneca, 37
- Session of the Poets, The, Suckling, 137[442]
- Seyliard, Mrs., see Elizabeth Beaumont
- Seyliard, Thomas, 45, 159, 176, 187;
- see also Beaumont, Elizabeth
- Shadwell, Thomas, 96
- Shakespeare, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35, 79, 83, 92, 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 114ff., 118, 122, 124, 136, 145, 154, 159, 182, 184, 193, 194, 199, 201, 211, 214, 219, 272, 280, 283, 286, 309, 326, 329, 330, 343, 344, 386ff., 387ff., 389, 396, 401, 411ff.
- Shakespeare, and Beaumont, 114-118
- Shakespeare, and his company of players, 110-111, 118-120, 145, 316
- Shakespeare, Was he influenced by Beaumont and Fletcher? 386-395
- Shaw, Knights of England, 17, 45, et passim
- Shelton, Thomas, transl. of Don Quixote, 120, 321-331, 335
- Shepheard's Calendar, 44
- Shepherdesse, The, John Beaumont, 159, 163
- Shepherd's Hunting, The, 135
- Shepherd's Pipe, The, 134, 135, 139
- Shirley, James, 150, 206, 208, 229
- Sicelides, Phineas Fletcher, 64
- Sidney, Elizabeth Manners, Countess of Rutland, 133, 139, 150-159, 165, 172-174, 180, 287
- Sidney, Sir Philip, 26, 37, 106, 111, 133, 142, 143, 150ff., 158, 159, 166, 197, 201, 392
- Sidney, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 42, 133, 153
- Silent Woman, The, 120, 413, see Epicoene
- Skipwith, Sir William, 45, 166, 215
- Spanish Curate, The, 236, 271
- Slye, Christopher, 103
- Smith, L. T., 11, 200
- Southampton, see Wriothesley
- Spedding, James, 36
- Speght's Chaucer, 24, 178
- Spenser, Edmund, 24, 44, 182, 193, 199, 200
- Stanhope, Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, 165
- Stanley, Thomas, second Earl of Derby, 14
- Stanley, Thomas, 350, 374
- Stapleton, Miles Thomas, 12
- State Papers Domestic, Calendar of, 15, 51-61, 63, 127, 129, 146, 162, 164, 177, et passim
- Stationers' Registers, 84, 121, 237, et passim
- Stationer to the Readers, The, Mosely, 206
- 'Stella', 166
- Stephens, John, 202
- Stiefel, A. L., 89
- Stourton, Lord, 50
- Stratford upon Avon, 118
- Stuart, Lady Arabella, 17, 179
- Suckling, Sir John, 137
- Sullivan, Mary, 127, 128
- Sundridge, 175-180, 377, et passim[443]
- Supposes, The, Ariosto—George Gascoigne, 34, 35
- suspense, 389
- Symonds, J. A., 386
- Swinburne, Algernon, 4, 7, 8, 190, 233, 397
- Sympson and Seward, 233
- Talbots, the, Earls of Shrewsbury, 14, 17
- Tamer Tamed, The, 83, 236, 279, et passim, The Woman's Prize
- Taming of the Shrew, The, 35, 83
- Tasso, Aminta, 132
- Taylor, John, 198
- Taylor, Joseph, 122, 214, 332, 335ff., 402
- Tempest, The, 110, 283, 344, 386, 387, 390, 391, 393
- Tennyson, Alfred, 183
- Theobald, Lewis, 237, 359
- Thersites, 326
- Thierry and Theodoret, 8, 109, 237, 238, 240, 378, 386, 387, 395
- Thorndike, A. H., Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare, editions of Maides Tragedy and Philaster, 73, 83, 84, 105, 110, 234, 241, 300, 303, 304, 305, 316, 318, 349, 350, 380, 386f.
- Thornhurst, Sir Stephen, 69
- 'Thyrsis,' 43, 187
- Time Poets, The, 203
- Timon, 389
- 'Tis a Pity, She's a Whore, 412
- Titles of Honour, 137
- Tombs in Westminster, On the, 183
- To the Apparition of his Mistresse calling him to Elizium, 170
- To the Honour'd Countess of ——, 152
- To the Memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us, 200
- Tourneur, Cyril, 272
- Townshend, Sir Robert, 167
- Tragedies of the Last Age, The, 354
- Tragedy of Bonduca, The, see Bonduca
- Travails of Three English Brothers, The, 81, 313, 314, 317, 318, 321, 325, 331
- Tresham, Francis, 48, 50, 52, 57, 58
- Tresham, Mary, 46
- Tresham, Sir Thomas, 46
- triplet, the, 259
- Triumph of Death, The, 270, 301-305, 389
- Triumph of Honour, The, 251, 301-305, 389
- Triumph of Love, The, 8, 251, 301-305, 388
- Triumph of Time, The, 270, 301-305
- True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, The, 326
- (On the) True Forms of English Poetry, 184
- Twelfth Night, 32, 117, 345, 390, 392, 393
- Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 345, 390, 392, 412[444]
- Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 5, 119, 237
- Underwood, John, 342, 343
- Upham, A. H., 90
- Upon an Honest Man's Fortune, see Honest Man's Fortune
- Upon the Lines and Life of Shakespeare, Hugh Holland, 148
- (Tragedy of) Valentinian, The, 6, 8, 211, 236, 287, 400, 410
- Vanbrugh, Sir John, 188
- Variorum Edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, 190, 217, 234, 271, 346, 367, 413, et passim
- Vaux, Anne, alias Mrs. Perkins, 46-59, passim, 164
- Vaux, Eleanor, alias Mrs. Jennings, 46, 47, 57
- Vaux, Mrs., Elizabeth Roper, 46-56, 138, 164
- Vauxes, the, cousins of the dramatist, and the Gunpowder Plot, 46-61, 164f.
- verse-endings, double, triple, etc., 243
- verse-tests, 243ff., 246ff.
- versification of Fletcher and of Beaumont, 243-259
- Very Woman, A, 377
- Villiers, Christopher, 161, 162
- Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 19, 60, 148, 159-164, 185
- Villiers, John, 161-162, 164
- Volpone, 72, 82, 92, 411
- von Wurzbach, Wolfgang, 334
- Walker, Henry, 119
- Walkley, Thomas, 145
- Wallace, C. W., Shakspere's Money Interest in the Globe, etc., Century Maga., 114, 118, 314, 315, 316, 319
- Waller, A. R., and Glover, A., editors of Camb. Eng. Class., Beaumont and Fletcher, 244, et passim;
- Waller, ed. of The Scornful Ladie, 377
- Waller, Edmund, 150, 184, 231, 349, 359, 374
- Walpole, Henry, 16, 48
- Ward, Sir Adolphus William, Hist. Eng. Dram. Lit., 3, 91, 216, 234, 308, 377, 397
- Warwick, Richard, Earl of, 14
- Webster, John, 102, 122, 211, 396, 399, 411
- Wenman, Sir Richard, 53, 138
- Wenman, Thomas, 134, 137, 138
- West, John, 149
- White Devil, The, 122, 399
- Whitefriars Theatre, the, 96f., 102f., 122, 304, 315, 316, 343, 360, 369
- Whitehall, 125f.
- White Webbs, 52, 56
- Wife for a Month, A, 236, 263, 275, 278, 400, 403-406, 410
- Wild-Goose Chase, The, Dedication, 214, 237, 279
- Wilkins, George, 314, 324, 325
- Wills, James, 188
- Wilson, Arthur, 160
- Winter, Henry and Thomas, 49-52, 57[445]
- Winter's Tale, The, 110, 159, 283, 344, 386, 387, 390, 391, 393
- Wit at Severall Weapons, 236, 237, 378
- Wither, George, 134f., 138, 142
- Wit Without Money, 237, 279
- Woman-Hater, The, 7, 40, 41, 59, 72-79, 80, 82, 93, 100, 112, 115, 130, 171, 237, 239, 240, 250, 258, 273, 281, 285, 297, 305, 307-311, 350, 378, 382, 385, 407, 412
- Woman is a Weather-Cocke, 87, 302-305
- Woman's Prize, The, or The Tamer Tamed, 83, 236, 279
- (To Any) Woman that hath been no Weather-cocke, 304
- Women Pleas'd, 236, 279
- Wood, Anthony, 32
- Wordsworth, W., 20, 21, 25
- Wright, Christopher and John, 49-52
- Wright, Thomas, 13
- Wriothesley, Henry, third Earl of Southampton, 154, 184
- Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 175
- Xenophon's Cyropædeia, 109
- Ye-test, the 271-273, 309, 371, 374-375
- Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 303
- Your Five Gallants, 324
- Zola, 404
Transcriber's Note:
Minor punctuation and capitalization inconsistencies have been
corrected without comment and include adding missing opening or
closing quotes, closing parenthesis, and sentence closing periods.
Images falling within an unbroken paragraph have been relocated to
either the top or bottom of said paragraph.
Word spelling, hyphenation, abbreviation, capitalization,
apostrophization, diacritical accents and other variations or
inconsistencies occur throughout the authors text, footnotes, index,
noted verse(s) and quoted materials. All have been retained as printed
unless specifically noted. Examples are provided below.
Typographical corrections:
- p. 17, "Holme-Pierpoint" to "Holme-Pierrepoint" (5) Holme-Pierrepoint is seventeen)
- p. 23, "Huntington" to "Huntingdon" (20) (Francis of Huntingdon)
- p. 62, "clerygyman" to "clergyman" (had been a clergyman)
- p. 68, "worldy" to "worldly" (Bishop's worldly estate)
- p. 118, "Aven" to "Avon" (2) (Stratford upon Avon)
- p. 164, "Beaument" to "Beaumont" (674) (John Beaumont never recalls)
- p. 345, "Gentleman" to "Gentlemen" (The Two Gentlemen of Verona)
- p. 445, "320" to "302" ("Woman is a Weather-Cocke," 87, 302-305)
- p. 444, "Kinsman" to "Kinsmen" (Two Noble Kinsmen, The)
- p. 445, "Cycropædeia" to "Cyropædeia" (Xenophon's Cyropædeia)
Possible typographical errors retained in text; falling within quoted
material:
- p. 64, "lived in her highnes," (highness)
- p. 81, "it was no ofspring" (offspring)
- p. 108, "Drammatick and Scenical King" (Dramatick)
- p. 122, "... excellent Maister Beamont" (Beaumont)
- p. 194, "... Francis Beamont" (Beaumont)
- p. 231, "Flesher and Beaumont" (Fletcher)
- p. 231, "The Faithfull Shipheardesse" (Shepheardesse)
- p. 375, "Abigal," (Abigail)
- p. 430, "Cavendishes" (Cavendishs') (in Index)
Several instances of "Middle English Spellings" used are:
- "Maiesties" (Middle English) and "Majesties," and
- "Doe, se, yt, yn, y'll" and "do, see, it, in, I'll"
Play Title Variations, each of which appears several times:
- "Aeschylus" and "Æschylus"
- "Amadis de Gaule" and "Amadis de Gaul"
- "Beggars' Bush" and "Beggars Bush"
- "... Curious coxcombe" and "... Curious cox-combe"
- "Duchess of Malfi" and "Duchess of Malfy"
- "Julius Ceasar" and "Julius Cæsar"
- "Maid's Tragedy", "Maids Tragedy", "Maides Tragedy"
- "Maske of the Gentleman of Grayes Inne" and "Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes Inne".
- "Morall Representations" and "Moralle Representations"
- "Parisitaster" and "Parasitaster"
- "Essay of Dramatick Poesie" and "Essay on Dramatick Poesy"
- "The Scornful Lady" and "The Scornful Ladie"
- "The Shepheardesse" and "The Shepheardess"
- "The Coxcomb" and "The Coxcombe"
- "Weather-cocke" and "Weather-Cocke"
- "Women Pleas'd" and "Women Pleased"
Other word variations:
- "Zouch" and "Zouche" (Ashby-de-la-----)
- "Bedchamber" and "Bed-chamber"
- "birthright" and "birth-right"
- "Cal, S. P.," "Cal. St. Pa., Dom.," "Calendar of State Papers (Domestic)" (see Footnotes)
- "Condel" and "Condell" (Henry ----)
- "countryside" and "country-side"
- "D'Urfey" and D'Urfé (Marquis ----)
- "Hoskyns" and "Hoskins" (Serjeant ----)
- "milkmaid" and "milk-maid" (both occur on p. 27)
- "northwest" and "north-west"
- "Pierepoint" and "Pierrepoint"
- "Sannazzaro" and "Sannazarro"
- "Shepherdesse" and "Shepheardesse"
- "Sempill" and "Semphill" (Sir James ----)
- "southeast" and "south-east"
- "White-hall" and "Whitehall"