  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 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 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 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. CHAPTER IIBEAUMONT'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 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. Rex Hierosolymus cum Bellomonte locatur, Bellus mons etiam cum Baghan consociatur, Bellus mons iterum Longicastro religatur, Bellus mons ... Oxonie titulatur. 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 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 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; 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 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 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:— 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 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. 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 NUNNERYJust 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 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 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, View taken by Buck in 1730 RUINS OF GRACE-DIEUNote: 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 1730We 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, 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER IIIAT 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 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 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, 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 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" 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, 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 Here, in the intervals between moots and bolts in the day time or during the long evenings about the 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, 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, 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. 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 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. 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." 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, CHAPTER IVTHE 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. 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 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." 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! 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 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 "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 "'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, 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 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 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 FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER VFLETCHER'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 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 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 THOMAS SACKVILLE, 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, 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. 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 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 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." CHAPTER VISOME 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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." 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," 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. 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, 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, So sweete and profitable. He is alluding to his not yet finished comedy, 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 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. 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 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 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, To knowing Beaumont e're it did come forth, Working againe untill he said 'twas fit; And make him the sobriety of his wit. 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER VIITHE "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"; 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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." 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 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 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, 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, FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER VIIIRELATIONS 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. 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: 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 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. 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. 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 BEN JONSON 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 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 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 CHAPTER IXTHE "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. 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 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 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 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." 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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." 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. 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 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 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. 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; and that, in the second Song of the First Book, 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 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. 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: 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. 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. 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XAN 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, 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 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. 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; 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. 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 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. CHAPTER XIBEAUMONT 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. 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. 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 Not only shunning by your act, to doe Ought that is ill, but the suspition too,— 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 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" 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 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." 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 manoeuvred 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 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 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: 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. 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 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 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 ... 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, 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 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.— 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 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. 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. From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XIIBEAUMONT'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, 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 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 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 ... 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. 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 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 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 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. 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," 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, 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. 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, 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 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? 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, 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, 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, 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; FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XIIITHE 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, A Paradice on earth is found, Though farre from vulgar sight, Which, with those pleasures doth abound, That it Elizium hight,— 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, Whether the anonymous writer on The Time Poets 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. 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 We may surmise that one more eulogist of Beaumont, his kinsman, 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XIVTRADITION, 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 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, 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. 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. 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. CHAPTER XVA 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 "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: 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. FOOTNOTES:
PART TWOTHE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
CHAPTER XVISTATEMENT 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 Sir Aston Cockayne was, therefore, fully justified, when, some time between 1647 and 1658, he thus upbraided the publishers of the folio: JOHN FLETCHER 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: 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 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 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," 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 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 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. 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, With Fleay, in 1874, began the scientific analysis Concerning the authorship of the successive scenes FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XVIITHE 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. 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, In each of these twelve plays, however, beginning with Thierry and ending with The Honest Mans Fortune, 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 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 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 FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XVIIITHE 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, Or wander after that they know not where To find? or, if found how to enjoy? Are men's brains 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,— 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? 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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): 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 ^ Fool " that I am, " I have " undone " myself, ^ And " with mine own " hand turn'd " my for"tune round, ^ 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 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? 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 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XIXFLETCHER'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; 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 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 My meat shall be what these wild woods afford, Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes, on whose Cheeks The Sun sits smiling. 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 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." 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. Do you see this Gent(leman), You that bring Thunders in your mouths, and Earthquakes, (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 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: Shew where to lead, to lodge, to charge with safetie,— Here's a strange fellow now, and a brave fellow, If we may say so of a pocky fellow.— And now, 't is ev'n too true, I feel a pricking, A pricking, a strange pricking.— With such a sadness on his face, as sorrow, Sorrow herself, but poorly imitates. Sorrow of sorrows on that heart that caus'd it! 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. To wear this jewel near thee; he is a tried one And one that ... will yet stand by thee. Other plays conceded by the critics to Fletcher alone, and written in his distinctive blank verse, display the same characteristics of style: The Chances 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 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, 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 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, 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: 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 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 For figurative purposes Fletcher finds material 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 CHAPTER XXFLETCHER'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 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, 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, FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XXIBEAUMONT'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 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 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 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 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 '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 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), 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, 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 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. CHAPTER XXIIBEAUMONT'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 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' 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 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. 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.' 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 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 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? "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: 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.' FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XXIIITHE 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." 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: 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 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, 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. 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. 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 FOOTNOTES: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. 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 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 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 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: 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 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, That the original performance was by a company of children appears from numerous passages in the 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 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. 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 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 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 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." 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 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 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. 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. Who like Don Quixote do advance Against a windmill our vaine lance, occur in a copy of verses To the Mutable Faire included among The Poems of Francis Beaumont in the edition of 1640. But the volume includes numerous poems not written by Beaumont, and is one of the most uncritical collections that ever was printed. This poem is by Waller. CHAPTER XXVTHE 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. 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; 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 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 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. Might not God have made A time for envious prying folk to sleep Whilst lovers met, and yet the sun have shone? And then: 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, 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, 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: 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; 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 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, 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. 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 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, Soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments Where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat And the cold marble melt; 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" 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 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. 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 Mock not the powers above that can and dare Give thee a great example of their justice To all ensuing ages. And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration 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 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, 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: 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! Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist, 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, 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 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 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 I desire you To lay what trains you will for my wish'd death, But suffer him to find his quiet grave In peace. 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. 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 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: 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 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 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 FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XXVITHE 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," 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 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 By permission of Methuen & Co., Ltd. DON DIEGO SARMIENTO, COUNT GONDOMAR From the portrait by G. P. Harding By permission of Methuen & Co., Ltd. DON DIEGO SARMIENTO, 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, 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. 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 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 manoeuvers 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 CHAPTER XXVIITHE 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 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 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." 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 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 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. FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XXVIIIDID 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 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 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 In determining the indebtedness, if any, 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 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 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; 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 FOOTNOTES:CHAPTER XXIXCONCLUSION 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, 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. 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,'" 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. 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, 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. 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, 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: 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 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 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: 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: 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 FOOTNOTES:APPENDIXGENEALOGICAL TABLES
TABLE A.PLANTAGENET, COMYN, BEAUMONT, AND VILLIERS.
TABLE BNEVIL, HASTINGS, BEAUMONT, TALBOT
TABLE C.BEAUMONT. PIERREPOINT. CAVENDISH, TALBOT.
TABLE DBEAUMONT, VAUX, TRESHAM, CATESBY
TABLE EFLETCHER, BAKER, SACKVILLE
INDEX
INDEX(The page-numbers refer to the foot-notes as well as to the main body of the text.) nal">19, 21, 24, 29
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:
Possible typographical errors retained in text; falling within quoted material:
Several instances of "Middle English Spellings" used are:
Play Title Variations, each of which appears several times:
Other word variations:
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