Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

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 1616 and 1618,127 Bolton omits the later dramatists altogether;128 but that is not to be construed by way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beaumont. There is no doubt that Bolton knew the Beaumonts personally, and appreciated their worth, and as early as 1610; – for to his Elements of Armories of that year, he prefixes a "Letter to the Author, from the learned young gentleman, I. B., of Grace-Dieu in the County of Leicestershire, Esquier,"129 who highly compliments the invention, judicial method, and taste displayed in the Elements, and returns the manuscript with promise of his patronage.

Further information of the esteem in which Francis was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect, written soon after his death by those who were near enough to him in years to have known him, or to assess his worth untrammeled by the critical consensus of a generation that knew him not. The tender tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, Dr. Corbet, successively Bishop of Oxford, and of Norwich, have already been quoted. A so-called "sonnet," signed I. F., included in an Harleian manuscript between two poems undoubtedly by Fletcher, may not have been intended for the dead poet; but I agree with Dyce, who first printed it,130 that it seems "very like Fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate": —

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 knellOur 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 haveA 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 VerseAs 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 wantHath seiz'd on Wit, good Epitaphs are scant;We dare not write thy Elegie, whilst each fearesHe nere shall match that coppy of thy teares.Scarce in an Age a Poet, – and yet heScarce 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 knowIf th' art it self unto that pitch could grow,Were 't not in thee that hadst arriv'd the hightOf all that wit could reach, or Nature might…

The elegist likens Beaumont to Menander,

Whose few sententious fragments show more worthThan all the Poets Athens ere brought forth;And I am sorry I have lost those houresOn them, whose quicknesse comes far short of ours,And dwelt not more on thee, whose every PageMay 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 nowBeing Greeke and Latine, they are Learning too:But those their owne Times were content t' allowA thriftier fame, and thine is lowest now.But thou shall live, and, when thy Name is growneSix Ages older, shall be better knowne;When thou'rt of Chaucers standing in the Tombe,Thou shall not share, but take up all his roome.131

A panegyric liberal in the superlatives of youth but, in view of passages to be quoted elsewhere, one of the sanest as well as earliest appreciations of Beaumont's distinctive quality as a dramatist; an appreciation such as the historian might expect from a collegian who, a dozen years later, was not only one of the most genial and refined scholars of his generation but, perhaps, the most accurate observer and epitomist of the familiar types and minor morals of his day, – a writer who in 1628 is still championing the cause of contemporary poetry. In his characterization of the Vulgar-Spirited Man "that is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses anything too deep for him; that cries, Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none," the Earle of the Microcosmographie is but repeating the censure of his elegy on Beaumont in 1616.

About 1620, we find a contemporary of altogether different class from that of the university student acknowledging the fame of Beaumont, the Thames waterman, John Taylor. This self-advertising tramp and rollicking scribbler mentions him in The Praise of Hemp-seed with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and others, as of those who, "in paper-immortality, Doe live in spight of death, and cannot die." And not far separated from Taylor's testimonial in point of time is William Basse's prediction of a prouder immortality. Basse who was but two years older than Beaumont, and, as we have seen, was one of the pastoral group with which Beaumont's career was associated, is writing of "Mr. William Shakespeare" who had died six weeks after Beaumont, – and he thus apostrophizes the Westminster poets of the Corner:

Renownèd Spencer, lye a thought more nyeTo learnèd Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lyeA little neerer Spencer, to make roomeFor Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.To lodge all foure in one bed make a shiftUntill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift,Betwixt this day and that, by Fate be slayneFor whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe.

The date of the sonnet of which these are the opening lines can be only approximately determined. It must be earlier, however, than 1623; for in that year Jonson alludes to it in verses presently to be quoted. And it must be later than the erection of the monument to Shakespeare's memory in Trinity Church, Stratford, in or soon after 1618, for in the lines which follow those given above the writer apostrophizes Shakespeare as sleeping "Under this carvèd marble of thine owne." The sonnet contemplates the removal of Shakespeare's remains to Westminster, and arranges the poets already lying there not in actual but chronological order.132

To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in the series of stanzas prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623, —To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us. Ben Jonson intends, however, no slight to Beaumont and the other poets mentioned by Basse, when, in his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the peers of Shakespeare. On the contrary this lover at heart, and in his best moments, of Beaumont, bestows a meed of praise: they are "great Muses," – Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, – but merely "disproportioned," if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but "thundering Æschylus," Euripides, and Sophocles, Pacuvius, Accius, "him of Cordova dead," must be summoned

To life againe to heare thy Buskin treadAnd shake a Stage.

Therefore it is, that Jonson calls —

My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee byChaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lyeA little further to make thee a roome:Thou art a Moniment without a toombe,And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,And we have wits to read, and praise to give.That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses;I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses.

That Beaumont was regarded by his immediate contemporaries not as a professional, but literary, dramatist, – a poet, and a person of social eminence, – appears from Drayton's Epistle to Henery Reynolds, Esq., Of Poets and Poesy, published 1627, from which I have earlier quoted. Here the writer, appraising the poets "who have enrich'd our language with their rhymes" informs his "dearly loved friend" that he does not

meane to runIn quest of these that them applause have wonneUpon our Stages in these latter dayes,That are so many; let them have their bayes,That doe deserve it; let those wits that hauntThose publique circuits, let them freely chauntTheir 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 the Pierian spring," and "reverend Chapman" for his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom he had loved, Alexander and Drummond, and concludes the roll-call with his two Beaumonts and his Browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and "Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts." This letter not only speaks the opinion of Drayton concerning the standing of the two Beaumonts in poetry, but incidentally asserts the popularity of their work, for the author informs his correspondents that he "ties himself here only to those few men"

Whose works oft printed, set on every post,To publique censure subject have bin most.

By 1627 all of the dramas in which Francis had an undoubted share, except The Coxcombe had been printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early as 1618 in a little volume that included also Drayton's elegies on Lady Penelope Clifton and the three sons of Lord Sheffield, and Verses by 'N. H.'

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, philosopher, and poet, Nicholas Hill133 Beaumont could not have failed to know him. He was of St. John's College, Oxford; he wrote and published a Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana to which, mentioning him by name, Ben Jonson alludes in his epigram (CXXXIV) Of The Famous Voyage of the two wights who "At Bread-streets Mermaid having dined and merry, Propos'd to goe to Holborne in a wherry." He was the secretary and favourite of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a good deal of a wag, and well acquainted with our old friend Serjeant Hoskyns of the Convivium Philosophicum. He died in 1610.

Whether the anonymous writer on The Time Poets134 was a personal acquaintance of Beaumont we cannot tell. The definite qualities of the poet which he emphasizes are, however, as likely to be drawn from life and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas. The lines, apparently composed between 1620 and 1636, begin,

One night, the great Apollo, pleas'd with Ben,Made the odde number of the Muses ten;The fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense,In complement and courtship's quintessence;Ingenious Shakespeare, Massinger that knowsThe 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 rankeOf the rarest Wits, was never more than Franck. —

The touch of familiarity with which Heywood135 causes that whole row of poets, many of them then dead, Robin Green, Kit Marlowe, the Toms (Kyd, Watson and Nashe), mellifluous Will, Ben, and the rest, to live for posterity as human, and lovable, gracefully heightens the compliment for one and all.

We may surmise that one more eulogist of Beaumont, his kinsman,136 Sir George Lisle, a marvellously gallant cavalier, who distinguished himself at Newberry, and was shot by order of Fairfax about the end of the Civil War, was old enough in 1616 to have known our poet. Though Sir George, in his verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, lays special stress upon the close-woven fancy of the two playwrights, he seems to have a first-hand information, not common to the younger writers of these commendatory poems, concerning Beaumont's share in at least one of the tragedies. He ascribes to him, not to Fletcher, – as we know by modern textual tests, correctly, – the nobler scenes of "brave Mardonius" in A King and No King. One attaches, therefore, more than mere literary, or hearsay, significance to his selection for special praise of Beaumont's force, when he says,

Thou strik'st our sense so deep,At once thou mak'st us Blush, Rejoyce, and Weep.Great father Johnson bow'd himselfe when hee(Thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee.

CHAPTER XIV

TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM

What we learn from tradition, and from the criticism of the century following Beaumont's death, adds little to what we already have observed concerning his life and personality. Concerning his share in the joint-plays, it adds much, mostly wrong; but of that, later. Mosely, in his address of The Stationer to the Readers prefixed to the folio of 1647, announces that knowing persons had generally assured him "that these Authors were the most unquestionable Wits this Kingdome hath afforded. Mr. Beaumont was ever acknowledged a man of a most strong and searching braine; and (his yeares considered) the most Judicious Wit these later Ages have produced. He dyed young, for (which was an invaluable losse to this Nation) he left the world when hee was not full thirty yeares old. Mr. Fletcher survived, and lived till almost fifty; whereof the World now enjoyes the benefit." The dramatist, Shirley, in his address To the Reader of the folio, says "It is not so remote in Time, but very many Gentlemen may remember these Authors; and some familiar in their conversation deliver them upon every pleasant occasion so fluent, to talke a Comedy. He must be a bold man," continues he, with a prophetic commonsense, "that dares undertake to write their Lives. What I have to say is, we have the precious Remaines; and as the wisest contemporaries acknowledge they Lived a Miracle, I am very confident this volume cannot die without one." Shirley also reminds the Reader that but to mention Beaumont and Fletcher "is to throw a cloude upon all former names and benight Posterity." "This Book being, without flattery, the greatest Monument of the Scene that Time and Humanity have produced, and must Live, not only the Crowne and sole Reputation of our owne, but the stayne of all other Nations and Languages." To such a pitch had the vogue of our dramatists risen in the thirty years after Beaumont's death! Not only Shakespeare and learnèd Ben, but Sophocles and Euripides may vail to them. "This being," – and here we catch a vision from life itself, – "this being the Authentick witt that made Blackfriars an Academy, where the three howers spectacle while Beaumont and Fletcher were presented, were usually of more advantage to the hopefull young Heire, than a costly, dangerous, forraigne Travell, with the assistance of a governing Mounsieur, or Signior, to boote. And it cannot be denied but that the spirits of the Time, whose Birth and Qualitie made them impatient of the sowrer ways of education, have from the attentive hearing these pieces, got ground in point of wit and carriage of the most severely employed Students, while these Recreations were digested into Rules, and the very pleasure did edifie."

So far as the plays printed in this folio are concerned, not much of this praise belongs to Beaumont; for, as we now know, not more than two of them, The Coxcombe and the Masque of the Inner Temple, bear his impress. But Shirley is thinking of the reputation of the authors in general; and he writes with an eye to the sale of the book.

Since we shall presently find opportunity to consider the trend of opinion during the seventeenth century regarding the respective shares of the dramatists in composition, but a word need be said here upon the subject, – and that as to the origin of a tradition speedily exaggerated into error: namely, that Beaumont's function in the partnership was purely of gravity and critical acumen. From the verses of John Berkenhead, an Oxford man, born in 1615, a writer of some lampooning ability and, in 1647 reader in moral philosophy at the University, we learn that, he, at least, thought it impossible to separate the faculties of the two dramatists, which "as two Voices in one Song embrace (Fletcher's keen Trebble, and deep Beaumont's Base"); that, however, there were some in his day who held "That One [Fletcher] the Sock, th' Other [Beaumont] the Buskin claim'd,"

That should the Stage embattaile all its Force,Fletcher would lead the Foot, Beaumont the Horse;

and that Beaumont's was "the understanding," Fletcher's "the quick free will." Such discrimination, as I have said, Berkenhead disavows; but he is of the opinion, nevertheless, that the rules by which their art was governed came from Beaumont:

So Beaumont dy'd; yet left in LegacyHis 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 contractThy 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 XV

A FEW WORDS OF FLETCHER'S LATER YEARS

Beside the dramas which there is any meritorious reason for assigning to the joint-authorship of the two friends, some dozen plays were produced by Fletcher alone, or in collaboration with others, before the practical cessation, in 1613, or thereabout, of Beaumont's dramatic activity. After that time Fletcher's name was attached, either as sole author or as the associate of Massinger, Field, William Rowley, and perhaps others, to about thirty more. From 1614 on, he was the successor of Shakespeare as dramatic poet of the King's Players. Jonson's masques delighted the Court, but no writer of tragedy or comedy, – not Jonson, nor Philip Massinger, who was now Fletcher's closest associate, nor Middleton or Rowley, Dekker, Ford, or Webster, – compared with him in popularity at Court and in the City. He is not merely an illustrious personality, the principal author of harrowing tragedies such as Valentinian, the sole author of tragicomedies such as The Loyall Subject, and long-lived comedies —The Chances, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and several more, – he is a syndicate: he stands sponsor for plays like The Queene of Corinth and The Knight of Malta in which others collaborated largely with him; and his name is occasionally stamped upon plays of associates, in which he had no hand whatever. "Thou grew'st," says his contemporary and admirer, John Harris, —

"Thou grew'st to govern the whole Stage alone:In which orbe thy throng'd light did make the star,Thou wert th' Intelligence did move that Sphear."

Dr. Harris, Professor of Greek at Oxford in the heyday of Fletcher's glory, and a most distinguished divine, writes, in 1647, as one who had known Fletcher, personally, – observes his careless ease in composing, his manner of conversation,

The Stage grew narrow while thou grew'st to beIn thy whole life an Exc'llent Comedie, —

and admires his behaviour:

To these a Virgin-modesty which first metApplause with blush and fear, as if he yetHad not deserv'd; till bold with constant praiseHis browes admitted the unsought-for Bayes.

So, addressing the public, concludes this panegyrist, —

Hee came to be sole Monarch, and did raignIn 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 PlayWhich was to others braines a toyle: with easeHe 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 trudgeTo Wit-conventions with Note-booke, to gleaneOr steale some Jests to foist into a Scene:He scorn'd those shifts. You that have known him, knowThe 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-doneHis very Selfe. I knew him till he dyed;And at his dissolution, what a TideOf sorrow overwhelm'd the Stage; which gaveVolleys 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,