Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

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. Here the run-on lines again abound, almost fifty per cent; while the stress-syllable openings are but sixteen per cent – much lower than one may find in many rhymed portions of the Shepheardesse. With regard to all other tests except that of double ending (which does not apply in this kind of heroic couplet), we find that these poems of Beaumont are of a metrical style distinguished by the same characteristics as his blank verse.152

2. In Certain Joint-Plays

If we turn now to a second class of material available, – the three plays indubitably produced in partnership, – and eliminate the portions written in the metrical style of Fletcher, as already ascertained, we may safely attribute the remainder to the junior member of the firm; and so arrive at a final determination of his manner in verse composition.

The three plays, as I have said before, are Philaster, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King. A passage, which in the opinion of nearly all critics153 is by all tests distinctively Fletcherian, may be cited from the first of these as an example of that which we eliminate when we look for Beaumont. It is from the beginning of Act V, 4, where the Captain enters:

"Philaster, brave Philaster!" Let Philas|terBe deeper in request, my ding [a] dongs,My paires of deere Indentures, ¦ Kings of Clubs, ^ Than | your cold wa|ter-cham|blets ¦ or | your paint|ings ^ Spit|ted with cop|per, ¦ Let | not your has|ty Silkes, ^ Or | your branch'd cloth | of bod|kin, ¦ or | your ti|shues, — ^ Deare|ly belov'd | of spi|cèd cake | and cus|tards, —Your Rob|in-hoods, |^ Scar|lets and Johns, |^ tye | your affec|tionsIn darknesse to your Shops. No, dainty duc|kers, ^ Up | with your three|-piled spi|rits, ¦ your | wrought va|lors.And let | your un|cut col|lers ¦ make | the King feeleThe measure of your mightinesse, Philas|ter!154

Note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the stress-syllable openings, the anapæsts, the feminine cæsuræ (dotted), the two omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause and the following accent at the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of line 13.

Of the non-Fletcherian part of Philaster, a typical example is the following from Act I, Scene 2, where Philaster replies to Arethusa's request that he look away from her:

I can indure it: Turne away my face?I never yet saw enemy that looktSo dreadfully but that I thought my selfeAs great a Basiliske as he; or spakeSo horrible but that I thought my tongueBore thunder underneath, as much as his,Nor beast that I could turne from: shall I thenBeginne 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 meA thing so loath'd, and unto you that askeOf 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 unrighteouslyHolds wealth or state from others shall be curstIn that which meaner men are blest withall:Ages to come shall know no male of himLeft to inherit, and his name shall beBlotted 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 forgiveMy rash attempt, that causelessly hath laidGriefs 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 miseryThat 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 forbearTo sleep with thee because I have put onA 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 growUp 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 scenes155 one notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings, and, consequently, of anapæstic substitutions, the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the beginning of the verse-section. While sometimes these characteristics appear in the other parts of the play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature of the non-Fletcherian rhythm. A comparison of the verse of Fletcher's Act IV, Scene 2, with that of his collaborator in Act I, Scene 1, well illustrates this difference. The recurrence of the feminine cæsura measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers. It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines; but of his collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for instance, wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the second scene of Act IV:

^ Fool | that I am, | I have | undone | myself, ^ And | with mine own | hand ¦ turn'd | my for|tune round,That was | a fair | one: ¦ I have child|ishly ^ Plaid | with my hope | so long, till I have broke | it,And now too late I mourn for 't, ¦ O | Spaco|nia,Thou hast found | an e|ven way | to thy | revenge | now! ^ Why | didst thou fol|low me, |^ like | a faint shad|ow,To wither my desires? But, wretched fool, ^ Why | did I plant | thee ¦ 'twixt | the sun | and me,To make | me freeze | thus? ¦ Why | did I  | prefer | her ^ To | the fair Prin|cess? ¦ O | thou fool, | thou fool,Thou family of fools, |^ live | like a slave | stillAnd 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 the passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a single feminine cæsura, but with several feminine (or double) endings:

Tigranes. Is it the course ofIberia, to use their prisoners thus?Had Fortune throwne my name above Arbaces,I should not thus have talkt; for in ArmeniaWe hold it base. You should have kept your temper,Till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashionPerhaps to brag.Arbaces. Bee you my witness, Earth,Need I to brag? Doth not this captive princeSpeake me sufficiently, and all the actsThat I have wrought upon his suffering land?Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of groundWithin | his whole | realme ¦ that | I have | not pastFighting and conquering?156

Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the cæsuræ are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly at the end of the second and third feet.

In respect of the internal structure of the verse the tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical characteristics of those parts of Philaster, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King which do not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are well defined and practically uniform; since they are of a piece with the metrical manner of The Woman-Hater, which is originally, and in general, the work of one author – Beaumont; and since they are also of a piece with the versification of the Maske, which is certainly by Beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems, – at least one criterion has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors.

Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV, Scene 2 of A King and No King, and the prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of Philaster, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same scenes.

CHAPTER XIX

FLETCHER'S DICTION

The verse criterion is, however, not of itself a reagent sufficient to precipitate fully the Beaumont of the joint-plays. For there still exists the certainty that in plotting plays together, each of the collaborators was influenced by the opinion of the other; and the probability that, though one may have undertaken sundry scenes or divers characters in a play, the other would, in the course of general correction, insert lines in the parts written by his collaborator, and would convey to his own scenes the distinguishing rhythm, "humour," or diction of a definite character, created, or elaborated, by his colleague. It, therefore, follows that the assignment of a whole scene to either author on the basis alone of some recurring metrical peculiarity is not convincing. In the same section, even in the same speech, we may encounter insertions which bear the stamp of the revising colleague. For instance, the opening of Philaster is generally assigned to Beaumont: it has the characteristics of his prose. But with the entry of the King (line 89) we are launched upon a subscene in verse which, on the one hand, has a higher percentage of double endings (viz. 38) than Beaumont ever used, but does not fully come up to Fletcher's usage; while on the other hand, it has a higher percentage of run-on lines157 (viz. 44) than Fletcher ever used. The other verse tests leave us similarly in doubt. To any one, however, familiar with the diction and characterization of the two authors the suspicion occurs that the scene was written by Beaumont in the first instance; and then worked over and considerably enlarged by his associate. In the first hundred lines of Act II, Scene 4, similar insertions by Fletcher occur, and in Act III, 2.158

Such being the case we may expect that an inquiry into the rhetorical peculiarities and mental habit, first of Fletcher, then of Beaumont, will furnish tests corrective of the criterion based upon versification.

1. Fletcher's Diction in The Faithfull Shepheardesse

Though rather poetic than dramatic, and composed only partly in blank verse, The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords the best approach to a study of Fletcher's rhetoric; for, written about 1608 and by Fletcher alone, it illustrates his youthful style in the period probably shortly before he collaborated with Beaumont in the composition of Philaster.

The soliloquy of Clorin, with which The Faithfull Shepheardesse opens, runs as follows:

Hail, holy Earth, whose cold Arms do imbraceThe truest man that ever fed his flocksBy the fat plains of fruitful Thessaly!Thus I salute thy Grave; thus do I payMy early vows and tribute of mine eyesTo thy still-loved ashes; thus I freeMyself from all insuing heats and firesOf 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] girtWith youthful Coronals, and lead the Dance;No more the company of fresh fair MaidsAnd wanton Shepherds be to me delightful,Nor the shrill pleasing sound of merry pipesUnder some shady dell, when the cool windPlays on the leaves; all be far away,Since thou art far away, by whose dear sideHow often have I sat Crowned with fresh flowersFor summers Queen, whilst every Shepherds boyPuts on his lusty green, with gaudy hookAnd hanging scrip of finest Cordovan.But thou art gone, and these are gone with theeAnd all are dead but thy dear memorie;That shall out-live thee, and shall ever spring,Whilst there are pipes or jolly Shepherds sing.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 gainIn the dark, hidden vertuous use of Herbs:That will I practise, and as freely giveAll my endeavours as I gained them free.Of all green wounds I know the remediesIn Men or Cattel, be they stung with Snakes,Or charmed with powerful words of wicked Art,Or be they Love-sick, or through too much heatGrown wild or Lunatic, their eyes or earsThickened with misty filme of dulling Rheum;These I can Cure, such secret vertue liesIn herbs applyèd by a Virgins hand.My meat shall be what these wild woods afford,Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes, on whose CheeksThe Sun sits smiling.159

This passage, as we have observed in the preceding section, does not display in full proportion or untrammeled variety the metrical peculiarities of Fletcher's popular dramatic blank verse. The verse is lyric and declamatory: his purely dramatic verse whether in the Monsieur Thomas of his earlier period, The Chances of the middle period, or A Wife for a Month and Rule a Wife of his later years, has the feminine endings, redundant syllables, anapæstic substitutions, the end-stopped and sometimes fragmentary lines, the hurried and spasmodic utterance of conversational speech. But, from the rhetorical point of view, this soliloquy – in fact, the whole Faithfull Shepheardesse– affords a basis for further discrimination between Fletcher and Beaumont in the joint-plays; for it displays idiosyncrasies of tone-quality and diction which persist, after Beaumont's death, in Fletcher's dramas of 1616 to 1625 as they were in 1607-1609: sometimes slightly modified, more often exaggerated, but in essence the same.

In Clorin's soliloquy, the reader cannot but notice, first, a tendency toward alliteration, the fed and flocks, fat and fruitful, fresh and fair, pleasing and pipes, – alliteration palpable and somewhat crude, but not yet excessive; second, a balanced iteration of words, – "be far away, Since thou art far away" (ll. 16-17), and, five lines further down, "But thou art gone and these are gone with thee," and in lines 31 and 32 "as freely give … as I gained them free"; and an iteration of phrases, rhetorical asseverations, negatives, alternatives, questions, – "Thus I salute thy grave; thus do I pay," "thus I free," "thus put I off" (lines 4, 6, 9); third, a preference for iteration in triplets, – "No more shall these smooth brows," "No more the company," "Nor the shrill … sound" (lines 10-14), "Or charmed," "or love-sick," "or through too much heat" (lines 35 and 36); fourth, a fondness for certain sonorous words, – "all ensuing heats … all sports" (lines 7-8), "all my endeavours … all green wounds" (lines 32-33), and the "alls" of lines 16 and 23; fifth, a plethora of adjectives, – "holy earth," "cold arms," "truest man," "fat plains" – many of them pleonastic – "misty film," "dulling rheum" – some forty nouns buttressed by epithets to twenty standing in their own strength; and a plethora of nouns in apposition (preferably triplets), – "all sports, delights, and jolly games" (line 8), "Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes" (line 42); sixth, an indulgence in conversational tautology: for Fletcher is rarely content with a simple statement, – he must be forever spinning out the categories of a concept; expounding his idea by what the rhetoricians call division; enumerating the attributes and species painstakingly lest any escape, or verbosely as a padding for verse or speech. Of this mannerism The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords many instances more typical than those contained in these forty-three lines; but even here Clorin salutes the grave of her lover in a dozen different periphrastic ways. To say that "all are dead but thy dear memorie" is not enough; she must specify "that shall outlive thee." To assert that she knows the remedies of "all green wounds" does not suffice: she must proceed to the enumeration of the wounds; nor to tell us that her meat shall be found in the woods: she must rehearse the varieties of meat. Her soliloquy in the last thirty lines of the scene, not here quoted, is of the same quality: it reminds one of a Henslowe list of stage properties, or of the auctioneer's catalogue that sprawls down Walt Whitman's pages.

And, last, we notice what has been emphasized by G. C. Macaulay and others, that much of this enumeration by division is by way of "parentheses hastily thrown in, or afterthoughts as they occur to the mind."160 Even in the formal Shepheardesse this characteristic lends a quality of naturalness and conversational spontaneity to the speech.

2. In the Later Plays

If now we turn to one of Fletcher's plays written after Beaumont's death, and without the assistance of Massinger or any other, – say, The Humorous Lieutenant of about the year 1619, – we find on every page and passages like the following.161– The King Antigonus upon the entry of his son, Demetrius, addresses the ambassadors of threatening powers:

Do you see this Gent(leman),You that bring Thunders in your mouths, and Earthquakes,To shake and totter my designs? Can you imagine(You men of poor and common apprehensions)While I admit this man, my Son, this natureThat in one look carries more fire, and fierceness,Than all your Masters lives162; dare I admit him,Admit him thus, even to my side, my bosom,When he is fit to rule, when all men cry him,And all hopes hang about his head; thus place him,His weapon hatched in bloud; all these attendingWhen 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, —163Here's a strange fellow now, and a brave fellow,If we may say so of a pocky fellow. —164And now, 't is ev'n too true, I feel a pricking,A pricking, a strange pricking. —165With such a sadness on his face, as sorrow,Sorrow herself, but poorly imitates.Sorrow of sorrows on that heart that caus'd it!166

In the passages cited above there happen to be, also, a few examples of the elocutionary afterthought:

You come with thunders in your mouth and earthquakes, —As arrows from a Tartar's bow, and speeding. —

To this device, and to the intensive use of the pronominal "one" Fletcher is as closely wedded as to the repetition of "all," —

They have a hand upon us,A heavy and a hard one.167To wear this jewel near thee; he is a tried oneAnd one that … will yet stand by thee.168

Other plays conceded by the critics to Fletcher alone, and written in his distinctive blank verse, display the same characteristics of style: The Chances of about 1615, The Loyall Subject of 1618 (like The Humorous Lieutenant of the middle period), and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife of the last period, 1624. I quote at random for him who would apply the tests, – first from The Chances,169 the following of the repeating revolver style:

Art thou not an Ass?And modest as her blushes! what a blockheadWould e're have popt out such a dry ApologieFor 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 manMade 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 Subject170– the farewell of Archas to his arms and colours. I wish I could quote it all as an example of noble noise, enumerative and penny-a-line rhetoric:

Farewell, my Eagle! when thou flew'st, whole ArmiesHave stoopt below thee: at Passage I have seen theeRuffle 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,The ruines our swords made, the bloudy ruins;Then flew this Bird of honour bravely, Gentlemen;But these must be forgotten: so must these too,And all that tend to Arms, by me for ever.

And from Act II, Scene 1, pages 101-102, for triplets: