Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;226 and here and there, Rowley.227 I should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's – in dramatizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism.

Though The Coxcombe was not successful in its first production before the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well received and favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court in 1612 in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the City theatres after the Restoration, and before 1682. In the revivals Beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy called The Fugitives, constructed by Richardson and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792. With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the Ricardo of the original), and Mrs. Jordan as Julia (alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran for a dozen nights or more.

7. —Philaster or Love lies a-Bleeding was "divers times acted at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his Majesties Servants." Under the second title in the Scourge of Folly, entered for publication October 8, 1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and I have already stated my reasons as based upon the history of the theatres228 for believing that its first performance took place between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610.

We might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of Hereford's Scourge of Folly, if we could affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. For just before the epigram on Love lies a-Bleeding, which, I think, without doubt, applies to Philaster, appears one To the Roscius of these times, Mr. W. Ostler, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's Revels' Children, – most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the time, – in 1601 when Jonson's Poetaster was acted. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Burbadge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,229 before Evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in 1608, some of the Queen's Revels' Children "growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, were taken to strengthen the King's service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this deposition places the transference of Underwood, Field, and Ostler to the King's Company between the beginning of April 1608 when the Revels' Children were temporarily suppressed and August of that year when the Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and others took over Evans's unexpired lease of Blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. But the deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily with, or under the supervision of, the King's Company at Blackfriars between December 7, 1609 and January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by March 25, 1610, and does not appear in the lists of the King's Men till 1616; and there is no record of Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company before the end of 1610, when they acted in Jonson's Alchemist (after October 3). Since Underwood and Ostler were not with the new Queen's Revels after January of that year, it is probable that Davies's epigram to the latter as "the Roscius of these times" in the Scourge of Folly, entered for publication on October 8, 1610, was written after Ostler had attained distinction in Shakespeare's company, the company of the leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to Ostler with that of the epigram to Fletcher on Philaster presented by that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the epigrams, – that is to say, between January 4 and October, 1610.

Since, however, the epigrams in The Scourge of Folly, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind. Of much greater weight as confirming the date of Philaster, as conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare's Cymbeline not only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific detail. I shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there is nothing in the Philaster or the Cymbeline to indicate the priority of the former. But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.230 For the Cymbeline, I accept the date assigned by the majority of critics, 1609. Shakespeare had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in mind since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage in Much Ado About Nothing (the quarto of 1600). In execution the play is, with The Winter's Tale and the Tempest, the dramatic sequel of that first of his "dramatic romances," – of which the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a wife or child, – the Pericles written in 1607 or 1608. And since already in Pericles, Shakespeare had blazed this new path, I cannot for a moment accept the hypothesis that he is in his Cymbeline borrowing profusely from Philaster, a work of comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of construction to the somewhat novel – to them entirely novel – method of the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved in Pericles and Cymbeline. And still the more so when one reflects that, in Pericles and Cymbeline, aside from the leading conception, everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to As You Like It and Twelfth Night; and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic construction in Philaster, otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of those earlier comedies and of the Pericles and Cymbeline would not suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that Philaster was first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July 1610.

The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that author credit for practically the whole work, – "Thou … raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of 1647, mentions Love Lies a-Bleeding among Fletcher's "incomparable plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene "when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he says:

Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared to thee,In thy Philaster and Maids Tragedy!Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray …

for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few insertions or revisions by Fletcher, Philaster is Beaumont's (and practically the same holds true of The Maides Tragedy, and the Bessus play —A King and No King). In Philaster Fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are I, 1b (from the King's entry, line 89 – line 358,231– a revision and enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2b (from Enter Megra), II, 4b (from Megra above), V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 was written by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14 to 29 (from Enter Arethusa and Bellario to "how brave she keeps him"). Similarly, the first draught of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34 (exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long tirade) and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end). But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas, tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." The last three lines of that soliloquy are his:

Soul-sick with poison, strike the monumentsWhere noble names lie sleeping, till they sweatAnd the cold marble melt;232

and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of Philaster's accusation of Arethusa. "The story of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten, – "these sad texts"233 Fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating.

It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes are elaborative, bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally easy, at times bustling, at times spectacular, but not vitally contributory to the business of the play. They comprise the longest speeches of the King, Pharamond, Philaster, Megra, and Bellario. Some of these, such as the King's denunciation of Megra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar rhetoric. The bawdy half-scene with its maid of easy honour is his; the discovery of the low intrigue, the simulated masque and the mob-scene are his. They may display, but they do not develop, characters. They are sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully poetic as in V, 3, 83-84, where his "all your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble" anticipates Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic; but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation of Beaumont. The play, in fact, is not only preponderatingly but primarily Beaumont's, from the excellent exposition in the first act to the series of sensational surprises which precede the dénouement in the fifth. The conception of the characters and the complication are distinctive of that writer's plots: the impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence toward the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and his unwarranted suspicion of the honour of his mistress. The subtle revelations of personality are Beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric pathos and beauty of Bellario, the nobler aspects of Dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet bewilderments and unmerited tribulations of Arethusa, the combination of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization, the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical insights, and the memorable lines. His, too, the humour of the rural sketches – the Country Fellow who has "seen something yet," the occasional frank animality, as well as the tender beauty of innocence. Not only are the virtues of the play Beaumont's but some of its faults of conception and construction; and those faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortuitous succession of the crises, and the subordination of Bellario in the dénouement.

The popularity of Philaster as an acting play, not only at Court but in the city, is attested by contemporary record. It was played after the Restoration with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed thirteen revivals, – the last at Bath on December 12 of the latter year, with Ward in the title-rôle and Miss Jarmin as Bellario.234

8. —The Maides Tragedy, acted by the King's Men during the festivities at Court, October 1612 to March 1613, was known to Sir George Buc when, October 31, 1611, he licensed an anonymous play as "this second maiden's tragedy." It was acted by the King's also at Blackfriars; and since it is in every way a more mature production than Philaster, I think that it followed that play, toward the end of 1610 or in 1611. It was first published in 1619, in quarto and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also anonymous; that of 1630 gives the names of Beaumont and Fletcher as authors. In the commendatory verses to the folio of 1647, Henry Howard ascribes the scene of Amintor's suicide to Fletcher; Waller assigns to him "brave Melantius in his gallantry" and "Aspatia weeping in her gown"; Stanley, too, gives him the weeping Aspatia; and Herrick, "Evadne swelling with brave rage." These descriptions are as misleading as blind. D'Avenant comes nearer the mark in his Prologue to The Woman-Hater, already quoted, where he indicates correctly an Evadne scene and an Aspatia scene as of Fletcher's composition. Metrical tests, corrected by the rhetorical, show that Fletcher's contributions are limited to three scenes and two half-scenes. The list opens with those to which D'Avenant alludes: II, 2, in which Fletcher "taught the sad Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, 1 (as far as line 200, "Prithee, do not mock me"), in which he "reduced Evadne from her scorn"; and it includes, also, the ten lines of V, 1, the larger part of V, 2 (to Exit Evadne), and the perfunctory V, 3. As to Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt can be entertained. It is an admirable example of his double endings (almost 40 per cent), his end-stopped lines (80 per cent), anapæstic rhythms and jolts, as well as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his incremental second thoughts. I fail to see how any critic can assign it to Beaumont.235 As frequently with Fletcher, Aspatia's mourning, though beautiful, is a falsetto from the classics; more like one of Rossetti's or Leigh Hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than a first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. There is likewise no doubt concerning the authorship of the first part of Act IV, 1 (lines 1-189), in which Melantius convinces Evadne of sin and drives her to vengeance upon the King. The latter part of the scene, also, appears to have been written by Fletcher in the first instance, and to have consisted of the first six speeches after the entrance of Amintor (lines 190-200), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to win belief" (247-254, 260-262), and the conclusion (263-285). But between Amintor's supplication "Prithee do not mock me" (line 200) and Evadne's assertion of sincerity "I have done nothing good to win belief" (line 247236), Beaumont has inserted four speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy otherwise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest passages of the play. In Evadne's "My whole life is so leprous it infects All my repentance" – "That slight contrition" – "Give me your griefs; you are an innocent, A soul as white as Heaven" – "Shoot your light into me" – "Dissembling with my tears" – "Cut from man's remembrance," we hear the words, phrases, and figures of Beaumont; and we trace him in the repeated use of "do." We find him in Amintor's "Seed of virtue left to shoot up" – "put a thousand sorrows off" – "that dull calamity" – "that strange misbelief" – and in

Mock not the powers above that can and dareGive thee a great example of their justiceTo all ensuing ages.237

And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration of sincere reform (255-259), we are thrilled by his sudden magic and his poetic finality:

Those short days I shall number to my rest(As many must not see me) shall, though too late,Though in my evening, yet perceive a will, —Since I can do no good, because a woman, —Reach constantly at something that is near it.

The ground-work of this latter portion, from Amintor's entrance, where Evadne cries "Oh, my lord," "My much abused lord," and he, "I may leap, Like a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines 190-200); and the last three speeches in general with Amintor's "My frozen soul melts," and "My honour falls no farther: I am well, then"; and with Evadne's "tales" that "go to dust forgotten," – the Niobe weeping till she is water, – the "wash her stains away," and this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction, to the scene as Fletcher originally wrote it.

All the creaturesMade 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; …

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 dramatic mastery of the grisly and shuddering; but though the scene is characterized by the same rapidity of conversational thrust and parry as the Fletcherian dialogue between Melantius and Evadne, it is, like it, marred in effect by violence physical rather than spiritual, by brutality of vituperation and stage realism with but scant relief of subtlety. Fletcher's tragic scenes excel not in portrayal of personality but in business; his contribution to Aspatia is not pathos but the embroidery of grief.

The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's: the cruel desertion of Aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery, her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her, its gradual recognition of the inevitable, – that unchastity cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor cleansed by blood, – and its true birth through love desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author of his wrongs, – yet idealized by virgin and wanton alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the conflict between honour and friendship, pride and sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the pestilent King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and hopeless. These are Beaumont's; and his, too, the wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive, and the psychic revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays – in fact, all that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the poetic finality.

In his Tragedies of the Last Age, licensed in 1677, Rymer attacked The Maides Tragedy violently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as Rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better have been called Amintor, or the Lustful King, or The Concubine. But The Maides Tragedy is a more attractive name, and it may be justified. For I do not find that the action is double-centred. It springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the Maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic devotion of Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's tragic weakness, his hamartia. His failure to act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. The Nemesis, too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the King, but Aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten:

I did that lady wrong. Methinks I feelA griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins, —238… The faithless sin I madeTo faire Aspatia is not yet revenged;It follows me. —239

His Nemesis is Aspatia, constant unto death, – and in her death, awakening such remorse that he must die to be with her: "Aspatia!" he cries —

The soule is fled forever, and I wrongMyselfe so long to lose her company,Must I talke now? Heres to be with thee, love!240

Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,241 of "the irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs" in the characterization and conduct of Evadne have logicality of appearance, but are based upon incorrect premises. The facts, as Beaumont gives them, are that Evadne was "once fair" and "chastely sweet," – before she met the King; that she was already corrupt when she took Amintor as her husband; that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in presence of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, is an assumed delicacy; that she loves the King "with ambition not with her eyes" (III, 1); that she "would bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has accepted Amintor as a screen, but speedily lusts for him, and is willing to give herself to him if he will forthright kill the King (II, 1, 179):

Wilt thou kill this man?Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sinOff 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: