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Francis Beaumont: Dramatist
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 second act and the third of the fifth. That is not unmotived, however; it is of Aspatia's own choosing and of Amintor's hamartia. Aspatia kisses him farewell, forgiving him, and saying that she "must trie Some yet unpractis'd way to grieve and die." He is, forthwith, entangled in the web of his wife's adultery, his own shame and more shameful delusion of allegiance. The girl whom he has so deeply wronged passes from his distracted consciousness, save for the sense that these troubles are his punishment. And when, toward the end of the play, the Maid comes in again, saying "this is my fatall houre," even we start at the remembrance that she had threatened to kill herself. And, because the scene in which she forces a duel upon Amintor is spirited and pathetic, his contrition poignant, and the joy of their reunion in the moment of death deeply tragic, we feel that we have been unduly cheated of the company of this innocent and resolute and surpassingly pathetic girl.
The play, with Burbadge in the rôle of Melantius, was popular during the lives of the authors. It was acted before the King and Queen in 1636 and it held the stage until the closing of the theatres. It was revived in 1660 and 1661. Pepys saw it at least five times before the middle of May 1668, and found it "too sad and melancholy" but still "a good play." It was popular when Dryden in his Essay on Dramatick Poesy, 1668, praised its "labyrinth of design." For a time during the reign of Charles II it was proscribed, possibly because the moral was too readily applicable to the conduct of the "merry monarch"; but the play in its original form was on the stage again by 1677. Before 1685 Waller made at least two attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy by writing a new fifth act in which Evadne was bloodlessly eliminated. In one of these sentimental absurdities the King alone survived; in another the King, preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving Amintor and Aspatia from suicide and joined them in marriage: but neither attempt, though made "to please the Court," was crowned with success. The play enjoyed several other revivals in the first half of the eighteenth century with high popularity, notably at the Haymarket in 1706 when Melantius was played by Betterton, Evadne by Mrs. Barry, and Aspatia by Mrs. Bracegirdle; and again in 1710 just before Betterton's death. In 1742 Theobald writes, that the famous controversy between Melantius and Amintor is always "received with vehement applause." In 1837 the play was acted by Macready at the Haymarket, with alterations by himself and three original scenes by Sheridan Knowles, under the name of The Bridal, and, as Dyce tells us, was very favourably received by the public.242
9. – Though the tragedy of Cupid's Revenge was printed in 1615 as the work of Fletcher alone, the publication was unauthorized, and the attribution is by a printer who acknowledges that he was not acquainted with the author. The quarto of 1630 assigns it correctly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The play is known to have been acted at Court by her Majesty's Children of Whitefriars, the first Sunday in January 1612; and as usual it must have been tested by public presentation before that date. The fact that the authors were, between 1610 and 1612, writing for the King's Men does not preclude their composing a play for the Queen's Children. It is not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier than 1611. Though the critics disagree concerning the precise division of authorship in nearly every scene, finding traces of alteration by Field, Massinger, and others, they discern a definite substratum of both Fletcher and Beaumont. It is unnecessary to specify the minor scenes in which Beaumont coöperated. The five which transfer the action from an atmosphere of supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion are by him.243 In these his sententious sunbursts, his verse, diction, hyperbole, portrayal by passive implication, are indubitable. The infatuation of the princess for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim humility and cackling mirth of the latter. The lust of Leucippus is transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to oaths "bestowed on lies," by his horror of the discovered baseness of his paramour, and the piety with which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's honour:
I desire youTo lay what trains you will for my wish'd death,But suffer him to find his quiet graveIn 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.244 Still he was probably wrong. It is not impossible that one of the dramatists contrived the plot; but, considering that three-quarters of the play was written by Beaumont, and that Fletcher's quarter contains but one scene at once of high design and vital to the story, it is not very likely that the contriving was by Fletcher unaided.
Modern critics display singular unanimity in their discrimination of the respective shares of the composers. With only one or two dissenting voices they attribute to Beaumont the first three acts, the fourth scene of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the fifth. To Fletcher they assign the first three scenes of the fourth act, and scenes one and three of the fifth. The tests which I have already described lead me to the same conclusion. Beaumont's contribution is distinguished by a largeness of utterance and a poetic inevitability, a diversity and mastery of characterization, a philosophical reach, a realism both humorous and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativity and tension, equal to, if not surpassing, any parallel elements or qualities to be found in the joint-plays. Arbaces, in apparent design, is of a Marlowan temper, moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brooking no rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and a tyrant, he is brave in fact, and in heart deluded by the assumption that he is also modest. The combination is Beaumontesque. That dramatist rarely creates fixed or transparent character. Arbaces assumes that he is single of nature and aim: an irresistible, passionless, and patient soldier; but his failure to fathom himself as his friend Mardonius fathoms him, is part of his complexity. His headlong love for the woman whom he believes to be his sister and the resulting horror of apprehension and conflict of desire reveal him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding revolutions of personality. "What are thou," he asks of this devilish unexpected lust —
What are thou, that dost creep into my breast;And dar'st not see my face?When he will decree that Panthea be regarded as no more his sister, and she remonstrates, – he thunders "I will hear no more"; but to himself: —
Why should there be such music in a voice,And sin for me to hear it?When Tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister in marriage, presumes to address her, with what majestic inconsistency the king rebukes him:
The least word that she speaksIs worth a life. Rule your disorder'd tongueOr 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 yetCorrupt 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 meAnd hang thy head down like a violetFull 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 goTo prison, to my death, to anything:I feel a sin growing upon my bloodWorse 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 Zagloban; the Bessus of Fletcher, in IV, 3 and V, 1 and 3, is a figure of low comedy, amusing to be sure, and reminiscent of Bobadill, but a purveyor of sophomoric quips and a tool for horse-play. The rural scene with its graphic humours of the soil is Beaumont's.
Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display no spiritual insight; supply no development of character; administer no dramatic fillip to the action and no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers, Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry.
To Beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in the creation of A King and No King one of the most intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean period, one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one of the most influential in the development of the heroic play of the Restoration. That it did not survive the eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as Dryden says "end with a prosperous event." The conflict of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed the limits of artistic mediation. The play would better have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering – that highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable. But though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy. That error arises from a careless reading of the text. From the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists are not brother and sister. And as for the protagonists themselves, – when the King is suddenly smitten by love (III, 1, 70-115) and rebels against its power, he does not even know that the object of his devotion is his supposed sister. When he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea, he revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility of self-denial. In his struggle against what seems to him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer, he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of what is right. His deepest despair is that he is "not come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb to worse temptation; and his last word before the tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think on." And when Panthea feeling the "sin growing upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that cries to him whom she thinks her brother, "Fly, sir, for God's sake!"
A King and No King evidently won favour at Court, for, as we have noticed, it was acted there both in 1611 and in 1612-1613. It was presented to their Majesties at Hampton Court in 1636. In 1661 Pepys saw it twice. Before 1682 Nell Gwynn had made Panthea one of her principal rôles. In 1683 Betterton played Arbaces to Mrs. Barry's Panthea. It was revived again in 1705, 1724, and 1788. Davies in his Dramatic Miscellany tells us that Garrick intended to revive it, taking the part of Arbaces himself and giving Bessus to Woodward, "but it was observed that at every reading of it in the green-room Garrick's pleasure suffered a visible diminution – at length he fairly gave up his design." Mr. Bond, in the Variorum edition, mentions a German adaptation of 1785, called Ethelwolf, oder der König Kein König.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAST PLAY
Eleven. – The first quarto of The Scornful Ladie, entered S. R., March 19, 1616, assigns the play to Beaumont and Fletcher, and says that it "was acted with great applause by the Children of Her Maiesties Revels in the Blacke Fryers." The references in Act V, 3, 4, to the Cleve wars show that it could not have been written before March 25, 1609. The sentence, "Marry some cast Cleve captain," is taken by some to indicate a date as early as the spring of that year, when James I "promised to send an English force to aid the Protestant party,"245 and when, undoubtedly, "cast" captains of the English army were clamouring for foreign service. In that case, the play was acted before January 4, 1610, for by that date the children of the Queen's Revels had ceased playing at Blackfriars. Since the plague regulations closed the theatres between March 9 and December 7, 1609, save for a week in July, these arguments would fix the performance in the Christmas month, December 7 to January 4, 1610. To this supposition a reference in Act I, 2 to binding the Apocrypha by itself, lends plausibility, if, as Fleay thinks, the sentence points to the discussion during 1609-1610 concerning the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Douay version of the Bible and its exclusion from the authorized version – both in progress at the time, and both completed in 1610.246 But the Apocrypha controversy was continued long after 1610.
A later date of composition than January 4, 1610, is, however, indicated if a line, III, 1, 341, to which attention has not previously been directed, in which the Elder Loveless says of Abigail, who is acting the termagant, "tie your she-Otter up, good Lady folly, she stinks worse than a Bear-baiting," was suggested by the termagant Mrs. Otter and her husband of the Bear-garden, in Jonson's Epicoene, acted between January 4 and March 10, 1610. And the two sentences in which Cleve is mentioned, "There will be no more talk of the Cleve wars while this lasts" (V, 3), and "Marry some cast Cleve captain [so italicized in the quarto], and sell Bottle-ale" (V, 4), point to a date later than July 1610, when actual fighting in Cleves-Juliers had barely begun. The captains are not English soldiers seeking service in a foreign army not yet mobilized, but Englishmen who have been captains in Cleves, have seen service, and been 'cast,' any time between July 1610 and the beginning of 1616, when, according to the quarto, the play had assuredly been performed. These considerations make it probable that The Scornful Ladie in its original form was presented first at Whitefriars while the Queen's Children were acting there, between 1610 and March 1613, or that it was one of the plays, old or new, presented by the Queen's Children (reorganized in 1614) when they opened at Rossiter's new Blackfriars in 1615-16.
Since active hostilities in Cleves were temporarily suspended in 1613-14 during the negotiations which led to the treaty of Xanten in November of the latter year, and since there would not only be much "talk" rather than fighting at the time, but also many captains 'cast' from their regiments, the conviction grows that the play was written between 1613 and the end of 1615. If The Scornful Ladie had been written before March 1613, it would undoubtedly have shared with The Coxcombe and Cupid's Revenge of the same authors, then in the flush of popularity at Court, the honour of presentation by the Queen's Revels' Children during the festivities attending the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth; for it was always a good acting play, and it has far greater merit than Cupid's Revenge which the Children performed three times before royalty in the four months preceding the marriage.
Other evidence, not hitherto noticed, still further confirms the conclusion that this was one of Beaumont and Fletcher's later joint-productions, perhaps the last of them. The conversational style is altogether more mature than in the remaining output of their partnership. It is the first work published under both of their names, and it was licensed for publication within two weeks after Beaumont's death, as one might expect of a play with which he was associated recently in the public mind. It is the only one of the joint-plays which he did not himself copy out, or thoroughly revise in manuscript, eliminating all or nearly all of Fletcher's distinctive ye's and y'are's, and reducing to uniformity the nomenclature of the dramatis personae. Of this, later. There is also a sentence in Act III, 2, which points definitely to a date of composition, 1613 to 1615. The Captain speaking to Morecraft, the usurer, says, "I will stile thee noble, nay Don Diego, I'le woo thy Infanta for thee" (punctuation of the quarto). 'Diego' had, of course, been for years a generic nickname for Spaniards; but Morecraft is neither a Spaniard nor in any way associated with Spaniards. There had been a Don Diego of malodorous memory, who had offensively "perfumed" St. Paul's and on whose achievement the Elizabethans never wearied ringing the changes.247 But that Don Diego was of the years before 1597 when there was, of course, no talk of wooing an Infanta; and the Captain here who comes to borrow money of the usurer had no intention of insulting him by likening him to the disgusting Spaniard of St. Paul's.
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, in 1613, "with the express object of winning James over from his alliance with France and the Protestant powers."248 During 1613 Queen Anne was favouring the Spanish marriage. In February 1614, Don Diego Sarmiento was sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of the King's powerful minion, the Earl of Somerset; and in May he was writing home of his success. In the latter month, the Lord Privy Seal, Northampton, was urging the marriage upon the King; and the King soon after had signified to Sarmiento his willingness to accept the hand of the Infanta for Charles, provided Philip of Spain should withdraw his demand for the conversion of the young prince to Catholicism. In June Sarmiento was advising Philip to close with James's offer. And a month or so later the Spanish Council of State had voted in favour of the match. Negotiations, broken off for a time, were resumed a few weeks after the treaty of Xanten was signed; and with varying success Don Diego was still pursuing his object in December 1615. The reference in The Scornful Ladie cannot possibly be to negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles's elder brother, Henry, who died in 1612, with one or the other of King Philip's daughters;249 as for instance in 1604 or 1607, for the Cleves wars had not then begun; or in 1611 and 1612, for no Don Diego had yet arrived in England. The upper limit of the reference to Don Diego Sarmiento's negotiations is May 27, 1613. Gardiner tells us, moreover, that "for some time" before Diego was created Count Gondomar in 1617 "he had been pertinaciously begging for a title that would satisfy the world that his labours had been graciously accepted by his master." This desire to be "stiled noble" was undoubtedly known to many about the Court. If Beaumont and Fletcher did not hear of it by common talk, they might readily have derived their information from Don Diego's acquaintance and Beaumont's friend, Sir Francis Bacon, Attorney-General at the time, or from a devoted companion of John Selden of the Inner Temple, Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, who in April 1615, was King James's intermediary with Sarmiento. Taking, accordingly, all these considerations into account in conjunction with the fact that no Cleves captains had yet been 'cast' from their commands abroad before the Queen's Revels' Children ceased playing at the old Blackfriars in January 1610, I have come to the definite conclusion that the play was written between May 27, 1613 and the beginning of 1616, and first acted after the Children reopened at the new Blackfriars in 1615-1616. The probabilities are that it was written after May or June, 1614, perhaps, as late as April 1615, when public attention had been startlingly awakened to Don Diego's personal and ambitious activity in furthering the Spanish alliance by a royal marriage; and that Beaumont's absence from London, probably at his wife's place in Kent, or the failing condition of his health, accounts for his subordinate share in the authorship, as well as for the incomplete revision of the text – a task evidently assumed by him in the preparation of the other plays planned and produced in partnership with Fletcher.
The commendatory verses of Stanley and Waller in the 1647 folio give the play to Fletcher; and the greater part of it is Fletcher's. Beaumont has contributed the vivid exposition of Act I, 1; Act I, 2, with its legal phraseology and racy realism; and the jovial posset-scene of Act II, 1, where Sir Roger's kindly pedantry is developed and the minor love-affair of Welford and Martha is introduced.250 Act II, 1, has been given by most critics to Fletcher because of the feminine endings of its occasional verse; but Beaumont could use feminine endings for humorous effect, and the diction and metal habit are distinctly his. He contributed also Act V, 2,251 where the hero finally tricks his scornful mistress into submission. The ye test, which I have said does not yield results in the case of other plays written by the two dramatists in collaboration, is of positive value here as confirming Beaumont's authorship of Act I, 1 and 2 and Act II, 1, and V, 2, for but a single ye (II, 1, l. 10) is to be found in those scenes. The results are negative in Act II, 2 and 3 – no ye's– but the diction and verse are Fletcher's. It is not unlikely that Beaumont revised the play up to the end of Act II. With Act III, the ye's are in evidence and continue to the end of the play, except in Beaumont's V, 2. In Act III, 1, there are but four; but two of them are in the objective case, a mark of Fletcher, not of Beaumont. On the other hand though the diction and verse somewhat resemble Fletcher's, the infrequency of the ye's heightens the suspicion that unless the scene is Fletcher's, revised imperfectly by Beaumont, it is the work of some third author – perhaps, as R. W. Bond,252 has suggested, Massinger. Act III, 2, on the other hand, not only has several ye's in the objective, but in proportion to the you's twenty-five per cent of ye's and y'are's, which approaches the distinctive habit of Fletcher; and the verse, rhetorical triplets, and afterthoughts are his. In all scenes of Acts IV and V, except the second of the latter, Fletcher's ye's occur, not in great number, but often enough in the objective case to corroborate the other, metrical and stylistic, indications of his authorship.