Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

I have said that no ye's occur in Acts I and II, and Act V, 2, the parts in which Beaumont's hand as author or reviser appears. Another very interesting confirmation of his authorship of Act I, 1, Act II, 1, and Act V, 2, is afforded by the double nomenclature of one of the characters, the amorous spinster who serves as waiting-woman to the Scornful Lady. According to the first three quartos (1616, 1625, 1630), and the folio (1679) which follows the text of these, whenever she appears in stage-direction or text before the beginning of Act III (viz., in Beaumont's scenes), she is called Mistress Younglove or Younglove, but in Acts III, IV, V, she is uniformly called Abigal, except in Beaumont's V, 2, where in the text and stage-direction (line 263) she is again Younglove. In the speech-headings, she is Abig. or Abi., all through the last three acts, for Fletcher has noticed that the abbreviation Young, for her, occurring by the side of Young Lo. for another character, Young Loveless, is confusing. But Beaumont, who revised the first two acts, has been less careful than his wont, for he occasionally retains the Young., which stood for the name by which he always thought of the waiting-woman.

Beaumont's Mistress Younglove of the earlier scenes is vividly vulgar and amorous. Fletcher takes her up and turns her into a commonplace stage lecher in petticoats; but Beaumont, in the fifth act, restores her to womanhood by giving her something of a heart. The Scornful Lady of Beaumont's scenes is self-possessed and many-sided, introspective and capable of affection. In Fletcher's hands she is shrewd and witty but evidently constructed for the furtherance of dramatic business. The steward, Savil, of Beaumont's Act I, appears not only to be honest but to be designed with a view to a leading part in the complication; in Act II, 2, Fletcher reduces him to drunkenness and servility, with slight regard to the possibilities of character and plot. The brisk but mechanical movement of the action and the stagey characterization and more animated scenes are Fletcher's; also the manœuvers directed against the Lady's attitude of scorn, except that by which she is overcome. Thorndike calls this comedy "perhaps the best representation of the collaboration" of these dramatists in that kind. If this is the best of which they were capable in that kind, it is as well that they did not produce more. This was written after Beaumont had retired to Sundridge Place, and was giving very little attention to play-writing. It was, however, a very popular play; frequently acted before suppression of the theatres, and in the decade succeeding the Restoration when it was several times witnessed by Pepys. Later, it was acted by Mrs. Oldfield; and, as The Capricious Lady (an alteration by W. Cooke), with Mrs. Abington in the heroine's part, it held the stage as late as 1788 – some six revivals in all. But, as Sir Adolphus Ward says, it is "coarse both in design and texture, and seems hardly entitled to rank high among English comedies." It undoubtedly suggested ideas for Massinger's tragicomedy, A Very Woman, licensed 1634, but in which Fletcher may have had a share; and for Sir Aston Cockayne's The Obstinate Lady of 1657.253

CHAPTER XXVII

THE DRAMATIC ART, PRINCIPALLY OF BEAUMONT

Of the eleven plays, then, from which one may try to draw conclusions concerning the respective dramatic qualities of Beaumont and Fletcher during the period of their collaboration, we have found that two, Loves Cure and The Captaine, do not definitely show the hand of Beaumont, and one, The Foure Playes, but the suspicion of a finger. Two, The Woman-Hater and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, are wholly or essentially of his unaided authorship. The remaining six, The Coxcombe, Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, Cupids Revenge, A King and No King, The Scornful Ladie, are the Beaumont-Fletcher plays. Others in which some critics think that they have found traces of Beaumont, assuming that in their present form they are revisions of earlier work, are Thierry and Theodoret, The Faithful Friends, Wit at Severall Weapons, Beggers Bush, Loves Pilgrimage, The Knight of Malta, The Lawes of Candy, The Honest Man's Fortune, Bonduca, Nice Valour, The Noble Gentleman, The Faire Maide of the Inne. These I have carefully examined, and can conscientiously state that in no instance is there for me satisfactory evidence of the qualities which mark his verse and style. When in any of the suspected passages the verse recalls Beaumont, the style is not his: I find none of his favourite words, phrases, figures, ideas. When in any such passage a Beaumontesque hyperbole appears, or an occasional word from his vocabulary, or a line of haunting beauty such as he might have written, his metre or rhythm is absent. On the other hand, such passages display traits never found in him but often found in some other collaborator with Fletcher, or in some reviser of Fletcher's plays, sometimes Massinger but more frequently Field. The latter dramatist modeled himself upon Beaumont, but though he caught, on occasion, something of the master's trick, no one steeped in the style of Beaumont can for a moment mistake for his even the most dramatic or poetic composition of Field. As to the scenes in prose supposed by some to have been written by Beaumont, there is not one that bears his distinctive impress, nor one that might not have been written by Daborne, Field, or Massinger, or by any of the half-dozen experts whose industry swelled the output of the Fletcherian syndicate. There being no evidence of Beaumont in any of these plays, it is unnecessary to investigate, here, the vexed question of the original date of each. Suffice it to repeat that concerning none is there definite or generally accepted information that it was written before Beaumont's retirement from dramatic activity.

Passing in review, the qualities of Beaumont as a dramatist we find that in characterization he is, when at his best, true to nature, gradual in his processes, and discriminating in delineation. He is melodramatic at times in sudden shifts of crisis; but he is uniformly sensitive to innocence, beauty, and pathos, – contemptuous of cowardice, braggadocio, and insincerity, – appreciative of fidelity, friendship, noble affection, womanly devotion, self-sacrifice, and mercy, of romantic enterprise, and of the virile defiance of calumny, evil soliciting, and tyranny. In the delineation of lust he is frankly Elizabethan rather than insidiously Jacobean. He portrays with special tenderness the maiden of pure heart whose love is unfortunately placed too high, a Bellario, Euphrasia, or Urania, – or crossed by circumstance, a Viola, Arethusa, Aspatia, Panthea. He distinctively appropriates Shakespeare's girl-page; under his touch her grace suffers but slight diminution, and that by excess of sentimentality rather than by lack of individual endowment. His love-lorn lasses are integral personalities. No one, not maintaining a thesis, could mistake Viola with her shrewd inventiveness and sense of humour for Arethusa, or Arethusa with her swift despairs for Bellario, or Bellario with her fearlessness and noble mendacity for the countrified Urania, or any of them for the lachrymose Aspatia, or the full-pulsed Panthea. I find them as different each from the other as all from the tormenting Oriana or that seventeenth century Lydia Languish, Jasper's mock-romantic Luce.

His most virile characters are not the tragic or romantic heroes of the plays, but the blunt soldier-friends. It has been said, to be sure, that "there is scarcely an individual peculiarity among them."254 But Mardonius never deserts his King, Melantius does. And neither the Mardonius nor the Melantius of Beaumont has the waggish humour of Beaumont's Dion. His romantic heroes, on the other hand, are not so distinct in their several characteristics; Amintor, Philaster, Leucippus are generous, impulsive, poetic, readily deluded, undecided, and in action indecisive. The differentiation between them lies in the dramatic motive. Of Amintor the mainspring is the doctrine of the divinity of kings; he cannot be disloyal even to the king who has duped him and made of him a "fence" for his wife's adultery. Of Leucippus the mainspring is filial piety – disloyalty would mean surrendering his father to an incestuous and vengeful woman. Of Philaster the mainspring is the duty of revolt for the recovery of his ancestral throne. In Philaster and Cupid's Revenge Beaumont's tyrants are sonorific yet shadowy forms; but the king of the Maides Tragedy is a thoroughly visualized monster, and Arbaces in A King and No King stands as an epitome of progressively developed, concrete personality, absolutely distinct from any other figure on Beaumont's stage. In the construction of Evadne and Bacha a similar skill in evolution and individualization is displayed. The latter is an abnormality grown from lust to overweening ambition; the former never loses our sympathy: in her depravity there is the seed of conscience; through shame and love she wins a soul; the crime by which at last she would redeem herself leaves her no longer futile but half-way heroic; and her pleading for Amintor's love, her self-murder, fix her in memory among those squandered souls that have known no happiness – whose misery or whose shame is merged and made beautiful in the pity of it all.

Of his braggarts and poltroons Beaumont is profuse: the best are Bessus and Calianax, so far as they have not been reduced to horse-play by another hand. For Pharamond we are indebted as much to Fletcher as to Beaumont. The Jonsonian humours of Beaumont's braggarts, excellent as they may be, are not more clearly marked nor better drawn than those of many of his other characters, the misogynist, the retributive Oriana, and the gourmand-parasite, in his youthful comedy of The Woman-Hater, or the devil-may-care Merrythought, Luce, the grocer and his wife, and in fact every convulsing caricature in his matchless Knight of the Burning Pestle. Of Beaumont's effectiveness in satire and burlesque, enough has already been said. His laughter is genial but not uproarious: he chuckles; he lifts the eyebrow, but seldom sneers. With the Gascon he vapours; with the love-lorn languishing, simpers; with the heroic Captain of Mile End, whiffles and – tongue in cheek – struts and throws a turkey-step; with the jovial roisterer he hiccoughs and wipes his mouth. Homely wit, bathos, and the grotesque he fixes as on a film, and makes no comment; fustian he parodies; affectation he feeds with banter. For the inflated he cherishes a noiseless, most exiguous bodkin.

As to the matter of technique we have observed that the clear and comprehensive expositions of the joint-plays are generally Beaumont's, – for instance, those of The Maides Tragedy, Philaster, King and No King, and The Scornful Ladie; that in the tragedies and tragicomedies the sensational reversals of fortune, as well as the cumulative suspenses and reliefs of the closing scenes, are in nearly all cases his; and that in the tragicomedies the shifting of interest from the strictly tragic and universal to the more individual – pathetic, romantic, and comic – emotions, is also his. The conviction of Evadne by her brother is an exception: that is the work of Fletcher; but her contrition in the presence of Amintor is again Beaumont's. What he was capable of in romantic comedy is shown by his 'Ricardo and Viola' episode. He cared much more for romance than for intrigue; and he found his romance in persons of common life as readily as among those of elevated station. In his share of the comedies of intrigue he shows, as elsewhere, that he was capable of Elizabethan bubukles, but ludicrous not lecherous. Above all, he delighted in interweaving with the romantic and sentimental that which partook of the pastoral, the pathetic, and the heroic. And we have noticed that, through the heroic and melodramatic, his more serious plays pass into the atmosphere of court life and spectacular display.

As for Fletcher's share in the dramas written in partnership with Beaumont, little need be said by way of summary. He bulks large in the comedies of intrigue, The Scornful Ladie and The Coxcombe; and especially in the sections of plot that are carnal, trivial, or unnatural. He is in them just what he is in his own Monsieur Thomas and his pornographic Captaine– in the latter of which, if Beaumont had any share at all it is unconvincing to me, save possibly as regards the one appalling scene of which I have spoken some five chapters back. To the tragedies and "dramatic romances" or tragicomedies Fletcher did not contribute one-third as much as his co-worker. As in the murder-scene of The Maides Tragedy he displays the dramaturgy of spectacular violence, so in the scene between Melantius and Evadne, the power of dramatic invective. But his aim is not the furtherance of interest by the dynamic unfolding of personality, or by the propulsion of plot through interplay of complicated motives or emotions, it is the immediate captivation of the spectator by rapidity and variety: by brisk, lucid, and witty dialogue, by bustle of action and multiplicity of conventional device, as in Cupids Revenge. Few of his scenes are vital; most are clever histrionic inlays, subsidiary to the main action, or complementary and explanatory, as in Philaster and A King and No King. His characters move with all the ease of perfect mechanism; but they are made, not born. It follows that, in the more serious of the joint-dramas, the principal personages are much less indebted to his invention than has ordinarily been supposed. In the comedies of intrigue, on the other hand, conventional types of the stage or of the theatre-going London world, especially the fashionable and the Bohemian provinces thereof, owe their existence chiefly to him. Blackguards, wittols, colourless tricksters, roaring captains, gallants, debauchees, lechers, bawds, libidinous wives, sophisticated maidens who preen themselves with meticulous virtue but not with virtuous thoughts, all these people the scenes which Fletcher contributed to the joint-comedies. And some of them thrust their faces into the romantic plays and tragedies as well. Fletcher's most important contribution to the drama, his masterly and vital contribution, is to be found in his later work; and of that I have elsewhere treated,255 and shall have yet a word to say here.

Of the Beaumont-Fletcher plays the distinctive dramaturgy as well as the essential poetry are Beaumont's, and these are worthy of the praise bestowed by his youthful contemporary, John Earle:

So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon,And all so born within thyself, thine own.

The Maske, The Woman-Hater, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle should appear in a volume bearing Beaumont's name. And for the partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher, perhaps, some day,

Some publisher will further justice doAnd print their six plays in one volume too.

CHAPTER XXVIII

DID THE BEAUMONT 'ROMANCE' INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE?

Richard Flecknoe, in his Discourse of the English Stage, 1664, thinking rather of the romantic and ornamented quality of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, "full of fine flowers," than of any anticipation in them of the love and honour of plays of the Restoration, says that they were the first to write "in the Heroick way." Symonds calls them the "inventors of the heroical romance." And lately Professor Thorndike256 and others have conjectured that the Shakespeare of Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest was following the lead of the two younger dramatists in what is attributed to them as a new style of 'dramatic romance' in his dramas. The argument is that Philaster (acted before October 8, 1610) preceded Cymbeline (acted between April 20, 1610 and May 15, 1611), and suggested to Shakespeare a radical change of dramatic method, first manifest in Cymbeline. And that five other "romances by Beaumont and Fletcher," Foure Playes in One, Thierry and Theodoret, The Maides Tragedy, Cupid's Revenge and A King and No King, constituting with Philaster a distinctly new type of drama, were in all probability acted before the close of 1611, and similarly influenced the method of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, also of 1611.

Before discussing the theory of Shakespeare's indebtedness to Philaster and its "Beaumont-Fletcher" successors, I should like to file a two-fold protest; first, against the use of the word 'romance' for any kind of dramatic production, whatever. 'Romance' applies to narrative of heroic, marvellous, and imaginative content, not to drama. The Maides Tragedy and Cupid's Revenge are not romances; they are romantic tragedies. Philaster, A King and No King, and Cymbeline are, of course, romantic; but specifically they are melodramatic tragicomedies of heroic cast. Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are romantic comedies of marvel or adventure. Nothing is gained in criticism by giving them a name which applies, in English, strictly to narrative, or by regarding them as of a different dramatic species from the romantic dramas of Greene and Shakespeare that preceded them. I object, in the second place, to the grouping of the six plays said to constitute "a distinctly new type of drama" under the denomination "dramatic romances of Beaumont and Fletcher"; for in some of them Beaumont had no hand, and in others, the most important, Fletcher's contribution of romantic novelty is altogether secondary, mostly immaterial. With Thierry and Theodoret, for instance, thus loosely called a "Beaumont-Fletcher romance," it is not proved that Beaumont had anything to do. The drama displays nothing of his vocabulary, rhetoric or poetry. It is a later production by Fletcher, Massinger, and probably one other; and is the only play of this tragic-idyllic-romantic type attempted by Fletcher after Beaumont had ceased writing. In three of the Foure Playes in One, Beaumont does not appear. He may possibly be traced in three scenes of The Triumph of Love; but with no certainty. Fletcher, on the other hand, had very little to do with the three great dramas of sensational romance which form the core of the group in question, Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King. As I have shown, he contributed not more than four scenes to Philaster, four to The Maides Tragedy, and five to A King and No King. And, with the exception of two spectacularly violent scenes in The Maides Tragedy, his contribution, so far as writing goes, is supplementary dialogue and histrionic by-play. Whatever is essentially novel, vital, and distinctive is by Beaumont. To Cupid's Revenge Beaumont's contribution was slighter in volume, but without it the play would lack its distinctive quality. If we must cling to the misnomer 'romance' for any group of plays which may have influenced Shakespeare's later comedies, let us limit the group to its Beaumont core, and speak of the 'Beaumont romance.'

The express novelty in technique of the six arbitrarily selected, so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' is supposed to lie in the dramatic adaptation of certain sensational properties more suitable to narrative fiction; especially in the attempt to heighten interest by adding to the legitimate portrayal of character under stress and strain (as in tragedy), or of character in amusing maladjustment with social convention (as in comedy), the portrayal of vicissitudes of fortune; and in the attempt to enhance the thrills appropriate to tragic and comic appeal by such an amalgamation of the two as shall cause the spectator to run up and down the whole gamut of emotional sensibility. In the realm of tragedy the accentuation of the possibilities of suspense, whether by Beaumont or any other, would be a novelty merely of degree. Cupid's Revenge, and The Triumph of Death (in the Foure Playes in One) could hardly have impressed the author of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as in this respect astounding innovations; and The Maides Tragedy does not, so far as I can determine, sacrifice the unities of interest and effect for enhancement and variety of emotional thrill. In any case, it would be necessary to date Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus, two or three years later than the fact, if one desired to prove that any Shakespearian tragedy was influenced by a Beaumont-Fletcher exaggeration of suspense. Whatever exaggeration may exist had already been practised by Shakespeare himself. If a Beaumont-Fletcher novelty influenced Shakespeare, that novelty must have lain in the transference of tragic suspense to the realm of romantic comedy with all its minor aesthetic appeals, and it would consequently be limited to their tragicomedies, Philaster and A King and No King. The tragicomic masques in the Foure Playes in One, that of Honour and that of Death, are too insignificant to warrant consideration; and Beaumont had nothing to do with them.

In determining the indebtedness, if any, of Cymbeline to Philaster we lack the assistance of authentic dates of composition. The plays were acted about the same time, —Philaster certainly, Cymbeline perhaps, before October 8, 1610. Beaumont and Fletcher's play may have been written as early as 1609; Shakespeare's also as early as 1609 or 1608: in fact, there are critics who assign parts of it to 1606. With regard to the relative priority of Cymbeline and A King and No King, we are more fortunate in our knowledge. The former had certainly been acted by May 15, 1611; the latter was not even licensed until that year, and was not performed at Court till December 26. The probabilities are altogether in favour of a date of composition later than that of Cymbeline.

But that Shakespeare's Cymbeline and his later romantic dramas betray any consciousness of the existence of Philaster and its succeeding King and No King has not been proved. Save for the more emphatic employment of the masque and its accessories of dress and scenic display, of the combination of idyllic, romantic, and sensational elements of material, and the heightened uncertainty of dénouement, all naturally suggested by the demands of Jacobean taste, no variation is discoverable in the course of Shakespeare's dramatic art. And in these respects I find no extrinsic novelty, no momentous change – nothing in Philaster and A King and No King that had not been anticipated by Shakespeare. Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are but the flowering of potentialities latent in the Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure– latent in the story of Apollonius of Tyre, and unavoidable in its dramatization as Pericles, a play that was certainly not influenced by the methods of Philaster. If in his later romantic dramas Shakespeare borrowed any hint of technique from the Beaumont contribution to the 'romances,' he was but borrowing back what Beaumont had borrowed from him or from sources with which Shakespeare was familiar when Beaumont was still playing nursery miracles of the Passion with his brothers in the Gethsemane garden at Grace-Dieu. Shakespeare's later comedies are a legitimate development of his peculiar dramatic art. Beaumont's tragicomedies, with all their poetic and idyllic beauty and dramatic individuality, are novel, so far as construction goes, only in their emphasized employment of the sensational properties and methods mentioned above. Their characteristic, when compared with that of Shakespeare's last group of comedies, is melodramatic rather than romantic. They set, in fine, as did Chapman's Gentleman Usher, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, an example which, abused, led to the decadence of Elizabethan romantic comedy.