Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

The resemblance between Philaster and Cymbeline, such as it is, is closer than that between Philaster and the Shakespearian successors of Cymbeline, —The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. But the common features of all these plays, the juxtaposition of idyllic scenes and interest with those of royalty, the combination of sentimental, tragic, and comic incentives to emotion, the false accusations of unchastity and the resulting jealousy, intrigue, and crime, the wanderings of an innocent and distressed woman in boy's clothing, the romantic localization, did not appear first in either Philaster or Cymbeline. Philaster and Cymbeline follow numerous clues in the idyllic-comic of Love's Labour's Lost and Midsummer-Night's Dream; in the idyllic-romantic-pathetic of Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; and for that matter in the materials furnished by Greene, Lodge, Sidney, Sannazzaro, Montemayor, Bandello, Cinthio and Boccaccio; and in the romantic and tragicomic fusion already attempted in Much Ado, All's Well, and Measure for Measure. For the character and the trials of Imogen, Shakespeare did not require the inspiration of a Beaumont. He had been busied with the figure of Innogen (as he then called her) as early as 1599; for in the 1600 quarto of Much Ado she appears by sheer accident in a stage direction as the wife of the Leonato of that play. He had been using the sources from which Cymbeline is drawn, – Holinshed and Boccaccio, and that early romantic drama, Fidele and Fortunio, – before Philaster was written. And it is much more likely that the Belarius of Shakespeare and the Bellario of Beaumont were both suggested by the Bellaria of Greene's Pandosto, than that Shakespeare borrowed from Beaumont. Nor is Shakespeare likely to have been indebted to Beaumont's example for the sensational manner of the dénouement in Cymbeline– the succession of fresh complications and false starts by which suspense is sustained. These are precisely the features that distinguish those scenes of Pericles which by the consensus of critics are assigned to Shakespeare; and Pericles was written by 1608, at least as early as Philaster, and in all probability earlier. In his story of Marina, Shakespeare is merely pursuing the sensational methods of Measure for Measure and anticipating those of The Winter's Tale. In general, the plot lies half-way between the tragicomic possibilities of the Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, All's Well, and Measure for Measure, and the romantic manipulation of Cymbeline and the later plays.

In fine, there is closer resemblance between Cymbeline and half a dozen of Shakespeare's earlier comedies, than between Cymbeline and Philaster; and it might more readily be shown that the author of Philaster was indebted to those half-dozen plays, than Shakespeare to Philaster. The differences between the Beaumont 'romances' and Shakespeare's later romantic comedies are in fact more vital than the similarities. In Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King the central idea is of contrast between sentimental love and unbridled lust, and this gives rise to misunderstanding, intrigue, and violence. In Shakespeare's later comedies the central motive is altogether different: it is of disappearance and discovery. The disappearance is occasioned by false accusation or conspiracy. In Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, the dramatic interest revolves about the pursuit of a lost wife or child, the wanderings and trials of the heroine, and her recovery;257 in The Tempest, about the disappearance and discovery of the ousted Duke and his daughter. There is no resemblance between Beaumont's love-lorn maidens in page's garb pursuing the unconscious objects of their affection and Shakespeare's joyous girls and traduced wives. Nor is there in Shakespeare's later comedies any analogue to the sensual passion of the 'Beaumont and Fletcher romances,' to their Bachas, Megras, and Evadnes, their ultra-sentimental Philasters, their blunt soldier-counselors and boastful poltroons. Pisanio and Cloten have respectively no kinship with Dion and Pharamond. What appears to be novel in Pericles and its Shakespearian successors, the somewhat melodramatic dénouement, is, as I have said, but the modification of the playwright's well-known methods in conformity with the contemporary demand for more highly seasoned fare. But, in essence, the dramatic careers of Imogen and Hermione, are no more sensational than those of their older sisters, Hero, Helena, and Isabella. And what is most evidently not novel with Shakespeare in his later romantic comedies, – the consistent dramatic interaction between crisis and character, – is precisely what the 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' do not always possess. Beaumont's characterization at its best, with all its naturalness, compelling pathos, poignancy, and abandon is lyrical or idyllic rather than dramatic; Fletcher's is expository and histrionic – of manners rather than the man.

Beaumont did not influence Shakespeare. And if not Beaumont, then certainly not Fletcher; for in the actual composition of the core of the so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' Fletcher's share was altogether subordinate; and since after the dissolution of the partnership he attempted but one romantic tragic drama of that particular kind, Thierry and Theodoret, – and that a clumsy failure, – it must be concluded that in the designing of those 'romances' his share was even less significant. But to appreciate the contribution of Beaumont to Elizabethan drama, and his place in literary history, it is fortunately not necessary to assume that he diverted from its natural course the dramatic technique of a master, twenty years his senior and for twenty years before Beaumont began to write, intimately acquainted with the conditions of the stage, – the acknowledged playwright of the most successful of theatrical companies and, in spite of changing fashions, the most steadily progressive and popular dramatic artist of the early Jacobean period. With regard to Beaumont it is marvel sufficient, that between his twenty-fifth and his twenty-eighth year of age he should have elaborated in dramatic art, even with the help of Fletcher, so striking a combination of preceding models, and have infused into the resulting heroic-romantic type such fresh poetic vigour and verve of movement.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER XXIX

CONCLUSION

Beaumont's poetic virtues are his peculiar treasure; but the dramatic method of his heroic-romantic plays lent itself lightly to imitation and debasement. Not so much The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King, which respect the unities of interest and effect, as Philaster, The Coxcombe, and Cupid's Revenge, to which Fletcher's contribution of captivating theatrical 'business' and device was more considerable. Some of these plays, and some of Shakespeare's, too, and of Marston's, and Chapman's, and Webster's, paved the way for the heroic play of the Restoration – a melodramatic development of tragicomedy and sentimental tragedy, in which philandering sentiment, strained and histrionic passion, took the place of romantic love and virile conflict, – a drama in which an affected view of life tinged crisis and character alike, an unreasoning devotion to royalty or some other chivalric ideal obscured personal dignity and moral responsibility, and the thrill of surprise dissipated the catharsis, proper to art, whether tragic or comic.

Upon the future of the comedy of intrigue and manners, Beaumont exercised no distinctive influence. In plays like The Coxcombe and The Scornful Ladie, the genius of Fletcher dominated the scenes of lighter dialogue and comic complication. And it is through comedies of intrigue and manners written by Fletcher alone or in company with others, especially Massinger, that Fletcher's individual genius exercised most influence on the subsequent history of the drama. The characteristics which won theatrical preëminence for his romantic comedies, heroic tragicomedies and tragedies, written after the cessation of Beaumont's activity, were a Fletcherian vivacity of dialogue, a Fletcherian perfection of 'business,' and a Fletcherian exaggeration of the tragicomic spirit and technique of which, in the days of the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership, Beaumont had availed himself but which he, still, by virtue of his critical faculty, had held somewhat in restraint.

From the time of Prynne's Histriomastix, 1633, there have been critics who have pointed to the gradual deterioration of the stage which, beginning, say some, with plays of Shakespeare himself, continued through Beaumont and Fletcher to the drama of the Restoration. Flecknoe, Rymer, Coleridge, Lamb, Swinburne, Ward, have commented upon phases of the phenomenon. And, recently, one of our most judicious contemporary essayists has in a series of articles developed the theme.258 I heartily concur with the scholarly and well-languaged editor of The Nation, in many of his conclusions concerning the general history of this decline; and I have already in this book availed myself with profit of some of his suggestions. I agree with him that the downfall of tragedy began when "the theme was altered from a single master passion to a number of loosely coördinated passions, thus relaxing the rigidity of tragic structure and permitting the fancy to play more intimately through all the emotions"; that this degeneration may be traced to the time "when ecclesiastical authority was broken by scepticism and knowledge, and the soul was left with all its riches of imagination and emotion, but with the principle of individual responsibility discredited and the fibre of self-government relaxed"; that "the consequences may be seen in the Italy of the sixteenth century"; and that "the result is that drama of the court which, besides its frequent actual indecency, is at heart so often non-moral and in the higher artistic sense incomprehensible." But when he ascribes this alteration of the theme of tragedy from a single master passion to a number of "loosely coördinated passions" to our "twin dramatists," and cites as his example The Maides Tragedy in which, as he sees it, we have "but a succession of womanly passions, each indeed cunningly conceived and expressed, but giving us in the end nothing we can grasp as a whole and comprehend"; – and says that Evadne is "no woman at all, unless mere random passionateness can be accounted such," I shake my head in sad demurrer. First, because, as I have tried to show above, Evadne is anything but an incomprehensible embodiment of unmotived passions, and The Maides Tragedy anything but a "loosely coördinated" concern, and secondly, because I disfavour this attribution of the decadence of tragedy, or of comedy, for that matter, to our twin dramatists. To substantiate such a charge it would be incumbent upon the critic to prove not only that the decadence is indubitably visible in the joint-work of Beaumont and Fletcher, but that it is specifically visible in Beaumont's, as in Fletcher's, contribution to that work, and also, that it was not already patent in the dramatic productions of their seniors; that it was not patent in Heywood's Royall King and Loyall Subject, for instance; in the "glaring colours" of Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, and in his Gentleman Usher with its artificial atmosphere of courtly romance, its melodramatic reverses and surprises, its huddling up of poetic justice; in the sensational devices, passionate unrealities and sepulchral action of Marston's Malcontent, the sophistical theme and callous pornography of his Dutch Courtezan, and in the inhuman imaginings of his Insatiate Countess; that it was not patent in the heartless irresponsibility and indecency of Middleton, and in the inartistic warping of tragic situations to comic solutions that characterize his early romantic plays; that it was not patent in the poisonous exhalations, the wildering of sympathy, and the disproportioned art that characterize the White Devil of their immediate contemporary, John Webster.

The decadence was hastened by Fletcher; but not in any distinctive degree by Beaumont. I second Mr. More's commendation of Prynne's "philosophic criticism of 1632 that 'men in theatres are so far from sinne-lamenting sorrow, that they even delight themselves with the representations of those wickednesses,'" but I deplore the application of that criticism to Beaumont and Fletcher, as that "they loosed the bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere bundle of irresponsibilities."

Many of Fletcher's excesses and defects not only in the plays written with Beaumont, but in plays written after his death, have been conferred from the day of Flecknoe to the present upon Beaumont. There is very little "sinne-lamenting sorrow" in the Valentinian of Fletcher, or of Fletcher and Massinger, and very little in Fletcher's Wife for a Month; but in many of Beaumont's scenes in The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King, and The Coxcombe the genuine accents of "sinne-lamenting sorrow" are heard. Fletcher certainly "loosed the bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere bundle of irresponsibilities," but not Beaumont. Let the reader turn to that poet's scenes in the joint-plays (two-thirds of the great ones) as I have indicated them, or to what I have unrolled of Beaumont's mental habit, and judge for himself.259

The concession of the essayist from whom, as a representative of enlightened modern opinion upon the subject, I have been quoting, – that "as Fletcher's work stands, he may appear utterly devoid of conscience, a man to whom our human destinies were mere toys," I hail with delight, although I think that Fletcher the man had more honest ideals than Fletcher the dramatist. But, as a critic, I resent the surmise that Fletcher "was by nature of a manlier, sounder fibre than Beaumont." In the heroic-romantic comedy, The Humorous Lieutenant, Fletcher displays, indeed, as Mr. More says, "a strain almost like that of Shakespeare, upon whom he manifestly modelled himself in everything except Shakespeare's serious insight into human motives." But does that play reveal anything of manlier, sounder fibre than Beaumont's A King and No King?

Written in 1619 The Humorous Lieutenant has enduring vitality, though not because of its tragicomic presupposition; for the wars and rumours of war are rhetorical or humorous, the devilish design of the King upon the chastity of the heroine is predestined to failure, – and the announcement of her death, but a dramatic device which may impose upon the credulity of her noble lover but not upon the audience. In the MS. of 1625 it is styled "a pleasant comedie"; and such it is, of 'humour' and romantic love, upon a background of the heroic. It is Fletcher's best comedy of the kind; one of the best of the later Shakespearian age. The conception of the Lieutenant, whose humour is to fight when he is plagued by loathsome disease and to wench when he is well, is not original, nor is the character of the hero Demetrius; but in the elaboration Fletcher has created these characters anew, has surrounded them with half a dozen other figures no less life-like, and has set them in a plot, cunningly welded of comic, sentimental, and martial elements, and captivatingly original. Though the interest is partly in a wanton intrigue, and the mirth grossly carnal even when not bawdy, I think that the objectionable qualities are, for almost the only time in Fletcher's career in comedy, not ineradicable. The wondrous charm, "matchless spirit," vivacity, and constancy of Celia render the machinations of the procuress, Leucippe, and her "office of concealments" futile, – so much dramatic realism to be accentuated or mitigated at the will of the stage manager; – and the alluring offers of the king are but so many weapons for his own defeat. If the Lieutenant were not an indissoluble compound of hero, swashbuckler, shirker, and "stinkard," I fear, indeed, that he would lose his savour. But the love of Rabelaisian humour is, after all, ingrained in the male of the species, and if the license be not nauseating it is not necessarily damnable. This boisterous, pocky rascal who "never had but two hours yet of happiness," and who courts the battlefield to save him "from the surgeon's miseries," held the stage from the time of Condel, Taylor, and Lowin, to that of Macready and Liston, and there is no reason why his vitality should not be perennial. There are few more laughable scenes in farcical literature than those in which, having drained a philtre intended to make Celia dote upon the King, the Lieutenant imagines himself to be a handsome wench of fifteen, wooes the King most fatuously, even kisses the royal horses as they pass by. The meeting and the parting, the trials and the reunion, of Celia and Demetrius constitute the most convincing and attractive romantic-pathetic love-affairs in Jacobean drama since Shakespeare had ceased to write. Indeed, this "perilous crafty," spirited, "angel-eyed" girl "too honest for them all" who so ingeniously and modestly shames the lustful monarch and wins her affianced prince is not unworthy of the master. Nor is Demetrius. The play contains many genuinely poetic passages, and some of those lines of meteoric beauty – "our lives are but our marches to the grave" – in which Beaumont abounded, and that Fletcher too rarely coined. With all the rankness of its humour, the play has such literary and dramatic excellence that one cannot but regret the infrequency with which Fletcher produced that of which he was capable.

But even this best of Fletcher's heroic-dramatic plays contains, as Mr. More has observed, "one of those sudden conversions which make us wonder whether in his heart he felt any difference between a satyr-like lust and a chaste love – the conversion of the lecherous old king." I grant Fletcher's surpassing excellence in comedy, especially the comedy of manners and intrigue as, for instance, The Chances and the Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and I have elsewhere acknowledged his supremacy after Shakespeare in that realm. But we are now considering not that kind of composition or its technique, but the fibre which might be expected to show itself in compositions involving the element of seriousness. The Humorous Lieutenant is of that kind, – it is called a tragicomedy by some. Has it one tithe of the serious insight into human life of any of Beaumont's plays involving ethical conflict?

Inquiring further into the fibre of Fletcher, let us pass in brief review another play, a genuine tragicomedy this time, A Wife for a Month, written the year before he died, of whose heroine Mr. More says that "from every point of view, ethical and artistic, she is one of the most finely drawn and truest women in the whole range of English drama." The complication, here, assuredly affords opportunity for the display of sound and manly fibre; and the tragicomedy is instructive in more ways than one: it illustrates Fletcher's skill in construction and his disregard of probability; his sense of moral conflict and his insensibility to moral beauty; his power to conceive characteristic situations and his impotence to construct natural characters; his capability of noble sentiment and poetic expression and his beastly perverseness of fancy, his prostitution of art to sordid sensationalism. The story of the cumulative torments to which a lustful usurper subjects the maiden, Evanthe, whom he desires, and Valerio whom she loves, is graphically estimated by one of the dramatis personae, – "This tyranny could never be invented But in the school of Hell: earth is too innocent." Beside it Zola's L'Assommoir smells sweet, and a nightmare lacks nothing of probability. Ugly, however, as the fundamental assumption is: namely, that the tyrant should permit a wedding on condition that at the end of a month the husband shall suffer death, – and with provision that meanwhile the honeymoon shall be surrounded with restriction more intolerable than death itself; and incredible as is the contrivance of the sequel, – kept a-going by the suppression of instinct and commonsense on the part of the hero, and withheld from its proper tragic conclusion by miraculous cure, an impossible conversion, and an unnatural clemency, – the plot is after all deftly knit, and the interest sustained with baleful fascination. But it would be difficult to instance in Jacobean drama a more incongruous juxtaposition of complication morally conceived, and execution callously vulgarized, than that offered by the scene between Valerio and Evanthe on their wedding-night. In the corresponding scene of The Maides Tragedy (II, 1), Beaumont had created a model: Amintor bears himself with dignity toward his shameless and contemptuous bride. But in Fletcher's play it is this "most finely drawn and truest woman" that makes the advances; and she makes them not only without dignity, but with an unmaidenly persistence and persuasiveness of which any abandoned 'baggage' or Russian actress of to-day might be ashamed. And, still, the dramatist is never weary of assuring us that she is the soul of "honour mingled with noble chastity," and clad in "all the graces" that Nature can give. In the various other trying situations in which Evanthe is placed it is requisite to our conviction of reality that she be the "virtuous bud of beauty": but the tongue of this "bud" blossoms into billingsgate, she swears "something awful," and she displays an acquaintance with sexual pathology that would delight the heart even of the most rabid twentieth-century advocate of sex-hygiene for boys and girls in coëducational public schools.

Two or three of the characters are nobly conceived and, on occasion, contrive to utter themselves with nobility. Valerio achieves a poetry infrequent in Fletcher's plays when he says of the shortness of his prospective joys:

"A Paradise, as thou art, my Evanthe,Is only made to wonder at a little,Enough for human eyes, and then to wander from," —

and when he describes the graces of spiritual love. And the Queen's thoughts upon death, though melodramatic, have something of the dignity of Beaumont's style. But the minds of the principal personages reflect not only the flashing current but the turbid estuaries of Fletcher's thought. The passion, save for Valerio's, is lurid, and the humour latrinal. To sketch the bestial even in narrative, however fleeting, is inartistic; to fix it on canvas is offensive; to posture it upon the stage is unpardonable. The last is practically what Fletcher has done here; and the wonder is that he appears to think that he is justifying virtue.

No; Fletcher had not the fibre of Beaumont even when he was writing with him; and he did not achieve "a manlier, sounder fibre," after Beaumont had ceased, and he had swung into the brilliant orbit which he rounded as sole luminary of the stage.

I object again, – and the reader who has followed the exposition of the preceding pages will, I hope, object with me, – to the dictum of a German writer of this latter day, that the reason of the degeneracy of Beaumont and Fletcher, ethically, "seems to lie in the narrowing of the drama from a national interest to the flattery of a courtly caste." Mr. More opines that such an explanation should not be pressed too far; and he suggests that one reason why "we are unable to comprehend many of the persons upon the stage of Beaumont and Fletcher" is that we are similarly unable to comprehend "the more typical men and women who were playing the actual drama of the age." So far as Fletcher's dramatis personae are concerned, there is truth in this; but why couple Beaumont with him? If you omit a character or two in The Woman-Hater, which was a youthful jeu d'esprit, you shall find very few incomprehensible figures among those of Beaumont's creation. And as to the German mentioned above, Dr. Aronstein, what "flattery of a courtly caste" can he possibly detect in Beaumont's satire upon favourites in The Woman-Hater; in that burlesque of bourgeois affectations, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (the Court, too, was still reading the literature there satirized); or in his Philaster, who was a rebel; or in his Amintor of The Maides Tragedy, whose fate hinged upon his shuffling subservience to a king, or in the King himself on whom God sends "unlookt-for sudden death," because of his lust; or in his King Arbaces, whose general has "not patience to looke on whilst you runne these forbidden courses"; or in his scenes of Cupid's Revenge, which scourge the vices of the Court; or in his Sir Roger and Mistress Abigail and her scornful Lady, – or in his Ricardo and Viola, who are just a lover and his lass, and have never dreamed of Court or King at all?