Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

Beaumont's friends were Fletcher's; and Fletcher must have known Browne. It has always seemed strange to me that, when enumerating in his Britannia's Pastorals the pastoral poets of England, – half a dozen of them, his personal acquaintances, – Browne should have omitted Fletcher to whom he was deeply indebted for literary inspiration. Between 1610 and 1613 he had, in his First Book of Britannia's Pastorals (Song 1, end; Song 2, beginning), borrowed the story of Marina and the River-God, as regards not only the main incident but also much of the poetic phrase, from the Faithfull Shepheardesse– the scene in which Fletcher's God of the River rescues Amoret and offers her his love. The borrowing is not at all a plagiarism, but an elaboration of the Amoret episode; and, as such, the imitation is indirect homage to the quondam pastoralist living close by in Southwark. I hesitate to enter upon quest of literary surmise. But some young lion of research might be pardoned if he should undertake to prove that the description of the shepherd Remond which Browne introduces into his first Song just before this borrowing from Fletcher's pastoral drama is homage to Fletcher, pure and direct:

Remond, young Remond, that full well could sing,And tune his pipe at Pan's birth carolling:Who for his nimble leaping, sweetest layes,A lawrell garland wore on holidayes;In framing of whose hand dame Nature sworeThat never was his like nor could be more.88

Conjectural reconstruction of literary relationships is perilously seductive. But it is only fair to apprise the young lion of the delightful certainty that though the trail may run up a tree, it abounds in alluring scents. He will find that no sooner has Browne's Marina concluded the adventure borrowed from Fletcher than she falls in with Remond's younger companion, "blithe Doridon," who, in the Second Book of the Pastorals, written in 1614-15, swears fidelity to Remond —

Entreats him thenThat he might be his partner, since no menHad cases liker; he with him would goe —Weepe when he wept and sigh when he did so;89

and that, in the second Song of the First Book,90 Doridon, who also is a poet, is described at a length not at all necessary to the narrative, and in terms that more than echo the description of the beauty of Hermaphroditus in the poem of that name which has been traditionally attributed to Beaumont. This Doridon is a genius:

Upon this hill there sate a lovely swaine,As if that Nature thought it great disdaineThat he should (so through her his genius told him)Take equall place with swaines, since she did hold himHer chiefest worke, and therefore thought it fit,That with inferiours he should never sit…

He is "fairest of men"; when he pipes "the wood's sweet quiresters" join in consort – "A musicke that would ravish choisest eares." He is, as I have said, a poet, —

And as when Plato did i' th' cradle thrive,Bees to his lips brought honey from their hive;So to this boy they came; I know not whetherThey brought, or from his lips did honey gather…

He is also a master in the revels,

His buskins (edg'd with silver) were of silke …Those buskins he had got and brought awayFor dancing best upon the revell day.

Browne, by the way, wrote the Prefatory Address to this Book of Britannia's Pastorals, June 18, 1613, only three months after Beaumont's Masque upon the "revel day" was acted; and the book was licensed for printing, the same year, November 15.

Returning to our young lion, he will, I fear me, exult (with lust of chase or laughter?) when in the third song of this book, he notes that Doridon, overhearing the love-colloquy of Remond and Fida, can find no other trope to describe their felicity than one drawn from Ovid, and from the so-called Beaumont poem of 1602, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, —

Sweet death they needs must have, who so uniteThat two distinct make one Hermaphrodite.91

Lured by such scents as these, our beast of prey may pounce – upon a shadow, or not? – when, having tracked the meandering Browne to the second song of the Second Book, he there hears him rehearse the names of

What shepheards on the sea were seeneTo entertaine the Ocean's queene, —

the poets of England: Astrophel (Sidney), "the learned Shepheard of faire Hitching hill" (Chapman), all loved Draiton, Jonson, well-languag'd Daniel, Christopher Brooke, Davies of Hereford, and Wither,

Many a skilfull swaineWhose equals Earth cannot produce againe,But leave the times and men that shall succeed themEnough to praise that age which so did breed them, —

and then, without interim, proceed:

Two of the quaintest swains that yet have beeneFailed their attendance on the Ocean's queene,Remond and Doridon, whose haplesse fatesLate sever'd them from their more happy mates.92

Browne, who had dropped these companion shepherds of the "pastoral and the rural song" three songs back, now needs them to scour the forests for the vanished Fida of his fiction. If he had not needed them for the narrative here resumed, might they not have attended the Ocean's queen with the other poets of England, – all, but Sidney, his personal friends, – as Fletcher and Beaumont? This is precisely the way in which Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Rafael introduced into their frescoes the Tornabuoni and Medici of their time. We may leave the inquisitive to follow them to that realm where, forsaking mythical and pastoral romance,

Many weary dayesThey now had spent in unfrequented wayes.About the rivers, vallies, holts, and crags,Among the ozyers and the waving flags,They merely pry, if any dens there be,Where from the Sun might harbour crueltie:Or if they could the bones of any spy,Or torne by beasts, or humane tyranny.They close inquiry made in caverns blind,Yet what they look for would be death to find.Right as a curious man that would descry,Led by the trembling hand of Jealousy,If his fair wife have wrong'd his bed or no,Meeteth his torment if he find her so.93

I cannot, however, refrain from pointing the venturesome researcher, – with irony – may be not Mephistophelian, but merely pyrrhonic, – to the dramatic misfortunes of Bellario, Aspasia, and Evadne, and other heroines of the dramatized romances in which Beaumont and Fletcher's theatre of the Globe was indulging at the time. And I would ask him after he has read the sage advice of Remond to the disconsolate shepherd, some two hundred lines further down, to turn to Fletcher's poem of 1613 Upon an Honest Man's Fortune, and decide whether the poet-philosopher of the one is not very much of the same opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other.94

CHAPTER X

AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT

Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's Inn enters the circle of Beaumont's associates not only as the advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in Shakespeare's company of actors turn for counsel in an important suit at law, and as the encomiast of Shakespeare himself a year or two later:

He that from Helicon sends many a rill,Whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men,95

but as one of the pastoralists of the Inns of Court. He was also a friend of Beaumont's older associates, Jonson, Drayton, and Davies of Hereford. From an unexpected quarter comes information of Brooke's intimacy with still others who at various points impinged upon Beaumont's career, – with Inigo Jones, for instance, who designed the machinery for Beaumont's Masque, and with Sir Henry Nevill, the father of the Sir Henry who, a few years later, supplied the publisher Walkley with the manuscript of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King. When we let ourselves in upon the elder Sir Henry carousing at the Mitre with Brooke and Jones, and others known to Beaumont as members of the Mermaid, in a famous symposium held some time between 1608 and September 1611, we begin to feel that it was not by mere accident that the manuscript of A King and No King fell into the hands of the Nevill family. Sir Henry the elder, of Billingbear, Berkshire, was a relative of Sir Francis Bacon, and a friend of Davies of Hereford, and of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to Nevill about 1611 one of his most graceful epigrams; probably, also, of Francis Beaumont's brother John, who wrote a graceful tribute to the memory of one of the gentlewomen of the family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill. This Sir Henry was an influential member of Parliament, a statesman, a courtier, and a diplomat, as well as a patron of poets. He came near being Secretary of the realm. It is his name that we find scribbled with those of Bacon and Shakespeare, about 1597, possibly by Davies of Hereford, the admirer of all three, over the cover of the Northumbrian Manuscript of "Mr. Ffrauncis Bacon's" essays and speeches. Sir Henry did not die till 1615, and it is more than likely that the play, A King and No King, which was acted about 1611, and of which his family held the manuscript, had his "approbation and patronage" as well as that of Sir Henry the younger "to the commendation of the authors"; and that both father and son knew Beaumont and Fletcher well.

The Mitre Inn, a common resort of hilarious Templars, still stands at the top of Mitre Court, a few yards back from the thoroughfare of Fleet Street.

The symposium to which I have referred is celebrated in a copy of macaronic Latin verses, entitled Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium Philosophicum;96 and I may be pardoned if I quote from the contemporary translation by John Reynolds of New College, the opening stanzas, since one is set to wondering how many other of the jolly souls "convented," beside Brooke and Jones and Nevill, our Beaumont knew. —

Whosoever is contentedThat a number be convented,Enough but not too many;The Miter is the place decreed,For witty jests and cleanly feed,The betterest of any.There will come, though scarcely current,Christopherus surnamèd TorrentAnd John yclepèd Made;And Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foeTo sup, his dinner will forgoe —Will come as soon as bade.Sir Robert Horse-lover the while,Ne let Sir Henry count it vileWill come with gentle speed;And Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-growsAnd John surnamèd Little-hoseWill come if there be need.And Richard Pewter-Waster bestAnd Henry Twelve-month-good at leastAnd John Hesperian true.If any be desideratedHe shall be amerciatedForty-pence in issue.Hugh the Inferior-Germayne,Nor yet unlearnèd nor prophaneInego Ionicke-pillar.But yet the number is not righted:If Coriate bee not invited,The jeast will want a tiller.

In his edition of Aubrey's Brief Lives, Dr. Clark supplies the glossary to these punning names. Torrent is, of course, Brooke. Johannes Factus, or Made, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's Inn, John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent in well known epistles of Henry Twelve-month-good, the Sir Henry Goodere, or Goodeere, who married Frances (Drayton's Panape), one of the daughters of "the first cherisher of Drayton's muse." Ne-let Sir Henry count it vile is the elder Nevill under cover of his family motto, Ne vile velis. Inigo Jones, Ionicke-pillar is even more thinly disguised in the Latin original as Ignatius architectus, Hugh Holland (the Inferior-Germayne) was of Beaumont's Mermaid Club, the writer – beside other poems – of commendatory verses for Jonson's Sejanus in 1605, and of the sonnet Upon the Lines and Life of that other frequenter of the Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." Holland's "great patronesse," by the way, was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, whose daughter married Beaumont's kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was by the great Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate, the "legge-stretcher of Odcombe" without whose presence this Convivium Philosophicum would "want its tiller." Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard Martin (the Pewter-waster). He was fond of the drama; had organized a masque at the Middle Temple at the time of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage; and it is to him that Ben Jonson dedicates the folio of The Poetaster (1616). In 1618, as Recorder of London, he was the bosom friend of Brooke, Holland, and Hoskins: he died of just such a "symposiaque" as this, a few years later, and he lies in the Middle Temple. Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic Latin verses of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself (surnamed Little-hose). He had been a freshman of the Middle Temple in the year when Beaumont was beginning at the Inner. He was an incomparable writer of drolleries, over which we may be sure that Beaumont many a time held his sides, – a wag whose "excellent witt gave him letters of commendacion to all ingeniose persons," a great friend of Beaumont's Jonson, and of Raleigh, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Daniel.

Of the participants in Serjeant Hoskins's Convivium Philosophicum, we find, then, that several were of those who came into personal contact with Beaumont, and that of the rest, nearly all moved in the field of his acquaintance. Concerning a few, Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe (Cranefield), Sir Robert Horse-lover (Phillips), Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows (Conyoke or Connock), and John Hesperian (West), I have no information pertinent to the subject.

CHAPTER XI

BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER; RELATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE

Glimpses of the more personal relations of Beaumont with the world of rank and fashion, and to some extent of his character, are vouchsafed us in the few non-dramatic verses that may with certainty be ascribed to him. Unfortunately for our purpose, most of those included in the Poems, "by Francis Beaumont, Gent.," issued by Blaiklock in 1640 and printed again in 1653, and among The Golden Remains "of those so much admired Dramatick Poets, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gents.," in 1660, are, as I have already said, by other hands than his: some of them by his brother, Sir John, and by Donne, Jonson, Randolph, Shirley, and Waller. Of the juvenile amatory lyrics, addresses, and so-called sonnets in these collections, it is not likely that a single one is by him; for in an epistle to Sidney's daughter, the Countess of Rutland, written when he was evidently of mature years and reputation, – let us suppose, about 1611, Beaumont says:

I would avoid the common beaten waysTo women usèd, which are love or praise.As for the first, the little wit I haveIs not yet grown so near unto the graveBut that I can, by that dim fading light,Perceive of what or unto whom I write.

Let others, "well resolved to end their days With a loud laughter blown beyond the seas," – let such

Write love to you: I would not willinglyBe pointed at in every company,As was that little tailor, who till deathWas hot in love with Queen Elizabeth.And for the last, in all my idle daysI never yet did living woman praiseIn prose or verse.

A sufficient disavowal, this, of the foolish love songs attributed to him by an uncritical posterity.

As for this "strange letter," as he denominates it, from which I have quoted, the sincere, as well as brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaintance with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess lived but twenty-five miles north-west of Charnwood, and in the same country of Leicestershire. One can see the towers from the heights above Grace-Dieu. The Beaumonts undoubtedly had been at Belvoir, time and again. "If I should sing your praises in my rhyme," says he to her of the "white soul" and "beautiful face,"

I lose my ink, my paper and my timeAnd nothing add to your o'erflowing store,And tell you nought, but what you knew before.Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swear,Madam, I think you are) endure to hearTheir own perfections into question brought,But stop their ears at them; for, if I thoughtYou took a pride to have your virtues known,(Pardon me, madam) I should think them none.

Many a writer of the day agreed with Beaumont concerning Elizabeth Sidney, – "every word you speak is sweet and mild." She, said Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden, "was nothing inferior to her father in poesie"; she encouraged it in others. But her husband, Roger, fifth Earl of Rutland, though a lover of plays himself, does not appear to have favoured his Countess's patronage of literary men. He burst in upon her, one day when Ben Jonson was dining with her, and "accused her that she kept table to poets." Of her excellence Jonson bears witness in four poems. Most pleasantly in that Epistle included in his The Forrest, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he says:

With you, I know my off'ring will find grace:For what a sinne 'gainst your great father's spirit,Were it to think, that you should not inheritHis love unto the Muses, when his skillAlmost you have, or may have, when you will?Wherein wise Nature you a dowrie gave,Worth an estate treble to that you have.Beauty, I know is good, and blood is more;Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what storeThe world hath scene, which all these had in trust,And now lye lost in their forgotten dust.

And in an Epigram97 To the Honour'd – Countesse of —, evidently sent to her during the absence of her husband on the continent, he compliments her conduct, —

Not only shunning by your act, to doeOught that is ill, but the suspition too, —

at a time when others are following vices and false pleasures. But "you," he says,

admit no company but good,And when you want those friends, or neare in blood,Or your allies, you make your bookes your friends,And studie them unto the noblest ends,Searching for knowledge, and to keepe your mindThe same it was inspired, rich, and refin'd.

Among other admirers of the Countess of Rutland was Sir Thomas Overbury, who, according to Ben Jonson, was "in love with her." Beaumont would have known the brilliant and ill-starred Overbury, of Compton Scorpion, who was not only an intimate of Jonson's, but a devoted admirer of their mutual friend, Sir Henry Nevill of Billingbear.

And if Beaumont was on terms of affectionate familiarity with Sidney's daughter, he could not but have known Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, as well, the idol of William Browne's epitaph, and of his old friend Drayton's eulogy, on the "Fair Shepherdess,"

To whom all shepherds dedicate their lays,And on her altars offer up their bays.

"In her time Wilton house," says Aubrey, "was like a College; there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. She was the greatest patronesse of witt and learning of any lady in her time." And if Beaumont knew the mother, then, also, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the son, to whom his master, Jonson, dedicates in 1611, the tragedy of Catiline, prefaced, as we have already observed, by verses of Beaumont himself.

Whatever Rutland's objection may have been to his Countess's patronage of poets, we may be sure that that lady's attitude toward Beaumont and his literary friends was seconded by her husband's old friend the Earl of Southampton, with whom in earlier days Rutland used to pass away the time "in London merely in going to plaies every day." Southampton had remained a patron of Burbadge, Shakespeare, and the like. And when he died in 1624, we find not only Beaumont's acquaintance, Chapman, but Beaumont's brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his memory. "I keep that glory last which is the best," writes Sir John,

The love of learning which he oft express'dIn conversation, and respect to thoseWho had a name in arts, in verse, in prose.

Since Southampton was "a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves"98 we may figure not only the two Beaumonts but their beloved Countess participating in such discussion of noble themes, – if not in London, then at Belvoir Castle or Titchfield House or Grace-Dieu Priory. If at Belvoir, Leland, the traveler, helps us to the scene. The castle, he says "standyth on the very knape of an highe hille, stepe up eche way, partely by nature, partely by working of mennes handes, as it may evidently be perceived. Of the late dayes [1540], the Erle of Rutland hath made it fairer than ever it was. It is straunge sighte to se be how many steppes of stone the way goith up from the village to the castel. In the castel be 2 faire gates, And its dungeon is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a place to walk yn, to se at the countery aboute, and raylid about the round [waull, and] a garden [plot] in the middle."99 One sees Francis toiling up the "many steps," received by his Countess and the rest, and rejoicing with them in the view of the twenty odd family estates from the garden on the high tower.

Returning to Francis Beaumont's epistle to the Countess of Rutland, we observe that it concludes with a promise:

But, if your brave thoughts, which I must respectAbove your glorious titles, shall acceptThese harsh disorder'd lines, I shall ere longDress up your virtues new, in a new song;Yet far from all base praise and flattery,Although I know what'er my verses be,They will like the most servile flattery shew,If I write truth, and make the subject you.

The opportunity for "the new song" came in a manner unexpected, and, alas, too soon. In August 1612, but a brief month or so after she had been freed by her husband's death from the misery of an unhappy marriage, she was herself suddenly carried off by some mysterious malady. According to a letter of Chamberlain to Sir R. Winwood, "Sir Walter Raleigh is slandered to have given her certaine Pills that despatch'd her." That, Sir Walter, even with the best intent in the world, could not have done in person, for he was in the Tower at the time. Perhaps the medicine referred to was one of those "excellent receipts" for which Raleigh and his half-brother, Adrian Gilbert, were famous. The chemist Gilbert was living in those days with the Countess of Rutland's aunt, at Wilton.

Three days after the death of the lady whom he so revered, Beaumont poured out his grief in verses justly praised as

A Monument that will then lasting beWhen all her Marble is more dust than she.

That is what John Earle, writing after Beaumont's own death, some four years later, says of the Elegy on the Death of the Virtuous Lady, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland. And so far as the elegy proper is concerned, – that is to say, the first half of the poem, ere it blazes into scathing indictment of the physicians who helped the Countess to her grave, – I fully agree with Earle. Here is poetry of the heart, pregnant with pathos, not only of the untimely event – she was but twenty-seven years old, – but of the unmerited misfortune that had darkened the brief chapter of her existence: her father's death while she was yet in infancy, —

Ere thou knewest the use of tearsSorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;

sorrow in her wedded life, —

As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief,There were enough to meet thee; and the chiefBlessing of women, marriage, was to theeNought but a sacrament of misery.

And then,

Why didst thou die so soon? Oh, pardon me!I know it was the longest life to thee,That e'er with modesty was call'd a span,Since the Almighty left to strive with man.

In this threnody of wasted loveliness and innocence, we have our most definite revelation of Beaumont's personality as a man among men: his tenderness, his fervid friendship, his passionate reverence for spotless womanhood and the sacrament of holy marriage (Jonson has given us the facts about her loathsome husband); his admiration of the chivalric great – as of the hero whose life was ventured and generously lost at Zutphen "to save a land," his contempt for pedantic stupidity and professional ineptitude, his faith in the "everlasting" worth of poetic ideals, his realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-balancing dignity, the cleasing poignancy, of human sorrow; his reluctant but profound submission to the decree of "the wise God of Nature"; his acceptance of the inexplicable irony of life and of the crowning mercy:

I will not hurt the peace which she should haveBy looking longer in her quiet grave, —

the consummation that all his heroines of tortured chastity, the Bellarios, Arethusas, Aspasias, Pantheas, Uranias, of his mimic world, devoutly desired. And as a revelation of his poetic temper, perhaps all the more for its accessory bitterness and rhetorical conceits, this elegy is as valuable a piece of documentary evidence as exists outside of Beaumont's dramatic productions. It displays not a few of the characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his preference in the best of their joint-plays for serious poetic theme, his realist humour and bold satiric force, his quiverful of words and rhythmical sequence, his creative imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity, —