Ben Jonson already, in his Every Man out of His Humour (1599), had satirized the common affectation under the similitude of a country knight, Puntarvolo, who, if not crazed, was at any rate "wholly consecrated to singularity" by reason of undue absorption of romances of chivalry, a singularity of "fashion, phrase, and gesture" of the Anthony Munday type and the type glassed in the Mirror of Knighthood. Sir Puntarvolo, who "sits a great horse" and "courts his own lady, as she were a stranger never encountered before," – who feigns that his own house is a castle, who summons with trumpet-blast the waiting-woman to the window, and, saluting her "after some little flexure of the knee," asks for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties" of the "lady" may shine on this side of the building, – who "planet struck" by the "heavenly pulchritude" of his long-suffering and much bewildered poor old wife, conveys to her the information that he is a poor knight-errant pursuing through the forest a hart "escaped by enchantment," and that, wearied, he and his servant make "suit to enter" her fair abode, – Sir Puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fantastic homage, what is he but a predecessor of Don Quixote and Ralph alike, fashioned out of the materials of decadent chivalric fiction common to both? In 1600, Robert Anton had burlesqued in prose and rhyme the romantic ballads of the day in his ludicrous Heroical Adventures of the Knight of the Sea, where "the queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into a knight-errant to do her business in the world."212 And in 1605, also before the appearance of Cervantes' burlesque, Chapman, with the collaboration of Jonson and Marston, had, in Eastward Hoe, satirized that other kind of knight, him of the city and by purchase, in the character of Sir Petronel Flash; and, with him, the aspirations of romance-fed merchants' daughters who would wed knights and dwell in country-castles wrested from giants. Nor had these authors failed to specify the sources of delusion, the Mirror of Knighthood, the Palmerin of England, etc. That both Beaumont and Fletcher were alive, without prompting from Cervantes, to the mania of chivalric emulation which obsessed the train-bands of London is attested by the bombastic talk of "Rosicleer" which Fletcher puts into the mouth of the city captain in Philaster, a play that was written about two years later than The Knight, in 1609 or 1610. There had been musters of the City companies at Mile End as early as 1532, and again under Elizabeth in 1559, and 1585, and 1599, when as many as 30,000 citizens were trained there. But the muster in which Ralph had been chosen "citty captaine" was evidently that of 1605, a general muster under James I.
Why, then, should we suppose that it was beyond the genius of a Beaumont to conceive, as Peele, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and others had conceived, a drama which should burlesque the devotees of such romances as were the fad of the day? And to conceive it without the remotest suggestion from Don Quixote? Whether Beaumont read Spanish or not, and there is no proof that he did read it; whether he had heard of Don Quixote or not, and there is little doubt that he had, there is nothing in The Knight of the Burning Pestle that in any way presupposes either verbal acquaintance with, or constructive dependence upon, the burlesque of Cervantes.213 In short, Professor Schevill, in the article cited above, and following him Dr. Murch, in an admirable introduction to his edition of The Knight, have shown that Beaumont's conception of the hero, Ralph, not only is not of a piece with, but is fundamentally different from, Cervantes' conception of Don Quixote; and they have demonstrated with a minuteness of chapter and verse that need not be recapitulated here that the motives, machinery and characters, ideas and phrases are, in so far as they have relation to romances of chivalry, drawn out of, or suggested by, the English translations already enumerated. This demonstration applies to the adoption of the squire, the rescue of Mrs. Merrythought, the incident of the casket, the liberation of the barber's patients, the mock-heroic love-affair, as well as to the often adduced barber's basin and the scene of the inn. Of the situations, there is none that is not a logical issue of the local conditions or the presuppositions of an original plot; whereas there are, on the other hand, numerous situations in Don Quixote, capable of dramatic treatment, that the Elizabethan playwright of 1607-8 could hardly have refrained from annexing if he had used that story as a source. The setting or background of The Knight, as Professor Schevill has said, in no way recalls that of the Don, "and it is difficult to see how any inspiration got from Cervantes should have failed to include at least a slight shadow of something which implies an acquaintance with Rocinante and Sancho Panza." Beaumont, in addition, not only satirizes, as I have said, the chivalric and bourgeois dramas of Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel like Mucedorus and the Travails, and parodies with rare humour the rant of Senecan tragedy; he not only ridicules the military ardour and pomp of the London citizens, and pokes fun at their unsophisticated assumption of dramatic insight and critical instinct, – with all this satire of the main plot and of the spectator-gods in the machinery, he has combined a romantic plot of common life – Jasper, Luce, and Humphrey, – and a comic plot of humours in which Jasper's father, mother, and brother live as Merrythoughts should. He has produced a whole that in drama was an innovation and in burlesque a triumph. The Knight was still an acting play in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. During the past thirteen years it has been acted by academic amateurs five times in America.
CHAPTER XXV
THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS
Six. —The Coxcombe was first printed in the folio of 1647. Our earliest record of its acting is of a performance at Court by the Children of the Queen's Revels in 1612.214 The day was between October 16 and 24. A list of the principal actors, all Queen's Children, preserved in the folio of 1679, indicates, however, that this was not the first performance; for three of the actors listed had left that company by August 29, 1611; one of them (Joseph Taylor) perhaps before March 30, 1610. The list was evidently contemporary with the first performance. The absolute upper limit of the composition was 1604, for one of the characters speaks of the taking of Ostend. If the play, as we are dogmatically informed by a credulous sequence of critics who take statements at second-hand, principally from German doctors' theses, were derived from Cervantes' story, El Curioso Impertinente, which appeared in the First Part of Don Quixote, printed 1605, or (since we have no evidence that our dramatists read Spanish), from Baudouin's French translation which was licensed April 26, 1608215 and may have reached England about June, – we might have a definite earlier limit of later date. But there is no resemblance between the motif of Cervantes' story, in which a husband out of curiosity and an impudent desire to heighten the treasure of his love would try his wife's fidelity, and that of Beaumont and Fletcher's play, where there is no question of a trial of honour. In Beaumont and Fletcher, we have a revelation of lust at first sight on the part of the husband's friend, Mercury, of unnatural friendly pandering on the part of that 'natural fool' the husband, Antonio, and of easy acquiescence on the part of Maria, the wife, in the cuckolding of her idiotic coxcomb, who with the wool pulled over his eyes takes her back believing that she is innocent. In Cervantes, the husband, sure of his wife and adoring her, urges his friend to make trial of her honour; the friend, outraged at first by the suggestion, refuses, but finally succumbs to passion and wins the wife, likewise, at first, above suspicion; and all die tragically. There is no resemblance in treatment, atmosphere, incidents, or dialogue. The only community of conception is that of a husband playing with fire – risking cuckoldom. But Cervantes' character of the husband is sentimentally deluded; Beaumont and Fletcher's is a contemptible and willing wittol. If Beaumont and Fletcher derived their plot from Cervantes, all that can be said is that they have mutilated and vulgarized the original out of all possibility of recognition.216
Other English dramatists dealing with the theme of The Curious Impertinent between 1611 and 1615 followed Cervantes more or less closely in the main motif, in incident, and in dialogue: the author of The Second Maiden's Tragedy, for instance, who made use of Baudouin's translation; and Nathaniel Field, who used either Baudouin or Shelton's publication of 1612 in his Amends for Ladies. But Beaumont and Fletcher in their tale of a husband cuckolded and pommeled were drawing upon another source, one of the many variants of Le Mari coccu, battu et content, to be found in Boccaccio and before him in Old French poems, and French and Italian Nouvelles. If they derived anything from Cervantes, whose theme is lifted from the Orlando Furioso, it was merely the suggestion for a fresh drama of cuckoldry. That their play was regarded by others as thus inspired appears, I think, from a passage in Ben Jonson's Alchemist, IV, vii, 40-41, where, after Kastril has said to Surly, "You are a Pimpe, and a Trig, and an Amadis de Gaule, or a Don Quixote," Drugger adds, "Or a Knight o' the curious cox-combe, Doe you see?" Field and the rest, writing in or after 1611, had uniformly referred to Cervantes' cuckold as the Curious Impertinent. Jonson wrote his Alchemist between July 12 and October 3, 1610, and up to that time the cuckold had been dramatized as Coxcomb only by Beaumont and Fletcher. The prefix 'Curious' indicates that in Jonson's mind his friend's play is associated with Cervantes' novel; and the further prefix of 'The Knight' looks very much like a reminiscence of "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," which had been played some two years before. This argument from contemporaneity of inspiration and allusion inclines me to date the upper limit of The Coxcombe about 1609, after Baudouin's translation Le Curieux Impertinent had reached England, and Shelton's manuscript had been put in circulation.
If to this conjecture we could add a precise determination of the period of Joseph Taylor's connection with the Queen's Revels' Children, we should have a definite lower limit for the performance of The Coxcombe in which he took part. But I find it impossible to decide whether Taylor had been with the Queen's Revels up to about March 30, 1610, upon which day his name appears among the Duke of York's Players who were recently reorganized and had just obtained a new patent; or had been up to that time with the predecessors of the Duke of York's (Prince Charles's) Company, and had left them shortly after March 30 for the Queen's Revels' Children. In favour of the former alternative are (1) that in the list of the Queen's Revels' actors in The Coxcombe he appears second to Field only, as if a player of long standing with them and high in the company's esteem at the time of the performance; (2) that he does not appear among the actors in the list for Epicoene which was presented first by the Queen's Revels' Children between January 4 and March 25, 1610: Field is still first, Barkstead, who had been eighth on the Coxcombe list, appears now second, as if promoted to Taylor's place, and Giles Carey is third in both lists; (3) that in the March 30 patent to the Duke of York's Players his name ranks only fifth, as if that of a recent acquisition. On this basis the lower limit would be March 25, 1610. In favour of the latter alternative, viz., that Taylor joined the Queen's Children from the Duke of York's, at a date later than March 30, 1610, are the considerations: (1) that when the new Princess Elizabeth's Company, formed April 11, 1611, gives a bond to Henslowe on August 29 of that year, Taylor's name appears with two of the Queen's Revels' Children of March 1610, as if all three had left the Queen's Revels for the new company at the same time; and (2) that their names appear close together after that of the principal organizer as if not only actors of repute in the company which they had left but prime movers in the new organization. On this basis the lower limit for the performance of The Coxcombe, at a time when all three were yet Queen's Revels' Children, would be August 29, 1611. Consulting the restrictions necessitated by the plague rate, we have, then, an option for the date of acting: either between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610, when Jonson had begun his Alchemist, or between November 29, 1610 and July 1611. In the latter case Ben Jonson's "Knight o' the curious coxcombe" would precede the performance of Beaumont and Fletcher's play and could not be an allusion. In the former, it would immediately follow the acting of The Coxcombe, and would manifestly be suggested by that play. I prefer the former option; and date the acting, – on the assumption that Taylor left the Queen's Revels by March 30, 1610, – before that date.217 Since Fletcher's contribution to the play has been mangled by a reviser it is impossible to draw conclusions as to the date of composition from the evidence of his literary style. But the characteristics of Beaumont in the minor plot are those of the period in which the Letter to Ben Jonson and Philaster were written. The play as first performed was condemned for its length by "the ignorant multitude."218 I believe that it was one of the two or three unsuccessful comedies which preceded Philaster; and, as I have said above, that it is the play referred to in the Letter to Ben Jonson, toward the end of 1609.219 If the date of acting was before January 4, 1610, the theatre was Blackfriars; if after, Whitefriars.
The Prologue in the first folio speaks of a revision. But though the hand of one, and perhaps of another, reviser is unmistakably present, the play is properly included among Beaumont and Fletcher's works. In the commendatory verses of 1647, Hills and Gardiner speak of the play as Fletcher's, but all tests show that Beaumont wrote a significant division of it, – the natural, vigorous, tender, and poetic subplot of Ricardo's desertion of Viola and his ultimate reclamation, – with the exception of three scenes and parts of two or three more. The exceptions are the first thirty-five lines of Act I, which have been supplied by some reviser; I, 3, in which also the reviser appears; I, 5, the drinking-bout in the tavern, where some of the words (e. g. "claw'd") indicate Fletcher, – and the gratuitous obscenity, Fletcher or his reviser; and Act II, 2, where Viola is bound by the tinkers and rescued by Valerio.220 Perhaps, also, the last thirty-six lines of Act III, 3, where Fletcher is discernible in the afterthoughts "a likely wench, and a good wench," "a very good woman, and a gentlewoman," and the hand of a reviser in the mutilation of the verse; and certainly Act IV, 3, where Fletcher appears at his best in this play.
The romantic little comedy of Ricardo and Viola is so loosely joined with the foul portrayal of the Coxcomb who succeeds in prostituting his wife to his friend, that it might be published separately and profitably as the work of Beaumont.221 It is well constructed; and it conveys a noble tribute to the purity and constancy of woman, her grace of forgiveness, and her influence over erring man. When Viola speaks she is a living person, instinct with recklessness, sweetness, and pathos. Few heroines of Elizabethan comedy have compressed so much reality and poetry into so narrow a compass. "Might not," she whispers when stealing forth at night to meet Ricardo: —222
Might not God have made
A time for envious prying folk to sleep
Whilst lovers met, and yet the sun have shone?
And then:
Alas, how valiant and how fraid at once
Love makes a Virgin!
When she comes upon her lover staggering outside the tavern with his sodden comrades,223 with what simplicity she shudders:
I never saw a drunken man before;
But these I think are so…
My state is such, I know not how to think
A prayer fit for me; only I could move
That never Maiden more might be in love!
When, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds that her rescuer is even more a peril,224 with what childlike trust she appeals:
Pray you, leave me here
Just as you found me, a poor innocent,
And Heaven will bless you for it!
When again deserted, with what pathos she sighs:
"I'll sit me down and weep;
All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower
Droops now, as well as I!"
And, finally, when she has rediscovered Ricardo, and conquered his self-reproach by her forgiveness, which is "to love you," with what admirable touch of nature and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude to her story and herself:225
Methinks I would not now, for any thing,
But you had mist me: I have made a story
Will serve to waste many a winter's fire,
When we are old. I'll tell my daughters then
The miseries their Mother had in love,
And say, "My girls, be wiser"; yet I would not
Have had more wit myself.
Ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development of personality; and the rural scenes and characters are convincing.
In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;226 and here and there, Rowley.227 I should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's – in dramatizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism.
Though The Coxcombe was not successful in its first production before the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well received and favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court in 1612 in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the City theatres after the Restoration, and before 1682. In the revivals Beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy called The Fugitives, constructed by Richardson and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792. With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the Ricardo of the original), and Mrs. Jordan as Julia (alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran for a dozen nights or more.
7. —Philaster or Love lies a-Bleeding was "divers times acted at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his Majesties Servants." Under the second title in the Scourge of Folly, entered for publication October 8, 1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and I have already stated my reasons as based upon the history of the theatres228 for believing that its first performance took place between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610.
We might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of Hereford's Scourge of Folly, if we could affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. For just before the epigram on Love lies a-Bleeding, which, I think, without doubt, applies to Philaster, appears one To the Roscius of these times, Mr. W. Ostler, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's Revels' Children, – most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the time, – in 1601 when Jonson's Poetaster was acted. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Burbadge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,229 before Evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in 1608, some of the Queen's Revels' Children "growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, were taken to strengthen the King's service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this deposition places the transference of Underwood, Field, and Ostler to the King's Company between the beginning of April 1608 when the Revels' Children were temporarily suppressed and August of that year when the Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and others took over Evans's unexpired lease of Blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. But the deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily with, or under the supervision of, the King's Company at Blackfriars between December 7, 1609 and January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by March 25, 1610, and does not appear in the lists of the King's Men till 1616; and there is no record of Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company before the end of 1610, when they acted in Jonson's Alchemist (after October 3). Since Underwood and Ostler were not with the new Queen's Revels after January of that year, it is probable that Davies's epigram to the latter as "the Roscius of these times" in the Scourge of Folly, entered for publication on October 8, 1610, was written after Ostler had attained distinction in Shakespeare's company, the company of the leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to Ostler with that of the epigram to Fletcher on Philaster presented by that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the epigrams, – that is to say, between January 4 and October, 1610.
Since, however, the epigrams in The Scourge of Folly, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind. Of much greater weight as confirming the date of Philaster, as conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare's Cymbeline not only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific detail. I shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there is nothing in the Philaster or the Cymbeline to indicate the priority of the former. But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.230 For the Cymbeline, I accept the date assigned by the majority of critics, 1609. Shakespeare had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in mind since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage in Much Ado About Nothing (the quarto of 1600). In execution the play is, with The Winter's Tale and the Tempest, the dramatic sequel of that first of his "dramatic romances," – of which the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a wife or child, – the Pericles written in 1607 or 1608. And since already in Pericles, Shakespeare had blazed this new path, I cannot for a moment accept the hypothesis that he is in his Cymbeline borrowing profusely from Philaster, a work of comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of construction to the somewhat novel – to them entirely novel – method of the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved in Pericles and Cymbeline. And still the more so when one reflects that, in Pericles and Cymbeline, aside from the leading conception, everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to As You Like It and Twelfth Night; and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic construction in Philaster, otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of those earlier comedies and of the Pericles and Cymbeline would not suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that Philaster was first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July 1610.
The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that author credit for practically the whole work, – "Thou … raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of 1647, mentions Love Lies a-Bleeding among Fletcher's "incomparable plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene "when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he says:
Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared to thee,
In thy Philaster and Maids Tragedy!
Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray …
for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few insertions or revisions by Fletcher, Philaster is Beaumont's (and practically the same holds true of The Maides Tragedy, and the Bessus play —A King and No King). In Philaster Fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are I, 1b (from the King's entry, line 89 – line 358,231– a revision and enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2b (from Enter Megra), II, 4b (from Megra above), V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 was written by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14 to 29 (from Enter Arethusa and Bellario to "how brave she keeps him"). Similarly, the first draught of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34 (exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long tirade) and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end). But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas, tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." The last three lines of that soliloquy are his:
Soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments
Where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat
And the cold marble melt;232
and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of Philaster's accusation of Arethusa. "The story of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten, – "these sad texts"233 Fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating.
It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes are elaborative, bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally easy, at times bustling, at times spectacular, but not vitally contributory to the business of the play. They comprise the longest speeches of the King, Pharamond, Philaster, Megra, and Bellario. Some of these, such as the King's denunciation of Megra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar rhetoric. The bawdy half-scene with its maid of easy honour is his; the discovery of the low intrigue, the simulated masque and the mob-scene are his. They may display, but they do not develop, characters. They are sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully poetic as in V, 3, 83-84, where his "all your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble" anticipates Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic; but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation of Beaumont. The play, in fact, is not only preponderatingly but primarily Beaumont's, from the excellent exposition in the first act to the series of sensational surprises which precede the dénouement in the fifth. The conception of the characters and the complication are distinctive of that writer's plots: the impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence toward the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and his unwarranted suspicion of the honour of his mistress. The subtle revelations of personality are Beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric pathos and beauty of Bellario, the nobler aspects of Dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet bewilderments and unmerited tribulations of Arethusa, the combination of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization, the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical insights, and the memorable lines. His, too, the humour of the rural sketches – the Country Fellow who has "seen something yet," the occasional frank animality, as well as the tender beauty of innocence. Not only are the virtues of the play Beaumont's but some of its faults of conception and construction; and those faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortuitous succession of the crises, and the subordination of Bellario in the dénouement.