CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAST PLAY
Eleven. – The first quarto of
The Scornful Ladie
, entered S. R., March 19, 1616, assigns the play to Beaumont and Fletcher, and says that it "was acted with great applause by the Children of Her Maiesties Revels in the Blacke Fryers." The references in Act V, 3, 4, to the Cleve wars show that it could not have been written before March 25, 1609. The sentence, "Marry some cast Cleve captain," is taken by some to indicate a date as early as the spring of that year, when James I "promised to send an English force to aid the Protestant party,"
245
245
Murray,
Eng. Dram. Comp.
, I, 153; Warwick Bond,
Variorum Ed. of B. and F.
, I, 359.
and when, undoubtedly, "cast" captains of the English army were clamouring for foreign service. In that case, the play was acted before January 4, 1610, for by that date the children of the Queen's Revels had ceased playing at Blackfriars. Since the plague regulations closed the theatres between March 9 and December 7, 1609, save for a week in July, these arguments would fix the performance in the Christmas month, December 7 to January 4, 1610. To this supposition a reference in Act I, 2 to binding the Apocrypha by itself, lends plausibility, if, as Fleay thinks, the sentence points to the discussion during 1609-1610 concerning the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Douay version of the Bible and its exclusion from the authorized version – both in progress at the time, and both completed in 1610.
246
246
Chr. Eng. Dr.
, I, 181.
But the Apocrypha controversy was continued long after 1610.
A later date of composition than January 4, 1610, is, however, indicated if a line, III, 1, 341, to which attention has not previously been directed, in which the Elder Loveless says of Abigail, who is acting the termagant, "tie your she-Otter up, good Lady folly, she stinks worse than a Bear-baiting," was suggested by the termagant Mrs. Otter and her husband of the Bear-garden, in Jonson's
Epicoene
, acted between January 4 and March 10, 1610. And the two sentences in which Cleve is mentioned, "There will be no more talk of the Cleve wars while this lasts" (V, 3), and "Marry some
cast Cleve
captain , and sell Bottle-ale" (V, 4), point to a date later than July 1610, when actual fighting in Cleves-Juliers had barely begun. The captains are not English soldiers seeking service in a foreign army not yet mobilized, but Englishmen who have been captains in Cleves, have seen service, and been 'cast,' any time between July 1610 and the beginning of 1616, when, according to the quarto, the play had assuredly been performed. These considerations make it probable that
The Scornful Ladie
in its original form was presented first at Whitefriars while the Queen's Children were acting there, between 1610 and March 1613, or that it was one of the plays, old or new, presented by the Queen's Children (reorganized in 1614) when they opened at Rossiter's new Blackfriars in 1615-16.
Since active hostilities in Cleves were temporarily suspended in 1613-14 during the negotiations which led to the treaty of Xanten in November of the latter year, and since there would not only be much "talk" rather than fighting at the time, but also many captains 'cast' from their regiments, the conviction grows that the play was written between 1613 and the end of 1615. If
The Scornful Ladie
had been written before March 1613, it would undoubtedly have shared with
The Coxcombe
and
Cupid's Revenge
of the same authors, then in the flush of popularity at Court, the honour of presentation by the Queen's Revels' Children during the festivities attending the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth; for it was always a good acting play, and it has far greater merit than
Cupid's Revenge
which the Children performed three times before royalty in the four months preceding the marriage.
Other evidence, not hitherto noticed, still further confirms the conclusion that this was one of Beaumont and Fletcher's later joint-productions, perhaps the last of them. The conversational style is altogether more mature than in the remaining output of their partnership. It is the first work published under both of their names, and it was licensed for publication within two weeks after Beaumont's death, as one might expect of a play with which he was associated recently in the public mind. It is the only one of the joint-plays which he did not himself copy out, or thoroughly revise in manuscript, eliminating all or nearly all of Fletcher's distinctive
ye's
and
y'are's
, and reducing to uniformity the nomenclature of the
dramatis personae
. Of this, later. There is also a sentence in Act III, 2, which points definitely to a date of composition, 1613 to 1615. The Captain speaking to Morecraft, the usurer, says, "I will stile thee noble, nay Don Diego, I'le woo thy Infanta for thee" (punctuation of the quarto). 'Diego' had, of course, been for years a generic nickname for Spaniards; but Morecraft is neither a Spaniard nor in any way associated with Spaniards. There had been a Don Diego of malodorous memory, who had offensively "perfumed" St. Paul's and on whose achievement the Elizabethans never wearied ringing the changes.
247
247
See Bond,
Variorum, B. and F.
, I, 417; and references as given there, and by Dyce, to
The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Captain
, and other plays.
But that Don Diego was of the years before 1597 when there was, of course, no talk of wooing an Infanta; and the Captain here who comes to borrow money of the usurer had no intention of insulting him by likening him to the disgusting Spaniard of St. Paul's.
The only provocation for styling Morecraft's 'widow' an Infanta in this scene of
The Scornful Ladie
is that there was much interest in London at the time in a proposed marriage between Charles, Prince of Wales, and the second daughter of Philip III of Spain, the Infanta Maria. And the conjunction of the "Infanta" with a "Don Diego" has reference to the activities of the astute Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña who had arrived as Spanish ambassador, in 1613, "with the express object of winning James over from his alliance with France and the Protestant powers."
248
248
See S. R. Gardiner,
History of England
, Vol. II (1607-1616), pp. 165, 218, 225, 247, 255, 316, 321, 324, 327, 368, for this and the following concerning Sarmiento.
During 1613 Queen Anne was favouring the Spanish marriage. In February 1614, Don Diego Sarmiento was sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of the King's powerful minion, the Earl of Somerset; and in May he was writing home of his success. In the latter month, the Lord Privy Seal, Northampton, was urging the marriage upon the King; and the King soon after had signified to Sarmiento his willingness to accept the hand of the Infanta for Charles, provided Philip of Spain should withdraw his demand for the conversion of the young prince to Catholicism. In June Sarmiento was advising Philip to close with James's offer. And a month or so later the Spanish Council of State had voted in favour of the match. Negotiations, broken off for a time, were resumed a few weeks after the treaty of Xanten was signed; and with varying success Don Diego was still pursuing his object in December 1615. The reference in
The Scornful Ladie
cannot possibly be to negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles's elder brother, Henry, who died in 1612, with one or the other of King Philip's daughters;
249
249
Gardiner,
Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage
, pp. 6, 7, 69.
as for instance in 1604 or 1607, for the Cleves wars had not then begun; or in 1611 and 1612, for no Don Diego had yet arrived in England. The upper limit of the reference to Don Diego Sarmiento's negotiations is May 27, 1613. Gardiner tells us, moreover, that "for some time" before Diego was created Count Gondomar in 1617 "he had been pertinaciously begging for a title that would satisfy the world that his labours had been graciously accepted by his master." This desire to be "stiled noble" was undoubtedly known to many about the Court. If Beaumont and Fletcher did not hear of it by common talk, they might readily have derived their information from Don Diego's acquaintance and Beaumont's friend, Sir Francis Bacon, Attorney-General at the time, or from a devoted companion of John Selden of the Inner Temple, Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, who in April 1615, was King James's intermediary with Sarmiento. Taking, accordingly, all these considerations into account in conjunction with the fact that no Cleves captains had yet been 'cast' from their commands abroad before the Queen's Revels' Children ceased playing at the old Blackfriars in January 1610, I have come to the definite conclusion that the play was written between May 27, 1613 and the beginning of 1616, and first acted after the Children reopened at the new Blackfriars in 1615-1616. The probabilities are that it was written after May or June, 1614, perhaps, as late as April 1615, when public attention had been startlingly awakened to Don Diego's personal and ambitious activity in furthering the Spanish alliance by a royal marriage; and that Beaumont's absence from London, probably at his wife's place in Kent, or the failing condition of his health, accounts for his subordinate share in the authorship, as well as for the incomplete revision of the text – a task evidently assumed by him in the preparation of the other plays planned and produced in partnership with Fletcher.
The commendatory verses of Stanley and Waller in the 1647 folio give the play to Fletcher; and the greater part of it is Fletcher's. Beaumont has contributed the vivid exposition of Act I, 1; Act I, 2, with its legal phraseology and racy realism; and the jovial posset-scene of Act II, 1, where Sir Roger's kindly pedantry is developed and the minor love-affair of Welford and Martha is introduced.
250
250
All critics agree in assigning I, 1, to Beaumont. They differ concerning the rest of I and II.
Act II, 1, has been given by most critics to Fletcher because of the feminine endings of its occasional verse; but Beaumont could use feminine endings for humorous effect, and the diction and metal habit are distinctly his. He contributed also Act V, 2,
251
251
So, also, Fleay, G. C. Macaulay, and Oliphant; Boyle,
N. S. S. Trans.
, XXVI (1886), and Bond,
u. s.
, p. 360.
where the hero finally tricks his scornful mistress into submission. The
ye
test, which I have said does not yield results in the case of other plays written by the two dramatists in collaboration, is of positive value here as confirming Beaumont's authorship of Act I, 1 and 2 and Act II, 1, and V, 2, for but a single
ye
(II, 1, l. 10) is to be found in those scenes. The results are negative in Act II, 2 and 3 – no
ye's
– but the diction and verse are Fletcher's. It is not unlikely that Beaumont revised the play up to the end of Act II. With Act III, the
ye's
are in evidence and continue to the end of the play, except in Beaumont's V, 2. In Act III, 1, there are but four; but two of them are in the objective case, a mark of Fletcher, not of Beaumont. On the other hand though the diction and verse somewhat resemble Fletcher's, the infrequency of the
ye's
heightens the suspicion that unless the scene is Fletcher's, revised imperfectly by Beaumont, it is the work of some third author – perhaps, as R. W. Bond,
252
252
Variorum
, I, 360.
has suggested, Massinger. Act III, 2, on the other hand, not only has several
ye's
in the objective, but in proportion to the
you's
twenty-five per cent of
ye's
and
y'are's
, which approaches the distinctive habit of Fletcher; and the verse, rhetorical triplets, and afterthoughts are his. In all scenes of Acts IV and V, except the second of the latter, Fletcher's
ye's
occur, not in great number, but often enough in the objective case to corroborate the other, metrical and stylistic, indications of his authorship.
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
253
The best editions of
The Scornful Ladie
since Dyce's time are that of R. Warwick Bond, in the
Variorum
, and of Glover and Waller in the
Camb. Engl. Classics
.
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
254
Thorndike,
Influence of B. and F.
, p. 123.
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,