Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

But, in the process of readjustment at Blackfriars, our young partners in dramatic production must have been drawn into professional relationship with the members of Shakespeare's company and undoubtedly with Shakespeare himself. From the first quarto of Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, published in 1620, we learn that this, the earliest of their great tragicomedies, was acted not by the Queen's Revels' Children, but by the King's Players, and at the Globe. From the second quarto, of 1622, we learn that it was acted also at Blackfriars: it may indeed have been first presented there. Our earliest record of the play shows that it was in existence before October 8, 1610. The Scourge of Folly by John Davies of Hereford, entered for publication on that date, contains an epigram to "the well deserving Mr. John Fletcher," which runs —

 
Love lies a-Bleeding, if it should not prove
Her utmost art to show why it doth love.
Thou being the Subject (now), It raignes upon,
Raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention:
For this I love thee; and can doe no lesse
For thine as faire, as faithfull Sheepheardesse.
 

Since there is nothing in Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, to indicate a date of composition earlier than 1608, and since this is the first of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas to be performed by Shakespeare's company, we may be fairly certain that the performance followed the readjustment of affairs between the Globe and Blackfriars in August of that year. Now, there had been regulations for years past of the City authorities and the Privy Council in accordance with which theatre in the City proper and the suburbs of Surrey and Middlesex were closed whenever the number of deaths by plague exceeded a certain limit per week. In and after 1608 this limit was set at forty; and it is probable that, in accordance with a still older regulation, the ban was not lifted until it was evident that the decrease in deaths was more than temporary.⁶⁹ That actors sometimes performed at Court while the plague rate was still prohibitive in and about the City, does not by any means justify us in assuming that they were ever allowed at such times to play in theatres thronged by the public.⁷⁰ Between August 8, 1608 and October 8, 1610, the only continuous period in which plays might have been presented by Shakespeare's company at the Globe or Blackfriars, without violating the plague law, was from December 7, 1609 to July 12, 1610; and we therefore conclude that it was during those months that Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster was first acted. The only other abatement of the plague that might have given promise of continuance was between March 2 and 23, 1609; but on March 9 the rate of deaths rose again above forty, and it is not likely that the authorities would have permitted the theatres to resume operations during those three weeks.⁷¹

With Philaster Beaumont and Fletcher leaped into the foremost rank as dramatists. I have so much to say of this tragicomedy in my discussion of the authorship of its successive scenes, that but a word may here be said concerning the reasons for its success. Hitherto, practically Shakespeare alone had written for the King's Servants romantic comedies of a serious cast; and they were generally based upon some well-known story. Here was a comedy of serious kind with a romantic and original plot, by authors comparatively new to the general public, written in a style refreshingly unhackneyed, and played in the best theatres and by the best company that London possessed. The Hamlet-like hero seeking his kingdom and his princess – the daughter of the usurper – and, through misunderstandings and misadventures, tragic apprehensions, swiftly succeeding crises, bloodshed, riot, and surprising reversals of fortune, attaining both birth-right and love; the pathetic innocence and nobly futile devotion of his girl-page; the triangular affair of the affections; the humour of the secondary characters; the allurements of spectacle and masque; the atmosphere of the palace, heroic, – of the country, idyllic, – of Mile-end and its roarers of the borough, somewhat burlesque, – the diapason of the poetry from bourdon to flute, – all combined to win immediate and long continuing favour, both of the City and the Court. Beaumont had, here, become to some extent "the sobriety of Fletcher's wit"; he had restrained "his quick free will," – not, however, so much by pruning what Fletcher wrote as by admitting him to but one-quarter of the composition. Something of the intrigue, the bustle, the spectacle, the easy conversation are Fletcher's; and his, such sexual vulgarity – very little – as stamps a scene or two. The rest is Beaumont's. As in the two great romantic dramas which followed, and in Beaumont's subplot of The Coxcombe, the story is of the authors' own invention. It is not necessary to trace the girl-page and her devotion to the Diana of Montemayor, or to Bandello, or even to Sidney's Arcadia. The girl-page was a commonplace of fiction at the time; and the differences in the conduct of this part of the story are greater than the resemblances to any one of those sources. Much more evidently is the devoted Euphrasia-Bellario a younger sister of Shakespeare's Viola. But, in general, external influences bear upon details of character, situation, and device, not upon the construction of the play as a whole.

Toward the end of 1610 or early in 1611, the partner-dramatists gave Shakespeare's company another play, – in many respects their greatest, —The Maides Tragedy. Here, again, the novelty of the plot attracted, in a degree heightened even beyond that of Philaster. The terrible dilemma of the duped husband between allegiance to the King who has wronged him and assertion of his marital honour, the astounding effrontery of his adulterous wife, her gradual acquirement of a soul and her attempted expiation of lust by murder, the mingled nobility and unreason of her brother and her husband, and the pathetic devotion and self-provoked death of the hero's deserted sweetheart, will be sufficiently discussed elsewhere. This was the highly seasoned fare that the Jacobean public desiderated, served in courses, if not more novel, at any rate of more startling variety than even Shakespeare had offered – whose devices, restrained within limit, these young dramatists were exaggerating to the n-th degree. As four-fifths of the composition of this tragedy was Beaumont's, so, too, we may be sure, four-fifths of the conception and invention of the plot.⁷² I have remarked, incidentally, that none of the great Beaumont-Fletcher plots is borrowed. Nearly every play, on the other hand, which Fletcher contrived alone, or in company with others than Beaumont, borrows its plot, major and minor, from some well known source, classical, historical, French, Spanish, or Italian. Mr. G. C. Macaulay states the bare truth, when he says that "in constructive faculty, at least, Beaumont was markedly superior to his colleague." Here there are traces, indeed, of external suggestion: something of Aspatia's career in relation to Amintor, who has deserted her, may be an echo of Parthenia's in the Arcadia; and the quarrel of Melantius and Amintor reminds one of that between Brutus and Cassius in Julius Cæsar; but the plot has no definite source.

The characterization and the poetry, "the strength and sweetness, and high choice of brain" are Beaumont's; so, too, the marvelous subtlety of dramatic device. Save in that one-fifth to which Fletcher was admitted. There Fletcher, in beauty and in tragic power, is giving us the best that he has so far produced: over-histrionic, to be sure, but of victorious excellence. And that one-fifth, for the first and almost only time in Fletcher's career as a dramatist is "untainted by obscenity."

In an anecdote preserved by Fuller, who was seventeen years of age when Fletcher died, we may fancy that we catch a glimpse of our bachelors at work upon this very play. The dramatists "meeting once in a Tavern to contrive the rude draught of a Tragedy, Fletcher undertook to Kill the King therein; whose words being overheard by a listener (though his Loyalty not to be blamed herein) he was accused of high Treason, till the mistake soon appearing, that the plot was only against a Drammatick and Scenical King, all wound off in merriment."⁷³ History and fable have fastened similar stories upon famous men; but if this one is authentic it undoubtedly refers to the writing of The Maides Tragedy, for, as we shall see, the killing of its King was one of the few scenes contributed by Fletcher. And the story adds colour to the ridicule which Beaumont in 1607 had heaped upon the intelligencer that lives in ale-houses and taverns; … "and brings informations picked out of broken words in men's common talk."

The connection thus formed with Shakespeare's company was continued by Beaumont, at any rate, until 1612, and by Fletcher as long as he lived. Before the end of 1611 the King's Players had presented to the public the last of this trio of dramatic masterpieces, A King and No King. In terrible fascination, this story of a man and woman struggling against love because they think they are brother and sister is as powerful as The Maides Tragedy. In poetry and in characterization, as well as in humour, it is grander than Philaster. But in beauty and pathos its subject did not permit it to equal either; and in dénouement, tragicomic and perforce somewhat strained, it is surpassed by the Tragedy. Of its defects as well as merits, I have so much to say later, that I must refrain now. The plot is as striking an example of constructive invention as those that had preceded. Some of the names are to be found in Xenophon's Cyropædeia (Books III-VI) and in Herodotus (Book VII); and hints for situation and characterization may have been derived from these sources, and the passion of Arbaces for his supposed sister from Fauchet's account of Thierry of France, – but such indebtedness is naught.⁷⁴ Three-quarters of the play is Beaumont's; and that large portion includes the majestic passion and conflict, the tragic irony and suspense, of A King and No King; in fact, – the whole serious plot, and part of the humorous by-play. Fletcher's slight contribution is principally of complementary scenes and low comedy. In these the curb upon his fanciful rhetoric and hilarious wit has been somewhat relaxed. In the character of the roaring Bessus, Beaumont himself gives rein with the élan of the comic artist; for the Bessus of Beaumont's scenes would have gone on a strike if he had not been suffered to "talk bawdy" between brags. Beaumont for all his sobriety and clean mirth was not a prude; and he wasn't writing the psalms of Robert Wisdom.

This play was as popular as those that had preceded. The King's Players acted it at Court in December of the year in which it had been first performed. And between October 1612 and March 1613, assisting in the festivities for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Elector Palatine, they presented before royalty all three of the great Beaumont-Fletcher plays. These were numbers in a series of thirteen that included, as well, the Much Ado, Tempest, Winter's Tale, Merry Wives, Othello, and Julius Caesar of Shakespeare. They also presented about the same time, in a series of six acted before the King (including I Henry IV, Much Ado, and The Alchemist), one of Fletcher's comedies of manners and intrigue, The Captaine, and a play utterly lost, called Cardenna, in which it is supposed that Fletcher collaborated with the Master himself.

That our dramatists, however, after their association was formed with Shakespeare and his company, by no means severed their connection with the company for which they had written in their younger days, the Children of the Queen's Revels, appears from the fact that during the same festivities a tragedy written by them about 1611, Cupid's Revenge, was played by the Children three times, and their romantic comedy, The Coxcombe twice; and that, in 1615 or the beginning of 1616, the Children presented at the new Blackfriars what was, probably, the last product of the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership, The Scornful Ladie.

Neither Cupid's Revenge nor The Scornful Ladie (though the latter, at least, was very popular and had a long life upon the stage) is a drama of high distinction. The former is a blend of two stories from Sidney's Arcadia, – the story of the vengeance of Cupid upon the princess Erona (Hidaspes in the play) who caused to be destroyed the images and pictures of Cupid, and was consequently doomed to an infatuation for a base-born man, – and the painful career of Plangus (Leucippus in the play) who, having an intrigue "with a private man's wife" (the monstrous Bacha of the play) gave her up to his father, swearing to her virtue, only to find that she should attempt to renew her liaison with him and, failing, scheme his downfall. The dramatists made considerable alteration, and added to the sources. But though the main plot – that of Leucippus and Bacha – offered magnificent possibilities, they fail of realization. Beaumont wrote about one-half of the play, and it is in his scenes that whatever there is of moral struggle and sublimity, of pathetic irony and of poetry, appears.

The Scornful Ladie, which I assign to this late date partly because of an allusion to the negotiations for a Spanish marriage, 1614-1616, is principally of Fletcher's composition. It is of the type of his earlier and later comedies of intrigue. Like most of them it is extremely well contrived for presentation upon the stage and it was, as I have said, most successful. The merit of the play lies, not in any element of poetry or vital romance, but in humorous and realistic characterization, easy dialogue, and clever device. The dramatists deserve all credit for the ingenious invention, for here again there is no known source. Beaumont's contribution, about one-third, is distinguished by the observation and the vis comica already displayed in the Woman-Hater and the Knight of the Burning Pestle and King and No King. But he is not dominating the details. When they wrote a comedy of intrigue, Fletcher sat at the head of the table. It is possible, however, that some of the "rules and standard wit" which Francis was so soon to leave to his friend "in legacy" were here applied; for the play is less exuberantly reckless in tone than several which Fletcher wrote alone. The three masterpieces of romantic drama, Beaumont controlled in composition, and revised. Of this play he did not finish the revision. It was written about 1614 or 1615, after he had settled in the country with his wife, and not long before his death.⁷⁵

CHAPTER VIII
RELATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, AND OTHERS IN THE THEATRICAL WORLD

Though the young poets did not begin to write for the King's Men before 1609, it is impossible that they should not have met Shakespeare, face to face, earlier in the century, whether at the Mermaid in Bread-street, Cheapside, where perhaps befel those "wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson," or about the Globe in Southwark or the theatre in Blackfriars, – which, though leased to the Revels' Children, belonged to Shakespeare's friend Richard Burbadge, – or at the lodgings with Mountjoy the tiremaker, on the corner of Silver and Monkwell Streets, where the master had lived from 1598 to 1604, and where, for anything we know to the contrary, he continued to live for several years more.⁷⁶ They would pass the house on their way from the Bankside north to St. Giles, Cripplegate, when they wished to observe what Juby and the rest of the Prince's Players were putting on at the Fortune, or on their way back to take ale with Jonson at his house in Blackfriars, or to follow Nat. Field or Carey, acting in one of their own or Jonson's plays at the private theatre close by.

That the young poets, even during their discipleship to Jonson were familiar with the poetry and dramatic methods of Shakespeare the most cursory reader will observe. Their plays from the first, whether jointly or singly written, abound in reminiscences of his work. But more particularly is he echoed by Beaumont. The echo is sometimes of playful parody, as in the "huffing part" which the grocer's prentice of the Knight of the Burning Pestle steals from Hotspur: —

 
By heaven, methinks it were an easie leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd Moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the Sea,
Where never fathome line toucht any ground,
And pluck up drownèd honour from the lake of Hell;
 

or as in The Woman-Hater, where it looks very much as if this stylist of twenty-two was poking fun at the circumlocutions of Shakespeare's Helena in All's Well that Ends Well. Labouring to say "two days" in accents suitable to a monarch's ear, she had evolved:

 
Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring
Their fiery torches his diurnal ring,
Ere twice in murk and accidental damp
Moist Hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp;
Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass
Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass,
What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly.
 

In terms strikingly reminiscent of this, Beaumont's courtier Valore instructs the gourmand of The Woman-Hater, how to address royalty:

 
You must not talk to him [the Duke]
As you doe to an ordinary man,
Honest plain sence, but you must wind about him.
For example: if he should aske you what o'clock it is,
You must not say, "If it please your grace, 'tis nine";
But thus, "Thrice three aclock, so please my Sovereign";
Or thus, "Look how many Muses there doth dwell
Upon the sweet banks of the learned Well,
And just so many stroaks the clock hath struck."
 

And when the Duke asks Lazarillo, thus instructed, "how old are you?" we can imagine with what mirth the graceless Beaumont puts into his mouth:

 
Full eight and twenty several Almanacks
Have been compiled all for several years,
Since first I drew this breath; four prentiships
Have I most truly served in this world;
And eight and twenty times hath Phoebus' car
Run out his yearly course since – .
Duke. I understand you, sir.
Lucio. How like an ignorant poet he talks!
 

Is it possible that associating with the literary school of the day, his brother John, Drayton, Chapman, and Ben Jonson, the young satirist, here vents something like spleen? Or is this purely dramatic utterance?

Like parodies of phrases in Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and other Shakespearean plays ripple the stream of Beaumont's humour. They are, however, always good-natured. But if Beaumont laughs when Shakespeare exaggerates, he also pays him in his later plays the tribute of imitation in numerous poetic borrowings of serious lines and telling situations: as where the King in Philaster tries to pray but, like the kneeling Claudius, despairs —

 
How can I
Looke to be heard of gods that must be just,
Praying upon the ground I hold by wrong? —
 

or "in the Hamlet-like situation and character of Philaster" himself; as, for instance, when to the usurping King who has said of him, "Sure hees possest," Philaster retorts:

 
Yes, with my fathers spirit. Its here, O King,
A dangerous spirit! Now he tells me, King,
I was a Kings heire, bids me be a King,
And whispers to me, these are all my subjects.
Tis strange he will not let me sleepe, but dives
In to my fancy, and there gives me shapes
That kneele and doe me service, cry me king:
But I'le suppresse him: he's a factious spirit,
And will undoe me.
 

The resemblance of the controversy between Melantius and Amintor to that of Brutus with Cassius has already been noticed; and everyone will acknowledge the resemblance of the "quizzical reserve" of his Scornful Lady to Olivia's, of Aspatia's melancholy in the Maides Tragedy to Ophelia's, and of Bellario's situation in Philaster to that of Viola in Twelfth Night.⁷⁷ This last play, indeed, acted, as we have seen, in the Middle Temple when Beaumont was a freshman in the Inns of Court, affects Beaumont's method and style, more than any other save the Pericles (1607, or January to May 1608), which prepared the way for the more important later romantic dramas of Shakespeare himself as well as for those of Beaumont and Fletcher.

During the years when Shakespeare's company was producing their romantic dramas, they were breathing, with Shakespeare, Burbadge, and Heming, the atmosphere of the Globe and Blackfriars; and, after Shakespeare had taken up a more continuous residence at Stratford, in 1611, Fletcher, at any rate, not only kept in touch with the remaining shareholders and actors of the Globe but with the Master himself, and conversed and wrote with him on various occasions. These may have fallen either at the New Place at Stratford, where the now wealthy country gentleman was wont to entertain his friends, or when Shakespeare came to town – as in May 1612. At that time his former host, Mountjoy's, son-in-law was suing the tiremaker for his wife's unpaid dower, and "William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon in the Countye of Warwicke, Gentleman" who had helped to make the marriage, was summoned as a witness.⁷⁸ Or between July and November of that year, when the "base fellow" Kirkham was bringing against Burbadge and Heming a suit concerning the profits of the Blackfriars theatre, in which as a shareholder Shakespeare, too, must have been interested; and when Christopher Brooke of the pastoral poets in Beaumont's Inns of Court was of the "councell" for Shakespeare's company.⁷⁹ Or in March 1613, when Shakespeare was negotiating for the house in Blackfriars which he bought that month from Henry Walker. In the latter year the King's Players performed two plays in the writing of which there is reason to believe that Shakespeare and Fletcher participated: The Two Noble Kinsmen, first published as "by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of 1634; and a lost play licensed for publication as the "History of Cardenio by Fletcher and Shakespeare," in 1653. Of the former, critics are generally agreed that Fletcher wrote about a dozen scenes and that Shakespeare in all probability wrote others. Maybe, however, Fletcher, and perhaps later Massinger, merely revised and completed Shakespeare's original draft of the play left in the company's hands. That The Two Noble Kinsmen borrows its antimasque from our friend Beaumont's Maske of the Inner Temple, which was presented in February 1613, may be construed as indicating that he, too, still had some connection with Shakespeare's company. But it is more likely that he was now happily married and settled in Kent, and didn't care what they did with his plays. Probably the Shakespeare-Fletcher play was acted soon after Beaumont's, and in the same year. With regard to the authorship of the Cardenio we have nothing but the publisher's statement; but we know that the play was written after the appearance, in 1612, of the story upon which it is based, in Shelton's English translation of the first part of Don Quixote; and that it was acted at Court by Shakespeare's and Fletcher's company in May and June 1613.

The partnership of Fletcher and Shakespeare in the writing of these two plays has been questioned, but as to their collaboration in a third, Henry VIII, there is not much possibility of doubt. In the conception of the leading characters Shakespeare is present, and in many of their finest lines, and specifically in at least five scenes; while Fletcher appears in practically all the rest. The play was acted by the King's Men at the Globe on June 29, 1613, and was included as Shakespeare's by his judicious editors and intimate friends, Heming and Condell, in the folio of 1623.

During these years of fruition the friendship with Jonson, who was writing at the time for both the companies to which our young dramatists gave their plays, continued apparently without interruption. It is attested by commendatory verses written by Beaumont for The Silent Woman, which was acted early in 1610, and by verses of both Fletcher and Beaumont prefixed to Jonson's tragedy of Catiline, published in 1611. On the latter occasion Beaumont commends Jonson's contempt for "the wild applause of common people," and declares that he is "three ages yet from understood;" while Fletcher even more enthusiastically avers, —

 
Thy labours shall outlive thee; and, like gold
Stampt for continuance, shall be current where
There is a sun, a people, or a year.
 

The generous and graceful response of Ben to the reverence of the younger of the twain appears in a tribute the date of which is uncertain, but which was included by the author among his Epigrams, entered in the Stationers' Registers, 1612.

 
To Francis Beaumont.
How I doe love thee, Beaumont and thy Muse,
That unto me dost such religion use!
How I doe feare my selfe, that am not worth
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth!
At once thou mak'st me happie, and unmak'st;
And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st.
What fate is mine, that so it selfe bereaves?
What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives?
When even there, where most thou praisest mee,
For writing better, I must envie thee.
 

Since Jonson was not given to indiscriminate laudation of his contemporaries in dramatic production, we may surmise that this tribute to the art of Beaumont follows rather than precedes the appearance of Philaster, and of perhaps both The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King. And whether there is any basis or not for the tradition handed down by Dryden⁸⁰ that Beaumont was "so accurate a judge of plays that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots," – there is here evidence, sufficiently convincing, of the high esteem in which "the least indulgent thought" and the large "giving" of the brilliant and independent gentleman-dramatist were held by the acknowledged classicist and dictator of the stage.

From the various sources already indicated and from contemporary testimony, later to be cited, it is easy to derive a definite conception of the world of dramatists and actors in which Beaumont and Fletcher moved. They knew, and were properly appraised by, Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker, Heywood, Massinger, Field, Daborne, Marston, Day, and Middleton, – with all of whom they were associated either in combats of poetry and wit or in the presentation of plays at Blackfriars, Whitefriars, or the Globe. Among actors their acquaintance included Field, Taylor, Carey, and others of the Queen's Revels' Children, and Richard Burbadge, Heming, Condell, Ostler, Cook, and Lowin of the King's Company. In what esteem they were held during these years we have evidence in the verses already quoted from Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, and Field. In the generous dedication of The White Devil by John Webster, in 1612, we find them ranked with the best: "Detraction," says he, "is the sworne friend to ignorance. For mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightened stile of Maister Chapman: The labour'd and understanding workes of maister Jonson: The no lesse worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister Beamont and Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood, wishing what I write may be read by their light: Protesting that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, I know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of Martiall – non norunt, Haec monumenta mori."