CENTRE
for
REFORMATION
and
RENAISSANCE
STUDIES
VICTORIA
UNIVERSITY
TORONTO
By permission o! the Right Hon. Lord Sackvdle, G.C 1M G
PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BEAUMONT
From the original painting at Knole Park
TO MY WIFE
PREFACE
N this period of resurgent dramatic creativity when
once more the literature of the stage enthralls the
public and commands the publisher, it is but natural
that playwright, play-lover, and scholar alike should
turn .with renewed and enlightened interest to the
models afforded by our Elizabethan masters of the age
of gold, to the circulnstances of their production and
the lives of their imperishable authors. Very close to
Shakespeare stood Beaumont and Fletcher; but, though
during the past three centuries books about Shake-
speare have been as legion and studies of the " twin
literary heroes" have run into the hundreds, to
Fletcher as an individual but one book has been de-
voted, and to Beaumont but one.
A portrait of either Beaumont or Fletcher demands
indeed as its counterpart, painted by the same brush
and with alternating strokes, a portrait of his literary
partner and friend. But in spirit and in favour the
twain are distinct. In this book I have tried to pre-
sent the poetic and compelling personality of Francis
Beaumont not only as conjoined with, and distin-
guished from, the personality of Fletcher, but as seen
against the background of historic antecedents and
family connections and as tinged by the atmosphere
PREFACE
of contemporary life, of social, literary, and theatrical
environment. No doubt the picture has its imperfec-
tions, but the criticism of those who know will assist
one whose only desire is to do Beaumont justice.
I take pleasure in expressing my indebtedness to the
authorities of the Bodleian Library and the British
Museum, to those of the National Portrait Gallery
(especially Mr. J. D. Milner), to our own Librarian
of the University of California, Mr. J. C. Rowell,
for unfailing courtesy during the years in which this
volume has been in preparation; to Mr. J. C. Schwab,
Librarian of Yale University, for the loan of rare and
indispensable sources of information, and to my. col-
league, Professor Rudolph Schevill, for reading proof-
sheets and giving me many a scholarly suggestion. I
deplore my inability to include among the illustrations
carefully made by Emery Walker, of 16 Clifford's
Inn, a copy of the portrait of Beaumont's friend, Eliza-
beth, Countess of Rutland, which hangs at Penshurst.
On account of the recent attempt to destroy by fire
that time-honored repository of heirlooms as precious
to the realm as to the family of Sidney, the Lord de
L'Isle and Dudley has found it necessary to close his
house to the public.
CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY.
Berkeley, California,
December 15, I93-
CONTENTS
PART TWO
THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER
CHAPTER PAGE
XVI STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM; CRITICAL AP-
PARATUS .............. 225
XVII THE DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD ...... 23(5
XVIII THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF
BEAUMONT .............. 243
XIX FLETCHER'S DICTION ........... 260
XX FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT ........ 277
XXI BEAUMONT'S DICTION .......
XXII BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT ........ 29I
XXIII THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS . 300
XXIV "THE WOMAN-HATER," AND " THE KNIGHT" 307
XXV THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS . 332
XXVI THE LAST PLAY ............. 368
XXVII THE DRAMATIC ART, PRINCIPALLY OF BEAU-
MONT ................ 378
XXVIII DID THE BEAUMONT "ROMANCE" INFLUENCE
SHAKESPEARE? ............ 386
XXIX CONCLUSION ......... 39
APPENDIX
Table A ................
" B .............. 420
" C
"' D
INDEX
................ 42I
................ 22
................ 423
............ 425
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
PART ONE
BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS
CAREER AS POET AND DRAMATIST.
BEAUMONT,
TH E DRAMATIST
CHAPTER I
THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA
,, / MONG those of our dramatists who either were
contemporaries of Shakespeare or came after
him, it vould be impossible to name more than three
to who.m the predilection or the literary judgTnent
of any period of our national life has attempted
to assign an equal rank by his side. In the Argo
of the Elizabethan drama--as it presents itself to
the imagination of our own latter days--Shakes-
peare's is and must remain the commanding fio-ure.
Next to him sit the twin literary heroes, Beaumont
and Fletcher, more or less vaguely supposed to be
inseparable from one another in their xvorks. The
Herculean form of Jonson takes a somevhat disputed
precedence among the other princes; the rest of these
are, as a rule, but dimly distinguished." So, xvith
just appreciation, our senior historian of the English
drama, to-day, the scholarly Master of Peter-
house. Sir Adolphus Ward himself has, by availing
of the inductive processes of the inventive and indefati-
3
6
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
of outline as that of Fletcher's is by comparison lax,
effusive, exuberant... In every one of the plays
common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not
to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch
of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every
such play, and above all of their two masterpieces,
Phila,ter and The Maid's Tragedy, it should be clear
to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has
not to do with the author of Ualcntinian [Fletcher]
and The Double Marriage [Hetcher and Massinger].
In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more
fluid, more feminine... But in those tragic poems
of which the dominant note is the note of ]eaumont's
genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper
key of emotion is touched, than ever was struck by
Fletcher. The lighter genius is palpably subordinate
to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the im-
pression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this dis-
tinction is never grave enough to produce a discord;
it is also true that the plays in vhich the predominance
of Beaumont's mind and style is generally perceptible
make up altogether but a small section of the work
that bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true
that within this section the most precious part of that
work is comprised."
The essay in which this noble estimate of Beau-
mont occurs remains indeed "the classical modern
criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher," and although
recent research has resulted in "variety of opinion
concerning the precise authorship of some of the plays
commonly attributed to those writers" its value is
substantially unaffected. The figure as revealed in
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 7
glorious proportions to the penetrative imagination
and the sympathy of poetic kinship, remains, but by
the patient processes of scientific research the outlines
have been more sharply defined and the very linea-
ments of Beaumont's countenance and of Fletcher's,
too, brought, I think, distinctly before us. Though
Swinburne attributes, almost aright, to Beaumont
alone one play, The lVo.man-Hater, and ascribes to
him the predominance in, and the better portions of
Philastcr and The Maid's Tragedy, and the high inter-
est and graduated action of the serious part of A Kin9
and No KizlT, and also, justly associates him with
Fletcher in the composition of The Scorfzful Lady, and
gives him alone " the admirable study of the worthy
citizen and his wife who introduced to the stage and
escort with their applause The Kzic.qht o1: the Burninc.q
Pestle," and implies his predominance in that play, he
does not enumerate for us the acts aud scenes and
parts of scenes which are Beaumont's or Fletcher's, or
Beaumont's revised by Fletcher, in any of these plays;
and consequently he points us to no specific lines of
poetic inspiration, no movements distinctively con-
ceived by either dramatist and shaped by his dramatic
pressure, no touchstone by which the average reader
may verify for himself that " to Beaumont his stars
had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and
passion, of tender power and broad strong humour,"
and that " to Fletcher had been allotted a more fiery
and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and
swiftness of action, a more various readiness and full-
ness of bright exuberant speech." Though he is right
in discerning in the homelier emotion and pathetic
8 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
interest of The Coxcomb, and of Ctpid's Revenge
the note of Beaumont's manner, he couples \vith the
former The Honest Ma's Fortune in which it is
more than doubtful whether Beaumont had any share.
To speak of Arbaces in ./1 King and No King as
Beaumont's, is mainly right, but not wholly, and to
assign to him the keen prosaic humor of Bessus and
his swordsmen, is to assign precisely the scenes that
he did not compose. To speak of Beaumont's Tri-
mph of Love is perhaps defensible; but, with grave
reluctance, we now question the attribution. He is
justified in withdrawing "the noble tragedy of
Thierry a.nd Theodorct'" from the field of Beaumont's
co6peration and ascribing it to Fletcher and Massinger ;
but he is undoubtedly wrong when he fails to couple
the latter's name with that of Fletcher as author of
I/cdentinian. Writing as Swinburne did after a study
of Fleay's first investigations into. the versification
of Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger, the wonder
is not that once or twice, as a critic, he makes an
incorrect attribution, but that his poetic instinct so
successfully defied the temptation to enumerate in
detail the respective contributions of Beaumont and
Fletcher on the basis of metrical tests per excellence,
so surprisingly novel and seductively convincing were
the tests then recently formulated. Swinburne's mis-
takes are of sane omission rather than of superero-
gation. By his judgments as a critic one can not
always swear; but here he is, in the main, marvel-
ously right, and a thousand times rather to be fol-
lowed than some of the successors of Fleay who have
swamped the personality of Beaumont by heaping on
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 9
him, foundered, sods from a dozen turf-stacks which
he never helped to build.
But the choricontcs--those who. would separate
every scene and line of the one genius from those of
the other--are not lightly to be spoken of. It is only
by combining their methods of analysis with the in-
tuitions of the poet-critics that one may hope to see
Frank Beaumont plain: " the worthiest and dosest
follower of Shakespeare in the tragic field; the earliest
as well as ablest disciple of Ben Jonson in pure com-
edy, varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody."
The labour is well bestowed if by its means lovers of
poetry and the drama, while not ceasing to admire
the elder dramatist, Fletcher, may be led to accede
at last to the younger his due and undivided honour,
may come to speak of him by unhyphenated name-
a personality of passion and of fire, a gracious power
in poetry, of effulgent dramatic creativity; -- if, like
the ancients, they may protest occasionally in the name
of Pollux alone.
CHAPTER II
BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS : GRACE-DIEU,
OX FORD
RANCIS BEAUMONT, the dramatist, came of
the younger line of an ancient and distinguished
family of Anglo-Norman descent in which there had
been Barons de Beaumont from the beginning of the
fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century.
They lived, as did the dramatist later, in the forest of
Charnw,ood in Leicestershire,--part of the old forest
of Arden. And it is of a ride to their family seat that
John Leland, the antiquary, speaks when in his itin-
erary, written between 1535 and 1543 , he says:
" From Leicester to Brodegate, by ground w-ell
wooded three miles... From Brodegate to Lough-
borough about a five miles. First, I came out of
Brodegate Park into the forest of Charmvood, com-
monly called the Waste. This great forest is a twenty
miles or more in compass, having plenty of wood ....
In this forest is no good town nor scant a village;
Ashby-de-la-Zouche, a market town and other villages
on the very borders of it... Riding a little further
I left the park of Beau Manor, closed with stone walls
and a pretty lodge in it. belonging of late to Beau-
monts... There is a fair quarry of alabaster stone
about a four miles from Leicester, and not very far
IO
HIS FAMILY AND CONNECTIONS II
from Beau Manor. 1 . . There was, since the Belle-
monts [Beaumonts], earls of \Varwick, a baron
[at Beaumanoir] of great lands of that name; and the
last of them in King Henry the Seventh's time was a
man of simple wit. His wife was after married to the
Earl of Oxford." These barons " of great lands,"
living in Charnwood Forest,-- where, as another old
writer tells us, " a wren and a squirrel might hop from
tree to tree for six miles; and in sumlner time a trav-
eler could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good
twelve miles, without seeing the sun,"--these barons
are the de Beaumonts, from the fourth of whom,
John, Lord Beaumont, who died in I396, our drama-
tist was descended.
The barony ran from father to son for six genera-
tions of alternating Henries and Johns, c. I3O 9 to 146o.
John, fourth Baron, was grandson of Alianor, daugh-
ter of Henry, Earl of Lancaster, and so descended
from Henry III and the first kings of the House of
Plantagenet. The second Baron, husband of Alianor
of Lancaster, was through his mother, Alice Comyn,
descended from the Scotch Earls of Buchan, and thus
connected with the Balliols and the royal House of
Scotland; through his father, Henry, the first Baron
de Beaumont, who died in 1343 , he was great-grand-
son of John de Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem,
I2IO--I225 .: In a quaint tetrastich in the church of
Barton-upon-Humber, the memory of these alliances is
thus preserved"
1 Leland's Itinerary. Ed. L. T. Smith. Vol. I. 18-19.
Leland's Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. IV, 126.
Collins, Peerage of England, IX, 460.
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Rex Hierosolymus cure Bellomonte locatur,
Bellus mons etiam cum Baghan consociatur,
Bellus mons iterum Longicastro religatur,
Bellus mons .. Oxonie titulatur. 1
The sixth Baron became, in 144o, the first Viscount
of English creation ; he married a granddaughter of the
Lord Bardolph of Shakespeare's 2 Hcm'y I'; but with
his son " of simple wit," who died in 15o 7, the vis-
county died out. Beamnanoir to the east of Charn-
wood is seven miles north o.f Leicester and nine from
Coleorton where, west o4 the Forest, an older branch
of the Beaumont family of which we shall hear, later,
continued to. live and is living to-day; and the old
barony was revived, in 184o, in a descendant of the
female line, Miles Thomas Stapleton, as ninth Baron
Beaumont.
The grandfather of the dramatist. John Beaumont,
was in the third generatio.n from Sir Thomas Beau-
mont, the younger son o.f the fourth Lord Beaumont.
John evidently had to make his way before he could
establish himself near the old home in Leicestershire;
but he must have had some competence and position
from the first, for he was admitted early, in the reign of
Henry VIII, a member of the Inner Temple; in I537
and I543 he performed the learned and expensive
functions of Reader, or exponent of the laxv in that
society, and later was elected treasurer or presiding
officer of the house. He started brilliantly in his
profession. In I5_o 9 he was counsellor for the cor-
poration of Leicester; and, by I539 , he had means or
1 J. Nichols, Collectiots toward the History, of Leicestershire
(Biblioth. Topogr. Brit., VII, 534). See, below, Appendix, A.
14 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
ings, was the daugh.ter of Sir William Hastings, a
younger son of the incorruptible William, Lord Hast-
ings, whom in 1483 Richard of Gloucester had de-
capitated. Her grandmother, Catherine Nevil, was
daughter to the Earl of Salisbury, who died at Pore-
fret, and sister to Richard, Earl of Warwick, the King-
maker. Elizabeth's aunt, Anne Hastings, was the wife
of George Talbo.t, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, and her
uncle, Edward, was the second Lord Hastings. Ed-
ward's children, our Elizabeth's first cousins, were
Anne, Countess to Thomas Stanley, second Earl of
Derby, and that George, first Earl of Huntingdon,
whom, with certain of his five sons, the master of
Grace-Dieu "ffeyred." 1 We may conjecture that the
feud expired with the marriage of Elizabeth Hastings
and John Beaumont, or with the death of the first Earl
in 1544; and that the policy of his successors, Francis
and Henry, in securing to the Huntingdon family the
reversion of the forfeited estates of the Master of the
Rolls and, later, releasing a portion of them to Eliza-
beth, was dictated by cousinly affection.
The great Francis, second Earl of Huntingdon, lived
in the castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, about an hour's
walk from Mistress Beaumont's, and had, in I532 ,
allied himself to royalty by marrying Katherine Pole,
niece of the Cardinal, and great-granddaughter of
that George, Duke of Clarence (brother to Edward
IV), who was "pack'd with post-horse up to heaven "
by the cacodemon of Gloucester. When Edward
VI died, Francis declared for Lady Jane Grey and
1 Collins, Peerage, VI, 648, et seq.; H. N. Bell, The Hunting-
don Peerage, I82I. See also, below, Appendix, Table B.
HIS FAMILY AND CONNECTIONS 5
was for a time imprisoned. His daughter was
the beautiful Lady Mary Hastings who, being of
the blood royal, was wooed for the Czar, and
might have been " Empress of Muscovy" had she
pleased. From the Huntingdon family Elizabeth
Hastings introduced at least one new christian
name into that of the Beaumonts. For the second
Earl, she named her oldest son Francis. One of her
daughters, Elizabeth, became the wife of William,
third Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in the adjoining
county of Northampton; and thus our dramatist,
through his aunt, was connected with another of the
proudest Norman families of England,--one of the
most devoted to. the Catholic faith and, as we shall see,
active in Jesuit interests that during the dramatist's
life in London assumed momentous political propor-
tions. Aunt Elizabeth, Lady Vaux, died before our
Frank Beaumont was born; and her son Henry died
when Frank was but ten years of age,--but in an
entry in the State Papers of 1595 concerning " the en-
tail of Lord Vaux's estates on his children by his first
wife [John] Beaumont's daughter," 1 several " daugh-
ters" are mentioned. These, his cousins of Harrow-
den, Frank knew from his youth up. In I605 all
England was to be ringing with their names.
John and Elizabeth were succeeded at Grace-Dieu
by their son, Francis. He was a student at Peter-
house, Cambridge; afterwards, at the Inner Temple,
where like his father before him, he proceeded Reader
and Bencher. In 1572 he sat in Parliament as mem-
ber for Aldborough; in 1589 he was made sergeant-
Calendar o State Papers (Domestic), 1595, p. 154.
HIS FAMILY AND CONNECTIONS 17
his redoubtable Lady, Bess of Hardwick, who finished
it. This aunt of the young Beaumonts of Grace-
Dieu, Lady Pierrepoint, was sister to William Caven-
dish, first Earl o.f Devonshire in I6II and fore-
father of the present Dukes,--to Henry Caven-
dish, the friend of Mary, Queen of Scots, and
son-in-law of her kindly custodian, George Talbot,
sixth Earl of Shrewsbury,-- to Sir Charles Caven-
dish, whose son, William, became Earl, and then
Duke of Newcastle,-- to Elizabeth Cavendish, Countess
of Lennox, the wife of Henry Darnley's brother,
Charles Stuart, and the mother of James I's hapless
cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart,--and to Mary Caven-
dish, Countess of Shrexvsbury, vife of Gilbert, seventh
Earl. The so.n of Sir Henry and Lady Pierrepoint,
Robert, born in the same year as his cousin, Francis
Beaumont, the dramatist, married a daughter of the
Talbots, became in due time Viscount Newark and
Earl of Kingston, and was killed in 643 during the
Civil War. From him descended Marquises of Dor-
chester and Dukes of Kingston, and the Earls Manvers
of the present time. Through their mother, Anne
Pierrepoint, the Beaumont children of Grace-Dieu
were, accordingly, connected with several of the most
influential noble families of England and Scotland; and
in their comradeship with the cousins of Holme-Pierre-
point they would, as of the common kin, be thrown into
familiar acquaintance vith the children of the various
branches of these and other houses that I might men-
tion. 1 Holme-Pierpoint is seventeen miles north-
1 See Shaw's Kights o[ Englad; Collins, Peerage; and arti-
cles in D. N. B. under names.
22
;BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
inspirations to poetry. In the Grey Friars' at-Lei-
cester, eleven miles south-east, Simon de Montfort
allied by marriage to the first Anglo-Norman de Beau-
mo.nts, Earls of Leicester, lay buried. There, too, until
his ashes were scattered on the waters of the Soar,
King Richard the Third. In the Blue Boar Inn of that
" toune,"-- in our young Beaumont's day, all " builded
of tymbre,"--this last of the Plantagenets had spent
the night before the battle o.f Bosworth. The field it-
self on which the battle was fought lies but eight
miles west of Leicester and about nine south of Grace-
Dieu. No wonder that Francis Beaumont's brother
John in after days chose Bosworth Field as the sub-
ject of an heroic poem:
The Winter's storme of Civill Warre I sing,
Whose end is crown'd with our eternall Spring;
Where Roses joyn'd, their colours mixe in one,
And armies fight no more for England's Throne.
The Beaumonts were living in the centre of the coun-
ties most engaged. Three of their predecessors had
fallen fighting for the red rose, John Beaumont of
Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at North-
ampton in I46o, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton
in I46. In his description of the battle, John intro-
duces by way of simile a reference to what may have
been a familiar scene about Grace-Dieu:
Here Stanley and brave Lovell trie their strenh . . .
So meete two bulls upon adjoyning hills
Of rocky Charnwood, while their murmur fills
The hollow crags, when striving for their bounds,
They wash their piercing hornes in mutuall wounds.
i
GRACE-DIEU 23
Lovell, himself, was a Beaumont on the mother's side.
And the poet takes occasion to pay tribute, also, to his
own most famous ancestor on the grandmother's side,
the "noble Hastings,". first baron, whose cruel execu-
tion in Richard III, Shakespeare had dramatized more
than twenty years before John wrote.
Just south of Charnwood Forest stood, in the day
of John and Francis, the Manor House in Bradgate
Park where Lady Jane Grey was born, and where she
lived from 1549 to 1552 while she was being educated
by her ambitious father and mother, the Marquis and
Marchio,ness of Dorset, "to occupy the towering po-
sition they felt assured she xvould sooner or later be
called to fill "--that of Protestant queen of England.
Here it was that Roger Ascham, as he tells us in his
Schoolmaster, after inquiring for the Lady Jane of
the Marquis and his lady who were out hunting in
Charnwood Forest, came upon the twelve-year old
princess in her closet "reading the. Pha,cdon of Plato
in Greek, with as much delight as gentlemen read the
merry tales of Boccaccio." The grandmother of the
young Beaumonts, who was still alive in I578, may
have lived long enough to take our Francis on her
knee and tell him of the hopes her Protestant kins-
men of Ashby-de-la-Zouch had fixed upon the Lady
Jane, and of how her cousin, the Earl, Francis of
Huntington, had been one of those who in Royal
Council in June I553, abetted the Dukes of North-
umberland and Suffolk in the scheme to secure
the succession of Lady Jane to the throne, and
ho.w, with these dukes and the Archbishop of Can-
terbury, and other lords and gentlemen (among
9- 4
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
them a certain Sir John Baker of Sissinghurst, Kent,
whose family later appears in this narrative), he
had signed the "devise " in accordance with w.hich
Jane was proclaimed Queen. And the old lady
would with bated breath tell him of the cruel fate of
that nine-days' queen. Of hmv Francis of Hunting-
don was sent to the Tower with Queen Jane, she also
would tell. But perhaps not nmch of hmv he shortly
made his peace with Queen Mary, hunted down the
dead Jane's father, and brought him to the scaffold.
And either their grandmother or their father, the
Judge, could tell them of the night in 1569 on which
their cousin, Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon, had
entertained in the castle " rising on the very borders "
of the forest to the east, Mary, Queen of Scots, when
she was on her way to her captivity in the house of
another connection of theirs, Henry Cavendish, at Tut-
bury in the county of Stafford, just east of them.
In the history of culture not only John and Francis,
but the Beaumonts in general are illustrious. In
various branches and for generations the poetic,
scholarly, and artistic vein has persisted. John
Beaumont's son and heir, the second Sir John, edited
his father's poems, and lived to write memorial verses
on Ben Jonson, and on Edward King, Milton's
" Lycidas"; and another son, Francis, wrote verses.
A relative and namesake of the dramatist's father,--
aftervards Master of Charterhouse,--wrote an Epis-
tle prefixed to Speght's Chaucer, 1598; and still an-
other more distant relative, Dr. Joseph, Master of Pe-
terhouse, and author of the epic allegory, Psyche, was
one of the poetic imitators through whom Spenser's
OXFORD -0 5
influence was conveyed to Milton. The Sir George
Beaumont of Wordsworth's day to whom reference
has already been made was celebrated by that poet
both as artist and patron of art. And, according to
Darley, 1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was of the
race and maiden name of our dramatist's mother,
Anne Pierrepoint. From which coincidence one may,
if he will, argue poetic blood on that side of the fam-
ily, too; or from Grosart's derivation of Jonathan Ed-
wards from that family, polemic blood, as well.
The three sons of Justice Beaumont of Grace-Dieu
were entered on February 4, 597, at Broadgates
Hall, now Pembroke, which at that time was one of
the most flourishing and fashionable institutions in
Oxford. These young gentlemen-commoners were
evidently destined for the pursuit of the civil and com-
mon law, since, as Dyce informs us, their Hall was
then the principal nursery for students of that disci-
pline. But one cannot readily visualize young Frank,
not yet thirteen, or his brother John, a year or so older,
devoting laborious hours to the Corpus Juris in the
library over the south aisle of St. Aldate's Church, or
to their Euclid, Strabo, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian.
We see them, more probably, slipping across St. AI-
date's street to Wolsey's gateway of Christ Church,
and through the, then unfinished, great quadrangle,
past Wolsey's tower in the southeast corner, and, by
what then served for the Broad Walk, to what nov
are called the Magdalen College School cricket
grounds, and so to some well-moored boat on the
flooded meadows by the Cherwell. And some days,
Works of B. and F., XVI.
26 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
they would have under arm or in pocket a tattered
volume of Ovid, preferably in translation,--Turber-
ville's Heroical Epistles. or Golding's rendering of the
Metamorphoscs,--or Painter's Palace of Pleasure, or
Fenton's Tragical Discourses out of Bandello, dedi-
cated to the sister of Sir Philip Sidney--Sir Philip,
whose daughter young Francis should, one day, re-
vere and celebrate in noble lines. Or they would
have Harington's Orlando Furioso to wonder upon;
or some cheap copy of Amadis or Palmerin to waken
laughter. And, other days, fresh quartos of Tambur-
lainc and Edward II and Dido, or Kyd's Spanish
Tragedy and Lyly's GalIathea, or Greene's Frier Ba-
con and James IU, or Shakespeare's Richard H, and
Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, and Love's La-
bour's Lost. These, with alternate shuddering and
admiring, mirth or tears, to declaim and in imagina-
tion re-enact. And certainly there would be mellow
afternoons when the ongs and omwttcs known as
Tottd's Miscellany and The Paradyse of Daynty
Devises, with their poems of love and chivalry by
Thomas, Lord Vaux,--of which they had often heard
from their cousins of Harrowden,and Chapman's
completion of Hero and Leander or Shakespeare's
l'enus and Adonis, and Drayton's fantastic but
graceful Endimion and Phoebe would hold them
till the shadows were well aslant, and the candles
began to wink them back to the Cardinal's quadrangle
and the old refectory, beyond, of Broadgates Hall.
For the Char and the boats were there then, and all
these E1 Dorados of the mind were to be had in
quarto or other form, and some of them were appear-
Taken by Buck
A PRIORY, ULVESTON, EXTANT IN 1730
OXFORD 27
ing first in print in the year when Frank and his broth-
ers entered Oxford.
We may be sure, that many a time these brothers
and sworn friends in literature, and Henry, too, loyal
young Elizabethans,-- and with them, perhaps, their
cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who was then at Oriel, M
strolled northwest from the Cherwell toward Yarnton,
and then \Voodstock with its wooded slopes, to see the
island where Queen Elizabeth, when but princess, had
been imprisoned for a twelvemonth, and, hearing a
milk-maid singing, had sighed, " She would she were
a milkmaid as she was "; and that they took note of
fair Rosamund's well and bower, too. They may have
tramped or ridden onward north to Banbury, and got
there at the same cakeshop in Parsons Street the same
cakes we get nmv. Or, some happy Michaelmas,
they vould have valked toward the fertile Vale of
Evesham, north, first, toward "Varwickshire where at
Compton Scorpion Sir Thomas Overbury, the ill-
fated friend of their future master, Ben Jonson,
was born, and on by the village of Quinton but
six miles from Shakespeare's Stratford, toward
Mickleton and the Malvern Hills; and then, turn-
ing toward the Cotswolds, to \Vinchcombe with its
ancient abbey and its orchards, to see just south
of it Sudely Castle where Henry VIII's last wife,
the divorced Catherine Parr, had lived and died,--
where Giles, third Baron Chandos, had entertained
Queen Bess, and where in their time abode the
Lord William. With this family of Brydges, Bar-
ons Chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in 597
at any rate after 6o2, when the fifth Baron, Grey,
28 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
succeeded to the title. For, writing Teares on the
death of that hospitable " King of the Cotswolds,"
which occurred in i62I, John Beaumont describes him
with the admiration begotten of long intimacy,--
" the smoothnesse of his mind," " his wisdome and
his happy parts," and " his sveet behaviour and dis-
course."
Or,--and how could any young Oxonian fail of it ?
--they started from ]3roadga.tes, do,n the High,
crossed Magdalen Bridge, where the boats were lazily
oaring below them, and set out for the climb to Rose
Hill; then down by sleepy ways to Littlemore, and to
Sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents to
Nuneham,--where now, in the fine old manor house,
hangs Frank's own portrait in oils,--one of the
two contemporary likenesses of him that exist to-day.
AT THE INNS OF COURT
come supper,--bread and beer again. After dinner,
and again after supper, he would enjoy bolts and ex-
ercises conducted by the utter barristers, day in and
day out through nearly the whole year. As he ad-
vanced in proficiency he would appear as a " moot-
man " in the arguments presented before the Benchers,
or governing fellows, seated as judges. And perhaps
he resigned himself, meanwhile, to the proper wear
within the Inn, which was cap and gown, " but the
fashion was to wear hats, cloaks or coats, swords,
rapiers, boots and spurs, large ruffs and long hair.
Even Benchers were found to. sit in Term Time with
hats on." l
Whether Beaumont gave promise or not we are
ignorant. The routine of the Inn was impeccable;
but students and benchers were not. There were not
infrequently other exercises than " moots " after sup-
per: cards and stage-plays, revels and sometimes riots.
This much we know, that before young Frank could
have fulfilled his seven or more years as student and
"moot-man," he was already in the rank of poets
and dramatists. But, that by no means precludes his
continuance for several years, perhaps till 1608, in
the juridical university, or his intimate association
with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of
what would be his college,--the Inner Temple. And
for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere
was as poetic as juridical. The young man's fancy
was fired by the poetry and the drama that for cen-
turies had enlivened the graver pursuits of the Gothic
halls that rose between Fleet Street and the Thames,
Inns of Court, etc., p. 163.
3 2 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Whitefriars and Paget Place,--" the noblest nurseries
of humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as Ben
Jonson calls them in his dedication 1 to the Inns of
Court of Every Man out of his Humour, first published
in the year when Beaumont entered.
According to Aubrey, while the garden-wall of
Lincoln's Inn, close by, was building, a Bencher
of that society "walking thro' and hearing" a
young bricklayer " repeat some Greek verses out of
Homer, discoursed with him, and finding him to
have a witt extraordinary gave him some exhibition
to maintaine hinl at Triuity College, Cambridge."
That young bricklayer was, later, Beaumont's friend
and master, Ben Jonson. Lincoln's Inn had long been
a nursing mother to dramatic effort. At the begin-
ning of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was one of its
members, Richard Edwardes, who, as Master of the
Chapel Children, produced the " tragicalI comedie "
Damon ad Pythias, and the tragedy of Pa-lamon and
Arcite, to the great edification of the Queen, and the
permanent improvement of the Senecan style of
drama by the fusion of the ideal and the common-
place, of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous
in an appeal to popular interest. " He was highly
valued," this Edwardes," by those that knew him," says
Anthony Wood, "especially his associates in Lincoln's
Inn." And it was in th.e Middle Temple, just fourteen
months after Beaumont joined the Inns of Court, that
Manningham, one o,f the barristers, witnessed the per-
formance for the Reader's Feast on Candlemas Day of
Shakespeare's Twelfth.Night. If Beaumout of the In-
The Dedication first appears in the folio of t6t6.
AT THE INNS OF COURT 33
ner Temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more
than the applause, he vas not our Frank Beaumont.
We may be sure that he had sauntered through the
Temple Gardens many an afternoon, and knew the
spot immortalized by Marlowe and that same Shakes-
peare, as the scene of the quarrel between Plantagenet
and Somerset when the white and red roses were
plucked, and that he would hear Shakespeare when he
could.
But much as the Middle Temple and Lincoln's
favoured the drama and costly entertainments on the
major feast-days, they were outdone in Christmas
revels and masques and plays by the closely affiliated
societies of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple. Be-
tween these Houses, says Mr. Douthwaite, the his-
to,rian of the former, " there appears anciently to have
existed a kindly union, which is shown by the fact that
on the great gate of the gardens of the Inner Temple
may be seen to this day [886] the ' griffin' of Gray's
Inn, whilst over the great gateway in Gray's Inn
Square is carved in bold relief the 'winged horse'
of the Inner Temple." The two societies had long
a custom of combining for the production of the-
atrical shows; and as we shall see, they com-
bined some thirteen years after Beaumont entered the
Inner Temple in the production at Court of one of
the most glorious and expensive masques ever pre-
sented in London, Beaumont's own masque for the
wedding of the Elector Palatine and the Princess
Elizabeth. They were influential as patrons of the
early drama, and as producers of amateur dramatists.
For centuries Gray's Inn had permitted " revels"
AT THE INNS OF COURT 35
with Francis Kinwehnersh, produced at Gray's Inn
an English rendering of Ludovico Dolce's Giocasta,
a tragedy descended from Euripides' Phoezissac by
way of a Latin version. "Altogether," remarks
Professor Cunliffe, 1 " the play must have provided a
gorgeous and exciting spectacle, and have produced
an impression not umvorthy of Gray's Inn, 'an
House ', the Queen said on another occasion, ' she was
much beholden unto, for that it did always study for
solne sports to present unto her.' " To this house
and to Gascoigne, Shakespeare, too, was beholden,
for from the Supposes proceeds more or less directly
the minor plot of The Taming of the Shrew. In
,588, Gray's Inn figures prominently again in the
career of the pre-Shakespearian drama, with the pro-
duction by one of its gentlemen, Thomas Hughes, of
a tragedy of English legend and Senecan type, The
Misfortuncs of Arthur, played by the society before
the Oueen at Greenwich. And, in *594, Gray's Inn
connects itself with the Shakespearian drama directly
by witnessing in the great hall in the Christmas sea-
son a play called A Comedy of Errors, "like to Plautus
his Menaechmus.'"
It is diverting to note that on the eve of just that
season of 594, a very pious xvoman, the second wife
of Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the mother of Anthony
and Francis, is writing to the elder brother "I trust
that they will not mum nor sinfully 1hake revel at
Gray's Inn." Anthony was not a very strict Puritan,
Francis still less so; and Francis, who had been of
Gray's Inn since *575, vas, till his fall from power,
Early English Classical Tragedies, Introduction, p. lxxxvi.
AT THE INNS OF COURT 37
these ends than that of the Inns of Court. As the
name itself implies the members were gentlemen of
the Court of the King. They must be " sons to per-
sons of quality"; they must be trained to the possio
bility of appearance before the King at any time; they
must be ready not merely as a privilege, but as a func-
tion, to entertain royalty upon summons. _As Gray's
Inn had its flavour of romance, its literary and drao
matic history, its Sidney, its Bacon, its Gascoigne;
so also the " anciently allied House" of the Inner
Temple.. There lingered the tradition, to. say the
least, of Chaucer's stirring poetry; there the spirit of
Sir Francis Drake,--stirring romances of the Span-
ish main; there the memory of the Christmas revels
of I562 at which was first acted the Gorboduc of
Thomas Sackville (afterwards Earl of Dorset, and
connected by marriage vith the Fletchers), and
Thomas Norton,--whose " stately speeches and well
sounding phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his
stile," whose national quality, romantic illumination
of classical form, impressive, and novel dramatic
blank verse were to influence imperishably the course
of Elizabethan tragedy. There, too, had been pro-
duced, by five poets of the House, in 568, " the first
English love-tragedy that has survived," 1 Gismo,d ol e
Sa.Ierw, a distant but unmistakable forerunner in tem-
pestuous passion and pathos of plays in which young
Beaumont was to compose the major part, The Maides
Tragedy and A King and No Kitg.
Here, in the intervals betxveen moots and bolts in
the day time or during the long evenings about the
Cunliffe, E. E. Class. Tragedies, p. Ixxxvi,
38
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
central fire in Hall or in Chambers, a young man of
poetic proclivities would find ample opportunity to in-
dulge his genius. And, even after he ceased to be an
inmate, the Inner Temple would still be for him a
club, in which by the payment of a small annual fee
he might retain membership for life. And member-
ship in one 'college' of this pseudo-university im-
plied an honorary ' freedom' of the others.
Beaumont would know not only William Browne, the
poet of the Inner Temple from 1611 on, and all
Browne's poetic fellows in that House, but Browne's
less poetic friend, Christopher Brooke, counsel for
Shakespeare's company of King's Players, who earlier
in the century had entered Lincoln's Inn; and, also,
Brooke's chamber-fellow, John Donne, whose secret
marriage with the daughter of the Lieutenant of the
Tover, in 1609, got the young scapegraces into jail.
And at Gray's Inn Beaumont would be even more at
home. It was the 'House' of his kinsman, Henry
Hastings of Ashby,--in 16o4 Earl of Huntingdon,-
two years younger than Frank, and admitted as early
as 1597; and of Robert Pierrepoint, vho had come
down with Frank from Oxford and was entered of the
Inns at the same time ; and, two years later, of Robert's
cousin, William Cavendish, afterwards second Earl of
Devonshire.
If we could be sure that a poem called The Mcta-
,orphosis o] Tabctcco, a mock-Ovidian poem of grace-
ful style and more than ordinary wit, published in
I6o, and ascribed by some one writing in a contem-
porary hand upon the title-page, to John Beaumont,
"SALMACIS AND HERMAPHRODITUS" 39
was John's we might regard the half dozen verses in
praise of "thy pleasing rilne," signed F. B., and begin-
ning,
My new-borne Muse assaies her tender wing,
And where she should crie, is inforst to sing,--
as young Francis' earliest effort in rhyme. The
dedication of the Metamorphosis to "my loving
friend, Master Michael Drayton," favours the con-
jectured composition by John, for he is writing other
complimentary poems to Drayton in the years immedi-
ately following 16o2. But, though F. B.'s lines prefa-
tory to. the Mctamorphosis are not unworthy
a fanciful youngster, they are negligible; as is
the. evidence of their authorship. Certain flimsy
love-poems included in a volume published forty years
later, twenty-four years after Beaumont's death, as
of his composition, have also been attributed to his
boyhood at the University, or at the Inner Temple.
Most of them have been definitely traced to other au-
thors, and of the rest of this class still unassigned
there is no reason to believe that he was the author.
In the same volume, however, there appears as by
Beaumont a metrical tale based upon Ovid, called
Salmacis ad Hermaphroditus, of which we cannot
be certain that he was not the author. The poem was
first published, without name of writer, in I6O2, and
was not assigned to Francis Beaumont until 1639,
when Lawrence Blaiklock included it among the
Poems: By Francis Beaumont, Gent., entered on the
Stationers' Registers, September 2, and published,
Reprinted by Draqnatic-ts, Sh. Soc. Pap. III, 94 (1847).
40 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
I64o. Blaiklock evidently printed from John
Hodgets's edition of 6o2, carelessly omitting here
and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical
mistakes. Either because he had private information
that Beaumont was the author, or because he wished
to profit by Beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as
to sign the initials, F. B., to the verse dedication, To
Calliope, and to alter the signature, A. F., appended to
an introductory sonnet, To the .4uthor, so as to read
I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher.) These licenses, in
addition to the reckless inclusion in the I64 o volume
of several poems by authors other than Beaumont,
vitiate Blaiklock's evidence. On the other hand. the
original publisher, ttodgets, was the publisher also, in
6o7, of The IVoma-Hatcr, a play now reasonably
accepted as by Beaumont, originally alone; and, in
Hodgets's edition of the Salmacis mtd Hermaphrodi-
tus, one of the introductory sonnets is signed J. B.,
and another W. B. The 'J. B.' sonnet is not un-
worthy of Beaumont's brother John. And if the
W. B. of the other verses, I Laztdem Atthoris,,
is \Villiam Basse,who in a sonnet, written after
Beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare Beau-
mont,"--there is further justification for entertaining
the possibility of Beamnont's authorship of the SaI-
macis. For Basse was one of the group of pastoral-
ists to which Francis' friend Drayton, and Drayton's
friend, William Browne, belonged,--a group with
which Francis must have been acquainted. But of
that we shall have more to say when we come to
consider Beaumont's later connection with Drayton,
and with the dramatic activities of the Inner Temple
" SALMACIS AND HERMAPHRODITUS " 41
at a time when Browne and other pastoralists were
members of it. For the present it is sufficient to
say that Basse was himself issuing a pastoral romance
in the year of Sa.hnacis, 1602; and that he was by way
of subscribing himself simply W. B.
The external evidence for Beaumont's authorship
of this metrical tale is, at the best, but slight. As
regards the internal, however, I cannot agree with
Fleay and the author of the article entitled oCahnacis
and Hermaphroditus not by Bealtmont. 1 Both dic-
tion and verse display characteristics not foreign to
Beamnont's heroic couplets in epistle and elegy, nor
to the blank verse of his dramas,--though they do
not markedly distinguish them. The romantic-clas-
sical and idyllic grace may be the germ of that which
flowers in the tragicomedies; and the joyous irony
is not unlike that of The IVoman-Hater and The
Kdcjht o[ the Burnincj Pestle. The poem is a volup-
tuous and rambling expansion of the classical theme
" which sweet-lipt Ovid long" agoe did tell." The
writer, like many a lad of 16o2, has steeped himself
in the amatory fable and fancy of Marlowe, Chapman,
and Shakespeare; and the passionate imaginings are
such as characterize poetic lads of seventeen in any
period. It is not impossible that here xve have Francis
Beaumont's earliest attempt at a poem of some pro-
portions, and that he was stirred to it by exercises
like The Endimion and Phoebe of Drayton, probably
by that time the friend of the Grace-Dieu family.
Francis, indeed, need not have been ashamed of such
a performance, for in spite of the erotic fervour and
XDramaticus, (as above).
DRAYTON AND THE HOPEFUL BOYS 43
comium upon the two daughters of his early patron,
Sir Henry Goodere, Frances and Anne (Lady Rams-
ford) ; then he celebrates a " dear Sylvia, one the best
alive," and
Then that dear nymph that in the Muses joys,
That in wild Charnwood with her flocks doth go,
Mirtilla, sister to those hopeful boys,
My loved Thyrsis and sweet Palmeo;
That oft to Soar the southern shepherds bring,
Of whose clear waters they divinely sing.
So good she is, so good likewise they be,
As none to her might brother be but they,
Nor none a sister unto them, but she,--
To them for wit few like, I dare will say:
In them as Nature truly meant to show
How near the first, she in the last could go.
The " golden-mouthed Drayton musical" had spent
his youth not many miles from " wild Charnwood,"
at Polesworth Hall, the home of the Gooderes, in
Warxvickshire. The dear nymph of Charnwood is
Elizabeth Beaumont, in 6o6 a lass of eighteen,--and
the " hopeful boys" who bring the southern shep-
herds (Jonson, perhaps, and young John Fletcher, as
well as Drayton) to their Grace-Dieu priory by the
river Soar, are John, then about txventy-three, and
the future dramatist, about tventy-two. * Under the
pastoral pseudonym of Mirtilla, Elizabeth is again
celebrated by Drayton tweuty-four years later, in his
On these identifications, see Fleay, Citron. Etg. Dr.. I, I43-
I4 ; Elton, Michael Drayton, pp. I3, 58; Child, Michael Drayton
(in Camb. Hist. Lit., IV, 97, et seq.).
DRAYTON AND THE HOPEFUL BOYS 45
the same day as his uncle, "Henry Perpoint of
county Notts," and William Skipwith of Cotes in the
Beaumont county--who appears later as a friend
of Fletcher. Two days afterwards, Thomas Beau-
mont of Coleorton received the honour of knighthood
at the Earl of Rutland's castle of Belvoir. 1
Sir Henry of Grace-Dieu did not long enoy his
title. He died about the tenth of July 16o5, and
was buried on the thirteenth. By his will, witnessed
by his brother Francis, and probated February 16o6,
Sir Henry left half of his private estate to his sister,
Elizabeth " for her advancement in marriage," and
the other half to be divided equally between John and
Francis. He was succeeded as head of the family
by John, 2 who later married a daughter of John For-
tescue--also of a poetic race--and left by her a
large family. The sister, Elizabeth (Mirtilla) prob-
ably continued to live at Grace-Dieu until her mar-
riage to Thomas Seyliard of Kent. And that Francis
occasionally came home on visits from London we have
other proof than that afforded by Da'ayton. The
provision of a competence made by Sir Henry's will
leads us to conjecture that the subsequent dramatic
activity of the younger brother was undertaken for
sheer love of the art: and that, vhile his finances may
have been occasionally at low ebb, the association in
Bohemian nnage with John Fletcher, which ollowed
the years of residence at the Inner Temple, was a
matter of choice, not of poverty.
1 Shaw's Knights of Engl., Vol. II, under dates.
Grosart (D. N. B. art. loh, Beam,ont) says that John had
been admitted to the Inner Temple with Henry. John does not
appear in Inderwick.
CHAPTER IV
THE VAUX COUSINS AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT
ERTAIN political events of the years I6O 3 to
I606 must have occasioned the young Beaumonts
intimate and poig-nant concern. Their own family was,
of course, Protestant, but it was closely connected by
blood and matrimonial alliance with some of the most
devoted and conspicuous Catholic families of England.
Some of their Hastings kinsmen, sons of Francis, Earl
of Huntingdon, were Catholics; and their first cousins,
the Vauxes, whose home at Great Harrowden near by
had been for over twenty years the harbourage of per-
secuted priests, were active Jesuits. After the death
of his first wife,-- Beaumont's aunt Elizabeth. who left
four children, Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne, m
William, Lord Vaux, had married Mary, the sister of
the noble-hearted and self-sacrificing Catholic, Sir
Thomas Tresham of Rushton in No,rthamptonshire;
and this lady had brought up her own children, George
and Ambrose, as well as the children of the first mar-
riage, in strict adherence to the Roman faith and prac-
tice. Henry, the heir to the title, had been one of that
zealous band of young Catholic gentlemen who re-
ceived Fathers Campion and Persons on their arrival in
England in 158o. 1 Before i594, Henry, "that blessed
a John MorNs, Life o[ Father John Gerard, p. 311, et. seq.
46
HIS CATHOLIC COUSINS 47
gentleman and saint," as Father Persons calls him, had
died, having resigned his inheritance of the Barony to
his brother George some years earlier in order to spend
his remaining days in celibacy, study, and prayer. In
I59O, George, the elder son by the second marriage,
had taken to wife, Elizabeth Roper, also an ardent
Catholic, the daughter of the future Lord Teynham.
She was left a widov in 1594 with an infant son, Ed-
ward, whom she educated to maintain the Catholicity
of the family. In I595, the old Baron, Beaumont's
uncle, died--" the infortunatest peer o.f Parliament
for poverty that ever was " by reason of the fines and
forfeitures entailed upon him for his religious zeal.
Meanwhile, in 1591 , we find the daughters of the first
marriage, Eleanor, whose husband was an Edward
Brookesby, of Arundel House, Leicestershire, and
Anne Vaux, concealing in a house in \Varwickshire,
the well-known Father Gerard and his Superior,
Father Garnet, from priest-hunters, or pursuivants.
These tvo cousins of Beaumont are described in
Father Gerard's Narrative 1 as illustrious for goodness
and holiness, " whom in my own mind I often compare
to the two women vho received our Lord." The
younger, Anne, " was remarkable at all times for her
virginal modesty and shamefacedness, but in the cause
of God and the defence of His servants, the virgo
became ,irago. She is almost always ill, but we have
seen her, when so weakened as to be scarce able to utter
three words without pain, on the arrival of the pursui-
vants become so, strong as to spend three or four hours
in contest with them. When she has no priest in the
1 Morris, op. cir., p. 113. See below, Appendix, Table D.
48 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
house she feels afraid; but the simple presence of a
priest so animates her that then she makes sure that no
devil has any power over her house." In the years
that follow to 16o.5, the Vauxes are identified as recu-
sants and as sympathizers with the untoward fortunes
of Fathers Southwell, Walpole, Garnet, and others.
In I6OI, their kinsman and Frank Beaumont's, Henry
Hastings, nephew to George, fourth Earl of Hunting-
don, has joined the ranks and in 6o2, we find him in a
list of Jesuits " to b sought after" by the. Earl of
Salisbury,--" John Gerard with Mrs. Vaux and young
Mr. Hastings." Father Gerard's headquarters in fact
are from 1598 to 16o 5 with Mrs. Vaux and her son
Edward, the young Baron..at Great Harrowden. and
there others of the fifteen Jesuit fathers in England at
that time, and prominent Catholics, such as Sir Oliver
Manners, brother of Roger, Earl of Rutland, Sir
Everard Digby, and Francis-Tresham, a first cousin
o.f Mrs. Vaux, were wont to fo,regather.
When James I came to, the throne, the Catholics had
hope of some alleviation of the penalties under which
they laboured. Disappointed in this hope, the discon-
tented, led by two priests, Watson and Clarke, em-
barked upon a wild scheme to kidnap the King and set
as the price o.f his liberty the extension to Catholics of
equal rights, religious, civil, and political, with the
Protestants. The plot was betrayed, the priests ex-
ecuted, and the other leaders condemned to death,
then reprieved but attainted. Among those thus re-
prieved were Lord Grey de Wilton and " a confederate
named Brookesby." This Brookesby was Bartholo-
mew, the brother of Eleanor Vaux's husband. When
THE GUNPOWDER PLOT 5 I
fused, he wrote an anonymous letter to Monteagle, beg-
ging him " as you tender your life, to devise some
excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament;
for God and man hath concurred to punish the wicked-
ness of this time." How Monteagle informed the
Council and the King. How Guy Fawkes was discov-
ered among his barrels of gunpowder, and on the
fourth of November arrested as "John Johnson," the
servant of Thomas Percy, one of the King's Gentle-
men Pensioners. How "on the morning of the fifth,
the news of the great deliverance ran like wildfire along
the streets of London," and Catesby and Wright, Percy
and the brothers \Vinter, were in full flight for Lady
Catesby's house in Ashby St. Legers, Northampton-
shire, not far from Harrowden.
With the rest of the world Francis Beaumont would
gasp with amazement. But what must have been his
concern when on the first examination of "John John-
son," November 5th, the identity of that conspirator
was established not by any confession of his, but from
the contents of a letter found upon him, written by
Beaumont's first cousin, Anne Vaux!
As intelligence oozed from the Lords of Council,
Beaumont would next learn that Anne's sister-in-law,
Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux of Harrowden had expected
something was about to take place, and that Father
Gerard and " \Valley " [Garnet, the Father Superior
of the English Jesuits] " made her house their chief
resort"; and then that Fawkes had confessed that
1 The facts as here presented are drawn from the Calendar
of State Papers (Donestic), the Gupovder Plot Book, and-
Father Gerard's Narrative (in iXlorris), in the order of dates as
indicated.
52 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Catesby, the two Winters, and Francis Tresham -- all
of the Vaux family connection--and Sir Everard
Digby of their close acquaintance, were implicated in
the Plot; and that the conspiracy was not merely to
blow up the older members of the royal family but to
secure the Princess Elizabeth, place her upon the
throne, and marry her to an English Catholic, 1- there-
fore, an enterprise likely to implicate his Catholic
cousins, indeed. His friend, Ben Jonson, is mean-
while blustering of private informations, and Francis
would be likely to hear that Ben has written (Novem-
ber 8) to Lord Salisbury offering his services to un-
ravel the web "if no better person can be found," and
averring that the Catholics " are all so enweaved in it
as it will make 500 gent. lesse of the religion within
this weeke." Then he is apprised that John Wright,
Catesby, Percy, etc., have been seen at " Lady " Vaux's
on the eighth. The next day, that these three and
Christopher Wright have been overtaken and slain ; and
then that, on the ninth, Fawkes has confessed that they
have been using a house of Father Garnet's at White
\Vebbs as a rendezvous. Perhaps White \Vebbs means
nothing to Francis just yet, but it soon will. Three
days later, Tresham under examination acknoxvledges
interviews with his cousins, Catesby and Thomas Win-
ter, and with Fathers Garnet and Gerard: but says he
has not been at Mrs. Vaux's house at Harrowden for a
year. Soon afterwards, December 5, {he Inner Tem-
ple itself is shaken to the foundations by the intelli-
gence that Jesuit literature has been discovered by Sir
Edward Coke in Tresham's chamber,--a manuscript
Nov. 5--8.
54
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
about Han owden, for not only were the two other
priests most suspected, Garnet and Greenway, there
sometimes, but also, Gerard, whom Huddleston has
met there. On January 9, Bates definitely connects
Gerard and Garnet with the proceedings; and all three
priests are proclaimed. Gerard cannot be found, but
from his own Narrative it appears that he had been
hiding at Harrowden before, that now he is concealed
in London, and Elizabeth Vaux knows where. 1 When
she is brought again before the Lords of Council and
threatened with death if she tell not where the priest
is, we may imagine the interest of the Beaumonts.
Francis, though no sympathizer w.ith the Plot, cannot
have failed to admire the bearing of Elizabeth during
the examination :
"As fo.r my hostess, Mrs. Vaux," writes Father
Gerard, "she was brought to London after that long
search for me, and strictly examined about me by the
Lords of the Council; but she answered to everything
so discreetly as to escape all blame. At last they pro-
duced a letter of hers to a certain relative, asking for
the release of Father Strange and another, of whom I
spoke before. This relative of hers was the chief man
in the county in which they had been taken, and she
thought she could by her intercession with him prevail
for their release. But the treacherous man, who had
often enough, as far as words went, offered to serve
her in any way, proved the truth of our Lord's
prophecy, ' A man's enemies shall be those of his own
household!' for he immediately sent up her letter to
the Council. They showed her, therefore, her own
a Morris, Li[e o[ Father Gerard, p. 385.
MRS. VAUX AND FATHER GERARD 55
letter, and said to, laer, ' You see now that you are en-
tirely at the King's mercy for life or death; so if you
consent to tell us where Father Gerard is, you shall
have your life.'
"'I do not know where he is,' she answered, 'and
if I did know, I would not tell you.'
" Then rose o,ne of the lords, who had been a former
friend of hers, to accompany her to the door, out of
courtesy, and on the way said to her persuasively,
'Have pity on yourself and on your children, and say
what is required of you, for otherwise you must cer-
tainly die.'
" To which she answered vith a loud voice, ' Then,
my lord, I will die.'
" This was said when the door had been opened, so
that her servants who were waiting for her heard what
she said, and all burst into weeping. But the Council
only said this to terrify her, for they did not commit
her to prison, but sent her to the house of a certain
gentleman in the city, and after being held there in
custody for a time she vas released, but on condition
of remaining in London. And one of the principal
Lords of the Council acknowledged to a friend that he
had nothing against her, except that she was a stout
Papist, going ahead of others, and, as it were, a leader
in evil."
What follows of Elizabeth's devotio.n to the cause,
would not be likely to filter through; but the Beau-
monts may have had their suspicions. According to
Father Gerard'--
"Immediately she vas released from custody, know-
ing that I was then in London, quite forgetful ot her-
56 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
self, she set about taking care of me, and provided all
the furniture and other things necessary for my new
house. Moreover, she sent me letters daily, recounting
everything that occurred; and when she knew that I
wished to cross the sea for a time, she bid me not spare
expense, so that I secured a safe passage, for that she
would pay everything, though it should cost five thou-
sand florins, and in fact she sent me at once a
thousand florins for nay journey. I left her in care
of Father Percy, who had already as nay companion
lived a long time at her house. There he still remains,
and does nmch good. I went straight to Rome, and
being sent back thence to these parts, was fixed at
Louvain." 1 So much at present of Elizabeth. We
shall hear of her, as did Beaumont, during the succeed-
ing years.
In the tribulations of Anne Vaux, his own first
cousin, Francis must have been even more deeply inter-
ested. That she was in communication with Fawkes
had been discovered, November 5- She was appre-
hended, committed to the care of Sir John Swynerton,
but temporarily discharged. \Vhen Fawkes confessed,
November 9, that the conspirators had been using a
house of Father Garnet's at \Vhite Webbs, in Enfield
Chace, the house called " Dr. Hewick's " was searched.
" No papers nor nmnition found, but Popish books and
relics,-- and many trap-doors and secret passages."
Garnet had escaped but, on examination of the servants,
it developed that under the pseudonym of " Meaze " he
had taken the house " for his sister, Mrs. Perkins,"--
[and who should " Mrs. Perkins " turn out to be but
Morris, pp. 43-44.
5 8 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
ing some mischief at one time, she had " begged Garnet
to prevent it." Examined again o.n March 24, she says
that " Francis Tresham, her cousin, often visited her
and Garnet at "Vhite Webbs, Erith, YVandsworth, etc.,
when Garnet would counsel him to be patient and quiet;
and that they also visited Tresham at his house in XVar-
wickshire." Garnet's trial took place at Guildhall on
March 28, Sir Edward Coke of the Inner Temple act-
ing for the prosecution. Garnet acknowledged that the
Plot had been conveyed to him by another priest
[Greenway] in confession. He was convicted, how-
ever, not for failing to divulge that knowledge, but for
failing to dissuade Catesby and the rest, both before
and after he had gained knowledge from Greenway.
He was executed on May 3- Of Anne's share in all
that has preceded, Beamnont would by this date have
known. One wonders whether he or his brother, John,
ever learned the pathetic details of the final correspond-
ence between Anne and the Father Superior. How,
March 21, she wrote to him asking directions for the
disposal of herself, and concluding that life without
him was "not life but deathe." How, April 2, he
.replied with advice for.her future; and as to Oldcorne
and himself, added that the former had " dreamt there
were two tabernacles prepared for them." How, the
next day, she wrote again asking fuller directions and
wishing Father Oldcorne had " dreamt there was a
third seat" for her. And how, that same day, with
loving thought for all details of her proceedings, and
with sorrom for his own weakness under examination,
the Father Superior sends his last word to her, that
WAS HIS BROTHER RECUSANT? 59
he will "die no.t as a victorious martyr, but as a pen-
itent thief,"--and bids her farewell.
All this o,f the Harrowden cousins and their connec-
tion with Catholicism and the Gunpowder Plot, I have
included not only because it touches nearly upon the
family interests and friendships of Beaumont's early
years, but also because it throws light upon the circum-
stances and feelings which prompted the satire of his
first play, The lKoman-Hatcr (acted in I6O7), where
as we shall see hi alludes with horror to the Plot itself,
but holds up to ridicule the informers who swarmed the
streets of London in the years succeeding, and trumped
up charges of conspiracy and recusancy against un-
offending persons, and so sought to deprive them, if
not of life, o.f property. It is with some hesitancy,
since the proof to me is not conclusive, that I suggest
that the animus in this play against favourites and in-
telligencers has perhaps more of a personal flavour than
has hitherto been suspected. _An entry from the
Docquet, calendared with the State Papers, Domestic,
of November 14, 16o7, may indicate that John Beau-
mont, the brother of Francis, though a Protestant, had
in some way manifested sympathy with his Catholic rel-
atives during the persecutions which followed the dis-
covery of the Gunpowder Plot:--" Gift to Sir Jas.
Sempill of the King's two parts of the site of the late
dissolved monastery of Grace-Dieu, and other lands in
Leicester, in the hands of the Crown by the recusancy
of John Beaumont." At first reading the John Beau-
mont would appear to be Francis' grandfather, the
Master of the Rolls. But the Master lost his lands not
WAS HIS BROTHER RECUSANT?
lines "; also that it is only under James's successor that
he is honoured by a baronetcy. It is, therefore, not at
all impossible that, because of some careless or over-
frank utterance of fellow-feeling for his Catholic con-
nections, or o.f repugnance for the unusually savage
measures adopted after the discovery of the Gun-
powder Plot, he may have been accused of recusancy,
deprived of part of his estate, and driven into, the seclu-
sion which he maintained at Grace-Dieu till 66 or
thereabout.
CHAPTER V
FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH
HE friendship between Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher may have commenced at any time
after Francis became a member of the Inner Temple,
in I6OO,--probably not later than 16o 5, when Beau-
mont was about twenty-one and Fletcher twenty-six.
The latter was the son of "a comely and courtly
prelate," Richard, Bishop, successively of Bristol,
Worcester, and London. Richard's father, also,
had been a clerygyman; and Richard, himself, in his
earlier years had been pensioner and scholar of Trin-
ity, Cambridge (1563), then Fellow of Bene't Col-
lege (Corpus Christi), then President of the
College. In 1573 he married Elizabeth Holland at
Cranbrook in Kent, perhaps of the family of Hugh
Holland, descended from the Earls of Kent, who later
appears in the circle of Beaumont's acquaintance; be-
came, next, minister of the church of Rye, Sussex,
about fifteen miles south of Cranbrook: then, Chap-
lain to the Queen; then, Dean of Peterborough.
While he was officiating at Rye, in December 1579 ,
John the fourth of nine children, was born. This
John, the dramatist, is probably the "John Fletcher
of London," who was admitted pensioner of Bene't
College, Cambridge, in 1591, and, as if destined
64 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
observing the ways of monarchs and courtiers, schol-
ars and poets, as well as of princes of the Church.
Since 1576, his father had " lived in her highnes,"
the Queen's, " gratious aspect and favour." Prcesul
splendidus, says Camden. Eloquent, accomplished,
courtly, lavish in hospitality and munificence, no won-
der that he counted among his friends, Burghley, the
Lord Treasurer, and Burghley's oldest son, Sir
Thomas Cecil, Anthony Bacon, the brother of Sir
Francis, and that princely second Earl of Essex,
Robert Devereux, who had married the widow of
Sir Philip Sidney, and with whom the lame but clever
Anthony Bacon lived. Sir Francis Drake also was
one of his friends and gave him a "' ringe of golde"
vhich he willed to one of his executors. Another of
his " loveinge freindes," and an assistant-executor of
his will, was the learned and vigorous Dr. Richard
Bancroft, his successor as Bishop of London and
afterwards Archbislaop of Canterbury. As for im-
mediate literary connections, suffice it here to say that
the Bishop's brother, Dr. Giles Fletcher, was a culti-
vated diplomat and vriter upon government, and that
the sons of Dr. Giles were the clerical Spenserians,
Phineas, but three years younger than his cousin the
dramatist,--whose fisher-play Sicclides was acting at
King's College, Cambridge, in the year of John's
Chances in London, and whose Brittain's Ida is as
light in its youthful eroticism as his Purple Island is
ponderous in pedantic allegory,and Giles, nine
years younger than John, who was printing verses
before John wrote his earliest play, and whose poem
of Christ's Victorie was published, in 161o, a year or
FLETCHER'S FAMILY 6 5
so later than John's pastoral of The Faithfull Shcp-
heardesse. Bishop Fletcher could tell his sons stories
of royalty, not only in affluence, but in distress; for
when John was but eight years old the father as
Dean of Peterborough was chaplain to Mary, Queen
of Scots, at Fotheringay, adding to her distress " by
the zeal with which he urged her to renounce the
faith of Rome." It was he who when Mary's head
was held up after the execution cried, " So perish all
the Queen's enemies! " 1 He could, also, tell them
much about the great founder of the Dorset family,
for at Fotheringay at the same time was Thomas
Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards first Earl of
Dorset, who had coane to announce to Mary, Queen
of Scots, the sentence of death.
From 59 on, the Bishop was experiencing the
alternate " smiles and frowns of royalty" in London;
about the time that John left college more particularly
the frowns. For, John's mother having died about
the end of 592, the Bishop had, in I595, most un-
wisely ma.rried Maria (daughter of John Giffard of
Weston-under-Edge in Gloucestershire), the relict of a
few months' standing of Sir Richard Baker of Sis-
singhurst in Kent. The Bishop's acquaintance with
this second wife, as well as with the first, probably de-
rived from his father's incumbency as Vicar of the
church in Cranbrook, Kent, which began in I555 and
was still existing as late as 574- T'he young Richa.rd
would often have shuddered as a child before Bloody
Baker's Prison with its iron-barred windows glower-
ing from the parish church, for Sir John hated the
1 Nichols's Progresses of Queen Eli.abeth, II, 5o6-51o.
THOiXIAS SACKVILI,E, FIRST EARL OF DORSET
From the portrait in the possession of Lord Sackville, at Knole Park
FLETCHER'S CONNECTIONS 67
association between the Fletchers and Lady Buck-
hurst's sister-in-law of Sissinghurst grew out of this
alliance of the Sackvilles with the Bakers.
Lady Baker was in I595 in conspicuous disfavour
with Queen Elizabeth, and with the people too; for,
if she was virtuous, as her nep.hev records, 1 "the more
happy she in herself, though unhappy that the world
did not believe it." 2 Certain it is, that in a contempo-
rary satire she is thrice-damned as of the most ancient
of disreputable professions, and once dignified as " my
Lady Letcher." 'Though of unsavoury reputation, she
was of fine appearance, and socially very well con-
nected. Her brother, Sir George Giffard, was in serv-
ice at Court under Elizabeth; and in Sackville, Lord
Buckhurst, she had a brother-in-law, who was kinsman
to the Queen, herself. But not only did the Queen
dislike her, she disliked the idea of any of her prelates,
especially her comely Bishop of London, marrying a
second time, vithout her express consent. For a year
after this second marriage the Bishop was suspended
from his office. " Here of the Bishop was sadly sensi-
ble," says Fuller, " and seeking to lose his sorrow in
a mist of smoak, died of the immoderate taking
thereof." Sir John Harington, however, tells us that
he regained the royal favour;--" but, certain it is that
(the Queen being pacified, and hee in great jollity
with his faire Lady and her Carpets and Cushions in
his bed-chamber) he died suddenly, taking Tobacco
in his chaire, saying to his man that stood by him,
whom he loved very well, ' Oh, boy, I die.' "
1 Sir Richard Baker, in his Chronicle of the Kings of England.
2 Fuller's Worthies, as cited by Dyce, I, x, xi.
FLETCHER'S CONNECTIONS 69
cushions and the special " stayre and dore made of
purpose . . in a bay windoxv " for the entrance of
Oueen Elizabeth when she might deign, or did deign,
to visit her unruly prelate,--what the lad of seventeen
did for a living before we find him, about 26o6 or
6o7, in the ranks of the dramatists, xve have no means
of knowing. Perhaps the remaining years of his boy-
hood were spent with his uncle, Giles, and his young
cousins, the coming poets, or with the aunt whom his
father called " sister Pownell." The stepmother of
eighteen months' duration is not likely with her luxu-
rious tastes and questionable character to have tarried
long in charge of the eight " poore and fatherless
children." She had children of her own by her pre-
vious marriage, in whom to seek consolation, Griso-
gone and Cicely Baker, then in their twenties, and
devoted to her. 1 And with one or both we may sur-
mise that she resumed her life in Kent, or with the heir
of sleepy Sissinghurst, making the most of her carpets
and cushions and such of her " thirds " as she could
recover, until--for she xvas but forty-seven--she
might find more congenial comfort in a third marriage.
Her permanent consoler was a certain Sir Stephen
Thornhurst of Forde in the Isle of Thanet; and he,
thirteen years after the death of her second husband,
buried her in state in Canterbury Cathedral, x 6o 9.
In I60 3 her sister-in-law, Cicely (Baker) Sackville,
now Countess of Dorset and the Earl, her husband,
that fine old dramatist of Beaumont's Inner Temple,
and former acquaintance at Fotheringay of John
1 As her monument in Canterbury would indicate. Hasted.
Hist. Ket, XI, 397.
7o
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Fletcher's father, had taken possession of the manor
of Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, where their de-
scendants live to-day. Before 16o9, Fletcher's step-
sister Cicely, named after her aunt, the Countess, had
become the Lady Cicely Blunt. Grisogone became the
Lady Grisogone Lennard, having married, about I596,
a great friend of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
and of his Countess (Sir Philip Sidney's sister), Sir
Henry, the son of Sampson Lennard of Chevening and
Knole. The Lennard estate lay but three and a half
miles from that of their connections, the Dorsets, of
Knole Park. If young Fletcher ever went down to see
his stepmother at Sissinghurst, or his own mother's
family in Cranbrook, he was but tventy-six miles by
post-road from Chevening and still less from Aunt
Cicely at Knole. Beaumont, himself, as we shall see,
married the heiress of Sundridge Place a mile and a
half south of Chevening, and but forty minutes across
the fields from Knole. His sister Elizabeth, too, mar-
ried a gentleman of one of the neighbouring parishes.
The acquaintance of both our dramatists with Bakers
and Sackvilles was enhanced by sympathies literary and
dramatic. A still younger Sir Richard Baker, cousin
to John Fletcher's stepsisters, and to the second and
third Earls of Dorset, was an historian, a poet, and a
student of the stage w on familiar terms with Tarle-
ton, Burbadge, and Alleyn. And the literary tradi-
tions handed down from Thomas Sackville, the author
of Gorbodztc and The Mirror for Magistrates were
not forgotten by his grandson, Richard, third Earl
of Dorset, the contemporary of our dramatists,--for
whom, if I am not mistaken, their portraits, now hang-
FLETCHER'S CONNECTIONS 71
ing in the dining-room of the Baron Sackville at Knole,
were painted. 1
I have dwelt thus at length upon the conditions ante-
cedent to, and investing, the youth of Beaumont and of
Fletcher, because the documents already at hand, if
read in the liffht of scientific biography and litera-
ture, set before us with remarkable clearness the social
and poetic background of their career as dramatists.
When this background of birth, breeding, and family
connection is filled in with the deeper colours of their
life in London, its manners, experience, and asso-
ciations, one may more readily comprehend why Dry-
den says in comparing them with Shakespeare,
" they understood and imitated the conversation of
gentlemen [of contemporary fashion] much better;
whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in rep-
artees, no poet before them could paint as they have
done."
1 For the Bakers and their connections, see Hasted, Hist. Kent,
III, 77; IV, 374, et seq.; VII. IOO-IOI; for the Sackvilles.--
Hasted, III, 73-82; for the Lennards.--Hasted, III, IO8-I6; the
Peerages of Collins, Burke. etc.. and the articles in D. N. B.
See also, below, Appendix, Table E.
CHAPTER VI
SOME EARLY PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND OF FLETCHER
EAUMONT and Fletcher may have been friends
by 6o 3 or 6o4,--iu all likelihood, as early as
6o 5 when, as we have seen, Drayton and other
" southern Shepherds " were by way of visiting the
Beaumonts at Grace-Dieu. In that year Jonson's
Volpone was acted for the first time; and one may
divine from the familiar and affectionate terms
in which our two young dramatists address the
author upon the publication of the play in 6o 7
that they had been acquainted not only with Jon-
son but with one another for the two years past.
We have no satisfactory proof of their coiSperation
in play-writing before 6o6 or 6o7. According to
Dryden,-- whose statements of fact are occasionally
to be taken with a grain of salt, but who, in this in-
stance, though writing ahnost sixty years after the
event, is basing his assertion upon first-hand author-
ity,--" the first play that brought ' them ' in esteem was
their Philaster," but "before that they had written
two or three very unsuccessfully." Philastcr, as I
shall presently show, vas, in all probability, first acted
between December 7, 6o9 and July 2, I6IO. Be-
fore 6o9, however, each had written dramas inde-
pendently, Beaumont The IVomav-Hater and The
SOME EARLY PLAYS . 73
Knight of the Bu.rnbtg Pestle; Fletcher, The Faithfull
Shepheardesse, and maybe one or two. other plays.
Our first evidence of their association in dramatic
activity is the presence of Fletcher's hand, apparently
as a reviser, in three-scenes of The Woman-Hater,
which vas licensed for publication May 2o, 6o 7, as
" lately acted by the Children of Paul's." From con-
temporary evidence we knoxv, as did Dryden, that
two of these plays, The Knight and Faithfull Shep-
heardesse vere ungraciously received; and Richard
Brome, about fourteen years after Fletcher's death,
suggests that perhaps Monsieur Thomas shared " the
comulon fate."
The lVoman-Hater was the earliest play of either
of our dramatists to find its way into print.
Drayton's lines, already referred to, about "sweet
Palmeo" imply that Beaumont was already known
as a poet, before April 6o6. A passage in the
Prologue of The IVoma.n-Hatcr seems, as Professor
Thorndike has shown, to refer to the narrow escape
of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston from having their
ears cropped for an offense given to the King by
their Eastward Hoe. If it does, "he that made this
play," undoubtedly Beaumont, made it after t'he pub-
lication of Eastzeard Hoe in 6o 5. The title-page of
6o 7 says tha.t the play is given "as it hath been
lately acted." The ridicule of intelligen, cers emu-
lating some worthy men in this land " who have dis-
covered things dangerously hanging over the State"
has reference to the system of spying which assumed
enormous proportions after the discovery of the Gun-
powder Plot in November I6O 5. An allusion to
"THE \VOMAN-HATER" 75
violating the plague regulations, as laid down by the
City, The IVoman-Ha.ter could have been acted during
the six months following November 20, 6o6. A pas-
sage in Act III, 2,1 which I shall presently quote in full,
is, as has not previously been noticed, a manifest parody
of one of Antony's speeches in Antony and Cleopatrc 2
which, according to all evidence, was not acted before
6o7. It would appear, therefore, that Beaurnont's
first play vas completed after January , 6o7, prob-
ably after March _o 4, when Ca.rr regained the royal
favour, and was presented for the first time during the
two months following the latter date.
The IVoman-Ha.tcr affords interesting glimpses of
the author's observation, sometimes perhaps experi-
ence, in town and country. " That I might be turned
loose," says one of his dramaHs personae, " to try my
fortune amongst the whole fry in a college or an inn
of court!" And another, a gay young buck,"I
must take some of the common courses of our nobility,
which is thus" If I can find no company that likes
me, pluck off my hat-band, throxv an old cloak over
my face and, as if I xvould not be known, walk hastily
through the streets till I be discovered" 'There goes
Count Such-a-one,' says one ; ' There goes Count Such-
a-one,' says another; 'Look hoxv fast he goes,' says
a third; 'There's some great matters in hand, ques-
tionless,' says a fourth; when all my business is to
have them say so. This hath been used. Or, if I
can find any company [acting at the theatre], I '11 after
dinner to the stage to see a play; where, when I first
enter, you shall have a murmur in the house; every
Dyce, B. and F., Vol. I, p. 3. Act IV, 14, o-54.
76 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
one that does not know, cries, 'What nobleman is
that?' All the gallants on the stage, rise, vail to
me, kiss their hand, offer me their places; then I pick
out some one vholn I please to grace among the rest,
take his seat, use it, throw my cloak over my face, and
laugh at him; the poor gentleman imagines himself
most highly graced, thinks all the auditors esteem
him one of lny bosom friends, and in right special
regard with me." _And again, and this is much like
first-hand knowledge: " There is no poet acquainted
with more shakings and quakings, towards the latter
end of his new play (when he's in that case that he
stands peeping betwixt the curtains, so fearfully that
a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks some-
body hisses), than I am at this instant." And again,
--of the political spies, who had persecuted more than
one of Beaumont's relatives and, according to tradi-
tion, trumped up momentary trouble for our young
dramatists themselves, a fexv years later: "This
fellow is a kind of informer, one'that lives in ale-
houses and taverns; and because he perceives some
worthy men in this land, with much labour and great
expense, to have discovered things dangerously hang-
ing over the state, he thinks to discover as much
out of the talk of drunkards in tap-houses. He
brings me information, picked out of broken words
in men's common talk, which with his malicious mis-
application he hopes vill seem dangerous; he doth,
besides, bring me the names of all the young gen-
tlemen in the city that use ordinaries or taverns, talk-
ing (to my thinking) only as the freedom of their
youth teach them vithout any further ends, for dan-
"THE WOMAN-HATER " 77
gerous and seditious spirits." Much more in this
kind, of city ways known to Beaumont; and, also,
something of country ways, the table of the Leices-
tershire squire--the Beaumonts of Coleorton and
the Villierses of Brooksby,--and the hunting-break-
fasts with which Grace-Dieu vas familiar. The hun-
gry courtier of the play vows to. " keep. a sumptuous
house; a board groaning under the heavy burden of
the beast that cheweth the cud, and the fowl that cut-
teth the air. It shall not, like the table of a country-
justice, be sprinkled over with all manner of cheap
salads, sliced beef, giblets and pettitoes, to fill up room;
nor shall there stand any great, cumbersome, uncut-up
pies at the nether end, filled with moss and stones,
partly to make a show with, partly to keep the lower
mess [below the salt] from eating; nor shall my meal
come in sneaking like the city-service, one dish a quar-
ter of an hour after another, and gone as if they had
appointed to meet there and mistook the hour; nor
should it, like the new court-service, come in in haste,
as if it fain would be gone again [whipped off by the
waiters], all courses at once, like a hunting breakfast:
but I would have my several courses and my
dishes well filed [ordered]: my first course
shall be brought in after the ancient manner
by a score of old blear-eyed serving-men in
long blue coats."--And not a little of life at Court,
and of the favourites, with whom King James
surrounded himself:-- " They say one shall see
fine sights at the Court? I'll tell you what you
shall see. You shall see many faces of man's making,
for you shall find very few as God left them: and you
78
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
shall see many legs too; amongst the rest you shall
behold one pair, the feet of vhich were in past times
sockless, but are now, through the change of time
(that alters all things), very strangely become the legs
of a knight and a courtier; another pair you shall see,
that were heir-apparent legs to a glover; these legs
hope shortly to be honourable; when they pass by they
will bow, and the mouth to these legs will seem to
offer you some courtship; it will swear, but it will lie;
hear it not."
Keen observation this, and a dramatist's acquaint-
ance with many kinds of life; the promise of a satiric
mastery, and very vivid prose for a lad of twenty-three.
The play is not, as a dramatic composition, of any
peculiar distinction. Beaumont is still in his pupilage
to the classics, and to Ben Jonson's comedy of humours.
But the hmnours, though unoriginal and boyishly
forced, are clearly defined; and the instinct for fun
is irrepressible. The \Voman-Hater, obsessed by the
delusion that all women are in pursuit, is admirably
victimized by a xvitty and versatile heroine who has,
with maliciously genial pretense, assumed the r61e of
man-hunter. And to the main plot is loosely, but not
altogether ineffectually, attached a highly diverting
story which Beaumont has taken from the Latin trea-
tise of Paulus Jovius on Roman fishes, or from some
intermediate source. Like the Tamisius of the orig-
inal, his Lazarillo,--whose prayer to the Goddess of
Plenty is ever, "fill me this day with some rare deli-
cates,"--scours the city in fruitless quest of an um-
brana's head. Finally, he is taken by intelligencers,
spies in the service of the state, who construe his pas-
"KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE" 81
cially, did not stomach the ridicule of the bombast-lov-
ing and romanticizing London citizen himself,--was
not yet educated up to the humour; perhaps, because
" hee . . . this unfortunate child . . . was so unlike
his brethren." At any rate, according to Walter
Burre, the punisher, in I63, "the wide world for
want of judgement, or not understanding the privy
marke of Ironic about it (which showed it was no of-
spring of any vulgar braine) utterly rejected it." And
Burre goes on to say in his Dedication of the quarto
to Maister Robert Keysar :--" for want of acceptance
it was even ready to give up the Ghost, and was in
danger to have bene smothered in perpetuall oblivion,
if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude)
had not bene moved both to relieve and cherish it:
wherein I must needs commend both your judgement,
understanding, and singular love to good wits."
The rest of this Dedication is of great interest as
bearing upon the date of the composition of the play;
but it has been entirely misconstrued or else it ves
us false information. That matter I shall discuss in
connection xvith the sources and composition of the
play? Suffice it to say here that The Knight fol-
lowed The Traz,ails of Three English Brothers, acted
June e9, 6o7, and that the Robert Keysar who res-
cued the manuscript of The Knight from oblivion had,
only in 6o6 or 6o7, acquired a financial interest in
the Queen's Revels' Children, and was backing them
during the last year of their occupancy of BIackfriars
when they presented the play, and where only it was
presented.
1 See Chap. XXIV, below.
84 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
a little later characterized his Monsieur Thomas.
The date of its first performance is determined by the
combined authority of the Stationers' Registers (from
which we learn that the publishers of the first quarto,
undated, but undoubtedly of 16o9,1 were in unassisted
partnership only from December 22, 16o8 to July 20,
16o9), of a statement of Jonson to Drummond of
Hawthornden that the play was written " ten years "
before 618, and of commendatory verses to the first
quarto of 16o 9, by the young actor-dramatist, Na-
thaniel Field. If we may guide our calculations by
the plague regulations of the time, it must have been
acted before July 8, 16o8.
On the appearance of the first quarto, in 6o 9,
Jonson sympathizing with " the worthy .author," on
the ill reception of the pastoral when first performed,
says :
I, that am glad thy innocence was their guilt,
for the rabble found not there the "vices, which they
look'd for," I
Do crown thy murder'd poem; which shall rise
A glorified work to time, when fire
Or moths shall eat what all these fools admire.
And Francis Beaumont writing to " my friend, Mas-
ter John Fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted wit"
and " art," and rejoices that, if they should condemn
the play now that it is printed,
Your censurers must have the quality
Of reading, which I am afraid is more
Than half your shrewdest judges had before.
x See Fleay, Chron. Eng. Dr., I, 312, and Thorndike, In/. o
B. a.d F., 64.
86
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
and, as one of the Queen's Revels' Children, he
had probably taken part in The Faithfull Shepheard-
esse when the undiscerning public hissed it. Field
came of good family, had been one of Mulcaster's pu-
pils at the Merchant Taylors' School, and was beloved
by Chapman and Jonson. He was then but twenty-
two,-- about three years younger than Fletcher's
friend, Beaumont,--but for nine years gone he had
been recognized as a genius among boy-actors. That
the verses of so young a man should be accepted, and
coupled with those of the thunder-girt Chapman, was
to him a great and unexpected honour; and the youth
expresses prettily his pride in being published by his
" lov'd friend" in such distinguished literary com-
pany,-
Can my approovement, sir, be worth your thankes,
Whose unknowne name, and Muse in swathing clowtes,
Is not yet growne to strength, among these rankes
To have a roome?
Noxv he is planning to write dramas himself; and it
is pleasant to note with what modesty he touches upon
the project :
But I must justifie what privately
I censur'd to you, my ambition is
(Even by my hopes and love to Poesie)
To live to perfect such a worke as this,
Clad in such elegant proprietie
Of words, including a morallifie,
So sweete and profitable.
He is alluding to his not yet finished comedy, ,4
Folio, i647, 'mortallitie'; a misprint.
FLETCHER'S "" SHEPHEARDESSE " 87
Woman is a llZeather-cocke. The youth must have
been close to Beaumont as well as to Fletcher; he, soon
afterwards, I6o9-IO, played the leading part in their
Corcombe,--which, I think, was the earliest work
planned and written by them in collaboration; and
when, a little later, his own first comedy was acted
by the Queen's Revels' Children no auditor of literary
ear could have failed to detect, amid the manifest
echoes of Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare, the
flattering resemblance in diction, rhythm, and poetic
fancy to the most characteristic features of Beau-
mont's style. This is very interesting, because in an-
other dramatic composition Foure Playes i One, writ-
ten in part by Fletcher, certain portions have so close
a likeness to Beaumont's work, that until lately they
have been mistakenly attributed to that poet and as-
signed to this early period of his career. The portions
of The Foure Playes not written by Fletcher vere
written by no other than Nat. Field. And since in
Field's tddress to the Reader of the IVeather-cocke,
licensed for publication November 23, I6, he still
speaks as if the IVeather-cocke were his only venture
in play-writing, we may conclude that The Foure
Playes in One xvas not put together before the end of
I6 , or the beginning of 612. That series need not,
therefore, be considered in the present place; all the
more so, since Beaumont had in all probability noth-
ing directly to do with its composition, x
Of the other dramas vritten by Fletcher alone and
assigned by critics to his earlier period, that is to
say before 6o, or even 6I, the only one beside
See Chap. XXIII, below.
88 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
The Faith full Shepheardesse that may vith any de-
gree of safety be admitted to consideration is a com-
edy of romance, mann.ers, and humours, Monsieur
Thomas. The romance is a delightful story of self-
abnegating love. The father, Valentine, and the son
Francisco, supposed to have been drovned long ago,
and now known (if the texts had only printed the
pIay as Fletcher vrote it) as CaIlidon, a guest of VaI-
entine, love the same girl, the father's vard. This
part of the play is executed with captivating grace.
It shows that FIetcher had, from the first, an instinct
for the dramatic handIing of a compIicated story, an
eye for delicate and surprising situations, an apprecia-
tion of chivalric honour and genuine passion, and a
fancy fertile and pIayfuI. In the subplot the man-
ners are such as vould appeaI to a Fletcher not yet
thirty years of age; and the hmnours are those of a
student of the earIier plays of Ben Jonson, and of Mar-
ston who ceased writing in t0o 7. It has indeed
been asserted, but without much credibility, that " the
notion of the panerotic Hylas," who nmst always " be
courting wenches through key-holes," vas taken from
a character in Marston's Pa.rasitaster, of 16o67 The
name of this Captain, Hylas, was in the mouth of
Fletcher in those early days; he uses it again in his part
of the Philaster, written in 6o 9 or I6IO, and else-
where. The snatches of song and the names of bal-
lads are those of contemporary popularity between 6o6
and 16o9; and in two instances they are those of
which Beaumont makes use in his Ktight of the Bur-
ing Pestle of 16o 7. The play was acted, too, appar-
See Guskar, Anglia, XXVIII, XXIX.
FLETCHER'S " MONSIEUR THOMAS " 8 9
ently by the same company, the (ueen's Revels' Chil-
dren, and in the same house as was Beaumont's. It
could not have been played by them at " the Private
House in Black Fryers " later than March 6o8, unless
they squeezed it into that last month of 6o 9 which
serves as a telescope basket for so many of the plays
which critics cannot satisfactorily date.
For my present purpose, which is to show how
Fletcher, not assisted by Beaumont, wrote during his
youth, it makes little difference whether Mop,sieur
Thomas was written as early as 6o8 or only be-
fore 6I. The fact is, however, that a line in the
last scene, "Take her, Francisco, now. no more
young Callidon," shows clearly that Callidon, a name
not occurring elsewhere in the play, and necessary
to the dramatic complication, had been used by
Fletcher in his first version; and vhen ve put the
names Callidon and Cellid4e together (she is Fran-
cisco's beloved) we are pointed at once to the source
of the romantic plot--the Histoire de Cdide,
Tham, yre, et Calido, at the beginning of the Second
Part of the Astre of the Marquis D'Urf4. a The
First Part of this voluminous pastoral romance had
been published, probably in I6O9, in an edition which
is lost; but a second edition, dedicated to Henri IV,
who died May I4, 6o, appeared that year. Some
of Fletcher's inspiration, as for the name and general
characteristic of Hylas, was drawn from the First
Part. The Second Part xvas not printed till later in
Stiefel, Zeitschr. [. Vergl. Lilt., XII (I898), 248 ; Engl. Stud.,
XXXVI; Hatcher, A,glia, Feb. 9o7; and Macaulay, C.H.L.,
VI, 56.
90 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
161o. It would, therefore, appear that Fletcher
could not have written Monsiezir Thomas before the
latter date. On the other hand, as Dr. Upham 1 has
indicated, the Astrde had been read as early as Feb-
ruary I2, 16o7, by Ben Jonson's friend, William
Drummond, who, on that day, writes about it critically
to Sir George Keith. If the First Part had been cir-
culated in manuscript, and read by an Englishman, in
16o7, it is not at all unlikely that the Second Part,
too, of this most leisurely punished romance, which
did not get itself all iuto covers till 1647, had been
read in manuscript by many men, French and English,
long before its appearance in print, 16Io;Jmay be
by Fletcher himself, as early as 16o8. Or he may
have heard the story, as early as that, from some one
who had read it. The fact that he alters some of
the names, follows the plot but loosely, characterizes
the personages not at all as if he had the original
before him, and uses none of their diction, would
favour the supposition that he is writing from hearsay,
or from some second hand and condensed version of
the story.
No matter what the exact date of composition,
Monsieur Thomas is the one play beside The Faithfdl
Shepheardesse from which we may drav conclusions
concerning the native tendencies of the young Fletcher.
The subplot of Thomas, concocted with clever ease,
and furnished with varied devices appropriate to
comic effect--disguisings, mouse-traps, dupers duped,
street-frolics and mock sentimental serenades, scaling-
ladders, convents, and a blackamoor girl for a decoy-
1 French Inauence in English Literature, pp. 3oo, 3o8.
FLETCHER'S " MONSIEUR THOMAS" 9 x
duck,--is conceived in a rollicking spirit and executed
in sprightly conversational style. Sir Adolphus Ward
says that " as a picture of manners it is excelled by few
other Elizabethan comedies." I am sorry that I can-
not agree; I call it lov, or farcical comedy; and though
the 'manners' be briskly and realistically imagined,
I question their contemporary actuality,--even their
dramatic probability. Amusing scapegraces like the
hero of the title-part have existed in all periods of
history; and fathers, who will not have their sons
mollycoddles; and squires of dames, like the suscepti-
ble Hylas. But manners, to be dramatically probable,
nmst reflect the contacts of possible characters in a
definite period. And no one can maintain that the
contact of these persons with the women of the play
is characterized by possibility. Or that these manners
could, even in the beginning of James I's reign, have
characterized a perceptible percentage of actual Lon-
doners. Thomas, whose humour it is to assume sancti-
mony for the purpose of vexing his father, and blas-
phemy for the purpose of teasing his sweetheart m
racking that " maiden's tender ears xvith damns and
devils,"--is no more grotesque than many a contem-
porary embodiment of 'humoJr.' But what of his
contacts with the " charming " Mary who " daily hopes
his fair conversion " and has "a credit," and " loves
where her modesty may live untainted"; and, then,
that she may "laugh an hour " admits him to her bed-
chamber, having substituted for herself a negro wench ?
And what of the contacts with his equally " modest "
sister, Dorothy, who not only talks smut with him and
with the " charming " lIary, but deems his fornication
92 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
" fine sport " and would act it if she were a man? I
fear that much reading of decadent drama sometimes
impairs the critical perception. In making allowance
for what masquerades as historical probability one
frequently accepts human improbabilities, and con-
dones what should be condemned--even from the
dramatic point of view. I have found it so in my
own case. With all its picaresque quality, its jovial
' humours' and its racy fun, this play is sheer stage-
rubbish" it has no basis in the general life of the
class it purports to represent, no basis in actual man-
ners, nor in likelihood or poetry. Its basis is in the
uncritical and, to say the least, irresponsible taste of
a theatre-going Rump which enjoyed the spurious
localization, aud attribution to others, of the imagin-
ings of its own heart.
The characters are well grouped; and the spirit of
merriment prevails. The reversals of motive and for-
tune, the recognitions and the dnouement are as ex-
cellently and puerilely absurd as could be desired of
such an amalgam of romance and farcical intrigue.
Richard Brome, writing in praise of the author for
the quarto of 1639, implies that the play was not well
received at its "first presenting,"--" when Ignorance
was judge, and but a few \Vhat was legitimate, what
bastard knew." That first presenting was between
t6o8 and 62 ; and the fexv might have cared more for
Jonson's E,cry Ma i his Humour or Volpone, or
something by Shakespeare, or soon afterwards for
Beaumont and Fletcher's Philastcr or M Kilt 9 and No
King. But, as Brome assures us, " the world's -own
wiser now." That is to say, it had learned by
FLETCHER'S " MONSIEUR THOMAS " 93
1639 " vhat was legitimate," and could believe that
in Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas and the like, " the
Muses jointly did inspire His raptures only with
their sacred fire." But even as transmogrified by
D'Urfey and others the play did not survive its cen-
tury.
No better example could be afforded of the kind of
comedy that Fletcher was capable of producing in his
earlier period. It shovs us with what ability he could
dramatize a romantic tale; with what license as a
realist imagine and portray an unmoral, when not im-
moral, semblance of contemporary life. That was
either before Beaumont had joined forces with him;
or when Beaumont was not pruning his fancy; was
not hanging " plummets " on his wit " to suppress Its
too luxuriant-growing mightiness," nor persuading him
that mirth might subsist " untainted with obscenity,"
and " strength and sweetness " and " high choice of
brain " be " couched in every line." I am not claim-
ing too much for Beaumont. In his later work as in
his earlier there is the frank animalism, at times, of
Elizabethan blood and humour; but one may search
in vain his parts of the joint-plays as vell as his youth-
ful Knight of the Burninca Pestle and those portions
of The l, Voma.,-Hatcr which Fletcher did not touch,
for the Jacobean salaciousness of Fletcher's Monsieur
Thomas and the carnal cynicism which lurks beneath
the pastoral garb of innocence even in The Faithfull
Shepheardessc;characteristics that find utterance
again, untrammeled, in the dramas written after the
younger poet was dead,--and Fletcher could no
longer, as in those earlier days,
94
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
wisely submit each birth
To knowing Beaumont e're it did come forth,
Working againe untill he said 'twas fit;
And make him the sobriety of his wit. 1
During the years of Beaumont's apprenticeship to
Poetry cloaked as Lmv things had changed but little in
his world of the Inner Temple. In its parliament, Sir
Edward Coke, judicial, intrepid, and devout is still
most potent. The chamber, lodging, and rooms which
his father, Mr. Justice Beaumont, and his uncle Henry
had built and occupied near to Ram Alley in the north
end of Fuller's Rents are still held by Richard Daveys,
who as Treasurer moved into them in 16Ol. Dr.
Richard Masters is still Master of the Temple; and in
the church, where Francis was obliged to receive the
Sacrament at stated times, he, sitting perhaps by his
uncle Henry's tomb, would hear the assistant minis-
ters, Richard Evans and William Crashaw. The
sacred place was still the refuge of outlaws from
\Vhitefriars who, claimed the privilege of sanctuary.
If Beaumont wished to steal, after hours, into the
Alsatia beyond Fuller's Rents, he must skirt or pro-
pitiate in 16o 7 as in 16o2 the same Cerberus at the
gates,-- William Knight, the glover. Outside awaited
him the hospitality of the Mitre Inn, or of Barrow at
the " Cat and Fiddle," or of the slovenly Anthony
Gibbes in his cook's shop of Ram Alley. 2
Adapted from Cartwright in the Commendatory
Folio of B. and F., 647.
Details in Inderwick, op. cit., Vols. I and II, passim.
CHAPTER VII
THE BANKE-SIDE
AND THE PERIOD OF THE PART-
NERSHIP
S we shall presently see, Beaumont during his
career in London retained his connection with
the Inner Temple, which would be his club; and it
may be presumed that up to 16o6 or 16o 7, his residence
alternated between the Temple and his brother's home
of Grace-Dieu. About 16o 9, however, he was surely
collaborating with his friend, Fletcher, in the com-
position of plays. And we may conjecture that, in
that or the previous year, our Castor and Pollux were
established in those historic lodgings in Southwark
where, as Aubrey, writing more than half a century
later, tells us, they lived in closest intimacy. That
gossipy chronicler records the obvious in his " there
was a wonderfull consimility of phansey between him
[Beaumont] and Mr. Jo. Fletcher, which caused that
dearnesse of friendship between them";1 but when
he proceeds " They lived together on the Banke-side,
not far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay
together (from Sir James Hales, etc.) ; had one wench
in the house between them, which they did so admire,
the same cloaths and cloake, etc., between them," we
feel that so far as inferences are concerned the ac-
1 Aubrey's Brief Lives, Ed. Clark, I, 94-95.
95
96 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
count is to be taken with at least a morsel of reserve.
Aubrey was not born till after both Beaumont and
Fletcher were dead; and, as Dyce pertinently remarks,
"perhaps Aubrey's informant (Sir James Hales)
knowing his ready credulity, purposely overcharged
the picture of our poets' domestic establishment." To
inquire too closely into gossip were folly; but it is
only fair to recall that sixty years after Fletcher's
death, popular tradition was content with conferring
the "wench," exclusively upon him. Oldwit, in
Shadwell's play of Bury-Fair (1689) says: "I my-
self, simple as I stand here, was a wit in the last age.
I was created Ben Jonson's son, in the Apollo. I knew
Fletcher, my friend Fletcher, and his maid Joan; well,
I shall never forget him: I have supped with him at
his house on the Banke-side; he loved a fat loin of
pork of all things in the vorld; and Joan his maid
had her beer-glass of sack; and we all kissed her, i'
faith, and vere as merry as passed." 1 It is hardly
necessary, in any case, to surmise with those who sniff
up improprieties that the admirable services of the
original " wench," whether Joan or another, far ex-
ceeded the roasting of pork and the burning of sack
for her two "batchelors."
To the years 16o 9 and 161o may be assig'ned with
some show of confidence Beaumont and Fletcher's
first sig'nificant romantic dramas The Co.rcombe and
Pl, ilastcr. The former was acted by the Children
of her Majesty's Revels, I think before July I2, 161o.
If at Blackfriars, before January 4, I6IO; if at
Whitefriars, after January 4. There are grounds for
Dyce, B. ad F., , XXVI,
LETTER TO BEN JONSON
97
believing that it was the play upon which Fletcher
and Beaumont were engaged in the country when
Beaumont wrote a letter, justly famous, probably to-
ward the end of t6o9, to Ben Jonson; and, since the
play was not well received, that it was one of the un-
successful comedies which as Dryden says preceded
Philaster. Philaster was acted at the Globe and
Blackfriars by the King's Men, for the first time, it
would appear, between December 7, ,6o9 and July
i2, I6IO. My reasons in detail for thus dating both
of these dramas are given later. But a word about
the Letter to Bezt Jonson may be said here.
It was first printed at the end of a play called
The Nice Valour in the folio of I647. Owing to a
careless acceptance of the rubric prefixed to it by the
publishers of that folio., historians have ordinarily
dated its composition at too early a period. The
poem itself mentions " Sutcliffe's wit," referring to
three controversial tracts of the Dean of Exeter,
printed in I6O6 ; but Beaumont might jibe at the Dean's
expense for years after I6O6. The rubic inscribed
a generation after the death of both our dramatists,
and therefore of but secondary importance, tells us
that the Letter was "written, before he [Beaumont]
and Master Fletcher came to London, with two of the
precedent comedies, then not finish'd, which deferr'd
their merry meetings at the Mermaid." We know
that the young men had been in London for years
before I6O6. If the rubric has any meaning what-
ever, it is merely that the customary convivialities at
the Mermaid, as described in the Letter, had been
interrupted by a visit to the country during which
98 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
they were finishing two of the comedies which precede
The Nice I"a'loztr in the folio; and it indicates a date
not earlier than I6o8, for the vriting of the letter,
and probably not later than July 26Io. For only
three of the fifteen plays which appear in the folio
before The Nice l'alotr could have been completed
during the career of Beaumont as a dramatist, and
none of the three antedates 26o8. In two of these
Beaumont had no hand" The Captain, which may
have been composed as late as 161I, and Be99ars"
Bush, 1 which shows the collaboration of Massinger,
but Fletcher's part of which may have been written
in 26o8. The only one of the " precedent comedies"
in which xve may be sure that Beaumont collaborated
is The Co.rcombe. If, as I believe, it xvas acted first
between December 16o 9 and July 162o it may well
have been written in the country during the latter
half of 16o 9, while the plague rate was exceptionally
high in London. Both Be99ars" Btsh and The Cox-
combe abound in rural scenes; but the latter especially,
in scenes that might have been suggested by Grace-
Dieu and its neighborhood.
The rubric prefixed to the Letter by the publishers
is of negligible authority. The 'me' and 'us' of
the Letter itself do not necessarily designate Fletcher
as the companion of Beaumont's rustication- they stand
at one time for country-folk; at another for the Mer-
maid circle, Jonson, Chapman, Fletcher, probably
Shakespeare, Drayton, Cotton, Donne, Hugh Holland,
Based upon Dekker's Belhnan o[ London, 16o8. Acted at
Court,
z See Chapter XXV, below.
LETTER TO BEN JONSON 99
Tom Coryate, Richard Martin, Selden (of Beaumont's
Inner Temple), and Other famous wits and poets;
at another for Jonson and Beaumont alone. The date
of the poem must be determined frown internal evi-
dence. It is written xvith the careless ease of long-
standing intimacy. It is of a genial, jocose, and fairly
mature, epistolary style. It betrays the literary as-
surance of one whose reputation is already established.
Beaumont is in temporary banishment from London,
for lack of funds- therefore, considerably later than
6o6, when he was presumably well off; for in that
year he had just come into a quarter of his brother,
Sir Henry's, private estate. He longs now for the
stimulus of the merry meetings in Bread-street, as one
whose wit has been sharpened by them for a long
time past :
Methinks the little wit I had is lost
Since I saw you; for Wit is like a Rest
Held up at Tennis, which men do the best
With the best gamesters; . . .
up here in Leicestershire " The Countrey Gentlemen
begin to allow My wit for dry bobs." " In this warm
shine" of our hay-making season, soberly deferring
to country knights, listening to hoary family-jests,
drinking water mixed with claret-lees, "I lye and
dream of your full Mermaid Wine ""
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtill flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
oo BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolv'd to live a foole, the rest
Of his dull life. Then, vhen there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justifie the Town
For three daies past,--wit that might warrant be
For the vhole City to talk foolishly
Till that were cancell'd,--and, when that was gone,
We left an Aire behind us, which alone
Was able to make the two next Companies
Right witty; though but downright fooles, more wise.
When he remembers all this, he " needs must cry,"
but one thought o f Ben Jonson cheers him :
Only strong Destiny, vhich all controuls,
I hope hath left a better fate in store
For me thy friend, than to live ever poore,
Banisht unto this home. Fate once againe
Bring me to thee, who canst make smooth and plaine
The way of Knowledge for me, and then I,
Who have no good but in thy company
Protest it will my greatest comfort be
To acknowledge all I have to flov from thee.
Ben, when these Scaenes are perfect, we '11 taste wine;
I '11 drink thy Muses health, thou shalt quaff mine.
The Letter was written after Beaumont's Muse had
produced something worthy of a toast from Jonson,--
the IVoma-Hater and the K,tight, for instance ( both
marked by wit and by the discipline of Jonson); but
not later than the end of I612, for during most of
I6 3 Jonson was traveling in France as governor to
Sir Walter Raleigh's " knavishly inclined " son; and
after February of that year Beaumont wrote so far
as I venture to conclude but one drama, The Scornful
"THE COXCOMBE" o
Ladle; and that does not precede this Letter in the
folio of I647; is not printed in that folio at all. Nor
was this Letter of a disciple written later than the
great Beaumont-Fletcher plays of i6io-I6I I, for then
Jonson was praising Beaumont for " writing better"
than he himself. If there is. any truth at all in the
rubric to. the Letter, the " scenes" of which Beau-
mont speaks as not yet " perfect" were of The Cox-
combe; and evidence which I shall, in the proper place,
adduce convinces me that that was first acted before
March 25, I6IO, perhaps before January 4- The
play would, then, have been written about the end of
6o9.
I do not wonder that, as the Prologue in the first
folio tells us, it was "condemned by the ignorant
multitude," not only because of its length, a fault re-
moved in the editions which we possess, but because
the larger part of the play is written by Fletcher, and
in his most inartistic, and irrational, licentious vein.
Beaumont, though admitted to the partnership, had
not yet succeeded in hanging "plummets " on his
friend's luxuriance. He contented himself with con-
tributing to a theme of Boccaccian cuckoldry the sub-
plot of how Ricardo, drunk, loses his betrothed, and
finds her again and is forgiven,--a little story that
contains all the poignancy of sorrow and poppy of
romance and poetry of innocence that make the com-
edy readable and tolerable.
As to the first production of the Philaster a word
must be said here, because the event marks the earliest
association, concerning which we have any assurance,
of the young dramatists vith Shakespeare. Until
I02 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
about I6o 9 they appear to have written for the Paul's
Boys, who acted, probably in their singing-school, un-
til I6O7; and for the Queen's Revels' .Children who,
under various managements, had been occupying
Richard Burbadge's theatre of Blackfriars since I597.
Their association with the Paul's Boys would of it-
self have brought them into touch with other Paul's
dramatists, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, and Chap-
man. In their association with the Queen's Revels'
Children they had been throwl closely together with
Chapman again, vith Jonson, and with John Day, all
of whom wrote for Blackfriars; and with Marston,
who not only wrote plays for the Children but had a
financial interest in the compmly. Some of these
dramatists,-- Jonson, for instance, and Webster,--
had occasionally written for Shakespeare's company
during these years; but we have no proof that Beau-
mont and Fletcher had any connection with the King's
Players of Shakespeare's company, as long as the
Children's companies continued in their usual course
at St. Paul's singing-school and Blackfriars. After
16o6, however, the Paul's Boys were on the xvane.
Perhaps they are to be indentified with the new Chil-
dren of the King's Revels, and an occupancy of White-
friars, in 6o7; but that clue soon disappears. And as
to the Queen's Revels' Children, we find that in April
6o8 they were suppressed for ridiculing royalty
upon the stage. 1 Their manager, Henry Evans, to
whom with three others Richard Burbadge had let
Blackfriars in I6OO, nov sought to. be set free from
1 Despatch of the French Ambassador in London, April 5,
I6o8, quoted by Collier, Hist. Eng. Dram. Poetry, I, 352.
PLAYS FOR THE KING'S SERVANTS io 3
the contract; and in August 6o8, the Burbadges
(Richard and Cuthbert), Shakespeare, Heming, Con-
dell, and Slye of the King's Company, took over the
lease which still had many years to run. 1 Shake-
speare's company had been acting at the Burbadges'
theatre of the Globe since 1599, as the Lord Cham-
berlain's till 16o3; after that, as his Majesty's Serv-
ants. Now Shakespeare's company took charge of
Blackfriars, as well; and, under their management,
for about a month between December 7, I6O9 and
January 4, 16io the Queen's Revels' Children, being
reinstated in royal favour, resumed their acting at
Blackfriars. On the latter date, the Children as re-
organized, opened at Whitefriars under the manage-
merit of Philip Rossiter and others; and among the
first plays presented by them, there, were Jonson's
Epicoene and, I believe, Beaumont and Fletcher's
The Coxcombe.
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 Lo'e Lies a-Bleeding, published in 162o,
we learn that this, the earliest of their great tragi-
comedies, was acted not by the Queen's Revels' Chil-
dren, but by the King's Players, and at the Globe.
From the second quarto, of I622, we learn that it was
acted also at Blackfriars: it may indeed have been
first presented there. Our earliest record of the play
x Answer of Hming and Burbadge to Kirkham's complaint,
1612, Greenstreet Papers in Fleay, Hist. Stage, p. 235.
IO4 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
shows that it was in existence before October 8, t6to.
The Scourge of Folly by John Davies of Hereford,
entered for publication on that date, contains an epi-
gram 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, Judgemet, and Im,ention:
For this I love thee; azd can doe o 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 I6O8, 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 perform-
ance 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 6o8 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. That actors sometimes performed at
Court while the plao-ue rate vas still prohibitive in
and about the City, does not by any means justify us
a See Murray, Eng. Dram. Conp., II, 7-I9.
THE GLOBE THEATRE, VITH ST. PAUL'S IN THE BACKGROUND
From Vischer's long view of London, 6s6
IO6 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
--the daughter of the usurper--and, through mis-
understandings and misadventures, tragic apprehen-
sions, 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
allu,-ements 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 con-
tinuing favour, both of the City and the Court. Beau-
mont 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 Fletch-
er'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 Beaumo.nt's subplot of The Coxcombe, the
story is of the authors' own invention. It is not nec-
essary to trace the girl-page and her devotion to the
Diana of Montemayor, or to Bandello, or even to
Sidney's Arcadic. The rl-page was a commonplace
of fiction at the time; and the differences in the con-
duct 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 gen-
IO8 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 col-
league." Here there are traces, indeed, of external
suggestion: something of Aspatia's career in relation
to Alnintor, who has deserted her, may be an echo of
Parthenia's ill the A'cadict; and the quarrel of Melan-
tius and Amintor reminds one of that between Brutus
and Cassius in Julius Ccsa.r; but the plot has no
definite source.
The characterization and the poetry, " the strength
and sweetness, and high choice of brain" are Beau-
mont'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 pro-
duced: 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 " un-
tainted by obscenity."
In an anecdote preserved by Fuller, who was seven-
teen 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 Loy-
alty 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. 1 History and fable have
Dyce, as above, B. atd F., I, xxxii.
"A KING AND NO KING" Io9
fastened similar stories upon famous men; but if
this one is authentic it undoubtedly refers to the writ-
ing of The Maides Tragedy, for, as we shall see, the
killing of its King was. one of the few scenes con-
tributed by" Fletcher. And the story adds colour to
the ridicule which Beaumont in 16o 7 had heaped
upon the intelligencer that lives in ale-houses and tav-
erns; . . "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. Be-
fore the end of I6I I the King's Players had presented
to the public the last of this trio of dramatic master-
pieces, A Kin 9 and No Kig. In terrible fascination,
this story of a man and woman struggling against
love because they think they are brother and sister
is as po.werful 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
d6nouement, tragicomic and perforce somewhat
strained, it is surpassed by the Tragedy. Of its de-
fects 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 Cyropcdeia (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 sup-
posed sister from Fauchet's account of Thierry of
I IO BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
France,-- but such indebtedness is naught? 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 /act,--the whole serious plot, and part of the hu-
morous by-play. Fletcher's slight contribution is
principally of complementary scenes and low comedy.
In these the curb upon his fanciful rhetoric and hilari-
ous wit has been somewhat relaxed. In the character
of the roaring Bessus, Beaumont himself gives rein
with the dlan 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. Beattmont for all his sobriety and clean
mirth was not a prude; and he was n'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 I612 and March I613, assisting in
the festivities for the marriage of the Princess EIiza-
beth 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 in-
cluded, as well, the Much Ado, Tempest, Winter's
Tale, Merry Wiz,es, Othello, and Julius Caesar of
Shakespeare. They also presented about the same
time, in a series of six acted before the King (includ-
ing Henry IU, Much Ado, and The Alchemist), one
See Alden's edition, p. I72 (Belles Lettres), and Thorndike's
citation of Fauchet, Les Antiquitez et Histoires Gauloises, etc.
(I599), Intl. o] B. and F., p. 82.
"CUPID'S REVENGE"
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 associa-
tion 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 6, Cupid's Rez'enge was played by
the Children three times, and their romantic comedy,
The Co.-combe twice; and that, in 6 5 or the be-
ginning of 66, the Children presented at the new
Black friars what was, probably, the last product of
the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership, The oCcornful
Ladie.
Neither Cupid's Revenge nor The oCcornful Ladle
(though the latter, at least, was very popular and had
a long life. upon the stage) is a drama of high dis-
tinction. The former is a blend of two stories from
Sidney's ,4rcadia,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 infatu-
ation 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 altera-
"THE SCORNFUL ,LADIE"
II 3
tion, and revised. Of this play he did not finish the
revision. It vas written about I6I 4 or I6I 5, after he
had settled in the country with his wife, and not long
before his death. 1
See below, Chapter XXVI.
CHAPTER VIII
RELATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, AND OTHERS
IN THE THEATRICAL WORLD
HOUGH the ,young poets did not begin to. write
for the King s Men before I6O9, 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 Mountjo.y the tiremaker, on the
corner of Silver and Monkwell Streets, vhere the
master had lived from 598 to 6o4, and where, for
anything we knov to the contrary, he continued to live
for several years more. 1 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 vay 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.
1Wallace, New Slakespeare Discoveries, Harper's Maga.,
March, 191o.
I16 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 compilfid 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 io'norant poet he talks!
Is it possible that associating vith 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, Atony 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 bor-
rowings of serious lines and telling situations: as
ATTITUDE TOWARD SHAKESPEARE 117
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 usurp-
ing 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 situ-
ation in Philaster to that of Viola in Twelfth Night. 1
This last play, indeed, acted, as ve have seen, in the
1For these and other reminiscences of Shakespeare. see
Alden's edition of Beaumont (Belles Lettres Series), XVI; Ma-
caulay's Beaumont" Leonhardt in Anglia. VIII. 424; Oliphant in
Engl. Studien, XIV, 53-94, Koeppel's Quello*-studien in M/n-
chener Beitriige, XI.
II8 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 (I6O7,
or January to May I6O8), 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 atmos-
phere of the Globe and Blackfriars; and, after Shake-
speare had taken up a more continuous residence at
Stratford, in I6I I, Fletcher, at any rate, not only kept
in touch with the remaining shareholders and actors
of the Globe but with the Master himself, and con-
versed and wrote with him on various occasions.
These may have fallen either at the New Place at
Stratford, where the now wealthy count W gentleman
was wont to entertain his friends, or when Shakes-
peare came to town--as in May I612. 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 Aven in the Countye of
Warwicke, Gentleman" who had helped to make the
marriage, was summoned as a witness. 1 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 Black-
friars theatre, in which as a shareholder Shakespeare,
too, must have been interested; and when Christopher
1 Wallace, New Shateespeare Discoveries (Harper's Maga.,
March, 19m).
FLETCHER AND SHAKESPEARE 119
Brooke of the pastoral poets in Beaumont's Inns of
Court was of the " councell " for Shakespeare's com-
pany. 1 Or in March I613, 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 Shake-
speare and Fletcher participated: The Two Nobh"
Kinsmen, first published as "by the memorable
worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr.
William Shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of I634;
and a lost play licensed for publication as the "" His-
tory of Cardenio by Fletcher and Shakespeare," in
I653. Of the former, critics are generally agreed that
Fletcher vrote about a dozen scenes and that Shake-
speare in all probability wrote others. Maybe, how-
ever, 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 I6I 3, 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 did n't care what they did vith his plays. Proba-
bly 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 I62, of the story
1 See the Greenstreet Papers, in Fleay, Hist. Stage, 239, 25o.
2o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
upon which it is based, in Shelton's English transla-
tion of the first part of Don Qui.rote; and that it was
acted at Court by Shakespeare's and Fletcher's com-
pany in May and June I6I 3.
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 I/HI,
there is not much possibility of doubt. In the con-
ception of the leading characters Shakespeare is pres-
ent, and in many of their finest lines, and specifically
in at least five scenes; while Fletcher appears in prac-
tically all the rest. The play was acted by the King's
Men at the Globe on June 29, I613, and vas included
as Shakespeare's by his judicious editors and intimate
friends, Heming and Condell, in the folio of I623.
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 Beau-
mont for The Silent l/Voman, which vas acted early
in I6o, and by verses of both Fletcher and Beaumont
prefixed to Jonson's tragedy of Catilinc, published in
I6II. 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 enthusiastic-
ally 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
BEN JONSON
From the miniature belonging to lIr. Evelyn Shirley
THE FRIENDSHIP WITH JONSON 2
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, 62.
To Francis Beaumont.
How I doe love thee, Beaumont and thy Muse,
That unto me dost such religion use!
How I doe feare nay 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 lauda-
tion of his contemporaries in dramatic production, we
may surmise that tiffs tribute to the art of Beaumont
follows rather than precedes the appearance of Philas-
ter, and of perhaps both The Maides Tragedy and A
Kin 9 and No Kin 9. And whether there is any basis
or not for the tradition handed down by Dryden a
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 es-
teem in which " the least indulgent thought " and the
large "giving " of the brilliant and independent gen-
tleman-dramatist were held by the acknowledged
classicist and dictator of the stage.
An Essa o Dramatick Poesie.
PLAYWRIGHTS AND PLAYERS 223
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 Mcrtictllmon norunt, Haec
monumenta nwri.
CHAPTER IX
THE
MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE " " THE PASTOR-
ALISTS, AND OTHER CONTEMPORARIES AT
THE INNS OF COURT
F" royal patronage we have had evidence in the
fact that during the festivities of October 16,
1612 to March I, 1613 , no fewer than five of the
Beaumont-Fletcher plays vere presented at Court, by
the King's Servants and the Queen's Revels' Children,
--some of them two and even three times. Our
poets are accordingly regarded by the great as dram-
atists of like distinction with Shakespeare, Jonson,
and Chapman, the authors of most of the other plays
then performed.
Of the esteem in which Beaumont individually was
held, not only at Court but by his fellows of the
Inner Temple, evidence is afforded by the fact that
when they were called upon, in company with the
gentlemen of Gray's Inn, to celebrate the marriage,
February .14 , 1613, of the Princess Elizabeth to the
Elector Palatine, with a masque, they did not, like
the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, go. out of their
own group of poets for a dramatist, but chose him.
The selection was but natural- he had already con-
tributed to The Maidcs Traged3,, a masque of the
very essence of dreams, executed with singular grace
and melody.
124
"MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE" I2 7
of countenance; and the world sayes yt comes to
passe after the old proverb--the properer men the
worse lucke." 1
On that day, accordingly, the masque was presented,
"in the new Banketting-House which for a kind of
amends was granted to them "; and with marked suc-
cess. " At the entrance of their Majesties and their
Highnesses," writes the Venetian ambassador to the
Doge and Senate, May IO, 6I 3, " one saw the scene,
with forests; on a sudden half of it changed to a
great mountain with four springs at its feet. The
subject of the Masque was that Jove and Juno de-
siring to honour the wedding and the conjunction
of two such noble rivers, the Thames and the Rhine,
sent separately Mercury and Iris, who appeared" and
Mercury then praised the couple and the Royal house,
and wishing to make a ballet suitable to the conjunc-
tion of two such streames, he summoned from the
four fountains, whence they spring and which are fed
by rain, four nymphs who laid among the clouds and
the stars that ought to bring rain. They then danced,
but Iris said that a dance of one sex only was not a
live dance. Then appeared four cupids, while from
the Temple of Jove, came five idols and they danced
with the stars and the nymphs. Then Iris, after de-
livering her speech, summoned Flora, caused a light
rain to fall, and then came a dance of shepherds.
Then in a moment the other half of the scene changed,
and one saw a great plateau with two pavilions, and
1John Chamberlain to Mris. Carleton, 8 February. 62-3,
in State Papers (Domestic) James I, LXXII, No. 3o. Quoted by
Miss Sullivan, Court Masques o] James I, p. 76 (93).
" MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE" I2 9
drowned the music. The main masque xvas stately,
and fitly symbolic of the occasion. And one at least
of the songs, that sung by the twelve white-robed
priests, each playing upon his lute, before Jupiter's
altar, has the rare lyrical quality, of Beaumont's best
manner,--
Shake off your heavy trance,
And leap into a dance,
Such as no mortals use to tread,
Fit only for Apollo
To play to, for the Moon to lead,
And all the Stars to follow!
We may be sure that the poet received his meed of
praise from King, Princess, and Elector, and from
officials of the Court--the Earl of Nottingham,
Lord Privy Seal, and Bacon, " the chief contriver";
and that he sat high at the " solemn supper in the
new Marriage-room " which the King made them on
the Sunday,-- maybe "at the same board" with the
King who doubtless jested much at the expense of
Prince Charles and his followers. For they had to
pay for the feast, " having laid a wager for the charges,
and lost it in running at the ring." 1
If it had not been customary for members of the
Inns of Court to retain connection with the Society
to which they belonged, even after they had ceased to
be in residence, especially if still living in the City,
we might infer from his authorship of this masque
that Beaumont had kept in touch with the Inner Tern-
1Calendar State Papers (Domestic), 1611-1618, pp. 171, 172,
175.
32 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
in March I612. He was some five years younger than
Beaumont, and, like Beaumont, was at just that time
on intimate terms of friendship with the last of the
Elizabethan pastoralists, Michael Drayton,--on terms
of reciprocal admiration and friendship also with
Beaumont's dramatic associates, Jonson and Chapman;
and he had himself, i1 i6i 3, been engaged for three
years upon the composition of the charming First
13ook of his Britanlia's Pastorals. In a letter written
some years later to a lover of the PastoraI,-- the trans-
lator of Tasso's Aminta, Henery Reynolds, Esq.,-- Of
Poets and Poesy, and published in 627, Drayton
couples \Villiam Browne so closely w'ith Sir John
and Francis Beaumont that even if the trio were not,
in various ways, affiliated with the same legal Society
we could not escape the conclusion that the brothers
were near and dear to Brovne. " Then," vcrites Dray-
ton, after mentioning other literary acquaintances,
Then the two ]eaumonts and my Browne arose,
My deare companions whom I freely chose
My bosome friends; and in their severall wayes,
Rightly borne Poets, and in these last dayes,
Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts,
Such as have freely tould to me their hearts,
As I have mine to them.
We may proceed upon the assumption that it would
have been impossible for these bosom friends of Dray-
ton, members of the same club, not to have known
each other. Especially, if we recall that Browne was
a literary disciple of Fletcher in pastoral poetry, be-
tween 6IO and I66, and that he had Beaumont's
BROWNE AND THE PASTORALISTS I33
masque and poetic fame in mind vhen, in the Dedi-
cation of his own Masque of Ulysses atd Circe, pre-
sented by the same Society of the Inner Temple not
quite two years later, January I3, I615, he said, " If
it degenerate in kind from those other our Society
hath produced, blame yourselves for not seeking to
a happier Muse."
I am at pains thus to emphasize the acquaintance of
Browne and Beaumont, because our acquaintance with
the latter is enriched if we may regard him as famil-
iarly associated with the literary coterie of the Inns of
Court. Browne and Beaumont had friends in com-
mon beside Drayton, Chapman, and Jonson. To, and
of, Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, Beau-
mont writes, as we shall presently notice, in terms of
admiration and intimacy. And it is for Mary, the
sister of Sir Philip, that William Browne composes,
in or after I62I, the immemorial epitaph,
Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse:
Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Fair, and learn'd, and good as shee
Time shall throw his dart at thee.
To this Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl,
Browne dedicates the Second Book of the Pastorals,
I66, which contains the beautiful tribute to Sidney
and his Arcadia.; and Pembroke shows his regard for
the young poet by appointing him tutor to a xvealthy
ward, and later taking him into the service of his
own family at Wilton. In 64 John Davies of Here-
BROWNE AND THE PASTORALISTS I35
published three pastoral elegies in I6O2, and he was
still writing pastorals half a century later. Another
of this group, George Wither, had since 16o6 been of
one of the adjoining Inns of Chancery. He is the
Roget, Thyrsis, Philarete of this pastoral field. In
164, he vrote the third eclogue supplementary to
Brovne's Shepherd's Pipe; and in 1615 he was a neigh-
bor of the Inner Temple poets, at Lincoln's Inn. In
that eclogue he speaks of a Valentine on " the Wed-
ding of fair Thame and Rhine" which he had com-
posed on the occasion of the royal marriage; and in
the first Ep.ithalallzium of the Valentine, he refers ex-
plicitly to the masques of Chapman and Beaumont.
He must have known both those " Heliconian wits."
" I 'm none," he says with self-depreciation,--
I 'm none of those that have the means or place
With shows of cost to do your nuptials grace;
But only master of mine own desire,
Am hither come with others to admire.
I am not of those Heliconian wits,
Whose pleasing strains the court's known humour fits,
But a poor rural shepherd, that for need
Can make sheep music on an oaten reed.
This " faithful though an humble swain " was of dis-
tinctive repute among Beaumont's associates by 1615 "
no less for the lyric ease of his Shepherd's Htntizg, or
of his
Shall I wasting in despair
Die because a woman's fair?
than for the " plain, moral speaking" of the ,4btses
Stript and IVhipt that in 1613-14 had brought him a
36 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
year's imprisonment in the Marshalsea. Jonson later
" personates" him as Chronomastix, or whipper of
the times, in a masque at Court; and Beaumont's, and
Fletcher's friend, Massinger, introduces him by allu-
sion, in his Duke of Milan, about 1620, "I have had
a fellow," says the Officer in Act III, ii, of that play
That could endite forsooth and make fine metres
To tinkle in the ears of ignorant madams,
That for defaming of great men, was sent me
Threadbare and lousy.
Still another member of this circle of poets asso-
ciated with the Inns of Court is the Cuddy of the
pastoral poems, the intimate friend of Wither and
Browne,--Christopher Brooke, who, though he does
not cut much of a fio-ure in his Elegies, or in his Ghost
of Richard III, was a lovable and hearty friend, and
a distino-uished Bencher of Lincoln's Inn. That
Brooke was intimate with Shakespeare's company of
the King's Servants, at just the period that Beaumont
and Fletcher were most closely associated with that
company, we have already noticed. As one of the
barristers who, in I612, defended Burbadge and Hem-
ing against the bill of complaint brought by Kirkham
for recovery of profits in the Blackfriars theatre, he
had much to do with having the " plaintiff's bill cleerly
and absolutely dismissed out of this courte."
This community of friendship with Browne and
Browne's circle gives us, by inference, a clue to an
extended list of the gentlemen of London with whom
Beaumont cannot have altogether failed to be ac-
1 See Greenstreet Papers, VIII, Fleay, Hist. Stage,
COTERIE OF THE INNS OF COURT 139
Temple in I6I I, and whose early death by drowning
Browne bewails in the fourth eclogue of the Shep-
herd's Pipe,--an elegy somewhat fantastic but beau-
tifully sincere, and, in one or two of its fundamental
concepts, decidedly reminiscent of Beaumont's elegy
written the year before on the death of the Countess
of Rutland.
These are a few of the members of this Society
whom Beaumont met whenever he visited the Inner
Temple. It was such as they and their companions,
many more of whom are mentioned in the Ier Tem-
ple Records, and described by Mr. Gordon Goodwin
in his edition of Browne's Poems, who set forth, or-
dered, and furnished Beaumont's Masq,e o[ the Ironer
Temple; and who, as gentlemen-masquers0 sailed with
him in the royal barge to \Vhitehall. and happily per-
formed the masque before the King and ueen, the
Princess Elizabeth, and the Count Palatine, on Satur-
day, the twentieth day of February I61,3.
Beaumont's friends vere Fletcher's; and Fletcher
must have known Browne. It has always seemed
strange to me that, vhen enumerating in his Britan-
da's Pastorals the pastoral poets of England,--half
a dozen of them, his personal acquaintances,--
Brovne should have omitted Fletcher to whom he was
deeply indebted for literary inspiration. Between
161o and 1613 he had, in his First Book of Britamda's
Pastorals (Song I, 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 FaithfMl Shepheardesse--the scene
in which Fletcher's God of the River rescues Amoret
4o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
and offers her his love. The borrowing is not at all
a plagiarism, but an elaboration of the Amoret epi-
sode; 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 swore
That never was his like nor could be more. 1
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 64-5, swears
fidelity to Remond-
Entreats him then
That he might be his partner, since no men
Had cases liker; he with him would goe--
Weepe when he wept and sigh when he did so;
a Brit. Past., I, , 476. o. Ibid., II, z, 469.
"REMOND " AND " DORIDON "?
and that, in the second Song of the First Book, 1
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 disdaine
That he should (so through her his genius told him)
Take equall place with swaines, since she did hold him
Her chiefest worke, and therefore thought it fit,
That with inferiours he should never sit.
He is " fairest of men "; vhen 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 whether
They 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 away
For dancing best upon the revell day.
Browne, by the way, vrote the Prefatory Address to
this Book of Britannia's Pastorals, June I8, I6I 3, only
three months after Beaumont's Masque upon the
1 El. 405-470.
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
" 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, over-
hearing 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 unite
That two distinct make one Hermaphrodite?
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 seene
To 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 swaine
Whose equals Earth cannot produce againe,
But leave the times and men that shall succeed them
Enough to praise that age which so did breed them,
and then, without interim, proceed"
Ibid., I, 3, 97--8.
I44 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
I cannot, however, refrain from pointing the ven-
turesome researcher,-- with irony -- may be not
Mephistophelian, but merely pyrrhonic,--to the dra-
matic 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 vould 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 gpoi an
Honest Man's Fortune, and decide vhether the poet-
philosopher of the one is not very much of the same
opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other?
Cf. especially Brit. Past., II, 2, 7o6-732, with Fletcher's de-
fiance of poverty and independence of criticism in his poem,
Upon a Honest Man's Fortune,
CHAPTER X
AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT
HRISTOPHER BROOKE of Lincoln's Inn en-
ters the circle of Beaumont's associates not only
as the advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in Shake-
speare's company of actors turn for counsel in an im-
portant suit at law, and as the encomiast of Shake-
speare himself a year or two later:
He that from Helicon sends many a rill,
Whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men, *
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 in-
timacy with still others who at various points im-
pinged upon Beaumont's career, with Inigo Jones,
for instance, who designed the machinery for Beau-
mont'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 Kitty. 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 I6O8 and Sep-
tember I6I I, we begin to feel that it was not by mere
The Ghost of Richard III, I, viii (64).
45
46 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
accident that the manuscript of d Kin 9 and No Kin9
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
i6i 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 gen-
tlewomen of the family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill.
This Sir Henry was an influential member of Parlia-
ment, 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 I597,
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 6 5, and it is more than
likely that the play, .d King and No Kin7, which
was acted about 6 , 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 Tem-
plars, 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 cele-
brated in a copy of macaronic Latin verses, entitled
Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium Philosophicum; and I
In Cal. State Papers (Dora.), under Sept. 2, 6. I find
" Description by Ralph Colphab [Thomas Cariat] of ]3rasenose
College, Oxford, of a philosophical feast the guests at which
FRANCIS BACON
From the portrait by Paul Van Somer in the National Portrait Gallery, London
AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE 47
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.--
\Vhosoever is contented
That 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 surnamfid Torrent
And John yclepfid Made;
And Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe
To sup, his dinner will forgoe--
Will come as soon as bade.
Sir Robert Horse-lover the while,
Ne let Sir Henry count it vile
Will come with gentle speed;
And -Rabbit-tree-where-acorn-grows
And John surnamed Little-hose
Will come if there be need.
And Richard Pewter-Waster best
And Henry Twelve-month-9ood at least
And John Hesperian true.
were Chris Brook, John Donne," and others in exactly the order
given below, save for one error. "' In Latin Rhymes." Dr. A.
Clark in his Aubrey's Brief Lives, II, 5o-5I, gives the Latin
verses from an old commonplace book in Lincoln College
Library, "authore Rodolpho Calsabro, Aeneacense"; but prefers
the attribution of another old copy, owned by Mr. Madan of
Brasenose, "per Johannem H.oskyns, London." The translation
by Reynolds, who died in I614, is also given by Dr. Clark.
I48
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
It any be desiderated
He shall be amerciated
Forty-pence in issue.
Htgh the Inferior-Germayne,
Nor yet unlearnfid nor prophane
Inego 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 Brie[ Lives, Dr. Clark
supplies the glossary to these punning names. Tor-
rczt is, of course, Brooke. Johannes Factus, or
Made, is Brooke's chamber-fellmv of Lincoln's Inn,
John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and cor-
respondent in well knoxvn epistles of Henry Twdz'e-
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 Ig-natius architectus. Hugh Hol-
land (the Infe4or-Germayne) was of Beaumont's
Mermaid Club, the writer--beside other poems of
commendatory verses for Jonson's ,efanus in I6O 5,
and of the sonnet Upon the Lines and Lilee of that other
frequenter of the Mermaid, " sweet Master Shake-
speare." 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 in-
AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE i49
troduced 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 (66). In I618, 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 Tem-
ple. Last, comes the reputed author of these maca-
ronic Latin verses of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself
(surnamed Little-h, ose). 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 Jon-
son, and of Raleigh, Donne, Selden, Camden, and Daniel.
Of the participants in Serjeant Hoskins's Conviv-
ium 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; RE-
LATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE
LIMPSES 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 vith cer-
tainty be ascribed to him. Unfortunately for our pur-
pose, most of those included in the Poems, " by Fran-
cis Beaumont, Gent.," issued by Blaiklock in 164o
and printed again in 1653, and among The Golden
Remains "of those so nmch admired Dramatick Poets,
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gents.," in
166o, 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 evi-
dently of mature years and reputation,--let us sup-
pose, about 161I, Beaumont says:
I would avoid the common beaten ways
To women us&d, which are love or praise.
As for the first, the little wit I have
Is not yet grown so near unto the grave
But that I can. by that dim fading light,
Perceive of what or unto whom I write.
15o
AND THE COUNTESS OF RUTLAND
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 willingly
Be pointed at in every company,
As was that little tailor, who till death
Was hot in love with Queen Elizabeth.
And for the last, in all my idle days
I never yet did living woman praise
In 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 vhich I have quoted, the sincere, as well as
brusque, humour attests more than ordinary acquaint-
ance with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the
poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Count-
ess lived but twenty-five miles north-west of Charn-
wood, 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 mv time
And nothing add to your o'erfiowing 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 hear
Their own perfections into question brought,
But stop their ears at them; for, if I thought
You took a pride to have your virtues known,
(Pardon me, madam) I should think them none,
I52 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 o.thers. But her hus-
band, 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
Forrcst, where speaking of his tribute of verse, he
says :
With you, I know my off'ring will find grace:
For what a sinne 'gainst yollr great father's spirit,
Were it to think, that you should not inherit
His love unto the Muses, when his skill
Almost 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 store
The world hath seene, which all these had in trust,
And now lye lost in their forgotten dust.
And in an Epigram 1 To the Honour'd Count-
essc 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 doe
Ought that is ill, but the suspition too,
Underwoods, XLVIII.
AND THE COUNTESS OF RUTLAND
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 mind
The 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 Pem-
broke, 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 Pemb.roke, the son, to whom his
I54 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
master, Jonson, dedicates in 6, 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 Rut-
land used to pass away the time " in London merely in
going to plaies every day." Southampton had re-
mained a patron of Burbadge, Shakespeare, and the
like. And when he died in 6-74, we find not only
Beaumont's acquaintance, Chapman, but Beaumont's
brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his mem-
ory. " I keep that glory last which is the best," writes
Sir John,
The love of learning which he oft express'd
In conversation, and respect to those
Who 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 them-
selves " 1 ,are may figure not only the txvo Beaumonts
but their beloved Countess participating in such discus-
sion 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, step.e up eche xvay, partely
by nature, partely by working of mennes handes, as it
may evidently be perceived. Of the late dayes [54o],
1 Thomas Nashe, Dedication o[ The Li[e of lack Wilton.
AND THE COUNTESS OF RUTLAND 55
the Erle of Rutland hath made it fairer than ever it
vas. 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 dun-
geon is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a
place to walk yn, to se at the countery aboute, and
raylid abo.ut the round [waull, and] a garden [plot] in
the middle." 1 One sees Francis toiling up the " many
steps," received by his Countess and the rest, and re-
joicing 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 respect
Above your glorious titles, shall accept
These harsh disorder'd lines, I shall ere long
Dress 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 man-
ner unexpected, and, alas, too soon. In August I612,
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 Ral-
Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 97.
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
eigh 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 re-
ceipts" 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
\Vilton.
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 be
When 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, Count-
ess of Rttland. 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
vith 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 vhile she was yet in in-
fancy,-
Ere thou knewest the use of tears
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years ;
sorrow in her wedded life,--
AND THE COUNTESS OF RUTLAND 57
As soon as thou couldst apprehend a grief,
There were enough to meet thee; and the chief
Blessing of women, marriage, was to thee
Nought 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 spot-
less 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 realiza-
tion of the vanity of human wishes and of the counter-
balancing dig-nity, 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 have
By looking longer in her quiet grave,--
the consummation that all his heroines of tortured
i58 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 fev of the characteristics which dis-
tinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his prefer-
ence 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 crea-
tive imagery, his lines of vivid, final spontaneity,--
Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse;
and " Thou art gone,"--
Gone like the day thou diedst upon, and we
May call that back again as soon as thee.
In still another way the lines on the death of Sid-
ney's daughter are instructive. Its noble tribute to
Sidney's Arcadia is payment of a debt manifest in
more than one of the dramas to which Beaumont had
contributed. Of Sir Philip, Beaumont here writes:
He left two children, who for virtue, wit,
Beauty, were lov'd of all.--thee and his writ:
Two was too few; yet death hath from us took
Thee, a more faultless issue than his book,
Which. now the only living thing we have
From him, we'll see, shall never find a grave
As thou hast done. Alas, would it might be
That books their sexes had, as well as we,
That we might see this married to the worth,
And many poems like itself bring forth.
AND THE COUNTESS OF RUTLAND 59
The Arcadia had already brought forth offspring: in
prose, Greene's Meza.phoz and Pandosto, and Lodge's
Rosalyde; in verse, Day's Ile o1: Guls. It had
fathered, immediately, the subplot of Shakespeare's
Ki 9 Lear,--and, indirectly, portions of the IVitcr's
Tale, and As I/ou Like It, and of other Elizabethan
plays. 1 Within the twelve months immediately pre-
ceding August I612, it had inspired also, as we have
already observed, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's
Rez, ege , the finest scenes in which are Beaumont's
dramatic adaptation of romantic characters and mo-
tives furnished by Sir Philip. And from that same
" faultless issue," the Arcadia; virtue, art, and beauty,
loved of all, had earlier still been draxvn by Beaumont,
certainly for The Maides Tragedy, and, perhaps, for
Phila.ster as well.
The acquaintance with the Rutland family was con-
tinued after the death of Francis by his brother
John, and his sister Elizabeth. The Nymph "of
beauty most divine . . . whose admirSd vertues draw
All harts to love her " in John's poem, The Shepherd-
ess, is Lady Katharine Manners, daughter of Francis,
sixth Earl of Rutland, and now the wife of George
Villiers, Marquis of Buckingham : and the Shepherdess
herself " who long had kept her flocks On stony Charn-
wood's dry and barren rocks," the country dame " For
singing crowned, whence grew a world of fame
Among the sheep cotes," is Elizabeth Beaumont of
Grace-Dieu, back on a visit from her Seyliard home
1 See Greg's Pastoral Poetry ad the Pastoral Drama, and my
former pupil, H. W. Hill's, Sidney's Arcadia and the Elizabethan
Drama.
16o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
in Kent. She had wandered into the summer place
of the Rutlands and Buckinghams near the Grace-
Dieu priory--" watered with our silver brookes," and
had been welcomed and had sung for them. And now
John repays the courtesy with indirect and graceful
compliment.
With the Villiers family, as I have earlier intimated,
the Beaumonts were connected not only by acquaint-
ance as county gentry but by ties of blood. Sir George
Villiers, a Leicestershire squire, had narried for his
second wife, about i589, Maria Beaumont, a relative
of theirs, who had been brought up by their kinsnen
of Coleorton Hall to the west of them on the other side
of the ridge. It will be remembered that one of those
Coleorton Beaumonts, Henry, was an executor of
Judge Beaumont's will in I598. The father of the
Maria, or Mary, Beaumont whom Henry Beaumont
nurtured as a waiting gentlewoman in his household,
was his second cousin, Anthony Beaumont of Glenfield
in Leicestershire. While Maria was living at the Hall,
the old Knight, Sir George Villiers of Brooksby, re-
cently widowed, visited his kinswoman, Eleanor Lewis,
Henry's wife, at Coleorton, " found there," writes a
contemporary, Arthur \Vilson, " this young gentle-
woman, allied, and yet a semant of the family," was
fascinated by her graces and made her Lady Villiers.
This Sir George Villiers was of an old and distin-
guished family. Leland mentions it first among the
ten families of Leicestershire, " that be there most of
reputation." 1 And he says " The chiefest house of
the Villars at this time is at Brokesby in Leicestershire,
1 Itiwrary, Vol. I, 21. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.
THE VILLIERS KIN x6x
lower by four miles than Melton, on the higher ripe
[bank] of Wreke river. There lie buried in the
church divers of the Villars. This Villars [of I54o ]
is lord of Hoby hard-by, and of Coneham in Lincoln-
shire .... He is a man of but two hundred marks of
land by the year." This " Villars" was the father of
the Sir George who married Maria Beaumont.
Brooksby, near Melton Mowbray, is only two or three
hours' drive from Coleorton.
The children of this marriage, John, George, and
Christopher, vere but a fev years younger than the
young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu; and there would
naturally be some coming and going between the Vil-
liers children of Brooksby and their Beaumont kin
of Coleorton and Grace-dieu. George, the second son,
born in 1592, through whom the fortunes of the family
were achieved, was introduced to King James in Au-
gust I64. This youth of twenty-two had all the
graces of the Beaumont as vell as the Villiers blood.
" He was of singularly prepossessing appearance," says
Gardiner, " and was endowed not only with personal
vigour, but with that readiness of speech which James
delighted in." It was his mother, Maria, now the
widowed Lady Villiers, who manceuvred the meeting.
Her husband's estates had gone to the children of the
first marriage- George was her favourite son and she
staked everything upon his success. James took to
him from the first: the same year lie made him cup-
bearer; the next, Gentleman of the Bed-chamber, and
knighted him and gave him a pension. We may im-
agine that Francis Beaumont and his brother John
watched the promotion of their kinsman with keen
GEORGE, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM 63
John Beaumont celebrated it with a glowing epithala-
mium, praying for the speedy birth of a son
Who may be worthy of his father's stile,
May answere to our hopes, and strictly may combine
The happy height of Villiers race with noble Rutland's
line.
Soon afterwards and before 623, John Beaumont's
Slzepherdesse, spoken of above, was written. Beside
the Nymph, the Marchioness of Buckingham. those
whom the poem describes as living in " our dales,"--
and welcoming Elizabeth Beaumont,--are the father
of the Marchioness, the Earl of Rutland, " his lady,"
Cicely (Tufton), the stepmother of Katharine Man-
hers,-- and
Another lady, in whose brest
True wisdom hath with bounty equal place,
As modesty with beauty in her face:
She found me singing Flora's native dowres
And made me sing before the heavenly pow'rs,
For which great favour, till my voice be done,
I sing of her, and her thrice noble son.
This other lady, so wise, and bounteous to John Beau-
mont, is the Countess of Buckingham, who when
John and our Francis. were boys, was poor cousin
Maria of the Coleorton Beaumonts. To the Marquis
of Buckingham, " her thrice-noble sonne," John writes
many poetic addresses in later years: of the birth of a
daughter, Mall, "this sweete armefull"; of the birth
and death of his first son; of how in his " greatnesse,"
George Villiers did not forget him"
I64 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
You, onely you, have pow'r to make me dwell
In sight of men, drawne from my silent cell;
and of how Villiers had won him the recognition of
the King:
Your favour first th' anointed head inclines
To heare my rurall songs, and read my lines.
George Villiers, is " his patron and his friend." In
writing to the great Marquis and Duke, John Beau-
ment never recalls the kinship; but in writing to the
less distinguished brother, the Viscount Purbeck, he
delicately alludes to it.
In the fortunes of the Vauxes of Harrowden, the
Beaumonts would naturally have continued their in-
terest. Anne, imprisoned after the Gunpowder Plot,
was released at the end of six months. The family
persisted in its adherence to the Catholic faith and poli-
tics. As late as Feb. 26, 1612, " Mrs. Vaux, Lord
(Edward) Vaux's mother, is condemned to perpetual
imprisonment, for refusing to take the Oath of Allegi-
ance "; and we observe that on IX{arch 21, of the same
year, " Lord Vaux is committed to the Fleet " for a
like refusal? Young Lo.rd Vaux got out of the Fleet,
in time married, and lived till 1661.
Others of kin or family connection,n and of his own
age,n with whom Francis would be on terms of social
intercourse or even intimacy during his prime, were
his cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who by 16Ol was in
Parliament as member for Nottingham, and in 1615
was High Sheriff of the shire; Henry Hastings, born
a Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), I6II-I6r7, under dates.
OTHERS OF KIN OR ACOUAINTANCE I65
in 1586 , who since I6O4 had been fifth Earl of Hunt-
ingdon, and in May 1616 was to be of those appointed
for the trial of the Earl and Countess of Somerset;
Huntingdon's sister, Catherine (who was wife of
Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield), and his brother,
Edward, a captain in the navy, who the year after
Beaumont's death made the voyage to Guiana under
Sir Walter Raleigh; Huntingdon's cousin, and also
Beaumont's kinsman, Sir Henry Hastings, of vholn
we have already heard as one of Father Gerard's con-
verts (a first cousin of Mrs. Elizabeth Vaux, and hus-
band of an Elizabeth Beaumont of Coleorton) ; Sir
William Cavendish, of the Pierrepoint connection, a
pupil of Hobbes, an intimate friend of James I, and a
leader in the society of Court, who was knighted in
16o 9 , and in 1612 strengthened his position greatly by
marrying Christiana, daughter of Lord Bruce of Kin-
loss; and that other young Cavendish, Sir William of
Welbeck, county Notts., who in 161I was on his trav-
els on the continent under the care of Sir Henry
Wotton. With at least three of these scions of fam-
ilies allied to the Beaumonts, Francis had been asso-
ciated, as I have already pointed out, by contempo-
raneity at the Inns of Court.
Neither the epistle to Elizabeth Sidney nor the elegy
on her death was included by Blaiklock in his foolish
book of so-called Beaumont poems. From the el%o3z
on Lady Markham's death, in 16o9, there included,
we learn little of the poet's self--he had never seen
the lady's face, and is merely rhetoricizing. From the
elegy, also included by Blaiklock, " On the Death of
the Lady Penelope Clifton," on October 26, 1613, al-
I68 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Fletcher's closest friend, if we except Beaumont,
seems to. have been Charles Cotton of Beresford, Staf-
fordshire, "a man of considerable fortune and high
accomplishments," the son of Sir George Cotton of
Hampshire. He owed his estates in Staffordshire, and
in Derbyshire as well, to his marriage with the daugh-
ter of Sir John Stanhope. To him in 1639, as " the
noble honourer of the dead author's works and mem-
ory," Richard Brome dedicates the quarto of Fletcher's
Monsieur Thomas. "Yours," he says, " is the worthy
opinion you have of the author and his poems; neither
can it easily be determined, whether your affection
to them hath made you, by observing, more able to
judge of them, than your ability to judge of them
hath made you to affect them deservedly, not par-
tially .... Your noble self (has) built him a more
honourable monument in that fair opinion you have
of him than any inscription subject to the wearing
of time can be." To this Charles Cotton, his cousin,
Sir Aston Cockayne, writes a letter in verse after
the appearance of the first folio of Beaumont and
Fletcher's plays, I647, speaking o.f Fletcher as " your
friend and old companion " and reproaching him
for not having taken the pains to set the printers
right about what in that folio was Fletcher's, vhat
Beaumont's, what Massinger's,--" I wish as free you
had told the printers this as you did me." And it is
apparently to. Cotton that Cockayne is alluding when,
upbraiding the publishers for not giving each of the
authors his due, he says, " But how came I (you
ask) so much to know? Fletcher's chief bosome-
friend informed me so." Elsevhere Cockayne de-
SOME OF FLETCHER'S FRIENDS I6 9
scribes Fletcher and Massinger as " great friends";
but the "bosome-friend " mentioned above cannot be
Massinger, for Massinger is one of those concerning
whose authorship " the bosome-friend " giYes infor-
mation.
Cotton was a friend of Ben Jonson, Donne, and
Selden, also. To him it is, as a critic, and not to his
son, who was a poet, that Robert Herrick, born seven
years after Beaumont, writes"
For brave comportment, wit without offence,
Words fully flowing, yet of influence,
Thou art that man of men, the man alone,
Worthy the publique admiration:
Who with thine owne eyes read'st what we doe write,
And giv'st our numbers euphonie and weight;
Tell'st when a verse,springs high, how understood
To be, or not, borne of the royall-blood.
What state above, what symmetric below,
Lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show.-- 1
And it is likely that Cotton did the same for Fletcher
and Beaumont.
Of Cotton, Fletcher's and, therefore, Beaumont's
friend, Lord Clarendon gives us explicit information:
" He had all those qualities which in youth raise men
to the reputation of being fine gentlemen: such a
pleasantness and gaiety of humour, such a sweetness
and gentleness of nature, and such a cirility and de-
lightfulness in conversation, that no man in the Court
or out of it appeared a more accomplished person: all
these extraordinary qualifications being supported by
x Hesperides, Aldine edition of Herrick, II, 136.
17o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
as extraordinary a clearness of courage, and fearless-
ness of spirit, of which he gave too often manifesta-
tion." In later life he was less happy in fortune and
in disposition, " and gave his best friends cause to
have wished that he had not lived so long." He passed
through the Civil War and died at the end of Crom-
well's protectorate, I658.
And of Robert Herrick, we may say that he, too,
was surely an acquaintance of our poets. He writes
many poems to Ben Jonson. To their other friend,
Selden, Fletcher's connection by the Baker alliance,
and Beaumont's associate in the Inner Temple, he
writes appreciatively :
Whose smile can make a poet, and your glance
Dash all bad poems out of countenance. 1
And of our dramatists themselves, he writes about
the same time that he is writing to Selden. in his
verses To the Apparition of his Mistrcsse, callin 9 him
to Elizium,
Amongst which glories, crown'd with sacred bayes
And flatt'ring ivie, two recite their plaies
Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all eares
Listen while they, like syrens in their spheres,
Sing their Evadne3
The Bohemian life on the Bankside, such as it was,
must have been brought to an end by Beaumont's mar-
riage, about 1613 . By that time Beaumont had writ-
Hesperides, Aldine edition, Herrick, I, 3or.
Op. cir., I, 329.
Jt}HN SELDEN
From the painting in the .Natlon.d Portrait Galler)-, I.ondon
SOME OF FLETCHER'S FRIENDS I7I
ten The Woman-Haler, The K,zight of the Burnbzg
Peslle, The Maske, and several poems; Fletcher, The
Failhfull Shcpheardcsse and three or four plays more;
the two in partnership, at least five plays; and Fletcher
had meamvhile collaborated vith other dramatists in
from eight to eleven plays which do not noxv concern
us. As to the remaining dramas assigned to this period
and attributed by various critics to Beaumont and
Fletcher in joint-authorship, we shall later inquire.
Suffice it for the present to say that I do not believe
that the former had a hand in any of them, except
The Scornful Ladie.
CHAPTER XII
BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING
FAMILY
N the I653 edition of the "Poems; By Francis
Beaumont, Gent." there is one, ordinarily re-
garded as of doubtful authorship, which, in default of
information to the contrary, I am tempted to accept
as his and to attach to it importance, as of biographical
interest. It purports to bear his signature " Fran.
Beaumont "; it bears for me the impress of his literary
style. Writing before August I612, to the Countess
of Rutland, Beaumont had, as we have remarked,
disclaimed ever having praised " living woman in
prose or verse." In The Examination of his Mistris"
Perfections, the poem of which I speak, the writer
praises with all sincerity the woman of his love"
Stand still, my happinesse; and, swelling heart,m
No more! till I consider what thou art.
Like our first parents in Paradise who " thought it
nothing if not understood," so the poet of his happi-
ness --
Though by thy bountious favour I be in
A paradice, where I may freely taste
Of all the vertuous pleasures which thou hast
[I] wanting that knowledge, must, in all my blisse,
172
HIS MARRIAGE 73
Erre with my parents, and aske what it is.
My faith saith 'tis not Heaven; and I dare swear,
If it be Hell, no pain of sence, is there;
Sure, 't is some pleasant place, where I may stay,
As I to Heaven go in the middle way.
Wert thou but faire, and no whir vertuous,
Ihou wert no more to me but a faire house
Hanted with spirits, from which men do them blesse,
And no man will halfe furnishe to possesse:
Or, hadst thou worth wrapt in a rivell'd skin,
'T were inaccessible. Who durst go in
To find it out? for sooner would I go
To find a pearle cover'd with hills of snow;
'T were buried vertue, and thou mightst me move
To reverence the tombe, but not to love,-
No more than dotingly to cast mine eye
Upon the urne where Lucrece' ashes lye.
But thou art faire and sweet, and every good
That ever yet durst mixe with flesh and blood:
The Devill ne're saw in his fallen state
An object whereupon to ground his hate
So fit as thee; all living things but he
Love thee; how happy, then, must that man be
Whom from amongst all creatures thou dost take!
Is there a hope beyond it? can he make
A wish to change thee for? This is my blisse,
Let it run on now; I know what it is.
The poet of this tribute is not wooing, but worship-
ing the woman won; reverently striving to compre-
hend an ineffable joy. The poem is not of praises
such as Beaumont in his epistle Ad Comitissam Rut-
lundiae contemns, praises " bestow'd at most need on
a thirsty soul." The writer, here, purports to ex-
174 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
amine into his Mistress's perfections, but, like the
author of the epistle to the Countess, he examines not
at all,--he observes the reticence for which Beaumont
there had given the reason,--
Nor do the virtuous-minded (which I swear
Madam, I think you are) endure to hear
Their own perfections into question brought,
But stop their ears at them.
When the lines of the Examination are set beside the
undoubted poems of Beaumont, they appear, in rhet-
oric, metaphor, and sentiment, to be of a type with
the two tributes to Lady Rutland; in vocabulary,
rhyme, and run-on lines, also, to be of one font with
them, and with the letter to Ben Jonson and the elegy
to Lady Clifton. When the lines are set beside those
of Beaumont's own phrasing in the dramas, one finds
that in their brief compass they echo the metaphor of
his Amintor, " my soul grows weary of her house,"--
the hyperbole of his Philaster, "I will sooner trust
the wind With feathers, or the troubled sea with
pearl,"--the passionate ecstasy of his Arbaces, " Here
I acknowledge thee, my hope.., a happinesse as
high as I could thinke . . Paradice is there!" The
tribute is a variant of those closing lines in A King
and No King,
I have a thousand joyes to tell you of,
Which yet I dare not utter, till I pay
My thankes to Heaven for urn.
I date this poem, then I612 or I6I 3, a year or two
URSULA ISLEY I75
after the play just mentioned and the epistle to Lady
Rutland; and I imagine with some confidence that it
was written by Beaumont for Ursula Isley, whom he
married about this time.
Ursula's father, Henry Isley, belonged to a family
of landed gentry which had been seated since the reign
of Edward II in the parish of Sundridge, Kent. The
manor came to them from the de Frerninghams in
42. In 554 Sir Harry Isley and his son, William,
who were prominent upholders of the reformed re-
ligion, had joined hands vith the gallant young Sir
Thomas \Vyatt of Allinon Castle--about seventeen
miles from Sundridge -- in the rebellion which he
raised in protest against the proposed marriage of
Queen Mary with Philip of Spain. At Blacksole
Field, near \Vrotham, half-way between Sundridge
and Allington, the Isley contingent was met and routed
by Sir Robert Southwell and Lord Abergavenny; and
the vast Isley estates were confiscated. A considerable
part was restored to \Villiam within a year or two.
But he falling into debt had to sell the larger portion;
and for the manor of Sundridge itself, he appears to
have paid fee farm rent to the Crown.
By will, probably September 3, 599, William's son,
Henry, left all his "mannors, lands, tenements, and
hereditaments, in the countie of Kent or else xvhere
within the realme of England, unto Jane my lovinge
wief in fee simple, viz t to her and her heires for ever,
to the end and purpose that she mave doe sell or
otherwise dispose at her discretion the same, or such
parte or soe much thereof as to her shall seeme fitt,
for the payement of all my just and true debts .
7 6 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
and also for the bringing up and preferment in mar-
riage of Ursula and Una, the two daughters or chil-
dren of her the said Jane, my lovinge wief." That the
children were not, however, stepdaughters of Henry,
is pointed out by Dyce, who quotes the manuscript of
Vincent's I.eicester, I6i 9 : " Ursula, the daughter
and coheir [evidently with Una] of Henry Isley. ''1
In fact, Henry had named Ursula after his mother, the
daughter of Nicholas Clifford.
It will be remembered that Beaumont's sister Eliza-
beth became the wife of a Thomas Seyliard of Kent.
The Seyliards were one of the oldest families in the
vicinity of Sundridge; and Thomas would be of
Brasted, which adjoins Sundridge westward, a quarter
of a mile from Sundridge Place and near the river
Darenth ; or of Delaware at the south of the parish ; or
of Gabriels about a mile from there and seven miles
south of Sundridge; or of Chidingstone close by; or
Boxley. If Elizabeth was married before 16I 3, it
is easy to surmise that during some visit to her, Beau-
mont was brought acquainted with Ursula Isley of
Sundridge Place. If not, we may refer the acquaint-
ance to sojournings with his friend, Fletcher, at Cran-
brook or at the Kentish homes of Fletcher's stepsis-
ters, or with their cousins, the Sackvilles.
We have no proof that Francis Beaumont wrote
more than one drama after the Whitehall festivities
of February I6I 3 . Two plays in which he is sup-
posed by some to have had a hand with Fletcher, The
Captaine and The Honest Man's Fortune, were acted
Works of B. and F.. I, li-lii.
-"Hasted's History of Kent (1797), II, 433; III, 146, 154, 186.
SUNDRIDGE PLACE 177
during that year; but I find no trace of Francis in the
latter and but slight possibility of it in the former.
We must conclude that from 1613 he lived as a coun-
try gentleman. He would be much more likely to
take up his abode at Sundridge, which, as we have seen,
belonged to his wife and her sister, than at Grace-
Dieu Manor; for that was occupied by John Beau-
mont who had four sons to provide for. It is, of
course, barely possible that one of his father's proper-
ties in Leicestershire or Derby may have fallen to
him,N Cottons, for instance, in the latter county, or
that " Mannor House of Normanton, and a close ther
called the Parke " mentioned in the Judge's will and
in which house-room was given by him to a " serv-
aunte . . . for the tearme of eleaven yeares" begin-
ning 1598. But the probabilities all point to the
manor house in Kent as the scene of Beamnont's clos-
ing years. 1
Sundridge Place lies, as we know, just south of
Chevening and west of Sevenoaks. The old manor
house in which, we may presume, Beaumont and Ur-
sula lived, and where his children were born, has long
since disappeared. But the old church, just north
of the Place, with its Early English and Perpendicular
architecture still stands nmch as in their day. The
old brass tablets to the Isleys of two centuries are
there, and the altar-tomb of the John Isley and his
wife who died a century before Beaumont xvas born.
Near this memorial xve may imagine that Beaumont
i For Sundridge and the Isleys, see Hasted's Kent, II, 53-5 ;
III, I2g--I2, I43-45; and Cal, S. P. (Dolt.) Jan. 3, Feb. 24,
554.
178 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
and Ursula sat of a Sunday; and through this same
pictu/esque graveyard, breathing peace, they would
pass home again. Some days they would take the
half-hour stroll across the forks of the Darenth, by
Combebank in the chalk hills and through the woods,
to Chevening House, and drink a cup with old Samp-
son Lennard and his son, Sir Henry, and Fletcher'a
stepsister Chrysogona (Grisogone), now Lord and
Lady Dacre, and make merry with their seven young-
sters; and, coming back by the Pilgrim's road that
makes for the shrine of the " holy blissful martir,"
Beaumont would quote, from Speght's edition of
Chaucer which had appeared but thirteen years before,
something merry of the
Well nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
Or sometimes they would tramp across to Squerries
and fish in the Darenth for the bream of which Spen-
ser had written; perhaps, visit their sister Seyliard that
same evening.
Another summer day, Francis would ride the ten
miles north tovard Chislehurst (ashes of Napoleon
le petit!), and turn aside to pay his compliments to the
proprietor of Camden Place, Ben Jonson's friend the
antiquary. But we may suppose that more gladly and
frequently than to any other spot, this dramatist-
turned-squire, and settled down for health and leisure,
would head his horse for Knole; and, galloping the
hills through Chipstead and Sevenoaks up to the old
8o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
woalld point out some new portrait of that wonderful
collection, then forming, of literary men in the din-
ing-room, and Beaumont would pass judgment upon
the presentment of some of his own contempora-
ries.
Then down the drive by which the sheep are brows-
ing and the deer, like Agag delicately picking their
way, and back to Sundridge of the Isleys, and to
Ursula; maybe to an afternoon o.f lazy writing on
scenes that Fletcher has called for--perhaps the
posset-night of Sir Roger and Abigail for the begin-
ning of The Scornfid Ladie.
In I64 or I615, the poet's first child, a
daughter, was born and was appropriately named
after the two Elizabeths who had touched most closely
upon his life. But the days of wedded happiness-
" This is my blisse, Let it run on now!"--were brief.
On March 6, 616, he died,-- only thirty-one years
of age.
The lines written to Lady Rutland, some five years
before,
What little wit I have
Is not yet grown so near unto the grave,
But that I can, by that dim fading light,
Perceive of what, or unto whom I write,
may have been conceived merely in humorous self-
depreciation. But when we couple them with the
epitaph written by John of Grace-Dieu " upon my
deare brother, Francis Beaumont,"--
1 Jonson's statement to Drummond "ere he was thirty years of
age" is incorrect, or was misreported.
i82 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Three days after his death the dramatist was buried
in that part of Westminster Abbey which, since Spen-
ser was laid there to the left of Chaucer's empty
grave, had come to be regarded as the Poets' Corner.
Beaumont lies to the right of Chaucer's gray marble
on the east side of the South Transept in front of
St. Benedict's chapel. In what honour he was held
we gather from the consideration that, of poets, only
Chaucer and Spenser had preceded him to a resting
place in the Abbey; and that of his contemporaries,
only four writers of verse folloved him: his brother,
Sir John, who died some eleven years later, and lies
beside him; his old friend, Michael Drayton, in 63I;
Hugh Holland, in 633; and that friend of all four,
Ben Jonson, in 637. On the " learned " or " histor-
ical " side of the transept, across the way from the
poets, lie also only three of Beaumont's genera-
tion: Casaubon the philologist, Hakluyt the voyager,
and Ben Jonson's master and benefactor--" most
reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in acts,
all that I know,"--Camden the antiquary. " In the
poetical quarter," writes Addison, a hundred years
later, "I found there were poets who had no monu-
ments, and monuments which had no poets." Of
the former category is Beaumont; of the latter, the
alabaster bust of Drayton whose body lies under the
north wall of the nave, and the monument to Jonson,
who, having no one rich enough to "lay out funeral
charges upon him," stands, in accordance with his
own desire, on his " eighteen inches of square ground "
under a paving-stone in the north aisle of the nave,--
and the figure of their associate, Shakespeare, who,
HIS DEATH 18 3
though there was much talk of transporting his body
from Stratford in the year of his death and Beau-
mont's, did not, even in "preposterous " effigy, join
his compeers of the Poets' Corner till more than a
century had elapsed. Upon Beaumont's grave Dry-
den's lofty pile encroaches. Above the grave rises
the bust of Longfellow; and not far from Beaumont,
Tennyson and Browning were lately laid to rest.
The verses, On the Tombs in I/Vestminster, attrib-
uted to our poet-dramatist, are of doubtful author-
ship, but in diction and turn of thought they are
paralleled by more than one of the poems which we
have found to be his:--
Mortality, behold, and feare,
What a change of flesh is here l
Thinke how many royall bones
Sleep within these heap of stones:
Here they lye, had realmes and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands;
Where from their pulpits, seal'd with dust,
They preach " In greatnesse is not trust."
Here's an acre sown, indeed,
With the richest, royall'st seed
That the earth did e're suck in
Since the first man dy'd for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cry'd,
"' Though gods they were, as men they dy'd ";
Here are sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.
Here's a world of pomp and state
Buried in dust, once dead by fate.
If the lines are not by Francis, they still preach the
I84 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
calm, deterministic spirit of his poems and his trag-
edies; and they are worthy of him.
Beaumont's surviving brother of Grace-Dieu con-
tinued for many years to write epistolary, panegyric,
and religious poems, which won increasing favour
among scholars and at Court. They were collected
and published by his son, in I629 . Of his Battle of
t3oswortl Field, which contains some genuinely poetic
passages, I have already spoken. In his lines to
James I Concertin 9 the True Forme of E.glish Po-
etry, composed probably the year of Francis' death,
or the year after, he desiderates regularity of rhyme,
Pure phrase, fit epithets, a sober care
Of metaphors, descriptions cleare, yet rare,
Similitudes contracted, smooth and round,
Not vex't by learning, but with nature crown'd,--
strong and unaffected language, and noble subject.
They made an impression upon his contemporaries in
verse; and, though he was but a minor poet, he has
come to be recognized as one of the "first refiners"
of the rhyming couplet,--a forerunner, in the limpid
style, of Waller, Denham, and Cowley. His transla-
tions from Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Prudentius
are done with spirit. His later poems set him before
us an eminently pious soul, kindly, courtly, and culti-
vated. His greatest work, the Croz,te of Thortes,
in eight books, is lost. It was evidently dedicated to
Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton, for in his elegy
on the Earl, 1624 , he says:
Shall ever I forget with what delight
He on my simple lines would cast his sight ?
I86 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
waters ever stain'd." His brother-in-law, George
Fortescue of Leicestershire, and others swell the
chorus of affection. He was, says the historian of
Leicestershire who knew him well,--William Burton,
the brother of that rector of Segrave, near by, who
vrote the dnato.my o[ Melancholy,-- he was " a gen-
tleman of great learning, gravity, and worthiness."
Sir John was succeeded at Grace-Dieu by John, his
oldest son, who fought during the Civil War for King
Charles, and fell at the siege of Gloucester, in 644.
Other sons were Gervase, who died in childhood,
Francis, who became a Jesuit, and Thomas, who suc-
ceeded in 644 to the family title and estates. The
Manor of Grace-Dieu passed finally to the Philips fam-
ily of Garendon Park, about four miles from Grace-
Dieu and half a mile from old Judge Beaumont's
property of Sheepshead. The founder of this family
at Garendon in I68Z was Sir Ambrose Philips, 1 the
father of the Ambrose who wrote the Pastorals and
The Distrest Mother. From the Philipses the present
owners of Garendon and Grace-Dieu, the Phillipps de
Lisles, inherited. The old house is no longer stand-
ing. But below the new Manor may be seen the ruins
of the Nunnery from which the Master of the Rolls
almost four centuries ago evicted Catherine Ekesil-
dena and her sister-nuns. It is interesting to note
that the name de Lisle, or Lisle, is but a variant of that
of Francis Beaumont's wife Isley (de Insula) : and
that the present family came from the Isle of Wight
and Kent, Ursula Isley's native county. I have not,
however, yet been able to establish any direct con-
Nichols, Coll. Hist., Lelc.,-Bibl. Top. Britt., VIII, t3-9, 34.
THE SURVIVING FAMILY I87
nection between the Sundridge Isleys and the Phil-
lipps de Lisles who came into the Grace-Dieu estates
in 1777 .
The sister of the Beaumonts, Elizabeth, was about
twenty-four years old at the time of Francis' marriage
to Ursula Isley of Kent. The date of her wedding
to Thomas Seyliard does not appear; but before 1619
she was settled in the same county, and within a few
miles of Chevening, Sundridge, and Knole. Of the
events of her subsequent life we know nothing. That
she cultivated poetry and the poets, however, may be
inferred, from various passages in
Eli,ium. In the third, fourth, and
written as late as 163o, the old poet
his nymphs,--singing in the " Poets
I surmise, was terrestrially Knole
" Mirtilla " who in his eighth Eglog
Drayton's Muses
eighth Nimphalls,
introduces among
Paradice," which,
Park,-- the same
of I6O6 was "sis-
ter to those hopeful boys, . . . Thyrsis and sweet
Palmeo." Only a year before the appearance of these
iWmphalls Drayton composed for the publication of
her elder brother's poems, a lament " To the deare
Remembrance of his Noble Friend, Sir John Beau-
mont, Baronet." Mirtilla had outlived both Thyrsis
and Palmeo, but not the affection of their life-long ad-
mirer and boon companion.
The widow of the dramatist bore a child a few
months after the father's death, and named her
Frances. In 1619 Ursula administered her husband's
estate; 1 and she probably continued to live with her
children at the family seat in Sundridge. The elder
daughter, Elizabeth, was married to "a Scotch colo-
1 A. B. Grosart, in D.N.B., art. Francis Beaumont.
THE SURVIVING FAMILY I89
thus helped to realize that in the arithmetic of genera-
tions Beaumont's times and thought are after all not
so far removed from our own. Two more such spans
of human existence would link his day with that of
Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPU-
TATION OF BEAUMONT
UR poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of
my scholarly friends, Professor Herford, judg-
ing apparently from the crude engraving of I7II, I
or from that of 1812, sees him, "of heavy and unin-
teresting features," but as Swinburne saw him, prob-
ably in Robinson's engraving of 1840, " handsome
and significant in feature and expression alike . ..
with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and
strong aquiline nose with a little cleft at the tip; a
grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely-
curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and
the imperial head, with its 'fair large front' and
clustering hair, set firm and carried high with an
aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observa-
tion "; 2 as xv.e see him to-day in the soft and speaking
photogravure 3 recently made from the portrait at
Knole Park or in the reproduction of 1911 4 of the
portrait which belongs to the Rt. Hon. Lewis Har-
court at Nuneham,--a courtly gentleman of noble
1 From the portrait at Knole Park.
Encyc. Brit., sub zomine.
* By Cockerel|, in the Variorum Edition of B. and F.'s Works,
Vol. I, 19o4. See Frontispiece to this volume.
4Historical Portraits, Vol. II. 6oo-I7OO, Oxford, 1911.
19o
PORTRAITS I91
mien, of countenance dignified, beautiful, and mobile,
and of dreamy eyes somewhat saddened as by physical
suffering, or by sympathetic pondering on the mystery
of life. The original at Knole was already there,
in the time of Lionel, seventh Earl of Dorset, I7x x,
and in default of information to the contrary we may
conclude that it has always been in the possession of
the Sackville family, and was painted for Beaumont's
contemporary, and I have ventured to surmise friend
as well as neighbour, Richard. third Earl of Dorset,-
who had succeeded to the earldom in 6o9--about the
year of Pl, ilaster. I have already shown that the Sack-
villes were connected with the Fletchers by marriage.
They were also patrons of Beaumont's friends, Jon-
son and Drayton. While the third Earl was still liv-
ing, poor old Ben writes to son, Edward Sackville, a
grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. And to
the same Edward, as fourth Earl, 1 Drayton dedicated.
163o, the Nimphalls of his Muses Eliium, and to his
Countess, Mary, the Divine Poems, published there-
vith. If, as others have conjectured, the Earl is him-
self the Dorilus of the Nimphalls, the exquisite De-
scription of Elicium which precedes, may be, after
the fashion of the poets and painters of the Renais-
sance, an idealized picture of Knole Park, where
Drayton probably had been received:
A Paradice on earth is found,
Though farre from vulgar sight,
Which, with those pleasures doth abound,
That it Elizium hight,
t Not to the third Earl, Richard, as Cyril Brett, Drayton's
21linor Poems, p. xix, has it.
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
of its groves of stately trees, its merle and mavis, its
daisies damasking the green, its spreading vines upon
the "cleeves," its ripening fruits:
The Poets Paradice this is,
To which but few can come;
The Muses onely bower of blisse,
Their Deare Elizium.
It was the widow of the third Earl, Anne (Clifford),
Countess of Dorset and, afterwards, of Pembroke and
Montgomery, x who erected the monument to Drayton
in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted
with this family of poets and patrons of art is, there-
fore, in every way more than probable; and there
is a poetic pleasure in the reflection that the family
still retains, in the house which Beaumont probably
often visited, this noble presentment of the drama-
tist.
The portrait at Nuneham, which I have mentioned
above, is not so life-like as that at Knole: it lacks the
shading. But it is for us most expressive: it is that
of an older man, spade-bearded, of broader brow,
higher cheek-bones, and face falling avay toward the
chin; of the same magnanimity and grace, but with
eyes more almond-shaped and sensitive, and eloquent
of illness. It is the likeness of Beaumont approaching
the portals of death.
Of the personality of Beaumont we have already
had glimpses through the window of his non-dramatic
x Clark's Aubrey's Brief Lives, II, 175, 239. Not Mary (Cur-
zon), the wife of the fourth Earl, as Professor Elton, Drayton
(I805), 13. 45, has it.
By permission of lir. Lewis Harcourt.
THE IEAUMONT
IqUNEHASI Pt-RTRAIT
HIS PERSONALITY 93
poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed him
chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tol-
erant of the " standing family-jests " of country gen-
tlemen, tired of " water mixed with claret-lees" "with
one draught " of which " man's invention fades," and
yearning for the Mermaid wine of poetic converse,
" nimble, and full of subtle flame." Other verses to
Jonson and to Fletcher express his scorn of " the
wild applause of common people," his confidence in
sympathetic genius and Time as the only arbiters of
literary worth. In still other poems, lyric, epistolary,
and elegiac, we have savoured the tang of his humour,
--unsophisticated, somewhat ammoniac; and from
them have caught his habit of emotional utterance,
frank and sincere, whether in admiration, love, or in-
dignation. We have grown acquainted with his rever-
ence for womanly purity ; with his religion of suffering,
his recognition of mortal pathos, irony, futility, and
yet of inscrutable purpose and control, and of the
countervailing serenity that awaits us in the grave.
An amusing side-light is thrown upon his character
by Jonson who told Drummond of Hawthornden, that
" Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his
own verses." We are glad to know that a man of
Jonson's well-attested self-esteem encountered in
Beaumont an arrogance and a consciousness of poetic
superiority; that even this " great lover and praiser
of himself, contemner and scorner of others," for
whom Spenser's stanzas were not pleasing, nor his
matter, and " Shakespeare wanted art,"-- that even
this great brow-beater of his contemporaries in liter-
ature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even
CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION 195
tween I616 and I618,1 Bolton omits the later drama-
tists altogether; 2 but that is not to. be construed by
way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beau-
mont. There is no doubt that Bolton knew the Beau-
monts personally, and appreciated their worth, and
as early as i6Io;--for to his Elements of Armories
of that year, he prefixes a "Letter to the Author,
from the learned young gentleman, I. B., of Grace-
Dieu in the County of Leicestershire, Esquier, ''3
who highly compliments the invention, judicial method,
and taste displayed in the Elemcnts, and returns the
manuscript with promise of his patronage.
Further information of the esteem in which Francis
was held, is afforded by the eulogies, direct or indirect,
written soon after his death by those who were near
enough to him in years to have known him, or to
assess his worth untrammeled by the critical con-
sensus of a generation that knew him not. The tender
tributes of his brother and of his contemporary, Dr.
Corbet, successively Bishop of Oxford, and of Nor-
wich, have already been quoted. A so-called " son-
net," signed I. F., included in an Harleian manuscript
between two poems undoubtedly by Fletcher, may
not have been intended for the dead poet; but I agree
with Dyce, who first printed it, 4 that it seems " very
like Fletcher's epicede on his beloved associate
a After the appearance of Montague's edition of King James's
Works, and before the execution of Raleigh.
Save for non-dramatic productions such as Ben Jonson's
Epigrams, etc.
Grosart, D.N.B., art, Sir John Beaumont, and Sir J. B.'s
Poems, xxxvi.
B. and F., Vol. I, lii.
I96
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Come, sorrow, come! bring all thy cries,
All thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes!
Burn out, you living monuments of woe!
Sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow l
Virtue is dead;
O cruel fate!
All youth is fled;
All our laments too late.
Oh, noble youth, to thy ne'er-dying name,
Oh, happy youth, to thy still-growing fame,
To thy long peace in earth, this sacred knell
Our last loves ring--farewell, farewell, farewell!
Go, happy soul, to thy eternal birth!
And press his body lightly, gentle Earth!
What the young readers of contemporary poetry
at the universities thought of him is nowhere better
expressed than in the lines written immediately after
the poet's death by the fifteen- o.r sixteen-year-old
John Earle;--he who was later Fellow of Merton;
and in turn Bishop of Worcester, and of Salisbu.
The ardent lad is gazing in person or imagination
on the new-filled tomb in the Poets' Corner, when he
writes :
Beaumont lyes here; and where now shall we have
A Muse like his, to sigh upon his grave?
Ah, none to weepe this with a worthy teare,
But he that cannot, Beaumont that lies here.
Who now shall pay thy Tombe with such a Verse
As thou that Ladies didst, faire Rutlands Herse?
A Monument that will then lasting be,
When all her Marble is more dust than she.
In thee all's lost: a sudden dearth and want
CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION 99
rollicking scribbler mentions him in The Praise of
Hemp-seed with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and
others, as of those who, " in paper-ilnmortality, Doe
live in spight of death, and cannot die." And not far
separated from Taylor's testimonial in point of time is
William Basse's prediction of a prouder immortality.
Basse who was but two years older than Beaumont,
and, as we have seen, was one of the pastoral group
with which Beaumont's career was associated, is writ-
ing of " Mr. William Shakespeare" who had died
six weeks after Beaumont,-- and he thus apostro-
phizes the Westminster poets of the Corner:
Renowned Spencer, lye a thought more nye
To learn+d Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye
A little neerer Spencer, to make roome
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.
To lodge all route in one bed make a shift
Untill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a rift,
Betwixt this day and that, by Fate be slayne
For whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe.
The date of the sonnet of which these are the opening
lines can be only approximately determined. It must
be earlier, however, than 1623; for in that year Jon-
son alludes to it in verses presently to be quoted. And
it must be later than the erection of the monument
to Shakespeare's memory in Trinity Church, Strat-
ford, in or soon after 68, for in the lines which
follow those given above the writer apostrophizes
Shakespeare as sleeping " Under this carvfid marble
of thine oxvne." The sonnet contemplates the re-
moval of Shakespeare's remains to Westminster, and
200 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
arranges the poets already lying there not in actual
but chronological order. 1
To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in
the series of stanzas prefixed to the Shakespeare folio
Of I623, To the memory of my belo,ed, the Author,
Mr. IVilliam Shakespeare and what he hath left us.
Ben Jonson intends, however, no slight to Beaumont
and the other poets mentioned by Basse, when, in
his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the
peers of Shakespeare. On the contrary this lover at
heart, and in his best moments, of Beaumont, bestows
a meed of praise" they are " great Muses," Chaucer,
Spenser, Beamnont,-- but merely " disproportioned,"
if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as
are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but
" thundering Eschylus," Euripides, and Sophocles,
Pacuvius, Accius, " him of Cordova dead," must be
summoned
To life againe to heare thy Buskin tread
And shake a Stage.
Therefore it is, that Jonson calls
My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further to make thee a roome"
Thou art a Moniment without a toombe,
t The version given above is that of Brit. lIus. MS. Lans-
downe 777. Of other versions one is attributed to Donne; but
the Lansdowne is the most authentic, and the evidence of author-
ship is all for Basse, whose name follows in the Lansdowne
manuscript. So, Miss L. T. Smith in Centurie o[ Praise, p. I39.
CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION 2Ol
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses;
I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses.
That Beaumont was regarded by his immediate con-
temporaries not as a professional, but literary, drama-
fist,--a poet, and a person of social eminence,--ap-
pears from Drayton's Epistle to Hencry Reynolds,
Esq., Of Poets and Poesy, published I627, from which
I have earlier quoted. Here the writer, appraising
the poets " who have enrich'd our language with their
rhymes " informs his " dearly loved friend " that he
does not
meane to run
In quest of these that them applause have wonne
Upon our Stages in these latter dayes,
That are so many; let them have their hayes,
That doe deserve it; let those wits that haunt
Those publique circuits, let them freely chaunt
Their fine Composures, and their praise pursue;
and thus, we may conjecture, he excuses the omission
of such men as Middleton, Fletcher, and Massinger.
Beginning with Chaucer, " the first of ours that ever
brake Into the Muses' treasure, and first spake In
veighty numbers," Drayton pays especial honour to
" grave, morall Spencer," " noble Sidney... heroe
for numbers and for prose," Marlowe with his " brave
translunary thlnas, Shakespeare of as smooth a
comicke vaine . . as strong conception, and as cleere
a rage, As any one that trafiqu'd with the Stage,"
" learn'd Johnson.. Who had drunke deepe of
202 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
the Pierian spring," and " reverend Chapman " for
his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom
he had loved, Alexander and Drummond, and con-
cludes the roll-call with his tvo Beaumonts and his
Browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and
" Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts."
This letter not only speaks the opinion of Drayton
concerning the standing of the two Beaumonts in
poetry, bu incidentally asserts the popularity of their
vork, for the author inforlns his correspondents that
he " ties himself here only to those few men "
Whose works oft printed, set on every post,
To publique censure subject have bin most.
By 162 7 all of the dramas in which Francis had an
undoubted share, except The Coxcombe had been
printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early
as 1618 in a little volume that included also Drayton's
elegies on Lady Penelope Clifton and the three sons
of Lord Sheffield, and Verses by 'N. H.'
This volume is Henry Fitzgeffrey's Certayn elegies
do,e by su4drie excellent wits (Fr. Beau., M. Dr.,
N. H.), with Satyres and Epigrames. Fitzgeffrey,
by the way, was of Lincoln's Inn in Beaumont's time;
and so were others connected with this volume, by
dedications or commendatory verses" Fitzgeffrey's
" chamber-fellow and nearest friend, Nat. Gurlin";
Thomas Fletcher, and John Stephens, the satirist, who
had been entered member of the Inn in i6II. They
must all have been known by Beaumont when he was
writing his elegies. The 'N. H.' thus posthumously
associated with our dramatist was, I think, the mathe-
IIICHAEL DRAYTON
From the portrait in the Dulvich Gallery
CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION 203
matician, philosopher, and poet, Nicholas Hill 1
Beaumont could not have failed to know him. He
was of St. John's College, Oxford; he wrote and
published a Philosolhia. Epicitrea Democritiana to
which, mentioning him by name, Ben Jonson alludes
in his epigram (CXXXIV) O/ The Famous Voyage
of the two wights who " At Bread-streets Mermaid
having dined and merry, Propos'd to goe to Holborne
in a wherry." He vas the secretary and favourite of
Edxvard de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a good deal
of a xvag, and well acquainted with our old friend
Serjeant Hoskyns of the Conviz, iztm Philosophicum.
He died in I6IO.
Whether the anonymous writer on The Time Poets
was a personal acquaintance of Beaumont ve cannot
tell. The definite qualities of the poet which he em-
phasizes are, hmvever, as likely to be drawa from life
and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas.
The lines, apparently composed between 62o and
1636 , begin,
One night, the great Apollo, pleas'd with Ben,
Made the odde number of the Muses ten;
The fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense,
In complement and courtship's quintessence;
Ingenious Shakespeare, Massinger that knows
The strength of plot to write in verse or prose,--
and continue with " cloud-grappling Chapman" and
others, as of the ten Muses.
a Mr. ]3ullen, D.N.B., under Fitzgeffrey, queries " Nathaniel
Hooke." I have not been able to identify Hooke.
Choice Droller3,, So,9s, azd Soznets, z656, i Sh. Soc. Pap.,
III, 172.
CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION 205
correctly,--the nobler scenes of "brave Mardonius "
in .d Kin9 and No KiutT. One attaches, therefore,
more than mere literary, or hearsay, significance to
his selection for special praise of Beaumont's force,
when he says,
Thou strik'st our sense so deep,
At once thou mak'st us Blush, Rejoyce, and Weep.
Great father Johnson bow'd himselfe when bee
(Thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee.
CHAPTER XIV
TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM
HAT we learn from tradition, and from the
criticism of the century following Beaumont's
death, adds little to what we already have observed
concerning his life and personality. Concerning his
share in the joint-plays, it adds much, mostly wrong;
but of that, later. Mosely, in his address of The
Stationer to the Readers prefixed to the folio of 1647,
announces that knowing persons had generally assured
him "that these Authors were the most unquestionable
Wits this Kingdome hath afforded. Mr. Beaumont
was ever acknowledged a man of a most strong and
searching braine; and (his yeares considered) the
most Judicious Wit these later Ages have produced.
He dyed young, for (which was an invaluable losse
to this Nation) he left the world when hee was not
full thirty yeares old. Mr. Fletcher survived, and
lived till almost fifty; whereof the World now enjoyes
the benefit." The dramatist, Shirley, in his address
To the Reader of the folio, says " It is not so remote
in Time, but very many Gentlemen may remember
these Authors; and some familiar in their conversa-
tion deliver them upon every pleasant occasion so
fluent, to talke a Comedy. He must be a bold man,"
continues he, with a prophetic commonsense, "that
2o6
TRADITIONAL CRITICISM 207
dares undertake to vrite their Lives. What I have
to say is, we have the precious Remaines; and as the
wisest contemporaries acknowledge they Lived a Mir-
acle, I am very confident this volume cannot die with-
out one." Shirley also reminds the Reader that but
to mention Beaumont and Fletcher " is to throw a
cloude upon all former names and benight Posterity."
" This Book being, without flattery, the greatest Mon-
ument of the Scene that Time and Humanity have
produced, and must Live, not only the Crowne and sole
Reputation of our owne, but the stayne of all other
Nations and Languages." To such a pitch had the
vogue of our dramatists risen in the thirty years after
Beaumont's death! Not only Shakespeare and learned
Ben, but Sophocles and Euripides may vail to them.
" This being,"--and here we catch a vision from life
itself,--" this being the Authentick witt that made
Blackfriars an Academy, where the three howers spec-
tacle vhile Beaumont and Fletcher were presented,
were usually of more advantage to the hopefull young
Heire, than a costly, dangerous, forraigne Travell,
with the assistance of a governing Mounsieur, or
Signior, to boote. And it cannot be denied but that
the spirits of the Time, whose Birth and Qualitie made
them impatient of the sowrer ways of education, have
from the attentive hearing these pieces, got ground
in point of wit and carriage of the most severely em-
ployed Students, while these Recreations were digested
into Rules, and the very pleasure did edifie."
So far as the plays printed in this folio are con-
cerned, not much of this praise belongs to Beaumont;
for, as we now know. not more than two of them,
208 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
The Coxcombe and the Masque of the Inner Temple,
bear his impress. But Shirley is thinking of the repu-
tation of the authors in general; and he writes with
an eye to the sale of the book.
Since we shall presently find opportunity to con-
sider the trend of opinion during the seventeenth cen-
tury regarding the respective shares of the dramatists
in composition, but a word need be said here upon the
subject,-- and that as to the origin of a tradition
speedily exaggerated into error: namely, that Beau-
mont's function in the partnership was purely
of gravity and critical acumen. From the verses of
John Berkenhead, an Oxford man, born in 1615, a
writer of some lampooning ability and, in 1647 reader
in moral philosophy at the University, we learn that,
he, at least, thought it impossible to separate the
faculties of the two dramatists, which "as two Voices
in one Song embrace (Fletcher's keen Trebble, and
deep Beaumont's Base"); that, however, there were
some in his day who held " That One [Fletcher] the
Sock, th' Other [Beaumont] the Buskin claim'd,"
That should the Stage embattaile all its Force,
Fletcher would lead the Foot, Beaumont the Horse;
and that Beaumont's was "the understanding," Fletch-
er's "the quick free will." Such discrimination, as I
have said, Berkenhead disavows; but he is of the
opinion, nevertheless, that the rules by which their art
was governed came from Beaumont:
So Beaumont dy'd; yet left in Legacy
His Rules and Standard-wit (Fletcher) to Thee.
TRADITIONAL CRITICISM 209
_And still another Oxford man, born four years be-
fore Beaumont's death, the Reverend Josias Howe,
reasserting the essential unity of their compositions,
concedes with regard to Fletcher,--
Perhaps his quill flew stronger, when
'T was weavhd with his Beaumont's pen;
And might with deeper wonder hit.
These and similar statements of 1647, essentially cor-
rect, concerning the force, depth, and critical acumen
of Beaumont had been anticipated in the testimonials
printed during his lifetime and down to 164o, espe-
cially in those of Jonson, Davies, Drayton, and Earle.
A verdict, much more doganatic, and responsible for
the erroneous tradition which long survived, proceeded
from one of the " sons of Ben," William Cartwright,
himself an author of dramas, junior proctor of the
University of Oxford in 1643, and " the most florid
and seraphical preacher in the university." He may
have derived the germ of his information from Jon-
son himself, but he had developed it in a one-sided
manner when, writing in 1643 " upon the report of
the printing of the dramaticall poems of Master John
Fletcher," he implied that the genius of " knowing
Beaumont" was purely restrictive and critical,--tell-
ing us that Beaumont was fain to bid Fletcher "be
more dull," to " write again," to "bate some of his
fire "; and that even when Fletcher had " blunted and
allayed " his genius according to the critic's command,
the critic Beaumont, not yet satisfied,
Added his sober spunge, and did comract
Thy plenty to lesse wit to make 't exact.
2o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
This distorted image of Beaumont's artistic quality
as merely critical lived, as we shall see, for many a
year. We shall, also, see that it is not from any
such secondary sources that supplementary informa-
tion regarding the poet himself is to be derived, but
from a scientific determination of his share in the
dramas ordinarily and vaguely assigned to an undif-
ferentiated Beaumont and Fletcher.
212 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
sionally stamped upon plays of associates, in which he
had no hand whatever. " Thou grew'st," says his
contemporary and admirer, John Harris,--
"Thou grew'st to govern the whole Stage alone:
In which orbe thy throng'd light did make the star,
Thou wert th' Intelligence did move that Sphear.
Dr. Harris, Professor of Greek at Oxford in the hey-
day of Fletcher's glory, and a most distinguished di-
vine, writes, in I647, as one who had known Fletcher,
personally,--observes his careless ease in composing,
his manner of conversation,
The Stage grew narrow while thou grew'st to be
In thy whole life an Exc'llent Comedie,--
and admires his behaviour:
To these a Virgin-modesty which first met
Applause with blush and fear, as if he yet
Had not deserv'd; till bold with constant
His browes admitted the unsought-for Bayes.
praise
So, addressing the public, concludes this panegyrist,--
Hee came to be sole Monarch, and did raign
In Wits great Empire, abs'lute Soveraign.
It is of these years of triumph that another of "the
large train of Fletcher's friends," Richard Brome, Ben
Jonson's faithful servant and loving friend, and his
disciple in the drama, tells us:
FLETCHER IN LATER YEARS 213
His Works (says Momus) nay, his Plays you'd say:
Thou hast said right, for that to him was Play
Which was to others braines a toyle: with ease
He playd on Waves which were Their troubled
Seas ....
But to the Man againe, of whom we write,
The Writer that made Writing his Delight,
Rather then Worke. He did not pumpe, nor drudge,
To beget Wit, or manage it; nor trudge
To Wit-conventions with Note-booke, to gleane
Or steale some Jests to foist into a Scene:
He scorn'd those shifts. You that have known him, know
The common talke that from his Lips did flow,
And run at waste, did savour more of Wit,
Then any of his time, or since have writ,
(But few excepted) in the Stages way:
His Scenes were Acts, and every Act a Play.
I knew him in his strength; even then when He--
That was the Master of his Art and Me--
Most knowing Johnson (proud to call him Sonne)
In friendly Envy swore, He had out-done
His very Selfe. I knew him till he dyed;
And at his dissolution, what a Tide
Of sorrow overwhelm'd the Stage; which gave
Volleys of sighes to send him to his grave;
And grew distracted in most violent Fits
(For She had lost the best part of her Wits) . . .
"Others," concludes this old admirer unpretentiously,
Others may more in lofty Verses move;
I onely, thus, expresse my Truth and Love.
No better testimony to the character of the man
who, even though Jonson was still writing, became
214 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
absolute sovereign of the stage after Shakespeare
and Beaumont had ceased, can be found than such
as the preceding. To Fletcher's innate modesty, other
contemporaries, Lovin and Taylor, who acted in many
of his plays, bear testimony in the Dedication of The
lVild-Goose Chase" " The Play was of so Generall
a receiv'd Acceptance, that (he Himself a Spectator)
we have known him unconcern'd, and to have wisht
it had been none of His; He, as well as the throng'd
Theatre (in despite of his innate Modesty) Applaud-
ing this rare issue of his Braine." He was the idol
of his actors" "And now, Farewell, our Glory! "
continue, in I652, these victims of " a cruell Destinie "
--the closing of the theatres at the outbreak of the
Civil \Vat,--" Farewell, your Choice Delight, most
noble Gentlemen! Farewell, the grand \Vheel that
set Us Smaller Motions in Action! "Tbe wheel of
Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger.
" Farewell, the Pride and Life o' the Stage! Nor
can ve (though in our Ruin) much repine that we
are so little, since He that gave us being is no more."
Fletcher was beloved of great men, as they them-
selves have left their love on record, of Jonson, Beau-
mont, Chapman, Massinger. If Shakespeare collab-
orated.with him, that speaks for itself. He was an
inspiration to young pastoralists like Browne, and to
aspiring dramatists like Field. He was a writer of
sparkling genius and phenomenal facility. He was
careless of myopic criticism, conscious of his dignity,
but unaffectedly simple,averse to flattering his
public or his patron for bread, or for acquaintance, or
for the admiration of the indolent, or for " itch of
18 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
9o5 gives the beautiful photogravure of Beaumont
of which I have already spoken, by Walker and Cock-
erell, from the original at Knole Park; and an equally
soft and expressive photogravure of Fletcher, by Em-
ery Walker, from the painting in the National Portrait
Gallery. For the first time the dramatists face as in
the originals" Beaumont, toward your left, Fletcher,
tovard your right.
Fletcher's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery
reveals a highbred, thoughtful countenance, large eyes
unafraid, wide-awake and keen, the nose aquiline and
sensitive, wavily curling hair, hastily combed back,
or through which he has run his fingers, a careless,
half-buttoned jerkin from which the shirt peeps forth,
-- all in all a man of more vivacious temper, ready and
practical quality than Beaumont.
The authorities of the Gallery, especially through
the kindness of Mr. J. D. Milner, who has been good
enough to look up various particulars for me, inform
me that this portrait of John Fletcher, No. 420, was
purchased by the Trustees in March 1876, its previous
history being unknown. The painting is by a con-
temporary but unknown artist, and is similar to the
portrait at Knole Park. It was engraved in the re-
verse by G. Vertue in 1729. They also inform me
that another portrait of a different type belongs to
the Earl of Clarendon. This, I conjecture, must be
that which John Evelyn, in a letter to Samuel Pepys,
12 August, 1689, says he has seen in the first Earl of
Clarendon's collection--" most of vhich [portraits],
if not all, are at the present at Cornebery in Oxford-
shire." But Evelyn adds that " Beaumont and
220 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Dyce 1 by Collier, " more in jest than in earnest,"
from the Parish-registers, are suggestive, if we reflect
that, about 1612 or 1613, the mdnage trois, provided
it continued so long, would have lapsed at the time
of Beaumont's marriage; and if we can swallow the
stage-fiction of Fletcher's "maid Joan" in Bury-Fair
(see page 96 above), whole and as something di-
gestible.
These are Collier's cullings from the Registers"
1612. Nov. 3- John Fletcher and Jone Herring
[were married]. Reg. o[ St. Saviour's, Southwark.
John, the son of John Fletcher and of Joan his wife
was baptized 25 Feb., 1619. Reg. of St. Bartholomew
the Great.
If this is our John Fletcher, his marriage would have
been about the same time as Beaumont's, and he may
have later taken up his residence in the parish of St.
Bartholomew the Great, on the north side of the river,
not far from Southwark. If Fletcher was married
in 1612, we may be very sure that his wife was
not a person of distinction. His verses Upon an
Honest Man.'s Fortzme, written the next year, give us
the impression either that he is not married and not
likely to be, or that he has married one of low estate
and breeding, has concluded that the matrimonial
game is not worth the candle, and rather defiantly has
turned to a better mistress than mortal, who can com-
pensate him for that which through love he has not
attained, " Were I in love," he declares,--
a Dyce, B. and F., I, lxxiii.
WAS FLETCHER MARRIED? 22I
Were I in love, and could that bright Star bring
Increase to Wealth, Honour, and everything:
Were she as perfect good, as we can aim,
The first was so, and yet she lost the Game.
My Mistriss then be Knowledge and fair Truth;
So I enjoy all beauty and all youth.
We may be sure that when Fletcher wrote this poem
he had known poverty, sickness, and affliction, but not
a consolation in wedded happiness:
Love's but an exhalation to best eyes ;
The matter spent, and then the fool's fire dies.
Since many of Collier's " earnests " turn out to be
" jests," why not the other way round? That is my
apology for according this " jest" a moment's whim-
sical consideration.
Such is an outline in broad sweep of the activities
and common relations of our Castor and Pollux, and
a preliminary sketch of the personality of each. With
regard to the latter, who is our main concern, the
vital record is yet more definitely to be discovered
in the dramatic output distinctively his during the
years of literary partnership; and to the consideration
of his share in the joint-plays we may now turn.
PART TWO
THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT
AND FLETCHER
CHAPTER XVI
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM ; CRITICAL APPARATUS
UCH of the confusion which existed in the minds
of readers and critics during the period follow-
ing the Restoration concerning the respective pro-
ductivity of Beaumont and Fletcher is due to accident.
The quartos (generally unauthorized) of individual
plays in circulation were, as often as not, wrong in
their ascriptions of authorship to one, or the other,
or both of the dramatists; and the folio of I647,
which, long after both were dead, first presented what
purported to be their collected works, lacked title-
pages to the individual plays, and, save in one instance,
prefixed no name of author to any play. The ex-
ception is The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes-
Inne and the Inner Temple " written by Francis Beau-
mont, Gentleman," which had been performed, Feb.
20, 1612-13, and had appeared in quarto without date
(but probably I6I 3) as "by Francis Beaumont, Gent."
In seven instances, Fletcher is indicated in the I647
folio by Prologue or Epilogue as author, or author
revised, and in general correctly; but otherwise the
thirty-four plays included (not counting the Maske)
are introduced to the public merely by a general title-
page as " written by Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher, Gentlemen. Never printed before, And now
226 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
published by the Authours Originall Copies." That
the public should have been deceived into accepting
most of them as the joint-product of the authors is
not surprising. Though it is not the purpose of this
discussion to consider plays in which Beaumont was
not concerned, it may be said incidentally that of
eleven of these productions Fletcher was sole author;
Massinger of perhaps one, and with Fletcher of eight,
and with Fletcher and others of five more; that in
several plays four or five other authors had a hand, and
that in at least five Fletcher had no share. 1
Sir Aston Cockayne was, therefore, fully justified,
vhen, some time between 1647 and 1658, he thus up-
braided the publishers of the folio:
In the large book of Playes you late did print
In Beaumont's and in Fletcher's name, why in 't
Did you not justice? Give to each his due?
For Beaumont of those many writ in few,
And Massinger in other few; the Main
Being sole Issues of sweet Fletcher's brain.
But how came I (you ask) so much to know?
Fletcher's chief bosome-friend informed me so.
I' the next impression therefore justice do,
And print their old ones in one volume too;
For Beaumont's works and Fletcher's should come forth,
With all the right belonging to their worth.
In still another poem, printed in I662, but written not
long after 1647, and addressed to his cousin, Charles
Cotton, Sir Aston returns to the charge:
1 See G. C. Macaulay (Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit., VI), and other
authorities as in footnote toward end of this chapter.
JOHN FLETCHER
From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery
Painter unknown but contemporary
COLLABORATION WITH FLETCHER 229
before gathered together. Beside those in which
Beaumont had, or could have had, a hand, the eighteen
include five of Fletcher's authorship, five in which he
collaborated with others than Beaumont; and one,
The Corona.lion, principally, if not entirely, by Shir-
ley. 1 As in the 1647 folio, the only indication of
respective authorship is to be found in occasional ded-
ications, prefaces, prologues and epilogues. But,
while in some half-dozen instances these name Fletcher
correctly as author, and, in two or three, by implica-
tion correctly designate him or Beaumont, in other
cases the indication is wrong or misleading. Where
" our poets " are vaguely mentioned, or no hint what-
ever is given, the uncritical reader is led to ascribe the
play to the joint composition of Beaumont and
Fletcher. The lists of actors prefixed to several of
the dramas afford valuable information concerning
date and, sometimes, authorship to the student of
stage-history; but the credulous would carry away the
impression that Beaumont and Fletcher had collabo-
rated equally in about forty of the fifty-three plays
contained in the folio of 1679.
The uncertainty regarding the respective shares of
the txvo authors in the production of this large number
of dramas and, consequently, regarding the quality
of the genius of each, commenced even during the
life of Fletcher who survived his friend by nine years,
and it has continued in some fashion doxvn to the
present time. Writing an eleg-y " on Master Beau-
mont, presently after his death," that is to. say, in
1 See authorities as in footnote, below.
2 Included "thirty years" after, among the commendatory
230 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
I66-I7, John Earle, a precocious youth of sixteen,
at Christ Church, Oxford, is so occupied with lament
and praise for " the poet so quickly taken off" that
he not only ascribes to him the whole of Philaster and
The Maides Tragedy (in both of which it was always
known that Fletcher had a share) but omits mention
of Fletcher altogether. So far, however: as the esti-
mate of the peculiar genius of Beaumont goes, the
judgment of young Earle has rarely been surpassed.
Oh, when I read those excellent things of thine,
Such Strength, such sweetnesse, coucht in every line,
Such life of Fancy, such high choise of braine,--
Nought of the Vulgar mint or borrow'd straine,
Such Passion, such expressions meet my eye,
Such Wit untainted with obscenity,
And these so unaffectedly exprest,
But all in a pure flowing language drest,
So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon,
And all so borne within thyself, thine owne,
I grieve not now that old Menanders veine
Is ruin'd, to survive in thee againe.
The succeeding exaltation of his idol above Plautus
and Aristophanes, nay even Chaucer, is of a generous
extravagance, but the lad lays his finger on the real
Beaumont when he calls attention to " those excellent
things," and to the histrionic quality, the high seri-
ousness, the " humours" and the perennial vitality
of Beaumont's contribution to dramatic poetry.
A year or so later, and still during Fletcher's life-
time, we find Drummond of Hawthornden confusing
poems in the folio of 647; but published earlier with Beaumot's
Poems, x64o.
232 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
appears) but to others like The Maides Tragedy and
The Scornful Ladle in which, undoubtedly, Beaumont
co6perated, says :
Fletcher, to thee wee do not only owe
All these good Playes, but those of others, too; . . .
No Worthies form'd by any Muse but thine,
Could purchase Robes to make themselves so fine;
and by Hills, who writes,--" upon the Ever-to-be-ad-
mired Mr. John Fletcher and his Playes,"--
"Fletcher, the King of Poets! such was he,
That earn'd all tribute, claim'd all soveraignty."
The third view was w still to follow Miss Hatcher--
that " Fletcher was the genius and creator in the work,
and Beaumont merely the judicial and regulative
force." Cartwright in his two poems of 1647, as I
have already pointed out, emphasizes this view:
Though when all Fletcher writ, and the entire
Man was indulged unto that sacred fire,
His thoughts and his thoughts dresse appeared both such
That 't was his happy fault to do too much;
Who therefore wisely did submit each birth
To knowing Beaumont ere it did come forth;
Working againe, until he said 't was fit
And made him the sobriety of his wit;
Though thus he call'd his Judge into his fame,
And for that aid allow'd him halle the name,
'T is knowne that sometimes he did stand alone,
That both the Spunge and Pencill were his owne;
That himselfe judged himselfe, could singly do,
And was at last Beaumont and Fletcher too.
DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD 237
The second folio, entitled Fifty Comedies and Tra 9-
edies, I679, contains, beside those above mentioned,
eighteen others, one of which, The Wild-Goose Chase,
had been published separately and in folio, I652. The
remaining seventeen said to be "published from the
Authors' Original Copies," are printed from the quar-
tos. They are The Maides Tragedy, Philaster, I King
and No King, The Scornful Ladle, The Elder Brother,
Wit without Money, The Faithfull Shepheardesse,
Rule a Wife and Ha.v a IVife, Monsieur Thomas,
Rollo, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Night-
Walker, The Coronation, Cupids Re,cnge, The Two
Noble Kinsmen, Thierry and Theodoret, and The
Woman-Hater.
In addition to these fifty-three plays, one, The Faith-
ful Friends, entered on the Stationers' Registers in
66o, as by Beaumont and Fletcher, was held in man-
uscript until I812, when it was purchased by Weber
from " Mr. John Smith of Furnival's Inn into whose
possession it came from Mr. Theobald, nephew to the
editor of Shakespeare," and published.
According to the broadest possible sweep of modern
opinion, the presence of Beaumont cannot by any tour
de force be conjectured in more than tventy-three of
the fifty-four productions listed above. The twenty-
three are (exclusive of The Maske) The Woman-
Hater, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Cupids
Revenge, The Scornful Ladle, The Maides Tragedy,
A King and No King, Philaster, Foure Playes in One,
Loves Cure, The Co.'combe, The Captaine, Thierry
and Theodoret, The Faithful Friends, Wit at Severall
Weapons, Beggers Bush, Loves Pilgrimage, The
DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD 239
tune, an occasional expert thinks that he finds a speech
or a scene in Beaumont's style, and concludes that the
play in its present form is a revision of some early
effort in which that dramatist had a hand. But where
one critic surmises Beaumont, another detects Beau-
mont's imitators; and where one conjectures Fletcher
and Beaumont conjoined, half a dozen assert Fletcher,
assisted, or revised by anywhere from one to four
contemporaries,-- Field or Daborne or Massinger,
Middleton or Rowley, or First and Second Unknown.
I have examined these plays and the evidence, as
carefully as I have those which have more claim to
consideration among the Beaumont possibilities, and
have applied to them all the tests which I shall pres-
ently describe; and have come to the conclusion that
Beaumont had nothing to do with any of the twelve.
There remain, then, of the twenty-three plays enu-
merated above as Beaumont-Fletcher possibilities, only
eleven of which I can, on the basis of external or
internal evidence, or both, safely say that they were
composed before Beaumont ceased writing for the
stage, and that he had, or may have had, a hand in
writing some of them. These are, in the order of their
first appearance in print: The Woman-Hater, pub-
lished without name of author in I6O7; The Knicdht
of the Burning Pestle, also anonymous, published in
I6I 3 ; Cupids Revenge, published as Fletcher's in I6I 5 ;
The Scornful Ladie, published in I616, as Beaumont
and Fletcher's, just after the death of the former; The
Mades Tragedy, published, without names of authors,
in i619; ,q ICing and No ICing, published as Beaumont
and Fletcher's in I619; Philaster, published as Beau-
240 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
mont and Fletcher's in 162o; and Foure Playes in
One, Loves Cure, The Coxcombe, and The Captain.e,
first published in the I647 folio, without ascription of
authorship on the title-page, but as of the " Comedies
and Tragedies written by Beaumont and Fletcher," in
general. In the case of Loves Cure the Epilogue men-
tions " our Author"; the Prologue, spoken " at the
reviving of this play," attributes it to Beaumont and
Fletcher. As for The Co-combe, the Prologue for a
revival speaks of "the makers that confest it for
their own."
It is worthy of notice that three only of these eleven
possible " Beaumont-Fletcher" plays were printed
during Beaumont's lifetime, The l/Voman-Hater,
The Knight of the Burdn 9 Pestle and Cupids Re-
vczge , and that on none of them does Beaumont's
name appear as author. The last indeed was ascribed,
wrongly, as I shall later show, to Fletcher alone. It
should also. be noted that four other of the plays, be-
ginning with The Scorful Ladle and ending with
Philaster, were published before the death of Fletcher
in 1625; and that while three of them have title-page
ascriptions to both authors, one, The Maides Tragedy,
is anonymous.
To. these eleven plays as a residuum I have given
the preference in the application of tests deemed most
likely to reveal the relative contribution and genius
of the authors in partnership. Beside the seven pub-
lished as stated above during Fletcher's life, two oth-
ers appeared vhch I do not include in this residuum,
The Faith.full Shepheardesse and Thierry and
Theodoret. The former, printed between December
242 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
cessively and cumulatively, of diction and mental
habit. Ultimately, and by induction, they are of dra-
matic technique and creative genius.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF BEAUMONT
I. In Plays Individually Composed.
HE studies of the most experienced critics into the
peculiarities of Fletcher's blank verse as dis-
played in productions of the popular dramatic kind,
indubitably written by him alone, x such as Monsieur
Thomas of the earlier period, ending I6I 3, The
Chances, The Loyall Subject, and The Humorous
Lieutenant of the middle period, ending I6I 9, and
Rule a IVife and Have a Wife of his latest period, in-
dicate that he indulges in an excessive use of double
endings, sometimes as many as seventy in every hun-
dred lines, even in triple and quadruple endings; in an
abundance of trisyllabic feet; and in a peculiar reten-
tion of the old end-stopped line, or final pause,--occa-
sionally in as many as ninety out of a hundred lines.
Attention has been directed also to the emphasis
which he deliberately places upon the extra syllable
of the blank verse, making it a substantive rather
than a negligible factor : as in the " brains " and " too"
of the following"
Or wander after that they know not where
To find? or, if found how to enjoy? Are men's brains
x Some sixteen plays in all.
243
244 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Made nowadays of malt, that their affections
Are never sober, but, like drunken people
Founder at every new fame? I do believe, too,
That men in love are ever drunk, as drunken men
Are ever loving.--1
and to his fondness for appending words such as
"first," "then," "there," "still," " sir," and even
" lady " and "gentlemen " to lines which already pos-
sess their five feet. It has also been remarked that
he makes but infrequent employment of rhyme.
Of this metrical style examples will be found on
pages in Chapter XIX, Section ., below; or on any
page of Fletcher's Rle a IVife azd Have a Wife, as
for instance the following from Act III, Scene I,
I4-23 :
Altea. My life[, an inlnocent[!
Mar 9. That's it lI aim[at,
5 That's it [ I hope I too;: then: I am sure[ I rule[
him ;
For inlnocents l are like I obeldient chil[dren
Brought up I under a hard I/xmothler-in-lawl, a
crulel,
Who beling not us'd I to breaklfasts and I collaltions,
When I they have coarse ] bread oflfer'd 'em I are
/x thank I full,
20 And take lit for l a falvour too I. Are the rooms I
Made readly to enltertain I my friendsl? I long I to
dance now,
And I to be wanlton. : Let I me have I a song.
XIs the great I couch up I the Duke I of Medilna sent?
Here the first half of v. 4 is also the last of the pre-
The Chowes, I, , p. 22"2 (Dyee); but as a rule I use ha
this chapter the text of the Cambridge 1Fglish Classics.
THE VERSE-TESTS 245
ceding line; seven out of ten verses have double end-
ings; one has a triple ending. One, v. 2I, has a quad-
ruple ending; unless we rearrange by adding "made
ready " to v. 2o, so as to scan :
.And take 't I for a falvour too I. Are the rooms ]made
readly
To en]tertain I my friends]? I long I to dance I now.--
Trisyllabic feet occur in nine; final pauses in nine;
stress-syllable openings and compensating anapests in
two; the feminine cesura (phrasal pause within the
foot) in two. The pause in v. 15, after txvo strong
monosyllables of which the first is stressed, produces
a jolt, typically Fletcherian.
Now, these peculiarities of versification are not a
habit acquired by Fletcher after Beaumont ceased to
write with him. They are rife not only in the plays
of his middle and later periods, but in those of the
earlier period while Beaumont was still at his side.
As for instance in Monsieur Thomas, entirely Fletch-
er's of I6O 7, or at the latest IgiI. The reader may
be interested to verify for himself by scanning the
following passage from Act IV, 2 at which I open
at random: Launcelot is speaking:
But to the silent streets we turn'd our furies:
A sleeping watchman here we stole the shooes from,
There made a noise, at which he wakes, and follows:
The streets are durty, takes a Queen-hithe cold,
Hard cheese, and that choaks him o' Munday next:
Windows and signs we sent to Erebus:
A crew of bawling curs we entertain'd last,
248 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
production in the pastoral spirit and form. Of this
a small part, but sufficient for our purpose, is com-
posed in blank verse; and I have cited in the next chap-
ter with another end in view, the opening soliloquy,--
to which the reader may turn. But as exemplifying
certain of Fletcher's metrical peculiarities, in a style of
verse suitable to be compared with Beaumont's in The
Maske, the following lines from Act I, I, are per-
haps even more distinctive. " What greatness," says
the Shepherdesse,--
What greatness, !or what private hidden power,
Is I there in me, I to draw submission
!
Io 5 From this rude man and beast ? Sure I am mortal,
The Daughter of a Shepherd; : he was mortal,
And she that bore me mortal:'! prick my hand,
And it will bleed; a Feaver shakes me, and
The self-same wind that makes the young Lambs
shrink
IIo Makes me [ a-cold; [ my fear says I am mortal.
Yet [ have I heard [ (my Mother told it me,
^And now I do believe it), " if I keep
My Virgin Flower uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair,
No Goblin, i Wood-god, Fairy, Elf, or Fiend,
II 5 ASa[tyr, or othler power that haunts the Groves,
Shall hurt my body, i or by vain illusion
Draw [ me to wanlder : after idle fires.
We have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings,
nine final pauses (end-stopped verses), four stress-
syllable openings with compensating anapests, and
seven feminine .cesure. In every way this sample
even of Fletcher's more formal style displays, in its
salient characteristics, a much closer resemblance in
THE VERSE-TESTS 249
kind to the sample of his later blank verse quoted
from Rule c IFile, above, than to that quoted from
Beaumont's Maske.
When we pass from samples to larger sections, and
compare percentages in the one hundred and thirty-
one blank verses of The Maslee and the first one hun-
dred and sixty-three of The Shepheardesse, we find
that in respect of final pauses there is no great differ-
ence. There are, in the former, more than is usual
with Beaumont--sixty per cent; in the latter, less
than is usual with Fletcher--fifty per cent. But in
other respects Beaumont's Maslee reveals peculiarities
of verse altogether different from those of Fletcher,
even when he is writing in the declamatory pastoral
vein. In the one hundred and thirty-one lines of the
Maske we find but one double ending; whereas in
the first one hundred and sixty-three blank verses of
The Shelheardesse we count as many as fourteen. In
these productions the proportion of feminine cesurae
is practically uniform--about forty per cent. But
when we come to examine the more subtle movement
of the rhythm, we find that in The ;Iaske not more
than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-
syllable, while in the blank verse of the Slcpheardesse
fully thirty-five out of every hundred lines have that
opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical cadence
vhich pervades much of Fletcher's metrical composi-
tion. In the matter of anapestic substitutions, and
of stress-syllable openings for the verse-section after
the ceesura, Beaumont is similarly inelastic; while
the Fletcher of the Shepleardcsse displays a mar-
vellous freedom. It follovs that in the Maske we
.5 2 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Here the run-on lines again abound, ahnost fifty per
cent; while the stress-syllable openings are but six-
teen per cent--much lower than one may find in
many rhymed portions of the Shepheardesse. With
regard to all other tests except that of double end-
ing (which does not apply in this kind of heroic
couplet), we find that these poems of Beaumont are
of a metrical style distinguished by the same char-
acteristics as his blank verse. 1
2. In Certain Joint-Plays.
If we turn now to a second class of material avail-
able,--the three plays indubitably produced in part-
nership,--and eliminate the portions written in the
metrical style of Fletcher, as already ascertained, we
may safely attribute the remainder to the junior mem-
ber of the firm; and so arrive at a final determination
of his manner in verse composition.
The three plays, as I have said before, are Philaster,
The Maides Tragcdy and A KiJtg ad No Kiz 9. A
passage, which in the opinion of nearly all critics e is
by all tests distinctively Fletcherian, may be cited
from the first of these as an example of that which
we eliminate when we look for Beaumont. It is from
the beginning of Act V, 4. where the Captain enters"
" Philaster, brave Philaster!" Let Philaslter
Be deeper in request, my ding [a] dongs,
The reader may udge for himself by referring to the citation
from the Letter and the poems to the Countess in Chapters
VII and XI, above.
o_ Fleay, Boyle, Oliphant, Alden. And even G. C. Macaulay,
who once claimed the whole play for Beaumont, says now "per-
haps Fletcher's."
254
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Bore thunder underneath, as much as his,
Nor beast that I could turne from: shall I then
Beginne to feare sweete sounds? a ladies royce,
Whom I doe love? Say, you would have my life;
Why, I will give it you; for it is of me
A thing so loath'd, and unto you that aske
Of so poore use, that I shall make no price.
If you intreate, I will unmov'dly heare.
Or the famous description of Bellario, beginning:
I have a boy,
Sent by the gods, I hope to this intent,
Not yet seen in the court--
from the same scene.
Or the King's soliloquy in Act II, Scene 4, containing
the lines :
You gods, I see that who unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be curst
In that which meaner men are blest withall:
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth.
The reader will at once be impressed with the regu-
larity of the masculine ending. Beaumont does not,
of course, eschew the double ending; but, as Boyle
has computed, the percentage in this play is but fifteen
in the non-Fletcherian passage, whereas the percent-
age in Fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. The prev-
alence of run-on lines is also notevorthy; and the
infrequency of the stress-syllable openings, anapests,
and feminine cesure by which Fletcher achieves now
conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt.
THE VERSE-TESTS 255
In The Maides Tragedy, such soliloquies as that of
Aspatia in Act V, Scene 4, with its mixture of blank
verse and rhyme:
This is my fatal hour; heaven may forgive
My rash attempt, that causeIessly hath laid
Griefs on me that will never let me rest,
And put a Woman's heart into my brest.
It is more honour for you that I die;
For she that can endure the misery
That I have on me, and be patient too,
May live, and laugh at all that you can do-
are marked by characteristics utterly unlike those of
Fletcher's dramatic verse. Also unlike Fletcher are
the scenes which abound in lines of weak and light
ending, and lines where the lighter syllables of every
word must be counted to make full measure. Fletcher
did not write:
Alas, Amintor, thinkst thou I forbear
To sleep with thee because I have put on
A maidens strictness;
or
As mine own conscience too sensible;--
I must live scorned, or be a murderer;
That trust out all our reputation.
Nor did Fletcher write, with any frequency, im-
proper run-on lines, such as III, 2, 135 (one of his
collaborator's scenes) :
256 EEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Speak yet again, before mine anger grow
Up beyond throwing down.
In this play the percentage of run-on lines in
Fletcher's scenes is about nineteen; in the scenes not
written by him, ahnost twenty-seven. Fletcher's
double endingsare over forty per cent; his collabora-
tor's barely ten.
In /i King and No King similar Beaumontesque
characteristics distinguish the major portion of the
play from the few scenes generally acknowledged to
be written by Fletcher. In Fletcher's scenes 1 one
notes the high proportion of stress-syllable open-
ings, and, consequently, of anapaestic substitutions,
the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not
infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after
the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the
beginning of the verse-section. While sometimes
these characteristics appear in the other parts of the
play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature
of the non-Fletcherian rhythm. A comparison of the
verse of Fletcher's Act IV, Scene 2, with that of his
collaborator in Act I, Scene I, well illustrates this
difference. The recurrence of the feminine caesura
measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers.
It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines: but of his
collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for in-
stance, wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the
second scene of Act IV:
Fool]that I am, ]I have ]undone ]myself,
]And ] with mine own]hand' turn'd ] my for]tune
round,
aiV, I, 2, 3; V, I, 3.
THE VERSE-TESTS 257
That was] a fair I one: ! I I have childlishly
Plaid I with my hope I so long, till I have broke I it,
AAnd nmv too late I mourn for 't, i 0 ] Spacolnia,
Thou hast found] an e]ven way]to thy I revenge ]
now !
"Why I didst thou folllow me, IAlike ] a faint
A shad]ow,
To wither my desires? But, wretched fool,
"Why ] did I plant ] thee : 'twixt ] the sun]and me,
ATo make ]me freeze ]thus? i Why ] did I I prefer ]
her
ATo ]the fair PrinIcess? : O I thou fool, ]thou fool,
Thou family of fools, ]Aiive ]like a slave ] still
And in ]thee bear ] thine own ] Ahell [ and thy tor- 1.
ment,--
where, beside the frequent double endings and end-
stopped lines, already emphasized in preceding exam-
ples, we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-
syllable openings with their anapestic sequences, three
omissions of the light syllable after the cesural pause
with the consequent accent at the beginning of the
verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine cesurm
(or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three
at least (vv. 2, 5, IO) are exaggerated jolts.
Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for
instance, Arbaces' speech beginning Act I, I, lO 5, of
lines rippling with as many feminine cesure. But,
utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thir-
teen of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only
two stress-syllable openings, only four anapmsts, one
omitted thesis after the cesural pause, four end-
stopped lines. He is more frequently capable, as in
258 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
the passage beginning 1. I29, of a sequence without a
single feminine cmsura, but with several feminine (or
double) endings"
Tiyranes. Is it the course of
Iberia, to use their prisoners thus ?
Had Fortune throwne my name above Arbaces,
I should not thus have talkt: for in Armenia
We hold it base. You should have kept your temper,
Till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashion
Perhaps to brag.
drbaces. Bee you my witness, Earth,
Need I to brag? Doth not this captive prince
Speake me sufficiently, and all the acts
That I have wrought upon his suffering Iand?
Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of ground
Within [his whole [ realme that [ I have [ not past
Fighting and conquering? 1
Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting
pause the cesure are masculine, and fall uncompro-
misingly at the end of the second and third feet.
In respect of the internal structure of the verse the
tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them
above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oli-
phant have set the percentage in his verse at about
twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the met-
rical characteristics of those parts of Philaster, The
Maides Tragedy and A Kin 9 and No Kin9 which do
not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are
well defined and practically uniform; since they are of
a piece with the metrical manner of The lUoman-
Hater, which is originally, and in general, the vork
a Quarto of I619 as given by Alden.
CHAPTER XIX
FLETCHER'S DICTION
HE verse criterion is, however, not of itself a re-
agent sufficient to precipitate fully the Beaumont
of the joint-plays. For there still exists the certainty
that in plotting plays together, each of the. collabora-
tors was influenced by the opinion of the. other; and
the probability that, though one may have undertaken
sundry scenes or divers characters in a play, the other
would, in the course o.f general correction, insert
lines in the parts written by his collaborator, and
would convey to his o.wn scenes the distinguishing
rhythm, " burnout," or diction of a definite character,
created, or elaborated, by his colleague. It, there-
fore, follows that the assignment of a whole scene to
either author on the basis alone of some recurring
metrical peculiarity is not convincing. In the same
section, even in the same speech, we may encounter
insertions which bear the stamp of the revising col-
league. For instance, the opening of Plgilaster is
generally assigned to Beaumont: it has the charac-
teristics of his prose. But with the entry of the
King (line 89) we are launched upon a subscene in
verse which, on the one hand, has a higher percent-
age of double endings (zi. 38) than Beaumont ever
used, but does not fully come up to Fletcher's usage;
FLETCHER'S DICTION 265
that "all are dead but thy dear memorie" is not
enough; she must specify '" that shall outlive thee."
To assert that she knows the remedies of " all green
wounds" does not suffice: she must proceed to the
enumeration of the wounds; nor to tell us that her
meat shall be found in the woods: she must rehearse
the varieties of meat. Her soliloquy in the last
thirty lines of the scene, not here quoted, is of the
same quality: it reminds one of a Henslowe list of
stage properties, or of the auctioneer's catalogue that
sprawls down Walt Whitman's pages.
And, last, we notice what has been emphasized by G.
C. Macaulay and others, that much of this enumeration
by division is by way of " parentheses hastily thrown
in, or afterthoughts as they occur to the mind." 1
Even in the formal Shepheardesse this characteristic
lends a quality of naturalness and conversational
spontaneity to the speech.
2. In the Later Plays.
If now we turn to one of Fletcher's plays written
after Beauinont's death, and without the assistance
of Massinger or any other,--say, The Humorous
Lieutenant of about the year I619,-- we find on every
page and passages like the followingY-- The King An-
tigonus upon the entry of his son, Demetrius, ad-
dresses the ambassadors of threatening powers:
Do you see this Gent(leman),
You that bring Thunders in your mouths, and Earth-
quakes,
G. C. Macaulay, Francis Beaumont. p. 45.
Act I, Sc. I, Camb. Engl. Classics, II, p. 286.
FLETCHER'S DICTION 269
The ruines our swords made, the bloudy ruins;
Then flew this Bird of honour bravely, Gentlemen;
But these must be forgotten- so must these too,
And all that tend to Arms, by me for ever.
And from Act II, Scene I, pages IOI-IO2, for
triplets"
Fight hard, lye hard, feed hard, when they come home,
sir ....
To be respected, reckon'd well, and honour'd ....
Where be the shouts, the Bells rung out, the peo-
ple? . . .
And, for "alls," and triplets"
And whose are all these glories ? why their Princes,
Their Countries and their Friends. Alas. of all these,
And all the happy ends they bring, the blessings,
They only share the labours!
Finally, from Rule a IVife, a few instances of the
iterations, three-fold or multiple, and redundant ex-
positions. In the first scene 1 Juan describes Leon:
Ask him a question,
He blushes like a Girl, and ansvers little,
To the point less; he wears a Sxvord, a good one,
And good cloaths too; he is whole-skin'd, has no
hurt yet,
Good promising hopes ;
and Perez describes the rest of the regiment,
That swear as valiantly as heart can wish,
Their mouths charg'd with six oaths at once, and
whole ones,
XCamb., III, p. x7o.
270 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
That make the drunken Dutch creep into Mole-hills; . . .
and he proceeds to Donna Margarita:
She is fair, and young, and wealthy,
Infinite wealthy, etc.
And then to Estefania who has tautologized of her
chastity, he tautologizes of his harmlessness: 1
I am no blaster of a lady's beauty,
Nor bold intruder on her special favours;
I know how tender reputation is,
And with what guards it ought to be preserv'd, lady.
As a fair example of this method of filling a page,
I recommend the first scene of the third act; and of
eloquence by rhetorical 'division,' Perez's description
of his room in the next scene: all in terms of three
times three.
If now the reader will turn, by way of confirma-
tion, to The Triumph of Time and The Triumph of
Death of which the metrical characteristics are ad-
mittedly Fletcher's, he will find that there, Fletcher,
before Beaumont's retirement from the partnership,
is already using in purely dramatic composition the
rhetorical mannerisms which mark both the lyrically
designed Shepheardesse of his early years and the
genuine dramas of the later.
3- Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures.
Beside the rhetorical mannerisms classified in the
preceding paragraphs I might rehearse a long list
of Fletcher's favourite expressions and figures of
speech. Of the former Mr. Oliphant has men-
albid., p. 172.
Engl. Studien, XIV, 65.
272 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
other tests, to Fletcher, ye occurs 271 times, while
in the scenes attributed to Massinger it occurs but
four. That is to say, for every ye in Fletcher's part
there are but o.65 you's; for every ye in Massinger's
part, 50 you's. Mr. W. W. Greg, applying the test
in his edition of The Eld.cr Brother, and counting
the y'are's as instances of ye, finds that the percentage
of ye's to york's in Fletcher's part is ahnost three times
as high as in Massinger's. In a recent article in The
Na.tio Mr. Paul Ehner More communicates his in-
dependent observation of the same mannerism in
Fletcher. Though he has been anticipated in part, his
study adds to McKerrow's the valuable information
that Fletcher uses the ye for yo in " both numbers and
cases, and in both serious and comic scenes." Mr.
More's statistics favour the .conclusion that the test
distinguishes Fletcher not only from Massinger, but
from other collaborators" Middleton, Rowley, Field,
Jonson, Tourneur. They do not carry conviction re-
garding Shakespeare, whose habit as Greg and others
had already announced varies in a perplexing man-
ner. Nor does Mr. More arrive at any definite result
concerning the test " when applied to the mixed work
of Beaumont and Fletcher." For though the high
percentage of ye's in the third and fourth of the
Foure Playes confirms the general attribution of those
'Triumphs' to Fletcher, the low percentage in the
first two 'Triumphs' does not justify "the common
opinion which attributes them to Beaumont." Their
author, as I have elsewhere stated, was probably Field.
Variorum, B. and F., Vol. II, 19o5.
New York, Nov. 14, 1912.
FLETCHER'S DICTION 273
" In the plays vhich are units," continues Mr. More,
" such as The Maid's Tragedy, Philaster, t King and
No King, The Kdght of the Burning Pestle, and The
Coxcomb, this mark of Fletcher does not occur at all.
It should seem that the vriting here, at least in its
final form, was almost entirely Beaumont's." I have
gone through all the plays which have been ordinarily
regarded as joint-productions of Beaumont and
Fletcher, and find that in this surmise Mr. More is
right. The Kn.ight, to be sure, is Beaumont's alone;
but with regard to the other four plays mentioned
above, in which they undoubtedly co6perated, the sug-
gestion that the writing, at least in its final form, was
ahnost entirely Beaumont's, because of the practically
complete absence of ye's, is justified by the facts. It
is, also, helpful in the examination of plays not men-
tioned in this list. It has, in connection with other
considerations, assisted me to the conclusion that
Fletcher went over two or three scenes of The IVom-
an-Hater, stamping them with his ye's after Beau-
mont had finished it as a whole; and it has confirmed
me in the belief that The .corful Ladle was one of
the latest joint-plays, only partly revised by Beau-
mont,--and that, not long before his death. Fletch-
er's preference for ye is a distinctive mannerism. His
usage varies from the employment of one-third as
many yds to that of twice as many ye's as you's;
whereas Beaumont rarely uses a ye. Even more
distinctive is Fletcher's use of y'are, and of ye in the
objective case. The latter, Beaumont does not toler-
ate.
For figurative purposes Fletcher finds material
274 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
most frequently in the phenomena of vinter and
storm" 'frosts,' 'nipping frosts,' 'nipping winds,'
' hail,' ' cakes of ice, ' icicles, ' thaw,' ' tempests,'
' thunders,' ' billows,' ' mariners ' and ' storm-tossed
barks,' 'wild overflows' of waters in stream or tor-
rent; in the phenomena of heat and light" 'suns,' the
'icy moon,' the 'Dog-star' or the 'Dog,' the 'Sirian
star,' the ' cold Bear' and ' raging Lion,' ' Aetna,' ' fire
and flames'; of trees" root and branch, foliage and
fruit: of the oak and clinging vine; of the rose or
blossom and the 'destroying canker'; of fever and
ague; of youth and desire, and of Death ' beating lar-
urns to the blood,' of our days that are 'marches to
the grave,' and of our lives 'tedious tales soon for-
gotten.' I have elsewhere called attention to the
numerous variations which he plays upon the 'story
of a woman.' His 'monuments' are in frequent
requisition and, by preference, they ' sweat '; men pur-
sued by widows fear to be 'buried alive in another
man's cold monument.' Other common images are
'rock him to another world,' 'bestride a billow,'
'plough up the sea.' He indulges in extended mytho-
logical tropes as of the 'Carthage queen' and
Ariadne; is especially attracted by Adonis, Hylas
(whom he may have got either from Theocritus or
the Marquis D'Urffi's Astraan character), and Her-
cules ; and, in general, he levies more freely than Beau-
mont on commonplace classical material. In his un-
assisted dramas his fondness for personification seems
to grow- many pages are thick with capitalized ab-
stractions; and the poetry, then, is usually limited to
the capitalization. The curious reader will find most
FLETCHER'S DICTION
275
of Fletcher's predilections in image-making clustered
in three or four typical passages of the later and un-
assisted plays, such as Alphonso's raving in A IVife
for a Month, IV, 4; and in passages, undoubtedly of
his verse and diction, in plays written conjointly with
Beaumont, such as that of Spaconia's outburst in
Kin 9 ad No King, IV, 2, 45-62.
Fletcher abounds in optatives: 'Would Gods thou
hadst been so blest!' '\Vould there were any safety
in thy sex!' and the like. He is also given to rhetori-
cal interrogations and elaborate exclamations; more
so than Beaumont. He affects the lighter kind of
oath, the appeal to something sacred, in attestation-
' \Vitness Heaven !' In entreaty--' High Heaven, de-
fend us !' Or in mere ejaculation--' Equal Heavens [ "
He varies his asseverations so that they appear less
bluntly profane: 'By my life!' 'By those lights, I
vow!'--or more appropriate to the emergency: ' By
all holy in Heaven and Earth!' He swears occa-
sionally ' By the Gods,' but not so frequently as Beau-
mont, for there was a puritanical reaction after
Beaumont's death. In the early joint-plays he affects
particularly 'all the gods,' 'By all those gods, you
swore by!' ' By more than all the gods!' In his im-
precations he is even more sulphurous than Beaumont:
'Hell bless you for it!' 'Hell take me then!' 'Thou
all-sin, all-hell, and last all-devils!'
In summary let us say of Fletcher's diction, that its
vocabulary is repetitious; its sentence-structure, loose,
cumulative, trailing: that its larger movement is, in
general, dramatic, conversational, abrupt, rather than
lyrical, declamatory, reflective. He writes for the
276 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
plot-- forward : not from the character -- outward.
When he bestows a lyrical or descriptive touch upon
the narrative it is always incidental to conversation or
stage business. When he indulges in a classical remi-
niscence he permits himself to embroider and bedizen;
but usually his ribbons (from a scantly furnished,
much-rummaged wardrobe) are carelessly pinned on.
While capable, especially in tragedy, of occasional
long speeches, he prefers the brief interchange of ut-
terance, the rapid fire and spasm of dialogue.
CHAPTER XX
FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT
ROM the study of Fletcher's unaided plays we
arrive at a still further criterion for the deter-
ruination of his share in the joint-plays,--his stock
of ideas concerning life, his view of the spectacle,
and his emotional attitude. His early pastoral com-
edy The Fathfull Shepheardesse might be dismissed
from consideration as a conventionalized literary
treatment of conditions remote from actual experience,
were it not that other dramatic exponents of shep-
herds and shepherdesses--Jonson, for instance, and
Milton--have succeeded in imbuing the pastoral
species with qualities distinctly vital; the former, with
rustic reality and genuine tenderness; the latter, with
profound moral significance. The Fa.ith[ull Shep-
heardesse, on the other hand, with all its beauty of
artistic form is devoid of reality, pathos, and sub-
limity. The author has no ideas worthy of the name
and, in spite of his singing praises of chastity, he has
his hand to his mouth where between fyttes there blos-
soms a superb smile. He has in art no depth of convic-
tion ; consequently, no philosophy of life to offer. The
Faith[ull Shephea.rdesse strikes the intellectual keynote
of all Fletcher's unaided vork. He is a playwright
of marvellous skill, a lyrist of facile verse and fancy,
but a poet of indifference--of no ethical insight or
277
278 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
outlook when he is purveying for the public. His
tragedies, for instance Valentidan and Bonduca (the
two scenes of the latter that may not be his are
negligible), abound in sudden fatal passions and noble
diction. They involve moral conduct, to be sure, patri-
otism, loyalty, chivalry, military prowess, insane lust
and vengeance, but they lack deep-seated and delib-
erate motive of action, and they fail of that inevita-
bility of spirituaI conflict which is requisite to a tragic
effect. The heroes of these, and of his tragicomedies
and romantic dramas, such as .d lVife for a Month,
The Loyall Subject, The Humorous Lieutenat, The
Pilgrim, The Island Princesse, may be fearless and
blameless, but their courage and virtue are of habit
rather than of moral exigency. Their loyalty is fre-
quently unreasonable and absurdly exaggerated. One
or two of his virtuous heroines are at once charming
and real; but as a rule with Fletcher the more
virtuous, the more nebulous. His villains have no
redeeming touch of humanity" their doom moves us
not; nor does their sleight-of-hand repentance con-
vince us. The atmosphere is histrionic. There is
scorn of Fate and Fortune, nmch talk of death and
the grave" and we " go out like tedious tales for-
gotten"; or we don't,just as may suit the stage
hangings, the brilliance of the footlights, and the
sentimental uptake. There is, in short, in his un-
assisted serious dramas little real pathos; little of
the grandeur and sudden imaginative splendour which,
we shall see, characterized Beaumont; none of Beau-
mont's earnestness and philosophical spontaneity and
profundity.
FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT 279
Like the tragicomic plays, Fletcher's lighter com-
edies, The Chances, The dlla.d Lover, The llZild-Goose
Chase, llZomen Pleased, escape a moral catastrophe by
walking round the issue. The heroes are amorous
gallants, irresponsible adventurers, adroit scapegraces,
devil-may-care rapier-tongued egoists and opportu-
nists. The heroines are "not made foi" cloisters";
when they are not already as conscienceless as the
heroes, in performance or desire, they are airy lasses,
resourceful in love, seeming-virtuous but suspiciously
well-informed of the tarnished side of the shield,
alxvays witty. Fletcher can portray the innocence and
constancy of woman; but he rarely takes the pains.
" To be as many creatures as a woman " is for him a
comfortable jibe. The charm of romantic character
and subtly thickening complication did not much at-
tract him.
He sets over in contrast the violent, insane, tragic,
or pathetic with the ludicrous or grotesque; he in-
dulges a careless, loose-jointed, adventitious humour.
That he could, on occasion, avail himself of the laugh-
ter of burlesque is abundantly proved by the utterances
of his Valentine in 'Vit without Money, the devices of
the inimitable Maria in The Tamer Tamed, and of the
Humorous Lieutenant. But for that comic irony of
issues by which the wilful or pretentious or deluded,
foes or fools of convention and born prey of ridicule,
are satisfactorily readjusted to society, he prefers to
substitute hilarity, ribaldry, the clash of wits, the
battledore and shuttlecock of trick, intrigue, of shift-
ing group and kaleidoscopic situation. The idiosvn-
crasies of the crowd delight him; but the more actual,
280 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
the more boisterous and bestial. His populace feeds
upon "opinions, errors, dreams."
His facile verse and limpid dialogue flash with
fancy. The gaiety of gilded youth ripples down the
page ; but the more clever, the more irrelevant the swirl-
ing jest,-- and, to say the least, the more indelicate.
Life is a bagatelle; its most strenuous interest- love;
and love is volatile as it is sudden. The attitude of
sex toward sex is as obvious to the level-headed ani-
mal, who is cynic in braiu and hedonist in blood, as its
significance is supreme" it is that of the man-or-
woman hunt; the outcome, a jocosity, more or less,
--whether of fornication or cuckoldry, or of tame,
old-fashioned, matrimonial monochrome.
These characteristics of the Fletcherian habit mark
all the author's independent plays from The Faith[ull
Shepheardcsse of 16o 7 or 16o8 to Rule a WinCe of
1624. The man himself, I think, was better than the
dramaturc artist catering to the public market. For
his personal, nay noble, ideals, let the reader turn to the
poem appended to The Honest Mans Fortune, and
judge. The characteristics sketched above are of the
maker of a mimic world. Since I have elsewhere
discussed them in full, and the marvellous success that
the dramaturge achieved in Shakespeare's Globe, this
brief enumeration must suffice. Fletcher's mental
habit affords an additional criterion for the determi-
nation of authorship in the unquestioned Beaumont-
Fletcher plays, and in the analysis of plays in which
the collaboration of the poets has been conjectured
but not so fully attested.
The Fellozt,s and Follozeers o[ Shakespeare (Part Two) in
Representative English Comedies, Vol. III.
282 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
it cried 'Dead' to something." This test alone, if
we had not others of rhetoric and metre, would go
far to deciding the respective contributions of our au-
thors to the personality of Captain Bessus in the latter
play. The Bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly
Beaumont's, is resonant with such cries and conversa-
tional citations; the Bessus of the last two, in a r61e
almost as extensive, uses the device but once. Beau-
mont sometimes indulges in enumerative sentences;
but the enumerations are generally in prose and (it
will be recalled that he was a member of the Inner
Temple) of a mock-legal character, not mere redun-
dancies of detail such as we find in Fletcher. Among
other peculiarities of expression is his frequent em-
ployment of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection.
Stock Words, Phrases, and Fio-ures.
Beaumont is especially fond of the folloving words
and phrasal variations" -- The 'basilisk' with his
'deaddoing eye,' 'venom,' 'infect,''infection' and
' infectious,' ' corrupt,' ' leprosy,' ' vild,' ' crosses' (for
'misfortunes'), ' crossed' and ' crossly matched,'
' perplex,' ' distracted,' ' starts' (for ' surprises' and
' fitful changes '), ' miseries,' ' griefs,' ' garlands,' ' cut,'
' shoot,' ' dissemble,' ' loathed,' ' salve' (as noun and
verb), ' acquaint' and ' acquaintance,' to ' article,'
'pull,' 'piece,' 'frail' and 'frailty,' 'mortal' and
' mortality,' ' fate' and ' destiny,' to ' blot' from
earth or memory, 'after-ages,' 'instruments' (for
'servants'). Of his repeated use of 'hills,' 'caves,'
mines, seas, thunder,' ' beast,' ' bull,' we shall
HIS DICTION 283
have further exemplification when we consider his
figures of speech.
He is forever playing phrasal variations upon the
words 'piece,' and 'little.' The former is a manner-
ism of the day, already availed of by Shakespeare in
Lear, 'O ruined piece of nature,' and frequently in
t.ztony and Cleopatra., and later repeated in the
Tempest and IVinter's Tale. So with Beaumont, Are-
thusa is a ' poor piece of earth '; ' erery maid in love
will have a piece' of Philaster; Oriana is a 'precious
piece of sly damnation,' ' that pleasing piece of frailty
we call voman.' Or the word is used literally for
' limb '" ' I '11 love those pieces you have cut away.'
Beaumont, I may say in passing, delights in cutting
bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the
land.'--' Little ' he affects, making it pathetic and even
more diminutive in conjunction vith ' that '" Euphra-
sia would 'keep that little piece I hold of life.' 'It
is my fate,' proclaims Amintor,
To bear and boxv beneath a thousand griefs
To keep that little credit with the world;
and so, ' that little passion,' ' that little training,' ' these
little wounds,' ad libitum. Somewhat akin is the
poet's use of 'kind" 'a kind of love in her to me';
'a kind of healthful joy.' His heroines good and
bad are given to introspection" they have 'acquaint-
ance' with themselves. 'After you were gone,' says
Bellario, 'I grew acquainted with my heart'; and
Bacha in Cpid's Revenge in a scene undoubtedly of
Beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'become
284 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
another woman; one, methinks, with whom I want
acquaintance.'
While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his
figures of poetry, or tropes, are generally of the more
creative kind,--metaphor, personification, metonymy,
--and these are very often heightened into that figure
of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His compari-
sons deal in a striking degree with elemental phenom-
ena: hills, caves, stones, rocks, seas, winds, flames,
thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are reminiscential of
country life. In each play some hero declaims of
'the only difference betwixt man and beast, my rea-
son'; and inevitabIy enlarges upon the 'nature un-
confined' of beasts, and illustrates by custom and
passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull m especially bull.
When the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull
of Phalaris charges in. But Beaumont prefers na-
ture: his images are sweet with April and violets and
dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn
'moved with a stiff gale 'm their heads bowing 'all
one way.' From the manufacture of books he bor-
rows two metaphors, 'printing' and 'blotting,' and
plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints'
wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her
'thoughts in lavn'; Amintor will 'print a thousand
vounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged
Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks
And make no man worthy for her to take.' With
similar frequency recur 'blotted from earth,' 'blotted
from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'
The younger poet personifies abstractions as fre-
quently as Fletcher, but in a more poetic vay. He
HIS DICTION 285
vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with figurative
verbs--' shoot,' ' grow,' ' cut.' ' I feel a grief shoot
suddenly through all my veins' cries Amintor;
and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt into me.'
'I feel a sin growing upo.n my blood" shudders
Arbaces. Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it
springs '; Amintor welcomes the hand that should
'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses
that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can
cut from man's remembrance.' Similar metaphorical
constructions abound, such as 'pluck me back from
my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus'
speeches in Beaumont's part of Cupid's Revenge; and
in a speech of Melantius 'I did a deed that plucked
five years from time' in The Maidcs Tragedy. Per-
sonified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural
with Beaumont---' Nothing but a multitude of walk-
ing griefs.' It is a mistake to suppose, as some do,
that passages written in Beaumont's metrical style are
not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger,
black Despair, Pride, \Vantonness, fire in his verse
in The IVoman-Hater; Chance, Death, and Fortune in
The Knight; Death, Victory, and Friendship, in The
l]laides Tragedy; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality, Na-
ture in Philaster; and so on.
No dramatist since the day of Kyd and Marlove
has more frequent or violent resort to hyperbole. His
heroes call on 'seas to quench the fires' they 'feel,'
and 'snows to quench their rising flames': they will
' drink off seas ' and ' yet have unquenched fires left'
in their breasts; they 'wade through seas of sins':
they 'set hills on hills' and "scale them all, and
286 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
from the utmost top. fall' on the necks of foes, 'like
thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the
underworld the worth ' of those they love. ' From his
iron den' they'll 'waken Death, and hurl him' on
lascivious kings. Arethusa's heart is 'mines of ada-
mant to all the world beside,' but to. her lover ' a last-
ing mine of joy '; her breath ' sweet as Arabian winds
when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two liquid ivory
balls.' Evadne vill sooner 'find out the beds of
snakes,' and 'with her youthful blood warm their
cold flesh' than accede to Amintor's desires. 'The
least word' that Panthea speaks 'is worth a life.'
'The child, this present hour brought forth to see
the world, has not a soul more pure' than Oriana's.
In one of Beaumont's verse-scenes of The Co.rcotbe,
Ricardo, reinstated in his Viola's esteem, would have
some woman ' take an everlasting pen ' into her hand,
'and grave in paper more lasting than the marble
monuments' the matchless virtues of women to pos-
terities. And as for Bellario's xvorth to Philaster,--
'T is not the treasure of all Kings in one,
The wealth of Tagus, nor the rocks of pearl
That pave the court of Neptune, can weigh down
That virtue.
Echoes not of Kyd and Marlowe only, but of
Shakespeare from Romeo to Ha, inlet and Macbeth,
reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of Beau-
mont.
Beaumont has more ejaculations than Fletcher, but
fewer optatives. He is chary of rhetorical questiol_.
and his exclamations run by preference into some fig-
HIS DICTION 287
ured hyperbole. He appeals less frequently than
Fletcher to ' all the gods,' but very often to ' the gods,'
'good gods,' 'ye gods,' 'some god.' He refers, in
conformity with his deterministic view of life, with
particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers
that must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better
powers,' 'Heaven and the povers divine,' 'you heav-
enly powers,' the ' povers that rule us'; and all these
he uses in attestation. An oath distinctive of him
is 'By my vexSd soul!' In his hyperboles, Hell and
devils play their part; but not in oath so frequently
as with Fletcher.
3. Lines of Inevitable Poetry.
Similarly noticeable is Beaumont's faculty for ' sim-
ple poetic phrasing.' The elevated passion, the sudden
glory,--and the large utterance of brief sentence and
single verse, have been remarked by critics from his
contemporary, John Earle, who wrote in commenda-
tion :
Such strength, such sweetness couched in every line,
Such life of fancy, such high choice of brain,
down to G. C. Macaulay, Herford, and Alden of the
present day. No reader, even the most cursory, can
fail to be impressed by the completeness of that one
line (in his lament for Elizabeth Sidney),
Sorrow can make a verse without a. Muse,--
by the ' unassuming beauty' of Viola's loneliness (in
his subplot of The Co.rcombe),
CHAPTER XXII
BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT
ROM passages in the indubitable metrical manner
and rhetorical style of Beaumont we pass to a
still further test by which to determine his share in
doubtful passages-- I mean his stock of ideas. Critics
have long been familiar with the determinism of his
philosophy of life. His Arethusa in Philaster ex-
presses it in a nutshell:
If destiny (to whom we dare not say,
Why didst thou this?) have not decreed it so,
In lasting leaves (whose smallest characters
Was never altered yet), this match shall break.--
We are ignorant of the 'crosses of our births.' Na-
ture 'loves not to be questioned, why she did this or
that, but has her ends, and knows she does well.'
" But thou," cries the poet,.
But thou hadst, ere thou knew'st the use of tears,
Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years.
'Tis the gods, 'the gods, that make us so.' They
would not have their 'dooms withstood, whose holy
wisdoms make our passions the way unto their justice.'
And ' out of justice we must challenge nothing.' The
gods reward, the gods punish: ' I am a man and dare
292 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
not quarrel with divinity . . . and you shall see me
bear my crosses like a man.' It is the 'will of
Heaven'; 'a decreed instant cuts off every life, for
which to mourn is to repine.' 1
Similarly familiar is Beaumont's recurrent doc-
trine of the divinity of kings. " In that sacred word,"
says his Amintor of The Maides Tragedy,--
In that sacred word
' The King,' there lies a terror: what frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when let us
Suffer and wait.
And again, to the monarch who has wronged him,
There is
Divinity about you, that strikes dead
My rising passions; as you are my King
I fall before you, and present my sword
To cut mine own flesh, if it be your will.
Of 'the breath of kings' Beaumont's fancy con-
structs ever new. terrors: it is 'like the breath of
gods '; it may blow men ' about the world.' But when
a king is guilty, though he may boast that his breath
' can still the winds, uncloud the sun, charm down the
swelling floods, and stop the floods of heaven,' some
honest man is always to be found to say 'No; nor'
can thy 'breath smell sweet itself if once the lungs
be but corrupted.' Though the gods place kings
'above the rest, to be served, flattered, and adored,'
kings may not 'article xvith the gods '--
x Elegy on the Countess of Ru.tland.
HIS MENTAL HABIT 293
On lustful kings
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from Heaven are sent;
But curs'd is he that is their instrument.
Of 'this most perfect creature, this image of his
Maker, well-squared man' Beaumont philosophizes
much. Again and again he reminds us that ' the only
difference betxvixt man and beast is reason.' In the
moment of guilty passion his Arbaces of A Kiz 9 and
No King cries"
Accursfid man !
Thou bought'st thy reason at too dear a rate,
For thou hast all thy actions bounded in
With curious rules, when every beast is free."
And, in the moment of jealousy, Philaster laments,
Oh, that, like beasts, we could not grieve ourselves
'Vith that we see not!
Beaumont knows of no natural felicity or liberty more
to be envied than that of the beast; and of no oppro-
brium more vile than that which likens man to lustful
beast, or ' worse than savage beast.'
He is impressed with the frailty of mankind and the
brevity of life" 'Frail man' and 'transitory man'
fell readily from his lips vho was to die so young.
He emphasizes the objective quality of evil" " Good
gods, tempt not a frail man!" prays Philaster; and
Arbaces struggling against temptation" " What art
thou, that dost creep into my breast; And dar'st not
see my face?" Once temptation has taken root, it
grows insidiously" Panthea " feels a sin growing
upon her blood "; and Arbaces moralizes
296 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
That men and women should be match'd together.
His Viola of the Coxcombe continues the conten-
tion :
Woman, they say, was only made of man
Methinks 't is strange they should be so unlike;
It may be, all the best was cut away
To make the woman, and the naught was left
Behind with him.
And the philosophy of Beaumont's love-lorn maid-
ens she sums up in her conclusion:
Scholars affirm the world's upheld by love;
But I believe women maintain all this,
For there's no love in men.
Deserted by her lover, she finds 'how valiant and
how 'fraid at once, Love makes a virgin'; and, sought
again by him repentant, she epitomizes the hearts of
all Bellarios, Arethusas, Pantheas, Uranias:
I will set no penance
To gain the great forgiveness you desire,
But to come hither, and take me and it . . .
For God's sake, urge your faults no more, but mend!
All the forgiveness I can make you, is
To love you : which I will do, and desire
Nothing but love again; which if I have not,
Yet I will love you still.
All man can do in return for such long-suffering mercy
is to revere: "How rude are all men that take the
name of civil to ourselves" murmurs the reformed
Ricardo ; and then --
HIS MENTAL HABIT
297
I do kneel because it is
An action very fit and reverent,
In presence of so pure a creature.
So kneels Arbaces; and so, in spirit, Philaster and
Amintor.
Prayer is for Beaumont a very present aid. Of
his women especially the 'vows' and 'oblations' are
a poetic incense continually ascending. And closely
akin to the prayerful innocence of tender maids is
the pathos of their 'childhood thrmvn away.' Even
his whimsical Oriana of The l/'oman-Hater can aver:
The child this present hour brought forth
To see the world has not a soul more pure,
More white, more virgin that I have.
The bitterest experiences of humanity are sprung
from misapprehension,--" They have most power to
hurt us that we love,"-- or from jealousy, slander, un-
warranted violence, unmerited pain. And for these
the only solace is in death. About this truth Beau-
mont weaves a shroud of unsullied beauty, a poetry
that has rarely been surpassed. In nearly all that he
has left us the thought recurs; but nowhere better
expressed than in those lines, already quoted in full
from Philaster, where Bellario " knows what 'tis to
die . . . a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jeal-
ousy." His Arethusa repeats the theme; but with a
wistful incertitude :
I shall have peace in death
Yet tell me this: there will be no slanders,
No jealousy in the other vorld; no ill there
298 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
" No," replies her unjustly suspicious lover.-- And
she:--" Show me, then, the way! " No kinder mercy
to the tempted, misconceived heir of mortality has
been vouchsafed than to 'suffer him to find his quiet
grave in peace.' So think Panthea and Arbaces; and
so his Urania and Leucippus find. And so the poet
closes that rare elegy to his belovbd Countess of Rut-
land"
I will not hurt the peace which she should have,
By longer looking in her quiet grave.
But still more powerful in its blessing than 'sleep'
and the ' peace ' of the ' quiet grave,' and more fearful
in its bane than the penalties of hell,--one reality
persists--the award of 'after-ages.' Bellario would
not reveal what she has learned, to make her life ' last
ages.' Philaster's highest praise for Arethusa is
" Thou art fair and virtuous still to ages." " Kill
me," says Amintor to Evadne,'---
Kill me; all true lovers, that shall live
In after-ages crossed in their desires,
Shall bless thy memory.
Ricardo of the Co.,'combe would have some woman
'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to poster-
ities.' Even the mock-romantic Jasper in the Knight
(which I am sure is all Beaumont) xvill try his sweet-
heart's love 'that the world and memory may sing
to after-times her constancy.' As to evil, it meets
its punishment both in heredity and in the verdict
of generations yet to come. "I see," soliloquizes the
usurping King in a passage already quoted from Philas-
ter:
HIS MENTAL HABIT 299
You gods, I see that vho unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed
In that which meaner men are blest withal-
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth; if he have any child
It shall be crossly matched.
" Show me the way," cries Arbaces to his supposed
mother, and thinking of heredity, " to the inheritance
I have by thee, vhich is a spacious world Of impious
acts." And Amintor warns Evadne" " Let it not
rise up for thy shame and mine To after-ages ....
We will adopt us sons; The virtue shall inherit and
not blood." " May all ages," prays the lascivious
Bacha in Cupid's Revenge, " May all ages, ''N
That shall succeed curse you as I do! and
If it be possible, I ask it, Heaven,
That your base issues may be ever monstrous,
That must for shame of nature and succession,
Be drowned like dogs!
So, passim, in Beaumont--' lasting to ages in the
memo,ry of this damnSd act'; 'a great example of
their justice to all ensuing ages.'
CHAPTER XXIII
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS
ITH the tests which have thus been described
we are equipped for an examination of the plays
written before I616, which have, in these latter days,
been with some show of evidence regarded as the
joint-production of the " two wits and friends."
1To employ in this process of separation the characteristics
of Fletcher's later dramatic technique as a criterion does not
appear to me permissible. For these, however, the reader may
consult Miss Hatcher's John Fletcher, A Study on Dramatic
Method, and sections 5 and 6 of my essay on The Fellows
Followers o[ Shakespeare, Part Two, Rep. Eng. Com., Vol. III,
now in press. The technique is more "likely to change than the
versification, the style, the mental habit. Its later characteristics
may, some of them, have been derived from the association with
Beaumont; or they may be of Fletcher's maturer development
under different influences and conditions. It is fair to cite them
as corroborative evidence in the process of separation, only when
they are in continuance of Fletcher's earlier idiosyncrasy. I
have, also, refrained from complicating the present discussion by
analysis of the style of Massinger, for which see Fleay, N. S. S.
Trans., 874, Shakesp. Manual, I876, Engl. Studien., 885-886,
and Chron. Eng. Dram., 89; Boyle, Engl. Studien, 88-887,
and N. S. S. Trans.. I886; Macaulay. Franc{s Beaumont, 883;
Oliphant, Engl. Studien, x89o-892; Thorndike, hall o[ B. and F.,
I9OI; and section 6 of my essay mentioned above. There is
no proof of Massinger's dramatic activity before July 613,
nor of his coSperation with Fletcher until after that date, {. e.,
after Beaumont's virtual cessation. He may have revised some
of Beaumont's lines and scenes: but Beaumont's style is too well
defined to be confused with that of Massinger or of any other
reviser: or of an imitator, such as Field.
3oo
THREE DISPUTED PLAYS 3o
While attempting to separate the composition of one
author from that of the other, we may determine
the dramatic peculiarities of each during the course
of the partnership, and obtain a fairly definite basis
for an historical and literary appreciation of the plays,
individually considered.
I.--Of the Foure Playes, or Morall Representations,
in One (first published as by Beaumont and Fletcher
in the folio of 647, but without indication of first
performance or of acting company), the last two,
The Triumph of Death and The Triumph o[ Time,
are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedIy Fletcher's
and have been assigned to him by all critics. The
Triumph o[ Death is studded with alliterations and
with repetitions of the effective word:
Oh I could curse
And crucify myself for childish doting
Upon a face that feeds not with fresh figures
Every fresh hour;
and with triplets:
What new body
And new face must I make me, with new manners;
and with the resonant "all ":
Make her all thy heaven,
And all thy joy, for she is all thy happiness;
and with Fletcher's favourite words and his nouns in
apposition, rhetorical questions, afterthoughts, verbal
enumerations, and turgid exposition. The same may
be said of The Triumph of Time. As there is less
302 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
of the redundant epithet than in The Faith,full Sh, ep-
heardesse (I6O9), but more than in Philaster (before
July 12, I6IO), I am of the opinion that Fletcher's
contribution to the Trimzphs falls chronologically be-
tween those plays. As Fletcher matures he prunes
his adjectives.
The rest of these Morall Represetztations display
neither the verse nor the rhetoric of Fletcher. On
the basis of verse-tests Boyle assigns them to Beau-
mont. Macaulay says, "probably,"--and adds the
Ind,uction. But Oliphant, taking into consideration
also the rhetorical and dramatic qualities, gives the
Induction and The Triumph of Honour to a third
author, Nathaniel Field, and only The Triumph of
Loz, e to Beaumont. As to the Induction and The
Triumph of Honour I agree with Oliphant. They
are full of polysyllabic Latinisms such as Field uses
in his IVoman is a l'Veather-cocke (entered for pub-
lication November 2 3, I6ii) and Beaumont never
uses" 'to participate affairs,' 'torturous engine,' etc. ;
and they are marked by simpler Fieldian expressions
' wale,' ' oTv'd,' ' blown man,' ' miskill,' ' vane,' ' lub-
bers,' 'urned,' and a score of others not found any-
where in Beaumont's undoubted writings. A few
words, like 'basilisk' and 'loathed' suggest Beau-
mont, as does the verse; but this may be explained by
vogue or imitation. Field was two or three years
younger than Beaumont, and had played as a boy
actor in one or more of the early Beaumont and
Fletcher productions. His IVoman is a IVeather-
cocke and his Amends for Ladies indicate the influ-
ence of Beaumont in matters of comic invention,
THREE DISPUTED PLAYS 305
Time and Death, though written at least two years
earlier, were not gathered up with Field's Induction,
Hon.our, and Love, into the Foure Playes i One until
about I612; and that the series was performed at
\Vhitefriars by Field's company of the Queen's Revels'
Children, shortly after they had first acted Cupid's
Revenge at the same theatre.
2.--Of the remaining ten plays in which, according
to the historical evidence adduced by various critics,
Beaumont could have collaborated, at least txvo furnish
no material that can be of service for the estimation
of his qualities. If Love's Cure vas vritten as early
as the date of certain references in the story, viz.,
i6o5-i6o9, it is so overlaid by later alteration that
whether, as the textual experts guess, it be Beaumont's
revised by Massinger, or Fletcher's revised by Mas-
singer and others, or Massinger and Middleton's, or
Beaumont's with the assistance of Fletcher and revised
by Massinger, Beaumont for us is indeterminate.
Fleay, Oliphant, and others trace him in a few prose
scenes, and in two or three of verse. * But where the
rhetorical and dramatic manner occasionally suggest
him, o.r the metre has somewhat of his stamp, words
abound that I find in no work of his undisputed compo-
sition. The servant, Lazarillo, like him of Beaumont's
lVoman-Hater, is a glutton, but he does not speak
Beaumont's language. The scenes ascribed to Beau-
mont reek with an excremental and sexual vulgarity
to which Beaumont never condescended, unless for
brief space, and when absolutely necessary for charac-
306 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
terization. And there is little, indeed, that bespeaks
Fletcher. Love's Cure was first attributed to Beau-
mont and Fletcher at a " reviving of the play " after
they were both dead; and it was not printed till 647.
It is not unlikely, as G. C. Macaulay holds, that the
play was written by Massinger, in or after 622.
3---As to that comedy of prostitution, xvith occa-
sional essays on the special charms of cuckoldry, The
Capta:ne (acted in 6 3, maybe as early as 6I,
and by the King's Company) there is no convincing
external proof o,f Beaumont's authorship.. It is, on
the contrary, assigned to Fletcher by one of his
younger contemporaries, Hills, whose attributions of
such autho,rship are frequently correct; and its accent
throughout is more clearly that of Fletcher than of
any other dramatist. The critics are agreed that it is
not wholly his, however; and G. C. Macaulay in es-
pecial conjectures the presence of Massinger. The
verse and prose of a few scenes a do not preclude the
possibility o,f Beaumont's cogperation: but I find in
them no vestige of his faith in sweet innocence; and
in only one,the awful episode (IV, 5), in which
the Father seeks his wanton daughter in a house of
shame and would kill her, his imaginative elevation
or his dramatic creativity.
IV, 5; V, , 4, 5.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE WOMAN-HATER," AND THE KNIGHT
OUR.--The IVoman-Hater was entered in the
Stationers' Registers, May 2o, I6O7, and pub-
lished in quarto (twice, with but slight variation) the
same year " as lately acted by the Children of Paules."
Of the date of composition, probably the spring of
I6o7, I have written in Chapter VI, above. There is
no indication of authorship in either quarto: but the
Prologue assigns it to a single author " he that made
this play." The quarto of I648 prints it as " by J.
Fletcher Gent"; that of I649, as by Beaumont and
Fletcher. The Prologue of I649, however, written
by D'Avenant for an undated revival of the play and
addressed to the Ladies, definitely ascribes the author-
ship to one " poet," who "to the stars your sex did
raise; for which, full twenty years he wore the bays."
The " twenty years " can apply only to Fletcher.
In the lines which follow, D'Avenant has been sup-
posed to credit the same author with the whole of
The Maides Traged3; Philaster, and .d King and No
King as well"
'T was he reduc'd Evadne from her scorn,
And taught the sad Aspatia hov to mourn;
Gave Arethusa's love a glad relief;
And made Panthea elegant in grief.
307
308 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
We now know, from the application of metrical and
rhetorical tests, that but a small part of each of the
plays here alluded to was written by Fletcher. If
D"Avenant has attributed to Fletcher in these cases
plays of which the larger part was written by Beau-
mont, he was but consistent in error when he ascribed
to Fletcher The IVoman-Hater, in which there is very
little that betrays resemblance to Fletcher's style. If,
on the other hand, D'Avenant in the verses quoted
above intended to attribute to Fletcher merely indi-
vidual scenes of The Maides Tragedy, etc., he must
have had a knowledge of the respective authorship
of the dramatists hardly to be reconciled with the pal-
pable mistake of assigning The IVoman-Hater to
Fletcher. For, by an odd coincidence, he has indi-
cated in the first and second verses two * of the five
scenes of The Maides Tragedy, and in the third, two
of the five scenes of Philaster which our modern criti-
cism has proved to be Fletcher's. The reference in
the fourth line is more vag-ue ; but it has the merit of
indicating the only scene of A Kin 9 and No Kin 9 in
which, according to our critical tests, Fletcher has
contributed to the characterization of Panthea. With
regard to The lVo-man-Hater, it would appear that
D'Avenant xvas carelessly following the mistaken
ascription of authorship on the title-page of the quarto
of 648.
Fleay, Boyle, Macaulay, and Ward, with but slight
hesitation, pronounce The I.Voman-Hater to be an in-
dependent production of Beaumont, written while he
was under the influence of Ben Jonson; but as I shall
a IV, ; and II, 2. V, 3, 4- IV, I.
AUTHOR OF "THE WOMAN-HATER"? 309
presently show, Fletcher has revised a few scenes.
Oliphant feels inclined to. join the critics mentioned
above, but cannot blind himself " to the presence of
Fletcher in a couple of scenes." One of these is
III, 1.1 In the quartos this scene is divided
into two. By the ye test the first half-scene, running
to Enter Duke, Etc., in which Oriana tempts Gon-
darino, would be Fletcher's (15 ye's to 9 you's) ; but
the percentage of double endings is too low, and that
of run-on lines too high for him. I think that he is
revising Beaumont's original sketch. The second
half-scene and the rest of the act are, by the ye test
and all o.ther criteria, Beaumont's. The metrical style
of the act as a whole is Beaumont's; so also the en-
clitic ' do's' and 'did's,' the Beaumontesque 'basilisk,'
'dissemble,' the mock-heroic prayers, and mock-legal
nicety of enumeration, the racy ironic prose, and the
burlesque Shakespearian echoes--" That pleasing
piece of frailty that we call woman," etc. The other
passage doubtfully assigned to Fletcher, by Oliphant
-- forty lines following Enter Ladies in V, 5 (Dyce)
--more closely resembles his manner of verse, but is
not markedly of his rhetorical stamp. But by the ye
test (24 ye's to 39 you's) the vhole of that scene, open-
ing Enter .4rigo and Oriana is Fletcher's, or Fletcher's
revision of Beaumont. So, also, by the ye test is
another scene not before ascribed to Fletcher, IV, 2
(2 7 yds to 2 5 you's), as far as Enter Oriana and her
lVaiting-woman. In this and the other ye scenes, the
ye frequently occurs in the objective,--which is abso-
Between Oriana sits down and exit Oriana, as in Dyce, Vol.
I, pp. 43-48.
3o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
lute Fletcher. The rest of this scene, constituting two
in the quartos, is pure Beaumo,nt. m The play is, so
far as we can determine, Beaumont's earliest attempt
at dramatic production. Fletcher touched it up, and
his revision shows in the scenes mentioned above; that
is to say, in about sixteen out of the seventy pages as
printed in the Cambridge tglish Classics.
The manifestly exaggerated torments of Gondarino
" who will be a scourge to. all females in his life,"
the amorous affectation of Oriana, the "stratagems
and ambuscadoes " of the hungry courtier in his pur-
suit of " the chaste virgin-head " of a fish, the zealous
stupidity of the intelligencers are, as we have already
noted, of the humours school; and the work is that
a beginner. But the " humours" are flavoured with
Beaumont's humanity; the mirth is his, genuine and
rollicking. The satire is concrete; and the play as a
whole, a promising precursor of the purple-flowered
prickly pear, next to be considered,--also, undoubt-
edly Beaumont's.
5.--Evidence, both external and internal, points to
the production of The Knight o[ the Burnizg Pestle
betveen July IO, I6O 7 and some time in March I6O8.
Since the first quarto (613) is anonymous, our earli-
est indication of authorship is that of the title-pages
of the second and third (635), which ascribe the play
to Beaumo.nt and Fletcher; and our next, the Cockpit
list of 639 where it is included in a sequence of five
plays in which one or both had a hand.
The dedication of the first quarto speaks in one
place of the " parents" of the play, and in others
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Now, Fortune, if thou beest not onely ill,
Shew me thy better face, and bring about
My desperate wheele, that I may clime at length
And stand,--
is in the usual manner of Beaumont. Luce's lament,
beginning" x
Thou that art
The end of all, and the sweete rest of all
Come, come, 6, Death ! bring me to thy peace,
And blot out all the memory I nourish
Both of my father and my cruell friend,--
and ending"
How happy had I bene, if, being borne,
My grave had bene my cradle !
has both the diction and the point of viexv of Beau-
mont; and its verse has not more of the double-end-
ings than he sometimes uses. The subject and the
mock-heroic purpose do not call for his usual dramatic
vocabulary" but we recognize his 'dissemble,' his
'carduus' and 'phlebotomy' (compare Philaster),
his 'eyes shoot me through,' his 'do's.' We recog-
nize him in the frequent appeals to Chance and For-
tune, in the sensational determination of Jasper to
test Luce's devotion at the point of the sword, and
in the series of sensational complications and dnoue-
ments which conclude the romantic plot: In short,
I agree with the critics who attribute the play, wholly
or chiefly, to Beaumont. Fletcher may have inserted
a few verses here and there; but there is nothing in
sentiment, phrase, or artifice, to prove that he did.
a IV, 4, 5. Macaulay, Oliphant, Bullen, and Alden.
AUTHORSHIP OF "THE KNIGHT" 313
The diversity of metrical forms is but an evidence
of the ingenuity of Beaumont. He has used blank
verse with frequent double-endings to distinguish the
romantic characters and plot: as in the scenes between
Venturewell and Jasper, Jasper and Luce. He has
used the heroic couplet with rhymes, single and double,
to distinguish the 1hock-romantic of Venturewell and
Humphrey, Humphrey and Luce. For the mock-he-
roic of Ralph he has used the swelling ten-syllabled
blank verse of Marlowe and Kyd, or the prose of
Amadis and Palmerin; for his burlesque of the May-
lord he has used the senarii of the antiquated inter-
lude. For the conversation of the Merrythoughts
and of the citizen-critics he has used plain prose; and
for the tuneful ecstasies of Merrythought senior, a
sheaf of ballads. This consideration alone,-- that
the metrical and prose forms are chosen with a view
to the various purposes of the play,--should convince
the reader of the vanity of assigning to Fletcher verse
which evidently had its origin not in any of his pro-
clivities, but in the temper of Beaumont's Venture-
well, Jasper, and Luce.
The Kzight of the Burffn 9 Pestle was written and
first acted between June 29, I6O7 and April I, I6O8.
The upper limit is fixed, as Boyle has indicated, x by the
mention, in Act IV, I, 46, of an incident in The Traz,-
ails of Three Ez.gIish Brothers, " let the Sophy of
Persia come and christen him a childe," concerning
which the 'Boy' remarks, I, 48-50, " that will not
do so well; 'tis stale; it has been had before at the
Red Bull." The Red Bull, Clerkemvell, had been
1 Engl. Studien, IX.
34 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
occupied by Queen Anne's Men (whose plays Beau-
mont is especially ridiculing), since 6o4 .1 The Trav-
ails was written hurriedly by Day, Rowley, and Wil-
kins after the appearance, June 8, 6o 7, of a tract by
Nixon, on the adventures of the three Shirleys, and
was performed June 29, by the Queen's iVien, 2 The
Travails dealt with a matter of ephemeral interest,
and would not long have held the public. It is, there-
fore, likely that the allusion to it in The Knight o[
the Burning Pestle was written shortly after June 2 9 .
Since the play, according to its first publisher, took
eight days to write, we cannot assign any date earlier
than, say, July xo, x6o7, for its first performance.
The lower limit is deternfined by the certainty that
The Knight was played by the Queen's Revels' Chil-
dren at Blackfriars; and that they ceased to act there
as an independent company some time in March x6o8.
The play belonged in 639 to Beeston's Boys, who had
it with four others of Beaumont and Fletcher from
Queen Henrietta's Men. None of these five plays
had ever been played by the King's Company; it is
likely that they had come to the Queen Henrietta's
from the Lady Elizabeth's Men with whom the
Queen's Revels' Children had been amalgamated in
x6x3 .a One of these plays, Cupid's Revenge, had cer-
tainly come down from the Queen's Revels' Boys in
that vay.
That the original performance vas by a company
of children appears from numerous passages in the
Wallace, Shakspere's Money Interest in the Globe, Cent.
Maga., Aug., I9IO, p. 51o.
9 Fleay, Chr. Eng. Dr., II, 277.
z Fleay, H. S., p. 356.
THE DATE OF " THE KNIGHT " 317
tenantless after that for six months and then had been
closed until December 7, 16o9, because of the prev-
alence of the plague. The Citizen's complaint that
the boys have been girding at citizens " this seven
yeares there hath been playes at this house" would
lose all cogency if spoken of the Queen's Revels' Chil-
dren when they were acting during the month follow-
ing December 7, 16o9, both because plays had been
then intermitted for the twenty months preceding,
and because in 16o 9 it was not seven but twelve years
since the boys had begun their occupancy of " this
house." It could not apply to the seven years be-
tween 1597, when they first occupied Blackfriars, and
1604, because The Knight of the Burning Pestlc was
not written till after the Travails of Three English
Brolhers appeared, June 29, 16o 7. But it does apply,
xvith all requisite dramatic and chronological accuracy,
to the seven years preceding the last date,--or the date
in March 1608, when, because of their scandalous
representation of the King of France and his mistress
in Chapman's Tragcdie of Charles, Duke of Byron,
and because of plays caricaturing and vilifying King
James, the Queen's Revels' Children xvere prohibited
from playing, their principal actors thrown into prison,
and Blackfriars suppressed. On September 9, 16oo,
Richard Burbadge had let Blackfriars on a twenty-one-
year lease to Henry Evans, the manager of the
Queen's Revels' Children, and under the organiza-
tion of that date they had by I6O7-I6O8 been giving
plays exactly "this seven yeares at this house." We
are, as I have said, informed by the publisher of The
Knight that the play was written in eight days. It
3x8 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
might have been staged in two or three. If the plague
regulations were enforced during I6O7-8, as I have
no doubt they vere, The Knight was acted between
July to and 23, 16o7, or between December 26, x6o7
and the Biron day in March 6o8.
The internal evidence is all confirmatory of this
period of composition. The (ueen Anne's Men of
the '" Red Bull " mentioned in the play obtained their
title to the Red Bull from Aaron Holland about 6o4.
The songs in the play were common property between
x6o4 and 16o7; none of the romances ridiculed is of
a later date than 6o7; and of the eight plays men-
tioned or alluded to, all had been acted before June
16o 7 but The Travails; and that was played for the
first time June 2 9 of that year. The allusions to ex-
ternal history such as that in Act IV, ii, 4, to. the
Prince of Moldavia--who left London in Novem-
ber i6o7--and the humorous jibe at the pretty
Paul's Boys of Mr. Mulcaster, who ceased teaching
them in 6o8, are all for I6o7-8.1 Fleay marshals
an applausive gallery of conjectures for his conjec-
ture of I6IO, but none of them appears to me to have
any substance; and in view of what has been said,
and of what xvill follow, I may dispense with their
consideration.
The history of the manuscript is, as has not been
noted before, also confirmatory of the I6o7-8 date.
The Robert Keysar who rescued the play from "per-
petuall oblivion" after its failure upon the stage (as
1 See the impressive array of evidence, internal and external,
presented by Thorndike, InS. of B. and F., pp. 59-63; and by
Alden, K.B.P., pp. 66-69 (Belles Lettres Series).
320 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
tion. When finally they did re-open at their new
theatre, in January I6IO, they evidently did not take
up the play. Somewhat later, say 1611, Keysar sent
the ananuscript to Butte for publication. Burre " fos-
tred it privately in his bosome these two yeares" and
brought it out in 1613.
The conclusion of Burre's dedicatory address to
Keysar in the first quarto, of 1613, has unnecessarily
complicated both the question of the date of compo-
sition and that of the source of The Knight o[ the
Burzig Pesble. " Perhaps," says he, " it [The
Knight] will be thought to bee o.f the race of Don
Quixote: ve both may confidently sweare, it is his
elder above a yeare; and therefore may (by vertue
of his birth-right) challenge the wall of him. I doubt
not but they will meet in their adventures, and I hope
the breaking of one staffe will make them friends;
and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travelI
through the vorld to seeke their adventures." This
denial of indebtedness to Cervantes has been generally
taken to refer to Shelton's English translation of Don
Quixote, entered S. R. January 19, I6II-I2, and
printed 1612: and it has, therefore, been supposed by
many that The KMght vas written and first acted in
161o or 161I. But if Burre was dating The Knight
as of I6IO or I6II, he was ignorant of the fact, as
established above, that the play was the elder of Shel-
ton's printed Don Qui.rote, not merely "above a
yeare," but above four years. There are only two
other constructions to be placed upon Burre's state-
ment: either that the play was the elder above a year
of the first part of Don Qui.rote, issued in the Span-
"DON QUIXOTE" AND "THE KNIGHT" 321
ish by Cervantes in 16o5,1 or that it was the elder
above a year of Shelton's translation as circulated
among his friends in manuscript, at any rate as early
as 16o 9. If Burre was dating the play, according to
the former interpretation, as of 16o4, he was ignorant
of the fact that it could not have been written till
after the appearance of The Travails of Three En 9-
lish Brother.; June 29, 16o 7. The latter interpreta-
tion would, if we could adopt it as his understanding
of the matter, not only comport xvith the date of the
production of The Knight in I6o78, but also, some-
what roughly, with his ovn statement that he had
had the manuscript already in a battered condition in
his "bosome" since I6IO or 1611.
If Burre, who was not a litterateur, did not know
that Shelton's translation of Don Qui.rote had been
going the rounds for years before it was printed in
1612, everybody else did. Shelton had announced
as much in his Epistle Dedicatorie to Theophilus, Lord
Howard of \Valden, prefixed to the first quarto of
1612. He translated the book, as he says, " some
five or six yeares agoe "--that would be in 16o7, for
he used the Brussels Reprint of that year as his text,
" out of the Spanish Tongue into the English in
the space of forty daies" being thereunto more than
half enforced through the importunitie of a very deere
friende, that was desirous to understand the subject.
After I had given him once a viev thereof, I cast it
aside, where it lay long time neglected in a corner,
and so little regarded by me as I never once set hand
to review or correct the same. Since when, at the
For this argument see Engl. Studien, XII, 3o9.
322 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
entreatie of others my-friends, I was content to let
it come to light, conditionally that some one or other
vould peruse and amend the errours escaped "--be-
cause he had not time to revise it himself. In other
words, Shelton had shown the manuscript transla-
tion of Don Qui.,.'ote to but one friend in 16o7; and
it was not till " long time " had elapsed that he began
to circulate it among his other friends on condition
that they should correct its errors. The date of cir-
culation was, probably, about 16o9, for in that year
we have our earliest mention of the reading of Don
Qixote by an Englishman,--by a dramatic character,
to be sure, but a character created by Ben Jonson.
In his Epicoow, acted in 161o, and written the year
preceding, that dramatist makes Truewit advise the
young Sir Dauphine to cease living in his chamber
"a month together upon Amadis de Gaule, or Don
Quixote, as you are wont." There is no ascription
of Spanish to Dauphine, vho is a typical London gal-
lant. He would read Amadis in the French, or the
English translation; and the only translation of Don
QuLrote accessible to him in 16o 9 would be Shel-
ton's manuscript of Part One? Jonson may himself
have been one of the friends to vhom Shelton sub-
mitted the translation. There is no reason to believe
that Jonson had read Cervantes in the original;
for, as Professor Rudolph Schevill has conclusively
demonstrated, his knowledge of Spanish was ex-
tremely limited. " The Spanish phrases pronounced
Baudouin's French version of 16o8 is merely of the episodic
narrative of The Curious Impertinent.
On the Dtauence o[ Spanish Literature upon En91ish (Ro-
manische Forschungen, XX, 613--615, et seq.).
3_94 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
ore.'" If (as I am sure was not the case) the play
was written after I6O8, Beaumont, or Beaumont and
Fletcher, could have derived suggestions for it from
Shelton's manuscript, first circulated in I6O 9. That
Beaumont, at any rate, was acquainted with the Span-
ish hero by 16Io, appears from his familiarity
with the Epicocne in which as we have observed, Don
Quixote is mentioned; for he wrote commendatory
verses for the quarto of that play, entered S. R.
September 2o of that year. If, on the other hand,
The Knight, as I hold, was written in x6o7 or I6O8,
the author or authors, provided they read Spanish,
could have derived suggestions from Cervantes' origi-
nal of I6o5; or if they did not read Spanish, from
hearsay. The latter source of information vould be
the more likely, for although sixteen of the ignorantly
so-called " Beaumont and Fletcher " plays have been
traced to plots in Spanish originals, there is not one
of those plots which either of the poets might not
have derived from English or French translation;
and in none of the sixteen plays is there any evidence
that either of the dramatists had a reading knowledge
of Spanish. 1 As to the possibility of information
by hearsay, other dramatists allude to Don Qui.rote
as early as 6o7-8; z and, indeed, it would be vir-
Of this I am assured by my colleague, Professor Rudolph
Schevill, who has made a special study of the plays and their
sources, and has published some of his conclusions in the article
in Romanische Forsctmngen, already cited; others, communicated
by him to Dr. H. S. Murch, appear in Yale Studies in English,
XXXIII, The K.B.P., Introduction. Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach's
unpublished conclusions, as cited by Miss Hatcher, John Fletcher,
etc., 9o5, p. 42, are to the same effect.
z Wilkins, Miseries of Enforced MarriaTe, III; Middleton,
Your Five Gallants, IV, 8; cited by Schevill, ut supra.
326 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
ing in common with the glorious but pathetically
unbalanced Don of Cervantes. Nor is there any re-
semblance between Ralph's Palmerin-born Squire
and Dwarf--and that embodiment of commonsense,
Sancho Panza. 1 The specific conception of The
Knight of the Burning Pestle, a satire upon the craze
of London tradesmen for romances of chivalry, for
" bunches of Ballads and Songs, all ancient," for the
bombast and sensationalism of Kyd's Spanish Trag-
edy, Marlowe's True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of
York, even of Shakespeare's Hotspur, and of dramas
of bourgeois knight-errantry,-- a burlesque of the civic
domestic virtues and military prowess of prentices
and shop-keepers, is much more applicable to the
conditions and aspirations of contemporary Bow-Bells
and the affectations of the contemporary stage than
to those which begot and nourished the madness of
the Knight of La-Mancha.
Beaumont may have received from the success of
the Don Qdwote of i6o 5 some impulse provocative
to the writing of The Knight, but a dramatic satire,
such as The Knight, might have occurred to him if
Don Qui.rote had never been written; just as that
other dramatic satire upon the dramas of folk-lore
romance, The Old [Vives Tale, had occurred to Peele
some fifteen years before Don Qui.rote appeared; and
as it had occurred to the author of Thersites to ridi-
cule, upon the stage, Greek tales of heroism and Brit-
ish worthies of knighthood and the greenwood still
fifty-five years earlier. The puritan and the ritualist,
the country justice and the squire, the schoolmaster
See Schevill, u. .
THE SOURCES OF " THE KNIGHT " 327
and the scribbling pedant, the purveyor of marvels of
forest and marsh, the knight-adventurer of ancient
lore or of modern creation, the damsel distressed or
enamoured of visionary castles, had, one and all,
awakened laughter upo,n the Tudor stage. The leisure
wasted, and the emotion misspent, over the Morte
d'Arthur and the histories of Huon of Bordeaux,
Guy Of Warwick, Bevis of Hamptoun, or of
Robin Hood and Clim of the Clough, had been de-
plored by many an anxious educato,r and essayist
of the day. Why was it not time and the fit oc-
casion, in a period vhen city grocers and their
wives would tolerate no kind of play but such as re-
vamped the more modern tales of chivalry, or tricked
tradesmen out in the factitious glory of quite recent he-
roes of romance,--why vas it not time for an attack
upon the vogue of Anthony Munday's translations of
the noxv offending cycles, Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin
dc Oliva, Palmerin o]: England, and upon the vogue
of the English versions of The Mirror o]: Knighthood
with its culminating bathos of the Knight of the Sunne
and His Brother Rosicleer? These had, in various
instalments, befuddled the popular mind for thirty
years.
Ben Jonson already, in his Every Man out of
His Humour (I599), 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 sing'u-
larity of " fashion, phrase, and gesture " of the An-
thony Munday type and the type glassed in the Mirror
328 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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, salut-
ing her " after some little flexure of the knee," asks
for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties"
of the " lady" may shine o,n this side of the building,m
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 "es-
caped by enchantment," and that, wearied, he and his
servant make " suit to enter" her fair abode,--Sir
Puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fan-
tastic homage, what is he but a predecessor of Don
Quixote and Ralph alike, fashioned out of the ma-
terials of decadent chivalric fiction common to both?
In I6OO, Robert Anton had burlesqued in prose and
rhyme the romantic ballads of the day in his ludicrous
tteroical Adventures o 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" x And in I6O5, also before the ap-
pearance 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
x H. V. Routh, in C. H. L., IV, 4IO.
THE SOURCES OF "THE KNIGHT 33
and Sancho Panza." Beamnont, in addition, not only
satirizes, as I have said, the chivalric and bourgeois
dramas of Heywood, If I'ott Kno Not 2lie, I;'ou
Kzova Nobvdy, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel
like Mucedor,us and the Traz'ails. 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 as-
sumption of dramatic insight and critical instinct,-
with all this satire of the main plot and of the specta-
tor-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 lIerrythoughts should
He has produced a whole that in drama was an inno-
vation and in burlesque a triumph. The Kuight was
still an acting play in the last quarter of the seven-
teenth century. During the past thirteen years it has
been acted by academic amateurs five times in
America.
CHAPTER XXV
THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS
IX.--The Co.rcombe 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 1612.1 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 per-
formance; for three of the actors listed had left that
company by August 29, I611; one of them (Joseph
Taylor) perhaps before March 3 o, 16Io. The list
was evidently contemporary with the first perform-
ance. The absolute upper limit of the composition
was 16o4, for one of the characters speaks of the
taking of Ostend. If the play, as we are dogmatic-
ally informed by a credulous sequence of critics who
take statements at second-hand, principally from Ger-
man doctors' theses, were derived from Cervantes'
story, E1 Curioso Impertinente, vhich appeared in
the First Part of Don Qui.rote, printed 16o 5, or (since
we have no evidence that our dramatists read Span-
ish), from Baudouin's French translation which was
licensed April 26, 16o8 e and may have reached Eng-
Cited by Oldys (Ms. note in Langbalne's .4ccount of Engl.
Dram. Poets, p. o8) --Dyce.
For this information I am indebted to my colleague, Pro-
fessor Schevill.
332
THE DATE OF " THE COXCOMBE " 333
land about June,--ve might have a definite earlier
limit of later date. But there is no resemblance be-
tween the notif of Cervantes' story,- in which a
husband out of curiosity and an impudent desire to
heighten the treasure of his love would try his xvife's
fidelity, and that of Beaumont and Fletcher's play,
xvhere 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 vife,
in the cuckolding of her idiotic coxcomb, who with
the xvool pulled over his eyes takes her back be-
lieving that she is innocent. In Cervantes, the hus-
band, 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, like-
wise, at first, above suspicion; and all die trag-
ically. There is no resemblance in treatment, atmos-
phere, incidents, (r 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 villing vittol. If
Beaumont and Fletcher derived their plot from Cer-
vantes, all that can be said is that they have mutilated
and vulgarized the original out of all possibility of
recoo-nition. 1
1 I know but two sane accounts of this matter: A. S. W. Rosen-
bach's in Mod. Lang. Notes, or, Colunm 36z (898) ; and Wolf-
340 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 '11 tel1 my daughters then
The miseries their Mother had in love,
And say, " My girls, be wiser "; yet I would not
Have had more vit 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 xvork has been revamped, and in verse as
well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant
thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced; 1
and here and there, Rovley. I should be sorry to
impute any of the nmtilations to the former. I think
that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak
endings, the finger-counted syl!ables, puerile accen-
tuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship
with the earlier output of the latter. But of what-
ever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been
guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher'sJ in drama-
tizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of
cuckoldry xvas not foreign to the genius of the Eliza-
bethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical
alloxvance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero
successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is
nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife,
1I, X, a (to Antonio's entry), III, ia (to servant's entry).
III, 2; IV, 4; V, I, 3.
THE DATE OF "PHILASTER" 341
and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual
gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, vorse
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 Co.'combe was not successful in its first
production before the '"io'norant multitude," it xvas
"in the opinion of men of worth well received and
favoured." We have seen that it vas 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 Resto,-
ration, 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 Ftgitives , constructed by Richard-
son 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-Bleeding7 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.
161o, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and
I have already stated my reasons as based upon the
34 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
history of the theatres x for believing that its first
performance took place between December 7, 6o9
and July 1_, 161o.
We might have something like confirmation of this
date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of
Hereford's oCcourgc o]: Folly, if we could affirm that
they were arranged in the order of their composition.
For just before the epigram on Lo'e lies a-Bleeding,
xvhich, I think, without doubt, applies to Philaster,
appears one To the Roscius ol these times, .air. IV.
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 six-
teen years of age at the time,--in 16Ol when Jonson's
Poetaster was acted. He could not have been more
than tventy-three years of age while still playing with
the Queen's Children in 16o8: and he would certainly
not have been styled " sole king of actors" at that
age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Bur-
badge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 con-
cerning the shares in the Blackfriars theatre, before
Evans surrendered the lease o.f that theatre in 16o8,
some of the Queen's Revels' Children " growing up
to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler,
vere taken to strenhen the King's service; and the
more to strengthen the service, the boys daily vearing
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,
Chapter VII, above.
Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Slmkespeare, I, 317.
346 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies ap-
pears to give that author credit for practically the
whole work,--" Thou... raign'st in Arte, Judge-
ment, and Invention," and adds a compliment for
" thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Her-
rick, writing for the folio of 1647, mentions Love Lies
a-Bleeding among Fletcher's " incomparable plays";
and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him defi-
nitely the scene " when first Bellario bled." John
Earle, however, writing " on Master Beaumont, pres-
ently 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, txvo 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
ptay--/ King and No King. In Philaster
Fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by
lnetrical when they may be applied, are I, I (from
the King's entry, line 89 line 358, a revision and
enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, '
(from Enter Megra), II, 4 (from Megra aboz,e),
V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 vas written
by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines I4 to
29 ( from Enter Arethusa and Bellario to "how
brave she keeps him"). Similarly, the first draught
x Lines are numbered as in the Variorrm edition.
HIS SHARE IN " PHILASTER " 347
of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34
(exit King), lO5-112 (the opening of Philaster's long
tirade and I29-i73 (from Philaster's exit to end).
But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we
find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical char-
acteristics, 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 ; 1
and he has overlaid (in lines 3-28) with his rhe-
torical 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 for-
gotten,--" these sad texts "e Fletchir " to his last
hour" is never weary of repeating.
It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes
are elaborative, bombastic, verbally vitty, conversa-
tionally 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
1 Fletcher affects this figure, cf../t Wife for a Month, Act II,
, lines 47-48.
2 Cf. his lines in Maides Tragedy, IV, I, 252-254; in Kin9 and
No King, IV, 2, 57-62; Philaster, V, 4, 114; Hum. Lie,a., IV,
5, 51; Mad Lover, III, 4, lO5; Loyall Subfect, III, 6, 141; IV, 3,
70; IVife for a Month, IV, 5, 38, 39.
348 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
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 sometinaes 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 " an-
ticipates Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic;
but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, ele-
vation 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 dnouement 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 o.f the honour of his mis-
tress. 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 combina-
tion of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization,
the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of
dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical in-
sights, 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
DATE OF "THE MAIDES TRAGEDY " 349
its faults of conception and construction; and those
faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero
and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortu-
itous succession of the crises, and the subordination of
Bellario in the dnouement.
The popularity of Philaster as an acting play, not
only at Court but in the city, is attested by contem-
porary record. It was played after the Restoration
with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed
thirteen revivals,rathe last at Bath on December 12
of the latter year, with Ward in the title-r61e and Miss
Jarmin as Bellario. 1
8.q The Maidcs Tragedy, acted by the King's Men
during the festivities at Court, October 1612 to
March 1613, was known to Sir George Buc when,
October 31, 161I, he licensed an anonymous play as
" this second maiden's tragedy." It was acted by
the King's also at Blackfriars; and since it is in every
way a more mature production than Philastcr, I think
that it followed that play, toward the end of 161o or
in 1611. It was first published in 1619, in quarto
and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also anony-
mous; that of 163o gives the names of Beaumont and
Fletcher as authors. In the commendatory verses to
the folio of 1647, Henry Howard ascribes the scene
of Amintor's suicide to Fletcher; Waller assigns to
him " brave Melantius in his gallantry " and " Aspatia
1 The best editions of PMlaster since the time of Dyce are
those of F. S. Boas, in the Te-nple Dramatists (898), P. A.
Daniel, in the Vmqorum (9o4), Glover and Waller, in the Canb.
Enl. Classics (9o5), and A. H. Thorndike in Belles Lettres
(5).
350 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
weeping in her gown"; Stanley, too, gives him the
weeping Aspatia ; and Herrick, " Evadne swelling with
brave rage." These descriptions are as misleading
as blind. D'Avenant comes nearer the mark in his
Prologue to The IVoman-Hater, already quoted,
where he indicates correctly an Evadne scene and an
Aspatia scene as of Fletcher's composition. Metrical
tests, corrected by the rhetorical, show that Fletcher's
contributions are limited to three scenes and two half-
scenes. The list opens with those to which D'Ave-
nant alludes" II, _% in which Fletcher " taught the sad
Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, I (as far as line
zoo, " Prithee, do not mock me "), in which he " re-
duced Evadne from her scorn "; and it includes, also,
the ten lines of V, I, the larger part of V, z (to
Exit Evadne), and the perfunctory V, 3- As to
Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt can be enter-
tained. It is an admirable example of his double
endings (almost 4o per cent), his end-stopped lines
(8o per cent), anapestic rhythms and jolts, as well
as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his in-
cremental second thoughts. I fail to see hoxv any
critic can assign it to Beaumont. a As frequently with
Fletcher, Aspatia's mourning, though beautiful, is a
falsetto from the classics; more like one of Rossetti's
or Leigh Hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than a
first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. There
is likewise no doubt concerning the authorship of the
first part of Act IV, (lines I-I89), in which Me-
a Thorndike, for instance,who selects lines -4o as an
stance of Beaumont's skill in imitating natural conversation.
Influence of t3. and F. on Shakespeare., p. 29.
SHARE IN " THE MAIDES TRAGEDY" 35
lantius convinces Evadne of sin and drives her to
vengeance upon the King. The latter part of the
scene, also, appears to have been written by Fletcher
in the first instance, and to have consisted of the first
six speeches after the entrance of Amintor (lines
190-2OO), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to
win belief" (247-254 , 26o-262), and the conclusion
(263-285). But between Amintor's supplication
" Prithee do not mock me " (line 2oo) and Evadne's
assertion of sincerity "I have done nothing good to
win belief " (line 247 1), Beaumont has inserted four
speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy other-
wise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tender-
est passages of the play. In Evadne's " My whole
life is so leprous it infects All my repentance"-
" That slight contrition "--" Give me your griefs; you
are an innocent, A soul as vhite as Heaven "--" Shoot
your light into me "--" Dissembling vith my tears "
--" Cut from man's remembrance," we hear the words,
phrases, and figures of Beaumont; and we trace him
in the repeated use of " do." \Ve find him in Amin-
tor's " Seed of virtue left to shoot up "--" put a thou-
sand sorrows off "--" that dull calamity "" that
strange misbelief " and in
Mock not the powers above that can and dare
Give thee a great example of their justice
To all ensuing agesY
And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration
Numbering of the Variorum. Qz "eies."
SHARE IN "THE MAIDES TRAGEDY " 353
dramatic mastery of the grisly and shuddering; but
though the scene is characterized by the same rapidity
of conversational thrust and parry as the Fletcherian
dialogue between Melantius and Evadne, it is, like
it, marred in effect by violence physical rather than
spiritual, by brutality of vituperation and stage real-
ism with but scant relief of subtlety. Fletcher's
tragic scenes excel not in portrayal of personality
but in business; his contribution to Aspatia is not
pathos but the embroidery of grief.
The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's:
the cruel desertion of Aspatia, her lyric self-oblitera-
tion and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation
of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery,
her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her,
its gradual recognition of the inevitable,-- that un-
chastity cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor
cleansed by blood,-- and its true birth through love
desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment
of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circum-
stance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author
of his wrongs,myet idealized by virgin and wanton
alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the
conflict between honour and :friendship, pride and
sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that
blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the pestilent
King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio
is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and
hopeless. These are Beaumont's; and his, too, the
wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthrall-
ing exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the
masque in the first act; the shrewd development of mo-
356
BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Wilt thou kill this man ?
Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sin
Off from thy lips.
But Amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious,
not the kind of man to satisfy her new desire, and
ambition too. He could never win her by winning
the throne,-- too lily-livered :
" I wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, " till I do know
the cause "; --
Then she, with passion " I wood thou wouldst."-- But
she is a woman whose first behest is scorned; and with
sudden revulsion of contempt for this poltroon, as
she now conceives him--
Why, it is thou that wrongst me; I hate thee;
Thou shouldst have kild thy selfe.
Amintor has lost his evil chance. She despises him
and yet, in her better moments, with a kind of pity.
It follows that her prompt avowal of her liaison, and
her return to the King and insulting treatment of
Amintor are of a piece with the corrupted nature of
the woman,--a nature that she displays up to the
moment of her awakening and imagined repentance.
The facts are, too, that she does not, immediately
after she has sworn to her brother to let the foul soul
of the King out, develop (IV, i), as Mr. More thinks,
a " mood of sudden and overwhelming love for Amin-
tor." She merely asks his pardon:
I doe appeare the same, the same Evadne,
Drest in the shames I liv'd in, the same monster,
"THE MAIDES TRAGEDY" 357
But these are names of honour to what I am .....
I am hell
Till you, my deare lord, shoot your light into me,
The beames o[ your forgivenesse.
The days that she shall number to her rest are short;
but she vainly imagines that, though but " one minute "
remains, she may " reach constantly at something that
is neare" the good. She is awakened to her hus-
band's whiteness of soul; but she makes no profession
of love, though love, this time not merely lust, be
stirred in her heart. She would not "let her sins
perish his noble youth." At last, in the moment of
mad exaltation after the murder of the King, when
she thinks that she has washed her soul cleaa in that
blood, the poor, misguided creature struggling toward
the light, but still, and consistently, enveloped in the
nmrk of her past, comes imploring the love of the
husband whom in the earlier days she had scorned.
She is still the passionate Evadne, who. " was too foule
vithin to, looke faire then," and " was not free till
now." Repulsed by Amintor, she dreams the one
sane madness of her career,--to win his love by tak-
ing leave of life,--and kills herself.
I perceive no irrelevance of motive in the conduct
of Evadne; even in the scenes which are not Beau-
mont's -- namely, the expostulation of her brother,
and the murder of the King. Nor do I find in the
play as a whole what Mr. More calls an " incompre-
hensible tangle of the passions."
The defect in the construction of the Maides Tra.g-
edy, if there is one, lies in the failure of the Maid
and her deserter to meet between the first scene of
HIS SHARE IN " CUPID'S REVENGE" 359
by i677. Before 1685 Waller made at least two
attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy
by writing a new fifth act in which Evadne was
bloodlessly eliminated. In one of these sentimental
absurdities the King alone survived; in another the
King, preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving
Amintor and Aspatia from suicide and joined theln
in marriage: but neither attempt, though made " to
please the Court," was crmvned with success. The
play enjoyed several other revivals in the first half of
the eighteenth century with high popularity, notably
at the Haymarket in I7O6 vhen Melantius was played
by Betterton, Evadne by Mrs. Barry, and Aspatia by
Mrs. Bracegirdle; and again in I7IO just before Bet-
terton's death. In I74Z Theobald vrites, that the
famous controversy between Melantius and Amintor
is always " received vith vehement applause." In
1837 the play was acted by Macready at the Haymar-
ket, with alterations by himself and three original
scenes by Sheridan Knowles, under the name of The
Bridal, and, as Dyce tells us, was very favourably re-
ceived by the public?
9---Though the tragedy of Cupid's Rcz'cnge was
printed in I6I 5 as the work of Fletcher alone, the
publication was unauthorized, and the attribution is
by a printer who acknowledges that he was not ac-
quainted vith the author. The quarto of I63O as-
signs it correctly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The
The best editions of M. T., since the time of Dyce, are those
of P. A. Daniel, in the Uariorum (I9O4), Glover and Waller, in
the Cambridge English Classics (t9o5), and A. H. Thorndike, in
the Belles Lettres ( 9o6).
360 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
play is known to have been acted at Court by her
Majesty's Children of Whitefriars, the first Sunday
in January I612; and as usual it must have been
tested by public presentation before that date. The
fact that the authors were, between I6IO and I612,
writing for the King's Men does not preclude their
composing a play for the Queen's Children. It is
not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier
than I6II. Though the critics disagree concerning
the precise division of authorship in nearly every scene,
finding traces of alteration by Field, Massinger, and
others, they discern a definite substratum of both
Fletcher and Beaumont. It is unnecessary to specify
the minor scenes in which Beaumont coiSperated. The
five which transfer the action from an atmosphere of
supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the
realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion
are by him. 1 In these his sententious sunbursts, his
verse, diction, hyperbole, portrayal by passive implica-
tion, are indubitable. The infatuation of the princess
for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim
humility and cackling mirth of the latter. The lust of
Leucippus is transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to
oaths "bestowed on lies," by his horror of the dis-
covered baseness of his paramour, and the piety with
which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's
honour :
I desire you
To lay what trains you will for my wish'd death,
But suffer him to find his quiet grave
In peace.
I, 3; II, ; III, ; IV, ; V, 4.
HIS SHARE IN "KING AND NO KING" 36I
The treacherous greed and malice of Bacha are tem-
pered by half-lights and shifting hues that make her
less a vampire when Beaumont depicts her. And the
final scene of tragedy in the forest is shot with pathos
by the " harmless innocence" of Beaumont's Urania
following Leucippus to save him
for love : m
I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught.
But the play as a whole lacks logical and natural mo-
tive, moral vigor and vitality; and its history upon
the stage is negligible.
IO.--Of the dates of ,/1 King aztd No King there
is no. doubt. It was licensed in I6I I, acted at Court
December 26 of the same year, and first published
in quarto in I6I 9 as by Beaumont and Fletcher. In
the commendatory verses of 1647, Henry Howard
gives Arbaces to. Fletcher; Jasper Mayne gives him
Bessus; Herrick goes further: " that high design Of
King and No King, and the rare plot thine." Earle,
on the other hand, gives Bessus to Beaumont; and
Lisle gives him Mardonius. Of the attributions to
Fletcher, Herrick's alone has plausibility, since, like
Philaster and The Maides Tragedy, the play is de-
rived from no known source. 1 Still he was probably
wrong. It is not impossible that one of the dramatists
contrived the plot; but, considering that three-quarters
of the play was vritten by Beaumont, and that Flet-
1 For conjectural sources see Chapter VII, above. The best
editions to-day are the Variorum and Alden's (Belles Lettres).
365 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
cher's quarter contains but one scene at once of
high design and vital to the story, it is not very likely
that the contriving was by Fletcher unaided.
Modern critics display singular unanimity in their
discrimination of the respective shares of the com-
posers. With only one or two dissenting xToices they
attribute to Beaumont the first three acts, the fourth
scene of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the
fifth. To Fletcher they assign the first three scenes
of the fourth act, and scenes one and three of the
fifth. The tests which I have already described lead
me to the same conclusion. Beaumont's contribution
is distinguished by a largeness of utterance and a
poetic inevitability, a diversity and mastery of char-
acterization, a philosophical reach, a realism both hu-
morous and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativ-
ity and tension, equal to, if not surpassing, any par-
allel elements or qualities to be found in the joint-plays.
Arbaces, in apparent design, is of a Marlowan temper,
moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brook-
ing no rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and
a tyrant, he is brave in fact, and in heart deluded by
the assumption that he is also modest. The combina-
tion is Beaumontesque. That dramatist rarely creates
fixed or transparent character. Arbaces assumes that
he is single of nature and aim: an irresistible, passion-
less, and patient soldier; but his failure to fathom
himself as his friend Mardonius fathoms him, is part
of his complexity. His headlong love for the woman
whom he believes to be his sister and the resulting
horror of apprehension and conflict of desire reveal
him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding
HIS SHARE IN "KING AND NO KING" 363
revolutions of personality. " What are thou," he
asks of this devilish unexpected lust--
What are thou, that dost creep into my breast ;
And dar'st not see my face ?
When he will decree that Panthea be regarded as no
more his sister, and she remonstrates,-- he thunders
" I will hear no more "; but to himself:--
Why should there be such music in a voice,
And sin for me to hear it?
When Tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister
in marriage, presumes to address her, with what ma-
jestic inconsistency the king rebukes him:
The least word that she speaks
Is worth a life. Rule your disorder'd tongue
Or I will temper it!
And so, now struggling, now wading on in sin, till
that heart-rending crisis is reached in which he con-
fesses the incestuous love to his friend and faithful
general, Mardonius; nay, even tries to win the friend's
support in his lustful suit, and is gloriously defeated.
Then follow the easy compliance of Bessus with his
wish, and, with equal precipitancy, the revulsion of a
kingly sense of rectitude against the willing pander:
Thou art too wicked for my company,
Though I have hell within me, and mayst yet
Corrupt me further,
The climax in which Arbaces can no longer refrain
is of Beaumont's best:
364 BEAUMONT, THE DRAIIATIST
Nay, you shall hear the cause in short, Panthea ;
And when thou hear'st it, thou will blush for me
And hang thy head down like a violet
Full of the morning's dew.
And she, recoiling, " Heaven forbid" and "I would
rather . . in a grave sleep with mv innocence," still
kisses him; and then in a panic, nobler than self-sup-
pression, cries :
If you have any mercy, let me go
To prison, to my death, to anything:
I feel a sin growing upon my blood
Worse than all these!
By a series of sensational boulez,ersements, and in a
dramatic agony o.f suspense, we are keyed to the scene
in which relief is granted: the princess who now is
Queen is no. sister to the King, who is now no King.
With the exception of a half-scene (Act IV, 2 )
of somewhat bustling mechanism and rant by Fletcher,
the whole of the King's portrayal is Beaumont's;
and with the exception of eighty lines written by
Fletcher (Act IV, I) of dramatic dialogue contain-
ing information necessary to the minor love-affair,
the story of the birdlike quivering, fond Panthea is,
also, entirely Beaumont's. The Mardonius of Beau-
mont, in the first three acts and the fifth, is a
fine, honest, blunt, soldierly companion and adviser
to the King; but when Fletcher takes him in hand
(Act IV, 2), he declines to a stock character wordy
with alliteration and commonplace. The Bessus of
Beaumont whose "reputation came principally by
thinking to run away" is, in Acts I-III, Falstaffian or
HIS SHARE IN "KING AND NO KING" 365
Zagloban; the Bessus of Fletcher, in IV, 3 and V, I
and 3, is a figure of low comedy, amusing to be sure,
and reminiscent of Bobadill, but a purveyor of sopho-
moric quips and a tool for horse-play. The rural
scene with its graphic humours of the soil is Beau-
mont's.
Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise mas-
terly play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dia-
logue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to
the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display
no spiritual insight; supply no development of char-
acter; administer no dramatic fillip to the action and
no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one rhetor-
ically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers,
Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry.
To Beaumont, then, it may be said that ve owe in
the creation o.f / King azd No Kig one of the most
intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean period,
one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one
of the most influential in the development of the heroic
play of the Restoration. That it did not survive the
eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful
nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it
is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which " as Dry-
den says " end with a prosperous event." The con-
flict of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed
the limits of artistic mediation. The play would better
have ended in a catastrophe of undeser'ed suffering
--that highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inex-
plicable. But though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is
not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy. That
error arises from a careless reading of the text. From
366 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protag-
onists are not brother and sister. And as for the
protagonists themselves,-- when the King is sud-
denly smitten by love (III, i, 7o-5) and rebels
against its power, he does not even knmv that the
object of his devotion is his supposed sister. When
he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea,
he revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when
the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance
they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility
of self-denial. In his struggle against what seems to
him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer,
he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of
what is right. His deepest despair is that he is " not
come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb
to worse temptation; and his last word before the
tragic -knot is cut is of loathing for " such a strange
and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think
on." And when Panthea feeling the "sin growing
upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throt-
tled by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that
cries to him whom she thinks her brother, " Fly, sir,
for God's sake!"
A King and No Kig evidently von favour at
Court, for, as we have noticed, it was acted there both
in 161I and in I612--I6I 3. It was presented to their
Majesties at Hampton Court in I636. In I66i Pepys
saw it twice. Before I682 Nell Gwynn had made
Panthea one of her principal rles. In 1683 Better-
ton played Arbaces to Mrs. Barry's Panthea. It was
revived again in 7o5, 724, and 788. Davies in
his Dramatic Miscellay tells us that Garrick intended
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAST PLAY
LEVEN.-- The first quarto o.f The Scorn[ul
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 Maj-
esties 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, 16o 9 . The sen-
tence, " 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," 1 and when, undoubtedly,
" cast" captains of the English army were clamouring
for foreign service. In that case, the play was acted
before January 4, I6IO, for by that date the children
of the Queen's Revels had ceased playing at Black-
friars. Since the plague regulations closed the thea-
tres between March 9 and December 7, 16o9, save
for a week in July, these arguments would tLx the per-
formance in the Christmas month, December 7 to
January 4, 161o. To this supposition a reference in
Act I, 2 to binding the Apocrypha by itself, lends
plausibility, if, as Fleay thinks, the sentence points
1 lXlurray, Eng. Dram. Comp.. I, 153 ; Warwick Bond, Zariorura
Ed. o[ B. and F., I, 359.
THE LAST PLAY 369
to the discussion during I6O9-16IO concerning the in-
clusion 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 I6Io. 1 But the Apocrypha controversy vas con-
tinued long after I6Io.
A later date of composition than January 4, 161o,
is, however, indicated if a line, III, I, 34 I, to which
attention has not previously been directed, in which
the Elder Loveless says of Abigail, vho 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 hus-
band of the Bear-oarden, in Jonson's Epicoene, acted
between January 4 and March Io, I6Io. And the
two sentences in vhich Cleve is mentioned, " There
will be no more talk of the Cleve wars while this
lasts " (V, 3), and " Marry some cast Clez,e captain
[so italicized in the quarto], and sell Bottle-ale"
(V, 4), point to a date later than July I6Io, 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 I6Io and the begin-
ning of I616, when, according to the quarto, the play
had assuredly been performed. These considerations
make it probable that The Scornful Ladic in its origi-
nal form was presented first at \Vhitefriars while the
Queen's Children were acting there, between I6Io and
March I6I 3, or that it vas one of the plays, old
Chr. Eng. Dr., I, 181.
370 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
or new, presented by the Queen's Children (re-
organized 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 I6I 5.
If The Scornfnl Ladic had been written before March
I6I 3, it would undoubtedly have shared with The
Co.rcombe and Cupid's Rc'etge 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 Beau-
mont and Fletcher's later joint-productions, perhaps
the last of them. The conversational style is alto-
gether 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
THE LAST PLAY 37 I
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, I6i 3 to I6I 5. 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 Span-
iards; but Morecraft is neither a Spaniard nor in any
way associated with Spaniards. There had been a
Don Diego of malodorous memory, who had often-
sively " perfumed " St. Paul's and on whose achieve-
merit the Elizabethans never xvearied ringing the
changes.' But that Don Diego was of the years be-
fore 1597 when there was, of course, no talk of woo-
ing an Infanta; and the Captain here who comes to
borrow money of the usurer had no intention of in-
sulting 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 Scornfid
Ladle 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 conjunc-
tion of the " Infanta" with a " Don Diego" has
reference to the activities of the astute Don Diego Sar-
miento de Acufia who had arrived as Spanish ambas-
a 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.
372 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
sador, in I6I 3, " with the express object of vinning
James over from his alliance with France and the
Protestant powers." 1 During I6 3 Queen Anne was
favouring the Spanish marriage. In February 614,
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 Sar-
miento his willingness to accept the hand of the In-
fauta for Charles, provided Philip of Spain should
withdraw his demand for the conversion of the young
prince to Catholicism. In June Sarmiento was ad-
vising 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, vere resumed a few weeks after the treaty of
Xanten was signed; and with varying success Don
Diego Was still pursuing his object in December 16I 5 .
The reference in The Scornf,l Ladle cannot possibly
be to negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles's
elder brother, Henry, vho died in I6r_, vith one or
the other of King Philip's daughters; z as for instance
in 6o4 or 6o 7, for the Cleves wars had not then be-
gun; o.r in i6II and I612, for no Don Diego had yet
arrived in England. The upper limit of the reference
1 See S. R. Gardiner, History o[ England, Vol. II (r6o7-r6r6),
pp. r65, er8, ee5, 247, 255, 3r6, 32r, 3e4, 327, 368, for this and
the following concerning Sarmiento.
o_ Gardiner, Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage, pp. 6,
7,69.
DON DIFGO SARMIENTO,
COUNT GONDOMAR
From the portrait by G. P. Harding
THE LAST PLAY
373
to Don Diego Sarmiento's negotiations is May 27,
I6 3. Gardiner tells us, moreover, that " for some
time" before Diego was created Count Gondomar in
6 7 " 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 kno,wn 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-Gen-
eral at the time, or from a devoted companion of
John Selden of the Inner Temple, Sir Robert Cotton,
the antiquary, who in April 6I 5, 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 6IO, I have come to the defi-
nite conclusion that the play was written between
May 27, 6 3 and the beginning of 616, and first
acted after the Children reopened at the new Black-
friars in I615-616. The probabilities are that it was
written after May or June, 614, perhaps, as late as
April i615, when public attention had been startlingly
awakened to Don Diego's personal and ambitious ac-
tivity 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
SHARE IN "THE SCORNFUL LADIE" 375
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 height-
ens 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, 1 has
suggested, Massinger. Act III, 2, on the other hand,
not only has several ye's in the objective, but in pro-
portion to the you's twenty-five per cent of ye's
and y' are's, which appproaches the distinctive habit of
Fletcher; and the verse, rhetorical triplets, and after-
thoughts 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 objec-
tive case to corroborate the other, metrical and stylis-
tic, indicatio.ns 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, I, Act II, I,
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. Ac-
cording to the first three quartos (I616, I625, 163o),
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 Younglo.ve 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
1 Variorum, I, 360.
376 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
speech-headings, she is Abig. or Abi., all through the
last three acts, for Fletcher has noticed that the ab-
breviation 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 occa-
sionally 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-pos-
sessed 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 Beau-
mont's Act I, appears not only to be honest but to be
designed with a view to a leading part in the complica-
tion; 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 move-
ment of the action and the stagey characterization and
more animated scenes are Fletcher's; also the ma-
noeuvers 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 xvere capable in that
kind, it is as well that they did not produce more.
This was written after Beaumont had retired to Sun-
"THE SCORNFUL LADIE" 377
dridge 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
vas several times witnessed by Pepys. Later, it was
acted by Mrs. Oldfield; and, as The Capricimts Lady
(an alteration by W. Cooke), with Mrs. Abington in
the heroine's part, it held the stage as late as 788--
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 Mas-
singer's tragicomedy, / Very I, Vo.man, licensed 634
but in which Fletcher may have had a share; and for
Sir Aston Cockayne's The Obstinate Lady of I657 .
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
F 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, ve have found that
two, Loves Cure and The Captaine, do not definitely
show the hand of Beaumont, and one, The Youre
Playes, but the suspicion of a finger. Two, The
Woman,-Hater and The Knight of the Buring Pestle,
are wholly or essentially of his unaided authorship.
The remaining six, The Coxcombe, Philaster, The
Maides Tragedy., Cupids Revenge, ZI King and No
Khzg, The .,Ccor,ftd 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 .,ce-'erall l'Veapons, Beggers Bush, Loves Pilgrim-
age, The Knight of Malta) The Lawes o]: Cmtdy, The
Honest Man's Fortune, Bonduca, Nice Valour, The
.Noble Gentleman, The Yaire Maide of the Inne.
These I have carefully examined, and can conscien-
tiously state that in no instance is there for me satis-
factory evidence of the qualities which mark his
verse and style. When in any of the suspected pas-
378
HIS DRAMATIC ART 379
sages 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 vritten, his metre or rhythm is absent.
On the other hand, such passages display traits never
found in him but often found in some other collab-
orator 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, some-
thing 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 melodra-
matic at times in sudden shifts of crisis; but he is unio
380 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
formly sensitive to innocence, beauty, and pathos,--
contemptuous of cowardice, braggadocio, and insin-
cerity,- appreciative of fidelity, friendship, noble af-
fection, womanly devotion, self-sacrifice, and mercy,
of romantic enterprise, and of the virile defiance of
calumny, evil soliciting, and tyranny. In the delinea-
tion of lust he is frankly Elizabethan rather than
insidio,usly Jacobean. He portrays with special ten-
derness the maiden of pure heart whose love is un-
fortunately placed too high, a Bellario, Euphrasia,
or Urania,-- or crossed b.y circumstance, a Viola,
Arethusa, Aspatia, Panthea. He distinctively appro-
priates Shakespeare's girl-page; under his touch her
grace suffers but slight diminution, and that by ex-
cess of sentimentality rather than by lack of individual
endowment. His love-lorn lasses are integral per-
sonalities. 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 Lang-uish, Jasper's mock-
romantic Luce.
His most virile characters are not the tragic or ro-
mantic 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." 1 But
Mardonius never deserts his King, Melantius does.
1 Thorndike, Int:luece of B. ad F., p. 123.
HIS DRAMATIC ART
38I
And neither the Mardonius nor the Melantius of Beau-
mont has the waggish humour of Beaumont's Dion.
His romantic heroes, on the other hand, are not so
distinct in their several characteristics; Amintor, Phil-
aster, Leucippus are generous, impulsive, poetic, read-
ily deluded, undecided, and in action indecisive.
The differentiation betveen 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
revt)lt 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 Maidcs
Tragedy is a thoroughly visualized monster, and Ar-
baces in ,4 King and No King stands as ar epitome of
progressively developed, concrete personality, abso-
lutely distinct from any other fig'ure on Beaumont's
stage. In the construction of Evadne and Bacha a
similar skill in evolution and individualization is dis-
played. The latter is an abnormality grown from lust
to overweening ambition; the former never Ioses our
sympathy: in her depravity there is the seed of con-
science; through shame and love she wins a soul; the
crime by which at last she would redeem herself
Ieaves 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
382 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
shame is merged and made beautiful in the pity of
it all.
Of his braggarts and poltroons Beaumont is pro-
fuse: 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 Beau-
mont'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 IVoman-Ha.ter, 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 Beau-
mont'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 sel-
dom sneers. With the Gascon he vapours; vith the
love-lorn languishing, simpers; with the heroic Cap-
tain o.f Mile End, whines and--tongue in cheek--
struts and throws a turkey-step; with the jovial rois-
terer 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 ad No
Ki 9, and The oCcornful Ladle; that in the tragedies
FLETCHER IN THE JOINT-PLAYS 383
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 con-
trition 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 fou'nd 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, lut 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 ve
have noticed that, through the heroic and melodra-
matic, 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 vay
of summary. He bulks large in the comedies of in-
trigue, The Scornful Ladle and The Co.rcombe; and
especially in the sections of plot that are carnal,
trivial, or unnatural. He is in them just what he is
in his own Monsfeur Thomas and his pornographic
Captainein the latter of which, if Beaumont had
any share at all it is unconvincing to me, save pos-
sibly as regards the one appalling scene of which I have
384 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
spoken some five chapters back. To the tragedies and
" dramatic romances" or tragicomedies Fletcher did
not contribute one-third as much as his co-worker.
As in the murder-scene of The Maides Tragedy he
displays the dramaturgy of spectacular violence, so
in the scene between Melantius and Evadne, the power
of dramatic invective. But his aim is not the fur-
therance of interest by the dynamic unfolding of per-
sonality, or by the propulsion of plot through inter-
play of complicated motives or emotions, it is the
immediate captivation of the spectator by rapidity
and variety" by brisk, lucid, and witty dialogue, by
bustle of action and multiplicity of conventional de-
vice, as in Cpids Revenge. Few of his scenes are
vital; most are clever histrionic inlays, subsidiary to
the main action, or complementary and explanatory,
as in Philaster and A King and No Kilt 9. His char-
acters move with all the ease of perfect mechanism;
but they are made, not born. It follovs that, in the
more serious of the joint-dramas, the principal per-
sonages are much less indebted to his invention than
has ordinarily been supposed. In the comedies of
intrigue, on the other hand, conventional types of the
stage or of the theatre-going London xvorld, especially
the fashionable and the Bohemian provinces thereof,
owe their existence chiefly to him. Blackguards,
wittols, colourless tricksters, roaring captains, gallants,
debauchees, lechers, bawds, libidinous wives, sophisti-
cated maidens who preen themselves with meticulous
virtue but not with virtuous thoughts, all these people
the scenes which Fletcher contributed to the joint-
comedies. And some of them thrust their faces into
FLETCHER IN THE JOINT-PLAYS 385
the romantic plays and tragedies as well. Fletcher's
most important contribution to the drama, his masterly
and vital contribution, is to be found in his later work;
and of that I have elsevhere treated, x and shall have
yet a word to say here.
Of the Beaumont-Fletcher plays the distinctive
dramaturgy as well as the essential poetry are Beau-
mont's, and these are worthy of the praise bestowed
by his youthful contemporary, John Earle:
So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon,
.And all so born within thyself, thine own.
The Maske, The lVoman-Hater, and The Knight of
the Burning Pestle should-appear in a volume bearing
Beaumont's name. And for the partnership of Beau-
mont and Fletcher, perhaps, some day,
Some publisher will further justice do
.And print their six plays in one volume too.
1 The Fellows and" Followers of Shakespeare, Part Two, in
Representative English Comedies, Vol. III, now in press.
THE BEAUMONT 'ROMANCE' 387
Philaster a distinctly new type of drama, were in all
probability acted before the close of 161I, and simi-
larly influenced the method of The IVinter's Tale and
The Tempest, also of I6I I.
Before discussing the theory of Shakespeare's in-
debtedness to Philastcr and its " Beaumont-Fletcher "
successors, I should like to file a two-fold protest;
first, against the use of the word 'romance' for any
kind of dramatic production, whatever. 'Romance'
applies to narrative of heroic, marvellous, and imagin-
ative content, not to drama. The Maides Tragedy
and Cupid's Revezzge are not romances; they are
romantic tragedies. Philaster, 7t King and No King,
and Cymbelite are, of course, romantic; but specifically
they are melodramatic tragicomedies of heroic cast.
Pericles, The IVinter's Tale, and The Ten,pest are
romantic comedies of marvel or adventure. Nothing
is gained in criticism by giving them a name which
applies, in English, strictly to narrative, or by regard-
ing them as of a different dramatic species from the
romantic dramas of Greene and Shakespeare that pre-
ceded them. I object, in the second place, to the
grouping of the six plays said to constitute "a dis-
tinctly new type of drama" under the denomination
" dramatic romances of Beaumont and Fletcher "; for
in some of them Beaumont had no hand, and in others,
the most important, Fletcher's contribution of roman-
tic novelty is altogether secondary, mostly immaterial.
With Thierry mid Theodoret, for instance, thus loosely
called a " Beaumont-Fletcher romance," it is not
proved that Beaumont had anything to do. The
drama displays nothing of his vocabulary, rhetoric
388 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
or poetry. It is a later production by Fletcher, Mas-
singer, and probably one other; and is the only play of
this tragic-idyllic-romantic type attempted by Fletcher
after Beaumont had ceased writing. In three of the
Fotre Pla.yes in One, Beaumont does not appear. He
may possibly be traced in three scenes of The Trimtph
of Love; but with no certainty. Fletcher, on the
other hand, had very little to do with the three great
dramas of sensational romance which form the core
of the group in question, Pl, ilaster, Tlw Maides Trag-
edy, and / King and No KiewiT. As I have shown,
he contributed not more than four scenes to Philaster,
four to The Maides TratTedy, and five to / King atd
No KintT. And, with the exception of two spectacu-
larly violent scenes in The Maides Tragedy, his con-
tribution, so far as writing goes, is supplementary
dialogue and histrionic by-play. Whatever is essen-
tially novel, vital, and distinctive is by Beaumont. To
Cupid's Revenge Beaumont's contribution was slighter
in volume, but without it the play would lack its dis-
tinctive quality. I.f we must cling to the misnomer
'romance' for any group o.f plays which may have
influenced Shakespeare's later comedies, let us limit
the group to its Beaumont core, and speak of the
' Beaumont romance.'
The express novelty in technique of the six arbitra-
rily selected, so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances'
is supposed to lie in the dramatic adaptation of certain
sensational properties more suitable to narrative fic-
tion; especially in the attempt to heighten interest by
adding to the legitimate portrayal of character under
stress and strain (as in tragedy), or of character in
390 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
beline to Philaster we lack the assistance of authentic
dates of composition. The plays were acted about
the same time,--Philaster certainly, ymbcline per-
haps, before October 8, I6IO. Beaumont and Fletch-
er's play may have been written as early as 16o9;
Shakespeare's also as early as 16o 9 or 16o8: in fact,
there are critics who assign parts of it to 16o6. With
regard to the relative priority of Cymbeline and A
King and No t'9, we are more fortunate in our
knowledge. The former had certainly been acted by
May 15, I6II; the latter was not even licensed until
that year, and was not performed at Court till De-
cember 26. The probabilities are altogether in favour
of a date of composition later than that of Cymbeline.
But that Shakespeare's Cy,zbeline and his later ro-
mantic dramas betray any consciousness of the exist-
ence of Philaster and its succeeding King and No
King has not been proved. Save for the more em-
phatic employment of the masque and its accessories of
dress and scenic display, of the combination of idyllic,
romantic, and sensational elements of material, and
the heightened uncertainty of dfinouement, all natu-
rally suggested by the demands of Jacobean taste, no
variation is discoverable in the course of Shake-
speare's dramatic art. And in these respects I find
no extrinsic novelty, no momentous change--noth-
ing in Philaster and A King and No Kiu 9 that had not
been anticipated by Shakespeare. C3,mbcliw, The
Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are but the flovering
of potentialities latent in the Two Gentlemen of
Verona and As You Like It, Much Ado About Noth-
in.q and Twelfth Night, All's V/ell That Ends Well
DID HE INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE? 39
and Measu,re for Measu.re--latent in the story of
Apollonius of Tyre, and unavoidable in its dramatiza-
tion as Pericles, a play that was certainly not influenced
by the methods of Philaster. If in his later romantic
dramas Shakespeare borrowed any hint of technique
from the Beaumont contribution to the 'romances,'
he was but borrowing back what Beaumont had bor-
rowed from him or from sources with which Shake-
speare was familiar when Beatunont was still playing
nursery miracles of the Passion with his brothers in
the Gethsemane garden at Grace-Dieu. Shakespeare's
later comedies are a legitimate development of his
peculiar dramatic art. Beaumont's tragicomedies,
with all their poetic and idyllic beauty and dramatic
individuality, are novel, so far as construction goes,
only in their emphasized employment of the sensa-
tional properties and methods mentioned above.
Their characteristic, when compared with that of
Shakespeare's last gro.up of comedies, is melodramatic
rather than romantic. They set, in fine, as did Chap-
man's Gentleman Usher, and Shakespeare's M'easure
for Meas'ure and All's IVell that Ends Well, an exam-
ple which, abused, led to the decadence of Elizabethan
romantic comedy.
The resemblance between Phila,ter and Cymbeliw,
such as it is, is closer than that between Philastcr and
the Shakespearian successors of Cymbeline,--The
IVinter's Tale and The Tern.pest. But the common
features of all these plays, the juxtaposition of idyllic
scenes and interest with those of royalty, the com-
bination of sentimental, tragic, and comic incentives
to emotion, the false accusations of unchastity and the
DID HE INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE? 393
which by the consensus of critics are assigned to
Shakespeare; and Pericles was written by 6o8, at
least as early as Philcaster, and in all probability earlier.
In his story of Marina, Shakespeare is merely pur-
suing the sensational methods of Measure for Meas-
tre and anticipating those of Th.e Vizter's Tale. In
general, the plot lies half-way between the tragicomic
possibilities of the Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night,
,dll's Well, and Measure for Measure, and the roman-
tic manipulation of Cymbeli-ne and the later plays.
In fine, there is closer resemblance between Cym-
belin.e and half a dozen of Shakespeare's earlier come-
dies, than between Cymbeline and Philaster; and it
might more readily be shown that the author of
Philaster was indebted to those half-dozen plays, than
Shakespeare to Philaster. The differences between
the Beaumont 'romances' and Shakespeare's later
romantic comedies are in fact more vital than the
similarities. In Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and
A King and No King the central idea is of contrast
between sentimental love and unbridled lust, and this
gives rise to misunderstanding, intrigue, and violence.
In Shakespeare's later comedies the central motive
is altogether different: it is of disappearance and dis-
covery. The disappearance is occasioned by false
accusation or conspiracy. In Pericles, Cymbeline,
and The Winter's Tale, the dramatic interest revolves
about the pursuit of a lost wife or child, the vander-
ings and trials of the heroine, and her recovery: in
The Tempest, about the disappearance and discovery
of the ousted Duke and his daughter. There is no
a See Morton Lute, Hand Book to Shakespeare's Works, p. 338.
394 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
resemblance between Beaumont's love-lorn maidens
in page's garb pursuing the unconscious objects of
their affection and Shakespeare's joyous girls and
traduced wives. Nor is there in Shakespeare's later
comedies any analogue to the sensual passion of the
'Beaumont and Fletcher romances,' to their Bachas,
Megras, and Evadnes, their ultra-sentimental Philas-
ters, their blunt soldier-counselors and boastful pol-
troons. Pisanio and Cloten have respectively no kin-
ship with Dion and Pharamond. What appears to
be novel in Pcricles and its Shakespearian successors,
the somewhat melodramatic d6nouement, is, as I
have said, but the modification of the playxvright's
well-known methods in conformity with the contem-
porary demand for more highly seasoned fare. But,
in essence, the dramatic careers of Imogen and Her-
mione, are no more sensational than those of their
older sisters, Hero, Helena, and Isabella. And what
is most evidently not novel with Shakespeare in his
later romantic comedies,-- the consistent dramatic
interaction between crisis and character,--is precisely
what the 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' do not
always possess. Beaumont's characterization at its
best, with all its naturalness, compelling pathos, poign-
ancy, and abandon is lyrical or idyllic rather than dra-
matic; Fletcher's is expository and histrionic--of
manners rather than the man.
Beaumont did not influence Shakespeare. And if
not Beaumont, then certainly not Fletcher: for in the
actual composition of the core of the so-called ' Beau-
mont-Fletcher romances' Fletcher's share was alto-
gether subordinate; and since after the dissolution of
DID HE INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE? 395
the partnership he attempted but one romantic tragic
drama of that particular kind, Thierry ad Theodoret,
--and that a clumsy failure,-- it must be concluded
that in the designing of those 'romances' his share
xvas even less significant. But to appreciate the con-
tribution of Beaumont to Elizabethan drama, and his
place in literary history, it is fortunately not necessary
to assume that he diverted from its natural course the
dramatic technique of a master, twenty years his
senior and for twenty years before Beaumont began
to write, intimately acquainted with the conditions of
the stage,--the acknowledged playwright of the most
successful of theatrical companies and, in spite of
changing fashions, the most steadily progressive and
popular dramatic artist of the early Jacobean period.
With regard to Beaumont it is marvel sufficient, that
between his twenty-fifth and his twenty-eighth year
of age he should have elaborated in dramatic art,
even with the help of Fletcher, so striking a combina-
tion of preceding models, and have infused into the
resulting heroic-romantic type such fresh poetic
vigour and verve of movement.
NOT A LEADER IN DECADENCE 397
the genius of Fletcher dominated the scenes of lighter
dialogue and comic complication. And it is through
comedies of intrigue and manners written by Fletcher
alone or in company with others, especially Mas-
singer, that Fletcher's individual genius exercised most
influence on. the subsequent history of the drama. The
characteristics which won theatrical pre/minence for
his romantic comedies, heroic tragicomedies and trage-
dies, written after the cessation of Beaumont's activity,
were a Fletcherian vivacity of dialogue, a Fletcherian
perfection of 'business,' and a Fletcherian exaggera-
tion of the tragicomic spirit and technique of which,
in the days of the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership,
Beaumont had availed himself but which he, still, by
virtue of his critical faculty, had held somewhat in
restraint.
From the time of Prynne's Histriomasti, 1633,
there have been critics who have pointed to the grad-
ual deterioration of the stage which, beginning, say
some, with plays of Shakespeare himself, continued
through Beaumont and Fletcher to the drama of the
Restoration. Flecknoe, Rymer, Coleridge, Lamb,
Swinburne, Ward, have commented upon phases of
the phenomenon. _And, recently, one of our most
judicious contemporary essayists has in a series of
articles developed the theme? I heartily concur with
the scholarly and well-languaged editor of The Nation,
in many of his conclusions concerning the general
history of this decline; and I have already in this
book availed myself with profit of some of his sug-
1 Mr. Paul Elmer More, The Nation, N. Y., Nov. 14, 1912,
April 24, 1913, May I, 1913.
398 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
gestions. I agree with him that the downfall of
tragedy began when "the theme was altered from a
single master passion to a number of loosely co6rdi-
nated passions, thus relaxing the rigidity of tragic
structure and permitting the fancy to play more inti-
mately through all the emotions "; that this degenera-
tion may be traced to the time " when ecclesiastical
authority was broken by scepticism and knowledge,
and the soul was left with all its riches of imagina-
tion and emotion, but with the principle of individual
responsibility discredited and the fibre of self-govern-
ment relaxed "; that "the consequences may be seen
in the Italy of the sixteenth century "; and that " the
result is that drama of the court which, besides its
frequent actual indecency, is at heart so often non-
moral and in the higher artistic sense incomprehensi-
ble." But when he ascribes this alteration of the theme
of tragedy from a single master passion to a num-
ber of " loosely co6rdinated passions" to our "twin
dramatists," and cites as his example The Maides
Tragedy in vhich, as he sees it, we have "but a suc-
cession of womanly passions, each indeed cunningly
conceived and expressed, but giving us in the end noth-
ing we can grasp as a whole and comprehend " ;--
and says that Evadne is " no woman at all, unless
mere random passionateness can be accounted such,"
I shake my head in sad demurrer. First, because, as
I have tried to show above, Evadne is anything but
an incomprehensible embodiment of unmotived pas-
sions, and The Maides Tragedy anything but a
"loosely coSrdinated" concern, and secondly, be-
cause I disfavour this attribution of the decadence of
NOT A LEADER IN DECADENCE 399
tragedy, or of comedy, for that matter, to our twin
dramatists. To substantiate such a charge it would
be incumbent upon the critic to prove not only that
the decadence is indubitably visible in the joint-work
of Beaumont and Fletcher, but that it is specifically
visible in Beaumont's, as in Fletcher's, contribution
to that work, and also, that it was not already patent
in the dramatic productions of their seniors; that it
was not patent in Heywood's Ro3'all King and Loyall
Subject, for instance; in the " glaring colours" of
Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, and in his Gentleman
Usher with its artificial atmosphere of courtly ro-
mance, its melodramatic reverses and surprises, its
huddling up of poetic justice; in the sensational de-
vices, passionate unrealities and sepulchral action of
Marston's Malcontent, the sophistical theme and cal-
lous pornography of his Dutch Courtezan, and in the
inhuman imaginings of his Insatiate Countess; that it
was not patent in the heartless irresponsibility and
indecency of Middleton, and in the inartistic warping
of tragic situations to comic solutions that character-
ize his early romantic plays; that it was not patent in
the poisonous exhalations, the wildering of sympathy,
and the disproportioned art that characterize the
IVhite Dez'il of their immediate contemporary, John
Webster.
The decadence was hastened by Fletcher; but not in
any distinctive degree by Beaumont. I second Mr.
More's commendation of Prynne's " philosophic crit-
icism of I632 that 'men in theatres are so far from
sinne-lamenting sorrov, that they even delight them-
selves with the representations of those wicked-
4oo BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
nesses,' " but I deplore the application of that criticism
to Beaun,ont and Fletcher, as that " they loosed the
bonds of conduct and left human nature as a mere
bundle of irresponsibilities."
Many of Fletcher's excesses and defects not only
in the plays written with Beaumont, but in plays writ-
ten after his death, have been conferred from the
day of Flecknoe to the present upon Beaumont.
There is very little "sinne-lamenting sorrow " in the
Valentinia. of Fletcher, or of Fletcher and Massin-
ger, and very little in ;Fletcher's Wife for a Month;
but in many of Beaumont's scenes in The Maides
Tragedy , and A Kin 9 and No King, and The Co.v-
combe the genuine accents of " sinne-lamenting sor-
row" are heard. Fletcher certainly "loosed the
bonds o.f conduct and left human nature as a mere
bundle o,f irresponsibilities," but not Beaumont. Let
the reader turn to that poet's scenes in the joint-plays
(two-thirds of the great ones) as I have indicated
them, or to what I have unrolled of Beaumont's men-
tal habit, and judge for himself. 1
The concession of the essayist from whom, as a
representative of enlightened modern opinion upon
the subject, I have been quoting,--that " as Fletcher's
work stands, he may appear utterly devoid of con-
science, a man to whom our human destinies were
mere toys," I hail with delight, although I think that
Fletcher the man had more honest ideals than Fletcher
the dramatist. But, as a critic, I resent the surmise
that Fletcher "was by nature o.f a manlier, sounder
fibre than Beaumont." In the heroic-romantic com-
Chapters XXlI and XXV, above.
COMPARED WITH FLETCHER 4oi
edy, The Humorous Lieutenant, Fletcher displays, in-
deed, as Mr. More says, "a strain almost like that of
Shakespeare, upon whorn he manifestly modelled him-
self in everything except Shakespeare's serious insight
into human motives." But does that play reveal any-
thing of manlier, sounder fibre than Beaumont's .d
King and No King ?
Written in r6I 9 The Humorous Lieutenant has en-
during vitality, though not because of its tragicomic
presupposition; for the wars and rumours of war are
rhetorical or humorous, the devilish design of the
King upon the chastity of the hero,ine is predestined
to failure,--and the announcement of her death, but
a dramatic device which may impose upon the credul-
ity of her noble lover but not upon the audience. In
the MS. of i625 it is styled "a pleasant comedie ";
and such it is, of ' humour' and romantic love, upon
a background of the heroic. It is Fletcher's best
comedy of the kind; one of the best of the later Shake-
spearian age. The conception of the Lieutenant,
xvhose humour is to fight when he is plagued by
loathsome disease and to wench when he is well, is
not original, nor is the character of the hero Deme-
trius; but in the elaboration Fletcher has created these
characters anew, has surrounded them with half a
dozen other figures no less life-like, and has set them
in a plot, cunningly welded of comic, sentimental,
and martial elements, and captivatingly original.
Though the interest is partly in a vanton intrigue,
and the mirth grossly carnal even when not bawdy,
I think that the objectionable qualities are, for almost
the only time in Fletcher's career in comedy, not in-
4o BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
eradicable. The wondrous charm, " matchless spirit,"
vivacity, and constancy of Celia render the machina-
tions of the procuress, Leucippe, and her " office of
concealments" futile,mso much dramatic realism to
be accentuated or mitigated at the will of the stage
manager ; -- and the alluring offers of the king are
but so many weapons for his own defeat. If the
Lieutenant were not an indissoluble compound of
hero, svashbuckler, shirker, and " stinkard," I fear,
indeed, that he would lose his savour. But the love
of Rabelaisian humour is, after all, ingrained in the
male of the species, and if the license be not nauseat-
ing it is not necessarily damnable. This boisterous,
pocky rascal who " never had but two hours yet of
happiness," and who courts the battlefield to save
him " from the surgeon's miseries," held the stage
from the time of Condel, Taylor, and Lowin, to that
of Macready and Liston, and there is no reason
why his vitality should not be perennial. There are
few more laughable scenes in farcical literature than
those in which, having drained a philtre intended to
make Celia dote upon the King, the Lieutenant im-
agines himself to be a handsome wench of fifteen,
wooes the King most fatuously, even kisses the royal
horses as they pass by. The meeting and the parting,
the trials and the reunion, of Celia and Demetrius
constitute the most convincing and attractive romantic-
pathetic love-affairs in Jacobean drama since Shake-
speare had ceased to write. Indeed, this " perilous
crafty," spirited, "angel-eyed " girl " too honest for
them all " who so ingeniously and modestly shames
the lustful monarch and wins her affianced prince is
COMPARED WITH FLETCHER 403
not umvorthy of the master. Nor is Demetrius. The
play contains many genuinely poetic passages, and
some of those lines of meteoric beauty--" our lives are
but our marches to the grave " in vhich Beaumont
abounded, and that Fletcher too rarely coined. With
all the rankness of its humour, the play has such lit-
erary and dramatic excellence that one cannot but
regret the infrequency with which Fletcher produced
that of which he was capable.
But even this best of Fletcher's heroic-dramatic
plays contains, as Mr. More has observed, " one of
those sudden conversions vhich make us wonder
vhether in his heart he felt any difference between a
satyr-like lust and a chaste love--the conversion of
the lecherous old king." I grant Fletcher's surpass-
ing excellence in comedy, especially the comedy of
manners and intrigue as, for instance, The Chances
and the Rtle a IVife and Have a IVife, and I have
elsewhere acknowledged his supremacy after Shake-
speare in that realm. But we are nov considering not
that kind of composition or its technique, but the fibre
which might be expected to show itself in compositions
involving the element of seriousness. The Humorous
Lieutenant is of that kind, it is called a tragicomedy
by some. Has it one tithe of the serious insight into
human life of any of Beaumont's plays involvi[g eth-
ical conflict?
Inquiring further into the fibre of Fletcher, let us
pass in brief review another play, a genuine tragi-
comedy this time, A IVife for a Month, written the
year before he died, of whose heroine Mr. More says
that " from every point of view, ethical and artistic.
404 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
she is one of the most finely drawn and truest women
in the whole range of English drama." The compli-
cation, here, assuredly affords opportunity for the dis-
play of sound and manly fibre; and the tragicomedy
is instructive in more ways than one: it illustrates
Fletcher's skill in construction and his disregard of
probability; his sense of moral conflict and his in-
sensibility to moral beauty; his power to conceive
characteristic situations and his impotence to construct
natural characters; his capability of noble sentiment
and poetic expression and his beastly perverseness of
fancy, his prostitution of art to sordid sensationalism.
The story of the cumulative torments to which a lust-
ful usurper subjects the maiden, Evanthe, whom he
desires, and Valerio whom she loves, is graphically
estimated by one of the dramatis personae,--'" This
tyranny could never be invented But in the school of
Hell: earth is too innocent." Beside it Zola's L'As-
sommoir smells sweet, and a nightmare lacks nothing
of probability. Ugly, however, as the fundamental
assumption is: namely, that the tyrant should permit
a wedding on condition that at the end of a month
the husband shall suffer death,--and with provision
that meanwhile the honeymoon shall be surrounded
with restriction more intolerable than death itself;
and in'credible as is the contrivance of the sequel.--
kept a-going by the suppression of instinct and com-
monsense on the part of the hero, and withheld from
its proper tragic conclusion by miraculous cure, an
impossible conversion, and an unnatural clemency,--
the plot is after all deftly knit, and the interest sus-
tained with baleful fascination. But it would be
406 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
Enough for human eyes, and then to wander from,"--
and when he describes the graces of spiritual love.
And the Queen's thoughts upon death, though melo-
dramatic, have something of the dignity of Beaumont's
style. But the minds of the principal personages re-
fleet not only the flashing current but the turbid
estuaries of Fletcher's thought. The passion, save
for Valerio's, is lurid, and the humour latrinal. To
sketch the bestial even in narrative, however fleet-
ing, is inartistic; to fix it on canvas is offensive: to
posture it upon the stage is unpardonable. The last
is practically what Fletcher has done here; and the
wonder is that he appears to think that he is justifying
virtue.
No; Fletcher had not the fibre of Beaumont even
when he was writing with him; and he did not achieve
"a manlier, sounder fibre," after Beaumont had
ceased, and he had swung into the brilliant orbit which
he rounded as sole luminary of the stage.
I object again,-- and the reader who has followed
the exposition of the preceding pages will, I hope, ob-
ject with me,--to the dictum of a German writer of
this latter day, that the reason of the degeneracy of
Bemtmont and Fletcher, ethically, "seems to lie in the
narrowing of the drama from a national interest to
the flattery of a courtly caste." Mr. More opines that
such an explanation should not be pressed too far; and
he suggests that one reason why " we are unable to
comprehend many of the persons upon the stage of
Beaumont and Fletcher" is that we are similarly
unable to comprehend " the more typical men and
women who were playing the actual drama of the
4o8 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
have learned of his breeding, life, and mental habit
the implicit opponent--very much like his brother
Sir John,--and of the opposite of which he was in
his poetic and dramatic output, as I have minutely
demonstrated, the professed exponent. In the broad
daylight of philological science and modern historical
criticism we should no longer regard Beaumont-and-
Fletcher as an indivisible pair of Siamese twins, con-
structing with all four hands at once the fabric of
fifty-three plays, or even of ten, and tongue-and-
grooving the boards with such diabolic deftness that
each artisan shall for ever be credited with the merits
and defects of both. It is, at any rate, time that the
world of scholars,--and then the world of readers
may follow,m render unto Cesar the things that are
Cesar's.
As for Cesar, we concede to him, John Fletcher,
once for all, as he may be read in his independent
work, by one even running, artistic virtues numerous
and brilliant: 1 gaiety, wit, sprightly dialogue; mas-
tery of stage-craft,m of all the devices of captivating
plot and rattling 'business,' and all the conventions
and theatrically legitimate clap-trap of dramatic types
and humours, hallowed by success, adored by the
actor, and darling to the public. \Ve concede skill in
the weaving of romantic complications, captivatingly
cunning, and in the construction of situations irresisti-
bly ludicrous; remarkable inventiveness of sensational
adventure and spectacular scene and attractive set-
1They are well presented by Miss Hatcher in her ]oh
Fletcher; and they are again discussed in my forthcoming third
volume of Representative Ezglish Comedies.
COMPARED WITH FLETCHER 4o9
ting; realism at every turn, and an ability to portray
manners, varied and minute. Above all, we admire,
and thankfully rejoice in, his smoothness of mechan-
ism, his lightness of touch, his contrivance and ma-
nipulation of pure comedy--whether of manners or
intrigue,--and in his world of characters, not only
laughter-compelling, but endoxved with humour them-
selves and sworn to the enthronement of the Spirit
of Mirth.
On the other hand we read on every page of
Fletcher's independent contribution to English drama
what, perhaps, was not the man himself, but his drama-
turgic pose--still for the world the essence of the
Fletcher who ruled it from the stage" 1 we read his
" shallowness of moral nature," his acquiescence in
the ethical apathy and cynicisln of the time; his indeli-
cacy; his indifference to, if not irreverence for, the
dramatic proprieties,-- his subservience to popular
taste and favour in an age when " the theatre had
ceased to be the expression of patriotism and of the
national life and had become the amusement of the
idle gentleman and of such members of the louver
classes as vere not kept away by the Puritan disap-
proval of the stage." \Ve witness with amusement
but vith self-reproach his presentation of characters
superficial, and superficially refracting the evanescent
vanities and heartless vices of Jacobean London, as
if representative of actual and general life; his play
of emotions feigned or sentimental; his violent con-
a See again Miss Hatcher's work, and G. C. Macaulay, Francis
Beaunzont, A Critical Study, especially pp. I86-I8; and my essay
on The Fellows and Follox,ers of Shakespeare (Part Two) in
the volume mentioned above.
4Io BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
trasts, unnatural conversions, impossible revolutions
of fortune; we discern the absence of subtle intuition,
the failure to effect profound and lasting impression,
the " lack of seriousness and of spiritual poise." We
note, in the heroic-romantic dramas, improbability
and extravagance; and, in the tragedies, such as l,'al-
eztiziaz, a total disregard of the unity of interest,--
just that muddling of motives of which the editor of
Tte Nation has written,-- and therefore the failure
to realize unity of effect. There has been no moral
sequence: the suspense has been distracted by the va-
riety of emotions stirred. After the hours of strain
to which the spectator has imaginatively subjected
himself, the relief what Aristotle calls the catharsis
is not forthcoming: because the intellect has not
been clarified but fuddled ; the will has not been braced ;
the feelings appropriate to tragedy of pity and of
fear--have not enjoyed an unthwarted, undiverted
outflow. The faculties have been tantalized by mani-
fold, deceptive, agonies of thirst. They should have
been centred in one yearning, conducted to one clear
spring of medicament, and purged by waters of truth,
justice, and sympathy. From Fletcher's f'aletitiaz,
and t?oduca despite the poetry and the onrush of
the dramatic action there proceeds no calm, " all pas-
sion spent"; no beauty that is peace. And of the
tragicomedies, Tlw Loyall Subject and d IVife for
a Moth,, this verdict may be even more readily pro-
nounced.
Such are the excellences and defects of Fletcher.
Let us give him all the glory of the former; but stay
from burdening Beaumont, who had faults of his own,
COMPARED WITH OTHERS 4II
with responsibility for the latter,--with the unmoral-
itv or immorality or extravagant artistry of Fletcher
when not associated with Beaumont. With the vices
and virtues of Fletcher's rocket, bursting in stellar
polychrome, Beaumont had nothing to do. To him
justice can be accorded only if he, after these three
centuries, be considered alone,--not for ever coupled
with Fletcher, but spoken and thought of, and known,
as.dramatist, poet, man of far sounder fibre, and more
virile marrow,--of superior insight, imagination, and
art.
Next to Shakespeare, the most essentially poetic
dramatist of the early Jacobean period was Francis
Beaumont. He had not the learning of Jonson, nor
the long career, nor the dictatorial position; nor did
he attempt to rival him in comedy, or criticism. But
his great poem, The Ma.ides Tragedy is a thousand
times more enthralling and poetic than Sejanns or
Catiline. Shakespeare always excepted, the only au-
thor of tragedy in that day whose intuitions and lines
of astounding splendour at all compete with, sometimes
surpass, Beaumont's is Webster; but the fascination
of his Duchess of Malfy is lurid, miasmatic, stupefy-
ing; that of The Maides Tragedy, breathless and
heart-breaking.
In the drama of mingled motive, Jonson produced
but one masterpiece that in poetry, valiancy of design,
and portrayal of the ridiculous, equals Beaumont's
.A K,g an, d No Kin.g,--the Volpone; but that is not
tragicomedy, and it drips venom. All that stands be-
tween A King and No Kig and artistic perfection is
the dnouement. If the lovers had died, their struggle
412 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
against temptation still continuing, their passion un-
fulfilled,- if in the moment of death, they had dis-
covered that their union were no incest after all, Beau-
mont would have left behind him another consummate
tragedy. As it is, to find a parallel in Jacobean liter-
ature, outside of Shakespeare, one must turn to Ford's
"Tis a Pity, She's a lFhorc. There again with poetic
effulgence the problem of incest is dramatized; but
how half-hearted the struggle, insincere the moral,-
the poetry, purple and unconvincing!
In romantic comedy, between 6o 3 and I6-.o 5, others
have produced plays which from the dramatic point
of view equal Philaslcr,-- Dekker, Heywood, Marston,
Chapman, Middleton, and Rowley. Not all even of
Shakespeare's romantic comedies come up to Philaster
in literary or dramatic excellence; but only Shake-
speare has written what surpasses it.
In the comedy that delineates humours, The IVom-
an-ijaler, as regards both poetry and technique, falls
below several plays of Dekker, Chapman, Marston,
Middleton, and Jonson, and below the earlier efforts
of Shakespeare; but in characterization it is as good
as some of Shakespeare's. There is no comic fig-
ure in Love's Labour's Lost., the Tvo Gentlemen
of Verona, or the Comedy of Errors, that surpasses
Beaumont's Hungry Courtier; and the humorous dia-
logue and the prose as a whole of The IVoman-ijater
are more natural, and more intelligible to the modern
ear. With Shakespeare's later comedies that in any
degree avail themselves of the ' humours' element, or
with Jonson's masterpieces in this kind, The lVoman-
Ijater, of course, can not be placed in comparison.
4I 4 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
manager's enterprise or ignorance, and luck, is ma-
terial for an essay in itself. I am not asserting that
The Knight of the Burning Pestle pretends to poetry,
as do all of Shakespeare's plays; but that for chuck-
ling and side-long mirth, and for manners and
insight into the life of a rarely interesting period, it
is fine comedy, while as burlesque it is equalled by
few of the kind in our language and excelled by none.
It may be true that burlesques lose their flavour with
the passing of their victims. But that does not hold
true of the drama of problems perennially recurring
and of emotions common to men of every age and clime.
Of such drama are The Maidcs Tragedy and A Kitty
and No King. They are not antiquated. And I doubt
vhether they are stronger meat than some of Shake-
speare's plays, all of which are more or less ' arranged'
before they are placed upon the modern stage. As
to strong meat, the difference betxveen the Elizabethan
taste and the present Georgian is more a matter of
variety than of flavour. Our forefathers liked their
venison in gobbets, for three hours at a stretch, and
washed it dovn with a tun or tvo of sack. The thea-
tre-going public to-day likes its game just as high, but
it varies the meal with other dishes as highly seasoned,
--and washes it down with a foreign-labeled little bot-
tle of champagne. Our ancestors called a depraved
woman by a brief bad name, and put it into poetry.
\Ve denominate her, if at all, by some euphemistic cir-
cumlocution, in prose; but we none the less throng the
theatre to see Dalilah play, and we follow with ap-
parent gusto her sinuous enticements upon the stage.
We rejoice in problem-plays more erotic, and far
COMPARED WITH OTHERS
415
more subtly perilous, than those xvhich Shakespeare
and Beaumont beheld. We are of an age of uplift,
and meticulous reform. We would eliminate forni-
cation and adultery; but not from our plays. They
teem with--suggestion. There is nothing neurotic,
nothing insidious in The Maides Tragedy and A Kin9
and No King. The grave of sin is wide open; and the
spade that digged it stands in plain view, and is called
a spade. On the whole I had rather have the Anglo-
Saxon bluntness and gleaming poetry of the Beaumont
than the whitewashed epigram and miching-mallecho
of the twentieth-century play I saw last night. There
is no reason why, properly cut and staged, Beaumont's
greatest plays should not yield delight to-day. And as
for the reader vhy should he not turn back to " the
inexhaustible treasures" of entertainment offered by
these plays. " They were," as says Mr. Paul Ehner
More, " they were to the Elizabethan age what the
novel is to ours, and I wonder how many readers three
centuries from now will go back to our fiction for
amusement as we to-day can go back to Beaumont and
Fletcher."
I began this book by quoting from an historian of
the drama of marked repute: "In the Argo of the
Elizabethan drama--as it presents itself to the im-
agination of our own latter days--Shakespeare's is
and must remain the commanding figure. Next to
him sit the twin literary heroes, Beaumont and
Fletcher--more or less vaffuely supposed to be in-
separable from one another in their works." And
also from the last great poet of the Victorian age:
" If a distinction must be made between the Dioscuri
APPENDIX
GENEALOGICAL TABLES
C)
49
420 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
L__
APPENDIX 4 :
422 BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST
APPENDIX 423
INDEX
43o INDEX
Boyle, R., 234, 252, 254, 3oo,
3o2, 308, 374
Bread-street, 99, 113, 2o3
Brett, Cyril, Drayton's Minor
Poems, 191
Bridal, The, 359
Brittain's Ida, Phineas Fletch-
er, 6 4
Britannia's Pastorals, 132-144
Broadgates, 29
Brome, Richard, 92, 168, 212,
213
Brooke, Christopher, 38, II9,
136, I45, I47-I49
Brookesby, Bartholomew, 48,
57 ; Edward, 47
Browne, William, 38, 4o, 131-
I44, 153, 202, 214
Browning, Robert, 183, 246
Brydges, Egerton, 233
Buc, Sir George, 349
Buckingham, George ViIIiers,
Duke of, I9, 60, 159-164,
BuIIen, A. H., art. John
Fletcher ( D. N. B); gen.
editor, Variorum Beau-
mont and Fletcher, 203,
234, 271, 272, 312, et pas-
sim
Burbadge, Cuthbert, lO3, 342,
343
Burbadge, Richard, Io2, lO3,
II4, II8, I22, 136, 154, 316,
317, 358
Burre, Waiter, 8I, 319, 32o,
322, 323
Burton, William, 16, 186
Bury-Fair, 96, 22o
Bussy D','tmbols, 399
Butler, James, Duke of Or-
monde, 188
cadences, conversational and
lyrical, 247
caesurae, 244ff.
Cambridge English Classics,
edition of Beaumont and
Fletcher, 244, 263-27o, et
passim
Camden, William, 137, 149,
I78, I82
Camden Miscellany, The, 66
Campion, Father, 46
Capricious Lady, The, 377
Captaine, The, 98, III, I76, 236,
240, 306, 378, 383
Cardenio or Cardenna, 111,
119
Carey, Giles, I14, 122, 336
Carleton, Mistris, 125
Cart (Ker) Robert, Earl of
Somerset, 74, 75, 179, 372
Cartwright, William, 2o9, 232
Casaubon, Isaac, 182
Catesby, Robert, 49, 50-53, 57,
58
Catholics, and the "Catholic
Cousins" of Beaumont,
46ff., 179
Catiline, I2O, I54, 411
Cavendish, Henry, 17, 24
Cavendishes, the, 16, 17, 38, 165
Cavendish, Sir William, first
Duke of Newcastle, 165
Centurie of Praise, 2oo
Cervantes, see Don Quixote
ChaIloner, Missionary Priests,
16
Chalmers, A., 185, 233
Chamberlain, John, 125, 126,
I55f.
Chancery, Inns of, 29, 30, et
passim; and see Inns of
Court
INDEX 431
Chances, The, 64, 211, 230, 236,
243, 244, 263, 267, 268, 279,
403
Chapel Players, the, 32
Chapman, George, 85, 86, 87, 98,
lO2, 116, 122, 124, 125, I32ff. ,
135 , 142 , I54 , I82, 189, I94.
I9 , 200, 202, 203, 214, 317,
328, 329, 391, 396, 399,
412
Charles I, I85, et passim
Charles II, 358
Charles, D,ke oj: Byron, The
Trat?edie o[, 317
Charles, Prince of Wales, 371,
372
Charnwood Forest, lO, 1I, I3,
18, 20, 43, 151, 159
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 37
Chaucer, Speght's, 24, 178
Cheapside, 99, 114, et pa.sim
Child, H. H., 43
" chorizontes," the, 9
Christ's Victorie, Giles Fletch-
er, 64
Cicely Tufton, see Rutland
Cinthio, 392
Clarendon, Lord, 169
Clark, Andrew, 147, 148, 192
Cleves wars, the, 368-370, 372,
373
Clifford, Anne, Countess of
Dorset, of Pembroke and
Montgomery, I92
Clifford's Inn, 131
Clifton, Sir Gervase, 166
Clifton, Lady Penelope, 165f.,
174, 202
Cockayne, Sir Aston, 168, 219,
226, 228, 233, 377
Coke, Sir Edward, 52, 58, 148,
I62
Coleorton, 12, 19, 45, 16o, et
passim
Coleridge, S. T., 5, 397
Collier, J. P., lO2, 220, 233
Collins, Peerage o[ England,
14, 17, 50, et passim
Comedy o[ Errors, A, 35, 393,
412, 413
Commenda,tory Verses, 94,
198, 229, 230, et passim
Concer,ing the True Forms o[
English Poetry, I84
Condell, Henry, lO3, 12o, 122,
343, 402
Congreve, William, 188
Convivium Philosophicum, 145-
149, 203
Conyoke or Connock, 149
Cook, Alexander, 122
Cooke, W., 377
Coke, Sir Edward, 52, 58
Corbet, Bishop, 181, 195
Coriolanus, 389
Coronation, The, 229, 237
Coryate, Tom, 99, 149
Cotton, Charles, the elder, 98,
I68-I 70 , 226--228
couplet, 'heroic,' 252
Cowley, Abraham, I84
Coxcombe, The, 8, 87, 96-1Ol,
103, I06, III, 202, 2(38, 228,
236, 240, 273, 286, 287, 294,
296,298,311,332-341 , 370,
378,383,396, 400
Cranefield, Arthur, 149
Critics of Beaumont and
Fletcher, 234
Croke, Sir John, Charles, and
Unton, 138
Cromwell, Oliver, 74, 138, 17o
Crowne of Thornes, The, 184
Cunliffe, J. W., 35, 37
43 2 INDEX
Cupid's Revenge, 8, iI1-112,
I59, 237,239, 240, 283,285,
288,294,299 , 3o5, 314,359ff.,
370, 378, 381, 384, 386, 387,
388, 389, 396, 4o7
Curious Impertinent, The, El
Curioso Impertinente, Le
Curieux Impertinent, 332,
334, 335
Custome of the Countrey,
The, 236
Cymbeline, 344, 345, 386-395
Cynthia's Revels, 85, 86
Cyropcedeia, lO9
Daborne, Robert, x22, 239, 379,
4o7
Damon and Pythias, 32
Daniel, Joseph, I49
Daniel, P. A., 349, 359
Daniel, Samuel, 142, 194
Darley, G., Works of Beau-
mont and Fletcher, 25, I8i,
233
D'Avenant, William, 82, 3o7,
308, 350
Davies, John, of Hereford,
Io5, I33, I42, I45, I46, 209,
342, 343, 346 366
Day, John, lO2, 122, 159, 314,
325
Dekker, John, 98, lO2, 122, 211,
412
Denham, Sir John, 184
Description of Elizium, Dray-
ton, IVI
Devereux, Lady Penelope, i66
diction, 26off., 275f., 281ff., and
see Beaumont and Fletcher
Diego Sarmiento, Don, Count
Gondomar, 37Iff.
Digby, Sir Everard, 48, 5o, 52,
53, 57
'scourse of the English
Stage, 386
disputed plays, 3ooff.
Di.trest Mother, The, I86
Divine Poems, Drayton, IgI
Dolce, Ludovico, Giocasta, 35
Don Diego, see Sarmiento de
Acufia
Donne, John, 38, 98, I48, 149,
I5o, 169
Don Quixote, relation to The
Knight o the Burning
Pestle, esp. 321-331;. also
8o, I20, 320, 332f., 413
' Doridon,' 14off.
Douay, 369
Douthwaite, W. R., Grafts Inn,
etc., 3off.
Double Marriage, The, 6, 236
Drake, Sir Francis, 37, 64, I38,
216
Dramatic Miscellany, Davies,
366
Drayton, Michael, 2L 26, 39.
40, 4I, 42, 43, 44. 72, 98,
ii6, iz2, I32ff., I37, I45,
I53, 182, 185, 187, 191, 192,
194, 201, 202, 209
Drummond, William, of Haw-
thornden, 84, 90, 152, 193,
194 , 202, 230
Dryden, John, 71, 72, 121, 188,
233, 358, 365
Duchess of Malt, The, 411
Dugdale, G., I31
Duke, H. E., Grafts Inn, 34ff.
Duke of Milan, The, 136
Duke of York, The, (Prince
Charles's) Players, 335, 336
D'Lrxf, Marquis, 89-90, 274
436 INDEX
Henry VIII, 12o, 179
Herbert, Mary, Countess of
Pembroke, 42
Herbert, William, third Earl
of Pembroke, I33 , 153
Herford, C. H., 287
Herodotus, lO9
Heroical Advcntures of the
Knight of the Sea, 328
Herrick, Robert, 169, 17o, 350,
361
Herring, Joan, 220
Hesperides, Herrick, 169, 17o
Heyward, Edward, 137
Heywood, Thomas, I22, 204,
325, 331, 399, 412
Hierarchie of the Blessed
Angells, The, o4
Hill, H. W., 159
Hill, Nicholas, 203
Hills, G., 337
Histoire de Celide, Thamyre,
et Calidon, 89
Historical Portraits (Oxford),
19o, 234ff.
Histriomastix, 397
History of Cardenio, by
Fletcher and Shakespeare,
119
Hodgets, John, 40
Holinshed, 392
Holland, Aaron, 318
Holland, Elizabeth, 62, 66
Holland, Hugh, 98, 148, 149
Holme-Pierrepoint, 16, 17
(Upon an) Honest Man's For-
tune, 8, 144, 176, 215, 220,
236, 238, 280, 378
Hoskins, John, his Convivium
Fhilosophicum, I46ff., 149,
203
Howard, Henry, 349, 36I
Howard of Walden, Lord, 321
Howe, Josias, 209
Hughes, Thomas, Misfortunes
of Arthur, 35
Humorous Lieutenant, The,
236, 243, 265, 268, 278, 279,
4Ol-4O3
Huntingdon, see Hastings
hyperbole, 285
Hypercritica, Bolton, 194
Idea, the Shepheard's Garland,
Eglogs, Drayton, 42
I[ You Know Not Me, You
Know Nobody, 331
Ile of Guls, 159
Imogen, Innogen, 392
Inderwick, F. A., Calendar of
Inner Temple Records, 30,
131, et passim
In Laudem ./luthoris, 40, 134
Inner Temple, 18, 29, 33, 37,
99, I24ff., I9, 131, 137, 138,
139, 162
Inner Temple Records, )--3I,
131, 139, et passim
Inns of Court and Chancery,
29, 32, 37, 118, 135, 145, et
passim
Imatiate Countess, The, 399
Island Princesse, The, 236, 278
Isley, Ursula, wife of the
dramatist, 175-128, 18o,
Isleys, the, 175-177 , 186
iteration, 259
James I, Progress of 16o3, 44;
60, 74, 77, 91, 161, 162, 164,
165, 372
joint-plays, 252ff., 4ooff., etc.
Jones, Inigo, 125, 145, 147, 148
INDEX 437
Jonson, Ben, 3, 5, 9. 24. 32, 52, 72,
82, 84, 85, 86, 96, 97, 98,
99, IOO, IOI, 102, 103, IIO,
III, II4ff., 122, 124, I32ff.,
136, 137, 142, 145, 148, 149,
I5O, 152, 153, 154, 157, 169,
17o, 174, 182, 185, 191, 193,
I99, 200, 2Ol, 205, 2o9, 211,
213, 214, 231, 272, 322, 327,
328, 329, 334, 335, 336, 342 ,
343, 369, 411, 412
Jovius, Paulus, 78
Juby, Edward, 114
Julius Caesar, lO8, IiO
Ker (Carr) Robert, Earl of
Somerset, 74, 75, 179, 372
Keysar, Robert, 80, 81, 315,
318, 32o, 323
Kinwelmersh, Francis, 35
King, Edward, Milton's 'Ly-
cidas,' 24
King azd No King, A, 7, 8, 37,
92 , 109-110, 112, 121, 145,
146, 174, 205, 237, 239, 241,
252, 255, 258, 259, 273, 275,
288, 293, 294, 307, 3O8, 311,
346, 361-367, 378, 381, 382,
384, 386-396, 40O, 401, 411,
414, 415
King Lear, 159, 283
King's Players, the, 38. 97, lO2,
lO3, lO5, lO9, IiO, 114, 119,
12o, 122, 124, 136, 211, 3o6,
315. 316, 343, 345, 349, 36o
King's Bench, 138
Kirkham, Edward. 118, 136
Knight of Malta, The, 211, 236 ,
238, 239, 378
Knight of the Burning Pestle,
The, 7, 41 , 73, 79-81, 88,
93, ioo, 112, 115, 171, 204,
237, 240, 273, 285, 31o-332 ,
378, 382, 385, 407, 413, 414
Knight of the Burning Sword,
The, 325
Knight of the Sunne and His
Brother Rosicleer, The, 327
Knole Park, Kent, 70, 187, et
passim
Knowles, Sheridan, 359
Koeppel, E., 117
Kyd, Thomas, 26, 200, 204, 285,
286, 313
Lady Elizabeth's Players, 314
Lamb, Charles, 233, 397
Langbaine, G., 233, 332
Lansdowne MS., 200
Lavoes of Candy, The, 236, 238,
378
Leland, John, Itinerary, IO, II,
154, 16o, et passim
Lennard, Sir Henry, twelfth
Lord Dacre, 70, 71, 178
Leonhardt, B., 117
Letter to Ben Jonson, 97-1Ol,
193, 251, 337
Lincoln's Inn, 32, I24f., 135,
136, 145, 148
Lisle, Sir George, 2o 4, 23I, 361
Little French Law3.,er, The,
236
Lodge, Thomas, 159, 392
Love Lies a-Bleeding, lO3, etc.,
see Philaster
Lovell, John, Lord, 22, 23
Lovers Progresse, The, 236
Loves Cure. 236, 240, 305, 378
Love's Labour" s Lost, 392, 412
Loves Pilgrimage, 236, 237,
238. 378
Lowin, John, I22, 2I 4, 402
438 INDEX
Loyall Subject, The, 21I, 236,
243 , 268, 278, 41o
Luce, Morton, 393
Lyly, John, 26, 200
Macaulay, G. C., Francis Beau-
.tont, a Critical Study;
Beaumont and tletcher in
Canb. Hist. Eng. Lit. 89,
lO8, 117, 226, 234, 252, 265,
287, 300, 302, 305, 308, 312 ,
337, 374, 409
Macbeth, 286
Macready, W. C., 359
Mad Lover, The, 236, 279
Maide in the Mill, The, 236
Maides Tragedy, The, 6, 7, lO7-
lO9, II7, i2i, I24, 159, 230,
232, 234, 237, 239, 240, 241,
252, 255, 258, 273, 285, 288,
289, 292, 308, 346, 349-359,
361, 378, 38I. 382, 384, 386-
395, 398, 400, 405, 407, 411,
414, 415
Malcontent, The, 399
Malone, Edmund, 233
Manners, Lady Katharine (Vil-
liers), Duchess of Buc "king-
ham, I59, 162, 163
Manners, Roger, see Rutland
Manningham, John, 32
Manverses, the, 16-18
Manwood, Thomas, 136
Marl coccu, battu et content,
Le, 334
Markham, Lady, 165
Marlowe, Christopher, 33, I94,
200, 2Ol, 204, 285, 286, 313,
326, 362
Marston, John, 73, 88, lO2, I22,
328, 329, 396, 399, 412
Martin, Richard, 99, 149
Mary, Queen of Scots, 24, 65,
x79
Masque of the Inner Temple,
The, 119, 124-139,145, 2o8,
225, 228, 236, 246, 247, 248,
249, 250, 259, 281, 385
3lasque of Flowers, see Flow-
Masque o[ Ulysses ond Circe,
The, 133
Massinger, Philip, 6, 8, 98, II9,
I22, 136 , I68, I69, 2oi, 203,
2II, 214, 2I 9, 226, 228, 234,
24I, 265, 272, 300, 305, 306,
326, 340, 379, 400, 407; au-
thorities upon his style,
300
Mayne, Jasper, 36I
McKerrow, R. B., 271, 272
Measure for Measure, 391, 392,
393
Menaechmus, 35
Menaphon, 159
Merchant Taylors' School, 86
Mermaid Tavern, the, 97-99,
114, 145, 148, 149, 193, 203
Merry Wives, The, Iio
Metamorphosis o1: Tobacco, 38
.lllicrocosmographie, 198
Middle Temple, the, 118, I24f. ,
138
Middleton, Thomas, lO2, 122,
2oi, 2II, 239, 272, 305, 324,
399, 407, 412
Midsummer-Night's Dream, A,
392
Milner, J. D., 218
Mirror for Magistrates, The,
70
Mirror of Knighthood, The,
327, 329
'Mirtilla,' 43, 45, 187
INDEX 439
Miseries of Enforced Marriage,
The, 324
Misfortunes of Arthur, The,
35
Mitre Inn, The, 94, 145, I46
Monsieur Thomas, 73, 84, 88--
94, 168, 237, 243, 245, 247,
263, 383
Montaigne, 228
Montagu, Lady Mary Wort-
ley, 25
Monteagle, Lord, 50, 51, 57
Montemayor, 392
Moore, Sir Thomas, 194
More, Paul Elmer, 272f., 355f.,
397ff., 415
Morris, John, Life of Father
Gerard, 46-59, et passim
Mosely, Humphrey, The Sta-
tioner to the Readers, 13o,
206, 216, 217
Morte d'.drthur, 327
Mountjoy, Christopher, 114,
118
Moyses in a Map of his Mir-
acles, 42
Mucedorus, 331
Much Ado About Nothing,
11o, 344, 390, 392
Mulcaster, Richard, 86, 3r8
Munday, Anthony, 327
Murch, H. S., ed. of The
Knighl, 324, 330
Murray, J. T., Eng. Dram.
Conp., lO4, lO5, 315, 368
Muses" Elizium, 44, 187, 19I
Narrative of Father Gerard,
47, 54
Nashe. Thomas, r54, 204
Nevill, Sir Henry, the elder,
145-148, 153; the younger,
145, 146
Nice Valour, The, 97, 98, 216,
236, 238, 378
Nichols, J., Collections, Hist.
Leicestershire, Progresses
of Queen Elizabeth, Prog-
resses of James I, 12, 13,
19, 65, 131, 186, et passim.
Nimphalls, Drayton, 187, 191
Night Walker, The, 237
Noble Gentleman,, The, 236,
238, 378
Northumbrian MS. of Bacon,
146
Norton, Thomas, Gorboduc, 37
oaths, 275, 286
Oath of Allegiance, The, 60, 164
Obstinate Lady, The, 377
Ode to Sir William Skipworth,
215
Oldfield, Mrs., 377
Old IVh,es Tale, The, 326
Oliphant, E. H., 83, lr7, 234,
241 , 252, 270, 272, 281, 300,
302, 3O4, 309, 312, 337, 338,
340, 374
On the Tombs in Westminster,
I83
optatives, 275, 286
Orlando Furioso, 334
Ostler (Osteler, Ostler, Osler),
Wm., 122, 342, 343
Othello, 79, IlO
Overbury, Sir Thomas, 27,
153, 179
Ovid, 38, 4 I,
Palanon and Arcite, 32
442 INDEX
Seyliard, Mrs., see Elizabeth
Beaumont
Seyliard, Thomas, 45, I59, I76,
I87; see also Beaumont,
Elizabeth
Shadwell, Thomas, 96
Shakespeare, 3, 4, 5, 9, I2, 23,
26, 32, 33, 35, 79, 83, 92, 98,
Ioi, lO2, Io3, Io5, Io6, io8,
I IO, II I, I I4ff. , IIS, I22,
I24, I36, I45, I54, I59, I82,
I84, I93, I94, I99, 201, 2II,
214, 219, 272 , 280, 283, 286,
309, 326, 329, 330, 343, 344,
386ff., "387ff., 389, 396,
4IIff.
Shakespeare, and Beaumont,
Shakespeare, and his company
of players, ioI-IiI, II8-
2o, I45, 316
Shakespeare, Was he influenced
by Beaumont and Fletch-
er ? 386-395
Shaw, Knights of England, 17,
45, et passim
Shelton, Thomas, transl, of
Don Quixote, I2O, 321-331,
335.
._Vhepheard's Calendar, 44
Shepherdess, The, John Beau-
mont, I59 , I63
Shepherd's Hunting, The, I35
Shepherd's Pipe, The, 34. I35,
I39
Shirley, James, xSo, 206, 208,
229
Sicelides, Phineas Fletcher, 64
Sidney, Elizabeth Manners,
Countess of Rutland, I33,
I39, I5o-I59, 65, I72-I74,
I80, 287
Sidney, Sir Philip, 26, 37, Io6,
III, i33, I42, i43, x5off.,
I58, I59, I66, I97, 2oi,
392
Sidney, Mary Herbert, Countess
of Pembroke, 42 , I33, I53
Silent Voman, The, i2o, 4r3,
see Epicoene
Skipwith, Sir William, 45, I66,
215
Spanish Curate, The, 236, 27I
Slye, Christopher,
Smith, L. T., II, 2oo
Southampton, see Wriothesley
Spedding, James, 36
Speght's Chaucer, 24, 78
Spenser, Edmund, 24, 44, I82,
I93, I99, 200
Stanhope, Philip, Earl of
Chesterfield, t65
Stanley, Thomas, second Earl
of Derby, I4
Stanley, Thomas, 35o, 374
Stapleton, Miles Thomas,
State Papers DomestiG Cal-
endar of, x5, 5I-6I, 63, I27,
x29, I46, I62, I64, I77, et
passim
Stationers" Registers, 84,
237, et passhn
Stationer to the Readers, The
Mosely, 2o6
' Stella,' i66
Stephens, John, 2o2
Stiefel, A. L., 89
Stourton, Lord, 5o
Stratford upon Avon,
Stuart, Lady Arabella, 7, I79
Suckling, Sir John, I37
Sullivan, Mary, x27, I28
Sundridge, x75-I8o, 377, et
passim
