FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[186]IV, 1; and II, 2.[187]V, 3, 4.[188]IV, 1.[189]BetweenOriana sits downandexit Oriana, as in Dyce, Vol. I, pp. 43-48.[190]I, 1; I, 2; II, 2; II, 3; III, 1; IV, 4.[191]E. g., the "lets" and the "alls" of IV, 4, 36-40, as numbered in Alden's edition. The play is devoid of Fletcherian jolts.[192]V, 2, 63,et seq.[193]II, 2, 90.[194]IV, 4, 5.[195]Macaulay, Oliphant, Bullen, and Alden.[196]Engl. Studien, IX.[197]Wallace,Shakspere's Money Interest in the Globe, Cent. Maga., Aug., 1910, p. 510.[198]Fleay,Chr. Eng. Dr., II, 277.[199]Fleay,H. S., p. 356.[200]Wallace,Shakspere and the Blackfriars, Century Maga., Sept., 1910, p. 751.[201]Murray,Eng. Dram. Comp., I, 353, who cites Nichols,Progresses, IV, 1074; but Whitefriars had been destined by Keysar and others for the Queen's Revels' Children since 1608.[202]Rawlidge,A Monster lately found out, etc., 1622, as quoted by Fleay,H. S., 36; Wallace,Cent. Maga., Aug., 1910; and Thorndike,Infl. of B. and F., p. 60.[203]See the impressive array of evidence, internal and external, presented by Thorndike,Infl. of B. and F., pp. 59-63; and by Alden,K. B. P., pp. 166-169 (Belles Lettres Series).[204]Accounts inAthenaeum, 2, 1903, 220.[205]Wallace,Cent. Maga., Sept.1910, p. 747. See also Greenstreet Papers in Fleay,H. St., 249.[206]For this argument seeEngl. Studien, XII, 309.[207]Baudouin's French version of 1608 is merely of the episodic narrative ofThe Curious Impertinent.[208]On the Influence of Spanish Literature upon English(Romanische Forschungen, XX, 613-615,et seq.).[209]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 inRomanische Forschungen, already cited; others, communicated by him to Dr. H. S. Murch, appear inYale 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 A. S. W. Rosenbach's unpublished conclusions, as cited by Miss Hatcher,John Fletcher, etc., 1905, p. 42, are to the same effect.[210]Wilkins,Miseries of Enforced Marriage, III; Middleton,Your Five Gallants, IV, 8; cited by Schevill,ut supra.[211]See Schevill,u. s.[212]H. V. Routh, inC. H. L., IV, 410.[213]The lines,Who like Don Quixote do advanceAgainst a windmill our vaine lance,occur in a copy of versesTo the Mutable Faireincluded amongThe Poems of Francis Beaumontin the edition of 1640. But the volume includes numerous poems not written by Beaumont, and is one of the most uncritical collections that ever was printed. This poem is by Waller.

[186]IV, 1; and II, 2.

[187]V, 3, 4.

[188]IV, 1.

[189]BetweenOriana sits downandexit Oriana, as in Dyce, Vol. I, pp. 43-48.

[190]I, 1; I, 2; II, 2; II, 3; III, 1; IV, 4.

[191]E. g., the "lets" and the "alls" of IV, 4, 36-40, as numbered in Alden's edition. The play is devoid of Fletcherian jolts.

[192]V, 2, 63,et seq.

[193]II, 2, 90.

[194]IV, 4, 5.

[195]Macaulay, Oliphant, Bullen, and Alden.

[196]Engl. Studien, IX.

[197]Wallace,Shakspere's Money Interest in the Globe, Cent. Maga., Aug., 1910, p. 510.

[198]Fleay,Chr. Eng. Dr., II, 277.

[199]Fleay,H. S., p. 356.

[200]Wallace,Shakspere and the Blackfriars, Century Maga., Sept., 1910, p. 751.

[201]Murray,Eng. Dram. Comp., I, 353, who cites Nichols,Progresses, IV, 1074; but Whitefriars had been destined by Keysar and others for the Queen's Revels' Children since 1608.

[202]Rawlidge,A Monster lately found out, etc., 1622, as quoted by Fleay,H. S., 36; Wallace,Cent. Maga., Aug., 1910; and Thorndike,Infl. of B. and F., p. 60.

[203]See the impressive array of evidence, internal and external, presented by Thorndike,Infl. of B. and F., pp. 59-63; and by Alden,K. B. P., pp. 166-169 (Belles Lettres Series).

[204]Accounts inAthenaeum, 2, 1903, 220.

[205]Wallace,Cent. Maga., Sept.1910, p. 747. See also Greenstreet Papers in Fleay,H. St., 249.

[206]For this argument seeEngl. Studien, XII, 309.

[207]Baudouin's French version of 1608 is merely of the episodic narrative ofThe Curious Impertinent.

[208]On the Influence of Spanish Literature upon English(Romanische Forschungen, XX, 613-615,et seq.).

[209]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 inRomanische Forschungen, already cited; others, communicated by him to Dr. H. S. Murch, appear inYale 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., 1905, p. 42, are to the same effect.

[210]Wilkins,Miseries of Enforced Marriage, III; Middleton,Your Five Gallants, IV, 8; cited by Schevill,ut supra.

[211]See Schevill,u. s.

[212]H. V. Routh, inC. H. L., IV, 410.

[213]The lines,Who like Don Quixote do advanceAgainst a windmill our vaine lance,occur in a copy of versesTo the Mutable Faireincluded amongThe Poems of Francis Beaumontin the edition of 1640. But the volume includes numerous poems not written by Beaumont, and is one of the most uncritical collections that ever was printed. This poem is by Waller.

[213]The lines,

Who like Don Quixote do advanceAgainst a windmill our vaine lance,

occur in a copy of versesTo the Mutable Faireincluded amongThe Poems of Francis Beaumontin the edition of 1640. But the volume includes numerous poems not written by Beaumont, and is one of the most uncritical collections that ever was printed. This poem is by Waller.

THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS

Six.—The Coxcombewas first printed in the folio of 1647. Our earliest record of its acting is of a performance at Court by the Children of the Queen's Revels in 1612.[214]The day was between October 16 and 24. A list of the principal actors, all Queen's Children, preserved in the folio of 1679, indicates, however, that this was not the first performance; for three of the actors listed had left that company by August 29, 1611; one of them (Joseph Taylor) perhaps before March 30, 1610. The list was evidently contemporary with the first performance. The absolute upper limit of the composition was 1604, for one of the characters speaks of the taking of Ostend. If the play, as we are dogmatically informed by a credulous sequence of critics who take statements at second-hand, principally from German doctors' theses, were derived from Cervantes' story,El Curioso Impertinente, which appeared in the First Part ofDon Quixote, printed 1605, or (since we have no evidence that our dramatists read Spanish), from Baudouin's French translation which was licensed April 26, 1608[215]and may have reached Englandabout June,—we might have a definite earlier limit of later date. But there is no resemblance between themotifof Cervantes' story, in which a husband out of curiosity and an impudent desire to heighten the treasure of his love would try his wife's fidelity, and that of Beaumont and Fletcher's play, where there is no question of a trial of honour. In Beaumont and Fletcher, we have a revelation of lust at first sight on the part of the husband's friend, Mercury, of unnatural friendly pandering on the part of that 'natural fool' the husband, Antonio, and of easy acquiescence on the part of Maria, the wife, in the cuckolding of her idiotic coxcomb, who with the wool pulled over his eyes takes her back believing that she is innocent. In Cervantes, the husband, sure of his wife and adoring her, urges his friend to make trial of her honour; the friend, outraged at first by the suggestion, refuses, but finally succumbs to passion and wins the wife, likewise, at first, above suspicion; and all die tragically. There is no resemblance in treatment, atmosphere, incidents, or dialogue. The only community of conception is that of a husband playing with fire—risking cuckoldom. But Cervantes' character of the husband is sentimentally deluded; Beaumont and Fletcher's is a contemptible and willing wittol. If Beaumont and Fletcher derived their plot from Cervantes, all that can be said is that they have mutilated and vulgarized the original out of all possibility of recognition.[216]

Other English dramatists dealing with the theme ofThe Curious Impertinentbetween 1611 and 1615 followed Cervantes more or less closely in the mainmotif, in incident, and in dialogue: the author ofThe Second Maiden's Tragedy, for instance, who made use of Baudouin's translation; and Nathaniel Field, who used either Baudouin or Shelton's publication of 1612 in hisAmends for Ladies. But Beaumont and Fletcher in their tale of a husband cuckolded and pommeled were drawing upon another source, one of the many variants ofLe Mari coccu, battu et content, to be found in Boccaccio and before him in Old French poems, and French and ItalianNouvelles. If they derived anything from Cervantes, whose theme is lifted from theOrlando Furioso, it was merely the suggestion for a fresh drama of cuckoldry. That their play was regarded by others as thus inspired appears, I think, from a passage in Ben Jonson'sAlchemist, IV, vii, 40-41, where, after Kastril has said to Surly, "You are a Pimpe, and a Trig, and an Amadis de Gaule, or a Don Quixote," Drugger adds, "Or a Knight o' the curious cox-combe, Doe you see?" Field and the rest, writing in or after 1611, had uniformly referred to Cervantes' cuckold as the Curious Impertinent. Jonson wrote hisAlchemistbetween July 12 and October 3, 1610, and up to that time the cuckold had been dramatized as Coxcomb only by Beaumont and Fletcher. The prefix 'Curious' indicates that in Jonson's mind his friend's play is associated with Cervantes' novel;and the further prefix of 'The Knight' looks very much like a reminiscence of "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," which had been played some two years before. This argument from contemporaneity of inspiration and allusion inclines me to date the upper limit ofThe Coxcombeabout 1609, after Baudouin's translationLe Curieux Impertinenthad reached England, and Shelton's manuscript had been put in circulation.

If to this conjecture we could add a precise determination of the period of Joseph Taylor's connection with the Queen's Revels' Children, we should have a definite lower limit for the performance ofThe Coxcombein which he took part. But I find it impossible to decide whether Taylor had been with the Queen's Revels up to about March 30, 1610, upon which day his name appears among the Duke of York's Players who were recently reorganized and had just obtained a new patent; or had been up to that time with the predecessors of the Duke of York's (Prince Charles's) Company, and had left them shortly after March 30 for the Queen's Revels' Children. In favour of the former alternative are (1) that in the list of the Queen's Revels' actors inThe Coxcombehe appears second to Field only, as if a player of long standing with them and high in the company's esteem at the time of the performance; (2) that he does not appear among the actors in the list forEpicoenewhich was presented first by the Queen's Revels' Children between January 4 and March 25, 1610: Field is still first, Barkstead, who had been eighth on theCoxcombelist, appears now second, asif promoted to Taylor's place, and Giles Carey is third in both lists; (3) that in the March 30 patent to the Duke of York's Players his name ranks only fifth, as if that of a recent acquisition. On this basis the lower limit would be March 25, 1610. In favour of the latter alternative, viz., that Taylor joined the Queen's Children from the Duke of York's, at a date later than March 30, 1610, are the considerations: (1) that when the new Princess Elizabeth's Company, formed April 11, 1611, gives a bond to Henslowe on August 29 of that year, Taylor's name appears with two of the Queen's Revels' Children of March 1610, as if all three had left the Queen's Revels for the new company at the same time; and (2) that their names appear close together after that of the principal organizer as if not only actors of repute in the company which they had left but prime movers in the new organization. On this basis the lower limit for the performance ofThe Coxcombe, at a time when all three were yet Queen's Revels' Children, would be August 29, 1611. Consulting the restrictions necessitated by the plague rate, we have, then, an option for the date of acting: either between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610, when Jonson had begun hisAlchemist, or between November 29, 1610 and July 1611. In the latter case Ben Jonson's "Knight o' the curious coxcombe" would precede the performance of Beaumont and Fletcher's play and could not be an allusion. In the former, it would immediately follow the acting ofThe Coxcombe, and would manifestly be suggested by that play. I prefer the former option; and date the acting,—on the assumption thatTaylor left the Queen's Revels by March 30, 1610,—before that date.[217]Since Fletcher's contribution to the play has been mangled by a reviser it is impossible to draw conclusions as to the date of composition from the evidence of his literary style. But the characteristics of Beaumont in the minor plot are those of the period in which theLetter to Ben JonsonandPhilasterwere written. The play as first performed was condemned for its length by "the ignorant multitude."[218]I believe that it was one of the two or three unsuccessful comedies which precededPhilaster; and, as I have said above, that it is the play referred to in theLetter to Ben Jonson, toward the end of 1609.[219]If the date of acting was before January 4, 1610, the theatre was Blackfriars; if after, Whitefriars.

The Prologue in the first folio speaks of a revision. But though the hand of one, and perhaps of another, reviser is unmistakably present, the play is properly included among Beaumont and Fletcher's works. In the commendatory verses of 1647, Hills and Gardiner speak of the play as Fletcher's, but all tests show that Beaumont wrote a significant division of it,—the natural, vigorous, tender, and poetic subplot of Ricardo's desertion of Viola and his ultimate reclamation,—with the exception of three scenes and parts of two or three more. The exceptions are the first thirty-five lines of Act I, which have been supplied by some reviser; I, 3, in which also the reviser appears; I, 5, the drinking-bout in the tavern, wheresome of the words (e. g."claw'd") indicate Fletcher,—and the gratuitous obscenity, Fletcher or his reviser; and Act II, 2, where Viola is bound by the tinkers and rescued by Valerio.[220]Perhaps, also, the last thirty-six lines of Act III, 3, where Fletcher is discernible in the afterthoughts "a likely wench, and a good wench," "a very good woman, and a gentlewoman," and the hand of a reviser in the mutilation of the verse; and certainly Act IV, 3, where Fletcher appears at his best in this play.

The romantic little comedy ofRicardo and Violais so loosely joined with the foul portrayal of the Coxcomb who succeeds in prostituting his wife to his friend, that it might be published separately and profitably as the work of Beaumont.[221]It is well constructed; and it conveys a noble tribute to the purity and constancy of woman, her grace of forgiveness, and her influence over erring man. When Viola speaks she is a living person, instinct with recklessness, sweetness, and pathos. Few heroines of Elizabethan comedy have compressed so much reality and poetry into so narrow a compass. "Might not," she whispers when stealing forth at night to meet Ricardo:—[222]

Might not God have madeA time for envious prying folk to sleepWhilst lovers met, and yet the sun have shone?

And then:

Alas, how valiant and how fraid at onceLove makes a Virgin!

When she comes upon her lover staggering outside the tavern with his sodden comrades,[223]with what simplicity she shudders:

I never saw a drunken man before;But these I think are so....My state is such, I know not how to thinkA prayer fit for me; only I could moveThat never Maiden more might be in love!

When, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds that her rescuer is even more a peril,[224]with what childlike trust she appeals:

Pray you, leave me hereJust as you found me, a poor innocent,And Heaven will bless you for it!

When again deserted, with what pathos she sighs:

"I'll sit me down and weep;All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.The evening comes, and every little flowerDroops now, as well as I!"

And, finally, when she has rediscovered Ricardo, and conquered his self-reproach by her forgiveness, which is "to love you," with what admirable touch of nature and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude to her story and herself:[225]

Methinks I would not now, for any thing,But youhadmist me: I have made a storyWill serve to waste many a winter's fire,When we are old. I'll tell my daughters thenThe miseries their Mother had in love,And say, "My girls, be wiser"; yet I would notHave had more wit myself.

Ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development of personality; and the rural scenes and characters are convincing.

In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;[226]and here and there, Rowley.[227]I should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's—in dramatizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife,and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism.

ThoughThe Coxcombewas not successful in its first production before the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well received and favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court in 1612 in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the City theatres after the Restoration, and before 1682. In the revivals Beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy calledThe Fugitives, constructed by Richardson and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792. With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the Ricardo of the original), and Mrs. Jordan as Julia (alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran for a dozen nights or more.

7.—PhilasterorLove lies a-Bleedingwas "divers times acted at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his Majesties Servants." Under the second title in theScourge of Folly, entered for publication October 8, 1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and I have already stated my reasons as based upon thehistory of the theatres[228]for believing that its first performance took place between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610.

We might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of Hereford'sScourge of Folly, if we could affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. For just before the epigram onLove lies a-Bleeding, which, I think, without doubt, applies toPhilaster, appears oneTo the Roscius of these times, Mr. W. Ostler, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's Revels' Children,—most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the time,—in 1601 when Jonson'sPoetasterwas acted. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Burbadge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,[229]before Evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in 1608, some of the Queen's Revels' Children "growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, were taken to strengthen the King's service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings,Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this deposition places the transference of Underwood, Field, and Ostler to the King's Company between the beginning of April 1608 when the Revels' Children were temporarily suppressed and August of that year when the Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and others took over Evans's unexpired lease of Blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. But the deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily with, or under the supervision of, the King's Company at Blackfriars between December 7, 1609 and January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by March 25, 1610, and does not appear in the lists of the King's Men till 1616; and there is no record of Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company before the end of 1610, when they acted in Jonson'sAlchemist(after October 3). Since Underwood and Ostler were not with the new Queen's Revels after January of that year, it is probable that Davies's epigram to the latter as "the Roscius of these times" in theScourge of Folly, entered for publication on October 8, 1610, was written after Ostler had attained distinction in Shakespeare's company, the company of the leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to Ostler with that of the epigram to Fletcher onPhilasterpresented by that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the epigrams,—that isto say, between January 4 and October, 1610.

Since, however, the epigrams inThe Scourge of Folly, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind. Of much greater weight as confirming the date ofPhilaster, as conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare'sCymbelinenot only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific detail. I shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there is nothing in thePhilasteror theCymbelineto indicate the priority of the former. But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.[230]For theCymbeline, I accept the date assigned by the majority of critics, 1609. Shakespeare had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in mind since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage inMuch Ado About Nothing(the quarto of 1600). In execution the play is, withThe Winter's Taleand theTempest, the dramatic sequel of that first of his "dramatic romances,"—of which the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a wife or child,—thePericleswritten in 1607 or 1608. And since already inPericles, Shakespeare had blazed this new path, I cannot for a moment accept thehypothesis that he is in hisCymbelineborrowing profusely fromPhilaster, a work of comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of construction to the somewhat novel—to them entirely novel—method of the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved inPericlesandCymbeline. And still the more so when one reflects that, inPericlesandCymbeline, aside from the leading conception, everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies fromThe Two Gentlemen of VeronatoAs You Like ItandTwelfth Night; and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic construction inPhilaster, otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of those earlier comedies and of thePericlesandCymbelinewould not suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction thatPhilasterwas first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July 1610.

The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "thewell-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that author credit for practically the whole work,—"Thou ... raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of 1647, mentionsLove Lies a-Bleedingamong Fletcher's "incomparable plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene "when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he says:

Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared to thee,In thyPhilasterandMaids Tragedy!Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray ...

for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few insertions or revisions by Fletcher,Philasteris Beaumont's (and practically the same holds true ofThe Maides Tragedy, and the Bessus play—A King and No King). InPhilasterFletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are I, 1b(from the King's entry, line 89—line 358,[231]—a revision and enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2b(fromEnter Megra), II, 4b(fromMegra above), V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 was written by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14 to 29 (fromEnter Arethusa and Bellarioto "how brave she keeps him"). Similarly, the first draughtof Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34 (exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long tirade) and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end). But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas, tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." The last three lines of that soliloquy are his:

Soul-sick with poison, strike the monumentsWhere noble names lie sleeping, till they sweatAnd the cold marble melt;[232]

and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of Philaster's accusation of Arethusa. "Thestoryof a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten,—"these sad texts"[233]Fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating.

It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes are elaborative, bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally easy, at times bustling, at times spectacular, but not vitally contributory to the business of the play. They comprise the longest speeches of the King, Pharamond, Philaster, Megra, and Bellario. Some of these, such as the King's denunciation ofMegra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar rhetoric. The bawdy half-scene with its maid of easy honour is his; the discovery of the low intrigue, the simulated masque and the mob-scene are his. They may display, but they do not develop, characters. They are sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully poetic as in V, 3, 83-84, where his "all your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble" anticipates Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic; but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation of Beaumont. The play, in fact, is not only preponderatingly but primarily Beaumont's, from the excellent exposition in the first act to the series of sensational surprises which precede the dénouement in the fifth. The conception of the characters and the complication are distinctive of that writer's plots: the impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence toward the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and his unwarranted suspicion of the honour of his mistress. The subtle revelations of personality are Beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric pathos and beauty of Bellario, the nobler aspects of Dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet bewilderments and unmerited tribulations of Arethusa, the combination of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization, the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical insights, and the memorable lines. His, too, the humour of the rural sketches—the Country Fellow who has "seen something yet," the occasional frank animality, as well as the tender beauty of innocence. Not only are the virtues of the play Beaumont's but some ofits faults of conception and construction; and those faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortuitous succession of the crises, and the subordination of Bellario in the dénouement.

The popularity ofPhilasteras an acting play, not only at Court but in the city, is attested by contemporary record. It was played after the Restoration with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed thirteen revivals,—the last at Bath on December 12 of the latter year, with Ward in the title-rôle and Miss Jarmin as Bellario.[234]

8.—The Maides 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, 1611, 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 thanPhilaster, I think that it followed that play, toward the end of 1610 or in 1611. It was first published in 1619, in quarto and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also anonymous; that of 1630 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 "Aspatiaweeping 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 toThe Woman-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'Avenant alludes: II, 2, in which Fletcher "taught the sad Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, 1 (as far as line 200, "Prithee, do not mock me"), in which he "reduced Evadne from her scorn"; and it includes, also, the ten lines of V, 1, the larger part of V, 2 (toExit Evadne), and the perfunctory V, 3. As to Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt can be entertained. It is an admirable example of his double endings (almost 40 per cent), his end-stopped lines (80 per cent), anapæstic rhythms and jolts, as well as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his incremental second thoughts. I fail to see how any critic can assign it to Beaumont.[235]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, 1 (lines 1-189), in which Melantiusconvinces 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 190-200), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to win belief" (247-254, 260-262), and the conclusion (263-285). But between Amintor's supplication "Prithee do not mock me" (line 200) and Evadne's assertion of sincerity "I have done nothing good to win belief" (line 247[236]), Beaumont has inserted four speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy otherwise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest 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 white as Heaven"—"Shoot your light into me"—"Dissembling with 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." We find him in Amintor's "Seed of virtue left to shoot up"—"put a thousand sorrows off"—"that dull calamity"—"that strange misbelief"—and in

Mock notthe powers abovethat can and dareGive thee a great example of their justiceTo all ensuing ages.[237]

And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseverationof sincere reform (255-259), we are thrilled by his sudden magic and his poetic finality:

Those short days I shall number to my rest(As many must not see me) shall, though too late,Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,—Since I can do no good, because a woman,—Reach constantly at something that is near it.

The ground-work of this latter portion, from Amintor's entrance, where Evadne cries "Oh, my lord," "My much abused lord," and he, "I may leap, Like a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines 190-200); and the last three speeches in general with Amintor's "My frozen soul melts," and "My honour falls no farther: I am well, then"; and with Evadne's "tales" that "go to dust forgotten,"—the Niobe weeping till she is water,—the "wash her stains away," and

All the creaturesMade for Heaven's honours, have their ends,and good ones,—All but the cozening crocodiles, false women—They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,Men pray against; ...

this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction, to the scene as Fletcher originally wrote it.

When to these two scenes we add the first and third of Act V, which are of no particular significance, and the second (to the death of the King), we have Fletcher's whole written contribution to this wonderful tragedy. In the murder of the King he displaysdramatic 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 realism 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-obliteration 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 unchastity 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 circumstance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author of his wrongs,—yet 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 enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive,and the psychic revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays—in fact, all that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the poetic finality.

In hisTragedies of the Last Age, licensed in 1677, Rymer attackedThe Maides Tragedyviolently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as Rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better have been calledAmintor, or theLustful King, orThe Concubine. ButThe Maides Tragedyis a more attractive name, and it may be justified. For I do not find that the action is double-centred. It springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the Maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic devotion of Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's tragic weakness, hishamartia. His failure to act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. The Nemesis, too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the King, but Aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten:

Back to Index Next