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[Illustration: By permission of the Right Hon. Lord Sackville, G. C. M. G.

PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BEAUMONT

From the original painting at Knole Park]

FRANCIS BEAUMONT: DRAMATIST

A Portrait

With Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, and of

His Association with John Fletcher

by

CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY, LITT.D., LL.D.

_Professor of the English Language and Literature

in the University of California_

[Illustration: DESORMAIS]

London

Duckworth & Co.

3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

1914

Copyright, 1914, by

The Century Co.

Published, February, 1914

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

In 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 circumstances 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 Shakespeare 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 devoted, 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 present the poetic

and compelling personality of Francis Beaumont not only as conjoined

with, and distinguished from, the personality of Fletcher, but as seen

against the background of historic antecedents and family connections

and as tinged by the atmosphere of contemporary life, of social,

literary, and theatrical environment. No doubt the picture has its

imperfections, 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 colleague, 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, Elizabeth, 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, 1913.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS CAREER AS POET AND DRAMATIST

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 3

II BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS: GRACE-DIEU,

OXFORD 10

III AT THE INNS OF COURT AND CHANCERY; THE

POEMS ASSIGNED TO THESE EARLIER YEARS 29

IV THE VAUX COUSINS AND THE GUNPOWDER PLOT 46

V FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH 62

VI SOME EARLY PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND OF FLETCHER 72

VII THE "BANKE-SIDE" AND THE PERIOD OF THE

PARTNERSHIP 95

VIII RELATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, AND

OTHERS IN THE THEATRICAL WORLD 114

IX THE "MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE": THE

PASTORALISTS, AND OTHER CONTEMPORARIES

AT THE INNS OF COURT 124

X AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT 145

XI BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER;

RELATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS OF NOTE 150

XII BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING

FAMILY 172

XIII THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY

REPUTATION OF BEAUMONT 190

XIV TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM 206

XV A FEW WORDS OF FLETCHER'S LATER YEARS 211

PART TWO

THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

CHAPTER PAGE

XVI STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM; CRITICAL APPARATUS 225

XVII THE DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD 236

XVIII THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF

BEAUMONT 243

XIX FLETCHER'S DICTION 260

XX FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT 277

XXI BEAUMONT'S DICTION 281

XXII BEAUMONT'S MENTAL HABIT 291

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 BEAUMONT 378

XXVIII DID THE BEAUMONT "ROMANCE" INFLUENCE

SHAKESPEARE? 386

XXIX CONCLUSION 396

APPENDIX

Table A 419

" B 420

" C 421

" D 422

" E 423

INDEX 425

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of Francis Beaumont _Frontispiece_

FACING

PAGE

The Ruins of Grace-Dieu Nunnery 22

Ruins of Grace-Dieu 26

A Priory, Ulveston, Extant in 1730 26

Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset 66

The Temple 96

The Globe Theatre, with St. Paul's in the Background 104

Ben Jonson 120

Francis Bacon 146

George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and Family 160

John Selden 170

The Beaumont of the Nuneham Portrait 192

Michael Drayton 202

John Fletcher 226

John Earle, Bishop of Worcester and Salisbury 244

Don Diego Sarmiento, Count Gondomar 372

BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST

PART ONE

BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS CAREER AS POET AND

DRAMATIST.

BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST

CHAPTER I

THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

"Among those of our dramatists who either were contemporaries of

Shakespeare or came after him, it would be impossible to name more than

three to whom the predilection or the literary judgment 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--Shakespeare's is and must remain the

commanding figure. Next to him sit the twin literary heroes, Beaumont

and Fletcher, more or less vaguely supposed to be inseparable from one

another in their works. The Herculean form of Jonson takes a somewhat

disputed precedence among the other princes; the rest of these are, as a

rule, but dimly distinguished." So, with just appreciation, our senior

historian of the English drama, to-day, the scholarly Master of

Peterhouse. Sir Adolphus Ward himself has, by availing of the inductive

processes of the inventive and indefatigable Fleay and his successors

in separative criticism, contributed not a little to a discrimination

between the respective efforts of the "twin literary heroes" who sit

next Jason; and who are "beyond dispute more attractive by the beauty of

their creations than any and every one of Shakespeare's

fellow-dramatists." But even he doubts whether "the most successful

series of endeavours to distinguish Fletcher's hand from Beaumont's is

likely to have the further result of enabling us to distinguish the mind

of either from that of his friend." Just this endeavour to distinguish

not only hand from hand, but mind from mind, is what I have had the

temerity to attempt. And still not, by any means, a barefaced temerity,

for my attempt at first was merely to fix anew the place of the

joint-authors in the history of English comedy; and it has been but

imperceptibly that the fascination of the younger of them, of Frank

Beaumont, the personality of his mind as well as of his art, has so

grown upon me as to compel me to set him before the world as he appears

to me to be clearly visible.

In broad outline the figure of Beaumont has been, of course, manifest to

the vision of poet-critics in the past. To none more palpably than to

the latest of the melodious immortals of the Victorian strain. "If a

distinction must be made," wrote Swinburne as early as 1875, "if a

distinction must be made between the Dioscuri of English poetry, we must

admit that Beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux was

on one side a demigod of diviner blood than Castor can it be said that

on any side Beaumont was a poet of higher and purer genius than

Fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to

discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a

difference. Few things are stranger than the avowal of so great and

exquisite a critic as Coleridge, that he could trace no faintest line of

demarcation between the plays which we owe mainly to Beaumont and the

plays which we owe solely to Fletcher. To others this line has always

appeared in almost every case unmistakable. Were it as hard and broad as

the line which marks off, for example, Shakespeare's part from

Fletcher's in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, the harmony would of course be

lost which now informs every work of their common genius.... In the

plays which we know by evidence surer than the most trustworthy

tradition to be the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher there is indeed

no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture as leaves the

greatest example of romantic tragedy ... an unique instance of glorious

imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly and other than heavenly breed,

disproportioned and divine. But throughout these noblest of the works

inscribed generally with the names of both dramatists we trace on every

other page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every turn the note of

a deeper voice, than we can ever recognize in the work of Fletcher

alone. Although the beloved friend of Jonson, and in the field of comedy

his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his

freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthiest and the closest

follower of Shakespeare.... The general style of his tragic or romantic

verse is as simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity 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, _Philaster_ 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 _Valentinian_

[Fletcher] and _The Double Marriage_ [Fletcher 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

Beaumont'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 impression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this distinction is

never grave enough to produce a discord; it is also true that the plays

in which 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 Beaumont 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 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

lineaments 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 Woman-Hater_, and ascribes to him the

predominance in, and the better portions of _Philaster_ and _The Maid's

Tragedy_, and the high interest and graduated action of the serious part

of _A King and No King_, and also justly associates him with Fletcher in

the composition of _The Scornful 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 Knight of the Burning

Pestle_," and implies his predominance in that play, he does not

enumerate for us the acts and 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 conceived 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 fullness of

bright exuberant speech." Though he is right in discerning in the

homelier emotion and pathetic interest of _The Coxcombe_, and of

_Cupid's Revenge_ the note of Beaumont's manner, he couples with the

former _The Honest Man's Fortune_ in which it is more than doubtful

whether Beaumont had any share. To speak of Arbaces in _A King and No

King_ as Beaumont's, is mainly right, but not wholly, and to assign to

him the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and his swordsmen, is to assign

precisely the scenes that he did not compose. To speak of Beaumont's

_Triumph of Love_ is perhaps defensible; but, with grave reluctance, we

now question the attribution. He is justified in withdrawing "the noble

tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_" from the field of Beaumont's

cooperation 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 _Valentinian_. 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 _par excellence_,--so surprisingly novel and seductively

convincing were the tests then recently formulated. Swinburne's mistakes

are of sane omission rather than of supererogation. By his judgments as

a critic one can not always swear; but here he is, in the main,

marvelously right, and a thousand times rather to be followed than some

of the successors of Fleay who have swamped the personality of Beaumont

by heaping on him, foundered, sods from a dozen turf-stacks which he

never helped to build.

But the _chorizontes_--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 intuitions of

the poet-critics that one may hope to see Frank Beaumont plain: "the

worthiest and closest follower of Shakespeare in the tragic field; the

earliest as well as ablest disciple of Ben Jonson in pure comedy, 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, OXFORD

Francis 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 Charnwood 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 itinerary, written

between 1535 and 1543, he says: "From Leicester to Brodegate, by

ground well wooded three miles.... From Brodegate to Loughborough

about a five miles.... First, I came out of Brodegate Park into the

forest of Charnwood, commonly 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 Beaumonts.... There is

a fair quarry of alabaster stone about a four miles from Leicester,

and not very far from Beau Manor.[1]... There was, since the

Bellemonts [Beaumonts], earls of Warwick, 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."[2] 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 summer

time a traveler 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 1396, our

dramatist was descended.

The barony ran from father to son for six generations of alternating

Henries and Johns, _c._ 1309 to 1460. John, fourth Baron; was grandson

of Alianor, daughter 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-grandson of John de Brienne, titular King of Jerusalem,

1210-1225.[3] In a quaint tetrastich in the church of Barton-upon-Humber,

the memory of these alliances is thus preserved:

Rex Hierosolymus cum Bellomonte locatur,

Bellus mons etiam cum Baghan consociatur,

Bellus mons iterum Longicastro religatur,

Bellus mons ... Oxonie titulatur.[4]

The sixth Baron became, in 1440, the first Viscount of English creation;

he married a granddaughter of the Lord Bardolph of Shakespeare's _2

Henry IV_; but with his son "of simple wit," who died in 1507, the

viscounty died out. Beaumanoir to the east of Charnwood is seven miles

north of Leicester and nine from Coleorton where, west of 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 1840, 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

generation from Sir Thomas Beaumont, the younger son of 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 1537 and 1543

he performed the learned and expensive functions of Reader, or exponent

of the law in that society, and later was elected treasurer or presiding

officer of the house. He started brilliantly in his profession. In 1529

he was counsellor for the corporation of Leicester; and, by 1539, he had

means or influence sufficient to secure for himself the old Nunnery of

Grace-Dieu in Charnwood Forest, which, as an ecclesiastical commissioner

he had four years earlier helped to suppress. That he entered into

possession, however, only with difficulty, is manifest from a letter

which he wrote in 1538 to Lord Cromwell, enclosing L20 as a present and

beseeching his lordship's intercession with the king that he may be

confirmed in his ownership of the "demenez" as against the cupidity of

George, first Earl of Huntingdon, who "doth labour to take the seyd

abbey ffrom me; ... for I do ffeyre the seyd erle and hys sonnes do

seeke my lyffe."[5] He occupied various important legal and

administrative positions in the county, and, shortly before the death of

Edward VI, was appointed to the high office of Master of the Rolls, or

Judge of the Court of Appeal. A year or two later, however, early in

1553, he was removed from his seat on the bench, for defalcation and

other flagrant breach of trust. He was imprisoned and fined in all his

property, and died the next year. His vast estates were bestowed on

Francis, Earl of Huntingdon, by Edward VI, but soon afterward, as a

result of legal manoeuvre and by the assistance of that Earl and his

eldest son, the widow of the Master of the Rolls contrived to retain the

manor of Grace-Dieu; and it long continued to be the country seat of the

Beaumonts.[6] This prudent, strenuous, and high-born lady, Elizabeth

Hastings, was the daughter of Sir William Hastings, a younger son of

the incorruptible William, Lord Hastings, whom in 1483 Richard of

Gloucester had decapitated. Her grandmother, Catherine Nevil, was

daughter to the Earl of Salisbury, who died at Pomfret, and sister to

Richard, Earl of Warwick, the King-maker. Elizabeth's aunt, Anne

Hastings, was the wife of George Talbot, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, and

her uncle, Edward, was the second Lord Hastings. Edward'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."[7] 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 Elizabeth, 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 1532, 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 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 proportions. 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 entail of Lord Vaux's estates on his

children by his first wife [John] Beaumont's daughter,"[8] several

"daughters" are mentioned. These, his cousins of Harrowden, Frank knew

from his youth up. In 1605 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 Peterhouse, Cambridge; afterwards, at the Inner

Temple, where like his father before him, he proceeded Reader and

Bencher. In 1572 he sat in Parliament as member for Aldborough; in 1589

he was made sergeant-at-law; and in 1593 was appointed one of the

Queen's Justices of the Court of Common Pleas. His method of trying a

case, technical and merciless, may be studied in the minutes of the Lent

assizes of 1595 at which the unfortunate Jesuit priest, Henry Walpole,

was sentenced to death for returning to England.[9] His career on the

bench was both successful and honourable; and he is described by a

contemporary, William Burton, the author of the _Description of

Leicestershire_, as a "grave, learned, and reverend judge." He married

Anne, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire knight, Sir George Pierrepoint

of Holme-Pierrepoint; and their children were Henry, born 1581; John,

born about 1583; Francis, the subject of this study, born in 1584 or

1585; and Elizabeth, some four years younger than Francis.[10] That we

know nothing of the life or personality of this mother of poets, is a

source of regret. Her family, however, was of a notable stock possessed,

immediately after the Conquest, of lands in Sussex under Earl Warren.

Their estate of Holme-Pierrepoint in Nottinghamshire they had inherited

from Michael de Manvers during the reign of Edward I. Anne's ancestors

had been Knights Banneret, and of the Carpet and the Sword, for

generations. Her brother, Sir Henry Pierrepoint, born 1546, married

Frances, the eldest daughter of the Sir William Cavendish who began the

building of Chatsworth, and his redoubtable Lady, Bess of Hardwick, who

finished it. This aunt of the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu, Lady

Pierrepoint, was sister to William Cavendish, first Earl of Devonshire

in 1611 and forefather of the present Dukes,--to Henry Cavendish, the

friend of Mary, Queen of Scots, and son-in-law of her kindly custodian,

George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury,--to Sir Charles Cavendish,

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 Cavendish, Countess of Shrewsbury,

wife of Gilbert, seventh Earl. The son 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 1643

during the Civil War. From him descended Marquises of Dorchester 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-Pierrepoint they would, as of the common kin, be thrown

into familiar acquaintance with the children of the various branches of

these and other houses that I might mention.[11] Holme-Pierrepoint is

seventeen miles northeast of Grace-Dieu, near the city of Nottingham,

in the red sand-stone country along the River Trent. The Park is but a

two or three hours' drive from Charnwood, and the old house to which

Anne used to take her children to see their grandparents still stands,

altered only in part from what it was in 1580. It belongs to the Earl

Manvers of to-day. In the church is the tomb of the poet's uncle, Sir

Henry Pierrepoint, who died the year before Francis.

Since no entry of Francis' baptism has been discovered it is uncertain

whether he was born at Grace-Dieu. The probabilities are, however, in

favour of that birth-place, since his father was not continuously

occupied in London until a later date. As to the exact year of his

birth, there is also uncertainty but I think that the records indicate

1584. The matriculation entry in the registers of Oxford University

describes him as twelve years of age at the time of his admission,

February 4, 1597 (new style), which would establish the date of his

birth between February 1584 and February 1585. The funeral certificate

issued at the time of his father's death, April 22, 1598, speaks of the

other children, Henry, John, and Elizabeth as, respectively, seventeen,

fourteen, and nine, years of age, "_or thereaboutes_"; but of Francis as

"of thirteen yeares _or more_."

Justice Beaumont was a squire of considerable means. When, in 1581, he

qualified himself to be Bencher by lecturing at the Inner Temple upon

some statute or section of a statute for the space of three weeks and

three days, his expenses for the entertainment at table or in revels,

alone, must have run to about L1500, in the money of to-day. He held at

the time of his death landed estates in some ten parishes of

Leicestershire, between Sheepshead on the east and and Coleorton three

miles away on the west, and scattered over some seven miles north and

south between Belton and Normanton. In Derby, too, he had two or three

fine manors. His will shows that he was able to make generous provision

for many of his "ould and faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing

specifically a handsome sum in money to his daughter Elizabeth. He was a

considerate and careful man, too, for the morning of his death he added

a codicil to his will: "I have left somewhat oute of my will which is

this, I will that my daughter Elizabeth have all the jewells that were

her mother's." His sons are not mentioned, for naturally the heir,

Henry, would make provision for John and Francis.[12] His chief executor

was Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, his kinsman,--worth mentioning here;

for at Coleorton another cousin, Maria Beaumont, the mother of the great

Duke of Buckingham, had till recently lived as a waiting gentlewoman in

the household.

Grace-Dieu where the youth of these children was principally spent, was

"beautifully situated in what was formerly one of the most recluse spots

in the centre of Charnwood Forest," within a little distance of the

turn-pike road that leads from Ashby-de-la-Zouch to Loughborough. It

lies low in a valley, near the river Soar. In his _Two Bookes of

Epigrammes and Epitaphs_, 1639, Thomas Bancroft gives us a picture of

the spot:

Grace-Dieu, that under Charnwood stand'st alone,

As a grand relicke of religion,

I reverence thine old, but fruitfull, worth,

That lately brought such noble Beaumonts forth,

Whose brave heroicke Muses might aspire

To match the anthems of the heavenly quire:

The mountaines crown'd with rockey fortresses,

And sheltering woods, secure thy happiness

That highly favour'd art (tho' lowly placed)

Of Heaven, and with free Nature's bounty graced.

And still another picture of it is painted, a hundred and seventy years

later by Wordsworth, the friend of the Sir George Beaumont who in his

day was possessed of the old family seat of Coleorton Hall, within half

an hour's walk of Grace-Dieu:--

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,

Rugged and high, of Charnwood's forest ground

Stand yet, but, Stranger! hidden from thy view,

The ivied Ruins of forlorn Grace-Dieu,--

Erst a religious house, which day and night

With hymns resounded, and the chanted rite:

And when those rites had ceased, the Spot gave birth

To honourable Men of various worth:

There, on the margin of a streamlet wild,

Did Francis Beaumont sport, an eager child:

There, under shadow of the neighboring rocks,

Sang youthful tales of shepherds and their flocks;

Unconscious prelude to heroic themes,

Heart-breaking tears, and melancholy dreams

Of slighted love, and scorn, and jealous rage,

With which his genius shook the buskined stage.

Communities are lost, and Empires die,

And things of holy use unhallowed lie;

They perish;--but the Intellect can raise,

From airy words alone, a Pile that ne'er decays.[13]

So far as the "youthful tales of shepherds" go, Wordsworth is probably

thinking of the verses of Francis' brother, Sir John, which open:

A shepherdess, who long had kept her flocks

On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks,--

written long after both brothers had left boyhood behind; indeed after

Francis was dead; or he is attributing to our Beaumont a share in

Fletcher's _Faithfull Shepheardesse_. Francis, himself, has given us

nothing of the pastoral vein, save sweet snatches in the dramas "with

which his genius shook the buskined stage."

There is no doubt that from childhood up, the brothers and, as I shall

later show, their sister Elizabeth breathed an atmosphere of literature

and national life. At an early age John was sufficiently confessed a

versifier to be assigned the Prelude to one of the nobly patronized

Michael Drayton's _Divine Poems_, and there is fair reason for believing

that the younger brother Francis was writing and publishing verses in

1602, when he was barely eighteen years of age. Their father was going

to and fro among the great in London who made affairs. The country-side

all about them was replete with historic memories and inspirations to

poetry. In the Grey Friars' at Leicester, eleven miles south-east, Simon

de Montfort allied by marriage to the first Anglo-Norman de Beaumonts,

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 of Bosworth. The field itself 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 subject 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 counties most engaged.

Three of their predecessors had fallen fighting for the red rose, John

Beaumont of Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at Northampton in

1460, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton in 1461. In his description of the

battle, John introduces by way of simile a reference to what may have

been a familiar scene about Grace-Dieu:

Here Stanley and brave Lovell trie their strength....

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 homes in mutuall wounds.

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

execution in _Richard III_, Shakespeare had dramatized more than twenty

years before John wrote.

[Illustration: Steel Engraving by W. Finden

THE RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU NUNNERY]

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 Marchioness of Dorset, "to

occupy the towering position they felt assured she would 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 _Phaedon_ 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 1578, may have lived long enough

to take our Francis on her knee and tell him of the hopes her Protestant

kinsmen of Ashby-de-la-Zouch had fixed upon the Lady Jane, and of how

her cousin, the Earl, Francis of Huntingdon, had been one of those who

in Royal Council in June 1553, abetted the Dukes of Northumberland and

Suffolk in the scheme to secure the succession of Lady Jane to the

throne, and how, with these dukes and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and

other lords and gentlemen (among them a certain Sir John Baker of

Sissinghurst, Kent, whose family later appears in this narrative), he

had signed the "devise" in accordance with which Jane was proclaimed

Queen. And the old lady would with bated breath tell him of the cruel

fate of that nine-days' queen. Of how Francis of Huntingdon was sent to

the Tower with Queen Jane, she also would tell. But perhaps not much of

how 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

Tutbury 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,--afterwards Master of

Charterhouse,--wrote an Epistle prefixed to Speght's _Chaucer_, 1598;

and still another more distant relative, Dr. Joseph, Master of

Peterhouse, and author of the epic allegory, _Psyche_, was one of the

poetic imitators through whom Spenser's 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,[14] 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 family, too; or from Grosart's derivation of

Jonathan Edwards from that family, polemic blood, as well.

The three sons of Justice Beaumont of Grace-Dieu were entered on

February 4, 1597, 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 common law, since, as Dyce informs us, their Hall was

then the principal nursery for students of that discipline. 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. Aldate'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 now 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, they would have under arm or in pocket a

tattered volume of Ovid, preferably in translation,--Turberville's

_Heroical Epistles_, or Golding's rendering of the _Metamorphoses_,--or

Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_, or Fenton's _Tragical Discourses_ out of

Bandello, dedicated to the sister of Sir Philip Sidney--Sir Philip,

whose daughter young Francis should, one day, revere 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 _Tamburlaine_ and _Edward II_ and

_Dido_, or Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ and Lyly's _Gallathea_, or Greene's

_Frier Bacon_ and _James IV_, or Shakespeare's _Richard II_, and

_Richard III_, and _Romeo and Juliet_, and _Love's Labour's Lost_.

These, with alternate shuddering and admiring, mirth or tears, to

declaim and in imagination re-enact. And certainly there would be mellow

afternoons when the _Songs and Sonnettes_ known as _Tottel'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 _Venus 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 El Dorados of the mind were to be

had in quarto or other form, and some of them were appearing first in

print in the year when Frank and his brothers entered Oxford.

[Illustration: View taken by Buck in 1730

RUINS OF GRACE-DIEU

Note: After Buck's time the ruins were "carried away to mend the roads."

See John Throsby, _Select Views of Leicestershire_, Vol. II, 461.]

[Illustration: Taken by Buck

A PRIORY, ULVESTON, EXTANT IN 1730]

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,--strolled northwest from the Cherwell toward Yarnton, and then

Woodstock 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 now. Or, some happy Michaelmas, they would have walked toward the

fertile Vale of Evesham, north, first, toward Warwickshire 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, turning toward the Cotswolds, to Winchcombe

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, Barons Chandos, the lads were acquainted, if not in 1597 at

any rate after 1602, when the fifth Baron, Grey, succeeded to the

title. For, writing _Teares_ on the death of that hospitable "King of

the Cotswolds," which occurred in 1621, John Beaumont describes him with

the admiration begotten of long intimacy,--"the smoothnesse of his

mind," "his wisdome and his happy parts," and "his sweet behaviour and

discourse."

Or,--and how could any young Oxonian fail of it?--they started from

Broadgates, down 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Leland's _Itinerary_, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 18-19.

[2] Leland's _Itinerary_, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. IV, 126.

[3] Collins, _Peerage of England_, IX, 460.

[4] J. Nichols, _Collections toward the History of Leicestershire_

(_Biblioth. Topogr. Brit._, VII, 534). See, below, Appendix, A.

[5] _Letters relating to the Suppression of the Monasteries_, pp.

251-252, Camden Society, 1843. The editor, Thos. Wright, describes the

petitioner as of Thringston, Co. Leicester.

[6] J. M. Rigg, _Dict. Nat. Biog._ art., _John Beaumont_; and

Nichols's _History of Leicestershire_, III, ii, 651, _et seq._

[7] Collins, _Peerage_, VI, 648, _et seq._; H. N. Bell, _The

Huntingdon Peerage_, 1821. See also, below, Appendix, Table B.

[8] _Calendar of State Papers_ (_Domestic_), 1595, p. 154.

[9] Challoner, _Missionary Priests_, I, 347.

[10] For the preceding details, and some of those which follow, see

the respective articles in the _Dictionary of National Biography_;

Dyce's _Works of Beaumont and Fletcher_, Vol. I, _Biographical

Memoir_; Grosart, _Sir John Beaumont's Poems_, and the sources as

indicated. See also, below, Appendix, Table C.

[11] See Shaw's _Knights of England_; Collins, _Peerage_; and articles

in _D. N. B._ under names.

[12] Dyce says that the Judge was knighted; so Rigg (_D. N. B._) and

others. The _Inner Temple Records_ speak of him thirty times, but only

once, Nov. 5, 1581, as "Sir," though others in memoranda running to

1601 which mention him are given the title. In the codicil to his will

he is plain "Mr. Beaumont"; and he is not included in Shaw's _Knights

of England_.

[13] _For a Seat in the Groves of Coleorton._

[14] _Works of B. and F._, XVI.

CHAPTER III

AT THE INNS OF COURT AND CHANCERY; THE POEMS ASSIGNED TO THESE EARLIER

YEARS.

The career of the Beaumonts at the University was shortened by the death

of their father, some fourteen months after their admission. Henry had

been entered of the Inner Temple, November 27, 1597, at his father's

request. Some say with John, but I do not find the latter in the

Records. Francis may have remained at Oxford until 1600. On November 3

of that year, he, also, was admitted a member of the Inner Temple, his

two brothers acting as sponsors for him. We notice from the

admission-book that he was matriculated _specialiter_, _gratis_,

_comitive_,--because his father had been a Bencher,--was excused from

most of the ordinary duties and charges, and was permitted to take his

meals and to lodge outside the Inn of Court itself. I gather that, like

other young students at the time, he lodged and pursued his studies in

one of the lesser Inns, called Inns of Chancery, attached to the Inner

Temple and under its supervision: Clifford's Inn across Fleet Street;

or, across the Strand, Lyon's Inn,--or, let us hope, by preference,

Clement's Inn; where had lain Jack Falstaff in the days when he was

"page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk," and was seen by lusty

Shallow to "break Skogan's head at the court-gate when 'a was a crack

not thus high;" where had boozed Shallow himself and his four

friends--"not four such swinge-bucklers in all the Inns of Court again";

and where, no doubt, they were talking in Beaumont's day "of mad Shallow

yet."

In 1600, the Inns of Chancery lodged about a hundred students each, and

served as preparatory schools for the Inns of Court. At one of these

lesser Inns[15] Beaumont would acquire some elementary knowledge of

civil procedure by copying writs of the Clerks of Chancery, would listen

to a reader sent over by the Inner Temple to lecture, and would be

"bolted," or sifted, in the elements of law by the "inner" or junior

barristers; and he would attend "moots" over which senior or "utter"

barristers presided. At the end of about two years or earlier, if he

proved a promising scholar, he would be transferred to the Inn of Court,

itself. We may assume that about 1602, Beaumont would be sitting in

Clerks' Commons in the Hall of the Inner Temple. Bread and beer for

breakfast,--provided on only four days of the week. At 12 o'clock he

would be summoned to dinner by the blowing of a horn,--"thou horne of

hunger that cal'st the inns a court to their manger." For his mess of

meat,--in Lent, fish,--on other occasions, loins of mutton, or beef,--he

would make himself a trencher of bread. At 6 or 7 o'clock would come

supper,--bread and beer again. After dinner, and again after supper, he

would enjoy bolts and exercises conducted by the utter barristers, day

in and day out through nearly the whole year. As he advanced 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."[16]

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 supper: 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 centuries had enlivened the graver

pursuits of the Gothic halls that rose between Fleet Street and the

Thames, Whitefriars and Paget Place,--"the noblest nurseries of

humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as Ben Jonson calls them in his

dedication[17] 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 him at Trinity 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

beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was one of its members, Richard

Edwardes, who, as Master of the Chapel Children, produced the "tragicall

comedie" _Damon and Pythias_, and the tragedy of _Palamon 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

commonplace, 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 the Middle Temple, just fourteen months

after Beaumont joined the Inns of Court, that Manningham, one of the

barristers, witnessed the performance for the Reader's Feast on

Candlemas Day of Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_. If Beaumont of the

Inner Temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more than the

applause, he was 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 Shakespeare, 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. Between these Houses, says

Mr. Douthwaite, the historian 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

[1886] 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 theatrical shows; and as we shall see, they combined some

thirteen years after Beaumont entered the Inner Temple in the production

at Court of one of the most glorious and expensive masques ever

presented 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" after six o'clock supper of

bread and beer; and when Beaumont was of the Inner Temple close by,

there was a Grand Week at Gray's in every term. "They had revels and

masques some of which," as a member of that society has recently said,

"have never been forgotten, and I think cannot be forgotten while

English history lasts."[18] From a very early date, perhaps not long

after the society was established in Edward the Third's reign in the old

manor of Portpool, "they were addicted at the Christmas season to a

great outburst of revelry of every kind. The revelings began at All

Hallows; at Christmas a Prince of Portpoole was appointed; who was also

Lord of Misrule, and he kept things gaily alive through Christmas and

until toward the end of January." These and other disguises, masques,

and mummeries, are lineal descendants of the mummings of the Ancient

Order of the Coif, such as regaled King Richard II at Christmas 1389;

and, amalgamated with St. George plays and other folk-shows and even

with sword-dances, they influenced the course of rural drama throughout

the realm. It may be a bow drawn at a venture but I cannot withhold the

suspicion that the Lord of Pool of the _Revesby Sword-Play_ and of other

popular compositions derives from the historic Prince of Misrule of the

Gray's Inn Christmas revels. It was George Gascoigne of Gray's Inn who

by a translation from Ariosto introduced the Renaissance treatment of

the Greek New Comedy and the Latin Comedy into England with his

_Supposes_ in 1566, and in the same year, with Francis Kinwelmersh,

produced at Gray's Inn an English rendering of Ludovico Dolce's

_Giocasta_, a tragedy descended from Euripides' _Phoenissae_ by way of a

Latin version. "Altogether," remarks Professor Cunliffe,[19] "the play

must have provided a gorgeous and exciting spectacle, and have produced

an impression not unworthy of Gray's Inn, 'an House', the Queen said on

another occasion, 'she was much beholden unto, for that it did always

study for some 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 1588, Gray's Inn figures prominently again in the career of

the pre-Shakespearian drama, with the production by one of its

gentlemen, Thomas Hughes, of a tragedy of English legend and Senecan

type, _The Misfortunes of Arthur_, played by the society before the

Queen at Greenwich. And, in 1594, Gray's Inn connects itself with the

Shakespearian drama directly by witnessing in the great hall in the

Christmas season 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 1594, a

very pious woman, 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 make 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 1575, was, till his fall from power, the

keenest devotee and most ardent and reckless promoter of masquing that

Gray's Inn or, for that matter, England, had ever known. According to

Spedding,[20] the speeches of the six councillors for the famous court

of the Prince of Purpoole in 1594 were written by him and him alone. He

furnished the money and much of the device for gorgeous masques before

Queen Elizabeth; and under her successor he was prime mover in many a

masque, like that of the _Flowers_, presented by the gentlemen of Gray's

Inn, in 1614, which, alone, cost him about L10,000 as reckoned in the

money of to-day. The masques by the four Inns, in honour of the Elector

Palatine's marriage, the year before, are said to have cost

L20,000,--five hundred thousand dollars in the money of to-day! And it

would appear that much of this expense was assumed by Sir Francis Bacon,

who in the years of his greatness as Solicitor-General and

Attorney-General retained intimate relations with the life of Gray's

Inn, and whom our Beaumont during the years of studentship before 1603,

when the gallant Sir Walter Raleigh was consigned to the Tower, must

many times have seen strolling with Sir Walter in the walks that Bacon

himself had laid out for his fellow-benchers of the Inn.

If Beaumont's family had deliberately set about preparing him for his

career of poet and dramatist, especially of dramatist who, with John

Fletcher, should vividly reproduce the life, manners and conversation of

young men of fashion about town, they could not have placed him in a

community more favourable to 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 persons of quality"; they must be

trained to the possibility of appearance before the King at any time;

they must be ready not merely as a privilege, but as a function, to

entertain royalty upon summons. As Gray's Inn had its flavour of

romance, its literary and dramatic 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

Spanish main; there the memory of the Christmas revels of 1562 at which

was first acted the _Gorboduc_ of Thomas Sackville (afterwards Earl of

Dorset, and connected by marriage with 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 produced, by five poets of the House, in 1568, "the

first English love-tragedy that has survived,"[21] _Gismond of Salerne_,

a distant but unmistakable forerunner in tempestuous passion and pathos

of plays in which young Beaumont was to compose the major part, _The

Maides Tragedy_ and _A King and No King_.

Here, in the intervals between moots and bolts in the day time or during

the long evenings about the central fire in Hall or in Chambers, a

young man of poetic proclivities would find ample opportunity to indulge

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 membership in one 'college'

of this pseudo-university implied 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 Tower,

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 1604 Earl of Huntingdon,--two years younger than

Frank, and admitted as early as 1597; and of Robert Pierrepoint, who 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 Metamorphosis of Tabacco_, a

mock-Ovidian poem of graceful style and more than ordinary wit,

published in 1602, and ascribed by some one writing in a contemporary

hand upon the title-page, to John Beaumont, was John's we might regard

the half dozen verses in praise of "thy pleasing rime," signed F. B.,

and beginning,

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 conjectured composition by John, for he is writing other

complimentary poems to Drayton in the years immediately following 1602.

But, though F. B.'s lines prefatory to the _Metamorphosis_ are not

unworthy of 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 authors, 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 and Hermaphroditus_, of which we cannot be

certain that he was not the author. The poem was first published,

without name of writer, in 1602,[22] 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, 1640. Blaiklock evidently

printed from John Hodgets's edition of 1602, 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 Author_, so as to read I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher). These

licenses, in addition to the reckless inclusion in the 1640 volume of

several poems by authors other than Beaumont, vitiate Blaiklock's

evidence. On the other hand, the original publisher, Hodgets, was the

publisher also, in 1607, of _The Woman-Hater_, a play now reasonably

accepted as by Beaumont, originally alone; and, in Hodgets's edition of

the _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_, one of the introductory sonnets is

signed J. B., and another W. B. The 'J. B.' sonnet is not unworthy of

Beaumont's brother John. And if the W. B. of the other verses, _In

Laudem Authoris_, is William Basse,--who in a sonnet, written after

Beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare Beaumont,"--there is further

justification for entertaining the possibility of Beaumont's authorship

of the _Salmacis_. For Basse was one of the group of pastoralists 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 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 _Salmacis_, 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 _Salmacis and

Hermaphroditus not by Beaumont_.[23] Both diction and verse display

characteristics not foreign to Beaumont's heroic couplets in epistle and

elegy, nor to the blank verse of his dramas,--though they do not

markedly distinguish them. The romantic-classical and idyllic grace may

be the germ of that which flowers in the tragicomedies; and the joyous

irony is not unlike that of _The Woman-Hater_ and _The Knight of the

Burning Pestle_. The poem is a voluptuous and rambling expansion of the

classical theme "which sweet-lipt Ovid long agoe did tell." The writer,

like many a lad of 1602, 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 we have Francis Beaumont's

earliest attempt at a poem of some proportions, 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 the occasional far-fetched conceits, the poet has

visualized clearly the scenes of his mythological idyl, and enlivened

the narrative with ingenuous humour; he has caught the figured style and

something of the winged movement of his masters; and every here and

there he has produced lines of more than imitative beauty:

Looke how, when Autumne comes, a little space

Paleth the red blush of the Summer's face,

Searing the leaves, the Summer's covering,

Three months in weaving by the curious Spring,--

Making the grasse, his greene locks, go to wracke,

Tearing each ornament from off his backe;

So did she spoyle the garments she did weare,

Tearing whole ounces of her golden hayre.

The earliest definite indication that I have found of Beaumont's

literary activity, and of his recognition by poets, connects him with

his brother John, and is highly suggestive in still other respects. John

had already written, in 1603 or 1604, verses prefatory to Drayton's

poetic treatment of _Moyses in a Map of his Miracles_, published in June

of the latter year; and also, in 1605, to Drayton's revision of the

_Barrons Wars_. On April 19, 1606, Drayton issued a volume entitled

_Poems Lyrick and Pastoral_, which included with other verses a

revision, under the name of _Eglogs_, of his _Idea, the Shepheard's

Garland_, first published in 1593. In the eighth eclogue of this new

edition, Drayton, writing of the ladies of his time to whom "much the

Muses owe," adds to his praise of Sidney's (Elphin's) sister Mary,

Countess of Pembroke, an encomium upon the two daughters of his early

patron, Sir Henry Goodere, Frances and Anne (Lady Ramsford); 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

Warwickshire. The dear nymph of Charnwood is Elizabeth Beaumont, in 1606

a lass of eighteen,--and the "hopeful boys" who bring the southern

shepherds (Jonson, perhaps, and young John Fletcher, as well as Drayton)

to their Grace-Dieu priory by the river Soar, are John, then about

twenty-three, and the future dramatist, about twenty-two.[24] Under the

pastoral pseudonym of Mirtilla, Elizabeth is again celebrated by Drayton

twenty-four years later, in his _Muses Elizium_. Since these Pastorals

are in confessed sequence with those of "the prime pastoralist of

England," and the pastoral Thyrsis and young Palmeo have already sung

divinely of the clear waters of their native stream, it would appear

that they too are disciples at that time of Master Edmund Spenser in his

_Shepheards Calender_. And since these brothers, so like in wit and

feature, and in charming devotion to their sister, are all the brothers

that she has, it is evident that this portion of the _Eglog_ was written

after July 10, 1605; for up to that date, the eldest of the family,

Henry, was still living, and at the manor house of Grace-Dieu. This

friendship between Drayton and the "hopeful boys" continued through

life; for, as we shall later note and more at length, in 1627, the year

of John's death, and many years after that of Francis, the older poet

still celebrates the twain as "My dear companions whom I freely chose My

bosome-friends."

When James I made his famous progress from Edinburgh to London, April 5

to May 3, 1603, "every nobleman and gentleman kept open house as he

passed. He spent his time in festivities and amusements of various

kinds. The gentry of the counties through which his journey lay thronged

in to see him. Most of them returned home decorated with the honours of

knighthood, a title which he dispensed with a profusion which astonished

those who remembered the sober days of Elizabeth."[25] One of those thus

decorated was the poet's brother Henry, who was dubbed knight bachelor

at Worksop in Derbyshire, on 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 Beaumont of Coleorton received the honour of knighthood at the

Earl of Rutland's castle of Belvoir.[26]

Sir Henry of Grace-Dieu did not long enjoy his title. He died about the

tenth of July 1605, and was buried on the thirteenth. By his will,

witnessed by his brother Francis, and probated February 1606, 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,[27] who later married a daughter of John Fortescue--also of a

poetic race--and left by her a large family. The sister, Elizabeth

(Mirtilla) probably continued to live at Grace-Dieu until her marriage

to Thomas Seyliard of Kent. And that Francis occasionally came home on

visits from London we have other proof than that afforded by Drayton.

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, while his finances

may have been occasionally at low ebb, the association in Bohemian

_menage_ with John Fletcher, which followed the years of residence at

the Inner Temple, was a matter of choice, not of poverty.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] _Inns of Court and Chancery_ (Lond., 1912), p. 45; W. R.

Douthwaite, _Gray's Inn, its History and Associations_ (Lond., 1886),

pp. 36, 78, 253. For the Beaumonts, and what follows, see, also,

Inderwick, _Inner Temple Records_ (Lond. 1896), I, 421; II, 435;

Introductions, and subjects as indexed.

[16] _Inns of Court, etc._, p. 163.

[17] The Dedication first appears in the folio of 1616.

[18] H. E. Duke, K. C., M. P., _Gray's Inn in Six Lectures on the Inns

of Court and of Chancery_, 1912.

[19] _Early English Classical Tragedies_, Introduction, p. lxxxvi.

[20] Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, I, 342.

[21] Cunliffe, _E. E. Class. Tragedies_, p. lxxxvi.

[22] Reprinted by _Dramaticus, Sh. Soc. Pap._ III, 94 (1847).

[23] _Dramaticus_, (as above).

[24] On these identifications, see Fleay, _Chron. Eng. Dr._, I,

143-145; Elton, _Michael Drayton_, pp. 13, 58; Child, _Michael

Drayton_ (in _Camb. Hist. Lit._, IV, 197, _et seq._).

[25] Gardiner, _Hist. Engl._ 1603-1607, p. 87.

[26] Shaw's _Knights of Engl._, Vol. II, under dates.

[27] Grosart (_D. N. B._ art. _John Beaumont_) 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

Certain political events of the years 1603 to 1606 must have occasioned

the young Beaumonts intimate and poignant 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 persecuted priests, were active Jesuits.

After the death of his first wife,--Beaumont's aunt Elizabeth, who left

four children, Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne,--William, Lord Vaux,

had married Mary, the sister of the noble-hearted and self-sacrificing

Catholic, Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton in Northamptonshire; and this

lady had brought up her own children, George and Ambrose, as well as the

children of the first marriage, in strict adherence to the Roman faith

and practice. Henry, the heir to the title, had been one of that zealous

band of young Catholic gentlemen who received Fathers Campion and

Persons on their arrival in England in 1580.[28] Before 1594, Henry,

"that blessed 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 1590, 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 widow

in 1594 with an infant son, Edward, whom she educated to maintain the

Catholicity of the family. In 1595, the old Baron, Beaumont's uncle,

died--"the infortunatest peer of 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

Warwickshire, the well-known Father Gerard and his Superior, Father

Garnet, from priest-hunters, or pursuivants. These two cousins of

Beaumont are described in Father Gerard's _Narrative_[29] as illustrious

for goodness and holiness, "whom in my own mind I often compare to the

two women who 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 _virago_. 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

pursuivants become so strong as to spend three or four hours in contest

with them. When she has no priest in the 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

1605, the Vauxes are identified as recusants and as sympathizers with

the untoward fortunes of Fathers Southwell, Walpole, Garnet, and others.

In 1601, their kinsman and Frank Beaumont's, Henry Hastings, nephew to

George, fourth Earl of Huntingdon, has joined the ranks and in 1602, we

find him in a list of Jesuits "to be 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 1605 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 of Mrs.

Vaux, were wont to foregather.

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 discontented, led by two priests, Watson and Clarke,

embarked upon a wild scheme to kidnap the King and set as the price of

his liberty the extension to Catholics of equal rights, religious,

civil, and political, with the Protestants. The plot was betrayed, the

priests executed, and the other leaders condemned to death,--then

reprieved but attainted. Among those thus reprieved were Lord Grey de

Wilton and "a confederate named Brookesby." This Brookesby was

Bartholomew, the brother of Eleanor Vaux's husband. When new and more

stringent measures were immediately adopted for the repression of

priests and recusants, the indignation of the Catholics reached a

climax. "They saw," says Gardiner, "no more than the intolerable wrong

under which they suffered; and it would be strange if there were not

some amongst them who would be driven to meet wrong with violence, and

to count even the perpetration of a great crime as a meritorious

deed."[30]

In 1603 Father Gerard took a new house in London in the fields behind

St. Clement's Inn,--just across the Strand from the Inner Temple where

Francis Beaumont was living at the time. "This new house," says Gerard,

"was very suitable and convenient and had private entrances on both

sides, and I had contrived in it some most excellent hiding-places; and

there I should have long remained, free from all peril or even

suspicion, if some friends of mine, while I was absent from London, had

not availed themselves of the house rather rashly."[31] These friends

were Robert Catesby, a cousin of the Vauxes of Harrowden; his cousin,

Thomas Winter; Winter's relative, John Wright, and Thomas Percy, a

kinsman of Henry, ninth Earl of Northumberland,--all gentlemen of

distinguished county families. In May 1604, these men with one Guy

Fawkes of York and Scotton, a soldier of fortune and "excellent good

natural parts," and, like the rest, fanatic with brooding over the

wrongs of the Catholic Church, met at Father Gerard's house behind St.

Clement's Inn, swore to keep secret the purpose of their meeting,

received in an adjoining room the Sacrament from Father Gerard, an

unwitting accomplice, in confirmation of their oath; and then, retiring,

learned from Catesby that the project intended was to blow up the

Parliament House with gunpowder when the King and the royal family next

came to the House of Lords. Within a few days "Thomas Percy hired a

howse at Westminster," says Fawkes in his subsequent Confession, "neare

adjoyning Parlt. howse, and there wee beganne to make a myne about the

XI of December, 1604." The rest of the story is too well-known to call

for repetition. How the gunpowder was smuggled into a cellar running

under the Parliament House; how, when Parliament was prorogued to

November 5th, 1605, the conspirators, running short of money to equip an

insurrection, added to their number a few wealthy accomplices,--most

significant to our narrative, that old friend of the Vauxes, Sir Edward

Digby, and Francis Tresham, cousin of Catesby and the Winters, and as I

have said of the Vauxes themselves.[32] How Tresham, recoiling from the

destruction of innocent Catholic Lords with the detested Protestants,

met Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes at White Webbs, "a house known as Dr.

Hewick's house by Enfield Chace," and laboured with them for permission

to warn their friends, especially his brothers-in-law, Lord Stourton and

Monteagle; and how, when permission was refused, he wrote an anonymous

letter to Monteagle, begging 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 wickedness of this time." How Monteagle

informed the Council and the King. How Guy Fawkes was discovered 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 Gentlemen

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 Winter, were in full flight for Lady

Catesby's house in Ashby St. Legers, Northamptonshire, 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 Johnson," 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![33]

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

"Walley" [Garnet, the Father Superior of the English Jesuits] "made her

house their chief resort"; and then that Fawkes had confessed that

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,[34]--therefore, an enterprise likely to implicate his Catholic

cousins, indeed. His friend, Ben Jonson, is meanwhile blustering of

private informations, and Francis would be likely to hear that Ben has

written (November 8) to Lord Salisbury offering his services to unravel

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 Webbs as a

rendezvous. Perhaps White Webbs means nothing to Francis just yet, but

it soon will. Three days later, Tresham under examination acknowledges

interviews with his cousins, Catesby and Thomas Winter, 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, the Inner Temple

itself is shaken to the foundations by the intelligence that Jesuit

literature has been discovered by Sir Edward Coke in Tresham's

chamber,--a manuscript of Blackwell's famous treatise on

_Equivocation_, destined to play a baleful role in the ensuing

examination of certain of the suspects.

Meanwhile, Francis would observe with alarm that his Vaux cousins are

from day to day objects of deeper suspicion. On November 13, Lord Vaux's

house at Harrowden is searched; his mother gives up all her keys but no

papers are found. She and the young lord strongly deny all knowledge of

the treason; the house, however, is still guarded. On the eighteenth,

Elizabeth, Mrs. Vaux, is examined and says that she does not know

"Gerard, the priest"[!]; but among the visitors at her house she

mentions Catesby, Digby, and "Greene" [Greenway] and "Darcy" [Garnet],

priests. She acknowledges having written to Lady Wenman, the wife of Sir

Richard, last Easter, saying that "Tottenham would turn French," but

fails to explain her meaning. From other quarters, however, it is

learned that she bade that lady "be of good comfort for there should

soon be toleration for religion," adding: "Fast and pray that that may

come to pass which we purpose, which yf it doe, wee shall see Totnam

turned French." And Sir Richard, examined concerning the contents of

Mrs. Vaux's letter to his wife, affirms that he "disliked their

intercourse, because Mrs. Vaux tried to pervert his wife." On December

4, Catesby's servant, Bates, acknowledges that he revealed the whole

Plot to Greenway, the priest, in confession, "who said it was a good

cause, bade him be secret, and absolved him." From Henry Huddleston's

examination, December 6, it appears that Mrs. Vaux has not been telling

the whole truth about Harrowden, 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 19, 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.[35] 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 with the Plot, cannot have

failed to admire the bearing of Elizabeth during the examination:

"As for 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

produced 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 letter, and said to her, 'You see now

that you are entirely 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 one 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

certainly die.'

"To which she answered with 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 was 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 devotion to the cause, would not be likely

to filter through; but the Beaumonts may have had their suspicions.

According to Father Gerard:--

"Immediately she was released from custody, knowing that I was

then in London, quite forgetful of herself, 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 thousand florins, and in

fact she sent me at once a thousand florins for my journey. I left

her in care of Father Percy, who had already as my companion lived

a long time at her house. There he still remains, and does much

good. I went straight to Rome, and being sent back thence to these

parts, was fixed at Louvain."[36] So much at present of Elizabeth.

We shall hear of her, as did Beaumont, during the succeeding

years.

In the tribulations of Anne Vaux, his own first cousin, Francis must

have been even more deeply interested. That she was in communication

with Fawkes had been discovered, November 5. She was apprehended,

committed to the care of Sir John Swynerton, but temporarily discharged.

When Fawkes confessed, November 9, that the conspirators had been using

a house of Father Garnet's at White Webbs, in Enfield Chace, the house

called "Dr. Hewick's" was searched. "No papers nor munition 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 Anne Vaux!] The books and relics are the property of "Mrs.

Jennings,"--[and who should she be but Anne's sister, Eleanor

Brookesby!] "Mrs. Perkins spent a month at White Webbs lately;" and

"three gentlemen [Catesby, Winter, and another] came to White Webbs, the

day the King left Royston" [October 31]. On November 27, Sir Everard

Digby's servant deposes concerning Garnet that "Mrs. Ann Vaux doth

usually goe with him whithersoever he goethe." On January 19, as we have

seen, warrants are out for the arrest of Garnet. On January 30, he is

taken with another Jesuit priest, Father Oldcorne, at Hindlip Hall, in

Worcestershire, where for seven days and nights they have been buried in

a closet, and nourished by broths conveyed to them by means of a quill

which passed "through a little hole in a chimney that backed another

chimney into a gentlewoman's chamber." True enough, the deposition, that

whithersoever her beloved Father Superior "goethe, Mrs. Ann Vaux doth

usually goe"; for she is the gentlewoman of the broths and quill,--she

with Mrs. Abington, the sister of Monteagle. Garnet and Oldcorne are

taken prisoners to the Tower; and three weeks later Anne is in town

again, communicating with Garnet by means of letters, ostensibly brief

and patent, but eked out with tidings written in an invisible ink of

orange-juice. On March 6, Garnet confesses that Mrs. Anne Vaux, alias

Perkins, he, and Brookesby bear the expenses of White Webbs. On March

11, Anne being examined says that she keeps the place at her own

expense; that Catesby, Winter, and Tresham have been to her house, but

that she knew nothing of the Plot; on the contrary, suspecting some

mischief at one time, she had "begged Garnet to prevent it." Examined

again on March 24, she says that "Francis Tresham, her cousin, often

visited her and Garnet at White Webbs, Erith, Wandsworth, etc., when

Garnet would counsel him to be patient and quiet; and that they also

visited Tresham at his house in Warwickshire." Garnet's trial took place

at Guildhall on March 28, Sir Edward Coke of the Inner Temple acting for

the prosecution. Garnet acknowledged that the Plot had been conveyed to

him by another priest [Greenway] in confession. He was convicted,

however, 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, Beaumont would by this date have known. One

wonders whether he or his brother, John, ever learned the pathetic

details of the final correspondence 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 sorrow for his own weakness

under examination, the Father Superior sends his last word to

her,--that he will "die not as a victorious martyr, but as a penitent

thief,"--and bids her farewell.

All this of the Harrowden cousins and their connection 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 circumstances and

feelings which prompted the satire of his first play, _The Woman-Hater_

(acted in 1607), where as we shall see he 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 unoffending persons, and so sought to

deprive them, if not of life, of 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 intelligencers 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,

1607, may indicate that John Beaumont, the brother of Francis, though a

Protestant, had in some way manifested sympathy with his Catholic

relatives during the persecutions which followed the discovery 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 Beaumont would appear to be

Francis' grandfather, the Master of the Rolls. But the Master lost his

lands not for recusancy (or refusal on religious grounds to take the

Oath of Allegiance, or attend the State Church), but for malfeasance in

office, and that in 1552-3, while the Protestant Edward VI was King. He

had no lands to lose after Mary mounted the throne,--even if as a

Protestant he were recusant under a Catholic Queen. The recusancy seems

to be of a date contemporaneous with James's refusal, October 17, 1606,

to take fines from recusants, the King, as the State Papers inform us,

taking "two-thirds of their goods, lands, etc., instead." The

"two-thirds" would appear to be the "two parts" of Grace-Dieu and other

lands, specified in the Gift; and that the sufferer was Francis

Beaumont's brother is rendered the more likely by the fact that the

beneficiary, Sir James Sempill, had been distinguishing himself by

hatred of Roman Catholics from November 16, 1605, on; and that on July

31, 1609, he is again receiving grants "out of lands and goods of

recusants, to be convicted at his charges."

There is nothing, indeed, in the career of Beaumont's brother, John, as

commonly recorded, or in the temper of his poetry to indicate a refusal

on his part to disavow the supremacy of Rome in ecclesiastical affairs,

or to attend regularly the services of the Protestant Church. His

writings speak both loyalty and Protestant Christianity. But it is to be

noted that not only many of his kinsmen but his wife, as well, belonged

to families affiliated with Roman Catholicism, and that his eulogistic

poems addressed to James are all of later years,--after his kinsman,

Buckingham, had "drawn him from his silent cell," and "first inclined

the anointed head to hear his rural songs, and read his 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

connections, or of repugnance for the unusually savage measures adopted

after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, he may have been accused of

recusancy, deprived of part of his estate, and driven into the seclusion

which he maintained at Grace-Dieu till 1616 or thereabout.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] John Morris, _Life of Father John Gerard_, p. 311, _et seq._

[29] Morris, _op. cit._, p. 113. See below, Appendix, Table D.

[30] Gardiner, _Hist. Engl._ 1603-1642, I, 234.

[31] Morris, p. 360. See also, below, Appendix, Table D.

[32] Fletcher's connections, also, the Bakers, Lennards, and

Sackvilles were interested in the fortunes of Francis Tresham; for he

had married Anne Tufton of Hothfield, Kent, granddaughter of Mary

Baker who was sister of Sir Richard of Sissinghurst and of Cicely,

first Countess of Dorset.--Collins, III, 489; Hasted, VII, 518. See

below, Appendix, Tables D, E.

[33] The facts as here presented are drawn from the _Calendar of State

Papers (Domestic)_, the _Gunpowder Plot Book_, and Father Gerard's

_Narrative_ (in Morris), in the order of dates as indicated.

[34] Nov. 5-8.

[35] Morris, _Life of Father Gerard_, p. 385.

[36] Morris, pp. 413-414.

CHAPTER V

FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH

The friendship between Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher may have

commenced at any time after Francis became a member of the Inner Temple,

in 1600,--probably not later than 1605, when Beaumont 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 clergyman; and

Richard, himself, in his earlier years had been pensioner and scholar of

Trinity, Cambridge (1563), then Fellow of Bene't College (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; became, next, minister of the church of Rye,

Sussex, about fifteen miles south of Cranbrook; then, Chaplain 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 for holy orders, became two years later a Bible-clerk, reading

the lessons in the services of the college chapel. At the time of his

entering college, his father had risen to the bishopric of Bristol; and,

later in 1591, had been made Lord High Almoner to the Queen; he had a

house at Chelsea, and was near the court "where his presence was

accustomed much to be." By 1593 the Bishop had been advanced to the

diocese of Worcester; and we find him active in the House of Lords with

the Archbishop of Canterbury in the proposal of severe measures against

the Barrowists and Brownists.[37] The next year he was elected Bishop of

London,--succeeding John Aylmer, who had been tutor to Lady Jane

Grey,--and was confirmed by royal assent in January 1595. From Sir John

Harington's unfavourable account[38] it would appear that the Bishop

owed his rapid promotion to the combination of great mind and small

means which made him a fitting tool for "zealous courtiers whose

devotion did serve them more to prey on the Church than pray in the

Church." But his will, drawn in 1593, shows him mindful of the poor,

solicitous concerning the "Chrystian and godlie education" of his

children and confident in the principles and promises of the Christian

faith,--"this hope hath the God of all comforte laide upp in my breste."

We have no record of John's proceeding to a degree. It is not unlikely

that he left Cambridge for the city when his father attained the

metropolitan see. From early years the boy had enjoyed every opportunity

of observing the ways of monarchs and courtiers, scholars 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." _Praesul

splendidus_, says Camden. Eloquent, accomplished, courtly, lavish in

hospitality and munificence, no wonder 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" which 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 Archbishop of Canterbury. As for immediate

literary connections, suffice it here to say that the Bishop's brother,

Dr. Giles Fletcher, was a cultivated diplomat and writer 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 _Sicelides_ 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

1610, a year or so later than John's pastoral of _The Faithfull

Shepheardesse_. 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!"[39] 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 come

to announce to Mary, Queen of Scots, the sentence of death.

From 1591 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

1592, the Bishop had, in 1595, most unwisely married Maria (daughter of

John Giffard of Weston-under-Edge in Gloucestershire), the relict of a

few months' standing of Sir Richard Baker of Sissinghurst in Kent. The

Bishop's acquaintance with this second wife, as well as with the first,

probably derived from his father's incumbency as Vicar of the church in

Cranbrook, Kent, which began in 1555 and was still existing as late as

1574. The young Richard would often have shuddered as a child before

Bloody Baker's Prison with its iron-barred windows glowering from the

parish church, for Sir John hated the primitive and pious Anabaptists

who had taken up their abode about Cranbrook, and he hunted them

down;[40] and Richard would, as a lad, have walked the two miles across

the clayey fields and through the low-lying woods with his father to the

stately manor house, built by old Sir John Baker himself in the time of

Edward VI, and have seen that distinguished personage who had been

Attorney-General and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Henry VIII,--and

who as may be recalled was one of that Council of State, in 1553, which

ratified and signed Edward VI's 'devise for the succession' making Lady

Jane Grey inheritress of the crown. And when young Richard returned from

his presidency of Bene't College, in 1573, to Cranbrook to marry

Elizabeth Holland, he would have renewed acquaintance with Sir Richard,

who had succeeded the "bloody" Sir John as master of Sissinghurst,

sixteen years before. He may for all we know have been present at the

entertainment which that same year Sir Richard made for Queen Elizabeth.

Maria Giffard was twenty-four years old, then. Whether she was yet Lady

Baker we do not know--but it is probable; and we may be sure that on his

various visits to Cranbrook, the rising dean and bishop had frequent

opportunity to meet her at Sissinghurst before his own wife's death, or

the death of Sir Richard in 1594. Since the sister of Sir Richard Baker,

Cicely, was already the wife of Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, when,

in 1586-7, Buckhurst and Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, were

thrown together at Fotheringay, it is not unlikely that the closer

association between the Fletchers and Lady Buckhurst's sister-in-law of

Sissinghurst grew out of this alliance of the Sackvilles with the

Bakers.

[Illustration: THOMAS SACKVILLE, FIRST EARL OF DORSET

From the portrait in the possession of Lord Sackville, at Knole Park]

Lady Baker was in 1595 in conspicuous disfavour with Queen Elizabeth,

and with the people too; for, if she was virtuous, as her nephew

records,[41] "the more happy she in herself, though unhappy that the

world did not believe it."[42] Certain it is, that in a contemporary

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

connected. Her brother, Sir George Giffard, was in service 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, without

her express consent. For a year after this second marriage the Bishop

was suspended from his office. "Here of the Bishop was sadly sensible,"

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.'"

That was in 1596. The Bishop left little but his library and his debts.

The former went to two of his sons, Nathaniel and John. The latter

swallowed up his house at Chelsea with his other properties. The

Bishop's brother and chief executor of the will, Giles, the diplomat, is

soon memorializing the Queen for "some commiseration towards the orphans

of the late Bishopp of London." He emphasizes the diminution of the

Bishop's worldly estate consequent upon his translation to the costly

see of London, his extraordinary charges in the reparation of the four

episcopal residences, his lavish expenditure in hospitality, his

penitence for "the errour of his late marriage," and concludes:--"He

hath left behinde him 8 poore children, whereof divers are very young.

His dettes due to the Quenes Majestie and to other creditors are

1400_li._ or thereaboutes, his whole state is but one house wherein the

widow claimeth her thirds, his plate valewed at 400_li._, his other

stuffe at 500_li._" Anthony Bacon, who sympathized with the purpose of

this memorial, enlisted the cooperation of Bishop Fletcher's powerful

friend and his own patron, the Earl of Essex, who "likewise represented

to the Queen the case of the orphans ... in so favourable a light that

she was inclin'd to relieve them;" but whether she did so or not, we are

unable to discover.[43]

What John Fletcher,--a lad of seventeen, when, in 1596, he was turned

out of Fulham Palace and his father's private house in Chelsea, with

its carpets and cushions and the special "stayre and dore made of

purpose ... in a bay window" for the entrance of Queen 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 1606 or

1607, in the ranks of the dramatists, we have no means of knowing.

Perhaps the remaining years of his boyhood 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 luxurious 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 previous

marriage, in whom to seek consolation, Grisogone and Cicely Baker,

then in their twenties, and devoted to her.[44] And with one or both

we may surmise 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 was 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,

1609.

In 1603 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 Fletcher's

father, had taken possession of the manor of Knole, near Sevenoaks in

Kent, where their descendants live to-day. Before 1609, Fletcher's

stepsister Cicely, named after her aunt, the Countess, had become the

Lady Cicely Blunt. Grisogone became the Lady Grisogone Lennard, having

married, about 1596, 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 twenty-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,

married 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--on familiar terms with Tarleton, Burbadge, and Alleyn. And

the literary traditions handed down from Thomas Sackville, the author of

_Gorboduc_ 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

hanging in the dining-room of the Baron Sackville at Knole, were

painted.[45]

* * * * *

I have dwelt thus at length upon the conditions antecedent to, and

investing, the youth of Beaumont and of Fletcher, because the documents

already at hand, if read in the light of scientific biography and

literature, 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

associations, one may more readily comprehend why Dryden 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 repartees, no poet before them

could paint as they have done."

FOOTNOTES:

[37] _Cal. State Papers (Dom.)_, April 7, 1593.

[38] _Briefe View of the State of the Church._

[39] Nichols's _Progresses of Queen Elizabeth_, II, 506-510.

[40] See the story in _Camden Miscellany_, III (1854).

[41] Sir Richard Baker, in his _Chronicle of the Kings of England_.

[42] Fuller's _Worthies_, as cited by Dyce, I, x, xi.

[43] The materials as furnished by Dyce, _B. and F._, I, xiv-xv, from

Birch's _Mem. of Elizabeth_, and the Bacon Papers in the Lambeth

Library are confirmed by _Cal. St. Papers_ (_Dom._), June 1596, July

9, 1597, _etc._

[44] As her monument in Canterbury would indicate. Hasted, _Hist.

Kent_, XI, 397.

[45] For the Bakers and their connections, see Hasted, _Hist. Kent_,

III, 77; IV, 374, _et seq._; VII, 100-101; for the Sackvilles.--Hasted,

III, 73-82; for the Lennards,--Hasted, III, 108-116; 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

Beaumont and Fletcher may have been friends by 1603 or 1604,--in all

likelihood, as early as 1605 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 1607 that they had been acquainted not only with Jonson

but with one another for the two years past. We have no satisfactory

proof of their cooperation in play-writing before 1606 or 1607.

According to Dryden,--whose statements of fact are occasionally to be

taken with a grain of salt, but who, in this instance, though writing

almost sixty years after the event, is basing his assertion upon

first-hand authority,--"the first play that brought 'them' in esteem was

their _Philaster_," but "before that they had written two or three very

unsuccessfully." _Philaster_, as I shall presently show, was, in all

probability, first acted between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610.

Before 1609, however, each had written dramas independently, Beaumont

_The Woman-Hater_ and _The Knight of the Burning 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 was licensed for publication May 20, 1607, as

"lately acted by the Children of Paul's." From contemporary evidence we

know, as did Dryden, that two of these plays, _The Knight_ and

_Faithfull Shepheardesse_ were ungraciously received; and Richard Brome,

about fourteen years after Fletcher's death, suggests that perhaps

_Monsieur Thomas_ shared "the common fate."

_The Woman-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 1606. A passage in the Prologue of _The Woman-Hater_ 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 the publication of _Eastward

Hoe_ in 1605. The title-page of 1607 says that the play is given "as it

hath been lately acted." The ridicule of intelligencers emulating some

worthy men in this land "who have discovered things dangerously hanging

over the State" has reference to the system of spying which assumed

enormous proportions after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in

November 1605. An allusion to King James's weakness for handsome young

men, "Why may not _I_ be a favourite in the sudden?" may very well

refer, as Fleay has maintained, to the restoration to favour of Robert

Ker (or Carr) of Ferniehurst, afterwards Earl Somerset,--a page whom

James had "brought with him from Scotland, and brought up of a

child,"[46] but had dismissed soon after his accession. It was at a

tilting match, March 24, 1607, that the youth "had the good fortune to

break his leg in the presence of the King," and "by his personal

activity, strong animal spirits," and beauty, to attract his majesty

anew, and on the spot. The beauty, Beaumont emphasizes as a requisite

for royal favour. "Why may not _I_ be a favourite on the sudden?" says

the bloated, hungry courtier, "I see nothing against it." "Not so, sir,"

replies Valore; "I know you have not the _face_ to be a favourite on the

sudden." The fact that James did not make a knight bachelor of Carr till

December of that year, would in no way invalidate a fling at the favour

bestowed upon him in March. Indeed Beaumont's slur in _The Woman-Hater_

upon "the legs ... very strangely become the legs of a knight and a

courtier" might have applied to Carr as early as 1603, for on July 25 of

that year James had made him a Knight of the Bath,--in the same batch,

by the way, with a certain Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdonshire.[47]

Without violating the plague regulations, as laid down by the City,

_The Woman-Hater_ could have been acted during the six months following

November 20, 1606. A passage in Act III, 2,[48] 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 Cleopatra_[49] which,

according to all evidence, was not acted before 1607. It would appear,

therefore, that Beaumont's first play was completed after January 1,

1607, probably after March 24, when Carr regained the royal favour, and

was presented for the first time during the two months following the

latter date.

_The Woman-Hater_ affords interesting glimpses of the author's

observation, sometimes perhaps experience, in town and country. "That I

might be turned loose," says one of his _dramatis 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, throw an old cloak over my face and, as if I

would 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 how fast he goes,' says a third;

'There's some great matters in hand, questionless,' 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'll after dinner to the

stage to see a play; where, when I first enter, you shall have a murmur

in the house; every 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 whom 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 my 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 somebody 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 tradition, trumped up

momentary trouble for our young dramatists themselves, a few 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

hanging 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 misapplication he

hopes will seem dangerous; he doth, besides, bring me the names of all

the young gentlemen in the city that use ordinaries or taverns, talking

(to my thinking) only as the freedom of their youth teach them without

any further ends, for dangerous and seditious spirits." Much more in

this kind, of city ways known to Beaumont; and, also, something of

country ways, the table of the Leicestershire squire--the Beaumonts of

Coleorton and the Villierses of Brooksby,--and the hunting-breakfasts

with which Grace-Dieu was familiar. The hungry 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 cutteth 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 quarter 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 shall see many legs

too; amongst the rest you shall behold one pair, the feet of which 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 acquaintance 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 humours, though

unoriginal and boyishly forced, are clearly defined; and the instinct

for fun is irrepressible. The Woman-Hater, obsessed by the delusion that

all women are in pursuit, is admirably victimized by a witty and

versatile heroine who has, with maliciously genial pretense, assumed the

role 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 treatise of Paulus Jovius on Roman fishes, or from

some intermediate source. Like the Tamisius of the original, his

Lazarillo,--whose prayer to the Goddess of Plenty is ever, "fill me this

day with some rare delicates,"--scours the city in fruitless quest of an

umbrana's head. Finally, he is taken by intelligencers, spies in the

service of the state, who construe his passion for the head of a fish

as treason aimed at the head of the Duke. The comedy abounds in parody

of verses well known at the time, of lines from _Hamlet_ and _All's Well

that End Well_, _Othello_[50] and _Eastward Hoe_[50] and bombastic

catches from other plays. To me the most ludicrous bit of burlesque is

of the moment of last suspense in _Antony and Cleopatra_ (IV, 14 and 15)

where Antony, thinking to die "after the high Roman fashion" which

Cleopatra forthwith emulates, says "I come my queen,"--

Stay for me!

Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,

And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.

Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,

And all the haunt [of Elysium] be ours.

So Lazarillo, in awful apprehension lest his love, his fish-head, be

eaten before he arrive,--

If it be eaten, here he stands that is the most dejected, most

unfortunate, miserable, accursed, forsaken slave this province

yields! I will not sure outlive it; no, I will die bravely and

like a Roman;

And after death, amidst the Elysian shades,

I'll meet my love again.

Shakespeare's play was not entered for publication till May 20, 1608,

but this passage shows that Beaumont had seen it at the Globe before May

20, 1607.

I have no hesitation in assigning to the same year, 1607, although most

critics have dated it three or four years later, Beaumont's admirable

burlesque of contemporary bourgeois drama and chivalric romance, _The

Knight of the Burning Pestle_. Evidence both external and internal,

which I shall later state, points to its presentation by the Children of

the Queen's Revels at Blackfriars while they were under the business

management of Henry Evans and Robert Keysar, and before the temporary

suppression of the company in March 1608. The question of date has been

complicated by the supposed indebtedness of the burlesque to _Don

Quixote_; but I shall attempt to show, when I consider the play at

length, that it has no verbal relation either to the original (1604) or

the translation (1612) of Cervantes' story. _The Knight of the Burning

Pestle_ is in some respects of the same boyish tone and outlook upon the

humours of life as _The Woman-Hater_, but it is incomparably more novel

in conception, more varied in composition, and more effervescent in

satire. It displays the Beaumont of twenty-two or -three as already an

effective dramatist of contemporary manners and humours, a master of

parody, side-long mirth, and ironic wit, before he joined forces with

Fletcher and developed, in the treatment of more serious and romantic

themes, the power of poetic characterization and the pathos that bespeak

experience and reflection,--and, in the treatment of the comedy of life,

the realism that proceeds from broad and sympathetic observation. The

play, which as the publisher of the first quarto, in 1613, tell us was

"begot and borne in eight daies," was not a success; evidently because

the public did not like the sport that it made of dramas and dramatists

then popular; especially, did not stomach the ridicule of the

bombast-loving 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 publisher, in 1613, "the wide world for want of judgement, or

not understanding the privy marke of Ironie about it (which showed it

was no ofspring 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 gives us false information. That matter I shall

discuss in connection with the sources and composition of the play.[51]

Suffice it to say here that _The Knight_ followed _The Travails of Three

English Brothers_, acted. June 29, 1607, and that the Robert Keysar who

rescued the manuscript of _The Knight_ from oblivion had, only in 1606

or 1607, acquired a financial interest in the Queen's Revels' Children,

and was backing them during the last year of their occupancy of

Blackfriars when they presented the play, and where only it was

presented.

In the same year, 1607, both young men are writing commendatory verses

for the first quarto of Ben Jonson's _Volpone_, which had been acted in

1605. Beaumont, with the confidence of intimacy, addresses Jonson as

"Dear Friend," praises his "even work," deplores its failure with the

many who "nothing can digest, but what's obscene, or barks," and implies

that he forbears to make them understand its merits purely in deference

to Jonson's wiser judgment,--

I would have shewn

To all the world the art which thou alone

Hast taught our tongue, the rules of time, of place

And other rites, deliver'd with the grace

Of comic style, which only is far more

Than any English stage hath known before.

But since our subtle gallants think it good

To like of nought that may be understood ...

... let us desire

They may continue, simply to admire

Fine clothes and strange words,

and offensive personalities.

Fletcher in a more epigrammatic appeal to "The true master in his art,

B. Jonson," prays him to forgive friends and foes alike, and then, those

"who are nor worthy to be friends or foes."

* * * * *

Concerning Fletcher's beginnings in composition the earliest date is

suggested by a line of D'Avenant's, written many years after Fletcher's

death (1625), "full twenty years he wore the bays."[52] It has been

conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists was in the field as

early as 1604, with his comedy of _The Woman's Prize_ or _The Tamer

Tamed_,--a well contrived and witty continuation of Shakespeare's

_Taming of the Shrew_,--in which Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's

Katherine, now deceased, marries the bereaved Petruchio and effectively

turns the tables upon him. If acted before 1607, _The Woman's Prize_ was

a Paul's Boys' or Queen's Revels' play. But while the upper limit of the

play is fixed by the mention of the siege of Ostend, 1604, other

references and the literary style point to 1610, even to 1614, as the

date of composition or revision.[53]

It is likely that Fletcher was writing plays before 1608, but what we do

not know. In that year was acted the pastoral drama of _The Faithfull

Shepheardesse_, a composition entirely his own. This delicate confection

of sensual desire, ideal love, translunar chastity, and subacid cynicism

regarding "all ideas of chastity whatever,"[54] was an experiment; and a

failure upon the stage. It has, as I shall later emphasize, lyric and

descriptive charm of surpassing merit, but it lacks, as does most of

Fletcher's work, moral depth and emotional reality; and following, as it

did, a literary convention in design, it could not avail itself of the

skill in dramatic device, and the racy flavour which 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 1609,[55] were in unassisted partnership only from

December 22, 1608 to July 20, 1609), of a statement of Jonson to

Drummond of Hawthornden that the play was written "ten years" before

1618, and of commendatory verses to the first quarto of 1609, by the

young actor-dramatist, Nathaniel Field. If we may guide our calculations

by the plague regulations of the time, it must have been acted before

July 28, 1608.

On the appearance of the first quarto, in 1609, 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, Master 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.

In the first quarto two commendatory poems are printed, the first by N.

F., the second by the Homeric scholar and well known dramatist, George

Chapman. The latter writes "to his loving friend, Master John Fletcher,"

in terms of generous encouragement and glowing charm. Your pastoral,

says he, is "a poem and a play, too,"--

But because

Your poem only hath by us applause,

Renews the golden world, and holds through all

The holy laws of homely pastoral,

Where flowers and founts, and nymphs and semi-gods,

And all the Graces find their old abodes,

Where forests flourish but in endless verse,

And meadows nothing fit for purchasers;

This iron age, that eats itself, will never

Bite at your golden world; that other's ever

Lov'd as itself. Then like your book, do you

Live in old peace, and that for praise allow.

If Jonson, Chapman, and Beaumont suspected the undercurrent of satire in

this Pastoral, and they surely were not obtuse, they concealed the

suspicion admirably. As for Fletcher he continued to "live in old

peace." "When his faire Shepheardesse on the guilty stage, Was martir'd

between Ignorance and Rage.... Hee only as if unconcerned smil'd." An

attitude toward the public that characterized him all through life.

The admiration of younger men is shown in the respectful commendation of

N. F. This is Nathaniel Field. He was acting with the Blackfriars' Boys

since the days when Jonson presented _Cynthia's Revels_, and, as one of

the Queen's Revels' Children, he had probably taken part in _The

Faithfull Shepheardesse_ when the undiscerning public hissed it. Field

came of good family, had been one of Mulcaster's pupils 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

company,--

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?

Now 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 morallitie,[56]

So sweete and profitable.

He is alluding to his not yet finished comedy, _A Woman is a

Weather-cocke_. The youth must have been close to Beaumont as well as to

Fletcher; he soon afterwards, 1609-10, played the leading part in their

_Coxcombe_,--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 Beaumont's

style. This is very interesting, because in another dramatic composition

_Foure Playes in One_, written 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 assigned to this early

period of his career. The portions of _The Foure Playes_ not written by

Fletcher were written by no other than Nat. Field. And since in Field's

_Address to the Reader_ of the _Weather-cocke_, licensed for publication

November 23, 1611, he still speaks as if the _Weather-cocke_ were his

only venture in play-writing, we may conclude that _The Foure Playes in

One_ was not put together before the end of 1611, or the beginning of

1612. That series need not, therefore, be considered in the present

place; all the more so, since Beaumont had in all probability nothing

directly to do with its composition.[57]

Of the other dramas written by Fletcher alone and assigned by critics to

his earlier period, that is to say before 1610, or even 1611, the only

one beside _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ that may with any degree of

safety be admitted to consideration is a comedy of romance, manners, 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 drowned long ago, and now known (if the texts had

only printed the play as Fletcher wrote it) as Callidon, a guest of

Valentine, love the same girl, the father's ward. This part of the play

is executed with captivating grace. It shows that Fletcher had, from the

first, an instinct for the dramatic handling of a complicated story, an

eye for delicate and surprising situations, an appreciation of chivalric

honour and genuine passion, and a fancy fertile and playful. In the

subplot the manners are such as would appeal to a Fletcher not yet

thirty years of age; and the humours are those of a student of the

earlier plays of Ben Jonson, and of Marston--who ceased writing in 1607.

It has indeed been asserted, but without much credibility, that "the

notion of the panerotic Hylas," who must always "be courting wenches

through key-holes," was taken from a character in Marston's

_Parasitaster_, of 1606.[58] 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 1609 or 1610, and elsewhere. The snatches of

song and the names of ballads are those of contemporary popularity

between 1606 and 1609; and in two instances they are those of which

Beaumont makes use in his _Knight of the Burning Pestle_ of 1607. The

play was acted, too, apparently by the same company, the Queen's

Revels' Children, 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 1608, unless they squeezed it into that last month of 1609

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

_Monsieur Thomas_ was written as early as 1608 or only before 1611. 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 when

we put the names Callidon and Cellidee together (she is Francisco's

beloved) we are pointed at once to the source of the romantic plot--the

_Histoire de Celidee, Thamyre, et Calidon_ at the beginning of the

Second Part of the _Astree_ of the Marquis D'Urfe.[59] The First Part of

this voluminous pastoral romance had been published, probably in 1609,

in an edition which is lost; but a second edition, dedicated to Henri

IV, who died May 14, 1610, 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 was not printed till later

in 1610. It would, therefore, appear that Fletcher could not have

written _Monsieur Thomas_ before the latter date. On the other hand, as

Dr. Upham[60] has indicated, the _Astree_ had been read as early as

February 12, 1607, 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 circulated in manuscript, and read by an Englishman, in

1607, it is not at all unlikely that the Second Part, too, of this most

leisurely published romance, which did not get itself all into covers

till 1647, had been read in manuscript by many men, French and English,

long before its appearance in print, 1610;--may be by Fletcher himself,

as early as 1608. 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 Faithfull Shepheardesse_ from which we may draw

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-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 cannot agree; I call it

low, 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

susceptible Hylas. But manners, to be dramatically probable, must

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 Londoners. Thomas, whose humour it is to assume

sanctimony for the purpose of vexing his father, and blasphemy for the

purpose of teasing his sweetheart--racking that "maiden's tender ears

with damns and devils,"--is no more grotesque than many a contemporary

embodiment of 'humour.' 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" Mary, but deems his fornication "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 condones 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 manners, 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, and attribution to others, of the imaginings of its own

heart.

The characters are well grouped; and the spirit of merriment prevails.

The reversals of motive and fortune, the recognitions and the denouement

are as excellently 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 What was legitimate, what bastard knew." That first

presenting was between 1608 and 1612; and the few might have cared more

for Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_ or _Volpone_, or something by

Shakespeare, or soon afterwards for Beaumont and Fletcher's _Philaster_

or _A King and No King_. But, as Brome assures us, "the world's grown

wiser now." That is to say, it had learned by 1639 "what 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 century.

No better example could be afforded of the kind of comedy that Fletcher

was capable of producing in his earlier period. It shows us with what

ability he could dramatize a romantic tale; with what license as a

realist imagine and portray an unmoral, when not immoral, 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 claiming 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 well as his youthful _Knight of the Burning Pestle_

and those portions of _The Woman-Hater_ 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 Shepheardesse_;--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,

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.[61]

During the years of Beaumont's apprenticeship to Poetry cloaked as Law

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 1601. 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 ministers, Richard Evans

and William Crashaw. The sacred place was still the refuge of outlaws

from Whitefriars who claimed the privilege of sanctuary. If Beaumont

wished to steal, after hours, into the Alsatia beyond Fuller's Rents, he

must skirt or propitiate in 1607 as in 1602 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.[62]

FOOTNOTES:

[46] The King's letter to Salisbury (undated, but of 1608). Gardiner,

_Hist. Engl._ 1603-1642, II, 43-45.

[47] This much more distinguished favour has been overlooked by

Thorndike and other critics. But it is possible that Shaw, _Knights of

England_, I, 154, may be confounding him with another Carr, a

favourite of Queen Anne's.

[48] Dyce, _B. and F._, Vol. I, p. 53.

[49] Act IV, 14, 50-54.

[50] _Cf._, Lazarillo's _Farewells_, Act III, 3.

[51] See Chap. XXIV, below.

[52] Prologue, for a revival, in 1649, of _The Woman-Hater_, which

D'Avenant mistakenly attributes to Fletcher.

[53] Reasons for dating an earlier version of the play about 1604 are

given by Oliphant, _Engl. Studien_, XV, 338-339, and Thorndike, _Infl.

of B. and F._, 70-71. In its present form, however, the play dates

later than Jonson's _Epicoene_, 1610. See Gayley, _Rep. Eng. Com._,

III, _Introd._, Sec. 15.

[54] I heartily concur with W. W. Greg's interpretation, _Pastoral

Poetry and Pastoral Drama_, p. 274.

[55] See Fleay, _Chron. Eng. Dr._, I, 312, and Thorndike, _Infl. of B.

and F._, 64.

[56] Folio, 1647, 'mortallitie'; a misprint.

[57] See Chap. XXIII, below.

[58] See Guskar, _Anglia_, XXVIII, XXIX.

[59] Stiefel, _Zeitschr. f. Vergl. Litt._, XII (1898), 248; _Engl.

Stud._, XXXVI; Hatcher, _Anglia_, Feb. 1907; and Macaulay, _C. H. L._,

VI, 156.

[60] _French Influence in English Literature_, pp. 300, 308.

[61] Adapted from Cartwright in the _Commendatory Poems_, Folio of _B.

and F._, 1647.

[62] Details in Inderwick, _op. cit._, Vols. I and II, passim.

CHAPTER VII

THE "BANKE-SIDE" AND THE PERIOD OF THE PARTNERSHIP

As 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 1606 or 1607, his residence alternated

between the Temple and his brother's home of Grace-Dieu. About 1609,

however, he was surely collaborating with his friend, Fletcher, in the

composition 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";[63] 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 account 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 myself, 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 world; and Joan his maid had her beer-glass

of sack; and we all kissed her, i' faith, and were as merry as

passed."[64] 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 exceeded the roasting of pork and

the burning of sack for her two "batchelors."

To the years 1609 and 1610 may be assigned with some show of confidence

Beaumont and Fletcher's first significant romantic dramas _The Coxcombe_

and _Philaster_. The former was acted by the Children of her Majesty's

Revels, I think before July 12, 1610. If at Blackfriars, before January

4, 1610; if at Whitefriars, after January 4. There are grounds for

believing that it was the play upon which Fletcher and Beaumont were

engaged in the country when Beaumont wrote a letter, justly famous,

probably toward the end of 1609, to Ben Jonson; and, since the play was

not well received, that it was one of the unsuccessful 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, 1609 and July 12, 1610. My reasons in detail for

thus dating both of these dramas are given later. But a word about the

_Letter to Ben Jonson_ may be said here.

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE

From Ralph Agas's Map of London, about 1561]

It was first printed at the end of a play called _The Nice Valour_ in

the folio of 1647. 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 1606; but Beaumont might jibe at the Dean's

expense for years after 1606. 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 1606. If the

rubric has any meaning whatever, 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 they were finishing

two of the comedies which precede _The Nice Valour_ in the folio; and it

indicates a date not earlier than 1608, for the writing of the letter,

and probably not later than July 1610. For only three of the fifteen

plays which appear in the folio before _The Nice Valour_ could have been

completed during the career of Beaumont as a dramatist, and none of the

three antedates 1608. In two of these Beaumont had no hand: _The

Captaine_, which may have been composed as late as 1611, and _Beggars'

Bush_,[65] which shows the collaboration of Massinger, but Fletcher's

part of which may have been written in 1608. The only one of the

"precedent comedies" in which we may be sure that Beaumont collaborated

is _The Coxcombe_. If, as I believe, it was acted first between December

1609 and July 1610[66] it may well have been written in the country

during the latter half of 1609, while the plague rate was exceptionally

high in London. Both _Beggars' Bush_ and _The Coxcombe_ 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 Mermaid circle,

Jonson, Chapman, Fletcher, probably Shakespeare, Drayton, Cotton, Donne,

Hugh Holland, 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 from internal

evidence. It is written with the careless ease of long-standing

intimacy. It is of a genial, jocose, and fairly mature, epistolary

style. It betrays the literary assurance of one whose reputation is

already established. Beaumont is in temporary banishment from London,

for lack of funds--therefore, considerably later than 1606, 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

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, when there hath been thrown

Wit able enough to justifie the Town

For three daies past,--wit that might warrant be

For the whole 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 of Ben

Jonson cheers him:

Only strong Destiny, which 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 flow from thee.

Ben, when these Scaenes are perfect, we'll taste wine;

I'll 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 _Woman-Hater_ and the _Knight_, for

instance (both marked by wit and by the discipline of Jonson); but not

later than the end of 1612, for during most of 1613 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 Ladie_; and that does not precede

this _Letter_ in the folio of 1647; is not printed in that folio at all.

Nor was this _Letter_ of a disciple written later than the great

Beaumont-Fletcher plays of 1610-1611, 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 Beaumont speaks

as not yet "perfect" were of _The Coxcombe_; and evidence which I shall,

in the proper place, adduce convinces me that that was first acted

before March 25, 1610, perhaps before January 4. The play would, then,

have been written about the end of 1609.

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 removed 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 contributing to a theme

of Boccaccian cuckoldry the subplot 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 comedy 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 with Shakespeare. Until

about 1609 they appear to have written for the Paul's Boys, who acted,

probably in their singing-school, until 1607; and for the Queen's

Revels' Children who, under various managements, had been occupying

Richard Burbadge's theatre of Blackfriars since 1597. Their association

with the Paul's Boys would of itself have brought them into touch with

other Paul's dramatists, Dekker, Webster, Middleton, and Chapman. In

their association with the Queen's Revels' Children they had been thrown

closely together with Chapman again, with 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 company. 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 Beaumont 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 1606, however, the Paul's Boys were on the wane.

Perhaps they are to be indentified with the new Children of the King's

Revels, and an occupancy of Whitefriars, in 1607; but that clue soon

disappears. And as to the Queen's Revels' Children, we find that in

April 1608 they were suppressed for ridiculing royalty upon the

stage.[67] Their manager, Henry Evans, to whom with three others Richard

Burbadge had let Blackfriars in 1600, now sought to be set free from

the contract; and in August 1608, the Burbadges (Richard and Cuthbert),

Shakespeare, Heming, Condell, and Slye of the King's Company, took over

the lease which still had many years to run.[68] Shakespeare's company

had been acting at the Burbadges' theatre of the Globe since 1599,--as

the Lord Chamberlain's till 1603; after that, as his Majesty's Servants.

Now Shakespeare's company took charge of Blackfriars, as well; and,

under their management, for about a month between December 7, 1609 and

January 4, 1610 the Queen's Revels' Children, being reinstated in royal

favour, resumed their acting at Blackfriars. On the latter date, the

Children as reorganized, opened at Whitefriars under the management 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 Love

Lies a-Bleeding_, published in 1620, we learn that this, the earliest of

their great tragicomedies, was acted not by the Queen's Revels'

Children, but by the King's Players, and at the Globe. From the second

quarto, of 1622, we learn that it was acted also at Blackfriars: it may

indeed have been first presented there. Our earliest record of the play

shows that it was in existence before October 8, 1610. _The Scourge of

Folly_ by John Davies of Hereford, entered for publication on that date,

contains an epigram to "the well deserving Mr. John Fletcher," which

runs--

_Love lies a-Bleeding_, if it should not prove

Her utmost art to show why it doth love.

Thou being the _Subject_ (now), It raignes upon,

Raign'st in _Arte, Judgement, and Invention:_

_For this I love thee; and can doe no lesse_

_For thine as faire, as faithfull_ Sheepheardesse.

Since there is nothing in _Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding_, to

indicate a date of composition earlier than 1608, and since this is the

first of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas to be performed by Shakespeare's

company, we may be fairly certain that the performance followed the

readjustment of affairs between the Globe and Blackfriars in August of

that year. Now, there had been regulations for years past of the City

authorities and the Privy Council in accordance with which theatre in

the City proper and the suburbs of Surrey and Middlesex were closed

whenever the number of deaths by plague exceeded a certain limit per

week. In and after 1608 this limit was set at forty; and it is probable

that, in accordance with a still older regulation, the ban was not

lifted until it was evident that the decrease in deaths was more than

temporary.[69] That actors sometimes performed at Court while the plague

rate was still prohibitive in and about the City, does not by any means

justify us in assuming that they were ever allowed at such times to play

in theatres thronged by the public.[70] Between August 8, 1608 and

October 8, 1610, the only continuous period in which plays might have

been presented by Shakespeare's company at the Globe or Blackfriars,

without violating the plague law, was from December 7, 1609 to July 12,

1610; and we therefore conclude that it was during those months that

Beaumont and Fletcher's _Philaster_ was first acted. The only other

abatement of the plague that might have given promise of continuance was

between March 2 and 23, 1609; but on March 9 the rate of deaths rose

again above forty, and it is not likely that the authorities would have

permitted the theatres to resume operations during those three

weeks.[71]

[Illustration: THE GLOBE THEATRE, WITH ST. PAUL'S IN THE BACKGROUND

From Vischer's long view of London, 1616]

With _Philaster_ Beaumont and Fletcher leaped into the foremost rank as

dramatists. I have so much to say of this tragicomedy in my discussion

of the authorship of its successive scenes, that but a word may here be

said concerning the reasons for its success. Hitherto, practically

Shakespeare alone had written for the King's Servants romantic comedies

of a serious cast; and they were generally based upon some well-known

story. Here was a comedy of serious kind with a romantic and original

plot, by authors comparatively new to the general public, written in a

style refreshingly unhackneyed, and played in the best theatres and by

the best company that London possessed. The Hamlet-like hero seeking his

kingdom and his princess--the daughter of the usurper--and, through

misunderstandings and misadventures, tragic apprehensions, swiftly

succeeding crises, bloodshed, riot, and surprising reversals of fortune,

attaining both birth-right and love; the pathetic innocence and nobly

futile devotion of his girl-page; the triangular affair of the

affections; the humour of the secondary characters; the allurements of

spectacle and masque; the atmosphere of the palace, heroic,--of the

country, idyllic,--of Mile-end and its roarers of the borough, somewhat

burlesque,--the diapason of the poetry from bourdon to flute,--all

combined to win immediate and long continuing favour, both of the City

and the Court. Beaumont had, here, become to some extent "the sobriety

of Fletcher's wit"; he had restrained "his quick free will,"--not,

however, so much by pruning what Fletcher wrote as by admitting him to

but one-quarter of the composition. Something of the intrigue, the

bustle, the spectacle, the easy conversation are Fletcher's; and his,

such sexual vulgarity--very little--as stamps a scene or two. The rest

is Beaumont's. As in the two great romantic dramas which followed, and

in Beaumont's subplot of _The Coxcombe_, the story is of the authors'

own invention. It is not necessary to trace the girl-page and her

devotion to the Diana of Montemayor, or to Bandello, or even to Sidney's

_Arcadia_. The girl-page was a commonplace of fiction at the time; and

the differences in the conduct of this part of the story are greater

than the resemblances to any one of those sources. Much more evidently

is the devoted Euphrasia-Bellario a younger sister of Shakespeare's

Viola. But, in general, external influences bear upon details of

character, situation, and device, not upon the construction of the play

as a whole.

Toward the end of 1610 or early in 1611, the partner-dramatists gave

Shakespeare's company another play,--in many respects their

greatest,--_The Maides Tragedy_. Here, again, the novelty of the plot

attracted, in a degree heightened even beyond that of _Philaster_. The

terrible dilemma of the duped husband between allegiance to the King who

has wronged him and assertion of his marital honour, the astounding

effrontery of his adulterous wife, her gradual acquirement of a soul and

her attempted expiation of lust by murder, the mingled nobility and

unreason of her brother and her husband, and the pathetic devotion and

self-provoked death of the hero's deserted sweetheart, will be

sufficiently discussed elsewhere. This was the highly seasoned fare that

the Jacobean public desiderated, served in courses, if not more novel,

at any rate of more startling variety than even Shakespeare had

offered--whose devices, restrained within limit, these young dramatists

were exaggerating to the _n_-th degree. As four-fifths of the

composition of this tragedy was Beaumont's, so, too, we may be sure,

four-fifths of the conception and invention of the plot.[72] I have

remarked, incidentally, that none of the great Beaumont-Fletcher plots

is borrowed. Nearly every play, on the other hand, which Fletcher

contrived alone, or in company with others than Beaumont, borrows its

plot, major and minor, from some well known source, classical,

historical, French, Spanish, or Italian. Mr. G. C. Macaulay states the

bare truth, when he says that "in constructive faculty, at least,

Beaumont was markedly superior to his colleague." Here there are traces,

indeed, of external suggestion: something of Aspatia's career in

relation to Amintor, who has deserted her, may be an echo of Parthenia's

in the _Arcadia_; and the quarrel of Melantius and Amintor reminds one

of that between Brutus and Cassius in _Julius Caesar_; but the plot has

no definite source.

The characterization and the poetry, "the strength and sweetness, and

high choice of brain" are Beaumont's; so, too, the marvelous subtlety of

dramatic device. Save in that one-fifth to which Fletcher was admitted.

There Fletcher, in beauty and in tragic power, is giving us the best

that he has so far produced: over-histrionic, to be sure, but of

victorious excellence. And that one-fifth, for the first and almost only

time in Fletcher's career as a dramatist is "untainted by obscenity."

In an anecdote preserved by Fuller, who was seventeen years of age when

Fletcher died, we may fancy that we catch a glimpse of our bachelors at

work upon this very play. The dramatists "meeting once in a Tavern to

contrive the rude draught of a Tragedy, Fletcher undertook to _Kill the

King_ therein; whose words being overheard by a listener (though his

Loyalty not to be blamed herein) he was accused of high Treason, till

the mistake soon appearing, that the plot was only against a Drammatick

and Scenical King, all wound off in merriment."[73] History and fable

have fastened similar stories upon famous men; but if this one is

authentic it undoubtedly refers to the writing of _The Maides Tragedy_,

for, as we shall see, the killing of its King was one of the few scenes

contributed by Fletcher. And the story adds colour to the ridicule which

Beaumont in 1607 had heaped upon the intelligencer that lives in

ale-houses and taverns; ... "and brings informations picked out of

broken words in men's common talk."

The connection thus formed with Shakespeare's company was continued by

Beaumont, at any rate, until 1612, and by Fletcher as long as he lived.

Before the end of 1611 the King's Players had presented to the public

the last of this trio of dramatic masterpieces, _A King and No King_. In

terrible fascination, this story of a man and woman struggling against

love because they think they are brother and sister is as powerful as

_The Maides Tragedy_. In poetry and in characterization, as well as in

humour, it is grander than _Philaster_. But in beauty and pathos its

subject did not permit it to equal either; and in denouement, tragicomic

and perforce somewhat strained, it is surpassed by the _Tragedy_. Of its

defects as well as merits, I have so much to say later, that I must

refrain now. The plot is as striking an example of constructive

invention as those that had preceded. Some of the names are to be found

in Xenophon's _Cyropaedeia_ (Books III-VI) and in Herodotus (Book VII);

and hints for situation and characterization may have been derived from

these sources, and the passion of Arbaces for his supposed sister from

Fauchet's account of Thierry of France,--but such indebtedness is

naught.[74] Three-quarters of the play is Beaumont's; and that large

portion includes the majestic passion and conflict, the tragic irony and

suspense, of _A King and No King_; in fact,--the whole serious plot, and

part of the humorous by-play. Fletcher's slight contribution is

principally of complementary scenes and low comedy. In these the curb

upon his fanciful rhetoric and hilarious wit has been somewhat relaxed.

In the character of the roaring Bessus, Beaumont himself gives rein with

the _elan_ of the comic artist; for the Bessus of Beaumont's scenes

would have gone on a strike if he had not been suffered to "talk bawdy"

between brags. Beaumont for all his sobriety and clean mirth was not a

prude; and he wasn't writing the psalms of Robert Wisdom.

This play was as popular as those that had preceded. The King's Players

acted it at Court in December of the year in which it had been first

performed. And between October 1612 and March 1613, assisting in the

festivities for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Elector

Palatine, they presented before royalty all three of the great

Beaumont-Fletcher plays. These were numbers in a series of thirteen that

included, as well, the _Much Ado_, _Tempest_, _Winter's Tale_, _Merry

Wives_, _Othello_, and _Julius Caesar_ of Shakespeare. They also

presented about the same time, in a series of six acted before the King

(including _I Henry IV_, _Much Ado_, and _The Alchemist_), one of

Fletcher's comedies of manners and intrigue, _The Captaine_, and a play

utterly lost, called _Cardenna_, in which it is supposed that Fletcher

collaborated with the Master himself.

That our dramatists, however, after their association was formed with

Shakespeare and his company, by no means severed their connection with

the company for which they had written in their younger days, the

Children of the Queen's Revels, appears from the fact that during the

same festivities a tragedy written by them about 1611, _Cupid's

Revenge_, was played by the Children three times, and their romantic

comedy, _The Coxcombe_ twice; and that, in 1615 or the beginning of

1616, the Children presented at the new Blackfriars what was, probably,

the last product of the Beaumont-Fletcher partnership, _The Scornful

Ladie_.

Neither _Cupid's Revenge_ nor _The Scornful Ladie_ (though the latter,

at least, was very popular and had a long life upon the stage) is a

drama of high distinction. The former is a blend of two stories from

Sidney's _Arcadia_,--the story of the vengeance of Cupid upon the

princess Erona (Hidaspes in the play) who caused to be destroyed the

images and pictures of Cupid, and was consequently doomed to an

infatuation for a base-born man,--and the painful career of Plangus

(Leucippus in the play) who, having an intrigue "with a private man's

wife" (the monstrous Bacha of the play) gave her up to his father,

swearing to her virtue, only to find that she should attempt to renew

her _liaison_ with him and, failing, scheme his downfall. The dramatists

made considerable alteration, and added to the sources. But though the

main plot--that of Leucippus and Bacha--offered magnificent

possibilities, they fail of realization. Beaumont wrote about one-half

of the play, and it is in his scenes that whatever there is of moral

struggle and sublimity, of pathetic irony and of poetry, appears.

_The Scornful Ladie_, which I assign to this late date partly because of

an allusion to the negotiations for a Spanish marriage, 1614-1616, is

principally of Fletcher's composition. It is of the type of his earlier

and later comedies of intrigue. Like most of them it is extremely well

contrived for presentation upon the stage and it was, as I have said,

most successful. The merit of the play lies, not in any element of

poetry or vital romance, but in humorous and realistic characterization,

easy dialogue, and clever device. The dramatists deserve all credit for

the ingenious invention, for here again there is no known source.

Beaumont's contribution, about one-third, is distinguished by the

observation and the _vis comica_ already displayed in the _Woman-Hater_

and the _Knight of the Burning Pestle_ and _King and No King_. But he is

not dominating the details. When they wrote a comedy of intrigue,

Fletcher sat at the head of the table. It is possible, however, that

some of the "rules and standard wit" which Francis was so soon to leave

to his friend "in legacy" were here applied; for the play is less

exuberantly reckless in tone than several which Fletcher wrote alone.

The three masterpieces of romantic drama, Beaumont controlled in

composition, and revised. Of this play he did not finish the revision.

It was written about 1614 or 1615, after he had settled in the country

with his wife, and not long before his death.[75]

FOOTNOTES:

[63] Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, Ed. Clark, I, 94-95.

[64] Dyce, _B. and F._, I, XXVI, _n_.

[65] Based upon Dekker's _Bellman of London_, 1608. Acted at Court,

1622.

[66] See Chapter XXV, below.

[67] Despatch of the French Ambassador in London, April 5, 1608,

quoted by Collier, _Hist. Eng. Dram. Poetry_, I, 352.

[68] Answer of Heming and Burbadge to Kirkham's complaint, 1612,

_Greenstreet Papers_ in Fleay, _Hist. Stage_, p. 235.

[69] See Murray, _Eng. Dram. Comp._, II, 171-191.

[70] As suggested by Thorndike, _Infl. B. and F. on Shakespeare_,

16-18. See Murray, _Engl. Dram. Companies_, II, 175.

[71] Further discussion of the _Philaster_ date will be found in

Chapter XXV, below.

[72] See Chapter XXV, below.

[73] Dyce, as above, _B. and F._, I, xxxii.

[74] See Alden's edition, p. 172 (_Belles Lettres_), and Thorndike's

citation of Fauchet, _Les Antiquitez et Histoires Gauloises, etc._

(1599), _Infl. of B. and F._, p. 82.

[75] See below, Chapter XXVI.

CHAPTER VIII

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

Though the young poets did not begin to write for the King's Men before

1609, it is impossible that they should not have met Shakespeare, face

to face, earlier in the century, whether at the Mermaid in Bread-street,

Cheapside, where perhaps befel those "wit-combates betwixt him and Ben

Jonson," or about the Globe in Southwark or the theatre in

Blackfriars,--which, though leased to the Revels' Children, belonged to

Shakespeare's friend Richard Burbadge,--or at the lodgings with Mountjoy

the tiremaker, on the corner of Silver and Monkwell Streets, where the

master had lived from 1598 to 1604, and where, for anything we know to

the contrary, he continued to live for several years more.[76] They

would pass the house on their way from the Bankside north to St. Giles,

Cripplegate, when they wished to observe what Juby and the rest of the

Prince's Players were putting on at the Fortune, or on their way back to

take ale with Jonson at his house in Blackfriars, or to follow Nat.

Field or Carey, acting in one of their own or Jonson's plays at the

private theatre close by.

That the young poets, even during their discipleship to Jonson were

familiar with the poetry and dramatic methods of Shakespeare the most

cursory reader will observe. Their plays from the first, whether jointly

or singly written, abound in reminiscences of his work. But more

particularly is he echoed by Beaumont. The echo is sometimes of playful

parody, as in the "huffing part" which the grocer's prentice of the

_Knight of the Burning Pestle_ steals from Hotspur:--

By heaven, methinks it were an easie leap

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd Moon,

Or dive into the bottom of the Sea,

Where never fathome line toucht any ground,

And pluck up drowned honour from the lake of Hell;

or as in _The Woman-Hater_, where it looks very much as if this stylist

of twenty-two was poking fun at the circumlocutions of Shakespeare's

Helena in _All's Well that Ends Well_. Labouring to say "two days" in

accents suitable to a monarch's ear, she had evolved:

Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring

Their fiery torches his diurnal ring,

Ere twice in murk and accidental damp

Moist Hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp;

Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass

Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass,

What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly.

In terms strikingly reminiscent of this, Beaumont's courtier Valore

instructs the gourmand of _The Woman-Hater_, how to address royalty:

You must not talk to him [the Duke]

As you doe to an ordinary man,

Honest plain sence, but you must wind about him.

For example: if he should aske you what o'clock it is,

You must not say, "If it please your grace, 'tis nine";

But thus, "Thrice three aclock, so please my Sovereign";

Or thus, "Look how many Muses there doth dwell

Upon the sweet banks of the learned Well,

And just so many stroaks the clock hath struck."

And when the Duke asks Lazarillo, thus instructed, "how old are you?" we

can imagine with what mirth the graceless Beaumont puts into his mouth:

Full eight and twenty several Almanacks

Have been compiled all for several years,

Since first I drew this breath; four prentiships

Have I most truly served in this world;

And eight and twenty times hath Phoebus' car

Run out his yearly course since--.

Duke. I understand you, sir.

Lucio. How like an ignorant poet he talks!

Is it possible that associating with the literary school of the day, his

brother John, Drayton, Chapman, and Ben Jonson, the young satirist, here

vents something like spleen? Or is this purely dramatic utterance?

Like parodies of phrases in _Hamlet_, _Antony and Cleopatra_, and other

Shakespearean plays ripple the stream of Beaumont's humour. They are,

however, always good-natured. But if Beaumont laughs when Shakespeare

exaggerates, he also pays him in his later plays the tribute of

imitation in numerous poetic borrowings of serious lines and telling

situations: as where the King in _Philaster_ tries to pray but, like

the kneeling Claudius, despairs--

How can I

Looke to be heard of gods that must be just,

Praying upon the ground I hold by wrong?--

or "in the Hamlet-like situation and character of Philaster" himself;

as, for instance, when to the usurping King who has said of him, "Sure

hees possest," Philaster retorts:

Yes, with my fathers spirit. Its here, O King,

A dangerous spirit! Now he tells me, King,

I was a Kings heire, bids me be a King,

And whispers to me, these are all my subjects.

Tis strange he will not let me sleepe, but dives

In to my fancy, and there gives me shapes

That kneele and doe me service, cry me king:

But I'le suppresse him: he's a factious spirit,

And will undoe me.

The resemblance of the controversy between Melantius and Amintor to that

of Brutus with Cassius has already been noticed; and everyone will

acknowledge the resemblance of the "quizzical reserve" of his Scornful

Lady to Olivia's, of Aspatia's melancholy in the _Maides Tragedy_ to

Ophelia's, and of Bellario's situation in _Philaster_ to that of Viola

in _Twelfth Night_.[77] This last play, indeed, acted, as we have seen,

in the Middle Temple when Beaumont was a freshman in the Inns of Court,

affects Beaumont's method and style, more than any other save the

_Pericles_ (1607, or January to May 1608), which prepared the way for

the more important later romantic dramas of Shakespeare himself as well

as for those of Beaumont and Fletcher.

During the years when Shakespeare's company was producing their romantic

dramas, they were breathing, with Shakespeare, Burbadge, and Heming, the

atmosphere of the Globe and Blackfriars; and, after Shakespeare had

taken up a more continuous residence at Stratford, in 1611, Fletcher, at

any rate, not only kept in touch with the remaining shareholders and

actors of the Globe but with the Master himself, and conversed and wrote

with him on various occasions. These may have fallen either at the New

Place at Stratford, where the now wealthy country gentleman was wont to

entertain his friends, or when Shakespeare came to town--as in May 1612.

At that time his former host, Mountjoy's, son-in-law was suing the

tiremaker for his wife's unpaid dower, and "William Shakespeare of

Stratford upon Avon in the Countye of Warwicke, Gentleman" who had

helped to make the marriage, was summoned as a witness.[78] Or between

July and November of that year, when the "base fellow" Kirkham was

bringing against Burbadge and Heming a suit concerning the profits of

the Blackfriars theatre, in which as a shareholder Shakespeare, too,

must have been interested; and when Christopher Brooke of the pastoral

poets in Beaumont's Inns of Court was of the "councell" for

Shakespeare's company.[79] Or in March 1613, when Shakespeare was

negotiating for the house in Blackfriars which he bought that month from

Henry Walker. In the latter year the King's Players performed two plays

in the writing of which there is reason to believe that Shakespeare and

Fletcher participated: _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, first published as "by

the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William

Shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of 1634; and a lost play licensed

for publication as the "_History of Cardenio_ by Fletcher and

Shakespeare," in 1653. Of the former, critics are generally agreed that

Fletcher wrote about a dozen scenes and that Shakespeare in all

probability wrote others. Maybe, however, Fletcher, and perhaps later

Massinger, merely revised and completed Shakespeare's original draft of

the play left in the company's hands. That _The Two Noble Kinsmen_

borrows its antimasque from our friend Beaumont's _Maske of the Inner

Temple_, which was presented in February 1613, may be construed as

indicating that he, too, still had some connection with Shakespeare's

company. But it is more likely that he was now happily married and

settled in Kent, and didn't care what they did with his plays. Probably

the Shakespeare-Fletcher play was acted soon after Beaumont's, and in

the same year. With regard to the authorship of the _Cardenio_ we have

nothing but the publisher's statement; but we know that the play was

written after the appearance, in 1612, of the story upon which it is

based, in Shelton's English translation of the first part of _Don

Quixote_; and that it was acted at Court by Shakespeare's and Fletcher's

company in May and June 1613.

The partnership of Fletcher and Shakespeare in the writing of these two

plays has been questioned, but as to their collaboration in a third,

_Henry VIII_, there is not much possibility of doubt. In the conception

of the leading characters Shakespeare is present, and in many of their

finest lines, and specifically in at least five scenes; while Fletcher

appears in practically all the rest. The play was acted by the King's

Men at the Globe on June 29, 1613, and was included as Shakespeare's by

his judicious editors and intimate friends, Heming and Condell, in the

folio of 1623.

[Illustration: BEN JONSON

From the miniature belonging to Mr. Evelyn Shirley]

During these years of fruition the friendship with Jonson, who was

writing at the time for both the companies to which our young dramatists

gave their plays, continued apparently without interruption. It is

attested by commendatory verses written by Beaumont for _The Silent

Woman_, which was acted early in 1610, and by verses of both Fletcher

and Beaumont prefixed to Jonson's tragedy of _Catiline_, published in

1611. On the latter occasion Beaumont commends Jonson's contempt for

"the wild applause of common people," and declares that he is "three

ages yet from understood;" while Fletcher even more enthusiastically

avers,--

Thy labours shall outlive thee; and, like gold

Stampt for continuance, shall be current where

There is a sun, a people, or a year.

The generous and graceful response of Ben to the reverence of the

younger of the twain appears in a tribute the date of which is

uncertain, but which was included by the author among his _Epigrams_,

entered in the Stationers' Registers, 1612.

_To Francis Beaumont._

How I doe love thee, Beaumont and thy Muse,

That unto me dost such religion use!

How I doe feare my selfe, that am not worth

The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth!

At once thou mak'st me happie, and unmak'st;

And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st.

What fate is mine, that so it selfe bereaves?

What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives?

When even there, where most thou praisest mee,

For writing better, I must envie thee.

Since Jonson was not given to indiscriminate laudation of his

contemporaries in dramatic production, we may surmise that this tribute

to the art of Beaumont follows rather than precedes the appearance of

_Philaster_, and of perhaps both _The Maides Tragedy_ and _A King and No

King_. And whether there is any basis or not for the tradition handed

down by Dryden[80] that Beaumont was "so accurate a judge of plays that

Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure,

and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving,

all his plots,"--there is here evidence, sufficiently convincing, of the

high esteem in which "the least indulgent thought" and the large

"giving" of the brilliant and independent gentleman-dramatist were held

by the acknowledged classicist and dictator of the stage.

From the various sources already indicated and from contemporary

testimony, later to be cited, it is easy to derive a definite conception

of the world of dramatists and actors in which Beaumont and Fletcher

moved. They knew, and were properly appraised by, Drayton, Jonson,

Chapman, Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker, Heywood, Massinger, Field,

Daborne, Marston, Day, and Middleton,--with all of whom they were

associated either in combats of poetry and wit or in the presentation of

plays at Blackfriars, Whitefriars, or the Globe. Among actors their

acquaintance included Field, Taylor, Carey, and others of the Queen's

Revels' Children, and Richard Burbadge, Heming, Condell, Ostler, Cook,

and Lowin of the King's Company. In what esteem they were held during

these years we have evidence in the verses already quoted from Drayton,

Jonson, Chapman, and Field. In the generous dedication of _The White

Devil_ by John Webster, in 1612, we find them ranked with the best:

"Detraction," says he, "is the sworne friend to ignorance. For mine owne

part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy

Labours, especially of that full and haightened stile of Maister

_Chapman_: The labour'd and understanding workes of maister _Jonson_:

The no lesse worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister

_Beamont_ and Maister _Fletcher_: And lastly (without wrong last to be

named), the right happy and copious industry of M. _Shake-speare_, M.

_Decker_, and M. _Heywood_, wishing what I write may be read by their

light: Protesting that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, I know

them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my owne worke, yet to most

of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of _Martiall--non norunt,

Haec monumenta mori_."

FOOTNOTES:

[76] Wallace, _New Shakespeare Discoveries, Harper's Maga._, March,

1910.

[77] For these and other reminiscences of Shakespeare, see Alden's

edition of Beaumont (_Belles Lettres Series_), XVI; Macaulay's

_Beaumont_; Leonhardt in _Anglia_, VIII, 424; Oliphant in _Engl.

Studien_, XIV, 53-94, Koeppel's _Quellen-studien_ in _Muenchener

Beitraege_, XI.

[78] Wallace, _New Shakespeare Discoveries_ (_Harper's Maga._, March,

1910).

[79] See the _Greenstreet Papers_, in Fleay, _Hist. Stage_, 239, 250.

[80] _An Essay of Dramatick Poesie._

CHAPTER IX

THE "MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE": THE PASTORALISTS, AND OTHER

CONTEMPORARIES AT THE INNS OF COURT

Of royal patronage we have had evidence in the fact that during the

festivities of October 16, 1612 to March 1, 1613, no fewer than five of

the Beaumont-Fletcher plays were 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

dramatists 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 contributed to _The Maides Tragedy_ a masque of the very essence

of dreams, executed with singular grace and melody.

The subject decided upon for the present gorgeous spectacle was the

"marrying of the Thames to the Rhine." The structure and stage machinery

were invented by Inigo Jones, who was, also, stage architect for

Chapman's rival masque of _Plutus_, presented on February 15, by the

gentlemen of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn. To the success of

Beaumont's production, that patron of masques, Sir Francis Bacon, then

his majesty's Solicitor-General, contributed in large measure: "You, Sir

Francis Bacon, especially," says the author in his Dedication of the

published copy, "as you did then by your countenance and loving

affection advance it, so let your good word grace it and defend it,

which is able to add value to the greatest and least matters." In a

contemporary letter of John Chamberlain to Mistris Carleton, Bacon is

called "the chief contriver" of the spectacle; an attribution which

leads us to infer that he "advanced" it not solely by "loving affection"

but by funds for the tremendous expense. For, as we have already

observed, in other cases, as of the Masque of Flowers, presented for a

noble marriage in 1614 by Gray's Inn, Bacon is not only patron but

purse, permitting no one to share expenses with him: "Sir Francis

Bacon," writes Chamberlain, "prepares a masque to honour this marriage,

which will stand him in above L2,000."

Beaumont's masque, which was to have been performed at Whitehall on

Tuesday evening, the 16th, had ill fortune on the first attempt. The

gentlemen-masquers, desiring to vary their pomp from that of Lincoln's

Inn and the Middle Temple, which had been on horse-back and in

chariots, made a progress by water from Winchester-House to Whitehall,

seated in the King's royal barge, "attended with a multitude of barges

and galleys, with all variety of loud music, and several peals of

ordnance; and led by two admirals." The royal family witnessed their

approach; and, as Chamberlain in the letter mentioned above says, "they

were receved at the privie stayres: and great expectation theyre was

that they shold every way exceed theyre competitors that went before

them both in devise daintines of apparell and above all in dauncing

(wherein they are held excellent) and esteemed far the properer men: but

by what yll planet yt fell out I know not, they came home as they went

with out doing anything, the reason whereof I cannot yet learne

thoroughly, so but only was that the hall was so full that yt was not

possible to avoyde yt or make roome for them; besides that most of the

Ladies were in the galleries to see them land, and could not get in, but

the worst of all was that the king was so wearied and sleepie with

sitting up almost two whole nights before that he had no edge to yt.

Whereupon S{^r} Fra: Bacon adventured to interest his maiestie that by

this disgrace he wold not as yt were burie them quicke; and I heare the

king shold aunswer that then they must burie him quicke for he could

last no longer, but with all gave them very goode wordes and appointed

them to come again on saterday: but the grace of theyre maske is quite

gon when theyre apparell hath ben already shewed and theyre devises

vented, so that how yt will fall out, God knows, for they are much

discouraged, and out of countenance; and the world sayes yt comes to

passe after the old proverb--the properer men the worse lucke."[81]

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 success. "At the entrance of their Majesties and their

Highnesses," writes the Venetian ambassador to the Doge and Senate, May

10, 1613, "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 desiring 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

conjunction of two such streames, he summoned from the four fountains,

whence they spring and which are fed by rain, four nymphs who hid 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 delivering

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 in them

one hundred and fifty Knights of Olympus,--then more tents, like a host

encamped. On the higher ground was the Temple of Olympian Jove all

adorned with statues of gold and silver, and served by a number of

priests with music and lights in golden Candelabra. The knights were in

long robes of silk and gold, the priests in gold and silver. The knights

danced, their robes being looped up with silver, and their dance

represented the introduction of the Olympian games into this kingdom.

After the ballet was over their Majesties and their Highnesses passed

into a great Hall especially built for the purpose, where were long

tables laden with comfits and thousands of mottoes. After the King had

made the round of the tables everything was in a moment rapaciously

swept away."[82]

Beaumont had introduced innovations--two antimasques, or "subtle,

capricious dances" accompanied by spectacular or comic dumb-show,

instead of one, and new and varied characters in each, instead of the

stereotyped Witches, Satyrs, Follies, etc. His Nymphs, Hyades, blind

Cupids, and half vivified Statuas from Jove's altar, of the first

antimasque occasioned great amusement, so that the King called for them

again at the end--"but one of the Statuas by that time was undressed."

And the May-dance of the second, with its rural characters--Pedant, Lord

and Lady of the May, country clown and wench, host and hostess,

he-baboon and she-baboon, he-fool and she-fool--stirred laughter and

applause that drowned the music. The main masque was 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."[83]

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 Temple. Though he had not professed the law, the

quiddities of its parlance enliven various passages of his _Woman-Hater_

and of the plays which he later wrote with Fletcher. Whether he kept his

name on the books or not, the Inner Temple was in a social sense his

club for life; and it was to "those Gentlemen that were his acquaintance

there" that the publisher Mosely turned for help when searching for his

portrait in 1647. The students of his generation were by 1612, many of

them, utter barristers, ancients, and benchers: he would affiliate with

them; and that he should be acquainted with the "Gentlemen who were

actors" in his masque goes without saying. This was an occasion of

tremendous moment to the members of the allied Houses. They were

conferring the highest honour upon their poet, and every man on the

books of each Inn knew him by name and face. One of the Fellows, John,

afterwards Sir John, Fenner provides a messenger "to fetch M{^r}

Beaumont," and advances 10_li._ "toward the mask business." Another,

Lewis Hele is twice paid 70_li._ toward the same business. From

Chamberlain's letter, we learn that the passage by water to Whitehall

"cost them better than three hundred pound,"--from two thousand to

twenty-four hundred pounds, in the money of to-day. From the records of

the Societies for "the 10th of King James," we find that "the charge in

apparell of the Actors in that great Mask at White-hall was supported"

by each Society; "the Readers at Gray's Inn being each man assessed at

4_l._, the Ancients, and such as at that time were to be called

Ancients, at 2_l._ 10_s._ apiece, the Barristers at 2_l._ a man, and the

Students at 20_s._"; and that on May 4, 1613, the Inner Temple is still

indebted over and besides the contribution of the House "for the late

show and sports ... not so little as 1200_li._,"--that is to say, from

seven to nine thousand pounds according our present valuation.[84]

Beaumont in his Dedication of the quarto (published soon afterwards) to

the worthy Sir Francis Bacon and the grave and learned Bench of the

anciently-allied Houses of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, is

addressing friends when he says "Yee that spared no time nor travell in

the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this Masque ... will not

thinke much now to looke backe upon the effects of your owne care and

worke: for that whereof the successe was then doubtfull, is now happily

performed and gratiously accepted. And that which you were then to

thinke of in straites of time, you may now peruse at leysure."

Of the gentlemen-masquers, and "the towardly yoong, active, gallant

Gentlemen of the same houses," who, as their convoy "set forth from

Winchester-House which was the _Rende vous_ towards the Court, about

seven of the clock at night," on that occasion, the most directly

interested in the event would be a group of literary friends of which

the central figure was William Browne of Tavistock. He had been at

Clifford's Inn, one of the preparatory schools for the Inner Temple, on

the other side of Fleet Street, since about 1608, had migrated to the

Inner Temple in November 1611, and had been admitted a member in March

1612. 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, in 1613, been engaged for three

years upon the composition of the charming _First Book_ of his

_Britannia's Pastorals_. In a letter written some years later to a lover

of the Pastoral,--the translator of Tasso's Aminta, _Henery Reynolds,

Esq.,--Of Poets and Poesy_, and published in 1627, Drayton couples

William Browne so closely with 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 Browne. "Then," writes Drayton, after mentioning other

literary acquaintances,--

Then the two Beaumonts 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 Drayton, 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, between 1610 and 1616,

and that he had Beaumont's masque and poetic fame in mind when, in the

Dedication of his own _Masque of Ulysses and Circe_, presented by the

same Society of the Inner Temple not quite two years later, January 13,

1615, 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 familiarly associated with the literary coterie of the Inns of

Court. Browne and Beaumont had friends in common beside Drayton,

Chapman, and Jonson. To, and of, Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Philip

Sidney, Beaumont 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 1621, 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_, 1616, 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 wealthy ward, and later

taking him into the service of his own family at Wilton. In 1614 John

Davies of Hereford wrote the third eclogue appended to Browne's

_Shepherd's Pipe_, in which he figures as old Wernock, and Browne as

Willy; and, in 1616, commendatory verses to the _Second Book_ of

Browne's _Pastorals_,--beginning "Pipe on, sweet swaine." He had already

in 1610, addressed "the most ingenious Mr. Francis Beaumont" in an

epigram of like familiarity and devotion:

Some that thy name abbreviate, call thee Franck:

So may they well, if they respect thy witt;

For like rich corne (that some fools call too ranck)

All cleane Wit-reapers still are griping it;

And could I sow for thee to reape and use,

I should esteeme it manna for the Muse.[85]

Another of this little group of late Spenserian pastoralists was, as we

shall later see, an admirer of Beaumont. This is William Basse, probably

the composer of the lines _In Laudem Authoris_, signed W. B., and

prefixed to the 1602 edition of _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_. With the

commendatory verses of Davies, George Wither, Thomas Wenman, and others

in Browne's _Second Book_ of the _Pastorals_, appear some again signed

W. B. "It is just possible," according to the most recent editor of

Browne's poems,[86] "that Basse and Browne were kinsmen." It is certain

that Basse was a retainer in the family of the poetic Thomas Wenman who

was Browne's contemporary at the Inner Temple. Basse, himself, had

published three pastoral elegies in 1602, and he was still writing

pastorals half a century later. Another of this group, George Wither,

had since 1606 been of one of the adjoining Inns of Chancery. He is the

Roget, Thyrsis, Philarete of this pastoral field. In 1614, he wrote the

third eclogue supplementary to Browne's _Shepherd's Pipe_; and in 1615

he was a neighbor of the Inner Temple poets, at Lincoln's Inn. In that

eclogue he speaks of a Valentine on "the Wedding of fair Thame and

Rhine" which he had composed on the occasion of the royal marriage; and

in the first _Epithalamium_ of the Valentine, he refers explicitly 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 distinctive repute among

Beaumont's associates by 1615: no less for the lyric ease of his

_Shepherd's Hunting_, or of his

Shall I wasting in despair

Die because a woman's fair?--

than for the "plain, moral speaking" of the _Abuses Stript and Whipt_

that in 1613-14 had brought him a 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 allusion, 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 associated 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

figure in his _Elegies_, or in his _Ghost of Richard III_, was a lovable

and hearty friend, and a distinguished 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 1612, defended Burbadge and Heming 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."[87]

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 acquainted. Browne

succeeded Beaumont as poet of the Inner Temple, and the friends of the

former in that Society would be known to the latter.

Among those who wrote verses laudatory of Browne's _Pastorals_ between

1613 and 1616, was his "learned friend," John Selden, the jurist and

antiquary, whose "chamber was in the paper buildings which looke towards

the garden." He kept, says Aubrey, "a plentifull table, and was never

without learned company": frequently that of Jonson, Drayton, and

Camden; and, we may be certain, of John Fletcher, too; for on his

mother's side, Selden as his coat of arms and epitaph prove, and as

Hasted tells us in his _History of Kent_, was of the "equestrian" family

of Bakers to which Fletcher's stepsisters belonged. Selden was of

Beaumont's age to a year, and had been of the Society since 1604. For

Browne's book Edward Heyward, also, wrote verses,--Selden's most

"devoted friend and chamber-fellow,"--to whom (Aubrey again) "he

dedicated his _Titles of Honour_," 1614. Heyward came from Norfolk and

was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1604. And with Selden must be also

bracketed, Thomas Wenman, of Oxfordshire; for so Suckling brackets him

in the _Session of the Poets_:

The poets met the other day,

And Apollo was at the meeting, they say....

'Twas strange to see how they flocked together:

There was Selden, and he stood next to the chaire,

And Wenman not far off, which was very faire.

Wenman came to the Inner Temple in 1613; he expresses in his

complimentary verses to Browne his wonder that the pastoralist can frame

such worthy poetry while as yet "scarce a hair grows up thy chin to

grace." Wenman was the son of that Sir Richard whose wife was implicated

in the Gunpowder Plot by Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux. He succeeded to an Irish

peerage in 1640. There was, also, Thomas Gardiner, the son of a rector

in Essex. He came to the Inner Temple in 1609, and in 1641 was knighted

for his loyalty to King Charles. There was, though not of the Inner

Temple, Browne's favourite companion, William Ferrar, the Alexis of the

pastoral circle. Ferrar was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1610, and

died young. He must have been a graceful and lovable youth, if we may

judge from Wither's and Browne's tributes to him. Through his father,

"an eminent London merchant, who was interested in the adventures of

Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh," Browne and Beaumont might, if in no other

way, have met with Sir Richard and Sir Walter. There were, also, writing

praises to Browne, the brothers Croke, sons of Sir John Croke of the

King's Bench. They were both of Christ's Church, Oxford, Charles and

Unton; and they became students of the Inner Temple in 1609. Charles was

something of a poet. In 1613 he was Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham

College; he took orders, and became a Fellow of Eton College; and during

the Civil War fled to Ireland. Unton rose at the Bar, became a member of

Parliament, "aided the Parliamentarians during the Civil War and enjoyed

the favour of Cromwell." And there was Browne's dear friend, Thomas

Manwood, who had entered the Inner Temple in 1611, and whose early

death by drowning Browne bewails in the fourth eclogue of the

_Shepherd's Pipe_,--an elegy somewhat fantastic but beautifully 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 _Inner Temple

Records_, and described by Mr. Gordon Goodwin in his edition of Browne's

_Poems_, who set forth, ordered, and furnished Beaumont's _Masque of the

Inner Temple_; and who, as gentlemen-masquers, sailed with him in the

royal barge to Whitehall, and happily performed the masque before the

King and Queen, the Princess Elizabeth, and the Count Palatine, on

Saturday, the twentieth day of February 1613.

Beaumont's friends were Fletcher's; and Fletcher must have known Browne.

It has always seemed strange to me that, when enumerating in his

_Britannia's Pastorals_ the pastoral poets of England,--half a dozen of

them, his personal acquaintances,--Browne should have omitted Fletcher

to whom he was deeply indebted for literary inspiration. Between 1610

and 1613 he had, in his _First Book of Britannia's Pastorals_ (Song 1,

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 _Faithfull Shepheardesse_--the scene in which

Fletcher's God of the River rescues Amoret and offers her his love. The

borrowing is not at all a plagiarism, but an elaboration of the Amoret

episode; 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.[88]

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 1614-15, 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;[89]

and that, in the second Song of the _First Book_,[90] 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"; when 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, wrote the _Prefatory Address_ to this Book of

_Britannia's Pastorals_, June 18, 1613, only three months after

Beaumont's Masque upon the "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, overhearing 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.[91]

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:

Two of the quaintest swains that yet have beene

Failed their attendance on the Ocean's queene,

Remond and Doridon, whose haplesse fates

Late sever'd them from their more happy mates.[92]

Browne, who had dropped these companion shepherds of the "pastoral and

the rural song" three songs back, now needs them to scour the forests

for the vanished Fida of his fiction. If he had not needed them for the

narrative here resumed, might they not have attended the Ocean's queen

with the other poets of England,--all, but Sidney, his personal

friends,--as Fletcher and Beaumont? This is precisely the way in which

Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Rafael introduced into their frescoes the

Tornabuoni and Medici of their time. We may leave the inquisitive to

follow them to that realm where, forsaking mythical and pastoral

romance,

Many weary dayes

They now had spent in unfrequented wayes.

About the rivers, vallies, holts, and crags,

Among the ozyers and the waving flags,

They merely pry, if any dens there be,

Where from the Sun might harbour crueltie:

Or if they could the bones of any spy,

Or torne by beasts, or humane tyranny.

They close inquiry made in caverns blind,

Yet what they look for would be death to find.

Right as a curious man that would descry,

Led by the trembling hand of Jealousy,

If his fair wife have wrong'd his bed or no,

Meeteth his torment if he find her so.[93]

I cannot, however, refrain from pointing the venturesome

researcher,--with irony--may be not Mephistophelian, but merely

pyrrhonic,--to the dramatic 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

would 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 _Upon an Honest Man's Fortune_, and decide

whether the poet-philosopher of the one is not very much of the same

opinion as the shepherd-philosopher of the other.[94]

FOOTNOTES:

[81] John Chamberlain to Mris. Carleton, 18 February, 1612-3, in

_State Papers (Domestic) James I_, LXXII, No. 30. Quoted by Miss

Sullivan, _Court Masques of James I_, p. 76 (1913).

[82] Foscarini in _Calendar of State Papers, Venetian_, XII, No. 832.

Quoted by Miss Sullivan, _op. cit._, p. 77.

[83] _Calendar State Papers (Domestic)_, 1611-1618, pp. 171, 172, 175.

[84] Dugdale's _Origines Juridicales_, as cited by Dyce, _B. and F._,

II, 453. Inderwick, _op. cit._, II, xxxix-xlii, 72, 77, etc.

Douthwaite, _op. cit._, 231. Nichols's _Progresses of King James_, II,

566, 591.

[85] _To Worthy Persons_, in the volume entitled _The Scourge of

Folly_.

[86] Gordon Goodwin, in _The Muses' Library_, 1894, p. 132.

[87] See _Greenstreet Papers_, VIII, Fleay, _Hist. Stage_, 250.

[88] _Brit. Past._, I, 1, 476.

[89] _Ibid._, II, 2, 469.

[90] Li. 405-470.

[91] _Ibid._, I, 3, 297-8.

[92] _Ibid._, II, 2, 247-352.

[93] _Ibid._, II, 2, 510-512.

[94] Cf. especially _Brit. Past._, II, 2, 706-732, with Fletcher's

defiance of poverty and independence of criticism in his poem, _Upon

an Honest Man's Fortune_.

CHAPTER X

AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT

Christopher Brooke of Lincoln's Inn enters the circle of Beaumont's

associates not only as the advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in

Shakespeare's company of actors turn for counsel in an important suit at

law, and as the encomiast of Shakespeare himself a year or two later:

He that from Helicon sends many a rill,

Whose nectared veines are drunk by thirsty men,[95]

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

intimacy with still others who at various points impinged upon

Beaumont's career,--with Inigo Jones, for instance, who designed the

machinery for Beaumont'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 King_.

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 1608 and September

1611, we begin to feel that it was not by mere accident that the

manuscript _of A King and No King_ 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 1611 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 gentlewomen of the

family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill. This Sir Henry was an influential

member of Parliament, 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 1597, 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 1615, and it is

more than likely that the play, _A King and No King_, which was acted

about 1611, 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 Templars, still stands at

the top of Mitre Court, a few yards back from the thoroughfare of Fleet

Street.

[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON

From the portrait by Paul Van Somer in the National Portrait Gallery,

London]

The symposium to which I have referred is celebrated in a copy of

macaronic Latin verses, entitled _Mr. Hoskins, his Convivium

Philosophicum_;[96] and I 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.--

Whosoever 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 surnamed _Torrent_

And John ycleped _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-good_ at least

And John _Hesperian_ true.

If any be desiderated

He shall be amerciated

Forty-pence in issue.

Hugh the _Inferior-Germayne_,

Nor yet unlearned 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 _Brief Lives_, Dr. Clark supplies the

glossary to these punning names. _Torrent_ is, of course, Brooke.

Johannes _Factus_, or _Made_, is Brooke's chamber-fellow of Lincoln's

Inn, John Donne; and Donne is the great friend and correspondent in well

known epistles of Henry _Twelve-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 Ignatius _architectus_, Hugh Holland (the

_Inferior-Germayne_) was of Beaumont's Mermaid Club, the writer--beside

other poems--of commendatory verses for Jonson's _Sejanus_ in 1605, and

of the sonnet _Upon the Lines and Life_ of that other frequenter of the

Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." 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 introduced

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_ (1616). In 1618, 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

Temple. Last, comes the reputed author of these macaronic Latin verses

of the Mitre, John Hoskins himself (surnamed _Little-hose_). 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 Jonson, and of Raleigh, Donne,

Selden, Camden, and Daniel.

Of the participants in Serjeant Hoskins's _Convivium 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[95] _The Ghost of Richard III_, I, viii (1614).

[96] In _Cal. State Papers (Dom.)_, under Sept. 2, 1611, I find

"Description by Ralph Colphab [Thomas Cariat] of Brasenose College,

Oxford, of a philosophical feast the guests at which 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, 50-51, 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 Hoskyns, London." The translation by

Reynolds, who died in 1614, is also given by Dr. Clark.

CHAPTER XI

BEAUMONT AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S DAUGHTER; RELATIONS WITH OTHER PERSONS

OF NOTE

Glimpses 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 with certainty be ascribed to

him. Unfortunately for our purpose, most of those included in the

_Poems_, "by Francis Beaumont, Gent.," issued by Blaiklock in 1640 and

printed again in 1653, and among _The Golden Remains_ "of those so much

admired Dramatick Poets, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gents.," in

1660, 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 evidently of mature years and reputation,--let us suppose,

about 1611, Beaumont says:

I would avoid the common beaten ways

To women used, 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.

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 which I have

quoted, the sincere, as well as brusque, humour attests more than

ordinary acquaintance with, and genuine admiration of, Elizabeth, the

poetic and only child of Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess lived but

twenty-five miles north-west of Charnwood, 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 my time

And nothing add to your o'erflowing 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.

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 others. But her husband, 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 Forrest_,

where speaking of his tribute of verse, he says:

With you, I know my off'ring will find grace:

For what a sinne 'gainst your 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 scene, which all these had in trust,

And now lye lost in their forgotten dust.

And in an Epigram[97] _To the Honour'd ---- Countesse 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,--

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

Pembroke, 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 Pembroke, the son, to

whom his master, Jonson, dedicates in 1611, 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 Rutland used to pass away the

time "in London merely in going to plaies every day." Southampton had

remained a patron of Burbadge, Shakespeare, and the like. And when he

died in 1624, we find not only Beaumont's acquaintance, Chapman, but

Beaumont's brother, joining in the chorus of panegyric to his memory. "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 themselves"[98] we may figure not only the two

Beaumonts but their beloved Countess participating in such discussion 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, stepe up eche way, partely by nature, partely by working of

mennes handes, as it may evidently be perceived. Of the late dayes

[1540], the Erle of Rutland hath made it fairer than ever it was. 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

dungeon is a fair rounde tour now turnid to pleasure, as a place to walk

yn, to se at the countery aboute, and raylid about the round [waull,

and] a garden [plot] in the middle."[99] One sees Francis toiling up the

"many steps," received by his Countess and the rest, and rejoicing 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 manner unexpected, and,

alas, too soon. In August 1612, 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 Raleigh 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

receipts" 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 Wilton.

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, Countess of Rutland_. 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 with 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 while

she was yet in infancy,--

Ere thou knewest the use of tears

Sorrow laid up against thou cam'st to years;

sorrow in her wedded life,--

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 spotless

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 realization of the vanity of human wishes and of the

counter-balancing dignity, 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 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 few of the

characteristics which distinguish him as a dramatist from Fletcher: his

preference 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 creative 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 Sidney'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.

The _Arcadia_ had already brought forth offspring: in prose, Greene's

_Menaphon_ and _Pandosto_, and Lodge's _Rosalynde_; in verse, Day's _Ile

of Guls_. It had fathered, immediately, the subplot of Shakespeare's

_King Lear_,--and, indirectly, portions of the _Winter's Tale_, and _As

You Like It_, and of other Elizabethan plays.[100] Within the twelve

months immediately preceding August 1612, it had inspired also, as we

have already observed, Beaumont and Fletcher's _Cupid's Revenge_, the

finest scenes in which are Beaumont's dramatic adaptation of romantic

characters and motives furnished by Sir Philip. And from that same

"faultless issue," the _Arcadia_, virtue, art, and beauty, loved of all,

had earlier still been drawn by Beaumont, certainly for _The Maides

Tragedy_, and, perhaps, for _Philaster_ as well.

The acquaintance with the Rutland family was continued after the death

of Francis by his brother John, and his sister Elizabeth. The Nymph "of

beauty most divine ... whose admired vertues draw All harts to love her"

in John's poem, _The Shepherdess_, 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 Charnwood'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 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 acquaintance as county gentry but by ties of

blood. Sir George Villiers, a Leicestershire squire, had married for his

second wife, about 1589, Maria Beaumont, a relative of theirs, who had

been brought up by their kinsmen 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

1598. 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,

recently widowed, visited his kinswoman, Eleanor Lewis, Henry's wife, at

Coleorton, "found there," writes a contemporary, Arthur Wilson, "this

young gentlewoman, allied, and yet a servant of the family," was

fascinated by her graces and made her Lady Villiers. This Sir George

Villiers was of an old and distinguished family. Leland mentions it

first among the ten families of Leicestershire, "that be there most of

reputation."[101] And he says "The chiefest house of the Villars at this

time is at Brokesby in Leicestershire, 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 1540] is lord of Hoby hard-by,

and of Coneham in Lincolnshire.... 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.

[Illustration: GEORGE VILLIERS, FIRST DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, AND FAMILY

From the painting by Honthorst in the National Portrait Gallery]

The children of this marriage, John, George, and Christopher, were but a

few years younger than the young Beaumonts of Grace-Dieu; and there

would naturally be some coming and going between the Villiers 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 August 1614. This youth

of twenty-two had all the graces of the Beaumont as well 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 manoeuvred 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 he made him cup-bearer; the next,

Gentleman of the Bed-chamber, and knighted him and gave him a pension.

We may imagine that Francis Beaumont and his brother John watched the

promotion of their kinsman with keen interest. But his phenomenal

career was only then beginning. In 1616, a few months after Francis had

died, Sir George Villiers was elevated to the peerage as Viscount

Villiers. By 1617 this devoted "Steenie" of his "dear Dad and Gossop,"

King James, is Earl of Buckingham, and now,--that Somerset has

fallen,--the most potent force in the kingdom; in 1618 he is Marquis,

and in 1623, Duke,--and for some years past he has been enjoying an

income of L15,000 a year from the lands and perquisites bestowed upon

him. Meanwhile his brother, John, has, in 1617, married a great heiress,

the daughter of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, and in 1619

has become Viscount Purbeck; his mother, the intriguing Maria, has been

created Countess of Buckingham, in her own right; in due time his

younger brother, the stupid Christopher, is made Earl of Anglesey. And

Buckingham takes thought not for his immediate family alone: In 1617

"Villiers' kinsman [Hen] Beaumont was to have the Bishopric of

Worcester, but failed";[102] in 1622 his cousin, Sir Thomas Beaumont of

Coleorton, the son of the Sir Henry[103] who cared for Villiers' mother

in her indigence, is created Viscount Beaumont of Swords; and in 1626,

John Beaumont of Grace-Dieu is dubbed knight-baronet.

In 1620, the Marquis of Buckingham had married Katharine Manners, the

daughter and sole heiress of Francis, Earl of Rutland. It was a love

match; and John Beaumont celebrated it with a glowing epithalamium,

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 1623, John Beaumont's _Shepherdesse_, 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

Manners,--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 Beaumont, 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:

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 Beaumont 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 interest. 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 politics. 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 Allegiance";

and we observe that on March 21, of the same year, "Lord Vaux is

committed to the Fleet" for a like refusal.[104] Young Lord Vaux got out

of the Fleet, in time married, and lived till 1661.

Others of kin or family connection,--and of his own age,--with whom

Francis would be on terms of social intercourse or even intimacy during

his prime, were his cousin, Robert Pierrepoint, who by 1601 was in

Parliament as member for Nottingham, and in 1615 was High Sheriff of the

shire; Henry Hastings, born in 1586, who since 1604 had been fifth Earl

of Huntingdon, 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

whom we have already heard as one of Father Gerard's converts (a first

cousin of Mrs. Elizabeth Vaux, and husband 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 1609, and in 1612 strengthened his

position greatly by marrying Christiana, daughter of Lord Bruce of

Kinloss; and that other young Cavendish, Sir William of Welbeck, county

Notts., who in 1611 was on his travels on the continent under the care

of Sir Henry Wotton. With at least three of these scions of families

allied to the Beaumonts, Francis had been associated, as I have already

pointed out, by contemporaneity 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 elegy on Lady Markham's death, in 1609, 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, almost as

artificial, we learn no more of Beaumont's personality,--but we are led

to conjecture some social acquaintance with the distinguished family of

her father, Lord Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, and of her husband,

Sir Gervase Clifton, who had been specially admitted to the Inner Temple

in 1607; and the conjecture is confirmed by the perusal of lines "to the

immortal memory of this fairest and most vertuous lady" included in the

works of Sir John Beaumont. He writes as knowing Lady Penelope

intimately,--the sound of her voice, the fairness of her face, her high

perfections,--and as regretting that he had neglected to utter his

affection in verse "while she had lived":

We let our friends pass idly like our time

Till they be gone, and then we see our crime.

These poems on Lady Penelope Clifton forge still another link between

the Beaumonts and the Sidneys, for Penelope's mother, the Lady Penelope

Devereux, daughter of Walter, first Earl of Essex, was Sidney's

_innamorata_, the Stella to his Astrophel.

One may with safety extend the list of Beaumont's acquaintances among

the gentry and nobility by crediting him with some of Fletcher's during

the years in which the poets were living in close association; not only

with Fletcher's family connections, the Bakers, Lennards, and Sackvilles

of Kent, but with those to whom Fletcher dedicates, about 1609, the

first quarto of his _Faithfull Shepheardesse_: Sir William Skipwith, for

instance, Sir Walter Aston, and Sir Robert Townshend. Of these the

first, esteemed for his "witty conceits," his "epigrams and poesies,"

was admired and loved not only by Fletcher but by Beaumont's brother as

well--to whom we owe an encomium evidently sincere:

... A comely body, and a beauteous mind;

A heart to love, a hand to give inclin'd;

A house as free and open as the ayre;

A tongue which joyes in language sweet and faire, ...

and more of the kind. Sir William was a not distant neighbour of the

Beaumonts, and was knighted, as we have seen, at the same time and place

as Henry of Grace-Dieu; one may reasonably infer that his "house as free

and open as the ayre" at Cotes in Leicestershire harboured Fletcher and

the two Beaumonts on more than one occasion. Sir Walter Aston of Tixall

in Staffordshire, the diplomat, of the Inner Temple since 1600, had

been, since 1603,[105] the patron also of Francis Beaumont's life-long

friend, Drayton. And that poet keeps up the intimacy for many years.

Writing, after 1627 when Sir Walter, now Baron Aston of Forfar, was sent

on embassy to Spain, he says of Lady Aston that "till here again I may

her see, It will be winter all the year with me." In 1609 Sir Walter is

a "true lover of learning," in whom "as in a centre" Fletcher "takes

rest," and whose "goodness to the Muses" is "able to make a work

heroical." Of Sir Robert Townshend's relation to our dramatists we know

nothing save that Fletcher says: "You love above my means to thank ye."

He came of a family that is still illustrious, and for a quarter of a

century he sat in Parliament.

Fletcher's closest friend, if we except Beaumont, seems to have been

Charles Cotton of Beresford, Staffordshire, "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 daughter of Sir John Stanhope. To him in

1639, as "the noble honourer of the dead author's works and memory,"

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

partially.... 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, 1647, speaking of 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, what 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." Elsewhere

Cockayne describes 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" gives

information.

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 symmetrie below,

Lives have, or sho'd have, thou the best can show.--[106]

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 civility and delightfulness in conversation, that no

man in the Court or out of it appeared a more accomplished person; all

these extraordinary qualifications being supported by as extraordinary

a clearness of courage, and fearlessness of spirit, of which he gave too

often manifestation." 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 Cromwell's protectorate, 1658.

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.[107]

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 Mistresse,

calling 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 Evadne.[108]

[Illustration: JOHN SELDEN

From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London]

The Bohemian life on the Bankside, such as it was, must have been

brought to an end by Beaumont's marriage, about 1613. By that time

Beaumont had written _The Woman-Hater_, _The Knight of the Burning

Pestle_, _The Maske_, and several poems; Fletcher, _The Faithfull

Shepheardesse_ and three or four plays more; the two in partnership, at

least five plays; and Fletcher had meanwhile collaborated with other

dramatists in from eight to eleven plays which do not now 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_.

FOOTNOTES:

[97] _Underwoods_, XLVIII.

[98] Thomas Nashe, _Dedication of The Life of Jack Wilton_.

[99] _Itinerary_, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 97.

[100] See Greg's _Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Drama_, and my

former pupil, H. W. Hill's, _Sidney's Arcadia and the Elizabethan

Drama_.

[101] _Itinerary_, Vol. I, 21. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.

[102] _Cal. State Papers, Domestic_, Chamberlain to Carleton, Jan. 4,

1617. The Villiers descent is given in Collins, _Peerage_, III, 762.

[103] Sir Henry had petitioned ineffectually for the revival of the

viscounty at an earlier date. _Cal. St. Pa., Dom._, Nov. 23, 1606;

see, also, reference in 1614. See also, below, Appendix, Table A.

[104] _Calendar of State Papers_ (Domestic), 1611-1617, under dates.

[105] Elton, _Drayton_, p. 28.

[106] _Hesperides_, Aldine edition of _Herrick_, II, 136.

[107] _Hesperides_, Aldine edition, _Herrick_, I, 301.

[108] _Op. cit._, I, 329.

CHAPTER XII

BEAUMONT'S MARRIAGE AND DEATH; THE SURVIVING FAMILY

In the 1653 edition of the "Poems; By Francis Beaumont, Gent." there is

one, ordinarily regarded 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 1612, 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,--

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 happiness--

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,

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 whit vertuous,

Thou 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 worshiping the woman won;

reverently striving to comprehend an ineffable joy. The poem is not of

praises such as Beaumont in his epistle _Ad Comitissam Rutlundiae_

contemns, praises "bestow'd at most need on a thirsty soul." The writer,

here, purports to examine 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 rhetoric, 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 um.

I date this poem, then 1612 or 1613, a year or two 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 Freminghams in 1412.

In 1554 Sir Harry Isley and his son, William, who were prominent

upholders of the reformed religion, had joined hands with the gallant

young Sir Thomas Wyatt of Allington 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 Wrotham, 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 William 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, 1599, William's son, Henry, left all his

"manners, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, in the countie of Kent or

else where 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 maye 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 ... and also for the bringing up

and preferment in marriage of Ursula and Una, the two daughters or

children 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 _Leicester_, 1619: "Ursula, the daughter and

coheir [evidently with Una] of Henry Isley."[109] In fact, Henry had

named Ursula after his mother, the daughter of Nicholas Clifford.

It will be remembered that Beaumont's sister Elizabeth 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.[110] If Elizabeth was

married before 1613, it is easy to surmise that during some visit to

her, Beaumont was brought acquainted with Ursula Isley of Sundridge

Place. If not, we may refer the acquaintance to sojournings with his

friend, Fletcher, at Cranbrook or at the Kentish homes of Fletcher's

stepsisters, or with their cousins, the Sackvilles.

We have no proof that Francis Beaumont wrote more than one drama after

the Whitehall festivities of February 1613. Two plays in which he is

supposed by some to have had a hand with Fletcher, _The Captaine_ and

_The Honest Man's Fortune_, were acted 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 country 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 Beaumont who had four sons to

provide for. It is, of course, barely possible that one of his father's

properties in Leicestershire or Derby may have fallen to him,--Cottons,

for instance, in the latter county, or that "Manner 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 "servaunte ... for the tearme of

eleaven yeares" beginning 1598. But the probabilities all point to the

manor house in Kent as the scene of Beaumont's closing years.[111]

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

Ursula 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 much 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 was born. Near this memorial we may imagine that Beaumont and

Ursula sat of a Sunday; and through this same picturesque 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 Sampson Lennard and his son, Sir Henry, and Fletcher's

stepsister Chrysogona (Grisogone), now Lord and Lady Dacre, and make

merry with their seven youngsters; 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 Spenser had written; perhaps, visit their

sister Seyliard that same evening.

Another summer day, Francis would ride the ten miles north toward

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 church that crowns

the height, would steady to a trot along the stately avenue of the Park

amid its beeches and sycamores,--resting his eye on broad sweeps of

pasture-land and distant groves, and thinking poetry,--to be greeted

within one short half-hour from the time he left the Place, by that most

hospitable nobleman of the day, the noblest patron of poetry and art,

Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset. They would pace--these two

lovers of Ben Jonson, and worshippers of the first dramatist-earl--the

Great Hall, together, talking of plays, of the burning of the Globe

while _Henry VIII_ was on the boards, or of the opening of the new

Blackfriars, or of Overbury's poisoning, and the scandalous marriage of

Rochester and Lady Essex, or of Sir Henry Nevill's chances in the matter

of the Secretaryship, or of Winwood's appointment, or of Raleigh's

grievances, or of the new favourite, young Villiers of Brooksby, or of

the long existing grievance of Beaumont's Catholic cousins, in and after

1614 all the more acute because of the hopes and fears thronging that

other subject of discussion which doubtless would occupy a place in any

conversation, the negotiations of Don Diego Sarmiento for a Spanish

Marriage. Perhaps they would stretch their legs out to the fire before

the old andirons that had once been Henry VIII's, and talk of the tragic

romance of young William Seymour and Lady Arabella Stuart, the cousin

alike of Robert Pierrepoint and his majesty, James I; or of the

indictment and fall of Somerset. Or they would stroll to the chapel, and

decipher the carvings of the Crucifixion which Mary, Queen of Scots, had

given to the Earl's brother, now dead. Or the Earl would point out some

new portrait of that wonderful collection, then forming, of literary men

in the dining-room, and Beaumont would pass judgment upon the

presentment of some of his own contemporaries.

Then down the drive by which the sheep are browsing and the deer, like

Agag delicately picking their way, and back to Sundridge of the Isleys,

and to Ursula; maybe to an afternoon of lazy writing on scenes that

Fletcher has called for--perhaps the posset-night of Sir Roger and

Abigail for the beginning of _The Scornful Ladie_.

In 1614 or 1615, 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, 1616, he

died,--only thirty-one years of age.[112]

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,"--

On Death, thy murd'rer, this revenge I take:

I slight his terrour, and just question make,

Which of us two the best precedence have--

Mine to this wretched world, thine to the grave.

Thou shouldst have followed me, but Death to blame

Miscounted yeeres, and measur'd age by fame:

_So dearely hast thou bought thy precious lines;

Their praise grew swiftly, so thy life declines._

Thy Muse, the hearer's queene, the reader's love,

All eares, all hearts (but Death's), could please and move;--

when we couple the dramatist's own words of his "wit not yet grown so

near unto the grave" with these of his brother which I have italicized,

and reflect that for the last three years Francis seems to have written

almost nothing, we are moved to conjecture that his early death was not

unconnected with an excessive devotion to his art, and that his health

had been for some time failing. As Darley long ago pointed out,[113] the

lines of Bishop Corbet "on Mr. Francis Beaumont (then newly dead)" may

intend more than a poetical conceit; and they would confirm the

probability suggested above.

He that hath such acuteness and such wit,

As would ask ten good heads to husband it;

He that can write so well, that no man dare

Refuse it for the best, let him beware:

Beaumont is dead; _by whose sole death appears,

Wit's a disease consumes men in few years_.--

And this conjecture is borne out by the portrait of the weary Beaumont

that now hangs in Nuneham.

Three days after his death the dramatist was buried in that part of

Westminster Abbey which, since Spenser 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 followed him: his

brother, Sir John, who died some eleven years later, and lies beside

him; his old friend, Michael Drayton, in 1631; Hugh Holland, in 1633;

and that friend of all four, Ben Jonson, in 1637. On the "learned" or

"historical" side of the transept, across the way from the poets, lie

also only three of Beaumont's generation: 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 monuments,

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, though there was much talk of transporting

his body from Stratford in the year of his death and Beaumont'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

Dryden'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 Westminster_, attributed to our

poet-dramatist, are of doubtful authorship, 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!

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 calm,

deterministic spirit of his poems and his tragedies; and they are worthy

of him.

Beaumont's surviving brother of Grace-Dieu continued 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 1629. Of his _Battle of Bosworth Field_, which contains some

genuinely poetic passages, I have already spoken. In his lines to James

I _Concerning the True Forme of English Poetry_, 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 translations from Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and

Prudentius are done with spirit. His later poems set him before us an

eminently pious soul, kindly, courtly, and cultivated. His greatest

work, the _Crowne of Thornes_, 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?

His onely mem'ry my poore worke adornes,

He is a father to my crowne of thornes:

Now since his death how can I ever looke

Without some tears, upon that orphan booke?

That this poem was printed we gather also from the elegy of Thomas

Hawkins upon Sir John.

I have already said that John was raised by Charles I, undoubtedly

through the influence of the Duke of Buckingham, to the baronetcy in

1626. He died only a year or two later,[114] and was lamented in verse

by his sons, and by poets and scholars of the day. On the appearance of

his poetical remains, Jonson wrote "This booke will live; it hath a

genius," and "I confesse a Beaumont's booke to be The bound and frontire

of our poetrie." And Drayton--

There is no splendour, which our pens can give

By our most labour'd lines, can make thee live

Like to thine owne.

In the commendatory poems, his friend, Thomas Nevill,[115] praises his

goodness, his knowledge and his art. Sir Thomas Hawkins of Nash Court,

Kent,--connected through Hugh Holland and Edmund Bolton with the circle

of Sir John's acquaintances,--emphasizes the modesty, regularity, moral

and religious devotion no less of his life than of his poetry. His sons

rejoice that "His draughts no sensuall 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 wrote the _Anatomy of Melancholy_,--he was "a gentleman 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 1644. Other sons were Gervase, who died in childhood,

Francis, who became a Jesuit, and Thomas, who succeeded in 1644 to the

family title and estates. The Manor of Grace-Dieu passed finally to the

Philips family 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 1682 was Sir Ambrose Philips,[116]

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 standing. 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 Ekesildena 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 connection

between the Sundridge Isleys and the Phillipps 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 Drayton's _Muses Elizium_. In the

third, fourth, and eighth _Nimphalls_, written as late as 1630, the

old poet introduces among his nymphs,--singing in the "Poets

Paradice," which, I surmise, was terrestrially Knole Park,--the same

"Mirtilla" who in his eighth Eglog of 1606 was "sister to those

hopeful boys, ... Thyrsis and sweet Palmeo." Only a year before the

appearance of these _Nimphalls_ Drayton composed for the publication

of her elder brother's poems, a lament "To the deare Remembrance of

his Noble Friend, Sir John Beaumont, Baronet." Mirtilla had outlived

both Thyrsis and Palmeo, but not the affection of their life-long

admirer 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;[117] and she probably continued to live with her children at the

family seat in Sundridge. The elder daughter, Elizabeth, was married to

"a Scotch colonel" and was living in Scotland as late as 1682. Frances

was never married. She seems to have cherished her father's fame as her

richest possession. It was, indeed, probably her only possession, save a

packet of his poems in manuscript which, we are told, she carried with

her to Ireland, but unfortunately "they were lost at sea"[118] on her

return. In 1682 she was "resident in the family of the Duke of Ormonde,"

then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland.[119] She appears to have attended the

high-spirited and capable Duchess, or other ladies of the Butler family,

at the Castle in Dublin, or the family seat in Kilkenny, as companion.

Under the protection of that loyal cavalier and Christian statesman,

James, Duke of Ormonde, whose prayer was ever "for the relieving and

delivering the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed,"[120] she must

have known happiness, for at any rate a few years. She was retired by

the Duke, apparently after the death of the Duchess, in 1684, on a

pension of one hundred pounds a year; and this competence we learn that

she still enjoyed in 1700, when at the age of eighty-four she was living

in Leicestershire,--let us hope in her father's old home of Grace-Dieu.

She may have survived to see the accession of Queen Anne. We know merely

that she died before 1711. Her life bridges the space from the day of

her father, Shakespeare's younger contemporary, to that of her father's

encomiast, Dryden, and further still to that of Congreve, Vanbrugh,

Farquhar, and Addison; and we are thus helped to realize that in the

arithmetic of generations 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[109] _Works of B. and F._, I, ii-iii.

[110] Hasted's _History of Kent_ (1797), II, 433; III, 146, 154, 186.

[111] For Sundridge and the Isleys, see Hasted's _Kent_, II, 513-521;

III, 128-132, 143-145; and _Cal, S. P._ (_Dom._) Jan. 23, Feb. 24,

1554.

[112] Jonson's statement to Drummond "ere he was thirty years of age"

is incorrect, or was misreported.

[113] _Introduction to The Works of B. and F._, ed. 1866, I, xviii.

[114] According to the Register of burials in Westminster Abbey, 1627;

but some authorities say 1628. See Dyce, I, xxi; Chalmer's _English

Poets_, VI, 3, and Grosart's edition of his poems.

[115] This is certainly not the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge,

as Grosart opines,--for the simple reason that the Master died

thirteen years before Sir John.

[116] Nichols, _Coll. Hist., Leic.,-Bibl. Top. Britt._, VIII, 1329,

1341.

[117] A. B. Grosart, in _D. N. B._, art. _Francis Beaumont_.

[118] Preface to _B. and F.'s Works_, ed. 1711, p. 1.

[119] Dyce, Vol. I, p. 211, from _MS., Vincent's Leicester_, 1683.

[120] James Wills, _Lives of Illustrious and Distinguished Irishmen_,

1841, Vol. III, Pt. ii, p. 244.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PERSONALITY, AND THE CONTEMPORARY REPUTATION OF BEAUMONT

Our poet's contemporaries saw him, not as one of my scholarly friends,

Professor Herford, judging apparently from the crude engraving of

1711,[121] or from that of 1812, sees him, "of heavy and uninteresting

features," but as Swinburne saw him, probably 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

observation";[122] as we see him to-day in the soft and speaking

photogravure[123] recently made from the portrait at Knole Park or in

the reproduction of 1911[124] of the portrait which belongs to the Rt.

Hon. Lewis Harcourt at Nuneham,--a courtly gentleman of noble 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, 1711, 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 1609--about the year of _Philaster_. I have already shown

that the Sackvilles were connected with the Fletchers by marriage. They

were also patrons of Beaumont's friends, Jonson and Drayton. While the

third Earl was still living, poor old Ben writes to son, Edward

Sackville, a grateful epistle for succouring his necessities. And to the

same Edward, as fourth Earl,[125] Drayton dedicated, 1630, the

_Nimphalls_ of his _Muses Elizium_, and to his Countess, Mary, the

_Divine Poems_, published therewith. If, as others have conjectured, the

Earl is himself the Dorilus of the _Nimphalls_, the exquisite

_Description of Elizium_ which precedes, may be, after the fashion of

the poets and painters of the Renaissance, 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,--

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,[126] who erected the

monument to Drayton in the Poets' Corner. That Beaumont was acquainted

with this family of poets and patrons of art is, therefore, 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 dramatist.

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 away 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.

[Illustration: By permission of Mr. Lewis Harcourt.

THE BEAUMONT

OF THE

NUNEHAM PORTRAIT]

Of the personality of Beaumont we have already had glimpses through the

window of his non-dramatic poems. His letter to Ben Jonson has revealed

him chafing in enforced exile from London, amusedly tolerant of the

"standing family-jests" of country gentlemen, 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 indignation. We have grown acquainted with his

reverence 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

literature, recognized in our poet a self-esteem which even he could

not bully out of him. But we must not be harsh in our judgment of

Drummond's Ben Jonson, for though he "was given rather to lose a friend

than a jest and was jealous of every word and action of those about

him," this is not the Ben who some seven years earlier had written "How

I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse"; this is Ben as Drummond saw him

in 1619--Ben talking "especially after drink which is one of the

elements in which he liveth." That Beaumont's affection and geniality of

intercourse were reciprocated not only by Jonson, but by others, we

learn from lines written to, or of, him by men of worth.

His judgment as a critic was recognized by his contemporaries, as well

as the poetic brilliance of the dramas which he was creating under

their eyes. His language, too, was praised for its distinction while

he was yet living. In the manuscript outline of the _Hypercritica_,

which appears to have been filled in at various times between 1602 and

1616, Bolton says: "the books out of which wee gather the most

warrantable English are not many to my remembrance.... But among the

cheife, or rather the cheife, are in my opinion these: Sir Thomas

Moore's works; ... George Chapman's first seaven books of Iliades;

Samuell Danyell; Michael Drayton his Heroicall Epistles of England;

Marlowe his excellent fragment of Hero and Leander; Shakespeare, Mr.

Francis Beamont, and innumerable other writers for the stage,--and

[they] presse tenderly to be used in this Argument; Southwell,

Parsons, and some few other of that sort." In the final version of the

_Hypercritica_, prepared between 1616 and 1618,[127] Bolton omits the

later dramatists altogether;[128] but that is not to be construed by

way of discrimination against Shakespeare and Beaumont. There is no

doubt that Bolton knew the Beaumonts personally, and appreciated their

worth, and as early as 1610;--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,"[129] who highly compliments the invention, judicial method,

and taste displayed in the _Elements_, 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 consensus 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 Norwich,

have already been quoted. A so-called "sonnet," 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,[130] that it seems "very like Fletcher's epicede on

his beloved associate":--

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!

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- or sixteen-year-old

John Earle;--he who was later Fellow of Merton; and in turn Bishop of

Worcester, and of Salisbury. 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

Hath seiz'd on Wit, good Epitaphs are scant;

We dare not write thy Elegie, whilst each feares

He nere shall match that coppy of thy teares.

Scarce in an Age a Poet,--and yet he

Scarce lives the third part of his age to see,

But quickly taken off, and only known,

Is in a minute shut as soone as showne....

Why should Nature take such pains to perfect that which ere perfected

she shall destroy?--

Beaumont dies young, so Sidney died before;

There was not Poetry he could live to, more:

He could not grow up higher; I scarce know

If th' art it self unto that pitch could grow,

Were 't not in thee that hadst arriv'd the hight

Of all that wit could reach, or Nature might....

The elegist likens Beaumont to Menander,

Whose few sententious fragments show more worth

Than all the Poets Athens ere brought forth;

And I am sorry I have lost those houres

On them, whose quicknesse comes far short of ours,

And dwelt not more on thee, whose every Page

May be a patterne to their Scene and Stage.

I will not yeeld thy Workes so mean a Prayse--

More pure, more chaste, more sainted than are Playes,

Nor with that dull supinenesse to be read,

To passe a fire, or laugh an houre in bed....

Why should not Beaumont in the Morning please,

As well as Plautus, Aristophanes?

Who, if my Pen may as my thoughts be free,

Were scurrill Wits and Buffons both to Thee....

Yet these are Wits, because they'r old, and now

Being Greeke and Latine, they are Learning too:

But those their owne Times were content t' allow

A thriftier fame, and thine is lowest now.

But thou shall live, and, when thy Name is growne

Six Ages older, shall be better knowne;

When thou'rt of Chaucers standing in the Tombe,

Thou shall not share, but take up all his roome.[131]

A panegyric liberal in the superlatives of youth but, in view of

passages to be quoted elsewhere, one of the sanest as well as earliest

appreciations of Beaumont's distinctive quality as a dramatist; an

appreciation such as the historian might expect from a collegian who, a

dozen years later, was not only one of the most genial and refined

scholars of his generation but, perhaps, the most accurate observer and

epitomist of the familiar types and minor morals of his day,--a writer

who in 1628 is still championing the cause of contemporary poetry. In

his characterization of the Vulgar-Spirited Man "that is taken only with

broad and obscene wit, and hisses anything too deep for him; that cries,

Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has

gone so, and he has read none," the Earle of the _Microcosmographie_ is

but repeating the censure of his elegy on Beaumont in 1616.

About 1620, we find a contemporary of altogether different class from

that of the university student acknowledging the fame of Beaumont, the

Thames waterman, John Taylor. This self-advertising tramp and

rollicking scribbler mentions him in _The Praise of Hemp-seed_ with

Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and others, as of those who, "in

paper-immortality, 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 writing of "Mr. William

Shakespeare" who had died six weeks after Beaumont,--and he thus

apostrophizes the Westminster poets of the Corner:

Renowned Spencer, lye a thought more nye

To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye

A little neerer Spencer, to make roome

For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.

To lodge all foure in one bed make a shift

Untill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift,

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 Jonson 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, Stratford, in or soon after 1618, for in the lines

which follow those given above the writer apostrophizes Shakespeare as

sleeping "Under this carved marble of thine owne." The sonnet

contemplates the removal of Shakespeare's remains to Westminster, and

arranges the poets already lying there not in actual but chronological

order.[132]

To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in the series of stanzas

prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623,--_To the memory of my

beloved, the Author, Mr. William 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, Beaumont,--but merely

"disproportioned," if one judge critically, in the present comparison,

as are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but "thundering

Aeschylus," 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,

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 contemporaries not as a

professional, but literary, dramatist,--a poet, and a person of social

eminence,--appears from Drayton's _Epistle to Henery Reynolds, Esq., Of

Poets and Poesy_, published 1627, 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 bayes,

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

weighty numbers," Drayton pays especial honour to "grave, morall

Spencer," "noble Sidney ... heroe for numbers and for prose," Marlowe

with his "brave translunary things," 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

the Pierian spring," and "reverend Chapman" for his translations: then

he passes to men of letters whom he had loved, Alexander and Drummond,

and concludes the roll-call with his two 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, but incidentally

asserts the popularity of their work, for the author informs 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 1627 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.'

[Illustration: MICHAEL DRAYTON

From the portrait in the Dulwich Gallery]

This volume is Henry Fitzgeffrey's _Certayn elegies done by sundrie

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 1611. 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 mathematician,

philosopher, and poet, Nicholas Hill[133] Beaumont could not have failed

to know him. He was of St. John's College, Oxford; he wrote and

published a _Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana_ to which, mentioning him

by name, Ben Jonson alludes in his epigram (CXXXIV) _Of 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 was the

secretary and favourite of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a good

deal of a wag, and well acquainted with our old friend Serjeant Hoskyns

of the _Convivium Philosophicum_. He died in 1610.

Whether the anonymous writer on _The Time Poets_[134] was a personal

acquaintance of Beaumont we cannot tell. The definite qualities of the

poet which he emphasizes are, however, as likely to be drawn from life

and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas. The lines,

apparently composed between 1620 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.

That Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, was a personal friend,--we may be

sure,--the kind of friend who having a sense of humour did not resent

Beaumont's genial satire in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ upon his

bourgeois drama of _The Foure Prentises_ of London. Writing as late as

1635, he remembers Francis as a wit:

Excellent Bewmont, in the formost ranke

Of the rarest Wits, was never more than Franck.--

The touch of familiarity with which Heywood[135] causes that whole row

of poets, many of them then dead, Robin Green, Kit Marlowe, the Toms

(Kyd, Watson and Nashe), mellifluous Will, Ben, and the rest, to live

for posterity as human, and lovable, gracefully heightens the compliment

for one and all.

We may surmise that one more eulogist of Beaumont, his kinsman,[136] Sir

George Lisle, a marvellously gallant cavalier, who distinguished himself

at Newberry, and was shot by order of Fairfax about the end of the Civil

War, was old enough in 1616 to have known our poet. Though Sir George,

in his verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, lays special

stress upon the close-woven fancy of the two playwrights, he seems to

have a first-hand information, not common to the younger writers of

these commendatory poems, concerning Beaumont's share in at least one of

the tragedies. He ascribes to him, not to Fletcher,--as we know by

modern textual tests, correctly,--the nobler scenes of "brave

Mardonius" in _A King and No King_. 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 hee

(Thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee.

FOOTNOTES:

[121] From the portrait at Knole Park.

[122] _Encyc. Brit., sub nomine._

[123] By Cockerell, in the _Variorum Edition of B. and F.'s Works_,

Vol. I, 1904. See Frontispiece to this volume.

[124] _Historical Portraits_, Vol. II, 1600-1700, Oxford, 1911.

[125] Not to the third Earl, Richard, as Cyril Brett, _Drayton's Minor

Poems_, p. xix, has it.

[126] Clark's _Aubrey's Brief Lives_, II, 175, 239. Not Mary (Curzon),

the wife of the fourth Earl, as Professor Elton, _Drayton_ (1895), p.

45, has it.

[127] After the appearance of Montague's edition of King James's

_Works_, and before the execution of Raleigh.

[128] Save for non-dramatic productions such as Ben Jonson's

_Epigrams_, etc.

[129] Grosart, _D. N. B._, art, _Sir John Beaumont_, and _Sir J. B.'s

Poems_, xxxvi.

[130] _B. and F._, Vol. I, lii.

[131] Revised by Earle for the _Commendatory Verses_, Folio 1647; but

I have retained some of the readings of the 1640 copy included in

Beaumont's _Poems_.

[132] The version given above is that of Brit. Mus. _MS. Lansdowne_

777. Of other versions one is attributed to Donne; but the Lansdowne

is the most authentic, and the evidence of authorship is all for

Basse, whose name follows in the Lansdowne manuscript. So, Miss L. T.

Smith in _Centurie of Praise_, p. 139.

[133] Mr. Bullen, _D. N. B._, under _Fitzgeffrey_, queries "Nathaniel

Hooke." I have not been able to identify Hooke.

[134] _Choice Drollery, Songs, and Sonnets, 1656, in Sh. Soc. Pap._,

III, 172.

[135] _The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells._

[136] Through the Villierses and therefore probably through the

Coleorton Beaumonts.

CHAPTER XIV

TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM

What 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 conversation 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 dares undertake to write their Lives.

What I have to say is, we have the precious Remaines; and as the wisest

contemporaries acknowledge they Lived a Miracle, I am very confident

this volume cannot die without 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 Monument 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 spectacle while 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 employed Students, while these Recreations were digested

into Rules, and the very pleasure did edifie."

So far as the plays printed in this folio are concerned, not much of

this praise belongs to Beaumont; for, as we now know, not more than two

of them, _The Coxcombe_ and the _Masque of the Inner Temple_, bear his

impress. But Shirley is thinking of the reputation of the authors in

general; and he writes with an eye to the sale of the book.

Since we shall presently find opportunity to consider the trend of

opinion during the seventeenth century 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 Beaumont'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," Fletcher'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.

And still another Oxford man, born four years before 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 weaved with his Beaumont's pen;

And might with deeper wonder hit.

These and similar statements of 1647, essentially correct, concerning

the force, depth, and critical acumen of Beaumont had been anticipated

in the testimonials printed during his lifetime and down to 1640,

especially in those of Jonson, Davies, Drayton, and Earle.

A verdict, much more dogmatic, 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 Jonson 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,--telling 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 contract

Thy plenty to lesse wit to make 't exact.

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 information

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 undifferentiated Beaumont and Fletcher.

CHAPTER XV

A FEW WORDS OF FLETCHER'S LATER YEARS

Beside the dramas which there is any meritorious reason for assigning to

the joint-authorship of the two friends, some dozen plays were produced

by Fletcher alone, or in collaboration with others, before the practical

cessation, in 1613, or thereabout, of Beaumont's dramatic activity.

After that time Fletcher's name was attached, either as sole author or

as the associate of Massinger, Field, William Rowley, and perhaps

others, to about thirty more. From 1614 on, he was the successor of

Shakespeare as dramatic poet of the King's Players. Jonson's masques

delighted the Court, but no writer of tragedy or comedy,--not Jonson,

nor Philip Massinger, who was now Fletcher's closest associate, nor

Middleton or Rowley, Dekker, Ford, or Webster,--compared with him in

popularity at Court and in the City. He is not merely an illustrious

personality, the principal author of harrowing tragedies such as

_Valentinian_, the sole author of tragicomedies such as _The Loyall

Subject_, and long-lived comedies--_The Chances_, _Rule a Wife and Have

a Wife_, and several more,--he is a syndicate: he stands sponsor for

plays like _The Queene of Corinth_ and _The Knight of Malta_ in which

others collaborated largely with him; and his name is occasionally

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 heyday of Fletcher's

glory, and a most distinguished divine, writes, in 1647, 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 praise

His browes admitted the unsought-for Bayes.

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:

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 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, Lowin and

Taylor, who acted in many of his plays, bear testimony in the

_Dedication_ of _The Wild-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) Applauding this

rare issue of his Braine." He was the idol of his actors: "And now,

Farewell, our Glory!" continue, in 1652, these victims of "a cruell

Destinie"--the closing of the theatres at the outbreak of the Civil

War,--"Farewell, your Choice Delight, most noble Gentlemen! Farewell,

the grand Wheel that set Us Smaller Motions in Action!"--The wheel of

Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger.--"Farewell, the

Pride and Life o' the Stage! Nor can we (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 themselves have left their

love on record, of Jonson, Beaumont, Chapman, Massinger. If Shakespeare

collaborated 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 greater fame."[137] If we may take him at his word, and

estimate him by the noblest lines he ever wrote,--the verses affixed to

_The Honest Man's Fortune_ (acted, 1613),--the keynote of his character

as a man among men, was independence. To those "that can look through

Heaven, and tell the stars," he says:

Man is his own Star, and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early, or too late.

Our Acts our Angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still;

And when the Stars are labouring, we believe

It is not that they govern, but they grieve

For stubborn ignorance.

That star is in "the Image of thy Maker's good":

He is my Star, in him all truth I find,

All influence, all fate;

and as for poverty, it is "the light to Heaven ... Nor want, the cause

of man, shall make me groan"; for experience teaches us "all we can: To

work ourselves into a glorious man." His mistress is not some star of

Love, with the increase to wealth or honour she may bring, but of

Knowledge and fair Truth:

So I enjoy all beauty and all youth,

And though to time her Lights and Laws she lends,

She knows no Age, that to corruption bends....

Perhaps through all this, there echoes the voice of that _praesul

splendidus_, his father, the Bishop, the friend of Sir Francis Drake, of

Burghley, and of the forceful Bishop Bancroft,--a father solicitous, at

any rate before he fell into the hands of his fashionable second wife

and lost favour with the Queen, for the "Chrystian and godlie education"

of his children. However that may be,--whether the noble idea of this

confession of faith is a projection from the discipline of youth or an

induction from the experience of life, the utterance of Fletcher's

inmost personality is here:

Man is his own Star, and that soul that can

Be honest, is the only perfect man.

Though, in the plays where Beaumont does not control, Fletcher so freely

reflects the loose morals of his age, the gross conventional

misapprehension of woman's worth, even the cynicism regarding her

essential purity,--though Fletcher reflects these conditions in his

later plays as well as in his early _Faithfull Shepheardesse_,[138] and

though he, for dramatic ends, accepts the material vulgarity of the

lower classes and the perverted and decadent heroics of the upper, there

still are "passages in his works where he recurs to a conception which

undoubtedly had a very vital significance for him--that of a

gentleman,"--to the "merit, manners, and inborn virtue" of the gentleman

not conventional but genuine.[139] In Beaumont, that "man of a most

strong and searching braine" whose writings and whose record speak the

gentleman, he had had the example beside him in the flesh. What that

meant is manifest in the encomium of Francis Palmer, written in 1647

from Christ Church, Oxford,

All commendations end

In saying only: Thou wert Beaumont's friend.

The engraving of Fletcher in the 1647 folio was "cut by severall

Originall Pieces," says Mosely "which his friends lent me, but withall

they tell me that his unimitable Soule did shine through his countenance

in such _Ayre_ and _Spirit_, that the Painters confessed it was not

easie to expresse him: As much as could be, you have here, and the

Graver hath done his part." The edition of 1711 is the first to publish

"effigies" of both poets, "the Head of Mr. Beaumont, and that of Mr.

Fletcher, through the favour of the present Earl of Dorset [the seventh

Earl], being taken from Originals in the noble Collection his Lordship

has at Knowles." The engravings in the Theobald, Seward and Sympson

edition of 1742-1750 are by G. Vertue. The engravings in Colman's

edition of 1778, are the same, debased. Those in Weber's edition of

1812, are done afresh,--of Beaumont by Evans, of Fletcher by

Blood--apparently from the Knole originals. They are an improvement upon

those of earlier editions. In Dyce's edition of 1843-1846, H. Robinson's

engraving of Beaumont has nobility; his attempt at Fletcher does not

improve upon Blood's. All these are in the reverse. The Variorum edition

of 1904-1905 gives the beautiful photogravure of Beaumont of which I

have already spoken, by Walker and Cockerell, from the original at Knole

Park; and an equally soft and expressive photogravure of Fletcher, by

Emery 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, toward 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 contemporary but unknown artist, and is

similar to the portrait at Knole Park. It was engraved in the reverse 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 which [portraits], if not all, are at the present

at Cornebery in Oxfordshire." But Evelyn adds that "Beaumont and

Fletcher were both in one piece." Yet another portrait said to be of

Fletcher, painted in 1625 by C. Janssen, belongs to the Duke of

Portland. This Janssen is the Cornelius to whom the alleged portrait of

Shakespeare, now at Bulstrode, is attributed. Cornelius did not come to

England before Shakespeare's death; and, consequently, not before

Beaumont's.

Fletcher died in August 1625. According to Aubrey, "In the great plague,

1625, a Knight of Norfolke (or Suffolke) invited him into the Countrey.

He stayed but to make himselfe a suite of cloathes, and while it was

makeing, fell sick of the plague and dyed. This I had [1668] from his

tayler, who is now [1670] a very old man, and clarke of St. Mary

Overy's." The dramatist was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark, the

twenty-ninth of that month. Sir Aston Cockayne's statement, in an

epitaph on Fletcher and Massinger, that they lie in the same grave, is

probably figurative. Aubrey tells us that Massinger, who died in March

1640, and whose burial is recorded in the register of St. Saviour's, was

buried not in the church, but about the middle of one of its

churchyards, the Bullhead, next the Bullhead tavern. There are memorials

now to both poets in the church, as also to Shakespeare, and Beaumont,

and to Edward Alleyn, the actor of the old Admiral's company.

It is generally supposed that Fletcher was never married. The name, John

Fletcher, was not unusual in the parish of St. Saviour's, and the

records of "John Fletcher" marriages may, therefore, not involve the

dramatist. But two items communicated to Dyce[140] by Collier, "more in

jest than in earnest," from the Parish-registers, are suggestive, if we

reflect that, about 1612 or 1613, the _menage a 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 digestible.

These are Collier's cullings from the Registers:

1612. Nov. 3. John Fletcher and Jone Herring [were married].

_Reg. of 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 Fortune_, 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 compensate him for that

which through love he has not attained, "Were I in love," he

declares,--

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

whimsical 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[137] See his _Ode to Sir William Skipwith_.

[138] "Thou wert not meant, Sure, for a woman, thou art so innocent,"

philosophizes the Sullen Shepherd concerning Amoret;--and not only

wanton nymphs but modest swains are of the same philosophy.

[139] Ward, _E. Dr. Lit._, II, 649,--quoting, in the footnote, from

_The Nice Valour_, V, 3.

[140] Dyce, _B. and F._, I, lxxiii.

PART TWO

THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

CHAPTER XVI

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM; CRITICAL APPARATUS

Much of the confusion which existed in the minds of readers and critics

during the period following the Restoration concerning the respective

productivity 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 1647, 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 exception

is _The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes-Inne and the Inner Temple_

"written by Francis Beaumont, Gentleman," which had been performed, Feb.

20, 1612-13, and had appeared in quarto without date (but probably 1613)

as "by Francis Beaumont, Gent." In seven instances, Fletcher is

indicated in the 1647 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 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.[141]

[Illustration: JOHN FLETCHER

From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery

Painter unknown but contemporary]

Sir Aston Cockayne was, therefore, fully justified, when, some time

between 1647 and 1658, he thus upbraided 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 1662, but written not long after 1647,

and addressed to his cousin, Charles Cotton, Sir Aston returns to the

charge:

I wonder, Cousin, that you would permit

So great an Injury to Fletcher's wit,

Your friend and old Companion, that his fame

Should be divided to another's name.

If Beaumont had writ those Plays, it had been

Against his merits a detracting Sin,

Had they been attributed also to

Fletcher. They were two wits and friends, and who

Robs from the one to glorify the other,

Of these great memories is a partial Lover.

Had Beaumont liv'd when this Edition came

Forth, and beheld his ever living name

Before Plays that he never writ, how he

Had frown'd and blush'd at such Impiety!

His own Renown no such Addition needs

To have a Fame sprung from another's deedes:

And my good friend Old Philip Massinger

With Fletcher writ in some that we see there.

But you may blame the Printers: yet you might

Perhaps have won them to do Fletcher right,

Would you have took the pains; for what a foul

And unexcusable fault it is (that whole

Volume of plays being almost every one

After the death of Beaumont writ) that none

Would certifie them so much! I wish as free

Y' had told the Printers this, as you did me.

. . . . . .

... While they liv'd and writ together, we

Had Plays exceeded what we hop'd to see.

But they writ few; for youthful Beaumont soon

By death eclipsed was at his high noon.

The statements especially to be noted in these poems are, first, that

Fletcher is present in most of the work published in the earliest folio,

that of 1647, Beaumont in but a few plays, Massinger in other few. This

information Cockayne, who was but eight years of age when Beaumont died,

and seventeen at Fletcher's death, had from Fletcher's chief

bosom-friend, and it was probably corroborated by Massinger himself,

with whom Cockayne and his family (as we know from other evidence) had

long been acquainted. Second, that _almost every play_ in the folio was

written after Beaumont's death (1616). This information, also, Cockayne

had from his own cousin who was a friend and old companion of Fletcher.

This cousin, the chief bosom-friend, as I have shown elsewhere, was

Charles Cotton, the elder, who died in 1658, not the younger Charles

Cotton (the translator of Montaigne),--for he was not born till five

years after Fletcher died. And, third, that not only is the title of the

folio "Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John

Fletcher, Gentlemen" a misnomer, but that the bulk of their joint-plays,

"the old ones" (not here included) calls for a volume to itself. A very

just verdict, indeed,--this of Cockayne,--for (if I may again anticipate

conclusions later to be reached) the only indubitable contributions from

Beaumont's hand to this folio are his _Maske of the Gentleman of Grayes

Inne_ and a portion of _The Coxcombe_.

The confusion concerning authorship was redoubled by the second folio,

which appeared as "_Fifty Comedies and Tragedies_. Written by Francis

Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen. Published by the Authors Original

Copies (_etc._)" in 1679. There are fifty-three plays in this volume;

the thirty-five of the first folio, and eighteen previously printed but

not 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 Coronation_, principally, if not entirely, by Shirley.[142] As

in the 1647 folio, the only indication of respective authorship is to be

found in occasional dedications, prefaces, prologues and epilogues. But,

while in some half-dozen instances these name Fletcher correctly as

author, and, in two or three, by implication correctly designate him or

Beaumont, in other cases the indication is wrong or misleading. Where

"our poets" are vaguely mentioned, or no hint whatever 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 collaborated

equally in about forty of the fifty-three plays contained in the folio

of 1679.

The uncertainty regarding the respective shares of the two 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 down to the present time. Writing an elegy "on

Master Beaumont, presently after his death,"[143] that is to say, in

1616-17, 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 estimate 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 seriousness, the

"humours" and the perennial vitality of Beaumont's contribution to

dramatic poetry.

A year or so later, and still during Fletcher's lifetime, we find

Drummond of Hawthornden confusing in his turn the facts of authorship;

for he "reports Jonson as saying that 'Flesher and Beaumont, ten years

since, hath written _The Faithfull Shipheardesse_, a tragicomedie well

done,'--whereas both Jonson and Beaumont had already addressed lines to

Fletcher in commendation of his pastoral."[144] By 1647, as Miss Hatcher

has shown, the confusion had crystallized itself into three distinct

opinions, equally false, concerning the respective contribution of the

authors to the plays loosely accredited to their partnership. These

opinions are represented in the commendatory verses prefixed to the

first folio. One was that "they were equal geniuses fused into one by

the force of perfect congeniality and not to be distinguished from each

other in their work,"--thus put into epigram by Sir George Lisle:

For still your fancies are so wov'n and knit,

'T was Francis Fletcher or John Beaumont writ;

and repeated by Sir John Pettus:

How Angels (cloyster'd in our humane Cells)

Maintaine their parley, Beaumont-Fletcher tels:

Whose strange, unimitable Intercourse

Transcends all Rules.

A second, the dominant view in 1647, was that "the plays were to be

accredited to Fletcher alone, since Beaumont was not to be taken into

serious account in explaining their production." This opinion is

expressed by Waller, who, referring not only to the plays of that folio

(in only two of which Beaumont appears) but to others like _The Maides

Tragedy_ and _The Scornful Ladie_ in which, undoubtedly, Beaumont

cooperated, 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-admired 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--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 halfe 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.

A similar view is implied by Dryden, when, in his _Essay of Dramatick

Poesie_, 1668, he attributes the regularity of their joint-plots to

Beaumont's influence; and reports that even "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."

This tradition of Fletcher as creator and Beaumont as critic continued

for generations, only occasionally disturbed,[145] in spite of the

testimony of Cockayne to Fletcher's sole authorship of most of the plays

in the first folio, to the cooperation of Massinger with Fletcher in

some, and to the fact that there were enough plays not here included,

written conjointly by Beaumont and Fletcher, to warrant the publication

of a separate volume, properly ascribed to both. To the mistaken

attributions of authorship by Dryden, Rymer, and others, I make

reference in my forthcoming Essay on _The Fellows and Followers of

Shakespeare_, Part Two.[146] The succeeding history of opinion through

Langbaine, Collier, Theobald, Sympson and Seward, Chalmers, Brydges,

_The Biographia Dramatica_, Cibber, Malone, Darley, Dyce, and the purely

literary critics from Lamb to Swinburne, has been admirably outlined by

Miss Hatcher in the first chapter of her dissertation on the _Dramatic

Method of John Fletcher_.

With Fleay, in 1874, began the scientific analysis of the problem,

based upon metrical tests as derived from the investigation of the

individual verse of Fletcher, Massinger, and Beaumont. His method has

been elaborated, corrected, and supplemented by additional rhetorical

and literary tests, on the part of various critics, some of whom are

mentioned below.[147] The more detailed studies in metre and style are

by R. Boyle, G. C. Macaulay, and E. H. Oliphant; and the best brief

comparative view of their conclusions as regards Beaumont's contribution

is to be found in R. M. Alden's edition of _The Knight of the Burning

Pestle_ and _A King and No King_. To the chronology of the plays

serviceable introductions are afforded by Macaulay in the list appended

to his chapter in the sixth volume of the _Cambridge History of English

Literature_, and by A. H. Thorndike in his _Influence of Beaumont and

Fletcher upon Shakespeare_.

Concerning the authorship of the successive scenes in a few of the

plays undoubtedly written in partnership by Beaumont and Fletcher a

consensus of opinion has practically been reached. Concerning others,

especially those in which a third or fourth hand may be traced, the

difference of opinion is still bewildering. This divergence is due,

perhaps, to the proneness of the critic to emphasize one or more tests

out of relation to the rest, or to forget that though individual scenes

were undertaken now by one, now by the other of the colleagues, the play

as a whole would be usually planned by both, but any individual scene or

passage revised by either. The tests of external evidence have of course

been applied by all critics, but as to events and dates there is still

variety of opinion. Of the internal criteria, those based upon the

peculiarities of each partner in respect of versification have been so

carefully studied and applied that to repeat the operation seems like

threshing very ancient straw; but to accept the winnowings of others,

however careful, is unsatisfactory. Tests of rhetorical habit and

tectonic preference have also been, in general, attempted; but not, I

think, exhaustively. And, though much has been established, and availed

of, in analysis, there remains yet something to desire in the

application of the more subtle differentiae yielded by such preliminary

methods of investigation,--what these differentiae teach us concerning

the temperamental idiosyncrasies of each of the partners in scope and

method of observation, in poetic imagery, in moral and emotional insight

and elevation, intellectual outlook, philosophical and religious

conviction.

FOOTNOTES:

[141] See G. C. Macaulay (_Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit._, VI), and other

authorities as in footnote toward end of this chapter.

[142] See authorities as in footnote, below.

[143] Included "thirty years" after, among the commendatory poems in

the folio of 1647; but published earlier with _Beaumont's Poems_,

1640.

[144] Miss O. L. Hatcher, _John Fletcher_, Chicago, 1905.

[145] As by Langbaine, _An Account of the English Dramatick Poets_

(1691), who acknowledges Cockayne as the only conclusive authority

upon the subject.

[146] _R. E. C._, Vol. III.

[147] F. G. Fleay, in _New Shakespeare Society Transactions_, 1874;

_Shakespeare Manual_, 1876; _Englische Studien_, IX (1866); _Chronicle

of the English Drama_, 1891. R. Boyle, in _Engl. Stud._, V, VII, VIII,

IX, X, XVII, XVIII, XXVI, XXXI (1881-1902), and in _N. Shaksp. Soc.

Trans._, 1886. G. C. Macaulay, _Francis Beaumont_, 1883; and in

_Cambridge History of English Literature_, VI (1910). A. H. Bullen,

article _John Fletcher_ in _Dictionary of National Biography_, XIX

(1889). E. H. Oliphant, in _Engl. Stud._, XIV, XV, XVI (1890-92). A.

H. Thorndike, _The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare_,

1901; Beaumont and Fletcher's _Maid's Tragedy_, etc. (Belles Lettres

Series), 1910. R. M. Alden, Beaumont's _Knight of the Burning Pestle_,

etc. (Belles Lettres Series), 1910. The introductions in the _Variorum

Edition_, 1904, 1905. For a general treatment of the subject see,

also, A. W. Ward's _History of English Dramatic Literature_, II,

155-248 (1875), II, 642-764 (1809), and F. E. Schelling's _Elizabethan

Drama_, II, 184-204, and for bibliography, 526. For general

bibliography, Thorndike and Alden in Belles Lettres Series, as above;

and _Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit._, VI, 488-496.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DELIMITATION OF THE FIELD

The plays contained in the first folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's

_Comedies and Tragedies_, 1647, are _The Mad Lover_, _The Spanish

Curate_, _The Little French Lawyer_, _The Custome of the Countrey_, _The

Noble Gentleman_, _The Captaine_, _The Beggers Bush_, _The Coxcombe_,

_The False One_, _The Chances_, _The Loyall Subject_, _The Lawes of

Candy_, _The Lovers Progresse_, _The Island Princesse_, _The Humorous

Lieutenant_, _The Nice Valour_, _The Maide in the Mill_, _The

Prophetesse_, _The Tragedy of Bonduca_, _The Sea Voyage_, _The Double

Marriage_, _The Pilgrim_, _The Knight of Malta_, _The Womans Prize_ or

_The Tamer Tamed_, _Loves Cure_, _The Honest Mans Fortune_, _The Queene

of Corinth_, _Women Pleas'd_, _A Wife for a Moneth_, _Wit at Severall

Weapons_, _The Tragedy of Valentinian_, _The Faire Maide of the Inne_,

_Loves Pilgrimage_, _The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes Inne, and the

Inner Temple, at the Marriage of the Prince and Princesse Palatine of

Rhene_ written by Francis Beaumont, Gentleman, _Foure Playes_ (or

_Moralle Representations_) _in One_.

Of these thirty-five, which purport to be printed from "the authours

originall copies," only one, as I have already said, _The Maske_, had

been published before.

The second folio, entitled _Fifty Comedies and Tragedies_, 1679,

contains, beside those above mentioned, eighteen others, one of which,

_The Wild-Goose Chase_, had been published separately and in folio,

1652. The remaining seventeen said to be "published from the Authors'

Original Copies," are printed from the quartos. They are _The Maides

Tragedy_, _Philaster_, _A King and No King_, _The Scornful Ladie_, _The

Elder Brother_, _Wit Without Money_, _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_,

_Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_, _Monsieur Thomas_, _Rollo_, _The Knight

of the Burning Pestle_, _The Night-Walker_, _The Coronation_, _Cupids

Revenge_, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, _Thierry and Theodoret_, and _The

Woman-Hater_.

In addition to these fifty-three plays, one, _The Faithful Friends_,

entered on the Stationers' Registers in 1660, as by Beaumont and

Fletcher, was held in manuscript until 1812, 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

twenty-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 Ladie_,

_The Maides Tragedy_, _A King and No King_, _Philaster_, _Foure Playes

in One_, _Loves Cure_, _The Coxcombe_, _The Captaine_, _Thierry and

Theodoret_, _The Faithful Friends_, _Wit at Severall Weapons_, _Beggers

Bush_, _Loves Pilgrimage_, _The Knight of Malta_, _The Lawes of Candy_,

_The Nice Valour_, _The Noble Gentleman_, _The Faire Maide of the Inne_,

_Bonduca_, and _The Honest Mans Fortune_. With regard to the last twelve

of these plays beginning with _Thierry and Theodoret_ there is no

convincing proof that more than the first four were written before

February 1613, when after preparing the _Maske_ for the Lady Elizabeth's

marriage to the Elector Palatine, Beaumont seems (except for his share

of _The Scornful Ladie_ which I date about 1614) to have withdrawn from

dramatic activity,--perhaps because of his own marriage about that time

and withdrawal to the country, or because of failing health; and there

is no generally accepted historical or textual evidence that Beaumont

had any hand even in these four. Of the eight remaining at the end of

the list, four may be dated before Beaumont's death in 1616: _The Honest

Mans Fortune_, which is said on manuscript evidence to have been played

in the year 1613, but probably later than August 5;[148] _Bonduca_,

which Oliphant asserts is an alteration by Fletcher of an old drama of

Beaumont's, but which other authorities assign to Fletcher alone; and,

on slighter evidence, _Loves Pilgrimage_, and _The Nice Valour_. The

balance of proof with regard to the other four, _The Knight of Malta_,

_The Lawes of Candy_, _The Noble Gentleman_, and _The Faire Maide of the

Inne_, is altogether in favour of their composition after Beaumont's

death.

In each of these twelve plays, however, beginning with _Thierry_ and

ending with _The Honest Mans Fortune_, 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 Beaumont'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 presently 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 enumerated 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_, published

without name of author in 1607; _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, also

anonymous, published in 1613; _Cupids Revenge_, published as Fletcher's

in 1615; _The Scornful Ladie_, published in 1616, as Beaumont and

Fletcher's, just after the death of the former; _The Maides Tragedy_,

published, without names of authors, in 1619; _A King and No King_,

published as Beaumont and Fletcher's in 1619; _Philaster_, published as

Beaumont and Fletcher's in 1620; and _Foure Playes in One_, _Loves

Cure_, _The Coxcombe_, and _The Captaine_, first published in the 1647

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 mentions "our Author"; the

Prologue, spoken "at the reviving of this play," attributes it to

Beaumont and Fletcher. As for _The Coxcombe_, 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

Woman-Hater_, _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ and _Cupids Revenge_,

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, beginning with

_The Scornful Ladie_ 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

published as stated above during Fletcher's life, two others appeared

which I do not include in this residuum,--_The Faithfull Shepheardesse_

and _Thierry and Theodoret_. The former, printed between December 22,

1608 and July 20, 1609, is of Fletcher's sole authorship, and will be

employed as one of the clues to his early characteristics. The latter,

attributed by some critics to both authors was published without

ascription of authorship in a quarto of 1621. It does not appear in the

folio of 1647, but was printed in second quarto as "by John Fletcher" in

1648, and again as "by F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher" in 1649; and was

finally gathered up with the _Comedies and Tragedies_ which compose the

folio of 1679. Oliphant and Thorndike are of opinion that the play is a

revision by Massinger of an original by Beaumont and Fletcher, but I

cannot discover in the text evidence sufficient to warrant its inclusion

in the list of plays worthy to be investigated as the possible product

of the partnership.

The eleven Beaumont-Fletcher plays to which the criteria of internal

evidence may be applied with some assurance of success, comprise in

their number, fortunately for us, three of which we are informed by

external evidence,--the contemporary testimony of John Earle, dated

1616-1617,--that Beaumont was concerned in their composition. These

three, _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_, and _A King and No King_, are

a positive residuum to which as a model of the joint-work of our authors

we may first, in the effort to discriminate their respective functions

when working in partnership, apply the tests of style derived from a

study of the plays and poems which each wrote alone.

With this delimitation of the field of inquiry, we are now ready for the

consideration of the criteria by which the presence of either author may

be detected. The criteria are primarily of versification; then,

successively and cumulatively, of diction and mental habit. Ultimately,

and by induction, they are of dramatic technique and creative genius.

FOOTNOTES:

[148] See Fleay, _Chron. Eng. Dram._, I, 195; and W. W. Greg,

_Henslowe Papers_, 90.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF BEAUMONT

I. In Plays Individually Composed.

The studies of the most experienced critics into the peculiarities of

Fletcher's blank verse as displayed in productions of the popular

dramatic kind, indubitably written by him alone,[149] such as _Monsieur

Thomas_ of the earlier period, ending 1613, _The Chances_, _The Loyall

Subject_, and _The Humorous Lieutenant_ of the middle period, ending

1619, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_ of his latest period, indicate

that he indulges in an excessive use of double endings, sometimes as

many as seventy in every hundred lines, even in triple and quadruple

endings; in an abundance of trisyllabic feet; and in a peculiar

retention of the old end-stopped line, or final pause,--occasionally 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

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,--[150]

and to his fondness for appending words such as "first," "then,"

"there," "still," "sir," and even "lady" and "gentlemen" to lines which

already possess 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 2, below; or on any page of Fletcher's _Rule a Wife and Have a

Wife_, as for instance the following from Act III, Scene 1, 14-23:

_Altea._ My life|, an in|nocent|!

_Marg._ That's it | I aim | at,

That's it | I hope | too; | then | I am sure | I rule |

him; 15

For in|nocents | are like | obe|dient chil|dren

Brought up | under a hard | [+!] moth|er-in-law|, a cru|el,

Who be|ing not us'd | to break|fasts and | colla|tions,

[+!] When | they have coarse | bread of|fer'd 'em | are thank|full,

And take | it for | a fa|vour too|. Are the rooms | 20

Made read|y to en|tertain | my friends|? I long | to dance now,

[+!] And | to be wan|ton. | Let | me have | a song.

Is the great | couch up | the Duke | of Medi|na sent?

[Illustration: JOHN EARLE, BISHOP OF WORCESTER AND SALISBURY

From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery]

Here the first half of v. 14 is also the last of the preceding line;

seven out of ten verses have double endings; one has a triple ending.

One, v. 21, has a quadruple ending; unless we rearrange by adding "made

ready" to v. 20, so as to scan:

And take 't | for a fa|vour too|. Are the rooms | made read|y

To en|tertain | my friends|? I long | to dance | now.--

Trisyllabic feet occur in nine; final pauses in nine; stress-syllable

openings and compensating anapaests in two; the feminine caesura (phrasal

pause within the foot) in two. The pause in v. 15, after two 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 Fletcher's of 1607, or at the latest 1611.

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,

When having let the pigs loose in out parishes,

O, the brave cry we made as high as Algate!

Down comes a Constable, and the Sow his Sister

Most traiterously tramples upon Authority:

There a whole stand of rug gowns rowted mainly,

And the King's peace put to flight, a purblind pig here

Runs me his head into the Admirable Lanthorn,--

Out goes the light and all turns to confusion.

No one, once acquainted with this style of blank verse, with its

end-stopped lines, double endings, stress-syllable openings,

feminine caesurae, trisyllabic feet, jolts, and heavy extra syllables,

can ever turn it to confusion with the verse of any poet before

Browning--certainly not with that of Beaumont.

Our materials for a study of Beaumont's individual characteristics in

the composition of dramatic blank verse appear at the first sight to be

very scanty; for the only example of which we have positive external

evidence that it was written by Beaumont alone, is _The Maske of the

Gentlemen of Grayes Inne and the Inner Temple_, and unfortunately some

critics have excluded it from consideration because of its exceptionally

formal and spectacular character and slight dramatic purpose. Written,

however, at the beginning of 1613, when the author's metrical manner was

a definitely confirmed habit, it affords, in my opinion, the best as

well as the most natural approach to the investigation of Beaumont's

versification. The following lines may be regarded as typical:

Is great Jove jealous that I am imploy'd

On her Love-errands? | She did never yet

Claspe weak mortality in her white arms,

As he hath often done: I only come

To celebrate the long-wish'd Nuptials

[+!] Here | in Olym|pia, | which | are now | perform'd.

Betwixt two goodly rivers, | that have mixt

Their gentle, rising waves, and are to grow

[+!] In | to a thou|sand streams | [+!] great | as themselves.

In these nine verses there are no Fletcherian jolts, no double endings.

In only two lines trisyllabic feet occur; in only two, final pauses.

There are stress-syllable openings in two, with the compensating

anapaests; feminine caesurae, in three (dotted); and a stress-syllable

opening for the verse-section after the caesura occurs in but one,

whereas there are at least three such in the passage from _Monsieur

Thomas_, quoted above.

Nothing could be more pronounced than the difference between the

metrical style of Fletcher's _Monsieur Thomas_ and _Rule a Wife_ and

that of Beaumont's _Maske_, as illustrated here. Fletcher abounds in

double endings, trisyllabic feet, and end-stopped lines, and such

conversational or lyrical cadences; Beaumont uses them much more

sparingly. But while the difference between the genuinely dramatic blank

verse of Fletcher and that of Beaumont is sometimes as pronounced as

this, it would be unscientific to base the criterion upon comparison of

a mature, conversationally dramatic, composition of the former with a

stiffly rhetorical declamatory composition of the latter. For a more

suitable comparison we must set Beaumont's _Maske_ side by side with

something of Fletcher's written in similar formal and declamatory

style,--_The Faithfull Shepheardesse_, for instance, a youthful

production in the pastoral spirit and form. Of this a small part, but

sufficient for our purpose, is composed in blank verse; and I have cited

in the next chapter 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, 1, are

perhaps even more distinctive. "What greatness," says the

Shepherdesse,--

What greatness, | or what private hidden power,

[+!] Is | there in me, | to draw submission

From this rude man and beast? Sure I am mortal, 105

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

Makes me | a-cold; | my fear says I am mortal. 110

[+!] 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, | Wood-god, Fairy, Elf, or Fiend,

[+!] Sa|tyr, or oth|er power that haunts the Groves, 115

Shall hurt my body, | or by vain illusion

[+!] Draw | me to wan|der | after idle fires.

We have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings, nine final pauses

(end-stopped verses), four stress-syllable openings with compensating

anapaests, and seven feminine caesurae. In every way this sample even of

Fletcher's more formal style displays, in its salient characteristics, a

much closer resemblance in kind to the sample of his later blank verse

quoted from _Rule a Wife_, 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 Maske_ and the first

one hundred and sixty-three of _The Shepheardesse_, we find that in

respect of final pauses there is no great difference. 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 _Maske_ 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 Shepheardesse_ we count as many as

fourteen. In these productions the proportion of feminine caesurae 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 Maske_ not

more than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-syllable, while

in the blank verse of the _Shepheardesse_ fully thirty-five out of every

hundred lines have that opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical

cadence which pervades much of Fletcher's metrical composition. In the

matter of anapaestic substitutions, and of stress-syllable openings for

the verse-section after the caesura, Beaumont is similarly inelastic;

while the Fletcher of the _Shepheardesse_ displays a marvellous freedom.

It follows that in the _Maske_ we encounter but rarely the rhetorical

pause, within the verse, compensating for an absent thesis or arsis;

while in the pastoral verse of Fletcher we find frequent instances of

this delicate dramatic as well as metrical device, and an occasional

jolting caesura.

We are not limited, however, to the material afforded by the _Maske_ in

our attempt to discover Beaumont's metrical characteristics when writing

alone. _The Woman-Hater_, included among the plays of Beaumont and

Fletcher in the folio of 1679, and ascribed to both on the title-page of

a quarto of 1649, is assigned by the Prologue of the first quarto, 1607,

to a single author--"he that made this play." And, though there is no

attribution of authorship on the title-page of the 1607 quarto, we know

from the application of verse-tests and tests of diction that, in all

but three scenes which have evidently been revised,[151] the author was

certainly not Fletcher. An examination of the inner structure of the

verse of _The Woman-Hater_, reveals, except in those scenes, precisely

the peculiarities that distinguish Beaumont's _Maske_: the same

infrequency of stress-syllable openings, and of anapaestic substitutions

and of suppressed syllables in metrical scheme. In respect of the more

evident device of the run-on line _The Woman-Hater_ reaches a percentage

twice as high as that employed in Fletcher's unassisted popular dramas;

and in respect of the double ending it has a percentage only one-quarter

as high. We notice also in this play a much more frequent employment of

rhyme than in any of Fletcher's stage plays, and a much larger

proportion of prose both for dialogue and soliloquy.

We should have further basis for conclusion concerning Beaumont's

metrical style in independent composition, if we could accept the

general assumption that he was the author of the _Induction_ to the

_Foure Playes in One_, and of the first two plays, _The Triumph of

Honour_ and _The Triumph of Love_. But for reasons, later to be stated,

I agree with Oliphant that the _Induction_ and _Honour_ are not by

Beaumont; and I hold that he can not be traced with certainty even in

the two or three scenes of _Love_ that seem to be marked by some of his

characteristics. The hand of a third writer, Field, is manifest in the

non-Fletcherian plays of the series.

But though we can not draw for our purpose upon other plays as his

unassisted work, we may derive help from the consideration of two at

least of Beaumont's poems,--poems that have something of a dramatic

flavour. Though they are in rhyming couplets, they display many of the

characteristics of the author's blank verse. In the _Letter to Ben

Jonson_, which is conversational, I count of run-on lines, thirty-eight

in eighty, almost fifty per cent, as compared with Fletcher's sometimes

ten or twenty per cent, in spite of the superior elasticity of blank

verse; and of stress-syllable openings in the same letter twenty-four

per cent as compared with the thirty-five per cent of Fletcher's more

highly cadenced rhythm in the _Shepheardesse_. In Beaumont's _Elegy on

the Countess of Rutland_, the last forty-four lines afford a fine

example of dramatic fervour--the indictment of the physicians. Here the

run-on lines again abound, almost fifty per cent; while the

stress-syllable openings are but sixteen 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 ending (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 characteristics as his

blank verse.[152]

2. In Certain Joint-Plays.

If we turn now to a second class of material available,--the three plays

indubitably produced in partnership,--and eliminate the portions written

in the metrical style of Fletcher, as already ascertained, we may safely

attribute the remainder to the junior member 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

Tragedy_ and _A King and No King_. A passage, which in the opinion of

nearly all critics[153] 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 Philas|ter

Be deeper in request, my ding [a] dongs,

My paires of deere Indentures, | Kings of Clubs,

[+!] Than | your cold wa|ter-cham|blets | or | your paint|ings

[+!] Spit|ted with cop|per, | Let | not your has|ty

Silkes, 10

[+!] Or | your branch'd cloth | of bod|kin, | or | your ti|shues,--

[+!] Deare|ly belov'd | of spi|ced cake | and cus|tards,--

Your Rob|in-hoods, |[+!] Scar|lets and Johns, |[+!] tye |

your affec|tions

In darknesse to your Shops. No, dainty duc|kers,

[+!] Up | with your three|-piled spi|rits, | your | wrought

va|lors. 15

And let | your un|cut col|lers | make | the King feele

The measure of your mightinesse, Philas|ter![154]

Note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the stress-syllable

openings, the anapaests, the feminine caesurae (dotted), the two omissions

of the light syllable after the caesural pause and the following accent

at the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of line 13.

Of the non-Fletcherian part of _Philaster_, a typical example is the

following from Act I, Scene 2, where Philaster replies to Arethusa's

request that he look away from her:

I can indure it: Turne away my face?

I never yet saw enemy that lookt

So dreadfully but that I thought my selfe

As great a Basiliske as he; or spake

So horrible but that I thought my tongue

Bore thunder underneath, as much as his,

Nor beast that I could turne from: shall I then

Beginne to feare sweete sounds? a ladies voyce,

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 regularity 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 passages, whereas the percentage in

Fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. The prevalence of run-on lines

is also noteworthy; and the infrequency of the stress-syllable openings,

anapaests, and feminine caesurae by which Fletcher achieves now

conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt.

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 causelessly 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, improper run-on lines, such

as III, 2, 135 (one of his collaborator's scenes):

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, almost twenty-seven.

Fletcher's double endings are over forty per cent; his collaborator's

barely ten.

In _A 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[155] one

notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings, 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 1, 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 instance, 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,

That was | a fair | one: | I have child|ishly

[+!] Plaid | with my hope | so long, till I have broke | it,

And now too late I mourn for 't, | O | Spaco|nia,

Thou hast found | an e|ven way | to thy | revenge | now!

[+!] Why | didst thou fol|low me, |[+!] like | a faint shad|ow,

To wither my desires? But, wretched fool,

[+!] Why | did I plant | thee | 'twixt | the sun | and me,

To make | me freeze | thus? | Why | did I | prefer | her

[+!] To | the fair Prin|cess? | O | thou fool, | thou fool,

Thou family of fools, |[+!] live | like a slave | still

And in | thee bear | thine own |[+!] hell | and thy tor|ment,--

where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped lines, already

emphasized in preceding examples, we observe in the run of thirteen

lines, six stress-syllable openings with their anapaestic sequences,

three omissions of the light syllable after the caesural pause with the

consequent accent at the beginning of the verse-section, and no fewer

than six feminine caesurae (or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of

which three at least (vv. 2, 5, 10) are exaggerated jolts.

Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for instance, Arbaces'

speech beginning Act I, 1, 105, of lines rippling with as many feminine

caesurae. But, utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen

of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only two stress-syllable

openings, only four anapaests, one omitted thesis after the caesural

pause, four end-stopped lines. He is more frequently capable, as in the

passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a single feminine

caesura, but with several feminine (or double) endings:

_Tigranes._ 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.

_Arbaces._ 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 land?

Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of ground

Within | his whole | realme | that | I have | not past

Fighting and conquering?[156]

Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the caesurae

are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly 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 Oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty,

and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical characteristics of

those parts of _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_ and _A King and No

King_ 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 Woman-Hater_, which is originally, and in

general, the work of one author--Beaumont; and since they are also of a

piece with the versification of the _Maske_, which is certainly by

Beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems,--at least one criterion

has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other

plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite

evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis

for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors.

Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the

fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant

quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of

the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later

development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer

all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful

collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the

contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise

marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the

rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV,