BEAUMONT'S DICTION
From a consideration of Beaumont's work in his poems, in his _Maske_ and
_Woman-Hater_, and such portions of the three unquestioned
Beaumont-Fletcher plays as are marked by his idiosyncrasies of
versification, we may arrive at conclusions concerning his diction,
rhetorical and poetic.
1. Rhetorical Peculiarities in General.
Beaumont's frequent use in prose of the enclitics 'do' and 'did' has
been observed by students of his style. The same peculiarity marks his
verse, and occasionally enables the reader to determine the authorship
of passages where the metrical tests are inconclusive. His rhetoric is
sometimes of the repetitive order, but, as Oliphant has indicated,
rather for ends of word-play and irony than for mere expansion as with
Fletcher. Such, for instance, is the ironical repetition of a speaker's
words by his interlocutor. I note also a tendency to purely dramatic
quotation, not common in Fletcher's writing,--_e. g._, in _The
Woman-Hater_: "Lisping cry 'Good Sir!' and he's thine own"; or "Every
one that does not know, cries 'What nobleman is that?'"--and in _A King
and No King_ "That hand was never wont to draw a sword, But it cried
'Dead' to something." This test alone, if we had not others of rhetoric
and metre, would go far to deciding the respective contributions of our
authors to the personality of Captain Bessus in the latter play. The
Bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly Beaumont's, is resonant with
such cries and conversational citations; the Bessus of the last two, in
a role almost as extensive, uses the device but once. Beaumont sometimes
indulges in enumerative sentences; but the enumerations are generally in
prose and (it will be recalled that he was a member of the Inner Temple)
of a mock-legal character, not mere redundancies of detail such as we
find in Fletcher. Among other peculiarities of expression is his
frequent employment of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection.
2. Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures.
Beaumont is especially fond of the following words and phrasal
variations:--The 'basilisk' with his 'deaddoing eye,' 'venom,' 'infect,'
'infection' and 'infectious,' 'corrupt,' 'leprosy,' 'vild,' 'crosses'
(for 'misfortunes'), 'crossed' and 'crossly matched,' 'perplex,'
'distracted,' 'starts' (for 'surprises' and 'fitful changes'),
'miseries,' 'griefs,' 'garlands,' 'cut,' 'shoot,' 'dissemble,'
'loathed,' 'salve' (as noun and verb), 'acquaint' and 'acquaintance,' to
'article,' 'pull,' 'piece,' 'frail' and 'frailty,' 'mortal' and
'mortality,' 'fate' and 'destiny,' to 'blot' from earth or memory,
'after-ages,' 'instruments' (for 'servants'). Of his repeated use of
'hills,' 'caves,' 'mines,' 'seas,' 'thunder,' 'beast,' 'bull,' we shall
have further exemplification when we consider his figures of speech.
He is forever playing phrasal variations upon the words 'piece,' and
'little.' The former is a mannerism of the day, already availed of by
Shakespeare in _Lear_, 'O ruined piece of nature,' and frequently in
_Antony and Cleopatra_, and later repeated in the _Tempest_ and
_Winter's Tale_. So with Beaumont, Arethusa is a 'poor piece of earth';
'every maid in love will have a piece' of Philaster; Oriana is a
'precious piece of sly damnation,' 'that pleasing piece of frailty we
call woman.' Or the word is used literally for 'limb':--'I'll love those
pieces you have cut away.'--Beaumont, I may say in passing, delights in
cutting bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the
land.'--'Little' he affects, making it pathetic and even more diminutive
in conjunction with 'that': Euphrasia would 'keep that little piece I
hold of life.' 'It is my fate,' proclaims Amintor,
To bear and bow beneath a thousand griefs
To keep that little credit with the world;
and so, 'that little passion,' 'that little training,' 'these little
wounds,' _ad libitum_. Somewhat akin is the poet's use of 'kind': 'a
kind of love in her to me'; 'a kind of healthful joy.' His heroines good
and bad are given to introspection: they have 'acquaintance' with
themselves. 'After you were gone,' says Bellario, 'I grew acquainted
with my heart'; and Bacha in _Cupid's Revenge_ in a scene undoubtedly of
Beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'become another woman; one,
methinks, with whom I want acquaintance.'
While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his figures of poetry, or
tropes, are generally of the more creative kind,--metaphor,
personification, metonymy,--and these are very often heightened into
that figure of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His comparisons deal
in a striking degree with elemental phenomena: hills, caves, stones,
rocks, seas, winds, flames, thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are
reminiscential of country life. In each play some hero declaims of 'the
only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason'; and inevitably
enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined' of beasts, and illustrates by
custom and passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull--especially bull. When
the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull of Phalaris charges
in. But Beaumont prefers nature: his images are sweet with April and
violets and dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn 'moved
with a stiff gale'--their heads bowing 'all one way.' From the
manufacture of books he borrows two metaphors, 'printing' and
'blotting,' and plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints'
wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her 'thoughts in lawn'; Amintor
will 'print a thousand wounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged
Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks And make no man
worthy for her to take.' With similar frequency recur 'blotted from
earth,' 'blotted from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'
The younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently as Fletcher, but
in a more poetic way. He vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with
figurative verbs--'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'I feel a grief shoot suddenly
through all my veins' cries Amintor; and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt
into me.' 'I feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders Arbaces.
Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it springs'; Amintor welcomes
the hand that should 'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses
that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can cut from man's
remembrance.' Similar metaphorical constructions abound, such as 'pluck
me back from my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus' speeches in
Beaumont's part of _Cupid's Revenge_; and in a speech of Melantius 'I
did a deed that plucked five years from time' in _The Maides Tragedy_.
Personified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural with
Beaumont:--'Nothing but a multitude of walking griefs.' It is a mistake
to suppose, as some do, that passages written in Beaumont's metrical
style are not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger, black
Despair, Pride, Wantonness, figure in his verse in _The Woman-Hater_;
Chance, Death, and Fortune in _The Knight_; Death, Victory, and
Friendship, in _The Maides Tragedy_; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality,
Nature in _Philaster_; and so on.
No dramatist since the day of Kyd and Marlowe has more frequent or
violent resort to hyperbole. His heroes call on 'seas to quench the
fires' they 'feel,' and 'snows to quench their rising flames'; they will
'drink off seas' and 'yet have unquenched fires left' in their breasts;
they 'wade through seas of sins'; they 'set hills on hills' and 'scale
them all, and from the utmost top fall' on the necks of foes, 'like
thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the underworld the
worth' of those they love. 'From his iron den' they'll 'waken Death, and
hurl him' on lascivious kings. Arethusa's heart is 'mines of adamant to
all the world beside,' but to her lover 'a lasting mine of joy'; her
breath 'sweet as Arabian winds when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two
liquid ivory balls.' Evadne will sooner 'find out the beds of snakes,'
and 'with her youthful blood warm their cold flesh 'than accede to
Amintor's desires. 'The least word' that Panthea speaks 'is worth a
life.' 'The child, this present hour brought forth to see the world, has
not a soul more pure' than Oriana's. In one of Beaumont's verse-scenes
of _The Coxcombe_, Ricardo, reinstated in his Viola's esteem, would have
some woman 'take an everlasting pen' into her hand, 'and grave in paper
more lasting than the marble monuments' the matchless virtues of women
to posterities. And as for Bellario's worth to Philaster,--
'T is not the treasure of all Kings in one,
The wealth of Tagus, nor the rocks of pearl
That pave the court of Neptune, can weigh down
That virtue.
Echoes not of Kyd and Marlowe only, but of Shakespeare from _Romeo_ to
_Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of
Beaumont.
Beaumont has more ejaculations than Fletcher, but fewer optatives. He is
chary of rhetorical questions, and his exclamations run by preference
into some figured hyperbole. He appeals less frequently than Fletcher
to 'all the gods,' but very often to 'the gods,' 'good gods,' 'ye gods,'
'some god.' He refers, in conformity with his deterministic view of
life, with particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers that
must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better powers,' 'Heaven and the
powers divine,' 'you heavenly powers,' the 'powers that rule us'; and
all these he uses in attestation. An oath distinctive of him is 'By my
vexed soul!' In his hyperboles, Hell and devils play their part; but not
in oath so frequently as with Fletcher.
3. Lines of Inevitable Poetry.
Similarly noticeable is Beaumont's faculty for 'simple poetic phrasing.'
The elevated passion, the sudden glory,--and the large utterance of
brief sentence and single verse, have been remarked by critics from his
contemporary, John Earle, who wrote in commendation:
Such strength, such sweetness couched in every line,
Such life of fancy, such high choice of brain,
down to G. C. Macaulay, Herford, and Alden of the present day. No
reader, even the most cursory, can fail to be impressed by the
completeness of that one line (in his lament for Elizabeth Sidney),
Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse,--
by the 'unassuming beauty' of Viola's loneliness (in his subplot of _The
Coxcombe_),
All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower
Droops now as well as I;--
by the sublimity of those few words to the repentant lover,
All the forgiveness I can make you is to love you;--
by the superb simplicity of Bellario's scorn of life, in _Philaster_,
'T is but a piece of childhood thrown away,
and the finality of her definition of death (which, as if in premonition
of his too sudden fate, is characteristic of Beaumont),--
'T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep;
A quiet resting from all jealousy,
A thing we all pursue; I know, besides,
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost;--
by the pathetic irony of Aspatia's farewell to love in _The Maides
Tragedy_,
So with my prayers I leave you, and must try
Some yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die;
and the heroism (in _Cupid's Revenge_, the final scene, undoubtedly of
Beaumont's verse) of Urania's confession to Leucippus,
I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught;
by Panthea's cry of horror, in _A King and No King_,
I feel a sin growing upon my blood;
and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify the gloom of
_The Maides Tragedy_: Amintor's
Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms;
and after Evadne's death,
My soul grows weary of her house, and I
All over am a trouble to myself;--
by the wounded Aspatia's
I shall sure live, Amintor, I am well;
A kind of healthful joy wanders within me;
and her parting whisper,
Give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down,
And cannot find thee.
This is Nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned poetry of the human
heartbreak. Where other than in Shakespeare do we find among the
Jacobean poets such verse?
That a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm is not surprising.
Instances rare in wisdom and phrasal conciseness are to be encountered
on every other page of Beaumont.
It may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical and poetic
diction, that, while the vocabulary may not be more varied, it is more
intimate, musical, and reverberant than Fletcher's; that the periods,
though sometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically broken,
as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical and descriptive
passages, both complex and balanced of structure,--pregnant of ideas
labouring for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo
Shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution, crowding of
illustration and fresh insistent thought, in a degree utterly foreign to
the rhetoric of Fletcher; and that his brief sentences are marked by a
direct and final resplendence and simplicity.
In the larger movements of composition the purely poetic quality
predominates over the narrative, dramatic or conversational. This
characteristic is especially noticeable in declamatory speeches and
soliloquies; sometimes idyllic as in Philaster's description of
Bellario,--"I found him sitting by a fountain's side,"--or in the
well-known "Oh that I had been nourished in these woods with milk of
goats and acorns"; often operatic, as in Aspatia's farewells to Amintor
and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively surcharged. Beaumont's
figures of rhetoric when not hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his
poetic tropes are creative, vitalizing. His speakers are
self-revelatory: expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection. Their
utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely loitering, rather
than, by way of dialogue, framed to further the action alone. And yet,
when they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary, and
abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation; not simply, as with
Fletcher, by giving opportunity for stage-business, but by differencing
the motive that underlies the action.