"THE WOMAN-HATER," AND "THE KNIGHT"
Four.--_The Woman-Hater_ was entered in the Stationers' Registers, May
20, 1607, and published in quarto (twice, with but slight variation) the
same year "as lately acted by the Children of Paules." Of the date of
composition, probably the spring of 1607, I have written in Chapter VI,
above. There is no indication of authorship in either quarto; but the
Prologue assigns it to a single author--"he that made this play." The
quarto of 1648 prints it as "by J. Fletcher Gent."; that of 1649, as by
Beaumont and Fletcher. The Prologue of 1649, however, written by
D'Avenant for an undated revival of the play and addressed to the
Ladies, definitely ascribes the authorship to one "poet," who "to the
stars your sex did raise; for which, full twenty years he wore the
bays." The "twenty years" can apply only to Fletcher.
In the lines which follow, D'Avenant has been supposed to credit the
same author with the whole of _The Maides Tragedy_, _Philaster_, and _A
King and No King_ as well:
'T was he reduc'd Evadne from her scorn,
And taught the sad Aspatia how to mourn;
Gave Arethusa's love a glad relief;
And made Panthea elegant in grief.
We now know, from the application of metrical and rhetorical tests, that
but a small part of each of the plays here alluded to was written by
Fletcher. If D'Avenant has attributed to Fletcher in these cases plays
of which the larger part was written by Beaumont, he was but consistent
in error when he ascribed to Fletcher _The Woman-Hater_, in which there
is very little that betrays resemblance to Fletcher's style. If, on the
other hand, D'Avenant in the verses quoted above intended to attribute
to Fletcher merely individual scenes of _The Maides Tragedy_, etc., he
must have had a knowledge of the respective authorship of the dramatists
hardly to be reconciled with the palpable mistake of assigning _The
Woman-Hater_ to Fletcher. For, by an odd coincidence, he has indicated
in the first and second verses two[186] of the five scenes of _The
Maides Tragedy_, and in the third, two[187] of the five scenes of
_Philaster_ which our modern criticism has proved to be Fletcher's. The
reference in the fourth line is more vague; but it has the merit of
indicating the only scene of _A King and No King_[188] in which,
according to our critical tests, Fletcher has contributed to the
characterization of Panthea. With regard to _The Woman-Hater_, it would
appear that D'Avenant was carelessly following the mistaken ascription
of authorship on the title-page of the quarto of 1648.
Fleay, Boyle, Macaulay, and Ward, with but slight hesitation, pronounce
_The Woman-Hater_ to be an independent production of Beaumont, written
while he was under the influence of Ben Jonson; but as I shall
presently show, Fletcher has revised a few scenes. Oliphant feels
inclined to join the critics mentioned above, but cannot blind himself
"to the presence of Fletcher in a couple of scenes." One of these is
III, 1.[189] In the quartos this scene is divided into two. By the _ye_
test the first half-scene, running to _Enter Duke, Etc._, in which
Oriana tempts Gondarino, would be Fletcher's (15 _ye's_ to 9 _you's_);
but the percentage of double endings is too low, and that of run-on
lines too high for him. I think that he is revising Beaumont's original
sketch. The second half-scene and the rest of the act are, by the _ye_
test and all other criteria, Beaumont's. The metrical style of the act
as a whole is Beaumont's; so also the enclitic 'do's' and 'did's,' the
Beaumontesque 'basilisk,' 'dissemble,' the mock-heroic prayers, and
mock-legal nicety of enumeration, the racy ironic prose, and the
burlesque Shakespearian echoes--"That pleasing piece of frailty that we
call woman," etc. The other passage doubtfully assigned to Fletcher, by
Oliphant--forty lines following _Enter Ladies_ in V, 5 (Dyce)--more
closely resembles his manner of verse, but is not markedly of his
rhetorical stamp. But by the _ye_ test (24 _ye's_ to 39 _you's_) the
whole of that scene, opening _Enter Arigo and Oriana_ is Fletcher's, or
Fletcher's revision of Beaumont. So, also, by the _ye_ test is another
scene not before ascribed to Fletcher, IV, 2 (27 _ye's_ to 25 _you's_),
as far as _Enter Oriana and her Waiting-woman_. In this and the other
_ye_ scenes, the _ye_ frequently occurs in the objective,--which is
absolute Fletcher. The rest of this scene, constituting two in the
quartos, is pure Beaumont.--The play is, so far as we can determine,
Beaumont's earliest attempt at dramatic production. Fletcher touched it
up, and his revision shows in the scenes mentioned above; that is to
say, in about sixteen out of the seventy pages as printed in the
_Cambridge English Classics_.
The manifestly exaggerated torments of Gondarino "who will be a scourge
to all females in his life," the amorous affectation of Oriana, the
"stratagems and ambuscadoes" of the hungry courtier in his pursuit of
"the chaste virgin-head" of a fish, the zealous stupidity of the
intelligencers are, as we have already noted, of the humours school; and
the work is that of a beginner. But the "humours" are flavoured with
Beaumont's humanity; the mirth is his, genuine and rollicking. The
satire is concrete; and the play as a whole, a promising precursor of
the purple-flowered prickly pear, next to be considered,--also
undoubtedly Beaumont's.
5.--Evidence, both external and internal, points to the production of
_The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ between July 10, 1607 and some time
in March 1608. Since the first quarto (1613) is anonymous, our earliest
indication of authorship is that of the title-pages of the second and
third (1635), which ascribe the play to Beaumont and Fletcher; and our
next, the Cockpit list of 1639 where it is included in a sequence of
five plays in which one or both had a hand.
The dedication of the first quarto speaks in one place of the "parents"
of the play, and in others of its "father"; and the address prefixed to
the second quarto speaks of the "author." Critics when relying upon
verse-tests think that they trace the hand of Fletcher in several
scenes.[190] But in those scenes, even when the double-endings might
indicate Fletcher, the frequency of rhymes, masculine and feminine, is
altogether above his usage; the number of end-stopped lines is
ordinarily below it; and the diction, save in one or two brief
passages,[191] is his neither in vocabulary nor rhetorical device. The
verse is singularly free from alliteration; and the prose, in which over
a third of the play is written, displays that characteristic of Fletcher
in only one speech,[192] and, there, with ludicrous intent. Though, on
the other hand, the verse is in many respects different from that which
Beaumont employed in his more stereotyped drama, it displays in several
passages his acknowledged peculiarity in conjunction with a diction and
manner of thought undoubtedly his. The prose is generally of a piece
with that of his other comic writing, as in _The Woman-Hater_ more
especially; and the scenes of low life and the conversation are coloured
by his rhetoric as we know them in _Philaster_, _A King and No King_,
and _The Coxcombe_. Of the portrayal of humours, mock-heroic and
burlesque, the same statements hold true. The verse of Jasper's
soliloquy:[193]
Now, Fortune, if thou beest not onely ill,
Shew me thy better face, and bring about
My desperate wheele, that I may clime at length
And stand,--
is in the usual manner of Beaumont. Luce's lament, beginning:[194]
Thou that art
The end of all, and the sweete rest of all
Come, come, o, Death! bring me to thy peace,
And blot out all the memory I nourish
Both of my father and my cruell friend,--
and ending:
How happy had I bene, if, being borne,
My grave had bene my cradle!
has both the diction and the point of view of Beaumont; and its verse
has not more of the double-endings than he sometimes uses. The subject
and the mock-heroic purpose do not call for his usual dramatic
vocabulary: but we recognize his 'dissemble,' his 'carduus' and
'phlebotomy' (compare _Philaster_), his 'eyes shoot me through,' his
'do's.' We recognize him in the frequent appeals to Chance and Fortune,
in the sensational determination of Jasper to test Luce's devotion at
the point of the sword, and in the series of sensational complications
and denouements which conclude the romantic plot. In short, I agree with
the critics[195] who attribute the play, wholly or chiefly, to Beaumont.
Fletcher may have inserted a few verses here and there; but there is
nothing in sentiment, phrase, or artifice, to prove that he did.
The diversity of metrical forms is but an evidence of the ingenuity of
Beaumont. He has used blank verse with frequent double-endings to
distinguish the romantic characters and plot: as in the scenes between
Venturewell and Jasper, Jasper and Luce. He has used the heroic couplet
with rhymes, single and double, to distinguish the mock-romantic of
Venturewell and Humphrey, Humphrey and Luce. For the mock-heroic of
Ralph he has used the swelling ten-syllabled blank verse of Marlowe and
Kyd, or the prose of _Amadis_ and _Palmerin_; for his burlesque of the
Maylord he has used the senarii of the antiquated interlude. For the
conversation of the Merrythoughts and of the citizen-critics he has used
plain prose; and for the tuneful ecstasies of Merrythought senior, a
sheaf of ballads. This consideration alone,--that the metrical and prose
forms are chosen with a view to the various purposes of the
play,--should convince the reader of the vanity of assigning to Fletcher
verse which evidently had its origin not in any of his proclivities, but
in the temper of Beaumont's Venturewell, Jasper, and Luce.
_The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ was written and first acted between
June 29, 1607 and April 1, 1608. The upper limit is fixed, as Boyle has
indicated,[196] by the mention, in Act IV, 1, 46, of an incident in _The
Travails of Three English Brothers_, "let the Sophy of Persia come and
christen him a childe," concerning which the 'Boy' remarks, I, 48-50,
"that will not do so well; 'tis stale; it has been had before at the Red
Bull." The Red Bull, Clerkenwell, had been occupied by Queen Anne's Men
(whose plays Beaumont is especially ridiculing), since 1604.[197] _The
Travails_ was written hurriedly by Day, Rowley, and Wilkins after the
appearance, June 8, 1607, of a tract by Nixon, on the adventures of the
three Shirleys, and was performed June 29, by the Queen's Men.[198] _The
Travails_ dealt with a matter of ephemeral interest, and would not long
have held the public. It is, therefore, likely that the allusion to it
in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ was written shortly after June 29.
Since the play, according to its first publisher, took eight days to
write, we cannot assign any date earlier than, say, July 10, 1607, for
its first performance. The lower limit is determined by the certainty
that _The Knight_ was played by the Queen's Revels' Children at
Blackfriars; and that they ceased to act there as an independent company
some time in March 1608. The play belonged in 1639 to Beeston's Boys,
who had it with four others of Beaumont and Fletcher from Queen
Henrietta's Men. None of these five plays had ever been played by the
King's Company; it is likely that they had come to the Queen Henrietta's
from the Lady Elizabeth's Men with whom the Queen's Revels' Children had
been amalgamated in 1613.[199] One of these plays, _Cupid's Revenge_,
had certainly come down from the Queen's Revels' Boys in that way.
That the original performance was by a company of children appears from
numerous passages in the text; and the only other children's company
available for consideration between 1603 and 1611, when the manuscript
fell into the publisher's hands, is that of the Paul's Boys. That the
Paul's Boys were not the company performing is shown, however, by a
passage in the _Induction_, where the citizen-critic, interrupting the
Prologue of the "good-man boy," says: "This seven yeares [that] there
hath beene playes at this house, I have observed it, you have still
girds at citizens." Now, at no date between the summer of 1608 and 1611
could it have been said of the Children of Paul's that they had been
acting seven years continuously at any one "house." The career of the
Paul's Boys as actors at their cathedral school had ended in the summer
of 1608, when Robert Keysar, Rossiter, and others interested in the
rival company of the Queen's Revels' Children had subsidized Edward
Pierce, the manager of the Paul's Boys, to cease plays at St.
Paul's.[200] If between that date and 1611 they acted, it was elsewhere,
at Whitefriars perhaps, and temporarily (not after 1609), and as the I
King's Revels' Children.[201] The citizen-critic, therefore, if speaking
after the summer of 1608, could not have referred to Paul's Boys. If
speaking of Paul's Boys between 1603 and 1608, the only "house" that he
can have had in mind would be their school of St. Paul's Cathedral; and
to say that there had been plays there for _seven_ years would have been
utterly pointless, for the Paul's Boys had been acting in their school,
or in its courtyard, for twenty, one might say fifty years, more or less
continuously. Fleay conjectures wildly that they had occupied
Whitefriars between 1604 and 1607, but that does not explain the "seven
yeares at this house"; to say nothing of the fact that such occupancy is
unproved. An old Whitefriars inn-yard playhouse had been "pulled down"
in 1582-3. No other Whitefriars Theatre existed till 1607, when a new
Whitefriars "was occupied by six equal sharers with original title from
Lord Buckhurst."[202]
The company was not that of St. Paul's; and the "house" was not a
school-house, but a regularly constituted theatre. Now, the only
theatre, public or private, that, at any rate between 1603 and 1611, had
been occupied by a boys' company for "this seven yeares" was
Blackfriars; and of Blackfriars the statement could be made only at a
date preceding January 4, 1610, and with reference to the Queen's
Revels' Children. On that date, as reorganized under Rossiter, Keysar,
and others, they received a Patent authorizing them to open at
Whitefriars, "or in any other convenient place." For about a month
before, they had filled an engagement at Blackfriars, the lease of which
had reverted on August 9, 1608 to Burbadge and Shakespeare's company of
the King's Players. They had ceased playing at Blackfriars as an
independent company in March 1608; the theatre had been tenantless
after that for six months and then had been closed until December 7,
1609, because of the prevalence of the plague. The Citizen's complaint
that the boys have been girding at citizens "this seven yeares there
hath been playes at this house" would lose all cogency if spoken of the
Queen's Revels' Children when they were acting during the month
following December 7, 1609, both because plays had been then intermitted
for the twenty months preceding, and because in 1609 it was not seven
but twelve years since the boys had begun their occupancy of "this
house." It could not apply to the seven years between 1597, when they
first occupied Blackfriars, and 1604, because _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_ was not written till after the _Travails of Three English
Brothers_ appeared, June 29, 1607. But it does apply, with all requisite
dramatic and chronological accuracy, to the seven years preceding the
last date,--or the date in March 1608, when, because of their scandalous
representation of the King of France and his mistress in Chapman's
_Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron_, and because of plays caricaturing
and vilifying King James, the Queen's Revels' Children were prohibited
from playing, their principal actors thrown into prison, and Blackfriars
suppressed. On September 29, 1600, Richard Burbadge had let Blackfriars
on a twenty-one-year lease to Henry Evans, the manager of the Queen's
Revels' Children, and under the organization of that date they had by
1607-1608 been giving plays exactly "this seven yeares at this house."
We are, as I have said, informed by the publisher of _The Knight_ that
the play was written in eight days. It might have been staged in two or
three. If the plague regulations were enforced during 1607-8, as I have
no doubt they were, _The Knight_ was acted between July 10 and 23, 1607,
or between December 26, 1607 and the Biron day in March 1608.
The internal evidence is all confirmatory of this period of composition.
The Queen Anne's Men of the "Red Bull" mentioned in the play obtained
their title to the Red Bull from Aaron Holland about 1604. The songs in
the play were common property between 1604 and 1607; none of the
romances ridiculed is of a later date than 1607; and of the eight plays
mentioned or alluded to, all had been acted before June 1607 but _The
Travails_; and that was played for the first time June 29 of that year.
The allusions to external history such as that in Act IV, ii, 4, to the
Prince of Moldavia--who left London in November 1607--and the humorous
jibe at the pretty Paul's Boys of Mr. Mulcaster, who ceased teaching
them in 1608, are all for 1607-8.[203] Fleay marshals an applausive
gallery of conjectures for his conjecture of 1610, but none of them
appears to me to have any substance; and in view of what has been said,
and of what will follow, I may dispense with their consideration.
The history of the manuscript is, as has not been noted before, also
confirmatory of the 1607-8 date. The Robert Keysar who rescued the play
from "perpetuall oblivion" after its failure upon the stage (as Burre
says in the dedication of the first quarto) and who "afterwards" (in
1610-11) turned it over, "yet an infant" (_i. e._ unpublished) and
"somewhat ragged," to Burre for publication, is the same "Mr. Keysar"
who in February 1606, with "Mr. Kendall," also of the Blackfriars'
management, had been paid for "Apparrell" furnished for a performance
given by the Children of Westminster School.[204] He at no period had
any connection with the Paul's Boys. He was, as Professor Wallace
informs us, a London goldsmith who "about this time (1606-7) acquired an
interest in the shifting fortunes of Blackfriars, and became the
financial backer of the Queen's Revels' Children. He had cause to
dislike King James for oppression in wresting money from the
goldsmiths."[205] Hence probably the attacks of the Queen's Revels'
Children upon the King, which helped to bring about their suppression at
Blackfriars in 1608. Keysar would inevitably know all about the plays
performed by his Children, _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ among the
rest, during the last year of their occupancy of Blackfriars. And since,
according to Burre, he appreciated the merits of _The Knight_ it was but
natural that he, and not some person unconnected with the company,
should have preserved the manuscript,--perhaps with a view to having the
Children try the play again after they should re-open at Whitefriars.
With Rossiter, soon after March 1608, he was making preparations for
such a reorganization. When finally they did re-open at their new
theatre, in January 1610, they evidently did not take up the play.
Somewhat later, say 1611, Keysar sent the manuscript to Burre for
publication. Burre "fostred it privately in his bosome these two yeares"
and brought it out in 1613.
The conclusion of Burre's dedicatory address to Keysar in the first
quarto, of 1613, has unnecessarily complicated both the question of the
date of composition and that of the source of _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_. "Perhaps," says he, "it [_The Knight_] will be thought to bee
of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his
elder above a yeare; and therefore may (by vertue of his birth-right)
challenge the wall of him. I doubt not but they will meet in their
adventures, and I hope the breaking of one staffe will make them
friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travell through
the world to seeke their adventures." This denial of indebtedness to
Cervantes has been generally taken to refer to Shelton's English
translation of Don Quixote, entered S. R. January 19, 1611-12, and
printed 1612; and it has, therefore, been supposed by many that _The
Knight_ was written and first acted in 1610 or 1611. But if Burre was
dating _The Knight_ as of 1610 or 1611, he was ignorant of the fact, as
established above, that the play was the elder of Shelton's printed _Don
Quixote_, not merely "above a yeare," but above four years. There are
only two other constructions to be placed upon Burre's statement: either
that the play was the elder above a year of the first part of _Don
Quixote_, issued in the Spanish by Cervantes in 1605,[206] or that it
was the elder above a year of Shelton's translation as circulated among
his friends in manuscript, at any rate as early as 1609. If Burre was
dating the play, according to the former interpretation, as of 1604, he
was ignorant of the fact that it could not have been written till after
the appearance of _The Travails of Three English Brothers_, June 29,
1607. The latter interpretation would, if we could adopt it as his
understanding of the matter, not only comport with the date of the
production of _The Knight_ in 1607-8, but also, somewhat roughly, with
his own statement that he had had the manuscript already in a battered
condition in his "bosome" since 1610 or 1611.
If Burre, who was not a litterateur, did not know that Shelton's
translation of _Don Quixote_ had been going the rounds for years before
it was printed in 1612, everybody else did. Shelton had announced as
much in his _Epistle Dedicatorie_ to Theophilus, Lord Howard of Walden,
prefixed to the first quarto of 1612. He translated the book, as he
says, "some five or six yeares agoe"--that would be in 1607, for he used
the Brussels Reprint of that year as his text,--"out of the Spanish
Tongue into the English in the space of forty daies: being thereunto
more than half enforced through the importunitie of a very deere
friende, that was desirous to understand the subject. After I had given
him once a view thereof, I cast it aside, where it lay long time
neglected in a corner, and so little regarded by me as I never once set
hand to review or correct the same. Since when, at the entreatie of
others my friends, I was content to let it come to light, conditionally
that some one or other would peruse and amend the errours
escaped"--because he had not time to revise it himself. In other words,
Shelton had shown the manuscript translation of _Don Quixote_ to but one
friend in 1607; and it was not till "long time" had elapsed that he
began to circulate it among his other friends on condition that they
should correct its errors. The date of circulation was, probably, about
1609, for in that year we have our earliest mention of the reading of
_Don Quixote_ by an Englishman,--by a dramatic character, to be sure,
but a character created by Ben Jonson. In his _Epicoene_, acted in 1610,
and written the year preceding, that dramatist makes Truewit advise the
young Sir Dauphine to cease living in his chamber "a month together upon
_Amadis de Gaule_, or _Don Quixote_, as you are wont." There is no
ascription of Spanish to Dauphine, who is a typical London gallant. He
would read _Amadis_ in the French, or the English translation; and the
only translation of _Don Quixote_ accessible to him in 1609 would be
Shelton's manuscript of Part One.[207] Jonson may himself have been one
of the friends to whom Shelton submitted the translation. There is no
reason to believe that Jonson had read Cervantes in the original; for,
as Professor Rudolph Schevill has conclusively demonstrated,[208] his
knowledge of Spanish was extremely limited. "The Spanish phrases
pronounced by the improvised 'hidalgo' in the _Alchemist_ (of 1610)
prove nothing." They were caught, as Professor Schevill says, from the
London vogue or may have been supplied by some Spanish acquaintance.
Indeed, one may even doubt whether if he read Shelton's manuscript
Jonson did so with any care, for not only in _The Alchemist_ but
elsewhere he uniformly couples Don Quixote as if a character of
chivalric romance with Amadis, of whom and his congeners Don Quixote is
a burlesque.
As to Burre, however, I do not think that he had been informed by Keysar
of the exact provenience of the manuscript of _The Knight_, or of the
date of first acting. I incline to believe that he had the _Epistle
Dedicatorie_ of the newly printed Shelton before him when, in 1613, he
wrote his dedication of _The Knight_ to Robert Keysar; for he runs the
figure of the book as a "child" and of its "father" and "step-father"
through his screed as Shelton had run it in 1612; and he hits upon a
similar diction of "bosome" and "oblivion." But, though he may have been
gratuitously challenging the wall of Shelton's newly printed _Don
Quixote_ in favour of _The Knight_ as in existence by 1610 or 1611, the
only interpretation of his "elder above a yeare" that would fit the fact
is afforded by the composition of the play, as already demonstrated, in
1607-8, more than a year before Shelton began to circulate his
manuscript.
In spite of Burre's assertion of the priority of _The Knight of the
Burning Pestle_, nearly every editor or historian who has touched upon
_The Knight_ informs us that it is "undoubtedly derived from _Don
Quixote_." If (as I am sure was not the case) the play was written
after 1608, Beaumont, or Beaumont and Fletcher, could have derived
suggestions for it from Shelton's manuscript, first circulated in 1609.
That Beaumont, at any rate, was acquainted with the Spanish hero by
1610, appears from his familiarity with the _Epicoene_ in which as we
have observed, Don Quixote is mentioned; for he wrote commendatory
verses for the quarto of that play, entered S. R. September 20 of that
year. If, on the other hand, _The Knight_, as I hold, was written in
1607 or 1608, the author or authors, provided they read Spanish, could
have derived suggestions from Cervantes' original of 1605; or if they
did not read Spanish, from hearsay. The latter source of information
would be the more likely, for although sixteen of the ignorantly
so-called "Beaumont and Fletcher" plays have been traced to plots in
Spanish originals, there is not one of those plots which either of the
poets might not have derived from English or French translation; and in
none of the sixteen plays is there any evidence that either of the
dramatists had a reading knowledge of Spanish.[209] As to the
possibility of information by hearsay, other dramatists allude to _Don
Quixote_ as early as 1607-8;[210] and, indeed, it would be virtually
impossible that any literary Londoner could have escaped the oral
tradition of so popular and impressive a masterpiece two years after its
publication.
All this supposition of derivation from _Don Quixote_ is, however, so
far as verbal indebtedness goes, or indebtedness for _motifs_, episodes,
incidents and their sequence, characters, machinery, dramatic
construction, manners, sentiments, and methods of satire, a phantom
caught out of the clear sky. So far as the satire upon the contemporary
literature of chivalry is concerned, when the ridicule is not of English
stuff unknown to Cervantes it is of Spanish material translated into
English and already satirized by Englishmen before Cervantes wrote his
_Don Quixote_. An examination of _The Knight_ and of the _Don_ in any
version, and of contemporary English literature, reveals incontestibly
not only that the material satirized, the phrases and ideas, come from
works in English, but that even the method of the satire is derived from
that of preceding English dramatic burlesque rather than from that of
Cervantes.
The title of the play was suggested by _The Knight of the Burning
Sword_, an English translation, current long before 1607, of the Spanish
_Amadis of Greece, Prince and Knight of the Burning Sword_. Ten full
years before 1607 Falstaff had dubbed his red-nosed Bardolph "Knight of
the Burning Lamp." The farcical, but eminently sane, grocer's
apprentice, turned Knight for fun, grows out of Heywood's _Foure
Prentises_, and Day and Wilkins's _Travails_, and the English
_Palmerins_, etc. He has absolutely nothing in common with the glorious
but pathetically unbalanced _Don_ of Cervantes. Nor is there any
resemblance between Ralph's Palmerin-born Squire and Dwarf--and that
embodiment of commonsense, Sancho Panza.[211] The specific conception of
_The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, a satire upon the craze of London
tradesmen for romances of chivalry, for "bunches of Ballads and Songs,
all ancient," for the bombast and sensationalism of Kyd's _Spanish
Tragedy_, Marlowe's _True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York_, even of
Shakespeare's Hotspur, and of dramas of bourgeois knight-errantry,--a
burlesque of the civic domestic virtues and military prowess of
prentices and shop-keepers,--is much more applicable to the conditions
and aspirations of contemporary Bow-Bells and the affectations of the
contemporary stage than to those which begot and nourished the madness
of the Knight of La Mancha.
Beaumont may have received from the success of the _Don Quixote_ of 1605
some impulse provocative to the writing of _The Knight_, but a dramatic
satire, such as _The Knight_, might have occurred to him if _Don
Quixote_ had never been written; just as that other dramatic satire upon
the dramas of folk-lore romance, _The Old Wives Tale_, had occurred to
Peele some fifteen years before _Don Quixote_ appeared; and as it had
occurred to the author of _Thersites_ to ridicule, upon the stage, Greek
tales of heroism and British worthies of knighthood and the greenwood
still fifty-five years earlier. The puritan and the ritualist, the
country justice and the squire, the schoolmaster and the scribbling
pedant, the purveyor of marvels of forest and marsh, the
knight-adventurer of ancient lore or of modern creation, the damsel
distressed or enamoured of visionary castles, had, one and all, awakened
laughter upon the Tudor stage. The leisure wasted, and the emotion
misspent, over the _Morte d'Arthur_ and the histories of Huon of
Bordeaux, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamptoun, or of Robin Hood and Clim
of the Clough, had been deplored by many an anxious educator and
essayist of the day. Why was it not time and the fit occasion, in a
period when city grocers and their wives would tolerate no kind of play
but such as revamped the more modern tales of chivalry, or tricked
tradesmen out in the factitious glory of quite recent heroes of
romance,--why was it not time for an attack upon the vogue of Anthony
Munday's translations of the now offending cycles, _Amadis of Gaul_,
_Palmerin de Oliva_, _Palmerin of England_, and upon the vogue of the
English versions of _The Mirror of Knighthood_ with its culminating
bathos of the _Knight of the Sunne and His Brother Rosicleer_? These
had, in various instalments, befuddled the popular mind for thirty
years.
Ben Jonson already, in his _Every Man out of His Humour_ (1599), had
satirized the common affectation under the similitude of a country
knight, Puntarvolo, who, if not crazed, was at any rate "wholly
consecrated to singularity" by reason of undue absorption of romances of
chivalry, a singularity of "fashion, phrase, and gesture" of the Anthony
Munday type and the type glassed in the _Mirror of Knighthood_. Sir
Puntarvolo, who "sits a great horse" and "courts his own lady, as she
were a stranger never encountered before,"--who feigns that his own
house is a castle, who summons with trumpet-blast the waiting-woman to
the window, and, saluting her "after some little flexure of the knee,"
asks for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties" of the "lady"
may shine on this side of the building,--who "planet struck" by the
"heavenly pulchritude" of his long-suffering and much bewildered poor
old wife, conveys to her the information that he is a poor knight-errant
pursuing through the forest a hart "escaped by enchantment," and that,
wearied, he and his servant make "suit to enter" her fair abode,--Sir
Puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fantastic homage, what is he
but a predecessor of Don Quixote and Ralph alike, fashioned out of the
materials of decadent chivalric fiction common to both? In 1600, Robert
Anton had burlesqued in prose and rhyme the romantic ballads of the day
in his ludicrous _Heroical Adventures of the Knight of the Sea_, where
"the queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into
a knight-errant to do her business in the world."[212] And in 1605, also
before the appearance of Cervantes' burlesque, Chapman, with the
collaboration of Jonson and Marston, had, in _Eastward Hoe_, satirized
that other kind of knight, him of the city and by purchase, in the
character of Sir Petronel Flash; and, with him, the aspirations of
romance-fed merchants' daughters who would wed knights and dwell in
country-castles wrested from giants. Nor had these authors failed to
specify the sources of delusion, the _Mirror of Knighthood_, the
_Palmerin of England_, etc. That both Beaumont and Fletcher were alive,
without prompting from Cervantes, to the mania of chivalric emulation
which obsessed the train-bands of London is attested by the bombastic
talk of "Rosicleer" which Fletcher puts into the mouth of the city
captain in _Philaster_, a play that was written about two years later
than _The Knight_, in 1609 or 1610. There had been musters of the City
companies at Mile End as early as 1532, and again under Elizabeth in
1559, and 1585, and 1599, when as many as 30,000 citizens were trained
there. But the muster in which Ralph had been chosen "citty captaine"
was evidently that of 1605, a general muster under James I.
Why, then, should we suppose that it was beyond the genius of a Beaumont
to conceive, as Peele, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and others had
conceived, a drama which should burlesque the devotees of such romances
as were the fad of the day? And to conceive it without the remotest
suggestion from _Don Quixote_? Whether Beaumont read Spanish or not, and
there is no proof that he did read it; whether he had heard of _Don
Quixote_ or not, and there is little doubt that he had, there is nothing
in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ that in any way presupposes either
verbal acquaintance with, or constructive dependence upon, the burlesque
of Cervantes.[213] In short, Professor Schevill, in the article cited
above, and following him Dr. Murch, in an admirable introduction to his
edition of _The Knight_, have shown that Beaumont's conception of the
hero, Ralph, not only is not of a piece with, but is fundamentally
different from, Cervantes' conception of Don Quixote; and they have
demonstrated with a minuteness of chapter and verse that need not be
recapitulated here that the motives, machinery and characters, ideas and
phrases are, in so far as they have relation to romances of chivalry,
drawn out of, or suggested by, the English translations already
enumerated. This demonstration applies to the adoption of the squire,
the rescue of Mrs. Merrythought, the incident of the casket, the
liberation of the barber's patients, the mock-heroic love-affair, as
well as to the often adduced barber's basin and the scene of the inn. Of
the situations, there is none that is not a logical issue of the local
conditions or the presuppositions of an original plot; whereas there
are, on the other hand, numerous situations in _Don Quixote_, capable of
dramatic treatment, that the Elizabethan playwright of 1607-8 could
hardly have refrained from annexing if he had used that story as a
source. The setting or background of _The Knight_, as Professor Schevill
has said, in no way recalls that of the _Don_, "and it is difficult to
see how any inspiration got from Cervantes should have failed to include
at least a slight shadow of something which implies an acquaintance with
Rocinante and Sancho Panza." Beaumont, in addition, not only satirizes,
as I have said, the chivalric and bourgeois dramas of Heywood, _If You
Know Not Me, You Know Nobody_, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel like
_Mucedorus_ and the _Travails_, and parodies with rare humour the rant
of Senecan tragedy; he not only ridicules the military ardour and pomp
of the London citizens, and pokes fun at their unsophisticated
assumption of dramatic insight and critical instinct,--with all this
satire of the main plot and of the spectator-gods in the machinery, he
has combined a romantic plot of common life--Jasper, Luce, and
Humphrey,--and a comic plot of humours in which Jasper's father, mother,
and brother live as Merrythoughts should. He has produced a whole that
in drama was an innovation and in burlesque a triumph. _The Knight_ was
still an acting play in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.
During the past thirteen years it has been acted by academic amateurs
five times in America.
FOOTNOTES:
[186] IV, 1; and II, 2.
[187] V, 3, 4.
[188] IV, 1.
[189] Between _Oriana sits down_ and _exit Oriana_, as in Dyce, Vol.
I, pp. 43-48.
[190] I, 1; I, 2; II, 2; II, 3; III, 1; IV, 4.
[191] _E. g._, the "lets" and the "alls" of IV, 4, 36-40, as numbered
in Alden's edition. The play is devoid of Fletcherian jolts.
[192] V, 2, 63, _et seq._
[193] II, 2, 90.
[194] IV, 4, 5.
[195] Macaulay, Oliphant, Bullen, and Alden.
[196] _Engl. Studien_, IX.
[197] Wallace, _Shakspere's Money Interest in the Globe, Cent. Maga._,
Aug., 1910, p. 510.
[198] Fleay, _Chr. Eng. Dr._, II, 277.
[199] Fleay, _H. S._, p. 356.
[200] Wallace, _Shakspere and the Blackfriars, Century Maga._,
Sept., 1910, p. 751.
[201] Murray, _Eng. Dram. Comp._, I, 353, who cites Nichols,
_Progresses_, IV, 1074; but Whitefriars had been destined by Keysar
and others for the Queen's Revels' Children since 1608.
[202] Rawlidge, _A Monster lately found out_, etc., 1622, as quoted by
Fleay, _H. S._, 36; Wallace, _Cent. Maga._, Aug., 1910; and Thorndike,
_Infl. of B. and F._, p. 60.
[203] See the impressive array of evidence, internal and external,
presented by Thorndike, _Infl. of B. and F._, pp. 59-63; and by Alden,
_K. B. P._, pp. 166-169 (Belles Lettres Series).
[204] Accounts in _Athenaeum_, 2, 1903, 220.
[205] Wallace, _Cent. Maga._, _Sept._ 1910, p. 747. See also
Greenstreet Papers in Fleay, _H. St._, 249.
[206] For this argument see _Engl. Studien_, XII, 309.
[207] Baudouin's French version of 1608 is merely of the episodic
narrative of _The Curious Impertinent_.
[208] _On the Influence of Spanish Literature upon English_
(_Romanische Forschungen_, XX, 613-615, _et seq._).
[209] Of this I am assured by my colleague, Professor Rudolph
Schevill, who has made a special study of the plays and their sources,
and has published some of his conclusions in the article in
_Romanische Forschungen_, already cited; others, communicated by him
to Dr. H. S. Murch, appear in _Yale Studies in English_, XXXIII, _The
K. B. P._, Introduction. Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach's unpublished
conclusions, as cited by Miss Hatcher, _John Fletcher_, etc., 1905, p.
42, are to the same effect.
[210] Wilkins, _Miseries of Enforced Marriage_, III; Middleton, _Your
Five Gallants_, IV, 8; cited by Schevill, _ut supra_.
[211] See Schevill, _u. s._
[212] H. V. Routh, in _C. H. L._, IV, 410.
[213] The lines,
Who like Don Quixote do advance
Against a windmill our vaine lance,
occur in a copy of verses _To the Mutable Faire_ included among _The
Poems of Francis Beaumont_ in the edition of 1640. But the volume
includes numerous poems not written by Beaumont, and is one of the
most uncritical collections that ever was printed. This poem is by
Waller.