THE FIVE CENTRAL PLAYS
Six.--_The Coxcombe_ was first printed in the folio of 1647. Our
earliest record of its acting is of a performance at Court by the
Children of the Queen's Revels in 1612.[214] The day was between October
16 and 24. A list of the principal actors, all Queen's Children,
preserved in the folio of 1679, indicates, however, that this was not
the first performance; for three of the actors listed had left that
company by August 29, 1611; one of them (Joseph Taylor) perhaps before
March 30, 1610. The list was evidently contemporary with the first
performance. The absolute upper limit of the composition was 1604, for
one of the characters speaks of the taking of Ostend. If the play, as we
are dogmatically informed by a credulous sequence of critics who take
statements at second-hand, principally from German doctors' theses, were
derived from Cervantes' story, _El Curioso Impertinente_, which appeared
in the First Part of _Don Quixote_, printed 1605, or (since we have no
evidence that our dramatists read Spanish), from Baudouin's French
translation which was licensed April 26, 1608[215] and may have reached
England about June,--we might have a definite earlier limit of later
date. But there is no resemblance between the _motif_ of Cervantes'
story, in which a husband out of curiosity and an impudent desire to
heighten the treasure of his love would try his wife's fidelity, and
that of Beaumont and Fletcher's play, where there is no question of a
trial of honour. In Beaumont and Fletcher, we have a revelation of lust
at first sight on the part of the husband's friend, Mercury, of
unnatural friendly pandering on the part of that 'natural fool' the
husband, Antonio, and of easy acquiescence on the part of Maria, the
wife, in the cuckolding of her idiotic coxcomb, who with the wool pulled
over his eyes takes her back believing that she is innocent. In
Cervantes, the husband, sure of his wife and adoring her, urges his
friend to make trial of her honour; the friend, outraged at first by the
suggestion, refuses, but finally succumbs to passion and wins the wife,
likewise, at first, above suspicion; and all die tragically. There is no
resemblance in treatment, atmosphere, incidents, or dialogue. The only
community of conception is that of a husband playing with fire--risking
cuckoldom. But Cervantes' character of the husband is sentimentally
deluded; Beaumont and Fletcher's is a contemptible and willing wittol.
If Beaumont and Fletcher derived their plot from Cervantes, all that can
be said is that they have mutilated and vulgarized the original out of
all possibility of recognition.[216]
Other English dramatists dealing with the theme of _The Curious
Impertinent_ between 1611 and 1615 followed Cervantes more or less
closely in the main _motif_, in incident, and in dialogue: the author of
_The Second Maiden's Tragedy_, for instance, who made use of Baudouin's
translation; and Nathaniel Field, who used either Baudouin or Shelton's
publication of 1612 in his _Amends for Ladies_. But Beaumont and
Fletcher in their tale of a husband cuckolded and pommeled were drawing
upon another source, one of the many variants of _Le Mari coccu, battu
et content_, to be found in Boccaccio and before him in Old French
poems, and French and Italian _Nouvelles_. If they derived anything from
Cervantes, whose theme is lifted from the _Orlando Furioso_, it was
merely the suggestion for a fresh drama of cuckoldry. That their play
was regarded by others as thus inspired appears, I think, from a passage
in Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_, IV, vii, 40-41, where, after Kastril has
said to Surly, "You are a Pimpe, and a Trig, and an Amadis de Gaule, or
a Don Quixote," Drugger adds, "Or a Knight o' the curious cox-combe, Doe
you see?" Field and the rest, writing in or after 1611, had uniformly
referred to Cervantes' cuckold as the Curious Impertinent. Jonson wrote
his _Alchemist_ between July 12 and October 3, 1610, and up to that time
the cuckold had been dramatized as Coxcomb only by Beaumont and
Fletcher. The prefix 'Curious' indicates that in Jonson's mind his
friend's play is associated with Cervantes' novel; and the further
prefix of 'The Knight' looks very much like a reminiscence of "The
Knight of the Burning Pestle," which had been played some two years
before. This argument from contemporaneity of inspiration and allusion
inclines me to date the upper limit of _The Coxcombe_ about 1609, after
Baudouin's translation _Le Curieux Impertinent_ had reached England, and
Shelton's manuscript had been put in circulation.
If to this conjecture we could add a precise determination of the period
of Joseph Taylor's connection with the Queen's Revels' Children, we
should have a definite lower limit for the performance of _The Coxcombe_
in which he took part. But I find it impossible to decide whether Taylor
had been with the Queen's Revels up to about March 30, 1610, upon which
day his name appears among the Duke of York's Players who were recently
reorganized and had just obtained a new patent; or had been up to that
time with the predecessors of the Duke of York's (Prince Charles's)
Company, and had left them shortly after March 30 for the Queen's
Revels' Children. In favour of the former alternative are (1) that in
the list of the Queen's Revels' actors in _The Coxcombe_ he appears
second to Field only, as if a player of long standing with them and high
in the company's esteem at the time of the performance; (2) that he does
not appear among the actors in the list for _Epicoene_ which was
presented first by the Queen's Revels' Children between January 4 and
March 25, 1610: Field is still first, Barkstead, who had been eighth on
the _Coxcombe_ list, appears now second, as if promoted to Taylor's
place, and Giles Carey is third in both lists; (3) that in the March 30
patent to the Duke of York's Players his name ranks only fifth, as if
that of a recent acquisition. On this basis the lower limit would be
March 25, 1610. In favour of the latter alternative, viz., that Taylor
joined the Queen's Children from the Duke of York's, at a date later
than March 30, 1610, are the considerations: (1) that when the new
Princess Elizabeth's Company, formed April 11, 1611, gives a bond to
Henslowe on August 29 of that year, Taylor's name appears with two of
the Queen's Revels' Children of March 1610, as if all three had left the
Queen's Revels for the new company at the same time; and (2) that their
names appear close together after that of the principal organizer as if
not only actors of repute in the company which they had left but prime
movers in the new organization. On this basis the lower limit for the
performance of _The Coxcombe_, at a time when all three were yet Queen's
Revels' Children, would be August 29, 1611. Consulting the restrictions
necessitated by the plague rate, we have, then, an option for the date
of acting: either between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610, when
Jonson had begun his _Alchemist_, or between November 29, 1610 and July
1611. In the latter case Ben Jonson's "Knight o' the curious coxcombe"
would precede the performance of Beaumont and Fletcher's play and could
not be an allusion. In the former, it would immediately follow the
acting of _The Coxcombe_, and would manifestly be suggested by that
play. I prefer the former option; and date the acting,--on the
assumption that Taylor left the Queen's Revels by March 30,
1610,--before that date.[217] Since Fletcher's contribution to the play
has been mangled by a reviser it is impossible to draw conclusions as to
the date of composition from the evidence of his literary style. But the
characteristics of Beaumont in the minor plot are those of the period in
which the _Letter to Ben Jonson_ and _Philaster_ were written. The play
as first performed was condemned for its length by "the ignorant
multitude."[218] I believe that it was one of the two or three
unsuccessful comedies which preceded _Philaster_; and, as I have said
above, that it is the play referred to in the _Letter to Ben Jonson_,
toward the end of 1609.[219] If the date of acting was before January 4,
1610, the theatre was Blackfriars; if after, Whitefriars.
The Prologue in the first folio speaks of a revision. But though the
hand of one, and perhaps of another, reviser is unmistakably present,
the play is properly included among Beaumont and Fletcher's works. In
the commendatory verses of 1647, Hills and Gardiner speak of the play as
Fletcher's, but all tests show that Beaumont wrote a significant
division of it,--the natural, vigorous, tender, and poetic subplot of
Ricardo's desertion of Viola and his ultimate reclamation,--with the
exception of three scenes and parts of two or three more. The exceptions
are the first thirty-five lines of Act I, which have been supplied by
some reviser; I, 3, in which also the reviser appears; I, 5, the
drinking-bout in the tavern, where some of the words (_e. g._ "claw'd")
indicate Fletcher,--and the gratuitous obscenity, Fletcher or his
reviser; and Act II, 2, where Viola is bound by the tinkers and rescued
by Valerio.[220] Perhaps, also, the last thirty-six lines of Act III, 3,
where Fletcher is discernible in the afterthoughts "a likely wench, and
a good wench," "a very good woman, and a gentlewoman," and the hand of a
reviser in the mutilation of the verse; and certainly Act IV, 3, where
Fletcher appears at his best in this play.
The romantic little comedy of _Ricardo and Viola_ is so loosely joined
with the foul portrayal of the Coxcomb who succeeds in prostituting his
wife to his friend, that it might be published separately and profitably
as the work of Beaumont.[221] It is well constructed; and it conveys a
noble tribute to the purity and constancy of woman, her grace of
forgiveness, and her influence over erring man. When Viola speaks she is
a living person, instinct with recklessness, sweetness, and pathos. Few
heroines of Elizabethan comedy have compressed so much reality and
poetry into so narrow a compass. "Might not," she whispers when stealing
forth at night to meet Ricardo:--[222]
Might not God have made
A time for envious prying folk to sleep
Whilst lovers met, and yet the sun have shone?
And then:
Alas, how valiant and how fraid at once
Love makes a Virgin!
When she comes upon her lover staggering outside the tavern with his
sodden comrades,[223] with what simplicity she shudders:
I never saw a drunken man before;
But these I think are so....
My state is such, I know not how to think
A prayer fit for me; only I could move
That never Maiden more might be in love!
When, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds that her rescuer is
even more a peril,[224] with what childlike trust she appeals:
Pray you, leave me here
Just as you found me, a poor innocent,
And Heaven will bless you for it!
When again deserted, with what pathos she sighs:
"I'll sit me down and weep;
All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower
Droops now, as well as I!"
And, finally, when she has rediscovered Ricardo, and conquered his
self-reproach by her forgiveness, which is "to love you," with what
admirable touch of nature and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude
to her story and herself:[225]
Methinks I would not now, for any thing,
But you _had_ mist me: I have made a story
Will serve to waste many a winter's fire,
When we are old. I'll tell my daughters then
The miseries their Mother had in love,
And say, "My girls, be wiser"; yet I would not
Have had more wit myself.
Ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development of personality; and
the rural scenes and characters are convincing.
In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the
prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is
Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse
as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and
there Massinger may be traced;[226] and here and there, Rowley.[227] I
should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think
that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the
finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have
much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of
whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the
prime offense is Fletcher's--in dramatizing that story at all. To make a
comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the
Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance.
But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the
cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous
wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual
gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than
prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to
artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part
could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary
criticism.
Though _The Coxcombe_ was not successful in its first production before
the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well
received and favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court in 1612
in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's approaching marriage with
the Princess Elizabeth. It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta
in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the
City theatres after the Restoration, and before 1682. In the revivals
Beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and
it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy called _The Fugitives_,
constructed by Richardson and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792.
With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the Ricardo of the original),
and Mrs. Jordan as Julia (alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran
for a dozen nights or more.
7.--_Philaster_ or _Love lies a-Bleeding_ was "divers times acted at the
Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his Majesties Servants." Under the second
title in the _Scourge of Folly_, entered for publication October 8,
1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and I have already
stated my reasons as based upon the history of the theatres[228] for
believing that its first performance took place between December 7, 1609
and July 12, 1610.
We might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping
of epigrams in Davies of Hereford's _Scourge of Folly_, if we could
affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. For
just before the epigram on _Love lies a-Bleeding_, which, I think,
without doubt, applies to _Philaster_, appears one _To the Roscius of
these times, Mr. W. Ostler_, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now
Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's Revels'
Children,--most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the
time,--in 1601 when Jonson's _Poetaster_ was acted. He could not have
been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the
Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly not have been styled
"sole king of actors" at that age. According to the supplication of
Cuthbert Burbadge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning
the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,[229] before Evans surrendered the
lease of that theatre in 1608, some of the Queen's Revels' Children
"growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, were taken
to strengthen the King's service; and the more to strengthen the
service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would
bee as fitt for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we] purchased
the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players,
which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this
deposition places the transference of Underwood, Field, and Ostler to
the King's Company between the beginning of April 1608 when the Revels'
Children were temporarily suppressed and August of that year when the
Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and others took over Evans's unexpired
lease of Blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. But the
deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years
after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement
of the sequence of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily with, or
under the supervision of, the King's Company at Blackfriars between
December 7, 1609 and January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the
head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by March 25, 1610, and
does not appear in the lists of the King's Men till 1616; and there is
no record of Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company
before the end of 1610, when they acted in Jonson's _Alchemist_ (after
October 3). Since Underwood and Ostler were not with the new Queen's
Revels after January of that year, it is probable that Davies's epigram
to the latter as "the Roscius of these times" in the _Scourge of Folly_,
entered for publication on October 8, 1610, was written after Ostler had
attained distinction in Shakespeare's company, the company of the
leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to
Ostler with that of the epigram to Fletcher on _Philaster_ presented by
that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the
epigrams,--that is to say, between January 4 and October, 1610.
Since, however, the epigrams in _The Scourge of Folly_, though
frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association,
sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous
chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be
regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind.
Of much greater weight as confirming the date of _Philaster_, as
conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_ not
only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical
characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific
detail. I shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there
is nothing in the _Philaster_ or the _Cymbeline_ to indicate the
priority of the former. But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate
in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.[230] For
the _Cymbeline_, I accept the date assigned by the majority of critics,
1609. Shakespeare had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in mind
since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage in
_Much Ado About Nothing_ (the quarto of 1600). In execution the play is,
with _The Winter's Tale_ and the _Tempest_, the dramatic sequel of that
first of his "dramatic romances,"--of which the leading conception is
the loss and recovery of a wife or child,--the _Pericles_ written in
1607 or 1608. And since already in _Pericles_, Shakespeare had blazed
this new path, I cannot for a moment accept the hypothesis that he is
in his _Cymbeline_ borrowing profusely from _Philaster_, a work of
comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been
admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for
eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much
more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since
about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its
enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of
construction to the somewhat novel--to them entirely novel--method of
the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved in
_Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_. And still the more so when one reflects
that, in _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_, aside from the leading conception,
everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by
Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from _The Two Gentlemen
of Verona_ to _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_; and that there is no
salient characteristic of dramatic construction in _Philaster_,
otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of
those earlier comedies and of the _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_ would not
suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that
_Philaster_ was first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont
and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July
1610.
The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as
does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In
his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the
well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that
author credit for practically the whole work,--"Thou ... raign'st in
Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as
faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of
1647, mentions _Love Lies a-Bleeding_ among Fletcher's "incomparable
plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene
"when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master
Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he
says:
Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared
to thee,
In thy _Philaster_ and _Maids Tragedy_!
Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray ...
for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few
insertions or revisions by Fletcher, _Philaster_ is Beaumont's (and
practically the same holds true of _The Maides Tragedy_, and the Bessus
play--_A King and No King_). In _Philaster_ Fletcher's scenes, as proved
by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are I,
1{^_b_} (from the King's entry, line 89--line 358,[231]--a revision and
enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2{^_b_} (from _Enter
Megra_), II, 4{^_b_} (from _Megra above_), V, 3 and V, 4. The first part
of Act II, 4 was written by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14
to 29 (from _Enter Arethusa and Bellario_ to "how brave she keeps him").
Similarly, the first draught of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly
lines 1-34 (exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long tirade)
and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end). But beginning with
Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we find insertions marked by Fletcher's
metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas,
tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets,
redundant "alls" and "hows." The last three lines of that soliloquy are
his:
Soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments
Where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat
And the cold marble melt;[232]
and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical triplets, his
"alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of Philaster's accusation of
Arethusa. "The _story_ of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow
quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten,--"these sad
texts"[233] Fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating.
It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes are elaborative,
bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally easy, at times bustling, at
times spectacular, but not vitally contributory to the business of the
play. They comprise the longest speeches of the King, Pharamond,
Philaster, Megra, and Bellario. Some of these, such as the King's
denunciation of Megra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar
rhetoric. The bawdy half-scene with its maid of easy honour is his; the
discovery of the low intrigue, the simulated masque and the mob-scene
are his. They may display, but they do not develop, characters. They are
sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully poetic as in V, 3, 83-84, where
his "all your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble"
anticipates Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic; but they lack
the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation of Beaumont. The play, in
fact, is not only preponderatingly but primarily Beaumont's, from the
excellent exposition in the first act to the series of sensational
surprises which precede the denouement in the fifth. The conception of
the characters and the complication are distinctive of that writer's
plots: the impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence toward
the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and his unwarranted suspicion
of the honour of his mistress. The subtle revelations of personality are
Beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric pathos and beauty
of Bellario, the nobler aspects of Dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet
bewilderments and unmerited tribulations of Arethusa, the combination of
idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization, the naturalness of
figure and setting, the vigour of dramatic progress, the passion, the
philosophical insights, and the memorable lines. His, too, the humour of
the rural sketches--the Country Fellow who has "seen something yet," the
occasional frank animality, as well as the tender beauty of innocence.
Not only are the virtues of the play Beaumont's but some of its faults
of conception and construction; and those faults are the unmanly
suspicious startings of the hero and his melodramatic violence, the
somewhat fortuitous succession of the crises, and the subordination of
Bellario in the denouement.
The popularity of _Philaster_ as an acting play, not only at Court but
in the city, is attested by contemporary record. It was played after the
Restoration with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed thirteen
revivals,--the last at Bath on December 12 of the latter year, with Ward
in the title-role and Miss Jarmin as Bellario.[234]
8.--_The Maides Tragedy_, acted by the King's Men during the festivities
at Court, October 1612 to March 1613, was known to Sir George Buc when,
October 31, 1611, he licensed an anonymous play as "this second maiden's
tragedy." It was acted by the King's also at Blackfriars; and since it
is in every way a more mature production than _Philaster_, I think that
it followed that play, toward the end of 1610 or in 1611. It was first
published in 1619, in quarto and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also
anonymous; that of 1630 gives the names of Beaumont and Fletcher as
authors. In the commendatory verses to the folio of 1647, Henry Howard
ascribes the scene of Amintor's suicide to Fletcher; Waller assigns to
him "brave Melantius in his gallantry" and "Aspatia weeping in her
gown"; Stanley, too, gives him the weeping Aspatia; and Herrick, "Evadne
swelling with brave rage." These descriptions are as misleading as
blind. D'Avenant comes nearer the mark in his Prologue to _The
Woman-Hater_, already quoted, where he indicates correctly an Evadne
scene and an Aspatia scene as of Fletcher's composition. Metrical tests,
corrected by the rhetorical, show that Fletcher's contributions are
limited to three scenes and two half-scenes. The list opens with those
to which D'Avenant alludes: II, 2, in which Fletcher "taught the sad
Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, 1 (as far as line 200, "Prithee, do not
mock me"), in which he "reduced Evadne from her scorn"; and it includes,
also, the ten lines of V, 1, the larger part of V, 2 (to _Exit Evadne_),
and the perfunctory V, 3. As to Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt
can be entertained. It is an admirable example of his double endings
(almost 40 per cent), his end-stopped lines (80 per cent), anapaestic
rhythms and jolts, as well as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures
and his incremental second thoughts. I fail to see how any critic can
assign it to Beaumont.[235] As frequently with Fletcher, Aspatia's
mourning, though beautiful, is a falsetto from the classics; more like
one of Rossetti's or Leigh Hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than
a first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. There is likewise no
doubt concerning the authorship of the first part of Act IV, 1 (lines
1-189), in which Melantius convinces Evadne of sin and drives her to
vengeance upon the King. The latter part of the scene, also, appears to
have been written by Fletcher in the first instance, and to have
consisted of the first six speeches after the entrance of Amintor (lines
190-200), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to win belief" (247-254,
260-262), and the conclusion (263-285). But between Amintor's
supplication "Prithee do not mock me" (line 200) and Evadne's assertion
of sincerity "I have done nothing good to win belief" (line 247[236]),
Beaumont has inserted four speeches that of themselves convert a
colloquy otherwise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest
passages of the play. In Evadne's "My whole life is so leprous it
infects All my repentance"--"That slight contrition"--"Give me your
griefs; you are an innocent, A soul as white as Heaven"--"Shoot your
light into me"--"Dissembling with my tears"--"Cut from man's
remembrance," we hear the words, phrases, and figures of Beaumont; and
we trace him in the repeated use of "do." We find him in Amintor's "Seed
of virtue left to shoot up"--"put a thousand sorrows off"--"that dull
calamity"--"that strange misbelief"--and in
Mock not _the powers above_ that can and dare
Give thee a great example of their justice
To all ensuing ages.[237]
And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration of sincere
reform (255-259), we are thrilled by his sudden magic and his poetic
finality:
_Those short days I shall number to my rest_
(As many must not see me) shall, though too late,
Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,--
Since I can do no good, because a woman,--
_Reach constantly at something that is near it_.
The ground-work of this latter portion, from Amintor's entrance, where
Evadne cries "Oh, my lord," "My much abused lord," and he, "I may leap,
Like a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines 190-200); and the
last three speeches in general with Amintor's "My frozen soul melts,"
and "My honour falls no farther: I am well, then"; and with Evadne's
"tales" that "go to dust forgotten,"--the Niobe weeping till she is
water,--the "wash her stains away," and
All the creatures
Made for Heaven's honours, have their ends, _and good ones_,--
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women--
They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,
Men pray against; ...
this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction, to the scene
as Fletcher originally wrote it.
When to these two scenes we add the first and third of Act V, which are
of no particular significance, and the second (to the death of the
King), we have Fletcher's whole written contribution to this wonderful
tragedy. In the murder of the King he displays dramatic mastery of the
grisly and shuddering; but though the scene is characterized by the same
rapidity of conversational thrust and parry as the Fletcherian dialogue
between Melantius and Evadne, it is, like it, marred in effect by
violence physical rather than spiritual, by brutality of vituperation
and stage realism with but scant relief of subtlety. Fletcher's tragic
scenes excel not in portrayal of personality but in business; his
contribution to Aspatia is not pathos but the embroidery of grief.
The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's: the cruel desertion of
Aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration and desperate rush on fate; the
artful revelation of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her
effrontery, her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her, its
gradual recognition of the inevitable,--that unchastity cannot be atoned
even by vengeance, nor cleansed by blood,--and its true birth through
love desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment of the innocent
but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance and besotted by loyalty to
the lustful author of his wrongs,--yet idealized by virgin and wanton
alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the conflict between
honour and friendship, pride and sacrifice, which ennobles the
comradeship of that blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the
pestilent King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio is part
humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and hopeless. These are
Beaumont's; and his, too, the wealth of dramatic situation and device:
the enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque
in the first act; the shrewd development of motive, and the psychic
revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of
tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays--in fact,
all that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense and the
swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the
fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the
poetic finality.
In his _Tragedies of the Last Age_, licensed in 1677, Rymer attacked
_The Maides Tragedy_ violently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness,
improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as
Rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better
have been called _Amintor_, or the _Lustful King_, or _The Concubine_.
But _The Maides Tragedy_ is a more attractive name, and it may be
justified. For I do not find that the action is double-centred. It
springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the Maid for a woman whom
he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic
devotion of Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's
tragic weakness, his _hamartia_. His failure to act in accordance with
the dictates of honour toward Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision
that costs him the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first
flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile as she was, she would
have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had
unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. The Nemesis,
too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the King, but Aspatia, thrust out of
mind though not forgotten:
I did that lady wrong. Methinks I feel
A griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins,--[238]
... The faithless sin I made
To faire Aspatia is not yet revenged;
It follows me.--[239]
His Nemesis is Aspatia, constant unto death,--and in her death,
awakening such remorse that he must die to be with her: "Aspatia!" he
cries--
The soule is fled forever, and I wrong
Myselfe so long to lose her company,
Must I talke now? Heres to be with thee, love![240]
Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,[241] of "the
irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs" in the
characterization and conduct of Evadne have logicality of appearance,
but are based upon incorrect premises. The facts, as Beaumont gives
them, are that Evadne was "once fair" and "chastely sweet,"--before she
met the King; that she was already corrupt when she took Amintor as her
husband; that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in presence
of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, is an assumed delicacy; that she loves
the King "with ambition not with her eyes" (III, 1); that she "would
bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has accepted Amintor as a
screen, but speedily lusts for him, and is willing to give herself to
him if he will forthright kill the King (II, 1, 179):
Wilt thou kill this man?
Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sin
Off from thy lips.
But Amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious, not the kind of man
to satisfy her new desire, and ambition too. He could never win her by
winning the throne,--too lily-livered:
"I wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, "till I do know
the cause";--
Then she, with passion "I wood thou wouldst."--But she is a woman whose
first behest is scorned; and with sudden revulsion of contempt for this
poltroon, as she now conceives him--
Why, it is _thou_ that wrongst me; I hate thee;
Thou shouldst have kild thy selfe.
Amintor has lost his evil chance. She despises him and yet, in her
better moments, with a kind of pity. It follows that her prompt avowal
of her liaison, and her return to the King and insulting treatment of
Amintor are of a piece with the corrupted nature of the woman,--a nature
that she displays up to the moment of her awakening and imagined
repentance. The facts are, too, that she does not, immediately after she
has sworn to her brother to let the foul soul of the King out, develop
(IV, 1), as Mr. More thinks, a "mood of sudden and overwhelming love for
Amintor." She merely asks his pardon:
I doe appeare the same, the same Evadne,
Drest in the shames I liv'd in, the same monster,
But these are names of honour to what I _am_ ... I am hell
Till you, my deare lord, shoot your light into me,
_The beames of your forgivenesse_.
The days that she shall number to her rest are short; but she vainly
imagines that, though but "one minute" remains, she may "reach
constantly at something that is neare" the good. She is awakened to her
husband's whiteness of soul; but she makes no profession of love, though
love, this time not merely lust, be stirred in her heart. She would not
"let her sins perish his noble youth." At last, in the moment of mad
exaltation after the murder of the King, when she thinks that she has
washed her soul clean in that blood, the poor, misguided creature
struggling toward the light, but still, and consistently, enveloped in
the murk of her past, comes imploring the love of the husband whom in
the earlier days she had scorned. She is still the passionate Evadne,
who "was too foule within to looke faire then," and "was not free till
now." Repulsed by Amintor, she dreams the one sane madness of her
career,--to win his love by taking leave of life,--and kills herself.
I perceive no irrelevance of motive in the conduct of Evadne; even in
the scenes which are not Beaumont's--namely, the expostulation of her
brother, and the murder of the King. Nor do I find in the play as a
whole what Mr. More calls an "incomprehensible tangle of the passions."
The defect in the construction of the _Maides Tragedy_, if there is one,
lies in the failure of the Maid and her deserter to meet between the
first scene of the second act and the third of the fifth. That is not
unmotived, however; it is of Aspatia's own choosing and of Amintor's
_hamartia_. Aspatia kisses him farewell, forgiving him, and saying that
she "must trie Some yet unpractis'd way to grieve and die." He is,
forthwith, entangled in the web of his wife's adultery, his own shame
and more shameful delusion of allegiance. The girl whom he has so deeply
wronged passes from his distracted consciousness, save for the sense
that these troubles are his punishment. And when, toward the end of the
play, the Maid comes in again, saying "this is my fatall houre," even we
start at the remembrance that she had threatened to kill herself. And,
because the scene in which she forces a duel upon Amintor is spirited
and pathetic, his contrition poignant, and the joy of their reunion in
the moment of death deeply tragic, we feel that we have been unduly
cheated of the company of this innocent and resolute and surpassingly
pathetic girl.
The play, with Burbadge in the role of Melantius, was popular during the
lives of the authors. It was acted before the King and Queen in 1636 and
it held the stage until the closing of the theatres. It was revived in
1660 and 1661. Pepys saw it at least five times before the middle of May
1668, and found it "too sad and melancholy" but still "a good play." It
was popular when Dryden in his _Essay on Dramatick Poesy_, 1668, praised
its "labyrinth of design." For a time during the reign of Charles II it
was proscribed, possibly because the moral was too readily applicable to
the conduct of the "merry monarch"; but the play in its original form
was on the stage again by 1677. Before 1685 Waller made at least two
attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy by writing a new fifth
act in which Evadne was bloodlessly eliminated. In one of these
sentimental absurdities the King alone survived; in another the King,
preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving Amintor and Aspatia from
suicide and joined them in marriage: but neither attempt, though made
"to please the Court," was crowned with success. The play enjoyed
several other revivals in the first half of the eighteenth century with
high popularity, notably at the Haymarket in 1706 when Melantius was
played by Betterton, Evadne by Mrs. Barry, and Aspatia by Mrs.
Bracegirdle; and again in 1710 just before Betterton's death. In 1742
Theobald writes, that the famous controversy between Melantius and
Amintor is always "received with vehement applause." In 1837 the play
was acted by Macready at the Haymarket, with alterations by himself and
three original scenes by Sheridan Knowles, under the name of _The
Bridal_, and, as Dyce tells us, was very favourably received by the
public.[242]
9.--Though the tragedy of _Cupid's Revenge_ was printed in 1615 as the
work of Fletcher alone, the publication was unauthorized, and the
attribution is by a printer who acknowledges that he was not acquainted
with the author. The quarto of 1630 assigns it correctly to Beaumont and
Fletcher. The play is known to have been acted at Court by her
Majesty's Children of Whitefriars, the first Sunday in January 1612; and
as usual it must have been tested by public presentation before that
date. The fact that the authors were, between 1610 and 1612, writing for
the King's Men does not preclude their composing a play for the Queen's
Children. It is not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier
than 1611. Though the critics disagree concerning the precise division
of authorship in nearly every scene, finding traces of alteration by
Field, Massinger, and others, they discern a definite substratum of both
Fletcher and Beaumont. It is unnecessary to specify the minor scenes in
which Beaumont cooperated. The five which transfer the action from an
atmosphere of supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the
realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion are by him.[243]
In these his sententious sunbursts, his verse, diction, hyperbole,
portrayal by passive implication, are indubitable. The infatuation of
the princess for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim
humility and cackling mirth of the latter. The lust of Leucippus is
transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to oaths "bestowed on lies," by
his horror of the discovered baseness of his paramour, and the piety
with which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's honour:
I desire you
To lay what trains you will for my wish'd death,
But suffer him to find his quiet grave
In peace.
The treacherous greed and malice of Bacha are tempered by half-lights
and shifting hues that make her less a vampire when Beaumont depicts
her. And the final scene of tragedy in the forest is shot with pathos by
the "harmless innocence" of Beaumont's Urania following Leucippus to
save him
for love:--
I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught.
But the play as a whole lacks logical and natural motive, moral vigor
and vitality; and its history upon the stage is negligible.
10.--Of the dates of _A King and No King_ there is no doubt. It was
licensed in 1611, acted at Court December 26 of the same year, and first
published in quarto in 1619 as by Beaumont and Fletcher. In the
commendatory verses of 1647, Henry Howard gives Arbaces to Fletcher;
Jasper Mayne gives him Bessus; Herrick goes further: "that high design
Of _King and No King_, and the rare plot thine." Earle, on the other
hand, gives Bessus to Beaumont; and Lisle gives him Mardonius. Of the
attributions to Fletcher, Herrick's alone has plausibility, since, like
_Philaster_ and _The Maides Tragedy_, the play is derived from no known
source.[244] Still he was probably wrong. It is not impossible that one
of the dramatists contrived the plot; but, considering that
three-quarters of the play was written by Beaumont, and that Fletcher's
quarter contains but one scene at once of high design and vital to the
story, it is not very likely that the contriving was by Fletcher
unaided.
Modern critics display singular unanimity in their discrimination of the
respective shares of the composers. With only one or two dissenting
voices they attribute to Beaumont the first three acts, the fourth scene
of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the fifth. To Fletcher they
assign the first three scenes of the fourth act, and scenes one and
three of the fifth. The tests which I have already described lead me to
the same conclusion. Beaumont's contribution is distinguished by a
largeness of utterance and a poetic inevitability, a diversity and
mastery of characterization, a philosophical reach, a realism both
humorous and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativity and tension,
equal to, if not surpassing, any parallel elements or qualities to be
found in the joint-plays. Arbaces, in apparent design, is of a Marlowan
temper, moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brooking no
rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and a tyrant, he is brave in
fact, and in heart deluded by the assumption that he is also modest. The
combination is Beaumontesque. That dramatist rarely creates fixed or
transparent character. Arbaces assumes that he is single of nature and
aim: an irresistible, passionless, and patient soldier; but his failure
to fathom himself as his friend Mardonius fathoms him, is part of his
complexity. His headlong love for the woman whom he believes to be his
sister and the resulting horror of apprehension and conflict of desire
reveal him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding revolutions
of personality. "What are thou," he asks of this devilish unexpected
lust--
What are thou, that dost creep into my breast;
And dar'st not see my face?
When he will decree that Panthea be regarded as no more his sister, and
she remonstrates,--he thunders "I will hear no more"; but to himself:--
Why should there be such music in a voice,
And sin for me to hear it?
When Tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister in marriage, presumes
to address her, with what majestic inconsistency the king rebukes him:
The least word that she speaks
Is worth a life. Rule your disorder'd tongue
Or I will temper it!
And so, now struggling, now wading on in sin, till that heart-rending
crisis is reached in which he confesses the incestuous love to his
friend and faithful general, Mardonius; nay, even tries to win the
friend's support in his lustful suit, and is gloriously defeated. Then
follow the easy compliance of Bessus with his wish, and, with equal
precipitancy, the revulsion of a kingly sense of rectitude against the
willing pander:
Thou art too wicked for my company,
Though I have hell within me, and mayst yet
Corrupt me further,
The climax in which Arbaces can no longer refrain is of Beaumont's
best:
Nay, you shall hear the cause in short, Panthea;
And when thou hear'st it, thou will blush for me
And hang thy head down like a violet
Full of the morning's dew.
And she, recoiling, "Heaven forbid" and "I would rather ... in a grave
sleep with my innocence," still kisses him; and then in a panic, nobler
than self-suppression, cries:
If you have any mercy, let me go
To prison, to my death, to anything:
I feel a sin growing upon my blood
Worse than all these!
By a series of sensational _bouleversements_, and in a dramatic agony of
suspense, we are keyed to the scene in which relief is granted: the
princess who now is Queen is no sister to the King, who is now no King.
With the exception of a half-scene (Act IV, 2{^_b_}) of somewhat bustling
mechanism and rant by Fletcher, the whole of the King's portrayal is
Beaumont's; and with the exception of eighty lines written by Fletcher
(Act IV, 1) of dramatic dialogue containing information necessary to the
minor love-affair, the story of the birdlike quivering, fond Panthea is,
also, entirely Beaumont's. The Mardonius of Beaumont, in the first three
acts and the fifth, is a fine, honest, blunt, soldierly companion and
adviser to the King; but when Fletcher takes him in hand (Act IV,
2{^_b_}), he declines to a stock character wordy with alliteration and
commonplace. The Bessus of Beaumont whose "reputation came principally
by thinking to run away" is, in Acts I-III, Falstaffian or Zagloban;
the Bessus of Fletcher, in IV, 3 and V, 1 and 3, is a figure of low
comedy, amusing to be sure, and reminiscent of Bobadill, but a purveyor
of sophomoric quips and a tool for horse-play. The rural scene with its
graphic humours of the soil is Beaumont's.
Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly play consists,
in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps
complementary to the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display
no spiritual insight; supply no development of character; administer no
dramatic fillip to the action and no thrill to the spectator; and,
exclusive of one rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor
lovers, Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry.
To Beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in the creation of _A King
and No King_ one of the most intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean
period, one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one of the
most influential in the development of the heroic play of the
Restoration. That it did not survive the eighteenth century is due not
so much to the painful nature of the conflict presented as to the fact
that it is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as Dryden says
"end with a prosperous event." The conflict of motives, the passions
aroused, have overpassed the limits of artistic mediation. The play
would better have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering--that
highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable. But though this be
a spoiled tragedy, it is not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy.
That error arises from a careless reading of the text. From the first,
the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists are not brother and
sister. And as for the protagonists themselves,--when the King is
suddenly smitten by love (III, 1, 70-115) and rebels against its power,
he does not even know that the object of his devotion is his supposed
sister. When he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea, he
revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when the twain are enmeshed
in the strands of circumstance they cease not to recognize the
liberating possibility of self-denial. In his struggle against what
seems to him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer, he,
still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of what is right. His
deepest despair is that he is "not come so high as killing" himself
rather than succumb to worse temptation; and his last word before the
tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange and unbelieved
affection as good men cannot think on." And when Panthea feeling the
"sin growing upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled
by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that cries to him whom
she thinks her brother, "Fly, sir, for God's sake!"
_A King and No King_ evidently won favour at Court, for, as we have
noticed, it was acted there both in 1611 and in 1612-1613. It was
presented to their Majesties at Hampton Court in 1636. In 1661 Pepys saw
it twice. Before 1682 Nell Gwynn had made Panthea one of her principal
roles. In 1683 Betterton played Arbaces to Mrs. Barry's Panthea. It was
revived again in 1705, 1724, and 1788. Davies in his _Dramatic
Miscellany_ tells us that Garrick intended to revive it, taking the
part of Arbaces himself and giving Bessus to Woodward, "but it was
observed that at every reading of it in the green-room Garrick's
pleasure suffered a visible diminution--at length he fairly gave up his
design." Mr. Bond, in the _Variorum_ edition, mentions a German
adaptation of 1785, called _Ethelwolf, oder der Koenig Kein Koenig_.
FOOTNOTES:
[214] Cited by Oldys (MS. note in Langbaine's _Account of Engl. Dram.
Poets_, p. 208)--Dyce.
[215] For this information I am indebted to my colleague, Professor
Schevill.
[216] I know but two sane accounts of this matter: A. S. W.
Rosenbach's in _Mod. Lang. Notes_, 101, Column 362 (1898); and
Wolfgang von Wurzbach's, in _Romanische Forschungen_, XX, pp. 514-536
(1907).
[217] Oliphant, _Engl. Stud._, XV, 322. Macaulay, 'probably 1610.'
[218] _Prologue_ in the first folio.
[219] Chapter VII.
[220] Even here, as Oliphant has said, Viola's first speech "is pure
Beaumont."
[221] His scenes are I, 4, 6; II, 4; III, 3 (to "where I may find
service"); IV, 1, 2, 7; V, 2, and the last twenty-seven lines of V, 3.
[222] I, 4. Scenes as arranged in Dyce, Vol. III.
[223] I, 6.
[224] III, 3.
[225] V, 2.
[226] I, 1, 2{^_a_} (to Antonio's entry), III, 1{^_a_} (to servant's
entry).
[227] III, 2; IV, 4; V, 1, 3.
[228] Chapter VII, above.
[229] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, I,
317.
[230] Chapter XXVIII, _Did the Beaumont 'Romance' Influence
Shakespeare?_
[231] Lines are numbered as in the _Variorum_ edition.
[232] Fletcher affects this figure, _cf._ _A Wife for a Month_, Act
II, 2, lines 47-48.
[233] _Cf._ his lines in _Maides Tragedy_, IV, 1, 252-254; in _King
and No King_, IV, 2, 57-62; _Philaster_, V, 4, 114; _Hum. Lieut._, IV,
5, 51; _Mad Lover_, III, 4, 105; _Loyall Subject_, III, 6, 141; IV, 3,
70; _Wife for a Month_, IV, 5, 38, 39.
[234] The best editions of _Philaster_ since the time of Dyce are
those of F. S. Boas, in the _Temple Dramatists_ (1898), P. A. Daniel,
in the _Variorum_ (1904), Glover and Waller, in the _Camb. Engl.
Classics_ (1905), and A. H. Thorndike in _Belles Lettres_ (1906).
[235] Thorndike, for instance,--who selects lines 22-40 as an instance
of Beaumont's skill in imitating natural conversation. _Influence of
B. and F. on Shakespeare_, p. 129.
[236] Numbering of the _Variorum_.
[237] Q2 "eies."
[238] II, 1, 127.
[239] III, 1, 221.
[240] V, 3, 244.
[241] P. E. More, _The Nation_, N. Y., April 24, 1913.
[242] The best editions of _M. T._, since the time of Dyce, are those
of P. A. Daniel, in the _Variorum_ (1904), Glover and Waller, in the
_Cambridge English Classics_ (1905), and A. H. Thorndike, in the
_Belles Lettres_ (1906).
[243] I, 3; II, 2; III, 2; IV, 1; V, 4.
[244] For conjectural sources see Chapter VII, above. The best
editions to-day are the _Variorum_ and Alden's (_Belles Lettres_).