THE LAST PLAY
Eleven.--The first quarto of _The Scornful Ladie_, entered S. R., March
19, 1616, assigns the play to Beaumont and Fletcher, and says that it
"was acted with great applause by the Children of Her Maiesties Revels
in the Blacke Fryers." The references in Act V, 3, 4, to the Cleve wars
show that it could not have been written before March 25, 1609. The
sentence, "Marry some cast Cleve captain," is taken by some to indicate
a date as early as the spring of that year, when James I "promised to
send an English force to aid the Protestant party,"[245] and when,
undoubtedly, "cast" captains of the English army were clamouring for
foreign service. In that case, the play was acted before January 4,
1610, for by that date the children of the Queen's Revels had ceased
playing at Blackfriars. Since the plague regulations closed the theatres
between March 9 and December 7, 1609, save for a week in July, these
arguments would fix the performance in the Christmas month, December 7
to January 4, 1610. To this supposition a reference in Act I, 2 to
binding the Apocrypha by itself, lends plausibility, if, as Fleay
thinks, the sentence points to the discussion during 1609-1610
concerning the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Douay version of the
Bible and its exclusion from the authorized version--both in progress at
the time, and both completed in 1610.[246] But the Apocrypha controversy
was continued long after 1610.
A later date of composition than January 4, 1610, is, however, indicated
if a line, III, 1, 341, to which attention has not previously been
directed, in which the Elder Loveless says of Abigail, who is acting the
termagant, "tie your she-Otter up, good Lady folly, she stinks worse
than a Bear-baiting," was suggested by the termagant Mrs. Otter and her
husband of the Bear-garden, in Jonson's _Epicoene_, acted between
January 4 and March 10, 1610. And the two sentences in which Cleve is
mentioned, "There will be no more talk of the Cleve wars while this
lasts" (V, 3), and "Marry some _cast Cleve_ captain [so italicized in
the quarto], and sell Bottle-ale" (V, 4), point to a date later than
July 1610, when actual fighting in Cleves-Juliers had barely begun. The
captains are not English soldiers seeking service in a foreign army not
yet mobilized, but Englishmen who have been captains in Cleves, have
seen service, and been 'cast,' any time between July 1610 and the
beginning of 1616, when, according to the quarto, the play had assuredly
been performed. These considerations make it probable that _The Scornful
Ladie_ in its original form was presented first at Whitefriars while the
Queen's Children were acting there, between 1610 and March 1613, or that
it was one of the plays, old or new, presented by the Queen's Children
(reorganized in 1614) when they opened at Rossiter's new Blackfriars in
1615-16.
Since active hostilities in Cleves were temporarily suspended in 1613-14
during the negotiations which led to the treaty of Xanten in November of
the latter year, and since there would not only be much "talk" rather
than fighting at the time, but also many captains 'cast' from their
regiments, the conviction grows that the play was written between 1613
and the end of 1615. If _The Scornful Ladie_ had been written before
March 1613, it would undoubtedly have shared with _The Coxcombe_ and
_Cupid's Revenge_ of the same authors, then in the flush of popularity
at Court, the honour of presentation by the Queen's Revels' Children
during the festivities attending the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth;
for it was always a good acting play, and it has far greater merit than
_Cupid's Revenge_ which the Children performed three times before
royalty in the four months preceding the marriage.
Other evidence, not hitherto noticed, still further confirms the
conclusion that this was one of Beaumont and Fletcher's later
joint-productions, perhaps the last of them. The conversational style is
altogether more mature than in the remaining output of their
partnership. It is the first work published under both of their names,
and it was licensed for publication within two weeks after Beaumont's
death, as one might expect of a play with which he was associated
recently in the public mind. It is the only one of the joint-plays which
he did not himself copy out, or thoroughly revise in manuscript,
eliminating all or nearly all of Fletcher's distinctive _ye's_ and
_y'are's_, and reducing to uniformity the nomenclature of the _dramatis
personae_. Of this, later. There is also a sentence in Act III, 2, which
points definitely to a date of composition, 1613 to 1615. The Captain
speaking to Morecraft, the usurer, says, "I will stile thee noble, nay
Don Diego, I'le woo thy Infanta for thee" (punctuation of the quarto).
'Diego' had, of course, been for years a generic nickname for Spaniards;
but Morecraft is neither a Spaniard nor in any way associated with
Spaniards. There had been a Don Diego of malodorous memory, who had
offensively "perfumed" St. Paul's and on whose achievement the
Elizabethans never wearied ringing the changes.[247] But that Don Diego
was of the years before 1597 when there was, of course, no talk of
wooing an Infanta; and the Captain here who comes to borrow money of the
usurer had no intention of insulting him by likening him to the
disgusting Spaniard of St. Paul's.
The only provocation for styling Morecraft's 'widow' an Infanta in this
scene of _The Scornful Ladie_ is that there was much interest in London
at the time in a proposed marriage between Charles, Prince of Wales, and
the second daughter of Philip III of Spain, the Infanta Maria. And the
conjunction of the "Infanta" with a "Don Diego" has reference to the
activities of the astute Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuna who had arrived as
Spanish ambassador, in 1613, "with the express object of winning James
over from his alliance with France and the Protestant powers."[248]
During 1613 Queen Anne was favouring the Spanish marriage. In February
1614, Don Diego Sarmiento was sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of
the King's powerful minion, the Earl of Somerset; and in May he was
writing home of his success. In the latter month, the Lord Privy Seal,
Northampton, was urging the marriage upon the King; and the King soon
after had signified to Sarmiento his willingness to accept the hand of
the Infanta for Charles, provided Philip of Spain should withdraw his
demand for the conversion of the young prince to Catholicism. In June
Sarmiento was advising Philip to close with James's offer. And a month
or so later the Spanish Council of State had voted in favour of the
match. Negotiations, broken off for a time, were resumed a few weeks
after the treaty of Xanten was signed; and with varying success Don
Diego was still pursuing his object in December 1615. The reference in
_The Scornful Ladie_ cannot possibly be to negotiations for the marriage
of Prince Charles's elder brother, Henry, who died in 1612, with one or
the other of King Philip's daughters;[249] as for instance in 1604 or
1607, for the Cleves wars had not then begun; or in 1611 and 1612, for
no Don Diego had yet arrived in England. The upper limit of the
reference to Don Diego Sarmiento's negotiations is May 27, 1613.
Gardiner tells us, moreover, that "for some time" before Diego was
created Count Gondomar in 1617 "he had been pertinaciously begging for a
title that would satisfy the world that his labours had been graciously
accepted by his master." This desire to be "stiled noble" was
undoubtedly known to many about the Court. If Beaumont and Fletcher did
not hear of it by common talk, they might readily have derived their
information from Don Diego's acquaintance and Beaumont's friend, Sir
Francis Bacon, Attorney-General at the time, or from a devoted companion
of John Selden of the Inner Temple, Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary,
who in April 1615, was King James's intermediary with Sarmiento. Taking,
accordingly, all these considerations into account in conjunction with
the fact that no Cleves captains had yet been 'cast' from their commands
abroad before the Queen's Revels' Children ceased playing at the old
Blackfriars in January 1610, I have come to the definite conclusion that
the play was written between May 27, 1613 and the beginning of 1616, and
first acted after the Children reopened at the new Blackfriars in
1615-1616. The probabilities are that it was written after May or June,
1614, perhaps, as late as April 1615, when public attention had been
startlingly awakened to Don Diego's personal and ambitious activity in
furthering the Spanish alliance by a royal marriage; and that Beaumont's
absence from London, probably at his wife's place in Kent, or the
failing condition of his health, accounts for his subordinate share in
the authorship, as well as for the incomplete revision of the text--a
task evidently assumed by him in the preparation of the other plays
planned and produced in partnership with Fletcher.
[Illustration: By permission of Methuen & Co., Ltd.
DON DIEGO SARMIENTO,
COUNT GONDOMAR
From the portrait by G. P. Harding]
The commendatory verses of Stanley and Waller in the 1647 folio give the
play to Fletcher; and the greater part of it is Fletcher's. Beaumont has
contributed the vivid exposition of Act I, 1; Act I, 2, with its legal
phraseology and racy realism; and the jovial posset-scene of Act II, 1,
where Sir Roger's kindly pedantry is developed and the minor love-affair
of Welford and Martha is introduced.[250] Act II, 1, has been given by
most critics to Fletcher because of the feminine endings of its
occasional verse; but Beaumont could use feminine endings for humorous
effect, and the diction and metal habit are distinctly his. He
contributed also Act V, 2,[251] where the hero finally tricks his
scornful mistress into submission. The _ye_ test, which I have said does
not yield results in the case of other plays written by the two
dramatists in collaboration, is of positive value here as confirming
Beaumont's authorship of Act I, 1 and 2 and Act II, 1, and V, 2, for but
a single _ye_ (II, 1, l. 10) is to be found in those scenes. The results
are negative in Act II, 2 and 3--no _ye's_--but the diction and verse
are Fletcher's. It is not unlikely that Beaumont revised the play up to
the end of Act II. With Act III, the _ye's_ are in evidence and continue
to the end of the play, except in Beaumont's V, 2. In Act III, 1, there
are but four; but two of them are in the objective case, a mark of
Fletcher, not of Beaumont. On the other hand though the diction and
verse somewhat resemble Fletcher's, the infrequency of the _ye's_
heightens the suspicion that unless the scene is Fletcher's, revised
imperfectly by Beaumont, it is the work of some third author--perhaps,
as R. W. Bond,[252] has suggested, Massinger. Act III, 2, on the other
hand, not only has several _ye's_ in the objective, but in proportion to
the _you's_ twenty-five per cent of _ye's_ and _y'are's_, which
approaches the distinctive habit of Fletcher; and the verse, rhetorical
triplets, and afterthoughts are his. In all scenes of Acts IV and V,
except the second of the latter, Fletcher's _ye's_ occur, not in great
number, but often enough in the objective case to corroborate the other,
metrical and stylistic, indications of his authorship.
I have said that no _ye's_ occur in Acts I and II, and Act V, 2, the
parts in which Beaumont's hand as author or reviser appears. Another
very interesting confirmation of his authorship of Act I, 1, Act II, 1,
and Act V, 2, is afforded by the double nomenclature of one of the
characters, the amorous spinster who serves as waiting-woman to the
Scornful Lady. According to the first three quartos (1616, 1625, 1630),
and the folio (1679) which follows the text of these, whenever she
appears in stage-direction or text before the beginning of Act III
(viz., in Beaumont's scenes), she is called Mistress Younglove or
Younglove, but in Acts III, IV, V, she is uniformly called Abigal,
except in Beaumont's V, 2, where in the text and stage-direction (line
263) she is again Younglove. In the speech-headings, she is Abig. or
Abi., all through the last three acts, for Fletcher has noticed that the
abbreviation Young, for her, occurring by the side of Young Lo. for
another character, Young Loveless, is confusing. But Beaumont, who
revised the first two acts, has been less careful than his wont, for he
occasionally retains the Young., which stood for the name by which he
always thought of the waiting-woman.
Beaumont's Mistress Younglove of the earlier scenes is vividly vulgar
and amorous. Fletcher takes her up and turns her into a commonplace
stage lecher in petticoats; but Beaumont, in the fifth act, restores her
to womanhood by giving her something of a heart. The Scornful Lady of
Beaumont's scenes is self-possessed and many-sided, introspective and
capable of affection. In Fletcher's hands she is shrewd and witty but
evidently constructed for the furtherance of dramatic business. The
steward, Savil, of Beaumont's Act I, appears not only to be honest but
to be designed with a view to a leading part in the complication; in Act
II, 2, Fletcher reduces him to drunkenness and servility, with slight
regard to the possibilities of character and plot. The brisk but
mechanical movement of the action and the stagey characterization and
more animated scenes are Fletcher's; also the manoeuvers directed
against the Lady's attitude of scorn, except that by which she is
overcome. Thorndike calls this comedy "perhaps the best representation
of the collaboration" of these dramatists in that kind. If this is the
best of which they were capable in that kind, it is as well that they
did not produce more. This was written after Beaumont had retired to
Sundridge Place, and was giving very little attention to play-writing.
It was, however, a very popular play; frequently acted before
suppression of the theatres, and in the decade succeeding the
Restoration when it was several times witnessed by Pepys. Later, it was
acted by Mrs. Oldfield; and, as _The Capricious Lady_ (an alteration by
W. Cooke), with Mrs. Abington in the heroine's part, it held the stage
as late as 1788--some six revivals in all. But, as Sir Adolphus Ward
says, it is "coarse both in design and texture, and seems hardly
entitled to rank high among English comedies." It undoubtedly suggested
ideas for Massinger's tragicomedy, _A Very Woman_, licensed 1634, but in
which Fletcher may have had a share; and for Sir Aston Cockayne's _The
Obstinate Lady_ of 1657.[253]
FOOTNOTES:
[245] Murray, _Eng. Dram. Comp._, I, 153; Warwick Bond, _Variorum Ed.
of B. and F._, I, 359.
[246] _Chr. Eng. Dr._, I, 181.
[247] See Bond, _Variorum, B. and F._, I, 417; and references as given
there, and by Dyce, to _The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, The
Captain_, and other plays.
[248] See S. R. Gardiner, _History of England_, Vol. II (1607-1616),
pp. 165, 218, 225, 247, 255, 316, 321, 324, 327, 368, for this and the
following concerning Sarmiento.
[249] Gardiner, _Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage_, pp. 6, 7, 69.
[250] All critics agree in assigning I, 1, to Beaumont. They differ
concerning the rest of I and II.
[251] So, also, Fleay, G. C. Macaulay, and Oliphant; Boyle, _N. S. S.
Trans._, XXVI (1886), and Bond, _u. s._, p. 360.
[252] _Variorum_, I, 360.
[253] The best editions of _The Scornful Ladie_ since Dyce's time are
that of R. Warwick Bond, in the _Variorum_, and of Glover and Waller
in the _Camb. Engl. Classics_.