THE DRAMATIC ART, PRINCIPALLY OF BEAUMONT
Of the eleven plays, then, from which one may try to draw conclusions
concerning the respective dramatic qualities of Beaumont and Fletcher
during the period of their collaboration, we have found that two, _Loves
Cure_ and _The Captaine_, do not definitely show the hand of Beaumont,
and one, _The Foure Playes_, but the suspicion of a finger. Two, _The
Woman-Hater_ and _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, are wholly or
essentially of his unaided authorship. The remaining six, _The
Coxcombe_, _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_, _Cupids Revenge_, _A King
and No King_, _The Scornful Ladie_, are the Beaumont-Fletcher plays.
Others in which some critics think that they have found traces of
Beaumont, assuming that in their present form they are revisions of
earlier work, are _Thierry and Theodoret_, _The Faithful Friends_, _Wit
at Severall Weapons_, _Beggers Bush_, _Loves Pilgrimage_, _The Knight of
Malta_, _The Lawes of Candy_, _The Honest Man's Fortune_, _Bonduca_,
_Nice Valour_, _The Noble Gentleman_, _The Faire Maide of the Inne_.
These I have carefully examined, and can conscientiously state that in
no instance is there for me satisfactory evidence of the qualities which
mark his verse and style. When in any of the suspected passages the
verse recalls Beaumont, the style is not his: I find none of his
favourite words, phrases, figures, ideas. When in any such passage a
Beaumontesque hyperbole appears, or an occasional word from his
vocabulary, or a line of haunting beauty such as he might have written,
his metre or rhythm is absent. On the other hand, such passages display
traits never found in him but often found in some other collaborator
with Fletcher, or in some reviser of Fletcher's plays, sometimes
Massinger but more frequently Field. The latter dramatist modeled
himself upon Beaumont, but though he caught, on occasion, something of
the master's trick, no one steeped in the style of Beaumont can for a
moment mistake for his even the most dramatic or poetic composition of
Field. As to the scenes in prose supposed by some to have been written
by Beaumont, there is not one that bears his distinctive impress, nor
one that might not have been written by Daborne, Field, or Massinger, or
by any of the half-dozen experts whose industry swelled the output of
the Fletcherian syndicate. There being no evidence of Beaumont in any of
these plays, it is unnecessary to investigate, here, the vexed question
of the original date of each. Suffice it to repeat that concerning none
is there definite or generally accepted information that it was written
before Beaumont's retirement from dramatic activity.
Passing in review, the qualities of Beaumont as a dramatist we find that
in characterization he is, when at his best, true to nature, gradual in
his processes, and discriminating in delineation. He is melodramatic at
times in sudden shifts of crisis; but he is uniformly sensitive to
innocence, beauty, and pathos,--contemptuous of cowardice, braggadocio,
and insincerity,--appreciative of fidelity, friendship, noble affection,
womanly devotion, self-sacrifice, and mercy, of romantic enterprise, and
of the virile defiance of calumny, evil soliciting, and tyranny. In the
delineation of lust he is frankly Elizabethan rather than insidiously
Jacobean. He portrays with special tenderness the maiden of pure heart
whose love is unfortunately placed too high, a Bellario, Euphrasia, or
Urania,--or crossed by circumstance, a Viola, Arethusa, Aspatia,
Panthea. He distinctively appropriates Shakespeare's girl-page; under
his touch her grace suffers but slight diminution, and that by excess of
sentimentality rather than by lack of individual endowment. His
love-lorn lasses are integral personalities. No one, not maintaining a
thesis, could mistake Viola with her shrewd inventiveness and sense of
humour for Arethusa, or Arethusa with her swift despairs for Bellario,
or Bellario with her fearlessness and noble mendacity for the
countrified Urania, or any of them for the lachrymose Aspatia, or the
full-pulsed Panthea. I find them as different each from the other as all
from the tormenting Oriana or that seventeenth century Lydia Languish,
Jasper's mock-romantic Luce.
His most virile characters are not the tragic or romantic heroes of the
plays, but the blunt soldier-friends. It has been said, to be sure, that
"there is scarcely an individual peculiarity among them."[254] But
Mardonius never deserts his King, Melantius does. And neither the
Mardonius nor the Melantius of Beaumont has the waggish humour of
Beaumont's Dion. His romantic heroes, on the other hand, are not so
distinct in their several characteristics; Amintor, Philaster, Leucippus
are generous, impulsive, poetic, readily deluded, undecided, and in
action indecisive. The differentiation between them lies in the dramatic
motive. Of Amintor the mainspring is the doctrine of the divinity of
kings; he cannot be disloyal even to the king who has duped him and made
of him a "fence" for his wife's adultery. Of Leucippus the mainspring is
filial piety--disloyalty would mean surrendering his father to an
incestuous and vengeful woman. Of Philaster the mainspring is the duty
of revolt for the recovery of his ancestral throne. In _Philaster_ and
_Cupid's Revenge_ Beaumont's tyrants are sonorific yet shadowy forms;
but the king of the _Maides Tragedy_ is a thoroughly visualized monster,
and Arbaces in _A King and No King_ stands as an epitome of
progressively developed, concrete personality, absolutely distinct from
any other figure on Beaumont's stage. In the construction of Evadne and
Bacha a similar skill in evolution and individualization is displayed.
The latter is an abnormality grown from lust to overweening ambition;
the former never loses our sympathy: in her depravity there is the seed
of conscience; through shame and love she wins a soul; the crime by
which at last she would redeem herself leaves her no longer futile but
half-way heroic; and her pleading for Amintor's love, her self-murder,
fix her in memory among those squandered souls that have known no
happiness--whose misery or whose shame is merged and made beautiful in
the pity of it all.
Of his braggarts and poltroons Beaumont is profuse: the best are Bessus
and Calianax, so far as they have not been reduced to horse-play by
another hand. For Pharamond we are indebted as much to Fletcher as to
Beaumont. The Jonsonian humours of Beaumont's braggarts, excellent as
they may be, are not more clearly marked nor better drawn than those of
many of his other characters, the misogynist, the retributive Oriana,
and the gourmand-parasite, in his youthful comedy of _The Woman-Hater_,
or the devil-may-care Merrythought, Luce, the grocer and his wife, and
in fact every convulsing caricature in his matchless _Knight of the
Burning Pestle_. Of Beaumont's effectiveness in satire and burlesque,
enough has already been said. His laughter is genial but not uproarious:
he chuckles; he lifts the eyebrow, but seldom sneers. With the Gascon he
vapours; with the love-lorn languishing, simpers; with the heroic
Captain of Mile End, whiffles and--tongue in cheek--struts and throws a
turkey-step; with the jovial roisterer he hiccoughs and wipes his mouth.
Homely wit, bathos, and the grotesque he fixes as on a film, and makes
no comment; fustian he parodies; affectation he feeds with banter. For
the inflated he cherishes a noiseless, most exiguous bodkin.
As to the matter of technique we have observed that the clear and
comprehensive expositions of the joint-plays are generally
Beaumont's,--for instance, those of _The Maides Tragedy_, _Philaster_,
_King and No King_, and _The Scornful Ladie_; that in the tragedies and
tragicomedies the sensational reversals of fortune, as well as the
cumulative suspenses and reliefs of the closing scenes, are in nearly
all cases his; and that in the tragicomedies the shifting of interest
from the strictly tragic and universal to the more individual--pathetic,
romantic, and comic--emotions, is also his. The conviction of Evadne by
her brother is an exception: that is the work of Fletcher; but her
contrition in the presence of Amintor is again Beaumont's. What he was
capable of in romantic comedy is shown by his '_Ricardo and Viola_'
episode. He cared much more for romance than for intrigue; and he found
his romance in persons of common life as readily as among those of
elevated station. In his share of the comedies of intrigue he shows, as
elsewhere, that he was capable of Elizabethan bubukles, but ludicrous
not lecherous. Above all, he delighted in interweaving with the romantic
and sentimental that which partook of the pastoral, the pathetic, and
the heroic. And we have noticed that, through the heroic and
melodramatic, his more serious plays pass into the atmosphere of court
life and spectacular display.
As for Fletcher's share in the dramas written in partnership with
Beaumont, little need be said by way of summary. He bulks large in the
comedies of intrigue, _The Scornful Ladie_ and _The Coxcombe_; and
especially in the sections of plot that are carnal, trivial, or
unnatural. He is in them just what he is in his own _Monsieur Thomas_
and his pornographic _Captaine_--in the latter of which, if Beaumont had
any share at all it is unconvincing to me, save possibly as regards the
one appalling scene of which I have spoken some five chapters back. To
the tragedies and "dramatic romances" or tragicomedies Fletcher did not
contribute one-third as much as his co-worker. As in the murder-scene of
_The Maides Tragedy_ he displays the dramaturgy of spectacular violence,
so in the scene between Melantius and Evadne, the power of dramatic
invective. But his aim is not the furtherance of interest by the dynamic
unfolding of personality, or by the propulsion of plot through interplay
of complicated motives or emotions, it is the immediate captivation of
the spectator by rapidity and variety: by brisk, lucid, and witty
dialogue, by bustle of action and multiplicity of conventional device,
as in _Cupids Revenge_. Few of his scenes are vital; most are clever
histrionic inlays, subsidiary to the main action, or complementary and
explanatory, as in _Philaster_ and _A King and No King_. His characters
move with all the ease of perfect mechanism; but they are made, not
born. It follows that, in the more serious of the joint-dramas, the
principal personages are much less indebted to his invention than has
ordinarily been supposed. In the comedies of intrigue, on the other
hand, conventional types of the stage or of the theatre-going London
world, especially the fashionable and the Bohemian provinces thereof,
owe their existence chiefly to him. Blackguards, wittols, colourless
tricksters, roaring captains, gallants, debauchees, lechers, bawds,
libidinous wives, sophisticated maidens who preen themselves with
meticulous virtue but not with virtuous thoughts, all these people the
scenes which Fletcher contributed to the joint-comedies. And some of
them thrust their faces into the romantic plays and tragedies as well.
Fletcher's most important contribution to the drama, his masterly and
vital contribution, is to be found in his later work; and of that I have
elsewhere treated,[255] and shall have yet a word to say here.
Of the Beaumont-Fletcher plays the distinctive dramaturgy as well as the
essential poetry are Beaumont's, and these are worthy of the praise
bestowed by his youthful contemporary, John Earle:
So new, so fresh, so nothing trod upon,
And all so born within thyself, thine own.
_The Maske_, _The Woman-Hater_, and _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_
should appear in a volume bearing Beaumont's name. And for the
partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher, perhaps, some day,
Some publisher will further justice do
And print their _six_ plays in one volume too.
FOOTNOTES:
[254] Thorndike, _Influence of B. and F._, p. 123.
[255] _The Fellows and Followers of Shakespeare_, Part Two, in
_Representative English Comedies_, Vol. III, now in press.