(1584-1616) (1579-1625)
"The names of Beaumont and Fletcher," says Lowell, in his lectures on
'Old English Dramatists,' "are as inseparably linked together as those
of Castor and Pollux. They are the double star of our poetical
firmament, and their beams are so indissolubly mingled that it is vain
to attempt any division of them that shall assign to each his rightful
share." Theirs was not that dramatic collaboration all too common among
the lesser Elizabethan dramatists, at a time when managers, eager to
satisfy a restless public incessantly clamoring for novelty, parceled
out single acts or even scenes of a play among two or three playwrights,
to put together a more or less congruous piece of work. Beaumont and
Fletcher joined partnership, not from any outward necessity, but
inspired by a common love of their art and true congeniality of mind.
Unlike many of their brother dramatists, whom the necessities of a lowly
origin drove to seek a livelihood in writing for the theatres, Beaumont
and Fletcher were of gentle birth, and sprung from families eminent at
the bar and in the Church.
[Illustration: Francis Beaumont]
Beaumont was born at Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire, 1584, the son of a
chief justice. His name is first mentioned as a gentleman commoner at
Broadgate Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford. At sixteen he was entered
a member of the Inner Temple, but the dry facts of the law did not
appeal to his romantic imagination. Nowhere in his work does he draw
upon his barrister's experience to the extent that makes the plays of
Middleton, who also knew the Inner Temple at first hand, a storehouse of
information in things legal. His feet soon strayed, therefore, into the
more congenial fields of dramatic invention.
Fletcher was born in Rye, Sussex, the son of a minister who later became
Bishop of London. Giles Fletcher the Younger, and Phineas Fletcher, both
well-known poets in their day, were his cousins. His early life is as
little known as that of Beaumont, and indeed as the lives of most of the
other Elizabethan dramatists. He was a pensioner at Benet College, now
Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in 1591, and in 1593 he was "Bible-clerk"
there. Then we hear nothing of him until 'The Woman Hater' was brought
out in 1607. The play has been ascribed to Beaumont alone, to Fletcher
alone, and to the two jointly. Whoever may be the author, it is the
firstling of his dramatic muse, and worth merely a passing mention. How
or when their literary friendship began is not known; but since both
were friends of Jonson, both prefixing commendatory verses to the great
realist's play of 'The Fox,' it is fair to assume that through him they
were brought together, and that both belonged to that brilliant circle
of wits, poets, and dramatists who made famous the gatherings at the
Mermaid Inn.
They lived in the closest intimacy on the Bankside, near the Globe
Theatre in Southwark, sharing everything in common, even the bed, and
some say their clothing,--which is likely enough, as it can be
paralleled without going back three centuries. It is certain that the
more affluent circumstances of Beaumont tided his less fortunate friend
over many a difficulty; and the astonishing dramatic productivity of
Fletcher's later period was probably due to Beaumont's untimely death,
making it necessary for Fletcher to rely on his pen for support.
In 1613 Beaumont's marriage to a Kentish heiress put an end to the
communistic bachelor establishment. He died March 6th, 1616, not quite
six weeks before Shakespeare, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Fletcher survived him nine years, dying of the plague in 1625. He was
buried, not by the side of the poet with whose name his own is forever
linked, but at St. Saviour's, Southwark.
"A student of physiognomy," says Swinburne, "will not fail to mark the
points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two
friends; both models of noble manhood.... Beaumont the statelier and
serener of the two, with clear, thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and
strong aquiline nose, with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and
beautiful mouth, with full and finely curved lips; the form of face a
very pure oval, and the imperial head, with its 'fair large front' and
clustering hair, set firm and carried high with an aspect of quiet
command and knightly observation. Fletcher with more keen and fervid
face, sharper in outline every way, with an air of bright ardor and
glad, fiery impatience; sanguine and nervous, suiting the complexion and
color of hair; the expression of the eager eyes and lips almost rivaling
that of a noble hound in act to break the leash it strains at;--two
heads as lordly of feature and as expressive of aspect as any gallery of
great men can show."
It may not be altogether fanciful to transfer this description of their
physical bearing to their mental equipment, and draw some conclusions as
to their several endowments and their respective share in the work that
goes under their common name. Of course it is impossible to draw hard
and fast lines of demarkation, and assign to each poet his own words.
They, above all others, would probably have resented so dogmatic a
procedure, and affirmed the dramas to be their joint offspring,--even as
a child partakes of the nature of both its parents.
Their plays are organic structures, with well worked-out plots and for
the most part well-sustained characters. They present a complete fusion
of the different elements contributed by each author; never showing that
agglomeration of incongruous matter so often found among the work of the
lesser playwrights, where each hand can be singled out and held
responsible for its share. Elaborate attempts, based on verse tests,
have been made to disentangle the two threads of their poetic fabric.
These attempts show much patient analysis, and are interesting as
evidences of ingenuity; but they appeal more to the scholar than to the
lover of poetry. Yet a sympathetic reading and a comparison of the plays
professedly written by Fletcher alone, after Beaumont's death, with
those jointly produced by them in the early part of Fletcher's career,
shows the different qualities of mind that went to the making of the
work, and the individual characteristics of the men that wrote it. Here
Swinburne's eloquence gives concreteness to the picture.
In the joint plays there is a surer touch, a deeper, more pathetic note,
a greater intensity of emotion; there is more tragic pathos and passion,
more strong genuine humor, nobler sentiments. The predominance of these
graver, sweeter qualities may well be attributed to Beaumont's
influence. Although a disciple of Jonson in comedy, he was a close
follower of Shakespeare in tragedy, and a student of the rhythms and
metres of Shakespeare's second manner,--of the period that saw 'Hamlet,'
'Macbeth,' and the plays clustering around them. Too great a poet
himself merely to imitate, Beaumont yet felt the influence of that still
greater poet who swayed every one of the later dramatists, with the
single exception perhaps of Jonson. But in pure comedy, mixed with farce
and mock-heroic parody, he belongs to the school of "rare Ben."
Fletcher, on the other hand, is more brilliant, more rapid and supple,
readier in his resources, of more startling invention. He has an
extraordinary swiftness and fluency of speech; and no other dramatist,
not even Shakespeare, equals him in the remarkable facility with which
he reproduces in light, airy verse the bantering conversations of the
young beaux and court-gentlemen of the time of James I. His peculiar
trick of the redundant syllable at the end of many of his lines is
largely responsible in producing this effect of ordinary speech, that
yet is verse without being prosy. There is a flavor about Fletcher's
work peculiarly its own. He created a new form of mixed comedy and
dramatic romance, dealing with the humors and mischances of men, yet
possessing a romantic coloring. He had great skill in combining his
effects, and threw a fresh charm and vividness over his fanciful world.
The quality of his genius is essentially bright and sunny, and therefore
he is best in his comic and romantic work. His tragedy, although it has
great pathos and passion, does not compel tears, nor does it subdue by
its terror. It lacks the note of inevitableness which is the final
touchstone of tragic greatness.
Their first joint play, 'Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding,' acted in
1608, is in its detached passages the most famous. Among the others,
'The Maid's Tragedy,' produced about the same time, is their finest play
on its purely tragic side, although the plot is disagreeable. 'King and
No King' attracts because of the tender character-drawing of Panthea.
'The Scornful Lady' is noteworthy as the best exponent, outside his own
work, of the school of Jonson on its grosser side. 'The Knight of the
Burning Pestle' is at once a burlesque on knight-errantry and a comedy
of manners.
Among the tragedies presumably produced by Fletcher alone, 'Bonduca' is
one of the best, followed closely by 'The False One,' 'Valentinian,' and
'Thierry and Theodoret.' 'The Chances' and 'The Wild Goose Chase' may be
taken as examples of the whole work on its comic side. 'The Humorous
Lieutenant' is the best expression of the faults and merits of Fletcher,
whose comedies Swinburne has divided into three groups: pure comedies,
heroic or romantic dramas, and mixed comedy and romance. To the first
group belong 'Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,' Fletcher's comic
masterpiece, 'Wit without Money,' 'The Wild Goose Chase,' 'The Chances,'
'The Noble Gentleman.' The second group includes 'The Knight of Malta,'
full of heroic passion and Catholic devotion, 'The Pilgrim,' 'The Loyal
Subject,' 'A Wife for a Month,' 'Love's Pilgrimage,' 'The Lover's
Progress.' The third group comprises 'The Spanish Curate,' 'Monsieur
Thomas,' 'The Custom of the Country,' 'The Elder Brother,' 'The Little
French Lawyer,' 'The Humorous Lieutenant,' 'Women Pleased,' 'Beggar's
Bush,' 'The Fair Maid of the Inn.'
Fletcher had a part with Shakespeare in the 'Two Noble Kinsmen,' and he
wrote also in conjunction with Massinger, Rowley, and others; Shirley,
too, is believed to have finished some of his plays.
Leaving aside Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are the best
dramatic expression of the romantic spirit of Elizabethan England. Their
luxurious, playful fancy delighted in the highly colored, spicy tales of
the Southern imagination which the Renaissance was then bringing into
England. They drew especially upon Spanish material, and their plays are
rightly interpreted only when studied in reference to this Spanish
foundation. But they are at the same time true Englishmen, and above all
true Elizabethans; which is as much as to say that, borne along by the
eager, strenuous spirit of their time, reaching out toward new
sensations and impressions, new countries and customs, and dazzled by
the romanesque and fantastic, they took up this exotic material and made
it acceptable to the English mind. They satisfied the curiosity of their
time, and expressed its surface ideas and longings. This accounts for
their great popularity, which in their day eclipsed even Shakespeare's,
as it accounts also for their shortcomings. They skimmed over the
surface of passion, they saw the pathos and the pity of it but not the
terror; they lacked Shakespeare's profound insight into the well-springs
of human action, and sacrificed truth of life to stage effect. They
shared with him one grave fault which is indeed the besetting sin of
dramatists, resulting in part from the necessarily curt and outline
action of the drama, in part from the love of audiences for strong
emotional effects; namely, the abrupt and unexplained moral revolutions
of their characters. Effects are too often produced without apparent
causes; a novelist has space to fill in the blanks. The sudden
contrition of the usurper in 'As You Like It' is a familiar instance;
Beaumont and Fletcher have plenty as bad. Probably there was more of
this in real life during the Middle Ages, when most people still had
much barbaric instability of feeling and were liable to sudden
revulsions of purpose, than in our more equable society. On the other
hand, virtue often suffers needlessly and acquiescingly.
In their speech they indulged in much license, Fletcher especially; he
was prone to confuse right and wrong. The strenuousness of the earlier
Elizabethan age was passing away, and the relaxing morality of Jacobean
society was making its way into literature, culminating in the entire
disintegration of the time of Charles II., which it is very shallow to
lay entirely to the Puritans. There would have been a time of great
laxity had Cromwell or the Puritan ascendancy never existed. Beaumont
and Fletcher, in their eagerness to please, took no thought of the
after-effects of their plays; morality did not enter into their scheme
of life. Yet they were not immoral, but merely unmoral. They lacked the
high seriousness that gives its permanent value to Shakespeare's tragic
work. They wrote not to embody the everlasting truths of life, as he
did; not because they were oppressed with the weight of a new message
striving for utterance; not because they were aflame with the passion
for the unattainable, as Marlowe; not to lash with the stings of bitter
mockery the follies and vices of their fellow-men, as Ben Jonson; not
primarily to make us shudder at the terrible tragedies enacted by
corrupted hearts, and the needless unending sufferings of persecuted
virtue, as Webster; nor yet to give us a faithful picture of the
different phases of life in Jacobean London, as Dekker, Heywood,
Middleton, and others. They wrote for the very joy of writing, to give
vent to their over-bubbling fancy and their tender feeling.
They are lyrical and descriptive poets of the first order, with a
wonderful ease and grace of expression. The songs scattered throughout
their plays are second only to Shakespeare's. The volume and variety of
their work is astonishing. They left more than fifty-two printed plays,
and all of these show an extraordinary power of invention; the most
diverse passions, characters, and situations enter into the work, their
stories stimulate our curiosity, and their characters appeal to our
sympathies. Especially in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy they have
no superior; their wit and spirit here find freest play. Despite much
coarseness, their work is full of delicate sensibility, and suffused
with a romantic grace of form and a tenderness of expression that
endears them to our hearts, and makes them more lovable than any of
their brother dramatists, with the possible exception of genial Dekker.
The spirit of chivalry breathes through their work, and the gentleman
and scholar is always present. For in contradiction to most of their
fellow-workers, they were not on the stage; they never took part in its
more practical affairs either as actors or managers; they derived the
technical knowledge necessary to a successful playwright from their
intimacy with stage folk.
As poets, aside from their dramatic work, they occupy a secondary place.
Beaumont especially has left, beyond one or two exquisite lyrics, little
that is noteworthy, except some commendatory verses addressed to Jonson.
On the other hand, Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' with Jonson's 'Sad
Shepherd' and Milton's 'Comus,' form that delightful trilogy of the
first pastoral poems in the English language.
The popularity of Beaumont and Fletcher in the seventeenth century, as
compared to that of Shakespeare, has been over-emphasized; for between
1623 and 1685 they have only two folio editions, those of 1647 and 1679,
as against four of Shakespeare. Their position among the Elizabethans is
unique. They did not found a school either in comedy or tragedy.
Massinger, who had more in common with them than any other of the
leading dramatists, cannot be called their disciple; for though he
worked in the same field, he is more sober and severe, more careful in
the construction of his plots, more of a satirist and stern judge of
society. With the succeeding playwrights the decadence of the
Elizabethan drama began.