“Secretary, fetch the gown I used to read petitions in, and the
standish I answer French letters with.”
Many of the comedies are impersonations of what were then called
humors, like the “Little French Lawyer;” and some, like the “Knight of
the Burning Pestle,” mere farces. Nearly all have the merit of being
lively and amusing, which, to one who has read many comedies, is
saying a great deal.
In what I said just now I did not mean that Fletcher does not
sometimes show an almost tragic power, as he constantly does tragic
sensibility. There are glimpses of it in “Thierry and Theodoret,” and
in the death-scene of the little Hengo in “Bonduca.” Perhaps I should
rather say that he can conceive a situation with some true elements of
tragedy, though not of the deepest tragedy, in it; but when he comes
to work it out, and make it visible to us in words, he seems to feel
himself more at home with the pity than the terror of it. His pathos
(and this is true of Beaumont also) is mixed with a sweetness that
grows cloying. And it is always the author who is speaking, and whom
we hear. At best he rises only to a simulated passion, and that leads
inevitably to declamation. There is no pang in it, but rather the hazy
softness of remembered sorrow. Lear on the heath, at parley with the
elements, makes all our pettier griefs contemptible, and the sublime
pathos of that scene abides with us almost like a consolation. It is
not Shakespeare who speaks, but Sorrow herself:--
“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, called you children;
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man:--
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this.”
What confidence of simplicity is this! We call it Greek, but it is
nature, and cosmopolitan as she. That white head and Priam’s--the
one feebly defiant, the other bent humbly over the murderous hand of
Achilles--are our sufficing epitomes of desolate old age. There is
no third. Generally pity for ourselves mingles insensibly with our
pity for others, but here--what are we in the awful presence of these
unexampled woes? The sorrows of Beaumont and Fletcher’s personages have
almost as much charm as sadness in them, and we think of the poet more
than of the sufferer. Yet his emotion is genuine, and we feel it to be
so even while we feel also that it leaves his mind free to think about
it, and the dainty expression he will give to it. Beaumont and Fletcher
appeal to this self-pity of which I just spoke by having the air of
saying, “How would _you_ feel in a situation like this?” I am not now
speaking of their poetical quality. That is constant and unfailing,
especially in Fletcher. In judging them as poets, the question would
be, not _what_ they said, but _how_ they said it.
How early the two poets came to London is uncertain. They had already
made Ben Jonson’s acquaintance in 1607. Their first joint play,
“Philaster, or Love lies a-bleeding,” was produced in 1608. I suppose
this play is more generally known than any other of theirs, and the
characteristic passages have a charm that is perhaps never found less
mixed with baser matter in any other of the plays which make up the
collection known as the Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and they bear
the supreme test of being read over again many times without loss of
freshness. Philaster is son and heir to a King of Sicily, but robbed of
his rights by the King of Calabria. This King has a daughter, Arethusa,
secretly in love with Philaster, as he with her, but destined by her
father to marry Pharamond, a Spanish Prince. Euphrasia, daughter of
Dion, an honest courtier, is also in love with Philaster, and has
entered his service disguised as a page, under the name of Bellario.
Arethusa makes her love known to Philaster, who, in order that they
may have readier means of communicating with each other, transfers
Bellario to her. Thyra, a very odious lady of the court, spreads a
report that Arethusa and her handsome page have been too intimate.
Philaster believes this slander, and this leads to many complications.
Arethusa dismisses Bellario. Philaster refuses to take him back. They
all meet in a convenient forest, where Philaster is about to kill
Arethusa at her own earnest entreaty, when he is prevented by a clown
who is passing. The King, finding his daughter wounded, is furious, and
orders instant search for the assassin. Bellario insists that he is
the criminal. He and Philaster are put under arrest; the Princess asks
to be their jailer. The people rise in insurrection, and rescue him.
It then turns out that he and Arethusa have been quietly married. Of
course the play turns out with the discovery of Bellario’s sex and the
King’s consent to everything.
I have said that it is hazardous to attempt dividing the work of
Beaumont and Fletcher where they worked together. Both, of course, are
to blame for what is the great blot on the play,--Philaster’s ready
belief, I might well say eager belief, in the guilt of the Princess.
One of his speeches is positively monstrous in infamous suggestion.
Coleridge says: “Beaumont and Fletcher always write as if virtue or
goodness were a sort of talisman or strange something that might be
lost without the least fault on the part of the owner. In short, their
chaste ladies value their chastity as a material thing, not as an act
or state of being; and this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that
all their women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a
few irrational humorists.... Hence the frightful contrast between their
women (even those who are meant to be virtuous) and Shakespeare’s.”
There is some truth in this, but it is extravagant. Beaumont and
Fletcher have drawn pure women. Both Bellario and Arethusa are so. So
is Aspatia. They had coarse and even animal notions of women, it is
true, but we must, in judging what they meant their women to be, never
forget that coarseness of phrase is not always coarseness of thought.
Women were allowed then to talk about things and to use words now
forbidden outside the slums. Decency changes its terms, though not its
nature, from one age to another. This is a partial excuse for Beaumont
and Fletcher, but they sin against that decorum of the intellect and
conscience which is the same in all ages. In “Women Pleased” Claudio
disguises himself, and makes love to his married sister Isabella in
order to test her chastity.
The question as to the authorship of “The Two Noble Kinsmen” has an
interest perhaps even greater than that concerning the shares of
Beaumont and Fletcher respectively in the plays they wrote together,
because in this case a part is attributed to Shakespeare. “The Two
Noble Kinsmen” was first published in 1634, and ascribed on the
title-page to “the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John F. and
Mr. W. S.” That Fletcher’s name should have been put first is not
surprising, if we remember his great popularity. He seems for a time to
have been more fashionable than Shakespeare, especially with the young
bloods fresh from the University and of the Inns of Court. They appear
to have thought that he knew the world, in their limited understanding
of the word, better than his great predecessor. The priority of name on
the title-page, if not due to this, probably indicated that the greater
part of the play was from the hand of Fletcher. Opinion has been
divided, with a leaning on the part of the weightier judges towards
giving a greater or less share to Shakespeare. I think the verdict
must be the Scottish one of “not proven.” On the one hand, the play
could not have been written earlier than 1608, and it seems extremely
improbable that Shakespeare, then at the height of his fame, and in
all the splendid maturity of his powers and of his mastery over them,
should have become the junior partner of a younger man. Nor can he be
supposed to have made the work over and adapted it to the stage, for he
appears to have abandoned that kind of work long before. But we cannot
suppose the play to be so early as 1608, for the parts admitted on all
hands to be Fletcher’s are in his maturer manner. Yet there are some
passages which seem to be above his reach, and might lead us to suppose
Fletcher to have deliberately imitated Shakespeare’s manner; but that
he never does, though indebted to him for many suggestions. There is
one speech in the play which is certainly very like Shakespeare’s in
the way it grows, and beginning with a series of noble images, deepens
into philosophic thought at the close. And yet I am not altogether
convinced, for Fletcher could heighten his style when he thought fit,
and when the subject fully inspired him.
Beaumont and Fletcher undoubtedly owed a part of their immediate renown
to the fact that they were looked upon as gentlemen and scholars. Not
that they put on airs of gentility, as their disciple Ford was fond of
doing a little later, and as Horace Walpole, Byron, and even Landor
did. They frankly gave their address in Grub Street, so far as we know.
But they certainly seem to have been set up, as being artists and men
of the world, not perhaps as rivals of Shakespeare, but in favorable
comparison with one who was supposed to owe everything to nature.
I believe that Pope, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare,
was the first to express doubts about the wisdom of accepting too
literally what Ben Jonson says of his “little Latin and less Greek.”
However that may be, and I am inclined to think Shakespeare had more
learning even, not to say knowledge, than is commonly allowed him,
it is singular that the man whose works show him to have meditated
deeply on whatever interests human thought, should have been supposed
never to have given his mind to the processes of his own craft. But
this comparison of him with Beaumont and Fletcher suggests one remark
of some interest, namely, that not only are his works by far more
cleanly in thought and phrase than those of any of his important
contemporaries, except Marlowe, not only are his men more manly and his
women more womanly than theirs, but that his types also of gentlemen
and ladies are altogether beyond any they seem to have been capable of
conceiving.
Of the later dramatists, I think Beaumont and Fletcher rank next
to Shakespeare in the amount of pleasure they give, though not in
the quality of it, and in fanciful charm of expression. In spite of
all their coarseness, there is a delicacy, a sensibility, an air of
romance, and above all a grace, in their best work that make them
forever attractive to the young, and to all those who have learned to
grow old amiably. Imagination, as Shakespeare teaches us to know it,
we can hardly allow them, but they are the absolute lords of some of
the fairest provinces in the domain of fancy. Their poetry is genuine,
spontaneous, and at first hand. As I turn over the leaves of an
edition which I read forty-five years ago, and see, by the passages
underscored, how much I enjoyed, and remember with whom, so many happy
memories revive, so many vanished faces lean over the volume with me,
that I am prone to suspect myself of yielding to an enchantment that is
not in the book itself. But no, I read Beaumont and Fletcher through
again last autumn, and the eleven volumes of Dyce’s edition show even
more pencil marks than the two of Darley had gathered in repeated
readings. The delight they give, the gayety they inspire, are all their
own. Perhaps one cause of this is their lavishness, their lightsome
ease, their happy confidence in resources that never failed them.
Their minds work without that reluctant break which pains us in most
of the later dramatists. They had that pleasure in writing which gives
pleasure in reading, and deserve our gratitude because they promote
cheerfulness, or, even when gravest, a pensive melancholy that, if it
does not play with sadness, never takes it too seriously.