Francis Beaumont: Dramatist / A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, / And of His Association with John Fletcher

by Charles Mills Gayley

CHAPTER XXI

BEAUMONT'S DICTION

From a consideration of Beaumont's work in his poems, in his Maske and Woman-Hater, and such portions of the three unquestioned Beaumont-Fletcher plays as are marked by his idiosyncrasies of versification, we may arrive at conclusions concerning his diction, rhetorical and poetic.

1. Rhetorical Peculiarities in General.

Beaumont's frequent use in prose of the enclitics 'do' and 'did' has been observed by students of his style. The same peculiarity marks his verse, and occasionally enables the reader to determine the authorship of passages where the metrical tests are inconclusive. His rhetoric is sometimes of the repetitive order, but, as Oliphant has indicated, rather for ends of word-play and irony than for mere expansion as with Fletcher. Such, for instance, is the ironical repetition of a speaker's words by his interlocutor. I note also a tendency to purely dramatic quotation, not common in Fletcher's writing,—e. g., in The Woman-Hater: "Lisping cry 'Good Sir!' and he's thine own"; or "Every one that does not know, cries 'What nobleman is that?'"—and in A King and No King "That hand was never wont to draw a sword, But it cried 'Dead' to something." This test alone, if we had not others of rhetoric and metre, would go far to deciding the respective contributions of our authors to the personality of Captain Bessus in the latter play. The Bessus of the first three acts, undoubtedly Beaumont's, is resonant with such cries and conversational citations; the Bessus of the last two, in a rôle almost as extensive, uses the device but once. Beaumont sometimes indulges in enumerative sentences; but the enumerations are generally in prose and (it will be recalled that he was a member of the Inner Temple) of a mock-legal character, not mere redundancies of detail such as we find in Fletcher. Among other peculiarities of expression is his frequent employment of 'ha' as an interrogative interjection.

2. Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures.

Beaumont is especially fond of the following words and phrasal variations:—The 'basilisk' with his 'deaddoing eye,' 'venom,' 'infect,' 'infection' and 'infectious,' 'corrupt,' 'leprosy,' 'vild,' 'crosses' (for 'misfortunes'), 'crossed' and 'crossly matched,' 'perplex,' 'distracted,' 'starts' (for 'surprises' and 'fitful changes'), 'miseries,' 'griefs,' 'garlands,' 'cut,' 'shoot,' 'dissemble,' 'loathed,' 'salve' (as noun and verb), 'acquaint' and 'acquaintance,' to 'article,' 'pull,' 'piece,' 'frail' and 'frailty,' 'mortal' and 'mortality,' 'fate' and 'destiny,' to 'blot' from earth or memory, 'after-ages,' 'instruments' (for 'servants'). Of his repeated use of 'hills,' 'caves,' 'mines,' 'seas,' 'thunder,' 'beast,' 'bull,' we shall have further exemplification when we consider his figures of speech.

He is forever playing phrasal variations upon the words 'piece,' and 'little.' The former is a mannerism of the day, already availed of by Shakespeare in Lear, 'O ruined piece of nature,' and frequently in Antony and Cleopatra, and later repeated in the Tempest and Winter's Tale. So with Beaumont, Arethusa is a 'poor piece of earth'; 'every maid in love will have a piece' of Philaster; Oriana is a 'precious piece of sly damnation,' 'that pleasing piece of frailty we call woman.' Or the word is used literally for 'limb':—'I'll love those pieces you have cut away.'—Beaumont, I may say in passing, delights in cutting bodies 'into motes,' and sending 'limbs through the land.'—'Little' he affects, making it pathetic and even more diminutive in conjunction with 'that': Euphrasia would 'keep that little piece I hold of life.' 'It is my fate,' proclaims Amintor,

To bear and bow beneath a thousand griefs
To keep that little credit with the world;

and so, 'that little passion,' 'that little training,' 'these little wounds,' ad libitum. Somewhat akin is the poet's use of 'kind': 'a kind of love in her to me'; 'a kind of healthful joy.' His heroines good and bad are given to introspection: they have 'acquaintance' with themselves. 'After you were gone,' says Bellario, 'I grew acquainted with my heart'; and Bacha in Cupid's Revenge in a scene undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse 'loathes' herself and is 'become another woman; one, methinks, with whom I want acquaintance.'

While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his figures of poetry, or tropes, are generally of the more creative kind,—metaphor, personification, metonymy,—and these are very often heightened into that figure of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His comparisons deal in a striking degree with elemental phenomena: hills, caves, stones, rocks, seas, winds, flames, thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are reminiscential of country life. In each play some hero declaims of 'the only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason'; and inevitably enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined' of beasts, and illustrates by custom and passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull—especially bull. When the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull of Phalaris charges in. But Beaumont prefers nature: his images are sweet with April and violets and dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn 'moved with a stiff gale'—their heads bowing 'all one way.' From the manufacture of books he borrows two metaphors, 'printing' and 'blotting,' and plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints' wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her 'thoughts in lawn'; Amintor will 'print a thousand wounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks And make no man worthy for her to take.' With similar frequency recur 'blotted from earth,' 'blotted from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'

The younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently as Fletcher, but in a more poetic way. He vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with figurative verbs—'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'I feel a grief shoot suddenly through all my veins' cries Amintor; and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt into me.' 'I feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders Arbaces. Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it springs'; Amintor welcomes the hand that should 'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can cut from man's remembrance.' Similar metaphorical constructions abound, such as 'pluck me back from my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus' speeches in Beaumont's part of Cupid's Revenge; and in a speech of Melantius 'I did a deed that plucked five years from time' in The Maides Tragedy. Personified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural with Beaumont:—'Nothing but a multitude of walking griefs.' It is a mistake to suppose, as some do, that passages written in Beaumont's metrical style are not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger, black Despair, Pride, Wantonness, figure in his verse in The Woman-Hater; Chance, Death, and Fortune in The Knight; Death, Victory, and Friendship, in The Maides Tragedy; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality, Nature in Philaster; and so on.

No dramatist since the day of Kyd and Marlowe has more frequent or violent resort to hyperbole. His heroes call on 'seas to quench the fires' they 'feel,' and 'snows to quench their rising flames'; they will 'drink off seas' and 'yet have unquenched fires left' in their breasts; they 'wade through seas of sins'; they 'set hills on hills' and 'scale them all, and from the utmost top fall' on the necks of foes, 'like thunder from a cloud'; or they 'discourse to all the underworld the worth' of those they love. 'From his iron den' they'll 'waken Death, and hurl him' on lascivious kings. Arethusa's heart is 'mines of adamant to all the world beside,' but to her lover 'a lasting mine of joy'; her breath 'sweet as Arabian winds when fruits are ripe'; her breasts 'two liquid ivory balls.' Evadne will sooner 'find out the beds of snakes,' and 'with her youthful blood warm their cold flesh 'than accede to Amintor's desires. 'The least word' that Panthea speaks 'is worth a life.' 'The child, this present hour brought forth to see the world, has not a soul more pure' than Oriana's. In one of Beaumont's verse-scenes of The Coxcombe, Ricardo, reinstated in his Viola's esteem, would have some woman 'take an everlasting pen' into her hand, 'and grave in paper more lasting than the marble monuments' the matchless virtues of women to posterities. And as for Bellario's worth to Philaster,—

'T is not the treasure of all Kings in one,
The wealth of Tagus, nor the rocks of pearl
That pave the court of Neptune, can weigh down
That virtue.

Echoes not of Kyd and Marlowe only, but of Shakespeare from Romeo to Hamlet and Macbeth, reverberate in the magniloquent hyperbole of Beaumont.

Beaumont has more ejaculations than Fletcher, but fewer optatives. He is chary of rhetorical questions, and his exclamations run by preference into some figured hyperbole. He appeals less frequently than Fletcher to 'all the gods,' but very often to 'the gods,' 'good gods,' 'ye gods,' 'some god.' He refers, in conformity with his deterministic view of life, with particular preference to the 'just gods,' the 'powers that must be just,' the 'powers above,' 'ye better powers,' 'Heaven and the powers divine,' 'you heavenly powers,' the 'powers that rule us'; and all these he uses in attestation. An oath distinctive of him is 'By my vexed soul!' In his hyperboles, Hell and devils play their part; but not in oath so frequently as with Fletcher.

3. Lines of Inevitable Poetry.

Similarly noticeable is Beaumont's faculty for 'simple poetic phrasing.' The elevated passion, the sudden glory,—and the large utterance of brief sentence and single verse, have been remarked by critics from his contemporary, John Earle, who wrote in commendation:

Such strength, such sweetness couched in every line,
Such life of fancy, such high choice of brain,

down to G. C. Macaulay, Herford, and Alden of the present day. No reader, even the most cursory, can fail to be impressed by the completeness of that one line (in his lament for Elizabeth Sidney),

Sorrow can make a verse without a Muse,—

by the 'unassuming beauty' of Viola's loneliness (in his subplot of The Coxcombe),

All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower
Droops now as well as I;—

by the sublimity of those few words to the repentant lover,

All the forgiveness I can make you is to love you;—

by the superb simplicity of Bellario's scorn of life, in Philaster,

'T is but a piece of childhood thrown away,

and the finality of her definition of death (which, as if in premonition of his too sudden fate, is characteristic of Beaumont),—

'T is less than to be born; a lasting sleep;
A quiet resting from all jealousy,
A thing we all pursue; I know, besides,
It is but giving over of a game
That must be lost;—

by the pathetic irony of Aspatia's farewell to love in The Maides Tragedy,

So with my prayers I leave you, and must try
Some yet-unpractis'd way to grieve and die;

and the heroism (in Cupid's Revenge, the final scene, undoubtedly of Beaumont's verse) of Urania's confession to Leucippus,

I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught;

by Panthea's cry of horror, in A King and No King,

I feel a sin growing upon my blood;

and by those flashes of incomparable verity that intensify the gloom of The Maides Tragedy: Amintor's

Those have most power to hurt us, that we love;
We lay our sleeping lives within their arms;

and after Evadne's death,

My soul grows weary of her house, and I
All over am a trouble to myself;—

by the wounded Aspatia's

I shall sure live, Amintor, I am well;
A kind of healthful joy wanders within me;

and her parting whisper,

Give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down,
And cannot find thee.

This is Nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned poetry of the human heartbreak. Where other than in Shakespeare do we find among the Jacobean poets such verse?

That a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm is not surprising. Instances rare in wisdom and phrasal conciseness are to be encountered on every other page of Beaumont.

It may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical and poetic diction, that, while the vocabulary may not be more varied, it is more intimate, musical, and reverberant than Fletcher's; that the periods, though sometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically broken, as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical and descriptive passages, both complex and balanced of structure,—pregnant of ideas labouring for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo Shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution, crowding of illustration and fresh insistent thought, in a degree utterly foreign to the rhetoric of Fletcher; and that his brief sentences are marked by a direct and final resplendence and simplicity.

In the larger movements of composition the purely poetic quality predominates over the narrative, dramatic or conversational. This characteristic is especially noticeable in declamatory speeches and soliloquies; sometimes idyllic as in Philaster's description of Bellario,—"I found him sitting by a fountain's side,"—or in the well-known "Oh that I had been nourished in these woods with milk of goats and acorns"; often operatic, as in Aspatia's farewells to Amintor and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively surcharged. Beaumont's figures of rhetoric when not hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his poetic tropes are creative, vitalizing. His speakers are self-revelatory: expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection. Their utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely loitering, rather than, by way of dialogue, framed to further the action alone. And yet, when they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary, and abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation; not simply, as with Fletcher, by giving opportunity for stage-business, but by differencing the motive that underlies the action.

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