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 XXIII

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS

With the tests which have thus been described we are equipped for an examination of the plays written before 1616, which have, in these latter days, been with some show of evidence regarded as the joint-production of the "two wits and friends."[180] While attempting to separate the composition of one author from that of the other, we may determine the dramatic peculiarities of each during the course of the partnership, and obtain a fairly definite basis for an historical and literary appreciation of the plays, individually considered.

1.—Of the Foure Playes, or Morall Representations, in One (first published as by Beaumont and Fletcher in the folio of 1647, but without indication of first performance or of acting company), the last two, The Triumph of Death and The Triumph of Time, are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedly Fletcher's and have been assigned to him by all critics. The Triumph of Death is studded with alliterations and with repetitions of the effective word:

Oh I could curse
And crucify myself for childish doting
Upon a face that feeds not with fresh figures
Every fresh hour;

and with triplets:

What new body
And new face must I make me, with new manners;

and with the resonant "all":

Make her all thy heaven,
And all thy joy, for she is all thy happiness;

and with Fletcher's favourite words and his nouns in apposition, rhetorical questions, afterthoughts, verbal enumerations, and turgid exposition. The same may be said of The Triumph of Time. As there is less of the redundant epithet than in The Faithfull Shepheardesse (1609), but more than in Philaster (before July 12, 1610), I am of the opinion that Fletcher's contribution to the Triumphs falls chronologically between those plays. As Fletcher matures he prunes his adjectives.

The rest of these Morall Representations display neither the verse nor the rhetoric of Fletcher. On the basis of verse-tests Boyle assigns them to Beaumont. Macaulay says, "probably,"—and adds the Induction. But Oliphant, taking into consideration also the rhetorical and dramatic qualities, gives the Induction and The Triumph of Honour to a third author, Nathaniel Field, and only The Triumph of Love to Beaumont. As to the Induction and The Triumph of Honour I agree with Oliphant. They are full of polysyllabic Latinisms such as Field uses in his Woman is a Weather-cocke (entered for publication November 23, 1611) and Beaumont never uses: 'to participate affairs,' 'torturous engine,' etc.; and they are marked by simpler Fieldian expressions 'wale,' 'gyv'd,' 'blown man,' 'miskill,' 'vane,' 'lubbers,' 'urned,' and a score of others not found anywhere in Beaumont's undoubted writings. A few words, like 'basilisk' and 'loathed' suggest Beaumont, as does the verse; but this may be explained by vogue or imitation. Field was two or three years younger than Beaumont, and had played as a boy actor in one or more of the early Beaumont and Fletcher productions. His Woman is a Weather-cocke and his Amends for Ladies indicate the influence of Beaumont in matters of comic invention, poetic hyperbole, burlesque and pathos, as well as in metrical style. The Honour is a somewhat bombastic, puerile, magic-show written in manifest imitation of Beaumont's verse and rhetoric.

As to The Triumph of Love, I go further than Oliphant. I assign at least half of it, viz., scenes 1, 2, and 6, on the basis of diction, to Field. In scenes 3, 4, and 5, I find some trace of Beaumont's favourite expressions, of his thoughts of destiny and death and woman's tenderness, his poetic spontaneity, his sensational dramatic surprises; but I think these are an echo. The rural scene lacks his exquisite simplicity; and some of the words are not of his vocabulary. One is sorry to strike from the list of Beaumont's creations the pathetic and almost impressive figure of Violante. If it was originally Beaumont's, it is of his earlier work revamped by Field; if it is Field's, it is an echo simulating the voice, but missing the reality, of Beaumont's Aspatia, Bellario, Urania. This criticism holds true of both the Triumphs, Love and Honour.

The commonly accepted date, 1608, for the composition of the Foure Playes in One is derived from Fleay, who mistakenly quotes a reference in the 1619 quarto of The Yorkshire Tragedy to the Foure Playes as if it were of the 1608 quarto where the reference does not appear.[181] While Fletcher may have written the first draft of his contribution before the middle of 1610, it is evident from Field's Address To the Reader in the first quarto of the Woman is a Weather-cocke (entered S. R., November 23, 1611), that Field's contribution was made after November 23, 1611. In that Address he makes it plain that this is his first dramatic effort: "I have been vexed with vile plays myself a great while, hearing many; now I thought to be even with some, and they should hear mine too." We have already noticed[182] that Field had not written even his Weather-cocke, still less anything in collaboration with Fletcher, at the time of the publication of The Faithfull Shepheardesse (between January and July, 1609); for in his complimentary poem for the quarto of that "Pastorall," Field acknowledges his unknown name and his Muse in swaddling clouts, and timidly confesses his ambition to write something like The Shepheardesse, "including a Morallitie, Sweete and profitable." That Field's contribution to the Foure Playes was not made before the date of the first performance of The Weather-cocke by the Revels' Children at Whitefriars, i. e., January 4, 1610 to Christmas 1610-11 (when its presentation before the King at Whitehall probably took place), further appears from his dedication To Any Woman that hath been no Weather-cocke (quarto, 1611) in which he alludes not to The Triumph of Honour, or of Love, but to Amends for Ladies, as his "next play," then on the stocks, and, he thought, soon to be printed.[183] The evidence, external and internal, amply presented by Oliphant, Thorndike, and others, but with a view to conclusions different from mine as to date and authorship, confirms me in the belief that Fletcher's Time and Death, though written at least two years earlier, were not gathered up with Field's Induction, Honour, and Love, into the Foure Playes in One until about 1612; and that the series was performed at Whitefriars by Field's company of the Queen's Revels' Children, shortly after they had first acted Cupid's Revenge at the same theatre.

2.—Of the remaining ten plays in which, according to the historical evidence adduced by various critics, Beaumont could have collaborated, at least two furnish no material that can be of service for the estimation of his qualities. If Love's Cure was written as early as the date of certain references in the story, viz., 1605-1609, it is so overlaid by later alteration that whether, as the textual experts guess, it be Beaumont's revised by Massinger, or Fletcher's revised by Massinger and others, or Massinger and Middleton's, or Beaumont's with the assistance of Fletcher and revised by Massinger, Beaumont for us is indeterminate. Fleay, Oliphant, and others trace him in a few prose scenes, and in two or three of verse.[184] But where the rhetorical and dramatic manner occasionally suggest him, or the metre has somewhat of his stamp, words abound that I find in no work of his undisputed composition. The servant, Lazarillo, like him of Beaumont's Woman-Hater, is a glutton, but he does not speak Beaumont's language. The scenes ascribed to Beaumont reek with an excremental and sexual vulgarity to which Beaumont never condescended, unless for brief space, and when absolutely necessary for characterization. And there is little, indeed, that bespeaks Fletcher. Love's Cure was first attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher at a "reviving of the play" after they were both dead; and it was not printed till 1647. It is not unlikely, as G. C. Macaulay holds, that the play was written by Massinger, in or after 1622.

3.—As to that comedy of prostitution, with occasional essays on the special charms of cuckoldry, The Captaine (acted in 1613, maybe as early as 1611, and by the King's Company) there is no convincing external proof of Beaumont's authorship. It is, on the contrary, assigned to Fletcher by one of his younger contemporaries, Hills, whose attributions of such authorship are frequently correct; and its accent throughout is more clearly that of Fletcher than of any other dramatist. The critics are agreed that it is not wholly his, however; and G. C. Macaulay in especial conjectures the presence of Massinger. The verse and prose of a few scenes[185] do not preclude the possibility of Beaumont's coöperation; but I find in them no vestige of his faith in sweet innocence; and in only one,—the awful episode (IV, 5), in which the Father seeks his wanton daughter in a house of shame and would kill her,—his imaginative elevation or his dramatic creativity.