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 XXVII

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.