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 XXVIII

DID THE BEAUMONT 'ROMANCE' INFLUENCE SHAKESPEARE?

Richard Flecknoe, in his Discourse of the English Stage, 1664, thinking rather of the romantic and ornamented quality of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, "full of fine flowers," than of any anticipation in them of the love and honour of plays of the Restoration, says that they were the first to write "in the Heroick way." Symonds calls them the "inventors of the heroical romance." And lately Professor Thorndike[256] and others have conjectured that the Shakespeare of Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest was following the lead of the two younger dramatists in what is attributed to them as a new style of 'dramatic romance' in his dramas. The argument is that Philaster (acted before October 8, 1610) preceded Cymbeline (acted between April 20, 1610 and May 15, 1611), and suggested to Shakespeare a radical change of dramatic method, first manifest in Cymbeline. And that five other "romances by Beaumont and Fletcher," Foure Playes in One, Thierry and Theodoret, The Maides Tragedy, Cupid's Revenge and A King and No King, constituting with Philaster a distinctly new type of drama, were in all probability acted before the close of 1611, and similarly influenced the method of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, also of 1611.

Before discussing the theory of Shakespeare's indebtedness to Philaster and its "Beaumont-Fletcher" successors, I should like to file a two-fold protest; first, against the use of the word 'romance' for any kind of dramatic production, whatever. 'Romance' applies to narrative of heroic, marvellous, and imaginative content, not to drama. The Maides Tragedy and Cupid's Revenge are not romances; they are romantic tragedies. Philaster, A King and No King, and Cymbeline are, of course, romantic; but specifically they are melodramatic tragicomedies of heroic cast. Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are romantic comedies of marvel or adventure. Nothing is gained in criticism by giving them a name which applies, in English, strictly to narrative, or by regarding them as of a different dramatic species from the romantic dramas of Greene and Shakespeare that preceded them. I object, in the second place, to the grouping of the six plays said to constitute "a distinctly new type of drama" under the denomination "dramatic romances of Beaumont and Fletcher"; for in some of them Beaumont had no hand, and in others, the most important, Fletcher's contribution of romantic novelty is altogether secondary, mostly immaterial. With Thierry and Theodoret, for instance, thus loosely called a "Beaumont-Fletcher romance," it is not proved that Beaumont had anything to do. The drama displays nothing of his vocabulary, rhetoric or poetry. It is a later production by Fletcher, Massinger, and probably one other; and is the only play of this tragic-idyllic-romantic type attempted by Fletcher after Beaumont had ceased writing. In three of the Foure Playes in One, Beaumont does not appear. He may possibly be traced in three scenes of The Triumph of Love; but with no certainty. Fletcher, on the other hand, had very little to do with the three great dramas of sensational romance which form the core of the group in question, Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King. As I have shown, he contributed not more than four scenes to Philaster, four to The Maides Tragedy, and five to A King and No King. And, with the exception of two spectacularly violent scenes in The Maides Tragedy, his contribution, so far as writing goes, is supplementary dialogue and histrionic by-play. Whatever is essentially novel, vital, and distinctive is by Beaumont. To Cupid's Revenge Beaumont's contribution was slighter in volume, but without it the play would lack its distinctive quality. If we must cling to the misnomer 'romance' for any group of plays which may have influenced Shakespeare's later comedies, let us limit the group to its Beaumont core, and speak of the 'Beaumont romance.'

The express novelty in technique of the six arbitrarily selected, so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' is supposed to lie in the dramatic adaptation of certain sensational properties more suitable to narrative fiction; especially in the attempt to heighten interest by adding to the legitimate portrayal of character under stress and strain (as in tragedy), or of character in amusing maladjustment with social convention (as in comedy), the portrayal of vicissitudes of fortune; and in the attempt to enhance the thrills appropriate to tragic and comic appeal by such an amalgamation of the two as shall cause the spectator to run up and down the whole gamut of emotional sensibility. In the realm of tragedy the accentuation of the possibilities of suspense, whether by Beaumont or any other, would be a novelty merely of degree. Cupid's Revenge, and The Triumph of Death (in the Foure Playes in One) could hardly have impressed the author of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as in this respect astounding innovations; and The Maides Tragedy does not, so far as I can determine, sacrifice the unities of interest and effect for enhancement and variety of emotional thrill. In any case, it would be necessary to date Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus, two or three years later than the fact, if one desired to prove that any Shakespearian tragedy was influenced by a Beaumont-Fletcher exaggeration of suspense. Whatever exaggeration may exist had already been practised by Shakespeare himself. If a Beaumont-Fletcher novelty influenced Shakespeare, that novelty must have lain in the transference of tragic suspense to the realm of romantic comedy with all its minor aesthetic appeals, and it would consequently be limited to their tragicomedies, Philaster and A King and No King. The tragicomic masques in the Foure Playes in One, that of Honour and that of Death, are too insignificant to warrant consideration; and Beaumont had nothing to do with them.

In determining the indebtedness, if any, of Cymbeline to Philaster we lack the assistance of authentic dates of composition. The plays were acted about the same time,—Philaster certainly, Cymbeline perhaps, before October 8, 1610. Beaumont and Fletcher's play may have been written as early as 1609; Shakespeare's also as early as 1609 or 1608: in fact, there are critics who assign parts of it to 1606. With regard to the relative priority of Cymbeline and A King and No King, we are more fortunate in our knowledge. The former had certainly been acted by May 15, 1611; the latter was not even licensed until that year, and was not performed at Court till December 26. The probabilities are altogether in favour of a date of composition later than that of Cymbeline.

But that Shakespeare's Cymbeline and his later romantic dramas betray any consciousness of the existence of Philaster and its succeeding King and No King has not been proved. Save for the more emphatic employment of the masque and its accessories of dress and scenic display, of the combination of idyllic, romantic, and sensational elements of material, and the heightened uncertainty of dénouement, all naturally suggested by the demands of Jacobean taste, no variation is discoverable in the course of Shakespeare's dramatic art. And in these respects I find no extrinsic novelty, no momentous change—nothing in Philaster and A King and No King that had not been anticipated by Shakespeare. Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are but the flowering of potentialities latent in the Two Gentlemen of Verona and As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure—latent in the story of Apollonius of Tyre, and unavoidable in its dramatization as Pericles, a play that was certainly not influenced by the methods of Philaster. If in his later romantic dramas Shakespeare borrowed any hint of technique from the Beaumont contribution to the 'romances,' he was but borrowing back what Beaumont had borrowed from him or from sources with which Shakespeare was familiar when Beaumont was still playing nursery miracles of the Passion with his brothers in the Gethsemane garden at Grace-Dieu. Shakespeare's later comedies are a legitimate development of his peculiar dramatic art. Beaumont's tragicomedies, with all their poetic and idyllic beauty and dramatic individuality, are novel, so far as construction goes, only in their emphasized employment of the sensational properties and methods mentioned above. Their characteristic, when compared with that of Shakespeare's last group of comedies, is melodramatic rather than romantic. They set, in fine, as did Chapman's Gentleman Usher, and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, an example which, abused, led to the decadence of Elizabethan romantic comedy.

The resemblance between Philaster and Cymbeline, such as it is, is closer than that between Philaster and the Shakespearian successors of Cymbeline,—The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. But the common features of all these plays, the juxtaposition of idyllic scenes and interest with those of royalty, the combination of sentimental, tragic, and comic incentives to emotion, the false accusations of unchastity and the resulting jealousy, intrigue, and crime, the wanderings of an innocent and distressed woman in boy's clothing, the romantic localization, did not appear first in either Philaster or Cymbeline. Philaster and Cymbeline follow numerous clues in the idyllic-comic of Love's Labour's Lost and Midsummer-Night's Dream; in the idyllic-romantic-pathetic of Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; and for that matter in the materials furnished by Greene, Lodge, Sidney, Sannazzaro, Montemayor, Bandello, Cinthio and Boccaccio; and in the romantic and tragicomic fusion already attempted in Much Ado, All's Well, and Measure for Measure. For the character and the trials of Imogen, Shakespeare did not require the inspiration of a Beaumont. He had been busied with the figure of Innogen (as he then called her) as early as 1599; for in the 1600 quarto of Much Ado she appears by sheer accident in a stage direction as the wife of the Leonato of that play. He had been using the sources from which Cymbeline is drawn,—Holinshed and Boccaccio, and that early romantic drama, Fidele and Fortunio,—before Philaster was written. And it is much more likely that the Belarius of Shakespeare and the Bellario of Beaumont were both suggested by the Bellaria of Greene's Pandosto, than that Shakespeare borrowed from Beaumont. Nor is Shakespeare likely to have been indebted to Beaumont's example for the sensational manner of the dénouement in Cymbeline—the succession of fresh complications and false starts by which suspense is sustained. These are precisely the features that distinguish those scenes of Pericles which by the consensus of critics are assigned to Shakespeare; and Pericles was written by 1608, at least as early as Philaster, and in all probability earlier. In his story of Marina, Shakespeare is merely pursuing the sensational methods of Measure for Measure and anticipating those of The Winter's Tale. In general, the plot lies half-way between the tragicomic possibilities of the Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, All's Well, and Measure for Measure, and the romantic manipulation of Cymbeline and the later plays.

In fine, there is closer resemblance between Cymbeline and half a dozen of Shakespeare's earlier comedies, than between Cymbeline and Philaster; and it might more readily be shown that the author of Philaster was indebted to those half-dozen plays, than Shakespeare to Philaster. The differences between the Beaumont 'romances' and Shakespeare's later romantic comedies are in fact more vital than the similarities. In Philaster, The Maides Tragedy, and A King and No King the central idea is of contrast between sentimental love and unbridled lust, and this gives rise to misunderstanding, intrigue, and violence. In Shakespeare's later comedies the central motive is altogether different: it is of disappearance and discovery. The disappearance is occasioned by false accusation or conspiracy. In Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, the dramatic interest revolves about the pursuit of a lost wife or child, the wanderings and trials of the heroine, and her recovery;[257] in The Tempest, about the disappearance and discovery of the ousted Duke and his daughter. There is no resemblance between Beaumont's love-lorn maidens in page's garb pursuing the unconscious objects of their affection and Shakespeare's joyous girls and traduced wives. Nor is there in Shakespeare's later comedies any analogue to the sensual passion of the 'Beaumont and Fletcher romances,' to their Bachas, Megras, and Evadnes, their ultra-sentimental Philasters, their blunt soldier-counselors and boastful poltroons. Pisanio and Cloten have respectively no kinship with Dion and Pharamond. What appears to be novel in Pericles and its Shakespearian successors, the somewhat melodramatic dénouement, is, as I have said, but the modification of the playwright's well-known methods in conformity with the contemporary demand for more highly seasoned fare. But, in essence, the dramatic careers of Imogen and Hermione, are no more sensational than those of their older sisters, Hero, Helena, and Isabella. And what is most evidently not novel with Shakespeare in his later romantic comedies,—the consistent dramatic interaction between crisis and character,—is precisely what the 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' do not always possess. Beaumont's characterization at its best, with all its naturalness, compelling pathos, poignancy, and abandon is lyrical or idyllic rather than dramatic; Fletcher's is expository and histrionic—of manners rather than the man.

Beaumont did not influence Shakespeare. And if not Beaumont, then certainly not Fletcher; for in the actual composition of the core of the so-called 'Beaumont-Fletcher romances' Fletcher's share was altogether subordinate; and since after the dissolution of the partnership he attempted but one romantic tragic drama of that particular kind, Thierry and Theodoret,—and that a clumsy failure,—it must be concluded that in the designing of those 'romances' his share was even less significant. But to appreciate the contribution of Beaumont to Elizabethan drama, and his place in literary history, it is fortunately not necessary to assume that he diverted from its natural course the dramatic technique of a master, twenty years his senior and for twenty years before Beaumont began to write, intimately acquainted with the conditions of the stage,—the acknowledged playwright of the most successful of theatrical companies and, in spite of changing fashions, the most steadily progressive and popular dramatic artist of the early Jacobean period. With regard to Beaumont it is marvel sufficient, that between his twenty-fifth and his twenty-eighth year of age he should have elaborated in dramatic art, even with the help of Fletcher, so striking a combination of preceding models, and have infused into the resulting heroic-romantic type such fresh poetic vigour and verve of movement.