Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.
Some dozen or more existing plays are attributed to Philip Massinger,[27] and he was doubtless the author of many others now unknown save by name. Of Wiltshire birth, his father had been dependant, or protégé of the Pembroke family, and the Christian name of Philip very likely kept alive the paternal reverence for the great Philip Sidney. Though Massinger was an industrious writer, and was well accredited in his time, it is certain that he had many hard struggles, and passed through many a pinching day; and at the last it would appear that he found burial, only as an outsider and stranger, in that old church of St. Saviours, near to London Bridge, where we found John Gower laid to rest with his books for pillow. If Massinger did not lift his lines into such gleams of tragic intensity as we spoke of in Webster and in Ford, he gave good, workman-like finish to his dramas; and for bloody apparelling of his plots, I think there are murderous zealots, in his Sforza[28] story at least, who could fairly have clashed swords with the assassins of “Vittoria Corombona.” It is a large honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named—outside some few of Shakespeare’s—no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the “New Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times,
“He frights men out of their estates,
And breaks through all law-nets—made to curb ill men—
As they were cobwebs.”
When Massinger died tradition says that he was thrust into the same grave which had been opened shortly before for John Fletcher; if not joined there, these two had certainly been fellows in literary work; and there are those who think that the name of Massinger should have recognition in that great dramatic copartnery under style of Beaumont and Fletcher.[29] Certain it is that other writers had share in the work; among them—in at least one instance (that of “Two Noble Kinsmen”)—the fine hand of Shakespeare.
But whatever helping touches or of outside journey-work may have been contributed to that mass of plays which bears name of Beaumont and Fletcher, it is certain that they hold of right that brilliant reputation for deft and lively and winning dramatic work which put their popularity before Jonson’s, if not before Shakespeare’s. The coupling together of this pair of authors at their work has the air of romance; both were well born; Fletcher, son of a bishop; Beaumont, son of Sir Francis Beaumont, of Grace-Dieu (not far away from Ashby-de-la-Zouch); both were university men, and though differing in age by eight or nine years, yet coming—very likely through the good offices of Ben Jonson—to that sharing of home and work and wardrobe which the old gossip Aubrey[30] has delighted in picturing. They wrought charmingly together, and with such a nice welding of jointures, that literary craftsmen, of whatever astuteness, are puzzled to say where the joinings lie. In agreement, however, with opinions of best critics, it may be said that Beaumont (the younger, who died nine years before his mate) was possessed of the deeper poetic fervors, while Fletcher was wider in fertilities and larger in affluence of diction.
The dramatic horrors of Ford and Webster are softened in the lines of these later playwrights. These are debonair; they are lively; they are jocund; they tell stories that have a beginning and an end; they pique attention; there are delicacies, too, and—it must be said—a good many indelicacies; there are light-virtued women, and marital infelicities get an easy ripening toward the over-ripeness and rottenness that is to come in Restoration times. These twain were handsome fellows, by Aubrey’s and all other accounts; Beaumont most noticeably so; and Fletcher—brightly swarthy, red-haired, full-blooded—dying a bachelor and of the plague, down in the time of Charles I., and thrust hastily into the grave at St. Saviours, where Massinger presently followed him.
I must give at least one taste of the dramatic manner for which both of these men were sponsors. It is from the well-known play of “Philaster” that I quote, where Euphrasia tells of the tender discovery of what stirred her heart:—
“My father oft would speak
Your worth and virtue: And as I did grow
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst
To see the man so praised; but yet all this
Was but a maiden longing, to be lost
As soon as found; till, sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god
I thought (but it was you) enter our gates.
My blood flew out, and back again as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath. Then was I called away in haste
To entertain you. Never was a man
Heaved from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I:
I did hear you talk
Far above singing! After you were gone,
I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched
What stirred it so. Alas, I found it Love!”
Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felicities of Elizabethan days were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too, that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of The Faithful Shepherdess—bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated classicisms—and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s “Comus.” Another foretaste of Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher:—
“Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly!
There’s nought in this life, sweet,
If man were wise to see’t,
But only melancholy,
O sweetest melancholy!
Welcome folded arms and fixèd eyes,
A sigh that piercing mortifies,
A look that’s fastened to the ground,
A tongue chain’d up without a sound!
Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves!
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are warmly hous’d save bats and owls!
A midnight bell, a parting groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon;
Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley;
Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”[31]