OTHER DRAMATISTS.
Beaumont and Fletcher.
John Fletcher was born at Rye in December, 1579; being the son of that Dean of Peterborough who troubled the last moments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and later was bishop, successively, of Bristol, Worcester, and London. Very early, aged about 12, the son entered Benet College, Cambridge, but before he was 17 the death of his father, in poverty, caused him to leave the University. We hear no more of him, on sound authority, till he began to write plays with Francis Beaumont, born in 1584, the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, a judge. In 1597 Beaumont entered Pembroke College, Oxford, then known as Broadgates Hall; three years later he entered the Inner Temple. In 1605 Beaumont wrote some prefatory verses to Jonson's play "The Fox (Volpone)" as also did Fletcher. "Philaster" (1610?) is believed to have been the first play composed in their prolific partnership, but it was also attributed to Beaumont alone. Beaumont died in March, 1616, the death-year of Shakespeare; Fletcher in 1625.
One need not be a Charles Lamb to discover that "after all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Sidneys and Shakespeares". But perhaps only a reader who is himself a poet can discover, with Mr. Swinburne's certainty, in Beaumont "the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour"; in Fletcher "a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness of bright original speech".
Others cannot pretend to assign to each author, or to their various allies, their own contributions to each of the fifty-two dramas, which Mr. Swinburne suspected Coleridge of "never having really read". Whether Coleridge did or did not carefully peruse the fourteen stout volumes of Weber's edition, it is certain that very few people are more industrious. A French critic, M. Jusserand, affirms that a friendly hand could make a pleasing selection of scenes, displaying tragical vigour, eloquence, poetry, wit, and that the selection would give "the falsest idea of their work," for "the lugubrious and the ribald were their chief domain".
At all events other qualities than ribaldry will win their readers at present, and it is unnecessary to direct readers to a play in which a woman "makes the very satyrs blush at her sight." Coleridge thought it would be interesting to settle a question of statistics, "how many of these plays are founded on rapes, how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies". Mr. Swinburne provided the statistics, Plays 52, Rapes 2, Incestuous Passions 0, Lunacies 2.
In the throng of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher (of which a folio edition was published in 1647; an uncertain amount of the writing was ascribed to Massinger), it must suffice to speak of but a few. The bald analysis of any of these Jacobean dramas cannot do justice to its merits. The plots of the greatest dramas, those of the Athenian stage and of Shakespeare, rest, now on history, now on inventions of prehistoric antiquity, myths and legends. The story of Lear has elements as impossible, and as primitive, as the stories of Œdipus or of Thyestes. The events are monstrous—"people don't do these things,"—but they afford to the dramatist great situations, and they were already familiar in tradition.
The events in "The Maid's Tragedy," on the other hand, could not have occurred, and have no traditional source. There have been callous and profligate kings, but Charles II, who declared that "in my reign all tragedies must end happily," and for whom Waller later made "The Maid's Tragedy" end happily, did not seduce innocent girls, hand them over as brides to courtiers who were already betrothed to other ladies, and retain his victims as his mistresses.
The king in "The Maid's Tragedy" does these things, and is a moral monster. Amintor being in love with Aspatia, and she with him, the king forces him—for loyalty and passive obedience are his guiding stars—to reject Aspatia, and wed Evadne, whom nobody suspects of being the royal mistress. At Courts, however, these graces are not hid.