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

The diversity of metrical forms is but an evidence of the ingenuity of Beaumont. He has used blank verse with frequent double-endings to distinguish the romantic characters and plot: as in the scenes between Venturewell and Jasper, Jasper and Luce. He has used the heroic couplet with rhymes, single and double, to distinguish the mock-romantic of Venturewell and Humphrey, Humphrey and Luce. For the mock-heroic of Ralph he has used the swelling ten-syllabled blank verse of Marlowe and Kyd, or the prose of Amadis and Palmerin; for his burlesque of the Maylord he has used the senarii of the antiquated interlude. For the conversation of the Merrythoughts and of the citizen-critics he has used plain prose; and for the tuneful ecstasies of Merrythought senior, a sheaf of ballads. This consideration alone,—that the metrical and prose forms are chosen with a view to the various purposes of the play,—should convince the reader of the vanity of assigning to Fletcher verse which evidently had its origin not in any of his proclivities, but in the temper of Beaumont's Venturewell, Jasper, and Luce.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle was written and first acted between June 29, 1607 and April 1, 1608. The upper limit is fixed, as Boyle has indicated,[196] by the mention, in Act IV, 1, 46, of an incident in The Travails of Three English Brothers, "let the Sophy of Persia come and christen him a childe," concerning which the 'Boy' remarks, I, 48-50, "that will not do so well; 'tis stale; it has been had before at the Red Bull." The Red Bull, Clerkenwell, had been occupied by Queen Anne's Men (whose plays Beaumont is especially ridiculing), since 1604.[197] The Travails was written hurriedly by Day, Rowley, and Wilkins after the appearance, June 8, 1607, of a tract by Nixon, on the adventures of the three Shirleys, and was performed June 29, by the Queen's Men.[198] The Travails dealt with a matter of ephemeral interest, and would not long have held the public. It is, therefore, likely that the allusion to it in The Knight of the Burning Pestle was written shortly after June 29. Since the play, according to its first publisher, took eight days to write, we cannot assign any date earlier than, say, July 10, 1607, for its first performance. The lower limit is determined by the certainty that The Knight was played by the Queen's Revels' Children at Blackfriars; and that they ceased to act there as an independent company some time in March 1608. The play belonged in 1639 to Beeston's Boys, who had it with four others of Beaumont and Fletcher from Queen Henrietta's Men. None of these five plays had ever been played by the King's Company; it is likely that they had come to the Queen Henrietta's from the Lady Elizabeth's Men with whom the Queen's Revels' Children had been amalgamated in 1613.[199] One of these plays, Cupid's Revenge, had certainly come down from the Queen's Revels' Boys in that way.

That the original performance was by a company of children appears from numerous passages in the text; and the only other children's company available for consideration between 1603 and 1611, when the manuscript fell into the publisher's hands, is that of the Paul's Boys. That the Paul's Boys were not the company performing is shown, however, by a passage in the Induction, where the citizen-critic, interrupting the Prologue of the "good-man boy," says: "This seven yeares [that] there hath beene playes at this house, I have observed it, you have still girds at citizens." Now, at no date between the summer of 1608 and 1611 could it have been said of the Children of Paul's that they had been acting seven years continuously at any one "house." The career of the Paul's Boys as actors at their cathedral school had ended in the summer of 1608, when Robert Keysar, Rossiter, and others interested in the rival company of the Queen's Revels' Children had subsidized Edward Pierce, the manager of the Paul's Boys, to cease plays at St. Paul's.[200] If between that date and 1611 they acted, it was elsewhere, at Whitefriars perhaps, and temporarily (not after 1609), and as the I King's Revels' Children.[201] The citizen-critic, therefore, if speaking after the summer of 1608, could not have referred to Paul's Boys. If speaking of Paul's Boys between 1603 and 1608, the only "house" that he can have had in mind would be their school of St. Paul's Cathedral; and to say that there had been plays there for seven years would have been utterly pointless, for the Paul's Boys had been acting in their school, or in its courtyard, for twenty, one might say fifty years, more or less continuously. Fleay conjectures wildly that they had occupied Whitefriars between 1604 and 1607, but that does not explain the "seven yeares at this house"; to say nothing of the fact that such occupancy is unproved. An old Whitefriars inn-yard playhouse had been "pulled down" in 1582-3. No other Whitefriars Theatre existed till 1607, when a new Whitefriars "was occupied by six equal sharers with original title from Lord Buckhurst."[202]

The company was not that of St. Paul's; and the "house" was not a school-house, but a regularly constituted theatre. Now, the only theatre, public or private, that, at any rate between 1603 and 1611, had been occupied by a boys' company for "this seven yeares" was Blackfriars; and of Blackfriars the statement could be made only at a date preceding January 4, 1610, and with reference to the Queen's Revels' Children. On that date, as reorganized under Rossiter, Keysar, and others, they received a Patent authorizing them to open at Whitefriars, "or in any other convenient place." For about a month before, they had filled an engagement at Blackfriars, the lease of which had reverted on August 9, 1608 to Burbadge and Shakespeare's company of the King's Players. They had ceased playing at Blackfriars as an independent company in March 1608; the theatre had been tenantless after that for six months and then had been closed until December 7, 1609, because of the prevalence of the plague. The Citizen's complaint that the boys have been girding at citizens "this seven yeares there hath been playes at this house" would lose all cogency if spoken of the Queen's Revels' Children when they were acting during the month following December 7, 1609, both because plays had been then intermitted for the twenty months preceding, and because in 1609 it was not seven but twelve years since the boys had begun their occupancy of "this house." It could not apply to the seven years between 1597, when they first occupied Blackfriars, and 1604, because The Knight of the Burning Pestle was not written till after the Travails of Three English Brothers appeared, June 29, 1607. But it does apply, with all requisite dramatic and chronological accuracy, to the seven years preceding the last date,—or the date in March 1608, when, because of their scandalous representation of the King of France and his mistress in Chapman's Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron, and because of plays caricaturing and vilifying King James, the Queen's Revels' Children were prohibited from playing, their principal actors thrown into prison, and Blackfriars suppressed. On September 29, 1600, Richard Burbadge had let Blackfriars on a twenty-one-year lease to Henry Evans, the manager of the Queen's Revels' Children, and under the organization of that date they had by 1607-1608 been giving plays exactly "this seven yeares at this house." We are, as I have said, informed by the publisher of The Knight that the play was written in eight days. It might have been staged in two or three. If the plague regulations were enforced during 1607-8, as I have no doubt they were, The Knight was acted between July 10 and 23, 1607, or between December 26, 1607 and the Biron day in March 1608.

The internal evidence is all confirmatory of this period of composition. The Queen Anne's Men of the "Red Bull" mentioned in the play obtained their title to the Red Bull from Aaron Holland about 1604. The songs in the play were common property between 1604 and 1607; none of the romances ridiculed is of a later date than 1607; and of the eight plays mentioned or alluded to, all had been acted before June 1607 but The Travails; and that was played for the first time June 29 of that year. The allusions to external history such as that in Act IV, ii, 4, to the Prince of Moldavia—who left London in November 1607—and the humorous jibe at the pretty Paul's Boys of Mr. Mulcaster, who ceased teaching them in 1608, are all for 1607-8.[203] Fleay marshals an applausive gallery of conjectures for his conjecture of 1610, but none of them appears to me to have any substance; and in view of what has been said, and of what will follow, I may dispense with their consideration.

The history of the manuscript is, as has not been noted before, also confirmatory of the 1607-8 date. The Robert Keysar who rescued the play from "perpetuall oblivion" after its failure upon the stage (as Burre says in the dedication of the first quarto) and who "afterwards" (in 1610-11) turned it over, "yet an infant" (i. e. unpublished) and "somewhat ragged," to Burre for publication, is the same "Mr. Keysar" who in February 1606, with "Mr. Kendall," also of the Blackfriars' management, had been paid for "Apparrell" furnished for a performance given by the Children of Westminster School.[204] He at no period had any connection with the Paul's Boys. He was, as Professor Wallace informs us, a London goldsmith who "about this time (1606-7) acquired an interest in the shifting fortunes of Blackfriars, and became the financial backer of the Queen's Revels' Children. He had cause to dislike King James for oppression in wresting money from the goldsmiths."[205] Hence probably the attacks of the Queen's Revels' Children upon the King, which helped to bring about their suppression at Blackfriars in 1608. Keysar would inevitably know all about the plays performed by his Children, The Knight of the Burning Pestle among the rest, during the last year of their occupancy of Blackfriars. And since, according to Burre, he appreciated the merits of The Knight it was but natural that he, and not some person unconnected with the company, should have preserved the manuscript,—perhaps with a view to having the Children try the play again after they should re-open at Whitefriars. With Rossiter, soon after March 1608, he was making preparations for such a reorganization. When finally they did re-open at their new theatre, in January 1610, they evidently did not take up the play. Somewhat later, say 1611, Keysar sent the manuscript to Burre for publication. Burre "fostred it privately in his bosome these two yeares" and brought it out in 1613.

The conclusion of Burre's dedicatory address to Keysar in the first quarto, of 1613, has unnecessarily complicated both the question of the date of composition and that of the source of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. "Perhaps," says he, "it [The Knight] will be thought to bee of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his elder above a yeare; and therefore may (by vertue of his birth-right) challenge the wall of him. I doubt not but they will meet in their adventures, and I hope the breaking of one staffe will make them friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travell through the world to seeke their adventures." This denial of indebtedness to Cervantes has been generally taken to refer to Shelton's English translation of Don Quixote, entered S. R. January 19, 1611-12, and printed 1612; and it has, therefore, been supposed by many that The Knight was written and first acted in 1610 or 1611. But if Burre was dating The Knight as of 1610 or 1611, he was ignorant of the fact, as established above, that the play was the elder of Shelton's printed Don Quixote, not merely "above a yeare," but above four years. There are only two other constructions to be placed upon Burre's statement: either that the play was the elder above a year of the first part of Don Quixote, issued in the Spanish by Cervantes in 1605,[206] or that it was the elder above a year of Shelton's translation as circulated among his friends in manuscript, at any rate as early as 1609. If Burre was dating the play, according to the former interpretation, as of 1604, he was ignorant of the fact that it could not have been written till after the appearance of The Travails of Three English Brothers, June 29, 1607. The latter interpretation would, if we could adopt it as his understanding of the matter, not only comport with the date of the production of The Knight in 1607-8, but also, somewhat roughly, with his own statement that he had had the manuscript already in a battered condition in his "bosome" since 1610 or 1611.

If Burre, who was not a litterateur, did not know that Shelton's translation of Don Quixote had been going the rounds for years before it was printed in 1612, everybody else did. Shelton had announced as much in his Epistle Dedicatorie to Theophilus, Lord Howard of Walden, prefixed to the first quarto of 1612. He translated the book, as he says, "some five or six yeares agoe"—that would be in 1607, for he used the Brussels Reprint of that year as his text,—"out of the Spanish Tongue into the English in the space of forty daies: being thereunto more than half enforced through the importunitie of a very deere friende, that was desirous to understand the subject. After I had given him once a view thereof, I cast it aside, where it lay long time neglected in a corner, and so little regarded by me as I never once set hand to review or correct the same. Since when, at the entreatie of others my friends, I was content to let it come to light, conditionally that some one or other would peruse and amend the errours escaped"—because he had not time to revise it himself. In other words, Shelton had shown the manuscript translation of Don Quixote to but one friend in 1607; and it was not till "long time" had elapsed that he began to circulate it among his other friends on condition that they should correct its errors. The date of circulation was, probably, about 1609, for in that year we have our earliest mention of the reading of Don Quixote by an Englishman,—by a dramatic character, to be sure, but a character created by Ben Jonson. In his Epicoene, acted in 1610, and written the year preceding, that dramatist makes Truewit advise the young Sir Dauphine to cease living in his chamber "a month together upon Amadis de Gaule, or Don Quixote, as you are wont." There is no ascription of Spanish to Dauphine, who is a typical London gallant. He would read Amadis in the French, or the English translation; and the only translation of Don Quixote accessible to him in 1609 would be Shelton's manuscript of Part One.[207] Jonson may himself have been one of the friends to whom Shelton submitted the translation. There is no reason to believe that Jonson had read Cervantes in the original; for, as Professor Rudolph Schevill has conclusively demonstrated,[208] his knowledge of Spanish was extremely limited. "The Spanish phrases pronounced by the improvised 'hidalgo' in the Alchemist (of 1610) prove nothing." They were caught, as Professor Schevill says, from the London vogue or may have been supplied by some Spanish acquaintance. Indeed, one may even doubt whether if he read Shelton's manuscript Jonson did so with any care, for not only in The Alchemist but elsewhere he uniformly couples Don Quixote as if a character of chivalric romance with Amadis, of whom and his congeners Don Quixote is a burlesque.

As to Burre, however, I do not think that he had been informed by Keysar of the exact provenience of the manuscript of The Knight, or of the date of first acting. I incline to believe that he had the Epistle Dedicatorie of the newly printed Shelton before him when, in 1613, he wrote his dedication of The Knight to Robert Keysar; for he runs the figure of the book as a "child" and of its "father" and "step-father" through his screed as Shelton had run it in 1612; and he hits upon a similar diction of "bosome" and "oblivion." But, though he may have been gratuitously challenging the wall of Shelton's newly printed Don Quixote in favour of The Knight as in existence by 1610 or 1611, the only interpretation of his "elder above a yeare" that would fit the fact is afforded by the composition of the play, as already demonstrated, in 1607-8, more than a year before Shelton began to circulate his manuscript.

In spite of Burre's assertion of the priority of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, nearly every editor or historian who has touched upon The Knight informs us that it is "undoubtedly derived from Don Quixote." If (as I am sure was not the case) the play was written after 1608, Beaumont, or Beaumont and Fletcher, could have derived suggestions for it from Shelton's manuscript, first circulated in 1609. That Beaumont, at any rate, was acquainted with the Spanish hero by 1610, appears from his familiarity with the Epicoene in which as we have observed, Don Quixote is mentioned; for he wrote commendatory verses for the quarto of that play, entered S. R. September 20 of that year. If, on the other hand, The Knight, as I hold, was written in 1607 or 1608, the author or authors, provided they read Spanish, could have derived suggestions from Cervantes' original of 1605; or if they did not read Spanish, from hearsay. The latter source of information would be the more likely, for although sixteen of the ignorantly so-called "Beaumont and Fletcher" plays have been traced to plots in Spanish originals, there is not one of those plots which either of the poets might not have derived from English or French translation; and in none of the sixteen plays is there any evidence that either of the dramatists had a reading knowledge of Spanish.[209] As to the possibility of information by hearsay, other dramatists allude to Don Quixote as early as 1607-8;[210] and, indeed, it would be virtually impossible that any literary Londoner could have escaped the oral tradition of so popular and impressive a masterpiece two years after its publication.