In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;[226] and here and there, Rowley.[227] I should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's—in dramatizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance. But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism.
Though The Coxcombe was not successful in its first production before the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well received and favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court in 1612 in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the City theatres after the Restoration, and before 1682. In the revivals Beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy called The Fugitives, constructed by Richardson and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792. With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the Ricardo of the original), and Mrs. Jordan as Julia (alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran for a dozen nights or more.
7.—Philaster or Love lies a-Bleeding was "divers times acted at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his Majesties Servants." Under the second title in the Scourge of Folly, entered for publication October 8, 1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and I have already stated my reasons as based upon the history of the theatres[228] for believing that its first performance took place between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610.
We might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of Hereford's Scourge of Folly, if we could affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. For just before the epigram on Love lies a-Bleeding, which, I think, without doubt, applies to Philaster, appears one To the Roscius of these times, Mr. W. Ostler, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's Revels' Children,—most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the time,—in 1601 when Jonson's Poetaster was acted. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Burbadge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,[229] before Evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in 1608, some of the Queen's Revels' Children "growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, were taken to strengthen the King's service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this deposition places the transference of Underwood, Field, and Ostler to the King's Company between the beginning of April 1608 when the Revels' Children were temporarily suppressed and August of that year when the Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and others took over Evans's unexpired lease of Blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. But the deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily with, or under the supervision of, the King's Company at Blackfriars between December 7, 1609 and January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by March 25, 1610, and does not appear in the lists of the King's Men till 1616; and there is no record of Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company before the end of 1610, when they acted in Jonson's Alchemist (after October 3). Since Underwood and Ostler were not with the new Queen's Revels after January of that year, it is probable that Davies's epigram to the latter as "the Roscius of these times" in the Scourge of Folly, entered for publication on October 8, 1610, was written after Ostler had attained distinction in Shakespeare's company, the company of the leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to Ostler with that of the epigram to Fletcher on Philaster presented by that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the epigrams,—that is to say, between January 4 and October, 1610.
Since, however, the epigrams in The Scourge of Folly, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind. Of much greater weight as confirming the date of Philaster, as conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare's Cymbeline not only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific detail. I shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there is nothing in the Philaster or the Cymbeline to indicate the priority of the former. But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.[230] For the Cymbeline, I accept the date assigned by the majority of critics, 1609. Shakespeare had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in mind since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage in Much Ado About Nothing (the quarto of 1600). In execution the play is, with The Winter's Tale and the Tempest, the dramatic sequel of that first of his "dramatic romances,"—of which the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a wife or child,—the Pericles written in 1607 or 1608. And since already in Pericles, Shakespeare had blazed this new path, I cannot for a moment accept the hypothesis that he is in his Cymbeline borrowing profusely from Philaster, a work of comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of construction to the somewhat novel—to them entirely novel—method of the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved in Pericles and Cymbeline. And still the more so when one reflects that, in Pericles and Cymbeline, aside from the leading conception, everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to As You Like It and Twelfth Night; and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic construction in Philaster, otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of those earlier comedies and of the Pericles and Cymbeline would not suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that Philaster was first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July 1610.
The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that author credit for practically the whole work,—"Thou ... raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of 1647, mentions Love Lies a-Bleeding among Fletcher's "incomparable plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene "when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he says:
Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared to thee,
In thy Philaster and Maids Tragedy!
Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray ...
for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few insertions or revisions by Fletcher, Philaster is Beaumont's (and practically the same holds true of The Maides Tragedy, and the Bessus play—A King and No King). In Philaster Fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are I, 1b (from the King's entry, line 89—line 358,[231]—a revision and enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2b (from Enter Megra), II, 4b (from Megra above), V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 was written by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14 to 29 (from Enter Arethusa and Bellario to "how brave she keeps him"). Similarly, the first draught of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34 (exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long tirade) and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end). But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas, tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." The last three lines of that soliloquy are his:
Soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments
Where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat
And the cold marble melt;[232]
and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of Philaster's accusation of Arethusa. "The story of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten,—"these sad texts"[233] Fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating.