MICHAEL DRAYTON
From the portrait in the Dulwich Gallery
This volume is Henry Fitzgeffrey's Certayn elegies done by sundrie excellent wits (Fr. Beau., M. Dr., N. H.), with Satyres and Epigrames. Fitzgeffrey, by the way, was of Lincoln's Inn in Beaumont's time; and so were others connected with this volume, by dedications or commendatory verses: Fitzgeffrey's "chamber-fellow and nearest friend, Nat. Gurlin"; Thomas Fletcher, and John Stephens, the satirist, who had been entered member of the Inn in 1611. They must all have been known by Beaumont when he was writing his elegies. The 'N. H.' thus posthumously associated with our dramatist was, I think, the mathematician, philosopher, and poet, Nicholas Hill[133] Beaumont could not have failed to know him. He was of St. John's College, Oxford; he wrote and published a Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana to which, mentioning him by name, Ben Jonson alludes in his epigram (CXXXIV) Of The Famous Voyage of the two wights who "At Bread-streets Mermaid having dined and merry, Propos'd to goe to Holborne in a wherry." He was the secretary and favourite of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a good deal of a wag, and well acquainted with our old friend Serjeant Hoskyns of the Convivium Philosophicum. He died in 1610.
Whether the anonymous writer on The Time Poets[134] was a personal acquaintance of Beaumont we cannot tell. The definite qualities of the poet which he emphasizes are, however, as likely to be drawn from life and conversation as from the perusal of his dramas. The lines, apparently composed between 1620 and 1636, begin,
One night, the great Apollo, pleas'd with Ben,
Made the odde number of the Muses ten;
The fluent Fletcher, Beaumont rich in sense,
In complement and courtship's quintessence;
Ingenious Shakespeare, Massinger that knows
The strength of plot to write in verse or prose,—
and continue with "cloud-grappling Chapman" and others, as of the ten Muses.
That Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, was a personal friend,—we may be sure,—the kind of friend who having a sense of humour did not resent Beaumont's genial satire in The Knight of the Burning Pestle upon his bourgeois drama of The Foure Prentises of London. Writing as late as 1635, he remembers Francis as a wit:
Excellent Bewmont, in the formost ranke
Of the rarest Wits, was never more than Franck.—
The touch of familiarity with which Heywood[135] causes that whole row of poets, many of them then dead, Robin Green, Kit Marlowe, the Toms (Kyd, Watson and Nashe), mellifluous Will, Ben, and the rest, to live for posterity as human, and lovable, gracefully heightens the compliment for one and all.
We may surmise that one more eulogist of Beaumont, his kinsman,[136] Sir George Lisle, a marvellously gallant cavalier, who distinguished himself at Newberry, and was shot by order of Fairfax about the end of the Civil War, was old enough in 1616 to have known our poet. Though Sir George, in his verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, lays special stress upon the close-woven fancy of the two playwrights, he seems to have a first-hand information, not common to the younger writers of these commendatory poems, concerning Beaumont's share in at least one of the tragedies. He ascribes to him, not to Fletcher,—as we know by modern textual tests, correctly,—the nobler scenes of "brave Mardonius" in A King and No King. One attaches, therefore, more than mere literary, or hearsay, significance to his selection for special praise of Beaumont's force, when he says,