Such being the case we may expect that an inquiry into the rhetorical peculiarities and mental habit, first of Fletcher, then of Beaumont, will furnish tests corrective of the criterion based upon versification.
1. Fletcher's Diction in The Faithfull Shepheardesse.
Though rather poetic than dramatic, and composed only partly in blank verse, The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords the best approach to a study of Fletcher's rhetoric; for, written about 1608 and by Fletcher alone, it illustrates his youthful style in the period probably shortly before he collaborated with Beaumont in the composition of Philaster.
The soliloquy of Clorin, with which The Faithfull Shepheardesse opens, runs as follows:
Hail, holy Earth, whose cold Arms do imbrace
The truest man that ever fed his flocks
By the fat plains of fruitful Thessaly!
Thus I salute thy Grave; thus do I pay
My early vows and tribute of mine eyes5
To thy still-loved ashes; thus I free
Myself from all insuing heats and fires
Of love; all sports, delights, and [jolly] games,
That shepherds hold full dear, thus put I off:
Now no more shall these smooth brows be [be] girt10
With youthful Coronals, and lead the Dance;
No more the company of fresh fair Maids
And wanton Shepherds be to me delightful,
Nor the shrill pleasing sound of merry pipes
Under some shady dell, when the cool wind15
Plays on the leaves; all be far away,
Since thou art far away, by whose dear side
How often have I sat Crowned with fresh flowers
For summers Queen, whilst every Shepherds boy
Puts on his lusty green, with gaudy hook20
And hanging scrip of finest Cordovan.
But thou art gone, and these are gone with thee
And all are dead but thy dear memorie;
That shall out-live thee, and shall ever spring,
Whilst there are pipes or jolly Shepherds sing.25
And here will I, in honour of thy love,
Dwell by thy Grave, forgetting all those joys,
That former times made precious to mine eyes;
Only remembring what my youth did gain
In the dark, hidden vertuous use of Herbs:30
That will I practise, and as freely give
All my endeavours as I gained them free.
Of all green wounds I know the remedies
In Men or Cattel, be they stung with Snakes,
Or charmed with powerful words of wicked Art,35
Or be they Love-sick, or through too much heat
Grown wild or Lunatic, their eyes or ears
Thickened with misty filme of dulling Rheum;
These I can Cure, such secret vertue lies
In herbs applyèd by a Virgins hand.40
My meat shall be what these wild woods afford,
Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes, on whose Cheeks
The Sun sits smiling.[159]
This passage, as we have observed in the preceding section, does not display in full proportion or untrammeled variety the metrical peculiarities of Fletcher's popular dramatic blank verse. The verse is lyric and declamatory: his purely dramatic verse whether in the Monsieur Thomas of his earlier period, The Chances of the middle period, or A Wife for a Month and Rule a Wife of his later years, has the feminine endings, redundant syllables, anapæstic substitutions, the end-stopped and sometimes fragmentary lines, the hurried and spasmodic utterance of conversational speech. But, from the rhetorical point of view, this soliloquy—in fact, the whole Faithfull Shepheardesse—affords a basis for further discrimination between Fletcher and Beaumont in the joint-plays; for it displays idiosyncrasies of tone-quality and diction which persist, after Beaumont's death, in Fletcher's dramas of 1616 to 1625 as they were in 1607-1609: sometimes slightly modified, more often exaggerated, but in essence the same.
In Clorin's soliloquy, the reader cannot but notice, first, a tendency toward alliteration, the fed and flocks, fat and fruitful, fresh and fair, pleasing and pipes,—alliteration palpable and somewhat crude, but not yet excessive; second, a balanced iteration of words,—"be far away, Since thou art far away" (ll. 16-17), and, five lines further down, "But thou art gone and these are gone with thee," and in lines 31 and 32 "as freely give ... as I gained them free"; and an iteration of phrases, rhetorical asseverations, negatives, alternatives, questions,—"Thus I salute thy grave; thus do I pay," "thus I free," "thus put I off" (lines 4, 6, 9); third, a preference for iteration in triplets,—"No more shall these smooth brows," "No more the company," "Nor the shrill ... sound" (lines 10-14), "Or charmed," "or love-sick," "or through too much heat" (lines 35 and 36); fourth, a fondness for certain sonorous words,—"all ensuing heats ... all sports" (lines 7-8), "all my endeavours ... all green wounds" (lines 32-33), and the "alls" of lines 16 and 23; fifth, a plethora of adjectives,—"holy earth," "cold arms," "truest man," "fat plains"—many of them pleonastic—"misty film," "dulling rheum"—some forty nouns buttressed by epithets to twenty standing in their own strength; and a plethora of nouns in apposition (preferably triplets),—"all sports, delights, and jolly games" (line 8), "Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes" (line 42); sixth, an indulgence in conversational tautology: for Fletcher is rarely content with a simple statement,—he must be forever spinning out the categories of a concept; expounding his idea by what the rhetoricians call division; enumerating the attributes and species painstakingly lest any escape, or verbosely as a padding for verse or speech. Of this mannerism The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords many instances more typical than those contained in these forty-three lines; but even here Clorin salutes the grave of her lover in a dozen different periphrastic ways. To say that "all are dead but thy dear memorie" is not enough; she must specify "that shall outlive thee." To assert that she knows the remedies of "all green wounds" does not suffice: she must proceed to the enumeration of the wounds; nor to tell us that her meat shall be found in the woods: she must rehearse the varieties of meat. Her soliloquy in the last thirty lines of the scene, not here quoted, is of the same quality: it reminds one of a Henslowe list of stage properties, or of the auctioneer's catalogue that sprawls down Walt Whitman's pages.
And, last, we notice what has been emphasized by G. C. Macaulay and others, that much of this enumeration by division is by way of "parentheses hastily thrown in, or afterthoughts as they occur to the mind."[160] Even in the formal Shepheardesse this characteristic lends a quality of naturalness and conversational spontaneity to the speech.
2. In the Later Plays.
If now we turn to one of Fletcher's plays written after Beaumont's death, and without the assistance of Massinger or any other,—say, The Humorous Lieutenant of about the year 1619,—we find on every page and passages like the following.[161]—The King Antigonus upon the entry of his son, Demetrius, addresses the ambassadors of threatening powers: