Sad Shepherd. 60. The pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd is the best testimony to the poetical imagination of Jonson. Superior in originality, liveliness, and beauty, to the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, it reminds us rather, in language and imagery, of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, perhaps, no other poetry has come so near to that of Shakspeare. Jonson, like him, had an extraordinary command of English, in its popular and provincial idioms, as well as what might be gained from books; and though his invincible pedantry now and then obtrudes itself into the mouths of shepherds, it is compensated by numerous passages of the most natural and graceful expression. This beautiful drama is imperfect, hardly more than half remaining, or more probably having ever been written. It was also Jonson’s last song; age and poverty had stolen upon him; but, as one has said, who experienced the same destiny, “the life was in the leaf,” and his laurel remained verdant amidst the snow of his honoured head. The beauties of the Sad Shepherd might be reckoned rather poetical than dramatic; yet the action is both diversified and interesting to a degree we seldom find in the pastoral drama; there is little that is low in the comic speeches, nothing that is inflated in the serious.
Beaumont and Fletcher. 61. Two men, once united by friendship, and for ever by fame, the Dioscuri of our zodiac, Beaumont and Fletcher, rose upon the horizon as the star of Shakspeare, though still in its fullest brightness, was declining in the sky. The first, in order of time, among more than fifty plays published with their joint names, is the Woman-Hater, represented, according to Langbaine, in 1607, and ascribed to Beaumont alone by Seward, though, I believe, merely on conjecture.[546] Beaumont died, at the age of thirty, in 1615; Fletcher in 1625. No difference of manner is perceptible, or, at least, no critic has perceived any, in the plays that appeared between these two epochs; in fact, the greater part were not printed till 1647, and it is only through the records of the play-house that we distinguish their dates. The tradition, however, of their own times, as well as the earlier death of Beaumont, give us reason to name Fletcher, when we mention one singly, as the principal author of all these plays; and, of late years, this has, perhaps, become more customary than it used to be. A contemporary copy of verses, indeed, seems to attribute the greater share in the Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, and King and no King, to Beaumont. But testimony of this kind is very precarious. It is sufficient that he bore a part in these three.
[546] Vol. i., p. 3. He also thinks The Nice Valour exclusively Beaumont’s. These two appear to me about the worst in the collection.
Corrupt state of their text. 62. Of all our early dramatic poets, none have suffered such mangling by the printer as Beaumont and Fletcher. Their style is generally elliptical, and not very perspicuous; they use words in peculiar senses, and there seems often an attempt at pointed expression, in which its meaning has deserted them. But, after every effort to comprehend their language, it is continually so remote from all possibility of bearing a rational sense, that we can only have recourse to one hypothesis, that of an extensive and irreparable corruption of the text. Seward and Simpson, who, in 1750, published the first edition in which any endeavour was made at illustration or amendment, though not men of much taste, and too fond of extolling their authors, showed some acuteness, and have restored many passages in a probable manner, though often driven out at sea to conjecture something, where the received reading furnished not a vestige which they could trace. No one since has made any great progress in this criticism, though some have carped at these editors for not performing more. The problem of actual restoration in most places, where the printers or transcribers have made such strange havoc, must evidently be insoluble.
The Maid’s Tragedy. 63. The first play in the collected works of Beaumont and Fletcher, though not the earliest, is the Maid’s Tragedy, and it is among the best. None of their female characters, though they are often very successful in beautiful delineations of virtuous love, attaches our sympathy like Aspasia. Her sorrows are so deep, so pure, so unmerited, she sustains the breach of plighted faith in Amyntor, and the taunts of vicious women with so much resignation, so little of that termagant resentment these poets are apt to infuse into their heroines, the poetry of her speeches is so exquisitely imaginative, that, of those dramatic persons who are not prominent in the development of a story, scarce any, even in Shakspeare, are more interesting. Nor is the praise due to the Maid’s Tragedy confined to the part of Aspasia. In Melantius we have Fletcher’s favourite character, the brave, honest soldier, incapable of suspecting evil, till it becomes impossible to be ignorant of it, but unshrinking in its punishment. That of Evadne well displays the audacious security of guilt under the safeguard of power; it is highly theatrical, and renders the success of this tragedy not surprising in times when its language and situations could be endured by the audience. We may remark in this tragedy, as in many others of these dramatists, that, while pouring out the unlimited loyalty fashionable at the court of James, they are full of implied satire, which could hardly escape observation. The warm eulogies on military glory, the scorn of slothful peace, the pictures of dissolute baseness in courtiers, seem to spring from a dislike, very usual among the English gentry, a rank to which they both belonged, for that ignominious government; and though James was far enough removed from such voluptuous tyrants as Fletcher has pourtrayed in this and some other plays, they did not serve to exemplify the advantages of monarchy in the most attractive manner.
64. The Maid’s Tragedy, unfortunately, beautiful and essentially moral as it is, cannot be called a tragedy for maids; and, indeed, should hardly be read by any respectable woman. It abounds with that studiously protracted indecency which distinguished Fletcher beyond all our early dramatists, and is so much incorporated with his plays, that very few of them can be so altered as to become tolerable at present on the stage. In this he is strikingly contrasted with Shakspeare, whose levities of this kind are so transitory, and so much confined to language, that he has borne the process of purification with little detriment to his genius, or even to his wit.
Philaster. 65. Philaster has been in his day one of the best known and most popular of Fletcher’s plays.[547] This was owing to the pleasing characters of Philaster and Bellario, and to the frequent sweetness of the poetry. It is nevertheless not a first-rate play. The plot is most absurdly managed. It turns on the suspicion of Arethusa’s infidelity. And the sole ground of this is that an abandoned woman, being detected herself, accuses the princess of unchastity. Not a shadow of presumptive evidence is brought to confirm this impudent assertion, which, however, the lady’s father, her lover, and a grave sensible courtier do not fail implicitly to believe. How unlike the chain of circumstance, and the devilish cunning by which the Moor is wrought up to think his Desdemona false! Bellario is suggested by Viola; there is more picturesqueness, more dramatic importance, not, perhaps, more beauty and sweetness of affection, but a more eloquent development of it in Fletcher; on the other hand, there is still more of that improbability which attends a successful concealment of sex by mere disguise of clothes, though no artifice has been more common on the stage. Many other circumstances in the conduct of Fletcher’s story are ill-contrived. It has less wit than the greater part of his comedies; for among such, according to the old distinction, it is to be ranked, though the subject is elevated and serious.
[547] Dryden says, but I know not how truly, that Philaster was “the first play that brought Beaumont and Fletcher in esteem; for before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully,” p. 100. Philaster was not printed, according to Langbaine, till 1620; I do not know that we have any evidence of the date of its representation.
King and No King. 66. King and No King is, in my judgment, inferior to Philaster. The language has not so much of poetical beauty. The character of Arbaces excites no sympathy; it is a compound of vain-glory and violence, which rather demands disgrace from poetical justice than reward. Panthea is innocent, but insipid; Mardonius a good specimen of what Fletcher loves to exhibit, the plain honest courtier. As for Bessus, he certainly gives occasion to several amusing scenes; but his cowardice is a little too glaring; he is neither so laughable as Bobadil, nor so sprightly as Parolles. The principal merit of this play, which rendered it popular on the stage for many years, consists in the effective scenes where Arbaces reveals his illicit desire. That especially with Mardonius is artfully and elaborately written. Shakspeare had less of this skill; and his tragedies suffer for it in their dramatic effect. The scene between John and Hubert is an exception, and there is a great deal of it in Othello; but in general he may be said not to have exerted the power of detaining the spectator in that anxious suspense, which creates almost an actual illusion, and makes him tremble at every word, lest the secret which he has learned should be imparted to the imaginary person on the stage. Of this there are several fine instances in the Greek tragedians, the famous scene in the Œdipus Tyrannus being the best; and it is possible that the superior education of Fletcher may have rendered him familiar with the resources of ancient tragedy. These scenes in the present play would have been more highly powerful if the interest could have been thrown on any character superior to the selfish braggart Arbaces. It may be said perhaps that his humiliation through his own lawless passions, after so much insolence of success, affords a moral; he seems, however, but imperfectly cured at the conclusion, which is also hurried on with unsatisfactory rapidity.
The Elder Brother. 67. The Elder Brother has been generally reckoned among the best of Fletcher’s comedies. It displays in a new form an idea not very new in fiction, the power of love, on the first sight of a woman, to vivify a soul utterly ignorant of the passion. Charles, the Elder Brother, much unlike the Cymon of Dryden, is absorbed in study; a mere scholar, without a thought beyond his books. His indifference, perhaps, and ignorance about the world are rather exaggerated and border on stupidity; but it was the custom of the dramatists in that age to produce effect in representation by very sudden developments, if not changes, of character. The other persons are not ill conceived; the honest, testy Miramont, who admires learning without much more of it than enables him to sign his name; the two selfish worldly fathers of Charles and Angelina, believing themselves shrewd, yet the easy dupes of coxcomb manners from the court; the spirited Angelina; the spoiled but not worthless Eustace, show Fletcher’s great talent in dramatic invention. In none of his mere comedies has he sustained so uniformly elegant and pleasing a style of poetry; the language of Charles is naturally that of a refined scholar, but now and then perhaps we find old Miramont talk above himself. The underplot hits to the life the licentious endeavours of an old man to seduce his inferior; but, as usual, it reveals vice too broadly. This comedy is of very simple construction, so that Cibber was obliged to blend it with another, The Custom of the Country, in order to compose from the two his Love Makes a Man, by no means the worst play of that age. The two plots, however, do not harmonize very well.