Beaumont and Fletcher.
John Fletcher was born at Rye in December, 1579; being the son of that Dean of Peterborough who troubled the last moments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and later was bishop, successively, of Bristol, Worcester, and London. Very early, aged about 12, the son entered Benet College, Cambridge, but before he was 17 the death of his father, in poverty, caused him to leave the University. We hear no more of him, on sound authority, till he began to write plays with Francis Beaumont, born in 1584, the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, a judge. In 1597 Beaumont entered Pembroke College, Oxford, then known as Broadgates Hall; three years later he entered the Inner Temple. In 1605 Beaumont wrote some prefatory verses to Jonson\'s play "The Fox (Volpone)" as also did Fletcher. "Philaster" (1610?) is believed to have been the first play composed in their prolific partnership, but it was also attributed to Beaumont alone. Beaumont died in March, 1616, the death-year of Shakespeare; Fletcher in 1625.
One need not be a Charles Lamb to discover that "after all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Sidneys and Shakespeares". But perhaps only a reader who is himself a poet can discover, with Mr. Swinburne\'s certainty, in Beaumont "the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour"; in Fletcher "a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness of bright original speech".
Others cannot pretend to assign to each author, or to their[Pg 243] various allies, their own contributions to each of the fifty-two dramas, which Mr. Swinburne suspected Coleridge of "never having really read". Whether Coleridge did or did not carefully peruse the fourteen stout volumes of Weber\'s edition, it is certain that very few people are more industrious. A French critic, M. Jusserand, affirms that a friendly hand could make a pleasing selection of scenes, displaying tragical vigour, eloquence, poetry, wit, and that the selection would give "the falsest idea of their work," for "the lugubrious and the ribald were their chief domain".
At all events other qualities than ribaldry will win their readers at present, and it is unnecessary to direct readers to a play in which a woman "makes the very satyrs blush at her sight." Coleridge thought it would be interesting to settle a question of statistics, "how many of these plays are founded on rapes, how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies". Mr. Swinburne provided the statistics, Plays 52, Rapes 2, Incestuous Passions 0, Lunacies 2.
In the throng of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher (of which a folio edition was published in 1647; an uncertain amount of the writing was ascribed to Massinger), it must suffice to speak of but a few. The bald analysis of any of these Jacobean dramas cannot do justice to its merits. The plots of the greatest dramas, those of the Athenian stage and of Shakespeare, rest, now on history, now on inventions of prehistoric antiquity, myths and legends. The story of Lear has elements as impossible, and as primitive, as the stories of ?dipus or of Thyestes. The events are monstrous—"people don\'t do these things,"—but they afford to the dramatist great situations, and they were already familiar in tradition.
The events in "The Maid\'s Tragedy," on the other hand, could not have occurred, and have no traditional source. There have been callous and profligate kings, but Charles II, who declared that "in my reign all tragedies must end happily," and for whom Waller later made "The Maid\'s Tragedy" end happily, did not seduce innocent girls, hand them over as brides to courtiers who were already betrothed to other ladies, and retain his victims as his mistresses.
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The king in "The Maid\'s Tragedy" does these things, and is a moral monster. Amintor being in love with Aspatia, and she with him, the king forces him—for loyalty and passive obedience are his guiding stars—to reject Aspatia, and wed Evadne, whom nobody suspects of being the royal mistress. At Courts, however, these graces are not hid.
The bridal eve is not much enlivened by a masque of Neptune and ?olus, and is saddened by the wails and prophecies of the forlorn Aspatia. Other bridesmaids talk ribaldry enough, but the bridegroom, whose heart is with Aspatia, feels
A grief shoot suddenly through all my veins;
Mine eyes rain: this is strange at such a time.
The bride receives him coldly. A man has wronged her, will he slay that man? She names the king: "To cover shame I took thee" she says. The situation,—with the horror-stricken loyalty of Amintor; his heart already a chaos of remorse, regret, and desire; the implacable resolution of Evadne; "the murderess-Magdalen, whose penitence is of one crimson colour with her sin—" is undeniably tragically great. Ribaldries as of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida" greet the happy pair in the morning. The secret reaches Melanthius, brother of Evadne and the king\'s bravest captain. Evadne binds the sleeping king in his bed, wakens him, taunts him, and stabs him for her husband, her brother, and herself. Aspatia disguises herself as her own avenging brother, challenges Amintor who has deserted her, strikes him, kicks him; at last he draws, and she falls by the hand of the man she loves. Evadne enters, red-handed from regicide,
Am I not fair?
Looks not Evadne beauteous with these rites?
The seeming dead speaks,—
I am Aspatia yet—
and takes farewell. Amintor stabs himself, but not before Evadne has set him the example. Had Ophelia fallen by the sword of Hamlet the tragedy would not have been "deeper".
"Philaster," again, is a romantic comedy, that deserves its[Pg 245] second title "Love lies a\'bleeding". Philaster is kept out of his royalty by the king, who is wedding his daughter, Arethusa, beloved by Philaster, to Pharamond, prince of Spain, a random debauchee. His intrigue with the audacious wanton Megra, a Court lady, and the besetting of him by the armed burgesses, devoted to Philaster, yield the grim comic material. Philaster gives his page, Bellario (really the disguised Euphrasia, who loves him), to Arethusa. She is accused of an intrigue with the page, who is the soul of loyalty to her and to Philaster. He, in jealousy, rejects both his lady and his page: they meet in a forest: he dismisses Bellario, and bids Arethusa stab him, or he will stab her.
We are two
Earth cannot bear at once.
He does stab her, and is attacked by a country fellow, who wounds him; he then flies from some of the Court who are approaching. Finding Bellario asleep in a glade, Philaster wounds her; so that the pursuers, who
Have no mark to know me but my blood,
may suppose Bellario to be the assailant of Arethusa! "Oh, my heart, what a varlet\'s this, to offer manslaughter upon the harmless gentlewoman," we may cry, with the grocers wife in "The Knight of the Burning Pestle". We "could hurl things at him," at Philaster: whose jealousy does not palliate his cruelty and treachery.
Through many complications the plot winds its way; Bellario, who is about to be tortured, proves to be a woman; both she and Arethusa survive; Philaster, of whom nobody thinks the worse, marries Arethusa; Pharamond is mobbed; all ends happily except for that most pathetic of patient Grizels, Bellario, who remains contented in the happiness of the others. The purity and sweetness of Arethusa, the loyalty of the loving Bellario, and her beautiful speeches, cannot enable this play to escape the blame of being unnatural and repulsive.
The naked analysis of the plays of this age, is, of course, no fair criterion of their merit. A bare exposure of the plot of[Pg 246] "Cymbeline" would deter a man from reading it. The authors are protected by the magic of their poetry, which conveys them off in a golden cloud as Aphrodite saved ?neas. A bare analysis of "A King and No King" (1611), with the alternate valour and nobility, brag, and unintelligible clemencies and ferocities of Arbaces, King of Iberia, who has defeated and captured Tigranes, King of Armenia, would move the most austere to mirth. But there is a method in the apparent madness of Arbaces; and Bessus, the braggart poltroon, is an officer worthy to fight under the same standard as Parolles and Bobadil, while virtue and happiness are kept for Arbaces and Panthea, Tigranes and the faithful Spaconia, through the sudden revelation of Gobrias, the Lord Protector, that Arbaces is a warming-pan pretender, and neither son of Queen Arane (who unceasingly tries to have him stabbed or poisoned), nor the brother of Panthea.
The last tragedies are "The False One," and "Valentinian". Concerning "Thierry and Theodoret" it is not pleasant to speak out, and it is not honest to be silent. "Derived," we are told, "from the French chronicles of the reign of Clotaire the Second," the play is rancid with the humours of the lowest London haunts; marked by wild anachronisms—the Merovingian troops carry muskets,—and crammed with impossible crimes. For a contrast we have the eloquence of Thierry (poisoned by a handkerchief that robs him of sleep, after he has been drugged to deprive him of offspring), and the spotless virtues of his wife Ordella, whom Thierry has been on the point of sacrificing to the gods. The blank verse almost uniformly moves with a loose superfluous foot; as
The most remarkable thing in which kings differ,
From private men,
and so on, is a specimen. There is a pearl to be found on this dust-heap, the stainless Ordella, "the most perfect idea of the female heroic character," says Lamb; but she is found after we have passed through a malodorous labyrinth of "unnatural and violent situations".
Plays like this, or even like "The Spanish Comedy," which opens pleasantly and humorously, and in the cure and his sexton[Pg 247] suggests the influence of Cervantes, but closes in a mist of evil passions, give some show of reason to the opinion of our French critic. "A friendly hand selecting with care" might give all of Beaumont and Fletcher\'s that can please readers not specially devoted to the study of the Drama. Even in the beautiful scenes of "The Faithful Shepherdess," in poetry worthy of Spenser\'s pastoral vein, the author, quite needlessly, introduces a shepherdess who resembles the Brunhault of "Thierry and Theodoret" as Brunhault may have been in girlhood.
"The Knight of the Burning Pestle," on the other hand, with the grocer-critic who insists on a play in which a grocer shall "do admirable things"; with the humours of the grocer\'s wife, and the Quixotic adventures of Ralph, the apprentice, is lively, and, says the Prologue, "has endeavoured, to be far from unseemly words to make your ears glow". Yet, in the jail delivery of the Barber, the authors go out of their way to find ugly ribaldries. Famous among the comedies are "The Scornful Lady," "The Humorous Lieutenant," "The Wild-goose Chase," and "The Little French Doctor". The lyrics and songs are especially beautiful, even in the Elizabethan wealth of song.
A peculiarity of Fletcher\'s blank verse is his fondness for redundant syllables at the close, and indeed anywhere in the line. This manner was gaining on Shakespeare in his latest plays, and, in authors after Fletcher, led to the decay, almost to the death, of blank verse. Yet Fletcher\'s lines, as before Marlowe and Shakespeare, were often "end-stopped": the sense closed with the close of each line; this is not the manner of Shakespeare, or of Beaumont. In his later days Fletcher went for his plots to Spanish tales and romances.
Chapman.
The date of the birth (near Hitchin) of George Chapman, conjecturally placed in 1559, is unknown. He was at Oxford in 1574. The exactness of his scholarship must not be estimated by his translation of Homer; translations, whether in prose or verse, did not then aim at precision. In 1594 he published "The Shadow of Night," containing verses which have been used to[Pg 248] support the theory that he was the poet concerning whose favour Shakespeare expresses uneasiness in his Sonnets. He wrote a conclusion to Marlowe\'s "Hero and Leander"; attempted the luscious (which did not suit his genius), in Ovid\'s "Banquet of Sense"; celebrated Henry, Prince of Wales, in "The Tears of Peace," is mentioned as a dramatist by Meres in 1598, and in that year published his version of "Seven Books of the \'Iliad\'" (not the first seven), while he finished his "Iliad" in 1611, his "Odyssey," some years later.
Thanks mainly to the perfect sonnet of Keats, Chapman\'s Homer is the work by which his memory is kept green except among special students of the Elizabethan drama. To have made Homer "common coin" was a great benefit to the English public, that had known only the mediaeval romances based on Ionian (700 b.c.), Athenian, and Roman perversions of the poet. The "Iliad" he did into "fourteeners," a jigging old measure,—[1] "a splendid swinging metre," says Saintsbury, "better able than any other English metre to cope with the body as well as the rhythm of the English hexameter". Tastes differ! Here are four lines ("Iliad" XV, 596-600). The poet speaks of Zeus,
For Hector\'s glory still he stood, and ever went about
To make him cast the fleet such fire as never should go out;
Heard Thetis\' foul petition, and wished in any wise
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
"The last line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman\'s own splendour at his best," says a critic, and this may be the best of Chapman. But it does not express the meaning of Homer, who says nothing about the "foulness" of the prayer of Thetis, and whose Zeus does not desire to satiate his eyes with "the splendour of the burning ships," but to see one ship set on fire; as, on that signal, he intends to cause the instant rout of the Trojans. It will be observed that Chapman here compresses four Greek hexameters into four English "fourteeners"; and that the movement[Pg 249] of his verse is as rapid as the nature of the "fourteener" permits. He is, however, rugged and obscure and overloads the simplicity of Homer with Elizabethan conceits of his own invention. The "Odyssey" he rendered into heroic couplets with a free movement, and, had he been more sparing of his own conceits, the version would be more satisfactory. Unhappily no English measure represents the Homeric hexameter.
In 1604-5, Chapman with Marston was imprisoned for a very faint piece of satire on the Scots, in "Eastward Ho"; and Ben Jonson, who had been no partner to the passage, as a collaborator in tie play magnanimously insisted on sharing the punishment.
Chapman\'s comedy, "All Fools" opens with an imitation of a play of Terence (followed by Molière in "L\'école des Pères"). We have the sensible and indulgent, and the severe and deceived father. But the plot becomes painfully involved, and jokes on cuckolds are no longer so delightful as they were for two centuries to English taste. His other comedies are not below the level of his contemporaries, excluding Shakespeare and Jonson.
Among Chapman\'s plays on contemporary French history, the two on Bussy d\'Amboise vary much from "Byron\'s\' (Biron\'s) Conspiracy," and "The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron". "Bussy d\'Ambois" has all the faults of fustian, obscurity, bloodshed, torture exercised on the stage, and great palpable ghosts. A friar is the go-between of le brave Bussy and Madame de Monsoreau, Chapman\'s "Tamyra, Countess of Mountsurry". He appears and disappears through a trap door, and when he dies "Umbra Friar" (the ghost of the holy man), "keeps on the business still". Mountsurry (Monsoreau) too, disguised as the friar, is very busy. A magician summons Behemoth, a monstrous fiend with whom Joan of Arc was accused of being too familiar. Tamyra is stabbed frequently on the stage, to make her write a letter inviting Bussy to a fatal tryst; and next, being tortured, she complies and writes in her own blood. Bussy is overpowered by numbers and slain. Charles Lamb admired a long description of a duel between six minions of Henry III, three on each side. The Nuntius (the messenger), a looker-on, tells how Bussy charged[Pg 250] his foe exactly as, in his youth, the Nuntius had seen a unicorn charge an Armenian jeweller, and
Nailed him with his rich antler to a tree.
In "The Revenge of Bussy" his ghost enters and dances with the ghosts of the Duc de Guise, the Cardinal, and Chatillon. The lookers-on are surprised, believing the Guises to be alive and well, when Aumale enters with the news that both have just teen assassinated! The "Revenge" contains some very noble passages of reflection, in which Chapman always shines, and some reminiscences of Homer. The ghosts, though "affable familiar sprites," might be excused by the example of Seneca\'s tragedies. Dryden found in "Bussy d\'Ambois" "a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense," but not all of the poetry is false. There are, indeed, in Chapman\'s blank verse, passages of exquisite beauty and charm: praise which cannot be denied to passages in the works of all his contemporaries in dramatic writing.
John Marston.
John Marston was of an old Shropshire family: he is supposed to have been born in 1575 and educated at Coventry school. He was a member of Brasenose College, Oxford. His father intended him to be a barrister, but observes in his will that "man proposeth but God disposeth". He wrote satires first, and then plays, later took orders, in 1616 received the living of Christchurch in Hampshire, and died in London in 1634. His plays had been collected and published in 1633. Marston\'s earliest publications, under the assumed name of Kinsayder, 1598, were "The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion\'s Image, with Certain Satires," and, in the same year, "The Scourge of Villainy". As to "Pygmalion,"
My wanton Muse lasciviously doth sing,
he says: the verses are in the stanza of "Venus and Adonis". With a cheerful anachronism, Pygmalion, having made his ivory statue of a woman, invokes the shade of Ovid—who lived much after his time. At his prayer the statue lives, and Marston ceases to sing lasciviously.
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Of the Satires we may say in the words addressed by Mr. Toots to the Chicken, "the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure". The first attacks one Ruscus, for writing, like Mr. Toots, letters to himself. Parasites and boasting soldadoes are also satirized. A quarrel with Hall who styled himself "the first English satirist," arose; the authors of "The Return from Parnassus" (1601) spoke of Marston with coarse but effective contempt. In 1599 this "new poet" sold a play to Henslowe. His "Antonio and Mellida," "Sophonisba," "What You Will," and "The Malcontent" (a misanthrope, as in Molière and Wycherley), do not receive much praise even from the greatest enthusiasts for the old drama. In the dedication to "The Malcontent" Marston made up his quarrel with Ben Jonson, whom he had assailed in "Satiromastix" in reply to Ben\'s "Poetaster" (1601), not before Ben, according to his own account, had beaten him. In 1605 Marston joined Chapman and Ben in composing "Eastward Ho". The remarks on the Scots, for which the authors were imprisoned, are merely such as Dr. Johnson used to make for the purpose of teasing Boswell. The play, on the whole, is a very good-humoured study of life in London—rather in Hogarth\'s manner,—with the honest goldsmith, his industrious and his idle apprentice; his ambitious daughter, who would marry a knight with a castle in the air; his quiet daughter, betrothed to the industrious apprentice; the usual number of jokes connected with "horns," and local colour that was useful to Scott in "The Fortunes of Nigel". Probably Marston did little in this favourite comedy; he wearied of play-writing, and was contemptuous of his own works, and careless of his own fame.
Dekker.
Thomas Dekker, as genial as Marston is crabbed, was a playwright and bookseller\'s hack, concerning whose life little is known except that he was one of Henslowe\'s "hands" in 1597; was redeemed by Henslowe from prison in the Poultry in 1598; and was still producing pamphlets in 1637. A Londoner by birth, he knew some Dutch, and as his Bryan in "The Honest Whore" proves, a little Gaelic. His most popular work in prose was "The[Pg 252] Gull\'s Hornbook," which is full of the details of life in the taverns; the thieves; the bona robas, usurers, fops, gamblers, all the world which is best known to the modern reader in "The Fortunes of Nigel".
The social historian finds matter gloomy enough as a rule, in "The Wonderful Year" of the accession of James I; and "The Seven Deadly Sins of London" shows a helpless horror of the crowded poverty of the town. Mr. Swinburne found in one of Dekker\'s tracts a genius akin to Goldsmith\'s, Thackeray\'s, Sterne\'s, Molière\'s, Dickens\'s, and not unlike Shakespeare\'s; with Goldsmith he is often compared; he has given men medicines to make them love him.
Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, and his contributions are discerned by the bewildering light of internal evidence. Of his own pieces, "The Shoe Maker\'s Holiday" (1600) is a broadly cheerful comedy; the jolly son of St. Hugh, Simon Eyre, becomes Lord Mayor, and, in the upper plot, the hero, Lacy, is very readily pardoned after deserting his regiment in France to woo another Mayor\'s daughter in the disguise of a shoemaker.
"The Honest Whore," in two parts, shows Bellafront as a Magdalen redeemed by a sudden love which does not find its earthly close; she marries a scamp to whom, in the Second Part, she plays the Patient Grizel, backed by her father disguised as an old serving-man. There is abundance of the inevitable ribaldry.
In a play devoted to "Patient Grissil," that ideal of the dramatists, occurs the lovely lyric "Art thou poor, Yet hast thou golden slumbers"; in "Old Fortunatus" (in the story of the Magical Purse) is "Fortune\'s kind, cry holiday": other pretty songs occur in "The Sun\'s Darling" (Ford and Dekker).
"Satiromastix," as we have seen, secures for Dekker the praise of audacity, for no craven would have attacked Ben Jonson. There are fine tirades of imaginative blank verse in "Fortunatus". Dekker admired a thoroughly good woman, whether converted or needing no conversion, as most of his fraternity and as Fielding did. But Fortune, if she sometimes "cried holiday" to Dekker, was never "kind". He is best remembered for his songs and for the words
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the best of men
That e\'er wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.
When Lamb tells us that Dekker "had poetry enough for anything": when Mr. Swinburne declares that Dekker "was endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humour, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement, and an exquisite simplicity of expression," we wish to search for his privately reprinted works in prose, and the solitary edition of his plays.
But on the other hand we are told that his "Satiromastix" is not too severely called "a preposterous medley": that his "besetting vice" is "reckless and sluttish incoherence"; that one play can be best explained as the work of an intoxicated man in a debtor\'s prison; that "there are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens and of sluts." Dekker wrote several pamphlets, which, in a sort, resemble some minor work of Daniel de Foe.
Middleton.
Though Ben Jonson said in his haste that Middleton was "a base fellow," he was of a gentle house. The date of his birth is unknown (1570?), as early as 1597 he was writing for the Press; by 1602 he was working at plays in which five or six other men collaborated. Probably they settled on a plot, or rather on two plots, upper and under, and each author wrote an act: a ............