Renowned Spencer, lye a thought more nye To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye A little neerer Spencer, to make roome For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.
To lodge all foure in one bed make a shift Untill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift, Betwixt this day and that, by Fate be slayne For whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe.
The date of the sonnet of which these are the opening lines can be only approximately determined. It must be earlier, however, than 1623; for in that year Jonson alludes to it in verses presently to be quoted. And it must be later than the erection of the monument to Shakespeare's memory in Trinity Church, Stratford, in or soon after 1618, for in the lines which follow those given above the writer apostrophizes Shakespeare as sleeping "Under this carved marble of thine owne." The sonnet contemplates the removal of Shakespeare's remains to Westminster, and arranges the poets already lying there not in actual but chronological order.[132]
To these verses Jonson, as I have said, alludes in the series of stanzas prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623,--_To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and what he hath left us._ Ben Jonson intends, however, no slight to Beaumont and the other poets mentioned by Basse, when, in his rapturous eulogy, he declines to regard them as the peers of Shakespeare. On the contrary this lover at heart, and in his best moments, of Beaumont, bestows a meed of praise: they are "great Muses,"--Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont,--but merely "disproportioned," if one judge critically, in the present comparison, as are, indeed, Lyly, Kyd, and Marlowe. Not these, but "thundering aeschylus," Euripides, and Sophocles, Pacuvius, Accius, "him of Cordova dead," must be summoned
To life againe to heare thy Buskin tread And shake a Stage.
Therefore it is, that Jonson calls--
My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye A little further to make thee a roome: Thou art a Moniment without a toombe, And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses; I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses.
That Beaumont was regarded by his immediate contemporaries not as a professional, but literary, dramatist,--a poet, and a person of social eminence,--appears from Drayton's _Epistle to Henery Reynolds, Esq., Of Poets and Poesy_, published 1627, from which I have earlier quoted. Here the writer, appraising the poets "who have enrich'd our language with their rhymes" informs his "dearly loved friend" that he does not
meane to run In quest of these that them applause have wonne Upon our Stages in these latter dayes, That are so many; let them have their bayes, That doe deserve it; let those wits that haunt Those publique circuits, let them freely chaunt Their fine Composures, and their praise pursue;
and thus, we may conjecture, he excuses the omission of such men as Middleton, Fletcher, and Massinger. Beginning with Chaucer, "the first of ours that ever brake Into the Muses' treasure, and first spake In weighty numbers," Drayton pays especial honour to "grave, morall Spencer," "noble Sidney ... heroe for numbers and for prose," Marlowe with his "brave translunary things," Shakespeare of "as smooth a comicke vaine ... as strong conception, and as cleere a rage, As any one that trafiqu'd with the Stage," "learn'd Johnson.... Who had drunke deepe of the Pierian spring," and "reverend Chapman" for his translations: then he passes to men of letters whom he had loved, Alexander and Drummond, and concludes the roll-call with his two Beaumonts and his Browne, his bosom friends, rightly born poets and "Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts." This letter not only speaks the opinion of Drayton concerning the standing of the two Beaumonts in poetry, but incidentally asserts the popularity of their work, for the author informs his correspondents that he "ties himself here only to those few men"
Whose works oft printed, set on every post, To publique censure subject have bin most.
By 1627 all of the dramas in which Francis had an undoubted share, except _The Coxcombe_ had been printed; and some of his poems had appeared as early as 1618 in a little volume that included also Drayton's elegies on Lady Penelope Clifton and the three sons of Lord Sheffield, and Verses by 'N. H.'
[Illustration: 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,
Thou strik'st our sense so deep, At once thou mak'st us Blush, Rejoyce, and Weep.
Great father Johnson bow'd himselfe when hee (Thou writ'st so nobly) vow'd he envy'd thee.
FOOTNOTES:
[121] From the portrait at Knole Park.
[122] _Encyc. Brit., sub nomine._
[123] By Cockerell, in the _Variorum Edition of B. and F.'s Works_, Vol. I, 1904. See Frontispiece to this volume.
[124] _Historical Portraits_, Vol. II, 1600-1700, Oxford, 1911.
[125] Not to the third Earl, Richard, as Cyril Brett, _Drayton's Minor Poems_, p. xix, has it.
[126] Clark's _Aubrey's Brief Lives_, II, 175, 239. Not Mary (Curzon), the wife of the fourth Earl, as Professor Elton, _Drayton_ (1895), p.
45, has it.
[127] After the appearance of Montague's edition of King James's _Works_, and before the execution of Raleigh.
[128] Save for non-dramatic productions such as Ben Jonson's _Epigrams_, etc.
[129] Grosart, _D. N. B._, art, _Sir John Beaumont_, and _Sir J. B.'s Poems_, xxxvi.
[130] _B. and F._, Vol. I, lii.
[131] Revised by Earle for the _Commendatory Verses_, Folio 1647; but I have retained some of the readings of the 1640 copy included in Beaumont's _Poems_.
[132] The version given above is that of Brit. Mus. _MS. Lansdowne_ 777. Of other versions one is attributed to Donne; but the Lansdowne is the most authentic, and the evidence of authorship is all for Basse, whose name follows in the Lansdowne manuscript. So, Miss L. T.
Smith in _Centurie of Praise_, p. 139.
[133] Mr. Bullen, _D. N. B._, under _Fitzgeffrey_, queries "Nathaniel Hooke." I have not been able to identify Hooke.
[134] _Choice Drollery, Songs, and Sonnets, 1656, in Sh. Soc. Pap._, III, 172.
[135] _The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells._
[136] Through the Villierses and therefore probably through the Coleorton Beaumonts.
CHAPTER XIV
TRADITION, AND TRADITIONAL CRITICISM
What we learn from tradition, and from the criticism of the century following Beaumont's death, adds little to what we already have observed concerning his life and personality. Concerning his share in the joint-plays, it adds much, mostly wrong; but of that, later. Mosely, in his address of _The Stationer to the Readers_ prefixed to the folio of 1647, announces that knowing persons had generally assured him "that these Authors were the most unquestionable Wits this Kingdome hath afforded. Mr. Beaumont was ever acknowledged a man of a most strong and searching braine; and (his yeares considered) the most Judicious Wit these later Ages have produced. He dyed young, for (which was an invaluable losse to this Nation) he left the world when hee was not full thirty yeares old. Mr. Fletcher survived, and lived till almost fifty; whereof the World now enjoyes the benefit." The dramatist, Shirley, in his address _To the Reader_ of the folio, says "It is not so remote in Time, but very many Gentlemen may remember these Authors; and some familiar in their conversation deliver them upon every pleasant occasion so fluent, to talke a Comedy. He must be a bold man," continues he, with a prophetic commonsense, "that dares undertake to write their Lives.
What I have to say is, we have the precious Remaines; and as the wisest contemporaries acknowledge they Lived a Miracle, I am very confident this volume cannot die without one." Shirley also reminds the Reader that but to mention Beaumont and Fletcher "is to throw a cloude upon all former names and benight Posterity." "This Book being, without flattery, the greatest Monument of the Scene that Time and Humanity have produced, and must Live, not only the Crowne and sole Reputation of our owne, but the stayne of all other Nations and Languages." To such a pitch had the vogue of our dramatists risen in the thirty years after Beaumont's death! Not only Shakespeare and learned Ben, but Sophocles and Euripides may vail to them. "This being,"--and here we catch a vision from life itself,--"this being the Authentick witt that made Blackfriars an Academy, where the three howers spectacle while Beaumont and Fletcher were presented, were usually of more advantage to the hopefull young Heire, than a costly, dangerous, forraigne Travell, with the assistance of a governing Mounsieur, or Signior, to boote. And it cannot be denied but that the spirits of the Time, whose Birth and Qualitie made them impatient of the sowrer ways of education, have from the attentive hearing these pieces, got ground in point of wit and carriage of the most severely employed Students, while these Recreations were digested into Rules, and the very pleasure did edifie."
So far as the plays printed in this folio are concerned, not much of this praise belongs to Beaumont; for, as we now know, not more than two of them, _The Coxcombe_ and the _Masque of the Inner Temple_, bear his impress. But Shirley is thinking of the reputation of the authors in general; and he writes with an eye to the sale of the book.
Since we shall presently find opportunity to consider the trend of opinion during the seventeenth century regarding the respective shares of the dramatists in composition, but a word need be said here upon the subject,--and that as to the origin of a tradition speedily exaggerated into error: namely, that Beaumont's function in the partnership was purely of gravity and critical acumen. From the verses of John Berkenhead, an Oxford man, born in 1615, a writer of some lampooning ability and, in 1647 reader in moral philosophy at the University, we learn that, he, at least, thought it impossible to separate the faculties of the two dramatists, which "as two Voices in one Song embrace (Fletcher's keen Trebble, and deep Beaumont's Base"); that, however, there were some in his day who held "That One [Fletcher] the Sock, th' Other [Beaumont] the Buskin claim'd,"
That should the Stage embattaile all its Force, Fletcher would lead the Foot, Beaumont the Horse;
and that Beaumont's was "the understanding," Fletcher's "the quick free will." Such discrimination, as I have said, Berkenhead disavows; but he is of the opinion, nevertheless, that the rules by which their art was governed came from Beaumont: