Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV, Scene 2 of _A King and No King_, and the prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of _Philaster_, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same scenes.
FOOTNOTES:
[149] Some sixteen plays in all.
[150] _The Chances_, I, 1, p. 222 (Dyce); but as a rule I use in this chapter the text of the _Cambridge English Classics_.
[151] For these scenes, and the reasons for asserting that Fletcher revised them, see Chapter XXIV below.
[152] The reader may judge for himself by referring to the citation from the _Letter_ and the poems to the Countess in Chapters VII and XI, above.
[153] Fleay, Boyle, Oliphant, Alden. And even G. C. Macaulay, who once claimed the whole play for Beaumont, says now "perhaps Fletcher's."
[154] Q 1622, slightly modernized.
[155] IV, 1, 2, 3; V, 1, 3.
[156] Quarto of 1619 as given by Alden.
CHAPTER XIX
FLETCHER'S DICTION
The verse criterion is, however, not of itself a reagent sufficient to precipitate fully the Beaumont of the joint-plays. For there still exists the certainty that in plotting plays together, each of the collaborators was influenced by the opinion of the other; and the probability that, though one may have undertaken sundry scenes or divers characters in a play, the other would, in the course of general correction, insert lines in the parts written by his collaborator, and would convey to his own scenes the distinguishing rhythm, "humour," or diction of a definite character, created, or elaborated, by his colleague. It, therefore, follows that the assignment of a whole scene to either author on the basis alone of some recurring metrical peculiarity is not convincing. In the same section, even in the same speech, we may encounter insertions which bear the stamp of the revising colleague. For instance, the opening of _Philaster_ is generally assigned to Beaumont: it has the characteristics of his prose. But with the entry of the King (line 89) we are launched upon a subscene in verse which, on the one hand, has a higher percentage of double endings (_viz._ 38) than Beaumont ever used, but does not fully come up to Fletcher's usage; while on the other hand, it has a higher percentage of run-on lines[157] (_viz._ 44) than Fletcher ever used. The other verse tests leave us similarly in doubt. To any one, however, familiar with the diction and characterization of the two authors the suspicion occurs that the scene was written by Beaumont in the first instance; and then worked over and considerably enlarged by his associate. In the first hundred lines of Act II, Scene 4, similar insertions by Fletcher occur, and in Act III, 2.[158]
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 eyes 5 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] girt 10 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 wind 15 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 hook 20 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 applyed 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, anapaestic 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:
Do you see this Gent(leman), You that bring Thunders in your mouths, and Earthquakes, To shake and totter my designs? Can you imagine (You men of poor and common apprehensions) While I admit this man, my Son, this nature That in one look carries more fire, and fierceness, Than all your Masters lives[162]; dare I admit him, Admit him thus, even to my side, my bosom, When he is fit to rule, when all men cry him, And all hopes hang about his head; thus place him, His weapon hatched in bloud; all these attending When he shall make their fortunes, all as sudden, In any expedition he shall point 'em, As arrows from a Tartar's bow, and speeding, Dare I do this, and fear an enemy?
Fear your great master? yours? or yours?
Here we have blank verse, distinctively Fletcherian with its feminine endings and its end-stopped lines. But, widely as this differs from the earlier rhythm of _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ and its more lyric precipitancy, the qualities of tone and diction are in the later play as in the earlier. The alliterations may not be so numerous, and are in general more cunningly concealed and interwoven, as in lines 2 to 4; but the cruder kind still appears as a mannerism, the "fire and fierceness,"
"hopes," "hang," and "head." The iterations of word, phrase, and rhetorical question, and of the resonant "all," the redundant nouns in apposition, the tautological enumeration of categories, proclaim the unaltered Fletcher. The adjectives are in this spot pruned, but they are luxuriant elsewhere in the play. The triplets,--"this man, my son, this nature,"--"admit," "admit," "admit," find compeers on nearly every page:
Shew where to lead, to lodge, to charge with safetie,--[163]
Here's a strange fellow now, and a brave fellow, If we may say so of a pocky fellow.--[164]
And now, 't is ev'n too true, I feel a pricking, A pricking, a strange pricking.--[165]
With such a sadness on his face, as sorrow, Sorrow herself, but poorly imitates.
Sorrow of sorrows on that heart that caus'd it![166]
In the passages cited above there happen to be, also, a few examples of the elocutionary afterthought:
You come with thunders in your mouth _and earthquakes_,--
As arrows from a Tartar's bow, _and speeding_.--
To this device, and to the intensive use of the pronominal "one"
Fletcher is as closely wedded as to the repetition of "all,"--
They have a hand upon us, A heavy and a hard one.[167]
To wear this jewel near thee; he is a tried one And one that ... will yet stand by thee.[168]
Other plays conceded by the critics to Fletcher alone, and written in his distinctive blank verse, display the same characteristics of style: _The Chances_ of about 1615, _The Loyall Subject_ of 1618 (like _The Humorous Lieutenant_ of the middle period), and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_ of the last period, 1624. I quote at random for him who would apply the tests,--first from _The Chances_,[169] the following of the repeating revolver style:
Art thou not an Ass?
And modest as her blushes! what a blockhead Would e're have popt out such a dry Apologie For this dear friend? and to a Gentlewoman, A woman of her youth and delicacy?
They are arguments to draw them to abhor us.
An honest moral man? 't is for a Constable: A handsome man, a wholesome man, a tough man, A liberal man, a likely man, a man Made up by Hercules, unslaked with service: The same to night, to morrow night, the next night, And so to perpetuity of pleasures.
Now, from _The Loyall Subject_[170]--the farewell of _Archas_ to his arms and colours. I wish I could quote it all as an example of noble noise, enumerative and penny-a-line rhetoric:
Farewell, my Eagle! when thou flew'st, whole Armies Have stoopt below thee: at Passage I have seen thee Ruffle the Tartars, as they fled thy furie, And bang 'em up together, as a Tassel, Upon the streach, a flock of fearfull Pigeons.
I yet remember when the Volga curl'd, The aged Volga, when he heav'd his head up, And rais'd his waters high, to see the ruins, The ruines our swords made, the bloudy ruins; Then flew this Bird of honour bravely, Gentlemen; But these must be forgotten: so must these too, And all that tend to Arms, by me for ever.