With woman's purity his darkest pages are starred. She is 'innocent as morning light,' 'more innocent than sleep,' 'as white as Innocence herself.' 'Armed with innocence' a tender spotless maid 'may walk safe among beasts.' Her 'prayers are pure,' and she is 'fair and virtuous still to ages.'[179] His fairest heroines are philosophers of 'the truth of maids and perjuries of men.' "All the men I meet are harsh and rude,"
says Aspatia,
And have a subtilty in everything Which love could never know; but we fond women Harbour the easiest and the smoothest thoughts, And think all shall go so. It is unjust That men and women should be match'd together.
His Viola of the _Coxcombe_ continues the contention:
Woman, they say, was only made of man Methinks 'tis strange they should be so unlike; It may be, all the best was cut away To make the woman, and the naught was left Behind with him.
And the philosophy of Beaumont's love-lorn maidens she sums up in her conclusion:
Scholars affirm the world's upheld by love; But I believe women maintain all this, For there's no love in men.
Deserted by her lover, she finds 'how valiant and how 'fraid at once, Love makes a virgin'; and, sought again by him repentant, she epitomizes the hearts of all Bellarios, Arethusas, Pantheas, Uranias:
I will set no penance To gain the great forgiveness you desire, But to come hither, and take me and it ...
For God's sake, urge your faults no more, but mend!
All the forgiveness I can make you, is To love you: which I will do, and desire Nothing but love again; which if I have not, Yet I will love you still.
All man can do in return for such long-suffering mercy is to revere: "How rude are all men that take the name of civil to ourselves" murmurs the reformed Ricardo; and then--
I do kneel because it is An action very fit and reverent, In presence of so pure a creature.
So kneels Arbaces; and so, in spirit, Philaster and Amintor.
Prayer is for Beaumont a very present aid. Of his women especially the 'vows' and 'oblations' are a poetic incense continually ascending. And closely akin to the prayerful innocence of tender maids is the pathos of their 'childhood thrown away.' Even his whimsical Oriana of _The Woman-Hater_ can aver:
The child this present hour brought forth To see the world has not a soul more pure, More white, more virgin that I have.
The bitterest experiences of humanity are sprung from misapprehension,--"They have most power to hurt us that we love,"--or from jealousy, slander, unwarranted violence, unmerited pain. And for these the only solace is in death. About this truth Beaumont weaves a shroud of unsullied beauty, a poetry that has rarely been surpassed. In nearly all that he has left us the thought recurs; but nowhere better expressed than in those lines, already quoted in full from _Philaster_, where Bellario "knows what 'tis to die ... a lasting sleep; a quiet resting from all jealousy." His Arethusa repeats the theme; but with a wistful incertitude:
I shall have peace in death Yet tell me this: there will be no slanders, No jealousy in the other world; no ill there?
"No," replies her unjustly suspicious lover.--And she:--"Show me, then, the way!" No kinder mercy to the tempted, misconceived heir of mortality has been vouchsafed than to 'suffer him to find his quiet grave in peace.' So think Panthea and Arbaces; and so his Urania and Leucippus find. And so the poet closes that rare elegy to his beloved Countess of Rutland:
I will not hurt the peace which she should have, By longer looking in her quiet grave.
But still more powerful in its blessing than 'sleep' and the 'peace' of the 'quiet grave,' and more fearful in its bane than the penalties of hell,--one reality persists--the award of 'after-ages.' Bellario would not reveal what she has learned, to make her life 'last ages.'
Philaster's highest praise for Arethusa is "Thou art fair and virtuous still to ages." "Kill me," says Amintor to Evadne,--
Kill me; all true lovers, that shall live In after-ages crossed in their desires, Shall bless thy memory.
Ricardo of the _Coxcombe_ would have some woman 'grave in paper' their 'matchless virtues to posterities.' Even the mock-romantic Jasper in the _Knight_ (which I am sure is all Beaumont) will try his sweetheart's love 'that the world and memory may sing to after-times her constancy.'
As to evil, it meets its punishment both in heredity and in the verdict of generations yet to come. "I see," soliloquizes the usurping King in a passage already quoted from _Philaster_:
You gods, I see that who unrighteously Holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed In that which meaner men are blest withal: Ages to come shall know no male of him Left to inherit, and his name shall be Blotted from earth; if he have any child It shall be crossly matched.
"Show me the way," cries Arbaces to his supposed mother, and thinking of heredity, "to the inheritance I have by thee, which is a spacious world Of impious acts." And Amintor warns Evadne: "Let it not rise up for thy shame and mine To after-ages.... We will adopt us sons; The virtue shall inherit and not blood." "May all ages," prays the lascivious Bacha in _Cupid's Revenge_, "May all ages,"--
That shall succeed curse you as I do! and If it be possible, I ask it, Heaven, That your base issues may be ever monstrous, That must for shame of nature and succession, Be drowned like dogs!
So, _passim_, in Beaumont--'lasting to ages in the memory of this damned act'; 'a great example of their justice to all ensuing ages.'
FOOTNOTES:
[178] Elegy on the Countess of Rutland.
[179] I cannot understand how so careful a scholar as Professor Schelling (_Engl. Lit. during Lifetime of Shakesp._, 207) can attribute to him, from the hopelessly uncritical collection of Blaiklock, the poem entitled _The Indifferent_, and argue therefrom his "cynicism" concerning the constancy of woman.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THREE DISPUTED PLAYS
With the tests which have thus been described we are equipped for an examination of the plays written before 1616, which have, in these latter days, been with some show of evidence regarded as the joint-production of the "two wits and friends."[180] While attempting to separate the composition of one author from that of the other, we may determine the dramatic peculiarities of each during the course of the partnership, and obtain a fairly definite basis for an historical and literary appreciation of the plays, individually considered.
1.--Of the _Foure Playes, or Morall Representations, in One_ (first published as by Beaumont and Fletcher in the folio of 1647, but without indication of first performance or of acting company), the last two, _The Triumph of Death_ and _The Triumph of Time_, are, according to the verse tests, undoubtedly Fletcher's and have been assigned to him by all critics. _The Triumph of Death_ is studded with alliterations and with repetitions of the effective word:
Oh I could curse And crucify myself for childish doting Upon a face that feeds not with fresh figures Every fresh hour;
and with triplets:
What new body And new face must I make me, with new manners;
and with the resonant "all":
Make her all thy heaven, And all thy joy, for she is all thy happiness;
and with Fletcher's favourite words and his nouns in apposition, rhetorical questions, afterthoughts, verbal enumerations, and turgid exposition. The same may be said of _The Triumph of Time_. As there is less of the redundant epithet than in _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ (1609), but more than in _Philaster_ (before July 12, 1610), I am of the opinion that Fletcher's contribution to the _Triumphs_ falls chronologically between those plays. As Fletcher matures he prunes his adjectives.
The rest of these _Morall Representations_ display neither the verse nor the rhetoric of Fletcher. On the basis of verse-tests Boyle assigns them to Beaumont. Macaulay says, "probably,"--and adds the _Induction_. But Oliphant, taking into consideration also the rhetorical and dramatic qualities, gives the _Induction_ and _The Triumph of Honour_ to a third author, Nathaniel Field, and only _The Triumph of Love_ to Beaumont. As to the _Induction_ and _The Triumph of Honour_ I agree with Oliphant.
They are full of polysyllabic Latinisms such as Field uses in his _Woman is a Weather-cocke_ (entered for publication November 23, 1611) and Beaumont never uses: 'to participate affairs,' 'torturous engine,' etc.; and they are marked by simpler Fieldian expressions 'wale,' 'gyv'd,'
'blown man,' 'miskill,' 'vane,' 'lubbers,' 'urned,' and a score of others not found anywhere in Beaumont's undoubted writings. A few words, like 'basilisk' and 'loathed' suggest Beaumont, as does the verse; but this may be explained by vogue or imitation. Field was two or three years younger than Beaumont, and had played as a boy actor in one or more of the early Beaumont and Fletcher productions. His _Woman is a Weather-cocke_ and his _Amends for Ladies_ indicate the influence of Beaumont in matters of comic invention, poetic hyperbole, burlesque and pathos, as well as in metrical style. The _Honour_ is a somewhat bombastic, puerile, magic-show written in manifest imitation of Beaumont's verse and rhetoric.
As to _The Triumph of Love_, I go further than Oliphant. I assign at least half of it, viz., scenes 1, 2, and 6, on the basis of diction, to Field. In scenes 3, 4, and 5, I find some trace of Beaumont's favourite expressions, of his thoughts of destiny and death and woman's tenderness, his poetic spontaneity, his sensational dramatic surprises; but I think these are an echo. The rural scene lacks his exquisite simplicity; and some of the words are not of his vocabulary. One is sorry to strike from the list of Beaumont's creations the pathetic and almost impressive figure of Violante. If it was originally Beaumont's, it is of his earlier work revamped by Field; if it is Field's, it is an echo simulating the voice, but missing the reality, of Beaumont's Aspatia, Bellario, Urania. This criticism holds true of both the Triumphs, _Love_ and _Honour_.
The commonly accepted date, 1608, for the composition of the _Foure Playes in One_ is derived from Fleay, who mistakenly quotes a reference in the 1619 quarto of _The Yorkshire Tragedy_ to the _Foure Playes_ as if it were of the 1608 quarto where the reference does not appear.[181]
While Fletcher may have written the first draft of his contribution before the middle of 1610, it is evident from Field's Address _To the Reader_ in the first quarto of the _Woman is a Weather-cocke_ (entered S. R., November 23, 1611), that Field's contribution was made after November 23, 1611. In that Address he makes it plain that this is his first dramatic effort: "I have been vexed with vile plays myself a great while, hearing many; now I thought to be even with some, and they should hear mine too." We have already noticed[182] that Field had not written even his _Weather-cocke_, still less anything in collaboration with Fletcher, at the time of the publication of _The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ (between January and July, 1609); for in his complimentary poem for the quarto of that "Pastorall," Field acknowledges his unknown name and his Muse in swaddling clouts, and timidly confesses his ambition to write something like _The Shepheardesse_, "including a Morallitie, Sweete and profitable." That Field's contribution to the _Foure Playes_ was not made before the date of the first performance of _The Weather-cocke_ by the Revels' Children at Whitefriars, _i. e._, January 4, 1610 to Christmas 1610-11 (when its presentation before the King at Whitehall probably took place), further appears from his dedication _To Any Woman that hath been no Weather-cocke_ (quarto, 1611) in which he alludes not to _The Triumph of Honour_, or of _Love_, but to _Amends for Ladies_, as his "next play,"
then on the stocks, and, he thought, soon to be printed.[183] The evidence, external and internal, amply presented by Oliphant, Thorndike, and others, but with a view to conclusions different from mine as to date and authorship, confirms me in the belief that Fletcher's _Time_ and _Death_, though written at least two years earlier, were not gathered up with Field's _Induction_, _Honour_, and _Love_, into the _Foure Playes in One_ until about 1612; and that the series was performed at Whitefriars by Field's company of the Queen's Revels'
Children, shortly after they had first acted _Cupid's Revenge_ at the same theatre.
2.--Of the remaining ten plays in which, according to the historical evidence adduced by various critics, Beaumont could have collaborated, at least two furnish no material that can be of service for the estimation of his qualities. If _Love's Cure_ was written as early as the date of certain references in the story, viz., 1605-1609, it is so overlaid by later alteration that whether, as the textual experts guess, it be Beaumont's revised by Massinger, or Fletcher's revised by Massinger and others, or Massinger and Middleton's, or Beaumont's with the assistance of Fletcher and revised by Massinger, Beaumont for us is indeterminate. Fleay, Oliphant, and others trace him in a few prose scenes, and in two or three of verse.[184] But where the rhetorical and dramatic manner occasionally suggest him, or the metre has somewhat of his stamp, words abound that I find in no work of his undisputed composition. The servant, Lazarillo, like him of Beaumont's _Woman-Hater_, is a glutton, but he does not speak Beaumont's language.
The scenes ascribed to Beaumont reek with an excremental and sexual vulgarity to which Beaumont never condescended, unless for brief space, and when absolutely necessary for characterization. And there is little, indeed, that bespeaks Fletcher. _Love's Cure_ was first attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher at a "reviving of the play" after they were both dead; and it was not printed till 1647. It is not unlikely, as G. C. Macaulay holds, that the play was written by Massinger, in or after 1622.