Alas, how valiant and how fraid at once Love makes a Virgin!
When she comes upon her lover staggering outside the tavern with his sodden comrades,[223] with what simplicity she shudders:
I never saw a drunken man before; But these I think are so....
My state is such, I know not how to think A prayer fit for me; only I could move That never Maiden more might be in love!
When, rescued from thieves in the country, she finds that her rescuer is even more a peril,[224] with what childlike trust she appeals:
Pray you, leave me here Just as you found me, a poor innocent, And Heaven will bless you for it!
When again deserted, with what pathos she sighs:
"I'll sit me down and weep; All things have cast me from 'em but the earth.
The evening comes, and every little flower Droops now, as well as I!"
And, finally, when she has rediscovered Ricardo, and conquered his self-reproach by her forgiveness, which is "to love you," with what admirable touch of nature and delicious humour she gives verisimilitude to her story and herself:[225]
Methinks I would not now, for any thing, But you _had_ mist me: I have made a story Will serve to waste many a winter's fire, When we are old. I'll tell my daughters then The miseries their Mother had in love, And say, "My girls, be wiser"; yet I would not Have had more wit myself.
Ricardo, too, is a creative study in the development of personality; and the rural scenes and characters are convincing.
In the main plot Beaumont had no hand whatever, unless it be in the prose of the trial-scene at the end of the fifth act. The rest is Fletcher's; but in a few scenes his work has been revamped, and in verse as well as style degraded by the reviser. Oliphant thinks that here and there Massinger may be traced;[226] and here and there, Rowley.[227] I should be sorry to impute any of the mutilations to the former. I think that the irregular lines, trailing or curtailed, the weak endings, the finger-counted syllables, puerile accentuation, and bad grammar have much nearer kinship with the earlier output of the latter. But of whatever sins of supererogation his revisers may have been guilty, the prime offense is Fletcher's--in dramatizing that story at all. To make a comedy out of cuckoldry was not foreign to the genius of the Elizabethans: for the pruriency of it we can make historical allowance.
But a comedy in which the wittol-hero successfully conducts the cuckolding of himself is nauseating. And that the wittol, his adulterous wife, and the fornicator should conclude the affair in mutual gratulation is, from the dramatic point of view, worse even than prurient and nauseating; it is unnatural, and therefore unsuited to artistic effect. No amount of technical ingenuity on Fletcher's part could have made his contribution to this play worthy of literary criticism.
Though _The Coxcombe_ was not successful in its first production before the "ignorant multitude," it was "in the opinion of men of worth well received and favoured." We have seen that it was played at Court in 1612 in the festivities for the Elector Palatine's approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. It was revived for Charles I and Queen Henrietta in 1636; and it was one of the twenty-seven "old plays" presented in the City theatres after the Restoration, and before 1682. In the revivals Beaumont's romantic subplot gradually assumed the dominant position, and it was finally borrowed outright for a comedy called _The Fugitives_, constructed by Richardson and acted by the Drury Lane company in 1792.
With Palmer in the part of Young Manly (the Ricardo of the original), and Mrs. Jordan as Julia (alias Beaumont's Viola), the adaptation ran for a dozen nights or more.
7.--_Philaster_ or _Love lies a-Bleeding_ was "divers times acted at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers by his Majesties Servants." Under the second title in the _Scourge of Folly_, entered for publication October 8, 1610, Davies of Hereford appears to mention it; and I have already stated my reasons as based upon the history of the theatres[228] for believing that its first performance took place between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610.
We might have something like confirmation of this date from the grouping of epigrams in Davies of Hereford's _Scourge of Folly_, if we could affirm that they were arranged in the order of their composition. For just before the epigram on _Love lies a-Bleeding_, which, I think, without doubt, applies to _Philaster_, appears one _To the Roscius of these times, Mr. W. Ostler_, saluting him as "sole king of actors." Now Osteler, Ostler, or Osler, had been one of the Queen's Revels'
Children,--most of them from thirteen to sixteen years of age at the time,--in 1601 when Jonson's _Poetaster_ was acted. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of age while still playing with the Queen's Children in 1608; and he would certainly not have been styled "sole king of actors" at that age. According to the supplication of Cuthbert Burbadge and others in the well-known suit of 1635 concerning the shares in the Blackfriars theatre,[229] before Evans surrendered the lease of that theatre in 1608, some of the Queen's Revels' Children "growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, were taken to strengthen the King's service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves [the King's Company], and soe [we] purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." On the face of it this deposition places the transference of Underwood, Field, and Ostler to the King's Company between the beginning of April 1608 when the Revels'
Children were temporarily suppressed and August of that year when the Burbadges, Shakespeare, Hemings, and others took over Evans's unexpired lease of Blackfriars with a view to occupying it themselves. But the deposition of Cuthbert Burbadge was not made till twenty-seven years after the occurrence described; and is not to be trusted as a statement of the sequence of events. The Boys may have acted temporarily with, or under the supervision of, the King's Company at Blackfriars between December 7, 1609 and January 4, 1610; but one of them, Field, is at the head of the new Queen's Revels at Whitefriars by March 25, 1610, and does not appear in the lists of the King's Men till 1616; and there is no record of Underwood and Ostler as members of the latter company before the end of 1610, when they acted in Jonson's _Alchemist_ (after October 3). Since Underwood and Ostler were not with the new Queen's Revels after January of that year, it is probable that Davies's epigram to the latter as "the Roscius of these times" in the _Scourge of Folly_, entered for publication on October 8, 1610, was written after Ostler had attained distinction in Shakespeare's company, the company of the leading actors of the day, and that the grouping of the epigram to Ostler with that of the epigram to Fletcher on _Philaster_ presented by that company indicates contemporaneity in the composition of the epigrams,--that is to say, between January 4 and October, 1610.
Since, however, the epigrams in _The Scourge of Folly_, though frequently arranged by groups, sometimes of mental association, sometimes of contemporaneous composition, do not follow a continuous chronological order, the juxtaposition of these two epigrams cannot be regarded as more than a feather's evidence to the direction of the wind.
Of much greater weight as confirming the date of _Philaster_, as conjectured above, is its resemblance to Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_ not only in general features of background and atmosphere, plot, typical characters, romantic motive, situations, and style, but also in specific detail. I shall presently attempt to show at greater length that there is nothing in the _Philaster_ or the _Cymbeline_ to indicate the priority of the former. But I must at the risk of anticipating indicate in this place though briefly the argument of a later chapter.[230] For the _Cymbeline_, I accept the date assigned by the majority of critics, 1609. Shakespeare had had the character of Imogen (or Innogen) in mind since he first introduced her, years before, as a silent personage in _Much Ado About Nothing_ (the quarto of 1600). In execution the play is, with _The Winter's Tale_ and the _Tempest_, the dramatic sequel of that first of his "dramatic romances,"--of which the leading conception is the loss and recovery of a wife or child,--the _Pericles_ written in 1607 or 1608. And since already in _Pericles_, Shakespeare had blazed this new path, I cannot for a moment accept the hypothesis that he is in his _Cymbeline_ borrowing profusely from _Philaster_, a work of comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of construction to the somewhat novel--to them entirely novel--method of the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved in _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_. And still the more so when one reflects that, in _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_, aside from the leading conception, everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ to _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_; and that there is no salient characteristic of dramatic construction in _Philaster_, otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of those earlier comedies and of the _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_ would not suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that _Philaster_ was first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July 1610.
The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that author credit for practically the whole work,--"Thou ... raign'st in Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of 1647, mentions _Love Lies a-Bleeding_ among Fletcher's "incomparable plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene "when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he says:
Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared to thee, In thy _Philaster_ and _Maids Tragedy_!
Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray ...
for, with the exception of three scenes, two half-scenes and a few insertions or revisions by Fletcher, _Philaster_ is Beaumont's (and practically the same holds true of _The Maides Tragedy_, and the Bessus play--_A King and No King_). In _Philaster_ Fletcher's scenes, as proved by rhetorical tests, and by metrical when they may be applied, are I, 1{^_b_} (from the King's entry, line 89--line 358,[231]--a revision and enlargement of Beaumont's original sketch), II, 2{^_b_} (from _Enter Megra_), II, 4{^_b_} (from _Megra above_), V, 3 and V, 4. The first part of Act II, 4 was written by Beaumont; but Fletcher has inserted lines 14 to 29 (from _Enter Arethusa and Bellario_ to "how brave she keeps him").
Similarly, the first draught of Act III, 2 was Beaumont's; certainly lines 1-34 (exit King), 105-112 (the opening of Philaster's long tirade) and 129-173 (from Philaster's exit to end). But beginning with Arethusa's soliloquy, line 35, we find insertions marked by Fletcher's metrical characteristics, his alliterations, favourite words and ideas, tautological expansions, repetitions, interrogations, triplets, redundant "alls" and "hows." The last three lines of that soliloquy are his:
Soul-sick with poison, strike the monuments Where noble names lie sleeping, till they sweat And the cold marble melt;[232]
and he has overlaid (in lines 113-128) with his rhetorical triplets, his "alls" and "hows" the genuine poetry of Philaster's accusation of Arethusa. "The _story_ of a woman's face," her inconstancy, the shadow quality even of her "goodness" soon past and forgotten,--"these sad texts"[233] Fletcher "to his last hour" is never weary of repeating.
It will be observed that, in general, Fletcher's scenes are elaborative, bombastic, verbally witty, conversationally easy, at times bustling, at times spectacular, but not vitally contributory to the business of the play. They comprise the longest speeches of the King, Pharamond, Philaster, Megra, and Bellario. Some of these, such as the King's denunciation of Megra and her reply are wild, whirling, and vulgar rhetoric. The bawdy half-scene with its maid of easy honour is his; the discovery of the low intrigue, the simulated masque and the mob-scene are his. They may display, but they do not develop, characters. They are sometimes fanciful; sometimes gracefully poetic as in V, 3, 83-84, where his "all your better deeds shall be in water writ, but this in marble"
anticipates Keats's famous epitaph; sometimes realistic; but they lack the pervading emotion, imagination, elevation of Beaumont. The play, in fact, is not only preponderatingly but primarily Beaumont's, from the excellent exposition in the first act to the series of sensational surprises which precede the denouement in the fifth. The conception of the characters and the complication are distinctive of that writer's plots: the impulsive, misjudged, and misguided hero, his violence toward the love-lorn maiden disguised as a page, and his unwarranted suspicion of the honour of his mistress. The subtle revelations of personality are Beaumont's: the simplicity, self-renunciation, lyric pathos and beauty of Bellario, the nobler aspects of Dion, the maidenly audacities, sweet bewilderments and unmerited tribulations of Arethusa, the combination of idyllic, pathetic, and romantic, the visualization, the naturalness of figure and setting, the vigour of dramatic progress, the passion, the philosophical insights, and the memorable lines. His, too, the humour of the rural sketches--the Country Fellow who has "seen something yet," the occasional frank animality, as well as the tender beauty of innocence.
Not only are the virtues of the play Beaumont's but some of its faults of conception and construction; and those faults are the unmanly suspicious startings of the hero and his melodramatic violence, the somewhat fortuitous succession of the crises, and the subordination of Bellario in the denouement.
The popularity of _Philaster_ as an acting play, not only at Court but in the city, is attested by contemporary record. It was played after the Restoration with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed thirteen revivals,--the last at Bath on December 12 of the latter year, with Ward in the title-role and Miss Jarmin as Bellario.[234]
8.--_The Maides Tragedy_, acted by the King's Men during the festivities at Court, October 1612 to March 1613, was known to Sir George Buc when, October 31, 1611, he licensed an anonymous play as "this second maiden's tragedy." It was acted by the King's also at Blackfriars; and since it is in every way a more mature production than _Philaster_, I think that it followed that play, toward the end of 1610 or in 1611. It was first published in 1619, in quarto and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also anonymous; that of 1630 gives the names of Beaumont and Fletcher as authors. In the commendatory verses to the folio of 1647, Henry Howard ascribes the scene of Amintor's suicide to Fletcher; Waller assigns to him "brave Melantius in his gallantry" and "Aspatia weeping in her gown"; Stanley, too, gives him the weeping Aspatia; and Herrick, "Evadne swelling with brave rage." These descriptions are as misleading as blind. D'Avenant comes nearer the mark in his Prologue to _The Woman-Hater_, already quoted, where he indicates correctly an Evadne scene and an Aspatia scene as of Fletcher's composition. Metrical tests, corrected by the rhetorical, show that Fletcher's contributions are limited to three scenes and two half-scenes. The list opens with those to which D'Avenant alludes: II, 2, in which Fletcher "taught the sad Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, 1 (as far as line 200, "Prithee, do not mock me"), in which he "reduced Evadne from her scorn"; and it includes, also, the ten lines of V, 1, the larger part of V, 2 (to _Exit Evadne_), and the perfunctory V, 3. As to Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt can be entertained. It is an admirable example of his double endings (almost 40 per cent), his end-stopped lines (80 per cent), anapaestic rhythms and jolts, as well as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his incremental second thoughts. I fail to see how any critic can assign it to Beaumont.[235] As frequently with Fletcher, Aspatia's mourning, though beautiful, is a falsetto from the classics; more like one of Rossetti's or Leigh Hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than a first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. There is likewise no doubt concerning the authorship of the first part of Act IV, 1 (lines 1-189), in which Melantius convinces Evadne of sin and drives her to vengeance upon the King. The latter part of the scene, also, appears to have been written by Fletcher in the first instance, and to have consisted of the first six speeches after the entrance of Amintor (lines 190-200), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to win belief" (247-254, 260-262), and the conclusion (263-285). But between Amintor's supplication "Prithee do not mock me" (line 200) and Evadne's assertion of sincerity "I have done nothing good to win belief" (line 247[236]), Beaumont has inserted four speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy otherwise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest passages of the play. In Evadne's "My whole life is so leprous it infects All my repentance"--"That slight contrition"--"Give me your griefs; you are an innocent, A soul as white as Heaven"--"Shoot your light into me"--"Dissembling with my tears"--"Cut from man's remembrance," we hear the words, phrases, and figures of Beaumont; and we trace him in the repeated use of "do." We find him in Amintor's "Seed of virtue left to shoot up"--"put a thousand sorrows off"--"that dull calamity"--"that strange misbelief"--and in
Mock not _the powers above_ that can and dare Give thee a great example of their justice To all ensuing ages.[237]
And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration of sincere reform (255-259), we are thrilled by his sudden magic and his poetic finality:
_Those short days I shall number to my rest_ (As many must not see me) shall, though too late, Though in my evening, yet perceive a will,-- Since I can do no good, because a woman,-- _Reach constantly at something that is near it_.
The ground-work of this latter portion, from Amintor's entrance, where Evadne cries "Oh, my lord," "My much abused lord," and he, "I may leap, Like a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines 190-200); and the last three speeches in general with Amintor's "My frozen soul melts,"
and "My honour falls no farther: I am well, then"; and with Evadne's "tales" that "go to dust forgotten,"--the Niobe weeping till she is water,--the "wash her stains away," and
All the creatures Made for Heaven's honours, have their ends, _and good ones_,-- All but the cozening crocodiles, false women-- They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores, Men pray against; ...
this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction, to the scene as Fletcher originally wrote it.
When to these two scenes we add the first and third of Act V, which are of no particular significance, and the second (to the death of the King), we have Fletcher's whole written contribution to this wonderful tragedy. In the murder of the King he displays dramatic mastery of the grisly and shuddering; but though the scene is characterized by the same rapidity of conversational thrust and parry as the Fletcherian dialogue between Melantius and Evadne, it is, like it, marred in effect by violence physical rather than spiritual, by brutality of vituperation and stage realism with but scant relief of subtlety. Fletcher's tragic scenes excel not in portrayal of personality but in business; his contribution to Aspatia is not pathos but the embroidery of grief.
The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's: the cruel desertion of Aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery, her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her, its gradual recognition of the inevitable,--that unchastity cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor cleansed by blood,--and its true birth through love desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author of his wrongs,--yet idealized by virgin and wanton alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the conflict between honour and friendship, pride and sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the pestilent King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and hopeless. These are Beaumont's; and his, too, the wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive, and the psychic revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays--in fact, all that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the poetic finality.
In his _Tragedies of the Last Age_, licensed in 1677, Rymer attacked _The Maides Tragedy_ violently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as Rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better have been called _Amintor_, or the _Lustful King_, or _The Concubine_.
But _The Maides Tragedy_ is a more attractive name, and it may be justified. For I do not find that the action is double-centred. It springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the Maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic devotion of Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's tragic weakness, his _hamartia_. His failure to act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. The Nemesis, too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the King, but Aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten:
I did that lady wrong. Methinks I feel A griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins,--[238]
... The faithless sin I made To faire Aspatia is not yet revenged; It follows me.--[239]
His Nemesis is Aspatia, constant unto death,--and in her death, awakening such remorse that he must die to be with her: "Aspatia!" he cries--
The soule is fled forever, and I wrong Myselfe so long to lose her company, Must I talke now? Heres to be with thee, love![240]
Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,[241] of "the irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs" in the characterization and conduct of Evadne have logicality of appearance, but are based upon incorrect premises. The facts, as Beaumont gives them, are that Evadne was "once fair" and "chastely sweet,"--before she met the King; that she was already corrupt when she took Amintor as her husband; that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in presence of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, is an assumed delicacy; that she loves the King "with ambition not with her eyes" (III, 1); that she "would bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has accepted Amintor as a screen, but speedily lusts for him, and is willing to give herself to him if he will forthright kill the King (II, 1, 179):
Wilt thou kill this man?
Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sin Off from thy lips.
But Amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious, not the kind of man to satisfy her new desire, and ambition too. He could never win her by winning the throne,--too lily-livered:
"I wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, "till I do know the cause";--
Then she, with passion "I wood thou wouldst."--But she is a woman whose first behest is scorned; and with sudden revulsion of contempt for this poltroon, as she now conceives him--
Why, it is _thou_ that wrongst me; I hate thee; Thou shouldst have kild thy selfe.
Amintor has lost his evil chance. She despises him and yet, in her better moments, with a kind of pity. It follows that her prompt avowal of her liaison, and her return to the King and insulting treatment of Amintor are of a piece with the corrupted nature of the woman,--a nature that she displays up to the moment of her awakening and imagined repentance. The facts are, too, that she does not, immediately after she has sworn to her brother to let the foul soul of the King out, develop (IV, 1), as Mr. More thinks, a "mood of sudden and overwhelming love for Amintor." She merely asks his pardon: