I doe appeare the same, the same Evadne, Drest in the shames I liv'd in, the same monster, But these are names of honour to what I _am_ ... I am hell Till you, my deare lord, shoot your light into me, _The beames of your forgivenesse_.
The days that she shall number to her rest are short; but she vainly imagines that, though but "one minute" remains, she may "reach constantly at something that is neare" the good. She is awakened to her husband's whiteness of soul; but she makes no profession of love, though love, this time not merely lust, be stirred in her heart. She would not "let her sins perish his noble youth." At last, in the moment of mad exaltation after the murder of the King, when she thinks that she has washed her soul clean in that blood, the poor, misguided creature struggling toward the light, but still, and consistently, enveloped in the murk of her past, comes imploring the love of the husband whom in the earlier days she had scorned. She is still the passionate Evadne, who "was too foule within to looke faire then," and "was not free till now." Repulsed by Amintor, she dreams the one sane madness of her career,--to win his love by taking leave of life,--and kills herself.
I perceive no irrelevance of motive in the conduct of Evadne; even in the scenes which are not Beaumont's--namely, the expostulation of her brother, and the murder of the King. Nor do I find in the play as a whole what Mr. More calls an "incomprehensible tangle of the passions."
The defect in the construction of the _Maides Tragedy_, if there is one, lies in the failure of the Maid and her deserter to meet between the first scene of the second act and the third of the fifth. That is not unmotived, however; it is of Aspatia's own choosing and of Amintor's _hamartia_. Aspatia kisses him farewell, forgiving him, and saying that she "must trie Some yet unpractis'd way to grieve and die." He is, forthwith, entangled in the web of his wife's adultery, his own shame and more shameful delusion of allegiance. The girl whom he has so deeply wronged passes from his distracted consciousness, save for the sense that these troubles are his punishment. And when, toward the end of the play, the Maid comes in again, saying "this is my fatall houre," even we start at the remembrance that she had threatened to kill herself. And, because the scene in which she forces a duel upon Amintor is spirited and pathetic, his contrition poignant, and the joy of their reunion in the moment of death deeply tragic, we feel that we have been unduly cheated of the company of this innocent and resolute and surpassingly pathetic girl.
The play, with Burbadge in the role of Melantius, was popular during the lives of the authors. It was acted before the King and Queen in 1636 and it held the stage until the closing of the theatres. It was revived in 1660 and 1661. Pepys saw it at least five times before the middle of May 1668, and found it "too sad and melancholy" but still "a good play." It was popular when Dryden in his _Essay on Dramatick Poesy_, 1668, praised its "labyrinth of design." For a time during the reign of Charles II it was proscribed, possibly because the moral was too readily applicable to the conduct of the "merry monarch"; but the play in its original form was on the stage again by 1677. Before 1685 Waller made at least two attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy by writing a new fifth act in which Evadne was bloodlessly eliminated. In one of these sentimental absurdities the King alone survived; in another the King, preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving Amintor and Aspatia from suicide and joined them in marriage: but neither attempt, though made "to please the Court," was crowned with success. The play enjoyed several other revivals in the first half of the eighteenth century with high popularity, notably at the Haymarket in 1706 when Melantius was played by Betterton, Evadne by Mrs. Barry, and Aspatia by Mrs.
Bracegirdle; and again in 1710 just before Betterton's death. In 1742 Theobald writes, that the famous controversy between Melantius and Amintor is always "received with vehement applause." In 1837 the play was acted by Macready at the Haymarket, with alterations by himself and three original scenes by Sheridan Knowles, under the name of _The Bridal_, and, as Dyce tells us, was very favourably received by the public.[242]
9.--Though the tragedy of _Cupid's Revenge_ was printed in 1615 as the work of Fletcher alone, the publication was unauthorized, and the attribution is by a printer who acknowledges that he was not acquainted with the author. The quarto of 1630 assigns it correctly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The play is known to have been acted at Court by her Majesty's Children of Whitefriars, the first Sunday in January 1612; and as usual it must have been tested by public presentation before that date. The fact that the authors were, between 1610 and 1612, writing for the King's Men does not preclude their composing a play for the Queen's Children. It is not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier than 1611. Though the critics disagree concerning the precise division of authorship in nearly every scene, finding traces of alteration by Field, Massinger, and others, they discern a definite substratum of both Fletcher and Beaumont. It is unnecessary to specify the minor scenes in which Beaumont cooperated. The five which transfer the action from an atmosphere of supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion are by him.[243]
In these his sententious sunbursts, his verse, diction, hyperbole, portrayal by passive implication, are indubitable. The infatuation of the princess for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim humility and cackling mirth of the latter. The lust of Leucippus is transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to oaths "bestowed on lies," by his horror of the discovered baseness of his paramour, and the piety with which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's honour:
I desire you To lay what trains you will for my wish'd death, But suffer him to find his quiet grave In peace.
The treacherous greed and malice of Bacha are tempered by half-lights and shifting hues that make her less a vampire when Beaumont depicts her. And the final scene of tragedy in the forest is shot with pathos by the "harmless innocence" of Beaumont's Urania following Leucippus to save him
for love:-- I would not let you know till I was dying; For you could not love me, my mother was so naught.
But the play as a whole lacks logical and natural motive, moral vigor and vitality; and its history upon the stage is negligible.
10.--Of the dates of _A King and No King_ there is no doubt. It was licensed in 1611, acted at Court December 26 of the same year, and first published in quarto in 1619 as by Beaumont and Fletcher. In the commendatory verses of 1647, Henry Howard gives Arbaces to Fletcher; Jasper Mayne gives him Bessus; Herrick goes further: "that high design Of _King and No King_, and the rare plot thine." Earle, on the other hand, gives Bessus to Beaumont; and Lisle gives him Mardonius. Of the attributions to Fletcher, Herrick's alone has plausibility, since, like _Philaster_ and _The Maides Tragedy_, the play is derived from no known source.[244] Still he was probably wrong. It is not impossible that one of the dramatists contrived the plot; but, considering that three-quarters of the play was written by Beaumont, and that Fletcher's quarter contains but one scene at once of high design and vital to the story, it is not very likely that the contriving was by Fletcher unaided.
Modern critics display singular unanimity in their discrimination of the respective shares of the composers. With only one or two dissenting voices they attribute to Beaumont the first three acts, the fourth scene of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the fifth. To Fletcher they assign the first three scenes of the fourth act, and scenes one and three of the fifth. The tests which I have already described lead me to the same conclusion. Beaumont's contribution is distinguished by a largeness of utterance and a poetic inevitability, a diversity and mastery of characterization, a philosophical reach, a realism both humorous and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativity and tension, equal to, if not surpassing, any parallel elements or qualities to be found in the joint-plays. Arbaces, in apparent design, is of a Marlowan temper, moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brooking no rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and a tyrant, he is brave in fact, and in heart deluded by the assumption that he is also modest. The combination is Beaumontesque. That dramatist rarely creates fixed or transparent character. Arbaces assumes that he is single of nature and aim: an irresistible, passionless, and patient soldier; but his failure to fathom himself as his friend Mardonius fathoms him, is part of his complexity. His headlong love for the woman whom he believes to be his sister and the resulting horror of apprehension and conflict of desire reveal him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding revolutions of personality. "What are thou," he asks of this devilish unexpected lust--
What are thou, that dost creep into my breast; And dar'st not see my face?
When he will decree that Panthea be regarded as no more his sister, and she remonstrates,--he thunders "I will hear no more"; but to himself:--
Why should there be such music in a voice, And sin for me to hear it?
When Tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister in marriage, presumes to address her, with what majestic inconsistency the king rebukes him:
The least word that she speaks Is worth a life. Rule your disorder'd tongue Or I will temper it!
And so, now struggling, now wading on in sin, till that heart-rending crisis is reached in which he confesses the incestuous love to his friend and faithful general, Mardonius; nay, even tries to win the friend's support in his lustful suit, and is gloriously defeated. Then follow the easy compliance of Bessus with his wish, and, with equal precipitancy, the revulsion of a kingly sense of rectitude against the willing pander:
Thou art too wicked for my company, Though I have hell within me, and mayst yet Corrupt me further,
The climax in which Arbaces can no longer refrain is of Beaumont's best:
Nay, you shall hear the cause in short, Panthea; And when thou hear'st it, thou will blush for me And hang thy head down like a violet Full of the morning's dew.
And she, recoiling, "Heaven forbid" and "I would rather ... in a grave sleep with my innocence," still kisses him; and then in a panic, nobler than self-suppression, cries:
If you have any mercy, let me go To prison, to my death, to anything: I feel a sin growing upon my blood Worse than all these!
By a series of sensational _bouleversements_, and in a dramatic agony of suspense, we are keyed to the scene in which relief is granted: the princess who now is Queen is no sister to the King, who is now no King.
With the exception of a half-scene (Act IV, 2{^_b_}) of somewhat bustling mechanism and rant by Fletcher, the whole of the King's portrayal is Beaumont's; and with the exception of eighty lines written by Fletcher (Act IV, 1) of dramatic dialogue containing information necessary to the minor love-affair, the story of the birdlike quivering, fond Panthea is, also, entirely Beaumont's. The Mardonius of Beaumont, in the first three acts and the fifth, is a fine, honest, blunt, soldierly companion and adviser to the King; but when Fletcher takes him in hand (Act IV, 2{^_b_}), he declines to a stock character wordy with alliteration and commonplace. The Bessus of Beaumont whose "reputation came principally by thinking to run away" is, in Acts I-III, Falstaffian or Zagloban; the Bessus of Fletcher, in IV, 3 and V, 1 and 3, is a figure of low comedy, amusing to be sure, and reminiscent of Bobadill, but a purveyor of sophomoric quips and a tool for horse-play. The rural scene with its graphic humours of the soil is Beaumont's.
Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display no spiritual insight; supply no development of character; administer no dramatic fillip to the action and no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers, Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry.
To Beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in the creation of _A King and No King_ one of the most intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean period, one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one of the most influential in the development of the heroic play of the Restoration. That it did not survive the eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as Dryden says "end with a prosperous event." The conflict of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed the limits of artistic mediation. The play would better have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering--that highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable. But though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy.
That error arises from a careless reading of the text. From the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists are not brother and sister. And as for the protagonists themselves,--when the King is suddenly smitten by love (III, 1, 70-115) and rebels against its power, he does not even know that the object of his devotion is his supposed sister. When he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea, he revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility of self-denial. In his struggle against what seems to him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer, he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of what is right. His deepest despair is that he is "not come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb to worse temptation; and his last word before the tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think on." And when Panthea feeling the "sin growing upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that cries to him whom she thinks her brother, "Fly, sir, for God's sake!"
_A King and No King_ evidently won favour at Court, for, as we have noticed, it was acted there both in 1611 and in 1612-1613. It was presented to their Majesties at Hampton Court in 1636. In 1661 Pepys saw it twice. Before 1682 Nell Gwynn had made Panthea one of her principal roles. In 1683 Betterton played Arbaces to Mrs. Barry's Panthea. It was revived again in 1705, 1724, and 1788. Davies in his _Dramatic Miscellany_ tells us that Garrick intended to revive it, taking the part of Arbaces himself and giving Bessus to Woodward, "but it was observed that at every reading of it in the green-room Garrick's pleasure suffered a visible diminution--at length he fairly gave up his design." Mr. Bond, in the _Variorum_ edition, mentions a German adaptation of 1785, called _Ethelwolf, oder der Konig Kein Konig_.
FOOTNOTES:
[214] Cited by Oldys (MS. note in Langbaine's _Account of Engl. Dram.
Poets_, p. 208)--Dyce.
[215] For this information I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Schevill.
[216] I know but two sane accounts of this matter: A. S. W.
Rosenbach's in _Mod. Lang. Notes_, 101, Column 362 (1898); and Wolfgang von Wurzbach's, in _Romanische Forschungen_, XX, pp. 514-536 (1907).
[217] Oliphant, _Engl. Stud._, XV, 322. Macaulay, 'probably 1610.'
[218] _Prologue_ in the first folio.
[219] Chapter VII.
[220] Even here, as Oliphant has said, Viola's first speech "is pure Beaumont."
[221] His scenes are I, 4, 6; II, 4; III, 3 (to "where I may find service"); IV, 1, 2, 7; V, 2, and the last twenty-seven lines of V, 3.
[222] I, 4. Scenes as arranged in Dyce, Vol. III.
[223] I, 6.
[224] III, 3.
[225] V, 2.
[226] I, 1, 2{^_a_} (to Antonio's entry), III, 1{^_a_} (to servant's entry).
[227] III, 2; IV, 4; V, 1, 3.
[228] Chapter VII, above.
[229] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, I, 317.
[230] Chapter XXVIII, _Did the Beaumont 'Romance' Influence Shakespeare?_