CHAPTER IX
THE "MASQUE OF THE INNER TEMPLE": THE PASTORALISTS, AND OTHER CONTEMPORARIES AT THE INNS OF COURT
Of royal patronage we have had evidence in the fact that during the festivities of October 16, 1612 to March 1, 1613, no fewer than five of the Beaumont-Fletcher plays were presented at Court, by the King's Servants and the Queen's Revels' Children,--some of them two and even three times. Our poets are accordingly regarded by the great as dramatists of like distinction with Shakespeare, Jonson, and Chapman, the authors of most of the other plays then performed.
Of the esteem in which Beaumont individually was held, not only at Court but by his fellows of the Inner Temple, evidence is afforded by the fact that when they were called upon, in company with the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, to celebrate the marriage, February 14, 1613, of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, with a masque, they did not, like the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, go out of their own group of poets for a dramatist, but chose him. The selection was but natural: he had already contributed to _The Maides Tragedy_ a masque of the very essence of dreams, executed with singular grace and melody.
The subject decided upon for the present gorgeous spectacle was the "marrying of the Thames to the Rhine." The structure and stage machinery were invented by Inigo Jones, who was, also, stage architect for Chapman's rival masque of _Plutus_, presented on February 15, by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn. To the success of Beaumont's production, that patron of masques, Sir Francis Bacon, then his majesty's Solicitor-General, contributed in large measure: "You, Sir Francis Bacon, especially," says the author in his Dedication of the published copy, "as you did then by your countenance and loving affection advance it, so let your good word grace it and defend it, which is able to add value to the greatest and least matters." In a contemporary letter of John Chamberlain to Mistris Carleton, Bacon is called "the chief contriver" of the spectacle; an attribution which leads us to infer that he "advanced" it not solely by "loving affection"
but by funds for the tremendous expense. For, as we have already observed, in other cases, as of the Masque of Flowers, presented for a noble marriage in 1614 by Gray's Inn, Bacon is not only patron but purse, permitting no one to share expenses with him: "Sir Francis Bacon," writes Chamberlain, "prepares a masque to honour this marriage, which will stand him in above 2,000."
Beaumont's masque, which was to have been performed at Whitehall on Tuesday evening, the 16th, had ill fortune on the first attempt. The gentlemen-masquers, desiring to vary their pomp from that of Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple, which had been on horse-back and in chariots, made a progress by water from Winchester-House to Whitehall, seated in the King's royal barge, "attended with a multitude of barges and galleys, with all variety of loud music, and several peals of ordnance; and led by two admirals." The royal family witnessed their approach; and, as Chamberlain in the letter mentioned above says, "they were receved at the privie stayres: and great expectation theyre was that they shold every way exceed theyre competitors that went before them both in devise daintines of apparell and above all in dauncing (wherein they are held excellent) and esteemed far the properer men: but by what yll planet yt fell out I know not, they came home as they went with out doing anything, the reason whereof I cannot yet learne thoroughly, so but only was that the hall was so full that yt was not possible to avoyde yt or make roome for them; besides that most of the Ladies were in the galleries to see them land, and could not get in, but the worst of all was that the king was so wearied and sleepie with sitting up almost two whole nights before that he had no edge to yt.
Whereupon S{^r} Fra: Bacon adventured to interest his maiestie that by this disgrace he wold not as yt were burie them quicke; and I heare the king shold aunswer that then they must burie him quicke for he could last no longer, but with all gave them very goode wordes and appointed them to come again on saterday: but the grace of theyre maske is quite gon when theyre apparell hath ben already shewed and theyre devises vented, so that how yt will fall out, God knows, for they are much discouraged, and out of countenance; and the world sayes yt comes to passe after the old proverb--the properer men the worse lucke."[81]
On that day, accordingly, the masque was presented, "in the new Banketting-House which for a kind of amends was granted to them"; and with marked success. "At the entrance of their Majesties and their Highnesses," writes the Venetian ambassador to the Doge and Senate, May 10, 1613, "one saw the scene, with forests; on a sudden half of it changed to a great mountain with four springs at its feet. The subject of the Masque was that Jove and Juno desiring to honour the wedding and the conjunction of two such noble rivers, the Thames and the Rhine, sent separately Mercury and Iris, who appeared; and Mercury then praised the couple and the Royal house, and wishing to make a ballet suitable to the conjunction of two such streames, he summoned from the four fountains, whence they spring and which are fed by rain, four nymphs who hid among the clouds and the stars that ought to bring rain. They then danced, but Iris said that a dance of one sex only was not a live dance. Then appeared four cupids, while from the Temple of Jove, came five idols and they danced with the stars and the nymphs. Then Iris, after delivering her speech, summoned Flora, caused a light rain to fall, and then came a dance of shepherds. Then in a moment the other half of the scene changed, and one saw a great plateau with two pavilions, and in them one hundred and fifty Knights of Olympus,--then more tents, like a host encamped. On the higher ground was the Temple of Olympian Jove all adorned with statues of gold and silver, and served by a number of priests with music and lights in golden Candelabra. The knights were in long robes of silk and gold, the priests in gold and silver. The knights danced, their robes being looped up with silver, and their dance represented the introduction of the Olympian games into this kingdom.
After the ballet was over their Majesties and their Highnesses passed into a great Hall especially built for the purpose, where were long tables laden with comfits and thousands of mottoes. After the King had made the round of the tables everything was in a moment rapaciously swept away."[82]
Beaumont had introduced innovations--two antimasques, or "subtle, capricious dances" accompanied by spectacular or comic dumb-show, instead of one, and new and varied characters in each, instead of the stereotyped Witches, Satyrs, Follies, etc. His Nymphs, Hyades, blind Cupids, and half vivified Statuas from Jove's altar, of the first antimasque occasioned great amusement, so that the King called for them again at the end--"but one of the Statuas by that time was undressed."
And the May-dance of the second, with its rural characters--Pedant, Lord and Lady of the May, country clown and wench, host and hostess, he-baboon and she-baboon, he-fool and she-fool--stirred laughter and applause that drowned the music. The main masque was stately, and fitly symbolic of the occasion. And one at least of the songs, that sung by the twelve white-robed priests, each playing upon his lute, before Jupiter's altar, has the rare lyrical quality of Beaumont's best manner,--
Shake off your heavy trance, And leap into a dance, Such as no mortals use to tread, Fit only for Apollo To play to, for the Moon to lead, And all the Stars to follow!
We may be sure that the poet received his meed of praise from King, Princess, and Elector, and from officials of the Court--the Earl of Nottingham, Lord Privy Seal, and Bacon, "the chief contriver"; and that he sat high at the "solemn supper in the new Marriage-room" which the King made them on the Sunday,--maybe "at the same board" with the King who doubtless jested much at the expense of Prince Charles and his followers. For they had to pay for the feast, "having laid a wager for the charges, and lost it in running at the ring."[83]
If it had not been customary for members of the Inns of Court to retain connection with the Society to which they belonged, even after they had ceased to be in residence, especially if still living in the City, we might infer from his authorship of this masque that Beaumont had kept in touch with the Inner Temple. Though he had not professed the law, the quiddities of its parlance enliven various passages of his _Woman-Hater_ and of the plays which he later wrote with Fletcher. Whether he kept his name on the books or not, the Inner Temple was in a social sense his club for life; and it was to "those Gentlemen that were his acquaintance there" that the publisher Mosely turned for help when searching for his portrait in 1647. The students of his generation were by 1612, many of them, utter barristers, ancients, and benchers: he would affiliate with them; and that he should be acquainted with the "Gentlemen who were actors" in his masque goes without saying. This was an occasion of tremendous moment to the members of the allied Houses. They were conferring the highest honour upon their poet, and every man on the books of each Inn knew him by name and face. One of the Fellows, John, afterwards Sir John, Fenner provides a messenger "to fetch M{^r} Beaumont," and advances 10_li._ "toward the mask business." Another, Lewis Hele is twice paid 70_li._ toward the same business. From Chamberlain's letter, we learn that the passage by water to Whitehall "cost them better than three hundred pound,"--from two thousand to twenty-four hundred pounds, in the money of to-day. From the records of the Societies for "the 10th of King James," we find that "the charge in apparell of the Actors in that great Mask at White-hall was supported"
by each Society; "the Readers at Gray's Inn being each man assessed at 4_l._, the Ancients, and such as at that time were to be called Ancients, at 2_l._ 10_s._ apiece, the Barristers at 2_l._ a man, and the Students at 20_s._"; and that on May 4, 1613, the Inner Temple is still indebted over and besides the contribution of the House "for the late show and sports ... not so little as 1200_li._,"--that is to say, from seven to nine thousand pounds according our present valuation.[84]
Beaumont in his Dedication of the quarto (published soon afterwards) to the worthy Sir Francis Bacon and the grave and learned Bench of the anciently-allied Houses of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, is addressing friends when he says "Yee that spared no time nor travell in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing of this Masque ... will not thinke much now to looke backe upon the effects of your owne care and worke: for that whereof the successe was then doubtfull, is now happily performed and gratiously accepted. And that which you were then to thinke of in straites of time, you may now peruse at leysure."
Of the gentlemen-masquers, and "the towardly yoong, active, gallant Gentlemen of the same houses," who, as their convoy "set forth from Winchester-House which was the _Rende vous_ towards the Court, about seven of the clock at night," on that occasion, the most directly interested in the event would be a group of literary friends of which the central figure was William Browne of Tavistock. He had been at Clifford's Inn, one of the preparatory schools for the Inner Temple, on the other side of Fleet Street, since about 1608, had migrated to the Inner Temple in November 1611, and had been admitted a member in March 1612. He was some five years younger than Beaumont, and, like Beaumont, was at just that time on intimate terms of friendship with the last of the Elizabethan pastoralists, Michael Drayton,--on terms of reciprocal admiration and friendship also with Beaumont's dramatic associates, Jonson and Chapman; and he had himself, in 1613, been engaged for three years upon the composition of the charming _First Book_ of his _Britannia's Pastorals_. In a letter written some years later to a lover of the Pastoral,--the translator of Tasso's Aminta, _Henery Reynolds, Esq.,--Of Poets and Poesy_, and published in 1627, Drayton couples William Browne so closely with Sir John and Francis Beaumont that even if the trio were not, in various ways, affiliated with the same legal Society we could not escape the conclusion that the brothers were near and dear to Browne. "Then," writes Drayton, after mentioning other literary acquaintances,--
Then the two Beaumonts and my Browne arose, My deare companions whom I freely chose My bosome friends; and in their severall wayes, Rightly borne Poets, and in these last dayes, Men of much note, and no lesse nobler parts,-- Such as have freely tould to me their hearts, As I have mine to them.
We may proceed upon the assumption that it would have been impossible for these bosom friends of Drayton, members of the same club, not to have known each other. Especially, if we recall that Browne was a literary disciple of Fletcher in pastoral poetry, between 1610 and 1616, and that he had Beaumont's masque and poetic fame in mind when, in the Dedication of his own _Masque of Ulysses and Circe_, presented by the same Society of the Inner Temple not quite two years later, January 13, 1615, he said, "If it degenerate in kind from those other our Society hath produced, blame yourselves for not seeking to a happier Muse."
I am at pains thus to emphasize the acquaintance of Browne and Beaumont, because our acquaintance with the latter is enriched if we may regard him as familiarly associated with the literary coterie of the Inns of Court. Browne and Beaumont had friends in common beside Drayton, Chapman, and Jonson. To, and of, Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, Beaumont writes, as we shall presently notice, in terms of admiration and intimacy. And it is for Mary, the sister of Sir Philip, that William Browne composes, in or after 1621, the immemorial epitaph,
Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse: Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother; Death, ere thou hast slain another, Fair, and learn'd, and good as shee Time shall throw his dart at thee.
To this Pembroke, William Herbert, third Earl, Browne dedicates the _Second Book_ of the _Pastorals_, 1616, which contains the beautiful tribute to Sidney and his _Arcadia_; and Pembroke shows his regard for the young poet by appointing him tutor to a wealthy ward, and later taking him into the service of his own family at Wilton. In 1614 John Davies of Hereford wrote the third eclogue appended to Browne's _Shepherd's Pipe_, in which he figures as old Wernock, and Browne as Willy; and, in 1616, commendatory verses to the _Second Book_ of Browne's _Pastorals_,--beginning "Pipe on, sweet swaine." He had already in 1610, addressed "the most ingenious Mr. Francis Beaumont" in an epigram of like familiarity and devotion:
Some that thy name abbreviate, call thee Franck: So may they well, if they respect thy witt; For like rich corne (that some fools call too ranck) All cleane Wit-reapers still are griping it; And could I sow for thee to reape and use, I should esteeme it manna for the Muse.[85]
Another of this little group of late Spenserian pastoralists was, as we shall later see, an admirer of Beaumont. This is William Basse, probably the composer of the lines _In Laudem Authoris_, signed W. B., and prefixed to the 1602 edition of _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_. With the commendatory verses of Davies, George Wither, Thomas Wenman, and others in Browne's _Second Book_ of the _Pastorals_, appear some again signed W. B. "It is just possible," according to the most recent editor of Browne's poems,[86] "that Basse and Browne were kinsmen." It is certain that Basse was a retainer in the family of the poetic Thomas Wenman who was Browne's contemporary at the Inner Temple. Basse, himself, had published three pastoral elegies in 1602, and he was still writing pastorals half a century later. Another of this group, George Wither, had since 1606 been of one of the adjoining Inns of Chancery. He is the Roget, Thyrsis, Philarete of this pastoral field. In 1614, he wrote the third eclogue supplementary to Browne's _Shepherd's Pipe_; and in 1615 he was a neighbor of the Inner Temple poets, at Lincoln's Inn. In that eclogue he speaks of a Valentine on "the Wedding of fair Thame and Rhine" which he had composed on the occasion of the royal marriage; and in the first _Epithalamium_ of the Valentine, he refers explicitly to the masques of Chapman and Beaumont. He must have known both those "Heliconian wits." "I'm none," he says with self-depreciation,--
I'm none of those that have the means or place With shows of cost to do your nuptials grace; But only master of mine own desire, Am hither come with others to admire.
I am not of those Heliconian wits, Whose pleasing strains the court's known humour fits, But a poor rural shepherd, that for need Can make sheep music on an oaten reed.
This "faithful though an humble swain" was of distinctive repute among Beaumont's associates by 1615: no less for the lyric ease of his _Shepherd's Hunting_, or of his
Shall I wasting in despair Die because a woman's fair?--
than for the "plain, moral speaking" of the _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ that in 1613-14 had brought him a year's imprisonment in the Marshalsea. Jonson later "personates" him as Chronomastix, or whipper of the times, in a masque at Court; and Beaumont's, and Fletcher's friend, Massinger, introduces him by allusion, in his _Duke of Milan_, about 1620, "I have had a fellow," says the Officer in Act III, ii, of that play--
That could endite forsooth and make fine metres To tinkle in the ears of ignorant madams, That for defaming of great men, was sent me Threadbare and lousy.
Still another member of this circle of poets associated with the Inns of Court is the Cuddy of the pastoral poems, the intimate friend of Wither and Browne,--Christopher Brooke, who, though he does not cut much of a figure in his _Elegies_, or in his _Ghost of Richard III_, was a lovable and hearty friend, and a distinguished Bencher of Lincoln's Inn. That Brooke was intimate with Shakespeare's company of the King's Servants, at just the period that Beaumont and Fletcher were most closely associated with that company, we have already noticed. As one of the barristers who, in 1612, defended Burbadge and Heming against the bill of complaint brought by Kirkham for recovery of profits in the Blackfriars theatre, he had much to do with having the "plaintiff's bill cleerly and absolutely dismissed out of this courte."[87]
This community of friendship with Browne and Browne's circle gives us, by inference, a clue to an extended list of the gentlemen of London with whom Beaumont cannot have altogether failed to be acquainted. Browne succeeded Beaumont as poet of the Inner Temple, and the friends of the former in that Society would be known to the latter.
Among those who wrote verses laudatory of Browne's _Pastorals_ between 1613 and 1616, was his "learned friend," John Selden, the jurist and antiquary, whose "chamber was in the paper buildings which looke towards the garden." He kept, says Aubrey, "a plentifull table, and was never without learned company": frequently that of Jonson, Drayton, and Camden; and, we may be certain, of John Fletcher, too; for on his mother's side, Selden as his coat of arms and epitaph prove, and as Hasted tells us in his _History of Kent_, was of the "equestrian" family of Bakers to which Fletcher's stepsisters belonged. Selden was of Beaumont's age to a year, and had been of the Society since 1604. For Browne's book Edward Heyward, also, wrote verses,--Selden's most "devoted friend and chamber-fellow,"--to whom (Aubrey again) "he dedicated his _Titles of Honour_," 1614. Heyward came from Norfolk and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1604. And with Selden must be also bracketed, Thomas Wenman, of Oxfordshire; for so Suckling brackets him in the _Session of the Poets_:
The poets met the other day, And Apollo was at the meeting, they say....
'Twas strange to see how they flocked together: There was Selden, and he stood next to the chaire, And Wenman not far off, which was very faire.
Wenman came to the Inner Temple in 1613; he expresses in his complimentary verses to Browne his wonder that the pastoralist can frame such worthy poetry while as yet "scarce a hair grows up thy chin to grace." Wenman was the son of that Sir Richard whose wife was implicated in the Gunpowder Plot by Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vaux. He succeeded to an Irish peerage in 1640. There was, also, Thomas Gardiner, the son of a rector in Essex. He came to the Inner Temple in 1609, and in 1641 was knighted for his loyalty to King Charles. There was, though not of the Inner Temple, Browne's favourite companion, William Ferrar, the Alexis of the pastoral circle. Ferrar was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1610, and died young. He must have been a graceful and lovable youth, if we may judge from Wither's and Browne's tributes to him. Through his father, "an eminent London merchant, who was interested in the adventures of Hawkins, Drake, and Raleigh," Browne and Beaumont might, if in no other way, have met with Sir Richard and Sir Walter. There were, also, writing praises to Browne, the brothers Croke, sons of Sir John Croke of the King's Bench. They were both of Christ's Church, Oxford, Charles and Unton; and they became students of the Inner Temple in 1609. Charles was something of a poet. In 1613 he was Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College; he took orders, and became a Fellow of Eton College; and during the Civil War fled to Ireland. Unton rose at the Bar, became a member of Parliament, "aided the Parliamentarians during the Civil War and enjoyed the favour of Cromwell." And there was Browne's dear friend, Thomas Manwood, who had entered the Inner Temple in 1611, and whose early death by drowning Browne bewails in the fourth eclogue of the _Shepherd's Pipe_,--an elegy somewhat fantastic but beautifully sincere, and, in one or two of its fundamental concepts, decidedly reminiscent of Beaumont's elegy written the year before on the death of the Countess of Rutland.
These are a few of the members of this Society whom Beaumont met whenever he visited the Inner Temple. It was such as they and their companions, many more of whom are mentioned in the _Inner Temple Records_, and described by Mr. Gordon Goodwin in his edition of Browne's _Poems_, who set forth, ordered, and furnished Beaumont's _Masque of the Inner Temple_; and who, as gentlemen-masquers, sailed with him in the royal barge to Whitehall, and happily performed the masque before the King and Queen, the Princess Elizabeth, and the Count Palatine, on Saturday, the twentieth day of February 1613.
Beaumont's friends were Fletcher's; and Fletcher must have known Browne.
It has always seemed strange to me that, when enumerating in his _Britannia's Pastorals_ the pastoral poets of England,--half a dozen of them, his personal acquaintances,--Browne should have omitted Fletcher to whom he was deeply indebted for literary inspiration. Between 1610 and 1613 he had, in his _First Book of Britannia's Pastorals_ (Song 1, end; Song 2, beginning), borrowed the story of Marina and the River-God, as regards not only the main incident but also much of the poetic phrase, from the _Faithfull Shepheardesse_--the scene in which Fletcher's God of the River rescues Amoret and offers her his love. The borrowing is not at all a plagiarism, but an elaboration of the Amoret episode; and, as such, the imitation is indirect homage to the quondam pastoralist living close by in Southwark. I hesitate to enter upon quest of literary surmise. But some young lion of research might be pardoned if he should undertake to prove that the description of the shepherd Remond which Browne introduces into his first Song just before this borrowing from Fletcher's pastoral drama is homage to Fletcher, pure and direct:
Remond, young Remond, that full well could sing, And tune his pipe at Pan's birth carolling: Who for his nimble leaping, sweetest layes, A lawrell garland wore on holidayes; In framing of whose hand dame Nature swore That never was his like nor could be more.[88]
Conjectural reconstruction of literary relationships is perilously seductive. But it is only fair to apprise the young lion of the delightful certainty that though the trail may run up a tree, it abounds in alluring scents. He will find that no sooner has Browne's Marina concluded the adventure borrowed from Fletcher than she falls in with Remond's younger companion, "blithe Doridon," who, in the _Second Book_ of the _Pastorals_, written in 1614-15, swears fidelity to Remond--
Entreats him then That he might be his partner, since no men Had cases liker; he with him would goe-- Weepe when he wept and sigh when he did so;[89]
and that, in the second Song of the _First Book_,[90] Doridon, who also is a poet, is described at a length not at all necessary to the narrative, and in terms that more than echo the description of the beauty of Hermaphroditus in the poem of that name which has been traditionally attributed to Beaumont. This Doridon is a genius:
Upon this hill there sate a lovely swaine, As if that Nature thought it great disdaine That he should (so through her his genius told him) Take equall place with swaines, since she did hold him Her chiefest worke, and therefore thought it fit, That with inferiours he should never sit....
He is "fairest of men"; when he pipes "the wood's sweet quiresters" join in consort--"A musicke that would ravish choisest eares." He is, as I have said, a poet,--
And as when Plato did i' th' cradle thrive, Bees to his lips brought honey from their hive; So to this boy they came; I know not whether They brought, or from his lips did honey gather....
He is also a master in the revels,
His buskins (edg'd with silver) were of silke....
Those buskins he had got and brought away For dancing best upon the revell day.
Browne, by the way, wrote the _Prefatory Address_ to this Book of _Britannia's Pastorals_, June 18, 1613, only three months after Beaumont's Masque upon the "revel day" was acted; and the book was licensed for printing, the same year, November 15.
Returning to our young lion, he will, I fear me, exult (with lust of chase or laughter?) when in the third song of this book, he notes that Doridon, overhearing the love-colloquy of Remond and Fida, can find no other trope to describe their felicity than one drawn from Ovid, and from the so-called Beaumont poem of 1602, _Salmacis and Hermaphroditus_,--
Sweet death they needs must have, who so unite That two distinct make one Hermaphrodite.[91]