Francis Beaumont: Dramatist A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, And of His Association with John Fletcher

CHAPTER XVIII

Chapter 232,854 wordsPublic domain

THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF BEAUMONT

I. In Plays Individually Composed.

The studies of the most experienced critics into the peculiarities of Fletcher's blank verse as displayed in productions of the popular dramatic kind, indubitably written by him alone,[149] such as _Monsieur Thomas_ of the earlier period, ending 1613, _The Chances_, _The Loyall Subject_, and _The Humorous Lieutenant_ of the middle period, ending 1619, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_ of his latest period, indicate that he indulges in an excessive use of double endings, sometimes as many as seventy in every hundred lines, even in triple and quadruple endings; in an abundance of trisyllabic feet; and in a peculiar retention of the old end-stopped line, or final pause,--occasionally in as many as ninety out of a hundred lines. Attention has been directed also to the emphasis which he deliberately places upon the extra syllable of the blank verse, making it a substantive rather than a negligible factor: as in the "brains" and "too" of the following:

Or wander after that they know not where To find? or, if found how to enjoy? Are men's brains Made nowadays of malt, that their affections Are never sober, but, like drunken people Founder at every new fame? I do believe, too, That men in love are ever drunk, as drunken men Are ever loving,--[150]

and to his fondness for appending words such as "first," "then," "there," "still," "sir," and even "lady" and "gentlemen" to lines which already possess their five feet. It has also been remarked that he makes but infrequent employment of rhyme.

Of this metrical style examples will be found on pages in Chapter XIX, Section 2, below; or on any page of Fletcher's _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_, as for instance the following from Act III, Scene 1, 14-23:

_Altea._ My life|, an in|nocent|!

Here the first half of v. 14 is also the last of the preceding line; seven out of ten verses have double endings; one has a triple ending. One, v. 21, has a quadruple ending; unless we rearrange by adding "made ready" to v. 20, so as to scan:

Trisyllabic feet occur in nine; final pauses in nine; stress-syllable openings and compensating anapaests in two; the feminine caesura (phrasal pause within the foot) in two. The pause in v. 15, after two strong monosyllables of which the first is stressed, produces a jolt, typically Fletcherian.

Now, these peculiarities of versification are not a habit acquired by Fletcher after Beaumont ceased to write with him. They are rife not only in the plays of his middle and later periods, but in those of the earlier period while Beaumont was still at his side. As for instance in _Monsieur Thomas_, entirely Fletcher's of 1607, or at the latest 1611. The reader may be interested to verify for himself by scanning the following passage from Act IV, 2 at which I open at random: Launcelot is speaking:

But to the silent streets we turn'd our furies: A sleeping watchman here we stole the shooes from, There made a noise, at which he wakes, and follows: The streets are durty, takes a Queen-hithe cold, Hard cheese, and that choaks him o' Munday next: Windows and signs we sent to Erebus; A crew of bawling curs we entertain'd last, When having let the pigs loose in out parishes, O, the brave cry we made as high as Algate! Down comes a Constable, and the Sow his Sister Most traiterously tramples upon Authority: There a whole stand of rug gowns rowted mainly, And the King's peace put to flight, a purblind pig here Runs me his head into the Admirable Lanthorn,-- Out goes the light and all turns to confusion.

No one, once acquainted with this style of blank verse, with its end-stopped lines, double endings, stress-syllable openings, feminine caesurae, trisyllabic feet, jolts, and heavy extra syllables, can ever turn it to confusion with the verse of any poet before Browning--certainly not with that of Beaumont.

Our materials for a study of Beaumont's individual characteristics in the composition of dramatic blank verse appear at the first sight to be very scanty; for the only example of which we have positive external evidence that it was written by Beaumont alone, is _The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes Inne and the Inner Temple_, and unfortunately some critics have excluded it from consideration because of its exceptionally formal and spectacular character and slight dramatic purpose. Written, however, at the beginning of 1613, when the author's metrical manner was a definitely confirmed habit, it affords, in my opinion, the best as well as the most natural approach to the investigation of Beaumont's versification. The following lines may be regarded as typical:

In these nine verses there are no Fletcherian jolts, no double endings. In only two lines trisyllabic feet occur; in only two, final pauses. There are stress-syllable openings in two, with the compensating anapaests; feminine caesurae, in three (dotted); and a stress-syllable opening for the verse-section after the caesura occurs in but one, whereas there are at least three such in the passage from _Monsieur Thomas_, quoted above.

Nothing could be more pronounced than the difference between the metrical style of Fletcher's _Monsieur Thomas_ and _Rule a Wife_ and that of Beaumont's _Maske_, as illustrated here. Fletcher abounds in double endings, trisyllabic feet, and end-stopped lines, and such conversational or lyrical cadences; Beaumont uses them much more sparingly. But while the difference between the genuinely dramatic blank verse of Fletcher and that of Beaumont is sometimes as pronounced as this, it would be unscientific to base the criterion upon comparison of a mature, conversationally dramatic, composition of the former with a stiffly rhetorical declamatory composition of the latter. For a more suitable comparison we must set Beaumont's _Maske_ side by side with something of Fletcher's written in similar formal and declamatory style,--_The Faithfull Shepheardesse_, for instance, a youthful production in the pastoral spirit and form. Of this a small part, but sufficient for our purpose, is composed in blank verse; and I have cited in the next chapter with another end in view, the opening soliloquy,--to which the reader may turn. But as exemplifying certain of Fletcher's metrical peculiarities, in a style of verse suitable to be compared with Beaumont's in _The Maske_, the following lines from Act I, 1, are perhaps even more distinctive. "What greatness," says the Shepherdesse,--

What greatness, | or what private hidden power, [+!] Is | there in me, | to draw submission From this rude man and beast? Sure I am mortal, 105 The Daughter of a Shepherd; | he was mortal, And she that bore me mortal: | prick my hand, And it will bleed; a Feaver shakes me, and The self-same wind that makes the young Lambs shrink

We have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings, nine final pauses (end-stopped verses), four stress-syllable openings with compensating anapaests, and seven feminine caesurae. In every way this sample even of Fletcher's more formal style displays, in its salient characteristics, a much closer resemblance in kind to the sample of his later blank verse quoted from _Rule a Wife_, above, than to that quoted from Beaumont's _Maske_.

When we pass from samples to larger sections, and compare percentages in the one hundred and thirty-one blank verses of _The Maske_ and the first one hundred and sixty-three of _The Shepheardesse_, we find that in respect of final pauses there is no great difference. There are, in the former, more than is usual with Beaumont--sixty per cent; in the latter, less than is usual with Fletcher--fifty per cent. But in other respects Beaumont's _Maske_ reveals peculiarities of verse altogether different from those of Fletcher, even when he is writing in the declamatory pastoral vein. In the one hundred and thirty-one lines of the _Maske_ we find but one double ending; whereas in the first one hundred and sixty-three blank verses of _The Shepheardesse_ we count as many as fourteen. In these productions the proportion of feminine caesurae is practically uniform--about forty per cent. But when we come to examine the more subtle movement of the rhythm, we find that in _The Maske_ not more than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-syllable, while in the blank verse of the _Shepheardesse_ fully thirty-five out of every hundred lines have that opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical cadence which pervades much of Fletcher's metrical composition. In the matter of anapaestic substitutions, and of stress-syllable openings for the verse-section after the caesura, Beaumont is similarly inelastic; while the Fletcher of the _Shepheardesse_ displays a marvellous freedom. It follows that in the _Maske_ we encounter but rarely the rhetorical pause, within the verse, compensating for an absent thesis or arsis; while in the pastoral verse of Fletcher we find frequent instances of this delicate dramatic as well as metrical device, and an occasional jolting caesura.

We are not limited, however, to the material afforded by the _Maske_ in our attempt to discover Beaumont's metrical characteristics when writing alone. _The Woman-Hater_, included among the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher in the folio of 1679, and ascribed to both on the title-page of a quarto of 1649, is assigned by the Prologue of the first quarto, 1607, to a single author--"he that made this play." And, though there is no attribution of authorship on the title-page of the 1607 quarto, we know from the application of verse-tests and tests of diction that, in all but three scenes which have evidently been revised,[151] the author was certainly not Fletcher. An examination of the inner structure of the verse of _The Woman-Hater_, reveals, except in those scenes, precisely the peculiarities that distinguish Beaumont's _Maske_: the same infrequency of stress-syllable openings, and of anapaestic substitutions and of suppressed syllables in metrical scheme. In respect of the more evident device of the run-on line _The Woman-Hater_ reaches a percentage twice as high as that employed in Fletcher's unassisted popular dramas; and in respect of the double ending it has a percentage only one-quarter as high. We notice also in this play a much more frequent employment of rhyme than in any of Fletcher's stage plays, and a much larger proportion of prose both for dialogue and soliloquy.

We should have further basis for conclusion concerning Beaumont's metrical style in independent composition, if we could accept the general assumption that he was the author of the _Induction_ to the _Foure Playes in One_, and of the first two plays, _The Triumph of Honour_ and _The Triumph of Love_. But for reasons, later to be stated, I agree with Oliphant that the _Induction_ and _Honour_ are not by Beaumont; and I hold that he can not be traced with certainty even in the two or three scenes of _Love_ that seem to be marked by some of his characteristics. The hand of a third writer, Field, is manifest in the non-Fletcherian plays of the series.

But though we can not draw for our purpose upon other plays as his unassisted work, we may derive help from the consideration of two at least of Beaumont's poems,--poems that have something of a dramatic flavour. Though they are in rhyming couplets, they display many of the characteristics of the author's blank verse. In the _Letter to Ben Jonson_, which is conversational, I count of run-on lines, thirty-eight in eighty, almost fifty per cent, as compared with Fletcher's sometimes ten or twenty per cent, in spite of the superior elasticity of blank verse; and of stress-syllable openings in the same letter twenty-four per cent as compared with the thirty-five per cent of Fletcher's more highly cadenced rhythm in the _Shepheardesse_. In Beaumont's _Elegy on the Countess of Rutland_, the last forty-four lines afford a fine example of dramatic fervour--the indictment of the physicians. Here the run-on lines again abound, almost fifty per cent; while the stress-syllable openings are but sixteen per cent--much lower than one may find in many rhymed portions of the _Shepheardesse_. With regard to all other tests except that of double ending (which does not apply in this kind of heroic couplet), we find that these poems of Beaumont are of a metrical style distinguished by the same characteristics as his blank verse.[152]

2. In Certain Joint-Plays.

If we turn now to a second class of material available,--the three plays indubitably produced in partnership,--and eliminate the portions written in the metrical style of Fletcher, as already ascertained, we may safely attribute the remainder to the junior member of the firm; and so arrive at a final determination of his manner in verse composition.

The three plays, as I have said before, are _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_ and _A King and No King_. A passage, which in the opinion of nearly all critics[153] is by all tests distinctively Fletcherian, may be cited from the first of these as an example of that which we eliminate when we look for Beaumont. It is from the beginning of Act V, 4, where the Captain enters:

Note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the stress-syllable openings, the anapaests, the feminine caesurae (dotted), the two omissions of the light syllable after the caesural pause and the following accent at the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of line 13.

Of the non-Fletcherian part of _Philaster_, a typical example is the following from Act I, Scene 2, where Philaster replies to Arethusa's request that he look away from her:

I can indure it: Turne away my face? I never yet saw enemy that lookt So dreadfully but that I thought my selfe As great a Basiliske as he; or spake So horrible but that I thought my tongue Bore thunder underneath, as much as his, Nor beast that I could turne from: shall I then Beginne to feare sweete sounds? a ladies voyce, Whom I doe love? Say, you would have my life; Why, I will give it you; for it is of me A thing so loath'd, and unto you that aske Of so poore use, that I shall make no price. If you intreate, I will unmov'dly heare.

Or the famous description of Bellario, beginning:

I have a boy, Sent by the gods, I hope to this intent, Not yet seen in the court--

from the same scene.

Or the King's soliloquy in Act II, Scene 4, containing the lines:

You gods, I see that who unrighteously Holds wealth or state from others shall be curst In that which meaner men are blest withall: Ages to come shall know no male of him Left to inherit, and his name shall be Blotted from earth.

The reader will at once be impressed with the regularity of the masculine ending. Beaumont does not, of course, eschew the double ending; but, as Boyle has computed, the percentage in this play is but fifteen in the non-Fletcherian passages, whereas the percentage in Fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. The prevalence of run-on lines is also noteworthy; and the infrequency of the stress-syllable openings, anapaests, and feminine caesurae by which Fletcher achieves now conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt.

In _The Maides Tragedy_, such soliloquies as that of Aspatia in Act V,