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

Act I, Scene 1, well illustrates this difference. The recurrence of the

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feminine caesura measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers. It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines; but of his collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for instance, wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the second scene of Act IV:

where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped lines, already emphasized in preceding examples, we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-syllable openings with their anapaestic sequences, three omissions of the light syllable after the caesural pause with the consequent accent at the beginning of the verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine caesurae (or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three at least (vv. 2, 5, 10) are exaggerated jolts.

Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for instance, Arbaces' speech beginning Act I, 1, 105, of lines rippling with as many feminine caesurae. But, utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only two stress-syllable openings, only four anapaests, one omitted thesis after the caesural pause, four end-stopped lines. He is more frequently capable, as in the passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a single feminine caesura, but with several feminine (or double) endings:

_Tigranes._ Is it the course of Iberia, to use their prisoners thus? Had Fortune throwne my name above Arbaces, I should not thus have talkt; for in Armenia We hold it base. You should have kept your temper, Till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashion Perhaps to brag.

_Arbaces._ Bee you my witness, Earth, Need I to brag? Doth not this captive prince Speake me sufficiently, and all the acts That I have wrought upon his suffering land? Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of ground Within | his whole | realme | that | I have | not past Fighting and conquering?[156]

Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the caesurae are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly at the end of the second and third feet.

In respect of the internal structure of the verse the tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical characteristics of those parts of _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_ and _A King and No King_ which do not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are well defined and practically uniform; since they are of a piece with the metrical manner of _The Woman-Hater_, which is originally, and in general, the work of one author--Beaumont; and since they are also of a piece with the versification of the _Maske_, which is certainly by Beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems,--at least one criterion has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors.

Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV,