Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ 1606. A passage in the Prologue of The Woman-Hater seems, as Professor Thorndike has shown, to refer to the narrow escape of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston from having their ears cropped for an offense given to the King by their Eastward Hoe. If it does, "he that made this play," undoubtedly Beaumont, made it after the publication of Eastward Hoe in 1605. The title-page of 1607 says that the play is given "as it hath been lately acted." The ridicule of intelligencers emulating some worthy men in this land "who have discovered things dangerously hanging over the State" has reference to the system of spying which assumed enormous proportions after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605. An allusion to King James's weakness for handsome young men, "Why may not I be a favourite in the sudden?" may very well refer, as Fleay has maintained, to the restoration to favour of Robert Ker (or Carr) of Ferniehurst, afterwards Earl Somerset, – a page whom James had "brought with him from Scotland, and brought up of a child,"46 but had dismissed soon after his accession. It was at a tilting match, March 24, 1607, that the youth "had the good fortune to break his leg in the presence of the King," and "by his personal activity, strong animal spirits," and beauty, to attract his majesty anew, and on the spot. The beauty, Beaumont emphasizes as a requisite for royal favour. "Why may not I be a favourite on the sudden?" says the bloated, hungry courtier, "I see nothing against it." "Not so, sir," replies Valore; "I know you have not the face to be a favourite on the sudden." The fact that James did not make a knight bachelor of Carr till December of that year, would in no way invalidate a fling at the favour bestowed upon him in March. Indeed Beaumont's slur in The Woman-Hater upon "the legs … very strangely become the legs of a knight and a courtier" might have applied to Carr as early as 1603, for on July 25 of that year James had made him a Knight of the Bath, – in the same batch, by the way, with a certain Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdonshire.47 Without violating the plague regulations, as laid down by the City, The Woman-Hater could have been acted during the six months following November 20, 1606. A passage in Act III, 2,48 which I shall presently quote in full, is, as has not previously been noticed, a manifest parody of one of Antony's speeches in Antony and Cleopatra49 which, according to all evidence, was not acted before 1607. It would appear, therefore, that Beaumont's first play was completed after January 1, 1607, probably after March 24, when Carr regained the royal favour, and was presented for the first time during the two months following the latter date.

       The Woman-Hater affords interesting glimpses of the author's observation, sometimes perhaps experience, in town and country. "That I might be turned loose," says one of his dramatis personae, "to try my fortune amongst the whole fry in a college or an inn of court!" And another, a gay young buck, – "I must take some of the common courses of our nobility, which is thus: If I can find no company that likes me, pluck off my hat-band, throw an old cloak over my face and, as if I would not be known, walk hastily through the streets till I be discovered: 'There goes Count Such-a-one,' says one; 'There goes Count Such-a-one,' says another; 'Look how fast he goes,' says a third; 'There's some great matters in hand, questionless,' says a fourth; – when all my business is to have them say so. This hath been used. Or, if I can find any company [acting at the theatre], I'll after dinner to the stage to see a play; where, when I first enter, you shall have a murmur in the house; every one that does not know, cries, 'What nobleman is that?' All the gallants on the stage, rise, vail to me, kiss their hand, offer me their places; then I pick out some one whom I please to grace among the rest, take his seat, use it, throw my cloak over my face, and laugh at him; the poor gentleman imagines himself most highly graced, thinks all the auditors esteem him one of my bosom friends, and in right special regard with me." And again, and this is much like first-hand knowledge: "There is no poet acquainted with more shakings and quakings, towards the latter end of his new play (when he's in that case that he stands peeping betwixt the curtains, so fearfully that a bottle of ale cannot be opened but he thinks somebody hisses), than I am at this instant." And again, – of the political spies, who had persecuted more than one of Beaumont's relatives and, according to tradition, trumped up momentary trouble for our young dramatists themselves, a few years later: "This fellow is a kind of informer, one that lives in ale-houses and taverns; and because he perceives some worthy men in this land, with much labour and great expense, to have discovered things dangerously hanging over the state, he thinks to discover as much out of the talk of drunkards in tap-houses. He brings me information, picked out of broken words in men's common talk, which with his malicious misapplication he hopes will seem dangerous; he doth, besides, bring me the names of all the young gentlemen in the city that use ordinaries or taverns, talking (to my thinking) only as the freedom of their youth teach them without any further ends, for dangerous and seditious spirits." Much more in this kind, of city ways known to Beaumont; and, also, something of country ways, the table of the Leicestershire squire – the Beaumonts of Coleorton and the Villierses of Brooksby, – and the hunting-breakfasts with which Grace-Dieu was familiar. The hungry courtier of the play vows to "keep a sumptuous house; a board groaning under the heavy burden of the beast that cheweth the cud, and the fowl that cutteth the air. It shall not, like the table of a country-justice, be sprinkled over with all manner of cheap salads, sliced beef, giblets and pettitoes, to fill up room; nor shall there stand any great, cumbersome, uncut-up pies at the nether end, filled with moss and stones, partly to make a show with, partly to keep the lower mess [below the salt] from eating; nor shall my meal come in sneaking like the city-service, one dish a quarter of an hour after another, and gone as if they had appointed to meet there and mistook the hour; nor should it, like the new court-service, come in in haste, as if it fain would be gone again [whipped off by the waiters], all courses at once, like a hunting breakfast: but I would have my several courses and my dishes well filed [ordered]; my first course shall be brought in after the ancient manner by a score of old blear-eyed serving-men in long blue coats." – And not a little of life at Court, and of the favourites with whom King James surrounded himself: – "They say one shall see fine sights at the Court? I'll tell you what you shall see. You shall see many faces of man's making, for you shall find very few as God left them; and you shall see many legs too; amongst the rest you shall behold one pair, the feet of which were in past times sockless, but are now, through the change of time (that alters all things), very strangely become the legs of a knight and a courtier; another pair you shall see, that were heir-apparent legs to a glover; these legs hope shortly to be honourable; when they pass by they will bow, and the mouth to these legs will seem to offer you some courtship; it will swear, but it will lie; hear it not."

      Keen observation this, and a dramatist's acquaintance with many kinds of life; the promise of a satiric mastery, and very vivid prose for a lad of twenty-three. The play is not, as a dramatic composition, of any peculiar distinction. Beaumont is still in his pupilage to the classics, and to Ben Jonson's comedy of humours. But the humours, though unoriginal and boyishly forced, are clearly defined; and the instinct for fun is irrepressible. The Woman-Hater, obsessed by the delusion that all women are in pursuit, is admirably victimized by a witty and versatile heroine who has, with maliciously genial pretense, assumed the rôle of man-hunter. And to the main plot is loosely, but not altogether ineffectually, attached a highly diverting story which Beaumont has taken from the Latin treatise of Paulus Jovius on Roman fishes, or from some intermediate source. Like the Tamisius of the original, his Lazarillo, – whose prayer to the Goddess of Plenty is ever, "fill me this day with some rare delicates," – scours the city in fruitless quest of an umbrana's head. Finally, he is taken by intelligencers, spies in the service of the state, who construe his passion for the head of a fish as treason aimed at the head of the Duke. The comedy abounds in parody of verses well known at the time, of lines from Hamlet and All's Well that End Well, Othello[50] and Eastward Hoe50 and bombastic catches from other plays. To me the most ludicrous bit of burlesque is of the moment of last suspense in Antony and Cleopatra (IV, 14 and 15) where Antony, thinking to die "after the high Roman fashion" which Cleopatra forthwith emulates, says "I come my queen," —

      Stay for me!

      Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,

      And with our sprightly port make СКАЧАТЬ