Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ and her Aeneas shall want troops,

      And all the haunt [of Elysium] be ours.

      So Lazarillo, in awful apprehension lest his love, his fish-head, be eaten before he arrive, —

      If it be eaten, here he stands that is the most dejected, most unfortunate, miserable, accursed, forsaken slave this province yields! I will not sure outlive it; no, I will die bravely and like a Roman;

      And after death, amidst the Elysian shades,

      I'll meet my love again.

      Shakespeare's play was not entered for publication till May 20, 1608, but this passage shows that Beaumont had seen it at the Globe before May 20, 1607.

      I have no hesitation in assigning to the same year, 1607, although most critics have dated it three or four years later, Beaumont's admirable burlesque of contemporary bourgeois drama and chivalric romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Evidence both external and internal, which I shall later state, points to its presentation by the Children of the Queen's Revels at Blackfriars while they were under the business management of Henry Evans and Robert Keysar, and before the temporary suppression of the company in March 1608. The question of date has been complicated by the supposed indebtedness of the burlesque to Don Quixote; but I shall attempt to show, when I consider the play at length, that it has no verbal relation either to the original (1604) or the translation (1612) of Cervantes' story. The Knight of the Burning Pestle is in some respects of the same boyish tone and outlook upon the humours of life as The Woman-Hater, but it is incomparably more novel in conception, more varied in composition, and more effervescent in satire. It displays the Beaumont of twenty-two or – three as already an effective dramatist of contemporary manners and humours, a master of parody, side-long mirth, and ironic wit, before he joined forces with Fletcher and developed, in the treatment of more serious and romantic themes, the power of poetic characterization and the pathos that bespeak experience and reflection, – and, in the treatment of the comedy of life, the realism that proceeds from broad and sympathetic observation. The play, which as the publisher of the first quarto, in 1613, tell us was "begot and borne in eight daies," was not a success; evidently because the public did not like the sport that it made of dramas and dramatists then popular; especially, did not stomach the ridicule of the bombast-loving and romanticizing London citizen himself, – was not yet educated up to the humour; perhaps, because "hee … this unfortunate child … was so unlike his brethren." At any rate, according to Walter Burre, the publisher, in 1613, "the wide world for want of judgement, or not understanding the privy marke of Ironie about it (which showed it was no ofspring of any vulgar braine) utterly rejected it." And Burre goes on to say in his Dedication of the quarto to Maister Robert Keysar: – "for want of acceptance it was even ready to give up the Ghost, and was in danger to have bene smothered in perpetuall oblivion, if you (out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not bene moved both to relieve and cherish it: wherein I must needs commend both your judgement, understanding, and singular love to good wits."

      The rest of this Dedication is of great interest as bearing upon the date of the composition of the play; but it has been entirely misconstrued or else it gives us false information. That matter I shall discuss in connection with the sources and composition of the play.51 Suffice it to say here that The Knight followed The Travails of Three English Brothers, acted. June 29, 1607, and that the Robert Keysar who rescued the manuscript of The Knight from oblivion had, only in 1606 or 1607, acquired a financial interest in the Queen's Revels' Children, and was backing them during the last year of their occupancy of Blackfriars when they presented the play, and where only it was presented.

      In the same year, 1607, both young men are writing commendatory verses for the first quarto of Ben Jonson's Volpone, which had been acted in 1605. Beaumont, with the confidence of intimacy, addresses Jonson as "Dear Friend," praises his "even work," deplores its failure with the many who "nothing can digest, but what's obscene, or barks," and implies that he forbears to make them understand its merits purely in deference to Jonson's wiser judgment, —

      I would have shewn

      To all the world the art which thou alone

      Hast taught our tongue, the rules of time, of place

      And other rites, deliver'd with the grace

      Of comic style, which only is far more

      Than any English stage hath known before.

      But since our subtle gallants think it good

      To like of nought that may be understood …

      … let us desire

      They may continue, simply to admire

      Fine clothes and strange words,

      and offensive personalities.

      Fletcher in a more epigrammatic appeal to "The true master in his art, B. Jonson," prays him to forgive friends and foes alike, and then, those "who are nor worthy to be friends or foes."

      Concerning Fletcher's beginnings in composition the earliest date is suggested by a line of D'Avenant's, written many years after Fletcher's death (1625), "full twenty years he wore the bays."52 It has been conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists was in the field as early as 1604, with his comedy of The Woman's Prize or The Tamer Tamed, – a well contrived and witty continuation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, – in which Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's Katherine, now deceased, marries the bereaved Petruchio and effectively turns the tables upon him. If acted before 1607, The Woman's Prize was a Paul's Boys' or Queen's Revels' play. But while the upper limit of the play is fixed by the mention of the siege of Ostend, 1604, other references and the literary style point to 1610, even to 1614, as the date of composition or revision.53

      It is likely that Fletcher was writing plays before 1608, but what we do not know. In that year was acted the pastoral drama of The Faithfull Shepheardesse, a composition entirely his own. This delicate confection of sensual desire, ideal love, translunar chastity, and subacid cynicism regarding "all ideas of chastity whatever,"54 was an experiment; and a failure upon the stage. It has, as I shall later emphasize, lyric and descriptive charm of surpassing merit, but it lacks, as does most of Fletcher's work, moral depth and emotional reality; and following, as it did, a literary convention in design, it could not avail itself of the skill in dramatic device, and the racy flavour which a little later characterized his Monsieur Thomas. The date of its first performance is determined by the combined authority of the Stationers' Registers (from which we learn that the publishers of the first quarto, undated, but undoubtedly of 1609,55 were in unassisted partnership only from December 22, 1608 to July 20, 1609), of a statement of Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden that the play was written "ten years" before 1618, and of commendatory verses to the first quarto of 1609, by the young actor-dramatist, Nathaniel Field. If we may guide our calculations by the plague regulations of the time, it must have been acted before July 28, 1608.

      On the appearance of the first quarto, in 1609, Jonson sympathizing with "the worthy author," on the ill reception of the pastoral when first performed, says:

      I, that am glad thy innocence was their guilt,

      for the rabble found not there the "vices, which they look'd for," I —

      Do crown thy murder'd poem; which shall rise

      A glorified work to time, when fire

      Or moths shall eat what all these fools admire.

      And Francis Beaumont writing to "my friend, Master John Fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted СКАЧАТЬ