Francis Beaumont: Dramatist. Gayley Charles Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ conducted by the utter barristers, day in and day out through nearly the whole year. As he advanced in proficiency he would appear as a "moot-man" in the arguments presented before the Benchers, or governing fellows, seated as judges. And perhaps he resigned himself, meanwhile, to the proper wear within the Inn, which was cap and gown, "but the fashion was to wear hats, cloaks or coats, swords, rapiers, boots and spurs, large ruffs and long hair. Even Benchers were found to sit in Term Time with hats on."16

      Whether Beaumont gave promise or not we are ignorant. The routine of the Inn was impeccable; but students and benchers were not. There were not infrequently other exercises than "moots" after supper: cards and stage-plays, revels and sometimes riots. This much we know, that before young Frank could have fulfilled his seven or more years as student and "moot-man," he was already in the rank of poets and dramatists. But, that by no means precludes his continuance for several years, perhaps till 1608, in the juridical university, or his intimate association with and residence in the stately old quadrangles of what would be his college, – the Inner Temple. And for a young man of his temperament the atmosphere was as poetic as juridical. The young man's fancy was fired by the poetry and the drama that for centuries had enlivened the graver pursuits of the Gothic halls that rose between Fleet Street and the Thames, Whitefriars and Paget Place, – "the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty in the kingdom," as Ben Jonson calls them in his dedication17 to the Inns of Court of Every Man out of his Humour, first published in the year when Beaumont entered.

      According to Aubrey, while the garden-wall of Lincoln's Inn, close by, was building, a Bencher of that society "walking thro' and hearing" a young bricklayer "repeat some Greek verses out of Homer, discoursed with him, and finding him to have a witt extraordinary gave him some exhibition to maintaine him at Trinity College, Cambridge." That young bricklayer was, later, Beaumont's friend and master, Ben Jonson. Lincoln's Inn had long been a nursing mother to dramatic effort. At the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign it was one of its members, Richard Edwardes, who, as Master of the Chapel Children, produced the "tragicall comedie" Damon and Pythias, and the tragedy of Palamon and Arcite, to the great edification of the Queen, and the permanent improvement of the Senecan style of drama by the fusion of the ideal and the commonplace, of the romantic, the serious, and the humorous in an appeal to popular interest. "He was highly valued," this Edwardes, "by those that knew him," says Anthony Wood, "especially his associates in Lincoln's Inn." And it was in the Middle Temple, just fourteen months after Beaumont joined the Inns of Court, that Manningham, one of the barristers, witnessed the performance for the Reader's Feast on Candlemas Day of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. If Beaumont of the Inner Temple, within a stone's throw, did not hear more than the applause, he was not our Frank Beaumont. We may be sure that he had sauntered through the Temple Gardens many an afternoon, and knew the spot immortalized by Marlowe and that same Shakespeare, as the scene of the quarrel between Plantagenet and Somerset when the white and red roses were plucked, and that he would hear Shakespeare when he could.

      But much as the Middle Temple and Lincoln's favoured the drama and costly entertainments on the major feast-days, they were outdone in Christmas revels and masques and plays by the closely affiliated societies of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple. Between these Houses, says Mr. Douthwaite, the historian of the former, "there appears anciently to have existed a kindly union, which is shown by the fact that on the great gate of the gardens of the Inner Temple may be seen to this day [1886] the 'griffin' of Gray's Inn, whilst over the great gateway in Gray's Inn Square is carved in bold relief the 'wingèd horse' of the Inner Temple." The two societies had long a custom of combining for the production of theatrical shows; and as we shall see, they combined some thirteen years after Beaumont entered the Inner Temple in the production at Court of one of the most glorious and expensive masques ever presented in London, Beaumont's own masque for the wedding of the Elector Palatine and the Princess Elizabeth. They were influential as patrons of the early drama, and as producers of amateur dramatists. For centuries Gray's Inn had permitted "revels" after six o'clock supper of bread and beer; and when Beaumont was of the Inner Temple close by, there was a Grand Week at Gray's in every term. "They had revels and masques some of which," as a member of that society has recently said, "have never been forgotten, and I think cannot be forgotten while English history lasts."18 From a very early date, perhaps not long after the society was established in Edward the Third's reign in the old manor of Portpool, "they were addicted at the Christmas season to a great outburst of revelry of every kind. The revelings began at All Hallows; at Christmas a Prince of Portpoole was appointed; who was also Lord of Misrule, and he kept things gaily alive through Christmas and until toward the end of January." These and other disguises, masques, and mummeries, are lineal descendants of the mummings of the Ancient Order of the Coif, such as regaled King Richard II at Christmas 1389; and, amalgamated with St. George plays and other folk-shows and even with sword-dances, they influenced the course of rural drama throughout the realm. It may be a bow drawn at a venture but I cannot withhold the suspicion that the Lord of Pool of the Revesby Sword-Play and of other popular compositions derives from the historic Prince of Misrule of the Gray's Inn Christmas revels. It was George Gascoigne of Gray's Inn who by a translation from Ariosto introduced the Renaissance treatment of the Greek New Comedy and the Latin Comedy into England with his Supposes in 1566, and in the same year, with Francis Kinwelmersh, produced at Gray's Inn an English rendering of Ludovico Dolce's Giocasta, a tragedy descended from Euripides' Phoenissae by way of a Latin version. "Altogether," remarks Professor Cunliffe,19 "the play must have provided a gorgeous and exciting spectacle, and have produced an impression not unworthy of Gray's Inn, 'an House', the Queen said on another occasion, 'she was much beholden unto, for that it did always study for some sports to present unto her.'" To this house and to Gascoigne, Shakespeare, too, was beholden, for from the Supposes proceeds more or less directly the minor plot of The Taming of the Shrew. In 1588, Gray's Inn figures prominently again in the career of the pre-Shakespearian drama, with the production by one of its gentlemen, Thomas Hughes, of a tragedy of English legend and Senecan type, The Misfortunes of Arthur, played by the society before the Queen at Greenwich. And, in 1594, Gray's Inn connects itself with the Shakespearian drama directly by witnessing in the great hall in the Christmas season a play called A Comedy of Errors, "like to Plautus his Menaechmus."

      It is diverting to note that on the eve of just that season of 1594, a very pious woman, the second wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the mother of Anthony and Francis, is writing to the elder brother "I trust that they will not mum nor sinfully make revel at Gray's Inn." Anthony was not a very strict Puritan, Francis still less so; and Francis, who had been of Gray's Inn since 1575, was, till his fall from power, the keenest devotee and most ardent and reckless promoter of masquing that Gray's Inn or, for that matter, England, had ever known. According to Spedding,20 the speeches of the six councillors for the famous court of the Prince of Purpoole in 1594 were written by him and him alone. He furnished the money and much of the device for gorgeous masques before Queen Elizabeth; and under her successor he was prime mover in many a masque, like that of the Flowers, presented by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, in 1614, which, alone, cost him about £10,000 as reckoned in the money of to-day. The masques by the four Inns, in honour of the Elector Palatine's marriage, the year before, are said to have cost £20,000, – five hundred thousand dollars in the money of to-day! And it would appear that much of this expense was assumed by Sir Francis Bacon, who in the years of his greatness as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General retained intimate relations with the life of Gray's Inn, and whom our Beaumont during the years of studentship before 1603, when the gallant Sir Walter Raleigh was consigned to the Tower, must many times have seen strolling with Sir Walter in the walks that Bacon himself had laid out for his fellow-benchers of the Inn.

      If Beaumont's family had deliberately set about preparing him for his career of poet and dramatist, especially of dramatist who, with John Fletcher, should vividly reproduce the life, manners and conversation of young men of fashion about town, they could not have placed him in a community more favourable to these ends than that of the Inns of Court. As the СКАЧАТЬ