Chapter 7 RELATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE, JONSON, AND OTHERS IN THE THEATRICAL WORLD

Though the young poets did not begin to write for the King's Men before 1609, it is impossible that they should not have met Shakespeare, face to face, earlier in the century, whether at the Mermaid in Bread-street, Cheapside, where perhaps befel those "wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson," or about the Globe in Southwark or the theatre in Blackfriars,-which, though leased to the Revels' Children, belonged to Shakespeare's friend Richard Burbadge,-or at the lodgings with Mountjoy the tiremaker, on the corner of Silver and Monkwell Streets, where the master had lived from 1598 to 1604, and

where, for anything we know to the contrary, he continued to live for several years more.[76] They would pass the house on their way from the Bankside north to St. Giles, Cripplegate, when they wished to observe what Juby and the rest of the Prince's Players were putting on at the Fortune, or on their way back to take ale with Jonson at his house in Blackfriars, or to follow Nat. Field or Carey, acting in one of their own or Jonson's plays at the private theatre close by.

That the young poets, even during their discipleship to Jonson were familiar with the poetry and dramatic methods of Shakespeare the most cursory reader will observe. Their plays from the first, whether jointly or singly written, abound in reminiscences of his work. But more particularly is he echoed by Beaumont. The echo is sometimes of playful parody, as in the "huffing part" which the grocer's prentice of the Knight of the Burning Pestle steals from Hotspur:-

By heaven, methinks it were an easie leap

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd Moon,

Or dive into the bottom of the Sea,

Where never fathome line toucht any ground,

And pluck up drownèd honour from the lake of Hell;

or as in The Woman-Hater, where it looks very much as if this stylist of twenty-two was poking fun at the circumlocutions of Shakespeare's Helena in All's Well that Ends Well. Labouring to say "two days" in accents suitable to a monarch's ear, she had evolved:

Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring

Their fiery torches his diurnal ring,

Ere twice in murk and accidental damp

Moist Hesperus hath quenched his sleepy lamp;

Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass

Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass,

What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly.

In terms strikingly reminiscent of this, Beaumont's courtier Valore instructs the gourmand of The Woman-Hater, how to address royalty:

You must not talk to him [the Duke]

As you doe to an ordinary man,

Honest plain sence, but you must wind about him.

For example: if he should aske you what o'clock it is,

You must not say, "If it please your grace, 'tis nine";

But thus, "Thrice three aclock, so please my Sovereign";

Or thus, "Look how many Muses there doth dwell

Upon the sweet banks of the learned Well,

And just so many stroaks the clock hath struck."

And when the Duke asks Lazarillo, thus instructed, "how old are you?" we can imagine with what mirth the graceless Beaumont puts into his mouth:

Full eight and twenty several Almanacks

Have been compiled all for several years,

Since first I drew this breath; four prentiships

Have I most truly served in this world;

And eight and twenty times hath Phoebus' car

Run out his yearly course since-.

Duke. I understand you, sir.

Lucio. How like an ignorant poet he talks!

Is it possible that associating with the literary school of the day, his brother John, Drayton, Chapman, and Ben Jonson, the young satirist, here vents something like spleen? Or is this purely dramatic utterance?

Like parodies of phrases in Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and other Shakespearean plays ripple the stream of Beaumont's humour. They are, however, always good-natured. But if Beaumont laughs when Shakespeare exaggerates, he also pays him in his later plays the tribute of imitation in numerous poetic borrowings of serious lines and telling situations: as where the King in Philaster tries to pray but, like the kneeling Claudius, despairs-

How can I

Looke to be heard of gods that must be just,

Praying upon the ground I hold by wrong?-

or "in the Hamlet-like situation and character of Philaster" himself; as, for instance, when to the usurping King who has said of him, "Sure hees possest," Philaster retorts:

Yes, with my fathers spirit. Its here, O King,

A dangerous spirit! Now he tells me, King,

I was a Kings heire, bids me be a King,

And whispers to me, these are all my subjects.

Tis strange he will not let me sleepe, but dives

In to my fancy, and there gives me shapes

That kneele and doe me service, cry me king:

But I'le suppresse him: he's a factious spirit,

And will undoe me.

The resemblance of the controversy between Melantius and Amintor to that of Brutus with Cassius has already been noticed; and everyone will acknowledge the resemblance of the "quizzical reserve" of his Scornful Lady to Olivia's, of Aspatia's melancholy in the Maides Tragedy to Ophelia's, and of Bellario's situation in Philaster to that of Viola in Twelfth Night.[77] This last play, indeed, acted, as we have seen, in the Middle Temple when Beaumont was a freshman in the Inns of Court, affects Beaumont's method and style, more than any other save the Pericles (1607, or January to May 1608), which prepared the way for the more important later romantic dramas of Shakespeare himself as well as for those of Beaumont and Fletcher.

During the years when Shakespeare's company was producing their romantic dramas, they were breathing, with Shakespeare, Burbadge, and Heming, the atmosphere of the Globe and Blackfriars; and, after Shakespeare had taken up a more continuous residence at Stratford, in 1611, Fletcher, at any rate, not only kept in touch with the remaining shareholders and actors of the Globe but with the Master himself, and conversed and wrote with him on various occasions. These may have fallen either at the New Place at Stratford, where the now wealthy country gentleman was wont to entertain his friends, or when Shakespeare came to town-as in May 1612. At that time his former host, Mountjoy's, son-in-law was suing the tiremaker for his wife's unpaid dower, and "William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon in the Countye of Warwicke, Gentleman" who had helped to make the marriage, was summoned as a witness.[78] Or between July and November of that year, when the "base fellow" Kirkham was bringing against Burbadge and Heming a suit concerning the profits of the Blackfriars theatre, in which as a shareholder Shakespeare, too, must have been interested; and when Christopher Brooke of the pastoral poets in Beaumont's Inns of Court was of the "councell" for Shakespeare's company.[79] Or in March 1613, when Shakespeare was negotiating for the house in Blackfriars which he bought that month from Henry Walker. In the latter year the King's Players performed two plays in the writing of which there is reason to believe that Shakespeare and Fletcher participated: The Two Noble Kinsmen, first published as "by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of 1634; and a lost play licensed for publication as the "History of Cardenio by Fletcher and Shakespeare," in 1653. Of the former, critics are generally agreed that Fletcher wrote about a dozen scenes and that Shakespeare in all probability wrote others. Maybe, however, Fletcher, and perhaps later Massinger, merely revised and completed Shakespeare's original draft of the play left in the company's hands. That The Two Noble Kinsmen borrows its antimasque from our friend Beaumont's Maske of the Inner Temple, which was presented in February 1613, may be construed as indicating that he, too, still had some connection with Shakespeare's company. But it is more likely that he was now happily married and settled in Kent, and didn't care what they did with his plays. Probably the Shakespeare-Fletcher play was acted soon after Beaumont's, and in the same year. With regard to the authorship of the Cardenio we have nothing but the publisher's statement; but we know that the play was written after the appearance, in 1612, of the story upon which it is based, in Shelton's English translation of the first part of Don Quixote; and that it was acted at Court by Shakespeare's and Fletcher's company in May and June 1613.

The partnership of Fletcher and Shakespeare in the writing of these two plays has been questioned, but as to their collaboration in a third, Henry VIII, there is not much possibility of doubt. In the conception of the leading characters Shakespeare is present, and in many of their finest lines, and specifically in at least five scenes; while Fletcher appears in practically all the rest. The play was acted by the King's Men at the Globe on June 29, 1613, and was included as Shakespeare's by his judicious editors and intimate friends, Heming and Condell, in the folio of 1623.

BEN JONSON

From the miniature belonging to Mr. Evelyn Shirley

During these years of fruition the friendship with Jonson, who was writing at the time for both the companies to which our young dramatists gave their plays, continued apparently without interruption. It is attested by commendatory verses written by Beaumont for The Silent Woman, which was acted early in 1610, and by verses of both Fletcher and Beaumont prefixed to Jonson's tragedy of Catiline, published in 1611. On the latter occasion Beaumont commends Jonson's contempt for "the wild applause of common people," and declares that he is "three ages yet from understood;" while Fletcher even more enthusiastically avers,-

Thy labours shall outlive thee; and, like gold

Stampt for continuance, shall be current where

There is a sun, a people, or a year.

The generous and graceful response of Ben to the reverence of the younger of the twain appears in a tribute the date of which is uncertain, but which was included by the author among his Epigrams, entered in the Stationers' Registers, 1612.

To Francis Beaumont.

How I doe love thee, Beaumont and thy Muse,

That unto me dost such religion use!

How I doe feare my selfe, that am not worth

The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth!

At once thou mak'st me happie, and unmak'st;

And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st.

What fate is mine, that so it selfe bereaves?

What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives?

When even there, where most thou praisest mee,

For writing better, I must envie thee.

Since Jonson was not given to indiscriminate laudation of his contemporaries in dramatic production, we may surmise that this tribute to the art of Beaumont follows rather than precedes the appearance of Philaster, and of perhaps both The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King. And whether there is any basis or not for the tradition handed down by Dryden[80] that Beaumont was "so accurate a judge of plays that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots,"-there is here evidence, sufficiently convincing, of the high esteem in which "the least indulgent thought" and the large "giving" of the brilliant and independent gentleman-dramatist were held by the acknowledged classicist and dictator of the stage.

From the various sources already indicated and from contemporary testimony, later to be cited, it is easy to derive a definite conception of the world of dramatists and actors in which Beaumont and Fletcher moved. They knew, and were properly appraised by, Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker, Heywood, Massinger, Field, Daborne, Marston, Day, and Middleton,-with all of whom they were associated either in combats of poetry and wit or in the presentation of plays at Blackfriars, Whitefriars, or the Globe. Among actors their acquaintance included Field, Taylor, Carey, and others of the Queen's Revels' Children, and Richard Burbadge, Heming, Condell, Ostler, Cook, and Lowin of the King's Company. In what esteem they were held during these years we have evidence in the verses already quoted from Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, and Field. In the generous dedication of The White Devil by John Webster, in 1612, we find them ranked with the best: "Detraction," says he, "is the sworne friend to ignorance. For mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightened stile of Maister Chapman: The labour'd and understanding workes of maister Jonson: The no lesse worthy composures of the both worthily excellent Maister Beamont and Maister Fletcher: And lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-speare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood, wishing what I write may be read by their light: Protesting that, in the strength of mine owne judgement, I know them so worthy, that though I rest silent in my owne worke, yet to most of theirs I dare (without flattery) fix that of Martiall-non norunt, Haec monumenta mori."

FOOTNOTES:

[76] Wallace, New Shakespeare Discoveries, Harper's Maga., March, 1910.

[77] For these and other reminiscences of Shakespeare, see Alden's edition of Beaumont (Belles Lettres Series), XVI; Macaulay's Beaumont; Leonhardt in Anglia, VIII, 424; Oliphant in Engl. Studien, XIV, 53-94, Koeppel's Quellen-studien in Münchener Beitr?ge, XI.

[78] Wallace, New Shakespeare Discoveries (Harper's Maga., March, 1910).

[79] See the Greenstreet Papers, in Fleay, Hist. Stage, 239, 250.

[80] An Essay of Dramatick Poesie.

* * *