Читать книгу Francis Beaumont: Dramatist - Gayley Charles Mills - Страница 7

Beaumont and Fletcher may have been friends by 1603 or 1604, – in all likelihood, as early as 1605 when, as we have seen, Drayton and other "southern Shepherds" were by way of visiting the Beaumonts at Grace-Dieu. In that year Jonson's Volpone was acted for the first time; and one may divine from the familiar and affectionate terms in which our two young dramatists address the author upon the publication of the play in 1607 that they had been acquainted not only with Jonson but with one another for the two years past. We have no satisfactory proof of their coöperation in play-writing before 1606 or 1607. According to Dryden, – whose statements of fact are occasionally to be taken with a grain of salt, but who, in this instance, though writing almost sixty years after the event, is basing his assertion upon first-hand authority, – "the first play that brought 'them' in esteem was their Philaster," but "before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully." Philaster, as I shall presently show, was, in all probability, first acted between December 7, 1609 and July 12, 1610. Before 1609, however, each had written dramas independently, Beaumont The Woman-Hater and The Knight of the Burning Pestle; Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse, and maybe one or two other plays. Our first evidence of their association in dramatic activity is the presence of Fletcher's hand, apparently as a reviser, in three scenes of The Woman-Hater, which was licensed for publication May 20, 1607, as "lately acted by the Children of Paul's." From contemporary evidence we know, as did Dryden, that two of these plays, The Knight and Faithfull Shepheardesse were ungraciously received; and Richard Brome, about fourteen years after Fletcher's death, suggests that perhaps Monsieur Thomas shared "the common fate."

The Woman-Hater was the earliest play of either of our dramatists to find its way into print. Drayton's lines, already referred to, about "sweet Palmeo" imply that Beaumont was already known as a poet, before April 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," —

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;

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, —

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:

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

And Francis Beaumont writing to "my friend, Master John Fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted wit" and "art," and rejoices that, if they should condemn the play now that it is printed,

In the first quarto two commendatory poems are printed, the first by N. F., the second by the Homeric scholar and well known dramatist, George Chapman. The latter writes "to his loving friend, Master John Fletcher," in terms of generous encouragement and glowing charm. Your pastoral, says he, is "a poem and a play, too," —

If Jonson, Chapman, and Beaumont suspected the undercurrent of satire in this Pastoral, and they surely were not obtuse, they concealed the suspicion admirably. As for Fletcher he continued to "live in old peace." "When his faire Shepheardesse on the guilty stage, Was martir'd between Ignorance and Rage… Hee only as if unconcernèd smil'd." An attitude toward the public that characterized him all through life.

The admiration of younger men is shown in the respectful commendation of N. F. This is Nathaniel Field. He was acting with the Blackfriars' Boys since the days when Jonson presented Cynthia's Revels, and, as one of the Queen's Revels' Children, he had probably taken part in The Faithfull Shepheardesse when the undiscerning public hissed it. Field came of good family, had been one of Mulcaster's pupils at the Merchant Taylors' School, and was beloved by Chapman and Jonson. He was then but twenty-two, – about three years younger than Fletcher's friend, Beaumont, – but for nine years gone he had been recognized as a genius among boy-actors. That the verses of so young a man should be accepted, and coupled with those of the thunder-girt Chapman, was to him a great and unexpected honour; and the youth expresses prettily his pride in being published by his "lov'd friend" in such distinguished literary company, —

Now he is planning to write dramas himself; and it is pleasant to note with what modesty he touches upon the project:

He is alluding to his not yet finished comedy, A Woman is a Weather-cocke. The youth must have been close to Beaumont as well as to Fletcher; he soon afterwards, 1609-10, played the leading part in their Coxcombe, – which, I think, was the earliest work planned and written by them in collaboration; and when, a little later, his own first comedy was acted by the Queen's Revels' Children no auditor of literary ear could have failed to detect, amid the manifest echoes of Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare, the flattering resemblance in diction, rhythm, and poetic fancy to the most characteristic features of Beaumont's style. This is very interesting, because in another dramatic composition Foure Playes in One, written in part by Fletcher, certain portions have so close a likeness to Beaumont's work, that until lately they have been mistakenly attributed to that poet and assigned to this early period of his career. The portions of The Foure Playes not written by Fletcher were written by no other than Nat. Field. And since in Field's Address to the Reader of the Weather-cocke, licensed for publication November 23, 1611, he still speaks as if the Weather-cocke were his only venture in play-writing, we may conclude that The Foure Playes in One was not put together before the end of 1611, or the beginning of 1612. That series need not, therefore, be considered in the present place; all the more so, since Beaumont had in all probability nothing directly to do with its composition.57

Of the other dramas written by Fletcher alone and assigned by critics to his earlier period, that is to say before 1610, or even 1611, the only one beside The Faithfull Shepheardesse that may with any degree of safety be admitted to consideration is a comedy of romance, manners, and humours, Monsieur Thomas. The romance is a delightful story of self-abnegating love. The father, Valentine, and the son Francisco, supposed to have been drowned long ago, and now known (if the texts had only printed the play as Fletcher wrote it) as Callidon, a guest of Valentine, love the same girl, the father's ward. This part of the play is executed with captivating grace. It shows that Fletcher had, from the first, an instinct for the dramatic handling of a complicated story, an eye for delicate and surprising situations, an appreciation of chivalric honour and genuine passion, and a fancy fertile and playful. In the subplot the manners are such as would appeal to a Fletcher not yet thirty years of age; and the humours are those of a student of the earlier plays of Ben Jonson, and of Marston – who ceased writing in 1607. It has indeed been asserted, but without much credibility, that "the notion of the panerotic Hylas," who must always "be courting wenches through key-holes," was taken from a character in Marston's Parasitaster, of 1606.58 The name of this Captain, Hylas, was in the mouth of Fletcher in those early days; he uses it again in his part of the Philaster, written in 1609 or 1610, and elsewhere. The snatches of song and the names of ballads are those of contemporary popularity between 1606 and 1609; and in two instances they are those of which Beaumont makes use in his Knight of the Burning Pestle of 1607. The play was acted, too, apparently by the same company, the Queen's Revels' Children, and in the same house as was Beaumont's. It could not have been played by them at "the Private House in Black Fryers" later than March 1608, unless they squeezed it into that last month of 1609 which serves as a telescope basket for so many of the plays which critics cannot satisfactorily date.

For my present purpose, which is to show how Fletcher, not assisted by Beaumont, wrote during his youth, it makes little difference whether Monsieur Thomas was written as early as 1608 or only before 1611. The fact is, however, that a line in the last scene, "Take her, Francisco, now no more young Callidon," shows clearly that Callidon, a name not occurring elsewhere in the play, and necessary to the dramatic complication, had been used by Fletcher in his first version; and when we put the names Callidon and Cellidée together (she is Francisco's belovèd) we are pointed at once to the source of the romantic plot – the Histoire de Celidée, Thamyre, et Calidon at the beginning of the Second Part of the Astrée of the Marquis D'Urfé.59 The First Part of this voluminous pastoral romance had been published, probably in 1609, in an edition which is lost; but a second edition, dedicated to Henri IV, who died May 14, 1610, appeared that year. Some of Fletcher's inspiration, as for the name and general characteristic of Hylas, was drawn from the First Part. The Second Part was not printed till later in 1610. It would, therefore, appear that Fletcher could not have written Monsieur Thomas before the latter date. On the other hand, as Dr. Upham60 has indicated, the Astrée had been read as early as February 12, 1607, by Ben Jonson's friend, William Drummond, who, on that day, writes about it critically to Sir George Keith. If the First Part had been circulated in manuscript, and read by an Englishman, in 1607, it is not at all unlikely that the Second Part, too, of this most leisurely published romance, which did not get itself all into covers till 1647, had been read in manuscript by many men, French and English, long before its appearance in print, 1610; – may be by Fletcher himself, as early as 1608. Or he may have heard the story, as early as that, from some one who had read it. The fact that he alters some of the names, follows the plot but loosely, characterizes the personages not at all as if he had the original before him, and uses none of their diction, would favour the supposition that he is writing from hearsay, or from some second hand and condensed version of the story.

No matter what the exact date of composition, Monsieur Thomas is the one play beside The Faithfull Shepheardesse from which we may draw conclusions concerning the native tendencies of the young Fletcher. The subplot of Thomas, concocted with clever ease, and furnished with varied devices appropriate to comic effect – disguisings, mouse-traps, dupers duped, street-frolics and mock sentimental serenades, scaling-ladders, convents, and a blackamoor girl for a decoy-duck, – is conceived in a rollicking spirit and executed in sprightly conversational style. Sir Adolphus Ward says that "as a picture of manners it is excelled by few other Elizabethan comedies." I am sorry that I cannot agree; I call it low, or farcical comedy; and though the 'manners' be briskly and realistically imagined, I question their contemporary actuality, – even their dramatic probability. Amusing scapegraces like the hero of the title-part have existed in all periods of history; and fathers, who will not have their sons mollycoddles; and squires of dames, like the susceptible Hylas. But manners, to be dramatically probable, must reflect the contacts of possible characters in a definite period. And no one can maintain that the contact of these persons with the women of the play is characterized by possibility. Or that these manners could, even in the beginning of James I's reign, have characterized a perceptible percentage of actual Londoners. Thomas, whose humour it is to assume sanctimony for the purpose of vexing his father, and blasphemy for the purpose of teasing his sweetheart – racking that "maiden's tender ears with damns and devils," – is no more grotesque than many a contemporary embodiment of 'humour.' But what of his contacts with the "charming" Mary who "daily hopes his fair conversion" and has "a credit," and "loves where her modesty may live untainted"; and, then, that she may "laugh an hour" admits him to her bed-chamber, having substituted for herself a negro wench? And what of the contacts with his equally "modest" sister, Dorothy, who not only talks smut with him and with the "charming" Mary, but deems his fornication "fine sport" and would act it if she were a man? I fear that much reading of decadent drama sometimes impairs the critical perception. In making allowance for what masquerades as historical probability one frequently accepts human improbabilities, and condones what should be condemned – even from the dramatic point of view. I have found it so in my own case. With all its picaresque quality, its jovial 'humours' and its racy fun, this play is sheer stage-rubbish: it has no basis in the general life of the class it purports to represent, no basis in actual manners, nor in likelihood or poetry. Its basis is in the uncritical and, to say the least, irresponsible taste of a theatre-going Rump which enjoyed the spurious localization, and attribution to others, of the imaginings of its own heart.

The characters are well grouped; and the spirit of merriment prevails. The reversals of motive and fortune, the recognitions and the dénouement are as excellently and puerilely absurd as could be desired of such an amalgam of romance and farcical intrigue. Richard Brome, writing in praise of the author for the quarto of 1639, implies that the play was not well received at its "first presenting," – "when Ignorance was judge, and but a few What was legitimate, what bastard knew." That first presenting was between 1608 and 1612; and the few might have cared more for Jonson's Every Man in his Humour or Volpone, or something by Shakespeare, or soon afterwards for Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster or A King and No King. But, as Brome assures us, "the world's grown wiser now." That is to say, it had learned by 1639 "what was legitimate," and could believe that in Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas and the like, "the Muses jointly did inspire His raptures only with their sacred fire." But even as transmogrified by D'Urfey and others the play did not survive its century.

No better example could be afforded of the kind of comedy that Fletcher was capable of producing in his earlier period. It shows us with what ability he could dramatize a romantic tale; with what license as a realist imagine and portray an unmoral, when not immoral, semblance of contemporary life. That was either before Beaumont had joined forces with him; or when Beaumont was not pruning his fancy; was not hanging "plummets" on his wit "to suppress Its too luxuriant-growing mightiness," nor persuading him that mirth might subsist "untainted with obscenity," and "strength and sweetness" and "high choice of brain" be "couched in every line." I am not claiming too much for Beaumont. In his later work as in his earlier there is the frank animalism, at times, of Elizabethan blood and humour; but one may search in vain his parts of the joint-plays as well as his youthful Knight of the Burning Pestle and those portions of The Woman-Hater which Fletcher did not touch, for the Jacobean salaciousness of Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas and the carnal cynicism which lurks beneath the pastoral garb of innocence even in The Faithfull Shepheardesse; – characteristics that find utterance again, untrammeled, in the dramas written after the younger poet was dead, – and Fletcher could no longer, as in those earlier days,

During the years of Beaumont's apprenticeship to Poetry cloaked as Law things had changed but little in his world of the Inner Temple. In its parliament, Sir Edward Coke, judicial, intrepid, and devout is still most potent. The chamber, lodging, and rooms which his father, Mr. Justice Beaumont, and his uncle Henry had built and occupied near to Ram Alley in the north end of Fuller's Rents are still held by Richard Daveys, who as Treasurer moved into them in 1601. Dr. Richard Masters is still Master of the Temple; and in the church, where Francis was obliged to receive the Sacrament at stated times, he, sitting perhaps by his uncle Henry's tomb, would hear the assistant ministers, Richard Evans and William Crashaw. The sacred place was still the refuge of outlaws from Whitefriars who claimed the privilege of sanctuary. If Beaumont wished to steal, after hours, into the Alsatia beyond Fuller's Rents, he must skirt or propitiate in 1607 as in 1602 the same Cerberus at the gates, – William Knight, the glover. Outside awaited him the hospitality of the Mitre Inn, or of Barrow at the "Cat and Fiddle," or of the slovenly Anthony Gibbes in his cook's shop of Ram Alley.62