The popularity of Philaster as an acting play, not only at Court but in the city, is attested by contemporary record. It was played after the Restoration with success; and between 1668 and 1817 it enjoyed thirteen revivals, – the last at Bath on December 12 of the latter year, with Ward in the title-rôle and Miss Jarmin as Bellario.234
8. —The Maides Tragedy, acted by the King's Men during the festivities at Court, October 1612 to March 1613, was known to Sir George Buc when, October 31, 1611, he licensed an anonymous play as "this second maiden's tragedy." It was acted by the King's also at Blackfriars; and since it is in every way a more mature production than Philaster, I think that it followed that play, toward the end of 1610 or in 1611. It was first published in 1619, in quarto and anonymously. The quarto of 1622 is also anonymous; that of 1630 gives the names of Beaumont and Fletcher as authors. In the commendatory verses to the folio of 1647, Henry Howard ascribes the scene of Amintor's suicide to Fletcher; Waller assigns to him "brave Melantius in his gallantry" and "Aspatia weeping in her gown"; Stanley, too, gives him the weeping Aspatia; and Herrick, "Evadne swelling with brave rage." These descriptions are as misleading as blind. D'Avenant comes nearer the mark in his Prologue to The Woman-Hater, already quoted, where he indicates correctly an Evadne scene and an Aspatia scene as of Fletcher's composition. Metrical tests, corrected by the rhetorical, show that Fletcher's contributions are limited to three scenes and two half-scenes. The list opens with those to which D'Avenant alludes: II, 2, in which Fletcher "taught the sad Aspatia how to mourn," and IV, 1 (as far as line 200, "Prithee, do not mock me"), in which he "reduced Evadne from her scorn"; and it includes, also, the ten lines of V, 1, the larger part of V, 2 (to Exit Evadne), and the perfunctory V, 3. As to Fletcher's authorship of II, 2 no doubt can be entertained. It is an admirable example of his double endings (almost 40 per cent), his end-stopped lines (80 per cent), anapæstic rhythms and jolts, as well as of his vocabulary, his favourite figures and his incremental second thoughts. I fail to see how any critic can assign it to Beaumont.235 As frequently with Fletcher, Aspatia's mourning, though beautiful, is a falsetto from the classics; more like one of Rossetti's or Leigh Hunt's poetic descriptions of a picture than a first-hand reproduction of nature and passion. There is likewise no doubt concerning the authorship of the first part of Act IV, 1 (lines 1-189), in which Melantius convinces Evadne of sin and drives her to vengeance upon the King. The latter part of the scene, also, appears to have been written by Fletcher in the first instance, and to have consisted of the first six speeches after the entrance of Amintor (lines 190-200), Evadne's "I have done nothing good to win belief" (247-254, 260-262), and the conclusion (263-285). But between Amintor's supplication "Prithee do not mock me" (line 200) and Evadne's assertion of sincerity "I have done nothing good to win belief" (line 247236), Beaumont has inserted four speeches that of themselves convert a colloquy otherwise histrionic and mechanical into one of the tenderest passages of the play. In Evadne's "My whole life is so leprous it infects All my repentance" – "That slight contrition" – "Give me your griefs; you are an innocent, A soul as white as Heaven" – "Shoot your light into me" – "Dissembling with my tears" – "Cut from man's remembrance," we hear the words, phrases, and figures of Beaumont; and we trace him in the repeated use of "do." We find him in Amintor's "Seed of virtue left to shoot up" – "put a thousand sorrows off" – "that dull calamity" – "that strange misbelief" – and in
Mock not the powers above that can and dare
Give thee a great example of their justice
To all ensuing ages.237
And in five verses of Evadne's succeeding asseveration of sincere reform (255-259), we are thrilled by his sudden magic and his poetic finality:
Those short days I shall number to my rest
(As many must not see me) shall, though too late,
Though in my evening, yet perceive a will, —
Since I can do no good, because a woman, —
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
The ground-work of this latter portion, from Amintor's entrance, where Evadne cries "Oh, my lord," "My much abused lord," and he, "I may leap, Like a hand-wolf, into my natural wildness" (lines 190-200); and the last three speeches in general with Amintor's "My frozen soul melts," and "My honour falls no farther: I am well, then"; and with Evadne's "tales" that "go to dust forgotten," – the Niobe weeping till she is water, – the "wash her stains away," and this remainder belongs, in verse no less than in diction, to the scene as Fletcher originally wrote it.
All the creatures
Made for Heaven's honours, have their ends, and good ones, —
All but the cozening crocodiles, false women —
They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores,
Men pray against; …
When to these two scenes we add the first and third of Act V, which are of no particular significance, and the second (to the death of the King), we have Fletcher's whole written contribution to this wonderful tragedy. In the murder of the King he displays dramatic mastery of the grisly and shuddering; but though the scene is characterized by the same rapidity of conversational thrust and parry as the Fletcherian dialogue between Melantius and Evadne, it is, like it, marred in effect by violence physical rather than spiritual, by brutality of vituperation and stage realism with but scant relief of subtlety. Fletcher's tragic scenes excel not in portrayal of personality but in business; his contribution to Aspatia is not pathos but the embroidery of grief.
The volume and essential vitality are Beaumont's: the cruel desertion of Aspatia, her lyric self-obliteration and desperate rush on fate; the artful revelation of Evadne's character, of her duplicity, her effrontery, her shamelessness; the stirrings of a soul within her, its gradual recognition of the inevitable, – that unchastity cannot be atoned even by vengeance, nor cleansed by blood, – and its true birth through love desired to love achieved in death; the bewilderment of the innocent but shuffling hero, blinded by circumstance and besotted by loyalty to the lustful author of his wrongs, – yet idealized by virgin and wanton alike; the spiritual elevation of Melantius, and the conflict between honour and friendship, pride and sacrifice, which ennobles the comradeship of that blunt soldier with the deluded Amintor; the pestilent King; and Calianax, the poltroon whose braggadocio is part humorous and part cunning, but all helpless and hopeless. These are Beaumont's; and his, too, the wealth of dramatic situation and device: the enthralling exposition, the silver sound and ecstasy of the masque in the first act; the shrewd development of motive, and the psychic revolutions of movement in the second and third acts; whatever of tenderness or of intricate complication the fourth displays – in fact, all that is not palpable violence. His, the breathless suspense and the swiftly urgent, unexpected sensations that crowd the last scene of the fifth and crown the catastrophe; and his, the gleaming epigram and the poetic finality.
In his Tragedies of the Last Age, licensed in 1677, Rymer attacked The Maides Tragedy violently for its lack of unity, unnaturalness, improbability of plot, and inconsistency of delineation. Perhaps, as Rymer insisted, the title is a misnomer: perhaps the play might better have been called Amintor, or the Lustful King, or The Concubine. But The Maides Tragedy is a more attractive name, and it may be justified. For I do not find that the action is double-centred. It springs entirely out of Amintor's desertion of the Maid for a woman whom he speedily discovers to be 'bed-fellow' to the King. The pathetic devotion of Aspatia is essential to our understanding of Amintor's tragic weakness, his hamartia. His failure to act in accordance with the dictates of honour toward Aspatia is prophetic of the indecision that costs him the respect of Evadne, nay extinguishes that first flicker of love which then was but desire. Vile as she was, she would have kissed the sin off from his lips if on their wedding-night he had unquestioningly slain the man to whom she had sold herself. The Nemesis, too, of Amintor is not Evadne nor the King, but Aspatia, thrust out of mind though not forgotten:
I did that lady wrong. Methinks I feel
A griefe shoot suddenly through all my veins, —238
… The faithless sin I made
To faire Aspatia is not yet revenged;
It follows me. —239
His Nemesis is Aspatia, constant unto death, – and in her death, awakening such remorse that he must die to be with her: "Aspatia!" he cries —
The soule is fled forever, and I wrong
Myselfe so long to lose her company,
Must I talke now? Heres to be with thee, love!240
Rymer's criticism and that of a recent essayist,241 of "the irrelevance of the motives that Beaumont employs" in the characterization and conduct of Evadne have logicality of appearance, but are based upon incorrect premises. The facts, as Beaumont gives them, are that Evadne was "once fair" and "chastely sweet," – before she met the King; that she was already corrupt when she took Amintor as her husband; that her "delicacy of feeling" after the marriage, in presence of her Ladies of the Bedchamber, is an assumed delicacy; that she loves the King "with ambition not with her eyes" (III, 1); that she "would bend to any one that won his throne"; that she has accepted Amintor as a screen, but speedily lusts for him, and is willing to give herself to him if he will forthright kill the King (II, 1, 179):
Wilt thou kill this man?
Sweare, my Amintor, and I'le kisse the sin
Off from thy lips.
But Amintor is cautious and obliquely conscientious, not the kind of man to satisfy her new desire, and ambition too. He could never win her by winning the throne, – too lily-livered:
"I wonnot sweare, sweet love," says he, "till I do know the cause"; —
Then she, with passion "I wood thou wouldst." – But she is a woman whose first behest is scorned; and with sudden revulsion of contempt for this poltroon, as she now conceives him —
Why, it is thou that wrongst me; I hate thee;
Thou shouldst have kild thy selfe.
Amintor has lost his evil chance. She despises him and yet, in her better moments, with a kind of pity. It follows that her prompt avowal of her liaison, and her return to the King and insulting treatment of Amintor are of a piece with the corrupted nature of the woman, – a nature that she displays up to the moment of her awakening and imagined repentance. The facts are, too, that she does not, immediately after she has sworn to her brother to let the foul soul of the King out, develop (IV, 1), as Mr. More thinks, a "mood of sudden and overwhelming love for Amintor." She merely asks his pardon:
I doe appeare the same, the same Evadne,
Drest in the shames I liv'd in, the same monster,
But these are names of honour to what I am … I am hell
Till you, my deare lord, shoot your light into me,
The beames of your forgivenesse.
The days that she shall number to her rest are short; but she vainly imagines that, though but "one minute" remains, she may "reach constantly at something that is neare" the good. She is awakened to her husband's whiteness of soul; but she makes no profession of love, though love, this time not merely lust, be stirred in her heart. She would not "let her sins perish his noble youth." At last, in the moment of mad exaltation after the murder of the King, when she thinks that she has washed her soul clean in that blood, the poor, misguided creature struggling toward the light, but still, and consistently, enveloped in the murk of her past, comes imploring the love of the husband whom in the earlier days she had scorned. She is still the passionate Evadne, who "was too foule within to looke faire then," and "was not free till now." Repulsed by Amintor, she dreams the one sane madness of her career, – to win his love by taking leave of life, – and kills herself.
I perceive no irrelevance of motive in the conduct of Evadne; even in the scenes which are not Beaumont's – namely, the expostulation of her brother, and the murder of the King. Nor do I find in the play as a whole what Mr. More calls an "incomprehensible tangle of the passions."
The defect in the construction of the Maides Tragedy, if there is one, lies in the failure of the Maid and her deserter to meet between the first scene of the second act and the third of the fifth. That is not unmotived, however; it is of Aspatia's own choosing and of Amintor's hamartia. Aspatia kisses him farewell, forgiving him, and saying that she "must trie Some yet unpractis'd way to grieve and die." He is, forthwith, entangled in the web of his wife's adultery, his own shame and more shameful delusion of allegiance. The girl whom he has so deeply wronged passes from his distracted consciousness, save for the sense that these troubles are his punishment. And when, toward the end of the play, the Maid comes in again, saying "this is my fatall houre," even we start at the remembrance that she had threatened to kill herself. And, because the scene in which she forces a duel upon Amintor is spirited and pathetic, his contrition poignant, and the joy of their reunion in the moment of death deeply tragic, we feel that we have been unduly cheated of the company of this innocent and resolute and surpassingly pathetic girl.
The play, with Burbadge in the rôle of Melantius, was popular during the lives of the authors. It was acted before the King and Queen in 1636 and it held the stage until the closing of the theatres. It was revived in 1660 and 1661. Pepys saw it at least five times before the middle of May 1668, and found it "too sad and melancholy" but still "a good play." It was popular when Dryden in his Essay on Dramatick Poesy, 1668, praised its "labyrinth of design." For a time during the reign of Charles II it was proscribed, possibly because the moral was too readily applicable to the conduct of the "merry monarch"; but the play in its original form was on the stage again by 1677. Before 1685 Waller made at least two attempts to change it from tragedy to tragicomedy by writing a new fifth act in which Evadne was bloodlessly eliminated. In one of these sentimental absurdities the King alone survived; in another the King, preposterously reformed, succeeded in saving Amintor and Aspatia from suicide and joined them in marriage: but neither attempt, though made "to please the Court," was crowned with success. The play enjoyed several other revivals in the first half of the eighteenth century with high popularity, notably at the Haymarket in 1706 when Melantius was played by Betterton, Evadne by Mrs. Barry, and Aspatia by Mrs. Bracegirdle; and again in 1710 just before Betterton's death. In 1742 Theobald writes, that the famous controversy between Melantius and Amintor is always "received with vehement applause." In 1837 the play was acted by Macready at the Haymarket, with alterations by himself and three original scenes by Sheridan Knowles, under the name of The Bridal, and, as Dyce tells us, was very favourably received by the public.242
9. – Though the tragedy of Cupid's Revenge was printed in 1615 as the work of Fletcher alone, the publication was unauthorized, and the attribution is by a printer who acknowledges that he was not acquainted with the author. The quarto of 1630 assigns it correctly to Beaumont and Fletcher. The play is known to have been acted at Court by her Majesty's Children of Whitefriars, the first Sunday in January 1612; and as usual it must have been tested by public presentation before that date. The fact that the authors were, between 1610 and 1612, writing for the King's Men does not preclude their composing a play for the Queen's Children. It is not, therefore, necessary to date the writing earlier than 1611. Though the critics disagree concerning the precise division of authorship in nearly every scene, finding traces of alteration by Field, Massinger, and others, they discern a definite substratum of both Fletcher and Beaumont. It is unnecessary to specify the minor scenes in which Beaumont coöperated. The five which transfer the action from an atmosphere of supernatural caprice and sordid irresponsibility to the realm of character, moral struggle, pathos, or passion are by him.243 In these his sententious sunbursts, his verse, diction, hyperbole, portrayal by passive implication, are indubitable. The infatuation of the princess for the dwarf takes on a human interest in the grim humility and cackling mirth of the latter. The lust of Leucippus is transfigured to nobility by his loyalty to oaths "bestowed on lies," by his horror of the discovered baseness of his paramour, and the piety with which he implores that she-devil to spare his father's honour:
I desire you
To lay what trains you will for my wish'd death,
But suffer him to find his quiet grave
In peace.
The treacherous greed and malice of Bacha are tempered by half-lights and shifting hues that make her less a vampire when Beaumont depicts her. And the final scene of tragedy in the forest is shot with pathos by the "harmless innocence" of Beaumont's Urania following Leucippus to save him
for love: —
I would not let you know till I was dying;
For you could not love me, my mother was so naught.
But the play as a whole lacks logical and natural motive, moral vigor and vitality; and its history upon the stage is negligible.
10. – Of the dates of A King and No King there is no doubt. It was licensed in 1611, acted at Court December 26 of the same year, and first published in quarto in 1619 as by Beaumont and Fletcher. In the commendatory verses of 1647, Henry Howard gives Arbaces to Fletcher; Jasper Mayne gives him Bessus; Herrick goes further: "that high design Of King and No King, and the rare plot thine." Earle, on the other hand, gives Bessus to Beaumont; and Lisle gives him Mardonius. Of the attributions to Fletcher, Herrick's alone has plausibility, since, like Philaster and The Maides Tragedy, the play is derived from no known source.244 Still he was probably wrong. It is not impossible that one of the dramatists contrived the plot; but, considering that three-quarters of the play was written by Beaumont, and that Fletcher's quarter contains but one scene at once of high design and vital to the story, it is not very likely that the contriving was by Fletcher unaided.
Modern critics display singular unanimity in their discrimination of the respective shares of the composers. With only one or two dissenting voices they attribute to Beaumont the first three acts, the fourth scene of the fourth, and scenes two and four of the fifth. To Fletcher they assign the first three scenes of the fourth act, and scenes one and three of the fifth. The tests which I have already described lead me to the same conclusion. Beaumont's contribution is distinguished by a largeness of utterance and a poetic inevitability, a diversity and mastery of characterization, a philosophical reach, a realism both humorous and terrible, and a power of dramatic creativity and tension, equal to, if not surpassing, any parallel elements or qualities to be found in the joint-plays. Arbaces, in apparent design, is of a Marlowan temper, moody, vainglorious, blinded by self-love, and brooking no rebuke; but he is not merely a braggart and a tyrant, he is brave in fact, and in heart deluded by the assumption that he is also modest. The combination is Beaumontesque. That dramatist rarely creates fixed or transparent character. Arbaces assumes that he is single of nature and aim: an irresistible, passionless, and patient soldier; but his failure to fathom himself as his friend Mardonius fathoms him, is part of his complexity. His headlong love for the woman whom he believes to be his sister and the resulting horror of apprehension and conflict of desire reveal him in many-sided dilatation and in swift-succeeding revolutions of personality. "What are thou," he asks of this devilish unexpected lust —
What are thou, that dost creep into my breast;
And dar'st not see my face?
When he will decree that Panthea be regarded as no more his sister, and she remonstrates, – he thunders "I will hear no more"; but to himself: —
Why should there be such music in a voice,
And sin for me to hear it?
When Tigranes, to whom he has offered that sister in marriage, presumes to address her, with what majestic inconsistency the king rebukes him:
The least word that she speaks
Is worth a life. Rule your disorder'd tongue
Or I will temper it!
And so, now struggling, now wading on in sin, till that heart-rending crisis is reached in which he confesses the incestuous love to his friend and faithful general, Mardonius; nay, even tries to win the friend's support in his lustful suit, and is gloriously defeated. Then follow the easy compliance of Bessus with his wish, and, with equal precipitancy, the revulsion of a kingly sense of rectitude against the willing pander:
Thou art too wicked for my company,
Though I have hell within me, and mayst yet
Corrupt me further,
The climax in which Arbaces can no longer refrain is of Beaumont's best:
Nay, you shall hear the cause in short, Panthea;
And when thou hear'st it, thou will blush for me
And hang thy head down like a violet
Full of the morning's dew.
And she, recoiling, "Heaven forbid" and "I would rather … in a grave sleep with my innocence," still kisses him; and then in a panic, nobler than self-suppression, cries:
If you have any mercy, let me go
To prison, to my death, to anything:
I feel a sin growing upon my blood
Worse than all these!
By a series of sensational bouleversements, and in a dramatic agony of suspense, we are keyed to the scene in which relief is granted: the princess who now is Queen is no sister to the King, who is now no King.
With the exception of a half-scene (Act IV, 2b) of somewhat bustling mechanism and rant by Fletcher, the whole of the King's portrayal is Beaumont's; and with the exception of eighty lines written by Fletcher (Act IV, 1) of dramatic dialogue containing information necessary to the minor love-affair, the story of the birdlike quivering, fond Panthea is, also, entirely Beaumont's. The Mardonius of Beaumont, in the first three acts and the fifth, is a fine, honest, blunt, soldierly companion and adviser to the King; but when Fletcher takes him in hand (Act IV, 2b), he declines to a stock character wordy with alliteration and commonplace. The Bessus of Beaumont whose "reputation came principally by thinking to run away" is, in Acts I-III, Falstaffian or Zagloban; the Bessus of Fletcher, in IV, 3 and V, 1 and 3, is a figure of low comedy, amusing to be sure, and reminiscent of Bobadill, but a purveyor of sophomoric quips and a tool for horse-play. The rural scene with its graphic humours of the soil is Beaumont's.
Fletcher's slight contribution to this otherwise masterly play consists, in brief, of facile dramatic dialogue, rhetorical ravings, stop-gaps complementary to the plot, and farce unrelated to it. His scenes display no spiritual insight; supply no development of character; administer no dramatic fillip to the action and no thrill to the spectator; and, exclusive of one rhetorically-coloured colloquy between the minor lovers, Tigranes and Spaconia, they are devoid of poetry.
To Beaumont, then, it may be said that we owe in the creation of A King and No King one of the most intensely powerful dramas of the Jacobean period, one of the most popular in the age of Dryden, and one of the most influential in the development of the heroic play of the Restoration. That it did not survive the eighteenth century is due not so much to the painful nature of the conflict presented as to the fact that it is "of that inferior sort of tragedies which" as Dryden says "end with a prosperous event." The conflict of motives, the passions aroused, have overpassed the limits of artistic mediation. The play would better have ended in a catastrophe of undeserved suffering – that highest kind of tragedy, inevitable and inexplicable. But though this be a spoiled tragedy, it is not, as many assert, an immoral tragicomedy. That error arises from a careless reading of the text. From the first, the spectator is led to divine that the protagonists are not brother and sister. And as for the protagonists themselves, – when the King is suddenly smitten by love (III, 1, 70-115) and rebels against its power, he does not even know that the object of his devotion is his supposed sister. When he is informed that the conquering beauty is Panthea, he revolts, crying "'t is false as Hell!" And when the twain are enmeshed in the strands of circumstance they cease not to recognize the liberating possibility of self-denial. In his struggle against what seems to him incestuous love, though the King does not conquer, he, still, not for a moment loses the consciousness of what is right. His deepest despair is that he is "not come so high as killing" himself rather than succumb to worse temptation; and his last word before the tragic knot is cut is of loathing for "such a strange and unbelieved affection as good men cannot think on." And when Panthea feeling the "sin growing upon her blood," learns the irony of high resolve throttled by infirmity, it is still her soul, unstrangled, that cries to him whom she thinks her brother, "Fly, sir, for God's sake!"
A King and No King evidently won favour at Court, for, as we have noticed, it was acted there both in 1611 and in 1612-1613. It was presented to their Majesties at Hampton Court in 1636. In 1661 Pepys saw it twice. Before 1682 Nell Gwynn had made Panthea one of her principal rôles. In 1683 Betterton played Arbaces to Mrs. Barry's Panthea. It was revived again in 1705, 1724, and 1788. Davies in his Dramatic Miscellany tells us that Garrick intended to revive it, taking the part of Arbaces himself and giving Bessus to Woodward, "but it was observed that at every reading of it in the green-room Garrick's pleasure suffered a visible diminution – at length he fairly gave up his design." Mr. Bond, in the Variorum edition, mentions a German adaptation of 1785, called Ethelwolf, oder der König Kein König.