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CHAPTER XVIII
THE VERSIFICATION OF FLETCHER AND OF BEAUMONT

I. In Plays Individually Composed

The studies of the most experienced critics into the peculiarities of Fletcher's blank verse as displayed in productions of the popular dramatic kind, indubitably written by him alone,¹⁴⁹ such as Monsieur Thomas of the earlier period, ending 1613, The Chances, The Loyall Subject, and The Humorous Lieutenant of the middle period, ending 1619, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife of his latest period, indicate that he indulges in an excessive use of double endings, sometimes as many as seventy in every hundred lines, even in triple and quadruple endings; in an abundance of trisyllabic feet; and in a peculiar retention of the old end-stopped line, or final pause, – occasionally in as many as ninety out of a hundred lines. Attention has been directed also to the emphasis which he deliberately places upon the extra syllable of the blank verse, making it a substantive rather than a negligible factor: as in the "brains" and "too" of the following:

 
Or wander after that they know not where
To find? or, if found how to enjoy? Are men's brains
Made nowadays of malt, that their affections
Are never sober, but, like drunken people
Founder at every new fame? I do believe, too,
That men in love are ever drunk, as drunken men
Are ever loving, —¹⁵⁰
 

and to his fondness for appending words such as "first," "then," "there," "still," "sir," and even "lady" and "gentlemen" to lines which already possess their five feet. It has also been remarked that he makes but infrequent employment of rhyme.

Of this metrical style examples will be found on pages in Chapter XIX, Section 2, below; or on any page of Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, as for instance the following from Act III, Scene 1, 14-23:

 
Altea. My life|, an in|nocent|!
Marg. That's it | I aim | at,
That's it | I hope | too; ¦ then ¦ I am sure | I rule | him;
For in|nocents | are like | obe|dient chil|dren
Brought up | under a hard | _^ moth|er-in-law|, a cru|el,
Who be|ing not us'd | to break|fasts and | colla|tions,
_^ When | they have coarse | bread of|fer'd 'em | are thank|full,
And take | it for | a fa|vour too|. Are the rooms |
Made read|y to en|tertain | my friends|? I long | to dance now,
_^ And | to be wan|ton. ¦ Let | me have | a song.
Is the great | couch up | the Duke | of Medi|na sent?
 

Here the first half of v. 14 is also the last of the preceding line; seven out of ten verses have double endings; one has a triple ending. One, v. 21, has a quadruple ending; unless we rearrange by adding "made ready" to v. 20, so as to scan:

 
And take 't | for a fa|vour too|. Are the rooms | made read|y
To en|tertain | my friends|? I long | to dance | now. —
 

Trisyllabic feet occur in nine; final pauses in nine; stress-syllable openings and compensating anapæsts in two; the feminine cæsura (phrasal pause within the foot) in two. The pause in v. 15, after two strong monosyllables of which the first is stressed, produces a jolt, typically Fletcherian.

Now, these peculiarities of versification are not a habit acquired by Fletcher after Beaumont ceased to write with him. They are rife not only in the plays of his middle and later periods, but in those of the earlier period while Beaumont was still at his side. As for instance in Monsieur Thomas, entirely Fletcher's of 1607, or at the latest 1611. The reader may be interested to verify for himself by scanning the following passage from Act IV, 2 at which I open at random: Launcelot is speaking:

 
But to the silent streets we turn'd our furies:
A sleeping watchman here we stole the shooes from,
There made a noise, at which he wakes, and follows:
The streets are durty, takes a Queen-hithe cold,
Hard cheese, and that choaks him o' Munday next:
Windows and signs we sent to Erebus;
A crew of bawling curs we entertain'd last,
When having let the pigs loose in out parishes,
O, the brave cry we made as high as Algate!
Down comes a Constable, and the Sow his Sister
Most traiterously tramples upon Authority:
There a whole stand of rug gowns rowted mainly,
And the King's peace put to flight, a purblind pig here
Runs me his head into the Admirable Lanthorn, —
Out goes the light and all turns to confusion.
 

No one, once acquainted with this style of blank verse, with its end-stopped lines, double endings, stress-syllable openings, feminine cæsuræ, trisyllabic feet, jolts, and heavy extra syllables, can ever turn it to confusion with the verse of any poet before Browning – certainly not with that of Beaumont.

Our materials for a study of Beaumont's individual characteristics in the composition of dramatic blank verse appear at the first sight to be very scanty; for the only example of which we have positive external evidence that it was written by Beaumont alone, is The Maske of the Gentlemen of Grayes Inne and the Inner Temple, and unfortunately some critics have excluded it from consideration because of its exceptionally formal and spectacular character and slight dramatic purpose. Written, however, at the beginning of 1613, when the author's metrical manner was a definitely confirmed habit, it affords, in my opinion, the best as well as the most natural approach to the investigation of Beaumont's versification. The following lines may be regarded as typical:

 
Is great Jove jealous that I am imploy'd
On her Love-errands? ¦ She did never yet
Claspe weak mortality in her white arms,
As he hath often done: I only come
To celebrate the long-wish'd Nuptials
_^ Here | in Olym|pia, ¦ which | are now | perform'd.
Betwixt two goodly rivers, ¦ that have mixt
Their gentle, rising waves, and are to grow
_^ In | to a thou|sand streams | _^ great | as themselves.
 

In these nine verses there are no Fletcherian jolts, no double endings. In only two lines trisyllabic feet occur; in only two, final pauses. There are stress-syllable openings in two, with the compensating anapæsts; feminine cæsuræ, in three (dotted); and a stress-syllable opening for the verse-section after the cæsura occurs in but one, whereas there are at least three such in the passage from Monsieur Thomas, quoted above.

Nothing could be more pronounced than the difference between the metrical style of Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas and Rule a Wife and that of Beaumont's Maske, as illustrated here. Fletcher abounds in double endings, trisyllabic feet, and end-stopped lines, and such conversational or lyrical cadences; Beaumont uses them much more sparingly. But while the difference between the genuinely dramatic blank verse of Fletcher and that of Beaumont is sometimes as pronounced as this, it would be unscientific to base the criterion upon comparison of a mature, conversationally dramatic, composition of the former with a stiffly rhetorical declamatory composition of the latter. For a more suitable comparison we must set Beaumont's Maske side by side with something of Fletcher's written in similar formal and declamatory style, —The Faithfull Shepheardesse, for instance, a youthful production in the pastoral spirit and form. Of this a small part, but sufficient for our purpose, is composed in blank verse; and I have cited in the next chapter with another end in view, the opening soliloquy, – to which the reader may turn. But as exemplifying certain of Fletcher's metrical peculiarities, in a style of verse suitable to be compared with Beaumont's in The Maske, the following lines from Act I, 1, are perhaps even more distinctive. "What greatness," says the Shepherdesse, —

 
What greatness, ¦ or what private hidden power,
_^ Is | there in me, | to draw submission
From this rude man and beast? Sure I am mortal,
The Daughter of a Shepherd; ¦ he was mortal,
And she that bore me mortal: ¦ prick my hand,
And it will bleed; a Feaver shakes me, and
The self-same wind that makes the young Lambs shrink
 
 
Makes me | a-cold; | my fear says I am mortal.
_^ Yet have I heard | (my Mother told it me,
And now I do believe it), ¦ if I keep
My Virgin Flower uncropt, pure, chaste, and fair,
No Goblin, ¦ Wood-god, Fairy, Elf, or Fiend,
_^ Sa|tyr, or oth|er power that haunts the Groves,
Shall hurt my body, ¦ or by vain illusion
_^ Draw | me to wan|der ¦ after idle fires.
 

We have here, in fifteen lines, four double endings, nine final pauses (end-stopped verses), four stress-syllable openings with compensating anapæsts, and seven feminine cæsuræ. In every way this sample even of Fletcher's more formal style displays, in its salient characteristics, a much closer resemblance in kind to the sample of his later blank verse quoted from Rule a Wife, above, than to that quoted from Beaumont's Maske.

When we pass from samples to larger sections, and compare percentages in the one hundred and thirty-one blank verses of The Maske and the first one hundred and sixty-three of The Shepheardesse, we find that in respect of final pauses there is no great difference. There are, in the former, more than is usual with Beaumont – sixty per cent; in the latter, less than is usual with Fletcher – fifty per cent. But in other respects Beaumont's Maske reveals peculiarities of verse altogether different from those of Fletcher, even when he is writing in the declamatory pastoral vein. In the one hundred and thirty-one lines of the Maske we find but one double ending; whereas in the first one hundred and sixty-three blank verses of The Shepheardesse we count as many as fourteen. In these productions the proportion of feminine cæsuræ is practically uniform – about forty per cent. But when we come to examine the more subtle movement of the rhythm, we find that in The Maske not more than ten per cent of the lines open with the stress-syllable, while in the blank verse of the Shepheardesse fully thirty-five out of every hundred lines have that opening and, consequently, impart the lyrical cadence which pervades much of Fletcher's metrical composition. In the matter of anapæstic substitutions, and of stress-syllable openings for the verse-section after the cæsura, Beaumont is similarly inelastic; while the Fletcher of the Shepheardesse displays a marvellous freedom. It follows that in the Maske we encounter but rarely the rhetorical pause, within the verse, compensating for an absent thesis or arsis; while in the pastoral verse of Fletcher we find frequent instances of this delicate dramatic as well as metrical device, and an occasional jolting cæsura.

We are not limited, however, to the material afforded by the Maske in our attempt to discover Beaumont's metrical characteristics when writing alone. The Woman-Hater, included among the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher in the folio of 1679, and ascribed to both on the title-page of a quarto of 1649, is assigned by the Prologue of the first quarto, 1607, to a single author – "he that made this play." And, though there is no attribution of authorship on the title-page of the 1607 quarto, we know from the application of verse-tests and tests of diction that, in all but three scenes which have evidently been revised,¹⁵¹ the author was certainly not Fletcher. An examination of the inner structure of the verse of The Woman-Hater, reveals, except in those scenes, precisely the peculiarities that distinguish Beaumont's Maske: the same infrequency of stress-syllable openings, and of anapæstic substitutions and of suppressed syllables in metrical scheme. In respect of the more evident device of the run-on line The Woman-Hater reaches a percentage twice as high as that employed in Fletcher's unassisted popular dramas; and in respect of the double ending it has a percentage only one-quarter as high. We notice also in this play a much more frequent employment of rhyme than in any of Fletcher's stage plays, and a much larger proportion of prose both for dialogue and soliloquy.

We should have further basis for conclusion concerning Beaumont's metrical style in independent composition, if we could accept the general assumption that he was the author of the Induction to the Foure Playes in One, and of the first two plays, The Triumph of Honour and The Triumph of Love. But for reasons, later to be stated, I agree with Oliphant that the Induction and Honour are not by Beaumont; and I hold that he can not be traced with certainty even in the two or three scenes of Love that seem to be marked by some of his characteristics. The hand of a third writer, Field, is manifest in the non-Fletcherian plays of the series.

But though we can not draw for our purpose upon other plays as his unassisted work, we may derive help from the consideration of two at least of Beaumont's poems, – poems that have something of a dramatic flavour. Though they are in rhyming couplets, they display many of the characteristics of the author's blank verse. In the Letter to Ben Jonson, which is conversational, I count of run-on lines, thirty-eight in eighty, almost fifty per cent, as compared with Fletcher's sometimes ten or twenty per cent, in spite of the superior elasticity of blank verse; and of stress-syllable openings in the same letter twenty-four per cent as compared with the thirty-five per cent of Fletcher's more highly cadenced rhythm in the Shepheardesse. In Beaumont's Elegy on the Countess of Rutland, the last forty-four lines afford a fine example of dramatic fervour – the indictment of the physicians. Here the run-on lines again abound, almost fifty per cent; while the stress-syllable openings are but sixteen per cent – much lower than one may find in many rhymed portions of the Shepheardesse. With regard to all other tests except that of double ending (which does not apply in this kind of heroic couplet), we find that these poems of Beaumont are of a metrical style distinguished by the same characteristics as his blank verse.¹⁵²

2. In Certain Joint-Plays

If we turn now to a second class of material available, – the three plays indubitably produced in partnership, – and eliminate the portions written in the metrical style of Fletcher, as already ascertained, we may safely attribute the remainder to the junior member of the firm; and so arrive at a final determination of his manner in verse composition.

The three plays, as I have said before, are Philaster, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King. A passage, which in the opinion of nearly all critics¹⁵³ is by all tests distinctively Fletcherian, may be cited from the first of these as an example of that which we eliminate when we look for Beaumont. It is from the beginning of Act V, 4, where the Captain enters:

 
"Philaster, brave Philaster!" Let Philas|ter
Be deeper in request, my ding [a] dongs,
My paires of deere Indentures, ¦ Kings of Clubs,
_^ Than | your cold wa|ter-cham|blets ¦ or | your paint|ings
_^ Spit|ted with cop|per, ¦ Let | not your has|ty Silkes,
_^ Or | your branch'd cloth | of bod|kin, ¦ or | your ti|shues, —
_^ Deare|ly belov'd | of spi|cèd cake | and cus|tards, —
Your Rob|in-hoods, |_^ Scar|lets and Johns, |_^ tye | your affec|tions
In darknesse to your Shops. No, dainty duc|kers,
_^ Up | with your three|-piled spi|rits, ¦ your | wrought va|lors.
And let | your un|cut col|lers ¦ make | the King feele
The measure of your mightinesse, Philas|ter!¹⁵⁴
 

Note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the stress-syllable openings, the anapæsts, the feminine cæsuræ (dotted), the two omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause and the following accent at the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of line 13.

Of the non-Fletcherian part of Philaster, a typical example is the following from Act I, Scene 2, where Philaster replies to Arethusa's request that he look away from her:

 
I can indure it: Turne away my face?
I never yet saw enemy that lookt
So dreadfully but that I thought my selfe
As great a Basiliske as he; or spake
So horrible but that I thought my tongue
Bore thunder underneath, as much as his,
Nor beast that I could turne from: shall I then
Beginne to feare sweete sounds? a ladies voyce,
Whom I doe love? Say, you would have my life;
Why, I will give it you; for it is of me
A thing so loath'd, and unto you that aske
Of so poore use, that I shall make no price.
If you intreate, I will unmov'dly heare.
 

Or the famous description of Bellario, beginning:

 
I have a boy,
Sent by the gods, I hope to this intent,
Not yet seen in the court —
 

from the same scene.

Or the King's soliloquy in Act II, Scene 4, containing the lines:

 
You gods, I see that who unrighteously
Holds wealth or state from others shall be curst
In that which meaner men are blest withall:
Ages to come shall know no male of him
Left to inherit, and his name shall be
Blotted from earth.
 

The reader will at once be impressed with the regularity of the masculine ending. Beaumont does not, of course, eschew the double ending; but, as Boyle has computed, the percentage in this play is but fifteen in the non-Fletcherian passages, whereas the percentage in Fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. The prevalence of run-on lines is also noteworthy; and the infrequency of the stress-syllable openings, anapæsts, and feminine cæsuræ by which Fletcher achieves now conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt.

In The Maides Tragedy, such soliloquies as that of Aspatia in Act V, Scene 4, with its mixture of blank verse and rhyme:

 
This is my fatal hour; heaven may forgive
My rash attempt, that causelessly hath laid
Griefs on me that will never let me rest,
And put a Woman's heart into my brest.
It is more honour for you that I die;
For she that can endure the misery
That I have on me, and be patient too,
May live, and laugh at all that you can do —
 

are marked by characteristics utterly unlike those of Fletcher's dramatic verse. Also unlike Fletcher are the scenes which abound in lines of weak and light ending, and lines where the lighter syllables of every word must be counted to make full measure. Fletcher did not write:

 
Alas, Amintor, thinkst thou I forbear
To sleep with thee because I have put on
A maidens strictness;
 

or

 
As mine own conscience too sensible; —
 
 
I must live scorned, or be a murderer; —
 
 
That trust out all our reputation.
 

Nor did Fletcher write, with any frequency, improper run-on lines, such as III, 2, 135 (one of his collaborator's scenes):

 
Speak yet again, before mine anger grow
Up beyond throwing down.
 

In this play the percentage of run-on lines in Fletcher's scenes is about nineteen; in the scenes not written by him, almost twenty-seven. Fletcher's double endings are over forty per cent; his collaborator's barely ten.

In A King and No King similar Beaumontesque characteristics distinguish the major portion of the play from the few scenes generally acknowledged to be written by Fletcher. In Fletcher's scenes¹⁵⁵ one notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings, and, consequently, of anapæstic substitutions, the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the beginning of the verse-section. While sometimes these characteristics appear in the other parts of the play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature of the non-Fletcherian rhythm. A comparison of the verse of Fletcher's Act IV, Scene 2, with that of his collaborator in Act I, Scene 1, well illustrates this difference. The recurrence of the feminine cæsura measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers. It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines; but of his collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for instance, wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the second scene of Act IV:

 
_^ Fool | that I am, | I have | undone | myself,
_^ And | with mine own | hand ¦ turn'd | my for|tune round,
That was | a fair | one: ¦ I have child|ishly
_^ Plaid | with my hope | so long, till I have broke | it,
And now too late I mourn for 't, ¦ O | Spaco|nia,
Thou hast found | an e|ven way | to thy | revenge | now!
_^ Why | didst thou fol|low me, |_^ like | a faint shad|ow,
To wither my desires? But, wretched fool,
_^ Why | did I plant | thee ¦ 'twixt | the sun | and me,
To make | me freeze | thus? ¦ Why | did I  | prefer | her
_^ To | the fair Prin|cess? ¦ O | thou fool, | thou fool,
Thou family of fools, |_^ live | like a slave | still
And in | thee bear | thine own |_^ hell | and thy tor|ment, —
 

where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped lines, already emphasized in preceding examples, we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-syllable openings with their anapæstic sequences, three omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause with the consequent accent at the beginning of the verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine cæsuræ (or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three at least (vv. 2, 5, 10) are exaggerated jolts.

Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for instance, Arbaces' speech beginning Act I, 1, 105, of lines rippling with as many feminine cæsuræ. But, utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only two stress-syllable openings, only four anapæsts, one omitted thesis after the cæsural pause, four end-stopped lines. He is more frequently capable, as in the passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a single feminine cæsura, but with several feminine (or double) endings:

 
Tigranes. Is it the course of
Iberia, to use their prisoners thus?
Had Fortune throwne my name above Arbaces,
I should not thus have talkt; for in Armenia
We hold it base. You should have kept your temper,
Till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashion
Perhaps to brag.
 
 
Arbaces. Bee you my witness, Earth,
Need I to brag? Doth not this captive prince
Speake me sufficiently, and all the acts
That I have wrought upon his suffering land?
Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of ground
Within | his whole | realme ¦ that | I have | not past
Fighting and conquering?¹⁵⁶
 

Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the cæsuræ are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly at the end of the second and third feet.

In respect of the internal structure of the verse the tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical characteristics of those parts of Philaster, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King which do not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are well defined and practically uniform; since they are of a piece with the metrical manner of The Woman-Hater, which is originally, and in general, the work of one author – Beaumont; and since they are also of a piece with the versification of the Maske, which is certainly by Beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems, – at least one criterion has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors.

Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV, Scene 2 of A King and No King, and the prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of Philaster, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same scenes.