Cran. Do, Master Frankford; he that hath least part,

Will find enough to drown one troubled heart.

Sir F. Peace with thee, Nan!-Brothers and gentlemen,

All we that can plead interest in her grief,

Bestow upon her body funeral tears! Brother, had you with threats and usage bad

Punish'd her sin, the grief of her offense

Had not with such true sorrow touch'd her heart.

Frank. I see it had not; therefore, on her grave

Will I bestow this funeral epitaph, Which on her marble tomb shall be engrav'd.

In golden letters shall these words be fill'd: 17

Here lies she whom her husband's kindness kill'd.

17 cut and filled in with gold. (N.)

Francis Beaumont (1585-1616)

came of

an old Leicestershire family, his father being a Justice of Common Pleas. He entered Oxford in 1597, and the Middle Temple as a law student in 1600. He may have been writing for the stage as early as 1605, and was soon working in collaboration with Fletcher. He cannot be traced on the stage after 1612. He died a month before Shakespeare, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was the son of a clergyman who rose to be Bishop of London. From the time that he entered Cambridge in 1591 we lose sight of him until he appears in 1607 as a dramatist. He continued active as a playwright till his death of the plague, collaborating at first with Beaumont, afterward with Shakespeare, Massinger, Field, and others. Tradition has it that Beaumont and Fletcher lived together in terms of closest intimacy on the Bankside. In the share which each contributed to the work going under their names there has been great interest from their own day to ours, but only six or seven plays are now believed to be of their joint authorship.

To Beaumont and Fletcher is usually ascribed the honor of introducing to the English stage a new type of play, the tragicomedy, or, as it has sometimes been loosely called, the romance. Philaster was staged somewhere between 1608 and 1610. By that time Shakespeare had perfected romantic love-comedy, introduced by Lyly, chroniclehistory, and tragedy; Ben Jonson had introduced the comedy of humors, Jonson and Middleton had established realistic comedy, and the vogue of domestic drama was practically over. Realism, owing largely to Jonson's influence, had been the prevailing force for a number of years, and the time was ripe for a swing of the pendulum of popular taste back toward romanticism. Into the vexed question of priority between Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, specifically between the dates of production of Cymbeline and Philaster, it is not profitable here to venture. The more generally accepted opinion is to the effect that the younger dramatists were the innovators; certain it is that to them we owe the popularization and fixing of the chief features of the new type.

In order to account for the wide difference in spirit and manner between this tragicomedy and earlier work it is necessary to

understand certain social changes which had been taking place. The drama of 1580-1600 is marked by a very healthy tone; during the next ten years an element of decadence crept in, and, broadly speaking, the drama degenerated steadily until the closing of the theaters in 1642. Times had changed since the brave days of Queen Bess. As G. C. Macaulay says (Camb. Hist. Engl. Lit., VI. 121): The genuinely national interest in the drama which especially characterized the last fifteen years of Elizabeth had, to a great extent, passed away, and the taste of the court had become gradually more and more the prevailing influence. Now the court of James was morally much less sound than that of Elizabeth. Corruption, political and social, was rife, and as the drama increasingly came to be the plaything of the court it reflected with increasing faithfulness the moral tone of the court) The immediate effect was a stimulation to greater brilliance, but at the expense of depth and a true interpretation of national ́life. "Closely connected with the want of moral earnestness

was the demand for theatrical entertainments which did not make any serious ap peal to the intellect; and hence, on the one hand, the exaggerated love of pageantry. which was gratified by the magnificence of the masques presented at court, and, on the other, the growing preference . . . for plots full of interesting events and surprising turns of fortune, rather than such as were developed naturally from situation and characters: the result being a comparative neglect of character interest, and disregard for the principle of artistic unity (Camb. Hist., VI. 122). To be purveyors of entertainment of this new sort for court audiences Beaumont and Fletcher were by birth and breeding well fitted. We get with them for the first time men of good family writing for the stage and it is not surprising that they should have been leaders in a new court drama.

Philaster is so thoroughly typical an example of Beaumont and Fletcher's tragicomedy that an analysis of it along the lines suggested by Professor Thorndike's study will serve to characterize the genre. The scene of the play is Sicily, but so far as realism of setting is concerned it might be anywhere else in the world; the locality of these plays is perfectly immaterial the action always occurs in a No-man's Land of romance. As

usual however, in Elizabethan drama, the speech and manner of the inhabitants even of No-man's Land occasionally bear a strange resemblance to those of the citizens of a more familiar city on the banks of the Thames; the captain's oration to the mob might be delivered by Simon Eyre to a band of shoemaker apprentices, and it is with a right London swagger that the scene goes. The plot, probably invented, is highly ingenious, very complicated, and utterly improbable.) With a story of pure sentimental love is con trasted one of base sensual passion; from the conflict of the two sorts of love arise the complications, for upon the discovery of Megra's intrigue with Pharamond hangs her spiteful accusation regarding Arethusa and the supposed Bellario, the working out of which fills the rest of the play.The action is developed by a series of striking situations, each of which is carefully planned to secure the greatest degree of theatrical effectiveness, regardless of its probability or improbability. The play begins on a note of excitement in Philaster's almost hysterical defiance of Pharamond, capped by an obviously feigned submission, followed by а surprise as Arethusa woos Philaster and the rivals are again brought into conflict. Between two scenes of lust is laid the strongly contrasting, sentimental conversation of Arethusa and Bellario. The fourth scene of act II is a good illustration of a situation developed for its own sake. With its cleverly arranged exits and entrances, its working up to the unexpected appearance of Megra on the balcony, and her sensational charge, it is most skilfully handled; but we should note that the revelation of the intrigue, out of which all possible effect is obtained, has no permanent interest of its own, and that the one point in which the scene advances plot is in the rousing of suspicion about Arethusa, which could have been done far more simply. The appeal of the third act is mainly through impassioned rhetoric. Replete with sensation are the wood scenes of act IV, with turn and counterturn, surprising meetings and equally surprising exits, culminating in the amazing episodes where Philaster wounds Arethusa and the sleeping Bellario. Probability would suggest that in the third scene Bellario, who could not very well help seeing that Arethusa's life was endangered, might easily have prevented bloodshed by revealing his identity, but in that event, of course, the play would have ended then and there; Bellario, therefore, keeps silence and meekly disappears at Philaster's command. The conduct of the rest of the scene is highly ingenious as Bellario takes on himself the crime of wounding Arethusa, while Philaster, not to be outdone in generosity, crawls out from under his bush to confess his guilt. The union of Philaster and Arethusa in act V seems to clear her honor, though the charge against

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her has never been refuted, but we are in difficulties once more when the king pronounces his sentence of death on the lovers. At this critical juncture the mob constitutes itself a deus ex machina, and Philaster's quelling of the riot seems to establish him in favor. Here Megra, who has almost been forgotten, reiterates her charge, and Philaster is on the point of killing himself when Bellario makes his confession. The skill with which this dénouement is secured is undeniable, as is also the artificiality of structure which makes it possible. No better example could be found of the use of surprise in tragicomedy, for the audience is as much astounded as are the persons of the play by Bellario's metamorphosis. Coleridge has called attention to Shakespeare's preference for the expectation method" of dénouement as contrasted with the "surprise method." Shakespeare uses the former consistently; with him, as, for instance, in the church scene in Much Ado About Nothing, no character assumes disguise without informing the audience of the fact and its purpose. The audience is therefore at all times more cognizant of the true situation than are the persons of the play is sure that the truth will be revealed in time to avert a tragic conclusion, and the play is kept in the realm of comedy. The sole intention of Beaumont and Fletcher, on the contrary, is to provide as sensational an ending as possible, and they delight in harrowing the feelings of the audience till the last moment. Where in Shakespeare the spectators think of the characters, their emotions, and their behavior in the situation, in tragicomedy their attention is directed to the event itself. The violent contrast of tragic and comic feeling involved in the surprise method is an essential characteristic of tragicomedy The gist of the complications in Philaster is expressed in Philaster's reproach to Bellario in the last scene:

"All these jealousies

Had flown to nothing, if thou hadst discovered
What now we know."

Such stressing of plot, or, more accurately, of situation, is practically certain to result レー in a slurring of characterization. Anything like psychological analysis or logical development of character is sacrificed to immediate theatrical effectiveness. The behavior of Philaster is a case in point. When viewed coolly he stands forth a cad of deepest dye. His readiness to believe the worst of Arethusa in the face of her own and Bellario's protestations of innocence shakes our confidence in him, and when this egregious hero attempts to kill first his mistress and later a sleeping boy all semblance of consistency and lifelikeness is destroyed. Most of the characters are exaggerated or intensified on some one side; they are too indubitably bad or too angelically good. Euphrasia's sentimental devotion, Megra's lustfulness, Phara

mond's poltroonery, Philaster's sensibility, are emphasized to the point of impossibility. Essentially they are not much more than types, which appear again and again in tragicomedy and the later Fletcherian romantic tragedy. As always, the chief figures are of high rank, and make no impression of reality. Lamb's well-known apology for the behavior of the people in Restoration comedy on the ground that they live in a world of their own, like fairies, might be applied to Philaster, Bellario, Megra, and the rest.

Whatever criticism may be passed upon plotting and characterization, no dissent is possible from the unanimous opinion as to the dramatic propriety and poetic beauty of Beaumont and Fletcher's verse. Smooth, easy-running, adapting itself with perfect facility to the action, as adequate for the expression of frantic passion or heart-broken pathos as for the badinage of courtiers, ever without strain or visible effort, it is the perfection of dramatic blank verse Nothing quite like it had been heard on the Elizabethan stage before; small wonder that it delighted the auditors and readers of its own day, and that it was regarded by the Restoration as the perfect model of dramatic dialogue. At its best it has a haunting beauty, especially when Arethusa or Bellario is speaking. Bellario's reply to Philaster's

"Oh, but thou dost not know

What 't is to die

"Yes, I do know, my lord: 'Tis less than to born; a lasting sleep, A quiet resting from all jealousy, A thing we all pursue; I know, besides, It is but giving over of a game That must be lost";

and Bellario's speech in V. ii:

"Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing Worthy your noble thoughts; 't is not a life, 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away the exquisite tenderness of these is beyond praise.

On the basis of stylistic differences attempts have been made to assign various parts of the play to one or the other of the joint authors, and while such identifications are always dangerous, it may be well to summarize the conclusions reached by Thorndike and Gayley, two of the most careful and recent of investigators. To Beaumont are assigned I. i (to entrance of King), ii; II. i, ii (to entrance of Megra, Gayley), iii, iv (to re-entrance of Dion); III. i, ii (in part); IV. i, ii, iii, iv; V. i, ii, v. To Fletcher: I. i (from entrance of King); II. ii (only from entrance of Megra, Gayley), iv. (from re-entrance of Dion); III. ii (in part); V. iii, iv. This gives to Beaumont much the greater share in the composition, and most of the finest poetry of the play, like Philaster's description of Bellario in I. ii, and all the wood

scenes.

Philaster was popular in its own day, held the stage up to the closing of the theaters, was put on as soon as they reopened (Pepys saw it in 1661 and 1668), and had several revivals in the eighteenth century. Its theatrical effectiveness and the astonishing brilliance of the verse are quite sufficient to account for its longevity, and its importance in the history of the drama is enhanced by the fact that in tragicomedy may be found the roots of the heroic drama of the Restoration.