Lovelace, like Cartwright, is of opinion that obscenity is permissible if it be artfully veiled.1 Astonishing as it is that the men of Cartwright's generation should have been blind to the fact that Fletcher was ten times more indecent than Shakespeare, it is even more wonderful to find the sober William Habington praising the former for the virtuous intentions of his plays.2 Sir Roger L'Estrange, however, throws some light upon the subject, by showing the spirit in which the girls of the period sought to improve their morals by studying such models as Celia in The Humorous Lieutenant, or Florimel in The Maid in the Mill3

The ideal of morality and art reflected in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher is, in fact, that of a court consciously comparing its own standard of refinement with the tastes of its ruder fathers. Birkenhead and Cartwright will no longer tolerate the "wit" of Euphues, which pleased the ladies and gentlemen of the court of Elizabeth, and was represented in such comedies as Twelfth Night and As You Like It: it has gone out of fashion, they say, like trunk-hose. The wit that is now aimed at is the style described two generations later by Dryden, when, speaking of Shakespeare, he says that "Beaumont and Fletcher understood and imitated the conversation of

1 Dyce's edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, vol. i. p. 25 :—

View here a loose thought said with such a grace

Minerva might have spoke in Venus' face;

So well disguised, that 'twas conceived by none
But Cupid had Diana's linen on.

2 Ibid. vol. i. p. 27 :

Revive then, mighty soul, and vindicate
From th' age's rude affronts thy injured fame;
Instruct the envious with how chaste a flame
Thou warm'st the lover; how severely just
Thou wert to punish, if he burned to lust;
With what a blush thou didst the maid adorn,
But tempted with how innocent a scorn.

3 Ibid. vol. i. p. 31 :—

The credulous bright girl that believes all
Language in oaths, if good, canonical,

Is fortified, and taught here to beware
Of every specious bait, of every snare,

Save one and that same caution takes her more

Than all the flattery she felt before.

She finds her boxes and her thoughts betrayed

By the corruption of the chamber-maid;

Then throws her washings and dissemblings by,

And vows nothing but ingenuity.1

1 Ingenuousness.

gentlemen much better; whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet before them could paint as they have done." 1 In the days of James I., according to Donne,

To be like the Court was a play's praise;

and all the external, well-defined code of behaviour which a Court prescribes was taken as the standard of the dramatist, in preference to those profounder instincts of the national conscience which had expressed themselves in the plays of Shakespeare. So strong and tenacious was the grasp which the artificial laws of etiquette fixed upon the imagination of society, so brilliantly were they reflected by Beaumont and Fletcher, that many of the plays of these poets held the stage up to the latter half of the eighteenth century; and though it would be now impossible to revive them, they are still often judged by canons of taste first proclaimed in their own generation. It is the duty of history to examine their genius by a more permanent standard of criticism; otherwise we should be doing an injustice to the surpassing poetical excellence of Shakespeare. But before doing so, it will be well to record the scanty biographical information we possess of the "great twin brethren" who so successfully imitated the manners of their time.

John Fletcher, the elder of the two, was one of the nine children of Richard Fletcher, Fellow and President of Benet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, and afterwards successively Bishop of Bristol, Worcester, and London. The poet (who was first cousin of Phineas and Giles Fletcher) was born in 1579 at Rye, in Sussex, of which place his father then held the living. He was admitted pensioner of Benet College, Cambridge, on the 15th October 1591, and was made Bible Clerk in 1593, but there is no record of his having taken a degree. Nor is it certain when he began his career as a dramatist: the first play of which he is known to be the author, The Woman Hater, was produced in 1606 or 1607. It is probable, however,

1 Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Speech of Neander.

that, as his father, who died in 1596, left his family in straitened circumstances, he had attempted before this date to support himself by writing for the stage. His alliance with Beaumont perhaps began with Philaster, which was acted in 1608 or 1609, and from this date onwards he continued to produce plays with great rapidity till he fell a victim to the plague in August 1625. He was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark, the exact situation of his grave being unknown.

Francis Beaumont, the third son of Francis Beaumont, was born in 1585 at Grace-Dieu, in Leicestershire, a property which, originally forming part of a monastery, had been purchased in 1539 by his grandfather, John Beaumont, surveyor of Leicestershire for the Crown. His father was serjeant-at-law, and was made one of the Justices of the Common Pleas in 1593. Francis was admitted as a gentleman commoner at Broadgates Hall (afterwards Pembroke College), Oxford, in 1597; but he remained only a short time at the University, and was entered as a member of the Inner Temple on the 3rd November 1600. He probably had not the same motives as Fletcher for exerting himself as a dramatist; but his love of poetry was early shown by his Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, (1602), a paraphrase of Ovid's story which, like his elegy on Lady Markham (1609), is marked by a taste for violent conceits, the natural product of the Euphuistic movement in literature. In 1607 he wrote a copy of commendatory verses in honour of Ben Jonson's Volpone; and the graceful lines with which Jonson repaid the compliment show a sincere appreciation of the genius of the younger poet. Beaumont married Ursula, daughter and coheiress of Henry Isley of Sundridge, in Kent, by whom he had two daughters, the younger of them, Frances, being born after his death, which happened on the 6th March 1616. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

There is no record of the way in which the partnership between Beaumont and Fletcher originated. Aubrey, whose evidence, owing to his credulity and love of gossip, is seldom very satisfactory, says in his Lives of Eminent

Men: “There was a wonderful a wonderful consimility of fancy between him (Beaumont) and Mr. J. Fletcher. . . . They lived together on the Bank Side, not far from the play-house, both batchelors, lay together, had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire, the same cloathes and cloaks, etc., between them." Nor can we be sure of the method on which the joint authorship of their plays was combined. Pope says in an epigrammatic line, "Beaumont's judgment checked what Fletcher writ," and though he calls this tradition the bald cant of women and boys," it is in accordance with contemporary criticism, and agrees with Dryden's account, who says: 'Beaumont was so accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and 'tis thought used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots."3 It may also be observed that, in the plays of which Beaumont is certainly part author, such as Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, The Scornful Lady, and others, both the structure of the plot and the distribution of the characters are much more artistic than in those which were produced by Fletcher alone after Beaumont's death. Finally, as I shall presently show, it is always easy to distinguish the style of Fletcher from that of Beaumont in those plays which they composed together. But when all minor differences are allowed for, it is plain that there must have been a marvellous harmony in the genius of the two poets. Both were brilliant and fluent talkers; both by their birth and position were intimately acquainted with the manners of aristocratic society and in the dramas which Fletcher

1 Epistle to Augustus, v. 84.

2 Thus Cartwright says (Commendatory Poems on Beaumont and Fletcher, Dyce's edition, vol. i. p. 41) ::

3

Though when all Fletcher writ, and the entire

Man was indulged unto that sacred fire,

His thoughts, and his thoughts' dress, appeared both such

That 'twas his happy fault to do too much;

Who therefore wisely did submit each birth

To knowing Beaumont ere it did come forth,

Working again, until he said 'twas fit,
And made him the sobriety of his wit;
Though thus he called his judge into his fame,
And for that aid allowed him half the fame,
'Tis known that sometimes he did stand alone.

Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Speech of Neander.

produced with such ready invention, during the ten years by which he survived Beaumont, there is no radical departure from the style of his earlier work. To examine the plays of the two poets one by one would be equally useless and foreign to the purpose of this history. A sufficiently clear insight into the great change in the character of the English drama after Shakespeare's age will be obtained by noting the practice of Beaumont and Fletcher with regard to what Aristotle calls the elements the poetic drama-Plot, Character, Thought, and Diction.1

1. Among these, says Aristotle, "the most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For tragedy is an imitation, not of men but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action therefore is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to action." 2 We have seen how strictly Shakespeare adhered to this principle in his treatment of Romance; how, like the great Greek dramatists, he almost invariably chooses some well-known story of general human interest, throws himself sympathetically into the ideal situation, and creates his characters out of the requirements of the imaginary circumstances. Though he freely adapts the stories he borrows to the requirements of the stage, he rarely modifies the central situation; Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, all the histories, and indeed most of his other plays, retain in their dramatic the features they possessed in their epic form. Hence the poet was always in touch with his audience: his art consisted in throwing into a more beautiful form ideas of action already existing in the national imagination. He took advantage of favourable social conditions, similar to

1 Aristotle enumerates six parts in tragedy, Scenery and Song being added to those mentioned above. "Song " in the Greek sense, of course, did not form part of the English drama. In the scenery there was no essential change since Shakespeare's time.

2 Aristotle, Poetics, vi. 9, 10 (Butcher's translation).