From Chaucer to Tennyson
accession of James I., in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years
following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed
since she came to the throne, in 1557. The same qualities of thought and
style which had marked the writers of her reign prolonged themselves in
their successors, through the reigns of the first two Stuart kings and
the Commonwealth. Yet there was a change in spirit. Literature is only
one of the many forms in which the national mind expresses itself. In
periods of political revolution, literature, leaving the serene air of
fine art, partakes the violent agitation of the times. There were seeds
of civil and religious discord in Elizabethan England. As between the
two parties in the Church there was a compromise and a truce rather than
a final settlement. The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and
partly Arminian. The form of government was Episcopal, but there was a
large body of Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change. In the
ritual and ceremonies many "rags of popery" had been retained, which the
extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elizabeth was a
worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. Though
circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe she
kept many Catholic notions; disapproved, for example, of the marriage of
priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of her prerogative in the
State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity. The authors of the
_Martin Marprelate_ pamphlets against the bishops were punished by
death or imprisonment. While the queen lived things were kept well
together and England was at one in face of the common foe. Admiral
Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was a
Catholic.
But during the reign of James I. (1603-1625) and Charles I. (1625-1649)
Puritanism grew stronger through repression. "England," says the
historian Green, "became the people of a book, and that book the Bible."
The power of the king was used to impose the power of the bishops upon
the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent became also
political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne. The writers of
this period divided more and more into two hostile camps. On the side of
Church and king was the bulk of the learning and genius of the time. But
on the side of free religion and the Parliament were the stern
conviction, the fiery zeal, the exalted imagination of English
Puritanism. The spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose great
figure dominates the literary history of his generation, as Shakspere
does of the generation preceding.
The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere's example
until the theaters were closed by Parliament, in 1642. Of the Stuart
dramatists the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, all of whose
plays were produced during the reign of James I. These were fifty-three
in number, but only thirteen of them were joint productions. Francis
Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere, and died a few years
before him. He was the son of a judge of the Common Pleas. His
collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of London, was five
years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine years. He was much the
more prolific of the two and wrote alone some forty plays. Although the
life of one of these partners was conterminous with Shakspere's, their
works exhibit a later phase of the dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists
followed the lead of Shakspere rather than of Ben Jonson. Their plays,
like the former's, belong to the romantic drama. They present a poetic
and idealized version of life, deal with the highest passions and the
wildest buffoonery, and introduce a great variety of those daring
situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic. But, while
Shakspere seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature, his
successors ran into every license. They sought to stimulate the jaded
appetite of their audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character,
unnatural lusts, subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess.
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable reading
than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and without that
consistency in the development of their characters which distinguished
Jonson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of graceful
dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the Restoration
two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or Jonson's
throughout the year, and he added that they "understood and imitated the
conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and
quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done."
Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere,
nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are
gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous,
courteous--according to the fashion of their times--and sensitive on the
point of honor. They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of
Dryden and the Restoration comedy. Still the manners and language in
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, and it is not
hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the
Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of
the cavaliers in his tract, _The Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked
the stage, in 1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an
offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears
cropped. Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He
had the healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and
Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in
language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which
was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which
could not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a
bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.
Among the best of their light comedies are _The Chances, The Scornful
Lady, The Spanish Curate_, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. But far
superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, _The Maid's
Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King_--all written jointly--and
_Valentinian_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_, written by Fletcher alone,
but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont. The tragic masterpiece
of Beaumont and Fletcher is _The Maid's Tragedy_, a powerful but
repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon its authors'
dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored by
the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which grew up under the
Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a mistress of the king,
who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his court, because, as she
explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding night,
I must have one
To father children, and to bear the name
Of husband to me, that my sin may be
More honorable.
This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole
range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king
as her paramour, Amintor exclaims:
O thou hast named a word that wipes away
All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name
"The king" there lies a terror. What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when, let us
Suffer and wait.
And the play ends with the words
On lustful kings,
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent,
But cursed is he that is their instrument.
Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's
pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he,
by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises
herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies
under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common
type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakspere's
Ophelia. All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog,
and a superhuman patience and devotion, a "gentle forlornness" under
wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness. In
_Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding_, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless
passion for Philaster--who is in love with Arethusa--puts on the dress
of a page and enters his service. He employs her to carry messages to
his lady-love, just as Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, is sent by the duke to
Olivia. Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady
have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia
with his sword. Afterward, convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks
forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia replies,
Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts. 'Tis not a life,
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.
Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly,
but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural
pathos--the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character--of
that one brief question and answer in _King Lear_.
_Lear_. So young and so untender?
_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true.
The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a common incident in the
romantic drama; and the fact that on the Elizabethan stage the female
parts were taken by boys made the deception easier. Viola's situation in
_Twelfth Night_ is precisely similiar to Euphrasia's, but there is a
difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic of a
distinction between Shakspere's art and that of his contemporaries. The
audience in _Twelfth Night_ is taken into confidence and made aware of
Viola's real nature from the start, while Euphrasia's _incognito_ is
preserved till the fifth act, and then disclosed by an accident. This
kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakspere. In this
instance, moreover, it involved a departure from dramatic probability.
Euphrasia could, at any moment, by revealing her identity, have averted
the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and
herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to
have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position. Such strained and
fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont
and Fletcher's tragi-comedies. Their characters have not the depth and
truth of Shakspere's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their
plays with pleasure, and remembers here and there a passage of fine
poetry, or a noble or lovely trait, but their characters, as wholes,
leave a fading impression. Who, even after a single reading or
representation, ever forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?
The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a
play as _A King and No King_. Here Arbaces falls in love with his
sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs
to his guilty passion. He is rescued from the consequences of his
weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister. But
this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the denouement to
chance, and not to those moral forces through which Shakspere always
wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which
keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator.
In one of John Ford's tragedies the situation which in _A King and No
King_ is only apparent becomes real, and incest is boldly made the
subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character
and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His