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PART ONE

BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS CAREER AS POET AND DRAMATIST

I THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 3

II BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS: GRACE-DIEU, OXFORD 10

V FLETCHER'S FAMILY, AND HIS YOUTH 62

VI SOME EARLY PLAYS OF BEAUMONT AND OF FLETCHER 72

X AN INTERSECTING CIRCLE OF JOVIAL SORT 145

PART TWO

THE COLLABORATION OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

XX FLETCHER'S MENTAL HABIT 277

Table A 419

" B 420

" C 421

" D 422

" E 423

INDEX 425

FACING PAGE The Ruins of Grace-Dieu Nunnery 22

Ruins of Grace-Dieu 26

A Priory, Ulveston, Extant in 1730 26

Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset 66

The Temple 96

The Globe Theatre, with St. Paul's in the Background 104

Ben Jonson 120

Francis Bacon 146

George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and Family 160

John Selden 170

The Beaumont of the Nuneham Portrait 192

Michael Drayton 202

John Fletcher 226

John Earle, Bishop of Worcester and Salisbury 244

Don Diego Sarmiento, Count Gondomar 372

BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST

PART ONE

BEAUMONT'S LIFE, HIS ACQUAINTANCES, AND HIS CAREER AS POET AND DRAMATIST.

BEAUMONT, THE DRAMATIST

THE CASTOR AND POLLUX OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

"Among those of our dramatists who either were contemporaries of Shakespeare or came after him, it would be impossible to name more than three to whom the predilection or the literary judgment of any period of our national life has attempted to assign an equal rank by his side. In the Argo of the Elizabethan drama--as it presents itself to the imagination of our own latter days--Shakespeare's is and must remain the commanding figure. Next to him sit the twin literary heroes, Beaumont and Fletcher, more or less vaguely supposed to be inseparable from one another in their works. The Herculean form of Jonson takes a somewhat disputed precedence among the other princes; the rest of these are, as a rule, but dimly distinguished." So, with just appreciation, our senior historian of the English drama, to-day, the scholarly Master of Peterhouse. Sir Adolphus Ward himself has, by availing of the inductive processes of the inventive and indefatigable Fleay and his successors in separative criticism, contributed not a little to a discrimination between the respective efforts of the "twin literary heroes" who sit next Jason; and who are "beyond dispute more attractive by the beauty of their creations than any and every one of Shakespeare's fellow-dramatists." But even he doubts whether "the most successful series of endeavours to distinguish Fletcher's hand from Beaumont's is likely to have the further result of enabling us to distinguish the mind of either from that of his friend." Just this endeavour to distinguish not only hand from hand, but mind from mind, is what I have had the temerity to attempt. And still not, by any means, a barefaced temerity, for my attempt at first was merely to fix anew the place of the joint-authors in the history of English comedy; and it has been but imperceptibly that the fascination of the younger of them, of Frank Beaumont, the personality of his mind as well as of his art, has so grown upon me as to compel me to set him before the world as he appears to me to be clearly visible.

BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS: GRACE-DIEU, OXFORD

Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, came of the younger line of an ancient and distinguished family of Anglo-Norman descent in which there had been Barons de Beaumont from the beginning of the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. They lived, as did the dramatist later, in the forest of Charnwood in Leicestershire,--part of the old forest of Arden. And it is of a ride to their family seat that John Leland, the antiquary, speaks when in his itinerary, written between 1535 and 1543, he says: "From Leicester to Brodegate, by ground well wooded three miles.... From Brodegate to Loughborough about a five miles.... First, I came out of Brodegate Park into the forest of Charnwood, commonly called the Waste. This great forest is a twenty miles or more in compass, having plenty of wood.... In this forest is no good town nor scant a village; Ashby-de-la-Zouche, a market town and other villages on the very borders of it.... Riding a little further I left the park of Beau Manor, closed with stone walls and a pretty lodge in it, belonging of late to Beaumonts.... There is a fair quarry of alabaster stone about a four miles from Leicester, and not very far from Beau Manor.... There was, since the Bellemonts , earls of Warwick, a baron of great lands of that name; and the last of them in King Henry the Seventh's time was a man of simple wit. His wife was after married to the Earl of Oxford." These barons "of great lands," living in Charnwood Forest,--where, as another old writer tells us, "a wren and a squirrel might hop from tree to tree for six miles; and in summer time a traveler could journey from Beaumanoir to Burden, a good twelve miles, without seeing the sun,"--these barons are the de Beaumonts, from the fourth of whom, John, Lord Beaumont, who died in 1396, our dramatist was descended.

Rex Hierosolymus cum Bellomonte locatur, Bellus mons etiam cum Baghan consociatur, Bellus mons iterum Longicastro religatur, Bellus mons ... Oxonie titulatur.

The great Francis, second Earl of Huntingdon, lived in the castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, about an hour's walk from Mistress Beaumont's, and had, in 1532, allied himself to royalty by marrying Katherine Pole, niece of the Cardinal, and great-granddaughter of that George, Duke of Clarence , who was "pack'd with post-horse up to heaven" by the cacodemon of Gloucester. When Edward VI died, Francis declared for Lady Jane Grey and was for a time imprisoned. His daughter was the beautiful Lady Mary Hastings who, being of the blood royal, was wooed for the Czar, and might have been "Empress of Muscovy" had she pleased. From the Huntingdon family Elizabeth Hastings introduced at least one new Christian name into that of the Beaumonts. For the second Earl, she named her oldest son Francis. One of her daughters, Elizabeth, became the wife of William, third Lord Vaux of Harrowden, in the adjoining county of Northampton; and thus our dramatist, through his aunt, was connected with another of the proudest Norman families of England,--one of the most devoted to the Catholic faith and, as we shall see, active in Jesuit interests that during the dramatist's life in London assumed momentous political proportions. Aunt Elizabeth, Lady Vaux, died before our Frank Beaumont was born; and her son Henry died when Frank was but ten years of age,--but in an entry in the State Papers of 1595 concerning "the entail of Lord Vaux's estates on his children by his first wife Beaumont's daughter," several "daughters" are mentioned. These, his cousins of Harrowden, Frank knew from his youth up. In 1605 all England was to be ringing with their names.

Justice Beaumont was a squire of considerable means. When, in 1581, he qualified himself to be Bencher by lecturing at the Inner Temple upon some statute or section of a statute for the space of three weeks and three days, his expenses for the entertainment at table or in revels, alone, must have run to about ?1500, in the money of to-day. He held at the time of his death landed estates in some ten parishes of Leicestershire, between Sheepshead on the east and and Coleorton three miles away on the west, and scattered over some seven miles north and south between Belton and Normanton. In Derby, too, he had two or three fine manors. His will shows that he was able to make generous provision for many of his "ould and faythefull servauntes," besides bequeathing specifically a handsome sum in money to his daughter Elizabeth. He was a considerate and careful man, too, for the morning of his death he added a codicil to his will: "I have left somewhat oute of my will which is this, I will that my daughter Elizabeth have all the jewells that were her mother's." His sons are not mentioned, for naturally the heir, Henry, would make provision for John and Francis. His chief executor was Henry Beaumont of Coleorton, his kinsman,--worth mentioning here; for at Coleorton another cousin, Maria Beaumont, the mother of the great Duke of Buckingham, had till recently lived as a waiting gentlewoman in the household.

Grace-Dieu, that under Charnwood stand'st alone, As a grand relicke of religion, I reverence thine old, but fruitfull, worth, That lately brought such noble Beaumonts forth, Whose brave heroicke Muses might aspire To match the anthems of the heavenly quire: The mountaines crown'd with rockey fortresses, And sheltering woods, secure thy happiness That highly favour'd art Of Heaven, and with free Nature's bounty graced.

And still another picture of it is painted, a hundred and seventy years later by Wordsworth, the friend of the Sir George Beaumont who in his day was possessed of the old family seat of Coleorton Hall, within half an hour's walk of Grace-Dieu:--

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound, Rugged and high, of Charnwood's forest ground Stand yet, but, Stranger! hidden from thy view, The ivied Ruins of forlorn Grace-Dieu,-- Erst a religious house, which day and night With hymns resounded, and the chanted rite: And when those rites had ceased, the Spot gave birth To honourable Men of various worth: There, on the margin of a streamlet wild, Did Francis Beaumont sport, an eager child: There, under shadow of the neighboring rocks, Sang youthful tales of shepherds and their flocks; Unconscious prelude to heroic themes, Heart-breaking tears, and melancholy dreams Of slighted love, and scorn, and jealous rage, With which his genius shook the buskined stage. Communities are lost, and Empires die, And things of holy use unhallowed lie; They perish;--but the Intellect can raise, From airy words alone, a Pile that ne'er decays.

So far as the "youthful tales of shepherds" go, Wordsworth is probably thinking of the verses of Francis' brother, Sir John, which open:

A shepherdess, who long had kept her flocks On stony Charnwood's dry and barren rocks,--

The Winter's storme of Civill Warre I sing, Whose end is crown'd with our eternall Spring; Where Roses joyn'd, their colours mixe in one, And armies fight no more for England's Throne.

The Beaumonts were living in the centre of the counties most engaged. Three of their predecessors had fallen fighting for the red rose, John Beaumont of Coleorton and John, Viscount Beaumont, at Northampton in 1460, and a Henry Beaumont at Towton in 1461. In his description of the battle, John introduces by way of simile a reference to what may have been a familiar scene about Grace-Dieu:

Here Stanley and brave Lovell trie their strength.... So meete two bulls upon adjoyning hills Of rocky Charnwood, while their murmur fills The hollow crags, when striving for their bounds, They wash their piercing homes in mutuall wounds.

Or,--and how could any young Oxonian fail of it?--they started from Broadgates, down the High, crossed Magdalen Bridge, where the boats were lazily oaring below them, and set out for the climb to Rose Hill; then down by sleepy ways to Littlemore, and to Sandford; then up the two long sharp ascents to Nuneham,--where now, in the fine old manor house, hangs Frank's own portrait in oils,--one of the two contemporary likenesses of him that exist to-day.

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