Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
Though, in the plays where Beaumont does not control, Fletcher so freely
reflects the loose morals of his age, the gross conventional
misapprehension of woman's worth, even the cynicism regarding her
essential purity,--though Fletcher reflects these conditions in his
later plays as well as in his early _Faithfull Shepheardesse_,[138] and
though he, for dramatic ends, accepts the material vulgarity of the
lower classes and the perverted and decadent heroics of the upper, there
still are "passages in his works where he recurs to a conception which
undoubtedly had a very vital significance for him--that of a
gentleman,"--to the "merit, manners, and inborn virtue" of the gentleman
not conventional but genuine.[139] In Beaumont, that "man of a most
strong and searching braine" whose writings and whose record speak the
gentleman, he had had the example beside him in the flesh. What that
meant is manifest in the encomium of Francis Palmer, written in 1647
from Christ Church, Oxford,
All commendations end
In saying only: Thou wert Beaumont's friend.
The engraving of Fletcher in the 1647 folio was "cut by severall
Originall Pieces," says Mosely "which his friends lent me, but withall
they tell me that his unimitable Soule did shine through his countenance
in such _Ayre_ and _Spirit_, that the Painters confessed it was not
easie to expresse him: As much as could be, you have here, and the
Graver hath done his part." The edition of 1711 is the first to publish
"effigies" of both poets, "the Head of Mr. Beaumont, and that of Mr.
Fletcher, through the favour of the present Earl of Dorset [the seventh
Earl], being taken from Originals in the noble Collection his Lordship
has at Knowles." The engravings in the Theobald, Seward and Sympson
edition of 1742-1750 are by G. Vertue. The engravings in Colman's
edition of 1778, are the same, debased. Those in Weber's edition of
1812, are done afresh,--of Beaumont by Evans, of Fletcher by
Blood--apparently from the Knole originals. They are an improvement upon
those of earlier editions. In Dyce's edition of 1843-1846, H. Robinson's
engraving of Beaumont has nobility; his attempt at Fletcher does not
improve upon Blood's. All these are in the reverse. The Variorum edition
of 1904-1905 gives the beautiful photogravure of Beaumont of which I
have already spoken, by Walker and Cockerell, from the original at Knole
Park; and an equally soft and expressive photogravure of Fletcher, by
Emery Walker, from the painting in the National Portrait Gallery. For
the first time the dramatists face as in the originals: Beaumont, toward
your left, Fletcher, toward your right.