Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
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
While Beaumont makes occasional use of simile, his figures of poetry, or
tropes, are generally of the more creative kind,--metaphor,
personification, metonymy,--and these are very often heightened into
that figure of logical artifice known as hyperbole. His comparisons deal
in a striking degree with elemental phenomena: hills, caves, stones,
rocks, seas, winds, flames, thunder, cold, ice, snow; or they are
reminiscential of country life. In each play some hero declaims of 'the
only difference betwixt man and beast, my reason'; and inevitably
enlarges upon the 'nature unconfined' of beasts, and illustrates by
custom and passion of ram, goat, heifer, or bull--especially bull. When
the bull of the pasture does not suffice, the bull of Phalaris charges
in. But Beaumont prefers nature: his images are sweet with April and
violets and dew and morning-light, or fields of standing corn 'moved
with a stiff gale'--their heads bowing 'all one way.' From the
manufacture of books he borrows two metaphors, 'printing' and
'blotting,' and plies them with effective variety: Philaster 'prints'
wounds upon Bellario; Bellario 'printed' her 'thoughts in lawn'; Amintor
will 'print a thousand wounds' upon Evadne's flesh; and Nature wronged
Panthea 'To print continual conquest on her cheeks And make no man
worthy for her to take.' With similar frequency recur 'blotted from
earth,' 'blotted from memory,' 'this third kiss blots it out.'
The younger poet personifies abstractions as frequently as Fletcher, but
in a more poetic way. He vitalizes grief and guilt and memory with
figurative verbs--'shoot,' 'grow,' 'cut.' 'I feel a grief shoot suddenly
through all my veins' cries Amintor; and again 'Thine eyes shoot guilt
into me.' 'I feel a sin growing upon my blood' shudders Arbaces.
Philaster will 'cut off falsehood while it springs'; Amintor welcomes
the hand that should 'cut' him from his sorrows; and Evadne confesses
that her sin is 'tougher than the hand of Time can cut from man's
remembrance.' Similar metaphorical constructions abound, such as 'pluck
me back from my entrance into mirth,' in one of Leucippus' speeches in
Beaumont's part of _Cupid's Revenge_; and in a speech of Melantius 'I
did a deed that plucked five years from time' in _The Maides Tragedy_.
Personified grief and sorrow are frequently in the plural with
Beaumont:--'Nothing but a multitude of walking griefs.' It is a mistake
to suppose, as some do, that passages written in Beaumont's metrical
style are not by him if they abound in personification. Hunger, black
Despair, Pride, Wantonness, figure in his verse in _The Woman-Hater_;
Chance, Death, and Fortune in _The Knight_; Death, Victory, and
Friendship, in _The Maides Tragedy_; Destiny, Falsehood, Mortality,
Nature in _Philaster_; and so on.