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
in his _Cymbeline_ borrowing profusely from _Philaster_, a work of
comparatively unestablished dramatists who had but recently been
admitted to authorship for the company of which Shakespeare had been for
eighteen years the principal, almost the only, playwright. It is much
more according to human probability that the younger dramatists, since
about the beginning of 1610 associated with the King's Company and its
enterprises, should have adapted their technical and poetic style of
construction to the somewhat novel--to them entirely novel--method of
the seasoned playwright of the King's Servants, as tried and approved in
_Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_. And still the more so when one reflects
that, in _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_, aside from the leading conception,
everything of major or minor detail had been already anticipated by
Shakespeare himself in earlier romantic comedies from _The Two Gentlemen
of Verona_ to _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_; and that there is no
salient characteristic of dramatic construction in _Philaster_,
otherwise original and poetically impressive as it is, which a study of
those earlier comedies and of the _Pericles_ and _Cymbeline_ would not
suggest. I, therefore, rest with some assurance upon the conviction that
_Philaster_ was first acted by the King's Company, soon after Beaumont
and Fletcher began to write for it, say between December 1609 and July
1610.
The play was first published in a quarto of 1620 which ascribes it, as
does the vastly improved quarto of 1622, to Beaumont and Fletcher. In
his epigram, addressed somewhat before October 8, 1610 to "the
well-deserving Mr. John Fletcher," John Davies appears to give that
author credit for practically the whole work,--"Thou ... raign'st in
Arte, Judgement, and Invention," and adds a compliment for "thine as
faire as faithfull Sheepheardesse." Herrick, writing for the folio of
1647, mentions _Love Lies a-Bleeding_ among Fletcher's "incomparable
plays"; and Thomas Stanley seems to ascribe to him definitely the scene
"when first Bellario bled." John Earle, however, writing "on Master
Beaumont, presently after his death" comes nearer the truth when he
says:
Alas, what flegme are they [Plautus and Aristophanes], compared
to thee,
In thy _Philaster_ and _Maids Tragedy_!
Where's such an humour as thy Bessus? pray ...