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
Other evidence, not hitherto noticed, still further confirms the
conclusion that this was one of Beaumont and Fletcher's later
joint-productions, perhaps the last of them. The conversational style is
altogether more mature than in the remaining output of their
partnership. It is the first work published under both of their names,
and it was licensed for publication within two weeks after Beaumont's
death, as one might expect of a play with which he was associated
recently in the public mind. It is the only one of the joint-plays which
he did not himself copy out, or thoroughly revise in manuscript,
eliminating all or nearly all of Fletcher's distinctive _ye's_ and
_y'are's_, and reducing to uniformity the nomenclature of the _dramatis
personae_. Of this, later. There is also a sentence in Act III, 2, which
points definitely to a date of composition, 1613 to 1615. The Captain
speaking to Morecraft, the usurer, says, "I will stile thee noble, nay
Don Diego, I'le woo thy Infanta for thee" (punctuation of the quarto).
'Diego' had, of course, been for years a generic nickname for Spaniards;
but Morecraft is neither a Spaniard nor in any way associated with
Spaniards. There had been a Don Diego of malodorous memory, who had
offensively "perfumed" St. Paul's and on whose achievement the
Elizabethans never wearied ringing the changes.[247] But that Don Diego
was of the years before 1597 when there was, of course, no talk of
wooing an Infanta; and the Captain here who comes to borrow money of the
usurer had no intention of insulting him by likening him to the
disgusting Spaniard of St. Paul's.