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
precisely the scenes that he did not compose. To speak of Beaumont's
_Triumph of Love_ is perhaps defensible; but, with grave reluctance, we
now question the attribution. He is justified in withdrawing "the noble
tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_" from the field of Beaumont's
cooperation and ascribing it to Fletcher and Massinger; but he is
undoubtedly wrong when he fails to couple the latter's name with that of
Fletcher as author of _Valentinian_. Writing as Swinburne did after a
study of Fleay's first investigations into the versification of
Fletcher, Beaumont, and Massinger, the wonder is not that once or twice,
as a critic, he makes an incorrect attribution, but that his poetic
instinct so successfully defied the temptation to enumerate in detail
the respective contributions of Beaumont and Fletcher on the basis of
metrical tests _par excellence_,--so surprisingly novel and seductively
convincing were the tests then recently formulated. Swinburne's mistakes
are of sane omission rather than of supererogation. By his judgments as
a critic one can not always swear; but here he is, in the main,
marvelously right, and a thousand times rather to be followed than some
of the successors of Fleay who have swamped the personality of Beaumont
by heaping on him, foundered, sods from a dozen turf-stacks which he
never helped to build.
But the _chorizontes_--those who would separate every scene and line of
the one genius from those of the other--are not lightly to be spoken of.
It is only by combining their methods of analysis with the intuitions of
the poet-critics that one may hope to see Frank Beaumont plain: "the
worthiest and closest follower of Shakespeare in the tragic field; the
earliest as well as ablest disciple of Ben Jonson in pure comedy, varied
with broad farce and mock-heroic parody." The labour is well bestowed if
by its means lovers of poetry and the drama, while not ceasing to admire
the elder dramatist, Fletcher, may be led to accede at last to the
younger his due and undivided honour, may come to speak of him by
unhyphenated name--a personality of passion and of fire, a gracious
power in poetry, of effulgent dramatic creativity;--if, like the
ancients, they may protest occasionally in the name of Pollux alone.
CHAPTER II
BEAUMONT'S FAMILY; HIS EARLY YEARS: GRACE-DIEU, OXFORD