To glad our age, and like young eagles teach them Pal. 'Tis too true, Arcite. To our Theban hounds, Pal. How, gentle cousin? May make it ours? And here being thus together, We are one another's wife, ever begetting New births of love; we are father, friends, acquaintance; I am your heir, and you are mine; this place Dare take this from us: here, with a little patience, Crave our acquaintance; I might sicken, cousin, I thank you, cousin Arcite !—almost wanton It is to live abroad, and everywhere! 'Tis like a beast, methinks! I find the court here, I am sure, a more content; and all those pleasures, That woo the wills of men to vanity, I see through now; and am sufficient From The Faithful Shepherdess.' To CLORIN in the wood, enter a SATYR with fruit. Satyr. Through yon same bending plain Since the lusty spring began. Sweeter yet did never crown The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown [Seeing Clorin Than the squirrel whose teeth crack them; Deign, O fairest fair, to take them! For these, black-eyed Dryope See how well the lusty time Hath decked their rising cheeks in red, Here be berries for a queen, The great god Pan himself doth eat: All these, and what the woods can yield, I freely offer, and ere long Will bring you more, more sweet and strong; Till when, humbly leave I take, Lest the great Pan do awake, That sleeping lies in a deep glade, Under a broad beech's shade. I must go, I must run, Swifter than the fiery sun. Clorin. And all my fears go with thee! What greatness, or what private hidden power, Is there in me to draw submission [Exit. Or voices calling me in dead of night To make me follow, and so tole me on PERIGOT and AMORET. draw (From Act 1. sc. i.) I should not love alone, I should not lose I've sent to heaven? Did you not give your hand, Amo. Shepherd, so far as maiden's modesty Peri. I take it as my best good; and desire, For stronger confirmation of our love, To meet this happy night in that fair grove, Where all true shepherds have rewarded been For their long service: say, sweet, shall it hold? Amo. Dear friend, you must not blame me if I make A doubt of what the silent night may do. . . . Maids must be fearful. . . . Peri. Oh, do not wrong my honest simple truth; As those chaste flames that burn before the shrine To draw you thither was to plight our troths, A virtuous well, about whose flowery banks Hath crowned the head of her long-loved shepherd (From Act 1. sc. ii.) The lyrical pieces scattered throughout Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are generally in the graceful style of the Faithful Shepherdess: Melancholy-from 'Nice Valour.' Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly! O sweetest melancholy! Welcome, folded arms, and fixed eyes, A look that's fastened to the ground, Fountain heads, and pathless groves, Then stretch your bones in a still gloomy valley : Nothing's so dainty-sweet as lovely melancholy. There are obvious resemblances between this lyric and Milton's Penseroso, which may have owed some suggestions to Fletcher. Song-from The False One.' Look out, bright eyes, and bless the air: That breaks out clearer still and higher. And soft Love a prisoner bound, Yet the beauty of your mind Neither check nor chain hath found. Look out nobly, then, and dare Even the fetters that you wear. The Power of Love-from 'Valentinian,' What the mighty Love has done; To deceive the hopes of man, Hear ye, ladies that are coy, What the mighty Love can do ; Fear the fierceness of the boy; The chaste moon he makes to woo; Vesta, kindling holy fires, Circled round about with spies, To Sleep-from the Same. Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes, In gentle showers; give nothing that is loud He Francis Beaumont wrote also a number of miscellaneous pieces, collected and published after his death. But some of the poems attributed to him were by Donne, Jonson, Shirley, Carew, Waller, or other less-known writers. Beaumont's love-poem on the Ovidian story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus was written when he was seventeen. wrote verses to Jonson 'Upon his Fox,' 'Upon the Silent Woman,' and ‘Upon his Catiline;' but his most celebrated non-dramatic work is the letter to Ben Jonson, which was originally published at the end of the play Nice Valour in the 1647 folio, with the following title: 'Mr Francis Beaumont's Letter to Ben Jonson, written before he and Master Fletcher came to London, with two of the precedent Comedies then not finished, which deferred their merry-meetings at the Mermaid.' From the Letter to Ben Jonson. The sun (which doth the greatest comfort bring Than beer, good only for the sonnet's strain, Lie where he will, and make him write worse yet; It is a potion sent us down to drink By special Providence, keeps us from fights, Makes us not laugh when we make legs to knights. bows 'Tis this that keeps our minds fit for our states, A medicine to obey our magistrates: For we do live more free than you; no hate, No envy at one another's happy state Moves us; we are all equal every whit : Of land that God gives men here is their wit, And gravest men will with their main house-jest Methinks the little wit I had is lost With the best gamesters. What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown For three days past; wit that might warrant be Till that were cancelled; and when that was gone, We left an air behind us, which alone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty-though but downright fools, more wise. Matthew Sutcliffe (1550?-1629), Dean of Exeter and long a court favourite, wrote over a score of books in controversial theology; and Robert Wisdom, who died Archdeacon of Ely in 1568, contributed one psalm-translation to Sternhold and Hopkins's version, and wrote a few other hymns and elegiac verses, but was neither revered for his wisdom nor praised for his poetry. Of land, &c., there men's wit depends on their estates. Main house-jest, standing family joke, handed down from father to son. My rest is up,' at tennis, bowls, and various games of cards and chance, was a phrase used to mean, My stake is laid: I take the chance.' On the Tombs in Westminster. Mortality, behold and fear; What a change of flesh is here! Think how many royal bones Sleep within this heap of stones! Here they lie had realms and lands, Who now want strength to stir their hands; Since the first man died for sin. Here the bones of birth have cried, 'Though gods they were, as men they died.' Here are wands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruined sides of kings. Here's a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate. The following poem, credited to Beaumont, and not unlike his other work, was rejected by Dyce as being by a later hand : An Epitaph. Here she lies whose spotless fame An epitaph to all that died, Beyond virginity refined, From lawless fire remained as free As now from heat her ashes be. Keep well this pawn, thou marble chest ; Till it be called for, let it rest ; For while this jewel here is set, The best edition of Beaumont and Fletcher is that of Dyce (11 vols. 1843-46), which superseded its chief predecessor, that of Weber (1812). Ten of the principal plays are given in the two volumes edited by Mr St Loe Strachey (Mermaid Series,' 1887). See A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature (2 vols. 1875); Fleay's Shakespeare Manual; G. C. Macaulay's Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study (1883); G. Rhys's edition of the Lyric Poems of the two poets (1897); and the bibliography by A. C. Potter in Harvard Bibliographical Contributions (1891). William Rowley (c.1585-c.1642), actor and playwright, is known as having collaborated with Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, Webster, Massinger, and Ford. He seems to have been indifferent to dramatic fame: of the score of plays in which he had some share we know not what his share was. A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vext; All's Lost by Lust; A Match at Midnight; A Shoomaker a Gentleman—all written between 1632 and 1638-are the only plays which bear his name as sole author, but they are partly adaptations of older plays. His versification was harsh; but his fellow-dramatists valued his vigour and versatility both in tragedy and comedy. He rarely attained to pathos; his fund of humour was conspicuous-humour sometimes rich and true, sometimes passing into mere buffoonery. His name used to be specially associated with The Witch of Edmonton, published as 'a tragicomedy by divers well esteemed poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, etc.' But probably Dekker had the main share in it, the farcical element being Rowley's. The Birth of Merlin, on whose title-page (1662) Shakespeare's name was unfortunately associated with Rowley's, is probably an old play remodelled, with an expansion of the comic element, by Rowley and others. In The Old Law, by Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley, Mr Bullen regards Act III. sc. i. as a characteristic specimen of Rowley's humour. This dread law, much as in Anthony Trollope's Fixed Period, was 'that every man living to fourscore years, and women to threescore, shall then be cut off as fruitless to the republic;' and Gnotho, anxious to be rid of his wife and marry a new one, bribes the parish clerk to falsify a date in the register in order to hasten the happy despatch: Gnotho. You have searched o'er the parish-chronicle, sir? Clerk. Yes, sir; I have found out the true age and date of the party you wot on. Gnoth. Pray you, be covered, sir. Clerk. When you have shewed me the way, sir. Gnoth. Likely to be the wiser man, sir; for your greatest clerks are not always so, as 'tis reported. Clerk. You are a great man in the parish, sir. Gnoth. I understand myself so much the better, sir; for all the best in the parish pay duties to the clerk, and I would owe you none, sir. Clerk. Since you'll have it so, I'll be the first to hide my head. Gnoth. Mine is a capcase: now to our business in hand. Good luck, I hope; I long to be resolved. Clerk. Look you, sir, this is that cannot deceive you : This is the dial that goes ever true; You may say ipse dixit upon this witness, And it is good in law too. Gnoth. Pray you, let's hear what it speaks. Clerk. Mark, sir. —Agatha, the daughter of Pollux, (this is your wife's name, and the name of her father,) bornGnoth. Whose daughter say you? Clerk. The daughter of Pollux. Gnoth. I take it his name was Bollux. Clerk. Pollux the orthography I assure you, sir; the word is corrupted else. Gnoth. Well, on, sir,-of Pollux; now come on, Castor. Clerk. Born in an. 1540, and now 'tis 99. By this infallible record, sir, (let me see,) she is now just fiftynine, and wants but one. Gnoth. I am sorry she wants so much. Clerk. Why, sir? alas, 'tis nothing; 'tis but so many months, so many weeks, so many Gnoth. Do not deduct it to days, 'twill be the more tedious; and to measure it by hour-glasses were intolerable. Clerk. Do not think on it, sir; half the time goes away in sleep, 'tis half the year in nights. Gnoth. O, you mistake me, neighbour, I am loath to leave the good old woman; if she were gone now it would not grieve me; for what is a year, alas, but a lingering torment? and were it not better she were out of her pain? 'T must needs be a grief to us both. Clerk. I would I knew how to ease you, neighbour ! Gnoth. You speak kindly, truly, and if you say but Amen to it, (which is a word that I know you are perfect in,) it might be done. Clerks are the most indifferent honest men,-for to the marriage of your enemy, or the burial of your friend, the curses or the blessings to you are all one; you say Amen to all. Clerk. With a better will to the one than the other, neighbour but I shall be glad to say Amen to any thing might do you a pleasure. : Gnoth. There is, first, something above your duty: [Gives him money] now I would have you set forward the clock a little, to help the old woman out of her pain. Clerk. I will speak to the sexton; but the day will go ne'er the faster for that. Gnoth. O, neighbour, you do not conceit me; not the jack of the clock-house; the hand of the dial, I mean. -Come, I know you, being a great clerk, cannot choose but have the art to cast a figure. Clerk. Never, indeed, neighbour; I never had the judgment to cast a figure. Gnoth. I'll shew you on the back side of your book, look you,-what figure's this? Clerk. Four with a cipher, that's forty. Gnoth. So! forty; what's this now? Clerk. The cipher is turned into 9 by adding the tail, which makes forty-nine. Gnoth. Very well understood; what is't now? Gnoth. A wager of that! let me see the place of my wife's age again. Clerk. Look you, sir, 'tis here, 1540. Gnoth. Forty drachmas you do not turn that forty into thirty-nine! |