Kitabı oxu: «Francis Beaumont: Dramatist», səhifə 14

CHAPTER XIX
FLETCHER'S DICTION

The verse criterion is, however, not of itself a reagent sufficient to precipitate fully the Beaumont of the joint-plays. For there still exists the certainty that in plotting plays together, each of the collaborators was influenced by the opinion of the other; and the probability that, though one may have undertaken sundry scenes or divers characters in a play, the other would, in the course of general correction, insert lines in the parts written by his collaborator, and would convey to his own scenes the distinguishing rhythm, "humour," or diction of a definite character, created, or elaborated, by his colleague. It, therefore, follows that the assignment of a whole scene to either author on the basis alone of some recurring metrical peculiarity is not convincing. In the same section, even in the same speech, we may encounter insertions which bear the stamp of the revising colleague. For instance, the opening of Philaster is generally assigned to Beaumont: it has the characteristics of his prose. But with the entry of the King (line 89) we are launched upon a subscene in verse which, on the one hand, has a higher percentage of double endings (viz. 38) than Beaumont ever used, but does not fully come up to Fletcher's usage; while on the other hand, it has a higher percentage of run-on lines¹⁵⁷ (viz. 44) than Fletcher ever used. The other verse tests leave us similarly in doubt. To any one, however, familiar with the diction and characterization of the two authors the suspicion occurs that the scene was written by Beaumont in the first instance; and then worked over and considerably enlarged by his associate. In the first hundred lines of Act II, Scene 4, similar insertions by Fletcher occur, and in Act III, 2.¹⁵⁸

Such being the case we may expect that an inquiry into the rhetorical peculiarities and mental habit, first of Fletcher, then of Beaumont, will furnish tests corrective of the criterion based upon versification.

1. Fletcher's Diction in The Faithfull Shepheardesse

Though rather poetic than dramatic, and composed only partly in blank verse, The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords the best approach to a study of Fletcher's rhetoric; for, written about 1608 and by Fletcher alone, it illustrates his youthful style in the period probably shortly before he collaborated with Beaumont in the composition of Philaster.

The soliloquy of Clorin, with which The Faithfull Shepheardesse opens, runs as follows:

 
Hail, holy Earth, whose cold Arms do imbrace
The truest man that ever fed his flocks
By the fat plains of fruitful Thessaly!
Thus I salute thy Grave; thus do I pay
My early vows and tribute of mine eyes
To thy still-loved ashes; thus I free
Myself from all insuing heats and fires
Of love; all sports, delights, and [jolly] games,
That shepherds hold full dear, thus put I off:
Now no more shall these smooth brows be [be] girt
With youthful Coronals, and lead the Dance;
No more the company of fresh fair Maids
And wanton Shepherds be to me delightful,
Nor the shrill pleasing sound of merry pipes
Under some shady dell, when the cool wind
Plays on the leaves; all be far away,
Since thou art far away, by whose dear side
How often have I sat Crowned with fresh flowers
For summers Queen, whilst every Shepherds boy
Puts on his lusty green, with gaudy hook
And hanging scrip of finest Cordovan.
But thou art gone, and these are gone with thee
And all are dead but thy dear memorie;
That shall out-live thee, and shall ever spring,
Whilst there are pipes or jolly Shepherds sing.
And here will I, in honour of thy love,
Dwell by thy Grave, forgetting all those joys,
That former times made precious to mine eyes;
Only remembring what my youth did gain
In the dark, hidden vertuous use of Herbs:
That will I practise, and as freely give
All my endeavours as I gained them free.
Of all green wounds I know the remedies
In Men or Cattel, be they stung with Snakes,
Or charmed with powerful words of wicked Art,
Or be they Love-sick, or through too much heat
Grown wild or Lunatic, their eyes or ears
Thickened with misty filme of dulling Rheum;
These I can Cure, such secret vertue lies
In herbs applyèd by a Virgins hand.
My meat shall be what these wild woods afford,
Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes, on whose Cheeks
The Sun sits smiling.¹⁵⁹
 

This passage, as we have observed in the preceding section, does not display in full proportion or untrammeled variety the metrical peculiarities of Fletcher's popular dramatic blank verse. The verse is lyric and declamatory: his purely dramatic verse whether in the Monsieur Thomas of his earlier period, The Chances of the middle period, or A Wife for a Month and Rule a Wife of his later years, has the feminine endings, redundant syllables, anapæstic substitutions, the end-stopped and sometimes fragmentary lines, the hurried and spasmodic utterance of conversational speech. But, from the rhetorical point of view, this soliloquy – in fact, the whole Faithfull Shepheardesse– affords a basis for further discrimination between Fletcher and Beaumont in the joint-plays; for it displays idiosyncrasies of tone-quality and diction which persist, after Beaumont's death, in Fletcher's dramas of 1616 to 1625 as they were in 1607-1609: sometimes slightly modified, more often exaggerated, but in essence the same.

In Clorin's soliloquy, the reader cannot but notice, first, a tendency toward alliteration, the fed and flocks, fat and fruitful, fresh and fair, pleasing and pipes, – alliteration palpable and somewhat crude, but not yet excessive; second, a balanced iteration of words, – "be far away, Since thou art far away" (ll. 16-17), and, five lines further down, "But thou art gone and these are gone with thee," and in lines 31 and 32 "as freely give … as I gained them free"; and an iteration of phrases, rhetorical asseverations, negatives, alternatives, questions, – "Thus I salute thy grave; thus do I pay," "thus I free," "thus put I off" (lines 4, 6, 9); third, a preference for iteration in triplets, – "No more shall these smooth brows," "No more the company," "Nor the shrill … sound" (lines 10-14), "Or charmed," "or love-sick," "or through too much heat" (lines 35 and 36); fourth, a fondness for certain sonorous words, – "all ensuing heats … all sports" (lines 7-8), "all my endeavours … all green wounds" (lines 32-33), and the "alls" of lines 16 and 23; fifth, a plethora of adjectives, – "holy earth," "cold arms," "truest man," "fat plains" – many of them pleonastic – "misty film," "dulling rheum" – some forty nouns buttressed by epithets to twenty standing in their own strength; and a plethora of nouns in apposition (preferably triplets), – "all sports, delights, and jolly games" (line 8), "Berries and Chestnuts, Plantanes" (line 42); sixth, an indulgence in conversational tautology: for Fletcher is rarely content with a simple statement, – he must be forever spinning out the categories of a concept; expounding his idea by what the rhetoricians call division; enumerating the attributes and species painstakingly lest any escape, or verbosely as a padding for verse or speech. Of this mannerism The Faithfull Shepheardesse affords many instances more typical than those contained in these forty-three lines; but even here Clorin salutes the grave of her lover in a dozen different periphrastic ways. To say that "all are dead but thy dear memorie" is not enough; she must specify "that shall outlive thee." To assert that she knows the remedies of "all green wounds" does not suffice: she must proceed to the enumeration of the wounds; nor to tell us that her meat shall be found in the woods: she must rehearse the varieties of meat. Her soliloquy in the last thirty lines of the scene, not here quoted, is of the same quality: it reminds one of a Henslowe list of stage properties, or of the auctioneer's catalogue that sprawls down Walt Whitman's pages.

And, last, we notice what has been emphasized by G. C. Macaulay and others, that much of this enumeration by division is by way of "parentheses hastily thrown in, or afterthoughts as they occur to the mind."¹⁶⁰ Even in the formal Shepheardesse this characteristic lends a quality of naturalness and conversational spontaneity to the speech.

2. In the Later Plays

If now we turn to one of Fletcher's plays written after Beaumont's death, and without the assistance of Massinger or any other, – say, The Humorous Lieutenant of about the year 1619, – we find on every page and passages like the following.¹⁶¹– The King Antigonus upon the entry of his son, Demetrius, addresses the ambassadors of threatening powers:

 
Do you see this Gent(leman),
You that bring Thunders in your mouths, and Earthquakes,
To shake and totter my designs? Can you imagine
(You men of poor and common apprehensions)
While I admit this man, my Son, this nature
That in one look carries more fire, and fierceness,
Than all your Masters lives¹⁶²; dare I admit him,
Admit him thus, even to my side, my bosom,
When he is fit to rule, when all men cry him,
And all hopes hang about his head; thus place him,
His weapon hatched in bloud; all these attending
When he shall make their fortunes, all as sudden,
In any expedition he shall point 'em,
As arrows from a Tartar's bow, and speeding,
Dare I do this, and fear an enemy?
Fear your great master? yours? or yours?
 

Here we have blank verse, distinctively Fletcherian with its feminine endings and its end-stopped lines. But, widely as this differs from the earlier rhythm of The Faithfull Shepheardesse and its more lyric precipitancy, the qualities of tone and diction are in the later play as in the earlier. The alliterations may not be so numerous, and are in general more cunningly concealed and interwoven, as in lines 2 to 4; but the cruder kind still appears as a mannerism, the "fire and fierceness," "hopes," "hang," and "head." The iterations of word, phrase, and rhetorical question, and of the resonant "all," the redundant nouns in apposition, the tautological enumeration of categories, proclaim the unaltered Fletcher. The adjectives are in this spot pruned, but they are luxuriant elsewhere in the play. The triplets, – "this man, my son, this nature," – "admit," "admit," "admit," find compeers on nearly every page:

 
Shew where to lead, to lodge, to charge with safetie, —¹⁶³
 
 
Here's a strange fellow now, and a brave fellow,
If we may say so of a pocky fellow. —¹⁶⁴
 
 
And now, 't is ev'n too true, I feel a pricking,
A pricking, a strange pricking. —¹⁶⁵
 
 
With such a sadness on his face, as sorrow,
Sorrow herself, but poorly imitates.
Sorrow of sorrows on that heart that caus'd it!¹⁶⁶
 

In the passages cited above there happen to be, also, a few examples of the elocutionary afterthought:

 
You come with thunders in your mouth and earthquakes, —
 
 
As arrows from a Tartar's bow, and speeding. —
 

To this device, and to the intensive use of the pronominal "one" Fletcher is as closely wedded as to the repetition of "all," —

 
They have a hand upon us,
A heavy and a hard one.¹⁶⁷
 
 
To wear this jewel near thee; he is a tried one
And one that … will yet stand by thee.¹⁶⁸
 

Other plays conceded by the critics to Fletcher alone, and written in his distinctive blank verse, display the same characteristics of style: The Chances of about 1615, The Loyall Subject of 1618 (like The Humorous Lieutenant of the middle period), and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife of the last period, 1624. I quote at random for him who would apply the tests, – first from The Chances,¹⁶⁹ the following of the repeating revolver style:

 
Art thou not an Ass?
And modest as her blushes! what a blockhead
Would e're have popt out such a dry Apologie
For this dear friend? and to a Gentlewoman,
A woman of her youth and delicacy?
They are arguments to draw them to abhor us.
An honest moral man? 't is for a Constable:
A handsome man, a wholesome man, a tough man,
A liberal man, a likely man, a man
Made up by Hercules, unslaked with service:
The same to night, to morrow night, the next night,
And so to perpetuity of pleasures.
 

Now, from The Loyall Subject¹⁷⁰– the farewell of Archas to his arms and colours. I wish I could quote it all as an example of noble noise, enumerative and penny-a-line rhetoric:

 
Farewell, my Eagle! when thou flew'st, whole Armies
Have stoopt below thee: at Passage I have seen thee
Ruffle the Tartars, as they fled thy furie,
And bang 'em up together, as a Tassel,
Upon the streach, a flock of fearfull Pigeons.
I yet remember when the Volga curl'd,
The agèd Volga, when he heav'd his head up,
And rais'd his waters high, to see the ruins,
The ruines our swords made, the bloudy ruins;
Then flew this Bird of honour bravely, Gentlemen;
But these must be forgotten: so must these too,
And all that tend to Arms, by me for ever.
 

And from Act II, Scene 1, pages 101-102, for triplets:

 
Fight hard, lye hard, feed hard, when they come home, sir…
 
 
To be respected, reckon'd well, and honour'd…
 
 
Where be the shouts, the Bells rung out, the people?..
 

And, for "alls," and triplets:

 
And whose are all these glories? why their Princes,
Their Countries and their Friends. Alas, of all these,
And all the happy ends they bring, the blessings,
They only share the labours!
 

Finally, from Rule a Wife, a few instances of the iterations, three-fold or multiple, and redundant expositions. In the first scene¹⁷¹ Juan describes Leon:

 
Ask him a question,
He blushes like a Girl, and answers little,
To the point less; he wears a Sword, a good one,
And good cloaths too; he is whole-skin'd, has no hurt yet,
Good promising hopes;
 

and Perez describes the rest of the regiment,

 
That swear as valiantly as heart can wish,
Their mouths charg'd with six oaths at once, and whole ones,
That make the drunken Dutch creep into Mole-hills; …
 

and he proceeds to Donna Margarita:

 
She is fair, and young, and wealthy,
Infinite wealthy, etc.
 

And then to Estefania who has tautologized of her chastity, he tautologizes of his harmlessness:¹⁷²

 
I am no blaster of a lady's beauty,
Nor bold intruder on her special favours;
I know how tender reputation is,
And with what guards it ought to be preserv'd, lady.
 

As a fair example of this method of filling a page, I recommend the first scene of the third act; and of eloquence by rhetorical 'division,' Perez's description of his room in the next scene: all in terms of three times three.

If now the reader will turn, by way of confirmation, to The Triumph of Time and The Triumph of Death of which the metrical characteristics are admittedly Fletcher's, he will find that there, Fletcher, before Beaumont's retirement from the partnership, is already using in purely dramatic composition the rhetorical mannerisms which mark both the lyrically designed Shepheardesse of his early years and the genuine dramas of the later.

3. Stock Words, Phrases, and Figures

Beside the rhetorical mannerisms classified in the preceding paragraphs I might rehearse a long list of Fletcher's favourite expressions and figures of speech. Of the former Mr. Oliphant¹⁷³ has mentioned 'plaguily,' 'claw'd,' 'slubber'd,' 'too,' 'shrewdly,' 'stuck with,' 'it shews,' 'dwell round about ye,' 'for ever,' 'no way,' (for 'not at all'). In addition I have noted the reiterated 'thus,' 'miracle,' 'prodigious' (in the sense of 'ominous') – 'prodigious star,' 'prodigious meteor' – 'bugs,' 'monsters,' and 'scorpions'; 'torments,' 'diseases,' 'imposthumes,' 'canker,' 'mischiefs,' 'ruins,' 'blasted,' 'rotten'; 'myrmidons'; 'monuments' (for 'tombs'), 'marble'; 'lustre,' 'crystal,' 'jewels,' 'picture,' 'painting,' 'counterfeit in arras'; 'blushes,' 'palates,' 'illusion,' 'abused' (for 'deceived'), 'blessed,' 'flung off,' 'cloister'd up,' 'fat earth,' 'turtle,' 'passion,' 'Paradise.' Oliphant assigns to Fletcher 'pulled on,' but I find that almost as frequently in Beaumont. 'Poison,' 'contagious' and 'loaden,' also abound in Fletcher, but are sometimes used by Beaumont. Fletcher affects alliterative epithets: 'prince of popinjays,' 'pernicious petticoat prince,' 'pretty prince of puppets,' – and antitheses such as 'prince of wax,' 'pelting prattling peace.' His characters talk much of 'silks' and 'satins,' 'branched velvets' and 'scarlet' clothes. They are said to speak in 'riddles'; they are threatened with 'ribald rhymes'; they shall be 'bawled in ballads,' or 'chronicled,' 'cut and chronicled.'

Another characteristic of Fletcher's diction is his preference for the pronoun ye instead of you. This was pointed out by Mr. R. B. McKerrow, who in his edition of The Spanish Curate¹⁷⁴ notes that in the scenes generally attributed, in accordance with other tests, to Fletcher, ye occurs 271 times, while in the scenes attributed to Massinger it occurs but four. That is to say, for every ye in Fletcher's part there are but 0.65 you's; for every ye in Massinger's part, 50 you's. Mr. W. W. Greg, applying the test in his edition of The Elder Brother,¹⁷⁵ and counting the y'are's as instances of ye, finds that the percentage of ye's to you's in Fletcher's part is almost three times as high as in Massinger's. In a recent article in The Nation¹⁷⁶ Mr. Paul Elmer More communicates his independent observation of the same mannerism in Fletcher. Though he has been anticipated in part, his study adds to McKerrow's the valuable information that Fletcher uses the ye for you in "both numbers and cases, and in both serious and comic scenes." Mr. More's statistics favour the conclusion that the test distinguishes Fletcher not only from Massinger, but from other collaborators: Middleton, Rowley, Field, Jonson, Tourneur. They do not carry conviction regarding Shakespeare, whose habit as Greg and others had already announced varies in a perplexing manner. Nor does Mr. More arrive at any definite result concerning the test "when applied to the mixed work of Beaumont and Fletcher." For though the high percentage of ye's in the third and fourth of the Foure Playes confirms the general attribution of those 'Triumphs' to Fletcher, the low percentage in the first two 'Triumphs' does not justify "the common opinion which attributes them to Beaumont." Their author, as I have elsewhere stated, was probably Field. "In the plays which are units," continues Mr. More, "such as The Maid's Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Coxcomb, this mark of Fletcher does not occur at all. It should seem that the writing here, at least in its final form, was almost entirely Beaumont's." I have gone through all the plays which have been ordinarily regarded as joint-productions of Beaumont and Fletcher, and find that in this surmise Mr. More is right. The Knight, to be sure, is Beaumont's alone; but with regard to the other four plays mentioned above, in which they undoubtedly coöperated, the suggestion that the writing, at least in its final form, was almost entirely Beaumont's, because of the practically complete absence of ye's, is justified by the facts. It is, also, helpful in the examination of plays not mentioned in this list. It has, in connection with other considerations, assisted me to the conclusion that Fletcher went over two or three scenes of The Woman-Hater, stamping them with his ye's after Beaumont had finished it as a whole; and it has confirmed me in the belief that The Scornful Ladie was one of the latest joint-plays, only partly revised by Beaumont, – and that, not long before his death. Fletcher's preference for ye is a distinctive mannerism. His usage varies from the employment of one-third as many ye's to that of twice as many ye's as you's; whereas Beaumont rarely uses a ye. Even more distinctive is Fletcher's use of y'are, and of ye in the objective case. The latter, Beaumont does not tolerate.

For figurative purposes Fletcher finds material most frequently in the phenomena of winter and storm: 'frosts,' 'nipping frosts,' 'nipping winds,' 'hail,' 'cakes of ice,' 'icicles,' 'thaw,' 'tempests,' 'thunders,' 'billows,' 'mariners' and 'storm-tossed barks,' 'wild overflows' of waters in stream or torrent; in the phenomena of heat and light: 'suns,' the 'icy moon,' the 'Dog-star' or the 'Dog,' the 'Sirian star,' the 'cold Bear' and 'raging Lion,' 'Aetna,' 'fire and flames'; of trees: root and branch, foliage and fruit; of the oak and clinging vine; of the rose or blossom and the 'destroying canker'; of fever and ague; of youth and desire, and of Death 'beating larums to the blood,' of our days that are 'marches to the grave,' and of our lives 'tedious tales soon forgotten.' I have elsewhere called attention to the numerous variations which he plays upon the 'story of a woman.' His 'monuments' are in frequent requisition and, by preference, they 'sweat'; men pursued by widows fear to be 'buried alive in another man's cold monument.' Other common images are 'rock him to another world,' 'bestride a billow,' 'plough up the sea.' He indulges in extended mythological tropes as of the 'Carthage queen' and Ariadne; is especially attracted by Adonis, Hylas (whom he may have got either from Theocritus or the Marquis D'Urfé's Astræan character), and Hercules; and, in general, he levies more freely than Beaumont on commonplace classical material. In his unassisted dramas his fondness for personification seems to grow: many pages are thick with capitalized abstractions; and the poetry, then, is usually limited to the capitalization. The curious reader will find most of Fletcher's predilections in image-making clustered in three or four typical passages of the later and unassisted plays, such as Alphonso's raving in A Wife for a Month, IV, 4; and in passages, undoubtedly of his verse and diction, in plays written conjointly with Beaumont, such as that of Spaconia's outburst in King and No King, IV, 2, 45-62.

Fletcher abounds in optatives: 'Would Gods thou hadst been so blest!' 'Would there were any safety in thy sex!' and the like. He is also given to rhetorical interrogations and elaborate exclamations; more so than Beaumont. He affects the lighter kind of oath, the appeal to something sacred, in attestation – 'Witness Heaven!' In entreaty – 'High Heaven, defend us!' Or in mere ejaculation – 'Equal Heavens!' He varies his asseverations so that they appear less bluntly profane: 'By my life!' 'By those lights, I vow!' – or more appropriate to the emergency: 'By all holy in Heaven and Earth!' He swears occasionally 'By the Gods,' but not so frequently as Beaumont, for there was a puritanical reaction after Beaumont's death. In the early joint-plays he affects particularly 'all the gods,' 'By all those gods, you swore by!' 'By more than all the gods!' In his imprecations he is even more sulphurous than Beaumont: 'Hell bless you for it!' 'Hell take me then!' 'Thou all-sin, all-hell, and last all-devils!'

In summary let us say of Fletcher's diction, that its vocabulary is repetitious; its sentence-structure, loose, cumulative, trailing: that its larger movement is, in general, dramatic, conversational, abrupt, rather than lyrical, declamatory, reflective. He writes for the plot – forward: not from the character – outward. When he bestows a lyrical or descriptive touch upon the narrative it is always incidental to conversation or stage business. When he indulges in a classical reminiscence he permits himself to embroider and bedizen; but usually his ribbons (from a scantly furnished, much-rummaged wardrobe) are carelessly pinned on. While capable, especially in tragedy, of occasional long speeches, he prefers the brief interchange of utterance, the rapid fire and spasm of dialogue.