Note the double endings, the end-stopped lines, the stress-syllable openings, the anapæsts, the feminine cæsuræ (dotted), the two omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause and the following accent at the beginning of the verse section, and the six feet of line 13.

Of the non-Fletcherian part of Philaster, a typical example is the following from Act I, Scene 2, where Philaster replies to Arethusa's request that he look away from her:

Or the famous description of Bellario, beginning:

from the same scene.

Or the King's soliloquy in Act II, Scene 4, containing the lines:

The reader will at once be impressed with the regularity of the masculine ending. Beaumont does not, of course, eschew the double ending; but, as Boyle has computed, the percentage in this play is but fifteen in the non-Fletcherian passages, whereas the percentage in Fletcher's contribution is thirty-five. The prevalence of run-on lines is also noteworthy; and the infrequency of the stress-syllable openings, anapæsts, and feminine cæsuræ by which Fletcher achieves now conversational abruptness, now lyrical lilt.

In The Maides Tragedy, such soliloquies as that of Aspatia in Act V, Scene 4, with its mixture of blank verse and rhyme:

are marked by characteristics utterly unlike those of Fletcher's dramatic verse. Also unlike Fletcher are the scenes which abound in lines of weak and light ending, and lines where the lighter syllables of every word must be counted to make full measure. Fletcher did not write:

or

Nor did Fletcher write, with any frequency, improper run-on lines, such as III, 2, 135 (one of his collaborator's scenes):

In this play the percentage of run-on lines in Fletcher's scenes is about nineteen; in the scenes not written by him, almost twenty-seven. Fletcher's double endings are over forty per cent; his collaborator's barely ten.

In A King and No King similar Beaumontesque characteristics distinguish the major portion of the play from the few scenes generally acknowledged to be written by Fletcher. In Fletcher's scenes[155] one notes the high proportion of stress-syllable openings, and, consequently, of anapæstic substitutions, the subtle omission occasionally of the arsis, and not infrequently of the thesis (or light syllable) after the pause, and the use of the accented syllable at the beginning of the verse-section. While sometimes these characteristics appear in the other parts of the play, their relative infrequency is a distinctive feature of the non-Fletcherian rhythm. A comparison of the verse of Fletcher's Act IV, Scene 2, with that of his collaborator in Act I, Scene 1, well illustrates this difference. The recurrence of the feminine cæsura measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers. It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines; but of his collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for instance, wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the second scene of Act IV:

where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped lines, already emphasized in preceding examples, we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-syllable openings with their anapæstic sequences, three omissions of the light syllable after the cæsural pause with the consequent accent at the beginning of the verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine cæsuræ (or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three at least (vv. 2, 5, 10) are exaggerated jolts.

Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for instance, Arbaces' speech beginning Act I, 1, 105, of lines rippling with as many feminine cæsuræ. But, utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only two stress-syllable openings, only four anapæsts, one omitted thesis after the cæsural pause, four end-stopped lines. He is more frequently capable, as in the passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a single feminine cæsura, but with several feminine (or double) endings:

Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the cæsuræ are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly at the end of the second and third feet.

In respect of the internal structure of the verse the tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical characteristics of those parts of Philaster, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King which do not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are well defined and practically uniform; since they are of a piece with the metrical manner of The Woman-Hater, which is originally, and in general, the work of one author—Beaumont; and since they are also of a piece with the versification of the Maske, which is certainly by Beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems,—at least one criterion has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors.

Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV, Scene 2 of A King and No King, and the prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of Philaster, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same scenes.

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 lines[157] (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:

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:

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:

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

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

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:

Now, from The Loyall Subject[170]—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:

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

And, for "alls," and triplets:

Finally, from Rule a Wife, a few instances of the iterations, three-fold or multiple, and redundant expositions. In the first scene[171] Juan describes Leon:

and Perez describes the rest of the regiment,

and he proceeds to Donna Margarita:

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

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. Oliphant[173] 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 Curate[174] 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 Nation[176] 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.