SHAKESPEARE AND CORNEILLE 293 was Theodora who came out disguised in Didymus's clothes. Placidus' rage now gives way to agonising jealousy. He believes that Theodora has yielded willingly to Didymus, and he suffers tortures. Finally we learn the truth. Didymus himself tells how he rescued Theodora unharmed; he is a Christian, and expects to die. "Live thou without jealousy," he says to Placidus; "I can endure the death penalty." "Alas!" answers Placidus, "how can I be other than jealous, knowing that this glorious creature owes more than life to thee. Thou hast given thy life to save her honour; how can I but envy thy happiness!" Both Theodora and Didymus are martyred, and the pagan lover, who did nothing to help his love, is left alone with his shame. The sole contrast intended here is between the noble qualities developed by the Christian faith and that baseness which was considered inseparable from heathendom. Two things arrest our attention in this comparison: firstly, the superiority of the English drama, which openly represents all things on the stage, even such subjects as are only passingly alluded to by society; and, secondly, the marked difference in the spirit of that Old England of the Renaissance from the allpervading Christianism of the early classic period in "most Christian" France. The calm dignity of Marina's innocence has none of that taint of the confessional which was plainly obnoxious to Shakespeare, and which neither the medieval plays before him, nor Corneille and Calderon after, could escape. Corneille's Theodora is a saint by profession and a martyr from choice. She gives herself up to her enemies at the end of the play, because she has been assured by supernatural revelation that she will not again be imprisoned in the house from which she has just escaped. Shakespeare's Marina, the tenderly and carefully outlined sketch of the type which is presently to wholly possess his imagination, is purely human in her innate nobility of nature. It is deeply interesting to trace in this sombre yet fantastically romantic play of Pericles the germs of all his succeeding works. Marina and her mother, long lost and late recovered by a sorrowing king, are the preliminary studies for Perdita and Hermione in A Winter's Tale. Perdita, as her name tells us, is lost and is living, ignorant of her parentage, in a strange country. Marina's flower-strewing suggests Perdita's distribution of blossoms, accompanied by words which reveal a profound understanding of flower-nature, and Hermione is recovered by Leontes as is Thaisa by Pericles. The wicked stepmother in Cymbeline corresponds to the wicked foster-mother in Pericles. She hates Imogen as Dionyza hates Marina. Pisanio is supposed to have murdered her as Leonine is believed to have slain Marina, and Cymbeline recovers both sons and daughter as Pericles his wife and child. The tendency to substitute some easy process of explanation, such as melodramatic music or supernatural revelation, in the place of severe dramatic technique, which appears at this time, betrays a certain weariness of the demands of the art. Diana appears to the slumbering Pericles as Jupiter does to Posthumus in Cymbeline. But it is for The Tempest that Pericles more especially prepares us. The attitude of the melancholy prince towards his daughter seems to foreshadow that of the noble Prospero towards his child Miranda. Prospero is also living in exile from his home. But it is Cerimon who approaches more nearly in character to Prospero. Note his great speech: "I held it ever, Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches: careless heirs But immortality attends the former, Making a man a god. 'Tis known I ever By turning o'er authorities, I have, To me and to my aid the blest infusions That dwell in vegetives, in metals, stones; And I can speak of the disturbances That Nature works, and of her cures; which doth give me A more content in course of true delight Than to be thirsty after tottering honour Or tie my treasure up in silken bags, To please the fool and death" (Act iii. sc. 2), The position in which Thaisa and Pericles stand in the second act towards the angry father, who has in reality no serious "PERICLES" AND "THE TEMPEST" 295 objection to their union, closely resembles that of Ferdinand and Miranda before the feigned wrath of Prospero. Most notable of all is the preliminary sketch we find in Pericles of the tempest which ushers in the play of that name. Over and above the resemblance between the storm scenes, we have Marina's description of the hurricane during which she was born (Pericles, Act iv. sc. 1), and Ariel's description of the shipwreck (Tempest, Act i. sc. 2). Many other slight touches prove a relationship between the two plays. In The Tempest (Act ii. sc. 1), as in Pericles (Act v. sc. 1), we have soothing slumbrous music and mention of harpies (Tempest, Act iii. sc. 3, and Pericles, Act iv. sc. 3). The words "virgin knot," so charmingly used by Marina: "If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep, Untied I still my virgin knot will keep" (Act iv. sc. 2), are also employed by Prospero in reference to Miranda in The Tempest (Act iv. sc. 1); and it will be observed that these are the only two instances in which they occur in Shakespeare. Thus the germs of all his latest works lie in this unjustly neglected and despised play, which has suffered under a double disadvantage: it is not entirely Shakespeare's work, and in such portions of it as are his own there exist, in the dark shadow cast by her hideous surroundings about Marina, traces of that gloomy mood from which he was but just emerging. But for all that, whether we look upon it as a contribution to Shakespeare's biography or as a poem, this beautiful and remarkable fragment, Pericles, is a work of the greatest interest.1 1 Delius Ueber Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, iii. 175-205; F. G. Fleay: On the Play of Pericles. The New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874, 195–254; Swinburne: A Study of Shakespeare, p. 206; Gervinus: Shakespeare, vol. i. 187, and Elze: Shakespeare, p. 409, still believe Pericles to be a work of Shakespeare's youth. XVI FRANCIS BEAUMONT AND JOHN FLETCHER It was a comparatively easy task to distinguish Shakespeare's part in Timon of Athens and Pericles, for it consisted of all that was important in either play. The identity of the men who collaborated with him seems to have been decided by pure chance, and is of little interest to us now-a-days. It is a different matter, however, in the case of two other dramas of this period which have been associated with Shakespeare's name-The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII.-for his part in them is unimportant, in one almost imperceptible, in fact. Their real author was a young man just coming into notice, who afterwards became one of the most famous dramatists of the day, and can hardly have been indifferent to Shakespeare. The question, therefore, of their mutual relations and the origin of their collaboration is one of the greatest interest. A drama entitled Philaster had been played at the Globe Theatre in 1608 with extraordinary success. It was the joint work of two young men, Francis Beaumont, aged 22, and John Fletcher, aged 28. The play made their reputation, and they found themselves famous from the moment of its representation. A would-be amusing, but in reality rather dull play of Fletcher's, The Woman-Hater, had been put on the stage in 1606-7. It contained some good comic parts, but nothing that gave promise of the poet's later works. After this triumph with Philaster, the two friends produced in 1610 or 1611 their masterpiece, The Maid's Tragedy, and their scarcely less admired A King and no King. This joint activity continued until the death of Beaumont in 1615. During the remaining ten years of his life Fletcher wrote alone, with the single exception of a play produced in collaboration with Rowley, and attained to a fame which probably eclipsed Shakespeare's in these FRANCIS BEAUMONT 297 last years of his life, as it certainly did immediately after his death. Dryden remarks, in his well-known Essay of Dramatic Poetry (1668), "Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of them being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." This statement seems somewhat exaggerated if we compare it with the entries in Pepys' Diary; still, we know that Shakespeare's fame was completely eclipsed towards the end of the century by that of Ben Jonson. Samuel Butler not only prefers the latter, but speaks as though his superiority was universally admitted.1 The two new poets were neither learned proletaires, like Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, nor of the middle classes, like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, but were both of good family. Fletcher's father was a high-placed ecclesiastic, much experienced in the courts of Elizabeth and James, and Beaumont was the son of a Justice of Common Pleas, and related to families of some standing. One great source of their popularity lay in the fact that they were thus enabled to reproduce to perfection the manners of the fine gentleman, his general dissipation, and his quick repartee. Francis Beaumont was born somewhere about the year 1586, at Grace Dieu in Leicestershire. His family numbered among those of the legal aristocracy, and many of its members were noted for poetical propensities and abilities; there were no fewer than three poets by name of Beaumont living at the time of Francis' death. The future dramatist was entered at ten years of age as a gentleman-commoner at Broadgate Hall, Oxford. He early left the university for London, where he was made a member of the Inner Temple. His legal studies appear to have sat lightly upon him, and he seems to have devoted himself principally to the composition of those plays and masques which were so frequently performed by the various legal colleges of those days. In 1613 he wrote the masque which was performed by the legal institutions of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn in honour of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage with the Elector-Palatine. It seems to have been a mutual enthusiasm for Jonson's Volpone (1605) which brought Beaumont and Fletcher together, and united them in a brotherly friendship and fellowship in work of which history affords few parallels. Aubrey, to whom we are indebted for a number of anecdotes about Shakespeare, gives the following 1 See Richard Garnett: The Age of Dryden, p. 249. |