Charles Gayley - Francis Beaumont - Dramatist

It is diverting to note that on the eve of just that season of 1594, a very pious woman, the second wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, and the mother of Anthony and Francis, is writing to the elder brother "I trust that they will not mum nor sinfully make revel at Gray's Inn." Anthony was not a very strict Puritan, Francis still less so; and Francis, who had been of Gray's Inn since 1575, was, till his fall from power, the keenest devotee and most ardent and reckless promoter of masquing that Gray's Inn or, for that matter, England, had ever known. According to Spedding, 20 20 Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, I, 342. the speeches of the six councillors for the famous court of the Prince of Purpoole in 1594 were written by him and him alone. He furnished the money and much of the device for gorgeous masques before Queen Elizabeth; and under her successor he was prime mover in many a masque, like that of the Flowers , presented by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn, in 1614, which, alone, cost him about £10,000 as reckoned in the money of to-day. The masques by the four Inns, in honour of the Elector Palatine's marriage, the year before, are said to have cost £20,000, – five hundred thousand dollars in the money of to-day! And it would appear that much of this expense was assumed by Sir Francis Bacon, who in the years of his greatness as Solicitor-General and Attorney-General retained intimate relations with the life of Gray's Inn, and whom our Beaumont during the years of studentship before 1603, when the gallant Sir Walter Raleigh was consigned to the Tower, must many times have seen strolling with Sir Walter in the walks that Bacon himself had laid out for his fellow-benchers of the Inn.

If Beaumont's family had deliberately set about preparing him for his career of poet and dramatist, especially of dramatist who, with John Fletcher, should vividly reproduce the life, manners and conversation of young men of fashion about town, they could not have placed him in a community more favourable to these ends than that of the Inns of Court. As the name itself implies the members were gentlemen of the Court of the King. They must be "sons to persons of quality"; they must be trained to the possibility of appearance before the King at any time; they must be ready not merely as a privilege, but as a function, to entertain royalty upon summons. As Gray's Inn had its flavour of romance, its literary and dramatic history, its Sidney, its Bacon, its Gascoigne; so also the "anciently allied House" of the Inner Temple. There lingered the tradition, to say the least, of Chaucer's stirring poetry; there the spirit of Sir Francis Drake, – stirring romances of the Spanish main; there the memory of the Christmas revels of 1562 at which was first acted the Gorboduc of Thomas Sackville (afterwards Earl of Dorset, and connected by marriage with the Fletchers), and Thomas Norton, – whose "stately speeches and well sounding phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile," whose national quality, romantic illumination of classical form, impressive, and novel dramatic blank verse were to influence imperishably the course of Elizabethan tragedy. There, too, had been produced, by five poets of the House, in 1568, "the first English love-tragedy that has survived," 21 21 Cunliffe, E. E. Class. Tragedies , p. lxxxvi. Gismond of Salerne , a distant but unmistakable forerunner in tempestuous passion and pathos of plays in which young Beaumont was to compose the major part, The Maides Tragedy and A King and No King .

Here, in the intervals between moots and bolts in the day time or during the long evenings about the central fire in Hall or in Chambers, a young man of poetic proclivities would find ample opportunity to indulge his genius. And, even after he ceased to be an inmate, the Inner Temple would still be for him a club, in which by the payment of a small annual fee he might retain membership for life. And membership in one 'college' of this pseudo-university implied an honorary 'freedom' of the others. Beaumont would know not only William Browne, the poet of the Inner Temple from 1611 on, and all Browne's poetic fellows in that House, but Browne's less poetic friend, Christopher Brooke, counsel for Shakespeare's company of King's Players, who earlier in the century had entered Lincoln's Inn; and, also, Brooke's chamber-fellow, John Donne, whose secret marriage with the daughter of the Lieutenant of the Tower, in 1609, got the young scapegraces into jail. And at Gray's Inn Beaumont would be even more at home. It was the 'House' of his kinsman, Henry Hastings of Ashby, – in 1604 Earl of Huntingdon, – two years younger than Frank, and admitted as early as 1597; and of Robert Pierrepoint, who had come down with Frank from Oxford and was entered of the Inns at the same time; and, two years later, of Robert's cousin, William Cavendish, afterwards second Earl of Devonshire.

If we could be sure that a poem called The Metamorphosis of Tabacco , a mock-Ovidian poem of graceful style and more than ordinary wit, published in 1602, and ascribed by some one writing in a contemporary hand upon the title-page, to John Beaumont, was John's we might regard the half dozen verses in praise of "thy pleasing rime," signed F. B., and beginning,

as young Francis' earliest effort in rhyme. The dedication of the Metamorphosis to "my loving friend, Master Michael Drayton," favours the conjectured composition by John, for he is writing other complimentary poems to Drayton in the years immediately following 1602. But, though F. B.'s lines prefatory to the Metamorphosis are not unworthy of a fanciful youngster, they are negligible; as is the evidence of their authorship. Certain flimsy love-poems included in a volume published forty years later, twenty-four years after Beaumont's death, as of his composition, have also been attributed to his boyhood at the University, or at the Inner Temple. Most of them have been definitely traced to other authors, and of the rest of this class still unassigned there is no reason to believe that he was the author. In the same volume, however, there appears as by Beaumont a metrical tale based upon Ovid, called Salmacis and Hermaphroditus , of which we cannot be certain that he was not the author. The poem was first published, without name of writer, in 1602, 22 22 Reprinted by Dramaticus, Sh. Soc. Pap. III, 94 (1847). and was not assigned to Francis Beaumont until 1639, when Lawrence Blaiklock included it among the Poems : By Francis Beaumont, Gent., entered on the Stationers' Registers, September 2, and published, 1640. Blaiklock evidently printed from John Hodgets's edition of 1602, carelessly omitting here and there a line, and introducing absurd typographical mistakes. Either because he had private information that Beaumont was the author, or because he wished to profit by Beaumont's reputation, he goes so far as to sign the initials, F. B., to the verse dedication, To Calliope , and to alter the signature, A. F., appended to an introductory sonnet, To the Author , so as to read I. F. (suggesting John Fletcher.) These licenses, in addition to the reckless inclusion in the 1640 volume of several poems by authors other than Beaumont, vitiate Blaiklock's evidence. On the other hand, the original publisher, Hodgets, was the publisher also, in 1607, of The Woman-Hater , a play now reasonably accepted as by Beaumont, originally alone; and, in Hodgets's edition of the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus , one of the introductory sonnets is signed J. B., and another W. B. The 'J. B.' sonnet is not unworthy of Beaumont's brother John. And if the W. B. of the other verses, In Laudem Authoris , is William Basse, – who in a sonnet, written after Beaumont's death, speaks of him as "rare Beaumont," – there is further justification for entertaining the possibility of Beaumont's authorship of the Salmacis . For Basse was one of the group of pastoralists to which Francis' friend Drayton, and Drayton's friend, William Browne, belonged, – a group with which Francis must have been acquainted. But of that we shall have more to say when we come to consider Beaumont's later connection with Drayton, and with the dramatic activities of the Inner Temple at a time when Browne and other pastoralists were members of it. For the present it is sufficient to say that Basse was himself issuing a pastoral romance in the year of Salmacis , 1602; and that he was by way of subscribing himself simply W. B.