Chapman was the first to strike into that field of romantic comedy which is now so peculiarly associated with the name of Fletcher."

40. John Marston.-John Marston (1575 ?-1634) was the son of John Marston, a lecturer of the Middle Temple, and the daughter of an Italian physician. He was probably born and certainly received his early education in Coventry. He was graduated at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1593. He began his literary career as a satirist in 1598; the next year he turned to the drama; but in 1607 he gave up his literary career to become a clergyman. From 1616 to 1631 he held the living of Christ Church, Hampshire.

Marston's satires of 1598 were "as strident as youth, cleverness, and inexperience could make them." " His first plays, Antonio and Mellida, and Antonio's Revenge, were of such turgid quality as to bring down upon him the ridicule of Jonson; yet it is important to note that these plays had a distinct part in the revival of the "bloodand-thunder" type of drama of which Hamlet remains as the highest example. For most of the period of his literary activity, however, Marston seems to have engaged in controversy. Much of his effort was directed against Jonson; yet in a season of reconciliation he collaborated with this great dramatist in the writing of Eastward Ho! and dedicated to him his best play, The Malcontent (1600). The malcontent is a banished duke who returns disguised to his former court and under the form of a mad humor speaks bitter truths. Other plays also contain strong

Parrott: Introduction to All Fooles and The Gentleman Usher,

'Schelling: English Drama, 128.

situations. However, "the texture of Marston's genius was singularly unequal, and he constantly promises more than he performs. In comedy only can it be truly said that he achieved success; yet in his more ambitious and less successful work there resides an arresting quality. When we are about to condemn unreservedly, he flashes into unexpected splendor; when we lay down the book, his characters refuse to be altogether dismissed into the limbo of forgotten things." 8

41. Thomas Dekker.-Thomas Dekker (1570 ?-1640?) with his literary work has left a tradition of singular charm. Of his life comparatively little is known. There is a notice in Henslowe's diary to the effect that he was at one time loaned forty shillings so that he might get out of jail, and he was in prison for debt from 1613 to 1616. He first appears in literary history in 1597, and for several years thereafter he seems frequently to have worked in collaboration with other playwrights. He was engaged in the stage quarrels of the time, taking sides with Marston against Jonson, and, as has been observed, writing his Satiromastix (1602) in reply to the Poetaster, exhibiting, however, no real malevolence. He worked very fast at times. "In the two years 1598 and 1599 Dekker wrote six plays single-handed and collaborated in at least eighteen." In 1631 he said that he had been a priest in Apollo's temple many years and that his voice had decayed with age. He disappears from view after 1637.

The best of the plays undoubtedly Dekker's are The

W. Macneile Dixon: " Chapman, Marston, Dekker," in C. H. E. L., VI, 56-57.

'Bates: Introduction to Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness and The Fair Maid of the West, xiv.

Shoemaker's Holiday (1597-9), The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus (1596), and The Honest Whore (1604), to which last a second part was afterwards added. The Shoemaker's Holiday is realistic in method and shows the life of the working class of London without the satire or the sordidness of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. The story deals with the rise in fortune of Simon Eyre, an exuberantly jolly shoemaker with singular pride in his craft and his burgher dignity; and the main plot has to do with the love of young Lacy and the mayor's daughter. The virtue of the work is not in its plot but in its characters and the wholesome though boisterous fun. Old Fortunatus is Dekker's version of the story of the purse that never runs dry. Old Fortunatus robs the Grand Turk of his wonderful hat and dies miserably in the second act. His son, Andelocio, however, fails to profit by his experience and also comes to grief. The play has little regard for probability and not much for dramatic unity. Its merit lies in individual passages of poetry; the blank verse, though careless, is often brilliant. The Honest Whore, in the first part of which especially Dekker was assisted by Middleton, uses in its two parts the same characters and the same moral lesson. It tells the story of Bellafront, "who has fallen but who is regenerated by a sincere love and is aided in her determination to lead an honest life by her own father, who has repudiated her in her evil days but now in disguise befriends her." 10

"Dekker is in no sense decadent, being the antithesis of Jonson in almost every way. Jonson was learned, classic and a theorizer, heavy and dignified; Dekker romantic, spontaneous, with no theories, a man of the streets who Schelling: English Drama, 113.

10

knew London well by night and who wrote when he was hungry whatever the publisher demanded." 11 His works exhibit " a certain careless geniality and wholesome sweetness of temper which make him, though not the most admirable, perhaps the most lovable of all our old playwrights." 12

42. Beaumont and Fletcher. The collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher is the most famous in the history of dramatic literature. Both of these men were of the gentility and their plays reflect the temper that was more and more to dominate court life under the Stuarts. Fletcher, the elder of the two, was a clever and very fast worker, while Beaumont, so far as we can judge, was of decidedly more than average poetic and dramatic power. The two men together, however, left a mass of work the question of whose authorship has within recent years been a constant challenge to investigators.

Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) was the son of a Leicestershire jurge of common pleas. In 1597 he entered what is now Pembroke College, Oxford, but his father dying he left without a degree. In 1600 he became a member of the Inner Temple, but he soon abandoned law for poetry. His connection with Fletcher began about 1605, and in the same year, moved by the art of Volpone, he wrote some complimentary verses to his "dear friend Master Ben Jonson." About 1613 he was married. When he died he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was born at Rye, in Sussex, the son of Richard Fletcher, minister of Rye and later Bishop of London. He entered what is now Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1591; but after this date 12 Wendell.

11 Neilson.

not a great deal is known with definiteness about his life. After Beaumont's withdrawal from the literary partnership he worked in collaboration with Massinger, Jonson, and Shakespeare. He died of the plague, and he seems to have left a pleasant reputation for modesty, simple selfrespect, and courtesy in his dealings with others.

Not less than fifty-two plays are commonly credited to Beaumont and Fletcher, aside from such a work as Henry VIII, in which Fletcher probably had some hand but which is regularly assigned to Shakespeare. "It is probable that, of the fifty-two plays which have commonly passed under the joint names, at least one belongs to Beaumont alone, and in some eight or nine others he cooperated with Fletcher, taking, usually, the leading part in the combination; that Fletcher was the sole author of about fifteen plays, and that there are some two-andtwenty, formerly attributed to the pair conjointly, in which we find Fletcher's work combined with that of other authors than Beaumont, besides five or six in which, apparently, neither Fletcher nor Beaumont had any appreciable share." 13 As for the plays which quite certainly belong either singly or jointly to the two men, criticism has concerned itself most largely with the matter of style. Those works known to be Fletcher's constantly exhibit loose metrical structure and weak line-endings. Such a play accordingly as The Knight of the Burning Pestle, of markedly different quality, is regularly assigned to Beaumont. The younger dramatist also seems mainly to have been responsible for the plotting and construction of Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, and A King and No 13 G. C. Macaulay: "Beaumont and Fletcher," C. H. E. L., VI, 130-31.

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