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Jacobean Tragicomedy and the Reconfiguration of Private Life

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Jacobean Tragicomedy and the Reconfiguration of Private Life 4 Transforming Sexuality: Jacobean Tragicomedy and the Reconfiguration of Private Life 1 Jacobean tragicomedy is the last original formal creation of En­ glish Renaissance drama meant for a public audience. Despite many illuminating studies, no explanation has ever accounted for all of the oddities of this hybrid genre, the most prominent of which remains the striking discrepancy between the aesthetic in­ fe riority of many of the plays and their undoubted historical im­ portance, including their contemporary popularity and the crucial role they played in the long-term development of seventeenth­ century drama. 1 Explanations that center on Shakespeare's ro- 1. See, e.g., Arthur C. Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottes­ ville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), pp. 3-4: "ThoughJonson's reputa­ tion may have been higher among the literati and Shakespeare's influence may have been more profound and enduring, it was (Beaumont and Fletcher) who clearly dominated the repertory of the English stage forthe better part of the seventeenth century ....It was only in the 1670s ...that the authority of their dramaturgy began to be questioned, and even then it continued to ex­ ercise a considerable influence, especially upon Restoration comedy. No En­ glish dramatists before or since have had so extraordinary an influence." In Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, N .J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., explores this long-ranging influence of Fletcherian characterization. For studies of the reputation of Beaumont and Fletcher, see Lawrence Wallis, Fletcher, Beaumont and Company: Entertainers to the Jacobean Gentry (New York: King's Crown, 1947); and William W. Appleton, Beaumont and Fletcher: A Critical Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956). Tragicomedy and the Private Life mances are clearly inadequate to any historical inquiry into the form. Notonly did Shakespeare retire over a decade beforethe end of James's reign, when the majority of tragicomedies were pro­ duced; but analyses of his romances cannot fail to focus on the miraculous reconciliations, the overcoming of suffering and in­ justice, that illuminate his last plays but that pointedly contrast with the deflating, irreverent levity characterizing the bulk of late Jacobean tragicomedies. Known as "the Beaumont and Fletcher plays," that bulk is largely the product of John Fletcher, who (though he had collaborators, primarily Francis Beaumont and Philip Massinger) became the chief playwright of the King's Men and dominated the Jacobean stage from Shakespeare's retirement in 1613 to his own death in 1625.2 Dryden himself tells us that it was Beaumont and Fletcher who provided the primary imaginative link between Renaissance and Restoration drama: "Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year forone of Shakespeare's or Johnson's ....Their plots were generally more regular than Shakespeare's, especially those which were made before Beaumont's death; and they under­ stood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better; whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in repartees, no 2. The designation "the Beaumont and Fletcher plays" generally refers to approximately fifty plays written by Beaumont, Fletcher, and a variety of other collaborators. Assessments of the precise number vary slightly. As reported by editors Arnold Glover and A. R. Waller in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905- 12), vol. l, p. v, the second Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (1679) contained fifty-two plays. Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama: 975-1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), assigns fifty-sixplays to Beaumont and Fletcher. The authorship of the plays (particu­ larly the possible collaborations between Shakespeare and Fletcher) has in­ spired a much wider debate. The most extensive and impressive work can be found in Cyrus Hoy, "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon," Studies in Bibliography, 8 (1956), 129-46; 9 (1957), 143-62; II (1958), 85-106; 12 (1959), 91-u6; 13 (1960), 77-108; 14 (1961), 45-67; 15 (1962), 71-90. For further informationon authorship stud­ ies, see Denzell S. Smith, "Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, " in The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith (Lin­ coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 52-53. 179 The Expense of Sp irit poet can ever paint as they have done ....I am apt to believe the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection: what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than orna­ mental." Dryden, of course, later recognizes the superiority of Shakespeare. But acknowledging Shakespeare's obvious greatness does not nullify the point that it is Fletcher, much more than Shakespeare, whose influence can be discerned in the most endur­ ing and delightful of Restoration dramatic creations, the comedy of manners. 3 Recognizing the extent of Fletcher's influence, studies of the large Beaumont and Fletcher corpus tend to fall into the now outmoded opposition of "critical" versus "historical" analyses gen­ erated by the dominance of the new criticism. Concentrating on what is defined as "the text itself, " the formervariety have helped greatly in underscoring thematic patterns and subtly unraveling the tone of the plays, but are ultimately defeated by the plays' artistic mediocrity. 4 The second version of this approach takes two forms. The first attempts to account for the blend of established conventions, novel techniques, and ingenious structural devices peculiar to tragicomedy by tracing their generic origins in classical and medieval drama, as well as in romantic story. 5 Such analyses tend to stress the importance of the sixteenth-century Italian poet- 3. John Dryden, "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), vol. I, p. 81. Though Ben Jonson is another obvious influence on the comedy of manners, he did not focus on the battle of the sexes, as Fletcher and his collaborators did. 4. See, e.g., J. F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shake­ sp eare, Beaumont and Fletcher (London: Faber & Faber, 1952); Philip Edwards, "The Danger Not the Death: The Art of John Fletcher," in Jacobean Theater, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, no. 1, ed. J. R. Brown and B. Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), pp. 159-77; Philip J. Finkelpearl, "Beaumont, Fletcher, and 'Beaumont and Fletcher': Some Distinctions," English Literary Renaissance, l (1971), 144-64; Cyrus Hoy, "Renaissance and Restoration Dra­ matic Plotting," Renaissance Drama, 9 (1966), 247-64; Clifford Leech, The John Fletcher Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962); Marco Mincoff, "Fletcher's Early Tragedies," Renaissance Drama, 7 (1964), 70-94; Michael Neill, '"The Simetry, Which Gives a Poem Grace': Masque, Imagery, and the Fancy of The Maid's Tragedy," Renaissance Drama, N.S. 3 (1970), I11-35 ; and Nancy Cotton Pearse, John Fletcher's Chastity Plays: Mirrors of Modesty (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1973). 5. The most important of these studies is Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (1952; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 180 Tragicomedy and the Private Life playwright Guarini, whose pastoral tragicomedy II Pastor Fido ( 1589, translated in 1601) and whose critical pronouncements defining the form directly influenced Fletcher, particularly in wri­ ting his own definitionof tragicomedy. These influencest udies are weakened by the fact that Fletcher's generic definition, though unique, is nevertheless notoriously inadequate and fails to account forhis work. 6 Indeed, Fletcher's pastoral tragicomedy The Faithfal Shepherdess (1608), the only one of his plays directly influenced by Guarini, was a drastic failure. His later work reveals that he largely abandoned the premises that he had pedantically tried to impose on a reluctant readership when the play was published sometime be­ fore the end of 1610. A second, historical approach attempts to place the Beaumont and Fletcher plays in the Tudor-Stuart dramatic tradition, which they are viewed as concluding. Because it endeavors to account for the contemporary popularity and influence of the plays, this ap­ proach is more effective. 7 Yet Fletcherian tragicomedy is too often dismissed as an inward-turning, decadent form, an exhausted re- 1969). See also Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Eliz­ abethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 186-215. 6. See John Fletcher, The Faith.fa/ Shepherdess, in Stuart Plays, ed. Arthur H. Nethercot, Charles R. Baskervill, and Virgil B. Heltzel; rev. Arthur H. Nethercot (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), p. 559: "A tragi­ comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no lifebe questioned, so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy." The trag­ icomedy The Two Noble Kinsmen, however, concludes with the death of one of the heroes. Cf. Giambattista Guarini, "The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry," in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilbert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), p. 5u: "He who composes tragicomedy takes fromtragedy its great persons but not its great action, its verisimilar plot but not its true one, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure, but not its sadnes.s, its danger but not its death; from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and above all the comic order." 7.
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