"Make us a round ring with your bills, my Hectors," in Philaster, v. 4 (a Fletcher scene, however). With the next long speech by Antony, beginning with line 173, Beaumont had more to do. It opens and ends with a reference to tears, and in the middle is the line: "Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!"' One of the features of Beaumont's work, especially in Philaster, is the large, but silent, part "the gods" take in the dialogue. This trait is also noticeable in the companion play, Cymbeline. One poet may have infected the other; but there is good reason to believe that the prevalence of the habit bears upon the date of the revised Julius Caesar. When the Act "to restrain the abuses of players" in the use of unseemly language became law, the dramatists had recourse to euphemistic expressions to convey the meaning of the plainer language denied them. Since they were forbidden to use lightly the names sacred to Christian worship, they called upon the gods of Rome and Greece. At any rate, that was Beaumont's practice in Philaster, the happenings of which are supposed to have taken place under the Christian dispensation. Gods are, of course, proper in a Roman play; but there is no cause to think that the poet desired to obtain the right mythological atmosphere in Julius Caesar. Had that been the case, he would have kept the devil out of the play. But the fact that he calls him the "eternal," and not the "infernal," one is a proof that the modern version of Julius Caesar is later than 1605. Beaumont's male characters are constant weepers. In his day, tears in a man's eyes were less shameful than they are now. But even that does not quite account for Beaumont's readiness, at all times, to turn on the tap of liquid grief. Shakespeare's men sometimes shed tears, but if anyone will go to the trouble of comparing Beaumont's work with Shakespeare's, he will see that men weep much more frequently in the plays of Beaumont than they do in those of the reputed author of Julius Caesar. For, while Shakespeare tries to keep tears under, Beaumont evokes them. He regards grief with a dubious eye unless it is signalled by a lachrymal flow. Compare the words of Antony and "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now "O, now you weep, and I perceive you feel —with the remarks (somewhat compressed) of Leucippus in the last scene of Cupid's Revenge: "Look you there! Know you that face? that was Urania: If you can weep, there's cause; poor innocent, The use of the gesture ("Look you here!" and "Look you there!") in both passages is significant. Note, also, that in each of the two lines -the verse-accent is contradicted by the sense-accent in exactly the same place: "If you have tears" corresponds with "If you can weep." Should the reader be disposed to credit the theory that this play is to be ascribed to Marlowe and Beaumont, he will probably agree with me in seeing the later poet in tearful speeches and in those in which "the gods" are invoked or addressed. The sequence of apostrophic lines (202 to 206) is clearly a fragment of the old play, and there is much of the early, tautological matter in the last long speech of Antony's (lines 214 to 234). The following passage "Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths, And bid them speak for me '' -with lines in the preceding scene: "Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue -probably supplied the writer of A Warning for Fair Women (published 1599, but obviously a much earlier play) with: "I gave him fifteen wounds, Which now be fifteen mouths that do accuse me." 66 66 I look upon 'sweet friends" (204) and sweet Caesar" as certain marks of Marlowe. But I am inclined to think that the effect of Antony's disclosure of the will was brought about by Beaumont. From this point onward, to the entry of the Servant, the text follows Plutarch pretty closely. From that, one may surmise, in the absence of any determining factor pointing to Marlowe, that Beaumont finished and rounded off the scene. Note, in the sentence, "Mischief, thou art afoot!" an instance of a peculiarity often seen in this play-the personification of abstract qualities. Among those that Beaumont elsewhere gives a being to are: Arithmetic, Atheism, Constancy, Grief, Sadness, Sorrow, Patience, Tumult and Wisdom. Sometimes two are bracketed together, as in an apostrophe in a later scene, "O hateful Error, Melancholy's child," and in Cupid's Revenge, where, in sequent lines, Leucippus says his griefs would make Wisdom "run frantic through the streets and Patience quarrel with her shadow."* * I did not become acquainted with the volume of Mr. J. M. Robertson's work on the Shakespeare canon dealing with this play until the day (July 17) on which I had finished the putting into type of the remarks upon this scene. Το anyone who has read Mr. Robertson's book, it will be plain that that searching critic and my lowly self have found something of a common stock of parallels. I could have wished that I had seen in time the " 'gliding ghost"' one. But of the others that Mr. Robertson has found and I have missed, there are not many that I desire to use. I was aware that Greene and others had alluded to Cæsar and his shoal of captives. A scene containing a representation of this must have formed part of an early play, but I can find no reason for the belief that it figured in the work by Marlowe that Beaumont-or, shall we say, Shakespeare?-revised. III. Were it not for the fact that this scene is almost entirely based upon Plutarch, one might be disposed to believe that it is exactly as Marlowe left it. The conduct and language of the Commoners recall the mob scenes in 2 Henry VI., and if we prefer "things unlucky" to the unwieldy "things unluckily," we shall have a phrase that, appearing in Romeo and Juliet, is more in agreement with Marlowe's time and usage. We also meet with “turn him going," not elsewhere found in Beaumont, but present in As You Like It. There is, besides, a similarity between one of Shylock's speeches and the soliloquy of Cinna: "I dreamt to-night that I did feast with Cæsar, And things unluckily charge my fantasy: I have no will to wander forth of doors, Yet something leads me forth." On the other hand, the style of the speech that Amintor utters outside the bridal chamber in the Maid's Tragedy, ii. 1— -is not far removed from that of the unfortunate poet's foreboding. And, for the use of the indefinite word, "things," compare three other passages in the Maid's Tragedy, v. 4: Moreover, this scene contains "It is no matter : it was probably Beaumont, and not Marlowe, who was using this phrase. CHAPTER VI.—EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT: ACT 4. WHILE I. WHILE the claims of Marlowe to part-authorship of Julius Caesar are strongest in the Second and Third Acts, it is in the First and Fourth that we find the greatest number of parallels with the work of Beaumont. This is not so evident in the scene before us, which does not appear to contain, beyond a few particulars derived from Plutarch, many additions by the later poet. One of Marlowe's phrases still stands in "three-fold world." This, we have seen, he had previously used in the Second Part of Tamburlaine, iv. 3: "To note me emperor of the three-fold world." But the next speech of Antony's (18 to 27) begins with Octavius, I have seen more days than you," and the use of this line here is an anticipation of the rhyme of the Cynic, which is also brought in, in its proper place, at the end of the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius. I believe the speechthe line, at least-to be Beaumont's, and the reason for this belief will be given in due course. Besides the phrase noticed, there are some lines also of a Marlowean cast. Antony's last speech (29 to 47) has a number of "catalogue" lines and others of a tautological nature, e.g. : "It is a creature that I teach to fight, To wind, to stop, to run directly on." "He must be taught, and train'd, and bid go forth."' "One that feeds On abjects, orts and imitations." |