Chapter XXIV: Act I: , Scene 1, well illustrates this difference. The recurrence of the

feminine caesura measures fairly the relative elasticity of the versifiers. It regulates two-thirds of Fletcher's lines; but of his collaborator's not quite one half. Fletcher, for instance, wrote the speech of Tigranes, beginning the second scene of Act IV:

[+!] Fool | that I am, | I have | undone | myself,
[+!] And | with mine own | hand | turn'd | my for|tune round,
That was | a fair | one: | I have child|ishly
[+!] Plaid | with my hope | so long, till I have broke | it,
And now too late I mourn for 't, | O | Spaco|nia,
Thou hast found | an e|ven way | to thy | revenge | now!
[+!] Why | didst thou fol|low me, |[+!] like | a faint shad|ow,
To wither my desires? But, wretched fool,
[+!] Why | did I plant | thee | 'twixt | the sun | and me,
To make | me freeze | thus? | Why | did I | prefer | her
[+!] To | the fair Prin|cess? | O | thou fool, | thou fool,
Thou family of fools, |[+!] live | like a slave | still
And in | thee bear | thine own |[+!] hell | and thy tor|ment,--

where, beside the frequent double endings and end-stopped lines, already emphasized in preceding examples, we observe in the run of thirteen lines, six stress-syllable openings with their anapaestic sequences, three omissions of the light syllable after the caesural pause with the consequent accent at the beginning of the verse-section, and no fewer than six feminine caesurae (or pauses after an unaccented syllable) of which three at least (vv. 2, 5, 10) are exaggerated jolts.

Beaumont is capable in occasional passages, as, for instance, Arbaces' speech beginning Act I, 1, 105, of lines rippling with as many feminine caesurae. But, utterly unlike Fletcher, he employs in the first thirteen of those lines no double endings, no jolts, only two stress-syllable openings, only four anapaests, one omitted thesis after the caesural pause, four end-stopped lines. He is more frequently capable, as in the passage beginning l. 129, of a sequence without a single feminine caesura, but with several feminine (or double) endings:

_Tigranes._ Is it the course of
Iberia, to use their prisoners thus?
Had Fortune throwne my name above Arbaces,
I should not thus have talkt; for in Armenia
We hold it base. You should have kept your temper,
Till you saw home agen, where 't is the fashion
Perhaps to brag.

_Arbaces._ Bee you my witness, Earth,
Need I to brag? Doth not this captive prince
Speake me sufficiently, and all the acts
That I have wrought upon his suffering land?
Should I then boast? Where lies that foot of ground
Within | his whole | realme | that | I have | not past
Fighting and conquering?[156]

Up to the twelfth verse with its exceptional jolting pause the caesurae are masculine, and fall uncompromisingly at the end of the second and third feet.

In respect of the internal structure of the verse the tests for Beaumont are, then, as I have stated them above; in respect of double endings, Boyle and Oliphant have set the percentage in his verse at about twenty, and of run-on lines at thirty. Since the metrical characteristics of those parts of _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_ and _A King and No King_ which do not bear the impress of Fletcher's versification, are well defined and practically uniform; since they are of a piece with the metrical manner of _The Woman-Hater_, which is originally, and in general, the work of one author--Beaumont; and since they are also of a piece with the versification of the _Maske_, which is certainly by Beaumont alone, and with that of his best poems,--at least one criterion has been established by means of which we may ascertain what other plays, ascribed to the two writers in common, but on less definite evidence, were written in partnership; and in these we may have a basis for determining the parts contributed by each of the authors.

Fleay and other scholars have grounded an additional criterion upon the fact that the unaided plays of Fletcher contain but an insignificant quantity of prose. They consequently have ascribed to Beaumont most of the prose passages in the joint-plays. But, because in his later development Fletcher found that conversational blank verse would answer all the purposes of prose, it does not follow that in his youthful collaboration with Beaumont he never wrote prose. We find, on the contrary, in the joint-plays that the prose passages in scenes otherwise marked by Fletcher's characteristics of verse, display precisely the rhetorical qualities of that verse. The prose of Mardonius in Act IV, Scene 2 of _A King and No King_, and the prose of Act V, Scenes 1 and 3, which by metrical tests are Fletcher's, are precisely the prose of Fletcher's Dion in Act II, Scene 4 and Act V, Scene 3 of _Philaster_, and the tricks of alliteration, triplet, and iteration, are those of Fletcher's verse in the same scenes.

FOOTNOTES:

[149] Some sixteen plays in all.

[150] _The Chances_, I, 1, p. 222 (Dyce); but as a rule I use in this chapter the text of the _Cambridge English Classics_.

[151] For these scenes, and the reasons for asserting that Fletcher revised them, see Chapter XXIV below.

[152] The reader may judge for himself by referring to the citation from the _Letter_ and the poems to the Countess in Chapters VII and XI, above.

[153] Fleay, Boyle, Oliphant, Alden. And even G. C. Macaulay, who once claimed the whole play for Beaumont, says now "perhaps Fletcher's."

[154] Q 1622, slightly modernized.

[155] IV, 1, 2, 3; V, 1, 3.

[156] Quarto of 1619 as given by Alden.