Beaumont & Fletcher, Thierry and Theodoret

Beaumont & Fletcher Thierry and Theodoret

The Works of Beaumont & Fletcher; The Text Formed from a New Collation of the Early Editions. With Notes and a Biographical Memoir by The Rev. Alexander Dyce. In Eleven Volumes. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLIII.

I am by no means satisfied either that Thierry and Theodoret was produced so early as he concludes, or that it was written entirely by Fletcher. The hand of Beaumont may be traced, I think, in its composition; (103)

…yet we know
That what was worn some twenty years ago
Comes into grace again; … (Prologue)

Brunhalt: Tax me not with these hot taintures!
[taintures: the old eds. Have ‘tainturs’ or ‘tainters’. Seward gave the latter. The Editors of 1778 rightly printed “taintures,” “though they do not remember meeting with the word!” It occurs elsewhere in these plays, as well as in Shakespeare, &c.]

(TT, Opening, 1.1, page 109)


Brunhalt: …Get you better servants,
People of honest actions, without ends,
And whip these knaves away; …

(TT, 1.1.110)


Brunhalt: Oh, ye gods!
Theodoret: Do not abuse their names: they see your actions;

(TT. 1.1.110)


Theodoret: …men these ruins,
And build again that broken fame, and fairly,
Your most intemperate fires have burnt; and quickly,
Within these ten days, take a monastery,
A most strict house; a house where none may whisper,
Where no more light is known but what may make you
Believe there is a day; where no hope dwells,
Nor comfort but in tears—

(TT. 1.1.112)


Theodoret: Leave these, and live like Niobe; I told you how;
And when your eyes have dropt away remembrance
Of what you were, I am your son: perform it. [Exit]

(T.T., 1.1.113)


Thierry: But I grow glorious—

(T.T., 2.1.122)


Bawdber: I hope your highness
Is pleas’d that I should still hold my place with you;
For I have been so long us’d to provide you
Fresh bits of flesh since mine grew stale, that surely,
If cashier’d now, I shall prove a bad eater
In the fish-market of cold Chastity.

(T.T., 2.1.122)


Martell: Note but yonder scarabs,
That liv’d upon the dung of her base pleasures;
How from the fear that she may yet prove honest
Hang down from their wicked heads!

(T.T., 2.1.127)



Brunhalt: My grief comes along
With the new queen, in whose grace all my power
Must suffer shipwreck. For me now,
That hitherto have kept the first, to know
A second place, or yield the least precedence
To any other, ’s death; to have my sleeps
Less enquir’d after, or my rising up
Saluted with less reverence, …

(T.T., 2.1.129)


Thierry: Sit all:
One health, and so to bed; for I too long
Defer my choicest delicates.
[One drink, wedding night]

(T.T., 2.4.129)


Brunhalt: Out, you pandar!
Why, to beat thee is only exercise
For such as do affect it: …

(T.T., 2.4.143)


Thierry: …thou hast never seen the rivers haste
With gladsome speed to meet the amorous sea.
Ordella: Ne’er but to praise the coolness of their streams.
Theirry: Nor view’d the kids, taught by their lustful fires,
Pursue each other through the wanton lawns,
And lik’d the sport.
Ordella: As it made way unto their envied rest,
With weary knots binding their harmless eyes.
Thierry: Nor do you know the reason why the dove,
One of the pair your hands wont hourly feed,
So often clipt and kiss’d her happy mate?
Ordella: Unless it were to welcome his wish’d sight,
Whose absence only gave her mourning voice.
Thierry: And you could, dove-like, to a single object
Bind your loose spirits? To one? Nay, such a one
Whom only eyes and ears must flatter good,
Your surer sense made useless? nay, myself,
As in my all of good, already known?
Ordella: Let proof plead for me: let me be mew’d up
Where never eye may reach me but your own;

(T.T., 3.1.146-7)

Thierry: Brother, friends, if honour unto shame
If wealth to want, enlarge the present sense,
My joys are unbounded. Instead of question,
Let it be envy not [to] bring a present
To the high offering of our mirth! banquets and masques
Keep waking our delights, mocking night’s malice,
Whose dark brow would fright pleasure from us! our court
Be but one stage of revels, and each eye
The scene where our content moves!
[if honour unto shame, if wealth to want: I see no difficulty in this passage, the meaning being clearly this: if the accession of honour to a person condemned to shame; if the accession of wealth to one in want, enlarge their feelings, their joys are unbounded. He considers himself as relived both from a sense of his own inability, or poverty, as he calls it, and a sense of shame also, by Ordella’s temperance. Instead of question, means instead of questioning whether I am happy or not; let it be considered as malice not to congratulate me on it. Mason.]

(T.T., 3.1.148)


Thierry: Music, why art thou so
Slow-voic’d? It stays thy presence, my Ordella;
This chamber is a sphere too narrow for
Thy all-moving virtue. Makeway, free way, I say!
Who must alone her sex’s want supply,
Had need to have a room both large and high.

(T.T., 3.1.148)


Bawdber: Give ground, whilst I drill my wits to the encounter.
[Exit Servant]
De Vitry, I take it.
De Vitry: All that’s left of him.
Bawdber: Is there another parcel of you? If it be at pawn, I
will gladly redeem it, to make you wholly mine.
De Vitry: You seek too hard a pennyworth.
Bawdber: You do ill to keep such distance; your parts have
been long known to me, howsoever, you please to forget acquaintance.
De Vitry: I must confess, I have been subject to lewd company.
Bawdber: Thanks for your good remembrance! You have
been a soldier, De Vitry, and borne arms.
De Vitry: A couple of unprofitable ones, that have only
served to get me a stomach to my dinner.
Bawdber: Much good may it do you, sir!
De Vitry: You should have heard me say, I had dine first: I have built on an unwholesome ground, raised up a house before I knew a tenant, marched to meet weariness, fought to find want and hunger.
Bawdber: ‘Tis time you put up your sword, and run away
For meat, sir: nay, if I had not withdrawn,
Ere now I might have kept the fast with you;
But since the way to thrive is never late,
What is the nearest course to profit, think you?
De Vitry: It may be your worship will say bawdry.
Bawdber: True sense, bawdry.
De Vitry: Why, is there five kinds of’em? I never knew but one.
Bawdber: I’ll shew you a new way of prostitution. Fall back! Further yet! Further! There is fifty crowns; do but as much to Protaldy, the queen’s favourite, they are doubled. [Gives money]
De Vitry: But thus much?
Bawdber: Give him but an affront as he comes to the presence, and in his drawing make way, like a true bawd, to his valour, the sum’s they own; if you take a scratch in the arm or so, every drop of blood weighs down a ducat.
De Vitry: After that rate, I and my friends would beggar the kingdom.
Sir, you have made me blush to see my want,
Whose cure is such a cheap and easy purchase:
This is male-bawdry, belike.

(T.T., 3.2.151-2)


Protaldy: You are saucy, sirrah!
De Vitry: The fitter to be in the dish with such dry stock-fish as you are [Protaldy strikes him.] How! Strike?

(T.T., 3.2.153)


De Vitry: Hear me, sir. This creature hired me with fifty crowns in hand to let Protaldy have the better of me at single rapier on a made quarrel: he, mistaking the weapon, lays me over the chaps with his club-fist, for which I was bold to teach him the art of memory.

(T.T., 3.2.153-4)


Brunhalt: Ha, ha! A son of mine! Do not dissever
Thy father’s dust, shaking his quiet urn,
To which thy breath would send so foul an issue:

(T.T., 3.2.156)


Thierry: How dare you then omit the ceremony
Due to the funeral of all my hopes?
Or come unto the marriage of my sorrows,
But in such colours as may sort with them?

(T.T., 4.2.173)


Thierry: …is there night
And rest for human labours? do not you
And all the world, as I do, out-stare Time,
And live, like funeral lamps, never extinguish’d?

(T.T., 5.2.188)


Thierry: …One of you sleep;
Lie down and sleep here, that I may behold
What blessed rest it is my eyes are robb’d of. [Attendant lies down]
See, he can sleep, sleep any where, sleep now,
When he that wakes for him can never slumber!
Is’t not a dainty ease?

(T.T., 5.2.189)


Martell: Why art thou such a monster?
Brunhalt: Why art thou
So tame a knave to ask me?

(T.T., 5.2.190)