Philaster

Overview

About a hundred pages, written jointly by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher around 1609 and first published in 1620, and generally credited with establishing the specific formula that Jacobean tragicomedy would follow for the rest of the period. Beaumont and Fletcher wrote as a genuine collaborative partnership for the King’s Men, the company Shakespeare himself belonged to, and Philaster was their first major commercial success together, popular enough on stage to define what audiences and the company alike expected from the pair’s subsequent work, and influential enough to shape how other playwrights of the period constructed tragicomic plots for a generation afterward.

The genre itself, tragicomedy, was not entirely new; Fletcher had already written a preface defending the form theoretically in an earlier play, arguing that a tragicomedy need not lack deaths to avoid being a tragedy, but must simply bring characters near enough to death that the danger feels genuinely real before finally sparing them. Philaster is the play where that theoretical defense found its most commercially successful practical demonstration, combining a political plot about disputed succession with a romantic plot about jealousy and mistaken accusation, and resolving both simultaneously in a final act that pulls every major character back from the brink of the tragic fate the earlier acts had seemed to be building toward.

What happens

The political situation. The king of Sicily has usurped the throne from Philaster’s father, and Philaster, though beloved by the common people as the rightful heir, has been kept from power and lives at court under the usurping king’s uneasy tolerance. The king plans to marry his daughter Arethusa to Pharamond, a Spanish prince, a match that would secure a foreign alliance but that Arethusa herself has no wish for, since she is secretly in love with Philaster, and he with her.

Bellario, the go-between. Philaster, needing a discreet way to communicate with Arethusa without exposing their relationship at a court where his own position is already precarious, gives her his devoted young page, Bellario, to serve as a messenger and companion. Bellario serves both of them with a loyalty that the play, in its early acts, presents simply as exceptional devotion to a beloved master, without yet revealing the deeper reason behind it.

Jealousy and the false accusation. A rival at court, motivated by malice, spreads a false report to Philaster that Arethusa and Bellario have become lovers, exploiting the natural intimacy of their arrangement as go-between and princess. Philaster, given no real opportunity or inclination to verify the charge before acting on it, is consumed by jealous rage. In a scene the play stages with genuine dramatic force, he confronts Arethusa in a forest, where, in his anguish and fury, he wounds her, and shortly afterward, in confused circumstances, wounds Bellario as well, believing himself betrayed by both of the people he loved and trusted most.

Escalation and near-catastrophe. The wounding sets off a cascade of consequences that drive the play toward what looks, through most of the fourth and fifth acts, like an unavoidable tragic conclusion: Philaster is captured and imprisoned, accused of assaulting the princess, and stands under sentence that could easily mean his execution. Arethusa, despite having been wounded by the very man now condemned, refuses to abandon her love for him and works, alongside a popular uprising among the common people who have never accepted the usurping king’s rule and who still regard Philaster as their rightful prince, to save him.

The revelation and resolution. Just as the political and romantic plots seem to be converging toward disaster, catastrophe is averted on two fronts simultaneously. Bellario, brought before the court to answer for the supposed affair with Arethusa, reveals a secret that reorganizes everything the audience has understood about the play’s central relationships: Bellario is not a boy at all but a young noblewoman, Euphrasia, who has loved Philaster hopelessly and in silence, and who took service with him in disguise specifically so she could remain near him, serving his love for another woman without any hope of her own devotion ever being returned or even recognized.

This revelation clears both Arethusa and Bellario of the false accusation that set the whole crisis in motion, since Bellario’s devotion, real as it is, was never to Arethusa but to Philaster himself, expressed through years of loyal, self-effacing service rather than through any actual betrayal. Simultaneously, the popular uprising in Philaster’s favor forces the usurping king’s hand, and Philaster is restored to his rightful position, freed from imprisonment, reconciled fully with Arethusa, who marries him despite the wound he gave her, while Bellario’s own unrequited devotion is acknowledged with sympathy by the other characters even as the play, true to its genre, resolves the central romance in Arethusa’s favor rather than hers.

How to read it

Read the play with the genre’s structural logic in mind: tragicomedy, as Beaumont and Fletcher practice it here, is not a story that avoids tragic material but one that pushes every plot line to the genuine brink of tragic outcome, real wounds, real danger of execution, real political catastrophe, before swerving away at the last possible moment. Reading it as though it were simply a comedy with some serious moments underplays how close the play repeatedly comes to the deaths a straightforward tragedy would deliver.

Pay attention to how little verification Philaster actually seeks before acting on the false accusation against Arethusa and Bellario. His jealousy moves from suspicion to violence with startling speed, and the play is doing real psychological work in showing exactly how a devoted lover can be turned toward cruelty by nothing more than an unverified story that confirms an anxiety he was already primed to believe.

Notice how the Bellario revelation reorganizes the play’s earlier scenes in retrospect. Once you know that the loyal, self-effacing page is a woman in disguised, hopeless love with Philaster, the earlier scenes of Bellario’s service take on a different, more poignant weight, and rereading them with that knowledge is genuinely worthwhile.

Read this play alongside Shakespeare’s late romances, particularly Cymbeline, which shares several structural elements, a wrongly accused woman, a disguised loyal follower, political restoration arriving alongside romantic reconciliation, and consider what Beaumont and Fletcher’s more commercially calculated tragicomic formula shares with, and how it differs from, Shakespeare’s own late experiments in the same general mode.

Consider Bellario’s fate at the play’s end as an open question rather than a fully resolved one. The play grants her sympathy and acknowledgment but not the romantic outcome her devotion might seem to deserve by any straightforward standard of dramatic justice, and deciding how to feel about that unresolved cost is part of what the play leaves its audience to work out.

Questions it raises

• Philaster wounds Arethusa on the strength of an accusation he never verifies. Does the play treat this as a forgivable consequence of love’s intensity, or as a genuine moral failure that happens to escape its usual consequences?
• Bellario’s devotion to Philaster goes unrewarded even after it is revealed and acknowledged. What does the play’s willingness to leave this cost unresolved suggest about what tragicomedy is actually willing to sacrifice for its happy ending?
• Is tragicomedy, as practiced here, a genuinely different way of exploring the same material tragedy explores, or is it a formula for having the emotional intensity of tragedy without its consequences?
• The political and romantic plots resolve simultaneously in the final act. Does linking Philaster’s rightful rule to his romantic vindication strengthen the play’s sense of justice, or does it conveniently let one resolution stand in for the other?
• How does knowing Bellario’s true identity change how you read the earlier scenes of loyal service? Does the play plant enough for an attentive audience to suspect the truth before the revelation, or is the surprise meant to be total?
• What does Philaster’s speed in believing the accusation against Arethusa reveal about the position of women at this court, whose reputations can be destroyed by an unverified rumor a powerful man is eager to believe?