BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, English dramatists.' The names of FRANCIS BEAUMONT (1584-1616) and JOHN FLETCHER are inseparably connected in the history of the English drama. John Fletcher was born in Dec. 1579 at Rye in Sussex, and baptized on the 20th of the same month. Richard Fletcher, his father, afterwards queen's chaplain, dean of Peter borough, and bishop successively of Bristol, Worcester, and Lon don, was then minister of the parish in which the son was born who was to make their name immortal. That son was just turned of seven when the dean distinguished and disgraced himself as the spiritual tormentor of the last moments on earth of Mary Stuart. When not quite 12 he was admitted pensioner of Bene't college, Cambridge, and two years later was made one of the Bible-clerks : of this college Bishop Fletcher had been president 20 years earlier, and six months before his son's admission had received from its authorities a first letter of thanks for various benefactions, to be followed next year by a second. Four years later than this, when John Fletcher wanted five or six months of his I7th year, the bishop died suddenly of overmuch tobacco and the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at his second marriage— this time, it appears, with a lady of such character as figures something too frequently on the stage of his illustrious son. He 'Recent research has resulted in some variation of opinion as to the precise authorship of some of the plays commonly attributed to them ; but this article, contributed to an earlier edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, remains the classical modern criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher, and its value is substantially unaffected. As representing to the end the views of its distinguished author, it is therefore retained as written though with some omissions necessitated by the restricted space available, the results of later research being epitomized in the Bibliographical Appendix at the end. (Ed.) left eight children by his first marriage in such distress that their uncle, Dr. Giles Fletcher, author of a treatise on the Russian commonwealth which is still held in some repute, was obliged to draw up a petition to the queen on their behalf, which was sup ported by the intercession of Essex, but with what result is uncertain.
From this date we know nothing of the fortunes of John Fletcher, till the needy orphan boy of 17 reappears as the brilliant and triumphant poet whose name is linked for all time with the yet more glorious name of Francis Beaumont, third and youngest son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, one of the justices of the common pleas—born, according to general report, in 1586, but, according to more than one apparently irrefragable docu ment, actually born two years earlier. The first record of his existence is the entry of his name, together with those of his elder brothers Henry and John, as a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates hall, Oxford, now supplanted by Pembroke college. But most lovers of his fame will care rather to remember the admirable lines of Wordsworth on the "eager child" who played among the rocks and woodlands of Grace-Dieu; though it may be doubted whether even the boy's first verses were of the peace ful and pastoral character attributed to them by the great laureate of the lakes. That passionate and fiery genius which was so soon and for so short a time to "shake the buskined stage" with heroic and tragic notes of passion and of sorrow, of scorn 'and rage, and slighted love and jealousy, must surely have sought vent from the first in fancies of a more ardent and ambitious kind; and it would be a likelier conjecture that when Frank Beaumont (as we know on more authorities than one that he was always called by his contemporaries, even in the full flush of his adult fame—"never more than Frank," says Heywood) went to college at the ripe age of 12, he had already committed a tragedy or two in emulation of Tamburlaine, Andronicus or Jeronymo. The date of his admission was Feb. 4, 1597; on April 22 of the following year his father died ; and on Nov. 3, 1600, having left Oxford without taking his degree, the boy of 15 was entered a member of the Inner Temple, his two brothers standing sponsors on the grave occasion. But the son of Judge Beaumont was no fitter for success at the bar than the son of Bishop Fletcher for distinction in the church : it is equally diffi cult to imagine either poet invested with either gown. Two years later appeared the poem of Salmacis and Hermapliroditus, gen erally attributed to Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion of the Ovidian legend, not on the whole discreditable to a lad of 18, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits. At 23 Beaumont prefixed to the magnificent masterpiece of Ben Jonson some noticeable verses in honour of his "dear friend" the author; and in the same year (1607) appeared the anonymous comedy of The Woman-Hater, usually assigned to Fletcher alone ; but being as it is in the main a crude and puerile imitation of Jonson's manner, and certainly more like a man's work at 22 than at 28, internal evidence would seem to justify, or at least to excuse those critics who in the teeth of high authority and tradition would transfer from Fletcher to Beaumont the principal re sponsibility for this first play that can be traced to the hand of either. As Fletcher also prefixed to the first edition of V olpone a copy of commendatory verses, we may presume that their common admiration for a common friend was among the earliest and strongest influences which drew together the two great poets whose names were thenceforward to be for ever indivisible. Entering college at the same age as Fletcher had entered six years earlier, Beaumont had before him a brighter and briefer line of life than his elder. But whatever may have been their respective situations when, either by happy chance or, as Dyce suggests, by the good offices of Jonson, they were first brought together, their intimacy soon became so much closer than that of ordinary brothers that the household which they shared as bachelors was conducted on such thoroughly communistic prin ciples as might have satisfied the most trenchant theorist who ever proclaimed as the cardinal point of his doctrine, a complete and absolute community of bed and board, with all goods thereto appertaining. But in the year following that in which the two younger poets had united in homage to Jonson, they had entered into a partnership of more importance than this in "the same clothes and cloak, etc." with other necessaries of life specified by Aubrey.
In 1608, if we may trust the reckoning which seems trust worthiest, the twin stars of our stage rose visibly together for the first time. The loveliest, though not the loftiest, of tragic plays that we owe to the comrades or the successors of Shake speare, Philaster, has generally been regarded as the first-born issue of their common genius. The noble tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret has sometimes been dated earlier and assigned to Fletcher alone; but we can be sure neither of the early date nor the single authorship. The main body of the play, comprising both the great scenes which throw out into full and final relief the character of either heroine for perfect good or evil, bears throughout the unmistakable image and superscription of Fletcher; yet there are parts which for gravity and steady strength of style, for reserve and temperance of effect, would seem to suggest the collaboration of a calmer and more patient hand ; and these more equable and less passionate parts of the poem recall rather the touch of Massinger than of Beaumont. In the second act, for example, the regular structure of the verse, the even scheme of the action, the exaggerated braggardism which makes of the hero a mere puppet or mouthpiece of his own self-will, are all qualities which, for better or for worse, remind us of the strength or the weakness of a poet with whom we know that Fletcher, bef ore or of ter his alliance with Beau mont, did now and then work in common. Even the Arbaces of Beaumont, though somewhat too highly coloured, does not "write himself down an ass," like Thierry on his first entrance, after the too frequent fashion of Massinger's braggarts and tyrants; does not proclaim at starting or display with mere wantonnness of exposure his more unlovely qualities in the naked nature of their deformity. Compare also the second with the first scene of the fourth act. In style and metre this second scene is as good an example of Massinger as the first is of Fletcher at his best. Observe especially in the elaborate narrative of the pre tended self-immolation of Ordella these distinctive notes of the peculiar style of Massinger; the excess of parenthetic sentences, no less than five in a space of 20 lines; the classical common place of allusion to Athens, Rome and Sparta in one superfluous breath ; the pure and vigorous but somewhat level and prosaic order of language, with the use of certain cheap and easy phrases familiar to Massinger as catchwords; the flat and feeble termina tions by means of which the final syllable of one verse runs on into the next without more pause or rhythm than in a passage of prose; the general dignity and gravity of sustained and meas ured expression. These are the very points in which the style of Massinger differs from that of Fletcher; whose lightest and loosest verses do not overlap each other without sensible dis tinction between the end of one line and the beginning of the next ; who is often too fluent and facile to be choice or forcible in his diction, but seldom if ever prosaic or conventional in phrase or allusion, and by no means habitually given to weave thoughts within thoughts, knit sentence into sentence, and hang whole paragraphs together by the help of loops and brackets. From these indications we might infer that this poem belongs altogether to a period later than the death of Beaumont ; though even during his friend's life it appears that Fletcher was once at least allied with Massinger and two lesser dramatists in the composition of a play, probably the Honest Man's Fortune, of which the accounts are to be found in Henslowe's papers.
Hardly eight years of toil and triumph, of joyous and glorious life were spared by destiny to the younger poet between the date assigned to the first radiant revelation of his genius in Philaster and the date which marks the end of all his labours. On March 6, 1616, Francis Beaumont died (according to Jonson and tradi tion) "ere he was 3o years of age," but this we have seen to be inconsistent with the registry of his entrance at Oxford. If we may trust the elegiac evidence of friends, he died of his own genius and fiery overwork of brain; yet from the magnificent and masculine beauty of his portrait one should certainly never have guessed that any strain of spirit or stress of invention could have worn out so long before its time so fair and royal a temple for so bright and affluent a soul. A student of physiognomy will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood, handsome and significant in feature and expression alike—Beau mont's the statelier and serener of the two, with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose, with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and the imperial head with its "fair large front" and clustering hair set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation : Fletcher's a more keen and fervid face, sharper in outline every way, with an air of bright ardour and glad fiery impatience ; sanguine and nervous, suiting the com plexion and colour of hair; the expression of the eager eyes and lips almost recalling that of a noble hound in act to break the leash it strains at—two heads as lordly of feature and as expres sive of aspect as any gallery of great men can show. That spring of 1616, we may note in passing, was the darkest that ever dawned upon England or the world ; for, just 48 days afterwards, it witnessed, on April 23, the removal from earth of the mightiest genius that ever dwelt among men. Scarcely more than a month and a half divided the death-days of Beaumont and of Shake speare. Some three years earlier by Dyce's estimate, when about the age of 29, Beaumont had married Ursula, daughter and co heiress to Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent, by whom he left two daughters, one of them posthumous. Fletcher survived his friend just nine years and five months ; he died "in the great plague, 1625," and was buried on Aug. 29, in St. Saviour's, South wark; not, as we might have wished, beside his younger fellow in fame, who but three days after his untimely death had added another deathless memory to the graves of our great men in Westminster Abbey, which he had sung in such noble verse. Dying when just four months short of 46, Fletcher had thus, as well as we can now calculate, altogether some 14 years and six months more of life than the poet who divides with him the imperial inheritance of their common glory.
The perfect union in genius and in friendship which has made one name of the two names of these great twin brothers in song is a thing so admirable and so delightful to remember, that it would seem ungracious and unkindly to claim for either a prec edence which we may be sure he would have been eager to dis claim. But if a distinction must be made between the Dioscuri of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than Castor can it be said that on any side Beau mont was a poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a difference.
Although the beloved friend of Jonson, and in the field of comedy his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthi est and the closest follower of Shakespeare. In the external but essential matter of expression by rhythm and metre he approves himself always a student of Shakespeare's second manner, of the style in which the graver or tragic part of his historical or romantic plays is mostly written; doubtless, the most perfect model that can be studied by any poet who, like Beaumont, is great enough to be in no danger of sinking to the rank of a mere copyist, but while studious of the perfection set before him is yet conscious of his own personal and proper quality of genius, and enters the presence of the master not as a servant but as a son. The general style of his tragic or romantic verse is as simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity of outline as that of Fletcher's is by comparison lax, effusive, exuberant. The matchless fluency and rapidity with which the elder brother pours forth the stream of his smooth swift verse gave probably the first occasion for that foolish rumour which has not yet fallen duly silent, but still murmurs here and there its suggestion that the main office of Beaumont was to correct and contain within bounds the overflowing invention of his colleague. The poet who while yet a youth had earned by his unaided mastery of hand such a crown as was bestowed by the noble love and the loving "envy" of Ben Jonson was, according to this tradition, a mere precocious pedagogue, fit only to revise and restrain the too liberal effusions of his elder in genius as in years. Now, in every one of the plays common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every such play, and above all of their two masterpieces, Philaster and The Maid's Tragedy, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has not to do with the author of Valentinian and The Double Marriage. In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more fluid, more feminine. From the first scene to the last we are swept as it were along the race of a running river, always at full flow of light and buoyant melody, with no dark reaches or perilous eddies, no stagnant pools or sterile sandbanks; its bright course only varied by sudden rapids or a stronger ripple here and there, but in rough places or smooth still stirred and spar kling with summer wind and sun. But in those tragic poems of which the dominant note is the note of Beaumont's genius and a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper key of emotion is touched than ever was struck by Fletcher. The lighter genius is palpably subordinate to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the impression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this dis tinction is never grave enough to produce a discord : it is also true that the plays in which the predominance of Beaumont's mind and style is generally perceptible make up altogether but a small section of the work that bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true that within this section the most precious part of that work is comprised. Outside it we shall find no figures so firmly drawn, no such clearness of outline, no such cunning of hands as we recognize in the three great studies of Bellario, Evadne and Aspatia. In his male characters, as for instance in the parts of Philaster and Arbaces, Beaumont also is apt to show something of that exaggeration or inconsistency for which his colleague is perhaps more frequently and more heavily to blame; but in these there is not a jarring note, not a touch misplaced; unless, indeed a rigid criticism may condemn as un feminine and incongruous with the gentle beauty of her pathetic patience the device by which Aspatia procures herself the death desired at the hand of Amintor. This is noted as a fault by Dyce; but may well be forgiven for the sake of the magnificent scene which follows, and the highest tragic effect ever attained on the stage of either poet. That this as well as the greater part of those other scenes which are the glory of the poem is due to Beaumont might readily be shown at length by the process of comparison. The noble scene of regicide, which it was found expedient to cancel during the earlier years of the Restoration, may indeed be the work of Fletcher; but the part of Evadne must undoubtedly be in the main assigned to the more potent hand of his fellow. There is a fine harmony of character between her naked audacity in the second act and her fierce repentance in the fourth, which is not unworthy a disciple of the tragic school of Shakespeare ; Fletcher is less observant of the due balance, less heedful of the nice proportions of good and evil in a faulty and fiery nature, compounded of perverse instinct and passionate reaction. From him we might have had a figure as admirable for vigour of handling, but hardly in such perfect keeping as this of Beaumont's Evadne, the murderess—Magdalen, whose penitence is of one crimson colour with her sin. Nor even in Fletcher's Ordella, worthy as the part is throughout even of the precious and exquisite praise of Lamb, is there any such cunning touch of tenderness or delicate perfume of pathos as in the parts of Bellario and Aspatia. These have in them a bitter sweetness, a subtle pungency of mortal sorrow and tears of divine delight, beyond the reach of Fletcher. His highest studies of female character have dignity, energy, devotion of the heroic type; but they never touch us to the quick, never waken in us any finer and more profound sense than that of applause and admiration. There is a modest pathos now and then in his pic tures of feminine submission and slighted or outraged love; but this submission he is apt to make too servile, this love too dog like in its abject devotion to retain that tender reverence which so many generations of readers have paid to the sweet memories of Aspatia and Bellario. To excite compassion was enough for Fletcher, as in the masculine parts of his work it was enough for him to excite wonder, to sustain curiosity, to goad and stimulate by any vivid and violent means the interest of readers or spec tators. The single instance of noble pathos, the one scene he has left us which appeals to the higher and purer kind of pity, is the death of the child Hengo in Bonduca—a scene which of itself would have sufficed to enrol his name for ever on the list of our great tragic poets. But no surer test or better example can be taken of the distinctive quality which denotes the graver genius of either poet than that supplied by a comparison of Beaumont's Triumph of Love with Fletcher's Triumph of Death. Each little play, in the brief course of its single act, gives proof of the peculiar touch and special trick of its author's hand; the deeper and more delicate passion of Beaumont, the rapid and ardent activity of Fletcher, have nowhere found a more notice able vent for the expression respectively of the most tender and profound simplicity of quiet sweetness, the most buoyant and impatient energy of tragic emotion.
In the wider field of their comic or romantic drama it is yet easier to distinguish the respective work of either hand. The bias of Fletcher was towards mixed comedy; his lightest and wildest humour is usually crossed or tempered by an infusion of romance; like Shakespeare in this one point at least, he has left no single play without some touch on it of serious interest, of poetic eloquence or fancy, however slight and fugitive. Beau mont, evidently under the imperious influence of Ben Jonson's more rigid theories, seems rather to have bent his genius with the whole force of a resolute will into the form or mould prescribed for comedy by the elder and greater comic poet. The admirable study of the worthy citizen and his wife, who introduce to the stage and escort with their applause The Knight of the Burning Pestle through his adventurous career to its untimely end, has all the force and fullness of Jonson's humour at its best, with more of freshness and freedom. In pure comedy, varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody, Beaumont was the earliest as well as the ablest disciple of the master whose mantle was afterwards to be shared among the academic poets of a younger generation, the Randolphs and Cartwrights who sought shelter under the shadow of its voluminous folds. The best example of the school of Jonson to be found outside the ample range of his own work is The Scornful Lady, a comedy whose exceptional success and prolonged popularity must have been due rather to the broad effect of its forcible situations, its wealth and variety of ludicrous incidents, and the strong gross humour of its dia logue, than to any finer quality of style, invention or character. It is the only work of Beaumont and Fletcher which a critic who weighs the meaning of his words can admit to be as coarse as the coarsest work of Ben Jonson.
The buoyant and facile grace of Fletcher's style carries him lightly across quagmires in which a heavier-footed poet, or one of slower tread, would have stuck fast, and come forth bemired to the knees. To Beaumont his stars had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour; to Fletcher had been allotted a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fullness of bright exuberant speech. The genius of Beaumont was deeper, sweeter, nobler than his elder's; the genius of Fletcher more brilliant, more supple, more prodigal, and more voluble than his friend's. With out a taint or a shadow on his fame of such imitative servility as marks and degrades the mere henchman or satellite of a stronger poet, Beaumont may fairly be said to hold of Shakes peare in his tragedy, in his comedy of Jonson; in each case rather as a kinsman than as a client, as an ally than as a follower : but the more special province of Fletcher was a land of his own discovering, where no later colonist has ever had power to settle or to share his reign. With the mixed or romantic comedy of Shakespeare it has nothing in common except the admixture or alternation of graver with lighter interest, of serious with humor ous action. Nothing is here of his magic exaltation or charm of fairy empire. The rare and rash adventures of Fletcher on that forbidden track are too sure to end in pitiful and shameful failure. His crown of praise is to have created a wholly new and wholly delightful form of mixed comedy or dramatic romance, dealing merely with the humours and sentiments of men, their passions and their chances; to have woven of all these a web of emotion and event with such gay dexterity, to have blended his colours and combined his effects with such exquisite facility and swift light sureness of touch, that we may return once and again from those heights and depths of poetry to which access was forbidden him, ready as ever to enjoy as of old the fresh incomparable charm, the force and ease and grace of life, which fill and animate the radiant world of his romantic invention. Neither before him nor of ter do we find, in this his special field of fancy and of work, more than shadows or echoes of his coming or departing genius. The quality of his genius, never sombre or subtle or profound, bears him always towards fresh air and sun shine. His natural work is in a midday world of fearless boyish laughter and hardly bitter tears. There is always more of rain bow than of storm in his skies; their darkest shadow is but a tragic twilight. What with him is the noon of night would seem as sunshine on the stage of Ford or Webster. There is but one passage in all these noble plays which lifts us beyond a sense of the stage, which raises our admiration out of speech into silence, tempers and transfigures our emotion with a touch of awe. And this we owe to the genius of Beaumont, exalted for an instant to the very tone and manner of Shakespeare's tragedy, when Amintor stands between the dead and the dying woman whom he has unwittingly slain with hand and tongue. The first few lines that drop from his stricken lips are probably the only verses of Beaumont or Fletcher which might pass for Shakespeare's even with a good judge of style— This earth of mine doth tremble, etc.
But in Fletcher's tragedy, however we may be thrilled and kindled with high contagious excitement, we are never awed into dumb delight or dread, never pierced with any sense of terror or pity too deep or even deep enough for tears. Even his Brun halts and Martias can hardly persuade us to forget for the moment that "they do but jest, poison in jest." A critic bitten with the love of classification might divide those plays of Fletcher usually ranked together as comedies into three kinds : the first he would class under the head of pure comedy, the next of heroic or romantic drama, the third of mixed comedy and romance ; in this, the last and most delightful division of the poet's work the special qualities of the two former kinds being equally blended and delicately harmonized. The most perfect and triumphant examples of this class are The Spanish Curate, Monsieur Thomas, The Custom of the Country, and The Elder Brother. Next to these and not too far below them, we may put The Little French Lawyer (a play which in its broad conception of a single eccentric humour suggests the collaboration of Beau mont and the influence of Jonson, but in style and execution throughout is perfect Fletcher), The Humorous Lieutenant (on which an almost identical verdict might be passed), Women Pleased, Beggars' Bush, and perhaps we might add The Fair Maid of the Inn; in most if not in all of which the balance of exultant and living humour with serious poetic interest of a noble and various kind is held with even hand and the skill of a natural master. In pure comedy Rule a Wife and have a Wife is the acknowledged and consummate masterpiece of Fletcher. Next to it we might class, for comic spirit and force of character, Wit without Money, The Wild Goose-Chase, The Chances, and The Noble Gentleman—a broad poetic farce to whose over flowing fun and masterdom of extravagance no critic has ever done justice but Leigh Hunt, who has ventured, not without reason, to match its joyous and preposterous audacities of super lative and sovereign foolery with the more sharp-edged satire and practical merriment of King and No King, where the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and his swordsmen is as typical of the comic style in which Beaumont had been trained up under Ben Jonson as the high interest and graduated action of the serious part of the play are characteristic of his more earnest genius. Among the purely romantic plays of Fletcher, or those in which the comic effect is throughout subordinate to the romantic, The Knight of Malta seems most worthy of the highest place for the noble beauty and exaltation of spirit which informs it with a lofty life, for its chivalrous union of heroic passion and catholic devotion. This poem is the fairest and the first example of those sweet fantastic paintings in rose-colour and azure of visionary chivalry and ideal holiness, by dint of which the romance of more recent days has sought to cast the glamour of a mirage over the darkest and deadliest "ages of faith." The pure and fervent eloquence of the style is in perfect keeping with the high romantic interest of character and story. In the same class we may rank among the best samples of Fletcher's workmanship The Pilgrim, The Loyal Subject, A Wife for a Month, Love's Pilgrimage, and The Lover's Progress—rich all of them in ex quisite writing, in varied incident, in brilliant effects and graceful and passionate interludes. In The Coxcomb, and The Honest Man's Fortune (two plays which, on the whole, can hardly be counted among the best of their class) there are tones of homelier emotion, touches of a simpler and more pathetic interest than usual; and here, as in the two admirable first scenes between Leucippus and Bacha, which relieve and redeem from contempt the tragic burlesque of Cupid's Revenge, the note of Beaumont's manner is at once discernible.
Even the most rapid revision of the work done by these great twin poets must impress every capable student with a sense of the homage due to this living witness of their large and liberal genius. There is the glory and grace of youth in all they have left us; if there be also somewhat too much of its graceless as well as its gracious qualities, yet there hangs about their memory as it were a music of the morning, a breath and savour of bright early manhood, a joyous and vigorous air of free life and fruitful labour, which might charm asleep forever all thought or blame of all mortal infirmity or folly, or any stain of earth• that may have soiled in passing the feet of creatures half human and half divine while yet they dwelt among men. For good or for evil, they are above all things poets of youth; we cannot conceive of them grown grey in the dignity of years, venerable with the authority of long life, and weighted with the wisdom of experi ence. In the Olympian circle of the gods and giants of our race who on earth were their contemporaries and corrivals, they seem to move among the graver presences and figures of sedater fame like the two spoilt boys of heaven, lightest of foot and heart and head of all the brood of deity. In perfect workmanship of lyrical jewellery, in perfect bloom and flower of song-writing, they equal all compeers whom they do not excel; the blossoms of their growth in this kind may be matched for colour and fragrance against Shakespeare's, and for morning freshness and natural purity of form exceed the finest grafts of Jonson. The Faithful Shepherdess alone might speak for Fletcher on this score, being as it is simply a lyric poem in semi-dramatic shape, to be judged only as such, and as such almost faultless; but in no wise to be classed for praise or blame among the acting plays of its author, whose one serious error in the matter was the submission of his Dryad to the critical verdict of an audience too probably in great part composed of clowns and satyrs far unlike the loving and sweet-tongued sylvan of his lovely fancy. And whether we assign to him or to Beaumont the divine song of melancholy (moestius lacrymis Simonideis), perfect in form as Catullus and profound in sentiment as Shelley, which Milton himself could but echo and expand, could not heighten or deepen its exquisite intensity of thought and word alike, there will remain witness enough for the younger brother of a lyric power as pure and rare as his elder's.
The excess of influence and popularity over that of other poets usually ascribed to the work of Beaumont and Fletcher for some half century or so after their own time has perhaps been some what overstated by tradition. Whatever may have been for a season the fashion of the stage, it is certain that Shakespeare can show two editions for one against them in folio; four in all from 1623 to 1685, while they have but their two of 1647 and 1679. Nor does one see how it can accurately or even plausibly be said that they were in any exact sense the founders of a school either in comedy or in tragedy. After Shakespeare there was yet room for Beaumont and Fletcher ; but after these and the other constellations had set, whose lights filled up the measure of that diviner zodiac through which he moved, there was but room in heaven for the pallid moonrise of Shirley; and before this last reflex from a sunken sun was itself eclipsed, the glory had passed away from English drama, to alight upon that summit of epic song, whence Milton held communion with darkness and the stars.
The chief collected editions of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are : Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beau mont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen, printed by Humphrey Mose ley in folio in 1647 as containing plays "never printed before"; Fifty Comedies and Tragedies written, etc. (fol. 1679) ; Works • • • (1843-46), edited by Alexander Dyce, which superseded earlier editions by L. Theobald, G. Colman and H. Weber, and presented a modernized text ; a second two-volume edition by Dyce in 185 2 ; The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (1905-12) edited by Arnold Glover and A. R. Waller in the "Cambridge English Classics" from the text of the end folio, and giving variant readings from all separate issues of the plays previous to that edition; and Works . . . (1904 ff.), under the general editorship of A. H. Bullen, the text of which is founded on Dyce but with many variant readings, the separate plays being edited by various editors.
The foundation of all critical work on Beaumont and Fletcher is to be found in Dyce. Discrimination between the work of the two dramatists and their collaborators has been the object of a series of studies for the establishment of metrical and other tests. Fletcher's verse is recognizable by the frequency of an extra syllable, often an accented one, at the end of a line, the use of stopped lines, and the frequency of trisyllabic feet. He thus obtained an adaptable instrument enabling him to dispense with prose even in comic scenes. The pioneer work in these matters was done by F. G. Fleay in a paper read before the New Shak spere Society in 1874 on "Metrical Tests as applied to Fletcher, Beaumont and Massinger." His theories were further developed in the article "Fletcher" in his Biog. Chron. of the Eng. Drama. Further investigations were published by R. Boyle in Englische Studien (vols. v.–x., Heilbronn, 1882-87), and in the New Shakspere Society Transactions (188o-86), by Benno Leonhardt in Anglia (Halle, vols. xix. seq.), and by E. H. Oliphant, a critic who, in The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (1927), restores to Beaumont much which other critics had denied him. On the sources of the plays see E. Koppel in Miinchener Beitriige zur roman. u. eng. Phil. (Erlangen and Leipzig, 1895) . Consult fur ther articles by A. H. Bullen and R. Boyle respectively on Fletcher and Massinger in the Dict. of Nat. Biog.; G. C. Macaulay, Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study (1883) ; C. N. Gayley, Francis Beau mont, Dramatist (1914) and A. W. Ward's chapter on "Beaumont and Fletcher" in vol. ii. of his Hist. of Eng. Dram. Lit. (new ed. 1899) ; and for the history and bibliography of individual plays E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vols. iii. and iv. (1923). Also A. C. Potter, A Bibliography of Beaumont and Fletcher (Harvard Bibliographical Contributions, 1895).
A list of the plays attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, with some details, is added, with the premise that, beyond the main lines of criticism laid down in Mr. Swinburne's article above, it is often difficult to dogmatize on authorship. Even in cases where the play was produced long after Beaumont had ceased to write for the stage there can be no certainty that we are not dealing with a piece which is an adaptation by a later hand of an earlier play.
The Joint Works of Beaumont and Fletcher.—The Scornful Lady (acted between 1613 and 1616, pr. 1616) is a farcical comedy of domestic life, in which one scene may be by Massinger. Philaster, of Love Lies a-Bleeding, is assigned by Macaulay to Beaumont practically in its entirety, while Fleay attributes only three scenes to Fletcher. It was probably acted c. between 16o8 and 161o, and was printed 162o; it was revised (1695) by Elkanah Settle and (1763) by the younger Colman, probably owing its long popularity to the touching character of Bellario. Beaumont's share also predominated in The Maid's Tragedy (acted c. 1611, pr. 1619), in A King and No King (acted at court Dec. 26, 1611, and perhaps earlier, pr. 1619), while The Knight of the Burning Pestle (assigned by Chambers to 1607, pr. 1613), burlesquing the heroic and romantic play of which Heywood's Four Prentices is an example, might perhaps be transferred entire to Beau mont's account. In Cupid's Revenge (acted at court Jan. 1612, and perhaps at Whitefriars in 161o, pr. 1615), founded on Sidney's Arcadia, the two dramatists may have had other collaborators. The Coxcomb (acted c. 161o, and by the Children of the Queen's Revels in 1612, pr. 1647) seems to have undergone later revision by Massinger or Rowley.
Works Assigned to Beaumont's Sole Authorship.-The Woman Hater (pr. 1607, as "lately acted by the children of Paul's") was assigned formerly to Fletcher. The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn was presented at Whitehall on Feb. zo, 1613, on the marriage of the Prince and Princess Palatine. Of Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One (printed in 1647), the Induction, with The Triumph of Honour and The Triumph of Love, are by Beaumont. Works Assigned to Fletcher's Sole Authorship.-The Faithful Shep herdess (pr. c. 1609) was ill received on its original production, but was revived in 1634. It was translated into Latin verse by Sir R. Fanshawe in 1658, and Milton's Comus owes not a little to it. In Four Plays in One, the two last, The Triumph of Death and The Triumph of Time, are Fletcher's. In the indifferent comedy of The Captain (acted 1612-13, revived 1626, pr. 1647) there is no definite evidence of any other hand than Fletcher's, though the collaboration of Beaumont, Massinger, and Rowley has been advanced. Other Fletcher plays are: Wit without Money (acted c. 1614, pr. 1639) ; the two romantic tragedies of Bonduca and Valentinian, both dating from c. 1614 and printed in the first folio ; Women Pleased (c. 162o, pr. 1647) ; The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tam'd (assigned by Cham bers to 1604, acted 1633 at Blackfriars and at court, pr. 1647), a kind of sequel to The Taming of the Shrew; The Chances (pr. 1647), taken from La Sennora Cornelia of Cervantes, and repeatedly revived after the Restoration and in the i8th century ; Monsieur Thomas (acted perhaps as early as 161o, pr. 1639) ; The Island Princess (c. 1621, pr. 1647) ; The Pilgrim and The Wild Goose-Chase (pr. 1652), the second of which was adapted in prose by Farquhar, both acted at court in 1621, and possibly then not new pieces; A Wife for a Month (lic. 1624, pr. 1647) ; Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (lic. 1624, pr. I64o) . The Pilgrim (acted at court, 1620, received additions from Dryden and was adapted by Vanbrugh.
Fletcher in Collaboration with other Dramatists.-External evidence of Fletcher's connection with Massinger is given by Sir Aston Cokaine, who in an epitaph on Fletcher and Massinger wrote: "Playes they did write together, were great friends," and elsewhere claimed for Massinger a share in the plays printed in the 1647 folio. James Shirley and William Rowley have their part in works that used to be included in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon ; and to a letter from Field, Daborne and Massinger, asking for £5 for their joint necessities from Henslowe about the end of 1615, there is a postcript suggesting the deduction of the sum from the "mony remaynes for the play of Mr. Fletcher and ours." The problem is complicated when the existing versions of the play are posterior to Fletcher's lifetime, that is, revisions by Massinger or another of pieces which were even originally of double authorship. In this way Beaumont's work may be concealed under successive revisions, and it would be rash to assert that none of the late plays contains anything of his.
Fletcher and Massinger.-R. Boyle joins the name of Cyril Tour neur to those of Fletcher and Massinger in connection with The Honest Man's Fortune (acted 1613, pr. 1647), which Fleay identifies with "the play of Mr. Fletcher and ours." The Knight of Malta (acted 1618-1g, pr. 1647) is regarded by Oliphant as the work of Fletcher, Massinger and Field; Thierry and Theodoret (acted c. 1617, pr. 1621) , perhaps a satire on contemporary manners at the French court as a revision by Massinger of an earlier work by Beaumont and Fletcher, though Beaumont's share in either must be regarded as problematical. Fletcher and Massinger's great tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (acted 1619) was first printed in Bullen's Old Plays (vol. ii., 1883) . They followed it up with The Custom of the Country (acted c. 1619, pr. 1647), based on an English translation (1619) of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda; The Double Marriage (c. 162o, pr. 1647) ; The Little French Lawyer (c. 162o, pr. 1647) ; The False One (c. 162o, pr. 1647) ; The Spanish Curate (acted 1622, pr. 1647), repeatedly revived after the Restoration, was derived from Leonard Digges's translation (1622) of a Spanish novel, Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard; The Prophetess (1622, pr. 1647), after wards made into an opera by Betterton to Purcell's music ; The Elder Brother (perhaps originally written by Fletcher c. 1614 ; revised and acted 1635, pr. 1637) ; Beggars' Bush (acted at court 1622, probably then not new, pr. 1647)• Other Combinations.-Fletcher had only a small share in The Noble Gentleman (1625-26, pr. 1647), and in Wit at Several he but writ an act or two," says an epilogue on its revival (1623 or 1626) . The play is probably a revision by Rowley and Middleton of an early Beaumont and Fletcher play. A Very Woman (1634, pr. 1655) is a revision by Massinger, perhaps of The Woman's Plot, ascribed to Fletcher and acted at court in 1621. Field worked with Fletcher and Massinger on the lost play of the Jeweller of Amsterdam (1619), and perhaps on The Queen of Corinth (c. 1616, pr. The Lover's Progress (acted 1634, pr. 1647), is probably a revision by Massinger of the Fletcher play licensed in 1623 as The Wandering Lovers. Love's Cure or The Martial Maid (1623 or 1625) is thought by Fleay to be a revision by Massinger of a Beaumont and Fletcher play produced as early as 16o7-o8. W. Rowley joined Fletcher in The Maid in the Mill (1623, pr. 1647) . The Nice Valour (acted 1625-26, pr. 1647) seems to have been altered by Middleton from an earlier play. The Night Walker (1633) is a revision by Shirley of a Fletcher play.
Fletcher and Jonson in Collaboration.-The history of The Bloody Brother or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, printed in 1639 as by "B. J. F.," is matter of varied speculation. Mr. Oliphant thinks the basis of the play to be an early work (c. 1604) of Beaumont, on which is super imposed a first revision (1616) by Fletcher and Jonson, and a subsequent revision (1636-37) by Massinger. The general view is that the main portion of the play is referable to Jonson and Fletcher. Jonson apparently had a share in Fletcher's Love's Pilgrimage (pr. 1647), which seems to have been revised by Massinger in 1635 .
Fletcher and Shakespeare.-The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed in 1634 as by Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare. If its first representation was in 1625 it was in the year of Fletcher's death. It was included in the second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's comedies and tragedies. If Shakespeare and Fletcher worked in con cert it was probably in 1612-13, and the existing play probably repre sents a revision by Massinger in 1625. Henry VIII. (played at the Globe in 1613) is usually ascribed mainly to Shakespeare and Fletcher, with a probable revision by Massinger and the conditions of its pro duction were probably similar. Fletcher and Shakespeare are together credited at Stationers' Hall with the lost play of Cardenio, destroyed by Warburton's cook.