Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

n Bread-street, Cheapside, where perhaps befel those "wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson," or about the Globe in Southwark or the theatre in Blackfriars,-which, though leased to the Revels' Child

o St. Giles, Cripplegate, when they wished to observe what Juby and the rest of the Prince's Players were putting on at the Fortune, or on their way back to t

ll observe. Their plays from the first, whether jointly or singly written, abound in reminiscences of his work. But more particularly is he echoed by Beaum

thinks it wer

honour from the

o the botto

thome line tou

wnèd honour from

s poking fun at the circumlocutions of Shakespeare's Helena in All's Well that Ends We

horses of the

torches his

murk and ac

hath quenched h

enty times the

hievish minutes

from your sound

umont's courtier Valore instructs the gourma

t talk to h

to an ord

ce, but you must

should aske you w

"If it please your

three aclock, so p

how many Muses

t banks of th

stroaks the clo

d, "how old are you?" we can imagine with what m

d twenty seve

piled all for

ew this breath;

ruly served i

twenty times h

yearly cou

nderstand

e an ignorant

is brother John, Drayton, Chapman, and Ben Jonson, the young satirist,

always good-natured. But if Beaumont laughs when Shakespeare exaggerates, he also pays him in his later plays the tribute of imitation in numerou

ca

ard of gods th

the ground I

r" himself; as, for instance, when to the usurping King wh

thers spirit. I

irit! Now he t

heire, bids

me, these are

ill not let me s

y, and there

d doe me servi

sse him: he's a

ll und

lancholy in the Maides Tragedy to Ophelia's, and of Bellario's situation in Philaster to that of Viola in Twelfth Night.[77] This last play, indeed, acted, as we have seen, in the Middle Temple when Beaumont was a freshman in the Inns of Court,

was bringing against Burbadge and Heming a suit concerning the profits of the Blackfriars theatre, in which as a shareholder Shakespeare, too, must have been interested; and when Christopher Brooke of the pastoral poets in Beaumont's Inns of Court was of the "councell" for Shakespeare's company.[79] Or in March 1613, when Shakespeare was negotiating for the house in Blackfriars which he bought that month from Henry Walker. In the latter year the King's Players performed two plays in the writing of which there is reason to believe that Shakespeare and Fletcher participated: The Two Noble Kinsmen, first published as "by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen," in a quarto of 1634; and a lost play licensed for publication as the "History of Cardenio by Fletcher and Shakespeare," in 1653. Of the former, critics are generally agreed that Fletcher wrote about a dozen scenes and that Shakespeare in all probability wr

In the conception of the leading characters Shakespeare is present, and in many of their finest lines, and specifically in at least five scenes; while Fletcher appears in practically all the re

JO

re belonging to

ttested by commendatory verses written by Beaumont for The Silent Woman, which was acted early in 1610, and by verses of both Fletcher and Beaumont prefixed to Jonson's tragedy of Catiline, published in 1611.

ll outlive thee

inuance, shall

un, a people

twain appears in a tribute the date of which is uncertain, but which was includ

ncis B

thee, Beaumon

dost such r

e my selfe, th

ent thought thy

ak'st me happi

gely to me, mo

ne, that so it

ne, that so thy

, where most th

better, I mu

ing. And whether there is any basis or not for the tradition handed down by Dryden[80] that Beaumont was "so accurate a judge of plays that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not con

r, Carey, and others of the Queen's Revels' Children, and Richard Burbadge, Heming, Condell, Ostler, Cook, and Lowin of the King's Company. In what esteem they were held during these years we have evidence in the verses already quoted from Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, and Field. In the generous dedication of The White Devil by John Webster, in 1612, we find them ranked with the best: "Detraction," says he, "is the sworne friend to ignorance. For mine owne part I have ever truly cherisht my good opinion of other mens worthy Labours, especially of that full and haightened stile

TNO

speare Discoveries, Har

(Belles Lettres Series), XVI; Macaulay's Beaumont; Leonhardt in Anglia, VIII, 424; Olip

peare Discoveries (Harpe

eet Papers, in Fleay,

ay of Drama