Francis Beaumont: Dramatist

he advocate to whom Beaumont's friends in Shakespeare's company of actors turn for counsel i

Helicon sends

ines are drunk by

mbers of the Mermaid, in a famous symposium held some time between 1608 and September 1611, we begin to feel that it was not by mere accident that the manuscript of A King and No King fell into the hands of the Nevill family. Sir Henry the elder, of Billingbear, Berkshire, was a relative of Sir Francis Bacon, and a friend of Davies of Hereford, and of Ben Jonson, who dedicated to Nevill about 1611 one of his most graceful epigrams; probably, also, of Francis Beaumont's brother John, who wrote a graceful tribute to the memory of one of the gentlewomen of the family, Mistress Elizabeth Nevill. This Sir Henry was an influential member of Parliament, a statesman, a court

ars, still stands at the top of Mitre Court, a fe

CIS

Van Somer in the Nationa

ophicum;[96] and I may be pardoned if I quote from the contemporary translation by John Reynolds of New College, the opening stanzas

er is c

mber be c

ut not t

is the pla

ests and cl

terest

me, though sc

rus surnam

n yclep

Meadow-pi

s dinner w

e as soo

Horse-lover

Henry cou

with gen

tree-where-

surnamèd

if there

d Pewter-W

elve-month-g

Hesperi

be desi

l be am

ence in

Inferior-

learnèd no

onicke-

number is

e bee not

will wan

ry verses for Jonson's Sejanus in 1605, and of the sonnet Upon the Lines and Life of that other frequenter of the Mermaid, "sweet Master Shakespeare." Holland's "great patronesse," by the way, was the wife of Sir Edward Coke of Beaumont's Inner Temple, whose daughter married Beaumont's kinsman, Sir John Villiers; and it was by the great Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, that Holland was introduced to King James. Also, of the Mermaid in Beaumont's time was Tom Coryate, the "legge-stretcher of Odcombe" without whose presence this Convivium Philosophicum would "want its tiller." Of the Mermaid, too, was Richard Martin (the Pewter-waster). He was fond of the drama; had organized a masque at the Middle Temple at the time of the Princess Elizabeth's marriage; and it

mont, and that of the rest, nearly all moved in the field of his acquaintance. Concerning a few, Arthur Meadow-pigmies'-foe (Cranefield), Sir Robert

TNO

of Richard III,

hers in exactly the order given below, save for one error. "In Latin Rhymes." Dr. A. Clark in his Aubrey's Brief Lives, II, 50-51, gives the Latin verses from an old commonplace book in Lincoln College Library, "authore