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When the first collected folio of Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher, containing a masque and some thirty-four plays, none
of the latter having previously been printed, was published in
1647, long after the deaths of its authors, no attempt was made
to discriminate between the parts of the famous collaborators;
nor did the 1679 folio, in spite of its eighteen additional plays,
suggest that a separation was desirable or feasible. But recent
investigation has tended more and more strongly toward such a
distinction, until, for instance, C.M. Gayley in his Beaumont
the Dramatist is sure of only six plays as the joint product
of Swinburne's Castor and Pollux of the English drama--although
E.H.C. Oliphant in his The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher
prefers eight and allows the two men three more with the assistance
of Massinger. Moreover, contrary to
the older impression growing out of the longer dramatic career
and larger output of Fletcher, virtually all modern critics insist
that Beaumont was the greater dramatist. But the disentangling
of the web has not ended here, since the hands of Massinger and
Field, not to mention those of William Rowley, Shirley,
Shakespeare, and others have been identified
in a considerable part of the work which for many years masqueraded
under the label of "Beaumont and Fletcher." The whole
situation provides a striking commentary on the conditions of
Elizabethan dramatic publication and authorship.
Both Beaumont and Fletcher brought a new respectability to
the Stuart drama, for both came from excellent families and were
able to picture the life of the upper classes, especially in
comedies of manners and "fashion," with ease and authenticity.
Fletcher's father eventually became Bishop of London, and his
uncle, Giles Fletcher, himself an author, was the parent of the
two Spenserian poets, Phineas and Giles the Younger. Beaumont
(born about 1584) was the youngest son of a prominent judge,
and his brother John early became recognized as a poet. Fletcher
entered Cambridge about 1591, when he was some twelve years of
age, and perhaps intended to take orders like his father, but
the latter's loss of Elizabeth's favor soon afterward may account
for the lack of any record of the boy's graduation; Beaumont
went to Oxford in 1597, but by 1600 had transferred himself to
the Inner Temple, though not necessarily because of any particular
ambition to follow his father's profession of the law. The date
at which the two men began to write, and even the date of their
first collaboration, cannot be exactly established, but Beaumont
published his first poetry about 1602, and seems soon to have
become a friend of Jonson and a member
of his circle--Dryden, in fact, preserving
the story that Jonson had such a regard for the other's judgment
that he submitted all his plays to him for criticism, especially
as regarded plot. Probably both of the future collaborators had
independently written a play or two apiece before their intimacy
began, sometime between 1604 and 1606; but they rapidly became
such friends that a tradition runs to the effect that they shared
rooms at the Bankside and owned all things in common. Since almost
no one holds to a date much earlier than 1606 for their first
significant collaboration, and since Beaumont's marriage in 1613
and his non-professional attitude toward the drama led to an
almost complete cessation of activity in literary creation after
that date, the partnership was not actually bery long in duration.
After the year 1616 had seen the deaths of both Beaumont and
his twenty-year senior, Shakespeare, Fletcher continued to write
so prolifically and successfully, both alone and in his favorite
collaboration, as to become the leading English dramatist, easily
overshadowing Jonson in popularity. Fletcher died of the plague
in 1625.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle is generally considered
to have been written about 1607-8, although Oliphant, on the
evidence of the printer's epistle, etc., prefers 1610. Some critics
also believe it to have been written entirely by Beaumont, at
least in its initial composition, but Oliphant, saying that none
of Beaumont's unaided work is extant, agrees with earlier critics
in attributing a small portion of it to Fletcher. According to
the frank admission of the publisher in the prefatory epistle
to the anonymous first quarto edition in 1613, the play was composed
in little more than a week, and upon being produced at the Blackfriars
by the Children of the Queen's Revels, was promptly rejected
by its audience, which obviously must have been restless under
its satire as well as bored by its form. For, in addition to
poking fun at the taste and manners of the London tradesman,
the play is a burlesque not only of such popular romantic dramas
as Mucedorus and Heywood's The Four Prentices of London
but also of such fictional romances, in both verse and prose,
as Rafe's own favorite Palmerin of England. The question
of Beaumont's debt to Don Quixote has likewise produced
much controversy, since no English translation of Cervantes work
has definitely been shown to have been printed before 1612, although
the manuscript was apparently circulated before this date; moreover,
though Fletcher used much Spanish material in later plays, Beaumont
never did, and there is no evidence to show that either could
read Spanish. French or English translations were usually available
in some form or other. Scholarly opinion today inclines toward
the rejection of the Spanish influence on the play and toward
the stressing of the English motives, conventions, and tendencies
of the time.
No serious question has ever been raised as to Fletcher's
complete authorship of The Faithful Shepherdess, since
the first quarto (undated, but probably issued about 1609-10,
a year or two after the production by the Children of the Queen's
Revels) bears his name, as do the four other editions preceding
the second folio, in which there was no distinction of authors.
This pastoral drama, or rather pastoral "tragi-comedy,"
which Fletcher carefully defines in his premise, is in the Italian
tradition of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, itself modeled
after Tasso's
Aminta; but these authors, as well as Spenser, merely
furnished some general suggestions and a few incidental details
without in any way detracting from Fletcher's originality. The
plot, largely because of the several pairings of lovers necessitated
by the author's desire to illustrate all the gradations of love
from the most sensual to the most chaste, is rather complicated,
but the poetry is fresh and graceful. Though the play was not
a stage success, it has retained the enthusiasm of readers, and
its influence is shown in Milton's Comus, both in theme
and in versification.
Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, produced about
1609 and first printed in an imperfect quarto in 1620, was the
earliest play of its authors, either singly or together, to achieve
a popular success; it was the first important play to spring
from their collaboration, and it was their first play to be acted
by Shakespeare's company. It belongs to the type of romantic
drama or tragi-comedy which was then coming into vogue, with
its rapidity of action, its spectacular scenes, its contrast
of love and lust, its mingling of humor and seriousness, its
sentimentalities, its glittering but shallow characters drawn
from the nobility, and its poetical passages. In spite of Thorndike's
opinion, expressed in 1901, that these tragi-comedies of Beaumont's
and Fletcher influenced Shakespeare's Cymbeline and The
Winter's Tale, the general view today is that the influence
was in the opposite direction. Philaster, although held
by Oliphant to be mostly by Beaumont, has given scholars an excellent
opportunity to apply their tests of authorship to its various
parts. These tests, after eliminating the negligible external
evidence, depend upon the following internal elements: versification,
especially Fletcher's free approximation of conversational prose
effects by the use of weak (i.e., double, triple, or even quadruple)
endings for his lines, with a general avoidance of rhyme (The
Faithful Shepherdess is an obvious exception), and a favoring
of the end-stop; diction and recurring rhetorical devices, such
as repetition of words, constructions, and ideas; and mental
attitude, shown in the use of certain types of material, such
as Fletcher's greater fondness for questionable moral situations
and furtive innuendo, and Beaumont's more truly philosophical
and speculative outlook. No source for Philaster has been
discovered, though resemblances to parts of Sidney's Arcadia
and Montemayor's Diana have been noted.
The Maid's Tragedy was apparently produced about 1611,
and was printed anonymously in 1619. A revised edition was brought
out in 1622, and another in 1630, containing the author's names.
Both the record of publications and the stage history of the
play attest its extreme popularity, for it went through many
editions, and leading actors appeared in it, or adaptations of
it, on into the nineteenth century. Although Beaumont, famed
for his plotting ability, is usually given credit for the major
part of the tragedy, there are still some rather unnatural and
unplausible aspects of both plot and motivation, but these are
almost overlooked in the intensity and interest of the action.
The tragedy of blood, lust, and revenge reaches one of its highest
points in this play. No source for the plot is known, but the
character and some of the acts of Aspatia are not unlike those
of Sidney's deserted Parthenia.
†This article was originally published
in Elizabethan and Stuart Plays ed. Charles Read Baskervill.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1934. pp. 1099-1101.
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