FRANCIS BEAUMONT (1584/5–1616) and JOHN FLETCHER (1579–1625)

FRANCIS BEAUMONT (1584/5–1616) and JOHN FLETCHER (1579–1625), the most famous collaboration in early modern English drama. Both men came from established families with strong writing traditions. Beaumont was born at Grace-Dieu, Leicestershire, the son of Francis Beaumont, a judge, and the brother of the poet John Beaumont. Fletcher was born on 20 December 1579, the son of Richard Fletcher, later bishop of London. Richard's brother, Giles Fletcher, was a poet and diplomat, and father of the "Spenserian" poets Giles, Jr., and Phineas. Both Beaumont and Fletcher attended university: Beaumont entered Broadgates Hall, Oxford, in 1597, before proceeding to the Inner Temple in 1600; Fletcher probably entered Benet College (now Corpus Christi), his father's old college, in 1591.

The collaboration between the two writers is first traced to The Woman Hater, written in 1606 for the Children of Paul's (a children's acting troupe). Beaumont had probably already written the erotic narrative poem Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, published in 1602. The pair moved from the Children of Paul's to the Children of the Queen's Revels, who first performed Cupid's Revenge (1607–1608), The Coxcomb (1608–1610), and The Scornful Lady (1610). Separately, Beaumont and Fletcher wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) and The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), respectively, for the same company; both plays seem originally to have failed in performance, perhaps because they were too avant-garde for the Blackfriars audience. The success of their collaborative plays, particularly Cupid's Revenge, seems to have caught the attention of the King's Men, for whom Beaumont and Fletcher wrote a series of highly successful collaborative plays: Philaster (or Love Lies a'Bleeding; c. 1609), The Maid's Tragedy (c. 1610), and A King and No King (1611). Fletcher alone wrote the tragedies Bonduca (c. 1609–1614) and Valentinian (c. 1610), and the comedy The Woman's Prize (or The Tamer Tamed; c. 1611), a mock-sequel to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

In 1613 Beaumont married Ursula Isley and seems to have retired from the theater; his last surviving dramatic work is The Masque of Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple (Gray's Inn and Inner Temple are two of the four Inns of Court), written for the wedding of James I's daughter Elizabeth in February 1613. It is possible that Beaumont's health was already declining when he retired; he died on 6 March 1616 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Fletcher, who seems to have preferred writing in collaboration, worked with Shakespeare on three plays for the King's Men in 1612–1613: Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio. He also wrote with Nathan Field, firstly for the Lady Elizabeth's Men, for whom Field was a leading actor (The Honest Man's Fortune [1613], Four Plays in One [c. 1614]), and later for the King's Men, for whom Field acted from 1616 (The Knight of Malta [1616–1618] and The Queen of Corinth [1617]). This period also saw the first performances of Fletcher's Wit without Money (1614), The Chances (c. 1617), and Women Pleased (c. 1618). After Field's death in 1619, Fletcher formed a settled collaboration with Philip Massinger. Their best-known plays include Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1619), The Custom of the Country (c. 1619), and The Sea Voyage (1622). He also continued to write plays alone, including The Humourous Lieutenant (c. 1619), The Island Princess (1621), The Wild Goose Chase (1621), and The Pilgrim (c. 1621). Fletcher died of plague on 29 August 1625, and was buried at St. Mary Overy, Southwark.

The fame of the Beaumont and Fletcher collaboration is due in part to the publication in 1647 of a lavish folio edition of Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, in which the plays were accompanied by a series of dedicatory verses written by admirers of the two playwrights, many of which eulogized them as a perfect synthesis. George Lisle, for instance, wrote: "your fancies are so wov'n and knit, / 'Twas Francis Fletcher, or John Beaumont writ." Continuing the tradition, John Aubrey wrote in Brief Lives: "They lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay together . . . had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloake, &c., between them." However, the posthumous union between Beaumont and Fletcher was occasionally contested, and the contribution of Massinger recognized. Aston Cockayne protested that Beaumont would have "frown'd and blush'd" to see his name attached to plays in which he had no claim, and notes that it is Massinger, not Beaumont, who was buried in Fletcher's grave: "So whom on earth nothing did part, beneath / Here (in their Fames) they lie, in spight of death."

The plays of the "Beaumont and Fletcher" canon remained popular throughout the seventeenth century, and Fletcher was regarded as one of the greatest dramatists of the age. While tragicomedies such as Philaster and A King and No King had a great impact on early seventeenth-century drama, the comedies, particularly those written with Massinger, had a shaping influence on the development of the Restoration theater.

See also Drama: English ; English Literature and Language ; Renaissance ; Shakespeare, William .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Bowers, Fredson, ed. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon. 10 vols. Cambridge, U.K., 1966–1996.

Secondary Sources

Bliss, Lee. Francis Beaumont. Boston, 1987.

Clark, Sandra. The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: Sexual Themes and Dramatic Representation. London, 1994.

Finkelpearl, Philip. Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Princeton, 1990.

Kelliher, Hilton. "Francis Beaumont and Nathan Field: New Records of Their Early Years." English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 8 (2000): 1–42.

McMullan, Gordon. The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher. Amherst, Mass., 1994.

Squier, C. L. John Fletcher. Boston, 1986.

Taunton, Nina. "Biography, a University Education, and Playwrighting: Fletcher and Marlowe." Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 63–97.

Lucy Munro