Francis Beaumont: Dramatist / A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, / And of His Association with John Fletcher

by Charles Mills Gayley

JOHN SELDEN
From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London

The Bohemian life on the Bankside, such as it was, must have been brought to an end by Beaumont's marriage, about 1613. By that time Beaumont had written The Woman-Hater, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Maske, and several poems; Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse and three or four plays more; the two in partnership, at least five plays; and Fletcher had meanwhile collaborated with other dramatists in from eight to eleven plays which do not now concern us. As to the remaining dramas assigned to this period and attributed by various critics to Beaumont and Fletcher in joint-authorship, we shall later inquire. Suffice it for the present to say that I do not believe that the former had a hand in any of them, except The Scornful Ladie.

FOOTNOTES:

[97] Underwoods, XLVIII.

[98] Thomas Nashe, Dedication of The Life of Jack Wilton.

[99] Itinerary, Ed. L. T. Smith, Vol. I, 97.

[100] See Greg's Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Drama, and my former pupil, H. W. Hill's, Sidney's Arcadia and the Elizabethan Drama.