1648.... As it hath beene Acted by his Majesties Servants with great Applause. Written by John Fletcher Gent. For Humphrey Moseley.
1649. The Woman Hater, or the Hungry Courtier. A Comedy ... Written by Francis Beamont and John Fletcher, Gent. For Humphrey Moseley. [A reissue. Prologue in verse, said by Fleay, i. 177, to be Davenant’s, and Epilogue, used also for The Noble Gentleman.]
Fleay, i. 177, and Gayley, 73, put the date in the spring of 1607, finding a reference in ‘a favourite on the sudden’ (I. iii) to the success of Robert Carr in taking the fancy of James at the tilt of 24 March 1607, to which Fleay adds that ‘another inundation’ (III. i) recalls a flood of 20 Jan. 1607. Neither argument is convincing, and it is not known that the Paul’s boys went on into 1607; they are last heard of in July 1606. The prologue expresses the author’s intention not to lose his ears, perhaps an allusion to Jonson’s and Chapman’s peril after Eastward Ho! in 1605. Gayley notes in II. iii what certainly looks like a reminiscence of Antony and Cleopatra, IV. xiv. 51 and xv. 87, but it is no easier to be precise about the date of Antony and Cleopatra than about that of The Woman Hater. The play is universally regarded as substantially Beaumont’s and the original prologue only speaks of a single author, but Davenant in 1649 evidently supposed it to be Fletcher’s, saying ‘full twenty yeares, he wore the bayes’. Boyle, Oliphant, Alden, and Gayley suggest among them III. i, ii; IV. ii; V. i, ii, v as scenes to which Fletcher or some other collaborator may have given touches.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle. 1607
1613. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. For Walter Burre. [Epistle to Robert Keysar, signed ‘W. B.’, Induction with Prologue, Epilogue.]
1635.... Full of Mirth and Delight. Written by Francis Beaumont and Iohn Fletcher, Gent. As it is now Acted by Her Maiesties Servants at the Private house in Drury Lane. N. O. for I. S. [Epistle to Readers, Prologue (from Lyly’s Sapho and Phaon).]
1635.... Francis Beamont....
Editions by F. W. Moorman (1898, T. D.), H. S. Murch (1908, Yale Studies, xxxiii), R. M. Alden (1910, B. L.), W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.).—Dissertations: R. Boyle, B. and F.’s K. B. P. (1889, E. S. xiii. 156); B. Leonhardt, Ueber B. und F.’s K. B. P. (1885, Annaberg programme), Die Text-Varianten von B. und F.’s K. B. P. (1896, Anglia, xix. 509).
The Epistle tells us that the play was ‘in eight daies ... begot and borne’, ‘exposed to the wide world, who ... utterly reiected it’, preserved by Keysar and sent to Burre, who had ‘fostred it priuately in my bosome these two yeares’. The play ‘hopes his father will beget him a yonger brother’. Burre adds, ‘Perhaps it will be thought to bee of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently sweare, it is his elder aboue a yeare’. The references to the actors in the induction as boys and the known connexion of Keysar with the Queen’s Revels fix the company. The date is more difficult. It cannot be earlier than 1607, since the reference to a play at the Red Bull in which the Sophy of Persia christens a child (IV. i. 46) is to Day’s Travels of Three English Brothers of that year. With other allusions, not in themselves conclusive, 1607 would agree well enough, notably with Ind. 8, ‘This seuen yeares there hath beene playes at this house’, for it was just seven years in the autumn of 1607 since Evans set up plays at the Blackfriars. The trouble is IV. i. 73, ‘Read the play of the Foure Prentices of London, where they tosse their pikes so’, for this implies that the Four Prentices was not merely produced but in print, and the earliest extant edition is of 1615. It is, however, quite possible that the play may have been in print, even as far back as 1594 (cf. s.v. Heywood). Others put it, and with it the K. B. P., in 1610, in which case the production would have been at the Whitefriars, the history of which can only be traced back two or three years and not seven years before 1610. On the whole, I think the reference to Don Quixote in the Epistle is in favour of 1607 rather than 1610. It is, of course, conceivable that Burre only meant to claim that the K. B. P. was a year older than Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote, which was entered in S. R. on 19 Jan. 1611 and published in 1612. Even this brings us back to the very beginning of 1610, and the boast would have been a fairly idle one, as Shelton states in his preface that the translation was actually made ‘some five or six yeares agoe’. Shelton’s editor, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, has shown that it was based on the Brussels edition of 1607. If we put it in 1608 and the K. B. P. in 1607 the year’s priority of the latter is preserved. Most certainly the K. B. P. was not prior to the Spanish Don Quixote of 1605. Its dependence on Cervantes is not such as necessarily to imply that Beaumont had read the romance, but he had certainly heard of its general drift and of the particular episodes of the inn taken for a castle and the barber’s basin. Fleay, Boyle, Moorman, Murch, and Alden are inclined to assign to Fletcher some or all of the scenes in which Jasper and Luce and Humphrey take part; but Macaulay, Oliphant and Gayley regard the play, except perhaps for a touch or two, as wholly Beaumont’s. Certainly the Epistle suggests that the play had but one ‘father’.
The Faithful Shepherdess. 1608–9