Beaumont and Fletcher, a pair of the greater dramatists of the Elizabethan age, whose joint work is the result of the most famous of literary partnerships. Francis Beaumont was the younger of the two by about five years, but he died nine years earlier than his friend. He was the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont, one of the justices of the Common Pleas, and was born at Gracedieu, in Leicestershire, in 1584. He was admitted in 1597 as a gentleman-commoner to Broadgate Hall, Oxford (now Pembroke College), and in 1600 to the Inner Temple. Two years thereafter he published Salmaeus and Hermaphroditus, an expansion of Ovid's version of the story. Ere long he became an intimate friend of Ben Jonson and the other men of genius who assembled at the Mermaid Tavern, and here no doubt he met the poet with whom he was to form so memorable a friendship. John Fletcher was born at Rye in Sussex, in December 1579. His father was that Dean of Peterborough who disturbed the last moments of Mary Stuart with his ill-timed exhortation, and afterwards as Bishop of London, died either of chagrin at the queen's displeasure on account of his second marriage, or of the immoderate use of tobacco. The boy entered Bene't (now Corpus) College, Cambridge, at twelve, and found himself at seventeen in poverty on his father's death. We know nothing of him until 1607, when he produced the Woman Hater. The intimacy which now commenced was one of singular warmth, even for that age when friendships were of a more romantic cast than at present. The two lived in the same house, and had clothes and cloak and everything in common. Aubrey ascribes the 'dearness of friendship between them' to a 'wonderfull consimilarity of phansy.' Beaumont married in 1613, but died 6th March 1616. Fletcher wrote on until his death, in his last four years producing no less than eleven new plays. He died in August 1625.
The works of Beaumont and Fletcher comprise in all fifty-two plays, a masque, and several minor poems; but it is difficult to allocate, in any satisfactory manner, the authorship of these. Professor Ward cannot trace any essential difference between the plays ascribed to both and those attributed to Fletcher alone, while he detects two styles in the plays written by Fletcher along with another than Beaumont. It used to be asserted that Fletcher contributed the vivacity and Beaumont the judgment, and that the latter chastened the exuberant fancies of the former. There seems, however, to be no foundation for this opinion, except the tradition and the fact that Beaumont's own verses are more severe and regular in form than those of the elder poet. Dyce thus assigns the authorship of the plays, with very varying degrees of certainty: By Beaumont and Fletcher, Four Plays in One, Wit at Several Weapons, Thierry and Theodoret, Maid's Tragedy, Philaster, King and no King, Cupid's Revenge, Little French Lawyer, Coxeomb, Laws of Candy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and The Scornful Lady; by Beaumont alone, the Masque; by Fletcher and Massinger, False One, Very Woman, The Lover's Progress; by Fletcher and Rowley, Queen of Corinth, Maid of the Mill, Bloody Brother; by Fletcher and Shirley, Noble Gentleman, Night Walker, Love's Pilgrimage; by Fletcher and Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen; the remaining plays by Fletcher alone. Fletcher's collaborateur in some of the later plays is, however, entirely uncertain. His own versification has many peculiar features which make his verse distinguishable from that of his contemporary dramatists. The chief of these is the frequency of double or feminine endings, in which he may be safely said to exceed any other writer of our old drama. According to Mr Fleay, the average of such endings in the plays as to all of which he and Dyce agree in considering Fletcher the sole author is 1777; that in the plays of Massinger, the dramatist next to Fletcher most given to the practice, 1059. Again, in the plays known to have been written by Fletcher alone, rhyme is used very sparingly, and prose is eschewed altogether. Professor Ward observes that the double-endings, particularly as used by Fletcher in combination with the practice of stopping the sense at the end of the verse, give so peculiar a cadence to the lines, and constitute a manner of versification from which when once adopted a poet is so unlikely incidentally to diverge, that their frequent employment in scenes of joint plays and their sparse employment in other scenes, may be fairly regarded as favouring the antecedent supposition of the presence or absence of Fletcher's hand. At the same time, too much may well be made of such mechanical tests, and it may be permitted to leave a problem that so acute a critic as the late Mr W. B. Donne regarded as insoluble in the pious uncertainty of the stationer's address to the courteous reader in the first folio edition of 1647 (the earliest, though that of 1679 was the first complete edition): 'It was once in my thoughts to have printed Mr Fletcher's works by themselves, because single and alone he would make a just volume; but since never parted while they lived, I conceived it not equitable to separate their ashes.' Fletcher undoubtedly had a share in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. The touch of Shakespeare is felt with considerable certainty in The Two Noble Kinsmen. There is a tone of music and a tread of thunder in some of the passages, to which no parallel can be found in any of the companion dramas. Only three plays were, during Fletcher's lifetime, published as joint productions. Two of these—Philaster and The Maid's Tragedy—are, with the exception of the great passages in The Two Noble
Kinsmen, the glory of the collection. The question has been often discussed, why these plays are called by the name of Beaumont and Fletcher, thus giving precedence to the younger and less voluminous writer. Mr Dyce's opinion is that of the three plays published as joint productions during Fletcher's life, Beaumont either had the greater share, or that, through feelings of natural courtesy, Fletcher placed the name of his deceased associate before his own, and that future editors naturally followed the arrangement which they found to their hand. From all that can be gathered, it would appear that Beaumont possessed the deeper and more thoughtful genius; Fletcher the gay and more idyllic. There is a strength as of granite rock in The Maid's Tragedy; there is a glad exuberant music, and a May-morning light and freshness in The Faithful Shepherdess, which Milton did not disdain to accept as a model in the lyrical portions of Comus, and of which the Endymion of Keats is but an echo. The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher never sound the deep sea of passion; they deport themselves, dolphin-like, on its surface. They are poets first and dramatists after; and indeed display but little power of serious and consistent characterisation, while they are much too fond of unnatural and violent situations. Morally, little can be said in their praise. Even that most delightful pastoral The Faithful Shepherdess is marred by deformities that interfere with its harmonious beauty. 'A spot,' says Charles Lamb, 'is on the face of this Diana. Nothing short of infatuation could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this "blessedness" such an ugly deformity as Cloe, the wanton shepherdess!' The best edition is that of Dyce (11 vols. 1843-46), which superseded its chief predecessor, that of Weber (1812). See A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature (2 vols. 1875); Fleay's Shakespeare Manual; G. C. Macaulay's Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study (1883); and the bibliography by A. C. Potter in Bibliographical Contributions of Harvard University (1891).