Beaumont (1584-1616) was the brother of Sir John Beaumont of Leicestershire. From Oxford he came to London to study law, but soon gave it up to write for the stage. Fletcher (1579-1625) was the son of the bishop of London, and shows in all his work the influence of his high social position and of his Cambridge education. The two dramatists met at the Mermaid tavern under Ben Jonson's leadership and soon became inseparable friends, living and working together. Tradition has it that Beaumont supplied the judgment and the solid work of the play, while Fletcher furnished the high-colored sentiment and the lyric poetry, without which an Elizabethan play would have been incomplete. Of their joint plays, the two best known are _Philaster_, whose old theme, like that of _Cymbeline_ and _Griselda_, is the jealousy of a lover and the faithfulness of a girl, and _The Maid's Tragedy_. Concerning Fletcher's work the most interesting literary question is how much did he write of Shakespeare's _Henry VIII_, and how much did Shakespeare help him in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_. JOHN WEBSTER. Of Webster's personal history we know nothing except that he was well known as a dramatist under James I. His extraordinary powers of expression rank him with Shakespeare; but his talent seems to have been largely devoted to the blood-and-thunder play begun by Marlowe. His two best known plays are _The White Devil_ (pub. 1612) and _The Duchess of Malfi_ (pub. 1623). The latter, spite of its horrors, ranks him as one of the greatest masters of English tragedy. It must be remembered that he sought in this play to reproduce the Italian life of the sixteenth century, and for this no imaginary horrors are needed. The history of any Italian court or city in this period furnishes more vice and violence and dishonor than even the gloomy imagination of Webster could conceive. All the so-called blood tragedies of the Elizabethan period, from Thomas Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ down, however much they may condemn the brutal taste of the English audiences, are still only so many search lights thrown upon a history of horrible darkness. THOMAS MIDDLETON (1570?-1627). Middleton is best known by two great plays, _The Changeling_[156] and _Women Beware Women_. In poetry and diction they are almost worthy at times to rank with Shakespeare's plays; otherwise, in their sensationalism and unnaturalness they do violence to the moral sense and are repulsive to the modern reader. Two earlier plays, _A Trick to catch the Old One_, his best comedy, and _A Fair Quarrel_, his earliest tragedy, are less mature in thought and expression, but more readable, because they seem to express Middleton's own idea of the drama rather than that of the corrupt court and playwrights of his later age.