FRANCIS BEAUMONT Born 1584 Died 1616 JOHN FLETCHER Born 1579 Died 1625 THE ELDER BROTHER THE SPANISH CURATE WIT WITHOUT MONEY BEGGARS BUSH THE HUMOUROUS LIEUTENANT THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS THE TEXT EDITED BY ARNOLD GLOVER, M.A. OF TRINITY COLLEGE AND THE INNER TEMPLE AND A.R. WALLER, M.A. OF PETERHOUSE CAMBRIDGE: at the University Press 1906 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, C.F. CLAY, MANAGER. London: FETTER LANE, E.C. Glasgow: 50, WELLINGTON STREET. Leipzig: F.A. BROCKHAUS. New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. [_All Rights reserved._] NOTE: The text of the present volume was passed for press by Arnold Glover and some progress had been made in his lifetime in the collection of the material given in the Appendix. Mrs. Glover's help has again been most valuable in the completion of the work. _The Elder Brother_ is printed entirely in prose in the Second Folio, and I have therefore printed in the Appendix the play in verse, as it appeared in the First Quarto. The case is an interesting one, and readers will be glad, I think, to have both forms in the same volume. I have not concerned myself with passages in the Second Folio in prose which have since been printed as verse. On the whole I agree with a recent critic who characterises as 'vexatious' the 'later practice of printing much manifest prose as verse, each post-seventeenth century editor apparently making it a point of honour to discover metre where no one had found it before, and where no one with an ear can find it now.'