Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
Fletcher's portrait in the National Portrait Gallery reveals a highbred,
thoughtful countenance, large eyes unafraid, wide-awake and keen, the
nose aquiline and sensitive, wavily curling hair, hastily combed back,
or through which he has run his fingers, a careless, half-buttoned
jerkin from which the shirt peeps forth,--all in all a man of more
vivacious temper, ready and practical quality than Beaumont.
The authorities of the Gallery, especially through the kindness of Mr.
J. D. Milner, who has been good enough to look up various particulars
for me, inform me that this portrait of John Fletcher, No. 420, was
purchased by the Trustees in March 1876, its previous history being
unknown. The painting is by a contemporary but unknown artist, and is
similar to the portrait at Knole Park. It was engraved in the reverse by
G. Vertue in 1729. They also inform me that another portrait of a
different type belongs to the Earl of Clarendon. This, I conjecture,
must be that which John Evelyn, in a letter to Samuel Pepys, 12 August,
1689, says he has seen in the first Earl of Clarendon's
collection--"most of which [portraits], if not all, are at the present
at Cornebery in Oxfordshire." But Evelyn adds that "Beaumont and
Fletcher were both in one piece." Yet another portrait said to be of
Fletcher, painted in 1625 by C. Janssen, belongs to the Duke of
Portland. This Janssen is the Cornelius to whom the alleged portrait of
Shakespeare, now at Bulstrode, is attributed. Cornelius did not come to
England before Shakespeare's death; and, consequently, not before
Beaumont's.
Fletcher died in August 1625. According to Aubrey, "In the great plague,
1625, a Knight of Norfolke (or Suffolke) invited him into the Countrey.
He stayed but to make himselfe a suite of cloathes, and while it was
makeing, fell sick of the plague and dyed. This I had [1668] from his
tayler, who is now [1670] a very old man, and clarke of St. Mary
Overy's." The dramatist was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark, the
twenty-ninth of that month. Sir Aston Cockayne's statement, in an
epitaph on Fletcher and Massinger, that they lie in the same grave, is
probably figurative. Aubrey tells us that Massinger, who died in March
1640, and whose burial is recorded in the register of St. Saviour's, was
buried not in the church, but about the middle of one of its
churchyards, the Bullhead, next the Bullhead tavern. There are memorials
now to both poets in the church, as also to Shakespeare, and Beaumont,
and to Edward Alleyn, the actor of the old Admiral's company.