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
_The Lawes of Candy_, _The Noble Gentleman_, and _The Faire Maide of the
Inne_, is altogether in favour of their composition after Beaumont's
death.
In each of these twelve plays, however, beginning with _Thierry_ and
ending with _The Honest Mans Fortune_, an occasional expert thinks that
he finds a speech or a scene in Beaumont's style, and concludes that the
play in its present form is a revision of some early effort in which
that dramatist had a hand. But where one critic surmises Beaumont,
another detects Beaumont's imitators; and where one conjectures Fletcher
and Beaumont conjoined, half a dozen assert Fletcher, assisted, or
revised by anywhere from one to four contemporaries,--Field or Daborne
or Massinger, Middleton or Rowley, or First and Second Unknown. I have
examined these plays and the evidence, as carefully as I have those
which have more claim to consideration among the Beaumont possibilities,
and have applied to them all the tests which I shall presently describe;
and have come to the conclusion that Beaumont had nothing to do with any
of the twelve.
There remain, then, of the twenty-three plays enumerated above as
Beaumont-Fletcher possibilities, only eleven of which I can, on the
basis of external or internal evidence, or both, safely say that they
were composed before Beaumont ceased writing for the stage, and that he
had, or may have had, a hand in writing some of them. These are, in the
order of their first appearance in print: _The Woman-Hater_, published
without name of author in 1607; _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, also
anonymous, published in 1613; _Cupids Revenge_, published as Fletcher's
in 1615; _The Scornful Ladie_, published in 1616, as Beaumont and
Fletcher's, just after the death of the former; _The Maides Tragedy_,
published, without names of authors, in 1619; _A King and No King_,
published as Beaumont and Fletcher's in 1619; _Philaster_, published as
Beaumont and Fletcher's in 1620; and _Foure Playes in One_, _Loves
Cure_, _The Coxcombe_, and _The Captaine_, first published in the 1647
folio, without ascription of authorship on the title-page, but as of the
"Comedies and Tragedies written by Beaumont and Fletcher," in general.
In the case of _Loves Cure_ the Epilogue mentions "our Author"; the
Prologue, spoken "at the reviving of this play," attributes it to
Beaumont and Fletcher. As for _The Coxcombe_, the Prologue for a revival
speaks of "the makers that confest it for their own."