It is worthy of notice that three only of these eleven possible "Beaumont-Fletcher" plays were printed during Beaumont's lifetime,--_The Woman-Hater_, _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ and _Cupids Revenge_, and that on none of them does Beaumont's name appear as author. The last indeed was ascribed, wrongly, as I shall later show, to Fletcher alone. It should also be noted that four other of the plays, beginning with _The Scornful Ladie_ and ending with _Philaster_, were published before the death of Fletcher in 1625; and that while three of them have title-page ascriptions to both authors, one, _The Maides Tragedy_, is anonymous. To these eleven plays as a residuum I have given the preference in the application of tests deemed most likely to reveal the relative contribution and genius of the authors in partnership. Beside the seven published as stated above during Fletcher's life, two others appeared which I do not include in this residuum,--_The Faithfull Shepheardesse_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_. The former, printed between December 22, 1608 and July 20, 1609, is of Fletcher's sole authorship, and will be employed as one of the clues to his early characteristics. The latter, attributed by some critics to both authors was published without ascription of authorship in a quarto of 1621. It does not appear in the folio of 1647, but was printed in second quarto as "by John Fletcher" in 1648, and again as "by F. Beaumont and J. Fletcher" in 1649; and was finally gathered up with the _Comedies and Tragedies_ which compose the folio of 1679. Oliphant and Thorndike are of opinion that the play is a revision by Massinger of an original by Beaumont and Fletcher, but I cannot discover in the text evidence sufficient to warrant its inclusion in the list of plays worthy to be investigated as the possible product of the partnership. The eleven Beaumont-Fletcher plays to which the criteria of internal evidence may be applied with some assurance of success, comprise in their number, fortunately for us, three of which we are informed by external evidence,--the contemporary testimony of John Earle, dated 1616-1617,--that Beaumont was concerned in their composition. These three, _Philaster_, _The Maides Tragedy_, and _A King and No King_, are a positive residuum to which as a model of the joint-work of our authors we may first, in the effort to discriminate their respective functions when working in partnership, apply the tests of style derived from a study of the plays and poems which each wrote alone. With this delimitation of the field of inquiry, we are now ready for the consideration of the criteria by which the presence of either author may be detected. The criteria are primarily of versification; then, successively and cumulatively, of diction and mental habit. Ultimately, and by induction, they are of dramatic technique and creative genius. FOOTNOTES: [148] See Fleay, _Chron. Eng. Dram._, I, 195; and W. W. Greg, _Henslowe Papers_, 90.