_The Woman-Hater_ was the earliest play of either of our dramatists to find its way into print. Drayton's lines, already referred to, about "sweet Palmeo" imply that Beaumont was already known as a poet, before April 1606. A passage in the Prologue of _The Woman-Hater_ seems, as Professor Thorndike has shown, to refer to the narrow escape of Jonson, Chapman, and Marston from having their ears cropped for an offense given to the King by their _Eastward Hoe_. If it does, "he that made this play," undoubtedly Beaumont, made it after the publication of _Eastward Hoe_ in 1605. The title-page of 1607 says that the play is given "as it hath been lately acted." The ridicule of intelligencers emulating some worthy men in this land "who have discovered things dangerously hanging over the State" has reference to the system of spying which assumed enormous proportions after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605. An allusion to King James's weakness for handsome young men, "Why may not _I_ be a favourite in the sudden?" may very well refer, as Fleay has maintained, to the restoration to favour of Robert Ker (or Carr) of Ferniehurst, afterwards Earl Somerset,--a page whom James had "brought with him from Scotland, and brought up of a child,"[46] but had dismissed soon after his accession. It was at a tilting match, March 24, 1607, that the youth "had the good fortune to break his leg in the presence of the King," and "by his personal activity, strong animal spirits," and beauty, to attract his majesty anew, and on the spot. The beauty, Beaumont emphasizes as a requisite for royal favour. "Why may not _I_ be a favourite on the sudden?" says the bloated, hungry courtier, "I see nothing against it." "Not so, sir," replies Valore; "I know you have not the _face_ to be a favourite on the sudden." The fact that James did not make a knight bachelor of Carr till December of that year, would in no way invalidate a fling at the favour bestowed upon him in March. Indeed Beaumont's slur in _The Woman-Hater_ upon "the legs ... very strangely become the legs of a knight and a courtier" might have applied to Carr as early as 1603, for on July 25 of that year James had made him a Knight of the Bath,--in the same batch, by the way, with a certain Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdonshire.[47] Without violating the plague regulations, as laid down by the City, _The Woman-Hater_ could have been acted during the six months following November 20, 1606. A passage in Act III, 2,[48] which I shall presently quote in full, is, as has not previously been noticed, a manifest parody of one of Antony's speeches in _Antony and Cleopatra_[49] which, according to all evidence, was not acted before 1607. It would appear, therefore, that Beaumont's first play was completed after January 1, 1607, probably after March 24, when Carr regained the royal favour, and was presented for the first time during the two months following the latter date.