The rest of this Dedication is of great interest as bearing upon the date of the composition of the play; but it has been entirely misconstrued or else it gives us false information. That matter I shall discuss in connection with the sources and composition of the play.[51] Suffice it to say here that _The Knight_ followed _The Travails of Three English Brothers_, acted. June 29, 1607, and that the Robert Keysar who rescued the manuscript of _The Knight_ from oblivion had, only in 1606 or 1607, acquired a financial interest in the Queen's Revels' Children, and was backing them during the last year of their occupancy of Blackfriars when they presented the play, and where only it was presented. In the same year, 1607, both young men are writing commendatory verses for the first quarto of Ben Jonson's _Volpone_, which had been acted in 1605. Beaumont, with the confidence of intimacy, addresses Jonson as "Dear Friend," praises his "even work," deplores its failure with the many who "nothing can digest, but what's obscene, or barks," and implies that he forbears to make them understand its merits purely in deference to Jonson's wiser judgment,-- I would have shewn To all the world the art which thou alone Hast taught our tongue, the rules of time, of place And other rites, deliver'd with the grace Of comic style, which only is far more Than any English stage hath known before. But since our subtle gallants think it good To like of nought that may be understood ... ... let us desire They may continue, simply to admire Fine clothes and strange words, and offensive personalities. Fletcher in a more epigrammatic appeal to "The true master in his art, B. Jonson," prays him to forgive friends and foes alike, and then, those "who are nor worthy to be friends or foes." * * * * * Concerning Fletcher's beginnings in composition the earliest date is suggested by a line of D'Avenant's, written many years after Fletcher's death (1625), "full twenty years he wore the bays."[52] It has been conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists was in the field as early as 1604, with his comedy of _The Woman's Prize_ or _The Tamer Tamed_,--a well contrived and witty continuation of Shakespeare's _Taming of the Shrew_,--in which Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's Katherine, now deceased, marries the bereaved Petruchio and effectively turns the tables upon him. If acted before 1607, _The Woman's Prize_ was a Paul's Boys' or Queen's Revels' play. But while the upper limit of the play is fixed by the mention of the siege of Ostend, 1604, other references and the literary style point to 1610, even to 1614, as the date of composition or revision.[53]