Francis Beaumont

The Complete Poetical Works of Francis Beaumont

Francis Beaumont (1584 - 6 March 1616) was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher. It was once written of Beaumont and Fletcher that "in their joint plays their talents are so...completely merged into one, that the hand of Beaumont cannot clearly be distinguished from that of Fletcher." Yet this romantic notion did not stand up to critical examination. In the seventeenth century, Sir Aston Cockayne, a friend of Fletcher's, specified that there were many plays in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio that contained nothing of Beaumont's work, but rather featured the writing of Philip Massinger. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics like E. H. C. Oliphant subjected the plays to a self-consciously literary, and often subjective and impressionistic, reading - but nonetheless began to differentiate the hands of the collaborators.