Francis Beaumont
born c. 1585, Grace-Dieu, Leicestershire,
Eng.
died March 6, 1616, London
English Jacobean poet and playwright who
collaborated with John Fletcher on comedies and
tragedies between about 1606 and 1613.
The son of Francis Beaumont, justice of common
pleas of Grace-Dieu priory, Charnwood Forest,
Leicestershire, Beaumont entered Broadgates Hall
(later Pembroke College), Oxford, in 1597. His
father dying the following year, he abruptly
left the university without a degree and later
(November 1600) entered London’s Inner Temple,
where he evidently became more involved in
London’s lively literary culture than in legal
studies.
In 1602 there appeared the poem Salmacis and
Hermaphroditus, generally attributed to
Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion
of the Ovidian legend that added to the story
humour and a fantastic array of episodes and
conceits. At age 23 he prefixed to Ben Jonson’s
Volpone (1607) some verses in honour of his
“dear friend” the author. John Fletcher
contributed verses to the same volume, and, by
about this time, the two were collaborating on
plays for the Children of the Queen’s Revels.
According to John Aubrey, a 17th-century
memorialist, in Brief Lives,
They lived together on the Banke side, not
far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay
together…; had one wench in the house between
them…; the same cloathes and cloake, &c.,
betweene them.
Their collaboration as playwrights was to last
for some seven years. In 1613 Beaumont married
an heiress, Ursula Isley of Sundridge in Kent,
and retired from the theatre. He died in London
in 1616 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
It is difficult to disentangle Beaumont’s
share in the 35 plays published in 1647 as by
"Beaumont and Fletcher" (to which another 18
were added in the 1679 collection). Scholars now
believe that only 10 of these were by the two
friends, while Beaumont’s hand also appears in 3
plays substantially written by Fletcher and
Philip Massinger. The rest are plays written by
Fletcher alone or in collaboration with other
dramatists, except for The Knight of the Burning
Pestle, which is Beaumont’s unaided work.
Attempts to separate the shares of Beaumont and
Fletcher in any given work are complicated by
the fact that Beaumont sometimes revised scenes
by Fletcher and Fletcher edited some of
Beaumont’s work. The Knight of the Burning
Pestle parodies a then popular kind of
play—sprawling, episodic, with sentimental
lovers and chivalric adventures. It opens with
The Citizen and his Wife taking their places on
the stage to watch “The London Merchant”—itself
a satire on the work of a contemporary
playwright, Thomas Dekker. Citizen and Wife
interrupt, advise, and insist that the play
should be more romantic and their apprentice
should take a leading part. Thereafter these two
contradictory plots go forward side by side,
allowing Beaumont to have fun with bourgeois
naïveté about art.
