VOLUME III SLICE IV Basso-relievo to Bedfordshire (continued 9)

The lords of Beaugency attained considerable importance in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries; at the end of the 13th century the fief was sold to the crown, and afterwards passed to the house of Orleans, then to those of Dunois and Longueville and ultimately again to that of Orleans. Joan of Arc defeated the English here in 1429. In 1567 the town was sacked and burned by the Protestants. On the 8th, 9th and 10th of December 1870 the German army, commanded by the grand-duke of Mecklenburg, defeated the French army of the Loire, under General Chanzy, in the battle of Beaugency (or Villorceau-Josnes), which was fought on the left bank of the Loire to the N.W. of Beaugency.

BEAUHARNAIS, the name of a French family, well known from the 15th century onward in Orléanais, where its members occupied honourable positions. One of them, Jean Jacques de Beauharnais, seigneur de Miramion, had for wife Marie Bonneau, who in 1661 founded a female charitable order, called after her the Miramiones. François de Beauharnais, marquis de la Ferté-Beauharnais, was a deputy in the states-general of 1789, and a devoted defender of the monarchy. He emigrated and served in Condé’s army. Later he gave his adherence to Napoleon, and became ambassador in Etruria and Spain; he died in 1823. His brother Alexandre, vicomte de Beauharnais, married Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie (afterwards the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte) and had two children by her—Eugène de Beauharnais (q.v.) and Hortense, who married Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland, and became mother of Napoleon III. Claude de Beauharnais, comte des Roches-Baritaud, uncle of the marquis and of the vicomte de Beauharnais, served in the navy and became a vice-admiral. He married Marie Anne Françoise (called Fanny) Mouchard, a woman of letters who had a celebrated salon. His son, also named Claude (d. 1819), was created a peer of France in 1814, and was the father of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, who married the grand-duke of Baden. The house of Beauharnais is still represented in Russia by the dukes of Leuchtenberg, descendants of Prince Eugène.

(M. P.*)

BEAUHARNAIS, EUGÈNE DE (1781-1824), step-son of Napoleon I., was born at Paris on the 3rd of September 1781. He was the son of the general Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais (1760-1794) and Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie. The father, who was born in Martinique, and served in the American War of Independence, took part in the politics of the French Revolution, and in June-August 1793 commanded the army of the Rhine. His failure to fulfil the tasks imposed on him (especially that of the relief of Mainz) led to his being arrested, and he was guillotined (23rd June 1794) not long before the fall of Robespierre. The marriage of his widow Josephine to Napoleon Bonaparte in March 1796 was at first resented by Eugène and his sister Hortense; but their step-father proved to be no less kind than watchful over their interests. In the Italian campaigns of 1796-1797 Eugène served as aide-de-camp to Bonaparte, and accompanied him to Egypt in the same capacity. There he distinguished himself by his activity and bravery, and was wounded during the siege of Acre. Bonaparte brought him back to France in the autumn of 1799, and it is known that the intervention of Eugène and Hortense helped to bring about the reconciliation which then took place between Bonaparte and Josephine. The services rendered by Eugène at the time of the coup d’état of Brumaire (1799) and during the Consulate (1799-1804) served to establish his fortunes, despite the efforts of some of the Bonapartes to destroy the influence of the Beauharnais and bring about the divorce of Josephine.

After the proclamation of the Empire, Eugène received the title of prince, with a yearly stipend of 200,000 francs, and became general of the chasseurs à cheval of the Guard. A year later, when the Italian republic became the kingdom of Italy, with Napoleon as king, Eugène received the title of viceroy, with large administrative powers. (See Italy.) Not long after the battle of Austerlitz (2nd December 1805) Napoleon dignified the elector of Bavaria with the title of king and arranged a marriage between Eugène and the princess Augusta Amelia of Bavaria. On the whole the government of Eugène gave general satisfaction in the kingdom of Italy; it comprised the districts between the Simplon Pass and Rimini, and also after the peace of Presburg (December 1805), Istria and Dalmatia. In 1808 (on the further partition of the papal states) the frontier of the kingdom was extended southwards to the borders of the kingdom of Naples, in the part known as the Abruzzi. In the campaign of 1809 Eugène commanded the army of Italy, with General (afterwards Marshal) Macdonald as his adlatus. The battle of Sacile, where he fought against the Austrian army of the Archduke John, did not yield proofs of military talent on the part of Eugène or of Macdonald; but on the retreat of the enemy into Austrian territory (owing to the disasters of their main army on the Danube) Eugène’s forces pressed them vigorously and finally won an important victory at Raab in the heart of the Austrian empire. Then, joining the main army under Napoleon, in the island of Lobau in the Danube, near Vienna, Eugène and Macdonald acquitted themselves most creditably in the great battle of Wagram (6th July 1809). In 1810 Eugène received the title of grand-duke of Frankfort. Equally meritorious were his services and those of the large Italian contingent in the campaign of 1812 in Russia. He and they distinguished themselves especially at the battles of Borodino and Malojaroslavitz; and on several occasions during the disastrous retreat which ensued, Eugène’s soldierly constancy and devotion to Napoleon shone out conspicuously in 1813-1814, especially by contrast with the tergiversations of Murat. On the downfall of the Napoleonic régime Eugène retired to Munich, where he continued to reside, with the title duke of Leuchtenberg and prince of Eichstädt. He died in 1824, leaving two surviving sons and three daughters.

For further details concerning Eugène see Mémoires et correspondance politique et militaire du Prince Eugène, edited by Baron A. Ducasse (10 vols., Paris, 1858-1860); F.J.A. Schneidewind, Prinz Eugen, Herzog van Leuchtenberg in den Feldzügen seiner Zeit (Stockholm, 1857); A. Purlitzer, Une Idylle sous Napoléon Ier: le roman du Prince Eugène (Paris, 1895); F. Masson, Napoléon et sa famille (Paris, 1897-1900).

(J. Hl. R.)

BEAUJEU. The French province of Beaujolais was formed by the development of the ancient seigniory of Beaujeu (department of Rhône, arrondissement of Villefranche). The lords of Beaujeu held from the 10th century onwards a high rank in feudal society. In 1210 Guichard of Beaujeu was sent by Philip Augustus on an embassy to Pope Innocent III.; he was present at the French attack on Dover, where he died in 1216. His son Humbert took part in the wars against the Albigenses and became constable of France. Isabeau, daughter of this Humbert, married Renaud, count of Forez; and their second son, Louis, assumed the name and arms of Beaujeu. His son Guichard, called the Great, had a very warlike life, fighting for the king of France, for the count of Savoy and for his own hand. He was taken prisoner by the Dauphinois in 1325, thereby losing important estates. Guichard’s son, Edward of Beaujeu, marshal of France, fought at Crécy, and perished in the battle of Ardres in 1351. His son died without issue in 1374, and was succeeded by his cousin, Edward of Beaujeu, lord of Perreux, who gave his estates of Beaujolais and Dombes to Louis II., duke of Bourbon, in 1400. Pierre de Bourbon was lord of Beaujeu in 1474, when he married Anne of France, daughter of Louis XI., and this is why that princess retained the name of lady of Beaujeu. Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I., got Beaujolais assigned to herself despite the claims of the constable de Bourbon. In 1531 the province was reunited to the crown; but Francis II. gave it back to the Montpensier branch of the Bourbons in 1560, from which house it passed to that of Orleans. The title of comte de Beaujolais was borne by a son of Philippe “Égalité,” duke of Orleans, born in 1779, died in 1808.

(M. P.*)

BEAULIEU, a village in the French department of Alpes-Maritimes. Pop. (1906) 1460. It is about 4 m. by rail E. of Nice (1¼ m. from Villefranche), and on the main line between Marseilles and Mentone; it is also connected with Nice and Mentone by an electric tramway. Of late years it has become a much frequented winter resort, and many handsome villas (among them that built by the 3rd marquess of Salisbury) have been constructed in the neighbourhood. The harbour has been extended and adapted for the reception of yachts.

(W. A. B. C.)

BEAULY (pronounced Bewley; a corruption of Beaulieu), a town of Inverness-shire, Scotland, on the Beauly, 10 m. W. of Inverness by the Highland railway. Pop. (1901) 855. Its chief interest is the beautiful remains of the Priory of St John, founded in 1230 by John Bisset of the Aird, for Cistercian monks. At the Reformation the buildings (except the church, now a ruin) passed into the possession of Lord Lovat. On the right bank of the river is the site of Lovat Castle, which once belonged to the Bissets, but was presented by James VI. to Hugh Fraser and afterwards demolished. To the south-east is the church of Kirkhill containing the vault of the Lovats. Three miles south of Beauly is Beaufort Castle, the chief seat of the Lovats, a fine modern mansion in the Scottish baronial style. It occupies the site of a fortress erected in the time of Alexander II., which was besieged in 1303 by Edward I. This was replaced by several castles in succession, of which one—Castle Dounie—was taken by Cromwell and burned by the duke of Cumberland in 1746, the conflagration being witnessed from a neighbouring hill by Simon, Lord Lovat, before his capture on Loch Morar. The land around Beauly is fertile and the town drives a brisk trade in coal, timber, lime, grain and fish.

BEAUMANOIR, a seigniory in what is now the department of Côtes-du-Nord, France, which gave its name to an illustrious family. Jean de Beaumanoir, marshal of Brittany for Charles of Blois, and captain of Josselin, is remembered for his share in the famous battle of the Thirty. This battle, sung by an unknown trouvère and retold with variations by Froissart, was an episode in the struggle for the succession to the duchy of Brittany between Charles of Blois, supported by the king of France, and John of Montfort, supported by the king of England. John Bramborough, the English captain of Ploërmel, having continued his ravages, in spite of a truce, in the district commanded by the captain of Josselin, Jean de Beaumanoir sent him a challenge, which resulted in a fight between thirty picked champions, knights and squires, on either side, which took place on the 25th of March 1351, near Ploërmel. Beaumanoir commanded thirty Bretons, Bramborough a mixed force of twenty Englishmen, six German mercenaries and four Breton partisans of Montfort. The battle, fought with swords, daggers and axes, was of the most desperate character, in its details very reminiscent of the last fight of the Burgundians in the Nibelungenlied, especially in the celebrated advice of Geoffrey du Bois to his wounded leader, who was asking for water: “Drink your blood, Beaumanoir; that will quench your thirst!” In the end the victory was decided by Guillaume de Montauban, who mounted his horse and overthrew seven of the English champions, the rest being forced to surrender. All the combatants on either side were either dead or seriously wounded, Bramborough being among the slain. The prisoners were well treated and released on payment of a small ransom. (See Le Poème du combat des Trente, in the Panthéon littéraire; Froissart, Chroniques, ed. S. Luce, c. iv. pp. 45 and 110 ff., and pp. 338-340).

Jean de Beaumanoir (1551-1614), seigneur and afterwards marquis de Lavardin, count of Nègrepelisse by marriage, served first in the Protestant army, but turned Catholic after the massacre of St Bartholomew, in which his father had been killed, and then fought against Henry of Navarre. When that prince became king of France, Lavardin changed over to his side, and was made a marshal of France. He was governor of Maine, commanded an army in Burgundy in 1602, was ambassador extraordinary to England in 1612, and died in 1614. One of his descendants, Henry Charles, marquis de Lavardin (1643-1701), was sent as ambassador to Rome in 1689, on the occasion of a difference between Louis XIV. and Innocent XI.

BEAUMANOIR, PHILIPPE DE RÉMI, Sire de (c. 1250-1296), French jurist, was born in the early part of the 13th century and died in 1296. The few facts known regarding his life are to be gathered from legal documents in which his name occurs. From these it appears that in 1273 he filled the post of bailli at Senlis, and in 1280 held a similar office at Clermont. He is also occasionally referred to as presiding at the assizes held at various towns. His great work is entitled Coutumes de Beauvoisis and first appeared in 1690, a second edition with introduction by A.A. Beugnot being published in 1842. It is regarded as one of the best works bearing on old French law, and was frequently referred to with high admiration by Montesquieu. Beaumanoir also obtained fame as a poet, and left over 20,000 verses, the best known of his poems being La Manekine, Jehan et Blonde and Salut d’amour.

BEAUMARCHAIS, PIERRE AUGUSTIN CARON DE (1732-1799), French dramatist, was born in Paris on the 24th of January 1732. His father, a watchmaker named Caron, brought him up to the same trade. He was an unusually precocious and lively boy, shrewd, sagacious, passionately fond of music and imbued with a strong desire for rising in the world. At the age of twenty-one he invented a new escapement for watches, which was pirated by a rival maker. Young Caron at once published his grievance in the Mercure, and had the matter referred to the Academy of Sciences, which decided in his favour. This affair brought him into notice at court; he was appointed, or at least called himself, watchmaker to the king, who ordered from him a watch similar to one he had made for Mme de Pompadour. His handsome figure and cool assurance enabled him to make his way at court. Mme Franquet, the wife of an old court official, persuaded her husband to make over his office to young Caron, and, on her husband’s death, a few months later, married the handsome watchmaker. Caron at the same time assumed the name Beaumarchais; and four years later, by purchasing the office of secretary to the king obtained a patent of nobility.

At court his musical talents brought him under the notice of the king’s sisters, who engaged him to teach them the harp. This position enabled him to confer a slight favour on the great banker Joseph Duverney, who testified his gratitude by giving Beaumarchais a share in his speculations. The latter turned the opportunity to good account, and soon realized a handsome fortune. In 1764 he took a journey to Spain, partly with commercial objects in view, but principally on account of the Clavijo affair. José Clavijo y Fajardo had twice promised to marry the sister of Beaumarchais, and had failed to keep his word. The adventure had not the tragic ending of Goethe’s Clavigo, for Beaumarchais did not pursue his vengeance beyond words. Beaumarchais made his first essay as a writer for the stage with the sentimental drama Eugénie (1767), in which he drew largely on the Clavijo incident. This was followed after an interval of two years by Les Deux Amis, but neither play had more than moderate success. His first wife had died within a year of the marriage and in 1768 Beaumarchais married Mme Lévêque. Her death in 1771 was the signal for unfounded rumours of poisoning. Duverney died in 1770; but some time before his death a duplicate settlement of the affairs between him and Beaumarchais had been drawn up, in which the banker acknowledged himself debtor to Beaumarchais for 15,000 francs. Duverney’s heir, the comte de La Blache, denied the validity of the document though without directly stigmatizing it as a forgery. The matter was put to trial. Beaumarchais gained his cause, but his adversary at once carried the case before the parlement. In the meantime the duc de Chaulnes forced Beaumarchais into a quarrel over Mdlle Menard, an actress at the Comédie Italienne, which resulted in the imprisonment of both parties. This moment was chosen by La Blache to demand judgment from the parlement in the matter of the Duverney agreement. Beaumarchais was released from prison for three or four days to see his judges. He was, however, unable to obtain an interview with Goezman, the member of the parlement appointed to report on his case. At last, just before the day on which the report was to be given in, he was informed privately that, by presenting 200 louis to Mme Goezman and 15 to her secretary, the desired interview might take place, if the result should prove unfavourable the money would be refunded. The money was sent and the interview obtained; but the decision was adverse, and 200 louis were returned, the 15 going as business expenses to the secretary. Beaumarchais, who had learned that there was no secretary save Mme Goezman herself, insisted on restitution of the 15 louis, but the lady denied all knowledge of the affair. Her husband, who was probably not cognisant of the details of the transaction at first, doubtless thought the defeated litigant would be easily put down, and at once brought an accusation against him for an attempt to corrupt justice. The battle was fought chiefly through the Mémoires, or reports published by the adverse parties, and in it Beaumarchais’s success was complete. For vivacity of style, fine satire and broad humour, his famous Mémoires have never been surpassed. Even Voltaire was constrained to envy them. Beaumarchais was skilful enough to make his particular case of universal application. He was attacking the parlement through one of its members, and the parlement was the universally detested body formed by the chancellor Maupeou. The Mémoires were, therefore, hailed with general delight; and the author, from being perhaps the most unpopular man in France, became at once the idol of the people. The decision went against Beaumarchais. The parlement condemned both him and Mme Goezman au blâme, i.e. to civic degradation, while the husband was obliged to abandon his position. Beaumarchais was reduced to great straits, but he obtained restitution of his rights within two years, and finally triumphed over his adversary La Blache.

During the next few years he was engaged in the king’s secret service. One of his missions was to England to destroy the Mémoires secrets d’une femme publique in which Charles Theveneau de Morande made an attack on Mme Du Barry. Beaumarchais secured this pamphlet, and burnt the whole impression in London. Another expedition to England and Holland to seize a pamphlet attacking Marie Antoinette led to a series of incidents more amazing than the intrigues in Beaumarchais’s own plays, but his own account must be received with caution. Beaumarchais pursued the libeller to Germany and overtook him in a wood near Neustadt. After a struggle he had gained possession of the document when he was attacked by brigands. Unfortunately the wound alleged to have been received in this fight was proved to be self-inflicted. The Austrian government regarded Beaumarchais with a suspicion justified by the circumstances. He was imprisoned for some time in Vienna, and only released on the receipt of explanations from Paris.

His various visits to England led him to take a deep interest in the impending struggle between the American colonies and the mother-country. His sympathies were entirely with the former; and by his unwearied exertions he succeeded in inducing the French government to give ample, though private, assistance in money and arms to the Americans. He himself, partly on his own account, but chiefly as the agent of the French and Spanish governments, carried on an enormous traffic with America. Under the name of Rodrigue Hortalez et Cie, he employed a fleet of forty vessels to provide help for the insurgents.

During the same period he produced his two famous comedies. The earlier, Le Barbier de Seville, after a prohibition of two years, was put on the stage in 1775. The first representation was a complete failure. Beaumarchais had overloaded the last scene with allusions to the facts of his own case and the whole action of the piece was laboured and heavy. But he cut down and remodelled the piece in time for the second representation, when it achieved a complete success. The intrigues which were necessary in order to obtain a licence for the second and more famous comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro, are highly amusing, and throw much light on the unsettled state of public sentiment at the time. The play was completed in 1778, but the opposition of Louis XVI., who alone saw its dangerous tendencies, was not overcome till 1784. The comedy had an unprecedented success. The principal character in both plays, Figaro, is a completely original conception; in fact Beaumarchais drew a portrait of himself in the resourceful adventurer, who, for mingled wit, shrewdness, gaiety and philosophic reflection, may not unjustly be ranked with Tartuffe. To English readers the Figaro plays are generally known through the adaptations of them in the grand opera of Mozart and Rossini; but in France they long retained popularity as acting pieces. The success of Le Mariage de Figaro was helped on by the methods of self-advertisement so well understood by Beaumarchais. The proceeds of the fiftieth performance were devoted to a charity, the choice of which provoked numerous epigrams. Beaumarchais had the imprudence to retaliate by personalities that were reported by his enemies to be dedicated against the king and queen. Beaumarchais was imprisoned for a short time by royal order in the prison of St Lazare. Brilliant pamphleteer as he was, Beaumarchais was at last to meet more than his match. He undertook to defend the company of the “Eaux de Paris,” in which he had a large interest, against Mirabeau, and brought down on himself an invective to which he could offer no reply. His real influence was gone from that date (1785-1786). Shortly afterwards he was violently attacked by Nicolas Bergasse, whom he sued for defamation of character. He gained his case, but his reputation had suffered in the pamphlet war. Beaumarchais’s later productions, the bombastic opera Tarare (1787) and the drama La Mère coupable (1792), which was very popular, are in no way worthy of his genius.

By his writings Beaumarchais contributed greatly, though quite unconsciously, to hurry on the events that led to the Revolution. At heart he hardly seems to have been a republican, and the new state of affairs did not benefit him. The astonishing thing is that the society travestied in Le Mariage de Figaro was the most vehement in its applause. The court looked on at a play justly characterized by Napoleon as the “revolution already in action” apparently without a suspicion of its real character. His popularity had been destroyed by the Mirabeau and Bergasse affairs, and his great wealth exposed him to the enmity of the envious. A speculation into which he entered, to supply the Convention with muskets from Holland, proved a ruinous failure. He was accused of concealing arms and corn in his house, but when his house was searched nothing was discovered but some thousands of copies of the edition (1783-1790) of the works of Voltaire which he had had printed at his private press at Kehl, in Baden. He was charged with treason to the republic and was imprisoned in the Abbaye on the 20th of August 1792. A week later he was released at the intercession of Mme Houret de la Marinière, who had been his mistress. He took refuge in Holland and England. His memoirs entitled, Mes six époques, detailing his sufferings under the republic, are not unworthy of the Goezman period. His courage and happy disposition never deserted him, although he was hunted as an agent of the Convention in Holland and England, while in Paris he was proscribed as an émigré. He returned to Paris in 1796, and died there, suddenly, on the 18th of May 1799.

Gudin de la Brenellerie’s Histoire de Beaumarchais (1809) was edited by M. Maurice Tourneux in 1888. See also L. de Loménie, Beaumarchais et son temps (1855), Eng. trans. by H.S. Edwards, (4. vols., 1856); A. Hallay’s Beaumarchais (1897); M. de Lescure, Éloge de Beaumarchais (1886); and Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. vi. Beaumarchais’s works have been edited by Gudin (7 vols., 1809); by Furne (6 vols., 1827); and by É. Fournier (1876). A variorum edition of his Théâtre complet was published by MM. d’Heylli and de Marescot (4 vols., 1869-1875); and a Bibliographie des œuvres de Beaumarchais, by H. Cordier in 1883.

BEAUMARIS, a market town and municipal borough, and the county town of Anglesey, N. Wales, situated on the Bay of Beaumaris, not far from Penmon, the northern entrance of the Menai Strait. Pop. (1901) 2326. It has but one considerable street. The large castle chapel, dedicated to the Virgin, has some fine monuments. David Hughes, of Jesus College, Oxford, founded the free grammar school in 1603. Buildings include town-hall and county-hall, with St Mary’s church of the 13th century, with chancel of the 16th. Practically without trade and with no manufactures, Beaumaris is principally noted as a bathing-place. Its earliest charter dates from 1283 and was revised under Elizabeth. The town was formerly called Barnover and, still earlier, Rhosfair, and bears its present name of French origin since Edward I. built its castle in 1293. This extensive building was erected on low ground, so that the fosse might communicate with the sea, and vessels might unload under its walls. The castle capitulated, after siege, to General Mytton (1646).

BEAUMONT, Belmont, or Bellomont, the name of a Norman and English family, taken from Beaumont-le-Roger in Normandy. Early in the 11th century Roger de Beaumont, a kinsman of the dukes of Normandy, married a daughter of Waleran, count of Meulan, and their son, Robert de Beaumont (d. 1118), became count of Meulan or Mellent about 1080. Before this date, however, he had fought at Hastings, and had added large estates in Warwickshire to the Norman fiefs of Beaumont and Pont Audemer, which he received when his father entered the abbey of St Peter at Préaux. It was during the reigns of William II. and Henry I. that the count rose to eminence, and under the latter monarch he became “the first among the counsellors of the king.” A “strenuous and sagacious man” he rendered valuable service to both kings in their Norman wars, and Henry I. was largely indebted to him for the English crown. He obtained lands in Leicestershire, and it has been said he was created earl of Leicester; this statement, however, is an error, although he exercised some of the privileges of an earl. His abilities as a counsellor, statesman and diplomatist gained him the admiration of his contemporaries, and Henry of Huntingdon describes him as “the wisest man between this and Jerusalem.” He seems to have been a man of independent character, for he assisted Anselm against William Rufus, although he supported Henry I. in his quarrel with Pope Paschal II. When Robert died on the 5th of June 1118 his lands appear to have been divided between his twin sons, Robert and Waleran, while a third son, Hugh, became earl of Bedford in 1138.

Robert de Beaumont (1104-1168), justiciar of England, married a granddaughter of Ralph Guader, earl of Norfolk, and receiving his father’s English fiefs in 1118 became earl of Leicester. He and his brother, Waleran, were the chief advisers of Stephen, and helped this king to seize the bishops of Salisbury and Lincoln in 1139; later, however, Robert made his peace with Henry II., and became chief justiciar of England. First among the lay nobles he signed the Constitutions of Clarendon, he sought to reconcile Henry and Archbishop Becket, and was twice in charge of the kingdom during the king’s absences in France. The earl founded the abbey of St Mary de Pré at Leicester and other religious houses, and by a charter confirmed the burgesses of Leicester in the possession of their merchant-gild and customs. His son, Robert, succeeded to the earldom of Leicester, and with other English barons assisted prince Henry in his revolt against his father the king in 1173. For this participation, and also on a later occasion, he was imprisoned; but he enjoyed the favour of Richard I., and died in Greece when returning from a pilgrimage in 1190. His son and heir, Robert, died childless in 1204.

Waleran de Beaumont (1104-1166) obtained his father’s French fiefs and the title of count of Meulan in 1118. After being imprisoned for five years by Henry I. he spent some time in England, and during the civil war between Stephen and the empress Matilda he fought for the former until about 1150, when he deserted the king and assisted the empress. His later history appears to have been uneventful. The county of Meulan remained in possession of the Beaumont family until 1204, when it was united with the royal domain.

Another member of the Beaumont family, possibly a relative of the earlier Beaumonts, was Louis de Beaumont (d. 1333), bishop of Durham from 1317 until his death. This prelate was related to the English king, Edward II., and after a life spent in strife and ostentation, he died on the 24th of September 1333. John Beaumont, master of the rolls under Edward VI., was probably a member of the same family. A dishonest and corrupt judge, he was deprived of his office and imprisoned in 1552.

The barony of Beaumont dates from 1309, when Henry Beaumont (d. 1340), who was constable of England in 1322, was summoned to parliament under this title. It was retained by his descendants until the death of William, the 7th baron and the 2nd viscount,1 in 1507, when it fell into abeyance. In 1840 the barony was revived in favour of Miles Thomas Stapleton (1805-1854), a descendant of Joan, Baroness Lovel, a daughter of the 6th baron, and it has since been retained by his descendants.

In 1906 Wentworth Blackett Beaumont (1829-1907), the head of a family well known in the north of England, was created Baron Allendale.

1 His father John (d. 1460), the 6th baron, great chamberlain and constable of England, was the first person advanced to the dignity of a viscount in England.

BEAUMONT, CHRISTOPHE DE (1703-1781), French ecclesiastic and archbishop of Paris, was a cadet of the Les Adrets and Saint-Quentin branch of the illustrious Dauphiné family of Beaumont. He became bishop of Bayonne in 1741, then archbishop of Vienne in 1743, and in 1746, at the age of forty-three, archbishop of Paris. Beaumont is noted for his struggle with the Jansenists. To force them to accept the bull Unigenitus which condemned their doctrines, he ordered the priests of his diocese to refuse absolution to those who would not recognize the bull, and to deny funeral rites to those who had confessed to a Jansenist priest. While other bishops sent Beaumont their adhesion to his crusade, the parlement of Paris threatened to confiscate his temporalities. The king forbade the parlement to interfere in these spiritual questions, and upon its proving obdurate it was exiled (September 18, 1753). The “royal chamber,” which was substituted, having failed to carry on the administration of justice properly, the king was obliged to recall the parlement, and the archbishop was sent into honourable exile (August 1754). An effort was made to induce him to resign the active duties of his see to a coadjutor, but in spite of the most tempting offers—including a cardinal’s hat—he refused. On the contrary, to his polemic against the Jansenists he added an attack on the philosophes, and issued a formal mandatory letter condemning Rousseau’s Émile. Rousseau replied in his masterly Lettre à M. de Beaumont (1762), in which he insists that freedom of discussion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force.

De Beaumont’s Mandements, lettres et instructions pastorales were published in two volumes in 1780, the year before his death.

BEAUMONT, SIR JOHN (1583-1627), English poet, second son of the judge, Sir Francis Beaumont, was born at Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire in 1583. The deaths of his father (in 1598) and of his elder brother, Sir Henry Beaumont (in 1605), made the poet early the head of this brilliant family; the dramatist, Francis Beaumont, being a younger brother. John went to Oxford in February 1597, and entered as a gentleman commoner in Broadgates Hall, the present Pembroke College. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1600, but on the death of Henry he no doubt went down to Grace-Dieu to manage the family estates. He began to write verse early, and in 1602, at the age of nineteen, he published anonymously his Metamorphosis of Tabacco, written in very smooth couplets, in which he addressed Drayton as his “loving friend.” He lived in Leicestershire for many years as a bachelor, being one “who never felt Love’s dreadful arrow.” But in process of time he became a tardy victim, and married a lady of the Fortescue family, who bore him four stout sons, the eldest of whom, another John, was accounted one of the most athletic men of his time. “He could leap 16 ft. at one leap, and would commonly, at a stand-leap, jump over a high long table in the hall, light on a settle beyond the table, and raise himself straight up.” This magnificent young man was not without literary taste; he edited his father’s posthumous poems, and wrote an enthusiastic elegy on him; he was killed in 1644 at the siege of Gloucester. Another of Sir John Beaumont’s sons, Gervaise, died in childhood, and the incidents of his death are recorded in one of his father’s most touching poems. Sir John Beaumont concentrated his powers on a poem in eight books, entitled The Crown of Thorns, which was greatly admired in MS. by the earl of Southampton and others, but which is lost. After long retirement, Beaumont was persuaded by the duke of Buckingham to move in larger circles; he attended court and in 1626 was made a baronet. This honour he did not long survive, for he died on the 19th of April 1627, and was buried in Westminster Abbey ten days later. The new Sir John, the strong man, published in 1629 a volume entitled Bosworth Field; with a taste of the variety of other Poems left by Sir John Beaumont. No more “tastes” were ever vouchsafed, so that it is by this volume and by the juvenile Metamorphosis of Tobacco that Beaumont’s reputation has to stand. Of late years, the peculiarities of John Beaumont’s prosody have drawn attention to his work. He wrote the heroic couplet, which was his favourite measure, with almost unprecedented evenness. Bosworth Field, the scene of the battle of which Beaumont’s principal poem gives a vaguely epical narrative, lay close to the poet’s house of Grace-Dieu. He writes on all occasions with a smoothness which was very remarkable in the first quarter of the 17th century, and which marks him, with Edmund Waller and George Sandys, as one of the pioneers of the classic reformation of English verse.

The poems of Sir John Beaumont were included in A. Chalmers’s English Poets, vol. vi. (1810). An edition, with “memorial introduction” and notes, was included (1869) in Dr A.B. Grosart’s Fuller Worthies’ Library; and the Metamorphosis of Tobacco was included in J.P. Collier’s Illustrations of Early English Popular Literature, vol. i. (1863).

(E. G.)

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, English dramatists1 The names of Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) are inseparably connected in the history of the English drama. John Fletcher was born in December 1579 at Rye in Sussex, and baptized on the 20th of the same month. Richard Fletcher, his father, afterwards queen’s chaplain, dean of Peterborough, and bishop successively of Bristol, Worcester and London, was then minister of the parish in which the son was born who was to make their name immortal. That son was just turned of seven when the dean distinguished and disgraced himself as the spiritual tormentor of the last moments on earth of Mary Stuart. When not quite twelve he was admitted pensioner of Bene’t College, Cambridge, and two years later was made one of the Bible-clerks: of this college Bishop Fletcher had been president twenty years earlier, and six months before his son’s admission had received from its authorities a first letter of thanks for various benefactions, to be followed next year by a second. Four years later than this, when John Fletcher wanted five or six months of his seventeenth year, the bishop died suddenly of over much tobacco and the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at his second marriage—this time, it appears, with a lady of such character as figures something too frequently on the stage of his illustrious son. He left eight children by his first marriage in such distress that their uncle, Dr Giles Fletcher, author of a treatise on the Russian commonwealth which is still held in some repute, was obliged to draw up a petition to the queen on their behalf, which was supported by the intercession of Essex, but with what result is uncertain.

From this date we know nothing of the fortunes of John Fletcher, till the needy orphan boy of seventeen reappears as the brilliant and triumphant poet whose name is linked for all time with the yet more glorious name of Francis Beaumont, third and youngest son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, one of the justices of the common pleas—born, according to general report, in 1586, but, according to more than one apparently irrefragable document, actually born two years earlier. The first record of his existence is the entry of his name, together with those of his elder brothers Henry and John, as a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates Hall, Oxford, now supplanted by Pembroke College. But most lovers of his fame will care rather to remember the admirable lines of Wordsworth on the “eager child” who played among the rocks and woodlands of Grace-Dieu; though it may be doubted whether even the boy’s first verses were of the peaceful and pastoral character attributed to them by the great laureate of the lakes. That passionate and fiery genius which was so soon and for so short a time to “shake the buskined stage” with heroic and tragic notes of passion and of sorrow, of scorn and rage, and slighted love and jealousy, must surely have sought vent from the first in fancies of a more ardent and ambitious kind; and it would be a likelier conjecture that when Frank Beaumont (as we know on more authorities than one that he was always called by his contemporaries, even in the full flush of his adult fame—“never more than Frank,” says Heywood) went to college at the ripe age of twelve, he had already committed a tragedy or two in emulation of Tamburlaine, Andronicus or Jeronymo. The date of his admission was the 4th of February 1597; on the 22nd of April of the following year his father died; and on the 3rd of November 1600, having left Oxford without taking his degree, the boy of fifteen was entered a member of the Inner Temple, his two brothers standing sponsors on the grave occasion. But the son of Judge Beaumont was no fitter for success at the bar than the son of Bishop Fletcher for distinction in the church: it is equally difficult to imagine either poet invested with either gown. Two years later appeared the poem of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, generally attributed to Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion of the Ovidian legend, not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits. At twenty-three Beaumont prefixed to the magnificent masterpiece of Ben Jonson some noticeable verses in honour of his “dear friend” the author; and in the same year (1607) appeared the anonymous comedy of The Woman-Hater, usually assigned to Fletcher alone; but being as it is in the main a crude and puerile imitation of Jonson’s manner, and certainly more like a man’s work at twenty-two than at twenty-eight, internal evidence would seem to justify, or at least to excuse those critics who in the teeth of high authority and tradition would transfer from Fletcher to Beaumont the principal responsibility for this first play that can be traced to the hand of either. As Fletcher also prefixed to the first edition of Volpone a copy of commendatory verses, we may presume that their common admiration for a common friend was among the earliest and strongest influences which drew together the two great poets whose names were thenceforward to be for ever indivisible. During the dim eleven years between the death of his father and the dawn of his fame, we cannot but imagine that the career of Fletcher had been unprosperous as well as obscure. From seventeen to twenty-eight his youth may presumably have been spent in such painful struggles for success, if not for sustenance, as were never known to his younger colleague, who, as we have seen, was entered at Oxford a few months after Fletcher must in all likelihood have left Cambridge to try his luck in London: a venture most probably resolved on as soon as the youth had found his family reduced by the father’s death to such ruinous straits that any smoother course can hardly have been open to him. Entering college at the same age as Fletcher had entered six years earlier, Beaumont had before him a brighter and briefer line of life than his elder. But whatever may have been their respective situations when, either by happy chance or, as Dyce suggests, by the good offices of Jonson, they were first brought together, their intimacy soon became so much closer than that of ordinary brothers that the household which they shared as bachelors was conducted on such thoroughly communistic principles as might have satisfied the most trenchant theorist who ever proclaimed as the cardinal point of his doctrine, a complete and absolute community of bed and board, with all goods thereto appertaining. But in the year following that in which the two younger poets had united in homage to Jonson, they had entered into a partnership of more importance than this in “the same clothes and cloak, &c.,” with other necessaries of life specified by Aubrey.

In 1608, if we may trust the reckoning which seems trust-worthiest, the twin stars of our stage rose visibly together for the first time. The loveliest, though not the loftiest, of tragic plays that we owe to the comrades or the successors of Shakespeare, Philaster, has generally been regarded as the first-born issue of their common genius. The noble tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret has sometimes been dated earlier and assigned to Fletcher alone; but we can be sure neither of the early date nor the single authorship. The main body of the play, comprising both the great scenes which throw out into full and final relief the character of either heroine for perfect good or evil, bears throughout the unmistakable image and superscription of Fletcher; yet there are parts which for gravity and steady strength of style, for reserve and temperance of effect, would seem to suggest the collaboration of a calmer and more patient hand; and these more equable and less passionate parts of the poem recall rather the touch of Massinger than of Beaumont. In the second act, for example, the regular structure of the verse, the even scheme of the action, the exaggerated braggardism which makes of the hero a mere puppet or mouthpiece of his own self-will, are all qualities which, for better or for worse, remind us of the strength or the weakness of a poet with whom we know that Fletcher, before or after his alliance with Beaumont, did now and then work in common. Even the Arbaces of Beaumont, though somewhat too highly coloured, does not “write himself down an ass,” like Thierry on his first entrance, after the too frequent fashion of Massinger’s braggarts and tyrants; does not proclaim at starting or display with mere wantonness of exposure his more unlovely qualities in the naked nature of their deformity. Compare also the second with the first scene of the fourth act. In style and metre this second scene is as good an example of Massinger as the first is of Fletcher at his best. Observe especially in the elaborate narrative of the pretended self-immolation of Ordella these distinctive notes of the peculiar style of Massinger; the excess of parenthetic sentences, no less than five in a space of twenty lines; the classical common-place of allusion to Athens, Rome and Sparta in one superfluous breath; the pure and vigorous but somewhat level and prosaic order of language, with the use of certain cheap and easy phrases familiar to Massinger as catchwords; the flat and feeble terminations by means of which the final syllable of one verse runs on into the next without more pause or rhythm than in a passage of prose; the general dignity and gravity of sustained and measured expression. These are the very points in which the style of Massinger differs from that of Fletcher; whose lightest and loosest verses do not overlap each other without sensible distinction between the end of one line and the beginning of the next; who is often too fluent and facile to be choice or forcible in his diction, but seldom if ever prosaic or conventional in phrase or allusion, and by no means habitually given to weave thoughts within thoughts, knit sentence into sentence, and hang whole paragraphs together by the help of loops and brackets. From these indications we might infer that this poem belongs altogether to a period later than the death of Beaumont; though even during his friend’s life it appears that Fletcher was once at least allied with Massinger and two lesser dramatists in the composition of a play, probably the Honest Man’s Fortune, of which the accounts are to be found in Henslowe’s papers.

Hardly eight years of toil and triumph of joyous and glorious life were spared by destiny to the younger poet between the date assigned to the first radiant revelation of his genius in Philaster and the date which marks the end of all his labours. On the 6th of March 1616 Francis Beaumont died—according to Jonson and tradition, “ere he was thirty years of age,” but this we have seen to be inconsistent with the registry of his entrance at Oxford. If we may trust the elegiac evidence of friends, he died of his own genius and fiery overwork of brain; yet from the magnificent and masculine beauty of his portrait one should certainly never have guessed that any strain of spirit or stress of invention could have worn out so long before its time so fair and royal a temple for so bright and affluent a soul. A student of physiognomy will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood, handsome and significant in feature and expression alike;—Beaumont’s the statelier and serener of the two, with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose, with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and the imperial head with its “fair large front” and clustering hair set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation: Fletcher’s a more keen and fervid face, sharper in outline every way, with an air of bright ardour and glad fiery impatience; sanguine and nervous, suiting the complexion and colour of hair; the expression of the eager eyes and lips almost recalling that of a noble hound in act to break the leash it strains at;—two heads as lordly of feature and as expressive of aspect as any gallery of great men can show. That spring of 1616, we may note in passing, was the darkest that ever dawned upon England or the world; for, just forty-eight days afterwards, it witnessed, on the 23rd of April, the removal from earth of the mightiest genius that ever dwelt among men. Scarcely more than a month and a half divided the death-days of Beaumont and of Shakespeare. Some three years earlier by Dyce’s estimate, when about the age of twenty-nine, Beaumont had married Ursula, daughter and co-heiress to Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent, by whom he left two daughters, one of them posthumous. Fletcher survived his friend just nine years and five months; he died “in the great plague, 1625,” and was buried on the 29th of August in St Saviour’s, Southwark; not, as we might have wished, beside his younger fellow in fame, who but three days after his untimely death had added another deathless memory to the graves of our great men in Westminster Abbey, which he had sung in such noble verse. Dying when just four months short of forty-six, Fletcher had thus, as well as we can now calculate, altogether some fourteen years and six months more of life than the poet who divides with him the imperial inheritance of their common glory.

The perfect union in genius and in friendship which has made one name of the two names of these great twin brothers in song is a thing so admirable and so delightful to remember, that it would seem ungracious and unkindly to claim for either a precedence which we may be sure he would have been eager to disclaim. But if a distinction must be made between the Dioscuri of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than Castor can it be said that on any side Beaumont was a poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a difference. Few things are stranger than the avowal of so great and exquisite a critic as Coleridge, that he could trace no faintest line of demarcation between the plays which we owe mainly to Beaumont and the plays which we owe solely to Fletcher. To others this line has always appeared in almost every case unmistakable. Were it as hard and broad as the line which marks off, for example, Shakespeare’s part from Fletcher’s in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the harmony would of course be lost which now informs every work of their common genius, and each play of their writing would be such another piece of magnificent patchwork as that last gigantic heir of Shakespeare’s invention, the posthumous birth of his parting Muse which was suckled at the breast of Fletcher’s as a child of godlike blood might be reared on the milk of a mortal mother—or in this case, we might sometimes be tempted to say, of a she-goat who left in the veins of the heaven-born suckling somewhat too much of his nurse Amalthaea. That question however belongs in any case more properly to the study of Shakespeare than to the present subject in hand. It may suffice here to observe that the contributions of Fletcher to the majestic temple of tragedy left incomplete by Shakespeare show the lesser workman almost equally at his best and at him worst, at his weakest and at his strongest. In the plays which we know by evidence surer than the most trustworthy tradition to be the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture as leaves the greatest example of romantic tragedy—for Cymbeline and the Winter’s Tale, though not guiltless of blood, are in their issues no more tragic than Pericles or the Tempest—a unique instance of glorious imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly aid other than heavenly breed, disproportioned and divine. But throughout these noblest of the works inscribed generally with the names of both dramatists we trace on every other page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every other turn the note of a deeper voice, than we can ever recognize in the work of Fletcher alone. Although the beloved friend of Jonson, and in the field of comedy his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthiest and the closest follower of Shakespeare. In the external but essential matter of expression by rhythm and metre he approves himself always a student of Shakespeare’s second manner, of the style in which the graver or tragic part of his historical or romantic plays is mostly written; doubtless, the most perfect model that can be studied by any poet who, like Beaumont, is great enough to be in no danger of sinking to the rank of a mere copyist, but while studious of the perfection set before him is yet conscious of his own personal and proper quality of genius, and enters the presence of the master not as a servant but as a son. The general style of his tragic or romantic verse is as simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity of outline as that of Fletcher’s is by comparison lax, effusive, exuberant. The matchless fluency and rapidity with which the elder brother pours forth the stream of his smooth swift verse gave probably the first occasion for that foolish rumour which has not yet fallen duly silent, but still murmurs here and there its suggestion that the main office of Beaumont was to correct and contain within bounds the overflowing invention of his colleague. The poet who while yet a youth had earned by his unaided mastery of hand such a crown as was bestowed by the noble love and the loving “envy” of Ben Jonson was, according to this tradition, a mere precocious pedagogue, fit only to revise and restrain the too liberal effusions of his elder in genius as in years. Now, in every one of the plays common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every such play, and above all of their two masterpieces, Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has not to do with the author of Valentinian and The Double Marriage. In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more fluid, more feminine. From the first scene to the last we are swept as it were along the race of a running river, always at full flow of light and buoyant melody, with no dark reaches or perilous eddies, no stagnant pools or sterile sandbanks; its bright course only varied by sudden rapids or a stronger ripple here and there, but in rough places or smooth still stirred and sparkling with summer wind and sun. But in those tragic poems of which the dominant note is the note of Beaumont’s genius a subtler chord of thought is sounded, a deeper key of emotion is touched, than ever was struck by Fletcher. The lighter genius is palpably subordinate to the stronger, and loyally submits itself to the impression of a loftier spirit. It is true that this distinction is never grave enough to produce a discord: it is also true that the plays in which the predominance of Beaumont’s mind and style is generally perceptible make up altogether but a small section of the work that bears their names conjointly; but it is no less true that within this section the most precious part of that work is comprised. Outside it we shall find no figures so firmly drawn, no such clearness of outline, no such cunning of hands as we recognize in the three great studies of Bellario, Evadne and Aspatia. In his male characters, as for instance in the parts of Philaster and Arbaces, Beaumont also is apt to show something of that exaggeration or inconsistency for which his colleague is perhaps more frequently and more heavily to blame; but in these there is not a jarring note, not a touch misplaced; unless, indeed, a rigid criticism may condemn as unfeminine and incongruous with the gentle beauty of her pathetic patience the device by which Aspatia procures herself the death desired at the hand of Amintor. This is noted as a fault by Dyce; but may well be forgiven for the sake of the magnificent scene which follows, and the highest tragic effect ever attained on the stage of either poet. That this as well as the greater part of those other scenes which are the glory of the poem is due to Beaumont might readily be shown at length by the process of comparison. The noble scene of regicide, which it was found expedient to cancel during the earlier years of the Restoration, may indeed be the work of Fletcher; but the part of Evadne must undoubtedly be in the main assigned to the more potent hand of his fellow. There is a fine harmony of character between her naked audacity in the second act and her fierce repentance in the fourth, which is not unworthy a disciple of the tragic school of Shakespeare; Fletcher is less observant of the due balance, less heedful of the nice proportions of good and evil in a faulty and fiery nature, compounded of perverse instinct and passionate reaction. From him we might have had a figure as admirable for vigour of handling, but hardly in such perfect keeping as this of Beaumont’s Evadne, the murderess-Magdalen, whose penitence is of one crimson colour with her sin. Nor even in Fletcher’s Ordella, worthy as the part is throughout even of the precious and exquisite praise of Lamb, is there any such cunning touch of tenderness or delicate perfume of pathos as in the parts of Bellario and Aspatia. These have in them a bitter sweetness, a subtle pungency of mortal sorrow and tears of divine delight, beyond the reach of Fletcher. His highest studies of female character have dignity, energy, devotion of the heroic type; but they never touch us to the quick, never waken in us any finer and more profound sense than that of applause and admiration. There is a modest pathos now and then in his pictures of feminine submission and slighted or outraged love; but this submission he is apt to make too servile, this love too dog-like in its abject devotion to retain that tender reverence which so many generations of readers have paid to the sweet memories of Aspatia and Bellario. To excite compassion was enough for Fletcher as in the masculine parts of his work it was enough for him to excite wonder, to sustain curiosity, to goad and stimulate by any vivid and violent means the interest of readers or spectators. The single instance of noble pathos, the one scene he has left us which appeals to the higher and purer kind of pity, is the death of the child Hengo in Bonduca—a scene which of itself would have sufficed to enrol his name for ever on the list of our great tragic poets. To him we may probably assign the whole merit of that fiery and high-toned tragedy, with all its spirit and splendour of national and martial passion; the conscious and demonstrative exchange of courtesy between Roman and Briton, which is one of the leading notes of the poem, has in it a touch of overstrained and artificial chivalry characteristic of Fletcher; yet the parts of Caratach and Poenius may be counted among the loftiest and most equal of his creations. But no surer test or better example can be taken of the distinctive quality which denotes the graver genius of either poet than that supplied by a comparison of Beaumont’s Triumph of Love with Fletcher’s Triumph of Death. Each little play, in the brief course of its single act, gives proof of the peculiar touch and special trick of its author’s hand: the deeper and more delicate passion of Beaumont, the rapid and ardent activity of Fletcher, have nowhere found a more noticeable vent for the expression respectively of the most tender and profound simplicity of quiet sweetness, the most buoyant and impatient energy of tragic emotion.

In the wider field of their comic or romantic drama it is yet easier to distinguish the respective work of either hand. The bias of Fletcher was towards mixed comedy; his lightest and wildest humour is usually crossed or tempered by an infusion of romance; like Shakespeare in this one point at least, he has left no single play without some touch on it of serious interest, of poetic eloquence or fancy, however slight and fugitive. Beaumont, evidently under the imperious influence of Ben Jonson’s more rigid theories, seems rather to have bent his genius with the whole force of a resolute will into the form or mould prescribed for comedy by the elder and greater comic poet. The admirable study of the worthy citizen and his wife, who introduce to the stage and escort with their applause The Knight of the Burning Pestle through his adventurous career to its untimely end, has all the force and fulness of Jonson’s humour at its best, with more of freshness and freedom. In pure comedy, varied with broad farce and mock-heroic parody, Beaumont was the earliest as well as the ablest disciple of the master whose mantle was afterwards to be shared among the academic poets of a younger generation, the Randolphs and Cartwrights who sought shelter under the shadow of its voluminous folds. The best example of the school of Jonson to be found outside the ample range of his own work is The Scornful Lady, a comedy whose exceptional success and prolonged popularity must have been due rather to the broad effect of its forcible situations, its wealth and variety of ludicrous incidents, and the strong gross humour of its dialogue, than to any finer quality of style, invention or character. It is the only work of Beaumont and Fletcher which a critic who weighs the meaning of his words can admit to be as coarse as the coarsest work of Ben Jonson. They are prone, indeed, to indulge elsewhere in a wanton and exuberant licence of talk; and Fletcher, at least, is liable to confuse the shades of right and wrong, to deface or efface the boundary lines of good and evil, to stain the ermine of virtue and palliate the nakedness of vice with the same indecorous and incongruous laxity of handling. Often in mere haste to despatch the business of a play, to huddle up a catastrophe or throw out some particular scene into sharp and immediate relief, he will sacrifice all seemliness and consistency of character to the present aim of stage effect, and the instant impression of strong incident or audacious eloquence. His heroines are too apt to utter sentiments worthy of Diana in language unworthy of Doll Tearsheet. But in this play both style and sentiment are throughout on a lower level, the action and emotion are of a baser kind than usual; the precept of Aristotle and the practice of Jonson have been so carefully observed and exaggerated that it might almost be said to offer us in one or two places an imitation not merely of the sorrier but of the sorriest qualities of human nature; and full as it is of spontaneous power and humorous invention, the comedy extolled by the moral Steele (with just so much of reservation as permits him to deprecate the ridicule cast upon the clerical character) is certainly more offensive to artistic law and aesthetic judgment by the general and ingrained coarseness of its tone, than the tragi-comedy denounced by the immoral Dryden as exceeding in licence his own worst work and that of his fellow playwrights; an imputation, be it said in passing, as groundless as the protest pleaded on their behalf is impudent; for though we may hardly agree with the uncompromising panegyrist who commends that play in particular to the approval of “the austere scarlet” (remembering, perhaps, that Aristophanes was the chosen bedfellow of Chrysostom), there is at least no such offence against art or taste in the eccentricity of its situations or the daring of its dialogue. The buoyant and facile grace of Fletcher’s style carries him lightly across quagmires in which a heavier-footed poet, or one of slower tread, would have stuck fast, and come forth bemired to the knees. To Beaumont his stars had given as birthright the gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad strong humour; to Fletcher had been allotted a more fiery and fruitful force of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more various readiness and fulness of bright exuberant speech. The genius of Beaumont was deeper, sweeter, nobler than his elder’s; the genius of Fletcher more brilliant, more supple, more prodigal, and more voluble than his friend’s. Without a taint or a shadow on his fame of such imitative servility as marks and degrades the mere henchman or satellite of a stronger poet, Beaumont may fairly be said to hold of Shakespeare in his tragedy, in his comedy of Jonson; in each case rather as a kinsman than as a client, as an ally than as a follower: but the more special province of Fletcher was a land of his own discovering, where no later colonist has ever had power to settle or to share his reign. With the mixed or romantic comedy of Shakespeare it has nothing in common except the admixture or alternation of graver with lighter interest, of serious with humorous action. Nothing is here of his magic exaltation or charm of fairy empire. The rare and rash adventures of Fletcher on that forbidden track are too sure to end in pitiful and shameful failure. His crown of praise is to have created a wholly new and wholly delightful form of mixed comedy or dramatic romance, dealing merely with the humours and sentiments of men, their passions and their chances; to have woven of all these a web of emotion and event with such gay dexterity, to have blended his colours and combined his effects with such exquisite facility and swift light sureness of touch, that we may return once and again from those heights and depths of poetry to which access was forbidden him, ready as ever to enjoy as of old the fresh incomparable charm, the force and ease and grace of life, which fill and animate the radiant world of his romantic invention. Neither before him nor after do we find, in this his special field of fancy and of work, more than shadows or echoes of his coming or departing genius. Admirable as are his tragedies already mentioned, rich in splendid eloquence and strong in large grasp of character as is the Roman history of The False One, full of interest and vigour as is the better part of Rollo Duke of Normandy, and sublime in the loveliness of passion as is the one scene of perfect beauty and terror which crowns this latter tragedy, Fletcher may claim a yet higher and more special station among his great dramatic peers by right of his comic and romantic than by right of his tragic and historic plays. Even in these he is more a romantic than a tragic poet. The quality of his genius, never sombre or subtle or profound, bears him always towards fresh air and sunshine. His natural work is in a midday world of fearless boyish laughter and hardly bitter tears. There is always more of rainbow than of storm in his skies; their darkest shadow is but a tragic twilight. What with him is the noon of night would seem as sunshine on the stage of Ford or Webster. There is but one passage in all these noble plays which lifts us beyond a sense of the stage, which raises our admiration out of speech into silence, tempers and transfigures our emotion with a touch of awe. And this we owe to the genius of Beaumont, exalted for an instant to the very tone and manner of Shakespeare’s tragedy, when Amintor stands between the dead and the dying woman whom he has unwittingly slain with hand and tongue. The first few lines that drop from his stricken lips are probably the only verses of Beaumont or Fletcher which might pass for Shakespeare’s even with a good judge of style—

“This earth of mine doth tremble,” &c.

But in Fletcher’s tragedy, however we may be thrilled and kindled with high contagious excitement, we are never awed into dumb delight or dread, never pierced with any sense of terror or pity too deep or even deep enough for tears. Even his Brunhalts and Martias can hardly persuade us to forget for the moment that “they do but jest, poison in jest.” A critic bitten with the love of classification might divide those plays of Fletcher usually ranked together as comedies into three kinds: the first he would class under the head of pure comedy, the next of heroic or romantic drama, the third of mixed comedy and romance; in this, the last and most delightful division of the poet’s work the special qualities of the two former kinds being equally blended and delicately harmonized. The most perfect and triumphant examples of this class are The Spanish Curate, Monsieur Thomas, The Custom of the Country, and The Elder Brother. Next to these and not too far below them, we may put The Little French Lawyer (a play which in its broad conception of a single eccentric humour suggests the collaboration of Beaumont and the influence of Jonson, but in style and execution throughout is perfect Fletcher), The Humorous Lieutenant (on which an almost identical verdict might be passed), Women Pleased, Beggars’ Bush, and perhaps we might add The Fair Maid of the Inn; in most if not in all of which the balance of exultant and living humour with serious poetic interest of a noble and various kind is held with even hand and the skill of a natural master. In pure comedy Rule a Wife and have a Wife is the acknowledged and consummate masterpiece of Fletcher. Next to it we might class, for comic spirit and force of character, Wit without Money, The Wildgoose Chase, The Chances, and The Noble Gentleman, a broad poetic farce to whose overflowing fun and masterdom of extravagance no critic has ever done justice but Leigh Hunt, who has ventured, not without reason, to match its joyous and preposterous audacities of superlative and sovereign foolery with the more sharp-edged satire and practical merriment of King and No King, where the keen prosaic humour of Bessus and his swordsmen is as typical of the comic style in which Beaumont had been trained up under Ben Jonson as the high interest and graduated action of the serious part of the play are characteristic of his more earnest genius. Among the purely romantic plays of Fletcher, or those in which the comic effect is throughout subordinate to the romantic, The Knight of Malta seems most worthy of the highest place for the noble beauty and exaltation of spirit which informs it with a lofty life, for its chivalrous union of heroic passion and Catholic devotion. This poem is the fairest and the first example of those sweet fantastic paintings in rose-colour and azure of visionary chivalry and ideal holiness, by dint of which the romance of more recent days has sought to cast the glamour of a mirage over the darkest and deadliest “ages of faith.” The pure and fervent eloquence of the style is in perfect keeping with the high romantic interest of character and story. In the same class we may rank among the best samples of Fletcher’s workmanship The Pilgrim, The Loyal Subject, A Wife for a Month, Love’s Pilgrimage, and The Lover’s Progress,—rich all of them in exquisite writing, in varied incident, in brilliant effects and graceful and passionate interludes. In The Coxcomb, and The Honest Man’s Fortune—two plays which, on the whole, can hardly be counted among the best of their class—there are tones of homelier emotion, touches of a simpler and more pathetic interest than usual; and here, as in the two admirable first scenes between Leucippus and Bacha, which relieve and redeem from contempt the tragic burlesque of Cupid’s Revenge, the note of Beaumont’s manner is at once discernible.

Even the most rapid revision of the work done by these great twin poets must impress every capable student with a sense of the homage due to this living witness of their large and liberal genius. The loss of their names from the roll of English poetry would be only less than the loss of the few greatest inscribed on it. Nothing could supply the want of their tragic, their comic or romantic drama; no larger or more fiery planet can ever arise to supplant or to eclipse the twin lights of our zodiac. Whatever their faults of shortcoming or excess, there is in their very names or the mere thought of their common work a kind of special and personal attraction for all true lovers of high dramatic poetry. There is the glory and grace of youth in all they have left us; if there be also somewhat too much of its graceless as well as its gracious qualities, yet there hangs about their memory as it were a music of the morning, a breath and savour of bright early manhood, a joyous and vigorous air of free life and fruitful labour, which might charm asleep for ever all thought or blame of all mortal infirmity or folly, or any stain of earth that may have soiled in passing the feet of creatures half human and half divine while yet they dwelt among men. For good or for evil, they are above all things poets of youth; we cannot conceive of them grown grey in the dignity of years, venerable with the authority of long life, and weighted with the wisdom of experience. In the Olympian circle of the gods and giants of our race who on earth were their contemporaries and corrivals, they seem to move among the graver presences and figures of sedater fame like the two spoilt boys of heaven, lightest of foot and heart and head of all the brood of deity. Shakespeare may have smiled as Jonson may have nodded approval of their bright swift work, neither of these great elders grudging his praise to the special charm which won for it a preference during one generation at least even over their own loftier and weightier verse; and indeed the advance in natural ease, in truth and grace of dialogue, is alike manifest whether we turn to such of their comic characters as Valentine and Don John, Rutilio and Monsieur Thomas, from the Truewit of Jonson or even from the Mercutio of Shakespeare; the one too stiff with classic starch, the other too full of mere verbal catches and forced conceits, to persuade us that either can in any age have fairly represented the light free talk and facile humour of its youth. In another field than this Beaumont and Fletcher hold as high and secure a station of their own as any poet of their race. In perfect workmanship of lyrical jewellery, in perfect bloom and flower of song-writing, they equal all compeers whom they do not excel; the blossoms of their growth in this kind may be matched for colour and fragrance against Shakespeare’s, and for morning freshness and natural purity of form exceed the finest grafts of Jonson. The Faithful Shepherdess alone might speak for Fletcher on this score, being as it is simply a lyric poem in semi-dramatic shape, to be judged only as such, and as such almost faultless; but in no wise to be classed for praise or blame among the acting plays of its author, whose one serious error in the matter was the submission of his Dryad to the critical verdict of an audience too probably in great part composed of clowns and satyrs far unlike the loving and sweet-tongued sylvan of his lovely fancy. And whether we assign to him or to Beaumont the divine song of melancholy (moestius lacrymis Simonideis), perfect in form as Catullus and profound in sentiment as Shelley, which Milton himself could but echo and expand, could not heighten or deepen its exquisite intensity of thought and word alike, there will remain witness enough for the younger brother of a lyric power as pure and rare as his elder’s.

The excess of influence and popularity over that of other poets usually ascribed to the work of Beaumont and Fletcher for some half century or so after their own time has perhaps been somewhat overstated by tradition. Whatever may have been for a season the fashion of the stage, it is certain that Shakespeare can show two editions for one against them in folio; four in all from 1623 to 1685, while they have but their two of 1647 and 1679. Nor does one see how it can accurately or even plausibly be said that they were in any exact sense the founders of a school either in comedy or in tragedy. Massinger, for some years their survivor, and in some points akin to them as a workman, cannot properly be counted as their disciple; and no leading poet of the time had so much in common with them as he. At first sight, indeed, his choice of romantic subject and treatment of foreign stories, gathered from the fertile tale-tellers of the south, and ranging in date from Boccaccio to Cervantes, may seem to mark him out as a member of the same school; but the deepest and most distinctive qualities of his genius set it far apart from theirs; though undoubtedly not so far that any discrepancy or discord should impair the excellence or injure the keeping of works in which he took part with Fletcher. Yet, placed beside theirs, the tone of his thought and speech seems by comparison severe as well as sober, and sad as well as severe. Their extravagant and boyish insanity of prostrate royalism is not more alien from his half pensive and half angry undertone of political protest than his usually careful and complete structure of story from their frequently lax and slovenly incoherence of character or plot, than his well composed and proportioned metre from their lighter and looser melodies, than the bitter insistence and elaborate acrimony of his judicial satire on hypocrisy or oppression from the gaiety or facility of mood which suffers them in the shifting of a scene to redeem their worst characters by some juggler’s trick of conversion at the last moment allowed them to wind up a play with universal reconciliation and an act of oblivion on all hands. They could hardly have drawn with such steady skill and explicit finish an Overreach or a Luke; but the strenuous and able work of Massinger at its highest point of success has no breath in it of their brighter and more immediate inspiration. Shirley, on the other hand, may certainly be classed as a pupil who copied their style in water-colour; his best tragedy and his best comedy, The Traitor and The Lady of Pleasure, might pass muster undetected among the plays of Fletcher, and might fairly claim to take rank above the lowest class of these. In the finest work of Middleton we recognize an almost exact reproduction of Fletcher’s metrical effects,—a reverberation of that flowing music, a reiteration of those feminine final notes. In his later tragi-comedies, throughout his masterpiece of Women beware Women, and in the noble scenes which make up the tragic or serious parts of The Changeling or The Spanish Gipsy,—wherever, in a word, we find the admirable but unequal genius of this poet at its best—we find a likeness wholly wanting in his earlier and ruder work, which undoubtedly suggests the influence of Fletcher. Other instances of imitation, other examples of discipleship, might perhaps be found among lesser men of the next generation; but the mass of succeeding playwrights began in a very short time to lower the style and debase the scheme of dramatic poetry; and especially to loosen the last ties of harmony, to deface the very form and feature of tragic verse. In Shirley, the last and least of those in whom the lineal blood of the old masters was yet discernible, we find side by side with the fine ancestral indications of legitimate descent exactly such marks of decadence rather than degeneracy as we might have anticipated in the latest heir of a long line which began with the rise of Marlowe, “sun of the morning,” in the highest heaven of our song, to prepare a pathway for the sun. After Shakespeare there was yet room for Beaumont and Fletcher; but after these and the other constellations had set, whose lights filled up the measure of that diviner zodiac through which he moved, there was but room in heaven for the pallid moonrise of Shirley; and before this last reflex from a sunken sun was itself eclipsed, the glory had passed away from English drama, to alight upon that summit of epic song, whence Milton held communion with darkness and the stars.

(A. C. S.)

Bibliographical Appendix

The chief collected editions of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are: Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, printed by Humphrey Moseley in folio in 1647 as containing plays “never printed before”; Fifty Comedies and Tragedies written, &c. (fol. 1679); Works ... (11 vols. 1843-1846), edited by Alexander Dyce, which superseded earlier editions by L. Theobald, G. Colman and H. Weber, and presented a modernized text; a second two-volume edition by Dyce in 1852; The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (15 vols. 1905, &c.) edited by Arnold Glover and A.R. Waller in the “Cambridge English Classics” from the text of the 2nd folio, and giving variant readings from all separate issues of the plays previous to that edition; and Works ... (12 vols. 1904, &c.), under the general editorship of A.H. Bullen, the text of which is founded on Dyce but with many variant readings, the last volume containing memoirs and excursuses by the editor.

The foundation of all critical work on Beaumont and Fletcher is to be found in Dyce. Discrimination between the work of the two dramatists and their collaborators has been the object of a series of studies for the establishment of metrical and other tests. Fletcher’s verse is recognizable by the frequency of an extra syllable, often an accented one, at the end of a line, the use of stopped lines, and the frequency of trisyllabic feet. He thus obtained an adaptable instrument enabling him to dispense with prose even in comic scenes. The pioneer work in these matters was done by F.G. Fleay in a paper read before the New Shakspere Society in 1874 on “Metrical Tests as applied to Fletcher, Beaumont and Massinger.” His theories were further developed in the article “Fletcher” in his Biog. Chron. of the Eng. Drama. Further investigations were published by R. Boyle in Englische Studien (vols. v.-x., Heilbronn, 1882-1887), and in the New Shakspere Society Transactions (1880-1886), by Benno Leonhardt in Anglia (Halle, vols. xix. seq.), and by E.H. Oliphant in Englische Studien (vols. xiv. seq.). Mr Oliphant restores to Beaumont much which other critics had been inclined to deny him. On the sources of the plays see E. Köppel in Münchener Beiträge zur roman. u. eng. Phil. (Erlangen and Leipzig, 1895). Consult further articles by A.H. Bullen and R. Boyle respectively on Fletcher and Massinger in the Dict. of Nat. Biog.; G.C. Macaulay, Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study (1883); and Dr A.W. Ward’s chapter on “Beaumont and Fletcher” in vol. ii. of his Hist. of Eng. Dram. Lit. (new ed. 1899).

A list of the plays attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, with some details, is added, with the premiss that beyond the main lines of criticism laid down in Mr Swinburne’s article above it is often difficult to dogmatize on authorship. Even in cases where the play was produced long after Beaumont had ceased to write for the stage there can be no certainty that we are not dealing with a piece which is an adaptation of an earlier play by a later hand.

The Joint Works of Beaumont and Fletcher.—The Scornful Lady (acted c. 1609, pr. 1616) is a farcical comedy of domestic life, in which Oliphant finds traces of alteration by a third and perhaps a fourth hand. Philaster or Love Lies a-Bleeding is assigned by Macaulay to Beaumont practically in its entirety, while Fleay attributes only three scenes to Fletcher. It was probably acted c. 1609, and was printed 1620; it was revised (1695) by Elkanah Settle and (1763) by the younger Colman, probably owing its long popularity to the touching character of Bellario. Beaumont’s share also predominated in The Maid’s Tragedy (acted c. 1609, pr. 1619), in A King and No King (acted at court December 26, 1611, and perhaps earlier, pr. 1619), while The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1610, pr. 1613), burlesquing the heroic and romantic play of which Heywood’s Four Prentices is an example, might perhaps be transferred entire to Beaumont’s account. In Cupid’s Revenge (acted at court January 1612, and perhaps at Whitefriars in 1610, pr. 1615), founded on Sidney’s Arcadia, the two dramatists appear to have had a third collaborator in Massinger and perhaps a fourth in Nathaniel Field.

The Coxcomb (acted c. 1610, and by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1612, pr. 1647) seems to have undergone later revision by Massinger. Fletcher’s collaboration with other dramatists had begun during his connexion with Beaumont, who apparently ceased to write for the stage two or three years before his death.

Works Assigned to Beaumont’s Sole Authorship.—The Woman Hater (pr. 1607, as “lately acted by the children of Paul’s”) was assigned formerly to Fletcher. The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn was presented at Whitehall on the 26th of February 1612, on the marriage of the Prince and Princess Palatine. Of Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One (acted 1608, pr. 1647), the Induction, with The Triumph of Honour and The Triumph of Love, both founded on tales from the Decameron, are by Beaumont.

Works Assigned to Fletcher’s Sole Authorship.—The Faithful Shepherdess (pr. c. 1609) was ill received on its original production, but was revived in 1634. That Fletcher was the sole author is practically unquestioned, though Ben Jonson in Drummond’s Conversations is made to assert that “Beaumont and Fletcher ten years since hath written The Faithful Shepherdess.” It was translated into Latin verse by Sir R. Fanshawe in 1658, and Milton’s Comus owes not a little to it. In Four Plays in One, the two last, The Triumph of Death and The Triumph of Time, are Fletcher’s. In the indifferent comedy of The Captain (acted 1612-1613, revived 1626, pr. 1647) there is no definite evidence of any other hand than Fletcher’s, though the collaboration of Beaumont, Massinger and Rowley has been advanced. Other Fletcher plays are: Wit Without Money (acted 1614, pr. 1639); the two romantic tragedies of Bonduca (in which Caradach or Caractacus is the chief figure rather than Bonduca or Boadicea) and Valentinian, both dating from c. 1616 and printed in the first folio; The Loyal Subject (acted 1618, revived at court 1633, pr. 1647); The Mad Lover (acted before March 1619, pr. 1647), which borrows something from the story of Mundus and Paulina in Josephus (bk. xviii.); The Humorous Lieutenant (1619, pr. 1647); Woman Pleased (c. 1620, pr. 1647); The Woman’s Prize or The Tamer Tam’d (produced probably between 1610 and 1613, acted 1633 at Blackfriars and at court, pr. 1647), a kind of sequel to The Taming of the Shrew; The Chances (uncertain date, pr. 1647), taken from La Sennora Cornelia of Cervantes, and repeatedly revived after the Restoration and in the 18th century; Monsieur Thomas (acted perhaps as early as 1609, pr. 1639); The Island Princess (c. 1621, pr. 1647); The Pilgrim and The Wild Goose-Chase (pr. 1652), the second of which was adapted in prose by Farquhar, both acted at court in 1621, and possibly then not new pieces; A Wife for a Month (acted 1624, pr. 1647); Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (lic. 1624, pr. 1640). The Pilgrim received additions from Dryden, and was adapted by Vanbrugh.

Fletcher in Collaboration with other Dramatists.—External evidence of Fletcher’s connexion with Massinger is given by Sir Aston Cokaine, who in an epitaph on Fletcher and Massinger wrote: “Playes they did write together, were great friends,” and elsewhere claimed for Massinger a share in the plays printed in the 1647 folio. James Shirley and William Rowley have their part in the works that used to be included in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon; and to a letter from Field, Daborne and Massinger, asking for £5 for their joint necessities from Henslowe about the end of 1615, there is a postscript suggesting the deduction of the sum from the “mony remaynes for the play of Mr Fletcher and ours.” The problem is complicated when the existing versions of the play are posterior to Fletcher’s lifetime, that is, revisions by Massinger or another of pieces which were even originally of double authorship. In this way Beaumont’s work may be concealed under successive revisions, and it would be rash to assert that none of the late plays contains anything of his. Mr R. Boyle joins the name of Cyril Tourneur to those of Fletcher and Massinger in connexion with The Honest Man’s Fortune (acted 1613, pr. 1647), which Fleay identifies with “the play of Mr Fletcher’s and ours.” The Knight of Malta (acted 1618-1619, pr. 1647) is in its existing form a revision by Fletcher, Massinger, and possibly Field, of an earlier play which Oliphant thinks was probably written by Beaumont about 1608. The same remarks (with the exclusion of Field’s name) apply to Thierry and Theodoret (acted c. 1617, pr. 1621), perhaps a satire on contemporary manners at the French court, though Beaumont’s share in either must be regarded as problematical. Fletcher and Massinger’s great tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnaveldt (acted 1619) was first printed in Bullen’s Old Plays (vol. ii., 1883). They followed it up with The Custom of the Country (acted 1619, pr. 1647), based on an English translation (1619) of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda; The Double Marriage (c. 1620, pr. 1647); The Little French Lawyer (c. 1620, pr. 1647), the plot of which can be traced indirectly to a novellino by Massuccio Salernitano; The Laws of Candy (c. 1618, pr. 1647), of disputed authorship; The False One (c. 1620, pr. 1647), dealing with the subject of Caesar and Cleopatra; The Spanish Curate (acted 1622, pr. 1647), repeatedly revived after the Restoration, was derived from Leonard Digges’s translation (1622) of a Spanish novel, Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard; The Prophetess (1622, pr. 1647), afterwards made into an opera by Betterton to Purcell’s music; The Sea-Voyage (1622, pr. 1647); The Elder Brother (perhaps originally written by Fletcher c. 1614; revised and acted 1635, pr. 1647); Beggar’s Bush (acted at court 1622, probably then not new, pr. 1647); and The Noble Gentleman (1625-1626, pr. 1647). Fletcher only had a small share in Wit at Several Weapons—“if he but writ an act or two,” says an epilogue on its revival (1623 or 1626),—and the play is probably a revision by Rowley and Middleton of an early Beaumont and Fletcher play. A Very Woman (1634, pr. 1655) is a revision by Massinger of The Woman’s Plot ascribed to Fletcher and acted at court in 1621. Field worked with Fletcher and Massinger on the lost play of the Jeweller of Amsterdam (1619), as on the Faithful Friends (1613-1614) and The Queen of Corinth (c. 1618, pr. 1647). The Lover’s Progress (acted 1634, pr. 1647) is probably a revision by Massinger of the Fletcher play licensed in 1623 as The Wandering Lovers, and is perhaps identical with Cleander, licensed in 1634. Love’s Cure or The Martial Maid (1623 or 1625) is thought by Mr Fleay to be a revision by Massinger of a Beaumont and Fletcher play produced as early as 1607-1608. W. Rowley joined Fletcher in The Maid in the Mill (1623, pr. 1647), and had a share with Massinger in the revision of The Fair Maid of the Inn (licensed 1626, pr. 1647), based on La illustre Fregona of Cervantes. Nice Valour (acted 1625-1626, pr. 1647) seems to have been altered by Middleton from an earlier play; The Widow, printed in 1652 as by Jonson, Fletcher and Middleton, must be ascribed almost exclusively to Middleton. The Night Walker (1633) is a revision by Shirley of a Fletcher play.

Fletcher and Jonson in Collaboration.—The history of The Bloody Brother or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, printed in 1637 as by “B.J.F.,” is matter of varied speculation. Mr Oliphant thinks the basis of the play to be an early work (c. 1604) of Beaumont, on which is superimposed a revision (1616) by Fletcher, Jonson and Middleton, and a subsequent revision (1636-1637) by Massinger. The general view is that the main portion of the play is referable to Jonson and Fletcher. Jonson apparently had a share in Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage (pr. 1647), which seems to have been revised by Massinger in 1635.

Fletcher and Shakespeare.—The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed in 1634 as by Mr John Fletcher and Mr William Shakespeare. If its first representation was in 1625 it was in the year of Fletcher’s death. It was included in the second folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s comedies and tragedies. If Shakespeare and Fletcher worked in concert it was probably in 1612-1613, and the existing play probably represents a revision by Massinger in 1625. Henry VIII. (played at the Globe in 1613) is usually ascribed mainly to Fletcher and Massinger, and the conditions of its production were probably similar. Fletcher and Shakespeare are together credited at Stationers’ Hall with the lost play of Cardenio, destroyed by Warburton’s cook.

(M. Br.)

1 Recent research has resulted in some variation of opinion as to the precise authorship of some of the plays commonly attributed to them; but this article, contributed to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, remains the classical modern criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher, and its value is substantially unaffected. As representing to the end the views of its distinguished author, it is therefore retained as written, the results of later research being epitomized in the Bibliographical Appendix at the end. (Ed.)