Beaumont, the Dramatist: A Portrait, With Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean, and of His Association With John Fletcher

WIFE PREFACE N this period of resurgent dramatic creativity when once more the literature of the stage enthralls the public and commands the publisher, it is but natural that playwright, play-lover, and scholar alike should turn with renewed and enlightened interest to the models afforded by our Elizabethan masters of the age of gold, to the circumstances of their production and the lives of their imperishable authors. Very close to Shakespeare stood Beaumont and Fletcher but, though during the past three centuries books about Shake speare have been as legion and studies of the twin literary heroes have run into the hundreds, to Fletcher as an individual but one book has been de voted, and to Beaumont but one. A portrait of either Beaumont or Fletcher demands indeed as its counterpart, painted by the same brush and with alternating strokes, a portrait of his literary partner and friend. But in spirit and in favour the twain are distinct. In this book I have tried to pre sent the poetic and compelling personality of Francis Beaumont not only as conjoined with, and distin guished from, the personality of Fletcher, but as seen against the background of historic antecedents and family connections and as tinged by the atmosphere