Francis Beaumont: a playwright from the Age of Shakespeare

Francis Beaumont was a leading playwright of the Shakespearean era, although his name is generally coupled with that of another playwright, namely John Fletcher, such that many more people have heard of “Beaumont and Fletcher” than of Francis Beaumont himself . 

Early years

His exact date of birth is unknown, although it was probably in late 1584. The reason for the uncertainty is the lack of a baptismal record for him, and the reason for this is that the Beaumont family were Catholics at a time when to be Catholic was a very dangerous thing. A Catholic baptism would have had to be carried out in secret.

The Beaumonts were a prominent Leicestershire family, Francis’s father being a judge. Francis entered an Oxford college in February 1597, aged 12, but had to leave the following year when his father died. In 1600 he was admitted to the Inner Temple (one of the four Inns of Court) where his two brothers were already established. However, it does not appear that he ever seriously considered taking up the law as his career.

Instead, he was far more interested in writing poetry and plays. His early poems showed great promise, and he was praised by, among others, Ben Jonson.

His first play written for the public stage was “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”, which was written in only eight days and is today Beaumont’s best-known solo play. It features a “play within a play” and the stage device of people who are apparently audience members becoming involved in the action on stage. A grocer and his wife interrupt the prologue of “The London Merchant”, a love story, to insist that their apprentice has a part and that the play should be a chivalric romance. The two themes become intermingled and the whole production becomes a satire on the theatrical conventions of the time. The influence of “Don Quixote” is also very strong.

Unfortunately for Beaumont, his audience was not ready for this degree of stage sophistication and it was not well received. Beaumont never attempted anything of such an avant-garde nature again, but the upside of this failure was that it drove him towards forging a partnership with another “failed” playwright, namely John Fletcher. 

Beaumont and Fletcher

At first, the partners wrote plays for the “children’s” acting companies that comprised, for example, the “Children of St Paul’s” who were recruited from the boy choristers of St Paul’s Cathedral. However, from about 1610 they moved their allegiance to the professional “King’s Men” company at the Globe Theatre. According to John Aubrey, the two lived together in a house near the theatre, sharing everything including their “wench”.

It is not easy to work out which plays produced during this time were collaborations between the two men, which were written on their own, and which in collaboration with other playwrights. Joint authorship was very common at a time when demand from the playhouses for new work was incessant. It is known, for example, that Fletcher worked with Philip Massinger, William Rowley and William Shakespeare, among others. However, it is not apparent that Francis Beaumont collaborated with anyone other than John Fletcher. 

It has been reckoned that nine plays can be reliably cited as being by “Beaumont and Fletcher”, five of them written for the Children’s companies and four for the King’s Men. The “Children’s” plays comprised four comedies and a tragedy. Only one of the plays, a comedy, had much impact. This was “The Scornful Lady”, the popularity of which probably derived from its sanctioning of the vulgar manners of young “men about town”, in their pursuit of women, given that the audiences would have contained many who fell into that category. 

The four “King’s Men” plays were of higher quality, and it is on two of them that the lasting reputation of Beaumont and Fletcher depends. “Philaster” (1609) is a romance set in a royal court, featuring many plot twists and turns and a hero in the mould of Hamlet, whose actions are often far from noble and who lacks the virtues that a prince should have, as well as being indecisive. The play appears to question the principle that kings are divinely ordained to rule, which was strongly maintained by King James I, but that did not prevent the play from being performed at Court.

“The Maid’s Tragedy” (1610-11) also features an unworthy king, who maintains that his divine right gives him the power to tyrannise those around him and force them to sacrifice their own romantic desires to satisfy his will. The plot is intricate, with several memorable scenes, and much of the verse is of the highest quality. 

There has been considerable debate over what form the collaboration between Beaumont and Fletcher took, with some critics saying that Beaumont wrote the tragic scenes and Fletcher the comic ones, although this has been strongly disputed. Another thought has been that Beaumont acted merely as Fletcher’s editor, and others have maintained that Beaumont wrote the scenes based on Fletcher’s plots. The question is still far from a definitive answer.

In 1613 Francis Beaumont renewed his acquaintance with the Inner Temple by writing a masque to be performed by its members (and those of Gray’s Inn) for the forthcoming marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Emperor Palatine. As all royal marriages are political, it is not surprising to find that the masque contains references to the political and dynastic themes of the day.

Francis Beaumont was married in 1613 to Ursula Isley, and they had two daughters. However, it would appear that at some time during the same year he suffered a stroke, which virtually put paid to his career as a writer. He lived for another three years and died on 6^th March 1616, probably aged 31 or 32. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in what was to become known as Poet’s Corner.

The reputation of Beaumont and Fletcher has fluctuated considerably during the 400 or so years since Beaumont’s death, as has that of virtually all the playwrights of Shakespeare’s age (and shortly after) who were not Shakespeare. It is noticeable that many of the plays in which Francis Beaumont had a hand featured extravagant plots that are less likely to appeal to modern audiences than to those of his own day. Those plays of Shakespeare that are equally of their age (such as Coriolanus) are also not among the most popular today. Whether the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Francis Beaumont alone, will ever recover the position they once held remains to be seen, but is unlikely. 

© John Welford