The marriage of Beaumont in 1613 must have divided the ordinary lives of the friends, and may also have forestalled death in interrupting their literary partnership; but tradition, which is usually tenacious of the quarrels of poets, records no jealousies or disputes between them, and it is human, if uncritical, to applaud the apology of the stationer in 1647 for not separating their works: 'But since never parted while they lived, I conceived it not equitable to separate their ashes.' Sir Aston Cokain, in an address to the publishers, declared it unjust to give Beaumont equal credit for a volume of plays of which he 'writ in few, And Massinger in other few'; and, besides similar testimony to Massinger in verses to Charles Cotton, he has an epitaph on Fletcher and Massinger, which is a further testimony to the former's capacity for enduring friendship, as well as a witness for that of his new friend, who survived him by nearly thirteen years. According to Cokain :

'Playes they did write together, were great friends,
And now one grave includes them at their ends.'

There is no reason to suppose that Beaumont and Fletcher were companions in boyhood, as Clarange describes himself and Lidian in the passage quoted from 'The Lovers' Progress'; and their Universities were Oxford and Cambridge respectively. They came to London in the early years of James I's reign, and possibly owed their first acquaintance to Jonson, whose fame and generous recognition of merit drew all young poets to his side. Both wrote verses in praise of his Volpone (acted in 1605); and as friends they brought their wit and conviviality to his circle. 'I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine,' says Beaumont in his letter to Jonson, written, according to the editors of the 1679 folio of their works, before he and Mr Fletcher came to London with two of the precedent Comedies then not finish'd, which deferr'd their merry meetings at the Mermaid.' They were practically compeers in rank and age; Fletcher, the elder by five or six years, was born in 1579. But in circumstances Beaumont had the advantage, for, though a third son, he belonged to a prosperous family. His father, Sir Francis Beaumont, of Grace Dieu in Leicestershire, a Justice of the Common

Pleas, had been dead two years when he was entered at the Inner Temple in 1600. Fletcher was one of many children of Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London, who died suddenly in 1596, leaving little property behind him. He was probably thrown early on his own resources, and perhaps already, in the early stages of their friendship, was well on the way to becoming a poet to a playhouse,' as Bishop Goodman afterwards called him.*

We know little of their lives. Neither their comparatively high rank and connexions nor their existence in a later and less simple age has given them any advantage over earlier playwrights in this respect; nor did they show more concern than their predecessors for the survival of their works. With the exception of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess,' it is not known that any play was published at their instigation; and no preface from their pens, except Fletqher's to that pastoral, is extant. Four plays only were published before Beaumont's death in 1616 and five more before Fletcher's death in 1625; for the rest the press waited till a 'Tragicall Age,' when the scene' was withered, and condemn'd. . . . to a long winter and sterilitie,' induced the actors to entrust them to the stationer. In these circumstances the first folio appeared in 1647; but the union of all the plays in one volume was not effected till 1679, when the publisher stated that seventeen plays were printed from the quartos, and the rest from a corrected copy of the first folio supplied by 'an ingenious and worthy Gentleman,' who had been an intimate of both authors and a spectator of most of their plays during their lifetime.

The Cambridge University Press has done a great service to students of literature by faithfully reproducing this 1679 text, with the addition of all prefatory matter from the first folio, and appendices supplying all textual variations and all additional matter in it and the quartos. This edition provides a complete apparatus for the study of the text, so far as it depends on the originals alone, and now only needs the one or two companion volumes which were promised, to contain explanatory notes and all other necessary information. Every reader

The Court of King James the First,' ed. Brewer, 1839, i, 134.

will regret that these have been abandoned, so far as the editor is concerned; and it is to be hoped that they will be supplied by other hands, without prolonged delay. Meantime a short general index would have been a useful addition to vol. x; at present any particular play must be quested through the title pages or the tables of contents (the latter are omitted in vols. II, III, IV) of several volumes. So far as the material appropriate to each separate play goes, that is being supplied, though slowly, in the edition with modernised and reconstructed text controlled by Mr A. H. Bullen ; but here again considerations of a more general kind are deferred to some period which the rate of progress 'prorogues' indefinitely. Meantime, however, Mr Bullen's edition progressively supplies what the Cambridge volumes do not profess to offer to wit, the results of scholarship as applied to the text wherever it appears to be defective, the advances in correction or interpretation made or attempted since the 17th century.

The character of the reign to which Beaumont and Fletcher belong supplies the key to much in their work that seems to introduce new features or gives it an unaccustomed complexion. According to contemporary historians and scandal-mongers, they matured in an age corrupted by peace and wealth, such as unemployed captains are wont to rail against in their plays. Peace is accused alike by the churchman (Bishop Goodman) and the old soldier (Arthur Wilson*); and the latter gives his opinion with the eloquence of a quondam poet, now chastened to puritanism in the godly household of the Earl of Warwick:

'Nothing now but bravery and feasting, the Parents of Debauchery and Riot, flourished among us. There is no Theam for History when men spill more drink than blood; when plots and contrivances for Lust, acted in dark corners, are more practised than Stratagems in War; and when the Stages, with silken Pageants and Poppets, that slacken the sinews, are more frequented than those Theaters of Honor, where Industry brawns and hardens the Arms. Peace is a great Blessing, if it bring not a Curse with it; but War is more happy in its effects than it, especially if it takes away

*The History of Great Britain,' etc., 1653, p. 91.

the distemper that grows by long surfets, without destroying the Body.'

But if peace supplied the favourable conditions, the active agency of corruption was charged upon the Scots, who, in Goodman's opinion, 'learned of the French to be wasteful and immoderate in their expense,' and bettered that instruction when (as the insinuation ran) they exchanged a wildernesse for a Canaan.' Lord Hay led the way in extravagance in dress and most kinds of ostentation. Through him, we are told, began the absurd and wasteful institution of 'ante-suppers' of dishes 'filled with the choycest and dearest viands sea or land could afford,' all which were merely an eye-feast, removed before the appearance of the actual supper courses, and inferior to them in heat only. The monstrous excesse of the belly and the back by his first president, became then the mode of those times for great persons (the most part) to follow, and for the common people to this hour to practise.'

Another evil, incident to times when weapons are worn, was greatly aggravated by the presence of the Scots and anger at their advancement. The pages of historians contain many references to the increase of sudden and bloody quarrels on this account; and the alarming frequency of the pre-arranged duel bears witness to the morbid sensitiveness to which the honour of individuals was becoming subject, in a society which refined upon the simpler and sounder notions of the last reign, and was unoccupied and unrestrained by active patriotism. Intimate friends, for little worthless punctilioes of Honour, . . . took the Field, and fell together by each other's hand'; † and the occurrence of such double catastrophes in duel is not more striking than the obstinate persistence of deadly feuds till opportunity served and the bitter fruit of fiery passions' was reaped. The personal intervention of the King, followed by a Star Chamber decree and an actual prosecution by Bacon of intending duellists, did something to mitigate the evil, which supplied the dramatists with a great variety

'Aulicus Coquinariae'; reprinted in 'Secret History of the Court of King James the First,' 1811, ii, 165.

See instances in Wilson, op. cit. p. 61.

of situations, tragic or romantic, and even comic, as when they mock, in 'A King and no King,' the niceties of honour adapted to arrant cowards. Their efforts on the side of reason are especially marked in Fletcher and his later coadjutor Massinger. In The Custom of the Country,' the conversion of an arrogant duellist is moralised; in 'The Lovers' Progress,' the duel between bosom friends and their seconds, and the duel thrust upon a temperate man with fatal results to his opponent and remorse and danger to himself, are both made as odious as precept, characterisation, and effective situations can make them; while in 'A Very Woman,' now credited to Fletcher as well as Massinger, Cardenes, after being schooled in honour of the right stamp' by almost fatal wounds, asks of his enemy in return for his wounds and 'honour in the general report Tainted and soil'd,'

This satisfaction-that you would forgive

My contumelious words and blow, my rash
And unadvised wildness first threw on you.'

To read Beaumont and Fletcher's plays is to sojourn in a world in which all these elements muster and contend-bravery and feasting, and their children debauchery and riot; hot blood and strained notions of honour, bringing grave or tragic consequences out of trifling causes; above all, the inevitable sex intrigue of undisciplined times. Subtle adventuresses, such as Lelia in 'The Captain,' begin in the pages of Arthur Wilson as victims of parental waste:

'Many young gentlewomen (whom their Parents debaucheries drive to necessities) made their Beauties their fortunes, coming to London to put them to sale; and some of them had so good Markets, that they obtained great Pensions during their lives, and afterwards were married to men of eminent parts, and fortunes, accounted wise, gallant and heroical spirits.'*

'Plots and contrivances for lust, acted in dark corners' led to crime and suspicion of crime in high places in the age as on the stage, which truly reflects the time in its representation of base and blood-stained intrigue. The tendency to represent the agonies resulting from poisonas in the frightful scenes which display Valentinian, in

* See instances in Wilson, op. cit. p. 146.