poet of some merit, but a man of
position, and Francis himself, two years before his death in 1616, married
a Kentish heiress. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke
College), Oxford, and seems to have made acquaintance with John Fletcher
soon after quitting the University. Fletcher was five years older than his
friend, and of a clerical family, his father being Bishop of London, and
his uncle, Giles Fletcher (the author of _Licia_), a dignitary of the
Church. The younger Giles Fletcher and his brother Phineas were thus
cousins of the dramatist. Fletcher was a Cambridge man, having been
educated at Benet College (at present and indeed originally known as Corpus
Christi). Little else is known of him except that he died of the plague in
1625, nine years after Beaumont's death, as he had been born five years
before him. These two men, however, one of whom was but thirty and the
other not fifty when he died, have left by far the largest collection of
printed plays attributed to any English author. A good deal of dispute has
been indulged in as to their probable shares,--the most likely opinion
being that Fletcher was the creator and Beaumont (whose abilities in
criticism were recognised by such a judge as Ben Jonson) the critical and
revising spirit. About a third of the whole number have been supposed to
represent Beaumont's influence more or less directly. These include the two
finest, _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_; while as to the third play,
which may be put on the same level, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, early
assertion, confirmed by a constant catena of the best critical authority,
maintains that Beaumont's place was taken by no less a collaborator than
Shakespere. Fletcher, as has been said, wrote in conjunction with Massinger
(we know this for certain from Sir Aston Cokain), and with Rowley and
others, while Shirley seems to have finished some of his plays. Some modern
criticism has manifested a desire to apply the always uncertain and usually
unprofitable tests of separation to the great mass of his work. With this
we need not busy ourselves. The received collection has quite sufficient
idiosyncrasy of its own as a whole to make it superfluous for any one,
except as a matter of amusement, to try to split it up.

Its characteristics are, as has been said, sufficiently marked, both in
defects and in merits. The comparative depreciation which has come upon
Beaumont and Fletcher naturally fixes on the defect