The following essay discusses Francis Beaumont and his frequent collaborator, John Fletcher.

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher began to work together as dramatists around 1606-1607, and in the course of the next half-dozen years wrote some of the most successful plays of the Jacobean theater, plays that continued to hold the stage a century later. They wrote both comedies and tragedies, but they seem to have had their first success in the newly fashionable genre of tragicomedy, a form that provided a potentially tragic plot with a happy ending. Their emergence as playwrights coincided with the closing years of Shakespeare's career in the theater, and critics have long noted the tragicomic shape of Shakespeare's last plays. Shakespeare's Cymbeline and Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster display some notable similarities of plot and tone, but the date of each play is so uncertain (both seem to have been written circa 1609) that...