BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.  The work of these two men is so closely interwoven that, though Fletcher outlived Beaumont by nine years and the latter had no hand in some forty of the plays that bear their joint names, we still class them together, and only scholars attempt to separate their works so as to give each writer his due share.  Unlike most of the Elizabethan dramatists, they both came from noble and cultured families and were university trained.  Their work, in strong contrast with Jonson’s, is intensely romantic, and in it all, however coarse or brutal the scene, there is still, as Emerson pointed out, the subtle “recognition of gentility.”

Beaumont (1584-1616) was the brother of Sir John Beaumont of Leicestershire.  From Oxford he came to London to study law, but soon gave it up to write for the stage.  Fletcher (1579-1625) was the son of the bishop of London, and shows in all his work the influence of his high social position and of his Cambridge education.  The two dramatists met at the Mermaid tavern under Ben Jonson’s leadership and soon became inseparable friends, living and working together.  Tradition has it that Beaumont supplied the judgment and the solid work of the play, while Fletcher furnished the high-colored sentiment and the lyric poetry, without which an Elizabethan play would have been incomplete.  Of their joint plays, the two best known are Philaster, whose old theme, like that of Cymbeline and Griselda, is the jealousy of a lover and the faithfulness of a girl, and The Maid’s Tragedy.  Concerning Fletcher’s work the most interesting literary question is how much did he write of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, and how much did Shakespeare help him in The Two Noble Kinsmen.

JOHN WEBSTER.  Of Webster’s personal history we know nothing except that he was well known as a dramatist under James I. His extraordinary powers of expression rank him with Shakespeare; but his talent seems to have been largely devoted to the blood-and-thunder play begun by Marlowe.  His two best known plays are The White Devil (pub. 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (pub. 1623).  The latter, spite of its horrors, ranks him as one of the greatest masters of English tragedy.  It must be remembered that he sought in this play to reproduce the Italian life of the sixteenth century, and for this no imaginary horrors are needed.  The history of any Italian court or city in this period furnishes more vice and violence and dishonor than even the gloomy imagination of Webster could conceive.  All the so-called blood tragedies of the Elizabethan period, from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy down, however much they may condemn the brutal taste of the English audiences, are still only so many search lights thrown upon a history of horrible darkness.