John Fletcher’s Collaborator on The Noble Gentleman

Although John Fletcher is recognized as one of the most influential dramatists of the early modern period, many of the theories concerning the divisions of authorship in his collaborative plays continue to present insoluble difficulties. For instance, according to the soundly based chronology developed by Martin Wiggins, many plays attributed in part to Francis Beaumont appear to have been written after Beaumont had ceased writing (c. 1613), or even after he died in 1616. A prime example would be The Noble Gentleman (1626), which E. H. C. Oliphant and Cyrus Hoy attributed in part to Beaumont. Modern scholarship holds that this was Fletcher’s last play and that it was completed by another hand after Fletcher died in 1625. This article offers the most comprehensive analysis yet undertaken of the stylistic qualities of the “non-Fletcher” portions in this play in relation to dramatists writing for the King’s Men at the time, thereby opening up several new lines of enquiry for co-authored plays of the period. Seeking to broaden our understanding of the collaborative practices in plays produced by that company in or around 1626, through a combination of literary-historical and quantitative analysis, the article puts forth a new candidate for Fletcher’s posthumous collaborator: John Ford.

Plot Illustrated

Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful composition of custom-made woodcuts in a trio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher quartos: The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), A King and No King (1619), and Philaster (1620). These plays cemented Beaumont and Fletcher’s widely acknowledged reputation for creating a pleasurable sense of not-knowing for playgoers through clever plotting. The title-page images present seemingly contradictory but equally viable forecasts of the plays’ endings and enhance readerly uncertainty through visual paradox. By contrast, the engravings made for the 1711 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works depicted single, isolated moments. In step with the resurgence of neoclassical principles of dramatic decorum in the late seventeenth century, these engravings attempted to unify readers’ attention where the earlier woodcuts had sought to confuse it to pleasing effect.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle and the Menace of the Audience

In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Francis Beaumont offers a satire of his dramatic working conditions and the precarious nature of his own authority in relation to that of a potentially informing audience. KBP uses its onstage audience to stage malconnections between representation and authority, and the success of its metadrama rests upon its reference to a sense of the twisted interaction between the producers and the receivers of dramatic representation. The chapter considers the ways in which these citizen auditors ‘inform’ the fictional Rafe who represents their interests. The casual inclusion of the threat of the informer in even these light entertainments forms a sinister element in these problematic connections as KBP’s metadramatic interlopers signify the intention of an all-encompassing surveillance, and operate not merely as an audience but also as proxy overseers. The result is a dramatic form which reproduces its own the material critical context, commenting not only on the interchange of dramatic levels, but also including the ubiquitous hazard of humiliating and potentially debilitating prosecution. This metadrama registers the solid contemporary fear that mistaking the author’s intention may lead not only to unkind reports but also, ultimately, to the horrors of the early modern gaol.

Beaumont's Lives

This essay explores the ‘lives’ of Francis Beaumont at the point of the four hundredth anniversary of his death, through elegies by John Earle and Thomas Pestell and hitherto unknown and newly interpreted biographical information that sheds fresh light on the relationship between his life and works. Focusing in particular on his plays The Scornful Lady and The Woman Hater, it argues that Beaumont and his regular collaborator, John Fletcher, mix (auto)biographical allusions with satire and fantasy. This analysis offers new perspectives on the ways in which their imaginations were sparked by their lived experience.

The Future Francis Beaumont

This essay attends to Beaumont’s recent performance and reception history, documenting a range of academic and popular responses to demonstrate the challenges and affordances of engaging with Beaumont’s plays. The first section examines several twenty-first century performances of Beaumont plays, focusing especially on the Globe’s stimulating production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The second section considers how Beaumont was both acknowledged and ignored in 2016, the year of his 400th anniversary. The final section suggests some avenues for further research into the performance of Beaumont’s plays.

Reading

This chapter examines the fortunes of ‘theatricality’ after the closing of the public theatres in 1642 and into the Restoration, with particular emphasis on how reading influenced notions of early modern theatre. It considers the question of early modern theatre and its relationship to the emerging concepts of drama and literary criticism by focusing on Humphrey Moseley and John Dryden. It also explores how the plays of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were revived by the companies of Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant and gradually transformed into a more readerly form of literary drama by the publishing efforts of Moseley and by the retrospective judgement of Dryden’sAn Essay of Dramatick Poesie. The chapter argues that, during the Restoration, ‘the London theater was crowded with old theatrical memories and new demands’, and that it had been fundamentally altered by its passage into print.