Francis Beaumont

In the imagined ship of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare commands the Argo—and Beaumont and Fletcher sit beside him as twin heroes. But can two distinct minds be heard in the plays they made together?

In this study of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, Charles Mills Gayley takes up a knot that has teased critics for generations: how to tell where Francis Beaumont’s work ends and John Fletcher’s begins. Their shared plays may sound like one voice, yet Gayley believes Beaumont’s own character as a poet can be brought into sharper view—his tragic feeling, comic touch, and place among his fellow dramatists. To find him, the reader must look closely at the lines, scenes, and turns of feeling that criticism has often blurred together. What, in the plays signed by both men, belongs to Beaumont alone?

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