Mr. Beaumont was esteemed so accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Johnson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censures; and it is thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving most of his plots.

[Footnote 1:  Jacob’s Lives of the Poets.]

[Footnote 2:  Wood.]

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Mr. JOHN FLETCHER

Was son of Dr. Richard Fletcher, Lord Bishop of London, and was born in Northamptonshire in the year 1576.  He was educated at Cambridge, probably at Burnet-college, to which his father was by his last will and testament a benefactor[1].  He wrote plays jointly with Mr. Beaumont, and Wood says he assisted Ben Johnson in a Comedy called The Widow.  After Beaumont’s death, it is said he consulted Mr. James Shirley in forming the plots of several of his plays, but which those were we have no means of discovering.  The editor of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays in 1711 thinks it very probable that Shirley supplied many that were left imperfect, and that the players gave some remains of Fletcher’s for Shirley to make up; and it is from hence (he says) that in the first act of Love’s Pilgrimage, there is a scene of an ostler transcribed verbatim out of Ben Johnson’s New Inn, Act I. Scene I. which play was written long after Fletcher died, and transplanted into Love’s Pilgrimage, after printing the New Inn, which was in the year 1630, and two of the plays printed under Fletcher’s name.  The Coronation and The Little Thief have been claimed by Shirley as his; it is probable they were left imperfect by the one, and finished by the other.  Mr. Fletcher died of the plague in the forty ninth year of his age, the first of King Charles I. An. 1625, and was buried in St. Mary Overy’s Church in Southwark.

Beaumont and Fletcher, as has been observed, wrote plays in concert, but what share each bore in forming the plots, writing the scenes, &c. is unknown.  The general opinion is, that Beaumont’s judgment was usually employed in correcting and retrenching the superfluities of Fletcher’s wit, whose fault was, as Mr. Cartwright expresses it, to do too much; but if Winstanley may be credited, the former had his share likewise in the drama, for that author relates, that our poets meeting once at a tavern in order to form the rude draught of a tragedy, Fletcher undertook to kill the king, which words being overheard by a waiter, he was officious enough, in order to recommend himself, to lodge an information against them:  but their loyalty being unquestioned, and the relation of the circumstance probable, that the vengeance was only aimed at a theatrical monarch, the affair ended in a jest.