given 'in this ill-instructed hall the last Christmas', and to seeing a play at the Bankside for sixpence. His poetical career probably begins with the anonymous Salmacis and Hermaphroditus of 1602. His non-dramatic poems, of which the most important is an epistle to Elizabeth Countess of Rutland in 1612, appeared after his death in volumes of 1618, 1640, and 1653, which certainly ascribe to him much that is not his. His connexion with the stage seems to have begun about 1606, possibly through Michael Drayton, a family friend, in whose Eglogs of that year he appears as 'sweet Palmeo'. But his first play, The Woman Hater, written independently for Paul's, shows him under the influence of Ben Jonson, who wrote him an affectionate epigram (lv), told Drummond in 1619 that 'Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses' (Laing, 10), and according to Dryden (Essay on Dramatick Poesie) 'submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots'. To Jonson's Volpone (1607) commendatory verses were contributed both by Beaumont, whose own Knight of the Burning Pestle was produced in the same year, and by John Fletcher, whose names are thus first combined. Jonson and Beaumont, in their turn, wrote verses for Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, probably written in 1608 or 1609 and published in 1609 or 1610. About 1608 or 1609 it may also be supposed that the famous literary collaboration began. This, although it can only be proved to have covered some half-dozen plays, left the two names so closely associated that when, in 1647 and 1679, the actors and publishers issued collections of fifty-three pieces, in all or most of which Fletcher had had, or was supposed to have had, a hand, they described them all as 'by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher', and thus left to modern scholarship a task with which it is still grappling. A contemporary protest by Sir Aston Cockaine pointed out the small share of Beaumont and the large share of Massinger in the 1647 volume; and the process of metrical analysis initiated by Fleay and Boyle may be regarded as fairly successful in fixing the characteristics of the very marked style of Fletcher, although it certainly raises more questions than it solves as to the possible shares not only of Massinger, but of Jonson, Field, Tourneur, Daborne, Middleton, Rowley, and Shirley, as collaborators or revisers, in the plays as they have come down to us. Since Fletcher wrote up to his death in 1625, much of this investigation lies outside my limits, and it is fortunate that the task of selecting the plays which may, certainly or possibly, fall before Beaumont's death in 1616 is one in which a fair number of definite data are available to eke out the slippery metrical evidence. It would seem that the collaboration began about 1608 and lasted in full swing for about four or five years, that in it Beaumont was the ruling spirit, and that it covered plays, not only for the Queen's Revels, for whom both poets had already written independently, and for their successors the Lady Elizabeth's, but also, and concurrently, for the King's. According to Dryden, two or three plays were written 'very unsuccessfully' before the triumph of Philaster, but these may include the independent
