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Francis Beaumont, a dramatist in the Renaissance theater, most famously collaborated.
A justice of the common pleas of Grace Dieu near Thringstone in Leicestershire fathered Beaumont, the son, born born at the family seat. Broadgates hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) educated him at 13 years of age in 1597. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and entered the Inner Temple in London in 1600 to follow in his footsteps.
Beaumont worked not long as a lawyer, accounts suggest. He studied Ben Jonson; Michael Drayton and other dramatists also acquainted him, who decided on this passion. He apparently first composed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. The edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits."
In 1605, Beaumont commendatory verses to Volpone of Jonson. Collaboration of Beaumont perhaps began early as 1605.
They hit an obstacle early in their dramatic careers with notable failures; The children of the Blackfriars in 1607 first performed The Knight of the Burning Pestle of Beaumont; an audience rejected it, and the epistle of the publisher to the quarto of 1613 claims, failed to note "the privie mark of irony about it;" they took satire of Beaumont as old-fashioned drama. It received a lukewarm reception. In the following year of 1608, Faithful Shepherdess failed on the same stage.
In 1609, however, the two collaborated on Philaster, which the men of the king performed at the globe theater and at Blackfriars. The popular success launched two careers and sparked a new taste for comedy. John Aubrey related a mid-century anecdote; , they lived in the same house on the Bankside in Southwark, "sharing everything in the closest intimacy."
About 1613, Beaumont married Ursula Isley, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent; she bore two daughters, one posthumous. After a stroke between February and October 1613, he ably composed no more than an elegy for Lady Penelope Clifton, who died 26 October 1613.
People buried his body in Westminster abbey. People celebrated Beaumont during his lifetime and remember him today as a dramatist.
No Beaumont involved, just Massinger for the first and last acts (Mr Exposition Man) and Fletcher, Shakespeare fanboy par excellence with the middle section. It's the Caesar and Cleopatra story, complete with her unconventional first meeting with him, delivered inside a carpet or, as Fletcher puts it, a "packet". The villain of the piece is the Roman who betrayed Pompey the Great, helping Ptolemy send his head to Caesar, not acceptable by Roman standards of honourable warfare. He's mostly quite nasty, though with some meaty scenes and speeches.
Read as part of the REP online readathon of the King's Men repertoire in the bleak winter of 2020.