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The Maid's Tragedy, a King and No King, Cupid's Revenge, the Scornful Lady, Love's Pilgrimage
Beaumont, Francis, Fletcher, John
704 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1970
About the author
Francis Beaumont
813 books22 followersborn 1584
English poet Francis Beaumont wrote his major works, plays, including The Maid's Tragedy and The Coxcomb , with John Fletcher in the 1610s.
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.
English poet Francis Beaumont wrote his major works, plays, including The Maid's Tragedy and The Coxcomb , with John Fletcher in the 1610s.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 30, 2023
The Maid's Tragedy: oh my oh my.
If you ever want to know what can go wrong with a sex-game involving knives, this is probably the play for you.
One of those Jacobean plays with a wedding-night scene to remember. Possibly not for the reasons you're hoping.
A fascinating book, Philaster: in so many ways like Cymbeline (the introduction makes it clear there is a connection between the two, but no one can quite tell which influenced the other), with smatterings of Hamlet and Henry IV part one, as well as some rampant renaissance misogyny and a bizarre gender-twist at the end, this play has to be read (and it would be fab to see it performed one day).
What this play makes clear is that ideas like trans and non-binary (even if not the words) have been with us for at least 400 years. There is a queer love-triangle going on at the centre of this, and I suspect there was much more of "this sort of thing" than one would necessarily suspect from a cursory read of the history books.
Cupid's Revenge is a mish-mash of a play, a bit like The Bacchae crossed with Phaedra, that sort of turns into the Revenger's Tragedy by the end.
Like other mash-mash plays (Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale), it doesn't (now) work as a whole, but there are brilliant bits along the way. And, like Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, phenomenally popular at the time.
The Scornful Lady: okay, there is always a disconnect when reading Beaumont and Fletcher after reading Shakespeare: you think it's going to go in the same direction, and then it just doesn't. This gives the impression that it's going to be something like Measure for Measure, but then that plot finishes towards the end of Act Three, then you think it's going to be some sort of class-based Revenge Drama, but it goes in an utterly different direction, and finishes with a (very) smutty conversation about wedding nights, with a character called "Sir Roger" (phnaaa phnaaa; ooh missis).
One couple only have sex because she thinks he's a woman, and it's only afterwards she realises he's not: she tells him to get back in women's clothes.
There's an older lady who cougars all the young men.
You keep expecting that marriage will cure the morally bankrupt, spendthrift younger brother, but another (completely different) character is converted instead.
And the central (?) story, about the Elder brother and the scornful "Lady": a classic meet-cute where they spend much of the play hating each other, before finally having great sex.
Love's Pilgrimage: a really good seventeenth century story of obsessional love: two women love a frankly worthless womaniser (an archetypal sexy bastard who is not worthy of either of them but they still can't keep away, and is probably, by modern standards, some sort of sex-addict) enough that they are prepared to throw away their lives and reputations and pretend to be men to follow him, and the brother of one of the women falls in hopeless love with the other woman (because she's still in love with the first guy) and is prepared to abase himself for the other guy's sloppy seconds.
Meanwhile, their fathers all fight.
If you've ever been in hopeless, pointless, obsessional love, you will wince. And all written in about 1610.
Makes the characters in Twelfth Night look vaguely sane.
We are spoilt by only having Shakespeare to read. Beaumont and Fletcher kick seven seasons of arse.
If you ever want to know what can go wrong with a sex-game involving knives, this is probably the play for you.
One of those Jacobean plays with a wedding-night scene to remember. Possibly not for the reasons you're hoping.
A fascinating book, Philaster: in so many ways like Cymbeline (the introduction makes it clear there is a connection between the two, but no one can quite tell which influenced the other), with smatterings of Hamlet and Henry IV part one, as well as some rampant renaissance misogyny and a bizarre gender-twist at the end, this play has to be read (and it would be fab to see it performed one day).
What this play makes clear is that ideas like trans and non-binary (even if not the words) have been with us for at least 400 years. There is a queer love-triangle going on at the centre of this, and I suspect there was much more of "this sort of thing" than one would necessarily suspect from a cursory read of the history books.
Cupid's Revenge is a mish-mash of a play, a bit like The Bacchae crossed with Phaedra, that sort of turns into the Revenger's Tragedy by the end.
Like other mash-mash plays (Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale), it doesn't (now) work as a whole, but there are brilliant bits along the way. And, like Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, phenomenally popular at the time.
The Scornful Lady: okay, there is always a disconnect when reading Beaumont and Fletcher after reading Shakespeare: you think it's going to go in the same direction, and then it just doesn't. This gives the impression that it's going to be something like Measure for Measure, but then that plot finishes towards the end of Act Three, then you think it's going to be some sort of class-based Revenge Drama, but it goes in an utterly different direction, and finishes with a (very) smutty conversation about wedding nights, with a character called "Sir Roger" (phnaaa phnaaa; ooh missis).
One couple only have sex because she thinks he's a woman, and it's only afterwards she realises he's not: she tells him to get back in women's clothes.
There's an older lady who cougars all the young men.
You keep expecting that marriage will cure the morally bankrupt, spendthrift younger brother, but another (completely different) character is converted instead.
And the central (?) story, about the Elder brother and the scornful "Lady": a classic meet-cute where they spend much of the play hating each other, before finally having great sex.
Love's Pilgrimage: a really good seventeenth century story of obsessional love: two women love a frankly worthless womaniser (an archetypal sexy bastard who is not worthy of either of them but they still can't keep away, and is probably, by modern standards, some sort of sex-addict) enough that they are prepared to throw away their lives and reputations and pretend to be men to follow him, and the brother of one of the women falls in hopeless love with the other woman (because she's still in love with the first guy) and is prepared to abase himself for the other guy's sloppy seconds.
Meanwhile, their fathers all fight.
If you've ever been in hopeless, pointless, obsessional love, you will wince. And all written in about 1610.
Makes the characters in Twelfth Night look vaguely sane.
We are spoilt by only having Shakespeare to read. Beaumont and Fletcher kick seven seasons of arse.
Displaying 1 of 1 review