ABSTRACT
Francis Beaumont, youngest son of a judge of the Common Pleas, is supposed to have been born about the year 1584, at the abbey of Grace-Dieu, in Leicestershire, which, at the dissolution of the monasteries, had become possessed by the judge’s father, who was recorder of the country, and subsequently a judge himself. Ben Jonson told Drummond that Beaumont thought too much of himself, – probably because Beaumont had joined the rest of the world in saying the same thing of Ben; but this did not hinder them, or had not hindered them, from giving one another the warmest praises. ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’s plots,’ observes Coleridge, ‘are wholly inartificial; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow their great improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue.’.
