Lately published, uniformly with the present volume, SPECIMENS OF ENGLISH DRAMATIC POETS WHO LIVED ABOUT THE TIME OF SHAKSPEARE. With Notes. BY CHARLES LAMB. New Edition, including THE EXTRACTS FROM THE GARRICK PLAYS. Complete in One thick Volume, price 5s. TS 22092 BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER; OR, THE Finest Scenes, Lyrics, and other Beauties OF THOSE TWO POETS, NOW FIRST SELECTED FROM THE WHOLE OF THEIR WORKS, To the Exclusion of whatever is Morally Objectionable: WITH OPINIONS OF DISTINGUISHED CRITICS, NOTES, EXPLANATORY AND OTHERWISE, AND A GENERAL INTRODUCTORY PREFACE, BY LEIGH HUNT. SECOND EDITION LONDON: HENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1862. REMARKS ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER INCIDENTAL TO THIS SELECTION. It is not customary, I believe, to write prefaces to books of selection. "Beauties" are understood to speak for themselves; and the more they deserve the name, the less politic it may be considered to dilate on the merits of the writings from which they have been culled. A wit who was shown the collection of detached passages called the Beauties of Shakspeare, is reported to have said: "Where are the other Inine volumes ?" There are such especial reasons, however, why a selection from the works of Beaumont and Fletcher is a thing not only warrantable but desirable (to say nothing of the difference of this volume from collections of merely isolated thoughts and fancies), that it is proper I should enter into some explanations of them; and for this purpose I must begin with a glance at the lives of the two poets. 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 county, and subsequently a judge himself. The poet was intended for the family profession, and, after studying awhile at Oxford, was entered of the Middle Temple; but on becoming acquainted with the stage, he probably felt that his vocation had been otherwise destined. The date of his first acquaintance with Fletcher is unknown; but it must of necessity have been when he was young; and the intimacy became so close, that the two friends are said not only to have lived in the same house (which was on the Surrey side of the Thames, near the Globe Theatre), but to have possessed everything in common. |