Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/141

Rh Common Pleas. Fletcher (1579-1625) was educated at Cambridge, but does not seem to have graduated. The Woman Hater, formerly attributed to Fletcher,—now generally, on internal evidence alone, to Beaumont,—was published in 1607, and the two friends began to collaborate about this date. Philaster (1620) is probably their first joint work. Beaumont had been at Oxford, but only for a short time, being entered a member of the Middle Temple in November 1600. He began as a poet, composing an Ovidian story, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602), and he wrote other poems in an extravagantly conceited style. He died in 1616, so that his friend and partner outlived him by nine years. After Beaumont's death, indeed, Fletcher collaborated with other dramatists, especially, it would seem, with Massinger.

The exact manner in which the two dramatists worked together is not discoverable, nor has the work devoted to the problem recently altered the traditional view, which regarded Beaumont as the more careful and correct artist, Fletcher as the more inventive and genial temperament. Differences