ntioned as a gentleman commoner at
Broadgate Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford. At sixteen he was entered
a member of the Inner Temple, but the dry facts of the law did not
appeal to his romantic imagination. Nowhere in his work does he draw
upon his barrister's experience to the extent that makes the plays of
Middleton, who also knew the Inner Temple at first hand, a storehouse of
information in things legal. His feet soon strayed, therefore, into the
more congenial fields of dramatic invention.

Fletcher was born in Rye, Sussex, the son of a minister who later became
Bishop of London. Giles Fletcher the Younger, and Phineas Fletcher, both
well-known poets in their day, were his cousins. His early life is as
little known as that of Beaumont, and indeed as the lives of most of the
other Elizabethan dramatists. He was a pensioner at Benet College, now
Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in 1591, and in 1593 he was "Bible-clerk"
there. Then we hear nothing of him until 'The Woman Hater' was brought
out in 1607. The play has been ascribed to Beaumont alone, to Fletcher
alone, and to the two jointly. Whoever may be the author, it is the
firstling of his dramatic muse, and worth merely a passing mention. How
or when their literary friendship began is not known; but since both
were friends of Jonson, both prefixing commendatory verses to the great
realist's play of 'The Fox,' it is fair to assume that through him they
were brought together, and that both belonged to that brilliant circle
of wits, poets, and dramatists who made famous the gatherings at the
Mermaid Inn.

They lived in the closest intimacy on the Bankside, near the Globe
Theatre in Southwark, sharing everything in common, even the bed, and
some say their clothing,--which is likely enough, as it can be
paralleled without going back three centuries. It is certain that the
more affluent circumstances of Beaumont tided his less fortunate friend
over many a difficulty; and the astonishing dramatic productivity of
Fletcher's later period was probably due to Beaumont's untimely death,
making it necessary for Fletcher to rely on his pen for support.

In 1613 Beaumont's marriage to a Kentish heiress put an end to the
communistic bachelor establishment. He died March 6th, 1616, not quite
six weeks before Shakespeare, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Fletcher survived him nine years, dying of the plague in 1625. He was
buried, not by the side of the poet with whose name his