The rest of this Dedication is of great interest as bearing upon the date of the composition of the play; but it has been entirely misconstrued or else it gives us false information. That matter I shall discuss in connection with the sources and composition of the play.51 Suffice it to say here that The Knight followed The Travails of Three English Brothers, acted. June 29, 1607, and that the Robert Keysar who rescued the manuscript of The Knight from oblivion had, only in 1606 or 1607, acquired a financial interest in the Queen's Revels' Children, and was backing them during the last year of their occupancy of Blackfriars when they presented the play, and where only it was presented.
In the same year, 1607, both young men are writing commendatory verses for the first quarto of Ben Jonson's Volpone, which had been acted in 1605. Beaumont, with the confidence of intimacy, addresses Jonson as "Dear Friend," praises his "even work," deplores its failure with the many who "nothing can digest, but what's obscene, or barks," and implies that he forbears to make them understand its merits purely in deference to Jonson's wiser judgment, —
I would have shewn
To all the world the art which thou alone
Hast taught our tongue, the rules of time, of place
And other rites, deliver'd with the grace
Of comic style, which only is far more
Than any English stage hath known before.
But since our subtle gallants think it good
To like of nought that may be understood …
… let us desire
They may continue, simply to admire
Fine clothes and strange words,
and offensive personalities.
Fletcher in a more epigrammatic appeal to "The true master in his art, B. Jonson," prays him to forgive friends and foes alike, and then, those "who are nor worthy to be friends or foes."
Concerning Fletcher's beginnings in composition the earliest date is suggested by a line of D'Avenant's, written many years after Fletcher's death (1625), "full twenty years he wore the bays."52 It has been conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists was in the field as early as 1604, with his comedy of The Woman's Prize or The Tamer Tamed, – a well contrived and witty continuation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, – in which Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's Katherine, now deceased, marries the bereaved Petruchio and effectively turns the tables upon him. If acted before 1607, The Woman's Prize was a Paul's Boys' or Queen's Revels' play. But while the upper limit of the play is fixed by the mention of the siege of Ostend, 1604, other references and the literary style point to 1610, even to 1614, as the date of composition or revision.53
It is likely that Fletcher was writing plays before 1608, but what we do not know. In that year was acted the pastoral drama of The Faithfull Shepheardesse, a composition entirely his own. This delicate confection of sensual desire, ideal love, translunar chastity, and subacid cynicism regarding "all ideas of chastity whatever,"54 was an experiment; and a failure upon the stage. It has, as I shall later emphasize, lyric and descriptive charm of surpassing merit, but it lacks, as does most of Fletcher's work, moral depth and emotional reality; and following, as it did, a literary convention in design, it could not avail itself of the skill in dramatic device, and the racy flavour which a little later characterized his Monsieur Thomas. The date of its first performance is determined by the combined authority of the Stationers' Registers (from which we learn that the publishers of the first quarto, undated, but undoubtedly of 1609,55 were in unassisted partnership only from December 22, 1608 to July 20, 1609), of a statement of Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden that the play was written "ten years" before 1618, and of commendatory verses to the first quarto of 1609, by the young actor-dramatist, Nathaniel Field. If we may guide our calculations by the plague regulations of the time, it must have been acted before July 28, 1608.
On the appearance of the first quarto, in 1609, Jonson sympathizing with "the worthy author," on the ill reception of the pastoral when first performed, says:
I, that am glad thy innocence was their guilt,
for the rabble found not there the "vices, which they look'd for," I —
Do crown thy murder'd poem; which shall rise
A glorified work to time, when fire
Or moths shall eat what all these fools admire.
And Francis Beaumont writing to "my friend, Master John Fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted wit" and "art," and rejoices that, if they should condemn the play now that it is printed,
Your censurers must have the quality
Of reading, which I am afraid is more
Than half your shrewdest judges had before.
In the first quarto two commendatory poems are printed, the first by N. F., the second by the Homeric scholar and well known dramatist, George Chapman. The latter writes "to his loving friend, Master John Fletcher," in terms of generous encouragement and glowing charm. Your pastoral, says he, is "a poem and a play, too," —
But because
Your poem only hath by us applause,
Renews the golden world, and holds through all
The holy laws of homely pastoral,
Where flowers and founts, and nymphs and semi-gods,
And all the Graces find their old abodes,
Where forests flourish but in endless verse,
And meadows nothing fit for purchasers;
This iron age, that eats itself, will never
Bite at your golden world; that other's ever
Lov'd as itself. Then like your book, do you
Live in old peace, and that for praise allow.
If Jonson, Chapman, and Beaumont suspected the undercurrent of satire in this Pastoral, and they surely were not obtuse, they concealed the suspicion admirably. As for Fletcher he continued to "live in old peace." "When his faire Shepheardesse on the guilty stage, Was martir'd between Ignorance and Rage… Hee only as if unconcernèd smil'd." An attitude toward the public that characterized him all through life.
The admiration of younger men is shown in the respectful commendation of N. F. This is Nathaniel Field. He was acting with the Blackfriars' Boys since the days