Beggars' Bush

Beggars' Bush is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators that is a focus of dispute among scholars and critics.

The authorship and the date of the play have long been debated by commentators. Critics generally agree that the hands of Fletcher and Philip Massinger are manifest in the text; but they dispute the presence of Francis Beaumont. Cyrus Hoy, in his wide-ranging survey of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, judged all three dramatists to have contributed to the play, and produced this breakdown among them:

Yet John H. Dorenkamp, in his 1967 edition of the play, rejects Beaumont's presence and attributes Acts I, II, and V to Massinger. (Dorenkamp agrees with Hoy and earlier critics in assigning Acts III and IV to Fletcher; Fletcher's distinctive pattern of strylistic and textual preferences makes his contribution easy to recognize.)

The question of Beaumont's possible authorial contribution complicates the question of the play's date. Beggars' Bush enters the historical record when it was performed for the Court at Whitehall Palace by the King's Men in the Christmas season of 1622 (on the evening of 27 December, "St. John's Day at night"). Some commentators argue that the play was probably new and current in that year, and was likely written shortly before — which would eliminate Beaumont, who had died in 1616. Scholars who favor Beaumont's presence must date the play prior to 1616, though evidence for such an early date is lacking.

The picture is also clouded by the question of the nature of Massinger's contribution; some critics have seen him as a direct collaborator with Fletcher, others merely as the reviser of an earlier Beaumont and Fletcher play. The text does show some of the discontinuities that can frequently be found in revised plays. (In the opening scene, for example, the usurper Woolfort calls Florez by his pseudonym Goswin, something he should not know.)

Beggars' Bush received its initial publication in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. The play was published in an individual quarto edition by Humphrey Robinson and Anne Moseley in 1661; the play was included in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 and subsequent editions of their works. It also exists in a 17th-century manuscript in the Lambarde MS. collection (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS. 1487.2), in the hand of Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men.

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