Francis Beaumont

Francis Beaumont (1584 – 6 March 1616) was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher.

Beaumont was the son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace Dieu, near Thringstone in Leicestershire, a justice of the common pleas. His mother was Anne, the daughter of Sir George Pierrepont (d. 1564), of Holme Pierrepont , and his wife Winnifred Twaits. Beaumont was born at the family seat and was educated at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College, Oxford) at age thirteen. Following the death of his father in 1598, he left university without a degree and followed in his father's footsteps by entering the Inner Temple in London in 1600.

Accounts suggest that Beaumont did not work long as a lawyer. He became a student of poet and playwright Ben Jonson; he was also acquainted with Michael Drayton and other poets and dramatists, and decided that was where his passion lay. His first work, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, appeared in 1602. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica describes the work as "not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits." In 1605, Beaumont wrote commendatory verses to Jonson's Volpone.

Francis Beaumont (MP)

Francis Beaumont (died 1598), judge, was the eldest son of John Beaumont, sometime master of the rolls, by his second wife Elizabeth, daughter of William Hastings. His father was removed from the bench in 1552 for scandalously abusing his position.

Life

Of Francis's early education nothing is recorded. He appears as a fellow-commoner of Peterhouse, Cambridge, when Elizabeth visited the university. There is no entry of his matriculation, nor of his having graduated. He studied law in the Inner Temple, was called to the bar, and practised with success and reputation. He represented Aldeburgh in the parliament of 1572. In 1581 he was elected Autumn Reader in the Inner Temple. In 1589 he was called to the degree of Serjeant-at-Law (Nichols' '"Leicestershire"', iii. 655). He was promoted to the bench as a judge of the common pleas on 25 January 1592-3.

Family, death and legacy

He married Anne, daughter of Sir George Pierrepont, knight., of Holme Pierrepont, Nottinghamshire, and widow of Thomas Thorold, of Marston, Lincolnshire. She predeceased him. They had a family of three sons and one daughter. The sons were Henry, who was knighted in 1603 and died in 1605, ætat. 24; John and Francis, the great dramatist. The daughter was Elizabeth, wife of Sir Thomas Seyliard, of Kent. Beaumont died at Grace-Dieu on 22 April 1598, and was buried on 12 June following, with heraldic attendance, in the church of Belton, within which parish Grace-Dieu lies. Burton, the historian of Leicestershire, who was three-and-twenty when Beaumont died, calls him a "grave, learned, and reverend judge".

Francis Beaumont (disambiguation)

Francis Beaumont was a dramatist.

Francis Beaumont may also refer to:

See also