Francis Beaumont

Plot me no plots.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle, one of Beaumont's early plays.

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

Quotes

• She's private to herself and best of knowledge
  Whom she'll make so happy as to sigh for.
  • The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607; published 1613), Act I, scene 1.

• Nose, nose, jolly red nose,
  And who gave thee that jolly red nose?
  Nutmegs and ginger, cinammon and cloves;
  And they gave me this jolly red nose.
  • The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607; published 1613), Act I, scene 4.

• Plot me no plots.
  • The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1607; published 1613), Act II, scene 5.

• What things have we seen
  Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
  So nimble and so full of subtile flame
  As if that every one from whence they came
  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
  And resolved to live a fool the rest
  Of his dull life.
  • Letter to Ben Jonson (1605), verses prefacing Jonson’s Volpone, as reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Mortality, behold and fear!
  What a change of flesh is here!
  Think how many royal bones
  Sleep within this heap of stones:
  Here they lie, had realms and lands,
  Who now want strength to stir their hands
  • On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey

About Beaumont

• He that hath such acuteness, and such wit,
  As would aske ten good heads to husband it;
  He that can write so well that no man dare
  Refuse it for the best, let him beware:
  BEAUMONT is dead, by whose sole death appeares,
  Wit’s a Disease consumes men in few yeares.
  • Richard Corbet, "On Mr. Francis Beaumont" (then newly dead), Beaumont and Fletcher, First Folio (1647)

See also

• Beaumont and Fletcher

External links

• Works by Francis Beaumont at Project Gutenberg