Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher wrote together for about six years, from around 1607, sharing lodgings, a mistress and, Aubrey says, clothes, and produced the tragicomedies that dominated the Jacobean stage after Shakespeare retired. Philaster, a romance of a disguised page, a wronged prince and a happy ending after threatened tragedy, set the pattern. Beaumont married and stopped writing in 1613 and died three years later; Fletcher went on alone and with Massinger and Shakespeare, with whom he wrote Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and died of plague in 1625. The folio of 1647 put their names together for good.