To the great Variety of Readers.
From the most able, to him that can but spell.
(Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare 1623 Folio. [A3])

While the twentieth century witnessed many endeavours in Beaumont and Fletcher criticism it would be fair to say that the general reader was left edition-poor. Certainly nothing was produced like the relatively inexpensive collected editions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The excellent work done on a few individual plays not withstanding, only two major collected B&F editions emerged from the 20th century: the Waller edition (1905-12) and the Bowers edition (1966-89), neither of which provided much in the way of textural apparatus to support the lay reader or the non-textual scholar. Twilight Pictures aims to ensure that the same cannot be said of the 21st century.

In his preface to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in 1679, Dryden observed that reading the plays of Fletcher, after reading those by Shakespeare, was akin to viewing "pictures shown to you in the twilight", that is, that they lacked the imaginary and poetic colour of their Shakespearean counterparts. While rarely expressed later in such a poetic form, Dryden's opinion on the comparative poetic skills of Shakespeare and Fletcher represents an idea that has permeated down to the present time. So why bother to reproduce the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher?

Firstly, we must consider that Dryden's opinion and that of subsequent critics represent just that, opinions. While it may be true that plays from the B&F canon are rarely judged to reach the aesthetic heights of their Shakespearean counterparts it would not be going too far to suggest that the best of Beaumont and Fletcher is certainly aesthetically better than the worst that the Shakespeare canon has to offer. But aesthetic judgments are always subject to interpretation and qualification, and putting them aside for the meanwhile, there can be no doubt of the enormous popularity of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays during the early decades of the seventeenth century and later during the Restoration. They were the first plays of the "old dramatists" to be resurrected with the reopening of the theatres in 1660 and the least tampered with or subjected to revision. No study of either Jacobean or Restoration drama can be complete without considering the works of John Fletcher and his collaborators.

The principal aims of this site are to provide a complete and electronically searchable database of all the works that fall within the confines of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon that is freely available for academic and non-profit use. It is an enormous task. Even by a modest count the B&F canon is larger than either Shakespeare's or Jonson's. 35 plays were included in the first folio of 1647, and another 18 were added with the publication of the second folio in 1679. Add to this the Shakespeare play All is True (Henry VIII) that was originally published in the Shakespeare first folio of 1623 and the total is 54 plays as well as numerous non-dramatic pieces of poetry, including Beaumont's erotic epyllia Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. There are also several other plays outside of this count that have at various times been attributed to Fletcher. In addition, many of the plays in the B&F canon exist in a variety of forms, from manuscript to quarto editions to the folios. This site aims to produce all of these texts whenever any significant variation occurs.

There have been several models for this site. The two of most note are: Internet Shakespeare Editions and The Milton Reading Room.

Notably: The Maid's Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King, and A Knight of the Burning Pestle all of which appeared as either Revels Plays or Regents Renaissance Drama Series editions.

Dryden, John. "Preface, The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy." Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1967. 251.