Sir John Beaumont — the older brother of the dramatist Francis Beaumont — attended Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College) Oxford and studied at the Inner Temple before marrying and inheriting the family estates in 1605; the following year he was in Newgate Prison, being declared a recusant. He lived most of his life in London, where he knew Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and Edmund Bolton; his poetry was admired by Alexander Pope, among others. Sir John, an ally of Buckingham, was made a baronet by James I in 1626; he was buried in Westminster Abbey the following year.
TEXT RECORDS:
1602The Metamorphosis of Tabacco.
1621The Shepherdesse.
PUBLICATIONS:
The metamorphosis of tobacco. 1602.
Bosworth Field, with a taste of the variety of other poems. 1629, 1710.
Poems, ed. A. B. Grosart. 1869.
The theatre of Apollo: an entertainment written by Sir John Beaumont in 1625, ed. W. W. Greg. 1925.
Shorter poems of Sir John Beaumont, ed. Roger D. Sell. 1974.
PROFILE AND
ASSOCIATES:
English
Catholic
Dissenter
Pembroke College Oxford
Inner Temple
Inns of Court
courtier
poet
Francis Beaumont
Francis Beaumont the Elder
Edmund Bolton
William Browne of Tavistock
Michael Drayton
Hugh Holland
James I
Charles I
Ben Jonson
REFERENCE:
DNB; NCBEL.
William Winstanley, Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) 145-46; Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (1690-91; 1721); Henry Headley, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry (1787); "Sir John Beaumont" Town and Country Magazine 20 (March 1788) 126 [from Headley]; George Ellis, Specimens of Early English Poetry (1790; 1801); Censura Literaria 9 (1809) 194-96; Chalmers, English Poets (1810); Alexander Chalmers, General Biographical Dictionary (1812-17); Bliss, Athenae Oxonienses (1815) 2:434-37; Nathan Drake, in Shakespeare and his Times (1817; 1838); Ezekiel Sanford, British Poets (1819); Robert Watt, Bibliotheca Britannica (1824); Richard Cattermole, Sacred Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1836); Robert Chambers, Cyclopedia of English Literature (1844); Edward Farr, Select Poetry, chiefly sacred, of the Reign of King James the First (1847); Allibone, Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1858-71; 1882); Thomas Corser, Collectanea Anglo-Poetica II (1861) 231-37; Moulton, Library of Literary Criticism (1901-05); Charles Mills Gayley, Francis Beaumont (1910); G. Williams, "The Pattern of Neo-Classical Wit" Modern Philology 33 (1935); Mark Eccles, "A Biographical Dictionary of Elizabethan Authors" in Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1942) 293-300; Bush, OHEL (1945); Randolph Lincoln Wadsworth, Jr, "The Gound, and Frontier of our Poetrie: A Study of Sir John Beaumont (1583-1627)" (Dissertation, Stanford University, 1967); Roger D. Sell, "The Authorship of the Metamorphosis of Tabacco and Salamacis and Hermaphroditus" Notes and Queries (January 1972); Roger D. Sell, life in Shorter Poems of Sir John Beaumont (1974); Mark Eccles, "Brief Lives" Studies in Philology 79 (1982); Saunders, Renaissance Poets (1983); Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Database (1995).
COMMENTARY RECORDS
for Sir John Beaumont:
BIOGRAPHY RECORDS
for Sir John Beaumont:
AUTHOR AS CRITIC:
(commentary records)