Thursday, March 6th, marked the anniversary of the death of English playwright Francis Beaumont, died in 1616. From the Forgotten English calendar of that day:<\/p>\n
\nOne evening in a tavern, Mr. Beaumont and his writing partner, John Fletcher, were hammering out the details of either The Maid’s Tragedy<\/i> or another of their tragic plays when a waiter overhead them plotting the assassination of the story’s king. On the patriotic ale-slinger’s say-so, the two were quickly arrested, thrown into prison, and charged with high treason. Shortly afterward, the basis of their villainous-sounding plan was revealed, allowing this tragic-sounding story to end as a comic literary footnate.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nAnd also the clear inspiration for Edmund Blackadder’s foul scheme against Messeurs Keanrick and Mossop in “Sense and Senility,” the fourth episode of Blackadder the Third<\/i>, when Baldrick hears them plotting out The Bloody Murder of the Foul Prince Romero and his Enormous Bosomed Wife<\/i> and relates his misheard conversation to the zounderkite Prince George, who believes the two thespians are plotting against him and fears for his life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thursday, March 6th, marked the anniversary of the death of English playwright Francis Beaumont, died in 1616. From the Forgotten English calendar of that day: One evening in a tavern, Mr. Beaumont and his writing partner, John Fletcher, were hammering out the details of either The Maid’s Tragedy or another of their tragic plays whenContinue reading “Comic Literary Footnotes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[4137,4110],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-blackadder","tag-history","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}