B eaumont, J ohn

Abstract

Sir John Beaumont (c.1584–1627), baronet and brother of the dramatist Francis Beaumont, was a Catholic devotional and court poet whose output includes an Ovidian satire, The metamorphosis of tabacco (1602), and a collection of poems titled Bosworth‐field (1629), containing verse on English political history, courtly lyrics to King James, King Charles, and royal favourites, Latin verse translations, and devotional poems on the Christian mysteries. Beaumont also composed the longest English poem on Christ's Passion, a 12‐book epic titled The crowne of thornes , preserved in only one extant manuscript (British Library, Additional MS 33392). Though Beaumont's modest popularity waned after the seventeenth century, in his own time he was revered by Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton as a poet encouraging Christian devotion and stoic virtue. Beaumont's use of the heroic couplet and his preference for ‘noble subject[s] which the mind may lift’ (‘To his late Majesty, concerning the true forme of English Poetry’) suggests his stylistic affinity with Jonson as well as his anticipation of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Though there is relatively little scholarship on Beaumont, his biography and literary output embody a rich synthesis of recusant Catholicism and courtly verse during the politically charged early seventeenth century.