The Noble Gentleman

The earliest certain fact known about the play is that it was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 3 February 1626 (new style). The play was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre.

Broadly speaking, there are two competing scenarios for The Noble Gentleman:

• The play is a "Beaumont and Fletcher play" – either a direct and overt collaboration between the two dramatists, or a work by Beaumont that was later revised by Fletcher. In the context of this hypothesis, dates for the play have been postulated that range from 1606 to 1613.^[1]
• The play is a later work written by Fletcher without Beaumont's participation; it may have been left unfinished at Fletcher's death in 1625 and been completed by someone else.

Cyrus Hoy, who favored the first of these interpretations, provided this breakdown of the authors' putative contributions in his survey of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon:

Beaumont – Act I, scene 4; Act II, 2; Act III, 1, 3, and 4; Act IV, 3-5;

Fletcher – Act I, scenes 1-3; Act II, 1; Act III, 2; Act IV, 1 and 2; Act V.^[2]

Earlier researchers had provided comparable divisions.^[3] Other scholars, however, have judged the evidence of Beaumont's presence too weak to be persuasive.^[4] Darren Freebury-Jones has proposed that John Ford was responsible for completing the play after Fletcher died in 1625.^[5]

Commentators who advocate Beaumont's authorial contribution must postulate a date of authorship prior to Beaumont's 1613 retirement and 1616 death, in the face of a lack of evidence. Conversely, Fletcher is supposed by some calculations to have worked on eleven plays in the last four years of his life; adding a twelfth stretches the credulity of some commentators.^[6] A compromise view, that Fletcher did a late (c. 1625) revision of a much earlier play that contained Beaumont's work, may have merit.^[7]