On May 20th, 1607, The Woman-Hater, the first play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, was entered for printing in the Stationers' Register. It is a play very few people have heard of or read, even in the academic community; fewer still have seen a production of The Woman Hater, for at least a century or two. Either alone or together or with a handful of other collaborators, Beaumont and Fletcher wrote over fifty plays, but only a few are ever produced.
Throughout the 1600s, these plays dominated English theater. They were produced and praised at four or five times the rate of Shakespeare's plays. Contemporaries placed John Fletcher in a "triumvirate of wit" with
