Beggars' Bush[1][2] is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators that is a focus of dispute among scholars and critics.
[3] Critics generally agree that the hands of Fletcher and Philip Massinger are manifest in the text, but they dispute the presence of Francis Beaumont.
Beggars' Bush enters the historical record when it was performed for the Court at Whitehall Palace by the King's Men in the Christmas season of 1622 (on the evening of 27 December, "St. John's Day at night").
It also exists in a 17th-century manuscript in the Lambarde MS. collection (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS. 1487.2), in the hand of Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men.
After the closure of the London theatres in 1642, at the start of the English Civil War, a droll known as The Lame Commonwealth was formed from material extracted from Beggars' Bush.
[8] And John Dryden modeled the main plot of his Marriage à la mode (1672) on Beggars' Bush.