‘This Beaumont & Fletcher Pair’

Keats’s famous walking tour of the Lake District, Ireland, and particularly Scotland with Charles Armitage Brown created a communal bond that resulted in collective literary activity, including Keats’s one play, Otho the Great. Walking side by side by day and writing across from one another in the evenings, they produced towards the end of the tour a jointly written poem, ‘Stanzas on some Skulls in Beauley Abbey, near Inverness,’ a foretaste of things to come. This essay explores Keats’s and Brown’s joint writing efforts in letters, in ‘Stanzas’ and perhaps in another poem, ‘Love and Folly,’ and in Otho. It places Brown more fully within the ‘Cockney School’ around Leigh Hunt, and it analyses Keats’s and Brown’s collaborations as a different form of communal work than is found elsewhere in the Hunt circle. The essay concludes with a contextualized reading of Otho that places it within romanticism’s attempt to reground tragedy around the collapse of the providential and hierarchical orders that undergird traditional tragedy.