John Fletcher (playwright)

This article is about the 17th-century English playwright. For the 20th-century American poet, see John Gould Fletcher.

John Fletcher (1579-1625). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

John Fletcher
Born	1579 Rye, Sussex, England
Died	1625 London
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	English
Period	16th–17th centuries (Jacobean)
Genres	Drama

John Fletcher (1579–1625) was an English playwright.

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Life

Overview

Fletcher was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day. He achieved even greater renown as the collaborator of Francis Beaumont. Later he collaborated with William Shakespeare, and succeeded Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men. Both during his lifetime and in the early Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's. Though his reputation has been eclipsed since, Fletcher remains an important transitional figure between the Elizabethan popular tradition and the popular drama of the Restoration.

Youth and education

Fletcher, a younger son of Dr. Richard Fletcher (afterwards bishop of London) by his 1st wife Elizabeth, was born in December 1579 at Rye in Sussex, where his father was then officiating as minister.

A ‘John Fletcher of London’ was admitted 15 October 1591 a pensioner of St. Benet's (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, of which college Dr. Fletcher had been president. Alexander Dyce assumes that this John Fletcher, who became a bible-clerk in 1593, was the dramatist.

Bishop Fletcher died, in needy circumstances, 15 June 1596, and by his will, dated 26 October 1593, left his books to be divided between his sons Nathaniel and John.

Early career

In 1606, Fletcher began to appear as an author for the Children of the Queen's Revels, then performing at the Blackfriars Theatre. Commendatory verses by Richard Brome in the Beaumont and Fletcher 1647 folio place Fletcher in the company of Ben Jonson; a comment of Jonson's to Drummond corroborates this claim, although it is not known when this friendship began.

Beaumont and Fletcher

Main article: Beaumont and Fletcher

At the beginning of Fletcher's career, his most important association was with Francis Beaumont. The duo wrote together for close to a decade, originally for the Children and then for the King's Men; Beaumont and Fletcher became the earliest famous writing duo of the British theatre.

According to a legend transmitted (or invented) by John Aubrey, Beaumont and Fletcher also lived together in Bankside, sharing clothes and having "one wench in the house between them." This domestic arrangement (if it actually existed), was ended by Beaumont's marriage in 1613, and their dramatic partnership ended after Beaumont fell ill (probably of a stroke) the same year.

Successor to Shakespeare

By this time, Fletcher had moved into a closer association with the King's Men. He is commonly assumed to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost play Cardenio, which is probably (according to modern scholarly consensus) the basis for Lewis Theobald's play Double Falsehood. A play Fletcher wrote singly around this time, The Woman's Prize or the Tamer Tamed, is a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew.

In 1616, after Shakespeare's death, Fletcher appears to have entered into an exclusive arrangement with the King's Men similar to that with which Shakespeare had worked; Fletcher wrote only for that company between the death of Shakespeare and his own death 9 years later. He never lost his habit of collaboration, working with Nathan Field and later with Philip Massinger, who succeeded him as house playwright for the King's Men. His popularity continued unabated throughout his life; during the winter of 1621, 3 of his plays were performed at court.

Fletcher died in 1625, apparently of the plague. He seems to have been buried in what is now Southwark Cathedral, although the precise location is not known; there is a reference by Aston Cockayne to a single grave for Fletcher and Massinger (also buried in Southwark).

Writing

Fletcher's early career was marked by a single significant failure: The Faithful Shepherdess, his adaptation of Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, which was performed by the Blackfriars Children in 1608. In the preface to the printed edition of his play, Fletcher explained the failure as due to his audience's faulty expectations. They expected a pastoral tragicomedy to feature dances, comedy, and murder, with the shepherds presented in conventional stereotypes – as Fletcher put it, wearing "gray cloaks, with curtailed dogs in strings." Fletcher's preface in defense of his play is best known for its pithy definition of tragicomedy: "A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants [i.e., lacks] deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy." A comedy, he went on to say, must be "a representation of familiar people," and the preface is critical of drama which would feature characters whose action violates nature.

In that case, Fletcher appears to have been developing a new style faster than audiences could comprehend. By 1609, however, he had found his stride. With Beaumont, he wrote Philaster, which became a hit for the King's Men and began a profitable connection between Fletcher and that company. Philaster appears also to have initiated a vogue for tragicomedy; Fletcher's influence has been credited with inspiring some features of Shakespeare's late romances (Kirsch, 288-90), and his influence on the tragicomic work of other playwrights is even more marked. By the middle of the 1610s, Fletcher's plays had achieved a popularity that rivalled Shakespeare's and which cemented the preeminence of the King's Men in Jacobean London. After Beaumont's retirement and early death in 1616, Fletcher continued working, both singly and in collaboration, until his death in 1625. By that time, he had produced, or had been credited with, close to 50 plays. This body of work remained a major part of the King's Men's repertory until the closing of the theatres in 1642.

Fletcher is seen at his best in his comedies. Few poets have been endowed with a larger share of wit and fancy, freshness and variety. Such plays as the Wildgoose-Chase and Monsieur Thomas are a feast of mirth from beginning to end.

The Faithful Shepherdess is (not excepting Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd) the sweetest of English pastoral plays; and some of the songs scattered in profusion through Fletcher's works are hardly surpassed by Shakespeare.

In tragedy he does not rank with the highest. Bonduca and Valentinian are impressive works, but inferior to the tragedies that he wrote with Beaumont, the Maid's Tragedy and A King and No King.

His mastery is most notable in 2 dramatic types, tragicomedy and comedy of manners, both of which exerted a pervasive influence on dramatists in the reign of Charles I and during the Restoration.

Critical introduction

by Andrew Cecil Bradley

By Fletcher there are but 3 poems extant; but each has an interest of its own. 2 of them are addressed to "the true master in his art" and "his worthy friend," Ben Jonson; and the other, "Upon an Honest Man’s Fortune", is more than worthy of its place at the end of the comedy which bears that name. In it we seem to come nearer than usual to the poet himself, who probably knew too much of "want, the curse of man," but never lost heart or belief in himself, and who has here described with admirable strength, what Goethe afterwards felt so keenly, the self-sufficience of the mind and its superiority to fortune.

  ‘Man is his own star, and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late;
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.’

These are fine lines, and there are others in the poem as good; yet we should hardly be willing to exchange any of Flethcer's best plays for them.

There is the same buoyant grace in Fletcher’s songs, and something more. In that age of songs, many a playwright could produce a lyric or 2 of the stamp which seems to have been wellnigh lost since; but songs seem to flow by nature from Fletcher’s pen in every style and on every occasion, and to be always right and beautiful. If he wants a drinking-song, he can rise to ‘God Lyæus, ever young,’ or can produce, what on a much lower level is hardly less perfect, the ‘Drink to-day and drown all sorrow’ of the Bloody Brother. The wonderful verses on Melancholy, which suggested Il Penseroso and are hardly surpassed by it, come as easily to his call as the mad laughing-song of the same play. ‘Sad songs,’ as in The Queen of Corinth; dirges, like the ‘Come you, whose loves are dead’ of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, or the ‘Lay a garland on my hearse’; invocations, prayers to Cupid, hymns to Pan,— each has its own charm, and Fletcher is as ready with his Beggars’ or Broom-man’s songs, or even with a dramatic battle-lyric like the tumultuous ‘Arm, arm, arm, arm!’ of The Mad Lover. Some of the best of these occur, indeed, in plays of which Beaumont was the joint author; but a comparison of those lyrics which undeniably belong to each poet alone is perhaps enough to convince us that Fletcher was the author of ‘Lay a garland on my hearse,’ if not also of ‘Come you, whose loves are dead.’

Probably however Fletcher touched his highest point in the song from Valentinian, ‘Hear, ye ladies that despise.’ Here the reader will observe (what applies also to another fine song from the same play, ‘Now the lusty spring is seen’) that the rhythm exactly corresponds in the 2 stanzas without at all interfering with the spontaneous effect of the whole.

Fletcher was the sole author of "The Faithful Shepherdess", the forerunner of Milton’s Comus; and we may safely assume that none of the extracts from it is a joint production. But this is not the case with their dramatic works. So complete was Beaumont and Fletcher's poetical union that it is impossible, in the absence of external evidence, to say with any certainty what part of those plays which belong to both is due to each, or even to describe their separate characteristics. An old tradition contrasted the ‘judgment’ of the younger poet, who was Jonson’s intimate friend, with the fancy and facility of the elder. That Fletcher possessed the latter qualities is certain; but we have no reason to attribute to Beaumont any of the deficiencies which the ‘faint praise’ of ‘judgment’ might seem to imply.

Critical reputation

During the Commonwealth, many of Fletcher's best-known scenes were kept alive as drolls, the brief performances devised to satisfy the taste for plays while the theatres were suppressed. At the re-opening of the theatres in 1660, the plays in the Fletcher canon, in original form or revised, were by far the most common fare on the English stage.

The most frequently revived plays suggest the developing taste for comedies of manners. Among the tragedies, The Maid's Tragedy and, especially, Rollo Duke of Normandy held the stage. 4 tragicomedies (A King and No King, The Humorous Lieutenant, Philaster, and The Island Princess) were popular, perhaps in part for their similarity to and foreshadowing of heroic drama. 4 comedies (Rule a Wife And Have a Wife, The Chances, Beggars' Bush, and especially The Scornful Lady) were also popular.

Yet the popularity of these plays relative to those of Shakespeare and to new productions steadily eroded. By around 1710, Shakespeare's plays were more frequently performed, and the rest of the century saw a steady erosion in performance of Fletcher's plays. By 1784, Thomas Davies asserted that only Rule a Wife and The Chances were still current on stage; a generation later, Alexander Dyce mentioned only The Chances.

Since then Fletcher has increasingly become a subject only for occasional revivals and for specialists. Fletcher and his collaborators have been the subject of important bibliographic and critical studies, but the plays have been revived only infrequently.

Recognition

11 of Fletcher's lyrics ("Sleep", "Bridal Song", "Aspatia's Song", "Hymn to Pan", "Away, Delights", "Love's Emblems", "Hear, ye Ladies", "God Lyaeus", "Beauty Clear and Fair", "Melancholy", and "Weep no more") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900.

Fletcher's plays

Fletcher's canon presents unusual difficulties of attribution. He collaborated regularly and widely, most often with Beaumont and Massinger but also with Nathan Field, Shakespeare and others. Some of his early collaborations with Beaumont were later revised by Massinger, adding another layer of complexity to unravel. Fortunately for scholars and students of English literature, Fletcher also had highly distinctive mannerisms in his creative efforts; his texts reveal a range of peculiarities that effectively identify his presence. He frequently uses ye instead of you, at rates sometimes approaching 50%; he frequently employs 'em for them, along with a set of other particular preferences in contractions; he adds a 6th stressed syllable to a standard pentameter verse line — most often sir but also too or still or next; he has various other specific habits and preferences. The detection of this pattern, this personal Fletcherian textual profile, has allowed researchers to penetrate the confusions of the Fletcher canon with good success—and has in turn encouraged the use of similar techniques more broadly in the study of literature.

Careful bibliography has established the authors of each play with some degree of certainty. Determination of the exact shares of each writer (for instance by Cyrus Hoy) in particular plays is ongoing, based on patterns of textual and linguistic preferences, stylistic grounds, and idiosyncrasies of spelling.

The list that follows gives a consensus verdict (at least a tentative one) on the authorship of the plays in Fletcher's canon, with likeliest dates of authorship, dates of first publication, and dates of licensing by the Master of the Revels, where available.

Solo Plays

• The Faithful Shepherdess, pastoral (written 1608–9; printed 1609?)
• Valentinian, tragedy (1610–14; 1647)
• Monsieur Thomas, comedy (c. 1610–16; 1639)
• The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, comedy (c. 1611?; 1647)
• Bonduca, tragedy (1611–14; 1647)
• The Chances, comedy (c. 1613–25; 1647)
• Wit Without Money, comedy (c. 1614; 1639)
• The Mad Lover, tragicomedy (acted 5 January 1617; 1647)
• The Loyal Subject, tragicomedy (licensed 16 November 1618; revised 1633?; 1647)
• The Humorous Lieutenant, tragicomedy (c. 1619; 1647)
• Women Pleased, tragicomedy (c. 1619–23; 1647)
• The Island Princess, tragicomedy (c. 1620; 1647)
• The Wild Goose Chase, comedy (c. 1621; 1652)
• The Pilgrim, comedy (c. 1621; 1647)
• A Wife for a Month, tragicomedy (licensed 27 May 1624; 1647)
• Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, comedy (licensed 19 October 1624; 1640)

Collaborations

With Francis Beaumont:

• The Woman Hater, comedy (1606; 1607)
• Cupid's Revenge, tragedy (c. 1607–12; 1615)
• Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, tragicomedy (c. 1609; 1620)
• The Maid's Tragedy, Tragedy (c. 1609; 1619)
• A King and No King, tragicomedy (1611; 1619)
• The Captain, comedy (c. 1609–12; 1647)
• The Scornful Lady, comedy (c. 1613; 1616)
• Love's Pilgrimage, tragicomedy (c. 1615–16; 1647)
• The Noble Gentleman, comedy (c. 1613?; licensed 3 February 1626; 1647)

With Beaumont and Massinger:

• Thierry and Theodoret, tragedy (c. 1607?; 1621)
• The Coxcomb, comedy (c. 1608–10; 1647)
• Beggars' Bush, comedy (c. 1612–13? revised 1622?; 1647)
• Love's Cure, comedy (c. 1612–13?; revised 1625?; 1647)

With Massinger:

• Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, tragedy (August 1619; MS)
• The Little French Lawyer, comedy (c. 1619–23; 1647)
• A Very Woman, tragicomedy (c. 1619–22; licensed 6 June 1634; 1655)
• The Custom of the Country, comedy (c. 1619–23; 1647)
• The Double Marriage, tragedy (c. 1619–23; 1647)
• The False One, history (c. 1619–23; 1647)
• The Prophetess, tragicomedy (licensed 14 May 1622; 1647)
• The Sea Voyage, comedy (licensed 22 June 1622; 1647)
• The Spanish Curate, comedy (licensed 24 October 1622; 1647)
• The Lovers' Progress or The Wandering Lovers, tragicomedy (licensed 6 December 1623; revised 1634; 1647)
• The Elder Brother, comedy (c. 1625; 1637)

With Massinger and Field:

• The Honest Man's Fortune, tragicomedy (1613; 1647)
• The Queen of Corinth, tragicomedy (c. 1616–18; 1647)
• The Knight of Malta, tragicomedy (c. 1619; 1647)

With Shakespeare:

• Henry VIII, history (c. 1613; 1623)
• The Two Noble Kinsmen, tragicomedy (c. 1613; 1634)
• Cardenio, tragicomedy? (c. 1613)

With Middleton and Rowley:

• Wit at Several Weapons, comedy (c. 1610–20; 1647)

With Rowley:

• The Maid in the Mill (licensed 29 August 1623; 1647).

With Field:

• Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One, morality (c. 1608–13; 1647)

With Massinger, Jonson, and Chapman:

• Rollo Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother, tragedy (c. 1617; revised 1627–30?; 1639)

With Shirley:

• The Night Walker, or The Little Thief, comedy (c. 1611; 1640)

Uncertain:

• The Nice Valour, or The Passionate Madman, comedy (c. 1615–25; 1647)
• The Laws of Candy, tragicomedy (c. 1619–23; 1647)
• The Fair Maid of the Inn, comedy (licensed 22 January 1626; 1647)
• The Faithful Friends, tragicomedy (registered 29 June 1660; MS.)

The Nice Valour may be a play by Fletcher revised by Thomas Middleton; The Fair Maid of the Inn is perhaps a play by Massinger, John Ford, and John Webster, either with or without Fletcher's involvement. The Laws of Candy has been variously attributed to Fletcher and to John Ford. The Night-Walker was a Fletcher original, with additions by Shirley for a 1639 production. And some of the attributions given above are disputed by some scholars, as noted in connection with Four Plays in One. Rollo Duke of Normandy, an especially difficult case and a focus of much disagreement among scholars, may have been written around 1617, and later revised by Massinger.

The 1st Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 collected 35 plays, most of which that had not been previously published. The 2nd folio of 1679 added 18 more, for a total of 53. The 1st folio included The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn (1613), and the 2nd The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), widely considered to be Beaumont's solo works.

A play in the canon, Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, existed in manuscript and was not published till 1883. In 1640 James Shirley's The Coronation was misattributed to Fletcher upon its initial publication, and was included in the 2nd Beaumont and Fletcher folio.

Publications

Plays

• Demetrius and Enanthe. London: Thomas Rodd, 1830.

Collected editions

• The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher (introduction & notes by Henry Weber). (14 volumes), Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne for F.C. & J. Rivington et al, 1812.

Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV, Volume V, Volume VI, Volume VII, Volume VIII, Volume IX, Volume X, Volume XI, Volume XII, Volume XIII, Volume XIV.

• The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (edited by A.R. Waller). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1905-1906; New York: Octagon Press, 1969.

Volume I, Volume II,Volume III, Volume IV, Volume V, Volume VI, Volume VII, Volume VIII, Volume IX, Volume X.

See also

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

•  Bullen, Arthur Henry (1889) "Fletcher, John (1579-1625)" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 19 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 303-311 
• This article incorporates public domain text from : Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, Dent; New York, Dutton.
• Finkelpearl, Daniel. Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
• Fletcher, Ian. Beaumont and Fletcher. London, Longmans, Green, 1967.
• Hoy, Cyrus H. "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon." Studies in Bibliography. Seven parts: vols. 8–9, 11–15 (1956–1962).
• Kirsch, Arthur. "Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy." ELH 34 (1967), 288–306.
• Leech, Clifford. The John Fletcher Plays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962.
• Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith.The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
• McMullen, Gordon. ‘Fletcher, John (1579–1625)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, May 2006.
• Oliphant, E. H. C. Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others. London: Humphrey Milford, 1927.
• Sprague, A. C. Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage. London: Benjamin Bloom, 1926.
• Waith, Eugene. The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952.

External links

Poems

• from "The Faithfull Shepheardesse"
• from "A Wife for a Month"
• Fletcher, John (1579-1625) (3 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Fletcher in The English Poets: An anthology: Song: ‘Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan’ (from The Queen of Corinth), Song: ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ (from The Nice Valour)
  • from The Faithful Shepherdess: "The Satyr, I", "The River God, to Amoret," "The Satyr, II"
  • from Valentinian: Song: ‘Hear, ye ladies that despise’, Song to Bacchus: ‘God Lyæus, ever young’, Invocation to Sleep,
• John Fletcher in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900:] "Sleep", "Bridal Song", "Aspatia's Song", "Hymn to Pan", "Away, Delights", "Love's Emblems", "Hear, ye Ladies", "God Lyaeus", "Beauty Clear and Fair", "Melancholy", "Weep no more"
• John Fletcher 1579-1625 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Poems by John Fletcher at Poetry Archive.
• John Fletcher at PoemHunter (21 poems)
• John Fletcher at Poetry Nook (64 poems)

Books

• Works by John Fletcher at Project Gutenberg
• E-books by John Fletcher
• John Fletcher at Amazon.com

About

• John Fletcher in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• John Fletcher at NNDB
• John Fletcher (1579-1625) at English Poetry, 1579-1830
• John Fletcher: A biographical sketch at TheatreHistory.com
• Fletcher, John (1579-1625 in the Dictionary of National Biography
• John Fletcher (1579-1625) at Luminarium

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Fletcher, John (1579-1625)
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher