John Fletcher (playwright)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Fletcher was baptised on the 20th of December 1579 in Rye, Sussex, and for much of the seventeenth century his name stood alongside William Shakespeare's as a byword for theatrical brilliance. During his lifetime, and again during the Stuart Restoration, audiences and critics treated Fletcher's fame as the equal of Shakespeare's. That fact will surprise anyone who has spent time in a modern theatre, where Fletcher's name rarely appears above a marquee. How did a man who wrote or co-wrote close to fifty plays, who succeeded Shakespeare as house playwright for the most powerful theatre company in England, come to occupy so modest a place in our cultural memory? The answers involve a father who knelt on a scaffold in front of a queen, a decade-long creative partnership that became the stuff of London gossip, a series of collaborations with Shakespeare himself, and a dramatic style so perfectly calibrated to its moment that it struggled to survive the moment's passing.

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Richard Fletcher, John's father, was present at one of the most dramatic moments of Elizabethan England. As Dean of Peterborough, he attended the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringhay Castle, and there he knelt on the scaffold steps and began to pray out loud at considerable length, in what witnesses described as a prolonged and rhetorical style, as though determined to force his way into the pages of history. When the axe fell, Richard cried out "So perish all the Queen's enemies!" Richard Fletcher rose through the church hierarchy to become, in succession, Bishop of Bristol, Bishop of Worcester, and Bishop of London. Yet his career ended badly. He fell out of favour with Queen Elizabeth over a marriage she had advised against, and although he appears to have been partly rehabilitated before his death in 1596, he died substantially in debt. The seven Fletcher children, including John, were then entrusted to their paternal uncle Giles Fletcher, a poet and minor official. Giles had his own patron: Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. When Essex's rebellion collapsed, Giles Fletcher's connections ceased to be an asset and may have become a liability. John Fletcher appears to have entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, around 1591, at the age of eleven. Evidence suggests he was preparing for a career in the church, following his father's footsteps. Instead, he followed the path of the University wits before him, moving from Cambridge to the commercial theatres of London.

• 3. The Beaumont Years

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  In 1606, Fletcher began appearing as a playwright for the Children of the Queen's Revels, then performing at the Blackfriars Theatre. It was through this milieu that he fell into the company of Francis Beaumont and, according to commendatory verses by Richard Brome in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, into the company of Ben Jonson as well. John Aubrey, writing later, transmitted an anecdote about Fletcher and Beaumont that may be invention but has proved too vivid to ignore: the two writers supposedly lived together in Bankside, shared clothes, and kept "one wench in the house between them". Whatever the domestic truth, the creative partnership was real and productive. The two wrote together for nearly a decade, first for the Children of the Queen's Revels and then for the King's Men. The partnership was broken by biography rather than artistic disagreement. In 1613, Beaumont married, ending the shared household. The same year, Beaumont suffered what was probably a stroke, which ended their dramatic collaboration. Beaumont died in 1616, still a young man. Long before that death, though, Fletcher had found a vehicle that would define his career: the tragicomedy. His pastoral play The Faithful Shepherdess failed at the Blackfriars in 1608, and in the preface to the printed edition, Fletcher explained the failure as a mismatch of expectations. His audience, he wrote, had expected pastoral tragicomedy to feature dances, comedy, and murder, with shepherds dressed in conventional costume, wearing "gray cloaks, with curtailed dogs in strings". The preface offered a definition of tragicomedy that remains quoted today: "A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy".

• 4. Working with Shakespeare

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  By 1609, the joint plays of Fletcher and Beaumont had found their audience. Philaster, their tragicomedy, became a hit for the King's Men and opened a profitable relationship between Fletcher and that company. Fletcher's influence on tragicomedy spread outward; scholars have credited him with inspiring features of Shakespeare's late romances, and his impact on the tragicomic work of other playwrights was described as even more marked. By the middle of the 1610s, Fletcher's plays were popular enough to rival Shakespeare's and to entrench the King's Men as the leading company in Jacobean London. The collaboration between Fletcher and Shakespeare produced three known works: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both written around 1613, and the lost Cardenio, also from that period. Some modern scholars have proposed that Cardenio is probably the basis for Lewis Theobald's later play Double Falsehood. Fletcher also wrote The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed, a solo comedy that served as a sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. After Shakespeare's death in 1616, Fletcher appears to have stepped into an exclusive arrangement with the King's Men similar to the one Shakespeare had held. For the nine years between Shakespeare's death and his own in 1625, Fletcher wrote only for that company. During the winter of 1621, three of his plays were performed at court.

• 5. The Fletcher Fingerprint

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  Because Fletcher collaborated so widely, the question of which lines he actually wrote has occupied scholars for generations. Fletcher worked most often with Beaumont and Philip Massinger, but also with Nathan Field, Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, James Shirley, and others. Some of his early collaborations with Beaumont were later revised by Massinger, adding further layers of complexity. The scholar Cyrus Hoy identified a set of distinctive textual habits that mark Fletcher's contribution. Fletcher used the word ye instead of you at rates sometimes approaching 50 per cent. He employed 'em for them. He added a sixth stressed syllable to a standard pentameter verse line, most often the word sir, but also too, or still, or next. Together, these preferences constitute what scholars call a Fletcherian textual profile, and the attempt to detect this profile encouraged the development of stylometry as a broader tool in literary scholarship. Other scholars, including Jeffrey Masten and Gordon McMullan, have pointed out limitations in Hoy's methods and questioned the logic of distinguishing playwrights on the basis of linguistic preferences alone. The first Beaumont and Fletcher folio, published in 1647, collected 35 plays, most of them not previously published. A second folio in 1679 added 18 more, for a total of 53. Neither folio is free of attribution problems: the second folio included James Shirley's The Coronation, which was misattributed to Fletcher, and it also included The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a play thought to be by Beaumont alone, though early editions had attributed it to both writers.

• 6. After the Theatres Closed

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  Fletcher died in August 1625, apparently of the plague, and was buried on the 29th of August in what is now Southwark Cathedral. The precise location of his grave is uncertain, but the poet Aston Cockayne mentions a common grave shared by Fletcher and Philip Massinger, who was also buried in Southwark. Two simple adjacent stones in the floor of the Cathedral Choir mark the spot: one reads "Edmond Shakespeare 1607", the other "John Fletcher 1625", placing Shakespeare's younger brother and the playwright as neighbours in death. At the closing of the theatres in 1642, Fletcher's body of work was still a substantial part of the King's Men's active repertory. During the Commonwealth period, when plays were suppressed, performers kept Fletcher's best-known scenes alive as drolls, brief informal performances devised to satisfy audiences without staging a full production. When the theatres reopened in 1660, the Fletcher canon dominated the English stage in both original form and revised versions. By around 1710, however, Shakespeare's plays were being performed more frequently. The century that followed saw a steady erosion of Fletcher's stage presence. By 1784, Thomas Davies asserted that only Rule a Wife and Have a Wife and The Chances were still being performed. A generation after Davies wrote, the critic Alexander Dyce could name only The Chances. Since then, Fletcher has become primarily a subject for specialists and occasional revivals, with his standing as a transitional figure between Elizabethan popular theatre and the drama of the Restoration recognized in scholarship even as his plays have largely left the repertory.