John Fletcher (playwright)

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was a Jacobean playwright.

Stage History

Fletcher's early career was marked by two significant failures. The publisher's preface to The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a collaboration with Beaumont performed in 1607, announces that the play did not succeed because its audience did not perceive the "privie mark of irony about it." Fletcher himself explains the failure of The Faithful Shepherdess, his adaptation of Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, in his prologue to the printed edition of the play. According to Fletcher, the audience did not understand the nature of true (that is, Italian) tragicomedy.

Related Topics:
Giovanni Battista Guarini - Il Pastor Fido

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In both cases, then, Fletcher appears to have been developing his new style faster than audiences could comprehend. The success he enjoyed later, however, derives only in part from his being favored with audiences who understood what he was about. By the middle of the 1610's, Fletcher and his collaborators had transformed the stylized action and acerbic satire of the first plays. By the middle of the decade, Fletcher's plays had achieved a popularity that rivalled Shakespeare's and which cemented the preeminence of the King's Men in Stuart London.

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During the Commonwealth, many of the playwright's best-known scenes were kept alive as "drolls," the brief performances devised to satisfy the taste for plays while the theaters were suppressed. At the re-opening of the theaters in 1660, Fletcher's plays, in original form or revised, were by far the most common fare on the English stage. In fact, it was only in the early 1700s that Shakespeare's plays were revived more frequently than Fletcher's.

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Since then, of course, Fletcher has increasingly become a subject only for occasional revivals and for specialists.

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