ENGL 385-01, John Fletcher: The Case for Collaborative Authorship, Fall 2008

Abstract

This junior topics seminar explores the exceptionally popular and prolific Renaissance dramatist, John Fletcher (1579-1625), who was Shakespeare’s successor as the principal writer for the King’s Company. Fletcher wrote by preference in collaboration with other playwrights, a practice that was the norm in the early modern theater, but which he adopted to an unusual degree. We will read not only plays he coauthored with other playwrights, including Beaumont and Massinger, but plays written as sequels or adaptations or revisions of other playwrights’ work. This course will introduce majors to an important body of work that remains unfamiliar to most undergraduates. Fletcher’s plays constitute the largest extant canon of drama produced in the English Renaissance. His significance and place in the literary canon are currently being reassessed by scholars of the seventeenth century. His plays lend themselves especially well to feminist and colonialist readings.