isThe Custom of the Country, a bawdy comedy in which, as with The Faithful Shepherdess, chastity carries the day for reasons unknown. The play is graced with the lecherous Hippolyta, a more complex and mature theatrical rendering of Cloe, and makes clear that the “rights” of the ruler, no matter how extensive, do not include intrusion into the personal lives of his subjects.

Fletcher’s most notable solo work of those years—and the climax of the themes that run through his work—is A Wife for a Month. Evanthe is Fletcher’s greatest wholesome “clever maiden.” Her spurning of Frederick, acting king of Naples, sets off a chain of sexual and political imbroglios. The play also includes Fletcher’s enchanting masque of Cupid in act 2. Ben Jonson declared that, excepting himself and Shakespeare, only Fletcher and George Chapman could write real masques.

The first Beaumont and Fletcher folio was published in 1647. Only Shakespeare and Ben Jonson also had folios of their works published in that century. John Dryden’s An Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1688) cites Fletcher, Shakespeare, and Jonson as exemplars of the dramatic form. In later ages Fletcher’s reputation was questioned by Algernon Charles Swinburne, who credited Beaumont with writing most of the dramatic scenes in their plays, and many have followed in his path. Those seeking to explain the decline of English drama after the Elizabethan age focused on the tragicomedy as the cause and on Fletcher as that genre’s chief exponent. Some critics considered what John Dryden praised as the “certain gaiety in their comedies, and pathos in their more serious plays” as evidence that Fletcher’s contribution weakened the plays by eschewing elements of the Aristotelian thesis on “dramatic unity.”

Yet Fletcher created a legacy of works, collaborative and solo, that includes more than half a dozen plays that rank with all but the cream of Shakespeare’s work. For his strong-willed, independent female characters alone—from Clorin and Cloe through Hippolyta and Evanthe—Fletcher should be credited as one of the brightest stars of his generation, and certainly as more than simply a pale reflection of his predecessor Shakespeare.

John Fletcher was born in Rye, Sussex, where he was baptized on December 20, 1579. His father, Richard, was a clergyman who attended Cambridge and was later made president of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, dean of Peterborough, and eventually bishop of London. Elizabeth I reportedly admired his talent as a scholar and bestowed special favor on him. John Fletcher’s uncles, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, were poets with respected reputations, and their successes added honors to the family name. These conditions of birth and social standing were somewhat unusual among playwrights of the age and doubtless helped to reinforce Fletcher’s reputation as an entertainer of gentlemen.

Although Fletcher no doubt attended lectures at his father’s alma mater, he may have been forced to leave Cambridge in 1596 when, perhaps in part because of an ill-advised second marriage, Bishop Fletcher was suspended by the queen. Later in that same year, he died, and Fletcher was probably taken under the wing of his uncle Giles, who may have helped to pay off the family’s large debts. Just when Fletcher began writing plays is not known, but it is certain that he was hard at work in collaboration with Beaumont early in the first decade of the seventeenth century. After Beaumont left the profession in 1613, Fletcher continued as the chief playwright for the King’s Men, working alone or with Philip Massinger, William Shakespeare (on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII), and several others. Fletcher’s death in August, 1625, was caused by the plague; he was buried in St. Saviours Church, Southwark, the district in which he had resided throughout his career in London.