Factory Birds
The Fair Maid of the West
The Family Reunion
Lynn Farleigh
George Farquhar
David Farr
Farrah
Nicholas Farrell
Mia Farrow
Fashion
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Faust
Ray Fearon
Michael Feast
Jules Feiffer
Emma Fielding
Joseph Fiennes
Ralph Fiennes
Geraldine Fitzgerald
Peter Flannery
James Fleet
Susan Fleetwood
John Fletcher
Flight
The Fool
Footfalls
John Ford
Oliver Ford Davies
The Forest
Emilia Fox
Philip Franks
Paul Freeman
Geoffrey Freshwater
Max Frisch
Frozen Assets
Christopher Fry
Athol Fugard
English playwright
One of the Jacobean theatre's most prolific professional playwrights, John Fletcher was the son of a Sussex clergyman (who rose to become bishop of London before falling from grace into poverty). He studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating in 1594. The biographical record goes cold until his emergence on the London theatrical scene in 1605. He often wrote in collaboration, forming partnerships with Francis Beaumont, Philip Massinger and William Shakespeare, his senior colleague in the King's Men. Fletcher and Beaumont achieved fame with a succession of crowd-pleasers, including The Maid's Tragedy (1611), rediscovered as a minor masterpiece by the RSC in 1980. Fletcher's own body of work includes The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), Wit Without Money (1615), and two plays staged by Gregory Doran at the RSC in 2002/03—The Island Princess (1621) and The Tamer Tamed (c. 1611), a sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
Modern interest in Fletcher rests chiefly on his collaborations with Shakespeare. Fletcher was more than an assistant; indeed, some scholars believe that the style of his own plays influenced Shakespeare's late romances. They collaborated on three plays for the King's Men in 1613—Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and a lost work called Cardenio. Henry VIII, included in the First Folio, was largely the work of Shakespeare; The Kinsmen, omitted, was largely by Fletcher (but scholars have identified Shakespeare's late style and poetic genius in acts one and five). It was published under their joint names in 1634. Cardenio was performed by the King's Men at court in May 1613; it was ascribed to Shakespeare and Fletcher by a London publisher in 1653, and later 'revised and adapted' by Lewis Theobold, who claimed to own the original manuscript, as Double Falsehood, or, the Distrest Lovers (Drury Lane, 1727). Superficially there is reason to doubt the provenance of this bastardised version (Theobold never published Shakespeare's manuscript despite being accused of peddling a fake), but scholars have detected remnants of Shakespeare and even more of Fletcher in the writing, and the plot, derived from an episode in Don Quixote, is typically late Shakespeare.
Fletcher wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen's strong subplot, the story of a young girl's unrequited love. This, in Imogen Stubbs's affecting performance, was the revelation of the RSC's 1986 production in the Swan. Like Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream she leaves home and sleeps rough in pursuit of the man who has rejected her; like Ophelia in Hamlet she loses her reason to the distress of those who love her—the scenes are by turns humorous, tender and heartbreaking, and Fletcher was both canny and affectionate in offering his mentor these acts of homage in the midst of their play.
After the premiere of The Two Noble Kinsmen at Blackfriars in the winter of 1613, Shakespeare retired and Fletcher took over as house playwright of the King's Men.
1969 RST: Trevor Nunn
1983 RST: Howard Davies
1996 Swan: Gregory Doran
The Maid's Tragedy, co-written with Francis Beaumont (c. 1611)
1980 TOP: Barry Kyle
The Two Noble Kinsmen, co-written with Shakespeare (c. 1613)
1986 Swan: Barry Kyle
2007 Swan: William Oldroyd
The Island Princess (c. 1621)
2002 Swan: Gregory Doran
The Tamer Tamed (also known as The Woman's Prize, c. 1611)
2003 Swan: Gregory Doran
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