John Fletcher, who was second to William Shakespeare as a playwright at the Globe Theatre, has never enjoyed the reputation of Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe, or even Thomas Middleton for that matter after his death. This special session, Celebrating the 400^th Anniversary of the Death of John Fletcher, “ will hopefully go some ways to revive the reputation of his plays to their rightful position in the canon of early modern English drama. Fortunately, new critical editions of John Fletcher’s work have recently come out in the Arden Early Modern Drama Series and the Revels Series, but much more work needs to be done on this playwright, and finally, although these papers build upon past research, these papers are taking Fletcher's and his collaborators' work in exciting new directions in which they have never gone.

In “More Roman than Rome: Fletcher’s Rewriting of Coriolanus to Bonduca,” Jennifer Beales argues that, like Shakespeare in Coriolanus, Fletcher sets his play on the fringes of Roman history to highlight the contingency of Rome’s success: both Coriolanus and Bonduca show Rome as vulnerable to attack, raising the counterfactual possibility that Rome—and therefore empire—could fail. Like its predecessor, Coriolanus, Fletcher’s Bonduca presents a portrait of Rome diminished; though the storylines are different, both plays represent Rome as militarily and morally compromised. Both plays center Roman military leaders, Coriolanus and Caratach (in Bonduca), whose inflexible personal codes contribute to their political or military failures. Fletcher, however, goes beyond Shakespeare by bringing his Roman tragedy home. Anticipating later critiques of empire, in Bonduca Fletcher demonstrates the dangers inherent in imitating the Roman empire, suggesting that the greatest Roman tragedy is to become more Roman than Rome.

In “Making the Reformation Visible: The Function of Masques in Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII or All Is True,” Jennifer Kraemer asserts that when Petr Plecháč published his computational analysis of Henry VIII, or All Is True (1613) in 2019, he confirmed what James Spedding had suspected in 1850: John Fletcher collaborated with William Shakespeare. Looking carefully at the scenes Plecháč’s analysis attributes to Fletcher, Kremer notes that these scenes are the ones containing the masque elements in the play, with the one notable exception being Anne Boleyn’s coronation in Act 4, scene 1, a Shakespeare-authored section. Thus, Fletcher inserted the masque at Anne Boleyn and Henry’s first meeting (1.4), Katherine of Aragon’s vision of heaven (4.2), and Elizabeth’s baptism (5.4). All the play’s masques do clearly mark important moments in the play’s politics and add the weight of ceremony to confirm Elizabeth’s role as the securer of the English Reformation and sponsor of English national greatness. Kraemer argues that Fletcher’s masques also work to reinforce the play’s contention that Henry VIII’s conversion to Protestantism was sincere.

In “Fletcher in Company,” Lucy Munro draws on Martin Wiggins’s recent reappraisal of historical data, and she re-examines the networks of family, friends, and colleagues that helped to shape Fletcher’s dramatic output during this period, using this analysis to reconsider the plays’ representations of gender, sexuality, friendship, and gainful employment. The first section reassesses Fletcher’s working relationships with two key figures: Nathan Field, the leading actor in the Queen’s Revels and Lady Elizabeth’s companies, a new collaborator with Fletcher in writing The Honest Man’s Fortune and Four Plays in One, and Philip Rosseter, the court musician who managed the Whitefriars playhouse. The second section shifts the focus to Fletcher’s family, looking at new evidence that illuminates not only the lives of Fletcher’s five sisters but also the intimate connection between the Fletcher family and the Whitefriars playhouse itself.

In “Performing Fletcher’s Genders,” Michael Wagoner argues that since John Fletcher is most often remembered for The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed because of its obvious connection to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, we might say that his work is most readily coded by his connection to issues of gender. Wagoner explores three key texts that offer readings of Fletcher’s understanding of gender, gender expression, and its connections to sexuality. Specifically, the men in A Wife for a Month, Margarita in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and Alinda in The Loyal Subject present a veritable spectrum of gender that upends binary notions of male and female and even of the equitable companionate marriage found in the earlier play. Attending to these texts then reveals a more diverse array of gendered representations and helps current scholars, and hopefully practitioners, to see the value of what Fletcher has to offer the 21st century.