The Strange Case of Susan Brotes: Rhetoric, Gender, and Authorship in John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, or How (Not) to Identify an Early Modern Playwright

Abstract

ho is “John Fletcher”? Does he have a clearly distinguishable writerly identity? I believed so when, a quarter of a century ago, I published w a monograph about this resolutely collaborative playwright, setting out to distinguish him critically from Beaumont, Field, Massinger, Shakespeare, and his other purported coadjutors and addressing the “unease” I believed to be characteristic both of Fletcherian writing and of subsequent responses to his work. I say “critically” because I was writing a work of historicist literary criti-