Fletcher’s Promiscuous Poetics

Abstract

these uninspired lines of Petrarchan longing come from John Fletcher’s pastoral tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherdess (ca. 1608)—and, on the whole, they would seem to reaffirm the generally bad opinion critics have had of the play since its first, disastrous staging in the early seventeenth century. In their prefatory poems to the first edition, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and Francis Beaumont all defended Fletcher’s play as too elegant and refined for the vulgar, illiterate, play-going rabble; it was (they assured him) “both a Poeme and a play,” a maligned masterpiece of “innocent