John Fletcher and the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s Plays

The purpose of this article is to trace and illuminate the many and diverse threads connecting playwright John Fletcher to the 1623 volume of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, more commonly referred to as the First Folio. While some of the material that I discuss in what follows will be already familiar to Fletcherian and Shakespearean scholars alike, no attempt has yet been made to offer a full picture of the connections between Fletcher and Shakespeare’s First Folio, nor to tease out the implications of the interest that Fletcher appears to have manifested in that volume in the years that led to its publication.¹

The Fletcher–First Folio connections can be divided into four categories: (1) the almost obsessive allusions to previously unpublished Shakespeare plays in Fletcher’s works circa 1619–23; (2) the presence of the Shakespeare-Fletcher collaborative play All Is True; or, King Henry VIII in the First Folio, contrasted with the absence of “Cardenio” and The Two Noble Kinsmen; (3) the references to Fletcher’s own 1620 tragicomedy Women Pleased in the surviving, Folio-only text of The Taming of the Shrew; and (4) Fletcher’s literary Hispanophilia and his personal connections with some of the most prominent promoters of the cultivation of Spanish letters in Jacobean England, who were variously connected with the making of the Folio.²

I. Alluding to Shakespeare’s Previously Unpublished Plays in 1619–1623

Fletcher famously engaged with the works of Shakespeare throughout his two-decade playwriting career, but his conversation with Shakespeare’s plays strongly intensifies in the 1619–23 period, as I and Gordon McMullan have amply demonstrated.³ I have identified a large number of verbal, structural, formal, and theatrical borrowings and echoes from Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus spread across such plays as Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt (1619, with Philip Massinger), The False One (1620, with Massinger), The Little French Lawyer (1620, with Massinger), Women Pleased (1620), The Island Princess (1621), The Wild Goose-Chase (1621), The Double Marriage (1622, with Massinger), The Prophetess (1622, with Massinger), and A Very Woman (1623, with Massinger). McMullan has called attention to the “spate of rereadings of The Tempest” in 1621–22 in The Island Princess, The Wild-Goose Chase, The Double Marriage, The Prophetess, and The Sea Voyage (1622, with Massinger).⁴

An element that is particularly striking in terms of Fletcher’s preferences is that his near obsession with Shakespeare in this period is especially directed toward the latter’s previously unpublished plays. As I argue elsewhere, Women Pleased also engages significantly “in terms of dramatic structure, staging, setting, genre, characterization and thematic concerns” with Othello, which would not be printed until 1622, so that indebtedness fits the pattern as well.⁵ With reference to Fletcher’s engagement with The Tempest at this time, McMullan suggests in passing that “one can only assume that the research of fellow King’s men [John] Heminges and [Henry] Condell into Shakespeare’s texts at that time had rekindled Fletcher’s long-standing fascination with his erstwhile colleague’s work.”⁶

In my view, Fletcher’s assiduous engagement with previously unpublished Shakespeare Folio plays circa 1619–23—importantly denoting a meticulous attention to their verbal texture—suggests that he had been reading those plays and not just watching them, and that he may have had some kind of access to playhouse manuscripts or transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays in the period that culminated with the publication of the First Folio. While Fletcher was never a sharer in the company, he was its leading playwright from 1616 to his death in 1625; not only would he have certainly known that the Folio was in the works, but his standing with the company may have also persuaded the King’s Men to grant him access to the manuscript texts as they were being gathered and prepared for typesetting. It is tempting, though it must remain speculative, to imagine that Heminges and Condell might have even been willing to accept the occasional editing input from Fletcher: for example, suggestions to resolve textual ambiguities, correct mistakes, fix metrical irregularities, or fill in blanks while the texts were being prepared for typesetting.

II. The Fletcher-Shakespeare Collaborations and the Folio

Fletcher collaborated with Shakespeare on three plays over a period of twelve to eighteen months circa 1612–13: the lost “Cardenio,” All Is True; or, King Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Of these three plays, only the second ended up being included in the Folio, with the title The Life of King Henry the Eighth. A significant delay in the acquisition of the manuscript of this play for typesetting caused the printing shop temporarily to set aside work on the “Histories” around March 1623 and resume it a few months later when the issue was resolved and the manuscript finally obtained.⁷ None of the three Fletcher-Shakespeare collaborations had previously been released for publication in quarto format, so there could not have been any rights problems to overcome; what caused the delay is therefore unclear.

As John Jowett has noted, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies “emphatically presents [Shakespeare] as a non-collaborating dramatist, not only by formulaic declaration on the title page but also in the assumptions and rhetorical strategy of the extensive preliminaries,” this “silence on the whole subject of divided authorship enabl[ing] an idealized image of Shakespeare set apart from the contaminating and less prestigious activity of collaboration.”⁸ Following this line of reasoning, the most widely credited explanation for the exclusion of “Cardenio” and The Two Noble Kinsmen is that it was Heminges and Condell’s decision. At the same time, Heminges and Condell needed Henry VIII: that play, as Chris Laoutaris puts it, “would have completed the sequence of history plays nicely, bringing it nearly up to date with the tail end of the Tudor line and the birth of Elizabeth I, whose kinsman James I had inherited the English throne after her. As such the entire sequence of history plays would have built cumulatively toward ratifying the divinely preordained inevitability of the king’s reign; a grand compliment to the monarch.”⁹ By including Henry VIII, the Folio would have presented Shakespeare “as a chronicler of the making of a nation, tracing a providential arc that culminated in England’s present greatness.”¹⁰

Will Sharpe has tentatively suggested an alternative narrative that would make Fletcher himself an agent in determining the inclusion of the plays that he had written with Shakespeare. He argues that the delay in the acquisition of a copy of Henry VIII for typesetting may have been the result of Fletcher’s own attempt “to withhold it from an imprint that failed to identify his co-authorship,” and he further wonders whether Fletcher, “one of the principal dramatists with the King’s company in 1623, [might] have not wanted his collaborative work attributed in its entirety to his co-author.”¹¹ Yet Sharpe immediately dismisses this possibility on the grounds that “Fletcher was not a sharer in the King’s Men … ; he did not own the plays he had sold to the company; and would … have been reluctant to stir animosity through any attempt to stall or thwart the highly ambitious non-theatrical business venture in which they were engaged.”¹² In other words, Fletcher “lacked the power of ownership to intervene even if he felt a moral right to the work.”¹³ Sharpe’s objections are sensible; yet he himself must simultaneously acknowledge that, “as Fletcher was an important asset to the company, and as the two other known Shakespeare–Fletcher collaborations were both excluded from the Folio, it remains possible that Fletcher provoked the delay.”¹⁴

Fletcher’s bargaining position with the King’s Men would have been, in my opinion, even stronger than Sharpe implies. In the early 1620s Fletcher was the principal playwright of the King’s Men and at the height of his success. While he did not own the playtexts of “Cardenio,” Henry VIII, or The Two Noble Kinsmen, his dramatic output was extremely important for the King’s Men in the early 1620s—especially his Spanish-literature-based plays, as I will discuss below—and the company would probably not have wanted to risk alienating him by subordinating works that he had co-authored entirely to the name of Shakespeare. Perhaps in the process of acquiring copy for the Folio, Heminges and Condell negotiated a compromise with Fletcher: they would publish Henry VIII in the Folio because it was necessary to crown the cycle of Shakespearean history plays as they wanted it to appear in the Folio, but they would respect Fletcher’s wishes by leaving “Cardenio” and The Two Noble Kinsmen out of the volume; after all—Heminges and Condell may have thought—the presence or absence of two late collaborative romantic tragicomedies would not have made much difference to the whole structure of the Folio—and at any rate those two plays might have also “felt” to them more Fletcherian than Shakespearean in terms of dramatic structure, style, and genre.¹⁵

Such a reconstruction of events must remain speculative; but it is an informed conjecture that, in conjunction with other evidence of Fletcher’s layered connections to the Folio, I believe deserves serious consideration.

III. The Taming of the Shrew and the Allusion to Soto

Critics have been divided over whether the reference to “Soto” in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew is an allusion to Fletcher’s Women Pleased, and whether it is of Elizabethan or Jacobean provenance. Women Pleased can be dated confidently to the end of 1620 based on external and internal evidence. First, the cast list in the Second Folio of Fifty Comedies and Tragedies: Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen (London, 1679)—generally taken to identify the men and youths who acted the main roles in the play’s first performance—indicates that Women Pleased was first performed after the death of Richard Burbage in March 1619 and before that of Nicholas Tooley in June 1623. Second, since no license for the play is to be found among the extant transcripts of the office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels (including those of his predecessor, Sir John Astley)—in which almost all the plays belonging to the final years of Fletcher’s career are included—the upper limit may be reasonably backdated to April 1622.¹⁷ Third, the subplot is largely based on three novelle from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, John Florio’s translation of which was entered in the Stationers’ Register on March 22, 1620; Fletcher’s likely use of Florio’s translation accords perfectly with his habit of pouncing on recent books, whether printed in England or on the continent, to use as sources for his plays.¹⁸ Fourth, as Martin Wiggins argues, “Women Pleased is likely to have been written in the second half of 1620, while Massinger was collaborating with Dekker on The Virgin Martyr. Adjacent allusions to Cleopatra and the South Seas in the same speech (in 1.2) might suggest proximity to both The False One [early 1620] and The Island Princess [1621].”¹⁹ The allusion to Soto in Shrew would, then, appear to point rather straightforwardly to some adjustments made to the Induction of Shrew between 1621 and 1623, when the Folio was printed. As Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane observe, however, the evidence for such adjustments is not unequivocal: “The visiting player said to have acted Soto has the speech-prefix ‘Sincklo,’ which appears nowhere else in this play.”²⁰ The prefix would seem to refer to actor John Sinklo, who “is named in other dramatic documents, some of which may date as early as the late 1580s, another as late as 1604.”²¹

For a long time, the most widely credited explanation for this clash of evidence was that the surviving text of Women Pleased was a revision of a much earlier (and conveniently lost) play, because this was the only theory that could accommodate the presence of the actor name “Sincklo” and the character name Soto together without making it necessary to posit an early 1620s revision of Shakespeare’s play. Some scholars, including Wiggins, have gone as far as to speculate that the Soto reference in the Induction to Shrew was in fact to an imaginary work, which Fletcher later developed into a play of his own.²² The “imaginary-work” hypothesis is by its very nature impossible to prove, and, as Taylor and Loughnane have pointed out, “the text of Shrew would be perfectly intelligible if the lines were omitted” and two of the suspect lines “are metrically irregular.”²³ This makes it probable “that the Soto allusion may have been inserted for a Jacobean revival of The Shrew, planned to coincide with performances of The Tamer Tamed, and accordingly touched up for the occasion.”²⁴ Anna Pruitt further argues that, while “the actor John Sinklo’s last known connection with Shakespeare’s company is his appearance in the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent … he might easily have continued with the company for many years afterwards.”²⁵ Lucy Munro also crucially points out that “the idea that the Folio’s version of the Shrew dates from the early 1620s is supported by the appearance in Act 3 of a messenger who is referred to in the speech prefix as ‘Nicke’ and is likely to be Nicholas Crosse, who was apprenticed to Heminges for ten years on May 25, 1614. Crosse played Barnavelt’s wife in Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt in August 1619, but he was coming toward the end of his apprenticeship by September 1623 … and he was probably playing minor adult roles by this time.”²⁶

In my view, later revision or interpolation is the most logical explanation behind the Soto reference in the Induction to Shrew, and it would be plausible to propose Fletcher as the writer who made the additions or changes to the text. Pace Gerald Eades Bentley and Wiggins, the reference fits nicely with what occurs in Fletcher’s Women Pleased: Soto is indeed “a farmer’s eldest son” who disguises himself as his master to woo the gentlewoman Belvedere, even though he ultimately does not manage to climb up to the place where she is confined.²⁷ As James J. Marino argues, the reference is also “singularly apt” at this precise moment in the Induction of Shrew, insofar as “the Lord, planning his trick on Christopher Sly, recalls another moment of class-conscious travesty, with another clownish character failing to sustain an aristocratic disguise with appropriate bearing.”²⁸ The players, adds Marino, “respond to this prompt by offering … an entertainment with a successful class disguise, with Tranio impersonating Lucentio in order to woo on his master’s behalf.”²⁹ The play also includes the name Petruccio, which, as Wiggins points out, “Shakespeare certainly imported from his own narrative source, Supposes, and which, therefore, we may reasonably presume, Fletcher drew in turn from Shakespeare.”³⁰

If Shrew was indeed altered in the early 1620s, Fletcher, as a former collaborator of Shakespeare’s who had written his own sequel/response to the play around 1610 (i.e., The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed), would certainly be the obvious candidate for the agent behind these alterations. Strikingly, Shrew is—like Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and The Tempest—a Folio-only play; if Fletcher made revisions to it for, say, an early 1620s revival, this would be consistent with his keen interest during this period in the plays that were first published in that volume. If the resulting, interpolated text of Shrew ended up in the Folio, this would be consistent with what happened with Measure for Measure and Macbeth, the plays adapted by Thomas Middleton.

IV. Fletcher and the Hispanophile Supporters of the Folio Venture

Fletcher was highly conversant with the literature that was being produced on the continent in the early seventeenth century and was particularly fond of Spanish authors, from Miguel de Cervantes to Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, from Mateo Alemán to Lope de Vega. As Taylor aptly summarizes, Fletcher “epitomizes the ‘cultural hispanophilia’ that co-existed, in early modern England, alongside prejudices against Spanish religion, Spanish imperialism, and Spanish complexions. Fletcher wrote more plays based on Spanish sources than any English dramatist; his genius recognized the genius of Spanish ‘Golden Age.’”³¹ Fletcher’s penchant for using recently published books as sources for his plays includes several Spanish volumes; to explain how Fletcher could get hold of all these books, José A. Pérez Díez hypothesizes that “someone in his circle had access to an active influx of imported books,” and he convincingly identifies that someone as James Mabbe, through whom Fletcher was probably connected to Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, and the portion of his library that he had had transferred to London during his stints as Spanish ambassador to England (1613–18 and 1620–22).³² As Pérez Díez illustrates, “Mabbe’s acquaintance with Fletcher is well attested: … Fletcher contributed two pages of prefatory verses, signed ‘I. F.’, to Mabbe’s 1622–1623 The Rogue, his translation of [Alemán’s] Guzmán de Alfarache… . This acquaintance may have materialized in the fact that Fletcher based at least five of his plays in as many of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, four of which featured in Mabbe’s selection of six published in 1640 but presumably translated much earlier.”³³

Laoutaris argues that the creation of the Shakespeare Folio was influenced by King James I’s plans to resolve political tensions between Britain and Spain through the marriage of his son Charles with a Spanish princess. Among the key figures that he singles out as decisive in channeling the topical interest in Spain through the Folio are Mabbe himself, poet and translator Leonard Digges, and publisher and bookseller Edward Blount; all three were committed to a project “to elevate works of Spanish literature as worthy of the attention of the English intelligentsia.”³⁴ Strikingly, Mabbe’s translation of Guzmán de Alfarache, published by Blount, is prefaced by three more dedications in addition to Fletcher’s: one by Digges, one by Ben Jonson, and one by Blount himself.³⁵ All the parties who contributed prefatory material to this volume except Fletcher were demonstrably associated with the Folio venture: Mabbe, Digges, and Jonson wrote dedicatory poems; Blount was part of (and probably led as the principal investor) the so-called Folio publishing “syndicate” with William and Isaac Jaggard, William Aspley, and John Smethwick.³⁶ We know for certain that Fletcher knew Mabbe and Jonson, and it is entirely possible that he knew Digges and especially Blount, given that by 1622–23, according to Laoutaris’s reconstruction, “Blount had known Mabbe for over a decade … , the two becoming firm friends and drinking companions, with the academic staying at the stationer’s home above his bookshop [at the sign of the Black Bear in St Paul’s Churchyard] when he visited him, the pair downing toasts of sweet wine with other acquaintances.”³⁷ In addition, Ben Higgins points out that “it is Blount and Jonson who share the strongest links among the Folio personalities,” with at least seven known professional interactions.³⁸

Based on Fletcher’s attested friendship with both Mabbe and Jonson, I believe it is likely that he may have been part of the “important network of social and professional relations” that Blount cultivated at the Black Bear.³⁹ This possibility is further strengthened by the fact that Fletcher fully shared Mabbe’s, Blount’s, and Digges’s love of Spanish letters, and that Fletcher and his collaborators also helped to elevate the status of Spanish literature in England by producing a significant amount of plays based on Spanish sources or with a Spanish setting between 1619 and 1623 for the commercial theater and the court. These plays are The Custom of the Country (1619, with Massinger, based on the very recent anonymous English translation of Cervantes’s The Travails of Persiles and Sigismunda); The Pilgrim (1621, based on the second part of Thomas Shelton’s translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, recently published by Blount with a dedication to the head of the Spanish faction at court, George Villiers, the Marquess of Buckingham, and on William Dutton’s recent translation of Lope de Vega’s Pilgrim of Castile); The Spanish Curate (1622, with Massinger, based on de Céspedes y Meneses’s Gerardo the Unfortunate Spaniard, recently translated by Digges and published by Blount); The Double Marriage (1622, with Massinger, a scene of which is modeled upon Sancho’s governorship of Barataria from Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote, published by Blount); A Very Woman (1623, with Massinger, later retitled The Spanish Lady and set in Spanish-ruled Sicily); and The Maid in the Mill (1623, with William Rowley, partly based on Digges’s abovementioned translation of Gerardo the Unfortunate Spaniard). Laoutaris sees the “underpinning presence” of these works of Spanish literature in the repertory of the King’s Men circa 1619–23 as “part of Edward Blount’s programme of bringing lesser-known Spanish texts to the attention of England’s literati” and a demonstration of “the King’s Men’s engagement with trends fuelled by their royal patron’s foreign policy.”⁴⁰ It is hard to imagine that Fletcher was not actively involved in Blount’s “programme” and in thinking about the Folio’s creation in the urgently contemporary terms that framed its conception and production.

V. A Very Early Reader of the Folio

Fletcher’s role as the leading playmaker for the King’s company during the production of the Folio, the numerous allusions to and reworkings of previously unpublished Shakespearean playtexts in his own dramatic output circa 1619–23, the inclusion of Henry VIII in and the exclusion of “Cardenio” and The Two Noble Kinsmen from the Folio, the 1620s alterations to the Induction of the Folio-only Shrew, and Fletcher’s relationships with several prominent Hispanophile London intellectuals involved in the Folio venture all seem to point in the same direction: that Fletcher was apprised of, and had every reason to be interested in, the momentous publishing enterprise unfolding around him in circa 1619–23.

Even if Fletcher was not actively involved in the preparation of the Folio, his own work and the compilation of the volume itself proceeded on closely parallel tracks—and very probably intersected—for at least a few years. Apparently, Fletcher’s encounter with the Folio during its creation helped him push his own drama in new directions: reading Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus seems to have reactivated his interest in writing Roman plays by prompting him to pen The False One and The Prophetess several years after his first forays into dramatizing Roman history with Valentinian (1614) and Bonduca (1614); the acquaintance with the Hispanophile intellectuals gravitating around the Folio venture may have stimulated Fletcher to develop an even keener interest in Spanish literature than before, as the most dense concentration of his plays based on Spanish literature was written circa 1619–23; perusing The Tempest appears to have encouraged Fletcher’s own explorations of the dangers and pitfalls of colonial travel and expansion in such plays as The False One, The Island Princess, and The Sea Voyage, themes that he had never previously tackled with such intensity; and re-encountering Shrew probably led him to rehearse with renewed enthusiasm his favorite issues of misogyny and gender conflict, which are especially on display, for instance, in Women Pleased. Clearly, Fletcher preferred to pay homage to Shakespeare by re-visiting, re-using, and re-fashioning his stories, characters, and theatergrams on stage rather than by memorializing his predecessor on the page.

We might productively think of Fletcher as one of the earliest readers of the 1623 Folio: he embodies the ample, intense, and enduring influence that Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies exerted on readers and writers alike since even before its first copies hit the London bookstalls. If Fletcher, whose playwriting career famously began—in The Faithful Shepherdess—with a complaint about how little control an author has over the reception of his work, could witness, in 2025, the divergent yet resonant ways in which both Shakespeare’s and his own canons have been constructed, he would probably appreciate the ironic relation between his own authorial identity and the two Folios with which he was associated. The 1623 Folio became decisive in establishing the Shakespeare canon as the emanation of a single, solitary, independent authorial voice by effacing the contributions of other writers, especially that of Fletcher; the Folio published by Humphrey Moseley in 1647 to memorialize Fletcher was famously graced by the latter’s portrait, crowned with laurels, but presented its contents as the work of two authors (Beaumont and Fletcher) and thereby ended up constructing for Fletcher a literary image that would forever remain associated with that of his friend, even though the volume itself included a mere two Beaumont-and-Fletcher plays among nearly all of Fletcher’s solo plays and most of those he wrote with other collaborators—whose contributions were, again, carefully concealed.

Footnotes