The Erotic Politics of Beaumont and Fletcher

TWO WITS ONE SOUL: THE EROTIC POLITICS OF BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER Ariel Franklin-Hudson In the First Quarto of John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, his friend Ben Jonson wrote that Fletcher’s play would “rise/A glorified worke to Time”1 Jonson was wrong. Today, Fletcher’s plays are rarely studied or performed, condemned by a critical tradition that labeled them as vice-ridden, poorly written, and vastly inferior to Shakespeare’s. Yet for a time, Fletcher – who followed Shakespeare as the house playwright of the King’s Men – reigned supreme on the London stage. Between 1606 and 1625 Fletcher wrote over forty plays with a series of collaborators; the most famous and successful was Francis Beaumont. Beaumont died in 1613, but he remained Fletcher’s poetic partner in legend and in print. The 1647 Folio of “Beaumont and Fletcher plays” cemented the myth of Beaumont and Fletcher as “two wits in growth/So just, as had one soule informed both.”2 At first reading, the Beaumont and Fletcher plays seem clunky and awkward, without the dramatic unity and profundity of vision3 so common to Shakespeare. Yet the Beaumont and Fletcher plays are also full of fascinatingly complicated characters, glorious rhetorical moments, and unsettling conclusions. They are funny and gruesome, tragic and comic. They deal provocatively with issues of sex and gender. Through an examination of Beaumont and Fletcher’s personal lives and collaboration, several of their plays, and the critical corpus surrounding their work, I attempt to answer a central question: what is it about the Beaumont and Fletcher plays that made them so popular and so reviled? Using queer theory and Sandra Clark’s argument that Beaumont and Fletcher’s treatment of “sexual situations [...] led to the marginalisation of their plays,”4 I investigate Beaumont and Fletcher’s metatheatricality, intertextuality, and erotic politics. 1 Ben Jonson, “To the worthy Author M. John Fletcher,” John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Cyrus Hoy, Beaumont and Fletcher: Dramatic Works, Vol. III, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 2 John Webster, “To the Manes of the celebrated Poets and Fellow-writers Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, upon the Printing of their excellent Dramatick Poems,” Comedies and tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gent (London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson and for Humphrey Moseley, 1647), Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. 3 Sandra Clark, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: Sexual Themes and Dramatic Representation (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), 10. 4 Ibid., 1..

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