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The Tamer Tamed: Dating Fletcher's Interactions with Shakespeare

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Shakespeariana ISSN 2283-8759 DOI 10.13133/2283-8759/14508 pp. 118-148 (2018) The Tamer Tamed: Dating Fletcher’s Interactions with Shakespeare Gary Taylor A physical system manifests itself only by interacting with another. The description of a physical system, then, is always given in relation to another physical system, the one with which it interacts.1 John Fletcher’s play The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed has been described as a sequel, an adaptation, an answer, and a counter-part to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew2. All those descriptions recognize that the plays constitute a particularly interesting dramatic diptych, created by different playwrights at different times. Fletcher’s play was undoubtedly written later than Shakespeare’s. But The Tamer Tamed has, by various scholars over the course of the last 1 Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems, trans. Simon Carnell and Eric Segre, London, Allen Lane, 2016, p. 216. 2 For ‘counter-part’, see Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, London, 1691, p. 217; for ‘sequel’, see Alexander Dyce, ed., The Works of Beaumont & Fletcher, London, Moxon, 1843-46, 11 vols, vol. I, p. lxiv; for ‘answer’, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, Oxford, Clarendon, 1923, 4 vols, vol. III, p. 222; for ‘adaptation’, see Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, eds, Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, London-New York, Routledge, 2000, pp. 23-65. Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 5/2018 119 GARY TAYLOR century, been dated as early as 1603 and as late as 16173. Depending on which of these dates is correct, Fletcher’s play could have been written at the beginning of his theatrical career, or after Shakespeare’s death, or after Shakespeare’s retirement from the stage, or after Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborated on three plays (The History of Cardenio, All Is True; or, Henry the Eighth, and The Two Noble Kinsmen), or just before those three collaborations, or in the middle of them4. Which of these dates is correct will affect interpretations, not only of Fletcher’s play and Fletcher’s career, but also of Shakespeare’s own biography, and the history of aesthetic and practical interactions between the two most popular and influential playwrights of the seventeenth century. One might therefore assume that Shakespeareans would take a keen interest in locating The Tamer Tamed more precisely between 1603 and 1617. But, in fact, the dating of The Tamer Tamed has been as neglected as the rest of Fletcher’s chronology. The last full-length scholarly analysis of evidence for the play’s date was an article by Baldwin Maxwell published in 19355. That article originated the now-widespread association of The Tamer Tamed with the year 16116. But Maxwell’s dating of other plays in the 3 Alfred Harbage and Samuel Schoenbaum gave the “range” of possible dates for the play as “1604–c.1617” (see Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975-1700: An Analytical Record of All Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies & C, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, London, Methuen, 1964, p. 98). Likewise, Chambers dated the play only “1604” or later (Elizabethan Stage, vol. III, p. 222). For 1603, see below. 4 For a summary and synthesis of scholarship on the dating of the three Fletcher- Shakespeare collaborations, see Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works”, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, eds Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 583-90. 5 Baldwin Maxwell, “The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed”, Modern Philology, 32 (1935), pp. 353-64. A slightly revised and expanded version of this article was printed in Maxwell’s Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1939, pp. 29-45. 6 The year 1611 is cited as most likely by: Harbage, p. 98; Gordon McMullan, “Chronology for the Plays of John Fletcher and His Collaborators”, in The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, p. 267; David Bevington, gen. ed., English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, New York, Norton, 2002, p. 1215; The Royal Shakespeare Company, ed., The Tamer Tamed, 2003; Meg Powers Livingston, ed., The Woman’s Prize by John Fletcher, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. vii-viii. Lucy Munro does not explicitly commit herself to 1611, but her “1609-11” accepts it as an option, and her discussion Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 5/2018 The Tamer Tamed: Dating Fletcher’s Interactions with Shakespeare 120 Fletcher canon has been contested, and, in the intervening eight decades, digital databases have made it possible to search comprehensively for phrases Maxwell interpreted as topical allusions7. A reconsideration of the evidence is long overdue. How late? Maxwell rejected the claims of Fleay and Gayley that The Tamer Tamed was written as late as 1613-16. Gayley argued that, being wholly Fletcher’s, The Tamer Tamed must have been “written after [Beaumont’s] retirement to the country in 1613”. His only substantive argument is “the similarity of phrases in this play to those of Wit without Money”, particularly the lines on “frippery” in III.i of Tamer and II.v of Wit, and “on the armies in the air at Aspurg in I.iv of the former and II.iv of the latter; as well as the mention of ‘craccus’, a favorite brand of tobacco at that time (cf. Middleton’s Faire Quarrel, IV.i, of 1616)”, which inclined him “to set the lower limit of composition at about 1615. Probably, as Fleay suggests, it was one of the plays acted by the Princess Elizabeth’s men between 1613 and 1616”8. There is no reason to believe that Fletcher was incapable of writing a play on his own before Beaumont’s retirement from the stage; The Tamer Tamed does not mention Aspurg; we don’t know how long “craccus” was a London tobacco commodity; like other playwrights of the period, Fletcher often repeated himself verbally, and the repetitions can be separated by many years. Maxwell’s strongest evidence against the years 1613-16 was the phrase “has worne / As many Servants out, as the Northeast passage / Has and commentary seem to prefer it: see John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, ed. Lucy Munro, London, Bloomsbury, 2010, pp. xv-xvi. 7 On The Noble Gentleman, see Philip J. Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 136-45, 249- 55. See also Gary Taylor, “Thomas Middleton, The Nice Valour, and the Court of James I”, The Court Historian, 6 (2001), pp. 1-36, and Gary Taylor, “Middleton and Rowley – and Heywood: The Old Law and New Technologies of Attribution”, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 96 (2002), pp. 165-217. 8 See Frederick Gard Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642, London, Reeves and Turner, 1891, 2 vols, vol. I, p. 198, and Charles Mill Gayley, Representative English Comedies, New York, Macmillan, 1914-36, 4 vols, vol. III, pp. lxvii-lxviii. Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 5/2018 121 GARY TAYLOR consum’d Saylors” (II.ii.66-68; II.i.67-69)9. As Maxwell observed, the fact that Fletcher referred here to the northeast passage “rather than the northwest passage as a consumer of men suggests that he was writing before September, 1611, when the survivors of Hudson’s voyage to the northwest reached England with their tragic tale of how Hudson with eight others had by mutineers been set adrift in small boats to perish and how on the hazardous voyage home four of the mutineers had been killed by Eskimos and others had died of starvation”10. The evidence against a later date is, in fact, even stronger than Maxwell realized. The simile “Venture as many kisses as the merchants / Do dollars in the East Indies” emphasizes the risks (“venture”) and the high costs of investment (“as many […] dollars”) rather than profit (IV.iii.44-45; IV.ii.44-45). That simile can hardly have been written between 1612 and 1619. In 1612, the outflow of investment for East India Company ventures was far lower than in any other year between 1601 and 1640; in 1613, four East India ships returned with more than a million pounds of pepper, producing a massive profit for investors and beginning a period of six uninterrupted years of prosperity for Company investors11. This new evidence from the East India Company accounts confirms 1611 as the latest possible date for the play. Fletcher and Shakespeare’s collaboration on The History of Cardenio must have been written at some time between mid-1612 and January 161312. We can 9 References to The Tamer Tamed quote the old-spelling text of The Woman’s Prize, ed. Fredson Bowers, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, 10 vols, vol. IV, pp. 1-148, a text that conflates the seventeenth-century witnesses but also provides a full textual apparatus. I also supply (where the line numbers differ) a second set of references, citing the modern-spelling text in The Tamer Tamed; Or, The Woman’s Prize, eds Celia R. Daileader and Gary Taylor, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006; that text gives preference to the manuscript version. The present essay is a much revised and updated version of my unpublished “The Date and Original Venue of Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed”, which Daileader and Taylor cited as “forthcoming”.
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