Fletcher in Company: Collaboration, the Whitefriars Playhouse, and Four Plays or Moral Representations in One

This essay revisits questions of creativity, co-authorship, and co-operation in the career of John Fletcher, who is best-known today for his collaborations with Francis Beaumont and William Shakespeare, but was also the author of important solo plays. Bringing together biography, theater history, and repertory studies, it offers a new angle on Fletcher’s career by examining in detail his underrated work for the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Whitefriars playhouse between 1609 and 1615, and by drawing on a set of new documentary materials that illuminate his writing life. These sources not only help to embed Fletcher within the playing company but also suggest that his experience of writing plays at the Whitefriars may have differed from that of his colleagues in significant ways. These insights are brought to bear on Four Plays or Moral Representations in One, the first play that Fletcher wrote with the actor-dramatist Nathan Field. Examining the ways in which it reworks Fletcher’s habitual preoccupation with gender and the abuse of power, I argue that Four Plays offers new ways of understanding the place of solo writing within broader structures of collaboration.