History

John Fletcher

Name: John Fletcher
Author: Orie Latham Hatcher
ISBN: 9781235948794

by Orie Latham Hatcher

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Synopsis

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 Excerpt: ...of the stage--two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." Scott Saintsbury Ed., XV, p. 346. 'An Account of English Dramatick Poets (1691), pp. 208-218, show a large number of Fletcher's plays being still acted "with great applause." 7Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration, 1660 to 1830. Continuous records show an almost unbroken stage popularity for Fletcher down to about 1760. 'II, 815. herent qualities found their chief title to public favor. That such an element may have contributed to the success of the plays is likely enough, however lamentable the fact. There are always people to whom such an appeal is gratifying and the number of such people was perhaps never larger in England than in Fletcher's generation and those succeeding it. This explanation is hardly adequate, however, to account for the measure or variety of success which the plays met with. Besides it should be noted that many of the writers of the commendatory verses of the 1647 Folio and even Collier in his Short View of the Immorality of the English Stage praise Fletcher for his superior morals and purity; so that it seems clear that however we may regard him today, his own age and the succeeding one did not single him out as one of the chief apostles of indecency. Certainly his continued popularity through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must have had a more substantial and genuinely commendable basis than that of obscenity; and in our study of Fletcher, as distinct from Beaumont, it becomes a question of high significance to discover the real secret of his popularity, and to measure his actual merit within the sphere of his art. Bow far was he justified by his aim--stage success--in disregarding the canons of ...