John Fletcher

An English Jacobean playwright, chief dramatist for the King's Men after Shakespeare's retirement and Shakespeare's own collaborator on his final plays (Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen). Alone and in his long partnership with Francis Beaumont, Fletcher was the most prolific and commercially successful practitioner of English tragicomedy, a hybrid form mixing tragedy's danger with a happy, reversal-driven ending: Philaster, A King and No King and The Faithful Shepherdess (whose own preface set out his theory of the form) are his principal examples. The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1608) restated for the English stage the theoretical defense the Italian Battista Guarini had given the genre a generation earlier in defending Il Pastor Fido.