Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “John Keats” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

John Keats

(1579 – 1625)

John Fletcher was born in December 1579 in Rye, Sussex, the son of Richard Fletcher, in turn. Dean of Peterborough, Bishop of Bristol, Bishop or Worcester, and later Bishop of London and chaplain to the queen. John Fletcher was cousin to the poet Phineas Fletcher, author of The Purple Island. He attended Bene’t College, Cambridge (now known as Corpus Christi College) of which his father had been president, but when his father died in 1596 he was in bad financial circumstances. In Mermaid Tavern he likely met his most famous collaborator, William Shakespeare, along with Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont, with whom his name is almost inextricably bound when his comedies are discussed. Fletcher’s collaboration with Beaumont lasted from 1607 until the latter’s death in 1616. He also wrote plays in conjunction with Massinger, Middleton, Rowley, and Jonson himself.

Fletcher’s first recorded sole-authorship play was The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1609) and he continued to write plays on his own. These included the historical tragedy Bonduca (1614), the comedies The Chances (c.1617), an adaptation from Cervantes, The Tamer Tamed (1624), which answered Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, a political drama, The Loyal Subject (1618), and a tragedy Valentinian (1610-?1614). Fletcher is likely to have collaborated with Shakespeare in two plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-16) and The Life of King Henry the Eighth (1613). The first of the plays written in collaboration with Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) was The Woman-Hater (1607), but their most famous play was the uproariously-funny Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) After the immense success of this play Beaumont and Fletcher never looked back. They had struck a close friendship. Their collaboration also produced Philaster (c.1609), a romantic mistaken-identity play, The Maid’s Tragedy (c.1610), a play about murder and betrayal, and, finally A King and No King (1611), a “black comedy” complete with incest and more mistaken identities, which somehow ends happily The first collected edition of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher came out in 1647.

It is near impossible to talk about the plays in terms of who did what. Some critics argue that Beaumont wrote better plots than Fletcher, or that Fletcher had a greater poetic gift, but in fact such speculation is useless because the collaboration was so close. What can be said is that the plays arc fast moving, well constructed, and, in the case of the comedies, still funny The verse in the tragedies often rises to very grand heights, and Fletcher shows a great gift for songs and lyrical writing. It has been estimated, however, that between 1609 and 1625, Fletcher was involved in the writing of forty-two plays. Fletcher was buried in St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on August 29, 1625.