John Fletcher and the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s Plays

The purpose of this article is to trace and illuminate the many and diverse threads connecting playwright John Fletcher to the 1623 volume of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, more commonly referred to as the First Folio. While some of the material that I discuss in what follows will be already familiar to Fletcherian and Shakespearean scholars alike, no attempt has yet been made to offer a full picture of the connections between Fletcher and Shakespeare’s First Folio, nor to tease out the implications of the interest that Fletcher appears to have manifested in that volume in the years that led to its publication.1 The Fletcher–First Folio connections can be divided into four categories: (1) the almost obsessive allusions to previously unpublished Shakespeare plays in Fletcher’s works circa 1619–23; (2) the presence of the Shakespeare-Fletcher collaborative play All Is True; or, King Henry VIII in the First Folio, contrasted with the absence of “Cardenio” and The Two Noble Kinsmen; (3) the references to Fletcher’s own 1620 tragicomedy Women Pleased in the surviving, Folio-only text of The Taming of the Shrew; and (4) Fletcher’s literary Hispanophilia and his personal connections with some of the most prominent promoters of the cultivation of Spanish letters in Jacobean England, who were variously connected with the making of the Folio.