John Fletcher

Most scholars acknowledge that Fletcher’s real talent lay in comedy, especially in the genre of tragicomedy. His style of tragicomedy at its best manages to generate considerable power through the sheer variety of the emotions it arouses. Fletcher is noted as a master of plot contrivance and character manipulation and of exaggerated speech used for dramatic effect. The customary 10-syllable line of Elizabethan dramatic blank verse overflows, in Fletcher's hands, into lines of 11 and sometimes 12 syllables, and he frequently employs run-on lines to achieve his goal. But for all the appearance of wild abundance and headlong extravagance in his use of language, his is a highly mannered style.

Fletcher’s works strongly influenced his contemporaries as well as his successors. His heroes, preoccupied with the themes of love or honor or both, are the immediate forebears of the protagonists of the plays of the Restoration period (see Restoration Comedy). Fletcher’s particular technical abilities served him well in handling plots of comic intrigue, and his delight in verbal display found its proper aim in the witty banter with which the sophisticated young men and women in his comedies match their forces in the game of love.