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Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher

Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher At the heart of Philip J. Finkelpearl’s groundbreaking book lies the perception that far from slavishly aping court manners and dogma, and far from producing merely sensational, vacuous “good theater, Beaumont and Fletcher actually wrote drama that engages in a spirited critique of the Jacobean court, of James and his theories of monarchy. Carefully analyzing the playwrights’ social and intellectual connections and reexamining the available biographical evidence, Finkelpearl builds a solid case that even though Beaumont and Fletcher may have found themselves on the royalist side had they lived to participate in the Civil Wars (as one contributor to the First Folio, George Lisle, suggested), “it was possible to hold ‘country,’ radical-Protestant, anti-Catholic, anticourt, antidames sentiments and still refuse to participate in a rebellion” (p. 38). Such ideas cut deeply across the grain of modern critical orthodoxy concerning the two most popular dramatists of the seventeenth century, and they proceed from two reasonable, relatively new assumptions: first, it is “unjustifiable to dispose a priori of a political interpretation of a Jacobean play’’ (p. 70), and, second, Beaumont and Fletcher’s work must be seen in relation to a tradition of dissent and criticism in the private theaters that represented http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Duke University Press

Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1990 by University of Washington
ISSN
0026-7929
eISSN
1527-1943
DOI
10.1215/00267929-51-4-559
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

At the heart of Philip J. Finkelpearl’s groundbreaking book lies the perception that far from slavishly aping court manners and dogma, and far from producing merely sensational, vacuous “good theater, Beaumont and Fletcher actually wrote drama that engages in a spirited critique of the Jacobean court, of James and his theories of monarchy. Carefully analyzing the playwrights’ social and intellectual connections and reexamining the available biographical evidence, Finkelpearl builds a solid case that even though Beaumont and Fletcher may have found themselves on the royalist side had they lived to participate in the Civil Wars (as one contributor to the First Folio, George Lisle, suggested), “it was possible to hold ‘country,’ radical-Protestant, anti-Catholic, anticourt, antidames sentiments and still refuse to participate in a rebellion” (p. 38). Such ideas cut deeply across the grain of modern critical orthodoxy concerning the two most popular dramatists of the seventeenth century, and they proceed from two reasonable, relatively new assumptions: first, it is “unjustifiable to dispose a priori of a political interpretation of a Jacobean play’’ (p. 70), and, second, Beaumont and Fletcher’s work must be seen in relation to a tradition of dissent and criticism in the private theaters that represented

Journal

Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1990

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