Parergon

It is a critical commonplace to declare at the beginning of a scholarly monograph about John Fletcher that despite being the most influential playwright of his era, the vast canon of John Fletcher–Francis Beaumont–Philip Massinger plays still go unexplored. Even if Fletcher has begun to receive his due attention over the last two decades, Domenico Lovascio’s monograph on the playwright’s dramatic representations of the Ancient Roman world is a welcome intervention in the field. Lovascio reads together what will now be called Fletcher’s ‘Roman plays’— Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One, and The Prophetess—as a group for the first time, arguing that their quality of disorientation evinces the playwright’s scepticism about the worthiness of Rome as an intellectual, political, and social model.

Importantly, Lovascio discusses the classical and early modern sources that inspired the plays, taking seriously Fletcher’s intellectual life as a philosopher of history and political thinker, even if the plays are often ironic and irreverent. In Fletcher’s Roman plays, there is ‘a grim depiction of a history devoid of purpose and transcendent meaning’ (p. 21), which Lovascio reads as an example of what Walter Benjamin theorised as Trauerspiel, or mourning play. The pessimistic portrayal of Rome was, as Lovascio establishes in Chapter 1, partly the result of the classical sources on which Fletcher based his plays. Unlike many of his contemporaries who depicted Ancient Rome—most notably Shakespeare— Fletcher did not rely on sources about the Republic such as Plutarch, Virgil, and Ovid, the kinds of writers that were part of a grammar school curriculum. Rather, Fletcher adapted writings about Rome’s Imperial era written during late antiquity, which he coupled with contemporary vernacular translations of ancient texts by Continental writers. These later historians tended to be more pessimistic about the Roman Empire, which led to Fletcher’s portrayal of Rome as ‘a corrupted political reality facing irreversible decay’ (p. 17).

In Chapter 2, Lovascio demonstrates how Fletcher’s plays undermine the English Renaissance’s myth of Ancient Rome as cultural exemplar. Fletcher’s Roman plays are questioning why the English Renaissance relied on the Roman Empire as a social, political, and philosophical model if Rome was destined to destroy itself. Rather than the Rome of superbia and virtus, Fletcher’s Roman world is one that lacks commendable political leadership and has been abandoned by the gods who are meant to protect the Roman citizens. Lovascio shows how Fletcher relies on a metaphor of disintegration and decay—particularly of the bodies of dead Roman emperors—to represent Rome as cruel and corrupt and, furthermore, that the Empire itself is also destined to dissolve. The only means Roman men possess to prove their virtus is on the battlefield, which is part of Fletcher’s valorisation of the military more generally. But as Lovascio [End Page 267] explains, even this is inadequate to save the Empire from the general violence and opportunism that will lead to its downfall.

Having dealt with the sources that Fletcher adapted in his Roman plays and his pessimistic depiction of the Empire, its leaders, and male subjects, in Chapter 3, Lovascio turns to Fletcher’s depiction of women. He argues that Fletcher conveys the female exemplum par excellence of the era—Lucretia’s suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius—as an inadequate ideal. Lovascio compares Fletcher’s representation of Roman women to non-Roman women (most notably, Bonduca and Cleopatra), and then to the women of the Fletcher canon more broadly. He finds that Fletcher is critical of Roman women’s reputation for ‘excessive passivity’ (p. 128), as they do not display the kinds of ‘masculine’ wit and fortitude as the plays’ non-Roman women and Fletcher’s female characters at large (Maria in The Tamer Tamed perhaps being the most famous example). Rather, Roman exempla for early modern women are, for Fletcher, ‘undependable and impractical’ (p. 128...