John Fletcher (1579–1625) was a Jacobean playwright. Following William Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, he was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day; during his lifetime and in the early Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's. He collaborated on writing plays with Francis Beaumont, and also with Shakespeare on three plays. Though his reputation has declined since, Fletcher remains an important transitional figure between the Elizabethan popular tradition and the popular drama of the Restoration. Biography Early life Fletcher was born in December 1579 (baptised 20 December) in Rye, Sussex, and died of the plague in August 1625 (buried 29 August in St. Saviour's, Southwark). His father Richard Fletcher was an ambitious and successful cleric who was in turn Dean of Peterborough, Bishop of Bristol, Bishop of Worcester and Bishop of London (shortly before his death), as well as chaplain to Queen Elizabeth. As Dean of Peterborough, Richard Fletcher, at the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringay Castle, "knelt down on the scaffold steps and started to pray out loud and at length, in a prolonged and rhetorical style as though determined to force his way into the pages of history". He cried out at her death, "So perish all the Queen's enemies!" Richard Fletcher died shortly after falling out of favour with the Queen, over a marriage she had advised against. He appears to have been partly rehabilitated before his death in 1596 but he died substantially in debt. The upbringing of John Fletcher and his seven siblings was entrusted to his paternal uncle Giles Fletcher, a poet and minor official. His uncle's connections ceased to be a benefit and may even have become a liability after the rebellion of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who had been his patron. Fletcher appears to have entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1591, at the age of eleven. It is not certain that he took a degree but evidence suggests that he was preparing for a career in the church. Little is known about his time at college but he evidently followed the path previously trodden by the University wits before him, from Cambridge to the burgeoning commercial theatre of London. Collaborations with Beaumont In 1606, he began to appear as a playwright for the Children of the Queen's Revels, then performing at the Blackfriars Theatre. Commendatory verses by Richard Brome in the