Though he is largely unknown to audiences today, John Fletcher was one of the most popular and successful playwrights of the English Renaissance. He took over from Shakespeare as the principal playwright of the King’s Men playing company, jointly writing three plays with Shakespeare at the end of the latter’s career between 1610-1612. John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Lord Denney’s Players’ twelfth production, offers Columbus audiences a lively, absurd expansion of the Shakespearean tropes they know and love, such as young people’s obsessive sexuality and feeling (seen also in Romeo and Juliet), a flight to the forest (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It), and the peculiar deus ex machina of a late work like Cymbeline. The premiere example of Renaissance tragicomedy, the play balances on a knife edge between genres while also offering such a robust satire of puritanical values that one reader has called it “American Pie set in the seventeenth century.”

November 21, 22, 23, 2024, 7:30pm, Columbus Performing Arts Center (549 Franklin Ave)

General Admission $12 / Students $5 / English and TFMA majors get in free at the door

Advance tickets available through Ticketmaster and the TFMA Box Office.