The Faithful Shepherdess
By John Fletcher
Directed by Sarah Neville
November 21 - 23
Columbus Performing Arts Center
549 Franklin Avenue
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.”
General Admission $12 / Students $5 / Department of English and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts majors get in free at the door
Advance tickets available through Ticketmaster and the Theatre, Film, and Media Arts Box Office.
On November 22nd, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is holding a symposium about the play, "John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess in Context".