“Shall I Never See a Lusty Man Again?”: John Fletcher’s Men, 1608–1715

Abstract

In 2009 I wrote an essay on Cardenio.1 I argued that in considering the nature of any play called Cardenio, written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, then one important area of investigation might be the modifications made to the narrative of interrupted male friendship between its apparent source in Cervantes and its eighteenth-century adaptation in Double Falsehood. Where the former celebrates an idealized male friendship, at times through the kinds of homoerotic representations of male beauty common to the classical and Renaissance traditions, the latter eschews this in favor of a celebration of a more domesticated and bourgeois heterosexuality. Theobald’s adaptation sidelines the homoerotic potential of early modern male philia, associating it with the rapacious aristocratic sexual appetites of the villainous Henriquez, whose characterization might readily be identified with what Thomas King terms “residual pederasty.” In the later period statusdriven homoeroticism comes to be understood as tyrannical and corrupting and, crucially, as outmoded.2 In arguing that an original Shakespeare and Fletcher play could not have worked in quite this way but, as in the Cervantes original, would have afforded much greater affective power to the friendship between Cardenio and Don Fernando, my main touchstones were the powerful portraits of male friendship available in the Shakespearian canon, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice, to the more generically comparable The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter, of course cowritten by Fletcher).KeywordsMale FriendshipMasculine IdentityPhysical BeautyMale ProtagonistSexual AppetiteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.