Mini-Symposium on The Faithful Shepherdess
The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies offers a daylong symposium and an additional mini-symposium most academic years. This autumn's offering is a half-day mini-symposium on John Fletcher's 1609 play, The Faithful Shepherdess.
Summary
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. The Faithful Shepherdess is among Fletcher’s earliest work, notable both for its strident policing of the pastoral mode and its definition of tragicomedy. In concurrence with Lord Denney’s Players’ production of The Faithful Shepherdess running at the Columbus Performing Arts Center November 21-23, OSU’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies presents a mini-symposium and keynote lecture reexamining the critical heritage and performance history of the play.
Schedule
Panel on "Affect, Influences, Audiences in the Renaissance Pastoral"
3 - 4:15 pm
Speakers: Jonathan Combs-Schilling (OSU); Christine Varnado (U Buffalo); Sarah Neville (OSU)
Keynote: "The Faithful Shepherdess at the Blackfriars Playhouse"
4:30 - 5:30 pm
Lucy Munro (King’s College London)
In a poem that prefaces Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess in its 1634 third edition, Shackerley Marmion praises the actor Joseph Taylor, who had recently brought it to the stage with his company, the King’s Men, as "thou, who first did’st give / Unto this booke a life." The fact that The Faithful Shepherdess appears to have flopped on its first performance by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1607-8 has dominated its critical afterlife. In contrast, Lucy Munro will reconsider the play’s theatrical ‘life’ by taking it seriously as a text for actors. In doing so, she will discuss its performance by the Queen’s Revels company and its revival by the King’s Men, both of which took place at the Blackfriars playhouse, focusing on questions of casting, gender and institutional politics.
This event is free and open to all. Co-hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Lord Denney's Players and the Humanities Institute. For accommodation requests and more information, email Megan Moriarty at moriarty.8@osu.edu.
Lord Denney's Players Present John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess
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.
