The Island Princess

by John Fletcher

New RSC Classics series highlights rarely performed Tudor and Jacobean plays.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Drama, Renaissance, Theatre, Fiction, School

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1647

About the author

John Fletcher (1579-1625) was an English playwright and one of the most prolific and influential dramatists of the early seventeenth century, whose career bridged the Elizabethan theatrical tradition and the drama of the Stuart Restoration. He emerged as a major figure in London theatre in the first decade of the 1600s, initially writing for the Children of the Queen’s Revels and soon becoming closely associated with the King’s Men. Fletcher’s early education at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, appears to have prepared him for a clerical career, but like many of the university-trained writers of his generation he gravitated instead toward the commercial stage. His rise was closely tied to his celebrated partnership with Francis Beaumont, with whom he developed a distinctive form of tragicomedy that proved enormously popular. Their collaboration produced several of the period’s most successful plays, including Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy, and A King and No King, works that helped define Jacobean taste through their blend of romance, political tension, and emotional intensity. Following Beaumont’s withdrawal from writing, Fletcher became increasingly central to the King’s Men and, after the death of William Shakespeare, effectively succeeded him as the company’s principal playwright. During this period he collaborated with Shakespeare on plays such as Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while also producing a large body of work either alone or with other dramatists, most notably Philip Massinger. Fletcher’s drama is marked by technical fluency, flexible verse, and a keen sense of theatrical pacing, and he showed particular mastery in tragicomedy and comedy of manners, genres that would dominate the Restoration stage. Although some of his early experiments, such as The Faithful Shepherdess, initially failed to find an audience, he quickly adapted his style and achieved sustained popularity, with multiple plays performed at court and revived frequently after his death. During the Commonwealth, scenes from his works circulated widely as short theatrical drolls, and following the reopening of the theatres in 1660, Fletcher’s plays were staged more often than those of any other playwright. Over time, however, his reputation declined as Shakespeare’s stature grew, and by the eighteenth century only a handful of his comedies remained in regular performance. Modern scholarship has emphasized both the scale of Fletcher’s output and the complexity of authorship within his canon, which reflects extensive collaboration and has prompted detailed stylistic analysis. Despite fluctuations in critical standing, Fletcher remains a key transitional figure in English drama, whose influence shaped both his contemporaries and the theatrical traditions that followed.

Reviews

[carol]

i can't believe i actually finished this

[Joules · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to John Fletcher for proving you can be horny and Christian at the same time

[Jacky Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Critically pertinent and interesting WHILE being readable. Good job Fletcher

[Aisling · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 and a half stars i guess? as quite a fan of renaissance / jacobean era plays this really was a personal let down. i think it’s a given to expect elements of colonialism/racism/sexism within plays from this period but that quite literally is the entire purpose of the play - a theatric acceptance and encouragement of expansion and colonialism. the plot of the second half of the play is very heavily rushed, and whilst the first plot of armusia breaking a king out of imprisonment is fun and interesting to consider how the performance would’ve been constructed, i just didn’t really enjoy anything beyond that? armusia has (from a christian perspective) a perfect level of righteousness and essentially has no flaws, and his absolute slander of the religion of tidore is just so unnecessary and intense - and then of course his perfection inspired the princess to leave behind all her own religious beliefs and morals as she converts to christianity and wow i guess colonialism is a good thing because it means we can convert others to christianity !! i’m sure that’s definitely what they want and it should become our goal as britain to expand our empire, profit off of those we colonise, and inflict our religion upon them because what they currently have is “barbaric” 🥰. yeah didn’t really fw this play.

[isa lim · Rating 1 out of 5]

garbage book. do not read

[Izzy Beer · Rating 2 out of 5]

kinda hard to get through. can’t find a play for it to watch anywhere online so clearly it’s not that good as no one wants to watch it

[Tom Caskie]

so many sexual references (apparently). Silly and then sudden religious fanaticism and fighting. Love that

[suna · Rating 1 out of 5]

bad

[Noah McCluskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short Review for this one. This is Fletcher's attempt at the Tempest, this play provides a vignette of a colonial encounter in which the Portuguese colonisers battle for the love of the titular Island Princess Quisara.

Quisara the object of everyone's affection is a metaphor for the island itself, to win her affection is to succeed in owning the Island. They duel, have prison breaks and scheme against each other to curry favour with her. but when Quisara makes a final ask of the leading suitor, Armusia all hell breaks loose. She asks the Christian Portuguese man to convert to Islam this is too far and we get multiple scenes of Armusia having some of the feistiest pro Christianity monologue you may see, I would guess the zeal and over the top nature is Fletcher poking fun but still these were some beautiful monologues.

The rest of the play has some Fletcher sex jokes and lots of interesting depictions of women, too much to possibly cover in this review. Overall I thought it was very good, an early modern piece that introduced themes of colonialism and religion in a careful manner and has monologues and scenes that at times surpass that of Shakespeare. Considering it's a play there are of course compromises to the necessity for it to be staged and there are potentially many redundant characters. In addition the humour doesn't always hit but the twists, writing and suspense makes it an enjoyable read.

[Honah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Keeping with the Christian theme, no plot point “begat” another

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her introduction to the Arden edition of this play, Clare McManus observes that twenty-first century readers and audiences might well be surprised to discover "that such a location was even available for dramatization by a Jacobean writer". I count myself amongst them: despite having read a fair number of early modern plays (most of them a very long time ago), I can't think of many with anything resembling such a setting, and The Island Princess itself is wholly new to me. The critical consensus links Fletcher's play to The Tempest. but to my eyes it has more affinity with All's Well That Ends Well or The Merchant of Venice (both in its Portia and its Shylock plots): as much as a tragicomedy, it feels like a semi-anti-romance, or perhaps a parodic romance, although the degree of semi-/anti-/parody could probably only really be appreciated in performance—or, more accurately, this degree could vary according to the production. On the page, it's not entirely clear whether we are meant to stand with the characters or cast a more critical eye on them: for example, in the Portuguese settlers' scoffing at the pursuits of Malukan noblemen in 1.1, or Quisara's discomforture at the failure of Rui Dias to perform the task (quest) set up for him in 2.6. I'm not if this is subtlety or fence-sitting, but it continues right to the end of the play: it's not hard to imagine that the reaction of a Jacobean audience to the juxtaposition of Quisara's and Armusia's attitudes to religious conversion might have been quite different to our own, but what would they made of the King of Tidore's professed "half" persuasion in favour of Christianity in the final scene, and what are we to make of it? It's either deliberately ambiguous or a fudge; given that Fletcher ducks some potential edginess by making the "Moor priest" just the Governor of Ternate in a false beard, I'm inclined to think the latter. All of this makes The Island Princess an interesting play, but not a neglected masterpiece.

[Yorgos · Rating 1 out of 5]

I cannot finish this piece of shit. I've overdosed on Fletcher soz, so here's my marginal notes on this and I'll let it be.
Random play June #5.5

I read Acts I-III and Intro to the Arden Early Modern Drama edition. Very poor. Text is fine but badly overpunctuated.

The intro is riddled with factual errors beginning on the very first page where it calls Othello a Muslim. (Lord help us, the author bio says she is now working on an edition of the play!) It is also bizarrely obsessed with 9/11. It is largely unedifying, interested as it is primarily in pointing out tensions, avenues for "analysis" etc., very much in the vein of a monstrously large essay prompt in an undergraduate English course. It merely indicates: there is race, there may be prejudice, there is colonialism; In the worst tradition of our modern critical school.

I have complained about the overediting of minor Elizabethan drama before but this does something even worse than Revels. Both overgloss, but this editor is seeking to put the critical weight of a Variorum Shakespeare with 300 years of Talmudish debate in the footnotes onto a play which will not support that kind of scrutiny. The editing is solipsistic, as if the text had no context, all notions exist to be reflected here, in this minor work of Fletcherian tragicomedy, where all that can be done editorially is indicate the proximity of notions. This play is a text too poor for characters, and we've loosed onto it a tradition of editorship too narrow-minded (or something) to analyze the world in a text, or make critical judgements, or -- heaven for fend -- moral ones, except cliche. It impoverishes us as readers.

Thus: the note to l. 65, p. 109, suggests that the simple and direct metaphor of "wearing one's complexion in a case" -- on its face about skin color, perhaps with a connotation of duplicitous behavior -- has something to say also about promiscuity and religious difference. If the pun on "case" rises to the level of a joke (as opposed to being merely humorous), and if the pun survives scansion in both its readings (as opposed to being merely suggestive), there is still no room for "religious difference." The only way for this to be possible is if it existed in a rich linguistic and thematic landscape, But this play is doggerel! There is no such landscape, it's just shit! So we have a bad case of overanalysis.

Let us take some more simply bad examples: p. 115, n. l. 17, a cringe-inducing case of finding "thematic" content in bad poetry. P. 117, n. l. 43, a schoolteacherish overreading presented with a lot of bluster; "demonstrates" -- ha! P. 122, n. l. 16 Implausibly calls a verbal echo of a biblical passage a "missrememberance", as if the Elizabethan audience knew the Song of Songs by heart! Im who do have a lot of it memorized didn't catch the parallels. And trying to foreground these puppet-characters is pointless. They have no mental life because they are badly written hack work. P. 121-3, n.s ll. 12, 21-2, 16-32, 32-7 all make sure you understand that this speech of 20 lines is naive -- 10 lines of footnote all saying the same thing! P. 127 n. l. 85 says "see ll. 86-87" -- the next lines. p. 131 n. l. 130 reads obscenity into a place where there is only a faint echo of the obscene (this a larger problem in this edition). p. 141 n. l. 47 and throughout: the footnotes relentlessly remind the reader that Fortune is the play's goddess, it must be every 2 or 3 pages. p. 150 n. l. 39 Motiveless, malignant symbol hunting.

Appleton's substantive comments are restricted to:

Fletcher has no real interest in the friction between East and West. He uses the Indian locale merely for its novelty, and in using this setting he has considerable success. One wishes, indeed, that he had indulged his taste for the oriental even further.

---

Good things: the play is a swashbuckler. If I had a better edition I bet it'd be fun. And it would be a great movie. Despite her failure McManus does a good job identifying the "Fletcherianisms", which was useful and fun to learn. Apparently there are operatic Restoration adaptations; I'm not surprised, but I have no opinion.

[Marnie Becho-Cannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I liked about The Island Princess is we are FINALLY given a female character during this time frame who has her own voice. #FemaleEmpowerment -- am I right?! In the class I've been reading this play for, the readings before now have continually focused on male characters who just walk all over the female characters and brutally control the female identity. Except The Sea Voyage, but even in that play there is still a drastic change when the right guy comes along and all thoughts of independence by the female is shot down.
In this play the main female character is very strong and independent with a dominant leader identity. And even in the end, when she is married off, she doesn't fully lose that controlling and dominating (I use this word A LOT for her btw...) identity. Which is very refreshing for a time frame where the female and their identity is frequently controlled and dominated by man. In the end her husband takes control of her independence, but it's a weird half win for her because the only reason he can control her when others can't is because he acknowledges and accepts her dominating identity. By him showing her that he is okay with that equality and respects her independence, as long as she accepts his as well, the result is her taking a step back and giving part of her identity to him. It's an interesting, yet satisfying ending to the play.
The focus on religion and Christianity is interesting as well, and Fletcher artfully works this devotion of faith into the concept of the island and human identity.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the East Indies, unusual for its period, though only a very vague sense of different cultures - and some of that a touch offensive to modern eyes perhaps. A princess is inundated by suitors, but her brother, the King, has been kidnapped by a local dignitary and is suffering in prison. She announces that she will only marry a man who can rescue her brother - and not simply release him, as the villainous Governor who captured him offers to do. Several suitors have ideas, but only one goes ahead, rents a merchant's house next to the prison, then blows it up in order to break the walls and spring the king.

And we are less than half way! It gets a bit bogged down in the Governor's nefarious plots, mostly in disguise, and some issues about changing religion, but in the end the baddy is unveiled and everyone who deserves to be happy is so.

Read as part of the REP King's Men online reading group in the bleak January of 2021.

[Valuxiea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the first half of this book and kind of hated the second. The main conflict is resolved early, and introduces a much more interesting conflict. However, while one single act explores this interesting conflict, it quickly become more about how amazing the West is and there's a new villainous angle which wears thin quickly. Still, all throughout I kept thinking "I would love to see how this would be performed" and I think the first half would stay well. But the theming and messaging are very dated and white savior esque, and even for plays of the era that would no transfer well to the stage today.

[One Sassy Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve read this play for college, but I will still rate it, so I give it 3.5 stars.

I quite liked this play and I think it’s interesting and very representative of the period that it is set in.

Expansionism and colonialism and those sort of themes. It also is very telling of the stereotypes and religious conflicts that provided tension in the contact between different cultures.

One thing I appreciated was that it had a lot of action and it was fairly dynamic.

[Raidah Ahmed · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐
It was a fun read🖤 I wish I had footnotes in my ebook, to help myself with the 17th century English at few points. But I liked it. Though most of the parts were unrealistic, specially the character of Armusia, I mean come on, who can be this good????? But then again, we don't always read to find realistic things😅over all it was good🖤

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 2 out of 5]

For my Renaissance Drama class. Like most of the plays for this class, the influence of imperialism and colonialism was evident. It was nice to see a female character exercising some autonomy over her narrative for once. Lots of fascinating socio-historical context for the turbulent political scene in England at the time of publishing.

[Kylee Lookabaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting investigation into female sovereignty. she's so pretty everyone is at her will, but her power is that of a dog bone as Margaret Atwood would say. Ultimately just horniness turned godliness, but ultimately outdone bc misogyny and all that. so, so, so much mysogyny. it's interesting the parallels to conversations one can have with a man in the 21st century. worthwhile.

[Eliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

HORRIFIC exploration of islam. transcends the concept of a tragicomedy to become more of an action play (???). quisara should have the last word. in general fun but what my lecturer describes as ‘twisty’ (which i think is v accurate)

[Maryam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unique read insofar as it being a culture study in which to break down discourse of the orient. Being of Indonesian descent this continues to be a read I would like to further breakdown one day.

[Jiang Yuqi · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 star. Read the synopsis first and thought it would be some Christian propaganda weird shits. But the play text is unexpected funny, dramatic and tender. Good characterisation etc. Strange use of side monologues tho. I start to wonder if Fletcher’s plays are always this tender…

[jules · Rating 1 out of 5]

i try to approach every text i study as if it has at least some potential merit, but after reading this play and two academic articles about it, i feel safe concluding that it is just straightforwardly SUPER racist colonial propaganda and i hate it.

[alec · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay racism! Okay boring plot! Ok misogyny and sexism! I did not like this play. Like yes it's important to not forget it because its issues can provoke meaningful conversation, but it is just not good.

[Cami · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars. Reading for my last ever university module- Rethinking Renaissance. The first 1600s text I've been able to read unaided, thank you, Hamnet.

Not really my typical choice, but I'm starting to appreciate the crazy plots in Renaissance plays.

[Spencer Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a genre I'm particularly familiar with. I read this play for school. I liked it compared to some other plays I've read in school.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is what I did today.

[paperbackfruit · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75

[ketelen ✩ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my master's.

I enjoyed this one, I found the dialogues more thought through and compelling than some other plays.

[Marissa]

Required reading