Bonduca

by John Fletcher

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Genres: Plays, Drama

111 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 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

[BJ Lillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bonduca is a fascinating play, but I wish Bonduca herself had more scenes. A pagan queen who led a tribe of Britons in revolt against their Roman occupiers in 60 AD, burning Londinium to the ground, Bonduca and her two daughters (whose parts are so small they aren’t even given names) steal every scene they’re in. But Fletcher insists on spending at least thrice the time with various tiresome men. Instead of giving Bonduca the staring role she deserves—if only on the grounds that he’s written her and her daughters to be the most interesting—Fletcher substitutes Caratach, a British chieftain imported from a few decades earlier in history.

Caratach is played as noble to the point of foolishness and spectacularly misogynistic (“home and spin, woman, spin, go spin!” he shouts after Bonduca—his queen, remember—at a critical moment). And yet, though Caratach seems to be the play’s hero, I don’t think he’s quite meant to be taken seriously. He has a whiff of parody about him. And by the end, a whiff of treason, too. But then, treason is always a question of who has the right—or power—to rule. And Bonduca is deeply ambivalent about both the invading Romans and rebelling Natives. If, as literary scholar Claire Jowitt suggests, the play is an allegory of England’s fledgling colony in Virginia, it’s a dizzyingly complex one.

Early modern tragedy and comedy were defined by their endings. In comedy, marriage mends the world; in tragedy, it is death that makes the world right. On the last page of the tragicomedy Bonduca, the world is left unraveled.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've only read Bonduca once (and Fletcher normally gets better on repeated readings) but this does not look like peak Fletcher, only really getting going around Act Three, and then having some stunningly good scenes (the daughters torturing the boyfriends, Penyus vacillating about whether to kill himself, Caratach trying to protect his young nephew Hengo from the news that they've lost the war and one or both of them is shortly going to die) in the last hour or so.

Bonduca herself (a weird spelling of Boudicca) is a bit of a nothing part, apparently cut down when one of the King's Men's apprentices (Richard Robinson, who had juts played the Duchess of Malfi) graduated to young men parts, and another left under mysterious circs (Walter Haynes, deciding to retrain as a carpenter), and the company missing good actors for women.

I read in the Waller edition, which had some of the swears (including some really quite innocuous ones) deleted, which was quite cute.

[Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Bonduca" is Early Modern for "Boudicca/Boadicea", in this case with added Caractacus, to show the mere women what a Real Hero is. The storyline is loosely based on the Iceni revolt of the 60s CE, with added subplots, killings, suicides et al. Quite entertaining, though Fletcher seemed to be addicted to very long deathbed speeches at this stage in his career.

Read as part of the Shakespeare Institute "Extra Mile" online readathon in the weird Covid-19 autumn of 2020.