The Custom of the Country

by John Fletcher

Once famed for its obscenity, this vigorous and enjoyable play traces the fortunes of two brothers shipwrecked in a foreign land. By turns poignant and risqué, sentimental and satiraical, its beautifully crafted plot embodies the collaborative art of its authors. It was given a staged reading in 1998 as part of the Globe Education's on-going program to record with professional casts all non-Shakespearean plays of the English Renaissance.

Genres: Plays, Drama

Paperback

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

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This play is silly and fun. And there's a male brothel where the dudes just get utterly exhausted by the ladies!

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Custom of the Country has a large number of Fletcher tropes: it is a tragicomedy, so you have absolutely no idea where it's going to go next, and it goes to some truly funky places.

Starting with a couple (and his horny brother) doing a runner to avoid Droit de Seigneur from lecherous Clodio, they arrive in Lisbon, get into an accidental murder in the street (like you do), from which one brother is attemptingly seduced by the luscious Hippolita (whom he fancies like the billy-o, but he has sworn to stay chaste to Zenocia) (a great, sexy trope from Fletcher, the master of the early modern impossible sex scene), while the other brother gets employed by a male brothel and forced to sexual service sixteen women a day, until his bones are completely empty.

Meanwhile, the guy he murdered is brought back to life, but decides he's going to change his life, while brothel-brother realises he's in love with the mum of the man he murdered (like you do) and there's some high-pitched drama, and....

I mean, this is a really good Fletcher (and Massinger? according to Wikipedia): we need to get more Fletcher onstage.