Domenico Lovascio: John Fletcher’s Rome: Questioning the Classics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

• William David Green

John Fletcher is one of the most important figures in the study of English Renaissance drama. Author or co-author of over fifty surviving plays, Fletcher was one half of the Beaumont and Fletcher writing partnership, was Shakespeare’s final regular collaborator, and succeeded Shakespeare as principal dramatist of the King’s Men after the older playwright’s death in 1616. Quite unlike Shakespeare’s in 2016, however, the quatercentenary of Fletcher’s death in 2025 is unlikely to bring with it a major celebration of Fletcher’s dramatic artistry. In John Fletcher’s Rome: Questioning the Classics, Domenico Lovascio provides a valuable counterpoint to Fletcher’s relative popular obscurity, offering a timely and illuminating investigation into Fletcher’s work. By focusing on Fletcher’s ‘Roman plays’ – specifically Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One, and The Prophetess – Lovascio also offers readers a detailed examination of Fletcher’s mastery of a learned dramatic subgenre that, as he duly notes, has long been more traditionally associated with such plays as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesr and Antony and Cleopatra, or Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and Sejanus.