Article: Cross-dressing, gender, and absolutism in the Beaumont and Fletcher plays.(Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher)(Critical Essay)

The most anxious and confrontational political statement in the 1647 folio of the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher is a blank space. In one of many prefatory poems by many authors, Thomas Peyton expresses his fear that his praise of Fletcher will "raise a discontent / Between the Muses and the ____________." (1) The rhyme, of course, makes clear the missing word is "Parliament"; the royalist affiliations of the folio are an open secret. But as Philip J. Finkelpearl shows, the folio's royalism is in fact at odds with the more complex politics of the plays themselves--plays that Finkelpearl argues are more aligned with the "country" than the "court." (2) Anxiety ...

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