Concerning Fletcher's beginnings in composition the earliest date is suggested by a line of D'Avenant's, written many years after Fletcher's death (1625), "full twenty years he wore the bays."[52] It has been conjectured by some that the elder of our dramatists was in the field as early as 1604, with his comedy of The Woman's Prize or The Tamer Tamed,—a well contrived and witty continuation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew,—in which Maria, a cousin of Shakespeare's Katherine, now deceased, marries the bereaved Petruchio and effectively turns the tables upon him. If acted before 1607, The Woman's Prize was a Paul's Boys' or Queen's Revels' play. But while the upper limit of the play is fixed by the mention of the siege of Ostend, 1604, other references and the literary style point to 1610, even to 1614, as the date of composition or revision.[53]
It is likely that Fletcher was writing plays before 1608, but what we do not know. In that year was acted the pastoral drama of The Faithfull Shepheardesse, a composition entirely his own. This delicate confection of sensual desire, ideal love, translunar chastity, and subacid cynicism regarding "all ideas of chastity whatever,"[54] was an experiment; and a failure upon the stage. It has, as I shall later emphasize, lyric and descriptive charm of surpassing merit, but it lacks, as does most of Fletcher's work, moral depth and emotional reality; and following, as it did, a literary convention in design, it could not avail itself of the skill in dramatic device, and the racy flavour which a little later characterized his Monsieur Thomas. The date of its first performance is determined by the combined authority of the Stationers' Registers (from which we learn that the publishers of the first quarto, undated, but undoubtedly of 1609,[55] were in unassisted partnership only from December 22, 1608 to July 20, 1609), of a statement of Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden that the play was written "ten years" before 1618, and of commendatory verses to the first quarto of 1609, by the young actor-dramatist, Nathaniel Field. If we may guide our calculations by the plague regulations of the time, it must have been acted before July 28, 1608.
On the appearance of the first quarto, in 1609, Jonson sympathizing with "the worthy author," on the ill reception of the pastoral when first performed, says:
I, that am glad thy innocence was their guilt,
for the rabble found not there the "vices, which they look'd for," I—
Do crown thy murder'd poem; which shall rise
A glorified work to time, when fire
Or moths shall eat what all these fools admire.
And Francis Beaumont writing to "my friend, Master John Fletcher" speaks of his "undoubted wit" and "art," and rejoices that, if they should condemn the play now that it is printed,
Your censurers must have the quality
Of reading, which I am afraid is more
Than half your shrewdest judges had before.