A critical edition of John Fletcher's 'The Island Princess' for Arden Early Modern Drama.

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I seek support to complete a critical edition of John Fletcher's 1621 play, 'The Island Princess', and so to make it accessible to a wide range of readers in schools, universities and theatres.The edition's value lies primarily in the importance of Fletcher's play itself. 'The Island Princess' is the first English play to dramatise the East Indies, specifically the islands now called the Moluccas, but known in the seventeenth century by the trade which drove the nations of Europe to compete for their possession - the 'Spice Islands'. The play is also a central part of a canon of early English theatre representing the act and aftermath of European colonialism in the Americas and the 'East'. Fletcher reworks the setting and action of Shakespeare's 'Tempest' (an exotic island, the arrival of Europeans who compete for its control) to create a quite different play, one notable for its self-conscious handling of tragicomic structure and tropes of courtliness, and for its interrogation of the dramatic representation of colonialism and religious difference. Furthermore, this play is a crucial early English theatrical consideration of the 'East' and of Islam. In the current geopolitical climate, there are clear pedagogical advantages to having a modern-spelling version of 'The Island Princess' readily accessible for use in schools and universities. At present, however, the play exists only in an old-spelling edition (Williams, 1982) which, though valuable, keeps present-day readers at arm's length from the text and - in comparison to Shakespeare's much-modernised plays - perpetuates a skewed sense of an archaic, inaccessible Fletcherian dramaturgy. My edition corrects this misunderstanding by providing a fully modernised text, following the rigorous practices of the Arden Shakespeare Series. In addition, readers' engagement with the play is aided by a full critical apparatus. The introduction and historical collation explain the play's textual history. Textual notes record editorial decisions and ambiguities, and the commentary elucidates references, discusses ambiguities, and explains sources and literary, historical, cultural and classical allusions. On a broader level, the commentary further analyses Fletcher's use of language, his discourses of religious faith, conversion, maritime trade and exploration, and European colonialism.Readers will discover a play which speaks to both the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. Early modern religious difference features prominently in recent criticism in the figures of the 'Turk', the martyr or the convert. Much, though, remains to be written about Fletcher's depiction of Islam and the cultural history of the 'Spice Islands'. In rehearsals for his 2002 RSC production of the play, director Gregory Doran used Giles Milton's popular historical novel 'Nathaniel's Nutmeg' to help his cast understand the significance of the 'Spice Islands' for a seventeenth-century writer and audience: a thorough scholarly treatment aimed squarely at the play itself is much over-due. My critical introduction fills this gap, unpacking the history and representation of European encounters with the Moluccas, and those between early modern Christianity and Islam, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. The introduction also deals with the play's performance history; its place in Fletcher's dramatic career and that of his playing company, the King's Men; the play's performance at court before James VI and I in 1621; its manipulation of the language of the Gunpowder Plot; and its dramatisation of the threatening figure of the foreign queen in Quisara, the princess of the title. So, the introduction situates the play in its historicised contexts, and in encouraging readers to their own understanding of the play, this edition will spark interest in the representation of the 'East' on the early modern English stage.