The Fleer

Part of the Globe Quartos series, co-published with Shakespeare's Globe marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Edward Sharpham's The Fleer is a bawdy, satiric and theatrically allusive comedy that was extremely popular with seventeenth-century readers. It is considered an early response to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Marston's The Malcontent. The Florentine duke Antifront is deposed by a usurper and escapes to London, where he disguises himself as a misanthrope called Fleer. When not jeering at Jacobean society, Antifront busies himself with preventing his dissolute daughters from committing murder and with steering them into marriage. Meanwhile, two sisters find that disguising themselves as boys to win their sweethearts is not as simple as other dramatists might have you believe... The Fleer was first performed in 1606. This edition in the Globe Quartos series is edited by Lucy Munro.