ABSTRACT
Of all the seventeenth-century playwrights who turned to Cervantes for inspiration, it is John Fletcher whose work shows the strongest influence from the Spanish writer. Both in plays for which he was sole author and plays in which he was a collaborator, Fletcher turned time and again to Cervantean prose fiction for plots, characters and situations. In using Cervantean material, Fletcher's reading of the Novelas ejamplares of 1613 was the most fruitful. Rule a Wife Have a Wife (1624), one of Fletcher's most enduring successes as a dramatist, brought together the shortest novella in Cervantes's collection 'El casamiento enganoso' with a plot taken from Salas Barbadillo's El sagaz Estado, marido examinado published in 1620. Fletcher derived imaginative geographies from Cervantine short stories, which he tied in to a literary landscape sufficiently well known to function as a source of humour for at least some of his audience.
