Four Plays in One

Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One is a Jacobean era stage play, one of the dramatic works in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. Initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, the play is notable both for its unusual form and for the question of its authorship.

No firm information of the date of Four Plays in One is available in the historical record. On general considerations, scholars have provisionally dated the play to the 1608–13 period. Of the four playlets, the last, The Triumph of Time, is the most masque-like, even to the point of featuring an anti-masque. Since Ben Jonson effectively invented the anti-masque in The Masque of Queens, which was performed and published early in 1609, it seems unlikely that Four Plays in One could be earlier than that.

As its title indicates, Four Plays in One is composed of a quartet of short plays; it takes the form of an Induction that sets up a frame play, followed by four plays-within-a-play, titled The Triumph of Honor, The Triumph of Love, The Triumph of Death, and The Triumph of Time. These dramatic techniques were rare but not unknown in Fletcher's time. The Induction and frame-play structure can be found in several works, including the anonymous The Taming of A Shrew and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, both from the early 1590s, and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle of 1607, among other examples. And the idea of a group of short plays presented as a unit can be traced back to Three Plays in One and Five Plays in One (both 1585) and an earlier Four Plays in One (1591); the two-part play The Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1585) shared the same type of structure; and a quartet titled All's One was acted c. 1606. (Unfortunately almost all of these are lost plays. Only one of the short plays in All's One has survived, as A Yorkshire Tragedy.)

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