Giles Fletcher (also known as Giles Fletcher, The Younger) (born ?1586, ?London; died Alderton, Suffolk, 1623) was an English poet chiefly known for his long allegorical poem Christ's Victory and Triumph (1610).
Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he remained in Cambridge after his ordination becoming reader in the Greek language in 1616, and in 1619 left to become rector of Alderton in Suffolk.
His principal work has the full title Christ's Victorie and Triumph, in Heaven, in Earth, over and after Death, and consists of four cantos. The first canto, Christ's Victory in Heaven, represents a dispute in heaven between justice and mercy, using the facts of Christ's life on earth; the second, Christ's Victory on Earth, deals with an allegorical account of Christ's Temptation; the third, Christ's Triumph over Death, covers the Passion; and the fourth, Christ's Triumph after Death, covering the Resurrection and Ascension, ends with an affectionate eulogy of his brother Phineas as Thyrsilis. The meter is an eight-line stanza in the style of Spenser; the first five lines rhyme ababb, and the stanza concludes with a rhyming triplet. Milton borrowed liberally from Christ's Victory and Triumph in Paradise Regained.
Fletcher was the younger son of Giles Fletcher the Elder (minister to Elizabeth I), the brother of the poet Phineas Fletcher, and cousin of the dramatist John Fletcher.
Fletcher was appointed "Remembrancer" to the city of London, and an extraordinary master of requests in 1596, and became treasurer of St Paul's in 1597.
Fletcher was employed in 1610 to negotiate with Denmark on behalf of the "Eastland Merchants," and he died next year, and was buried on the IIth of March in the parish of St Catherine Colman, London.
Fletcher's letters relative to the college dispute with the provost, Dr Roger Goad, are preserved in the Lansdowne MSS.
Fletcher was born in December, 1579 (baptized December 20) in Rye, Sussex, and died of the plague in August 1625 (buried August 29 in St.
Fletcher's early career was marked by one significant failure, of The Faithful Shepherdess, his adaptation of Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, which was performed by the Blackfriars Children in 1608.
Fletcher explains this failure in his prologue to the printed edition of the play; he claimed that the audience had not understood the nature of true (that is, Italian) tragicomedy, expecting instead the kind of artless mixture of humor and action typical of such Elizabethan dramatists as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe.
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