The Chances

The Chances is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher. It was one of Fletcher's great popular successes, frequently performed and reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The playwright chose an unusual and rather modern-seeming approach for the opening of this play: in place of the type of exposition common in English Renaissance plays (see The Tempest, Act I scene ii for a famously verbose example), Fletcher forces the audience to piece together the plot through a series of short action scenes.