''Love's Pilgrimage'' is a Jacobean era stage play, a

tragicomedy Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragedy, tragic and comedy, comic forms. Most often seen in drama, dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the ov ...

by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The play is unusual in their canon, in that its opening scene contains material from

Ben Jonson Benjamin Jonson ( 11 June 1572 – ) was an English playwright, poet and actor. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satire, satirical ...

's 1629 comedy '' The New Inn.''

The problem

The common materials are ''Love's Pilgrimage,'' Act I, scene i, lines 25-63 and 330–411, and ''The New Inn,'' II,v,48-73 and III,i,57-93 and 130–68. Early researchers like F. G. Fleay and Robert Boyle thought that the Jonsonian material in ''Love's Pilgrimage'' was authorial – that Jonson was one of the creators of the play. Modern critics favor the view that the common material, original with Jonson, was interpolated into ''Love's Pilgrimage'' during a revision, perhaps for a new production in 1635. (The office book of Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, records a payment of £1 received for renewing the license of the play on 16 September 1635.) It is possible that the revision was done by Jonson himself; but far more probably, it was the work of an anonymous reviser. The latter interpretation was first advanced by Gerard Langbaine in 1691, who claimed that Jonson's work was "stolen" for the play.

Authorship

Apart from the Jonsonian interpolations, the play shows internal evidence of being a fairly typical Beaumont and Fletcher collaboration. Cyrus Hoy, in his survey of authorship questions in the canon of Fletcher and his collaborators, produced this division of shares between the two dramatists: ::Beaumont — Act I, scene 1; Act IV; Act V; ::Fletcher — Act I, scene 2; Act II, Act III. The play is thought to have originally been written c. 1615–16, and therefore must have been one of the last plays Beaumont worked on before his 1616 death. Its early performance history is unknown; it was acted by the King's Men for King Charles I and Queen

Henrietta Maria Henrietta Maria of France (French language, French: ''Henriette Marie''; 25 November 1609 – 10 September 1669) was List of English royal consorts, Queen of England, List of Scottish royal consorts, Scotland and Ireland from her marriage to K ...

at Hampton Court Palace in December 1636.

Sources

The plot of the play derives from ''Las dos Doncellas,'' one of the ''Novelas ejemplares'' of

Miguel de Cervantes Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra ( ; ; 29 September 1547 (assumed) – 22 April 1616 Old Style and New Style dates, NS) was a Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelist ...

, published in Spain in 1613 and in a French translation in 1615. (Fletcher relied on another of the ''Novelas'' for his solo play '' The Chances.'') It is thought that the playwrights depended upon the French translation.Baldwin Maxwell, ''Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger,'' Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1939; pp. 107–8. ''Love's Pilgrimage'' was first published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.

References

{{Beaumont and Fletcher canon English Renaissance plays 1615 plays 1616 plays Plays by Francis Beaumont Plays by John Fletcher (playwright) Plays by Beaumont and Fletcher Plays based on works by Miguel de Cervantes Tragicomedy plays Charles I of England Henrietta Maria of France