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

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

Francis Beaumont Francis Beaumont ( ; 1584 – 6 March 1616) was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher. Beaumont's life Beaumont was the son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace Dieu, near Thr ...

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

Ben Jonson Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for t ...

'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 The Master of the Revels was the holder of a position within the English, and later the British, royal household, heading the "Revels Office" or "Office of the Revels". The Master of the Revels was an executive officer under the Lord Chamberlain ...

, 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 Events January–March * January 6 – King William III of England, who rules Scotland and Ireland as well as being the Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, departs from Margate to tend to the affairs of the Netherlands. * January 14 – A ...

, 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 Beaumont and Fletcher were the English dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, who collaborated in their writing during the reign of James I (1603–25). They became known as a team early in their association, so much so that their joi ...

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 Charles I may refer to: Kings and emperors * Charlemagne (742–814), numbered Charles I in the lists of Holy Roman Emperors and French kings * Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), also king of Albania, Jerusalem, Naples and Sicily * Charles I of ...

and Queen

Henrietta Maria Henrietta Maria (french: link=no, Henriette Marie; 25 November 1609 – 10 September 1669) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland from her marriage to King Charles I on 13 June 1625 until Charles was executed on 30 January 1649. She was ...

Hampton Court Palace Hampton Court Palace is a Grade I listed royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, southwest and upstream of central London on the River Thames. The building of the palace began in 1514 for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the chie ...

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 NS) was an Early Modern Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. He is best kno ...

, published in Spain in

1613 Events January–June * January 11 – Workers in a sandpit in the Dauphiné region of France discover the skeleton of what is alleged to be a 30-foot tall man (the remains, it is supposed, of the giant Teutobochus, a legendar ...

and in a French translation in 1615. (Fletcher relied on another of the ''Novelas'' for his solo play ''

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 play's Prologue assigns the ...

.'') 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 The Beaumont and Fletcher folios are two large folio collections of the stage plays of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The first was issued in 1647, and the second in 1679. The two collections were important in preserving many works of En ...

of 1647.

References

{{Beaumont and Fletcher canon English Renaissance plays 1610s plays Plays by Francis Beaumont Plays by John Fletcher (playwright) Plays by Beaumont and Fletcher Plays based on works by Miguel de Cervantes