''The Spanish Curate'' is a late
Jacobean era stage play, a
comedy
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...
written by
John Fletcher and
Philip Massinger
Philip Massinger (1583 – 17 March 1640) was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including ''A New Way to Pay Old Debts'', ''The City Madam'', and '' The Roman Actor'', are noted for their satire and realism, and their politi ...
. It premiered on the stage in
1622
Events
January–May
* January 7 – The Holy Roman Empire and Transylvania sign the Peace of Nikolsburg.
* February 8 – King James I of England dissolves the English Parliament.
* March 12 – Ignatius of Loyola, F ...
, and was first published in
1647.
Date and source
The play was licensed for production by 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. ...
, on 24 October 1622. The dramatists' source for their plot, the Spanish novel ''Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard'' by
Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, was first published in English, in a translation by
Leonard Digges, earlier in the same year.
Performance and publication
''The Spanish Curate'' was acted by the
King's Men, and was performed by that troupe at Court on
St. Stephen's Day
Saint Stephen's Day, also called the Feast of Saint Stephen, is a Christian saint's day to commemorate Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr or protomartyr, celebrated on 26 December in Western Christianity and 27 December in Eastern Chr ...
, 26 December 1622. The partial cast list of the premiere production, published in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of
1679, includes
Joseph Taylor,
William Ecclestone
William Ecclestone or EgglestoneDNB ( fl. 1610 – 1623) was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a member of Shakespeare's company the King's Men.
Life
Nothing is known with certainty about Ecclestone's early life. There was an Eccles ...
,
John Lowin
John Lowin (baptized 9 December 1576 – buried – 24 August 1653) was an English actor.
Early life
Born in St Giles-without-Cripplegate, London, Lowin was the son of a tanner. Like Robert Armin, he was apprenticed to a goldsmith. While ...
,
Thomas Pollard
Thomas Pollard (1597 – 1649×1655) was an actor in the King's Men – a prominent comedian in the acting troupe of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage.
Thomas Pollard was christened on 11 December 1597 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. H ...
,
Nicholas Tooley
Nicholas Tooley (c. 1583 – June 1623) was a Renaissance actor in the King's Men, the acting company of William Shakespeare.
Recent research has shown that Tooley was born in late 1582 or early 1583; his birth name was not Tooley but Wilkin ...
, and
Robert Benfield
Robert Benfield (died July 1649) was a seventeenth-century actor, noted for his longtime membership in the King's Men in the years and decades after William Shakespeare's retirement and death.
Nothing is known of Benfield's early life. He was mo ...
.
The play received its initial publication in the
first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. It was likely set into type from a prompt-book manuscript that was the work of
Ralph Crane
Ralph Crane ('' fl.'' 1615 – 1630) was a professional scrivener or scribe in early seventeenth-century London. His close connection with some of the First Folio texts of the plays of William Shakespeare has led to his being called "Shakespe ...
, the scribe who, in the same era, was preparing texts for the
First Folio
''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'' is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is cons ...
of
Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
plays.
Authorship
Given the highly distinctive profile of Fletcher's literary style, critics have found it relatively easy to distinguish between the respective shares of the two authors.
Cyrus Hoy
Cyrus Henry Hoy (February 26, 1926 – April 27, 2010) was an American literary scholar of the English Renaissance stage who taught at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, and was the John B. Trevor Professor of English (emerit ...
, in his major study of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, arrived at this differentiation, which largely agrees with the work of previous critics:
:Massinger – Act I; Act III, scene 3; Act IV, 1, 2, and 4; Act V, 1 and 3;
:Fletcher – Act II; Act III, scenes 1, 2, and 4; Act IV, 3 and 5–7; Act V, 2.
Massinger took primary responsibility for the main plot, while Fletcher handled the subplot.
In the Restoration
The play was revived during the
Restoration
Restoration is the act of restoring something to its original state and may refer to:
* Conservation and restoration of cultural heritage
** Audio restoration
** Film restoration
** Image restoration
** Textile restoration
* Restoration ecology
...
era, and was popular.
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys (; 23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament and is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade. Pepys had no mariti ...
saw it performed on 16 March 1661 by the
King's Company
The King's Company was one of two enterprises granted the rights to mount theatrical productions in London, after the London theatre closure had been lifted at the start of the English Restoration. It existed from 1660 to 1682, when it merged wit ...
, and again on 17 May 1669; productions continued into the 1670s and 1680s. Adapted forms of the play were staged at
Drury Lane
Drury Lane is a street on the eastern boundary of the Covent Garden area of London, running between Aldwych and High Holborn. The northern part is in the borough of Camden and the southern part in the City of Westminster.
Notable landmarks ...
in 1749, and at
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London, on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit-and-vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist si ...
in 1783 and as late as 1840.
Synopsis
Set in Spain, the play deals with a conflict between two brothers over their inheritance. Don Henrique is older than Don Jamie by a year; under the system of
primogeniture
Primogeniture ( ) is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn legitimate child to inherit the parent's entire or main estate in preference to shared inheritance among all or some children, any illegitimate child or any collateral relativ ...
, Henrique is the heir to their father's estate. The late father's will gives Jamie a small income, but Henrique treats his younger brother with rudeness and condescension, breeding a hostile relationship between the two. The problem is that Henrique and his wife, Violante, have been married for a dozen years but have no children—leaving Jamie as Henrique's heir.
Jamie is a member of a circle of aristocratic friends, which includes a boy named Ascanio. The boy is the son of poor parents, but is admired for his grace and nobility of character. Among Jamie's friends is Leandro, a lusty young man who is interested in the beautiful Amaranta. She is the wife of the rapacious lawyer Bartolus; the attorney keeps his wife closely watched, and Leandro has developed a scheme to seduce her. He masquerades as a wealthy law student come to take instruction from Bartolus.
[The Leandro subplot in ''The Spanish Curate'' resembles ]William Rowley
William Rowley (c. 1585 – February 1626) was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. His date of birth is estimated to have been c. 1585; he was buried on 11 February 1626 in ...
's subplot in '' The Changeling,'' a play that also dates from 1622. The go-between in this is Lopez, the local curate and the title character.
Don Henrique, angered over Jamie's status as his heir, makes a radical move to change the situation: he files a legal suit (Bartolus is his lawyer) to have the boy Ascanio declared his heir. Henrique testifies that before he married Violante, he was engaged or "precontracted" to Ascanio's mother Jacinta, and that the boy is his natural son. (Like other plays of the era, ''The Spanish Curate'' exploits the legal and ethical ambiguity of the precontract, which in some interpretations was like a demi-marriage...but not quite.) After the child's birth, Henrique had second thoughts about the social gap between himself and Jacinta, and got the precontract cancelled. Jacinta can only affirm the basic truth of Henrique's testimony; and on that basis, Henrique wins his suit. Ascanio is now his legal heir, and Jamie is out.
Violante, however, is outraged that Henrique has exposed this shameful affair and effectively thrown her infertility in her face. She bullies her husband into reversing course and driving Ascanio out of his house; Henrique offers the boy financial support, but the child returns to Jacinta and his pretended father Octavio. Violante is not satisfied with this, however; she reveals herself to be a truly ruthless person when she solicits Jamie to murder both Henrique and Ascanio and so come into his family fortune immediately.
Leandro works his way into the trust of Bartolus, and tries to seduce Amaranta; she is tempted by him, but stands on her virtue and fidelity. When Bartolus finally becomes suspicious, Amaranta can show that she and Leandro have been in church, and not having a sexual assignation.
The plot comes to a head in the final act: Violante meets Jamie and his pretended accomplices for the double murder—only to have her plot exposed. Henrique is shocked into penitence by the exposure of his wife's murder plot—and reveals that he and Violante are not actually, fully legally, married after all. Bartolus too is cowed by his involvement in the matter, and vows to change his ways. Jamie has no problem accepting Ascanio as his nephew, now that their family relations are better ordered. Massinger ends the play with a couplet extolling the middle way in marital relations, between too much pliability in a husband (like Henrique) and too little (like Bartolus)—much like the concluding couplet in Massinger's later play ''
The Picture.''
Notes
References
* Bowers, Fredson, general editor. ''The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon.'' Vol. 10, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
* Garrett, Michael. ''Massinger: The Critical Heritage.'' London, Routledge, 1991.
* Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. ''The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama.'' Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
* Oliphant, E. H. C. ''The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others.'' New Haven, Yale University Press, 1927.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spanish Curate, The
English Renaissance plays
1622 plays
Plays by John Fletcher (playwright)
Plays by Philip Massinger
Plays by John Fletcher and Massinger