The Maid's Tragedy

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The Maid's Tragedy is a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. It was written ca. 1608-1611, and published in 1619.

Scholars and critics generally agree that the play is mostly the work of Beaumont; Cyrus Hoy, in his extensive survey of authorship problems in the Beaumont/Fletcher canon, assigns only four scenes to Fletcher (II,ii; IV,i; and V,i and ii), though one of those is the climax of the play (IV,i).

Critics have varied widely, even wildly, in their responses to the play. Many have recognized the play's power, but have complained about play's extremity and artificiality. (People who dislike aspects of Beaumont and Fletcher's work will find those dislikes amply represented, even crystalized, in this play.) John Glassner once wrote that to display "the insipidity of the plot, its execrable motivation or the want of it, and the tastelessness of many of the lines one would have to reprint the play."^[1]

Andrew Gurr, one of the play's modern editors, notes that the play "has that anomaly amongst Elizabethan tragedies, an original plot." Other critics have noted that the play introduces romance into the standard revenge tragedy, and that the play, even in its artificiality, has relevance to the disputes about authority that characterized relations between kings and Parliament in the decades leading up to the English Civil War.^[2]

The play was published nine times in the seventeenth century; the first quarto of 1619, and the second of 1622, are usually synthesized to create modern editions, since Q2 contains eighty lines not included in Q1, plus a couple of hundred changes and corrections on Q1.

In the King's Men's production of the play, the part of Melantius was reportedly acted by John Lowin.

[edit] Notes

^ Logan and Smith, The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, p. 25.
^ Logan and Smith, pp. 26-7.

[edit] References

Cyrus Hoy, "The Shares of Fletcher and His Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Studies in Bibliography, VIII-XV, 1956-62.
Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.