A Very Woman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Very Woman, or The Prince of Tarent is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger and John Fletcher. It was first published in 1655, fifteen and thirty years after the deaths of its authors.
Scholars generally agree that the existing text of the play is a Massinger revision of an earlier work, though they disagree as to whether that earlier version was a Fletcher/Massinger collaboration or a work by Fletcher alone. (Cyrus Hoy favoured the latter view.) So the original must have predated Fletcher's death in 1625; lacking hard data on this point, scholars have estimated a date of authorship in the 1619–22 period. The play entered the historical record when it was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 6 June 1634; it is not improbable that Massinger's revision of the text shortly preceded that licensing. No firm information on the play's early stage history has survived; it is more likely than not that the play was acted by the King's Men, the company that performed most of the solo works of Fletcher and Massinger and their collaborations as well.
Early in the Restoration era, A Very Woman received a revival production in Oxford (1661).[1]
Publication
A Very Woman first appeared in print when it was included in an octavo volume titled Three New Plays, issued by Humphrey Moseley in 1655; the volume also contained Massinger's plays The Guardian and The Bashful Lover. (This 1655 volume appears to unite the final three surviving works of Massinger's dramatic career.) When Moseley entered the play into the Stationers' Register on 9 September 1653, he gave it a different subtitle, calling it A Very Woman, or The Woman's Plot. This alternative subtitle is found nowhere else, and there is no "woman's plot" in the play; but a play with the title The Woman's Plot was acted at Court on 5 November 1621.[2] Moseley employed the possibilities for confusion inherent in play titles and subtitles to register two plays for a single fee – which appears to be what he did in this case.[3] (For other examples of Moseley's trick, see The Bashful Lover, The Guardian, and The Lovers' Progress.)
Authorship
The original edition attributed the play to Massinger alone. Nineteenth-century scholars devoted much attention to the study of the canon of Fletcher and his collaborators, including the plays of Fletcher and Massinger. In the context of that general study, A Very Woman attracted attention; F. G. Fleay was the first commentator to recognise Fletcher's presence. Given Fletcher's highly distinctive textual and stylistic preferences, scholars have found it easy to distinguish between the two authors in the extant text. Their respective shares break down this way:
- Massinger — Act I; Act II, scenes 1, 2, and 3a (to Duke's exit); Act IV, 2; Act V;
- Fletcher — Act II, scene 3b (from Duke's exit); Act III; Act IV, 1 and 3.
Massinger's friend Sir Aston Cockayne borrowed heavily from A Very Woman for his own play The Obstinate Lady (published 1658).[4]
The uncertainties of the play's origin led early critics astray in one particular. The name of the character Cardenes led some to wonder if A Very Woman had some connection with the lost play Cardenio, attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare.[5] Modern critics dismiss any connection between the two.
Speculation has also linked A Very Woman with the lost play The Spanish Viceroy.
Sources
The dramatists' primary source for their story was El amante liberal (1613) by Miguel de Cervantes; Massinger's revision was influenced by Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.[6] The work was also influenced by The Mirror of Knighthood.[7]