Monsieur Thomas
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Monsieur Thomas is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher that was first published in 1639.
Scholars date the play to the 1610–16 period. Fletcher's source for the play's plot was the second part of the novel Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé, which was first published in 1610. It is true that, like many other literary works of the era, Astrée circulated in manuscript form prior to its appearance in print; William Drummond of Hawthornden read Part 1 of the novel in manuscript in February 1607,[1] and it is possible that Fletcher similarly saw Part 2 before 1610. Yet there is no direct evidence of this; and the simplest hypothesis is that Fletcher used the 1610 printed text of Astrée, Part 2 as his source. (Fletcher also used D'Urfé's novel as a source for his The Mad Lover and Valentinian, other plays of the same era.) Monsieur Thomas was "probably written by 1616."[2]
Publication
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 22 January 1639, and published later that year in a quarto printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller John Waterson. The 1639 quarto bears a commendatory poem written by Richard Brome, and an Epistle to Fletcher's admirer Charles Cotton, also signed by Brome. The title page of the quarto states that the play was acted at the Blackfriars Theatre, without mentioning the company involved.[3] Both the Register entry and the quarto assign the play's authorship to Fletcher alone, a verdict that is confirmed by the internal evidence of the text.
A second quarto, from the stationer Robert Crofts, is undated but is thought to have appeared c. 1661.
Like other previously-printed Fletcher plays, Monsieur Thomas was omitted from the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, but was included in the second folio of 1679. The play's plot resembles that of another Fletcher play, Wit Without Money; the two dramas share some characters' names (Francisco, Valentine, and Launce).
Revision
Though no sign of a second author or collaborator is present, the play does display the types of internal discontinuity that suggest revision – in this case, Fletcher's revision of his own earlier work. In the play's final scene, a character is addressed as "Francisco, now no more young Callidon" – which makes no sense, since the character in question has been identified as "Frank" throughout the play. The nickname "Wild-oats" is applied to two different characters in two separate scenes; the Dorothea of the first three Acts becomes Dorothy in the final two; other similar problems occur.[4] This suggests that an earlier version of the play existed, in which Francisco was called Callidon, as in D'Urfé's novel. (See Women Pleased for another instance of Fletcher revising his earlier work.)
The hypothesis of revision is supported by other external evidence. The King's Men revived Monsieur Thomas early in the Restoration era; Samuel Pepys saw it on 28 September 1661. The revival probably inspired the drama's re-publication in a Croft's second quarto. In Q2, the play is titled Father's Own Son. A play by this title was in possession of the Cockpit Theatre in 1639. The total implication of these facts is the existence of two versions of the same Fletcher play. Fletcher appears to have written Father's Own Son, perhaps for the Children of the Queen's Revels, c. 1610, or the Lady Elizabeth's Men a few years later; and that play descended to Beeston's Boys at the Cockpit Theatre three decades later, as various early plays did. Fletcher later produced a revised version of his play titled Monsieur Thomas, likely for the King's Men.[5]