The Loyal Subject
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The Loyal Subject is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy by John Fletcher that was originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.
The play was acted by the King's Men; the cast list added to the text in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 cites Richard Burbage, Nathan Field, Henry Condell, John Underwood, John Lowin, Nicholas Tooley, Richard Sharpe, and William Ecclestone – which indicates a production in the 1616–19 era, between 1616, when Field joined the company, and Burbage's death in March 1619.
Revival
The company revived the play in 1633, and performed it at the Palace of Whitehall on the night of Tuesday, 10 December of that year, before King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register in 1633, which normally preceded a publication; but the play remained out of print until 1647.
Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, left a note in his office book that is unusually informative on this play:
- "The Kings players sent me an old booke of Fletchers called The Loyal Subject, formerly allowed by Sir George Bucke, 16 Novem. 1618, which according to their desire and agreement I did peruse and with some reservations allowed of, the 23 of Nov. 1633, for which they sent mee according to their promise £1.0.0."
Sir George Buck was Herbert's predecessor as Master of the Revels in the 1610–22 period. Critics have debated whether Herbert would have re-licensed an old play unless it had been changed or revised in the interim; some scholars have supposed that Fletcher's play must have been revised for the 1633 revival – though no clear evidence of revision is found in the text. The play's Prologue and Epilogue are thought to date from the 1633 production, and are perhaps the work of Fletcher's longtime collaborator Philip Massinger.[1]
Sources
Scholars have devoted significant attention to the question of Fletcher's sources for his play. Fletcher modeled his play on an earlier work by Thomas Heywood titled The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, first published in 1637 but written two or three decades earlier. He also used a play by Lope de Vega called El gran duque de Moscovia, written c. 1613.[2] An extensive study of the relationship between the plays of Fletcher and Lope de Vega and their background in Russian history has been published by Ervin Brody.[3] The setting may also have been inspired by his uncle Giles Fletcher the elder's treatise Of the Russe Commonwealth, published 1591 after the author's diplomatic work in Russia.[4]