The Night Walker
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The Night Walker, or The Little Thief is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and later revised by his younger contemporary James Shirley. It was first published in 1640.
The play enters the historical record on 11 May 1633, when it was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels. In his records, Herbert specifically describes it as "a play of Fletcher's, corrected by Shirley...." The revision is readily datable, since Shirley includes a reference to William Prynne's diatribe against the theatre, Histriomastix, which was published in 1632. Shirley even gave an inadvertent guide to the extent of his revision: he changed the name of Fletcher's protagonist from Wildgoose to Wildbrain – but neglected to make the change consistently in the portions of the play he didn't revise.
Inconsistencies in the text also reveal the revision. The most blatant example occurs in the final scene, when the Lady calls out "Home!...Home, child!" – though the scene takes place in her own house. Cyrus Hoy, in his study of authorship problems in the canon of Fletcher and his collaborators, argues for this breakdown in the play:
- Fletcher – Act I, scenes 7 and 8; Act II, scene 1;
- Fletcher and Shirley – Act I, scenes 1–6; Act II, scenes 2–4; Acts III, IV, and V.[1]
Fletcher's original, which might have been titled The Little Thief, perhaps dates to 1611. Fletcher alludes to the sound of "Tom o' Lincoln," the great bell of Lincoln's Cathedral, as being like a scolding woman, as he does in his The Woman's Prize. The bell was new in 1611, and The Woman's Prize dates from that year. By implication, so did The Little Thief. Both plays also reveal the influence of Ben Jonson's Epicene (1609).[2]
Performance and publication
Shirley's revision was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre in 1634. The play was revived early in the Restoration era; Samuel Pepys saw it on 2 April 1661.
The Night Walker was published in quarto in 1640, printed by Thomas Cotes for the booksellers Andrew Crooke and William Cooke; the title page assigns it to Fletcher alone, and does the dedication. Andrew Crooke issued a second quarto edition in 1661. The play was included in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679.
A production of "The Night Walker", directed by Emily Bassett, was performed by Mary Baldwin University's Shakespeare & Performance Graduate Program in February, 2025.