The Poor Man's Comfort is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy by Robert Daborne — one of his two extant plays.
Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can variously describe by either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious play with a happy ending.
Robert Daborne was an English dramatist of the Jacobean era.
The play's date is uncertain, though it is generally assigned to the 1610–18 era. It was not published until several decades after it was written.
The Poor Man's Comfort was entered into the Stationers' Register on 20 June 1655, and published in quarto later that year by the booksellers Robert Pollard and John Sweeting. Both the Register entry and the title page of the quarto refer to Daborne as a "Master of Arts."
The Stationers’ Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England. The Register itself allowed publishers to document their right to produce a particular printed work, and constituted an early form of copyright law. The Company's charter gave it the right to seize illicit editions and bar the publication of unlicensed books.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1655.
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from folio, to quarto (smaller) and octavo. Historically, these terms referred to the format of the book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto historically was a book printed on a sheet of paper folded twice to produce four leaves, each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions.
In the original text, a stage direction at line 186 reads "Enter 2 Lords, Sands, Ellis." The names refer not to the characters of the play but the actors who played the roles — a feature that occurs on rare occasions in the texts of English Renaissance drama. (See, for example, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt .) The two actors may have been Gregory Sanderson and Ellis Worth, who played with Queen Anne's Men. [1]
Ellis Worth, or Woorth, was a noted English actor in the Jacobean and Caroline eras. He was a leading member of two important companies, Queen Anne's Men and Prince Charles's Men.
Queen Anne's Men was a playing company, or troupe of actors, in Jacobean era London. In their own era they were known colloquially as the Queen's Men — as were Queen Elizabeth's Men and Queen Henrietta's Men, in theirs.
The title page of the quarto states that the play was performed at the Cockpit Theatre, which was occupied by the Queen Anne's company from 1617 to 1619. If the title page describes the original production, the most likely single year for the play might be narrowed to 1617, since Daborne is thought to have stopped writing for the stage by 1618.
The Cockpit was a theatre in London, operating from 1616 to around 1665. It was the first theatre to be located near Drury Lane. After damage in 1617, it was named The Phoenix.
The drama was revived early in the Restoration era, in 1661 — which was its last known stage production.
A manuscript of the work is preserved in MS. Egerton 1994, an important collection of play manuscripts now in the British Library.
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the largest national library in the world by number of items catalogued. It is estimated to contain 150–200 million+ items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Daborne based his play on the seventh story in William Warner's Pan His Syrinx (1584, 1597). [2] Warner's story collection, his "sevenfold history," also served as Thomas Middleton's source for The Bloody Banquet . The title of the play is proverbial: "Virtue is the friend of life, the soul of health, the poor man's comfort and the rich man's wealth" is one among several versions.
The play tells the story of Gisbert, an old shepherd whose daughter, Urania, has been deserted by her husband, a nobleman from Thessaly. Gisbert fails to receive justice from a local court, and leaves his pastoral life to take a journey through a corrupt society. His story involves lovestruck shepherds, shipwrecked princesses, corrupt and venal lawyers, and violent whores. He finally attains justice from his king. Critics have praised the play for keeping Gisbert and Urania as shepherds till the end — not revealing them to be lost royalty or aristocrats in hiding, as is usual in the pastoral form. For Felix Schelling, the play "is quite enough to raise Daborne, hack-writer though he was, to a respected place among the dramatists of his day." [3]
Philip Massinger and Nathan Field my have borrowed from Daborne's play when they wrote their collaboration The Fatal Dowry . Gisbert's confrontation with his daughter Urania and her husband Lucius appears to have suggested the dramatic scene in the later play in which Rochfort confronts his daughter Beaumelle and her husband Charalois. [4]
The play was edited by Kenneth Palmer for the Malone Society in 1954. A more recent edition of the play was published in 2005. [5]
The Merry Devil of Edmonton is an Elizabethan-era stage play; a comedy about a magician, Peter Fabell, nicknamed the Merry Devil. It was at one point attributed to William Shakespeare, but is now considered part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet is a late Elizabethan stage play by Thomas Dekker, one of the plays involved in the Poetomachia or War of the Theatres.
The Maid's Metamorphosis is a late Elizabethan stage play, a pastoral first published in 1600. The play, "a comedy of considerable merit," was published anonymously, and its authorship has been a long-standing point of dispute among scholars.
Foul papers are an author's working drafts. The term is most often used in the study of the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists of English Renaissance drama. Once the composition of a play was finished, a transcript or "fair copy" of the foul papers was prepared, by the author or by a scribe.
Cupid's Revenge is a Jacobean tragedy written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. It was a popular success that influenced subsequent works by other authors.
The Arcadia is James Shirley's dramatization of the prose romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney — one expression of the enormous influence that Sidney's work exercised during the 17th century. Shirley's stage version was first published in 1640.
The Brothers is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by James Shirley. First published in 1653, The Brothers has sometimes been hailed as one of Shirley's best plays, though it has also been a focus of significant confusion and scholarly debate.
An Humorous Day's Mirth is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy by George Chapman, first acted in 1597 and published in 1599.
The Careless Shepherdess is a Jacobean era stage play, a pastoral tragicomedy generally attributed to Thomas Goffe. Its 1656 publication is noteworthy for the introduction of the first general catalogue of the dramas of English Renaissance theatre ever attempted.
The Maid's Revenge is an early Caroline era stage the play, the earliest extant tragedy by James Shirley. It was first published in 1639.
The Politician is a Caroline era stage play, a tragedy by written James Shirley, and first published in 1655.
The Faithful Shepherdess is a Jacobean era stage play, the work that inaugurated the playwriting career of John Fletcher. Though the initial production was a failure with its audience, the printed text that followed proved significant, in that it contained Fletcher's influential definition of tragicomedy. Like many of Fletcher's later tragicomedies, The Faithful Shepherdess deals with the darker side of sexuality and sexual jealousy, albeit within a comic framework.
The Fatal Dowry is a late Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy written by Philip Massinger and Nathan Field, and first published in 1632. It represents a significant aspect of Field's very limited dramatic output.
Thomas Creede was a printer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, rated as "one of the best of his time." Based in London, he conducted his business under the sign of the Catherine Wheel in Thames Street from 1593 to 1600, and under the sign of the Eagle and Child in the Old Exchange from 1600 to 1617. Creede is best known for printing editions of works in English Renaissance drama, especially for ten editions of six Shakespearean plays and three works in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
The Woman in the Moon is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written by John Lyly. Its unique status in that playwright's dramatic canon – it is the only play Lyly wrote in blank verse rather than prose — has presented scholars and critics with a range of questions and problems.
Love's Metamorphosis is an Elizabethan era stage play, an allegorical pastoral written by John Lyly. It was the last of his dramas to be printed.
A Looking Glass for London and England is an Elizabethan era stage play, a collaboration between Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene. Recounting the Biblical story of Jonah and the fall of Nineveh, the play is a noteworthy example of the survival of the Medieval morality play style of drama in the period of English Renaissance theatre.
All Fools is an early Jacobean era stage play, a comedy by George Chapman that was first published in 1605. The play has often been considered Chapman's highest achievement in comedy: "not only Chapman's most flawless, perfectly balanced play," but "also his most human and large-minded." "Chapman certainly wrote no comedy in which an ingenious and well-managed plot combined so harmoniously with personages so distinctly conceived and so cleverly and divertingly executed."
MS. Egerton 1994 is a manuscript collection of English Renaissance plays, now in the Egerton Collection of the British Library. Probably prepared by the actor William Cartwright around 1642, and later presented by him to Dulwich College, the collection contains unique copies of several Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline dramas, including significant works like Edmund Ironside and Thomas of Woodstock.