The Spanish Curate

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The Spanish Curate is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. It premiered on the stage in 1622, and was first published in 1647.

Comedy genre of dramatic works intended to be humorous

In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, stand-up comedy, or any other medium of entertainment. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old." A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.

John Fletcher (playwright) English Jacobean playwright

John Fletcher (1579–1625) was a Jacobean playwright. Following William Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, he was among the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day; during his lifetime and in the early Restoration, his fame rivalled Shakespeare's. Though his reputation has been far eclipsed since, Fletcher remains an important transitional figure between the Elizabethan popular tradition and the popular drama of the Restoration.

Philip Massinger 16th/17th-century English playwright

Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.

Contents

Date and source

The play was licensed for production by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 24 October 1622. The dramatists' source for their plot, the Spanish novel Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, was first published in English, in a translation by Leonard Digges, earlier in the same year. [1]

Sir Henry Herbert (1595–1673) was Master of the Revels to both King Charles I and King Charles II.

The Master of the Revels was the holder of a position within the English, and later the British, royal household, heading the "Revels Office" or "Office of the Revels". The Master of the Revels was an executive officer under the Lord Chamberlain. Originally he was responsible for overseeing royal festivities, known as revels, and he later also became responsible for stage censorship, until this function was transferred to the Lord Chamberlain in 1624. However, Henry Herbert, the deputy Master of the Revels and later the Master, continued to perform the function on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain until the English Civil War in 1642, when stage plays were prohibited. The office continued almost until the end of the 18th century, although with rather reduced status.

Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses was a Spanish novelist.

Performance and publication

The Spanish Curate was acted by the King's Men, and was performed by that troupe at Court on St. Stephen's Day, 26 December 1622. The partial cast list of the premiere production, published in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, includes Joseph Taylor, William Ecclestone, John Lowin, Thomas Pollard, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Benfield.

The King's Men was the acting company to which William Shakespeare (1564–1616) belonged for most of his career. Formerly known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they became The King's Men in 1603 when King James I ascended the throne and became the company's patron.

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1679.

William Ecclestone or Egglestone was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a member of Shakespeare's company the King's Men.

The play received its initial publication in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. It was likely set into type from a prompt-book manuscript that was the work of Ralph Crane, the scribe who, in the same era, was preparing texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. [2]

The Beaumont and Fletcher folios were two large folio collections of the stage plays of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The first was issued in 1647, and the second in 1679. The two collections were important in preserving many works of English Renaissance drama.

Ralph Crane was a professional scrivener or scribe in early seventeenth-century London. His close connection with some of the First Folio texts of the plays of William Shakespeare has led to his being called "Shakespeare's first editor."

<i>First Folio</i> 1623 collection of William Shakespeares plays

Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio. It is considered one of the most influential books ever published in the English language.

Authorship

Given the highly distinctive profile of Fletcher's literary style, critics have found it relatively easy to distinguish between the respective shares of the two authors. Cyrus Hoy, in his major study of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, arrived at this differentiation, which largely agrees with the work of previous critics: [3]

Cyrus Henry Hoy was an American literary scholar of the English Renaissance stage who taught at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, and was the John B. Trevor Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He wrote and published on a wide range of topics in English literature, though he is best known for his works on William Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other figures in English Renaissance theatre.

Massinger — Act I; Act III, scene 3; Act IV, 1, 2, and 4; Act V, 1 and 3;
Fletcher — Act II; Act III, scenes 1, 2, and 4; Act IV, 3 and 5–7; Act V, 2.

Massinger took primary responsibility for the main plot, while Fletcher handled the subplot.

In the Restoration

The play was revived during the Restoration era, and was popular. Samuel Pepys saw it performed on 16 March 1661 by the King's Company, and again on 17 May 1669; productions continued into the 1670s and 1680s. [4] Adapted forms of the play were staged at Drury Lane in 1749, and at Covent Garden in 1783 and as late as 1840.

Samuel Pepys English naval administrator and member of parliament

Samuel Pepys was an administrator of the navy of England and Member of Parliament who is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. Pepys had no maritime experience, but he rose to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II through patronage, hard work, and his talent for administration. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalisation of the Royal Navy.

The King's Company was one of two enterprises granted the rights to mount theatrical productions in London at the start of the English Restoration. It existed from 1660 to 1682.

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane West End theatre building in Covent Garden, London, England

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, commonly known as Drury Lane, is a West End theatre and Grade I listed building in Covent Garden, London, England. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The building is the most recent in a line of four theatres which were built at the same location, the earliest of which dated back to 1663, making it the oldest theatre site in London still in use. According to the author Peter Thomson, for its first two centuries, Drury Lane could "reasonably have claimed to be London's leading theatre". For most of that time, it was one of a handful of patent theatres, granted monopoly rights to the production of "legitimate" drama in London.

Synopsis

Set in Spain, the play deals with a conflict between two brothers over their inheritance. Don Henrique is older than Don Jamie by a year; under the system of primogeniture, Henrique is the heir to their father's estate. The late father's will gives Jamie a small income, but Henrique treats his younger brother with rudeness and condescension, breeding a hostile relationship between the two. The problem is that Henrique and his wife, Violante, have been married for a dozen years but have no children—leaving Jamie as Henrique's heir.

Jamie is a member of a circle of aristocratic friends, which includes a boy named Ascanio. The boy is the son of poor parents, but is admired for his grace and nobility of character. Among Jamie's friends is Leandro, a lusty young man who is interested in the beautiful Amaranta. She is the wife of the rapacious lawyer Bartolus; the attorney keeps his wife closely watched, and Leandro has developed a scheme to seduce her. He masquerades as a wealthy law student come to take instruction from Bartolus. [5] The go-between in this is Lopez, the local curate and the title character.

Don Henrique, angered over Jamie's status as his heir, makes a radical move to change the situation: he files a legal suit (Bartolus is his lawyer) to have the boy Ascanio declared his heir. Henrique testifies that before he married Violante, he was engaged or "precontracted" to Ascanio's mother Jacinta, and that the boy is his natural son. (Like other plays of the era, The Spanish Curate exploits the legal and ethical ambiguity of the precontract, which in some interpretations was like a demi-marriage...but not quite.) After the child's birth, Henrique had second thoughts about the social gap between himself and Jacinta, and got the precontract cancelled. Jacinta can only affirm the basic truth of Henrique's testimony; and on that basis, Henrique wins his suit. Ascanio is now his legal heir, and Jamie is out.

Violante, however, is outraged that Henrique has exposed this shameful affair and effectively thrown her infertility in her face. She bullies her husband into reversing course and driving Ascanio out of his house; Henrique offers the boy financial support, but the child returns to Jacinta and his pretended father Octavio. Violante is not satisfied with this, however; she reveals herself to be a truly ruthless person when she solicits Jamie to murder both Henrique and Ascanio and so come into his family fortune immediately.

Leandro works his way into the trust of Bartolus, and tries to seduce Amaranta; she is tempted by him, but stands on her virtue and fidelity. When Bartolus finally becomes suspicious, Amaranta can show that she and Leandro have been in church, and not having a sexual assignation.

The plot comes to a head in the final act: Violante meets Jamie and his pretended accomplices for the double murder—only to have her plot exposed. Henrique is shocked into penitence by the exposure of his wife's murder plot—and reveals that he and Violante are not actually, fully legally, married after all. Bartolus too is cowed by his involvement in the matter, and vows to change his ways. Jamie has no problem accepting Ascanio as his nephew, now that their family relations are better ordered. Massinger ends the play with a couplet extolling the middle way in marital relations, between too much pliability in a husband (like Henrique) and too little (like Bartolus)—much like the concluding couplet in Massinger's later play The Picture.

Notes

  1. ↑ Robert Kean Turner, in Bowers, p. 295.
  2. ↑ Robert Kean Turner, in Bowers, pp. 295–6.
  3. ↑ Logan and Smith, pp. 76, 108.
  4. ↑ Garrett, p. 11.
  5. ↑ The Leandro subplot in The Spanish Curate resembles William Rowley's subplot in The Changeling, a play that also dates from 1622.

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