|
''The Lovers' Progress,'' also known as ''The Wandering Lovers,'' or ''Cleander,'' or ''Lisander and Calista,'' is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. As its multiple titles indicate, the play has a complex history and has been a focus of controversy among scholars and critics. ==Facts and conclusions== The historical facts pertinent to the play, in chronological order, are these: * A play titled ''The Wandering Lovers'' was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 6 December 1623, as a work by John Fletcher. It was acted at Court on 1 January 1634. No play with that title has survived. * A play by Massinger titled ''The Tragedy of Cleander'' was similarly licensed on 7 May 1634, and performed soon after by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. Queen Henrietta Maria saw it there on 13 May that year. (''The Lovers' Progress'' could be called a tragedy from the point of view of the character Cleander, since Cleander dies in Act IV.) * Also in 1634, Sir Humphrey Mildmay noted in his diary that he'd seen a play he called ''Lisander and Calista''. Lisander and Calista are characters in ''The Lovers' Progress.'' * A play titled ''The Lovers' Progress'' was published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. The Prologue and Epilogue to the play indicate that this extant text is a revision by another hand of an original work by Fletcher. * On 9 September 1653, bookseller and publisher Humphrey Moseley entered a play he called ''The Wandering Lovers, or The Painter'' into the Stationers' Register. No work with this combined title and subtitle is known. Moseley had a habit, however, of exploiting the confusion inherent in titles and subtitles to register two separate plays for a single fee.〔E. H. C. Oliphant, ''The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others,'' New Haven, Yale University Press, 1927; pp. 95–6, 251.〕 (For examples, see ''The Bashful Lover,'' ''The Guardian,'' and ''A Very Woman.'') The implication is that Moseley's entry refers to two separate plays, the ''Wandering Lovers'' that was licensed in December 1623, and Massinger's lost play ''The Painter.''〔Oliphant, pp. 96 and 239-40.〕 * ''The Lovers' Progress'' was reprinted in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679; in that collection it is supplied with a cast list from the original production by the King's Men, a list that cites Joseph Taylor, John Lowin, Robert Benfield, John Underwood, Thomas Pollard, Richard Sharpe, George Birch, and John Thompson. This list has been interpreted to indicate a premier production of ''The Lovers' Progress'' in the 1623–24 period, after the death of King's Man Nicholas Tooley in June 1623 but before the death of John Underwood in October 1624 — or around the time of ''The Wandering Lovers.''〔Oliphant, p. 239.〕 The consensus interpretation of this evidence〔Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., ''The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama,'' Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978; pp. 77, 110, 113.〕 is that Fletcher wrote a solo play titled ''The Wandering Lovers,'' which was acted in late 1623 or early 1624 by the King's Men. A decade later, Massinger revised that play into a new version, alternatively known as ''Cleander'' or ''Lisander and Calista.'' This revised version was later published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folios of 1647 and 1679 as ''The Lovers' Progress.'' 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Lovers' Progress」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|