Aglaura (play)

Aglaura is a late Caroline era stage play, written by Sir John Suckling. Several aspects of the play have led critics to treat it as a key development and a marker of the final decadent phase of English Renaissance drama.

Suckling's earliest play, Aglaura was staged in 1637 by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre — not because they thought it was a good play or a potential popular hit, but because Suckling subsidized its production, reportedly spending between £300 and £400. The acting company was paid with the production's lavish costumes (lace cuffs and ruffs made of cloth of silver and cloth of gold), a form of hand-me-down compensation that the King's men accepted only in the 1630s, at a time when the company's fortunes were in relative decline. (When the same company staged a revival of John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess in 1634, they used the sumptuous costumes that had been created for Queen Henrietta Maria's masque of that year, The Shepherd's Paradise; they were then allowed to keep the costumes.)

A 1638 production of Aglaura at the English royal court borrowed Inigo Jones's scenery from Luminalia, the Queen's masque of that year. Again, the hand-me-down nature of the proceedings is a noteworthy departure from the practices of the 1620s and earlier.

Unusually, Suckling wrote the play as a tragedy, but added an alternative happy ending, so creating an optional tragicomedy. Suckling changed the ending for the April 1638 performance before the King, Charles I, and Queen Henrietta Maria.

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