A Cure for a Cuckold

A Cure for a Cuckold is a late Jacobean era stage play. It is a comedy written by John Webster and William Rowley. The play was first published in 1661, though it is understood to have been composed some four decades earlier.

Hard-data on the play's actual date of origin is lacking. Scholars have generally assigned the play's creation to the 1624–25 period. The King's Men is generally assumed to be the first theatrical troupe to have performed it.

The play was later adapted by Joseph Harris into The City Bride (1696).

In 1661 a quarto was printed by Thomas Johnson for the bookseller Francis Kirkman. Its title page assigns the play to Webster and Rowley. This quarto was the only edition of the play's publication printed before the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century scholars and critics (notably F. G. Fleay) disputed the attribution to Webster and Rowley but following the lead of Edmund Gosse most twentieth-century commentators have accepted the original authorial assignment, with Webster as the author of the serious main plot, and Rowley responsible for the comic subplot. Gosse, who admired the serious main plot, actually proposed splitting the play in two; and surprisingly enough this was later done — Webster's portion was published as a short play titled Love's Graduate in 1884. Gosse wasn't alone in his attitude; Algernon Charles Swinburne called the play "a mixture of coarsely realistic farce and gracefully romantic comedy."

In a 1927 study, Henry Gray posited Thomas Heywood as a third author. Gray argued that the play is mainly Rowley's work, with three scenes by Webster and four by Heywood. Webster may have revised the whole, in Gray's view. Gray's hypothesis has not found widespread support, though F. L. Lucas allowed a possibility that Heywood may have revised an original Webster/Rowley collaboration. Webster appears to have handled the play's main plot, and Rowley (unsurprisingly for a professional clown) the comic subplot.

A Cure for a Cuckold shares a complex inter-relationship with a set of other plays of its era, including Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Scornful Lady, Fletcher and Massinger's The Little French Lawyer, and Massinger's The Parliament of Love. Since A Cure for a Cuckold is later than most, perhaps all, of these plays, it likely represents the cumulative influence of a skein of dramatic development winding through them, centring on the plot of a woman who wants her lover to duel with and kill his best friend.

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