Holland's Leaguer

Holland's Leaguer is a Caroline Era stage play, a comedy written by Shackerley Marmion. It premiered onstage in 1631 and was first published in 1632. The play was a popular success and a scandal in its own day — scandalous because it dealt with a well-known London brothel.

In its literal sense, the term "leaguer" refers to a military encampment; Shakespeare uses the word in this original sense in All's Well That Ends Well, Act III, scene 6, line 26: "the leaguer of the adversaries." By the 1630s the word had become a slang term for a whorehouse, as here in this play, or in the 1640 play The Knave in Grain.

Holland's Leaguer was acted in December 1631 by Prince Charles's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre. It ran for six straight performances – which was highly unusual in the repertory system in which playing companies then operated, with a different play every day. The greatest theatrical success of the era, A Game at Chess, ran for nine straight performances in 1624; The Late Lancashire Witches ran for three straight days in 1634.

(It has been suggested, however, that the six-day run of this play may have been due in part to the thinness of the Princes's Men's repertory, as well as to the genuine popularity of the play.)

The same company would stage Marmion's next play, A Fine Companion, a year or so after his first.

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 26 January 1632, and was published in quarto later that year by the bookseller John Grove. The title page of the first edition states that the drama was acted by "the high and mighty Prince Charles's Men." This was ironic: the company was newly established, under the formal patronage of the then Prince Charles, later King Charles II — who was all of eighteen months old at the time. (An earlier version of the troupe had operated in the 1612–25 period under the same name, when it referred to the baby Charles's father, Charles I.)

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