Love's Cure

Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a comedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. First published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, it is the subject of broad dispute and uncertainty among scholars. In the words of Gerald Eades Bentley, "nearly everything about the play is in a state of confusion...."

Early critics assigned the authorship of the play to Beaumont and Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, James Shirley, and even Ben Jonson, in diverse combinations. The most common view is that the play is a work originally by Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, later revised by Massinger. (The play's Prologue mentions Beaumont and Fletcher by name, while the Epilogue refers to a single author, probably meaning the reviser.) Massinger's revision was sweeping, covering most of Acts I, IV, and V. Cyrus Hoy, in his survey of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, produced a detailed breakdown of authorship shares among scenes, portions of scenes, and single speeches. Simplified to the level of whole scenes, Hoy's analysis yields this schema:

The date of the play is equally in dispute. Most scholars favour an estimate of c. 1612–15, though a date as early as 1606 has been proposed. A crucial source for the sole existing text has been identified as La fuerza de la costumbre (1625) by Guillén de Castro y Bellvis — though this could have been the source for Massinger's revision only, which must have been executed after that date. The play's early performance history is unknown; it had passed into the possession of the King's Men by 1641. Massinger, who served as a house dramatist for the King's Men through the mature phase of his career in the 1630s, may have done his revision of the play for a revival by that company, as he did for other Fletcher plays.

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