Love's Metamorphosis

Love's Metamorphosis is an Elizabethan era stage play, an allegorical pastoral written by John Lyly. It was the last of his dramas to be printed.

Love's Metamorphosis was entered into the Stationers' Register on November 25, 1600, and was first published in 1601 in a quarto issued by the bookseller William Wood. The title page of the 1601 quarto calls the play a "witty and courtly pastoral," and states that it was first staged by the Children of Paul's, the troupe of child actors that was Lyly's regular company, and "now" (c. 1600) by the Children of the Chapel. "Probably the Paul's boys produced it c. 1589–90, and the Chapel revived it in 1600–1."

Love's Metamorphosis was left out of Six Court Comedies (1632), the first collected edition of Lyly's plays; and there is no evidence that it was ever a "Court comedy," that it was ever acted at Court. The play was not reprinted until F. W. Fairholt's 1858 edition of Lyly's collected works.

Lyly borrowed some elements for his play (the story of Erisichthon) from the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and others from a 1588 prose pamphlet by Robert Greene, known alternatively as Greene's Metamorphosis and Alcida. Most of the play, however, is judged to be original with Lyly.

Set in Arcadia, the play's plot contains two strains: the main plot features Ceres and three of her nymphs, Nisa, Celia, and Niobe; the three foresters or shepherds who love them, Ramis, Montanus, and Silvestris; and Cupid. Cupid punishes the nymphs for their disdain of the shepherds, by transforming them into a rock, a rose, and a bird.

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