Monsieur Thomas

Monsieur Thomas is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher that was first published in 1639.

Scholars date the play to the 1610–16 period. Fletcher's source for the play's plot was the second part of the novel Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé, which was first published in 1610. It is true that, like many other literary works of the era, Astrée circulated in manuscript form prior to its appearance in print; William Drummond of Hawthornden read Part 1 of the novel in manuscript in February 1607, and it is possible that Fletcher similarly saw Part 2 before 1610. Yet there is no direct evidence of this; and the simplest hypothesis is that Fletcher used the 1610 printed text of Astrée, Part 2 as his source. (Fletcher also used D'Urfé's novel as a source for his The Mad Lover and Valentinian, other plays of the same era.) Monsieur Thomas was "probably written by 1616."

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 22 January 1639, and published later that year in a quarto printed by Thomas Harper for the bookseller John Waterson. The 1639 quarto bears a commedatory poem written by Richard Brome, and an Epistle to Fletcher's admirer Charles Cotton, also signed by Brome. The title page of the quarto states that the play was acted at the Blackfriars Theatre, without mentioning the company involved. Both the Register entry and the quarto assign the play's authorship to Fletcher alone, a verdict that is confirmed by the internal evidence of the text.

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