Pathomachia

Pathomachia, or the Battle of Affections, also known as Love's Lodestone, is an early 17th-century play, first printed in 1630. It is an allegory that presents a range of problems to scholars of the drama of the Jacobean and Caroline eras.

The play was licensed for publication by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 16 April 1630 and was published later that year, in a quarto printed by the brothers Richard and Thomas Cotes for the bookseller Francis Constable. Constable dedicated the work to Henry Carey, 4th Baron Hunsdon and 1st Earl of Dover. In his dedication, Constable repeats the statement of the title page, that the author is deceased.

The full title of the play in the 1630 quarto is Pathomachia or the Battle of Affections, Shadowed by a Feigned Siege of the City of Pathopolis. The title page also states that the play was "Written some years since" by the late author and is now issued by one of his friends. The play's running title, which appears at the top of the pages of text, is Love's Lodestone. A University play by that name was staged c. 1616; the implication is that the Pathomachia of 1630 is the same work as the Love's Lodestone of c. 1616.

The play also exists in two manuscript texts; one is part of MS. Harl. 6869 Art. 1 in the collection of the British Library, and the other is MS. Eng. poet. e. 5 in the collection in the Bodleian Library.Pathomachia shares the Harleian MS. with another allegorical play, titled The Fallacies, or the Troubles of Hermenia, which is dated 1631 and ascribed to Richard Zouch. The Harleian MS. text of Pathomachia contains variant readings and some material absent from the printed text, but is missing its last seventeen or so lines.

There is no external evidence of the author's identity. One 19th-century commentator, misreading Francis Kirkman's 1661 play list, assigned the play to Anthony Brewer, an attribution for which there is no sound justification. An attempt to assign the play to John Marston has been rejected by the scholarly consensus. Attempts to assign the play to the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More are problematical chronologically, since More was born in 1614. (He might have written Pathomachia in his mid-teens, but he couldn't have written Love's Lodestone at the age of two.) The blind academic Ambrose Fisher (died 1617) has also been suggested as a candidate.

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