Philaster (play)

Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding is an early Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. One of the duo's earliest successes, the play helped to establish the trend for tragicomedy that was a powerful influence in early Stuart-era drama.

While the date of the play's origin cannot be fixed with certainty, Philaster must pre-date 1611, based on its mention by John Davies in his Scourge of Folly. (Davies's book was entered into the Stationers' Register on 8 October 1610, and was printed soon after.) Scholars generally assign the play to the 1608–10 interval, with "the middle to late summer of 1610" as perhaps the most likely specific period. The play was acted by the King's Men at both the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, and was performed at court twice in the winter of 1612–13.

The play was first published in 1620 by the bookseller Thomas Walkley, in a seriously defective text; Walkley issued a second quarto two years later (1622), which he termed "The second impression, corrected and amended." A third quarto was printed in 1628 by Richard Hawkins, followed by subsequent editions in 1634, 1639, 1652, and 1687; there was also an undated quarto that may date to 1663. Scholars have debated the cause of the differences between Q1 and the subsequent editions; the modern critical consensus favours censorship as the most plausible explanation. The villain in the original version of the play (represented by Q2 and later editions) was a Spaniard, the favourite stage villain in English drama at least since the Spanish Armada. King James I, however, favoured a pacifistic foreign policy and improved relations with Spain, so that the play needed to be revised for Court performance, primarily in the opening (I,i) and closing scenes (V,iii-iv, yielding the Q1 version. (Andrew Gurr's modern edition prints the Q1 alterations in an appendix.)

...
Wikipedia