The Captain (play)

The Captain is the title of a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. It was originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.

The play was acted at Court by the King's Men during the Christmas season of 1612–13 (the season that saw the lavish celebration of the wedding of King James I's daughter Princess Elizabeth with Frederick V, Elector Palatine); the company performed the play again at Court in May 1613. The partial cast list published with the play in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 mentions Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, William Ostler, and Alexander Cooke. Since Ostler joined the King's Men almost certainly in 1609, the play is judged to have originated in the 1609–12 period.

The play was revived in the Restoration era, but does not seem to have been particularly popular, or to have been staged often.

The consensus of scholarship agrees on the authorship of the play. Unlike some other Beaumont and Fletcher plays such as A King and No King, The Maid's Tragedy, and The Woman Hater, in which Beaumont is the dominant partner, The Captain shows Fletcher's hand predominating. Cyrus Hoy, in his survey of authorship problems in the canon of Fletcher and his collaborators, produced this breakdown between the two playwrights' respective shares:

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