The Coronation (play)

The Coronation is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by James Shirley, and notable for the tug-of-war of authorship claims in which it was involved in the middle seventeenth century.

The play was licensed by the Master of the Revels on 6 February 1635, and was probably written in the previous year or so. In May 1636, however, the London theatres shut down for one of their longest and most severe closures due to bubonic plague. Shirley left for his four years in Dublin (1636–40), and in the next year or so the playing company for which he had been serving as house dramatist, Queen Henrietta's Men, sold off their stock of Shirley's plays to the London booksellers. The result was that a group of Shirley's plays appeared in print in the late 1630s. Most of these were published under Shirley's name; only one, The Coronation, was misattributed to another dramatist. The first edition of The Coronation was issued in 1640 in a quarto printed by Thomas Cotes for the booksellers Andrew Crooke and William Cooke. And the authorship of the play was assigned to John Fletcher.

The source of the misattribution is not certain, though the acting company has borne the brunt of the suspicion; they are thought to have sold a spurious play called Look to the Lady as Shirley's at about the same time. When he was back in London, Shirley attempted to reclaim his lost offspring; The Coronation was listed in "A Catalogue of the Authors Poems already Printed," printed in Six New Plays in 1653, as "Falsely ascribed to Jo. Fletcher." Shirley's reclamation effort was not entirely successful, however; The Coronation was included in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679.

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