The Fair Maid of the Inn

The Fair Maid of the Inn is an early 17th-century stage play, a comedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. It was originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. Uncertainties of the play's date, authorship, and sources make it one of the most widely disputed works in English Renaissance drama.

The Fair Maid of the Inn was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 22 January 1626 (new style). In his records, Herbert specifically attributes the play to Fletcher, who had died in August 1625. The play is thought to have been acted by the King's Men, the company Fletcher served as house playwright — though firm data on its performance history is lacking.

Inconsistencies in the play's internal evidence, notably the lack of Fletcher's highly distinctive pattern of textual preferences (ye for you, 'em for them, etc.) through much of the play, made early scholars realize that the play was, like the majority of the works in Fletcher's canon, a collaboration. Individual critics argued in favor of a range of potential collaborators, including Philip Massinger, John Ford, John Webster, and William Rowley. These arguments depend upon literary parallels and the distinctive textual preferences of the different authors; for example, Ford's pattern of unusual contractional forms (like t'ee for to ye,) is present in some scenes but absent from others.

The play appears to have been a late work by Fletcher, perhaps left unfinished at his death, that was later completed by others and perhaps revised during the two decades between 1625 and 1647. Cyrus Hoy, in his sweeping evaluation of authorship questions in Fletcher's canon, argued that the hands of Massinger, Fletcher, Ford, and Webster are all detectable in the extant text. He assigned shares this way:

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