The Fair Maid of the West

The Fair Maid of the West, or a Girl Worth Gold, Parts 1 and 2 is a work of English Renaissance drama, a two-part play written by Thomas Heywood that was first published in 1631.

The dates of authorship of the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West are not known with certainty. Part 1 involves historical events of 1596 and 1597, and refers to Queen Elizabeth I in terms suggesting she was still alive at the time of its authorship; scholars therefore date Part 1 to the 1597–1603 period. Significant differences in tone between the two parts suggest that they were written separately, perhaps widely separately, in time: "What slight evidence there is...indicates that Heywood wrote Part II some twenty-five or thirty years after Part I."

The drama was entered into the Stationers' Register on 16 June 1631; later that year, both parts were published together, in a quarto by the bookseller Richard Royston. The volume may have been typeset in the shop of Miles Flesher, a printer who worked repeatedly for Royston in the early 1630s. The quarto bears Heywood's dedications of the two parts to two friends: Part 1 to John Othow and Part 2 to Thomas Hammon, both lawyers of Gray's Inn.

The 1631 quarto was the sole edition of the work prior to the 19th century.

The earliest production of Part 1 is unrecorded; but the play was revived c. 1630 by Queen Henrietta's Men. The plays are known to have been acted at Court in the winter of 1630–31. In one reasonable hypothesis, Heywood wrote Part 2 at about the time Part 1 was being revived, or c. 1630.

It appears that in preparation for the Court performance, a manuscript fair copy of both parts of the play was prepared, and that this fair copy later served as the copy text for the compositors who set the 1631 printed text into type.

Dramaturgically, The Fair Maid of the West is normally classed as a comedy, rather than any of the other standard classifications; yet it is a comedy of a specific type. Part 1, at least, draws upon what were then current events or contemporary history, and belongs to a group of similar Elizabethan plays; George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (c. 1588–89) and the anonymous Captain Thomas Stukeley (1596) are two prominent examples of the type, though there are many others in what was a popular subgenre of the era. One modern editor has described the play as "adventure drama," characterized by "simple, straightforward emotions, black and white morality, absolute poetic justice, and, above all, violent rapidity of action."

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