The Faithful Friends

The Faithful Friends is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy associated with the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. Never printed in its own century, the play is one of the most disputed works in English Renaissance drama.

The play's date of authorship is unknown; scholars, judging on internal features, have conjectured dates ranging from 1604 to 1626. Possible allusions to the December 1613 marriage of Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset have been read as indicating a date c. 1614 — though another allusion to Philip III of Spain and the Duke of Lerma seems to favor 1618–21 or later.

The Faithful Friends was entered into the Stationers' Register on 29 June 1660 by bookseller Humphrey Moseley. Moseley did not publish the play, though, prior to his death in the next year, 1661. The play remained in manuscript — now known as Dyce MS. 10 — until it was first published in Henry William Weber's 1812 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. "The MS. is in various hands, one of which has made corrections. Some of these seem on internal evidence to have been due to suggestions of the censor, others to playhouse exigencies." The main hand in the MS. is thought to be that of Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the King's Men. Knight may have purged oaths from the text, though he also left gaps in his manuscript, rather than guess at the intended meaning, where he couldn't read the "foul papers" or authorial draft from which he worked.

In the Stationers' Register entry, Moseley called The Faithful Friends a Beaumont and Fletcher work. Critics who have considered the play's authorship have started with the attribution to Beaumont and Fletcher, but have also postulated other potential writers, including Philip Massinger, Nathan Field, James Shirley, and Robert Daborne. Commentators have also proposed hypotheses of revision, even multiple revision; E.H.C. Oliphant thought that the play was written by Beaumont and Fletcher, revised by Field c. 1610-11, and revised again by Massinger c. 1613–14. None of these arguments has won acceptance from a consensus of scholars; the play's perceived low dramatic quality appears to stand as an argument against the presence of major talents.

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