The Lovers' Progress

The Lovers' Progress, also known as The Wandering Lovers, or Cleander, or Lisander and Calista, is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. As its multiple titles indicate, the play has a complex history and has been a focus of controversy among scholars and critics.

The historical facts pertinent to the play, in chronological order, are these:

The consensus interpretation of this evidence is that Fletcher wrote a solo play titled The Wandering Lovers, which was acted in late 1623 or early 1624 by the King's Men. A decade later, Massinger revised that play into a new version, alternatively known as Cleander or Lisander and Calista. This revised version was later published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folios of 1647 and 1679 as The Lovers' Progress.

Given the major stylistic and textual differences in the habits of Fletcher and Massinger, scholars have been able to distinguish the two men's hands in the existing version. Cyrus Hoy, in his wide-ranging study of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, argued for this division:

The primary source for the plot of The Lovers' Progress was the Histoire trage-comique de nostre temps, sous les noms de Lysandre et de Caliste, a popular prose romance by Vital d'Audiguier that was first published in 1615 and often reprinted. The first English translation appeared in 1617.

The text of The Lovers' Progress in the 1647 folio was one of those set into print by Susan Islip — a rare instance of a woman printer in that era. Widows sometimes continued the businesses of their late husbands; among booksellers, Alice Moseley, widow of Humphrey Moseley, and Elizabeth Allde, widow of Edward Allde, are two among a number of possible examples. For printer/widows like Islip, Ellen Cotes, widow of Richard Cotes and sister-in law of Thomas Cotes, can be cited, along with Alice Warren and Sarah Griffin.

The play is set in France. Its plot depends on an unusual narrative structure: a standard romantic triangle, tripled. There are three female characters, and each enjoys (or suffers) the romantic attentions of two men. Two, Calista and Olinda, are gentlewomen. Calista has already made a choice between her two suitors, and is married to Cleander; but her other suitor, Cleander's close friend Lisander, is still in love with her, and she still loves him. Calista's friend Olinda, however, cannot choose between Lidian (who is Calista's brother) and Clarange. (Lidian and Clarange are also close friends.) In despair, Olinda sends both her suitors away, and states that she will marry the man who returns to her last. The two men, applying their own culture's standard of judgement to this odd stricture, decide to settle the matter quickly — with a duel. The survivor will marry Olinda.

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