The Lovesick Court

The Lovesick Court, or the Ambitious Politique is a Caroline-era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Richard Brome, and first published in 1659.

The Lovesick Court was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 August 1640 by the bookseller Andrew Crooke, along with five other plays by Brome. Yet the play was not published until it was included in the 1659 Brome collection Five New Plays. In that volume, each of the plays has a separate title page; and three of those title pages, including the one for The Lovesick Court, are dated 1658 instead of 1659. Three of the plays have their own separate pagination, suggesting the possibility that they were intended for individual publication. The Lovesick Court, however, is not one of these three; its pagination is continuous with The English Moor, the previous play in the collection.

Of Brome's sixteen extant plays (including The Late Lancashire Witches, his collaboration with Thomas Heywood), none are tragedies and only three are tragicomedies (the other two are The Queen's Exchange and The Queen and Concubine). The Lovesick Court is a "Fletcherian" tragicomedy; it resembles the tragicomedies of John Fletcher, perhaps most notably A King and No King, along with other plays in the same class, like Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen, and James Shirley's The Coronation and The Arcadia. The latter play accentuates the point that the influence of Sir Philip Sidney's The Arcadia can generally be observed in this type of Fletcherian drama.

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