The Maid in the Mill

The Maid in the Mill is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and William Rowley. It was initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.

The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 29 August 1623. The play was performed by the King's Men at the Globe Theatre. The second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 provides a cast list for the original production that mentions Joseph Taylor, John Thompson, John Lowin, Robert Benfield, John Underwood, Thomas Pollard, and Rowley himself, who had joined the King's Men in 1623 for the final two years of his acting career, and who in this play filled the comic role of Bustopha. The play was acted at Court in 1628, though with a different cast, since both Rowley and Underwood had died in the intervening years.

In his records, Herbert assigns the authorship of the work to Fletcher and Rowley; and scholars have long recognized that the play's internal evidence confirms that attribution.Cyrus Hoy, in his landmark study of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, provided a breakdown of shares that essentially agreed with the judgements of earlier commentators:

The two playwrights took their main plot from Leonard Digges's translation of Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses — a source that Fletcher had exploited for The Spanish Curate in the previous year. They took the Florimel subplot from The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter; and they may also have been influenced by Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Fletcher, working with Philip Massinger, would compose a play with a very similar plot a few years later, in The Fair Maid of the Inn (1626).

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