The Parliament of Love

The Parliament of Love is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by Philip Massinger. The play was never printed in the seventeenth century, and survived only in a defective manuscript — making it arguably the most problematical work in the Massinger canon.

The Parliament of Love was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 3 November 1624. Herbert's entry indicates that the play was to be performed at the Cockpit Theatre. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 29 June 1660, but no publication ensued.

A manuscript of the play was in the collection belonging to John Warburton that was destroyed by Warburton's cook; that manuscript reportedly attributed the play to William Rowley. Scholars who have studied the authorship question have generally dismissed the Rowley attribution; the play as it exists is widely assigned to Massinger alone. (It is possible, though perhaps unlikely, that there were two plays of the same name by the two different writers.)

The manuscript that did survive, written double-sided on nineteen folio leaves, eventually came into the possession of Edmond Malone, the prominent Shakespeare scholar of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Malone made the manuscript available to William Gifford, who transcribed the text and included it in his collected edition of Massinger's works (1805–13).

Critics have noted relationships between The Parliament of Love and other English Renaissance plays, including Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, the Beaumont and Fletcher play The Scornful Lady, and the Webster/Rowley collaboration A Cure for a Cuckold. Each of these plays exploits the idea of a woman who wants her suitor to kill his best friend in a duel.

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