The Queen of Corinth

The Queen of Corinth is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. It was initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.

Scholars have dated the play to the 1616–18 period, based in part on an allusion in the play to "the Ulyssean traveller that sent home his image riding upon elephants to the great Mogul" (Act III, scene i). This is a reference to Thomas Coryat's Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul, which was published in London in 1616. The play, therefore, could not pre-date that year. The casual and somewhat deprecating tone of the allusion — "his wit is so huge, nought but an elephant could carry him" — has been interpreted to mean that it also dates prior to Coryat's death in Surat in 1617, or prior to news of his death reaching England, in 1618 at the latest.

This dating is confirmed by the cast list added to the play in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, which cites Richard Burbage, Nathan Field, Henry Condell, John Lowin, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, Thomas Pollard, and Thomas Holcombe. The list indicates that the play was produced by the King's Men in the 1616–19 period, between Field's joining the troupe in the earlier year and Burbage's death in the later.

Since Francis Beaumont had retired from dramatic authorship in 1613 and had died in 1616, he could not have contributed to the authorship of The Queen of Corinth. One piece of external evidence states that Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger were collaborating c. 1616: an entry in the Stationers' Register dated 8 April 1654 assigns the lost play The Jeweller of Amsterdam to the three writers. The murder that that play dramatized occurred in 1616, and it is likely that the play was written soon after the event to capitalize on current public interest.

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