The Wild Goose Chase

The Wild Goose Chase is a late Jacobean stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher, first performed in 1621. It is often classed among Fletcher's most effective and best-constructed plays; Edmund Gosse called it "one of the brightest and most coherent of Fletcher's comedies, a play which it is impossible to read and not be in a good humour." The drama's wit, sparkle, and urbanity anticipated and influenced the Restoration comedy of the later decades of the seventeenth century. The term "wild-goose chase" is first documented when used by Shakespeare in the early 1590s, but appears as a term with which his audience would be familiar, as there is no attempt to define its meaning.

Firm data on the play's date of authorship and early performance history have not survived. "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the year 1621 is a plausible date." "No one has ever questioned Fletcher's sole authorship of this play..."; his distinctive style is continuous throughout. The play was omitted from the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, although it was noted in that volume as a lost work of Fletcher's canon. When a manuscript was later recovered, the play was published in 1652 by Humphrey Moseley, one of the publishers of the 1647 folio. Moseley published the text in a folio format — highly unusual (although not wholly unprecedented) for a single play — precisely because Moseley wanted to give buyers and readers the opportunity to have the new play bound into their copies of the 1647 folio. This was a strategy that Moseley adopted in other cases; the challenging effort to produce collected editions of playwrights' dramas in the chaotic world of English Renaissance theatre sometimes necessitated such approaches. The play was later included in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679.

The Wild Goose Chase is given an elaborate presentation in the 1652 edition. The play is prefaced by five commendatory poems, including a 54-line encomium by Richard Lovelace. The characters in the list of Dramatis personae are given fulsome descriptions; De Gard, for example, is summarized as "A Noble stay'd Gentleman that being newly lighted from his Travels, assists his sister Oriana in her chase of Mirabel the Wild-Goose." A cast list for a King's Men's production of the play is included, with similarly rich and plumby descriptions; the part of Mirabel was "Incomparably Acted by Mr. Joseph Taylor," while the part of Belleur was "Most naturally Acted by Mr. John Lowin," and Pinac "Admirably well Acted by Mr. Thomas Pollard." The full cast list provides these assignments:

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