The Woman Hater

The Woman Hater is an early Jacobean era stage play, a comedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. One of the earliest of their collaborations, it was the first of their plays to appear in print, in 1607.

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1607, and was published later that year in quarto by the bookseller John Hodgets. A second imprint of the first quarto was issued in the same year. The title page offers no assignment of authorship. A few critics have suggested a 1605 date for the play, but most favor a date of 1606.

A second quarto was issued in 1648 by Humphrey Moseley, with an attribution to Fletcher. The second imprint of this second quarto, issued in 1649, assigned the play to both Beaumont and Fletcher and added a subtitle to the play, calling it The Woman Hater, or The Hungry Courtier.

Like other previously-published plays, The Woman Hater was omitted from the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. The play was later included in the second Beaumont/Fletcher folio in 1679.

The song "Come, Sleep" from Act III has been anthologized under the title "Sleep" and often set to music by later composers.

The title page of the first quarto states that the play was acted by the Children of Paul's, a company of child actors that is thought to have ceased activity after the summer of 1606.

The consensus of critical judgement accepts the play as a Beaumont and Fletcher collaboration in which Beaumont's is the dominant hand. Cyrus Hoy, in his survey of authorship problems in the canon of Fletcher and his collaborators, provided this breakdown of the two authors' respective shares:

...
Wikipedia