Thomaso

Thomaso, or the Wanderer is mid-seventeenth-century stage play, a two-part comedy written by Thomas Killigrew, The work was composed in Madrid, c. 1654. Thomaso is based on Killigrew's personal experiences as a Royalist exile during the era of the Commonwealth, when he was abroad continuously from 1647 to 1660.

Thomaso is now best known as the foundation upon which Aphra Behn constructed her finest play, The Rover, or the Banished Cavaliers (1677).

Though Killigrew drew upon Mateo Alemán's picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache for source material, his Thomaso is generally considered strongly autobiographical; it is no accident that the title is the Spanish version of the playwright's given name. Like his earlier comedy The Parson's Wedding (but unlike the tragicomedies that make of most of his dramatic output), Thomaso features abundant bawdy humour and sexual frankness, to the discomfiture of generations of traditional critics. Killigrew's heroine Angellica speaks out for the emotional freedom of women, and Thomaso is an unblushing libertine.

Critical responses to autobiographical works often confuse the author and the work. Theatrical rival Richard Flecknoe published a book titled The Life of Thomaso the Wanderer (1676) that lambasted Killigrew with a sweeping personal attack. Flecknoe asserted that Killigrew was "born to discredit all the Professions he was of; Traveller, Courtier, Soldier, and Buffoon."

Both parts of Thomaso were first published in Comedies and Tragedies, the collected edition of Killigrew's plays that Henry Herringman issued in 1664. In the collected edition, Thomaso is dedicated to "the fair and kind friends to Prince Palatine Polixander."

The printed text divides the play into a Part 1 and Part 2 of five Acts each. Critics note, however, that Part 1 provides no dramatic denouement at its end, so that the work is, in effect, a single ten-Act work (a characteristic Thomaso shares with the author's other double dramas, Cicilia and Clorinda and Bellamira Her Dream).

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