Women Pleased

Women Pleased is a late Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy by John Fletcher that was originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.

The play's date is uncertain; it is usually assigned to the 1619–23 period by scholars. It was acted by the King's Men; the cast list added to the play in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 cites Joseph Taylor, Nicholas Tooley, John Lowin, William Ecclestone, John Underwood, Richard Sharpe, Robert Benfield, and Thomas Holcombe – the same cast list as for The Little French Lawyer and The Custom of the Country, two other Fletcherian plays of the same era. The inclusion of Taylor dates the play after the March 1619 death of Richard Burbage.

As he often did, Fletcher depended on a Spanish source for the plot of his play; in this case, Grisel y Mirabella (c. 1495) by Juan de Flores supplied part of the main plot. He also appears to have been influenced by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale from The Canterbury Tales for the riddle which Silvio is set to solve by the Duchess within a year's time as well as Belvidere's disguise as an old hag and demand to marry him as boon for providing him with the answer to the riddle. Fletcher drew material for the subplot from three tales in the Decameron of Boccaccio, another dependable resource. Scholars attribute the play to Fletcher alone, since his characteristic pattern of stylistic and textual preferences is continuous throughout the text; but some critics favor the view that the extant text is a revision by Fletcher of an earlier play of his own authorship. See his Monsieur Thomas for a comparable case of Fletcher revising himself. He also borrowed from himself: Women Pleased shares a plot point (the heroine dressing up as an old woman to influence the plot) that also occurs in The Pilgrim, in a way that suggests Women Pleased is the earlier work.

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