The Sea Voyage
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The Sea Voyage is a late Jacobean comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The play is notable for its imitation of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
The Sea Voyage was licensed for performance by George Buc, the Master of the Revels, on June 22, 1622. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on Sept. 4, 1646, and was published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. The Sea Voyage was clearly acted by the King's Men, since the folio provides a partial cast list of the original production, which includes Joseph Taylor, William Ecclestone, Nicholas Tooley, John Lowin, and John Underwood, all members of the troupe.
The shares of the two collaborators, Massinger and Fletcher, are relatively easy to distinguish, due to Fletcher's distinctive pattern of linguistic usages. Cyrus Hoy observed that Fletcher's hand dominates in Acts I and IV, as Massinger's does in Acts II, III, and V. There is some crossover in the portions, though scholars are divided as to whether the play was revised into its final form by Fletcher (as Hoy thought), or by Massinger.[1]
The play begins with a storm, and features a desert island, castaways at a banquet, and a woman who has never seen a man, just as in The Tempest. In addition to Shakespeare's play, the collaborators consulted recent accounts of actual explorations, including those of William Strachey and John Nicoll.
In the Restoration era, The Sea Voyage was revived by the King's Company in an adaptation called The Storm. The adapted version premiered on Sept. 25, 1667, with both King Charles II and Samuel Pepys in the audience, as Pepys records in his Diary. Pepys liked the play so much—especially the added songs and dances—that he saw it again the next evening. The King's Company staged the play to beat the competition: William Davenant's and John Dryden's adaptation, The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island, would premier on November 7 of the same year. Another adaptation of The Sea Voyage, titled The Commonwealth of Women, was produced by Thomas d'Urfey in 1685.[2] D'Urfey's version proved even more popular after the turn of the eighteenth century, being performed in 1702, 1707, 1708, and 1710. D'urfey made the hero an Englishman instead of a Frenchman, and an honest pirate to boot,[3] anticipating Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance by nearly two centuries.
Along with Fletcher's The Island Princess, The Sea Voyage has attracted the attention of some late twentieth century critics and scholars as part of the literature of colonialism and anti-colonialism.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
- Oliphant, E. H. C. The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1927.
- Scheil, Katherine West. The Taste of the Town: Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater. Lewisburg, KY, Bucknell University Press, 2003.
- Sprague, Arthur Colby. Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1926.
