The Puritan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Puritan is a Jacobean comedy, published in 1607, generally considered to be written by Thomas Middleton.
The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on Aug. 6. 1607, and published in quarto before the end of the year, by George Eld. The title page of the quarto states that the play was performed by the Children of Paul's, one of the boys' acting companies of the era; and it attributes the play to "W. S." Those initials were first identified with William Shakespeare by Edward Archer, in his 1656 play list. Soon after, The Puritan was added to the second impression of the Shakespeare Third Folio (1664) by Philip Chetwinde, thus bringing the play into the Shakespeare Apocrypha. [See Folios and Quartos (Shakespeare).]
The modern scholarly consensus rejects the identification of "W. S." with Shakespeare; alternative candidates have been proposed in the form of the obscure Jacobean dramatists Wentworth Smith and William Smith. Yet studies of the play's internal evidence demonstrate that the play is almost certainly part of the dramatic canon of Thomas Middleton.
Some of the play's incidents are drawn from the contemporary work The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607).
[edit] References
- C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha, Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1908.
- David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
[edit] External links
- The Puritan online annotated text
 |
This article on a play is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
