Wandering Lovers, The

Historical Records

Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert

Transcriptions of Herbert's office book include the licensing of "The Wandering Lovers" on 6 December 1623 and a performance at Whitehall on 1 January 1624:

Wandring Lovers, written by Mr Fletcher, for the King's comp^y.

all^d 6^th Dec. 1623. 1^li

(Bawcutt 147, quoting Jacob Henry Burn's transcription, Beinecke Library, Osborn d1, p. 204)

Upon New-years night, by the K. company, The Wandering Lovers, the prince only being there. Att Whitehall.

(Bawcutt 148, quoting Malone 3:227)

Book Trade Records

Stationers' Register

On 9 September 1653, Humphrey Moseley entered the following double title in a series of 11 entries attributed to Philip Massinger:

The wandring lovers or the painter

(S. R. II, 1:429)

Theatrical Provenance

Performed by the King's Men in 1623.

Probable Genre(s)

(Information welcome.)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

(Information welcome.)

References to the Play

(Information welcome.)

Critical Commentary

The majority of scholarly commentary on "The Wandering Lovers" concerns whether it should be identified with the extant play The Lovers' Progress, printed in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio. (Some further discussion can be found in the entry for "Cleander".)

Fleay (1.219) identified the play with The Lovers' Progress on the grounds that the prologue and epilogue of the extant play clearly describe it as a revision of a Fletcherian original "long since writ" and that Massinger was evidently the reviser; on 7 May 1634 Herbert licensed "The Tragedy of Cleander" for the King's Men, and since Cleander is the name of a character who dies in The Lovers' Progress, Fleay assumed that the play printed in 1647 should be identified with the 1634 "Cleander". His argument for identifying the latter with "The Wandering Lovers" of 1623 is the fact that this title is an apt description of Lydian, Clarange, and Lysander in The Lovers' Progress, a play that also contains several verbal references to wandering.

Oliphant (239), supporting the identification, noted that the cast list for The Lovers' Progress, printed in the 1679 Second Folio, suggests that the original performance took place in late 1623 or early 1624, aligning it with the date of Herbert's license for "The Wandering Lovers." However, contra Fleay, Oliphant was persuaded by Dyce's judgement that the 1634 "Tragedy of Cleander" referred not to the extant play but rather "doubtless treated of the Cleander who was an officer of Alexander the Great, and who was put to death for offering violence to a noble virgin and giving her as a prostitute to his servants" (Dyce I.lxxix); as Oliphant noted, although Cleander dies in The Lovers' Progress, the play "can scarcely be called a tragedy," and that if the extant text of The Lovers' Progress represents a Massingerian revision of a Fletcherian original, then it was probably not separately licensed since it was not considered a new play.

Greg (BEPD 983) noted two possible objections to the lumping of "The Wandering Lovers", "The Tragedy of Cleander" and The Lovers' Progress. The first is that the English translation of the narrative source for The Lovers' Progress—Vital d'Audiguier's Histoire tragi-comique de notre temps—was only published in 1627, after Fletcher's death, although the original French was available. The second and stronger possible objection is that Moseley entered "The Wandering Lovers" in the Stationers' Register 6 years after he himself had printed The Lovers' Progress, although he may have done so mistakenly. As Greg notes, if the 1634 "Cleander" is not identified with The Lovers' Progress (as Dyce and Oliphant suggest), then there is "less reason to connect" the extant play to "The Wandering Lovers."

Bentley (3:360–63), arguing in favor of lumping, notes that the prologue and epilogue to The Lovers' Progress stress how comprehensive a revision of Fletcher's original play had been undertaken, such that the reviser could claim the same compensation as a wholly new play. This, Bentley observes, would explain the need for a new license in 1634. Further evidence is found in the proximity of the license for Massinger's "Cleander" on 7 May 1634 and the fact that on 21 May 1634 Sir Humphrey Mildmay reported in his diary (British Library, MS Harley 454) that he attended "the play Called Lasander & Callista, beinge a poem" (Bentley, JCS 2:676, 3:360). Bentley assumed that the play Mildmay saw was The Lovers' Progress, since Lysander and Calista are main characters of that play (the narrative source for which was translated into English in 1627 as A tragi-comicall history of our times, under the borrowed names of Lisander, and Calista), and that this was most likely also the play that was licensed on May 7. On the question of why the licensed play was identified as a tragedy, Bentley notes that The Lovers' Progress is designated as a tragedy in the 1679 Folio.

Wiggins allows the possibility that "The Wandering Lovers" represents a lost play and assigns it its own entry (#2076) and discusses the issue in the entry for The Lovers' Progress (#2077).

For What It's Worth

(Information welcome.)

Works Cited

Dyce, Alexander, ed. The Works of Beaumont & Fletcher. 11 vols. London: 1843–46.

Oliphant, E. H. C. The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. New Haven: Yale UP, 1927.

Site created and maintained by Misha Teramura, University of Toronto; updated 14 March 2025.