Fair Em

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Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, is an Elizabethan comedy written ca. 1590. It was bound together with Mucedorus and The Merry Devil of Edmonton in a volume labelled "Shakespeare. Vol. I" in the library of Charles II—though scholarly opinion universally rejects the attribution to William Shakespeare.

Fair Em was published in quarto twice before the closing of the theatres in 1642:

Q1, undated, with no attribution of authorship, was printed by "T. N. and I. W." The title page states that "it was sundrietimes publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the Lord Strange his seruaunts"—which dates the play to the 1589-93 period.

Q2, 1631, printed by John Wright, also by no attribution of authorship.

Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675), states that Fair Em was written by Robert Greene; but since Greene ridicules the play's author and parodies two lines from the closing scene in his 1591 pamphlet Farewell to Folly, this attribution also seems unsound.

The play itself is simple and dramaturgically primitive, but entertaining on a superficial level, and apparently was, in its own time, popular with audiences, as the title page of Q1 indicates.

[edit] References

• C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed., The Shakespeare Apocrypha, Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1908.
• F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.