The Widow (play)

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The Widow is a Jacobean stage play first published in 1652, but written decades earlier.

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on April 12, 1652, and published later that year in quarto by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley. The title page assigns The Widow to Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton, though the consensus of modern scholarship judges the play to be the work of Middleton alone.

The play is known to have been in the repertory of the King's Men. The tripartite attribution is repeated in Alexander Goughe's Address to the Reader prefacing the quarto text; Gough acted with the King's Men in the 1626–36 era. Nineteenth and early twentieth century critics, like E. H. C. Oliphant, made attempts to defend the original authorial attribution; but modern techniques of textual analysis find no evidence of the hands of either Jonson or Fletcher in the play, and a consistent pattern of evidence favoring Middleton.^[1] On the limited evidence available, the play is usually dated to c. 1615–17, partially on the basis of a "yellow bands" reference to the execution of Mrs. Anne Turner (November 14, 1615) for her part in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.^[2]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Lake, pp. 38-43.
2. ^ Mrs. Turner had started a fashion for wearing ruffs and cuffs dyed yellow instead of the standard white. At the gallows her executioner wore these "yellow bands," terminating the fashion forever. Beatrice White, Cast of Ravens, London, John Murray, 1965; p. 125.

[edit] References

• Lake, David J. The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
• Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.