The Poor Man's Comfort
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The Poor Man's Comfort is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy by Robert Daborne—one of his two extant plays.
The play's date is uncertain, though it is generally assigned to the 1610–18 era. It was not published until several decades after it was written. The Poor Man's Comfort was entered into the Stationers' Register on June 20, 1655, and published in quarto later that year by the booksellers Robert Pollard and John Sweeting. Both the Register entry and the title page of the quarto refer to Daborne as a "Master of Arts." In the original text, a stage direction at line 186 reads "Enter 2 Lords, Sands, Ellis." The names refer not to the characters of the play but the actors who played the roles—a feature that occurs on rare occasions in the texts of English Renaissance drama (see, for example, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt). The two actors may have been Gregory Sanderson and Ellis Worth, who played with Queen Anne's Men in the period of c. 1617–19.[1] The title page of the quarto states that the play was performed at the Cockpit Theatre, which was occupied by the Quen Anne's company from 1617 to 1619. Since Daborne is thought to have stopped writing for the stage by 1618, the most likely single year for the play might be narrowed to 1617.
The play was revived early in the Restoration era, in 1661 — though that was its last known stage production. A manuscript copy of the play also exists, in the collection of dramatic manuscripts known as Egerton MS. 1994 in the collection of the British Museum. The title of the play is proverbial: "Virtue is the friend of life, the soul of health, the poor man's comfort and the rich man's wealth" is one among several versions.
The play tells the story of Gisbert, an old shepherd whose daughter, Urania, has been deserted by her husband, a nobleman from Thessaly. Gisbert fails to receive justice from a local court, and leaves his pastoral life to take a journey through a corrupt society. His story involves lovestruck shepherds, shipwrecked princesses, corrupt and venal lawyers, and violent whores. He finally attains justice from his king. Critics have praised the play for keeping Gisbert and Urania as shepherds till the end — not revealing them to be lost royalty or aristocrats in hiding, as is usual in the pastoral form. For Felix Schelling, the play "is quite enough to raise Daborne, hack-writer though he was, to a respected place among the dramatists of his day."[2]
The play was edited by Kenneth Palmer for the Malone Society in 1954. A more recent edition of the play was published in 2005.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, p. 271.
- ^ Schelling, Felix Emmanuel. Elizabethan Drama, 1558–1642. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1908; Vol. 2, p. 163.
- ^ Daborne, Robert. The Poor Man's Comfort. Edited by Jane Kingsley-Smith. London, Routledge, 2005.
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