Thierry and Theodoret

Thierry and Theodoret is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators that was first published in 1621. It is one of the problematic plays of Fletcher's oeuvre; as with Love's Cure, there are significant uncertainties about the date and authorship of Thierry and Theodoret.

Publication

The first edition of the play is the 1621 quarto issued by the bookseller Thomas Walkley, with no attribution of authorship. The second quarto of 1648, published by Humphrey Moseley, assigned the play to Fletcher alone, but the third quarto of the following year (1649), also from Moseley, cites Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher on its title page. The play was included in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, though the text there is truncated and omits a substantial part of the work's conclusion.

Authorship

Early critics attributed the play to Beaumont and Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Nathan Field, Robert Daborne, John Webster, and George Chapman, in various combinations. Most modern scholarship accepts the play as a work originally by Beaumont and Fletcher that was later revised by Massinger, comparable to Love's Cure, The Coxcomb, and Beggars' Bush. Cyrus Hoy, in his survey of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, produced this breakdown of the three authors' shares:

Beaumont – Act III; Act V, scene 1;

Fletcher —Act I, scene 1; Act II, 2 and 3; Act IV, 1; Act V, 2;

Massinger – Act I, scene 2; Act II, 1 and 4; Act IV, 2.

Date

The date of the play is a matter of deep uncertainty and widespread dispute; scholars have ventured dates from 1607 to 1621. If Beaumont was one of the original authors, the first version of the drama obviously must have pre-dated his 1613 retirement and 1616 death.