The Spanish Gypsy

"The Spanish Gypsy" is an English Jacobean tragicomedy, dating from 1623. It is interesting to modern readers, students, and scholars principally because of the question of its authorship.

"The Spanish Gypsy" was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on July 9, 1623; the text includes two mentions of the camels and elephant that arrived in London for exhibit in that month. The play was performed at Court on November 5 of that year; Prince Charles attended.

The London stationer (i.e. bookseller and publisher) Richard Marriot published the play in quarto in 1653 as a collaboration between Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, one of several the two dramatists had created together. A second quarto was issued in 1661. The assignment of authorship was unquestioned till the 20th century. H. Dugdale Sykes was the first modern scholar to dispute the attribution to Middleton and Rowley; he favored John Ford as the author, judging on a range of stylistic and textual features. Following up on Sykes' perception, M. Joan Sergeaunt noted the strong resemblances between the gypsy scenes in this play and similar materials in the works of Thomas Dekker. Later scholars, perhaps most prominently David Lake, have refined and confirmed these studies; many modern scholars now accept Dekker and Ford as the likely authors of the play. [Lake, pp. 215-30.]

Conversely, the similarity of the comic subplot of the play to the work of Rowley has also been noticed. [Brittin, p. 97] The clown characters Sancho and Soto in "The Spanish Gypsy" show clear resemblances with clowns, like Chough and Trimtram in "A Fair Quarrel"; Soto is even called Lollio in IV.iii.80-86, Lollio being the name of Rowley's clown character in "The Changeling." "The Spanish Gypsy" dates from the early 1620s, a time when Dekker, Ford, and Rowley were certainly working together: they wrote "The Witch of Edmonton" in 1621, and joined with John Webster for "Keep the Widow Waking" in 1624. Combining external attribution with internal evidence, "The Spanish Gypsy" seems most likely to be the work of Ford, Dekker, and Rowley.

Notes

References

* Brittin, Norman. "Thomas Middleton." New York, Twayne, 1972.
* David J. Lake, David J. "The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays." Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 215-30.
* Sykes, H. Dugdale. "John Ford the Author of "The Spanish Gypsy"." In "Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama," London; Oxford University Press, 1924.