Francis Beaumont

Love's Cure Francis Beaumont

Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a comedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. First published in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, it is the subject of broad dispute and uncertainty among scholars. In the words of Gerald Eades Bentley, "nearly everything about the play is in a state of confusion...." The manifold problems about Love's Cure inevitably complicate the scholarly and critical response to the play. It is hard to say what the play reveals about Fletcher's dramaturgic artistry when his participation in the project is so clouded by uncertainty - one critic even referring to Fletcher's "collaboration with the dead". The play's strong theme of gender and sexuality, though, has attracted modern commentators on the subject.