Fortune by Land and Sea

Fortune by Land and Sea is a Jacobean era stage play, a romantic melodrama written by Thomas Heywood and William Rowley. The play has attracted the attention of modern critics for its juxtaposition of the themes of primogeniture and piracy. Publication Fortune by Land and Sea was entered into the Stationers' Register on 20 June 1655, and was published later that year in a quarto by the booksellers John Sweeting and Robert Pollard. This poorly-printed quarto was the only edition of the play to appear during the 17th century. Date and performance Scholarship has suggested a range of possible dates for the play. E. K. Chambers located it in the 1607–09 period. The title page of the 1655 quarto states that the drama was acted "by the Queen's servants", that is by Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre. Heywood was a key member of that company as both actor and playwright, and Rowley was writing for them too at that time. But while being open to this earlier dating, analysis by Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson suggests limits of 1607-9 and 1619–26, with a 'best guess' of 1623 owing to Rowley's identifiable collaborations with Heywood during the 1620s. Genre The 1655 quarto calls the play a tragicomedy, though it differs from the specific genre as it was developed by John Fletcher and his imitators during the Jacobean and Caroline eras. Instead the play belongs to the older tradition of romantic adventure that both Heywood and Rowley exploited in their playwriting careers, in works like Heywood's The Four Prentices of London (c. 1592), and The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), which Rowley wrote with George Wilkins and John Day.