The Custom of the Country

The Custom of the Country is a Jacobean stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, originally published in 1647 in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio. Date and sources The play is usually dated to c. 1619–23. It could not have been written earlier than 1619, when one of its primary sources, Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda by Cervantes, was translated into English. Cinthio's Hecatommithi also provided material for the play. Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, describes The Custom of the Country as an "old play" in an entry in his record book dated 22 November 1629. Performance The play was performed by the King's Men. The 1647 text provides this cast list: Joseph Taylor, John Lowin, John Underwood, Robert Benfield, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, Richard Sharpe, and Thomas Holcombe. (The folio provides the same cast list for two roughly contemporaneous plays in the canon, Fletcher's Women Pleased and Fletcher and Massinger's The Little French Lawyer.) The cast list indicates a date of first performance after Taylor joined the company in the Spring of 1619, and before Tooley's death in June 1623. Authorship Critics and scholars since the nineteenth century have recognised that the play is a Fletcher/Massinger collaboration. Cyrus Hoy, in his wide-ranging survey of authorship problems in the Fletcher canon, arrives at a division of authorship that is essentially the same as those of earlier commentators like E. H. C. Oliphant: