The False One

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The False One
history play
SettingAncient Egypt

The False One is a late

Jacobean stage play by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, though formerly placed in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. It was first published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio
of 1647.

This classical history tells of the meeting and romance of

Pompey the Great
at the hands of one of his own officers, the "false one" of the title.

Date

Scholars date the play to the 1619–20 period, partly because of parallels with the political situation in

Joseph Taylor, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, Robert Benfield, John Rice, Richard Sharpe, and George Birch. The presence of Taylor, who replaced Richard Burbage
after Burbage's death in the spring of 1619, indicates a date after that time.

Authorship

Given Fletcher's highly distinctive pattern of stylistic and textual preferences, scholars have found it fairly easy to distinguish the shares of the two authors in the play. Commentators from E. H. C. Oliphant[1] to Cyrus Hoy[2] have agreed that Massinger wrote Act I and Act V, while Fletcher wrote Acts II, III, and IV — the same division of labour as in The Elder Brother.

Characters

Plot

The dramatists chose to portray only the beginning of the story of Caesar and Cleopatra in their play; they concentrate on the events of 48 BC. The play is set in

Ptolemy XIII has sequestered his sister/wife/queen Cleopatra and has assumed sole rule of the kingdom, and the Battle of Pharsalia
has not yet occurred. By the play's end, Caesar has deposed Ptolemy and placed Cleopatra in sole possession of the Egyptian crown. The play's Prologue specifically states that the work shows a virginal "Young Cleopatra...and her great Mind / Express'd to the height...." Some of the famous aspects of the story are reproduced in the play: Cleopatra has herself delivered to Caesar in Act III, though enclosed in a "packet" rather than rolled up in a rug.

The playwrights chose to concentrate much of their attention on the figure of

Sir Lewis Stukeley.[3]

Critics have seen the influence of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in The False One, and have suggested that the portrayal of Septimius was partially modelled on Shakespeare's Enobarbus.[4] The False One is heavily dominated by political material, rather than dramatic realisations of its characters;[5] for some critics, the split in the play's focus among Cleopatra, Caesar, and Septimius prevents the play from cohering into an effective dramatic whole.

Related works

The collaborators' primary source for their play was the

Lucan
.

The historical characters of the play – primarily Caesar and Cleopatra, but also Pompey and even Septimius – have attracted the attention of various dramatists. Apart from the famous works of Shakespeare and

Charles Sedley's Antony and Cleopatra (1677), and John Dryden's All for Love (1678) — the last, one of Dryden's great successes. Similarly, Katherine Philips's translation of Pierre Corneille's La Mort de Pompée (1643)[6] was a stage hit in London in 1663. As late as 1910, John Masefield
treated Pompey and Septimius in his The Tragedy of Pompey the Great.

References

  1. ^ E. H. C. Oliphant, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1927; pp. 234–7.
  2. ^ Terence P. Logan And Denzell S. Smith, eds., The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists:A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978; pp. 74, 107.
  3. ^ Baldwin Maxwell, Studies in Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger, Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1939; pp. 170–2.
  4. ^ Maxwell, p. 169.
  5. ^ Ira Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger, Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell University Press, 1993; p. 104.
  6. ^ Eugene M. Waith, "The Death of Pompey: English Style, French Style," in: Shakespeare and Dramatic Tradition, William R. Elton and William B. Long, eds., Newark, DE, University of Delaware Press, 1989; pp. 276–85.

External links

  • The False One at Project Gutenberg
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