John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's comedy Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid (1615) is an innovative and provocative play that explores the struggle of two transgender siblings, Lucio and Clara, who have been brought up as members of their opposite genders. After twenty years of separation, they are forced to switch around their gender identities, facing fierce scrutiny from their family and the cruelly heteronormative society of early modern Seville. This Revels Plays volume is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of the play ever to be published. The text has been modernised and is accompanied by full commentary. The introduction presents ground-breaking research on the play's remarkable engagement with its Spanish literary sources, and it provides a full discussion of its dating, authorship, and reception by literary critics and in the theatre.

Reviews

'The culmination of more than a decade of patient textual comparison, collation, and emendation coupled with extensive biographical and historical research, José A. Pérez Díez's Revels edition of Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid constitutes an important addition to the relatively small extant body of Fletcher-associated plays available as single volume texts. Supplying us with an accessible modern spelling text of a play that twenty-first century instructors and students will likely find compelling, the edition's extensive, efficiently organized front matter offers a clear-eyed glimpse into the literary-historical matters that complicate study of the playwright and his collaborators' Early Theatre

Introduction
LOVE'S CURE, OR THE MARTIAL MAID
Appendices
1 Press variants
2 Compositorial analysis and running titles
3 Censorship in F
4 Piorato's song
5 Disputed narrative sources