The Nice Valour

rdf:langString The Nice Valour

rdf:langString The Nice Valour, or The Passionate Madman is a Jacobean stage play of problematic date and authorship. Based on its inclusion in the two Beaumont and Fletcher folios of 1647 and 1679 and two citations in 17th-century sources, the play has long held a place in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. Modern scholarship, however, has accumulated much internal evidence for the authorship of Thomas Middleton. The Nice Valour is the shortest play in the Beaumont/Fletcher folios, and inconsistencies in the text (the setting shifts between France and Genoa with no explanation) suggest revision by a hand other than that of the original author. Early critics, observing obvious differences from the normal style of Fletcher and Beaumont, postulated the participation of Middleton and perhaps William Rowley; their twentieth-century successors were able to refine that determination with a close study of the play's stylistic and linguistic preferences. Cyrus Hoy, in his massive study of authorship questions in the Fletcher canon, drew this division of authorship: Middleton — Act III; Act V, scene 1;Fletcher and Middleton — Acts I, II, and IV; Act V, scenes 2 and 3. David Lake, in his study of authorship problems in the Middleton canon, endorses Hoy's conclusion and supports it with additional evidence. The play's date remains uncertain, and has been placed anywhere from 1615 to 1625. Lake favours Baldwin Maxwell's date of c. 1615–16.