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.
Contents
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.
Subject matter
The play contrasts the fortunes of its characters in two radically different domains of experience: those living traditional English lives on land are ruled by the strictures of the primogeniture system, while escape to sea means a life of anarchic freedom, danger, and opportunity. Heywood exploited the subject of piracy in other works, notably his two-part play The Fair Maid of the West. In Fortune by Land and Sea, the playwrights based their plot on actual events from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as recounted in a 1583 pamphlet. The dramatists were looking back to an Elizabethan age of optimism and expansionism, from a Jacobean period that conspicuously lacked those traits.
Synopsis
The play relates the story of two interlocked rural families – two patriarchs, known simply as Old Forrest and Old Harding, each of whom has three children. Forrest has two sons and a daughter, and Harding has three sons. Through the course of the play, it is revealed that the families have endured contrasting reversals of fortune: when the two patriarchs were young men, the Forrest family was prosperous and land-rich, while the Hardings were their tenant farmers. Over the course of the two men's lives, the Forrests were reduced to comparative poverty while the Hardings flourished. Their contrasting fortunes may be the result of the two men's characters: Old Forrest is a mild-mannered and moral gentleman, while Old Harding is grasping and ruthless.
In the opening scene, Old Forrest tries dissuade his headstrong elder son Frank from carousing with his fair-weather friends, a "quarrelsome gentleman" named Rainsford and his hangers-on Foster and Goodwin. Frank Forrest ignores his father's sententious advice; but during the evening Rainsford insults Old Forrest to his son's face, calling him a "fool" and "dotard." The two draw their swords and fight, and Frank Forrest is killed. His family recover his body, but cannot prove the crime against Rainsford, who has powerful connections with the nobility.
Meanwhile, Old Harding has just married a new young wife. Harding's younger sons William and John, unhappy at this development, are hostile to their new stepmother, until Old Harding makes his displeasure plain; then the two young men grow more respectful. When Old Harding learns that his eldest son Philip has married Susan Forrest, a young woman of virtue but no dowry, he rejects the match and refuses the young couple all support. To survive, Philip and Susan must become servants in Old Harding's household. The new Mrs. Harding treats the couple with compassion, though brothers William and John are harsher toward their fallen older brother and his wife. Another Harding family servant is the play's Clown, who provides the comic relief.
Old Forrest's second son, known simply as Young Forrest, seeks out Rainsford and challenges him to a duel. The two fight, and Rainsford is killed. Young Forrest is pursued by the authorities and by Rainsford's friends Goodwin and Foster; fleeing, he leaps the Hardings' garden wall and confronts Mrs. Harding. Hearing his story, she feels compassion for him; she conceals him for a week, then sends him to her brother, a London merchant. He is similarly taken by Young Forrest's good nature, and helps the young man to travel abroad on one of his ships. The Merchant leaves for a voyage of his own shortly after.