Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeen ...

Davenant’s next play, Love and Honour, was presented later the same year in 1633. Davenant was not entirely happy with the title, and he asked Herbert to change the name to The Nonpareilles or The Matchless Maids. Bentley suggests it was also called The Courage of Love.³⁰ As the various titles suggest, this was a romance, quite different again from anything Davenant had written before and was written probably to catch the attention of the queen, whose taste was for heroic, romantic drama with themes of platonic love, sacrifice, and service for the loved one. In this, it was successful, for after the King’s Men put it on at the Blackfriars in December 1634, the queen asked for it to be shown again at Hampton Court on New Year’s Day 1636. It was kept in the repertoire by the acting company and was not printed until 1649. The play was one of the earliest in the genre, although Shirley had set the trend with The Grateful Servant, presented by the Queen’s Company in 1630. The text of 1673 includes a practical window but also mentions the “arras”, so again, it is impossible to know exactly how Davenant would have staged it either in 1633 or in the 1660s.

Love and Honour was followed very shortly by The Platonick Lovers, but this was not a success, neither with the Blackfriars audience nor the court, and it was licensed for publication in 1635. Shortly afterwards, The News From Plymouth appeared as a vacation play at the Globe in August 1635. This is the only one by Davenant that was obviously written for that particular audience and was probably a commercial venture. It is again a different style of play, with a cast of seamen becalmed in the port and enjoying the favours of the local ladies. There are many resemblances to Jonson’s characters, a Sir Solemn Trifle who is similar to Sir Politic-Would-Be, and others who draw on those in The Alchemist in a good, comically vulgar, farce which the King’s Men kept in the repertory and which was not published until after Davenant’s death. He wrote three more plays before the theatres closed and he became embroiled in the preparations for war. The Unfortunate Lovers was his first play put on when the theatres reopened after the plague of 1636.