Claricilla was entered into the Stationers' Register on 4 August 1640 and published the next year in a duodecimo volume that also contained Killigrew's first play, The Prisoners.
In addition to the two printed texts, a manuscript of the play dated 1639 survives with a title-page in Killigrew's hand (Harvard, Houghton Library, MS Thr 7).
[2] Killigrew's choice of the tragicomic genre for his first three plays, The Prisoners, Claricilla, and The Princess, made sense in terms of his social and cultural millieu.
Killigrew was aspiring to join a circle of dramatists associated with the English royal court and especially with the coterie around Queen Henrietta Maria.
When Killigrew was no longer committed to that type of courtly drama, he would write a radically different kind of play, in his comedy The Parson's Wedding.
Claricilla was one of the rare plays surreptitiously acted during the Interregnum, when the London theatres were officially closed; the 1653 performance at Gibbon's Tennis Court was raided by the authorities.