Holland's Leaguer (play)

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 26 January 1632, and was published in quarto later that year by the bookseller John Grove.

The title page of the first edition states that the drama was acted by "the high and mighty Prince Charles's Men."

Marmion's play is an exercise in "place realism," in which dramatists exploited actual locales around London for their works – something that became fashionable in the drama of the early 1630s.

[3] James Shirley's Hyde Park (1632) and Thomas Nabbes's Covent Garden (1633) and Tottenham Court (1634) participated this trend, as did several of the dramas of Richard Brome.

Earlier playwrights had also experimented with place realism, as in Lording Barry's Ram Alley (c. 1607) and Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614).

The actual brothel called Holland's Leaguer was located on the Bankside, on the southern shore of the River Thames across from London.

Holland was reportedly the name of the woman who ran the establishment — though a popular rumour also linked the house specifically with Dutch prostitutes.

The play refers directly to this riotous habit, in Act IV scene 3: (The 'prentices' Shrove Tuesday riots were sometimes severe.

Also in 1632, two other works on the subject appeared: a ballad by Lawrence Price called News from Holland's Leader, and a pamphlet from bookseller Richard Barnes.

[8] Authored by a Nicholas Goodman, the pamphlet is titled Holland's Leaguer: or a Historical Discourse of the Life and Actions of Dona Britanica Hollandia, the Arch-Mistress of the wicked women of Eutopis.

(Goodman's pamphlet does contain an interesting fact: the turret on the building's roof provided a view of the three Bankside theatres then standing, the Globe, the Hope, and the decrepit Swan.)

The play's main plot centres upon Philautus, a fashionable young lord; abetted by hangers-on like Ardelio, he has become devoted to vanity and self-absorption – to the displeasure of his wife, Triphoena.

When he first meets her, Philautus remarks that he has a sister with the same name; but he is no smarter than many other protagonists in English Renaissance comedy, and does not realise that the two Faustinas are one until the final Act of the drama.

The play's subplot deals with a group of would-be gallants, including Triphoena's bashful brother Capritio, his tutor Miscellanio, and the flamboyant Trimalchio.