The play was licensed for publication by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 16 April 1630 and was published later that year, in a quarto printed by the brothers Richard and Thomas Cotes for the bookseller Francis Constable.
[1] The full title of the play in the 1630 quarto is Pathomachia or the Battle of Affections, Shadowed by a Feigned Siege of the City of Pathopolis.
[3] Pathomachia shares the Harleian MS. with another allegorical play, titled The Fallacies, or the Troubles of Hermenia, which is dated 1631 and ascribed to Richard Zouch.
[6] Composed in prose rather than verse, Pathomachia relies heavily on the tradition of allegory and the morality play; its characters are personifications of the human passions, Love, Hatred, Pride, Malice, Envy, Curiosity, etc.
The play treats Love and Hatred as the King and Queen of the country of the emotions; but the royal figures have neglected their duties and a rebellion has sprung up among their subjects.
In the opening scene of Act II, for example, Justice tells Love that Heroical Virtue "is gone to the Antipodes, unto Japonia" [that is, Japan] and that "I have not heard of him since the time of Judas Maccabeus...." The drama also displays many references to then-recent historical events, including the Gunpowder Plot and François Ravaillac's assassination of Henri IV among others.
The one passage in the play most often cited in the critical literature is probably the catalogue of torture devices in Act III, scene iv: "the Russian Shiners, the Scottish Boots, the Dutch Wheel, the Spanish strappado, linen ball, and pearl of confession shall torment thee...," etc.
Apart from the earlier Lingua, Pathomachia can be classed with a roster of similar plays in its generation, including Dekker and Ford's The Sun's Darling, Nabbes's Microcosmus, Randolph's The Muses' Looking Glass, Barten Holyday's Technogamia, and William Strode's The Floating Island, among others.