The Faithful Shepherdess is a Jacobean era stage play, the work that inaugurated the playwriting career of John Fletcher.
[1] Though the initial production was a failure with its audience, the printed text that followed proved significant, in that it contained Fletcher's influential definition of tragicomedy.
Amarillis enlists the help of the Sullen Shepherd, a libertine villain willing to go to any lengths to obtain his desires or to break the "plighted troths of mutual souls."
The play was premiered onstage most likely in 1608, acted probably by the Children of the Blackfriars, one of the troupes of boy actors popular at the time.
(The production utilized the sumptuous costumes left over from the 1633 masque The Shepherd's Paradise, which Henrietta Maria then donated to the actors.)
The Faithful Shepherdess was first published soon after its stage premier, in a quarto issued by the booksellers Richard Bonian and Henry Walley; though the first edition is undated, it almost certainly appeared in 1609.
Fletcher states that the original audience, unfamiliar with the term and concept of tragicomedy, expected a play with characters "sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing each other."
Meighen capitalized on the 1634 revival by issuing a third quarto of the text in that year (printed by Augustine Matthews); subsequent editions followed in 1656 and 1665.
Critics have seen in the play the influence of Renaissance works like Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590) and Antonio Marsi's Mirzia.
"Fletcher glorifies chaste womanhood in a Spenser-like faery atmosphere...The play is an esthetic, not a moral failure, with lack of plot as its basic fault.
"[7] Fletcher would learn from his mistake; the tragicomedies he would later write, on his own and with Beaumont, Philip Massinger, and other collaborators, tend to be rich with (perhaps, in some cases, over-supplied with) variegated action.