The Fancies Chaste and Noble is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by John Ford, and notable for its treatment of the then-fashionable topic of Platonic love.
Queen Henrietta's Men performed at the Cockpit from their inception in late 1625 to May 1636, when the theatres of London suffered their longest shutdown due to bubonic plague.
[2] The subject of Platonic love was highly fashionable in the court of Charles I, especially with Queen Henrietta Maria, her ladies in waiting, and their coterie of courtier poets and dramatists, like Sir John Suckling.
The play relies heavily on the spectre of virtue and chastity tested by false accusations and suspicions and tricks — that strange obsession of English Renaissance drama.
Flavia pretends to embrace her new fortune, adopting the fashionable tastes and habits of a nouveau-riche aristocrat — though she still loves her first husband.
The comic subplot concerns the barber Secco and his marriage to Morosa, the older "religious matron" who serves as the guardian of the Fancies.