The Maid in the Mill

The Maid in the Mill is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and William Rowley.

In his records, Herbert assigns the authorship of the work to Fletcher and Rowley; and scholars have long recognized that the play's internal evidence confirms that attribution.

[1] Cyrus Hoy, in his landmark study of authorship problems in Fletcher's canon, provided a breakdown of shares that essentially agreed with the judgements of earlier commentators:[2] The two playwrights took their main plot from Leonard Digges's translation of Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses – a source that Fletcher had exploited for The Spanish Curate in the previous year.

[3] Fletcher, working with Philip Massinger, would compose a play with a very similar plot a few years later, in The Fair Maid of the Inn (1626).

[4] The play enjoyed a rare modern production, albeit an amateur one: it was acted by a Harvard University fraternity in 1900.

The men in the two parties draw their swords and prepare to fight, but Ismenia and Aminta prevail on them to part peacefully.

This motivates Julio to seek a resolution of his quarrel with Bellides – who comes to meet him on the same errand; both of the old men have grown fearful for their young relatives' lives if the feud continues.

The young people are less successful at managing their affairs; Antonio and Martino end up fighting in the street and being arrested by the night watchmen.