The Spanish Curate is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger.
The dramatists' source for their plot, the Spanish novel Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, was first published in English, in a translation by Leonard Digges, earlier in the same year.
The partial cast list of the premiere production, published in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, includes Joseph Taylor, William Ecclestone, John Lowin, Thomas Pollard, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Benfield.
It was likely set into type from a prompt-book manuscript that was the work of Ralph Crane, the scribe who, in the same era, was preparing texts for the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.
[2] Given the highly distinctive profile of Fletcher's literary style, critics have found it relatively easy to distinguish between the respective shares of the two authors.
The late father's will gives Jamie a small income, but Henrique treats his younger brother with rudeness and condescension, breeding a hostile relationship between the two.
She bullies her husband into reversing course and driving Ascanio out of his house; Henrique offers the boy financial support, but the child returns to Jacinta and his pretended father Octavio.
Violante is not satisfied with this, however; she reveals herself to be a truly ruthless person when she solicits Jamie to murder both Henrique and Ascanio and so come into his family fortune immediately.