The Faithful Friends

The Faithful Friends is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy associated with the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. Never printed in its own century, the play is one of the most disputed works in English Renaissance drama. The play is given a classical setting during the Roman Kingdom, but it actually occurs in the dramatic neverland of the English Renaissance stage. Its supposedly-ancient Romans refer to Niccolò Machiavelli, John of Gaunt and the Guildhall of London, among other anachronisms. (See The Old Law and Thierry and Theodoret for comparable cases.)