John Fletcher

The Maid in the Mill John Fletcher

The Maid in the Mill is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and William Rowley. It was initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. 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. They took the Florimel subplot from The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter; and they may also have been influenced by Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. 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).