The Weakest Goeth to the Wall is an anonymous Elizabethan-era stage play. Though the play is set in France, its plot is a reworking of a novel and the work has no historical connection. It is an early example of the kind of romantic comedy which evolved, in the Jacobean period, into the dominant genre of tragicomedy, though its historical setting complicates its classification. The play was at one point attributed to John Webster, but this attribution is now considered erroneous, and the question of its authorship remains elusive, with Thomas Dekker the most widely-accepted candidate for (at least partial) authorship.

Characters

Louis – The King of France Lodowick – The Duke of Bullen (or Bulloigne) Mercury – The Duke of Anjou Barnabe Bunch – An English tailor and cobbler Jacob (or Yakob) Van Smelt – A Flemish innkeeper Oriana – Wife to Lodowick Diana – Lodowick's daughter Hernando de Medina – The Spanish General Ugo de Cordova – Lieutenant to Hernando Emmanuel – The Duke of Brabant Leontius – A courtier of Emmanuel's

Ferdinand (Frederick) – Son to Lodowick who was lost as an infant and raised by Emmanuel Odilla – Daughter to Emmanuel Sir Nicholas – A parish priest Shamont – A courtier of Emmanuel's Lord Epernon – The French General Villiers – A merchant Two Gentlemen, three Citizens, two Messengers, a Nuncio, some members of Hernando's retinue, two Citizens of Shamount, two Soldiers in Epernon's service, two Messengers,

Plot John Genest summarized the plot of The Weakest Goeth to the Wall in the last of his ten-volume work on the history of the English stage as follows:

Date and text The play was printed in two quarto volumes, the first in 1600, the second in 1618. Facsimile editions of these quartos were produced in the early 20th century by the Malone Society under the editorship of J. S. Farmer and W. W. Greg.

There is no consensus on the date of the play's authorship. If Rich's Farewell to the Military Profession is indeed the source of the play's plot (see Sources), then the play cannot be earlier than 1581. On stylistic grounds, Rev. Ronald Bayne requires it to come after the appearance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine in 1587, while noting the presence of "signs of an older style", viz. the couplet and the six-lined-stanza forms. This dates the play only to the range 1587–1600, and does not exclude the possibility of revision.

In her critical edition, Jill L. Levenson makes a case for dating the play to the late 1590s, arguing on the basis of the chronology the Earl of Oxford's Men, on entries in Henslowe's Diary, on the relevance of the political intrigue of the plot to the issue of succession crisis of England in the winter of 1597/8, and on the timeline of Dekker's career.

Sources The source for the plot of the play is the first novel of Barnabe Rich's eight-story collection Farewell to the Military Profession, published 1581. The connection was first identified by the editors of the Shakespeare Society (under John Payne Collier) in 1846. They write:

The editors go on to speculate that Rich's novel and The Weakest Goeth to the Wall may have had a common source, but modern scholarship rejects this, regarding the play as dependent on the novel for its plot.

Authorship The quarto editions list no author, but note the play "hath been sundry times plaid by the right-honourable Earle of Oxenford, Lord great Chamberlaine of England his seruants." Edward Phillips attributed the play to Webster and Dekker in 1675, but this is known to have been due to a catalogue misreading of a type common to Phillips's work. In any case, Webster's authorship has been roundly rejected by all modern scholars on stylistic and stylometric grounds.

The idea that Dekker had a hand in the play has seen a good deal of scholarly support. The comic characters in particular bear a "family likeness" (in the phrase of Mary Leland Hunt) to those in plays known to have been by Dekker. Thus, Barnaby Bunch, a jovial tradesman, brings to mind Simon Eyre, and Yakob van Smelt, a lecherous stage-Dutchman, speaks a dialect remarkably like those in Dekker's Northward Ho, Westward Ho, and The Shoemaker's Holiday. Indeed, this play is one of less than a dozen plays of the period to employ stage-Dutch, and the dialect in The Weakest Goeth to the Wall is markedly different from all stage-Dutch known to have been written by other authors (as, for instance, Marston's The Dutch Courtesan or Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's).

Other candidates for authorship include Anthony Munday (favored by Collier and Bayne), on account of his and the play's connection to the Oxford's Men, under Edward de Vere (though the chronology which connects these two is disputed by Levenson); and Thomas Heywood, on stylometric grounds.

Appraisal The secondary literature on The Weakest Goeth to the Wall is very meager, and the play has seen only one critical edition: that of Jill L. Levenson. But the play has been seen favorably by those editors who have spent time working on it. In his four-volume edition of Webster's plays, William Carew Hazlitt quotes the praise of John Genest and John Payne Collier for the work. One of the most effusive is Rev. Bayne, who writes:

In terms of genre, the play belongs to the a small group of Elizabethan pseudohistorical romances. Within this group, it is the only one to display a substantial interest in politics.

References

External links https://bradfilippone.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/the-weakest-goeth-to-the-wall-introduction/ Annotated list of characters: https://cord.ung.edu/anonwgw.html