A Wife for a Month A Wife for a Month A Wife for a Month is a late Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 27 May 1624; it was acted by the King's Men. The partial cast list added to the play in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 mentions Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Richard Robinson, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, and George Birch. The list contains a contradiction, since Tooley died
A Wife for a Month Fletcher's "lewdest" play, and complaining of its "oppressiveness" and its celebration of a "macabre marriage." The play's plot turns on the idea of a tyrannical king who allows a man to marry the woman he loves...for a month, and without sexual relations. (If he violates the rule, she will be put to death.) At the end of that month, he will be executed. A Wife for a Month centers on Evanthe, a beautiful and chaste lady-in-waiting to Frederick's Queen. Evanthe has never been married, and King Frederick lusts after her. In the first scene, he calls for her to be