What is "andromana"

Andromana, or The Merchant's Wife is a mid-seventeenth-century stage play, a tragedy first published in 1660. It has attracted scholarly attention for the questions of its auhorship and the influence of its sources.

The play's date of authorship is unknown with certainty, and has been estimated in the 1642–60 era, during the English Civil War and the Interregnum when the theatres were officially closed. The play was reportedly performed in 1671, once the theatres had re-opened during the Restoration era. The play's May 19, 1660 entry into the Stationers' Register assigns the authorship of the work to James Shirley; the quarto published in the same year by the bookseller John Bellinger (which gives the play the subtitle The Fatal and Deserved End of Disloyalty and Ambition) attributes the play to "J. S." Many critics, however, have judged the play's " Burtonian melancholy" atypical of Shirley's style of drama; and its perceived lack of quality has led many Shirley scholars to omit the play from Shirley's canon.

Andromana is one of the many literary works of its period that draws upon Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia for its source material, both directly and through the secondary sources of the Beaumont and Fletcher play Cupid's Revenge. (The name "Andromana" derives from ancient Greek; the formidable women of ancient Sparta were known as "Andromanae.") Andromana also shows the influence of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, as mediated through the plays of John Ford.