The Knight of Malta

The Knight of Malta is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. It was initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.

No firm information is available on the play's date of authorship or earliest stage production. The cast list for the original King's Men's production, added in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, cites Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, Nathan Field, Robert Benfield, John Underwood, John Lowin, Richard Sharpe, and Thomas Holcombe, indicating that the play was performed in the 1616–19 period – after Field joined the troupe in 1616 but before Burbage's death in March 1619.

The authors depended upon the Filocolo of Giovanni Boccaccio as their source, specifically the section of that work called "The Thirteen Questions of Love."

Scholars, from F. G. Fleay to Cyrus Hoy and after, have attributed the authorship of the play to Fletcher, Field, and Philip Massinger. While not unanimous on all points, critics have generally favoured a division of authorship along these lines:

The play was roughly contemporaneous with The Queen of Corinth, another work by the same trio of writers. The play's villainess is called Zanthia in Act I, and Abdella through the remainder of the play, suggesting that the text was set into type from the authors' "foul papers" or working draft. The name conflict would have been corrected in the theatre promptbook.

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