The Swisser

The Swisser is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Arthur Wilson. It was performed by the King's Men in the Blackfriars Theatre in 1631, and is notable for the light in throws on the workings of the premier acting company of its time.

(In seventeenth-century parlance, "Swisser," or "Swizzer" or "Switzer," referred to a Swiss mercenary soldier.)

Though Humphrey Moseley entered the play into the Stationers' Register on 4 September 1646, no edition of the drama was printed in the seventeenth century. The play remained in manuscript until it was published in the early 1900s. The manuscript, now Add. MS. 36,749 in the collection of the British Museum, is in the author's hand.

The Swisser shares the primary fault of Caroline drama as a whole; it is unoriginal and highly derivative of earlier works. Felix Schelling catalogued the play's stock elements as "the lecherous tyrant; the love-lorn girl page; the banished lord...; two old men of noble houses, enemies; their children, in love; poison evaded by the substitution of a sleeping potion; a fair captive generously treated by a chivalrous soldier, her captor; and...consanguinity a bar to virtuous love." Schelling cites Campaspe, Romeo and Juliet, The Malcontent, Philaster, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as dramatic precedents. (He also concedes that the play "is not bad, as such productions go.")

The cast list supplied by the manuscript is one of only eight extant King's Men lists from the period of the 1620s and the early 1630s, making it a valuable source of information on the company in this era.

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