The Bashful Lover

The Bashful Lover is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger. Dating from 1636, it is the playwright's last known extant work; it appeared four years before his death in 1640.

The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 9 May 1636; it was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. It was first published in 1655, in the octavo volume titled Three New Plays issued by Humphrey Moseley, a volume that also contained Massinger's The Guardian and the Massinger/Fletcher play A Very Woman. When Moseley entered the play into the Stationers' Register on 9 September 1653, he listed it as Alexius, the Chaste Gallant or The Bashful Lover. There is no character named "Alexius" is Massinger's play — but a play titled Alexius, the Chaste Gallant had been acted in 1639. This appears to have been an instance of Moseley's habit of taking advantage of the inherent confusion of titles and subtitles to register two plays for the price of one. (For similar examples, see The Guardian, The Lovers' Progress, and A Very Woman.)

Comic material from The Bashful Lover (and also from A Very Woman and The Guardian) was adapted into a droll titled Love Lost in the Dark in 1680. The Bashful Lover was successfully revived at Covent Garden in 1798.

No specific source for the play has been identified; but like many of Massinger's plays, The Bashful Lover shares linkages with the prose romances of contemporary Spanish writers like Miguel de Cervantes. Massinger's protagonist, Hortensio, has been characterized as "a sort of pale Quixote; a knight-errant a little cracked or crazed; very sincere, and a trifle given to uttering vague and useless professions of hyperbolic humility and devotion."