The Prophetess is a late Jacobean era stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. It was initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. Date and performance The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 14 May 1622. It was acted by the King's Men; the cast included John Lowin, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Nicholas Tooley, John Shank, George Birch, Richard Sharpe, and Thomas Holcombe. Authorship Due to Fletcher's distinctive stylistic profile, the division of authorship in the play is largely clear and unambiguous. Cyrus Hoy gave this breakdown of the two writers' relative shares: Fletcher – Act I; Act III, Act V, scene 3; Massinger – Act II; Act IV; Act V, scenes 1 and 2. E. H. C. Oliphant provided the same scheme, except for an assignment of V,2 to Fletcher. Massinger may have revised the original play in 1629, for a revival in July of that year. One source of the play's plot is the History of Carinus of Flavius Vopiscus. (Massinger had previously dealt with the reign of Diocletian in The Virgin Martyr, his collaboration with Dekker.) Adaptation The Prophetess was revived by Thomas Betterton in 1690, in a musical adaptation "After the Manner of an Opera," with music by Henry Purcell; that version is sometimes known by the title Dioclesian. Betterton and Purcell's adaptation was performed in Dublin late in 1735. Critical response The Prophetess has been called "a strange and difficult play," noteworthy as almost the only work in Fletcher's canon that treats magic and thaumaturgy as a serious element, with Delphia "as a kind of a curiously feminized Prospero." Synopsis In the 1647 folio, The Prophetess is called a "Tragical History." At one point in the drama, the Chorus states that the play provides "Historie, / yet mixt...with sweet varietie" (IV, i). The plot certainly does offer historical information (some fairly accurate, some wildly not), intermingled with borrowings from folklore, legend, and fairy tale. The story begins in 284 A.D., with the reputedly historical murder of Numerian (the play calls him Numerianus) by Lucius Flavius Aper (in the play, Volutius Aper). In the opening scene, the emperor Charinus and his sister Aurelia discuss their brother's reported murder. They decide to offer a munificent reward to the man who kills Aper – co-rulership of the Roman Empire and Aurelia's