The Little French Lawyer is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. It was initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. Date Definite information on the play's date of authorship and early performance history is lacking. Scholars generally date the play to the 1619–23 period. The second Beaumont/Fletcher folio of 1679 provides a cast list for the play, which includes Joseph Taylor, Nicholas Tooley, John Lowin, William Ecclestone, John Underwood, Richard Sharpe, Robert Benfield, and Thomas Holcombe. This is the same cast of actors from the King's Men that the folio gives for The Custom of the Country and Women Pleased, plays that are thought to date from the same era. These plays must have premiered between the Spring of 1619, when Taylor joined the troupe, and June 1623, when Tooley died. Authorship Given Fletcher's highly distinctive style and mannerisms, the division of shares of authorship in the play is relatively clear. Cyrus Hoy offered a delineation that generally agreed with those of other critics: Massinger – Act I; Act III, scene 3; Act IV, 5; Act V, 3; Fletcher – Act II; Act III, scenes 1, 2, and 4; Act IV, 1–4; Act V, 2; Fletcher and Massinger – Act IV, scenes 6–7; Act V, 1. The play's closing couplet is similar to the closing couplet in The Sea Voyage, another of the dramatists' collaborations. The Little French Lawyer provides repeated displays of the two playwrights' habit of re-using characters' names from play to play. Dinant, Cleremont, Lamira and Beaupre all re-appear in Massinger's The Parliament of Love; Cleremont also previously appeared in Fletcher's Philaster and The Noble Gentleman. Lamira and Charlotte are used in The Honest Man's Fortune, and Verdon is found in Rollo Duke of Normandy. Sources The plot of the play is based on a story by Massuccio di Salerno (his Il novellino, novella xli), perhaps in the version in Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán (1599, 1605). The plot bears resemblances with several other plays of the era – the Beaumont and Fletcher play The Scornful Lady, John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Massinger's The Parliament of Love, and A Cure for a Cuckold, by John Webster and William Rowley. In the Restoration The play was revived during the Restoration era, being performed at the Inner Temple in 1670, probably at Candlemas, 2 February. It