The Duke's Mistress is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by James Shirley and first published in 1638. It was the last of Shirley's plays produced before the major break in his career: with the closing of the London theatres due to bubonic plague in May 1636, Shirley left England for Ireland, where he worked under John Ogilby at the Werburgh Street Theatre in Dublin for four years.
The Duke's Mistress was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 18 January 1636, and was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre. On 22 February 1636 it was performed at St. James's Palace before the King and Queen, Charles I and Henrietta Maria.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 13 March 1638 and was published in quarto later that year, printed by John Norton for the booksellers Andrew Crooke and William Cooke, the partners who issued many of Shirley's plays in that era. Curiously, surviving copies of the quarto differ in identification of the publishers; some copies name Crooke alone, while others mention only Cooke.[1]
The play shares some clear similarities with contemporaneous works like The Queen and Concubine by Richard Brome and A Wife for a Month by John Fletcher.[2] Shirley's use of the idea of men who are attracted to ugly women has provoked commentary on the psychological and other aspects of such a fixation.[3]