The Wedding is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by James Shirley. Published in 1629, it was the first of Shirley's plays to appear in print. An early comedy of manners, it is set in the fashionable world of genteel London society in Shirley's day.[1]
The play is thought to date from c. 1626. It was published in quarto in 1629, printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller John Grove. This first edition contained commendatory verses, including one by John Ford; the play was dedicated to William Gowre, Esq., a personal friend of the author. A second quarto was published in 1632; the title page of Q2 states that the play was "lately acted" by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre (also called the Phoenix) in Drury Lane. The Wedding was included among eight of Shirley's plays that were published in one volume in 1640. Another individual edition appeared in 1660, at the start of the Restoration era, published by William Leake.
The scholar and critic Alfred Harbage argued that Shirley's play alludes to the 1625 wedding of Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley. Their nuptials were the "celebrity wedding" of the day, and nobody in London society, Harbage maintained, could have seen or read the play "without thinking of the affair of Sir Kenelm Digby and Venetia Stanley."[2]