The Fall of the Earl of Essex

The Fall of the Earl of Essex is a 1731 tragedy by James Ralph. An adaptation of Restoration play The Unhappy Favourite (1681) by John Banks, it premiered at Goodman's Fields Theatre on 1 February 1731 and ran for four consecutive performances. The text was issued anonymously later that year. Ralph retained Banks’s plot but rewrote much of the dialogue, removed or softened several sensational episodes (including the “box on the ear”), altered stage business (the Queen addresses Essex on his first entrance; the scaffold is shown and Essex’s body is brought on), and regularised the verse with longer, reflective speeches and act-closing similes. Staged at a “little” theatre, the play has been read within the opposition-minded climate of the early 1730s; while direct identification with Sir Robert Walpole has been judged speculative, some scholars view the piece as obliquely anti-Walpole. Critical opinion has been cool: nineteenth-century commentator John Genest called the alteration dull (though better than Banks’s original), and later critics have likewise judged it unsuccessful. When Goodman's Fields returned to the Essex story in 1734 and 1745, bills styled the mainpiece as Banks’s original (The Unhappy Favourite / The Earl of Essex) rather than Ralph’s adaptation.