ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the background to The Pilgrim's composition, its sources and its purposes. A dramatic text such as The Pilgrim offers useful apercus into the intersections between tragicomedy, royalism and exile in the 1640s and 1650s, generating fruitful discussion of the means by which a popular literary and dramatic genre is filtered through the prism of defeat, dispossession and displacement. When exile is added to the mix, the political and psychological ramifications of tragicomedies like The Pilgrim are brought into even sharper focus. In a similar way, because the theatres had been closed by Parliament in 1642 one can argue that any drama performed or intended for performance written in exile, such as The Pilgrim, was on one level an act of political opposition. In offering his own assessment of The Pilgrim's contemporary political resonance, Harbage confined himself to the general comment that the play might have been written to please the exiled English gentry'.
