Volume 3 / Book 5 — BOOK V PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS (continued 5)

(vii) The Mack.

Produced by the Admiral’s on 21 Feb. 1595; cf. s.v. The Wonder of a Kingdom (supra).

(viii) 1 Fortunatus.

Revived by the Admiral’s on 3 Feb. 1596; cf. s.v. Old Fortunatus (supra).

(ix) Stukeley.

Produced by the Admiral’s on 11 Dec. 1596. On Fleay’s ascription to Dekker, cf. s.v. Captain Thomas Stukeley (Anon.).

(x) Prologue to Tamberlaine.

This rests on a forged entry in Henslowe’s Diary for 20 Dec. 1597; cf. s.v. Marlowe.

(b) Work for Admiral’s, 1598–1602

(i) Phaethon.

Payments in Jan. 1598 and for alterations for the Court in Dec. 1600; cf. s.v. The Sun’s Darling (supra).

(ii) The Triplicity or Triangle of Cuckolds.

Payment in March 1598.

(iii) The Wars of Henry I or The Welshman’s Prize.

Payment, with Chettle and Drayton, March 1598. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 192) speculates on possible relations of the plays to others on a Welshman and on Henry I.

(iv) 1 Earl Godwin.

Payment, with Chettle, Drayton, and Wilson, March 1598.

(v) Pierce of Exton.

Payment, with Chettle, Drayton, and Wilson, April 1598. Apparently the play was not finished.

(vi) 1 Black Bateman of the North.

Payments, with Chettle, Drayton, and Wilson, May 1598.

(vii) 2 Earl Godwin.

Payments, with Chettle, Drayton, and Wilson, May–June 1598.

(viii) The Madman’s Morris.

Payments, with Drayton and Wilson, July 1598.

(ix) Hannibal and Hermes.

Payments, with Drayton and Wilson, July 1598.

(x) 2 Hannibal and Hermes.

Greg (Henslowe, ii. 195) gives this name to (xiii).

(xi) Pierce of Winchester.

Payments, with Drayton and Wilson, July–Aug. 1598.

(xii) Chance Medley.

Payments to Dekker (or Chettle), with Munday, Drayton, and Wilson, Aug. 1598.

(xiii) Worse Afeared than Hurt.

Payments, with Drayton, Aug.–Sept. 1598.

(xiv) 1 Civil Wars of France.

Payment, with Drayton, Sept. 1598.

(xv) Connan Prince of Cornwall.

Payments, with Drayton, Oct. 1598.

(xvi) 2 Civil Wars of France.

Payment, with Drayton, Nov. 1598.

(xvii) 3 Civil Wars of France.

Payments, with Drayton, Nov.–Dec. 1598.

(xviii) Introduction to Civil Wars of France.

Payments, Jan. 1599.

(xix) Troilus and Cressida.

Payments, with Chettle, April 1599. A fragmentary ‘plot’ (cf. ch. xxiv) may belong to this play.

(xx) Agamemnon or Orestes Furious.

Payments, with Chettle, May 1599.

(xxi) The Gentle Craft.

Payment, July 1599; cf. The Shoemaker’s Holiday (supra).

(xxii) The Stepmother’s Tragedy.

Payments, with Chettle, Aug.–Oct. 1599.

(xxiii) Bear a Brain.

Payment, Aug. 1599; cf. s.vv. The Shoemaker’s Holiday (supra) and Look About You (Anon.).

(xxiv) Page of Plymouth.

Payments, with Jonson, Aug.–Sept. 1599.

(xxv) Robert II or The Scot’s Tragedy.

Payments, with Chettle, Jonson, ‘& other Jentellman’ (? Marston, q.v.), Sept. 1599.

(xxvi) Patient Grissell.

Payments, with Chettle and Haughton, Oct.–Dec. 1599; cf. supra.

(xxvii) Fortunatus.

Payments, Nov.–Dec. 1599; cf. s.v. Old Fortunatus (supra).

(xxviii) Truth’s Supplication to Candlelight.

Payments, Jan. 1600. Apparently the play was not finished; cf. s.v. The Whore of Babylon (supra).

(xxix) The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy.

Payment, with Day and Haughton, Feb. 1600. Apparently the play was not finished; cf. s.v. Lust’s Dominion (Marlowe).

(xxx) The Seven Wise Masters.

Payments, with Chettle, Day, and Haughton, March 1600.

(xxxi) The Golden Ass or Cupid and Psyche.

Payments, with Chettle and Day, April-May 1600; on borrowings from this, cf. s.v. Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas.

(xxxii) 1 Fair Constance of Rome.

Payments, with Drayton, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson (q.v.), June 1600.

(xxxiii) [1] Fortune’s Tennis.

Payment, Sept. 1600. A fragmentary plot (cf. ch. xxiv) is perhaps less likely to belong to this than to Munday’s Set at Tennis.

(xxxiv) King Sebastian of Portugal.

Payments, with Chettle, April-May 1601.

(xxxv) The Spanish Fig.

Payment, Jan. 1602. The payee is unnamed; cf. The Noble Soldier (supra).

(xxxvi) Prologue and Epilogue to Pontius Pilate.

Payment, Jan. 1602.

(xxxvii) Alterations to Tasso’s Melancholy.

Payments, Jan.–Dec. 1602.

(xxxviii) Jephthah.

Payments, with Munday, May 1602.

(xxxix) Caesar’s Fall, or The Two Shapes.

Payments, with Drayton, Middleton, Munday, and Webster, May 1602.

(c) Work for Worcester’s, 1602

(i) A Medicine for a Curst Wife.

Payments, July–Sept. 1602. The play was begun for the Admiral’s and transferred to Worcester’s.

(ii) Additions to Sir John Oldcastle.

Payments, Aug.–Sept. 1602; cf. s.v. Drayton.

(iii) 1 Lady Jane, or The Overthrow of Rebels.

Payments, with Chettle, Heywood, Smith, and Webster, Oct. 1602; cf. s.v. Sir Thomas Wyatt (supra).

(iv) 2 Lady Jane.

Payment, Oct. 1602. Apparently the play was not finished; cf. s.v. Sir Thomas Wyatt (supra).

(v) Christmas Comes but Once a Year.

Payments, with Chettle, Heywood, and Webster, Nov. 1602.

(d) Work for Prince’s, 1604

The Patient Man and the Honest Whore.

Payments, with Middleton, Jan.–March 1602; cf. s.v. The Honest Whore (supra).

The following plays are assigned to Dekker in S. R. but are now lost:

The Life and Death of Guy of Warwick, with Day (S. R. 15 Jan. 1620).

Gustavus King of Swethland (S. R. 29 June 1660).

The Tale of Ioconda and Astolso, a Comedy (S. R. 29 June 1660).

The two latter are also in Warburton’s list of burnt plays (3 Library, ii. 231).

The following are assigned to Dekker in Herbert’s licence entries:

A French Tragedy of The Bellman of Paris, by Dekker and Day, for the Prince’s, on 30 July 1623.

The Fairy Knight, by Dekker and Ford, for the Prince’s, on 11 June 1624.

The Bristow Merchant, by Dekker and Ford, for the Palsgrave’s, on 22 Oct. 1624.

Fleay, i. 232, seems to have nothing but the names to go upon in suggesting identifications of the two latter with the Huon of Bordeaux, revived by Sussex’s on 28 Dec. 1593, and Day’s Bristol Tragedy (q.v.) respectively.

For other ascriptions to Dekker see Capt. T. Stukeley, Charlemagne, London Prodigal, Sir Thomas More, The Weakest Goeth to the Wall in ch. xxiv. He has also been conjectured to be the author of the songs in the 1632 edition of Lyly’s plays.

ENTERTAINMENTS

Coronation Entertainment. 1604

See ch. xxiv, C.

Troia Nova Triumphans. 29 Oct. 1612

S. R. 1612, Oct. 21. ‘To be prynted when yt is further Aucthorised, A Booke called Troia Nova triumphans. London triumphinge. or the solemne receauinge of Sir John Swynerton knight into the citye at his Retourne from Westminster after the taking his oathe written by Thomas Decker.’ Nicholas Okes (Arber, iii. 500).

1612. Troia-Noua Triumphans. London Triumphing, or, The Solemne, Magnificent, and Memorable Receiuing of that worthy Gentleman, Sir Iohn Swinerton Knight, into the Citty of London, after his Returne from taking the Oath of Maioralty at Westminster, on the Morrow next after Simon and Iudes day, being the 29. of October, 1612. All the Showes, Pageants, Chariots of Triumph, with other Deuices (both on the Water and Land) here fully expressed. By Thomas Dekker. Nicholas Okes, sold by John Wright.

Edition in Fairholt (1844), ii. 7.

The opening of the description refers to ‘our best-to-be-beloved friends, the noblest strangers’. John Chamberlain (Birch, i. 202) says that the Palsgrave was present and Henry kept away by his illness, that the show was ‘somewhat extraordinary’ and the water procession wrecked by ‘great winds’. At Paul’s Chain the Mayor was met by the ‘first triumph’, a sea-chariot, bearing Neptune and Luna, with a ship of wine. Neptune made a speech. At Paul’s Churchyard came ‘the second land-triumph’, the throne or chariot of Virtue, drawn by four horses on which sat Time, Mercury, Desire, and Industry. Virtue made a speech, and both pageants preceded the Mayor down Cheapside. At the little Conduit in Cheapside was the Castle of Envy, between whom and Virtue there was a dialogue, followed by fireworks from the castle. At the Cross in Cheapside was another ‘triumph’, the House of Fame, with representations of famous Merchant Tailors, ‘a perticular roome being reserved for one that represents the person of Henry, the now Prince of Wales’. After a speech by Fame, the pageant joined the procession, and from it was heard a song on the way to the Guildhall. On the way to Paul’s after dinner, Virtue and Envy were again beheld, and at the Mayor’s door a speech was made by Justice.

THOMAS DELONEY (c. 1543–c. 1600).

A ballad writer and pamphleteer, who wrote a ballad on the visit to Tilbury in 1588. See ch. xxiv, C.

ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX (1566–1601).

It is possible that Essex, who sometimes dabbled in literature, had himself a hand in the device of Love and Self-Love, with which he entertained Elizabeth on 17 Nov. 1595, and of which some of the speeches are generally credited to Bacon (q.v.).

WILLIAM DODD (c. 1597–1602).

A Scholar and Fellow of St. John’s, Cambridge, and a conjectured author of Parnassus (cf. ch. xxiv).

MICHAEL DRAYTON (c. 1563–1631).

Drayton was born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, and brought up in the household of Sir Henry Goodyere of Polesworth, whose daughter Anne, afterwards Lady Rainsford, is the Idea of his pastorals and sonnets. With The Harmony of the Church (1591) began a life-long series of ambitious poems, in all the characteristic Elizabethan manners, for which Drayton found many patrons, notably Lucy Lady Bedford, Sir Walter Aston of Tixall, Prince Henry and Prince Charles, and Edward Earl of Dorset. The guerdons of his pen were not sufficient to keep him from having recourse to the stage. Meres classed him in 1598 among the ‘best for tragedy’, and Henslowe’s diary shows him a busy writer for the Admiral’s men, almost invariably in collaboration with Dekker and others, from Dec. 1597 to Jan. 1599, and a more occasional one from Oct. 1599 to May 1602. At a later date he may possibly have written for Queen Anne’s men, since commendatory verses by T. Greene are prefixed to his Poems of 1605. In 1608 he belonged to the King’s Revels syndicate at Whitefriars. No later connexion with the stage can be traced, and he took no steps to print his plays with his other works. His Elegy to Henry Reynolds of Poets and Poesie (C. Brett, Drayton’s Minor Poems, 108) does honour to Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont, and tradition makes him a partaker in the drinking-bout that led to Shakespeare’s end. Jonson wrote commendatory verses for him in 1627, but in 1619 had told Drummond (Laing, 10) that ‘Drayton feared him; and he esteemed not of him’. The irresponsible Fleay, i. 361; ii. 271, 323, identifies him with Luculento of E. M. O., Captain Jenkins of Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho!, and the eponym of the anonymous Sir Giles Goosecap; Small, 98, with the Decius criticized in the anonymous Jack Drum’s Entertainment, who may also be Dekker.

The collections of Drayton’s Poems do not include his plays.—Dissertations: O. Elton, M. D. (1895, Spenser Soc., 1905); L. Whitaker, M. D. as a Dramatist (1903, M. L. A. xviii. 378).

Sir John Oldcastle. 1599

With Hathaway, Munday, and Wilson.

S. R. 1600, Aug. 11 (Vicars). ‘The first parte of the history of the life of Sir John Oldcastell lord Cobham. Item the second and last parte of the history of Sir John Oldcastell lord Cobham with his martyrdom,’ Thomas Pavier (Arber, iii. 169).

1600. The first part Of the true and honorable historie, of the life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham. As it hath been lately acted by the right honorable the Earle of Notingham Lord high Admirall of England his seruants. V. S. for Thomas Pavier. [Prologue.]

1600.... Written by William Shakespeare. For T. P. [Probably a forgery of later date than that given in the imprint; cf. p. 479.]

1664. In Third Folio Shakespeare.

1685. In Fourth Folio Shakespeare.

Editions in collections of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and by W. Scott (1810, A. B. D. i), P. Simpson (1908, M. S. R.), J. S. Farmer (1911, T. F. T.).

Henslowe advanced £10 to the Admiral’s as payment to Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway for the first part of ‘the lyfe of S^r Jhon Ouldcasstell’ and in earnest for the second part on 16 Oct. 1599, and an additional 10s. for the poets ‘at the playnge of S^r John Oldcastell the ferste tyme as a gefte’ between 1 and 8 Nov. 1599. Drayton had £4 for the second part between 19 and 26 Dec. 1599, and properties were being bought for it in March 1600. It is not preserved. By Aug. 1602 the play had been transferred to Worcester’s men. More properties were bought, doubtless for a revival, and Dekker had £2 10s. for ‘new a dicyons’. Fleay, ii. 116, attempts to disentangle the work of the collaborators. Clearly the play was an answer to Henry IV, in which Sir John Falstaff was originally Sir John Oldcastle, and this is made clear in the prologue:

Doubtful and Lost Plays

For ascriptions see Edward IV, London Prodigal, Merry Devil of Edmonton, Sir T. More, and Thomas Lord Cromwell in ch. xxiv.

The complete series of his work for the Admiral’s during 1597–1602 is as follows:

(i) Mother Redcap.

Payments, with Munday, Dec. 1597–Jan. 1598.

(ii) The Welshman’s Prize, or The Famous Wars of Henry I and the Prince of Wales.

Payments, with Chettle and Dekker, March 1598. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 192) thinks that the play may have had some relation to Davenport’s Henry I of 1624 entered as by Shakespeare and Davenport in S. R. on 9 Sept. 1653.

(iii) 1 Earl Godwin and his Three Sons.

Payments, with Chettle, Dekker, and Wilson, March 1598.

(iv) 2 Earl Godwin and his Three Sons.

Payments, with Chettle, Dekker, and Wilson, May to June 1598.

(v) Pierce of Exton.

Payment of £2, with Chettle, Dekker, and Wilson, April 1598; but apparently not finished.

(vi) 1 Black Bateman of the North.

Payments, with Chettle, Dekker, and Wilson, May 1598.

(vii) Funeral of Richard Cœur-de-lion.

Payments, with Chettle, Munday, and Wilson, June 1598.

(viii) The Madman’s Morris.

Payments, with Dekker and Wilson, July 1598.

(ix) Hannibal and Hermes.

Payments, with Dekker and Wilson, July 1598.

(x) Pierce of Winchester.

Payments, with Dekker and Wilson, July–Aug. 1598.

(xi) Chance Medley.

Payments, with Chettle or Dekker, Munday, and Wilson, Aug. 1598.

(xii) Worse Afeared than Hurt.

Payments, with Dekker, Aug.–Sept. 1598.

(xiii-xv) 1, 2, 3 The Civil Wars of France.

Payments, with Dekker, Sept.–Dec. 1598. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 198) suggests some relation with Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (q.v.).

(xvi) Connan Prince of Cornwall.

Payments, with Dekker, Oct. 1598.

(xvii) William Longsword.

Apparently Drayton’s only unaided play and unfinished. His autograph receipt for a payment in Jan. 1599 is in Henslowe, i. 59.

[There is now a break in Drayton’s dramatic activities, but not in his relations with Henslowe, for whom he acted as a witness on 8 July 1599. On 9 Aug. 1598 he had stood security for the delivery of a play by Munday (Henslowe, i. 60, 93).]

(xviii-xix) 1, 2 Sir John Oldcastle.

See above.

(xx) Owen Tudor.

Payments, with Hathway, Munday, and Wilson, Jan. 1600; but apparently not finished.

(xxi) 1 Fair Constance of Rome.

Payments, with Dekker, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson (q.v.), June 1600.

(xxii) The Rising of Cardinal Wolsey.

Payments, with Chettle (q.v.), Munday, and Smith, Aug.–Nov. 1601.

(xxiii) Caesar’s Fall, or The Two Shapes.

Payments, with Dekker, Middleton, Munday, and Webster, May 1602.

GILBERT DUGDALE (c. 1604).

Author of Time Triumphant, an account of the entry and coronation of James I (cf. ch. xxiv, C).

JOHN DUTTON (c. 1598–1602).

Perhaps only a ‘ghost-name’, but conceivably the author of Parnassus (cf. ch. xxiv).

JOHN DYMMOCKE (c. 1601).

Possibly the translator of Pastor Fido (cf. ch. xxiv).

RICHARD EDES (1555–1604).

Edes, or Eedes, entered Christ Church, Oxford, from Westminster in 1571, took his B.A. in 1574, his M.A. in 1578, and was University Proctor in 1583. He took orders, became Chaplain to the Queen, and was appointed Canon of Christ Church in 1586 and Dean of Worcester in 1597. Some of his verse, both in English and Latin, has survived, and Meres includes him in 1598 amongst ‘our best for Tragedie’. The Epilogue, in Latin prose, of a play called Caesar Interfectus, which was both written and spoken by him, is given by F. Peck in A Collection of Curious Historical Pieces, appended to his Memoirs of Cromwell (1740), and by Boas, 163, from Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon. e. 5, f. 359. A later hand has added the date 1582, from which Boas infers that Caesar Interfectus, of which Edes was probably the author, was one of three tragedies recorded in the Christ Church accounts for Feb.–March 1582. Edes appears to have written or contributed to Sir Henry Lee’s (q.v.) Woodstock Entertainment of 1592.

RICHARD EDWARDES (c. 1523–1566).

Edwardes was a Somersetshire man. He entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 11 May 1540, and became Senior Student of Christ Church in 1547. Before the end of Edward’s reign he was seeking his fortune at Court and had a fee or annuity of £6 13s. 4d. (Stopes, Hunnis, 147). He must not be identified with the George Edwardes of Chapel lists, c. 1553 (ibid. 23; Shakespeare’s Environment, 238; Rimbault, x), but was of the Chapel by 1 Jan. 1557 (Nichols, Eliz. i. xxxv; Illustrations, App. 14), when he made a New Year’s gift of ‘certeigne verses’, and was confirmed in office by an Elizabethan patent of 27 May 1560. He succeeded Bower as Master of the Children, receiving his patent of appointment on 27 Oct. 1561 and a commission to take up children on 4 Dec. 1561 (Wallace, i. 106; ii. 65; cf. ch. xii). Barnabe Googe in his Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes (15 March 1563) puts his ‘doyngs’ above those of Plautus and Terence. In addition to plays at Court, he took his boys on 2 Feb. 1565 and 2 Feb. 1566 to Lincoln’s Inn (cf. ch. vii), of which he had become a member on 25 Nov. 1564 (L. I. Admission Register, i. 72). He appeared at Court as a ‘post’ on behalf of the challengers for a tilt in Nov. 1565 (cf. ch. iv). In 1566 he helped in the entertainment of Elizabeth at Oxford, and on Oct. 31 of that year he died. His reputation as poet and dramatist is testified to in verses by Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, Thomas Twine, and others and proved enduring. The author [Richard Puttenham?] of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) couples him with the Earl of Oxford as deserving the highest price for comedy and enterlude, and Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia (1598) includes him amongst those ‘best for comedy’. Several of his poems are in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576). Warton, iv. 218, says that William Collins (the poet) had a volume of prose stories printed in 1570, ‘sett forth by maister Richard Edwardes mayster of her maiesties revels’. One of these contained a version of the jest used in the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew (q.v.). There is nothing else to connect Edwardes with the Revels office, and probably ‘revels’ in Warton’s account is a mistake for ‘children’ or ‘chapel’.

Dissertations: W. Y. Durand, Notes on R. E. (1902, J. G. P. iv. 348), Some Errors concerning R. E. (1908, M. L. N. xxiii. 129).

Damon and Pythias. 1565

S. R. 1567–8. ‘A boke intituled ye tragecall comodye of Damonde and Pethyas.’ Rycharde Jonnes (Arber, i. 354).

Warton, iv. 214, describes an edition, not now known, as printed by William How in Fleet Street. The Tragical comedie of Damon and Pythias, newly imprinted as the same was playde before the queenes maiestie by the children of her grace’s chapple. Made by Mayster Edwards, then being master of the children. William How. [Only known through the description of Warton, iv. 214.]

1571. The excellent Comedie of two the moste faithfullest Freendes, Damon and Pithias. Newly Imprinted, as the same was shewed before the Queenes Maiestie, by the Children of her Graces Chappell, except the Prologue that is somewhat altered for the proper vse of them that hereafter shall haue occasion to plaie it, either in Priuate, or open Audience. Made by Maister Edwards, then beynge Maister of the Children. Richard Jones.

1582. Richard Jones.

Editions in Dodsley⁴, iv (1874), and by W. Scott (1810, A. B. D. i) and J. S. Farmer (1908, T. F. T.).—Dissertation: W. Y. Durand, A Local Hit in E.’s D. and P. (M. L. N. xxii. 236).

The play is not divided into acts or scenes; the characters include Carisophus a parasite, and Grim the Collier. The prologue [not that used at Court] warns the audience that they will be ‘frustrate quite of toying plays’ and that the author’s muse that ‘masked in delight’ and to some ‘seemed too much in young desires to range’ will leave such sports and write a ‘tragical comedy ... mixed with mirth and care’. Edwardes adds (cf. App. C, No. ix):

A song at the end wishes Elizabeth joy and describes her as ‘void of all sickness, in most perfect health’. Durand uses this reference to date the play in the early months of 1565, since a letter of De Silva (Sp. P. i. 400) records that Elizabeth had a feverish cold since 8 Dec. 1564, but was better by 2 Jan. 1565. He identifies the play with the ‘Edwardes tragedy’ of the Revels Accounts for 1564–5 (cf. App. B), and points out that there is an entry in those accounts for ‘rugge bumbayst and cottone for hosse’, and that in Damon and Pythias (Dodsley, iv. 71) the boys have stuffed breeches with ‘seven ells of rug’ to one hose. A proclamation of 6 May 1562 (Procl. 562) had forbidden the use of more than a yard and three-quarters of stuff in the ‘stockes’ of hose, and an enforcing proclamation (Procl. 619) was required on 12 Feb. 1566. Boas, 157, notes a revival at Merton in 1568.

Fleay, 60, thinks that the play contains attacks on the Paul’s boys in return for satire of Edwardes as Ralph Roister in Ulpian Fulwell’s Like Will to Like (q.v.).

Lost Play

Palamon and Arcite. 1566

This play was acted in two parts on 2 and 4 Sept. 1566, before Elizabeth in the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford (cf. ch. iv). The first night was made memorable by the fall of part of the staircase wall, by which three persons were killed. The Queen was sorry, but the play went on. She gave Edwardes great thanks for his pains. The play was in English. Several contemporary writers assign it to Edwardes, and Nicholas Robinson adds that he and other Christ Church men translated it out of Latin, and that he remained two months in Oxford working at it. Bereblock gives a long analysis of the action, which shows that, even if there is no error as to the intervening Latin version, the original source was clearly Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. W. Y. Durand, Journ. Germ. Phil. iv. 356, argues that Edwardes’s play was not a source of Two Noble Kinsmen, on the ground of the divergence between that and Bereblock’s summary.

There is no evidence of any edition of the play, although Plummer, xxi, says that it ‘has been several times printed’.

Doubtful Plays

Fleay, ii. 295, assigns to Edwardes Godly Queen Hester, a play of which he had only seen a few lines, and which W. W. Greg, in his edition in Materialien, v, has shown with great probability to date from about 1525–9. His hand has also been sought in R. B.’s Apius and Virginia and in Misogonus (cf. ch. xxiv).

ELIZABETH (1533–1603).

H. H. E. Craster (E. H. R. xxix. 722) includes in a list of Elizabeth’s English translations a chorus from Act II of the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus, extant in Bodl. MS. e Museo, 55, f. 48, and printed in H. Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors (ed. Park, 1806), i. 102. It probably dates later than 1561. But he can find no evidence for a Latin version of a play of Euripides referred to by Walpole, i. 85.

RICHARD FARRANT (?-1580).

Farrant’s career as Master of the Children of Windsor and Deputy Master of the Children of the Chapel and founder of the first Blackfriars theatre has been described in chh. xii and xvii. It is not improbable that he wrote plays for the boys, and W. J. Lawrence, The Earliest Private Theatre Play (T. L. S., 11 Aug. 1921), thinks that one of these was Wars of Cyrus (cf. ch. xxiv), probably based on W. Barker’s translation (1567) of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, and that the song of Panthea ascribed to Farrant in a Christ Church manuscript (cf. vol. ii, p. 63) has dropped out from the extant text of this. Farrant’s song, ‘O Jove from stately throne’, mentioning Altages, may be from another play. I think that Wars of Cyrus, as it stands, is clearly post-Tamburlaine, and although there are indications of lost songs at ll. 985, 1628, there is none pointing to a lament of Panthea. But conceivably the play was based on one by Farrant.

GEORGE FEREBE (c. 1573–1613 <)

A musician and Vicar of Bishop’s Cannings, Wilts.

The Shepherd’s Song. 1613

S. R. 1613, June 16. ‘A thinge called The Shepeherdes songe before Queene Anne in 4. partes complete Musical vpon the playnes of Salisbury &c.’ Walter Dight (Arber, iii. 526).

Aubrey, i. 251, says ‘when queen Anne came to Bathe, her way lay to traverse the famous Wensdyke, which runnes through his parish. He made severall of his neighbours good musitians, to play with him in consort, and to sing. Against her majesties comeing, he made a pleasant pastorall, and gave her an entertaynment with his fellow songsters in shepherds’ weeds and bagpipes, he himself like an old bard. After that wind musique was over, they sang their pastorall eglogues (which I have, to insert into Liber B).’ Wood’s similar account in Fasti (1815), i. 270, is probably based on Aubrey’s. He dates the entertainment June 11 (cf. ch. iv. and App. A, s. ann. 1613), and gives the opening of the song as

Aubrey has a shorter notice in another manuscript and adds, ‘He gave another entertaynment in Cote-field to King James, with carters singing, with whipps in their hands; and afterwards, a footeball play’.

GEORGE FERRERS (c. 1500–79).

A Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, son of Thomas Ferrers of St. Albans, who was Page of the Chamber to Henry VIII, and acted as Lord of Misrule to Edward VI at the Christmases of 1551–2 and 1552–3 (Mediaeval Stage, i. 405; Feuillerat, Edw. and M. 56, 77, 90). He sat in Parliaments of both Mary and Elizabeth, and wrote some of the poems in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559–78). He contributed verses to the Kenilworth entertainment of 1575, must then have been a very old man, and died in 1579. Puttenham says of Edward VI’s time, ‘Maister Edward Ferrys ... wrate for the most part to the stage, in Tragedie and sometimes in Comedie or Enterlude’, and again, ‘For Tragedie, the Lord of Buckhurst & Maister Edward Ferrys, for such doings as I haue sene of theirs, do deserue the hyest price’; and is followed by Meres, who places ‘Master Edward Ferris, the author of the Mirror for Magistrates’ amongst ‘our best for Tragedie’ (cf. App. C, Nos. xli, lii). Obviously George Ferrers is meant, but Anthony Wood hunted out an Edward Ferrers, belonging to another family, of Baddesley Clinton, in Warwickshire, and took him for the dramatist. He died in 1564 and had a son Henry, amongst whose papers were found verses belonging to certain entertainments, mostly of the early ‘nineties, which an indiscreet editor thereupon ascribed to George Ferrers (cf. s.v. Sir H. Lee).

NATHAN FIELD (1587–?).

For life vide supra Actors (ch. xv).

A Woman is a Weathercock. 1609 (?)

S. R. 1611, Nov. 23 (Buck). ‘A booke called, A woman is a weather-cocke, beinge a Comedye.’ John Budge (Arber, iii. 471).

1612. A Woman is a Weather-cocke. A New Comedy, As it was acted before the King in White-Hall. And diuers times Priuately at the White-Friers, By the Children of her Maiesties Reuels. Written by Nat: Field. For John Budge. [Epistles to Any Woman that hath been no Weathercock and to the Reader, both signed ‘N. F.’, and Commendatory verses ‘To his loved son, Nat. Field, and his Weathercock Woman’, signed ‘George Chapman’.]

Editions in O. E. D. (1830, ii), by J. P. Collier (1833, Five Old Plays), in Dodsley⁴ (1875, xi), and by A. W. Verity in Nero and Other Plays (1888, Mermaid Series).

This must, I suppose, have been one of the five plays given at Court by the Children of the Whitefriars in the winter of 1609–10. Fleay, i. 185, notes that I. ii refers to the Cleve wars, which began in 1609. The Revels children were not at Court in 1610–11. In his verses to The Faithful Shepherdess (1609–10) Field hopes for his ‘muse in swathing clouts’, to ‘perfect such a work as’ Fletcher’s. The first Epistle promises that when his next play is printed, any woman ‘shall see what amends I have made to her and all the sex’; the second ends, ‘If thou hast anything to say to me, thou know’st where to hear of me for a year or two, and no more, I assure thee’, as if Field did not mean to spend his life as a player.

Amends for Ladies. > 1611

1618. Amends for Ladies. A Comedie. As it was acted at the Blacke-Fryers, both by the Princes Seruants, and the Lady Elizabeths. By Nat. Field. G. Eld for Math. Walbancke.

1639.... With the merry prankes of Moll Cut-Purse: Or, the humour of roaring A Comedy full of honest mirth and wit.... Io. Okes for Math. Walbancke.

Editions, with A W. is a W. (q.v.).

The title-page points to performances in Porter’s Hall (c. 1615–16) by the combined companies of the Prince and Princess; but the Epistle to A W. is a W. (q.v.) makes it clear that the play was at least planned, and probably written, by the end of 1611. Collier, iii. 434, and Fleay, i. 201, confirm this from an allusion to the play in A. Stafford’s Admonition to a Discontented Romanist, appended to his Niobe Dissolved into a Nilus (S. R. 10 Oct. 1611). Fleay is less happy in fixing an inferior limit of date by the publication of the version of the Curious Impertinent story in Shelton’s Don Quixote (1612), since that story was certainly available in Baudouin’s French translation as early as 1608. The introduction of Moll Cutpurse suggests rivalry with Dekker and Middleton’s Roaring Girl (also c. 1610–11) at the Fortune, which theatre is chaffed in ii. 1 and iii. 4.

Later Play

The Fatal Dowry (1632), a King’s men’s play, assigned on the title-page to P. M. and N. F., probably dates from 1616–19. C. Beck, Philip Massinger, The Fatall Dowry, Einleitung zu einer neuen Ausgabe (1906, Erlangen diss.), assigns the prose of II. ii and IV. i to Field. There is an edition by C. L. Lockert (1918).

Doubtful Plays

Attempts have been made to trace Field’s hand in Bonduca, Cupid’s Revenge, Faithful Friends, Honest Man’s Fortune, Thierry and Theodoret, and Four Plays in One, all belonging to the Beaumont (q.v.) and Fletcher series, and in Charlemagne (cf. ch. xxiv).

JOHN FLETCHER (1579–1625).

Fletcher was born in Dec. 1579 at Rye, Sussex, the living of his father Richard Fletcher, who became Bishop of Bristol, Worcester, and in 1594 London. His cousins, Giles and Phineas, are known as poets. He seems too young for the John Fletcher of London who entered Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in 1591. After his father’s death in 1596, nothing is heard of him until his emergence as a dramatist, and of this the date cannot be precisely fixed. Davenant says that ‘full twenty yeares, he wore the bayes’, which would give 1605, but this is in a prologue to The Woman Hater, which Davenant apparently thought Fletcher’s, although it is Beaumont’s; and Oliphant’s attempt to find his hand, on metrical grounds, in Captain Thomas Stukeley (1605) rests only on one not very conclusive scene. But he had almost certainly written for the Queen’s Revels before the beginning, about 1608, of his collaboration with Beaumont, under whom his later career is outlined. It is possible that he is the John Fletcher who married Joan Herring on 3 Nov. 1612 at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, and had a son John about Feb. 1620 in St. Bartholomew’s the Great (Dyce, i. lxxiii), and if so one may put the fact with Aubrey’s gossip (cf. s.v. Beaumont), and with Oldwit’s speech in Shadwell’s Bury-Fair (1689): ‘I knew Fletcher, my friend Fletcher, and his maid Joan; well, I shall never forget him: I have supped with him at his house on the Bankside; he loved a fat loin of pork of all things in the world; and Joan his maid had her beer-glass of sack; and we all kissed her, i’ faith, and were as merry as passed.’ I have sometimes wondered whether Jonson is chaffing Beaumont and Fletcher in Bartholomew Fair (1614), V. iii, iv, as Damon and Pythias, ‘two faithfull friends o’ the Bankside’, that ‘have both but one drabbe’, and enter with a gammon of bacon under their cloaks. I do not think this can refer to Francis Bacon. Fletcher died in Aug. 1625 and was buried in St. Saviour’s (Athenaeum, 1886, ii. 252).

For Plays vide s.v. Beaumont, and for the ascribed lost play of Cardenio, s.v. Shakespeare.

PHINEAS FLETCHER (1582–1650).

Phineas Fletcher, son of Giles, a diplomatist and poet, brother of Giles, a poet, and first cousin of John (q.v.), was baptized at Cranbrook, Kent, on 8 April 1582. From Eton he passed to King’s College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in 1604, his M.A. in 1608, and became a Fellow in 1611. He was Chaplain to Sir Henry Willoughby of Risley from 1616 to 1621, and thereafter Rector of Hilgay, Norfolk, to his death in 1650. He wrote much Spenserian poetry, but his dramatic work was purely academic. In addition to Sicelides, he may have written an English comedy, for which a payment was made to him by King’s about Easter 1607 (Boas, i. xx).

Collections

1869. A. B. Grosart, The Poems of P. F. 4 vols. (Fuller Worthies Library).

1908–9. F. S. Boas, The Poetical Works of Giles Fletcher and P. F. 2 vols. (Cambridge English Classics).

Sicelides. 1615

[MSS.] Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 214.

Addl. MS. 4453. ‘Sicelides: a Piscatorie made by Phinees Fletcher and acted in Kings Colledge in Cambridge.’ [A shorter version than that of Q. and the Rawl. MS.]

S. R. 1631, April 25 (Herbert). ‘A play called Scicelides, acted at Cambridge.’ William Sheeres (Arber, iv. 251).

1631. Sicelides A Piscatory, As it hath been Acted in Kings Colledge, in Cambridge. I. N. for William Sheares. [Prologue and Epilogue.]

A reference (III. iv) to the shoes hung up by Thomas Coryat in Odcombe church indicates a date of composition not earlier than 1612. The play was intended for performance before James at Cambridge, but was actually given before the University after his visit, on 13 March 1615 (cf. ch. iv).

FRANCIS FLOWER (c. 1588).

A Gray’s Inn lawyer, one of the devisers of dumb-shows and directors for the Misfortunes of Arthur of Thomas Hughes (q.v.) in 1588, for which he also wrote two choruses.

JOHN FORD (1586–1639 <).

Ford’s dramatic career, including whatever share he may have had with Dekker (q.v.) in Sun’s Darling and Witch of Edmonton, falls substantially outside my period. But amongst plays entered as his by Humphrey Moseley on 29 June 1660 (Eyre, ii. 271) are:

‘An ill begining has A good end, and a bad begining may have a good end, a Comedy.’

‘The London Merchant, a Comedy.’

These ascriptions recur in Warburton’s list of lost plays (3 Library, ii. 231), where the first play has the title ‘A good beginning may have A good end’. It is possible, therefore, that Ford either wrote or revised the play of ‘A badd beginininge makes a good endinge’, which was performed by the King’s men at Court during 1612–13 (cf. App. B). One may suspect the London Merchant to be a mistake for the Bristow Merchant of Ford and Dekker (q.v.) in 1624. The offer of the title in K. B. P. ind. 11 hardly proves that there was really a play of The London Merchant. Ford’s Honor Triumphant: or The Peeres Challenge, by Armes defensible at Tilt, Turney, and Barriers (1606; ed. Sh. Soc. 1843) is a thesis motived by the jousts in honour of Christian of Denmark (cf. ch. iv). It has an Epistle to the Countesses of Pembroke and Montgomery, and contains four arguments in defence of amorous propositions addressed respectively to the Duke of Lennox and the Earls of Arundel, Pembroke, and Montgomery.

EDWARD FORSETT (c. 1553–c. 1630).

A political writer (D. N. B.) and probable author of the academic Pedantius (cf. App. K).

ABRAHAM FRAUNCE (c. 1558–1633 <).

Fraunce was a native of Shrewsbury, and passed from the school of that place, where he obtained the friendship of Philip Sidney, to St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1576. He took his B.A. in 1580, played in Legge’s academic Richardus Tertius and in Hymenaeus (Boas, 394), which he may conceivably have written (cf. App. K), became Fellow of the college in 1581, and took his M.A. in 1583. He became a Gray’s Inn man, dedicated various treatises on logic and experiments in English hexameters to members of the Sidney and Herbert families during 1583–92, and appears to have obtained through their influence some office under the Presidency of Wales. He dropped almost entirely out of letters, but seems to have been still alive in 1633.

Latin Play

Victoria. 1580 < > 3

[MS.] In possession of Lord De L’Isle and Dudley at Penshurst, headed ‘Victoria’. [Lines ‘Philippo Sidneio’, signed ‘Abrahamus Fransus’. Prologue.]

Edition by G. C. Moore Smith (1906, Materialien, xiv).

The play is an adaptation of Il Fedele (1575) by Luigi Pasqualigo, which is also the foundation of the anonymous Two Italian Gentlemen (q.v.). As Sidney was knighted on 13 Jan. 1583, the play was probably written, perhaps for performance at St. John’s, Cambridge, before that date and after Fraunce took his B.A. in 1580.

Translation

Phillis and Amyntas. 1591

S. R. 1591, Feb. 9 (Bp. of London). ‘A book intituled The Countesse of Pembrookes Ivye churche, and Emanuel.’ William Ponsonby (Arber, ii. 575).

1591. The Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch. Containing the affectionate life, and vnfortunate death of Phillis and Amyntas: That in a Pastorall; This in a Funerall; both in English Hexameters. By Abraham Fraunce. Thomas Orwin for William Ponsonby.

Dissertation: E. Köppel, Die englischen Tasso-Übersetzungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (1889, Anglia, xi).

This consists of a slightly altered translation of the Aminta (1573) of Torquato Tasso, followed by a reprint of Fraunce’s English version (1587) of Thomas Watson’s Amyntas (1585), which is not a play, but a collection of Latin eclogues. There is nothing to show that Fraunce’s version of Aminta was ever acted.

WILLIAM FULBECK (1560–1603?).

He entered Gray’s Inn in 1584, contributed two speeches to the Misfortunes of Arthur of Thomas Hughes (q.v.) in 1588, and wrote various legal and historical books.

ULPIAN FULWELL (c. 1568).

Fulwell was born in Somersetshire and educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford. On 14 April 1577 he was of the parish of Naunton, Gloucestershire, and married Mary Whorewood of Lapworth, Warwickshire.[657]

Like Will to Like. c. 1568

S. R. 1568–9. ‘A play lyke Wyll to lyke quod the Devell to the Collyer.’ John Alde (Arber, i. 379).

1568. An Enterlude Intituled Like wil to like quod the Deuel to the Colier, very godly and ful of pleasant mirth.... Made by Vlpian Fulwell. John Allde.

1587. Edward Allde.

Editions in Dodsley⁴, iii (1874), and by J. S. Farmer (1909, T. F. T.).

A non-controversial moral. The characters, allegorical and typical, are arranged for five actors, and include Ralph Roister, and ‘Nicholas Newfangle the Vice’, who ‘rideth away upon the Devil’s back’ (Dodsley, iii. 357). There is a prayer for the Queen at the end.

This might be The Collier played at Court in 1576. Fleay, 60; i. 235, puts it in 1561–3, assigns it to the Paul’s boys, and suggests that Richard Edwardes (q.v.) is satirized as Ralph Roister. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 228) suggests that Fulwell’s may be the play revived by Pembroke’s at the Rose on 28 Oct. 1600 as ‘the [devell] licke vnto licke’.

WILLIAM GAGER (> 1560–1621).

Gager entered Christ Church, Oxford, from Westminster in 1574, and took his B.A. in 1577, his M.A. in 1580, and his D.C.L. in 1589. In 1606 he became Chancellor of the diocese of Ely. He had a high reputation for his Latin verses, many of which are contained in Exequiae D. Philippi Sidnaei (1587) and other University volumes. A large collection in Addl. MS. 22583 includes lines to George Peele (q.v.). Meres in 1598 counts him as one of ‘the best for comedy amongst vs’. His correspondence with John Rainolds affords a summary of the controversy on the ethics of the stage in its academic aspect.

Latin Plays

Meleager. Feb. 1582

1592. Meleager. Tragoedia noua. Bis publice acta in aede Christi Oxoniae. Oxoniae. Joseph Barnes. [Epistle to Earl of Essex, ‘ex aede Christi Oxoniae, Calendis Ianuarij MDXCII. Gulielmus Gagerus’; Commendatory verses by Richard Edes, Alberico Gentili, and I. C[ase?]; Epistle Ad lectorem Academicum; Prologus ad academicos; Argumentum; Prologus ad illustrissimos Penbrochiae ac Lecestriae Comites. At end, Epilogus ad Academicos; Epilogus ad clarissimos Comites Penbrochiensem ac Lecestrensem; Panniculus Hippolyto ... assutus (vide infra); Apollo προλογίζει ad serenissimam Reginam Elizabetham 1592; Prologus in Bellum Grammaticale ad eandem sacram Maiestatem; Epilogus in eandem Comoediam ad Eandem.]

The dedication says ‘Annus iam pene vndecimus agitur ... ex quo Meleager primum, octauus ex quo iterum in Scenam venit’, and adds that Pembroke, Leicester, and Sidney were present on the second occasion. Meleager is ‘primogenitus meus’. The first production was doubtless one of those recorded in the Christ Church accounts in Feb. 1582 (Boas, 162), and the second during Leicester’s visit as Chancellor in Jan. 1585 (Boas, 192).

Dido. 12 June 1583

[MSS.] Christ Church, Oxford, MS. [complete text].

Addl. MS. 22583. [Acts II, III only, with Prologue, Argument, and Epilogue.]

Edition of B.M. fragment by A. Dyce (1850, Marlowe’s Works). Abstract from Ch. Ch. MS. in Boas, 183.

The play was produced before Alasco at Christ Church on 12 June 1583. It is unlikely that it influenced Marlowe’s play.

Ulysses Redux. 6 Feb. 1592

1592. Vlysses Redux Tragoedia Nova. In Aede Christi Oxoniae Publice Academicis Recitata, Octavo Idus Februarii. 1591. Oxoniae. Joseph Barnes. [Prologus ad Academicos; Epistle to Lord Buckhurst, ‘ex aede Christi Oxoniae sexto Idus Maij, 1592 ... Gulielmus Gagerus’; Commendatory verses by Thomas Holland, Alberico Gentili, Richard Edes, Henry Bust, Matthew Gwinne, Richard Late-warr, Francis Sidney, John Hoschines (Hoskins), William Ballowe, James Weston; Verses Ad Zoilum; Epistle Ad Criticum. At end, Prologus in Rivales Comoediam; Prologus in Hippolytum Senecae Tragoediam; Epilogus in eundem; Momus; Epilogus Responsiuus.]

The play was produced on Sunday, 6 Feb. 1592, and an indiscreet invitation to John Rainolds opened the flood-gates of controversy upon Gager’s head (cf. vol. i, p. 251 and App. C, No. 1). Gager’s Rivales was revived on 7 Feb. and the pseudo-Senecan Hippolytus, with Gager’s Panniculus, on 8 Feb. followed by a speech in the character of Momus as a carper at plays, and a reply to Momus by way of Epilogue. The latter was printed in an enlarged form given to it during the course of the controversy (Boas, 197, 234, with dates which disregard leap-year).

Additions to Hippolytus. 8 Feb. 1592

1592. Panniculus Hippolyto Senecae assutus, 1591. [Appended to Meleager; for Gager’s prologue, &c., cf. s.v. Ulysses Redux.]

These consist of two scenes, one of the nature of an opening, the other an insertion between Act I and Act II, written for a performance of the play at Christ Church on 8 Feb. 1592.

Oedipus

Addl. MS. 22583, f. 31, includes with other poems by Gager five scenes from a tragedy on Oedipus, of which nothing more is known.

Lost Play

Rivales. 11 June 1583

This comedy was produced before Alasco at Christ Church, on 11 June 1583. It is assigned to Gager by A. Wood, Annals, ii. 216, and referred to as his in the controversy with Rainolds (Boas, 181), who speaks of it as ‘the vnprinted Comedie’, and criticizes its ‘filth’. It contained scenes of country wooing, drunken sailors, a miles gloriosus, a blanda lena. The prologue to Dido says of it:

It was revived at Christ Church on 7 Feb. 1592 (Boas, 197) and again at the same place before Elizabeth on 26 Sept. 1592, when, according to a Cambridge critic, it was ‘but meanely performed’. Presumably it is the prologue for this revival which is printed with Ulysses Redux (q.v.).

BERNARD GARTER (c. 1578).

A London citizen, whose few and mainly non-dramatic writings were produced from 1565 to 1579. For his description of the Norwich entertainment (1578), cf. ch. xxiv.

THOMAS GARTER (c. 1569).

He may conceivably be identical with Bernard Garter, since Thomas and Bernard are respectively given from different sources (cf. D. N. B.) as the name of the father of Bernard Garter of Brigstocke, Northants, whose son was alive in 1634.

Susanna, c. 1569

S. R. 1568–9. ‘Ye playe of Susanna.’ Thomas Colwell (Arber, i. 383).

1578?

No copy is known, but S. Jones, Biographica Dramatica (1812), iii. 310, says: ‘Susanna. By Thomas Garter 4^to 1578. The running title of this play is, The Commody of the moste vertuous and godlye Susanna.’ According to Greg, Masques, cxxiii, the original authority for the statement is a manuscript note by Thomas Coxeter (ob. 1747) in a copy of G. Jacob’s Lives of the Dramatic Poets (1719–20). ‘Susanna’ is in Rogers and Ley’s list, and an interlude ‘Susanna’s Tears’ in Archer’s and Kirkman’s.

GEORGE GASCOIGNE (c. 1535–77).

George Gascoigne was son of Sir John Gascoigne of Cardington, Bedfordshire. He was probably born between 1530 and 1535, and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Gray’s Inn. He misspent his youth as a dissipated hanger-on at Court, under the patronage of Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton and others, and won some reputation as a versifier. About 1566 he married Elizabeth Breton of Walthamstow, widow of a London merchant, and mother of Nicholas Breton, the poet. From March 1573 to Oct. 1574 he served as a volunteer under William of Orange in the Netherlands. In 1575 he was assisting in preparing shows before Elizabeth at Kenilworth and Woodstock. It is possible that he was again in the Netherlands and present at the sack of Antwerp in 1576. On 7 Oct. 1577 he died at Stamford.

Collections

N.D. [1573] A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie.... For Richard Smith. [Datable by a prefatory epistle of 20 Jan. 1573, signed ‘H. W.’ and a reference in Gascoigne’s own epistle of 31 Jan. 1575 to Q₂. Includes Jocasta, Supposes, and the Mask.]

1575. The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire. Corrected, perfected, and augmented by the Authour. H. Bynneman for Richard Smith. [A second issue, For Richard Smith.]

1587. The whole workes of George Gascoigne Esquyre: Newlye compyled into one Volume.... Abel Jeffes. [Adds the Princely Pleasures. A second issue, ‘The pleasauntest workes....’]

1869–70. W. C. Hazlitt, The Complete Poems of George Gascoigne. 2 vols. (Roxburghe Library). [Adds Glass of Government and Hemetes.]

1907–10. J. W. Cunliffe, The Complete Works of George Gascoigne. 2 vols. (C. E. C.).

Dissertation: F. E. Schelling, The Life and Writings of George Gascoigne (1893, Pennsylvania Univ. Publ.).

Jocasta. 1566

With Francis Kinwelmershe.

[MS.] B.M. Addl. MS. 34063, formerly the property of Roger, second Lord North, whose name and the motto ‘Durum Pati [15]68’ are on the title.

1573. Iocasta: A Tragedie written in Greke by Euripides, translated and digested into Acte by George Gascoyne, and Francis Kinwelmershe of Grayes Inne, and there by them presented. 1566. Henry Bynneman for Richard Smith. [Part of Collection, 1573; also in 1575, 1587. Argument; Epilogue ‘Done by Chr. Yeluerton’.]

Editions by F. J. Child (1848, Four Old Plays) and J. W. Cunliffe (1906, B. L., and 1912, E. E. C. T.).—Dissertation: M. T. W. Foerster, Gascoigne’s J. a Translation from the Italian (1904, M. P. ii. 147).

A blank-verse translation of Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta (1549), itself a paraphrase or adaptation of the Phoenissae of Euripides (Creizenach, ii. 408). After Acts I and IV appears ‘Done by F. Kinwelmarshe’ and after II, III, V ‘Done by G. Gascoigne’. Before each act is a description of a dumb-show and of its accompanying music.

Supposes. 1566

1573. Supposes: A Comedie written in the Italian tongue by Ariosto, and Englished by George Gascoyne of Grayes Inne Esquire, and there presented. [Part of Collection, 1573; also in 1575 (with addition of ‘1566’ to title) and 1587. Prologue.]

Editions by T. Hawkins (1773, O. E. D. iii), J. W. Cunliffe (1906, B. L.), and R. W. Bond (1911, E. P. I.).

A prose translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s I Suppositi (1509). There was probably a revival at Trinity, Oxford, on 8 Jan. 1582, when Richard Madox records, ‘We supt at y^e presidents lodging and after had y^e supposes handeled in y^e haul indifferently’ (Boas, 161).

The Glass of Government. c. 1575

1575. The Glasse of Governement. A tragicall Comedie so entituled, bycause therein are handled aswell the rewardes for Vertues, as also the punishment for Vices. Done by George Gascoigne Esquier. 1575. Seen and allowed, according to the order appointed in the Queenes Maiesties Injunctions. For C. Barker. [Colophon] H. M. for Christopher Barker. [Epistle to Sir Owen Hopton, by ‘G. Gascoigne’, dated 26 Apr. 1575; Commendatory verses by B. C.; Argument; Prologue; Epilogue. A reissue has a variant colophon (Henry Middleton) and Errata.]

Edition by J. S. Farmer (1914, S. F.).—Dissertation: C. H. Herford, G.’s G. of G. (E. S. ix. 201).

This, perhaps only a closet drama, is an adaptation of the ‘Christian Terence’ (cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 216), with which Gascoigne may have become familiar in Holland during 1573–4. The prologue (cf. App. C, No. xiv) warns that the play is not a mere ‘worthie jest’, and that

MASK

Montague Mask. 1572

1573. A Devise of a Maske for the right honourable Viscount Mountacute. [Part of Collection, 1573; also in 1575, 1587.]

Anthony and Elizabeth Browne, children of Anthony, first Viscount Montague, married Mary and Robert, children of Sir William Dormer of Eythorpe, Bucks., in 1572 (cf. ch. v).

ENTERTAINMENTS

See s.v. Lee, Woodstock Entertainment (1575) and ch. xxiv, s.v. Kenilworth Entertainment (1575).

THOMAS GOFFE (1591–1629).

Selimus and the Second Maiden’s Tragedy have been ascribed to him, but as regards the first absurdly, and as regards the second not plausibly, since he only took his B.A. degree in 1613. His known plays are later in date than 1616.

ARTHUR GOLDING (1536–1605 <).

Arthur was son of John Golding of Belchamp St. Paul, Essex, and brother-in-law of John, 16th Earl of Oxford. He was a friend of Sidney and known to Elizabethan statesmen of puritanical leanings. Almost his only original work was a Discourse upon the Earthquake (1580), but he was a voluminous translator of theological and classical works, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1565, 1567). Beza’s tragedy was written when he was Professor at Lausanne in 1550 (Creizenach, ii. 456).

Abraham’s Sacrifice. 1575

1577. A Tragedie of Abrahams Sacrifice, Written in french, by Theodore Beza, and translated into Inglish by A. G. Finished at Powles Belchamp in Essex, the xj of August, 1575. Thomas Vautrollier. [Woodcuts, which do not suggest a scenic representation.]

Edition by M. W. Wallace (1907, Toronto Philological Series).

HENRY GOLDINGHAM (c. 1575).

A contributor to the Kenilworth and Norwich entertainments (cf. ch. xxiv, C) and writer of The Garden Plot (1825, Roxburghe Club). Gawdy, 13, mentions ‘a yonge gentleman touard my L. of Leycester called Mr. Goldingam’, as concerned c. 1587 in a street brawl.

WILLIAM GOLDINGHAM (c. 1567).

Author of the academic Herodes (cf. App. K).

HENRY GOLDWELL (c. 1581).

Describer of The Fortress of Perfect Beauty (cf. ch. xxiv, C).

STEPHEN GOSSON (1554–1624).

Gosson was born in Kent during 1554, was at Corpus Christi, Oxford, 1572 to 1576, then came to London, where he obtained some reputation as playwright and poet. Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) commends his pastorals, which are lost. Lodge speaks of him also as a ‘player’.[658] In 1579 he forsook the stage, became a tutor in the country and published The School of Abuse (App. C, No. xxii). This he dedicated to Sidney, but ‘was for his labour scorned’. He was answered the same year in a lost pamphlet called Strange News out of Afric and also by Lodge (q.v.), and rejoined with A Short Apology of the School of Abuse (App. C, No. xxiv). The players revived his plays to spite him and on 23 Feb. 1582 produced The Play of Plays and Pastimes to confute him. In the same year he produced his final contribution to the controversy in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (App. C, No. xxx). In 1591 Gosson became Rector of Great Wigborough, Essex, and in 1595 published the anonymous pamphlet Pleasant Quips for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen. In 1600 he became Rector of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. In 1616 and 1617 he wrote to Alleyn (q.v.) as his ‘very loving and ancient friend’.[659] He died 13 Feb. 1624.

Gosson claims to have written both tragedies and comedies,[660] but no play of his is extant. He names three of them. Of Catiline’s Conspiracies he says that it was ‘usually brought into the Theater and that ‘because it is known to be a pig of mine own sow, I will speak the less of it; only giving you to understand, that the whole mark which I shot at in that work was to show the reward of traitors in Catiline, and the necessary government of learned men in the person of Cicero, which foresees every danger that is likely to happen and forestalls it continually ere it take effect’.[661] Lodge disparages the originality of this play and compares it unfavourably with Wilson’s Short and Sweet[662] (q.v.). Of two other plays Gosson says: ‘Since my publishing the School of Abuse two plays of my making were brought to the stage; the one was a cast of Italian devices, called, The Comedy of Captain Mario; the other a Moral, Praise at Parting. These they very impudently affirm to be written by me since I had set out my invective against them. I can not deny they were both mine, but they were both penned two years at the least before I forsook them, as by their own friends I am able to prove.’[663] It is conceivable that Gosson may be the translator of Fedele and Fortunio (cf. ch. xxiv).

ROBERT GREENE (1558–92).

Robert Greene was baptized at Norwich on 11 July 1558. He entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1575 and took his B.A. in 1578 and his M.A. by 1583, when he was residing in Clare Hall. The addition of an Oxford degree in July 1588 enabled him to describe himself as Academiae Utriusque Magister in Artibus. He has been identified with a Robert Greene who was Vicar of Tollesbury, Essex, in 1584–5, but there is no real evidence that he took orders. The earlier part of his career may be gathered from his autobiographic pamphlet, The Repentance of Robert Greene (1592), eked out by the portraits, also evidently in a measure autobiographic, of Francesco in Never Too Late (1590) and of Roberto in Green’s Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). It seems that he travelled in youth and learnt much wickedness; then married and lived for a while with his wife and had a child by her. During this period he began his series of euphuistic love-romances. About 1586, however, he deserted his wife, and lived a dissolute life in London with the sister of Cutting Ball, a thief who ended his days at Tyburn, as his mistress. By her he had a base-born son, Fortunatus. He does not seem to have been long in London before he ‘had wholly betaken me to the penning of plays which was my continual exercise’.[664] His adoption of his profession seems to be described in The Groats-worth of Wit. Roberto meets a player, goes with him, and soon becomes ‘famozed for an arch-plaimaking poet’.[665] Similarly, in Never Too Late, Francesco ‘fell in amongst a company of players, who persuaded him to try his wit in writing of comedies, tragedies, or pastorals, and if he could perform anything worthy of the stage, then they would largely reward him for his pains’. Hereupon Francesco ‘writ a comedy, which so generally pleased the audience that happy were those actors in short time, that could get any of his works, he grew so exquisite in that faculty’.[666] Greene’s early dramatic efforts seem to have brought him into rivalry with Marlowe (q.v.). In the preface to Perimedes the Blacksmith (S. R. 29 March 1588) he writes: ‘I keep my old course to palter up something in prose, using mine old poesie still, Omne tulit punctum, although lately two Gentlemen Poets made two mad men of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers: and had it in derision for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the Sun.... Such mad and scoffing poets that have poetical spirits, as bred of Merlin’s race, if there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in an English blank-verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with self-love, or too much frequenting the hot-house (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits.... I but answer in print what they have offered on the stage.’[667] The references here to Marlowe are unmistakable. His fellow ‘gentleman poet’ is unknown; but the ‘mad priest of the Sun’ suggests the play of ‘the lyfe and deathe of Heliogabilus’, entered on S. R. to John Danter on 19 June 1594, but now lost.[668] In 1589 Greene published his Menaphon (S. R. 23 Aug.), in which he further alluded to Marlowe as the teller of ‘a Canterbury tale; some prophetical full-mouth that as he were a Cobler’s eldest son, would by the last tell where anothers shoe wrings’.[669] Doron, in the same story, appears to parody a passage in the anonymous play of The Taming of A Shrew, which is further alluded to in a prefatory epistle To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities contributed to Greene’s book by Thomas Nashe. Herein Nashe, while praising Peele and his Arraignment of Paris, satirizes Marlowe, Kyd, and particularly the players (cf. App. C, No. xlii). To Menaphon are also prefixed lines by Thomas Brabine which tells the ‘wits’ that ‘strive to thunder from a stage-man’s throat’ how the novel is beyond them. ‘Players, avaunt!’[670] In the following year, 1590, Greene continued the attack on the players in the autobiographic romance, already referred to, of Never Too Late (cf. App. C, No. xliii). In 1590 Greene, whose publications had hitherto been mainly toys of love and romance, began a series of moral pamphlets, full of professions of repentance and denunciations of villainy. To these belong, as well as Never Too Late, Greene’s Mourning Garment (1590) and Greene’s Farewell to Folly (1591). A preface to the latter contains some satirical references to the anonymous play of Fair Em (cf. ch. xxiv.) One R. W. retorted upon Greene in a pamphlet called Martine Mar-Sextus (S. R. 8 Nov. 1591), in which he abuses lascivious authors who finally ‘put on a mourning garment and cry Farewell’.[671] Similarly, Greene’s exposures of ‘cony-catching’ or ‘sharping’ provoked the following passage in the Defence of Cony-catching (S. R. 21 April 1592) by one Cuthbert Conycatcher: ‘What if I should prove you a cony-catcher, Master R. G., would it not make you blush at the matter?... Ask the Queen’s players if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same play to the Lord Admiral’s men for as many more.... I hear, when this was objected, that you made this excuse; that there was no more faith to be held with players than with them that valued faith at the price of a feather; for as they were comedians to act, so the actions of their lives were camelion-like; that they were uncertain, variable, time-pleasers, men that measured honesty by profit, and that regarded their authors not by desert but by necessity of time.’[672] It is probable that the change in the tone of Greene’s writings did not correspond to any very thorough-going reformation of life. There is nothing to show that Greene had any share in the Martinist controversy. But he became involved in one of the personal animosities to which it led. Richard Harvey, the brother of Gabriel, in his Lamb of God (S. R. 23 Oct. 1589), while attacking Lyly as Paphatchet, had ‘mistermed all our other poets and writers about London, piperly make-plaies and make-bates. Hence Greene, beeing chiefe agent for the companie [i.e. the London poets] (for hee writ more than foure other, how well I will not say: but sat citò, si sat benè) tooke occasion to canuaze him a little.’[673] Apparently he called the Harveys, in his A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (S. R. 21 July 1592, cf. App. C, No. xlvii), the sons of a ropemaker, which is what they were.[674] In August Greene partook freely of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings at a supper with Nashe and one Will Monox, and fell into a surfeit. On 3 September he died in a squalid lodging, after writing a touching letter to his deserted wife, and begging his landlady, Mrs. Isam, to lay a wreath of bays upon him. These details are recorded by Gabriel Harvey, who visited the place and wrote an account of his enemy’s end in a letter to a friend, which he published in his Four Letters and Certain Sonnets: especially Touching Robert Greene, and Other Parties by him Abused (S. R. 4 Dec. 1592).[675] This brought Nashe upon him in the Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters[676] (S. R. 12 Jan. 1593) and began a controversy between the two which lasted for several years. In Pierce’s Supererogation (27 Apr. 1593) Harvey spoke of ‘Nash, the ape of Greene, Greene the ape of Euphues, Euphues the ape of Envy’, and declared that Nashe ‘shamefully and odiously misuseth every friend or acquaintance as he hath served ... Greene, Marlowe, Chettle, and whom not?’[677] In Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), Nashe defends himself against these accusations. ‘I never abusd Marloe, Greene, Chettle in my life.... He girds me with imitating of Greene.... I scorne it ... hee subscribing to me in anything but plotting Plaies, wherein he was his crafts master.’[678] The alleged abuse of Marlowe, Greene, and Chettle belongs to the history of another pamphlet. This is Green’s Groats-worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance (S. R. 20 Sept. 1592, ‘upon the peril of Henry Chettle’[679]). According to the title-page, it was ‘written before his death and published at his dying request’. To this is appended the famous address To those Gentlemen, his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plays.[680] The reference here to Shakespeare is undeniable. Of the three playwrights warned, the first and third are almost certainly Marlowe and Peele; the third may be Lodge, but on the whole is far more likely to be Nashe (q.v.). It appears, however, that Nashe himself was supposed to have had a hand in the authorship. Chettle did his best to take the responsibility off Nashe’s shoulders in the preface to his Kind-Hart’s Dream (S. R. 8 Dec. 1592; cf. App. C, No. xlix). In the epistle prefixed to the second edition of Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil (Works, i. 154), written early in 1593, Nashe denies the charge for himself and calls The Groats-worth ‘a scald trivial lying pamphlet’; and it is perhaps to this that Harvey refers as abuse of Greene, Marlowe, and Chettle, although it is not clear how Marlowe comes in. There is an echo of Greene’s hit at the ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’ in the lines of R. B., Greene’s Funerals (1594, ed. McKerrow, 1911, p. 81):

It should be added that the theory that Greene himself was actor as well as playwright rests on a misinterpretation of a phrase of Harvey’s and is inconsistent with the invariable tone of his references to the profession.

Collections

1831. A. Dyce, The Dramatic Works of R. G. 2 vols.

1861, &c. A. Dyce, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of R. G. and George Peele.

1881–6. A. B. Grosart, The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of R. G. 15 vols. (Huth Library).

1905. J. C. Collins, The Plays and Poems of R. G. 2 vols.

1909. T. H. Dickinson, The Plays of R. G. (Mermaid Series).

Dissertations: W. Bernhardi, R. G.’s Leben und Schriften (1874); J. M. Brown, An Early Rival of Shakespeare (1877); N. Storojenko, R. G.: His Life and Works (1878, tr. E. A. B. Hodgetts, in Grosart, i); R. Simpson, Account of R. G., his Life and Works, and his Attacks on Shakspere, in School of Sh. (1878), ii; C. H. Herford, G.’s Romances and Shakespeare (1888, N. S. S. Trans. 181); K. Knauth, Ueber die Metrik R. G.’s (1890, Halle diss.); H. Conrad, R. G. als Dramatiker (1894, Jahrbuch, xxix. 210); W. Creizenach, G. über Shakespeare (1898, Wiener Festschrift); G. E. Woodberry, G.’s Place in Comedy, and C. M. Gayley, R. G., His Life and the Order of his Plays (1903, R. E. C. i); K. Ehrke, R. G.’s Dramen (1904); S. L. Wolff, R. G. and the Italian Renaissance (1907, E. S. xxxvii. 321); F. Brie, Lyly und G. (1910, E. S. xlii. 217); J. C. Jordan, R. G. (1915).

Alphonsus. c. 1587

1599. The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus King of Aragon. As it hath bene sundrie times Acted. Made by R. G. Thomas Creede.

There is general agreement that, on grounds of style, this should be the earliest of Greene’s extant plays. In IV. 1444 is an allusion to ‘mighty Tamberlaine’, and the play reads throughout like an attempt to emulate the success of Marlowe’s play of 1587 (?). In IV. i Mahomet speaks out of a brazen head. The play may therefore be alluded to in the ‘Mahomet’s poo [pow]’ of Peele’s (q.v.) Farewell of April 1589, although Peele may have intended his own lost play of The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek. There is no reference in Alphonsus to the Armada of 1588. On the whole, the winter of 1587 appears the most likely date for it, and if so, it is possibly the play whose ill success is recorded by Greene in the preface to Perimedes (1588). The Admiral’s revived a Mahomet on 16 Aug. 1594, inventoried ‘owld Mahemetes head’ in 1598, and revived the play again in Aug. 1601, buying the book from Alleyn, who might have brought it from Strange’s, or bought it from the Queen’s (Greg, Henslowe, ii. 167; Henslowe Papers, 116). Collins dates Alphonsus in 1591, on a theory, inconsistent with the biographical indications of the pamphlets, that Greene’s play-writing did not begin much before that year. A ‘Tragicomoedia von einem Königk in Arragona’ played at Dresden in 1626 might be either this play or Mucedorus (Herz, 66, 78).

A Looking Glass for London and England. c. 1590

With Lodge.

S. R. 1594, March 5. ‘A booke intituled the lookinge glasse for London by Thomas Lodg and Robert Greene gent.’ Thomas Creede (Arber, ii. 645).

1594. A Looking Glasse for London and England. Made by Thomas Lodge Gentleman, and Robert Greene. In Artibus Magister. Thomas Creede, sold by William Barley.

1598. Thomas Creede, sold by William Barley.

1602. Thomas Creede, for Thomas Pavier.

1617. Bernard Alsop.

Edition by J. S. Farmer (1914, S. F. T.).

The facts of Lodge’s (q.v.) life leave 1588, before the Canaries voyage, or 1589–91, between that voyage and Cavendish’s expedition, as possible dates for the play. In favour of the former is Lodge’s expressed intention in 1589 to give up ‘penny-knave’s delight’. On the other hand, the subject is closely related to that of Greene’s moral pamphlets, the series of which begins in 1590, and the fall of Nineveh is referred to in The Mourning Garment of that year. Fleay, ii. 54, and Collins, i. 137, accept 1590 as the date of the play. Gayley, 405, puts it in 1587, largely on the impossible notion that its ‘priest of the sun’ (IV. iii. 1540) is that referred to in the Perimedes preface, but partly also from the absence of any reference to the Armada. It is possible that ‘pleasing Alcon’ in Spenser’s Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (1591) may refer to Lodge as the author of the character Alcon in this play. The Looking Glass was revived by Strange’s men on 8 March 1592. The clown is sometimes called Adam in the course of the dialogue (ll. 1235 sqq., 1589 sqq., 2120 sqq.), and a comparison with James IV suggests that the original performer was John Adams of the Queen’s men, from whom Henslowe may have acquired the play. Fleay, ii. 54, and Gayley, 405, make attempts to distinguish Greene’s share from Lodge’s, but do not support their results by arguments. Crawford, England’s Parnassus, xxxii, 441, does not regard Allot’s ascription of the passages he borrowed to Greene and Lodge respectively as trustworthy. Unnamed English actors played a ‘comedia auss dem propheten Jona’ at Nördlingen in 1605 (Herz, 78).

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, c. 1589

S. R. 1594, May 14. ‘A booke entituled the Historye of ffryer Bacon and ffryer Boungaye.’ Adam Islip (Arber, ii. 649). [Against this and other plays entered on the same day, Adam Islip’s name is crossed out and Edward White’s substituted.]

1594. The Honorable Historie of frier Bacon, and frier Bongay. As it was plaid by her Maiesties seruants. Made by Robert Greene Maister of Arts. For Edward White. [Malone dated one of his copies of the 1630 edition ‘1599’ in error; cf. Gayley, 430.]

1630.... As it was lately plaid by the Prince Palatine his Seruants.... Elizabeth Allde. [The t.p. has a woodcut representing Act II, sc. iii.]

1655. Jean Bell.

Editions by A. W. Ward (1878, &c.), C. M. Gayley (1903, R. E. C. i), W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.), and J. S. Farmer (1914, S. F. T.).—Dissertation: O. Ritter, De R. G. Fabula: F. B. and F. B. (1866, Thorn diss.).

Fleay, in Appendix B to Ward’s ed., argues from I. i. 137, ‘next Friday is S. James’, that the date of the play is 1589, in which year St. James’s Day fell on a Friday. This does not seem to me a very reliable argument. Probably the play followed not long after Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (q.v.), itself probably written in 1588–9. The date of 1589, which Ward, i. 396, and Gayley, 411, accept, is likely enough. Collins prefers 1591–2, and notes (ii. 4) a general resemblance in tone and theme to Fair Em, but there is nothing to indicate the priority of either play, and no charge of plagiarism in the pamphlets (vide supra) to which Fair Em gave rise. Friar Bacon was revived by Strange’s men on 19 Feb. 1592, and again by the Queen’s and Sussex’s men together on 1 April 1594. Doubtless it was Henslowe’s property, as Middleton wrote a prologue and epilogue for a performance by the Admiral’s men at Court at Christmas 1602 (Greg, Henslowe, ii. 149).

Orlando Furioso. c. 1591

[MS.] The Dulwich MSS. contain an actor’s copy with cues of Orlando’s part. Doubtless it belonged to Alleyn. The fragment covers ll. 595–1592 of the Q_q, but contains passages not in those texts. It is printed by Collier, Alleyn Papers, 198, Collins, i. 266, and Greg, Henslowe Papers, 155.

S. R. 1593, Dec. 7. ‘A plaie booke, intituled, the historye of Orlando ffurioso, one of the xij peeres of Ffraunce.’ John Danter (Arber, ii. 641).

1594, May 28. ‘Entred for his copie by consent of John Danter.... A booke entytuled The historie of Orlando furioso, &c. Prouided alwaies, and yt is agreed that soe often as the same booke shalbe printed, the saide John Danter to haue thimpryntinge thereof.’ Cuthbert Burby (Arber, ii. 650).

1594. The Historie of Orlando Furioso One of the twelve Pieres of France. As it was plaid before the Queenes Maiestie. John Danter for Cuthbert Burby.

1599. Simon Stafford for Cuthbert Burby.

Edition by W. W. Greg (1907, M. S. R.).

The Armada (1588) is referred to in I. i. 87. Two passages are common to the play and Peele’s Old Wive’s Tale (before 1595), and were probably borrowed by Peele with the name Sacripant, which Greene got from Ariosto. The play cannot be the ‘King Charlemagne’ of Peele’s (q.v.) Farewell (April 1589), as Charlemagne does not appear in it. The appearance of Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in 1591 suggests that as a likely date. This also would fit the story (vide supra) of the second sale to the Admiral’s men, when the Queen’s ‘were in the country’ (cf. vol. ii, p. 112). Strange’s men played Orlando for Henslowe on 22 Feb. 1592. Collins, i. 217, seems to accept 1591 as the date, but Fleay, i. 263, Ward, i. 395, and Gayley, 409, prefer 1588–9. So does Greg (Henslowe, ii. 150) on the assumption that Old Wive’s Tale (q.v.) ‘must belong to 1590’. A ‘Comoedia von Orlando Furioso’ was acted at Dresden in 1626 (Herz, 66, 77).

James the Fourth. c. 1591

S. R. 1594, May 14. ‘A booke intituled the Scottishe story of James the Ffourth slayne at Fflodden intermixed with a plesant Comedie presented by Oboron Kinge of ffayres.’ Thomas Creede (Arber, ii. 648.)

1598. The Scottish Historie of Iames the fourth, slaine at Flodden. Entermixed with a pleasant Comedie, presented by Oboram, King of Fayeries: As it hath bene sundrie times publikely plaide. Written by Robert Greene, Maister of Arts. Thomas Creede.

Editions by J. M. Manly (1897, Specimens, ii. 327) and A. E. H. Swaen and W. W. Greg (1921, M. S. R.).—Dissertation: W. Creizenach, Zu G.’s J. IV (1885, Anglia, viii. 419).

There is very little to date the play. Its comparative merit perhaps justifies placing it, as Greene’s maturest drama, in 1591. Collins, i. 44, agrees; but Fleay, i. 265; Ward, i. 400; Gayley, 415, prefer 1590. Fleay finds traces of a second hand, whom he believes to be Lodge, but he is not convincing. In l. 2269 the name Adam appears for Oberon in a stage-direction, which, when compared with A Looking-Glass, suggests that the actor was John Adams of the Queen’s.

Lost Play

Warburton’s list of burnt plays (3 Library, ii. 231) contains the duplicate entries ‘His^t of Jobe by Rob. Green’ and ‘The Trag^d of Jobe. Good.’ Greg suggests a confusion with Sir Robert Le Grys, who appears in the list as ‘S^r Rob. le Green’.

The statement that Greene had a share in a play on Henry VIII (Variorum, xix. 500) seems to be based on a confusion with a Robert Greene named by Stowe as an authority for his Annales (Collins, i. 69).

Doubtful Plays

Greene’s hand has been sought in Contention of York and Lancaster, Edward III, Fair Em, George a Greene, Troublesome Reign of King John, Knack to Know a Knave, Thracian Wonder, Leire, Locrine, Mucedorus, Selimus, Taming of A Shrew, Thomas Lord Cromwell (cf. ch. xxiv), and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Henry VI.

FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE (c. 1554–1628).

Greville’s father, Sir Fulke, was a cadet of the Grevilles of Milcote, and held great estates in Warwickshire. The son was born at Beauchamp Court ten years before he entered Shrewsbury School on 17 Oct. 1564 with Philip Sidney, of whom he wrote, c. 1610–12, a Life (ed. Nowell Smith, 1907). In 1568 he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and from 1577 was a courtier in high favour with Elizabeth, and entrusted with minor diplomatic and administrative tasks. He took part in the great tilt of 15 May 1581 (cf. ch. xxiv) and was a steady patron of learning and letters. His own plays were for the closet. He was knighted in 1597. James granted him Warwick Castle in 1605, but he was no friend of Robert Cecil, and took no great part in affairs until 1614, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1621 he was created Lord Brooke. On 1 Sept. 1628 he was stabbed to death by his servant Ralph Haywood. D. Lloyd, Statesmen of England (1665), 504, makes him claim to have been ‘master’ to Shakespeare and Jonson.

Collections

S. R. 1632, Nov. 10 (Herbert). ‘A booke called Certaine learned and elegant Workes of Fulke Lord Brooke the perticular names are as followeth (viz^t) ... The Tragedy of Alaham. The Tragedy of Mustapha (by assignment from Master Butter).... Seile (Arber, iv. 288).

1633. Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke, Written in his Youth, and familiar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney. The seuerall Names of which Workes the following page doth declare. E. P. for Henry Seyle. [Contains Alaham and Mustapha.]

1670. The Remains of Sir Fulk Grevill Lord Brooke: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion: Never before Printed. T. N. for Henry Herringham. [Contains Alaham and Mustapha.]

1870. A. B. Grosart, The Works in Verse and Prose Complete of the Lord Brooke. 4 vols. (Fuller Worthies Library).

Dissertations: M. W. Croll, The Works of F. G. (1903, Pennsylvania thesis); R. M. Cushman (M. L. N. xxiv. 180).

Alaham. c. 1600 (?)

[MS.] Holograph at Warwick Castle (cf. Grosart, iv. 336).

1633. [Part of Coll. 1633. Prologue and Epilogue; at end, ‘This Tragedy, called Alaham, may be printed, this 13 day of June 1632, Henry Herbert.’]

Croll dates 1586–1600 on metrical grounds, and Cushman 1598–1603, as bearing on Elizabethan politics after Burghley’s death.

Mustapha. 1603 < > 8

[MSS.] Holograph at Warwick Castle (cf. Grosart, iv. 336). Camb. Univ. MS. F. f. 2. 35.

S. R. 1608, Nov. 25 (Buck). ‘A booke called the Tragedy of Mustapha and Zangar.’ Nathanaell Butter (Arber, iii. 396).

1609. The Tragedy of Mustapha. For Nathaniel Butter.

S. R. 1632, Nov. 10. Transfer from Butter to Seile (Arber, iv. 288) (vide Collections, supra).

Cushman dates 1603–9, as bearing on the Jacobean doctrine of divine right.

MATTHEW GWINNE (c. 1558–1627).

Gwinne, the son of a London grocer of Welsh descent, entered St. John’s, Oxford, from Merchant Taylors in 1574, and became Fellow of the College, taking his B.A. in 1578, his M.A. in 1582, and his M.D. in 1593. In 1592 he was one of the overseers for the plays at the visit of Elizabeth (Boas, 252). He became Professor of Physic at Gresham College in 1597 and afterwards practised as a physician in London.

LATIN PLAYS

Nero > 1603

S. R. 1603, Feb. 23 (Buckerydge). ‘A booke called Nero Tragedia nova Matheo Gwyn medicine Doctore Colegij Divi Johannis precursoris apud Oxonienses socio Collecta.’ Edward Blunt (Arber, iii. 228).

1603. Nero Tragoedia Nova; Matthaeo Gwinne Med. Doct. Collegii Diui Joannis Praecursoris apud Oxonienses Socio collecta è Tacito, Suetonio, Dione, Seneca. Ed. Blount. [Epistle to James, ‘Londini ex aedibus Greshamiis Cal. Jul. 1603’, signed ‘Matthaeus Gvvinne’; commendatory verses to Justus Lipsius, signed ‘Io. Sandsbury Ioannensis’; Prologue and Epilogue.]

1603. Ed. Blount. [Epistle to Thomas Egerton and Francis Leigh, ‘Londini ex aedibus Greshamiis in festo Cinerum 1603’; Epilogue.]

1639. M. F. Prostant apud R. Mynne.

Boas, 390, assigns the play to St. John’s, Oxford, c. Easter 1603, but the S. R. entry and the ‘Elisa regnat’ of the Epilogue point to an Elizabethan date.

Vertumnus. 29 Aug. 1605

[MS.] Inner Temple Petyt MS. 538, 43, f. 293, has a scenario, with the title ‘The yeare about’.

1607. Vertumnus sive Annus Recurrens Oxonii, xxix Augusti, Anno. 1605. Coram Iacobo Rege, Henrico Principe, Proceribus. A Joannensibus in Scena recitatus ab vno scriptus, Phrasi Comica propè Tragicis Senariis. Nicholas Okes, impensis Ed. Blount. [Epistle to Henry, signed ‘Matthaeus Gwinne’; Verses to Earl of Montgomery; commendatory verses, signed ‘Guil. Paddy’, ‘Ioa. Craigius’, ‘Io. Sansbery Ioannensis’, ‘Θώμας ὁ Φρεάῤῥεος’; Author ad Librum. Appended are verses, signed ‘M. G.’ and headed ‘Ad Regis introitum, è Ioannensi Collegio extra portam Vrbis Borealem sito, tres quasi Sibyllae, sic (ut e sylua) salutarunt’, which are thought to have given a hint for Macbeth.]

This was shown to James during his visit to Oxford, and it sent him to sleep. The performance was at Christ Church by men of St. John’s.

STEPHEN HARRISON (c. 1604).

Designer and describer of the arches at the coronation of James I (cf. ch. xxiv, C).

RICHARD HATHWAY (c. 1600).

Practically nothing is known of Hathway outside Henslowe’s diary, although he was included by Meres amongst the ‘best for comedy’ in 1598, and wrote commendatory verses for Bodenham’s Belvedere (1600). It is only conjecture that relates him to the Hathaways of Shottery in Warwickshire, of whom was Shakespeare’s father-in-law, also a Richard. He has left nothing beyond an undetermined share of 1 Sir John Oldcastle, but the following plays by him are traceable in the diary:

(a) Plays for the Admiral’s, 1598–1602

(i) King Arthur.

April 1598.

(ii) Valentine and Orson.

With Munday, July 1598. It is uncertain what relation, if any, this bore to an anonymous play of the same name which was twice entered in the S. R. on 23 May 1595 and 31 March 1600 (Arber, ii. 298, iii. 159), was ascribed in both entries to the Queen’s and not the Admiral’s, and is not known to be extant.

(iii, iv) 1, 2 Sir John Oldcastle.

With Drayton (q.v.), Munday, and Wilson, Oct.–Dec. 1599.

(v) Owen Tudor.

With Drayton, Munday, and Wilson, Jan. 1600; but apparently not finished.

(vi) 1 Fair Constance of Rome.

With Dekker, Drayton, Munday, and Wilson (q.v.), June 1600.

(vii) 2 Fair Constance of Rome.

June 1600; but apparently not finished.

(viii) Hannibal and Scipio.

With Rankins, Jan. 1601. Greg, ii. 216, bravely suggests that Nabbes’s play of the same name, printed as a piece of Queen Henrietta’s men in 1637, may have been a revision of this.

(ix) Scogan and Skelton.

With Rankins, Jan.–March 1601.

(x) The Conquest of Spain by John of Gaunt.

With Rankins, Mar.–Apr. 1601, but never finished, as shown by a letter to Henslowe from S. Rowley, bidding him let Hathway ‘have his papars agayne’ (Henslowe Papers, 56).

(xi, xii) 1, 2 The Six Clothiers.

With Haughton and Smith, Oct.–Nov. 1601; but the second part was apparently unfinished.

(xiii) Too Good To Be True.

With Chettle (q.v.) and Smith, Nov. 1601–Jan. 1602.

(xiv) Merry as May Be.

With Day and Smith, Nov. 1602.

(b) Plays for Worcester’s, 1602–3

(xv, xvi) 1, 2 The Black Dog of Newgate.

With Day, Smith, and an anonymous ‘other poete’, Nov. 1602–Feb. 1603.

(xvii) The Unfortunate General.

With Day, Smith, and a third, Jan. 1603.

(c) Play for the Admiral’s, 1603

(xviii) The Boss of Billingsgate.

With Day and one or more other ‘felowe poetes’, March 1603.

CHRISTOPHER HATTON (1540–91).

Christopher Hatton, of Holdenby, Northants, entered the Inner Temple in Nov. 1559. He was Master of the Game at the Grand Christmas of 1561, and the mask to which he is said to have owed his introduction to Elizabeth’s favour was probably that which the revellers took to Court, together with Norton (q.v.) and Sackville’s Gorboduc on 18 Jan. 1562. He became a Gentleman Pensioner in 1564, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Captain of the Guard in 1572, Vice-Chamberlain and Privy Councillor in 1578, when he was knighted, and Lord Chancellor on 25 April 1587. He was conspicuous at Court in masks and tilts, and is reported, even as Lord Chancellor, to have laid aside his gown and danced at the wedding of his nephew and heir, Sir William Newport, alias Hatton, to Elizabeth Gawdy at Holdenby in June 1590.

His only contribution to the drama is as writer of an act of Gismond of Salerne at the Inner Temple in 1568 (cf. s.v. Wilmot).

WILLIAM HAUGHTON (c. 1575–1605).

Beyond his extant work and the entries in Henslowe’s diary, in the earliest of which, on 5 Nov. 1597, he appears as ‘yonge’ Haughton, little is known of Haughton. Cooper, Ath. Cantab. ii. 399, identified him with an alleged Oxford M.A. of the same name who was incorporated at Cambridge in 1604, but turns out to have misread the name, which is ‘Langton’ (Baugh, 15). He worked for the Admiral’s during 1597–1602, and found himself in the Clink in March 1600. Baugh, 22, prints his will, made on 6 June 1605, and proved on 20 July. He left a widow Alice and children. Wentworth Smith (q.v.) and one Elizabeth Lewes were witnesses. He was then of Allhallows, Stainings. He cannot be traced in the parish, but the name, which in his will is Houghton, is also spelt by Henslowe Harton, Horton, Hauton, Hawton, Howghton, Haughtoun, Haulton, and Harvghton, and was common in London. He might be related to a William Houghton, saddler, who held a house in Turnmill Street in 1577 (Baugh, 11), since in 1601 (H. P. 57) Day requested that a sum due to Haughton and himself might be paid to ‘Will Hamton sadler’.

Englishmen for My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will. 1598

S. R. 1601, Aug. 3. ‘A comedy of A woman Will haue her Will.’ William White (Arber, iii. 190).

1616. English-Men For my Money: or, A pleasant Comedy, called, A Woman will haue her Will. W. White.

1626.... As it hath beene diuers times Acted with great applause. I. N., sold by Hugh Perry.

1631. A. M., sold by Richard Thrale.

Editions in O. E. D. (1830, i) and Dodsley⁴, x (1875), and by J. S. Farmer (1911, T. F. T.), W. W. Greg (1912, M. S. R.), and A. C. Baugh, (1917).

The evidence for Haughton’s evidence is in two payments in Henslowe’s diary of 18 Feb. and early in May 1598 on behalf of the Admiral’s. The sum of these is only £2, but it seems possible that at least one, and perhaps more than one, other payment was made for the book in 1597 (cf. Henslowe, ii. 191).

Patient Grissell. 1599

With Chettle and Dekker (q.v.).

Lost and Doubtful Plays

The following plays by Haughton, all for the Admiral’s, are traceable in Henslowe’s diary:

(i) A Woman Will Have Her Will.

See supra.

(ii) The Poor Man’s Paradise.

Aug. 1599; apparently not finished.

(iii) Cox of Collumpton.

With Day, Nov. 1599; on a ‘note’ of the play by Simon Forman, cf. ch. xiii (Admiral’s).

(iv) Thomas Merry, or Beech’s Tragedy.

With Day, Nov.–Dec. 1599, on the same theme as one of Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (q.v.).

(v) The Arcadian Virgin.

With Chettle, Dec. 1599; apparently not finished.

(vi) Patient Grissell.

With Chettle and Dekker (q.v.), Oct.–Dec. 1599.

(vii) The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy.

With Day and Dekker, Feb. 1600; but apparently then unfinished; possibly identical with Lust’s Dominion (cf. s.v. Marlowe).

(viii) The Seven Wise Masters.

With Chettle, Day, and Dekker, March 1600.

(ix) Ferrex and Porrex.

March-April 1600.

(x) The English Fugitives.

April 1600, but apparently not finished.

(xi) The Devil and His Dame.

6 May 1600; probably the extant anonymous Grim the Collier of Croydon (q.v.).

(xii) Strange News Out of Poland.

With ‘M^r. Pett’, May 1600.

(xiii) Judas.

Haughton had 10s. for this, May 1600; apparently the play was finished by Bird and S. Rowley, Dec. 1601.

(xiv) Robin Hood’s Pennorths.

Dec. 1600–Jan. 1601; but apparently not finished.

(xv, xvi) 2, 3 The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green.

With Day (q.v.), Jan.–July 1600.

(xvii) The Conquest of the West Indies.

With Day and Smith, April-Sept. 1601.

(xviii) The Six Yeomen of the West.

With Day, May–June 1601.

(xix) Friar Rush and the Proud Woman of Antwerp.

With Chettle and Day, July 1601–Jan. 1602.

(xx) 2 Tom Dough.

With Day, July–Sept. 1601; but apparently not finished.

(xxi, xxii) 1, 2 The Six Clothiers.

With Hathway and Smith, Oct.–Nov. 1601; but apparently the second part was not finished.

(xxiii) William Cartwright.

Sept. 1602; perhaps never finished.

WALTER HAWKESWORTH (?-1606).

A Yorkshireman by birth, Hawkesworth entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1588, and became a Fellow, taking his B.A. in 1592 and his M.A. in 1595. In 1605 he went as secretary to the English embassy in Madrid, where he died.

LATIN PLAYS

Leander. 1599

[MSS.] T. C. C. MS. R. 3. 9. Sloane MS. 1762. [‘Authore M^ro Haukesworth, Collegii Trinitatis olim Socio Acta est secundo A. D. 1602 comitiis Baccalaureorum ... primo acta est A. D. 1598.’ Prologue, ‘ut primo acta est’; Additions for revival; Actor-lists.]

St. John’s, Cambridge, MS. J. 8. [Dated at end ‘7 Jan. 1599’.]

Emmanuel, Cambridge, MS. I. 2. 30.

Cambridge Univ. Libr. MS. Ee. v. 16.

Bodl. Rawl. Misc. MS. 341.

Lambeth MS. 838.

The production in 1599 and 1603 indicated by the MSS. agrees with the Trinity names in the actor-lists (Boas, 399).

Labyrinthus. 1603 (?)

[MSS.] T. C. C. MS. R. 3. 6.

Cambridge Univ. Libr. MS. Ee. v. 16. [Both ‘M^ro Haukesworth’. Prologue. Actor-list in T. C. C. MS.]

St. John’s, Cambridge, MS. J. 8. T. C. C. MS. R. 3. 9. Bodl. Douce MSS. 43, 315. Lambeth MS. 838.

S. R. 1635, July 17 (Weekes). ‘A Latyn Comedy called Laborinthus &c.’ Robinson (Arber, iv. 343).

1636. Labyrinthus Comoedia, habita coram Sereniss. Rege Iacobo in Academia Cantabrigiensi. Londini, Excudebat H. R. [Prologue.]

An allusion in the text (v. 5) to the marriage ‘heri’ of Leander and Flaminia has led to the assumption that production was on the day after the revival of Leander in 1603; the actor-list has some inconsistencies, and is not quite conclusive for any year of the period 1603–6 (Boas, 317, 400).

MARY HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE (1561–1621).

Mary, daughter of Sir Henry, and sister of Sir Philip, Sidney, married Henry, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1577. She had literary tastes and was a liberal patroness of poets, notably Samuel Daniel. Most of her time appears to have been spent at her husband’s Wiltshire seats of Wilton, Ivychurch, and Ramsbury, but in the reign of James she rented Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, and in 1615 the King granted her for life the manor of Houghton Conquest, Beds.

Dissertation: F. B. Young, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1912).

TRANSLATION

Antony. 1590

S. R. 1592, May 3. ‘Item Anthonius a tragedie wrytten also in French by Robert Garnier ... donne in English by the Countesse of Pembrok.’ William Ponsonby (Arber, ii. 611).

1592. A Discourse of Life and Death. Written in French by Ph. Mornay. Antonius, A Tragoedie written also in French by Ro. Garnier Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke. For William Ponsonby.

1595. The Tragedie of Antonie. Doone ... For William Ponsonby.

Edition by A. Luce (1897). The Marc-Antoine (1578) of Robert Garnier was reissued in his Huit Tragédies (1580).

ENTERTAINMENT

Astraea. 1592 (?)

In Davison’s Poetical Rapsody (1602, S. R. 28 May 1602) is ‘A Dialogue betweene two Shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea. Made by the excellent Lady the Lady Mary Countesse of Pembrook at the Queenes Maiesties being at her house at —— Anno 15—’.

S. Lee (D. N. B.) puts the visit at Wilton ‘late in 1599’. But there was no progress in 1599, and progresses to Wilts. planned in 1600, 1601, and 1602 were abandoned. Presumably the verses were written for the visit to Ramsbury of 27–9 Aug. 1592 (cf. App. A).

JASPER HEYWOOD (1535–98).

Translator of Seneca (q.v.).

THOMAS HEYWOOD (c. 1570–1641).

Heywood regarded Lincolnshire as his ‘country’ and had an uncle Edmund, who had a friend Sir Henry Appleton. K. L. Bates has found Edmund Heywood’s will of 7 Oct. 1624 in which Thomas Heywood and his wife are mentioned, and has shown it to be not improbable that Edmund was the son of Richard Heywood, a London barrister who had manors in Lincolnshire. If so, Thomas was probably the son of Edmund’s disinherited elder brother Christopher who was aged 30 in 1570. And if Richard Heywood is the same who appears in the circle of Sir Thomas More, a family connexion with the dramatist John Heywood may be conjectured. The date of Thomas’s birth is unknown, but he tells us that he was at Cambridge, although a tradition that he became Fellow of Peterhouse cannot be confirmed, and is therefore not likely to have begun his stage career before the age of 18 or thereabouts. Perhaps we may conjecture that he was born c. 1570, for a Thomas Heywood is traceable in the St. Saviour’s, Southwark, token-books from 1588 to 1607, and children of Thomas Heywood ‘player’ were baptized in the same parish from 28 June 1590 to 5 Sept. 1605 (Collier, in Bodl. MS. 29445). This is consistent with his knowledge (App. C, No. lvii) of Tarlton, but not of earlier actors. He may, therefore, so far as dates are concerned, easily have written The Four Prentices as early as 1592; but that he in fact did so, as well as his possible contributions to the Admiral’s repertory of 1594–7, are matters of inference (cf. Greg, Henslowe, ii. 284). The editors of the Apology for Actors (Introd. v) say that in his Funeral Elegy upon James I (1625) he claims to have been ‘the theatrical servant of the Earl of Southampton, the patron of Shakespeare’. I have never seen the Elegy. It is not in the B. M., but a copy passed from the Bindley to the Brown collection. There is no other evidence that Southampton ever had a company of players. The first dated notice of Heywood is in a payment of Oct. 1596 on behalf of the Admiral’s ‘for Hawodes bocke’. On 25 March 1598 he bound himself to Henslowe for two years as an actor, doubtless for the Admiral’s, then in process of reconstitution. Between Dec. 1598 and Feb. 1599 he wrote two plays for this company, and then disappears from their records. He was not yet out of his time with Henslowe, but if Edward IV is really his, he may have been enabled to transfer his services to Derby’s men, who seem to have established themselves in London in the course of 1599. By the autumn of 1602 he was a member of Worcester’s, for whom he had probably already written How a Man may Choose a Good Wife from a Bad. He now reappears in Henslowe’s diary both as actor and as playwright. On 1 Sept, he borrowed 2s. 6d. to buy garters, and between 4 Sept, and 6 March 1603 he wrote or collaborated in not less than seven plays for the company. During the same winter he also helped in one play for the Admiral’s. It seems probable that some of his earlier work was transferred to Worcester’s. He remained with them, and in succession to them Queen Anne’s, until the company broke up soon after the death of the Queen in 1619. Very little of his work got into print. Of the twelve plays at most which appeared before 1619, the first seven were unauthorized issues; from 1608 onwards, he himself published five with prefatory epistles. About this date, perhaps in the enforced leisure of plague-time, he also began to produce non-dramatic works, both in prose and verse, of which the Apology for Actors, published in 1612, but written some years earlier (cf. App. C, No. lvii), is the most important. The loss of his Lives of All the Poets, apparently begun c. 1614 and never finished, is irreparable. After 1619 Heywood is not traceable at all as an actor; nor for a good many years, with the exception of one play, The Captives, for the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1624, as a playwright, either on the stage or in print. In 1623 a Thomas Heywarde lived near Clerkenwell Hill (Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvi. 345) and is probably the dramatist. In 1624 he claims in the Epistle to Gynaikeion the renewed patronage of the Earl of Worcester, since ‘I was your creature, and amongst other your servants, you bestowed me upon the excellent princesse Q. Anne ... but by her lamented death, your gift is returned againe into your hands’. But about 1630 he emerges again. Old plays of his were revived and new ones produced both by Queen Henrietta’s men at the Cockpit and the King’s at the Globe and Blackfriars. He wrote the Lord Mayor’s pageants for a series of years. He sent ten more plays to the press, and included a number of prologues, epilogues, and complimentary speeches of recent composition in his Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas of 1637. This period lies outside my survey. I have dealt with all plays in which there is a reasonable prospect of finding early work, but have not thought it necessary to discuss The English Traveller, or A Maidenhead Well Lost, merely because of tenuous attempts by Fleay to connect them with lost plays written for Worcester’s or still earlier anonymous work for the Admiral’s, any more than The Fair Maid of the West, The Late Lancashire Witches, or A Challenge for Beauty, with regard to which no such suggestion is made. As to Love’s Mistress, see the note on Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas. The Epistle to The English Traveller (1633) is worth quoting. Heywood describes the play as ‘one reserued amongst two hundred and twenty, in which I haue had either an entire hand, or at the least a maine finger’, and goes on to explain why his pieces have not appeared as Works. ‘One reason is, that many of them by shifting and change of Companies, haue beene negligently lost, Others of them are still retained in the hands of some Actors, who thinke it against their peculiar profit to haue them come in Print, and a third, That it neuer was any great ambition in me, to bee in this kind Volumniously read.’ Heywood’s statement would give him an average of over five plays a year throughout a forty years’ career, and even if we assume that he included every piece which he revised or supplied with a prologue, it is obvious that the score or so plays that we have and the dozen or so others of which we know the names must fall very short of his total output. ‘Tho. Heywood, Poet’, was buried at St. James’s, Clerkenwell, on 16 Aug. 1641 (Harl. Soc. Reg. xvii. 248), and therefore the alleged mention of him as still alive in The Satire against Separatists (1648) must rest on a misunderstanding.