Note 585 — Chapter XXIV · PLAYERS OF INTERLUDES

Warton speaks of a play by the ‘children’ or ‘choir-boys’ of St. Paul’s at a visit to Elizabeth by Mary and of another play of Holophernes ‘perhaps’ by the same children later in the year. But the dates given in his Hist. of Poetry (ed. Hazlitt), ii. 234, iii. 312, and his Life of Sir Thomas Pope (ed. 1780), 46, do not agree together, and the authority to which he refers (Machyn’s Diary, then in MS.) does not bear him out. On his bona fides cf. H. E. D. Blakiston, in E. H. Review, for April, 1896. Ward, i. 153, rather complicates the matter by adding to Holophernes a second play called The Hanging of Antioch, but even in Warton’s account this ‘hanging’ was only a curtain.