The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 4

[The academic drama only lies on the fringe of my subject, but I have included notes on extant English plays in chapters xxiii and xxiv, and give below, for the sake of convenience, a list of these, and another of those Latin plays which there is any positive evidence for assigning to the period 1558–1616 and to English authorship. Fuller treatment will be found in G. B. Churchill and W. Keller, Die lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen in der Zeit der Königin Elisabeth (1898, Jahrbuch, xxxiv. 220); G. C. Moore Smith, Notes on Some English University Plays (1908, M. L. R. iii. 141), and Plays performed in Cambridge Colleges before 1583 (1909, Fasciculus J. W. Clark dicatus, 265); L. B. Morgan, The Latin University Drama (1911, Jahrbuch, xlvii. 69); and F. S. Boas, University Plays (1910, C. H. vi. 293, with full bibliography), and University Drama in the Tudor Age (1914). Further material from Cambridge archives is in preparation by G. C. Moore Smith. In addition to the plays given in this list, some are incorporated in the description of The Christmas Prince (cf. ch. xxiv, s.a. 1607–8.]

By T. Tomkis.

By F. Verney.

Anon.

Anon.

Anon.

Anon.

By T. Tomkis.

Anon.

Anon.

By S. Daniel.

Anon.

By P. Fletcher.

Anon.

Anon.

By S. Brooke (q.v.).

Harl. MS. 6924, with dedication to Laud, President of St. John’s, Oxford, 1611–21, signed by Philip Parsons, of St. John’s, B.A. 1614, M.A. 1618.

S. R. 1634, April 17. ‘A booke called Bellum grammaticale &c. by Master Spense’, authorized by Herbert. John Spenser (Arber, iv. 317).

1635. Bellum Grammaticale sive Nominum Verborumque discordia civilis Tragico-Comoedia. Summo cum applausu olim apud Oxonienses in Scaenam producta et nunc in omnium illorum qui ad Grammaticam animos appellant oblectamentum edita. B. A. and T. Fawcet, impensis Joh. Spenceri.

Editions of 1658, 1698, 1718, 1726, 1729, and in J. Bolte (1908, Andrea Guarnas B. G. und seine Nachahmungen, 106).

A performance was given before Elizabeth at Ch. Ch., Oxford, on 24 Sept. 1592, with a prologue and epilogue by Gager, which are printed with his Meleager. But the play was not new, for Sir John Harington, who records the 1592 performance in his Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), 127, had already named ‘the Oxford Bellum Grammaticale’ as ‘full of harmeles myrth’ in his Apologie of Poetrie (1591). The ‘Master Spense’ of the S. R. entry may be a confusion with the publisher’s name. Wood, Ath. Oxon. ii. 533, was told by Richard Gardiner of Ch. Ch. that the author was Leonard Hutten, who took his B.A. from Ch. Ch. in 1578, and his M.A. in 1582. He was known as a dramatist by 26 Sept. 1583, when Gager wrote of him (Boas, 256),

The source was the Latin prose narrative Bellum Grammaticale (1511) of Andrea Guarna. Ralph Radclif (c. 1538) seems to have also treated the theme, but not necessarily in dramatic form (Mediaeval Stage, ii. 197).

Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 215. The Bodleian Catalogue dates the MS. c. 1600. The play, described in Jahrbuch, xlvii. 75, is a fragment only, probably written in some Jesuit seminary on the Continent, but with an English interest. There seems to be nothing specifically English in the theme of Sanguis Sanguinem sive Constans Fratricida Tragoedia, which is in the same MS.

Epilogue of a play by Richard Edes (q.v.) at Ch. Ch., Oxford.

By W. Gager (q.v.).

Camb. Emmanuel MS. 3. 1. 17. ‘Authore M^r Cruso Caii Colle: Cantabr.’

Aquila Cruso entered Gonville and Caius in 1610.

Lansd. MS. 723, f. 1. ‘Fatum Vortigerni seu miserabilis vita et exitus Vortigerni regis Britanniae vna complectens aduentum Saxonum siue Anglorum in Britanniam.’

Keller puts the play at the end of the sixteenth century, and thinks it influenced by Richard III.

See s.v. Susenbrotus.

Camb. Univ. MS. Mm. I. 24, with dedication by William Goldingham, B.A. 1567 and Fellow of Trinity Hall 1571, to ‘D. Thomae Sackuilo, Equiti aurato, Domino de Buckhurst.’ Sackville became Lord Buckhurst 1567 and K.G. 1588.

Bodl. Douce MS. 234, f. 15^v. This was ‘in diem comitialem anno domini 1596’, and the actor-list is composed of members of St. John’s, Cambridge (Boas, 398). The MS. has the note ‘Summus histrio-didascalus Mr. Pratt’ and a possible indication of authorship in the mutilated name ‘orrell’, which may stand for Roger Morrell, Fellow of St. John’s.

St. John’s Cambridge MS. S. 45; Caius Cambridge MS. 62.

Edition by G. C. Moore Smith (1908).

The actor-list agrees closely with that of Legge’s Ricardus III, and points to St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1579 (Boas, 393). The source is Boccaccio’s Decamerone, which suggests the possible authorship of A. Fraunce (q.v.), who used the Decamerone for his contemporary Victoria.

By G. Ruggle (q.v.).

By W. Hawkesworth (q.v.).

Lambeth MS. 838.

Edition by G. C. Moore Smith (1910).—Dissertation: G. C. Moore Smith, The Cambridge Play ‘Laelia’ (1911, M. L. R. vi. 382).

The production is assigned by Fuller, Hist. of Cambridge (ed. Nichols), 217, to a visit by the Earl of Essex to Cambridge as Chancellor of the University in 1597–8. Moore Smith has, however, shown that it almost certainly belongs to an earlier visit, and took place at Queens’ College on 1 March 1595. The chief evidence is the reference in Rowland Whyte’s account of the Device by Essex or Bacon (q.v.) for 17 Nov. 1595 to ‘Giraldy’ and ‘Pedantiq’, as played at Cambridge. These may fairly be taken to be the Gerardus and the pedant Petrus of Laelia. The actors of these two parts are identified with George Meriton and George Mountaine, Fellows of Queens’, by John Weever, Epigrammes (1599), iv. 19.

Conceivably this may also attribute authorship of the play and the device. The play is an adaptation of the Italian Gl’ Ingannati (c. 1531) through Les Abusez (1543) of Charles Estienne. It is possible that, directly or indirectly, it influenced Twelfth Night.

By W. Hawkesworth (q.v.).

Bodl. Douce MS. 234, f. 40^v, dated ‘Anno Dmni 1597, Decemb. 9’.

A note in Douce’s hand assigns the authorship to [Nathaniel] Wiburne, who, like the other actors, was of St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1597 (Boas, 398).

By S. Brooke (q.v.).

By W. Gager (q.v.).

By M. Gwynne (q.v.).

By W. Gager (q.v.).

By W. Gager (q.v.).

Emmanuel, Cambridge, MS. 1. 3. 16. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama, 368, thinks the handwriting later than 1600.

Cambridge Univ. Libr. MS. Ff. ii. 9. ‘Il pastor fido, di signor Guarini ... recitata in Collegio Regali Cantabrigiae’, with Prologus and Argumentum. T. C. C. MS. R. 3. 37.

Greg, Pastoral, 247, points out that this must be the ‘Fidus Pastor, which was sometimes acted by King’s College men in Cambridge’, out of which a contemporary observer thought that Daniel’s Queen’s Arcadia (q.v.) was drawn. It is a translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1590).

Caius College, Cambridge, MS. 62. ‘Paedantius comoedia acta in collegio Sanctae et individuae Trinitatis authore M^ro Forcet.’

T. C. C. MS. R. 17 (9).

S. R. 1631, Feb. 9. ‘A Comedy in Lattyn called Pedantius’, authorized by Austen. Milborne (Arber, iv. 248).

1631. Pedantius Comoedia, Olim Cantabrig. Acta in Coll. Trin. Nunquam antehac Typis evulgata. W. S. Impensis Roberti Mylbourne.

[Engravings of Dromodotus and Pedantius. Introductory lines, ‘Pedantius de Se’. The title-page has an engraved border dated 1583, already used for W. Alexander’s Monarchicke Tragedies (1616).]

Edition by G. C. Moore Smith (1905, Materialien, viii).

The introductory line, ‘Ante quater denos vixi Pedantius annos’, suggests production in 1591, but the play cannot have been very recent when Sir John Harington, in a note to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591), Bk. xiv, cited a ‘pretie conceit’ of ‘our Cambridge Comedie Pedantius (at whiche I remember the noble Earle of Essex that now is, was present)’. In his Apologie of Poetrie, prefixed to the translation, Harington also says (G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii. 210), ‘How full of harmeles myrth is our Cambridge Pedantius? and the Oxford Bellum Grammaticale?’ Harington, who again cites ‘our Pedantius of Cambridge’ in his Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), 126, was with Essex at Cambridge during 1578–81, and Moore Smith has shown that the production at Trinity was probably on 6 Feb. 1581, shortly before the defeat of Gabriel Harvey by Anthony Wingfield of Trinity for the Public Oratorship of Cambridge. There can be little doubt that Harvey was the butt of Pedantius, and hardly more that Wingfield was concerned in this satire. Nashe has two allusions to the matter. In Strange News (1593) he says that Harvey’s verses were ‘miserably flouted at in M. Winkfields Comoedie of Pedantius in Trinitie Colledge’ (Works, i. 303). In Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596) he says, ‘Ile fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedie in Trinitie Colledge; where, vnder the cheife part, from which it tooke his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School-master, hee was full drawen & delineated from the soale of the foote to the crowne of his head’, and goes on to enumerate the principal traits of Harvey touched off by the actors, who ‘borrowed his gowne to playe the Part in, the more to flout him’ (Works, iii. 80). So far, we are left a little uncertain whether the main authorship is to be ascribed, with Nashe in Strange News, to Anthony Wingfield, or, with the Caius MS., to Edward Forsett, both of whom were Fellows of Trinity in 1581. Moore Smith has, however, shown in T. L. S. (10 Oct. 1918) that Forsett refers to ‘Pedantio meo’ in the epistle to an unprinted Concio of his among the MSS. of St. John’s, Cambridge. For an absurd attempt to assign the authorship to Bacon, largely on the ground of some non-existent pigs in the title-page border, cf. E. A. [E. G. Harman], The Shakespeare Problem (1909), and T. L. S. (27 March, 17 April, 1 May, 1919). Modern ascriptions to Thomas Beard and to Walter Hawkesworth seem to rest on misunderstandings.

Bodl. Rawlinson MS. C. 787.

Bodl. MS. 27639.

Dedicated to John Buckeridge, President of St. John’s, Oxford, 1605–11, by Christopher Wren, father of the architect, who took his B.A. from St. John’s in 1609.

Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 171, f. 60.

This is a Jesuit play, on the heresy of England.

Lugentis Angliae faciem dum Poeta pingeret.

Moore Smith (M. L. R. iii. 143), who is responsible for the title, thinks that it was written at the seminary of Valladolid, perhaps in Elizabeth’s reign.

By T. Legge (q.v.).

Sloane MS. 1775, f. 242.

According to H. de W. Fuller in M. P. iv (1906), 41, this is a fragment based on A. Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, probably a student’s exercise, with corrections. It is datable by two poems in the same hand on the royal visit to Cambridge in 1615.

By W. Alabaster (q.v.).

Addl. MS. 20061. ‘Sapientia Solomonis: Drama Comicotragicum.’

This is an expanded version of the Sapientia Solomonis of Sixt Birck (1555). A performance is recorded at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1559–60 (Boas, 21, 387), but the prologue and epilogue to this version make it clear that it was acted before Elizabeth and the inclita princeps Cecilia, i. e. Cecilia of Sweden, who was in England during 1565–6 (cf. ch. i), by a

These were the Westminster boys, who gave the play in 1565–6 (cf. ch. xii). The elaborately bound and decorated MS. bears Elizabeth’s initials in several places, and was evidently the ‘book’ officially provided for her.

By S. Brooke (q.v.).

Bodl. Douce MS. 234. ‘Acta haec fabula 13º Januarii an. dmi. 1596.’

The actor-list belongs to St. John’s, Cambridge, and is headed by the name of [Francis] Rollinson, whose authorship has been unjustifiably assumed.

Lansd. MS. 723. ‘Solymannidae, Tragoedia ... 1581 Martii 5º.’

Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 195, f. 79. ‘Susenbrotus Comoedia. Acta Cantabrigiae in Collegio Trin. coram Rege Jacobo & Carolo principe Anno 1615.’

Bridgewater MS. ‘Fortunia.’

The accounts of the royal visit of 7–11 March 1615 do not mention the play, and the date of this visit would be ‘1614’. It may be the unnamed play given by Cambridge men, not at Cambridge, but at Royston in March 1616; the actors are ‘extra Lyceum’, cf. ch. iv.

Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 75. ‘Tomumbeius siue Sultanici in Aegypto Imperii Euersio. Tragoedia noua auctore Georgio Salterno Bristoënsi.’

Nothing is known of George Salterne, and a dedication to Elizabeth is hardly sufficient to indicate a production before her at Bristol during the progress of 1574.

By W. Gager (q.v.).

By M. Gwynne (q.v.).

By A. Fraunce (q.v.).

Emmanuel, Cambridge, MS. 3. 1. 17; T. C. C. MS. R. 3, 9.

The actor-list points to St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1606.