[241] P. E. More, The Nation, N. Y., April 24, 1913.
[242] The best editions of M. T., since the time of Dyce, are those of P. A. Daniel, in the Variorum (1904), Glover and Waller, in the Cambridge English Classics (1905), and A. H. Thorndike, in the Belles Lettres (1906).
[243] I, 3; II, 2; III, 2; IV, 1; V, 4.
[244] For conjectural sources see Chapter VII, above. The best editions to-day are the Variorum and Alden's (Belles Lettres).
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAST PLAY
Eleven.—The first quarto of The Scornful Ladie, entered S. R., March 19, 1616, assigns the play to Beaumont and Fletcher, and says that it "was acted with great applause by the Children of Her Maiesties Revels in the Blacke Fryers." The references in Act V, 3, 4, to the Cleve wars show that it could not have been written before March 25, 1609. The sentence, "Marry some cast Cleve captain," is taken by some to indicate a date as early as the spring of that year, when James I "promised to send an English force to aid the Protestant party,"[245] and when, undoubtedly, "cast" captains of the English army were clamouring for foreign service. In that case, the play was acted before January 4, 1610, for by that date the children of the Queen's Revels had ceased playing at Blackfriars. Since the plague regulations closed the theatres between March 9 and December 7, 1609, save for a week in July, these arguments would fix the performance in the Christmas month, December 7 to January 4, 1610. To this supposition a reference in Act I, 2 to binding the Apocrypha by itself, lends plausibility, if, as Fleay thinks, the sentence points to the discussion during 1609-1610 concerning the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Douay version of the Bible and its exclusion from the authorized version—both in progress at the time, and both completed in 1610.[246] But the Apocrypha controversy was continued long after 1610.
A later date of composition than January 4, 1610, is, however, indicated if a line, III, 1, 341, to which attention has not previously been directed, in which the Elder Loveless says of Abigail, who is acting the termagant, "tie your she-Otter up, good Lady folly, she stinks worse than a Bear-baiting," was suggested by the termagant Mrs. Otter and her husband of the Bear-garden, in Jonson's Epicoene, acted between January 4 and March 10, 1610. And the two sentences in which Cleve is mentioned, "There will be no more talk of the Cleve wars while this lasts" (V, 3), and "Marry some cast Cleve captain [so italicized in the quarto], and sell Bottle-ale" (V, 4), point to a date later than July 1610, when actual fighting in Cleves-Juliers had barely begun. The captains are not English soldiers seeking service in a foreign army not yet mobilized, but Englishmen who have been captains in Cleves, have seen service, and been 'cast,' any time between July 1610 and the beginning of 1616, when, according to the quarto, the play had assuredly been performed. These considerations make it probable that The Scornful Ladie in its original form was presented first at Whitefriars while the Queen's Children were acting there, between 1610 and March 1613, or that it was one of the plays, old or new, presented by the Queen's Children (reorganized in 1614) when they opened at Rossiter's new Blackfriars in 1615-16.