I do not feel able to accept the view, expounded by Fleay, i. 370, 386, and adopted by some later writers, that A Tale of a Tub, licensed by Herbert on 7 May 1633, was only a revision of one of Jonson’s Elizabethan plays. It appears to rest almost wholly upon references to a ‘queen’. These are purely dramatic, and part of an attempt to give the action an old-fashioned setting. The queen intended is not Elizabeth, but Mary. There are also references to ‘last King Harry’s time’ (I. ii), ‘King Edward, our late liege and sovereign lord’ (I. v). A character says, ‘He was King Harry’s doctor and my god-phere’ (IV. i). The priest is ‘Canon’ or ‘Sir’ Hugh, and has a ‘Latin tongue’ (III. vii). ‘Old John Heywood’ is alive (V. ii).
In 1619 Jonson told Drummond (Laing, 27) ‘That the half of his Comedies were not in print’. The unprinted ones of course included Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass. He went on to describe ‘a pastorall intitled The May Lord’, in which he figured himself as Alkin. As it had a ‘first storie’, it may not have been dramatic. But Alkin appears in The Sad Shepherd, a fragment of a dramatic pastoral, printed in F2 with a prologue in which Jonson describes himself as ‘He that hath feasted you these forty yeares’, and which therefore cannot have been written long before his death in 1637. This is edited by W. W. Greg (1905, Materialien, xi) with an elaborate discussion in which he arrives at the sound conclusions that the theory of its substantial identity with The May Lord must be rejected, and that there is no definite evidence to oppose to the apparent indication of its date in the prologue.
It is doubtful whether any of Jonson’s early work for Pembroke’s and the Admiral’s, except perhaps The Case is Altered, ever found its way into print. The record of all the following plays, except the first, is in Henslowe’s diary (cf. Greg, Henslowe, ii. 288).
(a) The Isle of Dogs.
See s.v. Nashe.
(b) On 3 Dec. 1597 he received £1 ‘vpon a boocke wch he showed the plotte vnto the company wch he promysed to dd vnto the company at crysmas’. It is just possible that this was Dido and Aeneas, produced by the Admiral’s on 8 Jan. 1598. But no further payment to Jonson is recorded, and it is more likely that Dido and Aeneas was taken over from Pembroke’s repertory; and it may be that Jonson had not carried out his contract before the fray with Spencer in Sept. 1598, and that this is the ‘Bengemens plotte’ on which Chapman was writing a tragedy on the following 23 Oct. The theory that it is the Fall of Mortimer, still little more than a plot when Jonson died, may safely be rejected (Henslowe, ii. 188, 199, 224).
(c) Hot Anger Soon Cold.
Written with Chettle and Porter in Aug. 1598 (Henslowe, ii. 196).
(d) Page of Plymouth.
Written with Dekker in Aug. and Sept. 1599 (Henslowe, ii. 205).