Harl. MS. 2412, a transcript dated 1588.
Hatton MS. (cf. Hist. MSS. i. 32).
Editions by B. Field (1844, Sh. Soc.) and W. C. Hazlitt (1875, Sh. L. ii. 1).—Dissertation: G. B. Churchill, Richard III bis Shakespeare (1897, 1900).
The names in the actor-lists, which agree, confirm those MSS. which date a production in March 1580 (Boas, 394), and as Essex left Cambridge in 1581, the date in the Tanner MS., in so far as it relates to a performance before him, is probably an error. It does not seem so clear to me that the Caius MS. may not point to an earlier production in 1573. And it is quite possible that there may have been revivals in some or all of the later years named in the MSS. The reputation of the play is indicated, not only by the notice of it by Meres (vide supra), but also by allusions in Harington’s Apologie of Poetrie (1591); cf. App. C, No. xlv. and Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596, Works, iii. 13). It may even, directly or indirectly, have influenced Richard III. The argument to the first Actio is headed ‘Chapman, Argumentum primae actionis’, but it seems difficult to connect George Chapman with the play.
Lost Play
The Destruction of Jerusalem
Meres calls this tragedy ‘famous’. Fuller, Worthies (1662), ii. 156, says that ‘Having at last refined it to the purity of the publique standard, some Plageary filched it from him, just as it was to be acted’. Apparently it was in English and was printed, as it appears in the lists of Archer and Kirkman (Greg, Masques, lxii). It can hardly have been the Jerusalem revived by Strange’s in 1592 (Greg, Henslowe, ii. 155). Can any light be thrown on Fuller’s story by the fact that in 1584 a ‘new Play of the Destruction of Jerusalem’ was adopted by the city of Coventry as a craft play in place of the old Corpus Christi cycle, and a sum of £13 6s. 8d. paid to John Smythe of St. John’s, Oxford, ‘for hys paynes for writing of the tragedye’ (Mediaeval Stage, ii. 361; H. Craig, Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (E. E. T. S.), 90, 92, 93, 102, 103, 109)?
THOMAS LODGE (c. 1557–1625).
Lodge, who uses the description ‘gentleman’, was son of Sir Thomas Lodge, a Lord Mayor of London. His elder brother, William, married Mary, daughter of Thomas Blagrave, Clerk of the Revels (cf. ch. iii). He entered Merchant Taylors in 1571, Trinity College, Oxford, in 1573, whence he took his B.A. in 1577, and Lincoln’s Inn in 1578. In 1579 (cf. App. C, No. xxiii) he plunged into controversy with a defence of the stage in reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse. Gosson speaks slightingly of his opponent as ‘hunted by the heavy hand of God, and become little better than a vagrant, looser than liberty, lighter than vanity itself’, and although Lodge took occasion to defend his moral character from aspersion, it is upon record that he was called before the Privy Council ‘to aunswere certen maters to be by them objected against him’, and was ordered on 27 June 1581 to give continued attendance (Dasent, xiii. 110). By 1583 he had married. His literary work largely took the form of romances in the manner of Lyly and Greene. Rosalynde: Euphues’ Golden Legacy, published (S. R. 6 Oct. 1590) on his return from a voyage to Terceras and the Canaries with Captain Clarke, is typical and was Shakespeare’s source for As You Like It. His acknowledged connexion with the stage is slight; and the attempt of Fleay, ii. 43, to assign to him a considerable share in the anonymous play-writing of his time must be received with caution, although he was still controverting Gosson in 1583 (cf. App. C, No. xxxv), and too much importance need not be attached to his intention expressed in Scylla’s Metamorphosis (S. R. 22 Sept. 1589):
To write no more of that whence shame doth grow,