Remember all is but a poet’s dream,
The first he had in Phoebus holy bower,
But not the last, unless the first displease.
This has been taken as indicating that the play was Lyly’s first; but it need only mean that it was his first in verse. All the others are in prose. The blank verse is that of the nineties, rather than that of the early eighties. There is nothing to show who were the actors, but it is not unlikely that, after the plays in Paul’s were dissolved, Lyly tried his hand in a new manner for a new company. Feuillerat, 232, 580, suggests that Elizabeth may have taken the satire of women amiss and that the ‘overthwartes’ of Lyly’s fortunes of which he complained in Jan. 1595 may have been the result. He puts the date, therefore, in 1593–4.
Doubtful Work
Lyly has been suggested as the author of Maid’s Metamorphosis and A Warning for Fair Women (cf. ch. xxiv) and of several anonymous entertainments and fragments of entertainments (ibid., and supra, s.vv. Cecil, Clifford, Lee).
LEWIS MACHIN (fl. c. 1608).
Nothing is known of Machin’s personality. He is probably the L. M. who contributed ‘eglogs’ to the Mirrha (1607) of the King’s Revels actor William Barksted (q.v.). A Richard Machin was an actor in Germany, 1600–6. There is no traceable connexion between either Richard or Lewis and Henry Machyn the diarist.
Machin collaborated with Gervase Markham in The Dumb Knight (q.v.).
The anonymous Every Woman in Her Humour and Fair Maid of the Exchange have also been ascribed to him (cf. ch. xxiv).