A student of Exeter College, Oxford, who became chaplain to Prince Henry (D. N. B.), and described his Creation in 1610 (cf. ch. xxiv, C).
RICHARD (?) PUTTENHAM (c. 1520–1601).
The author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589; cf. App. C, No. xli) claims to have written three plays, no one of which is extant. He analyses at length the plot of his ‘Comedie entituled Ginecocratia’ (Arber, 146), in which were a King, Polemon, Polemon’s daughter, and Philino. He twice cites his ‘enterlude’, Lustie London (Arber, 183, 208), in which were a Serjeant, his Yeoman, a Carrier, and a Buffoon. And he twice cites his ‘enterlude’, The Woer (Arber, 212, 233), in which were a Country Clown, a Young Maid of the City, and a Nurse.
The author of The Arte is referred to by Camden in 1614 (cf. Gregory Smith, ii. 444) as ‘Maister Puttenham’, and by E. Bolton, Hypercritica (c. 1618), with the qualification ‘as the Fame is’, as ‘one of her Gentlemen Pensioners, Puttenham’. H. Crofts, in his edition (1880) of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governour, has shown that this is more likely to have been Richard, the elder, than George, the younger, son of Robert Puttenham and nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot. Neither brother, however, can be shown to have been a Gentleman Pensioner, and Collier gives no authority for his statement that Richard was a Yeoman of the Guard. Richard was writing as far back as the reign of Henry VIII, and the dates of his plays are unknown.
WILLIAM RANKINS (> 1587–1601 <).
The moralist who published A Mirrour of Monsters (1587), The English Ape (1588), and Seven Satires (1598) is, in spite of the attack on plays (cf. App. C, No. xxxviii) in the first of these, probably identical with the dramatist who received payment from Henslowe on behalf of the Admiral’s for the following plays during 1598–1601:
(i) Mulmutius Dunwallow.
Oct. 1598, £3, ‘to by a boocke’, probably an old one.
(ii) Hannibal and Scipio.
With Hathway, Jan. 1601.