(xiv) The Unfortunate General.
With Day and Hathway, Jan. 1602.
(xv) The Italian Tragedy.
March 1603.
EDMUND SPENSER (1552–99).
The only record of Spenser’s dramatic experiments, unless they are buried amongst the anonymous plays of the Revels Accounts, is to be found in his correspondence of April 1580 with Gabriel Harvey, who wrote, ‘I imagine your Magnificenza will hold us in suspense ... for your nine English Commedies’, and again, ‘I am void of all judgment if your Nine Comedies, whereunto in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the Nine Muses (and in one mans fancy not unworthily) come not nearer Ariosto’s Comedies, either for the fineness of plausible elocution, or the rareness of Poetical Invention, than that Elvish Queen doth to his Orlando Furioso’ (Two other Very Commendable Letters, in Harvey’s Works, i. 67, 95). I can hardly suppose that the manuscript play of ‘Farry Queen’ in Warburton’s list (3 Library, ii. 232) had any connexion with Spenser’s comedies.
ROD. STAFFORD.
Probably the ‘Rod. Staff.’ who collaborated with Robert Wilmot (q.v.) in the Inner Temple play of Gismond of Salerne.
WILLIAM STANLEY, EARL OF DERBY (1561–1642).
Derby seems to have had players from 1594 to 1618, who presumably acted the comedies which he was said to be ‘penning’ in June 1599 (cf. ch. xiii), but none of these can be identified, although the company’s anonymous Trial of Chivalry (1605) needs an author. A fantastic theory that his plays were for the Chamberlain’s, and that he wrote them under the name of William Shakespeare, was promulgated by J. Greenstreet in The Genealogist, n.s. vii. 205; viii. 8, 137, and has been elaborately developed by A. Lefranc in Sous le Masque de ‘William Shakespeare’ (1919) and later papers in Le Flambeau and elsewhere. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was not impossibly written for his wedding on 26 Jan. 1595 (cf. App. A and Shakespeare Homage, 154).