The locality was the hall of the Inner Temple. Towards the lower end was discovered a sea-cliff. The drawing of a traverse discovered a wood, in which later two gates flew open, disclosing the maskers asleep in an arbour at the end of a glade. Awaked by a charm, they danced their first and second measures, took out ladies for ‘the old measures, galliards, corantoes, the brawls, etc.’, and danced their last measure.
The Inner Temple records (Inderwick, ii. 99) mention an order of 21 April 1616 for recompense to the chief cook on account of damage to his room in the cloister when it and its chimney were broken down at Christmas twelvemonth ‘by such as climbed up at the windows of the hall to see the mask’.
SIR GEORGE BUCK (ob. 1623).
He was Master of the Revels (cf. ch. iii). For a very doubtful ascription to him, on manuscript authority alleged by Collier, of the dumb-shows to Locrine, cf. ch. xxiv.
JAMES CALFHILL (1530?-1570).
Calfhill was an Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, man, who migrated to Oxford and became Student of Christ Church in 1548 and Canon in 1560. He was in Orders and was Rector of West Horsley when Elizabeth was there in 1559. After various preferments, he was nominated Bishop of Worcester in 1570, but died before consecration.
On 6 July 1564 Walter Haddon wrote to Abp. Parker (Parker Correspondence, 218) deprecating the tone of a sermon by Calfhill before the Queen, and said ‘Nunquam in illo loco quisquam minus satisfecit, quod maiorem ex eo dolorem omnibus attulit, quoniam admodum est illis artibus instructus quas illius theatri celebritas postulat’. No play by Calfhill is extant, but his Latin tragedy of Progne was given before Elizabeth at Christ Church on 5 Sept. 1566 (cf. ch. iv), and appears from Bereblock’s synopsis to have been based on an earlier Latin Progne (1558) by Gregorio Corraro.
THOMAS CAMPION (1567–1620).
Thomas, son of John Campion, a Chancery clerk of Herts. extraction, was born on 12 Feb. 1567, educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he took no degree, and admitted on 27 April 1586 to Gray’s Inn, where he took part as Hidaspis and Melancholy in the comedy of 16 Jan. 1588 (cf. ch. vii). He left the law, and probably served in Essex’s expedition of 1591 to France. He first appeared as a poet, anonymously, in the appendix to Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), and has left several books of songs written as airs for music, often of his own composition, as well as a collection of Latin epigrams and Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602). I do not know whether he can be the ‘Campnies’ who performed at the Gray’s Inn mask of Shrovetide 1595 at Court (cf. s.v. Gesta Grayorum), but one of the two hymns in that mask, A Hymn in Praise of Neptune is assigned to him by Francis Davison, Poetical Rhapsody (1602), sig. K 8, and it is possible that the second hymn, beginning ‘Shadows before the shining sun do vanish’, which Davison does not himself appear to claim, may also be his. By 1607 he had taken the degree of M.D., probably abroad, and he practised as a physician. Through Sir Thomas Monson he was entangled, although in no very blameworthy capacity, in the Somerset scandals of 1613–15. On 1 March 1620 he died, probably of the plague, naming as his legatee Philip Rosseter, with whom he had written A Booke of Airs in 1601.
Campion is not traceable as a writer for the stage, although his connexion with Monson and Rosseter would have made it not surprising to find him concerned with the Queen’s Revels syndicate of 1610. But his contribution to the Gesta Grayorum foreshadowed his place, second only to Jonson’s, who wrote a Discourse of Poesie (Laing, 1), now lost, against him, in the mask-poetry of the Jacobean period. In addition to his acknowledged masks he may also be responsible for part or all of the Gray’s Inn Mountebanks Mask of 1618, printed by Nichols, Eliz. iii. 320, as a second part of the Gesta Grayorum, and by Bullen, Marston, iii. 417, although the ascription to Marston is extremely improbable.