Fleay, ii. 321, suggests a date c. 1602 on the ground of apparent reference to the Poetomachia. But this is not conclusive, and Adams points to the use of a song (p. 335) from Bateson’s Madrigals (1604). He thinks that Lewis Machin was the author, as the style resembles that of the comic part of The Dumb Knight (vide s. Markham), and two passages are substantially reproduced in the latter. If so, this also may be a King’s Revels play. Allusions on p. 270 to the ‘babones’ (cf. s.v. Sir Giles Goosecap) and on p. 316 to the Family of Love (cf. s.v. Middleton) are consistent with a date of 1603–8.
Fair Em c. 1590
N.D. For T. N. and I. W.
[In Bodleian. Greg says that this is ‘considerably earlier’ than 1631. The t.p. is as in 1631. Chetwood mentions three early editions, including one undated and one of 1619. This is not now known.]
1631. A Pleasant Comedie of Faire Em, the Millers Daughter of Manchester. With the loue of William the Conqueror. As it was sundry times publiquely acted in the Honourable Citie of London, by the right Honourable the Lord Strange his Seruants. For John Wright.
Editions by R. Simpson (1878, S. of S. ii), J. S. Farmer (1911, T. F. T.), and in collections of Sh. Apocrypha.—Dissertations: R. Simpson, Some Plays Attributed to Sh. (1875–6, N. S. S. Trans. 155); K. Elze, Nachträgliche Bemerkungen zu Mucedorus und F. E. (1880, Jahrbuch, xv. 339); P. Lohr, Le Printemps d’Yver und die Quelle zu F. E. (1912).
The play has a double plot. One theme is the contest of William the Conqueror and the Marquess Lubeck for the loves of Princess Blanch of Denmark and of Mariana, a Swedish captive; the other is the contest of Manvile, Mountney and Valingford for Em, daughter of the Miller of Manchester. A ‘ballad intituled The Miller’s daughter of Manchester’ was entered on the Stationers’ Register by Henry Carr on 2 March 1581 (Arber, ii. 390). Fair Em has been included in the Shakespeare Apocrypha on the strength of a volume formerly in the collection of Charles II, and then in that of Garrick, in which it was bound up with Mucedorus and The Merry Devil of Edmonton and lettered ‘Shakespeare, vol. i’. On the other hand, Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675), assigned it to Greene. Clearly Greene is not the author, although there are certain resemblances of situation between the play and Friar Bacon; for he satirizes it in the preface to Farewell to Folly (Works, ix. 232), quoting one or two of its expressions and blaming them as borrowed out of Scripture. Of the author he says, ‘He that cannot write true English without the help of clerks of parish churches will needs make himself the father of interludes’, and, ‘The sexton of St. Giles without Cripplegate would have been ashamed of such blasphemous rhetoric’. Farewell to Folly seems to have appeared in 1591 (cf. s.v. Greene), and Fair Em may perhaps therefore be dated between this pamphlet and Friar Bacon (c. 1589). Simpson adopts the theory, which hardly deserves serious discussion, of Shakespeare’s authorship. He finds numerous (but impossible) attacks by Greene upon Shakespeare from the Planetomachia (1585) onwards, and thinks that Shakespeare retorted in Fair Em, satirizing Greene as Manvile and Marlowe as Mountney, and depicting himself as Valingford. ‘Fair Em’ herself is the Manchester stage. In the story of William the Conqueror he finds an allusion to the travels of William Kempe and other actors in Denmark and Saxony. Fleay, Shakespeare Manual (1878), 281, adopts much of this fantasy, but turns ‘Fair Em’ into the Queen’s company and Valingford into Peele. In 1891 (ii. 282) he makes ‘Fair Em’ Strange’s company. His minor identifications, whether of 1878 or of 1891, may be disregarded. More plausible is his suggestion that the author of the play may be Robert Wilson (q.v.), which would explain the attack upon Greene (q.v.) for his Farewell to Folly in R. W.’s Martin Mar-sixtus (1591). The suggestion that the play was the Sir John Mandeville revived by Strange’s for Henslowe in 1592 rests on a confusion between Mandeville and Manvile, but it may have been the William the Conqueror similarly revived by Sussex’s on 4 Jan. 1594 (Greg, Henslowe, ii. 151, 158).
The Fair Maid of Bristow > 1604
S. R. 1605, Feb. 8. ‘A commedy called “the fayre Mayd of Bristoe” played at Hampton Court by his Maiesties players.’ Thomas Pavier (Arber, iii. 283).
1605. The Faire Maide of Bristow. As it was plaide at Hampton, before the King and Queenes most excellent Maiesties. For Thomas Pavier.