an allusion which was not chronologically accurate until the close of the thirty-eighth regnal year on 16 Nov. 1596, after the play was in print, and could hardly have been made before the beginning of that year on 17 Nov. 1595, after it had been entered in S. R. As to the original author, one is bound to be sceptical of the unconfirmed notice by J. P. Collier (Bibliographical Account, i. 95) of an ‘inscription on an existing copy of the play ... assigning the authorship of it to Charles Tylney’. This, says Collier, ‘is the handwriting of Sir George Buck. He adds the information that he himself had written the dumb shows by which it was illustrated, and that it was originally called Elstrild’. Charles Tilney was a cousin of the Master of the Revels, and was executed for complicity in the Babington plot in 1586 (Camden, transl. 303). The statement, if true, would give an early date to the play, which the dumb shows and other ‘Senecan’ characteristics have been supposed to confirm. Fleay, ii. 321, boldly conjectures that the epilogue originally referred to ‘eight and twentie yeares’, and that the play was ‘by’ in the sense of ‘about’, Tilney, supposing the moral drawn against ‘ciuill discord’ instigated by ‘priuate amours’ to point at Mary of Scots. Recent investigations, however, concerning the relations of the play to Spenser on the one hand, and to Selimus (q.v.) on the other, suggest a date not earlier and not much later than 1591, either for the original composition of the play, or for a very substantial revision of it. Most of the points are well summed up by Cunliffe in C. H. v. 84. Locrine may borrow historical facts from the Faerie Queene (1590); it does not borrow phrases from it. It does, however, borrow phrases and whole lines, with more than Elizabethan plagiarism, from Spenser’s Complaints (1591). There is also an apparent loan from Wilmot’s Tancred and Gismund (1591). Some of the Complaints passages are also borrowed by Selimus, which makes similar booty both of Locrine itself and of the Faerie Queene. I agree with Cunliffe that the evidence is clearly in favour of Selimus being the later of the two plays, but am not so certain that the second borrowing of the Complaints passages tells against a common authorship of the two. It would be so, ordinarily, but here we have to do with an abnormal plagiarist. Whoever the author, he belongs to the school of the university wits. Marlowe is preferred by Malone, Peele by Fleay, Ward, Gaud, and for all but the comic scenes by Hopkinson, Greene by Brooke, Peele and Greene by Robertson.
The London Prodigal. 1603 < > 05
1605. The London Prodigall. As it was plaide by the Kings Maiesties seruants. By William Shakespeare. T. C. for Nathaniel Butter.
1664; 1685. [F3; F4 of Shakespeare.]
Editions in 1709, 1734 (J. Tonson), 1734 (R. Walker), by J. S. Farmer (1910, T. F. T.), and in Sh. Apocrypha.
Shakespeare’s authorship is accepted by few modern critics. An exception is Hopkinson. Fleay, Shakespeare, 299; B. C. i. 152, thinks that he may have ‘plotted’ the play, but that the writer is the same as that of Thomas Lord Cromwell, whom he believes to be Drayton. Perhaps he is right in regarding an allusion to service ‘under the king’ (II. i. 16) as pointing to a Jacobean date. Brooke suggests Marston or Dekker. A play ‘von einem ungehorsamen Khauffmanns Sohn’ appears in Anglo-German repertories of 1604 and 1606 (Herz, 65, 94).
Look About You. 1599 (?)
1600. A Pleasant Commodie, Called Looke about you. As it was lately played by the right honourable the Lord High Admirall his seruaunts. For William Ferbrand.
Editions in Dodsley4 (1874, vii), and by J. S. Farmer (1912, T. F. T.) and W. W. Greg (1913, M. S. R.).
At the end of the play Gloucester proposes to fight the Saracens in Portugal, and as Anthony Wadeson (q.v.) was writing The Honourable Life of the Humorous Earl of Gloster with his Conquest of Portugal in June or July 1601, it has been suggested by Fleay, ii. 267, and Greg, Henslowe, ii. 204, that Wadeson was also the author of Look About You. The play ought itself to appear somewhere in Henslowe’s diary, and Fleay may be right in identifying it with the Bear a Brain of 1599, although the only recorded payment for that play was not to Wadeson, but to Dekker. There are reminiscences of R.J. II. iv. 42; III. v. 221 in l. 2329, and of 1 Hen. IV, II. iv. 295 in l. 2426.