The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune. 1582 (?)
1589. The Rare Triumphs of Loue and Fortune. Plaide before the Queenes most excellent Maiestie: wherein are many fine Conceites with great delight. E. A. for Edward White.
Editions by J. P. Collier (1851, Roxb. Club) and in Dodsley4 (1874, vi).
Fleay, ii. 26, assigns the play to Kyd on account of the similarity of the plot to that of Soliman and Perseda, but this is hardly convincing. On 30 Dec. 1582 Derby’s players performed A History of Love and Fortune at court, for which a city and battlement were provided by the Revels office. If the two plays were identical, as dates and style make not improbable, the city presumably served as a background for the scenes at court, while the battlement was used for the presenters Venus and Fortune, who are said in Act I to be ‘set sunning like a crow in a gutter’.
Love Feigned and Unfeigned (?)
[MS.] On first and last leaves (sig. a 1 and ii. 8 of a copy (Brit. Mus. IB. 2172) of Johannes Herolt, Sermones Discipuli (1492).
Edition by A. Esdaile (1908, M. S. C. i. 17).—Dissertation: E. B. Daw, L. F. and U. and the English Anabaptists (1917, M. L. A. xxxii. 267).
The text is a fragment, but there may have been more, as the original fly-leaves and end papers of the volume are gone. Sir G. F. Warner thinks the hand ‘quite early seventeenth century’. The corrections in the same hand are such as rather to suggest an original composition, but may also be those of an expert copyist. Miss Daw thinks that the date of composition was in the seventeenth century, and that the play represents ideas belonging to (a) the Anabaptists and (b) the Family of Love, both of which were then active. She even suggests the possible authorship of the controversialist Edmond Jessop. Personally, I find it difficult to assign to the seventeenth century a moral written precisely in the vein of the middle of the sixteenth century, even to the notes (2, 69, 103) of action ‘in place’ (cf. ch. xix), and a phrase (76),
Why stare ye at me thus I wene ye be come to se a play,
closely parallel to Wit and Wisdom, 12, which is probably pre-Elizabethan. The Jacobean activity of Anabaptism and Familism only revived movements which had been familiar in England from Edwardian times, were particularly vigorous in 1575, and had apparently died down during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign; cf. for Anabaptists C. Burrage, The Early English Dissenters (1912), and for Familists s.v. Middleton, Family of Love.