DAMON AND PITHIAS.
EDITIONS.
For the titles of the two old copies, see Hazlitt’s “Handbook,” p. 177.
MR HAZLITT’S PREFACE.[1]
Richard Edwards (the elder), a Somersetshire man, was born about the year 1523, and is said to have received his education at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, whence “in youthful years,” as he himself narrates, in the “Paradise of Dainty Devices,” but not until after August 1544, “his young desires pricked him forth to serve in court, a slender, tall young man.” What his service at court may have been, does not appear, and he relinquished it for a time in 1547, when he was nominated a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, then newly founded by Henry VIII., and created M.A. Here, among other studies, he applied himself to that of music, under George Etheridge, with a view, probably, to further service at court. On his return to London, he entered himself of Lincoln’s Inn, and ultimately was constituted by Queen Elizabeth a Gentleman
of the Chapel Royal, and, in 1561, Master of the Children or singing boys of that establishment. Warton, after stating that Edwards “united all those arts and accomplishments which minister to popular pleasantry,” which may be very true, adds what (as Collier points out) is unquestionably a mistake, that the children of the chapel were first formed by him into a company of players; for they had regularly acted plays long before.
In 1566, Edwards attended the Queen in her visit to Oxford, where he composed a play called “Palamen and Arcite,” which was acted before Her Majesty in Christ Church Hall.
Stow, in his “Chronicle,” mentions the name of the play, and adds that “it had such tragical success as was very lamentable; for at that time, by the fall of a wall and a paire of staires & great prese (press) of the multitude, three men were slain.” “At night” (Sept. 2[2]), writes Anthony Wood, “the Queen heard the first part of an English play, named Palamon & Arcyte, made by M. Richard Edwards, a gentleman of her Chapel, acted with very great applause, in Christ Church Hall, at the beginning of which play, there was, by part of the stage which fell, three persons slain, besides five that were hurt. Afterwards the actors performed their parts so well, that the Queen laughed heartily thereat, and gave the author of the play great thanks for his pains” (quoted by Collier, “Annals of the Stage,”
i., 191). “Her Majesty also presented eight guineas to one of the young performers who gave her peculiar satisfaction. It is fair to add, in behalf of good Queen Bess, that from Peshall’s ‘History of the University,’ it would seem that the Queen was not present on the occasion of the accident.” He died on the 31st October in the same year, according to Hawkins; and in Turbervile’s Poems, printed in 1567, are two elegiac compositions on his decease, one by Turbervile himself, the other by Thomas Twine, the translator of Virgil.[3]
“Edwards,” writes Collier,[4] “enjoyed a very high reputation as a dramatic poet, but he seems to have owed much of it to the then comparative novelty of his undertakings.” Thomas Twine, in an epitaph upon his death, calls him—