[986] F. following Do. unnecessarily prints 'wee heare.'
[987] Bl. creature. F. first printed 'creator.'
[988] Disgrace attached to the elder because it was the tree on which Judas hanged himself. F.
George Peele
THE OLD WIVES' TALE
Edited with Critical Essay and Notes
by F. B. Gummere, Ph.D.,
Professor in Haverford College.
CRITICAL ESSAY
Life.—George Peele, probably sprung from a Devonshire family, and the son of James Peele, clerk of Christ's Hospital, is known to have been in 1565 a free scholar of the grammar school connected with that foundation. He went to Oxford in 1571; studied at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, and at Christ Church; took his B.A. in 1577, his M.A. in 1579, and went up to London about 1580. At Oxford he already had the name of poet, scholar, and dramatist. He was married, it would seem, as early as 1583, to a wife who brought him some property; this, however, soon vanished, and left the poet dependent upon his wits. Although the stories in the Jests are musty old tales, fastened upon Peele, it is unlikely that they settled on his name without a sense of fitness on the part of a public that had known his ways,—his hopeless lack of pence, his good nature and popularity, his shifts to beg, borrow, and cozen. With Greene, Nashe, Marlowe, and a few lesser lights, he belonged to that group of scholars who wrote plays, translations, occasional poems, pageants, and whatever else would find a market. Now and then, it is almost certain, he appeared as an actor. Of his dissolute course of life, its misery and squalour, there can be no doubt whatever; "driven as myself," says Greene, "to extreme shifts." As early as 1579 Peele had made trouble for his father; he lived in poverty; and the curtain falls upon an ignoble end. Dying before 1598, the poet barely saw his fortieth year.
Plays assigned to Peele.—The best plays of Peele are The Arraignment of Paris, published in 1584, and, in Fleay's opinion, played as early as 1581,—a "first encrease," Nashe calls it, written in smooth metres which doubtless had influence on Marlowe's own verse; The Old Wives' Tale, published 1595; and the saccharine David and Bethsabe, beloved of German critics. Edward I., with wofully corrupt text, is good only in parts; The Battle of Alcazar, published anonymously in 1594, is almost certainly Peele's, but does not help his reputation; while Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes is quite certainly not Peele's in any way. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, II. 296, assigns it, along with Common Conditions and Appius and Virginia, to R. B. (Richard Bower?), whose initials appear on the title-page of the last-named play. Professor Kittredge, however, Journal of Germanic Philology, II. 8, suggests, as author of Sir Clyomon, Thomas Preston of Cambyses fame. By way of compensation for this loss, Fleay (work quoted, II. 155) attributes to Peele The Wisdome of Doctor Doddipoll, published in 1600; there is dialect in the play, but overdone, good blank verse, and an indifferent plot. The song, What Thing is Love, hardly makes foundation enough for the assumption that Peele wrote the play, even with the aid of an enchanter among the characters, and a metre like that of David and Bethsabe. Further, Fleay presents our author with Wily Beguiled, possibly, he thinks, a university play; but his proof is not convincing. Kirkman, in a catalogue of plays added to his edition of Tom Tiler and his Wife, 1661, credits George Peele not only with David and Bethsabe, but with Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, while Will Shakespeare has the Arraignment of Paris. The Old Wives' Tale is set down as anonymous.