a pretty dialogue of John Davies 'twixt a Maide, a widow, and a wife.'
A Contention Betwixt a Wife, a Widdow, and a Maide was registered on 2 Apr. 1604 (Arber iii. 258), appeared with the initials I. D. in Francis Davison's Poetical Rhapsody (ed. 2, 1608) and is reprinted by Grosart in the Poems of Sir John Davies (q.v.) from the ed. of 1621, where it is ascribed to 'Sir I. D.'. (b) Nichols, Eliz. iii. 76, prints from Harl. MS. 286, f. 248, 'A Conference betweene a Gent. Huisher and a Poet, before the Queene, at M^r. Secretaryes House. By John Davies.' He assigns it to 1591, but Cecil was not then Secretary, and it probably belongs to 1602. (c) Hatfield MSS. xii. 568 has verses endorsed '1602' and beginning 'Now we have present made, To Cynthya, Phebe, Flora'.
vi. Theobalds Entertainment of 1606 (Earl of Salisbury).
See s.v. Jonson; also the mask described by Harington (ch. v).
vii. Theobalds Entertainment of 1607 (Earl of Salisbury).
See s.v. Jonson.
GEORGE CHAPMAN (c. 1560-1634).
Chapman was born in 1559 or 1560 near Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Anthony Wood believed him to have been at Oxford, and possibly also at Cambridge, but neither residence can be verified. It is conjectured that residence at Hitchin and soldiering in the Low Countries may have helped to fill the long period before his first appearance as a writer, unless indeed the isolated translation Fedele and Fortunio (1584) is his, with The Shadow of Night (1594). This shows him a member of the philosophical circle of which the centre was Thomas Harriot. The suggestion of W. Minto that he was the 'rival poet' of Shakespeare's Sonnets is elaborated by Acheson, who believes that Shakespeare drew him as Holophernes and as Thersites, and accepted by Robertson; it would be more plausible if any relation between the Earl of Southampton and Chapman, earlier than a stray dedication shared with many others in 1609, could be established. By 1596, and possibly earlier, Chapman was in Henslowe's pay as a writer for the Admiral's. His plays, which proved popular, included, besides the extant Blind Beggar of Alexandria and Humorous Day's Mirth, five others, of which some and perhaps all have vanished. These were The Isle of a Woman, afterwards called The Fount of New Fashions (May-Oct. 1598), The World Runs on Wheels, afterwards called All Fools but the Fool (Jan.-July 1599), Four Kings (Oct. 1598-Jan. 1599), a 'tragedy of Bengemens plotte' (Oct.-Jan. 1598; cf. s.v. Jonson) and a pastoral tragedy (July 1599). His reputation both for tragedy and for comedy was established when Meres wrote his Palladis Tamia in 1598. During 1599 Chapman disappears from Henslowe's diary, and in 1600 or soon after began his series of plays for the Chapel, afterwards Queen's Revels, children. This lasted until 1608, when his first indiscretion of Eastward Ho! (1605), in reply to which he was
