Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/364

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Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas. 1630-6 (?)

S. R. 1635, Aug. 29 (Weekes). 'A booke called Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma's selected out of Lucian Erasmus Textor Ovid &c. by Thomas Heywood.' Richard Hearne (Arber, iv. 347).

1637. Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma's, selected out of Lucian, Erasmus, Textor, Ovid, &c. With sundry Emblems extracted from the most elegant Iacobus Catsius. As also certaine Elegies, Epitaphs, and Epithalamions or Nuptiall Songs; Anagrams and Acrosticks; With divers Speeches (upon severall occasions) spoken to their most Excellent Majesties, King Charles, and Queene Mary. With other Fancies translated from Beza, Bucanan, and sundry Italian Poets. By Tho. Heywood. R. O. for R. H., sold by Thomas Slater. [Epistle to the Generous Reader, signed 'Tho. Heywood', and Congratulatory Poems by Sh. Marmion, D. E., and S. N.]

Edition by W. Bang (1903, Materialien, iii).

The section called 'Sundry Fancies writ upon severall occasions' (Bang, 231) includes a number of Prologues and Epilogues, of which those which are datable fall between 1630 and 1636. Bang regards all the contents of the volume as of about this period. Fleay, i. 285, had suggested that Deorum Judicium, Jupiter and Io, Apollo and Daphne, Amphrisa, and possibly Misanthropos formed the anonymous Five Plays in One produced by the Admiral's on 7 April 1597, and also that Misanthropos, which he supposed to bear the name Time's Triumph, was played with Faustus on 13 April 1597 and carelessly entered by Henslowe as 'times triumpe & fortus'. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 183) says of the Dialogues and Dramas, 'many of the pieces in that collection are undoubtedly early'. He rejects Fleay's views as to Misanthropos on the grounds that it is 'unrelieved tediousness' and has no claim to the title Time's Triumph, and is doubtful as to Deorum Judicium. The three others he seems inclined to accept as possibly belonging to the 1597 series, especially Jupiter and Io, where the unappropriated head of Argus in one of the Admiral's inventories tempts him. He is also attracted by an alternative suggestion of Fleay's that one of the Five Plays in One may have been a Cupid and Psyche, afterwards worked up into Love's Mistress (1636). This he says, 'if it existed', would suit very well. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that it did exist. Moreover, P. A. Daniel has shown that certain lines found in Love's Mistress are assigned to Dekker in England's Parnassus (1600, ed. Crawford, xxxi. 509, 529) and must be from the Cupid and Psyche produced by the Admiral's c. June 1600 (Henslowe, ii. 212). There is no indication that Heywood collaborated with Dekker, Chettle, and Day in this; but it occurs to me that, if he was still at the Rose, he may have acted in the play and cribbed years afterwards from the manuscript of his part. I will only add that Misanthropos and Deorum Judicium seem to me out of the question. They belong to the series of 'dialogues' which Heywood in his Epistle clearly treats as distinct from the 'dramas', for after describing them he goes on, 'For such as delight in Stage-poetry, here are also divers Dramma's, never