'pageant poet to the City of Milan', at any rate 'when a worse cannot be had'. He boasts that 'I do use as much stale stuff, though I say it myself, as any man does in that kind', and again, 'An they'll give me twenty pound a play, I'll not raise my vein'. Some 'will have every day new tricks, and write you nothing but humours'; this pleases the gentlemen, but he is for 'the penny'. Crawford points out that there are four quotations from the play in Bodenham's Belvedere (1600), of which Munday was the compiler, and suggests that he would have left it alone had the ridicule of himself then been a part of it. I should put the scene later still. Antonio makes an offer of 'one of the books' of his last pageant, and as far as is known, although Munday may have been arranging city pageants long before, the first which he printed was that for 1605. Nor does the reference to plays of 'tricks' and 'humours' necessarily imply proximity to Jonson's own early comedies, for Day's Law Tricks and his Humour out of Breath, as well as probably the anonymous Every Woman in her Humour, belong to 1604-8. Moreover, the play was certainly on the stage about this time, since the actors are called 'Children of Blackfriars', although of course this would not be inconsistent with their having first produced it when they bore some other name. The text is in an odd state. Up to the end of Act III it has been arranged in scenes, on the principle usually adopted by Jonson; after 'Actus 3 [an error for 4] Scaene 1' there is no further division, and in Act V verse and prose are confused. As Jonson was careful about the printing of his plays, as there is no epistle, and as C. A. was left out of the Ff., there is some reason to suppose that the publication in this state was not due to him. Is it possible that Day, whom Jonson described to Drummond as a 'rogue' and a 'base fellow', was concerned in this transaction? It is obvious that, if I. i is a later addition, the original production may have been earlier than 1598. And the original company is unknown. The mere fact that the Children of the Blackfriars revived it shortly before 1609 does not in the least prove that it was originally written for the Children of the Chapel. If Chapman's All Fools is a Blackfriars revival of an Admiral's play, C. A. might even more easily be a Blackfriars revival of a play written, say, for the extinct Pembroke's. With the assumption that C. A. was a Chapel play disappears the assumption that the Chapel themselves began their renewed dramatic activities at a date earlier than the end of 1600. Selin shows a fair amount of stylistic correspondence with Jonson's other work, but it is quite possible that, as suggested by Herford (R. E. C. ii. 9), he had a collaborator. If so, Chapman seems plausible.
C. A. has nothing to do with the Poetomachia. Hart (9 N. Q. xi. 501, xii. 161, 263) finds in the vocabulary of Juniper a parody of the affected phraseology of Gabriel Harvey, and in the critical attitude of Valentine a foreshadowing of such autobiographical studies as that of Asper in E. M. O. His suggestion that the cudgel-play between Onion and Martino in II. vii represents the controversy between Nashe and Martin Marprelate is perhaps less plausible. Nashe would be very likely to think the chaff of Harvey 'witty'.
