Antony and Valia.[1]
1 Long Meg of Westminster.[2]
The Welshman.[3]
1 Fortunatus.
Osric.
Time's Triumph and Fortune's.
The Witch of Islington.
Five plays of Marlowe's are conspicuous in the list. Mahomet might be either Greene's Alphonsus, King of Arragon or Peele's lost Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek. Fortunatus, as revised by Dekker in 1599, is extant, but it is doubtful whether Dekker was writing early enough to have been the author of the original play. Conjectural identifications of some of the other titles have been attempted.[4] There is, perhaps, a natural inclination to eke out our meagre knowledge of the repertory of the earlier Admiral's men, as it was constituted before 1590, by the assumption that the old and the revised new plays of 1594-7 belong to that stock. But this can only be proved to be so in the case of 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, where the title-page of the 1590 edition comes to our assistance. There is no trace between 1594 and 1597 of any of the other three plays, The Battle of Alcazar, The Wounds of Civil War, and Orlando Furioso, which there is independent evidence for connecting with the Admiral's. And it must be borne in mind that there were several other sources from which a supply of old plays might be drawn. Alleyn seems to have bought up the books and properties of the pre-1590 men, and we do not know how far he also retained rights in some or all of the plays produced during his alliance with Strange's. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities for either Alleyn, Henslowe, or the Admiral's men as a whole, to acquire copies from one or more of the companies, Pembroke's, the Queen's, Sussex's, which went under in the plague years. Henry V, if identical with The Famous Victories, had certainly been a Queen's play; The Ranger's Comedy had been played for Henslowe by the Queen's and Sussex's in April 1594; Jeronimo and The Guise had been similarly played by Strange's in 1592-3; and the fact that Strange's, the Queen's, Sussex's, and the
- ↑ I assume that 'valy a for' entered on 4 Jan. 1595 is the same play.
Conceivably it might be Vallingford, i. e. Fair Em, an old Strange's play. - ↑ An allusion in Field's Amends for Ladies, ii. 1, shows that Long Meg
still held the Fortune stage about 1611. - ↑ Possibly identical with Longshanks.
- ↑ The relations suggested are between The Love of a Grecian Lady and the German Tugend- und Liebesstreit, The French Doctor and both Dekker's Jew of Venice and the German Josephus Jude von Venedig, The Siege of London and Heywood's 1 Edward IV, The Welshman and R. A.'s The Valiant Welshman, Time's Triumph and Fortune's and Heywood's Timon. For details cf. Henslowe, ii. 165 sqq.
