Ho! The Induction describes the locality of the Hope as 'being as durty as Smithfield, and as stinking euery whit', and possibly glances at the Winter's Tale and Tempest in disclaiming the introduction of 'a Seruant-monster' and 'a nest of Antiques', since the author is 'loth to make Nature afraid in his Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries'. There is no actor-list, but in V. iii 'Your best Actor. Your Field?' is referred to on a level with 'your Burbage'. Similarly the puppet Leander is said to shake his head 'like an hostler' and it is declared that 'one Taylor, would goe neere to beat all this company, with a hand bound behinde him'. Field and Taylor were both of the Lady Elizabeth's men in 1614, while the allusion to Ostler of the King's men is apparently satirical. The suggestion of Ordish, 225, that Taylor is the water poet, who had recently appeared on the Hope stage, is less probable. The 'word out of the play, Palemon' (IV. iii) is set against another, Argalus 'out of the Arcadia', and might therefore, as Fleay, i. 377, thinks, refer to Daniel's Queen's Arcadia (1605), but the Palamon of T. N. K. was probably quite recent. I see no reason to accept Fleay's identification of Littlewit with Daniel; that of Lanthorn Leatherhead with Inigo Jones is more plausible. Gifford suggested that the burlesque puppet-play of Damon and Pythias in V. iv may have been retrieved by Jonson from earlier work, perhaps for the real puppet-stage, since 'Old Cole' is a character, and in Satiromastix Horace is called 'puppet-teacher' (1980) and in another passage (607) 'olde Coale', and told that Crispinus and Demetrius 'shal be thy Damons and thou their Pithyasse'.
The Devil Is An Ass 1616
1631. The Diuell is an Asse: A Comedie Acted in the yeare, 1616. By His Maiesties Seruants. The Author Ben: Ionson. I. B. for Robert Allot. [Part of F_{2}. Prologue and Epilogue. The play is referred to in Jonson's letter to the Earl of Newcastle, quoted under Bartholomew Fair.] 1641. Imprinted at London.
Edition by W. S. Johnson (1905, Yale Studies, xxix).—Dissertation: E. Holstein, Verhältnis von B. J.'s D. A. und John Wilson's Belphegor zu Machiavelli's Novelle vom Belfagor (1901). In the play itself are introduced references to a performance of The Devil as a new play, to its playbill, to the Blackfriars as the house, and to Dick Robinson as a player of female parts (I. iv. 43; vi. 31; II. viii. 64; III. v. 38). Probably the production was towards the end rather than the beginning of 1616.
Lost Plays
I do not feel able to accept the view, expounded by Fleay, i. 370, 386, and adopted by some later writers, that A Tale of a Tub, licensed by Herbert on 7 May 1633, was only a revision of one of Jonson's Elizabethan plays. It appears to rest almost wholly upon references to a 'queen'. These are purely dramatic, and part of an attempt to give the action an old-fashioned setting. The queen intended is not
