suggests production in 1591, but the play cannot have been very recent when Sir John Harington, in a note to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591), Bk. xiv, cited a 'pretie conceit' of 'our Cambridge Comedie Pedantius (at whiche I remember the noble Earle of Essex that now is, was present)'. In his Apologie of Poetrie, prefixed to the translation, Harington also says (G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii. 210), 'How full of harmeles myrth is our Cambridge Pedantius? and the Oxford Bellum Grammaticale?' Harington, who again cites 'our Pedantius of Cambridge' in his Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), 126, was with Essex at Cambridge during 1578-81, and Moore Smith has shown that the production at Trinity was probably on 6 Feb. 1581, shortly before the defeat of Gabriel Harvey by Anthony Wingfield of Trinity for the Public Oratorship of Cambridge. There can be little doubt that Harvey was the butt of Pedantius, and hardly more that Wingfield was concerned in this satire. Nashe has two allusions to the matter. In Strange News (1593) he says that Harvey's verses were 'miserably flouted at in M. Winkfields Comoedie of Pedantius in Trinitie Colledge' (Works, i. 303). In Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596) he says, 'Ile fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedie in Trinitie Colledge; where, vnder the cheife part, from which it tooke his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School-master, hee was full drawen & delineated from the soale of the foote to the crowne of his head', and goes on to enumerate the principal traits of Harvey touched off by the actors, who 'borrowed his gowne to playe the Part in, the more to flout him' (Works, iii. 80). So far, we are left a little uncertain whether the main authorship is to be ascribed, with Nashe in Strange News, to Anthony Wingfield, or, with the Caius MS., to Edward Forsett, both of whom were Fellows of Trinity in 1581. Moore Smith has, however, shown in T. L. S. (10 Oct. 1918) that Forsett refers to 'Pedantio meo' in the epistle to an unprinted Concio of his among the MSS. of St. John's, Cambridge. For an absurd attempt to assign the authorship to Bacon, largely on the ground of some non-existent pigs in the title-page border, cf. E. A. [E. G. Harman], The Shakespeare Problem (1909), and T. L. S. (27 March, 17 April, 1 May, 1919). Modern ascriptions to Thomas Beard and to Walter Hawkesworth seem to rest on misunderstandings. Perfidus Hetruscus.
Bodl. Rawlinson MS. C. 787. Physiponomachia (1609-11). Bodl. MS. 27639. Dedicated to John Buckeridge, President of St. John's, Oxford, 1605-11, by Christopher Wren, father of the architect, who took his B.A. from St. John's in 1609. Psyche et Filii Ejus.
Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS. 171, f. 60.
This is a Jesuit play, on the heresy of England.
Lugentis Angliae faciem dum Poeta pingeret.
