Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/102

This somewhat lengthy consideration of the correspondences between the two lists of plays belonging to the King’s players may form a background for the more interesting analysis of the plays given over to D’Avenant in 1660 and in 1668. The warrant of the former year presents him with nine plays of Shakespeare, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII., Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet, besides allowing him two months’ use of Pericles. Besides these, he obtained Denham’s The Sophy, a King’s men’s play not printed till 1642, but peculiarly left out of the 1641 list, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, another King’s men’s tragedy, but rightly omitted from the list since it had been published in 1623. It has been noted above that a two months’ right was given him in The Mad Lover and The Maid of the Mill; to these and Pericles may be added The Spanish Curate, The Loyal Subject, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. The 1668 warrant provides a different set of plays altogether. Those of 1660 had been, without exception, plays originally in the possession of the King’s men; these of 1668 mostly belonged to other sets of actors, and several came from the Cockpit company of 1639. Thus Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge and Chapman’s Chabot Admiral of France appear in the 1639 list, the first having belonged to the Queen’s Revels and later to the Lady Elizabeth’s men,^[1] and the second in all probability to the former company.^[2] Besides these, we know that Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage was an original Cockpit play. Markham’s Herod and Antipater was given first by the Red Bull company of the King’s Revels, while Day’s Humour out of Breath and Mason’s Mulleasses were owned by the Children of His Majesty’s Revels. Jonson’s Poetaster was published in 1602 as acted by the Children of the Chapel, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater in 1607 as acted by the Children of Pauls (although it was being given by the King’s men later^[3]); Chapman’s All Fools and The Conspiracy of Charles Duke of Byron are early Blackfriars plays, and his Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois was presented at the Whitefriars. Randolph’s The Jealous Lovers was a Cambridge drama; Chapman’s (or Glapthorne’s) The Revenge for Honour was licensed to the Prince’s men in 1624.^[4] There remain the three Shakespeare dramas (Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida,

1. Chambers, Eliz. Stage, iii. 225.
2. It was licensed later as Shirley’s (Adams, op. cit. 36).
3. As in the edition of 1648.
4. Adams, op. cit. 28.