has been supposed Queen Elisabeth's own presence graced the performance, her learned tastes were assuredly never provided with a more cunningly seasoned banquet.

The Isle of Dogs, which has a very special interest for The Is'e Nashe's biography, was never printed. It appears from of Dogs (never Henslowe's Diary that in the spring of 1597 Nashe was printed). engaged upon the composition of this piece when in circumstances of distress which the manager was fain to relieve; yet according to Nashe's own account2, when the play was actually produced, his own share in it, something like that of Sackville in The Mirror for Magistrates, comprised only the Induction and the first Act. But the offence given by the piece was such that the license of the lord admiral's company was withdrawn for some weeks, and that Nashe, as the reputed author of the whole, was for an even longer period confined in the Fleet prison. The incident, the effect of which was heightened by the suggestive title of the play, long remained a favourite reminiscence in connexion with Nashe's name3; but we know nothing concerning the

Hast therefore each degree
To welcome destiny:
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player's stage.
Mount we unto the sky,

I am sick, I must die.

Lord have mercy on us!'

By the bye, the unexplained 'Domingo' in the song of Bacchus' companions

'Monsieur Mingo for quaffing doth surpass

of which the last two lines are quoted in Henry IV, Part II, act v. sc. 2, may owe its origin to the type of Mingo Revulgo (i. e. Domingo Vulgus) in the famous Spanish Coplas. See Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, i. 232–3; and cf. ante, p. 231.-In Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, Domingo Rufus' appears as an alter ego of Master Redherring, the hero of the tract.

Collier's edition, p. 94.

2 See Nashe's Lenten Stuffe (Grosart, v. 200): 'That infortunate Embrion (an imperfit Embrion I may well call it, for I hauing begun but the induction and first act of it, the other foure acts, without my consent, or the least guesse of my drift or scope, by the players were supplied, which bred both their trouble and mine to) of my idle houres, the Ile of Dogs before mentioned, breeding vnto me such bitter throwes in the teaming as it did.... I was so terrifyed with my own encrease . . . that it was no sooner borne but I was glad to runne from it.'

It is referred to both by Meres in his Palladis Tamia, where he apostrophises Nashe as 'gallant young Juvenal,' and in The Returne from Pernassus.

Nashe's genius not essentially dramatic.

Henry

Chettle

(15641607 or ante).

piece, although we may safely suspect it to have had a special savour of the Thames and of 'lovely' London.

The discursive element in Nashe's genius, although it undoubtedly contributed to the attractiveness of his lost as it does to that of his extant dramatic work, is in itself the reverse of a dramatic quality. Whether or not, as has been sympathetically suggested1, he was the particular writer pictured under the character of Ingenioso by the author or authors of the Pernassus Plays, to whose charming personal tribute to himself I have already referred, he was the very incarnation of reckless wit-'academical' even in the special sense of the epithet that denotes the detachment of efforts like his from the immediate and what are very generally considered the serious purposes of life. It does not follow, however, that either human life or its mirror the drama would be anything but the poorer for the absence of such sallies as those by which he diversified their regular course of operations.

HENRY CHETTLE (1564-1607 or ante) should be mentioned here, as a writer closely connected with one at least of the above-mentioned dramatists, and thus placed in a peculiarly direct relation towards the early reputation of Shakspere himself. Having as editor of the posthumous publication of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit fallen under the suspicion (not, however, confined to himself) of manipulation of his text, Chettle published in self-defence his tract of Kind-Hart's Dreame (1593, or quite at the end of 1592)2. In this pamphlet he repudiated any such insinuation and took occasion to offer a very handsome testimonial to the playwright-unmistakeably Shakspere-whom the deceased author of the Groatsworth had gone out of his way to vilify. Chettle, who seems to have been in business as a printer before he contributed matter of his own to the press, claimed

1 See articles by Professor Hales in The Academy, March 19, and in Macmillan's Magazine, May, 1887.

2 Reprinted in Part I of Shakspere Allusion Books, edited by Dr. C. H. Ingleby for the (New) Shakspere Society, 1874. See, in the Introduction, Dr. Ingleby's argument as to Shakspere having been the person to whom Chettle's apology to this tractate was addressed.

to have done good service in his earlier craft both to Nashe and to other 'advanced' scholars; and the extraordinary multiplicity of his own dramatic labours brought him into direct association with a large number of the playwrights contemporary with himself. To him are attributed the sole or joint authorship of plays amounting in numbers to a total of two-score-and-nine, of which something like one-fifth purport to have been of his own unassisted making1. Such a record, however, possesses no very solid statistical value. Chettle's tract entitled Englande's Mourning Garment2 (an elaborate tribute which, from its design, must have been published very soon after the death of Queen Elisabeth) has a more general literary interest as furnishing his estimate of the chief literary influences acknowledged in his earlier days-although the names of several of the writers are veiled under fictitious appellations. His own life was full of troubles, and few of Henslowe's most regular supporters seem to have required more systematic relief3.

1602, pr.

No play attributed to Chettle's single authorship has Hoffman been preserved, with the exception of the sanguinary but (acted not as a whole powerful tragedy of Hoffman, or A Revenge 1631). for a Father (acted 1602, printed 16314). It would be futile to pretend to judge the dramatic talent of the author from this particular example of his work, more especially since Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, signals him out as 'one of the best for comedy'; on the other hand, so far as one can judge from the titles of the plays with which he is said to have been connected, his bent must be supposed to have lain towards tragedy. It is difficult to escape the conclusion, supported by the circumstance that in the summer of 1592 Chettle had in view for Henslowe

1 For the various computations, see Collier, iii. 51; Fleay, English Drama, i. 66 seqq.; and Mr. Bullen's article on Chettle in vol. x. of the Dictionary of National Biography (1887).

2 Likewise reprinted by Dr. Ingleby, u. s.

3 See Henslowe's Diary, 126, 141, 151.

Edited, with an Introduction, by H. B. L.' (1852). The Introduction contains a list of sixteen original plays attributed to Chettle, and of thirtyone (twenty-seven of these being lost) in which he is stated to have collaborated. Mr. Fleay considers Thomas Heywood to have had a share in Hoffman. See English Drama, i. 70–71; 291.

Patient
Grissil

(pr. 1603).

the composition of a play called by the latter a Danish tragedye1, that the author of Hoffman was acquainted with the theme of Hamlet, which was entered in the Stationers' Registers in this very year 1602 under the title of The Revenge of Hamlet Prince of Denmark 2. Whether from this we are to conclude Hoffman to have been designed as a rival play to the production of a rival company, is a question on which it is unnecessary to pronounce 3. If so, it was by coarser means that the 'Henslowe' tragedy sought to compass a more complete effect. The first act, notwithstanding its ghastliness, is perhaps the best portion of this play, the hero of which-nor vainly-boasts that the tragedy wreaked by him 'shall surpass those of Thyestes, Terens, Jocasta, or Medea.' The course of the action suggests either the determination of the author to lose sight of no suggestion of dramatic horror, or his use of some undiscovered local narrative source. But, although the strange jumble of German names and titles might favour the latter supposition, no such source has so much as been conjectured; and the tragedy remains, so far as we can see, a mass of theatrical motives of tragic effect rudely worked out.

Among the plays in which Chettle collaborated with other writers, it is pardonable to single out The Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissil1, in the composition of which Dekker and Haughton shared with him. The special

1 Henslowe's Diary, p. 224.

2 Stationers' Registers, ed. Weber, vol. iii. p. 84 b. The 'booke' is entered as yt was latelie Acted by the Lord Chamberlayne his servantes.'

3 See Delius' article Chettle's Hoffman and Shakespeare's Hamlet in Jahrbuch, &c, vol. ix. (1874).

Edited for the (Old) Shakespeare Society by the late Mr. Collier (1841). 5 As to Dekker, see below.-Of William Haughton personally very little is known, except that an attempt has been made to identify him with a namesake who, after graduating M.A. at Oxford, was incorporated at Cambridge in 1604. (See Mr. Bullen's notice in vol. xxv. of the Dictionary of National Biography, 1891.) His name is frequently mentioned in Henslowe's Diary, as concerned in all kinds of dramatic work, from a revision of Ferrex and Porrex to plays appealing directly to the tastes or interests of the day. On one occasion Henslowe records a loan to Haughton of 'x. to releace him owt of the clyncke' (the Clink prison in Southwark). His Englishmen for my Money, or A Woman will have her Will (reprinted in vol. x. of Hazlitt's Dodsley), entered in 1598 by Henslowe under the second of the above titles, but not extant in an earlier edition than that of 1616, appears to have been

history of the theme treated in this play covers a wider ground than can here be surveyed; suffice it therefore to say that the story, for which Chaucer considered himself indebted to Petrarch, although it had been previously— probably not for the first time-treated by Boccaccio, at a very early period commended itself to the stage. It furnished the plot of one of the few French mysteries known to have dealt with a semi-secular subject1. In the later Renascence age (1546) Hans Sachs produced a 'comedi' on the story of Griselda, in which according to his wont the concluding moral was not stinted 2. The subject has, in various forms, continued to attract dramatic writers down to our own day 3. As to the play by Chettle and his coadjutors, it was probably founded in the first instance upon the prose tract reproducing this favourite story, from which we may suppose the ballads on the same theme to have been derived. No immediate influence of Chaucer is recognisable in the composition of the play under notice. Indeed, the obvious necessity of compressing the limits of time gives to the action of this drama a greater measure a very popular play. It is a merry, bustling comedy of London life, showing how the three daughters of a 'Portingal' usurer and their three English lovers carried the day over their avaricious sire (whose nose, like that of Barabas, betokens his style of business and the three benighted foreigners favoured by him-a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Dutchman. Anthony, an intriguing schoolmaster, and Frisco, a bungling clown, help to carry on the action, which is extremely animated.-The Spanish Moor's Tragedy, by Chettle, Day, and Dekker (1600), is thought by Mr. Fleay, English Drama, i. 272, to be identical with Lust's Dominion, published in 1657 as Marlowe's. -The play of Jane Shore, by Chettle and Day, was probably much earlier in date of composition than 1602, when it was acted, with alterations, by Lord Worcester's company. (Halliwell's Dictionary, &c., 132.)

1 See Collier's Introduction, u. s., p. vi, and Ebert, Entwicklungsgeschichte, The date is given by Collier as 1393, by Ebert as 1395.

&c., p. 33.

2 See Goedeke and Tittmann's Dichtungen von Hans Sachs, iii. 48 seqq. Hans Sachs mentions Boccaccio as his original.

3 Friedrich's Halm's' Griseldis was produced at Vienna in 1835; MM. Silvestre and Morand's Grisélidis at the Comédie Française in 1891; and Mr. H. A. Jones' Patient Grizzle (I think) in 1893.

The History of Patient Grissil. Two early tracts in black letter. With an Introduction and Notes (by J. P. Collier), Percy Society's Publications, 1342.-William Forrest's poem The Second Gresyld (completed in 1558), a narrative in verse of the divorce of Queen Catherine of Aragon, testifies to the popularity of the story. (See Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xx. p. 5.)