ADDITIONAL NOTES ON THE PLAYS

ENDYMION

Endymion was published in 1591, and the title-page states that it had been played "before the Queenes Maiestie at Greenwich on Candlemas day at night, by the Chyldren of Paules." It is fairly certain that this performance took place on Feb. 2, 1586. The present text is based on Bond's reprint of the quarto of 1591, with slight additions from the version included by Blount in his Size Court Comedies, 1632. Like most of Lyly's plays, Endymion is an allegory of the court, with a mythological basis. Very little, however, is here borrowed from the myth of the Moon-goddess and her lover, and the plot is evidently invented with a view to carrying contemporary allusions. Beginning with Halpin's paper in 1843, many attempts have been made to read the riddle, the latest and most ingenious being that of M. Feuillerat, who identifies Cynthia with Elizabeth, Tellus with Mary of Scots, and Endymion with her son, James VI. The credit of having disproved the Endymion-Leicester identification is shared with M. Feuillerat by Dr. P. W. Long, who seeks to read the play as mainly an allegory of Heavenly Beauty (Cynthia) and Earthy Beauty (Tellus), an interpretation perhaps not wholly incompatible with the more personal solution.

THE OLD WIVES TALE

The Old Wife's Tale, as the title should appear in modern spelling (the reference being, of course, to Madge), was first published in 1595, and on this quarto, as reprinted by Gummere, the present text is based. The precise date of production has not been definitely ascertained, but it was probably not far from 1590. Source, in the usual sense of the term, the play can hardly be said to have; it is a medley of a dozen themes from current English folk-tales. Realistic in diction, romantic in subjectmatter, the play was a notable innovation in its day; and through the peculiar irony of the satire on romance, Peele introduced a new and subtler form of humor into English comedy. Both in its main theme, and in its use of the induction, this drama is an interesting forerunner of The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

FRIAR BACON AND FRIAR BUNGAY

This play was first printed in quarto in 1594, and that edition (Q1), as printed by Collins and Gayley, forms the basis of the present text. The existence of a second quarto, said to have been issued in 1599, has been rendered highly doubtful by Gayley. Later editions appeared in 1630 (Q.) and 1055 (Qp). The date of production was probably 1589-90. That part of the plot dealing with the marvelous exploits of Friar Bacon is drawn from The Famous Historie of Friar Bacon, a late sixteenth-century account of the legends that had gathered round the name of the Oxford Franciscan, Roger Bacon (born 1214). The love story is Greene's own. It seems probable that this comedy was conceived as a foil to Marlowe's tragedy of Doctor Faustus, some of the scenes approaching an actual parody, and stress being laid on the superiority of the English to the German necromancer.

TAMBURLAINE

Both parts of Tamburlaine were entered in the Stationers' Register on Aug. 14, 1590, and they appeared together in octavo in 1590, and again in 1592. The alleged existence of editions of 1593, 1597, and 1600 is unsupported by evidence; and the third edition seems to be that of 1605 (part i.) and 1606 (part ii.), printed from the first. The issue of 1590 is the basis of the present text. The first part of the play was probably produced three years before, in 1587, and the second part in the following year. All the early editions are anonymous, nor does there survive any pre-Restoration statement as to the authorship; yet so convincing is the internal evidence that the ascription to Marlowe may be regarded as indubitable.

The main source of part i is Fortescue's Foreste, 1571, a translation of Pedro Mexia's Silva de varia lecion, 1543. Additional details were derived from The Notable History of the Saracens by Thomas Newton, 1575, and from Petrus Perondinus, 1553. The title-rôle was first acted by the gigantic Edward Alleyn.

DOCTOR FAUSTUS

Allusions to contemporary events in the Low Countries fix the limits for the date of Doctor Faustus as 1585 and 1590; and the evidence of style places it after Tamburlaine. A ballad which seems to be inspired by the play was licensed in February, 1589, so that it is generally agreed that the first production of the play fell in the winter of 1588-89. "A booke calld the plaie of Doctor Faustus" was entered in the Stationers' Register on Jan. 7, 1601, but if an edition was published in that year, no copy has survived. The earliest extant edition is that of 1604 (Q,), on which the present text is based. This version was reprinted in 1609 and 1611; and in 1616 appeared an enlarged form, followed in the later quartos of 1619, 1620, 1624, and 1631. An edition issued in 1663 has many additions and excisions, but