British Library, MS Egerton 1994

Last updated

Egerton MS 1994 is a manuscript collection of English Renaissance plays, now in the Egerton Collection of the British Library. Probably prepared by the actor William Cartwright around 1642, and later presented by him to Dulwich College, the collection contains unique copies of several Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline dramas, including significant works like Edmund Ironside and Thomas of Woodstock . [1] [2]

The collection contains fourteen plays and an anonymous masque:


Thomas of Woodstock was one of Shakespeare's sources for his Richard II , and Edmund Ironside has been attributed to Shakespeare by some commentators.

Some of the plays, like The Two Noble Ladies and the two Heywood works, are judged to be autograph scripts, in the handwriting of the authors. (The Escapes of Jupiter consists of excerpts from Heywood's The Golden Age and The Silver Age.) The untitled masque in the collection has strong commonalities with the work of George Chapman; it borrows a long passage from The Tragedy of Byron , suggesting Chapman influence rather than authorship. [7]

The Launching of the Mary is a "first draft, written at different times, with different inks, and on different paper." The play was written at sea but subsequently supplied to a professional playing company when its author, Walter Mountfort, had returned to London.

The anonymous works in the collection have been the subject of attribution studies, and disagreements. Dick of Devonshire has been assigned to Davenport, but also to Heywood.

Related Research Articles

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1633.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1613.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1608.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Heywood</span> 16th/17th-century English playwright, actor, and author

Thomas Heywood was an English playwright, actor, and author. His main contributions were to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre. He is best known for his masterpiece A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic tragedy, which was first performed in 1603 at the Rose Theatre by the Worcester's Men company. He was a prolific writer, claiming to have had "an entire hand or at least a maine finger in two hundred and twenty plays", although only a fraction of his work has survived.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shakespearean history</span> Shakespeares history plays

In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The histories—along with those of contemporary Renaissance playwrights—help define the genre of history plays. The Shakespearean histories are biographies of English kings of the previous four centuries and include the standalones King John, Edward III and Henry VIII as well as a continuous sequence of eight plays. These last are considered to have been composed in two cycles. The so-called first tetralogy, apparently written in the early 1590s, covers the Wars of the Roses saga and includes Henry VI, Parts I, II & III and Richard III. The second tetralogy, finished in 1599 and including Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I & II and Henry V, is frequently called the Henriad after its protagonist Prince Hal, the future Henry V.

<i>King Leir</i> Anonymous Elizabethan play

King Leir is an anonymous Elizabethan play about the life of the ancient Brythonic king Leir of Britain. It was published in 1605 but was entered into the Stationers' Register on 15 May 1594. The play has attracted critical attention principally for its relationship with King Lear, Shakespeare's version of the same story.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Chapman</span> 16th/17th-century English dramatist, poet, and translator

George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. William Minto speculated that Chapman is the unnamed Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shakespeare apocrypha</span> Works questionably attributed to Shakespeare

The Shakespeare apocrypha is a group of plays and poems that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons. The issue is not to be confused with the debate on Shakespearean authorship, which questions the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.

<i>Thomas Lord Cromwell</i>

Thomas Lord Cromwell is an Elizabethan history play, depicting the life of Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, the minister of King Henry VIII of England.

Thomas of Woodstock and Richard the Second Part One are two names for an untitled, anonymous and apparently incomplete manuscript of an Elizabethan play depicting events in the reign of King Richard II. Attributions of the play to William Shakespeare have been nearly universally rejected, and it does not appear in major editions of the Shakespeare apocrypha. The play has been often cited as a possible influence on Shakespeare's Richard II, as well as Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, but new dating of the text brings that relationship into question.

<i>The Merry Devil of Edmonton</i>

The Merry Devil of Edmonton is an Elizabethan-era stage play; a comedy about a magician, Peter Fabell, nicknamed the Merry Devil. It was at one point attributed to William Shakespeare, but is now considered part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.

<i>Edmund Ironside</i> (play) Anonymous Elizabethan play apocryphally attributed to Shakespeare

Edmund Ironside, or War Hath Made All Friends is an anonymous Elizabethan play that depicts the life of the Anglo-Saxon king Edmund II of England. At least three critics have suggested that it is an early work by William Shakespeare.

The Masque of Beauty was a courtly masque written by Ben Jonson, and performed in London's Whitehall Palace on 10 January 1608. It inaugurated the refurbished banquesting hall of the palace. It was a sequel to the preceding Masque of Blackness, which had been performed three years earlier, on 6 January 1605. In The Masque of Beauty, the "daughters of Niger" of the earlier piece were shown cleansed of the black pigment they had worn on the prior occasion.

The Triumph of Beauty is a Caroline era masque, written by James Shirley and first published in 1646. The masque shows a strong influence of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, also known as, The Masque of the Olympic Knights, is an English masque created in the Jacobean period. It was written by Francis Beaumont and is known to have been performed on 20 February 1613 in the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, as part of the elaborate wedding festivities surrounding the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine.

Luminalia or The Festival of Light was a late Caroline era masque or "operatic show", with an English libretto by Sir William Davenant, designs by Inigo Jones, and music by composer Nicholas Lanier. Performed by Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies in waiting on Shrove Tuesday, 6 February 1638, it was one of the last and most spectacular of the masques staged at the Stuart Court.

Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One is a Jacobean era stage play, one of the dramatic works in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. Initially published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, the play is notable both for its unusual form and for the question of its authorship.

John of Bordeaux, or The Second Part of Friar Bacon, is an Elizabethan era stage play, the anonymous sequel to Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The play was never printed in its own historical era and survived in a single, untitled, defective manuscript until it was named and published in 1936. It is usually dated to the 1590–94 period, shortly after the success of Greene's original Friar Bacon.

George Eld was a London printer of the Jacobean era, who produced important works of English Renaissance drama and literature, including key texts by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Middleton.

Dick of Devonshire is an anonymous Jacobean era stage play, based on the autobiography of the real-life English sailor Dicke of Devonshire. Written in 1626, it survived as part of MS Egerton 1994; a manuscript collection prepared by the actor William Cartwright around 1642, and later presented by him to Dulwich College. The play was first published by A.H. Bullen in his Old English Plays series in 1885.

References

  1. F. S. Boas, Shakespeare and the Universities, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1923; pp. 96-110.
  2. Alfred Harbage, "Elizabethan and Seventeenth-Century Play Manuscripts," Papers of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 50 No. 3 (September 1935), pp. 687-99.
  3. Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978; pp. 217-19, 233.
  4. Logan and Smith, pp. 213-15.
  5. Logan and Smith, pp. 215-16
  6. Logan and Smith, p. 221.
  7. J. D. Jump, "The Anonymous Masque in MS. Egerton 1994," Review of English Studies, vol. 11 No. 42 (April 1935), pp. 186-91.