Dick of Devonshire

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Dick of Devonshire is an anonymous Jacobean era stage play, based on the autobiography of the real-life English sailor Dicke of Devonshire. [1] 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. [2]

Devon County of England

Devon, also known as Devonshire, is a county of England, reaching from the Bristol Channel in the north to the English Channel in the south. It is part of South West England, bounded by Cornwall to the west, Somerset to the north east, and Dorset to the east. The city of Exeter is the county town. The county includes the districts of East Devon, Mid Devon, North Devon, South Hams, Teignbridge, Torridge, and West Devon. Plymouth and Torbay are each geographically part of Devon, but are administered as unitary authorities. Combined as a ceremonial county, Devon's area is 6,707 km2 and its population is about 1.1 million.

MS. Egerton 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.

William Cartwright (actor) 17th-century actor and bookseller

William Cartwright was an English actor of the seventeenth century, whose career spanned the Caroline era to the Restoration. He is sometimes known as William Cartwright, Junior or William Cartwright the younger to distinguish him from his father, another William Cartwright, an actor of the previous generation.

Authorship

Though most contemporary scholars agree with Bullen in his tentative placing of authorship with Thomas Heywood, the nineteenth-century critic F. G. Fleay attributed the anonymous play to Robert Davenport, basing his judgement largely on perceived similarities between that play and The City Nightcap. [3] [4]

Thomas Heywood 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.

Frederick Gard Fleay was an influential and prolific nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar.

Robert Davenport was an English dramatist of the early seventeenth century. Nothing is known of his early life or education; the title pages of two of his plays identify him as a "Gentleman," though there is no record of him at either of the two universities or the Inns of Court. Scholars have guessed that he was born c. 1590; if, as some scholars think, he wrote the Address "To the knowing Reader" in the first quarto of King John and Matilda, he was still alive in 1655. He enters the historical record in 1624, when two of his plays were licensed by the Master of the Revels.

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References

  1. ↑ Velte, Mowbray. "The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood" p.98, Ardent Media, 1922
  2. ↑ Velte, Mowbray. "The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood" p.14, Ardent Media, 1922
  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. 218–19, 233.
  4. ↑ Long, William B. "New Approaches to Thomas Heywood. Playhouse Shadows: The Manuscript behind Dick of Devonshire" Early Theatre Vol 17, No 2 (2014) Grace Ioppolo (contributing editor)


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