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The Four Prentices of London is an Elizabethan play by English Renaissance playwright Thomas Heywood, thought to have originated c. 1592.
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.
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The play is known to have been acted by the Admiral's Men on 19 July 1594. It might also have been performed, under the title Jerusalem, by the Lord Strange's Men on 22 March and 25 April 1592. [1]
The Admiral's Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras. It is generally considered the second most important acting troupe of English Renaissance theatre.
Lord Strange's Men was an Elizabethan playing company, comprising retainers of the household of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. They are best known in their final phase of activity in the late 1580s and early 1590s. After 25 September 1593, they were known as the Earl of Derby's Men, that being the date of Stanley's accession to his father's title.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 19 June 1594, under the title Godfrey of Bouillon and the Conquest of Jerusalem, but was not published till 1615. The title page of the first quarto states that the play was acted by Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre, though the play had a long prior history of performances by earlier companies in earlier venues, as noted above. It was printed again in 1632.
The Stationers’ Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England. The Register itself allowed publishers to document their right to produce a particular printed work, and constituted an early form of copyright law. The Company's charter gave it the right to seize illicit editions and bar the publication of unlicensed books.
Godfrey of Bouillon was a Frankish knight and one of the leaders of the First Crusade from 1096 until its conclusion in 1099. He was the Lord of Bouillon, from which he took his byname, from 1076 and the Duke of Lower Lorraine from 1087. After the successful siege of Jerusalem in 1099, Godfrey became the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He refused the title of King, however, as he believed that the true King of Jerusalem was Jesus Christ, preferring the title of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre. He is also known as the "Baron of the Holy Sepulchre" and the "Crusader King".
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from folio, to quarto (smaller) and octavo. Historically, these terms referred to the format of the book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto historically was a book printed on a sheet of paper folded twice to produce four leaves, each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions.
The text of the play in the 1615 volume is preceded by an Epistle to the Prentices, signed by Heywood, and a Prologue that provides yet a fourth title, True and Strange, or The Four Prentices of London.
