Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 7.djvu/409

 n s. vii. may24, i9i3.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 401 LONDON, SATURDAY, MAT «, 191$. CONTENTS.-No. 178. NOTES :—The Date of Webster's ' Appius and Virginia,' 401—The Records of the City Livery Companies, 403— Izaak Walton and Tomb • Scratching — Parliamentary Changes—De Foe and Napoleon Bonaparte, 405—Latin Lines on Music—Discovery of Australia : Press Report of 1771, 408. QURRIES: — Hampstead Marshall and Sir Balthazar Gerbier, 406—Cotton Family, 408—Curious Colophon— " Bob's" — Act regulating Medical Practice — John Noorthouck—' Vivian Grey Queries—41 The querke of the sea "—Colleges : Matriculation and Graduation—llaslam of Greenwich—Scott: Stanhope, 409—Tobacco "Rape"— St. John the Baptist in Art—Biographical Information Wanted—The Cathedral at Pisa—Stanley Grove, Mort- lake—Heraldic—Author Wanted, 410. ■REPLIES:—"Scolopendra cetacea," 410—Old-time Chil- dren's Books and Stories, 411 —Earliest Age of Knight- hood : Arthur of Brittany, 412—' The Tomahawk,' 413— " -al," Noun - Suffix — Title - Page Wanted — Sir John Moore, 414—Henry Morris—Dr. Fowler of York—' A Londoner's London': Temple Bar—" Merrygreek," 416— "To carry one's life in one's hands"—Rev. A. Hedley— Cocks' Heads—'The Fly-Fisher's Entomology,' 416—"Of sorts" — "Furdall" — Almshouses near the Strand— Octagonal Meeting • Houses—Harcourt's Electioneering Squibs—'The Philosopher's Scales'—"Died in his coffin — Church Goods in the Seventeenth Century, 417 — Authors Wanted, 418. NOTES ON BOOKS: — 'Saint John's Wood' —'The Leopards of England, and Other Papers on Heraldry.' Booksellers' Catalogues. Notices to Correspondents. iSofJB. AN ATTEMPT TO DETERMINE THE DATE OF WEBSTER'S ' APPIUS AND VIRGINIA.' The dates of three of the four extant plays of which Webster was the sole author have now been determined either exactly or within narrow limits. ' The White Devil' is almost certainly to be ascribed to 1611, ' The Duchess of Malfy ' to 1613, and ' The Devil's Law Case ' to a date be- tween 1616 and 1623, probably after 1620. All efforts to ascertain even an approximate date for the composition of the remaining play, ' Appius and Virginia ' (of which the earliest edition known was published in 1654), have hitherto failed. It is, however, generally agreed that this play is the ' Appius and Virginia' which appears last in the list of forty-five plays appropriated in August, 1639, to " the King and Queens young company of players at the Cockpit in Drury Lane" on the representation of William Beeston, the governor of this company, and 1639 may therefore be taken as the forward limit. Only Fleay and, following him, Sir Sidney Lee favour an early date. Fleay assigns the composition to 1609, on the unwarrant- able assumption that the baldest of refer- ences to Lucretia in the closing lines of the play implies an allusion to Heywood's ' Rape of Lucrece ' published in the previous year. This naturally does not satisfy Sir Sidney Lee, but in his article in the ' D.N.B.' he nevertheless accepts Fleay's statement (unsupported by any evidence) that the play was acted by Queen Anne's company, and passed with ' The White Devil' to Queen Henrietta's. He accordingly assigns it to a date previous to 1619, asserting that it followed ' The White Devil' and preceded ' The Duchess of Malfy.' This is altogether out of the bounds of possibility. All the evidence points to the fact that ' The Duchess of Malfy ' followed close upon ' The White Devil,' and both the dissimilarity in the style of ' Appius and Virginia,' and Webster's own admission as to his slow method of composition, forbid us to place ' Appius and Virginia' between Webster's two great revenge tragedies. The fact that the play is not mentioned in the preface to ' The Devil's Law Case ' (which refers to 'The White Devil,' 'The Duchess of Malfy,' and also to a lost play called ' The Guise ') is of some value an presumptive evidence that it was written after 1623, the year in which ' The Devil's Law Case ' was published. Of other evi- dence in support of a date subsequent to 1623 none has yet been adduced, save that Dr. E. E. Stoll (' John Webster,- 1905) sub- mits that the undoubted imitations of Shakespeare's plays, and especially the Roman plays, in ' Appius and Virginia ' aro of such a character as to indicate the use of the printed text of the First Folio of 1623. Dr. Stoll, however, contents himself with the assertion that ' Appius and Virginia ' was written between 1623 and 1639. Even so, it must be admitted that his evidence for the early limit rests upon a very slendor basis. Prof. Vaughan (' Cambridge History of English Literature ') roundly states that the date cannot be fixed by either external or internal evidence. The cumulative effect of the evidence I propose to put forward here will, I think, be sufficient to establish the fact that the play is of a late date, that it is