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 characters, 'Soli deo honor et gloria Johannus Jeffere scribebat hoc'. This note is followed by the songs and their music, and at the top of the first is written 'Giles peperel for Iphiginia'. On the last page are the names 'Thomas Ba ' and 'Frances Whitton', which probably do not indicate authorship. A title-page may be missing, and a later hand has written at the head of the text, 'The Buggbears'.]

Editions by C. Grabau (1896-7, Archiv, xcviii. 301; xcix. 311) and R. W. Bond (1911, E. P. I.).—Dissertation: W. Dibelius (Archiv, cxii. 204).

The play is an adaptation of A. F. Grazzini, La Spiritata (1561), and uses also material from J. Weier (De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) and from the life of Michel de Nôtredame (Nostradamus), not necessarily later than his death in 1566. Bond is inclined to date the play, partly on metrical grounds, about 1564 or 1565. Grabau and Dibelius suggest a date after 1585, apparently under the impression that the name Giles in the superscription to the music may indicate the composition of Nathaniel Giles, of the Chapel Royal, who took his Mus. Bac. in 1585. But the name, whether of a composer, or of the actor of the part of Iphigenia, is Giles Peperel. The performers were 'boyes', but the temptation to identify the play with the Effiginia shown by Paul's at Court on 28 Dec. 1571 is repressed by the description of Effiginia in the Revels account as a 'tragedye', whereas The Bugbears is a comedy. Moreover, Iphigenia is not a leading part, although one added by the English adapter.

LAURENCE JOHNSON (c. 1577).

A possible author of Misogonus (cf. ch. xxiv).

BENJAMIN JONSON (1572-1637).

Benjamin Johnson, or Jonson, as he took the fancy to spell his name, was born, probably on 11 June 1572, at Westminster, after the death of his father, a minister, of Scottish origin. He was withheld, or withdrawn, from the University education justified by his scholastic attainments at Westminster to follow his step-father's occupation of bricklaying, and when this proved intolerable, he served as a soldier in the Netherlands. In a prologue to The Sad Shepherd, left unfinished at his death in August 1637, he describes himself as 'He that has feasted you these forty years', and by 1597 at latest his connexion with the stage had begun. Aubrey tells us (ii. 12, 226) that he 'acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse, somewhere in the suburbes (I thinke towards Shoreditch or Clarkenwell)', and again that he 'was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor'. The earliest contemporary records, however, show Jonson not at the Curtain, but on the Bankside. On 28 July 1597 Henslowe (i. 200) recorded a personal loan to 'Bengemen Johnson player' of £4 'to be payd yt agayne when so euer ether I or any for me shall demande yt', and on the very same day he opened on another page of his diary (i. 47) an account headed 'Received of Bengemenes Johnsones share as ffoloweth 1597' and entered in it