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''A Marriage between Wit and Wisdom. c. 1579''

[MS.] ''Brit. Mus. Addl. MS. 26782, formerly penes'' Sir Edward Dering.

Editions by J. O. Halliwell (1846, Sh. Soc.), J. S. Farmer (1909, T. F. T.).

The MS. has a title-page, with the date 1579, an arrangement of the parts for six actors and the title 'The of a Marige betweene wit and wisdome very frutefull and mixed full of pleasant mirth as well for The beholders as the Readers or hearers neuer before imprinted'. There are nine Scenes in two Acts, with a Prologue and Epilogus. The characters are almost wholly allegorical. Idleness is 'the vice'. The stage-directions mention a 'stage'. Halliwell prints the mutilated word left blank in the title above as 'Contract', no doubt rightly. Conceivably the play was in fact printed in 1579, as 'Mariage of wit and wisdome' is in Rogers and Ley's play-list of 1656 (Greg, Masques, lxxxvii).

The play might be identical with the lost Paul's moral of ''The Marriage of Mind and Measure'' (cf. App. B), which also belongs to 1579. Fleay, ii. 287, 294, infers from a not very conclusive reference to a 'King' in sc. iv that it dates from the time of Edward VI. He also identifies it with the Hit Nail o' th' Head named in Sir Thomas More (q.v.) because that phrase is quoted in the Epilogus, curiously disregarding the fact that the Sir Thomas More list names the play under its existing title as distinct from Hit Nail o' th' Head. Most of the plays in the Sir Thomas More list seem to be pre-Elizabethan; cf. ''Mediaeval Stage'', ii. 200.

THOMAS MIDDLETON (c. 1570-1627).

Thomas Middleton was a Londoner and of a gentle family. The date of his birth can only be roughly conjectured from the probability that he was one of two Thomas Middletons who entered Gray's Inn in 1593 and 1596, and of his earlier education nothing is known. His first work was The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597), and he may be the T. M. of The Black Book (1604) and other pamphlets in prose and verse. He appears as a dramatist, possibly as early as 1599 in The Old Law and certainly in Henslowe's diary during 1602, writing an unnamed play for Worcester's men, and for the Admiral's Caesar's Fall or The Two Shapes with Dekker (q.v), Drayton, Munday, and Webster, and by himself, Randal Earl of Chester, and a prologue and epilogue to Greene's Friar Bacon (q.v.). This work is all lost, but by 1604 he had also collaborated with Dekker for the Admiral's in the extant Honest Whore. From 1602, if not from 1599, to the end of their career in 1606 or 1607, he was also writing diligently for the Paul's boys. I think he is referred to with their other 'apes and guls', Marston and Dekker, in Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600), 40:

How like you Musus fashion in his carriage? O filthilie, he is as blunt as Paules.

Brabant, the speaker, represents Jonson, who told Drummond in 1619