Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 4).pdf/418

 1600, March 31 (in full court). 'A famous history called Valentine and Orsson played by her maiesties Players.' W. White (Arber, iii. 159). The relation of this Queen's play to that written by Hathaway and Munday (q.v.) for the Admiral's in 1598 is uncertain. Witless.

S. R. 1560-1. 'Playe of wytles.' Hacket (Arber, i. 154). Probably John Heywood's dialogue of Witty and Witless, extant in MS. (Mediaeval Stage, ii. 446). A Yorkshire Gentlewoman and her Son.

Ascribed to Chapman (q.v.).

APPENDIX N

MANUSCRIPT PLAYS

[Bibliographical Note.—This list includes only English texts. Most of the Latin plays (cf. App. K) also exist in MS. The English ones so preserved are generally of an academic type; on the general character of the few that are of play-house origin, cf. ch. xxii. Of the fifteen play texts collected in Egerton MS. 1994, only three appear to be of plays written before 1616; descriptions of this collection are in A. H. Bullen, O. E. P. ii. 417, and F. S. Boas, A Seventeenth-Century Theatrical Repertoire (3 Library, July 1917). In addition to the plays named below, there are a Pelopidarum Secunda in Harleian MS. 5110, which may be of any date in the first half of the seventeenth century, and a Welsh 'enterlut', dated 1584 and without ascription or title in Peniarth MS. 68 (H. M. C. Welsh MSS. i. 2. 467). A full account of the Plots ('plott' 'plotte', 'platt') is given, with the seven texts, by Greg, Henslowe Papers, 127. They have sometimes been taken for scenarie of impromptu plays, like the Italian 'Commedie dell'arte', although one of them is for the extant Battle of Alcazar; but they were probably for the use of the 'bookholder' or the 'tireman', and consist of skeleton outlines of the action, with notes of entrances and exits, and of the points at which properties and music are required. The names of the dramatis personae are generally accompanied by those of the actors who represented them. The paper on which they are written is mounted on pasteboard, and a hole cut near the top probably served to suspend them on a peg in the playhouse. All seven probably belong to companies (Strange's and Admiral's) with which Edward Alleyn was connected. One was utilized for the cover of a Dulwich MS., and G. Steevens, who once owned three of the others, found 'reason to suppose that these curiosities once belonged to the collection of Alleyn'.]

PLAYS

Alaham (Greville). MS. at Warwick Castle.

Alice and Alexis. Bodl. MS. 21745 (Douce MS. 171).

Antipoe (Verney). Bodl. MS. 31041.

Aphrodysial (Percy). MS. formerly in collection of Duke of Devonshire.

Arabia Sitiens (Percy). Ibid.