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 ''Minds. 1575 <''

Comoedia. A worke in ryme, contayning an Enterlude of Myndes, witnessing the Mans Fall from God and Christ. Set forth by H. N. and by him newly perused and amended. Translated out of Base-Almayns into English. [No imprint or colophon.] [Preface to the Reader; Prologue in dialogue.] This is a translation of the Low German Comoedia: Ein Gedicht des Spels van Sinnen, anno 1575 of Henrick Niklaes, the founder of the mystical sect known as the Family of Love (cf. s.v. Middleton). ''Misogonus. 1560 < > 77''

[MS.] In collection of the Duke of Devonshire. [By two hands, of which one is only responsible for the t.p. and some corrections in the text. The t.p. has the heading 'A mery and p Misogonus', followed by the names of the speakers and 'Laurentius Bari[Greek: ô]na Ketthering die 20 Novembris Anno 1577'. The text, which is apparently imperfect, stopping in iv. 4, is probably all in one other hand, together with a prologue, at the end of which is 'Thomas Rychardes'. The inscriptions 'Anthony Rice' on the title-page, 'Thomas Warde Barfold 1577' on the prologue-page, and 'W. Wyllm̃' and 'John York Jesu' in margins of the text, are all in later hands, some of them not of the sixteenth century.]

Editions by A. Brandl (1898, Q. W. D.), J. S. Farmer (1906), and R. W. Bond (1911, E. P. I.).—Dissertation: G. L. Kittredge, The M. and Laurence Johnson (1901, J. G. P. iii. 335).

Brandl, following Collier, ii. 368, 378, dates the play in 1560, on the ground of an allusion in i. 131 to 'the rising rection ith north', i.e. the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, as twenty-four years before the time of action, but it is not quite clear that the rambling dialogue of rustics, in which the passage occurs, justifies the interpretation put upon it; nor is the allusion in ii. 3 to the weather-cock of Paul's, set up in 1553 and destroyed in 1561, any more conclusive, as the phrase may have become proverbial. The style might be either of c. 1560 or, in a provincial play, of c. 1577, or, as Bond suggests, a reviser of c. 1577 might have revised a text of ten or twelve years earlier. For author, Fleay, 16, 58, 60, taking the piece to be that disliked at court on 31 Dec. 1559, offered Richard Edwardes, and is followed by Wallace, i. 111. There is nothing to suggest that the play was ever performed at court at all. It seems more natural to look for him, either in the Thomas Richards or in the Laurence Barjona of the MS. Conceivably Richards might be the T. R. whose initials appear on the prints of Impatient Poverty and Nice Wanton (cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 460) in 1560. Barjona might be the name of a converted Jew. But Kittredge regards it as an anagram of Johnson, and points out that a Laurence Johnson matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1570, and took his B.A. in 1574 and his M.A. in 1577, while a Thomas Richards of Trinity took his B.A. in 1571, and a Thomas Ward of Jesus in 1580. A reference to Cambridge