Tale’ he cites in ridicule a hexameter from the poem of Gabriel Harvey [q. v.], which was satirised by Nash in the course of his fierce contest with Harvey [see Nash, Thomas, 1567–1601].
In May 1591, when Queen Elizabeth visited Lord Burghley's seat of Theobalds, Peele was employed to compose certain speeches addressed to the queen which deftly excused the absence of the master of the house. In January 1596 he sent his ‘Tale of Troy’ to the great lord treasurer through a ‘simple messenger,’ ‘his eldest daughter, necessity's servant.’ His lyrics were popular in literary circles, and were included in the chief anthologies of the day (‘The Phœnix Nest,’ 1593; ‘England's Helicon’ and ‘England's Parnassus,’ 1600; ‘Belvidera, or the Garden of the Muses,’ 1610). The date of his death is unknown. In 1598 Francis Meres, in his ‘Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury,’ mentions him as having died of a loathsome disease. Samuel Rowlands, in his lines on ‘The Letting of Humour's Blood in the Head-vein,’ 1600, on the virtues of charnico, seems to allude to his death, as well as to the deaths of Greene and Marlowe (see Warton, Hist. of English Poetry, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1871, iv. 418. A forged letter, dated 1600, from Peele to Marlowe, cited by Dyce, p. 327 n., was first printed in Berkenhout, Biogr. Lit. p. 404).
Peele's works fall under the three divisions of (i) plays, (ii) pageants, and (iii) ‘gratulatory’ and miscellaneous verse.
I. Plays.—1. ‘The Arraignment of Paris’ was presented to the queen by the chapel children, probably in 1581 (see Fleay, English Drama, i. 152), and certainly before 1584, when it was anonymously printed. Copies are in the British Museum and in the Capell collection at Trinity College, Cambridge. Peele's authorship is attested by Nash. The idea of this piece—the trial by Diana, with whom Queen Elizabeth is easily identified, of Paris for error of judgment in giving the apple to Venus—was apparently original, though possibly the nucleus may be traceable to Gascoigne (see F. E. Schelling in Modern Language Notes, Baltimore, April 1893). Malone conjectures that Spenser is the Colin of this play, and that Spenser retorted upon Peele under the name of Palin in ‘Colin Clout's Come Home Again’ (ll. 392–3). Peele's diction is fearlessly affected, and the versification various and versatile. There is little blank verse, as compared with the rhymed lines. Some of the lyrics became popular, and one of them (‘Fair and Fair,’ &c.) is singled out for eulogy by Charles Lamb. 2. ‘The Famous Chronicle of King Edward I, surnamed Edward Longshanks,’ &c., &c., printed 1593, may have been acted two or three years earlier (the arguments of Fleay, English Drama, ii. 157, are not strong). This production—a chronicle history—marks a phase of the transition from the historical morality of the type of Bale's ‘Kynge Johan’ to the national historical tragedy of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Peele's play, although in its spirited opening and elsewhere it is dramatically effective and displays its author's classical and Italian reading, possesses little poetical merit. Its farcical scenes are calculated to make the judicious grieve; and its more serious portion, mostly adapted from Holinshed, recklessly embodies lying scandal about the good Queen Eleanor, ‘assimilated’ by Peele from a ballad (for which see Dyce, pp. 373–4) launched in the later Tudor spirit against a princess of Castilian birth. Copies of the first edition are in the British Museum, Bodleian Library, and the collection of Mr. Locker-Lampson at Rowfant. The second edition was issued in 1599, and is to be found in the British Museum, and in the libraries of Mr. Huth and Mr. Locker-Lampson. 3. ‘The Battle of Alcazar,’ printed in 1594, was in all probability acted before the spring of 1589 (cf. Peele, Farewell, &c.) It was assigned to Peele in ‘England's Parnassus’ (1600), and the internal evidence is conclusive (see Dyce and Læmmerhirt). ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ is the play mentioned by Henslowe as ‘Muly Mulocco,’ the name of one of its characters, on 29 Feb. 1592, and later (Diary, ed. Collier, p. 21, et al.). The conduct of its action is vigorous, and it has flights of exuberantly virile rhetoric which fit it for comparison with Marlowe's ‘Tamberlaine.’ But the play is more clumsily constructed. A presenter introduces each act, and there is a series of dumb-shows (cf. Dr. Brinsley Nicholson's note, ap. Bullen, i. 211 sqq.). Copies of this, the least rare of Peele's dramatic works, are in the British Museum, and at Britwell, Rowfant, and elsewhere. 4. ‘The Old Wives' Tale,’ printed in 1595, is held by Fleay (English Drama, ii. 154–5) to have been acted five years earlier, by way of a retort to Gabriel Harvey's attack upon Lyly. The latter, dated 5 Nov. 1589, was not published till 1593. The theory appears to rest on the very slender fact that one hexameter is quoted in the play from Harvey's ‘Encomium Lauri’ in his ‘Three Proper and Familiar Letters’ (1580). This romantic interlude, or farce, is pervaded, more particularly in its induction, by an irresistible flood of high spirits, which, on the stage as elsewhere, covers a multitude
