Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 2).pdf/217

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on 1 and 6 January and 26 February 1598. It is conceivable that one of these plays may have been a revised version of Love's Labour's Lost, which was printed as 'newly corrected and augmented' and 'as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas' in 1598. On the other hand, it is also possible that this print may have been intended to replace an earlier 'bad' quarto, not now preserved, and if so, the reference to the representation may have been carried on from the earlier title-page. In 1598 were also printed 1 Henry IV, and the anonymous Mucedorus, which may have already belonged to the Chamberlain's repertory, as it was certainly revised for them about 1610. The Merchant of Venice was entered in the Stationers' Register on 22 July, but with a proviso that it must not be printed 'without lycence first had from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen'. On 7 September 1598 was entered in the Stationers' Register the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, with its list of Shakespeare's plays up to date, including the mysterious Love's Labours Won, which I incline to identify with the Taming of the Shrew.[1] The earliest play not mentioned by Meres is probably Much Ado about Nothing, which may belong to 1598 itself. Another production of this year was Jonson's Every Man In his Humour, which was still a new play about 20 September, when an Almain in the audience lost 300 crowns. Possibly John Aubrey has this period in mind when he says that Jonson 'acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse, somewhere in the suburbes, I thinke towardes Shoreditch or Clarkenwell'.[2] Jonson, however, was in prison soon after the production of the play for the manslaughter of Gabriel Spencer on 22 September in Hoxton Fields, and there is no other evidence that he ever acted with the Chamberlain's men. His own name is not in the list of the original 'principall Comoedians' affixed to the text of Every Man In his Humour in the folio of 1616. This is of great value, as being the earliest extant list of the company. The ten names given are:

Will. Shakespeare.
Aug. Philips.
Hen. Condel.
Will. Slye.
Will. Kempe.
Ric. Burbage.
Joh. Flemings.
Tho. Pope.
Chr. Beeston.
Joh. Duke.

  1. App. C, No. lii.
  2. Aubrey, ii. 12. The same writer is obviously confused when he says, on the authority of Sir Edward Shirburn, that Jonson 'killed M^r Marlow the poet, on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-Curtain play-house'.