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Look About You and The Disguises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Fred L. Jones
Fred L. Jones*
Affiliation:
Mercer University
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Extract

Fleay's suggestion that Look About You, acted by the Admiral's Men at the Rose, was written in 1599, April 17—May 26, must be rejected. He advances but two plausible arguments: (1) the title-page (1600) states that the play was “lately” acted; (2) Wadeson's comedy of The Honourable Life of the Humorous Earl of Gloucester (1601)—possibly but not necessarily a sequel to Look About You—would seem to indicate a date of 1599 or 1600 for the latter play. But “lately acted” on a title-page means little; and even if in this case it was correctly used, it may indicate only a revival of the play. Fleay's opinion must be discounted on much weightier evidence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1929 , pp. 835 - 841
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1929

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References

Note 1 in page 835 It should be understood that I regard Look About You as a Chettle play. It was first attributed to Chettle by H. Dugdale Sykes; see Notes & Queries, 12 S, XII, April 28, 1923.

Note 2 in page 835 Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, II, 267. See also Greg, Henslowe's Diary, II, 204. In another place (I, 125) Fleay likewise suggests that Bear a Brain, 1599, was another title for Look About You. See Greg, Diary, II, 204.

Note 3 in page 835 Schelling (Elizabethan Drama, I, 176) gives 1595; Fleay (Biographical Chronicle, II, 144) gives 1594.

Note 4 in page 835 Cambridge History of English Literature, V, 356.

Note 5 in page 835 The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, the first by Munday, the latter by Munday and Chettle.

Note 6 in page 836 It is quite possible that Robin Hood had already appeared on the stage as the Earl of Huntington before Chettle wrote his play. The non-extant Pleasant Pastoral Comedy of Robin Hood and Little John was entered upon the Stationers' Register in 1594, and The Downfall (IV, 2, Hazlitt's Dodsley, VIII, 184-5) alludes to earlier Robin Hood plays. As far as the argument is concerned, it makes no difference whether Chettle or another dramatist (following Grafton, Chronicle, 1569) first introduced the outlaw to the playgoers as the Earl of Huntington.

Note 7 in page 837 Wm. Creizenach, The English Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, p. 221.

Note 8 in page 837 Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, II, 405.

Note 9 in page 837 Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, II, 611.

Note 10 in page 837 In the sense of importance in the action and of frequency of appearance. Accordingly we would not call old King Henry, Elinor, Leicester, and Lancaster chief characters.

Note 11 in page 838 V. O. Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama, pp. 121-2, 133.

Note 12 in page 838 Perhaps the title was merely changed. Fleay (B. C. E. D., I, 57; II, 304) thinks The Disguises the original version of Chapman's May Day. Sir Sidney Lee (French Renaissance in England, 420 n) points out Jean Godard's French metrical version of Ariosto's I Suppositi, published in 1594 with the title Les Disguisez, and asserts that The Disguises “translates, there can be no doubt, the new French recension” of Ariosto's comedy. He gives no reasons to support his conclusion. See Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama, p. 122.

Note 13 in page 838 Freeburg, op. cit., p. 123.

Note 14 in page 838 Freeburg, op. cit., p. 122.

Note 15 in page 839 Freeburg, op. cit., p. 131.

Note 16 in page 839 Ibid., p. 126.

Note 17 in page 839 This device had already been employed in the earlier George a Green, and Chettle uses it again in The Blind Beggar of Bednal-Green and in Hoffman.

Note 18 in page 840 Freeburg, perceiving no connection between The Disguises and Look About You, suggests 1597 as the earliest date for the latter. If the two titles do not belong to the same play, he is correct, for it is unreasonable to suppose that the Admiral's company would add a fourth multi-disguise play to their repertory while they had three such plays which held the public favor. See Freeburg, op. cit., p. 122.

Note 19 in page 840 See Chettle's “Address to the Gentlemen Readers,” prefixed to Kind Heart's Dream, 1592.

Note 20 in page 840 Greg, Henslowe's Diary, II, 193-4.

Note 21 in page 840 Ibid., II, 196.

Note 22 in page 840 Freeburg, op. cit., p. 131. Ronald Bayne is of like opinion; see the quotation from him on p. 835.

Note 23 in page 841 They were both still writing for the Admiral's Men in 1601. See Diary, II, 218.

Note 24 in page 841 Ward writes: “the ‘Pleasant Commodie called Looke About You‘. . . . which by any other name might have equally diverted the groundlings.”—History of English Dramatic Literature (1899), II, 611.