About the author

John Jones (fl. 1635) was an amateur dramatist, about whom little is known. Adrasta is the only piece of writing attributed to him. The play's title page states that it was ‘Never Acted’, and Jones's epistolary dedication to the play reveals why. Encouraged by the positive reception of readings of the play by his friends, Jones submitted it to the ‘players’ to be considered for performance. Unfortunately for Jones, the company ‘upon a sight and half view of it, refused to do it that right’. Jones complains that ‘The reason I well know not, unless perhaps it had not in it so much witchcraft in poetry, as, now ‘tis known, the stage will bear.’ He says that by the ‘earnest impulse of some particular friends’ with ‘necessity concurring’, and his own desire to work no further on it, he ‘was unwillingly forced to publish it to the world’. Jones complains that doubtless ‘a dog-toothed cynic will have a snap at it ’ now that it is published, but it is not worth his anger to respond.

About the text

The play proper is prefaced by an induction scene and prologue. An actor, playing the role of ‘a stranger’, demands to know from the Prologue (the actor speaking the prologue) what genre of play will be performed. Dissatisfied by the Prologue's answer – a satire – the stranger makes several specific demands about what play he thinks the audience ‘desires’. The Prologue suggests that the stranger should speak to the author. The stranger agrees and exits the stage (to the tiring-house) to pass on his advice about how to emend the plot. The play that follows, a tragi-comedy set in Florence about the trials of faithful love sourced from Boccaccio's Decameron, is presumably this ‘revised’ version.

The arts of memory

Our excerpt is taken from the opening dialogue of the opening scene of the play proper. It is a comic exchange between a gentleman, Antonio, and a page, Rigazzo, who was previously a student. Similar to the excerpt from Webster's Induction Scene to The Malcontent (VI.13), here we see another example of training in the memory arts put to ill use. This excerpt presents a striking example of how the memory arts were a familiar, if not necessarily well-understood, intellectual practice in Renaissance England.