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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The Drinking Academy, A Play by Thomas Randolph, edited by Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum and me and published by the Harvard University Press in June, 1930, was noticed at length in The Review of English Studies for October by Professor G. C. Moore Smith. He rejects Randolph's authorship and advances the claim of Robert Baron. “The present writer expressed the view,” he asserts, “that if the manuscript was, as alleged, in the handwriting of its author, the play could hardly be Randolph's.” As I was emboldened to accept Dr. Day's ascription of the play to Randolph partly by the fact that Professor Moore Smith, convinced by Dr. Day's evidence, had himself categorically assigned it to Randolph in the very note to which he thus vaguely refers, I subjoin extracts therefrom, since—as the testimony of an expert—they are an important element in the case.
1 vi (1930), 476–483.
2 “Thomas Randolph and The Drinking Academy,” PMLA, xliii (1928), 800–809.
3 “The Drinking Academy and its Attribution to Thomas Randolph,” PMLA, xliv (1929), 631–633. In The Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 1930, Professor Smith declares, surprisingly and incorrectly, that the reviewer who, in a preceding issue, had mentioned his acceptance of Randolph's authorship “credits me with an opinion not advanced in the book before him.” He goes on to say, correctly enough, that he has been led “to take another view in a review … shortly to appear in the Review of English Studies. … After much consideration, then, I have come to be of opinion that The Drinking Academy is not by Randolph, and is probably by Baron.”
4 See PMLA, xxxix, 837–871.
5 See also the uses of “vapour” in Jonson's The New Inn, 1629, iii. i, and Randolph's Hey for Honesty, 1651, p. 15.
6 Cf. William Bosworth, The Chast and Lost Lovers, 1651, E8v, “If Sappho, or Thalia did surpass In Lyribliring tunes.”
7 See also “utibule,” “repumicate,” “rutilate” (i, 6, 11, 57) in the N.E.D.
8 To help his case along, however, I call his attention to these lines in Baron's Cyprian Academy, iii, 81,
“Both these whom Hymen here untie [sic]
Make up but one Hermaphrodite,“
which follow Cleveland's,
“For Man and Wife make but one right
Canonicali Hermaphrodite.“
As usual I quote the 1652 Randolph (pp. 124–125).
9 Ed. R. B. Johnson, i (1893), 250.
10 The N.E.D. gives “fraunces” as an old spelling of “franchise.”
11 Dated “1613–16” by E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, iii (1923), 230.
12 There are many other important borrowings in The Drinking Academy from The Scornful Lady. I list a few here: line 63=p. 390; lines 95–96=pp. 389–390; lines 639–642 =p. 395. Professor Smith will find “Strike him a hornpipe, squeakers” (cf. p. 788, above) on p. 390.
13 N. & Q., 1914, ix, 62–63.
14 Nobody has ever suggested that Greene did not write Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay because one of his characters twice calls (v. ii) a devil “Master Plutus.” See also Fletcher's The Spanish Curate, i.i.217, “Pluto's flame-colour'd daughter,” a phrase which R. B. McKerrow (Variorum Edition, ii, 131) calls “an instance of the common confusion between Pluto and Plutus.” Two further instances occur in the first folio of Shakespeare, and are defended in a learned note by Percy Simpson, who calls to witness Marlowe, Webster, Bacon, and Lucian (N. & Q., 1899, IV, 265).
16 I dismiss here unanswered the fifth paragraph of the review, which takes up a trivial matter dismissed in a foot-note on pp. xxiv–xxv of the book, and which ends: “The story seems to me improbable at all points.” The matter in the foot-note is twice plainly called a guess, and has no bearing on the question of Randolph's authorship. This fifth paragraph is aimed at an alleged error made by Mr. G. Thorn-Drury, not by the editors. That distinguished scholar needs no help from me. I call attention to the fact, however, that while the editors' guess at the meaning of the Prologue seems improbable to Professor Smith, he makes no effort at interpreting this Prologue with reference to his new Baron theory. Content with showing the mistakes of Mr. Thorn-Drury about Randolph, he forgets that he is arguing in favor of Baron. How, pray, would he explain what in 1929 he called “the cryptic prologue” (see his explanation as given in the book, pp. xxii–xxiii), now that he has changed his mind about the authorship?
16 No date or place of writing is given in the 1645 edition; that of 1650 (section iii, p. 46) supplies “London, Aprili 16. 1622.” Jacobs, editing the letters, says (ii, 726) that the present specimen is “flagrantly misdated,” and adds, “the return from the Synod could not have been later than June 1619.” Jacobs (i, xxxi) believes that Howell returned from the Continent in the winter of 1620. The letter was not written immediately after his arrival in London, since at that time he was very ill, while, when he wrote, he had just been riding a Welsh nag sent him by Hugh Penry.
17 In N. & Q., 1914, ix, 22, Professor Smith asserts that Baron's language in The Cyprian Academy, “while it has many touches of old-fashioned euphuism, is distinguished by a recourse to the most absurd Latin expressions, which suggests a study of Cockeram's ‘Dictionarie’.”
18 Works, ed. Cunningham, vii (1875), 117.
19 N. &. Q., 1914, ix, 468. See also Bradley in M.L.N., xxxiv (1919), 402–408.
20 English Works, ed. G. H. Palmer, iii, 337.
21 One borrowing has been observed by Professor Smith in N. & Q., 1914, ix, 23, two others by Professor Briggs (ibid., pp. 467–468), and a few are in The Shakspere Allusion-Book, ii (1909), 5–6.
22 In N. & Q., 1914, ix, 22–23.
23 It is dated, almost symbolically, April 1!
24 Nothing is easier than to blunder. I willingly admit that I personally believe the explanation of “the temple” given on p. 38 of the printed book, and objected to by Professor Smith, to be erroneous. I also take advantage of this opportunity to point out that “thy sacred hunger” (line 47) and the Latin quoted at line 104 come respectively from the Aeneid, iii. 57, viii. 2, and probably that the “Harmus” river is from the Georgics, ii. 137. Any seventeenth-century schoolboy, or “good classic,” would have known that “thy sacred hunger” means “thy accursed hunger”; so that it will perhaps bring no comfort to my reviewer to call attention to “such is the sacred hunger of gold” in Baron's Apologie, p. 66.
25 The italics are mine.
26 Professor Moore Smith's elaborate investigations into Baron's life at Cambridge and elsewhere (see N. & Q., 1914, ix, 1–3, 22–24, 43–44, 61–63, 206) make it seem unlikely that any autographs of Baron have escaped his notice. But, for that matter, he continually insists that the play cannot possibly be in its author's hand.
27 “Vice” (line 546) is a mere comic slip of the tongue, instantly corrected to “device.”
58 So in Pocula Castalia, p. 36, Baron writes of his heroine Rosella, “Here of this wonder of nice Natures sweat Taking my Leave.”
