9rĪ clue is presented by the handwriting of the surviving manuscript ( Harley MS 7368). In 1871, William Shakespeare's handwriting was identified on this page of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore: Harley MS 7368, f. So what is the connection with William Shakespeare, the author of the more distinguished Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet? ![]() This late 16th or early 17th-century play is not always included among the Shakespearean canon, and it was not until the 1800s that it was even associated with the Bard of Avon. The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore does not immediately spring to mind as among Shakespeare's masterpieces. A more recent edition of the play was published in 2005.One of the most iconic literary manuscripts by one of the world's most famous playwrights, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), can now be viewed in full online on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts site. The play was edited by Kenneth Palmer for the Malone Society in 1954. Gisbert's confrontation with his daughter Urania and her husband Lucius appears to have suggested the dramatic scene in the later play in which Rochfort confronts his daughter Beaumelle and her husband Charalois. Philip Massinger and Nathan Field my have borrowed from Daborne's play when they wrote their collaboration The Fatal Dowry. ![]() For Felix Schelling, the play "is quite enough to raise Daborne, hack-writer though he was, to a respected place among the dramatists of his day." Critics have praised the play for keeping Gisbert and Urania as shepherds till the end - not revealing them to be lost royalty or aristocrats in hiding, as is usual in the pastoral form. He finally attains justice from his king. His story involves lovestruck shepherds, shipwrecked princesses, corrupt and venal lawyers, and violent whores. Gisbert fails to receive justice from a local court, and leaves his pastoral life to take a journey through a corrupt society. The play tells the story of Gisbert, an old shepherd whose daughter, Urania, has been deserted by her husband, a nobleman from Thessaly. The title of the play is proverbial: "Virtue is the friend of life, the soul of health, the poor man's comfort and the rich man's wealth" is one among several versions. Warner's story collection, his "sevenfold history," also served as Thomas Middleton's source for The Bloody Banquet. Egerton 1994, an important collection of play manuscripts now in the British Library.ĭaborne based his play on the seventh story in William Warner's Pan His Syrinx (1584, 1597). The drama was revived early in the Restoration era, in 1661 - which was its last known stage production.Ī manuscript of the work is preserved in MS. If the title page describes the original production, the most likely single year for the play might be narrowed to 1617, since Daborne is thought to have stopped writing for the stage by 1618. The title page of the quarto states that the play was performed at the Cockpit Theatre, which was occupied by the Queen Anne's company from 1617 to 1619. (See, for example, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt.) The two actors may have been Gregory Sanderson and Ellis Worth, who played with Queen Anne's Men. ![]() In the original text, a stage direction at line 186 reads "Enter 2 Lords, Sands, Ellis." The names refer not to the characters of the play but the actors who played the roles - a feature that occurs on rare occasions in the texts of English Renaissance drama. Both the Register entry and the title page of the quarto refer to Daborne as a "Master of Arts." The Poor Man's Comfort was entered into the Stationers' Register on 20 June 1655, and published in quarto later that year by the booksellers Robert Pollard and John Sweeting. It was not published until several decades after it was written. The play's date is uncertain, though it is generally assigned to the 1610–18 era.
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