PREFACE

Summary

The following pages contain the results of work done for the most part a good many years ago. They illustrate the references to plays in the bursarial accounts of the Cambridge colleges, which were transcribed at the same time and which are to be published shortly by the Malone Society.

They are also supplementary to Dr F. S. Boas’ standard work University Drama in the Tudor Age (1914) and to the same author's chapter on University Plays in the Cambridge History of English Literature with its appended Bibliography. It has been my endeavour not to repeat what has been so well said by Dr Boas. But perhaps in what has been left to me to say here, there is still something which may be of service to future historians of the University Drama. Much of it I know is tentative and open to correction. But the subject is one on which much has yet to be done.

In the Malone volume I have expressed my gratitude to the many officers of colleges whose ungrudging assistance made my work so pleasant and without which it could not have been done at all.