The Significance of a Date

Summary

So long as much of the chronology of Elizabethan drama remains unknown or uncertain, the dating of any plays of that period must present problems of interest. When, as sometimes happens, the date of one play may help to fix that of others, the correct solution of the problem may be exceptionally important. A prime example is the dating of the manuscript of Anthony Mundy’s John a Kent and John a Cumber.

John a Kent is by no means a dull play; its ingenious construction helps to explain why Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) described Mundy as “our best ” and why he included him among “the best for comedy”. But the play's intrinsic merits are likely to be overshadowed always by the relationship of the manuscript to that of Sir Thomas More. The latter play is also by Mundy, originally perhaps by him alone, although later others had a hand in it. The manuscript, in Mundy's writing, has revisions and alterations in five other hands (including Chettle's and Dekker's). Among these are three pages which many have argued are in Shakespeare's writing. If this is so, these three pages are our only sample of Shakespeare's hand other than six signatures dated some twenty years later, during his last four years.