Play Identifications: "The Wise Man of West Chester" and "John a Kent and John a Cumber; Longshanks and Edward I"

Abstract

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Frederick G. Fleay raised to high art the game of play identification. Choosing pairs in which one text survived and the other had a stage history in Henslowe's Diary, Fleay argued by a similarity of titles and subject matter that two plays were essentially the same text. Thus he identified The Wise Man of West Chester (Wise Man) with Munday's a Kent and a Cumber (John a Kent) and Longshanks with George Peele's Edward l1' W. W. Greg, in an edition of Henslowe's Diary (1908), rejected many of Fleay's identifications as based on error or fancy. However, Greg did not reject the game itself. Denying the association of Sir Mandeville with Fair Em, he took up another of Fleay's suggestions and agreed that Fair Em possibly the comedy Sussex's men played under the title William the Conqueror.2 In The Elizabethan Stage, E. K. Chambers sided with Greg, repeating for example the link between Fair Em and William the Conqueror.3 In those few cases where Chambers and Greg agreed with Fleay and they did so for Wise Man/John a Kent and Longshanks/ Edward I the identifications acquired a formidable authority.4 A manuscript of a Kent discovered in the early nineteenth century among the papers of Lord Mostyn; it signed Anthony Mundy and dated Decembris 1590.5 Greg, thinking the date 1595, looked for the play among the titles listed for the Admiral's men in Henslowe's Diary for 1594-97 (Chambers, also in error, thought the date 1596 [ES, 3:446]).6 Greg did not find a John a but, as Fleay had before him, he found a play that suited a Kent in the locale (West Chester) and subject matter (adventures of a wise man). He therefore decided that Fleay was almost certainly right to identify a Kent as the play entered ne on 2 December 1594 and continued by the title Wise Man for thirtytwo performances to 18 July 1597 with average receipts of 35s. as Henslowe's share.7 The play reappeared in the diary on 19 September 1601 when Admiral's men bought the playbook from Edward Alleyn for 40s. (HD, 181); presumably, the company revived the production at that time. No entry in the Stationers' Register or print of the pair has been found; the Mostyn manuscript of a Kent, now HM500 in the collections of the Huntington Library, is the sole original text.