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Home > EARLYTHEATRE > Vol. 14 > Iss. 2 (2011)

 

Abstract

We provide evidence for the authorship of a previously anonymous Caroline play, The Humorous Magistrate, currently held at the University of Calgary. Using the paleographic evidence of digital hand comparison charts, which compare exemplary letter-forms from handwritten documents, we contend that both versions of The Humorous Magistrate, along with numerous other plays and texts, were written and authored by John Newdigate III of Arbury Hall (1600-1642), a country gentleman working within a dynamic literary coterie based in the West Midlands. These hand charts map both the continuation and the evolution of his secretary and italic script, demonstrating that Newdigate was acutely attuned to the changing currents of early modern scribal culture. As author of The Humorous Magistrate and various other poems and plays, Newdigate can with reason be added to the group of amateur Caroline dramatists which includes the likes of John Suckling, Mildmay Fane, and William Cavendish.

Author Biography

Kirsten Inglis is a PhD candidate in the department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. She has presented her research at the annual conferences of the Rocky Mountain MLA, the British Shakespeare Association, and the Canadian Society for Italian Studies; she has been invited to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders. Kirsten’s doctoral research focuses on the translational poetics of Tudor women and she is a member of the University of Calgary’s Osborne Project, a SSHRC-funded early modern manuscript project.

Boyda Johnstone is a doctoral student in the Department of English at Fordham University. Although she was a student researcher on the Osborne Manuscript Project at the University of Calgary for two years, her personal interests lie in performative approaches to Middle English devotional illustrated manuscripts. She presented at the Medieval Translator conference in Padova, Italy, she contributed a book review for Early Theatre (12.1), and she is currently preparing a book chapter entitled 'Reading Images, Drawing Texts: Performing The Abbey of the Holy Ghost in British Library Stowe 39' to be published in Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders).