Chaloner's 'Treatise of the Isle of Man' which appeared therein); the rest is said to come from an 'MS.' which 'Mr Strahan of Baliol-College' extracted details from. How Scotsman

When my edition of Thomas Ravenscroft’s music treatises was in proofs at Ashgate in April 2014, I received a photograph of a 1630 license of alienation that revealed what Ravenscroft was doing after 1622, when he resigned his position as music master at Christ’s Hospital, a school for fatherless boys just north of St Paul’s. With a signature recognizable from his holographic dedication to Sir John Egerton in a Huntington Library copy of his treatise, A Briefe Discourse (1614),1 Ravenscroft signed himself in that document as deputy to the Lord High Treasurer of England, Richard Lord Weston.2 Just before publication I was able to establish that Ravenscroft had joined the chancery office in November 1622, the same month that he declared to the Christ’s Hospital Court of Governors that ‘hee was willing to leaue the place of Teaching the Children, having Resolued of another Course for himselfe’.3 Forty-nine certifying signatures over the period November 1622 to November 1630 amply confirm his presence in chancery, and testify to the fulfillment of his resolution.4

The Parliament which convened in 1523 is famous for the bitter debates which ensued between Thomas Wolsey and the House of Commons over the government’s attempt to levy an unprecedently large subsidy to fund the ongoing French war.2 In The House of Commons 1509–1558, S. T. Bindoff and his collaborators identified sixty-five men who served as members of Parliament in 1523, with varying degrees of confidence. This represents just over 20% of total seats in the Commons, which numbered around 296.3 It is worth noting that one further name has recently come to light: the prominent landowner Sir David Owen (c.1459–1535), illegitimate son of Sir Owen Tudor, and the king’s natural uncle.4 We know this because sometime between 1516 and 1529, Owen petitioned the Court of Chancery for action against Sir William Barantyne and others. In the petition, Owen mentioned the fact that he was currently serving as MP, and that deeds of arbitration had been wrongfully seized in Surrey while he was busy in London: ‘…petitioner is one of the knightes of the shire of Sussex to treat for the same shire in this present parliament And [illegible] in the comen house of the same parliament accordyng to his dutie And might not therfor call so diligently vpon the said [illegible] had don if he had nott ben attendyng in the said parliament…’.5 The document must date from 1516 to 1529 because Cardinal Wolsey is addressed as Lord Chancellor. It clearly does not date from the time of the 1529–1536 Parliament, since we already know the two men who were elected knights of the shire for Sussex in 1529: Sir John Gage and Sir Richard Shirley.6 It must, therefore, date from 1523. Owen is also known to have served as an MP for Sussex in 1491–92.7 We may suggest that Owen also served as MP in the 1512–1514 Parliament, since he secured a proviso in his favour to the act De feoffamento facto per Thomam Comitem Surreiae (3 Henry VIII, c. 16), though this is uncertain, since one did not have to be an MP to file a proviso with the clerk. He may well also have served in 1510 and 1515, for which Parliaments no knights of the shire for Sussex have been identified.

Making the ignominious eponymous, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) combines elements of two plays by giving Shakespeare’s characters the lead parts in a transplanted Waiting for Godot (where, of course, the title character is never seen at all). Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, which had its premiere in 1968, is also set in someone else’s theatre, and again highlights two marginal figures, the critics Birdboot and Moon, who have been sent by their papers to review a murder mystery. One of the two is more marginal than the other, as we immediately find out, because Moon is a second-string irked by lack of recognition. It is not enough, he complains, ‘to wax at another’s wane, to be held in reserve, to be on hand, on call, to step in or not at all, the substitute, the near offer’. Stoppard himself had been substitute theatre critic of the Bristol Evening World, while dreaming of being a foreign correspondent. As he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, however, he soon found the boot was on both feet, when he was taken on by Scene magazine as not only the number one critic but also his own second-string. ‘Being short of money’, he told Mel Gussow in April 1972, ‘the magazine had this critic Tom Stoppard and a man named William Boot who wrote about the theatre. I was both of them’—although the pseudonym had previously had another role, as the accidental foreign correspondent in Evelyn Waugh’s farcical novel Scoop.1

Journal Article The Almeda Plot Strand and the Text of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two Get access Lukas Erne Lukas Erne University of Geneva, Switzerland Email: lukas.erne@unige.ch Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 69, Issue 4, December 2022, Pages 287–291, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjac119 Published: 17 November 2022

In the preface to the second edition of his Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1846), the great Victorian litterateur Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) announced the inclusion of multiple new letters by Cromwell. He then added: ‘Not to say, that your Set of Cromwell Letters can ever, in this Second or in any other Edition, be considered as complete; an uncounted handful of needles to be picked from an unmeasured continent of hay, - how can you ever assure yourself that you have them all?’.2 Indeed, these words might just as well be applied to Carlyle himself. Despite fifty years of assiduous efforts by the successive editors of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970–), new Carlyle letters continue to come to light. The following three letters from the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the University of South Carolina are hitherto unpublished and reveal Carlyle at work on all three of his major histories, The French Revolution (1837), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), and Frederick the Great (1858–65). Together, they serve as a reminder that Carlyle was no ‘prophet’ or ‘sage’ (such as he often styled himself), but was rather, like any other historian, dependent upon his sources, on previous scholarship, and, perhaps above all, on the kindness of strangers.

The Latin poem John Gower composed to mark his January 1398 marriage to Agnes Groundolf, Est amor in glosa, presents multiple forms of interpretive difficulty and affords an opportunity to observe the author at work constructing individual lines of poetry. Its variable presentation in manuscripts raises doubts about its extent, whether the poem beginning ‘Est amor in glosa’ and preceded by a Latin headnote ought to be considered to consist of fifteen, nineteen, or twenty-seven lines.1 Gower’s first great modern editor, G. C. Macaulay, distinguished two poems, incipit ‘Est amor in glosa’ (nineteen lines) and incipit ‘Lex docet auctorum’ (eight lines).2 In his new edition of Gower’s minor Latin works, R. F. Yeager, following a suggestion of David R. Carlson’s, prints as one poem all twenty-seven lines commonly found in sequence in the manuscripts, subsuming Macaulay’s ‘Lex docet auctorum’ as lines 20–27 of Est amor in glosa.3 So curated, Est amor in glosa comprises three metrically distinct stanzas. The first has internally rhymed (‘leonine’) hexameters (ll. 1–15); the second has rhyming hexameter + pentameter (‘elegiac’) couplets (ll. 16–19); and the third reverts to leonine hexameters (ll. 20–27). The first and third stanzas show through-rhyming, that is, they stick to single rhyme sounds, -osa and -orum, respectively, effecting a formal heightening akin to insistent chiming. The poem’s interlude contains one elegiac couplet with collateral rhyme on -iguis line-medially and -amor line-finally (ll. 16–17) and another couplet through-rhymed on -ita (ll. 18–19). This is a remarkably complex scheme, but it falls within Gower’s tolerance for stylistic variegation in Latin verse. All three metrical styles, and others, occur in Gower’s virtuosic anti-lollard poem Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia, composed a year or so earlier.4

Laurence Nowell (c.1530–c.1569) was an antiquary, a pioneering scholar of Old English, and a significant figure in the development of cartography. His namesake and first cousin, Laurence Nowell (c.1516–1576), was a churchman who served as Dean of Lichfield from 1560 until his death. Later generations assumed there had been only one Laurence Nowell, and conflated their lives and careers: the confusion began in the seventeenth century, and persisted into William Hunt’s account in the Dictionary of National Biography of 1895, and into what remains in other respects an authoritative essay by Robin Flower of 1935.1 Only in 1974 did Retha Warnicke take the first serious forensic steps in disentangling the two men’s lives.2 Her conclusions have since been widely accepted, and in certain respects confirmed and consolidated, by others.3 Unresolved questions include the identity of the Laurence Nowell appointed master of Sutton Coldfield grammar school in 1546, and subsequently ordained deacon by the Bishop of London in 1550, who may or may not have been the future dean;4 and that of the Laurence Nowell who in 1559 sat in parliament for the borough of Knaresborough, who may or may not have been the antiquary.5