English 3336 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama and Theatre
Prompt # 15
10 October 2012

Finding out about early plays

A new assignment

Prompt #14 said, "We'll either make a decision or lay out a plan to find out what we need to know to make one." We didn't actually make that plan, but I've since come up with one.

Between now and Friday

On the list of plays, which is now on the course main page, as I added dates to the ones that didn't have them, I've identified ten plays written before 1670:

  1. Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery. The Tragedy of Mustapha, the son of Solyman the Magnificent (1665).
  2. Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery. The History of Henry the Fifth (1664).
  3. Dryden, John, and Sir Robert Howard. The Indian Queen (1664).
  4. Dryden, John. Tyrannick Love; or, The Royal Martyr (1669).
  5. Etherege, Sir George. She Would if She Could (1668).
  6. Howard, Sir Robert. The Committee; Or, The Faithful Irishman (1665).
  7. Howard, Sir Robert. The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma (1668)
  8. John Lacy. The Old Troop; or, Monsieur Raggou (1664).
  9. Sedley, Sir Charles. The Mulberry Garden (1668).
  10. Tuke, Sir Samuel. The Adventures of Five Hours (1664).
Here's the deal. I've numbered them off alphanumerically. Your job is to find out what you can about the two of them assigned to you in a half hour's work each. I suggest Google and Wikipedia as good starting places. What you're finding out is what sort of play it is, anything you can infer about how important or influential it is, and whatever else you think might help us decide which of these would be useful to read. When you've found what you can in 15 minutes or so, write up what you've learned (including where you learned it, of course, and post it to the "Early Plays" Forum (linked from the main course page). Use the title of the play as the title of your posting.

Assignments:

Iya Downey: 1, 6
Tabitha Goleniec: 2, 7
Matthew Goodwin: 3, 8
Kayla MacAllister: 4, 9
Adam Washburn: 5, 10
There's only one play on the list from the year 1670, John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada. I'll take that one and post on the forum a result of fifteen minutes' searching on Google and Wikipedia, to demonstrate how this might be done.

Do this by Friday's class; make it a priority over the reading and commenting on other people's reports (if you can do that too, that would be fine, but I think this should come first).

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