Henslowe writes: R at iiij playes in one the 6 of marche 1591 ... xxxjs vjdFour Plays in One is another lost play and we know almost nothing about it, except that it was ... four plays in one. It must have been a collection of one-act plays, perhaps linked by some kind of narrative device, and there are several examples of these in the period. There are lost Elizabethan plays called Three Plays in One and Five Plays in One. Thomas Middleton's one-act Yorkshire Tragedy (1607) was once part of an otherwise lost Four Plays in One. John Fletcher and his team wrote Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One around 1614. But these Jacobean examples are not the lost Elizabethan play.
In modern English: Received at Four Plays in One, 6th March 1592 ... 31 shillings and sixpence.
Unfortunately that's all I can tell you. It was four plays in one. Not five plays. Not three plays. But four plays. In one! Bargain!
FURTHER READING
Four Plays in One information
- Roslyn L. Knutson, "Four Plays in One", Lost Plays Database (2012).
- Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 879.
Henslowe links
- Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
- Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)
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