Ale, and Tobacco 17 



these verses were current there is no means of knowing. They are 

 quoted in Camden's Britannia and in DuCange's Glossarium but I 

 have not met with them elsewhere. The translations of the lines in 

 the two plays are different and apparently independent. The most 

 reasonable assumption is that the quotation was familiar at this time 

 among Cambridge students and was used in the one dialogue because 

 it had been used in the other. Randolph was presumably the bor- 

 rower, since Wine, Beere, and Ale, as we have seen, was manifestly 

 modelled on an earlier pair of Cambridge interludes. It has occurred 

 to me that Randolph might possibly be the author of both works — ^he 

 is said to have been very active as an undergraduate in getting up 

 student entertainments — but this conclusion seems on the whole 

 unlikely. Wine, Beere, and Ale, though clever, is quite lacking in the 

 verve and extravagance which characterize all of Randolph's un- 

 doubted comedies. It is far more probable that he had either seen the 

 piece performed in his early years at Cambridge (he matriculated 

 July, 1624) or became acquainted with it inamediately after its pub- 

 lication. Aristippus was entered on the Stationers' Register March 

 26, 1630. As the Cambridge session had been suspended since 

 November owing to the plague, the play, if acted at the University, 

 must have been written at least as early as 1629, the year in which 

 Wine, Beere, and Ale was published in its earlier form. 



WhUe there is no conclusive evidence to show that Wine, Beere, 

 and Ale was written for performance at Cambridge University, such 

 a supposition is, in view of what has already been said regarding its 

 relation to dialogues known to have been of Cambridge origin, very 

 probable. It is a fact that nothing so closely resembling this group — 

 nothing so like the acted debate of John Heywood's time, — is to be 

 found elsewhere in the Elizabethan or Stuart drama. Debate mater- 

 ial and motives do, indeed, appear with some frequency, but these 

 motives are usually incidental to the play as a whole. In masques, 

 where the contention sometimes constitutes the framework of the 

 piece, the subject is generally allegorical and didactic — the opposition 

 of mythological persons, of virtues and vices, or of other personified 

 abstractions. Perhaps the nearest akin in form and substance to the 

 Cambridge group are the Oxford debate play, Bellum Grammaticale,^ 



See Johannes Bolte, Andrea Guarnas Bellum Grammaticale und seine Nachahmwtgen, Monnmenta 

 Germaniae Paedagogica, XLIII, where the Elizabethan play is reprinted. 



