Date
In the Introduction to his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Ben Jonson alludes to The Spanish Tragedy as being "five and twenty or thirty years" old. If taken literally, this would yield a date range of 1584–89 — a range that agrees with what else is known about the play. Some critics, noting that the play makes no reference to the Spanish Armada of 1588, have argued for a date of 1587 as the most likely single year; others have varied that date a year or so, either way. Philip Edwards, in his Revels edition of the play, entertains a date range of 1582–92, but favours a date c. 1590.
Read more about this topic: The Spanish Tragedy
Famous quotes containing the word date:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Ev’rythin’s up to date in Kansas City.”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)