The Tragical History, Admirable Atchievments and various events of Guy Earl of Warwick was published in 1661 and carried the title-page ascription ‘Written by B. J.’. The play is based upon the medieval romance Guy of Warwick and dramatizes the second half of Guy’s life, beginning after his return to England and his marriage to Felice (rendered as ‘Phillis’ in the play). Guy decides to leave his wife, who is pregnant with their first child, and travel on pilgrimage to Christ’s sepulchre in Jerusalem. Having participated in raising the Saracen siege of the city, he returns to England, where he fights the giant Colbron and becomes a hermit. In the closing stages of the play, the dying hero is reunited with his son Rainborne. A comic subplot features Philip Sparrow, Guy’s servant, who hails from Stratford-upon-Avon and has therefore attracted suggestions of a connection with Shakespeare (Harbage, 1941, 42-9; Cooper, 2006, 119-38).

The dating of Guy is complex. It clearly belongs to the pre-civil war period, as attested by the title-page description ‘Acted very Frequently with great Applause, by his late MAJESTIES servants’; beyond this claim there is no other record of its performance. The question is whether the play as printed is also a rewriting of an earlier play. The Annals of English Drama gives the limits of the play as c.1590-c.1615, although Cooper has made a case for considering an even earlier date on the grounds of the play’s naïve dramaturgy, personified chorus between acts, and Marlovian diction (Harbage, 1964, 60; Cooper, 2006, 126). Inter-textual relations are fleeting: unusual phrases shared with Mucedorus (1598) indicate a connection between the plays, but do not prove the precedence of either, whereas the use of the phrase ‘the night’s far spent’ from the King James translation of Romans 13:12 indicates a date post-1611 (Peacham, 2006; Guy of Warwick, ed. Moore, xxvii; Wiggins et al, 2011-, sub. Guy of Warwick). ‘A Play Called the life and Death of Guy of Warwicke written by Iohn Day and Tho: Dekker’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 15 January 1620, and Harbage in the Annals tentatively identifies this Guy as a ‘revision’ of the putative 1590s’ play. To complicate matters further, the Annals proposes that the 1661 play represents this older play, rather than the 1620 Day/Dekker play, which would make it ‘the extant original of a lost revision’ (Greg, 1939-59, 1.31; Harbage, 1964, 60 and 114). Were Jonson to have had a hand in writing Guy, it is far more likely that he would have been involved in the 1590s than the 1620s.

Over the years the play’s title-page ascription to ‘B. J.’ has attracted sustained interest, although considerable doubt has been expressed over whether these initials point to Jonsonian authorship. The entry for the play in Baker’s Biographia Dramatica, for example, brings the well-worn quality-of-genius argument to bear on the question, as is the case elsewhere for other works attributed to Jonson in whole or part, such as Rollo (see Electronic Edition, Dubia, 7). D. E. Baker writes, The plot of this piece is founded on history, and it has been attributed to Ben Jonson; but we are apt to believe it only a conjecture formed from the letters prefixed to it, the execution of the work being greatly inferior to those of that first-rate genius. (Baker, 1812, 3.275-6)

Walter Scott recorded Baker’s judgement on the upper endpaper of his Abbotsford copy of Guy: ‘From the initials on the title-page it has been ascribed to Ben Jonson which is as true as the averral of the Biog: Dramatica that the plot is founded on history whereby Mr Baker probably meant as fable’. On the spine of this Abbotsford copy of the play is stamped ‘JONSON’S HIST. OF GUY EARL OF WARWICK 1661’.

The title-page of Guy also hints at an association with Jonson through an epigraph taken from Martial’s epigrams (1.91): ‘Cum tua non edas, carpis mea carmina, Laeli. / carpere vel noli nostra vel ede tua’ (‘Although you don’t publish your own poems, you criticise mine, Laelius: either don’t criticise mine or publish your own’) (Loeb, 1993, 1.108-9). This quotation does not appear in any of Jonson’s plays, but two Jonson quartos, Poetaster (1602) and Sejanus (1605), do carry epigraphs from Martial. Like the ‘B. J.’ ascription, this Martial epigraph is therefore probably a publishing ploy intended to bestow upon Guy the air of an authentic Jonson play and thus exploit Jonson’s high standing on the Restoration stage (see Miola, 1999, 35-48; Sorelius, 1966, 4). The second half of this epigram appears on the title-page of Thomas Jordan’s comedy The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon (1657), which is the published form of Youth’s Figaries, performed at the Red Bull in 1641. The play was later performed under the title Tricks of Youth in 1660 or 1661; if Guy was a Red Bull play, as is possible, then it may have some connection with Jordan, and so the title-page’s ascription to ‘B. J.’ may perhaps be an error for ‘T. J.’ (Moore, ed., Guy of Warwick, xix-xx).

Certain connections between Jonson and the Guy legend have perpetuated speculation about Jonson’s potential hand in Guy, although none of them constitutes anything like proof of his involvement. The first connection is the summary of a romantic drama reminiscent of the plot of Guy that appears in Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady (perf. 1632):

So, if a child could be born in a play, and grow up to a man i’the first scene, before he went off the stage, and then after to come forth a squire and be made a knight, and that knight to travel between the acts and do wonders i’the holy land, or elsewhere: kill paynims, wild boars, dun cows, and other monsters; beget him a reputation and marry an emperor’s daughter for his mistress; convert her father’s country; and at last come home, lame and all-to-beladen with miracles. (Chorus 1, 12-19)

The German scholar Ludwig Tieck, who made a copy of the 1661 Guy during a visit to England, thought that this plot represented ‘Ganz der Inhalt von Guy of Warwick’ (‘The entire content of Guy of Warwick’) (Hewett-Thayer, 1935, 402). Although nothing links Jonson’s synopsis directly to the 1661 Guy, or any of its possible predecessors, one section of Guy is very close to it in wording. The similarities raise the possibility that the 1661 text is related to the Guy play (if such it is) that Jonson was ridiculing:

Spar. . . . My Mistris Parnell is as precious to me, as your Lady Phillis is to you, we have gotten them both with child; and all the difference is, that Phillis is your wedded Wife, and Parnell is my unmarried Mistris, and we must needs run up and down killing of Dun Cowes, Dragons, Wild-boars and Mastiff Dogs, when we have more work at home then we can well turn our hands to. (lines 340-6)

The legendary Guy makes one appearance in a Jonson play (Tub, 3.6.6-7, in which he and Bevis of Hampton are described as famous ‘high constables’), and general similarities exist between Guy and Jonson’s unfinished play, Sad Shepherd (1641). Guy does not himself appear in Sad Shepherd, but it is peopled by other characters from English folklore such as Robin Hood and Robin Goodfellow, and the play contains passages of rural dialect (albeit rather ‘amateurish’; H&S, 10.363), as there are in Guy. A fourth potential connection, although once more insufficient to prove Jonson’s hand in authorship, is the use of the romance Huon of Bordeaux as a common source for Guy and for Jonson’s masque, Oberon (1611). Jonson’s use of Huon is very slight – he borrows only the name of Oberon – but, in Guy, Huon’s fight at the tower of Donather is invoked directly by the hero (lines 387-90).

In considering the question of Jonson’s possible authorship of Guy of Warwick, Helen Cooper draws attention to the statement by Time in the epilogue that ‘He’s but young that writes of this Old Time’ (line 1609), pointing out that Jonson would indeed have been young if Guy were written in the early 1590s, and that these are also Jonson’s lost years during which he may have been a travelling player. This player claim was made by Dekker in Satiromastix (1601), and Cooper also points out that in Satiromastix Horace (that is, Jonson) says of a letter, ‘Here lies entomb’d the loves of knights and earls’ (1.2.354-8; Guy being knight, earl, and eventually entombed) (Cooper, 2006, 128). A direct ‘Guy’ reference in Satiromastix is Tucca’s description of Horace as ‘villainous Guy’ in 4.1. Penniman and Scherer see this as a slighting reference to the legendary Guy of Warwick (Hoy, 1978-80, 1.265-6). Peacham, however, argues that ‘villainous Guy’ is a more specific reference to the play itself, Guy of Warwick (Peacham, 2009 ). His assertion rests on two hypotheses: that, in the wake of the Isle of Dogs affair, Shakespeare attacked Jonson in Two Gentlemen of Verona and that in riposte Jonson wrote the Sparrow scenes of Guy of Warwick as a satire on Shakespeare. This proposition is intriguing, but not ultimately convincing.

Even discounting Jonson’s involvement, it does seem likely that Guy of Warwick is a collaborative play. Other names mentioned in this connection are John Day and Thomas Dekker, to whom The Life and Death of Guy of Warwick was entered in 1620, and Thomas Heywood. In 1620, Dekker had just been released from prison, and was engaged in collaborations and revisions, several of which were staged at the Red Bull Theatre, including two collaborations with Day, The Bellman of Paris (1623) and Come See a Wonder (perhaps the same play as The Wonder of a Kingdom) (Jones-Davies, 1958, 1.62 and 2.401, 403). Various aspects of the 1661 Guy can be adduced to support a link with the 1620 play by Dekker and Day. It manifests some stylistic straits typical of Dekker and contains possible echoes from other Dekker plays; various interesting words such as ‘bagpudding’ and ‘brewis’ (favoured by Sparrow) occur in other Dekker plays; and Dekker had a proven interest in using material from folklore and popular culture. At about the same time as Guy was entered in the Stationers’ Register, Dekker’s collaboration with Massinger, The Virgin Martyr, was performed; when printed in 1622 its title-page bore wording very similar to that of Guy, and it was revived in 1661 and 1667. The pious tragic action of The Virgin Martyr and its archaic flavour also suggest similarities with Guy (Harbage, 1941, 44-5; Moore, ed., Guy of Warwick , xxii-xxiv).

The case for Thomas Heywood’s involvement rests on similar ground. Heywood often uses the device of a chorus asking the audience to ‘suppose’ something (as also happens in Guy); he favours Latin-speaking clowns (such as Sparrow), and in two Heywood plays (A Woman Killed with Kindness and The English Traveller) a meal is described in military language; the former play uses the same phrase, ‘battle ray’, as is employed in Guy (l. 1402) (Wiggins et al, 2011-, sub. Guy of Warwick).

In summary, whilst a long tradition speculates that Jonson’s hand can be discerned in Guy, the claim of sole authorship can be discounted. If Guy of Warwick is a collaborative play, Jonson is still an unlikely participant: more probable are Day, Dekker, Heywood, and perhaps others. As far as dating is concerned, Guy of Warwick is either original to the 1590s, or a seventeenth-century revision of such a play; the potentially decisive reference to the 1611 King James Bible points to the latter, and suggests composition in the second or third decade of the seventeenth century.