On 18 August 1598, the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe lent the Lord Admiral’s Men the sum of six pounds to pay Henry Porter, Henry Chettle, and Ben Jonson for ‘a book called Hot Anger Soon Cold’ (Life Records, 14). The play, presumably a comedy, was ‘almost certainly completed’ (Carson, 1988, 49), but no text or record of performance has survived. Anger was a subject of some interest to Jonson, whose surviving comedies often depict wrathful eruptions of the kind indicated by this title (Donaldson, 1984); and also to Porter (d. 1599), best known to posterity as author of The Pleasant History of The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, performed at an unknown date at the Rose Theatre by the Lord Admiral’s Men. In 1598 both Porter and Chettle were included in Francis Meres’s list of writers ‘the best for comedy amongst us’ (Palladis Tamia, ed. Smith, 1904, 2. 320). Chettle, who died in the early years of James’s reign, was a tireless collaborator; thirty-six of the forty-nine plays on which Henslowe’s Diary shows him employed between 1598 and 1603 were undertaken with other writers. Neil Carson (1988), 62 notes that Chettle and Porter had just finished collaborating on Black Bateman, Part 2, before embarking on Hot Anger Soon Cold, and that it is possible that Jonson, who does not figure prominently in Henslowe’s Diary at this time, ‘was brought in as “coadjutor” in a relatively subordinate role’ to help with the latter piece. Jonson and Chettle were to work together again, in collaboration with Thomas Dekker, on Robert II, King of Scots (1.231).

(See also JONSON’S LOST PLAYS)