: An Almond for a Parrot: Being a reply to Martin Mar-Prelate. by Lyly John Dubious Author Nash Thomas Dubious Author Petheram John Editor - Marprelate controversy

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Contributor: John Petheram

Puritan Discipline Tracts.

AN ALMOND FOR A PARROT; BEING A REPLY TO MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.

Re-printed from the Black Letter Edition, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES.

LONDON: JOHN PETHERAM, 71, CHANCERY LANE. 1846.

INTRODUCTION.

Although I cannot at this time bring together positive and undoubted evidence of the authorship of the following tract, at some future period, in the Introduction to one of his accredited productions, I hope to place the fact beyond the reach of cavil or question, that Thomas Nash, to whom public fame has given it, was the author.

Whatever may be the date of the first edition of Greene's Menaphon, we have here only to do with Nash's Preface to that work, and, though Sir E. Brydges, in his reprint of it in 1814, mentions 1587, in which he is followed by the Rev. A. Dyce in 1831, , by Mr. Collier above, in the same year, and again in 1842, all agreeing to fix the date of Nash's Preface in 1587; yet there is, if I mistake not, internal evidence that it could not have been written before the date of the first known edition, which is in 1589.

Of the accuracy of the extraordinary facts which Nash relates in the Introduction to the Almond for a Parrot , I had expected to find confirmation in some book of travels of the time, but in this have not succeeded.

Thirdly, he says, "If I please, I will think my ignorance indebted unto you that applaud it, if not, what rests but that I be excluded from your courtesy, like Apocrypha from your Bibles?"

This passage appears to refer to a fact which Martin Mar-Prelate states in his Epistle to the Terrible Priests. "The last lent there came a commaundement from his grace into Paules Church Yard, that no Byble should be bounde without the Apocripha." Strype, in his Life of Archbishop Whitgift, admits the order, and takes some pains to justify the Archbishop in issuing it.

I should not have taken the trouble to investigate the contents of this Preface of Nash, "the firstlings of my folly," as he calls it himself , with such minuteness, but that it establishes beyond question the fact that Nash commenced his literary career in 1589, and not, as is generally supposed, in 1587.

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