The Humorous Magistrate
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Humorous Magistrate (c. 1635-40) is a 17th-century country comedy in five acts discovered by the collector Edgar Osborne, who found the manuscript in a sale at Watnall Hall in Nottinghamshire, England in 1947. It was later sold to the University of Calgary in 1972. The play exists in two manuscripts and shows clear signs of authorial revision.
Manuscripts
In 1972, the University of Calgary acquired Edgar Osborne's collection of rare books and manuscripts, including The Humorous Magistrate (MsC132.27). The manuscript when acquired was untitled, dateless, and authorless. Under the direction of Professor Mary Polito, the manuscript was dated to the seventeenth-century and was determined to have been written near or after 1640 due to political and socio-economic references within the text. After workshop performances in association with the University of Calgary drama department, the Calgary manuscript was linked to another untitled manuscript found in Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, United Kingdom in 2004. These are the only two known extant manuscripts of The Humorous Magistrate. The Arbury manuscript is an earlier version of the Osborne, containing more amendments and approximately ten thousand more words.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Humorous Magistrate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.