The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0076  Thursday, 1 February 2007

From: 		Tom Reedy <
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Date: 		Monday, 29 Jan 2007 22:56:39 -0600
Subject:  	Unknown Play

In Sir John Harington's "An apologie of poetrie," the preface to his1590 
translation of Orlando Furiso, he writes:

Then, for comedies. How full of harmless mirth is our Cambridge 
Pedantius? and the Oxford Bellum Grammaticale? or to speak of a London 
comedy, how much good matter, yea and matter of state, is there in that 
comedy called the Play of the Cards? In which it is showed how four 
parasitical knaves rob the four principal vocations of the realm, videl. 
the vocation of soldiers, scholars, merchants and husbandmen. Of which 
comedy I cannot forget the saying of a notable wise counselor that is 
now dead, who when some, (to sing Placebo) advised that is should be 
forbidden, because it was somewhat too plain, and indeed as the old 
saying is, (sooth boord is no boord) yet he would have it allowed, 
adding it was fit that they which do that they should not, should hear 
that they would not.

1. Does anyone know this London play? I went to 
http://www.columbia.edu/~tdk3/earlymodern.html but I couldn't find a 
play by any variant of that name, and I don't recall that plot.

2. What does "sooth boord is no boord" mean?

Tom Reedy

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