The Birth of Merlin
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The Birth of Merlin, or, The Child Hath Found his Father is a Jacobean play, first performed in 1622 at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch.[1] It contains a comic depiction of the birth of the fully-grown Merlin to a country girl, and also features figures from Arthurian legend, including Uther Pendragon, Vortigern and Aurelius Ambrosius.
When the play was first published, in 1662, its publisher, Francis Kirkman, attributed it to William Shakespeare and William Rowley. The Birth of Merlin is thus one of two plays published in the seventeenth century as a Shakespearean collaboration, the other being The Two Noble Kinsmen. Most scholars reject the attribution to Shakespeare and believe that the play is Rowley's, perhaps with a different collaborator such as Thomas Middleton or Thomas Dekker. The play has occasionally been revived in the modern era, for example at Theatre Clwyd.
[edit] Notes
- ^ N.W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama (OUP, 1996)
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