George Peele

George Peele 1558?-1597?, English playwright, educated at Oxford. He experimented in a variety of forms, including the pageant, history, pastoral, comedy, and melodrama, but his best-known work is The Old Wives Tale (1595), a frolicsome piece that infuses a depiction of ordinary English life with elements of folklore and romance. His other extant plays include The Arraignment of Paris (1584), Edward I (1593), The Battle of Alcazar (1594), and The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599). Some modern scholarship has attributed to him almost a third of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c.1594). Peele was one of the "university wits," a group of poets and playwrights that included Marlowe , Nashe , and Robert Greene .

Bibliography: See his life and works, ed. by C. T. Prouty (3 vol., 1952-70); biography by G. K. Hunter (1968); B. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (2003).

Peele, George (1556–96), Elizabethan dramatist, who worked mainly for Henslowe, often in collaboration with other playwrights of the time. It has even been suggested, without proof, that he worked with Shakespeare on Henry VI, Parts One and Three, King John, and Titus Andronicus. His first extant play appears to be The Arraignment of Paris (c.1581), one of the earliest examples in English drama of the pastoral. It was followed, in uncertain order (the dates are conjectural), by David and Fair Bethsabe (c.1587); The Battle of Alcazar (c.1589), of which both the full text and the platt used backstage by the actors survive; The Old Wives' Tale (c.1590), Peele's best-known work, a mixture of high romance and English folklore once dismissed by the critics as negligible nonsense, but now considered a landmark in the development of English comedy; and finally Edward I (c.1591), which survives only in a mutilated form. Peele was also the author of several texts for pageants, of which Descensus Astraea (1591) survives, and of a number of charming lyrical poems, some included in his play-texts.

Peele, George (1556–96). From about 1581 he pursued an active and varied literary career. He was an associate of many other writers of the period, such as T. Watson and R. Greene. His works fall into three main categories: plays, pageants, and ‘gratulatory’ and miscellaneous verse. His surviving plays are The Araygnement of Paris (1584); Edward I (1593); The Battle of Alcazar (1594); The Old Wives' Tale (1595); and David and Fair Bethsabe (1599). His miscellaneous verse includes Polyhymnia (1590) and The Honour of the Garter (1593), a gratulatory poem to the Earl of Northumberland. Peele's work is dominated by courtly and patriotic themes, and his technical achievements include extending the range of non-dramatic blank verse.