MEDWALL, HENRY (fl. 1490, the earliest known writer of an English secular play, is said on good authority to have been well-born. The date of his birth and the circumstances of his youth and education are unknown. The earliest reference to him is in Cardinal Morton's Register at Lambeth in the year 1490. On Aug. 28, 1492, he was admitted to the rectory of Bulyngham in the English marches of Calais. It was not till Feb. 27, 1500-01 that he appears to have been granted letters of protection enabling him to go overseas, and a few months later he resigned. No later reference to him is known and it is surmised that he did not long survive his patron, Cardinal Morton, who died in 1500.
Morton had appointed him his chaplain and it was for the entertainment of the cardinal and his guests that Medwall exer cised his remarkable dramatic gifts. His reputation as a play wright has suffered from a story apparently invented by J. P. Collier, who stated that at Richmond in 1513 a moral interlude by Medwall, The Fynding of Truth, was performed but was not liked and that the king departed before the end to his chamber. There is no trace of the document on which the story is supposed to rest. Medwall did, however, write a morality play called Nature, in two parts and containing 2 2 characters. It is preserved in a single copy (printed by William Rastell) in the British Museum, and is a favourable example of the allegorical play. In
it Medwall displays his talent for realistic dialogue and his skill as a versifier.
It is, however, as the author of Fulgens and Lucres, the first known secular play in English, that Medwall has a distinctive place in the history of the drama. The play was supposed to have been lost, except for a fragment, but a copy printed by John Rastell was found in 1919 in Lord Mostyn's library and passed, at the sale of his books, to the late Henry E. Huntington of California. Its source is a neo-Latin declamatio by Bonaccorso of Pistoja, de Vera Nobilitate, telling how Fulgentius, a Roman senator, had a daughter Lucretia who had two suitors, Publius Cornelius, well-born, rich and idle, and Gaius Flaminius, of humble birth but virtuous. Each pleads his case, but there is no decision. In ithe play, Lucres decides in favour of Flaminius, as the more truly "noble" of the two. Medwall also adds a comic underplot, in which the servants of the suitors are rivals for the favours of her handmaid. By virtue of this play Medwall stands at the head of the long line of English playwrights.
See A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama (1926) ; Fulgens and Lucres edit. by F. S. Boas and A. W. Reed (1926) and Nature, ed. by A. Brandl in Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England (1898).
(F. S. B.)