ABSTRACT
Elias Schwartz bases his position on the Bellamont-Chapman identification in Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho, in production in 1605, on Chapman’s access to the manuscript of Grimeston’s General Inventory, and by Schwartz’s own admission, on the “tenuous” collateral evidence from a letter addressed from Chapman to Sir George Buck, the Deputy Master of the Revels. As a necessary prelude to the confrontation of the play itself, one must first settle the vexed matter of its date of composition. To fix the latest date of composition as early 1608 is possible because extant documents prove that the play, although an altered version of Chapman’s manuscript, was on the boards as early as the spring of 1608. The justification for so thinking depends upon Jenkin’s puzzling “Duke-Pepper-noone” which suggests that the text originally read Epernon for Blron in line 54. Besides keeping the pun Epernon would be completely consistent in this context where Chapman-Bellamont is being ridiculed for his French fixation.
