Master of the Revels in the context of "Hans Eworth"

The City Madam is a Caroline era comedy written by Philip Massinger. It was licensed by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 25 May 1632 and was acted by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. It was printed in quarto in 1658 by the stationer Andrew Pennycuicke, who identified himself as "one of the Actors" in the play. A second edition followed in 1659. Pennycuicke dedicated the play (Massinger was long dead) to Ann, Countess of Oxford—or at least most of the surviving copies bear a dedication to her; but others are dedicated to any one of four other individuals.

No direct source for the play has been identified, other than Massinger's own earlier play, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, which was modelled on Thomas Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One. Specific connections have been cited between The City Madam and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (regarding Sir John Frugal's pretended absence and masquerade), Ben Jonson's Volpone (Luke Frugal's rhapsodising over his wealth), and Rollo, Duke of Normandy (Stargaze's astrological verbiage), among other works.

The Tragical History of King Richard III, Alter'd From Shakespeare (1699) is a history play written by Colley Cibber. It is based on William Shakespeare's Richard III, but reworked for Williamite audiences.

Cibber, a prominent theatre manager, first attempted to stage his version in 1699, but the performance was a disaster. The Master of the Revels censored the entire first act and the production was a popular and commercial failure. Cibber published the script in 1700, including the problematic act, with a short note on its suppression. Ensuing performances from 1704 eventually risked the entire play in Cibber's new form. The play became a success with leading actors such as David Garrick playing Richard III.

The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. This was a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with England's publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers. The company's charter gave it the right to seize illicit editions of published works and to bar the publication of unlicensed books, and allowed publishers to document their right to produce a particular printed work in the register, which thus constituted an early form of copyright law.

For the study of English literature of the later 16th and the 17th centuries (covering the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras), and especially for English Renaissance theatre, the Stationers' Register is a crucial and essential resource: it provides factual information and hard data that is available nowhere else. Together with the records of the Master of the Revels (which relate to dramatic performance rather than publication), the Stationers' Register supplies many of the certain facts scholars possess on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and all of their immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. It is also an invaluable source of information about ephemeral publications, such as popular broadside ballads, of which no printed copies survive.