Albumazar (play)

Albumazar is a Jacobean era play, a comedy written by Thomas Tomkis that was performed and published in 1615.

The play was specially commissioned by Trinity College, Cambridge to entertain King James I during his 1615 visit to the University. College officials sought a play from alumnus Tomkis, then a lawyer in Wolverhampton, who had written the successful Lingua for his college a decade earlier. Gentlemen of Trinity College acted Albumazar before the King and his court on 9 March 1615 (new style). One report on this production from an audience member survives, in a letter from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton – though Chamberlain thought it a failure.

The play was revived onstage during the Restoration, by the Duke's Company at their theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields; Samuel Pepys saw it on 22 February 1668. In 1744 playwright James Ralph adapted Tomkis's play into his The Astrologer; it was not a success, and ran for one performance only. In 1747 David Garrick revived Tomkis's original; and in 1773 Garrick made and staged his own adaptation.

Albumazar was entered into the Stationers' Register on 28 April 1615, and was published soon after in a quarto printed by Nicholas Okes for the bookseller Walter Burre. (The 1615 quarto was issued in two states, which have sometimes been defined as two separate editions.) The play is anonymous in its first edition, though college records clearly assign it to Tomkis. A second edition was issued in 1634 by Nicholas Okes (also in two states); that edition claims to have been "Newly revised and corrected by a special Hand," though the changes in the text amount to little more than normal proofreading and correction of errors. A new edition was published by Thomas Dring in 1668 to coincide with the Restoration revival. Ralph's and Garrick's adaptations both were published, in 1744 and 1773 respectively.

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