A Knack to Know a Knave: ‘Laugh at the Faults and Weigh it as it is.’

The History Of European Theatre

Episode 138:

Over the course of speaking about English Renaissance Plays and Shakespeare I have had cause to mention the play ‘A Knack to Know a Knave’ several times. Most latterly because it is thought to include references to ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘Titus Andronicus’ and prior to that, in the season on the Early Renaissance Theatre it had a mention as one of the plays performed at the Rose Playhouse as recorded in Henslowe’s Diary. Having been reminded of it while writing about the early Shakespeare plays I thought that it deserved a little time in the spotlight on it’s own as it gives us a little snapshot of the plays, and particularly comedies other than Shakespeare and Jonson, that was circulating at the time of the earliest of Shakespeare’s plays. So, here is a little interlude of an episode all about ‘A Knack to Know a Knave’.

A quick word on ‘Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers’ by Darren Feebury-Jones, which is published in October 2024 and on Henry Porter and his possible involvement with ‘Dr Faustus’.

The performances of ‘A Knack to Know a Knave’ as reported in Henslowe’s Diary

The mystery of the low takings for repeated performances in a second run of the play

The printed quarto edition of the play

A summary of the plot

The (possibly) missing parts of the play, including Kempe’s extemporising

How the fools of Gotham folk tale is worked into the play

The allusions to other plays in the text

The final lines of the play

If you would like to read the text of A Knack to Know a Knave, you can find it on google books here

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