Today is quite possibly the anniversary of the birth of George Peele, who may have written a number of famous plays in 1500s England, may have collaborated with Shakespeare, and might have written a play that Shakespeare used as a basis for the play King John. Peele might have had red hair. He might have squinted a lot. But really he’s a mystery man, only partially emerging from the fog of history. Let’s have a look at what he’s suspected of.
The thing about George Peele is that quite a few contemporary accounts (diaries, letters, and the like) refer indirectly to him, but although official records were being kept in London in those days, hardly any of those mention Peele. We know he was baptized on July 25 in London, which suggests he might have been born that same day. But maybe not. Peele’s father James was a clerk who wrote two books about bookkeeping. One of them, published in 1569, has a woodcut illustration on the title page depicting the elder Peele. But although George Peele might have grown up to be a well-known playwright, there aren’t any illustrations of him. Some wag at the time suggested he had short legs and a dark complexion, but that’s all we’ve got to go on.
We also know that George Peele had several siblings, including a sister Isabel who married someone named Mathew Shakespeare. Later on, George may have worked directly with William Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus. So maybe Mathew introduced them? Of course, nobody has any idea whether Mathew Shakespeare was related to William Shakespeare.
We know one other thing about George Peele’s father James: in addition to his two bookkeeping books, he wrote the Ironmongers’ Pageants in 1566 and 1569. There’s a rumor that George wrote two of the London Lord Mayor’s pageants, so that could be a connection. Except of course nobody can say exactly which two pageants George possibly wrote.
The writer Robert Greene, whose pamphlets were humorous and very popular in late 1500s and early 1600s London, mentions George Peele at the end of Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit (basically a joke book), and urges Peele to repent from having “been driven to extreme shifts for a living.” Scholars familiar with the argot of that era suggest that Greene was saying that Peele lived recklessly and probably drank too much.
In the late 1500s a woman probably named Mary Gates (it might have been Yates) married George Peele. But we can’t be sure which George Peele it was, because there was at least one other in London at the same time. The other George Peele was a boxmaker. It is known that whichever George Peele whose wife was Mary was involved in a long legal fight to collect the money owed to Mary on behalf of her first husband, who had been killed in the army. It might have been the George Peele we’re talking about, because if he really was a writer, that writer mentioned a similar situation in the play Edward I, which suggests that he really was the writer. You see what kind of straws historians are grasping at here.
Although records of the births and deaths of George Peele’s siblings exist, nobody is sure when, where, or how George himself died. A contemporary writer named Francis Meres noted that Peele died “of the pox” in about 1596, but his is not the only bit of evidence. George Peele may instead have died in 1604. Or some other year. He might be buried at St. James’s Church in Clerkenwell, London. Or, well, maybe not. But if you visit Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, England, you may notice that one of the buildings is named Peele in memory of George Peele (the hospital is sure about this, at least). They’re not old buildings; the whole Horsham campus is new. And Peele never, as far as anybody knows, visited Horsham; it’s 30 miles from London. So why does that particular hospital have a building named after a ghost haunting the history books? Another mystery.
