Anyone who has read the diary of Richard Madox, Elizabethan Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, will know that he should probably not be valued as England's greatest theatre critic. On 22 February 1582, for example, he writes ‘We went to the theatre to see a scurvie play set owt by one virgin which ther proved a fyemarten with owt voice so we stayd not the matter’. Fyemartin here refers to a ‘freemartin’, which is a bovine term, used to describe a hermaphroditic calf. Had Madox been more interested, we might have been able to identify the ‘scurvie’ performance that he had left, but it has sadly not proved possible so far.

We should be grateful that he was slightly more careful with his record of 8 January 1582, therefore. Madox, his brother, and their friends, Richard Lateware of St John's College and George Abbot of Balliol College, go out ‘clubbing’, a use of a term which incidentally predates the OED's earliest identification of it by over fifty years. Clubbing in early modern Oxford seemed to consist of wandering between colleges and greeting friends with improvised orations. Madox's party ultimately reach their destination for the evening, Trinity College, and he records the following, ‘We supt at the presidents lodging and after had the Supposes handeled in the haul indifferently’. We might speculate about the production's failings, but there is scholarly consensus that the play referred to here is George Gascoigne's Supposes, a translation of Ariosto's erudite comedy, I Suppositi (1509). We know from the text, first published in 1573, that the play premiered at Gray's Inn in 1566 and, with the subsequent edition of 1575, we also have a hint at its initial reception; Gascoigne modestly added a brief Latin note to confirm that the audience had applauded, Et plauserunt.

Recent interest in the Inns of Court as a cultural context has helped to focus attention on both Gascoigne and the festive entertainments, such as the Revels at Gray's Inn, at which Supposes was first performed. We know rather less about drama at Trinity College, Oxford, however, although what we do know is relevant to an erudite performance.