Projector Lately Dead

Anon. (1634)

Historical Records

Henry Burton's polemical tract A Divine Tragedy is, essentially, a catalogue of cases where God has visited gruesome punishments upon enemies of puritanism. In particular, Burton offers a long and hostile account of the death of Charles I's Attorney-General William Noye, including an allegation that his death was made into a play:

Being opened after his death, ther was not a drop of bloud found in his body, for he had voided al out before, his false malicious hard heart with inward fretting & vexing was so consumed & shrinked up, that it was like an old rotten leather purse or meere scurfe, the Physicians never seeing the like before, his flesh and kidnies were as black as an hat, his intrails (except his lungs onely) all putred; and his carkas a miserable spectacle, but no stone that could trouble him was found about him: his funerall according to his desire was so private, that there were hardly Gentlemen enough to carry him to his grave, but that some came in by accident. His clients the Players, for whom he had done knight-service, to requite his kindnes, the next Terme following make him the subject of a merry Comedy, stiled; A Projector lately dead; wherein they bring him in his Lawyers robes upon the Stage, and openly dissecting him, find 100. Proclamations in his head, a bundle of old motheaten records in his maw, halfe a barrell of new white sope in his belly, which made him to scoure so much, and yet, say they, he is still very black & foule within. And as if this voiding of all his owne blood, & publike disgrace on the Stage were not sufficient to expiate the wronged Gentlemans bloud & infamy: himselfe in his last will layes a brand on his owne son and heire...

(Burton, A Divine Tragedy, 45-46.)

The play is also mentioned in a contemporary letter to the Virginian aristocrat John Winthrop. In the judgement both of Bentley and of Noy's biographer Jones, this letter is derived from Burton rather than being an independent witness. (See Bentley, 5.1398).