Peele, GEORGE, an Elizabethan dramatist, was son of James Peele, Clerk of Christ's Hospital, and was born most probably about 1558. He had his education there, and went up to Oxford in 1571. Next year his name is found on the list of members of Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, and from December 1574 to 1579 he was a student of Christ Church. He took his bachelor's degree in 1577, his master's in 1579. He seems to have had a reputation at the university as a poet and arranger of dramatic pageants, but by 1581 he had removed to London, where for seventeen years he lived a roosting Bohemian life as actor, poet, and playwright, dying a discreditable death in 1598. 'As Anacreon died by the pot, so George Peele by the pox,' writes Meres. We know that he married in 1583, and was one of those warned to repentance by the miserable Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). Little confidence need be put in The Merry Jest of George Peele (1607), which are mostly ancient and borrowed witticisms, representing Peele as a shifty and disreputable trickster and vagabond haunter of taverns. His best work, The Arraignment of Paris, a dramatic pastoral containing some exquisite verse and ingenious flatteries of Elizabeth, was published anonymously in 1584. Another pastoral play, The Hunting of Cupid (1591), is lost. In 1585 he was employed to write the Lord Mayor Dixi's Pageant, and in 1591 he prepared another for the mayoralty of Sir William Webbe. His fine and spirited Farewell to Sir John Norris in his expedition to Portugal in 1589 (eked out by A Tale of Troy); his Eclogue Gratulatory (1589) to the Earl of Essex on his return; his Polyhymnia (1590), on the retirement of Sir Henry Lee from the office of queen's champion (closing with the exquisite song 'His golden locks time hath to silver turn'd,' quoted in The Newcomes); his Speeches for the reception of Queen Elizabeth on her visit (1591) to Burgley at Theobalds; and his Honour of the Garter, written on the occasion of the investiture of the Earls of Northumberland and Worcester (1593), are other examples of the occasional poems that flowed from his fluent pen, and helped him to make a shifty living.
The historical play of Edward I. (1593) has descended in a very corrupt text, and is grievously marred by its baseless slanders against the stainless Queen Eleanor, due to the anti-Spanish prejudice of the time. His bombastic and ranting play, The Battle of Alcazar, was published anonymously in 1594, and was followed by another now lost, which in the Merry Jests is named The Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek. It is doubtless this play that is alluded to in Pistol's 'Have we not Hiren here?' His charming play, The Old Wives' Tale (1595), which most probably gave Milton the subject for his Comus, is well defended by Mr Bullen from the contemptuous criticisms of Symonds and Saintsbury. The latter, however, finds much higher poetic merit in David and Bethsabe (1599) than either Mr Bullen or Charles Lamb. The last work assigned to Peele is Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes (1599), but its authorship is more than doubtful.
Peele's works were first collected by Dyce (2 vols. 1828; 2d ed. 1829; a supplementary 3d volume in 1839). A carefully revised re-issue was published, together with Greene, in 1861. The best edition is that by A. H. Bullen (2 vols. 1888). See Ward's English Dramatic Literature (1875), and J. A. Symonds' Shakspeare's Predecessors (1884).