Nathan Field, actor, writer of two plays unassisted, and collaborator in at least six others, was chiefly known and highly praised by his contemporaries for his acting. He most likely played John Littlewit in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, a play in which Jonson compares him with Burbadge: just before the puppet show Cokes asks, "Which is your Burbadge now? ... Your best actor, your Field"" Field's name, along with Burbadge's, appears among the "Principall Actors" in the 1623 Shakespeare folio; we do not know what roles he played, but Edmund Malone, the eighteenth-century editor of Shakespeare, believes he "performed female parts." He is ranked next to Burbadge in the cast lists that were published in editions of The Queen of Corinth , which he wrote with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, and Fletcher's The Loyal Subject. He is also known to have played in Jonson's Poetaster and his Epicoene, and his...