The Parnassus plays are three dramas produced at St John's College, Cambridge, as part of the college's Christmas entertainments towards the end of the 16th century. They are humorous accounts of the adventures of two students, Philomusus and Studioso. The first play The Pilgrimage to Parnassus is an allegory about student life. The other two plays,The Return from Parnassus and The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, describe the two graduates' unsuccessful attempts to make a living.
Authorship of the plays is uncertain, nor is it known if they were all the work of the same person. John Weever has been suggested as author of the first play; the satirist Joseph Hall has been seen as an influence on—if not the author of—the other two, though recent statistical tests bring Hall's authorship into question. The dramatist John Day has also been proposed as a possible author.
A further sequel, The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, Or the Scourge of Simony, is a more ambitious, and from every point of view more interesting, production than the two earlier pieces. In it we again meet with Ingenioso, now become a satirist. On the excuse of discussing a recently published collection of extracts from contemporary poetry, John Bodenham's Belvedere, he briefly criticises, or rather characterises, a number of writers of the day, among them beingEdmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Michael Drayton, John Davies, John Marston, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and Thomas Nashe; the last of whom is referred to as dead.
