If so, it was a very small play. The phrase to eat dirt , first attested in the 1850s, expresses the same idea as to eat crow and to eat humble pie . According to the OED, the phrase used to appear sometimes in the form eat old Rowley's hat , though I've never seen it and the OED has no citations for it. I suspect nobody knows. There was a Jacobean playwright named William Rowley and Thomas Chatterton's supposed medieval monkish poet was named Thomas Rowley, though it is just as probable that Rowley was a character in a story or some minor personage now quite forgotten.
Some proverbial sayings have a very long history indeed.
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