Locating the Queen's Men, 1583-1603 (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 Material Practices and Conditions of Playing

Edited by Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 Locating the Queen’s Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on early modern England’s most prominent acting company, from their establishment in 1583 into the 1590s. Offering a far more detailed critical engagement with the plays than is available elsewhere, this volume situates the company in the theatrical and economic context of their time. The essays gathered here focus on four different aspects: playing spaces, repertory, play-types, and performance style, beginning with essays devoted to touring conditions, performances in university towns, London inns and theatres, and the patronage system under Queen Elizabeth. Repertory studies, unique to this volume, consider the elements of the company’s distinctive style, and how this style may have influenced, for example, Shakespeare’s Henry V. Contributors explore two distinct genres, the morality and the history play, especially focussing on the use of stock characters and on male/female relationships. Revising standard accounts of late Elizabeth theatre history, this collection shows that the Queen’s Men, often understood as the last rear-guard of the old theatre, were a vital force that enjoyed continued success in the provinces and in London, representative of the abiding appeal of an older, more ostentatiously theatrical form of drama. Helen Ostovich is Professor of English at McMaster University, Canada. Holger Schott Syme is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. Andrew Griffin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

General Editor’s Preface Helen Ostovich, McMaster University Performance assumes a string of creative, analytical, and collaborative acts that, in defiance of theatrical ephemerality, live on through records, manuscripts, and printed books. The monographs and essay collections in this series offer original research which addresses theatre histories and performance histories in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century life. Of especial interest are studies in which women’s activities are a central feature of discussion as financial or technical supporters (patrons, musicians, dancers, seamstresses, wigmakers, or ‘gatherers’), if not authors or performers per se. Welcome too are critiques of early modern drama that not only take into account the production values of the plays, but also speculate on how intellectual advances or popular culture affect the theatre. The series logo, selected by my colleague Mary V. Silcox, derives from Thomas Combe’s duodecimo volume, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1592), Emblem VI, sig. B. The emblem of four masks has a verse which makes claims for the increasing complexity of early modern experience, a complexity that makes interpretation difficult. Hence the corresponding perhaps uneasy rise in sophistication: Masks will be more hereafter in request, And grow more deare than they did heretofore. No longer simply signs of performance ‘in play and jest’, the mask has become the ‘double face’ worn ‘in earnest’ even by ‘the best’ of people, in order to manipulate or profit from the world around them. The books stamped with this design attempt to understand the complications of performance produced on stage and interpreted by the audience, whose experiences outside the theatre may reflect the emblem’s argument: Most men do use some colour’d shift For to conceal their craftie drift. Centuries after their first presentations, the possible performance choices and meanings they engender still stir the imaginations of actors, audiences, and readers of early plays. The products of scholarly creativity in this series, I hope, will also stir imaginations to new ways of thinking about performance.

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 Material Practices and Conditions of Playing

Edited by HELEN OSTOVICH McMaster University, Canada HOLGER SCHOTT SYME University of Toronto, Canada and ANDREW GRIFFIN University of California, Santa Barbara

© Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Surrey GU9 7PT USA England Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 : material practices and conditions of playing. – (Studies in performance and early modern drama) 1. Queen’s Men (Theater company) – History 2. Theatrical companies – England – History – 16th century 3. Theater – England – History – 16th century 4. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism I. Ostovich, Helen II. Syme, Holger Schott III. Griffin, Andrew 792’.0942’09031 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 : material practices and conditions of playing / edited by Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme and Andrew Griffin. p. cm. — (Studies in performance and early modern drama) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6661-5 (alk. paper) 1. Queen’s Men (Theater company)—History. 2. Theatrical companies—England— History—16th century. 3. Theater—England-—History—16th century. 4. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. I. Ostovich, Helen. II. Syme, Holger Schott. III. Griffin, Andrew, 1978– PN2589.L63 2009 792’.0942—dc22 ISBN ISBN: 978-0-7546-9809-8 (ebk.V)

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In memory of Scott McMillin 1934–2006

Contents

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

ix xiii

Locating the Queen’s Men: An Introduction Helen Ostovich Holger Schott Syme Andrew Griffin

1

Part 1: In and Out of London 1 On the Road and on the Wagon Barbara D. Palmer

27

2

41

The Queen’s Men in Elizabethan Cambridge Paul Whitfield White

3 Motives for Patronage: The Queen’s Men at New Park, October 1588 Lawrence Manley

51

4 London Inns as Playing Venues for the Queen’s Men David Kathman

65

5 ‘The Curtain is Yours’ Tiffany Stern

77

Part 2: The Repertory On Page and Stage 6 The Start of Something Big Roslyn L. Knutson 7 Page Wit and Puppet-like Wealth: Orality and Print in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London Ian Munro 8 Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III Brian Walsh

99

109 123

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9 The Famous Victories and the 1600 Quarto of Henry V Richard Dutton

135

Part 3: Figuring Character 10 On-stage Allegory and its Legacy: The Three Ladies of London Alan C. Dessen

147

11 Usury on the London Stage: Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London Lloyd Edward Kermode

159

12 Appropriations of the Popular Tradition in The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Troublesome Raigne of King John Karen Oberer 13

Male Birth Fantasies and Maternal Monarchs: The Queen’s Men and The Troublesome Raigne of King John Tara L. Lyons

171

183

Part 4: From Script to Stage 14 When is the Jig Up – and What is it Up To? William N. West 15 Facial Hair and the Performance of Adult Masculinity on the Early Modern English Stage Eleanor Rycroft

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217

16 Performing the Queen’s Men: A Project in Theatre Historiography Peter Cockett

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Bibliography Index

243 261



Notes on Contributors

Peter Cockett is Assistant Professor in Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster University, teaching acting, directing, and new work creation. His research is performance-centered and he is a specialist in medieval and early modern theatre. In addition to the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project, he also has directed research-creation productions of the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003), George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (2004), and the Chester Antichrist (2004) for the Poculi Ludique Societas. Peter Cockett is a professional actor and director. Alan C. Dessen, Peter G. Phialas Professor (Emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of eight books, four of them with Cambridge University Press: Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (1984); Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (1995); Rescripting Shakespeare (2002); and, co-authored with Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (1999). In 2005 he gave the annual British Academy Shakespeare lecture. Since 1994 he has been editor or co-editor of the “Shakespeare Performed” section of Shakespeare Quarterly. Richard Dutton has been Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University since 2003. Previously he was at Lancaster University in England for 30 years. He is best known for his work on early modern censorship, including Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (1991). Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone’ and the Gunpowder Plot (2008) will be his third monograph on Jonson. His scholarly editing includes Jonson’s Epicene (2003) for the Revels Plays (of which he is a general editor), and Volpone for the Cambridge Ben Jonson. He is working on the revisions of Shakespeare’s plays for court performance. Andrew Griffin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He completed his PhD on untimely deaths in Renaissance drama at McMaster University, where he won the Governor-General’s gold medal for best dissertation of 2008. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Jonson, Lording Barry, and John Stow. He is also editor of the Queen’s Men Editions/Internet Shakespeare Editions’ Chronicle History of King Leir (forthcoming) and co-editor of the ISE’s All’s Well that Ends Well (forthcoming on the ISE website and from Broadview Press). David Kathman is an independent scholar in Chicago, Illinois. His recent research has focused on inns, taverns, and other places besides playhouses where plays were performed in sixteenth-century London. He also has done extensive research on theatrical apprenticeship and written on the Shakespeare



Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

authorship question. His work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Early Theatre, Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lloyd Edward Kermode is an Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he co-directs the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the editor of Three Renaissance Usury Plays (Manchester University Press, 2008), and co-editor of the essay collection Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590 (Palgrave, 2004). Professor Kermode is currently starting a new project on provincial drama and the Queen’s Men. Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (University of Arkansas Press, 1991). She has published on theatre history in numerous journals, annuals, and essay collections. Her current projects include a search for the narratives behind lost plays of the Admiral’s Men in Henslowe’s Diary and a repertorial analysis of the commercial theatrical marketplace in 1587–1593, when Christopher Marlowe’s plays were new. Tara L. Lyons is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of specialization include early modern drama, history of the book, and gender studies. She is currently completing a dissertation titled ‘Pressing Issues: Drama in Collections before Jonson and Shakespeare’. Lawrence Manley, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995) and the editor of London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (1986). With Sally-Beth MacLean he is writing a book on Lord Strange’s Men and their plays. Ian Munro is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (Palgrave, 2005) and the editor of A Woman’s Answer is Never to Seek: Early Modern Jestbooks, 1526–1635 (Ashgate, 2007). Karen Oberer is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She recently delivered a paper at the 2008 Shakespeare Association of America conference in Dallas, Texas, entitled ‘King John’s “rude man”: The Bastard Faulconbridge and the medieval Garcio Stock Type’. She is currently working on an edition of The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England for The Queen’s Men Editions (associated with Internet Shakespeare Editions). Her dissertation focuses on the literary and historical lineage of stock characters from medieval literature to Shakespeare’s history plays.

Notes on Contributors

xi

Helen Ostovich is Professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, where she also edits the journal Early Theatre. Her articles on Jonson and Shakespeare have appeared in essay collections and such journals as English Literary Renaissance, Studies in English Literature, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. She has edited several plays by Ben Jonson, most recently The Magnetic Lady for the forthcoming Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, and is editing two plays by Richard Brome, a son of Ben, for the Richard Brome Electronic Edition (HRI Sheffield), with the paper edition forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is also a general editor for The Revels Plays and for The Queen’s Men Editions. Barbara D. Palmer is Professor of English (retired) at the University of Mary Washington and a Scholar in Residence of Mary Baldwin College’s MLitt/MFA in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance. Her publications on English medieval and Renaissance drama, art history, and iconography include “Early Modern Mobility: Players, Payments, and Patrons” (Shakespeare Quarterly 56), which won the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2006 Martin Stevens Award. Author of The Early Art of the West Riding of Yorkshire (1990), she currently is co-editing the Records of Early English Drama volumes for the West Riding and Derbyshire. Eleanor Rycroft is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, where she is completing a dissertation on facial hair and masculinity on the early modern stage. Her primary research interests are gender, early modern drama, and the social and political contexts of the theatre. Tiffany Stern is Professor of English at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at University College, Oxford. Her monographs are Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), Making Shakespeare (2004), and, with Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts (2007). She has edited the anonymous King Leir (2002), Sheridan’s Rivals (2004), and Shakespeare’s Merry Wives (forthcoming, 2009), and is editing George Farquhar’s Recruiting Officer and Brome’s Jovial Crew. Her current project is to complete a monograph, The Fragmented Playtext in Shakespearean England. Holger Schott Syme is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His essays have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, Textual Cultures, and elsewhere, and he is currently completing a study entitled A Culture of Mediation: The Performance of Authority in Shakespeare’s England. Brian Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Yale University. He has published essays on Shakespeare, Dekker, the Queen’s Men, and Heiner Müller.

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William N. West is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He has written Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002; pbk. 2006) and coedited (with Helen Higbee) Robert Weimann’s book Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and (with Bryan Reynolds) a collection of essays honouring Weimann, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). He is currently working on a book on theatrical cognition and experience in the 1590s called ‘Understanding and Confusion in the Elizabethan Theaters’. Paul Whitfield White is Professor of English and the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Purdue University. His work focuses on Tudor/Stuart drama, religion and culture. His most recent book is Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society 1485–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Acknowledgements

For support in the preparation of this volume, the editors are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Toronto, and McMaster University. We are also indebted to Ashgate’s anonymous readers of the manuscript for their enthusiastic suggestions, to Arleane Ralph, our indexer, and of course to Erika Gaffney for her interest and encouragement during the development of this repertory project. For his participation in the early stages of the ‘Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men’ research/creation project, as well as behind-the-scenes consultation and suggestions, we thank Scott McMillin, without whose energy this project might not have materialised so successfully; and we are grieved that he did not live to see the results either in the theatre or in this book. For their participation in the creation of this volume, we are grateful to Sally-Beth MacLean for opinions on various issues and essays, and to Alexandra Johnston, Jill Levenson, Martin White, M.J. Kidnie, Jeremy Lopez, Jennifer Roberts-Smith, Meredith Skura, Linda Phillips, Rob Carson, Tim Harrison, Christopher Hicklin, Gillian Levene, Christopher Matusiak, Emily Winerock, and for their electronic assistance, Diane Jakacki and Tara Milmine-Laxton.

Helen Ostovich Holger Schott Syme Andrew Griffin

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Introduction

Locating the Queen’s Men: An Introduction Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin

The New Specificity Not too long ago, a book about a company of actors would have been of interest primarily to theatre historians, and would have been expected to concern itself more or less exclusively with theatre-historical issues – company business, venues, touring patterns, the identification of the troupe’s members. At the same time, such areas of enquiry were of little consequence to those studying early modern plays. To the extent that their critical discussions took a concept of performance conditions into account at all, it was generally restricted either to a relatively abstract notion of the features of the ‘Shakespearean’ stage, or to attempts at locating playtexts in a dialectical dynamic between the concerns of authors and actors. Over the last 15 years, however, things have changed radically. Partly thanks to archaeological discoveries, such as the fundaments of the Rose Theatre on London’s South Bank, partly owing to the efforts of a number of scholars determined to combine the insights of theatre historians with close critical attention to the texts of plays, a new dialogue between the material conditions of playing and the interpretation of scripts has emerged. One of the main features of this dialogue is a renewed focus on local, situational, or political specificity. When discussing the staging of plays, for instance, critics now may take into account the features – reconstructed or discovered – of actual theatres where certain plays are known to have been performed. To cite just one example, excavations in 1989 revealed that the stage of Philip Henslowe’s first theatre, the Rose, unlike the rectangular platforms at the Globe or the Fortune, was quite shallow and tapered towards the front; this fact now informs the reading of plays known to have been performed there, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Carol Rutter has also suggested that the small size of the    See, for instance, Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford, 2000); Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge, 2005); Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford, 2007).    Jonathan Bate, for instance, writes illuminatingly on how Titus’s dramaturgy appears to reflect the particular conditions of the Rose; ‘Introduction’, Titus Andronicus, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London, 1995), 37–9.



Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

Rose’s stage might have influenced the way playwrights treated female roles: given the amount of space women’s costumes would have taken up, she argues, ‘it is tempting to speculate that playwrights rarely put as many as three women on this stage at a time not because they lacked actors but because they lacked space’. As Tiffany Stern’s essay in the present volume shows, such materialist attention to the specifics of a particular playhouse can be grounded in archival research as well as in archeological excavations. Situating the first performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V at the Curtain, for example, she refigures the aspersions the play’s prologue casts on the inadequate theatre as a genuine disparagement of the Chamberlain’s Men’s temporary home, rather than as mock modesty in the face of the new Globe’s relative splendor. In developing an account of the Curtain’s specific place in London’s theatrical and social landscape, she provides a newly concrete context for plays known or likely to have been staged there. Even as such discoveries are sharpening and concretizing notions of what material conditions gave shape to the creative endeavors of authors and actors, the wealth of data available through the volumes produced by the REED project has largely discredited the idea that most plays were (or could have been) written specifically for one particular performance space. We now know that all the adult companies continued to tour the country throughout Elizabeth’s reign, staging their plays in a wide variety of configurations and conditions; the more we learn about the actual spaces which served as performance venues, the more apparent it becomes that any play written with, say, the dimensions of the Rose in mind also had to be flexible enough to work in all kinds of radically different set-ups, and this realization will necessarily alter the way we approach early modern dramatic texts critically and analytically. The Repertory Approach Easily the most significant cross-pollination between theatre history and literary criticism has occurred in the field of repertory studies. Scholars such as Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, Roslyn Knutson, and, most recently, Lucy Munro have begun to study plays not as part of any one author’s oeuvre, but as part of a canon formed by the set of plays owned and performed by a particular company. In this approach, the author is displaced by the company and its efforts at establishing a coherent, recognizable, and, crucially, marketable identity. Marlowe’s name might have been associated with the Admiral’s Men, especially    Carol Chillington Rutter (ed.), Documents of the Rose Playhouse, rev. edition (Manchester, 1999), xv.    See Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998); Roslyn L. Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company (Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1991); Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge, 2001); Munro, Queen’s Revels.

Introduction



as Alleyn’s fame was so closely linked to his appearances as Tamburlaine, Barabas, and Faustus; likewise, Shakespeare would become a figurehead for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and Burbage’s association with Shakespearean characters mirrored Alleyn’s connection with Marlowe’s. But despite their central importance in traditional literary history, in their own time these writers were exceptional rather than typical figures. Repertory scholars have taught us that early modern theater-goers did, by and large, go to see a Strange’s Men play rather than one by Kyd; a Queen’s Men play rather than one by Greene or Wilson. As authors lose their author-function (and become what they were in the sixteenth century: mere writers), the conflict paradigm loses ground as well. No longer are playwrights and players pitted against one another in a struggle between textual purism and the improvisatory anarchy of performance. Instead, they are figured as participating in a shared undertaking, collaborators rather than rivals, often without strict allegiances and at liberty to move between companies and styles. The same Ben Jonson who wrote Every Man Out of His Humour for the Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 sold Cynthia’s Revels to the Children of the Chapel in 1601; received payment for ‘A Booke called Richard crockbacke & for new adicyons for Jeronymo’ from Henslowe on behalf of the Admiral’s Men in 1602 (despite killing one of their members four years earlier); produced a failure like Sejanus for the new King’s Men in 1603; and returned, after a year or two of masque-writing, with Volpone, again for the King’s Men, in 1606. It makes as much sense to read these very different plays as part of a number of equally different repertoires, aiming at slightly different audiences or attempting to cater to the same audience’s range of tastes, as it is worthwhile to incorporate them into a larger, supposedly coherent Jonsonian literary project. In reading the Queen’s Men’s plays, the repertory approach offers a particularly helpful means of constructing a canon. Whereas the Admiral’s Men, from the point of view of literary history, have Marlowe, and the Chamberlain’s and King’s 

  In the well-known ‘Funerall Elegye’ on Burbage’s death, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello are the Shakespearean figures mentioned, with ‘ould Heironymoe’ as the sole exception; see Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors and of Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England before 1642 (New Haven, 1929), 74–6.    For a good summary of the repertory approach’s tendency to avoid the pitfalls of an author-centric reading of early modern drama, see Lucy Munro, ‘Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 42 (2003): 1–33.    See particularly Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce.    R.A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2002), 203.    Reading the plays as part of a number of repertories inserts them into a linear narrative determined by performance; reading them as part of Jonson’s oeuvre needs to take into account his own repeated rewriting of history – the way he rewrote texts for print, chose to keep some from print publication altogether, and repeatedly reinvented himself in differing poetic personae.

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603



Men have Shakespeare (just as Paul’s Boys have Middleton), the company that dominated the English theatrical world between 1583 and the early 1590s cannot be associated with an equivalent author. Of the nine plays McMillin and MacLean are willing to place in their repertory with certainty, more than half are anonymous (Clyomon and Clamydes, The Famous Victories of Henry V, King Leir, The Troublesome Reign of King John, True Tragedy of Richard III), and only three can reliably be assigned authors (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Greene, The Old Wives Tale by Peele, and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London by Robert Wilson; Selimus has been ascribed to Greene, but the evidence is slight). Greene probably comes as close as anyone to being the company’s signature playwright (besides Friar Bacon and the possibility that he wrote Selimus, his James IV and Orlando Furioso can also be connected to the Queen’s Men), but as authorial reputations go, his has slipped from desperate (in his own time) to marginal at best (in our time). Unlike those of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Middleton, none of his plays were published in his lifetime. However successful they may have been on stage, they were received as performances, not as a writer’s works, and Greene spilt much ink lamenting his invisibility as an author in the theatre.10 For that very reason, however, the Queen’s Men’s plays lend themselves particularly well to the repertory approach. In the absence of a unifying figurehead, scholars have recently begun to study the company’s style. All criticism in this vein is indebted to the pioneering work of McMillin and MacLean, even if some of the authors in the present volume explore the Queen’s Men’s arsenal of representational and dramaturgical strategies in ways that go beyond the interpretations proposed in The Queen’s Men and Their Plays.11 But although the repertory approach to these plays enables a sophisticated critical response to texts that might otherwise appear opaque and relatively uncouth, we need to keep a number of caveats in mind. If Jonson refashioned himself through selective publication, we cannot rule out that what can be analysed as ‘the Queen’s Men’s style’ is similarly a function of the particular selection of plays that has survived – a selection that might reflect chance or, just possibly, an effort at fashioning an image in print as self-conscious as Jonson’s. Roslyn Knutson’s essay in this volume confronts this dilemma directly, admitting that irresolvable questions of chronology and influence make the construction of the company’s repertory a profoundly fraught task. Even as she expands the list of plays we might identify as the Queen’s Men’s, she discovers the hallmarks of their style – ‘frame structures, template romance characters, and a medley of linguistic styles’12 – in plays that belonged to other troupes, such as Derby’s Men’s Rare Triumphs of Love

  See Greenes Groats-vvorth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance (London, 1592), F1v; and Greenes Neuer too Late (London, 1590), C1. 11   See in particular the essays in this volume by Tara Lyons, Ian Munro, Karen Oberer, and Brian Walsh. 12   Knutson, ‘The Start of Something Big’, 102. 10

Introduction



and Fortune, and reveals just how problematic the notion of a coherent company aesthetic can be. Between 1583 and 1595 (the last year they are listed in Harbage and Schoenbaum’s Annals of English Drama),13 the Queen’s Men can be associated with at most 17 plays, of which 11 saw print publication (Knutson tentatively expands that list a little, suggesting the addition of Locrine, Edmund Ironside, and Nobody and Somebody). Compared to companies of similar prominence over similar spans of time, that is a miniscule set of texts. For instance, between 1594 and 1606, an equivalent span including similarly devastating plague years, the Admiral’s Men (performing until 1600 at the Rose, and thereafter at the Fortune – after 1603 as Prince Henry’s Men) staged at least 226 plays, of which only 27 were printed. The comparison is skewed, as Henslowe’s diary provides a level of detail for this company that does not exist for any other troupe of players. But even the Lord Chamberlain’s and King’s Men, about whom our knowledge is more typically limited, can be linked to 48 plays over the same period, largely because 40 of those texts were published. We will return to the issue of publication below; for now, the more puzzling question is why the Queen’s Men’s repertory was so small. Knutson has argued that a company like the Admiral’s Men would introduce a new play ‘at intervals of two or three weeks’, perform it on average 10 times over the next four months, and then retire it for a while. In any given year, they would stage between 20 and 30 plays14 – more than are known to survive from the Queen’s Men’s entire period of prominence. Even when we take into account what an infinitely superior source of data Henslowe’s diary constitutes, the difference between the Admiral’s Men’s repertory and that of the Queen’s Men is stunning. But the very existence of that diary, and what it stands for, also provides at least a partial explanation. Henslowe records the performances taking place at the Rose, day after day, at least from autumn to early summer. Playing to a relatively stable audience, drawing on the large and comparatively wealthy London public, companies such as the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s Men had to maintain a rapid circulation of shows, blending new plays with increasingly familiar (and hence gradually more unattractive) fare and revivals of almost forgotten and newly exciting pieces. By contrast, we know of only two or three extended stints the Queen’s Men spent in London – notably their licensed residency at the Bull and Bell Inns in the City from November 1583 until Shrovetide the next spring. When in London, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, the company made a habit of moving between different performance sites, perhaps acting at playhouses outside the city walls first and subsequently moving into the City proper.15 David Kathman’s discussion of the 13

  Alfred Harbage and S. Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700 (Philadelphia, 1964). 14   See Knutson, ‘The Repertory’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), 465–6. 15   See McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 45–9.

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603



inns linked to the Queen’s Men in this volume revises many traditional theatrehistorical assumptions about those spaces; he also provides evidence that suggests that at least initially the inns more than the purpose-built theatres were magnets for thieves and prostitutes, which makes the seeming preference of the Queen’s Men for inn-playing appear in a surprising new light. The Curtain, where they probably also performed (as Stern suggests below), had a similarly shady reputation. In any case, as they remained free of associations with any particular playhouse and determinedly peripatetic, the Queen’s Men effectively curbed their need for a constantly evolving repertory by instead playing to constantly changing audiences (and in London, perhaps to unusually distracted ones). Virtually all other major companies for whose activities we have significant data from the late sixteenth century can also be linked to a more or less stable London ‘home’. Strange’s Men played at the Rose, and referred to that theatre as ‘our plaiehowse on the Banckside’;16 Sussex’s Men next established a months-long residency there, possibly incorporating the now defunct Strange’s Men, if not, with the exception of The Jew of Malta, their repertory; and after Sussex’s in turn disappeared, the Admiral’s Men took over Henslowe’s theatre until the end of the century. The Chamberlain’s Men, themselves made up out of players formerly linked to troupes performing at the Rose, set up shop in Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, and eventually, after an enforced interlude at the Curtain, built the Globe. This potted history is an entirely familiar account of the chaotic transformation of the city’s theatrical scene in the early 1590s,17 but significantly, it has nothing to say about the Queen’s Men – with one curious exception. In April 1594, they joined Sussex’s Men for eight shows at the Rose. Rutter considers the brevity of the collaboration evidence of a ‘collaps[e]’, but while that may be the case, it was not necessarily the Queen’s Men who folded.18 As McMillin and MacLean have shown, a little later that year, we find the troupe in Coventry, and they went back to their regular touring patterns with undiminished energy for at least another five years.19   Rutter (ed.), Documents, 65.      The most influential version of this history has been developed in a number of publications by Andrew Gurr, who believes that the London theatrical scene was refashioned in the guise of a duopoly in the 1590s; the genesis of this reading can be traced from his ‘Intertextuality at Windsor’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987): 189–200, through The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996) and The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge, 2004) to its most recent iteration in his ‘Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005): 51–75. Gurr’s view has always had its critics. Roslyn Knutson’s critique has been the most bracing, especially in Playing Companies and Commerce, 8–11; for the most recent revision of Gurr’s position, see Paul Menzer, ‘The Tragedians of the City? Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590s’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 57 (2006): 162–82. 18    Rutter (ed.), Documents, 80. 19   See McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 184–8. As for Sussex’s Men, they were not heard from again until 1602, when a new company sponsored by the fifth Earl of Sussex emerged. It is worth noting that although we lack evidence for further Queen’s Men 16

17

Introduction



Constructing Popularity: Stage vs Page How can we read the company’s brief appearance in Southwark, then? It casts a particularly intriguing light on the question of repertory construction. Henslowe’s records suggest that the two companies played ‘to geather’, apparently amalgamating for the occasion.20 But of the five plays they performed, only one can unambiguously be identified as the Queen’s Men’s property (King Leir); another belonged to Sussex’s (The Fair Maid of Italy); and two more would soon become part of the Admiral’s Men’s stock (The Ranger’s Comedy and The Jew of Malta). The fifth is the ambiguous ‘frier bacone’, which may be either Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (and thus belonged to the Queen’s Men) or the anonymous John of Bordeaux, which, as McMillin and MacLean have argued, is the play Henslowe lists earlier in the diary (under the title of ‘fryer bacvne’) as performed by Strange’s Men in 1592.21 If Henslowe refers to John of Bordeaux here, then that play did better on this occasion than on any previous one recorded in the diary, earning Henslowe almost twice as much (43 shillings) as at all earlier performances. On the other hand, if he meant Greene’s play, it might still have been relatively new to London audiences, as theatres had been closed for most of 1593, and this may explain its relative success. King Leir also fared well, at 38 shillings on its first performance on April 6. But both plays were put to shame by Marlowe’s Jew, which made three pounds on April 2, and The Ranger’s Comedy, which made as much the next day. Both the second performances of Leir and The Jew of Malta, however, brought in 26 shillings. What can those figures tell us about the relative popularity of the Queen’s Men in 1594? For one thing, the companies (or Henslowe) surprisingly chose not to open, after the playhouses had been closed for almost two months (and for most of the preceding year), with one of Sussex’s plays, or the solidly popular Jew of Malta (last performed by Sussex’s Men on 4 February 1594, earning 50 shillings), but with the Queen’s Men’s Friar Bacon. As remarkably, the 43 shillings that performance made only fell seven shillings short of the Jew of Malta’s previous earnings. In fact, none of the Queen’s Men’s plays, supposedly out of favour and old-fashioned at this point, did any worse than plays did on average in spring 1594. The least successful show of the brief run, Fair Maid of Italy, belonged to Sussex’s Men. This pattern holds true when comparing the relative success of both companies over the entire spring, especially if we just look at plays that were staged more than once:

performances in London or the city’s suburbs, we also lack such evidence for almost all of the years that are generally considered the company’s heyday. To conclude from such a lack of evidence that no performances took place means leaving the conventional account of the troupe’s decline unquestioned. 20   Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 21. 21   See McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 90; Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 16.

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603



Titus Andronicus (3 performances) 49s. 4d. per performance Jew of Malta (3) 44s. Friar Francis (3) 42s. 4d. Buckingham (4) 37s. 3d. God Speed the Plough (2) 36s. King Leir (2) 32s. Friar Bacon (2) 31s. 6d. Abraham and Lot (3) 31s. 4d. George a Greene (5) 31s. 2d. Huon of Bordeaux (3) 29s. 8d. Richard the Confessor (2) 24s. 6d. Fair Maid of Italy (3) 18s.22

These were ‘exceptional receipts’23 – and yet the Queen’s Men’s plays are solidly average even by the high standard set by Sussex’s Men. Only three titles (Friar Francis, Titus, and Jew of Malta) did significantly better, and among those, Marlowe’s play was a unique success, never having made less than the 26 shillings it earned Henslowe on 7 April 1594. The extremely limited evidence we have for the Queen’s Men’s fate in London in the 1590s, then, suggests no signs of trouble. On the contrary, what little we know poses a serious challenge to the traditional narrative of the company’s decline, even in the sophisticated version constructed by McMillin and MacLean.24 In that narrative, the death of Tarlton in 1588 and the rise of a new kind of drama heralded by Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in 1587 combined to spell doom for the Queen’s Men and their way of doing theatre – at least in the capital and at court. The years of their decline were supposedly marked by a determined but ill-fated ‘anti-Marlowe campaign’. However, Henslowe’s records show that six years after Tarlton’s death, the troupe could still hold its own at the box office. More intriguingly, the Diary reveals that far from battling Marlowe’s drama on every front, the Queen’s Men in fact performed at least one of his plays in 1594 alongside two of their own (one of them, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, supposedly a critical response to Doctor Faustus). Once we turn from the theatrical record to the bookseller’s stall, however, the decline paradigm takes on a more tangible form. The first harbinger of the ‘blankverse revolution’,25 Tamburlaine, was first published in 1590, quickly reprinted in 1593, and would see further editions in 1605 and 1606. When Doctor Faustus was finally printed in 1604, it, too, became an instant success and was re-issued five times by 1620. The Spanish Tragedy likewise was a hit in print, first published in 1592 and seven more times by 1618. No similar success stories can be told of any of 22

    24   25   23

See Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 20–21. Rutter (ed.), Documents, 79. See McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 155–60, 166. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 166.

Introduction



the Queen’s Men’s plays, which fizzled in book form once they entered the market en masse in 1594.26 But is this really a story of different acting companies and their fates, as McMillin and MacLean suggest when they speak of ‘the companies which would survive to be read today and the company which would be forgotten after a generation’?27 We called Marlowe exceptional earlier, and this holds true of his status as an author in print as well. Of the 10 most successful plays during the part of the Admiral’s Men’s career recorded in Henslowe, only five were ever published – The Jew of Malta (36 performances), The Spanish Tragedy (29), Doctor Faustus (25), Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria (22), and A Knack to Know an Honest Man (21). Faustus and Kyd’s play, as we saw, sold very well, but The Jew of Malta was not printed until 1633, and then just once; and Blind Beggar was not reprinted either after its initial publication in 1598. In fact, of all the plays for which we have receipts data (up to November 1597), at most 10 were printed, and of those, only Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, one of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, and Tamburlaine were issued more than once. No matter how successful plays like The Wise Man of West Chester (32 performances), Bellendon (23), The Blind Beggar (22), or A Knack (21) were in the theatre, they lacked appeal as books. These figures suggest that we ought to heed Ian Munro’s argument in the present volume that the teleology implicit in the established narrative blurs a necessary distinction between ‘a theatrical history of early modern drama’ and ‘a literary history dependent on ideas of progress, refinement, and incipient modernity’.28 The literary history rests on cases like Marlowe’s, Shakespeare’s, and even Kyd’s, whereas the theatrical history (much easier to lose sight of as it is precisely the history that print failed to record) might well have developed in ways almost irrecoverable now, as the bulk of the repertory was not preserved in print precisely because the theatrical market and the book market evolved in distinct ways.29 As a consequence, the marketability of Marlowe and Kyd in print cannot be shown to correlate to the Admiral’s Men’s continued success on the stage: popularity in the 26

  Only Troublesome Raigne and Friar Bacon were reprinted at all, and in both cases it took 20 years or more for the second edition to appear. Orlando Furioso, if it was a Queen’s Men’s play, had moderate success as a book (Q1 1594, Q2 1599). On the sale of plays to Thomas Creede in 1594, see G.M. Pinciss, ‘Thomas Creede and the Repertory of the Queen’s Men, 1583–1592’, Modern Philology, 67 (1970): 321–30. 27   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 166. 28   Munro, ‘Page Wit and Puppet-like Wealth: Orality and Print in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London’, 111. 29   Exactly how to conceptualize popularity in print has recently been the subject of a debate among book historians of the period; see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005): 1–32; Peter W.M. Blayney, ‘The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005): 33–50; and Farmer and Lesser, ‘Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book Trade’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005): 206–13.

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

10

one format says little about popularity in the other. While the Queen’s Men’s plays might appear outdated compared to Tamburlaine or The Spanish Tragedy, such an essentially literary judgement tacitly accepts the print market as evidence for the theatrical one – and as the better documented example of the Admiral’s Men shows, such a relationship cannot be assumed. Hence the supposed outdatedness of the Queen’s Men’s theatrical repertory cannot properly be measured against the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which were likely exceptional rather than representative of what was on stage, in London or elsewhere, in the years up to 1597. On the other hand, that two Queen’s Men plays yielded good receipts at the Rose as late as April 1594 suggests that the old company had a lot of theatrical life in it yet. Such an insistence on the distinction between print and stage success finds confirmation in Richard Dutton’s essay in this volume, which argues that the first quarto of Shakespeare’s Henry V is not ‘an inadequate redaction of the much larger folio text’, but a version of the play performed in 1599, and profoundly indebted to the Queen’s Men’s Famous Victories of Henry V, first published in 1598. While Shakespeare ‘reinvented the verse and prose at every level’, the earlier play provided him with ‘the essential shape’ of the 1599 quarto text, and, perhaps more importantly, served as a model for a play designed to ‘stir up patriotic fervour and maintain morale’ in a ‘moment of looming crisis’.30 In spirit and overall dramatic structure, then, the Queen’s Men were still not out of fashion by the end of the century. But Dutton also reminds us of the fate of both texts in print. Thomas Creede had published Famous Victories in 1598; but when Shakespeare’s play appeared two years later, Creede served as the printer of what must have been a rival to his own Henry V text. Dutton, following Peter Blayney, suggests that Creede had to consent to the publication of Henry V, and did so on condition that he be hired as the printer. As neither the 1600 nor the 1602 quarto of Shakespeare’s play identify the author on the title page, the unmarked text more or less seamlessly takes the place of Famous Victories as the current printed version of the history of Henry V in dramatic form. Thus the Queen’s Men were indeed being superseded, certainly in the book market, and likely also at this point in the theatre, even though they could still serve as a model in 1598. But the gradual nature of their displacement suggests that the transition from their dramaturgical practices to Shakespeare’s was not the outcome of a clash of theatrical approaches. It is undoubtedly true that ‘print-culture and the Queen’s Men were not a good match’.31 The theatres, however, were not yet dominated by the preferences of literary audiences. While the company might have been doomed to fail on the page, their fate on the stage more likely was that of a drawn-out waning of their popularity. That more than one publisher thought the Queen’s Men’s plays would make a good investment in the 1590s certainly appears to speak to their continued popularity. Even if their theatrical appeal ultimately turned out not to translate 30

   

31

Dutton, ‘The Famous Victories and the 1600 Quarto of Henry V’, 135; 140; 143. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 85.

Introduction

11

onto the page, this was clearly not predictable for stationers like Thomas Creede, who clearly considered them marketable properties when he registered three of those texts in 1594 alone. In any case, for the Queen’s Men themselves selling their plays must have made good economic sense – it simply opened up a new source of revenue at a moment when playtexts first emerged on a significant scale as desirable commodities for publishers. From that perspective, the sudden appearance of so many of their plays as books in the mid-1590s only confirms the financial competence of the Queen’s Men as a theatre company. Money and Politics It is precisely this profit-oriented attitude of early modern actors that made classconscious antitheatricalists like John Cocke cringe. In his 1615 character of ‘A Common Player’,32 for instance, Cocke rails not only against the usual social and religious ills that the theatre is claimed to incite, but more pertinently attacks the class pretensions and the market-mindedness of the typical actor: ‘howsoever hee pretends to have a royall Master or Mistresse, his wages and dependance prove him to be the servant of the people’.33 Though it was published a dozen years after the final recorded appearance of the Queen’s Men and though Cocke’s screed can hardly be seen as an objective evaluation of the state of the early modern theatre, his observation about ‘common players’ and their wages is fairly accurate, and it holds true for the earlier company. As the notorious ‘affray’ involving the Queen’s Men at Norwich attests,34 when considering the Queen’s Men one should keep in mind that they were a ‘company’ in both senses of the word: they worked collectively to produce plays, but they were also purveyors of a product and relied upon (and jealously protected) profits from the sale of this product. But while we should take seriously Cocke’s description of ‘a common player’ when considering the Queen’s Men, their economic life was more complicated than he allows, and it was also more closely bound to their patron than he suggests. Because of their patronage relationship with the Queen and with members of her Privy Council, the Queen’s Men occupied a unique position among playing companies of the 1580s and 1590s when it came to making money. They were certainly ‘servants’ of a specific audience and they certainly knew how to attract that audience wherever they played. At the same time, however, their consistent success was in part contingent on their ties to Elizabeth I and to her circle of advisors.

32

  In E.K. Chambers (ed.), The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923), 4:255–7.   Cocke, in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:256. 34   See David Galloway (ed.), REED: Norwich (Toronto, 1984), 70–76. For a thorough account of the affray, see Jennifer Roberts-Smith, ‘The Red Lion and the White Horse: Inns used by Patronized Performers in Norwich, 1583–1624’ Early Theatre, 9.2 (2006): 109–44. 33

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To speak of the Queen’s Men’s in terms of their consistent success is to speak of them in terms that an earlier generation of theatre historians would have found quite foreign. Until McMillin and MacLean published The Queen’s Men and Their Plays in 1998, theatre historians generally figured the company as history’s losers: their founding by regal fiat in 1583 brought together a group of famous players who were initially successful, but their house style supposedly was unceremoniously rendered passé in the 1590s by the theatrical innovations in London that were associated with, for instance, Marlowe and the children’s companies. This obsolescence is generally indexed by the Queen’s Men’s waning presence at court until their final recorded show in 1594 and by their waning presence in London theatres as companies like Strange’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men began their ascendancy. But, as we argued above, they are ‘absent’ from London only in the sense that we have no information of whether they played in the city or not (which equally applies to most of their alleged years of success, and to most other companies in the late 1590s). More importantly still, McMillin and MacLean argue compellingly that ranking and valuing the Queen’s Men by appeal to their success at court and in the city occludes their documented tremendous success on tours beyond Westminster, London, and the suburbs, and it forgets that the Queen’s Men – the company of the realm – was originally founded expressly for such touring. In terms of earning-power, touring under Elizabeth’s imprimatur was certainly a considerable benefit. Apart from their status as servants of the queen, much of their early success is probably attributable to their status as an all-star troupe, composed of the most talented theatre professionals of the early 1580s. In the later years of their existence, however – once Tarlton had died and Marlowe’s theatrical innovations became increasingly de rigeur in London, and certainly at court – the Queen’s Men’s success in the provinces is likely due to the more traditional style that possibly (though not necessarily) kept them away from the capital after 1594. As David Harris Sacks notes, by the end of the century, towns outside London were generally more receptive than the faddish London audiences to drama of the Queen’s Men’s pre-Marlovian style.35 Despite these other factors that contributed to their success on tour, the name of their patron was doubtless a significant benefit. As critics often note, the negotiations between players and civic licensing authorities were fraught with political baggage, and they can be read as negotiations for favour between a town’s authorities and the patron under whose name a given company was authorised to travel. When a company of travelling players appeared in a town and requested permission to play, its reception and the size of its payment were often contingent on the status of its patron and the regional influence that patron wielded. Considering the ubiquitous influence of their patron, the Queen’s Men were rewarded throughout their career at a rate exceeding that paid to other companies, even after their fortunes in London and at court began to 35   David Harris Sacks, ‘London’s Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State’, in Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia, 2000), 39.

Introduction

13

wane and even after more innovative companies began touring with the plays that were changing the face of English drama. In 1583, for instance – the year of their founding – the Queen’s Men were given 20 shillings for a mayor’s performance in Abingdon, and they were provided with 16 shillings’ worth of wine, while other companies stopping in Abingdon were generally awarded 5 or 6 shillings for their mayor’s performances. The story in 1583 is similar for stops in Gloucester where the Queen’s Men earned 30 shillings rather than the typical 20 shillings or less, and in Bristol where they earned £2 compared with the 20 shillings paid to Oxford’s players and the 13 shillings and 4 pence given to a company composed of Hunsdon’s and Morley’s Men players.36 While these outsized payments in 1583 may speak to the relative novelty or celebrity of their early years, the company continued to receive larger payments than other companies in the 1590s and the early seventeenth century, well after its popularity in the capital and at court had deteriorated. Throughout their career the Queen’s Men were more readily able than other companies to garner large rewards. Where the extant records of payments strongly suggest that travelling under Elizabeth’s aegis paid substantial dividends to the Queen’s Men, records of the Gloucester and Leicester Common Councils unambiguously confirm the economic benefit. According to an ordinance preserved in the town records, the Gloucester Common Council declared in 1580 that the Queen’s players were authorized to perform three plays within three days, that players touring under the auspices of a baron or a patron of greater rank were permitted to perform twice over two days, and that companies touring under the auspices of a patron who ranked beneath a baron were allowed to perform once.37 Considering the costs of travelling, permission to remain in a single town for an extended run – playing at inns and guildhalls with the company retaining a portion of the door – would have translated into increased profits. In a similar display of preference for the Queen’s Men, Leicester – probably under the influence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was central to the formation of the Queen’s Men and a powerful supporter in their early years – passed an ordinance in 1582 that permitted performances only by players sponsored by the Queen or by Lords of the Privy Council.38 If the playing companies were a fraught medium through which towns would negotiate for privilege with patrons, one must also ask questions about the relationships between companies and the great houses that they visited with considerable regularity, as Barbara Palmer notes in this volume. Besides the more 36

  McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 44.   See Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (eds), REED: Cumberland / Westmorland / Gloucestershire (Toronto, 1986), 306–7. 38   Both this troupe and the ‘players’ named in the Gloucester ordinance are phantoms of the archive – they precede the formation of the Queen’s Men proper, and are not mentioned elsewhere. In any case, whether the provisions were hypothetical or for a company whose history is lost to us, what is evident is that travelling under royal patronage carried significant economic benefits. 37

14

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obvious examples of preference for the Queen’s Men in the towns where they played, Palmer points out in her essay that companies could count on familiar, lucrative, and receptive great houses when touring the provinces, and one must assume that the Queen’s Men – again, as representatives of the monarch – received a particularly warm welcome. Great houses were particular boons to a travelling company, as Palmer suggests, because they provided accommodation and food for both horses and players, along with some added benefits such as candles to light their rooms, and coal or wood to keep those rooms warm. Considering the explicitly mandated preference in civic and national regulations, it seems reasonable to presume a similar preference was extended to the Queen’s Men when they travelled to great houses, even if the extant evidence is too thin to prove such a claim generally. Likely also on account of their affiliation with Elizabeth, the Queen’s Men were paid not to play by civic and university authorities – to maintain public order, say, or out of antitheatrical religiosity – less frequently than other companies. The data on payments not to play are uncertain, but theatre historians generally agree that the turn-away rate for a company touring outside of London in the final two decades of the sixteenth century was around five per cent39 – a rate much higher than the rate that the Queen’s Men faced. According to extant records the Queen’s Men were paid not to play only 1.7 per cent of the time. Further, of the seven recorded instances where they received payments not to play, three were at Cambridge University, an institution which was, as the Marprelate controversy attests, hostile to popular theatre generally and to the Queen’s Men specifically. Strangely, however, the strained relationship between the university and the company speaks to the company’s relative success and to the importance of their relationship with Queen Elizabeth. As Paul White shows in his essay in this volume, the significant antitheatrical political clout of the university was waning in civic matters by the 1580s, and it was no longer politically powerful enough to keep players from performing within a previously respected five-mile radius of the university. As White points out, though, this waning had less to do with the university’s position within the city than with ‘the support of powerful patrons both at court and locally’ for the companies that came to the city.40 In this sense, the university’s refusal to allow the Queen’s Men to perform becomes a token gesture with little impact on the overall economic health of the company because they could still count on payments just beyond the university’s walls. Indeed, excluding the instances where the Queen’s Men were paid not to play by Cambridge University, their rate of performance was slightly higher than 99 per cent – far above the rate of performance that other companies of the period could hope for – and their list of recorded performances includes several shows in and near Cambridge, just beyond the university’s jurisdiction. 39   Peter Greenfield, ‘Touring’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of English Drama (New York, 1997), 252. 40   White, ‘The Queen’s Men in Elizabethan Cambridge’, 42.

Introduction

15

The benefits of the relationship between the monarch and the Queen’s Men were mutual, not unilateral, and the Queen’s Men performed ideological and practical work for Elizabeth when they toured widely. The Queen’s Men’s ubiquity throughout the realm, for instance, reminded civic authorities and subjects of Elizabeth’s broad reach at a moment when quelling the domestic threats of recusancy and radical Protestantism was central to the agenda of Elizabeth and the Privy Council. But the work performed by the Queen’s Men was also more subtly ideological. While it is problematic to characterize their repertory as flatly propagandistic, their plays – not surprisingly – often promote a coherent English nationalism (as in The Chronicle History of King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Troublesome Reign of King John), and they celebrate a pious but moderate Protestantism (as in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London). Considering the close relationship the Queen’s Men had both with Dudley and with Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s ‘spy-master’ and her de facto secretary of state, such an agenda is to be expected. We know that Dudley was integral to the establishment of the company in 1583; that many of the original Queen’s Men were culled from his own company; that when he toured the low countries on a diplomatic mission with a group of players in 1585, at least one of those players was probably a member of the Queen’s Men (Robert Wilson);41 and that between October 1584 and Christmas 1585, the Queen’s Men were the only players paid for performing at Dudley’s homes.42 We also know that Dudley had previously attempted to make political points through drama, as when he organised the staging of Gorboduc and The Masque of Beauty and Desire for the queen during the 1561–2 Christmas and New Year’s festivities in an attempt to forward his own marriage suit.43 Though we know less about the relationship between Walsingham and the Queen’s Men, we do know that he instigated and oversaw the company’s establishment. Despite the absence of confirming records, however, we also know that both privy councillors shared the Queen’s Men’s nationalist and moderately Protestant agenda, and that their support of the troupe can be directly linked to their view of drama as an effective medium for the dissemination of political positions. Apart from this ideological work, the Queen’s Men might also have performed, as Lawrence Manley points out in this volume in terms of trips to Stanley’s homes in New Park and Lathom, more clandestine diplomatic work on behalf of the crown. Indeed, according to Manley, Cocke’s description of the venal common player fails to describe the Queen’s Men at all if we consider their tours to the 41   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 20, 28. See also Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘Leicester and the Evelyns: New Evidence for the Continental Tour of Leicester’s Men’, Review of English Studies, 34.156 (1988): 487–93. 42   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 20. 43   On Dudley’s use of Gorboduc to argue for his marriage to Elizabeth I, see, for instance, Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, The English Historical Review, 110 (1995): 109–21.

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16

north, particularly their stops at the Stanley houses. From a practical perspective, travelling to the north would simply have been more difficult for the Queen’s Men, and with fewer stops along the way, the route would have proven less lucrative than a tour of the south and southeast of England. Perhaps this trip to the north is more readily explicable if we read it as a diplomatic mission on which the Queen’s Men were, as Manley suggests, travelling with the ‘compliments of the Stanleys’ patroness, the Queen’ as a show of gratitude for their support during the Spanish Armada crisis.44 Or, as Manley subsequently argues, we might understand these trips as an attempt on the part of the Queen’s Men to curry favour with a powerful member of the Privy Council at a moment when their fortunes at court were waning. Or, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, we might read the trips as factfinding missions and the Queen’s Men as a collection of agents sent to the north to divine the fidelity of a family that historically had close ties to Roman Catholicism. That surviving documents allow each of these interpretations speaks not only to the problematic incompleteness of the extant records, but also to the special status of the Queen’s Men. Considering the dynamic networks of economic necessity and royal interest in which the Queen’s Men functioned, it is close to impossible to make such a determination conclusively, even if we could ever say that the Queen’s Men followed a single purpose when they toured. Dramaturgical Style in the Queen’s Men’s Repertory Although the Queen’s Men performed both ideological and diplomatic work, they would not have drawn audiences had they not also been hugely entertaining. In looking at the company’s dramaturgy, McMillin and MacLean emphasize its general accessibility by pointing to the materiality of the Queen’s Men’s representational practices in performance, their ‘literalism’ in focusing on ‘the status of persons and objects’ as ‘the fundamental dramatic conception of the plays’.45 And this materiality is expressed in ‘medley’: not in discrete genres of history, comedy, or tragedy, but in the interplay between high and low, with the clown as the audience’s reference point in perceiving the meaning of the play from the bottom up, and from the outside in.46 In her essay in the present volume, Eleanor Rycroft gives a detailed example of this literalism or materialism in her discussion of beards on the early modern stage, particularly the staging of beardless youths as icons of rebellious adolescence, clearly defining Prince Hal and his friends in The Famous Victories of Henry V and Prince Edward and his circle in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This literalism of the theatre with its focus on the actors’ bodies, costumes, and properties takes on a stage life of its own in emphasizing, with or

44

    46   45

Manley, ‘Motives for Patronage: The Queen’s Men at New Park, October 1588’, 54. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 123. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 124–7.

Introduction

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without accompanying dialogue, the key idea of the play.47 Consider, in The Old Wives Tale, the sequences of the sisters going to the well to find their husbands: the rising of the golden head of corn in the well to deliver its riddling prophecy is itself a picture of fruitfulness, of harvesting what one sows, and of sexuality when time and opportunity are ripe. The behaviour of each sister at the well brings the reward with a pleasing symmetry beyond words: the ugly sweet-natured sister who did what was asked of her marries a generous blind man, and the beautiful shrewish sister who refused to obey marries a blustering deaf man. The images on the stage tell the story perfectly. McMillin and MacLean identify the other factor of the company style as ‘narrative overdetermination’ or the anxious adherence to plot beyond the demands of logic, with repetition of the narrative as the default position instead of allowing depth of character or complication of motive to contribute to the audience’s enjoyment or comprehension.48 But this kind of repetition of plot does not automatically mean that character and motive are reduced, merely that the weight of conveying shifts of character and layers of motive rests on the actor in performance. The style of the Queen’s Men, according to McMillin and MacLean, relies on the immediacy and clarity of performance in a very visual medium. Peter Cockett confirms this view in his discussion of the usefulness of character types as shorthand for actors, but how this shorthand translates into establishing ideologies in action is another question; performances change over time (within a twentyyear period, meaning might shift considerably), and individual actors will not necessarily confine themselves to consistent political behaviour on stage. In any case interpretation is in the eye of the beholder in the moment of viewing. Clownactors, used to improvising and to developing their ‘stock’ clown-characters into individualised commentators, may disrupt narrative and concept on stage, even authorized by playwrights, who may script the seemingly extempore clowning to connect critical ideas in materially accessible ways.49 The company repertory generally builds on three scene-types that arise from these concepts of literalism and narrative overdetermination: broad ‘stand-up’ comedy in which clowns are frequently choric,50 vivid sentimental moments of 47   For representative discussion of expanding meaning through stage literalism in Famous Victories, see Sally Robertson Romotsky, ‘Henry of Monmouth and the Gown of Needles’, Intertexts, 8.2 (2004): 155–72; and in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, see Kevin LaGrandeur, ‘Brasenose College’s Brass Head and Greene’s Friar Bacon’, Notes and Queries, 47.1 (2000): 48–50. 48   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 128–38. 49   See Kirk Melnikoff, ‘“[I]ygging vaines” and “riming mother wits”: Marlowe, Clowns and the Early Frameworks of Dramatic Authorship’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 16 (2007): 8.1–37 . 50   See Kirk Melnikoff, ‘The “Extremities” of Sumptuary Law in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 19 (2006): 227–34, especially 230 on the complications of Miles’s role.

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repentance or reunion, and brilliant massed scenes with swordplay, magic, and/or pageantry. The obvious example of all three scene-types is The Famous Victories of Henry V, with slapstick in scenes of the prince and his cronies (notably the Lord Chief Justice scene), and parody in scenes with John Cobbler and Derick (notably their take on the Lord Chief Justice scene);51 the sentiment exploited in the deathbed reconciliation of Henry IV with his son; the choreographed violence of the many battle scenes, and the pageantry of the final pre-wedding agreement between France and England. One rationale behind such intense and varied moments of spectatorship was the factor of filling the purse: ‘a good gate’ is what any commercial theatre needs.52 Without that healthy box office and large audiences, the Queen’s Men’s propaganda mission simply could not succeed. And good gates, as we saw, apparently marked the rise of this successful company. For political as well as economic reasons, then, the company had to be at the forefront of professional, crowd-pleasing dramaturgy. The Queen’s Men excelled at performance as a company of experienced actors, many with expertise as clowns, headed by Tarlton (until 1588), and their witty improvisation alone ensured full playhouses. Will West, in this volume, reminds us of the physicality of the jig and its relation to saturnalian disorder ‘barely contained’,53 with excess (often drunkenness) as the convenient excuse for risky improvisation. The company’s innovations in plot added spice and playful patriotism to their reformatting of morality play traditions, their reinvention of history with a Tudor edge, and their ironic nostalgia for the idealism of medieval romance showcased in Clyomon and Clamydes, which G.R. Hibbard described as a ‘romantic absurdity’ that anticipates the almost as absurd plot of Cymbeline.54 Such absurdity is demonstrated even more delightfully in Peele’s narratively complex The Old Wives Tale, in which blundering knights win fair ladies only through the efficacy of rustic folklore in the shape of the prophetic well and Jack, the grateful dead. Jack bears out West’s assertion that in jigs – most famously Tarlton’s, but including Queen’s Men performances generally – the play became a game and its end was audience participation in the noises of the game, ebullient with direct-address challenges, adversarial jesting, rowdy song, thunder, pyrotechnics, and clattering of swords. And within that noise there is potential for complex responsiveness, as unexpected reactions from actors or spectators spur sometimes competing interpretations of the game. A more complicated take on knightly honour and patriotic fervor as part of a game resonates through Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The comic/choric commentary begins in the opening scene when the prince changes costume with 51

  See L.S. Champion, ‘“What prerogatives meanes”: Perspective and Political Ideology in The Famous Victories of Henry V’, South Atlantic Review, 53.4 (1988): 1–19. 52   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 42. 53   West, ‘When is the Jig Up — and What is it Up To?’, 208. 54   G.R. Hibbard, ‘From “Iygging Vaines of Riming Mother Wits” to “the Spacious Volubilitie of a Drumming Decasillabon”’, The Elizabethan Theatre, 11 (1990): 64.

Introduction

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his fool Rafe, thus allowing Rafe to impersonate him in rowdy activity with his knights, while the prince himself plans a visit to Friar Bacon – who, meeting the fool-prince and the prince’s fool in the street, instantly sees through the disguises. This comic puncturing is also the key feature of Miles’s scenes, especially his enthusiastic gallop off to hell on the back of his devil-as-steed, taking Bacon’s curse as a positive opportunity for a new career. But the puncturing of another’s bubble does not give insight into one’s own fantasies. As the play progresses, both the arrogant Bacon and his arrogant prince presume on the status of intelligence or birth, which should entitle them to act on their desires with impunity. Both learn otherwise. Paul Dean points out that both characters go through an intertwined cycle from thoughtless abuse of power, through repentance, to reintegration with the national agenda set by the king.55 Prince Edward almost kills his best friend as a result of Bacon’s showing him in the perspective glass what Lacy (now seen as his rival) and Margaret (the object of the prince’s lust) are up to in Surrey; Bacon offends against religious duty by preventing Bungay from marrying the couple; and only the selfless love of this pair, each willing to suffer for the other, convinces Edward that he was wrong to abuse his royal privilege as friend and as lover. Bacon is a harder case: his experiments for walling England with brass have failed, his brazen head self-destructs, and his further misuse of the magic glass causes the deaths of two undergraduates who have seen their fathers kill each other for love of Margaret. Only then does Bacon recognize and repent his errors. Nothing is simple here; there is no refusal to represent depth of character and complex motive, despite McMillin and MacLean’s claims to the contrary. Margaret has also abused her privilege as a beautiful maiden, delaying her decision to marry either of these two gentlemen-fathers, because Lacy has delayed in fixing another wedding date; instead, he tests her love by rejecting her and then by returning to take her to court as his bride – if she will break her determination to become a nun: ‘God or Lord Lacy’ is the offer, without apology. In each instance, destiny reveals human frailty in all but the king himself. The king has succeeded in diplomatic strategies with his powerful European guests, allying himself with Spain through Edward’s marriage, and intimidating the Emperor by using Bacon to defeat the German magus Vandermast. In this central scene of the magic contest, with its over-the-top comedy, special effects, and royal pageantry, Bacon uses his science to destroy the more old-fashioned academic approach of the foreign wizard, thus simulating military defeat for England’s enemies without bloodshed.56 The 55

  Paul Dean, ‘Shakespeare’s Henry VI Trilogy and Elizabethan “Romance” Histories: The Origins of a Genre’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 33.1 (1982): 34–48. 56   See Bryan Reynolds and Henry Turner, ‘Performative Transversations: Collaborations through and beyond Green’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’, in Bryan Reynolds (ed.), Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (New York, 2006), chapter 10. See also Frank Towne, ‘“White Magic” in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’, Modern Language Notes, 57.1 (1952): 9–13, on Bacon’s repentance; and Kurt von Rosador, ‘The Sacralizing Sign:

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final scene reiterates Bacon’s intention to use his magic only for such legitimate patriotic ends. Scenes intersecting comedy, sentiment, and impressive display occur in all the plays. The sensitive moment of recognition, repentance, and reunion was an especially popular motif, as in Leir’s reunion with Cordella, with its repeated (and uneasily comic) motif of kneeling for and freely giving forgiveness; or, perhaps more impressively, the attempted murder of Leir and Perillus by the Messenger, who, despite his facetious mockery of the old men’s prayer books as weapons against attackers, repents and converts when God’s thunder shakes the daggers from his hands.57 The Three Ladies of London, on the other hand, offers a perverse example of recantation: Alan Dessen discusses the play as social satire with an unusual focus on Conscience, a female character pitted against groups of Vicelike characters who burgeon throughout the play to illustrate the appalling spread of economic materialism in a greedy and immoral urban culture contaminated by foreign agents. In this choice of central figure, Dessen sees a stunning stroke of originality.58 The failure of Conscience – in a seduction scene in which Lucre, another woman, taints Conscience’s body with black marks, signs of sin and perhaps of plague or syphilis59 – is what allows the criminally materialist society to devour and grow strong. In fact, the only unequivocal moral success story in The Three Ladies of London belongs to the Jewish moneylender Gerontus, who would rather save a man’s soul than claim a rightful debt – and the fact that he lives in Turkey, a country more tolerant than England in the play, feeds the concept of London’s sinful culture, on which Dessen builds his dramaturgical case. Lloyd Kermode continues this deliberation on the revised morality tradition with a focus on Usury – not by arguing for the breaking of Conscience or the loss of virtue, but by pointing out the transition from the negative moral exemplum to the positive view of usury as promoting the prosperity of the secular commonwealth.60 That is, the moral ill becomes the national good, with the middlemen – moneylenders, landlords, scriveners, factors – profitting from the new usury, skimming the labour of others. The irony of this transition is clear in the high interest rate in England, compared to much lower rates in continental Europe. Religion and Magic in Bale, Greene, and the early Shakespeare’, Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993): 30–45, on Protestant views of the same issue. 57   For a riveting discussion of this scene in the context of King Leir’s remarkable sensitivities as topical and influential drama, see Grace Ioppolo, ‘“A Jointure More or Less”: Re-Measuring The True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17 (2005): 165–79, especially 173–5. 58   Dessen, ‘On-stage Allegory and its Lessons: The Three Ladies of London’, 147–58. 59   See Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘(Po)X Marks the Spot: How to “Read” “Early Modern” “Syphilis” in The Three Ladies of London’, in Kevin Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2005), 109–32. 60   Kermode, ‘Usury on the London Stage: Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London’, 159–70.

Introduction

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The Three Ladies of London shows profiteering in property, as rack-renting skyrockets in London: landlords repossess houses and destroy lives and livelihoods, killing off the traditions of charity and hospitality, replacing them with lucre from any source by any means. The linking of Usury and Lucre eroticises finance by its gender assignment, and both Usury and Lucre participate in the corruption of Conscience. The trial at the end of the play seems to punish wrong-doers, but the sequel shows us that the situation can only get worse. In Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, as traditional moral bearings slip out of sight, the rate of ten per cent is branded on Usury, not so much as a punishment for crime, but rather as legitimating the interest he is allowed to take. The real danger now is not proper ‘interest’, but the by-passing of legitimate business practices by Fraud, the new villain of the state that accepts Usury as a regulated fact of business life. In a similar vein, Ian Munro furthers the discussion of Three Lords and Three Ladies of London by commenting on this new ‘establishment’ in Wilson’s plays, especially in the marriages of the three ladies to the three lords: Lucre weds Pomp, Conscience weds Pleasure, and Love weds Policy, each member of each couple legitimating the other. Lucre is no longer corrupting, but instead intrinsic to the state. Wilson’s sequel, in other words, jettisons the satire of the first play, and joins hands with morally opaque urban reality. The delicate balance of the play’s argument suggests both the need to support good ‘moral’ government of a ‘moral’ society, and implicit questioning of that morality by those disposed to puncture it. The bulk of the Queen’s Men’s repertory, however, is not in the morality tradition per se; it takes the form of the history play – the largest confirmed share of their repertory, including The Troublesome Reign of King John, The True Tragedy of Richard III, King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, with nods to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (set partly in the court of Henry III and partly in Brasenose College, Oxford61) and Selimus (in Tamburlaine territory). The history play genre as they developed it remained a ‘medley’ including comedy and romance, even if deaths intervene on occasion, especially in battle scenes.62 In her essay in this volume, Karen Oberer shifts the way of looking at the company dramaturgy by re-adjusting the focus on stock characters in the history plays, specifically Famous Victories and The Troublesome Reign of King John.63 Like Munro, Oberer gives credit to the influence and after-life of Tarlton in the performances of the Queen’s Men; his flexible comic routines rooted in stock situations formed a recognizable element that eased the transition from one play to

61   See Frank Ardolino, ‘Greene’s Use of the History of Oxford in The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 18.2 (2005): 20–25. 62   See Michaela Calore, ‘Battle Scenes in the Queen’s Men’s Repertoire’, Notes and Queries, 50.1 (2003): 398, for a chart of battle directions across the company’s plays. 63   Oberer, ‘Appropriations of the Popular Tradition in The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Troublesome Raigne of King John’, 171–82.

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the next, one town to the next, and one stage to the next.64 But beyond the spectacles already defined as set scenes of comic parody and pratfalling commentary on high matters, royal ceremonies or displays of power, and sentimental recognitions, Oberer concludes, as Cockett does, that character types assist the rehearsal process (in terms of actors getting into parts) and the production of meaning (in terms of audiences recognizing concepts). She points particularly to stark scenes of grief, as expressed by female figures of woe.65 These shifts of tone from Policy and Pomp (in Robert Wilson’s terms) to Pleasure and its opposite, Pain of Sorrow, draw spectators into the play in a different way. Whereas comic parody dominates in Famous Victories, the women of woe dominate at least the first five scenes of The Troublesome Reign; in this latter play, the comic parody is limited to attacks on Roman Catholic clergy for lechery, avarice, and simony as travesties of the holy life (scene 6). But in the earlier scenes, the figures of Lady Margaret, Constance, and Blanch create a corrective lens of poignancy and complexity through which we may view the rest of the play in perspective. Tara Lyons also concentrates on the female figures of The Troublesome Reign of King John, arguing that maternal power must be restored for the English nation to unite. By the final act, however, female characters have disappeared from the stage and King John must birth a ‘kingly braunch’ from his own ‘dividing bowels’.66 With the Bastard as midwife, King John constructs the fantasy of birthing male heirs without women and their wombs. Yet the play is conflicted about the relation of maternal to monarchial authority, and despite the fact that the company was formed to promote Queen Elizabeth’s agenda, Lyons asks whether staging fantasies of male maternity argues more for allegiance to ‘the nation’ than to the divine right of the sovereign queen. Along with these gender concerns expressed by Oberer and Lyons, Brian Walsh examines another riddle that bedevils the history play: to what degree does it tell the truth about the past?67 Early in The True Tragedy of Richard III, the figure Poetry (of uncertain gender, perhaps female) asks the (certainly female) figure Truth, ‘Will Truth be a player?’ This question cuts to the heart of larger cultural concerns about the representation of the past in the late-Elizabethan era and, more specifically, how the performance ‘game’ intervenes in such concerns. The course of The True Tragedy suggests that truth and poetry are co-dependent, intertwined

64   For another view of the relationship of Tarlton to the company, even after 1588, see Richard Levin, ‘Tarlton in The Famous History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999): 84–98. 65   On the male figure of woe, see Ioppolo, ‘“A Jointure More or Less”’, 172, for a discussion of Leir’s grief as the primary factor in upsetting the family dynamic, after the death of his wife. 66   Lyons, ‘Male Birth Fantasies and Maternal Monarchs: The Queen’s Men and The Troublesome Raigne of King John’, 183–97. 67   Walsh, ‘Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III’, 123–33.

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in an entertainment which conceives of the past as an imagined realm that exists only in theatrical performance.68

***

This book’s collective effort to locate the Queen’s Men, then, produces a much more complex picture of the company, its repertory, economic fate, and dramaturgical practices than even McMillin and MacLean’s sophisticated account offers. If the Queen’s Men did not falter in the 1590s, their continued success on English stages might find its explanation in a repertory that contained a considerable degree of corrosive energy and skepticism within its deceptively simple literary form and its apparent literalism. Shakespeare’s repeated return to their history plays in particular ought to remind us that as alien and simplistic as the Queen’s Men’s dramatic language can seem to us, it clearly continued to speak in many ways, and in complex ways, to the playwrights and playgoers of late Elizabethan England. From the new perspectives opened up in this volume, the company might now emerge not as a relic in its own lifetime, but as a less brash participant in the complicated and multiply self-contradictory ideological and dramaturgical negotiations that shaped the canon usually defined by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson.

68   See also Walsh’s ‘Theatrical Temporality and Historical Consciousness in The Famous Victories of Henry V’, Theatre Journal, 59.1 (2007): 57–73.

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Part 1 iN AND OUT OF LONDON

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Chapter 1

On the Road and on the Wagon Barbara D. Palmer

This essay proposes to supplement the account of the Queen’s Men’s Midlands and north-eastern touring offered by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean in The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. When that invaluable study was published in 1998, over half of the Cavendish and a third of the Clifford manuscripts were yet to be read. With that task now completed, as well as the rest of the West Riding and Derbyshire REED collections, the picture of northern provincial touring by professional troupes has acquired a context. Besides these new data, this essay also makes some assessment of known playing venues and playing conditions, including the ‘keep’ provided to professional players by the Clifford and Cavendish households. Finally, this essay looks at King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay with an eye to what properties, costumes, and spectacle would have been asked of the Queen’s Men were these three plays their repertory on provincial tour. The payments table below (see Appendix I) was compiled as part of a larger study, but I use it here to make four points. First, these data, which I believe to be representative when sufficient records spanning sufficient time survive, argue that provincial tours were a given mode of economic survival and profit for the professional company, whether based in the provinces or in London. Second, travelling professional players, at least in this part of the country, played towns and great houses with nearly equal frequency (the slight shortfall in house visits can be dismissed as household stewards’ occasional ‘hoc anno’ lump sums). Third, they actually could plan for playing in these towns and great houses: repeat visits are regular and the turn-away rate at most ten per cent, in only one instance without significant payment ‘not to play’. Fourth, they could count on playing ‘their exits and their entrances’ on a very familiar world’s stage: the rectangular great hall,   References to these plays in my text are from The History of King Leir (London, 1605; rpt Oxford, 1907); ‘The Famous Victories of Henry V’, in Geoffrey Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (7 vols, London, 1960); and Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Oxford, 1926).    ‘Early Modern Mobility: Players, Payments, and Patrons’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.3 (2005): 259–305. For the general treatment of provincial touring here, I have cannibalized this piece and several unpublished conference papers, with apologies to members of the 2006 Shakespeare Association of America Theatre History seminar who probably will find some bits all too familiar. 

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some larger, some smaller but all about twice as long as wide, well-lighted, heated, roofed, often panelled, painted, and decorated with wall hangings. Players on tour could count on a large rectangle, which for the sake of argument let us ‘average’ at 25 feet wide by 40 feet long; with maximal lighting from daylight (if the play were after dinner), large windows, fireplace(s), wall sconces, other candlelight, and torches; several doors, a screen, a screens passage, an elevated gallery, a ‘below’ under the gallery, gallery columns, and other potential features for exits, entrances, concealment, and blocking; and, perhaps, performance bonuses such as the ‘decorative’ elements of hangings, carvings, plaster ceilings, friezes, and the dais with its ‘settings’. Several known performance spaces survive for the Clifford and Cavendish households, whose payments to travelling professional players are documented in a remarkable cache of account books largely now at Chatsworth. The seat of the Cliffords, Earls of Cumberland, was Skipton Castle, at the farthest reach of the West Riding. Travelling troupes played in its early fourteenthcentury interior great hall, which overlooks the Conduit Court with the castle’s protected well water source. The hall is 28 feet wide by 50 feet long with a door to the lord’s withdrawing room and chamber at the dais end and two more entrance/ exit doors at the opposite end. A solar or bay window was added in the late 15th century and, in the absence of a documented gallery, seems to have served as a musicians’ alcove overlooking the Conduit Court. The alcove measures nine feet wide by six feet deep, opposite a fireplace of the same width but half the depth. The Cavendish seat, or at least that of its redoubtable matriarch Bess, was Hardwick Old Hall, with its commodious great hall of 36 feet wide by 52 feet long, but her New Hall high great chamber tops out at 33 feet wide by 66 feet long, a size which may have been designed to accommodate larger audiences rather than larger entertainments. Four huge windows, each about eight feet wide, provide fine natural light, and the fireplace is nearly fifteen feet. The dais end is a stage set by itself, richly decorated with the State, a plasterwork frieze of Diana surrounded by her court, and, around the chamber, the Flemish tapestries of Ulysses, Apollo and the muses, a female lute player, and other opulent, classical, and subtly feminist decoration which Bess bought in 1587. Accommodation at great houses such as Skipton or Hardwick was of no little economic impact to a professional troupe. Players normally were provided with dinner and supper, although the Cliffords often fed them breakfast as well. They ate in the hall – that is, not in the parlour with the intimate family nor below stairs with inferior servants but with other respectable ‘straungers’, gentlemen, and visitors. When they arrive, several of the players on occasion either eat at or are accounted to the steward’s board, which suggests some conference among senior players, troupe road manager, and household steward. The steward also provides 

  For examples of great halls, see the REED ‘Patrons and Performances’ website with REED Executive Editor Sally-Beth MacLean’s detailed images and explications of performance venues: .

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them with the occasional special dish in addition to the regular ‘messes’ served in the hall – by way of quality, one can draw the obvious comparison between the sophisticated fare of an aristocrat’s great hall menu and ‘pub grub’. The Clifford and Cavendish accounts do not yield specifics on the players’ accommodation – that is, which room or rooms they occupied – except that they were housed indoors in ‘a chamber’, for which a pound of candles is provided in one Clifford entry. Lighting for the plays is a separate line item not under the charge of the pantry steward. A second (as yet unique) Clifford entry for 26 January 1612–1613 provides three bushels – presumably 180 pounds – of coal, wood having grown scarce throughout the country, for the players, almost certainly to heat their chamber. Besides the players’ room and board, whatever horses they brought to a great house also were accommodated, at a rate worth at least a shilling a day. Touring clearly was profitable, particularly when travelling players performed several plays at a great house. For the sake of this present experiment, let us imagine that the Queen’s Men took three plays on the road, a repertory of King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Having conned McMillin and MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays prior to arranging this tour, the company has chosen these three texts because each can be covered by 14 nimble actors, including the three boys whose costumes still fit. Moreover, all three texts intersperse small groups among larger on-stage gatherings; and they also allow numerous roles to disappear or be suppressed. Both of these characteristics, the Queen’s Men have learned, allow the flexibility needed for playing on tour, when actors can fall ill, accidents happen, wardrobes malfunction, and playing conditions shift rapidly. Further, these texts largely depend on actors’ clearing the stage to signal a changed locale, announcing their staging locales as they play, or identifying stage sites by their characteristic presence in them, economical techniques to inform audiences without extensive setting and property apparatus. Although common sense dictates that touring troupes must have used wagons to transport costumes, properties, and other necessaries, English documentary records seldom support common sense. What needed to be carried on tour, whatever the means, by way of costumes, properties, and spectacle can be abstracted from the three texts, which I am assuming have become very familiar to this essay’s readers. The first observation one makes about King Leir is its 32 scenes, each marked by a change of locale, but one also notices that on the whole this is a very bare play. Settings are announced, departures to settings are described rather than presented, small groups and the alternation of groups carry the play with numerous comings and goings and direct audience address to inform as well as to span the numerous comings and goings. Disguisings which either swap costumes on stage or scale down noble finery to country habits of course advance Leir’s plot, but they also make for easier performance away from the fixed London playhouses’ tiring rooms and helping hands. Textually specified costumes for King Leir call for two palmers’ disguises; boots with spurs; Cordella’s ‘costly robes’ and her costume change into ‘meaner

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habit’ as she heads off to church; Gonorill’s ‘new fashioned gowne’; ‘playne country’ disguises for Cordella and Gallia, and for Mumford as ‘Roger/ Our man’; two mariners’ sea-gowns, one a ‘good strong motly gaberdine cost ... xiiij. good shillings at Billinsgate’ and the other ‘good sheeps russet’; two sea-caps; Leir’s ‘good gown’ and cap; Perillus’s ‘good cloke’ and ‘new dublet’; whatever is required to signify soldiers, the watch, and ‘captains’ both of the watch and military, the latter in pants but no doublets. Some distinction also seems to have been made between ‘English’ and ‘French’ clothing, particularly in the ‘shaghayrd’ messenger-murderer’s insistence that his apparel is all English and nothing of the French. The greatest costume challenge would seem to be ‘men and women halfe naked’, which suggests several female upper-body costumes sufficiently realistic to make Mumford’s day. What is striking about the play’s costumes, however, is how often the text draws attention to them and how often they are altered or exchanged, either in part or whole, during the play, which again suggests a flexibility useful for touring. With one exception, Leir’s properties are all small hand properties, carried on, carried off, and recycled among the actors as the action demands. The text calls for two riding wands; several letters with seals, which can be circulated during the performance, torn up by Ragan at the end, and recycled into the materials to draw lots for the next performance; four purses of money; two books; two daggers; a country basket; perhaps a beacon (which instead may be ‘a light, off’); two swords for the captains; two pots for the drunken watchmen, which can be recycled from the banquet earlier; a rope or chain to bind the town’s chief; and whatever armour, weapons, and banners outfit the two ‘armies’. The banquet table (‘O my Lord, a banquet, and men and women! ... She [Cordella] bringeth him to the table .… Perillus takes Leir by the hand to the table .… Leir drinks.… They eat hungerly, Leir drinkes’) poses less of a problem on the road than it does in the fixed playhouse, for there is scarcely a great hall or guild hall in England without a table in place. Unlike The Tempest, where the banquet can be made to disappear but the table has to be carried out, this table apparently stays put – or at least is not blessed with a direction for its removal. If Cordella is literally identifying ‘a banquet’ course, the table shows such dessert foods as fruits, tarts, egg pies, cheeses, jellies, and cakes, ‘holding fullness in one half of the dishes and shew in the other, which will be both frugall in the spender, contentment to the guest, and much pleasure and delight to the beholders’. In short, a normal great household banquet already was part stage-dressing, artifice, and make-believe; Leir’s reference to ‘sauory meat’ may be to sweetmeats; and the Henslowe inventory item ‘ij marchepanes’ may have found a textual home. Nor would Leir’s other ‘special effects’ have strained the Queen’s Men’s ingenuity. Thunder and lightning, especially when as here a brief sign from the heavens   Marge Lorwin, Dining with William Shakespeare (New York, 1976), 157, quoting Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife (London, 1615), part 2 of Countrey Contentments). 

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‘of divine displeasure’ rather than King Lear’s protracted descent into cosmic madness, are familiar devices, as are the drums, trumpets, alarums, still marches, and stage combats also called for in the King Leir text. Like King Leir, the second play in our Queen’s Men fictive repertory, The Famous Victories of Henry V, also can be dressed and propertied from the text. Required but uncited costumes include court garments for the nobles and aristocracy; symbols of office and appropriate identifying apparel for the Lord Mayor, Sheriff, and Archbishops; and elegant French female costumes for Katherine and her ladies. Additionally, Derick is in ‘silke apparell’ (rather reminiscent of that other pretty piece of flesh, Dogberry, with his ‘two gowns and everything handsome about him’); apparently the Prince disguises himself as a peddler in ‘this ruffianly cloake’ full of needles and eyelet-holes; the thief’s garments are scurvy and stinking; Derick may (or may not) need to display two shirts; and the text also requires his girdle stuffed with ‘French shoes’ and English soldiers’ caps for the tossing. Properties are no more extraordinary: three purses of money, a chair for John Cobler, a potlid with which Cobler’s wife can beat Derick, the Prince’s dagger, the King’s crown, two gold coins, a gilded tun holding tennis balls and a carpet, a ‘French’ sword, an ‘English’ sword, a cobbler’s pack of ‘French boots and shoes’, and a treaty scroll or letter with seals. As in Leir the spectacle of Famous Victories is unremarkable for a professional troupe – trumpets for kings’ entrances; a drummer; and stage combat on, off, and around through another entrance, accompanied by whatever weapons make the visible battle credible to the audience. One bit of business, however, can be remarkably effective when played in an English great hall – namely, the death of Henry IV. Earlier commentators on these plays – Greg, Chambers, Fleay, Malone, Bullough, on whom we depend for so very much intelligence on so many matters – in their minds’ eyes saw these texts performed in the London playhouses, not in a variety of provincial venues. Thus their tendency when annotating or explicating was to treat galleries, trap, inner stage, and large bulky properties as performance givens rather than alternatives, givens which often are reflected in bracketed stage directions. For Famous Victories, the dais end of a great hall already is marked, figuratively if not literally, as the throne or State; the other end, usually under a gallery with columns, screen, and screen doorways, serves admirably for ‘the king’s bedroom’ or ‘Friar Bacon’s cell’. On this particular fictive tour, with no documentation of a wagon, the Queen’s Men have left their canopied State, curtained bed, curtained pavilion, and other editor-invented appointments back at the Rose. Henry IV thus is reduced to dying in a chair, perhaps behind drawn curtains or the screen, ‘rocked a sleepe by the Musicke’above his head until it draws to a dying fall. The third play in our repertory, The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, initially looks more difficult to stage on tour but perhaps is the best suited for great hall performance because it requires ‘simultaneous’ as well 

 

Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 7:292.

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Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

as ‘successive’ staging. Costumes call for court, clerical, and country clothing, almost all of which can be found in Henslowe’s 1598 lost inventories (see Appendix III, below). Specifically, the text calls for Ralph’s fool’s cap and coat; the Prince’s all-green outfit; Margaret’s stammel red ‘country weeds’ and milkmaid’s smock; friars’ gowns; Miles’s poor scholar’s gown and corner-cap; high street academic gowns for the Oxford dons and two gentlemen scholars; perhaps three devil’s costumes (for one player), one of which is plain yeoman’s clothing; the inn mistress’s gown; country apparel for Lacy; kings’ robes; Elinor’s fine gown; Margaret’s nun costume; and wedding finery for the final ensemble. With the exception of Bacon’s study, about which more below, the play’s numerous properties are portable. The list includes Ralph’s dagger; the Prince’s sword; Miles’s armload of books; a spitted shoulder of mutton; Burden’s conjuring book; headgear for emperor and kings; three sets of swords, bucklers, and daggers in sheaths; Bacon’s prospective glass; a chair or stool in Bacon’s study; a lion’s skin for Hercules; a golden tree with removeable sprigs from which a dragon shoots fire; a covering cloth, salt, trenchers, and a mess of pottage and broth, which probably suggests a table in Bacon’s study; letters with seals; a bag of gold; Bacon’s white stick to draw the curtains, a book, and a lamp lighted by him; the Brazen Head; Miles’s weapons of defence, including a halberd and pistols; two pairs of rapiers and daggers; two more weapon sets, minimally daggers; three sets of boots and spurs; a pointless sword, a pointed sword, a globe, a rod of gold with a dove on it, a crown and sceptre, Prince Edward’s sword of homage, and the Crown of Germany. Clearly the various weapons can be recycled throughout the play(s), with the exception of such simultaneous scenes as the Lambert and Serlsby pères et fils duels, which, oddly for this heavily stage-directioned text, provide no guidance on when or how the four dead bodies are removed. Aside from the stage combat, Friar Bacon’s spectacle depends on several tried-and-true techniques of English early modern drama, namely a curtained space; controlled but attention-grabbing pyrotechnics; further distraction through noise-making and sleight-of-hand; and several ‘quaint devices’, amplified by stage report and actors’ reactions as much as by the objects themselves. These are the stuff of which cycle pageants – falls of Lucifer, annunciations, ascensions, pentecosts, dooms – and saints’ plays are made, whether on pageant wagons, in the streets, in churches, or in the guild and common halls of the towns. Much of the ‘magic’ of Friar Bacon is accomplished by simultaneous staging using human actors. In one part of our great hall Friar Bacon ‘conjures’ up or reveals through his prospective glass what we see and hear in another part – the Henley tavern hostess, who carries a spitted shoulder of mutton, accompanied by a devil, who apparently carries Burden’s conjuring book; a devil who carries Bungay away on his back; Hercules, who carries off the gold-leaved tree ‘with the dragon shooting fire’; the yeoman-devil who carries Miles away, the latter scene a comic interlude which covers the costume changes to wedding finery. Accompanied by ‘roaring’ 

 

McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 139, citing Chambers’ terminology.

On the Road and on the Wagon

33

and perhaps shooting squibs, the devil’s appearances are compelling theatre if not radically innovative stagecraft. For whatever reason, however, three opportunities for spectacle are deliberately not staged: Bacon only describes the feast he will conjure to replace the meagre pottage and broth; the double wedding has occurred before the ensemble entrance in wedding finery; and the ensemble departs to the off-stage wedding feast. Bacon’s cell needs curtains which can be drawn and a post for Miles’s head to encounter, both conditions which can be met by the screen end of a great hall. The direction reads ‘Enter Friar Bacon drawing the curtains with a white stick, a book in his hand, and a lamp lighted by him; and the Brazen Head, and Miles with weapons by him’, an order of progression which is not entirely clear. Since Bacon has not conjured up more than his two hands, they are occupied by the white stick to open the curtains and the book; he must release both to light the lamp (further inferential evidence of a table), he falls deeply asleep in the chair used for observers to his earlier conjuring, and in some fashion the audience is privy to all, which in time will include the Head’s speaking ‘and a lightning flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a hammer’ – as well as Bacon’s breaking his own prospective glass, which suggests either calculated destruction with easily reassembled parts or else multiple properties when on tour (unlikely both for cost and for carriage space). And so there we are, at the end of our imaginary Queen’s Men’s tour of the northern provinces. Several observations, in no particular order, seem to warrant further pondering. First, the sparse wagon documentation to date invites us to think of touring alternatives for large properties, effective ways to stage scenes that we may automatically have envisioned on the Globe stage with a bed, tomb, banquet table, or throne. Second, although these professional troupes could command an impressive array of stage spectacle, they did not always choose to wheel it all out, relying on the imaginative collaboration of their audiences. Rather than incinerating Skipton’s great hall, Lord Clifford might have preferred to fan a small flash in his mind. Third, what I have tried to suggest in this essay, with scant evidence, is that what McMillin and MacLean compellingly argue in Queen’s Men about doubling actors sensibly extends to costumes and properties on tour. Although these three plays constitute an artificial repertory, one begins to see numerous inventive possibilities for using a relatively small inventory to advantage. Although Professor Foakes wisely cautions that ‘perhaps little reliance is to be placed upon the connecting of a property with a specific play’, Appendix III below did not resist the temptation to do so. We seem to be short one gold-leaved tree, but the dragon carried on. Finally, and (like the wagons) on the basis of common sense without documentation, I would like to challenge the received characterization    See Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London, 1998) and Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge, 2005).    R.A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2002), 317.

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Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

of touring as a fate worse than drying on ‘To be, or not to be’. The attractions of touring were many, I suspect, then as now. For every Edward Alleyn writing Joan to dye his orange tawny stockings a good black and to sow September spinach in the erstwhile parsley bed, three other players well may have been eager to bolt, leaving their London responsibilities for the appreciable pleasures of provincial great households and the freedom of the road.

Appendix I: Comparative Payments to Traveling Professional Companies: City of York, 1576–1636 Borough of Doncaster, 1574–1642 Households of Cliffords, Earls of Cumberland, 1594–1635 (Skipton Castle and Londesborough) Households of Bess of Hardwick, William Cavendish, 1593–1620 (Chatsworth and Hardwick)

Decade

Total Visits

Played Towns

Played Houses

Average ₤ Towns

Average ₤ Houses

# Times ‘Not to Play’

1570s

13

12

0

13s.6d.

—

1:T

1580s

22

22

0

27s.

—

0

1590s

69

25

37

30s.

10s.+keep

7: 6T, 1H

1600s

36

16

15

26s.

12s.+keep

5: 3T, 2H

1610s

52

15

30

21s.

35s.+keep

1620s

34

12

17

15s.6d.

62s.+keep

1630s

29

22

6

15s.6d.

20s.+keep

1640s.

1

1

0

10s.

—

Average Towns ₤

Average Houses ₤

Appendix II: Queen’s Men In Derbyshire And Yorkshire

1575

Doncaster

Queen’s men players

20s.

‘when they came into the country’

8/1584

York

Queen’s players

£3 6s. 8d.

Comman Hall

1584

York

Queen’s men players

40s.

9/9/1587

York

Queen’s players

£3 6s. 8d.

7/24/1592

York

Queen’s players

£3 6s. 8d.

6/28/1593

Chatsworth

Queen’s players

20s.

9/1593

York

Queen’s players

53s. 4d.

9/2/1594

York

Queen’s men’s players

20s.

8/4/1595

Londesbr.

Queen’s players

3s. 4d.

came in her majesty’s liveries; Comman Hall

8/8/1595

York

Queen’s players

£3 6s. 8d.

pd by the chamberlains forth of the Common chanmber

7/1596

York

Queen’s players

40s.

Common Hall

9/5–11/1596

Hardwick

Queen’s players/certain of

20s.

1596

York

Queen’s men’s players

20s.

8/9/1598

York

8/1598

York

Queen’s players

40s. not to play

9/12/1599

York

Queen’s players

40s.

1599

York

Queen’s players

40s.

9/1600

Hardwick

Queen’s players

10s.

7/27/1602

York

Queen’s players

£3

Queen’s players: William 40s. to depart the city and Smith, John Garland, not to play John Cowper

in the Common Hall

Common Hall

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Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

Appendix III R.A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2002): performances of the three plays, receipts from ‘Henslowe’s half-share of the gallery monies which he received as landlord of the theatre’ (Foakes, xxxii, citing Greg). Lord Strange’s Men Friar Bacon, 19 February 1591 Saturday Friar Bacon, 25 March 1591/2 Friar Bacon 26 April 1592 Friar Bacon 6 May 1592 Friar Bacon 10 January 1593 Friar Bacon 17 January 1593 Friar Bacon 30 January 1593

17s. 3d. 15s. 6d. 24s. 14s. 24s. 20s. 12s.

In the name of God Amen begininge at easter 1593 the Quenes men & my lord of Susexe to geather Friar Bacon 1 April 1593 43s. Friar Bacon 5 April 1593 20s. kinge leare 6 April 1593 38s. Kinge leare 8 April 1594 26s. In the name of god Amen begininge at newing ton my Lord Admeralle men & my Lorde chamberlen men As ffolowethe 1594 harey the v 28 November 1595 £3 6s. hary the v 2 December 1595 35s. hary the v 8 December 1595 43s. hary the v 16 December 1595 29s. harye the v 28 December 1595 56s. harey the v 5 January 1595/6 26s. harye the v 19 January 1595/6 20s. hary the 5 6 February 1595/6 18s. hary the v 23 April 1596 15s. hary the v 26 May 1596 23s. hary the v 17 June 1596 27s. hary the v 10 July 1596 14s. hary v 15 July 1596 22s. Lent vnto Thomas downton the 14 of desemb[er] 1602 to paye vnto mr mydelton for a prologue & A epeloge for the playe of bacon for the corte the some of vs (p. 207)

On the Road and on the Wagon

39

From Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary, ‘Appendix 2: Playhouse Inventories Now Lost’, pp. 316–25.

The booke of the Inventary of the goods of my Lord Admeralles men, tacken the 10 of Marche in the yeare 1598

... Harey the fyftes dublet [‘Gone and loste’] Harey the fyftes vellet gowne [‘Gone and loste’] j fryers gowne [‘Gone and loste’] torchbearers’ suits, soldiers’ coats, green coats for Robin Hood, green hose j whitt shepen clocke priests coats, white shepherds’ coats fool’s coat, cape, babell 3 trumpets, a drum, a treble viol, a bass viol, a bandore, a sytteren long sword pair of hose for the Dauphin 1 bedstead 8 lances 2 steeples, 1 chime of bells, 1 beacon 1 globe, 1 golden scepter 2 marchepanes & the city of Rome [Faustus] wooden canopy lion’s skin numerous helmets, shields, foils, gilt speare 3 tymbrells, 1 dragon in fostes 3 imperial crowns, 1 plain crown 1 red stamel cloak with white copper lace 1 red stamel cloak with red copper lace Harye the v. velvet gowne Harye the v. satten dublet, layd with gowld lace.

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Chapter 2

The Queen’s Men in Elizabethan Cambridge Paul Whitfield White

In 1583–1584, Cambridge University officials took the bold move of banning the Queen’s Men from performing in Cambridge. Their contempt for the players is conspicuous in the University Audit Book: ‘Item given vnto the Queens players forbiddinge theim to playe in the towne/& so to ridd theim clean away.’ To at least some contemporaries, the university’s actions must have seemed ironic. Here was the premiere acting troupe in the nation, patronised by a queen who had granted the university extraordinary privileges, and mandated to spread the same patriotic Protestantism that Cambridge itself helped to establish in England; and yet academic officials were forbidding the royal troupe to perform within a five-mile radius of the university on the grounds that such ‘practisers of lewdness and unlawfull actes’ ‘for filthy lucre’ spread the plague, corrupted scholars, and drew them away from their studies. The irony gets richer. The prohibition on public playing in Cambridge (in which the above phrase appears) was written and sanctioned by the very institution which formed the Queen’s Men in the first place: the Privy Council. Successive Elizabethan vice-chancellors at Cambridge repeatedly cited a 1575 Privy Council letter, which the university had solicited from its chancellor, Lord Burghley, to ban professional players from performing in Cambridge, albeit often with a sizeable payoff. The large payment of 50 shillings by Cambridge University to the Queen’s Men ‘to ridd theim cleane away’ in 1584, along with the legal force of the Privy Council injunction, raises the question (posed by Alan Nelson) whether the town’s own reward to the Queen’s Men in that year – and perhaps in successive years – may have been a ‘payment of dismissal’ as well. Indeed, Nelson suspects that this might have been the case when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men visited Cambridge in 1594, one year after the 1575 prohibition was reaffirmed by the Privy Council. There is no question that university leaders vigorously opposed professional acting companies appearing in town, and in this respect they were more intolerant than their counterparts at Oxford where similar prohibitions were in place but less frequently enforced, especially in later years. I suspect this was because at Oxford   Alan Nelson (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge (2 vols, Toronto, 1989), 311.    Nelson, Cambridge, 984–5.    See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996); John R. Elliott, Jr., Alan H. Nelson, Alexandra F. Johnston, and Diana Wyatt (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Oxford (2 vols, Toronto, 2004). 

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Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

academic and civic officials were able to get along (or put up) with one another, despite competing interests and jurisdictional disputes. There, townspeople were even invited to academic plays. At Cambridge (where citizens were not frequently invited to college productions) the situation was quite different. During the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign disputes over property rights, economic practice, and the policing of public morals produced some of the worst sectarian violence the town had witnessed since the fourteenth century. The theatre business was caught up in this conflict both in representing it (as in the satiric comedy Club Law [1599]) and in suffering as a result of it. In this essay, I will argue that for about a decade after 1575, the university was successful in using its special privileges to oversee public order in the town to suppress popular plays and revels and thereby to reaffirm its superior authority over municipal leaders, including the often recalcitrant town mayor. However, it becomes quite clear from the mid-1580s that the Lord Mayor, local justices of the peace, and even one of the colleges did indeed host the Queen’s Men and other major acting companies in defiance of the official prohibition, and were able to do so with the support of powerful patrons both at court and locally. Let us first take a look at the Privy Council ruling of 1575. In that year, the university leadership, drawing on an unprecedented series of privileges and rights granted to it by Elizabeth’s royal charter of 1561 and the Act of Parliament a decade later, decided to seize control of popular entertainments in and around Cambridge. In previous years, municipal authorities had regulated town plays and other organized recreation. On 30 October 1575, the Privy Council wrote the following letter to the University: We beinge informed verie crediblie of some attemptes of light & decaied persons, who for filthie lucre are mynded, and do seeke now[a]dayes to devise & sett vpp in open places showes of vnlefull, hurtfull pernicious & vnhonest games, nere to that Vniuersitie of Cambridge, do consider that it cannot be, but a greate number of the youwthe and others of the same, may be thereby inticed from their ordinarie places of learninge, to be beholders, learners & practisers of Lewdnes, & vnlefull actes.



  Comparing audiences in attendance at productions before the Queen at Cambridge (1564) and Oxford (1566) illustrates this point. Before the seventeenth century I can only find a few rare instances when townspeople were in attendance at Cambridge academic plays and in two of them they were the town elite. One was at Christ’s in the early 1550s, another at Clare College in the 1590s.    For the privileges and rights, see Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge, Volume II: 1546–1750 (Cambridge, 2004), 74.    This is best illustrated in a 1561 proclamation ‘for unlawfull games’, which town authorities nailed to a board and posted at the guildhall. See the treasurer’s expense for 1561 in Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge (5 vols, Cambridge, 1842–1908), 2:171.

The Queen’s Men in Elizabethan Cambridge

43

After adding that public plays facilitate the spread of the plague, the letter goes on: Therefore we ... [d]o will & chardge yow the vicechauncellor, and with yow all others, aswell of the Vniuersitie, as of the Towne, or of the Cuntrey within five miles circuite; that are either by her Maiesties Commission, or by charter Iustices of peace/ To haue good regarde that in no wise there be from henceforthe any open showes made or suffered by color of any licences of Iusticees or others to procure assemblies, wherein any maner of vnlefull games shall be exercised, neither yet any assemblies in open places of multitudes of people, be suffered to be made within that Vniuersitie and Towne, or within five miles compasse.

The intent of this prohibition was to shut down popular playing sites not only within the town itself but on its outskirts, especially at Chesterton, about four miles upstream on the Cam, where the annual Sturbridge Fair, reportedly the largest fair in England (and model for Bunyan’s ‘Vanity Fair’), attracted large crowds, including many students, from late August through mid-September. For nearly a decade, the 1575 order appears to have proved effective, at least in keeping professional acting companies from performing before the Lord Mayor. No payment for any kind of troupe is listed in the municipal records from 1575 until the Queen’s Men show up in the summer of 1584. It did not stop some from trying, however. Leicester’s Men, perhaps during either their 1579 or 1580 tour through East Anglia which included a visit to Kirtling (the estate of Roger, second Baron North, a short distance from Cambridge) made an unsuccessful attempt at obtaining a license from the university, as did the Earl of Oxford’s Men that same year. We know this from a letter which Chancellor Burghley wrote from London to Vice-Chancellor John Hatcher, dated 9 June 1580, on behalf of his son-in-law’s troupe (Burghley’s daughter was married to Oxford). Burghley proposes that since ‘they belong to a noble man a peere of ye realm’, they should be considered for a license to visit Cambridge for four or five days, as they had been accustomed to do in the past, adding that he can vouch for the ‘modestie and comlines’ of their demeanor which is expected before learned audiences. Hatcher denied    Nelson, Cambridge, 276–7. Of the eight privy councilors who signed this letter, five had significant connections with the university (Burghley, Thomas Smith, Francis Walsingham, Francis Russell, and Robert Dudley); all, except Dudley (who was University High Stewart) had been students. Notably, Smith served as fellow, vice-chancellor, and a translator and producer of plays in the 1540s.    For Leicester’s Men at Kirtling, see Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘Leicester’s Men: Patronage of a Performance Troupe’, in Suzanne Westfall and Paul Whitfield White (eds), Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage (Cambridge, 2002), 246–71, 254; Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 41, 47, 175, 176, 206; and Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 308.    Nelson, Cambridge, 290.

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

44

the request. He replied that infection from the plague was a potential hazard during the hot summer months, and added, tellingly, ‘ye commencment tyme [is] at hande, which requireth rather diligence in stodie then dissolutenesse in playes.’10 At the same time as companies were trying to get entry into Cambridge in the wake of the 1575 prohibition, local justices were clearly resentful of the university’s control of entertainments and questioned its exclusive right to regulate and license players. We should keep in mind that Elizabeth I’s proclamation of 1559 invested local justices and town mayors with the right to regulate and license players within their own jurisdictions. That the regional authorities challenged the university’s exclusive privileges in this regard is explicitly evidenced by the fray at Chesterton over a bear-baiting exhibition organized by the pair of local impresarios known as ‘the Parris brothers’ in the Spring of 1581. When university officials tried to stop the event and arrest the bearwarden on the grounds that he was in violation of university privileges, Richard Parris, who served as Chesterton’s high constable, intervened to say that any charge brought forward must be heard before a justice of the peace, and not before ‘master Vicechancellor’, who ‘had no authority to call him before him.’11 This point of view is repeated several times in the depositions concerning the bear-baiting affair, which led to the arrest of the Parris brothers. As it turned out, the Parrises were suitors to Lord North of Kirtling, and it took North’s intervention with Lord Burghley to release the two men from imprisonment in London. As for the attitude of the lord mayors of Cambridge towards the ban, it is useful to remember that Cambridge’s civic leadership had a long and proud history of patronizing the playing troupes of the royal family and nobility dating back to the previous century; that, between about 1540 and 1570, on average two or three major troupes per year performed at least once before the mayor, sometimes at his private residence; and that their sudden banishment not only deprived the townspeople of a popular entertainment but also cut off a channel of diplomatic influence that came with hosting the servants of peers and other politically important courtiers.12   Nelson, Cambridge, 290–91. The letter is revelatory in another respect. Whether Burghley is specifically referring to Cambridge or not, the remark that Oxford’s Men ‘intend to spend iiij or v. daies there in Cambridge as heretofore they have accustomed to do … of late years’, suggests that in Cambridge an acting troupe took several days to stage plays to cover all of the available venues, perhaps taking in a college hall first, then a visit to the guildhall in the marketplace (at least prior to 1575) where the Mayor would approve performances there as well as one or more of the Cambridge inns on record for stage plays, and last, perhaps, a quick side trip up to Chesterton, especially if Sturbridge Fair was in progress. 11   Nelson, Cambridge, 300–301. One suspects that the local Chesterton vicar, none too happy that the baiting drew parishioners away during ‘sermon time’, identified as the time of the event, alerted college officials, since he accompanied them to the performance site. 12   For visiting companies, see Nelson, Cambridge, vol. 1. 10

The Queen’s Men in Elizabethan Cambridge

45

And all the time the university-imposed ban was in place for the townspeople, the university itself encouraged drama to flourish within its own walls. This brings us back to 1584 and the run of visits by the Queen’s Men and other major troupes that began that year, and which, if it involved performances at the guildhall, demonstrated the defiance with which later Elizabethan mayors (however belatedly) viewed the university’s ban on plays within the town and the perceived intrusion on their right to regulate and license them. But what is the evidence for non-academic performances during the 1580s and 1590s, and how frequently did they take place? Let us begin by considering the university itself, since for all its measures against popular playing, the Queen’s Men did manage to be invited there. The records indicate that the royal troupe was turned away by the university in 1579–80, 1583–1584, 1590–1591, and 1591–1592.13 In 1586– 1587, however, the Queen’s Men appear in the Trinity College Steward’s Book as follows: ‘Item given to the Quenes men at Midsomer by appoinctment xxx s.’14 ‘By appoinctment’ strongly suggests a commissioned performance. It may not have been coincidental that the vice-chancellor of Cambridge that year, John Copcot, was a fellow of Trinity, whose extraordinary rise to high office (he was never a college head) has been explained by his ties to Chancellor Burghley and fellow privy councillor (and former vice-chancellor) John Whitgift, to whom he was a personal chaplain. What role these privy councillors played, if any, in the Queen’s Men’s invitation is impossible to say, but I think it was largely up to the particular vice-chancellor in office whether the university rigorously enforced the 1575 prohibition, or conversely, welcomed the Queen’s Men and other players. Another political moderate with close ties to the court was John Jegon, the vice-chancellor in 1596, when the university paid the Queen’s Men 20 shillings, and, for a change, did not add phrasing in its account entry about dismissal.15 On the other hand, two of the heads during the years when players were frequently dismissed were Thomas Preston (author of Cambyses) and Thomas Legge (Richardus Tertius), both academic playwrights and producers who may have viewed the professional players as rivals to the university’s own program of drama. That the mayor did, in fact, host professional players during the 1580s and 1590s is clear from the town accounts in 1586–1587 (‘Item to the players yat plaid before Master Maior xxx s’) and 1587–1588 (‘Item to certeine players to plaie at Master Maiors house by the commandement of Master Maior & counsel’).16 The mayor in the latter case was John Edmunds, famous in Cambridge chronicles for antagonizing the university at virtually every opportunity, despite the fact that his own father had been Master of Peterhouse (his son was a graduate of 13

  Account entries for these dismissals in the latter three instances use similar language: ‘forbidding theim to playe’, ‘debarred by the Vicechauncellor from playeinge’, ‘debarred from playinge’ (Nelson, Cambridge, 311, 332, 338). 14   Nelson, Cambridge, 319. 15   For Jegon, see Morgan, History of the University, 92, 290, 363. 16   Nelson, Cambridge, 319 and 322.

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the same college).17 In the same year that Edmunds hosted players in his private residence, he faced a writ of excommunication from the Consistory Court presided over by the vice-chancellor, who had the authority to issue such a sentence as the deputy of the Bishop of Ely.18 Edmunds had impounded a herd of pigs belonging to the bailiff of Jesus College, which not only incurred the wrath of the vicechancellor but provoked a near riot by a club-wielding mob of students who broke into the town holding to free the pigs, acting apparently in the interests (if not on the orders) of university officers. This was the same John Edmunds who, as mayor in 1605–1606, lent the keys of the guildhall to two of Queen Anne’s players for stage construction and rehearsal purposes before the university ran the troupe out of town.19 Edmunds’s defiance of university authority was typical of municipal attitudes in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign.20 Further corroborating evidence of playing troupes in late Elizabethan Cambridge comes from the inns – three of which featured plays, two around the close of the sixteenth century. Nelson has uncovered court documents that indicate a ‘common playe’ was the occasion of a student arrest at the Elephant on 27 February 1596 and observes that ‘playes and interludes’ were staged at the Bear on 28 May 1601.21 Returning to the case of the Queen’s Men, I think Burghley, in his combined roles as privy councilor and university chancellor, is key to the argument that the Queen’s Men, in fact, defied the university ban in 1584 to stay in town and perform before the mayor. Burghley’s 1580 letter recommending a license for Oxford’s Men in Cambridge indicates that, in his view, player-servants of governing-class patrons ought to be exempt from the 1575 prohibition. Moreover, his support for a national troupe founded, at least in part, to advance religious and nationalistic interests is consistent with his temperament and past actions, even if Walsingham was the main force behind the company’s formation, as McMillin and MacLean argue.22 As we shall see shortly, Burghley did not take action against the 17   See Nelson, Cambridge, 1229 and 1404. Edmunds and Lord North shared family connections with Peterhouse. John Craig, ‘Sir Thomas North, (1535–1603)’, in H.C. Matthews and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), 111–13, 111. For more on North, see below. 18   The Consistory was ‘essentially an ecclesiastical court.’ We often forget that Cambridge and Oxford remained essentially religious institutions through the nineteenth century; most of their graduates pursued careers in the church. See Morgan, History of the University, 94–6. See also H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), 155–7. 19   See Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres (Cambridge, 1994), 88–9. 20   For more on town/gown relations, see Morgan, History of the University, 241–55. 21   Nelson, Cambridge, 365 and 378–9. 22   As a kind of censorship czar at the court of Edward VI, he had been in charge of acting companies nationwide, and during the propagandist offensive against Rome at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign he was reported to have written arguments for anti-Catholic

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Queen’s Men when the vice-chancellor urged their arrest after academic officials unsuccessfully tried to stop their performances in Chesterton in 1591–1592. And perhaps as early as 1584, the Queen’s Men themselves knew that Burghley would not interfere. They certainly did not make the same mistake as Oxford’s Men in seeking a license in advance from the vice-chancellor, thereby provoking a denial in writing before arriving in town. Surely they were aware of the overlapping civic and academic jurisdictions, and so after collecting their sizeable payoff from the university auditor, they (I would suggest) successfully applied for a license from the Lord Mayor, who recognised the possible public relations coup both locally and at court in showcasing this royal troupe with its star players and nationalistic agenda of plays. The privy councilor who, next to Burghley, had significant official ties to Cambridge was Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, from July 1585 the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain. But his allegiance lay with the town, not the university. Hunsdon was elected alderman of the town in 1577–1578 and served as town recorder from 1590–1591 until his death in 1596. His company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were paid 40 shillings from the town treasury in 1594–1595; and considering what I have argued about other companies previously performing in Cambridge, it seems inconceivable to me that this amount was paid for their dismissal.23 Unfortunately, we do not know to what extent Hunsdon’s political representation of Cambridge was more than ceremonial; it may simply be a testimony to the Cambridge council’s efforts to strengthen their patronage at the royal court. The town recorder’s role was to handle litigation, but in early modern Cambridge it was the deputy recorder who assumed the workload, and for that, apparently, he is reviled in the Parnassus plays.24 Clearly, however, the Queen’s Men’s most important – and powerful – supporter on the ground in Cambridge itself was Lord North, the town’s Lord High Stewart since 1572. North was already a kind of patron to the company, having paid them for performances at his estate in Kirtling in 1583 and 1587, the very period in which the Queen’s Men were performing in Cambridge. He himself supported a troupe of musicians (possibly players) known as Lord North’s Men, plays. He also may have had something to do with the strident Protestant stage propaganda witnessed by the Queen when he accompanied her to plays at Cambridge in 1564. On Walsingham, see McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 24–31. 23   For the payment record, see Nelson, Cambridge, 355. McMillin and MacLean suggest that the Lord Chamberlain’s office was in disarray in 1583 (due to Sussex’s death that year) and that Walsingham, rather than Sussex’s deputy at the time, Hunsdon, was instrumental in their formation. As Lord Chamberlain, however, Carey would have known the Queen’s Men from presumably arranging their visits to the royal court. 24   Hunsdon is a shadowy figure in the theatre community. Andrew Gurr thinks that Lord Howard of Effingham, the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s chief rival, played a far more significant role in supporting players. See his ‘Privy Councilors as Theatre Patrons’, in Westfall and White (eds), Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage, 221–45.

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who accompanied him to Cambridge for feasts with the Lord Mayor and council.25 A personal confidante of Elizabeth – he was her favorite gambling partner at court and had entertained the queen to the tune of £762 at Kirtling in 1578 – North was a magnate of unrivalled authority in Cambridgeshire, and had been since his election to Parliament in 1555 at the young age of 25.26 He was, in effect, the only politician in the region who could stand up to university authorities and get his way. He regularly locked horns with them over a range of disputes, some involving the town (he pilloried a student for insulting the mayor in 1569), and others involving the often shady operators who organized local entertainments (notably one ‘Robinson’ and the Parris brothers). In 1591, his relationship with the university was further strained when he was attacked by a raucous band of students – reportedly led by the ‘Singing Man of Trinity’ – while he stayed at the Falcon Inn, his usual residence in Cambridge.27 In an embittered letter to the Privy Council, he complained that the scholars assaulted him while in pursuit of his servant Thomas Parris, who was at large after knifing a student near Chesterton a few days earlier. (Parris was the deputy constable of Chesterton on whose behalf North intervened when he was imprisoned in London over the 1581 bear-baiting incident.) The following summer, in 1592, North found himself embroiled in a controversy surrounding the Queen’s Men’s performances near Sturbridge Fair, which illustrates both his support for the troupe and his quarrel with the university over legal jurisdiction. Despite being explicitly forbidden by university officials from playing at the colleges in Cambridge, the Queen’s Men, led by one ‘Dutton’ (the vice-chancellor reports), posted bills on college gates before heading north to Chesterton, across the river from the fair. In a letter to Chancellor Burghley dated 18 September, 1592, Vice-Chancellor Robert Some and the college heads complained: One of the Constables toulde vs that he heard the Players saye that they were licensed by the Lord Northe to playe in Chesterton. Wee cannot chardge his Lordship otherwise with that particular: But wee are able to iustify that the Lord North upon like occasion heretofore, beinge made acquainted with the said Lettres of the Lords of the Cownsell, returned aunswere in writinge, that those letters weare no perpetuity: And likewise also in this very accion when the Players came to him for his Lordships allowaunce for theire playeinge in Chesterton, and some of vs did then tell his Lordship that wee had the Lords of the Cownsells Lettres to the contrary, he openly vttered in the heareinge aswell of the Players, as of diuerse Knightes and Gentlemen of the Shier then present, that the date of those letters was almost expired, And he said then further to the 25

  See Nelson, Cambridge, 338.   See Craig, ‘Sir Thomas North’, 111–13. 27   The singing man, Thomas Atkins, had a record of violence: he ‘had bene expelled oute of the colledge where he now remayneth, for his deadly woundinge of one of the same house, with a short clubb whereunto the keies of the colledge gates were tied’. See Cooper, Annals, 2:505. 26

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Players, that althoughe they should playe at Chesterton; yet the Vicechauyncellor durst not commit them therefore.28

In addition to revealing that ‘diuerse Knightes and Gentlemen’ were attending the Queen’s Men’s plays in rural Cambridgeshire, the letter pointedly exposes the conflict between university officials and local justices over the licensing and regulating of plays and pastimes in Cambridge and the surrounding area. In this and a second letter to Burghley and the Privy Council the same day, university officials implore their chancellor to renew the 1575 order prohibiting popular plays and pastimes. As Frederick Boas observes, however, Burghley took no action, since a year later the new vice-chancellor, Thomas Legge, petitioned the Privy Council a second time to renew the prohibition, this time successfully, and with language more specifically targeting the professional troupes: ‘that no plaies or interludes of common plaiers be used or sette forthe either in the University or in any place within the compasse of five miles, and especiallie in the towne of Chesterton.’29 ‘Especiallie ... Chesterton’, seems to have been the key phrase here, since professional troupes continued to be welcomed by the Lord Mayor of Cambridge, including the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. In 1596, both the university and the town paid to see the Queen’s Men for the final time, each awarding them 20 shillings.30 It is difficult to know how many professional companies performed in Cambridge after 1596. Queen Anne’s Men, as previously noted, left town without playing in 1605–1606. Other troupes may have visited, entertained, and left without the official sanction of either the mayor or the vice-chancellor and therefore without leaving any record of performance. The town itself had become more puritan, as the colleges’ ‘citizen’ comedy Club Law and the Parnassus plays reveal, and this may be a better explanation for the meager evidence of troupe visits in the early seventeenth century than the enforcement of the university’s prohibition. Up until that time, however, the 1575 prohibition was imposed intermittently and selectively, depending on who assumed the vice-chancellor’s post. Most university leaders, one surmises, desired the suppression of the professional troupes, but within a decade of the 1575 prohibition performances resumed at the guildhall with the Queen’s Men leading the way, a move that reasserted the Lord Mayor’s right to license plays within his own jurisdiction and possibly came with the backing of the privy council and regional patrons. At the same time, there were those within the university who had no quarrel with the troupes; after all, they were staging plays written by alumni of the university, including Robert Greene (a Queen’s Men playwright), Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe. I suspect, however, that Greene’s tribute to Oxford in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, if performed locally on a Queen’s Men visit, would not have been enthusiastically received. 28

    30   29

Nelson, Cambridge, 340–41. See Frederick Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914), 224. Nelson, Cambridge, 369.

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Chapter 3

Motives for Patronage: The Queen’s Men at New Park, October 1588 Lawrence Manley

New Park, October 1588 On 10 August 1588, Henry Stanley, fourth Earl of Derby and Privy Councilor, wrote from his house in Cannon Row, Westminster, to Sir Richard Sherburne, Deputy Lieutenant of Lancashire and Steward of the Derby Household, to announce his recent return to England from his embassy to the Duke of Parma in the Spanish Netherlands. The embassy, which lasted from 25 February to late July, had been a fool’s errand, an attempt to postpone or avert Spanish action by means of negotiation; Parma’s commissioners, ‘purposely to surprise England unawares and unprovided’, for several months ‘dallied with the English, till the Spanish Fleet was come upon the Coast of England, and the thundering of the Ordnance was heard from the sea’. By early August, when Stanley and the other ambassadors arrived back in England, the Spanish fleet had been defeated, and the Earl’s letter, promising his return shortly to Lancashire, jubilantly reported ‘my safe aryvall this day at the Court, whither I was well welcome especiallie to her Matie, whoe used me most honourablie and by her gratious speeches gave me assurance both of her good acceptance of my seruice and of her purpose to recompense the same.’ The Earl’s service abroad had been matched by his son’s at home, as Ferdinando, Lord Strange, took up responsibility for the defence of Lancashire and Cheshire, where invasion was feared from the Irish Sea. In the Earl’s absence, the Queen’s orders for the defence had been explicitly addressed ‘to or right trustie & welbeloued the L. Strange’, who supervised the raising of troops and made provision for warning beacons, nightly watches, and the examination of ‘Newes and Tale-Carriers, and other insolent persons’. Reporting on the wartime status of Lancashire and Cheshire, a letter of intelligence addressed to Don Bernardin 

  William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of … Princesse Elizabeth (London, 1630), 136.    Susan Maria ffarington (ed.), The Farington Papers (Manchester, 1856).         John Harland (ed.), The Lancashire Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts (Manchester, 1859), 205–26.

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Mendoza, Spanish ambassador to France, explained that even though the Earl of Derby was in Flaunders, from whence he came lately, yet his sonne the Lord Strange, Lieutenant of Lancashire in his fathers absence, is said to have raised a great power of horsemen. And to shew the popular affection to this earl in his countrey, I heard it for certain reported, that when the earle continued longer in Flanders than they liked, and doubting of his return, ... the people of his countrie in a generalitie did amongst themselves determine, that the Lord Strange, the earle’s son, and all the manhood of Lancashire and Cheshire, would go over the seas and fetch the earl home. A matter for no purpose to be spoken of, but to note the force of the love which the people do beare to the earle, who with his sonne is firmly bent against the pope.

This popular support was expressed in the ‘great rejoicing the 13th of August by the Citizens of Chester, for the happy return of the Earl of Derby from his embassage out of Flanders’, when ‘many Bone-fires were made in Chester’. From his seat at Lathom, where he had arrived by 24 September, Lord Derby commanded his deputy lieutenants and the JPs of Lancashire to arrange ‘some godlie exercise of thankes gevinge ... by prayer & prechinge’ for ‘the late ouerthrowe of our Enemies taken vpon the coste of Irelande’. On 26 September, the Derby Household Book, dated from the Stanley residence at New Park, takes note of the Earl’s ‘retorne from his Jorneye & Imbassage from fflanders’. ‘My La. Strange & the little children of hers’ arrived on the day following, and over the next two weeks came the usual cavalcade of Stanley clients and retainers. Then, on Thursday, 16 October, the Book records a visit by ‘the Quene’s Players’. Because the keeper of the Household Book, William ffarington of Worden, shows little interest in (or approval of) the players whose appearances his diary so frequently records, we know nothing of the plays performed by the Queen’s Men or by other visiting companies for the Stanley household. There was, however, in the repertory of the Queen’s Men (some of whose players may have been recruited from Lord Derby’s own earlier company in 1583) a play whose vision of the beginnings of the Tudor reign seems as if it might have been written with the Stanleys in mind. Published in a quarto of 2200 lines by Thomas Creede in 1594, The True Tragedie of Richard the third … As it was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players depicts the Stanley ancestors in the starring roles in the defeat of Richard III and in the rise of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, to the English throne. Given   Harland, Lancashire Lieutenancy, 200, n. 27.   Daniel King, A Discription Historicall and Geographicall of the Countie Palatine of Chester (1656), 204.    Harland, Lancashire Lieutenancy, 210–11.         F.R. Raines (ed.), The Stanley Papers, Part II: The Derby Household Books (Manchester, 1853), 50–,51.  

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that Thomas, Lord Stanley, was rewarded for his service at Bosworth with the Earldom of Derby, and that Henry, Earl of Derby and his son Lord Strange were the great- and great-great-grandsons of Henry VII by a later marriage, the play is also an account of the Stanleys’ rise to the Derby earldom, their pre-eminence in the northwest of Tudor England, and their close connections with the Tudor reign. The play assigns to Thomas Stanley an early resistance to Gloucester’s planned usurpation that is nearly equivalent to that of the Chamberlain, Lord William Hastings. Information that the schemes of Richard’s secret council ‘wil cost the Lord Hastings and the Lord Standley their best capes’ prepares the audience for the Tower scene, where Hastings is dragged on-stage, arrested, and sentenced to death. Though Lord Stanley remains offstage, the raging Gloucester orders that Hastings’s ‘copartner the Lord Standley be carried to prison also, tis not his broke head I have given him, shall exscues him’. This wound, inflicted by the usurping Gloucester, is the first honourable badge of Stanley sacrifice on behalf of legitimate succession. Failing to explain Stanley’s subsequent release from prison, the play next depicts him, together with his son George, Lord Strange, facing the newlycrowned Richard’s suspicions of their support for Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and their aid in arranging for Richmond’s marriage to Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV. Richmond’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, having inherited a Lancastrian claim to the throne through her father the Duke of Somerset, was the second wife of Thomas Stanley; in the play she is known as ‘Lady Stanley’. Distrusting Lord Stanley’s circumspect denials, and wary of his request to return to Lancashire, where he might conspire more freely, Richard takes young George Stanley hostage, threatening to execute him should Stanley support Richmond. This tender parting of father and son forms the dramatic prelude to events at Bosworth. In a secret meeting with Richmond on the eve of battle, the ‘father’ Stanley reveals to his ‘son’ Richmond that his ‘only’ purpose in giving up George Stanley as hostage was ‘to come and speake with thee’ (1836) about his cautious plans to commit his troops to the Tudor cause while appearing to support Richard on the battlefield. During the battle itself, when Stanley refuses to commit his troops to Richard and sends the defiant claim that he has ‘another sonne left to make Lord Standley’ (1937), Richard sends Lovell and Catesbie offstage with orders to execute young Lord Strange. The matter is left hanging dramatically while the battle plays out and Richmond kills Richard. A final scene then stages the coronation, over which Lord Stanley presides, placing the crown on the head of the man he continues to call ‘my sonne’. Richmond in turn betroths himself to Elizabeth of York (whose on-stage prominence in this play pays tribute also to her namesake granddaughter, the patroness of the Queen’s Men). All seems well concluded but for Lord Stanley’s grief:    The True Tragedy of Richard The Third, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1929), lines 935– 57. All further references parenthetically in the text.

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Stan. And nowe were but my sonne George Standley here, How happie were our present meeting then, But he is dead, nor shall I euermore see my sweete Boy whom I do loue so deare, for well I knowe the vsurper In his rage hath made a slaughter of my aged ioy. Rich. Take comfort gentle father, for I hope my brother George will turne in safe to vs. Stand. A no my sonne, for he that ioyes in blood, will worke his furie on the innocent. Enters two Messengers with George Standley. Stan. But how now what noyse is this? Mess. Behold Lord Standley we bring thy sonne, thy sonne George Standley, whom with great danger we haue saued from furie of a tyrants doome. L. Stan. And liues George Standley? Then happie that I am to see him freed thus from a tyrants rage. Welcome, my sonne, my sweete George welcome home. George Stan. Thanks my good father, and George Standley ioyes to see you ioyned in this assembly. And like a lambe kept by a greedie Woolfe within the inclosed sentire of the earth, expecting death without deliuerie, euen from this danger is George Standley come, to be a guest to Richmond & the rest. (2121–43)

In its happy conclusion, The True Tragedy of Richard III is a romance twice over, celebrating both the union by betrothal of Lancaster and York and the reunion of the Stanleys, father and son, at the defining moment of that family’s greatness. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, was apparently not present when the Queen’s Men played at New Park on 16 October 1588 (he seems to have returned to Lancashire from London only on November 1), but if the company had performed their Richard III play in October 1588, they would have delivered immense satisfaction to the household and its assembled guests, including Lady Strange, compliments of the Stanleys’ patroness, the Queen. If not on that occasion, then on 18–19 July 1589, when ‘the Quenes Players plaied ii severall nyghtes’ at Knowsley or 12–13 September 1589, when they appeared again at Knowsley, they would have demonstrated what theatre could do for a noble household and its standing in the realm. The Making of the Stanley Legend In view of the actual historical record, the Queen’s Men (though not by themselves) had done rather a great deal for the Stanleys. Modern research shows that Thomas  



Raines (ed.), Derby Household Books, 52, 62, 65.

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Lord Stanley actually supported Richard III against the Duke of Buckingham’s earlier rebellion on Richmond’s behalf and that Stanley received many of Buckingham’s estates in reward. The modern historical record also shows that Lord Stanley may not have met his ‘sonne’ Henry Tudor until several days after the battle of Bosworth and that his complicated relationship to Richard III was part of a longstanding struggle with the Duke of Gloucester for supremacy in Lancashire and northern affairs. A representative modern view states that the involvement of the Stanleys in the various phases of the Wars of the Roses had demonstrated their knack of emerging from each phase of conflict with power preserved or enhanced. This required a great deal of political calculation, which has earned the family a reputation as trimmers. The family attitude was demonstrated at Bosworth where, despite overtures of support before the battle, the enormous Stanley army remained uncommitted until the outcome of the direct confrontation between the retinues of Richard III and Henry Tudor was in the balance.10

The earliest accounts of Richard III’s reign – in the contemporary continuation of the Crowland Chronicle, in Domenico Mancini’s De Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium Libellus, and in MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XVI – attach little importance to the role of the Stanleys. In their narratives of Hastings’s arrest and execution, none mentions Thomas Stanley or his wound. In the Crowland Chronicle, Lord Strange only becomes a hostage after his father prolongs his freely granted stay in the North on the eve of Richmond’s invasion; and Lord Strange, after his escape and re-capture, cravenly reveals to Richard ‘a conspiracy to support the party of the Earl of Richmond between himself, his uncle, William Stanley, and Sir John Savage’. He pleads ‘for mercy and promised his father would come to the king’s aid’, but Thomas Stanley sends word ‘he was not able to come, alleging ... the sweating sickness from which he was suffering’.11 These chronicles are likewise silent on the role of the Stanleys at Bosworth and in the battlefield coronation of Henry VII. The Great Chronicle of London and Fabyan’s Chronicle, both compiled in the early sixteenth century, are the first to say that Lord Stanley was present at the Tower on the occasion of Hastings’s arrest, wounded, imprisoned, and released, for fear that George Stanley, Lord Strange, might lead Cheshire and Lancashire in revenge; neither mentions the taking of George Stanley as a pledge 10

  Sean Cunningham, ‘Henry VII, Sir Thomas Butler and the Stanley Family: Regional Politics and the Assertion of Royal Influence in North-Western England, 1471– 1521’, in Tim Thornton (ed.), Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2000), 220. See also Rosemary Horrox, ‘Introduction’, and Michael Hicks, ‘Richard, Duke of Gloucester and the North’ in Rosemary Horrox (ed.), Richard III and the North (Hull, 1986), 1–10, 11–26. 11   The Crowland Chronicle Continuations: 1459–1486, ed. and trans. Nicholas Pronay and John Cox (London, 1986), 179.

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for Lord Stanley’s loyalty, though the Great Chronicle begins to touch on matters at Bosworth, stating that ‘therle of derby’ secretly aided Richmond by making ‘slow spede toward kynge Richard’, and that his brother ‘syr wylliam Stanley ... wan the possescion of kyng Richardys helmeth with the Crowne beying upon It, came streygth to kyng henry and sett It upon his hede saying, sir here I make yow kyng of Engelond’.12 It is only with the more extensive humanist histories of Thomas More and Polydore Vergil that the full Stanley legend begins to unfold. In More’s History of King Richard the Thirde, the henchmen who arrested Hastings at the Tower also ‘let flee at the Lorde Stanley which shronke at the stroke & fel vnder the table, or els his hed had ben clefte to the tethe: for as shortely as he shranke, yet ranne the blood aboute his eares’. Stanley, who ‘wisely mistrusted’ Richard’s secret plans in advance of the Tower meeting and had a ‘feareful dreame’ the night before Hastings’s arrest, had ‘sent a trustie secret messenger vnto him at midnight’, urging Hastings ‘to rise & ryde away with him’; had Hastings not disregarded Stanley’s premonitions, ‘the lord Stanley and he had departed with diuerse other lordes, and broken all the daunce’.13 More’s history breaks off, of course, with Cardinal Morton’s entry into the Buckingham conspiracy, but Vergil’s version, similar to More’s on the earlier events, follows through with a full account of the Stanley rebellion. The newly crowned Richard, trusting ‘Thomas Stanley least of all others, because he had in maryage Henryes mother’ Margaret Beaufort, would not allow Lord Stanley to depart for the North ‘before he had left George Strange his soone as a pledge in court’. Richmond enjoyed the support of the full Stanley clan, including ‘Thomas Stanley, William his brother, Gylbert Talbot, and others innumerable’; but on the eve of Bosworth Richmond remained ‘in great feare, because he thought that he cowld not assure himself of Thomas Stanley’, who could not ‘overtly shew himself to stand ... with earle Henry’ lest Richard ‘might kill his soone George’. At Atherstone, however, Richmond ‘dyd mete with Thomas and William’ Stanley to plan the battle, which ended successfully when Thomas Stanley withheld his troops ‘in the myddle way betwixt the two battayles’ and Sir William Stanley committed his forces at the opportune moment. In this version, for the first time, it is not William Stanley but Lord Thomas, patriarch of the future Derby Earls, who ‘set anon King Richerds crowne’ on Richmond’s head, ‘as though he had bene already by commandment of the people proclaimed king after the maner of his auncestors’.14 The way the story is pieced together has suggested to modern historians that the major eyewitness reporters for both More and Vergil may have included not 12

  The Chronicle of Fabyan (1542), fol. 463; The Great Chronicle of London, eds A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (London, 1938), 231, 237–8. 13   The History of Richard III, ed. Richard S. Sylvester, in The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (15 vols, New Haven, 1963–97), vol. 2. 14   Polydore Vergil, Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, Comprising the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1844), 212–26.

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only Thomas Morton, so obviously influential in More’s portion of the story, but also the first Earl of Derby himself (d.1504) and Christopher Urswick, a Stanley client and chaplain of Margaret Beaufort. Urswick, the son of a lay brother and sister at the Abbey of Furness in Lancashire, was sent to Cambridge at the expense of the Stanleys, and it was through them that he enjoyed the patronage of Margaret Beaufort. He accompanied the Earl of Richmond on his exile to France, became his confessor, landed with him at Milford Haven and accompanied him to Bosworth. Urswick was amply rewarded for his services to the Tudors with important church livings and diplomatic posts (he negotiated the marriage with Katherine of Aragon, for example); J.B. Trapp notes that ‘as Henry VII’s trusted personal agent Urswick was one of the clerics whose administrative and rhetorical skills helped to establish and consolidate the Tudor regime’. Urswick, Trapp adds, was well connected to the circle of Colet, More and Erasmus, and ‘he is named in the manuscript of Polydore’s Anglica historia (1512–1513), but not in the printed edition (Basel, 1534)’.15 Shakespeare’s version of the story acknowledges Urswick’s role in its creation by having the priest serve as the intermediary between Thomas Stanley and Richmond, bearing Stanley’s message that the Queen and the Princess Elizabeth have consented to a marriage with Richmond. Urswick was not, however, the only intermediary for the Stanley version of Tudor history. There is ample evidence, from a number of versified family sagas dating from the early and mid-sixteenth centuries, that ‘the Stanleys took pains to write themselves into the record of opposition to Richard’16 and indeed to celebrate their status as creators and loyal supporters of the Tudor reign. The Stanley role at Bosworth, for example, was celebrated both in the early alliterative poem ‘Bosworth ffeilde’, which lauds that ‘fflower of fflowers ... Stanley bothe sterne and stoute’ by telling the story from the point of view of Richmond, and in the ‘Song of Bessy’, a ballad that tells the story, in at least two manuscript versions, from the point of view of Elizabeth of York. In the former, Richmond prays for ‘the loue of the Lord Stanley’ who ‘maryed my mother a lady bright’; in the latter, Princess Elizabeth, assigned to the protection of Thomas Stanley by Edward IV, relates to her ‘father’ Stanley the dying Edward’s prophecy that ‘he and his thy help must be’.17 In both, the grand alliance of Lord Thomas, his brother Sir William, his brother-in-law John Savage, and his good neighbour Gilbert Talbot defeats Richard III despite the tyrant’s threats against the captive Lord Strange.

15   J.B. Trapp, ‘Urswick, Christopher (1448?–1522)’, in H.C. Matthews and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004), online edition, Jan. 2008. 16   Alison Hanham, Richard III and His Early Historians 1483–1535 (Oxford, 1975), 134. 17   ‘Bosworth ffeilde,’ in John W. Hales (ed.), Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript (3 vols, London, 1868), 3:233–59; ‘The Pleasant Song of the Lady Bessy’, in James O. Halliwell (ed.), Palatine Anthology: A Collection of Ancient Poems and Ballads, Relating to Lancashire and Cheshire (London, 1850), 1–59.

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The oral ballad-saga form of these works and others like them, together with their existence in multiple manuscript variants suggest that the Stanley legend circulated widely in the family’s domain and beyond. Their purpose, as some lines from a poem ‘Of the Princess Elizabeth’ indicate, was to present the Stanleys as peers with English royalty: That tyme the Standleyes without dowte were dred ouer England ferre and nee. Next Kynge Richard that was so stowte On any lorde in Englande free.18

Additional Stanley poems, ‘Scotish ffeilde’ and ‘fflodden ffeilde’, take the family fortunes up through 1513 and the second Earl of Derby’s feats, but they too begin with tributes to the founders of the Derby title, and, to judge from their prominent catalogues of local families and supporters, they may have served to shore up the Stanleys’ clientage networks and regional alliances. ‘Scotish ffeilde’, for example, enumerates the host who gathered in Richmond’s name at Bosworth: Derby that deare earle that doughty hath beene euer, & the Lord Chamberlaine that was his cheefe brother, Sauage, his sisters sonne, a sege that was able, & Gylbert the gentle with a iollye meanye; All Lancashire, these ladds thé ledden att their will, & Cheshyre hath them chosen for their cheefe captaine;Much worship haue thé woone in warre – theirs was of their namesIn France & in fele lands, so fayre them behappen, Sith Brute here abode & first built vp houses.19

‘Scotish ffielde’ straightforwardly recounts the Stanley alliance that, while the second Earl Thomas (grandson of the first) was fighting at the side of Henry VIII in France, turned back the Scots at Flodden. Gathered under the ‘standards of the Stanleys that stands by them selues’, and led by the second Earl’s uncles, Sir Edward (later first Baron Mounteagle) and James, Bishop of Ely, the men of ‘Lancashire like lyons laid them about. /All had been lost, by our lord, had not those leeds beene’ (356–62). In the more elaborate ‘Fflodden ffeilde’, ‘the Honourable Thomas Earle of Derbye’, fighting in France, first receives false news of a defeat, which is explained as resulting from the Earl’s absence at the head of the Lancashire and Cheshire troops; but after a long eulogy of the Lancashire retainers and properties supposed lost, a second messenger proclaims to King Henry VIII the happy truth:

   

18 19

‘Of the Princess Elizabeth’, in Halliwell (ed.), Palatine Anthology, 60. J.P. Oakden (ed.), Scotish ffeilde (Manchester, 1935), ll. 10–18.

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‘Lancashire and Cheshire’, said the Messenger, ‘they haue done the deed with their hand! Had not the Erle of derbye beene to the true, In great aduenture had beene all England.’20

The fullest version of the Stanley legend, however, is the metrical chronicle of the House of Stanley, which may have been composed by Thomas Stanley, Bishop of Sodor and Man (1502–1569) and the illegitimate son of Edward Stanley, Lord Mounteagle. Spanning the entire career of the family, from a foundling ancestor flown by an eagle to its nest to the contemporaneous third Earl Edward and his children, the chronicle gives special attention to the events that made Richmond the first Tudor king and Lord Thomas the first Stanley Earl of Derby. An older enmity between Gloucester and Stanley, involving Gloucester’s threat to ‘Kill the Earle of Darby and burne Lathum hall’ as well as Gloucester’s treacherous flight on the eve of Stanley’s successful conquest of Berwick, form the prelude to the central events – the wounding of Stanley during the arrest of Hastings, the perilous captivity of young George Stanley, and the battle of Bosworth, during which Stanley sends a courageous defiance of Richard’s threats to kill Lord Strange: King Rychard sent quikly word to the Earle of Darby, To come take his parte or his sonne Lord Straunge dy: He bad make meat of him to eate with his spoone, He would visit him ere the feast were done; And sent him word ... He took him for no king but for an usurper.

In its rendering of the coronation scene, however, this version lays bare some of the more practical motivations behind the creation of the family legend by alluding to the later fate of Lord Stanley’s brother, Sir William: Then therle of Darby without taking more reade, Straight set the crowne on King Harry the Seaventh his heade, Syr William Standleyes tongue was somewhat to ryfe, For a fonde worde he spake soone after he lost his lyfe, Said, set it on thine owne head, for nowe thou maye. King Henry afterwarde hard tell of that saye: In such cause is not meete with princes to boorde, Good service may be soone loste with a fonde woorde. 21 20

  ‘fflodden ffeilde’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, 1:313–40.   The Stanley Poem, in Halliwell, Palatine Anthology, 249–50; Andrew Taylor has proposed that the poem was composed by Richard Sheale, a minstrel who was patronized by the Stanleys; see ‘The Stanley Poem and the Harper Richard Sheale’, Leeds Studies in 21

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Thomas Stanley’s brother Sir William, whose troops (unlike those of Lord Thomas) had actually come to Richmond’s aid, and who himself placed the crown on the new king’s head according to earlier versions of the story, had in fact been executed in 1495 for his treasonous support of Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII (his rebellion would later be treated with some sympathy in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, which also features Christopher Urswick, the Stanley client and chaplain, in the prominent role of Henry VII’s advisor). The ill-judged witticism that in this poem stands in for Stanley treason against the Tudors points to the larger strategy behind the creation the family legend – the use of wit and fair words to defend the family’s interests and enhance its reputation. If good service might be lost with a fond word (and Sir William had done nothing worse, the poem implies), then by implication the right use of words could magnify the family’s service and justify its deeds. The Stanley Problem and the Motives for Patronage There was much for the powerful Stanleys to explain, and not just their cautious role at Bosworth or the later rebellion of Sir William Stanley. In January 1587 another Sir William Stanley, a cousin from the Hooten branch of the family, had surrendered the English garrison he commanded at Deventer and gone over to the Spanish; his subsequent probing for pro-Catholic support among the Stanleys and other Lancashire families was a persistent cause of concern to Lord Burghley. Other members of the family had been known for their Catholic sympathies. Edward, the third Earl of Derby, had used his position on the Privy Council to resist most aspects of the Edwardian religious reform. On the eve of Queen Mary’s coronation, the Earl rode to London with 80 men in coats of velvet and 218 yeomen in livery, and he contributed troops in support of the Queen during Wyatt’s rebellion.22 The marriage of Edward’s son Henry to Margaret Clifford, arranged by Queen Mary, was an effort to forge an alliance between the leading Catholic families of the North. In 1570, two of Lord Edward’s sons (Henry’s brothers) were imprisoned in the Tower for conspiring to release Mary, Queen of Scots from captivity and take her to the Isle of Man. The third earl’s support of Elizabeth during the Northern Rebellion of 1569 had also been lukewarm. When Lord Edward lay dying in 1571, his son Henry travelled north to attend him at Lathom, where he received from the Queen a letter that, in requesting the attendance of his son Ferdinando at court, might have resonated with events in the family during the reign of Richard III:

English, 28 (1997): 99–121. On the provenance and purpose of the Stanley poems, see also David A. Lawton, ‘Scottish Field: Alliterative Verse and Stanley Encomium in the Percy Folio’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 10 (1978): 42–57; on early frictions between Gloucester and the Stanleys, see Michael Jones, ‘Richard III and the Stanleys’, in Horrox (ed.), Richard III and the North, 27–50. 22   The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. J.G. Nichols (London, 1848), 40.

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Right Trusty and Welbeloued, we grete you well. By your letters to our Coosyn your Wiff, and otherwise also we understand, how well and earnestly disposed you ar towards us and our Service, and the Cause of your Absence from hence is not other than to attend upon our Coosyn your Father now in his Sicknes, and thereby also, in the Tyme of his Sicknes, to haue regard for the good Ordre of that Countrey, for the Contynuance of the same in Quitenes, all which we do very well allow in you, and in such Respect we ar the better content with your long Absence; and knowing your ernest Good-will to serve and please us at all Tymes, the lyke wherof we ar sorry not to have found in your Brother, which we know can not but be displesant to our Coosyn your good Father, whom we have gret Cause to love and esteem for his approved Fidelite to us in these Tymes, wherin others of his Degre hath greatly fayled. We will not otherwise therefore, at this Tyme, direct you to repayre hyther than your self shall see may stand with your Fathers lyking in this his Sicknes, but yet considering your Absence, we have bene ernest with our Coosyn you Wiff, that she wold move yow to send up yowr eldest Sone, to be here some Tyme, that both we might see hym, and his Mother might have some Comfort of hym, and cheffly, that he might here lern some Nurture, and be fashioned in good Manners, mete for one such as he is, and hereafter shall be by Courss of Nature, mete to serve the Realme. ... Yow may send hym up to be here this Christmas, an which we will now assuredly look for.23

It would be going too far to say that Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, was taken hostage to guarantee his father’s loyalty in December 1571 in exactly the same way that George Stanley, Lord Strange, had been taken hostage by Richard III in 1485 to guarantee his father’s loyalty. Indeed, the Queen’s letter might instead be interpreted to propose a kind of Spenserian education in which Ferdinando Stanley would be ‘fashioned in good Manners’ that he might be ‘mete to serve the Realme’. It should be remembered, though, that even in ‘Lady Bessy’ poems the captivity of George Stanley also began as a friendly arrangement in which Lord Thomas ‘sent the Lord Strange to London,/ To keep King Richard company’ (47, 93). The author(s) of The True Tragedy of Richard III may not have known any of the poems dealing with the Stanley saga (though if any members of the Queen’s Men had been recruited from Derby’s Men in 1583, they might have heard the poems read to the household at Lathom and elsewhere); the author(s) of the play almost certainly would not have known of Queen Elizabeth’s 1571 letter to Henry Stanley. For the purposes of the Queen’s Men, the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, in which the family legend had been enshrined out of More and Vergil, would have sufficed. But for the Stanleys themselves, who best knew their delicate situation and their past, an important lesson offered by the performance of The True Tragedy of Richard III (if the Queen’s Men played it during any of their 23   6 December 1571, in William Murdin (ed.), A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1759), 184–5.

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four known appearances at New Park or Knowsley, 1587–1590) would have been about the opportunities for protecting and promoting family interests by means of an alliance between professional theatre and aristocratic patronage. Subsequent appearances by the Queen’s Men at the Stanley estates were more elaborate than their first recorded visit in October 1588. On 18–19 July 1589 they played ‘ij severall nyghtes’ at the Derby seat of Knowsley, before a large assembly of family members and household officials. Not long afterward, on 12–13 September, at Knowsley, an even more distinguished audience witnessed a Saturday evening performance by the Queen’s Men; the following day, a Sunday, was an extravaganza on which ‘mr Leigh preached the queens players played in the after none & my Lord off Essex[’s players] at nyght’.24 Any one of these grand occasions could have been the occasion for the debut of The True Tragedy of Richard III, but given their four repeat appearances after 16 October 1588, the likelier scenario is that by the summer of 1589, that company’s play on the creation of the Tudor monarchy had already forged a warm relationship between the players and the Stanley household. Between the visit of the Queen’s Men in October 1588 and their return engagements in July and September 1589, there had been another important development in playing for the Stanley household. During the week of 29 December 1588–4 January 1589, the Household Book records an unusually prestigious gathering at Lathom for a performance by an unnamed group of players: Sondaye Mr Carter pretched at wch was dyvers strandgers; on Monday came Mr Stewarde; on Tvsedaye the reste of my L. Cownsill & also Sr Jhon Savadge, & at nyght a Playe was had in the Halle, & the same nyghte my L. Strandge came home.25

It is possible that the keeper of the book, William ffarington, did not know the name of this company of players or did not think it worth recording. But given the presence of all of Lord Henry’s council and the arrival of Lord Strange, a logical assumption is that this was the Lathom debut of Lord Strange’s own new company, formed around actors taken from the company of the Earl of Leicester (who had died in September 1588) and fresh from a trial run that had taken them to Coventry and perhaps elsewhere in the preceding months. Similarly anonymous players, almost certainly the same group, played again the following Sunday, when Lord Strange was again present, as he was at Lathom on 27 February 1590, when for a third time the unnamed ‘players playd at nyght’.26 The coincidence of Lord Strange’s presence on all three occasions when these unnamed players performed is probably a sign that the keeper of the Household Book did not identify them because he did not need

24

    26   25

The Derby Household Books, 65. The Derby Household Books, 56–7. The Derby Household Books, 75.

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to – they were simply part of what ffarington elsewhere called ‘his L. servants & householde for dailly attendans’.27 It was just after the first appearances of this unnamed company, in February 1589 – when Lord Henry was created Lord High Steward of the Royal Household and Ferdinando Stanley was called to Parliament as Lord Strange – that ‘my L. & my L. Strandge & La. Strandge went all towards London; and the same daye his Lordeshippe’s howse brake vppe at Lathom’. The unnamed players who had first appeared at Lathom just a few weeks earlier probably departed in the same direction; by the following November, they were playing at the Cross Keys Inn in London. The Stanleys had patronised not only family poems and sagas but their own players as well, going back to 1494.28 The most recent of the family’s companies of players, the Earl of Derby’s Men, had last performed at court in 1582–1583, about the time that the Queen’s Men had been formed by skimming actors out of all the leading companies of the time. The newly-formed group of players who performed for the Stanley household in early 1589 would have a distinguished career. In the tetralogy of historical plays that Shakespeare went on to write for those liverymen under Lord Strange’s personal patronage, Ferdinando Stanley witnessed and regaled the world with the story of his titular ancestor, ‘Valiant John Talbot ... Lord Strange of Blackmere’ (1 Henry VI, 4.7.61, 65), whose title came into the family through the marriage of George Stanley to Joan, daughter of Talbot’s descendant, Lord Strange of Knockyn; with the story of his great-great-great-great grandfather, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick and kingmaker, whose daughter Eleanor became the first wife of Thomas Stanley and matriarch of the future Derby earls; with the stirring tale of his great-great-great grandfather, John Clifford, the charismatic firebrand (precursor in Shakespeare’s work to Hotspur) whose descendants became the Earls of Cumberland, from whose line came Ferdinando’s mother, Margaret Clifford; and with a portrait of Lord Strange’s compassionate ancestor Sir John Stanley, who took custody of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, on the Stanley fiefdom of the Isle of Man; with the rescue of Edward IV by Sir William Stanley, one of the later heroes at Bosworth (‘Stanley, I will requite thy forwardness’, the rescued Edward promises [3 Henry VI, 4.5.23]); and, of course, in Richard III, with the story of his direct ancestors, Lord Thomas Stanley, founder of the Derby line, and Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. Perhaps the end result of motives for patronage supplied by the Queen’s Men’s The True Tragedy of Richard III on their visit to New Park in October 1588, these Shakespearian history plays are likely to have been among the works performed by Lord Strange’s Men during their appearances at court during the festive winter seasons of 1590–1592. During the last of these seasons, by which time the Queen’s 27

  The Derby Household Books, 27.   For the earlier history of theatrical patronage by the Stanleys, see Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘A Family Tradition: Dramatic Patronage by the Earls of Derby’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (eds), Region, Religion, and Patronage (Manchester, 2003), 205–26. 28

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Men had declined into relative obscurity, ‘the servantes of our own verie good Lord Strange’29 held exclusive sway at court, with a total of six performances. Lord Strange’s Men had not just supplanted but, in effect, become the Queen’s men.

29   Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1542–1631, ed. John Roche Dasent et al. (45 vols, London, 1890–1964), 22:264 (19 February 1592).

Chapter 4

London Inns as Playing Venues for the Queen’s Men David Kathman

The Queen’s Men were primarily a touring company, but they still spent a considerable amount of time playing in London. Although they were formed after the onset of permanent purpose-built playhouses in the 1570s, most of the evidence we have suggests that the preferred playing venues for the Queen’s Men in London were the four inns within the City limits that served as part-time playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century – the Bell Savage outside Ludgate, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, and the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street. On 28 November 1583, within the company’s first year of existence, the Court of Aldermen issued a license authorizing the Queen’s Men to play at the Bull and the Bell and nowhere else in London, on holidays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays only, until the following Shrovetide (3 March 1584). Two anecdotes in Tarlton’s Jests depict Richard Tarlton performing at the Bull, once alongside his fellow Queen’s Man William Knell in a play that is apparently The Famous Victories of Henry V. Another anecdote depicts Tarlton coming to the Cross Keys after having just played at the Bell next door, and an entry in the Stationers’ Register says that Tarlton performed his last ‘theme’ at the Bell Savage. In contrast, no anecdotes survive about Tarlton at the Theatre, the Curtain, or the Rose. Until recently, these inns have received very little attention from theatre historians. At least part of this neglect stems from the fact that they do not fit neatly into the popular narrative that depicts James Burbage and other players decamping to the suburbs to build their playhouses, thus escaping the reach of unremittingly hostile London city authorities. When they are mentioned at all, the inns are often depicted as primitive precursors to the Theatre and its ilk, supplanted once ‘real’ playhouses came onto the scene. In fact, the four inns mentioned above did not become playhouses until the mid-1570s, around the same time as the building of the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Newington Butts playhouse, and they remained    Corporation of London Repertory 21, fol. 10 (London Metropolitan Archive [henceforth LMA] COL/CA/01/01/021), transcribed in E.K. Chambers (ed.), ‘Dramatic Records of the City of London: The Repertories, Journals, and Letter Books’, in Malone Society Collections II.3 (Oxford, 1931), 285–320, 314–15.    Herbert Berry, ‘Playhouses, 1560–1660’, in Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (eds), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge, 2000), 295–305.

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popular playing venues for the next 20 years. One could make a good case that in the late 1570s, they were more popular than the three purpose-built playhouses on the City’s outskirts. This essay will try to rectify the situation by presenting some essential information about these inns. The main focus here will be on the Bull and the Bell, the two inns where the Queen’s Men were specifically licensed to play, and the two playing venues specifically mentioned in Tarlton’s Jests. The other two London playing inns, the Bell Savage and the Cross Keys, have much weaker connections to the Queen’s Men, and both have already been the subjects of detailed historical studies recently. The present study will include somewhat more condensed historical overviews of the Bull and the Bell – their location, physical structure, and ownership during the years they hosted plays, plus some anecdotes to help flesh out playing conditions there. All this information is part of a much larger research project on inns, taverns, halls, and other places besides custombuilt playhouses where plays were performed in sixteenth-century London. More information survives about these places than most people have generally realized, and it deserves to be taken into account in histories of the Elizabethan stage. The first of the two inns licensed for the use of the Queen’s Men, the Bull, was on the west side of Bishopsgate Street, in St Ethelburga parish in the northeast part of the City. Bishopsgate Street was (and still is) part of the main north-south thoroughfare of the eastern half of London, and was popular with travellers arriving in the city from the northeast. The Bull was the largest of several inns in St Ethelburga, with two of the others, the Green Dragon and the Four Swans, being located directly north of the Bull. Partly abutting on the south side of the Bull was the large house of Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of the Royal Exchange, which eventually (in 1597) became the home of Gresham College. During most of its time as a playhouse, the Bull was owned by George Mease, citizen and grocer, who had inherited it from his father William in 1573. George Mease did not run the Bull on a day-to-day basis; he lived in St Peter Cornhill, a short walk south, and leased the Bull to Mathew Harrison, citizen and cordwainer, who had been William Mease’s ‘faithfull and trustie ffrend’, as Mease’s will

   Herbert Berry, ‘The Bell Savage Inn and Playhouse in London’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 19 (2006): 121–43; David Kathman, ‘Alice Layston and the Cross Keys’, forthcoming in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 22 (2009).    This research was originally undertaken in collaboration with the late Herbert Berry before his untimely death in March 2006. I will be dedicating the resulting book to the memory of Herb, who made many valuable archival finds involving the Bell Savage and the Bell, and gave me invaluable advice on researching early modern property holdings in London. A broader summary of the evidence for inn playing in London, including some of the information about the Bull cited below, can be found in David Kathman, ‘Innyard Playhouses’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Theatre History (forthcoming).

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describes him. Harrison was living in the neighbourhood by 1561 and leasing the Bull at least by 1569; he continued to do so until his death in 1584, so he was presumably the one who decided to make it a part-time playhouse in addition to an inn. This move does not appear to have brought financial success to Harrison, for later lawsuits reveal that he was heavily in debt at the time of his death. His widow Joanna inherited the lease, along with her husband’s debts, and ran the Bull for five more years, until her own death in late 1589. After that, the lease passed into the hands of Thomas Parris, citizen and innholder, who was the leaseholder when the Bull ceased to host plays in the mid-to-late 1590s. Parris continued to operate it as an inn at least until 1614, and probably until his death in 1617. Edward Walker, citizen and saddler, the owner of the adjacent Green Dragon inn, bought the Bull from George Mease, probably around 1600, and in his will of 1602 bequeathed it to his son Thomas. The Bull was the only one of the four London inn-playhouses of the late sixteenth century to survive the fire of 1666, so post-fire maps are of particular value in reconstructing its physical layout in the sixteenth century. The earliest such map to provide significant detail, drawn to scale using more or less modern methods, was Ogilby and Morgan’s Large and Accurate Map of the City of London, published in 1676. This map shows that the Bull was roughly L-shaped, surrounding the Green    Two different versions of Mease’s will, only the second of which was probated, are at the National Archives [henceforth NA] PROB 11/55/217v-218. Mease actually left the properties which included the Bull to his wife Julian, daughter Isabel, and son George, but George had consolidated his interest to become the sole owner by 1581. The deed by which he did so (Hustings Roll 265, no. 65; LMA CLA/023/DW/01/264) also shows that Mathew Harrison was occupying the Bull by then.    On 23 May 1561, Catherine Wynsour, widow, received a license to alientate a messuage in Bishopsgate Street, St Helen Bishopsgate parish (across the street from the Bull) to Matthew Harryson, Hugh Wheler (the longtime occupant of the shop south of the Bull’s gate), and Peter Axton, citizens of London. The license is in NA C66/975, m. 1; an English abstract is in J.H. Collingridge and R.B. Wernham (eds), Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Vol. 2, 1560–1563 (London, 1948), 199. It is conceivable that this record refers to the Bull itself, but only if the scribe was mistaken about the parish.    The occupants of the Bull for each year from 1569 to 1614 can be traced in the St Ethelburga churchwardens’ accounts (Guildhall Library [henceforth GL] MS 4241/1), which list the amounts paid by each householder in the parish toward the parish clerk’s wages. Joanna Harrison’s will, which does not mention the Bull by name, is NA PROB 11/74/199; Edward Walker’s will, which does mention the Bull, is NA PROB 11/99/269; Thomas Parris’s will, proved on 2 May 1617, is PROB 11/129/369. The lawsuits over Mathew Harrison’s debts are NA REQ2/39/12 and REQ2/283/77, with NA REQ2/28/70 being depositions from the latter case; these will all be discussed in my book.    This map is reproduced at original size (one inch = 100 feet, or one millimeter = 4 feet) in Ralph Hyde, John Fisher, and Roger Cline, The A to Z of Restoration London (London: Guildhall Library, 1992). All measurements are based on this version.

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Dragon on two sides; like most inns, its street frontage consisted of shops, between which was a great gate leading to the inn proper. Travelers would pass through an 85-foot covered passageway to get to the first of the Bull’s three yards, which was about 60 feet long east-west and about 25 feet wide north-south at its widest point. Another covered passageway led to the second yard, which was about 70 feet by 20 feet. From this second yard, one passageway went north to a long L-shaped passage that eventually opened onto Broad Street to the west; another passageway went north into the Bull’s third yard, which was an irregular rectangle, about 45 feet by 35 feet at its widest points. This yard, unlike the other two, had only one entrance, and is probably where plays were performed. It was comparable in size to the original yard of the Rose playhouse, which was about 45 feet across before its 1592 expansion, and the single entrance would have made collecting admission easier. An anecdote from Robert Greene’s pamphlet The Third and Last Part of Conny-Catching (1592) provides some further evidence about playing conditions at the Bull. Greene describes how a young cutpurse ‘In the Christmas holydaies last came to see a play at the Bull within Bishops gate, there to take his benefit as time and place would permit him’. After quickly nipping a young man’s purse, the cutpurse ‘stepped into the stable to take out the mony, and to conuey away the purse’, but was disappointed to find nothing but white counters, a thimble, and a broken threepence. Looking around, he ‘spied a lustie youth entring at the doore, and his drab with him’, recognizing the youth as ‘one of the finest Nippers [i.e., cutpurses] about the towne’. The young cutpurse followed the lusty youth and his girl as they joined a ‘companie of seemely men’ to ply their trade ‘where both they might best beholde the play’. The lusty youth quickly stole a purse and tried to pass it surreptitiously to his companion, ‘but she being somewhat mindfull of the play, because a merriment was then on the stage, gaue no regard’. The young cutpurse took the stolen purse, ‘pluckt the queane by the coate’, and passed to her the purse with the white counters before quietly slipping away.10 Though the story about the cutpurses is most likely fictional, the background details about the Bull are presumably accurate. Many of Greene’s plays were performed by the Queen’s Men, so he was undoubtedly familiar with one of their main London venues and would expect many of his readers to be familiar with it as well. The events in the anecdote apparently take place in an enclosed outdoor space with a single entrance; the young cutpurse steps into a stable immediately after filching a purse, then looks up to see the lusty youth ‘entring at the doore’. There is also a stage, and the audience is able to walk around freely to get a better view. However, the Bull’s playing space also had galleries, as we learn from a story in Tarlton’s Jests wherein ‘at the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, where the Queen’s  

Berry, ‘Playhouses’, 422.   Greene, Robert, The Thirde and Last Part of Conny-Catching (1592) and A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher (1592), ed. G.B. Harrison (London, 1923), 37–9. 

10

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Men oftentimes played, Tarlton coming on the stage, one from the gallery threw a pippin at him’.11 All this information is consistent with plays being performed on a stage set up in the Bull’s third yard, with some of the audience in the galleries surrounding the yard, and the rest standing in the yard itself. Note also that Greene’s cutpurse goes to see a play at the Bull ‘in the Christmas holydaies last’, thus further supporting the idea that the inns were most often used as playhouses in the winter. Among other pieces of evidence, the license described earlier allowed the Queen’s Men to perform at the Bull and the Bell between 28 November 1583 and 3 March 1584, and the Lord Chamberlain wrote to the Lord Mayor on 8 October 1594 seeking permission for his company of players ‘to play this winter time within the City at the Cross Keys in Gracious Street’.12 However, Greene depicts this winter performance outdoors in the yard of the Bull, thus undercutting the arguments of scholars (such as Andrew Gurr) who have assumed that wintertime playing at inns took place indoors.13 In fact, all the evidence points to outdoor playing at the Bull (and the Bell Savage) regardless of the time of year, though the evidence regarding the Bell (and the Cross Keys) is more ambiguous, as we will see below. A more plausible reason that inns were preferred playing places in the winter was not because they provided shelter from the cold, but because they were more convenient for the London audience during the months when darkness fell early and curfews were in effect. Among the extensive evidence for such a restriction, the most explicit is the Corporation of London’s 1584 ruling ‘that no playeing be in the dark, nor continue any such time but as any of the auditorie may returne to their dwellings in London before sonne set, or at least before it be dark’.14 The other inn licensed for use by the Queen’s Men in 1583–1584, the Bell, was located on Gracechurch Street, a leisurely 10-minute stroll south of the Bull, in the parish of Allhallows Lombard Street. The two inns were actually on the same north-south street, but that street is known as Bishopsgate Street north of Cornhill, and as Gracechurch (or Gracious) Street south of Cornhill. The Bell and its fellow inn-playhouse, the Cross Keys, were adjacent to each other on the west side of Gracechurch Street, with the Bell on the north and the Cross Keys on the south. Both were a few doors north of Lombard Street and close to Leadenhall Market, which was across the street and a little to the north.

11

  Berry, ‘Playhouses’, 301.      Berry, ‘Playhouses’, 304; and E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923), 4:316. 13   Andrew Gurr, ‘Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 56 (2005), 54, refers to the Cross Keys as ‘an indoor venue’ and says that the Chamberlain’s Men ‘had been used to playing indoors through the winters of previous years’. 14   Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:302. Much of this evidence is discussed by Lawrence Manley, ‘Why Did Inns Function as Theaters?’, Huntington Library Quarterly (forthcoming). 12

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During its years as a playhouse, the Bell was owned by Thomas Smythe (1522–1591) and then by his son John Smythe. Thomas Smythe became very wealthy as the ‘customer’ of London (collector of subsidies on all imports at the port of London), and his powerful friends included William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who expressed his ‘great love’ for Smythe in his will.15 Smythe had gained control of the Bell through his wife Alice, the daughter of the inn’s earlier owner, former Lord Mayor Sir Andrew Judde. When Judde died in 1558, the Bell and various other properties first passed in turn to his two sons John and Richard. After they both died without heirs (in 1559 and 1562 respectively), the properties ended up with Judde’s son-in-law Smythe after a complicated series of legal maneuvers designed to prevent them from going to Judde’s widow (who was his third wife and the children’s stepmother).16 When Thomas Smythe died in 1591, the Bell passed to his son and heir John Smythe, who eventually sold it in 1600 to his cousin William Horsepoole of Gray’s Inn.17 Thomas and Alice Smythe lived in Allhallows Lombard Street as the parish’s richest residents; in the subsidy assessments of 1576 and 1582 they were assessed on £150 in goods each time, by far the largest assessments in the parish.18 However, they lived not in the Bell but in a large house across the street, which, after Thomas’s death, was occupied by his second son, Thomas, who eventually became longtime governor of the East India Company.19 In 1566 the elder Thomas   See Brian Dietz, ‘Smythe, Thomas (1522–1591)’, rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37985, accessed 4 Sept 2006]. This was not the Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) who was a longtime member of the Privy Council, nor the Sir Thomas Smith (c.1556–1609) who was secretary to the second Earl of Essex. 16   The details of these legal maneuvers will appear in my book. In short, Judde’s will provided that if neither of his sons had male heirs, much of his property would revert to his general heirs, the first of whom would be his widow. After John Judde died, Richard Judde conveyed the properties (including the Bell) to two trustees who leased them to Thomas Smythe, with the provision that after Richard Judde’s death they would pass to Thomas and Alice Smythe’s sons. This common legal move ensured that property passed to an owner’s blood descendants rather than to a later spouse. 17   Thomas Smythe’s will (which does not specifically mention the Bell) is NA PROB 11/78/179v; the deed for the 1600 sale is Hustings Roll 279, no. 33 (LMA CLA/023/ DW/01/278). William Horsepoole’s mother Elizabeth was Thomas Smythe’s sister, and in his will Smythe gave £250 to ‘my Brother Horsepoole and his wife’. 18   NA E179/145/252w; R.G. Lang (ed.), Two Tudor Subsidy Assessment Rolls for the City of London, 1541 and 1582 (London, 1993), 149. 19   The younger Thomas Smythe became prominent in London City government, serving as alderman and sheriff, and was knighted by James I. He was sheriff of London at the time of the Essex rebellion in 1601, and the Gracechurch Street house played a key role when Essex led his followers there on the day of the rebellion in an attempt to enlist Smythe’s help as captain of the trained bands of London. Smythe refused, and later claimed to have sneaked out the back door to get away from Essex, but he was still heavily fined and 15

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had leased the Bell for 60 years to Leonard Pennington, a fellow freeman of the Skinners’ Company who had previously operated another inn, the Hanging Sword in Fleet Street. After Pennington’s death in October 1574, the lease passed to Henry Haughton, citizen and saddler, who was to run the inn’s day-to-day operations during the entire 20-year period when it hosted plays.20 Haughton had been living in the parish at least since the mid-1560s, perhaps working for Pennington; he had six children christened at Allhallows Lombard Street between 1566 and 1579, four of whom died in infancy, and one of whom, Henry, was buried in the parish in 1593, just short of his 22nd birthday.21 However, it was only after he became the leaseholder of the Bell that plays began to be performed there. The first mention of playing at the Bell comes in a Bridewell Court of Governors deposition in May 1576, and in February 1577 the Revels Office paid 10s for ‘the carriage of parts of the well counterfeit from the Bell in Gracious Street to St John’s to be performed for the play of Cutwell’.22 On 1 January 1578, James Burbage’s company (probably Leicester’s Men) was scheduled to perform a play ‘at the dwelling house of a certain Henry Hawton called the Bell, situated in a thoroughfare called “Gracyous Strete”’.23 Haughton was active in the affairs of the Saddlers’ Company, serving as warden five times between 1586 and 1595, and as master from 1594 onward. Also active in the Saddlers at the same time was Edward Walker, who leased the adjacent Cross Keys from March 1585 to January 1588 but also (as we saw above) bought forced to resign as alderman and sheriff. See Basil Morgan, ‘Smythe, Sir Thomas (c.1558– 1625)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/25908, accessed 5 Sept 2006]. 20   The 1566 lease is described in the deed for the 1600 sale of the Bell, cited above. On 12 May 1564, the queen sold to Richard Sackville various properties, including an inn or messuage called ‘le Hanginge Swerde’ in ‘Fletestrete’, now or late in the tenure of William Mortymer or Leonard Penyngton. The record is NA C66/1003, m. 7–8, with an English abstract in Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, Volume III, 1563–1566 (London, 1960), 107–8. Pennington was buried in Allhallows Lombard Street on 18 October 1574 (GL MS 17613), and his will (NA PROB 11/57/28–28v), dated three days before his death, was proved on 29 January 1575. 21   The christenings and burials are in the Allhallows Lombard Street parish register (GL MS 17613), and are listed in David Kathman, ‘Citizens, Innholders, and Playhouse Builders, 1543–1622’, Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 44 (2005): 38–64. Henry Haughton may have been related to Peter Haughton, alderman, whom Thomas Smythe had described in his will as ‘my good neighboure’. 22   The Bridewell deposition is described and cited below, and the Revels Office record is transcribed (in modernized spelling) in Berry, ‘Playhouses’, 297. 23   David Mateer, ‘New Light on the Early History of the Theatre in Shoreditch [with texts]’, English Literary Renaissance, 36 (2006): 335–75, esp. 343, 370, 373. The text quoted here is Mateer’s translation of the original Latin, ‘apud domum mansionalem cuiusdam Henrici Hawton vocatam the Bell scituatam in vico vocato Gracyous Strete London’.

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the Bull around 1600, and Henry Tunstall, whose son James was a professional player and a member of the Admiral’s Men.24 Haughton still occupied the Bell when it was sold in 1600, and he was buried in Allhallows on 14 November 1601 as ‘Henry Haulton Cittizen’.25 Because the original Bell perished in the 1666 fire, later maps cannot be relied on as easily as they can with the Bull, but they can still provide some idea of what the pre-fire inn was like. As depicted in the 1676 Ogilby and Morgan map, the Bell had a single long, narrow yard, about 20 feet wide at its widest point in the middle, and about 125 feet long from east to west (or more than 150 feet long if an alley at the westernmost end is included). Visitors entered the yard from the east via a 25-foot covered passageway from Gracechurch Street, and at the west end of the yard was a narrow passageway north into the St Michael Cornhill churchyard and an adjoining alley. It is difficult to see how plays could have been performed in so narrow a yard, leading to the question of exactly where the Bell’s playing space was. Above we saw some of the explicit evidence for outdoor playing in one of the Bull’s yards, but no such evidence exists for the Bell, and in fact some circumstantial evidence suggests that playing at the Bell and its neighbour the Cross Keys may have been indoors. Both the Bull and the Bell Savage had multiple yards, making it easier for inn business to continue while a play was going on, whereas the Bell and the Cross Keys each had only a single yard. In addition, between 1573 and 1590 both the Bull and the Bell Savage regularly hosted outdoor fencing prizes for the Masters of Defence, as did the Theatre and Curtain playhouses north of the City. This fact suggests that these four venues all had similar capabilities to host an outdoor spectacle, whereas the fact that the Bell and the Cross Keys never hosted such prizes suggests that they were fundamentally different from the ampitheatre playhouses.26 A lawsuit of 1597 provides some further information about the part of the Bell closest to Gracechurch Street, including evidence for a hall where plays might have been performed. As with the Bull, the street frontage of the Bell on either side of its great gate consisted of shops, which Haughton subleased out to tenants. From 1588 to 1597 he leased the shop south of the gate to John Bendy, citizen and haberdasher, under two leases dated 13 days apart. According to Haughton’s 24   Saddlers’ Audit Book, 1555–1822 (GL MS 5384). Haughton and Walker were wardens together in 1594–1595, and were both auditors of the company’s books several times. Tunstall immediately preceded Haughton as a warden in 1585–1586, and both were auditors in 1590–1591. For Walker’s connection to the Cross Keys, see Kathman, ‘Alice Layston and the Cross Keys’. For James Tunstall, who was also a freeman of the Saddlers (probably by patrimony), see William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginning of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca and London, 1992), 25–9. 25   GL MS 17613. 26   For the fencing prizes of the Masters of Defence, see Herbert Berry, The Noble Science (London and Toronto, 1991), 32–3. The issues in this paragraph are discussed in more depth in Kathman, ‘Innyard Playhouses’.

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answer to Bendy’s bill of complaint, the first lease was for a shop, a back room behind the shop, and a little chamber over the back room, ‘nere adioyninge vnto the hall of the said Defendant Henry Hawghton’; the second lease was for a cellar, a hall, two chambers, a kitchen, and two garrets.27 This description tells us that the Bell had a hall, located on the upper floor near the front part of the inn. We cannot know from the description whether this hall would have been large enough to host plays, but the possibility cannot be categorically ruled out. The reference to garrets as part of Bendy’s property suggests that the building had no more than two main floors plus another floor containing garrets above, at least on its street frontage. Bendy’s chambers were presumably close to the inn’s rooms, because one of the charges in his bill of complaint is that when the inn was full, Haughton would lodge guests in Bendy’s rooms. Haughton admitted that he did so five or six times a year during term time, but said that this was no more than the ‘friendship’ that other neighbours had also extended to him by letting him lodge guests in their houses at busy times. Finally, references in the court minutes of Bridewell Hospital, which was mainly concerned with sexual crimes, give us some interesting snapshots of a few of the people who went to plays at the Bell and the Bull. On 27 May 1576, a woman named Godlyffe White, wife of John White, testified before the Bridewell Court of Governors after she had been accused of having sexual relations with several men other than her husband. She testified ‘that wallys wife and she the said whites wyffe and one harry Androes a taillor went to a play at the bell in Gratious street’, and that after the play ‘they went all to one Sybernes in Newgate markett And ther the said harry had the carnall vse of the said wallys wyffe in the kitchen’.28 From other testimony in the case, it appears that Godlyffe White was a prostitute, and that her husband was her pimp; in this context, Wallis’s wife looks like one of Godlyffe White’s fellow whores, and Androes the tailor her customer. Thus, to go with Robert Greene’s tale of cutpurses at the Bull, here we have a firsthand account of prostitutes at the Bell (which, incidentally, is also the earliest reference to playing there). Obviously, most of the audiences at these inns were not cutpurses or prostitutes, but these anecdotes show that the criminal element was a presence there. Three years later, the Bridewell minutes contain a similar reference to playing at the Bull. On 28 February 1579, a married woman named Elizabeth Everys described how she had started an affair with one Benjamin Gunston after 27

  NA C2/Eliz/B24/63. The lawsuit, which I will discuss in detail in my book, arose when Haughton evicted Bendy for nonpayment of rent and seized £10 of his goods as partial payment. Bendy owed Haughton the considerable sum of £228 on 20 different bills of debt, which he was gradually repaying; under the onerous terms of the leases, the entire amount came due if Bendy was more than 20 days late with his rent. 28   GL MS 33011/3, fol. 10v (microfilm of original held by Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum, Beckenham, Kent). Duncan Salkeld, ‘The Bell and the Bel Savage Inns, 1576–1577’, Notes & Queries, 249 (2004), 242–3, gives White’s first name as ‘Godlysse’, but it appears to be ‘Godlyffe’ in the manuscript.

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meeting him at a play at the Bull in Bishopsgate. He eventually put her up in what turned out to be a bawdy-house, and she was driven to become a prostitute herself after Gunston abandoned her.29 It was probably with such incidents in mind that Lady Anne Bacon, mother of Francis and Anthony Bacon, wrote to Anthony in May 1594 at his new house in Bishopsgate Street to warn him that ‘the Bull inn there, with continual interludes, had even infected the inhabitants with corrupt and lewd dispositions’.30 The Bridewell minutes also contain references to playing at the Bell Savage and the Cross Keys during this period; on 29 December 1577, Mark Osborne testified about a sexual assignation at his master’s house in the Little Old Bailey following an outing to see a play at the Bell Savage, and on 11 February 1579 a player named John Gibbes testified about meeting a woman introduced to him by his fellow Thomas Rowe after a play at the Cross Keys.31 Interestingly, however, the only reference to a non-inn playhouse during this period is a description of an outing on Whitsunday (7 June) 1579, when the operator of a bawdy-house took staff and clients to a play at the Curtain.32 There are no references to the Theatre or the Newington Butts playhouse, or to the playhouses at St Paul’s or the Blackfriars, all of which were active in the late 1570s. Of course, this is a small sample size and may not be representative, but the impression one gets is that the inn-playhouses within the City were the preferred entertainment venues for prostitutes and other habitués of London’s sexual underworld. Whether or not that is an accurate assessment, clearly the four inns played an important part in the dramatic life of London in the late sixteenth century. With specific reference to the Queen’s Men, the Bull and the Bell were the company’s London base for at least its first winter of existence, and the company undoubtedly played there often after that, to judge by the anecdotes in Tarlton’s Jests and elsewhere. Knowing more about the playing conditions in these inns can give us insights into how the company made its living from day to day, much as the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe in London has helped us understand playing in the custom-built playhouses. Knowing about the people who owned and operated these inns opens up a whole new universe of possible connections, and tells us 29   GL MS 33011/3, fols 373–373v. The manuscript actually says that Everys met Gunston during a play at the ‘bell at Bysshopsgate’, so it is possible that the meeting was at the Bell. However, it seems much more likely that the scribe mistakenly wrote ‘bell’ for ‘bull’ than that he mistakently wrote ‘Bishopsgate’ for ‘Gracious Street’. 30   Herbert Berry, ‘Chambers, the Bull, and the Bacons’, Essays in Theatre, 7.1 (1988): 35–42. 31   GL MS 33011/3, fols 267v–268, 364–364v, 367. These records are discussed further in Kathman, ‘Innyard Playhouses’. 32   GL MS 33011/3, fols 397v–399. This case is described in more detail by Bernard Capp, ‘Playgoers, Players and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern London: The Bridewell Evidence’, The Seventeenth Century, 18 (2003): 159–71, 162, who also summarizes the Bell Savage and Cross Keys references.

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something about the type of people who were willing to take the risks involved in turning an inn into a part-time playhouse within London’s City walls. More broadly, these inns, and the taverns and halls in London that hosted plays earlier in the sixteenth century, represent a corner of Elizabethan theatrical history that has been largely hidden, but which deserves to be explored.

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Chapter 5

‘The Curtain is Yours’ Tiffany Stern

The replica playhouse erected on the Bankside in London is called, officially, not ‘The Globe’ – the original name for the theatre in which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men/King’s Men played – but ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’. The title explains the rationale behind the theatre’s construction: in getting the Globe back, it is thought, something about Shakespeare will be returned to us. For a similar reason, the Rose is being ‘reconstructed’ in Lenox, Massachusetts, oddly, and questionably, because, says the website, it was ‘Shakespeare’s first theatre’; while the replica Blackfriars theatre in Staunton, Virginia, was built to be ‘a laboratory. We’re going to learn so much.’ It is powerfully believed that the shape and nature of the playhouses for which Shakespeare wrote are elements of his drama: only by recreating his spaces can we recover some of the dramatic meaning of the plays. For ‘Shakespeare invented his dramatic construction to suit his own particular stage’, wrote William Poel, one of the founders of the idea of replicating Shakespearean theatres and performances; ‘the plays were shaped to suit the theatre of the day and no other.’ ‘Reconstructed’ replicas give early modern playhouses a static permanence that their real counterparts never had. If Shakespeare’s plays were written with specific theatres in mind at all, they were fitted to living spaces that were shaped by time, situation and circumstance as well as construction. Repertory studies, which consider the surprising effects of time, situation, and circumstance on theatrical repertories, are thus the reverse of the school of thought that brings about ‘reconstruction’; repertory studies suggest that the changing nature of the biography of a company is key, and that a company’s vicissitudes are as important as a playwright’s to our understanding of early modern texts. This paper posits yet another biographical method for thinking about plays: it brings the concerns of repertory studies to fixed spaces, and considers the way incidental facts in the life of a permanent, static theatre might impinge on plays performed there. The playhouse I will discuss in this paper is the Curtain theatre in London, selected

  http://www.shakespeare.org/sandco.php?pg=rose&category=the%20Rose%20playh ouse%20U.S.A.%20Project&subCat=Overview; Steve Hendrix, ‘Where There’s A Will ... , Staunton, Va., Bets on Shakespeare’, Washington Post (Wednesday, October 10, 2001), C02.    Sir Lewis Casson, ‘William Poel and the Modern Theatre’, The Listener (10 January 1952), 56. 

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precisely because it was not often linked to a single company; it is the most ignored of the early modern London amphitheatres. The Curtain’s life is, of course, different from that of the Globe or Blackfriars, which had permanent companies – and probably, therefore, permanent wardrobes and specifically designed decorations and props. Nevertheless, if theatres are part of plays, that is equally true of theatres that were suffered as of theatres that were desired. Given that the Curtain is unlikely to have been physically reshaped by the companies that used it, the plays for it or in it will instead have had to adapt to what the theatre gave them. In considering what the Curtain imposed on its plays over time, this chapter will attempt to isolate the Curtain’s uniqueness. It will concentrate not so much on the playhouse’s appearance – which was imitative enough not to be striking – as its social situation (the particular audience that occupied it), its sense of itself (its branding and advertising), its historical situation (the specific events that by chance happened around it), its site (the fields in which it was built), and its reputation (particularly its close associations with clowning). The focus of the paper will be on what the Curtain ‘did’ to three plays mounted there in 1597– 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men: Romeo and Juliet, written for production at the Theatre (or perhaps somewhere else) but played in the Curtain; Henry V, squeezed, in at least one of its versions, inside the Curtain’s small circumference; and Every Man in his Humour, readied, if not written, with a knowledge that the Curtain would be its performance space. As a theatrical biography, then, the essay will be mostly concerned with the early life of the Curtain up until the time that those three plays were performed, though the theatre’s subsequent history will be briefly touched on. Viewing the Curtain’s history through three plays allows us to see how a theatre might affect a text in performance, whilst also raising questions concerning what we do not get back – as well as what we do – when reconstructing a theatre. For if we believe that the Globe and Blackfriars are part of Shakespeare, then we should address the fact that it was for the Curtain that Jonson wrote what many, from John Aubrey onwards, have identified as his first good play; while Shakespeare spent that same period of time – a period identified by Shapiro’s 1599 as ‘the decisive’ year in Shakespeare’s development as a writer – both performing and writing for the Curtain’s stage.

   The only recent modern account of the Curtain to have been put together is the useful collection, largely of legal documents relating to the Curtain, to be found in Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram (eds), English Professional Theatre 1530– 1660 (Cambridge, 2000). Most of the material here, which looks for the feel of the place and so relies on anecdote, is not in that account.    James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London, 2005), xxi.

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Background: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Curtain, 1597–1599 Built in 1577, and not pulled down until, perhaps, after the interregnum, the Curtain was by far the longest standing early modern theatre. It also has the longest performance history: for at least 50 years, maybe more, the Curtain hosted plays, sword-fights and other entertainments. Yet in its extensive history only one play (and no company) acknowledges Curtain performance on its title-page – and then it draws attention to the fact that it was also performed elsewhere: W. Smith’s The Hector of Germany ... As it hath beene publickly acted at the Red-Bull, and at the Curtayne, by a company of young-men of this citie (1615). For some reason Curtain performance never seems to have been something to boast about. The few narratives that relate to the Curtain always suggest that there was something unglamorous about the place (these narratives may, of course, reflect or create that suggestion). John Aubrey, gathering anecdotes from the 1660s onwards, heard that Ben Jonson in his early life ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of ... obscure playhouse somewhere in the suburbs’; while the ‘discovered’ early modern ballad ‘The Atheists’ Tragedie’ (actually a forgery by John Payne Collier) related how ‘Wormall’, an anagram of ‘Marlowe’, had ‘a player beene / Upon the Curtaine-stage, / But brake his leg in one lewd scene / When in his early age’ – by the nineteenth century, the space itself had come to seem doomed. The twentieth century film Shakespeare in Love picks up and promotes the tendency, making the Curtain the playhouse denied to Shakespeare, and so continuing the Curtain’s identity as an ill-fated space – whilst, patronizingly, ignoring everything about the real place apart from its title. For in actual fact the playhouse Burbage owned in 1593 was not the Curtain but the Theatre – but, of course, that name in a film that concerns several playhouses would be confusing to a modern audience: ‘Will Shakespeare has a play. I have a theatre. The Curtain is yours’ would lose considerable punch if it were to read ‘ ... a theatre: The Theatre is yours’. The film thus selects only the title, not the story, of the neglected Curtain playhouse. For it had been the Theatre, constructed a year before the Curtain, that had been the first permanent round playhouse to be built for London. Wide-eyed contemporaries described that striking building as a ‘gorgeous playing place’, praise never afforded to the Curtain just down the road, though both theatres were condemned often enough in the same breath: the very words ‘Theatre’ and ‘Curtain’ came to mean ‘playhouse’ (interestingly, this is not true of inn-theatres of the same period). So Newes from the North writes of going to ‘the Theater, to ye Courtain as they term it’, and John Northbrooke has ‘Youth’ ask ‘Doe you speake against those places ... which are made up and builded for suche Plaies and

   Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay (New York, 1999), 125.    John Stockwood, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse 24 Aug (London, 1578), 134.

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Enterludes, as the Theatre and Curtaines, and other such like places?’ From its moment of construction the Curtain was to share the Theatre’s opprobrium but not its glamour. The difference may have been that while the Theatre had been erected with entrepreneurial excitement, by James Burbage, a man who knew wood – he was a joiner – and knew plays – he was an actor – the builder of the Curtain seems to have had no direct connection either to staging or construction. Actually, we don’t entirely know who paid for the Curtain’s erection, which may be telling in itself. An early landlord for the Curtain was Maurice Long, a clothworker; an early owner of it was a yeoman of the Queen’s guard, Henry Lanman: one or other, or both, or someone else, may have commissioned as well as managed the playhouse. But the Curtain seems to have been built with no particular acting company in mind. Instead it was constructed as a hireable space, analogous to the various London inns, and all provincial playing places: spaces that anyone could acquire on a temporary basis for their shows. Its features are never described as distinguished in any way; rather, it appears to have been an archetypal round theatre: accounts describe how it was ‘built of timber and thatch’, had a ‘round circumference’, and galleries that were raked (in ‘degrees’), containing spaces where, if it rained, the audience would ‘sit dryer ... then those who are the understanding men in the yard’. It was perhaps the very ordinariness of the Curtain that accounts for the fact that in 1585 James Burbage and John Brayne, then owners of the Theatre, asked Henry Lanman, then owner of the Curtain, if he would let his theatre be an ‘easer’ to theirs: as Lanman recounts the transaction ‘Burbage and Braynes taking the Curten as an Esore to their playe housse did of ther own mocion move this Deponent that he wold agree that the proffittes of the said ij Playe howses might for vij yeres space be in Dyvydent between them.’10 It is not entirely clear quite what was the source of ‘ease’ that the Curtain might offer the Theatre. Often it is suggested that the agreement was to provide the Theatre with additional space – but how could pressure on one theatre be eased by acquiring another, different, theatre? What seems more probable, given the fact that this is an arrangement    T.F., Newes from the North (London, 1579); Ll. John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine plaies ... are Reproved (London, 1579), I1v.    See William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca and London, 1992), 224.    John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins, The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (London, 1607), H4v, described in the Stationers’ Register on 29 June 1607 as ‘A playe called the travailles of the Three Englishe brothers as yt was played at the Curten’ – see Edward Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers 1554–1640, (5 vols, London & Birmingham, 1875–1894), 3: 354. John Orrell, ‘The London Stage in the Florentine Correspondence 1604–1618’, Theatre Research International, 3 (1977–1978), 171; written on 22 August 1613. Jack Daw, Vox Graculi (London, 1623), 60–61. 10   PRO C24/226/11[PT 1] transcribed in Charles William Wallace, The First London Theatre: Materials for a History (Lincoln, NE, 1913), 149.

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to pool profits for both playhouses and share them equally, is that the ‘ease’ was financial. In a world in which every playhouse was under constant threat – of closure, fire, or repossession – it may have suited the proprietor of each playhouse to gamble one profit against another: for maybe only one of their theatres was going to make it. If so, the Theatre gambled wisely: it was closed in 1597, as were all theatres, in the furore surrounding the performance of Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson’s The Isle of Dogs at the Swan; it was then repossessed in 1598 by the angry owner of the land in which it stood. No one ever performed there again, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – the company that had been resident at the Theatre since 1594 – had, between 1597 and 1599, to move to the Curtain. Everything the company then did suggests that they were not thrilled with the new arrangement. Already knowing that locals would not let them transfer to the Blackfriars playhouse that they had constructed for just such an emergency, they struggled to get back rights to the Theatre; when that did not work, they deconstructed the old Theatre, acquired an entirely new piece of ground, and erected the Globe there using the Theatre’s old wood. The one thing they did not do over this period was attempt to make the Curtain their permanent home, though the Lanman arrangement had given them rights to the playhouse (indeed they may even have partially owned the place).11 ‘The Curtain effect’ seems to have been something that did not appeal. What happened to the plays performed in, or written for, the Curtain? Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet, an old but popular play, may have been written in 1594 or earlier; it was designed long before Curtain performance was a necessity. Indeed, by the time the Lord Chamberlain’s men arrived at the Curtain, Romeo and Juliet had already been printed in corrupt form (Q1, 1597); it was brought out in uncorrupt form while the company was at the Curtain itself (Q2, 1599).12 Yet when, in 1598, John Marston writes of ‘Luscus’ who steals all his conversational prowess, his jests and flirtatious phrases out of plays, he first asks the theatre-obsessive ‘what’s playd to day?’ (obviously a question about performance rather than reading), then explains what the response is: ‘I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow / Naught but pure Juliat and Romio.’ As it turns out, Luscus has learned passages from the play out of the notes he has written down in his ‘common-place booke’ – clearly something he did during performance as everything he now says is

11

  A suggestion made by William Ingram in ‘Henry Lanman’s Curtain Playhouse as an “Easer” to the Theatre, 1585–1592’, in Herbert Berry (ed.), The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch 1576–1598 (Montreal, 1979), 17–28. 12   See Andrew Gurr, ‘The Date and the Expected Venue of Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey, 49 (1996): 15–25.

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described as being ‘warranted by Curtaine plaudities’.13 Luscus, suggests the poem, is getting his Romeo and Juliet from performances at the Curtain. Other plays of the time make the same point. A second-rate lover is described in a 1599 university play, The Return to Parnassus, as speaking ‘nothinge but pure Shakspeare, and shreds of poetrie that he hath gathered at the theators’, again highlighting the fact that the theatre, rather than print, is the source of the Romeo and Juliet lines he brutally misquotes (‘the moone in comparison of thy bright hue [is] a meere slutt, Anthonies Cleopatra a blacke browde milkmaide, Hellen a dowdie’, a mangled version of Shakespeare’s ‘Laura to his Lady, was a kitchen wench, ... Dido a dowdie, Cleopatra a Gipsie ... ’ (TLN 1143–4)).14 Thus twice during the ‘Curtain’ period of performance we learn of audiences going to Romeo and Juliet for verbal titbits that they can use in their later, post-play flirtations. Extracting lubricious or amusing matter from the words or gestures of plays was a habit of audiences – but might it have been a habit of Curtain audiences in particular? George Wither describes a man whose wooing language ‘is such as he can cull, / From plaies he heard at Curtaine or at Bull, / And yet is fine coy MistresMarry-Muffe, / The soonest taken with such broken stuffe’; ‘Momus’, goes ‘to the Curtaine’ to pick up hints at fooling, and ‘notes ... downe’ not the text but ‘that action ... that likes him best’.15 In these examples, we are not even told what the plays are: what is important – what tells readers everything they need to know – is from where the plays emanate. But if the audience learnt the words and gestures for their flirtations and jokes from performance, then the Curtain will have put on plays with that knowledge: plays that were not simply bawdy in themselves, but the ‘teachers’ of bawdiness in others. Stubbs writing in the 1580s describes spectators running to ‘Theatres & curtens’ to see productions (again, it seems immaterial of which plays) ‘where such wanton gestures, such bawdie speeches: such laughing and fleering: such kissing and bussing: such clipping and culling: Suche winckinge and glancinge of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderfull to behold’.16 Romeo and Juliet has its own fair scattering of clipping and culling visible whether the play was put on at Theatre or Curtain; but it is audience behavior regarding its post-play ‘use’ after Curtain performance that we know about. Those references suggests that Romeo and Juliet, in its Curtain form at any rate, was one of a number of plays that came to function like flirtation – or even sexual – manuals.

  John Marston, Scourge of Villanie (London, 1598), H4.   The First Part of the Return to Parnassus in J.B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (London, 1949), 183–4. Quotations from Shakespeare are taken from Charlton Hinman’s Norton Facsimile (New York, 1968) of the 1623 Folio, using the Through Line Numbering (TLN) of that edition. 15   George Wither[s], Abuses (London, 1613), D3v; John Heath, Two Centuries of Epigrammes (London, 1610), E3v. 16   Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), L8–L8v. 13

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Its bawdy side will have been designed to appeal both to its Curtain and its Theatre audiences, of course, for these playhouses were reputed to be places where sex could be easily enflamed and easily acquired. After a play audience members might sleep with one another’s spouses (‘The Theater & Curtine may aptlie be termed ... the chappell Adulterinum’); or might experiment in ‘deviant’ – and perhaps homosexual – congress: ‘every one bringes another homeward of their way verye freendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse.’17 But it is a trip to the Curtain for which we have a single eye-witness account. During the time in which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were performing, Simon Forman the astrologer, often quoted for the summaries he wrote of the Shakespeare plays he saw at the Globe, paid two visits to the playhouse. They are recorded in his astrological diaries under the heading ‘Sarah Archdel’, a woman whom Forman hoped to woo to marriage, or something less permanent. His first account from 1599 records: The 19 of Aprill I was at the Caurtean and ther she came & her unkell & frendes and sate before me and after the play we wente in to the feldes together and soe I had some parly with her – but nothing of any thinge totching the matter and she semed very kind & courteouse & I led her by the hand all the waie all moste ... 18

Two days later, he wonders whether Sarah’s uncle will help him do more than hand-holding: ‘Questo 1599 22 aprill ... whe[the]r her unkell will assist me or be against me in my suet or no.’ In pursuance of the answer to his question ‘This dai he and I met at the Curtean againe and after walked in the fild but he I never moved the matter to him’.19 Forman was seeing performances by Burbage and Kempe and Shakespeare – but it’s the possibility of post-performative sex that is foremost in Forman’s mind, and is, by the second trip to the theatre, what he is attending the Curtain for. Was Romeo and Juliet the kind of play he was seeing (was it, indeed, one of the plays he saw)? Plays put on at the Curtain had at least to acknowledge that the staged production was not necessarily the audience’s main purpose in going to the theatre. At the Curtain, as makes marketing sense, the theatre seems to have embraced the sexual needs of its audience. It certainly had a particular name for its prostitutes – even amongst the whore-filled theatres of the time. Middleton, a playwright familiar with many playhouses, singles out the Curtain in 1604 when he writes ‘Little thought I, madam, that the camp had been supplied with harlots too as well as the Curtain.’20 Indeed, so associated was the Curtain with prostitution that the bawdyhouses nearby were casually described with reference to the playhouse they 17   William Rankins, The Mirrour of Monsters (London, 1587), B4; Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, L8. 18   Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 219, fol. 56. 19   Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 219, fol. 56. 20   Thomas Middleton, Father Hubburds Tales (London, 1604), E1.

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flanked, as though the one produced the other – as may indeed have been the case. Richard West writes of a ‘whoremonger’ picking his way carefully along the path ‘Towards the Curtaine’ to a house of ill repute, and Everard Guilpin depicts an old man ‘Who comming from the Curtaine sneaketh in, / To some odde garden noted house of sinne’, suggesting that the theatrical performance has brought about his subsequent expedition.21 Thus we can conjecture that the spectatorship for Romeo and Juliet in the Curtain’s 1597–1598 performances will have included a significant number of highly charged men, and a fair smattering of loose women, and that the sexual words and gestures of Romeo and Juliet will have been, by some, avidly assimilated for reproduction outside the playhouse. The popularity of its bawdy is made clear in parodies that flourished at the time, like Thomas Heywood’s How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602) in which young Arthur ‘poisons’ his chaste Juliet-like wife (actually with a sleeping-potion: she later wakes up in her tomb) in order to marry ‘an immodest curtizan’;22 and Henry Porter’s The Two Angry Women of Abington, in which Frank woes from below as Mall leans out of a window, the whole exchange being a skit of the ‘balcony scene’: Mal. I but me thinkes you speake without the booke, To place a sower wheele waggon in my looke, Where will you have roome to have the coach man fit? Fran. Nay, that were but small manners, and not fit, His dutie is before you bare to stand, Having a lustie whipstocke in his hand.23

Was Romeo and Juliet’s hammily sexual side always paramount – or did Curtain performance stilt the play so much that it had to be parodied? In Curtain performance, indeed, might it have ended up being played as a parody of itself? While the whore-filled audience was a characteristic shared – though perhaps to a lesser extent – by other playhouses, there was one absolutely Curtain-specific feature that must have uniquely affected every production. Like every theatre, the Curtain had its own ‘branding’; it possessed a distinctive visual image, a ‘sign’, that would have been prominently displayed on its flag, signpost and, perhaps, playbills. Naturally, in a world in which there was a fair amount of illiteracy, theatres’ signs were as important as theatres’ names; indeed, they generally represented those names, so that a theatre’s title came to seem doubly loaded: loaded as a word, and loaded as a visual statement. De Witt, writing in 1596, explains that he knows of four London playhouses ‘which from their diverse 21

  Richard West, The Court of Conscience (London, 1607), D3; Everard Guilpin, Skialetheia (London 1598), B7. 22   Thomas Heywood, A Pleasant Conceited Comedie, Wherein is Shewed, How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad (London, 1602), I1. 23   Henry Porter, The Pleasant History of the Two Angry Women of Abington (London, 1599), F1.

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signs bear diverse names’, mistakenly suggesting that the theatre’s names derive from their flags and signboards, rather than vice versa. His error highlights the visual power of these symbolic representations: a theatre’s ‘sign’ was a way of interpreting the place itself. De Witt concentrates on the signs of what he calls the four London ‘amphitheatres’ (meaning round theatres): the Swan – which, from the van Buchell/De Witt ‘Swan’ drawing, we know had a swan image on its main flag (and, as part of the place’s intensive branding, a tiny swan-flag hanging from the herald’s trumpet); the Rose – which, from its misidentification as the ‘Stare’ (star) playhouse in Norden’s Civitas Londini map of 1600, we know had a sharpedged patriotic Tudor rose as its sign (in the instance of the misidentification, the sign emerges as being more powerful than the actual name itself).24 The other two amphitheatres with the telling signs ‘are outside the city towards the north on the highway which issues through the ... Bishopsgate’: The Theatre and The Curtain.25 Given that the Theatre’s name mirrored its classical pretensions (‘they please to have it called, a Theatre, that is, even after the maner of the olde heathenish Theatre at Rome’) its sign can be guessed at: it will have been of a theatre, perhaps the Theatre, perhaps a classical construction, either way radiating assured selfconfidence.26 The Curtain, built nearby, had not been named nearly so carefully: it had been simply and unambitiously titled for the space it occupied. For ‘the Curtain’ was the title given to an area consisting of fields and houses enclosed by walls (curtains); or, alternatively, given to a court or close (from the medieval Latin, ‘cortina’), and the theatre’s site embraced ‘al that the house, tenement or lodge commonly called the Curtain, and also all that parcel of ground and close, walled and enclosed with a brick wall ... called also the Curtain close, sometime appertaining to the late Priory of Holywell’.27 Yet naturally the name ‘curtain’ itself will not have been free of theatrical connotations. Though critics have fallen over themselves to debunk the association between ‘The Curtain’ and a theatrical curtain, they forget that whatever the name originally referred to, it was used for a playhouse – and a playhouse just down the road from another that had a pointedly theatrical name. We can guess, then, that at this time the sign of the Curtain was ... a curtain. George Steevens, the eighteenth-century theatre historian and editor, may fill in the detail; he claimed, without providing a source, that ‘The original sign hung out at this theatre was the painting of a striped Curtain’.28 Edmund Malone 24   John Norden, Civitas Londini map (1600); the Swan theatre drawing is in Arendt van Buchell, ‘Ex observationibus Londinensibus Johannis De Witt’ (1596), Library of Utrecht University MS var 355, fols 131v–32. 25   van Buchell, ‘Ex observationibus’, fols 131v–32. 26   Stockwood, A Sermon, 134. 27   PRO C54/884/m.17–19, in Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses (Cambridge, MA, 1917), 76. 28   William Shakespeare, Prolegomena to the Dramatick Writings of Will. Shakspere (20 vols, London, 1785–1788), 1:293.

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followed him in this identification, then questioned it: ‘I never could learn on what authority Mr Steevens says the sign was a striped curtain .... The sign without doubt was a curtain, and it is of little consequence whether variegated; yet ... one would wish to be correct.’29 James Hawkins demurs maintaining that: ‘the sign of the theatre ... was a green curtain’, quoting as his source Anthony à Wood, who had not in fact addressed the sign at all, but had followed Aubrey in calling the playhouse ‘the Green Curtain’; this may, however, reflect a half remembered truth, that the playhouse was ‘at the sign of the green curtain’.30 Yet even ignoring this questionable information, the link between the theatre’s name and an actual curtain was undoubtedly early modern in origin, for when I.H. attacks Greene the clown, sharer in the Curtain, in 1615, it is because he and his contemporaries ‘were wont’ as the pun had it ‘to Curtaine over their defects’.31 Given that a theatre of this kind would have had curtains hung over doors of entrance and exit during performance – and along whatever ‘discovery space’ there was – the sign presumably was of (or evoked) stage curtains. This Curtain symbol will have worked its way into plays performed under it – at least that is the logical extension of the claim made by critics who ‘spot’ the Globe’s sign, Hercules with the world on his back, in Hamlet and Anthony and Cleopatra. Plays for or in the Curtain that make use of stage-curtains may have been angled in ways that they were not when performed in a different space. So, whether put on in the Theatre or the Curtain, Romeo and Juliet uses bed-curtain metaphors, as when morning ‘begin[s] to draw / The shadie Curtaines from Auroras bed’ (TLN 137–8) and later when ‘love performing night’ is to ‘Spred thy close Curtaine’ (TLN 1649); in both theatres, too, that metaphor is made ‘real’ at the latter end of the text when Juliet exits in a curtained bed (on ‘here’s drinke: I drinke to thee’, TLN 2538), and re-enters, again on her bed, to be discovered ‘dead’ by the nurse. In either playhouse, similarly, those ‘real’ curtains distressingly recall the earlier hopeful and sexually suggestive metaphor of the curtains. But in the Curtain theatre, any staged curtains are overtly metatheatrical in a way they are not at the Theatre, for now they also recall the playhouse’s name and sign – indeed, the bedcurtains used on stage may be the very curtains depicted on the flag. This means that, in the Curtain, the playhouse itself is confounded in one of the play’s striking metaphors, also seeming to offer sex but revealing ‘death’, its layered references exposed one-by-one like a Japanese box: the Curtain contains a curtain, containing a bed with a curtain. The playhouse itself ‘intrudes’ at a subtle and important 29   Edmond Malone quotes Steevens on the Curtain’s sign in Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage (Basil, 1800), 55. His later lack of confidence in the information is expressed in a private letter to Isaac Reed, quoted in James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, Editor of Shakespeare: With Selections from His Manuscript Anecdotes (London, 1860), 461. 30   James Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (5 vols, London, 1776), 4:65–6; Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (London, 1691), 518. 31   I.H., This Worlds Folly (London, 1615), B2.

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moment in the play – and not at a point where the play was ‘designed’ for that to happen. Shakespeare was fascinated by misleading signs – the alehouse sign of the ‘castle’ (rather than a castle itself) underneath which Somerset is killed in 2 Henry VI; the ‘Jerusalem’ that marks not Israel but the room in which Henry IV dies in 2 Henry IV. He is likely to have been profoundly conscious that the Curtain’s sign would affect his drama in ways difficult to unpick without careful rewriting. The Curtain playhouse with its knowing audience and its telling sign may have reinterpreted Romeo and Juliet in ways displeasing to its author; perhaps this was one reason why Shakespeare was keen to get away from it to a new theatre whose image he could help design. Certainly he moved over the Thames to the Globe site well before that new theatre was completed, his loyalties physically abstracted from the place where he was currently performing and writing. Henry V There is a difference, of course, between watching a theatre reshape an old play, as with Romeo and Juliet, and writing a new play with that theatre in mind. Shakespeare seems to have penned at least one play for the Curtain and also to have acknowledged the fact in his writing. Henry V dates from 1599 – or, at least, its prologue does; as James Bednarz points out, Jonson’s Every Man Out (1600) parodies at least the prologue if not also the choruses of Henry V. So Cordatus’s instructions to Mitis about the best way to watch Every Man Out are: Let your imagination be swifter then a paire of Oares, and by this, suppose Puntaruolo, Briske, Fungoso, and the Dog, arriu’d at the Court gate, & going vp to the great chamber. Macilente and Sogliardo, wee’ll leaue them on the water till possibility and natural means may land ’hem.32

This instruction takes up the plea in Henry V to let imagination help the audience ‘suppose’ what cannot be shown on the stage: ‘let us, .../ On your imaginarie Forces worke. / Suppose within the Girdle of these Walls / Are now confin’d two mightie Monarchies ... ’ (TLN 18–21).33 Dutton, elsewhere in this volume, suggests that the chorus and prologue were added from scratch in 1602, but the evidence he adduces may actually indicate a 1602 rewriting. Given Bednarz’s reinstatement of the idea of a 1599 prologue – raising linked questions about the date of the chorus – it becomes reasonable, once again, to trace the chorus’s remark about ‘the Generall of our gracious Empresse’ primed to return from fighting the Irish ‘bringing Rebellion broached on his Sword’ (TLN 2880–2) to the Earl of Essex, 32

  Ben Jonson, The Comicall Satyre of Every Man Out of His Humour (London, 1600), N3. 33   See James P. Bednarz, ‘When did Shakespeare Write the Choruses of Henry V?’, Notes and Queries, 53 (2006): 486–9.

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the only nobleman fighting Irish wars in 1599. Following this line of thought, the play, or, rather, the play’s framework, can be more specifically dated to the spring of that year when Essex (who was not in fact triumphant) still appeared to be doing well. This dating would make Henry V either one of the last plays the Lord Chamberlain’s Men put on at the Curtain or one of the first they put on at the Globe.34 The prologue (and choruses) suggest which is the case. Their doing-down of their stage is hardly a way of promoting a brand new theatre, but might be used to express disappointment at an old one. With their references to the stage as an ‘unworthy Scaffold’ (TLN 10), and their regular harping on the playhouse’s irritatingly small size – ‘this Cock-Pit’ (TLN 11) where the actors ‘[confined] in little roome’ (TLN 3370) can barely ‘cramme’ (TLN 12) anything – Henry V’s prologue and choruses seem depressed by their own physical situation. Indeed, the ‘O’ of the famous ‘Woodden O’ (TLN 14) analogy, though always, and rightly, pronounced ‘oh’, is simultaneously a sigh and a wooden naught, for, as the words go on to say, only ‘this great Accompt’ – which might be the history itself, or Shakespeare’s play – can add a number to the actors’ cipher: ... may we cramme Within this Woodden O. the very Caskes That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt? O pardon: since a crooked Figure may Attest in little place a Million, And let us, Cyphers to this great Accompt, On your imaginarie Forces worke. (TLN 11–18)

‘Naught’, then, hovers suggestively over the whole speech and in the rhyme word ‘Agincourt’: the theatre in which this play is set, the chorus seems to be saying, is ‘naught’ – nothing. This is hardly a mock modest way to sell a new theatre into which you have sunk all your money and hopes, the Globe.35 Rather, it suggests a play obliged to be staged at the Curtain – though probably written in the hope of the Globe production it would have gone on to have. Indeed, the prologue and chorus were, as I have argued elsewhere, time and theatre-specific, and seem to have dropped away by the time the company had moved to the Globe and the play was first (in corrupt form) published in 1600.36

34   Melissa D. Aaron, ‘The Globe and Henry V as Business Document’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 40 (2000): 277–92. 35   As suggested by Andrew Gurr, The First Quarto of King Henry V, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Early Quartos (Cambridge, 2000), 4. 36   For the specific connection between prologues, theatres and occasions see Tiffany Stern, ‘“A Small-Beer Health to his Second Day”: Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theatre’, Studies in Philology, 101 (2004): 172–199,

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Shakespeare may, however, also have been able to exploit the uncomfortable situation in which Henry V found itself performed. At any rate, the play seems, minutely, to have battened on the earliest big event to shake up (literally) the lives of Theatre and Curtain alike: an event that had happened years before the Lord Chamberlain’s Men arrived at the Curtain, but that was still powerfully associated with the place. At 6 pm on Wednesday, 6 April 1580, an earthquake had rocked the newly-built Theatre and Curtain, then full for a performance. The frightened audience thinking that the buildings themselves were about to collapse, had fought to get out into the fields, being less worried by the natural disaster than by the wooden buildings in which they found themselves. H. Carr composed ‘a ballet’, now lost, ‘comme from the plaie, comme from the playe: the house will fall, so people saye: the earth quakes, lett us hast away’, and Thomas Churchyard describes how the members of the audience sitting highest in the building – who will have corresponded, roughly, to those paying the most – were particularly threatened: A number being at the Theatre and the Curtaine at Hollywell, beholding the playes, were so shaken, especially those that stoode in the hyghest roomthes and standings, that they were not a little dismayed, considering, that they coulde no waye shifte for themselves, unlesse they woulde, by leaping, hazarde their lives or limmes, as some did in deede, leaping from the lowest standings.37

The damage done was slight in fact: no one was killed. But the psychological damage was permanent and long-lasting. For the next 20 years, the playhouses continued to be viewed as threatening spaces as likely to attack as protect; the audience panicked whenever they heard the wood of the playhouses settling. One reference tells how, during Doctor Faustus, ‘the old Theater crackt and frighted the Audience’; another relates how ‘tumults often are at stage-playes bred ... when the overloden seates do cracke’.38 Moreover, the playhouses continued to be associated with earthquakes for at least the next quarter century. Writing in 1606, Gardiner reminds the reader not of actual disasters that killed people – like the earthquake that brought about the collapse of the Paris Garden bear-baiting-ring in 1583 – but instead of ‘The earthquake that hapned in the yeere 1580 ... that shaked not only the scenicall Theatre, but the great stage and theatre of the whole land’.39 So when Shakespeare has Exeter in Henry V claim that the king will come to France ‘in fierce Tempest ... In Thunder and in Earth-quake’ (TLN 991–5), he knows that this threat has a place-specific meaning. Spoken in the Curtain, this and Stern, ‘Repatching the Play’, in Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (London, 2004), 151–77. 37   Arber (ed.), Transcript 2:368; Thomas Churchyard, A Warning for the Wise (London, 1580), B2. 38   Thomas Middleton, The Blacke Booke (London, 1604), B4; Sir John Harington, Orlando Furioso (London, 1591), O2. 39   S. Gardiner, Doomes-day Booke (London, 1606), 28.

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minor, and part-biblical, reference is nevertheless genuinely disturbing: it gives the audience minute pause, asking them to question the king’s brashness and so their own alliances. And, just as Henry is blasé with his extravagant claims, so too the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet makes light of quakes: in both instances the earthquake seems to have more meaning than its speakers realise. Says Juliet’s Nurse, ‘‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years; And [Juliet] was wean’d, I never shall forget it, of all the daies of the yeare, upon that day’ (TLN 378). Again, the quotation seems topical to place – so much so that critics regularly try to date Romeo using this reference as one way of dating the play, counting eleven years forward from 1580 or, picking their earthquakes, 1583. That is unlikely to be the way the analogy works – why would a playwright choose a comparison that needs re-dating on a yearly basis? – but the earthquake does indeed make bitter weaning for Juliet, linking her earliest attempt at independence with tragedy and showing her to be, perhaps like the theatres she inhabits, unstable and ready to endanger others in her own disaster. If Shakespeare had to suffer Curtain performance, perhaps he used it too. Every Man In his Humour One play unwittingly altered by Curtain performance was Jonson’s Every Man In – and, it seems, Jonson liked the fact. At any rate, he reminded readers about the play’s first production even when he rewrote the text itself. Thus the later, revised, Every Man In, a different play that is set in London rather than Italy, has a confusing title page that records the play’s (first) performance date, 1598, and (first) principal players: ‘Will Shakespeare, Ric. Burbadge ... Will. Kempe’.40 That first performance is the only of the three Curtain plays that can be absolutely dated, for the unpropitious reason that a foreign dignitary, an ‘Almain’, ‘lost 300 crowns at a new play called Every Man’s humour’ on 20th September 1598.41 Thus the two 1598 snapshots we have of the play – title-page and anecdote – show Every Man In attended by dignitary and pickpocket alike, and enacted by men of varied social rank (including Shakespeare, an actor-playwright who just two years earlier had, it seems, financed his father’s application for arms in order to establish his own position as a ‘gentleman’). Much of the comedy of Every Man In is specifically about just such social issues: in particular, it niggles at the loose connection between having rank and having money. Matheo asks Cob how the grand Bobadilla can possibly ‘lodge in such a base obscure place as thy house’; Cob replies that Bobadilla not only lives

  Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Jonson (London, 1616), 72.   Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1598–1601 (1869; rpt. Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1967), 97. 40 41

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with him but ‘owes me fortie shillings ... besides his lodging’.42 Part of the satire is to laugh at the props with which people attempt to bolster or convey their rank; in particular, at their rapiers. Like Romeo and Juliet, Every Man In exploits the craze for fighting in the Italian style that was sweeping London, a method that had been extolled by the famous Italian fencer Vincentio Saviolo, in classes and in his book, Saviolo his Practice (1595).43 Jonson pokes fun at the newly-popular Italian fighting terminology: so Bobadilla will save the state the cost of warfare by selecting 19 gentlemen and teaching them ‘special tricks, as your Punto, your Reverso, your Stoccato, your Imbroccato, your Passado, your Monsaunto, till they [can] all play very neare or altogether as well as myselfe’ (I2). Preparing to stage Every Man In at the Curtain, Jonson may have battened on the fact that the place of performance was historically famous for hosting fencing matches. For students of fencing needed to fight publicly in order to rise from ‘free scholars’, to ‘provosts’ and eventually ‘masters’ of the sword, and the ‘playing of prizes’ had been regularly staged in the Curtain and Theatre in the 1580s and perhaps later: ‘Androwe Bello playd his Provosts prize at the Courten in Holiwell the fiveth daye of July and at thre weapons, the longe sword, the staffe and the sword and buckeler ... [he] was made a Provoste under ffrauncies Calvert / 1582.’44 Every Man In jokes about fencing-snobs to an audience who may have been trained to be such snobs in the very place in which they were situated. Again, then, the Curtain audience is potentially adding something to the production – allowing Jonson to jibe at the social and educational background of his observers. Yet, as was also typical with Jonson, he became a product of the thing he criticized. On September 22 1598, two days after Every Man In’s first performance, Ben Jonson went to Hoxton Fields, fought a duel with an actor from the Admiral’s Men, Gabriel Spenser, and killed him. According to the Latin legal record, Jonson ‘feloniously and wilfully struck and assaulted ... Gabriel Spencer with a certain sword of iron and steel called in English a Rapier, costing 3s’.45 The information the coroner noted, as was usual at the time, was what type of sword was used, what metals it was made of, and how much it cost, assessing Jonson, in a sense, as the value of his sword, just as, in the play, Stephano believes that a Spanish Toledo (ideally one with a silver hilt) will reflect his own worth. The coroner’s details may well have been supplied by Jonson himself; certainly the playwright 42

  Ben Jonson, Every Man In His Humour (London, 1601), C1v–C2v. All further citation parenthetically in the text. 43   For the importance of Saviolo to Romeo and Juliet see Joan Ozark Holmer, ‘“Draw, if you be Men”: Saviolo’s Significance for Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994): 163–89; for his importance to Every Man In see Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, ed. Robert S. Miola (Manchester, 2000), 11, 20. 44   Transcribed in Herbert Berry, The Noble Science: A Study and Transcription of Sloane MS 2530, Papers of the Masters of Defence of London (Newark, 1991), 12. See also 13, 43, 44, 46, 49. 45   J.C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex Sessions Rolls (London, 1886–1892), 1:xxxviii.

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continued, later in life, to view his successful sword as a wonderful comment on his self-worth, crowing to Drummond that he had ‘killed his adversarie, which had hurt him in the arme’ even though Spenser’s sword had been technically superior at ‘10 inches Longer than his’.46 The sword-pride that is so laughable in the play leaves the fiction and becomes fact. It is no surprise in the circumstances, that contemporaries picked up on the way Jonson’s action in the fields by the Curtain made him appear ‘Jonsonian’ – a choleric character victim of wayward ‘humours’ himself. One year after Every Man In’s first performance Robert Allot quoted lines from the play in his book England’s Parnassus (1600) which he had seemingly captured during performance – the play was not in print when he put his collection together. Just as others had gone to the Curtain to pick up love mots, Allot had gathered there two passages of powerful speech, both of which he used, tellingly, as illustrations of ‘jealousy’, and both of which show how a man can become entirely victim to his emotions: ‘first it begins / Solely to worke upon the phantasie, / Filling her seat with such pestiferous aire, / As soone corrupts the judgement’ goes one of them.47 This very selection implies much about how the play was being understood by 1600. Jonson’s precipitous action seems to have highlighted for listeners what was not comic about his play; Allot’s choice of speeches on jealousy and bad judgement seems to reflect this, meaning that Every Man In was reinterpreted in the light of its author’s actions in the Curtain fields. Indeed, not only Jonson’s fight but its Curtain-hugging location were remembered long after his poor victim had been forgotten. John Aubrey learned, wrongly, from Sir Edward Shirburn that ‘[Jonson] killed Mr ... Marlow, the poet, on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-Curtain playhouse’.48 Just as the Curtain’s bawdyhouses had been described as though they were features of the theatre itself, so the surrounding fields and the events that took place in them came to seem part of the playhouse in some way. The Curtain’s name was regularly confounded with its situation, being titled ‘The Curtaine in Moorefeildes’ or remembered as ‘the Curtin In the feildes’.49 When apprentices rioted in those fields ‘my Lo. sent ij Aldermen to the Court for the suppressing and pulling downe of the Theatre and Curten’ even though neither theatre can have had much to do with the uprising as they were in performance at the time.50 Activities in the fields surrounding performance were coming to seem aspects of the theatre and were being used to (re)interpret the plays performed there. 46   Ben Jonson, Discoveries 1641 and Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden 1619 (London, 1923), 11. 47   Robert Allot, England’s Parnassus (London, 1600), 143; the lines quoted are 2.1.30–31 and 3.2.28. 48   Aubrey, Brief Lives, 2:12, 13. 49   Quoted in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923), 4:332; the Duke of Newcastle’s recommendations ‘To K Charles’, transcribed in G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (7 vols, Oxford, 1941–1968), 6:122. 50   Lansdown MS 41, fol. 31, transcribed in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:297–98.

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Clowning, and the afterlife of plays As I have argued, the ‘peripheral’ elements of the Curtain – audience, advertising, event, field – may have shaped performances and plays at least as much as the internal structure of the building. Then again, the Curtain was a place of peripheries. Even when within the walls of the Curtain, ‘extra-play’ theatrical activities were as famous, and perhaps more famous, than the plays put on there. One rhyme celebrates, without providing names, ‘the fat foole of the Curtin, / and the leane foole of the Bull’.51 For the playhouse had a particularly good reputation for its clowns: all the more surprising given that it did not have an association with a particular performing company. Yet of the performers who are known to have played at the Curtain over time, most are clowns – we have Curtain sightings of Richard Tarlton, Will Rowley, Thomas Green, Thomas Pope, Will Kempe and Robert Armin.52 Similarly, what happened after the end of the play, when the clown owned the stage, is what we know best about Curtain performance. Tarlton famously answered ‘themes’ at the Curtain when the Queen’s Men played there in the 1580s, creating extempore replies to questions shouted out at him; while postplay jigs were, like the Romeo and Juliet and Every Man snippets, taken out of the playhouse – yet performed with a memory of place attached to them. Wither refers to ‘A Curtaine jigge, a libel, or a ballet ... For fiddlers ... To sing at doores’.53 Will Kempe, clown of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598–1599, may, then, have been delighted to find himself at the Curtain, for he was especially famous for his jigs: ‘Will Kemp ... hath spent his life in mad Jigges and merry jestes’ was his description of himself.54 Every Man In, which lists Kempe as amongst its first performers, ends, in its 1598 Curtain version, with 15 of its 16 characters on stage. The missing character, ‘Cob’ the comic waterbearer, is said to be about to come on to entertain everyone: ‘And now to make our evening happinesse more full: this night you shall be all my guestes: where weele injoy the very spirite of mirth’ (sig. M2v). The Curtain play itself, that is, makes way for Kempe’s ‘merriments’. And yet Kempe fell out with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, seemingly during the Curtain years: he signed up to be a sharer in the Globe, but then withdrew from that and from the company. It is over this same Curtain period that Robert Armin, the company’s new wise fool, seems to have been acquired; quite when this happened, and quite how, are mysteries. Yet both that year seem to have wanted to be seen as the ‘real’ clown of the Curtain. In 1600, Armin published two books. One was called Foole upon Foole, and had a loaded description of who had authored it: ‘Written by one, seeming to have   William Turner, Turners Dish of Lenten Stuffe (London, 1612).   Tarlton, Kempe, and Armin are dealt with in this section. Rowley is described at the Curtain in A Banquet of Jeasts (London, 1630), 64; Pope and Green purchased shares in the Curtain. 53   Wither[s], Abuses, R1v. See also William West’s essay in this volume. 54   Will Kempe, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (London, 1600), A2v. 51

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his mothers witte, when some say he is fild with his fathers fopperie ... Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe.’55 His name shows possessive ownership of the Curtain space, of Tarlton who is presumably his projected ‘father’, and of his sense of self (‘snuff’, for a candle end, was a joke about his small height). The Latin of the phrase is telling, too: Armin is separating his brand of foolery, educated, verbal, ‘wise’, from Kempe’s physical humour. He published a second book that year: Quips upon Questions, or, A Clownes Conceite on Occasion Offered by ‘Clunnyco de Curtanio Snuffe’.56 This is a collection of playhouse ‘themes’, including seemingly Curtain-specific questions like ‘Wher’s Tarleton?’ (D4). Perhaps it was in order to restate his claim to his original space and audience that Kempe changed his loyalty to Worcester’s Men, and returned as one of them to the suburbs of Bishopsgate when the Chamberlain’s men had gone. At a theatre there – almost certainly the Curtain, though just possibly the Boar’s Head (an inn which contained a theatre) – Thomas Platter saw a clown throwing a shoe in 1600, the very time when Armin was proclaiming himself clown of the Curtain in print: in the suburb at Bishopsgate, ... I beheld a play in which they presented diverse nations and an Englishman struggling together for a maiden; ... the German ... won the girl in a tussle, and then sat down by her side ... when he and his servant drank themselves tipsy, so that they were both fuddled ... the servant proceeded to hurl his shoe at his master’s head, whereupon they both fell asleep; ... in conclusion they danced very charmingly in English and Irish fashion.57

We know the shoe-thrower was Kempe, for that incident was famous enough to be referred to in another play of the same time, Jonson’s Globe sequel to Every Man In, Every Man Out of his Humour, in which a character wishes he ‘had one of Kemps shooes to throw after you’.58 As this suggests, both Armin and Kempe relished Curtain superiority, one in print terms, one in performance terms, at the very moment when even the Master of the Revels had given up on the playhouse. On 22 June 1600, Edward Alleyn petitioned for rights to build a new theatre, the Fortune. The then Master of the Revels, Edmund Tylney, defending Alleyn’s idea to raise yet another theatre explains that ‘the house now in hand to be built by the said Edward Allen is not intended to increase the number of the Play-houses, but to be instead of another’, that ‘the Curtain [will] be ... either ruinated or applied to some other good use’.59   Robert Armin, Foole upon Foole (London, 1600).   Robert Armin, Quips upon Questions (London, 1600). 57   Thomas Platter and Horatio Busino, The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (London, 1995), 26. 58   Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of his Humour, Q1 (London, 1600), O1. The connection between the two is drawn by David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown (Cambridge, 1987), 146. 59   Transcribed in John Roche Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council 1599–1600 (London, 1905), 397. 55

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The threatened Curtain can hardly, then, have appealed as a physical space; but perhaps its mental space inspired the clowns. It may have been known for the freedom it offered clowns; the freedom to joke and extemporize that Shakespeare has Hamlet speak out against. Perhaps the Curtain in general provided opportunities that Shakespeare objected to, and that Jonson accommodated. The End of the Story The Curtain’s end is something of a mystery. It was not eventually ‘ruinated’ when the Fortune was built, and it staggered on, hosting, to our knowledge, in succession, Queen Anne’s Men (between 1603 and 1609), The Prince’s Men (1611 and 1619–1623), some young men of the city (1615), and Elizabeth and Charles’s Men (1615–1617), until, in about 1625, it was relegated for the use of fencers.60 On 21 February 1627 it is described as swamped with excrement, and two men are charged ‘for casting six tunn of filth, taken of common previes, into the common shoare neer the curtaine Playyhouse’.61 Yet still the playhouse survived. In 1660 a list of ‘common whores, night-walkers, pickpockets, wanderers and shoplifters and whippers in London’ includes ‘Mrs Mails by the Curtain playhouse’; as late as 1698 Samuel Newton collects rent on a ‘garden and houses called the Curtain playhouse in Hallowell Lane in Shoreditch’.62 Something called ‘playhouse’, perhaps the building itself turned into tenements, perhaps a memory of where it had been, continues to mark the Curtain’s space. It certainly remained the home of jigs long into the interregnum: a ballad called ‘The Man in the MOON Drinks Clarret: As it was lately Sung at the Curtain Holy-Well’ (perhaps a memorial to the 1621 Curtain play of that name) was printed between 1658 and 1664.63 As it seems, the Curtain was flanking its fencing matches or whatever other performances were taking place there with the last surviving relic of its playhouse past: ‘In Wine we 60   For information about Queen Anne’s Men’s performances, see Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 1:158; for information about Prince’s Men’s performances, see Loreen L. Giese, ‘Theatrical Citings and Bitings: Some References to Playhouses and Players in London Consistory Court Depositions, 1586–1611’, Early Theatre, 1 (1998): 113–28, 118, and Bentley, Stage, 1:201; for information about the ‘young-men of this citie’ see the titlepage to W. Smith’s The Hector of Germany ... As it hath beene publickly acted at the ... Curtayne (1615); for information about Elizabeth and Charles’s Men see Bentley, Stage, 4:868 – who writes about the amalgamated company, but is not sure about where they performed – and Giese, ‘Theatrical Citings’, 117, which provides fresh documentary evidence about the site of performance. 61   John Cordy Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (old series) (4 vols, London, 1888; rpt. London, 1974), 3:64. 62   John Garfield, The Wandering Whore (1600), B3v–B4, reproduced in facsimile by The Rota (Exeter, 1977); Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 13, 308–18, quoted in Lucyle Hook, ‘The Curtain’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 13 (1962): 499–504. 63   For all that is known of the Curtain play, see Bentley, Stage, 5:1370.

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call for Bawdy Jiggs ... Come agen, and agen / And still welcome Gentlemen.’ But this, the Curtain’s last word as a performance space, highlights what we can never by rebuilding get back: the ‘gentlemen’ in the audience, the post-performance activity (here drinking), the Curtain’s Holywell street site, the unknowable play or activity that flanked this ballad. Almost everything looked at in this chapter that might have been part of the way the Curtain was understood in its own time, is unreconstructable, raising questions about what it is exactly that we ‘get back’ when we erect such buildings. Then again, the narrative in which the Curtain has been described in this paper is itself a construction: rather as reconstructed theatres are built on minimal information and are then said to be crucial to our understanding of all plays, so this essay takes some of the limited facts available, floods known plays through them, and finds interpretations brought about by the information. A partial biography of the Curtain, this has also been a paper about the writing of biographies of playhouses – and, indeed, about theatre history, always so in danger of being constructed by its facts. It is, at the very least, a reminder about the distinction between what theatre history can do – describe the past, and speculate – and what ‘reconstructed theatres’ cannot do: recreate the past.

Part 2 The Repertory ON PAGE AND STAGE

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Chapter 6

The Start of Something Big Roslyn L. Knutson

In The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean assign nine plays to the repertory of the Queen’s Men on compelling external evidence such as title-page advertisements. McMillin knew there were other Queen’s Men plays ‘out there’; he acknowledges repeatedly that he is ‘missing some good bets’. He even constructed a ‘B’ list of plays associated with the Queen’s Men on circumstantial grounds. But, being a wise and rigorous theatre historian, he left the matter of repertory membership at that. The publication of The Queen’s Men and Their Plays gives me an opportunity to make a different choice. I can do what McMillin could not do without engaging in circular argument. I can take his assessment of the dramaturgy of the Queen’s Men, their ‘house style’, and apply it to plays on his ‘B’ list and elsewhere in an attempt to test the concept of house style as a means of identifying potential repertory members. I see my method, in comparison with his, as risky and liable to gross error. Nonetheless, I think that McMillin – who had a knack for scholarly whimsy, who could smile between the lines as he built a sentence in fourteeners into a paragraph that discussed the Queen’s Men’s favourite verse form – would not object to an approach that bends a few rules in order to mount a fresh attack on some of the knotty problems that concern company repertory assignments. In what follows, I will use The Queen’s Men and Their Plays as my parent text and offer an ‘afterword’ to McMillin and MacLean’s discussion of the repertory of the Queen’s Men. I will apply the dramaturgical house style of the company to plays contemporary with their first decade of playing – a medley style, a theatrical literalism, narrative over-determination, staging, and versification – to explore issues of repertory membership and influence. In addition, I will consider the reach of that style beyond the company’s heyday in the 1580s. Immediately, however, I run into trouble. The first problem is chronology. McMillin shrewdly avoided the chronology of stage runs by organizing his ‘A’ list according to publication dates, but if I do the same, my additions will be similarly end-loaded. That is, the plays will be assigned to 1593 or later, when the years that interest me the most are earlier, 1583 to 1591. The second problem is the line between company ownership and company influence. How do I differentiate those plays in the immediate family of the Queen’s Men from those that are second and third cousins because of the company’s influence? And third, how much of a 

 

McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 86.

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house style is the result of the dramatists’ sense of identity rather than that of the company? Of course, in what follows I am not going to solve these problems. But wrestling with them, I suggest, will provide guidelines for assessing the reputation of the Queen’s Men as the start of something big in the theatrical marketplace. Before addressing the repertory of the Queen’s Men per se, I want to look briefly at the theatrical environment of 1583 and ask what plays the company might have acquired from the players who were recruited that spring. McMillin stayed away from lost plays (another of his smart decisions), but if I intend to lengthen his ‘B’ list with plays the Queen’s Men might have acquired, the first place to look is the repertories of the companies from which players were recruited in 1583. Let me begin with John Dutton, who came from Warwick’s Men. From 1575 to 1580, Warwick’s Men played at Court each Christmas season, and the Revels Office recorded the titles of five of their plays. Two of the five sound classical in subject matter: ‘The Three Sisters of Mantua’ and ‘The Four Sons of Fabius’. Another two sound medieval: ‘The Irish Knight’, and ‘The Knight of the Burning Rock’, the latter allegedly based on a Spanish romance and translated into English under the title The First Part of the Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood. One play, ‘The Painter’s Daughter’, sounds homespun. Because these plays are lost, I cannot examine their political agendas, but the Revels Accounts for Shrovetide 1579 provide numerous hints about the staging of one, ‘The Knight of the Burning Rock’. In those accounts there is much ado about that rock, which, in the play, is a prison. In the source story, a magician imprisons the knight in that rock for bedding the magician’s daughter without wedding her. The Revels Accounts include payments for boat hire for carrying the rock to and from Court in two cars, for measuring the ‘bignes’ of the rock (309), for ivy and holly to cover the rock, for a scaling ladder ‘that serued at the Rock’ (307), and for coals to dry the painter’s work on the rock. In addition, the accounts refer to a cloud, mended with ‘A hoope and blewe Lynnen cloth’ (308), which required nails, a cord, and pulleys to draw it up and down, presumably to cover or discover the rock. There are also payments for the lead of the chair on which the knight sat in his rock prison, for three shillings worth of ‘Aquavite’ to make fire in the rock, and for ‘Rosewater to Alay the smell therof’ (308). The repertory of Sussex’s Men, from which company John Adams and Richard Tarlton came to the Queen’s Men, is consistent with the sample from Warwick’s Men in a mix of classical, knightly, and homespun subjects. However there is one surprise; it is a play given at Court in 1576–77 called ‘The Cynocephali’. The Cynocephali were a race of dog-men. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville 

  I enclose lost plays in quotation marks and indicate extant plays by italics.   Albert Feuillerat (ed.), Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1908), 303–8 (specific citations provided in the text). Lee Monroe Ellison identifies Ortunez as the source for ‘The Knight of the Burning Rock’ in The Early Romantic Drama at the English Court (Menasha, WI, 1917), 77. 

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identified them as creatures from India with the heads and barks of dogs. The dramatist of the lost play could have known the account of Marco Polo, who describes the Cynocephali with faces like big mastiffs. Polo adds that they are a very cruel race who live on an island and devour strangers who come ashore. The play could have shown a costuming detail out of Sir John Mandeville, who claims that the king of the Cynocephali wore an enormous ruby around his neck. What, one must ask, might the clown parts for such a play have been? If Adams and Tarlton, who were known as comedians among the Queen’s players, brought ‘The Cynocephali’ with them in 1583, the company holdings included not only a bigger vein of Mediterranean exotica than Selimus provided in the post-Marlowe, postArmada years but also parts for comedians more bizarre than those of disaffected commoner-soldiers. Three players – William Johnson, John Lanham, and Robert Wilson – came to the Queen’s Men from the company of the Earl of Leicester. Like their fellows, Leicester’s Men are known to have performed folk material, romantic tales out of Greek and Italian story collections, and the biblical story of Sampson, which they offered at the Red Lion playhouse. One of their plays survives, Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London. McMillin does not list it among his ‘B’ plays, but he seems sorely tempted to do so. What interests me about The Three Ladies as a member of the Queen’s Men’s repertory is that it raises the question of authorship. This play, more even than its sequel, an unquestionable member of the Queen’s Men’s repertory (Three Lords and Three Ladies of London), could very well have been seminal in the development of the company’s house style. And if that is the case, then much of what I have to say about anonymous plays in the 1580s and 90s may in fact be an identification of Wilson’s influence, if not also his authorship. Another play that survives from this period – The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune – belonged to Derby’s Men (or so E.K. Chambers and others have thought). I introduce it here because it has some features that would make it one of those good bets for the Queen’s Men, if I didn’t know better. For example, it has a frame structure in which the Olympian gods sit in judgement on two of their own, Venus and Fortune. Furthermore, The Rare Triumphs has a set of characters that would be at home in Sir Clyomon and Clamydes: these include the lovers, Fidelia and her sweetheart, Hermione; Fidelia’s father, who doesn’t think Hermione is marriage material; a hot-headed but ineffectual brother; a sycophant who teams up with a clown to do not much damage; and an embittered courtier masquerading as a hermit who is (of course!) Hermione’s real father. Still another Queen’s Men characteristic in The Rare Triumphs is the mix of linguistic styles. Douglas Bruster, at a session on Marlowe at MLA 2005, pointed out that in the play the gods speak in blank verse, the lovers in pentameter couplets, Fidelia’s father in longer-lined rhyme such as fourteeners, and the hermit – when he is mad    Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist Of The Dark Ages, Isidore Of Seville (New York, 1912), 142.    E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923), 4:28.

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– in prose. So (undermining my own argument) I have to ask: if frame structures, template romance characters, and a medley of linguistic styles are present in nonQueen’s Men plays in the 1580s, how is it possible to put any weight on these characteristics as signs of a play owned by the Queen’s Men? I am not going to answer this question now. Instead, I want to turn to the early years of the Queen’s Men’s existence and ask another awkward question: where are their history plays? Everyone has always agreed – and McMillin and MacLean press the point home – that the English history play became the company’s signature offering. Yet there is a four-year gap between their inception in 1583 and the first datable English chronicle play, namely, The Famous Victories of Henry V (which cannot be dated later than June 1587 because of the jest about Tarlton and Knell playing in it together). McMillin avoided this gap by using the publication rather than compositional dates of the plays on his ‘A’ list, but I think the gap has to be addressed. In effect that gap is the Queen’s Men at their most hegemonic. If their repertory during those first five years consisted of carry-overs from Warwick’s, Sussex’s, and Leicester’s Men, plus Clyomon and Clamydes, ‘Phillyda and Corin’, ‘Felix and Philiomena’, and Tarlton’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’, then the company took its own sweet time in carrying the true history of protestant England to the queen’s subjects. In my afterword to McMillin and MacLean’s discussion of repertory, I would mind the gap in two ways. One is to back-date a few of those history plays – maybe The True Tragedy of Richard III and King Leir – which seem to me the most likely candidates for pre-1588 composition. I could be persuaded that The Cobbler’s Prophecy and its sibling The Peddler’s Prophecy were pre-Armada plays too, but their re-dating doesn’t solve the problem of the apparent belatedness of the Queen’s Men’s history plays. I am also sorely tempted to add Soliman and Perseda. It is putatively by Kyd, who putatively wrote for the Queen’s Men in their early years. Soliman and Perseda has an old-fashioned frame structure in which Love, Fortune, and Death vie for control of the play (Death wins), and there is also a great clown part. Piston, Erastus’s man, is witty and enterprising, and he has a few Tarltonesque moves. For example, when the braggart soldier (Basilisco) 

  McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 89.   The Revels Accounts for 1584 document five performances by the Queen’s Men at court in 1584–5: ‘A pastorall of phillyda & Choryn’ on St Stephen’s Day, ‘The history of felix & philiomena’ on New Year’s, ‘An Inuention called ffiue playes in one’ on Twelfth Night, ‘An Inuention of three playes in one’ on Shrove Sunday, and ‘an Antick playe & a comodye’ on Shrove Tuesday (Feuillerat, Documents, 365). Following received wisdom, I collapse the ‘Five’ and ‘Three’ plays-in-one into the item attributed to Tarlton and called ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ (which is not to be confused with the Plot of ‘2 Seven Deadly Sins’). McMillin and MacLean include these lost plays on the ‘B’ list of Queen’s Men’s repertory (Queen’s Men, 92–3).    Thomas Watson and Thomas Achley also wrote for the Queen’s Men, but I cannot do much with their authorship because even the titles of their plays are lost. 

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rides a mule across the stage, Piston jumps on board, riding behind the braggart. But adding this pseudo-historical Mediterranean romantic tragedy doesn’t fill in the gap either. And it is a huge disappointment that Piston is killed at the end of the play. Audiences, surely, would not have tolerated Tarlton’s getting killed. So my candidate for a history play early in the career of the Queen’s Men is Locrine. It is already on McMillin’s ‘B’ list because Thomas Creede printed it, and Creede acquired a lot of Queen’s Men plays. Beyond that clue, Locrine has a few features that could be signs of the company’s emerging personality. Obviously it is a history play, treating the turmoil in England after the death of Brute. Also, the play illustrates narrative over-determination in the combination of dumb show and commentator: first comes the dumb show, then the choral figure of Ate explains what was just shown. It has a medley of verse forms (the plodding pentameters, relieved by the clown’s prose and song; the rhyme in Estrild’s plea of mercy to Locrine; and the Senecan stichomythia that marks their wooing). None of these features, though, is exclusive to the Queen’s Men. Other plays have dumb shows and mixed versification. I should at this point argue that Locrine offers a nationalistic, protestant line, but I am unskilled at recognizing political spin in plays. Beyond saying that Locrine is anti-invasion and anti-adultery, I don’t have much sense of its cultural agenda. But there is one aspect of Locrine that bolsters its candidacy as a Queen’s Men play, and that is the clown parts of Strumbo and Trompart. McMillin calls the clown ‘a literalist of the theatre ... [who] is funny the minute he is seen’, and Strumbo appears first in comic contrast to the warriors at the court of Brute. He is wearing a gown and carrying ink and paper; he is writing a love letter full of silly Euphuisms, and he talks to the audience as he writes. He adores this letter, and he exclaims to it: ‘Oh wit, Oh pate, O memorie, O hand, O incke, O paper’.10 Like Robert Wilson’s clowns, Strumbo is a cobbler expert in the malaprop; he flips the syllables in the name of the English hero, Albanact, calling him ‘King Nactabel’; and he misnames the enemy Scithians ‘the Shitens’. He pushes in among the warriors to create ‘the interplay of stately and comic elements’ that McMillin in other plays calls ‘the Tarlton tradition’.11 In one such moment, Strumbo fakes his death on the battlefield (a gambit made famous later by another clown on another English battlefield). Strumbo also is bawdy, a Tarlton trademark. In his letter, he claims that only ‘the pleasant water’ of Dorothy’s ‘secret fountaine’ can put out the fire of his love (B4v, ll. 349–50). Later, complaining about his second, shrewish wife, he moans, ‘O codpeece thou hast done thy maister, this it is to be medling with warme plackets’ (F3, ll. 1214–15). There will be objections about this company assignment and dating of Locrine: members of the scholarly community will claim that it has to be one of the weak McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 128.   The Tragedy of Locrine (Oxford, 1908), C1, ll. 358–9. Subsequent citations are given in the text. 11   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 133. 

 

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sons of Tamburlaine and thus post-1587. Maybe; for me, however, the association with Marlowe calls attention to the difficulty of establishing a chronology and thus repertory membership for plays on stage perhaps a decade earlier than their publication dates. The Marlovian connection also leads me to my next problem, namely, the difficulty of separating evidence of the Queen’s Men’s house style from its influence on non-Queen’s Men plays. To illustrate, I turn to the anonymous Edmund Ironside and George Peele’s Edward I. Both are conventionally dated post-Tamburlaine, post-Armada, and post-Tarlton and thus belong to the glut of plays in the years that the Queen’s Men made way at Court for the upstart Admiral’s Men. Both qualify as English chronicle plays, to which Edward I adds ballad literature as a source. But in my opinion, Edmund Ironside more nearly replicates the house style of the Queen’s Men as formulated by McMillin and MacLean and thus has the better credentials for assignment to their repertory. The case for Edmund Ironside begins with its title, ‘A True Chronicle History Called War Hath Made All Friends’. That formulaic phrasing – ‘True Chronicle History’ – points to the ‘campaign ... for substantial truth and plain speech’ that McMillin attributes to the Queen’s Men,12 and other aspects of the play reinforce the emphasis. For example, the Chorus, who connects some of the battle scenes, tells us he would have the audience ‘understand the truth/ And see the battles acted on the stage,/ But that their length would be too tedious’.13 The villain, Edric, exploits the motif in mockery. When he is caught spying, he pretends honesty, saying that ‘Poor naked truth’ has stripped away his disguise, that he now speaks ‘plainly’, and that his disguise was merely an attempt ‘to sound the truth’ of Edmund’s opinion of him (ll. 1316, 1319, 1321). Addressing Truth from another angle, Leah Scragg points out that Edmund Ironside is ‘entirely devoid of fairy tale and fantastic elements’.14 A lot of the blank verse in the play sounds like prose (a point McMillin makes about The True Tragedy of Richard III), and there are instances of pentameter lines ending in rhyme; even so, a diversity of versification is not the play’s long suit. However, one of McMillin’s kinds of literalism is: the battlefield ballet. The black-clad Chorus in Act 3, scene 3 advertises the battle scenes as dumb shows; he has the only speeches, which are punctuated by elaborate fight-scene directions. Included are visual emblems: for example, the villain Edric crosses the stage with a man’s head on his sword’s point. This gory display recalls an earlier scene in which Canute mutilates the sons of two English defectors who have re-defected and returned to Edmund’s camp. Along with the battle scenes, the cruelty of 12

  McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 33.   Edmund Ironside in E.B. Everitt and R.L. Armstrong (eds), Six Early Plays Related to the Shakespeare Canon (Copenhagen, 1965), 195–250, ll. 968–70. Subsequent citations from the play are given in the text. 14   Leah Scragg, ‘Saxon versus Danes: The Anonymous Edmund Ironside’, in D.G. Scragg and Carole Weinberg (eds), Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2000), 93–106, esp. 97. 13

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mutilating the young prisoners (mixed as in Selimus with black humour, in that the clown is the axe man), illustrates the narration-on-steroids that McMillin identifies with the Queen’s Men. Canute calls for an axe and block and knife, and says ‘I’ll cut their hands and noses off’ (l. 589). When the boys are brought on-stage, there’s more talk about cutting off the hands and noses, including talk from the youths, one of whom offers to do the job on himself. The torture then begins, with Canute ordering, the stage directions directing, and the boys taunting until, mercifully, they are sent off stage. McMillin saw a production of Edmund Ironside in England in the 1990s, and was intrigued, but I don’t know whether he saw in it reminders of the Queen’s Men’s house style. I don’t think he would have missed yet another ballet in which the two armies ‘march along the stage’ while the two kings exchange a kind of stichomythic vaunting that is punctuated by actual combat (sd, l. 1784). As a sidebar, let me add that it might please Eric Sams to put Edmund Ironside in the Queen’s Men’s repertory. Although he has suggested Edward Alleyn for the part of Edmund,15 who is supposedly tall, Sams would surely find even more appealing a company home where some rookie factotum might have been available as collaborator. In comparison with Edmund Ironside, I offer Edward I by George Peele as a play influenced by the Queen’s Men’s house style yet a step or two removed from its replication.16 Like the Queen’s Men plays, but also like non-Queen’s Men plays, the verse of Edward I has elements of the medley style in a mix of blank verse, rhymed pentameters, rhymed tetrameters, song, and prose. The staging, too, is identifiable with the Queen’s Men’s house style in the use of curtained spaces. Queen Elinor has a tent in several scenes, and in one scene so does King Edward. He is sitting in his tent with his pages about him when the bishop brings him his newly christened son and namesake; he kisses the child and says, ‘let vs visite my Queene and wife’,17 at which point everybody marches across the stage to her tent, where they find her in bed. The king then calls for a celebratory show, which takes place on this already-crowded stage. I am tempted to call this use of curtained spaces an ‘overuse’ and to ask if Peele is not one-upping his models in the Queen’s Men’s repertory. With yet another aspect of dramaturgy – the procession – I am sure that he is doing precisely that, not only besting the Queen’s Men’s plays but also those of a big-name competitor, Kit Marlowe. Edward I opens with a huge parade of diverse participants: maimed soldiers, lords, the king and queen, the princess, a prisoner, sailors and soldiers. Then Peele piles on with the request for ‘as many as may be’ (sd, l. 40). The stage directions call for specific costuming and properties: headpieces with garlands, coats marked with red crosses for the maimed crusaders, and a chair for the   Eric Sams, Shakespeare’s Lost Play: Edmund Ironside (London, 1985), 39–40.   Dora Jean Ashe, in ‘The Text of Peele’s Edward I’, argues that Edward I was originally a Queen’s Men’s play (Studies in Bibliography, 7 [1955]: 153–70, esp. 169). 17   Frank S. Hook and John Yoklavich (eds), The Dramatic Works of George Peele (3 vols, New Haven, 1961), scene 12, ll. 1938–9. Subsequent citations are given in the text. 15

16

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disabled ancient. A subsequent procession in scene three requires nine lords with nine pages, plus two English lords, the king and queen, and the queen mother; for this procession, the opening stage directions specify a costume, Longshanks’s ‘sute of Glasse’. In still another procession, the pregnant queen is brought on-stage on a litter carried by four Moors and accompanied by four footmen. Are these similarities signs of repertorial membership? Repertorial influence? Peele’s own theatrical style? I do not know the answer, but I do want to turn, specifically, to the relationship of authorship and house style by looking at the career of Robert Wilson after he left the Queen’s Men. Wilson will enable me to assess the afterlife of the Queen’s Men if I can demonstrate that he continues to write under their influence. The received opinion is that Wilson returned to the Queen’s Men in 1588 after a year or so on the continent with his former company, Leicester’s Men. He wrote The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London for the Queen’s Men in the wake of the Armada victory and Tarlton’s death. He is found next nearly a decade later in 1598 with the Admiral’s Men, collaborating on about 16 plays over a two-year period for production at the Rose. All but one of these is lost, so there is not much evidence on which to assess Wilson’s and the Queen’s influence. A couple of the titles – ‘Madman’s Morris’ and ‘Chance Medley’ – suggest a gallimaufry of comedic motifs, but I cannot do much with the likes of ‘Hannibal and Hermes’ or the two-part ‘Black Bateman of the North’ unless I imagine parts for Simplicity’s great-grandsons. As evidence of the Queen’s Men’s influence at least in genre, it is pertinent that more than half of Wilson’s jobs for the Admiral’s Men were history plays, but I look in vain for signs of the Queen’s Men’s house style in the one surviving play from this set, the first part of Sir John Oldcastle. There are no dumb shows, no chorus-narrated ballets of adversaries, no processions, no hint of diversity in the versification. Even the clowns are un-Wilsonian. There is a group of tradesmenrebels led by a brewer, but the model is Jack Straw or Jack Cade, not Simplicity. The other clown candidate is Parson John Wrotham, a debased version of Falstaff, who roams the countryside with his wench, robbing hapless travelers. Parson John runs into King Henry V in disguise, and the two joke about the king’s past as a thief; but the plays being recalled here are Shakespeare’s triad about ‘Prince Hal’ and The Famous Victories, the latter not known to be Wilson’s. However, I do see Wilson’s fingerprints – and thus also those of the Queen’s Men – elsewhere. One place is in A Knack to Know a Knave, which belonged to Strange’s Men in 1592, the period between Wilson’s tenure with the Queen’s Men and his reappearance with the Admiral’s Men. The other is in Nobody and Somebody, which was printed in quarto without a date but registered at Stationers’ Hall in March 1606 with an entry naming its company owners as ‘the Queens Maiesties Seruants’. Because of the 1606 date, scholars have given Nobody and Somebody to Queen Anne’s Men (formerly Worcester’s Men), but signs of Wilson in the play suggest to me the Queen’s Men of Elizabeth I instead. The interesting feature of both plays is that they combine Anglo-Saxon royals with commoners whose concern is for social justice. This is Wilson’s formula, though of course

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not his exclusively. In A Knack to Know a Knave, the Mad Men of Gotham with Will Kempe at the centre offered an opportunity for the dramatist to write another post-mortem part for Richard Tarlton. The character, Nobody, is the commoner with a social conscience in his play, and like Honesty in A Knack to Know a Knave he rarely misses an opportunity to emphasize that he is a ‘plain fellow’.18 If, as I have suggested in another context, A Knack to Know a Knave travelled to the Chamberlain’s Men, perhaps with Kempe,19 then the influence of the Queen’s Men travelled there also, and not just in Shakespeare’s memory of their plays. And, if Nobody and Somebody was, as scholars have believed, a play that actually belonged to 1606 and Queen Anne’s Men, then the Wilson formula – and by extension the afterlife of the Queen’s Men – reaches beyond Wilson’s death in 1600. There is one more influence of the Queen’s Men’s repertory to assess. It is probably the most extensive, and it is certainly the most elusive: the influence on provincial drama. All those years of touring by the Queen’s Men must have had an effect on the nature and quality of the plays written by regional and local dramatists for regional and local consumption. The records made public by the project based at the University of Toronto, Records of Early English Drama (REED), in conjunction with research by independent scholars have shed little light on the titles of plays performed in the provinces, and less still on the repertories held either by exclusively provincial companies or those with some or considerable presence in London. With one exception: the company of players led by Robert and Christopher Simpson under the patronage of Sir Richard Cholmley of Whitby in Yorkshire. The story of the Simpsons, which is told in a suit in the Court of Star Chamber, has a scholarly lineage that includes Charles J. Sisson, G.W. Boddy, John L. Murphy, and (soon) John M. Wasson and Barbara D. Palmer.20 The provocative detail for me in the voluminous court records is the four playbooks specified in the testimony: a ‘Saint Christopher’ play, which the company got in trouble for performing, and the three in their pack: The Travailes of Three English Brothers

  David L. Hay (ed.), Nobody and Somebody: An Introduction and Critical Edition (New York & London, 1980), viii.1182. 19   Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘Shakespeare’s Repertory’, in David Scott Kastan and John D. Cox (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1999), 346–61, esp. 349. 20   The key items in this history of the Simpsons’ company are the following: Charles J. Sisson, ‘Shakespeare’s Quartos as Prompt-Copies’, The Review of English Studies, 18 (1942): 129–43; G.W. Boddy, ‘Players of Interludes in North Yorkshire in the Early Seventeenth Century’, North Yorkshire County Record Office Publications, 10.3 (1976): 95–130; G.W. Boddy, ‘Catholic Missioners at Grosmont Priory’, North Yorkshire County Record Office Publications, 10.4 (1976): 65–76; John L. Murphy, ‘Traditions, Occasions, The Way We Live Now: 1610 in Stuart Yorkshire’, Darkness and Devils (Athens, OH, 1984), 93–118; and the forthcoming volumes of Yorkshire in the REED series, edited by John Wasson and Barbara Palmer. 18

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(the Simpsons called it ‘The Three Shirleys’), Pericles, and ‘Kinge Lere’.21 G.W. Boddy, who provided two lengthy essays on the affray in Yorkshire, drew a logical conclusion that this ‘Lere’ was the King’s Men’s Lear, Shakespeare’s Lear. Boddy based his conclusion on two facts: the Simpson company’s plays were playbooks, i.e., printed books; and Shakespeare’s play had been printed the previous year (1608). What he did not take into account is that the Queen’s Men’s Leir was also available in print, and the Star Chamber testimony provides no details of the text it spells ‘L E R E’. Boddy betrays a Shakespearean bias by observing that the Simpsons’ repertory indicates ‘how Shakespeare’s reputation extended deep into the provinces and ... how people were eager to see his latest plays’.22 Boddy may be absolutely right. But in terms of who had the reputation ‘deep into the provinces’ and whose plays the ‘people were eager to see’, the answer – even as late as 1609 – is the Queen’s Men.

21   I quote here an unpublished transcript by John M. Wasson of one document in the Star Chamber case. 22   Boddy, ‘Players of Interludes’, 106.

Chapter 7

Page Wit and Puppet-like Wealth: Orality and Print in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London Ian Munro

Three Lords and Three Ladies of London was in trouble the moment it reached the bookstall.

Early in Robert Wilson’s Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, an allegorical drama of the contemporary city, the ballad-seller Simplicity demonstrates his wares in a singing contest with Wit (page to Policy, one of the three lords). Although the audience awards the laurel to Simplicity, the other pages are unimpressed; page Will asks: ‘How wil you sel the ballad you sang, for Ile not buy the voice’ (340). On one level, the question is a sneer at the rustic and rusty-voiced Simplicity, the abject, malaprop clown of the play. But we could imagine it as a real question: in an era before audio recording, how do you sell a song without the voice? While the answer appears obvious – you sell words printed on a page – Will’s question highlights the substitution involved: instead of the experience of hearing the song, you sell an object that stands in for the experience. Although Three Lords and Three Ladies has (like most drama of the 1580s) received scant critical attention, it does occupy a central position in The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s groundbreaking study of the company. What interests McMillin and MacLean is less the aesthetic or theatrical merits of the play than the historical narratives that intersect through it – in particular, via its publication in 1590 alongside Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine:

  McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 126. All future citations parenthetically in the text.    All quotations from both Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies are from H.S.D. Mithal (ed.), An Edition of Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (New York, 1988), by through-line number; quotations from the commentary are by page number.    For more on this dynamic, see Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997). My essay is deeply in debt to this pioneering work. 

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Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603 At that defining moment in 1590 when playgoers standing before a London bookstall would have been pleased to see that both Three Lords and Three Ladies of London and Tamburlaine were available, they would have had a choice to make which is no longer available. We cannot buy Three Lords and Three Ladies, but Tamburlaine is still on the shelf. What was a choice in 1590 is now an outcome, as though a cultural contest has been waged and Marlowe has prevailed. (155)

Print is both the metric and the mechanism of that contest, in McMillin and MacLean’s account; Tamburlaine’s greater success at the bookstall indicates its cultural success, and its cultural success is due at least in part to its ability to move from stage to page: ‘Tamburlaine was a tremendous success on the stage, but it made a similar impact in print’ (84). Three Lords and Three Ladies, by contrast, could not easily make this leap from one cultural location to another; it was ‘in trouble the moment it reached the bookstall’ (126), unable to translate itself into a new form. And as the play, so the company: ‘The theatre is the only place for the Queen’s Men. They are out of their element in print’ (156). Stripped of the attributes of the theatre – the visual display, the histrionic acting style, the improvisations and pratfalls – printed versions of plays like Three Lords and Three Ladies seem incomplete. At issue, one might say, is separating the song and the singer: the plays of the Queen’s Men cannot be alienated from the theatrical labour that created them on stage. As in Will’s reluctant reaction to Simplicity’s performance, they draw attention to the substitution of printed commodity for theatrical event. Part of the project of McMillin and MacLean’s book is the laudable goal of valorizing the Queen’s Men for exactly that theatrical embeddedness, exploring their dramaturgy as part of a disparaged theatrical tradition that has a power and substance often ignored by critics. The effect, however, is to turn Three Lords and Three Ladies – and hence the Queen’s Men – into a contemporary relic. While specifically rebutting the assumption that the company essentially collapsed after the death of its star player Richard Tarlton, and the received idea that metropolitan success is the only worthwhile measure of the company, McMillin and MacLean unequivocally place Three Lords and Three Ladies in a narrative of cultural supercession. Although the play is admittedly ‘an up-to-date collection of the most topical items for Londoners of the late 1580s’, such as the death of Tarlton and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, it ‘can hardly be called forward-looking’ because its contemporary matter is ‘wedged into the framework of an old fashioned allegory’ (124). In short, the play ‘summons the theatrical characteristics of the past and uses them flamboyantly to convey the present news of the day’ (124). The contest between Wilson’s and Marlowe’s plays thus works through a series of implicit and explicit oppositions: performance versus print, allegory versus mimesis, medieval versus modern. We might pause on the neatness of these complementary oppositions – and on the role played by the ‘bookstall’ where the cultural contest has been decided. By glossing over the differences between the

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early modern market in drama and the modern market in early modern drama, this imaginary bookstall becomes an abstract and objective assessor of value. In the process, historical change and aesthetic distinctions seem to reinforce each other; if the bookstall that so troubles the Queen’s Men stands as the avatar of an emerging capitalist market in cultural goods, it also represents (in its modern guise) the retrospective judgement of literary history. We thus are led to applaud the Queen’s Men for what is irretrievable about them, secured in a framework of nostalgic absence; the inalienable orality of the plays of the Queen’s Men marks them as a doomed cultural form, already vanishing in its own time. Alas, poor Yorick. One problem with this kind of narrative is that the presentational mode and medley style favoured by the Queen’s Men continued to thrive in the early modern period (as Robert Weimann and Nora Johnson, among others, have recently illustrated) and it could be plausibly argued that it has never left the English stage. The apparent victory of Marlowe over Wilson – or rather, what the two authors represent – in fact only occurs within a specific hierarchy of artistic taste that prejudges the outcome. This is the critical handicap that all pre-Marlovian drama labours under, of course. For the most part, critics have difficulty separating what we might call a theatrical history of early modern drama from a literary history dependent on ideas of progress, refinement, and incipient modernity – a history that takes us from jigging veins to high astounding terms, as the prologue to Tamburlaine famously puts it. We consider the aesthetic distinctions offered by the prologue prophetic because its cultural investments match our own. In the process, plays like those of the Queen’s Men become dinosaurs, facing extinction with bewilderment. While Tamburlaine seems savvy, an active and self-aware participant in a rapidly changing market, Three Lords and Three Ladies seems inept, looking backwards longingly, unable to adapt to new cultural imperatives. I would argue that such a perspective is fundamentally incorrect; indeed, I believe that the play comprehends the structural changes and cultural contests of its time – especially those exemplified by the ‘bookstall’ – all too well. If the play does look backward, it is with a more complex glance than has generally been credited. This becomes clear if we contrast it not to Tamburlaine but to its own precursor and foil. Three Lords and Three Ladies of London is a sequel to Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, which dates from the early 1580s; the earlier play may have originally belonged to Leicester’s Men but was probably revived by the Queen’s Men shortly

   Talking specifically of the publication of Tamburlaine, Alexandra Halasz suggests that ‘Plays are or become respectable to the extent that they are distinguished from the stage as a specific and variously threatening site of commercialized discourse’ (Marketplace, 186).    See Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge, 2000), and Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2003).

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before the later play. Despite their superficial similarities the two plays are quite different in their use of allegorical structures. Three Ladies of London revolves around the corruption of Love and Conscience (two of the ladies) by Lucre (the third), supported by a host of allegorical villains: Fraud, Dissimulation, Simony, Usury, and so on; at its close, all three ladies are sentenced to eternal punishment for their crimes. In Three Lords and Three Ladies, the lords Policy, Pomp, and Pleasure (along with their respective pages, Wit, Wealth, and Will) redeem the three ladies; the play ends with Policy wed to Love, Pomp wed to Lucre, and Pleasure wed to Conscience. If the earlier play shows a London newly made wealthy, and thus a figure for international desire and foreign vice (the foreigners Fraud, Mercadore, Simony, etc., all pay court to Lady Lucre), the later play shows an urban world in which pomp, policy, and pleasure have come to rule, albeit benevolently. London’s lucre is no longer either a corrupting force or a sinful lure; instead, it is joined to London’s pomp, carefully defined as ‘the statelie magnificence and sumptuous estate without pride or vaineglorie’ (155–6). The allegorical mode is thus shown coming to terms with a new metropolitan reality; in place of the bitter social critique offered by Three Ladies of London we are given novel (and flexible) ethical narratives that largely legitimize the civic status quo. In the process Three Lords and Three Ladies develops a somewhat ironic cast. At the start of the play, Pomp, Policy, and Pleasure are all in love with Lucre and ignore the other ladies – an untenable situation, dramatically, but clearly an accurate observation on early modern London. In order to rectify things, Nemo (the ladies’ guardian) resorts to a ‘queint conceit’, or bit of theatrical legerdemain (1179): he presents Conscience in the guise of Lucre and lets the lords praise her beautiful appearance. Nemo’s ploy deftly establishes both the inherent beauty of virtue and the apparent need, in our modern world, to dress it up as material profit; Pleasure says, in affirming his choice of Conscience, ‘She’s Lucre vnto me’ (1226), which only compounds the moral ambiguity of the subterfuge. On another level, Nemo’s action offers a hint of the ethical role that the Queen’s Men might desire to play in sixteenth-century society: using their plays to nudge pleasure in the direction of conscience. The fundamentally theatrical nature of Nemo’s plot shows how the theatre can use its productions to help rectify the moral ambiguities and misalignments of the contemporary city. On a broader   ‘The appearance of The Three Lords in 1588 was almost definitely accompanied by the revision and revival of The Three Ladies in the same year, and this is proved by the change in the number of years since when Peter’s Pence was abolished from ‘26. yeares’ ago in the first quarto to ‘33 years’ ago in the second’ (Mithal, xxiv).    The ensuing argument is not intended to substitute Three Ladies of London for Three Lords and Three Ladies as a simplistic or dated drama; as the articles by Kermode and Harris cited below demonstrate, it is an extremely complex and powerful play.    Most notably, Usury – who in Three Ladies of London murdered Hospitality by cutting his throat – is allowed to remain in London, albeit under some restraints, at the end of the play. See Lloyd Kermode’s essay in this volume. 

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level, the challenge faced in the play of providing suitable allegorical resolutions – matching Lucre with Pomp, Pleasure with Conscience, Policy with Love – is cognate to the challenge faced by the play: making London legible through an allegorical frame, making sense of the city’s complexity and diversity through a persuasively apt moral calculus. Of course, Nemo’s ‘queint conceit’ also makes allegorical fulfillment subject to illusion and misdirection; the moral necessity of Pleasure’s match with Conscience is undermined by the arbitrary tricks used to achieve it. A corresponding maneuver is found in Nemo’s frank merchandizing of the Ladies: As cunning chapmen do by curious wares, Which seldome showen do most inflame the mind, So must I deale, being dainty of these Dames, Who seldome seen shal best allure these Lords. (970–74)

In the same way that the social goals of the theatre proceed in tandem with its commercial imperatives, Nemo must cunningly display Love, Conscience, and Lucre – who are not for all markets, apparently – in order to achieve the correct allegorical resolution. Rather than seeing the play’s juxtaposition of allegorical frame and topical events as a looking-backwards, then, we might see it as part of the complex process of connecting the represented world of the play to the world in which it was performed. An especially potent illustration of the tensions between allegorical structures and material contexts is found in the shields belonging to the three lords. As McMillin and MacLean note, the shields are of paramount importance in the play: ‘They speak in emblem and word, they represent the authority of the absent three lords for a long stretch of action, and they form the centre of the contest in the climactic Armada scene, where the three Spanish lords have textual shields too, and the battle is marked out by the advance and retreat of these blazons’ (125). The moral significance of the shields is established at the outset, when the three pages provide an elaborate analysis of their allegorical images and mottoes – a kind of microcosm of the allegorical action of the play, mapping abstract ideals onto urban realities. The subsequent entry of Simplicity, however, problematizes the status of the shields by drawing attention to what Jonathan Gil Harris has called the ‘turnstile quality’ of early modern stage properties. As McMillin and MacLean describe the scene:

   Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001): 479–91, 489. See also Harris, ‘(Po)X Marks the Spot: How to “Read” “Early Modern” “Syphilis” in The Three Ladies of London’, in Kevin Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh: Responses to Sexually Transmitted Disease in Renaissance Europe (Toronto, 2005), especially Harris’s development of the ‘mercantile chronotope’ of Three Ladies of London.

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After the lords have placed their shields on the stage as chivalrous challenges, Simplicity enters with his impresa, which is a picture of Tarlton, and begins to move the lords’ shields: they are blocking the stall from which he tries to wring subsistence by selling ballads. This kind of interplay between the lowly and the exalted lies at the centre of all the plays of the Queen’s Men. (125)

The contrast between Simplicity and the lords is here framed as an issue of formal style or dramaturgical tendency, one that epitomizes the plays of the Queen’s Men. While this is surely the case, we might also see it as an unpacking of the work of allegory. Harris argues that the allegorical object ‘aspires to timeless signification, yet ... cannot entirely shed its historical markings, including those inscribed upon it by the processes that have made it available for allegorical use’.10 Simplicity underscores such processes through his unyielding puzzlement about the presence of shields in the marketplace: ‘Whose wares are these, that are vp already? I paid rent for my standing’ (231–2); ‘Who sells them, can ye tell?’ (235); ‘how many of these for a groat?’ (287); ‘Not for silver nor gold? Why hang they, then, in the open market?’ (289). With each question Simplicity draws attention to the materiality of the allegorical objects, and to their embeddedness in the economy of the theatre. Within the represented world of the play, the shields are iconic, absolute articles; they ‘hang ... in the open market’ for reasons of contrast, signaling their separation from common goods. Within the representing world of the playhouse, the shields are exactly goods for sale – they are what the theatre audience has paid to view. Attempting to stave off Simplicity’s questioning, Will explains that the shields are ‘To be seen, not bought’ (290). The phrase points both towards the emblematic significance of the shields and to the peculiar commodity status of theatrical properties, which the audience pays money to view, not own. Simplicity’s confusion thus marks a persistent tension between the hermeneutic and mercantile spaces of the theatre. We might imagine such aspects of the play as participating in what Pierre Bourdieu would call the ‘position-taking’ of the work. For Bourdieu, artistic creations are always ‘position-takings’, through which agents (creators, companies, institutions, and so on) attempt to accrue capital and defend or improve their relative position in the field of cultural production.11 Although the strategies that comprise position-takings are sometimes deliberately enacted – as in the prologue to Tamburlaine, for example, with its dismissal of a certain kind of theatre – most are epiphenomenal, emerging from the structural relationships within the set of possible responses to the field.12 This ‘space of possibles’, as Bourdieu puts it, is 10

  Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair’, 489.   Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York, 1993), 30. 12   In focusing on moments within the play that exemplify the cultural position of the company, I have also been influenced by Weimann’s exploration of the interactions between ‘representation of authority’ and ‘authority in representation’ through which works of art 11

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constrained by the larger conditions (social, political, economic) that structure the field and is ‘objectively realized as a problematic’.13 In the case of Three Lords and Three Ladies, I would argue, this cultural problematic relates to the nature of the theatrical commodity in a rapidly changing cultural marketplace, and the principal articulation of this problematic occurs through the tensions between orality and print with which I began this essay. It would be a stretch to say that Three Lords and Three Ladies anticipates its ‘defining moment’ (as McMillin and MacLean term it) in print culture in 1590, given that only two plays were published in the 1580s – although the fact that one of those two plays was Three Ladies of London may make it less of a stretch. But Three Lords and Three Ladies is clearly concerned with the increasingly complex commodification processes of the early modern cultural marketplace, and these processes become especially fraught in the context of the inalienable orality of theatrical performance. As noted above, Simplicity sings his ballad in competition with Wit, the page of Policy, who had challenged the ballad-seller’s ability: ‘I my selfe dare lay six groats to six of your balde Ballads, that you your selfe shall say I sing better than you’ (306–8). Although the bet is amended and they ‘sing for good fellowship’ (328), the contest and the competitive spirit stand. The audience’s subsequent decision for Simplicity over Wit, itself significant, easily extends to a series of other oppositions: old and young, artisan and servant, tradition and novelty – and perhaps most importantly, singer and page.14 Given the ubiquity of early modern puns on ‘page’, we may imagine ‘Page Wit’ as a particular quality of print, here made to compete with the old-fashioned theatrical practices represented by Simplicity. It is ‘page wit’, after all, that the Queen’s Men lack, meaning both the ability to appear witty on the page and the facility that would allow the easy movement from stage to page. In choosing the simple song over the witty page, the audience endorses the theatrical practices of the Queen’s Men (an endorsement perhaps helped along by having the page sing badly). The valorization of the oral continues throughout the play, which revels in an oratorical, declamatory dramaturgy. There are more than two dozen instances where characters either declare that they will speak or command others to speak. In the world of Three Lords and Three Ladies, to remain silent (or even to whisper) is to be suspect, as the behavior of the play’s various antagonists makes clear. Of the three Spanish lords who challenge the Lords of London, only Pride speaks aloud – and then only in Latin. Nemo speaks the ethos of the play when he tells a disguised Falsehood, ‘No whispering friend, but shew it openly, / The matter good, you need not be ashamed’ (1013–14). By contrast, writing is treated with self-legitimize their productions (Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman [Baltimore, 1996], 18). 13   Bourdieu, Cultural Production, 30. 14   The stage direction has Simplicity addressing ‘one of his auditory’, which could mean an on-stage audience, but it seems more likely that he addresses the theatre audience.

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wariness in the play. After presenting a legal suit to the three lords, Simplicity is told, ‘sirra, your writing is so intricate, that you must speake your mind, otherwise we shall not know your meaning’ (1982–3). This is another jibe at Simplicity (hardly a good clerk) and a tactic for turning a legal document into a theatrical oration, but it also suggests that the intricacies of writing stand in opposition to the plain truth of speech. While reading occupies an important and positive role in the play – especially in the reading of allegorical objects – it is always reading aloud, transforming the written into public speech, putting literacy in the service of orality.15 The only written materials in the play that remain unspoken are the letters that Fraud, Dissimulation, and Usury present to the three lords in hopes of service. The play abundantly illustrates Wes Folkerth’s point that ‘in early modern culture, sound is considered a privileged mode of access to the deeply subjective thoughts, emotions, and intentions of others’.16 Throughout, people either declare who they are, or (in the case of the Spaniards and assorted Vices) are read aloud by others against their will. But a straightforward opposition between writing and speech, or page wit and theatrical labour, only goes so far; the play’s complex understanding of its own social and cultural stakes makes such a simple choice impossible to sustain. Again, in order to see this it is necessary to return to Three Ladies of London and another song of Simplicity’s. After the ruination of Love and Conscience by Lucre, Simplicity (who was a servant of Love) turns beggar. Starving by a road, he sings a ballad, ‘No biding in London for Conscience and Love’, which he concludes by speaking to an audience member: Now sirra hast eaten vp my song? and ye haue ye shall eate no more to day, For euery body may see you belly is growne bigger with eating vp our play: He has fild his belly, but I am neuer a whit the better, Therefore ile go seeke some vittailes, and member for eating vp my song you shall be my debter. (1228–34)

In this extradramatic exchange, connections are drawn between Simplicity’s multiple roles as singer, clown, beggar, and actor. In a clear example of a Bourdieuvian ‘position-taking’, song and play are conflated – the audience member has eaten up both – and Simplicity speaks as a representative of the playing company, defining for the audience the nature of the cultural product and 15

  On this point, see Smith: ‘In hindsight, it is easy for us to talk about the ‘triumph’ of printing in early modern Europe. What we are apt to miss is the resistance of voice to the new medium. In a culture that still gave precedence to voice – in legal practice, in rhetorical theory, in art made out of words, in the transactions of daily life – we should be looking, not for evidence of the hegemony of type technology, but for all the ways in which that newly discovered resource was colonized by regimes of oral communication’ (Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England [Chicago, 1999], 128–9). 16   Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York, 2002), 33.

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the conditions under which it can be acquired. While the prologue to Three Ladies of London compares seeing the play to buying clothing – ‘Your patience yet we craue a while, till we haue trimd our stall’ (15) – Simplicity’s comments amend the analogy by stressing bodily labour: the song belongs to him because he has sung it (and his belly remains empty when recompense for the performance is not forthcoming). Unlike clothing, a song is consumed on the spot, ‘eaten vp’; it cannot be separated from Simplicity’s performance of it, or sold again by those who receive it. And as the song cannot be separated from Simplicity, so the play cannot be separated from the company. Or at least so it must have seemed when the play was first performed; from the vantage of Three Lords and Three Ladies, written well after the publication of Three Ladies of London in 1584, the inalienability of theatrical products had been disproved. Indeed, if the Queen’s Men did take Three Ladies of London from Leicester’s company for their own use, its availability in print may have facilitated the appropriation. To cast Simplicity as a ballad-seller in the later play, then, seems a highly significant glance back at his role in the earlier play. In the same way that the allegorical structures of Three Lords and Three Ladies stand in ironic relation to those of Three Ladies of London, so the ‘position-taking’ articulated by the earlier play in this scene is problematized in the sequel. If the unbreakable connection between Simplicity and his song in Three Ladies of London underscores a particular understanding of theatrical labour, so does changing Simplicity from a ballad-singer to a ballad-seller – a figure who sells a commodity produced by others instead of his own labour, whose singing illustrates the product instead of comprising it, who is a bit-player in large-scale and largely untraceable processes of cultural appropriation and circulation.17 The complexity of this position-taking is taken further by the specific ballad that Wit and Simplicity sing: ‘Peggy and Willy, But now he is dead and gone: Mine own sweet Willy is laid in his graue la, la, la’ (301–3). As H.S.D. Mithal points out in his edition of the play, this is almost certainly a reference to ‘A pretie new ballad, intituled willie and peggie, to the tune of tarlton’s carroll’. He explains: ‘This ballad ends ‘qd. Richard Tarlton’, but it is in fact a lament over the death of Tarlton under the name of Willie’, drawing attention to his jesting, his fame, his relation to the queen, his ability to extemporize on ‘themes’ from the audience, and so on.18 The singer declares, moreover, that ‘none would be wery to see him on stage / from morning vntill it were night’ and ‘His like for merth is not left’.19 The singing of the ballad sets the stage for the discussion of ‘Tarltons picture’, which Will notices in Simplicity’s wares. Simplicity asks in astonishment, ‘didst thou neuer know Tarlton?’ (349), and goes on to describe him to the pages:

  See Halasz, Marketplace, 123.   Mithal, Edition, 157. 19   A.W. Clark (ed.), The Shirburn Ballads, 1585–1616 (Oxford, 1907), 352. 17

18

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O it was a fine fellow as ere was borne there will neuer come his like while the earth can corne: O passing fine Tarlton I would thou hadst liued yet ............................................. ... it was the merriest fellow and had such iestes in store that if thou hadst seene him, thou wouldst haue laughed thy hart sore. (365–73)

Less than two years after his death, Tarlton is already a nostalgic figure, representing a vanishing way of life in a rapidly changing city. McMillin and MacLean describe this as the play’s ‘one quiet moment’ (124), and in that respect we might imagine it as a scene of memento mori not unlike Hamlet’s discovery of Yorick’s skull – a scene also often taken as a memorial of Tarlton. Moreover, Tarlton epitomizes the dramaturgical style that McMillin and MacLean call ‘the literalism of the theatre’ and especially associate with the Queen’s Men (128–9). In this way, Simplicity’s mourning of Tarlton might be seen as a lament for the theatre of the Queen’s Men, who have lost not only their star actor but the embodiment of their theatrical ethos. McMillin and MacLean call this picture of Tarlton Simplicity’s chivalric ‘impresa’, placed in opposition to those of the three lords, and the homology holds true on a number of levels. Simplicity reads the ‘picture’ much as the pages read the shields, explaining to the audience the central importance of the image, and in the process turns Tarlton into an emblem on the same order. And as Simplicity represents in part an older London, one less concerned with pomp, pleasure, and policy, so it is appropriate that a figure of extemporal skill and simple mirth should be his shield and buckler against the new order. As the shields cannot escape the material conditions of the theatre, though, so Tarlton’s picture oscillates between the allegorical and the mercantile. Tarlton is less Simplicity’s escutcheon than his commercial ware; despite an attempt to give the picture to each of the pages in exchange for their service, he ends up selling it to Pleasure for a groat (412–13). And Tarlton is less a figure of a receeding orality than a prime example of the burgeoning marketplace of print. The ‘picture’ of Tarlton that Simplicity displays, John Astington has argued, is almost certainly a ballad or broadside image, likely one on the ballad that has just been sung: ‘this stage property is likely to have been the real thing, and the ballads were probably for sale outside the playhouse after the performance.’20 While every stage property is necessarily a ‘real thing’ – as the work of Harris, Natasha Korda, Andrew Sofer, and others has recently emphasized – such a mass-market image of Tarlton provides an especially legible illustration of the

20

  John H. Astington, ‘Rereading Illustrations of the English Stage’, Shakespeare Survey, 50 (1997): 151–170, 163. Levin is somewhat skeptical of Astington’s assumptions about the picture; see Richard Levin, ‘Tarlton’s Picture on the Elizabethan Stage’, Notes and Queries, 47.4 (2000): 435–6.

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commercial matrix that stands behind the prop.21 Furthermore, the presentation of an actual, physical ballad lamenting the death of Tarlton and the disappearance of his theatrical performances – ‘none would be wery to see him on stage’ – explicitly demonstrates his passage from the world of the playhouse to the world of the page. If, as I suggested at the outset, printed performance involves the substitution of an object for an event, the metaperformance of the printed ballad in the play involves us in multiple substitutions.22 The former experience of seeing Tarlton on stage becomes a printed ballad about that experience, which is then converted back into a theatrical experience in Three Lords and Three Ladies that substitutes for Tarlton’s presence in the theatre – an experience that (if Astington’s attractive speculation is correct) is itself transformed again by the selling of ballads after the show as souvenirs of the event. This chain of appropriations is illustrated by the theatrical display of picture itself, especially if the illustration of Tarlton is the familiar one of him dancing on stage with pipe and tabor. In this moment in the play, we are given a strange telescoping effect, as Tarlton moves from stage to page to stage again. This uncanny theatrical moment itself becomes the ground for a further repositioning of Tarlton; in Quips Upon Questions (1600), which mimics the extemporal ‘themes’ for which Tarlton was famous, the question ‘Wher’s Tarleton?’ leads to a joke about a collier who after seeing Three Lords and Three Ladies believes that Tarlton still lives, as his picture was presented on the stage.23 In a way, Tarlton haunts Three Lords and Three Ladies, though more as a figure of liminality and transformation than as a revenant of lost orality. This is true for his haunting of Elizabethan culture in general, as Lawrence Manley, Alexandra Halasz, and others have shown.24 Tarlton’s Newes Out Of Purgatorie, a collection of Boccacian merry tales introduced by the ghost of Tarlton, was first printed in 1590, the same year as Three Lords and Three Ladies, and in subsequent years Tarlton made many appearances in print. Perhaps the most surprising posthumous employment Tarlton found was as a paper bullet in the pamphlet war that erupted between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding Martin Marprelate (a printed character with strong associations with Tarlton and, in the view of McMillin and MacLean, the Queen’s Men). If, as Halasz has argued, that quarrel ‘functions as an index of humanist response to

21

  See Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (eds), Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge, 2002) and Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, 2003). 22   For more on the ‘metaperformance’ of ballads, see Smith, Acoustic World, 168–9. 23   Quoted in Levin, ‘Tarlton’s Picture’, 436. The (surely correct) identification of the play in Quips and Questions as Three Lords and Three Ladies is Levin’s. 24   See Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995) and Alexandra Halasz, ‘“So beloved that men use his picture for their signs”: Richard Tarlton and the Uses of Sixteenth-Century Celebrity’, Shakespeare Studies, 23 (1995): 19–38.

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the development of print culture’,25 it also provides an indication of the practices associated with the idea of Tarlton, as Nashe and Harvey each accuse the other of being like Tarlton or having a ‘Tarltonizing’ style or character. Harvey describes Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse as ‘according to the stile, and tenour of Tarletons president, his famous play of the seauen Deadly sinnes ... now pleasantlie interlaced with diuers new-founde phrases of the Tauerne: and patheticallie intermixt with sundry dolefull pageantes of his own ruinous, & beggerlie experience’.26 The attack is a pitch-perfect parody of the plays of the Queen’s Men, who likely performed Tarlton’s now-lost Seven Deadly Sins. In keeping with the company style, the title page of Three Lords and Three Ladies offers us The pleasant and Stately Morall, of the three Lordes and three Ladies of London. With the great Ioy and Pompe, Solempnized at their Mari-ages: Commically interlaced with much honest Mirth, for pleasure and recreation, among many Morall obseruations and other important matters of due Regard.27

Tarlton’s presence in Three Lords and Three Ladies is thus not only an example of the medley style that typifies the plays of the Queen’s Men – a moment of honest mirth interlaced with the larger narrative – but a personification of that style. In Harvey’s formulation, moreover, Tarltonian medley implies not only an immoderate interlacing of high and low but also a promiscuous cultural appropriation, where ‘new-founde phrases of the Tauerne’ are acquired for new uses. Describing Nashe’s wit as ‘Tarleton’s trickts’, Harvey claims in a similar fashion that ‘his iests [are] but the dregges of common scurrilitie, or the shreds of the theatre, or the of-scouring of new pampflets’.28 What Tarlton represents in these attacks is a radical circulation of cultural material, an endless moving from theatre to tavern to bookstall. This kind of recycling is highlighted in Three Lords and Three Ladies in Simplicity’s ‘intricate’ and comical suit, presented to the three lords after their victory over the Spaniards and their betrothal to the ladies. This moment of triumph and consolidation seems to Simplicity to be the appropriate time to attempt social change. In the suit, Simplicity asks that three ‘trades’ be barred from the city; typically, he identifies these trades by the street calls they raise. The first, ‘haue ye any old yron, male, or old harneis?’ (2002), he objects to because he believes that people only ask ‘to marke the houses where such stuffe is, that against rebels rise, there is harneis and weapon ready for them’ (2010–11). The second, ‘haue ye any ends of gold and silver?’ (2017), he thinks is a straightforward prelude to 25

  Halasz, Marketplace, 87.   Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters, and Certaine Sonnets especially Touching Robert Greene, and Other Parties, by him Abused (London, 1592), D4. 27   Mithal, Edition, cxii. 28   Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation or A New Prayse of the Old Asse (London, 1593), H4v–I1. 26

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robbery. And the third, ‘haue ye any wood to cleaue?’ (2028), is only asked so that wood-sellers can discover when wood is scarce and thus maximize their profits by raising prices (2030–36). Simplicity collectively labels these trades ‘haue ye anies’, and carefully distinguishes them from ‘what lack yees, as what do yee lacke, fine Lockrome, fine Canuas, or fine Holland cloath; or what lacke ye, fine Ballades, fine Sonets’ (1994–6). A clear division is made between those trades he considers honest, since they are based on filling the needs of customers, and those that he considers ‘very malapert trades’ (1999) and ‘not for the common wealth’ (1992), in that they involve the re-purposing of things already once sold, recirculating the surpluses of consumer society. The dire effects claimed for such practices – extortion, robbery, open rebellion – could be read as a resistance to the basic idea of circulation; if Simplicity is content with simple commercial relationships, one-time buying and selling of goods, he objects to the ways in which commodities might continue to circulate after their initial exchange. This is, of course, the fundamental problematic of the early modern theatre, which we might see as perpetually involved in an effort to negotiate its double status as magic circle and marketplace. Simplicity says that his suit is ‘for the puppet like wealth’ (1998). From the context, it seems fairly clear that this is a malapropism for ‘public-wealth’, an obsolete form of ‘commonwealth’. But connections between puppets and publicity, and puppets and the commonwealth, are hardwired into the play. To prepare for the battle with the Spanish, Policy urges the other two lords to ‘Carry, as it were, a careless regard / Of these Castillians and their accustomed brauado’ (1317–18). To that end, he asks Pleasure to maintain the city’s leisure industries: And pleasure, see that plaies be published, Mai-games and maskes, with mirth and minstrelsie Pageants and school-feastes, beares, and puppit plaies. (1324–6)

As McMillin and MacLean comment, this is a vigorous defence of the patriotic role of the theatre, in which ‘plays and other entertainments ... are contributing to the nation’s defence’ (33). The play thus imagines the sociopolitical role of the theatre as creating public shows for the pleasure of London and the defence of the realm. Moreover, the action of the play involves defending the space of the playhouse itself from foreign invasion; in the Armada scenes the stage becomes the country itself, from which the interloping Spanish must be driven, and their shields (and stage properties) destroyed.29 In this regard, the phrase ‘puppet like 29   In the interests of space I have skipped over any discussion of ‘the three Lordes of Lincolne’ (2080–81), who challenge the Lords of London for the Ladies shortly before the marriage; this benign reenactment of the fight with the Spanish lords revolves around the decorum of Lucre, Love, and Conscience residing in London, and provides another kind of differentiation, between metropolis and country town. (It is hard to imagine that these scenes were played outside of London.)

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wealth’ could indicate the theatricalized nature of early modern society, where theatrical puppetry helps to create a public sphere for nationalism. But ‘puppet ... wealth’ could also refer to the cultural world of theatre, a limited and specialized economy composed of various producers and institutions – what Bourdieu might call the field of theatrical production. From this perspective, Simplicity’s suit proposes rules for the theatre, ones intended not only to increase the theatrical capital of the Queen’s Men but also to defend the entire field by barring the recirculation of its cultural commodities in the larger field of cultural production. Already in the 1580s we seem very close to the pervasive late Elizabethan and Jacobean complaints about the appropriation of theatrical material, from tables filled with pilfered jests to plays lined with recycled bombast. But while England can be protected against Spanish infiltrations, the space of the theatre cannot be held separate from the larger commercial contexts that threaten its singular status, that appropriate its labour for new cultural and mercantile purposes. It is principally through the complex character of Simplicity that Three Lords and Three Ladies registers its ambivalence about this state of affairs. No resolution is offered to these issues by the play; Simplicity’s suit is first postponed so that preparations for the weddings can proceed, and then apparently forgotten in the flurry of events that conclude the play. We might imagine, though, that London’s Pomp, Policy, and Pleasure do not answer Simplicity’s suit because it is unanswerable, at least within the play. Instead, the suit – and its vision of a reformed cultural marketplace – must be put off, deferred beyond the space of Three Lords and Three Ladies of London and the ‘space of possibles’ of the cultural field in which the play must operate: ‘for these three faults the time serues not now to redresse’ (2046).

Chapter 8

Truth, Poetry, and Report in The True Tragedy of Richard III Brian Walsh

Throughout their repertory, the Queen’s Men show a persistent interest in history. According to Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, the company invented the history play genre with The Famous Victories of Henry V, and continued to stage the past in The Troublesome Reign of King John, King Leir, The True Tragedy of Richard III, and, to a lesser extent, in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The appeal of historical subject material for the Queen’s Men extended beyond the English past: Robert Greene’s Selimus is based on the life of an Ottoman Emperor. Alongside being the first theatrical group to engage in performing history on the popular stage, the Queen’s Men were quick to meditate on this practice. For this company, to tell history on stage involved an interrogation of the wider concept of historical representation and historical knowledge itself. The Queen’s Men represent the past as an essentially imagined realm: a realm that is so self-evidently ‘other’ from the performative present that it can only be invoked in highly stylized, consciouslymediated ways. The group’s work indicates a sensibility that historical knowledge is a human artifact, a sensibility that can be seen most acutely in The True Tragedy of Richard III, where, as I hope to show, the troupe offers its most deliberative reflection on the conceptual implications of performing history. This reflection is bound up with the form of theatre itself. The True Tragedy foregrounds the complicated issue of the status of ‘truth’ in historiography at the same time as it adds theatrical performance, in place of what Philip Sidney called the historian’s ‘bare Was’, to the expanding field of historical forms in the late sixteenth century. The Queen’s Men had a penchant for engaging with the past, and their style of play inflected the historical imagination in distinctive ways. According to McMillin and MacLean’s definitive study, the Queen’s Men were known for their ‘adaptability’, and were ‘remarkably quick-witted and resourceful in mounting their performances’. They were thus fundamentally audience-oriented. Their playing style was aimed at keeping a line of communication between the players and audiences open, so that at any moment one might expect an aside, a direct address, or some form of broad, physical comedy that could, for an instant at 

       

McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 33–5. Sidney, Sir Philip, The Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1966), 36. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 83.

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least, transform the theatrical experience from the presentation of a self-contained dramatic fiction to something more like what we would call a vaudevillian clown show. The Queen’s Men were formed ‘primarily for touring’, a way of putting the players and the ideas they promulgated ‘in circulation’. The company also frequently performed in and around London and at court, but they always maintained an itinerant identity, as can be seen by the fact that, even when they performed in London, they did not become affiliated with any particular theatre there. It is perhaps because of this that so many plays performed by the Queen’s Men include various kinds of ‘framing devices’. That is, the plays often showcase metatheatrical gestures through which the players grab the attention of playgoers or establish direct contact with the audience. This occurs sometimes at the start of a play, as in the prologues to Clyomon and Clamydes and Selimus; sometimes it occurs throughout the course of a play in the form of asides or other moments that recall older dramatic conventions of interaction with spectators, as in the clown scenes of the Three Lords and Ladies of London and The Famous Victories of Henry V. Such gestures might be especially important for a company that is oriented primarily toward touring, simply because constant movement means the likelihood of unfamiliar playing spaces and new audiences, an atmosphere in which the company may have felt more of a need to focus audience attention than a company that performs virtually every day at a ‘home’ theatre to audiences used to the conventions of a diurnal theatre industry. The commitment of the Queen’s Men to touring would also have meant that the group was frequently performing in non-purpose built theatres, so that the players needed to do extra work to help transform the inns, halls or village greens where they put on their plays into imaginative spaces of dramatic play. And, in so far as the company existed to promote Elizabeth’s social and religious-political agenda both in London and around the country, the group could use theatrical conventions like inductions, asides, and direct address to the audience as a means to engage playgoers more or less directly and attempt to influence their reception of key moments or aspects of the plays. This can be seen most explicitly in ‘prophetic’ speeches that anticipate and celebrate the Tudor ascendancy in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The True Tragedy of Richard III. The style of the Queen’s Men may have developed as a result of touring and the other conditions outlined above, as well as from the presence of a number of clowns, including the famous Richard Tarlton, in the group. Mainly, they sought to produce ‘knock about’ entertainment laced with Tudor propaganda. The goals of the Queen’s Men in these plays likely had little to do with a desire to initiate questions about historical representation. But in performing history they discovered fundamental incongruities inherent to representing the past. As a response to the challenges posed by performing the past, the Queen’s Men worked toward a conception of history wherein the past is a fictive construct to which audiences 

 

McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, xv, 5, 6.

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gain access through flamboyantly theatrical gestures rather than through carefully crafted verisimilitude. The most complicated ‘theatrical gesture’ in a Queen’s Men play occurs in the framing device for George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale. This play features an on-stage storyteller whose tale is interrupted by its embodiment. Rather than displacing the eponymous ‘Old Wife’ Madge and her auditors, the characters who emerge from her tale share the stage with them. The apparent usurpation of Madge by the enactment of her tale becomes instead a juxtaposition between a framing device and a series of dramatic actions. The anonymous True Tragedy of Richard III also features the juxtaposition of frame and object, although in a more abstract way. The play opens in a quasi-allegorical fashion, with the entrance of two figures the text identifies as ‘Truth’ and ‘Poetrie’. The two address each other by these appellations, and Truth speaks of showing ‘her pageant’, an undeveloped hint that the player represents Truth as female. Beyond this, it is not clear whether or how the players may have presented these abstractions through costume, prosthetics, props, or gesture. Things become even stranger when, before the two begin to speak, the stage direction reads ‘To them the Ghoast of George Duke of Clarence’, who cries out in Latin for blood and revenge and then quickly exits. Truth and Poetry defer dealing with this sensational apparition until well into their conversation. They begin instead by exchanging pleasantries before moving to more pointed questions about the complex knot of truth, poetry, and theatre: Poetrie. Truth, well met. Truth. Thankes Poetrie, what makes thou on a stage? Poet. Shadowes. Truth. Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes, Therefore depart and give Truth leave To shew her pageant. Poe. Why will truth be a Player? Truth. No, but Tragedia like for to present A Tragedy in England done but late. (7–15)

The conversation then shifts to the back story of the Wars of the Roses, as Truth tells how Henry VI was deposed by the House of York, whose leader, Richard Duke of York, soon ‘breathed his latest breath, / Leaving behind three branches of that line, / Three sonnes: the first was Edward, now the King, / George of Clarence, and Richard Glosters Duke’ (32–7).

   True Tragedy, line 12, my emphasis. Lines from The True Tragedy are cited by through-line numbers according to the Malone Society Reprint (The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, ed. W.W. Greg, Malone Society Reprint [Oxford, 1929]). I have retained the edition’s original spelling in all quotations, but for convenience have modernized the spelling of the play’s title throughout this essay.

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The author of The True Tragedy thus moves quickly through a series of traditional theatrical opening gestures at the start of the play: there is the Senecan convention, most certainly filtered through Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, of the vengeful ghost who inaugurates the action with a cry of ‘vendicta;’ the prologuelike exposition of the key actions and developments that precede the story about to be acted, which includes a chronicle-like genealogy; and, in a variation of the single player delivering a prologue, there is a kind of induction in which, through conversation, allegorical figures ready the audience for some of the broad, thematic problems that the performance of the play itself will entail. This jumble of staging maneuvers is perhaps an index of the author’s clumsiness, or it may be a more deliberate attempt to create a chaotic opening to the story of a havoc-wreaking king. In any case, the author does seem to signal a belief that this play cannot simply begin in the middle of the action, but rather requires some sort of framing device, one that calls attention to theatrical tradition and draws on theatrical forms such as the induction and the prologue. The players connect with the audience through an allegorical dialogue that stimulates reflection on the act of playing itself. ‘Poetry’ asserts a sense of playing as problematic as he speaks to the limits of theatrical representation. In response to the question ‘what makes thou upon a stage?’ Poetry is quick to answer ‘shadowes’. A synonym for ‘player’ throughout the early modern period, ‘shadow’ is a metaphorical description of theatre itself, one that highlights the insubstantial, fleeting, ephemeral, and also dubious nature of performance. The term is used again later, this time as a verb, to convey Richard’s fear of being rendered impotent and ineffectual at a decisive moment of the play, as he contemplates the possibility that his young nephew will be king now that Edward IV has died: ‘Have I removed such logs out of my sight as my brother Clarence / And king Henry the sixt, to suffer a child to shadow me?’ (369–70) and later Richard again uses the term to mean something that is fundamentally weak and empty as he responds to news that an enemy is arming against him: ‘Tush, a shadow without a substance, and a feare without a cause’ (467–8). ‘Truth’ likewise understands the word as indicating a debilitating state of lack, saying to Poetry ‘Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes.’ Truth even dismisses Poetry from the stage altogether: ‘Therefore depart and give Truth leave / To shew her pageant.’ For Truth, the emptiness and presumably false nature of Poetry on stage can be given substance through an infusion of Truth, or more specifically, a true story from the English past. McMillin and MacLean read this incident as an indication that Truth here ‘takes the leadership of playing away from Poetry’; indeed, in their reading, the Queen’s Men show a consistent belief that truth is ‘plainer and more honest than poetry’. However, I believe that The True Tragedy represents the relation between Truth and Poetry in a more complicated way than McMillin and MacLean acknowledge. Truth attempts to take the leadership of playing, but whether this happens is left 

 

McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 33, 166.

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ambiguous, as we will see, and even if it does happen, this still creates its own set of problems. The key difficulty with the assertion that Truth will supplant poetry, here on the stage, is identified immediately by Poetry: ‘Will Truth be a player?’ Poetry recognises the incongruity of the real, of ‘Truth’ being disseminated through the false, ‘Poetry’ and playing. In other words, Poetry articulates the essential paradox of Truth speaking on stage, for the setting immediately transforms Truth into a player. It is at this point that Truth launches into a twenty-line exposition of the Wars of the Roses, but the figure has made clear that the play will not consist of a narrated tale in the style of the chronicles. Truth has asked Poetry to depart and make way for Truth’s ‘pageant’, a word Truth uses again at the end of the scene, and which had a current usage in this period as a fictive display on a stage. Even in denying Poetry’s charge that it is incongruous for Truth to become a player, Truth invokes theatrical language to describe ‘her’ intentions: ‘Tragedia like’ Truth will ‘present a Tragedy.’ The promise to ‘adde bodies’ to the shadows Poetry makes on stage further implicates Truth in the materiality of theatrical playing, for to call on bodies is inevitably to call attention to the living, breathing bodies of the people on stage, professional players whose appearance here is not a unique embodiment, but one instance of a professional, diurnal commitment wherein the same bodies take on a host of different roles – including the possibility of multiple roles within a single play – some based on historical figures, some not. Following Truth’s first lines that set the scene for the play, Poetry ceases to be interested in whether Truth can be a player, and instead prompts Truth to fill in some remaining details, including the identification of the shrieking Ghost as Clarence. Moving to direct audience address at the end of a second extended exposition, this time a physical description of the Duke of Gloucester, Truth closes out this opening scene: ‘Thus, gentles, excuse the length by the matter, / And here begins Truthes Pageant, Poetrie / Wend with me’ (70–72). Truth seems here assured that the content of a history play excuses its theatrical framework. The ‘matter’ should be sufficient to keep the audience’s attention, for it promises to ‘revive the hearts of drooping minds’ (16). The fundamental problem identified by Poetry – ‘will Truth be a player?’ – remains unresolved as the two depart the stage together. This opening scene of The True Tragedy of Richard III encapsulates some of the key questions that are raised by the representation of history in general and the performance of history in particular. Chiefly, the scene seems to ask, can content that is presented on the popular stage by professional players be classified as ‘Truth’? Or does theatrical form relegate any ‘matter’ put forth on stage to the status of poetic ‘shadowes’? Is the affect achieved by ‘shadowes’ that are part of ‘Truth’s Pageant’ fundamentally different from the affect achieved by ordinary stage plays? The figures of Truth and Poetry raise these difficult questions but defer fully responding to them in this scene, and the remainder of the play engages them only tentatively. Truth and Poetry do not reappear, although presumably the players who took those parts had other roles in The True Tragedy (a topic I will return to below), thus revealing that

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‘Truth’ itself has indeed become a player; that Truth has, in fact, been a player all along. Whether the author of The True Tragedy was aware of Sidney’s Defence of Poetry and its intense meditation on the relation of truth to poetry is uncertain (the Defence was published a year after The True Tragedy, but is believed by many scholars to have circulated previously in manuscript). Despite a superficial similarity of interest in these terms, the two writers would seem to be working on shifting conceptual ground. Sidney differentiates the ‘particular truth of things’ – history in its exact details – from an exemplary moral truth. The important truth for Sidney is not to be gleaned from ‘particular’ things that happened, but from the universal moral certainties that poets invent and that promote virtuous action. While in both Sidney and The True Tragedy ‘poetry’ means something like imaginative fiction more than a literary form per se, ‘Truth’, in the title and opening sequence of The True Tragedy, appears to encompass both sides of Sidney’s hierarchy of truths: this ‘Truth’ is somewhat in between Sidney’s neo-platonic ideals and the aims of the emergent school of early modern antiquarianism (associated with figures like William Camden) that privileges precisely the ‘particular truth’ that Sidney disdains. As we will see below, the author of The True Tragedy does not commit fully to endorsing either a ‘just the facts’ approach to the telling of history, or the kind of fictionalizing, moral-didactic approach advocated by Sidney. The play exemplifies and indeed enacts a moment when the notion of historical truth itself lacks clear definition. While the choric figures do not reappear, the play does keep alive a line of metatheatrical communication between the players and the audience. Richard’s unnamed Page is an important character who addresses the audience at several points, and at one moment even invites the audience to employ its interpretive power: ‘I see my Lord [Richard] is fully resolved to climbe, but how hee climbes ile leave that to your judgements’ (475–6). In another instance of direct address, the host of an inn offers his own comments to the audience after the Page has bullied him into complicity with Richard’s plan to murder an enemy under the host’s own roof: ‘A maisters, maisters, what a troublesome vocation am I crept into, you thinke we that be In-keepers get all the world, but I thinke I shall get a faire halter to my neck’ (581–3). Through such gestures, The True Tragedy maintains throughout its performance the sense that it is itself a theatrical account of the English past. This acknowledgement is at some moments made implicitly through contrast with other forms of historical representation. During a confrontation with Richard, for instance, the Earl Rivers asserts ‘The Chronicles I record, talk of my fidelitie and of my progeny, / Wher, as in a glass, y[ou] maist behold, Thy ancestors & their trechery’ (621–2). This mention of the ‘Chronicles’ reminds audiences that such records exist, and that they are distinct from the form of representation now being enacted. Elsewhere, we see this reinforced as a character promises to write 

 

Defence of Poetry, 32.

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a historical ballad based on an event within the play. Lodowick, a man indebted to the dead King Edward’s mistress Jane Shore, encounters her begging in the street. The law forbids anyone to relieve her, and, despite the fact that she had once persuaded the king to return land to Lodowick, he refuses to aid her, saying instead: ‘I will shun her company and get me to my chamber, and there set downe in heroicall verse, the shameful end of a Kings Concubin’ (1077–9). The historical forms mentioned by Rivers and Lodowick remind us of the variegated ways in which history was represented in this era. Both Rivers’s ‘Chronicles’ and Lodowick’s ‘heroicall verse’ are written forms of history, distinct from the live enactment of the past the play presents. Lodowick’s intended work, in form and content, indeed recalls the Mirror for Magistrates, which includes a poem about Jane Shore, and which, as a printed book of historical poems, can only aspire to the kind of three dimensional, audio-visual form of history the theatre can provide. There is a moral charge to his comments, but Rivers refers to the ‘Chronicles’ mainly for their factual value: they vindicate his ancestors and accuse Richard’s. Lodowick envisions a historical project that is more explicitly moralistic: a poem that will show ‘the shameful end of a Kings Concubin’, a phrase that echoes copy from the title page of the 1594 quarto of The True Tragedy published by Thomas Creede: ‘With the lamentable ende of Shores wife, an example for all wicked women.’ This sentiment, both as it is expressed on the cover and within the play by Lodowick, is distinctly at odds with the completely sympathetic portrayal of Shore’s wife in The True Tragedy, revealing the instability of history as a vehicle for moral didacticism. In Lodowick the play provides a morally reprehensible version of how the past is put into discourse. Late in The True Tragedy, immediately after the crookbacked King has been killed by the Earl of Richmond, two characters appear on stage to initiate a more nuanced discussion of how this happens. One, Richard’s Page, is by now familiar to the audience: he has been in several key scenes and addressed the audience directly on a few occasions. The other, appearing for the first time, is identified in the text of the play by the strange speech prefix ‘Report’, and is addressed as ‘Report’ by the Page. Report begins the conversation with an urgent question: ‘How may I know the certain true report of this victorious battell fought to day, my friend what ere thou beest, tel unto mee the true report, which part hath wonne the victorie, whether the king or no’ (2003–6). Report’s query raises a number of crucial questions about historical representation that supplement those we encountered in the opening scene. Most obviously, he points to the importance of ascertaining truth – ‘the certain true report’ – as the goal of the ‘reporter’ of historical events. Methodologically, Report seeks out, in the classical tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, an eyewitness to aid him in making a record of these events. But as Report realizes, the search for truth entails confronting the possibility that the perspectives of individual witnesses can be warped by their own partiality. Hence, he emphasizes that he wants to hear ‘the true report’ from the Page, ‘what ere thou beest’, i.e., whatever side he has taken in the conflict.

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The Page delivers a ‘briefe discourse’ that shows a mind already at work in crafting a narrative out of the death of King Richard, a narrative made vivid through classical allusions. Richard arrived on the battlefield ‘mounted on horseback, with as high resolve as fierce Achillis mongst the sturdie Greekes’ (2018–19). The Page’s description also gestures toward offering an intelligible tactical cause for Richmond’s victory. Due to the length of the battle, King Richard eventually grew ‘faint, which Richmond straight perceived, and presently did sound a fresh alarme’. The Page further adds his interpretation of the King’s own motivation and mindset. Despite Richmond’s evident advantage as the battle dragged on, ‘worthie Richard ... did never flie, but followed honour to the gates of death’ (2026–7). Along with providing audiences with a fantasy of access to the decisive event at Bosworth – Richmond has moments before killed Richard on stage – The True Tragedy here shows the process by which one partial witness to the fight, Richard’s loyal Page, creates an account of the entire battle for a latecomer whose name signifies he will go on to ‘report’ the events of the battle to others. In this episode, The True Tragedy thus allegorizes the historian through the figure of Report. The Page’s particular account demonstrates that meaning does not inhere in the events of the past; narratives of those events are inevitably given shape by those who report them, as we saw when Lodowick chooses to write of Shore, a woman who showed him mercy and kindness, as ‘shameful’. This dialogue further provides a fascinating example of the essential belatedness of historical narratives. It is true that some histories are written by people who were themselves witness to the events they depict, but most often, the historian, like Report, arrives late on the scene, and must work backward through the testimony of others. The True Tragedy at this moment posits a gap between the events of the past and the representation of those events and thus enacts an exploration of the temporality of historical knowledge. Finally, the Page relies on literary allusion (‘Achillis’) and metaphor (‘the gates of death’) to convey his ‘briefe discourse’ and hence shapes history through his use of figurative language; in other words, his ‘truth’ cannot be spoken without ‘poetry’. To return to some of the issues raised in my earlier brief discussion of Sidney’s Defence, we can see in this scene how the author of The True Tragedy fails to commit to privileging either a strictly ‘factual’ approach to representing history, or an approach that would re-shape the raw materials of history into a neat, morally perspicuous package. The Page, though Richard’s loyal servant, does not deliver an account strictly biased on behalf of his master. He refers to Richmond as ‘worthie’ and calls both sides ‘brave batalians’ (2023). But he does emphasize Richard’s bravery and hence refuses to participate in the official line other characters will soon begin to disseminate about Richard’s essential depravity and Richmond’s providential victory, showing the possibility of different interpretations of Richard. The closing ‘prophetic speeches’ given by messengers, and then the old Queen and Princess, offer a further, intriguing example of the author’s balancing between an interest in the facts of history, and in the edifying lessons of history. These figures

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give a brief re-capitulation of the course of the Tudor reign, including mention of Queen Mary. Given that promoting the Protestant Elizabethan order was one of the putative reasons the Queen’s Men were formed, it is curious that Mary, in this post-Acts and Monuments and probably post-Armada play, is mentioned with no virulence, despite her ‘bloody’ reputation with Protestants and her marriage to the King of Spain. The Princess Elizabeth explains that after Edward VI’s death ‘Mary did succeede, which married Philip King of Spaine, she raigned fiue years, four moneths, and some odde dayes, and is buried in Westminister’ (2188–90). Mary’s term is described in language reminiscent of the oldest style of chronicle: a bare record that makes impartial note of her marriage to the Catholic King of Spain and that is most concerned with the precise length of her reign. Elizabeth’s ascendancy, though, is spoken of in conventionally messianic terms by the old Queen, who describes ‘Worthy Elizabeth, a mirrour in her age, by whose wise life and civil gouerment, her country was defended from the crueltie of famine, fire, and sword, warres, fearfull messengers’ (2192–94). The moral lesson, perhaps even the moral ‘truth’ of Elizabeth’s positive sovereignty, are emphasized over the ‘particular’ facts of her reign, the opposite of the way Mary is depicted. The speeches with which the play ends are noteworthy beyond their content. Given that these speeches break from the historical era in which the play is set in order to deliver trans-historical insights, they participate in the kind of framing I discussed in terms of the play’s opening. In fact, one might expect here the return of the opening frame figures, Truth and Poetry, to deliver these closing words and give the play a sense of symmetry. Instead, the text offers speech prefixes for two undifferentiated messengers (both given as ‘Mess.’), the Queen Mother, and Princess Elizabeth. McMillin and MacLean, in their conjecture about the play’s casting, suggest that the same actor played Poetry, the Page, and one of the messengers in the final scene. If this is true, one actor would have played three roles that each involved some theatrically self-conscious speeches, thus establishing that actor as a medium for metatheatrical reflection on history-making throughout the play. McMillin and MacLean also assign Truth and the Queen Mother to one actor, which would have the effect of making this player a figure who speaks ‘around’ the play’s ostensible setting in the time of Richard III at both the start and finish of the play. Such thinking is, of course conjectural. We might well be puzzled or disappointed that the text does not indicate that Truth and Poetry return at the end to deliver the closing words and give the play neat closure. We are left nonetheless with an ending that shares similarities with the beginning: figures talking about history in a way that violates a straightforward, mimetic representation of the past. The True Tragedy emphasizes its own status as a play through its use of specifically theatrical conventions such as direct address and asides to the audience. As in The Old Wives Tale, what initially seems to be a usurpation – there embodiment of narrative, here, Truth of Poetry – turns out instead to be the acknowledgement of co-dependence. Thinking back on the opening exchange between Truth and Poetry, we can see that while the play has not offered definitive answers to the

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conundrums it initially raises about the relation between truth and poetry, it does keep these conundrums alive, thus establishing them as urgent issues in historical thinking and representation. In The Famous Victories of Henry V, their first history play, the Queen’s Men contributed a new subject to the evolving debates and discussions over factual and moral truth and the edifying power of historical representation more generally: how does live performance of the past inflect the historical imagination? The True Tragedy anatomises all of these issues in the ‘Report’ scene. Report is a stand-in for the historian, who will go on to disseminate the events of the battle at Bosworth. Insofar as Report has an allegorical name, he also is ostentatiously a theatrical figure, made possible by the player enacting the part and the working theatre industry that is presenting the play. A chronicle, such as the work of the Holinshed syndicate, or a printed poem about the past, such as Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars, can also be self-reflexive about its creation. But the incongruity between the body of the present player and the historical figure being enacted in the moment of performance ensures that such self-reflexivity is an integral part of the history play as a form. Rather than ignore this dynamic, the Queen’s Men and the author of The True Tragedy engage it head on through further gestures of selfconsciousness about the production of history in their choice, for instance, to open the play with a conversation between Truth and Poetry. The discourse on history in the sixteenth century, as conducted both by early modern thinkers and by subsequent scholars, has most often emphasised its didactic potential. In his influential book on Tudor historiography, F.J. Levy gives voice to a standard aphorism about the didacticism of history in the Renaissance, writing that in the early modern period, ‘History that did not teach was utterly inconceivable, and if any changes occurred during the course of the sixteenth century, these had to do not with whether history should teach but what it taught’. This statement is undoubtedly true in most respects, but it leaves little room for an idea of history as also a source of pleasure rather than merely an educative vehicle. Theatre-goers in Elizabethan London found – indeed, wanted to find – more in stories about the past than moral lessons. Part of this pleasure follows from the fact that history plays provide a fantasy wherein temporal distance is elided and audiences have visual and auditory access to long-dead figures, a kind of imaginative triumph over the tyranny of time and space. And yet, the players in The True Tragedy mark the distance between the ‘then’ of Richard’s time and the ‘now’ of the play’s performance when they present themselves as allegorical abstractions rather than actual people with names and personal histories, when they reflect on the story as a matter of truth or poetry, when they engage the audience in direct address, and when they shift into 

  I address this and other such questions in relation to The Famous Victories in my article ‘Theatrical Temporality and Historical Consciousness in The Famous Victories of Henry V’, Theatre Journal, 59.1 (2007): 57–73.    F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), 7.

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a prophetic anticipation of Elizabeth. The theatrical enactment of history in this and arguably other plays by the Queen’s Men offers a peculiar fantasy of presence. The access to the past the plays provide is always complicated by the inevitable absence of history, but this absence is addressed through the pleasurable spectacle of the performance itself. The Queen’s Men foreground their playing as the conduit for the engagement with history that the audience gains at a performance of The True Tragedy. The company thus showcases here how performing history on stage becomes in the early modern period a distinctive means of representing the past. The True Tragedy of Richard III exemplifies how the Elizabethan play of history marks a new intervention in English historical consciousness at the end of the sixteenth century: a fantasy of access to the past that both constructs an experience of history and reveals that experiences of history are always constructed.

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Chapter 9

The Famous Victories and the 1600 Quarto of Henry V Richard Dutton

In an earlier essay, I argued that the folio text of Shakespeare’s Henry V was more likely to date from 1602 than from 1599. If that is so, the status of the 1600 quarto of the play (The cronicle history of Henry the fift) changes materially. It is no longer an inadequate redaction of the much larger folio text, the role it enjoys almost universally in the editorial tradition: as Andrew Gurr puts it, ‘a cheap paste copy of the Shakespearean diamond’. It is a (version of a) play that was almost certainly performed in its own right in 1599. That being so, it deserves more attention in its own right than it has generally received. And here I want to focus on one specific issue: its debt to the old Queen’s Men’s play, the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V, a text of which was published in 1598. Part of my point in so doing is to reinforce the dating argument I have already made, by demonstrating that Q (as I henceforth designate the 1600 quarto) is highly indebted to The Famous Victories (FV), while none of the material in F (The Life of King Henry the Fift, in the 1623 folio text) that does not pre-exist in Q derives from it at all. This strengthens the    Richard Dutton, ‘“Methinks the Truth Should Live from Age to Age”: The Dating and Contexts of Henry V’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005): 173–204. I accept that there is room for doubt over whether some smaller details of the text – such as the Irish materials, which I discuss below – may not have existed in 1600 and been lost in whatever imperfect process created Q. But no collation of the texts can establish that the choruses, 1.1, 3.1 and most of 3.2, 4.2, and much of 5.2, existed in 1600. Nor am I convinced by James Bednarz’s suggestion that Jonson mocks the chorus’s manner of conducting the audience back and forth across the Channel in the 1600 quartos of Every Man Out of His Humour. The verbal echoes he adduces are so much less self-evident than, for example, those in the 1616 Prologue to Every Man In His Humour, where Jonson clearly is mocking the expansive mode of Shakespeare’s histories. See James P. Bednarz, ‘When Did Shakespeare Write the Choruses of Henry V?’, Notes and Queries, 53 (2006): 486–9. For these reasons I have to disagree with Tiffany Stern elsewhere in this volume, who assumes that the choruses refer to 1599 performances at the Curtain. See also Notes 5 and 11.    Andrew Gurr (ed.), The First Quarto of King Henry V (Cambridge, 2000), ix.    References to FV, Q, and F are to the original 1598, 1600 and 1623 texts, as accessed on Early English Books Online. Each section of F has its own pagination. In the Histories this is erratic. The Second Part of Henry IV concludes on p.100, followed by an unnumbered Epilogue and list of roles. Henry V then begins on p. 69, but is consistent within itself.

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likelihood that the new materials in F (especially the Choruses, 1.1, 3.1 and most of 3.2, 4.2, and much of 5.2) are additions to the 1599 play, not restored excisions from it. The case for a 1602 dating of F is (has to be, in the absence of other evidence) largely circumstantial. Much of it relates to the changing context: in 1599 England was genuinely besieged, having lost the French alliance with the 1598 Treaty of Vervins (which also released Spain to focus its military might solely on England), while the situation in Ireland was spinning out of control. By 1602, the Battle of Kinsale (Christmas Eve, 1601) had put an end to the threats from both Spain and Ireland. A play about Henry V and Agincourt in 1599 was effectively a prayer for national delivery – which I suggest Q in fact represents – while a similar play in 1602 is one of national celebration, of relief that delivery has been effected (which, of course, in the hands of a master dramatist, is also able to handle some of the darker sides of power and warfare than may have been prudent earlier). The celebratory tone is largely effected by the Chorus, that remorselessly upbeat and tireless apologist for ‘the Mirror of all Christian kings’ (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p. 72), until the Epilogue’s deflating reminder of Henry’s early death and its consequences. The darker sides are largely introduced in the opening scene of church politics, in the much more violent threats to the people of Harfleur with which Henry’s speech in 3.3 concludes, and in Burgundy’s lengthy description (in 5.2) of the devastation Henry’s campaign has caused. None of this material is in Q – or in FV. Another thing notably absent from either Q or FV is any mention at all of Ireland. In F, the Dauphin derides the Constable for riding ‘like a Kerne of Ireland’ (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.72) and warns of ‘fall[ing] into foule Boggs’ (ibid), while Pistol cockily sings ‘Calmie custure me’ (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.87: a corruption of the Irish refrain ‘cailin og a’ stor’). Three items have generated much more comment: one is the whole role of Macmorris in the second half of 3.2 (‘What ish my Nation? Who talkes of my Nation?’: F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.78). Another is one of the play’s most famous textual cruces: Queen Isabella greets Henry as ‘brother Ireland’ (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.92). This is universally amended to ‘brother England’, either as a compositor’s misreading of ‘Ingland’ or because it is, as Gary Taylor puts it, ‘Shakespeare’s own ‘Freudian slip’ – a slip natural enough in 1599, a hundred lines after Shakespeare’s reference to the Essex expedition in 5.0’. I do not see it as a slip at all. Henry shortly assures Princess Katherine ‘‘England is thine, Ireland is thine, France is thine’’ (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.94). It might be unusual to address Henry by his second title, but it is not improper or disrespectful: in the context of negotiations towards the Treaty of Troyes, it is a gracious way of acknowledging that Henry was on the point of adding a third crown to the two he already possessed. And such a   Gary Taylor (ed.), Henry V (Oxford, 1982), 18. See also the notes to the line in J. Dover Wilson’s New Cambridge edition of Henry V (1947) and J.H. Walter’s Arden 2 edition (1954). 

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gesture would be particularly graceful in 1602 – and likely to be greeted warmly by audiences – with Ireland once again securely in English hands. Third, and most vexed of all, is that supposed ‘reference to the Essex expedition in 5.0’: The Generall of our gracious Empresse, As in good time he may, from Ireland comming, Bringing Rebellion broached on his Sword. (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.91)

In the universal editorial consensus that F (or something like it) existed in 1599, these lines are invariably glossed as a reference to the Earl of Essex’s expedition to Ireland in the Spring and Summer of that year. But if this and the other Choruses are later additions, this reference points to the man who did indeed ‘Bring rebellion broachèd on his sword’, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, the victor of Kinsale. It is, of course, entirely possible that some version of censorship removed all of these Irish references from Q. But it is at least as plausible that they were never there in 1599. They were certainly not in FV. Let us now look at what is in Q from the perspective of what it owes to FV. And the first thing that strikes us is just how much that is. FV consists of 20 scenes. 1 to 7 correspond with parts of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV; 8 and part of 9 correspond with 2 Henry IV; and the remainder of 9 to 20 (more than half the play) correspond closely with Q. Q picks up the material at exactly the same point in Scene 9, with the Archbishop of Canterbury (‘Bishop’ in Q) summoned to give his views of Henry’s claim to France, and expounding at some length on Salic Law; Henry and his counsellors discuss the Scottish threat; the Dauphin/Dolphin’s gift of tennis balls is received and defied; John Cobbler, his wife, and Derick provide comedy in scenes which will readily transpose to those of Pistol, Nym, and the others; the siege of Harfleur is mentioned but not shown (neither gives Henry a piece of rousing oratory); the Dauphin is prevented by his father from taking part in the battle of Agincourt; the French troops regard the English as easy prey; Henry tells the French herald that he refuses to be ransomed, whatever the outcome, and leads his troops with a stirring patriotic/religious battle-cry, invoking God and Saint George; ‘The Battle’ itself is hardly scripted; Henry and his nobles review their astonishingly light casualties, the Duke of York being the only notable one; Derick has an encounter with a French prisoner; Henry debates with the French 

  See Warren D. Smith, ‘The Henry V Choruses in the First Folio’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954): 38–57. If F was the version of the play performed at court in 1605, the lines (with ‘Empresse’ presumably amended to ‘Emperor’) must surely there have been received as a compliment to Mountjoy, by then elevated to the earldom of Devonshire for his success.    Several commentators have suggested that FV represents what may be a collapsing of two original Queen’s Men’s plays into one, and that more of their material may have been available to Shakespeare and lain behind 1 and 2 Henry IV. The Henry V material, however, seems relatively intact.

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King the precise terms of the peace treaty, demanding the crown immediately but, as negotiations overrun, wooing and winning Princess Katherine; there is a final comic scene of John Cobbler and Derick, involving many captured French shoes; Henry finally agrees to accept the French crown when the present king dies, as long as the French nobility swear allegiance to him (which they do), and the play ends – as Q does – with Henry proclaiming that he will wed Katherine very soon. There are relatively few verbal links between FV and Q, but enough to suggest Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the earlier play, either in performance or in the 1598 text: the interchange between Henry and the French Ambassador over whether the latter should feel free to speak his mind (FV, D3; Q, A4–4v); the description of the Dolphin’s present as a ‘tun’ of tennis balls/treasure (FV, D3; Q, A4v); the Herald’s request after Agincourt for leave to bury the dead (FV, F1v; Q, F1). The scene of Derick with his French prisoner is strongly reminiscent of Pistol with M. le Fer, while Henry’s wooing of Katherine is similar in both texts: both sequences strongly suggest some acquaintance. None of these suggests close attention by Shakespeare to the verbal play of FV, but some details and situations seem to have stuck with him. It seems, then, irrefutable that FV has provided Shakespeare with the essential shape of Q. They start and end in exactly the same place. Neither version gives us a scene at Harfleur; in neither version is the Dauphin at Agincourt (in this they follow the chronicles, as F does not); in both versions the triumph at Agincourt is rounded off with a mirroring triumph in the wooing of Katherine, which is undercut neither by Burgundy’s lament over war-torn France nor a reminder of how short-lived Henry’s achievements were to prove. The editorial tradition on Henry V assumes, either implicitly or explicitly, that FV had relatively little influence on the play (i.e. F), which it only patchily resembles; and that it was mere chance that the process which converted F to Q did so in such a way as to emphasize so many resemblances (and so few differences). Actually, so many editors until the last quarter century were so embarrassed that Shakespeare might have had anything but the remotest connection with either FV or Q that they never paused to acknowledge the resemblance at all. Gary Taylor, to his credit, did notice the resemblance, but still assumed a process of excisions from F to bring it about: ‘Whoever was responsible for them, the effect of the differences between this text and the one printed in all modern editions is to remove almost every difficulty in the way of an unambiguously patriotic interpretation of Henry and his    See Robert A.H. Smith, ‘Thomas Creede, Henry V Q1, and The Famous Victories of Henrie the Fifth’, RES, 49 (1998): 60–64.    See Taylor (ed.), Henry V Introduction, 27–8; T.W. Craik (ed.), Henry V, Arden 3 (London, 1995), 7–9; Gurr (ed.), Henry V (Cambridge: 1992), 226–30.    J.H. Walter’s characterization of FV gives some sense of the disdain in which the play was held: ‘the text is so corrupt and full of repetitions that it may even have been reconstructed from an author’s plot of the kind represented by the so-called Philander, King of Thrace’: Walter (ed.), Introduction, Henry V, xxxiii.

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war – that is, every departure from the kind of play which theatrical convention and the national mood would have led audiences of 1599 to expect’.10 Which is to say, to make it remarkably like FV. Is it not easier and more logical (Occam’s Razor) to assume a process in which Q always resembled FV, and that the major differences in F were a product of later rethinking? I am not by any means the first to suggest this relationship. Back in 1881 Brinsley Nicholson argued the case, as did Hardin Craig in 1927, and there may be others. Warren D. Smith, who first proposed that the Chorus to Act 5 refers to Mountjoy rather than to Essex, believed at least that choruses were a later addition to Q – and that they referred to performance in the banqueting house at Whitehall, rather than to a public theatre.11 But the editorial tradition – including all those cited here: Walters, Taylor, Gurr, and Craik – is so set on Q being a cutdown version of F that its similarity to FV is hardly an issue. Yet, by a particular irony, the stock of Q has grown steadily within that tradition. Where for, say, Walters and Humphreys it was a pirated copy of a scaled-down version of the play, probably meant to be used on tour in the provinces, for Taylor – and even more so for Gurr – Q is a fairly respectable version of the play as it was normally performed at the Curtain or the Globe in 1599. As Gurr puts it, ‘the quarto text of Henry V offers the best evidence we have of what routinely happened to the scripts that the Shakespeare company bought from their resident playwright ... the quarto [is] the prime case in point to test the view that the plays were radically altered between their first drafting and their first appearance on stage’.12 As the ‘bad quarto’ orthodoxy of the New Bibliographers has waned, this is something like a new orthodoxy that has waxed in its place.13 But it is a critical orthodoxy that continues to occlude the evident similarities between FV and Q. My argument is that Shakespeare was a more focused professional than this line of argument gives him credit for: that he firstly produced a robustly playable text, Q, a workmanlike   Taylor (ed.), Introduction, Henry V, 12.   Brinsley Nicholson, ‘The Relation of the Quarto to the Folio Version of Henry V’, Transactions of the New Shakespeare Society, 8 (1881): 77–102; Hardin Craig, ‘The Relation of the First Quarto Version to the First Folio Version of Shakespeare’s Henry V’, Philological Quarterly, 6 (1927): 225–34; Smith, ‘The Henry V Choruses’. 12   Gurr, The First Quarto of King Henry V, ix. 13   On the general decline in the fortunes of ‘bad quarto’ as a category for play-texts, see, for example, David Bradley, From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge, 1992); Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Kathleen O. Irace, Reforming the ‘Bad’ Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark: 1994); Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge, 1996); Randall McLeod (Random Cloud, pseud.), ‘The marriage of good and bad quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982): 421–31; Andrew Spong, ‘Bad Habits, ‘Bad’ Quartos, and the Myth of Origin’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12 (1996): 65–70; Paul Werstine, ‘Narratives about printed Shakespeare texts: “foul papers”, and “bad” quartos’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990): 63–86. Of recent Henry V editors, Craik is the least persuaded by these arguments, or least interested in pursuing their implications. 10 11

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revamping of the old Queen’s Men’s play, and that he only produced the much fuller and the multiply-layered F – more dependent on other sources, such as Holinshed – later, when particular circumstances (possibly a court performance, possibly the wish to impress in manuscript circulation) called for it.14 As Randall Martin has kindly pointed out to me, this relationship between Q and F Henry V closely resembles the one he posits between the 1595 octavo True Tragedy of Richard III (O) and the 1623 folio Henry VI (F): ‘O is a memorial report of an earlier version of the play which Shakespeare revised as F.’15 This process may have been a recurrent working method for Shakespeare. Of course, we should not overstate the similarities between FV and Q. Shakespeare has reinvented the verse and prose at every level. He has entirely re-imagined the comic scenes in the persons of Pistol, Nym, and their associates carried over from the Henry IV plays, replacing those of the great clown, Richard Tarleton, who originally played ‘Derick’. Shakespeare also has imagined Henry’s army as a much fuller cross-section of English (and Welsh) male society. In FV Henry only ever speaks to his aristocratic commanders, who – contrary to the chronicles – include a prominent Earl of Oxford; in Q Henry speaks to, or about, Shakespeare’s own historically questionable selection of aristocrats, but also to the captains, Gower and Flewellen, and three ordinary soldiers (the Bates, Court, and Williams of F), besides Pistol of his old tavern companions.16 And Shakespeare has added an early scene for Katherine, plus an entirely distinct sequence of some substance, the traitor scene. So Shakespeare has produced a distinctively different play, but within the structural confines of its predecessor. Some of the disdain earlier critics had for FV clearly arose from the fact that it speaks a dramatic language they did not really understand. Arthur Humphreys once suggested that ‘[r]eading that chaotic anonymous production The Famous Victories is like going through the Henry IV-Henry V sequence in a bad

14

  I do not address here the question of Shakespeare’s right to adapt the earlier play. The simple fact that it was in print did not give the Lord Chamberlain’s Men the right to take it over for the stage, even with Shakespeare’s thorough overhaul. (The issue probably arose again with King Leir/King Lear.) The Queen’s Men c. 1594 may have been more amenable to some kind of understanding with Shakespeare’s company. 15   Randall Martin (ed.), Henry VI, Part Three The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 2001), 121. 16   The author of FV and Shakespeare (somewhat differently in Q and F) both took considerable licence over the choice of aristocrats to be present at Agincourt. Seymour Pitcher argues that FV mentions the earls of Derby, Kent, Nottingham, Northumberland, and Huntington, and Lord Willoughby, purely in deference to their Elizabethan counterparts: see The Case for Shakespeare’s Authorship of The Famous Victories (New York, 1961), 183–95; Q focuses on the royal family – Exeter and York (Henry’s uncles), Bedford, Clarence and Gloucester (brothers), plus the Earl of Warwick; F loses Clarence and Warwick, replacing them with the earls of Westmorland, Salisbury and Shrewsbury (Talbot), seemingly concentrating on warriors already made famous in 1Henry V1 – possibly anticipating the Epilogue’s reminder of what would follow from all this.

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dream’.17 We have since learned from Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean to respect the ‘truthful’, unadorned style of such drama as one perfectly suited for its theatrical context and mission. Yet even they see that there are particular aspects of FV (as of The True Tragedy of Richard III) that need further explanation: ‘Our hypothesis is that these two texts ... often suspected of being “bad” quartos, but showing the same casting pattern as other Queen’s Men texts first entered or published in 1594, faithfully record the order of the speeches but carry an extra element of error introduced by transcription from dictation, which, we propose, was one way the company put together a new book when they divided into smaller units. Books created in this fashion would have been imperfect. They would have suffered from aural mistakes, but they would have served their purposes in performance.’ 18 This summation concludes a long and detailed analysis which I cannot reproduce in its entirety here, but which seems to me compelling. We do know that the Queen’s Men had sometimes performed plays requiring sixteen or more actors, but those ‘first entered or published in 1594’ required a uniform fourteen. It is reasonable to suppose that the company’s existing plays would have to be revised to accommodate the smaller number, perhaps made necessary when they lost their access to court and became a permanently touring company. Taking their cue from the fact that FV and The True Tragedy contain much verse set as prose, and, more oddly, much prose set as verse, McMillin and MacLean hypothesise an aural transmission: that the actors learned their revised roles first and dictated them (in order to have a permanent copy) to a scribe who was not skilled in such matters. And this version is what was sold to the printers/publishers in 1594. This theory seems to me so much more compelling an explanation for so many features of the text than the old ‘bad quarto’ suppositions of memorial reconstruction by a very limited number of ‘rogue actors’, or of surreptitious short-hand. As it happens, Q – while it speaks a dramatic language with which we are more familiar and so is more immediately comprehensible than FV – does show similar signs of aural transmission, including mislineations of verse and prose.19 Some of these, in fact, are very difficult to disentangle from the supposed evidence of Q being carved out of F. McMillin and MacLean offer a clear rationale for why such an aurally-transmitted text of FV should exist, but it will hardly serve for Q. The old assumption that F had to be reduced for a smaller touring company ignored the fact that there is no evidence that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men ever toured, except when forced to do so by plague, and certainly not around 1599. There is, however, one plausible circumstance which might have required the aural reconstruction of a revised text, such as that of FV: that would be if Shakespeare did what he said he

  Arthur Humpheys (ed.), King Henry IV, Part 1, Arden Two (London, 1960), Introduction, p. xxxii. 18   McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 119. 19   See Gurr, The First Quarto, 15–20, and Appendices 1 and 2. 17

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would do in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV, and produced a Henry V with Falstaff in it, but latterly found it necessary to remove him.20 The jury, in fact, is still out on whether Shakespeare ever produced a version with Falstaff alive in it. Both Q and F have Pistol speaking of Doll as if she were his wife, though Q (Scene 2) and F (2.1) are quite explicit that he married Nell Quickly, while Doll Tearsheet – clearly Falstaff’s whore in 2Henry IV – seems to have become ‘[his] espouse’ (Q, B2; F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.73). Late in the play, Pistol announces: ‘newes have I certainly / That Doll is sicke. One mallydie of France’ (Q, F4v); ‘Newes have I that my Doll is dead i’th Spitlle of a malady of France’ (F, Life of King Henry the Fift, p.92). This may be the vestige of a different set of marital relations between Pistol, Falstaff, Nell, and Doll, all the more so in that F also contains Pistol’s admission ‘Old I do wax’ (ibid), which between Oldcastle and the passing of years attaches more readily to Falstaff than to Pistol. But none of this is conclusive.21 So the removal of Falstaff could explain why we have an aurally-transmitted version without him, which is Q. Be that as it may, a more pressing question is why such a play as Q might be staged when it was. And this, too, may be related to FV. Why did Thomas Creede not choose to publish FV until 1598, four years after he entered it in the Stationers’ Register? Creede acquired most of the Queen’s Men plays that became available in 1594 – Clyomon and Clamydes, Selimus, and The True Tragedy of Richard III as well as FV.22 But he published all of the others within the year. It is often suggested that he was spurred by the success of Shakespeare’s 1 and 2 Henry IV, the first of which was entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1598. But it is not impossible that the changing international situation also had a bearing on his thinking. As mentioned earlier, England in 1598 was exposed against Spain as she had not 20   The tension over Oldcastle/Falstaff would inevitably be at its most intense in relation to the historical circumstances of Oldcastle’s death, burned as a Lollard in accordance with Henry’s policy of support for Church orthodoxy. Q makes no mention of Henry’s responsibility for Falstaff’s death, though F does. 21   There might be additional evidence for this if we could date and decode an inscription on the title page of the Huntington Library copy of Q. As Alan H. Nelson observes: ‘Among the numerous inscriptions on the title-page, the one which reads “much ye same w{i}th y{a}t in Shakespeare” may be in Buc’s hand.’ Sir George Buc was from 1610 Master of the Revels and a man with a serious interest in plays and who wrote them. What version of Shakespeare’s Henry V did he recognize Q to be ‘much the same with’? Some will assume it to be F, which he would have had to know in manuscript (or from post-1599 performance), since he was dead before the 1623 First Folio appeared. But it could equally be an earlier version of the play, with Falstaff. See Alan Nelson’s website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ahnelson/BUC/quartos.html and his ‘George Buc, William Shakespeare, and the Folger George a Greene’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49 (1998): 74–83. Professor Nelson bears no responsibility, however, for my suppositions about an earlier Henry V than the ones we possess. 22   Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and King Leir were also entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594, initially to Adam Islip, but his name is crossed out in both cases and replaced by Edward White. Friar Bacon was published in 1594, King Leir not till 1605.

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been for more than a decade – since before the Spanish Armada. And it seems certain that FV had originally been composed in similar circumstances. A story in Tarlton’s Jests makes it very likely that it was acted before mid-1587 when William Knell, who apparently played Henry, died – and Tarlton himself (Derick) died in 1588, the Armada year. So the play was not composed to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, to luxuriate in a moment of national triumph, but in a moment of looming crisis to stir up patriotic fervour and maintain morale by reminding audiences of past glories. This nostalgia is exactly the spirit of Q, which offers (as Gary Taylor puts it) ‘an unambiguously patriotic interpretation of Henry and his war’, so much less sophisticated and nuanced than F. In 1598–1599 (so different from 1602), that is what the situation demanded, and Shakespeare delivered. One further piece of evidence supports some such argument, or at least the likelihood that there were people at the time who felt that this is what had happened. That is the publication history of Q.23 The first evidence of its ownership appears in the Stationers’ Register, 14 August 1600: ‘Thomas Pavyer. Entered for his Copyes by the direction of master White warden under his hand wrytinge. These Copyes following being thinges formerlye printed and sett over to the sayd Thomas Pavyer, viz. ... The historye of Henry the Vth with the battell of Agencourt vid’ (Arber, 3.169). Q duly appeared, with the following information on the title-page: ‘The Chronicle History of Henry the fift, With his battell fought at Agin Court in France, Togither with Auncient Pistoll. As it hath bene sundry times played by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. London Printed by Thomas Creede, for Tho. Millington, and John Busby. And are to be sold at his house in Carter Lane, next the Powle head. 1600.’ The Stationers’ Register entry records the transfer of ownership of several works to Pavier in perfectly normal form, as Warden White of the Stationers’ Company accepted. What it does not record is who previously held the rights – by implication another member of the Company, not the actors. It seems very likely that Thomas Creede had appealed to the Company, on the basis of his undoubted ownership of FV. As Peter Blayney explains: The owner of a copy had not only the exclusive right to reprint the text, but also the right to a fair chance to recover his costs. He could therefore seek the Company’s protection if any book – not necessarily a reprint or plagiarism of 23   I ignore here the notorious ‘staying entry’ in the Stationers’ Register of 4 August 1600, relating to As You Like It, Much Ado, Every Man In His Humour and ‘HENRY the FFIFT’. Peter Blayney has argued that the latter reference is actually to the quarto of 2 Henry IV, not to Henry V (Q). (‘Shakespeare’s fight with what pirates?’, unpublished paper presented at the Folger Shakespeare Library in May 1987. See Gurr, Henry V, 217–20). Whether that is the case or not, it seems unlikely that any attempt to prevent the publication of Q would have related to the quality of its copy or to its being ‘pirated’. Much Ado and Every Man In were both published within the year (As You Like It not till 1623) in perfectly orderly texts, so that was not the issue that prompted the entry.

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his own copy – threatened his ability to dispose of unsold copies of an existing edition ... When Millington and Busby tried to license Shakespeare’s Henry V in 1600, therefore, the wardens would not have cared about either the authorship or the ‘Badness’ of the text – but they would have required the consent of Thomas Creede, who had published (and printed) The Famous Victories of King Henry the Fifth in 1598. Creede presumably did consent, on condition that he be hired (and therefore paid) to print the rival play.24

Further evidence for some such arrangement is provided by the 1602 reprint of Q (evidence, incidentally, of its popularity), which was logically published in Pavier’s name, but again Creede was the printer.25 Blayney’s compelling analysis does not establish that Creede felt that Q was a reworking of FV, only that it was a competitor text. But it is very striking that, in a year when A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 2 Henry IV, and Much Ado About Nothing were all printed for the first time, with their author’s name a prominent selling point on the title page, Q Henry V appeared without Shakespeare’s name attached. Furthermore, his name was still not there in 1602 or indeed 1619 (at a time when a number of works not by Shakespeare at all tried to trade on the cachet of his name).26 Was this perhaps Creede’s own way of saying that Q owes so much to FV that he does not deserve credit as the definitive author? Of course, we cannot answer that question. Nor can I categorically establish that Q was originally composed in its own right, following closely the contours of FV, as I have argued. But I think there is sufficient room for debate to call into question what has become almost the new orthodoxy, replacing that of piracy and ‘Bad Quartos’, which sees in Q a theatrical transformation of F by hard-headed actors and business men. And, on the strength of that, accepts Q’s version of the Dauphin not being at Agincourt as authentic to the original 1599 F. Q and F are, for whatever reasons, different versions of Henry V, rethought by Shakespeare (or his company) at different times. To conflate them (as the Taylor and Gurr, 1992, editions do; and the Oxford Shakespeare, and so the widely used Norton Shakespeare) is to produce a version of the play that, in all probability, Shakespeare never wrote, and no one ever saw or read.27 The relationship between FV and Q should at least warn us to respect the integrity of disparate texts. 24

  Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David S. Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), 399. 25   Thomas Creede also printed all but the first pre-folio quartos of Richard III – might he also have pressed his rights in The True Tragedy? 26   The 1619 edition was again published by Thomas Pavier. Indeed it was one of the notorious ‘Pavier quartos’ and hid its true status by bearing ‘1608’ on the title-page. Creede was by then dead and it was printed by William Jaggard. But even so, Shakespeare’s name does not appear. 27   All these texts, otherwise based on F, follow Q in not having the Dauphin at Agincourt, and assigning his F lines to Bourbon, which I think is highly questionable.

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Chapter 10

On-stage Allegory and its Legacy: The Three Ladies of London Alan C. Dessen

English professional drama before the mid 1580s has received little attention and less respect. Not surprisingly, most scholars who have dealt with such plays have expressed a distaste for fourteener couplets, allegory, and on-stage sermons and a preference for 1) the models provided by Plautus, Terence, and Seneca and 2) the new verisimilitude linked to Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. The prevailing narrative, in David Bevington’s terms, has therefore led to an ‘over-emphasis of classical rediscovery as the main line of development in English Renaissance drama’ so that ‘literary progress in the sixteenth century’ has been measured ‘only by the degree to which sophisticated learning freed English drama from the fetters of ignorance and bad taste’. Bevington’s 1962 book made a small dent in that assessment, but the ‘triumph of realism’ argument enunciated by Willard Thorp in 1928 has retained its power over the hearts and minds of scholars and hence of teachers, students, and theatrical professionals. 

  David Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA, 1962), 1.    See, for instance, Willard Thorp’s The Triumph of Realism in Elizabethan Drama, 1558–1612 (Princeton, 1928). According to Thorp, early Elizabethan drama ‘was often rambling in structure and its realism was still of the sort which the miracles supported, horse-play, tumbling, and the antics of rustics, tavern-brawlers and half-witted clowns’ (vii–ix). Such plays lacked ‘strongly individualized characters belonging to a higher order of society’ and were characterized by a heavy-handed didacticism. In contrast, by the death of Queen Elizabeth, an ‘evolutionary process’ had taken place wherein plays preserve ‘a complete panorama of English life’. The most important feature of this evolution, he argues, ‘is the loss of didactic purpose’, for him ‘the predominant characteristic of early Elizabethan drama’: ‘Before plays could be written which would show men as they are, writers had to believe that this was a better thing to do than to show them as the church or any other regent of morals thought they should be.’ His goal therefore is to trace ‘the decline of didacticism in theme and plot and the consequent triumph of realism’. For a representative account of the University Wits see chapter four of Parrott and Ball’s A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (London, 1943). According to this mid-century handbook, these figures (Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, and Marlowe) ‘shared the tastes of their public, but their education and their inborn talent enabled them to guide, purify, and elevate these tastes till at last they trained an audience ready to receive and applaud the work of Shakespeare’ (64).

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The problem is compounded by what is said (or more often not said) by contemporary spokesmen about this group of plays. The few comments from figures like Sidney, Gosson, Whetstone, and Puttenham about drama targeted at general audiences between 1560 and 1585 (as opposed to Sidney’s tempered praise of Gorboduc) are brief and dismissive, as is to be expected from writers who prize the ideals of the classical tradition (such as decorum, the unities, and so on). Unlike the situation a generation later (when Heywood could provide an ‘apology’ for popular theatre), no defence or rationale survives on behalf of the Tudor or early Elizabethan dramatists. Granted, as Bevington notes, ‘one cannot account for these plays by aesthetic laws of unity, correspondence, subordination, and the like’, but as he goes on to argue: ‘if some contemporary had had occasion to speak for the critically inarticulate authors of these plays, and had extracted a pattern or series of patterns from their work, he might have spoken quite differently of repetitive effect, multiplicity, episode, progressive theme’ and might have defended ‘a panoramic, narrative, and sequential view of art rather than a dramatically concise and heightened climax of sudden revelation’. Here The Three Ladies of London is a particularly good example. When treating the decade before Kyd and Marlowe, historians note the importance of 1576–1577 as marking the establishment of several permanent public theatres in the London area, a milestone in the development of English drama. But little or no evidence has survived about the effect of such a new home upon plays, players, and procedures in the late 1570s and early 1580s (such as the growth of the companies, the accumulation of stage properties, and the building of an audience). What has survived is The Three Ladies of London, now attributed to actor-playwright Robert Wilson, one of the few plays extant from the early 1580s associated with the new theatres and, significantly, a didactic and allegorical social satire upon materialism similar to (albeit longer and more complex than) the preceding troupe moral plays that are the focus of Bevington’s book. Although anything but a household word today, in its own time this play was well known enough to be alluded to by various contemporary writers and to be granted both a sequel (The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London) and a rebuttal in a play now lost (London Against the Three Ladies). 

  Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe, 3.   Citations from The Three Ladies of London are from volume 6 of William Carew Hazlitt (ed.), A Select Collection of old English Plays Originally Published by Robert Dodsley in the year 1744 (15 vols, 1874–76; 4th edn, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964). Page numbers from this edition and from Impatient Poverty are included in my text. For both an allusion to The Three Ladies and the only mention of the rebuttal see Stephen Gosson’s Plays Confuted in Five Actions, in William Carew Hazlitt (ed.), The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664 (London, 1869; rpt. New York, 1969), 185. In 1598, Everard Guilpin refers to ‘the old moral of the comedy, / Where Conscience favors Lucre’s harlotry’; see Allen D. Carroll (ed.), Skialetheia, ‘Satire I’, (Chapel Hill, 1974), 33–4. Originally printed in 1584, The Three Ladies of London appeared 

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That The Three Ladies of London was well known in the 1580s (and remembered by at least one writer in the late 1590s) is a fact that can easily be eclipsed by the power of the selective tradition that shapes such narratives, so that today’s prevailing tastes can readily eclipse the extant evidence. But can we safely assume that Wilson’s play and its predecessors represent a dead-end that has no significance whatsoever for the dramatists of the 1580s and 1590s? Some facets of these late moral plays were rejected (the verse forms, for instance, once blank verse became the norm), while other features (such as overt allegory) left only residual traces behind, but some facets of some of the plays of the next generation (especially those by dramatists in tune with the popular tradition) do make more sense when viewed in the light of what would have been well known, if old-fashioned, in the 1590s and early 1600s. What then can we learn from a transitional play such as The Three Ladies? First, though this play does not need the 14 or more actors associated with subsequent playscripts, it does demand a larger troupe of actors than its predecessors in the popular drama, many of which required only four or five actors (though Cambyses does need eight, six men and two boys). As Bevington notes, ‘the playwright is working with only two qualified boy actors’ who must play all in a second quarto in 1592, one of the few late moral plays to be reprinted (along with King Darius in 1577, Like Will to Like in 1587, and undated editions of Impatient Poverty, Nice Wanton, Lusty Juventus, and Cambyses). Dates attached to plays are for the convenience of the reader and are taken (sometimes with a substantial grain of salt) from Alfred Harbage’s Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London, 1964).    For an account of ‘the selective tradition’ see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York, 1961), 49–52. Williams distinguishes this category from both ‘the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and place’ and ‘the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts’. As he notes, even the specialist can know only a part of the recorded culture, so that ‘a selective process, of a quite drastic kind, is at once evident’, a process, in fact, that ‘begins within the period itself’, for ‘from the whole body of activities, certain things are selected for value and emphasis’ while, inevitably, other things are played down or ignored. What results (‘the historical record of a particular society’) then entails ‘a rejection of considerable areas of what was once a living culture’.    Consider as an analogy the cinematic Western with its many conventions and clichés (white hats versus black hats, rustlers versus lawmen, farmers versus ranchers, the hero’s comic companion, the walk-down fight at the climax). Long after the heyday of such a form, the memories or associations lingered on, even though the original impetus or naïve acceptance may have disappeared, so that later writers or directors could follow, adapt, or even stridently violate the original conventions and expectations. A few generations later, a scholar or moviegoer may have difficulty recapturing the original spirit or sense of structure that underlies the simple, straightforward Western (and may wonder how any audience could have taken seriously the stilted characters and contrived plots), but that spirit or rationale was there and was obvious to the original audiences (who undoubtedly never took the trouble consciously to formulate their understanding).

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three ladies. Love appears early in the play, exits with Conscience (p. 264), and does not return until late in the action (p. 358), whereas Lucre appears shortly after Love’s exit (p. 267) and is active until the final scene where the boy actor is directed to exit and ‘make ready for Love quickly’ (p. 368) while Conscience stays on-stage. Clearly, the same boy actor – with one exception – played both Love and Lucre. That exception is found in the brief third from last scene (pp. 358–9) in which the two appear on-stage together: ‘Enter Lucre, and Love with a vizard, behind’ (p. 358). The mask is necessary not only because Love complains of a swollen head but also because in her previous appearance Lucre had literally spotted Conscience (played by this same boy actor) with abomination by means of ‘a painted box of ink’ (p. 337). Such role-splitting is rare (and, as Bevington notes, if frequent, the surviving cast-lists ‘would be of little value as indexes of dramatic structure’). By my count, there are seven figures on-stage in scene 2 (Conscience, Lucre, the four knaves, and Simplicity), so that seven is the absolute minimum number of actors needed. Even with some quick changes a total of nine or ten actors seems more likely, but an eight-actor troupe (as in Cambyses) is at least possible. Simplicity is most likely a through-line (appearing in six scenes), but the four knaves (Dissimulation, Fraud, Usury, and Simony), who play a major role in the first two-thirds of the action, disappear for the final third (Fraud is the only one to appear after scene 12 of 18), in keeping with what Bevington terms suppression of personnel which along with alternation (whereby an actor alternates roles in consecutive scenes) is essential to this dramaturgy. Mercatore appears in five scenes, Gerontus in three, and Hospitality in two, so that these actors, along with those who played the knaves, could have been available to play the many one-shot figures: Fame, Artifex, Lawyer, Sincerity, Nicholas Nemo, Peter Pleaseman, Cogging, Tom Beggar, Wily Will, Turkish Judge, Diligence, Beadle, Clerk, Crier, Judge Nemo. Note too some distinctive differences from the troupe moral plays. A stock choice in the 1560s and 1570s is to build much of the action around a Vice, the figure who epitomises the primary focus of the on-stage sermon (Covetous, Revenge, Courage, Sin, Newfangle, Ambidexter, Haphazard), along with several sub-vices or lieutenants, so that early in the interlude this group dominates the action so as to overwhelm a variety of victims. Such is also the case in The Three Ladies in which Dissimulation, Fraud, Usury, and Simony prevail at the expense of Hospitality, Artifex, Lawyer, Sincerity, and, less directly, Gerontus. However, there are some distinctive differences. Dissimulation may be viewed as the key figure among the four, but he does not have the dominance of the traditional Vice (for instance, he does not bring his subordinates to heel by means of his dagger of lath). In the usual pattern, moreover, the two or three sub-vices would disappear midway in the play (or be suppressed, in Bevington’s terms) so that those actors are freed to play other roles, while the central Vice remains a major figure until the 

   



Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe, 90. Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe, 91.

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end, so that his arrest or defeat can serve as the allegorical closure of the action. In The Three Ladies, however, that climax is reserved for the trial of the title figures in front of Judge Nemo, so that the familiar paradigm has been adjusted to take into account the focus not on a single demonized sin or fault but on the assets of the city or larger society. As scholars have observed, a major feature of the moral drama is the breaking down of entities into component parts that can in turn be presented on the stage. Starting with The Castle of Perseverance in the early fifteenth century, that entity was Humanum Genus, Mankind, or Everyman (and later such figures as Magnificence, Wit, Lusty Juventus, and Worldly Man), but by the 1560s many of the moral dramatists expanded their focus to society as a whole. Scholars who prize the earlier protagonist-centered dramatic structure have therefore deemed the Elizabethan interludes shapeless because they lack a Humanum Genus protagonist, but, especially for a spectator, such a range of figures can add up to a cross section of society. In such plays the entity being broken down for theatrical analysis is not Mankind but England or the kingdom, often by means of a display of ‘estates’ figures who, taken together (often as victims of the Vice), represent a larger whole (as indicated when the title page describes The Three Ladies as ‘A Perfect Pattern for All Estates to look into’ [246]). Several plays (such as Like Will to Like, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, and The Three Ladies) employ such a thesis-and-demonstration structure in which the thesis is linked to the Vice (and often to the proverbial title as well) and the demonstration is provided by some set of components of the kingdom, whether representative figures (a farmer, a clergyman, a courtier, a scholar, a soldier) or some other configuration (Wealth, Health, and Liberty; the three ladies). As with the psychomachia, such a breaking down of the kingdom into component parts for exploration on-stage could be adapted to an individual scene as well as to an entire play (always taking into account the constraints imposed by the limited personnel available). The best example is provided by one of the major scenes in Thomas Lupton’s All for Money (1577) where a series of petitioners (presumably played by only two actors) parade before the magistrate, All for Money, who has instructions to grant only those suits approved by Money. The audience watches as this corrupt magistrate favours an admitted thief and ruffian; a woman who has murdered her child; a bigamist who seeks to replace his legal wife with a younger one; a foolish priest; a litigious landowner who exploits his poor neighbour; and an old crone who buys false witnesses to snare a young husband. The only figure refused by All for Money (who is flanked by Sin the Vice) is Moneyless-and-Friendless, a hapless figure too poor to provide a bribe. In a play with the announced goal of ‘plainly representing the manners of men and fashion of the world nowadays’ (p. 145), Lupton has used a corrupt magistrate, a Vice, and a group of social types to act out in one extensive scene how venality    Quotations from All for Money are from Ernst Vogel’s edition, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 40 (1904): 129–86.

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in various parts of society can undermine justice. The key to the technique lies in the breaking down of an entity into component parts suitable for a theatrical presentation that can fully develop the dramatist’s thesis or point of view – and here in a nutshell is the genesis of Wilson’s The Three Ladies. There are many facets of this dramatist’s critique of society worth exploring, but what most interests me, especially in terms of staging choices, is the presentation of Conscience. With one exception (The World and the Child), Conscience does not appear in the extant pre-Reformation moral plays of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries such as The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, Everyman, Nature, Wit and Science, The Interlude of the Four Elements.10 Moreover, especially when compared to other virtues, vices, sins, passions, and faculties, Conscience is not a notable part of the iconographic, emblematic, or pictorial tradition, so that one is hard pressed to find an equivalent to Justice’s sword and balance or Hope’s anchor.11 10   For a discussion from a theological perspective of The World and the Child and the subsequent moral plays that include Conscience see John S. Wilks, The Idea of Conscience in Renaissance Tragedy (New York,1990), esp. 44–77. Wilks argues that in The World and the Child ‘the authority by which Conscience instructs Manhood is derived from no fideistic adherence to the Scriptures, but from a variety of Catholic doctrinal propositions: Conscience is clearly concerned more with an obedience to the canonical traditions of the Church, than to the biblically revealed word of God.’ For him this play is ‘a pre-Reformation morality infused unequivocally with the doctrines of the Old Faith’ (46–7). Camille Wells Slights notes that there was ‘nothing radically new’ in how William Perkins and Protestant theologians ‘theorized conscience’. Nonetheless, ‘the Protestant conscience emerged as a new and powerfully destabilizing force in European culture; with the fragmentation of the medieval church, the de-emphasis on the mediating power of the clergy, and the doctrine of sola fides the ancient advice to ‘know thyself’ took on a new significance’ (233). See Slights, ‘Notaries, Sponges, and Looking-glasses: Conscience in Early Modern England’, English Literary Renaissance, 28 (1998): 231–46. 11   The author of Apius and Virginia does provide an identifying property (‘let Conscience hold in his hand a lamp burning’ [500] – for this text, I have modernized the old spelling), but I have found no evidence elsewhere to support use of such a lamp or its equivalent. Tilley records a variety of proverbs linked to Conscience that Shakespeare, Jonson, and others could and did draw upon (most notably, ‘Conscience is a thousand witnesses’, C601), but such items do not readily lend themselves to on-stage display. Drawing upon the casuistical tradition, Frederick Kiefer develops the notion of the Book of Conscience and, noting the presence of Conscience in sixteenth-century English drama, adds: ‘We don’t know how this personification was costumed, but it is not unlikely that a book served as a hand prop’ (124). Drawing upon the same casuistical material Garrett Sullivan links Conscience to sleep: for example, he notes that ‘the sleeping conscience does not confront the sinner with either evidence of his or her own transgressions or the impending inevitability of his or her death and judgement’; rather ‘Both conscience and sinner have succumbed to enticing pleasures’ so that, in Immanuel Bourne’s terms, they have been lulled ‘asleepe in that bewitching cradle of sinnes darke impurity’ (215). See Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books

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Conscience does appear on-stage in the decades that precede The Three Ladies. An early example is Impatient Poverty (1547, pr. 1560)12 where in his single sequence Conscience first debates with but fails to convert Abundance who chooses ‘worldly substance’ over ‘the everlasting life that is to come’ (p. 326) and then is befuddled by Envy claiming to be Charity, so that Conscience exits the scene and the play with ‘I will go into some far country’ (p. 329). These two encounters demonstrate two theatrical devices regularly linked to on-stage appearances of Conscience. First, when this figure loses a debate, it is often left behind while the chooser exits (sometimes accompanied by the tempter), so that literally and figuratively Conscience is forsaken. Second, when Conscience faces an antagonist rather than a chooser, it usually loses the debate (or is somehow tricked) so as to be driven off, rejected, or otherwise eliminated from the scene. Conscience plays a pivotal role in R.B.’s Apius and Virginia (1564, pr. 1575) where, after Apius agrees to the Vice’s plan (that will wrest Virginia from her family), the stage direction reads: ‘Here let him make as though he went out and let Conscience and Justice come out of him, and let Conscience hold in his hand a lamp burning and let Justice have a sword and hold it before Apius’ breast’ (500).13 Although Conscience and Justice have no lines while Apius is on-stage, the judge himself supplies their half of the argument: But out I am wounded, how am I divided? Two states of my life, from me are now glided, For Conscience he pricketh me contemned, And Justice saith, judgement would have me condemned: Conscience saith cruelty sure will detest me: And Justice saith, death in the end will molest me, And both in one sudden me thinks they do cry, That fire eternal, my soul shall destroy. (501–8)

Haphazard the Vice, however, mocks Conscience and Justice (‘these are but thoughts’ [510]) and argues instead: ‘Then care not for Conscience the worth of a fable, / Justice is no man, nor nought to do able’ (521–2). After Apius agrees to forgo his scruples (‘let Conscience grope, and judgement crave’), Conscience and Justice are left alone on-stage to lament his decision in psychological terms (Newark, 1996) and Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 2005). 12   Citations are from John S. Farmer (ed.), Recently Recovered ‘Lost’ Tudor Plays (London, 1907; rpt. New York, 1966), 311–48. Wilks (48–9) comments that this play’s ‘comparatively simple plot is clumsily executed and disorganized by a series of random and badly articulated digressions’, with the role allotted Conscience the major digression. For him, the presentation of this figure ‘is in significant respects doctrinally anomalous’. 13   All quotations from Apius and Virginia are from Ronald B. McKerrow’s Malone Society edition (London, 1911).

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(Conscience complains: ‘I spotted am by willful will, / By lawless love and lust / By dreadful danger of the life. / By faith that is unjust’ [538–41]). To act out the central decision in his play, R.B. has not resorted to a soliloquy or even to straightforward temptation by the Vice but has chosen to break down Apius’s choice into its component parts. Somehow, at the moment when the judge is leaving the stage under the influence of the Vice and his own lust, Conscience and Justice are to ‘come out of’ Apius (or ‘glide’ from him, according to the dialogue), whether from behind his cloak or through some stage device. The theatrically emphatic presence of these two figures (with their striking entrance, their emblems, and their gestures) is then linked verbally to Apius’s own conscience and sense of justice. Both the stage direction that indicates that Conscience and Justice are to ‘come out of’ Apius and the Vice’s insistence that ‘these are but thoughts’ underscore how the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind have been made external in a fashion particularly suited to on-stage presentation. The fullest display in the moral plays of Conscience as an interior force to be reckoned with is found in Nathaniel Woodes’s Conflict of Conscience (1572, pr. 1581)14 which presents the story of the apostate Francis Spira, here portrayed as Philologus, from a stridently anti-Catholic point of view. Initially Philologus resists the arguments of the Cardinal, Tyranny, Avarice, and Hypocrisy (‘I fear I should kill / My soul for ever, if against my conscience / I should to the Pope’s laws acknowledge obedience’ [87), but threats to the protagonist’s family and prosperity turn the tide, along with the appeals of a new tempter, Sensual Suggestion. The protagonist is then accosted by a figure designated as Spirit who repeatedly invokes ‘conscience’ (‘Let no suggestion of thy flesh thy conscience thee betray’ [102]) who is replaced by a second figure who describes himself as ‘Thy crazed conscience’ (105), but the result of the ensuing debate between this figure and Sensual Suggestion is predictable, with the joys of this world and the flesh winning out over the joys of heaven. Conscience may plead with Philologus to stay, but the protagonist accompanied by his tempter exits, saying: ‘It is lost labour that thou dost: I will be at a point, / And to enjoy these worldly joys I jeopard will a joint.’15 As in Impatient Poverty, a forsaken Conscience finishes the scene with a seven-line speech addressed to ‘O cursed creature, O frail flesh, O meat for worms, O dust’ that stresses ‘The blindness of the outward man’ (114–15). More elaborately than in Apius and Virginia, the central choice in this play is spelled out when Conscience loses a tug-of-war and is left alone on the stage. The role of Conscience in The Three Ladies is more akin to that in Impatient Poverty than to Apius and Virginia or The Conflict of Conscience in that the focus is on what is wrong with society as a whole rather than on an individual chooser such as Apius or Philologus. The emphasis here is on how Lucre ‘rules the rout’ (p. 249)   In Hazlitt’s Dodsley, 6:29–142. In his detailed treatment of this play (59–67) Wilks demonstrates that ‘the idea of conscience is treated with a degree of particularized theological erudition’ (59) not to be found in the other comparable moral plays. 15   Hazlitt’s Dodsley, 6:114. 14

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so that, as summed up on the title page, Love ‘is married to Dissimulation’ and Conscience is ‘fraught with all abhomination’ (p. 246). As in Lupton’s All for Money, the play presents the success of figures who pursue Lucre at any cost (as evidenced by the primacy of the four knaves) as opposed to the degradation of honest figures devoted to Love and Conscience. Typical is the Lawyer who complains: ‘I have pleaded for Love and Conscience, till I was weary’, but now, with ‘my purse light, and my heart heavy’, he decides that others should ‘plead for Conscience’ for ‘I’ll plead no more for such as brings nothing but beggary’ (p. 282) – and here, as elsewhere (such as in Volpone) a materialist links Conscience and beggary. The on-stage appearances of Lady Conscience in a society dominated by Lucre display a steady descent. She is driven out of the house she shares with Love, forced to sell her gown, reduced to selling brooms, and, despite her pleas (pp. 316–17), must stand by helplessly while Usury drags off Hospitality to his death (again Conscience loses a debate and is left behind). After an encounter with a mocking Lucre, Conscience laments at length the cozening prevalent in a range of professions (ostler, tapster, brewer, tanner, weaver, baker, chandler) ‘For which I judge it best for me to get some solitary place, / Where I may with patience this my heavy cross embrace’ (pp. 325–6). In her next appearance ‘with brooms at her back’ (p. 331) she laments the power of Usury, hears that Love is to marry Dissimulation, and finally gives in to Lucre: ‘I think you lead the world in a string, for everybody follows you: / And sith every one doth it, why may not I do it too?’ (p. 335). While Conscience (who has agreed to keep a bawdy house where Lucre and her customers will be ‘welcome at all hours’ [p. 336]) is counting her pay-off of 5,000 crowns, Lucre opens a ‘painted box of ink’ (p. 337) and spots Conscience’s face while verbally praising her beauty (‘This face is of favour, these cheeks are reddy and white’ [p. 338]). Alone on stage, Lucre brags that she has ‘spotted Conscience with all abhomination’ (p. 339), so that the stage business has made explicit the lament of Conscience in Apius and Virginia: ‘I spotted am by willful will, / By lawless love and lust.’ In the finale Conscience provides evidence that convicts Lucre (‘O Conscience! thou hast kill’d me; by thee I am overthrown’ [p.367]), is chastised and punished by Judge Nemo, and condemns both Lucre and herself: ‘What need further trial, sith I, Conscience, am a thousand witnesses?’ (p. 366). The power of Lucre and the failure of Conscience are presented as the keys to the ills of society in this play as opposed to the failure of Conscience in one chooser (Apius, Abundance, Philologus). After The Three Ladies and its sequel, Conscience may remain a central issue in many plays (such as Shakespeare’s tragedies), but the discrete allegorical persona is hard to find. That absence, however, does not mean that this early 1580s play is a total dead end. Rather, the theatrical heirs to The Three Ladies and comparable plays are the idea-oriented satirical comedies of Jonson and Middleton where con artists comparable to the Vice or the four knaves prey on a cross section

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of society. A look at Jonson’s inventive approach to staging the demise of conscience in Volpone can serve as a coda to this essay.16 Clearly, to possess a conscience in Jonson’s Venice is to put oneself at a distinct disadvantage. In Act 1 Corvino passes up a supposed opportunity to smother Volpone (Mosca asks ‘Why should you be thus scrupulous, pray you, sir?’), so that when Mosca reminds him later of such ‘scrupulous doubts’ Corvino responds: ‘Ay, a plague on’t; / My conscience fools my wit!’ (2.6.89–90).17 In a revealing exchange in Act 3, Celia rejects the ‘sensual baits’ in Volpone’s attempted seduction and appeals to him: ‘If you have conscience’ to which he replies ‘‘Tis the beggar’s virtue’ (3.7.209–10). The plight of Celia and Bonario is displayed at length in the trial of Act 4 when, after hearing Voltore’s rhetoric and the false testimony of Corbaccio, Corvino, and Lady Would-Be, the judges turn again to the two innocents: 1 Avocatore. What witnesses have you To make good your report? Bonario. Our consciences. Celia. And heaven, that never fails the innocent. 4 Avocatore. These are no testimonies. Bonario. Not in your courts, Where multitude and clamour overcomes. (4.6.15–19)

Clearly, conscience and ‘heaven, that never fails the innocent’ are not potent forces in this Venice – as opposed to the supposedly dying Volpone who after this exchange is brought in ‘as impotent’ (4.6.20). The final dialogue use of conscience is found midway in Act 5 when Voltore, having lost his hopes of becoming heir to Volpone’s wealth, confesses what he knows about the previous deceptions and tells the judges: ‘It is not passion in me, reverend fathers, / But only conscience, conscience, my good sires, / That makes me now tell truth’ (5.10.16–18). In response to this sudden fit of conscience (so out of place in this world), Corvino at first claims that the advocate is distracted, next argues he must be envious, and finally exclaims: ‘The devil ha’s entered   Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Brian Parker, The Revels Plays (New York, 1999), 1.5.73.   As a term, conscience is widely used in the dialogue of this play. Indeed, in this beast-fable Venice of predators and prey, Conscience is characterized as a weakness rather than a virtue, so that the term is often used mockingly or as part of a deception. For example, Mosca cons Corbaccio by assuring him that Volpone ‘out of conscience and mere gratitude’ will reward him (1.4.108); Lady Would-Be (confusedly) invokes ‘liberty of conscience’ (4.2.61) in her indictment of Peregrine as a courtesan in disguise; in Act 5 Mosca as Volpone’s heir tells Voltore that ‘You that have so much law, I know ha’ the conscience / Not to be covetous of what is mine’ (5.3.97–8); after their success in the trial of Act 4, Mosca tells Volpone: ‘Now, so truth help me, I must needs say this, sir, / And out of conscience’ that Voltore deserves ‘very richly – / Well – to be cozened’ (5.2.42–7). 16 17

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him!’ (5.10.35). According to the merchant, the Avocatori should ‘credit nothing, the false spirit hath writ: / It cannot be, but he is possessed’ (49–50). Corvino continues to argue that Voltore ‘is possessed; again, I say, / Possessed. Nay, if there be possession and / Obsession, he has both’ (5.12.8–10). The reader or playgoer knows that, at least for a moment, Voltore has dispossessed himself of his obsession with Volpone’s gold and is acting out of (or, more cynically, can afford to act out of) ‘conscience’. To Corvino, on the other hand, such behavior based upon scruples and not upon materialism can only be explained by reference to diabolic possession. Voltore’s fit of ‘conscience’ is short-lived. Once the bait of Volpone’s treasure is again dangled before him (5.12.15–21), the advocate recants his confession and, with Volpone acting as prompter and stage manager, acts out in high comic fashion the part of a man possessed by the Devil. With Volpone pointing out the symptoms as they occur and Corvino chiming in to reinforce the effect, the audience is treated to one of the funniest scenes in the play, culminating in the final lurid description of the spirit emerging ‘In shape of a blue toad, with a bat’s wings!’ (31). Now that Voltore has been ‘dispossessed’, he can conveniently deny the validity of his papers and statements that would otherwise incriminate the conspirators. His supposed ‘possession’, in other words, has been overcome so that his obsession with Volpone’s gold can reassert itself. But to see only such ironies is to miss the full force of Jonson’s on-stage imagery, his inventive alternative to the moral dramatist’s ejection of Conscience. What we see is an erect figure (Volpone) standing over (and visually exercising control over) a victim who is groveling on the floor of the stage in a fit (a comic analogue for Iago’s similar relationship to Othello in 4.1). Like Sir Pol (who had been forced to crawl into his tortoise shell), Voltore too in visual terms is being degraded to the level of an animal crawling on the ground. The effect is even more striking when one recalls the earlier trial scene. The imposing advocate, who had dominated and controlled the innocent and guilty alike with the power of his rhetoric, has been reduced to this groveling and writhing figure now that the supposedly ‘impotent’ Volpone has exercised his true power. Given the emphasis in previous scenes upon the vulnerability of conscience, this phony dispossession can provide an entertaining yet telling summary action. Clearly, Volpone is not driving a devil out of Voltore. Rather, the power of gold and cunning is ejecting that ‘conscience’ or principle that had caused the advocate, even for a moment, to give up his obsession and self-interest (‘It is not passion in me, reverend fathers, / But only conscience, conscience, my good sires, / That makes me now tell truth’). In keeping with the animal imagery that permeates this play, those qualities that separate man from beast (conscience, principle, reason) are here driven out of a representative figure so that his obsession with the false promises of his tempter can reassert itself. Moments before the resolution of the comedy, Jonson has demonstrated how the power of Lucre and Dissimulation can defeat Law and Conscience. Although a figure designated as Conscience has not been ejected, forsaken, or spotted with abomination, in this climactic and highly

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visible action Voltore’s conscience has been exorcised – and, as is evident in The Devil is an Ass and The Staple of News, Jonson has adroitly adapted the dramaturgy of the previous generation to his own distinctive purposes.

Chapter 11

Usury on the London Stage: Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London Lloyd Edward Kermode

Usury in Early Modern Financial and Moral Culture It is filthy gaines, and a worke of darkenesse, it is a monster in nature: the overthrow of mighty kingdomes, the destruction of flourishing States, the decay of wealthy Cities, the plagues of the world and the misery of the people: it is theft, it is the murthering of our brethren its the curse of God, and the curse of the people. This is usury. By these signes and tokens you may know it: For wheresoever it raigneth all those mischiefs ensue. The name of usurie is not dishonest of itself, or in the own nature: the abuse of usurie or usage is that which hath made it dishonest, and of so bad account among men. For usurie is properly the use of a thing.

When Francis Bacon wrote that ‘few have spoken of Usury usefully’, he probably intended the play on words. For a useful speech on usury might be a gloss to lead us away from sin and closer to God; or, if you are Bacon or any other forward looking practical man of an expanding economy, your use will be in learning how to use usury usefully – what rates make sense, when to borrow money and when to save money, when to trade in goods, when to play the international money market, and when to invest in real estate. After all, in Bacon’s Jacobean years, ‘everyone from knights to scriveners was lending at interest’. In this essay, I place 

  Since writing this essay, the material has been incorporated in the introduction to Three Renaissance Usury Plays, Lloyd Edward Kermode (ed.) Three Renaissance Usury Plays, Revels Companion Library (Manchester, 2008), 1–78.    Bishop John Jewel, quoted in John Blaxton, The English Usurer (London, 1634), C3–C3v. All quotations are in original spelling with silently corrected i/j and u/v.    Bullinger, quoted in Miles Mosse, The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie (London, 1595) (Collection of sermons preached 1592–1593), D2.    Francis Bacon, ‘Of Usury’, in Michael Kiernan (ed.) The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 125.    Theodore B. Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison, 1986), 53.

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Wilson’s writing on the cusp of the early modern transition between using usury as an exemplum for moral rectification and using the mechanism of usury to promote the secularizing commonwealth. The issues of trade, trust, and treachery, property, pelf, and perfidy are used by Robert Wilson in The Three Ladies of London to expose usury – the poisonous temptation of ‘cankered coin’ (17.75) – as a root cause for a city’s and its people’s misery. These questions are increasingly addressed, however, to expose the practical means of survival in Elizabethan London; moreover, they reveal the unfortunate necessity of going beyond ‘legal’ usury and into the inevitable realm of practising fraud. ‘For the Elizabethans’, writes C.T. Wright, ‘few moral and economic issues were more significant than the question of usury.’ Three main concerns drove the early modern usury debate, and I have discussed these at length elsewhere. First, the assertion of the ‘unnaturalness’ of ‘breeding’ barren metal was debated; second, there was the question of whether there were different ‘degrees’ of usury (depending on who was lending to whom, for what purpose, and at what rate), or whether all usury was equally damnable; and third, there was the struggle to reconcile the moral problem of non-charitable money lending with the economy’s need for useful credit – after all, the wealth of the commonwealth was also the health of the commonwealth, and England was up against increasingly sophisticated mercantilist competition from the Continent. Moreover, the question of money in circulation bore on other moral as well as economic issues such as the provision of hospitality, the setting of landowners to work (especially young gentleman with aspirations to financial, urban success), and the avoidance of idleness and base pursuits. Wilson does not just address these issues in Three Ladies, but emphasizes, in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1588–1589), the integration of Pomp and triumph into an English way of life specifically set against foreigners. In God and the Moneylenders Norman Jones uses the 1571 Parliamentary debate and Statute Against Usury as the pivotal document and historical moment around which to examine the ways in which English law and English morality worked together to define, debate, and allow usury. Both Jones and Eric Kerridge respond to, update, and expand R.H. Tawney’s influential introduction to his

  References to Three Ladies are taken from Kermode (ed.), Three Renaissance Usury Plays are taken from H.S.D. Mithal’s edition of the play, An Edition of Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (PhD Diss. U. of Birmingham, 1959, rep. New York and London, 1988).    For a discussion of this progression from usury to fraud, see Teresa Nugent, ‘Usury and Counterfeiting in Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, and in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’, in Linda Woodbridge (ed.), Money and the Age of Shakespeare (New York, 2003), 201–17.    Celeste Turner Wright, ‘Some Conventions Regarding the Usurer in Elizabethan Literature’, Studies in Philology, 31 (1934): 176–97, 176.    See Kermode (ed.), Introduction, Three Renaissance Usury Plays, 1–78. 

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edition of Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse Upon Usury of 1572.10 Jones’s book is particularly concerned to follow the overt shift from a mid sixteenth-century debate on usury based on moral and scriptural arguments to the early seventeenth century’s acceptance of the necessity of the ‘evil’ of usury and a consequent debate revolving around the quite different but related questions of economics and personal conscience. The early debate focused on the secular/sacred tension: as John Man’s 1578 translation of Wolfgang Musculus’s Common Places of Christian Religion appeals, ‘The Civile lawes doe not forbidde all thyngs, which bee unlawefull before God. ... They doe not forbydde anger, displeasure, impatience, envie, hatred, pryde, naughtie luste, covetousnesse, and suche other lyke, ... . No Civile lawe doth charge us with faythe, hope, charitie towards God and our neyghbour, patience in adversitie, myldenesse, meekenesse, humblenesse and modestie, &c. And yet for all that, no man ought to surmyse thereupon, that hee is not bounde unto these thynges, bicause that in case hee use hym self otherwyse, he is not condemned by the Civile lawes.’11 ‘By the last decade of the [sixteenth] century people were beginning to concede that the external definition and regulation of usury were to be left to the magistrates, without reference to theology’, writes Jones, adding that Miles Mosse, by the mid-1590s was ‘giving up on God’s law as the standard up to which secular law must measure’.12 Indeed, those moralists and preachers who continued to deny usury’s necessity were hanging on to a moral message that had been quieted if not silenced for many years by the 1590s. Founded in 1565, the Royal Exchange was officially opened by the Queen in 1571, the same year as the Statute Against Usury, which, despite its title, effectively permitted money-lending at up to 10 per cent. Robert Wilson, for all his apparent conservatism, seems to be ahead of the polemicist’s curve as he grudgingly depicts the way of the world: Three Ladies’s Lady Conscience addresses the same conflict between God’s law and necessity, as she contemplates her demeaned status as a broomseller: ‘But usury is made tolerable amongst Christians as a necessary thing, / So that, going beyond the limits of our law, they extort, and many to misery bring’ (10.25–6). One strong argument in the period for controlling usury and taking care of the economic health of the country was to make money plentiful and decrease interest rates on loans. In the Netherlands, for example, money was generally lent at six per cent in the absence of usury constraints. Because interest rates in England were routinely a few percentage points higher than on the Continent, lenders borrowed abroad and did their money lending in England: ‘Onely England is the parradise of 10   Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1989); Eric Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1988). See also Eric Kerridge, Usury, Interest and the Reformation (Aldershot, 2002). 11   Wolfgang Musculus, Common Places of Christian Religion, trans. John Man (London, 1578), B5. 12   Jones, God and the Moneylenders, 168, 169.

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Usurers’, notes the anonymous author of the manuscript ‘The Usurer Reformed’,13 echoing the conversation between Lady Lucre and Usury in Three Ladies (2.216– 27). The same advantage was clearly available for international merchants, who could borrow more cheaply than their English counterparts and thus undercut them in the marketplace. The underwriters of loans were not the only ones vilified in the period. Just as reviled, and often more so because more visible to the borrowers, were scriveners and brokers, whose ‘large conscience, is an yll warderobe for a poor mans goodes’.14 Brokerage might be the worst usury for unlike the usurer with money to lend, brokers make money from absolutely nothing, sitting in between the two or more parties to a transaction. John Blaxton’s extended simile gives us a taste of the opinion of the day: Not unaptly may we compare the usurer to the neather milstone, which is slow and sturres not; he sits at home, and spends his time in a devilish Arrithmeticke, in numeration of houres, dayes, and moneths, in Subtraction from other mens estates, and multiplication of his owne, untill he have made division betweene his soule and Heaven, and divided the earth to himselfe, and himselfe to hell. His broker we may compare with the upper milstone (without which the neather milstone may seeme unprofitable) that is quick and stirring, and runs round: the poore (like Corne) who between both these is grinded into powder.15

Wilson’s character Usury is in fact not so much an independent financier as he is Lady Lucre’s broker, and he thus combines both hated identities. Related villains were landlords and bawds, others who sat back and collected cash. The former is a rent-racking, hard-hearted beast of morality plays such as George Wapull’s The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576) and directly linked to Usury in Three Ladies, who evicts Conscience from her house, raising the rent for a quarter of a year. A very common complaint of the second half of the sixteenth century, which saw increased immigration into London from the provinces and abroad was of the rise in rents. Only two years after the character No Good Neighbourhood is ruining Tenant Tormented in Wapull’s play and a few years before Wilson wrote The Three Ladies of London, John Wharton responds to Deuteronomy 23, Leviticus 23, Exodus 22 and 1 Timothy 6 with a verse dream in which he sees usurers being punished in hell among a company of ‘Leasemongers’: A many of them at this daye, in Brittaine soyle doth dwel: Whom God wyl fling (for theyr desarts) downe to the pyt of hell.     15   13 14

‘The Usurer Reformed’, Huntington MS EL2468, fol. 14v. ‘The Usurer Reformed’, fol. 3v. Blaxton, The English Usurer (1634), ch. 5, G4v.

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They chop and chaunge, and Leases catch, and hoyseth up great rent: At general Sessions I do feare, for it they wyl be shent. The houses that did lately goe, but for a Marke a yeare: For Nobles seven they do goe nowe, howe do ye lyke this geare[?]16

George Wither adds to this concern to confirm that the landlord is as destructive a ‘usurer’ as the money lender, since both ‘breake / the rule of Christian charity’.17 The bawd is another procurer of unnatural breeding, a fact that the Clown in Twelfth Night plays with: when Viola gives the Clown a tip, he begins, ‘Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?’ and continues, ‘I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus’ (3.1.43, 45–6), thus drawing on an established connection between money-making and illicit sex. And in his Lectures on the XV Psalme (1604), George Downame wrote that usurers ‘live in idlenesse: for usurie, as one well sayth, is quæstuosa segn ties, gainefull idlenesse; they walk inordinately, seeking gaine by a trade of sinne, even as the common theefe or baud doth: for what is an usurer but as Bernard sayth, fur legatis, a theefe, which for the hardnesse of mens hearts the lawes do tollerate. The Philosopher matcheth the usurer with the baud: and to the same purpose observe the cohærence, Deut. 23. 18. 19.’18 Those who ‘gripe’ to make money of nothing, most often by taking advantage of their social standing as clerks or justices, are also classed as usurers by Wharton and Wither. Thus ‘There be of these, that Use for silence take / some others, an Usurious profit make / Of their authorities, and do advance / their wealth by giving others countenance.’ And middle-men in deals ‘oft, of every hundred, twenty take, / ere payment of our own, to us, they make / They must have bribes, their wives must have Caroches, / or horse, or jewels, after which encroaches / Their servants also.’ In the courts of law: mean Officers so speedily grow rich. Although they give large incomes, by this way their wives so on a sudden grow so gay, That were but Kitchen-maids few years before yea many in the blood of Orphans poor 16

  John Wharton, Wharton’s Dream. Conteyninge an invective agaynst certaine abhominable Caterpillers as Usurers, Extortioners, Leasmongers and such others (London, 1578), D2. 17   George Wither (1588–1667), lines appended to Blaxton’s English Usurer (L4–L4v in Huntington 28047). 18   George Downame, Lectures on the XV Psalme (1604), 258, Sv.

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Have dyed their Gowns in scarlet by such courses, and clothed and fed themselves with Widow’s curses.19

And finally, a more ‘active’ mode of brokering and one that pertains particularly to a London that is increasingly concerned with the burgeoning foreign trade into and out of the city involves a particular kind of agent, or middle-man, known as a ‘colourer’ of strangers’s goods; these men would pass off foreign product as their own so as to save the foreign trader the full brunt of extra duties on imported merchandise, in the process taking a cut of the selling price as an agent’s fee. Jonathan Gil Harris notes that for the writer Gerard Malynes, this ‘colouring’ is another form of usury, draining the domestic economy.20 Colouring is essential to the plot of The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), and criticism on the play has begun to examine seriously the moral and social repercussions of international trade; indeed, for someone like Malynes, this is a usury play. The weight of critical history’s reading of Eyre as a boisterous, Falstaffian character has kept the questionable and dangerous nature of his activities as a businessman (and controlling husband and master) suppressed. Usury and The Three Ladies of London The Three Ladies of London was an important precursor to Marlowe and Shakespeare’s ‘Jewish’ plays, and Sally-Beth MacLean and Scott McMillin have shown the ‘response’ of Marlowe to the Queen’s Men plays in general. The usurer Gerontus’s ‘two thousand ducats’ plus ‘another thousand’ for ‘three months’ space’ (9.3–4) anticipates Shylock’s deal of ‘three thousand ducats for three months’ in Merchant of Venice (1.3.1–3);21 Gerontus’s comment that ‘many of you Christians make no conscience to falsify your faith and break your day’ (9.9) suggests not only Shylock’s observations on the Christians’ hypocrisy but also Christian ‘policy’ in The Jew of Malta; and Judge Nemo’s maxim, ‘One may judge and speak truth, as appears by this. / Jews seek to excel in Christianity, and Christians in Jewishness’ (14.48–9) is this play’s ‘Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?’ (MV 4.1.169). Wilson’s Ottoman Jewish usurer (a triple devil) is not a precise, cutting usurer but an honest man, a merciful dealer, and a faithful religious person who is shocked by the Christian merchant’s willingness to convert to Islam to avoid debt;22   Wither, in Blaxton, The English Usurer, L4–L4v (Huntington 28047).   Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia, 2004), 57. 21   Usual loan periods were six months or 12 months, so this reprisal of three months as a bond date seems unusual and possibly connected. 22   Gerontus’s Turkey would have summoned impressive images of the newly familiarized Ottoman Empire in the way The Jew of Malta’s Turks probably did 10 years 19

20

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this observation prompted Thomas Cartelli’s caveat reminding us that Three Ladies’ ‘unorthodox treatment of Christian and Jew should ... be enlightening to those critics who continue to subscribe to a view of Elizabethan attitudes toward cultural difference which is as oversimplified as the one Marlowe and Shakespeare persuade us to reject’.23 In fact, Wilson seems to be doing something more daring and more relevant than Marlowe and Shakespeare by adding to the foreign Jew the unequivocally evil character of Usury in London who, by contrast to Gerontus, gives us what we would expect: he is ‘hard-hearted’ (2.171), a ‘bloodsucker’, a ‘thief’ (7.4), and a swinish ‘Suck-Swill’ (7.25). We have to understand that in spite of the goodness of the Turkish Jew, it is still his money lent out at usury that permits the corruption of England at the hands of the Italian merchant Mercadorus; thus the inescapable international web of usury connects usurers, no matter their apparent difference in character. This web ties all the activity of Three Ladies to usury, either directly or via one remove; and its international reach highlights the cross-cultural identity of ‘English’ characters. London’s Usury is native, though hardly ‘English’. He received his training in Venice under Lady Lucre’s ‘grandmother, the old Lady Lucre of Venice’ (2.216) and has taken up permanent residency in England, since ‘England was such a place for Lucre to bide, / As was not in Europe and the whole world beside’ (2.222–23). In Three Lords, Simony lists the aliens for Usury’s benefit: ‘‘Tis not our native countrie, thou knowest, I Simony am a Roman, Dissimulation a Mongrel, half an Italian, halfe a Dutchman: Fraud so too, halfe French, and halfe Scottish: and thy parents were both Jewes, though thou wert borne in London’ (1439–42; F4). H.S. D. Mithal questions whether Wilson put that last clause in the mouth of Simony precisely because this is slander and not the truth. The point is, I think, that Usury, whatever his parentage, is a second-generation English resident whereas the others are all new immigrants; he was born in London, served in Venice, and now has returned. Wilson’s Usury is multi-talented, expanding the meaning of ‘usury’ to cover other activities that we saw condemned in the contemporary anti-usury tracts. Wilson has Usury delegated by Lucre as her broker. He is her rent-racking real later; Wilson even provides us with the Turkish-Catholic contrast that Marlowe goes on to exploit for all its satirical and subversive worth. Alan Stewart emphasizes the fact that Three Ladies was written at a moment when ‘despite its best efforts, London could no longer see itself as somehow remote from and untainted by this Mediterranean world’ (‘“Come from Turkie”: Mediterranean Trade in Late Elizabethan London’, in Goran V. Stanivukovic (ed.), Re-Mapping the Mediterranean in Early Modern English Writings (London, 2007), 77. For studies of the Anglo-Turkish relationship as seen through the prism of drama in the period, see Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York, 2003); also his introduction to Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York, 2000). 23   Thomas Cartelli, ‘Shakespeare’s Merchant, Marlowe’s Jew: The Problem of Cultural Difference’, Shakespeare Studies, 20 (1987): 255–60, 259.

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estate manager, even though Lucre assigns this role specifically to Fraud (2.252). This connection and confusion between Usury and Fraud enacts the process of shifting historical concern from the former to the latter that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Usury is experienced in both repossessing houses and a sort of second-degree murder, for Simplicity complains, ‘O, that vile Usury! He lent my father a little money, and for breaking one day / He took the feesimple of his house and mill quite away: / ... / So he killed my father with sorrow, and undoed me quite’ (2.101–02, 105). Neither does Usury only pick on poor Conscience or modest Hospitality, which two characters, although embedded in moral significance, already suggest usury’s straddling of the moral and economic. Usury boasts early on that ‘sith I am so well settled in this country, / I will pinch all, rich and poor, that come to me’ (2.267–8), and indeed, it is Wilson’s concern throughout the play to insist on the bodily and material damage that Usury and Lucre do to all classes in London and England. Such damage is aggravated by alien immigrants, who are easily labelled ‘Simony’, ‘Dissimulation’, and ‘Fraud’, and who cause the increase in rents with their overcrowding of the capital.24 The interplay of geography and ethnicity, morality and practicality, gender and power, class and corruption in Three Ladies reveals Wilson’s attempt to inject the morality mode with a shot of vital economic politics. Wilson attempts to ‘realise’ his practical vision of reforming London through pivotal characters that exist on the verge between representational morality figures and realistic characters. Two such characters, placed on the edge of the play world’s own reality, provide examples of the play’s focus on the issue of usury, even when usury does not seem to be at stake. These are the two characters called ‘Nemo’. The first Nemo illustrates the connection of usury to hospitality and conscience, and the decline of Englishness as Wilson sees it; the second ‘Nemo’ will provide us with a kind of coda to point out Wilson’s ongoing interest in physicalizing and materializing the moral message. The Two Nemos The first ‘Nemo’ is the fallen nobleman who invites Simplicity to a dinner of nothing and then fades away:

24

  When Mercadorus encourages Lucre to rent rooms ‘to stranger dat are content / To dwell in a little room, and to pay much rent’ (5.72–3), she replies by telling him she has ‘infinite numbers in London that my want doth supply, / Beside in Bristol, Northampton, Norwich, Westchester, Canterbury, / Dover, Sandwich, Rye, Portsmouth, Plymouth, and many more, / That great rents upon little room do bestow? / Yes, I warrant you, and truly I may thank the strangers for this, / That they have made houses so dear, whereby I live in bliss’ (5.79–84). Lucre’s list of provincial towns is an accurate representation of locations to which aliens were encouraged to relocate at various times in the sixteenth century.

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But come in to dinner with me, and when you have dined, You shall have – Presently go out. (4.180–81)

This lack of hospitality foreshadows the dire event four scenes later, when we hear the character Hospitality cry out for help and see him dragged off stage to be murdered by Usury. This is a serious moment for London that demonstrates a shift into a late, mature version of morality drama, and one that insists not so much on the personal, moral fight of an Everyman figure but instead on a practical, physical battle for each Londoner. Heaven might be lost in Three Ladies by the turn toward worldliness. By contrast, Mankind’s Mercy could not die; when Titivillus whispers to Mankind that Mercy is hanged, it cannot be true for Mercy is always available to the repentant man. Hospitality, the social and physical provision of Christian teaching, on the other hand, is a material matter on earth and therefore a ‘touchable’ character. The early texts assume an unequivocal and direct link between usury and the decline of hospitality in England.25 The problem of usury’s ruin of the class of native gentleman, for example, is a central concern of Thomas Lodge in his An Alarum Against Usurers, which was published in 1584, the same year as Three Ladies. The importance of Hospitality’s death is clearly reflected in the play as Conscience finds no friendly reception wherever she goes. Conscience is not a tenable characteristic in contemporary London, because London is no longer a moral place but a bustling location of money-driven lending, trading, renting, and cheating. Even the traditionally honest or proverbially tricky – depending on whom you believe – English workman cannot avoid the taint of the foreign figures financed by usury. Wilson’s craftsman, ‘Artifex’, is drawn into a scheme in which foreign goods are made poorly but dressed well and sold to the impoverishment of the honest English worker. The Dutch Church Libel of 1593, a paper threatening resident strangers in England with violence and death, seems to refer to Marlowe and his plays of the immediately preceding years. With the text’s proximity of a ‘Machiavellian Marchant’, ‘usery’, and ‘Artifex’ as characterized nomenclature, we might now read the libel as quite probably referring to Three Ladies: Your Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state, Your usery doth leave us all for deade Your Artifex, & craftesman works our fate, And like the Jewes, you eate us up as bread. (ll. 5–8)26 25   C.T. Wright notes, ‘One chief Elizabethan grievance against the usurer was his ruin of the hospitable gentry’ (‘Some Conventions’, 187). For extensive analyses of hospitality in England, see Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), and Daryl Palmer, Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England (West Lafayette, IN, 1992). 26   See Arthur Freeman, ‘Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel’, English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973): 44–52, esp. 44–5.

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Despite being over a decade old by the time of the libel, The Three Ladies could well have remained a vital touchstone for such a reactionary text. The Three Ladies’ constant presence in the literary imagination of the rest of the sixteenth century is indicated by several events: very soon after its composition, The Three Ladies prompted a response, London Against the Three Ladies; as late as 1598 Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia directly refers to The Three Ladies;27 the play was revived with The Three Lords in 1590; and a second quarto was published in 1592.28 Hospitality’s murder points out contemporary politics as well as ‘timeless’ dramatic morality in another way, related again to the libel’s anti-alien focus. Conscience had earlier asked Hospitality, ‘But I pray you, sir, have you invited to dinner any stranger?’ (4.65), to which the answer is an emphatic negative: ‘No, sure; none but Lady Love, and three or four honest neighbours’ (4.66).29 With Conscience’s post-eviction declaration that Hospitality is her only hope still ringing in our ears, Usury murders Hospitality (Scene 8), thus ensuring the destruction of the ethical, Christian system of safekeeping that London should provide for native Londoners. This seems to be an urban problem: as Tom Tosspot asserts in Ulpian Fulwell’s Like Will to Like (1568), in all his travels around the country, he could not find corruptible followers. Conscience decides she must live alone, and she will sell brooms to earn a few pennies (8.138–51), a familiar marker of a woman in poverty. It is not long before Lucre corrupts Conscience too with a quick way out of desperation in a truly inhospitable land: Conscience must deck her own home beautifully and make a little hospitable corner ‘where few neighbours dwell, / And they be of the poorest sort’ (10.94–5) for Lucre to bring home her ‘familiar friends, to play and pass the time in sport’ (10.78). The irony of the part Conscience is forced to play – that of perverted and depraved hospitality – is palpable.30 The play’s insistence on the gendered and sexualised natures of handling, circulating, sharing, and hiring money has not been examined thoroughly, and I will be examining these elements in a future essay. The second ‘Nemo’ is the judge whom we are apparently supposed to take seriously as arbiter of moral rectitude. Of course, for all the severity of the final judgement in this play (and perhaps because it is almost melodramatic), we are encouraged to reflect on the noble ‘No-man’ we met earlier in the play, who 27

  These sources are listed by Alan Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln, NE, 1986), 7, 170 n. 11. 28   For an expanded discussion of the connections between Three Ladies and drama of the early 1590s, see Lloyd Edward Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge, 2008). 29   Felicity Heal points out that England had a good reputation for hospitality among well-to-do foreign travelers, although the English did not always feel obliged to live up to expectations. See her Hospitality in Early Modern England, 204. 30   Note the use of ‘honest’ and ‘poor’ to describe the destitute English living in the seedy parts of town and following Hospitality at the funeral. It seems that the practice of an honest living cannot be detached from a life of poverty in this vision of corrupted society.

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liberally offered non-existent hospitality, and we might question the extent to which this judge or the effects of his judgement even exist. Again, Wilson works through conceptual characters to make morality physical and material. Judge Nemo’s comment/question, for example, that ‘Thou wast pure, Love, and art thou become a monster[?]’ (17.86) points to the visible physical deformation of the Ladies (and Jonathan Gil Harris has deftly covered the intersections of ‘pox’ and linguistic corruption in the play).31 Wilson revisits the problem of Love’s (Venus’s) moral/sexual/physical/female corruption in The Cobbler’s Prophecy (1594), where her waiting maids, called ‘Ru’ and ‘Ina’, enter to depict the ruin of the realm and condemn ‘Venus alias lust’ for ‘her publike adulterie she hath committed with that base monster Contempt’.32 Reprising Judge Nemo’s sentence against the caretakers of Lucre’s house of lust in Three Ladies with the threats of hell, Wilson has Venus ‘utterly excluded the compasse of heaven;’ the ‘Cabbin of Contempt [is] to be consumed with fire’.33 The physical confirmation of Judge Nemo’s moral lessons appears in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, where the dishevelled ladies are let out of prison and matched with three Lords of London. Usury remains a key issue in this later play. We hear that the evil quartet who seemed to escape judgement in Three Ladies have had an increasingly hard time getting by in London. Only Usury continues to ‘liv[e] but too wel’ (613; D1) in London, and his friend Dissimulation manages to slip back into town during the market-day at Leadenhall and into Westminster to pick up the latest news. The final, comic attempt of the vices to win back the ladies’ favors fails dismally, although there is no finality to their suppression either. Usury is branded with ‘A litle x. standing in the midd’st of a great C’ (1954; H3) to denote the maximum percentage he is allowed to take on usury by law since 1571. Of course, this comedy is tempered: just as the Judge’s name ‘Nemo’ in Three Ladies might suggest, as Louis B. Wright noted, that ‘the dramatist satirically showed that no judge had yet dared sentence Lucre’, so the branding as punishment is countered by reading it as a confirmation of the legitimacy of Usury in London.34 Another allusion to the 1571 Act, the brand declares that London owns Usury, or that Usury is London’s adopted child; as Usury himself said a decade earlier in Three Ladies, Venetian Lucre had in London ‘a daughter, which her far did excel’, and that daughter declares that Usury ‘shall live here as pleasantly, / Ay, and pleasanter too, if it may be’ (2.221, 226–7). Usury, then, ‘settles’ into London just as the idea of usury did among those closely related to the necessities of trade. Whether we can read this episode as showing that Usury ‘no longer pos[es] a threat within the   Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘[Po]X Marks the Spot: How to “Read” “Early Modern” “Syphilis” in The Three Ladies of London’, in Kevin Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh: Responses to Sexually Transmitted Disease in Renaissance Europe (Toronto, 2005), 111–34. 32   Robert Wilson, The Cobbler’s Prophecy (London, 1594), E4–E4v. 33   Wilson, The Cobbler’s Prophecy, E4v. 34   Louis B. Wright, ‘Social Aspects of Some Belated Moralities’, Anglia, 54 (1930): 107–48, n. 129. 31

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world of the play’ is arguable, but Teresa Nugent seems right to emphasize that the suppression of the danger of usury in Three Lords indicates not a solution but an equivocal shift, whereby the new arch-enemy of a merchandising state is the tradethreatening figure of Fraud;35 we might even suggest that Fraud’s list of evil deeds in Three Ladies (2.68ff) already sets him on a path that prefigures a dangerous henchman like Marlowe’s Ithamore, waiting in the wings, allowing his employer to believe mistakenly in his own eternal power.

 

35

Nugent, ‘Usury and Counterfeiting’, 203–4, 207–8, 213.

Chapter 12

Appropriations of the Popular Tradition in The Famous Victories of Henry V and The Troublesome Raigne of King John Karen Oberer

Philip Sidney famously argued that plays which ‘mingle kings and clowns’ onstage were a lesser type of drama. ‘[I]n that comical part of our tragedy’, he argues, ‘we have nothing but scurrility, unworthy of any chaste ears, or some extreme show of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loud laughter, and nothing else.’ He is more concerned with the degrading effects of ‘tickling’ laughter, which is not stimulated by the delight of true comedy, but rather by the ridiculous. Sidney did not recognize the dramatic potential of hybridity, unlike the Queen’s Men, whose history plays deftly interweave the serious and the comic, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. The comic, however, is but one part of the popular theatrical convention which informed the Queen’s Men history plays. As suggested by the reference to the ‘mingling of kings and clowns’ in Sidney’s Defence, the rustic and the civilized are frequently juxtaposed in order to critique not only generic purity but also class purity. Essential to the low style were popular acting traditions that emerged from folk theatre: jigs, extemporizing, comic routines, stock characterization, and an emphasis on spectacle. In history plays, the low style is concerned with common experience, with public reactions to national events; the high style with the exclusive experiences of nobility. Richard Helgerson theorizes a movement away from these popular dramatic traditions during the 1590s, traditions which comprise what he calls the ‘players’ theater’. He cites Greene, Nashe, Marlowe, and Jonson as those who identified the necessity of transitioning from this low dramatic form to the ‘writers’ theater’ This high drama was apparently considered a literary one, written by genteel poets for a literate audience, and its proponents favoured serious genres such as satire and tragedy over comedy and ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’. Helgerson neglects to mention, however, that despite this perceived movement away from the ‘players’ theater’, the mixing of seriousness and farce maintained its popularity during the rise of the ‘writers’ theater’ What Sidney was unable to appreciate – and what most early modern playwrights understood – was the 

       

Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (London, 1966), 136. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), 200. Sidney, Defence, 135.

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sophistication with which it was possible to mingle ‘kings and clowns’ onstage. The anonymous authors of The Famous Victories of Henry V and of The Troublesome Raigne of King John appropriated popular or ‘low-style’ acting traditions into a surprisingly rich political commentary on class and government. The players themselves, especially Richard Tarlton, perceived the process of creating historical knowledge as being similar to the process of creating a theatrical production. The popular dramatic elements in particular were used to negotiate a primarily critical space within the plays’ historical, even propagandistic, content. Rather than having an inherently oppositional relationship, as Sidney suggests, high and low material could be merged in order to produce social satire that at once exploits popular traditions and nationalistic rhetoric while simultaneously placing them under scrutiny. Indeed, the Queen’s Men’s histories critique the very notions of high and low, even as the plays seem to employ them. This merging process applied popular tradition to historical event in order to make the audience members feel as if they were participating in history even while they maintained a critical distance from it. Stock characters, frequently employed in the comic scenes, allow common folk to ‘enter’ the action of the play. In particular, the clown, the braggart soldier, and the workman are stock types employed to appeal to a wide range of audiences. Just as often as the audience is expected to laugh at the comic type, so too is it expected to identify with him as an everyman: both Derick in The Famous Victories and the Bastard Fauconbridge in The Troublesome Raigne, for instance, elicit these simultaneous reactions. Female stock characters also permit a close level of audience identification; this is true most of all in The Troublesome Raigne, where the ‘weeping woman’ type is used to dramatic advantage. This stock character provides pathos as yet another counterpoint to the plays’ comic business and royal pomp. Comic scenes and stock characters strike a delicate balance in the Queen’s Men’s histories: one which alternately draws the audience into the action of the play and also allows viewers to be critical of these same events. Richard Tarlton’s comic style, which was a major component of the Queen’s Men plays even after his death, included frequent audience address, clowning, and extemporizing. Tarlton’s fame, which antedated the creation of the Queen’s Men in 1583, was key to the dramatic style of the troupe’s plays. Even though his death occurred relatively early in the troupe’s history (1588), the Queen’s Men continued to focus on the visual and the comic: in the plays ‘spoken language tends to be subordinate’ to ‘objects, costumes, the gestures of actors, and patterns of stage movement’. The emphasis on these elements and on Tarlton’s jesting and jigging resulted in greater audience unification. Tarlton’s biggest aesthetic contribution to 

  Brian Walsh, ‘Theatrical Temporality and Historical Consciousness in The Famous Victories of Henry V’, Theatre Journal, 59.1 (2007): 57. Walsh suggests that clowning in particular ‘emphasizes the physical presence of performance and works to stimulate the audience’s consciousness of the theatrical event in enacting history’.    McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 125.

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the Queen’s Men’s dramaturgy was his comic routine, during which he ‘made his audiences a single unit through the cohesion of shared laughter’. Moreover, the clown role traditionally invited a theatrical intimacy between actor and viewers. His habitual position in the platea, the downstage acting space, already permitted the clown close actor-audience contact, establishing ‘a flexible relationship between the play world and the real world’. The clown figure frequently performed the function of bridge between medieval history and early modern audiences. That Tarlton made famous the figure of the rustic clown and was largely responsible for bringing the English history play into commercial theatre suggests a successful integration of popular tradition, historiography, and proto-nationalism. The Famous Victories begins not with historical and time-specific deeds of nobility, but with a familiar scene of carnivalesque inversion: the prince has just robbed his own receivers. The audience is presented with character types and with a story which they already knew quite well. The tales of the robbed receivers, of the prince’s riot (B1) and of his altercation with the Chief Justice (B3v) were very familiar to late sixteenth-century audiences.10 Tudor historians such as Fabyan, Hall, Holinshed, and Stow all recorded these stories which they had learned from earlier writers. By 1513, they were ‘a matter of common fame’.11 Not only was Prince Henry’s transformation quite vivid in the public imagination, but it was extremely familiar through the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15.11–32). Even if the audience did not know the prince’s story, they would certainly have recognized the prodigal in his characterization. There is much critical debate about whether Prince Henry effects a real transformation; one of the main arguments that he does indeed transform concerns The Famous Victories’ morality play structure. The audience expects Prince Henry to transform just as Everyman or Mankind (or the prodigal) does. Edgar Schell argues that the play’s reformation scene ‘shows more than a trace of morality influence: in Hal’s symbolic robe, reminiscent of the robe Mankind dons and doffs to show his temptation and repentance, and in the sudden and unmotivated conversion’.12 The playwright employs this familiar structure in order to stimulate certain audience expectations about Henry’s reformation; however, he also inverts those very expectations. Louise Nichols identifies many moments   Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge, 1987), 156.   Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre (Baltimore, 1978), 80.    Gurr, Playgoing, 157.     McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men and Their Plays, xii. 10   All references to The Famous Victories are from the 1598 edition found on Early English Books Online (Cambridge University Library copy), and are cited parenthetically by signature in my text. 11   William Bowling, ‘The Wild Prince Hal in Legend and Literature’, Washington University Studies, Humanistic Series, 23 (1926): 312. 12   ‘Prince Hal’s Second “Reformation”’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 21.1 (1970), 12.  

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in the play in which the fame of the young King Henry’s victories are put into doubt: with the introduction of ‘lucke’ in Henry’s conquest of Harfleur (E2) for example, the play suggests that ‘fortune is a factor in Henry’s success’.13 Such a reliance on chance ‘contrasts with the providential view of the chronicles that sees victory for Henry as God’s plan. Suddenly an alternative possibility comes to light, and it is one that presents Henry with much less power’.14 The concept of fortune, rather than God, being responsible for Henry’s victory casts doubt on the inevitability of his success. The idea that history is a combination of God’s will, luck, and personal determination qualifies the play’s seemingly straightforward propagandistic message. The question of Prince Henry’s transformation is troubled by the sense that he never seriously engages in transgression at the beginning of the play. In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, the audience is reassured that Hal ‘will a while uphold/ The unyoked humour of [his fellows’] idleness’ (1.2.192–3);15 in The Famous Victories, the viewers are not given the same insight into the prince’s character. That Prince Henry allies himself with Ned, Tom, and Jockey rather than with Derick, John, and Robin, undermines any pretence that he might belong to the common folk, and hence to the play’s transgressive elements. Ned, Tom, and Jockey are simply braggarts and social climbers; Derick, John, and Robin are the lower-class, clownish figures who perform the highest level of social satire in the play. The real transgression does not occur with Prince Henry, but with those who are most socially distant from him. While the morality play structure prepares the audience for a tale of reformation, Henry’s attitude is the same from beginning to end, despite the melodramatic reconciliations with his father. The dialogue between Henry V and King Charles, during which the French king all but capitulates to Henry’s demands, shows that Henry’s ability to manipulate various situations has remained unchanged throughout the play. The scene parallels the previous comic one, in which a French soldier is frightened into running away. In both cases, the French surrender to the English, either visually or politically. The French king is portrayed as a genial character, yet easily bullied, and Henry exposes him as a relatively weak leader. For example, when Henry makes his numerous demands, Charles exclaims, possibly out of frustration, ‘Why then, belike all that I haue here is yours!’ (F3). Henry similarly bullies Katherine, the French king’s daughter, into accepting his marriage proposal. Katherine suddenly says, in an aside, ‘I may thinke my selfe the happiest in the world,/ That is beloued of the mightie king of England’ (F4). We are not to think her response out of the ordinary, as her capitulation merely continues the pattern of displaying 13

  Louise Nichols, ‘“My name was known before I came”: The Heroic Identity of the Prince’, in Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (eds), Other Voices, Other Views (Newark, 1999), 168. 14   Nichols, ‘My name’, 168. 15   William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 2005), 481–509.

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Henry’s manipulative charm. Yet Katherine is nevertheless given agency – under the command of her father, of course – to negotiate with King Henry. There is a suggestion of annoyance in Katherine’s voice, an angry reluctance to ‘debate any of these/ Unreasonable demands’ that Henry requires (F3v). Katherine acknowledges her own power to manipulate, via her role as political intercessor: ‘I would to God, that I had your Maiestie/ As fast in loue, as you haue my father in warres’ (F3v). She realizes that ending the bloody wars depends upon her successful negotiation. Henry boastfully tells her that ‘Ile deale as easily with thee,/ As heart can imagine, or tongue can require’; however, shortly afterwards he agrees to modify his demands (F4). This scene is therefore a political battle played out in social terms. In fact, Henry articulates as much after Katherine leaves the stage, returning to his former braggart posture: ‘if I knew I could not haue her fathers good wil,/ I would so rowse the Towers ouer his eares,/ That I would make him be glad to bring her me/ Upon his hands and knees’ (F4). Despite his boasting, the scene is about mutual capitulation; the audience is invited to believe that their marriage will be a partnership of equals, since Katherine and Henry both show an expertise in manipulation. Henry’s rhetoric and social skills here reflect back on the reconciliation scenes with his father. The audience has no reason to think that the exclamations he makes while his father sleeps are insincere. Thinking the king dead, he cries, ‘O my/ Dying father, curst be the day wherin I was borne, and ac-/ cursed be the houre wherin I was begotten’ (C4). When the king awakes, however, Henry shows a facility with language that reassures his dying father that he will be a good king. Again, Henry combines the language of a capitulation with that of military prowess: ‘he that seekes to take the Crown from my head,/ Let him looke that his armour be thicker then mine,/ Or I will pearce him to the heart,/ Were it harder then brasse or bollion’ (C4v). The words have their desired effect, as the Henry IV replies, ‘Nobly spoken, and like a king’ (D1). The popular image of Henry as a national hero is qualified by the issue of role-playing. The audience members may have asked themselves, ‘Was Henry V the strong leader of famous account, or merely a good actor? Are the two concepts mutually exclusive?’ The satire in other parts of The Famous Victories also negotiates questions of surrender and capitulation. In battle, for instance, John and Robin praise the ingenious military tactics of the English side at Agincourt. John is amazed ‘[t]o see how the French men were kild/ With the stakes of the trees’ (F2). As soon as they are warned that the tide of the battle may be turning, however, John says, ‘What shall we do, Robin? faith, Ile shift,/ For I can speake broken French’ (F2). Mere word of changing fortunes makes the men cowardly and allows the audience to laugh at John’s linguistic travesties. The French, naturally, are the greater satirical targets, as in the next scene of The Famous Victories Derick outwits a rather dull French soldier, who in turn runs away when the clown’s back is turned. But even during this scene, Derick reinforces the stereotype of the cowardly soldier: ‘What is he gone, masse, I am glad of it,/ For if he had staid, I was afraid he wold have sturd again,/ And then I should haue beene spilt,/ But I will away to kill more

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Frenchmen’ (F2v). We assume that he has not killed any to begin with. Despite his earlier patriotic rhetoric – when he asks John, ‘doest thinke that we are so base/ Minded to die among French men?’ (E1) – Derick’s bombast leaves him. Even though his battlefield antics are humorously framed, the clown discovers the fearsome realities of war. No doubt Derick, John, and Robin are in the thick of battle; they deal with their fear through clowning and wit, much as audience members themselves might be reassured by the clowns’ efforts to make serious (and immediately relevant) conflict into a comic show. These ‘soldiers’ are not real Agincourt soldiers, not the ones that defeat the French while being vastly outnumbered. The audience does not expect them to play the roles of soldiers, and yet the audience is simultaneously invited to be critical of the English army. The playwright’s social commentary about the make-up of armies is similar to Shakespeare’s satire in 2 Henry IV where Falstaff reviews his crew, appropriately named Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf (3.2).16 These names imply their lack of preparedness for battle: their filth, disease, weakness, and unmanliness. John and Robin are also defined by their names as being unfit for battle. What are a cobbler, a pewterer, and a clown doing amidst serious battle? Why is the Captain so intent on pressing a shoemaker into service (D4v)? This act of conscription implies desperation on the part of the English forces. Perhaps Henry’s victory is not as certain as the play’s reference to providence suggests. More disturbing is the comic reflection of Henry V’s military negotiation, which shows Derick and John looting the battlefield. While Henry arbitrates a peace with King Charles and deals with the aftermath of war, Derick boasts of being ‘foure or fiue times slaine’ and proudly describes how he escaped military service (F4v). And during Henry’s financial negotiations, John robs the dead French soldiers of ‘reparrell’ and shoes (G1). Neither Derick nor John has proven himself above running away from both English duty and the French soldiers. The ultimate aim of this scene is to show that some of Henry’s victories are not entirely worthy of being remembered in the chronicles. Hall, Holinshed, and Stow frequently recount noble deeds of royalty and well-known figures, but they neglect the acts of the undistinguished (and even criminal) men involved at the level of battle. The interspersing of Derick’s antics between scenes of Henry’s political and tactical prowess undermines the heroic element of historical accounts. Indeed, the audience is reminded that Henry begins the foray into France because of wounded pride: ‘the proudest French man in all France ... shall rue the time that euer/ These tennis balles were sent into England’ (D3v). This reaction is more childish than heroic. The insult persuades him to battle – more easily than Lord Oxford’s strategic advice that ‘in conquering Scotland, you conquer but one,/ And conquere France and conquere both’ (D2v). This is not to say that a patriotic Elizabethan audience would not feel the same outrage that King Henry feels; however, the viewers would likely recognize a comic connection between the underlying personal motivations of King Henry’s vengefulness and of Derick’s greed. 16

 

The Complete Works, 537–68.

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When dealing with serious matters such as war, greed, and personal ambition, the comic players are more insightful and accurate than the overt historical commentary found in the heroic scenes. Though The Famous Victories seems to be largely a propagandistic play, Derick and John Cobbler illustrate the English presence in France as a thieving one. Henry gives permission to the French forces that they may bury their dead (F1v), but Derick and John remind us that the dead are in fact looted before being interred. In contrast, Henry says that he will ‘go into the field my selfe/ To view my Country men, and to haue them honourably/ Buried’ (F2). The French king merely sends his herald to look after the dead; Henry looks to it himself. Immediately following this scene, however, we find Robin and John peremptorily deciding to change sides in the war (F2v), an act that reflects poorly on the English forces. The comic scene here emphasizes Henry’s sense of honour in contrast to his men’s cowardliness. Yet the French casualties’ poor treatment balances this praise of Henry with criticism of his men. The audience is invited to experience Henry’s victories, especially through Derick’s comic intercession; however, the viewers are also encouraged to remain critically distant from the action. Weimann identifies this process as a ‘dual’ or ‘complementary perspective’, a theorization useful in the consideration of the role of comedy and the popular in the solemn English history play: ‘the dramatic structure of popular comedy made the representation of serious business appear in a more comprehensive perspective, a perspective of comic or grotesque counterpoints, but in the last resort one more true to the realities of living, then and now’.17 Humourous interludes perform a function greater than providing comic relief and creating foils to the main plot. Comic lower-class characters universalize the themes and concerns which initially seem to belong only to the noble characters at circumstance-specific moments in time. This technique extrapolates the play’s moral messages: war entails greed, manipulation, opportunism, and even a hollow patriotism. But rather than being a straightforward morality play, The Famous Victories frames these lessons in the past, where the audience members can recognize their application not only to themselves but to historic rulers as well. The universalizing effect of the morality play tradition is also fundamental to The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England. The only wholly comic moment in the play occurs in the abbey scene, which is ostensibly a morality play in miniature. Besides Philip Fauconbridge, all of the comic stock characters in The Troublesome Raigne are church figures: Nun Alice, Friars Thomas, Anthony, and Laurence. The nun and friars represent various sins, including lust, greed, pride, and envy. The scene does not encourage the audience to identify directly with Fauconbridge, the everyman protagonist; rather, the morality structure allows the viewers to feel superior to the foolish villains who are easily identified as sinful abstractions. Fauconbridge, under orders to confiscate gold from all the abbeys, interrogates the clergy folk when he searches for the abbot’s hoard. Alice is found hiding in the abbot’s chest and doubts are cast on her chastity:   Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 242.

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Nunne ... what is ours, so fauour now be showne, You shall commaund as commonly, as if it were your owne. Frier Your honour excepted. Nunne I Thomas, I meane so. Philip From all saue from Friers. (E3v)18

Alice unwittingly implies that Fauconbridge is welcome to everything ‘commonly’ (a suggestive pun on her ‘common’ habits) until Thomas corrects her. Fauconbridge makes the joke explicit: Alice’s chastity is safe, except from all friars. Alice also suggests nuns’ typical covetousness: ‘I know an ancient Nunne,/ That hath a hoord this seuen yeeres,/ did neuer see the sunne’ (E3v). The abbot himself is said to own ‘plate and mony ... / The value of a thousand markes’ (E4). If Alice and the abbot are accused of licentiousness and greed, Friar Laurence is openly guilty of lust. Like Alice, he emerges from his hiding place, a nun’s ‘presse’, and admits that his ‘fancie soone burneth,/ Because he is mortall and made of mould’ (E4). Alice and Laurence have apparently been caught in the middle of a liaison. Fauconbridge charges all of the holy folk with deception and lectures them on the travesty they have made of religious life: How goes this geere? the Friers chest fild with a fausen Nunne, The Nunne againe lockes Frier vp, to keepe him from the Sunne. Belike the presse is Purgatorie, or penance passing grieuous: The Friers chest a hell for Nunnes! how doe these dolts deceiue vs? Is this the labour of their liues, to feede and liue at ease? To reuell so lasciuiously as often as they please. (E4)

Abstract concepts such as hell and purgatory are made into common household items; the clergy’s apparent holiness is a façade for revelling and lasciviousness. Fauconbridge is angrier, however, that the friars have lied to him about the abbey’s wealth than about their sinful transgressions. The audience would likely expect sinful behaviour from the clergy figures; the scene participates in the widely popular anti-fraternal tradition.19 Yet the audience would not necessarily expect Fauconbridge to claim that he will exploit the clergy for his own entertainment. 18

  All references to The Troublesome Raigne are from the 1611 edition found on EEBO and cited parenthetically by signature. 19   Laurence even claims ‘Amor vincit omnia’ in his defence (E4), a phrase immediately reminiscent of the motto inscribed on the Prioress’s brooch in Chaucer’s General Prologue (l. 162). From The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987).

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His motivation for looting the abbeys is clear: ‘Now warres are done, I long to be at home/ To diue into the Monks and Abbots bagges,/ To make some sport among the smooth skind Nunnes,/ And keepe some reuell with the fa[u]zen Friers’ (E2).20 Fauconbridge is not contravening a commitment to God, as the nuns, friars, and abbots are, but neither is he above the scene’s satire. More importantly, the audience is made to feel secure that they are morally exalted above the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The Catholic clergy are satirized here in order to justify both King John’s persecution of the monastic orders and, of course, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. King John’s money is being hoarded by the nuns and friars while they neglect their religious duties. They speak in a dated language, a mongrel Latin, which Fauconbridge calls ‘riming’ and ‘rabble’ (E3). The audience is placed in an objective position above the action of the play, via satire, and it is also made aware of the relevant political, even propagandistic, reasons for the monastic dissolution. The Troublesome Raigne’s spectacular elements – of King John’s second coronation, of the battle scenes, and of royal parleys – are voyeuristic insights into the workings of the court and a showcase of visual stimuli set apart from the play’s narrative. The visual pomp of John’s second coronation has purpose besides voyeurism, however. McMillin and MacLean argue ‘the excessiveness of the second coronation is like the excessiveness of popery, a point which is driven home by John’s tyrannical behaviour at the end of the scene’.21 The visual splendour of John’s reign demonstrates an excessiveness that emotionally repels an Elizabethan audience from the king because of the spectacle’s connection to Catholicism. Empathetic female stock characters balance this distancing effect in The Troublesome Raigne. Most of the play’s female characters are ‘weeping women’ stock types. Lady Margaret Fauconbridge laments that her adulterous indiscretion has been made public before the court. In the play’s first scene, the emphasis falls largely on the verification of the Bastard Fauconbridge’s royal lineage. Lady Margaret, however, speaks an impressive 42 lines which create a great deal of sympathy for her plight. The audience gets a chance to understand Lady Margaret’s difficult position as the object of King Richard’s affection. To her son she describes the king’s wooing: if thou knew’st what suites, what threats, what feares, To mooue by loue, or massacre by death, To yeeld with loue, or end by loues contempt, The mightinesse of him that courted me, Who tempered terror with his wanton talke, That something may extenuate the guilt. (B3v)

20

  The text reads ‘fanzen Friers’; the ‘n’ is an inverted ‘u’. ‘Fauzen’ means ‘false’.   McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 142.

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The mixture of words of fear – ‘threats’, ‘feares’, ‘massacre’, ‘death’, ‘terror’ – with talk of love – ‘yeeld’, ‘moue’, ‘suites’, ‘wanton’ – emphasizes the precariousness of Margaret’s position as a king’s lover. Constance also has moving lines at the capture of her son. She alludes to Dido’s grief at the loss of Troy: ‘Must I discourse? let Dido sigh and say,/ She weepes againe to heare the wracke of Troy:/ Two words will serue, and then my tale is done:/ Elnors proud brat hath rob’d me of my sonne’ (E2v).22 The grieved mother then predicts her own soon-to-be-effected death. Constance places herself in a temporal continuum of feminine grief. She aligns the loss of her son with the loss of Troy and her personal sorrow with Dido’s renowned sorrow. Then she communicates this historical grief to the audience of the Elizabethan present; through her grief, she leads viewers to feel as if they are participating in an expression of sorrow which is historically continuous. Blanch is similarly wracked with woe after the French and English renew their warfare. Her marriage to the dauphin has failed to make peace permanent. She feels divided between her nation and her adopted land, but she only laments the immediate departure of her new husband: ‘And will your Grace vpon your wedding day/ Forsake your Bride, and follow dreadfull drums?/ Nay, good my Lord, stay you at home with me’ (D4v). Blanch faces the combined difficulties of the other two women: her love places her in a threatening situation and she is confronted with the possibility of the loss of that same love. Shakespeare of course capitalizes on and fleshes out the grief of the weeping woman stock type in his play on King John. Though he shortens Lady Fauconbridge’s speeches in act 1, scene 1, Shakespeare gives more lines to Constance after Arthur’s death, not just after his abduction (3.4). Blanche has a moving speech in King John in which she figures the war as literally tearing her body apart (3.1.252–62).23 Though Shakespeare is the better rhetorician, the Queen’s Men’s play also considers the dangers and losses women faced as members of the court. The audience participates in a different sort of voyeurism, one in which private women’s griefs are made public. Not only is this grief womanly, it is royal. The viewer comes to a greater appreciation of the loss noblewomen suffer in the aftermath of war. Yet the suffering democratizes as well: the women in the audience might well sympathize with the royal characters’ plights, be it public shame, the dangers of love, the loss of a child, or the loss of a lover. The women (excepting Nun Alice in the abbey scene) disappear from the play after Constance’s lament, and the drama increasingly becomes a narrative about English national destiny: ‘King John’s career exemplifies the course that Elizabethans should pursue in 1591; his death and unfinished work become a cause for the spectators’ where Elizabeth is to complete England’s emancipation 22

  These lines might reference Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1583–1584). After Aeneas’s lengthy relation of Troy’s destruction, Dido exclaims, ‘I die with melting ruth; Aeneas, leave!’ (2.1.289). 23   The Complete Works, 425–52.

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from Rome.24 Rather than have empathy disappear completely from the play, the playwright merely changes his focus to a cause apparently closer to the audience’s heart: England as an exemplary Protestant state. What one is to gather about the dramatic techniques employed in the Queen’s Men history plays is that the troupe was well aware of central themes and visual tactics that could appeal to audiences of many classes and attitudes. The comic stock characters are key to the plays’ social and religious satire: This kind of interplay between the lowly and the exalted lies at the centre of all the plays of the Queen’s Men, and in its reliance upon earlier Tudor acting and visual traditions, it provides as lively an example of a continuing popular tradition as one can find in English drama.25

The Queen’s Men’s plays show us that sophistication and popular success can arise from the popular, the comic, and the use of stock characterization. As the recent Toronto performance of The Famous Victories demonstrated, the success of a play often relies on the conditions of performance beyond the dramatic text.26 ‘Tudor acting and [its] visual traditions’ may have been going out of date by the 1590s, but the Queen’s Men remained immensely popular in the provinces even after the rise of the London theatres. As Roslyn Knutson writes, Behind the assumption of repertory appeal is the belief that audiences were drawn by literary aspects of the plays, such as complexity of images, consistency of narrative, and psychologically plausible characters .... Consequently, old narratives of theater history are full of disparaging judgements about the repertories of companies not associated with Shakespeare.27

It seems that favouring the ‘complexity of images’ and ‘psychologically plausible characters’ necessitates a refutation of the popular tradition. And yet, as this paper has shown, there is a high degree of complexity in plays which appropriate popular traditions into the history genre. Older genres, such as the morality play, 24   John Sider, ‘Introduction to The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England’ (New York, 1979), lix. 25   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 125. 26   The Famous Victories of Henry V, dir. Peter Cockett, Tranzac Club, Toronto, ON, 26 October 2006. The club in which the performance took place had a bar in the playing space and was populated by friends of the actors and by well-wishing academics excited to be able to see a live production of a text that they had studied frequently. There seemed to be a reciprocal flow of energy between the players and the audience, making for heightened comic intensity in particular. 27   Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘The Repertory’, A New History of Early English Drama, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), 461.

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stock characterization, and clowning routines were valid and entertaining ways of communicating serious, even propagandistic, ideas to a general audience, while also permitting an important critical distance from historical narrative.28

28

  Helen Ostovich, email, 13 March 2007. I am indebted to her and to Andrew Griffin for their help in editing this article. I also wish to thank Paul Yachnin, Wes Folkerth, Jennifer Shea, and Myra Wright for their input and suggestions during the final revisions.

Chapter 13

Male Birth Fantasies and Maternal Monarchs: The Queen’s Men and The Troublesome Raigne of King John Tara L. Lyons

In The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean propose that in forming the Queen’s Men theatre troupe in 1583, the English crown understood the kind of cultural influence a group of travelling players might wield. In performing throughout the provinces of England in the mid-1580s until at least the mid-1590s, the Queen’s Men not only would have been celebrating the prestige of their patron but also may have been carrying out Queen Elizabeth’s political agendas. With radical Protestantism spurring divisions in the realm and Catholic sympathizers occupying regions in northern England, McMillin and MacLean argue that the Queen’s Men ‘would also give the impression of a watchful monarch, one whose “men” ranged over the land’. The crown’s goal was a unified, moderately protestant England loyal to its queen – and it seems that the Queen’s Men was created to help effect this very aim. Of the nine plays clearly attributed to the Queen’s Men, The Troublesome Raigne of King John was the first to be printed with ‘the Queenes Maiesties players’ attribution on its title pages in 1591. As a history play bringing to life the tragedy of proto-Protestant martyr King John, the anonymous Troublesome Raigne fits well into the repertoire of the Queen’s Men. The play might even be deemed ‘political propaganda’ as it used extensive pro-monarchial rhetoric and anti-papal   McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), 26–7.   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 28.    McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 88, 94. The Queen’s Men’s play Three Lords and Three Ladies of London was printed in 1590, but the title page does not name the theatre company. The Troublesome Raigne was published in two parts, with two separate title pages in 1591. The first part was titled, [T]roublesome raigne of Iohn King of England with the discouerie of King Richard Cordelions base sonne (vulgarly named, the bastard Fawconbridge): also the death of King Iohn at Swinstead Abbey, while the second part was titled, The second part of the troublesome raigne of King Iohn, conteining the death of Arthur Plantaginet, the landing of Lewes, and the poysning of King Iohn at Swinstead Abbey.  

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didacticism to construct the history of King John and ‘teach political lessons’. As McMillan and MacLean report, the Queen’s Men avidly performed history plays, and the company frequently performed works that promoted the Protestant ideals of ‘truth and plainness’. Thus, performing The Troublesome Raigne seemingly would have accomplished what McMillin and MacLean suggest the Queen’s Men was designed to achieve: to present a plain and truthful anti-Catholic history of England throughout the country’s extensive and sometimes dissenting territories, promoting not just moderate Protestantism but also obedience to Elizabeth and her centralised government. Like other Queen’s Men’s plays, The Troublesome Raigne is an anti-Catholic work. However, rather than solely advocating allegiance to an anti-Catholic sovereign like Elizabeth I, the play perhaps critiques the queen’s performance as monarch as well. The Troublesome Raigne stages debates about where sovereignty resides, debates that divide the nation of England in the play and are not plainly or truly resolved by the play’s conclusion. Characters who support the monarch’s absolute rights and powers argue that the king holds full authority over his subjects; through hereditary succession, God has chosen the king, and thus subjects must submit to his divine rule for the health of the nation. Other characters in the play reject King John and defend subjects’ rights and powers to assert political authority. Exercising the power to depose and elect their own kings, the subjects in The Troublesome Raigne claim the authority to protect England and its people. Other sixteenth-century narratives based on King John’s reign also depict the struggle for political power between John and his subjects. However, The Troublesome Raigne, performed by the Queen’s Men in the late 1580s and early 

  Virginia Mason Carr, The Drama as Propoganda; A Study of The Troublesome Raigne of King John (Salzburg, 1974), 41, 171.    McMillin and Maclean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 32–6.    Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven and London, 1996), explains that after the Reformation, the concept of the divine right of kings was often used to condemn disobedience, especially rebellion under religious motives. If the king was ordained by God, the people were politically and morally obligated to submit to the monarch’s rule (101). However, Burgess makes it clear that the divine right of kings also emphasized the monarch’s own subordination to God’s authority and natural law; in other words, the monarch had significant power under the divine right of kings, but this authority did not allow rulers to transcend the law. Thus, when John is accused of murdering Arthur, the nobles may be justified under the divine right of kings theory to label their morally-corrupt king a tyrant. Still, the freedoms granted divine kings in the play are under debate as was the theory and its implications in early modern England.    For more on the rights to elect or nominate English monarchs during the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, see Howard Nenner, The Right to Be King: The Succession to the Crown of England 1603–1714 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 44–7.    Other early modern texts that narrate King John’s struggle with his subjects include John Bale’s Kynge Johan, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, John Foxe’s Booke of Martyrs, and William Shakespeare’s King John.

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1590s, uniquely articulates the conflict through metaphors of male childbirth and maternal kingship. For instance, characters who support John’s monarchy through the divine right of kings fantasize about male birth, a process in which fathers birth their own sons without the troublesome presence of women and their wombs. The products of male parthenogenesis in the play, Phillip Fauconbridge and John’s son, Henry, maintain remarkable devotion to the English crown and strive to restore power to the English monarchy. Yet, other characters in the play, primarily nobles and barons, rally to protect England by deposing the monarch of the realm. These subjects exercise powers of election in choosing a male monarch who will be a figurative mother to the people. A ‘maternal’ male monarch, one who nurtures, nourishes, and serves the polity, becomes the ideal choice of ruler for subjects in The Troublesome Raigne. That the struggle over political authority in England is expressed in the rhetoric of birth and mothering in The Troublesome Raigne seems especially significant when we consider that much controversy during Elizabeth’s reign centred on the queen’s unreproductive body. In fact, issues about where sovereignty resided arose predominantly in Elizabethan England in response to the succession crisis. As Howard Nenner has explained, questions about who would rule after Elizabeth’s death resulted in part because England did not have a clear set of rules to determine succession, especially in the instance of a childless female monarch. Bloodlines did not automatically guarantee one the right and powers to the throne, even though many proposed that hereditary succession, like Elizabeth’s, was divinely ordained by God. Others argued that to ascend the throne, a monarch needed the consent of the people. Parliament in particular defended its right to choose a successor to the throne upon the death of the queen and asserted its authority to bestow the powers of the monarchy upon the newly-elected ruler. While The Troublesome Raigne undoubtedly urges loyalty to divinely ordained, nurturing rulers like Elizabeth I, the play also implies that a monarch’s reproduction of royal heirs is vital to her role as mother to the people. Moreover, the subjects’ desires to decentralize the powers of the monarchy are passionately defended in the play, leaving the final words of the performance to celebrate the power of the English people. Hence, I argue that these unresolved tensions over political authority expressed in the rhetoric of male birth and maternal kingship in The Troublesome Raigne of King John may both affirm and compromise the Queen’s Men’s ideological goals to 1) laud their patron and 2) unite English subjects in support of their unreproductive female monarch and her centralized government. Male Birth Fantasies, Hereditary Succession, and the Divine Right of Kings In early modern England, the divine right of kings theory was often used to support the succession of kings to the throne through heredity. As Nenner explains, ‘the 

 

Nenner, The Right to Be King, 45–6.

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doctrinally compelling argument in favour of heredity was that the closest in blood to a deceased monarch was a matter not of chance, but of divine choice’.10 Once the reigning monarch died, his heir immediately became the divinely-ordained king with God-granted power over his subjects.11 With divine blood, the heir was destined to be king, and nature’s laws would ensure the throne was his. On a more practical level, the proper workings of hereditary succession in the period also depended upon women’s fidelity to their husbands. An unfaithful wife could challenge the system of hereditary succession by producing an illegitimate child. In the case of a coy but adulterous queen, a bastard child could wrongfully ascend the throne and rule England. Anxieties over women’s infidelity in relation to hereditary succession haunt The Troublesome Raigne, but the play seemingly responds by removing women entirely from Part II and eliminating women from the process of reproduction altogether. The Troublesome Raigne sidesteps perceived threats to hereditary succession through male birth fantasies, as sons are imagined to be born solely from their fathers’ bodies. These sons then rise to defend English kings and vow to restore powers to the divine monarchy. Male birth fantasies seemingly represent desires for uncomplicated hereditary succession from father to son, and at the same time proclaim the necessity for subjects’ ultimate submission to a king whose powers are mandated by God. Women and specifically mothers who do appear for a short time in the play thus are depicted as impediments to a monarch’s claim to divine authority. For instance, Lady Constance, Arthur’s mother, challenges King John’s right to rule England and is accused of provoking war out of her own selfish desire to be queen (Part I, A3v). As his ‘mother’s sonne’, Arthur swears never to submit to John’s authority as king, and war between England and France ensues. Queen Elianor may be the only female character who remains steadfast to John’s hereditary right to rule. Elianor opens the play declaring to the barons and lords that through her womb, John is the rightful heir to the throne: ‘That from this wombe hath sprung a second hope, / A King that may in rule and vertue both / Succeede his brother in his Emperie’ (Part I, A3). However, this declaration of her son’s hereditary right does not prevent the nobles from rejecting John and electing a monarch more to their liking. A king born merely from a woman’s womb proves in the play to be easily deposed. It is not a coincidence then that when King John metaphorically births his son Henry III into the play, Henry’s mother is missing. In fact, she is not even mentioned in The Troublesome Raigne. Ultimately, the play implies that mothers threaten a king’s authority to demand obedience from his subjects and must be removed if the king is to rule the kingdom and unify the realm. Male birth fantasies provide the means for this to occur, as sons metaphorically sprung from their fathers’ bodies devote their lives to restoring faith in hereditary succession and the monarch’s divine right over his subjects. The Troublesome Raigne stages Philip Fauconbridge’s fantasy of birth from the figurative body of 10

  Nenner, The Right to Be King, 46.   Nenner, The Right to Be King, 33.

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his father, Richard the Lionheart. Philip is first introduced in the play as ‘heire to Robert Fauconbridge’ (Part I, A4v); however, by the end of the scene, Philip is publicly embraced as the ‘Sonne unto a King’ (Part I, B2v), even though his mother has publicly denied his royal lineage. When questioned about his own heredity, Philip enters into a hallucinatory ‘traunce’ (Part I, B2v) and proclaims: Philippus atauis adite Regibus. What saist thou Philip, sprung of auncient Kings? Quo me rapit tempestas? What winde of honour blowes this furie forth? Or whence proceed these fumes of Maiestie? Me thinkes I heare a hollow Eccho sound, That Philip is the Sonne unto a King: The whistling leaues upon the trembling trees, Whistle in consort I am Richards Sonne: The bubling murmur of the waters fall, Records Philippus Regius filius: Birds in their flight make musicke with their wings, Filling the ayre with glorie of my birth: Birds, bubbles, leaues, and mountaines, Eccho, all Ring in mine eares, that I am Richards Sonne. (Part I, B2v)

In this extraordinary nativity scene with declarations of paternity from voices in Latin, whistling trees, falling waters, and singing birds, Philip is divinely reborn, this time as a Plantagenet and without a biological mother who may be concealing her son’s heredity. While Lady Fauconbridge’s role in this birth is completely erased, the rhetoric of a birthing body is not. For example, the tempest’s fury and winds in Phillip’s vision hearken back to the literal ‘winds’ emitted from the womb in birth. As Jacques Gillemeau describes in his gynecological treatise, ‘Sometime also the wind is shut vp within the womb for I haue knovven some women, that haue voided them with such a sound, and noise, as though it had bene, by the fundament’.12 Not only wind, but water too, is recalled in Phillip’s trance as he hears the water ‘fall’. In his Directory for Midwives, Culpeper similarly describes the rushing of water in labour as a ‘fall’, one that like that in the play announces a ‘birth’: ‘In the time of Travail (the birth approching) both these skins, the Amnios and Alantois are broken by the vement stirring of the Child, to that these Excrements fall down to the Neck of the Womb; and this is that Midwives call the Water, and when they see that 12   Jacques Gillemeau. Child-birth or, The happy deliuerie of women (London, 1612), 47; Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (London, 1651), 110. Storms also relate to the maternal body as Adelman notes in her reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear; storms, she argues, come to ‘function as the sign of the female place of origin’. See Janet Adelman. Suffocating Mothers (New York, 1992), 110.

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come away, then they say to them that stand by, Now the Birth is near.’13 Within the play, the blowing of these winds, falling of waters, and trembling of the earth, natural phenomena found in varying forms in the panting, falling, and straining in the birthing room, overcome Philip as he is born anew as a king’s son. Yet, as much as Philip’s ‘birth’ is rhetorically similar to descriptions of gynecological birth, Philip’s revelation seems to represent a fantasy for males in early modern culture: a paternity test that is not dependent on the mother or her windy womb. But this trance is not merely a fantasy of legitimizing one’s paternity. Philip’s hallucination positions him as ‘sprung’ solely from King Richard, a male birth, with no physical woman or female body involved to invalidate his claim to royal blood. Parthenogenesis in this example permits Philip’s initiation into the royal dynasty and incites him to become protector of it. Almost immediately after his trance, Philip is knighted a Plantagenet by King John, joins the king in battle against Arthur’s claim to the English throne, and vows to revenge his father’s death. He declares, ‘Graunt heavens that Philip once may shew himself / Worthie the honour of Plantaginet, / Or basest glorie of a Bastards name’ (Part I, B3). As a heroic man of royal blood and staunchest supporter of John’s rule over England, Philip is eager to defend the monarchy, and it is his male birth fantasy that transforms him into a monarch’s dream: a knight who protects the king against rebelling subjects. With his paternity confirmed by divine forces, Phillip the Bastard confronts the dissenting nobles who gather at St Edmond’s Shrine to discuss deposing John and electing Lewes, the Dauphin of France, as their king. In this scene, the nobles first assume that the Bastard’s Plantagenet blood will secure his fealty to England – not to King John. But Philip considers their actions treasonous and as a newlyknighted Plantagenet, he fervently defends John’s divine right: I say tis shame, and worthy all reproofe, To wrest such pettie wrongs in tearmes of right, Against a King annoynted by the Lord. ...................................... Yet subjects may not take in hand revenge, And rob the heauens of their proper power, Where sitteth he to whome revenge belongs. (Part II, C1v–C2)

Here, Philip chastises the nobles for unjustly dispossessing John of the throne. Furthermore, he refutes the nobles’ call to protect themselves and their land from John’s ‘tyrrany’, for subjects are never in a position to judge the actions of their monarch. ‘Annoynted by the Lord’, John must answer only to God, not to his barons and lords. Whether or not the nobles believe John is guilty of ‘pettie wrongs’, Philip argues that the people of England have no authority to accuse or punish the king; just as John is subject to the Lord’s authority, they are subject to 13

 

Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, 169.

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John’s.14 Through Philip, the play advocates the monarch’s divine power over his subjects, and his male birth from the loins of King Richard promotes the notion that only by eliding the potentially unchaste womb of a mother can heirs realize their hereditary right. The Troublesome Raigne offers further support for the divine right of kings through metaphors of male birth. In the last scene of the play, John imagines birthing sons who will protect the divine right of kings and subsequently maintain the tradition of hereditary succession in England. As he dies from the monk’s poison, John offers what the play here implies England truly needs: strong, male heirs. Consequently, John rhetorically transforms his deathbed into a birthing chair so that he may deliver England its future hope. Struggling to stand, John asks, ‘Phillip a chayre ... My leggs disdaine the carriage of a King’ (Part II, E2v). Like a birthing mother following the directions set out in midwifery manuals, John feels ‘o payne!’ and sets himself down to bear the oncoming pangs weakening his body.15 Complaining of the ‘payne’ and ‘inwarde heate’ in his bowels, which Philip, like a kind midwife, instructs him to ‘beare ... with kingly fortitude’ (Part II, E2v), John predicts, From out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome, And with his feete treads downe the Strumpets pride, That sits upon the chaire of Babylon. (Part II, E3)

  The Homilie Against Disobedience and Wylfull Rebellion (London, 1570) likewise reiterates the divine right of monarchs: ‘it is most euident, that kinges, Queenes, and other princes (for he speaketh of aucthoritie and power be it in men or women) are ordained of God, are to be obeyed and honoured of their subiects; that such subjectes as are disobedient or rebellious agaynst theyr princes, disobey God, and procure theyr owne damnation: that the gouernment of princes is a great blessing of God geven for the commonwealth, specially of the good and godly’ (A3v). Moreover, The Homilie Against Disobedience and Wylfull Rebellion makes reference to the historical rebellion against King John to urge late sixteenth century readers to obey their monarch as they obey God: ‘The Byshop of Rome ... proceedyng euen by the same ways and meanes, and like wise cursing kyng John, and discharging his subiectes of their othe of fidelitie unto their soveraigne lorde. Nowe had Englishmen at that tyme knowen their duetie to their prince set foorth in Gods worde, would a great manye of the nobles, and other Englishmen, naturall subjects ... haue rebelled against their soueraigne Lorde the king? Woulde Englishe subiectes haue taken part against the king of Englande ... ?’ (I2v–I3). 15   In a section titled, ‘What must bee obserued, when the woman feeles her selfe, neare her time’, Gillemeau states, ‘As soone as she feeles her selfe stirred and prouoked with throwes and paines, which are vsuall in this case, it were good for her to walke vp and down the chamber, and then lay her selfe down warm in her bed: ... It is very certain, that all women are not deliuered after one fashion: for some are deliuered in their bed; others sitting in a chaire ... ’. (Child-Birth, 86–8). 14

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Just as his mother claimed to do in the very first lines of the play when she used the same terminology to describe John’s own birth, ‘That from this wombe hath sprung a second hope’ (Part I, A3), John’s heirs will bring triumph to the English monarchy and guarantee success for Protestantism in England. Again, John’s hope for England resides entirely with the strength of the monarchy, and specifically, a monarchy based upon divine hereditary succession, not election. The fantasy of a ‘Kingly braunch’ with its outstretched arms links the defeat of Catholicism to the Plantagenet genealogical chart or family tree. Thus, The Troublesome Raigne suggests that male born heirs are the most likely source to effect the defeat of the whore of Babylon and protect the divine right of England’s kings against Rome’s powers. John’s imagined reproductive feat also aims to secure future monarchs’ powers over English subjects. Seeing that John is nearly at his end, the faithful Philip assesses his patient’s progress: ‘See how he strives for life, unhappy Lord, / Whose bowels are devided in themselves’ (Part II, E3).16 Like a woman in childbirth whose belly is ‘rent and torne to pieces’, the king’s abdomen metaphorically divides. As if truly sprung from his father’s ‘breathles trunke’ (Part II, E4) or torso, John’s son, Henry III, immediately appears at his father’s side, even though he had not played a part or even been mentioned previously in the play. Henry’s ‘arrival’ coincides with the return of the nobles, begging John for pardon and vowing devotion to the English Crown. Hence, through the fantasy of male birth and the elimination of women, monarchic power is restored as the nobles bow to the king’s authority, and the theatrically male-born Henry III immediately becomes the new King of England. Just as in Philip’s birth, John’s reproductive labour effects the restoration of monarchic authority in the play and produces men who reject subjects’ desire for authority over the country and the king. As if finally returning kings to their rightful place of divine honour, the play expresses hope for the country through the preservation of the monarch’s authority: ‘Thus Englands peace begins with Henryes Raigne, / And bloody warres are closde with happie league’ (Part II, F1). The Troublesome Raigne here suggests that only when the people are united under the rule of the monarch born without doubt from his father’s bloodlines can peace ensue, and it is those males miraculously issued from kingly wombs who will successfully protect a monarch’s divine right. John’s divided bowels can now be ‘closde’ as England is no longer a divided country, and a Plantagenet monarch has been born from John’s loins to unify the people in ‘happie league’ under Henry’s rule.

16   Gillemeau also describes labour as the pain of the abdomen dividing: ‘as if those parts, and their belly were rent and torne to pieces’ (Child-Birth, 50).

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Maternal Monarchs and Subjects’ Demands for Authority The final moments of The Troublesome Raigne, however, are not this simple. Even though the nobles and the people of England have vowed their loyalty to John and relinquished their authority by kneeling to Henry III, the play’s concluding lines place authority not into the hands of any centralized, divine monarchic government, but instead with the people. The Bastard, the spokesman throughout the play for divine kingship, surprisingly proclaims, ‘If Englands Peeres and people ioyne in one, / Nor Pope, nor Fraunce, nor Spaine can doo them wrong’ (Part II, F1). The play’s final words erase the monarch’s role in bringing peace, for it is the unification of the lords and the commons that will lead England to its supremacy as a realm. Just as John prophesied that strong kings will reclaim their power in England, here The Troublesome Raigne implicitly threatens those same future monarchs; ultimately, the people of England will effectively protect the country through their own unified authority. By the end of the play, divine right by hereditary succession proves to be a less than compelling argument for the people of England in The Troublesome Raigne. After Philip eloquently argues for John’s divine right to rule, the nobles ignore the Plantagenet knight’s claims and still depose John. In rejecting the divine right of kings, subjects refuse to model their relationship to the king on their assumed relationship to God. Instead, they propose another paradigm based upon a more tangible relationship, that between a mother and her children. Subjects in The Troublesome Raigne desire a maternal monarch, one who responds to the needs of his people and negotiates power with his subjects, even so much as to recognize the subjects’ ability to choose their own leaders for the betterment of England. While hereditary succession of kings in The Troublesome Raigne seemingly calls for the complete removal of mothers from reproduction, desires for mothering monarchs in the play may indicate nostalgia for the ‘maternal’ traits of nurture, care, and sacrifice that are absent throughout much of the play. Indeed, John’s antimaternal actions incite the nobles to rebel against him and seek a more nurturing ruler. The play seems to advocate the necessity of a motherly but male king who must negotiate power with his subjects if England is to survive as a nation. While John avers that ‘The multitude (a beast of many heads) / Doo wish confusion to their Soveraigne’ (Part II, A4v), The Troublesome Raigne goes to lengths to defend subjects’ right to rebel against John. What John calls ‘a beast of many heads’ is far from being a discontented mob. In fact, in civilized councils, the nobles present valid and sympathetic reasons for their dissent. Even the ‘simple people’ use their noblemen to advocate for them in front of the king rather than immediately taking up arms. Early in the play, the peers report to John that the ‘commons’ and the ‘simple people’ of England wish Arthur to be freed from prison, for the young prince has committed no crime. John swears to release Arthur and acquiesce to his subjects’ requests: ‘Dimisse your counsell, sway my state, / Let John doo nothing, but by your consents’ (Part I, G2v). John soon after remits his promise, however, and argues for his absolute right to rule: ‘my will is

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law enough’ (Part I, G3v). The nobles disagree and when they find Arthur’s dead body, they accuse John of murder and refuse to submit to his authority. Arthur’s death then is the final provocation for the people of England to exercise power over their monarch. Not coincidentally, John’s failure to appease his people derives from the ultimate anti-maternal act: commanding a child’s torture. Rather than protecting his deceased brother’s child and comforting the widowed Constance, John avers, ‘The brat shall dye, that terrifies me thus’ (Part I, G3v). Arthur’s twenty-six line soliloquy lamenting his confinement and desperately crying for his mother’s comfort as he dies alone, vividly demonstrates John’s barbarity and further justifies the nobles’ rebellion against their murdering king in the play. It seems that John’s refusal to protect the children of England provokes their revolt, and thus, the play begins to reconceive the ideal relationship between the monarch and his subjects. The people of England in the play demand to be protected, but also respected as agents who wield political powers and rights over the country and even their king. We see this most clearly in the play’s defence of the subjects’ right to resist their monarch and appoint an appropriate ruler. Lord Essex argues that John’s choice to assert his will over that of his council violated the balance of power presumed to exist between a king and his subjects. Subordination to John is described as ‘The seruile yoke that payned us with toyle’ (Part II, B4v), rather than glorified service to a divine king. The lords and barons ultimately deny that God could approve of John’s actions and believe they must take up arms against the king, for ‘Tis Gods decree to wreak us of these harmes’ (Part II, A3v). In addition to the Pope’s command to forfeit loyalties to John, the nobles convene their council and conclude ‘to invest him [Lewes] as we may devise, / King of our Countrey in the tyrants stead’ (Part II, C1v). Lewes’s election is warranted by the peoples’ desire to protect their country and their land. As Salisbury states, England is ‘our’ country and the subjects will choose a leader ‘as we may devise’. Rejecting John’s right by succession and divine right as king, much of the country agrees with the nobles’ decision. Philip warns John of the ensuing danger: ‘The Nobles, Commons, Clergie, all Estates,/ ... / Thinks long to see their new elected King’ (Part II, B1v). The Troublesome Raigne presents a unified force of English subjects from all classes and ranks voicing their desire for a ‘new elected’ ruler of England. Lewes of France initially is presented in the play as a much better ruler than John, and his self-presentation as a mothering king persuades the nobles to vow allegiance to him. The play introduces Lewes as a kind king, a maternal monarch, or one who nurtures but also acknowledges the authority of the English subjects. Lewes claims that he ‘is in person come at your commaunds ... in lieu of former grief’ (Part II, C2v). The French prince promises the nobles ‘faithfull love’ and again swears ‘Love to you all, and Princely recompence / To guerdon your good wills unto the full’ (Part II, C3v). Lord Salisbury likens the French Dauphin to a motherly figure who will apply ‘the balme that closeth up our wounds’ and act as

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‘The soveraigne medicine for our quick recure’ (Part II, C3). Rather than merely a doctor who heals his patients and departs, Lewes swears to ‘live but to requite you all’ (Part II, C3). While John has incited civil war by abusing his kingly power, his subjects believe Lewes will heal the divisions caused by John’s lack of motherly succor; thus, they choose Lewes as their ruler. The exercise of the powers of election in The Troublesome Raigne clearly illustrates subjects’ desires for a voice in how the monarch governs the country. In the play, the subjects’ choice of king depends less on heredity or divine ordination, and relies instead on the motherly demeanor of a ruler. The nobles choose a king who will provide service to the people and foster unity. Unlike the childmurdering John who acts on his own accord, Lewes claims he will respect the lives and authority of his subjects. Election of a maternal king, or any sort of king for that matter, affirms the powers and rights of the people; if a monarch fails in his maternal performance, his crown may be removed by the same hands that granted it. The subjects’ deposition of John and election of Lewes in the play strongly support subjects’ desires to exercise their own political authority to improve the English nation. Lewes, however, turns out to be a fraudulent mother, and the nobles rebel against him just as they rejected John when he too failed to perform his maternal role. In the end, the nobles return to John, but more out of a devotion to England than any allegiance to their monarch’s divine rule. When Meloun confesses that Lewes plans to murder the English nobility, he advises the Englishmen: Tis time to flie, submit your selves to John, ................................... Back warmen, back, imbowell not the clime, Your seate, your nurse, your birthdays breathing place, That bred you, beares you, brought you up in armes. Ah! Be not so ingrate to digge your Mothers grave. (Part II, D2–D2v)

Likening rebellion against John to matricide, Meloun tries to convince the nobles to return their loyalties to the king, but not because of the king’s divine right. Instead, Meloun argues that subjects must sacrifice their own authority to save mother England from abuse. If they continue to support Lewes, they are metaphorically ripping apart their own mothers’ wombs. The better choice for England at this point in the play is to return to John. Hence, Meloun uses the subjects’ devotion to their country to justify submission to a monarch. Yet The Troublesome Raigne also shows that that the nobles still have a choice of whether to submit to John. Ultimately, national affiliation helps them decide. As Pembroke reasons, ‘lets rather kneele to him [John], / Than to the French that would confound us all’ (Part II, D2v). Fittingly, when the nobles return, John is finally ready to take on the role of maternal monarch for his subjects. After lamenting over his disgraceful performance as king, John does acknowledge that his actions have caused instability in the

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nation and made it vulnerable to attack from the outside and within. Therefore, John imagines himself as a maternal monarch in hopes of saving the country. Taking on the role of nurse and caregiver as the nobles had hoped Lewes might, John recognizes that his hand ‘must give the salve / To cure the hurt, els quite incurable’ (Part II, B3). To redeem England, the king reinvents himself as the kindest mother to his people. He declares, Though John be faultie, yet let subjects beare, He will amend and right the peoples wrongs. A Mother though she were unnaturall, Is better than the kindest Stepdame is: Let never Englishman trust forraine rule. (Part II, B2v)

While foreign rulers can only be stepmothers to the English people, John positions himself as the only monarch who can ‘amend’ the nation by submitting to Rome. As their ‘Mother’, even if a cruel one, John will forfeit his crown to Cardinal Pandulph so that England may be saved from French rule. John finally puts his people and country first. Willing to relinquish his crown and powers, John’s sacrifice saves his country from immediate slaughter and from being conquered. John’s appropriation of maternal kingship might be seen then as a victory for the people of England who have succeeded in having their needs and powers recognized by their monarch. While John still takes the leading role in saving the nation at this point in the play, maternal monarchy seemingly vests significant power with the subjects in that the king must accept responsibility over their wellbeing, even when their safety depends on his own loss of power. That The Troublesome Raigne transforms its proud divine monarch into a nurturing, maternal one ready to protect England indicates the play’s support of the subjects’ claim to political authority.17 Conflicting Ideologies and The Queen’s Men’s Goals We might conclude then that The Troublesome Raigne fails to resolve the struggle for political authority between the monarchy and English subjects. The play celebrates both divine monarchs and nurturing kings, succession by heredity and succession by election, the king’s divine power to birth England its future hope and the people’s strength in protecting their country. At the same time, the play refuses to criticize only one party in the conflict. Both divine right of kings and the subjects’ revolts receive their share of repudiation. What then does this ambiguity 17   Here, I do not mean to imply that maternal monarchs are weak or that they passively bow to their peoples’ demands out of fear or cowardice. On the contrary, the people prefer maternal monarchs because of their ability to both rule the nation and listen to their subjects. Anti-maternal monarchs in the play fail to protect the country. In fact, John’s ego and self-serving nature lead England into civil war.

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suggest about the play’s ideological message? How would The Troublesome Raigne help the Queen’s Men achieve their goals of promoting obedience under Queen Elizabeth’s rule? Perhaps the Queen’s Men were celebrating Elizabeth’s ability to negotiate her divine power with her subjects’ demands for authority, a conflict that kings in The Troublesome Raigne have difficulty resolving. Elizabeth could be both divine ruler and maternal monarch in the same day, even in the same speech. We see this in her addresses to Parliament, especially when succession questions initiated debates over where sovereignty resided. In response to her Parliaments’ demands that she marry and give England an heir, the queen chastised her presumptuous subjects in the same sentence in which she vowed her love: ‘doe not upbraid me with miserable lacke of children: for everyone of you, and as many as are Englishmen, are children, and kinsmen to me; of whom if God deprive me not. ... I cannot without injury be accounted Barren’.18 Frequently in speeches to her subjects, Elizabeth threatened her people with her divine right: ‘who is so simple that doubts whether a prince that is head of all the body may not command the feet not to stray when they would slip? God forbid that your liberty should make my bondage.’19 Yet, Elizabeth also reassured her subjects with reminders that ‘There will never queen sit in my seat with more zeal to my country, care to my subjects, and that will sooner with willingness venture her life for your good and safety, than myself.’20 In fact, Elizabeth made a proposal to her people, almost syntactically identical to King John’s promise to be a mother to his people in The Troublesome Raigne: ‘I assure you all, that thoughe, after my death, you may have many stepdames yet shall you never [have] a more naturall mother than I meane to be unto you all.’21 Figuring herself as the ‘naturall mother’ to her people as opposed to the ‘unnatural’ mother (though better than a Stepdame) that John considered himself, Elizabeth positions her maternal body as central to the English monarchy. No one, including her own subjects, could successfully take that role from her, even in death.22 The same rhetoric that Elizabeth appropriated to both secure her powers over her subjects and appease their need for a motherly monarch also proved useful for Parliament in demanding more authority over succession. As Paul Wentworth, a member of the House of Commons, is reported to have said, if Elizabeth did 18

  Carole Levin, ‘The Heart and Stomach of a King’: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994), 87. 19   Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (eds), Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago, 2000), 105. 20   Marcus, Mueller, and Rose, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, 339. 21   Levin, ‘The Heart and Stomach of a King’, 195. 22   In The Making of Jacobean Culture (Cambridge, 1997), Curtis Perry’s work on James as ‘nourish father’ strongly supports the notion that the ideal king should incorporate maternality into his ruling image, but Perry argues that Elizabeth’s representation as mother differs from that of James in the kind of material wealth James was known for bestowing on his chosen subjects (124).

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not name an heir to the throne, ‘she may be reckoned of, not as a Nurse, not as a Mother of Countrye, but as a Step-mother, nay as a Parricide of her Countrey, which had rather that England, which now breathed with her Breath, should expire together with her than survive her’.23 Here, Wentworth predicts that Elizabeth will be stripped of her title as ‘Mother’ and labeled a murderess if she fails to secure her children a future by naming a successor. Paul Wentworth’s younger brother Peter Wentworth continued the attack on Elizabeth’s refusal to name an heir and was even imprisoned in the Tower of London for asserting Parliament’s rights in the succession crisis. While in prison, Peter Wentworth wrote A Pithie Exhortation to her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, which was printed in 1598. In this text, Wentworth frequently uses Elizabeth’s role as mother to urge her to name an heir to the throne with Parliament’s consent: ‘And seeing God hath ordained you our nursing mother, we your children cry upon you, & most earnestly beseech you, that by neglecting this motion, you unnaturalie leave us not unto the evident spoile of the mercilesse bloodie sword.’24 Here Elizabeth’s maternal role comes under attack, for while she can foster her country, her refusal to birth heirs or name an heir for the stability of the English nation appears to some as a sign of child abuse. The ideological conflicts over a monarch’s divine rule and subjects’ political authority in The Troublesome Raigne leave us with few easy answers about how the play fits into the Queen’s Men’s repertoire. By the time the Queen’s Men performed The Troublesome Raigne, hopes of Elizabeth birthing heirs like John to ‘treade down the Strumpet’s pride’ were over, and a successor was still in question. Through a failure to give birth to a child, Elizabeth may have failed to be the maternal monarch her country needed her to be. That so much emphasis on mothering and birth pervades the play suggests the potential for a critique of Elizabeth’s unreproductive body. Neither male birth nor maternal monarch metaphors in The Troublesome simply advocate praise for Elizabeth’s virgin rule. Through male birth fantasies, The Troublesome Raigne suggests that women are merely obstacles in maintaining hereditary succession and divine right, as some were bound to consider Elizabeth in her refusal to continue the Tudor line. Additionally, the play suggests through Philip and John that only male reproductive monarchs will secure the strength of England, as John seemingly does in giving birth to heirs who will trample Rome. The subjects of England also claim the power to secure England’s strength as a country in the final lines of the play. Even the use of maternal rhetoric in the play turns out to be too complex to constitute a clear message of celebration for Elizabeth’s rule. More complications arise when we consider the wide range of audiences and the conflicting politics of peoples throughout the provinces of England where the Queen’s Men were recorded to have performed the play. Even though the Queen’s Men may have been formed to perpetuate the success of the monarchial 23

  Levin, ‘The Heart and Stomach of a King’, 87.   Peter Wentworth Esquire. A pithie exhortation to her Maiestie (Edinburgh, 1598), 8.

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government of Elizabeth, the plays they performed as a company of common men may have undermined the Crown’s very goals in some locales, affirmed them for audiences in other parts of the country, and most likely, accomplished both tasks for most audiences in England. Of course, we know that Elizabeth maintained her rule over England until she performed her own parthenogenetic birth on her deathbed in producing James VI of Scotland as successor to the English throne. Still, the expressions of subjects’ desires for power over monarchs and pressures for monarchial reform cannot be ignored in a play produced by a troupe aiming to secure allegiance to the Crowne. And it seems worth considering whether the seeds of subjects’ discontent disseminated by the touring company in plays like The Troublesome Raigne of King John merely needed time to gestate; instead of developing a unified protestant country under the monarchy, the Queen’s Men may (even if unintentionally) have been aiding England as it was birthing itself as a nation in opposition to monarchial rule.25 While no evidence suggests that the Queen’s Men were consciously subverting the Crown, their performance of The Troublesome Raigne of King John still exposes the problems of relying on theatrical representations to perform ideological work.

25   Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood (Chicago, 1992) charts the gradual formation of English people’s identification with the nation over identification with the monarch. We might see plays like The Troublesome Raigne aiding this formation. The play defends the peoples’ demands for power and presents the land of England as a strong base of identification. Perhaps The Troublesome Raigne added fuel to a fire that would incite the emergence of English nationhood in opposition to monarchial rule.

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Part 4 From script TO STAGE

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Chapter 14

When is the Jig Up – and What is it Up To? William N. West



A hall, a hall, Roome for the Spheres, the Orbes celestiall Will daunce Kemps Iigge. John Marston, ‘Humours’, Satire X, The Scourge of Villainy (1598) But oh purgation! yon rotten-throated slaves Engarlanded with coney-catching knaues, Whores, Bedles, bawdes, and Sergeants filthily Chaunt Kemps Iigge, or the Burgonians tragedy. Everard Guilpin, Satire V, Skialetheia, or a Shadow of Truth (1598)

The jig that concluded performances in the Elizabethan theatres remains a particularly lamented gap in our knowledge of early performance. Jigging and even particular jigs are frequently mentioned in plays and other documents of the period, well into the seventeenth century, but relatively few texts of jigs survive. Like ballads or similar texts, the jigs that are extant say relatively little about how they were performed. Although a few scholars have worked diligently to recover    I am grateful to Roger Clegg, Susan Dibble, and Susan Manning for their willingness to share ideas about how to talk about this genre of performance. In addition, Roger Clegg generously shared some of his research in advance of publication. Jeremy Lopez; Helen Ostovich; an anonymous reader who commented on this paper; and Emily Winerock, whose knowledge of Elizabethan dance challenged me to rethink what claims I could make for the jig were supportive and critical, as appropriate. I also owe thanks to my indispensable research assistant Gina di Salvo. A note on my title: although the phrase ‘the jig is up’ appears in neither Morris Palmer Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950) nor R.W. Dent’s Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley, 1981), and is cited as American slang by the OED with a first date of 1777, it is in fact Caroline at least. In Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass (London, 1632; performed 1629), as the pitiless Squelch turns the lass out of his house, he declares, ‘Now the gigs up’ (3.2.23; G1). Plays and other early works are cited from Early English Books Online (EEBO).    Peter Thomson, ‘The Missing Jig’, in On Actors and Acting (Exeter, 2000), 26–38, observes this gap; four years later, Peter Holland reiterates it in ‘Theatre without Drama: Reading REED’, in Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (Houndmill, 2004), 43–67, 58.

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what they can, the topic still awaits a complete treatment. Surviving texts suggest that jigs usually were dances in dialogue form, with characters alternating lines or verses and presumably steps as well. Since they were dances first and foremost, jig texts omit a great deal of what their audiences would have seen and heard, and the texts we have are probably deceptively brief. Although the modern critical tendency has been to treat jigs as a kind of performative lagniappe to the main event of the play, there is some evidence that they were as substantial (in their way) as plays. As David Wiles recommends, it is important to take the stage jig in the context in which it was performed rather than as a kind of ‘excrescence tacked on’ for the groundlings. Even if Elizabethan plays were fragmented into physical parts, letters, songs, prologues and so on, the event of playgoing must have been experienced, as Wiles says, holistically; the jig was part of a day at the theatre, as was crossing the water or buying nuts and bottle-ale. Judging only from the frequency of references to them, jigs must have seemed nearly as important as the play to at least some of their early audiences – indeed in some ways they were an equal and balancing element to the more heavily verbal performances that were better recorded by a script and that we read now. In Greene’s (and maybe the Queen’s Men’s) The Scottish History of James IV (c. 1590), the main action of the play is repeatedly referred to as a ‘jig’. In Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), Thomas Nashe derisively compares the short length of the play to a popular jig: ‘Ile be sworne, the Iigge of Rowlands God-sonne is a Gyant in comparison of it’ (B2). In A Challenge for Beauty (1636), Thomas Heywood 

  Useful sources include Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago, 1929), which includes many of the surviving jig texts; John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–1750 (Toronto, 1999); David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge, 1987); and Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O Factor (Chicago, 1999), pp. 133–67. Roger Clegg recently completed a dissertation on jigs at the University of Exeter, and he and Peter Thomson are currently working on a book-length investigation of the jig.    Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 69n.44, notes that when a jig called Shanks Ordinary was registered in 1624, the Master of Revels charged his full £1 fee for allowing it. Was this Herbert’s opportunism or a fair assessment of value? If the latter, what exactly was being valued? On 12 December 1597, Henslowe’s diary records that he paid 6s. 8d. for two jigs. In comparison, 10 days later he paid Anthony Munday and (Michael?) Drayton £3 for a play book; a week before he had paid Ben Jonson 20 s. for the ‘plotte’ of an unfinished play. See R.A. Foakes, (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary (2nd edition, Cambridge, 2002), 84; this information suggests that Henslowe’s market saw less work or less value or both in jigs than in plays.    Performance studies have pursued the importance of various contexts in which a play or other enactment takes place; see, for instance, Richard Schechner, ‘Towards a Poetics of Performance’, Essays on Performance Theory, 1970–76 (New York, 1977): 108–39.    The Scottish History of James the Fourth, 1598, ed. A.E.H. Swaen (Oxford, 1921). Cf., Ind.82, 89; First Dumb Show.1, 16, Third Dumb Show.8, Act 5.Chorus (three times).

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writes of jigs as different from plays in length rather than in kind: ‘In Italy and France, even in these dayes,/ Compar’d with ours, are rather jiggs than Playes’ (A3). Even the jigs that took place at the end of another performance may have lasted as long as an hour. If this is neither modern misinterpretation nor Elizabethan exaggeration, then much of the jig must have been given to vigorous, unscripted, unproscribed dancing. Even the most scrupulous study of texts and scores, then, may leave much of the jig in the dark. Here I want to take a different approach and look at how in its day the jig was discussed. Although I will argue that in many ways talk was the least important element of the Elizabethan stage jig, I want to consider how Elizabethans talked about jigs – not the word’s etymology but how it appears in various contexts and metaphors. When and how are jigs talked about? What was conveyed by talking about them? To understand these things helps give us a sense of what jig meant in the years when it was practiced by the Queen’s Men and long after, when their practices still remained a warm memory. In light of available evidence, this kind of research necessarily shades into more or less convincing speculation. Trying to say more about what happened in the jig, then, quickly runs into all the problems of method associated with early performance. I hope this paper stands on the more convincing end of the continuum. The stage jig seems to have been the usual conclusion to performances in Elizabethan playhouses and many Jacobean and Caroline ones as well. In 1592 on the last page of Pierce Penilesse Thomas Nashe twitted his inarticulate opponents for being ‘Where like the queint Comaedians of our time,/ That when their Play is doone do fal to ryme’, and in 1600 in Every Man Out of his Humour Jonson could still jokingly refer to a custom as ‘a thing studied, and rehearst as ordinarily ... as a jigge after a Play’ (F3v). Richard Tarlton and William Kempe were remembered literally for generations as the acknowledged masters of the jig, despite the fact that their ways of ending a show seem to have been distinctly different. Tarlton was particularly known for extemporaneous verses on ‘Theames’ that were posed to him from the audience.10 Kemp was known for his dancing, and several jigs 

  This suggestion may be based on a very literal reading of the subtitle of Tarlton’s Newes Out Of Purgatorie (1590) (‘Onely such a iest as his Iigge, fit for Gentlemen to laugh at an houre, &c.’); there are other reasons (discussed below) to think that the short length of the remaining texts is deceptive.    Under the aegis of Alexander Leggatt’s observation that ‘There is such a thing as having too much information. It creates a misplaced confidence that can actually block our understanding ...’; see ‘Richard Burbage: A Dangerous Actor’, in Jane Milling and Martin Banham (eds), Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performance (Exeter, 2004), 8–20.    For this brief overview, I rely heavily on Baskervill, Wiles, and Smith (see n.3 above). 10   For Tarlton’s career, see Thornton S. Graves, ‘Some Allusions to Tarlton’, Modern Philology, 18 (1921): 493–6; Peter Thomson, ‘The True Physiognomy of a Man: Richard Tarlton and His Legend’, Parergon, 14 (1997): 29–50; for his afterlife, see Alexandra Halasz, ‘“So beloved that men use his picture for their signs”: Richard Tarlton and the Uses of Sixteenth-Century Celebrity’, Shakespeare Studies, 23 (1995): 19–38.

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were explicitly credited to him as a composer or bore his name.11 Especially after 1600 when theatre audiences were becoming more stratified, jigs were associated with down-market tastes (usually by those whose tastes aspired to be elite or avant garde, like Jonson and his followers); the readiest example is the academic dramatist Hamlet, who sneers that Polonius is ‘for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps’ (Hamlet, 2.2.503–4). Most often, of course, the jig as a kind of dance is spoken of in the context of other dances, whether particular forms like morrises or hornpipes, or more general motions like gambols, gests, or antics. Sometimes the jig conveniently combines this more literal likeness with Hamlet’s association of the jig with bawdry in a particularly sexual dance, as in Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1621): Plain men dance the Measures, the Sinquapace, the Gay: Cuckolds dance the Horn-pipe; and Farmers dance the Hay: Your Soldiers dance the Round, and Maidens that grow big: You Drunkards, the Canaries; you Whore and Baud, the Jigg. (p. 154)

As Hamlet and Middleton both suggest, jigs, and the enjoyment of them, were regularly linked to sexuality, to the point that the word is also slang for intercourse. For instance, in Anthony Rudd and Thomas Richards’s moral play Misogonus (1577), Misogonus and Oenophilus predict the birth of a child as the result of ‘but one scottish gigge’ with a woman (2.2.32).12 The jigs Guilpin talks about in the epigraph are sung by, among others, ‘whores’ and ‘bawds’. Others describe jigs as ‘lewed’ or ‘nasty’.13 Jigs were also sometimes topical and libelous, and are linked to both the disputes of the Martin Marprelate tracts and the suppression of satires in 1599.14 From even this brief survey of the uses of the word jig, it is clear that jig had many associations, linked contingently but predictably in practice, so that almost any mention seems to evoke or recall other more remote, but still

11   On Kempe’s career, see Wiles and Max W. Thomas, ‘Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival to Market’, PMLA, 107 (1992): 511–23. Music survives for a ‘Tarlton’s Jigge’ as well, Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 95. 12   See also Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 18–21; Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 50–57. 13   The Middlesex magistrates’ Order for suppressinge of Jigges att the ende of Playes (1612) addresses ‘certayne lewed Jigges songes and daunces’, quoted in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, Oxford, 1923), 4: 340–41; Dekker, A Strange Horse-Race (1613), says that the ‘nasty bawdy Iigge’ at the end of a tragedy is blacker than anything in it (C4v). 14   C.J. Sisson (ed.), Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age (Cambridge, 1936), 125–56; Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 40–76.

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possible, meanings.15 We should thus perhaps not be overly precise about the genre of the jig when we can say so little about it with certainty. Jigs are transgressive, even offensive, and designedly so; they display what is ordinarily hidden and regularly threaten to run past the bounds of appropriate or expected behavior. But beyond this general set of associations, it is hard to determine what exactly counts as a jig. Instead, we should take our cue from the speakers of the time: the jig is whatever happened at the end of the play.16 Or that was reminiscent of what happened at the end of a play. Or that was associated with people who were otherwise associated with jigging. It makes for a big tent. Taking my own advice, in what follows I will feel free to draw on accounts of Tarlton’s themes and Kempe’s morrises to thicken my descriptions of the stage jig. One reason for the breadth of associations provided by jigs is that many of the references to them come well after the years that are identified as their glory days. To speak of jigs in the reign of Elizabeth, and even more in the decades after her rule, was often to speak obliquely about one’s own relation to the past, through culture, or society, plays, or more broadly to assert a set of imprecisely defined aesthetic, ethical, or even political values. This casts a haze of imprecision over what the jig was like and what it is supposed to mean, and brings in concepts, thoughts, and responses that might not immediately seem linked to it. People danced jigs before talking about them, and continue to dance them without talking about them. When jigs begin to be discussed, it is often because they are oldfashioned: when Jonson praises the dedicatee of Catiline (1611) for daring, ‘in these Iig-given times, to countenance a legitimate Poëme’ (A2–A2v), the times don’t seem especially jig-given – or if they are, they are mainly in a nostalgic, or anti-nostalgic, vein.17 But the jig is, in a sense, born old, at least as it appears in how people talked about it. Even very early instances see it as something somehow retrograde or passing. As early as 1589, Kempe is introduced as ‘Iestmonger and 15

  It should also be clear that the kind of research this statement is based on is enabled by databases of all sorts, from PhiloLogic to EEBO. 16   See, for instance, Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 99–104, linking Tarlton’s themes to the jig. On the jig’s mobility, so that features of it occur in other places than at the end of the play, see Michael E. Mooney, ‘“The Common Sight” and Dramatic Form: Rowley’s Embedded Jig in A Faire Quarrel’, Studies in English Literature, 20 (1980): 305–23 and Jackson Cope, ‘Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy and the Jig of “Singing Simpkin”’, Modern Language Notes, 70 (1955): 571–3. Both these writers take the form of the jig as more stable than its position, a premise one might call more ‘literary’ than ‘performative’, thus heading on a tack nearly opposite my own. 17   Tiffany Stern makes the sound point in Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York, 2004) that there are simply more surviving texts than later in the period, and therefore more evidence for almost anything. But references to jigs are also thematically or affectively nostalgic, so that I think it is fair to say that their overall belatedness is not only the result of changes in printing. Thomson, ‘Missing Jig’, 34, argues that the jig was not self-evidently a residual form in 1599. I would agree – but I think it represents itself and is represented as a residual form.

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Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton’, taking his authority as the successor to the master; later Robert Armin, the clown who replaced Kempe in the Shakespeare’s company, is advertised as Tarlton’s ‘adopted sonne’.18 These claims should probably be read as praise for the younger clowns as well as bids for them to step into the unique position held by Tarlton in popular thought.19 Whether it was part of the intention or not, though, both Kempe and Armin are represented as less perfect substitutes for the true master, Tarlton, from whom they derive their excellence quasi-filially.20 Even for those who valued it, the jig and its pleasures are regularly spoken of as disappearing or receding. After the player John Shank gave up his jigs in the early years of the seventeenth century, an elegiac note accompanies one aficionado’s stiff upper lip: That’s the fat foole of the Curtin, and the leane foole of the Bull: Since Shanke did leaue to sing his rimes, he is counted but a gull. The players of the Banke side, the round Globe and the Swan, Will teach you idle trickes of loue, but the Bull will play the man.21

The jig, one might say, had always been up. But this answer also makes the jig seem, as both Guilpin and Marston notice, not only up but up to everything – sex, slander, class consciousness, artistic taste, and in Marston even cosmology. In order to see more narrowly what the jig might have signified, we need to return from words about its action, insofar as this is possible while working from the words. Thematically, jigs were associated with all kinds of disorders and disorderings, sexual, social, and others. The chaotic sounds and movements of jigs seem also to have reminded their audiences of other kinds of confusion. The word jig was frequently associated with the word gig, with its variant whirligig, meaning

  For Kempe, Thomas Nashe, An Almond for a Parrat (London, 1589?), A2; for Armin, Tarlton’s Jests (London, 1638), C2. 19   See, for instance, Halasz, ‘“So beloved that men use his picture for their signs”’; Thomson, ‘True Physiognomy’. 20   Cf. the report of one of Tarlton’s improvised jokes during a performance, of which the writer remarks, ‘to this day I have heard it commended for rare, but no marvell, for he had many of these: But I would see our Clownes in these dayes [c. 1600?] do the like: no I warrant ye, and yet they thinke well of themselves too’ (Tarlton’s Jests). 21   William Turner’s Dish of Lenten Stuff (1613), cited in Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 118. John Shank was a player and jig-maker (see n.3, above), and perhaps author of the notorious (lost) jig Garlic; Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 114–19. 18

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a child’s toy spinning top.22 Often the terms are simply not distinguished, but sometimes a pun calls attention to the slippage of sense from one to the other, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594?), when Biron reproaches Ferdinand for being hypocritically in love, which is nothing less than: ‘To see great Hercules whipping a Gigge,/ And profound Salomon tuning a Iygge?’ (4.3.165–6),23 or more directly, when in the prologue of Edward Sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig (1607), Cupid threatens to ‘make some daunce a Iigge,/ More rounder yet then ere did Gig’ (B1). In lines like these, jig and gig are distinguished, yet related, suggesting motion that both whirls and soars, circling horizontally around a centre like a top but finally taking flight like a dancer rather than falling down. In his tenth Satire, which I cite as an epigraph to this paper, Marston ties the movement of jigs to cosmic disorder, inverting the claim of John Davies’ Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing (1596), a long poem that depicts the order of the natural and social worlds as an intricate, exacting dance.24 Marston’s direct allusion to Davies’s poem immediately before this passage (‘Praise but Orchestra ... faith you have his hart’ [H3v]) as well as his hyperbolic satire in raising Kempe’s jig to the level of cosmic principle, show that he is self-consciously pitting the wild and toplike whirling of Kempe’s jigs against a courtly model of ordered and hierarchical motion. Vigorous court dances in fact like the galliard offered physical challenges similar to that of the jig – so similar, in fact, that the very different steps of jig and galliard could work complexly as synonyms: a pamphlet describing a mythical morris dance declares that ‘Kempe’s morris to Norwich was no more to this than a galliard on a common stage, at the end of an old dead comedy’ (C1v).25 Courtly dancing, however, emphasized the masterful execution of demanding moves with seeming effortlessness and poise, training the body upward into the high leaps and kicks that characterized its most athletic forms.26 The jig also moved upward, but

22   My discussion on jig and gig covers some of the material in Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 14–16, with the important difference that Baskervill is trying to recover the word’s etymology as a means to understanding the word. I am trying to recover the word’s usage, which includes its folk etymology. The measure of aptness in each case is thus very different; whereas Baskervill can (rightly) note that it is a confusion to link jig and gig, for my purposes this practical slippage, whether knowing or unknowing, is exactly what is of interest. 23   I quote from Shakespeare’s folio Plays rather than the Oxford edition to preserve the distinction in the spelling of gigs and jigs. 24   Davies’s Orchestra, along with the speech on degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, is one of the keys for drawing E.M.W. Tillyard’s Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943). 25   Old Meg of Hereford-shire, for a Mayd-Marian: and Hereford towne for a Morrisdaunce. Or Twelue Morris-dancers in Hereford-shire, of twelue hundred yeares old (London, 1609). 26   Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst, 1998).

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fitfully and erratically, and at the same time it wheeled in rapid circles, like a top. According to Marston, it seemed always at risk of disastrously losing control: Yee gracious Orbs, keepe the old measuring, All’s spoyld if once yee fall to capering. (H4)

It seems to have underscored the physical and material constraints that the body had to overcome in its efforts. Like much physical comedy, jigging made things look hard. It showed off a body that was both prodigiously powerful and subject to extraordinary physical limitations.27 The emphasis on the physicality of the jig and its link to barely contained (or sometimes stoutly resisted) disorder is a recurring feature of discussions of the jig. Jigging readily slops over its confines into other areas of physical humour and excess. Similar prowess appears in anecdotes about the displays of drunkenness in whose company jigs and clowning often appeared; both drinking and jigging offer an opportunity to demonstrate physical strength and endurance while rejecting any attempt to transcend the gravity of the body. Many of the stories of Tarlton’s impromptu performances recorded in (or concocted for) Tarlton’s Jests take place in an alcoholic blur; a not untypical one shows Tarlton being commanded to stand by the city watch and feigning drunkenness to get off without being arrrested: ‘Stand, quoth Tarlton? let them stand that can, for I cannot. So falling downe, as though he had been drunke, they helpt him up, and so let him passe.’28 The themes with which Tarlton ended the play and the exploits that are recorded in Tarlton’s Jests and other works on Tarlton are described as no less physical than the jigs and other exploits associated with him. Part of Tarlton’s appeal was his ability to respond spontaneously to themes in sung verse, and what is attributed to him is rollicking, from A very lamentable and woful discourse of the fierce fluds, a 1578 broadside which Tarlton may actually have composed, to the response he supposedly gave to somebody who asked him how his nose got flat: Friend or foe, if thou wilt needs know, mark me well: With parting dogs and bears then by the ears, this chance fell: But what of that? 27   Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, observes that the clown of the jig is by no means a clever servant, but hopelessly unskilled – except for being the most athletic dancer. 28   Tarlton’s Jests, A2. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, and Thomson, ‘True Physiognomy’, both note that the clown did not distinguish his on-stage performances from his offstage performances, and that Tarlton’s intoxication was part of his act. This is not to say that it was not also intoxication.

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though my nose be flat, my credit to save Yet very well I can by the smell scent an honest man from a Knave.29

Marked rhythm like this, with short lines and strong rhymes – the jigging veins of rhyming mother wits? – is as much or more about the bounce and assonance of the short end-stopped lines than about its rather thin content. This is characterized as wit, but not especially thoughtful; it is a wit that emphasizes rhythm, rhyme, feel, noise, more than meaning. That Tarlton is here descanting on his own deformity further fastens his humour to his flesh.30 Even in his themes and other jests, Tarlton’s comedy, like Kempe’s, was resolutely physical, although not in the same sense. Like Kempe, Tarlton was skillful or at least a powerful dancer, enough so that that he could characterize himself humourously as hopping like a flea, and was athletic enough to be a Master of Fence.31 This was the kind of physicality that Kempe also exploited: Kempe’s jigs, and in particular his long morris dance from London to Norwich, are physical because they demonstrate unusual strength and endurance. But Tarlton’s performances also emphasize a different relation to his body and his world; they are physical because they inevitably force Tarlton to negotiate with a variety of props, beginning with his pipe and tabor, or the curtain that he would famously peep from behind and set the crowd laughing. The very act of improvising on a theme that was handed up or called out from the audience (who seem in the accounts to have come prepared with themes in the hopes of stumping Tarlton, ‘every one so pleased to throw up his Theame’ [C4v]) is a kind of material constraint, and the pleasure of Tarlton’s responses must have been like contemporary delight in improv comedy, where the difficulty of the problem adds to the pleasure taken in its solution. In two of Tarlton’s Jests, the constraint of the theme is literally material, as what is thrown up to the clown is not a topic but an apple and what is returned is an insult that humiliates and silences the thrower (B2–B2v). But many of Tarlton’s jests have similar trajectories. In ‘A Iest of Tarlton, proving Mustard to have wit’, Tarlton argues that mustard must be sentient because ‘knowing that you will bite it, it begins to bite you first’ (C3–C3v). A bystander (to play along? to test his claim?) takes a mouthful, and predictably is bitten by the sharp mustard. Tarlton responds, ‘so then conclude with me, that dumbe unfeeling Mustard hath more 29

  Tarlton’s Jests, C4–C4v; I have changed the lineation to emphasize the rhythm of the verse. 30   For Tarlton as an inspiration for Shakespeare’s Richard III, see Peter Thomson, ‘Rogues and Rhetoricians’, in Cox and Kastan (eds), New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), 321–35. 31   The flea anecdote is from Tarlton’s Jests, E4–E4v.

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wit than a talking unfeeling foole, as you are. Some were pleased, and some were not, but all Tarlton’s care was taken (for his resolution was ever) before he talkt any Iest’ (C3–C3v). This story ends strangely. Predictably, Tarlton always gets the last word, first as the bystander is momentarily too overcome by the mustard to speak, again when he tries to make a joke out of his own foolishness, and finally when amidst the mixed reception of the jest, Tarlton’s foresight – whatever it saw – is professed. Something, though, goes awry at the end, so that, unlike most of his jests, which please the million, Tarlton gets a mixed reception. The undisputed hero of the story, in a sense, is the mustard that bites back and remains silent. In such performances, things like horses or apples or mustard become agents or characters in their own right, bearing messages or defending themselves. But Tarlton’s especial ‘care’ allows him to enlist the material world to his side, as a kind of fellow operator.32 With Tarlton as a kind of conductor, he and the mustard join forces to silence the bystander who had sought to draw the focus of the performance to himself. This jest did not take place in a theatre, of course, if it took place at all; it is part of the Tarlton legend that theatre-goers also indulged in when they saw Tarlton perform as actor, jig-maker, or improvisor on themes. But it displays a shared vein in all Tarlton’s comedy that may say much about the felt riskiness of the jig. Tarlton’s humour has been described, accurately enough, as aggressive, and it clearly relies heavily on those cornerstones of comedy, the privileges of anger, the fear of humiliation, pleasure at the rough justice of comeuppance, and Schadenfreude.33 But Tarlton’s humour is aggressive in another sense as well, or perhaps instead: he insisted, physically and forcefully, that his onlookers engage with him and he returned their engagement. In all his themes and jests, Tarlton the player was never just a spectacle for his audiences; he required them, willing or not, to become participants with him, which might also mean against him as disputants or rivals. His improvisations on themes are as much challenges as performances. For example, the mustard jest poses a contest on at least two levels: between the bitten mustard and the biting human, and between Tarlton and the bystander. In addition, many other of the jests take the form of deceptions, riddles, or dares. As his practice with his themes suggests, Tarlton’s idea of the play was closer to our sense of a game or contest than to our sense of drama. Victory in these games or plays is won by reducing one contestant to silence, by taking away his power of speech physically, as the mustard does to the bystander, or by humiliating him, as Tarlton does. This seems to be the point of Tarlton’s jibe at the bystander as a ‘talking unfeeling foole’ compared to the ‘dumbe unfeeling 32   If Kempe played Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona, we may see there a taste of his quality in this vein of physical humour, as he clowns with his resistant co-actors of shoe, wand, and dog. 33   Both Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, and Thomson, ‘True Physiognomy’ and ‘Rogues’, make convincing cases for placing aggression and even cruelty at the centre of Tarlton’s wit.

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Mustard’. In his improvisations and jigs Tarlton’s goal, as well as that of the members of his audience who bring him themes or challenge his mustard, was to drive the opponent to a ‘non plus’, that condition where they would be incapable of responding – where they are rendered precisely speechless or, often, are shouted down and retreat in disarray. The particular phrase ‘non plus’ appears in Tarlton’s Jests at C4, D1v, and E2v, but is everywhere implied. Bruce Smith has recently offered a reinterpretation of the action of Hamlet that marks the difficulty with which Hamlet wins the ability to speak and to organize the play from the disorder of the other sounds and voices with which he shares the stage.34 The operation of the jig or the jest as performed by Tarlton or recalled by Marston or Guilpin is just the opposite – it is to win from the ordered contest of the encounter of audience and performer the ability to drown out one’s rivals. It is the triumph of noise. There is a more substantial link between jigs and what is inarticulate, beginning with the disorder of its dance. The Jacobean and Caroline masque, perhaps the most fully realized manifestation of courtly dancing, wanted to be articulated well enough to be legible – Ben Jonson made Dedalus a narrator for his aristocratic performers and had the master artificer ask So let your Dances be entwin’d, yet not perplex men, unto gaze. But measur’d, and so numerous too, as men may read each act you doe.35

The jig, in contrast, while no less strenuous, was illegible. It was noisy, both loud and full of static. Guilpin’s ‘Satire V’ stresses the pervasive, invasive sound of jigs in performance in contrast to more legible, logical pleasures; the narrator enjoys reading plays like ‘the Patheticke Spaniards Tragedies’ in the peace of his study, but in the street he is horrified by ‘the hotch-potch of so many noyses/ ... / That Chaons [sic] of rude sounds, that harmony,/ That Dyapason of harsh Barbary’, in particular the sound of jigs in performance (E1). These jigs are pointedly similar to the texts that he enjoys reading at home, ‘encoffin’d in this chest/ Amongst these bookes and papers’: the appalling ‘Burgonians tragedy’ paired with ‘Kemps Jigge’ invites comparison to ‘the Patheticke Spaniards Tragedies’ (also two?), and The Spanish Tragedy was a ballad as well as a play (D4v-E1). The crucial difference is the chaotic noise and disordered motion of performance. Jigs thus have had a strong affinity in performance to literal inarticulacy or inexpressiveness (although not to obscurity – depth and complexity are not features of surviving jigs!). Like many other Elizabethan song forms, the jig texts that remain make extensive 34

  Bruce R. Smith, ‘Mona Lisa Takes a Mountain Hike, Hamlet Goes for an Ocean Dip’, in Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Centre or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honour of Leeds Barroll (Selinsgrove, 2006), 238–53. 35   Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, ll. 261–6 in Works (London; performed 1618), E2–E2v.

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use of rhythmic nonsense syllables to mark time, ‘Fa la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la’ (Singing Simpkin, Baskervill, 444–5) or the eponymous ‘Dill dill dill dill’ of Pückelherings Dill dill dill (Baskervill, 509–10) and of near-nonsense, like ‘Come cudle me Cudie’ (Baskervill, 394–7) or ‘Jenny come tye my, Jenny come tye my, Jenny come tye my bonny Cravat’ (Baskervill, 398–400). They incorporate paralinguistic sounds like laughter (a ghost enters laughing an occasionally extrametrical and italicized ‘ho. ho. ho. ho.’ in one untitled manuscript of a jig)36 and mere noise – whipcracks, for instance (the ghost comes to whip the main dancer), or smoochy kisses (‘That I may give you kisses/ One, two, or three’, Simon and Susan, Baskervill, 382). Other jig texts suggest actions that must have included various slams, slaps, and thumps, and sound effects even aside from the sound of lively dancing. It would be hard to show that confused noise was more a feature of jigs than other kinds of performance, but several references to jigs seem to link them precisely to the failure of articulate speech and the triumph of sound suggested by the non plus, for instance, a passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost: Boy. Will you win your loue with a French braule? Braggart. How meanest thou, brauling in French? Boy. No my compleat master, but to Iigge off a tune at the tongues end, canarie to it with the feete, humour it with turning up your eie: sigh a note and sing a note, sometimes through the throate: if you swallowed love with singing love sometime through: nose as if you snuft up love by smelling love. (3.1)37

The scene begins with speech already attenuated, between Mote the boy’s singing of nonsense syllables (‘Concolinel’) and the braggart Armado’s malapropisms. It continues to describe as well as enact a loss of linguistic precision, passing from the joke on the paradox of brawling in French (would it matter?) to the equivocation on the dance called the brawl and a fight to the boy’s explanation (or demonstration) of the snuffling that is involved in wooing. That the boy may have actually snuffled is suggested by the unusual repetition of colons, a punctuation mark that among other things could signal a long pause – here perhaps to make a gesture or a sound that interrupts the speech. There seem to be words missing where the colons appear, which further suggests that something else not a word took their place in performance – perhaps a prosaic version of the way an incomplete line signals a silence in verse?38 The Boy is not dancing a jig, of course, 36   J.M. Nosworthy, ‘An Elizabethan Jig from the National Library of Wales’, Malone Society Collections, 9 (1971 [1977]): 29. See also The Black Man, Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, 469–72. 37   Works (London, 1623). I have again used the folio Plays, this time to preserve its punctuation. 38   I have transcribed the Folio here, but the 1598 Quarto is very close. The Quarto adds another semi-colon in the word humour, thus: ‘hun;our’ – perhaps a snuffling nasal?

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nor even exactly describing one; he is using jigs, among other things, as a point of comparison for stylish wooing, and his listing of actions that a braggart might play strongly implies that he enacts what he describes. But his actions also seem to mimic those of one who does dance a jig: he is probably jigging off a tune and canarying his feet as he says so (the canary was another unrestrained dance like the jig).39 This leads to the alternation of articulate singing and inarticulate sighing of ‘sing a note and sigh a note’. Does the clarity of the song further degrade as it passes ‘through the throate:’ to be ‘swallowed’ and then forced ‘through: nose as if you snuft up love’? Wooing and jigging both seem to produce a similar inability to speak clearly or articulately. In both wooing and jigging, and in jests like that of the mustard, what silences one’s speech is not just inarticulacy. It is what takes the breath away; the victim is less silent than gasping for air. In performances like Tarlton’s, language is subject to the same kind of interference from other sounds as other sounds; it can be choked off, left without air, interrupted, drowned out. Like the jigging body, it does not transcend the material world; it is part of it and calls attention to how that world presses against it. It acts, in fact, as a species of noise rather than the rational faculty expressed. At the end of 2 Henry IV (1597?), after Falstaff has been rejected, an epilogue ingratiatingly offers to requite a bad performance with the further exercise of his body: … here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and, as most debtors do, promise you infinitely. If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs? And yet that were but light payment, to dance out of your debt. ... My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night: and so kneel down before you – but, indeed, to pray for the Queen. (Epilogue, 13–18, 31–3)

This promised dance is, presumably, the jig at the end of the play (would the epilogue have been spoken by Kempe, who may have played Falstaff?), and here the body’s exhaustion serves as the fulfillment of a debt to the audience.40 This is a harder-edged version of the request for applause with which so many plays of this period conclude; here the actor proposes to dance himself out in exchange for the spectators’ favor. The fiction is that the performer will dance until he is too tired to go on, just as he is already too tired to speak any more; although a fiction, in it we Or just bad type? See Love’s Labour’s Lost (London, 1598), C3v. 39   See above, from Middleton’s Women Beware Women, ‘You Drunkards [dance], the Canaries; you Whore and Baud, the Jigg.’ 40   On Falstaff as one of Kempe’s roles, see Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown. Wiles also speculates interestingly on what would have happened had the actor playing Hamlet danced the jig at the end of that play, and in a personal communication Jeremy Lopez has asked whether, in Julius Caesar, Caesar himself might have danced the jig, in each case resurrecting a leading player and extending his life beyond that of the play.

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can discern the actor’s promise to use himself up in the service of the spectators.41 A mid-play jig similarly cuts off speech in James IV: Bohan. Haud your clacks lads, trattle not for thy life, but gather uppe your legges and daunce me forthwith a gigge worth the sight. Slipper. Why I must talk on I dy fort, wherfore was my tongue made. (A4)

What would have been understood in such an offer to dance to exhaustion? David Wiles has suggested that one role of the jig was to provide the (sexually) climactic closure that is so often postponed in the texts of the plays we have – the play is a kind of foreplay and the jig the consummation.42 But the jig might provide another kind of conclusion to the whole of the performance than the metaphorically orgasmic one Wiles suggests. Wiles, I think, overstates when he says that the jig is wholly sexual.43 Smith comes closer in describing the eroticism of the jig as its opening of borders, which is also the engaging of spectators as participants and the overshooting of the articulate and controlled. This epilogue to 2 Henry IV makes the jig the final (if feigned) draining away of the players’ vigor, their complete employment in the service to the audience. Perhaps it demonstrated, or seemed to demonstrate, a kind of real labour on the part of the actors, who were regularly mocked because their only work was play.44 The jig was in part a dance designed to take the breath away, not from the viewer, but from its performers, a dance whose goal was in part to render its speaker inarticulate through his exertions. The jig would not say much about itself; others would have to speak about it, because its own aim would be noise. Whatever words it had were concealed by the efforts of the performer, as his language returned to mere physicality in noise and breath. In so doing, the jig put the players to a non plus and returned the order of the play to the noisiness of everyday life in a spectacular whirl of increasing disorder. The change from Tarlton’s themes, which silenced his onlooker-opponents, and 41   If the duration of the jig was indeed as long as an hour, this exhaustion becomes more plausible; of course the offer need not be any more real than the claim that the epilogue is tired of speaking. On the other hand, Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, lists several plays in which the clown who would take the lead role in the jig was ‘kept in reserve’ during the last scene, 54ff. 42   Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 46–57. 43   Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 45, also implies that the name is onomatopoetic or mimetic of intercourse; I have tried to argue for a richer view of the word and its associations, although sexuality is of course important to those connections. The name for the dance predates its use on the stage. 44   Richard Flecknoe’s famous description of Richard Burbage is a defence against exactly this claim: ‘those who call him a Player do him wrong, no man being less idle than he, whose whole life is nothing else but action; with only this difference from other mens, that what is but a Play to them, is his Business; so their business is but a play to him’, quoted in William Ingram, Business of Playing: the Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, 1992), vi.

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Kempe’s jigs, which through profligate expenditure of energy returned the body of the actor to silence and stillness, coincides with the institutionalization of playing in Elizabethan England over the years in which the Queen’s Men were dominant.45 Tarlton’s jests capture a moment when playing was a more or less fraught contest between performers and onlookers, and most in the jig itself, where the crowd was invited to challenge the clown. The jig at the end of Henry IV, whether Kempe’s or not, is more of a display for consumption. Nothing is really being offered – the actor will surely not dance until he collapses, just as he has not really spoken until he is hoarse – but the form of the jig as contest is preserved in the pretended non plus of the actor. The audience, who has paid to see the show, no longer risks the danger of a real encounter; the actor becomes a spectacle for them rather than their collaborator, gamely staging his own subordination to their pleasures rather than contesting them. Instead, as in later years when it is still recalled and restaged, the jig is set up to become an object of nostalgia, derision, or both, as it is remembered as a pure spectacle.

45   See Thomas, ‘Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder’, on the marketing of Kempe’s morrises and the changing conditions of theatrical production.

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Chapter 15

Facial Hair and the Performance of Adult Masculinity on the Early Modern English Stage Eleanor Rycroft

Beards, or their lack, structure the attributions and distributions of manliness on the English stage as it develops into a commercial entity during the early modern era. In Shakespeare’s plays particularly, facial hair serves as a locus for adult masculine identity in a discourse which both reflected on and intervened in the English fashion for beards from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. The role of facial hair in the theatrical performance of masculinity ramifies powerfully with constructions of manhood in early modern society at large in which, as Will Fisher writes, ‘sex was materialized through an array of features and prosthetic parts. A list of some of these parts would have to include the beard and the genitals, but would also have to include clothing, the hair, the tongue, and weapons such as swords or daggers (to name just a few).’ Fisher’s list – like a Philip Henslowe inventory – demonstrates that Renaissance masculine identity was conveyed through the use of selected costumes or props. In addition, the Galenic one-sex model of gender in medical currency at the time registered sexual difference at the level of social behaviour rather than bodily destiny, proscribing any absolute distinctions between the sexes and gesturing towards the threat posed by the theatre itself in its spectacular exposure of identities which were neither god-given nor immutable. That players occupy, for law-makers and anti-theatricalists alike, the same culturally imaginary space as rogues, vagabonds,    The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.    See Elliott Horowitz, ‘The New World and the Changing Face of Europe’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 28.4 (1997): 1181–1201, in which the author asserts that the beard of Pope Julius II marked ‘a turning point in the facial history of Christian Europe’, for whom facial hair had previously ‘functioned ... as a sign of strangeness and otherness’ (1187).    William Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54.1 (2001), 157. See also Mark Albert Johnston, ‘Playing with the Beard: Courtly and Commercial Economies in Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias and John Lyly’s Midas’, English Literary History, 72 (2005): 79–103 for a discussion of the staging of the sign of the beard in the Renaissance, particularly pp. 79, 80–81, 96–7.    Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford, 2000), 106.

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and knaves, reveals the early modern anxiety that any individual could display the panoply of external signifiers that created particular social roles; it is one no doubt fuelled by the increasing demand for and availability of fashion, as well as the tools for self-fashioning, despite the prohibitions of sumptuary legislation. The tendency of the beard, and indeed of beardlessness, to slip through, evade, and imitate the categories it supposedly represents, renders it a singularly disturbing stage property within a theatre which repeatedly explored, in its stories of misrepresentation and misrecognition, the chimera of social identity itself. Within early modern society men were discursively distinguished from boys by their beard, whose appearance was thought to be produced by the increased heat of the male body during adolescence. The resulting humidity caused smoke or vapours to rise in the body which, according to the English translation of Aristotle’s Problems, ‘doth passe into hayre’. Those men who have a dominance of choler in the co-mixture of their bodily humours are likely because of their excessive heat to ‘have beards sooner than others’ (A6r), a theory which accounts for the hirsutism of soldiers sporting the spade or dibble beard on the early modern stage. Women meanwhile are deemed unable to grow beards, ‘Because they want heate, as it appeareth also in some effeminate men, who are beardles for the same cause, because they are of the complexion of women’ (A6v). This conception of male maturity is also found in John Trevisa’s medieval translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum (popularly reprinted in 1582), and persists into Renaissance medical theory. For instance, Lemnius writes in the 1576 translation of The Touchstone of Complexions that ‘all those partes in mans body are most rough and hayrie, which abounde in most heate. For it attracteth the vaporous fumes that issue from the humours, and fashioneth the same into a hayrie nature. And for this cause, many Springhaldes have not in that Age anye beardes, neither any other partes of their bodies hayrie’ (Fv). The polarization of boys and men within this system of thought, placing beardless boys closer to the humoural complexion of women, while still allowing for male physiology in the expectation of their eventual beardedness, endorses Stephen Orgel’s contention that boys were not so much viewed as mini-men but as antithetical to them during the Renaissance. I add to Orgel’s hypothesis the contention that their lack of facial hair interpellates them as boys; beardlessness, along with concomitant physical attributes such as a high voice (often linked with    Aristotle, The Problemes of Aristotle, with other Philosophers and Phisitions (Edinburgh, 1595), A7.    Much of the evidence for this contention is found in the plays themselves, in which heavier beards are frequently and consistently ascribed to military men. Jacques’s soldier in As You Like It is ‘bearded like the pard’ (2.7.150), for instance, while in Bartholomew Fair Ursula warns Jordan Knockem not to ‘tusk or twirl your dibble, good Jordan’, in Ben Jonson: Four Comedies, ed. Helen Ostovich (London, 1997) 4.4.134–5.    L. Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (London, 1576).    Stephen Orgel, Impersonations (Cambridge, 1996), 103.

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the ability to sing, as in the case of Nightingale in Bartholomew Fair), and small stature, I read as evidence that males have not entered the ranks of manhood. This distinction has important implications for the debates instigated by new historicist and cultural materialist critics concerning the reception of Shakespeare’s crossdressed heroines. If beardlessness links boys to females, then the theatre of transvestism doesn’t require the physiological leap of imagination needed by contemporary audiences. Women are dramatically represented, like boys, as beardless, smaller, and with higher voices than men. The beardlessness of the players in the boys’ companies, however, rendered it necessary for them to don prosthetic facial hair in order to make manifest the various forms of adult manliness they were dramatizing; a practice reflecting a residual medieval dramaturgy which informs early modern adult playing as well. The staging of the false beard has an extensive history in civic drama according to the information collated in the Records of the Early English Drama. An early vernacular reference in the Shrewsbury Bailiff’s expenses of 1525–26 and an inventory undertaken at St John’s College, Cambridge, records that ‘Master Leapar hathe the custode of vij berdes made of here. iiij yelow. one white. and one blak’.10 There are also numerous instances across the parishes of individuals being paid for the hiring of beards. In Coventry, the haberdasher Harry Benet is remunerated by the Weaver’s Company for rental of two beards during 1570, 1571, and 1572,11 while the Smith’s account books record the hiring-in of prosthetic facial hair from both Thomas Massye and Henrye Chamberleyne in 1584. A textual trace of the profitable traffic in false beards is evident in Quarlous’s surprising revelation when he comes to disguise as Trouble-all in Bartholomew Fair, that he has, ‘a nest of beards in my trunk, one something like his’, although this moment also implies the social dissimulation of the gallant indicated by Quarlous’s occupation of ‘gamester’.12 A list of false facial hair which interestingly exposes the varied applications of beards in the drama is found in the ‘Costumes and Props for the Plays for King James’s performed in 1604–1605’, which include ‘1 blewe hayre and beard for neptune. 1 blacke smooth hayre and beard for a magitian./1 white hayre and beard for nestor/ 1 Rounde white hayre./ 2 heremits beardes the on graye thother white. … 3 beards one Red one blacke thother flexen/ 10. satyrs heades & berdes … and one suite for Pan’.13 Fisher determines that the twenty-two beards used for this production of Alba may well have been supplied by Edward Kirkham and Thomas Kendall who were connected with the Blackfriars troupe, indicating that ‘these  

J.A.B Somerset (ed.), REED: Shropshire, vol. 1 (Toronto, 1994), 184.   A.H. Nelson (ed.), REED: Cambridge, vol. 1 (Toronto, 1989), 128. 11   R.W. Ingram (ed.), REED: Coventry (Toronto, 1981), 252, 255, and 258. 12   Ostovich (ed.), Ben Jonson: Four Comedies, 4.6.140, and ‘The Persons of the Play’, 544. 13   J.R. Elliott, Jr., A.H. Nelson, A.F. Johnston, and D. Wyatt (eds), REED: Oxford, vol. 2 (Toronto, 2004), 290. 

10

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props were taken from the Revels Office since Edward Kirkham was the Revels Yeoman at the time and one of the perquisites of his post was that he was entitled to rent out the costumes and other goods in his care’.14 This recorded example underscores both the material interpenetration of the forms of the drama during the early modern period, as well as the significance and transferability of the property of the false beard in designating masculine type on the stage. Pointing towards a symbolic economy of facial hair in early modern stagecraft in which particular forms, cuts, and colours of beards (re)produce specific theatrical typologies – the blue beard of Neptune, the white beard of Nestor, the grey beard of the hermit – the reference also suggests how the residual but sophisticated dramaturgy of beardedness might infuse the emergent commercial stage of London during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is evident, for instance, in Bottom’s concern over which beard is appropriate for his portrayal of Pyramus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his choices being either ‘your straw-colour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow’ (1.2.86–9).15 In the Queen’s Men’s play, Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, an early stage direction reads, ‘Enter Dissimulation, having on a Farmers long coate, and a cap, and poll and beard painted motley’ (A2v).16 Dissimulation goes on to say, ‘Nay who is it that knowes me not by my partie coloured head? They may well thinke that see me, my honestie is fled’ (A2v). The multi-coloured facial and head hair of Dissimulation is the sole visual indicator that the player is not what he appears to be in his apparel of the trustworthy and industrious farmer – the polychromy signifying that Dissimulation is misrepresenting the authority of the virtuous male he presents to the audience. Indeed, Simplicitie is able to decode Dissimulation’s true nature through his facial hair, declaring, ‘a bots on thy motley beard, I know thee, thou art Dissimulation / And hast thou got an honest mans coate, to semble this fashion’ (A3v). References to beards are found liberally in the works of the London dramatists, from the boy ensemble plays of Lyly, via Shakespeare and the citizen comedy of Jonson and Middleton, and through to playtexts produced under the regime of Charles I, those by Richard Brome, for example. In Shakespeare’s opus in particular, many masculine constructions depend on an audience’s foreknowledge of a shorthand of beard significations which denote specific character traits. Hotspur’s criticism of the English Lord in The History of Henry IV centres on how the ‘popinjay’ (1H4 1.3.49) has shaved off the sign of his masculinity, signifying a focus on conspicuous display which is both effeminate and inappropriate to the hyper-masculine and hyper-hairy sphere of the battlefield. Hotspur describes him 14

  Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard’, 84.   All Shakespeare references are to the Oxford 2nd edition and cited parenthetically in the body of the essay. 16   Robert Wilson, A right excellent and famous Comoedy called The Three Ladies of London (London, 1592). 15

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as ‘neat and trimly dressed, / Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin, new reaped, / Showed like a stubble-land at harvest-home’ (32–4). Gallant types on the stage generally are often accused of an unmasculine over-attentiveness to their appearance – often taking the form of a condemnation of their tendency to curl or dye, trim or shave their beard, perceived as an effeminizing treatment of the badge of their masculine superiority. While the semiotics of masculine prerogative require that the male keep his beard within the groomed bounds of civility, this need can simultaneously be seen as a perilous paring back of male authority. Hence Claudio and Don Pedro’s mockery of Benedick’s visit to the barbers in Much Ado About Nothing when they hear that ‘the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis balls’, making him appear ‘younger than he did by the loss of a beard’, and moreover that their former comrade now ‘rubs himself with civet’ (3.2.42–3, 44–5, 46). The formerly warlike Benedick has, through the process of altering his facial hair into a suitable mode for wooing and wedding, transformed his masculine appearance (and odour) into a form associated with the amorous gallant; a masculinity typified in Renaissance painting by the highly styled pique-devant beard favoured by Elizabethan courtiers.17 So beards not only epitomize for the audience the masculine type being dramatized in Shakespeare’s plays, but also mediate the power relations between or among the males on stage. When Mark Antony is recalled to Rome in Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra undermines his heroic masculinity by insinuating that he is subject to the whim of a mere boy, the ‘scarce-bearded Caesar’ (1.1.22). In the play, the degradation of his manliness by a younger male is complicated by the fact that Antony is depicted as being on the threshold of fully-bearded manhood and its subsequent degeneration into grey-haired old age. When he flees the scene of war to pursue his lover, his self-rebuke is figured through hair colour; ‘My very hairs do mutiny; for the white/ Reprove the brown for rashness, and they them / For fear and doting’ (3.11.13–15). The notion of Antony’s fading masculinity recurs when he teases Cleopatra for doubting his martial success later in the play: ‘What, girl, though grey/ Do something mingle with our younger brown, yet ha’ we/ A brain that nourishes our nerves’ (4.8.19–21). Shakespeare’s clear construction of Antony as older than his political rivals endorses Alexandra Shepard’s central notion in Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England that access to patriarchal prerogative was limited along lines of age, class, and status, and that the grey-headedness and humoural cooling of maturity were conceived of as a deterioration from the temperate prime of masculinity – the Age of Manhood. While greybeards could be constructed as wise counsellors, as in the case of Nestor in Troilus and Cressida, they are also 17

  See, for example, the uniformly pointed beards of the English sitters for the Somerset House portrait (Unknown artist, 1604[?], Oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London) which are contrastable with the more varied cuts on the Spanish delegates at the conference. I am indebted to Dr Margaret Pelling for this observation.

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potentially viewed as garrulous or foolish, as is arguably the case with Polonius in Hamlet. The stratification of men by age additionally informs the intra-masculine competition of ‘bearding’ – the literal or metaphorical tweaking of the badge of another man’s patriarchal authority – which depends upon both males inhabiting the same phase in the life-cycle. As Shepard argues, violence was acceptable between men and, ‘was only perceived as a violation when it breached accepted boundaries of propriety, determined by the status of opponents, the fairness of their match, and the location and cause of the dispute’.18 Antony’s subjection to the imperfectly bearded Caesar is therefore a particularly humiliating form of bearding for the powerful commander. If beards mark the man, and beardlessness the boy, what happens to masculinity during the liminal period of facial hair growth? Beards, after all, do not appear overnight, and the discurfication of masculinity in the early modern sex-gender system has trouble accounting for the period of equivocation between beardless boyhood and bearded manhood. The theatre, however, is uniquely able to explore the segment of masculinity between the poles, staging, as it did, the bodies of actual males who occupied the phases both before and after the perfectly bearded Age of Manhood. In the dramatic taxonomy, the time in which a male grows his beard is frequently associated with narrative and social disorder, particularly when the construction of the saucy wag – whose ‘smoothness’ consists not merely in his verbal virtuosity but also his physical hairlessness – becomes connected to the impudent and, at the extreme of the typology, criminal youth.19 Such theatrical fictions are contingent upon the perception of adolescent males in wider society, especially those not contained within systems of indenture and apprenticeship; the masterless men and vagrants. We can perhaps construe Hal as such a youth when he removes himself from the royal household to hang out with his drinking and whoring companions in the liberty of Eastcheap. We know for certain that Hal has not yet achieved full manhood because the moniker ‘boy’ is frequently attached to him. The fact that the heir apparent has not yet materialised his beard is confirmed in The Second Part of Henry the Fourth when the insulted Falstaff rants at the page he has been sent that Hal’s ‘chin is not yet fledge. I will sooner have a beard grow in the palm of my hand than he shall get one off his cheek, and yet he will not stick to say his face is a face-royal. God may finish it when he will; ‘tis not a hair amiss yet’ (2H4 1.2.20–25). Hal inhabits the cultural and dramatic space of youthful rebelliousness, the period in which the heat of increased sanguinity and/or choler of adolescence contains the potential to develop into socially reckless or dissident behaviour. Male adolescents on the stage are connected to a wider discourse of knavery and pubescence in early modern England, with an elision between the rogue and 18

 

A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003),

140. 19   See Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford, 2000), 59.

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actor evident in the Vagabond Act of 1571–72, for example, which ostensibly distinguished the two groups. The act targets masterless males over the age of 14 who may use ‘subtle, crafty and unlawful games or plays’.20 In this respect, the prevalence of disguised teenagers in the Tudor and Stuart theatre gestures towards a fear of the indeterminacy of the male in the process of growing a beard, and the boy’s ability within this period to dissimulate his social identity, as in Hal’s disavowal of his royal progeny as he drinks with his fellows in the alehouse. Of course, boy players themselves dissimulated adult male identity in plays such as Chapman’s May-Day, where Lodovico asserts, ‘thou shalt now see me stroke my beard, and/ speake sententiously’ – a prompt to the literary critic to see the prosthetic beard which is being staged.21 Reavley Gair’s claim that the oldest boy players of Paul’s would have been in their late teens endorses the fact that the company would have either been beardless or in the early stages of growing a beard, as adolescence was itself delayed during the era due to genetic, nutritional, and health factors.22 Herbert Moller contends that it was only during their midtwenties that sixteenth-century men would have sported a beard considered as meriting trimming, and that ‘An incipient beard ... not yet worth clipping, was not regarded as a sign of maturity’.23 Significantly, therefore, the Prince Hal character exists on the cusp of adult masculinity, revealed in Henry V during his courtship of Catherine, when he warns her ‘a black beard will turn white’ (5.2.160–1). Somewhere between his defeat of Hotspur at the end of Part One and his military successes in France in Henry V, Hal has become a bearded adult man. Shakespeare manages to evade the question of at what juncture some amount of facial hair becomes a beard – at what point it is full, complete and perfect – by bringing him back to the stage fully bearded; not as Hal, but as King Henry. Just as Hal’s dissemblance as a non-royal personage in Eastcheap is seen as damaging to the crown, his masquerade as a commoner the night before Agincourt is seen as the legitimate technique of a ruler, one mirrored by the Duke in Measure For Measure. It is primarily within the indeterminate phase of adolescence that disguising can be seen to have harmful consequences, largely because according to the one-sex model, this period allows youth to go ‘either way’ – a theory with a social dimension insofar as the carnival licence of boyhood must ultimately be replaced with the authority of manhood. The male must not remain in the realm of the knave lest he retain such qualities in adulthood (hence the pervasiveness of deviant unmarried soldiers in the drama, including Falstaff, whose inability to conform to the conditions of mature manliness result in 20

  Cited in D. Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (Toronto, 1998), 81; see also R. Gair, The Children of Paul’s (Cambridge, 1982), 3–4. 21   George Chapman, May-Day. A Witty Comedie, divers times acted at the Blacke Fryers (London, 1611), Cv. 22   Gair, The Children of Paul’s, 83. 23   H. Moller, ‘The Accelerated Development of Youth: Beard Growth as Biological Marker’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29.4 (1987), 752.

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his reappearance in a play devoted to exploring such matters, The Merry Wives of Windsor). As Bruce Smith writes, ‘masculinity in Shakespeare’s plays and poems is a function of time’,24 so the effeminate courtier of Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech is supplanted by the hirsute solider, who is, in turn, succeeded by the justice with his ‘beard of formal cut’ (AYL 2.7.155) – the groomed beard which I have argued represents patriarchal authority. At what point the next stage of adult masculinity is assumed varies in accordance with the genre of the play and the life path of the person, but marriage seems to be a crucial rite of passage for males both on the stage and in English cultural discourse. As many historians have argued, marriage authenticates adult masculinity with the male’s entry into the patriarchal order as a householder. It is also something delayed until a man has achieved the economic independence and associated credit-worthiness expected of adult males, often dependent in the drama upon military honours following a period of fighting abroad. A literary hero’s success on the battlefield usually corresponds with his complete beardedness and subsequent readiness for matrimony, as with the monarch in Henry V, or – in an interesting reversion – the incompletely bearded Troilus, who, after the failure of his romance with Cressida, foregoes thoughts of marriage until the outcome of the Trojan War is decided. At the play’s end, he embarks instead on another sort of union with Achilles in which ‘No space of earth shall sunder our two hates’ (5.10.27), a phrase idiomatically evocative of part of the marriage ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer, ‘Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder’. That some returning soldiers have to be coerced into matrimony indicates a reluctance to conform to heteronormativity, as in the case of Falstaff, or initially of Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, who would apparently prefer to elongate the phase of homosocial comradeship than accept Beatrice for his wife. Yet Benedick’s fellow combatant, Claudio, is conspicuously portrayed as physiologically different from his companions. He is said to have performed ‘in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion’ (1.1.14–15), and is notably provoked by Benedick with the insult ‘Lord Lackbeard’ in the final act (5.1.188). Perhaps Claudio’s failure to achieve all the qualities and characteristics of manliness perceived as requisite for marriage (symbolized by the fully-grown beard) account for his choleric and rash public humiliation of Hero. Perhaps we also can deduce from his characterization that those Shakespearean males, such as Troilus and Hal, who have trouble assimilating themselves into the institutions which will define them as adult men, would have been played by older ‘boy’ players who themselves inhabited the indeterminate phase of beard growth, and whose partial facial hair would have signified to their audiences a lack of readiness for the prescripts of mature masculinity. If so, incompletely bearded or beardless boy players, particularly those in disguise, have a more complex and variegated relationship to the semiotics of early modern manhood than previously explored by critics and

24

 

Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 69.

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historians, standing, to use Robert Weimann’s formulation, on ‘the threshold of the play and the playing of it’.25 The literary remains of the drama, the historical records of the use of prosthetic beards in theatrical productions, and the prevailing early modern discursive association of beards with male maturity, certainly indicate a stagecraft in which the social condition of the performer and degrees of beardedness visible on-stage were fundamental to audience reception and interpretation of character and plot. By deconstructing the ‘naturalness’ of facial hair, especially through the staging of false beards, however, the early modern theatre represented a challenge to the superiority of masculinity itself. While there are many discursive instances demonstrating an anxiety concerning the relative status of youth and age, the stage’s persistent use of beards in disguise plots, alongside the imitation and pastiche of patriarchal masculinity by young players may help, at least in part, to explain the cultural turn against boys’ acting companies in the early seventeenth century. Although this is largely due to the end of the commercial viability of a particular style of theatre, the embroilment of boy’s company playwrights in other political scandals for the satirical nature of their texts might suggest that the end of the fashion for ‘little eyases’ is similarly connected to the perils thought to result ‘when Boys dare to traduce men in authority’.26 The on-stage boy, eluding and mimicking adult masculine category and form, not only dramatized the social disorder attendant upon false or incomplete beardedness, he embodied it as well. Appendix As part of the ‘Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men’ project (supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada with a Research/Creation grant 2005–2008), performances of King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay were staged in Toronto and Hamilton on 24–9 October 2006. The use of false beards in these productions is worthy of consideration in an appendix, given that this project was the first to explore the complexity of early modern facial hair on the stage in practice, thereby illuminating the possible material ramifications of the discourse of facial hair in the sixteenthand seventeenth-century drama. Before watching these performances, for instance, I had wondered whether early modern players would have shaved in order to wear prosthetic beards, but the actors and costume designer found it far more practical to build on top of an actor’s actual beard when using false facial hair. The company found that when using full false beards, the moustaches were difficult to attach and kept dropping 25

     Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge, 2000), 93. 26   Thomas Tomkis, Lingua, 1607; cited in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge, 1996), 179).

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and obscuring their mouths as they spoke. They therefore only used the false hair of the chin but retained their actual moustaches when deploying prostheses. An unbearded actor wearing prosthetic facial hair in the SQM productions therefore exhibited only a chin curtain without moustache, which was anachronistic to the extent that the beard referred to the hair of both the upper lip and chin during the early modern era, having not yet been separated into component parts of moustache and chin hair in English discourse. The proven impracticality of performing with a false beard comprised of both these elements, however, raises the issue of whether Elizabethan actors would have done so, or whether they, like the ‘Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men’ (hereafter SQM) players, would have used only chin prostheses and maintained the facial hair on their upper lip as a base for the typologizing of stage masculinities. The practical experiments of the SQM plays also challenged my previous notion that adult actors would have shaved on an occupational basis – a belief which would require research into the knock-on effect of this practice on the cultural perception of early modern players. That my former ideas were modified and refined by the SQM experiments in performance lucidly demonstrates how expedient a critical jump-off point practice-based research can be for theatre historians and literary critics. Such research may be flawed to the extent that it is impossible to precisely reconstruct the mindsets of historical theatre practitioners, patrons, entrepreneurs, and audiences. However, it also reveals potential semantic dimensions to playtexts which reading alone cannot reveal. For those concerned with the reception of dramatic texts or the materiality of historical performance, I would argue that some level of practice-based research – be it an informal playreading or full-scale performance – is necessary, if not crucial. Statistically Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay used the highest proportion of false beards. Of the 26 male parts, 25 could be counted as youthful adult (the clowns and scholars, some of the rustics, and friends of Prince Edward) or adult male parts. Only one – the Post played by Derek Genova – fell squarely into roles associated with boys. Of the 25 adult male parts then, 11 utilized the actor’s actual beards to create roles, seven used false beards, and seven employed the clean-shaven faces of the actors to signify the difference of age between the younger adult male characters of students and princely fellows compared to the more assured maturity of doctors and clerics for instance, or that of class between the well-groomed noble or royal characters and the unbearded clowns or wildly-bearded rustic roles. In contrast, despite there being 38 male parts in The Famous Victories of Henry V, only four false beards were used to construct masculine types. In the production, there were not only nearly half the number of false beards and almost a third more male roles, but also around double the number of parts using the shaved chins of the actors in the construction of those roles (24 bearded parts and 14 unbearded parts, compared to 18 bearded and eight beardless characters in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay), and only two of these can arguably be considered parts for boys – the Vintner’s Boy and the French Drummer. While the expectation might have been placed on false beards to stratify the various and numerous masculinities of

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a play with such a high proportion of male parts, the stress on national rather than social difference in the text resulted in this not being the case. Exemplified by the fact that the actor, Don Allison, played both the King of England and the King of France in the play, the emphasis fell more solidly on the colours, fabrics, and signs embroidered on the costumes to differentiate males on the stage. Perhaps the use of false beards would have been an overuse of signifiers in this play, and certainly the practicalities of so many quick changes (with 11 of the 14 actors playing more than one and up to five parts), in conjunction with the historically accurate but time-consuming use of prosthetic beards attached with strings rather than with glue, precluded the deployment of too high a number of false beards in this particular production. It was, however, problematic that so many parts which audiences might have expected to see played in false beards, notably the parts of soldiers, were played by clean-shaven actors, often those doubling as women in Famous Victories or cross-cast as women in the two other plays. King Leir utilized the smallest number of false beards of all of the plays, only three in total. However, the play had the greatest number of female parts compared to the others in repertory; a ratio of 5: 21, in contrast to 2: 38 in The Famous Victories and 4: 26 in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.27 Yet, of all the productions, Leir had the greatest trouble negotiating the historical discourse of bearded male adulthood in contemporary practice. Paul Hopkins, playing the King of Gallia, was clean shaven, while the three characters who might not have been expected to sport facial hair – the Messenger, Cornwall’s servant, and Cambria’s servant – were all bearded, and this was mainly caused by the exigency for these actors to be bearded for their more prolonged stage presence in adult masculine roles in the other plays. The reverse was the case with Paul Hopkins, who played King Henry V in Famous Victories and Prince Edward in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, as well as Gallia in Leir. In pre-production discussions, the director Peter Cockett and I had decided that it was important for the character who was to become Hal to be beardless because of the socially disordered way in which he behaves in the early part of the play, a character choice repeated by Shakespeare in the second tetralogy. The failure to mark the beard which would have indicated his marriageability in the other plays in which Hopkins performed28 was a probable anachronism, and points up how touring troupes may have placed a good deal of importance on the contiguity of principal masculine parts when casting male roles across the repertoire, while simultaneously revealing the difficulty of doing so. Despite the picture produced by the SQM productions being somewhat distorted by the choice of the texts being played – chosen for scholarly interest, rather than for historically accurate or practical repertory – the productions definitively 27

  But of the four in the last play, only two are sustained parts; the other two appear only very briefly each in a single scene. 28   Hopkins could have worn a false beard, but the SQM players tended to don them only for roles in which they appeared as a different character for a scene or two, or perhaps just a cameo, in order to minimize any potential ‘wardrobe malfunctions’.

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demonstrated the effectiveness of using false beards to delineate masculine types on the all-male Elizabethan stage. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was the most notable in this respect, not merely because of the high quantity of male parts in the play, but also because of the vast array of male status on show – statuses fractured along lines of class, education, nationality, and religion as well as age. Facial hair became a primary apparatus for David Kynaston to characterize his three very diverse roles – all of which were essential to the narrative trajectory of the text but which traversed ages, nationalities and occupations. Through using dissimilar prostheses, he was able to slip convincingly from the prince’s laddish and courtly pique-devant bearded friend, Serlsby, into the more authoritatively grey-bearded, swallow-tailed Doctor Burden, through to his highest status role, the pompous and pedantic Jacques Vandermast, who displayed an extra-long beard to signify his wisdom, alongside a doctoral cap, velvet robes, and thick German accent. While instituting theories of early modern beardedness in practice was not without its problems for the actors, costume designer, and director, the uses of facial hair in the SQM productions – when used in combination with costume, voice, scenery, and props – demonstrated the possibility of constructing very different masculinities for the same actor both simply, speedily, and successfully. Of course there is no way of reconstructing early modern performances wholly authentically, but this does not render such reconstructive projects invalid from a critical perspective. All literary criticism is flawed if so; when analysing meaning in texts, at some point a critic must make assertions informed by her or his understanding of the known discourses, cultural forms, and political concerns of the period under study. Despite the evident critical issues surrounding practicebased research, the performances of King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay undoubtedly provided insight into the probable concerns of touring companies like the Queen’s Men, as well as potential solutions to the problems arising from the material limitations of itinerant playing.

Chapter 16

Performing the Queen’s Men: A Project in Theatre Historiography Peter Cockett

Shakespeare was not our contemporary, and one way to insist on that fact is to study the things which he had to deal with and which our age is free to ignore. Shakespeare had to deal with the Queen’s Men. We are free to ignore them – the first summer festival of Queen’s Men plays has yet to be held. But if measuring the difference between Shakespeare and ourselves makes for good history, and if the Elizabethans are to be thought of as not another version of ourselves but as strangers from the past, and if things nearly forgotten are the proper objects for historians to keep in view anyhow, then we think the plays of the Queen’s Men are worth careful consideration.

This statement from the preface to McMillin and MacLean’s book was the inspiration for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project, a research/creation experiment that produced three Queen’s Men plays in repertoire and performed them on a short tour of venues in Hamilton and Toronto, Canada in October 2006. The Queen’s Men and their Plays cautiously develops convincing arguments about the theatrical past through assiduous application to historical records. Our project was also guided by a desire to reach back and understand the past. We engaged in further research on the company and its working practices but instead of writing a book, we hired designers, appointed a company of actors, rehearsed the plays, and performed them within parameters set by the evidence of our research. Our insistence on a relationship between our productions and historical evidence places our work within what is often categorized as ‘original practice’ production but it was extremely important to our research team that we separate ourselves from the essentialism associated with other work in this area – much to the dismay of our publicity team, the words ‘recreation’, ‘reconstruction’, and ‘authentic’ were banned from all material related to the project. At the same time, we chose not to perform the plays in modern dress and using modern rehearsal techniques since   McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge, 1998), xvi.   The ‘Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men’ project (hereafter SQM) was sponsored by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research/Creation grant, 2005–2008. The project has continued with two further plays, The True Tragedy of Richard III (fall, 2007) and Clyomon and Clamydes (winter, 2009) in co-productions with PLS and the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto. 



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such a choice might lead to an equally problematic implication that the Queen’s Men were in some way our contemporaries. Our project was a research-creation exercise in theatrical history and it was important for us to maintain a sense of historical distance. In keeping with McMillin and MacLean’s book, we wanted to see the Queen’s Men as ‘strangers from the past’. Since the nature of that past is a matter of debate, we approached the work in the spirit of experimentation and created a production process that explored a variety of hypotheses about the company and its performance practice. These hypotheses based on relevant evidence quickly became subject to the contingencies of theatrical production and at times the pressures of production threatened to overwhelm our research agenda, but looking back on the process our inventive responses to the problems that arose teach their own lessons in theatre history, and our combination of modern and early modern theatre practice allows for an assessment of the relationship between the two. This paper will describe and analyze our process in relation to two topics: the make-up of the company and the doubling of the plays as presented in McMillin and MacLean’s book and as practiced in our project, and the effect of the rehearsal and performance process on the ideology of the plays. McMillin and MacLean’s analysis of the size and constitution of the company and its casting and doubling practices is a remarkable piece of scholarship both for its attention to detail and the careful manner in which it advances its persuasive arguments. In spite of the traditional inclination to view these plays as ‘bad’ quartos or ‘foul papers’, the authors work from the premise that the plays accurately account for the traffic of characters upon the stage and their faith yields telling results. Their analysis of each play’s largest scene discovers a remarkable consistency in the demands they make on company personnel. The early plays, The Troublesome Reign of King John and Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, need a cast of 17 and 15 respectively; the 1594 group which include our chosen plays demands 14 actors, and the later plays Clyomon and Clamydes and The Old Wives Tale, only ten. While the evidence both surprises and convinces, McMillin and MacLean are careful to qualify their claims saying that ‘this does not in itself indicate the actual size of the company, but only the economic ground-level of the company – a limit below which the company cannot perform the play as it stands’. Our original intention was to follow McMillin and MacLean’s doubling schemes but it became clear to us early on in the process that comparatively our ‘economic ground-level’ was going to be substantially lower than the original Queen’s Men. A company of 17 professional actors was ground-breaking in 1583 and a company of 14 is prohibitive today. Only the major festival companies can afford such expenditure on a regular basis. Following much crunching of numbers we decided that we 

  McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, xvi.   McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men: see Chapter 4, ‘Casting and the nature of the texts’, 97.    McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 120.    McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 100. 

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could afford a company of 12 professionals, featuring three Equity members on guest artist contracts, eight paid but non-union actors, and a musical director who would take on small roles where necessary. The remaining roles would be given to two student actors who would be involved in the productions part-time as part of an independent study course in theatre. This structure approximates our understanding of later Elizabethan companies – the Equity actors represent Elizabethan master actors, the eight non-union actors represent hired men, and the two students represent the masters’ apprentices. The relationship between the original Queen’s Men and our company is one of approximation and equivalency: the original Queen’s Men had 12 leading actors plus hired men and boys. We also know, however, that the number of personnel in the company changed over time and the position we found ourselves in as producers can be seen as equivalent to moments in the company history when the Queen’s Men reduced their numbers and had to find new ways to perform their old plays. Indeed the numbers in our company were in flux for the majority of the rehearsal and performance process and while this meant that we could not examine the effectiveness of McMillin and MacLean’s casting, it allowed us to test the company’s adaptability. It proved surprisingly difficult to recruit student actors and as we started to rehearse King Leir I had only 12 performers in place including the musical director, Scott Maynard, who was an inexperienced actor. I needed to find ways to cast the plays with the particular resources available to me at the time. McMillin and MacLean’s analysis of company numbers and doubling process followed strict principles: an actor needs about 20 lines to change costume (10 lines if they are throwing on a monk’s habit); any non-specific reference to plural extras requires two actors; and boys can only play women, silent attendants, or roles specifically described as boys as opposed to youths. The first principle is based on the pragmatics of changing costumes and remained a principle of my doubling although the line count was flexible, but the other two could not be maintained given the different personnel resources within our company. The easiest way to perform the plays with a smaller cast was to cut silent extras from scenes. Such editing proved sufficient to cast King Leir for 12, and our musical director had roles amounting to only 10 lines. The show lost a degree of pageantry and spectacle for the court and battle scenes but apart from that worked pretty effectively with a cast of 12. Famous Victories proved more difficult for several reasons. By the time we began rehearsals on this play, we had managed to recruit our first student; so, I could work out a doubling scheme for 13 actors. The student, however, was relatively inexperienced and due to his other studies could only rehearse part-time and was thus not a suitable candidate for playing multiple roles in one play. Another issue with the play is that two characters, Exeter and Oxford, 

  McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 60.   McMillin And MacLean, Queen’s Men, 190, double Warren with Friar Bungay with only a 10-line gap on the basis that putting on a monk’s habit can be done relatively quickly. 

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both of whom have relatively little to say, are on stage for significant amounts of time, making it difficult to double them with other characters and therefore harder to reduce the number of actors needed to perform the play. I chose to cast the musical director and the first student as Exeter and Oxford freeing my more versatile actors to play multiple roles. I cut many silent attendants but I was still not able to cast this play for 13 without cutting lines from the play. It had been one of the initial premises of our project that we would perform the plays uncut, but necessity is the mother of invention and I was forced to cut the silent Sheriff that accompanies the Lord Mayor to court, and the Jailer in the courtroom scene who has one line. Our research decision to perform the plays with full respect for the texts as they had survived was compromised, but on the other hand we were able to explore the adaptability of the text and the ability of the company to respond to changing personnel. After our first performance of Famous Victories we were able to recruit our second student and it proved remarkably easy to incorporate him into the next show. After two hours’ rehearsal with the company, he played the previously absent Sheriff and Jailer and an attendant for the Archbishop Bourges whom he accompanied carrying the offensive tun of tennis balls. The speed of this incorporation was made possible by the simple protocol we had developed for entrances and exits (all actors entered stage left and exited stage right), and by the fact that the company had become adept at improvising their blocking on the stage and could shift their positions in relation to the newcomer after giving him simple instructions for each scene. The process thus gave us insight into possible ways the company edited plays when the number of actors in the company changed and the surprising speed with which such changes could be made. McMillin and Maclean’s final casting guideline that boy actors could only play women or boys was also not followed by our company. Our decision here was founded not on pragmatic necessity alone but on the recent research of David Kathman, who established that the apprentice actors in early modern companies ranged from 14–22 years of age and that there is evidence of apprentices playing both male and female characters in the same play. In the original Queen’s Men, the apprentices would have played the female roles but our student ‘apprentices’ were part-time and inexperienced and thus not equipped to take on the challenging roles of women in King Leir. Our hope to employ teenaged professionals in these roles also proved impractical. Actors of the ability and experience to play the roles work primarily in film where they can demand much higher pay than we were able to offer. Furthermore, by the time an apprentice in the Queen’s Men company approached the role of Cordella he might already have several years experience playing smaller roles of women and working full-time with a company of professional actors. No such actors exist today. We chose instead to cast older actors (age range 24–7) who we felt could perform these roles with conviction and skill and these actors were officially hired men on the company pay-scale but    David Kathman, ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 220.

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operated as ‘apprentices’ working closely with the master actors in their scenes. This choice was necessitated by the size of the female roles in King Leir, but the roles for women in the other plays are less substantial, aside from the role of Margaret the fair maid of Fressingfield in Friar Bacon. Following McMillin and McClean’s maxim, the only roles open to the ‘boy’ actors in Famous Victories would be Katherine of France, the Cobbler’s Wife, Robin the tapster, and the two silent ladies that accompany Katherine in the French court. I could not afford to use my talented ‘boys’ so sparingly nor is it necessarily the case that the original company would have done so. Given apprentice actors talented enough to play the Gonorill/Ragan/Cordella triumvirate, it seems odd that they should be so sparsely employed in the other plays. We decided to experiment with other casting options for our ‘boys’. In Famous Victories, two of the ‘boys’ were used to play the prince’s young friends Ned and Tom. In practice, this casting was very effective, as it helped establish the prince’s adolescence without having to age the prince himself over the course of the play; the prince simply seemed older when he started interacting with the bearded Exeter and Oxford, instead of the beardless Ned and Tom. I also used our ‘boys’ to play the French soldiers, where the perceived femininity of the ‘boy’ actors added fuel to the stereotypical representation of the French, especially given these soldiers’ obsession with clothes.10 This casting served the ideological intentions of this nationalistic play and was a more pragmatic use of company resources than that proposed by McMillin and MacLean. Julian DeZotti, the actor playing Katherine of France, played one of the French soldiers, as well as Lawrence Costermonger and the Clerk of Office. The casting of Lawrence worked very well because Lawrence is in a subordinate position to John Cobbler and the actor’s relative youth supported the naïve enthusiasm for the wayward prince implied by the text. The Clerk’s lines are functional rather than character-driven but Julian developed a youthful, nervous, and stuttering clerk that added to the comedy in the scene. Julian played exclusively female roles in the other two plays but, in these three male roles, he was able to participate in the clowning that was so prevalent in the work of the company as a whole. This experience informed the development of the character of Margaret in the next play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and allowed us to imagine the development of a young Elizabethan actor’s career as his progressed from female roles to playing male roles in his later years. Taking small roles such as Lawrence, the Clerk, or Robin the tapster would have allowed the apprentices to extend their range as performers and prepare them for taking on larger male roles later in their careers. The original casting of the plays is unknowable but the challenges we faced as our personnel fluctuated must also have confronted the original company. The 10   The casting of the French soldiers also inspired me to cast the Dauphin as a ‘boy’ for similar comic effect. This choice however is a significant departure from the evidence of the records and the text and was only possible because we had cut Katherine’s attendant ‘ladies’ and therefore had one of our ‘boys’ free to play the Dauphin. It was a pragmatic choice motivated principally by our limited numbers.

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specific choices they made may have been different from ours but the options open to them were comparable. We can be pretty sure that the original company, for example, edited characters out of plays when circumstances demanded – McMillin and MacLean identify the phenomenon of disappearing characters as evidence of such practice. Our third play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, contains the most pertinent example of such a disappearance. In the central court scene, two references are made to a Saxony but he does not speak and his entrance is not indicated in the stage directions. McMillin and MacLean conclude that the surviving texts have been ‘cut down from larger versions’.11 If Saxony had been present the play would have demanded a minimum of 15 actors and cutting this character made it possible to perform the play with 14. Our experience with the Jailer reveals that it is surprisingly easy to make such cuts and additions to subsidiary characters as the number of actors in the company fluctuates. But Friar Bacon proved far more problematic from a casting point of view than the other plays. It demands 14 actors, but also 14 actors who are all capable of playing substantial roles in contrast to the other plays where three actors can be used to fill supporting or even silent parts. It was therefore more difficult to operate with our part-time student ‘apprentices’ on this production since they were absent from rehearsals for many scenes in which they played an integral part. The criteria adopted by McMillin and MacLean discovered a remarkable consistency in the casting of the plays published in 1594, but working with limitations on my personnel resources and a variable level of experience and time commitment between company members, the experience of casting and rehearsing the three different plays was far from consistent. While King Leir was manageable with a company of 12 actors and Famous Victories could be performed with little editing by 13, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay really called for a minimum of 14 full-time experienced actors. McMillin and MacLean were right to argue that a company of 14 actors is the economic ground zero necessary to perform the texts of all three plays as they have survived, but our research suggests that the plays are markedly different when it comes to their adaptability in the face of changing personnel resources. From this perspective Friar Bacon seems like a different kind of play. The play makes greater demands on acting resources and its reliance on spectacular special effects and the indication of the set-piece of the study significantly increased the number of props necessary to take the three plays on tour. Its increased demands on resources would have created a substantial addition to company expenses, perhaps demanding the wagon that Barbara Palmer thinks so unlikely, and I am tempted to speculate that the version of the play we have to hand represents the text of a special performance of some kind, perhaps at court where additional resources might be available. On the other hand, it might simply represent an example of the company working at its height with 14 experienced actors and the money to spend on maintaining their spectacle on tour. Without further evidence it is impossible to read back from our experience to re-assess the past in any concrete manner, 11

 

MacMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 108.

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but clearly the three plays, while showing a consistency on one level, make markedly different demands on company resources and vary in terms of ease of adaptability in the face of changing personnel. Working on the plays and adapting them to the changing conditions of our production process have given insight into the kind of decision-making that fluctuations in the Queen’s Men’s resources would have necessitated. Our personnel difficulties made simple correlations between McMillin and MacLean’s interpretation of records impossible, but in turn this difficulty presented us with new research opportunities. The experience of producing these three plays encourages us to see the Queen’s Men as a process, changing, evolving, and adapting to meet the pragmatic challenges of theatrical production. Our company proved remarkably resilient in the face of all the constant challenges. For this I have principally to thank the courage and creativity of the actors, but the rehearsal process we adopted also contributed to the adaptability of the company. As noted above, our company structure approximated the hierarchical structure of early modern theatre with master actors, hired men, and apprentices. Our rehearsal process was also constructed to reflect the current understanding of the early modern rehearsal process as presented by Tiffany Stern.12 Stern makes a compelling case out of the available evidence and we used her arguments as inspiration for our own process. It would have been unfair to expect a high performance level from our modern actors while strictly following our understanding of early modern practice; so, various concessions were made to ease them into the process. Evidence suggests, for example, that an early modern company would meet rarely in the same room before the opening of a play, but our actors came to our rehearsal rooms every day. Once there, however, they would work simultaneously on different scenes with the master actors taking the leading role in moving the scenes towards performance. The actors were given ‘parts’ and worked from them in rehearsal, but each actor also had a copy of the entire play. Since there were no directors in early modern theatre, I largely took on the role of facilitator encouraging the actors to work out the scenes for themselves and acting as a textual and historical guide where necessary, but I was also responsible for maintaining the research agenda of the project and in this respect worked in the conventional manner of a contemporary stage director in order to maintain the political ideology that informed the plays. The process throughout was a clear combination of the old and the new, and it was fascinating to watch the actors adapt to the old ways that to them were so new. Our twenty-first-century actors were used to a three and a half week-rehearsal period led by a director, but for our shows they only had between eight and 11 days to prepare each play and a relatively passive ‘director’. The pressure of time impacted the process greatly inclining the company towards simple and easily repeatable choices. My focus was to facilitate a process that would allow the plays to develop towards performance with minimum directorial interference. For 12

 

See Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford, 2000).

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example, one of the principal tasks of the modern director is to guide the traffic on and off the stage and given the lack of a director in the early modern process we experimented with ways in which a company could direct the traffic from within. We therefore developed blocking protocols that could be relied on when the actors approached new scenes. The most obvious example was the fact that actors always entered stage left and exited stage right. This decision was based on analysis of surviving texts, prompt books and parts in which I could find no reference to particular doors for entrances and exits unless two sets of characters entered simultaneously. It seemed possible that the early modern actors might have had an unspoken protocol in place that made such annotation unnecessary and I therefore decided to make all entrances and exits uniform. This cut down on decision-making and gave the actors a beginning and end for each scene. Initially, the actors spent much time analyzing and discussing the significance of the text before getting it up on its feet and once on their feet they would spend time developing elaborate blocking that would reflect their interpretation of the scenes. As the second play approached, the time pressures became clearer as the company process accelerated. The master actors were now more inclined to take responsibility for generating quick performance choices and rehearsals were driven first and foremost by the simple need to absorb the lines and establish basic blocking. Characterization and interpretation were approached in the spirit of collective improvisation led by the master actors but calling on the creative resources of all. The fluctuations in our personnel discussed above were an additional intransigent factor for the actors but the nature of the process we had adopted seemed to facilitate what could have been a highly problematic situation. After the second performance of Famous Victories into which our second student ‘apprentice’ had been incorporated after two hours’ rehearsal, we revealed his speedy insertion to the audience in a talk-back session and it was clear that it had been seamless – a credit to the actor himself but also to the company process. The fact that they could operate effectively with such uncertainty is a sign of the robust nature of the company’s working practice constructed as it was in the spirit of improvisation and out of a combination of individual responsibility, collective effort, and clear hierarchy. As the process developed, the relationship between the actors’ process, the performance as a whole, and intentions of the original company’s patrons became increasingly fascinating. Working from parts clearly affects the relationship between the actor and the play as a whole. It shifts the emphasis away from the collective impact of the play and onto the individual roles they are playing. In some respects, this is no different from modern practice as all actors tend to see the play from the perspective of their own character and will quickly read through a play underlining their lines as they go. The limited access to the text as a whole, however, exacerbates this effect when principally working from parts. The Elizabethan actor had less opportunity to assess the effect of the play as a whole before it was performed. If we accept McMillin and MacLean’s argument that the Queen’s Men were formed to serve the political agenda of powerful Protestants, how did the company maintain a consistent ideology in the plays they performed?

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Since actors had only their own parts in their hands, how did they know how one part related to the political agenda of the whole company? In a modern rehearsal the director usually maintains control over the interpretation of text. In the absence of a director, the Elizabethan actors in principle had more independence. Early theatre was a players’ theatre, and potentially the players could use performance to subvert the intentions of a playwright or even a patron should they be so inclined. The serious consequences of such an act no doubt acted as a deterrent, but having been through an approximation of the early modern rehearsal process with three plays, I feel that the process itself makes radical re-interpretations initiated by actors unlikely. First of all, plays were prepared for performance in a very short space of time and the company’s efforts had to be focused on the learning of lines rather than playing with their potential significance. In our process too, we worked extremely quickly and our modern actors had to adapt their working practices in order to get the plays on their feet in the short time available. In our initial rehearsals, the actors’ twenty-first-century training led them to explore possibilities in blocking and characterization, and to discuss the relationships involving their characters in depth. I had to encourage them to focus on learning the lines and trust to the fact that they could improvise blocking and figure out the relationships on their feet. The preparatory work they did was all extremely valuable and enriched the performance of our first play King Leir, but as the date of the first performance approached it became increasingly clear that all this work would be pointless if the actors did not know their lines. Indeed, while the actors all did an excellent job, the first performances of King Leir were quite shaky as actors grappled with their memories of the text. Once Leir opened, we started rehearsing Famous Victories, and the nature of our process was now clearer for the company who all threw themselves into line learning. The rehearsals now involved quick provisional choices often made by the master actors and then extensive drilling of the scenes in order to commit them to memory. The consequence of this working practice was that actors made simple character choices. Where modern acting methods encourage the actor to look for complexity and to make each character unique, our approximation of early modern working practice encouraged the company to make convenient choices. If one of your characters is like another in a different play, then there is no reason to distinguish between them. Seeing this as a time-saving device, I encouraged the actors to see their characters as types rather than individuals and to emphasize the similarity between characters from one play to the next. With two plays on their feet and few working days available to prepare for the third, the time constraints were even more intense and the actors felt they were reaching the limits of their mental capacity to learn lines, but by this stage the company had begun to develop a theatrical shorthand, a style, and a repertoire of characters on which they could draw. Julian Dezotti, who played Cordella in Leir and the French princess in Famous Victories, for example, was able to draw on both characters to create Margaret in Friar Bacon combining the spiritual commitment of Cordella with the coquettish qualities of Kate in order to capture Margaret’s virtuous but

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playful spirit. The process itself began to direct the plays, as actors’ choices were increasingly informed by their previous choices and one character bled into the next, and as elements of the new characters gave renewed life to the old. A further consequence of the process, however, was that the world of each play became remarkably consistent and relatively conservative in outlook. The collective vision of the play was created by the actors playing their parts simply and making choices that kept their characters in line with familiar stereotypes. For the most part I tried to take a back seat and let the process unfold, but I was also responsible for maintaining a consistent political interpretation of the texts. Our modern actors, for example, found the nationalism of Famous Victories hilarious in its extremity and were inclined to play it for irony, but I wanted to ensure that our performances reflected McMillin and McClean’s understanding of the company as a vehicle for government propaganda. This was perhaps the part of the process in which I was most active in determining the final product and, given the resistance of the company, I was led to wonder how the ideological intent of the plays was maintained by the original company. If the Queen’s Men followed the process of the London companies outlined by Tiffany Stern, then their initial contact with the play would be at the playwright’s reading. Here they would have heard the play in its entirety read by the playwright who would presumably give an inflection to his lines that communicated the politics of the play and who would be present to answer questions on this issue should they arise. After this moment, however, the company would disperse to work independently on their parts. They might access a complete copy of the play but largely they would be working from their individual parts. Parts, as I have already indicated, give the actor a distinct perspective on the play as a whole. How do they know the function of their role in relation to all the others? What information would they be looking for at the playwright’s reading? One is reminded here of the first mechanicals scene in which Bottom is very concerned to learn what type of part is Pyramus: lover, or tyrant? The type gives Bottom a clear indication of how the part should be played. Although clearly a degree of comic exaggeration modifies Shakespeare’s scene, I think, having been through the process, that Bottom’s questions are actually good ones. The type of parts would often be clear to the actors from their name: a prince, or a clown, or a constable, but where the type was unclear the actor might ask the playwright for clarification. That such a discussion might have taken place between actors and playwright now strikes me as realistic rather than comic. I also think that the interpretation of the play in performance would be contained by this working practice. As a modern actor and director I know that the actor has the interpretive and charismatic power to shift the audience’s perspective on the ideology of a play. To put it simply, the actor can make a villain seem like a hero and a hero like a villain through the performance choices made in rehearsal. Similarly the actor can turn a character intended for ridicule into a subject for sympathy, and vice versa. A company that builds performances of plays in reference to type characters is less likely to reinterpret a play in this manner. If each actor plays his part according to type, then the political message of the play is maintained without

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the monitoring presence of a director or playwright. Of course, in rehearsal and performance the players were no doubt adept at interpreting the message of their plays and adjusting their performances according to their own inclinations or the wishes of their patrons, but working in this manner for the first time, it struck me that the process itself was inclined towards political conservatism. The one exception to this would be the improvisations of Tarlton and the clowns, where the individual performer was given more scope to express himself and any political convictions he might hold independent of the playwright’s intentions and the objective of powerful patrons, subject of course to consequences of the law should he go too far. The Queen’s Men, of course, had a large number of actors famous for clowning: Tarlton aside, John Adams, John Singer and Robert Wilson were all known for their skills as comedians. It became increasingly clear in our later performances of Famous Victories that the improvisatory possibilities of performance are not confined exclusively to the lead clown character. The final performances of this play were in the student bar at McMaster University, and at the Tranzac Club in Toronto which was set up to approximate an Elizabethan inn-yard. The atmosphere was lively at both venues and I gave the actors free reign to play to the audience and into the space. At Quarters, the McMaster space, the actors were playing on the same level as the audience and could interact with them freely. Over the course of our rehearsal and performance process the company had become increasingly comfortable when engaging the audience directly in these highly interactive plays. The final performances of Famous Victories took this interaction to a new level. At Quarters, Derick and John Cobbler entered with Cobbler’s wife and travelled a circuitous route through the audience improvising dialogue on the way before returning to the stage for the scene proper. After the battle scene, our prince paused to quench his thirst with an audience member’s pint before resuming his dialogue. The atmosphere was electric and the engagement between actors and audience was central to their experience of the story, but at this performance the fundamental manner in which the story was told remained consistent with previous performances. This Famous Victories was a rambunctious, dynamic, and highly patriotic/nationalistic version of the life of King Henry V. The first performance at the Tranzac club, however, was another matter. For this performance we had also created a tavern atmosphere, building our small stage in the centre of the room and having the audience stand around on three sides. The audience, for this performance, was constituted by a substantial number of invited academics and a fair spattering of actors’ friends. The atmosphere was festive from the start as the audience responded enthusiastically to the opening scenes. The degree and quality of the laughter produced, to my ear, was notably distinct from previous performances. As an observer, I suspected two factors at play here. One was a contingent of young friends of the actors who were determined to have a good time and find humour at every opportunity. The other was an audience loaded with academics who appreciated the topical and inter-textual references in a characteristic manner. The quality of the laughter contained a higher degree of

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irony than I had detected in previous performances. The actors, attuned as they were by this point to their audience, responded in kind and I could see them distancing themselves slightly from their characters’ statements. The winking separation between actor and character created a conceptual and performative space within which irony flourished. The result was a high level of hilarity and a laughter distinct in tone from other performances, a laughter that acknowledged the extremity of the nationalism in the play and enjoyed it in a manner that verged on parody. In effect the performance worked counter to the intentions of the original company as the audience laughed at the nationalist sentiment and the play’s propagandistic stereotyping. Such a response would have been possible but unlikely in the company’s original audiences, and the fact that one of our audiences responded in this way should not be read either as indicative of original responses or as a valid interpretation of the intentions of the playwright. The real lesson for me here was the company’s ability to adapt their performance to the inclinations of their audience; or to see it from the converse perspective, the way in which the company changed their performances under the influence of a particular audience. While we have little surviving evidence of audience response, it is safe to say that the political agenda of the Queen’s Men’s principal patrons should not be taken as a sign of the inclinations of their audiences; in fact, quite the opposite is true, since political propaganda would have been redundant if the country was unified by a common goal. Surely the original company would have been sensitive to the political underbelly of the variety of civic and rural areas they visited. The performance of our Queen’s Men and their increasing ability to adapt each play to its space and to its specific audience is a reminder that the original company was working in a complex political landscape and could well have adapted performances to suit a particular audience, making the queen’s message more palatable to her potentially disruptive subjects. While the actual response of our audience cannot be taken as an indicator of original responses, a connection can be made on the basis of process. The company’s ability to adapt to and manipulate audience response must have been a key to its success. The ability of performers to influence an audience is part of the attraction of theatre as a means of political propaganda, but the fact that performers also can be influenced by audiences is a sign of the potential limits of its political effectiveness since an unmonitored company of players might change the effect of a performance under the influence of a particular audience in a manner that might work counter to the intentions of their patrons. Confronting the pragmatic difficulties of staging these plays in a touring repertoire has given us new insight into the complex relationship between the working practices of the company, the dramaturgy of their plays, and the effect of those plays in performance. None of the choices we made are definitive, but our decision-making process itself and its consequences have shed light on the company as it might have been in practice. Working through a process of approximation and compromise, we have used modern performance as a means to explore the historical evidence available on the company by putting it into action

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and observing the consequence of our choices and their relationship to modern theatre practice and to the current understanding of the original practice of the Queen’s Men. The key thing is not the authenticity of any of the choices we made, but the way those choices reveal the theatrical company as a process rather than a fixed entity. Theatrical production simply cannot be frozen in historical record, nor can a sense of the active quality of our subject be fully communicated in the written word.

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Index

Abingdon 13 Abraham and Lot 8 Achley, Thomas 102 Adams, John 100–101, 239 Admiral’s Men 2–7, 9–10, 12, 38–9, 72, 91, 106 affrays 11, 44, 108 Alarum Against Usurers 167 All for Money 151, 155 allegory 147–58 Alleyn, Edward 3, 34, 94, 105 Allhallows Lombard Street, London, parish of 69–72 Allot, Robert England’s Parnassus 92 Anatomie of Abuses 82 Androes, Harry 73 Anglica Historia 56–7, 61 Anthony and Cleopatra 86, 221 Apius and Virginia 152–5 Archdel, Sarah 83 Armada, the 16, 51, 106, 110, 113, 121, 143 Armin, Robert 93–4, 119, 206 As You Like It 143, 218 ‘Atheist’s Tragedy, The’ 79 Atkins, Thomas 48 Aubrey, John Brief Lives 78–9, 86, 92 Axton, Peter 67 Bacon, Anthony 74 Bacon, Francis 74, 159 Bacon, Lady Anne 74 Bale, John Kynge Johan 184 ballads see poems and ballads Bartholomew Fair 218–19 battlefield ballet 104–6 bawdiness and bawdy houses 74, 82–4, 92, 96, 103, 162–3, 155, 204 Bear Inn, the 46 bear-baiting 44, 48 beards and facial hair 16, 217–28

Beaufort, Lady Margaret aka Lady Stanley 53, 56–7 Bell Inn, the 5, 65–6, 69–74 Bell Savage, the 65–6, 69, 72, 74 Bellendon 9 Bendy, John 72–3 Bishopsgate Street 65–7, 69, 73–4 ‘Black Batemen of the North’ 106 Blackfriars 74, 78, 81, 219 Blackfriars replica 77 Blaxton, John The English Usurer 162 Blind Beggar of Alexandria 9 Blount, Charles, Lord Mountjoy 137, 139 Boar’s Head Inn, the 94 ‘Booke called Richard crockbacke, A’ 3 ‘Bosworth ffeilde’ (poem) 57 boy players and companies 29, 149–50, 219–20, 223, 225, 231–3 braggart characters 172, 174 Brayne, John 80 Bridewell 73–4 Brief Lives 78–9, 86, 92 Bristol 13 Broad Street 68 broadsides see poems and ballads Brome, Richard 201, 220 Buc, Sir George 142 Buchell, Arendt van 85 Buckingham 8 Bull Inn, the 5, 65–9, 71–4, 82, 93, 206 Burbage, James 65, 71, 79–80 Burbage, Richard 3, 6, 83, 90, 214 Burghley, Lord see Cecil, William Cambridge 42–9 Cambridge University 14, 45–7, 219 prohibition of Queen’s Men 41–50 Cambyses 149–50 Carey, Henry, Lord Hunsdon 47 Castle of Perseverance, The 151–2 Catiline 205 Cavendish household 27–9

262

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Cavendish, William 35 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 41, 43–4, 46, 49, 60, 69 Chamberlain’s Men 2–3, 5–6, 38, 41, 47, 49, 107, 140–41 at the Curtain 77–9, 81, 83, 88, 89, 93 ‘Chance Medley’ 106 Chapman, George 9, 223 Chatsworth 35–6 Cheshire 51–2, 55, 58–9 Chesterton 43–4, 47–9 Children of the Chapel 3 children’s companies see boy players and companies Cholmley, Sir Richard 107 Chronicle of Fabyan, The 55, 173 Churchyard, Thomas A Warning for the Wise 89 Clifford household 27–9, 35 Clifford, John 63 Clifford, Margaret, wife of Henry Stanley 60, 63 clowns and clowning 16–18, 93–5, 102–3, 105–6, 109, 124, 172–4, 182, 206, 208, 239 Club Law 42, 49 Clyomon and Clamydes 4, 18, 101–2, 124, 142 modern performance 229–30 Cobbler’s Prophecy, The 102, 169 Cobham, Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester 63 Cocke, John 11 college halls 44 Collier, John Payne 79 ‘Come cudle me Cudie’ (jig) 212 Conflict of Conscience, The 154 Conscience (character) 152–5, 157, 161, 166–8 Copcot, John 45 costumes 2, 16, 29–32, 39, 78, 231; see also beards and facial hair Court of Conscience, The 84 court performances 12–13, 16, 47, 63–4, 100, 102, 104, 124, 137, 140–41 Coventry 6, 62, 219 Cowper, John 37 Creede, Thomas 9–11, 52, 103, 129, 142–4

Cronicle history of Henry the fift, The (Q) 135–44 Cross Keys Inn, the 63, 65–6, 69, 71–2, 74 cross-dressing 219 Crowland Chronicle 55 Culpeper, Nicholas A Directory for Midwives 187–8 Cumberland, earls of see Clifford household Curtain, the 2, 6, 65, 72, 74, 77–96, 139, 206 cutpurses 68–9, 73, 95 Cymbeline 18 ‘Cynocephali, The’ 100–101 Cynthia’s Revel’s 3 Daniel, Samuel Civil Wars 132 Davies, John Orchestra 207 Day, John The Travailes of Three English Brothers 80, 107–8 De Witt, Johannis 84–5 Defence of Poetry 123, 128, 130 Derby, earls of see Stanley, Edward; Stanley, Thomas Derby’s Men 4, 52, 61, 63, 101 Devil is An Ass, The 158 dismissal payments see under players divine right of monarchs 186, 189, 191, 194, 197 Doctor Faustus 8–9, 89 Doncaster 35–6 doubling 33, 127, 131, 150, 230–32 Downame, George Lectures on the XV Psalme 163 Downton, Thomas 38 Drayton, Michael(?) 202 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester 13, 15, 43, 70 Dutton, John 100 earthquakes 89–90 Edmund Ironsides 5, 104–5 Edmunds, John 45–6 Edward I 104–5 Elephant Inn, the 46 Elizabeth I, queen of England 11, 15, 60–61, 185, 195–7 Elizabeth and Charles’s Men 95

Index Elizabeth of York 53, 57 England’s Parnassus 92 English Usurer, The 162 Essex’s Men 62 Everyman 152 Every Man in His Humour 78, 90–93, 135, 143 Every Man Out of His Humour 3, 87, 94, 135, 143, 203 Everys, Elizabeth 73–4 extemporal themes 94, 171–2; see also under Tarlton, Richard Fabyan, Robert Chronicle 55, 173 Fair Maid of Italy, The 7–8 Falcon Inn, the 48 Famous Victories of Henry V, The (FV) 4, 10, 15–16, 18, 21–2, 27, 29, 31, 38–9, 65, 102, 123–4, 132, 135–44, 172–7 modern performance 181, 225–8, 231–2, 234–9 Farington, William 52, 62–3 Fauconbridge, Philip (character) 172, 177–80, 185–92, 196–7 ‘Felix and Philiomena’ 102 female roles 2, 22, 172, 179, 232–3 , 237 fencers and fencing 72, 91, 95, 209 ‘fflodden ffeilde’ (poem) 58 fire of London (1666) 67, 72 Fleet Street 71 Foole upon Foole 93 Forman, Simon 83 Fortune, the 1, 5, 94–5 ‘Four Sons of Fabius, The’ 100 Four Swans Inn, the 66 Foxe, John Booke of Martyrs 184 framing devices 124–5 Fraud (character) 21, 112, 116, 150, 166, 170 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 4, 7–8, 16, 18–19, 21, 27, 29, 31–3, 38, 49, 124, 142 modern performance 225–8, 233–5, 237 Friar Francis 8 Fulwell, Ulpian Like Will to Like 151, 168

263

Gardiner, S. Doomes-day Booke 89 Garland, John 37 Garlic (jig) 206 George a Greene 8 Gerontus (character) 20, 150, 164–5 Gibbes, John 74 Gillemeau, Jacques Child-Birth or, The happy deliuerie 187, 189 Globe, the 1–2, 6, 77–8, 81, 83, 86–8, 93, 139, 206 Globe replica (‘Shakespeare’s Globe’) 74, 77 God Speed the Plough 8 Gorbuduc 15 Gosson, Stephen 148 Gracechurch (Gracious) Street 65, 69, 70–72 Great Chronicle of London 55–6 great halls 27–8, 31–2 great houses 13–14, 16, 27–8 ‘Green Curtain’ see Curtain, the Green Dragon Inn, the 66–8 Green, Thomas 93 Greene, Robert 3–4, 7–8, 49, 68–9, 86, 123, 147, 171, 202 Gresham, Sir Thomas 66 guildhalls 13, 44–6, 49 Guilpin, Everard Skialetheia 84, 168, 201, 204, 206, 211 Gunston, Benjamin 73–4 Hall’s Chronicle 61, 173, 176 Hamilton, Ontario 225, 229, 239 Hamlet 86, 211, 222 Hanging Sword Inn, the 71 ‘Hannibal and Hermes’ 106 Hardwick 28, 35, 37 Hardwick, Bess of 28, 35 Harrison, Joanna 67 Harrison, Mathew 66–7 Harvey, Gabriel 119–20 Hatcher, John 43 Haughton, Henry 71–3 Haughton, Henry, son of Henry 71 Haughton, Peter 71 Heath, John Two Centuries of Epigrammes 82 Hector of Germany, The 79

264

Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603

Henry IV, Part 1 137, 140, 142, 174, 220 Henry IV, Part 2 137, 140, 142–4, 176, 213–15, 222 Henry V 2, 10, 78, 87–9, 135, 138–2, 142, 144, 223–4 Henry VI 9, 140 Henry VII (Richmond) 53, 55–60, 63 Henry VIII 58 Henslowe, Philip 1, 3, 8–9 Diary 5, 7–9, 38, 202 lost inventories 32, 39, 217 hereditary succession see divine right of monarchs Heywood, Thomas 84, 148, 202 History of King Richarde the Thirde 56 history plays 21, 102–3, 106, 123–4, 127, 132–3, 171–2, 181 Holinshed, Raphael Chronicle 61, 132, 140, 173, 176, 184 Holywell Street 96 Horsepoole, Elizabeth 70 Horsepoole, William 70 Hospitality (character) 112, 150, 155, 166–8 How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad 84 Howard of Effingham, Lord 47 Hunsdon’s Men 13 Huon of Bordeaux 8 Impatient Poverty 148–9, 153–4 inns and innyards 5–6, 13, 46, 48, 63, 65–75, 94, 239 Interlude of the Four Elements, The 152 ‘Irish Knight, The’ 100 Isle of Dogs, The 81 Islip, Adam 142 Jaggard, William 144 James IV 4, 202, 214 Jane Shore (character) 129 Jegon, John 45 ‘Jenny come tye my’ (jig) 212 Jew of Malta, The 6–9, 164 jigs 18, 93, 95–6, 171, 201–15 John of Bordeaux 7 Johnson, William 101

Jonson, Ben 3–4, 78–9, 81, 87, 90–92, 94–5, 152, 155–8, 171, 202–5, 211, 220 Judde, John, son of Sir Andrew 70 Judde, Richard, son of Sir Andrew 70 Judde, Sir Andrew 70 Judge Nemo (character) 151, 155, 164, 166, 168–9 Kempe, Will 83, 90, 93–4, 107, 203–6, 209–10, 213 jigs and morrises 205, 207, 209, 215 Kendall, Thomas 219 King John (character) 22, 179–80, 184, 186, 188–95, 197 King Lear 108, 140, 187 King Leir 4, 7–8, 15, 20–21, 27, 29, 31, 38, 102, 108, 123, 140, 142 modern performance 225, 227–8, 231–5, 237 ‘Kinge Lere’ 108 King’s Men 3–5, 77, 108 Kirkham, Edward 219–20 Kirtling 43, 47–8 Knack to Know a Knave, A 106–7 Knack to Know an Honest Man, A 9 Knell, William 65, 102, 143 ‘Knight of the Burning Rock, The’ 100 Knowsley 54, 62 Kyd, Thomas 3, 9, 102, 126, 147 Kynge Johan 184 ‘Lady Bessy’ (poem) 61 Lancashire 51–5, 57–60 Lanham, John 101 Lanman, Henry 80–81 Large and Accurate Map of London 67, 72 Lathom 15, 52, 60–63 Leadenhall Market 69 Legge, Thomas 45, 49 Leicester 13 Leicester, earl of see Dudley, Robert Leicester’s Men 43, 62, 71, 101–2, 106, 111, 117 Leigh, Mr 62 Lemnius, L. The Touchstone of Complexions 218 Lenox, Massachusetts 77

Index Lewes of France (character) 192–4 licenses see under players Life of King Henry the Fift (F) 135–44 Like Will to Like 151, 168 Locrine 5, 103 Lodge, Thomas Alarum Against Usurers 167 Lodowick (character) 129 Lombard Street 69 Londesborough 35–6 London 12–13, 63, 65–75 London (setting) 90, 112–13, 118 London Against the Three Ladies 148, 168 Long, Maurice 80 Love’s Labour’s Lost 207, 212 Lucre (character) 21, 112–13, 154–5, 165–6, 168–9 Ludgate 65 Lupton, Thomas All for Money 151, 155 Luscus 81–2 Lyly, John 147, 220 ‘Madman’s Morris’ 106 magic 18–20, 32 male childbirth metaphors 22, 185–90, 197 ‘Man in the Moon Drinks Clarret, The’ 95 Mancini, Domenico De Occupatione Regni Anglie 55 Mandeville, Sir John 101 Mankind 152, 167 maps 67, 72, 85 marketplaces 44 Marlowe, Christopher 2–4, 7–10, 12, 49, 79, 92, 104–5, 109–11, 147–8, 164–5, 167, 171 Marston, John 81, 201, 206–8 Martin Marprelate 119, 204 Mary, queen of England 60 Mary, queen of Scots 60 masks 150 Masque of Beauty and Desire 15 masques 3, 15, 211 maternal kingship metaphors 185, 191–4, 196 May-Day 223 Mease, George 66–7 Mease, Isabel, daughter of William 67 Mease, Julian, wife of William 67

265

Mease, Thomas, son of George 67 Mease, William 66–7 Measure for Measure 223 Mendoza, Bernardin 51–2 Merchant of Venice, The 144 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 224 Middleton, Thomas 4, 83, 155, 220 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 144, 220, 238 minstrels 59 Mirror for Magistrates 129 morality play tradition 18, 20–21, 149–52, 154, 162, 167, 173–4, 177, 181 More, Thomas 56–7, 61 Morley’s Men 13 Morton, Thomas 56–7 Mortymer, William 71 Mountjoy, Lord 137, 139 Much Ado About Nothing 143–4, 221, 224 Munday, Anthony 202 Musculus, Wolfgang Common Places of Christian Religion 161 musicians 47 Nashe, Thomas 49, 81, 119–20, 171, 202–3 Nature, Wit and Science 152 Neville, Richard, earl of Warwick 63 New Park 15, 51–2, 54, 62–3 Newes from the North 79 Newgate Market 73 Newington Butts 65, 74 Newton, Samuel 95 ‘No biding in London for Conscience and Love’ (ballad) 116 Nobody and Somebody 5, 106 Norden, John Civitati Londoni 85 North, Roger, Lord 43–4, 47–8 Northbrooke, John 79 Northern Lass, The 201 North’s Men 47–8 Norwich 11, 207, 209 Nun Alice (character) 177–8 ‘Of the Princess Elizabeth’ (poem) 58 Ogilby and Morgan map 67, 72 Old Wives Tale 4, 17–18, 125, 131, 230 Order for suppressing of Jigges 204 Orlando Furioso 4

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Osborne, Mark 74 outdoor playing 68–9, 72 Oxford University 21, 41–2, 46, 49, 219 Oxford’s Men 13, 43–4, 46–7 Page (character) 128–30 ‘Painter’s Daughter, The’ 100 Paris Garden, the 89 Parnassus 47, 49 Parris, Richard 44, 48 Parris, Thomas 44, 48, 67 Paul’s Boys 4, 223 Pavier, Thomas 143–4 Peddlar’s Prophecy, The 102 Peele, George 4, 18, 104–6, 125, 147 Pennington, Leonard 70–71 Pericles 108 ‘Phyllida and Corin’ 102 Pierce Penilesse 120, 203 Platter, Thomas 94 play texts aural transmission 141–2 players 11, 15, 17, 29, 72 accommodations 14, 27–9 dismissal payments 14, 27, 35, 37, 41, 45, 49 doubling parts 33, 127, 131, 150 licenses 43–7, 49, 65–7, 69; see also boy players and companies playhouses; see also individual playhouses by name signs and flags 84–6 replicas 74, 77, 96 playing places 2, 5, 28, 124; see also individual inns and playhouses by name college halls 44 great halls 27–8, 31–2 great houses 13–14, 16, 27–8 guildhalls 13, 44–6, 49 inns and innyards 5–6, 13, 46, 63, 65–75, 94, 239 markets 44 outdoor venues 68–9, 72 private residences 46 Poel, William 77 poems and ballads 57–8, 61–3, 79, 95–6, 109, 114–19, 201, 208 Poetry (character) 126–7, 131

Pope, Thomas 93 Porter, Henry The Two Angry Women of Abington 84 Preston, Thomas 45 Prince Edward (character) 16 Prince Henry (character) 16, 173–7 Prince Henry’s Men 5 Prince’s Men 95 Princess Elizabeth (character) 130–31 Privy Council 11, 13, 16, 41–2, 49, 51, 60 prologues 87–8, 114, 117, 124, 126 properties 16, 30–33, 39, 78 , 234 kinds of broadsides 118 masks 150 shields 113–14, 118, 121 see also beards and facial hair prostitutes 6, 73–4, 83, 95 Pückelherings Dill dill dill (jig) 212 Puttenham, George 148 Queen Anne’s Men 46, 49, 95, 106–7 Queen Elianor (character) 186 Queen Mother (character) 130–31 Queen’s Men Cambridge University prohibition upon 41–50 cast size 230–35 collaboration with Sussex’s Men 6–7, 38 company/house style 4–5, 16–17, 99–101, 104–6, 111, 120, 124, 171–3 modern performances 181, 225–41 plays in print 8–10, 108, 110, 115, 117–20 political agenda 15–16, 124, 172, 177, 182–4, 195–7, 236–40 repertory 4–6, 77, 99–100, 102, 105, 107, 123; see also individual plays by title touring 2, 12–16, 27–8, 107, 124, 141, 183–4, 234 Quips upon Questions 94, 119 Ranger’s Comedy, The 7 Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune 4–5, 101

Index replica playhouses 74, 77, 96 Report (character) 129–30, 132 Return to Parnassus, The 82 Revels Office 71, 100, 102, 220 masters of 94, 142, 202 Richard III 52–3, 55–6, 60–61, 144 Richard the Confessor 8 Richards, Thomas Misogonus 204 Richmond, earl of see Henry VII Romeo and Juliet 78, 81–2, 84, 86–7, 90, 93 Rose, the 1–2, 5, 6, 10, 65, 68, 85, 106 Rose, the, replica 77 Rowe, Thomas 74 Rowley, William 80, 93, 107–8 Rudd, Anthony Misogonus 204 Russell, Francis 43 Sackville, Richard 71 Saddlers’ Company 71–2 ‘Saint Christopher’ plays 107 St Ethelburga, parish of 66–7 St Helen Bishopsgate, parish of 67, 94 St Michael Cornhill, parish of 72 St Paul’s 74 St Peter Cornhill, parish of 66 satire 20–21, 148, 171–2, 174–6, 179, 204 Savage, Sir John 55, 57–8, 62 Saviolo, Vincentio 91 ‘Scotish ffeilde’ (poem) 58 Scourge of Villainy, The 201, 206 Sejanus 3 Selimus 4, 21, 101, 123–4, 142 ‘Seven Deadly Sins, The’ 102, 120 sex 82–3, 86, 204, 217 ‘Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men’ (SQM) project 225–41 Shakespeare in Love 79 Shakespeare, William 3–4, 9, 57, 63, 78–9, 83, 87, 89–90, 95, 108, 138–42, 147, 165, 220, 223 ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’ 74, 77 Shank, John 206 Shanks Ordinary (jig) 202 Sharpham, Edward Cupid’s Whirligig 207 Sheale, Richard 59 Sherburne, Sir Richard 51 shields 113–14, 118, 121

267

Shirburn, Sir Edward 92 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The 164 Shrewsbury 219 Sidney, Philip 148 Defence of Poetry 123, 128, 130 signs and flags 84–6 Simon and Susan (jig) 212 Simplicity (character) 109, 114–18, 120–22, 150, 166 Simpson, Christopher 107–8 Simpson, Robert 107–8 Singer, John 239 Singing Man of Trinity see Atkins, Thomas Singing Simpkin (jig) 212 Sir John Oldcastle 106 Skialetheia 84, 168, 201, 204, 206, 211 Skinners’ Company 71 Skipton Castle 28, 33, 35 Smith, Thomas 43 Smith, W. 79 Smith, William 37 Smythe, Alice, wife of Thomas 70 Smythe, John, son of Thomas 69–70 Smythe, Thomas 69–71 Smythe, Thomas, son of Thomas 70 Soliman and Perseda 102–3 Some, Robert 48 ‘Song of Bessy’ (ballad) 57 Spanish Tragedy, The 8–10, 126, 211 special effects 30, 32, 234 magic 18–20, 32 thunder and lightning 30, 33 Spenser, Gabriel 91–2 stage combat and sword-play 18, 31–2, 79, 91 Stanley, Edward, 1st Baron Mounteagle 58–9 Stanley, Edward, 3rd earl of Derby 60 Stanley, Eleanor, 1st wife of Thomas 63 Stanley family 15–16, 52 Stanley, Ferdinando, Lord Strange, son of Henry 51–4, 61–4 Stanley, George, Lord Strange 53–7, 59, 61, 63 Stanley, Henry, 4th earl of Derby 51–3, 60–63 Stanley, James, bishop of Ely 58 Stanley, Joan, Lady Strange 54, 63

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Stanley, Lady see Beaufort, Lady Margaret ‘Stanley poem, the’ 59 Stanley, Sir John 63 Stanley, Sir William 56–60, 63 Stanley, Thomas, Lord Stanley and 1st earl of Derby 53–7, 59, 63 Stanley, Thomas, bishop of Sodor and Man 59 Staple of News, The 158 Stationers’ Register 65, 80, 142–3 Statute against Usury 160–61, 169 Staunton, Virginia 77 stock characterizations 171–2, 177, 179–82 Stow, John 173, 176 Strange’s Men 3, 6–7, 12, 38, 62–4, 106 Stubbes, Philip Anatomie of Abuses 82 Sturbridge Fair 43–4, 48 Sussex’s Men 6–8, 38, 100, 102 Swan, the 81, 85, 206 Talbot, Gilbert 56–8 Talbot, John, Lord Strange of Blackmere 63 Tamburlaine (character) 3 Tamburlaine 8–10, 104, 109–11, 114 Tarlton, Richard 8, 18, 21, 65, 69, 93–4, 100–103, 107, 114, 119–20, 124, 140, 203, 206, 210, 239 death 12 106, 110, 117–19, 172–3 extemporized themes 93, 117, 119, 203, 205–6, 208–10, 214–15 picture 114, 117–19 ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ 102, 120 Tarlton’s Jests 65–6, 68, 74, 143, 206, 208–9, 211 Tarlton’s Newes Out of Purgatorie 119, 203 Theatre, the 65, 72, 74, 79–83, 86, 89, 91 Thirde and Last part of Conny-Catching, The 68 This Worlds Folly 86 Three Ladies of London, The 20–21, 101, 111–12, 117, 147–70, 220 Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, The 4, 15, 101, 106, 109–22, 124, 148, 160, 168–70, 183, 230 ‘Three Shirleys, the’ see The Travailes of Three English Brothers ‘Three Sisters of Mantua, The’ 100

thunder and lightning 30, 33 Tide Tarrieth No Man, The 151, 162 title-pages 10, 79, 90, 99, 120, 129, 142–4, 183 Titus Andronicus 1, 8 Toronto, Ontario 181, 225, 229, 239 Travailes of Three English Brothers, The 80, 107–8 Trevisa, John 218 Troilus and Cressida 221 Troublesome Raigne of King John, The 4, 15, 21–2, 123, 171–2, 177–81, 183–97 modern performance 230 True Tragedy of Richard III, The 4, 21–2, 52, 54, 61–2, 102, 104, 123–31, 140–42, 144 modern performance 229 Truth (character) 126–8, 131 Tudor, Henry, earl of Richmond see Henry VII Tunstall, Henry 71–2 Tunstall, James, son of Henry 71–2 Twelfth Night 163 Two Angry Women of Abington, The 84 Two Centuries of Epigrammes 82 Two Gentlemen of Verona 210 Tylney, Edmund 94 Urswick, Sir Christopher 57, 60 Usury (character) 162, 165–6, 169 usury 20–21, 159–70 Vergil, Polydore Anglica Historia 56–7, 61 Very lamentable and woful discourse of the fierce fluds, A (broadside) 208 Vice characters 150–51, 155 Volpone 3, 155–6 Volpone (character) 156–7 Voltore (character) 156–8 wagons 29, 31–3, 234 Walker, Edward 67, 71–2 Walsingham, Sir Francis 15, 43, 46–7 Wapull, George The Tide Tarrieth No Man 151, 162 Warbeck, Perkin 60 Warning for the Wise, A 89

Index Warwick, earls of 63 Warwick’s Men 100, 102 Watson, Thomas 102 Wentworth, Paul 195–6 Wentworth, Peter A Pithie Exhortation to her Majesty 196 West, Richard The Court of Conscience 84 Wharton, John Wharton’s Dream 162 Wheler, Hugh 67 Whitby 107 White, Edward 142 White, Godlyffe, wife of John 73 White, John 73 Whitehall 139 Whitgift, John 45 Wilkins, George The Travailes of Three English Brothers 80, 107–8

269

‘Willie and Peggie’ (ballad) 117 Wilson, Robert 3–4, 15, 101, 103, 106–7, 110–11, 159–70, 239 Wise Man of West Chester, The 9 Wit (character) 109, 115, 117 Wither, George 82, 93, 163 women see female characters Wood, Anthony à 86 Woodes, Nathaniel Conflict of Conscience 154 Worcester’s Men 94, 106 World and the Child, The 152 Wynsour, Catherine 67 York 35–7 Yorkshire 28, 36–7, 107