Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays 9780300206890

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Lord Str ange’s Men and Their Plays

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LORD STR ANGE’S MEN AND THEIR PLAYS Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College, and from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2014 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Electra type by Westchester Publishing Services Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manley, Lawrence, 1949– Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays / Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-19199-8 (hardback) 1. Theatrical companies—England—London—History—16th century. 2. Theater—England—London—History—16th century. 3. Literature and society—England—History—16th century. 4. English drama— Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. I. MacLean, Sally-Beth. II. Title. PN2589.M36 2014 792′.094209031—dc23 2013044555 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10

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Lawrence Manley dedicates this book to his children, Jonathan and Laura

Sally-Beth MacLean dedicates this book to her grandchildren, Lachlan, Rebecca, Hunter, Malcolm, Kingsley, and Giles

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CONTENTS

Preface ix Introduction

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o n e Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

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t w o Lord Strange’s Men in London, 1589–1593

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t h r e e A Census of the Repertory I: The Rose Plays

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f o u r A Census of the Repertory II: Lost Plays and Others f i v e The Archive: Sources and Genres in the Repertory s i x Repertoire: The Plays in Per formance

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n i n e Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men t e n Endings

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s e v e n Politics and Religion in the Repertory e i g h t Travels and Per formance Venues

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A p p e n d i x A : Henslowe’s Diary Transcriptions A p p e n d i x B : Repertory Audit

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A p p e n d i x C : Itineraries of Lord Strange’s Men, 1576–1593 A p p e n d i x D : Casting Studies

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A p p e n d i x E : Actor Comparison Chart

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Contents Notes

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Bibliography Index

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PREFACE

This is a collaboration in which responsibilities have been divided but also shared at every turn. Discussions of family patronage traditions and touring in Chapters 1, 8, and 10 were the primary responsibility of Sally-Beth MacLean, with portions contributed by Lawrence Manley; the remaining chapters were the primary responsibility of Lawrence Manley, but with numerous contributions from Sally-Beth MacLean. Appendixes A and C were prepared by SallyBeth MacLean; Appendixes B, D, and E, by Lawrence Manley. Together, we have discussed and revised every aspect of this book over a period of several years. We fully share responsibility for the result. We have attempted as much as possible to use original sources, which have been transcribed and cited according to editorial principles established by the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project (see Appendix A for details). Every attempt has been made to seek out surviving family records and correspondence of the Stanleys, at the Lancashire Record Office in Preston; the British Library; the Huntington Library; and in collections such as the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House and the Shrewsbury/Talbot Papers at Lambeth Palace Library. Manuscripts relating to other aspects of Strange’s Men’s career have been consulted at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Dulwich College Archive; the Essex Record Office; the London Metropolitan Archives; The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew; and the Suffolk Record Office. We are grateful to these institutions for permission to quote from manuscripts in their collections. Plays are quoted, whenever possible, with through-line reference to Malone Society Reprint editions. In cases where these are unavailable, plays are cited by reference to signatures in original editions or, in the case of Shakespearean plays never published in a quarto attributable to Lord Strange’s Men, by reference to through-line numbers in the second edition of The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare Based on Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library Collection.

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Portions of the material in this book have been published previously in Region, Religion, and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare, ed. Richard Dutton et al. (2003); Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (2002); The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (2009); Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603, ed. Helen Ostovich et al. (2009); Rethinking Historicism, ed. Ann Baines Coiro and Thomas Fulton (2012); and Early Theatre, Huntington Library Quarterly, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Medieval Theatre, and Shakespeare Quarterly. We thank the editors of these journals and books for permission to reprint. We could not have completed this project without the support of numerous institutions, colleagues, friends, and family. Publication has been generously supported by the Cunningham Fund of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University and by a Research Publication Grant from Victoria College, University of Toronto. A short-term fellowship awarded to Lawrence Manley from the Huntington Library and support from the Griswold Fund at Yale University supported research on the Egerton manuscripts and the Bridgewater House library. SallyBeth MacLean’s UK archival research was supported by grants from Victoria College and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Among those individuals to whom this book owes most we count Robert Tittler, who introduced us to each other; the late Scott McMillin, who set us a daunting example but offered much help and encouragement as we began to work together; Alan Nelson for sharing not only his new discovery about the London Watermen’s petition but also for generously housing Sally-Beth at his Bloomsbury flat on more than one research trip in this cause; and Julian Bowsher for his up-to-the-minute advice on archaeological work at the Rose Theatre site. Two readers for Yale University Press offered thoughtful suggestions for improvement. It has been a pleasure to work with our supportive editors at the Press, Eric Brandt and Niamh Cunningham. At Yale, David Kastan and David Quint have been generous and astute readers as pieces of the project evolved. On the third-floor corridor of LinslyChittenden Hall, Jessica Brantley, Ian Cornelius, Roberta Frank, Alastair Minnis, and Claude Rawson contributed lore, expertise, and many good questions. Robert Babcock, Kathryn James, Maija Jansson, Andrew Kau, Stephen Parks, Brian Walsh, Alexander Welsh, and Keith Wrightson helped with crucial inquiries and made useful suggestions. Elsewhere, we want to thank Calista Lucy, librarian and archivist, for her help and warm hospitality at Dulwich College Archive; Byron Moldofsky, our expert cartographer; Alan Somerset for

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freely sharing his digital images for Caludon Castle and Southampton’s Bargate; Andrew Paterson, our photographer for Coventry Guildhall and Manchester Cathedral images; Manchester Cathedral for granting permission for access to their fine woodcarvings, and Tina Machado, who maintains the Historic Canterbury website (www.machadoink.com), for supplying us with old photographs of the vanished Canterbury Court Hall. Research on the provincial itinerary of Strange’s Men was facilitated by the generous collaborative support given by numerous REED editors, most of whom are individually cited in the chapters following where their unpublished records are mentioned. In a few cases, REED collections in progress yielded no evidence, but the editors were helpful nonetheless and so we thank here Anne Brannen (Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire); Jane Cowling (Winchester); Audrey Douglas (Salisbury); Jessica Freeman (Middlesex); James Gibson (Kent: Diocese of Rochester); Peter Greenfield (Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Hampshire); Rosalind Hays and Ted McGee (Wiltshire); Alexandra Johnston (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire); David Klausner (Yorkshire North Riding); John McKinnell (Durham); Alan Somerset (Staffordshire, Warwickshire); James Stokes (Suffolk); and Diana Wyatt (Yorkshire East Riding). For reading our work, checking, listening, and sharing their knowledge and research, we are grateful to Jennifer Andersen, Emily Anderson, John Astington, Ann Baines Coiro, Alan Dessen, Richard Dutton, Lukas Erne, Thomas Fulton, Paul Hammer, Ralph Hanna, Deborah Harkness, Jean Howard, William Ingram, Grace Ioppolo, Macdonald P. Jackson, Heather James, John Jowett, David Kathman, Sarah Knight, Roslyn Knutson, Peter Lake, Randall Martin, Paul Menzer, Lena Cowen Orlin, Helen Ostovich, A. J. Pollard, Mary Robertson, James R. Siemon, Joanna and Robert Smith, Stephen Tabor, Leslie Thomson, Brian Vickers, and Stephen K. Wright. We remember especially how much we, with all students of theater history, owe to the late Barbara Palmer, a dear friend and colleague. Finally, our thanks would not be complete without expressing our loving and appreciative thoughts to our families and especially our spouses, Ruth Manley and Paul MacLean.

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Introduction

On 6 May 1593, some three months after the London theaters had been closed by the worst outbreak of plague in London before the Great Plague of 1665, the Privy Council licensed “the seruauntes to our verie good the Lord Strainge” to continue their “quallitie of playing” on tour outside of London. The license named six sharing actors in this company, which was patronized by Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange and later 5th Earl of Derby: “Edward Allen, seruaunt to the right honorable the Lord highe Admiral, William kemp, Thomas Pope, Iohn Heminges, Augustine Phillipes & George Brian, being al one companie.”1 Of these six leading players in Lord Strange’s company, five of them—Pope, Phillips, Heminges, Kemp, and Bryan—would later be named, along with Richard Burbage, William Shakespeare, and Richard Cowley (the last another former player in Lord Strange’s Men) as the payees for performances at court by the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men between 1594 and 1604. The names of these former Strange’s Men appeared also in the lease for the grounds of the new Globe Theatre in February 1598/99: a moiety share in the arrangement (the other half being divided between Richard and Cuthbert Burbage) was to be divided among “William Shakespeare Augustine Phillipps Thomas Pope the said John Heminges . . . & William Kempe.”2 The name of Shakespeare, absent from the sharers mentioned in the Privy Council license for Strange’s Men but regularly linked as a fellow to them after 1594, provides one essential motive for our study of Lord Strange’s Men: this may be the company, or one of the companies, for whom Shakespeare was writing or acting before he can be documented as a Lord Chamberlain’s man. Strange’s Men was, in any case, the company from which nearly all of Shakespeare’s subsequent partners in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were to come. A

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history of Lord Strange’s Men amounts, then, to a prehistory of what has been called “the Shakespeare company.”3 The belief “that Shakespeare performed with Strange’s is probably the most popular of all the arguments” about his undocumented early career.4 While one of our aims in this book is to reexamine and to add to the grounds for a direct association between Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men, another is to provide the fullest possible account of Shakespeare’s fellows at an earlier stage in their career, for that earlier fellowship clearly had a profound influence on Shakespeare’s own career. John Heminges was one of the three theatrical associates to whom Shakespeare affectionately willed money for the purchase of a memorial ring in 1616, and in 1623 the favor was returned when Heminges, with Henry Condell, oversaw the publication of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Of the twenty-six players named in the first folio as “the Principall Actors in all these Playes,” those mentioned first, after the two names of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, were, in order, the same former members of Lord Strange’s Men: John Hemmings. Augustine Phillips. William Kempe. Thomas Poope. George Bryan. Three names farther down the list came “Richard Cowly,” who in late July 1592 had borne a letter from Joan Alleyn in London to her husband, Edward Alleyn, while he was playing with Lord Strange’s Men in Bristol. It is not just the prominence of future Lord Chamberlain’s Men among them that lends importance to the study of Lord Strange’s Men. Also important is the name of Edward Alleyn, whom the Privy Council license identifies as a leading member of the company even while he was continuing to wear the livery of a servant of Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral. While Alleyn was playing with Lord Strange’s Men, he became the son-in-law of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre on the Bankside, and he later returned to acting with and, together with Henslowe, managing the Lord Admiral’s Men, who became the other leading London company of the late Elizabethan period. Through the organization of Lord Strange’s Men, in other words, passed the key theatrical innovators who, in June 1594, formed the two acting companies that dominated the London theatrical world for much of its most vibrant decade. In examining Lord Strange’s company, its activities, and its plays, we

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are also examining a formative episode in the history of the later Elizabethan stage. It is our primary conviction, however, that this transitional moment holds an intrinsic interest. At the height of their achievements in the winter season of 1591/92, the servants of Lord Strange garnered an unprecedented six per formances at court (a feat not matched until the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did so in 1596/97 and not surpassed until their descendants, the King’s Men, performed eight times at court in 1603/4). In keeping with their extraordinary success, Lord Strange’s Men may also have been the first company to attempt long-term residence and extended daily repertory in London. Philip Henslowe’s diary of expenses and income associated with the Rose Theatre documents the activities of Strange’s Men during the first known long-term residence by any company at a London theater: an extended run at the Rose from 19 February–22 June 1592, during which the company offered 105 performances of twenty-four different plays, and a shorter series of twenty-nine performances at the Rose between 29 December 1592 and 1 February 1592/93, when they mounted two more new plays.5 Apart from the later records of the Admiral’s Men in Henslowe’s diary during periods of 1594– 97, there is no fuller record of the daily repertory of an early modern acting company than Henslowe’s account for Strange’s Men in 1592– 93. As compared with their contemporaries, Strange’s Men showed a marked preference for residence in London. It was in a letter addressed to his traveling son-in-law Edward Alleyn, “on[e] of my lord stranges players,” that the Rose’s owner, Henslowe, spoke of the recently traveling Pembroke’s Men, who had failed on tour and pawned their apparel, as being “all at home.”6 Lord Strange’s Men are the best answer we have to Andrew Gurr’s question “When did London become ‘home’ for the players under Elizabeth?”7 Associated with the ambitious roster of plays belonging to Strange’s Men are the names of nearly all the emerging playwrights of the time: Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, and, we believe, Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, and Shakespeare. Only the work of John Lyly, among this new generation of theatrical writers, appears not to have been performed by the company. From the longer-term life of the company’s plays—which in some cases had originated with earlier companies, such as the Admiral’s Men or Queen’s Men, and which in several instances passed on from Strange’s Men into the repertories of later companies—it is evident that Strange’s Men had an important transitional role to play through their selection of plays and players with star quality and through their flair for grasping current interests and new literary fashions. A number of the plays that passed through the company’s hands—The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta,

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and 1 Henry VI among them—developed a canonical status, both on the London stage and in print. The durability and influence of the company’s repertory seems to have gone hand in hand with its having been written by this emerging new generation of professional playwrights and with its having the capacity to survive in print as dramatic literature. Several key texts in the history of playbook publication—by Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, among others—came into print for the first time during the lifetime of Strange’s Men or in the months immediately following their apparent demise. The exceptional talent of the company’s personnel and the quality of its plays were no doubt mutually supporting, but both of these were owing as well to the circumstances of the company’s patronage. Until recently, aristocratic patronage was regarded for the most part as a legal fiction, a mere technical convenience allowing players to perform under the restrictions of the 1572 “Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes,” which had subjected to punishment all players “not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towardes any other honorable Personage of greater Degree.”8 Sir Walter Greg, for example, suggested that “the relation between the patron and his ‘servants’ . . . appears in practice to have been little more than nominal.”9 Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Lord Strange’s Men. Ferdinando Stanley, together with his wife, née Lady Alice Spencer, took their places in a longer family tradition of theatrical patronage. Records show that the Stanley earls of Derby had supported companies of actors and other entertainers throughout much of the sixteenth century, and a number of surviving texts and documents, including plays of Strange’s Men, suggest that the Stanleys actively pursued an agenda of promoting the family’s history and their close connection to the Tudor dynasty. The Derby Household Book, which records activities at the family households in Lancashire between May 1587 and August 1590, mentions no fewer than twelve household per formances during that period by leading touring companies, including the Queen’s Men, the Earl of Essex’s Men, and the Earl of Leicester’s Men. Ferdinando, Lord Strange, was present for each of four performances during these same years by an unnamed company that we conjecture was his own. It is one of our main purposes to connect the achievements of the company and the character of its apparently daring and innovative repertory to the patronage traditions and political interests of their aristocratic patrons. The prominence of the Stanleys in the early history plays of Shakespeare is also one of our reasons for thinking he wrote, and possibly acted, for Lord Strange’s company. While our exploration of the relationships among the acting company, its plays, and its patrons owes much to the place of acting companies in traditional

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theater history, and thus to the work of scholars like W. W. Greg and E. K. Chambers, it draws also on a more recent trend of interpreting early modern plays “not primarily in terms of their authorship but in terms of the theatre companies for which they were written.”10 This trend has drawn support from a number of scholarly developments, including new work on companies and their patrons, studies in the material conditions and aesthetics of performance, New Historical methods that situate the Elizabethan drama in relation to contemporary institutions, social practices, and historical events, and textual studies that have drawn new significance from variant texts on the basis of their different theatrical settings. In combination these developments have inspired theater historians to “remove the barriers” between the archival dimensions of traditional theater history and literary fields like textual studies and dramatic criticism.11 While drawing upon these developments, we have striven to bring even more fully into the picture the plays in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, their connections with contemporary politics and religion, and their relevance to the family history and agenda of the company’s aristocratic patrons. In doing so, we are attempting both a collective portrait and, especially in chapters 5–7, a description of what Scott McMillin came to call “company style,” in keeping with his hypothesis that “each company had its own political and theatrical characteristics.”12 In our central chapters, we describe the company style of Strange’s Men in terms of the distinctively literary nature of their innovative blank verse drama repertory, a body of work distinguished from that of earlier companies by its being written by educated authors rather than theatrical artisans. The plays involved a new degree of interest in what The Battle of Alcazar called “modern matter,” especially contemporary or near contemporary geopolitical affairs. In keeping with its learned and literary bias, the repertory also featured stage genres and representational paradigms drawn from classical and contemporary continental sources like the Senecan play and the Italian novella, using them to support suspenseful and intrinsically compelling structures that, in contrast to older techniques of narration, commentary, or allegorization, let the embodied performance of plot and character tell the tale. We examine in chapter 6 the performance techniques geared to these innovations: the use of machines and properties and the architectural resources of the Rose stage, remodeled for the company, to produce a charismatic theater of wonder and spectacle; the staging of extraordinary violence and cruelty to support the suspenseful narration, powerful passions, social imperatives, and moral dilemmas that go with Senecan revenge and courtly or erotic intrigue; the use of framed or inset per formance (especially in the company’s several magician plays) to transform the

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immediate emotional impact of sensational actions transpiring in the mise- en- scène into critical awareness of performance in the theatrical here and now; the use of acting styles that replaced stereotypical markers of status and allegorical personification with the embodiment of situation-specific purposes and passions; and the attempt to render, through the impersonation of passion and madness, the experience of individual consciousness in duress. As we proceed, our analysis of these techniques points also to their innovative epistemological and moral consequences. We explore the more heterodox or skeptical effects to be found in the complication or confounding of moral judgment by the excess of Senecan violence and cruelty; in the emphasis on illusion and disillusionment in patterns of spectation that mirror the theater’s own “art of diagnosis”;13 in the disenchantment of magical beliefs by staging that connects them to Realpolitik and political persecution; in the demonstration of the absurd and dehumanizing consequences of fanatical commitments in the company’s staging of war and mass violence; and in the conscientious resistance to conformity that emerges from the impersonation of individual passion and consciousness. Our study of the intellectual effects of the company dramaturgy is followed, in chapter 7, by a discussion of the political and religious dimensions of the company’s work. Beginning with a discussion of the company’s use of onstage immolations and judicial violence, the chapter connects the plays to the religious and political developments of the later Elizabethan age, including religious persecution and the state control of religious belief and practice in the years 1589– 93. As we explain, the apparently irenic views of the Stanleys, their local commitments to their northern Catholic domains, and their respect for the Catholic neighbors on whom it was their unhappy task (at peril of the family’s traditional power and standing) to impose the religious policies of the regime, all harmonize with the politically sophisticated repertory of Lord Strange’s company. In the company’s many uses of antipuritan and antipapal satire we find signs of the Catholic loyalist moderation of the Stanleys, while in the company’s preoccupation with “virtuous pagans”—societies and heroes whose virtues derive from non- Christian sources and challenge orthodox belief—we describe elements of the heterodoxy attributed to the inscrutable Lord Strange, whom one contemporary described as “of al three religions, and . . . of none.”14 Based on our interpretation of plays like The Jew of Malta, The Battle of Alcazar, and The Massacre at Paris, we find in the company’s treatment of “war for religion’s sake” elements of the irenic and politique thinking that the Stanleys appear to have shared with their most innovative intellectual contemporaries. There are a number of potential difficulties involved in characterizing the “company style,” beginning with the fluid nature of Elizabethan acting compa-

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nies and the interchangeability of the many properties that companies necessarily shared with each other. The leading members of Strange’s Men probably came from at least three other companies—Leicester’s Men, the Queen’s Men (if that had been the company of John Heminges), and the early Lord Admiral’s Men—and within a very few years they dispersed back into the later Lord Admiral’s Men, the new Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and possibly other companies as well. Moreover there is evidence to suggest that at least two other companies contemporary with Strange’s Men—Pembroke’s Men and Sussex’s Men—were tied up with plays such as Titus Andronicus and The Jew of Malta, which also have links to Strange’s Men. The difficulty of disentangling the identity of Strange’s Men from these other contemporary companies (a subject to which we return several times in the chapters that follow) is compounded by the fact that the period of their flourishing, 1589– 93, was marked by exceptional fluidity and volatility (as well as artistic ferment) in the theatrical profession. Henslowe’s records for the Rose and the theater at Newington Butts for January through June 1594 document various short performance runs by “the earle of susex his men,” “the Quenes men & my lord of Susexe togeather,” “my lorde admeralls men,” and “my Lorde Admerall men & my Lorde chamberlen men,” while also containing hints, in their mention of Titus Andronicus and The Jew of Malta, of former Strange’s Men lurking among these companies’ personnel.15 This complicated succession of companies appearing over just a few months exemplifies theatrical volatility in its most extreme form, at a moment when all the major acting companies were reorganizing after having struggled through the worst plague outbreak of the century. Plays, especially successful plays, followed shifting alliances like these, coming into one company from previous ones and then passing on to subsequent owners. These unstable circumstances—to say nothing of competition for desirable scripts in the theatrical marketplace, of the common practices and conventions necessary for making the profession’s artistry intelligible to audiences, or of the potential for collaborative playwrighting to produce a common stylistic currency stronger than company affiliation— must all qualify the sense in which we can speak of a wholly distinctive troupe identity or company style. In the early 1590s, the numerous “handovers between collaborators and acting companies” may have contributed to a degree of uniformity in practices and styles across companies, as Bart van Es has recently suggested.16 Nevertheless the company-based organization of the theatrical profession was no mere legal convenience but an important artistic and economic reality. Strange’s Men, when they were led by Edward Alleyn, playing 134 performances at the Rose, six at court, and many on the road inside a single year, were clearly

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a distinctive, desirable, and successful company, both a market phenomenon and an artistically accomplished ensemble. The company performed on a daily basis before their London audience a repertory of plays that, however subject to borrowing, collaboration, and dispersal, formed at that moment a body of work in which each element, each play, each performance, was conditioned by those surrounding it. As each play took its place in the repertory, it could in turn be informed not just by the others and by the exigencies of theatrical management but by the contemporary moment in the nation’s life and, we suggest, by the status, fortunes, and interests of the company’s aristocratic patron. Just as with any individual or any individual work of art we would want to insist upon the presence of shared attributes, generic traits, and transhistorical influences, so with the company style of Lord Strange’s Men. But by the same token we would also want to insist that a particular combination of such traits and influences, realized at a particular moment, can yield a singular identity. Despite what we have said about the generic traits of the profession and about economic competition and artistic emulation, the surviving evidence suggests that acting companies generally recognized and respected the properties of others—perhaps more so, for example, than did Elizabethan publishers. Acknowledging that these properties could be exchanged and recombined with others, we do not insist that Strange’s Men were separate from the theatrical world around them; on the contrary, in trying to produce this group portrait we are forced to engage with the history of other companies as well. Much more work is needed, especially on the companies that are more difficult to document: the earlier Admiral’s Men, Sussex’s Men, and Pembroke’s Men. More knowledge about these nearest contemporaries and their work would undoubtedly shed further light on Strange’s Men as well.17 A second challenge in the study of acting companies is the problem of identifying the specific published texts that might have belonged to a given company’s repertory, as well as any other surviving materials that might shed light on it. Given the migration of playbooks among companies, to say nothing of the complexities of playbook publication and variant texts, it can be difficult to attribute specific extant texts to a given company. That is especially the case with Lord Strange’s Men, a company with a relatively short life and a repertory containing plays that had very long ones. Only in two cases do the title pages of published plays assign them to Strange’s Men, and in these cases the title page attributions pose further problems. To begin with, neither A Pleasant Commodie, of faire Em the Millers daughter of Manchester . . . As it was sundrietimes publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the Lord Strange his seruaunts (n.d.) nor The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of

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Titus Andronicus: As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants (1594) appears among the 134 per formances by the company at the Rose. Moreover, Titus Andronicus (Strange’s Men became Derby’s Men when Ferdinando succeeded to his father’s earldom in September 1593) mentions multiple companies in a way that is not clearly explained. Henslowe’s diary provides much additional information about the repertory, but another set of difficulties arises from trying to match Henslowe’s idiosyncratic and sometimes cryptic titles to the title pages of extant plays. Even in the best cases, where it is possible to link plays to Henslowe’s titles, there are problems involving date of publication, multiple company ownership, and evidence of later revision that stand in the way of a straightforward or exclusive attribution to Strange’s Men. In cases of yet another sort, where there are no extant plays to match Henslowe’s titles, the plays must be considered “lost.” Here Henslowe’s titles sometimes enable us to identify subject matter and potential source material for these lost plays, while at other times no plausible identification avails itself. Finally, there is a group of extant plays not found in Henslowe, and with plausible connections to other companies, for which there are nevertheless grounds for attribution to Lord Strange’s Men. Some of these, such as the three parts of Henry VI, were eventually published, perhaps with subsequent revisions, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. These various attributional problems require us, in a two- chapter census of candidate plays, to explore in some detail and, we hope, to add to the grounds for linking extant plays and source materials for lost plays to Lord Strange’s Men. Although no study of Lord Strange’s Men is possible without some such set of attributions (and the many inferences and conjectures they entail), we have, for reasons explained more fully in the census itself, opted for a maximal rather than minimal discussion of what might reasonably be suspected to have been in the repertory. There is more to be learned about Strange’s Men and theater history generally by way of such maximal engagement with the problems of defining and characterizing the company’s repertory. We include in our study of the company’s repertory several candidate plays not mentioned in Henslowe’s diary, as well as several titles now lost, and we sometimes refer to them when we discuss such aspects of the company style as the literary sources and dramatic genres that formed the company’s archive, the practices that defined its performance style, and the political and religious implications of the repertory. As we build up this portrait of the company, we remind the reader—and we try to remain mindful ourselves—of Terence Schoone-Jongen’s anatomy of the

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Introduction

various kinds of arguments and hypotheses encountered in theater history: the possible (“a hypothesis which no evidence flatly contradicts”), the plausible (a “conjecture . . . based on some sort of positive evidence, rather than on the absence of negatory evidence” but “not strong or convincing enough to rule out other possibilities or plausibilities”), the probable (a hypothesis enabling other possibilities to “be laid aside because the probable hypothesis is so much stronger or more likely than any alternatives”), and the demonstrably certain.18 Claims of all four kinds will be found throughout this study. The nature of the subject being what it is, we cannot claim to be certain of all that we propose, nor will we pause to place precisely on this scale the status of each one of our conjectures. But we have tried, first, to make it clear when we are dealing with conjectures and speculations, and second, to build, where we can, from certainties toward possibilities and to avoid the mistake of building in the opposite direction. Specifically we organize our two-chapter census and our three-chapter analysis of the repertory by beginning in each case with what we deem to be the more secure attributions and only then turning to those involving more steps of inference or conjecture. This is also true of the book as a whole, since we take up last the difficult question of Shakespeare’s early company connections. Our use of narrative is balanced, we hope, by analysis of the evidentiary and interpretive difficulties that stand in its way. We begin with a two- chapter narrative of the company’s early history, placing the company in the longer perspective of Stanley theatrical patronage and tracing it from its formation through its residency at the Rose. Toward the end of the book we resume the narrative, following the company on tour and recounting the somewhat obscure circumstances of its demise. But even in our more analytical chapters on the repertory, we are forced repeatedly to engage with previous conjectural narratives about this company’s relations to others, to endorse aspects of older stories in the field of theater history, and to offer hypothetical narratives of our own to account for the features of key theatrical texts, including some by Shakespeare. Such narratives, William Ingram notes, pose a “procedural dilemma for a theater historian”: “Are ambiguities and contradictions in our data problems to be solved, requiring a selective narrative supporting one preferred interpretation against others and offering that as ‘what really happened’? Or are they a condition inherent in the data and in the nature of our own scholarship, requiring a fuller and more accommodating narrative with room for ambiguity and contradiction and alternative versions?”19 In the pages that follow, we do commit ourselves to a set of “preferred interpretations,” which take something like the form of a story, but at the same time we have observed the spirit of the analytical prescription implied in Ingram’s questions by writing a narrative that accommodates—

Introduction

11

and in places even highlights—the ambiguities and contradictions in the data. Included in the data are a significant number of remarkable early modern plays, and the difficult problems engaged and created by those plays are what have drawn us in the first place to the idea of reading repertory in the way we do, through company history. We hold with a conundrum of Scott McMillin’s: “We make narratives in order to organize and remember the evidence.”20 We stand by our story, even while we find ourselves remembering, at every turn, that the evidence with which we are working is incomplete, recalcitrant, and sometimes contradictory.

1

Origins of Lord Str ange’s Men

PAT RONAGE: A FA M I LY T R A DI T ION

Family tradition was fundamental to the creation and patronage of Lord Strange’s Men. From the standpoint of the players who formed the company, aristocratic patronage was both a working condition dating back to the medieval period and, following the 1572 “Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes,” a legal necessity, since the Act declared that “Bearewardes, Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towardes any other honorable Personage of greater Degree,” were subject to punishment as “masterless men” akin to “Roges, Vacaboundes, and Sturdye Beggers.”1 But from the standpoint of the company’s patron, Ferdinando Stanley, a key motive for his backing of players lay in a tradition of patronage developed through previous generations of the family. The Stanley Earls of Derby were landed aristocrats without equal in the northwest of England, where their vast estates centered in the two residences of Lathom and Knowsley in southwestern Lancashire.2 The founding member of the Stanley earldom was the same Lord Stanley familiar from the final scene on Bosworth Field in Shakespeare’s Richard III. A cunning politician, Thomas Stanley was able to parlay his inherited position as 2nd Lord Stanley and Lord of the Isle of Man into an earldom from a grateful Henry VII in 1485. Although this Tudor elevation to the higher nobility brought him a windfall of lands and important offices, Stanley had managed to develop political status through two previous Yorkist reigns, serving both Edward IV and Richard III as a privy councillor and lord steward of the royal household (1471–85), while accumulating numerous local appointments across the kingdom and offices in Cheshire and Lancashire, where his family had held lands for several generations.3 A telling 12

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

13

indication of his ability to maneuver his way through the upheavals of the time are his back-to-back appointments as constable of England, first by Richard III (1483) and then by Henry VII (1485/86). His marriages matched his political strategies. He first married Eleanor Neville, sister of Warwick the Kingmaker, and then in 1472, after her death, took a bride from the other side of the conflict, Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond and, after Bosworth, Henry VII. As the newly created Earl of Derby, Stanley bore the sword of state at Henry VII’s coronation, presided at his wedding to Elizabeth of York, and stood as godfather to their son, Prince Arthur.4 By 1489 Lord Thomas stood confirmed as a leading member of the new Tudor peerage and, “in consideration of good ser vice,” became the landowner of estates in no fewer than fourteen counties, stretching from the northwest through the Midlands as far south as Somerset.5 In the same decade, the marriage of his eldest son, George Stanley, to the heiress of the Lestrange estates in Shropshire and the Welsh marches had brought further lands and the title Strange of Knokyn into the family. Thus was established “an extensive territorial empire that was to last virtually unchanged for over two centuries.” 6 Numerous members of the gentry, nobility, and royalty in the later fifteenth century are known to have patronized performers, either for their own personal entertainment when in residence or as part of their traveling retinues. Such individual performers or small troupes seem to have toured on their own account as well, though the extent of their circuits can be difficult to trace because of the sporadic survival of records from the period. Members of a traveling retinue wore their lord’s livery, thereby claiming his protection while upholding his honor at home, at court, or on the road. This traditional bond between medieval minstrel and lord underlies the later Elizabethan links between player and patron.7 In the case of the Stanley Earls of Derby, a tradition of patronage was developed to support the family’s new prestige in the Tudor era and, we believe, to advance their influence in the northwest of England, at court, and, through touring, across the new Tudor nation. Lord Thomas Stanley does not seem to have been an especially active patron of performers. The accounts of medieval households are more elusive than civic records, but one roll of Lord Thomas Stanley’s accounts from an early stage in his career happens to be among those extant. In 1459– 60 Lord Stanley paid wages for a piper, Thomas, and a trumpeter, Mordoc, attached to his Lancashire household,8 and there are external records for his “minstrel” or “minstrels” at King’s Lynn in 1457–58 and the second a decade later, also for minstrels, in 1468– 69 at Grimsby.9 The most consistent form of entertainment associated with Lord Stanley’s name before and immediately after his acquisition of the

14

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

Derby title is the itinerant bearward who was rewarded eleven times along the southeast coast not far from London between 1474 and 1491.10 After his elevation to the earldom of Derby, three “mimi” under his patronage appeared at New College, Oxford, in mid-July 1485 and one or more of his “minstrels” showed up on their own at Rye in 1491, in Salisbury in 1498– 99, and at Bridgwater in 1504.11 There is one more important notice of a Derby troupe, termed “histriones,” at Shrewsbury in July 1495, in company with “histriones” of Prince Arthur and of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The occasion, which included a play in the Quarry, was a royal visit by the king and queen to Shrewsbury, where in 1485 Henry Tudor had crossed the Severn on his way to Bosworth and received the final messages of support from his Stanley allies. The king’s visit to Shrewsbury, which perhaps commemorated events from a decade earlier, was part of the royal family’s progress through the West Midlands on their way to the Derby residences of Knowsley and Lathom, where they were entertained from 28 July to 5 August.12 Of the events of that visit little is known, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the “histriones” who entertained the royal entourage at Shrewsbury may have been part of the lavish great house hospitality described in the early family verse chronicle known as “The Stanley Poem”: King Henry the Seaventh . . . did lye their eight dayes, And of all houses he gave it the most praise, And his haule at Richmond he pulld downe all, To make it up againe after Latham hall; To speake of his fare was sure so excellente, The king and his company so well contente, I hard noble men say that were of his trayne, They thought they should never se such faire againe. ... The earles buttry and seller open night and day, Come who would and welcome, no man was said nay.13

Thomas Stanley’s grandson, the second Earl Thomas, inherited the title in 1504. His offices and appointments were mostly confined to the northwest, where he principally resided. The only evidence of his patronage of household entertainers comes from the Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accounts of 1517–21. The fact that Shrewsbury is just a few miles southwest of the residence he inherited from his mother at Knockin Castle may explain why the 2nd Earl’s bearward and two entertainers (“histriones”) appeared there.14 They may have made similar neighborhood appearances at Liverpool, adjacent to their patron’s residence at

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

15

Knowsley, or at Ormskirk, near Lathom in Lancashire, but no early sixteenthcentury civic accounts survive for either of those towns. The county of Lancashire in this period lacked the diversified cultural life that some southern regions enjoyed. Its parishes were large and somewhat isolated, and its towns were relatively small. The terrain was difficult and underpopulated, with marshland near the coast and higher moorlands to the north and east. Even in the later sixteenth century and early seventeenth, entertainment in the region centered on the private residences of the Lancashire gentry, although a vigorous popular appetite for bearbaiting can be traced in ecclesiastical court records.15 The first two Derby earls were probably typical of other Lancashire nobility in their limited patronage of entertainers.16 There is a notable change in attitude toward patronage discernible in the records for the 3rd Earl of Derby’s entertainers that illustrates Edward Stanley’s vision of expanding family influence through the use of traveling performers. His troupes appear to have established a wide range of travel, their payments appearing at twenty-two locations, including several in the northeast. Fortythree performances have been found so far, starting with the earliest, to his “ludatores” at Selby Abbey in 1522–23, a year or two after he succeeded as Earl of Derby.17 During the earlier years of his long tenure of the earldom, Edward seems to have maintained the modest pattern of patronage inherited from his father. Stanley “histriones” appeared annually at Shrewsbury near the estate at Knockin,18 and Derby minstrels are found in the Southampton records for 1526–27.19 But during these formative years, young Edward was a ward in the household of Cardinal Wolsey, and Wolsey’s opulent lifestyle may have influenced the magnificent household and level of hospitality that the 3rd Earl was later to establish for himself in the northwest. After Wolsey’s fall in 1529, Edward was married to Dorothy Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, and shortly thereafter was granted livery of his own lands in January 1530/31. He continued to be active at court and brought renewed prominence to the Stanleys as a power in the north when, during the Pilgrimage of Grace, he was granted extraordinary powers in Lancashire. Just as the 1st Earl’s role at Bosworth brought power and titles to the family, so Lord Edward’s cautious support of the Crown in 1536 resulted in a “combination of territorial and political predominance . . . unique in mid-Tudor England.”20 It is perhaps no coincidence that the decade of the 3rd Earl’s rise to power, 1530–40, was the most active for his touring entertainers. Although the everpopular bearward continued to circulate wearing Derby livery,21 a troupe of players under Derby’s patronage becomes distinguishable in the English records

16

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

for several towns in the 1530s. Pursuing one of the most popular performance circuits in East Anglia, they were touring a region where the patron’s in-laws, the Howards, held sway, not far from London and the court. The performance locations—Ipswich, Bury St. Edmund’s, Cambridge, Dunmow, and Thetford, where the Latin records use the term “jocatores”—were all new to Derby entertainers.22 Also new were Bristol and the Seymour home at Wolfhall in the southwest, Leicester in the Midlands, and Skipton Castle in the northeast.23 The most active years on record for Derby’s troupe of players seem to coincide with a time of strong connection with the south in their patron’s life, either through a continuing need to appear at court or through affiliation in East Anglia with his first wife’s family. There is a noticeable gap in the record in the 1540s and 1550s. It appears that with the rise of a Protestant regime in London, Derby infrequently attended Privy Council meetings and became less interested in life at court than in establishing a splendid lifestyle in his own northern power base.24 By the 1560s, Christopher Haigh explains, “the earl had a household staff of 120, and it cost £1,500 a year to feed this vast concourse and the family and its guests. The Stanley household formed the core of the earl’s local power, and the patronage he provided gave him considerable influence over the county gentry.”25 It is impossible to determine what role entertainers played in this great Lancashire household, since most of the family’s records have been destroyed, many probably during the siege of Lathom in the Civil War.26 Only one manuscript survives for the 3rd Earl’s era, an account of his expenses in 1560– 61 as well as his household regulations for 1568.27 But the expenses are not itemized, so the summary totals for servants’ livery and wages cannot be broken down further to help in the search for entertainers retained by the earl. What the totals do indicate is that he spent at least seven weeks and four days “in progress” to and from London.28 Most of the year his household was likely in Lancashire, where he was famous for his lavish hospitality. (William Camden noted in his succinct eulogy that with the 3rd Earl’s death “the glory of Hospitality” was “layd asleepe.”)29 The evidence for Derby entertainers in other extant 1550s and 1560s sources is fragmentary. In the county records of Cheshire and Lancashire, we find no trace of them, although it must be admitted that almost no household or civic accounts survive in that region to shed light on the touring players of the period.30 Elsewhere players under Derby’s patronage show up at Newcastle upon Tyne in the spring of 1566 and at New Romney sometime during 1569–70.31 That other traditional entertainer type, the minstrel, was affiliated still, however loosely, with Derby’s retinue in this period. “The Lament of Richard Sheale,” a ballad surviving in manuscript, pays tribute to Sheale the minstrel’s “good

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

17

lord & master, whom I sarve / In my greatist povertie from me dyd neuer swarve, / But dyd wryt for me frendly aftar a lovyng facion, / And my lord Strang also on me dyde tak compassion.”32 Sheale’s patron and “good lord” was Edward, the 3rd Earl, and Lord Strange was Henry, his eldest son and heir.33 One of Sheale’s poems makes it clear that his task was not just to compose poems but to “syng,” to offer “myrry tawke,” and to “play the myrry knave.”34 Andrew Taylor has proposed Sheale as the possible author of “The Stanley Poem,” the longest and most elaborate in the numerous ballads and sagas devoted to the Stanley family. Like the poems in similar cycles celebrating the Percys and the Howards, these works were produced either by the minstrels who performed them or by “the dependents of the great families whose deeds they celebrated.”35 Dating for the most part from the mid-Tudor period, these poems—which include “The Rose of England,” “The Song of the Lady Bessy,” “Flodden Field,” “Scottish Field,” and “The Stanley Poem”—recount the family’s history from its mythical origins in the eagle-borne Oskell, 1st Lord Lathom, through Stanley heroics at Bosworth, Flodden, and Tournay, to the largesse of Earl Edward. They laud the family’s power in Lancashire and Cheshire and cement the links between leading gentry and loyal supporters in the region. While the ballad form of these works suggests that they may have been sung or recited at the great houses of Lancashire, the existence of multiple manuscript variants indicates that the Stanley legend circulated widely in the family’s domain and beyond. The compassionate support of the 3rd Earl’s son, Henry, Lord Strange, was praised by Sheale alongside his father’s. Like his father’s, Henry’s roots, through family, marriage, and later office appointments, were in the northwest, but his formative years and early career were influenced by court culture and its splendors. Edward’s eldest son by his first wife, Dorothy Howard, Henry Stanley, spent much of his youth at court as companion to Edward VI and as a gentleman of the privy chamber, both to Edward and to Philip I. Revels accounts for March 1546/47 record the making of “pleyers garmentes for the Kinges person, the duke of Sulffolke & my lorde straunge.”36 In 1555 he married Margaret, daughter of Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. Through her mother, Lady Eleanor Brandon, a daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, Margaret Clifford was a second cousin to Elizabeth I and thus a possible claimant to the throne. Intended to create an alliance between two of the most powerful families in the Catholic north, the marriage was celebrated in a lavish ceremony at Whitehall in the presence of Mary and Philip. Not long after his marriage, Henry bore the sword of state at the feast of St. George.37 In January 1558/59 he was summoned to Parliament and began, with his young wife, to lead a prominent life at the court of the new queen, Elizabeth. He led

18

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

a procession of one thousand horse through Fleet Street to escort a French embassy to court in 1561, and he was at the side of his old friend from the court of Edward VI, Sir Robert Dudley, when Dudley was created Earl of Leicester in 1564.38 That same year he accompanied Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and “diuerse knights and gentlemen” on an embassy to France to invest Charles IX with the Order of the Garter.39 Lady Strange was among the ladies in waiting when the queen visited Cambridge in 1564 and 1566, and Lord Strange served as a member of the advance party preparing the queen’s visit to Oxford; he was awarded on honorary M.A. during the festivities.40 During these years at court, at a time when other members of the nobility were adding players to their retinues, Henry Stanley seems to have done the same. His players have been detected first in the south, at Winchester and Southampton, in 1563, followed by a southwestern tour that included Bristol and Gloucester in 1564, and Canterbury in the southeast and Maldon in East Anglia sometime in the same year.41 From then on, Lord Strange’s troupe can be found on tour most years in various parts of the kingdom. The list of places on the tour is far-flung but mostly unconnected with the family’s widespread landholdings: Cambridge (1565– 66) and Ipswich (1566– 67) in East Anglia; Beverley (1566– 67) in the northeast; Canterbury and Dover (1568– 69) and Lydd and New Romney (1569–70) in Kent; and Plymouth and Bristol (1569) in the southwest.42 This would seem to have been touring for its own lucrative sake, probably at times when the Derby family had no personal call for household entertainment. If we can know little from extant documents about cultural life at Lathom and Knowsley during the last decade of the 3rd Earl’s life, the regular appearances of his son’s troupe elsewhere suggest that plays at home were an option, whether or not Earl Edward, by this time withdrawn from court life, maintained a troupe himself. When Henry became the 4th Earl of Derby in 1572, it is reasonable to assume that his troupe continued under his patronage, with a change of title. And the touring in the same southern regions continued for the next decade: Ipswich (1577–78, 1581–82) and Norwich (1581–82) in East Anglia; Dover (1577– 78) and Faversham (1577–78, 1579–80) in Kent; and Southampton (1578–79, 1582–83) on the road southwest to Bath (1578–79, 1582–83) and Bristol (1578– 79).43 Other stops in the southwest were made in 1579–80 in Gloucester, Dartmouth, and Exeter, and in 1580– 81 the route southwest to and from Exeter included Abingdon, Winchester, and Bath. Part of the same route was retraced in 1581–82, when Derby’s men played Winchester again.44 The troupe seems to have pursued new directions as well: Coventry, strategically positioned at the crossroads (1573–74, 1577–78, 1579–80), with nearby

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

19

Stratford upon Avon (1579–80), and a very popular eastern Midlands route that included Leicester (1579– 80, 1580– 81, 1582– 83) and Nottingham (1577–78, 1579– 80, 1580– 81, 1581– 82). It should also be noted that Derby’s players extended their tour as far as Newcastle upon Tyne in 1576.45 By the later 1570s Derby’s Men had become one of the most prominent of the Elizabethan acting companies. Evidently successful on their own terms, they were chosen, between 1579/80 and 1582/83, by Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, for three performances at court. Court performances during the 1570s had been dominated by companies under the patronage of the Earls of Leicester, Warwick (Leicester’s brother), and Sussex (at that time the Lord Chamberlain). But Tilney, who received his warrant as Master of the Revels in 1579 and was seeking (partly for reasons of economy) to expand court offerings by professional companies, appears to have turned to companies sponsored by his kinsmen Derby and (in 1582–83) Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. (All three families were linked by Howard connections.)46 Two of the plays that Derby’s men performed at court have been lost, although the title of one of these is partially known: “The soldan and the duke of . . .” (14 February 1579/80). “A History of Love and Fortune,” performed at Windsor on 30 December 1582, is likely the ten- cast magian romance published in 1589 under the title The Rare Triumphes of Loue and Fortune. Court per formances by Derby’s men took place either at Christmas or Shrovetide, although never both in a single year.47 The pattern suggests the company might have been with their patron’s family in the northwest for the other key festive date in any household calendar. We cannot be certain, for lack of family accounts in this period, but it is worth noting that there is a rare appearance by Derby’s players in the 1582–83 Liverpool town records.48 The quality of Derby’s Men must have been high, if court performances are any measure of excellence. But in 1583 they vanish from the records. What could be the explanation? Their patron experienced no fall from grace in this period. On the contrary, in the 1580s he gathered further appointments and distinctions: privy councillor (1585); ambassador extraordinary to France (1584/85); and chamberlain of the County Palatine of Chester (1588). The disappearance of Derby’s company falls close in time to March 1582/83, when Sir Francis Walsingham instructed the Master of the Revels to appoint twelve actors to a newly formed troupe under the patronage of the queen.49 These actors were plucked from the ranks of the leading troupes of the day: Robert Wilson, John Laneham, and William Johnson from Leicester’s Men; Tarlton and John Adams from Sussex’s; and possibly John Dutton from Oxford’s. But what of the remaining six? The troupes of origin for John Bentley, Toby Mills, John Towne, John Singer,

20

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

Lionel Cooke, and John Garland have not yet been traced, but it is probable that they were drafted from one or more of the companies featured at court in the early 1580s. Derby’s is a leading contender, therefore, and the formation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 may explain why the company disappears from the records at this point. Unlike the Earl of Leicester, who re-formed his own troupe within two years after the creation of the Queen’s Men, the Earl of Derby apparently did not reconstitute Derby’s Men.50 The years 1584–86 entailed extraordinary expense and responsibility for the earl, who in January 1584/85 outfitted and led a retinue of 220 on an embassy to invest the French King Henri III with the Order of the Garter. The earl “displayed such splendour and pomp,” Alberico Gentili wrote, “that France is said to be amazed at the magnificence of the embassy.”51 When it was rumored in the summer of 1587 that he would be appointed permanent ambassador to the French court, the earl wrote to the queen pleading ill health, but financial strain was the truer motive. Substantial land sales by the earl and his estranged wife in 1582–83 and heavy borrowing by the earl and by his son Ferdinando in the 1584– 93 period point to deteriorating finances as one possible reason behind the nonrenewal of the 4th Earl’s acting company. The family interest in theatrical patronage continued, however, in a new form, and this too may help to account for the apparent break in Henry’s support of actors. Records of provincial touring in civic and household accounts beyond the northwest demonstrate that his heir, Ferdinando, Lord Strange, had become an early adopter of the family’s patronage tradition. When he was just seventeen or eighteen (his birth date is uncertain), a troupe under his patronage surfaces in the southern provinces at Southampton in June 1577: “Item paid to my Lorde stranges servantes v young men vauters & Iumpers comonlie called Iumpers or Tumblers the 29 of Iune–x s.”52 A tumbling troupe is clearly differentiated in this account from the acting companies, and is also on record, probably along the same southern tour, at Exeter where their 13s 4d reward equaled that of the much more prominent Leicester’s Men.53 What motivated Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, to launch his career as a patron with such a company of tumbling players? A notable performance during the 1575 Kenilworth festivities is worth pausing over. The Earl of Leicester had engaged an Italian tumbler as a special act for the show presented on 14 July, a performance of remarkable dexterity described enthusiastically by Robert Langham.54 This spectacular Italian tumbler is one of several recorded between 1574 and 1575 in the provinces and at court. On 19 June 1574, the day after Leicester’s Men played for town officials, an Italian tumbler performed at Ipswich, receiving an equivalent 15s reward. Italian performers were also at Nottingham in

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21

September 1574, where they were paid “for serteyne pastymes that they shewed before mr meare & his brethren.” As at Ipswich, their tour may have coincided with that of Leicester’s Men, whose payment on 1 September immediately precedes theirs. The double coincidence of Italian travelers intersecting with the tour of Leicester’s Men at Ipswich and Nottingham55 may point to an interest on the part of Leicester himself in featuring a tumbling act at Kenilworth the following year. The timing of their travels would not preclude the possibility that these were the same Italian players who followed the royal progress of the court in July 1574 and “made pastyme” at Windsor and Reading.56 Still on the road, Italian “tumblers or players” also performed at the port town of Dover sometime during the September 1574– September 1575 accounting period.57 Only a handful of tumblers, vaulters, or rope-walkers, most without patrons, can be identified in provincial accounts between 1465 and 1573.58 It is hard to resist the theory that touring acts of spectacular acrobatic skill were innovative in the provinces in the 1570s and grew in popularity in subsequent decades.59 Although he was following family tradition by undertaking patronage of his own troupe, Ferdinando’s support of these unusual tumblers may be an early example of the same interest in new performance fashions that would lead to the more spectacular innovations of his later company. After all, Lord Strange had been introduced to a variety of performance traditions and venues from an early age, witnessing plays while matriculated at Oxford60 and being “fashioned in good Manners” while a squire in the royal household.61 Christmas and Shrovetide entertainments at court would have been part of his formative experience, the most consistently featured court performers in the period being Leicester’s Men and the boys’ companies.62 Records of royal entry at Worcester on 13 August 1575 include his name among the nobles in attendance to the queen on the same summer progress that featured the two-week extravaganza in July at Leicester’s Kenilworth residence.63 Within the Stanley household itself, young Lord Strange’s troupe of tumblers would have varied the entertainment options, given the already available talents of Derby’s actors. Annual tours, mostly on record in the south, show that the two family troupes followed the same itinerary in some years between 1576 and 1581. At Faversham in 1577–78 and at Bath in 1578–79 and again in 1580– 81, both Strange’s and Derby’s players are recorded, though comparing the rewards yields at least one surprise.64 Strange’s troupe seems to have launched itself into touring with considerable  clout, despite the junior status of its patron, even receiving a higher reward than Derby’s at Bath in 1578–79 and as much as Leicester’s at Exeter in 1576–77.65

22

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

Within a mere three years, just after Christmas 1579/80, Lord Strange’s “tumblers” had achieved the highest honor and reward of all: a command performance before the queen at Whitehall.66 Christmastide court festivities for two of the next three years continued to feature tumbling and “feats of activity” by Strange’s troupe, presumably the culmination of the annual tours recorded in the provincial accounts, with the likely addition of entertainment provided for the Stanley household at its Westminster residence in Cannon Row or at one of its residences in the northwest.67 These court appearances by Lord Strange’s Men, as well as performances by Derby’s Men in 1579/80 and 1582/83, raised the profile of Stanley theatrical patronage. The success of Lord Strange’s troupe might also have been owing to the one important performer whose name can be linked with them. John Symons is named as the payee and leader of the troupe at court in the Chamber accounts for the 1 January 1582/83 “Sundrey feates of Tumbling and Activitie” by a company named in the Revels accounts as Strange’s “servauntes.”68 However, after these years of court engagements, the troupe under Strange’s patronage disappears from the royal entertainment calendar. Symons may have had a star’s freelancing temperament, or he may have been lured away, but court records for Christmas 1584/85 show Symons and his fellows performing their vaulting and feats of activity under the patronage of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.69 In 1585/86 and 1587, Symons and company maintained their court appearances during the Christmas season, but without a patron named.70 It seems probable that by then the queen herself had assumed patronage, for when Symons’s showmanship was taken into the provinces in 1588, his tumbling act was part of the touring Queen’s Men. Their first notice in the fall of 1588 at the town of Nottingham singles out Symons as lead member, but sporadically specific accounts for the next two years identify both tumblers and rope- dancers in the queen’s company.71 Symons therefore may have moved from Strange’s patronage soon after 1583, and the dwindling records of Strange’s troupe suggest that their heyday was over. Although they surface occasionally in the provincial accounts until 1584– 85, the level of the two provincial rewards on record is significantly lower than in times past, reflecting the fact that Symons and perhaps others had moved on to other troupes.72 A company of musicians under Strange’s patronage does appear for the first time in the Earl of Leicester’s entourage in the Low Countries in 1586, but subsequent notices are few: at Nottingham the same summer and a couple of years later at Coventry.73 With their important court performances and extended tours, Lord Strange’s early company, like Derby’s Men before them, had in a relatively short time

Origins of Lord Strange’s Men

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risen to the top of the theatrical world only to suffer the price of success, as leading performers were swept away into new theatrical enterprises. Political preoccupations in the years between 1585 and 1588, together with their attendant financial obligations, may also have contributed to a short hiatus in the Stanley patronage tradition. But in the months following the Armada, the tradition was renewed, this time with the great house performances at Lathom and Knowsley, from which emerged the greatest London- centered company of its time. With their post-Armada revival, Lord Strange’s Men would themselves become the company who would sweep others into their enterprise. MO T I V ES FOR PAT RONAGE: N E W PA R K , O C T OBER 158 8

On 10 August 1588 Henry Stanley wrote from his house in Cannon Row, Westminster, to Sir Richard Shireburn, 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, “to surprise England vnawares and vnprouided,” for several months “dallyed with the English, till the Spanish fleete was come to the coast of England, and the thundering of the ordinance was heard from the sea.”74 By early August, when Stanley and his embassy arrived back in England, the Spanish fleet had been defeated, and the earl’s letter to Shireburn, announcing his imminent return to Lancashire, jubilantly reported “my safe aryvall this day at the Court, whither I was well welcome especiallie to her Maiestie, whoe used me most honorablie and by her gratious speeches gave me assurance both of her good acceptance of my seruice and of her purpose to recompense the same.”75 The earl’s ser vice abroad had been matched by his son’s at home, as Ferdinando, Lord Strange, had taken responsibility during the summer of 1588 for the defense of Lancashire and Cheshire, where invasion was feared from the Irish Sea.76 Reporting on the wartime status of Lancashire and Cheshire, a letter of intelligence addressed to Don Bernardin Mendoza, Spanish ambassador to France, had spoken of “the love which the people doe beare to the earle, who with his sonne is firmly bent against the pope.”77 That love was expressed in the “great rejoycing 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.”78 From his seat at Lathom, where he had arrived by 24 September, Lord Derby commanded his deputy lieutenant Sir

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John Byron and the justices of the peace of Lancashire to arrange “some godlie exercyse of thankes gevinge for the same by prayer & preachinge” for “the late ouerthrowe of our Enemies taken vpon the coste of Irelande.”79 On 26 September the Derby Household Book, dated from the Stanley residence at New Park, takes note of the earl’s “retorne from his Iorney & Imbassadge from fflanders.” “My Ladie Strandge & 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, 10 October, the steward records a visit by “the Qwenes players.”80 Because the keeper of the Household Book, William Farington 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 these 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 1594 quarto, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third . . . As it was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players casts the Stanleys in the starring role in the defeat of Richard III and the rise of Henry Tudor to the English throne. Given that Thomas, Lord Stanley, was rewarded for his ser vice at Bosworth with the earldom of Derby, the play is also an account of the Stanleys’ rise to the Derby earldom and to their preeminence in the northwest of Tudor England. The play assigns to Thomas Stanley an early resistance to Gloucester’s usurpation. Together with his son George, Lord Strange, Stanley is suspected by the tyrant Richard of supporting Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and 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 Thomas Stanley’s second wife. In the Queen’s Men’s play, she is known as “Lady Stanley.” Distrusting Lord Stanley’s circumspect denials and wary of his wish to return to Lancashire, where he might conspire more freely, Richard takes young George Stanley hostage, threatening to execute him should Stanley support Richmond. In a secret meeting with Richmond on the eve of battle, Stanley reveals to his “sonne” Richmond that his “onely” purpose in giving up George Stanley as hostage was “to come and speake with thee” (TLN 1826, 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

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sonne left to make Lord Standley” (TLN 1937–38), Richard sends Lovell and Catesbie offstage with orders to execute the young Lord Strange. The matter is left hanging in theatrical suspense while the battle plays out and Richmond kills Richard. Lord Stanley himself places the crown on the head of the man he continues to call “my sonne.” Richmond in turn betroths himself to Elizabeth of York, and all seems well concluded but for Lord Stanley’s grief over the fate of the hostage Lord Strange: Stan. And now 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 know 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. Stan. 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. (TLN 2122–38)

In this happy conclusion, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third is a romance twice over, celebrating both the marital union of Lancaster with York and the reunion of the Stanleys, father and son, at the defining moment that seals the family’s greatness. Ferdinando Stanley, the contemporary Lord Strange, was apparently not present when the Queen’s Men played at New Park on 10 October 1588 (he seems to have returned to Lancashire from London only on 2 November), but if the Queen’s Men had performed their Richard III play in October 1588, they would have delivered immense satisfaction to the household and its assembled guests, compliments of the Stanleys’ patron and recent benefactor, the queen. If not on that occasion, then on 6–7 July 1589, when “the Qwenes plaiers plaied ij severall nyghtes” at Lathom, or 6–7 September 1589 or 25 June 1590, when

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they appeared again at Knowsley,81 they would have demonstrated what theatrical performance could do for a noble family and its standing among neighbors and throughout the realm. 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, 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 long-standing 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.”82 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 BL: MS Cotton Vitellius A. XVI— attach little importance to the role of the Stanleys in the ascent of the Tudors. In their narratives of Hastings’s arrest and execution, none mentions Thomas Stanley or the wound that, according to the Queen’s Men, he so honorably acquired on that occasion. In the Crowland Chronicle, Lord Strange becomes a hostage only after his father threateningly prolongs his freely granted stay in the north on the eve of Richmond’s invasion, and Lord Strange, after his escape and recapture, cravenly reveals to Richard the conspiracy against him.83 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, wounding, and imprisonment. Neither mentions the taking of George Stanley as a pledge 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 Rychardys helmett wyth the

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Croune beyng upon It, cam streygth to kyng henry and sett It upon his hede sayyng, sir here I make yow kyng of Engeland.”84 It is only with the more extensive humanist histories of Thomas More and Polydore Vergil that the full Stanley legend begins to unfold. More’s History of King Richard the Thirde, which records Richard’s attack on Stanley,85 breaks off short 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. Trusting Thomas Stanley least of all others, because “he had in maryage Henryes mother,” Margaret Beaufort, the king seizes upon “George lord Strange his soone as a pledge in the court.” Richmond enjoys the support of the full Stanley clan, and at Bosworth Thomas Stanley withholds his troops “in the mydde way betwixt the two battaylles,” while Sir William Stanley commits his contingent at the opportune moment. In this version, for the first time, it is Lord Thomas Stanley, patriarch of the future Derby earls, who sets “King Richerds crowne” on Richmond’s head, “as thoughe he had bene already by commandment of the people proclaimyd king.”86 The way the story is pieced together has suggested to modern historians that the major reporters for both More and Vergil included not only Thomas Morton, so obviously influential in More’s portion of the story, but also the 1st Earl of Derby himself and Sir Christopher Urswick, a Stanley client and chaplain of Margaret Beaufort. Urswick, the son of a lay brother and sister of 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 ser vices to the Tudors with 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 (1512–13), but not in the printed edition (Basel, 1534).”87 Shakespeare’s version of the story, we shall see in chapter 9, explicitly acknowledges Urswick’s role in its creation by having the priest serve as the intermediary between Thomas Stanley and 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 century, that “the Stanleys took pains

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to write themselves into the record of opposition to Richard”88 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 Field,” which lauds “Lord Stanley bothe sterne & stout,” and in the “Song of Lady Bessy,” a ballad that tells the story from the point of view of Elizabeth of York.89 In both poems, the grand alliance of Lord Thomas, his brother Sir William, his brother-in-law John Savage, and his good neighbor Gilbert Talbot defeats Richard III despite the tyrant’s threats against the captive Lord Strange. The purpose of the poems, as some lines from the poem “Of the Princesse Elizabeth” indicate, was to present the Stanleys as peers of 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 England free.90

Additional Stanley poems, “Scottish Field” and “Flodden Field,” take the family fortunes up through 1513 and the feats of the 2nd Earl of Derby, 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 were meant to shore up clientage networks and regional alliances. The fullest version of the Stanley legend is the metrical chronicle of the house of Stanley, probably by Richard Sheale, though once thought to have been composed by Thomas Stanley, Bishop of Sodor and Man (d. 1569).91 Spanning the entire career of the family, the chronicle gives special attention to the events that made Richmond the first Tudor king and Lord Thomas the first Stanley Earl of Derby. In its rendering of the coronation scene, the poem 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, Straighte set the crowne on King Harry the Seaventh his heade. Sir 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 ser vice may be soone loste with a fonde woorde.92

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Thomas Stanley’s brother Sir William, whose troops were those that actually came to Richmond’s aid, and who was himself the one, in earlier versions of the story, who placed the crown on the new king’s head, was executed in 1495 for his treasonous support of Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII.93 There was in fact 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 1586/87 another Sir William Stanley, a cousin from the Hooten branch of the family, surrendered the English garrison he commanded at Deventer and went 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 too had been known for their Catholic sympathies. Edward, the 3rd Earl of Derby, had used his position on the Privy Council to resist most aspects of the Edwardian religious reform. For the coronation of Queen Mary he rode to London with eighty men in coats of velvet and 218 yeomen in livery, and he contributed troops in support of the Catholic queen against Wyatt’s rebellion.94 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 3rd Earl’s support of Elizabeth during the Northern Rebellion of 1569 had also been lukewarm. Perhaps as a result, when Lord Edward lay dying in 1571 and his son Henry had traveled north to attend him at Lathom, the queen sent a letter that, in requesting the attendance of Henry’s son Ferdinando at court, might have recalled events during the reign of Richard III. Surmising that Henry Stanley’s absence from court was “not other, than is to attend vppon [your] our Coosyn your father now in his sycknes,” and thanking him for “your ernest gud will to serve and please vs ^at all tymes, ye lyke wherof we ^ar sorry [have] not to have found in your brothern,” the queen concluded that “^consideryng your absence, we have bene ernest with our Coosyn your wiff, yat she wold [per< . . . >] move yow to send vpp your eldestt sone [our Coosyn] to be here some tyme.”95 It would be going too far to say that Lord Strange was being 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. It should be remembered, though, that even in the old saga “Lady Bessy” the captivity of George Stanley began as a friendly arrangement in which Lord Thomas sent “the Lorde Strange to London, / To keepe Richard companye.”96

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The author(s) of The True Tragedy of Richard the Third may not have known any of the poems dealing with the Stanley saga; for their purposes, the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, where the family legend had been enshrined, 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 the Third (if the Queen’s Men ever played it in their four known appearances at New Park or Knowsley) would have been about the ways in which professional theater and aristocratic patronage might combine to protect and promote family interests. Lord Thomas Stanley, under the speech heading of “Darbie,” was to reappear in a prominent role in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and in fact important Stanley ancestors and clients, as we explain in chapter 9, appear with conspicuous prominence throughout Shakespeare’s first tetralogy of history plays. W HO W ER E L OR D S T R A NGE ’ S M E N?

While the Queen’s Men were the highest-ranking company to play the Stanley houses in the northwest, there were other troupes recorded in the Derby Household Book. Two of them especially invite our attention in connection with the creation of Lord Strange’s new troupe: Leicester’s Men and the unnamed “players” who appear repeatedly. In early May 1587 the Earl of Derby returned from London to his principal home at Lathom, where the household settled in again for several summer months.97 Intermixed with the weekly dinners, business appointments, and sermons recorded in Faringdon’s journal are visits by the leading troupes of the realm, the first being Leicester’s Men, who played on 6 and 7 July 1587 before departing on the 8th.98 Unlike Henry Stanley, whose company was apparently discontinued after the formation of the Queen’s Men, Leicester seems to have re-formed a company of actors within two years of the royal raid that recruited three of his star performers (Robert Wilson, John Laneham, and William Johnson) for the queen’s company in 1582/83. A rare household account book99 shows evidence of a reformed company in May 1585, when Leicester’s players received several generous payments before setting off “into the Countrie” on a tour that took them through East Anglia, the Midlands, and the southwest as far as Bath and Gloucester.100 In the 1570s their predecessors had functioned as a quasi-royal company, with a range of touring and a level of reward to be equaled only by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. The new troupe was no less adventurous: they took touring to a new level late in 1585 when they set sail for the Low Countries to join Leicester’s splendid courtly retinue as he progressed through Middel-

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burg, Dordrecht, Rotterdam, and Delft to The Hague for celebrations at Epiphany 1585/86. As commander of the expedition to the Netherlands, Leicester had a large personal entourage, at the outset approximately a hundred, with a further seventy-two lords and gentlemen with their own retinues to swell the ranks.101 The players were summoned to Leicester House in London and paid £6 on 4 December before their departure, several days before their patron’s.102 A billeting list for the Hague entry on 6 January 1585/86 makes provision for fifteen players, as well as twelve musicians.103 We know that the players performed at least once for Leicester’s household abroad during the Christmas season, while some of them returned to England in the new year.104 The “jesting player,” Will Kemp, who was clearly one of Leicester’s Men by this time, set out for England on 4 January, but he was back with Leicester again by early May.105 Leicester may have recalled other players in time for the St. George’s Day celebrations at Utrecht in April. Stow records entertainments at the banquet, a show of tumbling and dance titled “the forces of Hercules” which “gaue great delight to the strangers, for they had not seene it before.”106 Featuring physical dexterity, music, and dance, the show transcended language barriers, and it served the dual political purposes of displaying superior English talents under Leicester’s patronage and complimenting Dudley himself, the new Hercules come to lend his strength to the Dutch cause. A month later, embattled but still hopeful of his position, Leicester and his players transferred the custom of touring to a new location on the continent. At Arnhem at the end of May, five named players—George Bryan, Thomas King, Robert Percy, Thomas Pope, and Thomas Stephens—were dispatched, with a letter of introduction from their patron, to tour parts of northern Europe; the courts of Frederick II of Denmark at Elsinore and Christian I, Elector of Saxony, at Dresden, made them welcome. Will Kemp and his boy, Daniel Jones, followed later, to augment or alternate performances at Elsinore in August and September.107 German archives indicate that the troupe of five actors became attached to Christian’s court until July 1587, although Kemp presumably returned home sooner.108 Three of these actors—Bryan, Kemp, and Pope—were among the six players named as leading members of Lord Strange’s Men in a license issued to the company by the Privy Council on 6 May 1593.109 When Leicester’s troupe came to Lathom in July 1587, they therefore included some of the most accomplished performers of the period, experienced in touring not only across the country (Leicester’s troupes typically ventured farther than most) but also on the continent. They were supported by a patron known for his sharp political instincts and strong promotion of the Protestant cause at home and abroad. After visiting

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Lathom they continued to tour until some time in 1588, when they disappear from provincial accounts, and for good reason: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, died on 4 September 1588, leaving his players to seek patronage elsewhere. Leicester’s Men could count on a friendly reception at Lathom. The personal lives of Henry Stanley and Robert Dudley had been entwined since the years they spent together in the household of Prince Edward, and their friendship was resumed more than a decade later, when Elizabeth came to the throne and Dudley’s status as royal favorite brought him to power.110 Summoned to Parliament as Lord Strange on 23 January 1558/59, Henry Stanley was active in events at the new Elizabethan court through the 1560s, during the period of Dudley’s growing influence. Dudley quickly saw the advantage of patronizing players (by June 1559), and Stanley seems to have followed suit in 1563. By the opening years of the 1580s, Derby’s troupe had joined Leicester’s as one of the most prominent of the Elizabethan acting companies. With lands and a title (Baron of Denbigh) based in North Wales, Leicester was appointed chamberlain of the County Palatine of Chester in 1565, a post that the Stanleys had regarded as theirs by hereditary right. During Leicester’s one recorded visit to Chester in June 1584, Stanley, by then the 4th Earl of Derby, was a prominent member of Leicester’s entourage—perhaps too prominent, since the orator’s assigned speech of welcome to “the Cheefe mentayno< . . . > defendourr and patrone” of the city “was not well liked of because he did direct it to Earle darby: & hauinge ended sayd God blesse the Earle of darby.”111 A year later, in 1585, Derby joined Leicester on the Privy Council, with consequent regular contact. Notable among the scattered correspondence surviving in various collections of state papers at the British Library are a couple from Derby—“Youre Lo[rdships] assured Lovynge Cosin and faythfull frende always”—to Leicester during his diplomatic mission to the continent in 1588 to treat with the Duke of Parma for peace with Spain.112 Ferdinando Stanley seems likely to have benefited from his father’s long friendship with Leicester when he first joined the royal household as an impressionable youth in the early 1570s. Ferdinando’s interests, we have seen, may have been shaped at court and by the Kenilworth festivities in 1575, and Leicester’s promotion of tumbling by touring Italians may also have influenced Ferdinando’s patronage of acrobatic performers in his first troupe. Beyond these precocious patronage activities, Ferdinando’s personal life may also have taken some direction from Leicester’s mentoring interests. Leicester was rumored to have had a hand in arranging the marriage of Ferdinando to Alice Spencer, youngest daughter of one of the wealthiest landowners in England, Sir John Spencer of Althorp, Northamptonshire.113

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In July 1587, when Leicester’s Men played Lathom, they may have met once again with performers under Ferdinando’s patronage whom they are likely to have encountered in the Low Countries a year before. We have noted the dwindling activities of Strange’s original troupe, apparently coinciding with John Symons’s move to other patrons. Yet Leicester thought well enough of Lord Strange and his musicians to include them in his continental entourage; the same day that Leicester’s players set out for Elsinore, their patron gave a reward to “iiij of my lords strangs mvsicions at arnam the first daye of Iune 1586 xx s.”114 Strange’s musicians show up not long after, in Nottingham on 24 June 1586, so Leicester’s payment must have been a farewell gift. They appear again only once in provincial accounts, at Coventry, at an unspecified date between 5 December 1588 and 26 November 1589.115 Although the identities of these musicians have proved untraceable, the gradual rebuilding of a second remarkable troupe of actors to promote Lord Strange’s reputation can be discerned in the same 1587–88 period. After a two-year hiatus, players under Strange’s patronage stopped at Coventry, though their level of reward (5s) was exactly half of what Strange’s tumbling troupe had earned at Coventry a decade earlier, and a comparison with the reward of 40s to Leicester’s Men in the same year’s account suggests that they were either of lesser quality or few in number.116 But at about this same time, Stanley household activities in Lancashire in 1587–88, covered by the surviving Derby Household Book, show signs of an emergent company. Farington, the family steward, records the return of Lord and Lady Strange to Lancashire on 23 October 1587.117 The family spent the Christmas season up until Shrovetide at Knowsley, and a typically cryptic entry in the Household Book reveals that they enjoyed entertainment by players shortly before 30 December.118 We must pause over this entry, which has achieved some notoriety in the speculative annals of Shakespeare’s “lost years.” The manuscript entry reads thus: “On ffryday my Lord the earle came home from the cowrte & the same night came my Lord bushoppe, mr stewarde mr receyver mr foxe, on saturedaye Sir Thomas hesketh plaiers wente awaie, & the same daye mr Edwarde halsoll, mr Houghton of houghton & many strandgers came to knowsley.”119 Characteristic of Farington’s style is the shorthand phrasing and erratic punctuation. Were these “plaiers” patronized by Sir Thomas Hesketh? Or has Farington simply omitted the verb “came” before or after Hesketh’s name, as well as the punctuation that would distinguish the note on the players’ departure from Hesketh’s arrival? And if, as the absence of the possessive form of Hesketh might suggest, the players did not wear Hesketh’s livery, could they have been so familiar as not to need a title?120

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Some attention must be paid first to Hesketh. Sir Thomas Hesketh (1527–88) belonged to the Lancashire gentry, with two residences in the county, at Martholme and Rufford, the latter not far from Lathom in the mosslands of west Lancashire. He was a local landowner of recusant sympathies, without notable appointments at the time of his visit to Knowsley. The likelihood that he had the inclination or purpose to patronize a touring troupe of players needs reexamination, especially as the only definite record of his interest in performers is dated almost two decades earlier, when a bequest was made to Hesketh’s minstrel James by Dean Alexander Nowell from his brother’s estate.121 No troupe of players under Hesketh’s patronage appears elsewhere in provincial records, and indeed it would have been quite exceptional for the Stanleys to have welcomed such a locally based company for their Christmas revels. A notable aspect of their taste is its apparent sophistication; while Earl Henry and his son might enjoy local entertainments such as the Shepherds’ pageant when they visited Chester, in their own homes they seem to have preferred the elite troupes from outside the county: Queen’s, Leicester’s and the Earl of Essex’s. Nonetheless lack of evidence has not prevented fanciful speculation about the extent of Hesketh’s patronage. Because of his friendship with Alexander Hoghton of Lea Hall, Hesketh was mentioned in Hoghton’s 1581 will as a possible refuge for the testator’s two “players,” named Fulk Gyllom and—more controversially—William Shakeshafte. The first choice of household to receive these two was in fact the patron’s half-brother, Thomas Houghton of Brinscall, and there is no proof that he refused to do so. The name “Shakeshafte” has given rise to a frenzy of speculation that the player belonging to Hoghton’s 1581 household might have been the seventeen-year- old Shakespeare from Stratford, spending some of his “lost years” in the northwest. Without lingering over the arguments, pro and con, we need only note that if Hesketh did inherit one or even both of Hoghton’s household entertainers in 1581, we might still question whether the players were still together seven years later, and if they were, why they would have ventured to Knowsley and been made welcome where no other locals seem to have performed.122 Hesketh himself was put under arrest in 1581 as a papist, so his inclination to take on entertainers at the time may have been curtailed in any case.123 Theories of Shakespeare’s Lancashire sojourn usually include episodes involving priest-holes and recusant Catholicism, but these do not fit well with the pattern of the Stanleys’ actions, policies, and apparent sympathies, nor do they fit with what we know of playing in the great houses of the family. If we resist the temptation to equate the Lancashire Shakeshafte of 1581 with Shakespeare of Warwickshire,124 and if we remain deeply skeptical that Hesketh patronized a troupe worthy of playing Knowsley at Christmas

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seven years later, then who were the “players” whose departure was noted by Farington in December 1587? Like some others, we are convinced that these were family players, not needing any further identification from Farington’s point of view, and that this was but the first of their several appearances in the surviving Household Book, which chronicles Lord Strange’s recruitment of a new family troupe.125 More notices of an unnamed company follow in subsequent years, always coinciding with Lord Strange’s own residency in the northwest. During the week of 29 December 1588–4 January 1588/89, Farington records an unusually prestigious gathering at Lathom for a performance by an unnamed group of players: “Sondaye mr Carter pretched at which was dyvers strandgers, on mondaye came mr Stewarde, on Tvesdaye the reste of my Lords cownsell & also Sir Iohn Savadge, at nyght a playe was had in the halle & the same nyght my Lord strandge came home.”126 Given the presence of all of Lord Henry’s council and the arrival of Lord Strange, our assumption is that this was Lord Strange’s own new company, but now, a few months after Leicester’s death, significantly expanded to include actors likely taken from Leicester’s Men, actors whose names we know from Leicester’s own continental household accounts and from the 1593 Privy Council license for Strange’s Men. Players, almost certainly the same group, played again the following Sunday, when Lord Strange was again present. During the following year of 1589/90, when Lord Strange was at Lathom on 21 February, once again a troupe of unnamed “players played at nyght.”127 The coincidence of Lord Strange’s presence on all four 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 to: they were simply an extension of what Farington elsewhere called “his Lordes servantes & howseholde for dailly attendans.”128 If, as these circumstances suggest, key players from the late Earl of Leicester’s patronage had migrated to Lord Strange’s newly formed troupe by Christmas 1588/89, their recruitment was likely owing not just to the long-standing connections between Leicester and the Stanleys or to the Stanleys’ venerable history of theatrical patronage but to a renewed ambition on the part of the family to advance their interests and influence through a playing company of national stature. Early in their history Leicester’s Men had become the first company to be licensed under the terms of the 1572 vagabondage act. It was on the model of Leicester’s Men, and partly from their personnel, that the Queen’s Men had been created in 1583, and even in the shadow of the queen’s own company Leicester’s Men had subsequently reemerged as an important troupe— perhaps the only rival to the Queen’s Men—in the provinces, at court, and

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abroad. The death of Leicester, and his players’ need for new patronage, had created for the Stanleys, at a key moment in the family’s history, an extraordinary opportunity to renew and expand upon their history of patronage. Little is known of the repertory of Leicester’s Men, but the plays of Robert Wilson (most of them written after he left Leicester’s for the Queen’s Men in 1583) are perhaps an indication of a willingness on the part of Leicester’s players to advance their patron’s agenda by engaging in satire, polemic, controversy, and matters of political moment.129 To recruit players from Leicester’s company was thus to do precisely what the queen and her advisors had done just five years earlier; Lord Strange was assembling, from Leicester’s former servants, an elite group of well-traveled professionals who might rival and surpass their contemporaries in distinction and influence. It was not long after Christmas 1588/89, when the Stanley household, council, and clientage had assembled for “a playe . . . in the halle,” that Ferdinando Stanley was summoned to Parliament as Lord Strange. His departure with his wife and father is noted by Farington on 27 January, when “my lord & my lord strandge & ladie Strandge went all towardes London, and the same daye his Lordeshippes howse broke vppe at lathom.”130 The unnamed players of Faringdon’s Household Book may indeed have been the same group that, before the year was out, had gained notoriety in London under the name of Lord Strange’s Men. These new liverymen—Kemp, Pope, and Bryan probably among them— would boldly bring distinction to their patron and their trade, rivaling and surpassing the queen’s own company in popularity and influence. Other actors would later join them: Edward Alleyn, for example, from the Lord Admiral’s Men, and John Heminges, who might have come from the Queen’s Men, perhaps bringing others with him. There may have been connections with James Burbage’s Shoreditch theater enterprise, and there is evidence, as we shall see, for connecting Shakespeare with the company as well. Their strongest connection was forged with the enterprising Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre. This part of the story does not belong to Lancashire, however, but to London.

2

Lord Str ange’s Men in London, 1589–1593

When Lord Strange departed for London, where, from 8 February to 29 March 1588/89 he sat through his first thirty- one sessions in the House of Lords, his players may have followed; no records of the company on tour elsewhere during that spring or summer have as yet been found. If the new company did go to London, they arrived in the capital at a crucial moment, just as the developing controversy over Martin Marprelate was taking to the public stage. By the following November, Lord Strange’s Men had taken a prominent role in this controversy, arousing the ire of the Lord Mayor and giving “great offence” to “the better sorte” for daring (in the words of a Privy Council minute) “to handle in their plaies certen matters of Diuinitye and of State vnfitt to be suffred.”1

“ T O T H E GR E AT OF F ENCE OF T H E BET T ER SORT E”: L ON D ON, 158 9

Learned puritan debate with the Elizabethan Church and its episcopal hierarchy had been forced underground in the autumn of 1588, but it reemerged shortly thereafter in the form of unlicensed satirical pamphleteering by the pseudonymous Martin Marprelate and his offspring, Martin Junior and Martin Senior. In the scurrilous abuse that Martin heaped on Archbishop Whitgift and other Anglican apologists, the puritan campaigners, led by the Welshman John Penry, borrowed from the popular stage, and perhaps especially from the Queen’s Men, vernacular tools of improvised mockery and derision. Declaring that the bishops and conforming clergy had “come unto their promotions by simony,” the Epistle to the Terrible Priests (October 1588), the first of Marprelate’s pamphlets, reported that “Tarleton took him not long since in Don John of 37

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London’s cellar.”2 Richard Tarlton, the leading clown of the Queen’s Men, had died in the previous month; the roguish personification Simony had featured in the anticlerical satire of Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1584) and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), the latter undoubtedly a property of the Queen’s Men. Wilson, with John Laneham and William Johnson (all of them among the five sharers named in the original patent of Leicester’s Men in 1574), had been recruited from Leicester’s troupe into the Queen’s Men in 1583. Marprelate’s opponents were quick to note the debt of his scoffing pamphlet style to the clowning satire of Wilson and Tarlton on the popular stage. Martin’s “twittle twattles” were said to have been “learned in Alehouses, and at the Theater of Lanam and his fellowes,”3 that is, at James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, where the Queen’s Men, under the management of John Laneham, were apparently playing. According to the anti-Martinist doggerel of Mar-Martine (1589), “These tinkers termes, and barbers iestes first Tarleton on the stage, / Then Martin in his bookes of lies, hath put in euery page.” 4 Claiming that the saucy Marprelate had usurped Tarlton’s mantle of “knaue and foole,” the anti-Martinist Whip for an Ape urged the prelates to abandon their ineffectual attempts to answer Martin in sober terms and to leave the discomfiting of Martin to the very theatrical entertainers from whom he had first borrowed his tricks: ye graue men that answere Martins mowes, He mockes the more, and you in vaine loose times: Leaue Apes to dogges to baite, their skins to crowes, And let old Lanam lash him with his rimes.5

By the spring and summer of 1589, as the authorities turned their efforts to ferreting out the Martinist press and conspirators, the stage and popular press were engaged, probably at the behest of Whitgift’s chaplain, Richard Bancroft, in a campaign of anti-Martinist ridicule. The surviving prose diatribes (probably written by playwrights like Robert Greene, John Lyly, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Nashe) make numerous references to a parallel series of theatrical assaults, apparently started by the Queen’s Men as early as April. In their account of the theatrical campaign, the pamphleteers explain that Martin was “sundrie waies verie curstlie handled; as first drie beaten, & therby his bones broken, then whipt that made him winse, then wormd and launced, that he tooke verie grieuouslie to be made a Maygame vpon the Stage”—all this (according to the marginal note) at “the Theater.”6 If the “dry beating” described in A Whip for an Ape originated in a performance—the poem tells how Martin, in the guise

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39

of an ape, was brought “out upon our stage . . . in a sacke”—then as many as three separate performances may have been devoted to the whipping of Martin the ape, to his worming and lancing on the stage, and to his being made a “Maygame” for protesting his earlier mistreatment. Numerous allusions to “the May-game of Martinisme,” in which Penry was “the foregallant of the Morrice” and “Martin himselfe . . . the Mayd-marian,” suggest that this may have been among the first and most influential of anti-Martinist shows.7 “The Anotamie latelie taken” of Martin is amply documented in references to “the blood and the humors that were taken from him, by launcing and worming him at London vpon the common Stage,” and to the “Phisitians” who “found by the sharpnes of his humour, when they had opened the vaine that feedes his head, that hee would spit out his lunges within one yere.”8 By the later spring of 1589 these scandalous shows had apparently become a separate concern for the embarrassed authorities. By mid-May the full complement of the Queen’s Men had divided and departed London on the longest tour they had undertaken, not returning until their court performance at Richmond Palace in December. The possibility that they left London as the result of official disfavor is supported by the Martinist boast that “Mar-Martin . . . John a Cant his hobby-horse”—sometimes taken as an allusion to playwright and pursuivant Anthony Munday, who, on behalf of Archbishop Whitgift, had apprehended the Martinist printer Giles Wigginton in December 1588—“was . . . newly put out of the Morris . . . with a flat discharge for ever shaking his shins about a May-pole again while he lived.”9 The anti-Martinists “Pasquill” and “Marforius” hinted that the hardships of the Queen’s Men’s long tour “in the Country” had resulted from some “slye practise that was vsed in restraining of her [Vetus Comaedia].”10 A reference in 1591 to the interval since “the plays in Paul’s were dissolved” suggests that if, as some suppose, John Lyly’s boy company had been involved in the anti-Martinist campaign, then their demise may have resulted from a similar restraint. If so, then the two dominant companies at court in the 1580s were forced to vacate the London stage as a result of their role in the controversy. Evidence suggests, however, that through the summer and autumn of 1589 other companies, including Lord Strange’s Men, had stepped into the breach to join “all the rimers . . . and stage-players, which my lords of the clergy had suborned” against the puritans.11 Martin’s enemies boasted that “euerie stage Plaier made a iest of him,” while his partisans complained that “in the action of dealing against Master Martin” the players had “gotten them many thousand eye-witnesses of their witless and pitiful conceits.”12 In addition to being staged in May-games, dry-beaten in a sack, wormed, lanced, and anatomized, Martin

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was depicted with “a cocks combe, an apes face, a wolfs bellie, cats clawes, &c.”13 In what may have been yet another show, this one a rape scene, Divinity was “brought foorth” on the stage “with a scratcht face, holding of her hart as if she were sicke, because Martin would haue forced her.”14 Among these anti-Martinist performances was probably one or more by Lord Strange’s Men. Theses Martinianae, dated 22 July 1589, lists “Kemp” among the “haggling and profane” satirists who served “for no other use, but to work [Martin’s] ruin and to bewray their own shame and miserable ignorance.”15 The anti-Martinist An Almond for a Parrat, published in early 1590 but written in the autumn of 1589, was dedicated to Will Kemp, “Jestmonger and Vicegerent generall to the Ghost of Dick Tarlton.” The author of the Almond (possibly Thomas Nashe, a client of Lord Strange and a probable collaborator in plays for his company), announced that “Signior Chiarlatano Kempino” was in London, and he further claimed to “haue beene oft in his company.”16 Martin’s theatrical opponents, and perhaps especially Lord Strange’s Men, drew further encouragement in late summer from the news that on 14 August servants of the Earl of Derby had discovered the underground Martinist press and arrested three of its operators as it was being moved from the home of John Hodgkins in Warrington, Lancashire to new quarters in Newton Lane near Manchester. Witnesses who had seen a case of type spilled on the ground when the press was being moved at Warrington were told that the metallic objects were pellets of “shot.”17 In response to the arrests, “Mar-phoreus,” jesting that the Martinists had “chosen a Saltpeter man for their foreman, and a gunne powder house (an hell on earth) for their printing shop,” published a mocking “lamentation of the Salt-peeter man.”18 The author of An Almond for a Parrat, perhaps deriving his information through connections to Lord Strange or his company, trumpeted the otherwise unrecorded news that the captured “saltpetermen” had absurdly “pretended the printing of Accidences, when my L. of Darbies men came to see what they were a doing.”19 With this news of the arrests and the Earl of Derby’s capture of the press came promises of a revived theatrical campaign in which Martin would be staged in a “cap’de cloake.” Munday would revenge himself by subjecting Martin’s “false carding to the stage of all mens scorne,” and new “Hayes, Iigges, Rimes, Roundelayes, and Madrigals” would “make the world laughe out the long Winters nights, which verie shortlie will steale vpon vs.”20 With these threats, however, also came complaints that the puritans would “not bee discouraged for the common players” and that they would never “be decyphered, and so perhaps discouraged” unless “those Comedies might be allowed to be plaid that are pend.”21 This hint of new restrictions against anti-

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Martinist performances is supported by complaints that “the faction of Martinisme hath mightie freends” and “great vpholders” that “some of the Cittie . . . fauour him,” that “a man cannot haue a bout with a Balletter, or write Midas habet aures asininas . . . but hee shall bee in daunger of a further displeasure.” Cuthbert Curry-knave feared that Will Kemp might shy from the controversy “in regard of the enuy of some Citizens, that can not away with argument.”22 This continuing backlash against Martin’s theatrical opponents is probably the context for a letter from John Harte, Lord Mayor of London, to Lord Burghley on 6 November 1589: My very ho good Lord Where by a lettre of your Lordships directed to mr yonge it appered vnto me. that it was your ho pleasure I sholde geue order for the staie of all playes within the Cittie, in that mr Tilney did vtterly mislike the same. According to which your Lordships good pleasure, I presentlye sente for suche players as I coulde here of, so as there appered yesterday before me the L Admeralles and the L Straunges players, to whome I speciallie gaue in Charge and required them in her Maiesties name to forbere playinge, vntill further order mighte be geuen for theire allowance in that respecte: Whereupon the L Admeralles players very dutifullie obeyed, but the others in very Contemptuous manner departing from me, wente to the Crosse keys and played that afternoone, to the greate offence of the better sorte that knewe they were prohibited by order from your Lordship. Which as I might not suffer, so I sent for the said Contemptuous persons, who haueing no reason to alleadge for theire Contempte, I coulde do no lesse but this eveninge Comitt som of them to one of the Compters, and do meane according to your Lord^ ships direction to prohibite all playing vntill your Lordships pleasure therein be further knowen.23

The “Contemptuous manner” of “Contemptuous persons” who had “no reason to alleadge for theire Contempte”: Lord Strange’s Men had clearly aroused the ire of the Lord Mayor. But Harte’s complaint points beyond mere bad manners toward a deeper audaciousness. If Harte had been clear to the players about the chain of orders he was enforcing, Lord Strange’s Men were at the very least guilty of open and immediate defiance of a ban that came not just from the Lord Mayor of London but from the Master of the Revels (Edmund Tilney), a privy councillor (Lord Treasurer Burghley), and a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex (Richard Young). In addition, if Edmund Tilney’s “mislike” of the plays on current offer was not just taking the form of second thoughts about plays whose performance he had earlier approved, then the company was also defying the very licensing arrangements under which they were required to operate.

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So alarming was Harte’s confrontation with the company that the Privy Council took up the matter and on 12 November prepared A lettre to the master of the Revelles, requiring him with two others the one to be appointed by the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and the other by the Lord mayor of London to be men of Larninge and Iudgement and to Call before them the seuerall Companies of players (whose servauntes soever they be) and to require them by authoritie herof to delyver vnto them ther booke that they maye Consider of the matters of their Comedyes and Tragedyes, and therevppon to syke out or reforme such partes and matters as they shall fynd vnfytt and vnreuerent to be handled in playes, bothe for divinitie and state, commaunding the said Companies of players in her maiesties name, that they forbear to present and playe publickly anie Comedy or Tragedy other then suche as they there shall haue seene and allowed which if they shall not observe they shall lett them know from their lordships that they shalbe not only sevearely punished but made Capable of the exercise of their profession forever hereafter.24

There is no evidence that such a committee was ever formed to augment the powers of the Master of the Revels, but the mere floating of the proposal by the Privy Council was a strong reaction to the willingness of Lord Strange’s Men to court controversy and to give “greate offence” to the “better sorte.” It is impossible to say with any certainty what offensive anti-Martinist show or shows the company had undertaken. From Nashe’s frequent pamphlet jibes against apes, Machiavels, and the “Good munckie face Machiuell” Martin, it is tempting to conjecture that theirs was an offering in which Martin was “attired like an Ape on ye stage”; if so, this may even have been the “matchavell” (or “Machiavel”) the company later performed at the Rose on 2 March, 3 April, and 29 May 1592.25 On the other hand, Nashe’s threats in the autumn of 1589 that he had a May game in preparation and that the chastised Munday would soon revenge himself on Martin have been taken as evidence that he and Munday were collaborating on a draft of the play that became John a Kent and John a Cumber, a play with a May game, anti-Martinist jibes, jokes about being “able to make a man a Munkey in lesse then halfe a minute,” and possible connections to Lord Strange’s Men.26 More solid than such conjectures is the inference that by November 1589, not long after they had formed themselves out of Leicester’s Men, and in the absence from London of the traveling Queen’s, Lord Strange’s Men had established themselves, along with the Lord Admiral’s, as a highly visible and audacious London company. Indeed the most striking feature of the Privy Council

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letter of 12 November 1589 is that it implicitly announces the end of an idea that had been pursued since 1583: that the Queen’s Men should be the sole authorized adult playing company. The letter requires the Master of the Revels and his associates to “Call before them the seuerall Companies of players (whose servauntes soever they be).”27 If the Queen’s Men had ever enjoyed a true monopoly on playing in London, they had certainly relinquished it when they departed the capital for their long tours as two separate companies in May 1589. By the following November the London stage was occupied by two newer companies, the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men. The core of veteran players in Lord Strange’s new company probably came from Leicester’s Men, a company that had almost certainly shared with the Queen’s Men a connection to artisanal traditions of popular clowning and a habit of using them in the ser vice of a patriotic Protestant agenda. But by 1589 older traditions of consensus building through ridicule were being turned to new purposes, first by Martin Marprelate and then by his opponents. Unlike the artisans and popular entertainers from whose vernacular techniques they were borrowing, the parties to the Marprelate dispute were university-trained intellectuals bringing matters of religion and state policy before the public in print. They were engaged not in building consensus but in waging a public and politically risky battle against their puritan English compatriots over controversial matters of governance and belief. Lord Strange’s Men thus began their career entangled in conditions that had greatly complicated the older regime of playing for political orthodoxy. The evidence suggests that Will Kemp and Lord Strange’s Men were on the one hand still playing against Martin Marprelate in the cause of religious and political orthodoxy. But on the other hand, their style in doing so apparently brought them to the disapproving notice of authorities and produced the first official record of their existence; for a certainty Lord Strange’s Men played in defiance of authority at the Cross Keys Inn on 5 November 1589, and for a certainty some of them spent that night in jail. “BEI NG A L ON E COM PA N IE”: F ROM T H E CROSS K E Y S T O T H E ROSE

When Lord Strange’s Men performed at the Cross Keys Inn in Gracechurch Street on 5 November 1589, they had established themselves in what apparently became one of their preferred London venues. That is implied by a letter, dated 8 October 1594, from Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain, to Sir Richard Martin, Lord Mayor of London, in behalf of his own newly formed company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In the letter Carey requests permission for his

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company, many of whose principal members (Augustine Phillips, George Bryan, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, and William Kemp) had been taken from the disbanded Lord Strange’s Men by June 1594, to play at their “accustomed” winter quarters: “where my nowe companie of Players haue byn accustomed for the better exercise of their qualitie, & for the ser vice of her maiestie if need soe requier to plaie this winter time within the Citye at the Crosse kayes in Gratious street, These are to requier & praye your Lordship . . . to permitt & suffer them soe to doe.”28 It was apparently by November 1589, as Lord Strange’s Men, that the future Lord Chamberlain’s Men had begun their custom of playing in “winter time within the Cittye at the Crosse kayes.” Located on the western side of Gracechurch Street in the parish of All Hallows Lombard Street, the Cross Keys was, with the adjacent Bell in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, and the Bell Savage on Ludgate Hill, one of four inns within the City of London that were in regular use as playhouses in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. A 1574 Act of the Common Council of London proposing to tax and regulate “playes, enterludes, and shewes . . . In greate Innes” may have been a motivation for creation of purposebuilt theaters, the Theatre and the Curtain, in the suburb of Shoreditch, just beyond the city’s jurisdiction in 1576 and 1577.29 Over the next two decades, even after the construction of the suburban theaters, there were continued complaints about and restrictions against playing at inns within the city’s jurisdiction. The timing of the 1574 Act (6 December) and of most restraints on “the exercise of playes within the Cittie of London and ^without the liberties” (23 December 1578) or “in and about the Cyttie of London” (12 November 1589) suggests that it was during the winter season that the City inns were often preferred by audiences and players to the suburban playhouses.30 Once again the pattern for Lord Strange’s Men may have been set by the Queen’s Men, who, despite the existence of the nearby Theatre and Curtain in Shoreditch, were licensed in November 1583 to perform at the Bull in Bishopsgate and the Bell in Gracechurch Street.31 Records of performances at the Cross Keys date to February 1578/79, when a player named John Gibbes testified to the court of Bridewell Hospital that one Amy Mason “beinge at the crosse keyes wher he plaied with his fellowes” sought an introduction to Gibbes and met with him “on sondaie after at ther plaie.”32 That same year, on 23 June, James Burbage, owner of the Theatre, was arrested for debt “as he came down Graces strete towardes the Cross Keys there to a Playe.”33 Owned by Alice Layston, widow of John Layston, citizen and girdler, from 1571 until her death in 1590, the Cross Keys, after falling into disrepair, had been leased to a new tenant, John Franklin, citizen and cloth worker, in

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January 1587/88. Franklin’s prompt refurbishment of the property, at “greate coste and chardges,” may have been a factor in the decision of Lord Strange’s Men to play at the Cross Keys in November.34 Some evidence suggests that the company performed in the innyard rather than in an “upper room,” as Andrew Gurr and Park Honan have asserted.35 Richard Flecknoe reported in 1664 that Elizabethan players had “set up Theaters, first in the City (as in the Inn-yards of the Cross-Keyes, and Bull in Grace and Bishops- Gate Street at this day is to be seen).”36 If Flecknoe meant that it was still “to be seen” that the yards of these inns had been used for playing, then in 1664 some physical evidence of those theatrical uses remained. With a yard measuring roughly 50 by 32 feet (after the rebuilding), it would appear the Cross Keys would have offered a theatrical space (approximately 150 to 170 square meters) comparing favorably with the yard of the 1587 Rose (123.9 square meters) and not badly with the 170.7 square meters in the yard of the Rose as enlarged in 1592.37 Against Flecknoe’s testimony of playing in the yard, however, we must set David Kathman’s observation that “in contrast to the Bull and the Bell Savage, evidence for outdoor playing at the Bell and the Cross Keys is scant; their physical configurations, plus the fact that they never hosted fencing

John Ogilby and William Morgan’s Large and Accurate Map of the City of London (1676), showing the yard of the Cross Keys (B.86) and, just to the north, the yard of the Bell (i.76). Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.

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prizes or similar activities, suggests that playing at those inns may have been indoors in a hall.”38 Whether indoors or out, when they played at the Cross Keys in November 1589, Lord Strange’s Men had ensconced themselves in the heart of the City of London, in a well-established venue for playing, recently refurbished (perhaps especially for their residence), at the onset of the winter holiday season. A play that may date from this period of the company’s first residence at the Cross Keys is A Pleasant Commodie, of faire Em, the Millers daughter of Manchester . . . As it was sundrietimes publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the Lord Strange his seruaunts. It would be reasonable to suppose that in November 1589 Lord Strange’s players were seeking to establish themselves in long-term London residence and to garner for themselves a prized appearance at court during the 1589– 90 holiday season. That is not, however, what happened. Court appearances that season went to the two companies with the longest history of court performances: the boys of St. Paul’s and the Queen’s Men, who had only just returned from their long tours in time to perform on 26 December, and the Lord Admiral’s Men, the other rising company who had “very dutifullie obeyed” the same orders from Lord Mayor Harte that Lord Strange’s Men had so contemptuously defied. Moreover, after some of their members spent at least the night of 5 November in jail, Lord Strange’s Men vanish from the records until 21 February 1589/90, when we surmise that they played at night while Lord and Lady Strange were in residence at Lathom.39 The odd feature of this appearance at Lathom is not its association with the festive winter season—there is evidence to suggest that such playing was a regular feature of the Derby household—but that the winter and spring of 1590 show no evidence of touring elsewhere by Lord Strange’s Men. It is possible that disfavor stemming from their defiance in November 1589 kept them out of London, but if so, then it is hard to explain, in the absence of records, how the company managed to finance their trip to Lathom. Absence of evidence cannot be taken as evidence of absence, however. If there was a period of suspension in the company’s activities in the month or months following November 1589, it cannot have been prolonged or permanently damaging to the company’s ambitions, since their next recorded appearances find them (in puzzling relationship to the Lord Admiral’s Men) engaged in court performances at Richmond on 27 December 1590 and at Greenwich on 16 February 1590/91. These first appearances at court in the 1590– 91 season may be connected in some way to Ferdinando Stanley’s apparent rise in status at court during the same period. Lord Strange appeared among the noble challengers at Whitehall in the unusually spectacular Accession Day Tilt of 17

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November 1590 and the “Welneere twise twentie Squires that went him by” may well have been servants in his livery, possibly even including players.40 Compared with the five court appearances by the Queen’s Men during that season, the two performances by Lord Strange’s Men left them in the second rank. But except for the Queen’s Men, they had no additional rivals at court. The boys of Paul’s had been “dissolved” and did not play at court in 1590– 91.41 More important, members of the Lord Admiral’s Men, the other adult company that had sharply distinguished themselves from Lord Strange’s Men while the Queen’s Men were away from London in 1589, were by 1590– 91 professionally connected with them. Whereas the Privy Council recorded warrants for payment to “the Lord Admyralles players” for “two severall plaies” and “other feates of activety” on 27 December and 16 February, the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber recorded payments “to George Ottewell and his Companye the Lorde Straunge his players” for “one Enterlude or Playe” and “other feates of Activitye” on each of the identical dates.42 This mysterious convergence of the names of the Lord Admiral and Lord Strange in the court performances of 1590– 91 may provide an indication of increased ambitions on the part of Lord Strange’s Men. It may also indicate where in London, besides the Cross Keys Inn, Lord Strange’s Men were playing in their early years. In the autumn of 1590, and perhaps for some months beyond, the Lord Admiral’s Men were performing at James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch. Their presence at the Theatre is reflected in Thomas Middleton’s later allusion to a performance of “Doctor Faustus when the old theatre cracked and frighted the audience,” 43 and it is supported by John Alleyn’s 1592 testimony in a lawsuit against James Burbage by the widow and associates of John Brayne, Burbage’s brother-in-law and problematic partner in the building and operation of the Theatre. Alleyn, the elder brother of Edward Alleyn, testified that on 16 November 1590 he had attempted to intervene in a quarrel at the Theatre between the Burbages and Mistress Brayne and her associates. “About viij Daies after,” Alleyn explained, he “and his fellowes” came to Burbage for “some of the Dyvydent money betwene him & them / growing also by the vse of the said Theater.” When Burbage bristled “that belike he ment to deale w t them / as he did wt the por wydowe,” Brayne, Alleyn, and his fellows threatened to “compleyne to ther lorde & Mr the lord Admyrall.” Burbage, “in A Rage,” declared “by a great othe / that he cared not for the iij of the best lordes of them all.” Burbage’s 24 November quarrel with the players, Alleyn later added, took place “in the Attyring house / or place where the players make them readye” and “in the hearing of one James Tunstall this depot and others.”44 The immediate impact of this incident on playing by the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Theatre is

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unknown, though from the tone of John Alleyn’s testimony in behalf of the Widow Brayne against the Burbages, it is clear that by the time of Alleyn’s testimony in February 1591/92 good relations were a thing of the past. Alleyn’s testimony, combined with other evidence, may provide a clue to the London whereabouts of Lord Strange’s Men, who were connected with the Lord Admiral’s Men in those records of court per formances over the same months (December–February) that followed the November 1590 quarrel at the Theatre. From the apparent connection of the two companies in the court records, E. K. Chambers inferred that an “amalgamated” company of Lord Admiral’s and Lord Strange’s Men was performing together at the Theatre in November 1590. Chambers and others found support for the idea of a “combined” company in the manuscript Booke and Platt of the second part of the 7 deadly sinns, in which James Burbage’s son “R Burbadg” plays leading roles alongside “mr Brian,” “mr Pope,” “mr Phillipps,” and such otherwise known members of Lord Strange’s men as “R Cowly” and “I Holland.” 45 However, David Kathman has found evidence to suggest that this plot may actually be of later date, documenting not Strange’s Men but the personnel of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men circa 1597. The plot does not, in any case, contain the name of James Tunstall, who was said to be present in the tiring house among the Admiral’s players who were “mak[ing] them readye” on 24 November 1590, or, for that matter, the name of Edward Alleyn or of any other known member of the Lord Admiral’s Men at the time, so it cannot serve as evidence for a full amalgamation between the two companies.46 In challenging the idea of a full amalgamation, Andrew Gurr has noted that the appearance of the two companies’ names in the Treasurer of the Chamber accounts more likely resulted from a connection recently formed at the time between Edward Alleyn, the leading actor of the Lord Admiral’s Men, and Lord Strange’s Men.47 Gurr explains that Charles Howard, the Lord Admiral, was present at the 5 March 1590/91 Privy Council meeting when the warrant for payment to the Lord Admiral’s Men was recorded, and the secretaries who recorded the payment were answerable to him, with the result that a company in which his servant Edward Alleyn performed became Howard’s company; on the other hand, those recording the actual payments in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber on 7 March would have known the name of the person to whom the payment was actually rendered: George Attewell, representing Lord Strange’s Men. Lord Strange’s Men are not, as Gurr explains, confused or combined with the Lord Admiral’s Men in any other warrants for court per formances or in Henslowe’s diary. Although the Privy Council touring license dated 6 May 1593 names “Edward Allen, seruaunt to the right honorable the

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Lord highe Admiral,” alongside Bryan, Heminges, Kemp, Pope, and Phillips, it refers to the entire group as “being al one companie seruantes to our verie good the Lord the Lord Strainge.”48 Alleyn himself accepted this nomenclature: while he was touring with Lord Strange’s Men in 1593, his letter to his wife in London instructed her to send in reply to “west chester or to york to be keptt till my Lord stranges players com.” Joan Alleyn and Philip Henslowe wrote their several letters to “Edward allen one of my lorde Stranges Players” (August 1593), to “mr Edwarde Allen on of my lorde strangs players” (14 August 1593), and to “mr edward allen one of my lord stranges players” (28 September 1593).49 The evidence points, then, not to an amalgamation of two full companies (a remnant of the Lord Admiral’s Men is recorded as touring separately from spring 1591 through 1592–93) but to Edward Alleyn’s association with Lord Strange’s Men. It is not impossible that a few other associates from the Lord Admiral’s Men came in 1590– 91 with Alleyn to Lord Strange’s Men. An undated letter to Joan Alleyn in the hand of Edward Alleyn, and facetiously purporting to be written by the boy actor Jon Pyk (Pyg), makes reference to “mr doutone” (i.e., the former Admiral’s Thomas Downton) and announces the “redy retorne” of the actors from touring. If the letter dates from the period of Alleyn’s touring with Lord Strange’s men in 1592– 93, this would mean that Downton and Pyg might have gone with Alleyn to Lord Strange’s company.50 Whether Alleyn came separately to Strange’s Men or with a few others, it appears from the joint warrants at court in 1590– 91 that this alliance might have formed while the Lord Admiral’s Men were at the Theatre, circa November 1590, at which time Lord Strange’s Men could have been occupying the adjacent Curtain. Built by Henry Lanham in 1577, the Curtain had been joined, since 1585, in a profit-sharing arrangement with Burbage’s Theatre.51 Special circumstances, we shall see, may have brought Strange’s Men to Shoreditch, but it would have been natural for the leading actors of the company, previously associated in Leicester’s Men, to gravitate toward an enterprise involving James Burbage, who was himself a former member and licensee of Leicester’s company. An earlier team of Leicester’s Men (including John Laneham, Richard Tarleton, and Robert Wilson) had played at the Theatre in 1582, just before they were recruited into the Queen’s Men in 1583. After Leicester’s Men had departed the Theatre in 1584, Burbage called himself “my Lord of Hunsdons man,” and in the 1585 winter season, following Burbage’s agreement to share profits with Henry Lanham and to take the Curtain as an “esore” (or “easer”) to the Theatre, the Audit Office recorded payment for two joint appearances, “to ye Seruauntes of the Lord admirall & ye Lorde Chamberlaine . . . for a plaie by them presented before her Maiestie on St Iohns daie last paste vij li. xiij s. iiij d”

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and “to ye Seruantes of ye Lorde admirall, & the Lord Chamberlaine . . . for a plaie by them presented before her Maiestie on Twelfe daie last past vj li. xiij s. iiij d.”52 It appears, in other words, that on a previous occasion two companies might have occupied the two Shoreditch theaters simultaneously in connection with a collaboration at court. For Lord Strange’s Men, occupying the Curtain as part of a similar two-theater, two-company arrangement might have been an opportunity to build their troupe while gaining additional protection at court through Charles Howard’s patronage of Alleyn. But an additional motive for the company’s presence in Shoreditch may have involved events at Philip Henslowe’s Rose playhouse on the Bankside. Three apparently related documents in the Henslowe-Alleyn papers, none bearing a date, make reference to a Privy Council order restraining Lord Strange’s Men from performing at the Rose. One of the documents, a letter from “the righte honorable the Lord Straunge his servantes and Plaiers” to the lords of the Privy Council, pleads that fforasmuche . . . oure Companie is greate, and thearbie our chardge intollerable, in travellinge the Countrie, and the Contynuaunce thereof, wilbe a meane to bringe vs to division and seperacion, whearebie wee shall not onelie be vndone, but alsoe vnreadie to serve her maiestie, when it shall please her highenes to commaund vs, And for that the vse of our plaiehowse on the Banckside, by reason of [by reason] the passage to and frome the same by water, is a greate releif to the poore watermen theare, And our dismission thence nowe in this longe vacation, is to those poore men a greate hindraunce, and in manner an vndoeinge, as they generallie complaine, Both our, and theire humble peticion and suite thearefore to your good honnours is, That yow wilbe pleased of your speciall favour, to recall this our restrainte, And permitt vs the vse of the said Plaiehowse againe.53

A second document, seemingly connected to this one and signed by seventeen members of the Company of Watermen, petitions “the right honnorable my Lorde Haywarde Lorde highe Admirall of Englande and one of her maiesties moste honnorable previe Counsayle” as follows: In moste hvmble manner Complayneth and sheweth vnto your good Lordeshipp, your poore suppliantes and dayly Oratours Phillipp Henslo, and others the poore watermen on the bancke side / whereas your good Lordship hathe derected your warrant vnto hir maiesties Iustices, for the restraynte of a playe howse [beinge] belonginge vnto the saide Phillipp Henslo one of the groomes of her maiesties Chamber. So it is if it please your good Lordshipp, that wee your saide poore watermen have had muche helpe and reliefe for vs

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oure poore wives and Children by meanes of the resorte of suche people as come vnto the said playe howse, It maye therefore please your good Lordship for godes sake and in the waye of Charetie to respecte vs your poore water men, and to give leave vnto the said Phillipp Henslo to have playinge in his saide howse duringe suche tyme as others have according as it hathe byne accustomed.54

The third document, not confirmed elsewhere in official records, appears to be a warrant from the Privy Council to the justices of Surrey, as well as bailiffs and constables, to lift a restraint on playing at the Rose: Whereas not longe since vpon some Consideracions we did restraine the Lorde Straunge his servauntes from playinge at the rose on the banckside, and enioyned them to plaie three daies at newington Butts, Now forasmuch as wee are satisfied that by reason of the tediousnes of the waie and yat of longe tyme plaies haue not there bene vsed on working daies, and for that a nomber of poore watermen are therby releeved, Yow shall permitt and suffer them or any other there to exercise yem selues in suche sorte as they haue don heretofore. And that the Rose maie be at libertie without any restrainte, solonge as yt shalbe free from infection of sicknes, Any Comaundement from vs heretofore to the Contrye notwithstandinge.55

These documents have traditionally been dated to 1592 or 1593, partly on the grounds that Lord Strange’s Men are not known to have performed at the Rose before February 1591/92, when performance records begin in Henslowe’s diary, and partly on the grounds that there was a substantial increase in plague deaths in London in the summer of 1592 and a grievous outbreak in 1593.56 This hitherto plausible interpretation is overturned, however, by Alan H. Nelson’s recent discovery that two of the seventeen signatories for the Company of Watermen were buried in St. Saviour’s parish in 1591: one of the Bankside petitioners, William Tutchener, was buried on 5 January 1590/91, while another, James Granger, was buried on 6 December 1591.57 This means, since the letter from Strange’s Men refers to “our dismission thence nowe in this longe vacation,” that the three documents, assuming they are connected, cannot be dated later than July or August 1590. Since the petition from Strange’s Men also refers to the Rose as “our plaiehowse on the Banckside,” it must also mean that Strange’s Men had been playing at the Rose prior to the restraint. The company, we have seen, did not perform at court in the winter of 1589/90, traveling instead to Lathom, where they played on 21 February. But by spring or early summer, if Nelson’s redating of the petitions is correct, they must have been back in London performing at the Rose. The company’s reference to the

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financial hardships of touring—“oure Companie is greate, and thearbie our chardge intollerable, in travellinge the Countrie, and the Contynuaunce thereof, wilbe a meane to bringe vs to division and seperacion”—has hitherto been taken to refer to potential hardships foreseen by the company, already on tour after the closure of London theaters on 24 June 1592, if they were to be prevented from returning to the Rose. Apart from their appearance at Lathom in February, however, there are no records of touring by the company anywhere in 1590; a reasonable inference is that the company was not on tour but in residence at the Rose immediately prior to their petition. The petition, referring to “our plaiehowse on the Banckside,” objects to “our dismission thence nowe in this longe vacation.” It refers also to “this our restrainte,” not to a general restraint, as if the company were being singled out for restriction. The Watermen’s petition suggests that the restraint was not so much against the company as against the Rose, since it asks leave for “the said Phillipp Henslo to have playinge in his saide howse duringe suche tyme as others have according as it hathe byne accustomed.” This wording appears to suggest that at the time of the petition “others” were allowed to keep London playhouses open. There is no other evidence of a general closure of London theaters in 1590, nor are there other known instances of closing only selected playhouses because of infection. Neither the Watermen’s petition nor the petition of Strange’s Men mentions infection as a cause for the restraint. The single mention of infection in the Privy Council warrant for reopening may not refer to the original reason for the restriction; it may serve merely as a proviso for the future, indicating that the playhouse would not be closed again except for the normal reasons of infection: “the Rose maie be at libertie without any restrainte, solonge as yt shalbe free from infection of sicknes.” Logically speaking, the “contrary” “Comaundement” given “heretofore” must have entailed that the Rose was restrained from opening even though free from sickness. Nelson’s data from the burial records of St. Saviour’s parish indicate a modest increase of mortality in 1590, but it does not approach the magnitude of the increase in the plague years of 1592 and 1593:58 Burials in the Parish of St Saviour’s in August 1589 18 1590 31 1591 19 1592 51 1593 265

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Burials in the Parish of St Saviour’s July–December 1589 124 1590 169 1591 161 1592 345 1593 760 It cannot be ruled out that this relatively small increase in mortality in summer 1590 raised sufficient concern to close the Rose even while other playhouses were allowed to remain open. The wording of the Privy Council warrant, which permits “the Lorde Straunge his servauntes . . . or any other there to exercise yem selues” (italics ours), would seem to suggest that the restriction, whatever its reason, was against the Rose rather than a specific company of players, despite the reference by Strange’s Men to “our dismission” and “this our restrainte.” By contrast with the dire consequences anticipated in the two strongly worded petitions, the warrant seems to imply that the restriction was shortlived, since it refers to enjoining Strange’s Men to play a mere “three daies at newington Butts.” But we do not know the precise timing or relation (if any) of this warrant to the two petitions or to the actual length of the closure. It is possible that the restriction was longer than three days, or that there was a prospect of its being longer than it was, or that, for whatever reason, some restriction specific to the Rose, due to infection or otherwise, made it seem an undesirable venue. Any of these might have been reason for Strange’s Men to contemplate a move to the Burbage theaters in Shoreditch. The Watermen’s plea on behalf of Henslowe certainly makes it look as if he, rather than Strange’s Men, would be the loser by a continued restriction against the Rose. While it is possible that Strange’s Men did as the warrant permitted and returned immediately to the Rose, to be joined there by Alleyn at some point after the quarrel of the Admiral’s Men with the Burbages in November 1590, it is also possible that the apparent partnership with Alleyn at court in December 1590 was formed in Shoreditch during or after the long vacation of 1590, when the Rose was closed. It is perhaps not accidental that Lord Strange’s Men, after their previous troubles at the Cross Keys, and finding their livelihood threatened by the closing of the Rose, allied themselves, for additional protection, with the chief player of the Lord Admiral’s company. In any case, a principal result of the collaboration at court in 1590– 91 was the extraordinary partnership in which Lord Strange’s Men somehow secured the ser vices of the leading actor of the moment. It is impossible to date precisely the point when Alleyn ceased to perform with the Lord Admiral’s Men and

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began performing on a full-time basis with Lord Strange’s Men, but 6 May 1591 is the last recorded transaction in which Alleyn was involved with his entrepreneur brother John and James Tunstall, the latter a Lord Admiral’s man, in the purchase of theatrical apparel.59 After being mentioned in connection with the court performances of Lord Strange’s Men in December and February 1590/91, the Lord Admiral’s Men appear to have abandoned the London stage and resorted to touring until they were reunited with Alleyn in June 1594. Some of them appear to have gone abroad during this same period.60 For Strange’s Men, the recruitment of Alleyn was a crucial step on their way to becoming the dominant London company of their time. Born in 1566, Edward Alleyn, as Thomas Fuller later reported, was “bred a Stage-player.” 61 A member of the Earl of Worcester’s Men by the age of seventeen in 1583, Alleyn appears to have emerged in a leading organizational role by January 1588/89, at which time he purchased from Richard Jones his share of “playinge apparelles playe Bookes, Instrumentes and other commodities” previously held “Ioyntlye with the same Edwarde Allen,” John Alleyn, and Robert

Portrait of Edward Alleyn in later life. Dulwich Picture Gallery. Reproduced with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College.

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Browne.62 Alleyn had probably already performed the title role in Marlowe’s groundbreaking Tamburlaine (published in 1590) and perhaps the roles of Doctor Faustus and Hieronimo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as well. By 1592, when Alleyn had been playing for some time with Strange’s Men, Thomas Nashe placed him in the front rank of English players, alongside Dick Tarlton, William Knell, and John Bentley, three of the Queen’s Men’s most famous actors, all dead by 1588.63 Though a living heir to their fame, Alleyn was also their rival by way of a new theatrical style; a letter in the Alleyn papers at Dulwich refers to a wager that puts up Alleyn’s acting against “any one playe that either Bently or Knell plaide.”64 Nashe’s praise of Alleyn, comparing him to Roscius, Aesop, and other “admyred tragedians,” explains that “none could euer performe more in action than famous Ned Allen.”65 Ben Jonson echoed Nashe’s emphasis on “action” in his laudatory epigram to Alleyn: “Others speak, but only thou dost act.” Heywood’s 1633 dedication and prologue to The Jew of Malta, praising Alleyn’s “peerless” manner, similarly calls him a “Proteus for shapes and Roscius for a tongue / So could he speak, so vary.” In the idiom of a slightly later time, Thomas Fuller declared, “He was the Roscius of our age, so acting to the life, that he made any part (especially a Majestick one) to become him.”66 Along with the evident majesty of his style, the shape- changing variousness of Alleyn’s impersonation seems to have been the key to his success. As documented in Henslowe’s diary, Alleyn’s daily repertory at the Rose with Lord Strange’s Men in 1592– 93 and with the revived Lord Admiral’s Men in 1594– 97 points to his versatility and extraordinary capacity for retaining in memory dozens of large, even massive roles. It has been estimated that while acting with the Lord Admiral’s Men 1594– 97 Alleyn would have “had to secure and retain command of about seventy- one different roles, of which number fifty-two or fiftythree were newly learned.”67 Alleyn’s roles included the “majestick” and changing moods of the defiantly heterodox Marlovian heroes Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus (Robert Greene wrote in 1588 of “Atheist Tamburlan” “daring God out of heauen”)68 and the volatile derangement and borderline pathology of the scheming Jew of Malta, the mad Orlando, and the antic Hieronymo. Alleyn “took possession” of these roles; literally, he owned many of the playbooks, but he also set his mark upon them (as the scroll for his part in Orlando Furioso indicates) and made them “become him.” Alleyn’s acting style, in combination with new kinds of playwriting from Marlowe, Kyd, and others, wrought a transformation in the art of playing. As declamation became embodiment, a theater of extroversion and explication increasingly became a theater of introspection and implication.69

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In Edward Alleyn, then, Lord Strange’s Men acquired a colleague who perhaps already was (and certainly became during his association with them) a “celebrity” actor, a rare performer who was being celebrated in print while still alive.70 Alleyn’s early fame may be the reason for his retaining the livery of the Lord Admiral while playing with Lord Strange’s Men. Charles Howard, the Lord Admiral and former Lord Chamberlain, held a higher rank than Ferdinando Stanley, a lord without portfolio, as well as a higher rank than Ferdinando’s father, the 4th Earl of Derby. Alleyn’s retention of the Lord Admiral’s livery might have come from some personal loyalty, though it may also have been Alleyn’s way of retaining the option of re-forming a company under Howard in the future. Retaining a degree of independence from Lord Strange’s Men was in any case a sign of Alleyn’s exceptional professional status and his capacity to freelance in his craft.71 To be sure, Alleyn and his associates (if not the secretaries of the Privy Council) were always clear that he was working with Lord Strange’s company. But when Lord Strange himself fell on hard times in January 1593/94 and his players began selling their old playbooks, the title page of A Knack to Know a Knave (a staple in the company’s repertory from 1592 and perhaps much earlier)72 offered the play to the public “as it hath sundrie tymes bene played by ED. ALLEN and his Companie.” It would be wrong, however, to see the alliance with Edward Alleyn as mere opportunism on the part of Lord Strange’s Men. The attraction to Alleyn cannot have been simply to his celebrity (which evidently grew after his alliance with Lord Strange’s Men) or to the possibility of gaining protection from a second patron in the Lord Admiral; it must have owed something to Alleyn’s cultivation of a new theatrical style and the new kinds of playwriting that supported it. A player whose strength lay in a protean variety of deeply impersonated action, whose very name “on the common stage,” as Nashe said, could “make an ill matter good,”73 would help Lord Strange’s Men to build the modern, large, and varied repertory that would be necessary to long-term London residence. Artistic ambition, as well as the pursuit of success at court and with the public, must have been part of the picture—and not just on one side: Alleyn too must have found good reasons of his own to leave his former associates, join forces with a fledgling company only a year old in London, and eventually travel with them on tour. To a man like Alleyn, whose first appearance on record as an actor, with Worcester’s Men in 1583, involved his “evyll & contemptyous wordes” against the mayor of Leicester,74 the “contemptuous manner” of Lord Strange’s Men may have been as attractive for its edginess as were the plays of Marlowe. In addition, several players in Lord Strange’s company were theatrical veterans who could claim their own distinction by way of their former membership in

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Leicester’s Men, a company with a long history of distinguished patronage, farflung travels, and connections to the greatest theatrical figures in the previous generation: James Burbage, Robert Wilson, and Dick Tarlton. If we were looking for a further reason for Alleyn’s attraction to Lord Strange’s Men, however, we might note that (so far as can be judged from his roles in the later Lord Admiral’s repertory, 1594– 97) Alleyn’s strength was in the “majestick” parts of tragedies, histories, and heroic romances rather than in comedy. We do not know, until John Singer went from the Queen’s to the revived Lord Admiral’s Men in 1594, of a comic actor associated with the Lord Admiral’s Men. But we do know that among Lord Strange’s Men was the former Leicester’s man “Signior Chiarlatano Kempino,” who was “here in London” in 1589, probably already with his old partners from the Leicester company. In addition, George Attewell the jig-writer received the payment for Strange’s Men when Alleyn played with them at court in 1590– 91. And by 1593, at the latest, the droll Richard Cowley, later Verges to Kemp’s Dogberry, was also with the company.75 It is worth remembering that on the title page of A Knack to Know a Knave, just beneath the declaration that it was “played by ED. ALLEN and his Companie,” is the advertisement that the play was offered “With KEMPS applauded Merrimentes of the men of Goteham.” Following the death in 1588 of Dick Tarlton, whose loss seems to have been a severe blow to the Queen’s Men, the way was open for Will Kemp to succeed him as the leading clown of the age.76 This pairing of Alleyn with Kemp looks like “celebrity” acting risen to new heights. No title page before the publication of A Knack to Know a Knave had ever boasted the talents of two such celebrity actors. Behind this celebrity association there may have been an ambition to rival and surpass the all-star model on which the Queen’s Men had been formed. But again we should emphasize the artistic significance of the collaboration, which was to build a new repertory of Protean variety. This repertory was characterized not so much by the “medley” style of the Queen’s Men, a multigeneric mixture always deployed in roughly similar proportions (though that remains a feature of some plays in the Strange’s repertory) as by an expanded range of distinct generic options and modes of impersonation. Distinctively different and self- complete theatrical worlds, rather than a demotic mixing of idioms, were what the company dealt in. In their collaborative pursuit of this new style, the personnel who converged in Lord Strange’s Men were, despite their varied origins, “al one companie.” The success of their collaboration may be measured by the events of the following year. A payment to the company in the Bath Chamberlains’ Accounts covering the period between June 1591 and June 1592 suggests that Strange’s

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Men traveled at some point during the period, but the absence of further records suggests the tour may have been limited and that the company’s primary intention was to maintain extended residence in London.77 They would almost certainly have been in London in time to “rehearse” for their unprecedented six appearances at court on 27 and 28 December 1591, 1 and 9 January 1591/92, and 6 and 8 February 1591/92. The Queen’s Men had kicked off the court season with a single play on 26 December 1591, and there were additional single performances by the players of the Earls of Sussex (2 January) and Hertford (6 January). But in a situation (six plays by Lord Strange’s Men to just one by the queen’s own company) that almost exactly reversed the situation of the preceding year (five plays by the Queen’s Men to two by Lord Strange’s), the stature of the Queen’s Men had been eclipsed. “[T]he Seruantes of our verie good lord Straunge,” as they were called in the Privy Council payment warrant for those six performances,78 had become the preeminent company at court. A further consequence of the events surrounding Alleyn’s alliance with Lord Strange’s Men may have been some division of the company’s personnel, especially if young Richard Burbage (b. 1568) had been acting with them at the Curtain. In view of doubts raised by Kathman’s recent reattribution of the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men circa 1596– 97, it is no longer safe to use the manuscript plot as evidence for events in 1590– 91. Nevertheless, even in the absence of support from the plot, there are still circumstances— including Burbage’s eventual partnership with former Strange’s Men in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the links that appear to connect Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and 2 and 3 Henry VI with both Lord Strange’s/Derby’s Men and Pembroke’s Men—to suggest that an additional consequence, if Strange’s Men and Alleyn parted from the Shoreditch theaters, could possibly have been the loss of Richard Burbage and other players, including Shakespeare perhaps, and ownership of plays by Shakespeare as well. In our census of the plays of Strange’s Men (chapters 3 and 4) and in our study of Shakespeare’s possible connections to the company (chapter 9), we explore in more detail our reasons for thinking that the several Shakespearean plays with attribution to Pembroke’s Men were originally written for and played by Lord Strange’s Men, possibly in Shoreditch in 1590. These early plays by Shakespeare, and Burbage’s role in them, may have been as important to the company’s rising status as the contributions of Kemp, Pope, Bryan, and the recently recruited Alleyn. In the weeks immediately following their six appearances at court, a further measure of the company’s accomplishment, and its significance for the London stage, can be found in the pages of the personal memorandum book of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose. Henslowe’s so- called diary documents daily per-

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formances by Lord Strange’s Men during an extended residence at the Rose between 19 February and 22 June 1592 and during a second, shorter period between 29 December 1592 and 1 February 1592/93. Involving an initial series of 105 consecutive performances of twenty-four different plays, old and new, and then a shorter series of twenty-nine performances, including three more new plays, for a total of twenty-seven plays in all, the residence of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose, Andrew Gurr has said, “may well have been the longest tenure for one company at one playhouse up to that time.”79 Henslowe had inherited the blank memorandum book from his recently deceased brother John in the weeks before he began to use it in early 1592, but the redating of the Watermen’s petition and the related petition of Lord Strange’s Men would appear to suggest that the company had been playing the Rose as early as 1590. If Strange’s Men had moved temporarily to Shoreditch for the latter part of 1590, they may very well have returned to the Rose by 1591, bringing Edward Alleyn with them. The company must certainly have made a strong impression somewhere in London during 1591, since by December they had clearly become, at least in the eyes of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, the most attractive company for court performances.80 Corroborating evidence that Lord Strange’s Men had established a new level of popularity with London audiences may be found in the physical transformation of the Rose itself. Near the beginning of his memorandum book, across a span of four full pages, Henslowe recorded an itemized “note of suche carges as I haue layd owt a bowte my playe howsse in the yeare of our lord 1592 as ffoloweth.”81 Amounting to at least £105 in all (the bottoms of leaves 4 and 5 are torn away), these extraordinary expenses for materials and labor supervised by John Griggs, original builder of the Rose in 1587, are now known, from discovery and excavation of the theater’s remains in 1988–89, to have involved a major expansion and remodeling of a structure that Henslowe had built less than five years earlier.82 Concentrated almost entirely at the fourteen-sided polygonal theater’s northern, stage end, these alterations, by moving the elongated, trapezoidal stage 2 meters further northward and by extending the galleries at the sides of the stage outward to the east and west as well, resulted in a substantial expansion of the theater’s yard by 27 percent, from 123.9 to 170.7 square meters.83 The increased size of the yard, combined with a modest increase in the extended galleries, whose capacity is estimated between 1,400 and 1,800, enabled the “tulip-shaped” remodeled Rose to accommodate up to 2,500 spectators, a number in line with Thomas Nashe’s boast in 1592 that a Talbot play, almost certainly Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI as performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose, had played to “ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times).”84

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Rose Theatre 1587. Courtesy of Museum of London Archaeology.

The increased audience capacity of the remodeling was probably linked to technological improvements in the performance space. At 5 meters deep and 11.2 meters wide, tapering to 8.2 meters wide at its front, the original stage of the 1587 Rose was front- oriented and relatively shallow, keeping the actors in close proximity to the front of the stage. Although the remodeled stage was deepened only slightly, by a half-meter, it was given a much more prominent thrust into the yard by the movement of the galleries to the west and east outward and away from the stage. While it created new space for standing in the yard at the sides of the stage, this movement of the galleries away from the stage was designed to provide sight lines from the upper galleries to another key innovation of the remodeled Rose: a new roof over the stage.85 The expanded, northern

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Rose Theatre 1592. Courtesy of Museum of London Archaeology.

end of the 1592 Rose thus widened the theater into an open-armed embrace of the increased numbers who could now, in both galleries and yard, surround on three sides a stage that played in several directions. With pillars at the front corners and a rebuilt tirehouse to help bear its weight at the rear, the roofed stage provided new possibilities for playing, including the capacity of a “heavens.” (A “throne In the heuenes” was added to the Rose in 1595.)86 The multiangled and somewhat irregular polygon at the rear of the original stage was replaced by three wider, balanced planes with a possible capacity for three stage doors, one of them perhaps a “discovery” space.87 Payment for ceiling work in “my lords Rome” indicates that the rebuilding included elite seating as well.88 Henslowe’s entry of these expenses under 1592 has sometimes been taken to suggest they were just being completed at the time Lord Strange’s Men

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began their playing at the Rose on 19 February 1591/92, but Neil Carson, noting Henslowe’s regular practice of making retroactive block entries rather than running tallies in his diary, observes, “The receipts are for large bills which were probably presented some months after the work was completed.”89 We cannot be certain, in other words, whether the renovations were accomplished in the months just prior to Henslowe’s record of Strange’s Men opening at the Rose in February 1591/92, or whether they were accomplished as much as a year earlier, in 1590/91, during the period when Strange’s Men were first forming their alliance with Alleyn. Neither can we be sure, while the rebuilding was under way, whether Strange’s Men were in temporary residence in Shoreditch or at the Cross Keys Inn, where, according to Henry Carey, they were “accustomed for the better exercise of their qualitie, & for the ser vice of her maiestie . . . to plaie this winter time within the Citye.” But since circumstances suggest that Strange’s Men had occupied the Rose as early as 1590 and that they returned there in 1591, there is every likelihood that Henslowe’s alterations to the playhouse were a result of the company’s influence. It is probably germane to the story we are telling that on 25 February 1591/92, Bryan Ellam, deposed in the case of Brayne v. Burbage, testified that “the said defendtes or one of them haue bestowed in further building & Reparacions of the Theater there [& other the houses in hollywell aforesaid (stricken out)] wtin this vj or vij weekes passed / to the value of xxx or xlli as this depot dothe estymate the same.”90 This is considerably less than the £105 expended by Henslowe at the Rose, but it is a significant sum, and it suggests that James Burbage may have been undertaking his own improvements in response to Henslowe’s enterprising renovations.91 It would have been a logical response for Burbage to renovate the Theatre for Pembroke’s Men, a company formed around some key members of Strange’s Men, like Richard Burbage, and perhaps around some key plays that Shakespeare had written for Strange’s Men as well. That Henslowe was willing to lay out more than £100 on a theater less than five years old in anticipation of hosting Strange’s Men in his playhouse might mean only that he was a shrewd reader of Edmund Tilney’s preferences at court. But that Henslowe was financially strong enough to undertake the alterations may suggest that he had already profited from the success of Lord Strange’s Men—and perhaps not just financially, since he may also have seen, with possible pressure from the company itself, how his playhouse might be adapted to enhance the company’s aims, strengths, and repertory. If Strange’s Men had indeed left the shut- down Rose for a stint in Shoreditch in the latter part of 1590, Henslowe may have been eager to reattract or retain them in 1591– 92, the more so if their return included the prospect of attracting Edward Alleyn away

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from the Burbage enterprise as well. That Henslowe began to record his daily profits from Lord Strange’s Men only in February 1591/92 may be an accident of his having inherited at that time a notebook from his brother, and he may have kept earlier records in another form. But the new accounting book may also mean that with the return of Lord Strange’s Men in prospect, Henslowe was anticipating a longer-term financial relationship. One other long-term relationship with the company was sealed in October 1592, when Edward Alleyn married Henslowe’s stepdaughter, Joan Woodward. For their part, having completed the sixth performance of their season at Court on 8 February and opened at the refurbished Rose on 19 February, Lord Strange’s Men were flush with £60, the single largest payment for a season of court playing in the Chamber accounts, a feat not surpassed until their latterday descendants, the King’s Men, performed eight times at court in 1603/4.92 They were thus in a good position to acquire and commission the number of plays and to retain the number of actors needed to support a large-scale company in extended London residence on the basis of changing daily performances. This appears to have been the company’s consistent ambition. In the course of their success, built on what the company and its members had learned through the success and failure of others over the preceding decade, Lord Strange’s Men had allied themselves with a family of patrons both powerful and experienced in theatrical patronage. Drawing their membership and ambitions from other important companies, they had crossed paths with the major theater business people of the time, including Alleyn, the Burbages, and Henslowe. In the great houses of the Stanleys in Lancashire, in the City of London’s inns and suburban theaters, and at court they had begun to play the scripts of a new generation of professional playwrights and to evolve a distinctive company style. They had dealt with Edmund Tilney and with the Lord Mayor of London. They had engaged in controversy, and they had spent time in jail. Their success was owing in part to their taking chances in a chancy time.

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“I N T H E NA ME OF G OD A MEN”: HENSL OW E’S ACCOU N T S A N D T H E R EPERT ORY S Y ST EM

Thanks to a memorandum book that Philip Henslowe inherited and began using shortly after his brother’s death, the residence of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose (19 February–22 June 1592 and 29 December 1592–1 February 1592/93) is the first recorded example of daily performance by a professional acting company in Elizabethan London. Henslowe was an entrepreneur and impresario renting out theatrical space, and so any separate purposes of Lord Strange’s Men can be read only indirectly through what he chose to record for his own purposes. There is no evidence in the early pages devoted to Lord Strange’s Men (ff. 7– 8v) of the later roles Henslowe would play with the Lord Admiral’s Men and others as financier for the companies and their agent with regard to acting personnel, playwrights, and theatrical properties. Lord Strange’s Men may have undertaken some of these activities in their own behalf or under a different manager previous to their arrival at the Rose. In the absence of prior records, it is also impossible to say how much the practices of Lord Strange’s Men might have shaped Henslowe’s recordkeeping methods, but for more than two years, until he began recording receipts for the Lord Admiral’s Men during their per formances at Newington Butts in June 1594, Henslowe retained, in his subsequent dealings with Sussex’s, the Queen’s, and the Lord Admiral’s Men, the same form he used for recording the playhouse receipts of Lord Strange’s Men: Received at (Title) (Date) e.g.,“Receued at mvlomvrco the 20 of febreary

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(Amount) xxix s.”1

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While helping us to identify individual plays in the repertory, Henslowe’s entries also provide a partial index to the company’s success, since the sums he noted almost certainly represent half of the daily receipts for seating in the galleries, the other half of which went to the acting company.2 Since most of Henslowe’s remaining entries in the diary deal with expenses rather than receipts—and exclusively so during the residence of Lord Strange’s Men—the sums recorded may actually be Henslowe’s record of the company’s half of the total gallery receipts, which he collected and then paid them. The company had exclusive claim to receipts for standing in the yard, which they probably collected themselves.3 If the sums recorded in the diary represent half the gallery receipts at 1p/ person surcharge for admission from the yard into the galleries, then they also represent roughly half the daily attendance in the galleries, which would on that assumption have ranged from a high of 1,820 in the galleries for “harey the vj” on 3 March (£3 16s 8d) to a low of 168 for “the lockinglasse” on 8 March (7s). Actual gallery numbers would have been slightly lower if receipts for “my lords Rome,” mentioned in Henslowe’s record of renovations, were included in the gallery receipts.4 There is no way to disaggregate attendance figures or fees for the lords’ room from the gallery totals, nor is there a way of knowing how much the company collected for themselves at the entrance into the yard. If the

“In the name of god A men 1591 | beginge the 19 of febreary my | lord stranges mene Asfoloweth.” Philip Henslowe’s diary. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 7 (detail). With kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College.

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maximum capacity of the expanded yard was near the high-end estimate of 650,5 then the company’s total take on 3 March would have been something like £7. The company’s gallery receipts between 22 February 1591/92 and 1 February 1592/93, presumably equal to those of Henslowe, were £230 9s 5d. Assuming a daily average of 340 spectators in the yard,6 the company’s total income (yard and galleries combined) from their 134 performances at the Rose would have been £425 16s, or a daily average of £3 3s 9d. This is considerably less per performance than the average of £10 the company received for each of their appearances at court, but their three court performances between February 1591/92 and February 1592/93 amounted to considerably less than 10 percent of what they may have earned in their more arduous 134 days of “rehearsal,” or public performance, at the Rose. Measured against the total of 125 weeks in 1592– 96 in which Henslowe hosted acting companies at the Rose (including Strange’s, Sussex’s, the Queen’s, and the Lord Admiral’s Men), the weekly averages earned by Lord Strange’s Men were above the norm; in fact their two runs in 1592 and 1593, a period disrupted by an outbreak of plague and a six-month closure of the Rose, were the fourth and fifth most profitable of the nine separate periods of playing recorded by Henslowe. If these averages point to a general level of success, the wide fluctuations in daily receipts underline the element of economic risk in playing, and they help to explain both why Lord Strange’s Men could not afford the risk of leasing the Rose outright and why Henslowe was forced to tie his own income to the daily fortunes of the company. A number of factors might have affected daily attendance. A stretch of unusually low receipts—12s 6d for “syr Iohn mandevell” on 24 February, 15s for “poope Ione” on 1 March, 14s for “matchavell” on 2 March, 16s for “bendo & Richardo” on 4 March, and 7s for “the lockinglasse” on 8 March—might be chalked up to a period of unseasonable weather having coincided with the first two weeks of Lent; but it is also true that three of the plays performed over these days were among the least frequently performed, and presumably the least popular, in the company’s repertory (see Appendix B). The tendency of receipts to decline with repeated performances of a given play posed the primary economic challenge of long-term residence in London: the need for a large and varied repertory and for an ongoing supply of new plays to replace those declining in receipts. Over their 134 days at the Rose, Lord Strange’s Men performed what appear to be twenty-seven different plays, ten of them only once each, and seventeen of them less than five times each. At their first seventeen per formances as recorded by Henslowe, Lord Strange’s Men offered fifteen different plays, repeating only two of them a second time. These

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prodigious opening weeks suggest the company already had in hand a sizable repertory when they began at the Rose in 1592 and that they must have built this up over previous extended periods of playing at the Rose and elsewhere in London. The fact that several of the plays that appear only once in the diary— “orlando” (21 February), “clorys & orgasto” (28 February), “poope Ione” (1 March), “senobia” (9 March), and “constantine” (21 March)—were performed during these opening weeks suggests also that a portion of the company’s repertory was already reaching the end of its useful life with London audiences. Some of these plays—“orlando” may have belonged earlier to the Queen’s Men, while “poope Ione” sounds like a play that would fit the Protestant profile of Leicester’s Men—could have been long familiar to London audiences from their previous life with other companies. To replace these plays declining in novelty or popularity, the company introduced, on average, a new play every three to four weeks, at least according to the abbreviation “ne” that Henslowe added at the head of entries which, with very rare exceptions,7 appear to mark the entrance of new plays to the repertory, for example: ne Receued at harey the vj the 3 of marche 1591

iij li. xvj s. 8 d.

The first performances of new plays (“harey the vj” on 3 March, “tittus & vespacia” on 11 April, “the second parte of tamber came” on 28 April, “the taner of Denmarke” on 23 May, “a knacke to knowe a knave” on 10 June, “the gelyous comodey” on 5 January, and “the tragedy of the gvyes” on 30 January) were always worth at least £3 each to Henslowe and to the company in gallery receipts. The “taner of Denmarke,” which for unexplainable reasons did not reappear after its highly profitable debut, is an intriguing exception to a general rule. After their debut, new plays usually returned quickly for repeat performances—the more successful ones quite frequently (once every ten days or so)—while older plays circulated less frequently in the mix, and the least successful eventually dropped out altogether. Receipts for plays generally declined over time, but obviously not at the same rate for every play nor at a steady rate for any individual play. In the period February–June, the most profitable performances of “the Iewe of malltuse” were the first, second, and eighth; of “Ieronymo” the first, third, and ninth; of “harey the vj” the first, fifth, second, and ninth; and of “tittus & vespacia” the first, fifth, and ninth. The profitable eighth performance of “the Iewe,” ninth of “Ieronymo,” ninth of “harey the vj,” and fifth of “tittus & vespacia” all fell in Whitsun week, a time when Londoners were accustomed to holiday playgoing and other festivities. Mondays and Tuesdays proved, on average, the most profitable days of the week.8

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Several anomalies resulted from the company’s six-month absence before returning to the Rose in late December, including a “bounce” effect in attendance for some of their older plays. However, if we consider their first, longer run from February–June to be a “season” equivalent to those played at the Rose from 1594 by the Lord Admiral’s Men, then in their 105 performances in 1592, Lord Strange’s Men offered a total of twenty-four plays, five of them “ne,” as compared with the seventeen plays, eight of them “ne,” offered by the Lord Admiral’s Men in their first 105 performances beginning in June 1594. The larger total number of plays offered by Lord Strange’s Men and the larger number of “ne” plays offered by the Lord Admiral’s Men may reflect the fact that in 1592 Lord Strange’s Men, the dominant London company for some time, had established a large repertory, while in 1594 the reorganized Lord Admiral’s Men, to whom Edward Alleyn had recently returned, were in the process of building up a new repertory upon their return to London after a long absence. Yet the process of building a repertory may also have differed between the two companies. When the Lord Admiral’s Men reopened for a second run at the Rose in August 1595, their first 105 per formances involved a total of twenty-three different plays, seven of them “ne.” These numbers look closer to the twenty-four, including five “ne,” of Lord Strange’s Men, and they suggest that by 1595 the Lord Admiral’s Men commanded a repertory of equivalent size. But the size of their built-up repertory alone does not tell the whole story. After their first 105 performances beginning in June 1594, the Lord Admiral’s Men went on, in their longest single season on record, to offer another 171 consecutive performances through the end of June 1595. When they reopened in August, only three of the seventeen plays that had been offered in their first 105 performances June– October 1594 (“godfrey of bullen,” “docter ffostose,” and “the venesyon comodey”) remained among the twenty-three plays they offered in 105 performances in August–December 1595; the rest of the repertory had turned over completely. It is perhaps misleading to compare this rapid rate of turnover with the case of Lord Strange’s Men, for whom we have less data accumulated over a shorter period of time. Touring from June through autumn 1592, while the Rose was closed, may have prevented Lord Strange’s Men from adding new plays to their repertory; they would have needed fewer plays on tour since the audiences on their tour were constantly changing, and their six-month absence from London audiences may have helped their existing core repertory to seem fresh upon their return. But in any case, when the company returned to the Rose for twentynine performances in December 1592–February 1592/93, nine of the twelve plays they performed were carried over from their repertory of the preceding spring.

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That this “sifting” effect is not entirely an artificial result of their period of touring is confirmed by comparison of the first and last six weeks of their earlier run from February to June. In their first six weeks (19 February–1 April) the company offered thirty-four performances of nineteen different plays, nine of them in repeated performance, ten of them offered only once; in their final six weeks (11 May–22 June) the company offered thirty-five performances of fourteen different plays, eight of them in repeated per formances, six of them offered only once. It is difficult to say whether this consolidation of the repertory is an early sign of a company failing to renew a shrinking stock of plays or whether it is part of an artistic plan to shape a stock of plays with enduring popularity. In either case, the pattern of consolidation demonstrates that the repertory system was an economic structure with profound artistic consequences. Designed to “create a habit of playgoing among the London populace— not a habit of playgoing in general, but a habit of playgoing at this par ticular theater,” the repertory system was built, as Scott McMillin suggests, around the value of novelty: “The theater of Shakespeare’s time was entirely made up of what we would call ‘contemporary drama.’ It had no classics to revive. Nothing the players were staging in the commercial theaters when Shakespeare first came to London (sometime between 1585 and 1590) would have gone back more than five years. Most of the active repertory had been written within the past year. That is how up to date the theater was, and how demanding of new plays from the relatively small number of writers who were turning out the scripts.”9 The success of Lord Strange’s Men was undeniably built on the pursuit of novelty, not only, as we shall see, in the artistic innovations undertaken by the new generation of authors who wrote their plays but also in the topicality of their repertory, which in so many instances derived from, or commented upon, contemporary events and concerns. But another consequence of the repertory system, and perhaps to an unprecedented degree with Lord Strange’s Men, was its capacity to produce a canon of “contemporary classics” whose popularity with audiences and whose influence on performance and publication would endure over a much longer period. Comparison with the Queen’s Men bears out the point. In agenda, popularity, and influence, the Queen’s Men were foundational to the later Elizabethan stage, but their influence was spread primarily through their practices and performances rather than through their original plays. Of the nine published plays with certain attribution to the Queen’s Men, only Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay appears to have retained its viability on the later Elizabethan stage, though The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Troublesome Reign of King John, The

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True Chronicle History of King Leir, and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third all lived on through revision by Shakespeare. Only three of the nine surviving texts of the Queen’s Men’s plays received more than one edition, and none more than three. By contrast, “Ieronymo” or The Spanish Tragedy (ten editions by 1633) remained a staple of the stage at the time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet; “the Iewe of malltuse” retained its stageworthiness well beyond the writing of The Merchant of Venice and was deemed worthy of revival and publication in 1632–33; “harey the vj” took its place in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623, and even a play like “mvlomvrco,” published only once and no longer esteemed today, was apparently undergoing a revival not long before Shakespeare wrote Othello and a decade after it had been a staple in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men. That some of these plays, with the players who performed them, may have come into Lord Strange’s Men from earlier companies, or that they subsequently went with veteran players into the longer-lived Lord Chamberlain’s and Lord Admiral’s Men, is part of our point about the pattern of “sifting” or selectivity that was, with Lord Strange’s Men, an artistic consequence of their success in repertory. The “bounce” effect in December–February 1592/93, when Lord Strange’s Men returned to the Rose after a six-month absence with the best of their old plays, was a consequence of the company’s beginning to create, for a new kind of playing, a new kind of “classic” or repertorially canonical play. It is important not to separate this innovation as some kind of prescient selection of a theatrical canon from the economic contingencies of the repertory system or from the theatrical practices associated with daily performance. To be sure, there are signs of artistic preference possibly overriding economic motives, as a comparison of frequency of performance with averaged receipts suggests. “Ieronymo” (second in frequency of performance but fourteenth in average receipts), “mvlomvrco” (third in frequency of performance but eleventh in receipts), and “mandevell” (sixth in frequency of performance but twenty-second in average receipts) look like plays more favored by the company than by audiences, though in two cases the theatrical longevity of the plays proved the company right. At the other extreme is the mysterious play usually transcribed as “the taner of Denmarke,” whose debut on 23 May brought the third highest single box office (£3 13s 6d) among the company’s 134 per formances. It was normally the company’s practice to follow up such a successful first per formance with subsequent per formances at frequent intervals (“harey the vj” played to large houses on three of the ten days following its debut), yet in none of the company’s fifty-two subsequent per formances was “the taner of Denmarke” ever revived. If a repeat per formance was not obstructed by the authorities or by another company’s interest in the property, then the play

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might have posed technical difficulties or been unpleasing to the actors themselves. Perhaps more important than the company’s conscious artistic decisions, or at least another dimension of them, were the practices, preferences, and ideas that evolved from spontaneous discoveries made in daily performance. In their first ten performances at the Rose, the company mounted ten different plays while, in anticipation of their eleventh performance, simultaneously rehearsing the debut of the ambitious “harey the vj.” This pace of production meant that in less than a year, between 19 February 1591/92 and 1 February 1592/93, Edward Alleyn had to recall or learn at least twenty-nine major roles, many of them hundreds of lines long, in fact among the longest roles created in the period. For Alleyn’s busy associates, the pace, in roles of smaller scale, was more frenetic: projecting from our casting studies of seven full- cast surviving Rose plays to the nineteen plays performed in the company’s first six weeks at the Rose, a principal actor with Lord Strange’s Men (we are choosing line 5 of the casting studies as our sample) might have played, over six weeks, something like sixtyfive different characters in a total of 171 scenes. A hired man (line 12 is our sample) might have played something like seventy-six minor roles in 123 scenes. Variety, experiment, and risk were clearly elements of such working methods, especially where rehearsal time was scant and actors had to rely for prior knowledge of a play on what they could divine from their separate parts or scrolls.10 But conversely, there must also have been a necessary reliance on regular habits and stylized inflections that were repeated across daily performances of the repertory. For both the company and its audience, the opportunities for repetition, contrast, variation, and cross-reference within the repertory helped to create the “company style.” We cannot say that a consistent company agenda always took priority over the economic need for novelty and theatrical appeal, but in the case of Strange’s Men we can identify some of the threads of company style that contributed to their apparent success. Through convergences in subject, theme, and genre, through the worlds they represented on stage, and through their manner of representing them, the company constructed something like a worldview, a characteristic way of seeing and expressing through live performance. It is not simply the case, then, that the audience and economics dictated the nature of the company’s work and artistry; the actors’ work in turn helped to shape their audience, the practice of playgoing, and the status of theater as art. Understanding this artistic dimension depends upon our “reading” of the company’s repertory. But here we encounter the many problems that surround the task of establishing the repertory as a corpus out of the variety of extant

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texts and other information available. The peculiar nature of these problems in the case of Lord Strange’s Men may be underlined by comparison with the repertory of the Queen’s Men. In The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, McMillin and MacLean adopted the “conservative approach” of “eschewing speculation” and limiting their account of the company’s artistic identity “to evidence which connects with that acting company and no other.” In practical terms, this meant using title-page attribution in printed texts “as the first line of evidence” and looking for “other explicit indications that the company performed the play before it reached the publisher.” This “restrictive” approach was justified on the grounds that only after such a cautious groundbreaking study could “broader avenues be opened later,”11 but it was rendered viable by the fact that there are seven published plays with unambiguous title-page attribution to the Queen’s Men. In the case of Lord Strange’s Men, there are only three plays with possible title-page attribution to the company, Fair Em (1592), Titus Andronicus (1594), and A Knack to Know a Knave (1594). Two of these—Titus Andronicus, attributed to “the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants,” and A Knack to Know a Knave, attributed to “ED. ALLEN and his Companie”—are in fact ambiguous cases, and only one of the three plays, A Knack to Know a Knave, appears among the twenty-seven plays mentioned in Henslowe’s diary of February 1591/92–February 1592/93. The one unambiguously attributed play, Fair Em, is not found at the Rose according to Henslowe’s diary. If there is, by comparison with the Queen’s Men, a dearth of solid title-page attributions from which to reconstruct the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, there is, on the other hand, a relative abundance of evidence from other sources, principally but not exclusively Henslowe’s diary. The scanty information about the repertory of the Queen’s Men in Henslowe’s diary is limited to the eight days in early 1594 when that company shared the stage at the Rose with Sussex’s Men. McMillin and MacLean used the two performances of “kinge leare” during those eight days to support their attribution of The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605), a play published without title-page attribution to the Queen’s Men. In the case of Lord Strange’s Men, there are ten titles among the twentyseven listed by Henslowe that can potentially be aligned with surviving texts, but the case for identification is never supported by evidence so straightforward as a title-page attribution. There is, to begin with, the relatively unambiguous case for identifying Henslowe’s “the Iewe of malltuse” with The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594 and surviving from an edition of 1633. And there are the only slightly more complicated cases for “the lockinglasse” as A Looking Glass for London and England

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(1594), for “Ieronymo” as The Spanish Tragedy (1592), and for “the tragedy of the gvyes” as The Massacre at Paris (n.d.). In more complicated cases like Henslowe’s “mvlomvrco” and “the comodey of doneoracio” we are at a considerably further remove from published titles like The Battle of Alcazar (1594) or The First Part of Ieronimo (1605), and so the grounds for attribution must in each case be examined in detail. Furthermore, since Henslowe was writing for his own purposes and not those of theater historians, his sometimes cryptic titling fails to decide for us which of the surviving texts are the ones to match to the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men: is “fryer bacone” The Honorable Historie of frier Bacon, and frier Bongay (1594) or the manuscript play that survives under the modern title of John of Bordeaux? Is “mvlomvrco” The Battle of Alcazar (1594) or The Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley (1605)? These are matters calling for discussion in our reconstruction of the repertory in the census that follows. So too is the fact that many of the published texts that can be matched to Henslowe’s titles show signs of having belonged to other companies either before or after Lord Strange’s Men performed them. McMillin and MacLean rejected from their version of the Queen’s Men’s repertory The Historie of Orlando Furioso (1594) on the grounds that the Lord Admiral’s Men were also said to have owned it and that Lord Strange’s Men, according to Henslowe, appear to have performed it. With Lord Strange’s Men, not only must reconstruction of their repertory perforce depend upon texts with affiliations to multiple companies; such affiliation, we have been saying, is the heart of the matter where their ambitions, influence, and achievements are concerned. That they might have adopted plays previously performed by the Queen’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men; that “harey the vj” survives only in the definitive monument of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the First Folio of Shakespeare; that The Spanish Tragedy and The Battle of Alcazar were later revived by the Lord Admiral’s Men; that The Jew of Malta, after subsequent performance by the later Lord Admiral’s Men, was revived again at the Cockpit and finally published in 1632/33; that “the comodey of doneoracio” may have passed through the hands of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men before being rewritten for the Children of Paul’s as The First Part of Ieronimo—these are all matters inseparable from identifying the work of Lord Strange’s Men. At the same time, however, these longer-term histories point to a process of possible revision or adaptation that complicates the task of recovering the precise version of the text that belonged to Lord Strange’s Men or the performance it contained. Another dimension of the problem of reconstructing repertory is represented by plays that do not appear in Henslowe’s diary but that show other signs—by

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way of internal evidence, patterns of patronage, intercompany relations, or the names of actors—of connection to Lord Strange’s Men. Several early plays of Shakespeare, including the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus, fall into this category. So do several important dramatic manuscripts, a form of data with little bearing on the repertory of the Queen’s Men but with much significance for the possible repertory of Lord Strange’s Men. Manuscripts like John of Bordeaux, John a Kent and John a Cumber, Sir Thomas More, and the longer role of Orlando in the manuscript scroll of Edward Alleyn’s part for the play all demand consideration for their possible connections with the company, as does The platt of The Secound parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinns (Dulwich College Archive: MS XIX), a document that until recently was unanimously attributed to Lord Strange’s Men circa 1590– 91. In all their complications, these manuscripts and published plays, in most cases lacking the confirmation of appearing in Henslowe’s diary but containing other signs of ownership by Lord Strange’s Men, have the potential of adding to the amount and kinds of information about the company’s repertory and practices even while their status as company properties remains a matter of conjecture. A final challenge created by the rich documentation of Henslowe’s diary is the fact that of the twenty-seven titles assigned to Lord Strange’s Men, seventeen are now apparently lost. Here again the situation contrasts with that of the Queen’s Men, for whom there must be many lost plays of which we know nothing. While McMillin and MacLean could draw upon nine extant and securely attributable texts for the Queen’s Men’s repertory, they were faced with only five manuscript references to now-lost plays: four from the Revels accounts of plays performed at court and one from an entry in the Stationers’ Register. With Lord Strange’s Men the proportions in the data are almost exactly the reverse: where we have relatively few title-page attributions on published texts, we have a great many titles of plays now lost. This is not unique to Lord Strange’s Men, of course, but results from the thorough documentation Henslowe provided for every company that performed at the Rose. The proportion of lost plays for some companies is even higher; consider the case of Sussex’s Men, where only three or possibly four of the twelve plays listed by Henslowe survive. If nothing could be known of these lost plays of Lord Strange’s Men from possible sources, related plays, or circumstantial evidence, it would be pointless to speculate on their subjects or their place in the repertory. But in several cases, including some of the company’s most profitable or frequently performed plays, we believe there is enough evidence to warrant careful speculation. We have chosen, then, in the repertory census that follows, to depart from the example of The Queen’s Men and Their Plays by examining in some detail

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the various grounds—documentary, circumstantial, and textual—for attributing plays to Lord Strange’s Men. Our aim is not simply to identify plays in the company’s repertory, to weigh the probabilities that support our identifications, or to hedge our bets. Rather we are exploring attributions in some depth because we believe there is much to be learned along the way about Lord Strange’s Men from the publication history of playbooks, from the many kinds of textual evidence for playhouse practice, and from the narratives that can be built around intercompany relations and the multiple ownership of plays. In the remainder of this chapter we discuss the grounds for linking extant texts with the titles recorded in Henslowe’s diary, while in chapter 4 we discuss the apparently “lost” plays listed by Henslowe as well as several extant plays, not listed by Henslowe, which are possibly attributable to Lord Strange’s Men.

E X TA N T ROSE PL AY S

“mvlomvrco” in fourteen performances, 20 february 1591/1592–20 january 1592/1593 In his edition of Henslowe’s Diary, W. W. Greg accepted, with some reservations, the “usual” identification of “mvlomvrco” with The Battell of Alcazar . . . As it was sundrie times plaid by the Lord high Admirall his seruants (1594). Greg’s view was endorsed by E. K. Chambers on the grounds that the title character Abdelmelec “is also called Muly Mollocco” in the play. However, in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: The Battle of Alcazar and Orlando Furioso, Greg reversed himself. Observing that the names “Mullucco” and “Molucco” are also used for Abdelmelec in The Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley (1605), he concluded that the “mvlomvrco” of Henslowe’s diary and Lord Strange’s Men was more likely an early rival to The Battle of Alcazar and a source for Captaine Thomas Stukeley. A particular sticking point for Greg was the disparity between Henslowe’s title and the title of The Battle of Alcazar, which appears both on the 1594 quarto and on the surviving MS “Plott of the Battell of Alcazar” (BL: MS. Additional 10449, f. 3), prepared for a revival of the play by the Lord Admiral’s Men sometime in 1601.12 Deferring to Greg, John Yoklavich repeated the conjecture that “Muly Molocco may have been a rival of Alcazar.”13 Recent scholarship has challenged Greg’s skepticism and once again linked The Battle of Alcazar to the “mvlomvrco” of Henslowe’s diary. Work on Captaine Thomas Stukeley has shown that the sketchy fifth-act account of the battle of Alcazar, with its obvious debt to Peele, was never more extensive than a

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last-act episode.14 In the Stukeley play, Abdelmelec is called “Molocco” by the King of Spain only in Act III, and Abdelmelec himself appears in only two scenes (speaking a total of forty-two lines). In The Battle of Alcazar he plays a far more prominent role, claiming equal prominence on the quarto title page with the Christian hero King Sebastian and more prominence than the English adventurer Stukeley. Though Abdelmelec’s is but the fourth-longest speaking part in The Battle of Alcazar, he is the hero of the play and the dominant figure around whom the action is shaped. His greatness in the play matches the contemporary reputation of the historical Moroccan king, who was most commonly known in the play’s sources and in other contemporary works as “muly molocco.”15 David Bradley thus proposes that “Muly Molocco may very well have been the name under which” The Battle of Alcazar “passed at the Rose” and concludes from a study of the available sources for the battle at El-Ksar Kbir that “there can be no doubt of its identity, for there could not have been another play about Abdelmelec based on the actual information available that was not exactly like this one.”16 As for the discrepancy in title between Henslowe’s “mvlomvrco” and the quarto title of The Battle of Alcazar, there are analogies with other titles in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, where Henslowe’s “Ieronymo” (and its variants) equates in print with The Spanish Tragedy, and Henslowe’s “the tragedy of the gvyes” (30 January 1592/93) becomes upon publication The Massacre at Paris. Henslowe appears often to have thought of plays in terms of the roles played by Edward Alleyn, his son-in-law. The title of the later MS “Plott of the Battell of Alcazar,” not from Henslowe’s pen, may reflect the prior publication of the quarto under that name. The 1594 title-page attribution of The Battle of Alcazar to “the Lord high Admirall his seruants” is not incompatible with its having been performed at the Rose by Lord Strange’s Men in 1592– 93. Evidence concerning the date of the play’s composition suggests that it might have belonged in the first instance to the earlier Lord Admiral’s Men. George Peele’s A farewell . . . to the famous and fortunate generalls of our English forces: Sir Iohn Norris & Syr Frauncis Drake, entered in the Stationers’ Register 23 February 1588/89 and probably published before 18 April 1589, when Norris and Drake’s expedition in support of the Portuguese pretender Don Antonio set sail for Lisbon, urged the departing forces to Bid Theaters and proude Tragaedians, Bid Mahomets Poo [i.e., poll], and mightie Tamburlaine, King Charlemaine, Tom Stukeley and the rest Adiewe.17

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Among its references to theatrical fare current in London in 1589—to Tamburlaine and to Aphonsus, King of Aragon (with its Mahomet’s “poll” or talking head)—the poem’s mention of a Stukeley play suggests, since no other candidate for this early date is known, that The Battle of Alcazar was already on stage. February 1588/89, if our account of the re-forming of Lord Strange’s Men is correct, would possibly be too early for the just emerging company; the play may therefore have come to Strange’s Men from the Lord Admiral’s through their association with Edward Alleyn. That the play was attributed to the Lord Admiral’s Men rather than Lord Strange’s/Derby’s Men upon its publication in 1594 is probably a reflection of circumstances at that time: Lord Strange’s Men no longer existed, and the play had likely passed, through the hands of Alleyn or Henslowe, back into the repertory of the rejuvenated Lord Admiral’s Men. Several other plays performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose in 1592–93 passed on or returned to the Lord Admiral’s Men in similar fashion, including The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, Tamar Cham (revived by the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1596 and sold by Edward Alleyn to the company in 1602 through a loan from Henslowe), and “the massaker of france” (i.e., Strange’s “the tragedy of the gvyes” or The Massacre at Paris), sold by Alleyn to the company through similar arrangements in 1601.18 We are inclined to accept the “pretty little story” in which Greg conjectures that The Battle of Alcazar “would have been acquired by Alleyn personally, who would have loaned it to Strange’s Men in 1592 as Muly Molocco, and on rejoining his own company in 1594 have allowed them to revive it as mahomett,” which, according to Henslowe, was performed seven times between 14 August 1594 and 5 February 1594/95. The 1594 publication of The Battle of Alcazar “As it was sundrie times plaid by the Lord high Admirall his seruants” could therefore have served to advertise this revival. “In the summer of 1601,” Greg’s story continues, “the performance of a play on the supposed adventures of Sebastian” (i.e., the “kinge sebastiane of portingalle” commissioned in April or May to Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle)19 led the company “once more to stage Peele’s drama as the first part to their new piece” and led Alleyn to insist in August that the company purchase “the Boocke of mahamett” from him.20 That series of events would parallel the route that took Tamar Cham and The Massacre at Paris from Lord Strange’s Men to similar sales by Alleyn in 1601–2, and it would substantiate the charge of Horace in Satiro-mastix (1602) that Dekker, coauthor of the new Sebastian play, had “cut an Innocent Moore i’th’ middle, to serue him in twice.”21 Greg’s conjectures also raise a question about the discrepancy between the titles of “mvlomvrco” and “mahomett” in Henslowe’s diary. In “The Plott of the Battell of Alcazar,” Alleyn is assigned the blackface role of the villainous Muly Mahamet, and it is in that ranting role that he is parodied by Pistol in 2 Henry IV

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(TLN 1200) and ridiculed in Jonson’s Poetaster (1602).22 Given Henslowe’s proclivity elsewhere for naming plays after Alleyn’s roles, the title of “mvlomvrco” suggests that with Lord Strange’s Men in 1592– 93 Alleyn may not have played the villain Muly Mahamet but the great-souled hero, Abdelmelec. Greg’s comparison of “The Plott of the Battell of Alcazar” with the 1594 quarto led him to conclude, by a process of circular reasoning, that The Battle of Alcazar was a “bad” quarto, “drastically cut down by the omission and reduction of speeches, by the elimination and doubling of parts, and by the suppression of spectacular shows, for representation in a limited time, by a comparatively small cast, with the minimum of theatrical paraphernalia.”23 In his massive and meticulous casting study of The Battle of Alcazar and the later theatrical plot, David Bradley has shown that the quarto assumes a cast of sixteen or seventeen adults (and not twelve, as Greg had claimed), a number so close to that of the later plot as to indicate that the plotter was working directly from the text as we have it and not, as Greg had surmised, from a longer, lost original out of which a reduced quarto text had been carved. There cannot have been substantial cuts, Bradley explains, since the quarto uses virtually all of the material contained in the available sources. According to the quarto’s most recent editor, the text is “theatrically . . . coherent and well-structured”; it is, as Bradley says, “a functional document of theatre” that “represents with reasonable accuracy the copy as it left Peele’s hands.”24 The case for Peele’s authorship is based largely on the attribution of six lines from The Battle of Alcazar (TLN 467–72) to Peele in Robert Allott’s Englands Parnassus (p. 37). That collection (p. 255) also attributes two lines of the Battle of Alcazar (TLN 49–50) to Dekker, but as Yoklavich notes, “no one has ever questioned the ascription” to Peele.25 “ieronymo” in sixteen performances, 14 march 1591/1592–22 january 1592/1593 The identification of Henslowe’s “Ieronymo” with The Spanish Tragedy has never been disputed. Hieronimo is the hero of The Spanish Tragedy, and Jeronimo is the name Ben Jonson gives the play in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair. None of the ten editions of the play up to 1633 attributes the play to Thomas Kyd, but on the strength of Thomas Heywood’s 1612 quotation from a passage by “M. Kid, in the Spanish Tragedy”26 and much other circumstantial evidence, Kyd’s authorship of the play is rarely questioned. An authoritative edition of the play, printed by Edward Allde for Edward White, was published without date under the title The Spanish Tragedie, Con-

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taining the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo. Newly corrected and amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression. White’s edition must have been published before 18 December 1592, when the court of the Company of Stationers fined White for “havinge printed the spanishe tragedie belonging to . . . Abell Ieffes.”27 Jeffes had entered “a booke whiche is called the Spanishe tragedie of Don Horatio and Bellmipeia &c” in the Stationers’ Register on 6 October 1592.28 It is therefore likely that both Jeffes’s “first impression” and White’s “corrected and amended” edition were published during the interval between June 1592, when the London theaters had been closed by the authorities, and December 1592, by which time Lord Strange’s Men had returned to London to perform at court and to resume playing at the Rose. Sale of the play for publication may have helped finance the travels of Lord Strange’s Men during their absence from the Rose; its publication may also have served as an advertisement in anticipation of the company’s return, but no edition of the play attributes it to any acting company. “Ioronymo” was the second play performed by the company (“mvlomvrco” was the first) upon their reopening at the Rose on 29–30 December 1592. Henslowe did not mark the “Ieronymo” of Lord Strange’s Men as “ne,”29 so it was presumably already an older play that had been performed at the Rose prior to February 1591/92. Like other plays in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, The Spanish Tragedy subsequently became a property of Henslowe or of the Lord Admiral’s Men, who revived it in January 1596/97 and again, in collaboration with Pembroke’s Men, in October 1597. In September 1601 and June 1602 Henslowe collaborated with Edward Alleyn in payments to Ben Jonson for writing “adicians in geronymo” and “new adicyons for Ieronymo.”30 These may or may not be the additional passages first published in the 1602 Thomas Pavier edition, which was “enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted.”31 The history of The Spanish Tragedy before 1592 is obscure, and it is difficult to date the composition of the play in the absence of major sources or decisive topical allusions. Philip Edward’s dating of the play to 1590 on the basis of parallel passages in Tamburlaine (1590) and Thomas Watson’s Meliboeus (1590) has not proved persuasive.32 Scholars also dispute the extent and specificity of possible allusions to Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy in a passage of Thomas Nashe’s preface to Menaphon, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 23 August 1589.33 Claims that the play must have been written before the Armada on the grounds that it does not celebrate the English victory are largely subjective. (The celebration of John of Gaunt’s triumph in Hieronimo’s opening masque may have been sufficient to establish the point that “English warriours likewise conquered

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Spaine, / And made them bow their knees to Albion” [TLN 586–87].) It would have been an anachronism to allude to the Armada given the play’s assumptions about Spanish–Portuguese relations in 1580–82 as general background to the action, and in any case subjective expectations for rabidly anti-Spanish sentiment are insensitive to the extent to which the play shows sympathy for the “lamentable” and “pitifull” fate of its noble Spanish heroes Horatio, BelImperia, and Hieronimo. More secure than the tenuous allusions to Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy in Nashe’s preface to Menaphon is the unquestionable allusion to the play recently identified by Lukas Erne in Nashe’s Anatomie of Absurditie.34 On the grounds that “the Anatomie of absurdities” was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 19 September 1588, Erne concludes that The Spanish Tragedy “must have been composed before the English victory” over the Armada. However, in his preface to the second edition of Greene’s Menaphon, entered, as we have seen, on 23 August 1589, Nashe’s claim that The Anatomie of Absurdities is forthcoming from the press “ere long” suggests that the Anatomie was not yet published. Nashe’s editor McKerrow concluded that the first edition of the Anatomie, dated 1589, was probably not printed before February or March of 1589/90, since the title page of a second issue, dated 1590, appears to have been set up from the same block.35 Nashe’s possible allusion to The Spanish Tragedy, in other words, could have been added at any time during the seventeen to eighteen months between September 1588 and February–March 1589/90. In fact it is hard to see how Nashe, who could not have left Cambridge for London before March 1587/88 and who claimed that the Anatomie was begun “in the Countrey” during a “vacation,” could have become so current about the London stage and literary scene without some updating after September 1588. If Lord Strange was the patron whom Kyd had “servd almost theis vj yeres” by 1593 (a possibility discussed in chapter 5), then there is a greater likelihood that Kyd composed The Spanish Tragedy in the first instance for Lord Strange’s Men. The text published by Edward White in late 1592 is the ultimate basis for all subsequent editions, including the 1594 edition, “printed by Abel Ieffes . . . to be sold by Edward White,”36 which solved by compromise the Jeffes–White dispute of two years earlier, and the 1602 edition of Thomas Pavier, which, except for the five added or rewritten passages, derives from William White’s 1599 edition, itself derivative from 1594. In all probability, therefore, the 1592 text is a reliable representation of the play as it was performed by Lord Strange’s Men. The one major exception to this conclusion concerns the performance of “Solyman and Perseda,” the play-within-the-play. Hieronimo instructs his players to speak their parts “in vnknowne languages” (TLN 2580), and at the conclusion

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of the inset play he announces, “Heere breake we off our sundrie languages / And thus conclude I in our vulgare tung” (TLN 2765). In the printed text, however, the play is performed in English after a printer’s insertion announcing Gentlemen, this play of HIERONIMO in sundry languages, was thought good to be set down in English more largely, for the easier understanding to every publique reader. (TLN 2695– 98)

The publisher’s insertion of the play in English was evidently not accommodated by removal of the references to “unknown” and “sundry languages” in the portions of the text that precede and follow it. The printed text does not obscure the multilingual form in which the play-within-the-play was evidently performed by Lord Strange’s Men.37 “spanes comodye donne oracioe” in six performances, 23 february 1591/1592–21 may 1592 The “spanes comodye donne oracioe” was performed once as a freestanding title (23 February 1591/92) and, on five later occasions, under the titles of “comodey of doneoracio,” “doneoracio,” or “comodey of Ieronymo,” just prior to performances of “Ieronymo” or The Spanish Tragedy. On four of these five occasions, “doneoracio” was performed on the day immediately preceding “Ieronymo,” while on the fifth occasion, three days intervened. Although he cites Greg’s observation that “there is hardly any instance of a play being repeated twice running” in Henslowe’s diary but “several occasions” where two-part plays were performed consecutively, Philip Edwards doubted “that two plays existed” and believed “spanes comodye donne oracioe” was a variant title for “Ieronymo.”38 Most scholars, however, surmising that “spanes comodye donne oracioe” was a separate play, have concentrated on the problematic relationship between the title in Henslowe’s diary and the quarto of The First Part of Ieronimo, With the Warres of Portugall, and the life and death of Don Andraea published by Thomas Pavier in 1605. F. S. Boas, observing that The First Part of Ieronimo seems to mock the hero for his diminutive stature, concluded that the 1605 play was a parody of The Spanish Tragedy performed by the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars in 1604.39 In questioning Boas’s theory, Arthur Freeman maintained it was “unlikely that anyone fabricated The First Part out of thin air, and far more probable that the extant play represents a revision or rewriting of the original ‘spanes

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comodye.’ ” He concluded that the 1605 text was “based on a lost version played for Henslowe in 1592” and that it is “fairly close, at least in plot, to the early forepiece.”40 Andrew Cairncross went further, suggesting that the 1605 play was a bad quarto, “a memorial version [of] a longer good text by Kyd, The Spanish Comedy, which preceded The Spanish Tragedy and combined with it to form a two-part play.”41 The problem with this view, and with that of Freeman, is that it would be a very bad text indeed if its plot was in fundamental conflict with its companion play, The Spanish Tragedy. As Boas had noted, The First Part of Ieronimo fails to contain important elements or events alluded to in The Spanish Tragedy, such as an element of secrecy surrounding the love affair between Balthasar and Bel-Imperia and anger on the part of her father, Castile, when he discovers it. (In The First Part Castile hears of the affair without expressing disapproval.) It also contains elements, such as the presence of Hieronimo at the battle between Portugal and Spain, that are impossible in the world of The Spanish Tragedy, where Hieronimo learns of the battle by report. A brilliant solution to these problems has recently been advanced by Lukas Erne, who bases his reconstruction of the lost “doneoracio” on a distinction between those important elements of The First Part of Ieronimo that are entirely consistent with The Spanish Tragedy (and thus an accurate representation of the original forepiece) and those that are at odds with it (and thus a partial rewriting of the original to suit the purposes of the Children of the Chapel circa 1604). Like Boas, Erne notes that The First Part contains many elements exactly as they are required by The Spanish Tragedy: a war between Portugal and Spain and a conflict between the two champions Don Balthazar and Don Andrea, a love affair between Don Andrea and Bel-Imperia, a battlefield attempt to rescue Don Andrea by his friend Horatio, Horatio’s recovery of Don Andrea’s body and funeral for his friend, the Spanish defeat of Portugal, and an incipient conflict between Horatio and Bel-Imperia’s brother Lorenzo over the capture of Don Balthazar. He notes also the absence in The First Part of other key events required by The Spanish Tragedy: Andrea’s “secret” possession of Bel-Imperia, Castile’s wrath at Bel-Imperia’s affair with Don Andrea, Pedringano’s role as go-between for the lovers, and Lorenzo’s intervention to prevent Pedringano’s punishment when the angry Castile discovers it. The key to Erne’s interpretation is the link he draws between these missing elements required by The Spanish Tragedy and the presence of elements in direct conflict with it: the early discovery by Horatio and Hieronimo in The First Part of Lorenzo’s perfidy (a discovery of which they are ignorant in The Spanish Tragedy), Hieronimo’s presence at the battle between Portugal and Spain, and above all a whole series of events connected with Lorenzo’s villainy that essentially duplicate his perfidies

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in The Spanish Tragedy. These include, Lorenzo’s attempt to “crosse my Sister’s loue”42 by proposing a rival suitor; his suborning of a murderer, Lazarotto, to assassinate Bel-Imperia’s true love; and his betrayal of the assassin after promising him a pardon. These last elements, amounting to an “intrigue” plot virtually identical with that of The Spanish Tragedy, were written, Erne argues, to exploit the popularity of Kyd’s play and imported into the frame of the original “doneoracio,” out of which space was carved by cutting scenes dealing with the clandestine side of the love affair. The result, then, was a conflation of the two plays into one, with the war plot taken from the original first part played at the Rose and the intrigue plot taken from the Lorenzo intrigue of The Spanish Tragedy. It is remarkable to see how well, in Erne’s analysis, the two levels differ consistently in style as well as compatibility with The Spanish Tragedy. Those portions of The First Part of Ieronimo apparently deriving from “doneoracio” are written in a style compatible with other work of the early 1590s; several scholars have noted its similarities to that of The Spanish Tragedy.43 Just as the scenes deriving from the original “doneoracio” contain all and only those Spanish and Portuguese characters who feature in their identical roles in The Spanish Tragedy (Andrea, Spain, Castile, Lorenzo, Bel-Imperia, Pedringano, the Spanish General, the Viceroy of Portugal, Don Pedro, Balthasar, Alexandro, Viluppo, Horatio, and Hieronimo) and just as the Lorenzo intrigue redundant of The Spanish Tragedy features invented characters who do not appear in the latter play (Medina, Alcario, and Lazarotto), so a heroic style and aristocratic decorum govern the love and war plots continuous with The Spanish Tragedy, while the redundant intrigue plot is marked by a salacious and satirical style typical of the later boys’ plays. In the latter category too are the short passages placing Hieronimo at the battle in The First Part—an element incompatible with The Spanish Tragedy—in which the boastful and diminutive interloper, suitable for child performance, is ridiculed as “little Jeronimo,” an “ynch of Spaine . . . little longer then thy beard” (3.1.33–35). Shorn of these elements of pastiche and parody vamped up from The Spanish Tragedy and adapted to the private theater, the underlying substrate of The First Part is actually a heroic play that sets the stage for The Spanish Tragedy in large-scale scenes of political pageantry, romance, and epic warfare: the election and embassy of Don Andrea, the love affair and final farewell of Don Andrea and Bel-Imperia, the confrontation of the two armies and Balthasar’s heroic defiance of Don Andrea, Horatio’s friendship with Don Andrea and Bel-Imperia, his attempt to rescue the doomed Don Andrea in the battle, his capture of Balthasar, his quarrel with Lorenzo over that honor, and his performance of the funeral rites of Don Andrea.

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In their recollection of these and other events, the lengthy summaries that open The Spanish Tragedy skillfully bridge the two plays, enabling the second to stand free of the first while also picking up the threads of the first for those in the audience who had seen it. In a particularly brilliant observation, Erne tracks a key property across the suturing of the two plays, as the “softe and silken charme”—the scarf which Bel-Imperia ties on Don Andrea’s sleeve in an “amorous knot” (2.6.16–17), which the dying Don Andrea takes as consolation in his final line and which Horatio takes from Andrea’s corpse to “weare in memorie . . . of our muteall loues” (3.3.164– 65)—is recognized by Bel-Imperia in The Spanish Tragedy as “my fauour at his last depart” just before she urges Horatio to “weare it both for him and me” and takes Horatio as “my second loue” (sig. B4). The 1605 text of The First Part of Ieronimo is thus in many of its parts a legible palimpsest of Lord Strange’s Men’s forepiece to The Spanish Tragedy. From references in the latter play to Castile’s wrath at Bel-Imperia’s secret affair we have references to other elements of the original no longer extant. Reference in The First Part to Lorenzo’s jealous wish to “crose my Sisters louing hopes” (1.3.34) and his rejoicing that after Andrea’s death he may “choose my Sister out her second loue” (3.2.148) suggest that, quite apart from the obviously invented and misplaced intrigue involving Lorenzo with Alcario and Lazarotto, there must have been in the original “doneoracio” a place for Lorenzo’s scheming against his sister. A comment from Lorenzo to Pedringano in The Spanish Tragedy suggests what it might have been: it is not long thou knowst, Since I did shield thee from my fathers wrath For thy conueiance in Andrea’s loue, For which thou wert adiudg’d to punishment. I stood betwixt thee and thy punishment. (TLN 655–59)

It seems reasonable to suppose that in the forepiece Lorenzo’s main action was to betray to his father knowledge learned from Pedringano of Bel-Imperia’s affair, thus bringing upon the go-between the very wrath from which he claims to have protected him. (That would be a striking forecast of Lorenzo’s promise to protect Pedringano in The Spanish Tragedy.) It is tempting to guess too that there may have been a larger role for Horatio and perhaps Hieronimo as confidants to the affair of Don Andrea and Bel-Imperia. Thus if The Spanish Tragedy is the first and most influential of Elizabethan revenge tragedies, its relation

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to the “spanes comodye” also clearly anticipates the relation of Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge to his Antonio and Mellida, in which a love affair promisingly begun in oppressive circumstances ends in a vengeful bloodbath. The First Part of Ieronimo contains much more of the anti-Spanish sentiment that some scholars miss in The Spanish Tragedy, but it takes the form of sympathy for Portuguese independence. In the play the Portuguese, including the noble Balthazar, insist repeatedly that “our kingdome is our owne” (2.1.32), resolve not “to liue like Captiues” but “as free borne die” (3.1.19), and seek through “honored valiansie” to regain “what our predecessors lost to Spaine” (2.1.31, 85). These are sentiments consonant with the post-Armada expedition of Norris and Drake in support of efforts to regain Portuguese independence, and they place the two-part Spanish comedy and tragedy, together with The Battle of Alcazar, into the company’s large-panel portrait of the contemporary Mediterranean world. The “spanes comodye donne oracioe” ranked sixth in frequency of perfor mance among plays mounted at the Rose by Lord Strange’s Men; in terms of receipts, only seven other plays garnered Henslowe larger profits. After playing a final time in combination with The Spanish Tragedy on 21–22 May 1592, “doneoracio” dropped mysteriously from the repertory, while The Spanish Tragedy was performed as a freestanding play an additional six times, on 27 May–18 June 1592 and 30 December–22 January 1592/93. “the iewe of malltuse” in thirteen performances, 26 february 1591/1592–1 february 1592/1593 The Jew of Malta, performed on average fortnightly throughout the residence of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose, was third in frequency of performance and third in receipts, after “harey the vj” and “Ieronymo.” Henslowe did not mark the play “ne” at its first recorded performance, so the play was evidently not new to the Rose and perhaps not new to the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men. If the Machiavel’s prologue is original to the play, then his report that “now the Guise is dead” indicates that the play could not have been written until some time after 23 December 1588, when Henri de Lorraine, third Duke of Guise, was assassinated.44 Lord Strange’s Men did not inherit other Marlovian plays, 1 and 2 Tamburlaine or Doctor Faustus, from the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the dates of composition usually advanced for The Jew of Malta, 1589– 91, open the possibility that Strange’s Men could actually have been the company that premiered the play.45

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An additional twenty-six performances of The Jew of Malta at the Rose in 1594– 97 by various companies, including Sussex’s alone and in association with the Queen’s Men, and the Lord Admiral’s alone and in association with Pembroke’s Men, suggests the play eventually belonged to Henslowe and the Rose rather than to any one group of actors. The play’s association with the Rose is also confirmed by the “cauderm for the Iewe” in the now lost 1598 inventory of “properties for my Lord Admeralles men” and by Henslowe’s 1601 loans toward the purchase of “divers thinges for the Iewe of malta.”46 In the dedication and prologue for the later Cockpit performance that he supplied for the 1633 quarto of the play, Thomas Heywood declared that “the part of the Jew” had been played by “the best of actors,” Edward Alleyn. If the role belonged to Alleyn from the first, then the play might have followed a path of ownership similar to that of Tamar Cham and The Massacre at Paris. Evidence from the appearance of Sussex’s Men at the Rose from 27 December 1593 to 6 February 1593/94 and in 1–8 April 1594 may indicate that it was Alleyn or other actors, moving from company to company during a volatile period, who at that point owned the play. Not until they had given twenty-eight per formances of nine other plays, all of them now obscure except for The Pindar of Wakefield, did Sussex’s Men mount The Jew of Malta, just four performances after they had also introduced Titus Andronicus, a play whose quarto title page attributes it to “the Earle of Darbie [i.e., the former Lord Strange], Earle of Pembrooke, and Earl of Sussex their Seruants.” From the Sussex company’s delayed introduction of these two plays with previous associations to other companies, McMillin concluded that Sussex’s Men were joined briefly, toward the end of their run in late January to early February 1593/94, by members from the possibly disbanded Pembroke’s Men (said by Henslowe to have ceased touring and pawned their apparel by August 1593) and Derby’s (previously Strange’s) Men, whose last known performance was at Caludon Castle in December 1593.47 The famouse tragedie of the Riche Jewe of Malta was entered in the Stationers’ Register for Nicholas Ling and Thomas Millington on 17 May 1594, about a month after Sussex’s Men had mounted their final production of the play on 7 April and then possibly disbanded. (They do not appear in any subsequent records of performance until 1602.)48 This publication entry of The Jew of Malta also came just three days after the reconstituted Lord Admiral’s Men had opened their new residence at the Rose on 14 May with a performance of the play. This chain of events—the apparently delayed performance of The Jew of Malta twenty-eight days into the residence of Sussex’s Men at the Rose, the

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entry of the play for publication in May, and the frequent performance of the play at the Rose throughout the spring and summer of 1594—could be explained in terms of public interest aroused by the sensational case of the Jewish physician Rodrigo Lopez, who had been arrested for plotting to assassinate the queen in late January 1593/94 and was executed in June. But as McMillin argued, the delayed appearance of The Jew of Malta with Sussex’s Men and its registration for publication also form a striking parallel with the case of Titus Andronicus, which similarly made a late appearance in the repertory of Sussex’s Men as “ne” during the same fortnight that Marlowe’s play arrived with the company and then similarly was registered for publication. “A booke intituled a Noble Roman Historye of Tytus Andronicus” was entered in the Stationers’ Register for John Danter on 6 February 1593/94, the very day on which Sussex’s independent residence at the Rose came to an end with a performance of that play.49 Sussex’s evidently retained The Jew of Malta, which they revived when they returned to the Rose in April for a week-long coresidence with the Queen’s Men, but the company did not perform Titus Andronicus during this brief reprise. That suggests that Alleyn and perhaps other Derby’s Men remained with Sussex’s in April but that any collaborators from Pembroke’s Men had by that time departed from the Rose or withdrawn Titus from Sussex’s repertory. The entry of The Jewe of Malta for publication on 17 May is sometimes explained as a defensive response to John Danter’s registration on 16 May of “a ballad intituled the murtherous life and terrible death of the riche Jew of Malta.”50 But Danter had also entered “the ballad” of Titus Andronicus on the very day he entered that play. Perhaps the publication of a ballad-play combination was being planned by the former members of two different companies, Derby’s Men and Pembroke’s Men, who, while briefly joining forces and playing The Jew of Malta and Titus Andronicus jointly with Sussex’s Men at the Rose, were seeking to finance their own new organizations. That possibility is reinforced by the contemporaneous publication of other plays by the former Lord Strange’s Men and Pembroke’s Men in early 1594.51 It is supported too by subsequent events: the reconstituted Lord Admiral’s Men opened at the Rose with The Jew of Malta. When the new Lord Chamberlain’s Men joined them for alternating performances at the Rose in June, their repertory included Titus Andronicus. By two different routes and groups of players, the two plays once again rotated briefly in performance on the same stage. No copy of The famouse tragedie of the Riche Jewe of Malta entered for Ling and Millington in 1594 survives. Text for the play derives from a 1633 quarto, The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. As it was playd . . . by her Majesties

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Servants at the Cock-Pit. Opinions vary on the extent to which the 1633 quarto, minus the dedication and prologues and epilogues prepared by Thomas Heywood for the court and Cockpit performances, might represent “the Iewe of malltuse” performed by Lord Strange’s Men. Heywood’s 1633 epilogue and prologue, claiming that “we only act and speak what others write,” explained that the play was “writ many years agone” and “hath passed . . . many censures.”52 Nevertheless, comic episodes from the second half of the play involving Bellamira and Pilia-Borza (3.1., 4.2–4.4) and the death of the two friars (3.1) have been suspected of being later interpolations. Thus whereas N. W. Bawcutt maintained that the quarto of 1633 is “a good and reliable text of Marlowe’s original version . . . derived from Marlowe’s ‘foul papers,’ with no sign of revision by a later dramatist,” Fredson Bowers found it “most improbable” that Heywood or others responsible “would not touch up an old play for a new audience” and concluded that “the comic scenes . . . were among those that were touched up.”53 While excluding the Bellamira and Pilia-Borza scenes from our hypotheses about Lord Strange’s Men, we accept Bawcutt’s claim that “the quarto gives us substantially the play that Marlowe wrote” and that Lord Strange’s Men performed. “the tragedy of the gvyes” in one performance, 30 january 1592/1593 “The tragedy of the gvyes” was performed by Lord Strange’s Men on 30 January 1592/93, two days before their final appearance at the Rose on 1 February, when playing in London was banned for eleven months due to a continuing outbreak of plague. The play was revived, under the title of “the masacer” as well as “the Gwies,” for ten performances by the reconstituted Lord Admiral’s Men when they opened at the Rose in June 1594; it dropped from their repertory in late September, at about the time they added “docter ffostose” to their schedule. A loan from Henslowe to William Bird “to bye a payer of sylke stockens to playe the gwisse in” points to a possible revival late in 1598.54 A further revival was probably in the works between November 1601, when Henslowe recorded loans of “a clocke for the gwisse” and “lynynge for the clockes for the masaker,” and January 1601/2, when “the massaker of france” was among three playbooks for which Henslowe paid Edward Alleyn at the appointment of the company.55 Like the “Boocke of tambercame,” The Massacre at Paris seems to have passed through the hands of Alleyn on its way from Lord Strange’s Men to the Lord Admiral’s Men, who probably acquired The Spanish Tragedy and The Jew of Malta by similar means.56 The single performance of The Massacre at Paris by Lord Strange’s Men is marked in Henslowe’s diary as “ne.” The play has to have been written after the

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death of Henri III in August 1589, but evidence that Marlowe relied for details of Henri’s death on The True History of the Ciuill Warres of France (1591) suggests that he may have written The Massacre after his arrest in Flushing and his return to England in January–March 1591/92. An octavo text of the play was printed by Edward Allde for Edward White and published without date as The Massacre at Paris: With the Death of the Duke of Guise. As it was plaide by the right honourable the Lord high Admirall his Seruants. Written by Christopher Marlow. There is no entry in the Stationers’ Register to assist with dating. The octavo bears a title-page device in use by Allde from 1592, a first-page ornament in use from 1593, and, on sig. A3, an undamaged head-piece ornament that shows damage in all works of Allde’s printed after 1603. The 1,250-line text shows many signs of revision for shortened performance: a notable absence of speeches longer than a dozen lines, vestigial characters, apparent elisions and vagueness in the staging of complex scenes. Evidence for cutting is also provided by the so-called Folger leaf, a single two-sided manuscript page of the play, deemed to be “a genuine playhouse document,” that provides a fuller thirty-six-line treatment of a passage that reduces to sixteen lines in scene xix of the printed text.57 If that is a representative sample, then the play represented in the octavo may have been very substantially cut.58 In addition to evidence of theatrical compression, the printed text also abounds in such signs of memorial reconstruction as metrical irregularity, confusion of prose and verse, catchphrases used as filler, verbatim internal repetition and anticipation, and apparent contamination by lines identical or nearly identical with lines from such other early Elizabethan plays as The First Part of the Contention (1594), The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595), Edward II (1594), and Arden of Faversham (1592). In Laurie Maguire’s Shakespearean Suspect Texts, a work largely devoted to undermining excessive claims for the theory of the “memorial reconstruction” of theatrical texts, The Massacre at Paris survives as one of just four among forty candidate texts for which “a strong case can be made for memorial reconstruction.”59 If the octavo of The Massacre at Paris, which could have been printed any time between 1593 and 1603, is a “memorially reported text which has no direct transmissional connection with Marlowe’s manuscript,”60 then what is the relationship of this text to Henslowe’s “tragedy of the gvyes”? The octavo title page attributes the play to “the Lord high Admirall his Seruants,” but the possibility of a relatively early date is supported by the similarity between spellings in the octavo and spellings in other books printed by Allde in 1592– 94: The Spanish Tragedy (late 1592) and (to a lesser extent) The Battle of Alcazar (1594) and the Wars of Cyrus (1594).61 Another feature supporting early publication of the

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octavo is the apparent memorial connection of lines in The Massacre to lines in the second and third parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI and in the versions of these plays associated with Pembroke’s Men and published 1594– 95, The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York.62 The period 1594– 95, the post-plague period of company reorganization that brought many other plays into print, is perhaps the most plausible date for publication of the octavo. Although the play continued to be performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men after June 1594, the octavo of The Massacre at Paris may provide us, filtered through memory, with a revision by Lord Strange’s Men of their own original version of the play. Despite its obvious compression and elements of memorial reconstruction, the text is fundamentally coherent and theatrically effective, as the history of its performance has shown. If the text is not always a reliable recollection of the language Marlowe wrote for the players, its unusually full and explicit stage directions show that the creators of the revised text were preoccupied by the vivid actions being performed. As David Riggs has observed of the text, “Memorial reconstruction is a selective process. The reported text contains what the actors found to be the most memorable parts of Marlowe’s Massacre. . . . The players recalled Marlowe’s fine touches of sadism and brutality. . . . They carried out Marlowe’s intention to set the most shocking aspects of the French religious wars before English theatergoers. . . . If [the Guise’s] victims said anything memorable during their final moments, the players forgot it; instead, they conveyed the frenzied pace of a pathological killing machine.”63 That impression is no doubt heightened by the compression of language in the surviving text, but it probably indicates what Lord Strange’s Men were seeking from the play. “orlando” in one performance, 21 february 1591/1592 The Defence of Conny Catching (1592) alleged that Robert Greene had sold “the Queens Players . . . Orlando Furioso for twenty Nobles, and when they were in the country, sold the same Play to the Lord Admirals Men for as much more. Was not this plaine Conny-catching Maister R.G.?” (sigs. C3– C3v). Whatever Greene’s role in the transactions through which Lord Strange’s Men brought “orlando” to the Rose in February 1591/92, there is indeed circumstantial evidence for linking this play both to Edward Alleyn and to the Queen’s Men. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, ff. 261–71, is a damaged paper roll containing actors’ cues and about two-thirds of the part of Greene’s mad hero Orlando, including corrections in the hand of Alleyn himself. It is possible, then, that the play

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actually belonged first to the Lord Admiral’s Men and then came to Lord Strange’s Men, like other Admiral’s plays, through their collaboration with Alleyn. Chronology, however, points in another direction. Greene borrows passages in Italian, as well as the names and background for his play, directly from Ariosto’s poem, but if Greene took the name of “Sacrapant” (Sacripante in the original) from Sir John Harington’s translation, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 26 February 1590/91, then it is more likely that the play was not completed until mid-1591, by which time the Lord Admiral’s Men were apparently no longer active in London. In that case the anecdote in The Defence of Conny Catching, a work entered in the Stationers’ Register 21 April 1592—two months after the performance of “orlando” at the Rose—may be referring, as others evidently did, not to the Lord Admiral’s company but to Lord Strange’s company under the leadership of the Lord Admiral’s servant Edward Alleyn. The play might have passed to Lord Strange’s Men after the Queen’s Men had played at court on 26 December 1591 and then departed London,64 but Henslowe did not mark “orlando” as “ne” on 21 February 1591/92. If the play was at that time already an older play at the Rose (it was dropped from the repertory after the single performance on 21 February), then the play must have passed from the Queen’s Men to Alleyn some time during 1591. “A plaie booke, intituled, the historye of Orlando ffurioso” was entered to John Danter in the Stationers’ Register on 7 December 1593, and the rights were transferred to Cuthbert Burby on 28 May 1594.65 A quarto of the play, dated 1594, was subsequently published as The Historie of Orlando Furioso . . . As it was plaid before the Queenes Maiestie. Noting that Alleyn’s manuscript scroll for the part of Orlando is in many places different from and longer than the role in the quarto, and estimating from the surviving 531 lines that Alleyn’s Orlando part must have run to about eight hundred lines, Greg hypothesized that the quarto text derived from a theatrical revision involving “extensive omissions and compressions” as well as “persistent corruption” by memorial reconstruction. Subsequent work has challenged Greg’s confidence in the greater authority of Alleyn’s scroll over the published text, suggesting rather that the two documents, each of which has problems as well as independent theatrical viability, represent two different states or versions of the play.66 From the scroll belonging to Alleyn (and presumably Lord Strange’s Men), it would seem that, as played at the Rose, the mad scenes of Orlando were more extensive than in the quarto. Furthermore in place of a comic scene in the quarto, where Orlando breaks a fiddle over the head of a clown who tries to play it, Orlando was given in Alleyn’s scroll a mad “arraignment” scene in which, with Argalio and Melissa present, he takes a chair and summons several imaginary figures to a mock

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trial. The possible influence of this scene on the similar one in the 1608 quarto of King Lear (13.15–48) points to elements of gravitas and high tragedy, missing from the 1594 quarto, that may have been essential to the version played by Lord Strange’s Men.67 On the basis of this and other textual differences, Greg supposed that elements of vulgar clowning were added to the quarto in compensation for the cutting of Orlando’s tragic madness, but the process might have gone the other way. Mention on the quarto title page that Orlando Furioso had been “plaid before the Queenes Maiestie” possibly provides further evidence that the company associated with the quarto was not Lord Strange’s Men but the Queen’s Men. Of the seven plays before 1608 published with title-page claims about court performance, at least five, and possibly all seven, were entered for publication or published within a year of court per formance by the company to which they belonged.68 In the curtailed court season of 1593– 94, the Queen’s Men gave the sole court performance, at Greenwich on Twelfth Night. If the pattern of court performance and publication is any guide, then the Queen’s Men could have performed Orlando Furioso on Twelfth Night 1593/94. Evidence that members of the Queen’s Men were involved in the preparation of copy for the quarto is found in apparent memorial overlap from other texts of the Queen’s Men possibly prepared at about the same time: King Leir (entered 14 May 1594) and The Old Wives’ Tale (entered 16 April 1595).69 Casting study too might support this attribution. As represented in the quarto, the play can be cast for nine adults and two boys, approximately the same number required by Queen’s Men’s plays published after 1594, the ten- cast Old Wives’ Tale (1595) and Clyomon and Clamydes (1599). However, the vestigial roles of Aquitaine and Rosillion (the latter a mute), both of whom are required to drop abruptly from the action in order to accommodate a minimal four of the “twelve Peeres of France” required to enter at 4.1, suggest that a fuller version of the play sustaining the roles Aquitaine, Rosillion, and at least four Peers of France would have demanded a minimal cast of thirteen, a number in line with the five fourteen- cast plays published or entered with attribution to the Queen’s Men in 1594: Selimus, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and King Leir. McMillin and MacLean observe that a fully cast Orlando Furioso, capable of bringing on stage all twelve Peers of France, would require at least sixteen actors, a number in line with plays of the Queen’s Men published before 1592—the fifteen- cast Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590) and The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591)—but also in line with the fourteen to sixteen adults required

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for performance of most plays by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose. We may surmise, then, that in addition to containing a more extensive role for Orlando and in addition to bearing a greater tragic weight, the “orlando” performed by Lord Strange’s Men also sustained full roles for Aquitaine and Rosillion, elaborated on the reconciliation of Mandricard and Marsillus (who appear inexplicably in palmer’s weeds at l. 1093), and staged a magnificent full-fledged pageant of the twelve peers arriving in India to rescue the mad Orlando. In contrast to the scenario just sketched, it is also possible that the abridged eleven- cast version of Orlando Furioso, which bears resemblance to the twelvecast Knack to Know a Knave (1594) and the thirteen- cast Fair Em (1592– 93?) belonged to Lord Strange’s Men themselves and reflects the straightened circumstances of touring in 1593. An argument against that possibility is the evidence that the play was already old and then discontinued at the time of its single recorded per formance by Strange’s Men in February 1591/92. We have no explanation for the fact that the play was not offered again by the company during their subsequent 129 performances at the Rose. The Defence of Conny Catching could not have been published until after 21 April, so its report of the Orlando’s resale was not likely a factor in the play’s discontinuation. It would appear from the low takings of its single performance (16s 6d) that the play was not well received or possibly was near the end of its useful performance life with Strange’s Men. In fact it ranks among the least profitable items in the repertory, with other single-performance plays like Chloris and Ergasto, Pope Joan, Zenobia, and Constantine. From the fact that “orlando” never appears again in Henslowe’s diary, we may also surmise that Edward Alleyn had no interest in reviving the play with the Lord Admiral’s Men. “fryer bacone” in seven performances, 19 february 1591/1592–30 january 1592/1593 The “fryer bacone” with which Lord Strange’s Men opened at the Rose in February 1592/93 is sometimes thought to be the play behind “the Historye of ffryer Bacon and ffryer Boungaye” entered in the Stationers’ Register to Edward White on 14 May 159470 and published later in that year as The Honorable Historie of frier Bacon, and frier Bongay . . . As it was plaid by her Maiesties seruants. Although Greene’s Orlando Furioso appears to have been owned by the Queen’s Men as well as by Edward Alleyn, no other play known to have been performed by Lord Strange’s Men was published with an unambiguous attribution to the Queen’s Men. The greater likelihood is that the “fryer bacone”

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performed by Lord Strange’s Men was the untitled romance recorded in Alnwick Castle MS 507 and titled John of Bordeaux by its modern editor, who notes that the play “might be called The Second Part of Friar Bacon.”71 Several marginal stage directions in this manuscript assign roles and entrances (ll. 466, 678–79, 1159) to the actor John Holland, who is also named in a stage direction (“Enter Beuis, and Iohn Holland”) in the Folio 2 Henry VI (TLN 2019). Holland’s name could have been added to the copy text for the Folio at a date later than 1593, but one school of opinion holds (and in chapters 4 and 9 we give our reasons for thinking) that the Folio text of 2 Henry VI derives from a version of the play originally intended for performance by Lord Strange’s Men. Where Greene’s play is cast for eleven adults and three boys, a number in line with the casting of the Queen’s Men’s plays 1592– 94,72 John of Bordeaux is cast for fourteen adults and four boys, a number in line with the casting of other plays for Strange’s Men at the Rose. In John of Bordeaux Lord Strange’s Men would have possessed an artful second part to the Queen’s Men’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, in which Bacon renews his rivalry with the German magician Vandermast while benevolently protecting the family of John of Bordeaux in their trials. The play assumes and frequently refers to relevant portions of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (chiefly dealing with Bacon’s career) while excluding references to the love plot and clown part in that play, neither of which allowed for further development. Where the Friar Bacon of the Queen’s Men was woven around a romantic courtship plot involving Prince Edward and his rivals in pursuit of fair Margaret, the Friar Bacon of Lord Strange’s Men is shaped as a romance in which the chivalric hero, separated from his wife and family by a tyrannous German emperor and his lecherous and cruel son, are reunited through the combined force of their long-suffering virtue and Bacon’s benign magic. Bacon’s clownish servant Miles, carried off to Hell on the devil’s back in Greene’s play, is replaced by a new assistant, the tavern-going Perce, whose routines are closer to those of Adam in The Looking Glass for London and England than to the schemes of Miles, and in John of Bordeaux the bluff patriotism of Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay gives way to quasi-religious sentiment; the play, as we shall see, draws on elements of the suppressed mystery plays. Like several other plays in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men—The Spanish Comedy, 1 Henry VI, and Harry of Cornwall—John of Bordeaux was a play designed to complement, by way of prequel or sequel, preexisting plays, some of which were in the possession of other companies. Not marked as “ne” upon its first recorded performance, John of Bordeaux was evidently an established play in the company’s repertory by February 1591/92

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and could have been written for them at any time after 1589, the date usually given for the composition of Greene’s original. A play that Henslowe similarly called “frier bacone” was mounted twice during a week of joint playing at the Rose (1–8 April) by Sussex’s Men and the Queen’s Men. Since Sussex’s Men had not mounted a “frier bacone” during their preceding thirty performances from 27 December to 6 February, this was likely the original version belonging to the Queen’s Men and entered to Edward White in May 1594.73 It was Henslowe’s practice, in recording play receipts, to designate the second of twopart plays as such (i.e., “the 2 parte of tambercam,” “the 2 pte of godfrey of bullen,” “the 2 pte of tamberlen”). He did not designate John of Bordeaux as “2 parte fryer bacone” in 1592– 93, perhaps because at that time it was serving not as the second part of a two-play sequence mounted at the Rose but as a freestanding rival to Greene’s famous Friar Bacon. Conversely, with the arrival of the Queen’s Men in early 1594, Henslowe did not designate Green’s play as “1 parte frier bacone” because it was never his practice before late 1594 (and not consistently thereafter) to designate first parts as such.74 Upon the reorganization of companies in 1594, “fryer bacone” did not, like such other Strange’s plays as The Spanish Tragedy, The Massacre at Paris, or The Jew of Malta, continue with the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Rose. That, along with possible verbal echoes and influence from John of Bordeaux in Shakespeare’s late romances, might be reason to think the play went into the repertory of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but a December 1602 loan from Henslowe toward payment of Thomas Middleton for composing “a prologe & a epeloge for the playe of bacon for the corte,” suggests instead some continuing, if vestigial, association with the Lord Admiral’s Men.75 The manuscript of John of Bordeaux contains revisions to speech headings and stage directions in a hand resembling that found in “The platt of The Secound parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinns” (Dulwich College Archive: MS XIX) and in the plot for The Battle of Alcazar. Evidence of three additional hands, including that of Henry Chettle, who added an eleven-line speech for John of Bordeaux in a space left empty by the primary scribe, is also found in the manuscript and may be a further sign of later connection to Henslowe.76 Several features of the manuscript—the writing of verse as prose, the manuscript’s relative brevity (1,330 lines, with at least another twenty lost to damage at the end), the space left by the primary scribe for a second missing speech for John of Bordeaux, phonetic spellings that possibly reflect dictation, repetition of a few short passages, and the reduction to brief stage directions of several scenes or inset magical shows—led the play’s modern editor to suggest that the manuscript is “a shortened version of a longer text . . . perhaps for a touring cast, of

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which the clown was to be an important member.”77 Harry Hoppe, drawing on then- current theories of memorial reconstruction and “bad” quartos, went further and declared John of Bordeaux to be “a bad quarto that never reached print.”78 Recent work on theatrical revision and the use of recitation in the preparation of theatrical manuscripts, however, has prompted Laurie Maguire to describe the manuscript as a theatrically viable revision of a full-scale play written for fourteen adults and four boys.79 Abbreviated stage directions calling for inset shows and an unwritten clown scene suggest that these were too familiar to the actors to need more elaborate description: Exent Bacon to bring in the showes as you knowe (TLN 446–47) her the musicke enters her the playe (here the play) (TLN 764, 769, 777) Enter the seane of the whiper (TLN 1059) Enter the show of Lucres (TLN 1267) These numerous inset shows—the German emperor’s vision of the siege of Ravenna (TLN 447), a musical show of fauns and satyrs comforting John of Bordeaux (TLN 764, 769, 777), the “scene of the whipper” for the clown Perce and the Jailer (TLN 1059), and a show depicting the rape of Lucrece (TLN 1267)—would have transformed the relatively brief manuscript into a substantial spectacle. “harey the vj” in seventeen performances, 3 march 1591/1592–31 january 1592/1593 There are four known plays from the period featuring King Henry VI: the three parts of Henry VI published in the First Folio and the lost play represented in the “The platt of The Secound parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinns,” in which Henry VI and Lydgate remain onstage throughout to frame three inset plays on Envy, Sloth, and Lechery. Most scholars now agree that early versions of the Folio texts of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI served as the basis for the abbreviated reconstructions published as The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (1594) and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke . . . with the whole contention betweene the two Houses Lancaster and Yorke (1595). The title-page attribution of the latter to “the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants,” in com-

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bination with the linked titles of these two works and their obvious design as a two-part sequence, supports the supposition that the company responsible for these two early versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI was Pembroke’s Men. One reason for connecting Henslowe’s “harey the vj” with the Folio’s 1 Henry VI is a passage in Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Deuill, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 August 1592 and published shortly thereafter. In a “defence of Playes” against the “clubfisted Vsurer[s]” in the City of London who sought to suppress them, Nashe cites the recent success of a patriotic play depicting the death of the English hero John Talbot: “How would it haue ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumph againe upon the Stage, and haue his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”80 Going on to praise “famouse Ned Allen”—probably “the Tragedian” who represented Talbot at the Rose—Nashe concludes his Svpplication with fulsome praise of Ferdinando Stanley, “the matchlesse image of Honor, and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Ioues Eagle-borne Ganimed, thrice-noble Amyntas,” for “benefits receiued.”81 Most of 1 Henry VI draws upon Holinshed’s Chronicles and other historical sources; among the prominent unhistorical exceptions are the titles attributed to the deceased Talbot by Sir William Lucy in 4.7 and the scene involving the plucking of the roses in Temple Garden (2.4). These are among the scenes attributed to Shakespeare by those who view 1 Henry VI as a “collaborative manuscript” supplied “by the authors for its perfor mance at the Rose.”82 In his study of Shakespeare’s role in this collaboration, Gary Taylor concludes that “Shakespeare unmistakably had some connection at some time in the early 1590s with Strange’s Men” and that 1 Henry VI “can be credibly linked by documentary evidence with both Shakespeare and that company.”83 We examine this possibility in more detail in chapter 9. Marked as “ne” upon its first appearance in Henslowe’s diary, “harey the vj” was probably new not only to the Rose but also to Lord Strange’s Men and to London audiences when it opened on 3 March 1591/92. This inference is supported by the four performances the play received within two weeks of its first appearance, by the frequency of its performance thereafter, and by Henslowe’s total receipts for the play (£33 14s 8d), which lend credibility to Nashe’s boasts about the play’s being witnessed by “ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall

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times).”84 It is sometimes argued that all three of the Henry VI plays were “written in the order of the events” they portray,85 but this poses a problem of dating, since not later than September 1592 the third play in narrative order, the play behind The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and Folio 3 Henry VI, was known to the author(s) of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, who used York’s complaint that Queen Margaret has a “Tygres Heart wrapt in a Womans Hide” (F TLN 604, O sig. B2v) to attack the “upstart crow” Shakespeare for having a “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde.”86 Attempts to circumvent the problem of dating raised by the Groatsworth’s allusion to 3 Henry VI rest on unpersuasive theories that the “ne” performance of “harey the vj” at the Rose was a revival of an earlier version of 1 Henry VI, or that the second and third parts of the sequence, not yet performed when Lord Strange’s Men departed the Rose for touring in the summer of 1592, were available to the authors of the Groatsworth in manuscript or through rehearsal.87 There is stronger evidence to suggest, however, that “harey the vj” or 1 Henry VI was in fact written last in the sequence and probably in the months preceding the “ne” play’s debut at the Rose. The expedition of the Earl of Essex in support of Henri of Navarre and Essex’s siege of Rouen (October 1591–April 1592) is a circumstance that may account for the prominence of the earlier siege of Rouen in Act 3 of 1 Henry VI.88 More decisive to the later dating of 1 Henry VI are the coherent design of 2 and 3 Henry VI as a freestanding two-part sequence, their apparent ignorance of events in 1 Henry VI, and the equally compelling evidence that the latter play shows knowledge of the former two, frequently anticipating and borrowing from them.89 The second and third parts, in their earlier published form as The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, had been entered or transferred for publication in 1594 and 1602, but when, in preparation for the publication of the First Folio, entries were made for Shakespearean plays “not formerly entered to other men,” the previously unpublished 1 Henry VI was entered as “The thirde parte of Henry ye sixt.”90 Although the wording may be intended only to indicate the order in which the plays were registered for publication, it also lends support to a view widely current in textual scholarship: that “harey the vj” or 1 Henry VI was third in order of composition, written after the other two parts and forming a “free-standing piece” or “prequel” designed “to draw on audience knowledge of the earlier two plays.”91 Less controversial than the date and order of composition for the three parts Henry VI 92 is the possibility that all three parts were in the first instance written for Lord Strange’s Men. We review in chapters 4 and 9 further evidence that The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York de-

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rived from versions of these plays that lie behind the texts of Folio 2 and 3 Henry VI and were intended for (and possibly performed by) Lord Strange’s Men. “a knacke to knowe a knave” in seven performances, 10 june 1592–24 january 1592/1593 Marked “ne” upon its first per formance, remounted for two additional performances during its opening fortnight at the Rose in June 1592, and then revived for four performances in December–January 1592/93, A Knack to Know a Knave was the sixth most profitable of the company’s plays according to Henslowe’s receipts. The first per formance of the play took place three days after the company’s final per formance of A Looking Glass for London and England, and it may have been conceived as a replacement for Greene and Lodge’s play. As moral plays in medley style, the two works have much in common: a preoccupation with sin, judgment, and forgiveness; estates satire on contemporary corruptions in Court and City; attacks on London usury, puritan theology, and clerical hypocrisy; conjurings and traditional stage devils; and a clownish blacksmith. It would appear that A Looking Glass for London and England was a particularly demanding play to cast; as an updated moral play, A Knack to Know a Knave would have combined freshness with more manageable casting demands. Although the play’s title derives from a lost recusant book notorious in the 1570s,93 it draws the plot of its moral satire—Honesty’s exposure of the hidden sins of the four sons of the bailiff of Hexham—from a traditional morality-play device. In the Briefe Apologie of Poetrie prefacing his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Sir John Harington lauds “a London Comedie” containing “much good matter, yea and matter of state”; it was called “the play of the Cards, in which it is showed how foure Parasiticall knaues robbe the foure principall vocations of the Realme, videl. the vocation of Souldiers, Schollers, Marchants, and Husbandmen.”94 In just this way does The Three Ladies of London (1584), a play possibly belonging originally to Leicester’s Men, link its four scoundrels to the knaves in a deck of cards. As the clown Simplicity observes: Nowe all the Cardes in the stock are delte about, The foure knaues in a cluster comes ruffling out ... Fraud is the clubbish knaue, and Usery the hard harted knaue: And Simony the dyamon daintie knaue, And Dissimulation the spitefull knaue of Spade.95

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A Knack to Know a Knave adapts this formula to the knavish tricks perpetrated by the Bailiff of Hexham’s sons, who occupy the estates of Court (Perin), Country (Walter), City (Cuthbert) and Church (John). The play alludes to matters of current concern, including the undermining of traditional religion by puritan zeal and hypocrisy and the conveyance of commodities to enemies abroad, a matter that had been taken up in just those terms by the Privy Council during 1591– 92.96 The character of “Cuthbert Coni- Catcher” exploits the contemporary popularity of Robert Greene’s pamphlets on the criminal underworld, and the play alludes to several plays of recent date, including one or more “Titus” plays (see chapter 4) and Locrine. The author or authors of A Knack to Know a Knave are unknown.97 In its treatment of the servile and treacherous courtier Perin, as in much of its estates satire, the play closely resembles Greene’s Quip for an Vpstart Courtier (entered 21 July 1592 and published within the year), and the play’s plot resembles Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, both in the erotic rivalry between King Edgar and his surrogate wooer (analogous to the rivalry between Prince Edward and Lacy in Greene’s play) and in the magical intervention of Dunstan (possibly modeled on Greene’s Bacon). However, these overlaps with Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay count as much against Greene’s authorship of A Knack to Know a Knave as for it, and the extent to which the one play duplicates the other may be yet another argument against Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (and in favor of John of Bordeaux) as the “fryer bacone” that belonged to Strange’s Men. Taken together, John of Bordeaux, with its reprise of Bacon’s duel with Vandermast, and A Knack to Know a Knave, with its reprise of the romantic rivalry in Greene’s play, form a complementary pair drawn out of the different strands of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The play was entered for publication by Richard Jones on 7 January 1593/94 and published within the year as A most pleasant and merie new Comedie, Intituled, A Knacke to knowe a Knaue. Newlie set foorth, as it hath sundrie tymes bene played by ED. ALLEN and his Companie. With KEMPS applauded Merrimentes of the men of Goteham, in receiuing the King into Goteham. At just under 1,900 lines, the quarto shows several signs of abridgement or incomplete revision. There are many unmarked entrances and exits, and King Edgar’s climactic confrontation with the devil, Alfrida, and Ethenwald is so compressed as to be little more informative than John of Bordeaux’s “bring in the showes as you knowe” (TLN 447). More significantly there is evidence of revision for reduced- cast performance in the quarto’s failure to sustain several characters and plot strands. Alfrida’s father Osricke is unable to appear in the final scene if

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there are to be enough actors for attendants to fetch and arrest the four knavish sons of the Bailiff of Hexham. The play also fails to follow up the exile of Philarchus, who disappears from the play after being sent away “to liue in good and honest sort / Untill thou be recalled by the king.” Most severely truncated of all are the “applauded merriments” involving the three mad citizens of Gotham: reduced to forty-four not-so-amusing lines in the quarto, they hardly amount to the selling point the title page makes of them. Additional unconformities in plot, irregular printing of verse (which may result either from playhouse dictation or printing-house practice), and several possible “inter-play borrowings,” including some from plays associated with Pembroke’s Men, led Maguire to rank A Knack to Know a Knave as “possibly” a memorial reconstruction.98 As represented by the quarto, A Knack to Know a Knave can be cast for a minimum of eleven adults and two boys, well below the casting norms for the plays of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose. A possible explanation is that the quarto represents a theatrical abridgement for a reduced cast following the departure of Lord Strange’s Men from the Rose after 1 February 1592/93. More substantial roles for the three Gothamites and the exiled Philarchus, and a chance for Alfrida’s father Osricke to be onstage for the happy conclusion, would require another three or four adults, a number that would bring the cast into line with other company plays at the Rose. One further sign that the quarto derives from the last days of Lord Strange’s Men is found in the title-page attribution of the play to “ED. ALLEN and his Companie.” By the time the play was entered and published, it is possible that the company was no longer performing under the name and patronage of Ferdinando Stanley. In the uncertain period of early 1594, when company affiliations and identities were so fluid, the publisher was perhaps seeking to capitalize instead on the reliable cachet of the company’s chief player. “the lockinglasse” in four performances, 8 march–7 june 1592 “A booke intituled the lookinge glasse for London by THOMAS. LODG[E] and ROBERT GREENE gent” was entered in the Stationers’ Register to Thomas Creede on 5 March 1593/9499 and published later that year, without attribution to an acting company, as A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande. Made by Thomas Lodge, Gentleman, and Robert Greene. Because “Adam” appears in later portions of the text as one of the speech headings for a figure otherwise designated as “Smith” and “Clowne,” Greg conjectured that “Adam” was an actor’s name inserted into the playhouse copy and therefore

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that the play may have belonged first to the Queen’s Men, who in 1588 featured an actor named John Adams. This does not work. The given name “Adam” is not the surname “Adams”; the character is familiarly addressed several times in the play as “Adam”; the irregularities in his speech heading have to do with a larger set of speech-heading problems in the scenes in which he appears.100 Except for the play’s medley style and the fact that Thomas Creede printed several plays attributed to the Queen’s Men (he also printed Clyomon and Clamydes, Famous Victories, Selimus, and True Tragedy),101 there are no other reasons to associate The Looking Glass with the early history of that company. Thomas Lodge had been closely connected with the Stanley household since his youth, and he dedicated two works to members of the family (see chapter 5), so it is likely that this play belonged in the first instance to Lord Strange’s Men. The publication of the play without attribution to company may reflect the unsettled state of the major acting companies in the spring of 1594. The play would likely have been written in the interval between Thomas Lodge’s sea voyage with Captain John Clarke (1 November 1586 to later 1587) and his voyage with Thomas Cavendish (26 August 1591 to early 1593).102 The play was not marked “ne” upon its first appearance in Henslowe’s diary on 8 March 1591/92; its status as an older play with the company and with London audiences is perhaps reflected in the fact that it was performed only four times during the company’s run at the Rose that spring. It was not revived for the briefer run in December–January 1593/94. Not appearing in Henslowe’s diary subsequent to its performance by Lord Strange’s Men, the play presumably did not carry over into the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men. However, several further editions of the play (in 1598, 1602, 1617, and a fifth edition without surviving date but recently identified as printed by William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier in 1604/5)103 testify to its continuing popularity. As a play of Strange’s Men published without title-page attribution and not appearing in the later pages of the diary, A Looking Glass is a candidate for those plays that members of Lord Strange’s Men may have taken with them into the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.104 But the play could have gone elsewhere; a copy of the undated quarto (possibly 1598) marked up to serve as a prompt copy contains the names of two actors, John Garland and Gilbert Reason, with associations to the later Queen’s Men, the Duke of Lennox’s Men (after 1603), and Prince Charles’s Men (after 1608).105 The 1594 quarto, the only authority for all later editions, contains no signs of major theatrical revision and is therefore probably a reliable text of the play performed by Lord Strange’s Men.

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These, then, are the extant texts that can, with varying degrees of confidence, be linked to the titles of plays by Lord Strange’s Men recorded in Henslowe’s diary. But the diary contains other titles that do not appear to match any extant plays, and there are other extant plays, not listed in Henslowe’s diary, that have some claim to have been connected with Lord Strange’s Men. These are explored in the ensuing chapter.

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Our census of Rose plays has so far yielded ten surviving plays with plausible links, some stronger than others, to Lord Strange’s Men: The Battle of Alcazar, Orlando Furioso, The Jew of Malta, 1 Henry VI, A Looking Glass for London, The Spanish Tragedy, A Knack to Know a Knave, The Massacre at Paris, John of Bordeaux, and (parts of) The First Part of Hieronimo. Outside of these plays in Henslowe, there remain one additional extant play with an unambiguous titlepage attribution to Lord Strange’s Men, Fair Em; one additional play with a possibly ambiguous title-page attribution, Titus Andronicus; and a group of five plays for which there is some evidence for attribution to Lord Strange’s Men, 2 and 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and the manuscripts of John a Kent and John a Cumber and Sir Thomas More. In what follows, and before taking up the titles of Rose plays listed in Henslowe but now apparently lost, we discuss these nonRose plays and the grounds for attributing them to Lord Strange’s Men. Further support for these attributions is offered in subsequent chapters analyzing the aspects of the repertory, touring, and Shakespeare’s early company connections. NON - ROSE PL AY S A N D O T H ER C A N DIDAT ES FOR AT T R I BU T ION

a pleasant commodie, of faire em the millers daughter of manchester: with the loue of william the conqueror: as it was sundrietimes publiquely acted in the honourable citie of london, by the right honourable the lord strange his seruaunts Fair Em is the one play with an unambiguous title-page attribution to Lord Strange’s Men. Ironically, though, the play does not appear in Henslowe’s list of 104

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plays performed by the company at the Rose in 1592– 93. Published without entry in the Stationers’ register or date on its title page, the play was “Imprinted at London for T.N. and I.W.” and bears a printer’s device associated with John Danter. If “T.N.” was the Thomas Newman who went out of business around the end of June 1593, then the play must have been printed by then, a conclusion also supported by the title-page attribution to the company of Lord Strange, whose title changed when he became 5th Earl of Derby upon his father’s death in September 1593. Since John Danter was not permitted by the Company of Stationers to print books independently until August 1592, the play was most likely printed between August 1592 and June 1593.1 Fair Em contains, in the disguised Sir Thomas Goddard and its praise of “good Sir Edmund Treford,”2 a series of elaborate compliments to a legendary ancestor of Sir Edmund Trafford, sheriff of Lancashire and a prominent ally of the Stanleys who sat on the council of the 4th Earl Henry and served with him on the ecclesiastical high commission for the county. Trafford died in May 1590, but he was presumably present with “the rest of my Lordes Council” at Lathom in early January 1589/90, when unnamed players that were probably Lord Strange’s gave two performances for the household and council.3 Other evidence for an early date for the play includes the title-page reference to its being “sundrietimes publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London” (Strange’s Men were within the City of London when they acted at the Cross Keys Inn in 1589) and an attack on the author of Fair Em in Robert Greene’s Farewell to Follie (1591). Greene, mocking a “father of interludes” who uses “Scripture to proue any thing he says,” cites “a mans conscience is a thousande witnesses” (Romans 2:15) and “Loue couereth a multitude of sinnes” (1 Peter 4:8).4 These lines appear in Fair Em as “Thy conscience Manuile a hundred witnesses” (TLN 1424) and “loue that couers multitude of sins” (TLN 1385). An early date for the play may possibly explain its absence from the company’s later repertory at the Rose in 1592– 93 as well as its difference from the other Rose plays in terms of casting. (The play can be cast for as few as nine adults and four boys.) However, several features of the text support the possibility that it is a theatrical revision involving both abbreviation and a reduction in cast. At 1,546 lines long, the text contains several repeated lines, indicating possible anticipation or recollection, as well as at least one auditory spelling (l. 151) that may have been produced through playhouse recitation as a means of revision.5 Unusually attentive stage directions, several printed in the margin, “suggest that the underlying MS was prepared for use as a playbook.”6 Anomalies in plotting and staging also point to cutting from a longer and more demanding play. At least three important character roles have been cut in order to permit doubling, and an anticipated final confrontation between the armies of Zweno

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and William the Conqueror fails to materialize.7 It would appear, then, that the play was originally designed for performance by a minimum of at least twelve to fourteen adults and four boys. It is difficult to say when or for what purpose the play might have been abridged. The play’s associations with matters of local interest in Cheshire and Lancashire—“A Ballad Intituled, The Millers daughter of Mannchester” was entered in 15818—make it a strong candidate for early touring performances or for the final tours of 1592 and 1593, during which it appears the company might have been forced to reduce its numbers and eventually to sell the play for publication (see chapter 8). The historical romance plot focusing on William the Conqueror has led to conjectures that Fair Em may have been the “william the conkerer” performed at the Rose on 4 January 1593/94 by the Earl of Sussex’s Men, a company whose London revival may have been enabled by recruitment of members from Strange’s/Derby’s then disbanding company.9 Little is known of Sussex’s other titles performed in the earlier weeks at the Rose, except for the evidently popular play that Henslowe alternately labeled in its five performances “gorge a grene” or “the piner of wiackefelld.” Entered in April 1595 but only surviving in a 1599 quarto, A Pleasant Conceyted Comedie of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield can be cast for ten adults and four boys, a number in line with our casting for Fair Em and identical with Standish Henning’s estimate that Fair Em can be performed by “fourteen actors, ten men and four boys.”10 Fair Em has been attributed to various authors, including Robert Wilson and William Shakespeare.11 Recent attribution of the play on stylistic grounds to Thomas Kyd12 perhaps finds additional support from the fact that the historical romance plot involving William the Conqueror and Lübeck comes from a novella in Thomas Wotton’s Courtlie Controuersie of Cupids Cautels (1578), a work that also provided the source for Soliman and Perseda. Both plots in Fair Em— the king’s conflict with a surrogate suitor and the rivalry of several gentlemen for the hand of a commoner—appear to imitate the love plot in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. In view of Greene’s apparent jibe at the play, it is likely that in Fair Em, as also in A Knack to Know a Knave, the author was creating a play for Lord Strange’s Men by drawing from the work of Greene.

the most lamentable romaine tragedie of titus andronicus: as it was plaide by the right honourable the earle of darbie, earle of pembrooke, and earle of sussex their seruants (1594) Titus Andronicus is the only play besides Fair Em with an apparent title-page attribution to Lord Strange’s Men, who became the Earl of Derby’s Men in

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September 1593, when Ferdinando Stanley succeeded to the earldom of Derby. Attribution of the play to Strange’s/Derby’s Men poses a problem, however, because the play is not recorded among the 129 performances of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose in 1592– 93, and “titus & ondronicus” is marked as “ne” upon the first of its three performances by Sussex’s Men at the Rose on 23 January 1593/94. David George, developing an earlier suggestion by Paul E. Bennett, has argued that Titus Andronicus was indeed a new play in late January 1593/94 and that the title-page attribution is to a “combination” of players from Sussex’s Men supplemented by actors from Pembroke’s Men, who were forced to pawn their apparel and suspend their touring by August 1593, and Strange’s/Derby’s Men, whose last known appearance was in early December 1593.13 There is evidence to support the second of these theories: that Sussex’s Men, a company that had not appeared at court since 1591 and was probably without a patron following the death of the 4th Earl in December 1593, was in need of plays and players from other companies. Not until twenty-three days into their run at the Rose, and six days before its end, did Sussex’s Men perform the largecast Titus Andronicus and The Jew of Malta. If the “gorge a gren” or “the piner of wiackefelld” performed by the company is the play entered in April 1595 as “the Pynder of Wakefielde” and published in 1599, with attribution to “the seruants of the right Honourable the Earle of Sussex,” then the personnel of Sussex’s Men were ten adults and four boys. The same is true if the quarto of Fair Em, cast for nine to ten men and four boys, was the “william the conkerer” performed by Sussex’s on 4 January. Some combination of “the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants” was indeed necessary for the Rose performances of the large- cast Titus Andronicus and The Jew of Malta in late January 1593/94. It does not follow, however, from the fact that “titus & ondronicus” was “ne” to the Rose in January 1593/94, that the play was at that time new to Lord Strange’s Men or to London audiences. Evidence to the contrary is an apparent allusion to Titus Andronicus in the 1594 quarto of A Knack to Know a Knave, a play that had been “ne” with Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose on 10 June 1592 and had been performed seven times by 24 January 1592/93: My gratious Lord, as welcome shall you be, To me, my Daughter, and my sonne in Law, As Titus was vnto the Roman Senators, When he had made a conquest on the Goths: That in requitall of his seruice done, Did offer him the imperiall Diademe. (TLN 1488– 93)

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On the grounds that A Knack to Know a Knave was in his view “a ‘bad’ quarto,” Paul Bennett argued that this reference to Titus’s “conquest on the Goths” involved a “slip of the tongue or pen,” that “Goths” should be “Jews,” and that the passage is thus an allusion to another play belonging to Lord Strange’s Men, the lost “tittus & vespacia.”14 Below we make a case for “tittus & vespacia” as a play dealing with Titus Vespasianus and the conquest of the Jews and the destruction of Jerusalem. It is not true, however, that the allusion in A Knack to Know a Knave fits Titus Vespasianus better than it fits Titus Andronicus. Titus Vespasianus did not receive the “imperiall Diademe” until his father’s death, nine years after his defeat of the Jews and outside the purview of the known plays on the subject, while Saturninus claims the “Imperiall Diademe” at the very outset of Titus Andronicus (TLN 12). Though, strictly speaking, it is true that Titus Andonicus’s nomination as emperor comes from “the people of Rome” for whom Marcus stands as a “speciall Partie” (i.e., tribune; TLN 28–29), it is not true, as Bennett maintains, that Saturninus is “the senators’ choice for emperor”;15 Saturninus proposes himself on the basis of heredity and merely claims the support of the “Noble Patricians” (TLN 7). On the other hand, Titus Andronicus is “by the Senate accited home,” and, as his rivals are urged to withdraw their candidacy “in the Capitall and Senates Right,” he is proposed “in election for the Romaine Empery” (TLN 52, 78, 30). The passage in A Knack to Know a Knave thus fits the opening scene of Titus Andronicus in ways that it does not fit either the historical sources or the extant plays which we believe are closest to the “tittus & vespacia” of Lord Strange’s Men.16 It remains possible, since A Knack to Know a Knave is a theatrical revision or abridgement with memorial elements, that the passage in question was not in the version performed in 1592– 93 but was added closer in time to the publication of the quarto, which was entered on 7 January 1593/94. There is no timetable, however, that works well with Bennett’s theory that the word Goths must have been introduced on the eve of publication, when some of Strange’s/Derby’s Men, while preparing A Knack to Know a Knave for the press, were supposedly rehearsing to perform in a “ne” Titus Andronicus with Sussex’s Men on 23 January. Strange’s/Derby’s Men were playing in Coventry on 2 December 1593. When Sussex’s Men opened at the Rose in late December 1593, they were, as The Pinner of Wakefield suggests, approximately ten men and four boys. However, Titus Andronicus, with The Taming of the Shrew and the Henry VI plays, is among the most demanding of large- cast plays in the entire Shakespeare corpus.17 It is difficult to imagine that in the volatile circumstances of later 1593 Shakespeare would have been writing Titus Andronicus for a company that lacked the resources to perform it or for a consortium of actors that to all appearances did

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not actually form until the final days of January 1593/94. Moreover if Titus Andronicus was in fact an entirely new play on 23 January 1593/94, then it had possibly the least successful life in the entire history of the Elizabethan stage, since it was entered for publication by John Danter exactly two weeks later, on 6 February. Titus Andronicus clearly did not belong to Sussex’s Men, whose second short stint at the Rose around Easter did not include the play. Instead the play turned up in June, at Newington Butts, in the hands of the new Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Support for a more workable chronology may lie in the title-page attribution of Titus Andronicus to “the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants,” for it is entirely possible that in addition to describing a consortium formed in January 1593/94, the attribution also describes a sequence of ownership and performance unfolding over a longer period of time. Such a sequence, based on older professional connections, would help to explain the brief formation of the apparent consortium under the name of (the deceased earl of) Sussex. As McMillin has theorized, Titus Andronicus “was carried along by one group of actors as they performed under a succession of patrons.”18 Confirmation of this theory comes from the title page of the 1600 quarto of Titus, which presents the play “As it hath sundry times beene playde by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke, the Earle of Darbie, the Earle of Sussex, and the Lorde Chamberlaine theyr Seruants.” If the addition of “sundry times” did not “suggest an assumption of performance by . . . the companies in succession,” the phrase would be logically vague, misleading, or ill-informed.19 For the play to have belonged, successively, to Strange’s Men and Pembroke’s Men before it was performed as “ne” at the Rose by a consortium under the patronage of the Earl of Sussex, the play must have been written before February 1591/92, since it does not appear in Henslowe’s record of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose.20 There is no decisive piece of evidence, by way of unambiguous source or allusion, to prove this conjecture beyond doubt, but several circumstances provide support for it: possible verbal echoes in Titus Andronicus of The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591);21 vocabulary and stylistic tests that link the style of Titus most strongly to such early plays as The First Part of the Contention, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, 1 Henry VI, Richard III, and The Taming of the Shrew;22 and the indication in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) that “Jeronimo or Andronicus” had been on the stage “five and twenty, or thirty years” previously.23 None of this evidence is decisive, but it is at least as strong as the evidence in favor of a 1594 dating: the “ne” in Henslowe’s diary (which means only that the play received a “ne” performance at the Rose); the use of the word palliament in George Peele’s 1593 The Honour of the Garter (a

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use that can be accounted for at Titus Andronicus 1.1.182 by the fact that Peele himself is the probable author of Act I);24 and verbal similarities between Titus Andronicus and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (the dating of the latter, published in 1594, makes it possible that Nashe was the debtor rather than the source).25 Arguments in favor of an earlier dating can be tied to conjectures about the early history of Lord Strange’s Men and their relationship to Pembroke’s Men, as well as to Ben Jonson’s comment linking Titus Andronicus with Jeronimo at the same point in time twenty-five to thirty years before 1614. As Alan Hughes notes in pointing to the sensational violence, cruelty, and revenge that link Titus Andronicus to The Spanish Tragedy and The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s play “has much in common with a type of play which was being written before 1590. If it was written much after that date, it was a belated specimen of the type.”26 As with 2 and 3 Henry VI—the versions of them that formed the original two-part Contention play—so with Titus Andronicus: there is a reasonable probability that this play belonged in the first instance to Lord Strange’s Men but remained with the Burbage core of a newly formed Pembroke’s Men.

2 and 3 henry vi Differences between the Folio versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI and the versions of these plays published as The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (1594) and The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595)27 suggest that some original version of the former two preceded the latter two in composition and may have been written in the first instance for Lord Strange’s Men. In chapter 9 we explore some features of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI that arguably follow from an association of the plays with Lord Strange’s Men. We summarize here some of the textual matters and points of chronology that lend support to this attribution. The quarto of The First Part of the Contention (Q) has been attributed to Pembroke’s Men, based on its close relationship to the octavo version (O) of 3 Henry VI, The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (1595), which claims the play “was sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants.” The two texts are also linked by the single-volume publication of both plays as a two-part sequence, The Whole Contention betweene the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke, by Thomas Pavier in 1619.28 Both plays are shorter by about a third than their Folio equivalents, and they are marked by other features—confusions between verse and prose, auditory spellings, anticipations, inter-play borrowings, inferior language, and occasionally garbled

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sense—that suggest the use of memory or recitation in preparation of the text or intervention by “scribes, compositors, forgetful authors, revising authors, adapters, or other playhouse personnel adding to a MS.”29 Several theories have been advanced to explain these features: (1) “revision” theories30 that, from Malone to Charles Prouty, saw Folio 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI as Shakespearean rewrites of cruder non-Shakespearean originals; (2) “bad quarto” theories31 of piracy and memorial reconstruction that link various textual features, such as reduced casting requirements, cuts and abbreviation, prose in place of verse, and theatrical explicitness, to memorial reconstruction of a Shakespearean text abbreviated for provincial touring; and (3) the view, which began with the work of Madeleine Doran, that The First Part of the Contention represents a “good” quarto in the sense that it more or less accurately represents a “good acting version” of what we have in the Folio 2 Henry VI, whatever its precise relationship to that text.32 The same has more recently been argued for The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, and this view of both texts has gained support both from theater historians who suggest that The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York were designed for performance in London playhouses33 and from revisionist textual scholars who, while raising doubts about the “bad quarto” theory generally, have increasingly insisted on the idea that quarto texts, even sometimes “bad” ones, represent alternative versions of the plays, with different interpretive implications.34 There is less ground for certainty about the company with which the original plays behind Folio 2 and 3 Henry VI were first associated, but a prominent school of thought maintains that the Folio texts derive from play scripts that were revised and perhaps censored over time but were originally intended for performance by Strange’s Men.35 There is also therefore a body of opinion that holds the theatrical revisions and abridgements represented in The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York were prepared by Pembroke’s Men from these plays originally belonging to Lord Strange’s Men. Chronology supports this view. The allusion in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit to “a Tygres Heart, wrapt in a Womans Hide” (3 Henry VI, TLN 603) must have been written by the time of the Groatsworth’s entry in the Stationer’s Register on 20 September 1592, that is, too soon after the Rose debut of 1 Henry VI on 3 March 1591/92 for the second and third parts to have been written “in the order of the events” they portray.36 Such a sequence would be possible if 1 Henry VI, while “ne” at the Rose in March 1591/92, was actually an older play previously performed elsewhere, but the play seems newly written to exploit contemporary interest in Essex’s siege of Rouen in the winter of 1591/92.37 Moreover if 1 Henry VI had been written before parts 2 and 3 (which until the 1623 publication of

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the Folio had always been treated as a freestanding two-part sequence), then parts 2 and 3 would not exhibit ignorance of Talbot and other important matters treated in part 1.38 Possible echoes of 3 Henry VI in The Troublesome Reign of King John, published in 1591, suggest that the second and third parts had been written before that, at a time when there is no evidence to prove that Pembroke’s Men as yet existed.39 The most reasonable inferences are that “by 1591, 2 and 3 Henry VI had been performed successfully, presumably by Lord Strange’s company,” and that “when Alleyn and some of Strange’s Men left the Theatre for the Rose . . . they may have taken Part One with them, in its present form or partly written, while Parts Two and Three were retained by the Burbages at the Theatre; if . . . Pembroke’s company was created to play at the Theatre, that would explain how Pembroke’s Men came to be in possession of Parts Two and Three, but not Part One.” 40 Recent editors of 2 and 3 Henry VI have found in references to “bigboond Warwike” in The True Tragedy (sig. E3) and to the “coale-black hayre” of Warwick in 3 Henry VI (TLN 2733) and of Cade in The First Part of the Contention (TLN 2022) evidence that these parts were doubled by Edward Alleyn during his association with Lord Strange’s Men.41 Despite being considerably shorter than their Folio counterparts, Q and O contain additional matter not found in 2 and 3 Henry VI: the onstage murder of Duke Humphrey and an additional Cade scene in Q; a larger role for Buckingham in O. Since Q and O apparently altered the originals of 2 and 3 Henry VI in other respects—cutting down the roles of Hume and Bullingbroke and eliminating the role of Southwell in Q, cutting and rearranging scenes in Act 4 of O—it is possible that some of this material was added in revision. But given the tendency of Q and O to cut rather than add material elsewhere, it is possible that the original versions of the plays also contained this additional material. An obstacle to recovering the originals behind 2 and 3 Henry VI and their Pembroke’s counterparts is the possibility of later revision within the Folio texts themselves.42 In the absence of the originals that the textual data require us to hypothesize, there is finally no way of knowing for a certainty “what may have been added or amended,” after the publication of the Pembroke’s texts in 1594– 95, to “the manuscript behind F.” Nevertheless the evident agency of two different early companies, Strange’s and Pembroke’s Men, in the creation of these plays, together with the context of patronage and politics in the early 1590s, prompts us to speculate, in chapter 9, on what happened to Shakespeare’s early history plays, including Richard III, as they passed, perhaps with their author, from one company to another.

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sir thomas more MS Harley 7368, or “The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore,” is a manuscript play with revisions by several hands. The earliest layer of the manuscript is a fair copy, in the hand of Anthony Munday (Hand S) of a play, perhaps originally by more than one author, depicting the rise and fall of the legendary Londoner, from his successful quelling of the Evil May Day riot of 1517 to his execution in 1535, an event that the play only vaguely attributes to More’s refusal to “subscribe vnto those Articles” as demanded by the king.43 The manuscript contains substantial revisions and additions by several other hands, including that of the person (Hand C) who compiled (and in some places transcribed) the revisions and made alterations to the manuscript in preparation for performance. Hands widely accepted as those of Henry Chettle (Hand A), Thomas Heywood (Hand B), Shakespeare (Hand D), and Thomas Dekker (Hand E) contributed numerous revisions and additions. Some of these are made on the original manuscript of Hand S, but the most substantial (ff. 7a– 9a and ff. 12a–13b) are written on fresh sheets replacing pages removed from the original, and they undertake major revisions to two evidently controversial portions of the original play. These deal with the London uprising against aliens on Evil May Day 1517 (scenes i and iii–vi) and with More at the peak of his career, between his rise to knighthood and his arrest for treason (scene viii). Contributions to the original layer of the manuscript (henceforth the “Original Text”) in the hand of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, provide an explanation for at least some of the revisions. Crossing out single speeches in the opening scene depicting the mob on Evil May Day and then marking the whole scene for deletion, Tilney went on with marginal advice to “mend” a passage referring to “these dangerous times” and to “the displeased cōmons of the Cittie” (TLN 318, 323). He altered references to “straunger” and “ffrencheman” (TLN 359, 364, 369), called for portions of the scene to be deleted, and objected to a further mention of “these troublous times” (TLN 583–97). Later in the manuscript, Tilney turned his attention to More’s recalcitrance in the “king’s great matter,” canceling a portion of the scene depicting the refusal of More and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, to sign the king’s articles (TLN 1246–75). From Tilney’s summary comment at the head of the manuscript it is clear that his primary concern was with the play’s depiction of the Evil May Day rising. He warns the players to leave out “ye insur wholy & ye Cause ther off & egin wt Sr Tho: Moore att ye mayors sessions wt a reportt afterwardes off his good servic’ done being Shriue off Londō vppō a mutiny Agaynst ye Lũbardes only by A shortt reportt & nott otherwise att your own perrilles. E Tyllney” (ll. 1–19n.).

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Until recently a key set of circumstances involving Hand C—including the connection of Hand C with another play in the hand of Anthony Munday, John a Kent and John a Cumber, and with The platt of The Secound parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinns (Dulwich College Archive: MS XIX)—was considered cause for linking Sir Thomas More and these other plays to Lord Strange’s Men. But David Kathman, following an earlier suggestion by McMillin, has advanced new evidence for attributing the plot of 2 Deadly Sins to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men circa 1597– 98. The implication that Hand C, which is also connected with the Admiral’s Men’s Fortune’s Tennis (variously dated 1597–1602), might have worked for both the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s at roughly the same time in the later 1590s raises problems for Kathman’s attribution.44 Nevertheless Kathman’s evidence that the Thomas Belt of 2 Deadly Sins was apprenticed to the Lord Chamberlain’s John Heminges in November 1595 is sufficiently strong that the case for linking Hand C’s work in Sir Thomas More to some connection with Lord Strange’s Men by way of his role in 2 Deadly Sins can no longer be considered secure. Attributions of the original text of Sir Thomas More to Lord Strange’s Men in 1592– 93 have otherwise rested partly on arguments involving historical circumstances and partly on theater-historical considerations. A number of scholars have connected both the play’s treatment of Evil May Day and Tilney’s apparent dislike of it to the anti-alien agitation in London between the riots of June 1592 and to the discovery of the so- called Dutch Church libel, an anti-alien diatribe posted on the churchyard wall of the Dutch Reformed Church in Broad Street, in early May 1593.45 In support of such historical arguments, McMillin drew attention to corroborating theater-historical evidence: the fact that the play contains an unusually large number of speaking parts for a large-scale company and the fact that among roles predating that of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the eight-hundred-line part of More is exceeded in length only by those of Hieronimo, Tamburlaine, Barabas, and Richard III. The first three of these were indubitably roles played by Edward Alleyn, and the fourth may have been as well, if, as we believe, Richard III was written in the first instance for Lord Strange’s Men. If the last attribution is correct, then all of these plays, with the exception of Tamburlaine (another Alleyn role), may have belonged to Lord Strange’s company.46 In his recent edition of Sir Thomas More, John Jowett takes issue with “most critics” by dating the original text to circa 1600. Jowett casts doubt on the validity of McMillin’s theater-historical evidence, pointing out that casting for the play is not exceptionally demanding and that long roles like those cited above continued to be performed in revivals by later companies even as new large

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roles, like those of Henry V and Hamlet, were created. He also dismisses the contextual arguments regarding anti-alien disorders in 1592– 93 as “too malleable” and in fact “doubtful,” since it could be argued that the play “could not have been written at the same time [as the anti-alien uprising of 1592– 93] because the event made any potential reference to it subject to censorship.”47 That is, however, precisely what dating of the play to 1592– 93 and the evidence of Tilney’s censorship argue. And in fact there is evidence in The Life and Death of Jack Straw (entered 23 October 1593, published 1594) of another play from 1592– 93 that, from the safer distance of the Peasants’ Rebellion, did indeed, and quite anachronistically, succeed in depicting a scene of anti-alien violence with clear relevance to contemporary events: Enter Nobs with a Flemming. Sirra here it is set downe by our Captaines that as many of you as cannot say bread and cheese, in good and perfect English, ye die for it, & that was the cause so many strangers did die in Smithfield. Let me heare you say bread and cheese. Brocke and Keyse. Exeunt both (ll. 615–21)

Likewise in The First Part of the Contention, the Cade rebellion inflects Lord Say’s speaking in Latin in a way that matches the contemporary anti-alien feeling found in Sir Thomas More: All. Kent, what of Kent? Say. Nothing but bona, terra. Cade. Bonum terum, sounds whats that? Dicke. He speakes French. Will. No tis Dutch. (sigs G2– G2v).48

In dating the Original Text to 1600, Jowett offers a new set of contextual and circumstantial arguments, but these are not, in our view, as convincing as those that support the earlier date of 1592– 93: (1) Assuming both that the contested date written at the end of Munday’s manuscript of John a Kent and John a Cumber is 1595 or 1596 and that this represents the date of the play’s composition, Jowett uses Edward Maunde Thompson’s dating of Munday’s hand in Sir Thomas More as “later” than his hand in Kent in Cumber to argue that 1596 is the safer estimate of the earliest date at

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which the Original Text could have been prepared. He fails to mention Thompson’s observations that this disputed date, not in Munday’s hand, may once have been linked to further writing on the left-hand portion of the page that has been torn away, that the purpose of the date is unknown and “provides no actual basis for a date of the play,” and that Munday’s hand in Sir Thomas More has “a much nearer palaeographical connection” to Kent and Cumber than to The Heaven of the Mynde (dated 1602 in Munday’s own hand).49 (2) Jowett cites a “renewed vogue for history plays” in 1598–1600 as a possible incitement for the Original Text, but the first vogue for history plays in the early 1590s included both Jack Straw and 2 Henry VI, two plays specifically involving public disorders in London. Jowett fails to notice that many of the phrases in the Original Text or revisions of Sir Thomas More that he links to mob scenes in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus can also be found in the Cade rebellion dating from circa 1590– 92.50 While Jowett connects Marc Antony’s whipping of Julius Caesar’s crowd “into an insurrectionary rage against the conspirators” with More’s pacification of the May Day mob, he fails to note the closer analogy between More’s calming of the uprising and the elder Clifford’s eloquent quelling of the Cade rebellion in 2 Henry VI (“What say ye, countrymen?”).51 (3) Jowett links the “poore artifi[cers]” of a censored passage in the Original Text (TLN 392) to a 1599 petition against aliens by the “poor artificers” of the Merchant Taylors, but he fails to note that the phrase is common parlance for the journeymen and nonliveried craftsmen of the London companies,52 and he fails to observe that the phrase was actually used in the anti-alien Dutch Church libel, the document with which the fates of Marlowe, Kyd, and the London theater world became so unfortunately entangled in May 1593: Cutthrote like in selling, you vndoe vs all, & with our store continually you feast: We cannot suffer long. Our pore artificers doe starve & dye.53

The principal text Jowett cites on anti-alien sentiment is Thomas Deloney’s letter on behalf of English silk weavers, a document in print by July 1595 and, addressed to the ministers of the Dutch and French Churches, a clear response to the events of 1592– 93. It is also this same period that produced Sir Moyle Finch’s argument in Parliament (21 March 1592/93) in behalf of tolerance, a speech whose use of the golden rule (“They are strangers now, we may be strangers hereafter. So let us do as we would be done unto”)54 chimes closely with More’s speech in the revision. Finch’s speech might well have influenced the Original Text, which had already departed from Holinshed’s narrative by con-

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cluding the riot with some version of More’s successfully “persuading the rebellious persons to cease.”55 (4) Jowett attempts to connect Sir Thomas More with William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), but what he calls the latter’s “jocular form of hostility” directed against an avaricious moneylender, a Portuguese Jew, in a marriage comedy involving English gallants and wealthy foreign merchants is quite different from the violent labor-based mob action against French and Dutch Protestants in Sir Thomas More. The scenes in Sir Thomas More resemble more closely the anti-alien events and documents of 1592– 93 or the attack on Flemings in Jack Straw. Jowett also calls attention to the influence of “city comedy” on Sir Thomas More’s “focus on the social lives of London citizens, and its references to “the lord mayor, the aldermen, the sheriffs, the mayoral sessions, city locations and institutions, trades, apprentices, money, play, food, and families” (p. 425). It is true that Sir Thomas More shares these traits with city comedy, but it also shares them with Jack Straw and with three of the four plays in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy—1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, and Richard III—where contexts of civic disorder and public crisis are much closer to the events of Sir Thomas More. (5) Jowett maintains that Doll Williamson in Sir Thomas More ‘”correlates” with the Doll Tearsheet of 2 Henry VI and the Doll of 1 Sir John Oldcastle, but apart from their mutual volubility, the likeness is slim, since the latter two are either “potentially or actually a prostitute,” whereas Doll Williamson is “a faithful wife who resists abduction” (p. 30). “Doll” is a familiar colloquial diminutive, and there is perhaps a stronger nondramatic precedent for Doll Williamson as the wife of a London citizen in the Doll Stodie of Richard Johnson’s Nine Worthies of London (1592), a girl who courted a future Lord Mayor during his apprenticeship (sig. E2v). (6) More persuasive are the resemblances Jowett notes between Sir Thomas More and later plays on other Tudor counselors, Sir Thomas Cromwell (1602) and (perhaps) Henslowe’s lost plays on Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1601). In this category of plays “dealing with the lives of the friends and advisers of kings” (p. 29), Jowett also includes 1 Sir John Oldcastle (1600). More does indeed have affinities with Cromwell and Oldcastle, but these likenesses do not fit well with Jowett’s acknowledgment of More’s “closer relation to the model of the saint’s life and its focus on a Catholic martyr” (p. 31) or with his speculation that after 1600 “a play about More might have appeared a timely renegotiation of the Catholic past.” Unlike Sir Thomas More, Cromwell and Oldcastle are staunchly Protestant plays; so are all the other Jacobean plays on the Tudor period, such as If You Know Not Me You Know No Body (1605), When You See Me You Know Me

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(1605), The Whore of Babylon (1607), and Henry VIII (1613). Jowett’s account of More’s “renegotiation of the Catholic past” is a much better fit, we believe, with the religious and political orientation of Lord Strange’s Men (as we describe it in chapter 7). The period of Anthony Munday’s “engage[ment] in religious controversy” was the 1580s, not the 1600s,56 and what Jowett describes as “the apparently contradictory nature of his involvement” (p. 14) has strong affinities with Lord Strange and his company. Jowett has stated elsewhere that there is “no evidence” of Munday “writing plays at all during the period of Lord Strange’s Men.”57 Munday did, however, dedicate his Defence of Contraries (1593) to Lord Strange with his “humble affection” and the offer of his “very vttermost habilitie to your Honors ser vice.”58 Francis Meres’s 1598 inclusion of “Anthony Mundye our best plotter” and “Henry Chettle” among the “best Poets for Comedy”59 is hard to reconcile with Jowett’s very late dating of the dramatic careers of Munday and Chettle (a possible contributor to the Original Text) based on the accident of their first appearances in Henslowe’s accounts of payments to playwrights, records which Henslowe did not begin keeping until late 1597. We offer below and in chapter 7 our reasons for thinking Munday might have written both John a Kent and John a Cumber and Sir Thomas More for Strange’s Men. (7) Drawing on recent work by Macdonald P. Jackson, Jowett cites stylistic features that might support a later date for the Original Text: “the placement of midline pauses and the presence of a number of oaths, exclamations and contractions” typical of a later date as well as “the relatively high frequency of modern ‘has’ and ‘does’ over the older ‘hath’ and ‘doth’ ” (p. 430). Some of the features examined by Jackson are indeed more common after 1600 than before, but none of them—unless it be the four contractions, “then’s” (used twice), “they’d,” “bear’t,” and “deny’t,” unknown in any other play before 1597–98 (three of the four actually appear previously in prose or verse)—raise serious obstacles to a dating of 1592– 93.60 (8) Jowett supports his late dating with the suggestion that two of the anecdotes in the Original Text (More’s jest about a possible capitulation to the king’s demand and a jest about his urine and possible longevity) derive from Sir John Harington’s The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). The first of these, however, also appears in another acknowledged source, Thomas Stapleton’s Tres Thomae (1589), where it is immediately juxtaposed to an anecdote wherein More’s wife visits the Tower to urge him “not to sacrifice his children,”61 just as she also urges him in the immediately adjacent passage in the play (“haue care of your poore wife and children” [TLN 1813]). This connection to Alice More’s visit and the fact that in the play the jest is played on Alice during her visit make Staple-

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ton the more likely source. The second jest, not found in any source outside of Harington, contains one very strong overlap in phrasing (“he saw nothing in that mans water, but that he might liue long enough / So pleased the king” [Harington]; “the man were likely to liue long enough / so pleased the king” [TLN 1753–54]). Harington may not have been the earliest or the only source for the anecdote, however. The jest has been described as belonging to an “oral tradition” of anecdotes, some of which “found their way into the sources, while others did not.”62 Moreover The Metamorphosis of Ajax lacks a related jest, about More’s suffering from the stone, which is directly connected in the play to the one involving More’s urine. This supports the possibility of an independent source, as does the fact that the wording in the version of the urine story told in the biography of More by “Ro: Ba:,” usually dated to 1599, differs markedly from the wording in Harington (“this patient is not so sicke but that he may do well, if it be not the kings pleasure he should die”). Perhaps most tellingly, apart from this single passage extant in Harington, there is no source material used in the play that was not already published before 1589. If the play was not written until 1600, it is surprising that no further piece of source material published later than 1589 has been found sticking to it.63 Four contractions unprecedented in drama (but found in other works) before 1597– 98, the single jest from The Metamorphosis of Ajax, and a general resemblance (despite key religious differences) to Sir Thomas Cromwell are perhaps the weightiest of Jowett’s evidence against an attribution of the Original Text to 1592– 93. But if Jowett is correct in redating the play to 1600, he has been unable to attribute the play to a company (the play does not appear as an Admiral’s Men’s play in Henslowe’s diary) or to explain convincingly why the play was written at that time or why Tilney, at that later date, chose to censor it. The earlier date, we believe, presents fewer obstacles to a plausible company attribution and provides stronger motives both for the play’s composition and for its censorship. Among the circumstances converging on 1592/93 there is, as Ernst Honigmann has noted, the “strange coincidence” that it was in 1593 that More’s grandson, Thomas More II (1531–1606), commissioned from Rowland Lockey three paintings of the extended More family, all of them based on a lost original by Hans Holbein.64 Prior to the recent appearance of Jowett’s edition, the main area of disagreement over the manuscript was not the date and auspices of the original play by Hand S but the date of Hand C’s revisions and the additions in Hands A, B, D, and E. Giorgio Melchiori, relying on the now questionable link between Hand C’s role in the plot of 2 Deadly Sins and Lord Strange’s Men, argues that both the original play and its revisions and additions date to 1593; but a problem with

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this view is that none of the work by the additional hands is marked by comments from Tilney, whose censorship appears to predate them. As Greg observed, “only collective insanity” could have led the revisers to undertake their relatively minor revisions in the immediate aftermath of Tilney’s sweeping advice at the head of the manuscript to leave out “ye insur wholy” and replace it with “A shortt reportt & nott otherwise att your own perrilles.” It has been argued that Tilney read the manuscript twice, first the Original on which he made his running comments and then the revised play, after which, in lieu of further marginal comment, he subsequently left his single stringent note at the head of the manuscript, requiring the company to “leave out ‘ye insur wholy.”65 But the idea that Tilney could have reread the revised manuscript in its disorganized and nearly indecipherable state is on the face of it implausible, and there are additional difficulties with early dating of the additions, including the fact that Thomas Heywood (Hand B) is not known to have begun his playwriting career until after February 1592/93 and the fact that Thomas Dekker (Hand E), born in 1572, is not otherwise known to have written for the theater before 1598. McMillin, building on the role of Hand C in the plot of Fortune’s Tennis, attributed by Greg to the Lord Admiral’s Men circa 1597– 98, argued that the additions and revisions to “Sir Thomas More” in Hands A, B, C, and E were prepared for the Lord Admiral’s Men “shortly after 1600.”66 However, on the inference that Hand D’s use of the previously censored word strangers shows he was unaware of Tilney’s censorship or the other additions (and implicitly assuming that Shakespeare would not have contributed to revision of a play for the Lord Admiral’s Men as late as 1600), McMillin concluded that Shakespeare must have “participated in the original composition of the play, as a collaborator with Hand S” and any other writers whose work S was transcribing.67 Aside from his failure to explain why Hand D would have made a separate addition (requiring deletion of equivalent material) to what is otherwise a continuous layer of original composition, there are, as Gary Taylor has pointed out, additional problems not addressed by McMillin’s argument.68 Taylor challenges McMillin not only on the date of Hand D’s addition but also on his attribution of the post-1600 revisions to the Lord Admiral’s Men, suggesting instead the possibility that the revisions could have been undertaken by Shakespeare’s own company. If, as Kathman has recently suggested, the plot of 2 Deadly Sins was prepared by Hand C not for Lord Strange’s Men in 1590– 91 but for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1597– 98, that would be further evidence to support Taylor’s attribution of the revised Sir Thomas More to the latter company.

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For our purposes, given the reasonable possibility that the revisions came later and for a different company (Strange’s Men having probably disbanded by the end of 1593), it matters little which company undertook them. As we have demonstrated, there are lines of descent from Lord Strange’s Men into both of the later companies, and plays previously performed by Lord Strange’s Men can be found in the continuing repertory of each of them. That the revisions were probably undertaken later, and not by Lord Strange’s Men, does have a significant impact on the text we imagine the company was preparing, but the preponderance of the evidence (and, with important exceptions,69 of scholarly opinion) continues to point to Lord Strange’s Men as the company to whom Sir Thomas More was first “offered for performance”70 and therefore as the company to whom Tilney was directing his advice when he warned that they would be performing the unrevised play “att [their] own perrilles.” It is of course deeply significant to our purposes that the portion of the play in Shakespeare’s hand, More’s quelling of the insurrection in scene v, cannot be securely linked to the play’s early history with Lord Strange’s Men. There is evidence of contributions from other authors in the Original Text transcribed by Munday,71 and it is not impossible that Shakespeare was among them or that, at whatever date, he was revising himself in scene v. We do know, in any case, from Tilney’s warning about reporting rather than representing More’s “good servic don”—as we also know from Hand C’s addition and from subsequent scenes—that missing leaves in Munday’s hand must have presented a scene similar in substance to the contribution given in Hand D. We know also from the canceled lines at the end of f. 5v (and from the canceled lines at the beginning of the council scene transcribed by Hand C on the verso f. 7v of Addition II) that in scene iv of the original text, “hree or foure Prentises” accosted Sir John Munday in the street and one of them wounded him “in the forhead wth his Cudgill” (l. 452; Addition II, l. 73). For the text as it may have been prepared for Lord Strange’s Men, our purpose is best served by Greg’s Malone Society Reprint, which presents in continuous form the Original Text in Hand S, retaining the original version of scene iv (without the added Clown), the surviving portion of the canceled scene v (the apprentice insurrection), the original consolation speech of More to his wife (TLN 1471–516), and the canceled lines (1956– 64) in which, on the scaffold, More anticipates the resurrection of his soul. For the purposes of reconstructing original material lost from the original between ff. 11b and 14a we must needs rely at a minimum upon Addition II, ll. 68–270, for the council scene (v) and More’s quelling of the insurrection (vi), which we can judge from the original Hand S folios missing between ff. 5b and 10a must have been roughly

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similar in length to the portions of Addition II on ff. 7b– 9a. We must also rely on those two portions within Addition IV, ff. 12a–13b that provide the upshot of More’s joke on Erasmus and Surrey lost from the original text (ll. 130–81) and that explain that the arrest of the ruffian Faulkner as resulting from an affray in Paternoster Row (ll. 26– 65). For the purpose of our analysis, we make no use of the remaining portions of the Additions, and we retain the sequence of events from the original text for scene (viiia–b) involving the long-haired ruffian and the meeting with Erasmus. So far as we can determine, the total of 292 lines for which we must rely on Additions II and IV has no impact on casting for the Original Text, which we estimate requires fifteen adults (twelve in principal roles) and six boys, a number in line with casting for several of the company’s other plays. This first version of Sir Thomas More was a daring play, and not just for its ambitious scale or its edgy engagement with discontent and public disorder— a feature that links it with Jack Straw and with the Cade rebellion in The First Part of the Contention and 2 Henry VI. Its unusual protagonist is a commoner who rises to uncommon heroism during times of public emergency on the strength of his conscience. Written, we suggest, during a period of public disorder, doctrinal conflict, and official persecution (and not from the safer perspective of later times), the play takes up, against the ideological grain of its time, the life of a discredited Catholic saint, and it alludes obliquely to all that followed from “the king’s great matter”; yet it also insists (at even greater risk of being misunderstood) that the salvation of its hero’s soul does not rest on doctrine but on virtue. We explain in chapter 7 why we believe that is a profile that fits Lord Strange’s Men.

john a kent and john a cumber John a Kent and John a Cumber (Huntington Library: MS 500) is a comedy in the hand of Anthony Munday, with an endorsement and few stage directions added in the same Hand C that compiled the revisions to Sir Thomas More. The manuscript is wrapped in a portion of the same vellum leaf (from the Compilatio prima of Canon Law by Bernard of Pavia) that was used for the wrapper of Sir Thomas More. Until recently these links between the two manuscripts and their connection to the same Hand C that wrote The platt of The Secound parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinns were reason for attributing the play to Lord Strange’s Men. That attribution is necessarily weakened if, as Kathman proposes, the plot of 2 Deadly Sins belongs rather to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men circa 1597– 98.72

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A second rationale sometimes offered for attributing John a Kent and John a Cumber to Lord Strange’s Men is a date written at the end of the manuscript. The portion of the final leaf that comes just before the date is torn away, and with it any information, such as a note of licensing or sale, that might explain the date’s significance. Read as “1595” by the play’s earliest editors, J. P. Collier and J. S. Farmer, the date was reinterpreted as “1596” by Edward Maunde Thompson and W. W. Greg, and it has recently been read as such by MacDonald P. Jackson.73 I. A. Shapiro proposed “1590,” a date that supported attribution to Lord Strange’s Men and remained unquestioned until Jackson’s redating to 1596 and Grace Ioppolo’s revival of the claim that the date is “1595.”74 In any case, because the hand is not Munday’s and because the meaning of the date, placed on the right hand side of a page whose left side is torn away, is unknown, the date could have been added to the manuscript at any time subsequent to its completion by Munday; it does not necessarily indicate a date of composition. One small circumstance may support the possibility of composition closer to the “1590” proposed by Shapiro: an apparent attack on Munday in the Protestacyon of Martin the Great, a Martinist pamphlet dating to mid-September 1589: “Among all the rimers and stage-players, which my Lords of the clergy had suborned against me, I remember Mar-Martin, John a Cant his hobby-horse, was to his reproach newly put out of the Morris, take it how he will, with a flat discharge for ever shaking his shins about a May-pole again while he lived.”75 Noting that “Maister Munday” was also addressed in a mock “oration of Iohn Canterburie to the pursuivants” in The iust censure and reproofe of Martin Iunior (July 1589), some scholars have cited Munday’s roles as an anti-Martinist writer and pursuivant in the ser vice of John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, as evidence that The Protestacyon was referring not only to Munday but also, through the phrasing “John a Cant” (a form not otherwise used by Martinists in reference to Whitgift), to Munday’s “John a Kent.”76 If The Protestacyon was alluding to John a Kent and John a Cumber, that would place the play very early indeed in the career of Lord Strange’s Men, a possibility enhanced by the fact that members of the company were arrested for defying a ban on anti-Martinist playing in November 1589 and by the ways in which, as Donna Hamilton has shown, the play encodes a satire against puritans (see chapter 7). An alternative suggestion is that John a Kent and John a Cumber was influenced by The Protestacyon’s jibes against Whitgift as “John a Cant.,” “John o’ Cant.,” and “John of Cant.,” and that the play depicts in merrier, less contentious form the conflict between John Whitgift of Canterbury and the Cambrian or Cumbrian John Penry, widely suspected as the creator of Martin Marprelate. Observing that the war between Kent and Cumber, while “repeating the discomfiture of

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Marprelate in anti-Martinist plays,” makes use of music, foolery, and a morris dance, E. A. J. Honigmann suggested that the play, possibly coauthored by Nashe and Munday, could be a milder version of the threatened “May-game of Martinisme” that Nashe claimed to be preparing in October 1589.77 Perhaps telling against this early date and attribution is the fact that John a Kent and John a Cumber was apparently not performed at the Rose in 1592– 93; but its absence might very well be due to the disfavor into which anti-Martinist playing, and Lord Strange’s Men, fell in later 1589. A further complication to attributing the play to Strange’s Men is the fact that one of the most popular plays of the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Rose in 1594– 97, performed as “ne” on 2 December 1594 and repeated thirty-two times subsequently, was “the wise man of chester” or “of Westchester.” The environs of Chester are the setting for much of the action in Munday’s play, and the presence of “Kentes woden leage” in a Henslowe inventory of March 1597/98 has led some to suggest this was a property belonging to The Wise Man of Westchester; but a wooden leg is not a property of the wise man John a Kent in Munday’s manuscript. That anomaly has sometimes been offered as a reason for thinking that The Wise Man of Westchester was not Munday’s play but possibly a rival or sequel; but it is also possible that “Kentes woden leage” was connected with a play other than The Wise Man of Westchester.78 If The Wise Man of Westchester, “ne” to the Rose in 1594, is identical with John a Kent, this is no obstacle to the play’s having been performed by Strange’s Men prior to their arrival at the Rose or while on tour. In fact, if the play was connected to the Marprelate controversy, it may have become for a while too risky to perform. The play has strong affinities with other plays attributable to Lord Strange’s Men, including clown scenes that resemble “KEMPS applauded Merrimentes” in A Knack to Know a Knave and a magician whose aid of lovers resembles the Friar Bacon of John of Bordeaux. While these might, as Douglas Arrell has recently argued, mark John a Kent and John a Cumber as a later imitation of the Strange’s repertory, Turnop’s scenes in the play seem less an imitation for another company than scenes specifically designed for Kemp’s unique talents and stage persona. Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, rather than John of Bordeaux, could have been a precedent for John a Kent, A Knack to Know a Knave, and other magian plays belonging to Strange’s Men. Resemblances of Turnop to Bottom the Weaver and of Shrimp to Puck the Weaver, have been taken by several scholars as evidence that John a Kent and John a Cumber must have preceded the writing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594– 95).79

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Our attribution of John a Kent and John a Cumber to Lord Strange’s Men rests not only upon its possible engagement in the Marprelate controversy but also upon the play’s immersion in the landscape and legends of Chester, Flintshire, and Holywell Priory. No company has a stronger claim for knowing and being known in these regions than Lord Strange’s Men. In chapter 7 we examine the play’s relevance to religious controversy in the early 1590s, and in chapter 8 we present the case for John a Kent and John a Cumber as a play written to support regional performance in the Stanley domains. T H E L OS T ROSE PL AY S

In addition to the extant plays that can be linked to Strange’s Men through Henslowe’s diary or by other means, we know from Henslowe’s diary the titles of an additional sixteen to eighteen plays80 now lost: “syr Iohn mandevell,” “clorys & orgasto,” “poope Ione,” “matchavell,” “bendo & Richardo,” “iiij playes in one,” “senobia,” “constantine,” “Q Ierusallem”/“Ierusalem,” “harey of cornwell,” “brandymer,” “tittus & vespacia,” “the second parte of tamber came”/“tambercame,” “the taner of Denmarke,” “the gelyous comodey,” and “the comodey of cosmo.” To judge by frequency of performance and daily receipts, some of these plays, such as “syr Iohn mandevell,” “tambercame,” “tittus & vespacia,” and “harey of cornwell,” were among the company’s more successful or popular. Because of their prominence in the repertory, these titles have a special claim upon our attention. At the other extreme, several of the remaining titles of lost plays, none of them marked “ne,” appear only once in the diary, in all of these cases within the company’s first six weeks of recorded performance at the Rose: “clorys & orgasto,” “poope Ione,” “iiij playes in one,” “senobia,” “constantine,” and “brandymer.” The implication that these were older plays waning in popularity does not mean, however, that they too were not, at some earlier point, perhaps even during an earlier run at the Rose, just as successful with audiences as “syr Iohn mandevell” and “tittus & vespacia” or just as much an expression of the company’s identity and style. Neither should the primary reason that plays are “lost”—the fact that they were apparently not printed—necessarily imply that they were bad or uninteresting. That should be evident from the apparent success of “syr Iohn mandevell” and from later revivals or rewritings that appear to be connected with “tittus & vespacia” and “tambercame.” Yet another category of play may be represented by the single performance of the “ne” and now lost play usually transcribed as “the taner of Denmarke.” The

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play’s debut was the third most profitable performance in the company’s 134 days at the Rose, ranking just behind the debut performances of “harey the vj” and “the tragedy of the gvyes,” yet in fifty-two subsequent performances the play was not repeated. Perhaps 23 May 1592 was a particularly fine day on which high expectations for “the taner of Denmarke” met with particularly sharp disappointment, or perhaps the play proved unmanageable from a technical standpoint. But we know from the playhouse manuscript of Sir Thomas More—as we also know from the titles of “lost” plays like The Isle of Dogs—that a bar to further performance or publication could in some cases result from a play’s potentially sensational interest. For all of these reasons, and because the lost titles in Henslowe’s diary amount to such a high proportion in our most basic information about the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, we think it worthwhile to extend our census to lost plays like “the taner of Denmarke” in search of information that might round out our picture of the company. The trickiness of attempting to reconstruct lost plays from available sources is nicely illustrated by Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, a work that, as we might conclude if we had only Henslowe’s title “orlando” to work with, draws on Ariosto’s romance. Nevertheless if neither the play nor the manuscript part of Orlando survived, it would be a risky business to guess which or how many of the plot lines in Ariosto’s immense poem were represented in the “orlando” recorded by Henslowe. The activities of Orlando in As You Like It might lead us to speculate that poems had been hung on theatrical trees in the “orlando” at the Rose, and so we might conjecture that Canto XXIII of Ariosto was involved; but Shakespeare’s play is so amusingly oblique to Greene’s that our reasonable conjectures would mislead us. Nothing in Ariosto’s poem would lead us to suppose (as is in fact the case) that a play on “orlando” might owe less to the story of Angelica and Medoro than to the tale of Ariodante and Ginevra, or that the rival to Orlando was not the gentle Medoro but the villainous Sacripante, or that in the play Angelica was actually faithful to Orlando, or that Orlando’s wits would be recovered in the way they are. Only our general knowledge of the license taken by Elizabethan playwrights, by reminding us of the limits of source study, would prevent us from being surprised by the unpredictable play Greene actually wrote. To move from “orlando” to a similar lost title: it is likely, given the absence of alternatives, that the leading role in the twice-performed “brandymer” derived from the companion of Orlando and lover of Fiordeligi in the Orlando Furioso. We might suppose, from Brandimart’s death at Lipadusa in Ariosto’s poem, that the play was tragic, but Greene’s Orlando Furioso should be a warning against such an assumption. Nevertheless something is learned about company style from the

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likelihood that two plays in the repertory were drawn from Ariosto’s fashionable and witty poem, perhaps inspired by or otherwise connected with Sir John Harington’s near- contemporary translation of Orlando Furioso in English heroical verse (1591). The value of potential sources for reconstructing lost plays depends in part upon the length and specificity of the source. The reigns of Richard II, Henry V, or Richard III as recounted in Holinshed’s Chronicles, for example, yielded many different kinds of plays by Shakespeare and others. So too could Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, though a “brandymer” might yield a narrower range of possible plays than an “orlando.” In a range narrower still, a short novella, when matched to the title of a lost play, can yield useful information about the literary archive from which the play was drawn, about the play’s subject matter, plot, and genre, and about the likely nature of its interest to playwrights, players, and audiences. It should come as no surprise that among the lost plays of Lord Strange’s Men the most frequently performed are often the ones for which there seems to be more surviving evidence. This may be because the materials on which they were based were more widely available or more prominent in the minds of Elizabethans, but it is also because the more frequently performed lost plays were important enough to have become part of the archive themselves, leaving their mark through later revivals, rewritings, influences, and allusions. Some lost plays, in other words, have left a wake of disturbances detectable elsewhere— elsewhere in the repertory of Strange’s Men, for example, or in the plays of other and later companies, or in the culture more broadly. When evidence derived from apparent influence, from contemporary events and interests, or from other aspects of the company’s repertory can be combined with extant source materials, there is a stronger basis for plausible conjectures about lost plays. At the opposite extreme are cases where the titles of lost plays are too broad or generic to permit identification of a specific source (“constantine” and “the gelyous comodey” fall into this category, as does “matchavell,” though there may be hints about this last title in the Machiavel who introduces The Jew of Malta and in Nashe’s frequent anti-Martinist jibes against apes, Machiavels, and the “Good munckie face Machiuell” Marprelate who was mocked, possibly by Strange’s Men, on London’s stages).81 Especially vexing are those seemingly specific titles which prove difficult to match to extant sources or stories (examples are “clorys & orgasto,” “the comodey of cosmo,” and “the taner of Denmarke”). With plays like these, the absence of a clear match restricts us to only the most general surmises about genre, pastoral in the first case, comedy in the second, comedy or history in the third. In the survey that follows, we begin

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with the most important of the company’s plays at the Rose and proceed to some of those performed less frequently. “tittus & vespacia” in ten performances, 11 april 1592–25 january 1592/1593 The play that Henslowe called “tittus & vespacia,” performed as “ne” on 11 April 1592 and mounted frequently thereafter (it was the company’s fifth most profitable play at the Rose), has sometimes been connected with Titus Andronicus on about the same logical grounds, one scholar notes, as those by which Fluellen connects Wales with Macedonia because “there is Salmons” in the rivers of both (Henry V, TLN 2555).82 Since there is no historical “Vespasia” other than the barely documented mother of the Emperor Vespasian, it seems much more likely that the title is “Titus and Vespasian,” father and son emperors, or perhaps “Titus Vespasianus,” that is, Titus the son of Vespasian. Titus Vespasianus can be derived from Henslowe’s “tittus & vespacia” in exactly the same way Titus Andronicus has been derived without challenge from Henslowe’s “tittus & ondronicus.” A play on Titus Vespasianus would almost certainly be about the fall of Jerusalem, and a first guess might be that it came from the pages of the Jewish Wars of Flavius Josephus. Twenty years ago a Sotheby’s auction brought to light the manuscript of a supposedly lost Latin play on the fall of Jerusalem by the Cambridge scholar Thomas Legge, author of Ricardus Tertius, the Latin history play that influenced subsequent vernacular plays on the subject, including Shakespeare’s. Solymitana Clades, now Cambridge University Library MS Additional 7958, is a ten-thousand-line play, not quite finished. Designed originally in two parts but expanded into three, it was nearing completion around 1590 when, according to Thomas Fuller, “having at last refined it to the purity of the Publique Standard some Plageary filched it from him, just as it was to be acted.”83 That the play actually did become known to the public is supported by the fact that in 1598 Francis Meres noted in his report on contemporary dramatists that “Doctor Leg of Cambridge hath penned two famous tragedies, the one of Richard the 3, the other of the destruction of Ierusalem.”84 That Legge’s play might have come to public notice (and to the attention of Meres) through a vernacular Titus Vespasianus by Lord Strange’s Men is perhaps supported by two surviving works with possible links to the company. The first is the account of the fall of Jerusalem in Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares ouer Iervsalem, entered 8 September 1593, published later that year, and probably written during the severe outbreak of plague that had closed the theaters

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since the preceding February. Nashe, as we have seen, can be connected to Strange’s Men through his role in the Marprelate controversy and through his Pierce Penniless, which lavished praise on Lord Strange, Edward Alleyn, and 1 Henry VI. A second work possibly connected with “tittus & vespacia” and Lord Strange’s Men is a play by William Heminges, published in 1662 but written circa 1628–30, The Jewes Tragedy, OR Their Fatal and Final Overthrow by Vespatian and Titus his Son. Heminges, an Oxford M.A. and ne’er- do-well who was later imprisoned for debt, is said to have “commenced a dramatick poet”85 soon after the death of his father, John Heminges (d. 1630), a leading shareholder in Lord Strange’s Men. The possibility that the younger Heminges’s The Jewes Tragedy owed something to the “tittus & vespacia” of Lord Strange’s Men is strengthened by the fact that a “Titus, and Vespatian” appears alongside The Winter’s Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Hamlet, and 2 Henry IV on a 1619 manuscript associated with Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels.86 The list appears to be in the hand of Edward Knight, bookkeeper of the King’s Men, and so it may be that, like other plays that had originally belonged to Lord Strange’s Men, Henslowe’s “tittus & vespacia” passed, possibly with revision, to the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men.87 Nashe’s account of the fall of Jerusalem in Christ’s Teares appears to choose many of the same episodes from Josephus’s larger history as Legge’s trilogy, and it presents them in nearly the same order; a similar set of events is followed in roughly similar order by Heminges as well.88 Legge, Nashe, and Heminges might independently have selected the same episodes from The Jewish Wars. It is harder to account, however, for passages that are shared among the three texts but not found in Josephus. The most striking is the proclamation by which the villain Schimeon summons every kind of criminal to his faction.89 There can be little doubt that for this proclamation the three works are indebted to each other or to another common source, Peter Morwen’s The Historie of the latter times of the Iewes common weale, a translation from Sebastian Münster’s Latin version of the Sefer Yosippon, a medieval history of the Jews attributed to Joseph ben Gorion, called “little Josephus.” First published in 1558 and reissued seven times before 1600, Morwen’s translation of this popular history of the Jews contains a proclamation by Schimeon virtually identical to those found in Legge, Nashe, and Heminges.90 The narrative of the siege of Jerusalem to be found in the pages of Morwen—which include episodes involving Vespasian, a character absent from Legge’s trilogy but prominent in the first act of Heminges’s play—more precisely matches the sequence of events in Nashe and Heminges than it does the sequence in Legge’s trilogy. In fact it is evident that there is nothing in either

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Nashe or Heminges that cannot be found in Morwen or that would have required them to have read either Josephus or Legge.91 But if Legge is not a source for Nashe or Heminges, then it is astonishing that Legge would have selected from the pages of Morwen (for him a source secondary to Josephus) the same proclamation of Schimeon used by Nashe and Heminges, or that all three authors, including Legge, should have located the story’s anangnorisis at the moment when the virtuous pagan Titus, witnessing the violent treachery and sacrifice of the zealot rebellion, ponders the mad religion of the Jews and exonerates himself. In the long lament of Titus in Solymitana Clades, Legge draws extensively on a similarly long passage in Morwen,92 while Nashe and Heminges render more compactly the irony of Titus’s pagan virtue appalled at Jewish zeal: Thou seest howe proude they be. . . . I wyll geat me hence from these most wicked men, and flee away to saue my life, lest I also perishe in their sinnes. The Historie of the latter times of the Iewes common weale, ff. 233–33v they grow so arrogant they think they cannot be conquered. . . . In the sight of whoever you are that rules the heaven, I dissociate myself from this outrage. Solymitana Clades, ll. 7463–521 Titus (an infidel) vnderstanding the multitude of thy prophanations and contumacies, was afraid to stay in thee, saying: Let vs hence, least theyr sinnes destroy vs. Christes Teares, 2: 78 Forbear, forbear, ye cursed wretches, to destroy Those sacred walls, —how glorious they appear! O ye rebellious Slaves! How dare you tempt So great a Deity? . . . Thunder. ... The heavens are angry sure, they chide with me. Forbear, Forbear, thou flaming firmament, To chide Vespatians sonn; for ’tis not he Hath done thee this dishonor. The Jewes Tragedy, 5.7

The theological overtones embedded in Titus’s indictment of the Jews would be impossibly anachronistic in Josephus, but they are the essence of the medieval Joseph ben Gorion, whose interpretation colors all of the passages above.

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That Legge has drawn on Morwen for passages that are also crucial to Nashe and Heminges is perhaps an indication that the latter two, or the lost “tittus & vespacia” they could be echoing, were themselves inspired by Legge’s play, written so near in time to the Rose play.93 Nashe, who left Cambridge in 1588/89, was knowledgeable about Legge and Cambridge drama and had perhaps participated in Cambridge plays himself,94 was in a position to know of Legge’s nearly complete play, whose latest known source was published as recently as 1588.95 This does not make Nashe, or any potential author of “tittus & vespacia,” a direct plagiarist of Legge, since, if The Jewes Tragedy is a reliable indication, the main source for “tittus & vespacia” was probably Morwen. Rather the evidence—the account of the siege in Christes Teares (1593), the republication of Morwen in 1593; a Stationers’ Register entry for an unpublished “JOSEPHUS of the warres of the Jewes” in October 1591; the 1591 revival of a 1584 “Destruction of Ierusalem” play at Coventry; the publication of an English Josephus in 1602 by another Strange’s author and client, Thomas Lodge; the 1619 “Titus, and Vespatian” linked to plays belonging to the Lord Chamberlain’s/ King’s Men; the Vespatian and Titus his Son by the son of John Heminges—all point to the probability that Lord Strange’s Men were responding to the prestige of Legge with a “tittus & vespacia” distinctively their own. Further support for “tittus & vespacia” as a play about the siege of Jerusalem is found in another play belonging to Lord Strange’s Men, The Jew of Malta, where Barabas refers to Christians as an Vnchosen Nation, neuer circumciz’d; Such as poore villaines were ne’re thought vpon Till Titus and Vespasian conquer’d vs.96

Even more suggestive is a passage in Shakespeare’s King John that seems to be recalling, in the Bastard’s mockery of the rival French and English kings at the siege of Angiers, both “the Mutines of Jerusalem” and its staging of a similar siege in which defiant inhabitants “stand securely on their battlements / As in a Theater, whence they gape and point / At your industrious Scenes and acts of death” (TLN 692, 688– 90). Thus although “tittus & vespacia” is lost, it has left in its wake considerable evidence that it was a play on the destruction of the Temple, a work contiguous with medieval traditions in which revenge for the Savior’s death was carried out by a Titus and Vespasian miraculously converted to Christianity.97 But unlike those fantastic and highly Christianized tales—at least if Legge, Nashe, and Heminges are any guide—“tittus & vespacia” was invested in a humanistic

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spirit of historicity. As an extrabiblical play on the history of the Jews, it provided a substitute, as did the “Destruction of Jerusalem” play at Coventry, for traditional biblical drama. “Tittus & vespacia” would also have been in line with the other “strange but true” Asian and Near Eastern histories in the company’s repertory, plays like “senobia,” “tambercame,” and The Battle of Alcazar. While we cannot prove that The Jewes Tragedy derived directly from “tittus & vespacia,” Heminges’s adaptation of Morwen gives us a suggestive picture of how the history of the siege could be transformed into a highly sensationalized popular theater play. Heminges adds to Morwen’s narrative a number of outrageously theatrical elements: an unhistorical villain, Zareck, who functions as a  Machiavellian agent to stir the intrigue and perform atrocious deeds; a prominent clown, Peter, who becomes the sidekick of the mock high priest Pennel; a fantastic murder scene in which Eleazer conspires with Zareck in killing his father, the high priest Ananias; extensive mad scenes for Eleazer, who cannot wash his father’s blood from his hands; and a concluding allegorical masque of the Six Roman Champions. All of this is filtered through overt

Miriam displays her partly devoured child, by Jost Amman, in Opera Iosephi (1580). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth—the mad Eleazer’s “To be, or not to be, Ay there’s the doubt” (3.2.1) shows that it was not for nothing that John Heminges named his son William—but the underlying combination of savagery and intrigue with crude clowning looks in many ways like a good fit with drama of the early 1590s and the work of Lord Strange’s Men.98 It is a reasonable suspicion, since Heminges’s play follows a narrative structure similar to the one in Legge and Nashe, that the lost “tittus & vespacia” might have concluded with the same grotesque Thyestean feast that ends The Jewes Tragedy. If, as we have also suggested, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was an early Strange’s play that went with the Burbages to a newly formed Pembroke company, then “tittus & vespacia,” which was “ne” in April 1592, might have been its replacement. If, on the other hand, Titus Andronicus is the later play, then its Thyestean feast may derive in part (Ovid’s tale of Philomel is the other inspiration) from “tittus & vespacia.” “mandevell” in eight performances, 24 february 1591/1592–31 january 1592/1593 The eight per formances of “mandevell” place it sixth in frequency of performance and seventh in average and total receipts, making it one of the more successful of the company’s plays at the Rose in 1592– 93. The play was performed during both the earlier and later runs, which suggests it may have been a relatively new or popular play. It disappears from Henslowe’s diary after the demise of Strange’s Men and does not seem to have been acquired by Henslowe or the Lord Admiral’s Men. It has long been supposed that this now lost play had some connection with the popular legend of the medieval traveler Sir John Mandeville, which was printed in six editions by 1582. Thus “mandevell” has been described by William Sherman as a “travel play” and by Roslyn Knutson as “a ‘wonders’ play.”99 A travel narrative and wonders play “mandevell” certainly would have been if it transcribed in any fashion the wondrous travels recorded in The voyages and trauailes of Sir John Maundeuile knight. This popular book’s possible influence on the stage has been noted in connection with allusions to exotic creatures and peoples in plays like Othello,100 and it looks as if Mandeville’s account of his strange encounters might have furnished the tributary peoples gathered in the grand procession that ends the surviving “plot” of The first parte of Tamar Cam and thus possibly the “tambercame” of Strange’s Men. The narrator of The voyages and trauailes is essentially a roving reporter whose function is to record rather than act, and most of his travelogue merely describes exotic sites,

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strange creatures, and mythical peoples. The one episode in the narrative that involves Mandeville in eventful action is his ser vice to the sultan of Egypt: “for I dwelled with him Souldier in his wars a great while against the Bedions, and he would haue wedded me to a great princes daughter right richly, if I would haue forsaken my faith.”101 This narrative hint is developed in one of the many episodes of a little-known Mandeville romance contained in book 11 of the 1596 edition of William Warner’s epic Albion’s England.102 Warner’s Mandeville narrative involves the legendary English traveler in a comic love plot that includes two couples, disguise, a chivalric tournament, a visually striking dramatic discovery, erotic conflict, a ring trick, a masked dance, and much else that makes it read almost like a play transcribed. Running to 1,166 lines and involving twelve narrative episodes (much like “scenes”), Warner’s Mandeville story has a welldefined, shapely action involving such themes as dangerous courtship, concealed desire, male friendship, female initiative, and threats to loyalty in love and religion. Its foursome of lovers, involved in intrigues and dramatic discovery scenes, yields many monologues and dialogues on love’s power and challenges, while the pageantry of its tournament and masquerade provides the choreography for larger scenes imbued with strong group feeling. A “mandevell” play constructed on the lines of Warner’s romance would in many respects resemble Fair Em. An attorney in the court of common pleas, Warner was a client of Sir George Carey, later Lord Chamberlain and brother-in-law to Ferdinando Stanley. In the 1596 edition of Albion’s England, dedicated to Carey, Warner refers to the supposed murder of Ferdinando, suggesting that the late Lord Strange and Earl of Derby was killed because he refused to collaborate in a papist conspiracy to put him on the English throne: False Hesket too not falsely spake, reporting lately this, That such as Papists would seduce, and of seducing mis, Are marked dead: For he to whom he so did say, feare I, Earle Ferdinando Stanley, so dissenting, so did trie, As other Peeres, heere, and els-where, haue found the like no lye. Nor preached he the Pope amis, that did to him applie This Text, to witt: This is the Heire, come on and let him die, Th’ Inheritance let vs inioye: Nought seeke they els, for why?103

The strongest evidence of Warner’s connection to the theater is his translation, Menaecmi, A pleasant and fine conceited comaedie (1595). Criticism has not solved the problem of occasional resemblances between Warner’s transla-

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tion and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which is presumed to have been performed at Gray’s Inn during the Christmas revels of 1594.104 It is not inconceivable that Warner was actually the author of the “mandevell” of Lord Strange’s Men; if not, then his Mandeville romance may be a redaction of the play. “harey of cornwell” in four performances, 25 february 1591/1592–18 may 1592 According to Henslowe’s diary, “harey of cornwell” was already an old play in the repertory when Strange’s Men staged it four times during their first recorded run at the Rose. It ranked eleventh in frequency of performance among the twenty-four plays performed during that run, but only sixteenth in terms of receipts, so it may have been a play more favored by the company than by audiences. The company took the play into the provinces as well. During their long tour following the closing of the London theaters in February 1592/93, Lord Strange’s Men visited Bristol, where, on 1 August, Edward Alleyn dispatched a letter to his wife in which he noted that the company was “redy to begin the playe of hary of cornwall.”105 The name of Harry of Cornwall derives from a title first bestowed upon his father. Richard I had given the earldom of Cornwall to his brother John, and “Iohns sonne, Henry the Third, honoured therewith his brother, Richard the King of the Romanes. . . . [Richard] had issue Henry Earle of Cornwall, who deceased issuelesse.”106 Printed materials available to the author(s) of “harey of cornwell” would have included the obvious chronicle sources in English as well as the Historia maior of Matthew Paris (1571) and the Flores historiarum of Matthew of Westminster (1570), both of which were consulted by George Peele, the likely author of The Famous Chronicle of king Edward the first, sirnamed Edward Longshankes (1593). Henry of Cornwall was better known in the chronicles as Henry of Almaine, a title he received when his father, Richard of Cornwall, “was crowned king of the Germans, or the Romans. . . . The new king Richard conferred the honour of knighthood on Henry.”107 Henry was raised at court as a companion to his cousin, the young Prince Edward, and the fortunes of the two were to remain intertwined throughout the Barons’ War. Having first sided with Prince Edward and the king against the barons, Henry reversed himself and was among “the cheefe that vndertooke this matter” of the barons’ cause.108 He was taken prisoner at Henry III’s behest and released only when the barons marched an army against London. Henry then reversed himself again, at Prince Edward’s behest, joining those who “reuolted from the barons to the kings side.”109 In response to

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this apparent betrayal, Simon de Montfort, leader of the barons, allowed his nephew to depart, saying, “My lord Henry, it is not on account of your arms that I grieve, but for the inconstancy which I see in you. Go, therefore, and return with your arms, for I fear them not in any way.”110 Henry answered de Montfort’s magnanimity by appearing in arms against him at the battle of Lewes, but Henry was abroad on an embassy when the forces of Prince Edward finally surrounded de Montfort and his sons at the decisive battle of Evesham in August 1265. De Montfort and one of his sons were killed, and de Montfort’s body was “shamefullie abused & cut in peeces.”111 In the reprisals that followed the defeat of the barons, the supporters of Simon de Montfort were disinherited. Chief among these supporters was Robert de Ferrers, Earl of Derby, “Against whom the lord Henrie, sonne to the king of Almaine was sent with a great power: the which comming to Chesterfield fell vpon his enimies in such wise on the sudden, that they had not time to arme themselues, and so were distressed and ouercome.”112 The Derby title was sequestered, and it remained with the Crown and the House of Lancaster until the first Tudor king conferred the earldom of Derby on his stepfather, Thomas Stanley.113 The remaining sons of Simon de Montfort, the younger Simon and Guy, survived to take a terrible revenge on Harry of Cornwall, whose abandonment of the barons’ cause they blamed for their father’s death and defeat. When Harry of Cornwall was visiting Viterbo on his return from the Crusades, he “was slaine . . . by the hand of Guie de Montfort, the sonne of Simon de Montfort earle of Leicester, in reuenge of the same Simons death. This murther was committed afore the high altar, as the same Henrie kneeled there to heare diuine seruice.”114 The perpetrators escaped to live in exile, excommunicated for the horrific deed. Perhaps the most notorious murder of the thirteenth century, the death of Henry of Cornwall was immortalized in Dante’s Inferno (xii.119–20), where the poet reserved a place in the fiery Phlegeton for Guy de Montfort, one who “in God’s sanctum stabbed the heart / That by the Thames drips blood still unatoned.”115 An important piece of theatrical evidence suggests that the story of Henry of Almaine was indeed known to theater audiences through “harey of cornwell.” In the coronation procession that begins Edward I, the new king enters London with a train that includes two mysterious characters whose presence has not been accounted for by commentators: “The Trumpets sound, and enter the traine, viz. his maimed Souldiers with headpeeces and Garlands on them, every man with his red Crosse on his coate: the Ancient borne in a Chaire,

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Gustave Doré, The Death of Henry of Germany (detail), from History of the Crusades by Michaud (Philadelphia, 1896). Courtesy of Yale University Library.

his Garland and his plumes on his headpeece, his Ensigne in his hand. Enter after them Glocester and Mortimer bareheaded, and others as many as may be. Then Longshanks and his wife Elinor, Edmund Couchback, and Jone and Signior Moumfort the Earle of Leicester, prisoner, with Sailers and Souldiers, and Charles de Moumfort his brother.”116 This procession carries into Edward I some unexplained business that may have originated in “harey of cornwell.” In his list of dramatis personae, the play’s modern editor lists “Signor Montfort, Earl of Leicester” (i.e., Guy de Montfort) and “Charles de Monfort his brother” as “Unexplained Characters.” It would seem, from the presence of these captives in the grand entry of Edward I, that in this play the hero (whose red cross and accompanying sailors show that he is freshly returning from the Crusades) achieves a poetic justice that history denied, as Edward enters London holding captive the two murderers of his beloved companion Henry. If so, that would make the lost play “harey of cornwell” a “first part” predecessor (or perhaps later prequel) to Edward I.

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If “harey of cornwell” attempted anything like the full story of the causes leading up to the murder, it would have been an example of a large-scale chronicle play already in the repertory before Strange’s Men mounted 1 Henry VI. As a work about thirteenth- century events in the interval between the reigns depicted in the Queen’s Men’s The Troublesome Reign of King John and Peele’s Edward I, “harey of cornwell” may have been part of a thirteenth- century historical panorama on the London stage in the early 1590s. Edward I may very well be recalling a lesson taught by “harey of cornwell” when it looks back (in a way that seems to presume audience familiarity) upon the events of the preceding reign and concludes that they show How factions waste the ritchest Commonwealth, And discord spoiles the seates of mightie kings. The Barons warre, a tragicke wicked warre, Nobles, how hath it shaken Englands strength? (ll. 643–47)

“the second par te of tamber came” and “tambercame” in six performances, 28 april 1592–19 january 1592/1593 It is not clear whether one play or two are represented by “the second parte of tamber came,” performed as “ne” on 28 April 1592 and repeated on 10 May, and by the play designated more simply as “tambercame,” performed four times subsequently between 26 May 1592 and 19 January 1592/93. It was Henslowe’s consistent practice, with two-part plays, to name the second part explicitly as such, but his practice with the naming of first-part plays was inconsistent, since, prior to 1595, he gave only the title of the play without indicating it was a first part. It is possible, then, based on Henslowe’s practice, that, in distinction to “the second parte of tamber came,” the unspecified “tambercame” of Lord Strange’s Men was the first part and that the company therefore performed both parts of the play.117 There is support for this possibility in Henslowe’s later accounts for the Lord Admiral’s Men: when “godfrey” and “2 pte godfrey of bullen” alternated at weekly intervals in July–August 1594, the first part was not designated as such. Similarly although “tamberlan” and “the 2 pte of tamberlen” began playing on successive days in December or January 1594/95, the first of the two plays was not designated as “the fyrste pte of tamberlen” until 11 March 1594/95, the earliest date in the diary at which Henslowe designates any first-part play as such. Finally, the “tambercame” mounted by the Lord Admiral’s Men as “ne” on 6 May 1596 was not explicitly designated as “j pte of tambercame” until it began running in back-to-back performances with the

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“ne” version of the “2 pte of tmbercame” [sic] on 19–20 June. There is no reason to expect, therefore, that prior to March 1595 Henslowe would have explicitly declared the first part of “tambercame” as such. If Lord Strange’s Men did possess both parts of a “tambercame” play, they did not alternate performances or mount them back to back, but neither did they do so on more than one occasion with their twenty-two performances of the two “Ieronymo” plays, nor did the Lord Admiral’s Men do so with their two Godfrey of Bullogne plays in 1594. Regular back-to-back performance of the two “tamberlen” plays in December or January 1594/95 is the first such arrangement to be found in the diary, and so it is entirely possible that Strange’s “tambercame” and “second parte of tamber came” were indeed a pair. The Lord Admiral’s “tambercame” plays were “ne” in 1596 and thus either wholly new or newly revised for performance. The possibility that they were revised from versions of the play(s) of Lord Strange’s Men is indicated by the fact that “tambercame” was owned by Edward Alleyn rather than by the Lord Admiral’s Men. Alleyn sold the play, along with “the massaker of paris,” another play original to Lord Strange’s Men, to the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1601/2. The plot of “The first parte of Tamar Cam,” a playhouse plot now lost but transcribed and published by George Steevens in 1803, was apparently prepared in connection with a revival of the play at the time of its sale to the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1602.118 Cast for sixteen men and four or five boys, a number in line with our casting for Lord Strange’s Men, the plot provides, at a distance of a decade and two revivals, important clues as to the nature of the “tambercame” play(s) of 1592– 93. The most important of these is the first name on the plot, the “Mango Cam” who presides as ruler over the opening scene and makes further appearances through the first two acts. This may be the great Khan Möngke (d. 1259), grandson of Ghengis Khan and fourth ruler of the immense thirteenthcentury Mongol (or, by the Elizabethan way of reckoning, Mongol-Tartar) Empire, a pan-Asian power that brought into subjection “all the Realmes, Dominions & nations, euen from Scithia vnto the Mediterran sea, wher the Sun ryseth, & some what more, insomuch that with reason [the khan] intituleth him selfe Lord and Emperour of all the East partes.”119 During the Seventh Crusade it did not escape notice in the West that the expanding Mongol Empire had become a scourge against the Muslim world, and several missions were dispatched—by the king of Armenia, by Pope Innocent IV, and by the French king Louis IX—to contract an alliance of Christians with Mongol-Tartars against a common Islamic enemy. From the accounts of these medieval missions—Hetoum’s Fleur des histories de la terre d’Orient and the Franciscan narratives of John Plano de Carpini and Wilhelm Rubruck—as

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well as from the slightly later Travels of Marco Polo and derivatives like Mandeville’s Voyages & Trauailes came the Elizabethan archive on which “tambercame” was based.120 For Marco Polo, Möngke was merely “the greate Cane that is paste,”121 but from several other sources Elizabethans could learn that Möngke was among “the sonnes of Chingis Cham his other sonne,” that “the great Can, which now reigneth” was “called Manghu Can,” that this “Mango Chan . . . was a gode Christene man and baptyzed,” or that he was reported to be so, or that “Mango Can was christened at the request and desyre of the Kynge of Armeny.”122 Despite many variations in detail, all of the available sources agree on three essential attributes of the Mongol-Tartars in the reign of “Mango Cam”: military discipline and ferocity made the Cam “the power of God vpon earth” and “Emperour of all men”; the Mongols were “much addicted to wicked arts, geue credit to dreames, and entertaine and allow such as use the magicall science and art of diuination”;123 their faith in “God Almighty,” though “they bee not Christians,” led the Mongol princes to “make more account of Christians, then they doe of other people.”124 This alleged religious tolerance and eclecticism of the Mongol princes probably also accounted, in the European mind, for their reliance on the occult arts of soothsayers and “Philosophers . . . of Astronomie, Nigromancie, Geometrie, Pyromancy, and many other sciences.”125 The name of the titular hero of “tambercame,” “Tamar Cam,” probably derived from that of Temür Khan, nephew of Möngke and son of Kubilai, that is, the “Tamor Can” who was “the sixt Emperoure of the Tartarians.”126 The career of Temür Khan, however, was conducted mainly in the East and is not easily connected either with the reign of Möngke or with the events of “The plot of The first parte of Tamar Cam,” which take place principally in Persia. It would appear from the events implied by the playhouse plot that the play may have transposed the name of the sixth emperor, “Tamar Cam,” onto the career of Möngke’s brother Hülegü (more commonly called Halcon, Halaon, or Allau in the early sources), who was sent to command Möngke’s expeditions to the West, just as Kubilai was sent to conquer eastward: “Manghu Chan hath eight Brethren. . . . One of them [i.e., Hülegü] hee sent . . . towards Persia, and is now entred therein, to goe (as is thought) into Turkie, from thence to send Armies against Baldach [i.e., Baghdad].”127 It may have been an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays that led the authors of “tambercame” to transpose Temür Khan’s name onto the career of Hülegü. This “Temur or Tamor,” Samuel Purchas later noted, was “about 100. yeares before Tamerlane,” yet conflation of the two was plausible at a time when another source could refer to “the Greate Tamur Chan, that is to say, an Iron Lorde, who is otherwise by some corruptly

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called Tamerlan and Tamburlan.”128 Henslowe’s preferred spelling, “tambercame,” where the plot refers to “Tamar Cam,” may have been influenced by the published spelling in the popular 1590 Tamburlaine. From a reading of “The plot of The first parte of Tamar Cam,” where the opening scene between “Mango Cam” and “Tamar Cam” is followed by Tamar’s battle against the Persians and his subsequent negotiations with the “King of Persia” and “Tarmia his daughter,” and where the play concludes with Tamar Cam’s wedding to Palmida rather than the Persian princess Tarmia, it seems very likely that the plot line was following the sources’ account of Hülegü, whose head wife was one “Descotacon” or Dokuz Khatun, a Nestorian Christian sometimes reputed to be daughter of the legendary Prester John. A succinct summary can be found in Richard Knolles’s General historie of the Turkes (1603), published a decade after the writing of the play: “Mango the great Chan of TARTARIE . . . sent his brother Haalon with an exceeding great armie against the Turkes and Sarrasins in SYRIA and the land of PALESTINE. This Haalon conuerted also vnto the Christian faith by his wife, setting forward with a world of people following him, in the space of six moneths ouerran all PERSIA, with the countries adjoining.”129 From the playhouse plot, in which the central development, following the battle with Persia, is Tamar Cam’s decision to marry Palmida rather than the widowed Persian princess Tarmia, it appears that the hero of “tambercame” was less reliant than Marlowe’s Tamburlaine on martial and rhetorical prowess and much more involved with magic, prophecy, and intrigue. The drunken clown Assinico, rather than the hero, dominates the battle scenes, rather in the manner of Tarlton in The Famous Victories of Henry V. Central to the dominant prophecy and marriage plot is Tamar Cam’s companion or advisor Otanes, an apparent magician or soothsayer who conjures or consults with two opposing spirits, Diaphines, apparently aligned with the Persian cause and favoring marriage with the king’s daughter Tarmia (his part was played in 1602 by Dick Jubie, who doubled as a Persian), and Ascalon, a spirit favoring the great Cam and marriage with Palmida. It is difficult to read from the plot the details of the political intrigue, which involves an attempt by three Mongol noblemen to betray Tamar Cam. With the aid of the spirit Ascalon, Otanes, and the loyal Tartar henchman Colmogra, the plot is discovered, and the three noblemen are exposed and beheaded offstage: “Exeunt Otanes & nobles / wth the 3 Rebells: to them Otanes: wth a head. To them Mr. Charles wth an other head / To them Dick Jubie wth an other head.” After a comic scene in which the clown consorts with Otanes’s spirits (much like Wagner in Doctor Faustus, Miles in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, or Perce in John of Bordeaux), Palmida meets

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with Otanes and the spirits, and the stage is then set for Tamar Cam’s choice of a bride. The climactic scene looks like a female confrontation worthy of the meeting between Cleopatra and Octavia in Dryden’s All for Love: Enter Cam: Otanes: attendants: . . . To them Tarmia the nurss . . . wth children. . . . To them Otanes and Palmida: & 2. spirritts: Exeunt. manet Tamor & 2. spirritts: Exit. manet spirritts. To them Assinico: To them Palmida. Exeunt. manet Palmida. To herr Tamor Cam: To them Tarmia: to them guard.130

With Tamar Cam’s choice of Palmida comes the apparent defeat of the Persian party; the disinheritance of Tarmia’s children from the Persian throne; a masquelike scene, reminiscent of Greene’s Orlando Furioso and John of Bordeaux, involving nymphs and satyrs; and finally an immense procession of peoples subject to the new regime: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Enter the Tartars . . . Enter the Geates . . . Enter the Amozins . . . Enter the Nagars . . . Enter the ollive cullord moores . . . Enter Canniballs . . . Enter Hermaphrodites . . . Enter the people of Bohare . . . Enter Pigmies . . . Enter the Crymms [i.e., Crimean Tartars] . . . Enter Cattaians . . . Enter the Bactrians

Perhaps appropriately described as a “spin-off of the elder Tamburlaine plays,”131 “tambercame” appears to have been about an exotic, anti-Muslim scourge, and like The Battle of Alcazar, which featured “a Portingale” as a choric narrator to relate to the audience the “strange but true” history of the battle of the three kings at El-Ksar Kbir, “The plot of The first parte of Tamar Cam” featured Dick Jubie as a “Chorus” and probable narrator of the play’s unfamiliar story.132 Because there is no surviving plot for “the second parte of tamber came,” it is more difficult to say where the sequel might have ended, but there was ample

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material for a follow-up in Tamar Cam’s (i.e., Hülegü’s) subsequent conquests of Baghdad and Aleppo, his wife’s mercy on the Christians of Baghdad, the death of the fourth emperor “Mango Cam,” Tamar Cam’s return to the East, and the reversal of Tamar Cam’s victories when his successor became the victim of Christian treachery.133 These events would yield a sequel not unlike the second part of Tamburlaine, where the entropic forces of death and a failed succession overtake earlier triumphs. “Tambercame” appears to have left its mark on the world of the Elizabethan theater. “The great Chams beard” (Much Ado about Nothing, TLN 670) and “the Tartars painted Bow of lath” (Romeo and Juliet, TLN 460) are stage properties affectionately remembered by the younger Shakespeare. Dekker, who recalled “Tamor Cham” on more than one occasion, had the swaggering Captain Tucca address the king at the end of Satiro-mastix (1602) as “greate Sultane Soliman, . . . o royall Tamor Cham” (sigs. L2v–L3). The magian aura (and perhaps the spectacle) of “tambercame” was revived in a fireworks entertainment for the 1613 wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine; in it, “the Black-sould hell commanding Magitian Mango (a Tartarian borne)” used his “Charmes, exorcismes, and potent execrable incantations” to raise “a strong impregnable Pauilion.”134 “bendo & richardo” in three performances, 4 march 1591/1592–5 june 1592 As Sir Walter Greg long ago suggested,135 the “bendo & Richardo” performed as an old play on 4 March, 12 April, and 5 June 1592 was almost certainly drawn from the forty-eighth novella in the first edition of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1566), the tale of Bindo and Ricciardo. Published in the collections of Bandello (1.25) and Ser Giovanni (Il Pecorone, IX.1), the novella derives ultimately from the tale of the thief and the Egyptian king Rhampsinitus in the Histories of Herodotus (2.121.1– 6). In Painter’s rendering, the ruler’s pursuit of a clever trickster is at once a comedy, combining fabliau elements with exploits worthy of Jack the Giant Killer, and a grotesque detective thriller focused on the perspective of the hunted criminal. According to the story, “Bindo a notable Architect, and his sonne Ricciardo . . . throughe inordinate expenses were forced to robbe the Treasure house” designed by Bindo for the Duke of Venice. Using a concealed passageway of his own design, Bindo nightly steals from the treasury until the Duke discovers the passageway and sets a trap, causing “to be brought into the chamber a caldron of pitche, and placed it directly under the hole, commaunding that a fyre

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should be kept day and night under the caldron, that the same might continually boyle. . . . It came to pass that . . . remouing the stone, [Bindo] went in as he did before, and fell into the caldron of pitche (which continually was boyling there) vp to the waste.”136 To save his wife and son from the Duke’s wrath, the dying Bindo advises Ricciardo to cut off his head and bury it, thereby obliterating his identity. In the ensuing game of cat and mouse, Ricciardo several times eludes the traps the Duke sets for him. In a final test, the Duke places his own daughter, “which was an exceding faire creature,” in a bedchamber surrounded by rooms housing the twenty-five “moste riotous and lecherous yong men” of the city, Ricciardo among them. Realizing the maiden, following her father’s instructions, has spotted him with ink when he shares her bed, Ricciardo returns a second time, steals the ink, and marks the remaining twenty-four lechers in their sleep, some with as many as ten spots. Confronted with the results of Ricciardo’s busy night, the Duke and his counsel “fell into a great laughter.” There being no other way to discover the knave with “the subtilest head that euer was knowen,” the Duke rewards him with a pardon and the hand of his daughter.137 A cast of twenty-five spotted lechers would have overtaxed the company, but the comic denouement, whatever its scale, would have amounted to a strikingly outrageous revision to the more traditional spotting of Conscience in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London. The apparent amorality of the tale, underlined by its combination of comedy with grotesque violence and by its sympathy for guilty parties being hounded by the authorities, would have made “bendo & Richardo” an unusual play for its time. Though not the first to draw on novella sources, it is an early example that may have helped to bring the novella collections into greater favor with playwrights. As played at the Rose, “bendo & Richardo” would likely have exploited the sensational shock of Bindo’s falling into the boiling cauldron, an effect featured also in The Jew of Malta and perhaps facilitated by an item in Henslowe’s 1598 inventory (now lost), “Item, j cauderm for the Jewe.”138 “poope ione” in a single performance, 1 march 1591/1592 The “poope Ione” performed on 1 March 1591/92, shortly after the company’s opening at the Rose, was not profitable, nor was it repeated. This may indicate that it was already an older play not much in favor with the company or audiences. The play’s subject was almost certainly the supposed female pope of the ninth century, whose legend probably originated in the thirteenth century and passed into sixteenth- century England through such well-known works as

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Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus and Lydgate’s Falls of Princes.139 With the coming of the Reformation, the Pope Joan legend became the focus of extensive controversy. Among the several contemporary sources available to playwrights, John Bale’s The Pageant of Popes (1574) provides a convenient summary of the narrative: Ioan the eight, being a woman, was made Pope, and because of her bringing vp vnder a certeine Englishe Monke of Fulda (whome she loued tenderly) her name was altered, and she was called Iohn Englishe. . . . More to enioye her louers company, and the better to auoyde suspicion, [she] dissembled her kinde, and put her selfe into mans apparel, & so trauailed with the Monke her peramour to Athens: where after she had profited in all the sciences, her louer being dead, she came to Rome disguising still her selfe, and counterfeiting to be a man. . . . And many had her in admiration for her learning: She grew into so great credit, & was so wel liked of al, that Leo the Pope being dead, they chose her Pope: In whiche office as other Popes did, shee gaue orders, made priests and deacons, promoted bishops, made abbots, sayde masses, hallowed altars and churches, ministred the Sacramentes, and gaue men her feete to kisse, and did all other thinges belonging to Popes. . . . She was gotten with childe by one of her familiar chaplaynes a Cardinall, to whome her fleshly appetite caused her to disclose her selfe. As she was going on procession solemnly to Lateran churche, in the middest of the way, and in ye open streate between Colossus & Clement church, she was deliuered of childe in presence of all ye people, and died of her trauell in the same place. And for this wickednesse she was stripped and spoyled of all pontificall honour, and buried without anye pompe or solemnitie. (ff. 56–56v)

In Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, where the life of Joan immediately followed that of the “remarkably virtuous” Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, Joan is esteemed for “her erudition” and “for her outstanding virtue and holiness.”140 It is not impossible, then, that in “poope Ione” Lord Strange’s Men were portraying a learned woman and ruler to match with their own “senobia.” But in the face of Protestant propaganda from Bale to Foxe,141 it seems unlikely that the Pope Joan of the Rose Theatre could have escaped the more scandalous implications of her story. For English Protestants, the scandal of Pope Joan was “a curtaine and vilde theater set open,” a story “penned and plaied” to undermine papal claims about infallibility and an unbroken apostolic succession. The story of Joan showed that the cardinals’ “holy spirit, who in all their counsels is present euer,” had “suffered them in their creation and consecration of a new High Priest, inwardly, outwardlye and most ridiculously to erre.”142 Moreover since “a

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woman as Saint Paul teacheth us, is not capable of ecclesiasticall function,” the “succession deriued from our holy mistris John pope, cannot possibly be of force,” and papists must “bragge no longer of their succession.”143 But most important was the prophetic symbolism: “Gods speciall prouidence” had suffered “this woman should be made Pope being also an harlot . . . to bewraye the whore of Babilon in a Pope being an whore, Whereof the holy Ghost foretold, Apoc. 17.”144 In Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) the female pope is to be found, in a line of temptresses descending from Duessa as the Whore of Babylon, in the wayward and alluring Phedria, a whorish seductress “that laught, as merry as Saint Ione” (II.vi.3). The importance of Pope Joan as an antipapal icon, together with the evidence that the play was old by March 1592, suggests that this play may have come to Lord Strange’s Men through Pope, Bryan, and Kemp from the more staunchly Protestant repertory of Leicester’s Men. On the other hand, the timing of the publication of John Mayo’s The Popes Parliament . . . Whereunto is annexed an Anatomie of Pope Ioane (1591) suggests that the play may have sparked or drawn upon current popular interest in the early 1590s. In fact, as Craig M. Rustici has observed,145 it is not impossible that the discontinuation of the play and its failure to be published are connected with the controversial nature of its subject, with its potential for risqué performance, or with the riskiness of guying a woman in a position of power. Just as Spenser excised the 1590 allusion to

Pope Joan gives birth, Ioannis Boccatii de Certaldo insigne opus De claris mulieribus (Berne, 1539). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Pope Joan from his 1596 Faerie Queene, so Lord Strange’s Men may have decided to play it safe by dropping “poope Ione” from their roster of plays. It is worth mentioning three further aspects of the Pope Joan legend, all noted by Rustici, that may have influenced the performance by Lord Strange’s Men. First, since Bale maintained that she had written “Necromantica quaedam. Lib. I,” “poope Ione” may have belonged, alongside “fryer bacone,” John a Kent, Joan of Arc, Eleanor Cobham, Melissa, and St. Dunstan, in the cadre of theatrical mages who populated the company’s repertory (see chapter 6). Second, the Catholic Nicholas Harpsfield had attempted to explain the Pope Joan legend as the story of a sexual hermaphrodite or of a man transformed into a woman, a bizarre defense that was extensively mocked in the 1591 Anatomie of Pope Ioane (sigs. Fii–Fiiiv). Finally, a prominent subject of mockery throughout the English literature on the female pope was the “chaire of ease, or hollow stoole of easement” alleged to have been invented for the purpose of sexually vetting all papal candidates subsequent to Joan.146 It is going beyond our brief to insist that, in addition to a learned female pope giving birth while on procession, the “poope Ione” of Lord Strange’s Men involved necromancy, hermaphroditism, sex change, or clowning over a sedes stercoraris, but we cite these elements of the legend to show that the archive available to Elizabethan playwrights would easily have supported a riotous and provocative play. “senobia” in a single performance, 9 march 1591/1592 “Senobia” looks like another play that may have grown old in the repertory by the spring of 1592. It must have represented the ancient queen of Palmyra, whose story, recorded by Tremellius Pollo in the Historia Augusta, was known to sixteenth- century English readers through works like Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and the second volume of William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1567). According to Painter, the third-century Syrian queen, “by her wysedome & stoutnesse . . . subdued all the empire of the Orient, & resisted the inuincible Romans.” Zenobia was married to Odenatus, who was to become “lorde of all the Orient” during a period when Roman power in the East was weakened by the rise of the Thirty Tyrants. When, at the behest of the Roman emperor Galienus, Odenatus was treasonously assassinated by a lieutenant, his followers “chose Zenobia to bee Protector of hir sonne, and gouerner ouer the sayd Orient Empire.” As “Tutrix of hir children, Regent of an Empire, and Captain general of the armie,” Zenobia “vsed hir selfe so wiselie and well, as she acquired no lesse noble name in Asia, than Queene Semiramis did in India.”147

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Only after Zenobia had successfully resisted an invasion by the new emperor Aurelian and defiantly rejected his proposals for a dishonorable peace, was the queen finally captured and the city of Palmyra destroyed: “which done, the Emperour Aurelianus retourned to Rome, carying wyth hym Zenobia, not to doe hir to death, but to tryumphe ouer hir. At what tyme to see that noble Ladie goe on foote, and marche before the triumphing Chariot bare foted, charged wyth ye burden of heauie chaunce, and hir two children by hir side: truly it made the Roman Matrons to conceiue great pitie, being well knowen to al the Romanes, that neither in valorous dedes, nor yet in vertue or chastitie, any man or woman of hir time did excel hir.”148 A woman warrior and ruler famous for her armor and horsemanship, Zenobia was also known for her married chastity, celebrated by Juan Luis Vives in The Instruction of a Christian Woman (1529), and for the “wysedom and policy” she “attayned by the study of noble philosophye,” a learnedness praised in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women (1545), where the queen disputes in dialogue with two male interlocutors.149 Appearing next to Pope Joan in Boccaccio’s De Claris mulieribus, Zenobia, as a learned, chaste, and legitimate

Inigo Jones, “The Countesse of Derby” as Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, for The Masque of Queens (1609). Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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woman ruler, was a potential antithesis to the notorious female pope and, in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, one of their several studies of famous women. Her reputation as a virtuous woman warrior made her a flattering mirror of Elizabeth I, to whom she was compared, for example, in James Aske’s Elizabetha triumphans (sig. A4v). Ben Jonson revived “the virtuous Palmyrene, Zenobia,” for The Masque of Queenes (1609), and Inigo Jones indicated in his drawing for the costume of the widowed queen Zenobia that her role was assigned to “the Countess of Darbie.” We cannot be certain whether this is the former Lady Strange, the dowager Countess of Derby, or her sister-in-law, the former Elizabeth de Vere, wife of William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby and Ferdinando’s younger brother. But in Jonson’s masque for the preceding year, The Masque of Beauty (1608), and in Samuel Daniel’s Vision of Twelue Goddesses (1604), the masquing Countess of Derby was Ferdinando Stanley’s widow.150 Lady Alice may well have been familiar with the story of Zenobia from its staging by her late husband’s players. “the taner of denmarke” in a single performance, 23 may 1592 The subject of the play usually transcribed as “the taner of Denmarke” remains to this day unidentified. No Danish tanner (if “tanner” is the word Henslowe meant) has been found, save for the tanner who, according to the gravedigger in Hamlet, “will last you nine year” in the grave (5.1.167). By analogy with “The Tanner of Tamworth,” the comic figure who, as promised on the title page of Heywood’s The first and second partes of King Edward the Fourth (1600), spends “mery pastime” with the Yorkist king, it has been suggested that “the taner of Denmarke” was “a craft play” or a “gild or citizen’s play.”151 But whereas the tanner of Tamworth, had the text of Edward the Fourth not survived, would still be attested in nondramatic sources,152 a tanner of Denmark is untraceable. In view of this apparent dead end, we think it worth mentioning that there is an extant play involving Denmark, if not tanners, for which a plausible attribution to Lord Strange’s Men has been made. The play most commonly called Edmond Ironside, a theatrical manuscript dating, according to its editor Randall Martin, to the early 1590s but containing evidence of revision for revival by a later company, possibly the Lady Elizabeth’s Men circa 1622–24, is a play with apparent links to early works of Shakespeare and to A Knack to Know a Knave.153 As Martin has demonstrated, the quarrel in Edmond Ironside between the archbishops of Canterbury and York is modeled on and closely echoes the language of the quarrel between Winchester and Gloucester in 1 Henry VI.

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York’s indictment of Canterbury contains direct echoes of Gloucester’s condemnation of Winchester: I humble me to God and not to thee, A traytor, a betrayor of his kinge, A rebel, a prophane priest, a Pharesie, A parrasite, an enimie to peace, A foe to trewth and to Religion. (Edmond Ironside, 3.1.19–23; italics ours) Thou art a most pernitious Vsurer, Froward by nature, Enemie to Peace; Lasciuious, wanton, more then well beseemes A man of thy Profession and Degree. (1 Henry VI, TLN 1221–24; italics ours)

The direction of this and many other borrowings, as Martin demonstrates, is from 1 Henry VI to Ironside, and the direction of the debt is the same in the case of Titus Andronicus. For example, Ironside’s “some new never-hard of torteringe paine” (4.1.4) echoes Titus’s “Some neuer hard of tortering paine,”154 and its “bigbond daines adrest to fight . . . / With anye Giant of your Ciclopes size” (3.5.9, 2.3.92) echoes Titus’s “big-boand men framde of the Cyclops size” (TLN 1912). In situation, the torture of the sons of Turkullus and Leofric, when Canutus orders Edrick to cut “their hands and noses off” (2.3.22), conflates the torture of Lavinia, the maiming of Titus, and the murder of his two sons. The torture of Lavinia, “Lopt and hewde” of “her two branches those sweet Ornaments” (TLN 1070–71), Martin shows, inspires Ironside’s pledges being “Lopt and bereft of those Two ornaments” (2.3.33), even to the extent of defying sense, since it is not clear which “two ornaments” of the noses and hands mentioned by Canutus are intended. Edmond Ironside contains convincing, if slighter, echoes of 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III as well, and it has extensive links to A Knack to Know a Knave, including both verbal echoes and, in the scene involving Canutus’s wooing of Egina, the presence of similar elements in a sequence identical to the wooing scene involving Ethenwald and Alfrida in A Knack.155 A Knack, which Martin shows to be the borrower in this case, made its successful debut on 10 June 1592, just eighteen days after the debut (and immediate disappearance) of “the taner of Denmarke.” Like A Knack to Know a Knave and like the Thomas Goddard/Ranulphus Trafford plot in Fair Em, Edmond Ironside deals with Saxon history, a demonstrable interest of Strange’s Men in a way that craft or guild plays are not.

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We can connect no tanner or tanning with Canutus, Edmond, or any other element in this play, which involves a protracted martial rivalry between two kings and two peoples for dominion over England. But a “tamer” of Denmark (minim errors involving n and m are probably the most common in the period) the temperate Edmond Ironside undoubtedly proves to be in his heroic resistance to the conquering Danes. The English are “A generacion like the Chosen Iewes, / Stubborne, vnwildye, feirce and wild to tame” (1.1.136–37), and Canutus complains that “Never sence Edmond was of force to beare / A massey helmet and a Curtlaxe / Could I retorne a victor from the feild” (2.3.183–85). Edmond’s superiority to Canutus epitomizes the play’s contrast of Saxons with Danes. The Saxons, Uskatulf explains to Canutus, are hardy wisie and vallowrous Theire names discover what theire natures are, More hard then stones, and yet not stones indeed; In fight, more then stones detestinge flight, In peace, as soft as waxe, wise, provident. Witnes the manye Combates they have fought Denmarke, our Cuntryes losse by them and theires With manie other witnesses of worth; How often they have driven vs to our shiftes And made vs take the sea for our defence When wee in number have bin three to one. (1.1.170– 80)

Although Edmond’s several victories over the rash braggart Canutus culminate with the single combat in which he “drives Canutus about” and “driues Canutus backe aboute the stage” (5.2.223, 234), he follows up his triumph with a generous if ultimately foolish proposal to share the rule of the kingdom in peace.156 In submitting to this arrangement, Canutus’s tongue, “by gentle speech,” accomplishes “that which thie sword could never doe” (5.2.241–42). Canutus, in other words, is tamed. If Edmond Ironside is a “tamer” of Denmark, is “taner” the only possible transcription of Henslowe’s diary entry, f. 7v? Though it seems unambiguous that Henslowe’s hand rendered “taner,” this may not be what he intended. Randall Martin states that it is “common” in the handwriting of the period that “the letters u, m, and n are not distinguished.”157 A clear case where “n” and “m” are not distinguished in the diary is “anorter”/ “amorter” (f. 17v, l. 28). Here, where Henslowe was writing a recipe to clear blindness, he clearly wanted to “stampe” the ingredients “in a panne or bassen or amorter.” Henslowe wanted

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to write “am,” but his hand undeniably gave him “an.” Perhaps something similar happened when he wanted a “tamer” rather than a “taner.” The word Denmark does not appear in either of the two titles on the manuscript itself: “Edmond Ironside | The English King,” inscribed, perhaps at a later date, on the first leaf of the manuscript, and “A trew Cronicle History called | Warr hath made all friends,” written at the head of the first leaf of text, possibly original and surely ironic in view of the sequel which the play clearly anticipates: the fall, with the murder of Edmond, “of the glorious maiestie of the English Kingdome,” and the homiletic reinforcement of the “old doctrine, that Euerie kingdome diuided in it selfe cannot long stand.”158 Although there are in Henslowe’s diary “many examples . . . of the names of plays being changed or of plays being given alternative titles,” the lack of a match between Henslowe and these titles on the manuscript, together with two possible echoes of Venus and Adonis (entered in the Stationers’ Register on 18 April 1593), lead Martin to conjecture that the play was intended for the road after the closing of the Rose on 2 February 1592/93.159 Noticing that at least one of the cuts marked in later revisions appears to censor the attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury as “A rebell, a prophane preist, a Pharesie, / A parrasite, an enimie to peace” (3.1.21– 22), Martin also speculates that Edmond Ironside may have been too controversial to have been played at the Rose.160 These are plausible suggestions, but there are further circumstances suggesting that Edmond Ironside may have been at the Rose as “the taner of Denmarke” on 23 May 1592. Among the most striking of these, Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse his Svpplication to the Divell, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 August 1592 and a proven guide—with its praise of Edward Alleyn, a Talbot play, and Ferdinando Stanley—to the doings of Strange’s Men at the Rose, appears to know Edmond Ironside and to know it for its potential offensiveness. In the section of Pierce Penilesse devoted to the sin of Pride, Nashe includes satiric sketches of “the Spaniard,” “the Italian,” “The Frenchman,” and “the most grosse and sencelesse proud dolts . . . the Danes.”161 While the first three predictably conventional portraits run to an average of 150 words each, the last is a conspicuously expanded tour de force running to nearly a thousand words. In Nashe’s portrait of their swaggering imposterhood, the Danes “stand so much vpon their vnweldy burliboand souldiery, that they account of no man that hath not a battle Axe at his girdle to hough dogs with, or weares not a cockes feather in a redde thrumd hat like a caualier: briefly, he is the best foole bragart vnder heauen.”162 This veers close to the language and action of the play. When Edmond, despite the treachery of the Danes, bests them at the battle of Worcester,

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the previously overconfident Canutus harangues his army in terms similar to those used by Nashe: A plague vppon you all for arrant Cowardes. Looke how a dunghill Cocke, not rightly bred Doth come into the pitt with greater grace, Brvslinge his feathers, settinge vppe his plumes, ... Yett after when he feeles the spures to pricke Crakes like a Craven and bewrayes himself. Even so my bigbond daines adrest to fight As though they meant to scale the Cope of heaven (And like the Giants graple with the godes) At first encounter rush vppon theire foes, But straighte retire. ... But all my Daines are Braggadochios And I accurst to bee the generall Of such A flocke of fearefull runnawaies. (3.5.1–4, 7–13, 32–34)

Using the new word Braggadochio, freshly borrowed from Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene (Nashe would refer, later in 1592, to Harvey as “Braggadochio Glorioso”),163 the petulant Canutus himself is a prime instance of Nashe’s “foole braggart.” Even while Nashe’s “burliboand souldiery” echoes Canutus’s “bigbond Daines” (and in turn Ironside’s echo of Titus’s “big-bon’d men fram’d of the Cyclops’ size” [4.3.46]), it may also be hinting that the part of Canutus was played by Edward Alleyn, who may also have played the “bigboond traytor Warwike.”164 There may be a further recollection of performance in Nashe’s “Axe at his girdle to hough dogs with,” since Stich uses an axe to cut off the noses and hands of the young pledges. Nashe’s telling contrast between Danish swagger and English pluck seems to be recalling the play’s final combat, in which Edmond “driues Canutus backe aboute the stage” (5.2.234): “Thus walkes he vp and downe in his Maiestie, taking a yard of ground at euery step, and stamps on the earth so terrible, as if he ment to knocke vppe a spirite, when (foule drunken bezzle) if an Englishman set his little finger to him, he falls like a hogs-trough that is set on one end” (1: 178). Some memory of Alleyn’s impersonation of Doctor Faustus may also be creeping into this passage, but the stronger recollection of a proud Dane stamping—perhaps the earliest of many

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recollections of Alleyn’s strutting and stalking the stage in long strides165— appears to come from the final scene of Ironside. On 17 March 1592/93 Nashe’s attack on the Danes was brought to the attention of Lord Burghley. Robert Beale, a clerk of the Privy Council, had been banished from court for having criticized the bishops in the course of showing sympathy for Protestant allies of the nonepiscopal variety. Defending himself in a letter to Burghley, Beale protested that he was not given “the lyke libertie” as those who were free “by printe and speache to incense what they list.” He singled out a “booke intituled, A supplication to the Diuell,” which “so reuylethe the whole nation of Denmarke, as eueryeone that bearithe anye due respecte to her Maiestie and her good frendes, maye be sorrye and ashamed to see it. The realme hathe otherwise enimyes inoughe, without making anye more by suche contumelious pamphlettes.” The Supplication stirred up “hatred and strife . . . not onelye amonge ourselues, but also againste our neighbors the Churches in France, Geneua, the Lowe Countryes, and Scotland.”166 Arthur Williamson and Paul McGinnis, who have noticed in Pierce Penilesse a satire on the possibility of a Scottish succession to the English throne, conjecture that Nashe was sniping at Anne of Denmark and the Scottish–Danish alliance.167 They suggest also that through his portrait of the Danes Nashe was striking, as he had in the Marprelate controversy, at Presbyterians. It is certainly the case that Nashe criticizes the Danes for lacking the “Byshopricks, Deaneries, Prebendaries, and other priuate dignities” that “animate our Diuines to such excellence,” and he anticipates the very wording of Beale’s indignant letter in his fable of the Chameleon and disguised Fox who persuade Englishmen that every flower and herb is infected by spiders, cankers, and toads, “whereas in other Countries, no noisome or poisonous creature might liue, by reason of the imputed goodness of the Soyle, or carefull diligence of the gardners aboue ours, as for example, Scotland, Denmarke, and some more pure partes of the seauenteene Prouinces.”168 Edmond Ironside, so far as we can tell, is innocent of the anti-Scottish and anti-Presbyterian mischief of Nashe, but the play’s patriotic Anglo-Saxon animus against the Danes and its skeptical regard of foreign rule in England may have been sufficient, in the context of 1592 and the problem of the Scottish succession—if its later- censored insult against the Archbishop of Canterbury was not a further source of trouble—to have kept the play off the boards. Yet numerous other details of Edmond Ironside would seem to place it in 1592, very possibly among Strange’s Men at the Rose: Stich’s rejection of his humble parentage resembles that of Rasni in A Looking Glass for London and of Pucelle in 1 Henry VI; the play’s attack on the leader who “Will starve his souldiers or

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keepe backe theire paye” (1.3.14) echoes sensitivities over the treatment of troops returning from the failed Portuguese and French expeditions (see chapter 7);169 and aspects of the play’s stage directions seem to place it on the Rose’s shallow, elongated stage (e.g., the two armies “marche a long the stage, one [towards] an other” [5.2.37], as in other processions at the Rose [see chapter 6]). Whether the “hardicute” and “knewtus” that played the Rose briefly in October–November 1597 are one play or two (neither is marked “ne”),170 Edmond Ironside, a play that clearly anticipates a second-part sequel, may have been one of these titles and, like several other plays that stayed at the Rose with Henslowe and Alleyn, a play performed by Strange’s Men. Is “The Tamer of Denmark” a title that would have made any sense to English ears in 1592? It might have been more meaningful, perhaps, than “The Tanner of Denmark.” A search of Early English Books Online for “tanner of,” 1520–1640, yields several references to the “tanner of Tamworth” (most but not all in Heywood), several to Robert Ket, the “tanner of Wimondham,” one to the “Bests Soone, the Tanner of Wingham” in 2 Henry VI (4.2.21–22; TLN 2340– 41), one to a tanner of Colchester, one to a “Tanner of Witam and Wolvercote,” and one, in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1626), to a tanner of Wallingford. All are references to English tanners, just as most examples of “the crafts play” or “guild or citizens’ play” known to us—Edward IV, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, If You Know Not Me You Know No Body come to mind—are about English craftspeople. So “the taner of Denmarke” does not match usage as recorded by EEBO, nor does it match other examples of the genre proposed by Roslyn Knutson. A similar EEBO search, 1520–1640, for “tamer of” yields several references, most from translations of Seneca’s plays, to Hercules as “tamer of Monsters,” “tamer of the worlde,” “tamer of the seauen-headed monster,” and “tamer of Lycurgus.” Historical heroes with the title include Brennus “the tamer of the Romans,” “Hanniball the tamer of kingdomes,” the Herculean Henri IV, “tamer of our Gaule,” Meles Fitz Henry, “the tamelesse tamer of the Irish nation,” and a putative “tamer of the Turkish moone.” Rome is the “subduer and Tamer of all other nations.” Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1584) translates Latin domitor, -oris as “a tamer: a breaker: a subduer: a vanquisher,” and most lexicons of the period (Elyot, Huloet, Baret, Thomas, and Florio) treat it similarly. Conversely, John Leland’s De uiris illustribus describes Edward the son of King Alfred as “bellipotens et Danorum domitor.”171 “The tamer of Denmarke,” then, is a title that fits linguistic usage and a clear generic profile. Edmond Ironside is a play that fits that profile; it knows and is

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known by other plays of Strange’s Men, and it appears to have been known to Thomas Nashe as a play performed by Ned Alleyn. We acknowledge that “the tamer of Denmarke” cannot be squared with either of the titles written on the manuscript, and we are not certain how the manuscript acquired a single phrase from Venus and Adonis before April 1593,172 but we believe there are reasonable grounds for suggesting Edmond Ironside may be a “lost” play of Lord Strange’s Men.

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In her study of Latin American performance, Diana Taylor explains that cultures generate, store, and transmit knowledge by means of an “archive” of enduring material artifacts (such as buildings, objects, texts, and other documents) and by means of a “repertoire” of actions and practices involving live participation (such as spoken language, dance, sports, rituals, and other modes of performance). Taylor’s interest lies primarily in modes of participatory performance that operate at some remove from archival forms of knowledge, but she recognizes that the “archive” and the “repertoire” interpenetrate across a spectrum of cultural phenomena, from language (which combines live speech with written record) to law and religion (where written texts and corporeal enactment often work in combination). Two of Taylor’s further observations are especially pertinent to the study of Elizabethan acting companies: (1) the relationship between an archive and a repertoire cannot, generally speaking, be characterized as either sequential or hegemonic (i.e., it is misleading to rank either of these two phenomena as primary or secondary to the other); (2) archives and repertoires are culturally significant because both are shaped (and constantly reshaped over time) by the values, interests, and beliefs of a given society.1 Theatrical performance is clearly a phenomenon where archive and repertoire operate in variable combinations, ranging from dramatic literature (such as the plays of Seneca), in which performance is almost purely notional and transmission is primarily textual, to improvisational performances (such as commedia dell’arte), where live transmission plays a much stronger role than textual transmission. Elizabethan theater was enriched and complicated by the changing ways in which it combined an archive of documents and inherited textual materials with a repertoire of bodily transmitted performance practices.

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As Evelyn Tribble observes while quoting T. Fitzpatrick on commedia dell’arte, every performance was “a highly distributed act ‘in which oral and literate processes happily cohabited and complemented each other.’ ”2 Documenting the repertoire of skills, techniques, and styles practiced by Elizabethan performers must necessarily depend upon an archive that survives exclusively in the realm of textuality (as printed and manuscript playbooks as well as other documents and written records of performance). But using the archive to reconstruct the repertoire is not simply a methodological necessity; it is rooted in assumptions about Elizabethan theater as a medium both textual and performative. Theater’s combination of archival and behavioral traits helps explain the way the repertorial system of Elizabethan acting companies actually worked. While all acting companies shared both the immense cultural archive and repertoire (the texts and behaviors) belonging to all Elizabethans as well as an archive and repertoire (of plays and performances) specific to the theater profession, each individual company’s work must have formed a characteristic selection and inflection of elements drawn from all of these, a “cognitive ecology,” in Tribble’s terms.3 Rotating in daily performance, a successful company’s repertory, created by playwrights from their knowledge of Elizabethan culture and then enacted, became in turn a distinctive component within that culture, a discernible “company style” consisting of characteristic subjects, stories, genres, themes, and modes of verbal and enacted expression. One of the meanings of “Lord Strange’s Men,” in other words, would have been rooted in the theatergoing public’s recognition of the selection that formed the company’s distinctive archive and repertoire. To be sure, the performance skills and practices developed by individual acting companies were selected and adapted from the techniques common to the acting profession generally. Nevertheless Lord Strange’s Men would have mobilized in distinctive ways both the extratheatrical repertoire of Elizabethan spoken language, comportment, ceremony, and ritual and the common artisanal practices that the veterans of the company, previously members of Leicester’s, the Queen’s, and the Lord Admiral’s Men, brought with them to their new enterprise or borrowed from what they saw other companies doing. But the company’s distinctive performance styles would also have been profoundly influenced by the genres, sources, and styles of the plays in its archive. In this chapter we attempt to characterize some of the archival dimensions of the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men—its selection of subjects, materials, and genres—as represented by its plays. We argue that the company’s identity was formed in part by its interest in “modern matter,” by which we mean both its preference for dramatizing recent geopolitical events and its evident interest in

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performing genres with a strong classical or Italianate pedigree, including Senecan revenge, novella intrigue, and what Henslowe (or the company) called “gelyous comodey.” These interests were not, of course, entirely unique to the company—if they were, the company’s work would have been unintelligible— but Lord Strange’s Men were innovators who fastened upon key subjects and interests at a decisive moment in Elizabethan stage history. Our discussion of the company’s archive inevitably shades into a discussion of the ways the company’s per formance techniques were integrated with their choice of materials. Those techniques are discussed in chapter 6. It is impossible to say unequivocally whether the company’s authors and playbooks (ultimately the company’s choice of materials) produced their theatrical practices or whether their practices and skills helped to produce the kinds of writing represented in their plays. The reciprocal connection is what creates the “company style.” AU T HOR S

In many respects Lord Strange’s Men continued the older “artisanal” model of popular theater. To begin with, sixteen of the titles mentioned in Henslowe’s diary belong to plays now lost. Though the impact of some of them, such as “tambercame” and “tittus & vespacia,” is visible in allusions that survive in extant works, these lost plays were apparently never published, and so their authors remain just as anonymous as their artisanal forebears in the popular performance tradition. Moreover several of the company’s extant plays—The Booke of Sir Thomas More, John of Bordeaux, and John a Kent and John a Cumber (if this last belonged to Strange’s Men)—survive only as unpublished playhouse documents, and all of them bear the signs of the collaborative work and practical adaptation that went with artisanal theater. Even 1 Henry VI, for that matter, remained an unpublished playhouse document until 1623, and it too bears signs of collaboration. Anonymity was also a feature of several company plays that did receive early publication. A Knack to Knowe a Knave (1594), attributed to “ED. ALLEN and his Companie,” remains to this day a company play without an author. The Spanish Tragedy (1592), Orlando Furioso (1594), The Battle of Alcazar (1594), and Titus Andronicus (1594), now recognized as a collaboration, all appeared in early editions without authorial attribution. If there was ever an edition of The Jew of Malta earlier than 1633, it too might have lacked an indication of authorship; no author, at any rate, is mentioned in the 1594 entry of the play in the Stationers’ Register. Of the more than thirty titles with possible connections to Lord Strange’s Men, only two were published, before the First Folio, in a form that attributed them to particular authors: A Looking Glasse for

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London and England. Made By Thomas Lodge Gentleman, and Robert Greene and the undated The Massacre at Paris . . . Written by Christopher Marlow. A useful corrective against drawing too firm a line between artisanship and authorship, or between the Queen’s Men and the upstart company of Lord Strange, is the fact that, compared with the plays of Lord Strange’s Men, a higher percentage of possible Queen’s Men’s plays appeared with authorial attributions on their title pages. Lack of publication or authorial attribution is not, however, a sign of the company’s retrograde status; to a large extent it merely indicates that the nascent field of playbook publication was not yet focused on the authorship of plays and that much playwriting was almost by definition collaborative.4 Nevertheless it is evident from the longer-term life of several of the plays of Lord Strange’s Men—from their longevity in both print and performance as they passed to later companies—that the company played a crucial transitional role in terms of their selection of plays and players with “star” quality and in terms of their flair for grasping current interests and new literary fashions. Many of the plays that passed through the company’s hands, perhaps as a result of repeated London performances, developed a “canonical” status, both on the London stage and in print. The durability and influence of their repertory seems to have gone hand in hand with its having been written by a new generation of highly educated and exceptionally talented playwrights. Associated with Lord Strange or with Lord Strange’s Men and their plays are the names of nearly all the major playwrights of the time: Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Anthony Munday, Thomas Nashe, and Henry Chettle, whose hand appears in the manuscripts of John of Bordeaux and Sir Thomas More. Among the leading playwrights of the time, John Lyly may be the only one whose work does not appear to have been linked to the company. With the possible exception of Shakespeare, the connection of these individuals to the theater was not primarily through their work as performers, as it had been for Richard Tarlton or Robert Wilson, who also served as playwrights for the Queen’s Men. They were professional authors whose independent status as gentleman poets, intellectuals, and independent authors in various nontheatrical genres was supported only in part by their commissions to supply acting companies with fresh material. The difference between them and their artisanal forbears and colleagues is the issue—and Shakespeare is caught in the issue—in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592).5 Lord Strange’s Men were not unique in acquiring scripts from this new generation of writers. The company followed close upon the lead and in some cases secured the plays of their im-

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mediate predecessors and rivals, including the Queen’s Men, some of whose plays were also authored by Greene and Peele, as well as by “industrious Kyd.”6 Nevertheless by comparison with what is known of previous companies, including the Queen’s, Leicester’s, and the contemporary Lord Admiral’s Men, the cadre of authors represented in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, including the names of Marlowe and Shakespeare, was exceptionally deep, indeed nearly comprehensive, in the newer kinds of professional writing moving onto the London stage in the early 1590s. The talent of the company’s actors and the quality of its plays and writers were no doubt mutually supporting. “Dramatists as well as actors, company managers, theatre owners and other personnel,” Grace Ioppolo has observed, “lived in a highly interrelated theatrical business world.”7 There was much theatrical experience among the former Leicester’s Men in Lord Strange’s company, but the roles of Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe as theatrical managers were no doubt essential to the company’s acquisition of its repertory. Evidence suggests that Strange’s Men may have been at the Rose even before their partnership with Alleyn, perhaps as early as 1590, and their obvious resistance to touring was likely connected to Henslowe’s concerted effort to build his business on the Bankside. Henslowe did not begin keeping records of his extensive dealings with playwrights until 1597. One possible inference, according to Ioppolo, is that before that date “Henslowe was earning income from the performance of plays . . . , not from contracting dramatists to write those plays.”8 But it is evident from Henslowe’s later ownership of plays performed by Strange’s Men that he may at least have helped the company finance its acquisition of plays and, in doing so, have developed a knack for acquiring successful theatrical properties. Alleyn too may have played a role in securing plays, beginning with his play purchases from Richard Jones in 1589– 90. His later sale of “the massaker of france” to Henslowe9 indicates that he may have owned, and thus been the one to acquire, some of the plays of Lord Strange’s Men. Henslowe’s records of his dealings with playwrights on commission from 1597 show them working in something like a partnership with the playing company. “Dramatists,” as Ioppolo says, “did not simply hand over a completed manuscript, and their authority, at the playhouse door and disappear.”10 They collaborated with the company in plotting, casting, and rehearsing the play.11 Actors themselves sometimes urged Henslowe to finance especially promising works proposed by authors, and they frequently served as witnesses to Henslowe’s dealings with them. Some of the regular playwrights in Henslowe’s post-1597 stable, such as Munday, Chettle, and Robert Wilson, may have established their links to Henslowe during the period when Strange’s Men were at the Rose.

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Though there is no evidence in the records that Thomas Lodge was writing for Henslowe after 1597, Henslowe intervened on his behalf circa 1597– 98 in a suit for indebtedness, perhaps through a connection that went back to Lodge’s work with Strange’s Men and his enjoyment of Stanley patronage.12 But while players themselves and the management of Henslowe may have shaped the working environment of playwrights, the high profile of “literary” authorship in the company’s repertory may also have been owing to the long Stanley tradition of theatrical patronage and to the reputation of Lord and Lady Strange as exceptional literary connoisseurs and patrons.13 Few theatrical patrons can be connected through acquaintance or patronage to so many of the playwrights and leading authors of their time. In fact nearly every one of the above-mentioned authors could claim some personal or patronage connection to Lord Strange. For example, in January 1592/93, when Marlowe was arrested on suspicion of counterfeiting in the Netherlands, he reported to Sir Robert Sidney that he was “very wel known both to the Earle of Northumberland and my Lord Strang.”14 Possible support for this claim is found in a letter from Thomas Kyd to the Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Puckering at some time after the death of Marlowe and following his own release from custody after questioning (and possibly torture) in connection with the so- called Dutch Church libel and the papers that were subsequently found in the lodgings he shared with Marlowe. Kyd explained, “My first acquaintance with this Marlowe, rose vpon his bearing name to serve my Lord although his Lordship never knewe his ser vice, but in writing for his plaiers, ffor never cold my Lordship endure his name, or sight, when he had heard of his conditions, nor wold indeed the forme of devyne praiers vsed duelie in his Lordships house, haue quadred with such reprobates.” As for his own connection to this patron, Kyd added that he hoped, despite his recent troubles, to “reteyne the favours of my Lord, whom I haue servd almost theis vj yeres nowe.”15 The candidate who, when Kyd was writing in late 1593, best fits a profile involving seven years’ ser vice, a playing company, and the patronage of Marlowe is Lord Strange.16 Marlowe’s explicit claim to have been “very wel known to . . . Lord Strang”17 adds weight to this possibility. If, as Dennis Flynn has suggested, the “Mr John Donnes” or “Mr Jhon Downes” who was among the “noble men Knightes and Esquires and Gentlemene geving their Attendance” on Henry Stanley during his 1585 embassy to invest Henri III in the Order of the Garter was actually the young Jack Donne, then he too may have been among the intellectuals patronized by the family.18 Less subject to speculation are published acknowledgments and bids for patronage explicitly addressed to Lord Strange and his family. Lodge, in a work dedicated to William Stanley, who succeeded Ferdinando as 6th Earl of Derby

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The Stanley arms, published in Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation (1592). Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library.

in 1594, explained that “your noble father [i.e., Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby] in mine infancie, with his owne hands incorporated me into your house.”19 If, as seems likely, Lodge was the translator of the first “Protestant” edition of Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (1592)—he was definitely the translator of The Flowers of Lodowick of Granada (1601)—then it was also he who included a copy of the Stanley arms and a fulsome tribute to “his especiall good Lord . . . and Ladie Strange” with the Prayers volume, a work that had been “so long since of me made promise at Channon-rowe,” the Stanley residence in Westminster.20 Robert Greene, who had dedicated The Mirror of Modestie (1584) to Ferdinando’s mother, the Countess of Derby, lauded Lord Strange as “so honorable a Maecenas” in the dedication to Ciceronis Amor (1589).21 Anthony Munday, who may have written John a Kent and John a Cumber and Sir Thomas More for Lord Strange’s Men, labeled Ferdinando “the true heir and successor in your fathers nobleness and vertues,” and he dedicated his Defence of Contraries (1593) to the new earl with his “humble affection” and the offer of his

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Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange and (1593– 94) 5th Earl of Derby, in the year of his death, 1594. Courtesy of the owner.

“very vttermost habilitie to your Honors ser vice.”22 In his Polyhymnia (1589), Peele celebrated “The Earle of Darbies valiant sonne and heire, / Brave Ferdinande Lord Straunge” for his role in the Accession Day Tilt of 1589, and in lavishing description on “Stanleyes olde Crest and honourable badge . . . Joves kinglie byrd, the golden Eagle,” he evoked the myth, deriving from the old Stanley sagas, that the family line had descended through the foundling Oskell discovered in an eagle’s nest.23 In Pierce Penilesse, Nashe, we have seen, showed himself “thankfull (in some part) for benefits receiued” from Lord Strange, paying tribute to Edward Alleyn, to the Talbot play of Strange’s Men, and to the company’s patron, “the matchlesse image of Honor, and magnificent rewarder of virtue, Ioues Eagle-borne Ganimed, thrice-noble Amintas.” Quoting from Ovid’s Heroides, Nashe extolled Lord Strange as decus atque æui gloria summa tui—the ornament and chief glory of his time.24 Nashe dwelt at some length on Edmund Spenser’s failure to include Lord Strange among the eleven nobles to whom he wrote dedicatory sonnets in the 1590 Faerie Queene. Spenser had, of course, by the time of Pierce Penilesse praised his supposed kinswoman, “the Ladie Straunge,” formerly Alice Spencer of Althorpe, for her “noble match with that most honourable Lord the verie Paterne of right Nobilitie.” In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), Spenser lamented the passing Ferdinando Stanley under the same pastoral name used by Nashe, Amyntas.25

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Spenser’s tribute is a reminder that if Ferdinando Stanley’s patronage of leading writers was modeled on that of his mentor, the Earl of Leicester, it was also rooted in his personal reputation as an intellectual who, in addition to “maintaining” those who piped, could pipe himself with “passing [i.e., surpassing] skill.”26 John Bodenham’s Bel-vedere, or The Garden of the Muses (1600) includes “Ferdinando, Earl of Derby” among the “noble personages” (the Earl of Oxford, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir John Harington, Sir Edward Dyer, and Fulke Greville, among others) whose poems were printed in the volume.27 In the posthumous tribute in William Covell’s Polimanteia (1595), the poetic achievement of this “neuer enough lamented” lord was reason for linking his name with Sir Philip Sidney’s.28 George Chapman linked “that most ingenious Darbie” with “deepe searching Northumberland, and skill-imbracing heire of Hunsdon [George Carey],” describing all three as young noblemen who “most profitably entertained learning in themselues.” Like Nashe, Chapman drew upon the Stanley eagleand- child emblem in order to declare, “He is the Ganemede, the birde of Ioue, / Rapt to his soueraignes bosome for his loue.”29 It is probably crucial to Lord Strange’s roles as patron and intellectual, and to his acting company’s work with plays from a new generation of writers, that compared with other leading theater patrons of the period—Henry Carey (b. 1526), Robert Dudley (b. 1532), Henry Radcliffe (b. 1533), Charles Howard (b. 1532), and Henry Herbert (b. 1538)—he was a full generation younger (b. circa 1559, matriculated St. John’s, Oxford 1572) and thus a close contemporary to the company’s playwrights: Peele (b. 1556, matriculated Broadgates Hall, Oxford 1571), Lodge (b. 1558, matriculated Trinity, Oxford 1574), Greene (b. 1558, matriculated St. John’s, Cambridge 1577), Marlowe (b. 1564, matriculated Corpus Christi, Cambridge 1580), Nashe (b. 1567, matriculated St. John’s, Cambridge 1582), Kyd (b. 1558), Munday (b. 1560), Chettle (b. circa 1561– 63), and Shakespeare (b. 1564). Much has been made of this “Elizabethan younger generation” and the paradoxical relationship between its extraordinary intellectual qualifications and its marginalized relationship to the dominant but aging Elizabethan establishment.30 As a member of the peerage and the son of a privy councillor and Lord High Steward, Ferdinando Stanley experienced nothing like the marginality of the university wits and professional playwrights, whose estateless condition forced them into the commercial worlds of popular print and performance. But as a talented and ambitious nobleman without portfolio, a suspected Catholic whose potential claim to the throne kept him under close surveillance and out of power, and a well-educated intellectual whose apparent tolerance of heterodox opinion caused his name to be linked with those of the “wizard Earl” of Northumberland and Sir Walter Raleigh, Ferdinando Stanley

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was a patron well-matched to the generational experience, ambition, and outlook of the most innovative of late Elizabethan playwrights. While Lord Strange’s company took much in personnel and practices, as well as plays and intellectual cues, from companies sponsored by the queen, the Earl of Leicester, and the Lord Admiral, and while they probably owed much of their success to Henslowe’s help with financing plays and managing collaborations, both players and their playwrights found in Lord Strange precisely the sort of patron under whom a theater given to experiment, daring, and expanded intellectual horizons might flourish. “MODER N M AT T ER”: GEOP OL I T ICS A N D CON T EM P OR A RY W R I T I NG

In keeping with the intellectual profile of the company’s patron and its leading authors, the plays of Lord Strange’s Men linked the stage closely to the modern world and to fashionable modes of writing associated with the contemporary Renaissance. The archive, in other words, was “bookish,” drawing, most importantly, on the humanistic revival of classical learning and on writing from and about the contemporary world. Perhaps most striking in this archive, by way of contrast with the repertory of the Queen’s Men, is direct embrace of current geopolitics. Some of the plays in Strange’s repertory that feature this distinctively “modern” geopolitical orientation, such as The Battle of Alcazar and The Spanish Tragedy, might possibly have originated with the slightly earlier Lord Admiral’s Men. But our first documentable knowledge of these plays of modern times is through their appearance in Strange’s repertory, alongside other works of a similarly contemporary character, like The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris. Strange’s Men may have had a line of plays engaging with Saxon history, particularly if, in addition to A Knack to Know a Knave and Fair Em the Millers Daughter, Edmond Ironside was among their plays. But the surviving plays of the Queen’s Men dealt almost exclusively with ancient and medieval English history (The True Chronicle History of King Leir, The Troublesome Reign of King John, The True Tragedy of Richard III) and historical romance (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay), English folklore (The Old Wives’ Tale), or English satire and homiletics (The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London). By contrast, the archive for many of the plays of Lord Strange’s Men was a selection of news and history devoted to recent world affairs.31 The Battle of Alcazar, for example, translates to the stage a “complex, globally oriented history”32 widely documented in contemporary chronicles: the 1578 victory of Abd el-Malek and the still-reigning Moroccan prince Mulay al-Mansur

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(d. 1603) over the combined forces of the usurping Mulay Mahamet and the Portuguese King Sebastian at El-Ksar Kbir. Peele’s main source was the translation, by way of Latin, from the 1578 Spanish original of Luis Nieto, in John Polemon’s Second part of the booke of Battailes, fought in our age (1587). But the events at El-Ksar Kbir were widely documented, almost from the moment of their unfolding, in the contemporary English press.33 The contemporaneousness of the printed material, in this case, provides a good illustration of the interaction between the archive and the repertoire of embodied knowledge and practice engaged by the theater, because the recently chronicled events at El-Ksar Kbir were continuing to impact English affairs even as The Battle of Alcazar was being performed.34 As “a picture of the tangled web of Realpolitik” involving Portugal, Spain, England, Morocco, the Turkish Empire, England, Italy, Ireland, and the papacy, The Battle of Alcazar was “the only play in the whole Elizabethan repertoire to

The battle of El-Ksar Kbir, from Portugalesische Schlacht und gewisse Zeittung (Nuremburg, 1579). Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliotek.

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portray the Christian-Islamic conflict in North Africa with historical accuracy.”35 Whether the play originated with Edward Alleyn and the earlier Lord Admiral’s Men or with Lord Strange’s Men themselves, who were likely playing in London from the spring of 1589, The Battle of Alcazar was drawn from events so near to the present that the meaning of what the play took from print was being inflected by ongoing events. The play would thus have resonated not only with the recent press but with other kinds of cultural performances, such as Peele’s Device of the Pageant borne before Woolstone Dixi (1585), a London mayoral show dating from the year the Barbary Company was incorporated and prominently featuring a Moor riding upon a lynx, or the colorful reception of the Moroccan ambassador Marzuq Raiz in January 1588/89, when he was greeted “with the chiefest marchants of the Barbary Company, well commanded all on horseback” and driven “in Coche” into London, where he delivered Morocco’s promise of support to the Norris–Drake expedition.36 When The Battle of Alcazar was being performed at the Rose in 1592– 93, a few years after the Portuguese expedition had returned in failure, the play would have acquired further contemporary resonances.37 So closely tied was the play to the unfolding geopolitical situation of the last quarter of the sixteenth century that its subsequent revival by the Lord Admiral’s Men at the Fortune circa 1600 was probably in turn inspired by the arrival in London of Abd el- Ouahed, the most recent ambassador from Mulay al-Mansur, the still-surviving victor at El-Ksar Kbir. Though at a somewhat greater distance, the implications of the Portuguese tragedies at El-Ksar Kbir (1578), Alcantara (1580), and the Azores (1582–83) also formed a geopolitical frame of reference for The Spanish Tragedy, a companion to Peele’s play in the repertory. Although Kyd’s play is not in any sense a direct representation of contemporary events, Spain’s military defeat of Portugal in the play and the arrangement of a marriage and succession resulting in a “post-Portuguese Spanish imperium” where “Spaine is Portugall / And Portugall is Spaine” (TLN 542–43) amount to a strong evocation of the contemporary world shaped by Spain’s annexation of the Portuguese kingdom. (It would not have been lost on English audiences that the Armada of 1588 was largely a Portuguese navy.)38 Also part of Kyd’s play world and of the timely archive of Lord Strange’s Men is the role of the Ottoman Turks in shaping the sixteenth- century Mediterranean. The play-within-the-play, a compressed version of the tragedy of Solyman and Perseda (1592), is set during the Turkish siege of Rhodes (1522), an event within sufficiently recent memory for Hieronimo to have used an account of it as the basis for the play he drafted during his studious youth in Toledo.

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Hieronimo’s use of such timely material not only models Kyd’s own similar use of works like Sebastian Münster’s Comosgraphie Universelle (1575) for The Spanish Tragedy and Solyman and Perseda; it also models the learned use of source material pertaining to the Turkish Empire elsewhere in the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, in the account of recent Turkish support for Abdelmelec against Muly Mahamet in The Battle of Alcazar, for example, and in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which, with considerable license, represents the 1565 Turkish siege of Malta. But the action of The Jew of Malta is placed “within a very specific strategic context that has less to do with . . . the siege of Malta in 1565 than with the English promotion of Eastern trade between 1589 and 1592”; that maneuvering included the merging of the Venice and Turkey companies into the new Levant company in January 1591/92, just a month before Lord Strange’s Men are recorded at Henslowe’s Rose.39 Crucial to contemporary events in the Mediterranean were developing connections between merchant venturing, information gathering, and espionage like those embodied in Marlowe’s Jewish intriguer, Barabas. Marlowe may have modeled Barabas on contemporary figures like Joseph Mendez-Nassi (João Micques), a Marrano diplomat and advisor to Selim II who became Duke of Naxos after engineering the capture of Cyprus by the Turks in 1570, or David Passi, the double- and triple-agent in Constantinople, who appears prominently in English state papers of 1585–91.40 The Jew of Malta introduced the Rose audience, in other words, to a contemporary world of transnational connections based on the circulation of money and secret information.41 Marlowe’s connection with the Elizabethan intelligence ser vice perhaps accounts for the fact that his contribution to the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men appears to draw not just on contemporary publications but on knowledge too recent or too sequestered to have been printed. The Massacre at Paris draws from recent pro-League pamphlets such as Charles Pinselet’s Martire des deux frères (1589) in order to bring the play’s events very nearly up to the present, with the assassinations of the Guise (1587) and Henri III (1589) and with the accession of the reigning king, Henri of Navarre, on behalf of whom the Earl of Essex led an unsuccessful expedition to besiege Rouen in August 1591–January 1591/92.42 In the English Agent who attends upon Henri III in time to hear the dying king’s words, Marlowe indicates a source of intelligence so fresh that, apart from The Massacre itself, it was not reported in print until 1655.43 Perhaps influenced by the cosmopolitan experience of its writers and players,44 the sequence of plays mounted at the Rose over four days on 27–31 May 1592, hints at the cumulative effects that could be achieved by combining several of the company’s best-known “modern” plays in repertory:

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Receued at Ieronymo the 27 of maye 1592 Receued at matchevell the 29 of maye 1592 Receued at the Iewe of malta the 30 of maye 1592 Receued at mvlemvloco the 31 of maye 1592

xxiij s. xxvj s. xxxiij s. xxiiij s.45

The modern flavor of this repertory shaped the company’s performance practices as well. While prologues and presenters were common practice, several of those in the repertory of Strange’s Men mediated the action through commentary and report, calling explicit attention to the contemporaneity and veracity of the events represented on stage. Peele, for example, taking a hint from the claim in Polemon’s Second part of the booke of Battailes, fought in our age (1587) that its version of “The Battaile of Alcazar” (Peele’s main source) was “taken out of a nameless Portugall auctor” (sig. R3), framed his play with a Presenter (identified as “a Portingall” in the later Lord Admiral’s Men’s plot)46 who stands in for the eyewitness author-participant Luis Nieto, author of the account translated in Polemon: Saie not these things are faind, for true they are, ... Sit you and see this true and tragicke warre, A modern matter full of bloud and ruth, Where three bolde kings confounded in their height, Fall to the earth contending for a crowne, And call this warre The battell of Alcazar. (TLN 44, 62– 66)

In The Jew of Malta the modernity of the story and its implications are similarly introduced to the audience by another modern author-figure, in this case the Machiavel. Whatever its subject, the lost “matchavell” play of Lord Strange’s Men was performed the day before The Jew of Malta on two of the three occasions when it was recorded in Henslowe’s diary. (A third performance preceded the premiere of “harey the vj,” which also alludes to “notorious Machiauile”; TLN 2714.) In Marlowe’s prologue, the figure of “Machevil,” responding to contemporary claims that England had thus far been spared translations of Machiavelli,47 introduces a capsule summary of his shockingly amoral philosophy to the Rose audience: “I count Religion but a childish Toy / And hold there is no sinne but Ignorance” (sig. B). These contemporary presenters are matched in The Massacre at Paris by the mysterious figure of the English Agent, introduced in the play’s final scene as a surrogate for the author and his clandestine sources, and delegated by the dying

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Henri III to bear his message to England. The news borne by the Agent was in this case swiftly overtaken by events, since by 30 January 1592/93 the audience had experienced the failure of the 1591 expedition to Dieppe in behalf of Henri IV, and it knew also about extensive losses among English forces sent to Henri’s aid. (By late 1592 only six hundred of the approximately eight thousand troops sent in the previous eighteen months remained in fighting trim.) Some in the audience might have heard about the widely rumored negotiations between Henri of Navarre and his League opponents and thus about the waning prospects of the Protestant cause in France. When the play opened in January 1592/93, a new wave of reinforcements was in preparation, but if the play continued to be played outside of London during the company tour of 1593, then the meaning of the play would have been changed again by the hard winter experienced by the Brittany expedition, and yet again after July 1593, when Henri abandoned his support of the Protestant cause and declared, “Paris vaut bien une messe.”48 The theatrical aesthetic adopted by Lord Strange’s Men thus involved the staging of events so closely connected with current affairs that their meaning could quickly change in response to new information and ongoing developments. This is a mode of “framing” quite different from that practiced by the more traditional Queen’s Men, whose literalist technique used framing to supply “a surplus of narrative explanation” and moral commentary.49 The presenters, narrators, and surrogate authors in the plays of Lord Strange’s Men certainly narrate, interpret, and otherwise mediate to the audience in traditional fashion; but their function, as with Hieronimo’s baffling title boards, playbook, prologue, and epilogue, is not so much to explain as (in a manner almost opposite to explaining) to situate the contemporary audience themselves within the frame of the play and to implicate them in the complexities of their own contemporary world as it unfolds on stage.50 Created by intellectuals, this was an educated theater for an informed London audience. Written under the influence of humanist learning, it gave prominent attention to the place of intellectuals and intellectual heroism in worlds shaped by political intrigue, warfare, and the power of money. To be met with among the intellectuals in the repertory of Strange’s Men were not just the “portingall” Presenter who stands in for the contemporary “Portugall auctor” of The Battle of Alcazar or the provocative Machiavel who introduces The Jew of Malta but (in The Massacre at Paris) figures like Peter Ramus, Omer Talon, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas, and (if the manuscript play on Sir Thomas More was first prepared for Lord Strange’s Men) More, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and probably Erasmus. (The sheets in the original manuscript corresponding to the

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later version of the Erasmus scene do not survive.) To turn to plays with more distant settings, the hero of “mandevell” was probably a courtly adventurer along the lines of the one in William Warner’s Albion’s England, but he was also known to Elizabethans as a widely-traveled ethnographer of Eastern peoples and religions. The ancient author Flavius Josephus, if the plays by Thomas Legge and William Heminges are any guide, might have featured as a key participant in the lost “tittus & vespacia.” In the category of ancient authorities brought to life on stage were the prophet Osea, revived in A Looking Glass for London and England in order to preach to the London theater audience, and Jonah, a tortured prophet whose Job-like suffering gives him every reason to ask what it profits a man to speak in behalf of the Lord. The heroine of the lost “poope Ione” was held “in admiration for her learning,”51 as was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who featured in 1 Henry VI. So too was the heroine of the lost “senobia,” famous for the “wysedom and policy” she “attayned by the study of noble philosophye.”52 Among the magian heroes in the company repertory were the learned St. Dunstan of A Knack to Know a Knave and Friar Bacon of John of Bordeaux, whose citation of the Almagest’s “Sapiens dominabitur astris” supports the hero’s praise of scholars: “men of art to you belonges / the prayes that vertue guides and pittie waightes vpon” (TLN 773–74). To sum up, this was a repertory based in an archive of learned books and current knowledge, and one of its purposes was to mediate the excitement to be found in books, “men of art,” and “modern matter.” “ T H E E XOR BI TA N T W ICK EDN ESS OF P OW ER”: SEN EC A N ISM

Marked by the presence of these bookish figures, the repertory was deeply and extensively indebted to ancient and modern literatures and to classical rhetorical training. Orlando Furioso, for example, not only put on stage material derived from Ariosto at the very moment his fashionable poem was being published for the first time in English translation by Sir John Harington; it also included passages of Italian (roughly paraphrased) from Ariosto’s original Italian as well as Latin from Mantuan’s Eclogues, Cicero, and Prudentius. Orlando Furioso wears its learning less subtly than other plays in the repertory, but the play’s cleverness in combining a modern slander plot with romance epic, Herculean madness, and pastoral and lyric interludes gives it something like the witty delicacy of a boys’ play. Among the more important strands in the company repertory were those drawn from the literate traditions of Senecan tragedy and from the Italian no-

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vella, with its narratives of intrigue and jealous passion. These two strands of influence, sometimes braided together in the company’s plays, supported a new theatrical “genrism,” marked by the emergence of modern equivalents to the classical genres of tragedy and comedy and by conscious experimentation with their interoperable structures. This innovation, distinguishing the repertory from the medleys, moral plays, and chivalric romances of the Queen’s Men, cannot be attributed to Lord Strange’s Men exclusively, but it is in their work that we find a uniquely complete and coherent picture of tragic and comic genres emerging on the popular stage from the archives of Senecan excess and novella intrigues. Ben Jonson’s reference in Bartholomew Fair (1614) to tastes that hold “Jeronimo, or Andronicus are the best plays” points to the foundational significance of this pair of plays and to the importance of their Senecan manner for the Elizabethan popular theater.53 Both linked with Lord Strange’s Men, both possibly originated by them, these generation-defining plays brought to the popular stage a model of tragedy influenced by ancient example and previously associated primarily with elite venues like the universities and Inns of Court. At the broadest level, where the revenge structure of Senecan tragedy overlapped with Christian notions of divine retribution and moral justice, it provided for a stronger narrative line in dramatic writing, a unified action with compelling intrinsic interest, a tale that tells itself in the suspenseful unfolding. Revenge supplies narrative coherence not just to The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus but to Abdelmelec’s victory over Muly Mahamet in The Battle of Alcazar; it drives the intrigues of Barabas in The Jew of Malta, and in The Massacre at Paris it enables Marlowe to connect the 1572 massacre to the horrid revenges against the Duc du Guise and his brother and to the Guise’s dying call for further revenge on Henri III that will, by play’s end, engulf all of Europe: Ah Sextus, be reueng’d vpon the King. Philip and Parma, I am slaine for you: Pope excommunicate, Philip depose, The wicked branch of curst Valois his line. (TLN 1240–43)

The lost “tittus & vespacia” was almost certainly concerned with what the Middle Ages knew as the ultimate “vengeance of our Lord” against the Jews. It may also have contained (along with The Battle of Alcazar and Titus Andronicus) a Thyestean feast modeled on Seneca (see chapter 4). While no play of the period can be called strictly or purely Senecan—it was the norm for modern English tragedies, Fulke Greville said, to “point out God’s

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The assassination of the Duc du Guise, from Charles Pinselet, Le Martire des deux frères (1589). Courtesy of Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

revenging aspect upon every particular sin”54—it is also a mistake to see in the revenge tragedies of Lord Strange’s Men only an inherent conservatism, a mere adaptation of Seneca’s “bleak moralism” to Christian didacticism,55 or a visceral recoil from Tamburlanian excess to more “conventional ideas” of sin and punishment.56 In addition to supporting intrinsically compelling narrative structures, new aspects of verbal style, and spectacular devices like the soliciting ghost, Senecanism also supplied, through its very resemblances to Christian thinking, the potential for collision between divine and personal justice. As a corollary of such collisions, it could also underwrite the “particular style of selfhood” that Gordon Braden has described as “the self’s search for a radical, unpredicated independence.”57

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In contrast to modern tragedy’s providential concern with “God’s revenging aspect,” ancient tragedy, Greville claimed, exemplified “the dangerous miseries of man’s life, where order, laws, doctrine, and authority are unable to protect innocency from the exorbitant wickedness of power.”58 In his account of Renaissance tragedy and the Senecan tradition, Braden has located in the Stoic response to this “exorbitant wickedness of power” (or to political impotence under tyranny) the basis for cultivating a privilegium, an alienated inner world and private cause. The counterpart of this alienated inner world in the realm of Senecan tragedy is the vengeful anger “which bursts upon and desolates an unexpecting and largely uncomprehending world” and enacts “the mind’s disruptive power over external reality.”59 Thus much more than mere unity of narrative action emerged from the theatrics of Senecanism. The combination of moral outrage with political powerlessness helped to create, in The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and their Elizabethan kin, the guarded inner life of the revenging hero, his isolation by powerlessness, his epistemological uncertainty, his moral conflictedness, as well as the necessity of dissimulation, secrecy, and soliloquized deliberation of private purposes in oppressive circumstances. All of these attributes had undoubted implications for the performance techniques of Strange’s Men—for styles of impersonation and methods for presenting passion, for example, or (in the revenger’s search for demonstrative retribution that brings with it “the victim’s acknowledgement of his conqueror”)60 for the staging of spectacular violence. “ T HE ST R A NGEN ESS OR PER PL E X EDN ESS OF W I T T Y F IC T IONS ”: I N T R IGU E

Much of what went into the private passions, intrigue, paranoia, and Machiavellian Realpolitik of popular revenge tragedy came not from Seneca but from the melodramatic and sensational treatment of private passion and intrigue in the novella tradition. Greville distinguished between “tragedies . . . naked and casual like the Greek and Latin” and those “contrived with the variety and unexpected encounters of the Italians.”61 His account of the latter kind, where tragedy is shaped by “the strangeness or perplexedness of witty fictions,” is a good description of the elaborate intrigues and crossed purposes that characterize several tragedies of Lord Strange’s Men.62 By analogy with the Senecan revenge plot, love intrigue drawn from the novella tradition supported plots “better knit, more unified and coherent than those based on chronicles or episodic romances.”63 It encouraged the sort of suspenseful plotting that lets the theater tell the tale, adding sensationalism, emotional variety in subordinate roles, and

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a model of causation rooted in erotic passion and conniving purposes. Whether the central erotic problem was generated by the power of a jealous father endangering a clandestine suitor, by the cruelty of a predatory tyrant competing with a sexual rival, or by the treachery of friendships and loyalties betrayed by rivalry (all these variants are to be found in the plays of Strange’s Men), it brought with it a range of extravagant and intense emotions—a variety of ethical dilemmas involving honor, loyalty, and chastity—and a metatheatrical fascination with the nature of spectation, illusion, and disillusionment. We cannot say that the importation of such romantic material to the English popular stage originated exclusively with Lord Strange’s Men. As early as 1582 Stephen Gosson noted that Painter’s “the Palace of pleasure” was being “ransackt, to furnish the playe howses in London.” 64 But the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men is the first in which we can actually see the erotic subject matter of the novella and its corresponding manner of intrigue—previously developed in elite, private theater plays like Gismond of Salerne (1567) and its revision as Tancred and Gismund (1591)—actually taking full effect on the popular stage. “Dangerous suspition,” or “danger mixt with iealous despite” (The Spanish Tragedy, TLN 811–12), is the typical atmosphere created by erotic intrigues unfolding in perilous courtly situations. In The Spanish Tragedy the inset tragedy of Solyman and Perseda, drawn from Jacques Yver’s Printemps d’Yver by way of William Wotton, befits the play’s modern Spanish “author,” the learned Hieronimo; it also imbeds, as a play-within-the-play, a version of the main plot’s novella-like rivalry between Horatio and Balthazar for the hand of Bel-Imperia. It probably calls up as well, from the now-lost first part of Jeronimo, the original persecution (and possible murder) of the overreaching Andrea by the jealous father and brother of Bel-Imperia.65 “The cause was loue, whence grew this mortall hate” (TLN 2790) is a statement that glosses not just “Solyman and Perseda” but The Spanish Tragedy and its prequel. In The Jew of Malta a dangerous, spying father and a rivalrous love affair are combined in a crucial strand of the plot: the tragic pursuit of Abigail by Lodowick and Matthias, which leads in turn to Abigail’s betrayal of her father and the Jew’s revenge. By contrast, the clever, unexpectedly comic ending of the company’s Orlando Furioso lies in its being derived not so much from Ariosto’s main romance plot, where Angelica proves spectacularly unfaithful to Orlando, as from Greene’s transposition of a more novella-like intrigue involving jealousy, deception, and slander—Ariosto’s inset tale of Ariodante and Ginevra—onto the poem’s central episodes. The surprising result is an Angelica who turns out to be unexpectedly faithful. Like Orlando Furioso, other works fashioned for Lord Strange’s Men play self- consciously with unstable generic borders, where the cliffhanging,

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melodramatic effects of erotic intrigue and its violent emotions derive from events that can veer with equal probability toward tragedy or comedy. The company’s “bendo & Richardo,” probably drawn from Bandello and Ser Giovanni by way of Painter, looks to have been a play whose grotesque violence and gothic atmosphere finally veered toward fabliau. The Mandeville romance recorded in Warner’s Albion’s England, which we suspect of being related to the “mandevell” play in Henslowe’s diary, is in many ways a comic mirror image of Solyman and Perseda, containing as it does a tournament and unknown challenger, a lost love-token, a fearful flight from a persecuting ruler, exile and service to a Muslim prince, a masked ball, and an outburst of jealousy that in this case ends with a happy reconciliation. “GELYOUS COMODE Y ”: GEN ER IC H Y BR IDI T Y

The title of the lost “gelyous comodey” perhaps points to the company’s apparent preference for comedies based on erotic rivalry and incorporating the melodramatic potential of jealousy and betrayal. Mixed into the moral satire of A Knack to Know a Knave is the contest for the love of Alfrida waged between King Edgar and Ethenwald, Earl of Cornwall, who schemes to win for himself the bride he is commissioned to woo in the king’s behalf. The tragic, predatory tyranny of Edgar resembles Rasni’s murder of the Paphlagonian king for the sake of his wife in A Looking Glass for London and England and Prince Ferdinand’s wicked persecution of John of Bordeaux in order to obtain the knight’s wife, Rossaline. The mustache-twirling villainy of King Edgar’s erotic tyranny derives ultimately from Holinshed, but in keeping with its happy outcome A Knack to Know a Knave also imports from comic tradition and novella trickery the more comic side of intrigue, which assumes “Deceit in loue is but a merriment / To such as seek a riuall to preuent” (TLN 913–14). In the company’s other surviving comedy, Fair Em, a predatory tyrant plot similar to A Knack to Know a Knave’s, in which William the Conqueror competes with his commissioned suitor Lübeck for the hand of Mariana, is combined with a second plot involving the three companionate suitors of the Miller of Manchester’s daughter; the result is a quintessentially “gelyous comodey.” The play explores various dilemmas of honor and compromised friendship, and it portrays the passionate “hate, disdaine, reproach, and infamie” that are “the fruit of frantike bedlome ielozie” (TLN 458–59). In its attempt to follow Terence and the influential example of Munday’s Fedele and Fortunio (1585), Fair Em in the end supplies almost enough additional women to lay erotic rivalry to rest, but it seems always to have been the intention of the play’s author(s) to

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omit a full complement of potential spouses in order to emphasize at the end of the play the sense of disillusionment and emotional injury wrought by jealousy and slander. In other words, just as “the strangeness or perplexedness of witty fictions” drawn from modern novella intrigues helped to complicate and sensationalize the tragic plots favored by Lord Strange’s Men, so also did the perverse erotic rivalries behind their comedies. As they came to be inflected by the romantic values embedded in the novella tradition, rival lover plots of the sort found in ancient comedy acquired the constellation of violent passions, strong social imperatives, and sharp moral dilemmas that Lord Strange’s Men were clearly seeking to exploit. Like Senecan revenge, this was a generic thread in the archive with strong implications for the company’s performance techniques, which included not only methods for impersonating passion and arousing suspense by way of passion’s volatile and unpredictable course but also suspenseful uses of staging and spectacle. Just as revenge tragedy could reflect self-consciously upon the staging of spectacular violence, so in “gelyous comodey” the thematics of love’s illusions and disillusionment were embodied in the dynamics of spectation. These dynamics could sometimes take emblematic form, as in Fair Em’s stage direction “Enter Valingford and Mountney at two sundrie dores, looking angerly each on other with Rapiers drauen” (ll. 813–14) or in the last of the wary confrontations between Lodowick and Matthias in The Jew of Malta: Enter Mathias. Math. This is the place; now Abigall shall see Whether Mathias hold her deare or no. Enter Lodo. reading. Lod. What, dares the villain write in such base terms? Math. I did it, and reuenge it if thou dar’st. Fight: Enter Barabas aboue. Bar. O bravely fought; and yet they thrust not home. Now, Lodowicke, now, Mathias; so. [Both fall dead.] (sig. F2v)

As Barabas’s jealous “supervision” of the scene from above suggests, the ultimate import of such scenes concerns the role of spectation in the very nature of jealousy itself. Thus in Orlando Furioso Orlando comes upon and misconstrues the forged poems hung up by Sacripante, and in The Spanish Tragedy Pedringano, discovering the secret affair of Horatio and Bel-Imperia, “shews all to the

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Prince and Lorenzo, placing them in secret” on the balcony above Hieronimo’s orchard (sig. C4v). Perhaps the most elaborate of such spectacles is formed by the chain of rival lovers in Fair Em, each entering to observe the intentions of the competitors who follow: Enter Manuile alone, disguised ... Enter Valingford at another dore, disguised. . . . Manuile stays hiding himselfe. ... Enter Mountney disguised at another dore. (TLN 277, 291, 302)

Anticipating the game of “all hid” in Love’s Labour’s Lost but rooted in jealousy rather than in sporting suspicion, this scene embodies as spectatorial situation the erotic problem of imperfect knowledge; it points forward to Fair Em’s key metaphor—the illusory basis of the slanders against the heroine—and to the pain of Em’s final disillusionment with love. Lord Strange’s Men were perhaps not the first to develop these effects of “gelyous comodey”; they may have found a strong precedent in one of the most innovative of the Queen’s Men’s plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, where Prince Edward observes through Bacon’s magic glass his proxy suitor Lacy wooing Margaret of Fressingfield for himself. But a substantial portion of their plays deploy these “spectacles of jealousy” not simply for the dramatic irony that lends intrinsic interest to intrigue plots or for the sake of putting jealousy into the emblematic form of juxtaposed viewpoints but in order, through the staging of doubt and imperfect knowledge, to lend depth and substance to the personal worlds and passions represented. As Katharine Maus has explained in her treatment of the staging of jealousy, spectation is an “art of diagnosis” that mirrors the theater’s own.66 In what spectation skeptically suggests about the inscrutability of secret purposes and hidden emotions, about the inner lives and intentions of others, it supports modes of characterization and impersonation that imply more than meets the eye. In the plays of Lord Strange’s Men, spectation supports the company’s experiment in personating passion. A final example of the company’s creation of sensational dramatic moments from the situational context of jealousy is the Guise’s discovery of his wife’s secret affair with Mugeron, a creepy theatrical coup that Marlowe derived from a minor historical scandal involving a wholly separate person from Mugeron (one Saint-Mégrin) but that he then inflated into the basis for the play’s final revenge action, the outbreak of civil war between the Guise and Henri III:

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The Archive: Sources and Genres in the Repertory Enter the Maid with Inke and Paper. [Duch.] So, set it down, and leaue me to my selfe. [Exit Maid.] She writes. O would to God this quill that heere doth write Had late been pluckt from out faire Cupids wing: That it might print these lines within his heart. Enter The Guise. Guise. What, all alone, my loue, and writing too: I prethee, say to whome thou writes? Duch. To such a one, my Lord, as when she reads my lines, will laugh, I feare me, at their good aray. Guise. I pray thee let me see. Duch. O no, my Lord, a woman only must partake the secrets of my heart. Guise. But Madam I must see. he takes it. Are these your secrets that no man must know? Duch. O pardon me my Lord. Guise. Thou trothles and vniust, what lines are these? Am I growne olde, or is thy lust growne yong, Or hath my loue been so obscurde in thee That others needs to comment on my text? ... Mor du, wert not the fruit within thy wombe, Of whose increase I set some longing hope: This wrathfull hand should strike thee to the hart. Hence strumpet, hide thy head for shame, And fly my presence if thou looke to liue! Exit [Duchess]. O wicked sex, periured and vniust, Now doe I see that from the very first, Her eyes and lookes sow’d seeds of periury, But villaine he to whom these lines should goe Shall buy her loue euen with his dearest bloud. Exit. (TLN 801–37v)

Carefully choreographed around situation- changing entrances and exits and based on the subtext of the Guise’s violent, menacing temperament, the scene integrates language with gesture, script with embodiment, tracing an arc of unfolding emotional action to its conclusion on the note of blood revenge. This is not a scene required by the historical sources for The Massacre at Paris, but its focus and technique, novella-like and (at the end) Senecan, are the very essence of the company’s technical achievements in narrative coherence and emotional power. They are a dimension of the company’s archive insofar as they

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derive from its preoccupation with “modern matter,” in this case both recent French politics and the literate fashion for novella intrigue. But they are just as surely a dimension of the company’s artistic repertoire, its cultivation of techniques of staging, spectation, and impersonation, which marked a new departure for the Elizabethan stage. We have begun our turn from the company’s archive to its performance techniques, and we will take up questions of impersonation and acting style in the chapter that follows.

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Repertoire: The Plays in Performance

PER FOR M A NCE T R A DI T IONS A N D T H E AT R IC A L FA SH IONS

Before they joined together as Lord Strange’s Men, the members of the company had been Leicester’s, Lord Admiral’s, and Queen’s Men; some of their plays likely came to them from these companies. The playwrights who prepared new plays for them wrote for other companies as well. It is inevitable, then, that the company should have relied upon the common currency of Elizabethan theatrical craft. To be found in their plays are techniques of allegorical embodiment, pantomime, and visual display prominent elsewhere in the tradition and among their rivals. The processions, disguisings, conjurings, apparitions, devils, swordplay, battles, and clowning in their plays look in many respects like those performed by other companies. At the same time, the repertory shows many signs of self-conscious experiment and creative adaptation of traditional performance techniques. For example, the company’s work with emblematic staging and pantomime can be seen in their handling of the traditional motif of the sinner carried to Hell on the devil’s back. In one of the company’s belated morality plays, A Knack to Know a Knave, the death of the wicked Bailiff of Hexham adheres straightforwardly to a longestablished stage tradition: Bayl. Ah hark, methinkes the Iudge doth giue my doome, And I am damned to euer burning fyre: Soule, be thou safe, and bodie flye to hell. He dyeth. Enter Deuil, and carie him away. (ll. 370–73)

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By contrast with this straightforward treatment, however, A Looking Glass for London and England modifies the formula, conflating it with a disguising scene in which a would-be trickster appears “clad in diuels attire” in order to amuse himself by pretending to be the spirit of a dead man returned from Hell to claim the life and soul of the clownish blacksmith Adam. Ordered to “get vp on my backe, that I may carrie thee,” Adam, claiming to be “a Smith sir,” checks out of habit “whether you be well shod or no” and, discovering the demon “hath neuer a clouen foote,” administers a beating to the mock- devil (TLN 1667–731). The beating itself represents no advance over traditional stagecraft, and arguably this conflation of two inherited stage practices is merely a function of the play’s larger strategy of “sophisticatedly combining a number of inherited dramatic modes with imitations of the newest vogues, so that the piece has the appearance of a spectacular résumé of the state of the theater in 1590.”1 But the exposure of the actor’s shoe doing duty for the devil’s hoof disenchants in a manner that supplants emblematic technique (as does Shakespeare’s probable recollection of this moment at the end of Othello), and it points to the further innovation of deferring the devil’s work when Adam is handed over to the merely secular authority of the public hangman. Another revealing example of experiment transforming emblematic technique is the company’s handling of suicidal despair. In A Looking Glass, a despairing Usurer, disturbed by the portents threatening destruction to Nineveh, enters “solus, with a halter in one hand, dagger in the other” and laments his groaning conscience, at which point “The euill angell tempteth him, offering the knife and rope.” In a further dozen lines, the Usurer considers repentance and then “sits him downe in sack- cloathes, his hands and eyes reared to heauen” (TLN 2041– 79). Subordinating language to pantomime, the Usurer’s repentance follows in the most straightforwardly conservative manner a traditional practice extending from Skelton’s Magnyfycence, where Myschefe offers the despairing hero a “knife” and “halter” (ll. 2313–14), to Doctor Faustus, where at the depth of Faustus’s despair “Mephistopheles gives him a dagger” (A-Text, 5.1.51). This emblematic “theatergram”2 proved adaptable to Spenser’s allegory of Despair, who offers his victims a rope and rusty knife (The Faerie Queene, 1.9.29). The technique is conspicuously invoked in order to be literally dropped, however, in The Spanish Tragedy, as the despairing Hieronimo weighs his options: Enter Hieronimo with a Ponyard in one hand, and a Rope in an other. Hiero. Now Sir, perhaps I come and see the King,

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Repertoire: The Plays in Per for mance The King sees me, and faine would heare my sute. Why is not this a strange and seld seene thing, That standers by with toyes should make me mute. Go too, I see their shifts, and say no more, Hieronimo, tis time for thee to trudge. Downe by the dale that flowes with purple gore, Standeth a firie Tower, there sits a iudge, Vpon a seat of steele and molten brasse: And twixt his teeth he holdes a fire-brand, That leades vnto the lake where hell doth stand. Away Hieronimo to him be gone: Heele doe thee iustice for Horatios death. Turne downe this path thou shalt be with him straite, Or this, and then thou needs not take thy breth. This way, or that way: soft and faire, not so: For if I hang myselfe, lets know Who will reuenge Horatios murther then? No, no, fie, no: pardon me, ile none of that: He flings away the dagger & halter. This way ile take, and this way comes the King. He takes them vp againe. (TLN 1859– 82)

Though it follows the tradition by ending with a change of mind, the passage arrives at its destination by an innovative route, and the discarding of the props is anticipated by a transformation of technique, as language supplants pantomime in Horatio’s discovery of an unconventional motive to continue living. Though elements of pantomime remain, they are transformed into metaphor, as the poniard and halter become the “ways” and “paths” in Hieronimo’s mental journey, which converge on the underworld path on which Andrea has preceded him, then lead to the discovery of his own cause. The “third way” at which Hieronimo arrives—his plan of revenge—is ambiguously glossed by the gesture of taking up the props again. The props continue to function in an emblematic fashion, now signaling his intention to seek revenge and, more broadly, marking the turn of his incipient madness into an “antic” but purposeful manner. No longer the emblem of suicide that bespeaks his despairing situation but instead the means by which he will alter it, the dagger becomes an ambiguously “twice-performed” emblem, a prop available for Hieronimo’s performance as well as the actor’s. In the interval that follows, it is first not clear how Hieronimo will use the poniard and then, as “he diggeth with his dagger,” not clear whether it is merely the actor, or also Hieronimo, who is feigning madness. Hieronimo’s

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abrupt “Exit” (TLN 1946) adds to the mystery of his hidden life and purpose. Later in the play he mischievously reinvokes the emblematic tradition by way of strategic misdirection when he briefs his young cast that the Bashaw who conspired with Soliman in the murder of Erasto, “moued with remorse of his misdeeds,” “ran to a mountain top and hung himselfe” (TLN 2534–35). Having played the Bashaw’s part personally, Hieronimo is finally thwarted when “he runs to hang himselfe” (TLN 2845), but then, in effect, he innovates again, exchanging the halter not for the traditional dagger but for the penknife with which to kill Castile before finally slaying himself. Kyd’s self- conscious manipulation of the emblematic instruments of suicide (and thus of the emblematic tradition itself) is taken one step further in The Jew of Malta, where Barabas invokes the motif of contemplated suicide (and most probably the Usurer of A Looking Glass as well) in a performance from which suicide’s literal stage instruments have been erased. With the discovery that the home in which he has concealed his money bags has been confiscated for a nunnery, Barabas invokes the possibility of suicide only to dismiss it: My gold, my gold, and all my wealth is gone. You partiall heauens, haue I deseru’d this plague? What will you thus oppose me, lucklesse Starres, To make me desperate in my pouerty? And knowing me impatient in distresse, Thinke me so mad as I will hang my selfe, That I may vanish ore the earth in ayre, And leaue no memory that e’er I was. No, I will liue: nor loath I this my life: And since you leaue me in the Ocean thus To sinke or swim, and put me to my shifts, I’le rouse my senses, and awake my selfe. (sigs. C3v– C4)

The malign heavens form an unconventional backdrop for this nonemblematic, almost entirely verbal performance of the will to live. Against such a background, what is the point of a halter, when the perversity of the universe can better be answered with a greater perversity, the sheer, grim determination to live on in willful defiance? Barabas’s madness, if madness it is, goes Hieronimo one better, since revenge, at this early point, has yet to become his purpose. The breathy “hang my selfe,” suspended sardonically at line’s end, and the increasing length and rhetorical vehemence of Barabas’s questions all turn on the fulcrum of his blunt declaration of the will to exist, and from that declaration follow the means

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to self-renewal: “for Religion / Hides many mischiefes from suspition” (sig. C4). Elements of the emblematic tradition return when Barabas, torn between girl and gold, beauty and bliss, “hugs his bags” (sig. D2v), but it is precisely the purpose of the play to create ambiguity by juxtaposing such elements of emblematic tradition against the sheer vitality and verbal improvisation of the villain-hero. Innovations like these were in many respects created by the plays’ authors, who provided the actors with new techniques to go with new material; at the same time, though, it required the actors’ practice of performing in daily repertory—and against the background of artisanal tradition—to make the changes evident through the cross-referencing of performance styles. Such crossreference was likely not unique to Lord Strange’s Men, but as the leading company in London and at court during a time of particularly intense and rapid transformation in the art, they were exceptionally well positioned to respond to the range of possibilities being opened on the later Elizabethan stage. Establishing themselves in London after a decade and a half of growth in the city’s theater industry had begun to build a contemporary audience and repertory, and making it a point to perform on a daily basis over long-term residence, the company developed practices that relied heavily, as the scenes above suggest, on inter-repertorial borrowing and allusion. Just as they could adapt and transform elements from the emblematic and medley style of the Queen’s Men, for example, so were they just as quick as the Queen’s Men and other companies to incorporate and modify the “high astounding terms” and spectacular effects of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. In the chariot of Muly Mahamet in The Battle of Alcazar, in the chariot of Titus in the first scene of Titus Andronicus, and in the opening scene of “harey the vj,” where the members of the funeral cortège are bound to Henry V’s “Woodden Coffin . . . / Like Captiues bound to a Triumphant Carre” (TLN 27, 30), the company showed their penchant for performative cross-reference. Self-conscious citation of earlier performance modes was put to similar use in The Spanish Tragedy, where Hieronimo’s masque of English conquerors was worked up in the emblematic pageant style of the Queen’s Men—the English champions’ hanging up of their escutcheons specifically evokes a similar motif in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London—only for this emblematic performance to receive its problematic reception in the context of Realpolitik at the Spanish court. For the Rose audience, then, the issue was not so much what the masque’s allegory had to say about England, Spain, and Portugal as its troubling opacity to the flummoxed Portuguese ambassador and Spanish king (“I sound not well the misterie”; TLN 552), both of whom puzzle over its mischievous provocations. In its ironic effects, this first inset performance anticipates the final

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masque in several languages, in which the author-actor Hieronimo uses theatrical contrivance “to butcher an entire royal line.”3 The daily performances recorded in Henslowe’s diary show Lord Strange’s Men, like the later Lord Admiral’s Men, developing their repertory out of the proven successes of their own and other companies, diversifying within established genres, following up on popular subject matter, and extending familiar narratives by way of prequels and sequels.4 Besides acquiring plays from other companies, Lord Strange’s Men developed new work out of the native genres favored by the Queen’s Men, such as the English chronicle play (“harey of cornwell,” “harey the vj,” perhaps Sir Thomas More), the chivalric romance (“mandevell” and John of Bordeaux) and the satiric medley (A Looking Glass for London and England and A Knack to Know a Knave); by the same token, they continued and built upon the work of the Lord Admiral’s Men in the pagan conqueror play (The Battle of Alcazar, the two parts of Tamar Cham, “tittus & vespacia”) and revenge tragedy (The Spanish Tragedy and perhaps Titus Andronicus). Their preferred method of development, however, was not straightforward imitation but differentiation by way of generic experiment and contamination. Thus, for example, their London moral play took its satiric impetus from The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London but developed its narrative materials by daring to revive the Old Testament biblical play and by parodying the outrageous excesses of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. The company’s other moral play, A Knack to Know a Knave, imported the allegorical manner of The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London into a plot combining the features of “gelyous comodey,” saint’s play, and magian spectacle. Several of their plays, contributing to a new fashion for multipart narrative, provided fresh perspectives on existing material in the form of prequels or sequels. Thus “harey the vj” was written as a prequel to the two parts of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, which by 1592 probably belonged to Pembroke’s Men, and “harey of cornwell” was likely devoted to events immediately preceding those covered in Edward I. John of Bordeaux was designed not just as a sequel to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay but, in its imitation of providentialist romance from The true chronicle history of King Leir, as a treatment of magic deviating quite deliberately, as we shall see, from the conservatism of Greene’s Bacon play for the Queen’s Men. The extent to which Lord Strange’s Men looked outward in this interrepertorial manner to the work of other companies was a defining feature of their inwardly distinctive performance style and thus one of the reasons for their apparent success. The very intensiveness with which they cultivated the accumulating dramatic repertory of their time, in other words, probably contributed

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to their professional celebrity. The most important elements of the company’s performance style, however, were developed by working inwardly, in relation to their own house, their personnel, their own repertory, and the audience who were becoming their regular patrons. Barabas’s hat, “a present from the Great Cham” (sig. H4v), the dying Bailiff’s vision of Revenge “with an yron whip” (TLN 367), York’s allusion to “notorious Macheuile” (TLN 2714), and Rubin Arches’s sacrifice of a son without “sweet smoake of fire” (TLN 399) are instances wherein The Jew of Malta, A Knack to Know a Knave, 1 Henry VI, and The Battle of Alcazar invoke aspects of other company plays (Tamar Cham, The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, and Titus Andronicus) that were familiar only through performance. The cauldron that probably appeared in “bendo & Richardo” as well as in the Jew of Malta, the bashaws who appeared in The Jew of Malta, The Battle of Alcazar, John of Bordeaux, and The Spanish Tragedy, and the clownish Smith reprised from the Looking Glass for London in A Knack to Know a Knave are just a few minor examples of technical resources belonging to the company’s repertoire. In what follows, we discuss those aspects of the repertoire that most strongly defined the company style.

SPEC TACL E A N D S TAGI NG

The company style of Lord Strange’s Men relied heavily on spectacular effects. Particularly impressive, for example, was the dumb show preceding the fifth act of The Battle of Alcazar: Enter the Presenter before the last dumbe show, and speaketh. Ill be to him that so much ill bethinkes, And ill betide this foule ambitious Moore, Whose wily traines with smoothest course of speech, Hath tide and tangled in a dangerous warre, The fierce and manly king of Portugall. Lightning and thunder. Nowe throwe the heauens foorth their lightning flames, And thunder ouer Afffrickes fatall fields, Bloud will haue bloud, foul murther scape no scourge. Enter Fame like an Angell, and hangs the crownes vpon a tree. At last descendeth fame as Iris, To finish fainting Didoes dying lyfe, Fame from her stately bowre doth descend,

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And on the trees as fruit new ripe to fall, Placeth the crownes of these vnhappie kings, That earst she kept in eie of all the world. Heere the blazing Starre. Now firie stares and streaming comets blaze, That threat the earth and princes of the same. Fireworkes. Fire, fire about the axiltree of heauen, Whoorles round, and from the foot of Casyopa In fatall houre consumes these fatall crownes, One fals. Downe fals the diademe of Portugall, The other fals. The crownes of Barbary and kingdoms fall, Ay me, that kingdomes may not stable stand, And now approching neere the dismall day, The bloudie daie when the battles ioyne, Mondaie the fourth of August seuentie eight ... Exit. Alarums within, let the chambers be discharged, then enter to the battell, and the Moores flie. (TLN 1256– 90)

Though this pyrotechnical display of “firie stares and streaming comets” probably alludes to a historical event in the months preceding El-Ksar Kbir—the appearance of the great comet visible from November 1577 to January 1577/78— the dumb show transforms the historical phenomenon into a spiritual portent, combining it with the emblematic allegory of the falling crowns and the angellike personification of Fame in order to foretell the destruction of three kings in one fateful day. Like the monitory spectacle in A Looking Glass, where “A hand from out a cloud, theatneth a burning sword” to Nineveh (TLN 1636), the dumb shows in The Battle of Alcazar vividly embody the supernatural forces associated with traditional drama. The ghosts and the personification of Revenge that frame the action of The Battle of Alcazar and The Spanish Tragedy, the angels who usher in the prophets in A Looking Glass, and the many devils summoned from Hell in A Knack to Know a Knave, John of Bordeaux, “harey the vj,” and The First Part of the Contention (if that was originally a play for Strange’s Men) derive from an older type of dramaturgy that treats the stage as a threshold between this world and the next.

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The company’s primary interest, however, lay not so much in the supernatural causes of portents as in their potential for being translated into stunning material displays that would make full use of the company’s resources and the architecture of the Rose stage. The spectacular events in A Looking Glass included such visual coups de théâtre as the “Lightning and thunder wherewith Remilia is strooken” (TLN 530), the sight of “Ionas the prophet cast out of the whales belly vpon the Stage” (TLN 1460), the appearance of a “Serpent” that “deuoureth the vine” under which Jonas shelters (TLN 2190), and the entry of Oseas, “brought in by an Angell . . . and set downe ouer the Stage in a Throne” (TLN 160). While some of these spectacles were influenced by traditional Christian dramaturgy (the vomiting whale, for example, may have been a latter- day version of Hell mouth, perhaps even the “Hell mought” listed among Henslowe’s properties in 1598),5 others were theatrical stunts devoted to bizarre and alien wonders; in this category were spectacles like the “Priest[s] of the sunne, with the miters on their heads, carrying fire in their hands” (TLN 1618), the feat by which “The Magi with their rods beate the ground, and from vnder there riseth a braue Arbour” (TLN 522–23), and the apparently popular show, repeated in Orlando Furioso and John of Bordeaux, in which nymphs, fauns, and satyrs were summoned by magic to console suffering romantic heroes with graceful song and dance. The manuscript plot for the Lord Admiral’s Men’s later revival of Strange’s “tamar cham” contains a similar scene of nymphs and satyrs honoring the marriage of Tamar Cham with Palmida, and it musters for its final scene an astounding procession of tartars, amazons, negroes, moors, cannibals, hermaphrodites, and pygmies.6 The probable author of the spectacular Battle of Alcazar was George Peele, an organizer of paradramatic shows and pageants whose work included royal receptions at Oxford, Lord Mayor’s shows in London, and a heraldic poem in celebration of the 1590 Accession Day tilt. Peele had probably already proven himself a “craftsman of wonder” for the popular stage in the Queen’s Men’s Old Wives’ Tale.7 So had Greene in the Queen’s Men’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in Alphonsus, King of Aragon, a play whose auspices are unknown. The contributions of Peele and Greene to the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men, together with those of Marlowe, who had developed an alternative use of spectacle for the cruelty of Tamburlaine, and of Kyd, who has been said to have created “an art of spectacle as significant conception,”8 suggest that Lord Strange’s Men were seeking to develop a charismatic theater of wonder. The company’s style, in other words, braided entertainment and storytelling with a mode of efficacious per formance that made the audience participants in a wondrous event.

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The hoariest sleights and simplest feints of the traditional actor’s craft would have sufficed for such wonders in John of Bordeaux as the binding of Amurath in a spell (TLN 199), Perce’s use of baggy pants to “transubstantiate” books into bottled ale (TLN 388–402), or the villagers who dance themselves dizzy in a charmed circle (TLN 795–837). The same is true of the signaling of Orlando’s offstage victory by his reentry wearing Rodamont’s coat (Orlando Furioso, sig. C2v) or of St. Dunstan’s instructing the devil Asmoroth to “follow me inuisible” (A Knack to Know a Knave, TLN 1595). But many of the spectacular effects and sensational events in the repertoire suggest that the company was seeking to make full and innovative use of the features of the Rose.9 Among these resources was the three-faced frons scenae, which seems, from the plays of Strange’s Men, to have had doors on each of the two outermost, angled faces and a larger door, capable of serving as a “discovery space,” on the central façade of the tiring house. The use of more than two doors is visible in stage directions calling for entrances or exits “at one doore and . . . at another” (as opposed to “the other”),10 for entrances or exits “at one end” and “at the other end,” for exits “seuerally” or entrances “seuerall wayes,”11 and, most explicitly, in Fair Em’s “Enter Manuile alone, disguised. . . . Enter Valingford at another dore. . . . Enter Monteney at another dore” (TLN 278, 291, 302). That the central door may have been larger is suggested by the entry of the chariot in The Battle of Alcazar and by the many apparent uses of a “discovery space” of some size. These include a dumb show with a curtained bed in The Battle of Alcazar (sig. A2v), the opening appearance of Barabas “in his Counting-house, with heapes of gold before him” (sig. Bv), the drawing of a curtain to reveal the sleeping Friar Barnardine (IV.i.137–41), the drawing of the curtain of Remilia’s tent (TLN 51– 552), and the drawing of an arras to reveal the Lord Mayor’s court in session (Sir Thomas More, TLN 105). Other implied uses for the central opening include the cave in the bordering wood of Orlando Furioso, the gates of Orleans and Bordeaux in “harey the vj,” and the entry to the temple of Nineveh in A Looking Glass (TLN 2150). The relatively shallow and elongated stage at the Rose, stretching across the three angled bays of the tiring house, lent support to the several grand processions in the plays. These included not only the final procession of subjected peoples in 1 Tamar Cham but also the funeral procession of Henry V in “harey the vj,” the entry of “the twelue Peeres of France, with drum and trumpets” in Orlando Furioso (TLN 1071), and, in The Spanish Tragedy, the arrival of the victorious army, which is required to “enter and passe by” and then to “enter again” and “march once more about these walles” before depositing Balthazar, Lorenzo, and Horatio before the royal party (TLN 210–36). In Edmond Ironside the two armies of the Saxons and the Danes “march a longe

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the stage, one [towardes] an other” (5.2.37 s.d.), and the two leaders “trayne theire souldio along the stage” (5.2.85. s.d.). The company often made use of playing space above the stage, where Barabas and Abigail make strategic appearances in The Jew of Malta, where Lorenzo, Balthazar, Bel-Imperia, and possibly the viewers of the final masque appear in The Spanish Tragedy, where the assassin of Coligny probably stands “in some window” to shoot into the street (The Massacre at Paris, TLN 102, 228), and where besieged defenders appear “upon the walls” in “harey the vj” (TLN 720, 1472, 1852), Orlando Furioso (TLN 394), and (possibly) “tittus & vespacia.”12 There is less conclusive evidence for the use of a trapdoor and space beneath the stage, but there are possible indications of such a device in A Looking Glass, where “The Magi with their rods beate the ground, and from vnder there riseth a braue Arbour” (TLN 521–22) and where “a flame of fire appeareth from beneath, and Radagon is swallowed” (TLN 1230–31). Revenge’s exit lines to Andrea at the end of The Spanish Tragedy likewise speak of hasting “downe” (TLN 2964) to the underworld to greet the souls of the play’s many victims.13 There is no requirement that the many spirits and devils of the plays emerge through a trapdoor, but where the stage directions are often general (“Enter the Deuill,” or “Enter Fiends. . . . They depart”) the language surrounding such events speaks of their being “raysd” from “the depe,” from “the bowells of the yearth,” or from the “powerful regions under the earth.”14 Similar ambiguities surround the possible use of aerial effects, as when Oseas is “brought in by an Angell . . . and set downe ouer the Stage in a Throne.”15 In The Battle of Alcazar the Presenter’s reference to Fame “descend[ing] . . . like Iris” (italics ours) may also be glossing as an aerial descent the stage direction calling for Fame to “Enter . . . like an Angel,” that is, not in the garb of an angel but in flight (TLN 1267, 1269). Henslowe’s payment of carpenters for “mackinge the throne In the heuenes” dates to June 1595, but it seems possible that in The Looking Glass for London and The Battle of Alcazar, both on the books as older plays in 1592, Lord Strange’s Men were already somehow making use of aerial effects in their plays.16 Plays like “harey the vj,” The Jew of Malta, and The Massacre at Paris all stage rapidly unfolding historical events around carefully delineated urban spaces, thus seeming to exploit the various spatial dimensions of the Rose’s permanent architecture. The Orleans sequence of 1 Henry VI, for example, concludes with the spectacular night raid in which Talbot, Bedford, and Burgundy, entering with their forces and “with scaling Ladders,” “ascend” and make their “entrance seuerall wayes” up the three-faceted frons scenae (“Ile to yond corner.” “And I to this.” / “And heere will Talbot mount” [TLN 683–714]). The French then

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“leape ore the walles in their shirts” (TLN 720), a “feat of activity” more in line with what we know of Lord Strange’s troupes than with the later work of Shakespeare. The Bailiffs of London “appeare aboue” on the walls of London just before, in a stage direction added to the manuscript of Edmond Ironside, the troops of Canutus “assayle the walls in their shirts” (3.2.8, 48). Both of Marlowe’s two plays for Lord Strange’s Men differ from his others in being set in confined, labyrinthine urban locales that, Escher-like, dizzyingly shift the action between upper and lower, exterior and interior, private and public spaces.17 In the successive staging of The Jew of Malta, the action moves through the private spaces of Barabas’s two houses (with their counting house, gallery, and curtained space for the sleeping friar), the nunnery that the first of these becomes (with its bell and upper window), the house of Bellamira, the senate house, the marketplace and streets, the city walls, and the privy postern leading underneath them. In The Massacre at Paris the explosive violence of St. Bartholomew’s Day (accelerated, perhaps, by the effects of abridgement in the text) moves rapidly between the Paris streets and private interiors invaded by the marauding Catholics. The Rose stage provides, in succession, the window

Franz Hogenberg, L’assassinat de Coligny (c. 1572). Reproduced by permission of Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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from which the Lord Admiral is shot; the streets where Protestants are chased down; the Lord Admiral’s bed and bedchamber, from which his body is thrown; the doorway to Seroune’s house, within which his wife speaks before her husband emerges to his slaughter; Ramus’s study, from whose window Taleus leaps before the assassins enter from the street; the schoolroom from which the young Navarre and Condy flee as the Guisards enter to murder their tutors; the wood where Protestant worshippers are murdered en masse; the tree on which the corpse of the Lord Admiral, headless and handless, is hung upside down. Piranesi’s dark prison scenes, rather than Escher’s staircases, may be a better analogy for the labyrinthine succession of spaces in these spectacles of rampant violence. The nightmarish atmosphere of these plays was reinforced by the Rose’s sonic resources, which obviously included a large bell and a set of explosive “chambers” located somewhere offstage. The climactic engagement of The Battle of Alcazar begins with the call for “Alarums within, let the chambers be discharged” (TLN 1300), and likewise when the armies of Don Sebastian and Muly Mahamet arrive at Tangiers, “the Trumpets sound, the chambers are dischargde” (TLN 977). Interestingly the only other plays before Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to make reference to “chambers” are two we believe to have been intended for Lord Strange’s Men but perhaps never performed at the Rose: The First Part of the Contention, which demands “the chambers be discharged, like as it were a fight at sea” (TLN 1463– 64), and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which requires that “the chambers be discharged” for the battle of Tewkesbury (sig. E4).18 Other plays by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose must, however, have made use of Henslowe’s “chambers”; in the Gunner of Orleans scene of “harey the vj,” for example, “they shot” (that is, “shoot”) the “peece of Ordnance” the gunner has placed (probably offstage) opposite the English siege tower (TLN 540, 479). Barabas’s plan that “A warning-peece shall be shot off from the Tower” of Rhodes is likewise fulfilled when the script calls for “a charge” to go off (sigs. Kv– K2). In keeping with the Guise’s order to “shoot the ordinance off . . . then toll the bell” as signals to commence the Bartholomew’s Day massacre, “The ordinance being shot off, the bell tolls” (TLN 389– 98), and the bell continues to toll throughout the four horrific scenes of slaughter that follow (see TLN 541). The bell was uncoupled from the chambers in The Jew of Malta, but it was used separately, to equally horrifying effect, to initiate the poisoning of the nunnery. M AGIC A N D T H E AT R IC A L SK EP T ICISM

In their spectacular uses of the Rose theater space, as in their use of fireworks, sound effects, mechanical devices, and elaborate dumb shows, Lord Strange’s

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Men were clearly drawing from the techniques of public pageantry in order to produce a commercial theater rich in wondrous and “magical” effects. In public pageantry and official ceremonies, the purpose of spectacle was, paradoxically, to render much of the real world invisible, including both the underlying political realities and the material processes responsible for the spectacle itself. Calling not so much for interpretation as for consumption, spectacle and pageantry subordinated the public to “its own activity of visualization.”19 What mattered, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, was not what the public thought, but what it saw.20 And what it saw was shaped by the social, political, and religious arrangements being transacted through the ceremony of which the spectacle was part. To the extent that the artistry behind the splendor of spectacle was visible as such, it reflected the wealth and magnificence of the patrons and sponsors more than it did the skills and intentions of the performers themselves. Though we might suppose that in many regards the striking effects of spectacle worked similarly in public pageantry and in plays at the Rose—Strange’s Men, after all, were servants to magnificent aristocratic patrons—their daily repetition in the theater repertory clearly involved some crucial differences. As experienced theater professionals engaging in the commercial enterprise of daily performance, Lord Strange’s Men were using the techniques of spectacle to support the dramatic mise-en-scène, to display their skills and charisma, to explore the technical capacities of the commercial stage, to attract and shape a permanent theatergoing public—a body of consuming patrons—and to support an entertainment business with its own distinctive forms of commodified magnificence. This is perhaps one reason why so much of the spectacle in the company repertory is presented as already “received” by an onstage audience, that is, framed as performance, presented as sensational illusion produced by theatrical skill. As a further consequence of being presented in this conspicuous way, spectacle and theatrical illusion could also become the provocative and sometimes curious object of the plays’ own intellectual scrutiny. This is most obviously true of those plays containing such embedded shows and per formances as Hieronimo’s ambiguous court masques and the entertainments worked up by clowns in A Knack to Know a Knave. The rehearsal of such framed performances points at once to the company’s exceptional showmanship and to the tendency of their plays to mediate between spectacular actions transpiring in the mise-en-scène and critical awareness of the technical panache of their performance in the theatrical here and now. The company’s style was thus aligned with philosophy’s way of treating wondrous emotions and perplexing experience: wonder and perplexity initiate a

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reflexive double-take that leads to intellectual discovery and clarification. So, for example, reflexiveness, as much as sensationalism, is a keynote of the company’s remarkable preoccupations with magic and with spectacular cruelty and violence. To begin with the first of these, John of Bordeaux’s interpolated stage direction to “bring in the showes as you know” (TLN 446) aptly emphasizes the extent to which that play’s spectacular magic scenes take the form of freestanding spectacles produced by Bacon to console, edify, or manipulate the play’s other characters. Similarly in A Knack to Know a Knave St. Dunstan’s conjuring show, however garbled in the surviving quarto, puts a devil into disguise for the ethical and political purpose of enlightening the tyrannical King Edgar by means of a powerfully theatrical demonstration. Even the supernatural shows of A Looking Glass for London and England are largely presented as such, not just in the obvious sense that acts of God are always signs and portents “shown” to mortals, but in the less obvious sense that except for the few unfortunately “real” effects they inflict on their carefully selected victims, the play’s acts of spectacular vengeance—the blasting of Remilia by lightning, the fiery swallowing of Radagon into the earth, the hand emerging from a cloud and holding a lightning bolt—turn out to be less the traditional emblems that they seem than deliberately misleading demonstrations of God’s true nature, which, to Jonas’s great exasperation, proves merciful toward Nineveh.21 In other words, the play’s spectacular techniques are owing ultimately to the fact that its God is not just the greatest of all theatricalists but the greatest of all ironists. In the magian plays that figured prominently in their repertory,22 the company was responding creatively to a very recent fashion whose theatrical appeal lay partly in the way that the performance of magic always exploits ambiguous relationships between trickery and the possibility of efficacious ritual.23 This ambiguity plays a crucial role in the influential magian plays that immediately preceded those of Lord Strange’s Men: The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (Derby’s Men, c. 1582), Doctor Faustus (probably for the Lord Admiral’s Men), and Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the Queen’s Men’s comic answer to Marlowe’s Faustian tragedy. All of these plays depend heavily on the antimagian countertradition that, from the time that Lucifer first aspired to “be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:14), identified magic as the work of the Antichrist, as an anticreational realm of false likenesses parodically opposed to the divine creation. Based on the rivalry of Aaron’s magic with that of Pharaoh’s sorcerers (Exodus 7:6–12) or of Simon Peter’s with that of Simon Magus (Acts 8: 9–24), the contest between the rival magics of God and Satan became a major element in medieval drama. But with the coming of the Reformation, as Protestant thinking increasingly associated papist rituals and images with the dangerous

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illusions and perverse powers of the Antichrist, theatrical performance itself began to be linked to demonic magic as one of the devil’s works. Reformers drew upon the antitheatrical writings of the Church fathers, but it was Protestant iconoclasm itself, with its suspicion of images and its certainty that “the devil is in his pomps and shows,” that transformed theatrical performance into a violation of the baptismal vow to renounce “the devil, his pomps, shows, and works.”24 A decade before Lord Strange’s Men came to London, during the antitheatrical campaign that followed the building of the first London theaters, playing was linked specifically with conjuring as a work “sucked out of the devil’s teats, to nourish us in idolatry, heathenry, and sin.” “Stage players of interludes” were linked with “witches, sorcerers,” and “such like infamous and notorious wicked persons.”25 Daring though they were in putting magical performance on the stage in the wake of such opinions, plays like The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, Doctor Faustus, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay ambivalently hedged the charisma of stage magic—and achieved their complexity—by way of cautious deference to Protestant interdictions against both magic and traffic in theatrical illusions. In The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, performed by the 4th Earl of Derby’s company in the early 1580s, the magical books of Bomelio, far more than those of Shakespeare’s Prospero (whose library they perhaps inspired), prove a dangerous liability; only after they are burned by the old magician’s son as “captivating the mind” and “selling the soul to sin”26 does the play move into a happier register with Jupiter’s clarifying judgment. Doctor Faustus depends heavily upon Marlowe’s searching consideration of the case against magic and illusions, and the tragic fate of Faustus probably provoked the reactionary response of Greene’s Friar Bacon, a genial sage who conscientiously renounces magic in response to the ill effects of his potent glass. While the play makes brilliant use of the glass and other devices to underline the cleverness of the theatrical magic being performed on the stage, Greene—perhaps in keeping with the Queen’s Men’s status as the monarch’s own company—finally subordinates Bacon’s magic and the power of theater itself to religious orthodoxy and to the glory of the nation. Bacon’s renunciation of magic goes hand in hand with his loyal ser vice to Henry III and his final prophecy of England’s glorious Elizabethan future. In John of Bordeaux, however, Lord Strange’s Men took an opposing approach to the problem of magic. Following the precedent set in Greene’s play, Friar Bacon in this sequel has learned to “meditat on sin” (TLN 23, 44), and the magic glass he shattered in the earlier play remains unavailable as a stage device. But so far has Bacon forgotten his earlier renunciation that he now, in the

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old Catholic tradition of rival spiritual magics, masters the power of the devil in order to defend persecuted virtue. No longer a mere academic and nationalistic rivalry, Friar Bacon’s renewed contest with Vandermast is a spiritual battle driven by his rival’s demonic contribution to the wicked plots of the lecherous villain Ferdinand against the play’s gentle hero and his chaste, long- suffering wife. The reluctant devil Astaroth is summoned and subdued by Bacon’s charms: Bacon stay Astrow . . . wilt thow do what I command the Astro) I dar not) Bacō) stay trembling ○♀○ lacke to my stratch out waund or I will tei thy for a thowsand years wher [belce] Lucefer nor all the devells in hell shall once resece the from my magicke spells ... . . . willt thou do what I command the do) Astrou) what so ever. (TLN 661–73)

A similarly efficacious command over the devil is deployed in A Knack to Know a Knave, which even more powerfully than John of Bordeaux revives a suspect older dramaturgy, in this case choosing as its conjuring hero none other than an English saint, Dunstan, legendary for his feats of commanding devils. Like the company’s Bacon, their Dunstan, calling upon the name of God, compels from the devil the truth about King Edgar’s evil intentions and commands him in his effort to thwart them: Dun. Asmoroth, ascende, veni Asmoroth, Asmororh [sic] veni. Enaer [sic] the Deuill. Deuil. What wilt thou? Dunston. Tel me what means the King? Deu. I will not tell thee. Dunst. I charge thee by the eternall liuing God, That keeps the prince of Darknes bound in chaines, And by that Sun, that thou wouldst gladly see, By heauen and earth, and euery liuing thing, Tel me that which I demand of thee. Deu. Then thus, the king doth mean to murther Ethenwald. (TLN 1582– 92)

If the conjuring “bishop Dunstan” is not quite a Catholic saint, he behaves very much in the manner of one from a miracle play. Just as, in A Looking

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Glass for London, the company was reviving, under the guise of satirical complaint, the suppressed tradition of the biblical plays, so it would appear that in these magian plays the company was using the performance of magic to revive aspects of the popular saints’ and miracle plays. Given an intellectual climate wherein the Protestant approach to magic and theater could produce such deeply ambivalent works as Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the magian plays of Lord Strange’s Men might at first glance appear naïve in their closer adherence to discredited traditions. But their dramaturgy clearly uses the spectacle of magic to solicit conscious reflection, in the face of antitheatrical iconoclasm, on the efficacious power of performance and theatrical illusion. Both Dunstan and the Bacon of John of Bordeaux are, like Faustus and Greene’s Bacon, primarily theatrical magicians, but they use theatrical illusion in the spiritual struggle of good against evil. Most telling in this respect, perhaps, is the vision that Bordeaux’s Bacon, perhaps recalling Doctor Faustus’s “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” (A-text, 5.2.78), conjures in the western sky for the suffering heroine Rossaline a vision all the more consoling for the simple wisdom it conveys: “Riteous god will neuer fayle the Iust”; he “who suffers in this world a wrongfull / cros shall haue reward in heaven”; God is stronger than thy foes, “he will not leve the[e] long” (TLN 992, 996– 97, 999). These are morals, and this is a dramaturgy, to contrast with those of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Greene’s closing tribute to the Elizabethan state on behalf of the Queen’s Men, a classically adorned prophecy whose contrast of Spain with England comes right off the page from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, is poetically sophisticated compared with the homely, pious consolations of Bacon in John of Bordeaux. But the price of Greene’s golden decor is Protestant disenchantment and political submission. In John of Bordeaux, by contrast, Bacon’s magical escape from prison, among the final and most striking demonstrations of his unrelinquished power, is a daring coup de théâtre whose effect depends upon its slyly subversive reenactment of the Harrowing of Hell from the suppressed cycle plays. Comparing the hero’s magical escape and his “incendiary” release of the emperor’s prisoners to the final repentance and political submission of Greene’s Bacon, Brian Walsh has called attention to the “unorthodox political tenor” of the play, its “subversive attitude toward monarchial supremacy.”27 But the political audacity that Walsh recognizes in the play’s staging of a comic prison break within yards of the Southwark Clink would have been further magnified by the scene’s unreformed staging of Bacon’s powers in the trappings of discredited Catholic dramaturgy. Reversing the expectation of damnation established in plays like

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Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,28 the Bacon of Lord Strange’s Men instead compels the ever more recalcitrant demons to release him from his chains: Thunder lyghtnyng Enter Astrowgh and Rabsacke Quid petes Bacon Bacon Quid petes why stubbern hellhoundes whates the case this rusty Iorne hanges vpon my narme why shakes not of theas Chaynes when as I charme heaven yearth and hell why quakes not all yor poures Astrow no Bacon no it goes not with the as twas wont the hellish sperrites ar no mor at thy commaund thy tyme prefickst thy pour hath a nend and thow art ours both bodie and soull ho ho ho Bacon away presuming speright away thow hast no pouer ouer a Cristian fayth willt thow do what I command the do) devell) no Bacon no Bacon no Seleno frater hecatis vnbrarum pater ○♀○ et trux erinis nube tenarivm nemvus flintisqui frodis horida mici teges it nox Cleno qui flctis manv negra et retortes luna pernox Astro cornibus ha desta) astro) stay Bacon I will do what so ever thou commandst me do. (TLN 1134–52)

If the magical release of Bacon from his chains evokes the angel’s rescue of St. Peter, Bacon’s subsequent liberation of Perce and the other prisoners explicitly revives the Harrowing of Hell: Bacon com com perce shak of thy chaynes and go with me Perce o brave wat an excelint word is that shake of thy chaynes mar let me ad som what to it to make the sentence more full no more but this shake of yor Chaynes and a fig for the hangman o mr what a word wer this at the Iayll in a sies tyme it wer the sauing of fortie mens Lives) Bacon) well go yor wayes and bed all the presoners shacke of ther chaynes and a fige for the hang man) perc) and shall the fall all of) baco) I mary perce ho brave wher ar you ye velines and theves shake

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of yor chaynes and a fig for the hang< . . . > Enter all the presoners perce now mr hells broke lose hers such a crew as yo never se. (TLN 1204–16)

“A fig for the hangman”: if Perce’s thrice-repeated invocation gives a politically subversive twist to the five-times repeated injunction for the prisoners to “shake off thy chains,” his climactic exclamation, “hell’s broke loose,” points unmistakably to the artisanal roots of this prison break in the forbidden cycle plays. In the manner of the cycle plays’ disguised savior, whose true paternity is hidden from Satan, Bordeaux’s Bacon turns out not to be what the work of other theatrical companies suggested he ought to be: he is not so much an overreaching intellectual playing with dangerous magic as he is, in a manner of speaking, a theatrical Son of God. The play’s use of his magic as a vehicle for self-conscious theatrical allusion makes the braiding of magic with theatrical charisma especially tight and sophisticated; Bacon’s magic becomes all the more efficacious for its being so evidently rooted in the traditions of the recently suppressed religious theater. In A Knack to Know a Knave, it is not just the saint-like magian power of Dunstan but also the rendering of judgment that self- consciously evokes the stage techniques of traditional religious drama. The scene of judgment pitting Honesty and a beggar against the hypocritical John the Precise (especially TLN 1619–42) indicts puritanism all the more powerfully for its being conducted in the theatrical language of the Last Judgment plays of the suppressed mystery cycles. “Hee that / giueth a cup of cold water in my name shall be blessed”; “He that giueth to the poore lendeth vnto the Lord, / And he shal be repaid seuen fold” (TLN 1626–27, 1638–39): though it mentions only two of the corporal works of mercy cited in the gospel of Matthew (25:34–36) and thus follows at a safe distance the more thoroughgoing use of Matthew in the forbidden cycle plays, the scene nonetheless powerfully echoes the voice of the Son of God in plays like the Chester Judgment.29 Through its use of suppressed medieval stage techniques, A Knack to Know a Knave transforms its own “spectacle of penance and punishment” into a “spectacle of the theater passing judgment.”30 Dunstan’s “orthodox control of demons,” the play’s uses of the pre-Reformation Judgment plays, its commendation of religious works of charity, and its unrelenting attacks on puritanical flintiness and hypocrisy are not, then, theatrically naïve but avant-garde in their insistence, against the grain of very recent Protestant influence, that the devil’s own house, the shape-shifting realm of Antichrist, might still function, through its command of illusion, as a secular

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theater of God’s judgments.31 John Parker’s brilliant and deeply informed account of Marlowe’s plays as a self-conscious “theater of Antichrist” suggests that work in this profoundly reflexive vein began with the Tamburlaine plays and Doctor Faustus, and thus in the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men. But Parker’s reading of The Jew of Malta as a spectacular and bloody spectacle of Antichristian sacrifice invites us to ask whether the performance of The Jew of Malta by Lord Strange’s Men might have been owing not only to the company’s preeminent status by 1592 and to their work with Marlowe but also to a close fit with the company’s style in John of Bordeaux and A Knack to Know a Knave.32 The company reinvested magian theatrical effects with unorthodox significance. This is true even in 1 and 2 Henry VI, where the performance of magic adheres more closely to Protestant views of magic as a forbidden art and unreliable prop of papist misdevotion. Pucelle’s French and papist magic appears temporarily to defeat the charismatic English heroism of Talbot at Bordeaux, but only to fail her in the end, when the demonic powers she summons prove as treacherous and undependable as her weak French allies at Angiers. As Alan Dessen points out, the play draws strong parallels between the devil’s abandonment of Pucelle and the immediately preceding failure of the quarreling English commanders to come to the aid of Talbot.33 In other words, since it is not Joan’s bargain with the devil but English weakness that reduces the glorious Talbot to a “stinking and fly-blowne” corpse (TLN 2310), the play proves nearly as politically disenchanting toward the spectacle of Talbot’s patriotic charisma as it proves religiously disenchanting toward Joan’s magical powers. Through the failure of Joan’s magic, the play underlines the treacherous, disenchanting effects of Realpolitik and factionalism among the English nobility. A similar disenchantment surrounds the conjuring of Eleanor Cobham in 2 Henry VI. Like Pucelle’s, Dame Eleanor’s conjuring is a dangerous chicanery, but once again, since she is being set up by Winchester and others conspiring against Duke Humphrey, magic proves feeble compared with the mightier chicanery of factional Realpolitik. In cases like these, the spectacular use of magic brings the historical mise-en-scène up against critical reflection upon its charismatic performance in the Elizabethan present, a present when heterodoxy was regarded as treason and evidence of witchcraft was regularly used against perceived enemies of the state. In this way the company’s theater of wonder was also a theater for skeptical judgments. V IOL ENCE A N D IRON Y

Like its performances of magic, the company’s penchant for staging grotesque savagery and mass carnage included elements of distancing and framing

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that fostered emotional ambivalence and critical reflection. In consequence of the company’s extensive work with revenge tragedy, erotic intrigue, and contemporary political trauma, their plays abounded in scenes of violence and cruelty, requiring an extensive inventory of grotesque props and horrific stageeffects—for example, the boiling cauldron from The Jew of Malta and “bendo & Richardo,” the “bloudie banket” (including “Dead mens head in dishes”) from The Battle of Alcazar,34 the similar Thyestean feasts of Titus Andronicus and (probably) “tittus & vespacia,” the severed heads of 1 Tamar Cham and the first of the Contention plays, and, if Edmond Ironside belonged to Strange’s Men, the head that the Machiavel Edricus places “vppon his swords point, holding yt vppe” to deceive the Saxons into thinking their leader Edmond has been killed (3.3.18). Partly because the company’s histories and tragedies were so extensively concerned with the “demonstrative” nature of revenge (i.e., with the insistence that vengeful acts be seen to communicate their retributive purpose), such acts were often framed as spectacle within or by the plays themselves. “See heere my shew, look on this spectacle,” Hieronimo insists, calling attention to the “strange and wondrous shew” of his revenge (TLN 2781, 2593). So in effect did many of the plays in their graphic depictions or accounts of bodies subjected to stabbing, smothering, strangling, hamstringing, poisoning (by porridge and by scent), hanging, burning, beheading, boiling, blowing up, eviscerating, butchering, dismembering, glossectomizing, and devouring. The exquisitely ironic sense of justice figured into the performance of such grotesque acts went with a host of other effects that complicated or confounded moral judgment: astonishment at the cleverness of the perpetrators; abhorrence at their brutality; satisfaction with the destruction of the victims; laughter at the victims’ stupidity and the unexpectedness of their demise; horror at the suddenness, pain, and totality of their extinction; wonder at the inexorable logic of retribution; and bewilderment by its opaque illogic and inarticulate savagery. Marlowe pioneered the technique of leaving the audience to contemplate the final, silent remnants of violent spectacle: the brain-strewn cage of Bajazeth, the scattered limbs of Doctor Faustus, Barabas’s steaming cauldron. But the shocked and baffled response of the onstage audience to Hieronimo’s deadly masque models, in something like a Marlovian fashion, the audience’s response to its incomprehensible excess, unintended effects, and disproportionate violence. The play’s frame, which summons the ghost of Andrea and the reluctant spirit of Revenge to interpret the spectacle, actually deepens the opacity of the play’s events, blurring the borders of reality and allegory, human and supernatural, waking and dreaming, living and dead, divine justice and cruel fate. The ambiguity of the play’s violent spectacle continues to elicit antithetical

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responses among modern critics, who have described the play as a divine “justice machine” and as “a denial of God’s care for man.”35 “There is no end: the end is death and madness”—a line from the later additions to The Spanish Tragedy and thus not part of its per formance by Lord Strange’s Men—appropriately describes not only Kyd’s original but much of the company’s tragic repertory, where excessive and disturbing violence has the effect of undermining calculations of moral right, confidence in the ways of divine justice, or certainty in martial causes.36 In “harey the vj,” for example, the shocking and graphic death of Salisbury and Gargrave epitomizes the randomness and unheroic nature of battlefield death, as the noble English commanders, emerging “on the Turrets” to survey the siege of Orleans, are instantly slaughtered by a mere child igniting a cannon: Enter the Boy with a Linstock. Salisb. . . . Sir Thomas Gargraue, and Sir William Glansdale, Let me haue your expresse opinions, Where is best place to make our Batt’ry next? Gargraue. I thinke at the North Gate, for there stands Lords. Glansdale. And I heere, at the Bulwarke of the Bridge. Talb. For aught I see, this Citie must be famisht, Or with light Skirmishes enfeebled. Here they shot, and Salisbury falls downe. Salisb. O Lord, have mercy on vs, wretched sinners. Gargraue. O Lord, haue mercy on me, wofull man. Tal. What chance is this that suddenly hath crost vs? Speak, Salisbury; at least, if thou canst, speake. How far’st thou, Mirror of all Martial men? One of thy Eyes, and thy Cheekes side struck off? (TLN 524–44)

After the sudden shock of the blast and the outcries of Salisbury and Gargrave, the scene descends into the rhetorical bathos of Talbot’s attempt to fill the silence of the victims’ gruesome and protracted dying. But the stage direction declaring “Salisbury lifteth himselfe vp, and groanes” (TLN 578) provides the single irony-laden response to Talbot’s pointless exhortations. Talbot’s heroic sentiments, like his unwarranted confidence just a moment before, are undermined by the senseless, anonymous, and unchivalric effects of modern violence so casually unleashed. In this scene and in its many scenes of mass violence and disorder—and in the crusading folly of El-Ksar Kbir, with its nine thousand dead; the Bartholomew’s Day massacre; the siege of Jerusalem, with its canni-

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balism and desecration of the Temple—the company preoccupied itself with staging the absurd and dehumanizing consequences of fanatical commitments unto death. I M PER SONAT ION A N D H E T EROD OX Y

There are many areas of overlap among the various features we have associated with the archive and repertoire of Lord Strange’s Men: the contemporaneity of their material, their commitment to dramatizing narrative, the unity of action achieved by their work in Senecan revenge and erotic intrigue, the intertwined development of private purpose and personal passion, the cultivation of classical rhetorical techniques (argument in utramque partem, antilogy, paradox, allusion, and metaphor) to convey thought and emotion; the innovative uses of inter- and intrarepertorial cross-referencing; the uses of spectacle and staging for unconventional or skeptical purposes. There is one other crucial area where many of these features converge: in techniques of impersonation aimed at rendering the experience of individual consciousness in crisis. This was a key development across later Elizabethan drama, but it was particularly suited to the work of Lord Strange’s Men because of its potential as a technique for introducing skeptical or heterodox points of view into the experience of theater. Because the company’s plays were not so much concerned with moral patterns defined by status as with actions defined by purposes and passions, the parts available to the players were less in the nature of type- cast “lines” matching talents to fixed decora or standard personifications as they were individualized roles for impersonation, for “the embodiment of one soul, its passions and its actions, by another.”37 Parts for clowns and boys were partial exceptions to this rule, as were most of the parts in estates satires like A Looking Glass and A Knack to Know a Knave, where social status and allegorical attributes provided the material for actors to personify. The most frequently performed and successful of the company’s plays, however, offered a variety of highly individualized roles enriched by their interinvolvement in a single, complex action. Creating these roles was the job of the company’s writers: it was Kyd who created the variegated parts for Hieronimo, Bel-Imperia, Lorenzo, Balthazar, Isabella, Castile, and Pedringano, all of their characteristics and perspectives bound together in one fate; Marlowe who created the distinctive speech and motivations that bring Barabas, Ferneze, Calymath, Abigail, Ithamore, and Pilia-Borza into tragic collision. To think about the interactions among these varied perspectives, however, is to think about the challenges they provided for individual

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impersonation and ensemble playing, about the opportunities they created for the development of acting technique. The style of an early soliloquy by Barabas demonstrates some of the novel techniques being explored by the company’s players: I haue bought a house As great and faire as is the Gouernors; And there in spite of Malta will I dwell: Hauing Fernezes hand, whose heart I’le haue; I, and his sonnes too, or it shall goe hard. I am not of the Tribe of Levy, I, That can so soone forget an iniury. We Iewes can fawne like Spaniels when we please; And when we grin, we bite; yet are our lookes As innocent and harmlesse as the Lambes. I learn’d in Florence how to kisse my hand, Heave vp my shoulders when they call me dogge, And ducke as low as any bare-foot Fryar, Hoping to see them starue vpon a stall, Or else be gather’d for in our Synagogue; That when the offering-Bason comes to me, Euen for charity I may spit intoo’t. Here comes Don Lodowicke, the Gouernors sonne, One that I loue for his good fathers sake. (sigs. D3v–D4)

Delivered as an aside in the presence of the officers running Malta’s slave market, and ending with a sinister announcement of Lodowick’s entry on the scene, the speech shows many of the hallmarks of traditional dramaturgy. It fills in the undepicted business of Barabas’s reinstatement following the recovery of his hidden money, and it offers, during a pause in the action, a forecast of future events by way of an explicit self- description of motive and purpose. The use of the third person (“we Jews”) generalizes Barabas’s type, and the animal similes of dog and lamb (along with the contemptible barefoot friar) set an emblematic gloss on Barabas’s hypocritical modus vivendi. However, the fawning spaniel (unconventionally not a wolf) and the innocent lamb cue the many gestures and postures (fawning, grinning, kissing the hand, hunching the shoulders, ducking the head) by which the conflicting impulses of the Jew are embodied as mannerism even while, switching from first-person plural to singular, Barabas narrates the specific circumstances under which, with help from the Flo-

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rentines, he first learned such abject gestures. This shift from description to narrative provides Barabas with a personal cause, and it provides the player (in this case Edward Alleyn) with an emotional past to bear within his body. As the narrative then moves ambiguously between past and present tenses, propelled by a mounting series of clauses, it imagines the reduction of Barabas’s enemies both past and present (now a vague “them”) to charity cases. It then culminates— as the synagogue offering basin comes round to him, delayed by the adverbial “euen for charity”—with a shocking and plosive expression of contempt: “that . . . I may spit intoo’t.” Theological allusion probably lurks in the spurned charity plate, but the vehement onomatopoeia of “spit” and “too’t,” turning pronunciation into action, collapses self-description into the immediacy of embodiment. It answers with both visceral retribution and precise verbal echo, the injurious “spite of Malta” that set the whole speech off in the first place. Working from the hints provided in this speech—and perhaps from the physicality of Alleyn’s performance—Shakespeare took the dramaturgical innovation further, eliminating (but for Shylock’s first aside [TLN 365–76]) the technique of self- description, putting Shylock’s memories of persecution into the forensic form of a self- defense delivered, through ensemble acting, to his enemy, thereby turning the contemptuous word and gesture (doubled by the alliterating “spet” and “spurn”d’) into the directly confrontational act of spitting in Antonio’s face: Goe to then, you come to me, and you say, ‘Shylocke, we would haue moneyes,’ you say so: You that did voide your rume vpon my beard, And foote me as you spurne a stranger curre Ouer your threshold; moneyes is your suite. What should I say to you? Should I not say, Hath a dog money? Is it possible A curre should lend three thousand ducats? or Shall I bend low in a bond-mans key, With bated breath, and whispring humblenesse, Say this: Faire sir, you spet on me Wednesday last; You spurn’d me such a day. (1623, TLN 443–54)

That this mode of impersonation could be taken into ensemble acting is demonstrated even in a lesser play like Fair Em, where the abandoned heroine’s expression of her final disappointment with love takes the initial form of forensic testimony, in which she presents her case against Manvile to the king:

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Pardon my Lord, Ile tell your grace the troth, Be it not imputed to mee as a discredite. I loued this Manuile so much, that still methought When he was absent did present to mee The forme and feature of that countenance Which I did shrine an ydoll in mine heart. And neuer could I see a man methought That equald Manuile in my partiall eye. Nor was there any loue betweeen vs lost, But that I held the same in high regard, Vntill repaire of some vnto our house, Of whome my Manuile grew thus jealous. (TLN 1435–46)

The modest simplicity of diction in Em’s narrative derives some of its honest effect from the presence of the king, while the invocation of Platonism and dream formula (“methought”) provide the boy impersonating Em with a memory of an image once carried in the heart, perhaps also an image to be carrying still while explaining the experience of its loss. The real collaborative achievements in acting come, however, with Em’s visceral recoil from Manvile’s limp conciliatory gesture: Manvile. Pardon me sweet Em, for I am onely thine. Em. Lay off thy hands, disloyall as thou art, Nor shalt thou haue possession of my loue, That canst so finely shift thy matters off. Put case I had beene blinde and could not see, As often times such visitations falles That pleaseth God which all things doth dispose: Shouldest thou forsake mee in regard of that? I tell thee, Manuile, hadst thou been blinde, Or deafe, or dumbe, or else what impediments might befall to man, Em would have loued, and kept, And honoured thee: yea, begde if wealth had faylde For thy releefe. Manuile. Forgiue mee, sweete Em. Em. I do forgiue thee with my heart, And I will forget thee too, if case I can: But neuer speake to mee, nor seeme to know mee. (TLN 1457–73)

That this encounter looks not like a nuptial—a point emphasized by Em’s echoes of language from the wedding liturgy—is only part of its dramaturgical rich-

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ness. Em’s momentary lapse into third-person description (TLN 203) looks like a regression into an older style of acting, except that the self-alienating effect of the technique here serves to underline her grasp that this hypothetical existence will never be. The immediacy, vehemence, and possible absurdity of Em’s response—her sharp confrontation of Manvile in front of everyone— show the depth of her injury and the completeness of her disillusionment. Forgetting Manvile while forgiving him must have been an astonishingly unconventional thing to do in a supposed comedy—it is a more acerbic response than most of Shakespeare’s comic heroines can muster against their feckless lovers—but at the same time Em’s parenthetical “if case I can” points to the continuing ambivalence of her emotional response, to the necessity for the actor to continue bearing some image of Manvile in her heart even while she rejects him. Performance of this kind is situation-specific; it calls for acting in response to a dynamic stage environment, and it unfolds inner life through perceptions and emotions arising from unexpected and ambiguous encounters. For example, Hieronimo’s nighttime discovery of Horatio’s corpse in his garden, as Lukas Erne explains, generates a soliloquy in “fine concordance with the action out of which it grows”:38 Enter Hieronimo in his shirt, &c. Hiero. What outcries pluck me from my naked bed, And chill my throbbing heart with trembling feare, Which neuer danger yet could daunt before. Who cals Hieronimo? Speake, heere I am: I did not slumber, therefore ’twas no dreame, No, no, it was some woman cride for helpe, And heere within this garden did she crie. And in this garden must I rescue her: But stay, what murdrous spectacle is this? A man hangd vp and all the murderers gone, And in my bower to lay the guilt on me: This place was made for pleasure not for death. He cuts him downe. Those garments that he weares I oft haue seene, Alas, it is Horatio my sweet sonne, O no, but he that whilome was my sonne, O was it thou that call’dst me from my bed, O speak if any sparke of life remaine. I am thy Father, who hath slaine my sonne? (TLN 935–54)

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Here it is not ensemble playing but response to situation, unfolded through changing perception, that enables the soliloquy to become embodied action. The nightshirt, and perhaps the torch and sword in the 1615 title-page illustration, provide the actor (again Edward Alleyn) with instruments for depicting his awakening vigilance, while the cues of trembling fear and the chill of his throbbing heart cue the actor’s body as well. The act of listening for the summoning voice turns from the uncertainty of questioning to the firmness of Hieronimo’s challenge, an almost metaphysical answer to the mysterious summons—“Speake, heere I am.” With this assertion of his presence Hieronimo accepts the new existence into which, like Aeneas waking to the fall of Troy or Moses before the burning bush, he is just beginning to enter. The disorienting nature of this new experience, pitched between waking and sleep, dream and reality, gives way again to the vividness of the cry in the mind’s ear, and then to the beginnings of a visual search of “this garden,” a phrase whose repetition simultaneously re- directs his focus and expresses his surprise and outrage at the violation of this private sanctuary, meant for pleasure. Then, brought up short by the “murdrous spectacle” of the hanging corpse, swiftly bypassing the possibility of suicide and moving straight to the suspicion of a treacherous design against him (a bizarrely efficient mental trajectory that comes close to creating a personal subconscious from the audience’s knowledge of events), Hieronimo moves through a rapid series of acts, gestures, and discoveries, as he cuts down the corpse, identifies the garments, and recognizes the body as that of his “sweet sonne” (a phrase he will repeat twice in the play, echoing a similar phrase used by the anguished Portugal). He recognizes again, against the grain of his denial, that the body is not only Horatio’s but dead, desperately attempts to revive it by again demanding speech from silence, makes a second assertion of existence (“I am thy Father”) that chimes with the first (“heere I am”), and then climactically cries out into the silent darkness the agonized question, “Who hath slain my sonne?” The closeness of the writing here shows how the company’s Senecan archive must have been wedded to a repertoire of virtuoso per formance techniques; the match of the two defines the company style. This answer of Hieronimo to the midnight summons in his garden is an awakening in many senses. It is an awakening, first of all, to the tragic existence defined by the revenger’s situation, an existence marked by epistemological doubt as to truth and facts, moral uncertainty as to the justice of actions and events, isolation by way of powerlessness in a corrupted world, mad commitment to a compelling private cause, and radical independence from any orthodox pieties or deference to authority. It is not, then, just an awakening for Hieronimo, but

Title-page illustration, The Spanish Tragedy (1615). Robert H. Taylor Collection. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

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an awakening for the later revengers who were to follow him, including Hamlet. It is also an awakening to new modes of selfhood and to new means for their representation on the stage. It might also have been awakening of the audience to the experience of tragic desolation. A key to the situation-specific nature of those representational means is the extent to which they define subjectivity by way of its conscientious resistances to conformity with established authority, beliefs, and values. Hieronimo’s status as a conscientious servant of power challenged by the treacheries of a corrupted regime is not more typical of later revengers than it is typical of heroes in the plays of Lord Strange’s Men. To an astonishing degree, the heroes of these plays are less often princes and rulers than they are virtuous subordinates caught, through their adversarial relationship to higher powers or corrupted courtly environments, in politically treacherous conditions or morally challenging dilemmas. The plight of the loyal knight John of Bordeaux, victim to the villainy of a weak king’s corrupt son, comes close to repeating the situation of Hieronimo. John Talbot and Titus Andronicus are both loyal generals victimized by the weakness of the rulers they serve and by the corruptions of their courts. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is an intellectual statesman caught in similar circumstances. Sir John Mandeville (in the romance by Warner we think possibly related to the lost “mandevell”) is a courtier whose long exile stems from his fear of Edward III’s jealous regard for the royal family’s status (“to moue the king threats death”), just as Orlando is “banisht for some offence by Charlemaine” and then marked as an outlaw by his illicit love of an enemy princess.39 The influence of Dunstan and Honesty as counselors in A Knack to Know a Knave is compromised by the unpredictability of their royal master Edgar and by his treacherous favorites, while Ethenwald’s duty as surrogate suitor to Edgar in that play, and Lübeck’s similarly risky duty to William the Conqueror in Fair Em, must contend with the arbitrary and tyrannical ways of his royal master. Barabas hardly fits this model of virtuous and beleaguered subordination, but, as a commoner caught up in the machinations of geopolitical realignment, his consciousness provides a center of perception standing in deeply skeptical relation to the play’s various political authorities. The Battle of Alcazar would seem to be a major exception to this pattern, providing as it does, in the Muslim prince Abdelmelec, an image of strong kingship rare in the repertory of Strange’s Men, a heroic prince to set against the treachery of Philip II, the madness of Muly Mahamet, and the zealous folly of Sebastian. Yet even this play provides, in the English renegade Stukeley, an alternative center of interest anchored in a skeptical subordinate’s-eye view—in this case a viewpoint close to that of clowning. Stukeley is as much a roguish

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puzzle as Jack Cade, and the tedious obituary he rises to deliver after his death is perhaps the most retrograde piece of dramaturgy in the entire repertory of Strange’s Men. Yet he, with Abdelmelec, is the one to foresee that Philip will betray Sebastian, and in his own otherwise ridiculous obituary he condenses into two pungent lines an interpretation of events that—against the grain of the play’s portentous dumb-shows on Fame, Nemesis, and Revenge—far better characterizes the grim historical folly of El-Ksar Kbir, a war supposedly conducted for religion’s sake: “from our Cradles we were marked all / And destinate to dy in Affric heere” (TLN 1495– 96). The technique of successive staging preferred by the company was well-suited to underlining the situational ironies associated with the shifts in power or changes in authority, since the transformation of space on the stage could mime the rise and fall of favorites, the formation and demise of factions, the waning and waxing of power, literally the “dis-placement” of one political situation by the force of another. The labyrinthine invasions and expulsions of St. Bartholomew’s Day scenes in The Massacre at Paris provide a powerful example of worlds being turned inside out for religion’s sake, but so does the transformation of Barabas’s house into a convent, a dispossession that—coupled with Barabas’s penetrating question, “Is theft the ground of your Religion?” (sig. Cv)— undermines as “theft” the typological foundations of Christianity even while it hints that theft was also the ground for Crown seizure of Church properties during the Reformation.40 Many of the play’s reversals and displacements produce similarly ironic and destabilizing effects: the marching of the slaves into the marketplace of Malta (“Euery ones price is written on his backe”; sig. D3v), Barabas’s rise and fall from the governorship, Ferneze’s appropriation of Barabas’s trap and his volte-face with the Turks, and above all the deeply ironic sacrifice of the Jew Barabas so that Christian Malta may be saved in order to make peace with the Turk. Sir Thomas More’s powerful ironies arise from the placement of More’s consciousness amid situational reversals that are signaled by similarly successive staging, so that the sergeant rescued from the mob by More at the beginning of the play becomes the same sergeant who later arrests More for treason, and the scaffold used to execute the May Day rioters becomes the scaffold More himself ascends at the end of the play. None of these reversals are lost on the centrally important consciousness of More himself, who notes upon his entry to the Tower that “many an innocent” has preceded him, who claims “God is as strong heere as he is abroade” (TLN 1664, 1673), and who remarks to one of the sheriffs on the morning of his execution, “I was in times past as you are now” (TLN 1895). Juxtaposing the witty and virtuous perceptions of More’s gargantuan

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eight-hundred-line role against political events all the more sinister for their arbitrary and impersonal nature, the play’s logic is one in which More’s “peace of conscience” puts “the world and I / . . . at a little odds” and, by rendering More “a dead man to the world,” fits “his sweete soule to liue among the Saintes” (TLN 1741–42, 1705–7). Many of More’s antinomian comments on the vanities of earthly power—about receiving “a smoothe Courte shauing” or being “at libertie” by death (TLN 1440, 1809)—would be mere orthodox pieties but for the historical specificity of their application to the court and advisors of the father of the reigning English queen. Because of that daring specificity, the censor Edmund Tilney marked for omission not only the Evil May Day scenes but also More’s long meditation on the contentment of those who suffer “the whip, the burden and the toile,” the wretchedness of the prince “that sinfully renewes / the noones excesse in the nights daungerous surfeits,” and the perilous offices and “bribes that make open traffick twixt the soule, / and netherland of Hell” (TLN 1471–1516). As an intellectual hero daring to oppose himself to conformity, More is, as Ernst Honigmann has suggested,41 a kind of Faustian figure, and he is clearly regarded as such in Surrey’s epilogue: “A very learned woorthie Gentleman / Seales error with his blood” (TLN 1983–84). But as a Faustian intellectual hero, More’s inner life and reflections, his having “a thing within me” that raises his “better part” above weaker eyes (TLN 1966– 68), draw upon the new dramaturgy in order to support the play’s unorthodox view of politics in the early Tudor regime. That view is one the play associates with the power of theater. “My lord a player? Let vs not meddle with any such matters,” declares one of the traveling interluders, shying away from the very mischievous implications that the play’s own metatheatricality arouses as it undertakes to “make . . . of a state pleader, a stage player” (TLN 1154–55, 1933). With his witty flair for performance, More is a figure who, in “this last Sceane of my tragedie” (TLN 1934), invalidates through his own virtuoso performance the sinister maneuvering of the Tudor state. As a learned humanist and state servant who is also a devoted theatricalist, More occupies a position much like that of Hieronimo, and to much the same effect, however more passive his conscientious resistance to power’s allurements. Hieronimo’s own performance revives a youthful play once “acted / By Gentlemen and schollers too, / Such as could tell what to speak.” The cunning of the play’s learned designer ironically undermines the princely Balthazar’s blithe observation, “now it shall be plaide by Princes and Courtiers / such as can tell how to speak” (TLN 2506– 9). Under Hieronimo’s direction, the performance becomes an instrument of regime change, unseating princes and courtiers with deadly aim.

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Unlike the pious More, Hieronimo directs his outrage against the authority of the heavens themselves, tracing the failure of justice on earth to the indifferent silence of the divine. Impersonated madness licenses him to go so far within as to question belief in providence itself: still tormented is my tortured soule, With broken sighes and restles passions, That winged mount, and houering in the aire, Beat at the windowes of the brightest heauens, Solliciting for iustice and reuenge: But they are plac’t in those imperiall heights, Where countermurde with walles of diamond, I find the place impregnanble, and they Resist my woes, and giue my words no way. (TLN 1588– 96)

Hieronimo’s vain solicitation of the heavens demonstrates the way “performance kills belief.”42 The performance of madness in tragic extremity—another feature of the company’s passionate impersonation of Isabella, Hieronimo, Orlando and (perhaps) Titus Andronicus, as well as such borderline personalities as Barabas, Ithamore, Ferneze, Muly Mahamet, Stukeley, the Guise, Joan, and Talbot (“My thoughts are whirled like a Potters wheele, / I know not where I am, nor what I doe” [1 Henry VI, TLN 613–14])—shows the company’s penchant for working sympathetically with points of view cross-grained against the supposed sanity of Elizabethan norms.

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Politics and Religion in the Repertory

On 12 November 1589, just six days after the arrest of members of Lord Strange’s Men for performing at the Cross Keys Inn in defiance of a mayoral order to desist, the Privy Council wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury proposing measures to prevent stage players from handling “in their plaies certen matters of Diuinytie and of State vnfitt to be suffred.”1 The Council was invoking a proclamation of 1559 that forbade the performing of plays “wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweal shall be handled or treated.”2 The timing of the 1589 memorandum in conjunction with the staging of the Marprelate controversy and the incident at the Cross Keys Inn suggests that in this instance it may have been Lord Strange’s Men who particularly alarmed the authorities, and not just because of their insubordination toward the Lord Mayor but because of their controversial handling of “matters of Diuinytie and of State.” Evidence from the repertory points to engagement with political and religious controversy as a feature of the company style. That evidence includes, for example, the prominence of contemporary geopolitics in the archive behind the plays, the company’s proclivities for staging acts of spectacular cruelty and mass violence, the restaging of scenes from the forbidden cycle plays, and the prominence of subaltern heroes—beleaguered noblemen and counselors like Hieronimo, John of Bordeaux, and Sir Thomas More—who conscientiously resist conformity with established authority. In this chapter we examine the political and religious implications of the repertory, situating the plays in the context of the crises and controversies of their Elizabethan moment, 1589– 93. In their account of the “post-Reformation public sphere,” Peter Lake and Steve Pincus observe that the emergence of “an adjudicating public (or pub-

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lics)” accelerated during the 1590s, a period of “perceived crisis or emergency,” when “members of the regime, its supporters, loyal opposition and overt critics and opponents all resorted to religiopolitical controversy and making public pitches.” During this period of controversy, unmatched in intensity until the later 1620s and 1630s, a number of factions—“Protestant opponents of a Catholic regime,” “Catholic opponents of a Protestant one,” “Puritan critics of the national church,” and “the center of the regime itself”—were all participating in a “sustained pitch of political discourse.” “Print, the pulpit, performance, and circulating manuscripts were all used to address . . . socially heterogeneous, and, in some sense, popular audiences.”3 As their participation in the Marprelate controversy suggests, Lord Strange’s Men, as the preeminent London company of the early 1590s, were positioned to play a leading role in the theatrical dimensions of this public-making process. The company’s plays were attuned to engage audiences on the problems and controversies of their moment. Such engagement was probably not separable from the artistic and financial motives of the company, nor can it really be separated from considerations of patronage, since public discussion in this period was not independent of the interests of patrons and other political actors; in fact such discussion did not originate with the public but with “the actions of groups or factions located at or near the center of the establishment.”4 Patronage, in other words, was not only a necessity in conditions where the protocols for public discussion were so “hazy and ill defined” that “it was always horribly easy to fall over the edge into sedition”;5 patronage was also a crucial factor in the shaping of positions to begin with. In the case of Lord Strange’s Men and their Stanley patron, the connections between patronage and the politics of theater may have been especially strong. The elements of skepticism, daring, heterodoxy, irenism, and politique thinking in the plays put them in dialogue with policies of the Elizabethan regime and with the complicated political position of the Stanleys at the moment of their company’s greatest public fame. PL AY I NG W I T H F I R E

If cruelty and mass violence were among the spectacular stage effects with which Lord Strange’s Men evoked the conflicts of the contemporary world, so was their habit of playing with fire. Fire, fireworks, the threat of fire, and the enactment of immolation play a strikingly prominent role in the company’s repertoire of stage effects.6 Pyrotechnics were clearly at work, for example, in “the blazing Starr” and “Fire works” in the first-act dumb show of The Battle of Alcazar; later in the play ambassadors of Muly Mahamet pledge allegiance by

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offering “heere our hands into this flame” (TLN 655). In A Looking Glass for London and England, priestly sages enter “carrying fire in their hands” (TLN 1618), the proud queen Remilia is struck by lightning (“Lightning and thunder wherewith REMILIA / is strooken”; TLN 529–30), and the evil Radagon is destroyed when “a flame of fire appeareth / from beneath, and RADAGON is swallowed” (TLN 1230–31).7 Among the more horrific immolations in the work of Lord Strange’s Men are those performed with the boiling cauldron in The Jew of Malta and in the lost “bendo & Richardo,” whose novella source requires the hero to be trapped in a “caldron of pitche (which continually was boyling there) vp to the waste.”8 Real or threatened judicial execution, by fire and other means, figures prominently in the repertory. Angelica is threatened with immolation when the peers of France prepare to “have her punisht by the lawes of France, / To end her lust in flames of fire” (Orlando Furioso, TLN 1454–55), and in John of Bordeaux the emperor, accusing Rossaline of witchcraft, vows that “burning faggeetes shall inchaunt yor limes” (TLN 1033–34). A similar threat occurs in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy when the Portuguese counselor Alexandro, falsely accused of slaying Prince Balthasar, is brought onstage and the viceroy orders his guards to “burne his body in those flames. / They binde him to the stake” (TLN 1133–34). If Henslowe’s “iiij playes in one” (6 March 1591/92) was an early version of the play represented in The platt of The Secound parte of the Seuen Deadlie Sinns,9 then the self-immolation of the Assyrian prince Sardanapulus was yet another pyrotechnical death scene staged by the company. Whether Titus Andronicus was performed only by members of Lord Strange’s Men who combined with Sussex’s at the Rose in February 1593/94 or whether it was an earlier play belonging originally to Strange’s Men, it shares the company’s preoccupations in the offstage human sacrifice that begins the play: “Alarbus limbs are lopt, / And intrals feede the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke like incense, doth perfume the skie” (TLN 167– 69). In the early 1590s such sensational scenes might have struck audiences as the sort of things that happened in “another country,” in revenge tragedies, Italianate intrigues, and romance, at the hands of crazed tyrants like Ferneze, the Portuguese viceroy, or the emperor of John of Bordeaux. After all, according to the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy, the anti-Lollard heresy laws were repealed in England and such immolations were supposedly a thing of the past; “Only those who brought the authority of the crown in question by refusal to accept the royal supremacy were liable to suffer death, and they not as heretics but as traitors, whose punishment did not belong to the church courts.” Cases of reli-

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gious deviance were no longer tried under the old heresy laws but referred to the ecclesiastical court of High Commission, whose penalties included death only as a remote theoretical possibility.10 Yet there were many instances when capital punishment for spiritual error was not theoretical. Several Anabaptists were burned under heresy laws in 1575– 89,11 but more important, the Elizabethan regime became vigorous in the 1580s and early 1590s in its pursuit of nonconforming religious minorities under the capital treason laws. The execution of the Jesuit missionaries that began in the 1580s, peaking with the execution of thirty- one Catholics in 1588 and peaking again in 1591 with the execution of another fifteen, produced its own literature of spectacular martyrdom. The pursuit of puritans under treason law in the 1590s was perhaps equal reason for thinking that the days of Mary had returned, and that once again the religious enemies of the bishops would become victims of the state. In the spring of 1591, as the result of an investigation launched in the Court of High Commission, three of the accused Marprelate conspirators were sentenced to execution; two later recanted and were reprieved, while a third died in prison. That same spring, amid controversy about its potentially abusive powers, the Court of High Commission turned over to the Star Chamber its investigation of leading Presbyterians in the hope that they would receive “an exemplary punishment to the terror of others.”12 When Strange’s Men were performing at the Rose in 1592 and 1593 the fate of the imprisoned Presbyterians, already crushed and cowed, had yet to be determined. The Separatists Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, not so lucky as the Presbyterians (all of whom were eventually released), were executed in April 1593, as was John Penry, the alleged creator of Martin Marprelate and the first puritan martyr, the following spring.13 Though it was created specifically to deal with religious offenses and to demonstrate that the state was not in the business of persecuting religious minorities or applying capital sentences, the behavior of the Court of High Commission, by turning religious cases over to the Star Chamber, may have looked in 1592– 93 like the sign of a return to the terrible days recounted in the pages and illustrations of Foxe. It is possible that the pyrotechnical effects of Strange’s Men were simply connected to the company’s line in spectacle or the coincidental result of the company’s having a pyrotechnician among its personnel,14 but it seems less coincidental that the company specialized as well in onstage hangings, a stunt relatively rare in the drama of the period15 but called for in the Spanish Tragedy, where Pedringano is executed onstage (the stage direction says the Hangman “turnes him off ”; TLN 1572); in Sir Thomas More, where, along with Williamson and

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his wife Doll (“he kisses her on the ladder”; TLN 680), John Lincoln is hanged onstage (“he goes vp . . . he leapes off”; TLN 613, 635); and in The Massacre at Paris, where the body of the Lord Admiral is hung from a tree (“They hang him”; TLN 593). Scenes like these, or the scene of Sir Thomas More mounting the scaffold to face his beheader, evoke the atmosphere of public violence and state repression within which Strange’s Men were living and working in the early 1590s. And it was not just an atmosphere, since the repression appears to have reached out and touched two of the company’s best playwrights, Kyd and Marlowe, quite directly in the spring of 1593.16 Immediately preceding the hanging of the Lord Admiral’s body in The Massacre at Paris, as the Catholic rioters debate whether to burn the body, the play foregrounds the irony that immolators will inhale the horrid smoke of their victims: 2. Why, let vs burne him for an heretick. 1. O no, his bodye will infect the fire, and the fire the aire, and so we shall be poysoned with him. (TLN 581– 84)

A similarly trenchant irony concludes The Jew of Malta, when the play catches the audience up short when the boiling Jew cries out to both his onstage executioners and the (probably cheering) theatergoers at the Rose: “helpe me, Christians. / Gouernour, why stand you all so pittilesse?” (sig. K2). In 1 Henry VI any compassion expressed in Warwick’s mitigation of Joan’s penalty is undermined by the gruesome details of her offstage fate: hearke ye, sirs: because she is a Maide, Spare for no Faggots, let there be enow: Place barrelles of pitch vpon the fatall stake, So that her torture may be shortned. (TLN 2695– 98)17

Warwick’s call for faggots and barrels of pitch is horrid enough for any in the audience who had merely viewed the illustrations in the pages of Foxe, and it would surely have pricked those who had witnessed more. Joan’s parting curse offers a stunning reminder of what her English executioners had come to perpetrate upon themselves: darknesse, and the gloomy shade of death Inuiron you, till Mischeefe and Dispaire, Driue you to break your necks or hang your selues. (TLN 2729–31; italics ours)

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T H E “ N E W CECI L L I A N I NQU ISI T ION ”

Joan’s curse against England was, in a manner of speaking, being fulfilled during the very years (1589– 93) when Lord Strange’s Men were at work. Dread of foreign enemies and a series of unsuccessful military adventures abroad, coupled with fear of dissension and conspiracy at home, led to repressive measures and an atmosphere of state paranoia that Catholic propagandists called the “new Cecillian Inquisition” and that one modern scholar has called “the Cecilian ‘State of Terror.’ ”18 While the Marprelate controversy was raging on page and stage and Richard Bancroft was complaining from the pulpit at Paul’s Cross that England was threatened by an army of “Papists, Libertines, Anabaptists, the Familie of love, and sundrie other . . . sectaries and schismatikes,”19 the nation was once again appearing vulnerable from abroad. Philip II was rumored to be preparing a second Armada, and a long, grinding war in the Netherlands had left all but three provinces in the hands of Parma’s Catholic forces. In an attempt to deflect the perceived Spanish threat, Norris and Drake had been sent in April 1589 with an expedition to restore the pretender Don Antonio to the Portuguese throne, a fiasco that cost some eight thousand to eleven thousand English lives. The return of the tattered Portuguese expedition coincided almost to the day (1 August 1589) with news of the assassination of the French king Henri III, the successful opponent of the Guises whom England was attempting to draw into an anti-Spanish league.20 Throwing its support behind the Protestant claimant Henri of Navarre, England next sent a series of doomed expeditions in support of this difficult and unreliable ally. To the cost of these adventures in lives and treasure was added an incalculable cost in morale. Diseased, wounded, and unpaid veterans of the Portuguese campaign were kept away from London by royal proclamation and executed “for a terror to the rest” when they violated it.21 Veterans of “these late wars in the Low Countries and France” were similarly subjected to antivagrancy measures, and deserters from the Normandy and Brittany campaigns, accused of “using most slanderous speeches of those Her Highness’s service and entertainment,” were said to be hindering recruitment efforts.22 The “drifting apart of government and people”23 in these years is reflected in the surveillance and suspicion engendered by the government’s emergency campaign against its perceived domestic enemies. Citing danger from the underground “seminarians, Jesuits, and traitors” who were preparing to aid a Spanish invasion by making “breaches in men’s and women’s consciences,” a proclamation in October 1591 established commissions in all the “ports, towns and shires” of England to stop and search travelers, investigate unusual movements,

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and solicit denunciations of all persons engaged in any suspicious activity.24 In response to the vigilance and the persecution, arrests, torture, and executions that followed, Catholic propagandists alleged that under Lord Burghley’s direction, burdensome wars abroad led to “presinges, and sending foorthe of men . . . almost yearely into Ireland, . . . into the low countries, . . . into Fraunce and Britany, . . . into Portugall,” while at home, under the “new Cecillian Inquisition,” even loyal Protestants were “sought, & examined . . . excepte they alwayes cary their pasportes with them in their pocketts, & ride vp & downe Ingland, as they would passe thorough Turky.”25 These turbulent affairs of the regnum Cecilianum are the context in which Lord Strange’s Men took it upon themselves to handle “in their plaies certen matters of Diuinitye and of State.” In their plays they addressed themselves to torture and mass violence, to the geopolitical matters of Spain and Portugal (The Battle of Alcazar, The Spanish Tragedy), to wars in France (including The Massacre at Paris and 1 Henry VI, with its own siege of Rouen), and to problems of religious difference, political loyalty, and war for religion’s sake. It is both ironic and important that during these same years the very fusion of religion with state power that sustained international conflict and supported domestic persecution could be “prised apart,” in theory at least, in the justifications offered, on either side, by the Elizabethan state and its critics.26 On the one hand, Catholic critiques of the “Cecillian Inquisition,” noting that loyal Catholics were persecuted while “puritaines are tolerated to say, do & write what they list,” decried the injustice of “making that to be new Treason, which is nothing els but old faith and religion.”27 On the other hand, Burghley was insisting as early as 1583 that because the Catholic enemies of the state were “not being delt withall vpon questions of religion” but prosecuted under the treason laws, it was false and shameless to report they “were put to death onely for profession of the Catholique faith.” In 1591 Burghley claimed that those “professing contrary Religion” were merely impeached “by payment of a pecuniary summe,” failing to mention the further penalties for failure to conform when fined.28 Sir Francis Bacon, defending Burghley’s policies, similarly claimed dissidents might reserve “their consciences to themselves . . . conforming their outward demeanour no further, then is needful for the common tranquility of all.”29 But such distinctions between religion and state power had become, by the crisis of the later 1580s and early 1590s, “little more than rhetorical or polemical” gestures. As Patrick Collinson points out, religion had become integral to the process of state building in Europe, and the consolidation of regimes and the disciplining of their populations depended increasingly “on a perception of the profound and irreconcilable religious differences by which the continent

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was now divided.”30 These divisions were important subject matter for Lord Strange’s Men, but just as crucial was the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing, during the emergency of 1589– 93, “between the ideologues and the politiques.”31 That such a distinction was invoked but not sincerely practiced by the regime or by its militant Catholic opponents does not mean that it was not a distinction imagined and devoutly sought elsewhere in the political nation, among partially conforming nonrecusant Catholics, for example, who, ridiculed as “Church papists,” maintained strong connections with the religious majority;32 or among nonseparatist Protestants of various doctrinal shades; or among neighbors, families, guilds, and other affinities to whom personal ties and social bonds were simply stronger than the force of confessional differences. Jeffrey Knapp has recently made the case for the Elizabethan theatrical community as another grouping that was broadly conformist and antisectarian but also accommodationist, inclusivist, and supranationally Christian in a broadly Erasmian sense.33 That is an extremely broad characterization, but to judge by the political and religious tenor of the company’s plays, it seems like a particularly useful description of Lord Strange’s Men and their playwrights. It is perhaps also a useful description of the politics and religion of the company’s Stanley patrons, at least so far as they can be known.34 A major theme in one of the most important anti-Burghley libels of 1592 was the marginalization of the “auncient nobilitie of the Realme” by the upstart Protestant favorites and leading ministers of the queen. Claiming that the “generall oppression of the people” was “no lesse lamentable then the ouerthrowe of the nobilitye,” the libel explained that “the Lyftenantes and Iustices of the Shires, who are reported to liue in best credit with their countries, are no more but the subiect of pusuivants, catchpoles, and promoters, and must night and day be redy, to waite and attend euery call, of this vile and abject sorte of people.”35 Opposite this passage a marginal notation, “As the E. of Darby & others,” identifies the Stanleys as a major target of the suspicion and harassment directed at the ancient nobility by Elizabeth’s Protestant favorites. Neither the Tudor myth of Thomas Stanley’s role at Bosworth, it would seem, nor the sagas retailing the patriotic family legend had erased the memory of Lord Thomas’s cautious neutrality at Bosworth or the stain of the family’s more recent defections, which included the tepid resistance of the Catholic-leaning 3rd Earl, Edward, to the Northern rebellion of 1569, the plot of the 3rd Earl’s sons Thomas and Edward to free Mary Queen of Scots from captivity at Sheffield, and Sir William Stanley of Wooten’s surrender of the English garrison at Deventer to Spanish troops in 1587.

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Henry Stanley, the 4th Earl of Derby, was clearly an unwavering supporter of the Tudor succession. As Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire and a key member of the ecclesiastical High Commission for the diocese of Chester, he appears to have become, over time, a compliant if moderate enforcer of Protestant religious measures on his Lancashire and Cheshire neighbors.36 Sir Christopher Hatton acknowledged “how principall & necessarie an Instrument my Lord of Derbie is in those parts, for all her Majesties Ser vices.”37 Nevertheless the earl was regularly denounced for insufficient zeal by local Protestant agitators,38 and the Privy Council, when implementing anti- Catholic policies in Lancashire, evidently preferred working behind the earl’s back with the more dependable William Chadderton, bishop of Chester, and with the staunchly Protestant Earl of Huntington, Lord President of the North. It appears to have taken the Earl of Leicester’s discreet advice (and probably the fear that noncooperation would mean sacrificing his family’s position) to persuade Derby to cooperate with Chadderton and the High Commission and, later, to lead the county in taking the Bond of Association against Mary Queen of Scots.39 On more than one occasion in 1583 Ferdinando Stanley wrote to Chadderton apologizing for his father’s “backwardnes in the matter” of religious enforcement, a backwardness he attributed to the earl’s regard for “his honor, the quiete contentes of the Countrie: & tendinge to his frendes desires.”40 Derby’s reputation for moderation among Catholics may have been behind his leadership of the lavish embassy to install Henri III in the Order of the Garter in 1585 and a reason for his delegation to negotiate for peace with the Duke of Parma in the Netherlands in the spring and summer of 1588. By the mid1580s Leicester’s continuing persuasions, the maneuverings of Chadderton, Huntington, and the Privy Council, and new prospects for promotion at court had probably combined to outweigh any reservations Derby may have harbored about cooperation with the regime. Derby became a privy councillor in 1585, sat as a commissioner on the trial of Mary Queen of Scots in 1586, and presided over the treason trial of the recusant Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, in 1589.41 Just as he had hunted down the Marprelate press in Manchester in 1589, so, in response to the 1591 proclamation against seminary priests and recusants, Derby implemented anti- Catholic campaigns in Lancashire and Cheshire. But of the eight hundred recusants brought before the 1592 assize, only a quarter of those were indicted and only a dozen were eventually fined. In a list of privy councillors compiled by the Spanish ambassador in 1587, Derby was not ranked among the militant Protestant “heretics” and “devils” (who included Leicester, Huntington, Warwick, Burghley, Hunsdon, Hatton, and Walsingham) but was placed, with his kinsmen Shrewsbury and Cumberland, among the “schismat-

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ics and neutrals.” He was described as “another good servant of Lord Robert Dudley, but in his own conscience . . . neutral.”42 Sir Edward Stafford called Derby “too good a natured man.”43 The spirit of Derby’s oversight in Lancashire may be gathered from a New Year’s sermon at New Park by one of the Stanley household preachers. John Cardwell’s sermon on Romans 13:11–14 departs from a chestnut of Protestant preaching (“let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light”), exposes the error of papists who believe they can “purchase the realme of Paradice by their owne merites,” and calls for the “abolishing of Idolatrie” and “the restoring of sound religion.” Its overriding themes, however, are Paul’s exhortation to “mutual loue and friendshippe,” dismay at the “warres, that are inflamed throughout al christendome . . . through enuie and contencion,” and commendation of good neighborhood based on the proper use of riches, hospitality, and the importance of the golden rule: “Hee that loueth his neighbor, will not backbite him or make or forge lyes of him to his disprofit any maner of waye.”44 A similarly irenic spirit is found in a letter from Derby to his friend the Earl of Shrewsbury at Christmas 1591, a missive written in the immediate wake of the Burghley proclamation just a few weeks earlier. Conveying a gift of Spanish oranges and lemons acquired from Captain Thomas Thornton in Dublin and enclosing Thornton’s cover letter to the effect that the mariners shipping the fruit “reporte that the people of Biscay are very desirous to haue peace with Englande,” Derby emphasized to Shrewsbury that “your Lord shall perceiue how wyllynglye some of King Philype his subiectes wolde haue peace wythe Englande.”45 Opposite in spirit to the “new Cecillian Inquisition,” the irenic manner of the Stanleys in dealing with Catholic neighbors at home and abroad probably reinforced long-standing suspicions against them in London. Through his intelligence network, Burghley kept close tabs on the affairs of the 4th Earl, as well as a map on which he made notes about the families of Lancashire.46 He followed even more closely rumors concerning the Derby heir, Lord Strange. In one of his letters to Bishop Chadderton, Lord Strange himself insisted on his deep personal commitment to Chadderton’s campaign for “some better reformacion in this soe unbridled and bade an handfull of Englande.”47 Though this commitment on behalf of “her maiestie” against “rebellious minded” papists is primarily politique in its patriotic dislike of rebellion, it may also be inflected by a genuine investment in “some better reformation” of the Elizabethan Church. The real point, however, is that the depth of the religious commitment is impossible to gauge. Lord Strange gave unquestioned loyal ser vice to the Crown in Lancashire during his father’s absence in the summer of the

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Armada, but judging from a prayer attributed to him at the time, he avoided any zealous extreme. Calling upon God to “norrish Christian Concord amongst vs,” the prayer implores, on the one hand, that there remain no “Idolatry error and blasphemous Ceremonyes” in England and, on the other hand, that there be “no false interpretacion of the Scriptures obstinately defended.”48 More than the usual Stanley caution and neutrality may have been involved in Lord Strange’s position, since he inherited through his mother, a granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary in the Suffolk line, the exceptional burden of a plausible claim to the English throne. In A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594), a work clearly written before Ferdinando’s death in April 1594, the Jesuit Robert Parsons explained that a claim to the throne inhered in “the children of the countesse of Derby . . . both in respect of their discent, . . . and then againe for their neernes in degree, which by the Countesse yet liuing is neerer to king Henry the seuenth by one degree, then any other competitor whatsoeuer.” The difficulty this claim created for Ferdinando was perhaps exacerbated by the quality that made Parsons reluctant to endorse him. Lord Strange’s religion, he claimed, was too inscrutably politic (or perhaps too genuinely heterodox) for men to be “satisfied & contented” with him: “The earle of Darbyes religion, is held to be . . . doubtful, as some do thinke him to be of all three religions [i.e., Protestant, Puritan, and Catholic], and others of none, and these agayne are deuided in iudgements, about the euent heerof, as some do imagin that this opinion of him, may do him goode . . . but others do persuade themselues that it will do him hurt, for that no side in deede will esteeme or trust him.”49 There was certainly little trust of Lord Strange where Burghley and other Protestant counselors were concerned. In 1587 government agents intercepted an emissary from Sir William Stanley, the papist renegade who surrendered Deventer to the Spanish, while he was bearing a message to Lord Strange to the effect that “hir Matie is but a shadowe, and one person, if God shoulde will hire Matie, he wolde be one that shoulde stand my L. Strange, one day, as anny one man.”50 In the spring of 1591 Burghley took testimony from two captured emissaries sent to talk about the succession and persuade Catholics to cast their eyes upon Lord Strange, who might be made king by the Catholics unanimously.51 Burghley of course did not inform Lord Strange of these inquiries, but he kept in his personal possession a letter borne by the messengers, professedly from Robert Parsons (but not in his hand), in which the bearers were instructed to send a report of “what you find in the mane my cousin” (“by his Cusin is meante,” says a marginal note, “my Lord Straunge”).52 In June and July 1592, to come closer to the end of Strange’s Men’s first run at the Rose, the authorities

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learned from three separate sources that there was “intelligence between” Lord Strange and Allen; that emissaries had been charged “by meanes of one Iohn Garret [i.e., Gerard] a pryest . . . to make tryall of my L Strange, & see how he was affected to that pretence of the crowne after her maiesties deathe”; and that Sir William Stanley hoped to find material support “by the figure 19 [i.e., Earl of Derby] and the young one 14 [i.e., Lord Strange].”53 Allegations like these, together with Burghley’s bizarre belief that Derby and Lord Strange would be prepared to support a landing of ten thousand to twelve thousand papal troops on the northwest coast (Catholic propaganda held that “D[octor] Dee their conjurer or Astrologer is said to have . . . told the Counsel by his calculation, that the Realme indeed shalbe conquered by this Somer, believe him who wil”),54 cast an unwarranted cloud of suspicion over the apparent religious moderation of the Stanleys and their good standing among their neighbors in Lancashire. They were almost certainly loyal to the regime. The queen had given “her good acceptance” of Derby’s ser vice in the Netherlands during the Armada, and in 1589 she praised him as “the principal cause of the staying of the country [Lancashire] from falling into Popery.”55 The earl was reported in 1590 to have “preachinge in his house Sabothly, by the best preachers in ye countie,” including Edward Fleetwood, the zealous rector of Wigan who had not long before denounced him to Burghley for “tolleratinge and no way sowndly reforming the notoriows backwardnesse of his whole Company in religion, and chefely of the chefest abowte him.”56 Ferdinando Stanley too was accounted by his friends a reliable supporter of the regime; his brother-in-law George Carey, the future Lord Chamberlain, praised “the good ser vice he did to her Majesty and the realm,” and he claimed that the queen herself testified to the Privy Council that no “man in the world loved her better than he did.”57 But these last remarks were part of Carey’s inquest into Ferdinando’s mysterious death in April 1594. The political loyalty and apparent religious conformity of the Stanleys could not, in the divisive mood of the later Elizabethan years, prevent their apparently moderate and pragmatic approach to religious differences from being interpreted as disloyal and dangerous. SEPA R AT ISM A N D CONFOR M I T Y

Lord Strange’s Men did not just put matters of divinity and state before the public by playing with fire. Their plays offered numerous critiques of the extremities of both papist and puritan zeal. On the one hand, much of the antiCatholic material in the repertory comes from an older Elizabethan mainstream, as might be expected from a company whose leading players had belonged to

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the Earl of Leicester’s troupe. The lost “poope Ione,” already an old play when it left the boards in March 1592, was presumably an antipapist play that could well have been inherited from the repertory of Leicester’s Men. “Harey the vj” has been read as a “Foxeian play” based on its treatment of the Catholic saint Joan and its treatment of the quarrel between Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and the conniving Bishop of Winchester.58 It is part of Marlowe’s ironic way of working that the Duc du Guise and the cardinals of Guise and Lorraine (conflated in The Massacre at Paris) are such perfect papist villains, and that the friars and nuns of The Jew of Malta are cut from even cruder antipapist cloth. The unseen but sinister Philip II and the mad zealot Juan Sebastian, to say nothing of the ludicrous Irish bishop, supply The Battle of Alcazar with Catholic knaves and fools aplenty, though here, as with Marlowe, the ironies of the play do not stop with its invoking the stage stereotypes of Catholic villainy. These antipapal aspects of the repertory were balanced, however, by a strand of antipuritan satire that was perhaps the earliest and strongest on the Elizabethan stage. A Looking Glass for England, for example, concludes in the manner of the Queen’s Men’s plays, with a patriotic prayer in support of England’s queen, “That she may bide the pillar of his Church / Against the stormes of Romish Antichrist” (TLN 2406–7). Yet this patriotism is balanced elsewhere in the play with pungent satire against the hypocrisies of Protestant enthusiasm. Thus while Oseas praises Protestant realms “where the word / Is daily preached both at church and boord: / Where maiestie the Gospell doth maintaine,” he also laments that a hypocritical “shew of zeale is prankt in robes of zeale, / When Ministers powle the pride of common-weale” (TLN 1451–52, 1816–17). Jonas likewise objects that “prophets new inspired presume to force / And tie the power of heaven to their conceits” (TLN 1051–52), and he explains how a paradoxically “irreligious zeale” has undone the works of devotion and charity associated with traditional religion: irreligious zeale Incampeth there where virtue was inthroan’d. Ah-lasse the while, the widow wants reliefe, The fatherlesse is wrongd by naked need, Deuotion sleepes in sinders of Contempt, Hypocrisie infects the holie Priest. (TLN 961– 66)

In A Knack to Know a Knave the critique of puritanism is couched, as we have seen, in a reenactment of the Last Judgment in the cycle plays, and it is directed at one of the most odious of Elizabethan stage puritans, the unctuous

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John the Precise.59 Following his father’s advice to “blinde the world with thy hypocrisie” and “with thy pureness blind the peoples eies,” John confirms early in the play that he and his brethren “blind the world with holinesse, / And so by that are tearmed pure Precisians” (TLN 284– 93, 343–44). The play attributes this hypocrisy to sola fideism, which annuls the per formance of works in order to justify economic self-interest. Hypocritically citing St. Paul (“thou shalt get thy liuing with the sweat of thy browes”) and Solomon (“good deeds do not iustify a man”), John the Precise refuses charity to a beggar because “the Spirit doth not mooue me thereunto.” As the play’s satiric spokesman Honesty observes, echoing the use of the Sermon on the Mount in the Last Judgment plays, he can turne and wind the Scripture to his owne vse, but he remembers not where Christ saith, He that giueth to the poore lendeth vnto the Lord. (TLN 1621–38)

In an uncharacteristically retaliatory final scene, the play condemns John the Precise to public execution “for abusing the blessed word of God,” “mocking the diuine order of Ministery,” and leading “the ignorant into errours” (TLN 1855–57). The divisive effects of Protestant zeal may have been emphasized elsewhere in the repertory. We cannot be sure of what was in the lost “tittus & vespacia,” but in other dramatic versions of the fall of Jerusalem and in much contemporary commentary, the creation of internal divisions by the suicidal Jewish Zealot factions is coded to suggest analogies with the separatism of extreme Protestants. In Solymitana Clades, Thomas Legge, a northern Catholic whose protection of recusant students and dramatic activities at Cambridge earned him a dangerous denunciation from his puritan colleagues, reserved his deepest venom for the mad atrocities of the Jewish Zealot faction, which arise from their puritanical refusal to allow the “unclean mixing” of Roman with Jewish offerings in the Temple. The Zealots oppose having “the innermost chambers of the Temple laid open for one and all,” and they use the cloak of religion to advance their purposes: “everyone pretends to be a Zealot, that he might kill his enemy.” Titus, the prudent and magnanimous victim of repeated Zealot treacheries, stands by in a mixture of grief and incomprehension as he watches the city destroy itself in internecine religious butchery. At the height of the play’s insanity, as the Temple burns, Titus offers a skeptical lament (not found in the sources) that must have seemed relevant to contemporary religious divisions and persecutions: “What manner of nation is this, which attributes

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murderousness to religion or calls infanticide by the name of sacrifice? What kind of God makes such a demand? What kind of priest makes such offerings?”60 In William Heminges’s The Iewes Tragedy (written circa 1629; published 1662), a work perhaps derived from “tittus & vespacia,” religious zeal likewise excuses rebellion against the “sacriligious” King Agrippa, and there is no mistaking the thinly disguised attack on Protestant iconoclasm in the Zealots’ murder of the high priest Ananias, their stripping of his robes, and their investing of the clownish carter Penuel in his place. Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares ouer Ierusalem (1593), a work exactly contemporary with “tittus & vespacia,” portrays the Zealot rebellion as a militant desecration of the established religio-political order: “displacing of the Sanhadrin, . . . the Sacrifice they silenced, put the High-Priest to death, and conuerted the Temple to an Armory. . . . The Vessels of the House of the Lorde they put to vile vses. Not any consecrated thing but they arrested and made booty of. . . . Not onely those that came to offer, but those that but offred to kneele in the Temple, they ran through. . . . False witnesses they had in pay a Campe royal.”61 Nashe brings the nightmare closer to home when he remarks that “as great as Ierusalem, [so] hath London deserued. Whatsoeuer of Ierusalem I haue written, was but to lend her a Looking-glasse” (2: 80). Underlining similarities between the Zealot rebellion and the extremer forms of Protestantism among the London clergy, Nashe declares “those Preachers please best which can fitte vs with a cheape Religion, that preach Fayth, and all Fayth, and no Good-workes” (2: 106–7). Like the Jews, who made of Scripture “a too-to compounde Cabalisticall substaunce,” the “propagation of the Gospell” and “the suppressing of Popery” by modern extremists involves an abusive scripturalism that “turneth the truth of God to a lye” by breeding division: “where they enuie, Scripture is theyr Champion to scold” (2: 118, 127). “Instead of Bread,” some militant clergy “gyue the children of theyr Ministry stones to throwe at one another” (2: 133). We are conjecturing when we offer Christ’s Teares in token of the lost “tittus & vespacia,” but in Pierce Penilesse, a work dedicated to Lord Strange and praising his company’s Talbot play, Nashe had also attacked the “chuff-headed Burghomasters” of London for their puritanical opposition to playing.62 It would certainly have been a fitting revenge for the players’ arrest by the Lord Mayor in 1589 if the “tittus & vespacia” of Lord Strange’s Men had at least implied the analogies between London and Jerusalem that Nashe makes so explicit. Given the appearance of Christ’s Teares during the same period of religious division as the play, it is hard to see how a play on the destruction of Jerusalem, if that was the subject of “tittus & vespacia,” could not have echoed the attacks on divisive Protestant religiosity found elsewhere in the work of Lord Strange’s Men.

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The company’s connection to Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber is far from secure, but a recent reading of the play by Donna B. Hamilton suggests that it adopts a Church-papist or loyal accommodationist perspective on contemporary religious divisions. The action of the play, Hamilton points out, is “church-centered.”63 The Abbey Church of St. Werburgh in Chester is the setting for the final scene, in which Kent’s magical deceptions win Griffin Merridock and Lord Powys their brides. The Abbey forms an urban counterpart to the play’s central rural episodes, which are built around a clandestine nighttime journey to the Welsh shrine of St. Winifred’s Well at Holywell in Flintshire. The countess is initially reluctant to perform the erotic rite of washing “at Saint winifredes fayre spring” (TLN 259) because of her husband’s ban on superstitious practices and “auncient rules, / Religiously obserued in these partes” (TLN 259– 64). By invoking post-Reformation prohibitions against recusant practices—many accusations against pilgrims to the St. Winifred’s Well survive in Tudor–Stuart records—the play thus bestows upon the women’s flight into the rural darkness of Wales an aura of transgression and danger that is more than simply romantic. The play’s conclusion, Hamilton points out, requires that “people are able to enter the church as themselves, not disguised.”64 John a Kent helps the lovers Merridock and Powys to enter the church where his magical opponent John a Cumber has sequestered the brides, Sydanen and Marian, pending the arrival of the unwanted suitors and the girls’ heavy-handed fathers, who intend “to force their children from their soules affect” (TLN 42). Assigned to stand guard at the church door, the villainous John a Cumber “assumes,” as Hamilton puts it, “that the people most intent on getting past him will come in disguise.”65 But John a Kent benignly suggests that instead of lying or disguising themselves, the girls’ true lovers should simply enter the church as they are: Tu weele no shapes, nor none of these disguysings, They ofore seru’d both his turne and myne, As no ye are, so shall ye passe the gate. (TLN 1558– 60)

It makes something of a hash of the beautiful idea of passing the gate “as now ye are” that the suitors are actually helped by John a Kent’s casting “a sillie dazeling mist” over John a Cumber’s eyes (TLN 1613), but whereas Cumber relies primarily on the “shadowes” of mere disguise and deception, Kent relies here and elsewhere on the “substance” of efficacious magic. Hamilton’s reading of the play as using “old traditions” to demystify “the rhetoric of control being used against Catholics”66 complements another strand

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of antipuritan satire in the play, which seems to be alluding to both the Marprelate controversy and the satirical powers of theater. It has long been suggested that Anthony Munday, an anti-Martinist author and pursuivant to John Whitgift, is the “John a Cant his hobby-horse” attacked in the last of the Marprelate pamphlets. Given that Kent and Cumber is an extended flyting in which Cumber more than once gets his comeuppance, the play looks suspiciously like an enactment of the Marprelate controversy, a contest between John (Whitgift) of “Canterbury” and John (Penry) of “Cymbria” or Wales.67 This seems all the more plausible in view of the theatrical ridicule to which Cumber is subjected by Kent in the middle of the play. It is actually Cumber’s intention to ridicule Kent by securing a crew of local clowns to perform in his own behalf (as Martin Marprelate had resorted to clowning in print), but Kent instead turns the show against the Marprelate figure of Cumber himself, just as Whitgift had done in recruiting playwrights and players to the anti-Martinist cause. It makes for impish satire, then, that the clown Turnop (a part for putatively “haggling and profane” Kemp if there ever was one) and his crew are cast as honest vestrymen with a sideline in fiddling, piping, dancing, and theatrical performing. They subject the sour and suspicious Cumber to what amounts to a lap dance from their Maid Marian before making him wear the fool’s motley in their morris dance. Most deliciously of all, this highly musical play, set in Chester and northern Wales—in the domains of the Stanleys—is perhaps contemporary not only with the staging of anti-Martinist plays in London but with the slanderous puritan campaign being conducted in Lancashire against the Earl of Derby for failing to suppress “Wakes, ffayres, markettes, barebaytes, bullbaites, Ales, Maygames, Resortinge to Alehowses in tyme of devyne ser vice, pypinge and dauncinge, huntinge & all maner of vnlawfull gamynge.” 68 In view of the morris dance to which John a Cumber is subjected by John a Kent, it is worth recalling the references to Martin Marprelate being “made a Maygame vpon the Stage” at “The Theater”; to “the May-game of Martinisme,” in which Penry was “the foregallant of the Morrice”; and, in the pro-Martinist Protestacyon of Martin the Great, to Munday, “John a Cant his hobbie-horse,” being “newly put out of the Morris . . . for ever shaking his shins about a Maypole again while he lived.”69 The Protestacyon, usually dated to mid-September 1589, is by that dating about two months too early to be alluding to the arrest of members of Lord Strange’s Men for refusing to cease their anti-Martinist performances at the Cross Keys Inn, but it may refer to events leading up to that arrest, and it may also help to explain the work of the Privy Council six days after it, when they proposed action to prevent players from treating matters of divinity and state. It may even explain the absence of the play from the roster at the Rose in 1592–93.

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Similar questions of conformity and loyalty play a prominent role in Sir Thomas More, another manuscript play involving the hand of Munday and bearing features that, as we have seen, give it a plausible claim to have originated with Lord Strange’s Men in 1592– 93. The play is evasive on the subject of the royal “Articles” to which More is three times urged to “subscribe” (TLN 1235– 36, 1541, 1571), but it shows More becoming “subiect to the rack of hate” (TLN 1496) for deciding to follow his conscience no matter the consequences.70 David Bevington has suggested that the “argument” of Sir Thomas More “is that, within the orthodox limits of obedience to the king as head of the church, a man’s private opinions are his own.” Because More’s stance “is not labeled Catholic,” Bevington adds, it is meant to appeal “to all those who are troubled in their religious allegiances. The answer is staunchly orthodox, in that it absolutely forbids any compromising of duty toward the state in matters of social injustice or doctrine; but it plainly views sympathetically the Londoners’ plea for some official forbearance in return for their loyalty.”71 David Womersley likewise suggests that the play is “simultaneously Catholic and Protestant,”72 and that its utopian potential as contemporary theater, a potential tragically unrealizable within the play’s historical frame of reference, rests on the case it makes for tolerance based on deference to secular authority and combined with mutual forbearance among English subjects. These are the two ideals emphasized in More’s eloquent calming of the Evil May Day riot in the first half of the play. Written in a hand often supposed to be Shakespeare’s, More’s speeches to the rebels occur in an Addition (II) that replaces pages from the original fair copy. The speeches cannot therefore be dated to the time of the play’s original composition. But Tilney’s warning on the original layer of the manuscript against depicting More’s “good servic don” indicates that the original already contained an offensive scene concerning More’s quelling of the rioters, and we cannot rule out the possibility, given the various authorial hands that may be buried in Munday’s fair copy, that the author of the original was Shakespeare and that he was thus revising himself in Addition II. Whenever the revised scene was written, it shows a remarkable grasp of the play’s irenic spirit. More’s orthodox advice on obedience to the higher powers out of St. Paul (TLN 216–29) is surrounded by irenic counsel to empathy and respect for differences among natives and strangers. More asks the anti-alien rioters to consider first the consequences for themselves of banishing the immigrants: graunt them remoued and graunt that this yor [y] noyce hath Chidd downe all the matie of Ingland

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Politics and Religion in the Repertory ymagin that you see the wretched straingers their babyes at their backs, and their poor luggage plodding tooth ports and costs for transportacion and that you sytt as kings in your desires aucthoryty quyte sylenct by yor braule and you in ruff of yor opinions clothd what had you got, I’le tell you, you had taught how insolenc and strong hand should prevayle how ordere should be quelld, and by this patterne not on of you should lyve an aged man for other ruffians as their fancies wrought with sealf same hand sealf reasons and sealf right woold shark on you and men lyke ravenous fishes woold feed on on another. (Addition II, ll. 191–211)

Doll Williamson responds, “thats as trewe as the gospel,” and it is indeed by the golden rule of the Sermon on the Mount (“Therefore whatsoeuer ye woulde that men should doe to you, euen so doe ye to them”; Matthew 7:12) that More asks the rioters to weigh what it would be like were the king to banish you, whether would you go. what Country by the nature of yor error should gyve you harber go you to ffraunc or flanders to any iarman pvince, [to] spane or portigall nay any where [why you] that not adheres to Ingland why you must needs be straingers. Woold you be pleasd to find a nation of such barbarous temper that breaking out in hiddious violence woold not afford you, an abode on earth whett their detested knyves against yor throtes spurne you lyke dogs, and lyke as yf that god owed not nor made not you, nor that the elaments wer not all appropriate to [ther] yor Comforts but Charterd vnto them, what would you thinck to be thus vsd, this is the straingers case and this your momtanish inhumanyty All faith a saies trewe letts vs do as we may be doon by. (Addition II, ll. 245– 64)

“Go you to France or Flanders . . . to Spain or Portugal”—whatever the date of the revision, this sounds a lot like it owes something to the earlier 1590s. The

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“barbarous temper” of England cannot help reflecting the concern elsewhere in the play—despite a putative focus on economic rights—with contemporary strife and persecution for religion’s sake. What, after all, had brought those foreigners, Flemings and Frenchmen, to England? Tilney, wanting to keep at arm’s length any analogy with contemporary affairs, at first insisted that “Lombard”— the historically accurate term for the economic event of 1517—be used in lieu of the play’s terms “straunger” and “ffrencheman” (TLN 364, 68). But then, as he was confronted with the cascading names of “Picarde . . . de Barde, Peter van Hollock, Adrian Martine” (TLN 421–22), Tilney grew impatient with tinkering and sent the whole scene to the block. The sentiment against alien immigrants in 1592– 93, Tilney might have been thinking, was entangled with the foreign campaigns that, during “these dangerous times,” “these troublous times” (two more phrases that Tilney excised), were taking English troops over the channel in precisely the opposite direction. WA R FOR R EL IGION ’S SA K E Ye may see many housholders oppressed with yeeres and sorowes, laden with children on their shoulders and their sides; their wiues folowing at their heeles blubbered with teares, hauing their little infants lugging at their breasts; abandoning their auncient and goodlie patrimonies . . . their mouables so costlie: winding themselues at length out of the armes of their kinred, friendes, and neighbors . . . some trauailing towardes . . . England, perswaded to finde . . . courtesie, charitie, pitie, mercie and succour.73

It is worth wondering whether, in writing More’s portrait of those “wretched straingers / their babyes at their backs, and their poor luggage / plodding tooth ports and costs for transportacion,” Shakespeare might have been recalling this contemporary portrait of refugees from the religious wars in France. The Massacre at Paris, devoted to these wars, is one of several plays in which Lord Strange’s Men explored the question of war for religion’s sake. Others include The Jew of Malta, with its war of three religions, and probably “tittus & vespacia,” if it concerned the Zealot rebellion. Orlando Furioso, “brandimer,” and John of Bordeaux all derive from the literature of the Crusades. The contest of Talbot with the Catholic witch Pucelle in “harey the vj,” a play whose siege of Rouen was being staged while England was besieging Rouen on behalf of Henri of Navarre, involves thinly disguised religious warfare that allegorizes the early 1590s. One of the most important of these plays in terms of its contemporary interest is The Battle of Alcazar, which depicts the defeat of England’s ally Portugal

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at El-Ksar Kbir on 4 August 1578. The death of the childless King Juan Sebastian at El-Ksar ended Portugal’s national independence, as the country, caught in a succession crisis, was annexed (along with its magnificent fleet) by Philip II. According to the sources of the play, which derive ultimately from Spanish accounts and therefore underline the folly of Juan Sebastian and heighten the virtue of his Moorish opponent Abdelmelec, the disaster that ended Portugal’s sovereignty was caused by the naïve Christian chivalry of the Portuguese king, who was “studious to enlarge his Empire and Religion.” While the Spanish sources depict Abdelmelec administering “Iustice with equitie, much favoring Christians,” they show Sebastian haranguing his troops to fight “for the honour of God, and the increase of the Christian Religion” while also paradoxically “promising them great riches.”74 The Second part of the booke of Battailes (1587) notes Juan Sebastian’s warmongering was echoed by “the Bishoppes of Coimbra and Portua . . . and many other spirituall persons,” while A Dolorous discourse, of a most terrible and bloudy Battel . . . (1579) insists that “Prelates, prophets, and Preachers” who “persuade Princes to the shedding of blood, murdering of Innocents, and to make spoyle of the People . . . are not the seruauntes of Iesus Christ: but in dede the very scholers of Antichrist.”75 Peele’s play highlights Philip II’s treacherous betrayal of Juan Sebastian, an element of the story suppressed in the mainly pro-Spanish sources, but he readily adopts from the sources their contrast between Sebastian’s mad Christian zealotry, abetted by Philip out of cynical motives, and the Muslim Abdelmelec’s magnanimous and peaceful inclinations toward Christianity. Thus Peele’s Sebastian and his counselors repeatedly insist that their alliance with the evil usurper Muly Mahamet will “plant religious truth in Affrica” (TLN 831), “propagate religious truth” (TLN 946), and “inlarge the bounds of christendome” (TLN 995). Ironically, however, “our Christ, for whom in chiefe we fight,” turns out, despite Sebastian’s prayers, not to “fauor this warre” (TLN 994, 996). On the moral superiority of Abdelmelec to his Christian enemies, The Battle of Alcazar concurs with the sources, which have the Muslim prince laboring “all that he could, to feare the king of Portugall from that enterprise,” sending him messages “to weigh and thinke with himselfe, how iust and lawfull a cause he hath to come into Africa.”76 Peele’s Abdelmelec takes pity on the portending doom of “a carelesse christian prince” (TLN 912) whose “foresight hath bin small” (TLN 1090), but in vain does he send “secret messengers to counsell him” to peace (TLN 907). Sebastian, denying that “our enemie would wish vs anie good” (TLN 1165), rejects these overtures with a savage and suicidal zeal:

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Cast feare aside, my selfe will leade the way, And make a passage with my conquering sword Knee deepe in bloud of these accursed Moores. (TLN 1168–70)

Against such insanity, Abdelmelec is left with little choice but to make Sebastian “know and rue his ouersight / That rashly seekes the ruine of this land” (TLN 1148–49). Peele’s depiction of El-Ksar Kbir can be read as ranking Catholics, including the treacherous Philip II, morally below the virtuous heathen Abdelmelec and thus, by implication, further still beneath the virtue of English Protestants. Perhaps that was an orthodox intention of the play in 1589, when Abdelmelec’s brother and rightful successor Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur (the play’s “Muly Mahamet Seth”) had became the joint planner of the expedition by Norris and Drake to reinstate the Portuguese pretender Don Antonio. Peele’s poem on the occasion of the expedition’s departure resembles Sebastian’s mad, crusading militarism in its Protestant enthusiasm for putting down the Catholic Antichrist. But even in 1589 there must already have been enough suspicion of England’s alliance with Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur to lend irony to the scene in which Muly Mahamet’s ambassadors swear, hands in fire, their loyalty to Sebastian’s cause. Such suspicions might also have provoked some thoughtful double takes at the stuffing of Muly Mahamet’s skin, a punishment inflicted “That all the world may learne by him to auoide / To hall [i.e., hale] on princes to iniurious warre” (TLN 1581– 82). Certainly by August 1589, with the loss of eight thousand to eleven thousand English lives and the return of the remainder of the force, the play would have provoked as much doubt and skepticism as patriotism. It would almost certainly have done so by 1592, when, just as the play was on the boards at the Rose, martial law and hangings were being used against the veterans of the Norris–Drake campaign and the unreliable Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur was being blamed for the mission’s failure.77 The ironic structure of the play, in which the “personal stature and moderation” of the barbarous hero Abdelmelec force “Christian Europe to look critically at itself,” means that it is not (or not only) “Portugal’s or England’s history that frames Barbary’s, but Barbary’s that frames Portugal’s and England’s.”78 In Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris the company presented a spectacle of mass violence inflicted by supposed Christians and countrymen against each other. Essential to the play’s assessment of the role of religion in politics is the Machiavellian soliloquy by the Catholic Guise on the hypocritical exploitation of “our difference in Religion” (TLN 23):

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At the time of the play’s Rose debut in January 1592/93, England was entangled in Navarre’s still-unfolding campaign against the papacy and the Duke of Parma. Essex had been recalled to England from the faltering siege of Rouen in January 1591/92, and the siege was broken off in April of that year, when Navarre first withdrew his troops to engage Parma. Navarre announced his conversion to Catholicism in May 1593, at a time when English troops, freshly committed during the very month of January when The Massacre opened at the Rose, were still exposed in Brittany and Normandy. Marlowe, murdered on 30 May 1593, could not have known of Navarre’s conversion at the time he wrote the play, yet he did in a manner anticipate these events in the play’s deeply ironical structure, a symmetrical pattern in which revenge, undertaken in the name of religious causes, repeatedly proves “more farcical than tragic.”79 In keeping with Protestant orthodoxy, the play invites “our approval of [Navarre] and our condemnation of [the Guise],” but it also displays “a disposition to suspect keenly partisan attitudes” and to “respond skeptically” to the pursuit of war for religion’s sake.80 In keeping with many of its French Protestant sources, The Massacre invokes a politique ethos, but unlike those sources, it does so in a manner that breaks with partisan religious ideology: “under the guise of vulgar anti- Catholicism,” the play raises “a skeptical unease about confessional states of any stripe, whether Protestant or Catholic.”81 The play’s ironic symmetries begin with its staging of spectacular violence, in which the quasi-ritual enactment of religious murder amounts to blasphemy, whether on the part of the Catholic perpetrators of the Massacre: Admi. O let me pray before I dye. Gonzago. Then pray vnto our Ladye, kisse this crosse. Stab him. (TLN 360– 62) Loreine. I am a preacher of the word of God, And thou a traitor to thy soule and him. Guise. Dearely beloued brother, thus tis written. He stabs him. (TLN 410–13)

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Seroune. O let me pray before I take my death. Mount. Despatch then quickly. Seroune. O Christ my Sauiour. Mount. Christ, villaine, why darst thou presume to call on Christ, without intercession of some saint? Sancta Iacobus, he was my Saint, pray to him. Seroune. O let me prayv unto my God. Mount. Then take this with you. Stab him. (TLN 426–35)

Or on the part of the Massacre’s Protestant revengers: Car. What will you fyle your hands with Churchmens bloud? [Sec. Murd.] Shed your bloud? O Lord, no: for we entend to strangle you. . . . Now they strangle him. (TLN 1347–50, 1363)

On each side, the “country’s good” is invoked against the religion of the opposing party. The Guise calls on his followers to “rather chuse to seek your countries good / Than pittie or releeue these vpstart hereticks” (TLN 260– 61) while Navarre proclaims war Against the proud disturbers of the faith . . . Who set themselues to tread vs under foot And rent our true religion from this land. ... We must with resolute mindes resolue to fight In honor of our God and countries good. (TLN 843–51)

In keeping with the absurdly talionic logic of the play’s religious strife, the dying curses and vows of the Guise and Henri III mirror each other. While the Guise calls upon Pope Sixtus to “be reueng’d vpon the King” and “excommunicate . . . curst Valois his line. / Viue la messa, perish Hugonets” (TLN 1240– 45), Henri implores “the Queene of England specially, / Whom God hath blest for hating Papestry,” to “whet thy sword on Sextus bones, / That it may keenly slice the Catholicks” (TLN 1526–27, 1567– 68). The Massacre is written from within an ideological framework dictated by its Huguenot sources, but the greater rhetorical volubility of the Protestant cause

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in Navarre’s closing vow that “Rome and all those popish Prelates there, / Shall curse the time that ere Nauarre was King” (TLN 1580– 81) is not necessarily (given Marlowe’s shrewd attention to the connections between hyperbole and hypocrisy) a feature that adds to its justice. Despite his use of Huguenot sources, Marlowe blackens the character of Henri III in ways that overgo even the most lurid of the Guisard propagandists,82 and Marlowe’s Navarre adopts Machiavellian tactics nearly identical to those of the Guise.83 The pious rhetoric in which these tactics are draped (TLN 694– 95, 704–5), Marlowe shows, are instigated by his Calvinist advisors Pleshé (i.e., du Plessis-Mornay [xiii.42–43]) and Bartus (i.e., du Bartas). It is at du Bartas’s advice that Navarre allies himself with the unsavory Henri (TLN 696– 97, 860– 61), and it is in the presence of the pious du Bartas that Navarre—after the slaughter of Catholic troops at Coutras— offers his most disturbing defense of war for religion’s sake: How many noble men haue lost their liues, In prosecution of these cruell armes, Is ruth and almost death to call to minde: But God we know will alwaies put them downe, That lift themselues against the perfect truth, Which Ile maintaine so long as life doth last, And with the Q. of England ioyne my force: To beat the papall Monarck from our lands, And keep those relicks from our countries coastes. (TLN 960– 69)

Navarre’s “unconvincingly sanctimonious” sentiments introduce an element of farce to the pattern of revenge, so that the play deploys “vivid anti- Catholicism” while making “a dispassionate ironic comment on the cruel fanaticism of both sides.”84 In this respect the French war of the three Henris bears comparison with the folly of El-Ksar Kbir, where “three bolde kings,” in “a battaile . . . wherin neither party gained,”85 were “confounded in their height” (TLN 65– 66), or with the The Jew of Malta’s tragic farce involving conflict among the three religions of the Book. In the way that it combines apparent Protestant orthodoxy with implicit dissent, The Massacre at Paris “mirrors the complexity of its moment,”86 and not just because it draws on sources written by both sides but because it draws creatively on the politique ideas and rhetoric being used in bad faith by religious ideologues on both sides. Among the many pro-Navarre pamphlets being translated in England in 1591–92, perhaps at the behest of the government,87 were a number that mustered politique arguments and irenic sentiments calculated to draw reasonable

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Catholics (and international supporters) to the side of a Protestant succession. Thus The Restorer of the French Estate (1589), lamenting that “Church-men . . . haue left deuotion and charitie to embrace hypocrisie and madnes” and insisting that “this noueltie of forcing mens consciences is come out of Sathans shop,” declared, “It is more tollerable, more reasonable, and agreable to Gods pleasure, to suffer the heretike and infidell to liue, and dwell by him, then to make hauock in the Church, and set a way wide open to a thousand & a thousand confusions, impieties, & other mischieuous villanies which warres brings with it.”88 In keeping with the habit of subordinating politique thinking to ideological ends, the pamphlet went on to demonstrate the Calvinist verity that the pope is the Antichrist. It is the achievement of The Massacre at Paris to have shifted the emphasis, not necessarily separating politique thinking from its Protestant application, but strongly underlining the politique ideas and implications of the ideological material from which it draws its picture of war for religion’s sake. “The afflictions of France,” one pamphleteer noted, “may be Englands Looking Glass, and their neglect of peace, our continuall labour and studie how to preserue it.”89 The self-injuring, suicidal nature of war for religion’s sake was also conveyed in politique literature by way of analogies with the destruction of Jerusalem: “Hierusalem was lost while the Iewes busie about the exercise of the ceremonies of their sabaoth, . . . fell uppon the edges of the Romanes swordes.”90 Given their apparent preoccupation with war for religion’s sake, Lord Strange’s Men may have made a similar connection, for their debut of The Massacre at Paris was immediately preceded by a revival of their “tittus & vespacia”: ne

Receued at titus the 25 Ienewaye 1593 Receued at the tragedy of the gvyes 30 Receued at mandevell the 31 of < . . . > Receued at frier bacon the 30 of [Iuly] Ieneway 1593 Receued at harey the vj the 31 of Ienewarye 1593 Receued at the Iewe of malta the j of febreary 1593

xxx s. iij li. xiiij s. < . . . .> xij s. xxvj s. xxxv s.91

Assuming that we are correct in our identification of “frier bacon” with John of Bordeaux and in our conjectures about “mandevell,” then religious difference and war for religion’s sake were common threads throughout this six- day sequence of performances, the final days of Strange’s Men at the Rose, according to Henslowe’s diary. There can be little doubt, in any case, about The Jew of Malta or about “harey the vj,” which, at the risk of anachronism, depicts a kind of religious war between the English Talbot and the Catholic witch of France, burned at play’s end. Essex had been recalled from the futile siege of Rouen by the time the company staged their own siege of Rouen at the Rose. Talbot’s

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“valiant acts” in the play, Nashe said, were a sharp “reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours.”92 But so, perhaps, was the senselessness of Talbot’s death, brought about by divisions among the English themselves. The play may also have contained a further reproof to “these days of oures” in the quiet and less often noticed reflection of the young Henry VI: I always thought It was both impious and vnnaturall, That such immanity and bloody strife Should reigne among Professors of one Faith. (TLN 2345–48)

V I RT UOUS H E AT H E N

The saintly Henry VI, so ill-equipped for his surroundings in a supposedly Christian Europe, may be the most virtuous Christian prince in the plays of Lord Strange’s Men. In contrast to the Queen’s Men’s Henry V or King John, and in contrast to Edward I, for example, the heroes in the plays of Lord Strange’s Men are for the most part not their Christian princes (consider, for example, the unappealing Juan Sebastian and Philip II in The Battle of Alcazar, the Spanish and Portuguese rulers in The Spanish Tragedy, the Christian governor Ferneze in The Jew of Malta, the temperamental kings Edgar and William of A Knack to Know a Knave and Fair Em, the unseen but dangerous Henry VIII of Sir Thomas More); rather the heroes are long-suffering, loyal, and conscientious subordinates (such as Hieronimo, John of Bordeaux, Talbot, and More). To the extent that the company’s plays do involve virtuous or heroic princes, these tend to a remarkable degree to be virtuous heathen. In their Prologue to The Troublesome Reign of King John the Queen’s Men comment on the Lord Admiral’s Men’s outrageous Tamburlaine, obliging those in the audience who have “entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine, / And given applause unto an Infidel” that they must now “welcome (with like curtesy) / A warlike Christian and your Countryman.”93 By contrast, the virtuous heroes in the plays of Strange’s Men include Abdelmelec, the wise victor at the battle of Alcazar; the high-minded Amurath and Selimus of John of Bordeaux (who perhaps rebuke Greene’s treatment of the same characters in Selimus); the heroes of the lost “tambercame,” who included “Mango Cam,” probably the historical Möngke Khan, the thirteenth- century emperor of the Mongol Tartars; Titus Vespasianus; Zenobia, the ancient queen of Palmyra; Rasni, an Assyrian tyrant whose astonishing repentance is a rebuke to Christian Londoners; and, in their own way, Ithamore, Calymath, and Barabas, whose villainies comment ironi-

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cally on the corrupted morals of the supposedly Christian governor and clergy of Malta. Of this list all but Zenobia featured in plays that were among the most frequently performed and lucrative for Strange’s Men in their run at the Rose. There could hardly be better evidence than the Rose performances of Lord Strange’s Men in 1592– 93 that the London stage was becoming a site for the “rehearsal of cultures,” for the exploration of morality and religion through “the words and ways of marginal or alien cultures.”94 While some of the company’s plays, like The Jew of Malta, must have worked by negative example, using heathen and non- Christian villains to comment on deeper perfidies within the Christian world, others appear instead to have used exemplary pagans to model non- Christian virtues. That is certainly the case with the Abdelmelec of The Battle of Alcazar, the one play in this latter vein to survive from the repertory. Other plays that seem most likely to have followed this pattern are lost. To judge, however, from the fragmentary evidence of their possible sources and of other works on their probable subjects, they may very well have displayed, with The Battle of Alcazar, the traits that Frank Grady associates with medieval literature concerning “righteous heathen”: an ironic contrast with a Christian viciousness that ill befits a people ostensibly living under the Law of Grace . . . historical self-reflection—not merely the recognition that the esteemed pagan and his Christian counterpart belong to different and sometimes historically remote worlds, but the acknowledgement of some connection or continuity between those worlds that is historical . . . moral . . . [and] geographical leveling produced by the conceit of travel . . . a doctrinal leveling that renders all virtue, moral or political, pagan or Christian, past or present, equally admirable and ser viceable everywhere.95

At the risk of pressing speculation beyond the extant theatrical texts of Lord Strange’s Men, we should recall, apropos of “tittus & vespacia,” for example, that the Titus Vespasianus of Thomas Legge asks pointedly of the Zealot rebellion, “What manner of nation is this, which attributes murderousness to religion or calls infanticide by the name of sacrifice? What kind of God makes such a demand?” Nashe’s Christs Teares over Ierusalem (1594) similarly observes that whereas “Titus (an Infidell)” had “vnderstanding the multitude of thy prophanations and contumacies,” the divinely favored Jews had “Prophecie” but were “blinded, & wantedst the sence in Vespasian.”96 In manuscript versions of Mandeville’s Travels, a likely source for “mandevell,” the hero’s extensive dialogue with the sultan over the Qur’an and the Islamic faith leads to an understanding of common beliefs and a rebuke of Christian failures and hypocrisies.

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From the Gymnosophes (actually from passages in Hosea and the Acts of the Apostles) Mandeville learns that God has “othere seruauntes than tho that ben vnder Cristene lawe” and that “no man scholde haue in despite non erthely man . . . for wee knowe not whom God loueth ne whom God hateth.” The great khan too, Mandeville observes, permits Christians at his court, “for he defendeth no man to holde no lawe other than him lyketh.”97 We cannot demonstrate that passages like these appeared in the “mandevell” at the Rose (they certainly do not appear in Warner’s Mandeville romance), but we can be reasonably sure that any dramatist exploring the fourteenth- century tale would have encountered them. We can be reasonably sure too that the “Mango Chan” of Mandeville’s Travels and other sources was featured by Lord Strange’s Men in yet another play, at least if the “Mango Cham” who sends “Tamar Cam” to conquer Persia in The plot of The firste parte of Tamar Cam also appeared in (the possibly identical) “tambercame” of Lord Strange’s Men. The historical Möngke Khan was probably an animist and shamanist who ruled over an empire containing large populations of Buddhists, Muslims, Nestorian and Orthodox Christians, and other religions. Mandeville claimed that “Mango Chan . . . yaf lettres of perpetuelle pes to alle Cristene men,” while Hetoum’s narrative attributed to Möngke the dictum that “fayth wyll haue no body by force.” 98 A more striking account of “Mango Cam,” published in Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), is that of the Franciscan William of Rubruck, whose journey to the great khan concludes with a climactic audience in which the khan “beganne to confesse his Faith unto me”: We Moallions (saith he) beleeue that there is but one God, through whom we liue and die; and we haue an upright heart towards him . . . as God hath giuen the hand diuers fingers, so he hath giuen many waies to men. God hath giuen the Scriptures to you, and ye Christians keep them not. Ye finde it not in the Scriptures that one of you shall dispraise another? Doe you find it, said he? No, said I, but I haue signified unto you from the beginning, that I would not contend with any. I speak it not, saith he, touching you. And in like manner, ye finde it not, that for Money a man ought to decline from Iustice? No sir, said I, neither came I to these parts to get Money. . . . I speak not (saith he) for that. God hath giuen you the Scriptures, and ye keepe them not. But he hath giuen us Sooth-sayers, and we do that which they bid vs, and we liue in peace. He dranke foure times as I thinke, before hee disclosed these things. And while I hearkened attentively whether he would confesse any thing else concerning this Faith, he began to speake of my return, saying, You haue stayed a long time heere, my pleasure is, therefore, that you return.99

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We cannot know that in his one appearance in the opening scene of The plot of The firste parte of Tamar Cam, “Mango Cam” uttered any words remotely like these. The focus of the plot falls on Mango’s subordinate, “Tamar Cam,” his victory over the Persian shah, and his rejection of the shah’s daughter Tarmia in favor of Palmida. When Ben Jonson remembered “the Tamerlanes, and Tamarchams of the late age,” it was simply to condemn them for having “nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.”100 But if “tambercame” resembled the Tamburlaine plays in these potboiling aspects, it might equally, given the evidence of the other materials in the repertory, have resembled Marlowe’s plays in the trenchant ironies that could emerge from the portraiture of virtuous pagans. That would fit what we can tell of religion and politics in the work of Lord Strange’s Men, as it would also fit the profile of contemporary politique rhetoric. In using that rhetoric, Catholics could complain “no Turk, or Moore at this day doeth exercise” the persecution Protestant princes inflict upon “subiects for difference of Religion,” while Protestants resisting Catholic oppression could declare that “the very Paynims could say that no religion is accomplished by mischieuous wickednesse. . . . Monstrous is that error that thinke[s] to vphold and augment religion through impietie.”101 The fact that such politique comments could be subordinated to the ideological agendas of opposing religious factions does not mean, however, that it was not possible to shift the emphasis, to turn political rhetoric into something like a genuine critique of enforced conformity and war for religion’s sake. That it is difficult, as Collinson argues, to distinguish the ideologues from the politiques in the early 1590s might suggest that the plays of Lord Strange’s Men were hewing to a line compatible with the Elizabethan political mainstream and to ways of thinking not far removed from the propaganda of Burghley’s government. But areas of compatibility need not imply identical purposes; indeed the pungent ironies of the plays would not work were there not also key areas of difference. In attributing a political and religious temper to a whole repertory we are of course overlooking crucial differences among the plays, differences that must be ascribed in the first instance to their authors. Yet it was the company that commissioned these authors and decided which plays of theirs they would perform. Their choices would have had many motivations, including artistic and financial considerations. The indications are, however, that artistic and financial motives were probably not separable from the company’s evident intention to participate in “the sustained pitch of public political discourse”102 in the years 1589– 93. That they felt able to do so with reasonable safety is owing to several

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factors, including the “hazy and ill defined” protocols that surrounded public discussion,103 a system of theatrical censorship that could reliably wave them off the most dangerous projects, and the fundamentally loyalist spirit within which the company framed the skeptical and heterodox effects of their performances. An additional factor must have been their sense that they could rely upon the protection, support, and interest of their Stanley patrons, a family whose complicated position in 1589– 93 resonates in striking ways with the political and religious tenor of the repertory. The fit among plays, players, and patrons that we have described supports a story very different from the tale of Lancashire priestholes and Jesuit subversion that has sometimes been told. We have placed Lord Strange’s Men and their patrons in the context of a conscientious and penetrating critique of the political and religious problems of late Elizabethan England, but a critique that was also deeply and fundamentally loyal. In their combination of critique with good faith, the plays of the company seem matched to the politique manner of the Stanleys and Lord Strange. Robert Parsons wrote that “no side in deede will esteeme or trust” Lord Strange because “some do thinke him to be of all three religions and others of none.” Lord Strange himself had written somewhat ambiguously to Bishop Chadderton that “to be constant is noe common vertew althoughe it be most commendable most fitt, & least founde in noble men.”104 It is perhaps a commitment to ambiguity itself that was being announced in the motto painted on Lord Strange’s Accession Day portrait (see page 164): “Sans changer ma verité.”105

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The long-established tradition of provincial touring by professional companies leads us to expect a similar pattern of activity for Lord Strange’s second troupe. If key members of Leicester’s Men did migrate after their patron’s death to Strange’s newly formed company, then they would have brought broad and relevant experience from travels across the kingdom and even onto the continent. The best routes, the most lucrative avenues, the cultivation of a patron’s interests on the road, would all have been familiar to the likes of Will Kemp, George Bryan, and Thomas Pope. Yet quite strikingly, the new Strange’s company does not show up in provincial accounts for three years after their formation, apart from the first performances at the Stanley residences in the northwest during the Christmas and Shrovetide seasons.1 The search for their performance records yields notices only in the metropolis, suggesting that the company had a different goal, setting their sights on achieving commercial success in London and at court, a feat they accomplished with remarkable speed. Other companies, including the Queen’s and the Admiral’s Men, continued to maintain a provincial presence during these years, so the absence of Strange’s is quite exceptional. We know that in November 1589 they were determined to perform in London at the Cross Keys Inn, and by the end of 1590 they had been invited to offer two plays at court, probably with Edward Alleyn, as part of the Christmas and Shrovetide annual festivities.2 The fortuitous survival of Henslowe’s diary further reveals that from 19 February to 22 June 1592 Strange’s Men was the company in residence at the Rose Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, where it offered a total of 105 performances during the four-month period, a demanding schedule and the first of its kind on record.

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The successful enterprise of Strange’s Men was disrupted by two unwelcome developments in the summer of 1592. Following the apprentices’ riot in Southwark, the Privy Council on 23 June ordered the restraint of plays and other entertainments drawing potentially dangerous assemblies of people to the theater districts in London and on its outskirts until Michaelmas.3 By mid-August the plague, endemic during this period, began to resurface in London, and the restraints on playing seem to have been further extended till late in the year.4 The Rose would not reopen until 29 December. Strange’s Men had previously raised some stout resistance about venturing into the provinces: when they were kept from playing at the Rose, possibly as early as the long vacation of 1590, they objected that they would find “our chardge intollerable, in travellinge the Countrie.”5 However, now they were forced to seek audiences outside the capital. The first precisely dated notice of Strange’s Men on tour comes immediately following the Privy Council’s closure of theaters, from the Rye chamberlains’ accounts, a 24 June payment of 13s 4d for a performance in the southeast port town near the Sussex-Kent border that could be reached on a direct, if somewhat challenging, road from London across the Weald.6 By 13 July the company was playing the Court Hall in the cathedral city of Canterbury, and it seems probable that a cluster of payments in other Kentish towns in the same year is further evidence of a southeastern circuit at the outset of the tour. Faversham, Maidstone, and the coastal town of Folkestone all record performances, but others in the same compact region may also have provided venues; the civic accounts of three of the most likely—Rochester, Hythe, and Lydd—are missing for this year.7 Distances were short between these towns and the official rewards were relatively high, so a circular route from London through eastern Sussex and Kent in late June through mid-July was an easy choice for a company that did not want to stray far from its preferred base of operations. The company may have hoped for a return to their London base sometime during the summer or autumn. However, London theaters were to remain closed past Michaelmas and, as it turned out, for a longer period than may have been expected. Probably for this reason Strange’s Men extended their tour to the southwest, though we cannot be sure which road was taken to Bristol for performances in early August.8 There is no record, other than the late June payment at Rye, along the southern coastal route through Southampton and Dorset, so they may have preferred to set out from London along the great western road through Reading and

Map of England and Wales with tour stops by Lord Strange’s Men, 1576– 93. © Sally-Beth MacLean.

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Marlborough after completing their circuit of Kent and eastern Sussex. This was the most direct road to the southwest, with stages noted in Grafton’s Abridgement of the Chronicles of Englande (1572) as follows: from London, Colnbrook (near Slough), Maidenhead, Reading, Newbury, Hungerford, Marlborough, Chippenham, Marshfield, and thence to Bristol.9 Of these only Marlborough has a civic account extant for 1591– 92 that might indicate their passage through the town, but no payment to Strange’s is noted. Along or near this same route there were alternatives for players prominent at court—the Earl of Pembroke’s residence at Wilton some thirty-five miles southwest of Marlborough and the Earl of Hertford’s residence at Tottenham House, a few miles east of the town—but no family household accounts have yet been found to support the supposition.10 There is a generous reward of 30s noted in the Bristol mayor’s audit for a performance before the civic officials falling within the period of 6–19 August.11 However, given the size and prosperity of the city, it is probable that the company performed at other venues and on other days. Bristol’s St. James Day fair was one of the great English fairs, by this time running for nine days, starting on 25 July—a well-known event that might easily have made Bristol the major destination for a company hoping to find an urban audience outside London.12 Beyond Bristol we know that Strange’s Men took the road north to Gloucester, where payment was made between 13 and 27 September, in the same period as the queen’s progress to neighboring Sudeley Castle, 9–12 September.13 Suggestive though these intersecting travel routes may be, there is no proof that Giles Brydges, 3rd Lord Chandos, included Strange’s Men in his entertainments for the queen during her visit. The next clearly dated reward was made at Oxford on 6 October, and it does seem probable that a civic payment made by Coventry’s warden toward the end of the annual accounts for 1591– 92 relates to the same early autumn tour.14 Sadly enough, no Stratford or Warwick civic accounts survive for this year to tell us when, or whether, Strange’s Men used the road through those towns between Oxford and Coventry. Only two other tour stops have been traced during the Michaelmas 1591 to Michaelmas 1592 accounting year, and both resist confident placement on the itinerary we have been able to piece together from elliptical evidence. Although the road between Oxford and Cambridge might have served as the route back to London in the fall of 1592, the October date at Oxford follows the end of Cambridge’s accounting year, and so the visit to the other university town recorded by the Cambridge town treasurer must have come before. The same is true of a reward at Bath, made at some point during the city’s June 1591 through 10 June 1592 accounting year. The payment to Strange’s Men is the last entry

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under the “Gifts and Rewards” section and was made by a second hand that recorded several final entries. Was Bath the focus of a short trip earlier in 1592 between the court appearances in the Christmas and Shrovetide festivities before the company took up residence at the Rose? Or was this the only destination in the second half of 1591? We are unlikely ever to know for sure.15 Never more than a few days from London or the location of the itinerant royal court (also dodging the plague), Strange’s Men seem to have kept to the most popular southern circuits, unlike the Admiral’s Men, who extended their travels farther north, where they can be found at Congleton on the western edge of the Peak District in the fall, Shrewsbury in the West Midlands the following February, and York and Newcastle upon Tyne in the spring of 1593.16 The clues that have surfaced from the systematic search of regional records across the kingdom are probably sufficient to draw this conclusion even though we must still acknowledge the limits and inevitable distortions of surviving documents. The 1592 tour records include no private residences or inns, nor, as we have indicated, do they reflect every town that may have been favored with a performance on the routes taken. What we know is based only on very incomplete data, and where records do exist, it must be admitted that only the reward paid for a single official performance before the mayor and council is noted, not the gate received at other performances elsewhere in town. For a well-populated city such as Bristol, the single payment of 30s can scarcely reflect the size of the purse taken by the company at the end of their stay there. We can safely assume that there may also have been private residences with hosts friendly to Lord Strange along the preferred southern roads, but the loss of family records, especially acute in the south, prevents us from identifying these additional locations. As for inns, so easily assumed by previous generations to have offered their yards as playing spaces, evidence is generally scant, but we should neither be surprised by the lack nor assume from the gap that inns were not used by touring companies. The records of such performances, if they survived, would be innkeepers’ accounts or journals, but the odds against such pragmatic documents surviving the changing circumstances of working individuals over several centuries are even greater than those against survival of a noble family’s personal papers. However, whether the yards or the indoor hall rooms were favored by players may have depended on a variety of factors, not always admitted by advocates of one position or another: availability, weather conditions, and the needs of other travelers and coaches. We want to pause to reflect on this first major tour by Strange’s Men in the summer and early fall of 1592. They had been accustomed to playing in the purposebuilt Rose Theatre for several months before setting out on the southeastern

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circuit. The most typical space awaiting them in the provinces was the seat of civic authority, the town or guildhall prominent in the center of each tour stop. Robert Tittler pinpoints the reasons why: “The format of [this] command performance, following the presentation of credentials and the grant of permission, promised something for everyone. It demonstrated the mayor’s authority, while his presence on opening night lent dignity both to himself and the occasion. It provided the players with the official endorsement of the mayor and perhaps some immunity from local harassment. It created the aura of proper decorum appropriate to performance in the town’s seat of government, while at the same time relegating the players’ activities to that civic space most able to be supervised and controlled. Finally, it allowed town officials to scrutinize the content of the performance, and presumably to forbid ‘unseemly’ ideas from wider expression.”17 Few of the halls on Strange’s 1592 tour are now extant, with one splendid exception. None of the Kent town halls or the Court Hall at Rye in Sussex has remained intact, although Canterbury’s Court Hall did survive, albeit much remodeled, until 1952.18 Canterbury’s mid-fifteenth- century Court Hall was a three- story timber-framed building, located on the northeast side of High Street adjacent to the Red Lion Inn. The 1438 indenture for construction of the hall specified it was “to be precisely 41 ft. 10 in. long (other dimensions not specified) and of four bays. . . . There was to be a high dais . . . on the high bench, as well as side-benches, and for lighting, windows and four ‘gapias’ (hardly dormers, but high ‘frieze-windows’ on the otherwise blind west side).”19 In the eighteenth century the remodeled ground-floor hall was described as “a handsome and lofty room, with a spacious gallery over the door.”20 A mayor’s parlor was adjacent to the hall at the upper end. At the southwestern end of the country, we know more about the guildhalls serving as venues for touring professional troupes. Bristol’s fifteenth- century guildhall was located on the west side of Broad Street near St. John’s Gate. The original dimensions are not recoverable, but an early nineteenth- century witness has left a description of the hall as it stood before demolition in 1843–46: “On entering the hall the visitor is somewhat impressed by an idea of its antiquity, arising, in a great measure, from the character of its early Gothic and lofty roof, which from its high pitch, would indicate its erection before the end of the fifteenth century, after which period they were made considerably lower. The tie-beams are supported on rainbow arches, springing from corbels, representing the figure of an angel, with expanded wings, supporting a shield, an ornament in general use from the latter part of the fourteenth century to the early part of the sixteenth. The spaces between the raf ters, now ceiled with plaster,

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Canterbury Court Hall exterior, circa 1912, on the corner of the High Street (front right). Reproduced by permission of Historic Canterbury (www.machadoink.com).

were originally left open to the actual frame timbers, as was the case with the Norman roof.”21 A few miles to the east, Bath’s medieval guildhall is known to have existed in Boatstall Lane near the East Gate by the mid-fourteenth century. The hall was a single-story space open to the roof, with the dais at the south end, a passage at the north end leading to the kitchen and pantry, and a council chamber on the floor above beside a small armory. The main entrance was toward the center on the west side. By 1581 a bay window had been added, probably by the dais at the southwest end. The plan and dimensions of the hall (24’ x 45’) have been conjectured by Elizabeth Holland from contemporary accounts and an eighteenthcentury description.22 In 1625 civic business was relocated to the market house in High Street and the old hall converted for use as a slaughterhouse that unsurprisingly did not survive Georgian improvements to the city. In the Tudor period Gloucester had three successive town halls, known as the Boothall, on the south side of Westgate Street not far from the quay. The original medieval hall was rebuilt between 1529 and 1536, its replacement remaining in use until the “new hall” was constructed the year after Strange’s Men played in the city.23 The corporation used a large hall primarily for its courts and assizes and a large chamber on the upper story for elections, but little is known

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Canterbury Court Hall interior, circa 1903. Reproduced by permission of Historic Canterbury (www.machadoink.com).

about the dimensions and decorative scheme of these or other rooms in the Tudor building. The same is true of the medieval stone guildhall at Oxford, located on the east side of St. Aldate’s Street, between Blue Boar Street and the High Street.24 The fourteenth- century guildhall at Cambridge was located on the south side of the marketplace, its ground level open and the upper story supported on arches. This guildhall was demolished in 1782, but some details, notably its dimensions—a relatively modest 17.5' x 22'—were recorded at the time. The hall had a parlor to the east at the high end, a kitchen at the low end, and a pantry on the south side. Entrance was via an external staircase at the southwest corner, and two windows on the north wall overlooked the market.25 Our knowledge of these provincial venues is thus limited almost solely to their central location in the towns and a safe assumption that they were of various dimensions, but modeled generally on the layout of a rectangular private hall, with a dais for the mayor and key members of the town hierarchy at the high end and in some cases a kitchen with ser vice rooms accessible at the low end. Fortunately, however, the guildhall of one of the most fre-

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quented cities on the touring circuit does remain, remarkably preserved, almost against all odds. Many people are surprised to learn that Coventry’s guildhall survives, directly across from the World War II bombsite of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Bayley Lane. The red sandstone building dates back to the fourteenth century and contains on the upper floor of its west range a large open hall with splendid windows and an intact minstrels’ gallery.26 This was one of the finest civic per for mance spaces available, comparable to some private great halls in elegance and proportion.27 The hall’s dimensions are 30’ wide by 72' long, with a roof height of 33', generous enough to measure against those of the Rose. Overlooking the hall at the high end are two remarkably preserved features that could have served as a historical set piece for any play chosen by Strange’s Men for performance before the mayor and council. An impressive late fifteenthcentury glass window of nine lights overlooks the dais where the mayoral seat of authority was placed: Henry VI stands in the center light with ancestors in panels to left and right and coats of arms in the tracery lights above. Immediately

The approach to St. Mary’s Guildhall along Bayley Lane, Coventry, with ruins of St. Michael’s Cathedral to the left. Photo © Andrew Paterson.

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The high end of St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry. Photo © Andrew Paterson.

below, the magnificent tapestry, rich in symbolism, was commissioned by Henry VII to hang in St. Mary’s Hall as part of a plan to canonize his predecessor.28 (Henry VI was revered by Coventry in part because he granted the city status as a county in its own right.) Probably Flemish in design and weave, it represents the Assumption of the Virgin with the apostles and kneeling figures of Henry VI (not, as commonly supposed, Henry VII) and his queen, and above a somewhat out- of- character but possibly Protestant-inspired figure of Justice replacing a Christ in Judgment. To the left and right are angels with the instruments of Passion and saints. Mayors and ecclesiastical dignitaries of Coventry as well as royal and noble benefactors were featured in the six large windows of the east and west walls, but the medieval glass was mostly destroyed by riots or overzealous restoration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The high-arched oriel toward the dais on the west wall has in its windows some fragments of medieval glass from the north window and some of the original heraldic tiles from the hall floor. The oriel originally led to a door in the thickness of the buttress, connecting

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Late fifteenth- century window, St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry. Henry VI is in the central light, with Henry III to the left and Edward III to the right. Photo © Andrew Paterson.

with a former buttery along the west wall and a now blocked doorway to the north and balcony beyond.29 The timber-paneled roof features painted heraldic bosses and ten angel musicians, in facing pairs along the trusses forming the five bays of the hall. By circa 1581 the hall’s decorative scheme also included verses by Philemon Holland in Latin and English commemorating various worthies and inscribed, with heraldic devices, on oak paneling on the east and west walls, though seventeenthcentury whitewash subsequently obliterated all traces. The screen’s end still has its three traditional doors, the central one larger, leading down a staircase to the kitchen. The east-end door leads into the council chamber and the west door into the “prince’s chamber.” A narrow door at the southeast corner provides access to stone stairs up to the gallery level, with the half-timbered south range rooms beyond on two levels. The dimensions of the minstrels’ gallery are approximately 29.5' long by 4.5' deep. (The window above was added during the 1926 restoration.) In the late sixteenth century a tall

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screen was placed at the low end to conceal the entrances to the council rooms and kitchen stairs—a screen that may also have been useful for players making their exits and entrances. The survival of so many original features is a credit to the city’s care for its heritage, as well as to some exceptional good fortune. At the outbreak of World War II, the precious medieval stained glass, tapestry, carved wooden bosses, and other furnishings were prudently stored elsewhere for safety. The hall roof suffered fire damage during air raids in 1940 and 1941 but was restored in the late 1940s, when the angels and heraldic bosses were repaired and repainted, and the medieval glass and tapestry were repositioned in the hall. Returning to the end of 1592, a lack of evidence in provincial accounts suggests that Strange’s Men must have headed back to London. The onset of plague in the early fall does seem to have eased for a period of weeks late in 1592, as reference is made to that fact in a Privy Council letter to the mayor and aldermen of London on 21 January 1592/93: “The infection within the Cittie of London which for certaine weekes together beganne to diminishe groweth nowe to increase.”30 It had become customary for performance troupes invited to present their shows at court during the Christmas season to rehearse in preparation in the London area during the late autumn, and this, it seems, was what the company must have done, though they were not in residence again at the Rose until 29 December. Where the company may have tried out its three court plays in London before the first performance on 27 December at Hampton Court has not been discovered.31 The company did eventually return to the Rose for the twenty-nine performances recorded by Henslowe from 29 December 1592 until 1 February 1592/93.32 Interestingly two of these, “cnacke” (31 December) and “the Iewe” (1 January), were offered on the same days as the second and third performances at court, suggesting a company appetite for profit as well as prestige.33 Running plays in repertory until the first of February may even have been tweaking the noses of the authorities. A Privy Council letter to the mayor and alderman of London on 28 January had followed hard upon another (now lost) to the justices of the peace of Middlesex and Surrey, ordering immediate prohibition against plays, bearbaiting, and other sports because of increase in the plague.34 ON T H E ROA D AGA I N: 1593

With the second enforced closure of the London theaters, in February 1592/93, Lord Strange’s Men once again took the only alternative available: to tour the

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provinces. With Edward Alleyn as a star member of their company, they apparently included in the early stages of their tour another popular circuit much frequented by professional troupes in the sixteenth century. The provincial sources are more varied than usual for the 1593 tour because that rare and much desired item, an actor’s letter from the road, survives from two locations on the route. Alleyn wrote his first extant letter home to his wife Joan on 2 May 1593 from Chelmsford in Essex.35 Worth noting in this context is the May Day starting date of the town’s annual four-day fair, presumably an attraction for a troupe with a strategic sense of its best interests.36 Chelmsford was an episcopal manor located on an important thoroughfare, a convenient stage, with eleven major inns, on the road from London to Colchester and Ipswich.37 It was not an incorporated borough in the period, and the only records of possible relevance to shed light on where Strange’s Men may have performed in the town—if they did—are the parish church wardens’ accounts, surviving from 1557 but devoid of any indication of performances by touring players in this period.38 The only other touring evidence in that eastern region comes from the market town of Sudbury, where a payment was recorded sometime during the 1592– 93 year.39 A spring visit in 1593 linked with Chelmsford less than thirty miles away on the main road seems most likely, given the itinerary details for the fall of 1592 outlined earlier. It is perhaps worth noticing in this context too that one of Sudbury’s annual fairs was held on 12 March.40 Although we have searched for other evidence at key locations (Maldon, Colchester, and Saffron Walden in Essex; Aldeburgh, and Bury St. Edmund’s in Suffolk), as well as Cambridge and elsewhere in Cambridgeshire, the accounts are either summary (e.g., Maldon), not extant (e.g., Aldeburgh), or unyielding (e.g., Cambridge, Saffron Walden). Such are the frustrations of itinerary compilation. A payment in the Faversham 1592– 93 town account may also have been connected with the early stages of this 1593 tour, although the town’s proximity to London, perhaps two days’ journey away, could have allowed a midautumn visit in 1592 not long after the annual town account began and before preparations for court performances started before Christmas. Curiously there are no other civic or household payments yet found to complement this evidence along the circuit followed through Kent in the summer of 1592.41 The official reward of 20s at Faversham was certainly better than the 13s 4d afforded by Rye or the 4s at Folkestone, so simple economics—the short distance and the prospect of a better reception—may have contributed to the troupe’s decision to revisit the town. A license issued to Strange’s Men on 6 May 1593 by the Privy Council allowed them to play anywhere free from plague and beyond a seven-mile radius

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of plague-ridden London, in lieu of performing on Bankside. Recognition of their quality is expressed in the license; touring will enable them to exercise their talents and make some money “that they maie be in the better readines hereafter for her maiestes seruice whensoeuer they shalbe thereunto called.”42 Six touring players are named: Edward Alleyn (still identified as a Lord Admiral’s man), William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan, “being al one companie” for the purpose of this tour license. On 1 August 1593 Alleyn dispatched an affectionate letter from Bristol to his wife in London. From this letter home to his “good sweett mouse” on the “wensday after saint Iams his day” from Bristol (i.e., 1 August) it is evident the troupe had toured as far as the southwest between June and late July.43 Their direction may be clear but, for the most part, not the road they followed. However, although the Southampton Book of Fines furnishes no evidence for summer 1593 because pages for this year were torn out of the manuscript, the Privy Council license cited above was copied into the town’s civic records and dated 3 July 1593, a strong indication that the company had passed that way and shown their warrant to play.44 So which of several possible roads to and beyond the port of Southampton did Strange’s Men take before reaching Bristol, where Alleyn’s letter of 1 August furnishes solid indication of their whereabouts? No payments have been found in Dorset along the southern coastal route, though only Lyme Regis has town accounts surviving for 1593.45 Detailed mayors’ accounts for Salisbury, at the hub of several roads through Wiltshire, cease in 1582, and our search for relevant accounts at Winchester in Hampshire or Marlborough, Devizes, Wilton, and Chippenham in Wiltshire yielded no returns.46 Unfortunately for us, Alleyn did not reflect upon where he had been when he wrote to his wife, only on where his troupe was heading next on a tour projected to last till All Hallow’s tide. Their intentions were clear enough: after Bristol, the road north would take the company through Shrewsbury and Chester and then through the Pennines to York, all stops where letters from home might be sent. This is rare but key evidence that touring troupes plotted their itineraries in advance rather than simply “wandering” through the provinces, as Chambers expressed it more than once in his influential Elizabethan Stage. It is also evident that they were heading out on a long and strenuous tour northward. On 1 August Strange’s Men were preparing to perform “hary of cornwall” at an unspecified venue in Bristol. In this instance we cannot confirm the usual civic-sponsored performance before the mayor and council in the guildhall, though we know such performances continued to be a norm there at least until

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the early seventeenth century. Although the string of annual mayors’ audits surviving is impressive from 1531 through 1642, the account for 1592– 93 is not extant, and any payment made to Strange’s that year gone with it.47 It is probable that the company performed at other venues and on other days too. Alleyn’s reference to St. James’s Day (25 July) is again worthy of note: when Alleyn wrote his letter, Bristol’s nine- day St. James fair was still in progress. Not many miles southeast of Bristol was the city of Bath, the third location associated with a surviving letter, dated 14 August, this time from Philip Henslowe to his son-in-law Alleyn.48 Henslowe’s allusion to Alleyn’s sickness at Bath is one piece of evidence that Strange’s Men played Bath at some point while they were in the Bristol area. Another is the annual city chamberlains’ account confirming a reward to “my Lord Stranges plaiers” at an unspecified time during that year.49 Because Henslowe’s letter refers to a period with no correspondence received from Alleyn, presumably because of his illness at Bath, as well as two more recent letters, that of 1 August and another lost, it seems likely that Strange’s Men made their stop at Bath sometime in July as they neared the end of the road west to Bristol.50 The next destination suggested by Alleyn for family letters by post was Shrewsbury, at the northern reach of the River Severn. And indeed the company followed their intended route, with an official reward confirmed by the Shrewsbury bailiffs’ annual account, recorded sometime before 29 September and perhaps around the time of the annual St. Matthew’s Day fair on 21 September.51 If they headed due north via the Aust ferry across the Severn to a well- documented road through Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, and Shropshire, the more populated towns would have included Monmouth, Hereford, Leominster, and Ludlow, towns less than twenty miles apart.52 Both Grafton’s 1572 road list and John Ogilby’s 1675 maps in two parts give us evidence of this route, but again the accounts fail us. There are no civic accounts surviving for Monmouth and very few for Hereford and Leominster.53 Just across the county border from Leominster lay Ludlow, where the bailiffs and chamberlains’ accounts for 1592– 93 survive but yield no relevant reward.54 Nor are there private household records surviving from the region to help us with alternative tour stops, but we might reasonably guess that Strange’s Men would have made stops at two or more of these locations, given the distances to be covered. Another gap in the records occurs in Chester, the next stop on the itinerary laid out in Alleyn’s letter. As we have noted previously, Chester was a center of influence for the earls of Derby and a likely draw for Strange’s Men. Henry Stanley had held the office of lord lieutenant of Cheshire and Lancashire for many years, and Ferdinando would succeed him in that office as well as in the

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earldom while his troupe was still on tour in September 1593. It would be surprising indeed if Strange’s Men did not play Chester, but neither the city nor the cathedral treasurers’ accounts survive for 1592– 93 as confirmation. The next stop mentioned in Alleyn’s letter is York, but in the northwest there were other possible attractions for this particular troupe. In fact their choice of route through the Welsh Marches rather than other routes through the Midlands may even have been at the suggestion of their patron. The Stanley family residences were mostly situated in southwest Lancashire, at Knowsley, Lathom, and New Park, not many miles from Chester. We know from his letter to Sir Robert Cecil dated 21 September 1593 that Ferdinando Stanley was then in residence at New Park, less than a mile from Lathom, where his father lay dying.55 Given Henry’s deteriorating condition, Lord Strange may have been at one or another of the Stanley homes during the late summer, but there are no Stanley household documents to tell us whether Ferdinando’s appetite for entertainment had been dampened by his father’s final illness. The mention of Chester on the company’s itinerary suggests that a stop to visit their patron in residence not many miles from that city could have been on the original agenda for the tour, and we should certainly not expect that Alleyn would suggest sending personal post along to his patron’s residence. Less persuasive is a case made in an essay by David George for an extended stop in the tiny town of Prescot near the Stanleys’ Knowsley estate. Whatever the purpose of the short-lived playhouse built in Prescot sometime after 1592, it would surely have been a major fall from grace for what was arguably the premier acting troupe in the land to embrace it as an alternative to the Rose during the plague year. As George notes, Prescot had a population of approximately four hundred and was “a poor place with its inhabitants engaged in the making of clay pots and coal mining.”56 Not only did Strange’s Men have other places to go on tour during the fall, but their patron had more serious matters on his mind than throwing up a purpose-built theater for them in the improbable location of Prescot. Ferdinando was thinking of the transfer of some of his father’s offices when he wrote to Sir Robert Cecil in September, but he was also soon demoralized by the cloud of deep suspicion arising from the treasonous activities of the recusant Richard Hesketh, who approached him in late September about pursuing the Stanley claim to the throne. The year 1593 turned out to be one of crisis, a turning point in the life of the patron that we think had a profound impact on his players’ performance calendar. That Strange’s Men continued their tour during the autumn is not in doubt. Beyond the city of Chester, their next destination for post was York. Here again we have only Alleyn’s letter to indicate that intent.57 Although there are other

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companies rewarded during the year in the civic accounts, the Strange or Derby name does not appear among them. Did Strange’s Men change their direction? Was there an accounting oversight? It’s unlikely that we will ever know. Two payments in the Coventry area in early December 1593 confirm that they were still touring in the provinces late in the year. The Coventry wardens’ account helpfully dates payment to Derby’s players on 2 December.58 We also know that Derby’s Men played for Henry, Lord Berkeley, on 5 December at his principal residence, Caludon Castle, three and a half miles along the road northeast from Coventry.59 The only other possible reward to the 5th Earl’s troupe that we have found comes from the Leicester chamberlains’ account for 1593– 94, though it should be noted that the accounting year extended into a period later in the year, when the payment could have been to the 6th Earl’s new troupe instead.60 Because Leicester is only twenty miles or so away on a main road leading from the northeast through Coventry, a major hub of the English road network, and because no other records have been found for Derby’s Men between December 1593 and their patron’s sudden death in April 1594, it seems likeliest that the stop at Leicester was made en route to or from Coventry. In retrospect, the more extended 1593 tour featured some of the same performance venues as the previous year: the familiar town halls at Faversham, Bristol, Bath, and Coventry. Most of our available evidence suggests similar venues at Sudbury, Southampton, Shrewsbury, Chester, and Leicester. Sudbury’s Moot Hall was located on an island at the lower end of Market Hill, but it was demolished in the 1830s, when the site was converted for public road paving. A double-gabled building of timber, “with an overhanging upper-storey, and high-pitched roof surmounted by a little bell cupola,” the council chamber and borough sessions court were on the upper story, with the jail, storage, and butchers’ stalls on the ground floor.61 During early fourteenth-century alterations Southampton’s guildhall was incorporated, as a large upper-story room, in the stone and flint Bargate, the original north entrance gate into the town dating back to the twelfth century. The bays or recesses created by the two impressive drum towers of the north façade are lit only by narrow arrow slits, but the Bargate’s crenellated south façade still features four tall two-light windows, with a canopied niche in the middle now containing a statue of George III. The present windows were inserted in the nineteenth century to replace sash windows, but their placement probably reflects the fourteenth- century originals. The wide center archway on the ground level also dates from the fourteenth century. Also on the south side, a staircase leads up to the main entrance door, embellished by a foliated arch and the much-renovated hall, measured in the nineteenth century as approximately

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Southampton Bargate, viewed from the south. Photo © Alan Somerset.

52' by 40' before later renovations. Used until the 1770s as the guildhall, the space was restored and reopened in 2006 as an art gallery.62 At Shrewsbury the bailiffs probably paid for an official performance before the mayor at the town’s Booth Hall, an early sixteenth-century low timber building with a clock turret at the north end of the marketplace, demolished in 1785.63 The ground floor was used for shops, and the upper level served as a civic hall. Thomas Phillips, writing a few years before the Booth Hall’s demolition, described it thus: “The present is an old, low, timber building, consisting of a large room 63 feet in length, and 25 1 ⁄2 in breadth, in which assizes, sessions, and other courts are held; it is commodious, but in no respect elegant; adjoining to it is a large room, commonly called the Green Room.” 64 Located in St. Werburgh’s Street at the intersection with Northgate Street, Chester’s Common Hall stood on a southwest corner opposite Chester Cathedral. Formerly St. Nicholas’s Chapel, the building dated from the mid-fourteenth century and was acquired by the city in 1546, when it was converted for civic use. A floor was inserted, dividing the building horizontally: the lower room was used for storage of trade goods like wool, corn, and cloth, and the upper chamber served for civic assemblies, elections, and courts. It was replaced as a civic building in 1698 and had a varied existence subsequently, so little can be discovered about its original layout. In the mid-nineteenth century it was

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mostly demolished, although some substantial stonework survives in the north and south walls.65 By contrast, Leicester’s Guildhall, adjacent to St. Martin’s Church in Guildhall Lane, is one of the delightful survivals from the period, a performance venue used frequently by touring performers in the sixteenth century as well as the present day. The Guildhall is a late medieval half-timbered building originally belonging to the Corpus Christi Guild but purchased to replace an older town hall in 1563. The oldest section is the hall on the ground level of the courtyard’s north range. The minstrels’ gallery and staircase have misled some theater historians, as they are not original but were added during nineteenthand twentieth- century renovations at the low end, to the east. The hall does, however, retain its original measurements (20' x 62'), stone floor, timber-framed walls, and pitched cruck-frame ceiling (rising to 27’ at its peak).66 Three of the five bays are late fourteenth century, lit by three windows with three lights each on the north wall and two more on the south wall with two lights each facing the courtyard. The two fifteenth- century bays at the high end have more light, thanks to two windows of seven lights each on the north wall near the dais. There is an entrance at the low end, and a previous entrance from the courtyard near the dais is known to have preceded the present doublepaneled door in the south wall. The mayor’s parlor is adjacent to the hall at the west end, but its entrance is via the courtyard. We have excluded Chelmsford from this roster of civic venues quite deliberately. Manor business was conducted at a medieval tollhouse in the market-

Leicester Guildhall exterior. Photo © Paul MacLean.

Leicester Guildhall high end. Photo © Paul MacLean.

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Surviving north wall of Caludon Castle’s great hall. Photo © Alan Somerset.

place, but our research suggests that there was no guild or town hall likely to have housed a performance. In this instance perhaps one of the many town inns served the purpose, but we can only speculate. Lack of evidence for its use in surviving records has eliminated the church, although parish buildings are known to have been used elsewhere by players when no town hall was available. Although we suspect that town halls were not the only provincial venues used by Strange’s Men, clues for any private residences that may have been on their 1592 and 1593 tours are almost entirely lacking. Henry Berkeley’s residence at Caludon Castle lay at what seems to have been the far end of their second tour; apart from that, only the Stanley residences in the northwest are candidates for inclusion in our review of provincial venues. Only a rather forlorn sandstone wall remains of Caludon Castle’s former splendor, now unheralded in a public park.67 The surviving north wall, with its tall, pointed windows, probably belonged to the mid-fourteenth- century great hall of a moated castle belonging to the Mowbray family before it passed to the Berkeleys. The castle was largely rebuilt by Henry Berkeley circa 1580 but abandoned after the Civil War.68

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When Ferdinando Stanley wrote Sir Robert Cecil on 21 September, just before his father’s death, he was resident at New Park, a smaller family house located less than a mile from their sumptuous principal residence at Lathom. Demolished circa 1725, the building at New Park, also called Halton Castle, can be traced now only by a small square earthwork on Ormskirk Golf Course.69 We do not know whether Strange’s Men did in the end reach Lathom and New Park, but initial plans could have been made with that purpose in mind during the plague- driven closure of the London theaters. If so, Lathom House would have been familiar to some members of the company from their earliest days under Lord Strange’s patronage. Lathom had been built on a grand scale in the late fifteenth century by the 1st Earl of Derby. A fortified castle, Lathom seems to have had a number of towers, which accounts give variously as seven, nine, or eleven in number. James Croston, for example, describes it thus: “The building itself was of vast extent, with a massive keep—the Eagle Tower—rising in the midst, and surrounded by embattled curtain walls, strengthened by seven lofty towers, the whole being encircled by a wide ditch or moat, across which access was gained by a drawbridge communicating with a portcullised gateway.”70 Little is known about its ground plan, and even the location of its foundations has been obscured by the passage of time, but we do know from “The Stanley Poem” that Henry VII gave it the “most praise” of “all houses” and rebuilt Richmond Palace “to make it up againe after Latham hall.”71 We also learn something about the potential for performance at Lathom from a 1576 manuscript poem by Thomas Chaloner of Chester, a herald painter and genealogist who describes an elaborate great hall screen designed for “my good L. thEarle of Derbie” by one Parker, “a man of lancastshire” who was “brought vpp within this noble hall.” A cross between a landscape painting, an armillary sphere, and a perpetual calendar, it would seem, the screen amounted to a theatrum mundi or depiction of the cosmos. It depicted “Therthe as how yt stands benethe with hills and valleyes brave, / with towers and townes with trees and brooks with rocks and many a caue,” and it showed “how therth devyds it selfe,” “when the moone in euerie moneth dothe chainge,” and “the course of all the planets bright arisinge at the east.”72 This is a microcosmic backdrop that would have suited the earlier Derby players’ The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune73 or the several magian plays of Lord Strange’s Men. Another residence that some of Strange’s Men undoubtedly knew was Knowsley House, situated in a park on high ground seven miles northeast of Liverpool. The present family seat of the Earl of Derby is mostly the creation of eighteenth- and twentieth- century renovators, but two red sandstone turrets

Early Tudor carving on the warden’s stall- end showing stonemasons approaching a gatehouse entrance to Lathom (south side of the choir, Manchester Collegiate Church). Photo © Andrew Paterson.

Early Tudor misericord showing the traditional elephant and castle motif. The castle is probably Lathom, with the gatehouse and high curtain wall in the foreground (south side of the choir, Manchester Collegiate Church). Photo © Andrew Paterson.

Knowsley in the later seventeenth century. Printed from “a very old picture on board.” Reproduced from Raines, Stanley Papers, vol. 3.1, between clx and clxi.

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and some fabric in the north façade of the south wing may date back to the late fifteenth century.74 A medieval house on the site was remodeled and enlarged in stone by Thomas, 1st Earl of Derby, in anticipation of the visit of his stepson, Henry VII, in 1495. Further improvements were made by Edward, the 3rd Earl, in the mid-sixteenth century, when he established permanent residence in his northwestern center of power.75 T OU R I NG PER F OR M A NCE C ON DI T IONS

Our exploration of surviving performance venues—the alternative theaters of the provinces—suggests that the traditional view of touring as an experience fraught with hardships needs adjustment, however reluctant Strange’s Men may have been to leave London in the summer of 1592. As some of the players knew from years of experience under Leicester’s and, in Alleyn’s case, the Lord Admiral’s patronage, there were new audiences waiting in the towns and private residences across the country. There were guaranteed official rewards to be had from their performances before civic officials, as well as more gatherings from other shows offered to the wider public, especially in a large, well-populated city like Bristol at fair time. We know professional troupes received generous rewards as well as bed and board at the homes of the nobility, so the basic costs of travel would have been eased at such locations.76 Furthermore there were some commodious indoor halls available on the tour, though the variations in their size and only brief setup time demanded adaptability, both from the players and in the shows they selected to perform on the road. The practical necessity of minimizing the amount to be transported on foot, with a wagon, probably reduced ambitious stage effects to essential props and costumes; large set pieces would have been a most unappealing option for those doing the transporting themselves. What seem to have been guaranteed still in this period were the rectangular rooms of guildhalls and private great halls, with good acoustics and protected conditions, both advantages over the outdoor theater at the Rose. Most halls by this time had windows large enough to ensure good lighting for daytime performances, especially toward the dais end, where bay windows such as Coventry’s had become the fashion. It is improbable that players mounted the dais, however. The high end was for members of the civic or family hierarchy; neither the mayor of Bristol nor the Earl of Derby were likely to countenance the performance of a play on their symbolic space of power, nor were the players likely to have access to mayoral parlors or private withdrawing chambers, typically connected by doors leading from the dais. The access points for players would have included the entrance or ser vice

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doors at the low end, as well as any doors that might have been available along the side walls. Even as the number and location of doors and costume- changing spaces may have varied from hall to hall, so the existence of a gallery could not be guaranteed, despite the romantic appeal of minstrels’ galleries. Coventry had such a gallery; Leicester and Southampton did not. The players had to accommodate their staging accordingly, and they may have chosen the plays to perform in response to local conditions, even as they may have thought to mount “hary of cornwall” in the southwest because of regional associations. There is no evidence that we know of that they could expect a trap at any provincial venue. The locating of the audience, apart from the dignitaries looking on from the dais, seems likely to have followed long-established banqueting style of placement, with ranks of audience standing or seated along the side walls and toward the low end. We assume that the main performing space would therefore have been in the center toward the high end, the width of the staging area dependent on the width of the hall. In some instances, as at Cambridge (17.5') and Leicester (20'), the audiences may have been pressed hard against each other and the performing space less than half the size of the stage at the Rose (estimated as 37' wide, tapering to 27' at the front by 18' deep).77 According to a record of a decade or so later at Cambridge, members of Queen Anne’s company claimed that a stage was to be built in the Guildhall and the glass windows taken down before their performance, presumably in case of breakage, though we never have such evidence for Strange’s Men and therefore cannot assume that towns, or families, paid for construction of stages at every tour stop.78 Most halls had more length and perhaps potentially even greater staging depth than the Rose’s approximate 18': Coventry (72'), Leicester (62'), and Shrewsbury (63') all had substantial playing space, even after allowing for the dais and other audience members. ROA D SHOWS: PL AY S F OR T OU R I NG

We know for certain of only one play performed by Lord Strange’s Men during their tours. On 1 August 1593 Alleyn explained in a letter to his wife that the company was “redy to begin the playe of hary of cornwall.”79 There is no further hard evidence of how many or which of the company’s plays were performed on tour, but two lines of speculation present themselves, one focused on economies of touring and staging, and one focused on the possible regional origins or appeal of subject matter. These two lines of speculation converge suggestively in the cases of some plays, while in other cases they do not, raising

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the possibility that some of the company’s touring plays may have required a full cast and some may have played with reduced casts. There is furthermore some circumstantial evidence in the records of touring that might account for these differences in casting. One long-established line of speculation about the repertory of touring companies, now much discredited in its original form and subject to many qualifications, maintains that touring imposed severe hardships and restrictions on what a company might accomplish financially and artistically while traveling. Gone the way of the pirates and many features of the “bad” quartos are the impoverished actors who, as the story once went, were forced to slash and dumb down London plays in order not to overtax the limited capacities of provincial audiences. Thanks to the Records of Early English Drama, we now have a better picture of the long-established prestige, viability, and organized nature of touring. Still part of the picture, however, are the economic challenges facing those large-scale, London-based companies that were forced onto the road by the closing of the London theaters during the difficult years of 1592– 93. We know also that by late summer of 1593 Pembroke’s Men had been forced to cut short their tour, sell their apparel, and return to London because they could not “saue ther carges th trauell.”80 In his study of the high costs of touring, William Ingram underlined the necessity of controlling costs, and Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s demonstration that the well-traveled Queen’s Men divided into two smaller branches for the purposes of touring suggests that one way of controlling costs and increasing profits was to tour with reduced casts.81 Such reduced- cast touring may be one of the ways (we probably need several) to account for the reduced- cast plays that once went under the name of “bad” quartos. If this explanation is correct, then by a reversal of the logic, we might suppose that reduced- cast plays are strong candidates for touring performances. Casting studies of the plays we have attributed to Lord Strange’s Men yield the following results:

Fair Em Orlando Furioso A Knack to Know a Knave The Battle of Alcazar The Massacre at Paris The Jew of Malta John of Bordeaux

Men 9 9 11 13 14 14 15

Boys 4 2 2 5 3 3 3

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Titus Andronicus The Spanish Tragedy A Looking Glass for London and England Sir Thomas More John a Kent and John a Cumber Edmond Ironside 1 Henry VI

15 15 15 15 16 18 19

3 4 5 6 5 4 3

There is a distinct gap in the casting requirements for the surviving texts of the first three plays on this list and those for the remainder. As it happens, the surviving quartos of the first three plays also show evidence of abridgement. A Knack to Know a Knave is a text that fails to sustain several characters and plot strands, and the “applauded Merrimentes” of Will Kemp that survive in the quarto hardly amount to the selling point the title page makes of them. In Fair Em at least three important character roles have been cut in order to permit doubling. It would appear that before being abridged for a reduced cast, the play was originally designed for performance by a minimum of at least twelve to fourteen adults and four boys, a number more in line with the full- cast plays of Lord Strange’s Men. In Greene’s Orlando Furioso the vestigial roles of Aquitaine and Rosillion, both of whom drop abruptly from the action in order to accommodate a very minimal four of the “twelve Peeres of France” in 4.1, suggest that a fuller version of the play sustaining the roles of Aquitaine, Rosillion, and at least four Peers of France would have demanded a minimal cast of thirteen adults. McMillin and MacLean observe that a fully cast Orlando Furioso, capable of bringing on stage all twelve Peers of France, would require at least sixteen actors, a number in line with plays of the Queen’s Men published before 1592 but also in line with the fourteen to sixteen adults required for per formance of most plays by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose. We cannot say with certainty—as we can with Fair Em and A Knack to Know a Knave—that the reduced- cast quarto of Orlando Furioso is the version that belonged to Lord Strange’s Men, but its casting is a close match to the other two plays. We have no specific evidence that these plays were produced for the purpose of touring with reduced personnel, though it is perhaps worth noting that when Lord Strange’s Men returned from their extensive 1592 tour and reopened at the Rose on 29 December 1592, it was not until their sixteenth performance, on 16 January 1592/93, that they revived “harey the vj,” the single most profitable and most frequently performed of their plays during their previous run, February– June 1592. In the sixteen days before “harey the vj” was revived, A Knack to Know a Knave was performed three times. This suggests that upon returning to

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London the company might have been in a better position, in terms of cast, stage management, and currency of rehearsal, for an immediate staging of A Knack than for a full-blown revival of the large- cast “harey the vj.” Along with titles matching these reduced- cast texts, the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men also contains a number of plays that, in their use of regional settings, legends, and allusions, may reflect the company’s links to the domains of the Stanleys and its adaptation of professional playing to the local venues and performance traditions of northwest England. Fair Em, for example, has been described as a play whose local allusions mark it as “a country play, written for Lord Strange’s Men to act in Lancashire and Cheshire.”82 Set in the time of William the Conqueror, the play depicts in the disguised Sir Thomas Goddard a version of a legend associated with the important Trafford family of Manchester. The play alludes to the Trafford family crest, and it twice mentions, under the name of Sir Edmund Trafford, the legend that the family’s ancestor, Ranulphus Trafford, resisted the Normans in the disguise of a peasant.83 At roughly the time Fair Em was performed, Sir Edmund Trafford of Manchester, the head of the family, was sheriff of Lancaster and, with Henry Stanley and Laurence Chaderton, Bishop of Chester, a member of the ecclesiastical commission for Lancashire and Cheshire. In 1578 Henry Stanley had named him first among “his very loving friends” in the Salford hundred.84 Sir Edmund was a visitor to Lathom in August 1587 and August 1589, and his son, a contemporary of Ferdinando Stanley, was among the family’s most frequent guests. Among the nobility and gentry from Cheshire and Lancashire celebrated in the poems of Richard Robinson’s A Golden Mirrour (1589), “Sir Edmond Traffard” appeared third in the collection, just after “the right honorable, Fardinando, Lord Strange” and Lady Julian Holcraft (sigs. C3v–E). Along with these allusions to the contemporary Traffords, the play’s intrinsic design highlights several local themes and concerns. It was, after all, William the Conqueror who, in driving back the Danes, established a bulwark of northwestern defense by creating the earldom of Chester, the line of Norman overlords whose title, transferred by Henry III to his son Edward, had become one of the titles belonging to the English Crown. In the play’s war plot, William returns from Denmark to England and is taken prisoner at “fair Li’erpool,” while in the love plot the fair Elner and her father, the “Citizen of Westchester,” form symmetrical counterparts to the fair Em and her father, “the Miller of Manchester.” The play might have appealed not only to the Stanleys and the Traffords but also to many of those who at one time or another formed the “great company” in the halls at New Park, Lathom, and Knowsley, including men like “mr maire of Chester” and “his brethren,” or “the mayre of Lyverpolle . . . &

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others of that towne,” or “dyvers manchester men,” or “mr bavande & other of the cyttisens of chester.”85 No candidate for the repertory seems more thoroughly a regional play than John a Kent and John a Cumber. Set in medieval Chester and its Welsh environs, the play’s romantic plot involves a competition for the hands of Sidanen, daughter of the Welsh prince Llewellyn, and Mariana, daughter of Ranulph, Earl of Chester. The play alludes, moreover, to the Chester landscape and its legends. Ranulph, for example, elaborates somewhat gratuitously on the route of the intended wedding procession of his daughter: Thence to the Castell shall you walk along And at St Iohns shall be solemnized, The nuptialles of your honors, and these virgins. ffor to that Churche, Edgar, once England’s King, Was by eight Kinges, conquerd by him in warres: Rowed royally on St Iohn Baptist day. In memory of which pompe, the Earles our auncestors, Haue to that Churche beene noble benefactours. Moorton. Eight Kings rowe one? That was great pompe indeed. Pemb. One of them was of Scotland, as I read, The Irishe, and the dane two more beside, And fiue of Brittayne, all subdued by him. (ll. 160–72)

Focused on civic and religious landmarks like the Castle and the Church of St. John, the passage alludes to the famous episode of King Edgar being rowed on the Dee by tributary kings, an event that was used in Henry Bradshaw’s early sixteenth- century verse chronicle to account for King Edgar’s local benefactions.86 The Abbey Church of St. Werburgh, the setting for the final contest between the two magicians, forms an urban counterpart to the Welsh shrine of St. Winifred’s Well at Holywell, Flintshire, where—despite Ranulph’s hostility to “these auncient rules, / Reigiously obserued in these partes”—the women go seeking prophecy of future husbands at “Saint winifredes fayre spring” (TLN 271–72, 260). While references to the old religion support its aura of romance, the play also deploys, as we have seen, an antipuritan (and perhaps anti-Marprelate) musical spirit, embodied in the morris dance in which Turnop and his company ridicule the thwarted John a Cumber. In John a Cumber’s musical siege of Sir Gosselin Denvyle’s castle the play may have been alluding to yet another Chester legend, according to which Ranulph the Good, besieged by Llewellyn

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in Rhuddlan Castle, was rescued when one Ralph Dutton “gathered together a company of musicians, and such other people as by their means were drawn together in and about Chester” and gave “the onset to the earl’s enemies, and . . . raised the siege.” The “famous meeting such minstrels” was “duly continued” in the court of Cheshire musicians “at every Midsummer Fair,” which brought “an extraordinary confluence of loose people thither at that season.”87 Writing from Bristol while on tour in August 1593 and looking forward to further steps on what he called “our long Iorney,” Alleyn advised his wife to send letters ahead “by the cariers of shrowsbery or to west chester or to york.”88 If John a Kent and John a Cumber belonged to Strange’s Men, then they were exceptionally well equipped for playing in the region of Chester. The chapel at Holywell, celebrated in the play, had been built by Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII and wife of Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby. Lady Stanley sponsored the publication of the first printed life of St. Winifred, and carvings of the Stanley arms adorn the chapel at Holywell to this day. Just a few miles to the southwest, between Holywell and Denbigh, was Lleweni, the home of the Welsh-speaking Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir John Salusbury and his wife, Ursula Stanley, the illegitimate daughter of the 4th Earl, Henry Stanley. The Derby Household Book records frequent visits to Lancashire by Sir John and his wife, but perhaps more significantly, a manuscript copied at Lleweni contains the titles of several songs associated with Edward Alleyn, as well as one, “seedanen,” which may be associated with John a Kent and John a Cumber. The “seedanen” in the Lleweni manuscript, Sally Harper argues, is associated with “the song of Sydanen” offered as an aubade by Turnop and his fellows in John a Kent and John a Cumber, where a stage direction dictates that “they play, the boy sings in Welsh” (ll. 566–72).89 Some of these possibly “regional” plays are among the “reduced- cast” texts discussed earlier. The fairly obvious abridgement represented by the 1594 quarto of A Knack to Know a Knave should probably be taken, like the similarly obvious abridgement of Fair Em, to indicate that these plays traveled, in at least one of their forms, with a reduced company. They would have been all the more portable for framing a vision of English life that appealed not just to traditional instincts but to local ones. John a Kent and John a Cumber, by contrast, is a very large- cast play, and it must in any case be considered a less secure attribution to Lord Strange’s Men than Fair Em and A Knack to Know a Knave. But we have no definite evidence that touring was everywhere and always done with reduced- cast plays; we should perhaps take seriously the players’ earlier complaint that “oure Companie is greate, and thearbie our chardge intollerable, in travellinge the Countrie.” In other words, reduced- cast touring may not have

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been the norm but an option under specific circumstances. We are left, then, with accounting for the fact that the quartos of Fair Em, A Knack to Know a Knave, and (if this version of the text belonged to Lord Strange’s Men) Orlando Furioso are apparently reduced- cast plays. Some possible reasons present themselves in the circumstances surrounding the company’s final months on tour. T H E E N D OF T H E ROA D

The last closely dated stop on the provincial itinerary that we have been able to construct for Ferdinando Stanley’s company is Caludon Castle. On 5 December 1593 Derby’s Men received a modest reward of 10s, quite a contrast to the 60s lavished on Pembroke’s Men in June of the same year.90 In fact the reward at Leicester was low as well, a mere 5s, a quarter of the allowance for Worcester’s Men in the same season.91 It is tempting to interpret these declining rewards as a sign of the company’s uncertain status or perhaps the division of its players by December 1593, when their patron’s political fortunes were in crisis. We have also noted with interest another reward, on 7 December 1593, in the civic accounts of Winchester farther south: “tenne shillings . . . to the plaiers of the Right Honorable the Erle of Sussex & five shillings to the plaiers of A noble man in the parts of the North.”92 This mention of a “noble man in the parts of the North,” an unusually opaque reference, does stimulate speculation, especially as there were very few noble patrons based in the north with active troupes on record in 1593.93 When the Rose reopened between 27 December 1593 and 6 February 1593/94, the resident company was Sussex’s Men, now including in their repertory The Jew of Malta, the previous box- office hit closely associated with Strange’s Men.94 Around the same time Strange’s (now Derby’s) Men began selling their plays: Orlando Furioso was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 7 December 1593; A Knack to Know a Knave, which featured the unusual title page attribution to “ED: ALLEN and his Companie,” with no mention of Derby’s patronage, on 7 January 1593/94; and Titus Andronicus on 6 February 1593/94, an edition whose title page states that it “was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earl of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants.” We think that McMillin was on the right track in suggesting that “Alleyn, perhaps along with Kempe and other veterans from Strange’s Men, joined Sussex’s company sometime after their first season began at the Rose, in time to add The Jew of Malta to the repertory before playing was curtailed,”95 but we wonder if the entry at Winchester is a clue that the company had divided, at least for a time, by December 1593, with some members joining Sussex’s on the road to Winchester while a smaller core played at Caludon Castle.

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Caludon was an obvious choice for Derby’s Men in any event. The Berkeley residence was less than a day’s walk from Coventry, and the resident lord had a track record of patronizing entertainers himself, as well as hosting those of others. But Henry Berkeley, 7th Baron Berkeley, also had a personal link to Ferdinando Stanley, for he had married Katherine Howard, cousin of the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard. The Lord Admiral’s wife was Katherine Carey, and so he was brother-in-law to George Carey, son of the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey. George was married to Elizabeth Spencer, the younger sister of Alice Spencer, familiar to us as the wife of Ferdinando Stanley. This is a close circle of family connections and therefore worth attending to. If Derby’s Men were searching for more auspicious patronage by the end of 1593, they could not have found more promising mentors than the Careys and Howards. Within six months, after Edward Alleyn had returned to the Admiral’s Men, his original patron’s company, five sharers of the Strange/Derby troupe resurfaced under the new patronage of Henry Carey, Lord Chamberlain, at the Rose between 3 and 13 June, playing in company, or alternately, with the Lord Admiral’s.96 As the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company was to show some of the same reluctance to tour widely: between 1594 and 1597 they toured to the southwest twice (1594: Marlborough; 1596– 97: Marlborough, Bath, and Bristol), East Anglia once (1594– 95: Cambridge, Ipswich), and Kent twice (1596– 97: Dover, Faversham; August, 1597: Rye).97 In one year (1596) the tour was during a period of theater closure due to plague in London.98 Between the fall of 1597 and the spring of 1603, however, the company seems to have been content to perform at their theater base in London or at court during the Christmas and Shrovetide seasons each year.99 As Shakespeare’s company, their preferences have dominated the narrative of Elizabethan theater history for generations, but we would suggest that those among them who had enjoyed success as Strange’s Men in the early 1590s were innovators in more ways than one. Their approach to touring should be viewed more thoughtfully as a distinctive element of company style that was neither an inherited tradition nor a habit shared by all professional troupes of the period.

9

Shakespeare and Lord Str ange’s Men

Not long after Lord Strange’s Men played their 1592 season at the Rose, Shakespeare came to public notice in print for the first time. Greenes Groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance (1592) described “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shakescene in a countrey” (sig. Fv). The question of where and how Shakespeare attracted this attention—indeed the question of his whereabouts and professional affiliations prior to the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594—remains without a definitive answer. “The belief that Shakespeare performed with Strange’s [Men] is probably the most popular of all the arguments considered” in Terence G. Schoone-Jongen’s recent survey of theories about Shakespeare’s early acting company affiliations.1 Yet despite the distinguished list of scholars Schoone-Jongen cites as endorsing a connection with Lord Strange’s Men—E. K. Chambers, Peter Thomson, Andrew Gurr, Park Honan, and E. A. J. Honigmann, among them—Shakespeare studies are not unanimous on the subject. Allison Gaw claimed that there was “no connection between Shakespeare and Strange’s Men,” and Peter Alexander maintained there is “no evidence that he wrote anything for them.” Antony Hammond offers a more cautious challenge, noting the possibility of Shakespeare’s association with the “harey the vj” performed by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose but then asserting that there is “no evidence other than this title to associate [Shakespeare] with them before 1594.”2 While there is no definitive evidence, there are, of course, other circumstances that might suggest a possible connection with Lord Strange’s Men—the

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fact, for example, that so many of Shakespeare’s colleagues in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, John Heminges, and Richard Cowley) had originally been in Strange’s Men or the fact that the title page of the 1594 quarto promoted Titus Andronicus as having been “Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants.” But Hammond is correct that “harey the vj” is the strongest evidence for a Shakespearean connection to Strange’s Men. Nashe’s description of a play about John Talbot in 1592 (the date of Henslowe’s/Strange’s “harey the vj”) is an excellent match to The First Part of King Henry the Sixt in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623). In the absence of any other play answering to Nashe’s description, it would seem that Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI is the “harey the vj” performed by Strange’s Men at the Rose in 1592. T H E PROBL EM OF “H A R E Y T H E V J”

Complicating this evidence for a connection between Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men are the signs that 1 Henry VI is a work of collaborative authorship and the fact that the only known text of the play, published in the 1623 folio, postdates the performance of “harey the vj” by more than three decades. Theories about the collaborative authorship of 1 Henry VI, in all of which Shakespeare continues to claim a share, are not by themselves an obstacle to linking Shakespeare to the work of Lord Strange’s Men in 1592. Gary Taylor, in one of the most thorough accounts of multiple authorship of the play, concludes that Shakespeare’s collaboration “with three other playwrights in writing Henry the Sixth, Part One” is proof that he “unmistakably had some connection at some time in the early 1590s with Strange’s Men.”3 Neither do theories that Shakespeare revised the play at some later date necessarily dissociate him from Strange’s Men: Marco Mincoff, Norman Sanders, and E. Pearlman, all of whom find evidence of revision in the incompletely harmonized features of the play, suggest that Shakespeare, as sole author of the play, was merely a reviser of his own “harey the vj” sometime after first writing it in 1592.4 Only when theories about multiple authorship of 1 Henry VI are combined with theories about later revisions to the manuscript do questions about Shakespeare’s connection to the “harey the vj” of 1592 arise. And as a matter of fact, not even when such theories are combined— depending on the dating of Shakespeare’s contribution—is a connection to Strange’s Men necessarily ruled out.5 The only cases against Shakespeare’s having contributed to “harey the vj” for Lord Strange’s Men are those that, emphasizing the absence of any published text before the First Folio, hypothesize that

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Shakespeare’s contributions to this coauthored play must have been added at some point after 1594 on behalf of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Two kinds of argument are usually offered in support of such hypotheses: (1) arguments about the possible irrelevance, redundancy, or incomplete integration of those portions of the play most widely attributed to Shakespeare, and (2) the unexamined assumption that Shakespeare would not, in his early career, have written for more than one company at any given time.6 There are a few instances of a third type of argument about late Shakespearean revision to the play, based on stylistic claims by specialists who believe they can identify features of Shakespeare’s style with such chronological precision as to confidently assign a later date to the “Shakespearean” passages of 1 Henry VI. In what follows, we do not address such stylistic arguments, partly because they belong to an underdeveloped field where there is little strong consensus regarding basic methods but also because we are persuaded that Shakespeare’s role in “harey the vj” can be clarified by a fresh consideration of the supposed “revision” of the text, by an examination of the theater-historical issues involving patronage, dating, and company affiliation, and by a reconsideration of the grounds for connecting additional plays by Shakespeare with Lord Strange’s Men. We begin by using evidence about patronage from a scene of 1 Henry VI (4.7), a scene attributed to Shakespeare by many of those who see the play as a collaboration, in order to confirm, should any still doubt it, that 1 Henry VI is indeed the “harey the vj” of Lord Strange’s Men. That evidence suggests, furthermore, that the scene must have been part of the play by 1592. We then demonstrate why we believe those portions of 1 Henry VI most frequently attributed to Shakespeare, 2.5 and 4.5, are not later additions to the play but integral to the original design and compatible with a date of 1592. Finally, we take up the larger questions concerning Shakespeare’s company affiliation and present our reasons for thinking that several of Shakespeare’s early history plays, including all three parts of Henry VI as well as Richard III, might have been performed by or at least written or first conceived for Lord Strange’s Men. TA L BO T ’ S EPI TA PH A N D T H E QU ES T ION OF S TA N L E Y PAT RONAGE

A reason sometimes given for attributing 1 Henry VI to Lord Strange’s Men is the “epitaph’ ” in which Sir William Lucy, seeking on the battlefield of Chastillon near Bordeaux the whereabouts of the English hero Sir John Talbot, delivers what turns out to be a posthumous tribute to the hero who has died some twenty-eight lines earlier:

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But wheres the great Alcides of the field, Valiant Lord Talbot, Earle of Shrewsbury? Created, for his rare successe in Armes, Great Earle of Washford, Waterford, and Valence, Lord Talbot of Goodrig and Vrchinfield, Lord Strange of Blackmere, Lord Verdon of Alton, Lord Cromwell of Wingefield, Lord Furniuall of Sheffield, The thrice victorious Lord of Falconbridge, Knight of the Noble Order of S. George, Worthy S. Michael, and the Golden Fleece, Great Marshall to Henry the sixt Of all his Warres within the Realme of France. (TLN 2294–2305)

Scholars have often picked “Lord Strange of Blackmere” from this list of titles as evidence that 1 Henry VI is the “harey the vj” that Henslowe’s diary attributes to Strange’s Men. Michael Hattaway, for example, states that Ferdinando Stanley was “a descendant of the Lord Talbot who appears in the play.” Michael Taylor observes, in connection with Talbot’s title “Lord Strange of Blackmere,” that “the current Lord Strange was patron” of the company that performed “harey the vj.” Roger Warren argues that “Lord Strange may have commissioned a play about Talbot, an earlier Lord Strange.” Paul J. Vincent states that “Lord Strange, the patron of the acting company which first performed harey the vj, was a descendant of the play’s protagonist, Lord Talbot,” and he suggests that “the playwright(s) were concerned to flatter the patron of the commissioning acting company.”7 Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange of Knokyn, was not a descendant of John Talbot, and “Lord Strange of Blackmere” was not among his titles. From the early fourteenth century there had in fact been two different baronages of Strange. Both of them, Knokyn and Blackmere, originated among the Lestranges, lords of the Shropshire marches.8 When Joan Lestrange married George Stanley, the son of Thomas, Lord Stanley and 1st Earl of Derby, the Strange of Knokyn title entered the Stanley line. Ferdinando Stanley inherited the title as 13th Lord Strange of Knokyn. By contrast, the title of Lord Strange of Blackmere was inherited in 1421 by John Talbot, the hero of 1 Henry VI and later 1st Earl of Shrewsbury. The title remained with the Talbots and was held from 1590 by Gilbert Talbot (1552–1616), 7th Earl of Shrewsbury.9 The difference between the two titles and lines of ancestry is apparent in Ralph Brooke’s A Catalogve and Succession of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earles, and Viscounts of this Realme of England (1619):

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Ferdinando Lord Stanley, Strange, and of the Isle of Man . . . the fift Earle of Derby. (p. 72) Gilbert Talbot, . . . seuenth Earle of Shrewsbury, Lord Talbot, Furniuall, Verdon and Strange of Blackmer, . . . Knight and Companion of the Noble Order of the Garter. (p. 199)

Clearly the titles of Gilbert Talbot, not those of Ferdinando Stanley, are the ones that appear in the epitaph of Sir John Talbot in 1 Henry VI. The epitaph might conceivably have been added to “harey the vj” at any time before 1623, the date of its appearance in the First Folio. The year 1596 is sometimes suggested as the earliest possible date based on a potential source for Lucy’s tribute, An Armor of Proofe (1596), dedicated by Roger Cotton to Gilbert Talbot, “Earle of Shrewsburie, Lord Talbot, Furniuall, Strange of Blackmeare, Verdon and Louetoft, Knight of the most noble order of the Garter.” In his dedication Cotton pays tribute to one of Gilbert Talbot’s “most noble progenatours,” the “worthy peere” who together with his valiant Sonne the Lord Lisle, in that sore battle fought at Castilion in Fraunce their sweete lyues did ende: where a monument of the Earle remayneth vnto this day, and this inscription following, ingrauen thervpon: Heere lyeth the right noble Knight Iohn Talbot Earle of Shrewsburie, Earle of Washford, Waterforth, and Valence, Lorde Talbot of Goodritche and Vrchingfeilde: Lorde Strange of Blackmeare, Lord Verdon of Alton, Lord Crumwell of Wingfeilde, Lord Louetoft of Worsoppe, Lord Furniuall of Sheffeilde, and Lord Falconbridge, Knight of the most noble orders of S. George, S. Michael, and the Golden Fleece, Great Marshall to King Henrie the sixt of his Realme of Fraunce, who dyed at the battle of Castilion neare Burdeaux, Anno. 1453. (sig. A3v)

A similar epitaph appears in Richard Crompton’s Mansion of Magnanimitie (1599), where it is said to have been “ingrauen” on the “Tombe” where Talbot was “interred” in France (sigs. E3v–E4). By the time of Ralph Brooke’s Catalogve and Succession (1619), Cotton’s “monument” and Crompton’s “Tombe” had become “a Toombe at Roane in Normandy, whereon this Epitaphe”—one virtually identical to those in Cotton and Crompton—was said to be written.10 This “Toombe”— often, following Brooke, located at Rouen—became a staple of subsequent chronicles,11 and it has continued to be credited by eminent Shakespeareans from Edmund Malone to John Dover Wilson, J. P. Brockbank, and Emrys Jones.12 The supposition that the list of titles first found in Cotton and Crompton originates from an actual epitaph has been offered as evidence that, barring

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discovery of an earlier source, Sir William Lucy’s tribute must derive from these “historical” sources and so represents revisions to 4.7 at least several years later than the debut of “harey the vj” at the Rose in February 1591/92.13 That would mean that Shakespeare’s scenes were unlikely to have been written for Lord Strange’s Men, who ceased to exist by December 1593. But scholars have always recognized that although the earliest known source for the epitaph is Cotton (1596), it could have derived from an earlier one,14 and this is the nub of the matter: to find that earlier source from which Talbot’s epitaph derived. That the formulaic list of titles must indeed have come from a source earlier than Cotton and, more important, that it could not have originated from a Talbot epitaph anywhere in France is underlined by Augustine Vincent’s attack on Ralph Brooke in A Discoverie of Errovrs in the first Edition of the Catalogve of Nobility (1622). Citing Brooke’s version of the epitaph, Vincent demolishes several of its elements as “puffed . . . vp” fiction, pointing out, for example, that the Barony of Wingfield was not held by John Talbot, that the Fauconbridge title was held by the Nevilles, and most crucially that Talbot could not have belonged to the order of St. Michael, which “was not instituted vntill the yeare 1469. . . . This Earle of Shrewsbury died (as I haue said before) a°. 1453. the Order of Saint Michael begunne a°. 1469. so that by this account you make him a Knight and Companion thereof sixteene yeares before that order was deuised.” Vincent went on to say “a word or two about the place of his Buriall; Yorke [Brooke] says at Roane in Normandy, but vndoubtedly hee was buried at Whitchurch in Shropshire, where his Monument is extant, for Roan was surrendred to the French 3. or 4. yeares before his death, therefore vnlikely to haue his Sepulture there. Learned Camden . . . deliuers the epitaph truely, as it is to be seene at Whitchurch, in these words.”15 The epitaph that Vincent cites from William Camden, in a form much simpler than the versions discussed so far, commemorates “the right Noble Lord, Sir John Talbot, sometimes Earle of Shrewsburie, Lord Talbot, Lord Furnivall, Lord Verdon, Lord Strange de Black-Mere, and Mareshall of France.”16 None of the other “puffed . . . vp” titles found in 1 Henry VI, in Cotton, and in the other treatments of Talbot appear. In his article on Talbot’s epitaph, Georges Lambin, despite his sympathy with Vincent’s debunking of Brooke’s version of the epitaph as “puffed . . . vp” fiction, went on to construct a notional now-lost tomb for Talbot at Falaise. But in seeming contravention of this dubious exercise, Lambin also supplied, in the middle of his analysis, a much better explanation of the missing “source” for the list of titles repeated in Cotton, Crompton, and Brooke.17 Lambin took note of the most egregious anachronism in the reports:

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Lambin noticed that unlike these reporters, Sir William Lucy, though guilty of rhetorical excess and anachronism, is innocent of falsely reporting Talbot’s membership in the orders of St. Michael and the Golden Fleece. Lucy is merely declaring, in the teeth of the French victors, that “the Noble Order of Saint George,” to which Talbot belongs, is an order “worthy S. Michael, and the Golden Fleece.” So far, then, is 1 Henry VI from borrowing from Cotton or Crompton or any reliable source recording a French “epitaph” of John Talbot that the play’s own language actually explains where, by way of later misinterpretation, Talbot’s anachronistic status as a Knight of St. Michael originated. It originated at the Rose. There is further evidence for this in Cotton’s wording, which introduces his version of the epitaph with the statement that Talbot, “together with his valiant Sonne the Lord Lisle, in that sore battle fought at Castilion in Fraunce their sweete lyues did ende” (italics ours). Hall’s chronicle, which does not depict the actual deaths of the two Talbots in any detail, merely states that along with Talbot “there dyed manfully hys sonne the lord Lisle” (“manfullie” is repeated in Holinshed’s similarly succinct version).18 It was not in the dry pages of the chronicles but on the stage, as Thomas Nashe suggested, that Talbot had “his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”19 It would appear that Cotton referred to the Talbots ending “their sweete lyues” because he, a London draper, had been among those “ten thousand spectators” who first shed tears over Talbot’s final, stirring battle cry: Then follow thou thy desp’rate Syre of Creet, Thou Icarus, thy Life to me is sweet: If thou wilt fight, fight by thy Fathers side, And commendable prou’d, let’s dye in pride. Exit. (TLN 2225–29; italics ours)

If Sir William Lucy was committing an anachronism, then, by invoking the Order of St. Michael some fourteen years before it was created, this was not a citation of “fact” in support of claims about Talbot’s actual titles but a rhetorical

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move in support of the hero’s—and really the play’s—defense of the Order of the Garter. Talbot’s battle cries are “Saint George, and Victory!” (TLN 2171) and “God, and S. George, Talbot and Englands right” (TLN 2006).20 When Talbot tears the Garter from the leg of the cowardly Sir John Fastolfe, he delivers a praise of the order: When first this Order was ordain’d, my Lords, Knights of the Garter were of Noble birth; Valiant, and Vertuous, full of haughtie Courage, Such as were growne to credit by the warres: Not fearing Death, nor shrinking for Distresse, But alwayes resolute, in most extreames. (TLN 1779– 84)

That “the Noble Order of S. George” is an order “worthy S. Michael, and the Golden Fleece,” a claim that Lucy upholds in defiance to his addressees, the princes of France and Burgundy and thus the patrons of these two foreign orders, is a point in support of the play’s celebration of the Talbot Shrewsbury earldom and the Order of the Garter. If we were looking for a “source” for this “anachronistic” portion of the epitaph, we might find it in William Harrison’s Description of England in Holinshed’s Chronicles, where “the noble order of the Toison Dor or golden fléese” and “that of saint Michaell and his one and thirtie knights” are linked together in the story of the founding of the Order of the Garter by Edward III. This passage, and the similar account given by Holinshed in the reign of Edward III,21 have been suggested as possible sources for another Garter play, Edward III, and especially for the Countess of Salisbury scene, in which Shakespeare may have had a hand.22 As for the other “puffed . . . vp” titles in Talbot’s epitaph in 1 Henry VI, their likely source is not the epitaph of the 1st Earl, extant at Whitchurch and recorded by Camden, but the epitaph of the 6th, George Talbot, who died 18 November 1590 and was buried in a splendid tomb in the Shrewsbury Chapel at St. Peter’s Church, Sheffield, on 13 January 1590/91. A lengthy Latin epitaph by John Foxe, graven in stone, survives, but according to the seventeenthcentury antiquarian Roger Dodsworth (1585–1654), an English epitaph, no longer extant, was painted on a wooden panel hung next to the tomb; it paid tribute to George Earle of Shrowsbury, Washford and Waterford, Earle Marshall of England, Talbot of Goodridge, Lord Verdon of Altoun, Furniuall of Sheffield, Lord Luftot of Worksopp, Lord Crumbwell of Wingfeld,

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Lord Strange of the Blackmeere, and Justice by Northtrente Of forrestes and chases, a councellor, president Unto the Soueraigne Quene &c. for his loyaltye Knyght of the Garter, eke these titles all had hee: Which solemnly proclaimed by heraldes that daie When was his funeral.23

Here, just in time to have inspired Lucy’s epitaph in 1592, are the titles awarded to the hero Talbot in 1 Henry VI, including those contested by Vincent as unhistorical. In fact everything in Lucy’s speech can be accounted for in Dodsworth’s manuscript account of the wooden tablet or at the Sheffield tomb itself (where the arms of Valence appear). The only exceptions are Falconbridge, a fictional title with a long pedigree in Shakespeare’s works,24 and the misunderstood mention of St. Michael and the Golden Fleece. These two exceptions, not found at the 1590 tomb, are the trace elements that allow us to track all the subsequently printed versions of Talbot’s “epitaph”—in Cotton, Crompton, Brooke, and others—back to the only other place they appear, at their theatrical origin in 1 Henry VI. Amazingly, by 1598 these trace elements—Falconbridge and the Golden Fleece—had apparently made their way into a manuscript kept at Whitchurch, in which, according to a 1663 report by Elias Ashmole, it was recorded that Talbot was, along with all those other titles, “Lord Fauconbridge, Knight of the most Noble Order of St. George, Saint Michaell and the Goulden Fleece.”25 Ashmole’s report was confirmed by Sir William Dugdale, who conjectured that the 1598 manuscript epitaph “was heretofore written, as I guess, on some tablet hanging neere this tomb.”26 The process that created John Talbot’s epitaph is now fully visible: it was Shakespeare, in 1 Henry VI, who turned a contemporary tribute to the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury into the historical John Talbot’s unhistorical epitaph. The first record of the misunderstood tribute is Cotton’s publication in 1596. We do not know of any evidence that would connect Gilbert Talbot with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or with their patron at any time subsequent to 1594. There is another date, however, that would connect Talbot very powerfully with 1 Henry VI and Lord Strange’s Men. Talbot was inducted into the Order of the Garter on 20 June 1592, within weeks of the 3 March debut of “harey the vj” as a “ne” play at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre. And in contrast with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men were a company whose patron had strong personal as well as historical connections with the Shrewsbury earls. That the

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two Lords Strange, Stanley and Talbot, shared a common ancestry among the Lords Lestrange of Shropshire was but the least of them. From Polydore Vergil onward, Tudor historians recorded that the Earl of Richmond triumphed over Richard III at Bosworth Field owing to the support of “Thomas Stanley, William his brother, Gylbert Talbot, and others innumerable.”27 The Stanley–Talbot alliance was commemorated as well in the manuscript ballads and sagas retailing the exploits of the Stanleys to the great house culture of the north,28 and it is underlined in Shakespeare’s Richard III (1597 Q, sig. Lv). Celebration of the Stanley–Talbot regional alliance thus persisted quite powerfully at the time of “harey the vj.” In A Golden Mirrour (1589), the publisher John Proctor referred to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury and Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby as “those two most noble and loyall men” who were “spectacles or looking glasses, wherein all men may see a liuely pourtrayture of right Noble myndes in deede, for the right of their Countreys weale beyng most vigilant and studious.” Allegorical verses in this volume by Richard Robinson depict a virgin queen beset by a fox and wolf but preserved in the end by the Talbot hound and Stanley eagle.29 As in the past, going back to Bosworth, so on the eve of the Armada, the pairing of Talbot and Stanley, Hound and Eagle, was a patriotic gesture geared to the preservation of local power and interests.30 The Talbot papers, now at Lambeth Palace, contain a substantial correspondence in which the Stanleys and the Talbots repeatedly exchanged favors and arranged for mutual support. After Gilbert Talbot became the 7th Earl of Shrewsbury in December 1590, the Stanleys assiduously courted his friendship. Henry Stanley offered his ser vices at court in April 1591 and again in February 1591/92, while Lord Strange, writing from “The Courte” in May 1591, asked “if in this plasse I may in your absens doo you any frindly offis.”31 A lengthy correspondence in January–February 1593/94 shows Talbot mediating in Ferdinando’s dangerous dispute with the Earl of Essex,32 and during his suspicious final illness in April, Ferdinando attempted to entail his estates to Talbot and three other trustees. Talbot, Lord Strange of Blackmere, attended the funeral of Lord Strange of Knokyn, and he possessed, endorsed in his own hand, “the maner of the death of the Earl of Derby,” a sensational document circulating at the time and detailing the evidence that the earl had died by poisoning or witchcraft.33 This is a set of relationships that, beyond the common Lestrange ancestry and title, might well have inspired a noble patron to ask his players to “study a speech of some dosen or sixteene lines, which I would set downe, and insert in’t” (Hamlet, TLN 1580–81). We are not suggesting that Lord Strange himself wrote Talbot’s epitaph, a speech that belongs to a much more extensive pattern

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in 1 Henry VI’s celebration of the Talbot Shrewsbury earldom and the Order of the Garter. We are, however, invoking Stanley patronage as a motive for important features of the Talbot play “harey the vj,” and we are offering Sir William Lucy’s epitaph as evidence for the dating of that portion of the play to 1592.34 If, as many suggest, Lucy was created by Shakespeare, then one reasonable inference is that he was created to deliver Talbot’s epitaph for Lord Strange’s Men in 1592.35 T H E T EM PL E GA R DEN: SH A K ESPE A R E’S ROL E I N 1 HENRY V I, 2. 4

That is not the only possibility, however. A few disintegrationists of 1 Henry VI, such as Chambers and, more recently, Brian Vickers, have argued on stylistic grounds that 4.7 is not by Shakespeare.36 Others, such as H. C. Hart (who awards Shakespeare the first fifty lines of 4.7) and Gary Taylor (who awards him the first thirty-three lines), deny Shakespeare credit for the portion of the scene containing Talbot’s epitaph.37 Furthermore anomalies involving the stage directions and speech headings for Lucy in 4.2 and 4.7 present the possibility that it was not Lucy’s lines but only his speech headings that were added by Shakespeare at some later date.38 If these doubts about the date of Lucy’s role are correct, then it is perhaps only an unidentified collaborator, not Shakespeare, who can be plausibly connected with Talbot’s epitaph and Lord Strange’s Men in 1592. In contrast to the lack of unanimity about the authorship of 4.7, however, there is little controversy about Shakespeare’s authorship of 2.4 (the Temple Garden scene) and 4.5 (the first of the three consecutive scenes involving the deaths of the two Talbots). No disintegrationist denies Shakespearean authorship of 2.4, while Chambers is alone among disintegrationists in doubting Shakespeare’s authorship of 4.5: F. G. Fleay, Gaw, Hart, and Wilson all accepted it, as do Gary Taylor, Hugh Craig, and Vickers, who finds Taylor’s identification of Shakespeare’s hand in 4.5 “uncontroversial.”39 With these scenes the problem is not Shakespeare’s authorship but the question of its date. On the one hand, some disintegrationists, like Wilson and Taylor, who argued that Shakespeare contributed the last adjustments before the 1592 debut, rule out the idea of substantial revision “months or years after the original performances.”40 On the other hand, largely based on arguments about the “unnecessary” or “redundant” nature of 2.4 and 4.5, some distintegrationists (like Gaw and more recently Paul Vincent), as well as some who (like Marco Mincoff and more recently E. Pearlman) attribute the play wholly to Shakespeare, hypothesize that these scenes were the product of revisions probably dating from a revival of the play by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men some time after 1594.

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Of course it is impossible to prove there was no revision to 1 Henry VI before its first publication in 1623. And the folio text does contain apparent redundancies.41 But these redundancies are compatible both with the piecemeal nature of multiple authorship and with the consensus that the folio text originated in a manuscript that had not been finalized by the prompter for performance. In other words, they are explicable without hypotheses concerning substantial revisions and additions at a significantly later date. While accepting that 1 Henry VI is a play involving multiple authorship, we argue that Shakespeare’s work in 2.4 and 4.5 is foundational to the original play and dateable on circumstantial grounds to 1591– 92. Modern ideas that the Temple Garden is Shakespeare’s later addition to the play originate with (and for the most part remain tied to) the work of Allison Gaw. In support of his claim that Shakespeare was revising an earlier Talbot play after 1594, Gaw argued that the Tower scene (2.5), which appears to begin as if introducing the character of Richard Plantagenet for the first time, stands free of 2.4; that it supplies its own raison d’être in one of Plantagenet’s comments to Mortimer (TLN 1116–21); that it contains sufficient preparation for (and a verbal anticipation of) Plantagenet’s restoration to the title of York in 3.1; that 2.5 would have been unnecessary if 2.4 had already existed; and that Shakespeare, who can plausibly be connected with Pembroke’s Men in 1592– 93, could therefore have had no connection with members of Lord Strange’s Men until some of them became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594.42 These arguments about 2.4 remain essentially unchanged in more recent arguments that Shakespeare was either revising his own work or revising the work of multiple authors. The political plot cannot, however, have been a later addition. Henslowe, and so most likely Lord Strange’s Men, did not call their play “Talbot”; they called it “harey the vj,” most likely to capitalize on the popularity of the Henry VI plays that were eventually published in 1594– 95 as The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York. With the arguable exception of 5.1, the only appearances of the monarch who gives the play its name are precisely those (3.1, 3.4–4.1, and 5.5) that involve him in the Wars of the Roses and that therefore tie this play to the other two on Henry’s reign. As for arguments about the relationship of the Temple Garden scene to the Tower scene, so far is 2.5 from being a freestanding explanation of the Plantagenet–Somerset quarrel, and so far is 2.4 from being an unnecessary later addition, that it can be shown that 2.5 (and much else in the play) assumes and requires the staging of 2.4 as its background. Without the quarrel between Plantagenet and Somerset in 2.4, the Keeper of the Tower would have no reason to seek Plantagenet by

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sending “vnto the Temple, vnto his Chamber” (TLN 1089); the meeting of Plantagenet with Mortimer in 2.5 is unhistorical, and there was no historical precedent for associating Plantagenet with the Temple. If, as Gaw and Paul Vincent have argued, Plantagenet were being introduced for the first time in 2.5, it would not be necessary for Mortimer to soliloquize for thirty lines while waiting for Plantagenet to arrive; Mortimer soliloquizes because Plantagenet was the last to exit the Temple Garden scene immediately preceding: the soliloquy covers for Plantagenet’s reentry from his “late” humiliation at the hands of Somerset in 2.4. Without 2.4 there would be no reason for Plantagenet to refer to himself as “late despised Richard” (TLN 1107): Mortimer’s soliloquy explains the attainder by which Plantagenet has “beene obscur’d, / Depriu’d of Honour and Inheritance” since “Henry Monmouth first began to reigne” (TLN 1096– 97, 1093), but he is immediately puzzled: “Why didst thou say of late thou wert despis’d?” (TLN 1113; italics ours). Without the actual staging of his “late” humiliation in 2.4, Plantagenet’s “explanation” to Mortimer (as Gaw describes it) would be obscure in the extreme: This day in argument vpon a Case, Some words there grew ’twixt Somerset and me: Among which tearmes, he v’sd his lauish tongue, And did vpbrayd me with my Fathers death; Which obloquie set barres before my tongue, Else with the like I had requited him. Therefore good Vnckle, for my Fathers sake, ... declare the cause My Father, Earle of Cambridge, lost his Head. (TLN 1116–25)

Without 2.4, the very mention of Somerset’s name (shorn of any explanation here) would be meaningless. The massed entry at the beginning of 1.1 calls for “The Duke of Somerset” to be present for the scene, but this unidentified mute does not speak until 2.4, when “wrangling Somerset” (TLN 934) and York, clearly identified and introduced for the first time in the play, begin their quarrel. As they pass from “the Temple hall” to “the Garden” (TLN 931–32), thereby giving Plantagenet a reason to have a “Chamber” in Temple Inn, the subject of their debate is described as “a Case of Truth,” one of those “nice sharpe Quillets of the Law” (TLN 946) that requires the participants to insist upon “the truth, and plainnesse of the Case” (TLN 975). Not only does the debate in 2.4,

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then, supply the “argument vpon a Case” mentioned in 2.5, but the precise nature of the case—whether a father’s “arrest” and execution for treason is automatically an “attainder” that disinherits his son—also supplies an explanation of the “late” “obloquy” that sets “barres before my tongue,” preventing York from answering Somerset in kind. At this seminal moment for the entire first tetralogy, it is Somerset who first changes the nature of the quarrel in the garden, turning the question from a matter of law, “bookes,” and “Studie” to a matter of arms by invoking “my Scabbard” (TLN 989), that is, by insisting upon his aristocratic standing and Plantagenet’s demotion by attainder. “We grace the Yeoman, by conuersing with him” (TLN 1011), Somerset sneers: by virtue of his father’s treason, Plantagenet is legally “attainted, / Corrupted, and exempt from ancient Gentry . . . / And till thou be restor’d, thou art a Yeoman” (TLN 1023–25). This is the unanswerable “obloquy” that, as Plantangenet otherwise mysteriously explains in 2.5, sets bars before his tongue: according to the legal point in question, Plantagenet has lost the aristocratic standing to answer Somerset on Somerset’s aristocratic terms. By exploring this legal question and its social and emotional consequences, 2.4 is crucial preparation for 2.5.43 Moreover, the Temple Garden scene is precisely not a duplication of information in the latter scene, which concerns itself not with the legal question of attainder and its social consequences but with the genealogical basis for the Yorkist claim to the throne, a subject that is not otherwise explicitly at issue anywhere in 1 Henry VI. In fact it is 2.4, not 2.5, that is assumed by the later portions of the play, which involve the impact on Talbot of the quarrel between Plantagenet and Somerset, not the Yorkist claim to the throne. It is 2.5, not 2.4, that anticipates the struggle for the throne in 2 and 3 Henry VI, while 2.4 merely begins the series of events leading to the death of Talbot. Without 2.4, one of the two antagonists in this chain of events, Somerset, would not have spoken until the Parliament scene of 3.1, where, without his ever having been identified by name, he briefly defends Gloucester and opposes Winchester (TLN 1260). This provokes from Plantagenet an aside that would be unintelligible to the audience without the context of the initial quarrel in 2.4: Plantagenet, I see, must hold his tongue, Least it be said, Speake Sirrha when you should: Must your bold Verdict enter talke with Lords? (TLN 1268–70)

Without 2.4, the speaker of Somerset’s resentful aside would go unidentified or unaddressed by name until the coronation scene, 4.1.

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Even more than 3.1 does the coronation scene (4.1) assume 2.4 as essential background. The conflict between Plantagenet (now reinstated as “York”) and Somerset at Henry VI’s Paris coronation is an unhistorical episode. According to Holinshed, the only disharmony at the coronation was a contretemps between Winchester and Bedford. In the play, by contrast, Bedford has been dead since 3.2, while Winchester, who crowns the king at the opening of the scene, speaks no further. Instead, with the entry of Vernon and Basset quarreling over the roses they wear in fealty to their masters, York and Somerset, the origin of the Wars of the Roses is again traced back to the Temple Garden scene. Basset complains This Fellow heere with enuious carping tongue, Vpbraided me about the Rose I weare, Saying, the sanguine colour of the Leaues Did represent my Masters blushing cheekes: When stubbornly he did repugne the truth, About a certain question in the Law, Argu’d betwixt the Duke of Yorke, and him: With other vile and ignominious tearmes. (TLN 1839–46)

This is unhistorical invention. The historical reason given in Holinshed for the York–Somerset quarrel—Somerset’s jealousy at the king’s appointment of York as regent in France—cannot possibly exist until York has been appointed regent at the end of the coronation scene. The Temple Garden is not explicitly mentioned, but everything else—the roses, Basset’s allusion to the “certain question in the Law,” and his reference to “vile and ignominious tearmes” spoken by Somerset—all track reliably to the earlier unhistorical scene universally attributed to Shakespeare. Nothing rules out the possibility, given the prominence of the roses in the scene, that when York formally challenges Somerset, the token he throws down is a white rose.44 The dramatic climax of the scene unquestionably links the emblematic roses to York’s appointment to the regency by way of the king’s own imprudent donning of the Lancastrian red rose: I see no reason if I weare this Rose, That any one should therefore be suspitious I more incline to Somerset, than Yorke: Both are my kinsmen, and I loue them both. ... Cosin of Yorke, we institute your Grace To be our Regent in these parts of France. (TLN 1903– 6, 1913–14)

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It is remotely possible, that the author(s) of 4.1, seeking to provide a prequel to the emblematic roses invoked in 2 and 3 Henry VI, decided merely to allude here to an as yet undepicted event which (as the revisionists would have it) they nevertheless supposed would have to involve (1) a quarrel over the wearing of red and white roses, (2) “a certain question in the Law,” and (3) the exchange of “vile and ignominious tearmes.” It is remotely possible, in other words, that the source for everything in 4.1 was not the Temple Garden scene of 1 Henry VI itself but merely the rose imagery of the 2 and 3 Henry VI plays,45 which by spring of 1592 were probably in the hands of another company, Pembroke’s Men. If so, then it is also possible that 1 Henry VI is the only play in the First Folio on which Shakespeare worked “solely as a reviser.”46 It is certainly possible too— such is Shakespeare’s talent—that he might subsequently, as a mere reviser of other men’s work, have created precisely that undepicted scene which the rest of the play, to that point in time, could not yet appear to have already known so well.47 But rather than accept this long list of remote possibilities, nearly all of which are required by the revision theory, it is more efficient and reasonable to conclude that several important scenes of the play composed before March 1592, including 2.5, 3.1, and 4.1, were written with knowledge of what Shakespeare was contributing in the Temple Garden scene, 2.4. That probability is increased by circumstances that in 1591– 92 would have made the plucking of roses in the Temple Garden an appropriate origin (or “prequel” in box-office terms) for the internecine struggles later in Henry’s reign and for the symbolism of the red and white roses, which had already been associated with the two Contention plays. One of these is the debut of the play at Henslowe’s newly renovated Rose Theatre. Another may perhaps be found in Stanley patronage. In the main chronicle sources, Hall and Holinshed, the emblematic roses of Lancaster and York are applied retroactively as a gloss on the happy Tudor marriage of Lancaster with York, but they do not form any part of the historical conflict leading up to the union. However, in the mid-Tudor Stanley ballads and sagas, the rose symbolism was applied to episodes of the actual Lancastrian–Yorkist feud and linked to the story of the Stanleys’ fortunes.48 As for  the choice of the Temple Garden as the scene for the initial plucking of the roses, B. J. Sokol has recently noted that in 1591, probably by April, a “new faire Garden plot” at the Inner Temple “was taken into severalty, . . . environed vpon twoe sides about with a strong bricke wall,” and “ornyfied with beautifull bankes, curious knots and beddes of fragrant flowers, & sweete herbes of sundry scents and sorts.” 49 Like the company’s Stanley patronage and its venue at the Rose Theatre, the laying out of the Temple Gardens in 1591 supports the likelihood that the unhistorical quarrel in the Temple

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Garden belongs to the earliest stratum of 1 Henry VI and was written by the spring of 1592. T H E DE AT H OF T H E TA L BO T S: R E V ISION OR OR IGI NA L?

Along with 2.4, the scenes (4.2–4.7) involving the death of the Talbots are those most consistently associated by disintegrationists and revisionists with Shakespeare’s authorship. Scenes 4.2–4.4 establish the dire circumstances leading up to Talbot’s defeat, 4.2 (a scene universally agreed to be by Shakespeare) by depicting the (unhistorical) refusal of Bordeaux to allow him refuge (TLN 1973, 1978), 4.3 and 4.4 by showing York, then Somerset, failing to come to Talbot’s aid when Sir William Lucy reports to them of Talbot’s impending doom. The fate of the Talbots would be unintelligible without these scenes, and because no other trace remains of any preexisting scenes that these “additions” or “revisions” would have to have replaced, claims about their being later additions or revisions can be supported only by arguments based on the dating of Shakespeare’s style. It is implausible that 4.3 and 4.4, depicting York and Somerset failing to aid Talbot, could be late additions retroactively imposing the quarrel of York and Somerset on the fate of Talbot; that quarrel, as we have shown in our discussion of 2.4 in relation to 3.1 and 4.1, is the central matter of the play. In contrast to 4.2–4.4, the subsequent scenes involving the elder and younger Talbot (4.5–4.7) have more frequently been cited as containing redundancies and stylistic differences that might point to a multiple authorship and/or later revision. Accounts of these by John Dover Wilson, Philip Brockbank, Marco Mincoff, and E. Pearlman pose no difficulties, since they assume either early revision by Shakespeare in 1592 or self-revision at a later date. Problems arise, however, where perceived redundancies and stylistic differences are combined with hypotheses about multiple authorship in order to suggest that Shakespeare contributed his scenes only as later revisions to the play after 1594. Thus Paul Vincent, endorsing the view of Wilson and Pearlman that “4.5 is a revision and intended for replacement of 4.6,” but also drawing upon Wilson’s impressions about different authorship of the two scenes, maintains that “Shakespeare rewrote the sequence for a revival of the play.”50 Vickers, following Vincent and the same predecessors, hypothesizes that Shakespeare’s contributions to act 4 were meant “to focus more clearly some of the issues involved in the abandonment of Talbot on the battlefield due to the squabbles among the English noblemen” and “to tidy up what is a repetitive pair of scenes between Talbot and his son (4.5; 4.6), at least one of which is superfluous.”51

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But the assumptions about redundancies and stylistic differences on which the arguments of Vincent and Vickers are based are offset by demonstrable continuities and a unified design. Quoting the source for the dialogue between Talbot père et fils from Hall’s Vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), Pearlman misleadingly begins in what is actually the middle of Hall’s account with Talbot’s long speech to his son and then, summarizing the content of the dialogue from that point forward, states that Shakespeare borrowed “the specific design of the first version (4.6) of the encounter between Talbot and his son . . . : (1) the father entreats . . . (2) the son . . . denies, and then (3) the two soldiers exit to die nobly together” (numerals ours).52 Having shown how this sequence works in 4.6, Pearlman then proceeds to argue that the same three-part sequence is repeated, redundantly, in 4.5, which he claims is Shakespeare’s later “revision” of 4.6. The latter scene, he argues, was intended to be cut but survived by some (inexplicable) error in transmission, thereby making its way into the First Folio. In fact, however, Pearlman’s summary, like the one in Wilson from which it borrows, inaccurately foreshortens the dialogue in Hall, which includes two exchanges in the following order (we are quoting the full sequence, with no omission), beginning with the speech in which the elder Talbot, desiring to save the life of his son, 1. willed, aduertised, and counsailled hym to departe out of the felde, and to saue hym selfe. 2. But whē the sonne had aūswered that it was neither honest nor natural for him, to leue his father in the extreme ieopardye of his life, and that he woulde taste of that draught, which his father and Parent should assay and begyn: 3. The noble erle & comfortable capitayn sayd to him: Oh sonne sonne, I thy father, which onely hath bene the terror and scourge of the Frēch people so many yeres, which hath subuerted so many townes, and profligate and discomfited so many of them in open battayle, and marcial conflict, neither cā here dye, for the honor of my countrey, without great laude and perpetuall fame, nor flye or departe without perpetuall shame and cōtinualle infamy. But because this is thy first iourney and enterprise, neither thy flyeng shall redounde to thy shame, nor thy death to thy glory: for as hardy a man wisely flieth, as a temerarious person folishely abidethe, therfore y• fleyng of me shalbe ye dishonor, not only of me & my progenie, but also a discomfiture of all my company: thy departure shall saue thy lyfe, and make the able another tyme, if I be slayn to reuenge my death and to do honor to thy Prince, and profyt to his Realme.

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In other words, it is actually the case that in Hall the father twice “entreats” and the son twice “denies.” This pattern of repetition, first found in Hall, is parsed out by the play into the two separate exchanges dramatized (nonredundantly) in 4.5 and 4.6. In the first exchange from Hall, Talbot urges his son “to departe out of the felde, and to saue hym selfe,” and the son replies “that he woulde taste of that draught, which his father and Parent should assay.” This is essentially what happens in 4.5, where Talbot urges his son to “escape / By sodaine flight” (TLN 2122–23), and the son answers with his desire to share, for the first time, in the honor his father has already earned: Flight cannot stayne the Honor you haue wonne, But mine it will, that no Exploit haue done. (TLN 2939–40)

In response to the elder Talbot’s admission that he would never fly to save himself because “My Age was neuer tainted with such shame,” the son replies: And shall my Youth be guiltie of such blame? No more can I be seuered from your side, Then can your selfe, your selfe in twain diuide. (TLN 2160– 62)

At this point (which is not marked by a scene division in the folio), the play departs from Hall by calling for the Talbots to exit for an “Alarum: Excursions, wherein Talbots Sonne is hemm’d about, and Talbot rescues him” (TLN 2169–71). Following the rescue of the son by the father, the two Talbots reenter for a second exchange in what is marked as a separate scene only in modern editions, 4.6. This time Talbot Senior, following his narration of how “frŏ the Dolphins Crest thy Sword struck fire,” asks whether his son, having just given

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the Bastard of Orleans “the Maidenhood / Of thy first fight” (TLN 2181, 2188– 89), will now heed his continuing advice to flee: Art thou not wearie, Iohn? How do’st thou fare? Wilt thou yet leaue the Battaile, Boy, and flie, Now thou art seal’d the Sonne of Chiualrie? (TLN 2199–201)

This difference of circumstances, as compared with those in the preceding scene, explains why Talbot’s earlier exhortation, “Flye, to reuenge my death, if I be slaine” (TLN 2131; italics ours) is not redundant when it appears in 4.6 but responds precisely to the altered conditions produced by young Talbot’s first taste of battle: Wilt thou yet leaue the Battaile, Boy, and flie, Now thou art seal’d the Sonne of Chiualrie? Flye, to reuenge my death when I am dead. (TLN 2199–201; italics ours)

In reply, the son refuses for a second time (as he also does in Hall, where “neither desire of lyfe, nor thought of securitie” prevail with him) “To saue a paltry Life, and slay bright Fame” (TLN 2216). The father then leads the son into the second mêlée that will result in their deaths: Then follow thou thy desp’rate Syre of Creet, Thou Icarus, thy life to me is sweet: If thou wilt fight, fight by thy Fathers side, And commendable prou’d, let’s dye in pride. Alarum. Excursions. Enter old Talbot led. (TLN 2225–30)

Only by virtue of their linkage do the two scenes manage to reduce the redundancy of the five-step dialogue in Hall, splitting it into two segments dramatically arranged around the first set of alarums and excursions, where young Talbot experiences his first taste of honor and is “seal’d the Sonne of Chiualrie.” The quasi-allegorical symmetry of the two scenes is underlined in other ways as well, as the chivalrous father’s rescue of the son at the first alarum, when the Bastard of Orleans “drew blood / From thee, my Boy, and had the Maidenhood / Of thy first fight” (TLN 2187–89), is balanced by the son’s protection of the father at the second alarum (TLN 2235–38). Together, then, the two alarums, one between modern scene divisions 4.5 and 4.6 and one dividing modern 4.6 from 4.7, form an effective prequel to

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analogous symmetries in the other Henry VI plays, for example, those involving the deaths of the two Cliffords in 2 and 3 Henry VI or the emblematic scenes involving fathers and sons at the Battle of Towton in 3 Henry VI. If, as Pearlman conjectures, 4.6 was intended to be cut in revision, this symmetry of the two alarums and two rescues would be lost. So would the symmetry that connects the Bastard’s role as the unchivalrous butt of ridicule in 4.6, where the elder Talbot “quickly shed / Some of his Bastard blood” (TLN 2190– 91), to young Talbot’s heroic plea in 4.5 that his father not make “a Bastard, and a Slaue of me” (TLN 2126). Eliminating 4.6 would eliminate the telling contrast between the noble blood of young John Talbot in 4.5 and the “Contaminated, base, / And mis-begotten blood” of the Bastard in 4.6. It would also eliminate much of the allegory by which young Talbot is “seal’d the Sonne of Chivalrie” during the whole sequence. An untested virgin, as it were, in 4.5 (“no Exploit haue [I] done”; TLN 2140), he loses “the Maidenhood / Of thy first fight,” according to the description of 4.6, where he boldly strikes fire from the Bastard’s crest but is then wounded and has to be rescued. His maturation is completed only during the second alarum between 4.6 and 4.7, where this time, in his final aristeia, he rescues his father before losing his life in a “great rage of Heart” (TLN 2241). The metaphor of sexual initiation—and of gender transformation—that tracks this process may seem to some indecorous, but it is common Elizabethan (and Shakespearean) currency.53 To claim, by way of a conjectured revision, that such indecorousness would have been eliminated along with alleged “redundancies” is to fail to appreciate the strongly parallel, even allegorical manner in which these scenes are written. It also fails to appreciate the Ovidian allegory punctuating the end of 4.6, where young Talbot, cast as Icarus, “follow[s]” his “des’prate Syre of Creet” into battle. Pearlman finds it an “inconceivably maladroit repetition”54 that a second reference to Ovid’s myth occurs just fourteen lines later in 4.7, when the dying elder Talbot laments: And in that Sea of Blood, my Boy did drench His ouer-mounting Spirit; and there di’de My Icarus, my Blossome, in his pride. (TLN 2244–46)

The two allusions are not redundant, however, but perfectly complementary, since in the first it is the “ouer- daring Talbot” (TLN 2069) who, as Daedalus, leads his son into battle, while in the second it is the “ouer-mounting Spirit” of his son that, like that of Icarus, drowns in a sea (of blood) in consequence. This allegory, parallel with the others, concludes, as Pearlman himself notes, when

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young Talbot’s body is borne onstage and his father’s final speech “syncretizes” classical and Christian images of father and son: Coupled in bonds of perpetuitie, Two Talbots winged through the lither Skie, . . . shall scape Mortalitie. (TLN 2248–52)

Perhaps inspired by Hall’s statement that the Talbots were trapped in a “subtile labirynth” (f. Clxv) or by a similar use of the myth in 3 Henry VI (TLN 3094– 96), an allegory of Daedalian “ouer- daring” and Icarean “ouer-mounting” thus runs throughout the entire episode. Some may chortle at the soaring rhetoric surrounding the death of the Talbots; “Blossom, we may say, speed thee well” is Pearlman’s cold-hearted jab.55 But Nashe, writing of “braue Talbot (the terror of the French),” invoked not scornful laughter but “the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at seuerall times), who . . . imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”56 On the scene’s emotional power, the receipts for “harey the vj” in Henslowe’s diary would seem to support Nashe more than Pearlman. The scene depicting the deaths of the Talbots derives its power from its essential linkage with the two scenes that precede it. Even if Shakespeare is not (as some suspect) the author of the entire sequence, but only of 4.5 (as virtually all agree), our analysis convinces us that 4.5 is not a later revision meant to render 4.6 redundant but an integral part of the play that opened at the Rose in March 1592. F ROM S T R A NGE ’ S M E N T O PEM BROK E’ S M E N: SH A K ESPE A R E’S COM PA N Y A F F I L I AT IONS

With the exception of 1 Henry VI, no other plays demonstrably by Shakespeare appear in Henslowe’s record of the repertory of Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose. This suggests that if Shakespeare was working as an actor in 1592– 93, his primary affiliation at that moment may not have been with Strange’s Men but with a different company. That company could have been Pembroke’s Men, to judge both from the mention of the company on the title page of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595) and from the grounds for associating Pembroke’s Men with The First Part of the Contention (1594), Titus Andronicus (1594), and possibly The Taming of the Shrew (date unknown). These hints of affiliation with Pembroke’s Men are often cited by disintegrationists and revisionists as evidence that Shakespeare could not have contributed to “harey the vj” in 1592. There is little to support such a conclusion. If Shakespeare was

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acting in 1592 (the Groatsworth’s references to an “vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” and a “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde” suggest Shakespeare was known as an actor), then he probably was, as Gary Taylor suggests, a hired man, “and hired men, like hired playwrights, had no fixed company allegiance.”57 Observing that “Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic work” is not “marked by close connection to a particular troupe,” Bart Van Es points out that “distribution among multiple companies is characteristic of the work of professional authors in the period.”58 Even if Shakespeare was a player whose acting ser vices were retained exclusively by one company, there is no reason to believe that he could not, like other playwrights, have worked with more than one company in his capacity as a writer.59 If that is in fact what he was doing, it might help to explain the Groatsworth’s objection that the “vpstart Crow” was “an absolute Iohannes fac totum, . . . in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Shakespeare may not only have been an actor who was presuming to write plays but an actor who was trying to become a full-time freelance playwright by composing, in the manner of Marlowe, Nashe, Peele, and Greene, for more than one company. The probability that Shakespeare contributed to “harey the vj” for Lord Strange’s Men is increased if, as scholars have often suggested, the early versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI that gave rise to the Pembroke company’s First Part of the Contention and True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York had originally been written for Lord Strange’s Men. The fluid circumstances surrounding acting companies in the early 1590s allow for such a possibility. There are no records to confirm the existence of Pembroke’s Men before their per formance at Hampton Court on 26 December 1592. It seems likely, however, that to have secured such a prestigious performance, the company must have been established well before that date. The Groatsworth’s allusion to The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York in August 1592, the evidence of that play’s influence on 1 Henry VI, and its absence from the Rose repertory of Strange’s Men all suggest that by the spring of 1592 The True Tragedy, and probably The First Part of the Contention as well, were being performed elsewhere in London by Pembroke’s Men, perhaps at James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch.60 Andrew Gurr, following Chambers, conjectures that Pembroke’s Men were formed in the spring of 1591 from a remnant of Lord Strange’s Men when Edward Alleyn, playing with Strange’s Men, took part of that company away from Shoreditch, where they had been playing, in response to a quarrel between the Burbages and the Lord Admiral’s Men, an event that is ambiguously dated between November 1590 and May 1591.61 Alan Nelson’s recent redating of the petitions of Lord Strange’s Men and the Company of Watermen to 1590 changes this picture

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slightly, suggesting that Strange’s Men were previously playing at the Rose until the “long vacation” of 1590, but it also provides, in the petitions’ reference to closure of the Rose, an explanation for why the players might have gone to Shoreditch in the later part of 1590. If the identical payments to the Lord Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men for court performances in December and February 1590/91 can be taken as an indication that Edward Alleyn had by that time begun playing with Lord Strange’s Men, then it is also possible that this arrangement began in later 1590 while Lord Strange’s Men were perhaps playing at the Curtain and the Lord Admiral’s Men were playing at the Theatre. If, as our conjecture would have it, Strange’s Men were for a time in Shoreditch, and even if Alleyn had already begun playing with them, there is little to suggest that Strange’s Men were the company who had quarreled with the Burbages and consequently left Shoreditch. John Alleyn testified that when he “and his fellowes” came to James Burbage for “some of the Dyvydent money betwene him & them” they threatened to “compleyne to ther lorde & Mr the lord Admyrall.”62 If any company left Shoreditch by May 1591 as the result of a quarrel with the Burbages, it must have been the Lord Admiral’s Men, who, having transacted for the last time with Edward and John Alleyn on 6 May 1591 for the purchase of playing apparel, disappear from London records until 1594.63 It may not, then, have been in immediate response to the Burbage–Alleyn quarrel that Pembroke’s Men were formed, as the hypotheses of Chambers and Gurr would have it, nor must the company have been formed very much before Lord Strange’s Men began their run at the Rose in March of 1592. If members of Pembroke’s Men came from Strange’s Men, they may very well have parted from their fellows on amicable rather than hostile terms, at least to judge from their apparent re- combination with former Strange’s players in the Lord Chamberlain’s company in June 1594, at which time Edward Alleyn and the Lord Admiral’s Men were also not loathe to share the stage with them at Newington Butts. The second and third parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus are among the most demanding of Shakespeare’s plays to cast: 2 & 3 Henry VI are more demanding than The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and they may have originated with a large company of Lord Strange’s Men before Pembroke’s Men were formed. Several signs link Shakespeare with both Strange’s Men and Pembroke’s Men. One is the 1594 title of Titus Andronicus, “Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants.” But there are many other signs involving the Henry VI plays. They include not just the debt of 1 Henry VI (a Strange’s play) to 2 and 3 Henry VI (which eventually

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became Pembroke’s plays) but the indications that all three plays, and perhaps Richard III as well, were inspired by or originated under Stanley patronage. In other words, the textual evidence for the derivation of The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York from early versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI is compatible both with the circumstantial hints that Pembroke’s Men may have derived from Strange’s Men and with the evident concern throughout the first tetralogy with the historical fortunes of the Stanleys of Lancashire. In what follows, we examine and refine the often- discussed evidence that Shakespeare’s early history plays derive from connections with Lord Strange’s Men and the patronage of the Stanleys.

T H E M AT T ER OF EL E A NOR COBH A M: T WO COM PA N Y V ER SIONS OF 2 HENRY V I

Differences between the folio version of 2 Henry VI and the quarto First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (1594)64 may tell us something about what happened to a play designed for Strange’s Men as it passed into the hands of Pembroke’s Men. Among the most important of those differences is the treatment of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester. The handling of this matter in the two versions of the plays, we propose, reflects changes in company patronage and agendas in 1592– 93. In the folio version, the judgment and sentencing of Dame Eleanor and her accomplices refers to spectacular punishment in a manner that resembles not only the condemnation of Joan of Arc in 1 Henry VI but that play’s allusions to the practices of execution by fire in sixteenth- century England: King. Stand forth Dame Elianor Cobham, Glosters Wife: In sight of God, and vs, your guilt is great, Receiue the Sentence of the Law for sinne, Such as by Gods Booke are adiudg’d to death. You foure from hence to Prison, back againe; From thence, vnto the place of Execution: The Witch in Smithfield shall be burnt to ashes, And you three shall be strangled on the Gallowes. You Madame, for you are more Nobly borne, Despoyled of your Honor in your Life, Shall, after three dayes open Penance done, Liue in your Countrey here, in Banishment, With Sir Iohn Stanly, in the Ile of Man. (TLN 1051– 67)

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Although the duchess is mercifully spared execution in favor of ritual humiliation and exile to the Stanley domain on the Isle of Man, her accomplices (in the folio, the witch “Mother Iordan,” “Bullingbrooke,” and “the two Priestes” Hume and Southwell) are sent to execution, the men to hanging, the “Witch” to Smithfield to “be burnt to ashes.” The First Part of the Contention, by contrast, omits the sentencing of the accomplices and concentrates on the mitigated punishment of Eleanor Cobham alone, significantly omitting as well the name of her custodian, Sir John Stanley: King. Stand foorth Dame Elnor Cobham Duches of Gloster, and here the sentence pronounced against thee for these Treasons, that thou hast committed against vs, our States and Peeres. First for thy hainous crimes, thou shalt two daies in London do penance barefoote in the streetes, with a white sheete about thy bodie, and a waxe Taper burning in thy hand. That done, thou shalt be banished for euer into the Ile of Man, there to ende thy wretched daies, and this is our sentence erreuocable. Away with her. (TLN 806–14)

Whereas in Pembroke’s Men’s First Part of the Contention King Henry pronounces sentence on Eleanor alone for “these Treasons, that thou hast committed against vs, our States and Peeres,” in 1 Henry VI, from which the quarto was derived, she is condemned “for sinne, / Such as by Gods Booke are adiudg’d to death”—that is, not for treason but for the heresy of witchcraft, according to Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The differences between the two texts on this point may owe something to the fact that the crimes and fate of Eleanor Cobham were a matter of politically significant controversy in Elizabethan England. According to the 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, Eleanor Cobham was “for suspicion of heresie, that is to say, for the loue and desire of the truth . . . by the papists banished into the ile of man; as Hardinge and Fabian do write.”65 Foxe’s description of Eleanor Cobham as the first female English Protestant martyr was challenged by the Catholic writer Nicholas Harpsfield, who claimed that Foxe had misrepresented the charge against the Duchess of Gloucester as heresy, when it was in fact treason, and who also pointed out the different treatment of Dame Eleanor in Hall’s chronicle, a source Foxe had apparently suppressed in his account. Although Hall provides some implicit support for Foxe’s claim that the indictment of Eleanor Cobham was a first step in the campaign against her husband, he treats the matter of her guilt more ambiguously, noting, on the one hand, that she was in fact “accused of treason, for that she, by sorcery and

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enchauntment, entended to destroy the kyng,” but adding, on the other hand, that her alleged co- conspirator Bolingbroke went to his execution asserting “that there was neuer no suche thyng by theim ymagined” and that the priest “John Hum had his Pardon.”66 In subsequent editions of the Actes and Monuments Foxe backpedaled on his suppression of Hall and the nature of the charges against Dame Eleanor, but he also exploited more fully the indications of the possible falsity of the charges found in Hall’s treatment of Bolingbroke’s dying denials and the suspicious pardoning of the state’s witness, Hume. Citing historical misuses of witchcraft accusations by papists, Foxe asked, as he took Hall to be asking, whether the charge against Eleanor Cobham “is to be judged true, or suspected rather to be false and forged.” Citing both the Bishop of Winchester’s conniving against Duke Humphrey and the papist superstition that “sorcery can be wrought . . . against the church and the king,” Foxe explained that “many subtle pretences, after the like sort, have been sought, and wrongful accusations brought, against many innocent persons.” In Foxe’s mind, the charges made against Dame Eleanor in Hall’s account involved just the sorts of superstition that papist persecutors were apt to invoke against their spiritual enemies.67 Both versions of the play transform the nature of Dame Eleanor’s actual offense. Where Hall (and after him Holinshed) speaks of using “an image of waxe . . . to do injury to the king” by means of sorcery,68 both versions of the play represent a less sensational crime: the use of conjuring to foretell the king’s future. There was precedent for this in the version of the story in the 1578 Mirror for Magistrates, where Eleanor declares that her crime was “by skill coniectural / Of art Magicke and wicked Sorcery / To deeme and dyuine the princes desteny,” and where she also insists “I neuer had the will / By any Inchauntment sorcery or charme / Or other wyse, to worke my princes harme.”69 The trial of Eleanor Cobham, which took place in a spiritual court, was in fact a precedent-setting witchcraft case that transformed sorcery against the monarch from a simple felony to political treason. The Mirror for Magistrates comments explicitly on this transformation. Eleanor explains that she was, on the one hand, indicted without legal protections in the spiritual court of the Bishop of Winchester but then, on the other hand, turned over to civil authority to be condemned for treason: The kynges councel were called to the case My husband than shut out for the season In whose absence I found but little grace For Lawiers turned our offence to treason.70

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Under the influence of the Reformation, the civil penalties for making prophecies had finally been reduced in 1549, but in 1581 an “Acte against sedicious Wordes and Rumors,” reviving a temporary Marian statute of 1554–55, once again made it a capital felony “by setting or erecting of any Figure or Figures, or by casting of Nativities or by calculacion, or by any Prophecieng Witchcrafte Cunjuracions . . . [to] seeke to knowe . . . howe longe her Maiestie shall lyve . . . or who shall raigne . . . after her Highenesse Decease.”71 The dramatic handling of the matter of Eleanor Cobham, as Nina Levine suggests, might thus “have prompted some members of the audience to see a connection between Foxe’s proto-protestant heroine” and contemporary affairs, to see that Protestants might not only be guilty of turning heretical Catholics into state enemies, as they had done in the 1580s, but that they might also turn the force of secular law against other Protestants, as they indeed appeared to some to be doing in the early 1590s, when the Court of High Commission was handing over religious cases against Presbyterians and Separatists to the Star Chamber.72 It is precisely on this issue that, in their judgment of the nature of Eleanor Cobham’s crime, the two versions of the play diverge. The First Part of the Contention makes the case that Eleanor’s prophecy by witchcraft was a state crime (“Treasons, that thou hast committed against vs, our States and Peeres”), whereas 2 Henry VI pointedly juxtaposes the spiritual nature of Eleanor’s offence (“sinne / Such as by Gods Booke are adiudg’d to death”) against the political nature of her banishment and the capital sentences imposed on her accomplices. Although both versions of the play leave open the possibility, implied by Hall and amplified in Foxe’s “conjectures” and Baldwin’s emotional narrative, that Dame Eleanor was in fact framed by a political conspiracy, this possibility is more strongly emphasized at several points in 2 Henry VI which The First Part of the Contention seems specifically designed to have suppressed.73 Both texts, for example, give Sir John Hume a soliloquy confessing to his entrapment of Dame Eleanor, but whereas in the quarto it is Suffolk who “hyred me to set her on / To plot these Treasons gainst the King and Peeres” (TLN 282–83), in the longer folio version it is Suffolk as well as “the rich Cardinall” Winchester who hire Hume “to vnder-mine the Duchess, / And buzze these Coniurations in her brayne” in order that “her Attainture, will be Humphreyes fall” (TLN 363, 366– 67, 382). Accordingly the quarto makes Dame Eleanor more culpable in the conjuring scene. Whereas in F Eleanor only enters “aloft” (i.e., at a distance) and somewhat later in the conjuring scene, merely giving permission for what she calls “this geere” to proceed (TLN 632, 634), in Q Eleanor enters first and initiates the scene by providing Hume with “this scrole of paper here, / Wherein is writ the questions you shall aske” (TLN 483–84) and ordering the conjuring

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to proceed. In F a team involving two priests, Hume, and the conjurer Roger Bullingbrooke directs the conjuring, whereas in Q it is the witch, Mother Jordan, transparently a surrogate for Dame Eleanor herself, who directs Bullingbroke’s summoning of spirits. Perhaps most strikingly, where Q carefully tracks Eleanor’s guilt by a physical trail leading from the list of questions she hands to the conjurers to its reading in the conjuring scene and its presentation as evidence to the king (who actually reads from it), F has York and Buckingham mysteriously discover (or perhaps produce, since it isn’t otherwise mentioned) an incriminating paper at the scene of the conjuring but then merely level accusations before the king without actually producing the evidence. No paper trail, in other words, but only the accusatory voice of Winchester (cut in Q) backs up the charges. Like the later scene of Eleanor’s sentencing, the scene of accusation puts the charges differently in the two versions: F says that “a sort of naughtie persons” under Dame Eleanor’s direction “haue practis’d dangerously against your State” (TLN 919, 923), but Q declares more explicitly that “proud Dame Elnor our Protectors wife, / Hath plotted Treasons gainst the King and Peeres” (TLN 697– 98). In F a temporal punishment is imposed upon a heretical practice (the result of Hume’s scheme to “buzze these Coniurations in her brayne”; TLN 375), while Q sets aside spiritual error in the interest of prosecuting simple treason. Scholarship on the folio and quarto texts has long suggested that the authority of 2 Henry VI lies in a script originally intended for Strange’s Men but then adapted for Pembroke’s Men as First Part of the Contention. If this is true, then the two texts offer insight into how one company’s play was politically transformed as it entered the repertory of another. The question is: Why? If the play had a potential relevance to events of the 1590s, it came even closer to restaging a different set of events that began in 1579, when Ferdinando Stanley’s mother, the Countess of Derby, fell into deep misfortune after being accused of using sorcery to discern the queen’s future. During the 1579 visit of the Duc d’Alençon, the countess, a granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary and a second cousin to Elizabeth I, fell into disfavor over her apparent opposition to the queen’s proposed match. According to a report by the Spanish ambassador, “the countess of Derby and a daughter of the earl of Bedford” were “arrested for talking about” the match; special importance was attached to the Countess of Derby’s comments, the reporter adds, because “she and her husband are claimants to the Crown.” A second report, three days later, elaborated on graver charges: “one of the charges against the countess of Derby, besides talking about the marriage, is that she tried to discover by means of witchcraft

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(and there are a great number of witches here) whether the Queen would live long. They have not yet dared to put her into the Tower, although orders had been given to that effect.”74 Those arrested presumably included William Randall and the several accomplices whom Stow reports being convicted in November 1580 “for coniuring to know where treasure was hid in the earth.”75 Randall’s name appears in a letter of May 1580 in which the Countess of Derby, under house arrest, complains to Sir Francis Walsingham of the “heauy & longe continued displeasure which her Maiesty . . . by ye accusacion of some others hath layd upon me.” She presents her guilt as a matter of association only: Sicknes & weakness in my Body & limbes I haue of longe tyme been accustomed to sufferr. And finding small remedy after proofs of many, lastly upon the informacion of some about me yat one Randall had a speciall remedy for ye cure of my Disease by applying of outward thinges: I had him in my House for that purpose from May untill August next following, in which tyme I found some ease by his Medicines. But since I haue understood by report yat man to haue lyued in great wickedness, where with it hath pleased God to sufferr him amonge other not a little to plague me with his slanderous tongue whilst he lyued.76

According to the countess, her mere association with Randall had linked her to imagined plots and false charges. These included a preposterous scenario reported by the Venetian ambassador, a “conspiracy by a sect of Huguenots, styled ‘the Puritans’ . . . to poison the Queen through the agency of one of her principal ladies, namely, the Countess of Derby, who is now in prison.”77 Randall the conjurer was executed in November 1580; the Countess of Derby, like the Duchess of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI, was banished from court into the custody of her kinsman, Thomas Seckford, Master of the Requests. In her subsequent letters beseeching Sir Christopher Hatton to intercede with the queen, the countess speaks of herself as “a poore wretched abandoned Lady” and declares herself in a “blacke dongeon of sorrowe, and dispaire.”78 For the ending of her story we must rely on Camden’s notice of her death in 1596, which leaves the impression that she never escaped her disgrace and may have further harmed her cause “a little before her death”: “Amongst so many men, is not to be passed over in silence Margaret Clifford, Countesse of Darby . . . who out of her womanish weaknesse and curiosity, consulting with wizards or cunning men in a credulous vanity, and I know not what ambitious hope, had in a manner lost the Queenes favour a little before her death.”79

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So closely does the fate of Eleanor Cobham resemble that of Lady Margaret, Countess of Derby, that the allusions in 2 Henry VI might seem to rule out the possibility that Strange’s Men would ever have performed such a play. But the relatively complex and tactful treatment of the duchess in 2 Henry VI, especially when compared with the harsher treatment of The First Part of the Contention, may rather be a sign that the handling of the matter was originally designed to suit the company patron. The story includes one of the greatest moments of pathos in Shakespeare’s early work, when the duchess appears in a white sheet, carrying a taper, as she does public penance through London on her way to banishment in the Isle of Man (a fiefdom of the Earls of Derby) in the custody of Sir John Stanley, Lord of the Isle of Man. 2 Henry VI does all it can to mitigate the seriousness of the charge against Dame Eleanor, to minimize her actual involvement with conjuring, and to lay an equal burden against the ambitions of her accusers and their political prosecution of spiritual error.80 By contrast, the harsher treatment of the duchess in the quarto play reflects not only a greater political orthodoxy on the issue of state crimes but also a greater indifference or even insensitivity to the play’s contemporary relevance to the Countess of Derby and her son. By December 1592, when they were invited to perform at court alongside Strange’s Men, and when the number of performances by Strange’s Men was reduced from the previous year, perhaps in order to accommodate them, Pembroke’s Men were emerging as equals to what had briefly been London’s most accomplished and fashionable resident company. At this point, while performing before the queen against whom the Countess of Derby had allegedly practiced conjuring, they may well have felt that they were doing themselves a favor with greater religious orthodoxy and less delicacy toward a disgraced Catholic noblewoman with recently aired claims to the throne. We do not know precisely when or why The First Part of the Contention was created from the play represented by 2 Henry VI, nor do we know whether it is the only version ever performed by Pembroke’s Men. But if Pembroke’s Men were being more politically cautious, their caution may have been rewarded. Strange’s Men, who performed six times at court in the 1591– 92 season, played only three times in the 1592– 93 season, sharing the bill with Pembroke’s Men, who performed twice. The sequence of the dates for these performances (26 December and 5 January for Pembroke’s Men, 27 and 31 December and 1 January for Strange’s Men) does not permit a two- company per formance of all three Henry VI plays in their historical sequence, but if there is any analogy with the variable order in which the older cycle plays might have been seen by

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audiences,81 then in the court season of 1592/93, all of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, now the property of two companies, might have been on offer. T H E S TA N L E Y A NCES T OR S A N D PAT RONAGE I N 2 A N D 3 HENRY V I

Where The First Part of the Contention has Henry VI harshly pronounce Eleanor Cobham “banished for euer into the Ile of Man, there to ende thy wretched daies,” 2 Henry VI has him sentencing her to “Liue in your Countrey here, in Banishment, / With Sir Iohn Stanly, in the Ile of Man.” The latter sentence, by contrast with the former, is presented almost as a mercy “after . . . open Penance done.” The mention of Sir John Stanley is perfectly in keeping with Hall’s report that Dame Eleanor was “adiudged to perpetuall prisone in the Isle of Man, under the kepyng of sir Jhon Stanley, knight,”82 but it also highlights another key figure in the Stanley saga. The Stanley poem relates how lordship over the Isle of Man was awarded to Sir John Stanley by Henry IV for his support of the Lancastrian cause at the battle of Shrewsbury: “Even thus the Ile of Man came first to the Standleys.”83 Though not eliminated entirely, the part of Sir John Stanley is shorter and distinctly less appealing in The First Part of the Contention than in 2 Henry VI. Stanley’s role in the penance scene is twice as long in F as it is in Q, and it is more magnanimous. Whereas in Q Stanley coldly explains that he is “commanded” by “decree” to “conduct” Dame Eleanor “into the Ile of Man” (TLN 961– 63), in F he is “giuen in charge” to “protect my Lady here,” and he gently promises that she shall be used “Like to a Duchesse, and Duke Humfreyes Lady, / According to that State” (TLN 1256–57, 1278–79). In Q Stanley’s only subsequent interchange with the duchess brusquely commands her to “shift your selfe” out of the white sheet of humiliation before departing (TLN 976–77); in F only the duchess herself speaks harshly of “shifting” her gown, while Stanley, more compassionately, releases her from penance done: “Madame, your Penance done, / Throw off this Sheet, / And goe we to attyre you for our Iourney” (TLN 1285–87). In The First Part of the Contention, where Pembroke’s Men were obviously looking for ways to shorten the play, reducing Stanley’s role to that of a flatfooted functionary may very well have been a way to shed the slant of Stanley patronage as well. That may also be a reason for an analogous reduction in the role of the Cliffords in The First Part of the Contention. As Ernst Honigmann has suggested, the expansive and charismatic role of Clifford Senior in 2 and 3 Henry VI may be owing partly to the fact that while Stanley ancestors were hardly to be found

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in the historical sources for the reign of Henry VI, the Cliffords, ancestors of Lord Strange’s mother, née Lady Margaret Clifford, figured prominently. In 2 and 3 Henry VI the younger Clifford certainly lives up to the negative and unhistorical accounts of his vengefulness in the pages of Hall, Holinshed, and Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates, all of which may have been motivated by midTudor suspicions about the loyalties of the Catholic Henry Clifford, 2nd Earl of Cumberland. But 2 and 3 Henry VI also bestow on both Cliffords exceptional measures of “heroism, loyalty, chivalry . . . and repentance” not found in the source material.84 In 2 Henry VI the elder Clifford receives unhistorical credit for quelling the Cade rebellion with a patriotic invocation of Henry V (TLN 2787–829). As might be expected, the speech is much curtailed in The First Part of the Contention, but more strikingly the version of the play by Pembroke’s Men reduces to a mere snarling match (TLN 2153– 60) the folio’s depiction of a noble chivalric encounter between York and the elder Clifford at St. Albans (TLN 3232–51). The ensuing death of Clifford is immediately followed by the younger Clifford’s passionate outburst, an apocalyptic invocation of heroically insatiable thirst for revenge that marks a high point of rhetorical achievement in the Henry VI plays. Again, as might be expected, Clifford’s speech is severely truncated in the Pembroke version. Clifford’s first invocation of revenge, reduced from thirty-five to nineteen lines, furthermore turns the “ruine of olde Cliffords house” (TLN 3283) into the ruin “of all Comberlands true house” (TLN 2150), thereby replacing the original Clifford heritage (and implicitly its link to the Stanleys) with the unhistorical title that, not created until 1525 for the Cliffords, was held in the later Elizabethan period by George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland. Increasingly in 3 Henry VI the voice of young Clifford, a rehearsal, perhaps, for Hotspur, forms a counterpoint to the emerging voice of Richard of Gloucester; he stands as the last vestige of a heroic age to set against the novel Machiavellian cunning of Proteus’s apprentice. This portion of young Clifford’s role in 3 Henry VI survives almost intact into The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, but it is only a remnant of a more extensive original design. One other Stanley, Sir William, the brother of Lord Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, makes a cameo appearance in 3 Henry VI, when he helps to engineer Edward of York’s escape from Lancastrian captivity at Middleham Castle in Yorkshire. In Hall’s chronicle, the source for this scene, Edward, captured by Warwick and in the custody of the Archbishop of York, is met by “syr William Stanley, syr Thomas of Borogh, and dyuers other of hys frendes, with suche a great bend of men, that neither his kepers woulde, nor once durst moue him to retorne to prison agayn.”85 Largely an unexplained mystery in Hall, the rescue

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is moved into the dramatic foreground in both versions of 3 Henry VI, where it becomes a ruse involving Richard of Gloucester and the other future players in Richard III, Hastings, and the Sir William Stanley who would join his brother Lord Thomas on the side of Richmond at the Battle of Bosworth. King Edward’s thanks to Stanley are cut short by Gloucester’s brusque intervention (“ ’tis no time to talke”; TLN 2371), perhaps in a minor way setting the stage for the Stanley–Richard conflict of Richard III. This scene, together with the expanding role of Richard of Gloucester throughout the play, suggests that a further play on the model of the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy of Richard the Third must have been under consideration by Shakespeare at the time that the original version of 3 Henry VI was being written, possibly as early as 1591, and therefore quite possibly for Lord Strange’s Men before Pembroke’s Men were created. R ICH A R D III, R E V ISED?

Shakespeare’s Richard III depicts the signal event in the Stanley legend: the role of Lord Thomas Stanley, his brother William, his son George (Lord Strange), and their allies in bringing Stanley’s stepson, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, to the English throne. Although Shakespeare’s play generally responds to the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy of Richard the Third by emphasizing wholly different episodes from the chronicles, focusing, for example, on the death of Clarence and Richard’s marriage with the Lady Anne, where the Queen’s Men had concentrated on the fate of Jane Shore and the Buckingham rebellion, Richard III hews closely to the earlier play in tracing the role of the Stanleys in returning Richmond to England, supporting his victory at Bosworth, and arranging for his marriage with Elizabeth of York. The prominence of the Stanleys in Shakespeare’s Richard III has often been offered in support of the idea that the play was written for Lord Strange’s Men. Thus John Jowett, taking note of Ernst Honigmann’s work on Shakespeare and the Stanleys, observes that “Lord Strange . . . was a descendant of the play’s Lord Stanley” and concludes that it “looks as though” Richard III “was written with this company and its patron in mind.”86 There is no independent confirmation that the play belonged to Strange’s Men,87 and so the likelihood of this possibility is tied up with unanswered questions about the date of the play’s composition. The range of dates that have been suggested places Richard III squarely in the period of uncertainty concerning the creation (and possible demise) of Pembroke’s Men and that company’s connection (if there was any) with Lord Strange’s Men. Antony Hammond

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and Harold Brooks, based on what they take to be numerous parallels between Richard III and Marlowe’s Edward II, conclude that “Richard III . . . seems likely to have been written in 1591.”88 Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, dismissing these supposed parallels as “unconvincing” and noting stylistic affinities with 1 Henry VI, date the play “after the theatres were closed in June 1592.”89 James R. Siemon suggests that composition of Richard III “was under way . . . sometime in early 1592” and conjectures that although there is no notice of the play being performed in London (at the Rose or elsewhere), it might have been performed outside of London while the theaters were closed in 1592– 93.90 Katherine Duncan-Jones points out that Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Rising to the Crown of Richard the third, a poem dateable to September 1593, appears to anticipate a yet unperformed sequel to the Henry VI plays: The Stage is set, for Stately matter fitte, Three partes are past, which Prince-like acted were, To play the fourth, requires a Kingly witte, Else shall my muse, their muses not come nere.91

Duncan-Jones suggests “one possibility is that all four plays were known to have been written, but that the restraint on playing in February 1592/93 prevented performance of the fourth.”92 While Strange’s Men were on tour in September 1593, Edward Alleyn was inquiring with Henslowe concerning the whereabouts of Pembroke’s Men. If Henslowe’s report that some six weeks earlier Pembroke’s Men had been forced to pawn their apparel and return to London means that the company was actually disbanded by mid- August, then perhaps the Richard III anticipated by Fletcher that same month would have to have been performed, if at all, by Strange’s Men. Given this chronology, it is perhaps not surprising that, when examined from the standpoint of patronage and the representation of fifteenth- century history, Richard III, like 2 and 3 Henry VI, shows signs of being associated with both companies. Following up on textual studies hypothesizing that the Pembroke versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI derive from fuller versions belonging to Lord Strange’s Men, and drawing on Jowett’s insights about Pembroke allusions in Richard III, we suspect that while the play looks as if it might have been conceived and written (and possibly even performed) by Strange’s Men, it also contains material that points to its having possibly been revised for Pembroke’s Men. If Samuel Schoenbaum was correct in surmising that Shakespeare may have “free-lanced as a dramatist” in the early 1590s,93 Richard III may be a prod-

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uct of such freelancing: a play that he conceived or began writing for one company but adapted for another during a period of transition and uncertainty in the London theater world.94 We cannot say what Shakespeare’s Richard III was like in its earliest version, since the first quarto dates from 1597, long after the apparent demise of both Lord Strange’s Men and the earlier Pembroke’s Men by the winter of 1593/94. The play as we have it is complex and subtle on the role of the Stanleys. As in the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy of Richard the Third, the fate of young George Stanley—described to Richmond as “thy tender brother George”—remains a decisive factor in Lord Stanley’s cautious dealing with Richard. But Richard III’s final scene reduces to a mere report (“Rich. But tell me, is yong George Stanley liuing. / Dar. He is my lord”; sig. M3v) the Queen’s Men’s sentimental staging of young George Stanley’s reunion with his father. The Shakespearean version also eliminates the early signs of Stanley’s conscientious resistance to Gloucester’s usurpation—both his suffering a wound and his being briefly imprisoned as a result of protesting Hastings’s arrest at the Tower—and it leaves ambiguous until a point somewhat later in the play the true nature of the wily Lord Stanley’s intentions. The potential threat of Stanley ambitions is underlined in Queen Elizabeth’s hostile reference to Stanley’s wife in response to his delivery of good wishes: The Countesse Richmond good my Lo: of Darby, To your good praiers will scarcely say, Amen: Yet Darby nothwithstanding shees your wife, And loues not me, be your good Lo. assurde I hate not you for her proud arrogance. (sigs. B3v–B4)

Stanley, playing both sides of the fence, does Richard’s bidding when he intercepts Queen Elizabeth of York’s company at the Tower, where the princes are imprisoned, and summons the Lady Anne to become “Richards royall Queene” (sig. H3v). Later in the play, where the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy has Richmond give explicit thanks to Stanley “for your vnlooked for aide” (TLN 2047) at Bosworth, Shakespeare leaves it unclear whether Stanley acts openly on behalf of Richmond at Bosworth or merely refuses to come to Richard’s assistance. In other ways, however, the play keeps Stanley firmly on the favorable side of the balance sheet. While seemingly endorsing Richard’s usurpation, Stanley counsels Elizabeth and her brother Dorset to make cause with Richmond, and he begins to take personal responsibility for arranging the dynastic

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marriage that, according to the chronicles, was an “enterprise betwene the two mothers,” Richmond’s and Elizabeth of York’s.95 Likewise Shakespeare suppresses Stanley’s role as Richard’s steward in putting down the Buckingham rebellion; he puts him (rather than his brother William) at the head of the Stanley forces; and he brings him on a secret and potentially perilous visit to his stepson Richmond’s tent just before the battle of Bosworth.96 As Honigmann has observed, Shakespeare’s Stanley is “the only nobleman of the Yorkist faction not deceived by Richard” and “the one politician who out-manoeuvres Richard until and during the Battle of Bosworth.”97 Paradoxically, however, the very passage that does the most to clarify Stanley’s intentions and to emphasize Stanley leadership at Bosworth also does the most to undermine it. This is the strange dialogue between Lord Stanley and Sir Christopher Urswick (4.5). In this efficient little scene, Shakespeare disposes of the many unnamed messengers who pass to and fro in the chronicles and in the Queen’s Men’s play, crystallizing into a single exchange all the crucial information—the arrangements for Richmond’s marriage to Elizabeth of York and the roster of allies gathering toward Market Bosworth: Enter Darbie, Sir Christopher. Dar. Sir Christapher, tell Richmond this from me, That in the stie of the most bloudie bore, My sonne George Stanlie is franckt vp in hold, If I reuolt, off goes young Georges head, The feare of that, withholdes my present aide, But tell me, where is princelie Richmond now? Christ. At Pembroke, or at Harford-west in Wales. Dar. What men of name resort to him. S. Christ. Sir Walter Herbert, a renowned souldier, Sir Gilbert Talbot, Sir William Stanlie, Oxford, redoubted Pembroke, Sir Iames Blunt, Rice vp Thomas, with a valiant crew, With many moe of noble fame and worth, And towardes London doe they bend their course, If by the way, they be not fought withall. Dar. Retourne vnto thy Lord, commend me to him, Tell him, the Queene hath hartelie consented, He shall espouse Elizabeth her daughter, These letters will resolue him of my minde. Farewell. Exeunt. (sigs. L–Lv)

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The stage direction establishing this encounter is bizarre, since Urswick is not otherwise mentioned by name in Shakespeare’s play. His naming in the stage direction and the speech heading (“Sir Christopher” and “S. Crist.,” respectively) is therefore not strictly speaking necessary for the purposes of the playhouse; as with Sir William Lucy in 1 Henry VI, “Messenger” ought to suffice. Yet Shakespeare seems to insist, by way of Lord Stanley’s salutation (“Sir Christapher”) that his playhouse should know him, just as he insists that “Sir William Lucy” should have his name spoken in 1 Henry VI. Depicting Urswick in the role of a participant giving an eyewitness report of Richmond’s allies, Shakespeare seems to “out” him as what in fact he was: a Stanley client who was likely one of the earliest authors to link the Tudor triumph at Bosworth to the legend of the Stanley kingmakers. Moreover by recording his name both in the dialogue (i.e., for explicit per formance) and in the speech heading (for readers of the text), Shakespeare seems to be casting himself as a historian who, having read the past from between the lines of patronage, is squaring the record in his own right. Shakespeare deftly forgoes any wooden declaration of Urswick’s surname, as if to imply, through Lord Stanley’s oral “Sir Christapher,” that we too ought to be familiar with him, as certainly Lord Stanley was.98 And through this unexplained familiarity of Lord Stanley with “Sir Christapher,” Shakespeare requires his modern editors, in turn, to become historians—to supply in brackets, from between the lines of the chronicles, the missing surname of the suppressed author of the story.99 Urswick, we have seen in chapter 1, was a client of Lord Stanley, an eyewitness and participant in the events leading up to Bosworth, a chief intermediary in the Countess of Derby’s marriage negotiations for her son, and probably an important source for the early version of Tudor history recorded by Polydore Vergil. It is hard to decide, when it comes to Urswick’s scene in the play, whether Shakespeare is favorably depicting an important Stanley client or, more critically perhaps, underlining the extent to which Stanley patronage influenced the way Tudor history came to be written.100 Perhaps oddest of all is the fact that the restored eyewitness reporter Urswick actually misreports. Though he repeats the usual roster of the Stanley allies, he begins by devoting a full line to a person not usually associated with victory at Bosworth, indeed a figure whose loyalties remained unexplained in the chronicles: “Sir Walter Herbert, a renowned souldier.” The mention of the Herbert name, together with the mention of Jasper Tudor, the “redoubted” Earl of Pembroke two lines later, leads those who care about such things to suppose that the passage reflects a change in theatrical patronage, Urswick’s

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mention of Sir Walter Herbert being added as a compliment to the patron of the acting company, Lord Pembroke’s Men, into whose hands Shakespeare’s Richard III, along with the second and third parts of Henry VI, may have passed. There was already precedent for highlighting the Pembroke title in the version of 2 Henry VI belonging to Pembroke’s Men: forced to cut roles for a reduced cast in The First Part of the Contention, the company understandably dropped 2 Henry VI’s Stafford and kept its Pembroke, changing King Edward’s “Pembrooke and Stafford . . . / Goe leuie men, and make prepare for Warre” (F TLN 2163– 64) to “Penbrooke . . . goe raise an armie presentlie / Pitch vp my tent, for in the field this night / I meane to rest” (sig. D5). The Pembroke in question in both 2 Henry VI and Richard III, Sir Walter Herbert, was one of the upstart Raglan Herberts, sprung from William, a natural son of Sir William ap Thomas of Glamorgan, who took the name Herbert and, as a supporter of the Yorkist Edward IV, temporarily won the earldom of Pembroke from the attainted Lancastrian Jasper Tudor in 1462. This first Herbert earl, William, had also captured Edmund Tudor’s son Henry (later Earl of Richmond) and, having purchased that young man’s wardship and marriage, made plans to marry him to one of his own daughters. Following the execution of this first Herbert earl, the earldom returned to Jasper Tudor, the “redoubted” supporter of Richmond at Bosworth who is mentioned in Urswick’s report. But the dispossessed Herbert heir, Sir Walter, “a renowned souldier” according to Shakespeare’s Urswick, fights alongside his father’s former rival, the “redoubted Pembroke,” at Bosworth. Thus just before Lord Stanley comes to pay his secret visit to Richmond’s tent at Bosworth, Richmond goes completely off the historical record by commanding Sir James Blunt (like Sir William Lucy, another unhistorical figure probably derived from a Stratford family only knighted in 1588) to bear two messages, one to Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, and one to Lord Stanley: The Earle of Pembroke keepe[s] his regiment, Good captaine Blunt, beare my good night to him, And by the second houre in the morning, Desire the Earle to see me in my tent. Yet one thing more, good Blunt before thou goest: Where is Lord Stanlie quartered, doest thou know. ... If without perill it be possible, Good captaine Blunt beare my good night to him, And giue him from me, this most needefull scrowle. (sig. L2v)

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It is unlikely to be coincidence that, with so little warrant from the historical sources, the first Tudor monarch should send messages to “the Earle of Pembroke” and “Lord Stanlie,” the ancestors of precisely the two different theater company patrons with whom Shakespeare is most likely to have been connected in the early 1590s. In the event, only Richmond’s interview with Stanley, for which there was stronger historical warrant, is actually dramatized in the play. But as Jowett points out, the folio text of Richard III, which seems to have made use in places of a more expansive theatrical manuscript than the one behind the 1597 quarto, adds just before this fascinating passage an additional gratuitous recognition of the Raglan Herberts when Richmond commands, “My Lord of Oxford, you Sir William Brandon / And [you] Sir Walter Herbert stay with me” (TLN 3463– 64). Working from a small hint, transposed in the first instance into Urswick’s speech from an anonymous messenger’s report that appears at an earlier point in the Queen’s Men’s True Tragedy,101 Shakespeare has created another aristocratic union to set next to the marriage of Lancaster and York and the alliance of Tudor and Stanley: a battlefield alliance between the Lancastrian Tudors and the Yorkist Herberts, families who had in fact been bitter rivals for the earldom of Pembroke. This fictional alliance forecasts a key development of the mid-Tudor period, when the grandson of the first Raglan Herbert earl, having married a sister of Katherine Parr, became the first Pembroke earl of the Tudor creation. Such genealogical details may seem obscure, but they would probably not have been lost on Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, patron of Pembroke’s Men, formed sometime in 1591– 92, nor would they, much later, have been lost on William Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works. Not long after the Raglan Herberts joined the Tudor victors at Bosworth, that is to suggest, not long after Shakespeare’s Richard III migrated from Strange’s to Pembroke’s Men (or not long after Shakespeare hedged his bets when he was unsure which company might debut his new history play),102 Lord Strange’s Men lost their Stanley patron and ceased to exist as a company. The exact order of these two events cannot be certain, but they are probably in any case connected. Shakespeare’s Richard III probably returned to the boards in the years after June 1594, when the former leading partners in Lord Strange’s company rebanded—possibly with members from Pembroke’s Men—under the patronage of Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain. The Richard III this company performed—that is, something very close to the variants of the Richard III first fixed in the quarto of 1597 (“As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants”),

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reprinted 1598, 1602, 1605, and 1622, and published with further variants in the Folio of 1623—still bears the signs, in the handling of the Stanleys, Urswick, and the Pembroke allies at Bosworth, of a longer history of theatrical patronage and the passage of the play through the hands of Lord Strange’s and Pembroke’s Men.

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“ T HE BO T T OM NO T Y ET FOU N D”: T H E DE AT H OF F ER DI NA N D O S TA N L E Y

On 25 September 1593, the day of his father’s death (and thus the day he became 5th Earl of Derby), Ferdinando Stanley was visited at New Park in Lancashire by Richard Hesketh, an exiled Lancashire gentleman. Hesketh later confessed he had been sent as an emissary from Catholics abroad to sound out Stanley on his willingness to take up the claim to the English throne that descended to him through his mother. The earl did not meet with Hesketh on that occasion, but two meetings with Hesketh followed, the first at New Park on 27 September, when Hesketh delivered a letter, the contents of which he subsequently claimed he had not seen, the second, at Ferdinando’s request, at Brewerton Green on 2 October. On the day following their second meeting, the earl rode with Hesketh to London, where he turned his recent visitor over to the authorities as a Catholic conspirator. After much questioning and a full confession, Hesketh was hanged as a traitor. Perhaps Stanley failed to act with enough due speed (he did not meet with the queen until 10 October or communicate with Robert Cecil about the matter until 13 October), or perhaps he did not explain himself with sufficient candor (it was not until November, back in Lancashire, that he admitted to Sir Robert Cecil that there had been a third party, Sir Thomas Langton, present at one or both of his meetings with Hesketh; he “forgott to speak of him,” he said, when he turned Hesketh in, and he subsequently “thoughte it needeles” to mention him until prompted by an inquiry from Cecil).1 Only reluctantly did Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Thomas Egerton follow the queen’s wish that Hesketh’s indictment should mention Ferdinando’s good faith in the matter. For 321

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the remainder of the autumn and winter of 1593/94, Ferdinando remained at home in Lancashire, expecting to be “crossed in court: and crossed in his country,” as his wife put it, while many of his father’s offices and titles passed not to him but to more trusted court favorites.2 In a letter to the Earl of Essex in late December, Ferdinando referred to what he called “my disgrace.”3 The following April, after weeks of quarreling with Essex about Essex’s protection of a former Stanley retainer by whom Ferdinando had felt threatened, the new Earl of Derby suddenly took ill and, over the course of thirteen days, died a slow and painful death. According to the initial information that came to an inquiry headed by Sir George Carey, Ferdinando’s brother-in-law and son of Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain, Dr. John Case and “three other physicians” who attended Ferdinando had immediately pronounced “his disease could be no other but flat poisoning.”4 But subsequent reports involving witchcraft, wax effigies, and mysterious apparitions quickly overshadowed Case’s blunt medical verdict. By the time Carey wrote to his wife within a week of Ferdinando’s death, he reported Dr. Case’s conclusion but went on to speculate that “the good ser vice he did to her Majesty and the realm, and no private ill desert of his own, shortened his days . . . by villainous poisoning, witchcraft and enchantment, whereof the bottom not yet found.”5 Witchcraft altogether displaced any mention of poison in the official report submitted by Carey and Sir Thomas Egerton and in the sensational elaboration of this report printed in the 1600 edition of Stow’s Annales of England.6 But rumors that the earl was murdered continued to fuel contemporary speculation about the party responsible. On the one hand, a 1594 pamphlet implied—and William Warner later (1596) stated outright—that Ferdinando’s death was a reprisal by Catholics abroad or in Lancashire for his betrayal of Hesketh.7 On the other hand, Sir John Harington, in A Tract of the Succession to the Crown (1602), implied that it was not Catholics abroad but well-placed English Protestants at home who became so concerned about Ferdinando Stanley’s potential claim to the throne that they “gave him a receipt against ambition here in the kingdome of England that sent him unto the kingdome of heaven instantly.”8 Recusants, still sometimes echoed in modern scholarship, suspected that Lord Burghley was behind the death of Ferdinando Stanley, but there is no evidence to support such a claim.9 The official government line was that Ferdinando was “so wise and dutifull” that his exposure of Hesketh cost him his life.10

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PROF ESSIONA L T R A NSI T ION: “ M Y L OR D A DM ER A L L E M E N & M Y L OR DE CH A M BER L E N M E N ”

On tour as Derby’s Men during that somber autumn of their patron’s troubles, the Stanley players made their way northward, possibly having performed, as Edward Alleyn’s letter from Bristol predicted they would, at Shrewsbury, Chester, and York. Their last recorded appearance was for Henry, Lord Berkeley, on 5 December at his principal residence, Caludon Castle, three and a half miles along the road northeast from Coventry.11 Derby’s Men may not have been expecting to play the Christmas season at court; in any case, they did not do so. Though Lord Strange’s Men had been the specially favored company at court during the previous three years, the single performance at court in 1593/94 was awarded to a group of veterans, the Queen’s Men, a troupe not seen at court seen 1590. In the weeks and months following their last known appearance at Caludon Castle, several of Strange’s/Derby’s old plays were registered for publication. Orlando Furioso was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 7 December 1593, A Knack to Know a Knave on 7 January 1593/94, and A Looking Glass for London on 5 March 1593/94. The title page of A Knack to Know a Knave described it as “sundrie times . . . played by ED. ALLEN and his Companie. With KEMPS applauded Merrimentes of the men of Goteham.” This highly unusual instance of a playbook advertised over the names of celebrity players rather than the name of the acting company’s patron seems to indicate that Strange’s/Derby’s Men were in the process of breaking up before the death of their patron in April and that by early 1593/94 its former members were in the process of forming new partnerships. This possibility may also be supported by the title page of Titus Andronicus, a work entered on 6 February 1593/94, at least if “Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Seruants” refers to a consortium of players rather than a succession of companies. (It can, of course, refer to both, and the second possibility would help to explain the first, if we are correct in our surmises about the derivation of Pembroke’s from Strange’s Men.) Already by late summer 1593, Edward Alleyn, on tour with the company in Bristol, had inquired of the whereabouts of the touring Pembroke’s Men, who, as Henslowe replied, had six weeks earlier pawned their apparel and returned to London, possibly disbanded for the time being. The last two appearances of Derby’s Men at Coventry (2 December)12 and Caludon show a notable decline in the size of the company’s usual awards (to 5s and 10s, respectively). At almost the same time as these final appearances and reduced

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payments, a civic account for Winchester, dated 7 December, awarded “tenne shillings . . . to the plaiers of the Right Honorable the Erle of Sussex & five shillings to the plaiers of A noble man in the parts of the North.”13 This unusual phrasing suggests that players of possibly ambiguous patronage had combined forces with Sussex’s Men. These players of an unnamed northern lord may have been former members hived off from a shrinking Derby’s Men.14 If a full company of Derby’s Men did return to play a London theater in the winter of 1593/94, they certainly did not perform at their former venue, the Rose, which was occupied between 23 January and 6 February by “the earle of susex his men.”15 During their first twenty-four performances, Sussex’s Men performed plays, most now lost, from their own distinctive repertory. (Their one surviving play from that run, The Pindar of Wakefield, can be cast for ten men and four boys.) However, the final six performances by Sussex’s included four performances of a “ne” “titus & ondronicus” (Titus Andronicus requires a minimum of fifteen men and three boys) and a revived “Iewe of malta” (which casts out for a minimum of fourteen men and three boys). The sudden appearance of these two plays, till then almost certainly the properties of Pembroke’s Men and Strange’s Men, was interpreted by Scott McMillin to suggest that actors from those two companies—Edward Alleyn possibly among them—had found their way back to the Rose in order to collaborate with Sussex’s Men, who had last shared billing with Strange’s Men at court in 1591/92. By late May 1594 Alleyn must have renewed his old association with the Lord Admiral’s Men, who had apparently continued on tour, perhaps in diminished numbers, after their last known appearances in London in 1590/91. The other five principals named in the 1593 touring license of the former Strange/Derby company— William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan—must also have been in London by May 1594, about to launch the next phase of their careers under the Lord Chamberlain, the father of Ferdinando Stanley’s brother-in-law. The new company made its first recorded appearance between 3 and 13 June 1594, when Henslowe’s diary documented a brief run for “my Lord Admeralle men & my Lorde chamberlen men” at Newington Butts during a period when the Rose and other London venues remained closed by plague.16 The list of titles performed—“andronicous,” “hamlet,” and “the tamynge of A shrowe” by one company, “the Iewe of malta” and “the masacer” by the other—suggests that the two companies were performing separately while briefly sharing the Newington venue and Henslowe’s management on the basis of associations dating from more than two years earlier with Lord Strange’s Men. Later that summer the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at

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Marlborough and perhaps elsewhere on tour. In October they sought permission through their new patron, Henry Carey (who called them “my nowe companie of Players”), to play at their “accustomed” winter quarters at the Cross Keys Inn, the very place where some of Strange’s Men had been arrested for playing in November 1589. They performed at court on 26 and 28 December, with payment later received by “William Kempe William Shakespeare & Richarde Burbage.”17 Payments for court per formances in 1596/97 were received by “Iohn Hemynge and George Bryan” and in 1597/98 by “Thomas Pope & Iohn Hemynges.”18 With the possible exception of Burbage, these partners of the Lord Chamberlain’s players, some together since they were Leicester’s Men in the 1580s, had developed their craft as fellow players with Lord Strange’s Men. T H E W ID OW A N D T H E “N IDICO CK ”: T H E PL AY ER S OF A L ICE , COU N T ESS OF DER BY, A N D W I L L I A M S TA N L E Y, 6 T H E A R L OF DER BY

Just as the Lord Chamberlain’s men were forming, the Derby name reappears in provincial touring records. On 27 May a troupe of players under the patronage of Alice, now the dowager Countess of Derby, appeared at Winchester, receiving a 6s 8d reward.19 This troupe is never heard from again, and we can only wonder why they chose Winchester as the focus of their apparently brief tour and whether the group included any members of the once- dominant Strange’s Men. The lack of further appearances by this company may be owing to the fact that the core talent of Strange’s Men were at the same time forming the Lord Chamberlain’s company. The countess’s apparently short-lived troupe of May 1594 was not the only one associated with the Stanleys in Hampshire during that month. Another Derby company surfaced not much farther south, at Southampton, between 15 and 19 May, but this troupe was performing at the higher level of £1 in company with Lord Morley’s players, a collaboration that apparently continued; later in the year Derby’s and Morley’s were turned away together at King’s Lynn with a £1 reward.20 Other appearances by Derby’s Men at Ipswich (8 May) and Norwich (15 September) also won a £1 official payment, so this would seem to have been a new formation, ready to tour provincially and recognized as worthy of encouragement.21 Their patron could only have been William Stanley, the younger brother of Ferdinando and his successor as 6th Earl of Derby. A sometime resident of Lincoln’s Inn and friend of John Donne, William, whom Ferdinando’s brother-in-law George Carey described in the above-mentioned letter to his

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wife as “the nidicock,” became an enthusiastic heir to the family tradition of theatrical patronage. In fact he may have been the most zealous of them all: Derby’s wife urged her uncle, Lord Burghley, to intervene on behalf of the players “for that my Lord taking delite in them it will kepe him from moor prodigall courses,”22 and a 1599 letter written by George Fenner refers to Lord William as “busye in penning comedyes for the common players,” quite probably his own and possibly in preparation for their first appearance at court during the Shrovetide festivities of 1599/1600.23 By the end of the summer of 1599 Derby’s players had also acquired a London base at the new Boar’s Head playhouse.24 Derby’s acting troupe appears consistently in the provincial records from the first month of his succession to the title in 1594 until 5 February 1636/37, when Derby’s Men can still be traced at Doncaster in the northeast.25 The suggestion has been made that the new Derby troupe was simply a continuation or “remnant” of the previous earl’s company.26 This is unlikely. In the midst of the bitter legal conflict between William and his brother’s widow,27 it is improbable that leading members of Ferdinando’s company would have made an easy migration to the patronage of the brother whom he and his wife apparently held in some disdain. It is evident, in any case, that the leading members of Lord Strange’s company went on instead to form the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But laying claim to a troupe of Derby players would have been in keeping with William’s other pressing claims to his brother’s inheritance. Among various strategies to win favor at court, an acting troupe could be both useful and relatively undemanding on his disputed financial resources, and William clearly shared with other members of the family a fascination with theater. In addition to patronizing the adult company under his name, William also helped to revive the tradition of child companies. In November 1599 it was reported that “My Lord Darby hath put up the playes of the children in Pawles to his great paines and charge.”28 By Shrovetide 1599/1600, under the leadership of Robert Browne, a sharer in the Boar’s Head playhouse, Derby’s Men were performing at court, with two repeat appearances the following year.29 After the death of Browne in 1603, the preference of this Derby company for the south of England seems to have dissipated, though, as Chambers noted, John Taylor the water poet remarked on “a play of the Life and Death of Guy of Warwick, played by the Right Honourable the Earl of Derby his men” on 14 October 1618 at the sign of the Maidenhead in Islington on the northern outskirts of London.30 All further evidence shows this troupe continuing their touring life exclusively in the north, where they appear in the records of Congleton, Kendal, and the Curwen family at Workington

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Hall in the northwest and Doncaster across the Pennines. William Stanley was undoubtedly a flamboyant figure and an enthusiastic patron of theater, but this profile of his company’s narrowing fortunes does not support the theory, promoted by Abel Lefranc and echoed by A. W. Titherley, that he was the author of the works of Shakespeare.31 “M Y L OR D S T R A NGES D OUGH T ER”: T H E COU N T ESS OF BR ID GE WAT ER A N D HER PL AY S

EL 6495, part of the Egerton manuscript collection at the Huntington Library, is a 1627 inventory of the library of Lady Frances Egerton, 1st Countess of Bridgewater and second of Ferdinando Stanley’s three daughters. This “Catalogue of my Ladies Bookes at London; Taken October. 27th. 1627,” which includes some interpolated entries and two updated inventories taken 26 April 1631 and 17 April 1632, lists some 241 titles, including the following: 44. Diuers Playes by Shakespeare _________________ 1602. 45. 46. 47. 48. Diuerse playes in 5 thicke volumes 49. in Velum(1 geuen to my Ldy Mary) 50. A Booke of Diuerse Playes in Leather ___________ 1599. 52. A Booke of Diuerse Playes in Velum ____________ 1601.

Heidi Brayman Hackel has written well about the inventory as a whole, about the status of the Countess of Bridgewater as an early modern book collector, and about the nature of the collection, which includes not only religious works but also many works of literature, history, and travel, mostly in English. She says little, however, concerning items 44–52, a remarkable set of eight bound volumes of plays, five of them “thicke” and one of them containing “Diuers Playes by Shakespeare.”32 Lady Frances Stanley, born in 1583, was present at New Park in October 1588, when the Queen’s Men performed for the household.33 She was probably present as well when additional household performances were given by the Queen’s Men, Essex’s Men, Leicester’s Men, and the unnamed troupe we take to be her father’s company, Lord Strange’s Men.34 We do not know whether she was allowed to see the plays performed on these occasions. But as a member of a family with a multigenerational tradition of acting company patronage, whose mother and sister were later the patronesses of masques by Milton and Marston, and whose children by John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, danced to the steps of Milton’s Comus, the countess evidently took an interest in theater, indeed took an interest to the extent of owning at least three bound volumes of

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playbooks35 by 1602, when she would have been nineteen, and eight bound volumes of playbooks by 1627. The inventory of the countess’s library came with the Egerton manuscripts to the Huntington Library through the purchase in 1917 of the Bridgewater House Library, “the oldest large family collection in England to survive intact into modern times.”36 The bound volumes of plays mentioned in the inventory have long since been unbound and scattered, first through a sale of duplicate copies from the Bridgewater Library by the auction house of John King in April 1802, when the public was offered some 229 plays, including sixty-two pre-1627 plays (fifty-four of which we have located) that can be considered candidates for inclusion in the countess’s bound pamphlet volumes, and then through sales by John Anderson Galleries in 1917–23, in which the Huntington disposed of nearly 350 pre-1686 Bridgewater playbooks that were deemed to duplicate its existing holdings. Fifty of these (we have located forty- one) were playbooks published before 1627 and thus are candidates for the countess’s collection. Including the pre-1627 Bridgewater playbooks remaining at the Huntington, there are more than 180 pre-1627 candidate titles, plus another fifty-eight duplicates of these, now scattered throughout the public and private libraries of the United States and Europe. A consideration that both facilitates and complicates any attempt to reconstruct the countess’s bound volumes of plays is a ubiquitous feature of playbooks from the Bridgewater collection: the presence of a numeral inside a square bracket, written in the upper right-hand corner of the title page of most plays by the countess’s son John, 2nd Earl of Bridgewater (d. 1686).37 Because this numbering is not in the countess’s hand but in her son’s, we cannot be certain whether any Bridgewater House play with a pre-1627 publication date was already part of the 1627 inventory, acquired later by the countess, who did not die till 1636, acquired by her husband, John Egerton (d. 1649), or acquired still later by the 2nd earl. However, several mitigating factors enable the majority of pre-1627 Bridgewater plays to remain candidates for having been collected by the countess herself: (1) there are no signs of ownership by the countess’s father, Ferdinando Stanley, or by her mother; (2) very few pre-1627 Bridgewater playbooks contain any previous marks of ownership, as we might expect they would if they had been collected much later, long after their publication dates; (3) while a very few of the playbooks contain marks of ownership by the 1st earl, the vast majority do not; and (4) eight bound volumes of playbooks, five of them “thicke” (handwritten numerals on pre-1627 imprints run as high as “20”) would yield a great many individual plays.

Title page, Bridgewater copy of the 1599 quarto of Romeo and Juliet. Courtesy of the Huntington Library.

330

Endings

Many other difficulties stand in the way of reconstructing the bound volumes of the countess, including questions about the 2nd earl’s later interventions and collecting (to say nothing of his accuracy), the fact that the title pages of several candidate plays are damaged or otherwise lacking the 2nd earl’s numbering, the fact that one of the bound volumes was “geuen to my Ldy Mary” (possibly the countess’s daughter Mary, b. 1608, and married to Richard Herbert, 2nd Earl of Cherbury, in 1627), and the fact that a great many nondramatic quarto pamphlets, also bearing the 2nd earl’s numbering, may have been bound in with the plays. Short of thorough reconstruction, there are nevertheless useful tasks that can be performed with the data. Assuming that “Diuerse Playes by Shakespeare . . . 1602” contained no Shakespeare play published later than 1602,38 the candidate plays for inclusion in this volume are the following: 1. Titus Andronicus (1600) 2. Much Ado About Nothing (1600) 3. Romeo and Juliet (1599) 4. Richard II (1598) 5. 1 Henry IV (1599) 6. 2 Henry IV (1599) 7. Love’s Labours Lost (1598) 8. The Merchant of Venice (1600) 9. Richard III (1598) 10. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) 11. The First Part of the Contention (1600) 12. Richard Duke of York (1600) This list approximates a volume of pre-1602 plays by Shakespeare,39 with the obvious problem that it contains two duplicated numbers (7 and 8) and the caveat that numbers 2 and 6 are not unambiguously legible. While acknowledging these anomalies, we can reasonably hypothesize that here, more than twenty years in advance of the First Folio, are the makings of a nearly “complete” volume containing all of Shakespeare’s plays that were in print by 1602, including the only available versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI, with the exception of Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602). If we cannot hypothesize the contents of the countess’s seven other bound volumes with the same degree of confidence, we can draw a few more conclusions about the significance of the Bridgewater collection, beginning with its potential size. If we compare the list of Bridgewater candidate titles published between 1581 and 1627 with Sir Walter Greg’s exhaustive list of all public theater titles published during the same period, we discover that the Bridgewater col-

Endings

331

Lady Frances Stanley, Countess of Bridgewater. Private collection, on loan to Ashridge Business School.

lection contains roughly 180 of Greg’s 240 titles, or approximately 75 percent of the titles known to have been available. In view of the countess’s inventory of eight bound volumes, including a volume of Shakespeare as well as five “thicke” volumes, it is likely that the countess’s collection “at London” alone included a substantial portion of these Bridgewater plays. That would make her collection at London one of the largest early modern collections of playbooks and perhaps the largest compiled by any woman in her time.40 Moreover the

332

Endings

playbooks in the 1627 inventory would have been only a portion of a much larger theater collection compiled over nearly a century by the countess until her death in 1636, by her husband, the 1st Earl of Bridgewater, and by their son, the Elder Brother of Comus, who continued to collect plays till his dying day. If we count Bridgewater plays still held at the Huntington (about 250), plays scattered by the Anderson Gallery sales (about 350), and plays (including a huge cache of plays in French) sold by John King in 1800–1804 (about 380 plays plus an additional twenty-three “volumes” of Restoration plays), we are talking about probably more than a thousand plays, the vast majority numbered by the hand of the 2nd earl before 1686. Surely one ending to our story—an ending not yet really ended, since the Bridgewater Library is a still living if much- dispersed organism—is this remarkable collection of playbooks. This particular ending might be traced to many different beginnings in the House of Stanley’s long history of theatrical patronage, going back to the decades just after Bosworth Field. But EL 6495 tells us that one beginning of this ending belongs to the young girl who, while players, including Strange’s Men, were performing at Lathom and Knowsley, was known in the Derby Household Book as “mrs fransis my Lord strandges doghter.”41

Appendix A

Henslowe’s Diary Transcriptions

All quotes from the diary in the text are taken from this appendix rather than from previous editions of the diary. MS images can be viewed on the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project website (http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk /). The diary is quoted with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. Extracts from Henslowe’s diary have been transcribed and lightly edited from the MS original at Dulwich College Archive according to REED guidelines for semi-diplomatic transcription. For further details on REED guidelines, see Handbook for Editors, http:// www.reed.utoronto.ca/handbook.pdf. The following editorial conventions are used below and elsewhere in the text: Italic

[] | ^

indicates expansion of MS abbreviations with letters supplied MS damage with loss of letters canceled word or phrase folio turnover MS caret to indicate insertion

Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 7– 8v In the name of god A men 1591 beginge the 19 of febreary my lord stranges mene Asfoloweth 1591 Receued at fryer bacone the 19 of febreary +satterdaye Receued at mvlomvrco the 20 of febreary Receued at orlando the 21 of febreary Receued at spanes comodye donne oracioe the 23 of febreary Receued at syr Iohn mandevell the 24 of febreary

333

xvij s. iij d. xxix s. xvj s. vj d. xiij s. vj d. xij s. vj d.

334

ne

Ester < . >

ne

Appendix A Receued at harey of cornwell the 25 of febreary 1591 Receued at the Iewe of malltuse the 26 of febreary 1591 Receued at clorys & orgasto the 28 of febreary 1591 Receued at mvlamvlluco the 29 of febrearye 1591 Receued at poope Ione the 1 of marche 1591 Receued at matchavell the 2 of marche 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 3 of marche 1591 Receued at bendo & Richardo the 4 of marche 1591 Receued at iiij playes in one the 6 of marche 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 7 of marche 1591 Receued at the lockinglasse the 8 of marche 1591 Receued at senobia the 9 of marche 1591 Receued at the Iewe of malta the 10 of marche 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 11 of marche 1591 Receued at the comodey of doneoracio the 13 marche 1591 Receued at Ieronymo the 14 of march 1591 Receued at harey the 16 of marche 1591 Receued at mvlo mvllocco the 17 of marche 1591 Receued at the Iewe of malta the 18 of marche 1591 Receued at Ioronymo the 20 of marche 1591 Receued at constantine the 21 of marche 1591 Receued at Q Ierusallem the 22 of marche 1591 Receued at harey of cornwell the 23 of marche 1591 Receued at fryer bacon the 25 of marche 1591 Receued at the lockinglasse the 27 of marche 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 28 of marche 1591 Receued at mvlimvlucko the 29 of marche 1591 Receued at doneoracio the 30 of marche 1591 Receued at Ioronymo the 31 of marche 1591 Receued at mandefell the 1 of aprell 1591 Receued at matchevell the 3 of aprell 1591 Receued at the Iewe of malta the 4 of aprel 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 5 of aprell 1591 Receued at brandymer the 6 of aprell 1591 Receued at Ieronymo the 7 of aprell 1591 Receued at mvlo mvloco the 8 of aprell 1591I.h.—01—10—00 Receued at the comodey of Ierony< . >o the 10 of aprell 1591 Receued at tittus & vespacia the 11 of aprell 1591 Receued at byndo & Richardo the 12 of aprell 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 13 of aprell 1591 Receued at Ioronymo the 14 of aprele 1591

xxxij s. l s. xviij s. xxxiiij s. xv s. xiiij s. iij li. xvj s. 8 d. xvj s. xxxj s. vj d. iij li. vij s. xxij s. vj d. lvj s. xxxxvij s. vj d. xxviiij s. iij li. xj s. xxxj s. vj d. xxviij s. vj d. xxxix s. xxxviij s. xij s. xviij s. xiij s. vj d. xv s. vj d. lv s. iij li. viij s. iij li. ij s. xxxix s. iij li. xxx s. xxij s. xxxxiij s. xxxxj s. xxij s. xxvj s. xxiij s.| xxviij s. iij li. iiij s. xxiij s. xxvj s. xxxiij s.

Henslowe’s Diary Transcriptions Receued at mandevell the 15 of aprell 1591 Receued at mvllo mvlluco the 17 of aprelle 1591 Receued at the Iewe of mallta the 18 of aprell 1591 Receued at the lockingglasse the 19 of aprell 1591 Receued at tittus & vespacia the 20 of aprell 1591 Receued at harey the vj the 21 of aprell 1591 Receued at the comodey Ieronymo the 22 of aprell 1591 Receued at Ieronymo the 24 of aprell 1592 Receued at Ierusalem the 25 of aprell 1592 Receued at fryer bacon the 26 of aprell 1592 Receued at mvlo mvloco the 27 of aprell 1592 ne Receued at the second parte of tamber came the 28 of aprel Receued at harey of cornwell the 29 of aprell 15921 Receued 24 Receued at mvlo mvlluco the 30 of aprell 15922 Receued at Ieronymo the 2 of maye 15923 Receued at titus & vespacia the 3 of maye 15924 Receued at harey the vj the 4 of maye 15925 Receued 32.14 Receued at the Iewe of mallta 5 of maye 15926 Receued at fryer bacon the 6 of maye 1592 Receued at brandimer the 8 of maye 1592 Receued at harey the vj the 7 of maye 1592 34 Receued at tittus & vespacia the 8 of maye 1592 Receued at Ieronymo the 9 of maye 1592 Receued at the 2 parte of tambercam ye 10 maye 1592 Receued at the Iew of mallta the 11 of maye 1592 whittsontyde Receued at Ieronymo the 13 of maye 1592 Receued at harey the 6 the 14 of maye 1592 Receued at tittus & vespacia the 15 of maye 1592 51–107 Receued at mandevell the 16 of maye 1592 Receued at mvllomvloco the 17 of maye 1592 Receued at harey of cornwell the 18 of maye 1592 Receued at harey the vj the 198 of maye 1592 1. 2 written over 1 2. 2 written over 1 3. 2 written over 1 4. 2 written over 1 5. 2 written over 1 6. 2 written over 1 7. written over canceled < . >9–10 8. 19 written over 10

335 xxvj s. xxx s. xxxxviij s. vj d. xxiiij s. lvj s. xxxiij s. xvij s. xxviij s. xxxxvj s. xxiiij s. xxvj s. iij li. iiij s. xxvj s. lviij s. xxxiiij s. lvij s. vj d. lvj s. xxxxj s. xiiij s. xxiiij s. xxij s. xxx s. xxvj s. xxxvij s. xxxiiij s. iij li. 4 s. l s. iij li. xxxx s. xxxvj s. vj d. xxvj s. xxx s.

336

ne

066

Appendix A Receued at the Iewe of mallta the 209 of maye 1592 Receued at the comodey of Ieronymo the 2110 maye 1592 Receued at Ieronymo the 2211 of maye 1592 Receued at the taner of Denmarke the 2312 maye 1592 Receued at titus & vespacia the 2413 of maye 1592 Receued at harey the vj the 2514 of maye 1592 Receued at tambercame the 2615 of maye 1592 Receued at Ieronymo the 2716 of maye 1592 Receued at matchevell the 2917 of maye 1592 Receued at the Iewe of malta the 3018 of maye 1592 Receued at mvlemvloco the 3119 of maye 1592 Receued at Bendo & Richardo the 5 [< . . >]20 of Iune21 1592 Receued at tittus & vespacia the 6 of Iune 1592 Receued at the lockinglasse the 7 of Iune 1592 Receued at the tambercame the 8 of Iune 1592 Receued at Ieronymo the 9 of Iune 1592 Receued at a knacke to knowe a knave 1592 10 day Receued at harey the vj the 12 of Iune 1592 Receued at mvlemvloco the 13 of Iune 1592 Receued at the Iewe of malta the 14 of Iune 1592 Receued at the knacke to knowe a knave the 15 of Iune 1592 Receued at mandevell the 16 of Iune 1592 Receued at Ioronymo the 18 of Iune 1592 Receued at harey the vj the 19 of Iune 1592

liiij s. xxviij s. xxvij s. iij li. xiij s. vj d. xxx s. xxiiij s. xxxvj s. vj d. xxiij s. xxvj s. xxxiij s. xxiiij s| xxxij s.22 21

22

76 ne

80

9. 20 written over 11 10. 21 written over 12 11. 22 written over 13 12. 23 written over 14 13. 24 written over 15 14. 25 written over 16 15. 26 written over 17 16. 27 written over 18 17. 29 written over 20 18. 30 written over 21 19. 31 written over 22 20. 5 [< . . >] written over other numbers 21. Iune written over other letters 22. 1587 written very faintly at the top of the folio

xxxxij s. xxix s. xxxx s. xxviij s. iij li. xij s. xxxij s. xx s. xxxviij s. lij s. xx s. xxiiij s. xxxj s.

Henslowe’s Diary Transcriptions Receued at the comodey of Ieronymo the 20 of Iune 1592 Receued at tambercame the 21 of Iune 1592 Receued at the knacke to knowe A knave the 22 of Iune 1592

337 xv s. xxxij s. xxvij s.

In the Name of god Amen 159323 beginnge the 29 of desember

ne

ne

Receued at the mvlomulluco the 29 of desember 1592 Receued at Ioronymo the 30 of desember 1592 Receued at the cnacke the 31 of desember 1592 Receued at the Iewe the 1 of Ianewary 1592 Receued at the cnacke the 3 of Ienewary 1592 Receued at mandevell the 4 of Ienewary 1592 Receued at the gelyous comodey the 5 of Ienewary 1592 Receued at titvs the 6 of Ienewary 1592 Receued at Ieronymo the 8 of Ienewarye 1593 Receued at mvlo mulocko the 9 of Ienewary 1593 Receued at frier bacon the 10 of Ienewary 1593 Receued at the comodey of cosmo the 12 of Ieneway 1593 Receued at mandevell the 13 of Ienewary 1593 Receued at the cnacke the 14 Ienewary 1593 Receued at tittus the 15 of Ienewary 1593 Receued at harey the 6 of 16 of Ienewary 1593 Receued at frer bacon the 17 of Ienewary 1593 Receued at the Iew the 18 of Ieneway 1593 Receued at tambercam the 19 of Ienewaye 1593 Receued at mvlomvloc the 20 Ieneway 1593 Receued at Ieronymo the 22 of Ieneway 1593 Receued at cossmo the 23 of Ienewaye 1593 Receued at the knacke the 24 Ienewye 1593 Receued at titus the 25 Ienewaye 1593 Receued at the tragedy of the gvyes 30 Receued at mandevell the 31 of < . . . > Receued at frier bacon the 30 of [Iuly] Ieneway 1593 Receued at harey the vj the 31 of Ienewarye 1593 Receued at the Iewe of malta the j of febreary 1593

23. 3 corrected from 2

iij li. x s. iij li. viiij s. xxx s. lvj s. xxix s. xij s. xxxxiiij s. lij s. xxij s. xx s. xxiiij s. xxxxiiij s. ix s. xxiiij s. xxx s. xxxxvj s. xx s. iij li. xxxvj s. xx s. xx s. xxx s. xxiiij s. xxx s. iij li. xiiij s. < . . . >| xij s. xxvj s. xxxv s.

Appendix B

R epertory Audit

338

Frequency of Per for mance

Total Receipts

17 16 14 13 10 8 7 7 7 4 4 4 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1 Henry VI The Spanish Tragedy The Jew of Malta The Battle of Alcazar Titus Vespasianus A Knack to Know a Knave The Spanish Comedy Mandeville 1 Tamar Cham John of Bordeaux A Looking Glass for London 2 Tamar Cham Harry of Cornwall Bindo and Richardo The Massacre at Paris The Comedy of Cosmo The Tanner of Denmark Q. Jerusalem Machiavel Brandimart The Jealous Comedy Four Plays in One Zenobia Chloris and Ergasto Orlando Furioso Pope Joan Constantine

1 Henry VI The Spanish Tragedy The Battle of Alcazar The Jew of Malta Titus Vespasianus Mandeville A Knack to Know a Knave The Spanish Comedy John of Bordeaux A Looking Glass for London Harry of Cornwall 1 Tamar Cham Bindo and Richardo Machiavel 2 Tamar Cham The Comedy of Cosmo Q. Jerusalem Brandimart The Massacre at Paris The Tanner of Denmark The Jealous Comedy Zenobia Four Plays in One Chloris and Ergasto Orlando Furioso Pope Joan Constantine

Average Receipts 35/ 8/ 0 29/ 12/ 0 29/ 7/ 6 24/ 1/ 0 22/ 11/ 6 12/ 18/ 0 8/ 9/ 6 8/ 1/ 6 7/ 4/ 6 6/ 6/ 9 5/ 15/ 0 5/ 1/ 0 4/ 17/ 6 3/ 11/ 0 3/14/0 3/14/0 3/ 13/ 6 3/ 4/ 0 3/ 2/ 0 2/ 6/ 0 2/ 4/ 0 1/ 11/ 6 0/22/6 0/ 18/ 0 0/16/ 6 0/ 15/ 0 0/ 12/ 0

The Massacre at Paris The Tanner of Denmark 2 Tamar Cham The Jew of Malta Titus Vespasianus The Jealous Comedy The Comedy of Cosmo 1 Henry VI A Knack to Know a Knave 1 Tamar Cham The Battle of Alcazar Q. Jerusalem Four Plays in One The Spanish Tragedy A Looking Glass for London Bindo and Richardo The Spanish Comedy Harry of Cornwall Brandimart Machiavel Mandeville Zenobia John of Bordeaux Chloris and Ergasto Orlando Furioso Pope Joan Constantine

1 1 2 13 10 1 2 17 7 4 14 2 1 16 4 3 7 4 2 3 8 1 7 1 1 1 1

3/ 14/ 0 3/ 13/ 6 2/ 10/ 6 2/ 5/ 2 2/ 5/ 1 2/ 4/ 0 1/ 17/ 0 2/ 1/ 2 1/ 16/10 1/ 16/ 1 1/ 14/ 3 1/ 12/ 0 1/ 11/ 6 1/ 11/ 0 1/ 8/ 8 1/ 7/ 2 1/ 5/ 8 1/ 4/ 4 1/ 3/ 0 1/ 0/ 7 1/ 0/ 2 22/ 6 18/ 0 18/ 0 16/ 6 15/ 0 12/ 0

Appendix C

Itineraries of Lord Strange’s Men, 1576–1593

The details included here have been culled from a wide-ranging search of provincial accounts, systematically surveyed and published in REED volumes or forthcoming in REED collections as noted in the text. We have supplemented these ample resources with several Malone Society Collections volumes for locations in East Anglia and for court performances, but we have also visited archives in instances where consistency in dating and transcription style was needed according to the REED editorial principles we have adopted. Grace Ioppolo’s Henslowe- Alleyn Digitisation Project website has also been a superb reference tool for off-site consultation of the remarkable archive held at Dulwich College. More information about the per formance events and the provincial venues of the Strange/Derby troupes in 1576– 93, as well as those of previous earls of Derby, can be found, with interactive mapping, on the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. The itineraries for what we interpret to have been the first and second troupes patronized by Lord Strange are only as complete as surviving sources allow. A fuller explanation of the difficulties in compiling such an itinerary is included as Appendix A in McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 170–74. The dates of company payments or per formances are as precise as possible, but many refer to a civic accounting year running from 29 September to 28 September in the following year. Where the accounting year differs from this norm, the date range is included in square brackets (e.g., in the first instance, Bath, [11 July 1578– 9 June 1579]). The evidence that we have drawn on for our discussion of company per formance records in chapters 1, 2, 8, and 10 is summarized below, with the tour locations organized insofar as it is possible by date and by likely direction of regional tours using the clues available.

340

Itineraries of Lord Strange’s Men, 1576–1593

341

Type

Dates

Location

Payment

Players Tumblers Players Players Players Players

1576–77 29 June 1577 1577–78 1578–79 1578–79 1578–79 [11 July 1578– 9 June 1579] 7 Dec. 1578 1578–79 [1 Nov. 1578–31 Oct. 1579] 11 Feb. 1578/79 15 Jan. 1579/80 20–26 Nov. 1580 19 Dec. 1580 1580–81 1580–81 [22 July 1580–21 July 1581] 1580–81 [13 June 1580–15 June 1581] 26 Mar.–1 Apr. 1581 1580–81 28 Dec. 1581

Exeter Southampton Faversham Ipswich Rochester Bath

13s 4d 10s 5d 6s 8d 13s 4d 6s 8d 5s 2d

Nottingham Coventry

6s 8d 10s

Stratford Whitehall Bristol Rye Canterbury Lydd

5s £10 13s 4d 10s 10s 3s 4d

Bath

7s 9d

Bristol Gloucester Westminster

13s 4d 14s 4d £10

4 Jan. 1581/82 1581–82 [29 Sept. 1581– c. 1 May 1582] 1 Jan. 1582/83

Nottingham Plymouth

6s 8d 10s

Windsor

£13 6s 8d

1583–84 1584–85

Barnstaple Beverley

2s 2s

1587–88 [1 Nov. 1587.–31 Oct. 1588] 27–30 Dec. 1587 31 Dec. 1588–5 Jan.15 88/89 5 Nov. 1589

Coventry

5s

Players Players Players Tumblers Players Players Players Players Players Players Players Feats of activity Players Players Feats of activity Players Players GAP Players Players Players Players Players Players & feats of activity

15–21 Feb. 1589/90 27 Dec. 1590

Knowsley Lathom London: Cross Keys Lathom Richmond

£10: 1 play with Admiral’s Men

342

Appendix C

Type

Dates

Location

Payment

Players & feats of activity Players

16 Feb. 1590/91

Greenwich

27, 28 Dec. 1591, 1, 9 Jan., 6, 8 Feb. 1591/92 1591–92 [June 1591–10 June 1592] 19 Feb. 1591/92–22 June 1592 1591–92 [2 Nov. 1591–2 Nov. 1592] 24 June 1592 1591–92 [8 Sept. 1591– 8 Sept. 1592] 13 July 1592 1591–92 6–19 Aug. 1592 1591–92 [between 13 and 27 Sept. 1592] 6 Oct. 1592 1591–92 [1 Nov. 1591–31 Oct. 1592] 1591–92 27, 31 Dec. 1592–1 Jan. 1592/93 29 Dec. 1592–1 Feb. 1592/93 2 May 1593 1592–93 1592–93 3 July 1593 1593 [11 June 1592–10 Sept. 1593] 1 Aug. 1593 1593 [after 1 August 1593] 1593–94

Whitehall

£10: 1 play with Admiral’s Men £60: 6 plays

Bath

17s

Rose Theatre Maidstone

20s

Rye Folkestone

13s 4d 4s

Canterbury Faversham Bristol Gloucester

30s 20s 30s 10s

Oxford Coventry

6s 8d 20s

Cambridge Hampton Court Rose Theatre Chelmsford Sudbury Faversham Southampton Bath

20s £30: 3 plays

Players Players Players Players Players Players Players Players Players

Players Players Players Players Players Players Players Players Players? Players Players Players Players [as Ld Derby] Players [as Ld Derby] Players [as Ld Derby]

2 Dec. 1593

5 Dec. 1593

3s 6d 20s 16s 3d

Bristol Shrewsbury

40s: with Admiral’s

Leicester

5s

Coventry

20s

Caludon Castle

10s

Appendix D

Casting Studies

Casting studies are rightly regarded with skepticism because of the disparities in the results they produce. As an aspect of per formance, casting is an art rather than a science and subject to variation with each production; as notional productions, casting studies can likewise be expected to vary. Thus Edward Burns, for example, casts 1 Henry VI for fourteen adults and two boys, while David Bradley casts it for twenty-five or more adults and four or more boys, and T. J. King casts it for a gargantuan fifteen major acting lines, thirteen minor acting lines, and two boys.1 One factor that makes casting studies so varied, as W. W. Greg observed, is our uncertainty as to “what, so to speak, are the rules of the game.”2 Some rules can be inferred from the texts of the plays themselves and from the other playhouse documents associated with them, but these must be supplemented with additional rules and assumptions of our own making. It seems important, then, to state at the outset the principles that govern the casting studies that follow.3 It has been our hope that strict adherence to them will guarantee a degree of internal consistency to shore up the results. 1. The rule of “immediate juxtaposition,” first spelled out by William Poel and evident from the play texts themselves, is that with rare exceptions, no character who exits the stage may immediately reenter.4 Over and over again the plays show evidence of several lines that delay the reentry of a character, even where one scene ends and the next begins. In modern casting studies this rule is extended to a second rule.

1. Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 1, ed. Burns, 297–303; Bradley, From Text to Per formance, 233; King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays, Table 35, 159– 61. 2. Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, 120. 3. In formulating these, we draw especially on McMillin, “Casting for Pembroke’s Men”; McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, chapter 5; Ringler, “The Number of Actors in Shakespeare’s Early Plays”; and Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, chapter 1. 4. Shakespeare in the Theatre, 41, as cited in Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 32n9.

343

344

Appendix D

2. A delayed reentry is required for doubling of roles. Estimates vary as to the length of the required delay, though a minimum of about twenty to twenty-five lines is generally assumed. With one or two exceptions explicitly noted in the explanations that accompany the studies below, we have observed a minimum interval of twenty lines for any doubling actor to make a change of role. However, because there is disagreement about the length of required delay, we have always specified (with the abbreviation dly followed by a number) the number of lines between an actor’s exit and his reentry. The size of a cast may be indicated, then, not only by the largest number of actors onstage simultaneously but by the largest number of departing and entering characters as constrained by the rule of immediate juxtaposition and by the delay required for doubling. We do not, however, see the logical force of claiming that the largest scene or most demanding juxtaposition is itself necessarily an indication of the company’s total size; it is only an indication of the minimum size required for a given play. The phenomenon of the “hired man” allows cast size to vary. 3. No “splitting” of roles, where the role of one character is shared between two actors, is permitted. There is only one example of this practice (in the plot of Believe as You List) in all of the available evidence.5 4. Alternating or “redoubling” of roles,6 where one actor alternates in two or more recurring roles, is permitted. There is evidence of this in surviving plots for demanding large-scale plays like Frederick and Basilea and The Battle of Alcazar. The practice would be more demanding (and perhaps confusing) than the more common procedure of doubling between roles that do not require alternating, and we have tried, where possible, to avoid it, especially where it would be frequent or be used in lines devoted to the play’s most prominent characters. We do, however, occasionally resort to it, allowing even major actors’ lines to include a small part or two for the sake of economy. 5. Casting should be economical. We assume that additional acting lines (i.e., jobs for additional “hired men”) should not be invented to cover a few small needs that can more economically be covered by the alternation of “redoubling” of roles for existing lines. 6. Although no adults play female roles and no boys play major adult male roles, the rule of economy suggests that boys, especially those in small female roles, may have been available for appropriate supernumerary roles as messengers and in the nonspeaking parts of soldiers, “attendants,” “others,” and so on. In the explanatory notes we have indicated a small number of cases where having an adult double the role of an older woman might reduce the need for boys in the cast. 7. Unless the playbook specifies otherwise, calls for supernumeraries in the plural (“soldiers,” “attendants,” “others,” etc.) are always interpreted, following William Ringler’s example, as meaning “two.” It is perhaps arbitrary to set any number, but two is less arbitrary than others given rule 5: the task is to find the minimum number of actors with which it is possible to meet the play’s casting demands. By the same logic, calls for “many soldiers” or “as many as may be” are interpreted to mean “three.” 8. Supernumerary roles should always be counted. Some casting studies, such as that of Edward Burns for 1 Henry VI, simply assume there would have been an ample supply 5. King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays, 46. 6. See McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, 105.

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of stagehands, doorkeepers, and so on to fill the mostly nonspeaking roles of servants, soldiers, and others. People filling such roles are part of the cast, and their numbers matter as an indication of company practice. In the studies below, on the basis of rule 7, we have factored into our casting every supernumerary called for or implied by the text. In the tiny number of cases where we have fallen short a soldier or two, we have simply said so in the explanatory notes. The idea is that such cases should be rare. The list of plays that follows is based on the size of the cast required, in ascending order and including candidate plays not listed in Henslowe’s diary. Fair Em 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

William the Conqueror (i, iii, vi, viii, x, xiii, xv, xvii). Lubeck (i, iii, vi, viii, xii, xvii). Manvile (i, iv, vi, viii, xii, xiv, xvii). Mountney (i, iv, v, ix, xi, xvii); Soldier (speaks) (xiii); Attendant (xv). Valingford (i, iv, vii, ix, xi, xiv, xv, xviii). Dirot (i); Jailer (vi); 1 Attendant Guard (xii); Demarch (dly 24 xiii, xv, xvii). Sir Thomas Goddard (i, xi, xvi, dly 151 xvii); Citizen of Westchester (xiv). Trotter (ii, v, xi); Rosilio (dly 40 xii, xvii); Attendant (xv). Zweno (iii, xii, xvii); Ambassador of Denmark (xv). Fair Em (ii, v, vii, xi, xvi, dly 150 xvii). Blanch (iii, vi, viii, x, xviii); Soldier (xiii). Mariana (iii, vi, viii, xii, xvii). Messenger (vi); Elner (xiv, xvii); 2 Attendant Guard (xii).

The text, 1,546 lines long, shows several signs of theatrical abridgement, one of the most prominent of which is underlined by its light casting demands. The play’s largest scene (xvii) calls for a minimum of thirteen actors, nine adults, and four boys. The text has clearly been adapted for a reduced cast, since at least three important character roles have been cut in order to permit doubling. The roles of Dirot and Demarch, onstage together at the beginning of the play, have to be doubled by a single actor later in the play. The part of the clown Trotter is dropped from the play after scene xi, at which point the actor playing his line must take up the role of Zweno’s servant Rosilio. In the concluding scene, the Citizen of Westchester ought to be present alongside his daughter Elner in order to match the presence of the Miller of Manchester and his daughter Em, but he cannot appear because his role must be doubled by the actor playing the Miller. In the climactic confrontation between the armies of Zweno and William the Conqueror, William can be supplied with only two attendants, while Zweno’s “army” must be kept offstage altogether. It appears that the play was originally designed for performance by a minimum of twelve adults and four boys. Orlando Furioso 1. Orlando (i, dly 136 ii, alarum iii, v, dly 17 vi, dly 19 vii, ix, x, dly 60 xi). 2. Marsillus (i, iv, dly 112 viii, x, dly 74 xi); 1 Soldier (ii, vii).

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Mandrecard (i, dly 22 iv, dly 112 vii, x, dly 74 xi); 3 Soldier (vii). Sacripant (i, iv, x); 4 Soldier (vii); Namus (dly 90 viii). Brandemart (i, iii, vii); First Satyr (vii); Peer (xi). Rodamant (i, iii, vii); Oliver (dly 90 viii, xi). Soldan of Egypt (i); Rosillion (dly 138 ii); 1 Soldier (iv); 2 Soldier (vii); Oger (dly 90 viii, xi). 8. Sacripant’s Man (i, iv); Clown Rafe (vi); Turpin (viii, xi); Second Satyr (dly 89 ix). 9. 1 “Others” (i); Soldier on Walls (dly 144 ii); 2 Soldier (iv); Clown Tom (vi, dly 104 vii); Fiddler (ix); Peer (xi). 10. Angelica (i, iv, vii, xi); Melissa (ix). 11. Orgaglio (i, dly 116 iv, dly 50 v, vii, ix); Medor (iv); (possible) Peer (xi). Edward Alleyn’s MS scroll for the part of Orlando, as Greg demonstrated, differs in many particulars from the quarto. Perhaps most important from the standpoint of casting, the play contains vestigial roles for Aquitaine and Rosillion (the latter has soldiers, but no lines); these characters drop inexplicably from sight after scene iv, while the play adds several new roles (Oger, Oliver, Namus, and Turpin) in its final third. The number of vestigial roles in the quarto demands efficiency in casting, lest too many actors be left waiting to fill roles during long idle periods. Accordingly we have allowed actors playing major roles to double as soldiers and other extras, and by doing this we have been able to meet all of the play’s demands (except for a second “other” in scene i) with a cast of nine adults and two boys. Given the reduced size of the cast, and the fact that the available cast falls woefully short of the “Twelve Peers of France” demanded by the stage directions, it seems likely that the play, cast for about nine adults in the quarto, was originally cast for a minimum of twelve. A Knack to Know a Knave 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

King Edgar (i, iii, vi, x, xi, dly xii, xiv). Bishop Dunstan (i, iii, vi, x, dly 32 xi, dly 70 xii, xiv). Perrin (i, dly 64 ii, vi, viii, x, dly 35 xi, dly 70 xii, xiv); First Old Man (viii). Honesty (i, iv, vi, viii, x, xii, dly 18 xiii, dly 91 xiv). Ethenwald (i, v, vii, ix, dly 100 x, xii, xiv); Philarchus (iii). Bailiff of Hexham (ii); Osricke (v, dly 65 ix, xii); 1 Poor Man (viii); Attendant (xiv). John the Precise (ii, xiii, dly 109 xiv); Broker (iv); Knight (viii); Smith of Gotham (xi). Cuthbert Coneycatcher (ii, iv, vi, xiv); Squire (viii); Piers Plowman (x); Cobbler of Gotham (dly 80 xi). Walter (ii, viii, x, dly 182 xiv); Beggar (xiii). Devil (ii); Gentleman (iv); Bailiff (viii); Clerk of Assize (x); Asmoroth (xii, xiv); Attendant (dly 118 xiv). Philarchus’s father (iii); 2 poor Man (viii); Miller of Gotham (xi); Neighbor (xiii); Attendant (dly 182 xiv).

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12. Alfrida (ix, xiii, xv); Attendant (iii). 13. Attendant (iii); Kitchen Maid (xii); Attendant (dly xiv). Because the play casts for eleven adults and two boys, the chief problem is to explain the disparity between this casting and the larger- cast plays performed at the Rose during the same period. The most likely possibility is that the quarto represents a theatrical abridgement following the departure of Lord Strange’s Men from the Rose after 1 February 1592/93. Signs of abridgement include probable extensive reduction of “KEMPS applauded Merrimentes” (a meager forty-four lines in the quarto); the apparently premature dropping of the plot involving Philarchus and his son, from whose exile no promised developments emerge; and the necessity of dropping Alfrida’s father, Osricke, from the final scene in order to provide the minimum of the four necessary attendants to fetch and take custody of the four discovered knaves. To give fuller play to the Gothamites and to continue the Philarchus plot would take a minimum of three to four additional adults. That would bring the play into line with the average of fifteen adults for other plays of the company at the Rose. The Battle of Alcazar 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Presenter (i, iv, ix, xiv, xvii); Governor of Lisbon (vi); Governor of Tangier (xii). Muly Mahamet. Abdelmunen (i); Abdelmunen’s ghost (iv); Stukeley (vi, viii, x, xiii, xvi, xviii). Abdelmelec. Calcepius Bassa (ii, v); King Sebastian (viii, x, xiii, xvi, xviii). Zareo (ii, xi, dly 21 xv, xviii); Irish Bishop (vi, viii, x). Muly Mahamet Seth (ii, v, xi, xv, xviii). Soldier (in “others,” ii); Messenger (dly 52 iii); Moor (v); Attendant Moor (vii); Moorish Ambassador (dly 22 viii); Spanish Ambassador (x); 1 Captain (xii); 1 Italian (xviii). Pisano (iii); Allecto (dly 97 iv); Janissary (dly 22 v, also in “train” of xi, xv); Attendant Moor (vii); Moorish Ambassador (dly 22 viii); Spanish Legate (x); 1 Moor to bear corpse of Abdelmelec (xviii). Bassa’s guard (ii); Megara (iv); Moor (dly 22 v); Duke of Avero (viii, xiii, xvi, xviii). Bassa’s guard (ii); Tisiphone (iv); Janissary (dly 22 v, and “train” of xi); Duke of Barceles (viii); Celybin (xv); 2 Moor to bear corpse of Abdelmelec (xviii). Guard (iii); Jonas (vi, viii, x); 2 Captain (xii); 1 Portingale (xviii). Guard (iii); Hercules (vi, viii, x, xiii, xvi); 2 Portingale (xviii).

Son of Muly Mahamet (i, iii, vii, xiii, called “boy” in xviii). 1 Murdered Child (i); Ghost (iv); Page (viii); 2 Italian (xviii). 2 Murdered Child (i); Ghost (iv); Calipolis (vii, and possibly xiii). Rubin Archis (ii); Nemesis (iv); Rubin Archis (dly 33 v, and possibly in “train” of xi, xv); Lewis de Silva (viii, x); Fame (xvii). 18. Abdel Reyes (ii, v, and possibly in “train” of xi, xv); Christopher de Tavera (viii).

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Greg, assuming only two lines for boy actors, gets the total cast down to sixteen by doubling lines 15 and 16 with lines 17 and 18. (He also assumes that line 14 is for an adult actor, but this contradicts the call in scene xviii for a “boy.”) Greg’s conjecture that the cast was limited to two boys would mean five role changes for line 17 in the play’s first five scenes. Greg’s scheme for the adult lines, which calls for two actors in mute roles only, demands fourteen adult actors in all, but one of these, as just noted, is assigned line 14, the son of Muly Mahamet, a role that seems clearly meant for a boy. Except for this difference between Greg’s scheme and ours, the number of adult actors, thirteen, is the same. The Massacre at Paris 1. King Charles IX (i, iv, xiii); Friar (xxiii, dly 20 xxiv). 2. Henri of Anjou, afterward King Henri III (iv, dly 21 v, ix, dly 8 x, xiv, xvii, xix, xxi, xxiv). 3. Navarre, afterward King Henri IV (i, iii, ix, xiii, xvi, xviii, xx, xxiv). 4. Duke of Guise (ii, iv, dly 21, v, vi, vii, ix, xi, dly 15, xii, xiv, dly 37 xv, xvii, xix, xxi). 5. Lord Admiral (i, iii, dly 44 iv, dly 24 v); Ramus (ix); dly 30 Lord of Poland (x); 1 Protestant (xii); Mugeroun (xiv, xvii, xix); 1 Murderer (xxi, dly 31, xxii); English Agent (xxiv). 6. Prince of Condy (i, iii, ix); 2 Protestant (xii); Joyeux (xiv, xvii); Captain of Guard (xxi); Messenger (xxiv). 7. Dumaine (iv, dly 21 v, vi, vii, ix, xxiii); Surgeon (dly 51 xxiv). 8. Cossin (iv); Seroune (viii); 1 Schoolmaster (dly 68 ix); 1 Lord of Poland (dly 25 x); Epernoun (xiii, dly 16 xiv, xvii, xix, xxi, xxiv). 9. 1 “Other” (i); Gonzago (v, vi, vii, ix); 1 of “Two” (xi); 1 Catholic in massacre (dly 34 xii); Bartus (xvi, xviii, xx, xxiv). 10. 2 “Other” (i); Retes (v, vi, vii, ix); 2 of “Two” (xi); Pleshé (xiii, xvi, xx, xxiv). 11. Mountsorrell (v, viii, dly 19 xix); Cardinal “of Lorraine” (xi, xiv, xxii); Attendant (xxiv). 12. Apothecary (ii, dly 82, iii); Attendant (dly 37 iv); Loreine, a preacher (vii); 2 Schoolmaster (ix); Attendant (xi); Protestant (dly 26 xii); 1 “Other” (xiv); 1 Navarre’s Train (xvi, xviii); “One with pen and ink” dly 77 (xix); 2 Murderer (xxi, xii); Soldier (xxiv). 13. Soldier (ii, dly 35 iii); Attendant (dly 30 iv); Soldier (v–vii, ix); Attendant (xi); 2 Catholic in massacre (dly 26 xii); Cutpurse (xiv); Messenger (xviii); Soldier with a musket (xix); 3 Murderer (xxi, xxii); Soldier (xxiv). 14. Lord Admiral’s man (iv); Soldier (dly 25 vi–viii); Talaeus (ix); 2 Lord of Poland (dly 73 x); Protestant (xii); 2 “Other” (xiv); 2 Navarre’s Train (xvi, xviii); Attendant (xxi, xxiv). 15. Catherine (i, iv, xi, xiii, dly 12, xiv, xxi). 16. Margaret (iii); Protestant (xii); Duchess of Guise (xv). 17. Queen Mother of Navarre (iii); Seroune’s wife (viii); Maid to Duchess of Guise (xv); Son of Guise (xxi).

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Like the quarto of The Jew of Malta, first published in 1633, the undated octavo of The Massacre at Paris, which some scholars date as late as 1602, cannot be taken for granted as an accurate reflection of “the tragedy of the gvyes” performed as a “ne” play by Strange’s Men at the Rose on 30 January 1592/93. Like The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris remained, according to Henslowe’s diary, in the repertory of the Lord Admiral’s Men, who performed it several times between July and September 1594 and possibly in 1598 and 1601–2 as well. The Massacre at Paris features a large number of roles, including a great many for supernumeraries. The play’s efficiencies come from its pageant-like rotation of roles (Cossin, Gonzago Retes, Mountsorrell, and Loreine drop out, to be replaced by Bartus, Plesché, Epernoun, and the Cardinal) and from its bloody subject, as the deaths of the Lord Admiral, Ramus, the two schoolmasters, Mougeroun, Joyeux, the Cardinal, and the Guise free up the cast for additional roles. The difficulty of casting the play is compounded by the apparent elisions and vagueness of the text during the crowded and fast-moving scenes of the massacre. For example, scene xii, just eight lines long, calls for the killing and removal of the bodies of “five or six Protestants” yet specifies the entrance of only the Guise. Gonzago and Retes are of the Guise party in the massacre in scene ix and so may be present as the “two” who hang the Lord Admiral’s body (we assume this is a manikin) in scene xi and then perhaps immediately reappear to massacre the “five or six Protestants” in scene xii, but their business as actors points to the serious textual elisions that make casting difficult. Scene ix (part of the massacre) as well as the final scene would seem to call for an absolute minimum of thirteen adult actors. Due to what appears to be a strange inefficiency in the line (7) occupied by Dumaine, who is difficult to double with any of the roles in adjacent scenes, the play appears to require a minimum of fourteen adults. The Jew of Malta 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Machiavel (i); Ferneze (iii, v, viii, xi, xvii, dly 37 xviii, xx). Barabas (ii, dly 37 iii, iv, vi, viii, x, xiii, xv, xvii, dly “alarms” xviii, xx). Machiavel (i); Ithamore (vi, dly 23 vii, ix, dly 34 x, xiii, dly 23 xiv, xvi, dly 18 xvii). Calymath (iii, xvii, dly “alarms” xviii, dly 102 xix, dly 50 xx); Adult Slave (vi). First Merchant (ii); Basso/Callapine (dly 136 iii, xi, xvii, dly “alarms” xviii, dly 101 xix, dly 50 xx); Mathias (dly 362 iii, vi, viii). Second Merchant (ii); Second Basso (dly 120, iii, xvii, dly “alarms” xviii, dly 101 xix dly 50 xx); Lodowick (dly 360 iii, vi, viii). 1 Jew (ii, dly 47 iii); Friar Jacomo (dly 87 iii, ix, xii, dly 20 xiii); First Janissary (xviii). 2 Jew (ii dly 47 iii); Friar Barnardine (dly 87 iii, xii, dly 20 xiii); Second Janissary (xviii). 3 Jew (ii dly 47 iii); Third Friar (dly 87 iii); Pilia-Borza (vii, xiv, dly 26 xv, dly 10 xvi, dly 6 xvii); Messenger (xix, dly 15 xx). 1 Knight of Rhodes (iii, v, xi, xvii, dly 37 xviii, xx). 2 Knight of Rhodes (iii, v, xi, dly 37 xviii, xx). Martin del Bosco (v, xi, xvii, xx); 3 Officer (iii). 1 Officer (iii, v, dly 13 vi, xvii); 1 Attendant (viii); 1 Carpenter (xx). 2 Officer (iii, v, dly 13 vi, xvii); Second Attendant (viii); Second Carpenter (xx).

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15. Abigail (iii, dly 20 iv, vi, ix, xii). 16. Abbess (iii); Second Slave (Boy) (vi); Bellamira (dly 213 vii, xiv, xvi, dly 43 xvii). 17. Katherine (vi, viii, xvii). John of Bordeaux 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

12. 13. 14.

Emperor (i, v, xiii, dly 29 xiv, xviii). John of Bordeaux (i, v, viii, x, xiv, xvi, xviii). Rossacler (i.e., Rosader) (i, iii, v, xii, xvi, xviii). Vandermast (i, iii, v, ix, xi, xiii, dly 29 xiv, xvii, xviii). Friar Bacon (i, dly 58 ii, v, ix, dly 49 x, xiv, xvii, dly 29 xviii). Ferdinand (i, iii, v, ix, xii, dly 35 xiii, dly 29 xiv, xviii). Amurath (ii, v); Constable Nickit (dly 33 xi); Jailer (xv); Rabsacke (xvii); First Lord (dly xviii). Cali Bashaw (ii, v); 1 Officer (vii); Neighbor (dly 38 xi); Corebus (xvi); 1 Prisoner (“nimer”) (dly 127 xvii); “Collatine” (dly 35 xviii). Bashaw (ii, v); 2 Officer (vii); 1 Satyr (x); Neighbor’s Wife (xi); Damon (xvi); 2 Prisoner (“such like”) (dly 127 xvii); “Tarquin” (dly 35 xviii). Perce (ii, iv, vi, xi, xv, xvii). (John Holland’s line): Astaroth (ii, ix, xvii, dly 57 xviii); Servant (v, xiii); 2 Satyr (dly 95 x). Selimus (ii); Janissary (v); 1 Soldier (viii); Bacon’s Scholar (x); 2 Lord (xviii). 1 Nobleman (i); 1 Scholar (iv, vi, x); 2 Soldier (xviii); 3 Prisoner (“cutpurse”) (xvii). 2 Nobleman (i); 2 Scholar (iv, vi, x); 3 Soldier (viii); 4 Prisoner (“horsestealer”) (xvii).

15. 16. 17. 18.

Rossaline (i, iii, vii, xii, xiv, xviii); Singing Nymph (x). Hostess (vi, xi); Vandermast’s wife (ix). 1 Child (daughter) (i, xii, xiv); 1 Faun (x); “Lucrece” (xviii). 2 Child (i, xii, xiv); 2 Faun (x).

8. 9. 10. 11.

We have assigned an aged female role (that of the Neighbor’s Wife in xi) to the actor carrying the roles in line 9; this makes sense in terms of his obvious teamwork throughout with the actor in line 8. For the purpose of calculating the time for exit and reentry, it should be noted Renwick says that, “correcting the verse-lining and calculating the prose roughly,” the 1,330 lines of the manuscript “would make some 1720 lines of print.”7 Titus Andronicus 1. Saturninus (i, iii, dly 245 iv, x, xiii). 2. Bassianus (i, iii, dly 50 iv); 1 Judge (vi); Clown (ix, dly 38 x); Valentine (xii); Roman Lord (dly 67 xiii). 3. Marcus (i, v, dly 58 vi, dly 12 vii, ix, xii, dly 75 xiii). 4. Titus (i, iii, dly 257 iv, vi, dly 12 vii, ix, x [if he shoots], xii, dly 25 xiii). 7. John of Bordeaux, vii.

Casting Studies 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

351

Chiron (i, dly 25 ii, dly 10 iii, dly 88 iv, dly 121 v, viii, x, xii). Demetrius (i, dly 25 ii, dly 10 iii, dly 88 iv, dly 121 v, viii, x, xii). Aaron (i, manet ii, iv, vi, dly 173 vii, xi, xiii). 1 Saturninian (i); Lucius (dly 5 i, iii, dly 257 iv, vi, xi, xiii). 2 Saturninian (i); Martius (dly 5 i, iii, dly 191 iv, vi); Publius (ix, dly 150 xii); 1 Goth (xi). 1 Bassianian (i); Quintus (dly 5 i, iii, dly 191 iv, vi); Sempronius (ix); 2 Goth (xi). 1 Senator (i, vi); Attendant (iii, dly 257 iv); Messenger (dly 224 vi); “another with weapons” (viii); Caius (dly 173 ix, dly 150 xii); Emillius (dly 60 x, dly 152 xi, dly 25 or 73, xiii). 2 Senator (i, vi); Attendant (iii, dly 257 iv); 1 Lord (x); 1 Soldier (xi); 2 Tribune (xiii). 1 Tribune (i, vi, xiii); Attendant (iii, dly 257 iv); 2 Lord (x); 2 Soldier (dly 63 xi). 2 Tribune (i, vi); Attendant (iii, dly 257 iv); 3 Lord (x); 1 Ladder (dly 53 xi); 1 Goth (xiii). 2 Bassianian (i); Captain (dly 5 i); 2 Judge (vi); 4 Lord (x); 2 Ladder (dly 53 xi); 2 Goth (xiii).

16. Tamora (i, iii, dly 9 iv, x, xii, dly 16 xiii); Nurse (dly 58 viii). 17. Alarbus (i); Lavinia (dly 27 i, ii, dly 50 iii, dly 121 iv, dly 121 v, dly 58 vi, dly 12 vii, xiii). 18. Mutius (i); Young Lucius (vii, dly 7 viii, dly 173 ix, dly 25 xiii). 19. Coffin-bearer (i); Table-bearer (xiii). 20. Coffin-bearer (i); Table-bearer (xiii). Titus Andronicus is a challenging play to cast because the 1594 quarto adds to the demands for senators, tribunes, and “followers” in its opening scene; additional calls for “others” (l. 409); for coffin-bearers; and, most famously, for “others as many as can be” (l. 69). A bare minimum of fifteen adults can perform the opening scene only if the followers of Saturninus and Bassianus can be doubled by the captain and by the sons of Titus, all of whom must immediately reenter. There is furthermore a requirement for stagehands available to bear the coffin of Titus’s son; such additional hands are probably needed as well for the final banquet, to judge from the Folio’s explicit call for “A Table brought in.” The heavy demands of the opening scene are more than matched by those in the final two scenes. Because the butchering of Chiron and Demetrius, assisted by Valentine, Publius, and Caius, concludes the penultimate scene, none of the actors occupying their lines is available for the first two large parties entering in the first sixteen lines of the final scene (Marcus, Lucius, Aaron, and the Goths; Saturninus and Tamora, with “Tribunes and others”). Provided that the “Romane lord” (to whom the quarto gives a speech assigned in the Folio to a Goth) and “Emillius” (to whom the quarto assigns speeches in the final portion of the scene) do not enter until some point later in the scene—perhaps with Titus (whose own reentry from scene xii occurs twenty-five lines into scene xiii), or perhaps in the tumult following the deaths of Tamora, Titus, and Saturninus—these roles can be taken by players involved in the

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murder of Chiron and Demetrius. The Goths dispatched with Aaron at the beginning of the scene must silently return in order to be sent to bring him in again at the end of the scene, because the tribunes and probably the “Romane lord” and “Emillius” must remain to “all hail” Lucius during that final errand. Three young players can manage the parts of boys and women only if each of them can double in one other role. At fifteen adults and three boys, the play is under considerable casting pressure and requires us, for the coffin-bearers and table-bearers, to break our rule about not assuming “extras.” David Bradley’s casting for sixteen adults and three boys may be closer to the mark. Eugene Waith’s casting of the play for twenty-five men and two boys is clearly on the high side.8 The Spanish Tragedy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ghost of Andrea (chorus). Revenge (chorus). King of Spain (ii, iv, vii, xx, xxii, xxvii). Don Cyprian (ii, vii, xx, xxii, xxvi, dly 16 xxvii); Edmund Earl of Kent (masque iv). Lord General (ii); Robert Earl of Gloucester (masque iv); Serberine (viii, xi); Hangman (xiv, dly 17 xv); 1 Petitioner (xxi); Royal Train (xxvii). Hieronimo (ii, iv, viii, x, xiv, dly 10 xv, xix, dly 3 xx, dly xxi, dly 115 xxii, xxiv, xxvi, dly 10 xxvii). Lorenzo (ii, iv, dly 9, v, dly 6 vi, viii, x, xii, xviii, xx, xxii, xxiv, xxvii). Balthazar (ii, iv, dly 9, v, dly 6 vi, viii, xii, xviii, xxii, xxiv, xxvii). Horatio (ii, iv, vi, viii, xxvii as corpse); Hymen (xxiii). Portuguese Ambassador (iv, vii, ix, xx, xxvii); Spanish Army (ii). Spanish Army (ii); Viceroy of Portugal (dly 68 iii, ix, xx, xxvii). Spanish Army (ii); Alexandro (dly 68 iii, ix); Deputy (xiv); Don Pedro (xxii, xxvii). Spanish Army (ii); Viluppo (dly 68 iii, ix); 1 Watch (xi); 1 Officer (xiv); 1 Portingale (xix); 2 Petitioner (xxi); Royal Train (xxvii). John of Gaunt (masque iv); Pedringano (dly 50 v, dly 42 vi, viii, x, dly 26 xi, xiv); Don Bazulto (xxi); Royal Train (xxvii). Army (ii); Scutcheon (iv); 1 Portuguese Nobleman (ix); 2 Watch (xi); 2 Officer (xiv); Christophil (xvii); 2 Portingale (xix); 3 Petitioner (xxi); Servant (dly 115 xxii).

16. Bel-Imperia (iv, vi, viii, x, xvii, dly 24 xviii, xxii, xxiv, xxvii). 17. Isabella (viii, xvi, xxv). 18. 1 Scutcheon (masque iv); Lorenzo’s Page (x, xii, dly 11 xiii, dly 16 xiv, xviii); 1 Torchbearer (xxiii). 19. 2 Scutcheon (masque iv); 2 Portuguese Nobleman (ix); 3 Watch (xi); Isabella’s Maid (xvi); Servant (xxi); 2 Torchbearer (xxiii).

8. Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 233; Titus Andronicus, ed. Waith, 216–17.

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We have used the quarto of 1592, and our casting scheme therefore does not cover the “scenes added” to the 1602 edition. Don Cyprian and the Lord General, important members of the Spanish court in scene ii, are conspicuously absent in the heavily demanding masque scene at the Spanish court, scene iv. This suggests they may have been used as players in the masque scene. If so, the play’s only “redoubling” would occur in the line assigned to Don Cyprian. A Looking Glass for London and England 1. 2. 3. 4.

15.

Rasni (i, v, vii, ix, xiii, xvi, dly 56 xvii, xx). Sicilia (i, vii, ix, xiii, xvi, dly 56 xvii, xx); Lord (v). Crete (i, vii, ix, xiii, xvi, dly 56 xvii, xx); Lord (v). Paphlagonia (i, v, vii); 1 Merchant (dly 55 viii, xi); Soothsayer (dly 101 ix, xiii, xvi); Lord (xx). Oseas (ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii, viii, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv). Angel (ii, viii, xii, xv, xviii); Lord (xx). Peter, a Ruffian (iii, vii); Jonas (dly 100 viii, xii, xv, dly 127 xvi, xviii, xx). Adam the Clown (iii, vii, xiv, xvi, xix). 2 Ruffian (iii, vii); 1 Sailor (dly 127 viii, xi); Soothsayer (dly 101 ix, xiii, xvi); 2 Searcher (xix). Usurer (iv, vi, xv, xvii, xx); 2 Merchant (viii, xi); Lord (xiii). Thrasibulus (iv, vi, ix, xv, xx); Lord (xiii). Alcon (iv, vi, ix, xv, xx); Lord (xiii). Mizaldo, a Lawyer (vi); Ship’s Master (viii, xi); Lord (xiii, xvi, xx). Radagon (i, v, ix); Governor of Joppa (xi); Priest of the Sun (xiii); Evil Angel (xvii); 1 Searcher (xix). Judge (vi); Smith, Adam’s Master (dly 78 vii, x); Smith, Devil (xiv).

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Remilia (i, v); Samia (ix, xv). Alvida (i, v, vii, xiii, xvi, dly 34 xvii, xx). Lady to Alvida (vii); Clesiphon, a lad (ix, xv). Attendant Lady (v, xiii, xvi, dly 34 xvii, xx); 2 Sailor (viii, xi). Attendant Lady (v, xiii, xvi, dly 34 xvii, xx).

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

The most strenuous demand on the cast occurs at scenes xiii–xiv, which call for a minimum of seventeen players, fourteen adults, and three boys. John a Kent and John a Cumber 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Ranulph, Earl of Chester (ii, v, dly 186 vi, ix, xii). Mortaigue (ii); Prince Llewellen (v, dly 186 vi, ix, xii). John a Kent (i, iv, dly 212 vi, dly 20 vii, ix, xi, dly 24 xii). John a Cumber (v, dly 32 vi, dly 50 vii, ix, xii). Griffin Meridoc (i, dly 312 ii, iv, vi, viii, dly 123 ix, xi, dly 24 xii). Lord Powys (i, dly 123 ii, iv, vi, viii, dly 123 ix, xi, dly 24 xii).

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Jocelyn Denvile (i, dly 95 vi, viii, dly 123 ix, xi); 1 servant of Chester (v). Evan Griffin (i, dly 95 vi, viii, dly 123 ix); 2 servant of Chester (v, dly 104 x). Pembroke (ii, dly 173 ii, v, dly 180 vi, ix, xii). Morton (ii, dly 173 iii, v, dly 180 vi, ix, xii). Oswen (ii, dly 173 iii, v, dly 186 vi, viii, dly 200 ix, xii). Amery (ii, dly 173 iii, v, dly 186 vi, viii, dly 200 ix, xii). Turnop (dly 137 iii, v, vii, ix); Abbot (dly 104 x, xii); train of Pembroke and Morton (ii). 14. Hugh the Sexton (dly 137 iii, v, vii, ix); train of Pembroke and Morton (ii). 15. Spurling (dly 137 iii, v, vii, ix); train of Pembroke and Morton (ii). 16. Tom Taborer (dly 137 iii, v, vii, ix); train of Pembroke and Morton (ii). 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Countess of Chester (ii, iv, vi, viii, dly 123 ix, xii). Sydanen (ii, iv, dly 93 vi, viii, dly 123 ix, xii); 1 Antic (dly 255 vi). Marian (ii, iv, dly 74 vi, viii, dly 123 ix, xii); 2 Antic (dly 272 vi). Shrimp (iv, dly 47 vi, viii, dly 200 ix); 3 Antic (vi). Robert (iii); Will the boy (v); 4 Antic (dly 95 vi); the boy (ix).

We have not provided for the “consort” of Turnop & Co. called for in scene v, on the assumption that they may be instrumentalists; if they are singers, there is perhaps sufficient time, with 25 lines before their appearance and 137 lines after it, for the consort to be doubled with the Countess, Sidanen, and Marian. The antics, who must be singers and who must appear to be visibly changed by magic into Chester, Llewellen, Pembroke, and Morton, are parts for the leading boys, who are indeed available because they are required for other roles. There is also ample opportunity, with ninety-five lines preceding their appearance and several hundred following it, for the antics to be played by Turnop and the other clowns. Mortaigue, who appears only in scene i and seems to have been dropped, can be doubled by a number of actors, such as Llewellyn or John a Cumber, who do not appear in the early scenes. Maximum demand occurs in scene ix, which requires all twenty- one actors. Sir Thomas More 1. Sir Thomas More (ii, vi, viii, viiib, dly 17 ix, dly 13 x, dly 66 xi, xiii, dly 28 xiv, xvi, dly 9 xvii). 2. Francis de Bard (i); Earl of Surrey (iii, vi, dly 126 vii, dly 27 viii, viiib, x, xii, dly 120 xiii, dly 28 xiv, xvii). 3. Caveler (i); Earl of Shrewsbury (iii, vi, x, xii, dly 120 xiii, dly 28 xiv, xvii); Erasmus (viii). 4. John Lincoln (i, iv, vi, dly 102 vii); Player/Inclination, the Vice (ix); Downes (xiii); Brewer (xv); Hangman (xvii). 5. Williamson (i, iv, vi, dly 102 vii); Roper (ix, xi, xiii, dly 64 xvi); Butler (xv). 6. Sherwin (i, iv, vi, dly 102 vii); Prologue (ix); 3 Warder (xiv); Warder (xvii). 7. George Betts (i, iv, vi, dly 102 vii); Mr. Morris (viiib); Alderman (dly 75 ix); Lieutenant of the Tower (xii, xiv, xvi, dly 9 xvii).

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8. Lord Mayor (ii, vi, ix); Servant (xiii); Porter (xv); Sheriff (xvii). 9. Suresbie (ii); Crofts (vi); Other Player (ix); Mr. Catesbie (xiii, xv). 10. Lifter (ii); “some” (s.d. iv, 435, 446); Officer/Proclamation (vii); Faulkner (viiib); Clerk of the Council (x); Mr. Gough (xiii, xv). 11. Recorder (ii); Sergeant (vi); Sheriff (dly 62 vii, viiib, xviii); Bishop of Rochester (x, xii); Gentleman Porter (xiv). 12. Sir Thomas Palmer (ii, vi, dly 72 x); Randall (viii); Luggins (ix); Warder (xii, xiv); Servant (xvi); Lieutenant’s Guard (dly 9 xvii). 13. Sir Roger Cholmley (ii, vi); Officer/Keeper (dly 72 vii); Warder (xii, xiv); Lieutenant’s Guard (xvii). 14. “Another” Justice (ii); Messenger (dly 70 iii, vii); Attendant (dly 27 viii); Serving Man (ix); Purse (dly 13 x); Servant (dly 66 xi, xiii); Horsekeeper (xv). 15. Smart (ii); “some” (iv); Rafe (vii); Attendant (dly 27 viii); Serving Man (ix); Mace (dly 13 x); Servant (dly 66 xi, xiii). 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Doll Williamson (ii, iv, vi, dly 102 vii); Lady Mayoress (ix); Poor Woman (xiv). Harry (v); Lady More (ix, xi, xiii, xvi). Robin (v); 2 Officer-Prisoners (vii); Wit (ix); Roper’s Wife (xi, xiii, xvi). Kit (v); 1 Officer- Gibbet (vii); Vanity (ix). More’s daughter (ix, xiii, xvi). More’s daughter (ix, xiii, xvi).

For casting the play we use the Malone Society edition of Sir Walter Greg, which reproduces the continuous text of Hand S. We have added to the beginning of scene vi the lines (123–270) of Addition II that are in Hand D since there must have been a similar passage in the original manuscript, and we follow Greg in observing the hiatuses at the end of v, viii, and viiib. The last of these makes it impossible to observe the law of delayed reentry between viiib and ix. The play can be performed with fifteen adult actors (fourteen must speak) and six boys, all of whom must speak. This is determined by the two largest adjacent scenes, in which roles that cannot be doubled call for fourteen adult actors (twelve speakers) and four boy speakers; the two daughters of More who are mutes in this scene speak in xi, xiii, and xvi. This casting scheme does not include the mute “other ladies” of ix, and, in the same scene, it makes provision of only one actor to cover the call for “so many Aldermen as may.” Scene vii makes a heavy call for at least five Officers, two of whom must speak. Our scheme assigns the nonspeaking Officer parts to be doubled in lines belonging to boy actors. An alternative would be to assign these three (or more) roles to the mutes who fill out the corps of Aldermen in ix. Edmond Ironside 1. Canutus (i, iv, vi, viii, alarum & dly 11 ix, xi, xv, alarum xvi, xviii). 2. Edricus (i, dly 55 ii, iv, dly 15 v, dly 6 vi, viii, alarum & dly 17 ix, xi, xiii, xv, alarum vi, dly 16 xvii, dly 35 xviii). 3. Leofric (i, iii, x, xv in “other lords,” xvii in “other,” dly 35 xviii); 1 Bailiff (x).

356 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Appendix D

17. 18.

Turkillus (i, iii, x, xv in “other lords,” xvii in “other,” dly 35 xvii); 2 Bailiff (x). Canterbury (i, iv, vi, dly 56 vii, xv, xviii); Chorus (ix). Vskataulf (i, iv, vi, viii, alarum & dly 17 ix, xi, xv, xviii); Messenger (xiii). Swetho (i, iv, vi, viii, alarum & dly 17 ix, xi, xv, xviii). Southampton (i, iv, vi, viii, alarum & dly 17 ix, xi, xv, xviii). Edmond (iii, viii, alarum & dly 11 ix, dly 24 x, xiii, xv, alarum & dly 21 xvi, dly 19 xvii, dly 35 xviii). Alfricke (iii, x, xiii, xv, xvii, dly 35 xviii). Edricke (v); York (vii, xv in “other lords,” xvii in “other,” dly 35 xviii); Gunthranus (xiv). Stich (v, dly 75 vi, x, dly 6 xii, xvii). 1 Countryman (i); 1 Banquet (iv); Messenger (vi, assigned to “Gibson” in ms); 1 Danish Soldier (viii, alarum & 11 ix, xi, xv, xviii); Messenger (vi); 1 Bluecoat (Roger) (dly 108 xii). 2 Countryman (i); 2 Banquet (iv); 2 Danish Soldier (viii, alarum & dly 11 ix, xi, xv, xviii); 2 Bluecoat (dly 108 xii). 1 Pledge (vi, assigned to “Grad.” in ms); Danish herald (viii); 3 Danish Soldier (xv); Vlfkettle (xvii, dly 35 xviii). 2 Pledge (vi, assigned to “Stutf.” in ms); Messenger (viii); 4 Danish Soldier (xv); 3 English Soldier (xviii). 1 English Soldier (vi, alarum & 11 ix, dly 24 x, xv); Goodwine (xiii, xviii). 2 English Soldier (vi, alarum & 11 ix, dly 24 x, xv); Aylward (xiii, xviii).

19. 20. 21. 22.

Edrick’s Wife (v); Emma (xiv, xviii). Egina (iv, xv, xviii). Prince Alphred (xiv). Prince Edward (xiv).

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

Four Danish soldiers are required to speak in scene xv, but in other scenes we have, according to our usual rule, limited their number to two. Even by this rule, the most demanding scene, xviii, leaves us short one English soldier, unless the presence of Goodwine and Aylward (who enable Edmund’s party to outbalance Canutus’s by two) can be considered to fulfill that role. All eighteen male lines are required to speak. None of the four roles for boys can be doubled. One of the princes must be small enough to be set on Emma’s knee, the other small enough to be “in her arme.” The First Part of King Henry VI 1. Talbot (iv, alarum v, vii, dly 44 viii, dly 11 ix, xiii, xv, dly xvi, dly 20 xvii, xx, alarum xxi, alarum xxii); Shepherd (xxvi). 2. Bedford (i, vii, dly 41 viii, dly 55 xiii); York (x, dly 32 xi, dly 8 xii, dly 55 xiii, xv, dly 18 xvi, xviii, xxv, dly 150 xxvi); 1 Ambassador (xxiii). 3. Gloucester (i, iii, xiixv, dly 18 xvi, xxiii, xxvii). 4. Exeter (i, xii, xv, dly 18 xvi, xxiii, xxvii); Woodvile “within” (iii). 5. Warwick (i, x, xii, xv, dly 18 xvi, xxvi); Sir William Lucy (xviii, xxii); 2 Ambassador (dly xxii).

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6. Winchester (i, iii, xii, xv, dly 18 xvi, xxiii, xxvi). 7. Charles/“Dolphin” (ii, dly 91 v, alarum vi, dly 48 vii, xiii, dly 17 xiv, xxii, xxiv, xxvi); Master Gunner (iv); Mortimer (xi). 8. Alanson (ii, vi, dly 39 vii, xiii, dly 27 xiv, xxii, xxiv, xxvi); 1 Lord Mayor’s Officer (dly 68 iii); General of Bordeaux (xvii). 9. Reignier (ii, vi, dly 39 vii, dly 32 xiii, xxiv, dly 130 xxv, dly 124 xxvi); Vernon (x, xv, dly 77 xvi); Lord Mayor (dly 68 iii, xii); French Herald (xxii). 10. Suffolk (x, xii, xv, xvi, xxv, xxvii); Gargrave (iv). 11. Bastard (ii, vii, xiii, dly 27 xiv, xxi, xxiv); Glansdale (iv); Lawyer (x). 12. Somerset (i, x, xii, xv, dly 18 xvi, xix); 2 Lord Mayor’s Officer (iii); Legate (xxiii); 1 Fiend (xxv). 13. Salisbury (iv); Burgundy (vii, dly 41 viii, xiii, dly 67 xiv, xxii, xxiv, dly 34 xxv); Governor of Paris (xvi). 14. English Captain (viii, dly 60 ix, dly 155 xiii, xix); Basset (xv, dly 77 xvi); Talbot’s Servant (xxii); 1 Messenger (i, dly 110 iv); 1 Gloucester’s Servant (iii, dly 85 xii); 1 Jailer (xi); English Soldier crying “A Talbot!” (vii); 2 Fiend (xxv). 15. Sir John Fastolfe (dly 155 xiii, xvi); 2 Messenger (i, xxviii); 2 Gloucester’s Servant (iii, dly 85 xii); 2 Jailer (xi); 1 English Soldier (vi, dly 39 vii, viii, dly 60 ix, xxv, dly 150 xxvi); 1 Body bearer (xii). 16. 3 Messenger (i); 1 Warder (iii); 2 English Soldier (vi, dly 39 vii, viii, dly 60 ix, xxv, dly 150 xxvi); Talbot’s Trumpet (xvii); York’s Trumpet (dly 56 xviii); 1 Lord Mayor’s Attendant (xii); 1 “Others”(xvi); 2 Body bearer (xxii). 17. French Drum (ii); Talbot’s Drum (dly 20 xvii); French Sergeant (vii); French Scout (xxiv); 1 French soldier (dly 69 xiii); Countess’s Messenger (dly 75 viii, dly 11 ix); 2 Lord Mayor’s Attendant (xii); 1 Chair for Bedford (dly 23 & 2 alarums xiii); 1 York’s “many soldiers” (dly 56 xviii); 1 Somerset’s “Army” (dly 7 xix). 18. 2 French Soldier (ii, vi, dly 69 xiii, xxii, xxv); 1 French Sentinel (dly 20 vii); Countess’s Porter (ix); 2 Chair for Bedford (dly 23 & 2 alarums xiii); 1 Winchester’s Servant (dly 145 iii, xii); 2 York’s “many soldiers” (xviii); 2 Somerset’s “Army” (dly 7 xix). 19. 3 French Soldier (ii, vi, dly 69 xiii, xxii, xxv); 2 French Sentinel (dly 20); 2 Winchester’s Servant (dly 145 iii; xii); 3 York’s “many soldiers” (xviii); 3 Somerset’s “Army” (xix). 20. Pucelle (ii, v, alarum vi, dly 48 vii, xiii, dly 27 xiv, xii, xxiv, alarum xxv, dly 150 xxvi). 21. King (xii, xv, dly 18 xvi, xxiii, xxvi); Master Gunner’s Boy (iv); Talbot’s Son (xx, alarum xxi, alarum xxii). 22. Countess of Auvergne (ix); Princess Margaret (xxv). Sixteen of the lines for adults are required to speak, thirteen in major roles. Reignier does not appear, as expected, among the French party during the juxtaposed scenes with the highest demands (xiv/xv–xvi) because he must double Vernon. Hard-pressed are the six hired men in lines 14–19! Talbot’s Trumpet must (with a possible fifty-six-line delay) double as York’s Trumpet, and lines 17–19, normally French soldiers, must supply the

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“many soldiers” of York and the “Army” of Somerset. Even so, our casting leaves us short one French soldier in scene xiii. A larger cast of extras than we supply would probably have been desirable. “Harey the vj” lies at the upper limit for the casting of other texts known to have been performed at the Rose by Lord Strange’s Men. All of our “candidate” plays for the repertory as well can be cast within the numbers required for 1 Henry VI, a reasonably secure attribution to the company. 2 Henry VI 1. King Henry (i, iii, v, vii, ix, dly 174 x, dly 113, xi, xv, xx, xxii, alarums, xxiii). 2. Duke Humphrey (i, dly 109 ii, dly 147 iii, v, vii, dly 67 viii, dly 116 ix, dly 234 ix); Walter Whitmore (xii); Old Clifford (xix, dly 6 xx, xxii, alarums xxiii). 3. Salisbury (i, iii, vi, ix, dly 282 x, dly 124 xi, xxii, xxiv); Smith the Weaver (xiii, alarum xiv, xvii, alarums xviii, alarum xix, dly 8 xx). 4. Warwick (i, iii, vi, ix, dly 282 x, dly 113 xi, xxii, alarums xxiii, dly 72 xxiv); John Holland (xiii, alarum xiv, xvii, alarums xviii, alarum xix, dly 8 xx). 5. Cardinal Beaufort (i, iii, v, ix, dly 66 x, dly 210 xi); Cade (xiii, alarum xiv, xvii, alarums xviii, alarum xix, xxii); Edward Plantagenet (dly 121 xxii). 6. Suffolk (i, iii, v, vii, ix, dly 57 x, xii); Dick Butcher (dly 39 xiii, alarum xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, alarum xix, dly 8 xx); Richard Plantagenet (xxii, alarums, xxiii, dly 19 xxiv). 7. York (i, iii, dly 40 iv, vi, vii, ix, xxii, alarums xxiii, dly 60 xxiv); Bevis (xiii, alarum xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, alarum xix, dly 8 xx). 8. Somerset (i, iii, ix, dly 66 x, xx, xxii, alarum xxiii); Spirit (dly 22 iv); Lieutenant (xii); Lord Say (xv, xviii). 9. Buckingham (i, iii, dly 40 iv, dly 160 v, ix, xv, dly 100 xix, dly 6 xx, xxii); Shipmaster (xii); Matthew Goffe (xviii). 10. Hume (ii, iv, vii); Simpcox (dly 100 v); Sir John Stanley (viii); Post (dly 283 ix); Vaux (dly 366 x); Mate (xii); Clerk of Chartham (dly 84 xiii); Lord Scales (xvi); Iden (xxii). 11. Peter Thump (iii, vii); Sir Humphrey Stafford (dly 40 iv, dly 131 xiii); One crying “a miracle” (dly 91 v); 1 “many commons” (x), 1 Gentleman (xii); 1 Irish Army (xxii); Plantagenet Army (dly 45 xxii); 1 Soldier (xxiv). 12. Bullingbroke (iv, vii); Beadle (dly 185 v); 1 Herald (dly 160 viii, dly 37 ix); Attendant (dly 14 x); Stafford’s Brother (xiii); 1 Citizen (xvi); Messenger (xviii); 2 Irish Army (xxii); 2 Plantagenet Army (dly 45 xxii); 2 Soldier (xxiv). 13. Horner (iii, vii); Mayor of St Albans (v); 2 Herald (ix); Attendant (dly 14 x); Sawyer (xiii, alarums xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, alarum xix, dly 8 xx); 3 Irish Army (xxii); 3 Plantagenet Army (dly 45 xxiii). 14. Messenger (ii, xv, xx); 1 Petitioner (dly 57 iii); Southwell (dly 180 iv, vii); 1 Alderman (dly 100 v); 1 Humphrey’s Servant (dly 90 viii); 1 Humphrey’s Guard (dly 24 ix); 2 “many commons” (dly 320 x); 1 “infinite others” (xiii); Soldier running (xvii); 1 Soldier (xix); 4 Irish Army (xxii); 4 Plantagenet Army (dly 45 xxii).

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15. Servant (iii, iv); 2 Alderman (v); 1 Neighbor (vii); 1 Humphrey’s Servant (dly 90 viii); 2 Humphrey’s Guard (ix), 3 “many commons” (dly 320 x); 2 “infinite others” (xiii); 2 Citizen (xvi); 1 Soldier (xix); 1 Attendant (xxii). 16. 2 Petitioner 9iii); 1 Chair bearer (v); 2 Neighbor (vii); 4 “many a commons” (x); 2 Gentleman (xii); 1 Stafford’s Soldier (dly 120 xiii); Messenger (dly 40 xv); 1 Soldier (xix); 1 Colors (xxii, xxiv); 1 Warwick’s Soldiers (dly 100 xxii). 17. Guard (iv); Falconer (dly 35 v, vii); 1 Prentice (dly 42 vii); 1 Officer (dly 15 viii); 1 Murderer (x); 2 Stafford’s Soldier (xiii); 1 “all the rest” (xviii); 2 Soldier (alarum xix); 2 Colors (xxii, xxiv); 2 Warwick’s Soldier (dly 45 xxii). 18. Guard (iv); Falconer (dly 35 v, vii); 1 Prentice (dly 42 vii); 2 Officer (dly 15 viii); 2 Murderer (x); 1 “others” (xii); Drum (xiii, xxiv); 2 “all the rest” (xviii); Irish Drum (xxii); Plantagenet Drum (dly 45 xxii). 19. 2 Chair bearer (v); Sheriff (viii), 5 “many commons” (x); 2 “others” (xxii); “others” (dly 72, xxiii). 20. Queen Margaret (i, iii, v, vii, ix, dly 66 x, xv, xx, xxii, alarum xxiii). 21. Duchess of Gloucester (ii, dly 121 iii, dly 12 iv, vii, dly 16 viii); Michael (xiii). 22. Margery Jordain (iv, vii); Simpcox’s Wife (dly 100, vii). The First Part of the Contention 1. King Henry (i, iv, vi, viii, x, dly 90 xi, dly 78 xii, xv, xix, xxi, xii). 2. Duke Humphrey (i, dly 74 ii, iv, vi, viii, ix, dly 46 x, dly 95 xi); Walter Whitmore (xiii); Old Clifford (xviii, dly 8 xix, xxi, xii). 3. Salisbury (i, iv, vii, “to them” viii, x, dly 65 xi, dly 85 xii, xxi, xii); Robin (xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, dly 8 xix). 4. Warwick (i, iv, vii, viii, x, dly 65 xi, xxi, xii). 5. Cardinal (i, iv, vi, viii, x, dly 32 xi, dly 136 xii); Cade (xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, xx); Edward Plantagenet (dly 90 xxi). 6. Suffolk (i, ii, vi, viii, x, dly 24 xi, xiii); Dick (dly 23 xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, dly 8 xix); Richard Crookback (dly 90 xxi, xxii). 7. York (i, iv, dly 75 v, vii, “to them” viii, x, xxi, xii); Tom (xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, dly 8 xix). 8. Somerset (i, iv, dly 27 x, dly 32 xi, dly 59 xix, xxixii); Spirit (dly 58 vi); Beadle (dly 136 vi); Sir John Stanley (ix); Captain (xiii); Stafford (dly 84 (xiv); Lord Say (xv, xviii). 9. Buckingham (i, iv, dly 75 v, dly 132 vi, viii, x, dly 37 xi, xviii, dly 8 xix, xxi, xxii); Shipmaster (xiii). 10. Hume (ii, dly 39 v); Armorer (iv, viii); Simpcox (dly 55 vi); Herald (dly 51 ix); Vawse (xi); Master’s Mate (xiii); alarums dly 23 Harry (xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, dly 8 xix); Young Clifford xxi, xxii). 11. Peter Thump (iii, dly 70 iv, viii); Bullingbroke (dly 39 v); Mayor of St Albans (dly 60 vi); Messenger (x); Clerk of Chattam (xiv), Lord Skayles (xvi); Matthew Goffe (xviii); Iden (xx, dly 44 xxi). 12. Messenger (ii); 1 Alderman (vi); 1 Neighbor (viii); Sheriff (dly 9 ix); 1 Cardinal’s Man (dly 107 x); 1 Murderer (dly 95 xi); 1 “other” with Suffolk (xiii); George (alarums

360

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Appendix D dly 23 xiv, xvii, alarum xviii, dly 8 xix); 1 Plantagenet Soldier (xxi); 1 Bearer of Buckingham (xxii). 1 Petitioner (iii); 2 Alderman (vi); 2 Neighbor (viii); Sheriff (dly 9 ix); 2 Cardinal’s Man (dly 107 x); 2 Murderer (dly 95 xi); 2 “other” with Suffolk (xiii); Stafford’s Brother (dly 84 xiv); Messenger (dly11 xv); Soldier running (xvii); Sergeant (alarum dly 84 xviii); 2 Plantagenet Soldier (xxi); 2 Bearer of Buckingham (xxii). 2 Petitioner (iii); “one” (v); One crying “a miracle” (dly 47 vi); 1 Prentice (viii); 1 Officer (dly 9 ix); 1 Citizen (xvi); 1 Eyden’s Man (xx); Clifford Drum (dly 90 xxi); 3 Bearer of Buckingham (xxii). 1 “others” (i, iii, v, xviii); 1 Chair bearer (vi); 2 Prentice (viii); 2 Officer (dly 9 ix); Herald (dly 25 x) 2 Citizen (xvi); 2 Eyden’s Man (xx); 1 Clifford Soldier (dly 90 xxi). 2 “others” (i, iii, v, xviii); 2 Chair bearer (vi); 1 Servant of Duke Humphrey (ix);  Herald (dly 10 x); 3 Citizen (xvi); 3 Eyden’s Man (xx); 2 Clifford Soldier (dly 90 xxi). 2 Servant of Duke Humphrey (ix); 4 Eyden’s Man (xx); 1 Warwick’s Soldier (dly 109 xxi). Drum (ix); 5 Eyden’s Man (xx); Warwick’s Drum (dly 109 xxi). 2 Warwick’s Soldier (xxi). Plantagenet’s Drum (xxi). Buckingham’s Drum (xxi). 1 Buckingham’s Soldier (xxi). 2 Buckingham’s Soldier (xxi).

24. Queen Margaret (i, iii, iv, vi, viii, x, xv, xix, xxi, xii). 25. Duchess of Gloucester (ii, iv, vii, dly 79 ix). 26. Margery Jordain (v); Simpcox’s Wife (dly 55 vi). Where the Folio text of 2 Henry VI (F) requires thirteen principal actors, six hired men, and three boys, for a total of twenty-two, the quarto of the The First Part of the Contention (Q) requires eleven principal actors, five hired men (not counting, see below, the “extras” in lines 17–23), and three boys, for a total of nineteen. This is perhaps evidence in support of the hypothesis that Q derives from an earlier version of F meant for Strange’s Men before the formation of Pembroke’s Men. The reduction in Q’s requirements for principal actors comes in scenes iii–vii, where, as Scott McMillin has shown (“Casting for Pembroke’s Men”), rearrangement of the action enables the actors playing Peter and the Armorer to double in the roles of Hume and Bullingbroke, an impossibility in F that leads to the requirement of thirteen principal actors. Q also cuts the role of Southwell, and does not require Hume, Bullingbroke, and Margery Jordain to be sentenced on stage. Both versions require the principals we have put in lines 3, 5, 6, 7, and 10 to dodge their roles as nobles with their roles as Cade and his thugs; this may have made such an amusing point that it was worth the trouble of this unusual arrangement. An unusual casting circumstance with 2 and 3 Henry VI, even more evident in the Pembroke’s versions, is the exceptional casting demands of the grand fifth- act battles.

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The staging of the battle of St. Albans in Q xxi, explicit in its calls for drums and soldiers for Plantagenet, Warwick, Clifford, and Buckingham, causes us, in lines 17–23, to violate our general rule of not calling in “extras.” The equivalent scene in Folio 2 Henry VI is less explicit on the call for extras at St. Albans, but if Q is taken as a guide (as it often is by modern editors), then drums and soldiers for the Plantagenets, Warwick and Salisbury, and Clifford (at least nine extras), coming just eighty lines after York has sent off his Irish army, drum, and colors, would have exceeded the requirements in Q. In both versions of the play, roles for all but one of the boys are eliminated or much reduced in the second half of the play, suggesting that they may have been put to use among the “extras” at St. Albans. 3 Henry VI 1. King Henry (i, vi, ix, xi, xix, xxi, xxvii). 2. York (i, dly 70 ii, iv); Speaking Father (ix); Oxford (xiii, 42, dly 22 xvi, xix, xxi, dly 57 xxii, dly 25 xxiii, xxv, alarum xxvi). 3. Richard Duke of Gloucester (i, dly 67 ii, v, dly 80 vi, alarum vii, excursions viii, x, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii, xx, dly 51 xxi, dly 10, xxii, xxiv, dly 66, xxv, alarums xxiv, dly 40 xxvii, xxviii). 4. Edward Plantagenet (i, dly 67 ii, v, dly 80 vi, alarum, vii, excursions viii, x, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii, xx, dly 51, xxi, dly 10 xxii, alarum, xxiii, dly 46 xxiv, dly 66 xxv, excursions xxiv, xxviii). 5. Warwick (i, v, dly 80 vi, alarum vii, excursions, viii, x, xiii, xv, dly 22 xvi, xix, xxi, dly 31 xxii, alarum xxiii). 6. Norfolk (i, vi); 1 Keeper (xi); Somerset (xiv, dly 27 xv, dly 22 xvi, xix, xxii, alarum xxiii, xxv, alarum xxvi); Montgomery (dly 52 xx). 7. Montague (i, v, dly 80 vi, x, xiv, xix, xxi, dly 66 xxii). 8. Clifford (i, iii, dly 26 iv, vi, viii, x); Hastings (xiv, xvi, xviii, xx, xxviii). 9. Northumberland (i, iv, vi); Speaking Son (ix); 2 Keeper (xi); King Lewis (xiii); Mayor of York (xx). 10. Westmoreland (i); Clarence (vi, alarum vii, x, xii, xiv, dly 27 xv, dly 22 vii, xix, xxi, dly 76 xxii, xxiv, dly 66 xxv, alarum xxiv, xxviii). 11. Exeter (i, ix, xxi); Rivers (dly 64 xvii); Lieutenant of Tower (xix, xxvii). 12. 1 “the rest” (i); Tutor (iii); 1 Soldier of Margaret (dly 43 iv, xxv); Messenger (vii); Non-speaking Father (ix); Bourbon (xiii); 1 Watchman (xvi); Sir William Stanley (xviii); Post (dly 76 xix); Mayor of Coventry (xxiii). 13. 2 “the rest” (i); 2 Soldier of Margaret (i, xxv); Norfolk’s Messenger (dly 205 v); Nonspeaking Son (ix); Post (xiii); Stafford (dly 39 xiv); 2 Watchman (xvi); 1 Alderman (xx); Sir John Somerville (xxii). 14. Drum (i, xx); Sir John Mortimer (dly 128 ii); Messenger (v, xxii, xxv); Nobleman (xii); Post (xiv); 1 French Soldier (xv, dly 28 xvi). 15. 1 Yorkist Soldier (i, v, dly 80 vi, x, dly 51 xxi, dly 66 xxv, alarum xxvi); 1 Messenger (dly 114 ii, xxii); 2 French Soldier (xv, dly 28 xvi); Huntsman (xviii); 2 Alderman (xx); 1 “the rest” (xxiv); Attendant (xxviii).

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Appendix D

16. 1 Yorkist Soldier (i, v, dly 80 vi, x, dly 51 xxi, dly 66 5.4 alarum xxvi); 3 Watchman (xvi); 1 Dutch Soldier (xx); 2 “the rest” (xxiv); Attendant (xxviii). 17. 1 Warwick’s Soldier (i, v); 1 Clifford’s Soldier (iii); 2 Dutch Soldier (xx); 2 Messenger (xxii); 2 “the rest” (xxiv); 3 Yorkist Soldier (xxvi). 18. 2 Warkwick’s Soldier (i, v); 2 Clifford’s Soldier (iii); 1 Montgomery’s Soldier (xx); 1 “others” (xxii). 19. 1 Norfolk’s Soldier (i); Drum (vi); 2 Montgomery’s Soldier (xx); 2 “others” (xxii). 20. 1 Norfolk’s Soldier (i); Trumpet (vi); Oxford’s Drum (xxii). 21. Trumpet (vi); Oxford’s Colors (xxii). 22. Montague’s Drum (xxii). 23. Montague’s Colors (xxii). 24. Somerset’s Drum (xxii). 25. Somerset’s Colors (xxii). 26. Clarence’s Drum (xxii). 27. Clarence’s Colors (xxii). 28. 2 Oxford’s Colors (xxii). 29. 2 Montague’s Colors (xxii). 30. 2 Somerset’s Colors (xxii). 31. 2 Clarence’s Colors (xxii). 32. 33. 34. 35.

Queen Margaret (i, iv, vi, ix, xiii, xxv, alarums xxvi); Nurse (xxviii). Prince Edward (i, iv, vi, ix, xiii, xxv, alarums xxvi). Rutland (iii); Lady Grey/Queen Elizabeth (xii, xiv, xvii, xxviii). Lady Bona (xiii); Richmond (xix); Yorkist Prince Edward (xxviii).

The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York 1. King Henry (i, vi, ix, xi, xix, xxiv). 2. York (i, dly 40 ii, iv); Speaking Father (ix); Oxford (xiiii, xvi, xix, dly 37 xx, alarums xxi, xxiii). 3. Richard Crookback (i, dly 37 ii, v, vi, viii, x, xii, xiv, dly 26 xv, dly 27 xvi, xvii, dly 47 xix, dly 11 xx, xxii, dly 34 xxiii, dly 36 xxiv). 4. Edward Plantagenet (i, dly 37 ii, v, vi, alarums vii, x, xii, xiv, dly 28 xv, dly 19 xvi, xviii, dly 47 xix, dly 11 xx, xxii, dly 34 xxiii, xxv). 5. Warwick (i, vi, alarums vii, dly 13 viii, x, xiii, xv, xix, xx, alarums xxi). 6. Norfolk (i); Tutor (iii); Norfolk’s Messenger (vi); 1 Keeper (xi); Somerset (xiv, xv, xix, dly 42 xx, alarums xxi). 7. Montague (i, dly 33 ii, xii, xiv, xx); Messenger (v); Rivers (xvii). 8. Clifford (i, iii, dly 15 iv, vi, viii, x); Hastings (xii, xiv, dly 26 xv, dly 27 xvi, xviii, xxiii, xxv). 9. Northumberland (i, iv, vi); Speaking Son (ix); King Lewis (xiii); Sir William Stanley (xvi); Sir John Montgomery (xviii). 10. Westmoreland (i); Sir John Mortimer (dly 109 ii); Clarence (vi, alarums vii, xii, xiv, xv, xix, dly 49 xx, xii, dly 34 xiii, xxv).

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11. Exeter (i, ix); Sir Hugh Mortimer (dly 109 ii); Ancient (v); 2 Keeper (xi); Pembroke (xiv); Mayor of York (xvii); Sir John Somerville (xx); Messenger (xiii). 12. Drum (i, v, xviii, xxiii); Messenger (dly 71 ii, dly 63 vi, xii, dly 82 xiv; dly 20 xix); Non-speaking Father (xii); Post (dly 123 xiii). 13. 1 Yorkist Soldier (i, iv, x, xiii, xiv, xix, xxii, dly 34 xxiii); 1 French Soldier (xv); 1 Holland Soldier (xviii); 1 Oxford’s Soldier (xx); 1 “others” (xxv). 14. 2 Yorkist Soldier (i, iv, x, xiii, xiv, xix, xxii, dly 34 xiii); 2 French Soldier (xv); 2 Holland Soldier (xviii); 2 “others” (xxv). 15. 1 Warwick’s Soldier (i); 1 Clifford’s Soldier (iii); Ancient (v); Non-speaking Son (ix); 1 “others”; 1 Edward’s Guard (xv); 1 Montgomery’s Soldier (xviii); 1 Messenger (xx); 1 Margaret’s Soldier (xxiii). 16. 2 Warwick’s Soldier (i); 2 Clifford’s Soldier (iii); Messenger (v); 2 “others” (xiii); 2 Edward’s Guard (xv); Huntsman (dly 40 xvi); 2 Montgomery’s Soldier (xviii); Messenenger (xx); 2 Margaret’s Soldier (xxiii). 17. 1 Norfolk’s Follower, if Yorkist soldiers are necessary (i); Drum (v); Somerset’s Drum (xx). 18. 2 Norfolk’s Follower, if Yorkist soldiers are necessary (i); 1 Somerset’s Soldier (xx). 19. 2 Somerset’s Soldier (xx). 20. Montague’s Drum (x). 21. 1 Montague’s Soldier (xx). 22. 2 Montague’s Soldier (xx). 23. 1 Clarence’s Drum (xx). 24. 1 Clarence’s Soldier (xx). 25. 2 Clarence’s Soldier (xx). 26. 27. 28. 29.

Queen Margaret (i, iv, vi, ix, xiii, xxiii); Nurse (xxv). Prince Edward (i, vi, ix, xiii, xxiii). Rutland (i, iii); Lady Grey/Queen Elizabeth (xii, xiv, xvii, xxv). Lady Bona (xiii); Richmond (xix); Yorkist Prince Edward.

Not counting the same need for “extras” encountered with the texts of 2 Henry VI, casting for the Folio 3 Henry VI (F) can be carried along effectively with eighteen adults (eleven principal actors and seven hired men) and four boys, while the octavo of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (O) can be cast with sixteen adults (eleven principal actors and five hired men) and four boys. There are few significant differences in the principal acting lines, except that Exeter appears to drop from the play at an earlier point in O, perhaps to cover for the Mayor of York. Below the line, F has several additional demands, including the character of Stafford, the aldermen of York, the Mayor of Coventry, and a few specific calls for “others” (xxii) or “the rest” (i) or “trumpets” (vi) not found in O. Perhaps most significantly (compare the comments on “Pembroke” in Richard III, chapter 9), by dropping Stafford from scene xiv, O highlights Pembroke alone, changing the King’s command for “Pembrooke and Stafford” to “Goe leuie men, and make prepare for Warre” (F TLN 2163– 64) to the command for “Penbrooke” to “goe raise an armie presentlie / Pitch vp my tent, for in the field this night / I meane to rest” (D5).

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McMillin (“Casting for Pembroke’s Men”) has pointed to several changes in O’s rendering of equivalent scenes in Act IV of the Folio text. Scene xv of O conflates two scenes of F (xv and xvi) and eliminates the need for the Folio’s three speaking watchmen. Scene xix of O, in conflating F xix and xxi, brings an earlier end to Exeter’s occupancy of speaking line 11, freeing it for the Mayor of York in scene xviii, and it also eliminates the Lieutenant of the Tower, who is absent in the final scene of the play as well. Because the sequence in O combines F xix and xxi to follow Edward’s appearance at York in xx, it also creates an impossible juxtaposition of Edward’s rescue in xx with Edward’s rescue in xviii. O solves this problem by moving F xvii, the dialogue between Rivers and Queen Elizabeth (scene xvii in O), to the position following Edward’s rescue. A glance at acting lines 21–29 in F and lines 17–25 in O shows that like the battle scene at St. Albans in 2 Henry VI and The First Part of the Contention, the scene at Coventry before the battle of Barnet (O scene xx, F scene xxii) pulls out all the stops in calling for “extras” unnecessary for casting anywhere else in the play.

Appendix E

Actor Comparison Chart

365

Lord Strange’s Men Edward Alleyn P [Richard Burbage] Thomas Pope P George Bryan P Will Kemp P Augustine Phillips P John Heminges P George Attewell C John Holland J Richard Cowley A mr doutone [Thomas Downton] A2 “pyk” [John Pyg] A2 [Thomas Goodale M]

Pembroke’s Men

Plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins

[Richard Burbage]

R Burbadge Mr Pope Mr Brian will foole Mr Phillips

“John Holland” 2H6

J Holland R Cowly

“Tom” 1C T “Will” 1C T “Robin” 1C Sinklo 3H6 Slie T

Lord Chamberlain’s Men Ric. Burbadge I O S V F1 Tho. Pope I O F1 George Bryan F1 Will. Kempe I F1 Aug. Philips I O S F1 Joh. Hemings I O S V F1

Richard Cowley F1

T. Goodale Will. Shakespeare I S F1 R Pallant J. Duke J. Sincler W. Sly “Lydate” “Henry VI”

Joh. Duke I Will. Slye I O S V F1

“Harry” 1C

“Sander” 1C T “Nick” 1C

Harry T. Belt H R. Gough Sander Nick Ned Kit

Hen. Condel I O S V F1 Robert Gough F1 Alexander Cooke S V F1 Nicholas Tooley F1 Chr. Beeston I

“Gabriel” [Spencer?] 3H6 “Humphrey” [Jeffes?] 3H6 [George?] “Bevis” 1C 2H6 P Privy Council Warrant 6 May 1593

3H6 Named in First Folio text of 3 Henry VI

C Named in Treasurer of the Chamber payments 1590/91

T Named in The Taming of a Shrew

A Named in Edward Alleyn letter 1 August 1593

1C Named in The First Part of the Contention (1594)

A2 Named in undated Edward Alleyn letter

I Cast list of Every Man in his Humour, Jonson Workes (1616)

J Named in MS of John of Bordeaux

O Cast list of Every Man out of his Humour, Jonson Workes (1616)

M Named in MS of Sir Thomas More (Hand C addition possibly of later date and company) 2H6 Named in First Folio text of 2 Henry VI H Apprenticed to John Heminges 1595

S Cast list of Sejanus, Jonson Workes (1616) V Cast list of Volpone, Jonson Workes (1616) F1 “Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes” in the First Folio (1623)

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NOTES

i n t roduc t ion 1. The National Archives (hereafter abbreviated TNA): Public Record Office (hereafter abbreviated PRO), PC 2/20, 351. 2. Case of Witter v. Heminges and Condell, Court of Requests Proceedings, 28 April, 17 James I (1619), as cited in Wallace, “Shakespeare and His London Associates,” 53. 3. Gurr, The Shakespeare Company. 4. Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare’s Companies, 103. 5. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 16–20. 6. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 19: Letter from Philip Henslowe to Edward Alleyn, 28 September 1593; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 7. Gurr, “The Authority of the Globe and the Fortune,” 254. 8. 14 Eliz. c. 5., in Statutes of the Realm, 4.1: 591. 9. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, 2: 68– 69; see also Fogle, “ ‘Such a Rural Queen,’ ” 3, 13. 10. Munro, “Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach,” 2. Books that have contributed to the trend are Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company; McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays; Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queens on the Early Modern Stage, especially chapter 2; Munro, The Children of the Queen’s Revels. Essential recent work on acting companies, written in a more traditional vein, is found in the books of Andrew Gurr: Shakespearian Playing Companies, The Shakespeare Company, and Shakespeare’s Opposites. 11. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men and Their Plays, xi. 12. McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More, 9. 13. Maus, “Horns of Dilemma,” 575. 14. Robert Parsons, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594), part 2, sig. Ii4.

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Notes to Pages 7–14

15. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 8v– 9; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 16. Shakespeare in Company, 56, 74. 17. As Scott McMillin observed, “Until we know the theatrical characteristics of each acting company, we do not know some of the basic facts of Elizabethan theatre history” (Elizabethan Theatre and The Book of Sir Thomas More, 9). 18. Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare’s Companies, 4. 19. Ingram, “Introduction: Early Modern Theater History,” 13. 20. McMillin, “The Sharer and His Boy,” 242.

ch a p t er 1. or igi ns of l or d s t r a nge’s m e n 1. 14 Eliz. c. 5., in The Statutes of the Realm, 4.1: 591. 2. See Coward, The Stanleys. We are following the more familiar succession numbers for this line of Derby earls from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (henceforth ODNB), rather than the Complete Peerage’s absolute succession numbers. According to the latter system, Henry, the 4th Earl in the Stanley line, was the 13th Earl of Derby. 3. For a brief synopsis of the family’s landholdings, including the estates at Lathom and Knowsley, see The Victoria History of the County of Lancaster, 3: 157– 68, 251–52. For Thomas Stanley’s principal biographical details, see Complete Peerage; the ODNB; Coward, The Stanleys, 2–19. 4. Bagley, Earls of Derby 1485–1985, 23–24. 5. Coward, The Stanleys, 12–14. 6. Coward, The Stanleys, 15. 7. See further Bean, From Lord to Patron, especially 18–22, 145. 8. The six-sheet account roll for 1459– 60 is now held at the Lancashire Record Office: DDHi, Box 23; see REED: Lancashire, lxxxix, 179. These are the heraldic minstrels adopted by many noble households in the fifteenth century, described by Westfall, Patrons and Per for mance, 64–74. 9. For the King’s Lynn reward, see Collections, 11: 50. The Grimsby account is published in REED: Lincolnshire, 1: 79. For the difficulties inherent in translating from civic accounts such terms as “fistulatores,” “ministralli,” or even the generic “mimi” or “histriones,” see Young, “Plays and Players,” 9: 2, 10: 1. 10. For payments at Rye and Battle Abbey, see REED: Sussex, 55, 59, 60, 62, 184. The payments from the coastal Kentish town records of Dover and Sandwich are in REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 351, 353, 369, 370, 374, 3: 829. In addition, a notice of two or more bearwards appears in the Magdalen College, Oxford records in December 1485: REED: Oxford, 1: 29. 11. See REED: Oxford, 1: 30; REED: Sussex, 62; REED: Somerset including Bath, 1: 42. The recorded visit of Stanley’s minstrels in company with Lord Strange’s comes from the Salisbury Corporation Ledger Book B, f. 203a, courtesy of Audrey Douglas, whose Salisbury collection will be published in the REED series.

Notes to Pages 14–15

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12. See REED: Shropshire, 1: 161– 62 for the “ludum in quarrel” and the visit of the king, queen, and prince of Wales to Shrewsbury. The “dry quarry” was an important site for communal activities in the town, first recorded in 1445–46 when a two- day play was staged there in what seems to have been a semicircular amphitheater located to the northeast of an area now known as Quarry Park (REED: Shropshire, 2: 387– 88). The ODNB notes the royal visit to Knowsley and Lathom in 1495. 13. Bodleian Library: MS. Rawlinson Poet, 143, f. 25v. For a transcription, see “The Stanley Poem,” in Halliwell, Palatine Anthology, 266– 67; full poem transcribed 208–71. 14. REED: Shropshire, 1: 173–74, 176. In 1520–21 the accountant notes that Derby’s entertainers provided music. In the same year the Countess of Derby’s musical entertainers also appeared at Shrewsbury. For a brief history of Knockin Castle, see the Venues section of the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. 15. See, for example, REED: Lancashire, l. 16. Although relevant records are lacking in this region for the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth, we can trace very few small minstrel bands with Lancashire patrons on the road elsewhere in the country during this period. See further MacLean, “A Road Less Travelled?” 17. The Selby Abbey accounts have been transcribed for inclusion in the forthcoming REED collection for Yorkshire West Riding, edited by Barbara D. Palmer and John M. Wasson. 18. There are some helpful details about these “histriones” in the civic accounts. It seems likely that Edward had one “entertainer” traveling with another patronized by his cousin Thomas, 2nd Lord Monteagle. References to the bailiffs listening to “melodiam eorum” makes it apparent that these were musicians, and in one year, 1525–26, the names Ralph Hubbard and Lokkett are supplied (REED: Shropshire, 1: 181, 182, 187); it seems likely Hubbard was touring under Derby’s patronage, while Lokkett was Monteagle’s man. 19. The Derby minstrels appearing in the Southampton records for 1526–27 were more modestly paid but may have been offering the same type of entertainment, and it is possible that Ralph Hubbard was one of those who made that journey south. A number of factors may have influenced the level of civic reward at the two locations, but it is obvious that Stanley influence was stronger in the northwest Midlands, where they held substantial estates. The 12d given to Derby’s minstrels at Southampton was an average amount for that city. By contrast, the Shrewsbury reward was consistently 6s 8d, with the additional perquisite of wine clearly indicated in 1524–25. Our thanks to Peter Greenfield, REED coeditor for the Hampshire dramatic records, for sharing his transcripts from the Southampton Book of Fines (Southampton Record Office: SC5/3/1, f. 61v). 20. Walton, Lancashire, 13. 21. Derby’s bearward was rewarded in the southeast at Lydd (22 July 1530–21 July 1531), Southampton (1530–32), Dover (1532–33, 1534–35), Rye (1533, 1534), and Folkestone (1543–44), with more than one bearward appearing in the New Romney records (1534– 35, 1543–44). In addition, along the West Midlands circuit, Derby’s bearward appeared

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22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

Notes to Page 16 at Shrewsbury several times (1532–33, 1537–38, 1542–43) and at the abbot of Worcester’s house at Crowle in 1534. See REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 684, 429, 431, 578, 771, 775; REED: Sussex, 102–4; REED: Shropshire, 1: 190, 196, 199; REED: Herefordshire/Worcestershire, 527. The Southampton record is found in Southampton Record Office: SC5/3/1, f. 67. See Collections, 11: 113–14, 148, 182 for Bury St. Edmund’s, Ipswich, and Thetford; REED: Cambridge, 1: 106, 110; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, 8: 338 for Dunmow Priory. See REED: Bristol, 43; Jackson, “Wulfhall and the Seymours,” 174; Leicester Chamberlains’ Accounts, Leicestershire Record Office: BR III/ 2/11, mb. 1, to be published in the late Alice B. Hamilton’s edition of Leicestershire for the REED series. Were the minstrels who appeared in the northeast at Skipton in 1535 the same troupe? It is impossible to be sure, just as we cannot make secure connections with the “minstrels” who appear a decade later in the Dover accounts or at Ludlow in 1550–51. See REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 446; REED: Shropshire, 1: 80. The Clifford steward’s account entry (Chatsworth House: Bolton Abbey MS 12, f. 31) will be published in the REED edition for Yorkshire West Riding. William, All the Queen’s Men, 55. Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, 104–5. The grand scale of life in the 3rd Earl’s household is reflected in the cortège of eight hundred choristers, gentlemen, esquires, heralds, poor men, and household officers that processed the two miles from Lathom to Ormskirk church on the occasion of his funeral in December 1572; see Collins, Peerage, 3: 73–76. See Coward, The Stanleys, xi–xii, for a brief account of the various misfortunes that befell the family archives. The household expense account for July 1560 through July 1561 and the regulations have been published with the household expenses of Henry, the 4th Earl, for 1587– 90, in Raines, The Stanley Papers. Raines, The Stanley Papers, 6. The Historie of the most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth, Late Queene of England (1630), Book 2: 51. Of the known gentry households, there is only a Shireburn of Stonyhurst rental and account book covering 1567–71. Of the principal towns on established per formance routes, only Liverpool and Chester have records before 1572 (the year of Earl Edward’s death), and these are very limited. See further REED: Lancashire; REED: Cheshire including Chester. It is worth noting also that a bearward was circulating late in the 1550s in the north, appearing at Shrewsbury and York, and again in 1563– 64 at Newcastle, Beverley, and Leicester. An isolated payment to Derby’s bearwards also occurs in the Dover accounts for 1566– 67. See REED: Newcastle upon Tyne, 45; REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 466, 799; REED: Shropshire, 1: 206; and REED: York, 1: 330. The Leicester Chamberlains’ Account is in Leicestershire Record Office: BR.III/2/31, mb. 1. We are grateful to Diana Wyatt for access to her transcripts from the Beverley Town Accounts (East Riding of Yorkshire Archive Office: BCII/6/27, mb. 3).

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32. Our thanks to Andrew Taylor for a copy of his transcription from Bodleian Library: MS Ashmole 48 in advance of publication in his book, Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel. Sheale’s epitaph for Margaret, the Countess of Derby and Edward’s second wife, is included in the same manuscript; her death in 1558 helps to date both the poem and the MS. 33. Although Sheale lived in Tamworth, Staffordshire, it is apparent that he received direct payment, on occasion, from his patron and that there must have been some personal contact with the family, even though he was not a resident member of the household. For further analysis of Sheale’s career and repertoire, as well as MS Ashmole 48, see Taylor, Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel. 34. Fowler, Literary History, 99–100. 35. Firth, “The Ballad History of the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII,” 22. On the provenance and purpose of the Stanley poems, see Lawton, “Scottish Field”; Taylor, “The Stanley Poem and the Harper Richard Sheale.” 36. Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels, 24. 37. Machyn, London Provisioner’s Chronicle, f. 71. 38. Machyn, London Provisioner’s Chronicle, ff. 142v–43; Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, 2nd ed. (1586), 1207. 39. Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, 1206. 40. Nichols, Progresses . . . of Queen Elizabeth, 1: 181, 206, 215. 41. See REED: Bristol, 71; REED: Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, 300; REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 1: 193. The Southampton Steward’s Account entry occurs in Southampton Record Office: SC5/1/45, f. [13v] and the Maldon Chamberlains’ Account in the Essex Record Office: D/B3/3/252, mb. 4. The Winchester Chamberlains’ Account (Hampshire Record Office: W/E1/93, mb. [5]) appears in Cowling, “An Edition of the Records.” 42. See REED: Cambridge, 1: 249; Chambers, “Players at Ipswich,” 264; REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 1: 196, 2: 467, 699, 799; REED: Devon, 239; REED: Bristol, 77. The Beverley record comes from the Governors’ Minute Book, East Riding of Yorkshire Archive Office: II/7/2, f. 86v. 43. See Chambers, “Players at Ipswich,” 270, 272; REED: Norwich 1540–1642, 63; REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 471, 554; REED: Somerset including Bath, 1: 12, 13; REED: Bristol, 117. The two Southampton payments appear in the Stewards’ Accounts and Book of Fines, respectively (Southampton Record Office: SC5/1/48, f. [15]; SC5/3/1, f. 184v). 44. REED: Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, 306; REED: Devon, 68, 157, 158; REED: Somerset including Bath, 12. See also the Winchester Chamberlains’ Accounts (Hampshire Record Office: W/E1/102, mb. 5d, W/E1/103, mb. 5); our thanks to Alexandra Johnston for access to her transcript from the Abingdon Chamberlains’ Accounts (Berkshire Record Office: A/FA c/1, f. 178v), to be included in her Berkshire edition for REED. 45. See REED: Coventry, 265, 286, 294; Stratford upon Avon Council Book A (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: BRU 2/1, p. 95); Leicester Chamberlains’ Accounts (Leicestershire Record Office: BRIII/2/47 mb. 1; BRIII/2/48, mb. 1; BRIII/2/50, mb. 1);

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Notes to Pages 19–21

Nottingham Chamberlains’ Accounts (Nottinghamshire Record Office: CA 1617, f. 3v; CA 1619, f. 3v; CA 1620, f. 4; CA 1621, f. 4v); REED: Newcastle upon Tyne, 60. 46. For the court calendar and Tilney’s par ticular interests in promoting the troupes of his extended family, see McMillin, “Queen’s Men and the London Theatre,” 11–12; Barroll, “Social and Literary Context,” 22. 47. For details and the court calendar of plays, see Astington, English Court Theatre, 190, 230. 48. See REED: Lancashire, 46. 49. Further analysis of this notable event and the newly formed company of actors can be found in McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men. 50. See further MacLean, “Tracking Leicester’s Men,” 261– 62. There is an odd, isolated payment at Ipswich on 7 August 1592 to “therll of Darbys players and to the Lorde admirals players” (Chambers, “Players at Ipswich,” 277). It seems likely that this may have been an error, given the complete lack of evidence for a troupe patronized by the 4th Earl over the previous decade. Furthermore this is the year when Strange’s men are on record elsewhere with the Admiral’s Men, so a confusion as to which Stanley was patron of this troupe seems a plausible explanation (see, e.g., REED: Shropshire, 1: 277). 51. Coward, The Stanleys, 33–34; De legationibus, libri tres, quoted by Coward, 39n22. 52. Book of Fines, Southampton Record Office: SC5/3/1 f. 165v. 53. REED: Devon, 156. Full details of all references to the touring records of professional companies cited from published REED volumes can be found on the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. 54. Robert Langham: A Letter, 48. 55. See Chambers, “Players at Ipswich,” 269; Nottingham Chamberlains’ Accounts, Nottinghamshire Record Office: CA 1613, p. 7. 56. TNA: PRO, AO.3/907, p. 117. See also Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 2: 352–58 for further instances of Italian players in England. 57. REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 470. Other records of tumbling performers in the provinces during the same period occur in the southwest and at Cambridge, but they are not specifically identified as Italian. See REED: Devon, 67, 154; REED: Cambridge, 1: 273. 58. Our search of published and in progress REED collections has yielded only five such acts with patrons: the Prince’s tumbler, 1474–75 and seven “saltores” of the Earl of Somerset, 1483– 84, both at Barnstaple (REED: Devon, 34, 36); the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports’s tumbler in Sandwich, 1510–11 (REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 833); and at Selby Abbey, the Prince’s tumblers, c. 1480 and Thomas Darcy’s tumbler, c. 1500 (Selby Bursars’ Accounts, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull: DDLO/20/6, mb. 8 and Yorkshire Archaeological Society: MD282, mb. 2). 59. Philip Butterworth describes some of the more interesting examples in his chapter “Feats of Activity: Juggling, Tumbling and Dancing on the Rope,” in Magic on the Early English Stage, 26–48. 60. See Foster, Alumni oxonienses, 4: 1409; the 1572–73 account entry in REED: Oxford, 1: 155.

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61. From the queen’s letter in the Cecil papers at Hatfield House dated 6 December 1571, Hatfield House: CP 158, no. 147. 62. See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4: Appendix A, 88– 97. 63. REED: Herefordshire/Worcestershire, 436. 64. For Faversham’s adjacent rewards of 6s 8d to both Strange’s and Derby’s players, see REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 554. For the 5s 2d reward to Strange’s and the 4s to Derby’s at Bath in 1578–79, see REED: Somerset including Bath, 1: 12. Derby’s Men received 15s at Bath in 1580– 81, while Strange’s earned 7s 9d. 65. REED: Devon, 156. 66. Collections, 6: 16. Strange’s tumblers received £10 on 15 January 1579/80, recorded in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber. 67. For the £10 payments at Westminster (28 December 1581) and 1 January 1582/83 at Windsor, see Collections, 6: 19, 21. 68. TNA: PRO, AO.3/907, p. 244. 69. Collections, 6: 22. 70. Collections, 6: 23, 24. Chambers’s suggestion that a reference to “Mr Standleyes Boyes” with John Symons in the 1585/86 Christmas court records may indicate a return to Lord Strange’s patronage is implausible, given Ferdinando Stanley’s noble status. Also the 1585– 86 Faversham record cited as further evidence of the troupe’s continuing existence is misdated by almost a decade: see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 119, compared with REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 554, 559. 71. For details of the Queen’s Men tours, 1588– 90, see McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 178– 80. The Nottingham entry is in the Nottingham Chamberlains’ Accounts, Nottinghamshire Record Office: CA 1629, p. 11. 72. The only known 1584– 85 appearance can be found in the Beverley Town Accounts for the year (East Riding of Yorkshire Archives: BCII/6/37, mb. 3). The other tour stop was at Barnstaple in 1583– 84 (REED: Devon, 45). 73. The musicians’ entries are published in Adams, Household Accounts, 352–53 and REED: Coventry, 323. The Nottingham entry is in Nottingham Chamberlains’ Accounts, Nottinghamshire Record Office: CA 1625, f, 13. 74. William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of . . . Princesse Elizabeth (1630), Book 3: 136. 75. Farington, Farington Papers, 134. 76. See Harland, Lancashire Lieutenancy, 205– 6. 77. Harland, Lancashire Lieutenancy, 200n27. 78. William Smith and William Webb, A Discription Historicall and Geographicall of the Countie Palatine of Chester (1656), 204. 79. BL: Harley 1926, f. 88, © The British Library Board. 80. Derby Household Book, Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 23, col. 3. 81. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, pp. 28, col. 1; 31, col. 1; 40, col. 2. 82. Cunningham, “Henry VII, Sir Thomas Butler and the Stanley Family,” 220–21. See also Hicks, “Richard, Duke of Gloucester and the North”; Jones, “Richard III and the Stanleys.” 83. Pronay and Cox, Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 179.

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Notes to Pages 27–31

84. The Chronicle of Fabyan (1542), f. 463; Thomas and Thornley, Great Chronicle of London, 231, 237–38. 85. More, Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 2: 45–50. 86. Vergil, Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, 212–26. 87. ODNB. 88. Hanham, Richard III and His Early Historians, 134. 89. “Bosworth ffeilde,” in Hales and Furnivall, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, 3: 233– 59; “The most pleasant Song of Lady Bessy,” in Halliwell, Palatine Anthology, 1–105. 90. “Of the Princesse Elizabeth,” in Halliwell, Palatine Anthology, 60. 91. ODNB. 92. Bodleian Library: MS. Rawlinson Poet. 143, f. 22. On early frictions between Gloucester and the Stanleys, see Jones, “Richard III and the Stanleys.” 93. Sir William’s rebellion is treated with some sympathy in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1634), which also features, in the prominent role of Henry VII’s advisor, Christopher Urswick, the Stanley client and chaplain. 94. Machyn, London Provisioner’s Chronicle, f. 20v; MacCulloch, “Vitae Mariae Angliae Reginae,” 284. 95. 6 December 1571, Hatfield House: CP 158, no. 147; for a similar interpretation of this letter, see Zevin, The Life of Edward Stanley, 247–48. 96. Halliwell, Palatine Anthology, 93. 97. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 9. An almost complete transcription of the Derby Household Book was edited, with extensive notes, by Raines, The Stanley Papers. 98. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 13, col. 1. The dramatic records from the Derby Household Book have been published in REED: Lancashire, 179– 82. In some instances, after rechecking the original MS, our pagination differs. 99. Evelyn MS 258b was formerly among the Evelyn family papers on deposit at Christ Church Oxford. The account book was discovered by Sally-Beth MacLean (see “Leicester and the Evelyns,” 493). A full transcription is provided by Adams, Household Accounts. The MS was purchased by the British Library in 1995 and has been catalogued as Additional MS 78,178. All references are cited from the MS. 100. BL: Additional MS 78,178, ff. [11v], [14], © The British Library Board. See further MacLean, “Tracking Leicester’s Men,” 246–71. 101. See Adams, Household Accounts, 22–23, 27–29, 429 for precise details. 102. BL: Additional MS 78,178, f. [51], © The British Library Board. 103. BL: Cotton Vespasian CXIV, f. 320, col. B, © The British Library Board. 104. Adams, Household Accounts, 369–75, edits complementary disbursements from another Leicester account book, the Staunton MS for 1585– 87, lost in a fire at the Shakespeare Memorial Library, Birmingham in 1879. See especially 370–71. Leicester’s Men are likely to have performed at the sumptuous banquet hosted by the earl at Delft; see Strong and Van Dorsten, Leicester’s Triumph, 40–41. 105. MacLean, “Leicester and the Evelyns,” 490, 493; Adams, Household Accounts, 374. Sir Philip Sidney referred to “will, my lord of lester iesting plaier” in a letter from Utrecht to Sir Francis Walsingham on 24 March 1585/86 (BL: Harley 287, f. 2, © The

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British Library Board). Other players must have been released that same spring for their English touring season, which focused on the southwest via the Thames Valley in the early spring; see the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. 106. Stow, The Annales of England (1600), 1199. 107. MacLean, “Leicester and the Evelyns,” 492, 493. 108. Per formances at these foreign courts may also have highlighted the arts of tumbling and music: the performers are called “instrumentister och springere” in Bolte’s transcripts from the Elsinore Register, “Englische Komödianten in Danemark und Schweden,” 101; see also Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 271–73. See also Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), sig. E1; Sjögren, “Thomas Bull and Other ‘English Instrumentalists’ in Denmark”; Baldwin, Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, 74–76. It is clear from English civic records that another section of Leicester’s troupe was again touring the English provinces from at least January through the spring and summer of 1587. 109. The players are named—Edward Alleyn (still identified as a Lord Admiral’s man), William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan “being al one companie”—for the purpose of this tour license. TNA: PRO, PC 2/10, p. 351. 110. Leicester’s biographer, Simon Adams, suggests that the “best explanation” of Dudley’s early years “is that he was attached to the household of Edward, prince of Wales, in the early 1540s. Although he is not found in any of the extant lists of the king’s henchmen or the ‘young lords’ educated with Edward, a number of them became his lifelong friends: Henry Sidney (1529– 86), Henry Hastings, third earl of Huntingdon (1536?– 95), Henry Stanley, fourth earl of Derby, and, possibly, George Talbot, sixth earl of Shrewsbury” (ODNB). 111. REED: Cheshire including Chester, 2: 868–74. 112. BL: Cotton Vespasian CVIII, f. 100, dated 28 February 1587/88, © The British Library Board; but also see f. 30. 113. Suggested by Fogle, “ ‘Such a Rural Queen,’ ” 9–10. The marriage was sharply criticized by some for diminishing the noble line of Stanley through union with a gentry family, yet the marriage was a happy one, with a solid Protestant pedigree on both sides; see Peck, “ ‘The Letter of Estate,’ ” 34, which transcribes the following from one libelous MS: “And how hee disparges the n[ob]le blud of the lande, witnes the match he made be twixte a meane knights daughther and the noble Earle of Darbies sone and heire.” 114. BL: Additional MS 78,178, f. [56v], © The British Library Board; see also Adams, Household Accounts, 352–53. 115. Nottingham Chamberlains’ Accounts, Nottinghamshire Record Office: CA1625, f. 13, and REED: Coventry, 322. 116. See REED: Coventry, 290, 320–21. The relevant wardens’ account covers the period 14 November 1587 through 4 December 1588. 117. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 18, col. 2. 118. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 20, col. 1. 119. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 20, col. 1.

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Notes to Pages 33–40

120. The vagaries of scribal practice in the period make the absence of the possessive form “Heskethes” inconclusive. 121. REED: Lancashire, 160. 122. The most extensive discussion of the subject is E. A. J. Honigmann’s in Shakespeare: “The Lost Years,” an influential book favoring a recusant Shakespeare. Skeptics include, among others, Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire; Douglas Hamer, “Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?”; and, more recently, Robert Bearman, “ ‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’ Revisited.” 123. Honigmann, Shakespeare, 34–35, notes the arrest and suggests that Shakeshafte may have moved on quickly if indeed he ever was in the employ of Hesketh in 1581. 124. In addition to the skeptics cited earlier on the position that the “William Shakeshafte” mentioned in Hoghton’s will was not the “William Shakespeare” from Warwickshire but a member of the Lancashire Shakeshaftes, see the recent evidence that the younger William Shakeshafte, glover of Preston, was connected with the Heskeths and Hoghtons and therefore likely the person mentioned in Hoghton’s will: Parry, “New Evidence on William Shakeshafte and Edmund Campion.” 125. See, for example, Raines, The Stanley Papers, 46; Thaler, “Faire Em,” 657. 126. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 25, col. 2. 127. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 36, col. 2. 128. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 9, col. 2. 129. See White, Theatre and Reformation, 62– 66. 130. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 26, col. 2.

ch a p t er 2. l or d s t r a nge’s m e n i n l on d on, 158 9 –15 93 1. Letter to Lord Burghley, 6 November 1589, BL: Lansdowne 60, f. 46; Privy Council Minute, 12 November 1589, TNA: PRO, PC 2/16 , f. 388. 2. “An Epistle to the Terrible Priests,” in Pierce, Marprelate Tracts, 45–46. 3. Martins Months minde (1589), sig. F2. 4. Mar-Martine (1589), in Lyly, Complete Works of John Lyly, 3: 426. 5. A Whip for an Ape (1589), in Lyly, Complete Works of John Lyly, 3: 421. 6. Martins Months minde (1589), sig. E3v. 7. The First Parte of Pasqvils Apologie (1590) and Pasqvill’s Retvrne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 135, 83. 8. A Countercuffe giuen to Martin Iunior (August 1589) and Pasqvill’s Retvrne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 59, 100. 9. “The Protestation of Martin Marprelate,” in Black, Marprelate Tracts, 204. 10. Pasqvill’s Returne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 100. 11. “The Protestation of Martin Marprelate,” in Black, Marprelate Tracts, 204. 12. Martins Months minde, sig. E4; Theses Martinianae, in Pierce, Marprelate Tracts, 330. 13. Pappe with an Hatchet, in Lyly, Complete Works of John Lyly, 3: 408. 14. Pasqvill’s Retvrne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 92. 15. Theses Martinianae, in Pierce, Marprelate Tracts, 331–33.

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16. An Almond for a Parrat, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 3: 342. For speculations on Kemp as a theatrical anti-Martinist, see Poole, “Saints Alive!”; Dusinberre, “Topical Forest.” 17. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, 38. 18. Martins Months minde, sigs. A2v, H2. 19. An Almond for a Parrat, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 3: 355. 20. Pappe with an Hatchet, in Lyly, Complete Works of John Lyly, 3: 408; An Almond for a Parrat, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 3: 374; A Countercuffe giuen to Martin Iunior, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 64. 21. Pappe with an Hatchet, in Lyly, Complete Works of John Lyly, 3: 408. 22. Pasqvill’s Retvrne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 73, 75, 94; An Almond for a Parrat, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 3: 341–42. 23. BL: MS Lansdowne 60, f. 46, © The British Library Board. 24. TNA: PRO, PC 2/16, f. 389. For an account of this proposal in the context of the Marprelate controversy, see Dutton, Mastering the Revels, 74–79. 25. An Almond for a Parrat, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 3: 348, 354. 26. See Honigmann, “John a Kent and Marprelate,” especially 290. See also chapters 4 and 7 below. 27. TNA: PRO, PC 2/16, f. 389. 28. London Metropolitan Archives: COL/RMD/PA/01/2, p. 17. 29. BL: Lansdowne 20, pp. 23–24, © The British Library Board. 30. BL: Lansdowne 20, pp. 23–24; TNA: PRO, PC 2/12, f. 348; TNA: PRO, PC 2/16, f. 388. See Manley, “ Why Did London Inns Function as Theaters?” 31. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4: 295– 96. 32. GL: MS 33011/3 ff. 364v, 367, cited in Capp, “Playgoers, Players, and Cross-Dressing,” 163–64. 33. TNA: PRO C 24/226, pt. 1, sheet 7. 34. TNA: PRO, C2/Eliz F8/52, from a transcription supplied by David Kathman. For our information about the Cross Keys Inn we are indebted to Kathman, “Alice Layston and the Cross Keys.” 35. See Gurr, “Henry Carey’s Peculiar Letter,” 54–55; Honan, Christopher Marlowe, 161. 36. “A Short Discourse of the English Stage,” in Love’s Kingdom (1664), sigs. G4v–5. 37. These are dimensions estimated by William Ingram on the basis of the Large and Accurate Map of the City of London published by John Ogilby and William Morgan (1676); see Wickham et al., English Professional Theatre, 296. The Ogilby and Morgan map was made after the great London fire of 1666, but property boundaries and foundation lines tended to remain the same after the fire, and the map proves accurate within feet of what has been found from early seventeenth- century documents pertaining to the Red Bull and the Boar’s Head, neither of which was damaged by the fire. 38. Kathman, “Inn-Yard Playhouses,” 163. Kathman addresses some of the controversial aspects of inns as per formance venues, and from his research on varied evidence for London inns, he argues for a more flexible approach than conventional narratives allow. The Bell, for instance, had only a narrow single yard but a hall on the upper

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Notes to Pages 46–51

floor that might better have accommodated plays, while it seems likely that the Bell Savage hosted plays as well as bearbaitings and fencing matches in one of its two yards. The Cross Keys, where Strange’s Men had performed in 1589, though it had two different street accesses, had only a single yard, so regular business might have had to halt if an audience and stage occupied the space; such temporary disruption would have to have been weighed against possible advantages of inn yard per formances to the business of the inn. 39. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 36, col. 2. 40. Polyhymnia (1590), in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 1: 233. 41. See “The Printer to the Reader,” in Lyly, Endymion, 74. 42. TNA: PRO, PC 2/18, f. 154 (5 March 1590/91); TNA: PRO, E351/542, mb. 155d. 43. The Black Book (1604), in Middleton, Works of Thomas Middleton, 8: 13. 44. Wallace, First London Theatre, 101, 127. 45. Dulwich College Archive: MS XIX, ff. 2, 3; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 120, 125. 46. See McMillin, “Building Stories”; Kathman, “Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins.” For continuing doubts and qualifications of Kathman’s reattribution, see Gurr, “The Work of Elizabethan Plotters”; Manley, “Thomas Belte.” Kathman replies to Gurr’s doubts in “The Seven Deadly Sins and Theatrical Apprenticeship.” 47. Gurr, “The Chimera of Amalgamation.” 48. TNA: PRO, PC2/20, f. 351. 49. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, ff. 13, 15–16v, 17–18, 19–20v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 50. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 21; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 51. That profit-sharing arrangement was described by Lanman in his deposition in the Bryne v. Burbage lawsuit, in Wallace, First London Theatre, 149. 52. TNA: PRO, A.O. 1/384/24, mb. 12. The Chamber Accounts, by contrast, record payment for only a single appearance: “To the Servauntes of the lord admirall and the lo Chamberlaine [Hunsdon] . . . for a plaie by them presented before her maiestie one Twelfe daie” (TNA: PRO, E351/542, mb. 79). 53. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 23; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 54. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 25; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 55. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 27; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 56. See, for 1592, Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4: 311, and for 1593, Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 260. 57. Alan Nelson, “Philip Henslowe and the Bankside Watermen: A Fresh Look at Three Familiar Documents,” delivered at the conference Who Invented the “Shakespearean Theatre?” organized by Grace Ioppolo, University of Reading, 24 November 2012, cited with permission.

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58. St. Saviour’s parish register, London Metropolitan Archives: MS P92/SAV/3001. For these figures we are grateful to Alan Nelson. See also Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society, 31. 59. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 6. It might be expected that Alleyn and the Lord Admiral’s Men would have broken with James Burbage shortly after their quarrel over the “Dyvydent money” and “the vse of the said Theater,” which, according to the initial testimony of John Alleyn (given 6 February 1591/92), came “about viij Daies after” the quarrel of the Burbages with the Widow Brayne on 16 November 1590. However, John Alleyn’s second deposition (given 6 May 1592), recounting what look to be the same events of November 1590, refers to them as occurring “about A yere past,” that is, about May 1591. See Wallace, First London Theatre, 101, 127. It is because of this second reference that scholars claim that “the Admiral’s left the Theatre in May 1591” (Greg, Dramatic Documents, 1: 23); that “after the quarrel with Burbadge in May 1591, the two companies [the ‘amalgamated’ Admiral’s and Strange’s] probably went together to the Rose” (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 120); and that Edward Alleyn made his “break from the Theatre in May” 1591 (Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 261). It may be that in May 1592 John Alleyn was alluding to the same November 1590 events he had described in February 1591/92 but that his description of events as “about A yere past” was too loose to be accurate. Alternatively there is nothing in the testimony to suggest that the Burbage-Alleyn quarrel led to an immediate departure from the Theatre, and the dating of Edward Alleyn’s transaction with John Alleyn and James Tunstall on 6 May 1591 may be connected with a division in the Lord Admiral’s Men and departure from the Theatre during the same month. 60. Richard Jones, from whom Edward Alleyn had purchased playbooks and apparel in 1589, announced to Alleyn circa February 1591 or 1592 that he was about “to go over beyond the seas with mr. browne and the company” (Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 9). Their journey is confirmed by the passport of 10 February in which Charles Howard gave permission for Jones, Browne, and others of “mes Jouers et seruiteurs” to travel on the continent; see Schrickx, Foreign Envoys and Travelling Players, 329. 61. Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), sig. Fff2. 62. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 3; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. In January 1588/89 Edward Alleyn, aged between twentythree and twenty-four, would have been at the age specified by the Custom of London for the termination of apprenticeship. 63. Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Devil (1592), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 215. 64. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 7; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 65. Pierce Penilesse his Svpplication to the Divell (1592), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 215. 66. “Epigrams LXXXIX: To Edward Alleyn,” in Jonson, Ben Jonson: Complete Poems, 63, l. 12; Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, 193; Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), f. Fff2v. 67. Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe, 9.

382

Notes to Pages 55–64

68. Perimedes The Blacke-Smith, in Greene, Life and Complete Works, 7: 8. 69. For a defense of Alleyn’s acting against myths that it was somehow old-fashioned, see Lopez, “Alleyn Resurrected.” 70. See Cerasano, “Edward Alleyn, the New Model Actor” and “Edward Alleyn: 1566–1626.” 71. For a discussion of these motives, see Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 66. 72. For the possibility that A Knack to Know a Knave was one of the Marprelate plays of Lord Strange’s Men in 1589, see Adkins, “Genesis of Dramatic Satire.” 73. Nashe, Strange Newes (1592), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 296. 74. Leicester Hall Papers Bound, Leicestershire Record Office: BRIII/18/1, f. 38, forthcoming in REED: Leicestershire, ed. Alice Hamilton. 75. Edward’s Alleyn’s letter to his wife Joan, “his good sweett mouse,” from Bristol in early August 1593 indicates he had received from her a letter delivered by “richard couley” (Dulwich College Archive: MS 1, f. 13). 76. Thomas Heywood later noted that Kemp “succeeded” Tarlton “as wel in the fauour of her Maiesty, as in the opinion & good thoughts of the generall audience” (An Apology For Actors [1612], sig. E2v). 77. REED: Somerset including Bath, 1: 15. 78. TNA: PRO, PC2/19, f. 208. 79. Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 259. 80. For an argument that success at court might not be a reflection of commercial success, see Syme, “The Meaning of Success,” 493– 94, and “Three’s Company,” 280. 81. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 4 ff. 82. Our summary of findings from the discovery and partial excavation of the Rose Theatre site is based primarily on Bowsher and Miller, The Rose and the Globe, chapters 3 and 5. 83. We are grateful to Julian Bowsher and Museum of London Archaeology for their calculation of these figures, which are based on Fig. 91 (122) and Fig. 96 (125) in Bowsher and Miller, The Rose and the Globe. 84. Pierce Penilesse his Svpplication to the Divell (1592), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 212. 85. Bowsher and Miller, The Rose and the Globe, 58–59, 118. 86. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 2v. 87. See Greenfield and Gurr, “Rose Theatre, London.” 88. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 2v, 5v, 5, 4; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 89. Carson, Companion, 15. 90. As cited in Wallace, The First London Theatre, 76. 91. See Berry, “Aspects of the Design and Use of the First Public Playhouse,” 32. We are grateful to Julian Bowsher for calling this coincidence to our attention. 92. TNA: PRO, PC2/19, f. 208 (20 February 1591/92).

ch a p t er 3. a cens us of t h e r epert ory i 1. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 7; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. All transcriptions, including the Diary folios devoted to

Notes to Pages 65–67

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

383

Lord Strange’s Men in Appendix A, are done according to paleographical guidelines developed for the REED volumes. The traveler Thomas Platter wrote of theater admissions that “anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny, but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a further door and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of all, where he not only sees everything well but can also be seen, then he gives yet another English penny at another door.” Basle University Library: Platter’s Journey 1595–1600, f. 683, in Wickham et al., English Professional Theatre, 412–13. Recalling the circumstances of the wrangling in 1590 between James Burbage and the widow of John Brayne, his partner at the Theatre, Cuthbert Burbage noted that the “players that liued in those first times had onely the profitts arising from the dores, but now the players receaue all the commings in at the dores to themselues & halfe the Galleries from the Houskeepers” (TNA: PRO, LC5/133, p. [50]). In Henslowe’s contract with his original partner in the building of the Rose, John Cholmeley, was to receive through 1595 the “moytie or one halfe of All suche some and somes of moneye gaynes profyttes and Comodytie . . . by reasonne of any playe or playes that shalbe showen or playde.” The absence of Cholmeley’s name from the diary and Henslowe’s references to “my playe howsse” suggest that “the partnership was dissolved before the theatrical entries in the Diary commence,” Dulwich College Archive: Muniments I, no. 16; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, xxxii. See Carson, Companion, 15, 20–21. For a speculative attempt to factor privileged seating into Henslowe’s receipts, see Price, “Henslowe’s ‘ne.’ ” Eccles, The Rose Theatre, 133–36. If the 1,820 persons in the galleries on 3 March 1591/92 for “harey the vj” represented the galleries’ maximum capacity, then the daily average attendance in the galleries over 134 per formances, 828 per per formance, came to an average of 45 percent capacity. By analogy, a daily average of 340 persons in the yard would be 45 percent of the largest estimated yard capacity of 750. See Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 143–46. Greg interprets “ne” to mean (1) “new to the stage,” (2) “new to the company,” and (3) “new in its par ticular form, having received alterations since it was last acted” (Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, 2: 148). For the suggestion that “ne” refers to a higher attendance fee that may have been connected to licensing fees for review by the Master of the Revels of a new or newly revised play, see Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, xxxiv. Roslyn Knutson’s “new or marketably new” may be the most flexible interpretation of “ne” (“The Repertory,” 467). Winifred Frazer (“Henslowe’s ‘ne,’ ” 34–35) has suggested “ne” designates plays performed at Newington Butts rather than at the Rose, but this does not work, since in June 1594, during the ten days the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Chamberlain’s Men were playing in combination at Newington Butts, “bellendon” was marked “ne.” Obvious errors in Henslowe’s listing of dates for May 1592 prompted Sir Walter Greg to emend all of Henslowe’s entries to eliminate playing on Sundays (Henslowe,

384

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Notes to Pages 69–79

Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, 2: 324–27), but such a thoroughgoing imposition of regularity is difficult to reconcile with many other irregularities that recur throughout the diary; see Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, xxx–xxxiii. McMillin, “Professional Playwrighting,” 226–27. See Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, chapter 3; Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, chapter 1. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 86– 87. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, 2: 149; Simpson, School of Shakspere, 1: 141; Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, 10–11. For a recent argument dating “The Plott of the Battell of Alcazar” to a revival by the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1601, see Wiggins, “Choice of Impossible Things.” “The Battle of Alcazar,” ed. John Yoklavich, in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 2: 222. For that reason, Captaine Thomas Stukeley is probably a better candidate for the “stewtly” performed ten times between December 1596 and June 1597 than for the “mvlomvrco” of Lord Strange’s Men; see Wiggins, “Things That Go Bump in the Text”; Stukeley, The Stukeley Plays, 34–48. On the prominence of “Abdelmelec” for metrical convenience, see Stukeley, Stukeley Plays, 24. Abdelmelec is given the name “Mullie Molloque” in the state papers; “Mulla Maluca” in the Dolorous Discourse, of a most terrible and bloudy Battel, fought in Barbarie (1579), passim; “Mulei Moluc” in The Historie of the Uniting of the Kingdom of Portugall and the Crowne of Castill (1600), 14–52 passim; and “Muley Maluco” in The Strangest Adventure that Ever Happened (1601), sigs. B3–B3v. In the most important of the sources for The Battle of Alcazar, John Polemon’s Second part of the booke of Battailes (1587), the name “Abdelmelec” is consistently used throughout. Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 139. Ll. 20–22, in The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed. David H. Horne, in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 1: 221. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 96, 108, 116v. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 168–70. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 9; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 180; Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, 12n. Satiro-mastix. Or The vntrussing of the humorous poet (1602), sig. E3. The workes of Beniamin Ionson (1637), 308. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, 15. Stukeley, Stukeley Plays, 19; Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 171, 175. The Battle of Alcazar, ed. John Yoklavich, in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 2: 220. An Apology for Actors (1612), sig. E3v. Greg and Boswell, Records . . . of the Stationers’ Company, 44. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2: 293.

Notes to Pages 79–85

385

29. He did mark as “ne” the first per formance of the January 1596/97 revival, the first time the post-1594 Lord Admiral’s Men had performed the play at the Rose, but the notation was at some time erased (Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 55n4). 30. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 94, 106v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 31. For recent arguments that the additions in the 1602 edition are by Shakespeare, see Vickers, “Identifying Shakespeare’s Additions,” and Bruster, “Shakespearean Spellings.” 32. Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, ed. Edwards, xxi–xxvii, 141–44. For dissent from Edwards’s dating, see Freeman, Thomas Kyd, 73–74; Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 58. 33. Nashe, Works, 3: 315–16. F. S. Boas, accepting Nashe’s remarks as allusions to Kyd and The Spanish Tragedy, regarded the Menaphon epistle as a terminus ad quem for the play’s composition (Kyd, Works of Thomas Kyd, xxviii–xxx). Nashe’s editor McKerrow, however, concluded, “There is no reason for supposing either Kyd or The Spanish Tragedy to be referred to” (Works, 4: 449–51). Philip Edwards, arguing for a 1590 date of composition, followed McKerrow in maintaining there is “no likely allusion to The Spanish Tragedy” in the Menaphon preface (Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, ed. Edwards, xxiii), and Freeman (Thomas Kyd, 74) acknowledged “the understandable uncertainty” about the possible allusions. Erne (Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 52–53) argues at some length that Nashe’s comment about “thrust[ing] Elisium into hell” (Works, 3: 316) is indeed a reference to The Spanish Tragedy. 34. In comparing scholars who are besotted with superficial eloquence to “him that had rather haue a new painted boxe, though there be nothing but a halter in it” (Nashe, Works, 1: 31), Nashe appears quite clearly to allude to the comic episode in which the condemned Pedringano fails to find his expected pardon in a “bare emptie box” and is hanged with a halter (sig. Fv). 35. Nashe, Works, 4:1; cf. Nicholl, A Cup of News, 284n23. 36. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, 1: 110. 37. For dissent from the idea that “Solyman and Perseda” was performed by Lord Strange’s Men “in sundry languages,” see Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, ed. Bevington, 121n. 38. Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Edwards, 137. 39. Kyd, Works of Thomas Kyd, xlii–xliii. 40. Freeman, Thomas Kyd, 176–77. 41. Kyd, [The Spanish Comedy, or,] The First Part of Hieronimo, xix. 42. The First Part of Ieronimo, in Kyd, Works of Thomas Kyd, 1.3.28; subsequent quotations of The Spanish Tragedy are from this edition. 43. Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, ed. Schick, xviii; Kyd, [The Spanish Comedy, or,] The First Part of Hieronimo, xvi; Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 21. 44. Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, prologue, l: 3. 45. Tucker Brooke thought “1590 cannot be far wrong” (Marlowe, Works, 230). Bawcutt suggests “1589 or 90” (Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, 1). James Siemon offers “some time from 1589 to 1591” (Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Siemon, xi). David Riggs prefers 1591 but allows that “1589– 90 is perfectly feasible” (World of Christopher Marlowe, 263). Park Honan suggests “1590/91, and probably by the spring 1591 at the latest” (Christopher Marlowe, 250).

386

Notes to Pages 86–89

46. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 87; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. For the lost inventory, see Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 321. 47. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 280; McMillin, “Sussex’s Men in 1594.” 48. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2: 307b. 49. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2: 304b. 50. See, for example, Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, 38. 51. Among plays of Lord Strange’s Men, Orlando Furioso was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 7 December 1593, and A Knack to Know a Knave was entered on 7 January 1593/94. Among plays of Pembroke’s Men, The First Part of the Contention was entered on 12 March 1593/94, and The Taming of a Shrew was entered on 12 May 1594. 52. Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, 192– 93. 53. Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, 17, 40; Marlowe, Complete Works, ed. Bowers, 1: 256–57. Cf. Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Ribner, 67. 54. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 38v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 55. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 94– 94v, 96; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 56. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 108, 116v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 205, 217. 57. The Massacre at Paris, ed. Edward J. Esche, in Marlowe, Complete Works, ed. Gill, 5: 296. Samuel A. Tannenbaum suggested in 1933 that the Folger leaf is among the many forgeries of the nineteenth- century literary historian John Payne Collier (Shakesperian Scraps, 177– 86). Joseph Q. Adams (“The Massacre at Paris Leaf”) immediately refuted Tannenbaum’s arguments in 1934, as did J. M. Nosworthy in 1945 (“The Marlowe Manuscript”). Esche (295– 98) argues that the manuscript is not a forgery. The Folger leaf is accepted as authentic by Maguire, “Marlovian Texts and Authorship,” 46, and by Honan, Christopher Marlowe, 276–77. In their massive twovolume study of Payne Collier and his forgeries, Arthur and Janet Freeman conclude the Folger leaf is a “genuine MS, though probably not in Marlowe’s hand” (John Payne Collier, 2: 1076). Peter Beal rejects the idea that there is “any good reason to suppose that it is a forgery” (Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1:2, 325). Van Es, not citing evidence, proposes that the leaf is “most likely . . . an addition . . . made by an anonymous patcher,” Shakespeare in Company, 26. 58. R. Carter Hailey, based on examination of the paper of the leaf, suggests that, if authentic, the scene “was probably an insertion produced subsequent to the author’s initial draft” and could therefore “represent an addition for a revival” (“The Publication Date of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris,” 35). Hailey also reopens the possibility of forgery by Collier on the grounds that Folger MS. X.d.59 (13), containing Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores, book 2, elegy 4 and like the Massacre leaf also once in the possession of Collier, is written on paper with the same watermark. 59. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 324; cf. 279– 81. 60. Marlowe, Complete Works, ed. Bowers, 1: 358.

Notes to Pages 89–96

387

61. These, noted in an unpublished dissertation by Robert Welsh, are examined in the principal editions of the play: Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and The Massacre at Paris, xlvii–xlviii; Massacre at Paris, ed. Esche, in Marlowe, Complete Works, ed. Gill, 5: 294; Marlowe, Complete Works, ed. Bowers, 1: 355–56. 62. We discount memorial reconstruction as an explanation for overlapping passages between The Massacre at Paris and Edward II (see Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies, 367; Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage, lvii; Massacre at Paris, ed. Esche, in Marlowe, Complete Works, ed. Gill, 301) on the grounds that both are works of the same author, and the two lines The Massacre shares with Arden of Feversham (see Massacre at Paris, ed. Esche, 303) on the grounds that the latter play was available in print from 1592. 63. Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, 310–11. 64. This is the view of Greg in Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements, 129. 65. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2: 303, 307b. 66. See Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 82– 85, 187– 89, 292– 93; Warren, “Greene’s Orlando.” 67. Stern, “ ‘Part’ for Greene’s Orlando Furioso.” 68. The unambiguous cases are Campaspe (1584), Sapho and Phao (1584), both performed at court in 1583– 84; Midas (entered Stationers’ Register 4 October 1591, published 1592), performed on Twelfth Night 1590/91; Old Fortunatus (entered Stationers’ Register 20 February 1599/1600, performed on St. John’s Day or New Year’s, 1599– 1600); and King Lear (entered Stationers’ Register 26 November 1607, performed 26 December 1606). If, as Greg suggested (v) in his Malone Society edition, The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality (1602) belonged to the Children of the Chapel Royal, then it was performed on 22 February 1601/2. If the “Comoedie of Titirus and Galathea” entered for Gabriel Cawood on 1 April 1585 was Lyly’s Galathea (1592)—it was reentered under that title along with Endymion and Midas on 4 October 1591— then it could have been a third among the four boys’ plays at Court in the 1583– 84 season. 69. Cf. King Leir, TLN 698–701 with Orlando Furioso, TLN 260– 62; The Old Wives’ Tale, TLN 890– 93 with Orlando Furioso, TLN 72–76. 70. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2: 307. 71. John of Bordeaux, viii. 72. See McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 190. 73. McMillin, “Ownership.” 74. Knutson, “Henslowe’s Naming of Parts.” 75. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 108v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. The title page of the 1630 quarto of Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay declares that the play “was lately plaid by the Prince Palatine his Seruants,” a company descended at two removes, by way of Prince Henry’s Men, from the Lord Admiral’s, but this may be too long after the events that concern us to be helpful. 76. John of Bordeaux, vii. 77. John of Bordeaux, vii, xiii.

388 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

Notes to Pages 96–102 Hoppe, “John of Bordeaux: A Bad Quarto that Never Reached Print.” Maguire, “(Mis)diagnosing Memorial Reconstruction,” 114–28. Nashe, Works, 1: 211–13. Nashe, Works, 1: 215, 243. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, ed. Taylor, 77; Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 1, ed. Burns, 80; Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Wilson, 102. Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 183; see also van Es, who claims that “Plays by Shakespeare, including Henry VI, Part 1, were performed by Lord Strange’s Men at Henslowe’s Rose. It is likely he had some connection with this company,” Shakespeare in Company, 52. See Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 135. Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Hattaway, 36; see also Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xxxvi; Born, “Date of 2, 3 Henry VI,” 323–34. Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, 84– 85. The Groatsworth was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 September 1592. See Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Hattaway, 38–39; Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xxxvii, li; Born, “Date of 2, 3 Henry VI,” 328–30; and Born, “Why Greene Was Angry at Shakespeare,” 138–40. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 3: 24–25. The original strong argument of these points is in Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Wilson, xi–xiii; see also Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 149–53. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2:305b, 3: 80b, 4:69. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, ed. Taylor, 13; Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 1, ed. Burns, 6. Among recent scholars holding open the possibility that 1 Henry VI was the earliest of the plays to be written are Jones, Origins, 135–38, and Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Warren, 70. Knack to Know a Knave, ed. Proudfoot, vi. A Preface, Or Rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie, in Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591), sig. vi. A pithie and plesant Comoedie of the three Ladies of London (1584), in Wilson, An Edition, 11, 137–38, 229–31. See Dessen, “Jonson’s ‘Knaue of Clubs,’ ” 584– 85. See Born, Rare Wit, 5. In “Why Greene Was Angry at Shakespeare,” Hanspeter Born has updated his earlier argument (Rare Wit, 69–142) that Shakespeare revised the part of Ethenwald as recorded in the 1594 quarto. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 274–76. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, 2: 305. Lodge and Greene, Looking- Glass for London and England, iii. Several times addressed as “Adam,” the clown is given as a speech heading the trade-name of his master, “Smith,” in 1.2, where one of his companions is given the speech heading “Clowne” (TLN 191–281). In 2.3 he is given the speech heading “Clowne” while his master is “Smith” (TLN 772– 840), and the same arrangements obtain in 3.3 and 5.1,

Notes to Pages 102–108

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

389

where he is still “Clowne” but addressed as “Adam” (TLN 1293–359). Three times in 4.4 he is given the speech heading “Adam” and is “Adam” in a stage direction (TLN 1673). He is consistently “Adam” in 5.4. See Pinciss, “Thomas Creede.” See Ryan, Thomas Lodge, 75– 80; Tenney, Thomas Lodge, 96– 98, 112–24; Paradise, Thomas Lodge, 35–42. See Maguire, “Printer and Date of Q4,” 155– 60. See Knutson, Repertory, 8– 9. See Baskervill, “Prompt Copy.”

ch a p t er 4 . a cens us of t h e r epert ory ii 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

Fair Em, ed. Greg, vi. Fair Em, ed. Greg, l. 1529; cf. also l. 101. See Wraight, Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn, 205– 8. Greenes farewell to folly (1591), sig. A4v. Fair Em, ed. Henning, 10–23. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 247. The roles of William’s two lieutenants, Dirot and Demarch, are collapsed into one; the part of the clown Trotter is dropped from the play after scene xi, at which point the actor playing him must take up the role of Zweno’s servant Rosilio; the Citizen of Westchester cannot be present for the final scene, however, because his role has probably been doubled by the actor playing the Miller. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 2: 390. See the comments on The Jew of Malta in chapter 3 and on Titus Andronicus below and in chapter 8. Fair Em, ed. Henning, 22. “William the conkerer” does not appear in Henslowe’s diary after February 1593/94, and so Fair Em (or its original) may have passed, along with Titus Andronicus, into the repertory of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. See Knutson, Repertory, 59. Lines in works by Robert Wilson similar to the ones in Fair Em attacked by Greene, together with circumstantial evidence for a religious antipathy between Greene and Wilson, have been offered in support of Wilson’s authorship; see Fair Em, ed. Henning, 54–72. For attribution to Shakespeare, see Sams, The Real Shakespeare, 163– 65. See Vickers, “Thomas Kyd, Secret Sharer.” George, “Shakespeare and Pembroke’s Men,” 315–23. Bennett, “The Word ‘Goths,’ ” 462. Bennett, “An Apparent Allusion,” 424. G. Harold Metz concludes that “the allusion in A Knack to Know a Knave is a reference to Shakespeare’s play substantially in its extant form and that Titus Andronicus must have been on the boards before the first per formance of A Knack on 10 June, 1592” (Shakespeare’s Earliest Tragedy, 192). See Gary Taylor, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Wells et al., William Shakespeare, 95. See also the Casting Study in Appendix D below.

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Notes to Pages 109–111

18. McMillin, “Sussex’s Men in 1594,” 217. 19. Jonathan Bate argues to the contrary that “an assumption made by a printer in 1600 cannot be taken as firm evidence of the original meaning of the 1594 title-page” (Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Bate, 76n1). 20. It is sometimes suggested that Titus was “ne” at the Rose in January 1593/94 because it was a “newly revised” version of a Shakespearean or non-Shakespearean original performed under the title of Titus and Vespacia; see below for our rejection of this conjecture. 21. Noted by J. C. Maxwell in the Arden 2 edition of Titus Andronicus, xxii; Maxwell (xxiii) argues for a date of “about 1590 or a little earlier.” 22. See Taylor, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Wells et al., William Shakespeare, 114; Jackson, Studies in Attribution, 148–58, 211–12; Wentersdorf, “Shakespearean Chronology and the Metrical Tests.” 23. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, Induction, ll. 95– 98. 24. See Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, chapter 3; Taylor, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in Wells et al., William Shakespeare, 115. 25. See Burnet, “Nashe and Titus Andronicus”; cf. Metz, Shakespeare’s Earliest Tragedy, 248–54. 26. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Hughes, 5. 27. There were in fact three quarto editions of the Contention, Q1 (1594), Q2 (1600), and Q3 (1619), the last of which differs in important respects from the first two, and the second of which merely reprints the first. As our argument does not involve Q2 or Q3, we refer to Q1 throughout as simply “Q.” 28. For echoes of other plays of Pembroke’s Men in The First Part of the Contention, see Shakespeare, Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, Appendix 3. 29. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts, 155. 30. See especially Prouty, The Contention and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI. 31. See Alexander, Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III; Hart, Stolne and Surreptitious Copies, 450. 32. Doran, Henry VI, Parts II and III, 27. 33. Montgomery, “Original Staging.” 34. See, e.g., Maguire, Shakespearian Suspect Texts; Urkowitz, “ ‘If I Mistake in Those Foundations.’ ” 35. Cairncross surmised that Shakespeare wrote 2 Henry VI “as part of a carefully planned tetralogy, probably in 1590, for Pembroke’s Men, or their predecessors. . . . A few cuts in personnel and extensive cuts in the text were made, probably at once. . . . Late in 1593, or early in 1594, the play was ‘reported’ by a group of Pembroke’s Men for a provincial tour, and the report sold to Thomas Millington” (Shakespeare, Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xlvi). Michael Hattaway assumes that “Shakespeare wrote the trilogy for per formance by Strange’s Men” but that “only the first part was performed by them” before “they divided, and one group, under the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke, embarked on a provincial tour that began in October and lasted about ten months” (Shakespeare, Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. Hattaway, 63– 67).

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36. Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Hattaway, 36; see also Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xxxvi; Born, “The Date of 2, 3 Henry VI.” 37. See chapter 9 for more evidence of a date of 1591/92. 38. On the other hand, as Peter Alexander noted, those responsible for The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York may have remembered a couple of lines from 1 Henry VI when they prepared their copy for publication; see Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III, 190– 91. 39. Shakespeare, Third Part of King Henry VI, xlv. 40. Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. Knowles, 121; Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Warren, 64. 41. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Warren, 66; Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, ed. Martin, 128. 42. Randall Martin notes that The True Tragedy (and perhaps, by implication, The First Part of the Contention as well) may in some respects “be closer [than F] to the play original audiences knew on Elizabethan stages” (Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, ed. Martin, 105). 43. Munday, Book of Sir Thomas More, l. 1541; unless otherwise indicated, subsequent quotations are from this edition. Our reasons for citing from this text are given below. 44. Andrew Gurr describes the company affiliation of Hand C as “a major awkwardness in Kathman’s theory” (“The Work of Elizabethan Plotters,” 74). Kathman does not accept Gurr’s linking of Hand C’s role in John a Kent and John a Cumber and Sir Thomas More to the Lord Admiral’s Men prior to Hand C’s role in Fortune’s Tennis (“Seven Deadly Sins,” 125–26). 45. Pollard, Shakespeare’s Hand, 22–30; McMillin, Elizabethan Theatre, 67–72; Long, “Occasion of The Book of Sir Thomas More”; Munday, Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, 18–19; Honigmann, “Play of Sir Thomas More.” 46. See McMillin, Elizabethan Theatre, chapter 2, and “Book of Sir Thomas More.” 47. Munday, Sir Thomas More, ed. Jowett, 424. 48. For a claim that the further blackening of the rebellion by Pembroke’s Men’s in The First Part of the Contention was a direct response to the anti-alien disorders of June 1592, see Irace, Reforming the “Bad” Quartos, 144. 49. Munday, Sir Thomas More, ed. Jowett, 425; Thompson, “Autograph Manuscripts.” Subsequent references to Jowett’s edition are cited parenthetically in the text. Thompson underlines “the improbable, even unreasonable, supposition that the author [Munday] inscribed his authenticating signature [on the space just above the date] but left the completion of the date of the composition of the MS [‘underscored with flourishes, such as usually indicate finality’] to be added by somebody else” (335). Jowett also fails to mention Thompson’s dating of Kent and Cumber to around 1590 and Sir Thomas More around 1592– 93. 50. Thus “frends, masters countrymen” (Addition I, 149), “Peace there I say, heare Captaine Lincolne speake / Keepe silence” (Original Text, 412–13), and “Peace heare me” (Addition II, 123) resemble “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” (Julius Caesar, 3.2.73) and “Hear me speak” (Coriolanus, 1.1.1), but they also resemble the Cade rebellion’s “What say ye, countrymen?” (2 Henry VI, 4.8.11), “Command silence. . . .

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Notes to Pages 116–120

Silence!” (2 Henry VI, 4.2.37–38), “Hear me but speak” (2 Henry VI, 4.7.59), “Why country-men and warlike friends of Kent” (1 Contention, sig. G3), “heare me but speake” (1 Contention, sig. G2v), “Proclaime silence . . . Silence,” (1 Contention, F3). Similarly, just as “fire the houses / of these audacious straungers” (417–18) is linked by Jowett to Julius Caesar’s “burn the house of Brutus” (3.2.224), it might instead be linked to the Cade rebellion’s “set London Bridge on fire, and if you can, burn down the Tower too” (4.6.14–15; cf. 1 Contention, sig. Gv). 51. More’s speech is an addition, possibly quite later than the Original Text, but it clearly replaced a scene where More speaks to similar effect, if not necessarily in identical terms. On the Cade rebellion as a response to the anti- alien riots of 1592, see Wilson, “Shakespeare and the Cloth Workers,” in Will Power, 23–46. On connections between 2 Henry VI and Sir Thomas More, see Chambers, “Some Sequences of Thought.” 52. It appears, for example, in the 1529 “Replicacion of the Artificers, Poor Men of the Craft of Goldsmiths,” in the 1555 Act Touching Weavers, and in a 1556 act of the London Common Council. 53. Ll. 23–25; the complete libel is transcribed in Freeman, “Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel.” 54. Sir Simonds D’Ewes, The Journals of All the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1682), 507. 55. The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 842. 56. Munday remained a messenger of Her Majesty’s Chamber, and thus in the employ of Sir Thomas Heneage, until the latter’s death in 1595. 57. Unpublished essay, “Sir Thomas More and the Absence of Evidence,” SAA Seminar on Lacunae, April 2011, p. 2. 58. Cambridge University Library copy, sig. A2. 59. Palladis Tamia (1598) ff. 283– 83v. 60. Jackson, “Deciphering a Date.” 61. Stapleton, Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, 176. 62. Metz, Sources of Four Plays, 195. 63. See Gabrieli, “Sir Thomas More”; Melchiori and Gabrieli, “Appendix,” 197–202. 64. Honigmann, “Play of Sir Thomas More,” 80– 81. 65. Bald, “Booke of Sir Thomas More”; see also Blayney, “Booke of Sir Thomas Moore,” 169. An alternative suggestion holds that after his first critical reading Tilney reviewed the additions, found them satisfactory, and made no further comment; see Munday, Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, 27. 66. McMillin found additional support for his dating of the revisions in E. K. Chambers’s view that the date of the plot of 2 Fortune’s Tennis was more likely 1602 than the date 1597– 98 suggested by Greg; see Elizabethan Theatre, 83n7. 67. McMillin, Elizabethan Theatre, 142; McMillin (146–47) found further support for his theory in the fact that Hand D does not, like B, C, and E, make any alterations to S and therefore was possibly working simultaneously with S rather than contributing at a later date. 68. Taylor, “Date and Auspices,” 118–19.

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69. Aside from the recent work by John Jowett and MacDonald P. Jackson, discussed above, the principal exception is Rutter’s (generally rejected) attribution of Hand D to Webster (“Playwrights at Work”). Rutter’s work is questioned by, among others, Taylor, “Date and Auspices,” and Forker, “Webster or Shakespeare.” Though Rutter has not been accepted on Hand D, her attribution of Sir Thomas More to Worcester’s Men circa 1601–3 is entertained by Jowett. 70. Gabrieli and Melchiori suggest that “offered for per for mance to” is preferable to “written for” (Munday, Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, 46n45). 71. The case for Chettle’s authorship of substantial portions of the original is made by Jowett, “Henry Chettle.” For the suggestion that Dekker was the author of the deleted scene of the apprentices’ attack on Sir John Munday, see Munday, Sir Thomas More, ed. Gabrieli and Melchiori, 13. 72. The inscription written halfway down the title leaf, usually read as “V Thomas Thomas” and by T. W. Baldwin as “legit V Thomas,” has sometimes been taken as the name of Thomas Vincent, said by John Taylor to be “Book-keeper or prompter at the Globe play-house neere the Banck-end in Maidlane” (Taylors feast [1638], 66). See also Baldwin, “Review of Samuel A. Tannenbaum,” 329; Munday, An Edition of Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber, ed. Pennell, 6, 52. 73. Munday, John a Kent and John a Cumber, ed. Collier, vi; Munday, The Book of Johna-Kent and John-a-Cumber, ed. Farmer, 2; Thompson, “Autograph Manuscripts”; Greg, “Autograph Plays,” 89– 90; Jackson, “Deciphering a Date.” Byrne emended Collier’s “1595” to “1596” in her edition of John a Kent and John a Cumber, 51. 74. Shapiro, “The Significance of a Date”; Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts, 101. The date of 1590 was endorsed by Long, “John a Kent and John a Cumber,” 125, 130n15. 75. The Protestion of Martin Marprelate, in Black, Marprelate Tracts, 204. 76. Wilson, “Anthony Munday, Pamphleteer and Pursuivant”; Shapiro, “The Significance of a Date,” 101. 77. Pasqvill’s Retvrne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 83. See chapter 2; Honigmann, “John a Kent and Marprelate.” 78. Knutson, “Play Identifications,” 4–5; Arrell, “John a Kent, the Wise Man of Westchester.” 79. See for example, Womersley, “Shakespeare and Anthony Munday,” 82, and Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 39–40. 80. The exact number of plays depends on whether one play or two are represented by “the second parte of tamber came” and “tambercame” and by “Q Ierusallem” and “Ierusalem”; see the discussion of “tambercame” below. 81. An Almond for a Parrat, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 3: 348, 354. 82. See Rhodes, “Titus and Vespasian.” Among those who have suggested “tittus & vespacia” is connected with Titus Andronicus are Chambers, who conjectured it was “probably the play on which was based Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus” (Elizabethan Stage, 2: 122), and Harold D. Fuller, who argued that “tittus & vespacia” was the lost source for the Dutch version of Titus Andronicus, Jan Vos’s Aran et Titus (1641) (“Sources of Titus,” 12–16). Besides Rhodes, early advocates for the view that “tittus &

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Notes to Pages 128–131

vespacia” was a siege of Jerusalem play include Greg, who found it “difficult to believe that the title could have been given to any play not connected with the siege of Jerusalem” (Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, 2: 155); Adams, Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” 10; Bennett, “An Apparent Allusion.” 83. Fuller, History of the Worthies of England, sig. Mmm3v. For our discussion of Legge and “tittus & vespacia” we are indebted to Sutton (Legge, Thomas Legge), who was not aware of Morwen or Heminges, and to Wright, Vengeance of Our Lord. 84. Palladis Tamia (1598), f. 283. 85. Adams, Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, 34. 86. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1: 319–20. 87. Middleton, Hengist King of Kent, xxin1. 88. Parallels between Legge and Nashe include the portents and omens that begin the story (Legge, ll. 89–205; Nashe 2: 61– 62), the description of the three rebel factions of Eleazar, Iechochanan, and Schimeon; the murder of the high priest Ananias (Legge, ll. 4310–20; Nashe, 2: 65), the rigged election of a rustic as a mock high priest (Legge, ll. 3775– 845; Nashe, 2: 67), the treacherous opening of the city to the Edomites (Legge, ll. 4294–309; Nashe, 2: 65), the slaughter of worshippers at sacrifice in the temple (Legge, ll. 3525– 601; Nashe, 2: 65– 66); the horrors of famine (Legge, ll. 7128– 220; Nashe, 2: 69–70); a mother’s cannibalism of her son and her offering of a Thyestean feast at which she serves up the remains as revenge (Legge, ll. 7221–7408; Nashe, 2: 71–77); Titus’s speech of moral revulsion (Legge, ll. 7446–533; Nashe, 2: 78) and his destruction of the city. 89. See Legge, ll. 4682–700; Nashe, 2: 64; Heminges, 3.6.57– 66. We cite from Morley’s edition of The Jewes Tragedy in The Plays and Poems of William Heminge. 90. See A compendious and most marueilous Historie of the latter times of the Iewes common weale (1575), sigs. R6–R6v. 91. For example, all three works note that the zealot rebels appointed a mock high priest, but it is clear that Legge’s handling of this episode derives from Josephus, while the versions of Nashe and Heminges derive from Morwen; see Lodge, f. 637, Legge, ll. 3809–10 and cf. Morwen, ff. 119v–20 with Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 2: 67 and Heminges, 3.6. Nashe’s editor McKerrow, who suggests that he may have read Josephus, observes that if Nashe read this immense work he never referred to it elsewhere in his writing. 92. Cf. Morwen, ff. 232–34 and Legge ll. 7454–507. 93. “Tittus & vespacia” may also have been indebted to the Coventry civic per formances of “The Destruction of Ierusalem,” a play commissioned in 1584 from John Smith (1563–1616), then a student at St. John’s College, Oxford, performed that year and probably revived in 1591. On the basis of the surviving record of payments to the actors, in which many of the roles mentioned overlap with names found in Josephus and Morwen, it has been suggested that the Coventry play also contained scenes involving the rival factions of Jechochanan, Schimeon, and Eleazar as well as the scene involving the widow’s cannibalism of her son. See REED: Coventry, 303– 9, 332, 587; Ingram, “Fifteen Seventy-nine and the Decline of Civic Religious Drama.” Wright (Vengeance of Our Lord, 199–200) reconstructs the probable scenes from the list of

Notes to Pages 131–137

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roles, while Sutton (Legge, Thomas Legge, 2: 612) notes that there are several mismatches in character names between the Coventry play and Legge’s. 94. The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, sig. G3, claimed that he “had a hand in” a controversial Cambridge “show called Terminus & non terminus.” 95. Legge, Thomas Legge, 2: xiv. 96. The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (1633), sig. D3v. 97. On these traditions, see Wright, Vengeance of Our Lord, especially chapter 6; Millar, Siege of Jerusalem; Hanna and Lawton, The Siege of Jerusalem, xxxvii–xli. 98. On Heminges’s heavy-handed echoes of Shakespeare, see Adams, “William Heminge and Shakespeare.” 99. Sherman, “Travel and Trade,” 109; Knutson, “Playing Companies and Repertory,” 185. 100. See, for example, Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, chapter 7. 101. The Voyages and Trauailes of Sir John Maundevile Knight (1582), sigs. Dv–D2. 102. Bennett, Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, discusses the Mandeville romance in Warner but does not consider the lost play. Moseley discusses both Warner’s romance and the lost play but does not posit a connection of the romance to the play, which he describes as a “sensationalized version of the Travels” or “the Travels turned . . . into a popular ‘Eastern’ play”; see Moseley, “Lost Play of Mandeville” and “Metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville.” 103. Albions England (1597), 231. 104. See Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, 21–25. 105. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 13, Letter from Edward Alleyn to his wife Joan, “his good sweett mouse,” circa 24 July 1593; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. In a letter sent to Alleyn on 14 August, his father-inlaw Philip Henslowe reported, “We hard that you weare very sycke at bathe & that one of your felowes weare fayne to playe your parte for you” (MS I, f. 17). 106. Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall (1602), 79. The election of Richard, Duke of Cornwall, to the kingdom of the Romans, contested by Alphonsus, King of Castile, is the subject of The Tragedy of Alphonsus Emperour of Germany, a play of uncertain date attributed to George Chapman on the title page of the quarto first published by Humphrey Moseley in 1654. Richard’s son Henry does not appear in the play. 107. Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 3: 239. 108. Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 264. 109. Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 266. 110. Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 3: 339. 111. Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 270. 112. Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 272. 113. See Bagley, Earls of Derby, 22–23; Dutton, “Shakespeare and Lancaster.” 114. Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 275. 115. Dante, The Inferno, 82. Henry’s heart was buried in Westminster Abbey near the tomb of Edward the Confessor. 116. Edward I, ed. Frank S. Hook, l. 41ff., in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 2: 73.

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Notes to Pages 138–144

117. See Knutson, “Henslowe’s Naming of Parts.” 118. See Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 115–21. Our account of “tambercame” is indebted to Bradley’s careful study of the plot, and we quote the plot from his transcription, 116–17. 119. John Frampton, A Discouerie of the countries of Tartaria, Scithia, & Cataya (1580), sig. A3. 120. The texts of Carpini and Rubruck were not published in English translation until the 1599 edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation . . . and Hakluyt’s partial translation of Rubruck was not replaced by a full version of the text until Purchas his Pilgrimes in Fiue Bookes (1625). There is nothing that we cite from these later publications that cannot be found, more diffusely, in Hetoum’s Fleur des histories (Pynson’s Lytell Cronycle, c. 1520), in The Voyages and Trauailes of Sir John Maundeuile Knight (1582), and in Ralph Newberry’s translation of The most noble and famous trauels of Marcus Paulus . . . (1579). 121. The most noble and famous trauels of Marcus Paulus, 34. 122. “The Voyage of Johannes de Plano Carpini vnto the Northeast parts of the world, in the yeere of our Lord, 1246,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 60; “The iournal of Frier William de Rubruquis . . . vnto the East parts of the worlde. Ann.Dom. 1253,” in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 108– 9; Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, 165; Burger, A lytell cronycle, 39. 123. Frampton, Discourse, f. 4v. 124. Voyages and Trauailes of Sir John Maundeuile, sig. P4; Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 107. 125. Voyages and Trauailes of Sir John Maundeuile, sig. P4v. 126. Lanquet, An epitome of chronicles (1559), 231. According to Burger, A lytell cronycle (61), “The Great Emperour of the Tartas that kept the lordshype is called Tamor Cann.” Cf. The most noble and famous trauels of Marcus Paulus, 57. 127. Purchas his Pilgrimes in Fiue Bookes . . . The Third Part (1625), 39. 128. Purchas his Pilgrimes, 387; Lazaro Sorano, The Ottoman of Lazaro Sorano (1603), 64. 129. Knolles, General historie of the Turkes, 113. 130. For the sake of clarity, we have here omitted from Bradley’s transcription the names of actors mentioned in the plot and set each of the crucial entrances on separate lines; we have done the same with our final citation from the plot, below. 131. Knutson, “The Repertory,” 472. 132. Like Richard Alleyn, who was needed as a “Portingale” and had no time to change costume for his role as a Presenter in “The Plott of the Battell of Alcazar,” Dick Jubie was forced to deliver the chorus of “tambercame” in his garb as a Persian. 133. See, for example, the summary of events in Fuller’s History of the holy warre, 208. 134. Taylor, Heauens Blessing and Earths Ioy (1613), sigs. B–B2v. 135. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, 2: 152. 136. The Palace of Pleasure (1566), f. 284. 137. The Palace of Pleasure (1566), ff. 287v– 89. 138. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 321.

Notes to Pages 145–152

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139. See, e.g., The tragedies, gathered by Jhon Bochas, of al such Princes as fell from theyr estates throughe the mutability of Fortune (1554), sig. Eev. 140. Boccaccio, Famous Women, 439. 141. See, in addition to Bale, Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of matters most special and memorable (1583), f. 137. 142. Historia de Donne Famosa. Or The Romaine Jubile (1599), sig. B2. 143. Thomas Bell, The suruey of Popery (1596), 192. 144. The Pageant of Popes, f. 56v. 145. Afterlife of Pope Joan, chapter 2. 146. The Popes Parliament, sig. Bii. 147. The second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (1567), ff. 95– 97v. 148. The second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (1567), ff. 100–100v. 149. A very frutefull and pleasant Boke called the Instructio[n] of a Christian woma[n] (1529), sigs. Eiv–Eiv v; The Defence of Good Women (1545), sigs. E, Ev. See also Wayne, “Zenobia in Medieval and Renaissance Letters.” 150. The Masque of Queenes, in Jonson, Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, 141. According to Cedric Brown, “the British library copy” of The Vision of Twelve Goddesses (1604) “has manuscript notes in a contemporary hand identifying Proserpina as the Countess Dowager” (John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments, 183n15). In a contemporary description of The Masque of Beauty by Antonio Galli, “Alicia Darbie” is identified as the Countess of Derby, Rime . . . al’ Illvstrissima Signora Elizabetta Talbot-Grey (London, 1609), 19; see Brown (15); Orrell, “Antimo Galli’s Description of The Masque of Beauty.” 151. Knutson, “Playing Companies and Repertory,” 185; Knutson, Repertory, 43. See also “The Tanner of Denmark,” Lost Plays Database, http://www.lostplays.org/index.php /Tanner_of_Denmark _The. 152. The story of Kynge Henry the IIIJth and the Tanner of Tamworthe was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1564; see Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, 27. The “manner of vncouth speech” that “the Tanner of Tamworth” used with “king Edward the fourth” was cited by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 214. 153. Martin, Edmond Ironside, 380– 81. 154. TLN 1028, cited from Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Berger and Mowat; unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references are to this edition. 155. Martin, Edmond Ironside, 363–75. 156. For the view that the peaceable Edmond is “a type of Christ” whose eventual fate is anticipated by his betrayal in this play by Edricus, who “sought like Iudas to betraye his Lord / Into the hands of blood thirstye Daines” (5.1.10–11), see Scragg, “Saxons versus Danes,” 104. 157. Martin, Edmond Ironside, 353. 158. Holinshed, The First and second volumes of Chronicles, 2: 178. 159. The use of alternative titles is noted by Arrell, “John a Kent, the Wise Man of Westchester.” Martin notes (368) that Ironside’s “Then for a manuell seale receave this kisse” (2.1.53) chimes with “set thy seal manual on my wax-red lips” in Venus and Adonis (l. 516). Less convincing is Martin’s second comparison (369) between “bristle

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Notes to Pages 152–160

poynted speeres which vpright stand” (Edmond Ironside, 4.1.65) and “His [the boar’s] brawny sides with hairy bristles armed / Are better proof than thy spear’s point can enter” (Venus and Adonis, ll. 625–26). In the one case the bristles are likened to spears, while in the other case they resist a single spear. 160. Martin, Edmond Ironside, 373. Cf. Janet Clare’s assessment that “there is little” in the play “which would have alarmed Tilney” (“Art made tongue-tied by authority,” 46). 161. Pierce Penilesse, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 176–77. 162. Pierce Penilesse, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 177. 163. Strange Newes (1592; entered Stationers’ Register 12 January 1592/93), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 294. 164. The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595), sig. E3. The phrase is not in the folio 3 Henry VI, and Randall Martin suggests it was possibly imported through memorial reconstruction into the octavo True Tragedy; see Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, ed. Martin, 128; cf. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Warren, 65– 67. 165. For a survey of many references to Alleyn’s “stalking-stamping,” “stalking steps,” and “stalking and roaring,” see Gurr, “Who Strutted and Bellowed?” 166. BL: Lansdowne MS 73, f. 12, © The British Library Board. 167. “Radical Menace,” 113–15. 168. Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 178, 225. 169. See Martin, Edmond Ironside, 42. 170. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 27v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. The now-lost 1598 inventory of “suche books as belong to the Stocke” mentions only a single title, “Hardicanewtes.” See Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 324. 171. Leland, De uiris illustribus, 246. 172. Although the combination of “manual” and “seal” in connection with kissing is unique to Ironside and Venus and Adonis, there are many instances of sealing with kisses before 1592, including Munday’s Palmerin d’Oliua (1588), Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, and Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (printed 1594 but probably performed before 1592), and “manual seal” is a common phrase in the period.

ch a p t er 5. t h e a rchi v e: s ou rces a n d ge n r es i n t h e r epert ory 1. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 19–24. 2. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 156. 3. “A cognitive ecological model dovetails well with the recent emphasis on theatrical scholarship on company- specific or reportorial histories. Each company has a distinct cognitive ecology, some more closely akin than others,” Cognition in the Globe, 153. 4. The publication of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays (1590) and Doctor Faustus (1592) was a key development in the emergence of the Elizabethan professional playwright, but this is not discernible from the title pages of these works, where Marlowe’s name does not appear.

Notes to Pages 160–164 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

399

Van Es, Shakespeare in Company, 39. Thomas Dekker, A Knights Coniuring (1607), sig. K4v. Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts, 12. Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts, 14. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 96; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. Ioppolo, Dramatists and Their Manuscripts, 29. See Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, 59– 61; Stern, Documents of Perfor mance in Early Modern England, 25; Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 66; King, Casting Shakespeare’s Plays, 6–10. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, ff. 30–33v. For our survey of Ferdinando Stanley’s patronage connections we are indebted to Heywood, Earls of Derby; Fogle, “ ‘Such a Rural Queen’ ”; Daugherty, “Question of Topical Allusion.” TNA: PRO, SP 84/44, f. 60v. See Wernham, “Christopher Marlowe at Flushing.” BL: MS Harley 6849, f. 218, © The British Library Board; fully transcribed in Freeman, Thomas Kyd, 180– 81. On the grounds that Kyd dedicated his 1594 translation of Robert Garnier’s Cornelia to Bridgett, Countess of Sussex, Arthur Freeman, Thomas Kyd, 32–37, proposed that Kyd’s lord was either Robert Radcliffe, Lord Fitzwalter and Earl of Sussex after his father’s death in December 1593, or, since Radcliffe was only twenty in 1593 and perhaps too young to have been Kyd’s “Lord” for “theis vj yeres,” his father, Henry Radcliffe, 4th Earl of Sussex. Henry Radcliffe’s career, however, was spent almost entirely in Hampshire, away from London and the court, and there is no evidence that Marlowe wrote plays for his company. More recently Lukas Erne, believing that Marlowe’s claim to be “very wel known” to Lord Strange conflicts with Kyd’s assertion that “never cold my Lordship endure” Marlowe’s name, has proposed that the patron of both Marlowe and Kyd was Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, whose company performed Edward II (Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 227–30). Several recent biographers of Marlowe adopt the view that Kyd’s patron was Lord Strange; see Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe, 228; Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, 262; Honan, Christopher Marlowe, 243. Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility, 134. A Fig for Momus (1595), sig. A2v. Of Prayer and Meditation (1592), ff. 3–4. Greene, Life and Complete Works, ed. Grosart, 7: 100. Cambridge University Library copy, sig. A2. The 1593 edition of The Defence of Contraries promised a second volume of paradoxes “vpon the good acceptation of the first Booke” (103), yet this second volume was evidently forestalled, since Munday says in the dedication of his 1602 True knowledge of a mans owne selfe that “the troubles of the time, & misinterpretation of the worke by some in authoritie, was the only cause why it went not forward” (sig. A5). See Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox, 24. Hamilton suggests the “troubles” may be related to the fact that The defence of

400

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

Notes to Pages 164–167

contraries derived from the work of a French Catholic, Charles Estienne (Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 124–25). The “misinterpretation” may have been owing, however, to the plight of the discredited Ferdinando Stanley from October 1593. No entry for the Stationers’ Register survives, but Munday’s dedication to Ferdinando as “the great and puissant Earl of Derby” clearly alludes to the recent death of the 4th Earl in September. Ferdinando’s fall from grace followed by just a few days the death of his father, so it is possible Munday was responding to the earl’s banishment from court and his loss of office by offering paradoxical consolations, “For him that hath lost his worldly Honours and Preferments: That a man ought not to be greeued, though he be despoiled of his goods and honours” and “For the Exiled: That it is better to be banished, than continue in libertie.” The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed. David H. Horne, in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 233. Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 243. “The Teares of the Muses,” in Complaints (1591), sig. E2; Colin Clouts Come home againe (1595), sig. C2– C2v. Colin Clouts Come home againe, sig. C2. Bel-vedere, or The Garden of the Muses (1600), sig. A5. See May, “Spenser’s ‘Amyntas.’ ” The longest of these poems, a parodic pastoral praise of “Phillis” that may be targeting Abraham Fraunce’s The Lamentations of Amyntas for the Death of Phillis (1587), may be partially responsible for the pastoral name “Amyntas” that Nashe and Spenser assigned to Lord Strange. The salaciousness of “My Mistress in hir brest dothe were” may help to explain Nashe’s dedication of his unpublished pornographic poem, “The Choice of Valentines,” to “the Right Honourable the Lord S.” See Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, 458. Polimanteia (1595), sig. Q2. The Shadow of Night (1594), Epistle, ll. 30–32, 462– 63 and gloss, n25, in Chapman, Poems of George Chapman, 19, 41, 45. See, e.g., Bradbrook, “No Room at the Top”; Esler, Aspiring Mind; Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals. To be sure, the Queen’s Men’s Selimus, responding to the innovative Asiatic focus of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, drew on translations of recent chronicles in order to present, highly fictionalized, the relatively recent reign of the early sixteenth- century Turkish emperor Selim I (1520– 66), “grandfather to him that now reigneth” (i.e., Amurath, 1574– 95), and to document “a most lamentable history / Which this last age acknowledgeth for true” (title page and Prologue, Selimus, Emperor of the Turks [1594], in Vitkus, Three Turk Plays, 55, 59). Bartels, Speaking of the Moor, 29. See, e.g., A dolorous discourse, of a most terrible and bloudy Battel, fought in Barbarie, the fowrth day of August, last past (1578), or “The Calamatie, and seruile bondage of Portugall, vnder the gouernment of Phillip king of Castile . . . the 5. of August 1578,” in George Whetstone, The English Myrror (1586), 84– 87. On Peele’s use of the several sources available, see The Battle of Alcazar, ed. John Yoklavich, in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 2: 226–79, 369–73; Stukeley, Stukeley Plays, 26–27.

Notes to Pages 167–171

401

34. See, e.g., A Relation of the expongnable attempt and conquest of the yland of Tercera (1584); The Explanation of the True and Lawfull Right and Tytle, of the Most Excellent Prince, Anthonie (1585); and George Peele’s, “A Farewell To the most famous Generalles of our English forces by land and Sea, Sir John Norris and Sir Frauncis Drake Knightes” (1589), ll. 23–28, in The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed. David H. Horne, in Peele, Life and Works of George Peele, 1: 221–22. That The Battle of Alcazar was probably already on the stage by the time Peele’s poem in celebration of the Norris–Drake expedition was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 23 February 1588/89 is reflected in the poem’s mention of the expedition’s farewell to London’s “Theaters and proude Tragaedians, . . . mightie Tamburlaine / . . . Tom Stukeley and the rest” (ll. 20–23). 35. Matar, Britain and Barbary, 15; Hunter, English Drama 1586–1642, 79. On the sources and contemporaneity of the play, see, in addition to Bartels, D’Amico, The Moor, chapter 1; Barroll, “Mythologizing the Ottoman”; Guinle, “Barbarous/Barbarian”; Hyland, “Moors.” 36. The Ambassage of Master Henry Roberts . . . to Mully Hamet Emperour of Marocco, in Richard Hakluyt, Principall navigations, voyages, and discoveries of the English Nation (1599), second volume, second part, 117–18. 37. A reading suggested by Matar, Britain and Barbary, 17–19. 38. For essays connecting The Spanish Tragedy to anti-Spanish sentiment and Protestant apocalypticism, see Ardolino, Apocalypse and Armada; Broude, “Time, Truth, and Right”; Fuchs, “Sketches of Spain”; Hill, “Senecan and Vergilian Perspectives”; Johnson, “Spanish Tragedy”; Mulryne, “Nationality and Language.” 39. Wilson, “Another Country,” 184. 40. See Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 297– 99, 309–12; Brooke, “Prototype”; Wilson, “Another Country.” See also Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically, chapter 6, “Alien Intelligence.” 41. See Wilson, “Another Country.” 42. Briggs, “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris”; Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 258, 284– 85. 43. See Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, 313–14. 44. Marlowe, who had visited the Guise’s own college at Rheims and traveled in the Netherlands, and Lodge, who sailed to Terceira and the Canary Islands in 1585– 86 and to Brazil in 1591, were among the best-traveled authors for Lord Strange’s troupe, but it is worth remembering also that several of the former Leicester’s Men who formed Lord Strange’s Men had themselves been with Leicester in the Low Countries and visited Elsinore. 45. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 7v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 46. The latter is conjectured by Bradley in From Text to Per for mance, 200. 47. John Case, Sphaera Civitatis (Oxford, 1588), sig. A2. On Marlowe’s possible allusion to Case and to the Latin translation of Gentillet’s Discours sur les moyens du bien gouverner (Anti-Machiavel), see Marlowe, Jew of Malta, ed. Bawcutt, 62nn1–4. 48. On the English expeditions in support of Henri IV, see MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, chapters 7– 9.

402

Notes to Pages 171–187

49. McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 134. 50. We adapt here Taylor’s description of the performative “scenario,” which “places spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics” (Archive and the Repertoire, 33). 51. Bale, The Pageant of Popes (1574), f. 56. 52. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Defence of Good Women (1545), sig. E. 53. Bartholomew Fair, Induction ll. 93– 96, in Jonson, Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, vol. 4. 54. A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610, pub. 1652), in Greville, Prose Works of Fulke Greville, 133. 55. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition, 181. 56. See Berek, “Tamburlaine’s Weak Sons.” 57. Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition, 67. 58. Greville, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, 138. 59. Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition, 39. 60. Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition, 60. 61. Greville, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, 222. 62. The practice of sensationalizing classical tragedy by contaminating it with courtly situations, erotic conflicts, and Machiavellian intrigues drawn from the novella had originated with Italian dramatists like Cinthio and Denores, who declared that “the material for the most perfect tragedy” was to be found “in a subject suited to our own days, i.e. a story from Boccaccio,” Poetica (1588), 48v, cited in Charlton, Senecan Tradition, xc. 63. Doran, Endeavors of Art, 336. See also Harbage, “Intrigue in Elizabethan Tragedy.” 64. Playes confuted in fiue actions (1582), sig. D5v. There is possible evidence of early experimentation with novella material in the titles of such lost plays as “The Three Sisters of Mantua” (Warwick’s, 1578) and “The Duke of Milan and the Marquis of Mantua” (Sussex’s, 1579). 65. For a reading that suggests that Andrea is revenged by the deaths of Castile and Lorenzo as well as that of Balthasar, see Empson, “Spanish Tragedy.” 66. Maus, “Horns of Dilemma,” 575.

ch a p t er 6. r epert oi r e 1. Introduction to A Looking Glass for London and England, in Fraser and Rabkin, Drama of the English Renaissance, 1: 383. 2. For the concept of “theatergram,” which she derives from the lazzi of commedia dell’arte, see Clubb, Italian Drama, 35. 3. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, 160. The first masque’s problematic impact on its onstage audience is discussed by Siemon, “Sporting Kyd”; its relationship to the masque in several languages is discussed by Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 97–99. 4. We paraphrase here Roslyn Knutson’s description of the techniques of repertorial expansion practiced by the Lord Admiral’s Men in Playing Companies and Commerce, 57– 61.

Notes to Pages 190–196 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

403

Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 319. Ll. 95– 96 and 107–17 of the plot, in Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 117. See Ewbank, “ ‘What Words, What Looks, What Wonders?’ ” See Zitner, “Spanish Tragedy,” 92. On staging at the Rose, including the staging of plays by the Lord Admiral’s Men, see Gurr, “Rose Repertory”; Wickham, “ ‘Heavens,’ Machinery, and Pillars”; Eccles, Rose Theatre. The Spanish Tragedy, TLN 1831. Cf. Sir Thomas More, TLN 1860, and the later plot for the Battle of Alcazar, which specifies “Enter at one d” and “att anth” for the Quarto’s confrontation at sig. D4v: see Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 122–23. The entrance of John of Bordeaux and his son Rossacler “at one dore” and “at tother dore” (l. 1246) may only be an apparent exception to this pattern, since the royal party that has summoned the two challengers has probably entered through the central door just nineteen lines earlier. Sir Thomas More, ed. Greg, 1, 583, 1674. See the apparent comparison of the ramparts of Angiers to the ramparts of Jerusalem in King John, 2.1.373– 80. On the staging of The Spanish Tragedy, see Rowan, “Staging of The Spanish Tragedy”; Tweedie, “ ‘Action Is Eloquence’ ”; Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre, 101–28; Kohler, “Kyd’s Ordered Spectacle.” A Knack to Know a Knave, TLN 372, 657, 1584; 1 Henry VI, TLN 2433–53. Some scholars believe this merely calls for an angel to escort Oseas to a chair at the side of the stage, but the person(s) responsible for the third quarto of the play, changing “set” to “let,” thought otherwise. See, e.g., Wickham, “ ‘Heavens,’ Machinery, and Pillars,” 11–12. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 2v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. Scott McMillin suggested that instead of a permanent “discovery space” recessed into the frons scenae and a gallery above, the Rose might have used a moveable scaffold, which, when curtained off below, could serve as a discovery space while also offering a platform for scenes played above (Elizabethan Theatre, chapters 5– 6). On the locales of these plays and their symbolic arrangement, see Thomson, “Marlowe’s Staging of Meaning.” See Edelman, “Battle of Alcazar.” Howard, “Dialectic and Spectacle,” 4. “The World of Wrestling,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Layers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 15–26, cited in Howard, “Dialectic and Spectacle,” 3. For a comic interpretation of the scene, see Blanc, “Barbarism in Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glass.” For the tradition of hermeneutical paradox linked to the book of Jonah, see Parker, Aesthetics of Antichrist, 28–38. Magicians and sorcerers in the repertory include Melissa in Orlando Furioso, Otanes in 1 Tamar Cham, Friar Bacon and Vandermast in John of Bordeaux, Dunstan in A Knack to Know a Knave, Pucelle in “harey the vj,” the priests of the sun in A Looking Glass, and (if, as we suspect, the plays were associated with Lord Strange’s Men) the

404

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

Notes to Pages 196–216

dueling magicians of John a Kent and John a Cumber and Eleanor Cobham and her associates in 2 Henry VI. On the performative consequences of this ambiguity, see Mangan, Performing Dark Arts, 16–17. Anthony Munday, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theatres (1580), 13. Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583), sig. L6; John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes . . . (1577), 70. Owen, An Edition of The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, 1365–70. Walsh, “Charismatic Authority and Political Subversion,” 2. Walsh highlights this reversal as part of his persuasive rejection of Richard Levin’s theory that the imperfect manuscript would have ended with a repentance like that of Greene’s Bacon. The Last Judgment, ll. 621–28 in Mills, Chester Mystery Plays, 435. Lopez, “Imagining the Actor’s Body on the Early Modern Stage,” 200. For a valuable account of the use of traditional dramaturgy in A Knack to Know a Knave, see Cox, The Devil and the Sacred, 132–36. Parker, Aesthetics of Antichrist, 183–208. Dessen, “Stagecraft and Imagery,” 72. TLN 1065. The “plot” for The Battle of Alcazar, prepared for a later revival by the Lord Admiral’s Men, calls in the scene for “Dead mens head in dishes”; see Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 123. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition, 222, 225; Edwards, “Thrusting Elysium into Hell,” 123. Fourth Addition, l. 163, in Kyd, Spanish Tragedy, ed. Edwards, 133. For the relevance of this passage to a skeptical reading of the play, see Leggatt, “ ‘A Membrane Has Broken,’ ” 229–30. Roach, Player’s Passion, 25. Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 69. Warner, Albions England (1597), 272; Orlando Furioso (1594), TLN 179. On Barabas’s eviction, typology, and the Reformation confiscation of Church properties, see Lupton, “Jew of Malta”; Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, 15; Parker, Aesthetics of Antichrist, 202–4. Honigmann, “Play of Sir Thomas More,” 79– 80. “Per formance kills belief; or rather acknowledging theatricality kills the credibility of the supernatural” (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 109). See also Bate, “Performance of Revenge.”

ch a p t er 7. p ol i t ics a n d r e l igion i n t h e r epert ory 1. TNA: PRO, PC 2/16, 12 November 1589. 2. Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 115: Proclamation 458 (16 May 1559). On the similarities of phrasing in these and similar orders, see Womersley, Divinity and State, 3.

Notes to Pages 217–221 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

405

Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 273–78. Lake and Questier, “Puritans, Papists, and the ‘Public Sphere,’ ” 592. Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 278. For a fuller discussion, see Manley, “Playing with Fire.” For a discussion of these and similar effects, see Butterworth, Theatre of Fire. The Palace of Pleasure (1566), f. 284. Kathman, “Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins,” has found evidence that the plot may date to a per formance by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men circa 1597, but this does not rule out the possibility that the play was inherited from Strange’s Men. Houlbrooke, Church Courts, 214–15; Usher, Rise and Fall, 94– 96. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, 100. Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 418. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, 75– 91; McGinn, John Penry, 134. Greene’s Orlando Furioso had perhaps belonged previously to the Queen’s Men, and there are other plays in the Queen’s Men’s repertory, such as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Old Wives’ Tale, and The Cobbler’s Prophecy, that also call for spectacular pyrotechnical effects. See Shapiro, “ ‘Tragedies Naturally Performed.’ ” On the death of Marlowe and the torture of Kyd, see Freeman, “Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel”; Nicholl, Reckoning; Rigg, World of Christopher Marlowe, chapters 14–15. The play’s movement of the scene offstage may reflect contemporary ambivalence about the cruel disfigurement of women’s bodies by hanging on the public scaffold; see Laurence, History of Capital Punishment, 9; Naish, Death Comes to the Maiden, 9; Dolan, “ ‘Gentlemen, I Have One More Thing to Say,’ ” 166. Richard Verstegan, A Declaration of the Trve Cavses of the Great Trovbles, Presvpposed to be intended against the realme of England (1592), 73; Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama, 34. Patrick Collinson also remarks that “in the . . . nasty nineties, there was a declared war against terror, aimed at puritan extremists who were allegedly prepared to use violence to achieve their ends; a war, to be sure, mostly of words, although there were three barely legal executions” (“Politics of Religion,” 78). A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the 9th of Februarie . . . (1588), 3. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I, 91– 96. Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 44–48: no. 715, “Prohibiting Unlawful Assembly by Members of Fleet,” 24 August 1589, and no. 716, “Placing Vagrant Soldiers under Martial Law,” 13 November 1589. Stow reports that the demobbed soldiers “so rudely behaved themselves about the country, about the court, and elsewhere, that many were misliked of their doings, and divers of them being apprehended, on the 27 of August one was hanged on the end of a signe at an Inne doore in the towne of Kingstone upon Thames, for a terror to the rest. The 29 of August, two more were hanged in Smithfield, two at the Tower Hill, two besides Westminster, and one at Tiborne” (The Annales of England [1600], f. 1264). Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 105– 6: no. 745, “Ordering Examination of Vagrant Soldiers,” 28 February 1591/92; Wernham, After the Armada, 417.

406

Notes to Pages 221–225

23. Wernham, After the Armada, v. 24. Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 86– 93: no. 738, “Establishing Commissions against Seminary Priests and Jesuits.” 25. Verstegan, A Declaration of the Trve Cavses of the Great Troubles, 56; Robert Parsons, An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of My L. Treasurers of Ingland (1592), 22. On anti-Burghley satire, see Perry, Literature and Favoritism, 188– 89; Adams, “Favourites and Factions,” 272–73; Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Siemon, 28–39. 26. Collinson, “The Politics of Religion,” abstract. 27. Verstegan, A Declaration of the Trve Cavses of the Great Troubles, 41, 45. 28. The Execution of Iustice in England (1583), sigs. A4, C2; A Declaration of great troubles pretended against the Realme . . . (1591), 4. 29. Edmund Bunny, The Treatise tending to Pacification, in Robert Parsons, A Booke of Christian exercise appertaining to Resolution (1584), 28. 30. Collinson, “Politics of Religion,” 78. 31. Collinson, “Politics of Religion,” 80. Peter Lake and Michael Questier similarly observe that “if the nature of the standoff with Catholicism forced the state into making and maintaining a series of distinctions between religion and politics, conscience and treason, by the same token Catholics could undermine the legitimacy of the regime by attacking and redrawing precisely those distinctions” (“Puritans, Papists, and the ‘Public Sphere,’ ” 589). 32. We borrow here from the terminology of Collinson, “Politics of Religion,” 85. 33. See Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 20, 27, 41, 145. 34. The summary that follows is drawn in part from Bagley, Earls of Derby, chapters 3, 4; Flynn, John Donne, chapter 10; Coward, The Stanleys, chapter 10; Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, passim; Canino, Shakespeare and the Nobility, chapter 6. 35. Verstegan, A Declaration of the Trve Cavses, 17, 56. 36. Henry Stanley was reported by the Spanish ambassador to be a “passionate heretic.” His 1574 report to the Privy Council “touching certain popish disorders” in Lancashire declared the county was “the very sink of popery” (Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, 259, 223). Following his 1567 separation from the Countess of Derby and his open affair with Jane Halsall of Knowsley, the ambassador declared Derby to be “therefore a Protestant” (Calendar of State Papers: Spanish, 2: 229). 37. Hatton to William Chadderton, 14 May 1583, in Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, 30. 38. See Manning, “Making of a Protestant Aristocracy”; REED: Lancashire, 21–28. 39. On Derby’s taking of the bond, see Cressy, “Binding the Nation,” 222, 229. 40. Ferdinando Stanley to William Chadderton, 21 March 1583/84, Cambridge University Library: MS Additional 17, f. 43v. 41. For Derby’s role in the Arundel trial and the suggestion that he was taking his cues from Burghley’s courtroom signals, see the transcription from the Yelverton manuscript in Pollen and MacMahon, Ven. Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, 271. 42. Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, 4: 184. 43. Sir Edward Stafford to Sir Francis Walsingham, 1 March 1584/85, in Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 19: 312.

Notes to Pages 225–232

407

44. John Caldwell, A Sermon preached before the right honorable Earle of Darbie, and diuers others assembled in his honors Chappell at Newparke in Lankashire, the second of Ianuarie . . . 1577, (1577), sigs. C8v, B8v, D8, E6v, A5– A5v. 45. Lambeth Palace Library: Talbot Papers, MS 3200, ff. 130–31; by permission of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library. 46. See Gillow, “Lord Burghley’s Map of Lancashire,” and more recently, an article that questions Gillow’s dating, Shannon and Winstanley, “Lord Burghley’s Map of Lancashire Revisited.” 47. Ferdinando Stanley to William Chadderton, 16 December 1583, Cambridge University Library: MS Additional 17, f. 42v. 48. “A Prayer of the Right honourable | ferdinando Lo: Strange in | º . 1588,” Huntington Library: MS EL 9. 49. A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594), 267, 253; italics ours. 50. “The Examination of John Flud, servante to Sire William Stanley,” in Heywood, Cardinal Allen’s Defence, xxxiv ff. 51. TNA: PRO, SP12/238, ff. 243v, 246 (21 May 1591); see Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Elizabeth, vol. 3: 1591–1594, 39–40. 52. Letter from Robert Parsons to John Sicilio and John Fixerio, priests in Lisbon, 13 April 1591, Hatfield House: CP 168/13. 53. TNA: PRO, SP 2/242, ff. 96, 207 and SP 15/32, f. 72. For the passage using cipher (SP 12/242, f. 96), we rely on the translation in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth, 1591– 94, 234. 54. Parsons, A Briefe apologie (1602), sigs. F3– F3v, citing a letter of Cardinal Allen dated 7 January 1591/92, quoted in Parry, “Context of John Shakespeare’s ‘Recusancy,’ ” 12. 55. Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, 140. 56. REED: Lancashire, 223. 57. Letter of Sir George Carey to his wife Elizabeth Spencer, 22 April 1594, regarding the death of Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby, Gloucestershire Record Office: MF 1161, Letter Book no. 2, transcribed in Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence, 474–75. 58. See Womersley, Divinity and State, 237–46. 59. On the antipuritanism of A Knack, see Cox, Devil and the Sacred, 132–36; Jones, Radical Pastoral, 160– 69. 60. Solymitana clades (The destruction of Jerusalem), in Legge, Thomas Legge, 2: 333, 353, 455. 61. Christs Teares ouer Ierusalem, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 2: 29, 65– 68. 62. Pierce Penilesse, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 174. 63. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 115. 64. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 115. 65. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 115. 66. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 114. 67. See Honigmann, “John a Kent and Marprelate.” 68. REED: Lancashire, 220.

408

Notes to Pages 232–244

69. Martins Months minde (1589; STC: 17452), sig. E3v; The First Part of Pasqvils Apologie (1590) and Pasqvill’s Retvrne to England (1589), in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 135, 83; The Protestacyon of Martin the Great, in Pierce, Marprelate Tracts, 412. 70. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 123. 71. Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics, 256. 72. Womersley, Divinity and State, 215, 217. 73. Michel Hurault, Restorer of the French Estate (1589), 6. 74. The Second part of the booke of Battailes, sigs. T3, X–Xv. 75. The Second part of the booke of Battailes, sig. Xv; A Dolorous discourse, sig. B7v. 76. The Second part of the booke of Battailes, sigs. T3v–4. 77. Matar, Britain and Barbary, 18–19; Matar, “Queen Elizabeth I through Moroccan Eyes.” 78. Bradley, From Text to Per for mance, 133; Bartels, Speaking of the Moor, 41. 79. Weil, Christopher Marlowe, 101. 80. Briggs, “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris,” 273; Weil, Christopher Marlowe, 101. 81. Womersley, Divinity and State, 139. 82. Hillman, Shakespeare, Marlowe, 80– 83. On Marlowe’s blackening of Henri III and Navarre through the use of pro- Guisard literature, see Briggs, “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris.” 83. Kirk, Mirror of Confusion, 84. 84. Briggs, “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris,” 272; Womersley, Divinity and State, 138; Thomas and Tydeman, Christopher Marlowe, 260. 85. Whetstone, The English Myrror (1586), 85. 86. Womersley Divinity and State, 140. 87. See Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce, chapter 2. 88. Restorer of the French Estate (1589), 3, 26, 12. 89. The Mutable and wauering estate of France, from the yeare of our Lord 1460, vntill the yeare 1595 (1597), “To the Reader,” unpaginated. 90. Edward Aggas, An Answeare to the Supplication (1591), sig. A2v. 91. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, ff. 8– 8v. There is a problem with Henslowe’s dates at this point, since the dating of “the tragedy of the gvyes” and “mandevell,” dated 30 and 31 January, are followed by assignment of “frier bacon” and “harey the vj” to the same dates. The sequence is clear, however. 92. Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 212. 93. Troublesome Raigne of King Iohn, sig. A2. 94. Mullaney, Place of the Stage, 82. 95. Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, 7, 13. 96. Solymitana clades (The destruction of Jerusalem), in Legge, Thomas Legge, 2: 455; Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 2: 78–79. 97. Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, 214, 177. For the dialogue with the sultan concerning the Qur’an and Christianity, see 97–104. 98. Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, 165; Richard Pynson, A lytell Chronycle (c. 1520), f. xiiii. 99. Purchas his Pilgrimes. In Five Bookes . . . The Third Part (1625), 43.

Notes to Pages 245–250

409

100. Timber: or Discoveries, in Jonson, Complete Poems, 398. 101. Robert Parsons, An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of My L. Treasurers of Ingland (1592), 50; Restorer of the French Estate (1589), 11. 102. Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 279. 103. Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 278. 104. Robert Parsons, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, 253; Ferdinando Stanley to Bishop William Chadderton, 21 March 1583/84, Cambridge University Library: MS Additional 17, f. 43v. 105. The portrait, held privately, is also reproduced and discussed in Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare, 123–24.

ch a p t er 8. t r av el s a n d per for m a nc e v e n u es 1. We are fortunate in having access to many unpublished transcripts from REED collections in progress. Only a very small number of counties in the northeast and one in the Midlands remain to be surveyed by the REED team. 2. See chapter 3 for the Cross Keys and Collections, 6: 27, for the relevant payments in the declared accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber (TNA: PRO E351/542, mb. 155d). 3. TNA: PRO, PC 2/19, pp. 414–15; published in Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. 22: 1591– 92 (1901), 549–51. A description of the disorder in early June is given in a 12 June letter from the Lord Mayor of London to Lord Burghley. For a transcript, see Chambers and Greg, “Dramatic Records from the Lansdowne Manuscripts,” 187– 89. 4. A Privy Council letter to the solicitor- general on 13 August (TNA: PRO, PC 2/19, p. 541) first refers to “the contagion of the plauge dailie Increasing in London.” It is apparent that the disease continued to cause serious concern, from a series of subsequent letters from the Privy Council to the Mayor of London and to other towns, dating from 6 September through 30 October (TNA: PRO, PC 2/20, pp. 23, 26, 45, 66, 74, 98, transcribed in Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. 23: 1592 (1901), 177, 181– 83, 203, 231, 241, 276). A Privy Council letter to the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London on 1 October criticizes them for lack of good policy and diligence in the matter and explains the queen’s continuing intention to avoid her houses in the area (TNA: PRO, PC 2/20, p. 57). Many of the key documents of control for the 1592– 93 period appear in Appendix D of Chambers’s Elizabethan Stage, 4: 310–14. For details of the serious outbreak of the plague in London in 1592– 93 especially, see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4: 347–49; Slack, Impact of Plague, 62, 151. 5. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 23; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; see chapter 2. 6. See REED: Sussex, 136, n281. Andrew Gurr’s finding for Rye in July 1593 (Shakespearian Playing Companies, 274) is misdated and is in fact this entry for 24 June 1592. 7. REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 1: 227; 2: 561, 583, 721. For more details for performance events here and elsewhere, see Appendix C. 8. REED: Bristol, 142. 9. According to Ogilby’s mileage calculations in Britannia (1675), the first comprehensive road map for the kingdom, the total distance between London and Bristol was

410

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

Notes to Pages 250–253 115 miles; sample distances are Marlborough to Calne 12.5 miles; to Chippenham 5.6 miles; to Marshfield 9.2 miles; and into Bristol 12.2 miles. See also Davison, “Commerce and Patronage.” It may be of interest that Hertford’s players performed once at court during the same Christmas season that featured Strange’s Men four times; they were also rewarded at Bristol in the same period, 6–19 August. See note 8 above. Patrick Carter, “Historical Background,” in REED: Bristol, xvii; Vanes, Port of Bristol, 19. The chamberlains’ account for 1591– 92 is apparently in chronological order: Gloucestershire Record Office: GBR F 4/3, f. 279. The payment was edited by Peter Greenfield in REED: Cumberland/Westmorland/Gloucestershire, 312. See REED: Oxford, 1: 233, 2: 1111, where note is made that the civic accounts this year are out of chronological order; REED: Coventry, 336. See REED: Cambridge, 1: 338; REED: Somerset including Bath, 1: 15. Further context is provided by the Bath chamberlain’s account, Bath Record Office: CA no. 29, mb. [1]. As Robert Alexander notes (REED: Somerset including Bath, 2: 874), the beginning of this roll’s year cannot be determined exactly, as the roll for 1590– 91 does not survive, but he assumes a starting date of June 1591 based on the accounting style of previous rolls. REED: Cheshire including Chester, 2: 619; REED: Shropshire, 1: 276, note, 2: 679; REED: York, 1: 455; REED: Newcastle upon Tyne, 90 (the last two in company with Lord Morley’s). Tittler, Architecture and Power, 143–44. For the medieval tradition of playing in such provincial venues, see MacLean, “The Southwest Entertains.” The Court Hall was declared unsafe and demolished, though its Norman cellar was incorporated in the commercial building erected on the site. Two c. 1948 photos were published in Canterbury Mayoral Quincentenary, 4 and 6. The exterior of the hall had been substantially altered and refaced by the twentieth century. Little is known about the sixteenth- century town halls at Maidstone (demolished 1762– 63) and Folkestone (demolished 1840). Faversham had three guildhalls in the Tudor period. Little other than their locations is known about the first two, but the third, with timber arcades open at the ground level, is still located at the north end of the marketplace. The second guildhall, built in 1574, was still in use when Strange’s Men paid their visit; the third was converted in 1604 from its original use as a market hall. Rye’s Tudor Court Hall above the market house stood in the butchery on the south side of the present Market Street until its demolition in 1742. For further architectural details and history, see the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. As quoted by Rigold, “Two Types of Court Hall,” 4. Gostling, A Walk in and about the City of Canterbury, 32. “Rambling observations: On some of the principal Buildings in Bristol and its Neighbourhood by an occasional visitor,” pt. 1 (23 January 1843 newspaper column pasted in a notebook, Bristol Record Office: 41923/1). A late eighteenth- century ground plan of the guildhall survives in the Bristol Record Office: Plan Book A, f. 214. The dimen-

Notes to Pages 253–259

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

411

sion of 100’ in length from the back of the hall to the front of Small Street is noted along the side of the plan. See also Gomme, Jenner, and Little, Bristol. Holland, “Earliest Bath Guildhall,” especially 171. The Jacobean Boothall remained in use until the early nineteenth century, after which it served various, less formal purposes (e.g., as music hall, skating rink, theater, and cinema) until its demolition in 1957. See further Victoria History of the Counties of England: Gloucester, 4: 248. See also Greenfield, “Professional Players,” 84– 85, for details of the second Boothall’s shape and uses cited in a 1569 indenture between the city and a lessee, Robert Ingram. Victoria History of the Counties of England: Oxford, 4: 331. Atkinson, Cambridge Described, 85. The source for the dimensions is a 1781 technical drawing by James Essex, designer of Cambridge’s late eighteenth- century town hall, included as figure 15 in Atkinson’s work (83). Originally built in 1340–42 to serve the needs of Coventry’s powerful merchant guild, the guildhall was purchased by the city in 1552 after the dissolution of religious guilds and chantries. See the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website for further details; Lancaster, St Mary’s Hall. The north wall at the high end was reconstructed in the late fifteenth century to add the window and make space for the new tapestry, possibly at the induction of Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth, as members of the Trinity Guild in 1500 (Lancaster, St Mary’s Hall, 6). In 1826, as part of renovations to the hall, the oriel was rebuilt and the arch opposite opened up as a lobby to the mayoress’s parlor. The old buttery toward the northwest end was demolished and the two doors from the oriel passage were blocked. TNA: PRO, 2/20, p. 200; for a full transcript see Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. 24: 1592– 93 (1901), 22. The payment for three plays was recorded in the Treasurer of the Chamber accounts (TNA: PRO, E351/542, mb. 181), published in Collections, 6: 28. Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 19–20. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 8; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. TNA: PRO, PC 2/20, pp. 211–12, published in Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. 24: 1592– 93 (1901), 31–32. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 10; transcribed in Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 274–75. Letters, Online Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs [Essex] (23 July 2007). See further Grieve, Sleepers and the Shadows, vol. 1: The Medieval and Tudor Story and vol. 2: From Market Town to Chartered Borough 1608–1888: “The town and its bridges became an important stage on the highway which linked London with East Anglia and the coast, known later as the Great Essex Road” (1). Manor business was conducted at the tollhouse in the marketplace, but no bailiffs’ accounts for the period survive. The Chelmsford church wardens’ accounts are at the Essex Record Office: D/P 94/5/1.

412

Notes to Pages 259–261

39. Sudbury Court Book 3, Suffolk Record Office (Bury St. Edmund’s branch): EE501/2/2, f. 161v; the accounting year was the conventional 29 September 1592 to the following 28 September 1593. 40. Letters, Online Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs [Suffolk] (23 July 2007). Gurr includes Norwich in his 1593 itinerary for Strange’s Men (Shakespearian Playing Companies, 274); this is an error, as it was William Stanley’s troupe, Derby’s Men, who played Norwich in September 1594, not 1593 (see REED: Norwich 1540–1642, 105). 41. REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 561. 42. TNA: PRO, PC2/20, p. 351, published in Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. 24: 1592– 93 (1901), 212. 43. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 13; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; transcribed in Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 276. 44. Our thanks to Peter Greenfield, coeditor of the Hampshire collection for the REED series, for giving us an advance look at his transcripts from the Southampton records (Knaplocke’s Book, Southampton Record Office: SC2/6/5, f. 28v). A payment to Derby’s men, paired with Lord Morley’s at Southampton in mid-May and at King’s Lynn in September during the same year, was for William Stanley’s troupe in 1594, after Ferdinando’s death in April. Gurr (Shakespearian Playing Companies, 274, 276) records this Southampton entry as May 1594 under Strange’s Players but then errs in the dating of the same entry as 1592– 93 under his “Derby’s Players” heading. The King’s Lynn entry has been published in Collections, 11: 66. 45. See, e.g., REED: Dorset/Cornwall, 48– 86 for the range of documents extant. 46. Our thanks to the following REED editors whose research has helped our search for southern itinerary details: Jane Cowling (Winchester), Audrey Douglas (Salisbury), and Rosalind Hays (Wiltshire). 47. See REED: Bristol, xlv–xlvi for the range of extant mayors’ audits and 143–44 for a transcript of Alleyn’s letter. 48. Philip Henslowe’s letter to Alleyn, Dulwich College Archive: MS I, ff. 17–17v; transcribed in Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 278– 80. 49. Robert J. Alexander’s transcriptions of both the account entry and the letter have been published in REED: Somerset including Bath, 15–16. 50. The manuscript entry (Bath Record Office: CA No. 31, mb. [1]) is the last entry in the fair accounts for the account year running from 11 June 1592 through to 10 September 1593. 51. The date, 24 July, appears at the top of the second bifolium, indicating the start of the accounts to follow. See REED: Shropshire, 1: 277. The payment is made to “my Lord strange and my Lord admyralls players,” acknowledging Alleyn, among others. 52. Grafton’s Abridgement of the Chronicles of Englande (1572) lists this road from Bristol to Shrewsbury among its “high wayes from any notable towne in Englande to the Citie of London. And lykewise from one notable towne to an other.” The mileages cited in that contemporary source are as follows: Bristol to Aust 8 miles; Aust via the

Notes to Pages 261–265

413

ferry to Monmouth 12 miles; Monmouth to Hereford 12 miles; Hereford to Leominster 8 miles; Leominster to Ludlow 7 miles; Ludlow to Shrewsbury 20 miles. 53. David Klausner’s research results from the Herefordshire and Monmouthshire town and household accounts have been published in REED: Herefordshire/Worcestershire, and RED: Wales. 54. Payments noted in the accounts this year to the Lord President’s players are published in REED: Shropshire, 1: 89. 55. The letter is addressed to Sir Robert Cecil and seeks his support, with Burghley’s, for a smooth transmission of the chamberlainship of Chester from Ferdinando’s father to himself, in view of Henry Stanley’s imminent demise (Hatfield House: CP 23/60; a transcript was published in Historical Manuscripts Commission Report: Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury, part IV, 376). A further letter to Cecil was written, with a beseeching tone, on 26 September, to the same end (Hatfield House: CP 23/68). 56. George, “The Playhouse at Prescot,” especially 227. 57. Chambers’s listing for York, which links Strange’s with Lord Morden’s (for Morley’s) men, is a payment from the city chamberlains’ annual account to the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Morley’s players in April 1593, clearly a different combined troupe. Chambers’s inclusion of Newcastle northeast of York is another misleading error, resulting from his conflation of the Admiral/Morley’s players with Derby’s. The Newcastle payment is to the Lord Admiral’s and Lord Morley’s “being all in one companye” in May, following the road north from York. See REED: Newcastle upon Tyne, 90 for the entry from the city chamberlains’ account for the year. 58. See REED: Coventry, 341. The year heading “1594” in this edition refers to the year when the annual accounts for 1593– 94 were delivered. 59. Berkeley House Steward’s Book, Berkeley Castle Muniment Room: General Series Bound Book 107, f. 51. Courtesy of Peter Greenfield, who published his initial findings in “Entertainers of Henry, Lord Berkeley,” 12–24. The Berkeley household records for Caludon are being edited by Alan Somerset for his Warwickshire collection in the REED series. 60. Leicestershire Record Office: BRIII/2/62 mb. 2 (as Derby’s). 61. Wall, Sudbury, 49. 62. See further Platt and Coleman-Smith, Excavations in Medieval Southampton, 58– 62; Victoria History of the Counties of England: Hampshire, vol. 3; Pevsner and Lloyd, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 533–36. The measurements quoted are from Davies, History of Southampton, 71. 63. A new hall was built on an adjacent site. An eighteenth- century print shows the market square during the poll between Lord Clive and William Pulteney in 1774 (reproduced in REED: Shropshire, 2: 386). For further details, see the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. 64. Phillips, History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury, 133. 65. See the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website for further details; Victoria History of the Counties of England: Chester, 5.2: 16.

414

Notes to Pages 265–275

66. Although demolition was considered, in 1922 the City Council agreed to restore the building, removing unsightly annexes and other additions that masked its original character. A description and ground plan were published in McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 68–71. 67. Victoria History of the Counties of England: Warwick, 8: 121–22. 68. See further Emery, Greater Medieval Houses, 2: 366. The castle was sold by George, 18th Lord Berkeley, to Thomas Morgan in 1632; after Morgan, a Royalist, was killed at the battle of Newbury in 1643, it was largely destroyed and abandoned, the stone plundered for other buildings in the area. Circa 1920 the castle site was acquired by Coventry for housing estates. Caludon Park, including the castle remains, was created in 1964. 69. Lewis, Medieval Earthworks, 277. In the fifteenth century the Stanley lords of Lathom had created the park, called Lady or New Park (Victoria History of the County of Lancaster, 3: 254n24). 70. Croston, County Families, 86. For details of its later history and more, see the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website. See also Lewis, “Lathom House.” 71. Bodleian Library: MS. Rawlinson Poet. 143, f. 25v. 72. BL: MS Harley 1927, ff. 10v–12, © The British Library Board; the poem is transcribed in Heywood, Earls of Derby, 21–24, and discussed in Hancox, Kingdom for a Stage, 14–17. 73. Revels accounts for the 1582 “The Historie of Love and ffortune” describe something like the settings of The Rare Triumphs in a list of canvas panels that depicted a city, “a Battlement,” and, on a third blank in the MS, possibly a “cave” or “countryside.” See Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels, 349. 74. Sir John Stanley I acquired Knowsley via marriage to Isabel, daughter of Sir Thomas Lathom, circa 1385. 75. See further the REED Patrons and Per for mances Website; Hussey, “Knowsley Hall”; Pevsner, Lancashire; Victoria History of the County of Lancaster, 3: 157– 68. 76. See further Palmer, “Early Modern Mobility”; Greenfield, “Touring.” 77. See further chapter 2. 78. REED: Cambridge, 1: 403 (for 1605– 6). Despite the players’ claim of the mayor’s approval, the Commissary Court forbade them from playing in the town or within a five-mile radius. 79. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 13; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. In a letter sent to Alleyn on 14 August, his father-in-law Philip Henslowe reported, “we hard that you weare very sycke at bathe & that one of your felowes weare fayne to playe your parte for you” (MS I, f. 17). 80. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 19; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College; Letter from Philip Henslowe to Edward Alleyn, transcribed in Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 280. 81. Ingram, “Costs of Touring”; McMillin and MacLean, Queen’s Men, 44, 60– 63. 82. Simpson, School of Shakspere, 2: 372, quoted in Thaler, “Faire Em,” 649. 83. See Fair Em, ed. Henning, 23n27. 84. As noted by Thaler, “Faire Em,” 654.

Notes to Pages 276–279 85. 86. 87. 88.

415

Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, pp. 28, col. 2; 37, col. 2; 10, cols. 1, 2. The holy lyfe and history of saynt werburge (1521), sigs. Pvi–Pvii. History of Cheshire, 1: 143. Dulwich College Archive: MS I, f. 13; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 89. Among the song titles listed in Bangor MS Gwyneddon 4 is “orlando,” a title that Sally Harper, recalling that the scroll of Edward Alleyn’s part in the play calls for Alleyn to sing “I am Orlando,” suggests is to be associated with the Orlando Furioso performed by Strange’s Men at the Rose (“An Elizabethan Tune List,” 57–58). See also Harper, “ ‘A Dittie to the Tune of Welsh Sydannen.’ ” 90. See Greenfield, “Entertainments of Henry, Lord Berkeley,” 14–15. 91. Leicestershire Record Office: BRIII/2/62, mb. 2. 92. The entry on f. 22 of Winchester’s Proceedings Book A (Hampshire Record Office: W/B2/2) was transcribed by Jane Cowling for her PhD dissertation, “Edition of the Records,” 70. 93. REED research has not yet identified a likelier candidate than Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Derby for the description “noble man of the North” with a troupe along the southern route in December 1593. Between 1590 and 1593 only John, Baron Darcy patronized a troupe of players who played in the south, though their patron had his residence in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Darcy’s Men had made a rare appearance at Rye sometime between 3 September 1592 and 2 September 1593, but they had returned to the north by mid-September 1593 (REED: Sussex, 137; REED: Newcastle upon Tyne, 93). 94. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 8v; transcribed in Henslowe, Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Foakes, 20–21. See further chapter 4. 95. McMillin, “Sussex’s Men in 1594,” 217–19. 96. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 9. 97. See REED: Somerset including Bath, 1: 17; REED: Bristol, 150; REED: Cambridge, 1: 355; REED: Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, 2: 484, 562; REED: Sussex, 140. Marlborough’s details come from research at the Wiltshire Record Office in Trowbridge, where MacLean surveyed the Marlborough chamberlains’ accounts (G22/1/205/2). For Ipswich Chamberlains’ Accounts, see Chambers, “Players at Ipswich,” 279. Some scholars have suggested that the troupe was at Burley- on-the-Hill, Rutland as well for Sir John Harington’s private household per for mance of Titus Andronicus early in 1596 (Davison, “Commerce and Patronage,” 64; Knutson, Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 60); however, this assumption has been challenged recently and persuasively by Holger Schott Syme, “Three’s Company,” 275– 84. 98. Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater, Appendix 3, 229. 99. Astington, English Court Theatre, appendix of per formances at court, lists twenty-five per formances by the Chamberlain’s Men 1597–1602/3. There is a provincial payment to one of the Chamberlain’s Men, Will Kemp, at Norwich in March 1600, but this was at the time of his star turn, the solo dance from London to Norwich. See further REED: Norwich 1540–1642, 114–15, 331–38.

416

Notes to Pages 280–285 ch a p t er 9. sh a k espe a r e a n d l or d s t r a nge’s m e n

1. Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare’s Companies, 103. 2. Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 183; Gaw, Origin and Development, 151; Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Hammond, 55. See also Alexander, Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III, 189. 3. Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 186, 183; cf. van Es, Shakespeare in Company, 52. 4. Mincoff, “Composition of Henry VI, Part 1”; Pearlman, “Shakespeare at Work”; Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry the Sixth, ed. Sanders, 11, which airs the revision theory without endorsing it. 5. John Dover Wilson, for example, conjectured that Shakespeare was brought in at the last moment in 1591– 92 to “pull into shape” a draft of “harey the vj” because the company had discovered that one of the play’s authors was Robert Greene, whom they resented for his having sold them Orlando Furioso, a play allegedly owned previously by the Queen’s Men; see Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Wilson, xlix. 6. Thus Peter Alexander, noting echoes of 1 Henry VI in Pembroke’s Men’s True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, concluded that Pembroke’s Men must also have owned 1 Henry VI and that therefore Henslowe’s “harey the vj” must be some other play (Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III, 188– 90). Based on similar assumptions, Gaw concluded that because of links between some of Shakespeare’s plays and Pembroke’s Men, Shakespeare could not have been connected with Lord Strange’s Men; see Origin and Development, 153–57. 7. Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Hattaway, 36; Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, ed. Taylor, 217; Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Warren, 70; Vincent, “Structuring and Revision,” 379n10. Lawrence Manley also referred in an earlier essay to Talbot as Ferdinando Stanley’s “titular ancestor,” “Motives for Patronage,” 63. 8. Cokayne, Complete Peerage, vol. 12, pt. 1: 346, 352, 356. 9. Cokayne, Complete Peerage, vol. 12, pt. 1: 342, 620. 10. Ralph Brooke, Catalogve and Succession (1619), 196. 11. See, e.g., Camden’s Historie of the Life and Reigne of . . . Princesse Elizabeth (1634), sig. Hhh3v; Sir Richard Baker, A chronicle of the Kings of England (1643), 80. 12. See Shakespeare, Plays and Poems, ed. Malone, 6: 89n6; Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Wilson, xviii; Brockbank, “The Frame of Disorder,” 76; Jones, Origins, 143. 13. Thus Tucker Brooke, who knew of Compton (1599) but not Cotton (1596), used the epitaph to argue for a theory of later Shakespearean revision of the play (Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry the Sixth, ed. Brooke, 136). Allison Gaw, also aware of Crompton but not Cotton, argued that, based on current knowledge, revision of this portion of the play could not be placed “earlier than 1599” (Origin and Development, 128). 14. Shakespeare, King Henry VI Part 1, ed. Burns, 252. Josephine Pearce suggested “the reviser of 1 Henry VI could have availed himself of this material” any time after 1596, though she also cautioned that “there is no good reason to doubt a source available to Roger Cotton would also be available to the reviser, indeed, perhaps even the original author, of 1 Henry VI” (“Earlier Talbot Epitaph,” 329).

Notes to Pages 285–290

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15. Augustine Vincent, A Discoverie of Errovrs in the first Edition of the Catalogve of Nobility (1622), 464– 65. 16. Camden, Britannia (1610), 598. 17. Lambin, “Here Lyeth John Talbot,” 369. 18. Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke (1548), f. Ddvi; Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 640. 19. Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 212. 20. On 1 Henry VI as a “Garter” play, see Melchiori, Shakespeare’s Garter Plays, 114–15. 21. The First and second volumes of Chronicles (1586), 1: 162; The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 686. 22. See Melchiori, Edward III, 17–25. 23. Bodleian Library: MS Dodsworth 160, ff. 126v–28v. 24. These include the Bastard Faulconbridge in King John and the Duke of Faulconbridge, whose name appears among the adherents of Charles VI and later among the Agincourt dead in Henry V. Longaville in Love’s Labours Lost is said to have attended the wedding feast “of the beautious heire / Of Iaques Fauconbridge” (TLN 533–34), and “Fauconbridge, the yong Baron of England” is one of the unseen suitors of Portia in The Merchant of Venice (TLN 257). The “sterne Falconbridge” who “commands the Narrow Seas” in 3 Henry VI (TLN 270) is the one historical figure to appear among all of these otherwise fictional Falconbridges, who seem to have been something of an in-joke in Shakespeare’s earlier career. 25. Bodleian Library: MS Ashmole 854, p. 219, cited in Earwaker, “John Talbot.” 26. Cokayne, Complete Peerage, 7: 137n(f). 27. Vergil, Polydore Vergil’s English History, 212–26. 28. It is mentioned, for example, in Oakden, “Scotish ffeilde,” ll. 10–18; in “The Song of the Lady Bessy,” in Halliwell, Palatine Anthology, 35–36; and in “The Rose of England” (ll. 109–12, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 3: 349). On the place of these poems, and the alliances they celebrate, in northern great house culture, see Barrett, Against All England. 29. Robinson, A Golden Mirrour (1589), dedication and sigs. A1– A1v. 30. The author of the poem, the Richard Robinson who identifies himself in The rewarde of Wickednesse (1574) as “Seruaunt in housholde to the right Honorable Earle of Shrowsbury” and a guard serving in Shrewsbury’s “watche of the Scottishe Queene” (title page and sig. A4), could very possibly have been the author of Shrewsbury’s painted epitaph. 31. Lambeth Palace Library: MS 3200, f. 121; by permision of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library. 32. Calendar of the Shrewsbury and Talbot Papers, 2: 182–84 (Talbot Papers, MS 3199, ff. 661, 669, 677, 681, 685, 687, 709); by permision of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library. 33. Calendar of the Shrewsbury and Talbot Papers, 2: 255 (Talbot Papers, MS 3203, f. 14); 184 (Talbot Papers, MS 3199, f. 713ff); by permision of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library. 34. There is further evidence for a 1592 dating in Lucy’s final lines in the scene, which appear to allude to the Earl of Essex’s contemporary campaign in France: “Ile beare them hence: but from their ashes shal be reard / A Phoenix that shall make all France affear’d” (TLN 2327–28).

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Notes to Pages 290–295

35. Our account involves the apparent contradiction that a speech intended as a compliment to a nobleman living in 1592 should undertake such rhetorical inflation of fact and then undermine it. A first explanation is that, as the circulation of the spurious epitaph demonstrates, such inflation was perhaps not perceived as such. A second answer would be that just as Lucy’s speech serves more than one purpose, as both his defiance to the French and the play’s praise of the Garter to the Rose audience, so the play takes more than one perspective on the subjects of war, honor, and heraldry. Brockbank, who can be faulted for biting on the subject of Talbot’s tomb at Rouen, comments brilliantly on the way that Lucy’s tribute and Joan’s immediate deflation of it combine to form a kind of transi tomb (“The Frame of Disorder,” 92). When Talbot’s nemesis Joan replies, “Him that thou magnifi’st with all these Titles / Stinking and fly-blowne yies heere at our feete” (TLN 2309–10; italics ours), she forms a grim memento mori just at the foot of Lucy’s glorious “epitaph.” 36. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1: 290– 91; Vickers, “Incomplete Shakespeare”; Vickers, “The Three Authors of Henry VI” (unpublished paper, May 2009). 37. Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry the Sixth, ed. Hart, xviii; Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 168. E. K. Chambers, who saw evidence for two hands in 4.7, also divided the scene, like Taylor, at l. 33 (William Shakespeare, 1: 290). 38. See Pearlman, “Shakespeare at Work,” 21n11. 39. Vickers, “Incomplete Shakespeare,” 339. 40. Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 170. 41. Such as the two quarrels between the supporters of Winchester and Gloucester in 1.3 and 3.1 or the four recurrences of the plot involving the cowardice of Sir John Fastolfe. These were first explored by Henneman, “Episodes in Shakespeare’s 1. Henry VI”; they are discussed extensively by Vincent, “Structuring and Revision,” 381– 85. 42. Gaw, Origin and Development, 101– 8, 153–57. Gaw added the stylistic observation that the “high percentage of feminine endings” in the Shakespearean 2.4 “indicates its date to be not earlier than 1598” (34n39). The prominence of feminine endings in 2.4 continues to be offered as a sign of Shakespearean authorship (Mincoff, “Composition of Henry VI, Part 1,” 283; Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 164– 66), but it is now recognized that this was an “early predilection” of Shakespeare’s, decreasing in frequency only for a short time in the mid-1590s. Marina Tarlinskaja also demonstrates that a high percentage of feminine endings is characteristic of Shakespeare’s early style, falling off in 1594– 96 but returning to prominence with The Merchant of Venice and the Henry IV plays; Tarlinskaja’s analysis does not rule out revision after 1597, but neither does it rule out authorship before 1594; see Shakespeare’s Verse, 181– 86. Gary Taylor’s examination of rare words and phrasal links also places 2.4 and 4.5 in the period 1591– 93 (“Shakespeare and Others,” 167). 43. If 2.4 “belongs to a late revision,” Mincoff observed, “it must, like the Talbot sequence, have replaced existing material, for it is presupposed by the following scene of Mortimer’s death” (“Composition of Henry VI, Part 1,” 283). 44. This possibility is endorsed by Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part One, ed. Taylor, 195. 45. See 2 Henry VI, TLN 266; 3 Henry VI, TLN 346, 1235; First Part of the Contention, TLN 197; The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, sig. C3.

Notes to Pages 295–302

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46. Vincent, “When harey Met Shakespeare,” 301. 47. Thus Vincent, following Gaw’s suggestion that 2.5 “contains irremovably embedded within itself the kernel for later expansion into II, iv” (106), refers to “the seeds that Shakespeare took from the older 2.5 and germinated into the Temple Garden of 2.4” (“Structuring and Revision,” 386). 48. This suggestion is made in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 3: 28, who reprints “The Rose of Englande,” where Richard III uproots the emblematic rose garden of the English Crown, but Lord Thomas Stanley, in the form of the Stanley eagle, sequesters a branch of it by marrying Margaret Beaufort and adopting her son Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond (3: 346). “The Red Rose” of Richmond is likewise supported by the Stanleys in the “Song of Lady Bessy,” while in “The Stanley Poem,” the Bosworth sequence concludes with the two marriages that simultaneously create the Tudor rose and the Stanley title of Lord Strange through George Stanley’s marriage “to the heyre of the Lord Strange” (Bodleian Library: MS. Rawlinson Poet. 143, f. 22). 49. Inner Temple Miscellaneous MS 32, in A Calendar of the Inner Temple Records, ed. Inderwick, 1: 370–74, cited in Sokol, “Manuscript Evidence.” 50. Vincent, “Structuring and Revision,” 392. Vincent cites Wilson’s impressions about the differing “poetic quality” of the couplets in 4.5 and 4.6 and the “poverty-stricken diction” and “vague syntax” of 4.6 as compared with 4.5, but he also notes (n39) that the very “poverty-stricken” archaisms cited by Wilson are actually found in early Shakespearean works, including Titus Andronicus (act 3) and 2 and 3 Henry VI. 51. Vickers, “The Three Authors of 1 Henry VI,” unpublished essay (May 2009), 50. 52. Pearlman, “Shakespeare at Work,” 5. In this Pearlman closely follows Wilson, who claims that 4.6 is “virtually a repetition of 4.5. . . . the action almost identical (the father urging the son to save himself by flight; the son refusing to desert his father; both going forward into battle resolved to die together)” (Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Wilson, xlv). 53. Wilson notes parallels with 1 Henry IV, 5.4.129–30 and Nashe’s The Vnfortunate Traveller (Shakespeare, First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Wilson, 184nn17–18). 54. Pearlman, “Shakespeare at Work,” 15. 55. Pearlman, “Shakespeare at Work,” 16. 56. Pierce Penilesse, in Nashe, Works of Thomas Nashe, 1: 211–13. 57. Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others,” 183. 58. Van Es, “ ‘Johannes fac Totum,’ ” 567. 59. Thomas Heywood, for example, while under exclusive contract to act for Philip Henslowe, wrote plays for both the Lord Admiral’s Men and Derby’s Men, and Ben Jonson, while he was acting for the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, was writing for multiple companies. 60. The alternative theory, that Pembroke’s split from Strange’s for the purposes of touring after the closing of the London theaters in June 1592, continues to have at least one adherent in Hanspeter Born, but the textual evidence that some version of 2 and 3 Henry VI preceded 1 Henry VI makes this unlikely. 61. See chapter 2, n. 59.

420

Notes to Pages 303–312

62. Wallace, First London Theatre, 101, 127. 63. See Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare’s Companies, 134. We can see no reason, despite his brother’s participation in the transaction, why the purchase could not have been in behalf of Edward Alleyn’s partnership with Lord Strange’s Men. 64. There were in fact three quarto editions of the Contention, Q1 (1594), Q2 (1600), and Q3 (1619), the last of which differs in important respects from the first two, the second of which merely reprints the first. As our argument does not involve Q2 or Q3, we refer to Q1 throughout as simply “Q.” 65. Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (1563), f. 371. 66. Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), f. Cxlvj. 67. Actes and Monuments (1583), 702–3. Foxe offered as an example the charges laid against “the Queene and Shores wife by the Protectours [Richard of Gloucester], for inchaunting & bewitching of his withered arme” (703). 68. Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), f. Cxlvi; Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles (1586), 623. 69. Campbell, Mirror for Magistrates, 435. 70. Campbell, Mirror for Magistrates, 436; italics ours. 71. 23 Elizabeth c. 2, in Statutes of the Realm, 4.1: 659– 60. 72. Levine, Women’s Matters, 63. 73. For a fuller reading of the two texts on Dame Eleanor’s culpability, see Manley, “From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men.” 74. Calendar of State Papers Spanish, 2: 692– 93. 75. The Annales of England (1592), f. 1178. 76. BL: MS Harley 787, f. 16v, © The British Library Board. 77. Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 7: 614. 78. BL: Additional MS 15,891, ff. 88v, 76–76v, © The British Library Board. 79. Annales, Or The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth (1635), 470. 80. Cairncross suggests that F’s Duchess may be a later revision, dating from the period (July 1596–March 1597) when William Brooke, the 7th Lord Cobham, was Lord Chamberlain (Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xxvi). This analogy with the Henry IV plays’ substitution of Falstaff for Oldcastle and The Merry Wives of Windsor’s transformation of “Brooke” into “Broome,” does not work, however, since F’s “Stand forth Dame Elianor Cobham” staunchly retains the Cobham name. 81. See Jones, Origins, 129–30. 82. Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), f. Cxlvj. 83. Bodleian Library: MS. Rawlinson Poet. 143, f. 16. 84. Canino, Shakespeare and the Nobility, 150. Several of the points mentioned below are drawn from Canino, who argues (151) that the roles of the Cliffords “may have been created for the benefit of, and perhaps even as a tribute to, George Clifford,” the 3rd

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Earl of Cumberland (1558–1605). The Clifford ancestry of Lord Strange and the fact that his mother was the 3rd Earl of Cumberland’s half-sister, we suggest, would have been stronger motivation than a direct connection to George Clifford for this aspect of 2 and 3 Henry VI. 85. Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), f. CCiii. 86. Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Jowett, 4. 87. Bullough notes there is “no external evidence” that Richard III was acted in 1592 or 1593 (Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 3: 222). 88. Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Hammond, 61; Brooks, “Marlowe and Early Shakespeare.” 89. Wells et al., William Shakespeare, 115–16. 90. Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Siemon, 46–47. 91. The Rising to the Crowne of Richard the third, in Licia, Or Poemes of Love (1593), sig. L2. 92. Duncan-Jones, “ ‘Three Partes Are Past,’ ” 21. 93. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, 166. See also Van Es, “ ‘Johannes fac Totum’?” 94. We follow here Jowett’s suggestion that “the Quarto text itself indicates that a play initially written as if for Strange’s Men is given finishing touches toward its close that make it suitable for the new Pembroke company” (Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Jowett, 7). 95. Holinshed, The Third volume of Chronicles, 742. 96. See Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Jowett, 4–5; Honigmann, Shakespeare: “The Lost Years,” 64. 97. Honigmann, Shakespeare: “The Lost Years,” 64. 98. An analogous case occurs in 3 Henry VI, where Sir William Stanley participates in the rescue of Edward IV from captivity. Stanley, who speaks no lines, is named as part of the rescue party in the opening stage direction of 4.5, yet Shakespeare insists that the stage, as well as the page, shall recognize Stanley by having the rescued King Edward address him: “Stanley, I will requite thy forwardnesse” (TLN 2370). 99. Thus, for example, the interpolations in Riverside Shakespeare (4.5.0 s.d.): SCENE [V] Enter [Stanley, Earl of] Derby, and Sir Christopher [Urswick, a priest]. 100. See Manley, “In Great Men’s Houses.” 101. The hint is the passage in which an anonymous messenger “from the mother Queene / And the Ladie Stanley your mother” reports to Richmond on the supporters “coming in our aide”: First, theirs the Lord Talbut, the Earle of Shreuebury sonne and heire, with a braue band of his owne. There is also the Lord Fitz Harbart, the Earl of Pembrookes sonne and heire. Of the Gentlemen of the Welch, there is sir Prise vp Thomas, and sir Thomas vp Richard, & sir Owen Williams, braue gentlemen my Lord. (ll. 1721, 1723–29) Shakespeare has removed the slighting “Fitz-” from Walter Herbert’s name and substituted the rival earl, Jasper Tudor, for the mention of Sir Walter’s executed father.

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Notes to Pages 319–323

102. This last possibility is suggested by Jowett, who also acknowledges the alternative possibility that “the manuscript [on which the Folio text is based] could have been updated with the two discrete ‘Pembroke’ passages if, for example, it was about to be gifted to the Earl himself, or indeed if the manuscript underwent minor revision with a view to a delayed first per formance or a revival by Pembroke’s Men” (Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. Jowett, 6).

ch a p t er 10. en di ng s 1. Hatfield House: CP 24/32. 2. Hatfield House: CP 170/16. 3. Speaking of the queen’s “pleasure of making a Chamberlain of Chester,” a title of his father’s to which the queen had yet to appoint him, Ferdinando wrote that “her will must be my lawe, and so she make no other, my disgrace will be the lesse” (Lambeth Palace Library: Talbot Papers, MS 3199, f. 609; by permission of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library). Daugherty, Assassination of Shakespeare’s Patron, supersedes earlier accounts of Ferdinando’s misfortune found in Devlin, “The Earl and the Alchemist,” in Hamlet’s Divinity, 74–114; Edwards, Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I; Stanley, House of Stanley, 163– 65; Coward, The Stanleys, 144–46; and Bagley, Earls of Derby, 65– 66. 4. Letter of Sir George Carey to his wife Elizabeth Spencer, regarding the death of Ferdinando, 5th Earl of Derby, Gloucestershire Record Office: MF 1161, Letter Book no. 2, transcribed in Wilson, Shakespeare, 474. 5. Gloucestershire Record Office: MF 1161, Letter Book no. 2, transcribed in Wilson, Shakespeare, 474. 6. Talbot Papers H713, transcribed in Lodge, Illustrations of British History, 2: 459– 62; The Annales of England (1600), 1275–77. 7. “When they had once fully discovered the loyaltie of [Ferdinando’s] affection towards her majesty . . . hee came shortly afterwards to the end of his life” (The Estate of English Fugitives (1594), in Clifford, State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler, 3: 21). For Warner, see Albions England (1597), 231. 8. Sir John Harington, A Tract of the Succession to the Crown (1602), 42. 9. In a document of 16 August 1594, Henry Young reported that a suspected recusant, Rowland Yorke, “believed the Lord Treasurer had poisoned the young Earl of Derby to marry the young Lady Vere to the Earl’s brother, England being governed by the Machiavellian policy of those who would be Kings” (TNA: PRO, SP 12/249, f. 154; also calendared in the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic . . . Elizabeth, 1591–1594, 545). Peter Thomson, without citing sources, mentions “the likelier possibility that [Ferdinando Stanley] had been despatched on orders from Lord Burghley, whose whispering spies were the source of the alternative rumours” about witchcraft (Shakespeare’s Professional Career, 44). 10. A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies (1594), sig. C2. 11. For details see Chapter 8n59.

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12. See REED: Coventry, 341. The year heading “1594” in this edition refers to the year when the annual accounts for 1593– 94 were delivered. 13. The entry on f. 22 of Winchester’s Proceedings Book A (Hampshire Record Office: W/B2/2) was transcribed by Jane Cowling for her PhD dissertation, “An Edition of the Records,” 70. 14. That shrinkage may be reflected also in the 1593/94 quartos of Orlando Furioso and A Knack to Know a Knave, quartos that, compared with the usually larger casting demands of Strange’s/Derby’s plays, can be cast for nine men and two boys and ten men and two boys, respectively. See chapter 8. 15. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 8v; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 16. Dulwich College Archive: MS VII, f. 9; transcribed with kind permission of the Governors of Dulwich College. 17. TNA: PRO, E351/542, mb. 207d. See Collections, 6: 29. 18. TNA: PRO, E351/543 mbs. 12d, 25d. See Collections, 6: 29. 19. Winchester Chamberlains’ Accounts, Proceedings Book A, Hampshire Record Office: W/B2/2, f. 25v. 20. Southampton Book of Fines, SRO: SC5/3/1 f. 249, courtesy of Peter Greenfield; and for King’s Lynn, Collections, 11: 66. 21. Chambers, “Players at Ipswich,” 278; REED: Norwich 1540–1642, 105. 22. Hatfield House: CP 186/24. 23. TNA: PRO, SP 12/271, f. 80. For court appearances, see Astington, English Court Theatre, 236. 24. Berry, Boar’s Head Playhouse, 36. 25. Palmer, “Early Modern Mobility,” 303, citing from Doncaster’s borough accounts. 26. Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 265; Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 126– 27. 27. See Coward, The Stanleys, 37, 44–52; Bagley, Earls of Derby, 67–71. 28. Rowland White to Sir Robert Sidney, HMC Report: Lord de L’Isle and Dudley, 2: 415, cited in Gair, The Children of Paul’s, 118. 29. TNA: PRO, E351/543, mbs. 57, 69d; for transcripts, see Collections 6: 31–32; and for Robert Browne, see Berry, Boar’s Head Playhouse, 191– 97. 30. The Pennyles Pilgrimage, in Taylor, Works of John Taylor, 67, as noted by Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 2: 127n4. 31. Lefranc, Under the Mask of William Shakespeare; Titherley, Shakespeare’s Identity. 32. Hackel merely observes that the countess’s “collection of drama included masques, closet dramas, and plays from the public theaters, and she counted among her books Ben Jonson’s 1616 Workes, The New Inne, and a manuscript of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, Fulke Greville’s Tragedy of Mustapha, Mary Sidney’s Antonius, ‘Diuers Playes by Shakespeare,’ and seven other volumes of ‘Diuerse Playes’ ” (“The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library,” 143–44). A fuller version of Hackel’s study, with a corrected version of her transcription of EL 6495, appears in her Reading Material in Early Modern England.

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Notes to Pages 327–331

33. “My Lady strandge & the Litle children of hers” arrived at New Park on 26 September. On 10 October, the steward records a visit by the Queen’s Men (Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 22). 34. Lady Frances was probably present for two per formances by Leicester’s Men at Lathom on 6–7 July 1587, since the Household Book notes that “mrs fransis my Lord strandges doghter, went . . . awaye” the week of 19 August (Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, pp. 13–14). She appears to have been in residence on 31 December 1588, when “a playe was had in the halle” at New Park, since the Household Book notes that on 20 January “my Lord strandges children went awayes” (24–25). Lady Frances may have been at Knowsley on 7 September 1589, when “the quenes players played in the after noone, & my Lord off Essex at nyght,” since the Household Book records that on the 21st “my Lord Stranges children dyned at mr Suttons” (28). She may have been present at Lathom on 21 February 1589/90 when (Lord Strange’s?) “players played at nyght,” since Lord and Lady Strange were at that time in residence (34). She was quite definitely in residence at Knowsley when the Queen’s Men came on 25–26 June 1590, since the Household Book notes that “my Lord strandges children & all the howseholde removed [from Lathom] to Knowsley” the week before (38). There is in fact only one occasion on which the evidence suggests she was not in residence at the time of a per formance: “the Qwenes players plaied ij severall nyghtes” at Lathom 6–7 July 1589, but “my Lord strandge & his doghters” are noted as arriving at Lathom on 9 July (27). 35. The vast majority of these are in quarto format, but we use the term playbook because a few are in octavo. 36. Tabor, “The Bridgewater Library,” 40. 37. See De Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts, 18–19. 38. It is not altogether obvious what the date 1602 means, since it was not at that time common practice to include lettering on bindings; see Gaskell, New Introduction to Bibliography, 152. It is possible that the date given to the volume in the inventory is simply the publication date that appeared on the title page of the first item in the volume (a possibility perhaps supported by items listed in the John King sales catalogue for 22 August 1800, which mentions, for example, “Settle (Elkanah) Empress of Morocco, plates, and 5 other Plays”). However, the greater likelihood is that the date 1602 means the date of the binding of the volume and not the publication date of the first play in the volume, since (1) no title of a first play is given, as is the case with the King catalogue; (2) there are very few candidates for a play by Shakespeare published in 1602, and none of the three possible candidates, Q1 The Merry Wives of Windsor, Q2 Henry V, or Q3 Richard III, turn up in the collection; (3) the Shakespeare quarto with a Bridgewater “1” on the title page is Q2 Titus Andronicus, publication date 1600. 39. The 1600 editions of The Merchant of Venice (I.R. for Thomas Heyes) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (for Thomas Fisher) are the authentic editions of that date, not the 1619 forgeries given 1600 imprints by Thomas Pavier. 40. The closest rivals might be the collections of Sir Edward Dering (1598–1644), which contained more than 225 playbooks; Sir John Harington (1560–1612), in which 170

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plays gathered in twelve bound volumes give a rough comparison on which to speculate about the size of the countess’s bound volumes; and Henry Oxinden (1608–70), who owned 123 plays. See Greg, Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, 3: 1306– 17; Krivatsky and Yeandle, “Sir Edward Dering”; Lennam, “Sir Edward Dering’s Collection of Playbooks.” See also Hackel, “ ‘Rowme’ of Its Own”; Nelson, “Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles”; Morgan, “Frances Wolfreston and ‘Hor Bouks.’ ” 41. Lancashire Record Office: DDF 2429, p. 14.

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INDEX

Abd el- Ouahed, 168 Abingdon, Berkshire, per formances at, 18 Abridgement of the Chronicles of Englande (Grafton), 250, 261 Acrobats, 20–22, 32 “Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes” (1572), 4, 12, 35 Actes and Monuments (Foxe), 305, 306 Adams, John, 19, 102 Albion’s England (Warner), 134, 172, 177 Aldeburgh, Suffolk, per formances at, 259 Alexander, Peter, 280 Allde, Edward, 78 Allegory, 182, 187 Alleyn, Edward: and The Battle of Alcazar, 168, 177–178; and Edmond Ironside, 153; in “harey of cornwell,” 135, 259–260, 272; and Henslowe, 49, 63, 76, 261; history of, 54–55; and The Jew of Malta, 55, 86, 88, 207; in Lord Admiral’s Men, 39, 49, 54, 68, 279, 303, 324; in Lord Strange’s Men, 2, 3, 7, 36, 48–49, 53–58, 62– 63, 112, 161, 247, 302–303, 366; in The Massacre at Paris, 77, 86, 88; and Nashe, 55, 129, 152, 164; and Orlando Furioso, 55, 74, 90– 92; and Pembroke’s Men, 314, 323; possible Shakespearean roles of, 112, 153; roles simultaneously played by, 55, 71, 114; and The Spanish

Tragedy, 55, 79, 86, 88, 210; and Sussex’s Men, 86– 87, 278, 324; and “tambercame,” 77, 88, 139; as theatrical manager, 161; and tour per formances, 259, 260, 271, 277 Alleyn, Joan, 2, 49, 63, 135, 259–260 Alleyn, John, 47–48, 54, 303 Allott, Robert, 78 Almond for a Parrat, An (Nashe), 40 Alphonsus, King of Aragon, 190 Anabaptists, 219 Anatomie of Absurditie (Nashe), 80 Anatomie of Pope Ioane, 147 Anglica historia (Polydore Vergil), 27, 289, 317 Anonymity, 159. See also Attributional issues Antonio and Mellida (Marston), 85 Antonio’s Revenge (Marston), 85 Arden of Faversham, 89 Ariosto, Ludovico, 91, 99, 126–127, 176 Armor of Proofe, An (Cotton), 284 Arnhem, Netherlands, 31 Artisanal model of popular theater, 43, 158–159, 182–183 Ashmole, Elias, 288 Aske, James, 149 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 126 Attewell, George, 47, 48, 57, 366

457

458

Index

Attributional issues, 8–10, 74, 159–166 Authorship, 8, 159–166 Bacon, Sir Francis, 222 Bale, John, 145, 147 Bancroft, Richard, 38, 221 Bargate, Southampton, 263–264, 272 Barnstaple, Devon, per formances at, 341 Barrow, Henry, 219 Barthes, Roland, 195 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 78, 109, 173 Bath, Gloucestershire, per formances at, 18, 21, 30, 57–58, 250, 251, 253, 261, 263, 279, 341, 342 Battle of Alcazar, The: attributional issues, 5, 73, 75–78; authorship of, 159; casting in, 273, 347–348; dating of, 89; and Edward Alleyn, 77–78, 168; geopolitics in, 5, 85, 166–172; and Henslowe’s “mvlomvrco,” 73, 75–76; impersonation in, 212; publication of, 77; pyrotechnic displays in, 217–218; religious and political themes in, 6, 235–236, 243; in repertory, 132, 169–170, 338; and Senecanism, 173; sources of, 236; staging of, 173, 186, 188–192, 194; and Tamar Cham, 142, 177–178; “the Plott of,” 75, 95, 142n32; violence in, 203 Bawcutt, N. W., 88 Beale, Robert, 154 Bearbaiting, 14, 15 Beaufort, Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, 13, 24, 27, 277, 315, 317 Bell Inn, London, 44, 45 Bell Savage Inn, London, 44, 45 Belt, Thomas, 114 Bel-vedere, or The Garden of the Muses (Bodenham), 165 “bendo & Richardo” (Henslowe title), 66, 125, 143–144, 177, 188, 203, 318, 334, 336 Bennett, Paul E., 107, 108 Bentley, John, 19, 55

Berkeley, Henry, 7th Baron Berkeley, 263, 267, 279 Beverley, Yorkshire East Riding, per formances at, 18, 341 Bevington, David, 233 Bird, William, 88 Boas, F. S., 81, 82 Bodenham, John, 165 Boothall, Gloucester, 253–254 Booth Hall, Shrewsbury, 264, 272 Bowers, Fredson, 88 Braden, Gordon, 174 Bradley, David, 76, 78 Brandon, Eleanor, Countess of Cumberland, 17 “brandymer” (Henslowe title), 125–127, 334, 339 Brayne, John, 47 Bridgwater, Somerset, per formances at, 14 Briefe Apologie of Poetrie (Harington), 99 Bristol, per formances at, 2, 16, 18, 135, 248, 250–252, 260–261, 263, 271, 277, 279, 323, 341, 342 Brockbank, J. P., 284, 296 Brooke, Ralph, 283, 284, 288 Brooks, Harold, 314 Browne, Robert, 54–55 Bryan, George: in Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1, 2, 44, 281, 324, 325, 366; in Leicester’s Men, 31; in Lord Strange’s Men, 1, 31, 36, 49, 58, 146, 366; and tour per formances, 247, 260 Brydges, Giles, 3rd Lord Chandos, 250 Buc, Sir George, 129 Bull Inn, London, 44, 45 Burbage, Cuthbert, 1 Burbage, James, 36, 38, 44, 47, 49, 53, 57, 62– 63, 302, 303 Burbage, Richard, 1, 2, 48, 58, 62, 325, 366 Burby, Cuthbert, 91 Bury St. Edmund’s, Suffolk, per formances at, 16, 259 Byron, John, 24

Index Cairncross, Andrew, 82 Caludon Castle, Warwickshire, 86, 263, 267, 278, 279, 323, 342 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 18, 27, 80, 128, 131, 165, 229; per formances at, 16, 18, 250, 254, 259, 272, 279, 342 Camden, William, 16, 285, 309 Cannon Row, Westminster, 22, 23, 163 Canterbury, Kent, per formances at, 18, 248, 252–254, 341, 342 Capital punishment, 218–220, 304–305 Cardwell, John, 225 Carey, George, 2nd Baron Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlain, 134, 165, 227, 279, 322. See also Lord Chamberlain’s Men Carey, Henry, 1st Baron Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlain, 18, 19, 43, 62, 165, 279, 319, 322. See also Lord Chamberlain’s Men Carey, Katherine, Countess of Nottingham, 279 Carpini, John Plano de, 139 Carson, Neil, 62 Casting studies: The Battle of Alcazar, 347–348; Edmond Ironside, 355–356; Fair Em, 345; 1 Henry VI, 356–358; 2 Henry VI, 358–359; 3 Henry VI, 361–362; The Jew of Malta, 349–350; John a Kent and John a Cumber, 353–354; John of Bordeaux, 350; A Knack to Know a Knave, 346–347; A Looking Glass for London and England, 353; The Massacre at Paris, 348–349; Orlando Furioso, 345–346; Sir Thomas More, 354–355; The Spanish Tragedy, 352–353; Titus Andronicus, 350–352; The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, 362–364 Catalogve and Succession of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earles, and Viscounts of this Realme of England, A (Brookes), 283–284 Catholicism: capital punishment for, 219; and Lord Strange’s Men, 217; and

459

repertory, 6; repression of, 221–227; Stanley family connections to, 29, 224, 321–322 Cavendish, Thomas, 102 Cecil, Sir Robert, 262 Cecil, William, 1st Baron Burghley, 29, 41, 154, 222–227, 245, 322, 326 Chadderton, William, 224, 246 Chaloner, Thomas, 268 Chambers, E. K., 5, 48, 75, 260, 280 Chapman, George, 165 Charles IX (King of France), 18 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 147 Chelmsford, Essex, per formances at, 259, 265, 267, 342; plays, 201 Chester, 19, 23, 32, 49, 124, 125, 224, 231, 232, 261, 275, 276–277; per formances at, 34, 260, 261–262, 263, 264–265, 323 Chettle, Henry, 3, 77, 95, 113, 118, 160, 161, 165 Chippenham, Wiltshire, per formances at, 250, 260 Christian I (Elector of Saxony), 31 Christs Teares ouer Iervsalem (Nashe), 128, 129, 131, 230, 243 Cicero, 172 Clarke, John, 102 Clifford, George, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, 312 Clifford, Henry, 2nd Earl of Cumberland, 312 Clifford, Margaret, Countess of Derby, 17, 29, 163, 308–310, 312 “clorys & orgasto” (Henslowe title), 67, 125, 127, 334, 339 Clyomon and Clamydes, 92 Cobham, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, 304–311 Colchester, Essex, per formances at, 259 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (Spenser), 164 Collier, J. P., 123 Collinson, Patrick, 222, 245

460

Index

Colnbrook, Buckinghamshire, per formances at, 250 Comedy of Errors, The (Shakespeare), 135 “the comodey of cosmo” (Henslowe title), 125, 127, 337, 339 Common Hall, Chester, 264–265 Condell, Henry, 2, 367 Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, A (Parsons), 6, 226, 246 Conformity, 227–235 Congleton, Cheshire, per formances at, 251, 326 “constantine” (Henslowe title), 67, 93, 125, 127, 334, 339 Cooke, Lionel, 20 Cooper, Thomas, 155 Corpus Christi Guild, Leicester, 265 Cosmographie Universelle (Münster), 169 Cotton, Roger, 284, 286, 288 Court, per formances at, 1, 3, 7, 19, 20, 21, 22, 39, 46–50, 51, 53, 58, 59, 63, 66, 92, 247, 251, 258, 303, 310–311, 323, 341–342 Court Hall, Rye, 252–254 Courtlie Controuersie of Cupids Cautels (Wotton), 106 Court of High Commission, 219, 307 Covell, William, 165 Coventry, per formances at, 18, 22, 33, 108, 131, 132, 250, 255–258, 263, 272, 323, 341, 342 Cowley, Richard, 1, 2, 48, 57, 281, 366 Craig, Hugh, 290 Creede, Thomas, 102 Crompton, Richard, 284, 288 Cross Keys Inn, London, 43–50, 62, 105, 216, 232, 247, 325, 341 Croston, James, 268 Crowland Chronicle, 26 Crusades, 235–242 Curtain Theatre, Shoreditch, 44, 49, 50, 58, 303

Daniel, Samuel, 149 Dante, 136 Danter, John, 87, 91, 105, 109 Dartmouth, Devon, per formances at, 18 De claris mulieribus (Boccaccio), 145, 147, 148 Defence of Conny Catching, The, 90– 93 Defence of Contraries (Munday), 118, 163 Defence of Good Women, The (Elyot), 148 Dekker, Thomas, 77, 78, 113, 120, 143 Deloney, Thomas, 116, 155 Derby Household Book, 4, 24, 30, 33, 35, 277 Description of England (Harrison), 287 Dessen, Alan, 202 De uiris illustribus (Leland), 155 De Vere, Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford, 22, 165 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex, 98, 111, 169, 238, 241, 289, 322. See also Essex’s Men Device of the Pageant borne before Woolstone Dixi (Peele), 168 Devizes, Wiltshire, per formances at, 260 Discoverie of Errovrs in the first Edition of the Catalogve of Nobility, A (Vincent), 285 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 196, 197, 199 Dodsworth, Roger, 287 Doran, Madeleine, 111 Dorset, county of, per formances in, 248, 260 Dover, Kent, per formances at, 18 Downton, Thomas, 49, 366 Dudley, Robert, 1st Earl of Leicester, 18, 20, 22, 30–31, 32, 33, 35–36, 165, 224. See also Leicester’s Men Dugdale, William, 288 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 314 Dunmow, Suffolk, per formances at, 16 Dutch Church libel, 114, 116, 162 Dutton, John, 19

Index Edmond Ironside: attribution issues, 149–156; casting study, 355–356; staging of, 191–192; violence in, 203 Edward I (Peele), 138 Edward II (Marlowe), 89, 314 Edward III, 287 Edward IV (Heywood), 155 Edward IV (King of England), 12 Edward VI (King of England), 17, 18 Edwards, Philip, 79, 81 Egerton, Frances, 1st Countess of Bridgewater, 327–332 Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 17–18, 20, 21, 22, 29, 87, 227, 250, 308–310, 321 See also Queen’s Men Elizabethan Stage (Chambers), 260 Elizabetha triumphans (Aske), 149 Ellam, Bryan, 62 Elsinore Castle, Denmark, per formances at, 31, 33 Elyot, Thomas, 148 Englands Parnassus (Allott), 78 Englishmen for My Money (Haughton), 117 Epistle to the Terrible Priests (Martin Marprelate), 37 Erne, Lukas, 80, 82, 209 Essex’s Men, 4, 34, 327 Exeter, per formances at, 18, 20, 21, 341 Faerie Queene. The (Spenser), 146, 147, 153, 199 Fair Em the Miller’s Daughter: attribution issues, 46, 72, 104–105; authorship of, 106; casting for, 93, 105–106, 273–274, 345; impersonation in, 207–208; jealousy in, 177–178; politics in, 242; regional allusions in, 105, 275; and Saxon history, 150, 166; staging in, 179, 191; and Sussex’s Men, 107; tour per formances of, 274, 275, 278 Falls of Princes (Lydgate), 145 Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley, 73, 75–76

461

Famous Victories of Henry V, The, 69, 92, 141 Farington, William, 24, 33, 35 Farmer, J. S., 123 Faversham, Kent, per formances at, 18, 21, 248, 259, 263, 279, 341, 342 Fedele and Fortunio (Munday), 177 Ferrers, Robert de, 6th Earl of Derby, 136 Finch, Moyle, 116 First Part of Ieronimo, The, 73, 81, 83– 85, 104 First Part of the Contention, The: attribution issues, 89, 90, 96, 98, 301, 330; and 2 Henry VI, 110–112, 302, 304, 307, 308, 311; staging of, 189, 194; and Titus Andronicus, 109 Fisher, John, 113 Fitzpatrick, T., 158 Fleay, F. G., 290 Flecknoe, Richard, 45 Fleetwood, Edward, 227 Fletcher, Giles, 314 “Flodden Field” (poem), 17, 28 Flowers of Lodowick of Granada, The (Luis de Granada), 163 Folkestone, Kent, per formances at, 248, 259, 342 Fortune’s Tennis, 114, 120 “iiij playes in one” (Henslowe title), 125, 218, 334, 339 Foxe, John, 145, 219, 228, 287, 305–306 Franklin, John, 44 Frederick II (King of Denmark), 31 Freeman, Arthur, 81 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Greene): attribution issues, 69, 73, 92, 93– 96; jealousy in, 179; plot of, 100, 124; staging of, 190, 196, 197. See also Greene, Robert Frons scenae, 191–192 “fryer bacon” (Henslowe title), 73, 93, 334–335. See also John of Bordeaux Fuller, Thomas, 54, 128

462

Index

Garland, John, 20, 102 Gaw, Allison, 280, 290, 291, 292 “the gelyous comodey” (Henslowe title), 67, 125, 127, 177–178, 337, 339 Gentili, Alberico, 20 George, David, 107, 262 Gibbes, John, 44 Gismond of Salerne, 176 Globe Theatre, Southwark, 1 Gloucester, per formances at, 18, 30, 250, 253–254, 341, 342 Goddard, Thomas, 105, 275 Golden Mirrour, A (Robinson), 275, 289 Goodale, Thomas, 366 Gosson, Stephen, 176 Grady, Frank, 243 Granada, Luis de, 163 Granger, James, 51 Great Chronicle of London, 26 Greene, Robert: and Fair Em, 105–106; and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 93– 95, 100, 124, 127, 187, 190, 196–197, 199; and Greenes farewell to folly, 105; and A Knack to Know a Knave, 100; and A Looking Glass, 99, 101, 160; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 55, 160, 190; and Marprelate controversy, 38; and Menaphon, 80; and Orlando Furioso, 90– 91, 126, 142, 176; patrons of, 163, 165; and the Queen’s Men, 90, 161; and A Qvip for an Vpstart Courtier, 100; and Selimus, 242 Greenes farewell to folly, 105 Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, 98, 111, 160, 280 Greenwich Palace, per formances at, 46, 92, 342 Greenwood, John, 219 Greg, W. W.: on The Battle of Alcazar, 77, 78; on “bendo & Richardo,” 143; on Henslowe’s diary, 75; on historical methods, 5; on John a Kent and John a Cumber, 122, 123; on A Looking Glass,

101; on Orlando Furioso, 91; on Tilney’s censorship, 120 Greville, Fulke, 173–174, 175 Griggs, John, 59 Grimsby, Lincolnshire, performances at, 13 Guildhalls, 252–257, 260–261, 263–266, 271–272 Gurr, Andrew, 3, 45, 48, 59, 280, 302 Gyllom, Fulk, 34 Hague, The, Netherlands, 31 Haigh, Christopher, 16 Halton Castle, Lancashire, 268 Hamilton, Donna B., 129, 231 “hamlet” (Henslowe title), 324 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 70, 115, 129, 133, 149, 212, 289 Hammond, Antony, 280, 313–314 Hampton Court Palace, per formances at, 258, 302, 342 “harey of cornwell” (Henslowe title), 125, 135, 333–335. See also Harry of Cornwall “harey the vj” (Henslowe title), 65, 67, 71, 96, 333–337. See also 1 Henry VI Harington, Sir John, 91, 99, 118, 127, 172 Harper, Sally, 277 Harpesfield, Nicholas, 147, 305 Harrison, William, 287 Harry of Cornwall, 94, 125, 135–138, 187, 260, 272, 333, 334, 335, 339 Hart, H. C., 290 Harte, John, Lord Mayor of London, 41, 42 Hattaway, Michael, 283 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 224, 309 Haughton, William, 117 Heminges, John: in Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1, 2, 44, 114, 281, 324, 366; in Lord Strange’s Men, 1, 7, 36, 49, 129, 366; and Shakespeare, 2; and Thomas Belt, 114; and tour per formances, 260 Heminges, William, 129, 133, 172, 230; and “tittus & vespacia,” 128–133

Index Henning, Standish, 106 Henri III (King of France): assassination of, 171, 221; and civil war, 179–180, 239; Stanley’s embassy to, 20, 224 Henri IV (King Henri IV of France and King of Navarre), 94, 169, 171, 194, 221, 235; and The Massacre at Paris, 238–240 1 Henry VI: attribution issues for, 9, 14, 96– 99, 280; capital punishment in, 220; casting for, 108, 274, 303, 343, 356–358; as collaborative work, 97, 159, 281–282; dating of, 98, 284, 288, 295–296; and Edmond Ironside, 149–150; and A Looking Glass for England, 154; and Nashe (Thomas), 59, 97, 129; politics and religion in, 202, 228, 241–242; as prequel, 94, 98, 187; in repertory, 274, 339; Shakespearean authorship, 281–282, 290–296, 330; and siege of Rouen, 98, 111, 222, 235, 241; staging of, 188, 192, 202; and Titus Andronicus, 109 2 Henry VI: attribution issues for, 9, 110–112, 302–304; casting for, 303; dating of, 90, 98; and Edmond Ironside, 150; Eleanor Cobham in, 304–311; and The First Part of the Contention, 96, 304–311; and John of Bordeaux, 94; and Lord Strange’s Men, 58, 302–304; and Pembroke’s Men, 96– 97, 110–112, 304, 310; rose imagery in, 295; Shakespearean authorship, 304–311, 330; staging in, 94, 202 3 Henry VI: attribution issues for, 9, 110–112; casting for, 303, 361–362; Clifford family in, 311–312; dating of, 90, 98; and Edmond Ironside, 150; and Edward Alleyn, 112; and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, 98; and Lord Strange’s Men, 58, 98– 99, 110–112, 302; rose imagery in, 295; Shakespearean authorship, 311–313; Sir William Stanley in, 312; and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, 96, 110–112

463

Henry III (King of England), 135 Henry VI (King of England), 242, 255–257 Henry VII (King of England). See Tudor, Henry Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 118, 194 Henry of Almaine, 135–138 Henslowe, Philip: association with Edward Alleyn, 2, 49, 63, 76, 78, 79, 261; diary of, 3, 7, 9, 51, 58–59, 64– 67, 73, 86, 95, 138, 152; diary transcriptions, 333–337; handwriting of, 151; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 36, 51; ownership of plays, 77, 79; on Pembroke’s Men, 3, 314, 323; as Rose Theatre owner, 2, 51–52, 59– 62; and theater at Newington Butts, 7, 64, 324; as theatrical manager, 161 Herbert, Henry, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, 165, 319. See also Pembroke’s Men Herbert, Sir Walter, 318 Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, 319 Hereford, Herefordshire, per formances at, 261 Heresy laws, 218–219 Herodotus, 143 Heroides (Ovid), 164 Hesketh, Richard, 262, 321 Hesketh, Sir Thomas, 33–34 Heywood, Thomas, 78, 86, 88, 113, 120 Historia Augusta (Tremellius Pollo), 147 Historie of the latter time of the Iewes common weale, The (Morwen), 129 History of King Richard the Thirde (More), 27 Hodgkins, John, 40 Hoghton, Alexander, 34 Holland, Elizabeth, 253 Holland, John, 48, 94, 366 Holland, Philemon, 257 Honan, Park, 45, 280 Honigmann, Ernst, 119, 124, 214, 280, 311, 313

464

Index

Honour of the Garter, The (Peele), 109–110 Hoppe, Harry, 96 Houghton, Thomas, 34 Howard, Charles, 1st Earl of Nottingham and Lord Admiral, 2, 48, 50, 56, 165. See also Lord Admiral’s Men Howard, Dorothy, Countess of Derby, 15, 17 Howard, Philip, 13th Earl of Arundel, 224 Hughes, Alan, 110 Hülegü, 140 Humanism, 171, 214 Hume, John, 307 Humphrey, 2nd Duke of Gloucester, 172, 228 Hungerford, Berkshire, per formances at, 250 Hythe, Kent, per formances at, 248 “Ieronymo” (Henslowe title), 67, 70, 73, 76, 78, 334–337. See also The Spanish Tragedy “Ierusallem” aka “Q Ierusallem” (Henslowe title), 125, 334, 339 If You Know Not Me You Know No Body (Heywood), 117, 155 Inferno (Dante), 136 Ingram, William, 10, 273 Innocent IV (Pope), 139 Inns, per formances at, 43–50, 62, 63, 105, 216, 232, 247, 251, 259, 267, 325, 326, 341 Instruction of a Christian Woman, The (Vives), 148 Ioppolo, Grace, 123, 161 Ipswich, Suffolk, per formances at, 16, 18, 20, 21, 279, 325, 341 Isle of Dogs, The (Nashe), 126 Jack of Newbury (Deloney), 155 Jackson, Macdonald P., 118, 123 Jaggard, William, 102 James I (King of England). See King’s Men

Jeffes, Abell, 79 Jewes Tragedy, The (Heminges), 129, 132, 230 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe): antiCatholic themes in, 228; attribution issues, 72, 77, 85– 88; authorship of, 159; and “bendo & Richardo,” 144; capital punishment in, 220; casting for, 107, 273, 349–350; Edward Alleyn in, 55; geopolitics in, 166, 169, 170; and Lord Admiral’s Men, 73, 77, 86, 88, 95, 324; love intrigue in, 176, 178; and “matchavell,” 127; and The Merchant of Venice, 207; per formance techniques in, 185, 188, 206–207; publication of, 86– 87; pyrotechnics in, 144, 218, 220; religion and politics in, 235, 240, 241, 242, 243; in repertory, 170, 188, 241, 334–335, 339; and Senecanism, 173; staging of, 192, 193, 213; and Sussex’s Men, 7, 86– 87, 107, 278, 324; and “tittus & vespacia,” 131; violence in, 110, 203, 218, 220; and war for religion’s sake, 6, 213, 235, 240, 243 Joan of Arc (Pucelle in 1 Henry VI), 147, 202, 215, 220–221, 228, 304 John a Kent and John a Cumber: attribution issues, 42, 74, 122–125, 231; authorship of, 114, 115, 159, 163; casting for, 274, 353–354; date of, 115–116, 123, 124; and Marprelate controversy, 42, 123–124, 232; per formance techniques in, 124, 232; regional associations of, 276–277; religious themes in, 231–232 John of Bordeaux: attribution issues, 73, 74, 94, 95; authorship of, 159–160; casting for, 9, 273, 350; and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 187, 189, 197–199; jealousy in, 177; and A Knack to Know a Knave, 100; and Orlando Furioso, 142, 190; per formance techniques in, 96, 187, 189–190, 198; pyrotechnics in, 218; religion and politics in, 94, 212, 216, 235,

Index 241–242; in repertory, 188, 202, 235, 241, 339; and Shakespearean romance, 95; staging of, 124, 189, 190, 191, 196, 197, 198–199, 200–201; and Tamar Cham, 142 Johnson, Richard, 117 Johnson, William, 19, 30, 38 Jones, Daniel, 31 Jones, Emrys, 284 Jones, Inigo, 149 Jones, Richard, 54, 100, 161 Jonson, Ben: on Edward Alleyn, 55, 78; and Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 367; and The Masque of Queenes, 149; and Philip Henslowe, 79; and Senecanism, 173; and The Spanish Tragedy, 109, 110, 173; on Tamar Cham, 245 Joseph ben Gorion, 129, 130 Josephus, Flavius, 172 Jowett, John, 114, 115–119, 313–314 Kathman, David, 45, 48, 58, 114, 120 Kemp, William: in A Knack to Know a Knave, 57, 124, 274, 323; in Leicester’s Men, 31, 146; in Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1, 2, 44, 281, 324–325, 366; in Lord Strange’s Men, 1, 31, 36, 40, 41, 43, 49, 57, 58, 146, 232, 278, 281, 366; and tour per formances, 247, 260, 274 Kenilworth, Warwickshire, per formances at, 20, 21, 32 Ket, Robert, 155 Khatun, Dokuz, 141 King, Thomas, 31 King John (Shakespeare), 131 King’s Lynn, Norfolk, per formances at, 13 King’s Men, 1, 3, 63, 129, 131 Knack to Know a Knave, A: allegory in, 187, 205; Alleyn associated with, 56–57; anti-Puritanism in, 228; attribution issues, 72, 99–101; authorship of, 100, 159; casting for, 93, 100–101, 273–274, 346–347; and Edmond Ironside, 150;

465

framed per formances in, 195–196; and Robert Greene, 100, 106; impersonation in, 205, 212; jealousy in, 177; Kemp associated with, 57, 124, 274, 323; magic in, 124, 172, 198; per formance techniques in, 182–183, 187, 188, 189, 191, 201; publication of, 278, 323; religious and political themes in, 212, 228, 242; in repertory, 67, 99, 124, 150, 166, 188, 202, 336, 339; and Saxon history, 150; staging of, 189, 196, 198, 201; and “tittus & vespacia,” 108; and Titus Andronicus, 107; tour per formances of, 274, 278 Knapp, Jeffrey, 223 Knell, William, 55 Knockin Castle, Shropshire, 14, 15 Knolles, Richard, 141 Knowsley House, Lancashire, 12, 14–15, 18, 262; per formances at, 23, 25–26, 30, 33–34, 262, 268–271, 332, 341 Knutson, Roslyn, 133, 155 Kyd, Thomas: authorship of Fair Em, 106; authorship of The Spanish Comedy, 82; authorship of The Spanish Tragedy, 78; and Dutch Church libel, 116, 162, 220; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 160; patronage by Lord Strange, 80, 162, 165; and playbook publications, 4; and Queen’s Men, 161. See also The Spanish Comedy; The Spanish Tragedy Lake, Peter, 216 Lambin, Georges, 285 “The Lament of Richard Sheale” (poem), 16–17 Langham, Robert, 20 Lanham, Henry, 49 Lanham, John, 19, 30, 38 Lathom House, Lancashire, 12, 14, 16, 18, 23, 29, 30, 105, 262, 275; per formances at, 23, 25, 31–32, 33, 35, 36, 46, 51, 52, 262, 268–270, 332, 341 Layston, Alice, 44

466

Index

Legend of Good Women, The (Chaucer), 147 Legge, Thomas, 128, 131, 172, 229, 243 Leicester, Leicestershire, per formances at, 16, 19, 263, 265–266, 278, 342 Leicester Guildhall, 265–266, 272 Leicester House, London, 31 Leicester’s Men: and James Burbage, 49; court per formances of, 21; members of, 7, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 49, 57, 182; per formances for Stanley household, 4, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 327; Protestant repertory of, 36, 43, 67, 99, 146, 228; and Queen’s Men, 19, 35; touring per formances by, 4, 19, 20–21, 31–33, 247 Leland, John, 155 Lennox’s Men, 102 Leominster, Herefordshire, per formances at, 261 Lestrange, Joan, Baroness Strange, 283 Levine, Nina, 307 Life and Death of Jack Straw, The, 115, 116, 117, 122 Ling, Nicholas, 86, 87 Liverpool, Lancashire, per formances at, 14–15, 19 Lodge, Thomas: authorship of A Looking Glass, 101–102, 160; and Philip Henslowe, 162; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 160; Stanley patrons of, 102, 162–163, 165; and “tittus & vespacia,” 131 Looking Glass for London and England, A: anti-Puritanism in, 228; attribution issues, 72–73, 94, 101–103, 159–160; casting for, 99, 274, 353; impersonation in, 205; jealousy in, 177; per formance techniques in, 183, 187; publication of, 323; pyrotechnic displays in, 218; in repertory, 99, 154, 187, 188, 205, 336, 339; staging of, 189, 190, 191, 192, 196 Lopez, Rodrigo, 87 Lord Admiral’s Men: and Edward Alleyn, 2, 36, 49, 53–54, 55–56, 260, 279, 324;

and The Battle of Alcazar, 76–77, 166, 168, 170; and James Burbage, 47–48, 302–303; court per formances by, 2, 46, 48, 303, 341, 342; and Henslowe, 2, 64, 138–139; and The Jew of Malta, 85– 87; and John of Bordeaux, 95; and Lord Strange’s Men, 42–43, 46–49, 54, 77, 187, 202, 303, 341, 342; and The Massacre at Paris, 88, 90; members of, 7, 43, 49, 54, 57, 70, 182; at Newington Butts, 64, 303, 324; and Orlando Furioso, 73, 91; repertory of, 3, 57, 70, 73, 102, 114, 124, 133, 138–139, 187, 196, 202; at Rose Theatre, 2, 7, 64, 66, 68, 138–139, 279, 324; and Sir Thomas More, 119–120; and The Spanish Tragedy, 79, 166; and Tamar Cham, 139, 190; and Tamburlaine, 242; and travels, 49, 54, 247, 251, 342 Lord Chamberlain’s Men: members of, 1–2, 7, 43–44, 48, 70, 303, 325, 326; at Newington Butts, 109, 303, 324; origins of, 323–325; repertory of, 58, 73, 87, 95, 102, 109, 114, 120, 122, 129, 131; at Rose Theatre, 7, 279, 324; Shakespeare’s connections to, 1–2, 279, 281, 282, 290; travels of, 279, 324–325 Lord Strange’s Men: casting for, 343–364; court per formances by, 3, 46–47, 58, 63, 66, 247, 258, 310–311, 342; at Cross Keys Inn, 43–50, 105, 325; itineraries of, 340–342; and Leicester’s Men, 30–33, 35–36; in London (1589– 93), 37– 63; and Lord Admiral’s Men, 42–43, 46–49, 54, 77, 187, 202, 303, 342; and Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1–2, 43–44, 279, 323–325; members of, 1–2, 30–36, 49, 53–57, 260, 366; at Newington Butts, 51, 53; origins of, 12–36; patronage of, 12–30, 217; and Pembroke’s Men, 7, 58, 62, 86, 107, 110–112, 301–320; repertory of, 64–246, 335–338, 339, 366; at Rose Theatre, 50– 63, 64–103, 186–188,

Index 191–194; and Shakespeare, 280–320; and Sussex’s Men, 7, 86– 87, 106–108, 218, 278, 324; travels and per formance venues of, 247–279, 340–342. See also Repertory Lost plays, 9, 74–75, 125–156 Louis IX (King of France), 139 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 179, 330 Lucy, William, 97, 282–287, 290, 296, 317 Ludlow, Shropshire, per formances at, 261 Lydd, Kent, per formances at, 18, 248, 341 Lyly, John, 3, 38, 39, 160 Lyme Regis, Dorset, per formances at, 260 MacLean, Sally-Beth, 72, 73, 74, 92, 273 Magnyfycence (Skelton), 183 Maguire, Laurie, 89 Maidenhead, Berkshire, per formances at, 250 Maidenhead Inn, Islington, per formances at, 326 Maidstone, Kent, per formances at, 248, 342 Maldon, Essex, per formances at, 18, 259 Malone, Edmund, 284 Mancini, Domenico, 26 “mandevell” (Henslowe title), 66, 70, 125, 133–135, 172, 177, 187, 212, 243–244; in repertory, 241, 338–339 Mandeville, Sir John, 133, 140, 244 Mansion of Magnanimitie (Crompton), 284 Marco Polo, 140 Marlborough, Wiltshire, per formances at, 250, 260, 279, 324–325 Marlowe, Christopher: and authorship, 160–161; death of, 238; and Doctor Faustus, 197; and Dutch Church libel, 116, 220; innovations of, 33, 190, 203, 205, 245, 302; intelligence ser vice connections of, 169–170; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 160; patronage by Lord Strange, 162, 165; and playbook

467

publication, 4; religion and politics in works of, 237–238, 240; and Tamburlaine, 55, 140. See also The Jew of Malta; The Massacre at Paris Marprelate controversy, 37–43, 123–124, 127, 129, 154, 216–217, 219, 221, 224, 232, 276 Marshfield, Gloucestershire, 250 Martin, Randall, 149–150 Le Martire des deux frères (Pinselet), 169 Mary, Queen of Scots, 29, 223, 224 Mary I (Queen of England), 29 Mason, Amy, 44 Masque of Beauty, The (Jonson), 149 Masque of Queenes, The (Jonson), 149 Massacre at Paris, The: attribution issues, 73, 76, 86, 88– 90; authorship of, 160; casting for, 273, 348–349; geopolitics in, 166–172, 222; irony in, 213, 228; jealousy in, 180–181; ownership of, 77, 86; religion and politics in, 235, 237–241; in repertory, 166, 241, 338, 339; and Senecanism, 173; sources of, 169; staging of, 90, 192–194; text of, 89– 90; violence in, 95, 204, 220, 235, 237; and war for religion’s sake, 6, 213, 222 “matchavell” (Henslowe title), 42, 66, 125, 127, 170, 334, 336 Matthew of Westminster, 135 Maus, Katharine, 179 Mayo, John, 146 McMillin, Scott: on company style, 5; on 2 Deadly Sins, 114; on historical narratives, 11; on Orlando Furioso, 92; on repertory, 69, 72, 73, 74; on Sir Thomas More, 120; on Sussex’s and Strange’s Men, 86– 87, 109, 278, 324; on tour per formances, 273 Melchiori, E. Giorgio, 119 Meliboeus (Watson), 79 Menaphon (Greene), 80 Mendoza, Bernardin, 23 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 70, 207, 330

468

Index

Meres, Francis, 118, 128 Metamorphosis of Ajax, The (Harington), 118, 119 Middleton, Thomas, 47 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 330 Millington, Thomas, 86, 87 Mills, Toby, 19 Mincoff, Marco, 281, 290, 296 Minstrels, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 34, 255, 257, 265, 272, 277 Mirror for Magistrates, 306, 312 Mirror of Modestie, The (Greene), 163 Möngke Khan, 139, 140, 244–245 Monmouth, Monmouthshire, per formances at, 261 Montfort, Guy de, 136 Montfort, Simon de, 8th Earl of Leicester, 136 Moot Hall, Sudbury, 263 More, Alice, 118 More, Sir Thomas, 27. See also Sir Thomas More Morton, Thomas, 27 Morwen, Peter, 129, 132 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 143, 330 Mulay al-Mansur, 166–167, 168 Munday, Anthony: and John a Kent and John a Cumber, 122–125; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 38, 160, 163; patronage by Lord Strange, 165; and religious themes, 231–232; and Sir Thomas More, 113, 114, 115–116, 118 Münster, Sebastian, 129, 169 “mvlomvrco” (Henslowe title), 64, 70, 73, 75, 334–336. See also The Battle of Alcazar Nashe, Thomas: and Christs Teares ouer Iervsalem, 128, 129, 230, 243; and Edmond Ironside, 153–154; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 38, 40, 55–56, 160; patrons of,

165; and Pierce Penilesse, 97, 129, 152, 164, 230; religion and politics in works of, 242; on Rose Theatre, 59; on Talbot, 59, 286, 301; and “tittus & vespacia,” 128–131; and Titus Andronicus, 110 Nelson, Alan H., 51 Neville, Eleanor, 13 Newbury, Berkshire, per formances at, 250 Newcastle upon Tyne, per formances at, 16, 19, 251 Newington Butts theater, Surrey, 7, 51, 64, 109, 303, 324 Newman, Thomas, 105 New Park, Lancashire, 24, 225, 262, 268, 321; per formances at, 25, 30, 275, 327 New Romney, Kent, per formances at, 16 Nieto, Luis, 167 Nine Worthies of London (Johnson), 117 Norwich, per formances at, 18, 325 Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, per formances at, 19, 20–21, 22, 33, 341 Nowell, Dean Alexander, 34 De Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium Libellus (Mancini), 26 Of Prayer and Meditation (Luis de Granada), 163 “Of the Princesse Elizabeth” (poem), 28 Old Wives’ Tale, The (Peele), 92, 190 Order of the Garter, 18, 20, 224, 287, 288 “orlando” (Henslowe title), 90– 93, 126, 333. See also Orlando Furioso Orlando Furioso (Greene): Alleyn in, 55; Alleyn’s scroll for, 55, 74, 91– 92; attribution issues, 73, 92; authorship of, 159; casting for, 92– 93, 273–274, 345–346; jealousy in, 177–179; love intrigue in, 176; madness in, 55, 215; publication of, 279, 323; pyrotechnics in, 218; and Queen’s Men, 73, 91– 93, 126; religion and politics in, 235; in repertory, 142, 190, 191, 192, 212, 235, 333,

Index 339; and Senecanism, 172; sources for, 126–127, 172, 176; staging of, 190, 191, 192; tour per formances of, 274, 278 Orlando Furioso in English heroical verse (Harington), 127 Ormskirk, Lancashire, 15 Oskell, 1st Lord Lathom, 17 Othello (Shakespeare), 70, 183 Ovid, 164 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 18, 190; per formances at, 14, 21, 250, 254, 342 Pageant of Popes, The (Bale), 145 Painter, William, 143, 147, 176 Palace of Pleasure, The (Painter), 143, 147, 176 Paris, Matthew, 135 Parker, John, 202 Parr, Katherine (Queen of England), 319 Parsons, Robert, 226, 246 Patronage: and attribution, 74; of authors, 162–165; of Lord Strange’s Men, 20–23, 32–36; motives for, 23–30; necessity of, 4; and politics, 217; Stanley tradition of, 4, 12–20 Pavier, Thomas, 80, 81, 102, 110 Pearlman, E., 281, 290, 296, 297, 300, 301 Peele, George: attribution issues, 78, 135; and Device of the Pageant borne before Wolstone Dixi, 168; and Edward I, 135, 138; farewell to Norris and Drake, 76; and geopolitics, 170; and The Honour of the Garter, 109; and Lord Strange’s Men, 3, 76, 160, 164; patronage by Lord Strange, 164; religion and politics in works of, 237; and staging, 190; and Titus Andronicus, 109. See also The Battle of Alcazar Pembroke’s Men: at court, 310–311; and First Part of the Contention, 90, 110–112, 187, 304, 311–312; and Henry VI plays, 97, 112, 295, 304–305, 308; and The Jew of Malta, 86, 87; and political themes,

469

310; and Richard III, 313–320; at Rose Theatre, 86, 87; and Shakespeare, 7, 58, 291, 301–304; and The Spanish Tragedy, 79; and tour per formances, 3, 273, 278, 314, 323; and Titus Andronicus, 107–110; and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, 90, 111 Penry, John, 37, 39, 123, 219 Percy, Robert, 31 Per formance, 182–215; of acrobatics, 20–22, 192–193; artisanal traditions of, 182–188; fashions in, 182–188; framed, 195; heterodoxy in, 205–215; impersonation in, 205–215; and improvements at Rose Theatre, 60– 62; irony in, 202–205; and magic, 194–202; and pyrotechnics, 188–189, 217–220; space for, 60– 62, 191–194; and spectacle, 188–194; and staging, 188–194; techniques of, 5; technological improvements for, 60– 62; and theatrical skepticism, 194–202; violence in, 202–205 Per formance venues, 247–279. See also Guildhalls; Inns; Rose Theatre; Theaters; Town halls Philip I (King of Spain), 17 Philip II (King of Spain), 212, 221, 236, 242 Phillips, Augustine: in Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1, 2, 44, 281, 324, 366; in Lord Strange’s Men, 1, 49, 366; and tour per formances, 260 Phillips, Thomas, 264 Pierce Penilesse (Nashe), 97, 129, 152, 164, 230 Pincus, Steve, 216 Pinner of Wakefield, The, 86, 108 Pinselet, Charles, 169 Plague, 1, 7, 51, 66, 128, 248, 258 Platonism, 208 Playbook publication, 4, 8, 159–160. See also specific plays Plymouth, Devon, per formances at, 18, 341

470

Index

Poetaster (Jonson), 78 Polemon, John, 167, 170 Polimanteia (Covell), 165 Politics: and censorship, 115, 152, 214, 216, 246; and conformity, 227–235; and Elizabethan policy, 221–223; and Marprelate controversy, 37–43; and public sphere, 216–217; in repertory, 5, 6, 166–172, 216–246; and separatism, 227–235; Stanley family management of, 24–30, 223–227 Polydore Vergil, 27, 289, 317 Polyhymnia (Peele), 164 “Poope Ione” (Henslowe title), 66– 67, 125, 144–147, 334; in repertory, 93, 172, 228, 339 Pope, Thomas: in Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1, 2, 44, 281, 324, 325, 366; in Leicester’s Men, 31; in Lord Strange’s Men, 1, 31, 36, 48, 49, 58, 146, 366; and tour per formances, 247, 260 Pope Joan legend, 144–147 Popes Parliament, The (Mayo), 146 Prescot, Lancashire, 262 Prince Charles’s Men, 102 Printemps d’Yver (Yver), 176 Privy Council, 1, 31, 35, 37, 42, 50, 52–53, 100, 216, 224, 227, 248, 258 Proctor, John, 289 Protestacyon of Martin the Great, 123, 232 Protestantism: and antitheatricalism, 197, 199; and Leicester’s Men, 36, 43, 67, 146, 228; and Lord Strange’s Men, 117–118, 217, 229; and magic, 196–197; and separatism, 223 Prouty, Charles, 111 Prudentius, 172 Puckering, Sir Thomas, 162 Puritanism, 99, 201, 217 Pyg, John, 49, 366 Queen’s Men: acrobats in, 22; casting for, 94, 274; company style of, 37, 43, 57, 171,

186; court per formances by, 46, 47, 58, 92, 323; and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 94, 95, 179, 187, 196, 197, 199; and The Jew of Malta, 86, 87; and London inns, 44; and A Looking Glass, 102, 228; and Marprelate controversy, 37–39; members of, 182; origins of, 7, 19–20, 24, 38; and Orlando Furioso, 67, 73, 90– 93; per formances for Stanley household, 4, 24–25, 30, 34, 327; and personnel of Lord Strange’s Men, 7, 30, 36, 55, 57; repertory of, 3, 24, 30, 36, 69–74, 160, 166, 173, 187; at Rose Theatre, 7, 64, 66, 72, 166, 173, 187; and Senecanism, 173; success of, 35–36, 69–70; and Sussex’s Men, 72, 86– 87, 95; and tour per formances, 4, 22, 24–25, 30, 39, 43, 47, 247, 273; and The Troublesome Reign of King John, 138, 242; and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 24–26, 30, 313, 315–316, 319 Queen’s Men and Their Plays, The (McMillin & MacLean), 72, 74, 340 Quip for an Upstart Courtier, A (Greene), 100 Radcliffe, Henry, 4th Earl of Sussex, 165. See also Sussex’s Men Raiz, Marzuq, 168 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 165 Randall, William, 309 Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, The, 19, 196, 197, 268 Reading, Berkshire, per formances at, 21, 248, 250 Reason, Gilbert, 102 Religion: and censorship, 42–43, 152, 214, 216; and heresy, 306–307; and Martin Marprelate controversy, 37–43; in repertory, 6, 216–246; and Stanley family, 29, 223–227; war for sake of, 6, 235–242. See also Anabaptists; Catholicism; Protestantism; Puritanism; Separatism

Index Repertory, 64–156; allegorical techniques in, 182–186; audit, 338–339; authorship issues, 159–166; candidates for attribution, 104–125; casting for, 343–364; and company style, 71, 158–159, 186–188; framing in, 5– 6, 96, 170, 189, 195, 203; geopolitics in, 166–172; Henslowe’s accounts of, 64–75, 333–337; heterodoxy in, 205–215; humanism in, 171–172; hybridity of genre in, 177–181; impersonation in, 205–215; intrigue in, 175–177; irony in, 202–205; lost plays, 125–156; magic and magical effects in, 194–202; politics and religion in, 6, 216–246; pyrotechnics in, 202–205; Rose plays, 64–103, 333–337; Senecanism in, 172–175; sources and genres in, 157–181; as system, 64–70, 186–188; for touring, 272–278; violence in, 202–205. See also specific plays Restorer of the French Estate, The, 241 Richard I (King of England), 135 Richard II (Shakespeare), 330 Richard III (King of England), 12, 13, 24, 26 Richard III (Shakespeare), 12, 30, 109, 150, 289, 304, 313–320, 330 Richard Duke of York (Shakespeare), 330 Richmond Palace, 14, 268; per formances at, 39, 46, 341 Riggs, David, 90 Rising to the Crown of Richard the third, The (Fletcher), 314 Robinson, Richard, 275, 289 Rochester, Kent, per formances at, 248, 341 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 143, 330 “The Rose of England” (poem), 17 Rose Theatre, Southwark: Admiral’s Men at, 2, 7, 64, 66, 68, 138–139, 279, 324; Chamberlain’s Men at, 7, 279, 324; closure of, 50–53, 248, 324; excavation of, 59; Henslowe as owner, 2, 7, 65– 66; Pembroke’s Men at, 86, 87; Queen’s

471

Men at, 7, 72, 166, 173, 187; renovation of, 60– 62, 295; repertory from, 42, 58–59, 64–103, 241–244, 281, 333–337, 339; and rose imagery in 1 Henry VI, 295; stage size at, 272; Strange’s Men at, 3, 7, 50– 63, 64, 191–194, 258, 274, 278, 342; Sussex’s Men at, 7, 64, 72, 86– 87, 278, 324; technical resources of, 191–194 Rubruck, Wilhelm, 139 Rustici, Craig M., 146, 147 Rye, Sussex, per formances at, 14, 248, 252, 259, 279, 341, 342 Saffron Walden, Essex, per formances at, 259 Salisbury, Wiltshire, per formances at, 14, 260 Salusbury, Sir John, 277 Sanders, Norman, 281 Savage, John, 28 Schoenbaum, Samuel, 314 Schoone-Jongen, Terence, 9–10, 280 “Scottish Field” (poem), 17, 28 Sebastian I (King of Portugal), 167, 213, 236, 242 Seckford, Thomas, 309 “the second parte of tamber came” (Henslowe title), 138–143. See also Tamar Cham; “tambercame” Second part of the booke of Battailes (Polemon), 167, 170, 236 Sefer Yosippon (Joseph ben Gorion), 129. See also Morwen, Peter Selby Abbey, Yorkshire West Riding, per formances at, 15 Selimus, 92 “senobia” (Henslowe title), 67, 125, 132, 147–149, 334. See also Zenobia Separatism, 227–235 Shakeshafte, William, 34 Shakespeare, William, 280–320; and Countess of Bridgewater’s collection, 327–331; and Fair Em, 106; and 1 Henry

472

Index

Shakespeare, William (continued) VI, 96– 99, 281–282, 290–296; and 2 Henry VI, 110–112, 304–311; and 3 Henry VI, 110–112, 311–313; and John of Bordeaux, 95; in Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 1–2; and Lord Strange’s Men, 2, 3, 4, 30, 58, 160, 280–320; patrons of, 165; and Pembroke’s Men, 62, 301–304, 316–320; and playbook publications, 4, 9; and Queen’s Men, 69–70; religion and politics in works of, 233–235, 242–243, 306–307; and Richard III, 27, 313–320; and Sir Thomas More, 113, 120–121, 233–234; and Stanley patronage, 282–290, 304–313; and Titus Andronicus, 106–110. See also further Shakespeare titles Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Maguire), 89 Shapiro, I. A., 123 Sheale, Richard, 16–17, 28 Sherman, William, 133 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The (Dekker), 155 Shrewsbury, Shropshire, per formances at, 14, 15, 251, 260, 261, 263, 264, 323, 342 Sidney, Sir Philip, 165 Sidney, Sir Robert, 162 Siemon, James R., 314 Singer, John, 19, 57 Sir John Oldcastle, 117 Sir Thomas Cromwell, 117 Sir Thomas More: attribution issues, 74, 113–122; authorship of, 113, 120–121, 159; capital punishment in, 219–220; casting for, 354–355; censorship of, 115, 120, 214, 233; irony in, 213–214; religious and political themes in, 233, 242; staging of, 191 Skipton Castle, Yorkshire West Riding, per formances at, 16 Sokol, B. J., 295 Solyman and Perseda (Kyd), 168–169, 177

Solymitana Clades (Legge), 128–132, 229 “The Song of the Lady Bessy” (poem), 17, 28, 29 Southampton, per formances at, 15, 18, 20, 248, 260, 263–264, 325, 341, 342 “spanes comodye donne oracioe” (Henslowe title), 81, 333–334. See also The First Part of Ieronimo; The Spanish Comedy Spanish Comedy, The, 81– 85, 94, 339 Spanish Tragedy, The: Alleyn in, 55, 76; attribution issues, 70, 73, 76, 77, 78– 81; authorship of, 159; capital punishment in, 219–220; casting for, 274, 352–353; date of, 79, 89; framing in, 189; geopolitics in, 168–169, 222; impersonation in, 183–184; influence of, 4, 70; love intrigue in, 176; ownership of, 77, 79, 88; per formance techniques in, 183–184; publication of, 4, 70, 78– 80; pyrotechnics in, 218; and Senecanism, 173, 175, 333–338, 339; and The Spanish Comedy, 81– 85; staging of, 189, 191, 192, 218; violence in, 203–204 Spencer, Sir John, Lord Mayor of London, 32 Spenser, Edmund, 146, 147, 153, 164–165, 199 Stafford, Edward, 225 Stanley, Alice (Spencer), Countess of Derby, 4, 32, 164, 325 Stanley, Edward, 3rd Earl of Derby, 15, 17, 29, 223, 271 Stanley, Ferdinando, Lord Strange and later 5th Earl of Derby: claim to English throne, 226, 262, 322; at court, 29, 164, 246; death of, 321–322; friendship with Talbots, 289; marriage of, 32; patronage of players, 4, 20–30, 164, 246; patronage of writers, 162–166; politics and religion of, 6, 225–227, 321–322; portrait of, 164, 246; and Privy Council license for company, 1; quarrel with

Index Essex, 289, 322; title of, 283–284. See also Lord Strange’s Men Stanley, Frances, Countess of Bridgewater, 327–332 Stanley, George, Lord Strange, 13, 24, 25, 29, 283; in Richard III, 313–316; in The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 24–25 Stanley, Henry, Lord Strange and later 4th Earl of Derby, 18, 23, 29, 32, 261, 275, 277, 289; friendship with Leicester, 32; patronage of Derby’s Men, 17–20; patronage of Lodge, 163; politics and religion of, 224–226, 289 Stanley, Sir John, Lord of Man, 305, 311 Stanley, Sir William (brother of Lord Thomas), 29, 312 Stanley, Sir William of Wooten, 29, 223, 226 Stanley, Thomas, Bishop of Sodor and Man, 28 Stanley, Thomas, 2nd Baron Stanley and later 1st Earl of Derby, 12–14, 26–29; in Richard III, 315–317; in The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 24–25 Stanley, Thomas, 2nd Earl of Derby, 14–15 Stanley, Ursula, 277 Stanley, William, 6th Earl of Derby, 325–327 “The Stanley Poem” (poem), 14, 17, 28, 268, 311 Star Chamber, Court of, 219, 307 Steevens, George, 139 Stephens, Thomas, 31 St. Mary’s Guildhall, Coventry, 255–257 Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire, per formances at, 18–19, 250, 341 Sudbury, Suffolk, per formances at, 259, 263, 342 Sussex’s Men: casting for, 107; and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 95; and The Jew of Malta, 86, 87; and Lord Strange’s Men, 7, 86, 106, 324; members of, 7;

473

and Queen’s Men, 72, 95; repertory of, 74, 106; at Rose Theatre, 7, 64, 72, 86– 87, 278, 324; and Titus Andronicus, 86, 106–109 Symons, John, 22, 33 Talbot, George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, 289 Talbot, Gilbert, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, 28, 283, 284, 288, 289 Talbot, John, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, 281, 282–290; in 1 Henry VI, 59, 97, 192, 202, 204, 212, 215, 235, 242, 282, 290, 296–301 Tamar Cham, 77, 86, 138–143; influence of, 143; ownership of, 77, 86; plot of, 141–142; in repertory, 187, 188, 203, 242, 335–337, 339; sources for, 139–140, 244–245; spectacle in, 190 “tambercame” (Henslowe title), 138–143. See also Tamar Cham Tamburlaine, 55, 79, 140, 186, 245 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare), 108, 109, 301 Tancred and Gismund, 176 “the taner of Denmarke” (Henslowe title), 67, 70–71, 149–156, 336. See also Edmond Ironside Tarlton, Richard, 19, 38, 40, 55, 57, 141, 160 Taylor, Andrew, 17 Taylor, Diana, 157 Taylor, Gary, 97, 120, 281, 290, 302, 314 Taylor, Michael, 283 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 197 Temür Khan, 140. See also Tamar Cham Theaters, 1, 7, 36, 38, 44, 47–48, 49, 51, 62, 64, 109, 112, 302, 303, 324 Theatre, the, Shoreditch, 36, 38, 44, 47–48, 49, 62, 112, 302, 303. See also Burbage, James Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (Cooper), 155 Theses Martinianae, 40 Thetford, Norfolk, per formances at, 16

474

Index

Thompson, Edward Maunde, 115, 123 Thomson, Peter, 280 Thornton, Thomas, 225 Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (Wilson), 38, 92, 144, 186, 187 Tilney, Edmund: censorship by, 115, 120, 214, 233; and court per formances, 19, 41, 59, 62, 113 Tittler, Robert, 252 “tittus & vespacia” (Henslowe title), 67, 108, 128–133; influence of, 131–133; politics and religion in, 229–230, 243; in repertory, 125, 132, 187, 192, 203, 241, 334–337, 339 Titus Andronicus: attribution issues, 9, 58, 72, 106–110, 133; authorship of, 159; casting for, 108, 350–352; per formance techniques in, 186; pyrotechnics in, 218; and Senecanism, 173, 175; and Shakespeare, 281, 301, 303, 330; violence in, 203 Tottenham House, Wiltshire, 250 Tours, 1, 13–22, 30–33, 37, 39, 46, 48–49, 52, 54, 58, 68, 107, 247–279, 323–325; of 1592, 248–258; of 1593, 258–271; conditions of, 271–272; end of, 278–279; road shows, 272–278 Towne, John, 19 Town halls, 252–254, 263–265, 267, 272 Trafford, Sir Edmund, 105, 275 “the tragedy of the gvyes” (Henslowe title), 73, 76, 337. See also The Massacre at Paris Trapp, J. B., 27 Tremellius Pollo, 147 Tres Thomae (Stapleton), 118 Tribble, Evelyn, 158 Troublesome Reign of King John, The, 69, 92, 109, 112, 138, 242 True Chronicle History of King Leir, The, 69–70, 72, 92 True History of the Civill Warres of France, The, 89

True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, The: attribution issues, 89, 90, 96, 98, 110–112, 301–302, 304; casting for, 303, 362–364; date of, 98; relation to 3 Henry VI, 110–112, 302, 313; staging of, 194; Stanley family in, 312–313; Titus Andronicus links to, 109 True Tragedy of Richard the Third, The, 24–30, 70, 92 Tudor, Edmund, 318 Tudor, Henry, 1st Earl of Richmond and King Henry VII of England, 12, 13, 14, 24, 26, 27, 271, 277, 280–301; in Richard III, 313, 315–319; in “The Stanley Poem,” 28, 268; in The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 25–26 Tudor, Jasper, 318 Tumbling troupes, 20–22, 31, 32, 33, 341 Tunstall, James, 48, 54 Tutchener, William, 51 2 Deadly Sins, plot of, 58, 74, 114, 119–120, 122, 218, 366 Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements (Greg), 75 Unfortunate Traveller, The (Nashe), 110 Urswick, Sir Christopher, 27, 316–317 Utrecht, Low Countries, per formances at, 31 Vagabondage act of 1572, 12, 35 Van Es, Bart, 7, 302 Vickers, Brian, 290, 296, 297 Vincent, Augustine, 285 Vincent, Paul J., 283, 290, 292, 296 Vision of Twelue Goddesses (Daniel), 149 Vives, Juan Luis, 148 Voyages & Trauailes (Mandeville), 140, 244 Walsh, Brian, 199 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 19 Warbeck, Perkin, 29

Index Warner, William, 134, 172, 177 Warren, Roger, 283 Wars of Cyrus, The, 89 Warwick, Warwickshire, per formances at, 250 Watermen, Company of, 50–51, 53 Watson, Thomas, 79 Wells, Stanley, 314 Westminster Palace, per formances at, 341 When You See Me You Know Me (Rowley), 117–118 White, Edward, 78–79, 80, 93, 95 White, William, 80 Whitehall Palace, 17, 46; per formances at, 22, 341, 342 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 37, 38, 39, 123, 232 Whore of Babylon, The (Dekker), 118 Williamson, Arthur, 154 William the Conqueror (King of England), 106, 177 Wilson, John Dover, 284, 290, 296 Wilson, Robert, 19, 30, 36, 38, 57, 106

475

Wilton, Wiltshire, per formances at, 260 Wilton House, Wiltshire, per formances at, 250 Winchester, Hampshire, per formances at, 18, 260, 278, 324, 325 Windsor Palace, per formances at, 19, 21, 341 Wise Man of Westchester. The, 124 Witchcraft, 306 Wolfhall, Wiltshire, 16 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, 15, 117 Woodward, Joan, 63, 259 Worcester, Worcestershire, 21 Worcester’s Men, 54, 56, 278 Wotton, Thomas, 106 Wotton, William, 176 Yoklavich, John, 75, 78 York, per formances at, 49, 251, 260, 262 Young, Richard, 41 Yver, Jacques, 176 Zenobia, 93, 145, 147–149, 242–243, 339