Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory

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CHILDREN OF THE QUEEN’S REVELS This is the first book-length study of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the most enduring and influential of the Jacobean children’s companies. Between 1603 and 1613 the Queen’s Revels staged plays by Francis Beaumont, George Chapman, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, all of whom were at their most innovative when writing for this company. Combining theatre history and critical analysis, this study provides a history of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, and an account of their repertory. It examines the ‘biography’ of the company – demonstrating the involvement in dramatic production of dramatists, shareholders, patrons, audiences and actors alike, and reappraising issues such as management, performance style and audience composition – before exploring their groundbreaking practices in comedy, tragicomedy and tragedy. The book also includes five documentary appendices detailing the plays, people and performances of the Queen’s Revels Company. l u c y m u n r o is a lecturer in English at Keele University. She has edited Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer and is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Book of the Play in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky and Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield and Garrett A. Sullivan. She reviews regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, New Theatre Quarterly, Around the Globe and The Year’s Work in English Studies, and is a regular contributor to Smoke: A London Peculiar.

CHILDREN OF THE QUEEN’S REVELS A Jacobean Theatre Repertory

LUCY MUNRO

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521843560 © Lucy Munro 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 - -

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To the memories of my mother, Cheryl Munro, and my grandmother, Valerie Evans

Contents

List of illustrations Preface List of abbreviations

page viii ix xii

Introduction

1

1

Raiding the nest: a company biography

13

2

‘Proper gallants wordes’: comedy and the theatre audience

55

3

‘Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt’: company politics and the development of tragicomedy

96

‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’: tragedy and the text

134

4

Conclusion

164

Appendix A: The Chapel /Queen’s Revels repertory (Summary) Appendix B: The Chapel /Queen’s Revels repertory (Data and analysis) Appendix C: Biographical summary Appendix D: Actor lists Appendix E: Court and touring performances, 1600–13 Notes Bibliography Index

167 170 179 185 187 194 231 253

vii

Illustrations

1 Title-page of Edward Sharpham, The Fleer (London, 1607). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 2 Title-page of George Chapman, The Widow’s Tears (London, 1612). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 3 Fenchurch pageant in the processional entry of James I into the city of London, March 1604, in Stephen Harrison, Arches of Triumph (London, 1604). Reproduced with the permission of Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 4 John Norden, map of London in Speculum Britanniae (London, 1593). Reproduced with the permission of Guildhall Library, Corporation of London 5 Rehearsal picture from Epicoene, directed by Christian Billing for Mamamouchi’s Miscreants, University of Warwick, 2000. Photograph by Florence Liber. Reproduced with permission 6 Title-page of The Works of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

viii

page 22

26

44

64

91

101

Preface

This book focuses on the Jacobean career of the company variously known as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the Children of the Revels, the Children of Blackfriars and the Children of Whitefriars. Established as the Children of the Chapel in 1600, the Queen’s Revels were the most prominent, politically contentious and dramatically experimental of the early seventeenth-century children’s companies. In focusing on the Jacobean period, I potentially create a problematic divide between the careers of the Children of the Chapel and the Children of the Queen’s Revels. However, after 1603 the patronage of Queen Anna of Denmark, the appointment of Samuel Daniel as licenser, the involvement of John Marston as shareholder and the increased experience of the performers take the company in new directions. In addition, the repertory of 1600–3 is affected to a large degree by the specific theatrical environment of the ‘War of the Theatres’ or poetomachia, in which the Chapel plays Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster are usually thought to have been involved. The ‘war of the theatres’ has recently been analysed in detail (with widely divergent approaches and conclusions) by Matthew Steggle, Roslyn Lander Knutson and James P. Bednarz, and I have therefore chosen to focus on other aspects of the Blackfriars repertory.1 Since it would be impossible to take into account the full complexities of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatrical and cultural milieus in one book, I have (reluctantly) decided to focus on the Jacobean period. However, I include in Chapter One an account of the events of 1600–3 and discussion of plays performed in those years, some of which may have been revived after 1603. Data relating to the Elizabethan period has also been included in the documentary appendices. A note on the texts used in this study. Some of the works on which I draw here have been extensively edited; others have received little or no editorial attention. I have decided, therefore, that a fairer impression will ix

x

Preface

be given by my using early modern texts as far as possible. Any emendations to quotations are indicated by square brackets; long ‘s’ has been regularised, and black-letter has been converted to roman type. To facilitate cross-referencing, line or page references have been supplied from modern editions. For citations from manuscripts, in most cases references are provided to an archival source and a modern transcript. Where possible I have checked the transcript against the original; in the few cases where I have been unable to consult a manuscript personally, the transcript is cited before the archive details. Following the practice of a number of modern historians, for some personal names I have chosen to use the version the bearers themselves preferred. Thus I refer to the Queen Consort of James I as ‘Anna’, rather than ‘Anne’, and to his cousin as ‘Arbella Stuart’ rather than ‘Arabella’. Dates are given old-style, with the year assumed to begin on 1 January. Unless stated otherwise, dates of plays given in the text are those of first performance. Names of companies are generally given with the first citation. This study has its origins in my King’s College London PhD thesis, submitted in 2001, and it has taken a while to reach its final form. I have, therefore, a few people to thank. My greatest debt is to my PhD supervisor, Gordon McMullan. His support, belief and advice have been invaluable (as has his regular nagging about the merits of structure); he has been a good friend and a superb academic example. Kate McLuskie and Kiernan Ryan were stimulating and humane examiners, and I am extremely grateful for their detailed comments and advice. I would also like to thank the readers for Cambridge University Press for their informed criticism, in particular the readers of sample material and the anonymous reader of the penultimate draft. At Cambridge I would like to thank Sarah Stanton for her faith in the project and Rebecca Jones for her help with the final typescript. I am particularly grateful for the help and support of friends who have read (suffered?) early drafts: Michela Calore, Kevin De Ornellas, Ralph Parfect, Tanya Pollard, Richard Proudfoot, Tom Rutter, Alison Stenton and Ann Thompson. Others have contributed comments, suggestions and advice: I would especially like to thank Eva Griffith, Sue Wiseman, Cathy Shrank, James Wallace, Rebecca Rogers, Kevin Quarmby, Anne Gill, Fiona Ritchie, Maggie Wilkinson, Mark Hutchings, Adam Smyth, Karen Britland, Lucie Sutherland, Max Fincher and Angus Wrenn. Leah Scragg’s seminars at the University of Manchester provided my first

Preface xi encounter with the likes of Marston and Beaumont and Fletcher, and I am very grateful for her consistent support. I am indebted to the British Academy, who funded my MA and PhD work, to the King’s College Faculty of Humanities, and to the English Department Postgraduate and Research Committee. I am also grateful to the English departments of King’s College London and Reading University for short-term teaching posts which enabled me to complete revisions to the typescript. Some of the material presented here found its first audience at various seminars and conferences; I am very grateful to Sue Wiseman, Cathy Shrank, Janet Costa, Alex Davis, Tess Grant, Stephen O’Neill and Padraig Kirwan for inviting me to speak. I am also indebted to SallyBeth MacLean, who provided me with some references from unpublished REED material, and to Richard Dutton, Jeffrey Masten and David Kathman, who let me read essays prior to publication. I would also like to thank Dr Kathman for his comments on Chapter One. Thanks are due to Nick Tanner and Martha Crossley for inviting me to attend rehearsals for their King’s College production of Eastward Ho, and to Tony Bell, Deb Callan and Kate Hall for allowing me to watch rehearsals for Globe Education staged readings of Eastward Ho and The Insatiate Countess. I am especially grateful to Christian Billing, who battled with the London postal service to supply me with material relating to his production of Epicoene at Warwick University, and to Frances Liber, who took the photograph reproduced in Chapter Three. I also would like to thank the Beinecke Library, University of Yale, the Guildhall Library, London, and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, for their help with the illustrations. Family and friends have been hugely supportive, especially my dad, George Munro, my brother, Duncan, and flatmates who had to live with this work at various stages: Jess Leupolz, Julia Roberts and Jo Upton. I would also like to thank Sara Ayech, Amanda Beale, Ben Clancy, Liz Hampson, Clare Wadd and Clare Wiggins for tolerance and distractions. Above all, I thank Matt Haynes for emotional, spiritual and grammatical support.

1

See Matthew Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 1998), especially 21–61; Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

Abbreviations

Arber BL Bowers CA CSP Domestic

CSP Venetian

DNB ELH ELN ELR ES GL

Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1604 A.D., 5 vols. (London: Privately Printed, 1876) British Library Fredson Bowers, gen. ed., The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968–96) H. N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History (1926; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964) Robert Lemon and M. A. E. Green, eds., Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I (1547–1625), 12 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1856–72) R. Brown et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives of Collections of Venice and in Other Libraries of North Italy, 38 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1864–1947) Brian Harrison, gen. ed., The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) English Literary History English Language Notes English Literary Renaissance E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) Guildhall Library xii

Greg, Bibliography

HSS JCS MRDE MSC MSC 6 MSC 13 NA N&Q RD REED RES RORD SBP SEL ShS SP SPC SQ STC

TLS TN

Abbreviations xiii W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Bibliographic Society at the University Press, Oxford, 1939–59) C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52). G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–68) Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England Malone Society Collections David Cook and F. P. Wilson, eds., ‘Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber 1558–1642’, MSC 6 (1961), 1–175 W. R. Streitberger, ed., ‘Jacobean and Caroline Revels Accounts 1603–1642’, MSC 13 (1986), 1–182 National Archives, Kew (formerly the Public Record Office) Notes and Queries Renaissance Drama Records of Early English Drama Review of English Studies Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Its Design (New York: New York University Press, 1964) Studies in English Literature Shakespeare Survey Studies in Philology Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Shakespeare Quarterly A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1986) Times Literary Supplement Theatre Notebook

Introduction

Enter PROLOGVE. PRO. From all that’s neere the Court, from all that’s great Within the compasse of the Citty-wals, We now haue brought our Sceane Enter Citizen [from audience]. c i t . Hold your peace good-man boy. p r o . What do you meane sir? c i t . That you haue no good meaning: This seuen yeares there have beene playes at this house, I haue obserued it, you haue still girds at Citizens; and now you call your play, The London Marchant. Downe with your Title, boy, downe with your Title.1

The light-hearted confrontation staged in the opening scene of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, first performed around 1607, is typical in many ways of the material dramatised between 1603 and 1613 by the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The Queen’s Revels was the most enduring and influential of the Jacobean children’s companies. Its plays are ambitious and innovative, even avant-garde; its relationship with the audience was informal and, occasionally, combative, with a tendency either to risk confusing spectators with metatheatrical or generic experimentation, or to overstep the bounds of what was considered acceptable in political or social satire. Staging a play like The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which opens with this striking and potentially baffling metatheatrical intervention, was a risky move, but the Queen’s Revels were accustomed to financial, social and political hazard. After the reestablishment in 1599 of the Children of Paul’s, a company that took its boy actors from the ranks of the Cathedral choir school, the Children of the Chapel began to perform at the Blackfriars theatre in 1600. The precise links of the Children of the Chapel with the Chapel Royal have been much disputed, but in 1603, on the accession of James I, 1

2

Children of the Queen’s Revels

the company was granted a royal patent and became the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Building on the popularity of plays by Ben Jonson and George Chapman, the Queen’s Revels commissioned plays from the likes of John Marston – a shareholder in the company – and quickly developed a repertory that intrigued, amused and irritated their original audiences in equal measure. This irritation often spilled into political controversy, and the company lost its royal patent in early 1606; from this date, it seems to have been known as the Children of the Revels. They continued to operate in their Blackfriars theatre until 1608, when serious indiscretions over Chapman’s two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron and a lost play about James I’s Scottish silver mine led to the company’s collapse and the surrender of the playhouse lease to Richard Burbage of the King’s Men. Within a year, however, a company led by Queen’s Revels shareholder Robert Keysar was performing at court, and by late 1609 a new ‘Children of the Queen’s Revels’ was in residence at the Whitefriars theatre, where the company remained until finally merging with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in early 1613.2 The appeal of the children’s companies is perhaps particularly difficult for modern readers to grasp, more difficult even than the conventional performance of women’s parts by boys or young men in the adult companies. This difficulty can be illustrated by a comment in Nicholas Wright’s recent play, Cressida, in which ‘Richard Robinson’ – a former boy ‘actress’ with the King’s Men – remarks of a 1630s experiment with children’s companies, ‘It was a silly idea to start with. Boys playing grown-up men, oh I don’t know, there’s something funny about it.’3 As this comment highlights, in addition to performing roles with a different gender and, in many cases, social status from their own, the boy actors in children’s companies also engaged in a form of age transvestism. It has often been argued that the children’s companies must have had an appeal distinct from that of the adults, and an antimimetic acting style based on ironic exaggeration. In many ways, however, the differences between the adult and children’s companies have been exaggerated. This is largely because critics have focused on plays performed when the Paul’s and Chapel companies were reconstituted in 1599–1600, such as Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge (Paul’s, c.1599–1601), and Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster (Chapel, 1600–1). Some aspects of these plays are tailored to the specific character of the companies when they were first reconstituted – the inductions to Antonio and Mellida and Cynthia’s Revels, for instance, explicitly refer to the bodies of the adolescent actors. In other respects, however, their techniques are

Introduction

3

analogous to those employed by the adult companies, for which many of their dramatists also worked, and they can be staged effectively with adult casts.4 Moreover, the children’s companies’ repertories and dramaturgy did not remain static. Many actors stayed with the companies, and as they grew older and more proficient dramatists were able to assume greater versatility from their experienced performers. Perhaps as a result of this growing virtuosity, together with the employment of self-consciously innovative writers, the repertories performed at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres in the years 1603–8 and 1609–13 constitute the most consistently fascinating body of drama staged in this period, notwithstanding the King’s Men’s catalogue of plays by Shakespeare and, later, by Beaumont and Fletcher. The Queen’s Revels is often said to have produced mainly ‘railing’ plays; like Beaumont’s Citizen, some critics have assumed that the purpose of the company was to ‘haue still girds at Citizens’, while others have detected jibes against crown and court.5 In fact, the Queen’s Revels plays demonstrate a much greater range than the satiric stereotype might suggest. With the exception of the chronicle history play, they encompass every significant early Jacobean narrative mode: the disguised ruler play (The Malcontent, The Fawn, The Fleer), city comedy (Eastward Ho, The Dutch Courtesan, Your Five Gallants, A Woman is a Weathercock), revenge tragedy (The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, Cupid’s Revenge), political tragedy (The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron) and travel drama (A Christian Turned Turk). Many of their works are strikingly experimental, even iconoclastic: heroic tragedy in Bussy D’Ambois; metadramatic excesses in The Knight of the Burning Pestle; inventive music and spectacle in Sophonisba; ironic pastoral in The Faithful Shepherdess; stark misanthropy in Epicoene. In concentrating on a single repertory, and asserting the importance of that model for the criticism of early modern drama, my approach in this book is indebted to the recent work of Mary Bly, Andrew Gurr, Roslyn Lander Knutson, and Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean.6 The organisation of theatre history by company recurred throughout the twentieth century – E. K. Chambers’s The Elizabethan Stage (1923), G. E. Bentley’s The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941–68) and Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996) each included narrative accounts of theatre companies – and studies of the children’s companies were published by H. N. Hillebrand, Michael Shapiro and Reavley Gair.7 Recently, however, it has become an increasingly attractive option for literary critics, due, at least in part, to the influence of post-structuralist uncertainty regarding the place of the author. We are

4

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recognising that, as Jacques Derrida suggests in Of Grammatology, ‘the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper systems, laws and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system.’8 The author is a useful organising principle, but it is not the only one available. Michel Foucault argues that ‘since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive’; to a large extent, the main ‘regulator of the fictive’ in the early modern playhouse was the playing company, not the author.9 As the material summarised by Bentley in The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time suggests, companies purchased plays from dramatists – sometimes buying a complete script, more often paying in installments after discussions over an idea, a plot or a completed act – and had near-complete control over those plays’ progress to the stage.10 Plays seem to have been produced through the cooperation of playwrights and companies, as seen in Dekker’s testimony in Star Chamber in 1624 that he and other dramatists were ‘making & contriuing [. . .] [a] play called keep the widow waking and did make & contrive the same vppon the instruccions giuen them by one Raph Savage [the Red Bull company’s agent]’.11 Approaching plays through the company for which they were written is a way of acknowledging the compromises which writers make when they engage with institutions such as the early modern theatre industry. It is not, however, a question of denying the playwright’s agency, but of considering the input of all those involved in the production and dissemination of plays: dramatists, actors, shareholders, playhouse functionaries, patrons, audiences and publishers. In focusing on the contexts in which plays were originally produced, this book is, to a certain extent, in thrall to what Walter Benjamin rather unpleasantly dubbed ‘the whore called “Once upon a time” in historicism’s bordello’.12 A repertory approach is, however, offered more as a theoretical construct than as a historicist imperative. Furthermore, although I have concentrated on the repertory in which these plays were, in the main part, originally performed, I have included in the text and notes references to recent productions of the plays, a reminder that the ‘meaning’ of a play is located not only in the circumstances of its first production, but also in later performances and appropriations. This book is therefore a response to McMillin and MacLean’s suggestion that company repertories should be studied ‘with the kinds of critical and textual attention that are normally reserved for the canons of the playwrights’.13 A multiplicity of approaches is envisaged, whereby canons

Introduction

5

associated with theatre history are opened up to the full range of available critical and textual models. The closest analogue to what I attempt here is Bly’s recent book Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, a study of ‘Whitefriars puns, the men who wrote the puns, the plays in which they appear, and the audience for those puns’ (2–3). Like Bly, I attempt to bring into play all the currently available data about the company and its personnel. Chapter One, ‘Raiding the nest: a company biography’, explores the potential and problems inherent in the idea of a ‘company biography’. I first provide an overview of the activities of the Children of the Chapel and the Children of the Queen’s Revels in the years 1600–13, then turn to a detailed analysis of what is known about the Queen’s Revels personnel and their input into the production of plays at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres. A model of collaborative authority over dramatic production – on which I draw in the following chapters – is established through examination of the various roles of dramatists, shareholders, patrons, associates, actors and publishers. In Queer Virgins Bly melds a close linguistic analysis, informed by queer theory, with equally close attention to the circumstances in which the plays were written and performed. Such a concentrated critical model could, however, constrain a study of the Queen’s Revels repertory. The King’s Revels company was in existence only in the plague-disrupted seasons of 1607–8; the extant repertory is remarkably homogenous, being the product of one specific literary moment and of a small group of dramatists whose extant plays are highly collaborative.14 The plays of the Queen’s Revels, produced by a larger group of dramatists over a longer period of time, demand a more flexible approach or series of approaches. In order to take this diversity into account, and to avoid the potentially reductive format of the chronological survey, I structure my reevaluation of the Queen’s Revels repertory by genre, looking in turn at three broad structural genres or ‘kinds’: comedy, tragicomedy and tragedy.15 Taking a fresh look at genre need not mean returning to a historically deracinated or simplistically formalist approach: to appropriate Ben Jonson’s term, we should not be confined by ‘the nicenesse of a fewe (who are nothing but Forme)’.16 Categorising plays by means of their genre was integral to the dramatic process; it thus provides us with a historically grounded perspective on the collaborative production of plays and an interpretative link between their production and reception.17 The importance of generic categories can be seen at all stages in the production of drama in the commercial theatre, from the commissioning and writing of plays through to their performance, reception and afterlife

6

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in print. In Philip Henslowe’s account book or Diary, for instance, generic categories seem to be as everyday and concrete as the props and properties alongside which they are catalogued: Lent vnto John ducke to paye for ) the tvrckes head & ij wemens gownes mackenge & fresh watr for owld castell 3li s & the merser bill & harey chettell in eareneste of a tragedie called . . . . . . . . ye 24 of aguste 1602

) Lent vnto xpofer beston & Robart palante the r 26 of nov{e}mb{er} 1602 to paye vnto John day to m smythe xxxxs mr hathway & the other poete in p{ar}te of payment of the playe called [John dayes comody] the some of the blacke doge of newgate18

Judging by Henslowe’s Diary, generic categories were used as shorthand for the kinds of plays required, communicating mutually understood requirements regarding subject matter, narrative structure, dramatic language and characterisation. In the second extract a title has eventually been interlined below; in the first, space was left for a title that was never entered. Usually the categories are simple, with repeated references to comedies and tragedies, but they are occasionally more complex: an entry in George Chapman’s hand, dated 17 July 1599, notes that he has received part payment for ‘a Pastorall ending in a Tragedye’.19 At the other end of the play’s life, fixed generic categories came back into use in the shape of generic tags on printed title-pages, which were also used for advertising.20 The wording of these title-pages demonstrates the extent to which knowledge of generic terms was assumed by those who marketed and printed drama: ‘AL | FOOLES | A | Comedy, Presented at the Black | Fryers, And lately before | his Maiestie. | Written by George Chapman’; ‘THE | VVONDER | of VVomen | Or | The Tragedie of Sophonisba, | as it hath beene sundry times Acted | at the Blacke Friers. | Written by IOHN MARSTON’; ‘POE¨TASTER, | OR | His Arraignment. | A Comicall Satyre. | Acted, in the yeere 1601. By the then | Children of Queene ELIZABETHS | CHAPPEL. | The Author B. I.’; ‘The Deuils Law-case. | OR, | When Women goe to Law, the | Deuill is full of Businesse. | A new Tragecomœdy. [. . .] As it was approouedly well Acted | by her Maiesties Seruants. | Written by IOHN WEBSTER’.21 Where a play’s genre is provided, it is usually more prominent than either company or author; companies tend to take precedence over authors.22

Introduction

7

Generic terms were also employed in prologues and inductions – the first parts of a play to be encountered by the theatre audience.23 Early modern drama was performed in repertory, with large gaps between performances of any single play; a play that was unsuccessful at its first performance could easily be dropped. Emphasis on a play’s genre is often associated, therefore, with the need for a play to be accepted on its very first performance; to a large extent, its success could depend on the success with which the audience ‘read’ its genre. For this reason prologues frequently couple references to genre with pleas for a play’s gentle reception by the audience. The prologue to Jonson’s Volpone (King’s Men, 1605), for example, states that the writer ‘presents quick Comœdy, refined, | As best Criticks haue designed ’, hoping to ally the audience with the judgement of these ‘best Criticks’.24 Similarly, in the prefatory address ‘To the Reader’ in his innovative ‘pastorall Tragie-comedie’, The Faithful Shepherdess (Queen’s Revels, c.1608), Fletcher regrets not having defined its genre in the theatre. ‘If you be not reasonably assurde of your knowledge in this kinde of Poeme’, he writes, ‘lay downe the booke or read this, which I would wish had bene the prologue.’25 The play failed on its first performance and may not have been performed again before it appeared in print, judging by Beaumont’s reference to this ‘second publication’ in a dedicatory verse.26 Fletcher therefore implies that he believes the play might have succeeded if he had prepared its original audience properly. Jonson and Fletcher suggest the utility of fixed generic categories in the battle between audiences’ expectations and dramatists’ intentions or company policy. Elsewhere, however, the picture is a little more complicated. The title-page of John Day’s The Isle of Gulls (Queen’s Revels, 1606) contains no generic terms. This does not mean, however, that no interest is shown in the play’s form. In its metadramatic induction, the Prologue is forced to negotiate with three ‘Gentlemen’. These fictional playgoers are part of the select group found only in indoor theatres such as the Blackfriars, who would sit on stools placed on the edge of the stage itself, thereby crossing the boundary between spectator and spectacle. Taking advantage of their proximity to the company’s representative, each gentleman demands to see a different kind of play. The first demands vicious satire: ‘ist any thing Criticall?’, he asks, ‘Are Lawyers fees, and Cittizens wiues laid open in it: I loue to heare vice anatomized, & abuse let blood in the maister vaine, is there any great mans life charactred int?’27 When told that ‘only in the person of Dametas’ will vices be expressed, he declares, ‘All thats nothing to mee, and there be not Wormewood water and

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Copperes int, Ile not like it, should Apollo write it, and Rosius himselfe act it’ (A2v; Induction, 57, 62–4). The second gentleman demands ‘a sceane of venery, that will make a mans spirrits stand on theyr typtoes, and die his blood in a deepe scarlet’, and the third ‘a stately pend historie, as thus, The rugged windes, with rude and ragged ruffes. &c’ (A2v; Induction, 68–70, 77–9). Their demands eventually lead the exasperated Prologue to ask, Alas Gentlemen, how ist possible to content you? you will haue rayling, and inuectiues, which our Authour neither dares, nor affects: you baudy and scurrill iests, which neither becomes his modestie to write, nor the eare of a generous Auditory to heare: you must ha swelling comparisons, and bumbast Epithites, which are as fit for the body of a Comedie, as Hercules shooe for the foote of a Pygmey: yet all these we must haue, and all in one play, or tis alreadie condemned to the hell of eternall disgrace. (A2v–A3r; Induction, 83–92)

The Prologue uses three arguments in an attempt to limit the audience’s right to demand what the play should be like: the inclination of the playwright, the taste of the rest of the audience, and the generic indecorum of introducing the wrong kind of discourse into a comedy. The appeal to indecorum caps his protest; the combination of demands would, in his eyes, result in incoherence. The Prologue begs the gentlemen to embrace the play and its generic character, and thereby to accept and approve it; the gentlemen, however, remain obstinate: 1 Looke toot, if there be not gall int, it shall not passe. 2 If it be not baudie, tis impossible to passe. 3 If it be both Criticall and baudy, if it be not high written, both your Poet and the house to, loose a friend of me. (A3r; Induction, 93–8)

In the comment that both the dramatist and the playhouse lose out if their play is rejected, the induction reasserts the necessary collaboration between individual members of the company and between the company and the audience. Ironically, of course, the play capably mixes all three contradictory modes – its playful adaptation of Sidney’s Arcadia is simultaneously satiric, bawdy and high-blown – triumphantly confounding its audience’s expectations and calling into question the kinds of mutually exclusive generic categories that the induction invokes. Conceptions of genre in the early modern theatre seem to have been a peculiar mixture of the set and the fluid. Those involved with the production of dramatic texts were acutely aware of genres and generic categorisation, but approached them in a highly flexible manner. If the play’s audience or readers were thought to need guidance, a generic

Introduction

9

definition would be provided, usually presented in neo-classical terms or as if it had literary authority. Such definitions were rarely adhered to within plays, however, and playwrights and companies often portrayed themselves as rejecting genre altogether when particular categories became outmoded or politically dangerous. The prologue to The Woman Hater remarks of its author, he that made this Play, meanes to please Auditors so, as hee may bee an Auditor himselfe hereafter, and not purchase them with the deare losse of his eares: I dare not call it Comedie, or Tragedie; ’tis perfectly neyther: A Play it is, which was meant to make you laugh, how it will please you, is not written in my part[.]28

The Woman Hater was first performed by the Children of Paul’s in 1606, and the reference to the ‘deare losse of his eares’ may be an allusion to the political controversy aroused by the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The tragic Philotas and the comic Eastward Ho and The Isle of Gulls all displeased the authorities; Jonson later commented that Chapman, Marston and himself, as the writers of Eastward Ho, were in danger of having ‘their ears cutt & noses’.29 The prologue is, moreover, eager to tell the audience they will not find in this play ‘the ordinarie and ouer-worne trade of ieasting at Lordes and Courtiers, and Citizens, without taxation of any particular or new vice by them found out, but at the persons of them’ (A2v; lines 19–21). The play’s protested political neutrality is embodied in its refusal to participate in the potentially dangerous genres of comedy and tragedy, and in its (stated) refusal to engage with the kind of satiric material demanded by the fictional spectator in The Isle of Gulls. The refusal to write a play according to a previously defined genre or popular mode – or, rather, the refusal to admit to having done so – is politically, rather than artistically, motivated. Reactions of audiences towards generic signifiers also seem to have been variable: spectators might, for instance, criticise a play for not conforming with neo-classical rules, or demand that comic material or tragic language be inserted into plays for which companies and dramatists thought it unsuited. Because early modern theatre companies were dependent on their audiences, they were concerned with keeping the attention and approval of disparate groups of people with different ideas about what constituted a particular genre and whether generic decorum should be kept. In addition, the rapid turnover of plays in a repertory system meant that most plays were adaptations, material being taken from many different sources. These conditions meant that the forms of plays were constantly mutating, and the boundaries between dramatic

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genres constantly shifted with the introduction of fresh sources and influences. This model of genre has most in common with the theoretical perspective outlined in Derrida’s important essay ‘The Law of Genre’. Derrida argues that even though there may be a ‘law of genre’ – a prohibition against miscegenation that can be either a prediction (‘it will happen thus. I will not mix genres’) or a ‘sharp order’ – it is accompanied by a counterlaw or ‘law of the law of genre’, a ‘principle of contamination’.30 At the instant when a text is identified as belonging to a specific genre, the genre itself is altered; the text simultaneously belongs and does not belong to that genre. These ‘laws’ are not presented as alternative ways of viewing a text; they are instead bound together. ‘Every text participates in one or several genres’, Derrida writes: there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free anarchic and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself, because of the effect of the code and of the generic mark. In marking itself generically, a text demarcates itself. (65)

Although the post-structuralist ‘text’ is often historically and politically deracinated, Derrida’s formulation – in particular the idea of generic participation without belonging – is a useful tool in analysing the function of generic conventions in the early modern theatre industry. Theatrical modes need to be seen not as monolithic entities with sets of clearly defined and mutually exclusive characteristics, but as unstable networks of generic signifiers understood by producers and audiences. The signifiers are themselves the product of commonly held perspectives and inherited ideas, and are constantly subject to change as those ideas and perspectives change. At any one time a play’s genre can be influenced by factors such as the opinions of its author, the strategies of its playing company or the demands of its audience. Each new work is a negotiation between an inherited form and current ideas and fashions, and with each new work the genres in which it participates are reconfigured and their ideological associations are adjusted. Thus a structural genre such as comedy or tragedy can seem static or archetypal, but it is in fact continually modulating and its boundaries shifting. In looking at a major structural genre, each chapter also draws on a different range of critical, theoretical and textual approaches. Chapter Two, ‘“Proper gallants wordes”: comedy and the theatre audience’, revisits the much-debated problem of the nature and outlook of the early

Introduction

11

modern theatre audience and the question of whether the Queen’s Revels audiences constituted a ‘coterie’. Documentary evidence for the composition of the Queen’s Revels audience is assessed, and a new perspective on the relationship between play and audience gained through a study of the function of jokes – particularly jokes about social status – in their comedies. The representation of gendered and class-inflected speech in plays such as Eastward Ho, Your Five Gallants and Epicoene aimed to provoke laughter, but could also provoke an uneasy reaction in the Queen’s Revels’ socially uncertain spectators. That unease could, in turn, disturb the comfort with which the comic form traditionally aims to provide its audience, and accentuate the Queen’s Revels’ own problematic place in Jacobean society. Chapter Three, ‘“Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt”: company politics and the development of tragicomedy’, proposes a new model for source study, analysing the crucial part played by the Queen’s Revels in the development of a ‘new’ dramatic genre, tragicomedy. Looking at the combined contributions of dramatists and shareholders, the chapter explores the way in which source texts including Sidney’s Arcadia, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, and Lylyan ‘tragical tragical comedy’ were assimilated into the complex literary and political network surrounding the Queen’s Revels. Through plays such as The Malcontent, The Widow’s Tears, Law Tricks, The Isle of Gulls, Cupid’s Revenge and The Faithful Shepherdess, the Queen’s Revels developed a distinctive version of tragicomedy. This mode was to become dominant in the Jacobean and Caroline theatre when their dramatists and, later, their plays were adopted by the King’s Men. Chapter Four, ‘“Ieronimo in Decimo sexto”: tragedy and the text’, picks up McMillin and MacLean’s suggestion that company repertories might be examined with an eye to textual matters. In the tragedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres, we find a demonstration of the textual instability of early modern drama in general and tragedy in particular. Three plays – Philotas, The Insatiate Countess and Bussy D’Ambois – show signs of textual revision; others were censored prior to their publication (The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron) or published in ways which mediate the revisionary relationship between performance and print (Sophonisba, A Christian Turned Turk, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois). Simultaneously, these plays demonstrate the instability of tragedy itself. In the tragedies performed at Blackfriars, we find the company experimenting with a form often neglected by children’s companies, reshaping it to suit

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their practical demands. In the Whitefriars tragedies, on the other hand, we see the shaping effects of a shift in audience taste: the new popularity of the tragicomic form developed by the Queen’s Revels playwrights at the Blackfriars. Studying a company repertory enables us to recuperate plays and dramatists often neglected in traditional critical works and to place them alongside more canonical texts and writers. It also opens up a discursive space in which we can study all those who took part in the production of plays, from the dramatists to the shareholders, from the patrons to the actors. In a system in which commercial plays were generally commissioned and bought outright by the companies, it seems paradoxical that the study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama has been so often organised around dramatists, whose control over their texts was limited and local. Focusing on the repertory context in which plays were written and performed cannot account for every aspect of dramatic creation – no one approach can possibly do this – but it enables a critic to allow for the input of a far greater range of agents than a thematic or author-based approach. It compels us to consider companies and audiences in terms other than those of impediments to authorial genius, and returns the commercial contexts of the early modern theatre industry to the centre of critical concern.

chapter 1

Raiding the nest: a company biography

Of course, the managers of the private theatres were not interested in disseminating infection; their only guilt was to be embarked on a commercial enterprise.1

Many readers’ first introduction to the children’s companies of early seventeenth-century London are the somewhat jaundiced comments of Rosencrantz in the Folio version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet : [T]here is Sir an ayrie of Children, little Yases, that crye out on the top of question; and are most tyrannically clap’t for’t: these are now the fashion, and so be-rattle the common Stages (so they call them) that many wearing Rapiers, are afraide of Goose-quils, and dare scarse come thither.2

In his reference to the rival theatre as a nest of little eyases (untrained hawks), Rosencrantz alludes specifically to the Chapel/Queen’s Revels company, the more ‘flauntingly outrageous’ of the children’s companies,3 whose Blackfriars playhouse was located in an area associated with the trade in feathers. His comments seem to set up a division between the ‘common Stages’ – large public theatres such as the Globe, used by adult companies – and the private, indoor theatres, suggesting that the latter are stealing upper-class spectators (swords were traditionally worn only by gentlemen) from the former. This idea of an antagonistic divide between public and private and a polarisation of their audiences was most famously developed by Alfred Harbage in his classic account of the ‘rival traditions’, a critical model based on the assumption that the masses supported a popular drama at the amphitheatres and a decadent aristocratic coterie patronised the private children’s theatres. While he characterised the plays of the adults as wholesome entertainment, Harbage found the children’s plays morally and (especially) sexually inappropriate. However, Rosencrantz’s comment may be more multivalent than has often been assumed. Roslyn Lander Knutson has argued recently that it does not relate to the theatrical conditions of 1600–1, the time of the 13

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so-called ‘War of the Theatres’, but is a later insertion provoked by the political unrest caused by Queen’s Revels plays such as Eastward Ho (1605), The Isle of Gulls (1606) and Byron (1608).4 It may therefore be analogous to Thomas Heywood’s criticism of the children’s companies in An Apology for Actors, composed around 1608, in which Heywood attacks ‘The liberty, which some arrogate to themselues, committing their bitternesse, and liberall inuectives against all estates, to the mouthes of Children, supposing their iuniority to be a priuiledge for any rayling, be it never so violent.’5 In this interpretation Rosencrantz’s words do not express the adult company’s irritation with the children who have been stealing their audiences, but indicate the very real concern caused by the juvenile company’s political indiscretions. There is also, however, another possibility: rather than critiquing the children’s success or political indiscretion, Rosencrantz may actually be advertising them to the Globe audience.6 As Andrew Gurr has recently pointed out, the comments are addressed to Hamlet, played by Richard Burbage, the owner of the Blackfriars theatre and the children’s landlord, who may have been keen to protect his investment.7 As these diverging interpretations of one fragment of a text suggest, accounts of the Children of the Queen’s Revels are inevitably skewed by the perspective of the individual critic: the same allusion may indicate commercial rivalry, political disruption or shrewd marketing. Critical narratives can be equally slippery elsewhere. Scholars often attempt to locate a controlling intention or influence behind the Queen’s Revels’ plays. This is perhaps part of the process – criticised by Knutson in her recent book Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time – in which commercial decisions are analysed in terms of personal quarrels and antagonisms. It may be beneficial, however, to test how far this anthropomorphic technique might take us. Author-based studies of literature habitually begin with a biographical sketch. An attempt to perform a similar manoeuvre in a study of a theatre company obviously calls into question some of the presumptions on which traditional authorial studies are based. There can be no unique intellect, though there might be a distinctive aesthetic; psychology would almost certainly have a greatly reduced role to play. Although a number of issues can be translated directly into the company ‘biography’ – politics and patronage; influence and inspiration – the concept of a company biography is in itself problematic. While the Blackfriars and Whitefriars incarnations of the Children of the Queen’s Revels share a name, a patron, some actors and a group of plays, Richard Dutton has recently argued that they

A company biography

15

should be regarded as separate entities.8 On a theoretical level, moreover, William Ingram reminds us that ‘a company of players is always an ephemeral thing, no more susceptible of meaningful biographical limning than any other ongoing corporate body’.9 Rather than constructing one overarching narrative, I aim, therefore, to attend to a series of smaller, overlapping narratives; Ingram suggests that it is helpful to think of the development of theatre history as an ‘evolving series of maps’, which place the critic ‘in comparable relationships to the data [. . .] that is their speciality’ (225). We need to look more closely at all the historical individuals who comprised the Queen’s Revels company, and to revisit issues such as the commissioning of the plays, the function of political and literary networks, and the nature of the actors and their playing style. Before approaching this, however, I will sketch the first ‘map’, an outline of the major events which took place at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres in the years 1600–13. i 1600–1603: Before the Revels In September 1600 Henry Evans rented a theatre in the Blackfriars precinct adjacent to the City of London from Richard Burbage. The rooms which made up the theatre – the second to be created in this district – had been purchased in February 1596 by Burbage’s father, James. James Burbage had planned to use the Blackfriars as a replacement for the Chamberlain’s Men’s Shoreditch playhouse, the Theatre, but this was forbidden after a group of Blackfriars residents – including the company’s recently inherited patron, George Carey, Lord Hunsdon – petitioned the Privy Council.10 While the Blackfriars playhouse was empty, Evans seized his chance, successfully gambling that the residents of the Blackfriars would tolerate the presence of a children’s company. Evans was a scrivener by trade, but by the 1580s was working with the Children of the Chapel at Richard Farrant’s first Blackfriars theatre. He was payee at court in December 1584 for a company briefly known as Oxford’s Children, but fades out of view with the decline of the children’s companies in the late 1580s.11 Under the agreement reached with Burbage on 2 September 1599, he leased the new Blackfriars theatre for twenty-one years, the lease being effective from 29 September.12 Evans found himself in possession of what seems to have been the largest of the early seventeenth-century ‘private’ or indoor theatres.13 The

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playhouse is thought to have been in the old Parliament Chamber of the Blackfriars buildings, described in the lease agreement as ‘All those Seaven greate vpper Romes as they are nowe devided being all vpon one flower and sometyme beinge one greate and entire rome’.14 Burbage seems to have restored the old Parliament Chamber, taking out the partitions, for use as the theatre’s auditorium. The lease described the room as ‘all that great hall or place (in English Room) with places (in English rooms) above it as they were then built, adorned (in English furnished), and erected with a Theatre (in English a Stage) porticoes (in English Galleries) and seats.’15 The chamber measured 46 feet from east to west and 66 feet from north to south,16 with the stage seemingly running from east to west. It had galleries (though it is not clear how many), a paved floor, and an entrance at the north end of the hall. It seems to have had a tiring house with three doors, though its exact nature and dimensions are disputed. The playhouse also seems to have had a balcony area, termed the ‘Tarrasse’ by George Chapman in May Day and used in a number of plays.17 In a dedicatory poem prefacing the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems, Leonard Digges mentions ‘The Cockpit Galleries, Boxes’ at the Blackfriars; as John Orrell notes, this suggests that some of the galleries surrounding the pit were partitioned as boxes.18 It is unclear how many spectators the Blackfriars would have admitted: Andrew Gurr argues that the audience in a two-gallery house would have been ‘barely 600’, and in a three-gallery house ‘perhaps 700’, a far lower capacity than that of the amphitheatres used by adult companies.19 The Blackfriars was, however, larger than the later Whitefriars theatre and much larger than the theatre used by the Children of Paul’s, which may have admitted barely 50 spectators.20 Despite its size, the theatre must at times have seemed oppressively close. A number of contemporary references attest to the practice of sitting on the stage – the prime location for an ostentatious spectator – a practice which is alluded to in the opening scenes of the Isle of Gulls and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The boxes themselves were close to the stage: in 1632 a young man sitting on the stage obscured the view of those in the boxes, one of whom reached out a hand and ‘putt him a little by’.21 Once he had his theatre, Evans’s next problem was finding actors. The most prominent child actors of the previous generation had been associated with choir schools, and when the Children of Paul’s resumed playing in 1599 they continued to take their performers from the ranks of the cathedral choir.22 Evans, however, established his company as a commercial enterprise, and seems not to have held an office at any of London’s

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choir schools. Instead, he brought in Nathaniel Giles, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal at Windsor, who had the authority to take – in effect, to kidnap – children to be employed as choristers.23 Although Giles’s patent referred only to the choir, Giles and Evans used it to take children for the playing company; Evans seems also to have used Giles’s position as authority to call his new company ‘the Children of the Chapel’, implicitly linking the new troupe with the old Blackfriars theatre and its previous inhabitants.24 The new theatre company began playing late in 1600, and its early plays include Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster, Chapman’s All Fools and May Day and revivals of The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality and Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis.25 Their immediate popularity is demonstrated by performances at court on 6 January and 22 February 1601.26 The first quarto version of Hamlet indicates the appeal of the children’s companies in general. Asked by Hamlet why the ‘Tragedians of the Citty’ are touring, Gilderstone (Guildenstern) replies that ‘their reputation holds as it was wont’, but that noueltie carries it away, For the principall publike audience that Came to them, are turned to priuate playes, And to the humour of children.27

The prominence of both private theatres is indicated by the Privy Council’s letter to the Mayor of London of 11 March 1601, ‘requiring him not to faile to take order the players within the Cyttie and the liberties, especyally at Powles and the Blackfriars, may be suppressed during this time of Lent’.28 Using the Chapel patent to take children for the playing company soon landed Giles and Evans in serious trouble. In December 1601 a complaint was brought before the Star Chamber by Henry Clifton of Toftrees, Norfolk, claiming that on 13 December 1600 his son Thomas had been abducted by Giles, Evans, James Robinson ‘& others [. . .] vnknowne’, ostensibly for the choir but in fact for the playing company. According to his father, Thomas was kidnapped on his way home from his grammar school at Christ Church, London, and compelled ‘to exercyse the base trade of a mercynary enterlude player, to his vtter losse of tyme, ruyne and disparagment’.29 Clifton’s case was heard in Star Chamber in spring 1602, and Evans was reportedly censured for ‘his vnorderlie carriage and behauiour in takinge vp of gentlemens children against theire wills and to ymploy them for players’.30

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Giles apparently dissociated himself from the company; Evans brought in new blood, and on 20 April 1602 a partnership was ratified between himself and his son-in-law Alexander Hawkins on the one hand, and Thomas Kendall (a haberdasher), Edward Kirkham (a yeoman in the Revels office) and William Rastell (a merchant) on the other. The three new partners between them bought a half-share in the remaining lease of the Blackfriars theatre: ‘during the continuance of the said lease’ Kendall, Kirkham and Rastell were granted the ioynt vse occupacion and profytt together with the within bounden henrye Evans & Alexander Hawkins [. . .] in the said greate hall or Roome and other the premisses [. . .] payinge vnto the said henrye and Alexander [. . .] henceforth yearlie duringe the continuance of the saide lease the moyetie or one half of the said yearlie rent.31

Evans left London. In a later lawsuit he claimed that this was in order to give his associates a free run: ‘to there vse and dispose as best liked them as there free wills and pleasures for a longe space and tyme, to there great benefitt and profitt’. In the same suit, however, Evans stated also that the Lord Chamberlain had learnt from Kirkham that he still had an interest in the business: he was by the defendant [Kirkham] and his said Associates vpon false informacion made to the late Lord Hunsdon, late Lord Chamberlaine, against this Complainant [Evans], comaunded by his Lordship to avoyd and leave the same, for feare of whose displeasure the Complainant was forced to leave the Country[.]32

The fact that there is no record of performances by the Children of the Chapel at court during the Christmas festivities of 1602–3 perhaps indicates further official displeasure. In their first two years of existence, therefore, the Children of the Chapel had found great success, but their progress had almost been stopped in its tracks in the controversy over its acquisition of boy players. They continued, however, to perform: their repertory in 1602–3 includes new comedies by Chapman, Sir Giles Goosecap and The Gentleman Usher, and may also include Marston’s The Malcontent.33 If so, The Malcontent marks a first move into what was to be important new territory for the company. 1603–1608: Children of the [Queen’s] Revels The accession of James I found the Children of the Chapel in an uncertain position. The theatres had been closed on 19 March 1603 owing to the

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illness of Elizabeth, and opened for only a short time after her death before London was hit by a severe outbreak of plague. This kept the theatres closed until well into the next year; eventually, on 9 April 1604, a Privy Council warrant permitted them to reopen.34 The children’s companies were always vulnerable during such closures: they rarely had the touring resources of the adult companies, and managers had additional problems in maintaining the actors and keeping the company together. During the closure Evans (who had returned to London) became ‘wearye and out of lykinge’ with his twenty-one-year lease and talked with Richard Burbage about its cancellation.35 In the event these talks came to nothing, and by the time the theatres reopened the company was in a much stronger position. On 4 February 1604 they were issued with a patent which put them under the patronage of Anna of Denmark, James’s Queen Consort. In effect, the Children were officially dissociated from the Chapel Royal, an action which can be interpreted both as a mark of royal favour and as one of displeasure. The fact that one of their actors appeared in the civic pageant mounted to mark James’s official entry into the city on 15 March 1604 (‘Thamesis being presented by one of the children of her Maiesties Reuels’36) may indicate that it was the former. The repertory shifts in the first years of James’s reign. Performances of Marston’s The Malcontent (if it was not first performed before March 1603), The Fawn and The Dutch Courtesan, Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, Chapman’s Monsieur D’Olive and The Widow’s Tears, and John Day’s Law Tricks and The Isle of Gulls introduced a harsher satiric strain and a new tragicomic mode to their plays. The company also began to commission tragedies, performing Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Daniel’s Philotas and Marston’s Sophonisba. Around 1607 a further experimental, iconoclastic touch was added with Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge and The Coxcomb, and Middleton’s Your Five Gallants. Further tragedies were commissioned: Chapman’s ambitious two-part history The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, and Middleton’s The Viper and her Brood, now lost. The 1604 patent also provided the company with its own licenser, the poet and dramatist Samuel Daniel; it ordered that ‘noe such Playes or Shewes shalbee presented before the saide Queene our wief by the said Children or by them any where publiquelie acted but by the approbacion and allowaunce of Samuell Danyell whome her pleasure is to appoynt for that purpose’.37 Daniel probably became involved with the company shortly after the new king’s accession: in a letter to Sir Thomas Egerton,

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written around 1603, he complains that ‘whilst I should have written the actions of men, I have been constrayned to live with Children, and contrary to myne owne spirit, put out of that Scene which nature had made my parte’.38 In early 1604 he was given a stipend by Kirkham and Kendall. This may, as Daniel later claimed, have been in ‘consideracion of his greate paynes & travell’ in gaining the patent. It may, however, as Kirkham asserted, have been intended as payment for ‘the paines to be taken by the said Samuell Danyell aboute the Approbacion and Allowance of such Playes and shewes as should be Acted and presented by the said Children’.39 Since the children’s companies seem previously to have been under the control of the Master of the Revels – Jonson, for instance, claims in his 1616 Folio that Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster were performed in 1600 and 1601 ‘by allowance’ – in ‘allowing’ plays Daniel was usurping the regular Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney.40 Kirkham, a yeoman in the Revels office and a shareholder in the Queen’s Revels company, may therefore have faced a conflict of interest or allegiance at Daniel’s appointment. His later movement between the Revels and Paul’s companies may, however, indicate his involvement in a wider Revels office strategy to control the activities of the children’s companies; it is noticeable that Kirkham possessed his share in the Queen’s Revels company as late as 1608.41 Daniel’s involvement with the company marks the start of a period during which the Queen’s Revels was frequently in trouble for its satirical representations of important figures and political events. Daniel himself was called before the Privy Council in early 1605 to explain Philotas, which was thought to comment on the Essex rebellion. In a letter to the Earl of Devonshire, he claimed that Philotas had been ‘perused’ by the Master of the Revels; consulting Tilney may, as Dutton argues, have been an ‘insurance policy’, given the play’s risky material.42 Nonetheless, the fuss caused by the play probably forced Daniel to give up his post as licenser. On 28 April 1605 he assigned his stipendiary payments to John Gerrard; after that time, as he later testified in a lawsuit brought against him by Kirkham and Kendall, he ‘neaver intermeddled or had to doe wth the said Compltes or Lettres Pattentes or eaver demaunded any thinge of the Compltes’.43 It is difficult, however, to be sure exactly when Daniel ceased to be involved with the company. The furore over Philotas was followed by similar disturbances, most noticeably the incendiary performances of Eastward Ho (1605), The Isle of Gulls (February 1606), the Byron plays and a lost play, ‘The Silver Mine’, which satirised the king and his Scottish

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silver mine (both March 1608). The controversy resulted in the loss of the Queen’s patronage as early as 1606; printed editions of The Isle of Gulls (1606), The Fleer (1607) and Law Tricks (1608) call the company ‘the Children of the Revels’ (see fig. 1). Nonetheless, the name changes were uncertain even to those in charge; in 1612 Henry Evans, referring to events of 1608, talked about the ‘Copartners, Sharers, and Masters of the Queenes Mates Children of her Revells (for so yt was often called)’.44 The disturbances of 1605–6 may also have provoked another change: the departure of Edward Kirkham to the Children of Paul’s.45 Kirkham seems, however, to have returned to the Children of the Revels before the final debacle of the Byron plays and ‘The Silver Mine ’. The performances of these plays provoked the king to demand that the company be dissolved; he also forbade performances by all the theatre companies, a prohibition that was followed by a prolonged plague closure.46 The double inhibition led to the disintegration of the Children of the Revels and the Children of the King’s Revels, the only other operational children’s company at that time (the Children of Paul’s having folded around 1606), which cannot be traced in London after 1608.47 The (Queen’s) Revels company was also hit by the deaths of some of its personnel: Sharpham’s death from the plague on 22 April 1608 was followed by the burial of John Browne, ‘one of the play boys’, at St Anne, Blackfriars, on 9 May.48 In June the shareholder Thomas Kendall followed them to the grave.49 Henry Evans gave up the lease of the Blackfriars theatre in August 1608, having been forbidden by the king from using the playhouse ‘and so no proffitt made of the said howse but a contynuall rent of ffortie powndes to be paid for the same’. He claimed that he had Kirkham’s permission to wind up the company and relinquish the lease: ‘the same made the complt [Kirkham] willing voluntarily to forgoe the same howse as this deftt conceaved’.50 Kirkham later denied this, however, setting in motion a long series of lawsuits. Another shareholder, Robert Keysar, also disputed Evans’ right to surrender the lease, claiming that Richard Burbage had promised him that the King’s Men would come to no agreement with Evans that prevented the Children returning to the Blackfriars when the plague subsided, a claim that Burbage vigorously denied.51 Despite the loss of its theatre, the effects of the plague and dissension among the shareholders, the company does not disappear from the record. During the Christmas season of 1608–9, Keysar took to perform at court a company perhaps provocatively described as the ‘Children of the blackfriers’.52 Some of the Queen’s Revels actors are found in

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Figure 1. Title-page of Edward Sharpham, The Fleer (London, 1607), attributing the play to the ‘Children of the Revels’.

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the cast of Jonson’s The Key Keeper entertainment, performed for the opening of the New Exchange on 11 April 1609.53 They began also to tour outside London during 1609, and payments were made to the ‘Children of the Revelles’ in Leicester and to the ‘Children of the Chapell’ in Maidstone.54 1609–1613: Changing locations When the London theatres finally reopened in winter 1609–10, the Children of the Queen’s Revels were operating in the Whitefriars theatre; they were granted a new royal patent on 4 January 1610, shortly after the ‘Children of the Whitefryers’ had performed at court.55 The lease to this theatre, previously used by the Children of the King’s Revels, was held by Philip Rosseter, a royal lutenist who became the Queen’s Revels’ leading shareholder.56 A complaint from the constables of St Dunstan in the West to a wardmote inquest on 21 December 1609 – ‘We [the constables] present one playhouse in the same precinct [Whitefriars] not fitting there to be now tolerable’ – suggests that the company had already taken up residence, but it seems likely that plague kept the theatres closed until early 1610.57 The Queen’s Revels performed at Whitefriars, largely without incident, until March 1613, when Rosseter went into partnership with Philip Henslowe and the company was effectively merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men.58 Like the Blackfriars theatre, the Whitefriars theatre was a conversion within a former monastery precinct, in this case the old Carmelite priory. It is currently thought that the playhouse auditorium was located in a long, narrow room described as ‘The Hale’ on an early seventeenthcentury survey of the area; it was probably smaller and less grand than the Blackfriars.59 The hall occupied much of the ground floor and seems to have been one storey high; the survey indicates that it had stone walls, and that it measured around 90 feet by 17 feet.60 This is obviously a very different space from the Blackfriars which, as noted above, was 46 feet by 66 feet. Analysing internal references in Whitefriars plays, Jean MacIntyre suggests that the interior had an unusual configuration: ‘the horizontal scale seems have been reduced so as to maximize space for the paying audience, leading to what the scripts suggest were distinctive modifications: a smaller platform, a proportionately wider discovery space, entry doors set at the very edges of the stage, and a reduced upper playing area’.61

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The upper playing area is used sparingly in both King’s Revels and Queen’s Revels plays. The discovery space, on the other hand, is used extensively, and was apparently spacious enough to hold large properties along with several actors. Queen’s Revels plays such as The Insatiate Countess, Epicoene, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and Amends for Ladies, with their extensive use of the discovery space and entry doors, and their infrequent but dramatically effective use of the balcony area, are designed specifically for performance at the Whitefriars.62 In particular, the opening of The Insatiate Countess – in which the discovery of the titular countess in mourning in the discovery space is accompanied by a ribald comment, ‘What should we doe in this Countesses darke hole?’63 – seems to have been made for this thin, extreme space, channelling the audience’s view into the stage’s most characteristic feature. The new Children of the Queen’s Revels seems to have found success – in 1611 Prince Otto von Hess-Cassel described it as ‘the best company in London’64 – and it is tempting to view this company, with a new patent and new theatre, as separate from the upstart Blackfriars children. However, such clear distinctions are difficult to maintain, since there is a noticeable overlap in personnel and repertory. There is some continuity of management: Robert Keysar, who took the ‘Children of the Blackfriers’ to perform at court in 1608–9, was also the payee when the ‘Children of the Whitefryers’ performed there in 1609–10. Keysar repeatedly referred to the Whitefriars Queen’s Revels as a continuation of the old Blackfriars troupe: in his Bill of Complaint against Richard Burbage and others, dated 8 February 1610, he claimed that he had purchased ‘one full Sixt parte of and in Certaine goodes apparell for players, propertyes, playe bookes and other thinges then and still vsed by the Chilldren of the Queenes matyes Revells in and aboute their playes, enterludes and other exercises’.65 We know that some plays were performed at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars; Keysar indicates that there was also a continuity of physical properties between the two Queen’s Revels companies. Actors were common to both companies. The cast of The Key Keeper in April 1609 featured Nathan Field, Giles Cary (also known as Giles Gary), and William Ostler. Field and Ostler had appeared in The Poetaster at Blackfriars in 1601, and Cary was to appear with Field in Epicoene, performed at Whitefriars in 1609–10. William Barksted, who also appeared in Epicoene, may have been associated with the Queen’s Revels prior to their occupation of the Whitefriars theatre, since he was in contact with Robert Keysar as early as January 1609.66 In the 1610 lawsuit against Keysar, Cuthbert Burbage claimed that he would call as witnesses

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John Marston, Henry Evans and his wife, Nathan Field, John Underwood, William Ostler, William ‘Baxstead’, Philip Rosseter and Margaret Hawkins (Evans’s daughter and the widow of Alexander Hawkins). With the possible exception of Rosseter, all these witnesses would have been expected to have had personal knowledge of the events at Blackfriars in 1608. The ‘new’ company performed a number of the old Queen’s Revels’ plays, such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb and Cupid’s Revenge, and Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears, which was printed in 1612 ‘As it was often presented in the blacke and white Friers’ (fig. 2). They also seem to have had possession of Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and the collaborative Eastward Ho, both of which appear in the repertory of Lady Elizabeth’s Men after the merger between the two companies in early 1613.67 New plays performed at the Whitefriars in 1609–13 include Jonson’s Epicoene, Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady, Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk and The Insatiate Countess, seemingly revised by William Barksted and Lewis Machin from a draft by Marston. The fact that the company possessed the same name as the Blackfriars Queen’s Revels, some of the same actors, many of the same costumes and properties, a number of the same plays, and new plays by old Queen’s Revels dramatists, may have meant that its audiences saw it as being the same company even if, strictly speaking, it was not. ii I turn now to a detailed analysis of the shareholders, dramatists, patrons and actors of the Queen’s Revels company, all of whom had a contributory influence on the kinds of plays that were performed and the ways in which they circulated in early Jacobean literary culture. The shareholders in the various incarnations of the Children of the Queen’s Revels were always a mixed group, many of them with professional or institutional uses to the company in which they invested. The dramatists, similarly, came from a wide range of backgrounds and differed in their cultural leanings, their allegiances and their patrons. The major patron of the Queen’s Revels company during this period was Queen Anna of Denmark. We should, however, also consider the possible influence of those who patronised individual dramatists or shareholders, such as the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon, who were patrons of Marston and

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Figure 2. Title-page of George Chapman, The Widow’s Tears (London, 1612), noting performances at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres.

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Fletcher, or Fulke Greville, who had connections with dramatists and shareholders. As Kathleen McLuskie and Felicity Dunsworth note, the ‘patronage of individual dramatists was different from the patronage of theater’.68 The distinction could, however, become blurred. Personal patronage of a dramatist could lead to patronage of a company, and the political stance of personal patrons could be reflected in a company repertory, especially where patrons were shared between dramatists and other shareholders. The agency of the company’s actors should also be taken into account; they gained in influence and autonomy as they grew older and began to be more involved with the affairs of the company for which they performed. Shareholders and dramatists The royal patent issued to the Children of the Queen’s Revels in February 1604 listed a number of the company’s shareholders: the Queene our deerest wief hath for her pleasure and recreacion when she shall thinke it fit to have any playes or shewes appoynted her servauntes Edward kirkham Alexander hawkyns Thomas kendall and Robert Payne to provyde and bring vppe a convenient nomber of Children whoe shalbe called children of her Revelles [. . .] to practize and exercise in the quality of playinge by the name of Children of the Revells to the Queene within the Blackfryers in our Cytie of london or in any other convenient place where they shall thinke fit for that purpose[.]69

The name of Henry Evans is noticeably absent, but Hawkins, his son-inlaw, may have been acting as his agent. Little is known about Robert Payne.70 As noted above, Kirkham and Kendall had joined the Blackfriars syndicate in 1602. William Rastell, like Evans, was not named in the patent, but seems to have been involved with the company until 1608, when he was one of the shareholders who allegedly received a portion of the company’s ‘Apparells, properties & goods’.71 As a haberdasher, Kendall was particularly useful to a theatre company, as costumes were a major expense. An expensive costume could cost far more than the play text itself, and costumes may have been an even greater budgetary problem in the children’s companies, as the actors were constantly growing. The provision of ‘apparel’ is a constant theme in the lawsuits concerning the Queen’s Revels, and shareholders capitalised on their investment by renting clothes to other organisations. In October 1604 Kendall provided costumes and other items for the triumph honouring the new Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Lowe, a fellow haberdasher.72

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In August 1605 he and Edward Kirkham hired out costumes to be used in plays celebrating the visit of the king and queen to Oxford.73 Kendall also provided costumes for the Westminster School Christmas plays of 1605 and 1606. In the first set of accounts, his name is associated with that of Kirkham, and in the second with that of Robert Keysar.74 Keysar, a goldsmith, joined the company before May 1606, when he negotiated with Thomas Middleton over a tragedy called The Viper and her Brood. He claimed in 1610 that he had bought a one-sixth interest in the remaining lease of the Blackfriars playhouse, together with a one-sixth interest in the Blackfriars costumes, properties and playbooks, from the playwright John Marston.75 Marston himself bought the share sometime between 1602 and 1604, and probably sold it to Keysar in early 1606. Like Marston, some other shareholders had obvious creative interests. William Strachey, who also held a sixth-share, was interested in literary affairs and had numerous literary connections.76 He contributed verses to the 1605 quarto edition of Jonson’s Sejanus, wrote The True Repertory of the Wracke (a source for Shakespeare’s The Tempest) while employed as Secretary to the Virginia Company, and contributed to the posthumous editions of Thomas Overbury’s poem The Wife. Martin Peerson, who held a share in the lease and properties which he sold to Thomas Kendall for £45 in December 1606, was a composer and musician who worked with Ben Jonson on the Highgate Entertainment of 1604.77 The new patent issued to the Whitefriars Queen’s Revels on 4 January 1610 indicates a similar mixture of shareholders, authorising Robert Daborne Phillippe Rosseter Iohn Tarbock Richard Iones, and Robert Browne to prouide and bring vpp a convenient nomber of Children whoe shalbe called Children of hir Revelles [. . .] and them to practice and exercise in the quality of playing, by the name of the Children of the Revells to the Queene within the white ffryers in the Suburbs of our Citty of london, or in any other convenyent place where they shall thinke fitt for that purpose[.]78

Like Marston, Robert Daborne was a playwright. His involvement with the Queen’s Revels may actually date back to the company’s Blackfriars incarnation, since in 1608 he was found to owe £50 to Robert Keysar; he may have written plays for Blackfriars, but if so, none has survived.79 Like Peerson, Philip Rosseter was a musician and composer; he was employed as a royal lutenist from 1604 and published A Booke of Ayres (1601, a collaboration with Thomas Campion) and Lessons for Consort (1609).80 He was probably the leading shareholder at this time and was actively recruiting others. In 1610, according to Thomas Woodford, Richard Hunt

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‘gaineing the acquaintance of divers Players by the speciall meanes of one Emanuell Read a Player did buy of one Phillipp Rossester or some other a part of a Playe house then lying and being in ye precentes of the white ffryers London’.81 Little is known about John Tarbuck; he was payee for the company’s court performances in 1610 and 1611 and was rewarded by the Privy Council for ‘apprehendinge a certayne suspicious person’ in the service of the Archbishop of Canterbury in October 1612.82 Richard Jones and Robert Browne were actors with considerable experience of playing in London and on the Continent; Browne seems to have been involved with the training of young actors in the 1590s, and may have filled the same role with the Queen’s Revels.83 It is difficult to tell where responsibility for individual plays was located. As the Philotas case indicates, dramatists were sometimes accountable for their plays, though it is possible that the question of Daniel’s culpability was complicated by his role as licenser to the Queen’s Revels – as Dutton notes, he seems to have been the first dramatist to be held individually responsible for his work.84 A year later, however, Sir James Murray’s complaint that Eastward Ho insulted Scottish courtiers also resulted in action against the writers, at least two of whom were imprisoned and apparently threatened with physical mutilation. This case will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two. Dramatists were not always held individually responsible for their plays, though. On 7 March 1606 Sir Edward Hoby wrote to Sir Thomas Edmondes describing the action taken against another Queen’s Revels play, The Isle of Gulls; he mentions the playhouse where the offending play has been performed, but not the playwright, John Day: ‘At this time was much speach of a playe in the Blacke Fryers, where in the Ile of Gulls, from the highest to the loweste, all mens parts were acted of two divers nations, as I understand sundry were comitted to Bridwell.’85 The ‘sundry’ possibly includes some of the actors, the shareholders and/or managers and the dramatist, but Hoby did not regard the dramatist as having sole responsibility for the performance and the offence it caused. Similarly, in March 1608 the company performed The Silver Mine ; according to the French ambassador, Antoine Lefe`vre de la Boderie, it ‘slandered their King, his mine in Scotland, and all his Favourites in a most pointed fashion [. . .] having made him rail against heaven over the flight of a bird and have a gentleman beaten for calling off his dogs, they portrayed him as drunk at least once a day’.86 The Florentine agent Ottaviano Lotti also commented on the company’s indiscretion:

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A comedy has been acted here by the public players which has given a good deal of displeasure, because it made fun of the new fashion found in Scotland. One expects to see the players banned, and the author of the play has run off in fear of losing his life, probably because he mingled ideas that were too wicked, in which so much was concealed.87

According to the only English account, the king’s rage was turned mainly on the actors. His signet clerk, Sir Thomas Lake, writing to Robert Cecil and the Privy Council, names the theatre company, ‘ye children of ye blackfriars’, but not the author, and says that the king had vowed that they ‘should never play more, but should first begg their bred’. The author comes as an afterthought: ‘my lord chamberlain by himselfe or your lordships at the table should take order to dissolve them, and to punish the maker besydes’.88 In such a situation, where do we find the guiding agency – the authority, even – behind the plays performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels? Attempts have been made to locate a leading intellect or ´eminence grise behind the plays and, particularly, behind their political intentions. Andrew Gurr favours Evans, though his attempts to prove that the repertory shifted dramatically once he was out of the picture are unconvincing.89 The shareholders themselves argued about who was responsible for the combined Byron/Silver Mine debacle. In a later lawsuit, Evans claimed that Kirkham was the most guilty: ‘yt is true that after the Kings most excellent Matie, vpon some misdemeanors committed in or about the plaies there, and specially vpon the def ts [Kirkham’s] Act & doings thereabout, had prohibited that no plaies should be more vsed there’.90 Giving evidence in another suit, he outlined the situation in a slightly different way: ‘the complt [Kirkham] and this def t [Evans], by his Mates speciall commaundement being prohibited to vse any plaies there, and somme of the boyes being committed to prison by order from his highnes’.91 There is little evidence to indicate who commissioned particular plays. Kirkham may have considered at least some of the Blackfriars plays his personal property, since he seems to have taken Bussy D’Ambois and The Fawn with him when he moved to the Children of Paul’s.92 The appearance in the Blackfriars repertory of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, written for Paul’s, coincides with Kirkham’s return to the Children of the Revels. Keysar was also involved with the commissioning of plays: Middleton claimed that he had given a tragedy called The Viper and her Brood to him on 7 May 1606 in payment for a loan made on 6 May.93 As H. N. Hillebrand writes, there is ‘every reason to think that Middleton

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was dealing with Keysar not as a money broker but as a theatrical manager, and that the debt he incurred was in earnest of a play’.94 Keysar’s leading role in the company is also indicated by the payment to ‘Thomas Keysar’ – probably a slip of the pen – in May 1607 for the Children of the Revels’ performances at court of 29 July 1606 and 1 January 1607.95 He is associated in particular with The Knight of the Burning Pestle; according to the publisher Walter Burre, the play would have been lost after its unsuccessful performance if Keysar ‘(out of your direct antipathy to ingratitude) had not bene moued both to relieue and cherish it ’.96 After the events of 1608, and the loss of the Blackfriars theatre, Keysar continued to be associated with playwrights. In January 1609 he lent money to William Barksted; like the loan to Middleton, this may have been for a play or it may have been otherwise connected to Barksted’s role as an actor in the Queen’s Revels company. He may also have been the means by which Robert Daborne was introduced into the company’s management; as noted above, the two men had dealings with each other as early as 1608. Keysar eventually dropped out of view; although he was payee on 10 May 1610 for five court performances over Christmas 1609/10, this was his last recorded involvement with the company. By this time, Rosseter, who held the Whitefriars lease, was the leading shareholder. In late 1609 or early 1610, anxious to protect his company and his investment, he reached an agreement with Edward Pearce of the Children of Paul’s for a ‘Cessation of playeing & playes to be acted in the said howse neere St Paules Church aforesaid for wch the said Roceter Compounded with the said Pierce to giue him [. . .] twenty poundes per Annum’.97 Rosseter apparently convinced the King’s Men that the deal was as much to their advantage as his and persuaded them to pay half the cost of the dead rent. Like Keysar, he may also have taken a close interest in the Queen’s Revels’ plays: in December 1610 he was presented before the London Consistory Court ‘for that he peremptorily affirmed in most vile spitefull speaches that a man might learne more good att one of their plaies or interludes then at twenty of our Rogishe sermons’.98 According to Edgar J. Fripp, Rosseter claimed that these were old statements, made before 9 November 1609 and not since; Fripp writes that he was ‘let off’ on 14 January 1611.99 Telling connections between the company and London’s print culture can be traced. In dedicating The Knight of the Burning Pestle to Keysar, Walter Burre refers to him as his ‘many waies endeered friend’ (A2r; p. 3). Burre was also the publisher of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour

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(printed 1601), Cynthia’s Revels (1601), Catiline (1611), and The Alchemist (1612), and he later acquired the rights to Epicoene, Sejanus and Volpone.100 Marston was a close friend of Henry Walley, who printed Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess with Richard Bonian around 1609.101 The pair also entered Jonson’s The Case is Altered in the Stationers’ Register, but passed the publication of the play to Bartholomew Sutton and William Barrenger.102 Alone, Bonian printed Middleton’s Your Five Gallants, also a Queen’s Revels play, around 1608.103 Another publisher, Thomas Thorpe, had links with a number of the Queen’s Revels’ dramatists. He published the first editions of Jonson’s Sejanus (1605) and Volpone (1607), Marston’s What You Will (1607) and three of Chapman’s plays: All Fools (1605), The Gentleman Usher (1606) and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608). He was, in addition, the publisher in 1603 of a speech by Richard Martin, the dedicatee of Jonson’s The Poetaster.104 Daniel was a friend of his publisher Simon Waterson, making a bequest to him in his will; after his death Waterson issued The Whole Workes of Samuel Daniel Esq. in Poetrie (1623), supervised by Daniel’s musician brother John.105 Waterson also published the 1602 quarto of the first English translation of Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, used as a source by Marston and Fletcher; the quarto was dedicated to Daniel’s patron Sir Edward Dymock and accompanied by sonnets from Daniel and the translator, who was probably Dymock’s brother Tailboys.106 In this context it is unsurprising to find that the majority of the Queen’s Revels’ plays were published within a year or two of their original performance; I will examine this issue in greater detail in Chapter Four. As we have seen, at least two of the dramatists who wrote for the Children of the Queen’s Revels held shares in the company, and another, Daniel, was closely concerned with the company through his post as licenser. In other respects, too, the company’s dramatists appear to have been a fairly close-knit group, despite Jonson’s mixed comments on his fellow writers in his conversations with Drummond.107 In autumn 1604 Beaumont and Field were bound to keep the peace in Cambridge after they became involved in a quarrel between Field’s brother Theophilus, at that time a fellow of Pembroke College, and Thomas Bradbury, a fellow of King’s.108 Connections are evident also in the dedications printed with plays by dramatists associated with the Queen’s Revels. The first of these plays, Jonson’s Sejanus (printed 1605), carried verses from Chapman and Marston; Volpone (1607) carried verses from Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Field and ‘E.S.’, who may be Edward Sharpham.109 The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1609) was accompanied by verses

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from Chapman, Beaumont, Jonson and Field, and Jonson’s Catiline (1611) by verses from Fletcher, Field and Beaumont. Beaumont also wrote verses on Jonson’s Epicoene, published in the 1616 Folio, and Chapman wrote verses for Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock, published in 1612. What is noticeable about these collaborations is that even when the play was written for another company (Sejanus and Volpone were performed by the King’s Men), the unifying factor among the dramatists is their association with the Queen’s Revels. If we add Strachey’s contribution to the Sejanus verses, the connection looks even stronger.

Patrons and associates The role of Anna of Denmark as the company’s main patron has been much debated. Some critics, notably Albert Tricomi, have seen in the oppositional or ‘anticourt’ drama of the Queen’s Revels company a reflection of Anna’s own political stance; her court was a separate establishment, and her masques frequently interrogated the policies of her husband and his advisers.110 More tantalising, as far as the commercial drama is concerned, are comments made by the French ambassador, Christophe de Harlay, Comte de Beaumont, on 14 June 1604. Reporting to Paris on English attitudes towards their new king, he writes: Consider for pity’s sake, what must be the state and condition of a prince whom the preachers publicly from the pulpit assail, whom the comedians of the metropolis bring upon the stage, whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband?111

There is no evidence to indicate whether Anna actually attended the theatre, as her successor, Henrietta Maria, was to do; it is probably more likely that Beaumont is referring to performances at court. Since the Queen’s Revels boys were the most prominent performers of dramatic satire in the early Jacobean period, it has often been assumed they are the target, and Anna could have seen them at Whitehall on 21 February 1604.112 There are other links between Anna and the company bearing her name. The queen was a patron of Samuel Daniel, the author of her first court masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (performed January 1604); the issue of the royal patent to the Queen’s Revels a month later was reportedly a result of his influence. Daniel later wrote The Queen’s Arcadia for the royal visit to Oxford of August 1605 and became a

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member of Anna’s household; his last extant play, Hymen’s Triumph, was performed at the marriage of her lady-in-waiting and close friend Jean Drummond in February 1614.113 Further links can be traced between Queen’s Revels personnel such as Jonson, Daniel and Chapman, and other members of the queen’s court, including Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Frances, Countess of Hertford, and Susan de Vere, later Countess of Montgomery.114 An additional connection to the queen is a later patron of the Queen’s Revels company, Sir Thomas Monson (on whose request the 1610 patent seems to have been granted), who had formerly been her Chancellor. Monson was a noted patron of musicians, and the dedicatee of Philip Rosseter and Thomas Campion’s 1601 collaboration, A Book of Ayres.115 There are also connections between the Queen’s Revels dramatists and Anna’s elder son, Prince Henry. Most of these links derive from Elizabethan patronage networks surrounding the third Earl of Essex. Daniel was patronised by Essex adherents Charles Blount (later Earl of Devonshire) and Fulke Greville, to whom he paid tribute in ‘Musophilus’: ‘Thy learned iudgement which I most esteeme | (Worthy Fulke Greuil) must defend this course.’116 These associations returned to haunt him when, as we have seen, he was interrogated by the Privy Council over Philotas; Daniel wrote a desperate letter to Blount: ‘J beseach yow let not now an Earle of Devonshr. overthrow what a L. mountioy hath donne, who hath donne me good and J have donne hime honor.’117 Another Queen’s Revels dramatist, Chapman, dedicated his Seven Books of the Iliad (1598) to Essex; it is probably no coincidence that the Byron plays also comment on the Essex affair.118 Like Daniel, Chapman knew Fulke Greville, and his play The Widow’s Tears was dedicated to a kinsman of Greville’s when it was published in 1612.119 Like many other members of Essex’s circle, both men gravitated towards Prince Henry when James’s initial enthusiasm for redeeming Essex’s memory waned. Daniel dedicated Philotas to Henry on its publication in 1605, a gesture which was probably politically motivated; Chapman’s dedication of the 1608 edition of the Twelve Books of the Iliad to Henry is similarly symbolic, especially as Henry was himself by that time interested in Essex.120 Chapman is sometimes thought to have held the post of sewer-in-ordinary to the Prince; this is almost certainly untrue, but he is likely to be the ‘Mr. Chapman’ who received livery for the Prince’s funeral as one of the ‘Gentlemen extraordinarie servauntes to the Prince’.121 Networks of patronage and friendship surrounding the Queen’s Revels personnel frequently indicate political and social perspectives. One of the

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most prominent is the association between the company and the Inns of Court. Marston was a second-generation member of the Middle Temple; he was introduced by his lawyer father ‘specially’ in August 1592, at the age of fifteen, though he does not seem to have taken up residence until a few years later. Between 1597 and 1606 he was resident in the Middle Temple almost continuously.122 Edward Sharpham, described on the 1607 titlepage of The Fleer as ‘of the Middle Temple’, entered the Inn in June 1594.123 Francis Beaumont, whose father was a judge, was resident in the Inner Temple in the early seventeenth century, and participated in their Christmas revels; in 1613 he wrote The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn for performance at court during the marriage celebrations for Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine.124 Jonson, though not a member of the Inns himself, had numerous connections there, including Richard Martin (the dedicatee of The Poetaster, and author of dedicatory verses for Sejanus), John Donne (who wrote verses for the 1607 quarto of Volpone), John Selden, Thomas May, Thomas Carew, Christopher Brooke and Charles Cotton.125 Three Queen’s Revels dramatists – Chapman, Daborne and Jonson – were to write verses for Brooke’s The Ghost of Richard III (1615). Chapman was employed by the Inns in 1613, when he wrote The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn for the royal wedding; the masque also featured Philip Rosseter in his capacity as royal lutenist.126 Inns of Court connections are not limited to the dramatists. William Strachey was resident in Gray’s Inn in 1605, and in dedicating his manuscript ‘First Booke of the Historie of Trauaile into Virginia Britannia’ to Francis Bacon claimed that he was ‘bound to your observaunce, by being one of the Graies-Inne Societie’.127 Strachey was also a friend of Donne, Brooke and Martin, of Chapman’s friend Matthew Roydon, who had connections with Thavies Inn, and of Thomas Campion, who was a Gray’s Inn resident in the 1580s and 1590s.128 In this way the Gray’s Inn connection also extends to Philip Rosseter, Campion’s friend and colleague. Patrons were also shared between Queen’s Revels dramatists and shareholders. In addition to his connections with Daniel and Chapman, Fulke Greville was also a patron of Martin Peerson, who was later to publish settings for some of his poems.129 Marston and Fletcher shared the patronage of the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon. Marston’s Entertainment at Ashby was performed to mark the visit of the Countess’s mother, Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, in July 1607, while the close relationship between Fletcher and the Huntingdons is indicated by a verse letter to the Countess, written around 1620.130 Fletcher may have originally

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made the acquaintance of the Huntingdons through Marston or through Beaumont, whose family seat was at Grace Dieu, Leicestershire, near the Huntingdons’ house at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.131 In the first edition of The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher addresses dedicatory poems to three men: Sir Walter Aston, Sir William Skipwith and Sir Robert Townsend. Aston, a poet himself, was an important patron of Michael Drayton, and the dedicatee of his anticourt poem The Owl.132 The ascription of Donne’s verse letter to the Countess of Huntingdon to Aston in all three surviving manuscript copies indicates how closely Aston was associated with the Huntingdons.133 Skipwith had connections with the Huntingdons and with the Beaumonts: John Beaumont’s elegy for Skipwith appeared in 1629, and Skipwith himself is thought to have written the verses attached to the Huntington Library manuscript of the Entertainment at Ashby.134 In a manuscript poetic miscellany associated with the Skipwith family, his poems are placed alongside those of Donne, Francis Beaumont, Fletcher and (probably) Aston; the connection with the Huntingdons is underlined by the inclusion of Thomas Pestell’s ‘verses of ye Countess of Huntington’ in the same volume.135 Townsend, ‘a mediatory figure between the Mermaid and Ashby’, was a patron of Jonson, receiving a copy of Sejanus with an autograph dedication: ‘The Testemony of my affection, & obseruance [. . .] wch I desire my remayne wth him, & last beyond Marble’.136 While this is a limited sketch, such a set of patrons is richly suggestive. A number of the dramatists’ and shareholders’ patrons and associates had an uneasy relationship with authority and the court of James I. Students at the Inns of Court were noted for their liking for satire and, as Philip Finkelpearl notes, ‘[w]hether or not lawyers as a class were “infected with Puritanism”, as one sympathizer with the Crown claimed, the lawyers did join in an alliance with the Puritans against the encroachments of royal power’.137 Although the term ‘Puritans’ is problematic, many anticourt groups were staunchly Protestant, and disliked the king’s pacifist policies in Europe. David Norbrook suggests that there was in the early Jacobean period a set of Protestant poets alienated from the court who ‘could almost be described as constituting a poetic “opposition”’.138 These poets, often referred to as the ‘Spenserians’, included Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Christopher Brooke and younger pastoral writers such as William Browne, George Wither, and Phineas and Giles Fletcher. It is noticeable that many of these writers were connected with the Queen’s Revels, either directly (Daniel), through patronage (Greville, Drayton), through friendship (Brooke), through familial links (Phineas

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and Giles were John Fletcher’s cousins),139 or through literary sympathy and allusion (Browne, for instance, draws on The Faithful Shepherdess in his 1613 Britannia’s Pastorals).140 Some of the individual patrons were also in some way oppositional: the Earl and Countess of Huntingdon in particular have been characterised as uncourtly in their allegiances, and they were reluctant to attend at court.141 Actors As the Clifton case indicates, one of the greatest problems facing the Queen’s Revels shareholders was the acquisition and retention of actors. Whereas the majority of early-to-mid Elizabethan child performers were linked either with grammar schools or with choir schools, their late Elizabethan and early Jacobean counterparts were increasingly commercialised. Although Jonson was later to refer to Nathan Field as his ‘scholar’ (HSS, vol. 1, 137), the link between children’s performance and the educational process dissipated and eventually all but disappeared. The Children of Paul’s were still attached to a choir school, but the Children of the Chapel had only a tenuous connection with the Chapel Royal, and this connection disappeared when they became the Children of the Queen’s Revels. The third Jacobean children’s company, the Children of the King’s Revels, was established as a commercial company from the outset. At first, as described above, the Chapel managers used Nathaniel Giles’s choir patent to impress children for the theatre company. In his complaint regarding the abduction of his son Thomas, Henry Clifton names several other boys taken in this way, many of them from grammar schools: John Chappell a gramer schole scholler of one Mr Spykes schole neere Criplegate, london, john Motteram, a gramer scholler in the free schole at Westminster; Nathan Field a scholler of a gramer schole in London kepte by one Mr Monkaster, Alvery Trussell an apprentice to one Thomas Gyles one Phillip Pykman and Thomas Grymes apprentices to Richard & Georg Chambers, Saloman Pavey apprentice to one Peerce[.]142

Several of the schools had semi-professional theatrical associations. Richard Mulcaster (‘Mr. Monkaster’) was successively master of the Merchant Taylors’ school and St Paul’s grammar school (separate from the choir school), and his pupils were not only taught plays but occasionally performed them at court. The complaint also refers to ‘one Peerce’, who is likely to be Edward Pearce, master of the St Paul’s choristers and

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theatre company, and ‘one Thomas Gyles’, who may be Pearce’s predecessor as master of the choir school. If these identifications are correct, then Evans and Nathaniel Giles were taking children not only from grammar schools, but also from the rival theatre company. In his description of the Chapel company, Clifton harps on three things: the commercial (‘mercenary’) nature of the theatre company, their ‘lewdness’, and the social status of the children who had been kidnapped. He alleges that the boys were all ‘noe way able or fitt for singing nor by anie the sayd confederates endevoured to be taught to singe’ and were therefore not covered by Giles’s patent.143 His son was instantly transformed into a professional actor; Clifton complains that Thomas was given ‘in moste scornefull disdaynfull, & despightfull manner, a scrolle of paper, conteyning parte of one of theire said playes or enterludes, & [. . .] commaunded to learne the same by harte’.144 He emphasises his care for his son, claiming that Thomas had been ‘taught & instructed in the growndes of lerning and the Latin tonge’, preparing him for his future life as a member of the gentry.145 He allegedly told Giles and his confederates that it was ‘not fitt that a gentleman of his sorte should have his sonne & heire (and that his only sonne) to be soe basely vsed’, only to meet with the scornful retort that ‘they had aucthoritie sufficient soe to take any noble mans sonne in this land’.146 The contradiction between the life of a ‘gentleman’s child’ and that of a player is also stressed in a later report of the verdict reached, in which it is claimed that Evans was censured for ‘his vnorderlie carriage and behauiour in takinge vp of gentlemens children against theire wills and to ymploy them for players’.147 The theatre companies seem to have prized educated children, but these were more likely to have parents with powerful connections, and taking them was extremely risky.148 With the obvious exception of Thomas Clifton, however, some of the children listed in the complaint remained with the company: Nathan Field and Salomon Pavy were both to appear in Jonson’s lists of the principal actors in Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster. After the problems with impressment, the Chapel/Queen’s Revels company seems to have resorted to apprenticeship, a method used by the adult companies and later by the Children of the King’s Revels.149 When Martin Peerson sold his share in the company in December 1606, the sale had the proviso that Peerson ‘was to paye for the dyet of one which was then his boye or servante and one of the actors of the saide playes or enterludes’.150 In another instance of apprenticeship, on 14 November 1606 Abel Cooke was apprenticed to Thomas Kendall by his mother, Alice, under an obligation that meant that he should remain with

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Kendall for three years as an actor in the company. Abel left after six months, however, whereupon Kendall sued Alice Cooke.151 It may not just have been the managers who took on apprentices. When William Ostler and Giles Cary appeared in Jonson’s The Key Keeper entertainment in April 1609, Robert Cecil’s accounts referred to them as ‘Ostler the player’ and ‘his boye’, and recorded a ‘reward given by my Mr Will{ia}m Oster’ signed ‘Gilles Gary’.152 The unreliability of the apprentice method, however, goes some way towards explaining why the company’s managers originally preferred to impress educated children. Although the name Children of the Queen’s Revels gives the impression that the actors were juveniles, in the Jacobean period the company was already moving away from the late Elizabethan children’s company model. In 1600 the Children of the Chapel’s actors seem to have been aged between ten and fourteen: we know, for instance, that Nathan Field was baptised at St Giles, Cripplegate, on 17 October 1587, Salomon Pavy at St Dunstan, Stepney, on 12 May 1588, and John Motteram on 6 July 1589 at Addlethorpe, Lincolnshire.153 The fact that the oldest of the children were around fourteen is in line with evidence that male puberty was often assumed in early modern England to take place around this age. The boy singer George Mason was dismissed from Robert Cecil’s service in June 1608, shortly after his fourteenth birthday; his tutor Innocent Lanier commented, perhaps bitterly, ‘it lay not in my power to keepe his voyce’.154 In The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life (1607), Henry Cuffe says that ‘childhood’ lasts from birth to the age of twenty-five, but breaks this down into several subcategories. Infancy, he writes, lasts until a boy is three or four and boyhood for another five years. The next stage is ‘our budding and blossoming age, when our cheekes and other hidden parts begin to be clothed with that mossie excrement of haire, which is prorogued vntill the eighteenth year’ and the last is youth, which lasts until the age of twenty-five.155 Cuffe’s categories allow for very early or very late puberty; The Office of Christian Parents (1616) says that childhood ‘after seuen reacheth to fourteene, and to twelve in maides; because at that yeeres they beginne the flower of youth, preparing it selfe to the state of manhood or marriage’.156 In a late seventeenth-century text, The Academy of Armory, Randle Holme distinguishes between the ‘stripling or young boy’, the ‘youth’ and the ‘young man’; the boy is aged between seven and fourteen, the youth between fourteen and twenty-one, the young man between twenty-two and thirty.157 Similarly, a late sixteenth-century English book, The Problems of Aristotle, asks, ‘Why are boyes apt to chaunge their voyce about 14 yeares of age?’ and adds specific

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references to the ages of puberty – fourteen in men, twelve in women – not found in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, on which it is based.158 The boy actors of 1599 and 1600 were therefore children according to medical and social criteria. The situation was not, however, so clear cut for the children’s companies in the Jacobean period. When the theatres finally reopened in April 1604, many of the boys were well into their teens, and former colleagues such as John Chappell and the unfortunate Thomas Clifton (thirteen in 1601) were attending university.159 There is no evidence to suggest that actors were forced to leave the children’s companies when their voices had broken; plays performed by the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel, such as Marston’s Antonio plays and Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, were commenting metatheatrically on the actors’ squeaking and creaking voices as early as 1599–1600.160 Among the Blackfriars actors, Nathan Field was sixteen by April 1604. Apart from a possible brief spell at Cambridge University around 1604, he remained with the Children of the Chapel/Queen’s Revels until their merger with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in March 1613, at which time he was twentyfive.161 Michael Shapiro thinks that Field was ‘probably atypical’, noting that he is the only member of the casts of Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601) to appear in that of Epicoene (1609–10).162 However, William Ostler, who appeared in The Poetaster, and John Underwood, who appeared in Cynthia’s Revels and The Poetaster, are not recorded in another company until 1610, when both appear in the cast list for The Alchemist playing adult roles. If Abel Cooke, who was briefly a member of the Queen’s Revels, was the boy baptised at Allhallows, London Wall, on 4 April 1589, then he was seventeen when he was apprenticed to Thomas Kendall in November 1606.163 The Queen’s Revels shareholders occasionally commented on the ages of their actors. In May 1610 Robert Keysar claimed that his actors were: a Companye of the moste exparte and skillful actors wthin the Realme of England to the number of eighteane or Twentye persons all or moste of them trayned vp in that service, in the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth for Ten yeares togeathr and aftrwardes preferred into her maties service to be the Children of her Revells by a patent from his moste excellent Matie, but kept and mainteyned at the Costes and Charges of this Complainante vntill nowe [. . .] they are enforced to be dispersed and turned awaye to the abundante hurte of the said young men[.]164

Richard Burbage and Henry Condell, two of the defendants, objected to Keysar’s statements about the number of his actors, their prowess and the reasons for their dispersal, but did not object to his calling his actors

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‘young men’, nor his claim that at least some of the actors had been together for ten years. In a similar comment on the age and agency of the actors, Edward Kirkham, referring in 1612 to the events of 1608, noted that ‘the said Children [. . .] were Masters themselues’, hinting that the actors were old enough to have more control of their company’s affairs, or had even usurped authority from their elders.165 Among the Whitefriars actors, Hugh Attewell, who played Sir Amorous La Foole in Epicoene, must have been at least twenty-one in April 1613 when he gave sureties for a friend and was described as a ‘gentleman’; he must therefore have been at least seventeen in 1609/ 10.166 William Barksted, who played Morose, was also at least twenty in 1609/10, as he was twenty-one or over when he signed a bond with Richard Graves on 8 September 1610. He may in fact have been slightly older: Robert Keysar sued Barksted in 1612 on the bonds for £16 and £13 he had signed in January 1609, payable after a year and a day in 1610. Barksted claimed that he could prove he was under twenty-one and therefore not liable when he made the bonds, while Keysar maintained that he was of age. The fact that Barksted was arrested in a notorious bawdy house in Field Lane (north of Holborn) in March 1610 may also argue a certain maturity.167 Emanuel Reade, who graduated, like Barksted, to the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, seems to have been a member of the Queen’s Revels in 1610, when he was involved in the sale of a share in the company to Richard Hunt. Reade was born in March 1592, and would therefore have been eighteen in 1610.168 Robert Benfield and Joseph Taylor may also have been members of the Queen’s Revels company, if the cast list for The Coxcomb in the 1679 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio represents the Queen’s Revels company in 1608, when the play was first performed. Taylor was christened on 6 February 1586, and by 21 February 1609 Benfield was old enough to have fathered a son.169 Knowledge of the ages of the Queen’s Revels performers has obvious repercussions for our understanding of their performance style, since early modern commentators were acutely aware of the physical developments which accompanied puberty. In particular, as Will Fisher suggests, one of the key means by which juveniles and adult men could be distinguished was facial hair.170 Randle Holme, for instance, distinguishes between the child, who is ‘smooth and [has] little hair’, the ‘youth’, who has ‘hair on the head, but none on the face’, the ‘young man’, who has ‘hair on the head and a little on the higher lip, a Muschatoe’, and the ‘man’, ‘having a beard’.171 Boys, youths and young men alike lacked a beard, the possession of which signified adult status. Therefore, even for the ‘young man’,

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performing as a mature adult or old man meant that he was assuming an age – and concomitant social standing – he did not possess. We are mistaken if we exaggerate the differences between the child and adult companies, particularly after 1604, when the physical dissimilarities were becoming less pronounced. However, there would still be an obvious difference between, say, the role of Morose as played by William Barksted, then in his early twenties, and the same role if it had been performed by Richard Burbage, aged around forty. When the children’s companies were revived in 1599–1600, one of the aspects which seems to have most impressed their contemporaries was their performance of age. In his epitaph for Salomon Pavy, who died at the age of thirteen, Jonson wryly comments that Pavy acted ‘Old men so duely | As, sooth, the Parcæ thought him one, | He plai’d so truely’.172 Although this is obviously a neat poetic strategy, some of the early Chapel plays feature old men prominently; the scheming Gostanzo and Marc Antonio in Chapman’s Terentian farce All Fools, for instance, who pride themselves on their cunning but are roundly outwitted by the younger generation. The Chapel plays also feature old women, such as Corteza in Chapman’s The Gentleman Usher, who is wooed by the fraudulent Medice. When she protests, ‘I am too old for you’, Medice responds: ‘Too old, thats nothing, | Come pledge me wench, for I am drie againe, | And strait will charge your widdowhood fresh.’173 Eventually, a tipsy Corteza claims that she ‘neuer was more sound of winde and limbe’ and sticks out ‘A great bumbasted legge’ to prove how well she can make a leg (B4v; 2.1.27, 28SD). Dialogue and costume thus combine to create an impression of age around the young performer. Some of the Chapel plays also foreground the incongruity of a prepubescent or pubescent boy playing an adult. In the induction to Cynthia’s Revels, for instance, the Third Child – who also played Anaides and who seems to have had a breaking voice174 – impersonates two different adult spectators without recourse to costume or a prosthetic beard. The first is a caricature of a playhouse-frequenting gallant, or wealthy young man-about-town, complete with his tobacco pipe, on which the Third Child is required to puff throughout the speech: Now Sir; suppose I am one of your Gentile Auditors, that am come in (hauing paid my money at the Doore with much adoe) and here I take my place, and sit downe: I haue my three sorts of Tabacco, in my Pocket, my Light by me; and thus I Begin. By Gods so, I wonder that any man is so madde, to come to see these raskally Tits play here — They doe act like so manie Wrens, or Pismires — not the fift part of a good Face amongst them all — And then their Musique is abominable — able to stretch a

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mans Eares worse, then ten — Pillories, and their Ditties — most lamentable things, like the pittifull Fellowes that make them — Poets. By Gods lid, and ’twere not for Tabacco — I thinke — the very stench of ’hem would poyson mee, I should not dare to come in at their Gates — A man were better visit fifteene Iayles — or a dozen or two of Hospitals — then once aduenture to come neare them.175

The second, less exaggerated, spectator is described by the Third Child as ‘a more sober, or better-gather’d Gallant; that is (as it may be thought) some Friend, or Wel-Wisher to the House’ (A3v; Induction, 134–6). In this sequence, the ironic illusion of age is created through the stage business of smoking (often associated in the early modern period with uncertain masculinity) and tricks of speech, such as the first gallant’s swearing, and the second’s tone of worldly sophistication and references to the other performers as ‘boy’, ‘wagge’ and ‘cracke’. The boy actor’s performance highlights his virtuosity as an actor even as the induction also insists on the incongruity of his playing an adult role. Children’s performance as adults was not always comic or ironic, however, and by the early Jacobean period the juvenile companies’ performance style may have been more flexible than is often assumed. In the accounts of the entertainment mounted as part of the processional entry of James I into the City of London in March 1604, no particular irony is attached to the portrayal of Thamesis by one of the Queen’s Revels children. Thamesis is one of only two speaking roles in this sequence, the other being that of Genius Urbis, performed by Edward Alleyn. The text of the speeches, printed by Jonson and Stephen Harrison, shows that the Queen’s Revels boy was required to speak far less than Alleyn, who was praised by Thomas Dekker for his ‘excellent Action, and a well tun’de audible voyce’.176 Harrison’s illustration (fig. 3) and Jonson’s detailed account demonstrate, however, the visual and dramatic importance of Thamesis in the sequence: Vnderneath these, in an Aback thrust out before the rest, lay TAMESIS. The Riuer, as running along the side of the Citty; in a skinne made like flesh, naked, and blew. His mantle of sea-greene or water colour, thinne, and bolne out like a sayle; Bracelets about his wreasts, of willow and sedge, a crowne of sedge and reede vpon his head, mixt with water-lillies; alluding to Virgills description of Tiber [. . .] His beard, and haire long, and ouergrowne. He leanes his arme vpon an earthen pot, out of which, water, with liue Fishes, are seene to runne forth, and play about him. His word, FLVMINA SENSERVNT IPSA. A Hemistich of Ouids: The rest of the verse being, quid esset amor

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Figure 3. Fenchurch pageant in the processional entry of James I into the city of London, March 1604, in Stephen Harrison, Arches of Triumph (London, 1604), showing one of the Queen’s Revels children as Thamesis and Edward Alleyn as Genius Urbis.

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Affirming, that Riuers themselues, and such inanimate Creatures, haue heeretofore beene made sensible of Passions, and Affections; and that hee nowe, no lesse pertooke the ioy of his Maiesties gratefull approach to this Citty, than any of those persons, to whome hee pointed, which were the daughters of the Genius[.]177

Although the costume would appear to accentuate the actor’s lithe body, the false beard and hair prevent his seeming merely youthful. In Harrison’s illustration, which is probably not realistic in execution, it is difficult to tell that the actor playing Thamesis was younger than the actor playing Genius Urbis.178 As The Magnificent Entertainment suggests, the performance styles of the children’s companies may have modulated as the actors grew older. Many of the later Queen’s Revels plays are predicated on the interstitial character of the company, which included not only prepubescent children, but also performers who would have been categorised as ‘youths’ or ‘young men’ by Holme or the author of The Office of Christian Parents. In Marston’s The Fawn, which is interested, like All Fools, in battles of wits between old and young, age is both immutable and a constructed category. Early in the play, Tiberio, son of Duke Hercules, courts Dulcimel on his father’s behalf, watched by a disguised Hercules and Dulcimel’s father, the imbecilic Duke Gonzago. When Dulcimel questions the fidelity of Hercules’ portrait, Tiberio offers another ‘counterfeit’: ‘if your eie dislike that deader peece, behold me his true forme and liuelier image, such my Father hath beene’.179 Dulcimel, however, refuses his easy equation of young and old: d u l . My Lord, please you to scent this flower. t i b . Tis withered Ladie, the flowers scent is gone. d u l . This hath been such as you are[.] (B2r; 1.2.119–21)

Even as Tiberio unsuccessfully substitutes himself for Hercules, Gonzago insists on the similarity between himself and his daughter, commenting to the silent courtier Granuffo, ‘Heare, thats my wit, when I was eighteen old such a pretty toying wit had I, but age hath made vs wise (hast not my Lord?) [. . .] Pretty, pretty, iust like my younger wit: you know it my Lord.’ (B2r, B2v; 1.2.113–15, 128–9). The audience are of course aware that Dulcimel’s wit can owe nothing to her idiotic father: parallels between youth and age are systematically broken down. After Gonzago and his train depart, the courtiers Nymphadoro and Herod comment further on his decrepitude: h e r o . Did not Tiberio call his father foole? n y m . No, he said yeares had weakned his youthfull quicknes.

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h e r o . He swore he was bald. n y m . No; but not thicke hayr’d. h e r o . By this light, Ile sweare he said his father had the hipgout, the strangury, the fistula in ano, and a most vnabydable breath, no teeth, lesse eyes, great fingers, little legges, an eternall fluxe, and an euerlasting cough of the longues. (B3r; 1.2.189–97)

Herod insists on the unsuitability of the marriage between Hercules and Dulcimel, focusing on the contrast between the grotesque, diseased body of the elderly duke and that of ‘a Lady of fifteene’ (B3r; 1.2.200–1). Unsurprisingly, having overheard this exchange, Hercules renounces his suit to Dulcimel, commenting in soliloquy, ‘I neuer knew till now, how old I was’ (B4r; 1.2.318). The narrative appears to set up a straightforward battle between youth and age. With Hercules’ surrender, however, Marston twists the traditional concerns of New Comedy into something rather different. Instead of watching youth outwit age, we see the hapless Tiberio and Gonzago manipulated by both Hercules and Dulcimel, who are kindred spirits in their artfulness – Gonzago unwittingly gets this right when he comments that his daughter is ‘As old as [Hercules] in wit’ (D3r; 2.2.545). Hercules is a disguised ruler, like those featured in The Malcontent and The Fleer, but he is also an elderly version of the trickster hero of city comedy, a superannuated prodigal who has voluntarily given up his land but who works for altruistic political and dynastic purposes, purging Gonzago’s court of its susceptibility to flattery and regulating the sexual behaviour of Tiberio, his son and heir. A character who combines both youth and age, he is appropriately played by an actor whose status is equally liminal. A similar elderly prodigal can be found in another of Marston’s plays for the Queen’s Revels, The Dutch Courtesan (c.1604), which foregrounds the actors’ uncertain status by centring one of its comic set-piece scenes on the ‘shaving’ – literal and metaphoric – of the vintner Mulligrub by Cocledemoy, a ‘knauishly witty City companion’.180 Cocledemoy plans his disguise carefully: ‘let me see, a Barbar, my scuruie tongue will discouer me, must dissemble, must disguise, for my beard, my false hayre, for my tongue Spanish Dutch, or Welsh, no, a Northerne Barbar’ (C2r; 2.1.204–7). His face and voice disguised as the barber Andrew Shark, Cocledemoy covers Mulligrub’s face in soap, puts a coxcomb on his head, and leaves him. With his eyes shut to protect them from the soap, Mulligrub tries to continue their discussion of politics, plots revenge against Cocledemoy, and demands that the barber do his duty: ‘shaue me well, I shall bee one of the common Councell shortly, and then

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Andrew, why Andrew, Andrew, doest leaue me in the Suddes?’ (D2v; 2.3.78–81). Cocledemoy is described as a ‘thick, elderly stub-bearded fellow’; his disguise as Andrew Shark therefore involves, for the actor, the substitution of one prosthetic beard for another. Elsewhere in the play, characters are bearded – Crispinella berates Tysefew for having ‘a brazen face, a Leaden braine, and a copperbeard’ (F1v; 4.1.23–4) – and scantily bearded: the nurse Putifer says that Freevill has ‘has a legg like a post, a nose like a Lion, a brow like a Bull, and a beard of most faire expectation’ (D3v; 3.1.59–61). Attention to facial hair is part of Marston’s physically precise bawdy in his depiction of relations between the sexes, reminding the audience that these are sexually liminal adolescent performers. Concern with the performers’ indeterminate status can also be seen in comments from outside the children’s companies. For instance, William Crashaw criticises the Children of Paul’s for their performance of Middleton’s The Puritan, attacking the company in terms drawn from Cyprian’s often quoted prohibition against actors: ‘a player ought not to come to the Lords table; and that he that teacheth children to play, is not an instructor, but a spoiler & destroyer of childre[n]: they know they haue no calling, but are in the State like warts on the hand, or blemishes in the face’.181 Crashaw’s concern is mainly with the corruption of the pedagogic duty of care. However, his anxiety may have arisen in part precisely because the Paul’s boys were not simply children but adolescents: around this time they were described in an account of one of their performances as ‘the Youthes of Paules, commonlye cald the Children of Paules’.182 Manuals for parents often indicate that adolescence was a particularly vulnerable time: The Office of Christian Parents argues that between 14. and 28. the child is most sensible, full of strength, courage, and actiunes, easily drawne to libertie, pleasure, and licentiousnes; which if they take deepe rooting at this age, they will hardly or neuer be remooued; and so all the good, and all the ioy, and all the honour of our child, is turned to euill, sorrow, and shame, and the poore young man laid open to the snares of the deuill, to be holden at his pleasure with the tight chaine of his raging concupiscence, to be carried as his slaue, whether he will, till he haue brought him (except God be extraordinarie mercifull vnto him) to most fearefull destruction and euerlasting perdition. (S4r–v)

Concern about the boy actor’s vulnerability lies behind Crashaw’s comments, and also behind the prohibition placed on Nathaniel Giles in 1606, when he was forbidden to use the Chapel choristers ‘as Comedians or Stage players’: ‘it is not fitt or decent that suche as should singe the

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praises of god Allmightie shoulde be trained vpp or imployed in such lascivious and prophane exercises’.183 The sexual language of Giles’s patent is echoed in less obviously antitheatrical references to children’s performances. In Father Hubburd’s Tale (1604), a gallant is advised that he will find at Blackfriars ‘a neast of Boyes, able to rauish a man’, and in 1609 Dekker similarly advised the subject of The Gull’s Hornbook that by sitting on the stage in an indoor playhouse ‘you may (with small cost) purchase the deere acquaintance of the boyes’.184 The juvenile actor was not, however, appreciated only by men. It was often assumed in the early modern period that women were interested in young actors. In 1602 Philip Gawdy related a rumour that the Dowager Countess of Leicester had married ‘one of the playing boyes of the chappell’, and in an epigram by Thomas Randolph a young actor is maintained by an older woman who loves him because ‘he played the womans part so well’.185 Clerimont’s boy in Epicoene, in a piece of metatheatrical comment, complains that the collegiate women ‘play with me, and throw me o’ the bed; and carry me in to my lady; and shee kisses me with her oil’d face; and puts a perruke o’ my head; and askes me an’ I will weare her gowne; and I say, no: and then she hits me a blow o’ the eare, and calls me innocent, and lets me goe.’186 The eroticism of the playhouse is not easily confined to modern hetero/homosexual categories. Truewit remarks on Clerimont’s going ‘betweene his mistris abroad, and his engle at home’ (2Y2r; 1.1.24–5), and the ingle himself moves between Clerimont and a ‘mistris abroad’. The same boys or young men could be objects of desire for male and female spectators.187 In a rare discussion of the sexual valences of children’s company performance, Susan Zimmerman argues that child and adult performers ‘could not have created the same erotic resonances in performance. Scenes featuring two boys playing women might have resonated similarly, but not those featuring impersonations of men and women, especially in sexual contexts.’ 188 It seems unlikely, however, that this would have been the case in Queen’s Revels comedies such as The Dutch Courtesan, with its frank anatomisation of sexual desire, or tragedies such as Sophonisba or Bussy D’Ambois. In the case of The Dutch Courtesan, the smaller age difference between the actors playing Crispinella and Tysefew may have added to the sexual spark of their duels of wit, making them seem more evenly matched. Performance therefore highlights an aspect of The Dutch Courtesan stressed by recent critics: its emphasis on various kinds of sexual relationship, including the Protestant-influenced companionate marriage exemplified by the courtship of Crispinella and Tysefew.189

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The effect in tragedy may have been rather different. Nathan Field was the first actor to play the title role in Bussy D’Ambois, a prologue added to the 1641 quarto, in which the King’s Men defend their title to the play in revival, remarking that ‘Field is gone | Whose Action first did give it name’.190 He would have been a seventeen-year-old Bussy in the play’s first performances in 1604, when the company had only just begun to experiment with tragedy, with another boy playing Tamyra. Towards the end of the play, Montsurry discovers Tamyra’s affair with Bussy, and tortures her in an attempt to force her to write to her lover so that he can use her letter as bait to trap him. Tamyra resists, begging Montsurry in excessive, masochistic terms: Hide in some gloomie dungeon my loth’d face, And let condemned murtherers let me downe (Stopping their noses) my abhorred foode. Hang me in chaines, and let me eat these armes That haue offended: Binde me face to face To some dead woman, taken from the Cart Of Execution, till death and time In graines of dust dissolue me; Ile endure: Or any torture that your wraths inuention Can fright all pittie from the world withall: But to betray a friend with shew of friendship, That is too common, for the rare reuenge Your rage affecteth; heere then are my breasts, Last night your pillowes; heere my wretched armes, As late the wished confines of your life: Now breake them as you please, and all the boundes Of manhoode, noblesse, and religion.191

Montsurry stabs her – ‘Till thou writ’st | Ile write in wounds (my wrongs fit characters)’ (H2v; 5.1.124–5) – and places her on a rack; Tamyra eventually agrees to write, but ‘in my bloud that he may see, | These lines come from my wounds and not from me’ (H3r; 5.1.167–8). In this highly melodramatic, sexual scene, the youth of the performers and the smaller age differences between them could create a highly disturbing ‘erotic resonance’. Whereas adult company plays depicting a similar situation could set up a clear distinction between male adults and ‘women’, Jacobean children’s company plays were capable of creating a slippage between boys and adult men, between ‘male’ and ‘female’, abuser and abused.192 As Gina Bloom has pointed out, the adolescent actor’s physicality could create potentially disturbing effects, its liminal state disrupting conventional gender categories.193

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It is noticeable that a number of the plays performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars – when the repertory also included a revised version of Bussy D’Ambois – experiment with the figure of a young man who is disguised as a woman. The earliest of these plays is George Chapman’s May Day, probably first performed around 1601 and revived around 1610, in which one of the central characters, a page called Lionell, is disguised as a woman in order that Quintiliano can trick his lieutenant.194 In a frequently quoted passage, Quintiliano says, ‘Afore heauen ’tis a sweete fac’t child, me thinks he should show well in womans attire: and hee tooke her by the lilly white hand, and he laid her vpon a bed. Ile helpe thee to three crownes a weeke for him, and she can act well. Ha’st euer practis’d my pretty Ganimede?’ (G2v; 3.3.202–6). His pronouns constantly shifting, Quintiliano thinks that he comments on the boy’s effeminacy. The page ‘Lionell’ is, however, a woman in disguise, a fact that is concealed from the audience until the play’s conclusion. He is therefore – it turns out – a woman disguised as a boy disguised as a woman; complicating things further still, this character was originally, of course, played by a boy. Lionell/Theagine’s ambiguity is mirrored by that of two other characters: Lucretio, Theagine’s beloved, who spends much of the play in his own cross-gender disguise as Lucretia, and Franceschina, Quintiliano’s wife, who dresses as a boy for the purposes of romantic intrigue. Although Theagine and Lucretio camouflage themselves with little difficulty, Franceschina’s disguise is rumbled immediately by her husband Quintiliano, who is nonetheless oblivious to her true identity: ‘Vpon my life the hindermost of them, is a wench in mans attire, didst thou not marke besides his slabbering about her, her bigge thighs and her splay feete’ (I2v; 4.5.106–8). Franceschina is also, however, played by a boy, so any recognisably feminine characteristics such as ‘bigge thighs’ and ‘splay feet’ can only be an effect of costuming.195 May Day thus blurs the boundaries between woman and boy even as it insists on the existence of such boundaries. In the most famous of the Whitefriars plays, Epicoene, Jonson transforms Chapman’s ‘Lionell’, picking up his fellow dramatist’s innovatory concealment of the character’s true identity and gender. Epicoene, the gentlewoman offered to Morose as a silent bride, turns out to be what Theagine only pretended to be – a boy who has been disguised as a girl to fulfil a practical joke. The motif is also recycled in another Whitefriars play, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady. Here its effect is reversed, as Welford’s disguise as a silent masked woman allows Elder Loveless to marry the Lady and leads to his own marriage with the Lady’s

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sister Martha. Its most ironic treatment can be found, however, in Field’s Amends for Ladies, where characters repeatedly disguise themselves as the opposite sex. The gallant Bold disguises himself as an elderly servant, Mary Princox, in an attempt to seduce Lady Bright, but finds himself turned out of her house without his clothes. Elsewhere, Lady Honour disguises herself as an Irish footboy and waits on her own lover, Ingen; she is horrified to find that Ingen is apparently married, but his ‘wife’ turns out to be his brother, Frank, in disguise. In the most overtly comic use of the motif, Welltried and Bold introduce Lady Bright to a masked woman who is supposedly Bold’s fiance´e. However, ‘she’ is really Lord Feesimple, who thinks that his disguise will allow him to marry Lady Bright, and only narrowly avoids being married off to his own father. The cross-gender disguise, already overdetermined in the wake of May Day and Epicoene, ultimately becomes ridiculous, and the spectators are left unable to gauge exactly who is supposed to be ‘male’ or ‘female’ at any particular time. As in Bussy D’Ambois, the potential slippage between ‘male’ and ‘female’ possible in the juvenile troupe, with its mixture of actors in their teens and early twenties, is used to create disturbing and comic effects. While the exaggerated performance of age became less central to the Queen’s Revels appeal as the actors grew older, their class transvestism – the assumption of the social position of mature or elderly men and women – may have become more disturbing. The social status of children was usually determined by that of their parents, from whom the child actors were separated through abduction or apprenticeship. Henry Clifton’s complaint, we recall, implicitly contrasts his own status as a gentleman with that of a player. The fact that the Chapel boys were still children, however, may have prevented their performance of social status seeming such an acute matter of concern as their performance of gender. In contrast, in 1619, when he was one of the most famous actors of his day, Field was the target of rumours that the Earl of Argyll had paid ‘for the noursing of a childe wch the worlde sayes is Daughter to my lady and N. Feild the Player’.196 In this jibe the player’s low social status and the incongruity of Argyll’s paying for the upkeep of his child is taken for granted. Similarly, a jest in Taylor’s Wit and Mirth, featuring Field, underlines the social uncertainty of the actor’s position by making him the butt of a gentleman’s joke: [M]Aster Field the Player riding vp Fleetstreet, a great pace, a Gentleman called him, and asked him what play was playd that day: he (being angry to be stayd upon so friuolous a demand) answered, that he might see what play was to bee

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playd vpon euery Poste, I cry you mercy (said the Gentleman) I tooke you for a Poste, you road so fast[.]197

Both of these jibes were made long after Field had left the Queen’s Revels, but another pointed jest commented on the same issue as early as 1613: VVho braues it now as doth yong Histrio? Walking in Pauls like to some Potentate, Richly replenisht from the top to t’h toe; As if he were deriu’d from high estate: Alas, ther’s not a man but may descry, His begging trade, and bastard faculty.198

Henry Parrott here attacks the young actor, possibly again Nathan Field, for his presumption offstage; he continues to act as if he has high status, when in fact his rich clothes are undeserved and his profession ignominious. The ‘begging trade, and bastard faculty’ links social and sexual misdemeanour, and puts ‘Histrio’ at the bottom of the social scale on two counts. While the threat posed by child actors was contained by their youth, the older Queen’s Revels performers were potentially more subversive and were therefore held up as objects of mockery or disdain. During the first decade of James’s reign, the Queen’s Revels’ actors gradually stopped being objects – boy actors controlled by a managing syndicate or the passive cause of lust in an audience – and became subjects, taking a progressively more active role in the company and gaining their own sexual and social reputations and identities. As noted above, Field began to write himself, first contributing commendatory verses to other dramatists’ plays, and later writing A Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies for performance at the Whitefriars. Barksted wrote for the Queen’s Revels as well as acting in their plays, and Reade was evidently taking an interest in the company’s finances when he urged Hunt to buy a share from Rosseter. When, therefore, we think about the agency behind the plays performed by the Queen’s Revels at Blackfriars and Whitefriars, we need to consider not only the shareholders, patrons and dramatists, but also the actors, their stage personae and their input into the plays and the company as a whole. The plays suggest, in addition, that a variety of performance styles were available, ranging from broad caricature to a more subtle impersonation and negotiation of the potential disparity between actor and role. While early Chapel plays such as Cynthia’s Revels use a broadly presentational style, in which many of the characters are described in detail before they

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first appear, some of the Queen’s Revels plays demand virtuoso comic and tragic performances, such as the title roles in The Fawn or Bussy D’Ambois, and skilled ensemble playing. Although the acting styles required from the company’s juvenile performers are far from naturalistic, it is perhaps an overstatement to call them ‘anti-mimetic’,199 and it is certainly mistaken to argue that the plays’ appeal was based solely on ‘child-actors consciously ranting in oversize parts’.200 Conclusion Paying attention to a series of overlapping narratives or ‘maps’ (to return to Ingram’s term) of the people involved in the staging of plays at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres in the years 1603–13 demonstrates the fractured and contingent nature of company identity and authority. Although we often assume that well-known dramatists such as Jonson, Chapman and Marston bore the primary responsibility for their plays, it seems that little-known figures such as shareholders Kendall, Keysar and Kirkham might have had an equally strong influence on dramatic production. We need also to be aware of the different functions that various individuals may have had within the company at any one time: Field and Barksted, for instance, should be understood as both actors and dramatists, Marston and Daborne as both dramatists and shareholders. Focusing on the company allows us also to integrate into the collective production of dramatic texts issues such as censorship, often seen as the repression of a particular authorial voice, and patronage, seen as a corrupting influence on the individual playwright. To seek a single voice behind any one play – be it writer, actor or shareholder – vastly underestimates the complexity of the way in which early modern plays reached the stage. As Joan Littlewood comments, ‘Nobody ever really wrote on their own. Aristophanes, Ben Jonson or Brecht. Theatre is collaborative.’201 In this context, therefore, it is unnecessary to look for a prime intelligence behind the plays performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Instead, the political attitudes and allegiances of shareholders and dramatists alike can be traced and juxtaposed: it is in this network of allegiances, some conflicting – such as Jonson’s allegiance to King James and Daniel’s to Queen Anna – that any authority behind or over the plays produced will be discovered. Rather than looking for a central controlling presence behind the theatrical performances, we should think perhaps of a composite authority over a play or series of plays, which is strictly local and limited.

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As my opening discussion of the ‘little eyases’ passage suggests, this kind of analysis can only be tentative and provisional. There is, after all, only fragmentary surviving evidence for the ways in which theatre companies functioned, and in many cases different kinds of evidence – legal, literary and economic, for example – must be juxtaposed. A working model of collaborative authority suits the conditions in which the plays were written and performed, but it also better accords with the nature of the surviving texts, which are themselves the productions of a composite process. Lack of complete evidence is, of course, a major problem in any attempt to historicise the study of early modern drama. I do not think, however, that it excuses us from making the attempt; although it can be difficult to reconstruct the conditions in which plays were written and performed, the insights gained in the attempt are considerable.

chapter 2

‘Proper gallants wordes’: comedy and the theatre audience

A comedy that is unamusing is a tragedy, ask any producer.1

In his commonplace book, published posthumously as Timber: Or Discoveries; Made Upon Men and Matter, Ben Jonson remarks, ‘the moving of laughter is a fault in Comedie, a kind of turpitude, that depraves some part of mans nature without a disease’.2 Jonson’s comments may seem incongruous to a modern reader. Although it is a modern cliche´ to say that Shakespeare’s comedies are not funny,3 we still often associate laughter and comedy; if a comedy is not funny, it is seen to have failed. Modern productions of early modern plays are often judged in these terms: a favourable review of the National Theatre’s 1983 revival of The Fawn remarks, ‘[w]e watch it, as it must have been written, with a constant smile that erupts into frequent chuckles and occasional belly-laughs’.4 The early modern theatre did not make this assumption. Indeed, the place of laughter in comedy and in society in general was increasingly ambiguous. Jonson’s comments, echoing Philip Sidney and explicitly following Aristotle, that encouraging laughter is a ‘fault in Comedie’, and ‘a kind of turpitude’, are an acknowledgement of an emergent debate. Sidney himself specifically condemns comic techniques of the 1580s: ‘our Comedients thinke there is no delight without laughter, which is verie wrong, for though laughter may come with delight, yet commeth it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter’.5 Outside the theatre William Harrison contrasts the ribaldry ‘naturallye incident to carters, & clownes, who thincke themselues not to be merie and welcome, yf their foolish vaines in this behalfe be neuer so little restrayned’ with ‘the great silence that is vsed at the tables of the honorable & wyser sort’.6 Another commentator observed in 1649 that those ‘most apt to laughter’ were ‘children, women and the common people’.7 Although eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Browne could praise its ‘sweet contraction of the 55

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muscles of the face, and a pleasant agitation of the vocal Organs’, as Keith Thomas notes, the ‘orthodox view was that the dignity of the great was seriously impaired by such “undecent cachinnations”, such “ridiculous wrinkles in the face”’.8 Laughter is associated in these works with lack of decorum, with childishness, and with lower class status. In this context the performance of comedies by the Children of the Queen’s Revels is in itself problematic. Indoor theatres, used exclusively by children’s companies before 1609, are often assumed to have attracted a more select audience than the amphitheatres used by the adult companies. Alfred Harbage goes so far as to say that the ‘exclusion by economic means of the craftsmen, shopkeepers, and their families, who constituted the bulk of the audience at the other theatres, was indeed a chief raison d’eˆtre for Blackfriars and Paul’s’.9 Although this view rests on questionable foundations, it bears consideration. If we believe that laughter is the preserve of ‘children, women and the common people’, the Blackfriars and Whitefriars Queen’s Revels companies deliberately and paradoxically excluded many of those capable of laughter, but nonetheless played comedic material. Even more problematically, if children are particularly susceptible to laughter, what did it mean when boy actors provoked laughter in an older, socially superior audience? The distrustful view of laughter held by Jonson and Sidney was not, of course, the only commonly held attitude. In the prefatory epistle to The Roaring Girl, Thomas Middleton promises his readers ‘Venery, and Laughter’, and a more relaxed perspective can be seen also in the popularity of jest-books designed to ‘promote harmlesse mirth’.10 Middleton thus voices an alternative, anti-academic stance towards comedy contrary to the classicist stance taken by Jonson in his critical writing. In stage comedies classical theory and jest-book practicality were brought into conflict, with laughter working to complicate a classicised conception of the genre; jokes can question and undermine comic form and, especially, comic closure. This contradictory attitude towards laughter can be used to explore the way in which comedy functions within the repertory of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, and can serve as a means of unpacking the problematic relationship between performers and audience, and between audience and dramatic fiction. My focus here is on the way in which jokes unravel social identity, and I suggest that comic language itself becomes a double-edged weapon. In Timber: Or Discoveries Jonson asserts that ‘Language most shewes a man [. . .] It springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the mind. No glasse renders a mans forme, or

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likenesse, so true as his speech’ (2Q2v; lines 2031–4). Language comes, as Adam Fox argues, ‘to underpin social hierarchies, to provide a litmus of rank and degree and a vehicle for status differentiation’.11 However, this view of language could cause problems, as an individual’s ‘true’ identity might not correlate to their social identity. James Cleland, for instance, complains that it is ‘a pitty’ that ‘a Noble man is better distinguished from a Clowne by his golden laces, then by his good language’.12 Distinctions between social groups, and between language users, were no longer clear cut – if, in fact, they had ever been. Jokes, puns and jibes about social status therefore allow us to identify a stress-point at which the relationship between comedy and its socially aware audience can be tested. In plays such as Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho (1605), Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (c.1607), and Jonson’s Epicoene (1609–10), standard comic structures are manipulated in order to confirm or confound audience expectation, with laughter playing a crucial role in the production or withholding of satisfaction. Before looking at these plays in detail, however, I will first examine the relationship between jokes and the comic form in more detail, and take another look at the nature of the Queen’s Revels audiences at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres. jests to make you merry? Early modern popular culture was awash with jokes of various kinds, found in various media and formats. Particularly relevant to my purpose here is the jest-book, a form popular throughout the century, and one dedicated to the production of laughter. Jokes about social status dominate, together with a delight in the more perverse ways in which language can be shaped or misshaped: ‘ One asked why a Knight tooke place of a Gentleman, it was answered because they were Knights now a days before they were Gentlemen’; ‘One said a rich widdow was like the rubbish of the world that helps only to stop the breaches of decayed houses’; ‘One said roaring Gallants were like Pedlers, because some of them did carry their whole estates upon their backs.’13 The jest-book’s stereotypical figures of the newly made knight, the rich widow and the gallant are familiar to us from stage comedies, as is its linguistic play. The similarities do not stop there. Like stage plays, jests reveal social tensions; the laughter they create is cruel, focusing on those who seem to challenge societal norms. Thomas Wilson writes that the ‘occasion of laughter [. . .] is the fondnes, the filthines, the deformitee, and all suche euill behauior, as we

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se to bee in other’, arguing in a tradition which derives ultimately from Aristotle’s Poetics.14 As Keith Thomas notes, it is ‘a harshly intolerant popular culture, hostile to privacy and eccentricity, and relying on the sanction not of reason but of ridicule’.15 The difference between jest-book and stage comedy lies in the structural complexity of the dramatic genre. While a jest-book might have a wholly conservative function, mocking the follies and foibles of those who do not conform to society’s unwritten laws, stage comedy is, through the act of dramatic impersonation, inherently multivocal. Jokes are mediated by the performance situation and by their integration into a comic narrative structure. The first of the jokes quoted above was actually lifted by the jest-book’s compiler, Robert Chamberlain, from the Children of the Queen’s Revels’ comedy The Fleer (c.1606). In the play the joke is part of a dialogue between Fleer (who is really Duke Antifront, acting as a pander to his daughters in order eventually to reform their behaviour), and one of the daughters’ foolish suitors, Sir John Have-Little: k n i . Faith I am going to thy Ladies Fleir. fl e . You will not speake with am now; for my Ladies will speake with none but Gentlemen. k n i . Why sir, I hope I am a Knight, and Knights are before Gentlemen. fl e . What Knights before Gentlemen, say ye? k n i . Faith I. fl e : Thats strange, they were wont to bee Gentlemen fore they were knighted: but for this newes Ile folow you. k n i : Doe, and as occasion serues Ile preferre thee.16

In The Fleer the joke is built up through successive lines of dialogue; the jest-book, in contrast, reduces it to a question and a punchline. In addition, Sharpham also situates the joke in a long line of jibes at the state of English knighthood; the irony of the joke in its dramatic context is that Fleer is apparently as desperate for patronage and promotion as the newly made knight. In the context of the play’s narrative structure, however, HaveLittle is being manipulated and subjected to derision by a disguised Italian duke, even as he is attracted to the duke’s depraved daughters. Another example of the sometimes uneasy relationship between jokes and comic narrative structures can be found in dramatists’ incorporation of the biblical story of the prodigal son. This story was extremely popular as an organising narrative in comedies of the early seventeenth century, and was apparently perfectly suited to a Jacobean preoccupation with dissolute young men and the usurers and bawds who preyed on them.17

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Plays such as A Trick to Catch the Old One (Paul’s, c.1605; Queen’s Revels, c.1608), Ram Alley (King’s Revels, c.1607–8) and The Scornful Lady (Queen’s Revels, c.1610) feature members of the landed gentry who have lost their land through prodigal behaviour. Other plays feature prodigal apprentices, such as Eastward Ho and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Queen’s Revels, c.1607). The prodigal story seems to suit comedy, its closing emphasis on repentance and reconciliation satisfying a genre ‘the beginning whereof is euer full of troubles, and the end ioyfull’, as one early modern commentator explained.18 As this suggests, narrative structure could be considered a safer generic indicator than laughter alone, and jokes often seem to work against narrative structures, complicating or negating comedy’s movement towards reconciliation. An extreme example of the productive tension between jokes and comic structure can be found in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which provides a bravura anatomisation of city comedy and the prodigal narrative in its play within a play, The London Merchant. The London Merchant looks at first like a standard city comedy, in which a prodigal apprentice is dismissed by his master for daring to love his daughter. The characters’ names are typical of the genre, as is the deadpan blank-verse dialogue between Venturewell, Jasper and Luce with which the narrative begins. However, the staid London Merchant is infected by the excessive nature of the romance narrative which the Citizens force upon the playing company, becoming progressively more anarchic and linguistically outrageous with the introduction of Luce’s foolish suitor, Humphrey, and the feuding Merrythought family. Eventually, Jasper fakes his own death and impersonates his own ghost, terrifying the repentant Venturewell. Jasper’s ‘death’ leads, improbably, to The London Merchant’s happy conclusion and general reconciliation. The Citizens, who have insisted that their apprentice Rafe take a central role in the play, are disappointed that their prote´ge´ does not feature in the comic conclusion and demand that he should instead have a grand deathscene. The representative of the playing company protests – ‘’Twill be very vnfit he should die sir, vpon no occasion, and in a Comedy too’ – but the Citizen is adamant: ‘Take you no care of that sir boy, is not his part at an end, thinke you, when he’s dead?’19 On his cue, Rafe enters ‘with a forked arrow through his head ’ (K3r; 5.277SD), and delivers a stirring blank-verse oration, detailing his exploits and his final, sudden death: Then comming home, and sitting in my Shop With Apron blew, death came vnto my Stall

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Children of the Queen’s Revels To cheapen Aqua-vitæ, but ere I Could take the bottle downe, and fill a taste, Death caught a pound of Pepper in his hand, And sprinkled all my face and body ore, And in an instant vanished away. [. . .] Then tooke I vp my Bow and Shaft in hand, And walkt in Moore-fields to coole my selfe, But there grim cruel death met me againe, And shot this forked arrow through my head, And now I faint, therefore be warn’d by me, My fellows euery one, of forked heads. Fare-well all you good boies in merry London, Nere shall we more vpon Shroue-tuesday meete, And plucke downe houses of iniquitie. My paine increaseth: I shall neuer more Hold open, whilst another pumpes both legs, Nor daube a Satten gowne with rotten egs: Set vp a stake, oˆ never more I shall, I die, flie, flie my soul to Grocers Hall. oh, oh, oh, &c. (K3r–v; 5.307–29)

Death was usually considered the stuff of tragedy, but in his light-hearted domestication of the Grim Reaper, Beaumont paradoxically keeps a kind of generic decorum even as he gleefully disregards comedy’s other conventions.20 As the parodies of death in The Knight of the Burning Pestle suggest, the concluding sections of plays are often generic stress-points. In the epistle prefacing Volpone (King’s, 1605, published 1607), Jonson complains that his ‘Catastrophe may, in the strict rigour of Comick Law, meete with censure’, but asserts that his ‘special aime’ was ‘to put the snafle in their mouths, that crie out, we neuer punish vice in our Enterludes’. He therefore ‘tooke the more liberty; though not with out some lines of example drawne euen in the Antients themselues, the goings out of whose Comœdies are not alwayes ioyfull, but oftimes, the Baudes, the Seruants, the Riualls, yea, and the maisters are mulcted.’21 Jonson criticises dramatists who allow reconciliation to triumph over justice, and concludes Volpone with the punishment of its central character; he argues that he breaks the rules at the behest of critics in the audience. Yet in contravening the ‘strict rigour of Comick Law’, Jonson withholds comic closure – and the pleasure of reconciliation – from one section of his audience, even as he pleases the moralistic faction.

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reading the audience In dramatising its own spectators, The Knight of the Burning Pestle inevitably raises questions regarding the identity of the audiences of the Queen’s Revels plays. The audiences in indoor theatres such as the Blackfriars and Whitefriars are usually thought to have been more select than those in the amphitheatres and to have constituted a distinct coterie. However, Harbage’s statement that the indoor theatres purposefully excluded ‘craftsmen, shopkeepers and their families’ is overstated: it seems extremely unlikely that all the Queen’s Revels citizen-shareholders would have been willing to exclude other tradesmen on ideological grounds. Other factors were involved. Entrance prices at the indoor theatres were higher than those of the amphitheatres. For instance, the basic price at the Theatre in Shoreditch in the 1590s was 1d., rising to 6d. for the Lord’s room, whereas the Blackfriars’ minimum admission was 6d., rising to 2s. 6d. for a box alongside the stage.22 In November 1600 Sir William Cavendish spent 18d. on a visit to Paul’s and, in June 1601, 12d. on a visit to the Blackfriars.23 Prices were, however, dictated at least in part by the size of the theatres. The amphitheatres may have admitted as many as 3,000 spectators, but the Blackfriars theatre probably allowed no more than 700, the Whitefriars theatre slightly fewer, and the tiny theatre used by the Children of Paul’s fewer still.24 Moreover, at least in the earlier stages of their existence, the children’s companies may have performed as infrequently as once a week, in contrast with the adults, who, Philip Henslowe’s accounts suggest, would have played every day if allowed.25 With a smaller capacity, less frequent performances and higher overheads caused by the need to maintain the boy actors, the managers of the private theatres probably had no choice but to impose high entrance prices. A wealthier clientele is likely therefore to have been a by-product rather than a conscious strategy. Early seventeenth-century accounts do not specify that different social groups automatically attended a particular theatre. In The Gull’s Hornbook Dekker does not discriminate between the audiences of the different playhouses, but instead asserts that the place is so free in entertainement, allowing a stoole as well to the Farmers sonne as to your Templer: that your Stinkard has the selfe same libertie to be there in his Tobacco-Fumes, which your sweet Courtier hath: and that your Car-man and Tinker claime as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to giue iudgment on the plaies life and death, as well as the prowdest Momus among the tribe of Critick[.]26

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As Ann Jennalie Cook points out, in an important revision of Harbage, the adult and children’s companies were at times competing for the same audience, rather than attracting entirely discrete clientele.27 Although her emphasis on the select nature of theatre audiences is overstated, Cook rightly emphasises the continuity that must have been present; the fact that a playgoer could afford to attend the indoor theatres did not mean that he or she attended those theatres exclusively. There is some anecdotal evidence to support Cook’s conclusion that high-status visitors could be found in both indoor theatres such as the Blackfriars and outdoor theatres such as the Globe and the Fortune. Sir William Cavendish made eight visits to the indoor theatres between 1600 and 1602, and we know that Sir Richard Cholmley also went to the Blackfriars in 1603, since records show that he was involved in an altercation there.28 High-status visitors went to the outdoor as well as to the indoor theatres. Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin Pomerania, and his train visited both the children’s and the adults’ playhouses, including the Blackfriars and the Fortune, during his visit to London in 1602.29 The Venetian ambassador, Zorzi Giustinian, saw Pericles at the Globe at some time between May 1606 and November 1608; his party included the French ambassador and his wife and possibly the Secretary of the Florentine embassy.30 Prince Frederick Lewis of Wu¨rttemberg saw Othello at the Globe in 1610, and Edward Pudsey, a Derbyshire gentleman, seems to have seen the same play before it was published in 1622.31 In 1611 two London butchers, Ralph Brewyn and John Lynsey, were accused of ‘abusinge certen gentlemen at the playhouse called The Fortune’.32 Aside from documented gentry and aristocratic visitors, who else attended the indoor playhouses? Some playwrights insist on a variety of spectators: in the preface to A Christian Turned Turk (Queen’s Revels, 1611), Robert Daborne criticises the ‘silken gulls and ignorant Cittizens’ who condemned his play in performance at the Whitefriars.33 Similarly, in his commendatory verses to The Faithful Shepherdess (Queen’s Revels, c. 1608), Jonson described the audience at the Blackfriars as comprising the ‘Gamster, Captaine, Knight, Knights man, | Lady or Pusill ’ and ‘the shops Foreman or some such brave sparke, | That may judge for his sixe-pence’.34 Jonson invokes a startling heterogeneity, but it is difficult to gauge how accurate this description is. Since sixpence was possibly as much as onetwelfth of the London artisan’s weekly wage, the visit of a ‘shops Foreman’ may have been unusual. On the other hand, one example of Jonson’s ‘Knights man’ is actually documented – Cavendish’s household book

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records that his servant Hallam accompanied him to Paul’s.35 It is impossible, however, to tell what percentage of the audience might have been servants. It is similarly difficult to gauge how many women were present, though references to ladies, gentlewomen, citizens’ wives and prostitutes suggest that it was not unusual for them to attend the theatres.36 In The Gull’s Hornbook Dekker assumes that his gallant, seated on the stage at an indoor playhouse, will be an object of attention for women in the audience. In a recent article Linda Levy Peck notes that the Cecil children were regular playgoers from an early age, visiting the Cockpit, Blackfriars and Globe theatres.37 Although the records she cites are Caroline, they raise the possibility that children may also have formed part of the audience in the early seventeenth century. The Inns of Court were near to the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres (see fig. 4), and it is likely that the students comprised a significant proportion of their audiences. They were widely viewed as inveterate playgoers. In the Overburian Characters, for instance, ‘A Fantasticke Innes of Court Man’, having ‘heard one mooting, and seene two playes [. . .] thinkes as basely of the Vniuersitie, as a young Sophister doth of the Grammer-schoole ’, and Sir John Davies describes ‘Rufus the Courtier’ at an indoor theatre where ‘the clamorous fry of Innes of Court, | Fills up the priuate roomes of greater price’.38 Students did not attend only the indoor theatres, but their numbers may have been proportionately higher there than in the amphitheatres. Several of the writers and shareholders in the private theatres were Inns of Court men, notably John Marston, Francis Beaumont, Edward Sharpham and William Strachey. Since the average age at admission to the Inns was seventeen, the students may have had an attraction to or sympathy with the boys and young men of the children’s companies.39 Gallants, wealthy young men-about-town, are associated with indoor and outdoor theatres. In a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in December 1609, William Holbrooke complains that dissolute ‘Noble-men and Gentlemen’ spend their money on ‘Play bookes’ and ‘stage players’, while John Davies of Hereford describes in The Scourge of Folly (1611) ‘A gallant, at a Play, that vsde to brall’.40 The Overburian Characters similarly include ‘An Improuident young Gallant’ who leaves the indoor playhouse ‘with a kind of walking Epilogue betweene the two Candles, to know if his Suite may passe for currant’ (K8v). In Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Harbage portrays Sharpham as just such a gallant manque´:

Figure 4. John Norden, map of London in Speculum Britanniae (London, 1593), showing the locations of the Blackfriars and Whitefriars precincts.

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He was a man about town who died in 1608 after displaying his wit in two lamentable plays for the boys. Besides the ‘sums of money due and owing’ him, his will mentions only personal apparel – the accoutrements of a gallant. There are the pale carnation stockings, the rapier hatched with silver, the girdle and hangers trimmed with silver, and so on. (54)

Although Harbage’s syntax hints that Sharpham died as a result of his plays, he actually died during the same outbreak of plague that seems to have finished off his then-company, the Children of the King’s Revels.41 To a less jaundiced eye, the clothes which Sharpham left might indicate a man who had made some money and was trying to protect it; as Peter Stallybrass reminds us, clothes were one of the safest ways to invest your capital as they were portable and easy to pawn.42 As his account of Sharpham indicates, Harbage assumes that there was a continuity of interest between the dramatists who wrote for the private theatres and their audiences. The cleric Thomas Adams may have thought the same, since in his opinion the theatre reinforces the epicure’s unproductive idleness: ‘First, they visit the Tauerne, then the Ordinarie, then the Theater, and end in the Stewes: from Wine to Ryot, from that to Playes, from them to Harlots.’43 There is, however, little evidence that audiences viewed dramatists and their plays as representing their interests. The audiences in the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres may have been richer than average but, judging by the many comments on failed plays, they were not especially discerning or cooperative. In many accounts the relationship between spectator and play is combative to say the least. Samuel Rowlands’s ‘Swearing Knaue’, for instance, sits on the stage and ‘sweares to all he heares and sees; | That Speech is good, that Action disagrees’.44 Similarly, in the prologue to All Fools (Chapel, c.1601; Queen’s Revels, 1604–5), Chapman satirically demands the kind attention of those who sit on the stage: Great are the giftes giuen to vnited heades, To gifts, attyre, to faire attyre, the stage Helps much, for if our other audience see You on the stage depart before we end, Our wits goe with you all, and we are fooles; So Fortune gouernes in these stage euents, That merit beares least sway in most contents. Auriculas Asini quis non habet? How we shall then appeare, we must referre To Magicke of your doomes, that neuer erre.45

Chapman’s plea to the most influential section of his audience suggests, as Kathleen McLuskie argues of Jonson’s relationship with the commercial

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theatre audience, that a ‘balance of understanding’ had to be created between companies, playwrights and spectators. ‘[T]he trick’, she argues, ‘was to retain enough meaning in a play to keep an audience engaged while avoiding the particularity which might separate off individuals or influential groups.’46 This issue of ‘particularity’ is something to which I shall return below. gentleman born Rather than promoting the interests of their audience, the Queen’s Revels comedies actively interrogate the social identities associated with the spectators, and the performance of social class by actors highlights its mutability outside the theatre. It is no coincidence that early seventeenth-century English society was marked by social mobility. Writing around 1600, Thomas Wilson condemns those ‘not contented with their states of their fathers to be counted yeomen [. . .] but must skipp into his velvett breches and silken dublett and, getting to be admitted into some Inn of Court or Chancery, must ever after thinke skorne to be called any other then gentlemen’.47 The gentry, on the other hand, shaken by the influx of foreign place-seekers on the accession of James I and the attendant inflation of the honours system, were subject to downward mobility. While a wealthy merchant or lawyer might buy land in an attempt to enter the elite, or try to raise the status of his children by education or marriage, the gentry were often unable to provide for younger sons, and sometimes entered them into trade rather than the universities or the Inns of Court.48 In the early seventeenth century, students in the Inns of Court themselves had varied backgrounds. The Inns enrolled as many sons of ordinary gentlemen as of peers, baronets, knights and esquires; the sons of lawyers, clergy, doctors, merchants and citizens made up a significant minority.49 It is to this section of society – aspirant children of yeoman, tradesmen and professionals, and anxious gentry – that much of the audience of the Blackfriars seemingly belonged. In many ways this was the most nebulous of social categories, since it was increasingly difficult to ascertain which features defined a gentleman. Most frequently mentioned as reliable indicators are the possession of external rank or office, money and an education, and, most vague of all, the ‘appearance’ of a gentleman.50 In his 1583 description of England, Thomas Smith claims that gentlemen ‘be made good cheape in England’: ‘whosoever studieth the lawes of the realme, who studieth in the vniuersities, who professeth liberall sciences, and to be shorte, who can liue idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and

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countenaunce of a gentleman, he shall be called master [. . .] and shall be taken for a gentleman’.51 Aware of the imprecise nature of these criteria, some commentators attempted to define ‘true’ gentility through virtue or honour. In a sermon of 1603, Henry Crosse asks, ‘if one shall stand vpon his riches, parentage, office, place, dignitie, and by these onely suppose to win the place of true honour, he climbeth a rotten ladder: for what is all this worlds pompe, or titulary preferments, if not atchieued by Vertue?’52 Honour was itself an ambiguous quality. Crosse argues, following Cicero, that it is ‘a vnion of praises of good men, which iudge of Vertue without partialitie, and not by the opinion of the multitude, which looke more to a veluet Iacket, the outward brauerie, then to the minde how it is qualified’ (D1r). This judging by those qualified to judge is, however, perilously close to the view that what makes someone a gentleman is the opinion of others that he is one. Even more uncertain are gradations within the gentry. In Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies (Queen’s Revels, c.1611), Lord Feesimple complains about his father’s handling of his education: he neuer brought me vp to any Lordly exercise, as fencing, dancing, tumbling, and such like: but forsooth I must write and reade, & speake languages, and such base qualities, fit for but Gentlemen. Now sir would I tell him, Father you are a Count, I am a Lord: a poxe a writing and reading, and languages, let mee be brought vp as I was borne.53

Feesimple lacks the courage to fight, and during the play is coached in the behaviour of a roaring boy by mere gentlemen. He is something of a blank slate; unable to converse wittily, he cries, ‘I would giue 20. Markes now to any person that could teach mee to conuey my tongue (sance stumbling) with such dexteritie to such a period’ (B3v; 1.1.327–30). Another nobleman in the same play, Lord Proudly, shares Feesimple’s blinkered attitude to lordly behaviour; accused of ill manners by Grace Seldom, a citizen’s wife, he responds, ‘Vnciuillie, mew, can a Lord talke vnciuilly?’ (C3r; 2.1.92). Grace’s response, ‘Your mothers Cat ha’s kitten’d in your mouth, sure’, draws attention to the fact that Lord Proudly, in attempting to act in a lordly manner, does not even speak in a recognisably human fashion (C3r; 2.1.95–6). Rather than reflecting debate about the status of the gentry and nobility, the plays contribute to that debate; this is borne out in Anthony Stafford’s lament: ‘Gentry now degenerates: Nobility is now come to bee nuda relatio, a meere, bare relation, and nothing else. How manie Players haue I seene vpon a stage, fit indeede to be Noblemen? how many that bee

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Noblemen, fit only to represent them?’54 In Stafford’s view, stage representations of nobility do not necessarily undermine nobility itself, but they do highlight the degeneration of the contemporary gentlemen and noblemen who seem less noble than the actors who perform such roles on the stage. Awareness of the shaky foundations of social status is thus accompanied by a sense of the performativity of rank. As Shakespeare’s Old Shepherd says in The Winter’s Tale (King’s Men, c.1610–11), ‘we must be gentle, now we are Gentlemen’.55 This performativity lends itself to drama, where age, gender and status are all performed, and the more nebulous ways of defining gentility tend to receive the fullest treatment. Audiences are left to make up their own minds from a range of (sometimes conflicting) sources. In Eastward Ho Quicksilver repeatedly protests his gentle status: ‘my mother’s a Gentlewoman: and my father a Iustice of Peace and of Quorum, and tho I am a yonger brother and a prentise yet I hope I am my fathers sonne’; ‘tho I am a prentise I can giue armes, and my father’s a justice a peace by discent’; ‘as I am a Gentleman borne, Ile be drunke grow valiant, and beate thee’.56 Quicksilver locates his social identity in his parentage rather than his apprenticeship. Sindefy’s dissenting voice comes through clearly, however, as she denounces him as ‘a Prentise, in the habite and disguise of a Gentleman’ (H1v; 5.1.11–12), and for Touchstone, Quicksilver’s status as his apprentice overrides all others: ‘I am thy maister William Tutchstone Goldsmith: and thou my Prentice Francis Quick-siluer: and I will see whether you are running’ (A2r; 1.1.12–15). Gentry status is shown as being under threat from the incursions of work in another Queen’s Revels play, All Fools. Here a complaint similar to that of Lord Feesimple is voiced further down the social scale, as Valerio remonstrates against his father: does he thinke To rob me of my selfe? I hope I know I am a Gentleman, though his couetous humour And education hath transform’d me Bayly, And made me ouerseer of his pastures, Ile be my selfe, in spight of husbandry. (B1v–B2r; 1.1.135–40)

Valerio talks about his ‘selfe’, a social identity which must be maintained in the face of his father’s determination that he be a sensible country gentleman. His identity as a gentleman is maintained, it turns out, through stereotypically gallant behaviour. His friend Rinaldo comments, ‘Ile beare thee witnes, thou canst skill of dice, | Cards, tennis, wenching, dauncing,

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and what not? [. . .] Th’art knowne in Ordinaries, and Tabacco shops, | Trusted in Tauernes and in vaulting houses’ (B2r; 1.1.154–5, 156–7). In the construction of Valerio’s and Quicksilver’s gentlemanly personae, ostentatious display is everything. Similarly, in the first scene of Epicoene, the social status of the gallants Clerimont and Truewit is established through their ability, as Thomas Smith puts it, to ‘liue idly’. Truewit describes Clerimont as ‘the man that can melt away his time, and neuer feeles it’; asked ‘what should a man doe?’, he replies, ‘Why, nothing: or that, which when ’tis done, is as idle’.57 As Quicksilver tells Golding, ‘do nothing, be like a gentleman, be idle, the curse of man is labour’ (A3v; 1.1.138–9). For Quicksilver and Truewit, this is a positive quality; other early modern commentators disagreed. Thomas Adams bemoans the indolence of contemporary youth: They sleepe on their Beddes of Downe, rise to their Tables of Surfet, and from thence to their sportes of Mischiefe; sleeping, playing, eating, dauncing, drinking, dallying [. . .] they runne round in a Ring [. . .] no time must be spared from Sathan: they inuert the Order God hath disposed to the times preposterously, makeing the night day, and the day night[.] (The Gallants Burden, E4v)

Like Quicksilver and Truewit, Adams claims that the gallant’s idleness reinforces his social identity, and for all three there is a kind of circularity to this process through which identity is created and displayed. The use of language as a marker of social class was also problematic. Many of the Queen’s Revels plays are concerned with the question of gentle speech, and whether such a defining characteristic was possible. In Eastward Ho Quicksilver explicitly stresses language as the mark of the gentleman: ‘I haue as good, as proper gallants wordes for it as any are in London, Gentlemen of good phrase, perfect language, passingly behau’d, Gallants that weare socks and cleane linnen’ (A2v; 1.1.71–75). In Early Modern English ‘good phrase’ and ‘perfect language’ were issues of linguistic competence as much as of accent. Manfred Go¨rlach notes that ‘[l]exis is the most obvious marker of social class in written texts’, where accent is of course less important than in speech, and that failing to understand words could be seen as a marker of gender or class difference.58 The title-page of Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604) states that its glosses are provided ‘for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons’.59 Thomas Dekker’s mock advice in The Gull’s Hornbook, and Richard Brathwait’s real advice in The English Gentleman, both stress the importance of speech. Brathwait argues that a gentleman controls his speech,

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drawing a distinction between ‘speech’ and ‘words’: ‘The rash Young man, who useth no guard to his mouth, nor no gate of circumstance unto his lips, inuereth himselfe to many words, but little Speech’.60 Dekker’s gallant is advised to ‘hoord vp [. . .] play-scraps’ (E4v), a tactic also used by Quicksilver. The gull is to talk familiarly and to boast whenever possible; when walking around the city, he is to ‘curse and sweare (like one that speaks hie dutch) in a lofty voice’ (F2v). In Eastward Ho Quicksilver’s liberal use of profanities is linked with his idea of his social status; when Golding comments, ‘Fye how you sweare’, his reply is ‘Sfoot man I am a Gentleman, and may sweare by my pedegree, Gods my life’ (A3v; 1.1.122– 4). The opposite view was, possible, however, and in another Queen’s Revels comedy, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb (c.1608), the milkmaid Nan doubts Richardo’s gentle status because he uses bad language: ‘There was never any so on’s complexion, a Ge[n]tleman? | I’de be asham’d to have such a foule mouth.’61 The calculated outrage of swearing often seems merely ridiculous: in Amends for Ladies a roaring boy tells Lord Feesimple, ‘vse your owne words, Dam mee is mine, I am knowne by it all the towne o’re, d’ee heare?’ (E4v; 3.4.123–4). Jokes about social status in plays performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels are therefore dependent on a fully engaged – albeit perhaps combative – relationship between the audience and the comic genre. In Thomas Hobbes’s multivalent account, ‘Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.’ 62 This bears some resemblance to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which comedy is described as ‘a mimesis of people worse than are found in the world – worse in the particular sense of “uglier”, as the ridiculous is a species of ugliness; for what we find funny is a blunder that does no serious damage or an ugliness that does not imply pain’.63 However, in addition to the Aristotelian focus on the onlooker’s pleasure in the deformity of another, Hobbes highlights another important aspect of laughter: the capacity to find one’s own activities amusing and to recognise oneself as comic. There are various ways of getting (and not getting) the joke, and laughter – like comedy in general – does not relate to society in any singular manner. In his important account of laughter, Henri Bergson argues that comedy is something ‘[b]egotten of real life and akin to art’, though he makes a crucial caveat about its relationship with the ‘real’.64 A sense of detachment in the spectator is crucial to the success of comedy: ‘step

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aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy’. ‘To produce the whole of its effect’, Bergson asserts, ‘the comic demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.’ Laughter remains, however, a social act: ‘This intelligence must always remain in touch with other intelligences [. . .] Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo’ (5). The idea that laughter functions through the collective reaction of an audience is clearly useful in relation to stage comedy. It can also be associated with the Aristotelian function of the comic as the representation of a deformed ‘other’. Bergson writes: ‘The comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence’ (8). To identify too much with the comic representation, calling emotions into play, negates its function; for Bergson, laughter is as much an act of repression as of expression. This formulation of laughter might remind us of the aggression of the jest-book, but both Bergson’s and Hobbes’s theories are complicated when applied to stage comedy. The multivocality of theatre means that drama is in some ways fundamentally unsuited to a regulatory function: stage comedy can have conflicting aims and can be interpreted by its audience in different ways. Variant response is mocked in Jonson’s The Case is Altered (Queen’s Revels, c.1605–8), in which Valentine comments on the playhouses in ‘Utopia’: ‘the sport is at a new play to obserue the sway and variety of oppinion that passeth it. A man shall haue such a confus’d mixture of iudgement, powr’d out in the throng there, as ridiculous, as laughter it selfe: one saies he likes not the writing, another likes not the plot, another not the playing.’65 Describing the responses as ‘as ridiculous, as laughter it selfe’, this comment links audiences who hold divergent opinions with the unruly comic genre. Making these judgements the subject of jokes, Jonson tries to preclude their being used in relation to his play, attempting to impose a consistently positive response. Comedy is, however, notably defective as a means by which univocal responses can be imposed. In practice, there may have been only one way, albeit impractical, to ensure the correct reception of a dramatic work. A Gentleman in the induction to The Isle of Gulls, ironically a play that singularly failed to avoid ‘particularity’, asks of the playwright, ‘And where sits his friends? hath he not a prepard company of gallants, to aplaud his iests, and grace out his play’ (A2r; lines 24–6). Planted members of the audience could lead their fellow spectators by receiving jests positively. As both examples suggest in their different ways, jokes

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could be an important means of channelling an audience’s responses, and a means by which their potential hostility could be directed in ways that were useful to the dramatist and company. This strategy could be risky, however, and mockery of social aberrance, familiar from the jest-books, could actually work against comedy’s movement towards closure and harmony. In The Place of the Stage, Steven Mullaney overlooks, I think, this aspect of the relationship between comedy and its audiences. He argues that because the children’s companies’ repertories were largely comic, the private theatres before 1609 ‘remained an interstitial form of drama, representing a less incontinent breach of civic authority than the playhouses outside the city’. The children’s comedies were a ‘contained form of social criticism, one that relies, as pre-Elizabethan drama had always done, on a stable and circumscribing social structure’.66 It was, however, a boys’ company – the Children of the Queen’s Revels – that most frequently threatened what Mullaney calls ‘the political well-being and stability of the city’ in the first years of James’s reign. Moreover, many of the plays that caused this trouble were comic, including, among others, Eastward Ho, The Isle of Gulls, and the lost play about King James’s silver mine. Mullaney nonetheless argues that the children’s companies ‘did not, of course, subject the city to the spectacle of its own incontinence, nor did they redefine the place or power of their audience within the theater to the degree characteristic of the public stage’. This is because, he writes, ‘Spectators took an active part in the plays presented by the boys’ companies at theaters like Blackfriars and St. Paul’s, voicing their own objections, comments, quips, and quiddities as the drama unfolded, even seating themselves on the stage [. . .] to enter more fully into the play’ (53). In Mullaney’s view, an audience’s identification with the representations played before it negates the ability of the children’s companies’ comedies to criticise the London society of which the spectators were part. However, even relatively small audiences such as those in the Blackfriars or Whitefriars theatres might have contained sufficient social identities and allegiances to make a uniform interpretation virtually impossible. The possibility of unstable audience response combines with the inherent multivocality of the Queen’s Revels comedies – the company tries to make a disparate audience laugh and that laughter disrupts the reconciliatory conclusion towards which comedy is orientated. As Michael Bristol comments, laughter ‘is linked, not only to clearly reconizable aberration and deformity, but also to structural ambiguity in the social system and to discord experienced as a result of that ambiguity’.67 Although jokes and

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comic narratives aim to regulate behaviour – one through mockery, the other through the eventual depiction of social harmony – these aims can be brought into conflict with each other, as neo-classical assumptions about the genre collide with locally inflected jokes. The unpredictable effects of laughter therefore cause Sidney and Jonson to reject it in comedy; mockery can go beyond its immediate targets, and can undermine societal norms even as it claims to uphold them. In Jacobean London, where social mobility was in the process of calling ‘normality’ into question, this problem was particularly acute.

many words, but little speech In 1619, during his visit to Scotland, Ben Jonson visited William Drummond of Hawthornden. During one of their talks, Drummond writes, Jonson told him that he was delated by Sr James Murray to the King for writting something against the Scots in a play Eastward Hoe & voluntarly Imprissonned himself wt Chapman and Marston, who had written it amonst ym. the report was that they should then had their ears cutt & noses. after yr delivery he banqueted all his friends, yr was Camden Selden and others. at the midst of the Feast his old Mother Dranke to him & shew him a paper which she had (if the Sentence had taken execution) to have mixed jn ye Prison among his drinke, which was full of Lustie strong poison & that she was no churle she told she minded first to have Drunk of it herself. (HSS, vol. 1, 140)

In its description of a social situation and its build-up to a snappy punchline, Drummond’s account of Jonson’s anecdote is similar to the jokes which filled seventeenth-century jest-books. Jonson, like Field and Barksted, was to become a jest-book character himself; in one eighteenthcentury example, ‘Jonson’ is refused admittance to Lord Craven’s house: ‘No, no, quoth my Lord, you cannot be Ben Johnson who wrote the Silent Woman, you look as if you could not say Bo to a Goose: Bo, cry’d Ben; very well, said my Lord, who was better pleas’d at the Joke, than offended at the Affront, I am now convinced, by your Wit, you are Ben Johnson.’68 Although the joke here is extremely weak, it has much the same structure and subject matter as Drummond’s anecdote. Both stories feature ‘Jonson’ in the company of people of high social status, either Lord Craven or the Camden and Selden of Drummond’s story; both cast doubt on Jonson’s own status, through the denial of his identity or the questionable behaviour of his mother. Jest-books often had the same oral

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provenance as Drummond’s story; John Taylor writes that his jests are ‘Chargeably collected out of Tauernes, Ordinaries, Innes, Bowling Greenes, and Allyes, Alehouses, Tobacco shops, High-wayes, and Water-passages’, ‘by relation and heare-say’.69 Plays were themselves thought to be constructed through dramatists’ tavern observations. In Amends for Ladies Whorebang asks Welltried, ‘Will you not pledge these healths Master Welltried ? wee’le haue no obseruers’, to which Welltried responds, ‘Why Mounser Whore-bang ? I am no play maker’ (E4v; 3.4.104–7). Similarly, a jest relates Two Poets being merry in a taverne the one was desirous to be gone, the other entreated him to stay telling him that if he did goe away he would make a comedie upon him, you shall get nothing by that reply’d the other for then I will make a tragedy on thee and in the latter end of it thou shalt hang thy selfe. (Chamberlain, Conceits, E4v)

Like Drummond’s story, jests play with an overlap between life and fiction, the assumption that real-life situations can feed into drama and jest-books. In each example, however, the situations feed into preestablished narrative structures. In Drummond’s anecdote the very real threat of violence is turned into a comic-festive depiction of the strength of Jonson’s friendship and familial relationships. It barely, however, controls its own problematic aspects. The means by which Jonson gained his liberty – a shower of servile letters sent by him and Chapman to various nobles and the king – are glossed over; similarly, the offence – ‘something against the Scots’ – is left tantalisingly undefined. Class tensions are consistently veiled, but in the account of the banquet the presence of the cultured Camden and Selden is juxtaposed with the carnivalesque behaviour of Jonson’s ‘old Mother’. In addition to contemporary inhibitions about women’s speech and women’s drinking, Dummond’s language is ambivalent. In the phrase ‘Lustie strong poison’, the first word seems to attach itself to the mother despite its grammatical application to poison. The statement that ‘she was no churle’ simultaneously raises the possibility that she is a ‘churle’, that she is out of place in the cultivated gathering. It is also difficult to assess whether the statement comes from the narrating ‘Jonson’ or from the mother herself, and whether the anecdote is really praising the mother’s behaviour, or whether ‘Jonson’ is secretly embarrassed by it. The fact that Eastward Ho was a comedy is particularly important here. Although Drummond’s account of Jonson’s banquet attempts to erase

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class and gender tensions, its comic structure continually brings them to the surface. In the case of Eastward Ho, jokes at the expense of one section of society – the Scottish courtiers who came to London after the accession of James I – offended one member of the audience, namely Sir James Murray, himself a Scottish courtier. If, as McLuskie describes, a company attempted to unify audience response, and to avoid ‘the particularity which might separate off individuals or influential groups’, the unifying tactics fell noticeably short. Offence was caused by individual jibes within the overall comic structure of the play, underlining the problematic aspect of comedy’s dependence on jokes. Eastward Ho itself arguably exacerbates this problem in its dramatisation of its own audience. At the end of Act Five, Quicksilver draws the spectators in, saying, ‘I perceiue the multitude are gatherd together, to veiw our comming out at the Counter. See, if the streets and the Fronts of the Houses, be not stucke with People, and the Windowes fild with Ladies, as on the solemne day of the Pageant !’ (I4v; Epilogue, 1–6). To a large extent, though, the audience have been in the play all along. Quicksilver, the would-be gallant and gentleman apprentice, is an inveterate playgoer, using the language of the playhouse – lines of Pistol in 2 Henry IV – to attack his equally well-born opponent Golding: ‘Sirrah Goulding, wilt be ruled by a foole? turne good fellow, turne swaggering gallant, and let the Welkin roare, and Erebus also’ (A3v; 1.1.124–7). For Quicksilver, the language of the theatre – detached from its dramatic context but retaining its talismanic value – can be used as a weapon against the sober virtues of trade. Released from his indentures, he continues to use this idiom, reciting the first speech of The Spanish Tragedy to a sardonic Touchstone: q u i c k . Am I free a, my fetters? Rente; Flye with a Duck in thy mouth: and now I tell thee, Touchstone — t o u c h . Good sir. q u i c k . When this eternall substance of my soule, t o u c h . Well said, chandge your gould ends for your play ends. q u i c k . Did liue imprison’d in my wanton flesh. t o u c h . What then sir? q u i c k . I was a Courtier in the Spanish court, and Don Andrea was my name. t o u c h . Good maister Don Andrea will you marche? q u i c k . Sweete Touchstone, will you lend me two shillings? t o u c h . Not a penny. q u i c k . Not a penny? I haue friends, & I haue acquaintance, I will pisse at thy shop posts, and throw rotten Egges at thy signe. Worke vpon that now. Exit, staggering. (B4r; 2.1.141–57)

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Quicksilver dramatises his own predicament as a gentleman-apprentice, rejecting the potential path back to wealth which was offered by apprenticeship. Aside from the play-scraps, nuances of language are important. In the above passage Touchstone addresses Quicksilver ironically as ‘Good maister Don Andrea’, to which Quicksilver responds by addressing him as simply ‘Sweete Touchstone’. In De Republica Anglorum, Smith notes that ‘master’ is ‘the title which men giue to esquires and other gentlemen’ (E2r) – as a gentleman, Quicksilver would be addressed as ‘master’, but not by Touchstone, who is his ‘master’ while he is an apprentice. Earlier in the scene, Touchstone complains that Quicksilver answers only when he calls ‘Maister Quickesiluer (without any familiar addition)’ (B2v; 2.1.4–5); Quicksilver’s calling Touchstone ‘Sweete Touchstone’ inverts the inversion caused by the social mobility which has already seen a gentleman’s son apprenticed to a citizen. In the last line, ‘Worke upon that now’, Quicksilver turns Touchstone’s own catchphrase back on him. Touchstone has a rival stock of quotations; he describes how he ‘garnished’ his shop ‘for want of Plate, with good wholsome thriftie sentences; As, Touchstone, keepe thy shopp, and thy shoppe will keepe thee. Light gaines make heauy purses. Tis good to be merry and wise’ (A2v; 1.1.56–60). Touchstone has constructed his own social identity by putting before himself text-book examples of the way a citizen should behave, and has thereby risen to wealth and influence. It is significant that Golding, the dutiful apprentice, outlines his ambitions in strikingly similar language: As for my place and life thus I haue read: What ere some vainer youth may terme disgrace, The gaine of honest paines is neuer base: From trades from artes, from valor honor springs, These three are founts of gentry, yea of Kings. (A4r; 1.1.171–5)

Identifying himself with the profession in which he has been apprenticed, Golding, unlike Quicksilver, models his speech on his master’s, rejecting his fellow apprentice’s idea of gentlemanly behaviour. Language is frequently joined by outward appearance as a marker of social identity, as status becomes performative. Aspiring young men are portrayed as firm believers in Smith’s statement that someone who ‘will beare the port, charge and countenaunce of a gentleman [. . .] shall be taken for a gentleman’. In John Bodenham’s Politeuphuia, a prodigal is defined as ‘Hee that is superfluous in his diet, sumptuous in his apparrell, and lauish of his tongue’.70 Quicksilver – like the gallant in Dekker’s The

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Gulls Hornbook, who must sit on the stage in order to show off his garments – is preoccupied by his clothes, hiding a sword and finery under his apprentice’s cloak. When freed from his apprenticeship, his first action (after he sobers up) is to change his clothes for those of a gallant. For the prodigal gallant, the priority is display, be it sartorial or linguistic. In Eastward Ho preoccupation with gentle behaviour is a concern of young men and women alike. Like Quicksilver, Touchstone’s daughter Gertrude signals her distaste for citizen life by reciting ballads and snatches from plays – in one scene she parodies Ophelia’s song from Hamlet – and by her attention to her clothes. Her desire to be a lady is presented in her rejection of citizen fashion, and the lustful tailor with whom she banters tries to mould her body to the court fashion. Both Dekker and Robert Cawdry would have noted the ways in which Gertrude’s gender and social aspirations are indicated in her speech. Like Cawdry’s ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlewomen’, unskilled in language, she is unaware of the true meanings of words. When Sir Petronel Flash refers to the court game of ‘balloon’, she misunderstands completely, replying, ‘At Baboone? Iesu! you and I will play at Baboone in the countrey?’ (B1r; 1.2.93–4). And, like Dekker’s ‘Arcadian and Euphuisd gentlewomen’, she reads only popular romances, such as ‘the Knight o’ the Sunne, or Palmerin of England’ (H2r; 5.1.32–3).71 As the daughter of wealthy citizen parents, Gertrude expects to rise in social status via marriage. As she says in the last act, after she has been deserted by her worthless husband Sir Petronel, ‘Mother, you should ha loook’d [sic] to it; A bodie would thinke you were the older: I did but my kinde, I. He was a Knight, and I was fit to be a Lady. Tis not lacke of liking, but lacke of liuing, that seuers vs. And you talke like your selfe and a Cittiner in this, yfaith’ (H3r; 5.1.137–42). Here we see the confusion of Gertrude’s social identity. She attacks her mother for speaking ‘like your selfe and a Cittiner’, but her own ‘kind’ – meaning both nature and family – has been disrupted by her upbringing. She concludes, ‘You smell [o’] the Touch-stone. He that will doe more for his daughter, that he has marryed a sciruie Gold-end man, and his Prentise, then he will for his t’other Daughter, that has wedded a Knight and his Customer. By this light, I thinke hee is not my legittimate Father’ (H3r; 5.1.143–8). The confusion which social mobility breeds within families is apparent. Touchstone tells Gertrude after the marriage of Mildred and Golding, ‘An’t please your worship, this is not your Sister: This is my daughter, and she call[s] me Father, and so does not your Ladiship, an’t please your

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worship Madam.’ (D4r; 3.2.102–5). Mistress Touchstone retorts, moreover, ‘she must not call thee Father by Heraldrie, because thou mak’st thy Prentise thy Sonne as wel as she’ (D4r; 3.2.106–8). The same confusion is expressed in Gertrude’s abuse of Mildred: God giue you ioy Mistrisse What lacke you. Now out vpon thee Baggage; my sister married in a Taffeta Hat? Mary hang you; Westward with a wanion te’ yee, Nay I haue done we ye Minion, then y’faith, neuer looke to haue my countnance any more: nor any thing I can do for thee. Thou ride in my Coach? or come downe to my Castle? fie vpon thee: I charge thee in my Ladiships name, call me Sister no more. (D4r; 3.2.93–101)

At first oscillating wildly between sarcastic ‘you’ and condescending ‘thee’, Gertrude’s mode of addressing her sister then shifts to ‘ye’, a form of address which may have been considered more courtly and refined than ‘you’ in the Jacobean period.72 By the end of the speech, she is consistently addressing Mildred as ‘thee’, showing her indignation and her contempt for Mildred’s lower status as the wife of a tradesman and former apprentice.73 Sir Petronel has an equally fragile social status. He is one of the king’s thirty-pound knights, and he marries Gertrude for the land she has inherited from her grandmother (his own property turns out to be illusory). The extent to which his gentlemanly status is dependent on wealth and, in particular, on land is highlighted by Mistress Fond’s comment of Gertrude: ‘O shee’s married to a most fine Castle i[’]th’ countrey, they say’ (D3r; 3.2.22–3). Touchstone attacks Petronel in terms indicating the shakiness of his status: ‘there are two sorts of Gentlemen. There is a Gentleman Artificiall, and a gentleman Naturall; Now, though your worship be a Gentleman Naturall’ (D4v; 3.2.136–39). Echoing the analysts of English society, Touchstone argues that the two sorts of gentlemen are those who are given gentry status, and those who are descended from gentlemen. Petronel is, however, a ‘gentleman Naturall’ – that is, a fool. Any other status is irrelevant. The play thus calls into question its characters’ belief in social standing. Gertrude’s misguided belief that her gentility is concrete and can be pawned like her clothes is devastatingly mocked. She accuses Sindefy of scorning her newly acquired rank: ‘do I offer to morgage my Ladiship for you, and for your auaile, and do you turne the Lip, and the Alas to my Ladiship?’, only for Sindefy to reply, ‘No Madam, but I make question, who will lend anything vpon it?’ (H2r–v; 5.1.67–71).

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In only one Queen’s Revels play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, is a gentleman given a singular mode of speech. The gentleman suitor Humphrey’s first lines set the tone for a relentlessly derisive portrayal, asserting his social standing in a style which immediately undermines his pretensions to authority: I thanke you sir, Indeed I thanke you sir, and ere I stir It shall bee knowne, how euer you do deeme, I am of gentle bloud and gentle seeme. (B4r; 1.80–3)

Humphrey’s linguistic style is unique. The citizens, the Prologue and the Merrythoughts generally speak in colloquial prose (except for when Master Merrythought sings instead); the lovers and Venturewell speak in blank verse, as does Rafe in most of his speeches, an exception being the Maying scene, where he is given old-fashioned fourteeners. Only Humphrey speaks in regular rhymed pentameter couplets, an affectation heightened by the deliberately ludicrous effect of some of his rhyme words, and the contorted syntax that enables the rhymes and the regularity of the rhythm: I must, I must, and thus it is agreed, Your daughter rides vpon a browne-bay steed, I on a sorrel, which I brought of Brian, The honest Host of the red roaring Lion, In Waltham situate[.] (D1r; 2.21–5) Father, my bride is gone, faire mistresse Luce; My soule’s the fount of vengeance, mischiefes sluce. (I3v; 5.36–7)

It is a mark of Venturewell’s and the Citizen Wife’s lack of discernment that they favour Humphrey; his statement that Humphrey has ‘language good enough to win a wench’ (B4r; 1.106) is laughable. A gentleman is given a distinctive speech pattern and identity, but it is used only to mock him. Many of the characters in Eastward Ho and The Knight of the Burning Pestle invite ridicule, but an audience could not view them merely from a position of amused superiority. Social mobility meant that the relationship between spectators in the Blackfriars and the comic fiction presented to them might be more complex than a simple reaffirmation of their own social standing. Where social status is revealed as a performance, the distinction between ranks is not secure. In the case of Eastward Ho, Sir James Murray, himself knighted in the aftermath of James’s succession,74 seems to have taken offence at jokes which appear trivial to a modern

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reader but which were stingingly effective in 1605. Murray was not simply a philistine; he was interested in artistic affairs and may have been a regular playgoer. John Davies of Hereford in The Scourge of Folly addresses him as ‘mine honoured friend’ and praises his apparently underused poetic ability, ‘seld, but bright; as that Starre did appeare | To light the wise, to finde out Wisedoms ame’ (B6v–B7r). Murray’s irritation with Eastward Ho had, it seems, greater social and political motivation behind it than mere spite. In the event, one of the play’s jokes, referring to ‘a few industrious Scots’ present even in Virginia (E3r; 3.3.44), was cancelled after the first edition was issued, and an exchange between Gertrude and her tailor, in which she asks whether her farthingale is ‘a right Scot’, may have been trimmed prior to publication.75 Other jibes were, however, allowed to stand in successive editions, including the Gentleman’s mocking jibe at Sir Petronel, in which he mimics James’s Scottish accent: ‘I ken the man weel, hee’s one of my thirty pound Knights’ (F4r; 4.1.197–8). The plays’ jokes have a similar thrust to those of the jest-books, seeking to regulate social behaviour through ridicule, but their relationship with the comic form as a whole is complex and ambivalent. As noted above, both Eastward Ho and The Knight of the Burning Pestle make use of the figure of the prodigal apprentice who eventually outwits his master. Whereas Jasper stages his own death, Quicksilver undergoes an extravagant repentance, enlivened by an extended parody of popular criminal repentance ballads. He claims that his ‘Repentance’ is an imitation of George Mannington’s well-known ‘sorrowful Sonet’, printed in Clement Robinson’s A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), and he catches the sentimentality and thumping rhythms of these ballads precisely: I Waile in wo, I plunge in pain, with sorowing sobs, I do complain, With wallowing waues I wish to die, I languish sore whereas I lie (‘A sorrowful Sonet’)76 In Cheapside famous for Gold & Plate, Quicksiluer I did dvvel of late: I had a Master good, and kind, That vvould haue vvrought me to his mind. (Eastward Ho, I3r; 5.5.55)

Although some commentators have taken Quicksilver’s ‘Repentance’ at face value, Security’s clumsy song, performed immediately after, emphasises its parodic nature:

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O Maister Touchstone, My heart is full of vvoe; Alasse, I am a Cuckold: And, vvhy should it be so? Because I vvas a Vsurer, And Bavvd, as all you knovv, For vvhich, againe I tell you, My heart is full of vvoe. (I4r; 5.5.153–60)

Making a joke of Quicksilver’s repentance, the play also burlesques Gertrude’s submission to Touchstone through its very excessiveness: I ha’ bene proud, and lasciuious, Father; and a Foole, Father; and being raisd to the state of a wanton coy thing, calld a Lady, Father; haue scorn’d you, Father; and my Sister; & my Sisters Veluet Cap, too; and would make a mouth at the Citty, as I ridde through it; and stop mine eares at Bow-bell: I haue said your Beard was a Base one, Father; and that you look’d like Twierpipe, the Taberer; and that my Mother was but my Midwife. (I4r; 5.5.174–182)

The absurdity of the prodigal story itself, with its implausible repentances and reconciliations, is mocked through this alternation of precise and clumsy parodies. Touchstone’s conclusion is also part of this parodic strategy, calling explicit attention to the narrative structure which underlies the play and pointing to its artificiality: Behold the carefull Father; thrifty Sonne, The solemne deedes, which each of vs haue done, The Vsurer punisht, and from Fall so steepe The Prodigall child reclaimd, and the lost Sheepe. (I4v; 5.5.220–4)

The prodigal narrative is suited to a comic structure through its emphasis on reconciliation, but the play’s parodic songs and mock-solemn conclusion mean that it exaggerates its own generic conventions. Although Eastward Ho provides extravagant repentance and equally extravagant reconciliation, its witty rhetorical excess undermines comic closure. This is of a piece with the effect described above, whereby various jokes – namely those against upstart knights and industrious Scots – can cause a particular member of an audience to refuse the blandishments of comic reconciliation. Although Murray’s reaction seems to have been unexpected, the general effect of jokes in the play is to work against the comfortable formal aspects of comedy. A jest-book function, mocking the follies and foibles of the deformed or mistaken, is sometimes incompatible with the comic narrative’s tendency to end joyfully. There is a tension between laughter and comedy, which is fruitful and funny in Eastward Ho,

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albeit unpredictable in its effects. The play, like the preface to Volpone, draws attention, therefore, to the problematic aspects of comic closure. those that forget themselves Thomas Middleton’s Your Five Gallants, like Eastward Ho, displays a marked wariness about the extent to which social identity can be an illusory construct, an anxiety embodied in its concern with clothing. Both plays also engage with the potential tension between reconciliation and punishment, manipulating the generic expectations of their audiences through jokes. In a recent essay John Jowett superbly details Middleton’s subversion of theatrical convention in Your Five Gallants; it is, he argues, ‘a dramatic art that works with and against the categorised elements of stage playing; words and music, act and entr’acte, speech and action, onstage event that is seen and off-stage event that is assumed’.77 The play is, I argue, equally experimental in its treatment of genre. Your Five Gallants turns on the unmasking of a group of ‘false’ gallants (rival suitors to Katherine the ‘deceast knights daughter’) by the ‘real’ gentleman Fitsgrave.78 Frippery (the broker-gallant), Primero (the bawdgallant), Goldstone (the cheating-gallant), Pursenet (the pocket-gallant) and Tailby (the whore-gallant) are Theophrastian caricatures similar to Joseph Hall’s Characters of Vices and Vertues (1608), or the ‘characters’ added to Thomas Overbury’s The Wife in its second and subsequent editions. Their names correspond to their functions, and they are introduced as exemplary figures in the play’s introductory sequence: Presenter or Prologue, passing ouer the Stage, the Bawde-gallant, with three wenches gallantly attirde, meetes him, the whore-Gallant, the pocket-Gallant, the cheatingGallant, kisse these three wenches, and depart in a little whisper and wanton action: now for the other, the Broker-Gallant, hee sits at home yet I warrant you, at this time of day, summing vp his pawns, hactenus quasi inductio, a little glimpse giuing. (A2r; Induction)

The Latin tag gives the reader an advance indication of the ways in which this language will later be used as a means of dispelling illusion and displaying ‘true’ nature and identity. The gallants are repeatedly shown as unable to understand Latin; this takes on special significance at the end of the play, when the gallants try to woo Katherine by presenting her with a ‘Strange-gallant, and conceited maske’ (H2v; line 2558) written by Fitsgrave. Directing the gallants’ speech, Fitsgrave reveals their ‘true’ natures through the Latin mottoes he gives them and the Latin

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commentary given to Pursenet’s boy. The gallants’ lack of education is exposed, and their ignorance of Latin allows them to be tricked into revealing themselves to Katherine (who, significantly, can understand Latin). Their garrulousness elsewhere in the play is thus exposed as facile ability, without the deeper learning that a real gentleman (by implication Fitsgrave) should be able to draw upon. This use of language to reveal true status is, however, undermined by the play’s continual emphasis on the fragility of social identity. Latinity may reveal true gentility, but it is not always clear what ‘true gentility’ is. In Your Five Gallants this uncertainty is expressed through the association of clothing and rank. Instead of owning land and fulfilling his duties by taking office and looking after his tenants, the gallant Bunglar boasts of his callousness towards dependants: b u n . I remember ’twas once my fortune to be coozned of all my clothes, and with my clothes my money; a poore Shepheard, pitt[y]ing me, tooke me in and relieu’de me. g o l d . ’Twas kindly done of him ifaith. b u n . Nay you shall see now, ’twas his fortune likewise not long after, to come to mee in much distresse ifaith, and with weeping eyes, and do you thinke I remembred him. g o l d . You could not choose. b u n . By my troth not I, I forgot him quite, and neuer remembred him to this houre. g o l d . And yet knew who he was. b u n . As well as I know you ifaith — ’Tis a gift giu’n to some aboue others. (D1v; lines 997–1009)

It is significant that Bunglar loses his clothes; as we have seen in Eastward Ho, clothing is a crucial marker of social identity. The loss of identity from which the shepherd saved him is made explicit in his protest ‘why alas tis nothing to forget others; what say you to those that forget themselues?’ (D1v; lines 1112–13).79 Bunglar and the other gallants in the play have forgotten themselves; they retain the signifiers of social standing but none of the responsibility that should go with them. When Goldstone urges the vintner Jack to turn gallant, it is solely in terms of ill-gotten money and personal show: ‘liue upon vsury, weare thy gilt spurs at thy girdle for feare of slubbering.’ (D1r; lines 958–9). Your Five Gallants uses material objects in distinctive ways: as Jowett suggests, Middleton’s aim in the play ‘is not primarily to demonstrate the progress of particular characters or relationships. Instead, the reader or performer must keep a clear eye on the fortunes or “careers” of stage

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properties’ (‘Pre-Editorial Criticism’, 138). The play’s emphasis on garments and the movement of clothing undermines conventional means of characterisation and demonstrates the instability of social identity. Central movements are those of Fitsgrave’s jewel and Katherine’s pearl chain, each of which is pickpocketed by Pursenet’s boy and circulated among the gallants and courtesans. Frippery is the central agent in the social mobility of clothing. He wears ‘sir Oliuer Needies Taffety cloake, & Beuer hat’ and ‘Andrew Lucifers Rapier and dagger’ (B1v; lines 327–8, 329) in order to court Katherine, lends Primero gentlewomen’s clothes for the courtesans, and takes Tailby and Bunglar’s clothes in the course of the game of dice. Elsewhere, Fitsgrave’s cloak is stolen by Goldstone and worn by Frippery himself.80 Frippery’s sense of identity, like Bunglar’s, is based on amnesia: ‘my beginning was so poore, I would faine forget it, and I take the only course, for I scorne to thinke ont’ (B1v; lines 301–2). Wearing other people’s clothes is part of his ascent from ignominy; near the start of the play, he ponders which borrowed cloak to wear ‘to continue change’ (B1v; 323). Frippery’s identity and status is located not in any internal quality but in the clothes that enable him to enact a higher status. Clothing cannot, therefore, be an accurate gauge of social identity, a fact which the play persistently foregrounds. Accused of stealing money, Pursenet protests, ‘I hope I goe not like a raskall’, to which his victim replies, ‘Are you faine to flie to your cloathes, because yare Gallant, why theres no raskall, like your Gallant raskall beleeue that’ (G4r; lines 2305–9). At the play’s conclusion, the falsity of the gallants’ appearance is embodied in theatrical terms, in the masquing clothes they acquire from Frippery. Although these are the only explicitly theatrical clothes in the play, they serve to highlight the way in which all other clothes are also costumes. The association of clothing and identity is not, however, confined to the gallants. Like the ‘false’ gentlemen, Fitsgrave spends much of the play in disguise, assuming the false identity of a raw university student in order to trap them. His status is also shaky; he is a gentleman because he tells us he is and because other characters treat him as such. A comparison can be drawn with The Coxcomb, performed by the Queen’s Revels shortly after Your Five Gallants. The gentlewoman Viola attempts to elope with her lover Richardo, stealing away from her father’s house in classic romantic comedy fashion. However, the play relentlessly mocks her attempts to act out the role of the disguised gentlewoman. In the first act, scenes showing Richardo and his friends getting progressively drunker, more aggressive and more lustful are alternated with those

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showing Viola alone and vulnerable. When she finally encounters them, instead of a romantic reunion, there is a near-rape. In this encounter her social status is called into doubt for the first time; a hungover Richardo later says: The taverne boy was here this morning with mee And told me that there was a Gentlewoman, Which he tooke for a whore that hung on me: For whom we quarrel’d, and I know not what. (2O1r; 2.4.20–3)

When she flees she is first turned away by Antonio, who refuses to open the door because he thinks she is a thief, using ‘some fained voyce to raise compassion’ (2N3r; 2.1.85–6). She is then mistaken for a ‘Gentlewoman whore’ by the prostitute Dorothy and the Tinker. Viola is naively unperceptive: she tells Dorothy and the Tinker ‘Y’are so gentle people to my seeming, | That by my truth I could live vvith you’ (2N4r; 2.2.61–2) even as they rob her and threaten her with death. Similarly, she does not later realise that the ‘Country gentleman’ Valerio is trying to seduce her. When she finally takes refuge with Mercury’s mother, working as a servant, no one recognises the true gentility of the disguised gentlewoman. She is attacked for her mistakes as a ‘filthy destroying Harlot’ (2O4r; 4.7.34), and when she tries to give the mother a jewel in recompense she is accused of having stolen it. As Freevill points out in The Dutch Courtesan (Queen’s Revels, c.1604): tis not in fashion to call thinges by their right names, is a great marchant, a coockold, you must say, he is one of the liuery, is a great Lord, a foole, you must say, he is weake, is a gallant pocky, you must say, he has the court skab[.]81

When there is no one to call Viola a gentlewoman, she ceases to be treated as such; social status is dependent on opinion. The Coxcomb undermines the generic expectations of romantic comedy through realistic emphasis on the problems of signifying social status; Your Five Gallants similarly manipulates generic expectations, especially in its conclusion. The gallant’s masque is a debasement of the social and courtly function of royal masques, and though Fitsgrave returns the masque to its theoretical function – the exposure of vice and virtue – its use remains problematic. At the end of the masque, after the revelation of the gallants’ ‘true’ natures, they are hastily married off to the courtesans. In moral terms this is a typical punishment for vice, comparable with the marriage of Hoard the usurer in A Trick to Catch the Old One, who is tricked into marrying his enemy’s former lover. In formal terms,

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however, it looks like the imposition of a stereotypically comedic ‘happy’ ending. The play is remarkably hard-headed about this; receiving Fitsgrave’s sentence, the gallants argue that ‘these forc’d marriages do neuer come to good’ and ‘often prooue the ruin of great houses’ (I4r; lines 2995, 2997). Although they have been caught in their pretence of gentility and respectability, the gallants still pretend to a status they do not possess. Middleton’s comedy thus tackles head-on Jonson’s problem in Volpone – how to punish the guilty and still provide comic reconciliation? Here, marriage, the staple of 1590s romantic comedy, is made to be the punishment allotted to the discovered villains. It is, however, a notably discomforting finale. The ending of Your Five Gallants, which juxtaposes arbitrary punishment and lack of repentance from the villains with a generically conventional conclusion, is in keeping with the unease the play engenders about the nature of its characters. Placing Fitsgrave in opposition to the false gallants, the play provides gentlemen in the audience with both of Hobbes’s laughter-providing situations, ‘some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them’ and ‘the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves’. Throughout the play, however, the confusion of clothing and identity, and the depiction of social status as both something real and something enacted, means that the categories are jumbled and spectators are perhaps left unsettled; antagonism and pleasure fail to be reconciled. This ending is similar to that of another popular Queen’s Revels play, The Fleer, in the last lines of which the disguised Antifront reveals himself and passes comedic sentence on his daughters, Florida and Felecia, marrying them to Piso and Have-Little, the suitors whom they enlisted to kill the gallants, Ruffle and Spark, when the latter rejected them. He also pairs off the rest of the cast: Ruffle and Spark are to marry Nan and Susan, and Petoune is to marry Florida and Felecia’s elderly waiting gentlewoman, Fromaga: Signior Antifront yet liues, And heeres his elder Daughter whome himselfe But now condemn’d to die: and heeres the younger Left for you, the poisoned men are heere aliue againe, Who did but dreame of death, but yet doe Liue t’enrich a nuptiall bed to you two, And now since euerie thing so well doth sort, Let all be pleas’d in this our comicke sport,

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Where’s Petoune? he shall haue his Mistris too, He most deserues, for he did hotly woe, If we part friendes, your hands vnto vs lend, What was not well, weele next striue to amend. (H4v; 5.5.127–39)

C. G. Petter interprets this ending as formulaic, noting that a similar pattern of marriage to courtesans is found in contemporaneous plays such as Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho (Paul’s, 1605), Beaumont’s The Woman Hater (Paul’s, c.1606), and Barry’s Ram Alley (King’s Revels, c.1607–8). ‘[W]ere the theatrical traditions of the time’, he asks, ‘so pervasive that they would influence a fashion-conscious writer like Sharpham to end his play in a way which is contradictory to what appears to have been his overall design?’82 A comparison with Your Five Gallants, however, suggests that both plays share a self-conscious awareness that comic endings can be satirised as arbitrary impositions.83 Earlier in the play, Sharpham demonstrates his satiric appreciation of romantic comedy conventions in his treatment of Nan and Susan, who disguise themselves as boys in order to follow Ruffle and Spark but find that their plan has one major flaw: nan. sp. nan. su. ruff. su.

Gentlemen doe you lack a Boy? No, O God, I am vndone. Sir do’y want a Seruant? No. O Lord what shall I doe? (E3r; 2.1.561–7)

Nan and Susan are rejected by the objects of their affections, and the improbabilities of the disguise-plots of romantic comedy are revealed. Sharpham’s awareness of generic conventions suggests that, like Middleton, he is interrogating the happy ending through an awareness of the ways in which laughter can be played off against the self-contained comic form. I suggested earlier that the prodigal plotline’s concluding sequence of repentance and reconciliation can be undermined by its own excesses. A similar process can be observed in Your Five Gallants, The Coxcomb and The Fleer, where the target is the old-fashioned romantic comedy narrative. In these plays specific jokes, with local effects, work to undermine the equilibrium of standard comic narratives. The comedies of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, studied as a group, therefore demonstrate a striking awareness of the problematic aspects of comic closure, and the equally problematic relationship between comedy and laughter.

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The Queen’s Revels’ desire to interrogate comic closure extended still further in Epicoene, a play which combines the problematic aspects of the prodigal son and romantic comedy narratives. The ways in which this is achieved can again be seen most clearly through an analysis of the Queen’s Revels’ repertory, as plays originally performed together can once again be juxtaposed and their rhetorical strategies compared. With Epicoene we move to the Whitefriars incarnation of the Queen’s Revels company. There is not, however, a noticeable difference in the comic strategies of the repertory. Some of the plays mentioned above, such as The Coxcomb, were revived in the Whitefriars repertory, and the ways in which comedy and laughter are handled are also strikingly similar. The socially ambitious characters of Epicoene, like those of Your Five Gallants, judge and are judged through the relationship between language and outward appearance. Language is crucial to this silence-obsessed play, and its social nuances are traced subtly, if not quietly. Drawing on Patricia Parker’s analysis of ‘virile style’, Lorna Hutson notes Jonson’s debt to classical ideas about rhetoric which ‘linked virility to an eloquence that was neither loquaciously redundant nor ineffectually at a loss for words’. Hutson describes Morose and Dauphine as ‘reluctant to engage in the redundancies of conversational linguistic exchange’ and opposes them to those ‘like Sir Amorous and Sir John Daw, lavishly indiscriminate in their linguistic engagements’.84 She thus underlines Dauphine’s and Morose’s rhetorical resemblance, which denotes an essential similarity and mutual dependence between the two characters – a ‘carrion-crow’ and a ‘corpse’ according to Paul Taylor in a review of the RSC’s 1989 production of Epicoene.85 Morose may be averse to conversation; he is not, however, averse to all speech. As he says, ‘all discourses, but mine owne, afflict mee, they seeme harsh, impertinent, and irksome’ (2Y5v; 2.1.4–5) – he is as willing to speak in monologue as he is reluctant to engage in dialogue. Another strand of rhetorical culture, closely related to that described by Hutson, holds that ‘Women are wordes, Men are deedes’; a 1581 poem of this title argues that ‘By deedes and not by words men praise obtayne, | Monsters, no men, whose deedes their words doe stayne’.86 Garrulity in women is considered to be undesirable but inevitable; in men it casts doubt on their very gender: overarticulate men are neither male nor female, but hybrid monsters. None of the female characters – not even Epicoene herself

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at her most virago-like – speaks anywhere near as much, or at such length, as Morose or Truewit, and though they may not be ‘lavishly indiscriminate’ in their speech, their linguistic exuberance is unsettling. This would have been especially true for a Jacobean audience, who were conditioned to think excessive speech ungentlemanly; it is telling to find that James Cleland’s Heropaideia, or the Institution of a Young Noble Man (1607) includes sections not only on ‘How a Noble Man should speake’ (2A1v), but also on ‘In what things he should be silent’ (2A3r). The second act provides disturbing linguistic performances by both Morose and Truewit, as Morose’s monologue to the mute servant is followed by Truewit’s bravura terrorisation of a now virtually silent Morose. Truewit outlines the torments which Morose will encounter if he marries, brandishing a halter as a visual counterpoint. Such is the violence of Truewit’s language, and the extent of its sexual disgust, that Morose’s meek question, ‘Gentle sir, ha’ you done? ha’ you had your pleasure o’ me?’ (2Z1v; 2.2.134–5) becomes a charged double entendre. In effect, Morose has been feminised by Truewit’s attack, and has regressed to effeminate linguistic incompetence; this regression is underlined in the wake of his disastrous marriage to Epicoene, when he is humiliated by the highly articulate and ‘masculine’ Lady Haughty (see fig. 5). Although Dauphine, Clerimont and Truewit view themselves as superior to the gulls La Foole and Daw, there are finely drawn parallels between them. La Foole’s claim to gentry status is possibly stronger than Dauphine’s own. He is of ‘as ancient a family, as any is in Europe’, and is definitely not one of James’s thirty-pound knights, having been ‘knighted in Ireland’, albeit thanks to the influence of Lady Lofty (2Y5v; 1.4.39–40, 60). The origins of Dauphine’s knighthood are not divulged, though his reasons for wanting it are hinted at in Morose’s full-blooded tirade against his nephew, which is worth quoting at length: This night I wil get an heire, and thrust him out of my bloud like a stranger; he would be knighted, forsooth, and thought by that meanes to raigne ouer me, his title must doe it: no kinsman, I will now make you bring mee the tenth lords, and the sixteenth ladies letter, kinsman; and it shall do you no good kinsman. Your knighthood itself shall come on it’s knees, and it shall be reiected; it shall bee sued for it’s fees to execution, and not bee redeem’d; it shall cheat at the tweluepeny ordinary, it knighthood, for it’s diet all the terme time, and tell tales for it in the vacation, to the hostesse: or it knighthood shall doe worse; take sanctuary at Coleharbor, and fast. It shall fright all it friends, with borrowing letters; and when one of the foure-score hath brought it knighthood ten shillings,

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it knighthood shall go to the Cranes, or the Beare at Bridge-foot, and be drunk in feare: it shall not haue money to discharge one tauerne reckoning, to inuite the old creditors, to forbeare it knighthood; or the new, that should be, to trust it knighthood. It shall be the tenth name in the bond, to take vp the commoditie of pipkins, and stone jugs; and the part thereof shall not furnish it knighthood forth, for the attempting of a bakers widdow, a browne bakers widdow. It shall giue it knighthoods name, for a stallion, to all gamesome citizens wiues, and bee refus’d; when the master of a dancing schoole, or (How do you call him) the worst reueller in the towne is taken: it shall want clothes, and by reason of that, wit, to foole to lawyers. It shall not haue hope to repaire it selfe by Constantinople, Ireland, or Virginia; but the best, and last fortune to it knighthood shall be, to make DOL TEARE-SHEET, or KATE COMMON, a lady: and so, it knighthood may eate. (2Z5v; 2.5.100–31)

Morose, disgusted that his newly knighted nephew is trying to pull rank on him, demonstrates the confusion which social mobility is breeding in families. His repeated use of the archaic possessive form ‘it knighthood’ demonstrates his desire to put Dauphine back where he belongs – to infantilise him.87 It depicts the helplessness of a knight with no financial resources; like Gertrude’s ‘ladiship’, Dauphine’s knighthood cannot buy him anything of itself. Morose’s tirade thus sends us back to the old conundrum concerning social status: which is more important, rank or money? An abiding problem for young gentlemen in Jacobean plays is the loss of land. Young Loveless in The Scornful Lady has sold all his land to a usurer; Witgood opens A Trick to Catch the Old One with the words ‘All’s gone! still thou are a Gentleman, that’s all; but a poore one, that’s nothing.’88 In Epicoene Morose, aware of this cliche´, demands of Truewit, ‘Good sir! haue I euer cosen’d any friends of yours of their land? bought their possessions? taken forfeit of their morgage? beg’d a reuersion from ’hem? bastarded their issue?’ (2Y6v; 2.2.43–6). In the long speech quoted above, Morose dwells on his own wealth, and the small amounts for which Dauphine will be forced to humiliate himself, as he descends through layers of debt, past debtors’ prison and lawyers to the final indignity: dependence on women. Morose lovingly delineates the possibility of a ‘browne bakers widdow’, ‘gamesome citizens wiues’ and, finally, ‘DOL TEARE-SHEET, or KATE COMMON’; as in Eastward Ho, the needy gallant is forced to unite with a wealthier lower-class woman. Here, in addition, the various projected liaisons mark the gallant’s downward spiral. Epicoene differs markedly from Eastward Ho, however, in that none of Morose’s predictions are fulfilled. There are, in fact, two kinds of prodigal gallant narratives. The first finds the prodigal saved at the last minute

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Figure 5. Rehearsal picture from Epicoene, directed by Christian Billing for Mamamouchi’s Miscreants, University of Warwick, 2000. Photograph by Florence Liber. Lady Haughty (Nigel Lister) humiliates Morose (Christian Billing).

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through a deus ex machina. In The Scornful Lady, for example, Young Loveless regains his lands and makes a successful marriage through the sudden return of his brother and an equally sudden change of heart from the usurer. The usual binary relationship between the prodigal and the usurer is broken down, as Moorecraft decides that he must himself turn prodigal: Yes faith Knight, Ile follow thy example: thou hadst land and thousands, thou spendst, and flungst away, and yet it flowes in double: I purchasde, wrung, and wierdraw’d for my wealth, lost, and was cozend: for which I make a vowe, to trie all the waies above ground, but Ile finde a constant meanes to riches without curses.89

In the second prodigal narrative, the gallant bests the opposition by his own wit. Thus, in A Trick to Catch the Old One, Witgood not only marries the heiress and regains his lands, but also tricks the usurer into marrying his former courtesan. Epicoene follows this narrative, but there is something clinical about the triumph of Dauphine over Morose, spectacular as the revelation that Epicoene is really a boy in disguise is as a coup de the´aˆtre. The play’s cold brilliance accounts for its varied reception, and the distaste that some of the original audience seem to have felt. In an address to Sir Francis Stuart, Jonson asserts that ‘the certaine hatred of some’ reveals ‘how much a mans innocency may bee indanger’d by an vn-certaine accusation’ (2Y1r; HSS, vol. 5, 161 [lines 14–16]), and Francis Beaumont, in a dedicatory poem to Epicoene printed in the 1616 Folio, also hints that Jonson was thought to be mocking real people rather than vices. This offence is usually located in the passage which refers to the ‘Prince of Moldauia,’ and ‘his mistris, mistris EPICŒNE’ (3C6r; 5.1.24–5). The Venetian ambassador wrote in a despatch of 8 February 1610 that Arbella Stuart, the king’s cousin, had complained ‘that in a certain comedy the playwright introduced an allusion to her person and the part played by the Prince of Moldova. The play was suppressed.’90 On his visit to London in 1607 the Prince of Moldavia had apparently boasted that he was going to marry Stuart; her sensitivity may have been due to the fact that in early 1610 she had become secretly engaged to her cousin William Seymour.91 Like the collegiates of Epicoene, Stuart was formidably learned, and it would not be surprising if Jonson had taken the opportunity to attack her ‘epicene’ wit, given that the play probably contains jibes against other educated female patrons, such as Lucy, Countess of Bedford. The audience reaction may, however, have stemmed from more than one political

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factor. Jonson apparently told Drummond, truculently, ‘when his play of a Silent Woman was first acted, ther was found Verses after on the stage against him, concluding that, that play was well named the Silent Woman. ther was never one man to say plaudite to it’ (HSS, vol.1, 151). This is such an inviting joke that it is hard to imagine a seventeenthcentury wag missing the opportunity, whatever they really thought about the play. Other early sources seem to indicate the play’s popularity: the doggerel rhyme ‘The Fox, The Alchemist, and Silent Woman | Done by Ben Jonson and outdone by no man’, for instance.92 The joke about the audience’s silent response, however, is too close to Jonson’s comments in the printed edition to be discounted, and it accords with the ambivalence felt by modern audiences about the play in performance. Michael Schmidt writes of the RSC revival, ‘when [Morose’s] nephew triumphs over him, and he retires like an even worse-handled Malvolio, the audience emits an audible “Oh” of dissent and alarm’.93 The play’s conclusion is formally unnerving. Reviewing the RSC production of Epicoene, Taylor notes that ‘usually in a comedy you want Youth to get its hands on Age’s money in order to fund some romantic project, which is drearily not the case here’.94 The same effect was evident in Christian Billing’s production at the University of Warwick in 2000. A young all-male cast enabled this production to approach more closely than most the play’s original performance by youths; this contrasts with the RSC production, in which John Hannah played Epicoene (billed as ‘Hannah John’ in the programme) and Liza Hayden played Clerimont’s boy, but the collegiates were played by women. In Billing’s production casting meant that the ending could retain all of its unsettling quality, as the revelation of Epicoene’s masculinity could retain its shock value even for an audience who were mostly familiar with the play. Epicoene’s femininity was revealed as only one of a series of constructed gender identities, which also included Morose’s attempt to fit the role of husband, the gallants’ self-conscious display, the contested relationship between Captain and Mistress Otter, and the collegiates’ fractured protofeminist solidarity. As performance reveals, Epicoene’s conclusion is anticomedic. The miser and the gallant are there, fixed in their double-dependency, but the play refuses to add all the conventional trappings, such as the reconciliation found in Eastward Ho or the marriages found in A Trick to Catch the Old One or The Scornful Lady. In fact, The Scornful Lady – probably performed in repertory with Jonson’s play – breaks the pattern established by Epicoene. A silent woman, in this case a disguised suitor, enables a marriage and finds

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one his/herself; the miser finds a new purpose in life and breaks his parasitical relationship with the gallant. Comic harmony is created from unpromising material; themes and characters found in Epicoene are reused in a very different conclusion. The comparison makes the ending of Epicoene look even bleaker. At the start of the play, the gallants may represent, as Michael Shapiro argues, the aspirations of their early audiences.95 By the end, however, Morose has become increasingly helpless and the gallants seem contrastingly cold and ruthless. The cruelty of the joke undermines comedy’s cohesive function, and what may start out as pleasurable surprise, causing laughter, can end in antagonistic discomfiture.

conclusion Changing attitudes towards laughter, and the idea that it was vulgar or indecorous in the upper classes, specifically in upper-class men, caused the comedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels to be problematic in several respects. If laughter is indecorous, the provoking of laughter in high-status spectators by comedies performed by lower-born juvenile actors might itself be seen as vulgar or outre´. The effect of a joke could therefore be highly unpredictable. In the case of Eastward Ho, jokes about Scottish courtiers caused Sir James Murray to complain to the king. Yet similar jibes can be found in many contemporaneous plays, some of which seem to have been suppressed, others not. Day’s The Isle of Gulls, with its performance in English and Scottish accents (as Sir Edward Hoby wrote, ‘from the highest to the loweste, all mens parts were acted of two divers nations’), dramatised the tensions surrounding the influx of Scots to the English court and the competition for the king’s favour.96 When it was first performed in 1606, the question of the union between the two countries was current; political union was first discussed in the parliament of 1604, and it remained topical throughout 1605 and 1606.97 Not surprisingly, The Isle of Gulls was suppressed. In May 1607 another (lost) play by an unidentified company featured anti-Union stage business in which an actor with a pair of bagpipes ruined the concord of a group representing the provinces of England: ‘Finally he averred that he was a Scotsman, and he was bundled out and told that he had very little judgment if he thought that so villainous an instrument could harmonize and unite with others so noble and worthy.’98 The Florentine agent Ottaviano Lotti comments that ‘The Scots knights who were present to hear the play thought about making their resentment plain right there,

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but they refrained, and hoped that the king would be greatly moved to anger.’99 Other plays survive despite barbed references to the Scots, such as Cocledemoy’s satirical impersonation of the ‘Northern Barbar’ Andrew Shark in The Dutch Courtesan. The unpredictable effect of jokes is not confined to those about the Scots; Arbella Stuart’s reaction to Epicoene seems to have been caused by what seems like a minor joke about the Prince of Moldavia. The relationship between jokes and the comic form is also complex, as I have described, with some commentators thinking that laughter was unsuited to comedy. In a number of the Queen’s Revels’ plays, jokes highlight the problematic aspects of comedy’s desire for harmonious closure, with playwrights engaging with the fact that the ending appropriate to a particular story might not accord with neo-classical ideas about proper comic structure. Comic narratives tend to stress contrition and reconciliation; this trajectory is complicated and/or undermined by the concurrent need to provoke laughter. Both laughter and comedy were thought to have a social function – to our eyes essentially conservative – in the regulation of behaviour. When the two means of regulating behaviour are brought together in the theatre, however, their purposes seem to conflict and ultimately undermine each other. Mullaney’s view of comedy as ‘a contained form of social criticism’ breaks down when we look closely at the comedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels and their audiences’ reactions to them. This is partly due to the unpredictable nature of jokes, and partly because in early Jacobean London it was impossible to find a ‘stable and circumscribing social structure’. It was difficult to maintain a stable social identity in the face of social mobility, with many complex and even contradictory elements signalling status. Companies could not depend on their audiences having a shared viewpoint and uniform reaction to jokes; even relatively small audiences such as those of the Blackfriars or Whitefriars theatres could contain enough disparate social identities and allegiances to make a uniform interpretation virtually impossible.

chapter 3

‘Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt’: company politics and the development of tragicomedy

I am told that what we are about to see is neither comedy nor tragedy, but a mixture of both. And that’s a jolly good opportunity for you, parents included, to keep your wits about you so as to tell the one from the other. In those parts that are funny, and in those parts only, I shall expect you to laugh. And in other parts, the reverse. And intelligently.1

‘A tragie-comedie’, writes John Fletcher, ‘is not so called in respect of mirth and killing but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie.’2 These remarks have haunted critical writing on seventeenthcentury tragicomedy. The Faithful Shepherdess apparently flopped in its first production by the Children of the Queen’s Revels around 1608, but Fletcher went on to write some of the most successful tragicomedies of the century, and tragicomedy concurrently became the preeminent dramatic genre in the Jacobean and Caroline theatres. His comments on the form of The Faithful Shepherdess have therefore been applied to the full range of tragicomic plays produced in the London theatres. Seventeenth-century tragicomedy does not, however, have its origin in The Faithful Shepherdess alone. Fletcher’s address ‘To the Reader’ was written in relation to The Faithful Shepherdess, not to tragicomedy as a genre, and in response to a specific situation: the play’s theatrical failure.3 Fletcher concludes, ‘Thus much I hope will serue to iustifie my Poeme, and makeyou [sic] vnderstandit [sic], to teach you more for nothing, I do not know that I am in conscience bound’ (¶2v; lines 26–8). In fact, the origins of the form of tragicomedy emerging in the first decade of the seventeenth century cannot be found in any one play or author. The development of tragicomedy was propelled by the collaborative practices of the playing companies, and one group in particular: the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Fletcher’s complaints about the reception of The Faithful Shepherdess suggest that the audience were reacting to a genre with which they were 96

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unfamiliar. Wishing that he had provided the spectators with a generically didactic prologue, he supplies them with the definition lacking in the theatre: It is a pastorall Tragie-comedie, which the people seeing when it was plaid, hauing euer had a singuler guift in defining, concluded to be a play of country hired Shepheards, in gray cloakes, with curtaild dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another[.] (¶2v; lines 1–7)

Without a prologue to guide them, Fletcher suggests, the confused spectators fell back on versions of pastoral and tragicomedy very different from those he aimed to promote. Dramatist and audience were not reading from the same script or, more accurately, were not basing their ideas of pastoral and tragicomedy on the same literary or dramatic sources. In tracing the development of the Queen’s Revels version of tragicomedy, therefore, we trace the ways in which various source texts were integrated into the company’s plays, producing a distinctive mode which was to be the basic pattern for the genre’s dominant late Jacobean form. Fletcher draws implicitly on the writings of the Italian playwright Battista Guarini and, in particular, Guarini’s own defence of pastoral tragicomedy, the ‘Compendio Della Poesia Tragicomica’, published with his play Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd ) in 1602. The influence of Guarini can be traced also in the play itself, in which Fletcher juxtaposes Italianate pastoral with references to the English pastoral tradition (especially the works of Spenser and Sidney), to Ovidian erotic verse, and to the ‘tragical comedies’ written by Richard Edwards and John Lyly and performed by the Elizabethan children’s companies. These works form, I suggest, a pervasive background to the Queen’s Revels experiments with tragicomedy, in which source texts are assimilated into a complex cultural network. The plays examined in detail here – Marston’s The Malcontent (c.1603), Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604–5), Day’s The Isle of Gulls (1606), Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1607–8) and The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1608) draw on these texts to greater or lesser extents, moulding a new dramatic mode which is simultaneously satiric and pastoral, comic and tragic. We require, therefore, a new way of approaching the old literarycritical standby of source study, not from the point of view of the dramatist alone, but from that of the company. This may seem in some ways paradoxical. In modern source study, we are reminded, ‘any text derived from a source is a reading of that source’.4 The question is,

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however, who is reading? Or, to paraphrase Michel Foucault’s own borrowing from Samuel Beckett, what does it matter who is reading? In analysing the Queen’s Revels’ development of tragicomedy, we need to consider a range of readers, from dramatists and audiences to shareholders and patrons. For instance, the use of Guarini in the plays of the Children of the Queen’s Revels can be traced through the involvement with the company of Fletcher, Chapman, Marston, Daniel and Anna of Denmark, in their various roles as dramatists, shareholder, licenser and patron. Similarly, it is not surprising to find the Queen’s Revels dramatists drawing on the works of John Lyly, given that he wrote plays for the children’s companies with which shareholder Henry Evans was involved in the 1580s. Sources and influences might enter the repertory via many routes, and our image of a playwright using sources – of an individual sitting alone in a study with books spread out on a table – is fundamentally limited when we try to assess how the introduction of particular source texts could affect the development of dramatic genre in the early Jacobean commercial theatre.

pastoral politics Although The Faithful Shepherdess has been situated convincingly in terms of Fletcher’s patronage connections and political concerns, the play has often been seen as incongruous in the context of the Queen’s Revels repertory, which is characterised as consisting mainly of satiric ‘railing’ plays.5 However, satiric and pastoral modes are not so far removed from each other as has sometimes been assumed. Early modern writers frequently alluded to the political functions of pastoral. Sidney, for instance, argues that pastoral ‘can shewe the miserie of people, vnder hard Lords and rauening souldiers’ and ‘vnder the prettie tales of Woolues and sheepe can enclude the whole considerations of wrong doing and patience’.6 Similarly, George Puttenham writes that pastoral was developed ‘not of purpose to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loues and communication: but vnder the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters’.7 Pastoral entwines the sexual with the political; as Louis A. Montrose comments, Puttenham ‘suggestively describes a verbal complex that is literally pastoral in form, pervasively amorous in content, and intrinsically political in purpose’.8 This version of pastoral crossed over into drama: Thomas Heywood, for instance, argues that dramatic pastoral shows the ‘harmelesse loue of

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Sheepheards diuersely moralized, distinguishing betwixt the craft of the Citty and the innocency of the sheep-coat’.9 Satire and pastoral were juxtaposed in the environs of the Inns of Court, the milieu from which the Blackfriars drew a number of its spectators, dramatists and shareholders. The vogue for verse satire in the 1590s was largely a product of the Inns, where writers such as Marston and Donne were resident, and the students’ fondness for satiric writing was coupled with an appreciation of pastoral. For instance, Richard Barnfield, who was associated with Gray’s Inn in the 1590s, published two sets of pastoral verse, The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) and Cynthia (1595); the epistle ‘To the curteous Gentlemen Readers’, attached to the second collection, is addressed primarily to the students at the Inns of Court.10 Barnfield’s pastorals are calculated to amuse knowing readers: as Bruce Smith argues, ‘Only readers sophisticated enough to know all about pastoral poetry – its origins in Virgil, its artificial conventions, its capacity for allegory – can appreciate just how outrageous Barnfield is when he takes those conventions and makes sport with them.’11 In this intellectual context, it seems natural that the Queen’s Revels’ writers should occasionally experiment with pastoral and that they should couple it with satire. Outside the Inns there was, in the early Jacobean period, a strong tradition of political pastoral. ‘Spenserian’ poets such as William Browne, Michael Drayton, George Wither, Christopher Brooke and, later, John Fletcher’s cousins Giles and Phineas, reconstituted pastoral as a satiric, anticourtly genre, often invoking nostalgia for the (highly idealised) reign of Elizabeth I.12 In addition to their debt to Spenser, these poets also drew on Sidney, the other great Elizabethan writer of pastoral; it is noticeable that Fulke Greville, who is sometimes associated with the Spenserians, criticised King James’s pacifism in his account of Sidney’s life and used the Arcadia as part of this project.13 The Queen’s Revels’ licenser, Samuel Daniel, was loosely connected with the Spenserians. He shared with them a desire to experiment with and to politicise the pastoral mode and after he was sidelined at court – ‘shouldered out of his initial prominent position by Jonson’s skill in courtly poetry’14 – shared their ambivalent attitude towards the king. Tragicomedy is itself closely related to both pastoral and satire, relations which were created largely through the figure of the satyr. Satyrs were depicted in classical writings attending country deities such as Pan and Bacchus, and became a fixture in pastoral poetry. During the sixteenth century a false etymology fused ‘satyr’ with the ‘satire’ familiar

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from the writings of Horace, Juvenal and Persius. Thomas Drant, the first English writer to try to define satire, advances several suggestions: it may derive from the Latin satura (a stew ‘full’ [satur] of different ingredients), from the planet Saturn, or from the woodland deity.15 Puttenham later explained that poets, in order to escape censure for their criticism of ‘vice and vicious men’, disguised themselves as satyrs, ‘whereupon the Poets inuentours of the deuise were called Satyristes’ (Arte of English Poesie, E4v, F1r). The satyr was thereby associated with the anatomies of society’s vices presented in classical satires. Sixteenth-century Italian theorists associated satyrs with tragicomedy through the so-called ‘satyr play’, which was one of the form’s dramatic precursors. In the ‘Compendio’ Guarini traced the origins of pastoral tragicomedy in ‘the eclogue and the satyr drama of the ancients’.16 Satyr plays seem to have been performed alongside the tragic trilogies in ancient Greece; the only surviving example, Euripides’ Cyclops, combines, in Guarini’s words, ‘grave action for the life of Odysseus, a tragic character, with the drunkenness of the Cyclops, which is a comic action’ (508). ‘The pastoral tragicomedy form’, G. K. Hunter argues, ‘had grown out of attempts to reinvent the Greek satyr play. The satyr and the shepherd are presented by the theorists as its alternate protagonists.’17 The illustration on the title-page of Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio highlights this association (see fig. 6). Above the personifications of comedy and tragedy which flank the title it shows three figures: ‘Satvr’, with pan-pipes and a stave, on the left; ‘Pastor’, with a shepherd’s crook and pipe, on the right; and ‘Tragicomoedia’ in the centre, perching upon a roundel displaying a Roman theatre. ‘Tragicomoedia’ wears the tunic and sock associated with comedy, and the crown and sceptre of tragedy; she combines the functions of tragedy and comedy, but can utilise the style or settings of satire or pastoral.18 The conjunction of pastoral and satire can also be found in Lyly’s Midas (Paul’s, 1589–90), particularly in the figure of Pan, characterised as a ‘rude Satyre’.19 Midas, described in its prologue as a ‘gallimaufrey ’ and a ‘mingle-mangle ’ (A2r–v; line 20), is unusual among Lyly’s plays for its use of the political pastoral. In one scene we find an extended debate about Midas’s rule among a group of pastoral figures including the shepherd Menalcas, who complains, ‘We poore commons (who, tasting warre, are made to rellish nothing but taxes) can do nothing but griue, to see things vnlawful practised, to obtein things impossible’ (E3v; 4.2.57–62). In the early seventeenth century the introduction of Italianate pastoral tragicomedy into England was giving dramatists an additional flexibility

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Figure 6. Title-page of The Works of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616).

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in their use of pastoral and political forms. Instrumental in this process was Samuel Daniel. In his dedicatory poem prefacing the ‘Dymock’ translation of Il Pastor Fido (1602), Daniel recalls the occasion on which he and Sir Edward Dymock, to whom the volume is dedicated, met Guarini in Italy. The dramatist had, he writes, oft imbas’d Vnto vs both the vertues of the North Saying, our costes were with no measures grac’d Nor barbrous tongues could any verse bring forth.20

Daniel praises the new translation, which will show Guarini that his play ‘now in England can | Speake as good English as Italian ’. As John Pitcher suggests, Daniel’s dedicatory poems advance his own poetic agenda: ‘every time he commends a close personal friend on a translation, he is advertising his own reputation and judgement in that same public market’.21 In the early 1600s Daniel made a sustained effort to introduce the latest Italian forms into English. In 1601 he published a new volume of his Works in which he added to the sonnet sequence Delia a close translation of the first chorus of the Aminta, ‘O bell eta` de l’oro’, which he entitled ‘A Pastorall’, and in A Defence of Rhyme (1603) he highlighted the achievements of Italian poets such as Tasso.22 Daniel’s fondness for Italian verse was mocked in the Cambridge University play The Return From Parnassus or the Scourge of Simony (c.1603): ‘Sweete hony dropping D: doth wage | Warre with the proudest big Italian, | That melts his heart in sugred Sonnetting.’23 Despite this mockery, a growing vogue for Italian pastoral can be seen in other plays performed at Cambridge, including a Latin translation of Il Pastor Fido (c.1604) and a pre-1605 version of Luigi Groto’s Il Pentimento Amoroso.24 In the years following the death of Elizabeth I, the popularity of Italian literature increased. As James Knowles describes, Anna of Denmark’s interest in Italian culture informed her patronage consistently.25 Anna’s knowledge of Italian language and literature dates from as early as 1592, when Giacomo Castelvetro became her Italian tutor in Scotland; Castelvetro had been instrumental in the first publication of Il Pastor Fido in England, and it seems fair to assume, as Kathleen Butler suggests, that it was he who introduced Anna to Guarini’s work, of which she became particularly fond.26 When the Florentine Grand Duke presented Anna with a number of books in 1611, an onlooker wrote, ‘it was clear that Her Majesty was more familiar with the Pastor Fido than with any of the others’.27 In England Castelvetro’s position as Anna’s Italian tutor was

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taken over by John Florio, Daniel’s friend and brother-in-law, who often purchased books on Anna’s behalf.28 In this context it is unsurprising to find that one of Daniel’s early Jacobean works was a Guarinian pastoral, Arcadia Reformed, performed before Anna and Prince Henry during the royal visit to Oxford in August 1605. The play is based closely on Il Pastor Fido, Tasso’s Aminta (itself a source for Guarini’s play) and Groto’s Il Pentimento Amoroso.29 Although generally undervalued by critics, it seems to have pleased its original audience: John Chamberlain, for instance, told Ralph Winwood that Daniel’s ‘English pastorall’ ‘made amends’ for the tedious Latin plays of the previous days ‘being indeed very excellent, and some parts exactly acted’.30 Although Jason Lawrence argues that Arcadia Reformed was inflected by university politics rather than by court politics, it seems unlikely, given Daniel’s personal connections with the queen and her circle, that his use of Il Pastor Fido was entirely unconnected with Anna’s literary tastes.31 Links between Anna and Arcadia Reformed were highlighted when the play was printed in the following year under the new title The Queen’s Arcadia. Underlining its Guarinian derivation, it was described on the title-page as ‘A Pastorall Trage-comedie’, the first English play to receive this Italianate generic tag.32 The play also demonstrates the mingling of pastoral and satire common to the English tradition, incorporating satiric scenes featuring characters such as Alcon, a quack doctor, Lincus, a corrupt lawyer, and Pistophoenax, a ‘disguiser of religion’. The removal of some of these sequences in the 1607 volume of Daniel’s Certain Small Works may indicate that the writer was aware that the scenes were potentially disjunctive within his Italianate pastoral.33 They may, however, have been removed because of their political comment; another erasure was the first edition’s preface, in which Daniel protested – perhaps too much – the political innocence of the play. company politics Although Daniel did not write a play in this mode for the commercial stage, his liking for Italian forms, his use of political material, and his connections with the Children of the Queen’s Revels were to have farreaching effects on the direction the company took with its plays. For our purposes it is also worth noting the involvement of other Queen’s Revels personnel in the performance of Arcadia Reformed; costumes for all the plays performed at Oxford were provided by Edward Kirkham

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and Thomas Kendall, shareholders in that company.34 As this suggests, the institutional dimension of the development of tragicomedy is of central importance. Most of the extant tragicomic plays of the seventeenth century come from the repertories of the Children of the Queen’s Revels and the King’s Men. Although the Children of Paul’s performed Marston’s comic/tragic generic diptych, Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge (c.1599–1601), their subsequent repertory concentrates mainly on comedy. However, the company performed a mixedmode play at court during the 1606 visit of King Christian IV of Denmark; it was described in a printed account of the visit as ‘a playe called Abuses: containing both a Comedie and a Tragedie, at which the Kinges seemed to take delight and be much pleased’.35 It is possible, therefore, that other plays have been lost. The situation is similar among the adults, the early Jacobean repertories of the Queen’s and Prince’s Men containing little that could be described as tragicomedy. Worcester’s Men performed How a Man May Choose a Good Wife From a Bad (c.1602), the first of a popular prodigal son subgenre – dubbed ‘tragical comedies’ by Marvin Herrick36 – but their extant plays after this date are mostly comedies or histories. In the King’s Men’s repertory, on the other hand, a pair of prodigal plays performed around 1603, The Fair Maid of Bristow and The London Prodigal, were joined by Shakespeare’s ‘problem’ plays: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Around 1604 the company revived its Sidneian pastoral, Mucedorus (originally performed c.1590).37 It also annexed The Malcontent, first performed by the Chapel/Queen’s Revels company, seemingly in retaliation for the theft of one of its own plays; it was rewritten by Marston and Webster, and performed at the Globe around 1604, when Richard Burbage played Malevole. In 1607 the chief dramatist of the King’s Men turned to tragicomedy and wrote the hugely popular Pericles, most likely in collaboration with George Wilkins. I suggest that the writing of Pericles was a response to the combined success of The Malcontent and Mucedorus, an assertion which gains greater weight if we look to Wilkins’s The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, a play which stands in an oddly tragicomic relation to another contemporaneous King’s Men play, A Yorkshire Tragedy. Although The Malcontent and Measure for Measure are similar in many ways, after 1604 the repertories of the King’s Men and the Children of the Queen’s Revels move in distinctively different directions. The King’s Men were aware that their rivals were dabbling in Italianate tragicomedy; in their 1605 comedy Volpone, Lady Politic Would-Be recites the names of

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several Italian poets, including Tasso, Groto and Guarini, and remarks of Il Pastor Fido: All our English Writers, I meane such, as are happy in th’ Italian, Will deigne to steale out of this Author, mainely; Almost as much, as from Montaigne´ ; He has so moderne, and facile a veine, Fitting the time, and catching the Court-eare.38

This passage has frequently been interpreted as an attack on Daniel, Jonson’s rival for masque commissions at the time; it is noticeable that Jonson also attacks ‘a few Italian Herbs, pick’d vp, and made into a Sallade ’ in Hymenaei (1606).39 It could also refer to Marston’s use of Il Pastor Fido in The Malcontent and his use of Montaigne in The Dutch Courtesan and The Fawn.40 It may also, however, glance at the Queen’s Revels in general, and their use of modish literary works favoured by Queen Anna. In addition to her fondness for Guarini and other Italian writers, Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays was dedicated to a group of women prominent at her court, and in the second edition of 1613 the translator was to add a dedication to the queen herself.41 With the revival of Mucedorus and the first performances of Pericles, the King’s Men begin to develop a tragicomic form, often labelled ‘romance’, with which Shakespeare’s so-called ‘late plays’ – Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale – are associated. As Helen Hackett notes, these plays ‘announce their affinity [to prose romance] through their repeated motifs of shipwrecks, lost children, marvellous visions and the workings of providence’.42 They resemble Guarini’s conception of tragicomedy, notably in terms of tone, which he requires to be ‘mixed, in order to be a unit […] not so grand that it rises to the tragic nor so humble that it approaches the comic’ (‘Compendio’, 525, 526). Although Pericles is more disjunctive, it shows the first move into this mode, especially in its narrative structure, some of its linguistic techniques and the handling of its final scenes. The tragicomedies of the Queen’s Revels are more comic and satiric, being notable, like the late Jacobean plays for which they provide a generic template, for what Mary Beth Rose calls ‘deflating, irreverent levity’.43 In addition, some critics have detected a high level of camp humour in Fletcherian tragicomedy, notably in plays such as Philaster.44 The use of common sources – of Ovid, for instance – in the two versions of tragicomedy is symptomatic. In the Shakespearean version, Ovid’s

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Metamorphoses is used to tilt the genre towards romance, taking on some of the characteristics of Ovid’s own transformatory writing process. As David Armitage writes, the Metamorphoses frequently recast tragic material from Virgil: ‘Ovid’s outlook, as well as his subject matter, is metamorphic. He emphasises regeneration and transfiguration; achieved possibility and relieved suffering; capricious gods and indistinct causality.’45 A similar process is at work in the tragicomedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels, but the emphasis is crucially different. Their playwrights seem to thrive on the juxtaposition of conflicting sources, and their plays are more antiromantic than romantic – romance is complicated by the introduction of material which reverses, complicates, exaggerates, or, especially, ironises it. In this respect the Queen’s Revels dramatists were following a tradition of children’s company dramaturgy developed by Edwards and Lyly in the sixteenth century. In particular, Lyly’s treatment of Ovid is marked by deflating levity and by his awareness of the extent to which Ovid’s reworkings of Virgil often involved a mischievous and comic reshaping and eroticisation of the older poet’s stories. Like the Queen’s Revels dramatists, moreover, Lyly combines the Ovidian, the pastoral and the tragicomic. The satiric ‘gallimaufrey’ Midas, for example, is based closely on Book Eleven of the Metamorphoses, and it should also be remembered that the early repertory of the Children of the Chapel in 1600–1 included Lyly’s own Love’s Metamorphosis, a self-consciously Ovidian story of transformation set in a pastoral landscape.46 Although the company appears to have quickly tired of these revivals of older children’s company plays – in Cynthia’s Revels Jonson mocks ‘the Vmbræ, or Ghosts of some three or foure Playes, departed a dozen yeares since’ that recently made up their repertory47 – it seems likely that its writers were influenced by the older dramatist’s skilful handling of source and genre. As Barnabe Rich observed, Lyly could ‘court it with the best and scholar it with the most’, and in his plays the socially aware Queen’s Revels dramatists found one model for their own practice.48 danger but not death Although The Malcontent may date from the late Elizabethan rather than the early Jacobean period, it stands in many ways as a paradigmatic tragicomedy for the company. In the later tragicomedies this play’s concern with the relationship between the sexual and political, and its highly allusive deployment of Continental and vernacular sources, are

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constantly reworked. The Malcontent was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 5 July 1604 as ‘an Enterlude called the Malecontent Tragiecomedia’ (Arber, vol. 3, 268). As the generic tag suggests, the play draws on Guarini, and in particular on the 1602 translation of Il Pastor Fido praised by Daniel. As G. K. Hunter writes, ‘it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tragiecomedia in the Stationers’ Register refers to Marston’s programmatic attempt to reconstruct this genre in English’.49 Since Marston seems to have held a share in the Chapel/Queen’s Revels company, his writing a tragicomedy for the company was a bold statement of intent. The Malcontent is tragicomic in several interrelated ways. Above all, it develops a tragicomic aesthetic which is in many respects congruent with Guarini’s. Although Marston rejects the Guarinian requirement that tragicomedy should invoke ‘laughter that is not excessive’, he incorporates tragicomedy’s ‘great persons but not its great action, its verisimilar plot but not its true one, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death’, and its ‘feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and […] comic order’ (‘Compendio’, 511). The play’s disguised ruler motif – also used in Measure for Measure, Middleton’s The Phoenix (Paul’s, c.1603–4), Marston’s own The Fawn (Queen’s Revels, 1604–5), Day’s Law Tricks (Queen’s Revels, c.1604) and Sharpham’s The Fleer (Queen’s Revels, c.1606) – lends itself to a tragicomic treatment in which tragic potential is contained within a circumscribed narrative structure and the duke’s final revelation of his true identity constitutes Guarini’s ‘happy reversal’. The Malcontent also uses intertextual quotation to underline its tragicomic credentials, incorporating into a comic narrative material taken from popular Elizabethan tragedies, including The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet and Marston’s own Antonio’s Revenge. Characteristic revengetragedy tropes in The Malcontent include the malcontent revenger himself, multiple revenge actions, use of a staged theatrical within the play proper, copious use of poison, and revenge tragedy’s own insistent intertextuality. In keeping with the play’s tragicomic structure, however, such intertextual references serve to undermine the tragic pretensions of the characters. At the end of Act One, Malevole (the ‘malcontent’ persona of the deposed Duke Altofronto) asks the ambitious Mendoza, ‘Egistus didst euer here of one Egistus ?’50 The reference is to Aegisthus, the lover of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra, who assisted her in killing her husband and was later killed by her son Orestes. The story, which formed the basis of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, is also found in Sophocles and Euripides, and was

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later told in the style of a revenge tragedy in Thomas Heywood’s second Iron Age play (Queen Anna’s Men, c.1613). The application of the legend to Mendoza is apposite, as he is conducting an affair with Aurelia, the usurping Duke Pietro’s wife; Malevole, however, describes both Mendoza – ‘whore sonne hot rainde hee Marmoset’ (B4r; 1.5.7) – and Aegisthus – ‘a filthy incontinent Fleshmonger’ (B4r; 1.5.10) – in resolutely comic-sexual, unheroic terms. The revenge story implications of the allusion are retained as he warns Mendoza, ‘Orestes, beware Orestes’ (B4r; 1.5.13). The ludicrous nature of Mendoza’s pretensions to power and potency is particularly evident in his language. Congratulating himself on cuckolding Duke Pietro, Mendoza is carried away by his own words: O Paradice, how maiesticall is your austerer presence? how imperiouslie chaste is your more modest face? but, O! how full of rauishing attraction is your pretty, petulant, languishing, lasciuiously-composed countenance: these amarous smiles, those soule-warming sparkling glances; ardent as those flames that sing’d the world by heedelesse Phaeton; in body how delicate, in soule how witty, in discourse how pregnant, in life how wary, in fauours how iudicious, in day how sociable, and in night how? O pleasure vnutterable, indeed it is most certaine, one man cannot deserue onely to inioy a beautious woman: but a Duches? in despite of Phœbus Ile write a Sonnet instantly in praise of her. (B4v; 1.5.39–51)

In speeches such as these, Marston combines a number of tragic and tragicomic poetic styles. The carefully layered comparisons owe something to Lyly’s characteristic Euphuistic style, developed in prose works such as Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues his England (1580), which gives a glossy sheen to his tragical comedies.51 Similarly, the soaring oratory of the speech is akin to that of Marlovian overreachers such as Faustus, and it might also be compared with Hamlet’s consideration of ‘What peece of worke is a man’.52 The ironies are, however, insistent. Mendoza transforms Hamlet’s philosophical enquiry about the nature of man into a discourse on sexual stimulation, and whereas Hamlet concludes that ‘man delights not me, nor woman neither’, Mendoza’s speech is all about his delight in woman. Conflating ‘Paradice’ and the duchess, he is unaware that Aurelia is about to replace him with Ferneze. The classical references are equally double-edged. Phaeton is an early modern archetype of fatally aspiring youth and Mendoza unconsciously comments on the dangers of his own situation. The terms of his aspiration are equally bathetic, as Mendoza rivals Phoebus not by aspiring to heaven, but by attempting to write a sonnet without possessing inspiration or talent. The excesses of Lylian tragicomic discourse undermine Mendoza’s

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lofty tragic aspirations, and here, as elsewhere in the play, Marston creates a spiralling absurdity of which the character is oblivious. The ambiguities of the speech are closely tied in with The Malcontent’s major thematic concerns: the relationship between sexual and constitutional misdemeanours, between verbal and moral dissonance. At the start of the play, music is used to highlight this focus on various kinds of disorder. It opens with the ‘vilest out of tune Musicke ’ (B1r; 1.1.0SD), and when Malevole appears, separated from the other characters by his position in the upper level, he addresses Ferrard as ‘Dukes Ganimed ’, ‘shadow of a woman’, ‘lambe a Court’ and ‘smooth chind Catamite’ (B1r; 1.1.6–9). Although his disordered speech is licensed by Pietro, who invites him to ‘trot about and be-spurtle whom thou pleasest’ (B1r; 1.1.11–12), Malevole’s insults imply that the politically unnatural Duke Pietro, who deposed him with the help of foreign power, is also ‘unnatural’ sexually. The associations between tonal, sexual and constitutional disorder continue through the repeated cuckolding of Pietro by Mendoza and Ferneze, culminating in Mendoza’s attempt to crown his own usurpation by marrying Maria, Altofronto’s wife. In addition to the manipulation of comic tone within a revenge plot, the tragicomic nature of the play is illustrated also by the way in which potentially tragic situations are undercut by allusions to comic or tragicomic texts. A particularly intriguing sequence incorporates dialogue from Il Pastor Fido in order to comment on its own portrait of a dissolute court. In the Guarini/Dymock text the wanton Corisca tries to persuade Amarillis to abandon her chastity, delivering a notable variation on the Renaissance carpe diem theme: This life’s too short To passe it ouer with one onely loue: Man are too sparing of their fauours now, (Whether’t be for want, or else for frowardnesse) The fresher that we are, the dearer still: Beautie and youth once gone w’are like Bee hiues That hath no honey, no nor yet no waxe. Let men prate on they do not feele our woes, For their condition differs much from ours, The elder that they grow, they grow the perfecter: If they loose beautie, yet they wisedome gaine: But when our beautie fades that oftentimes Conquers their greatest witts, strait fadeth all our good, There cannot be a vilder thing to see Then an old woman. (H4r–v)

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In The Malcontent Corisca’s words are introduced in a scene featuring Maquerelle, the ageing court bawd, and Emilia and Bianca, two of the ladies attending Aurelia. Rather than the corruption of innocence, the scene features the detailed instruction of women already converted to Maquerelle’s cause. Echoing Corisca’s ‘This honestie is but an art to seeme so’ (Il Pastor Fido, H4r), Maquerelle asks Bianca ‘Haue you the art to seeme honest’ (The Malcontent, D1v; 2.4.26). When Bianca replies ‘I thanke aduise and practise’ (D1v; 2.4.27), she recommends the attentions of ‘Doctor Plaster-face’ and tells her: youth and beautie once gone, we are like Beehiues without honey: out a fashion, apparell that no man will weare […] let men say what the will, life a woman, they are ignorant of our wants, the more in yeeres the more in perfection the grow: if they loose youth and beauty, they gaine wisdome and discretion: But when our beauty fades, godnight with vs, there cannot be an vglier thing to see then an ould woman, from which, oˆ pruning, pinching, and painting, deliuer all sweete beauties. (D2r; 2.4.42–4, 46–53)

With a startling shift of emphasis, the words spoken by a seductive young woman in Guarini are given to the ageing bawd. Maquerelle’s rhetoric is also more trivial in a patriarchal society than Corisca’s, aiming not to pervert chastity, but to encourage the use of cosmetics by those who already merely ‘seeme honest’. As Hunter points out, Marston eschews the pastoral in his tragicomedy; material taken from the pastoral play is, however, used to comment on the comic depravity of the court, playing on the traditional concern of pastoral with the relationship between the country and the city.53 The use of the material from Guarini is also an intertextual comment on the play’s generic composition. The comic exchange between Maquerelle and Bianca is inserted between two highly melodramatic scenes, one in which Pietro and Mendoza plan to surprise Aurelia and Ferneze in the act of adultery, and one in which Mendoza waits outside Aurelia’s room, sword in hand. In the ‘Compendio’ Guarini argues that tragicomedy takes from tragedy ‘its danger but not its death’; in The Malcontent quotation from Il Pastor Fido hints that this is a tragicomic world. Allusions to tragicomic texts, and the constant undermining of characters’ tragic pretensions, help to prepare the audience for The Malcontent’s comic conclusion. Rather than culminating in a bloodbath, the play ends in a scene of moderated punishment as Malevole/Altofronto refuses to take revenge on his enemies. He ‘kickes out ’ Mendoza rather than taking bloody revenge, commenting that ‘an Eagle takes not flies’ (H4v; 5.6.160).

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Maquerelle is sent to the suburbs, Pietro and Aurelia to their ‘vowes’, and the elderly hanger-on Bilioso is merely chastised: ‘You to my worst friend I would hardly giue: | Thou art a perfect olde knaue’ (H4v; 5.6.161–4). This conclusion is akin to Guarini’s ideas about the correct tragicomic ending for a play. Rejecting tragic scenes of retribution, he argues that while tragedies with a double conclusion – one ending for good characters and one for bad – are the true ancestors of tragicomedy, a strictly moral ending is not necessary in the mixed mode: ‘Punishment […] is unfitting to tragicomic poetry, in which according to comic custom, the bad characters are not chastised’ (‘Compendio’, 527). In The Malcontent Malevole’s refusal to let the story end in tragedy, transforming the revenge narrative into tragicomedy, becomes a moral comment on revenge itself. mirth and killing Shortly after The Malcontent was appropriated by the King’s Men, the Queen’s Revels began to perform Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears. Like The Malcontent, this was a popular play, revived in 1611–13 and performed at court during the celebration of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Elector Palatine.54 Although The Widow’s Tears is described as a comedy in the title-page and paratextual material of the 1612 quarto edition, its tone is often jarring and satiric, and it incorporates a good deal of tragic material. Comparisons can be drawn, moreover, with two other plays written by Chapman for the Chapel/Queen’s Revels company, The Gentleman Usher (c.1602) and Monsieur D’Olive (c.1605), both of which combine comic and tragic material. In particular, Monsieur D’Olive’s dark subject matter has much in common with that of The Widow’s Tears – it could, indeed, be subtitled The Widower’s Tears – focusing on a wife who imprisons herself in her house as a result of her husband’s jealousy and a man who refuses to bury his dead wife. These tragic-seeming plots are juxtaposed with the farcical portrayal of D’Olive, a conceited and voluble would-be ambassador. All three plays seem to be indebted to Marston’s reconfiguration of comic and tragic modes in The Malcontent, but it is worth remembering that Chapman was commissioned in 1599 to write a ‘Pastorall ending in a Tragedye’,55 and it is clear that he was aware of Continental developments. Dedicating The Widow’s Tears to John Reed, he argues that in addressing his play to ‘friends worthy and noble’ he follows the example of a select group of writers: ‘Other Countrie men haue thought the like

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worthie of Dukes and Princes acceptations; Iniusti sdegnij; Il Pentimento Amorose, Calisthe, Pastor fido, &c. (all being but plaies) were all dedicate to Princes of Italie ’.56 Aside from their use as precedents, his exemplars – Bernardino Pino’s pastoral comedy Gli Inguisti Sdegni, Groto’s Il Pentimento Amoroso and La Calisto, and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido – do not seem to be accidental, given the interest in Italian pastoral among the Queen’s Revels’ dramatists. Like The Malcontent, The Widow’s Tears often seems to glance at Guarinian ideas about tragicomedy and, like Marston, Chapman inclines to the satirical side of tragicomedy rather than to the pastoral.57 Whereas The Malcontent combines tragic and comic elements within one narrative structure, The Widow’s Tears falls into two generically distinct sections, in which the play’s two plots are taken in sequence. In the first part the cynical wit Tharsalio woos the widowed Countess Eudora, while in the second part his brother Lysander tests the constancy of his wife, the resonantly named Cynthia, by faking his own death. This archetypal story of female frailty is taken from Petronius’s The Widow of Ephesus; the first half follows a dramatic narrative often found in city comedy, the wooing of a young widow by a witty younger son with no fortune of his own.58 On his first appearance Tharsalio vows to reject ‘weake Fortune’ (B1r; 1.1.8) and takes Confidence as his guide; he repeatedly, and outrageously, confronts Eudora with his intentions towards her, and eventually she agrees to marry him. As Lee Bliss argues, Chapman uses farce techniques to uphold the fast-moving narrative, providing ‘a circumscribed, permissible area in which forbidden impulses can be enjoyed and lived out vicariously’.59 The farcical speed at which Tharsalio acts and speaks, for instance, carries the audience into his absurd worldview. The sudden reversal in Eudora’s attitude towards Tharsalio is also characteristic of what Jessica Milner Davis calls ‘quarrel-farce’: if the magnetic attraction and antagonism between two people ‘can once be briefly aligned, they can be stabilised in mutual attraction’.60 An early modern precedent for this kind of farce, featuring a verbally aggressive relationship within a patriarchal framework, is found in The Taming of the Shrew (c.1590–4) which recent commentators have begun to consider as harshly brilliant farce rather than uneven or flawed romantic comedy. Like Shakespeare, Chapman was fond of neo-classical farce, a fondness most effectively displayed in All Fools, based partly on Terence’s Adelphi, which was revived and performed by the Queen’s Revels alongside The Widow’s Tears. The repertory in this period also included another revival, Jonson’s

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The Case is Altered>, based on Plautus’s Captivi and Aulularia.61 Russ McDonald’s comment on Shakespeare holds true for the Queen’s Revels dramatists: ‘we whitewash our subject by refusing to admit his attraction to farce and declining to explore his talent for it’.62 The wooing of Eudora is concluded at the beginning of Act Three, and an inset masque scene, highly modish after Queen Anna’s Twelfth Night masques of 1604 and 1605, concludes the farce plot in a socially harmonious framework. Following this hiatus, the game starts again, with a new chaste victim. Bliss argues that it is at this point that the tone of the play shifts to something disquietingly like tragedy. I suggest, however, that the tone shifts at a slightly earlier point, on Eudora’s submission to Tharsalio. We are not actually shown how she comes to her decision; she exits at the end of Act Two, threatening him: I see wordes will neuer free me of thy boldnesse, and will therefore now vse blowes; and those of the mortallest enforcement. Let it suffice Sir, that all this time, and to this place, you enioy your safetie; keepe backe: No one foote follow mee further; for I protest to thee, the next threshold past, lets passe a prepar’d Ambush to thy latest breath. (F1v–F2r; 2.4.235–40)

Tharsalio responds by saying ‘This for your Ambush’ – a stage direction reads ‘He drawes ’ – ‘Dare my loue with death?’ (F2r; 2.4.241–2) and follows her off stage. Her servants refuse to go after them, and the act ends. Tharsalio’s phallic drawn sword and his threat, which equates love and ‘death’ (the sexual connotations of the word are important here), are the last we see of his wooing technique. The next appearance of either character is Tharsalio’s entrance before Lysander and Cynthia, when he uncloaks to reveal that he is wearing rich clothes. Gloating, he tells them that he is to marry Eudora, but does not explain how he persuaded her. When Cynthia asks, ‘Is there probabilitie in this; that a Ladie so great, so vertuous, standing on so high termes of honour, should so soone stoope?’ (F3v; 3.1.96–7), he responds, with his customary egotism, ‘You would not wonder sister, if you knew the lure she stoo’pt at […] when youth, wit, and person come aboord once, tell me sister, can you chuse but hoist saile, and put forward to the maine?’ (F3v; 3.1.98, 103–5). Tharsalio argues that his sexual allure has won him the widow. The circumstances of the exchange between them, however, raise the possibility of violence and even rape: we are not told that Tharsalio forced Eudora but, unnervingly, we are not told that he did not.63 Eudora herself is permitted no further comment; the next time she is seen is at the wedding masque.

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The threat of sexual violence lends a darker tone to the farce structures of The Taming of the Shrew, and it is also characteristic of Lylyan tragical comedy, in which the threat of rape is emblematic of the mode’s tragic potential.64 A similar elision can be found in Middleton’s Women Beware Women (King’s Men, c.1621) when the Duke escorts a silent Bianca off stage. She reenters some forty lines later saying, ‘Now bless me from a blasting; I saw that now, | Fearful for any woman’s eye to look on’, and there has been much critical debate about whether she is raped by the Duke or ‘merely’ seduced.65 Closer in date to The Widow’s Tears is Lording Barry’s Ram Alley (King’s Revels, 1607–8), in which the impecunious William Smallshank wins Taffeta, a rich widow, by threatening her with his sword: hold your tongue Nor speake, cough, sneeze or stampe, for if you doe, By this good blade Ile cut your throte directly, Peace, stirre not, by Heauen Ile cut your throate If you but stirre: speake not, stand still, go to, Ile teach coy widdowes a new way to woe.66

Taffeta responds favourably to these tactics, accepting the ‘lusty lad’ who ‘winnes his widow with his well drawne blade, | And not with oaths and words’ (H3v; 2138–41). Although she accepts – even approves – his behaviour, the basic configuration is the same as in The Widow’s Tears: a suitor loses patience with words and instead reaches for his sword. In Ram Alley violence is written as part of the comic fun, a game into which Taffeta happily falls; in Women Beware Women the seduction/rape is the starting point for the ensuing tragedy. In the tragicomic The Widow’s Tears the disquieting elision in Eudora’s story is followed by a progressive darkening of tone in the second part of the play. The stakes of the game have crucially shifted, as Chapman is now concerned not with a widow’s constancy, but a wife’s. Cynthia’s constancy is far more important to the patriarchal society of the play than Eudora’s, and this section of the play obviously cannot end in comic fashion with a marriage, as the first section did. The setting of the play changes from the city and the court to the graveyard, where Cynthia shuts herself up in the tomb with the coffin that she thinks contains Lysander’s corpse. The shift towards serious issues is prefigured not only by the uneasy conclusion to the Tharsalio/Eudora story, but by a number of Ovidian allusions which undercut the escapist farce of the first section. The most prominent of these are references to the transformed Actaeon, to whose

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curiosity Tharsalio twice compares Lysander’s desire to know whether his wife would remain faithful to him after his death. The implications of the Actaeon comparison are made explicit in Monsieur D’Olive, where Roderigue, thinking that Marcellina immures herself in order to conceal a lover and see him by night, comments that she ‘turnes poore Argus | to Acteon ’.67 Tharsalio tells his brother, ‘Be ignorant. Did you neuer heare of Actaeon?’ (C3r; 1.3.61), and continues: Curiositie was his death. He could not be content to adore Diana in her Temple, but he needes must dogge her to her retir’d pleasures, and see her in her nakednesse. Doe you enioy the sole priuilege of your wiues bed? haue you no pretie Paris for your Page? No yong Adonis to front you there? (C3r; 1.3.63–7)

Pretending to discourage him with the Actaeon comparison, Tharsalio undermines Lysander’s trust in Cynthia further with the reference to the adulterous Paris. The tragic potential of the second part of the play is hinted at here; like Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and devoured by his own dogs (Tharsalio’s gruesome pun refers to that transformation), Lysander will cause his own downfall through his curiosity. The other stories to which Tharsalio refers are also unhappy ones; Paris’s abduction of Helen caused the Trojan War, while Adonis, like Actaeon, was killed in the act of hunting. Tharsalio later inflames Lysander further with another reference to Actaeon: Tush, her selfe knowes not what shee shall doe when she is transform’d into a Widdow. You are now a sober and staid Gentleman. But if Diana for your curiositie should translate you into a monckey; doe you know what gambolds you should play? your only way to bee resolu’d is to die and make triall of her. (D1v; 2.1.25–9)

Lysander will undertake to die and to be transformed in the process. His ‘gambols’ will include disguising himself as a soldier and wooing his unsuspecting wife (the sexual pun in Tharsalio’s order to ‘die’ turns out to be highly appropriate); he will finally see his friend Lycus brought close to execution for his murder. Becoming his own cuckold, Lysander brings himself to a state in which he and Cynthia can no longer trust one another, and will have to play out their marriage in a state of watchfulness and suspicion. On finding out how she has been tricked, Cynthia returns to the Ovidian motif, describing herself as the ‘Ill-destin’d wife of a transform’d monster; | Who to assure him selfe of what he knew, | Hath lost the shape of man’ (K3v; 5.5.78–80).

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The references to Lysander as Actaeon come immediately before the tonal shift occasioned by Tharsalio’s victory over Eudora, while Cynthia’s comment precedes another transformation of tone, back into farce. Cynthia shuts Lysander in the tomb, where he is discovered by the Watch and brought before the new Governor, an incompetent fool, ‘now by fortunes iniudicious hand, guided by bribing Courtiers […] rais’d to this high seate of honour’ (I3v; 5.2.59–61). The Governor accuses Lycus of committing ‘a most inconuenient murther vpon the body of Lysander ’ (L1r; 5.5.172), and refuses to hear Lysander’s side of the story, arguing that to be impartial he must not listen to anyone. Finally convinced of the facts of the situation, he merely confesses ‘For my part, I am at a non-plus’ (L2v; 5.5.288). The conclusions of both the wooing plot and the Lysander/Cynthia plot are deliberately ambiguous. The play ends with Tharsalio ordering Lysander and Cynthia to kiss, ‘Brother let your lips compound the strife, | And thinke you haue the only constant Wife’ (L2v; 5.5.291–2), but the last verbal exchange we see between husband and wife comes when she locks him in the tomb. Although some critics have attacked the final scenes of The Widow’s Tears,68 the farcical conclusion underlines the unsettling nature of the play as a whole. Opening with Tharsalio’s carnivalesque wooing of Eudora, it proceeds to Lysander’s desire to play Actaeon, which turns his world upside down, and concludes with the inversion of order in the state as a whole, and the paradoxical statement that Cynthia – who thought that she was cuckolding her husband when she submitted to the wooing of the ‘soldier’ – is ‘the only constant Wife’. The inversion of social structures is emphasised when the first soldier refers to the ‘topsyturuy world’ where ‘friendship and bosom kindnes, are but made couers for mischief ’ (K2r; 5.4.28–9), and when the Governor declares ‘Ile turne all topsie turuie’ (L1v; 5.5.209). As Bliss argues, there is a generic and thematic correspondence between the first and third parts of the play, and the Governor’s egotistical distortions correlate with Tharsalio’s attitudes, thus exposing ‘the archmanipulator’s share in the general folly’.69 Chapman combines material associated with native tragical comedy and the Italian theorists in a deliberately uneasy and tragicomic portrayal of fractured social structures. Moreover, the pairing-off of the young lovers Hylus and Laodice highlights ironically the play’s antiromantic conclusions about marriage. Like The Malcontent, The Widow’s Tears integrates Italianate tragicomedy with native pastoral and satire. Both plays use a disjunctively tragicomic tone to comment on aspects of contemporary society and mores,

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employing classical references to underline their poetic strategies. They also satirise incompetent or corrupt rulers, the treatment of the usurpers in The Malcontent being comparable with that of the Governor in The Widow’s Tears. The portrayal of corrupt power and corruptible sexuality is incorporated into the tragicomic structures of the plays. This strategy is continued in two later plays, The Isle of Gulls and Cupid’s Revenge. Both draw heavily on Sidney’s Arcadia, making use of political pastoral in their varyingly tragicomic forms. Cupid’s Revenge takes an opposite approach from that of The Malcontent, using comic material in a revenge-tragedy plot, just as The Malcontent uses revenge-tragedy material in a comic plot. The Isle of Gulls, meanwhile, uses the flexibility of the new tragicomic form to comment on the political realities of early seventeenth-century Britain. happy reversal As described in Chapter Two, the anti-Union satire of The Isle of Gulls caused a political scandal when the play was first performed in February 1606. Based on the Arcadia – it has been described by one outraged critic as a ‘travesty’ of Sidney’s romance70 – the impact of The Isle of Gulls comes from its application of pastoral material to the contemporary political scene. Day mischievously rewrites the Arcadia as a scandalous anticourt satire, relentlessly burlesquing the disguised princes and retired king of the prose romance, and presenting King James and his court through the thinnest of veils. The political impact of the play has been described in detail elsewhere, notably by Albert Tricomi, and in this chapter my interest lies in the generic implications of Day’s politically inspired manipulation of his prose source.71 Both The Isle of Gulls and an earlier play written by Day for the Queen’s Revels, Law Tricks, disturb and unsettle their audiences through tragicomic techniques. In Law Tricks this is achieved through manipulation of the tragicomic potential of the prodigal son and disguised ruler narratives. Duke Ferneze fakes his own death in order to test his scholarly son Polimetes. In his father’s absence Polimetes interrupts his studies and maintains a woman whom everyone assumes to be his whore, but is actually his long-lost sister. Meanwhile, the Countess – the patient wife figure conventional in prodigal son plays – is divorced on a false charge by her avaricious husband Lurdo; she eventually takes a potion that simulates death and is entombed. Law Tricks highlights the ridiculous aspects of the prodigal/disguised ruler narratives through the tragic-comic exaggeration

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of its ending. Order is finally restored through the duke’s return, the deus ex machina conclusion mocking those found in plays such as How a Man May Choose a Good Wife From a Bad and The London Prodigal. It also parallels the revelation of the duke’s return in The Malcontent and the role of the foolish Governor at the end of The Widow’s Tears. The sardonic treatment of the prodigal narrative extends to the subplot. Polimetes reveals the guilt of Lurdo and his co-conspirator Horatio by pretending to call the Countess from her grave to accuse them. On this evidence, the conspirators are sentenced to be ‘clos’de aliue in her dead tombe’.72 However, when the Countess then rises from her tomb to plead for their lives, Lurdo is merely ordered to ‘Recieue her, loue and lodge her in your heart’, while Horatio is banished from ‘the Court, though not our land’ (I3v; lines 2299, 2303). The sudden reversals in the public theatre plays, where a wife’s escape seemingly absolves a husband’s guilt, are made ridiculous in the sensationalism of their treatment in Law Tricks. The epilogue comments further on the play’s dramatic and generic implausibility, repeating the play’s subtitle, ‘who would have thought it?’: ‘Who would haue thought, such strange euents should fall | Into a course so smooth and comicall?’ (I4r; lines 2309–10). In this respect Day follows the example of The Case is Altered, a play which demonstrates an intense and problematic interest in its own mechanics, and features a final scene in which the play’s title is repeated no less than five times.73 The Isle of Gulls is more complex than Law Tricks, using the Arcadia to develop a politically and sexually charged satiric drama. The play was, as noted above, first performed in the context of parliamentary debate regarding the union between Scotland and England, and Sir Edward Hoby’s comment that in The Isle of Gulls ‘from the highest to the loweste, all mens parts were acted of two divers nations’, can be found in a letter which otherwise focuses on events in Parliament.74 The play achieves its satiric effect by displacing political union on to sexual union, an analogy already familiar from King James’s assertion in Parliament on 19 March 1604: ‘I am the Husband and all the vvhole Isle is my lawfull VVife.’ 75 The retreat to the Arcadian isle is caused by Basilius’s desire to control the sexuality of his daughters. In the first scene he states that ‘their quiet, and the smothe streame of our gouernment in Arcadia, was troubled by the impetuous concourse of vnruly suters’.76 Later in the play, the princesses Violetta and Hippolita argue that they are kept by ‘Iaylors’, in ‘a strange kind of seruile libertie […] onely to keep vs from mariage’ (D2v; 3.2.24, 29–30). In order to win the princesses and thereby the dukedom, suitors must penetrate the isle itself, ‘fenc’t in | by sea and Land’ (A4r; 1.1.33–4).

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The identification of the women with the isle is made clear, as the Captain of the Guard is described as ‘times bawde, thou that hast kept the Ages doore, whilst vp-start basenes crept into the bedde of greatnesse’ (A4v; 1.2.1–3). The play’s generic form is part of its satiric commentary on the politico-sexual question of union. In the last act the princes Lisander (disguised as an Amazon) and Demetrius (disguised as a woodsman) appear to have won the princesses. However, at the last minute they are beaten by another pair of princes, Julio and Aminter, who had been introduced in the first act but had seemed to be confined to a subplot as comic failures. Spectators have been encouraged to focus on Lisander and Demetrius, and to direct their sympathies towards them, but those sympathies are undercut. This ending is described by the play’s editor, Raymond Burns, as ‘the sacrifice of dramatic inevitability to a theatrical gimmick’.77 However, the switch can also be linked with the surprise ending for tragicomedy advocated by Guarini, who speaks of the ‘happy reversal’ which the mixed form takes from comedy, and also, as described above, argues for the utility of a double conclusion. In The Isle of Gulls one set of princes is given a happy ending, while the others fail; their rewards are not, however, apportioned in accordance with their attempts to win the princesses from their father, nor in accordance with audience expectations. The intrusion of Julio and Aminter is unexpected; it surprises and disconcerts as much as it amuses, and an audience might be expected to feel aggrieved rather than amused by the manipulation of their sympathies. The political machinations of Lisander and Demetrius are seen to be useless in the face of an arbitrary narrative, and the tragicomic form of the play becomes a burlesque on the pretensions of the suitors. The substitution also undercuts the generic assumptions of the source text. The Arcadia, as Jennifer Richards and James Knowles point out, ‘seems to affirm the “natural” superiority of its two princely protagonists’.78 In The Isle of Gulls, however, the nobility of the princes is irrelevant – Julio and Aminter are simply more successful. The play’s successful characters are those who place their faith in cynical realpolitik rather than those who trust the conventions of prose romance. Day exploits to the full the capacity of the new tragicomic form to provide a different kind of ending, and his play thrives on the dissonance between source text – and source genre – and its dramatisation. The early plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher for the Queen’s Revels – Cupid’s Revenge and The Faithful Shepherdess – build on this irreverent moulding of prose

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source to the new dramatic mode, and its implicit or explicit political applications. enough to make it no comedy Cupid’s Revenge, first performed a year or two after the scandal of The Isle of Gulls, also takes material from the Arcadia, combining two stories from the version printed in 1590.79 It seems to have been influenced by The Isle of Gulls and The Widow’s Tears, sharing an interest in court politics with Day’s play, and utilising some of the farce techniques of Chapman’s. The play’s construction is similar to that of The Widow’s Tears, having a twopart structure in which the events in each plot are related consecutively. In the first scene Hidaspes is granted a favour by her father, Duke Leontius, and, urged by her brother Leucippus, she asks him to eradicate the worship of Cupid in his dukedom. Cupid-worship is, she says: A vaine and fruitlesse Superstition; So much more hatefull, that it beares the shew Of true Religion, and is nothing else But a selfe-pleasing bold lasciuiousnes.80

She refuses to accept Cupid’s divinity, believing that his cult is merely a pretext to allow people to act out their lusts. Leontius warns Hidaspes that ‘if he be | A god, he will expresse it vpon thee my childe’ (B2v; 1.1.78–9), but agrees to her demand. The temples are defiled, and in the next scene Cupid descends from the heavens and vows to take his revenge. Hidaspes is the first to succumb, falling in love with her brother’s dwarf, Zoylus. She begs her father to be allowed to marry him; when he refuses and orders Zoylus’s execution, she dies of grief. Cupid then turns his attention to Leontius and Leucippus. The seemingly chaste Leucippus has an illicit sexual relationship with a widow, Bacha, and when he is discovered with her swears that she is chaste. His father, believing his story, falls in love with Bacha himself and marries her. Unable to persuade Leucippus to continue their relationship, Bacha intrigues against him, intending her daughter Urania to become heir to the dukedom. Urania, who has been brought up away from court, falls in love with Leucippus and runs away to serve him in his exile, disguised as a boy. Meanwhile, Leontius sickens and dies. At the play’s climactic conclusion, the corrupt courtier Timantus attempts to kill Leucippus, but is prevented by Urania, who takes the blow for him. Bacha kills Leucippus and then herself, and Leucippus’s cousin Ismenus succeeds to the dukedom.

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As this summary suggests, familiar materials and conventions are used and tilted in peculiar ways. Both stories upon which Cupid’s Revenge is based are taken from the Arcadia, but Beaumont and Fletcher combine separate narratives of the prose romance for their own antiromantic purposes. In the Arcadia the stories of the princess who offends Cupid and the prince whose lover marries his father are linked only by the person of Plangus (the source for Leucippus), who features in both. Allusions to Cupid, however, encourage the drawing of parallels between the stories. In the Arcadia Sidney places between the two stories a sequence in which Miso rails against the God of Love, setting up an alternative genealogy and nature for him. She relates that she was shown a picture of Cupid painted a foule fiend I trow: for he had a paire of hornes like a Bull, his feete clouen, as many eyes vpon his bodie, as my gray-mare hath dappels, & for all the world so placed. This monster sat like a hangman vpon a paire of gallowes, in his right hand he was painted holding a crowne of Laurell, in his left hand a purse of mony, & out of his mouth honge a lace of two faire pictures, of a man and a woman, & such a countenance he shewed, as if he would perswade folks by those allurements to come thither & be hanged. (Y3v–Y4r; Evans, Arcadia, 308)

In the poem that follows she criticises the ‘Poore Painters’ and ‘silly Poets’ who picture Cupid as ‘A naked god, blind, young, with arrowes two’ and says that he is instead ‘an old false knaue […] By Argus got on Io, then a cow ’ (Y4r–Y5r; Evans, Arcadia, 309). In Sidney’s earlier draft, known as the Old Arcadia, these words are given to Discus and are proclaimed before the assembled Arcadians; the story of Erona is then told by Histor to counteract his blasphemy.81 In the revised version of the Arcadia with which Beaumont and Fletcher are more likely to be familiar, however, they are uttered by a foolish old woman, and a group of ladies are described as having ‘made sport’ at her stories (Y5r; Evans, Arcadia, 310). This comic, antiromantic sequence (which displays romance’s tendency towards self-parody) is used in Cupid’s Revenge as a model for the stories surrounding it. Sidney’s version of the story of the princess casts doubt on the role of Cupid, ‘for to that the Lycians impute it’ (X7v; Evans, Arcadia, 302); the other source story does not mention the god. Beaumont and Fletcher, however, insist upon Cupid’s divinity, using it to create the play’s most striking visual motif. The presentation of Cupid in Cupid’s Revenge was probably conventional, but members of the audience who were familiar with the Arcadia may have been simultaneously aware of Sidney’s anarchic presentation of the god. It is perhaps also relevant that Cupid’s Revenge is closely contemporaneous with Fletcher’s The Faithful

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Shepherdess, in which another god, Pan, is constantly invoked but never seen: Sidney’s Cupid, with his horns and cloven feet, is very similar visually to Pan, who was usually a symbol of sexual incontinence. The play’s tragic form diverges from the Arcadia, in which Erona eventually marries her lover and the story of Plangus is interrupted by Basilius and left unfinished. However, although the deaths are enough to make it no comedy, to paraphrase Fletcher’s preface to The Faithful Shepherdess, the tone of the play is frequently comical, if not farcical. The dignified and rather stilted purity of Hidaspes and Leucippus in the first scene is replaced by a ridiculous lust for unsuitable persons. Meanwhile, the duke completely loses his dignity and is reduced to senile preening. The tone is consistently cynical and the central characters’ pretensions to dignity are constantly undermined, not least through on-stage comments from Ismenus and a group of gossiping gentlemen. In the first scene the latter comment on the duke’s wisdom in giving Hidaspes her wish, and her vows of chastity are described as ‘folly’. Agenor comments that ‘Shee’s doubtlesse very chaste and vertuous’ (B1v; 1.1.16), but his insertion of the word ‘doubtless’ creates a certain unease about her rigid standards. Leucippus is an early example of the Fletcherian foolish young prince, who recurs in many later plays, including Philaster, A King and No King and The Humorous Lieutenant. He is ludicrously high-minded; when the people rise against the duke on his behalf he refuses to accompany them, and sends them home: All that loue me depart: I thanke you, and will serue you for your loues: But I will thanke you more to suffer me To gouerne em once: more, I doe beg yee, For my sake to your houses. (I4v; 4.5.4–8)

Leucippus is repeatedly berated by Ismenus for his lack of political acumen, Ismenus’s down-to-earth tones contrasting with his cousin’s high-blown rhetoric. When he criticises Leucippus for discharging the people who revolt on his behalf, Leucippus asks, ‘To what end should I keepe em? I am free’ (K1r; 4.5.23), to which Ismenus replies: Yes, free o’th Traytors, for you are proclaymed one. […] This is one of your morall Philosophy is it? Heauen blesse me from subtilties to vndo my self with; But I know if, reason her selfe were here, She would not part with her owne safetie. (K1r; 4.5.24, 26–9)

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Philip Finkelpearl rightly argues that ‘as a tragic hero Leucippus is badly miscast’, but it seems unlikely that this is his intended role.82 The presentation of Duke Leontius is unfavourable, and the scenes featuring the uprising of the citizens on behalf of Leucippus are, as Gordon McMullan notes, astonishing in the context of the Midlands Revolt of the previous year.83 It is difficult, however, to see Cupid’s Revenge as a wholly tragic piece of anticourt drama. Serious political issues are presented in a farcical, tragicomic tone, similar to that used in the depiction of sexual and political union in The Isle of Gulls. Leucippus is a tragicomic figure, unconsciously funny in his adherence to moral absolutes. His death scene is a case in point. He begins a philosophical oration – ‘what is man? or who would be one, when he sees a poore weake woman can in an instant make him none’ (L3r; 5.4.200–2) – but is interrupted by Dorialus’s comment, ‘She is dead already’ (L3r; 5.4.203). Attempting to outline his last requests, he dies mid-sentence, denied the dignity of a completed speech. The treatment of Hidaspes and Leontius is similarly ironic. Hidaspes’s love scene with the dwarf, in which she is unable to see his deformities, is cruelly funny, O blasphemy! he may perhaps to thee Appeare deform’d, for he is indeed Vnlike a man: his shape and colours are Beyond the Art of Painting; he is like Nothing that we haue seene, yet doth resemble Apollo, as I oft haue fancied him, When rising from his bedde he stirres himselfe, And shakes day from his hayre. (C1v; 1.4.16–23)

In Sidney’s story the object of the princess’s desire is socially, rather than physically, monstrous, ‘a yong man but of mean parentage […] as that he was but the sonne of her Nurse, & by that meanes (without other desert) became knowen of her’ (X7v; Evans, Arcadia, 302). Beaumont and Fletcher, however, make her love both more comic and more dramatic; her death and the death of the blameless dwarf are also added to the story. Generically, the play is double-edged. Tragedy is undercut by the farcical tone and set-piece scenes, such as the wooing of Zoylus by Hidaspes and of Bacha by Leontius, but the comedy of these scenes is tempered by the inclusion of political realities: this is farce with real victims. Cupid’s Revenge appears to have been extremely popular; court performances indicate that it was revived by the Queen’s Revels in 1611–12 and 1612–13, and there may have been other revivals.84 The play is in many

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respects a culmination of the techniques developed by the Queen’s Revels’ dramatists, their experience with the Blackfriars company accustoming Beaumont and Fletcher to the way in which disjunctive tones could be combined within one play. It was probably this play, more than any other, which spurred the King’s Men to commission plays from Beaumont and Fletcher when the theatres reopened in 1609. In addition to the evident success of Cupid’s Revenge with the Blackfriars audience, part of its plot – Urania’s love for Leucippus and her decision to follow him in disguise as a boy – is reworked in Philaster, one of their first plays for the King’s Men.85 delight and denial Where does this leave The Faithful Shepherdess ? The play was probably performed in the same playing season as Cupid’s Revenge, but its fortunes were very different. Whereas Cupid’s Revenge was a hit, The Faithful Shepherdess is generally remembered for one thing: its failure on the public stage. Stung by this failure, Fletcher and a group of colleagues attempted in the printed text to portray The Faithful Shepherdess as a unique experiment. In some respects at least, this is accurate. Although the previous tragicomedies of the Children of the Queen’s Revels drew on Guarinian theory, The Faithful Shepherdess is a more thorough attempt to recreate Italian pastoral tragicomedy than any other commercial play of the period, following the example of Daniel’s The Queen’s Arcadia. Set in a poetically lush pastoral milieu, with characters including a satyr and a river god, The Faithful Shepherdess is seemingly remote from the Machiavellian political concerns of The Malcontent or The Isle of Gulls. The play was performed, nevertheless, within a theatrical repertory containing a number of other tragicomedies, and it shares certain aspects of dramatic technique with these plays. On a literal level, that of plot and language, the play appears to be a faithful adaptation of Guarinian techniques and mores to the commercial stage. However, when we look more closely at Fletcher’s carefully constructed patterns of allusion, and examine the dramatic action, it is clear that his attitudes towards Italian pastoral tragicomedy are far from simple. The Faithful Shepherdess represents an attempt to integrate Italianate pastoral with the English tradition exemplified by the Spenserians, drawing on both versions of pastoral in ways in which each is complicated and ironised. As Beaumont argues in one of the play’s prefatory poems, The Faithful Shepherdess is characterised by ‘wit and art’, a carefully controlled irony which was missed by

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those who originally condemned it.86 The way in which the sources are treated on the subtextual level has much in common with Marston’s or Chapman’s techniques, or those used in Cupid’s Revenge. In this context we need to consider the possibility that The Faithful Shepherdess was not an aberration on the part of the Queen’s Revels managers, but was actually part of their politically inflected, comic-tragic repertory. Fletcher’s handling of his central theme of chastity is emblematic of his double-edged treatment of the genre. On a narrative level the theme is taken extremely seriously: the confusion caused by the shepherds’ passions is ended by Clorin, who at the end of the play outlines a series of measures to be taken to keep them pure. If summarised, therefore, the play looks like a straightforward paean to the power of chastity and the evils of sensuality, praising the creation of a chaste commonwealth. Politically, moreover, the depiction of strict chastity in a pastoral world is obviously associated with the Spenserians’ pastoralised attacks on courtly mores.87 However, Fletcher juxtaposes this narrative progression with a highly allusive comic subtext. A play that on the narrative level upholds the necessity for chastity echoes the language of erotic poetry, and bristles with allusions to particularly lubricious classical narratives. Most importantly, Fletcher draws directly on 1590s Ovidian erotic poetry. A notable example is Thenot’s description of Clorin’s forehead: ‘hye, | And smooth as Pelops shoulder’ (D2v; 2.2.119–20). The cold image of Pelops’s ivory shoulder is also blazoned in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Barnabe Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe, in which he sought to rewrite the sonnet sequence as Ovidian verse: Euen as delicious meat is to the tast, So vvas his necke in touching, and surpast The vvhite of Pelops shoulder.88 Thence rise her humble seemely shoulders, Like two smooth pullish’t Iuory toppes, Of loues cheefe frame, the chief vphoulders VVhiter then that was of Pelops.89

Ovidian echoes seem incongruous in the context of the play’s narrative focus on chastity. They are juxtaposed, however, with references to the native pastoral, especially Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and The Shepherd’s Calendar, and can be seen as part of the same political project. It has long been realised that the portrayal of sexual desire in 1590s erotic poetry is extremely complex, and served as an alternative to the state-sponsored discourses of Petrarchanism and Neoplatonism, based as it was in the Inns

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of Court, rather than the court itself. Hannah Betts argues, for instance, that Parthenophil and Parthenophe is marked by a ‘sustained hostility toward virginity [that] was in obvious opposition to the dominant ideology of the late Elizabethan court’.90 In The Faithful Shepherdess allusions to epyllia – a form associated with anticourt writing in the 1590s and early 1600s – are used in the context of early Jacobean nostalgia for the Virgin Queen and a kind of anticourt writing with a very different sexual background.91 A tendency to undercut narrative through allusion can be seen throughout The Faithful Shepherdess. One of its most problematic aspects is the portrayal of Pan, here an incongruous god of chastity. Clorin’s closing speech to the Priest and the shepherds is Calvinist in style and theme, focusing on the value of strict self-supervision; she tells the shepherds to examine themselves and the Priest to teach them how to cleare, The tedeous way they passe through, from suspect Keepe them from wrong in others, or neglect Of duety in them selues. (K4r; 5.5.169–72)92

She also alludes to the Edenic golden age, urging that the shepherds avoid ‘the tree | that hanges with wanton clusters’ (K4r; 5.5.175–6). These aspects of her speech are emphasised in the Priest of Pan’s blessing, in which he asks that Pan Giue yee meanes to know at leng[th], All your Ritches all your streng[th]. Cannot keepe your foot from falling, To lewd lust, that still is calling, At your cottage, till his power, Bring againe that golden howre: Of peace and rest, to euery soule. (K4v; 5.5.200–6)

Similarly, in the first scene of ritual the Priest outlines the chaste behaviour demanded by Pan, purging the shepherds of the ‘high rebellious heat, | Of the grapes and strength of meat’ (B3r; 1.2.12–13). The religious phraseology of Clorin and the Priest draws on the (potentially unlikely) identification of Pan, as god of the shepherds, with Christ. In a gloss attached to the May eclogue in Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, E. K. writes that Pan is ‘Christ, the very God of all shepheards, which calleth himselfe the greate and good shepherd. The name is most rightly (me thinkes) applyed to him, for Pan signifieth all or omnipotent, vvhich is onely the Lord Iesus.’93 In The Faithful Shepherdess, however, the association of Pan with Christ is confined largely to these scenes of religious ceremony. Elsewhere, other

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aspects of Pan’s reputation are foregrounded. In the play’s first scene, which immediately precedes the Priest’s ceremony, a Satyr interrupts Clorin’s meditations on the grave of her beloved. He describes himself as the servant of Pan, and he is distracted by Clorin from his mission to prepare for Pan’s night-time indulgence of his own ‘wanton quick desires’: ‘at a feast, | He entertaines this comming night, | His Paramoure the Syrinx bright’ (B1v; 1.1.54–6). Pan is peculiarly ambiguous. The Satyr describes him as a voluptuary, entertaining his ‘Paramoure’, eating ‘lussious’ fruit, and spending the day asleep (B1v, B2r; 1.1.90, 96–9), but the Priest and the Old Shepherd invoke him in order to enforce a strict chastity. Among the shepherds Pan’s position is equally uncertain. Amoret blesses the Sullen Shepherd in Pan’s name when he (mis)directs her to Perigot, ‘for this thy care of me, | Pray Pan thy loue may euer follow thee’ (E3v; 3.1.114–15), using the god’s name to endorse her own ideas of chaste loyalty. Conversely, Cloe prays to him for success in her tryst with Alexis, ‘now | Great Pan for Sirinx sake bid speed our plow’ (E2r; 2.4.107–8), recalling the (more conventional) licentious Pan described by the Satyr. The story of Pan and Syrinx is frequently alluded to throughout the play, and serves to underline the play’s tragicomic presentation of desire. The Satyr refers to the coming meeting of the lovers in highly sensuous terms: Now whilst the moone doth rule the sky, And the starres, whose feeble light Giue a pale shadow to the night, Are vp, great Pan commaunded me To walke this groue about, whilst he In a corner of the wood, Where neuer mortall foote hath stood, Keepes dancing, musicke and a feast, To intertaine a louely guest: Where he giues her many a rose Sweeter then the breath that blowes The leaues: grapes, beries of the best, I neuer saw so great a feast. (E4v; 3.1.167–79)

Although the Satyr refers to Syrinx as Pan’s ‘Paramoure’, the sexual encounter between the pair is continually deferred in the play. Even Cloe’s oath implies only that Pan desires Syrinx, not that she returns his love. In the legend (told most famously in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Pan never consummated his desire for Syrinx, a follower of Diana; pursued by

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the god, she called on the water nymphs to help her and was transformed into a reed: ‘when Pan betwene his armes too ketch ye Nymph had thought | In steade of her hee cawght the redes newe growen vpon the brooke’.94 The eventual fate of Syrinx is invoked by Amarillis late in the play, as she runs from the Sullen Shepherd: Thou God of sheepheards: Pan for her deare sake, That loues the Riuers brinks, and still doeth shake, In colde reme[m]brance of thy quick pursute: Let me be made a reede, and euer mute, Nod to the waters fall, whilest euery blast, Singes through my slender leaues that I was chaste. (I4v; 5.3.83–8)

In The Faithful Shepherdess Pan is simultaneously a libertine, an exemplar of chastity, and a Christ-analogue; these contradictions remain unresolved, and various versions of the god’s legend are juxtaposed.95 The treatment of Amoret is also indicative of Fletcher’s tragicomic technique. She has much in common with characters found in Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido and Daniel’s The Queen’s Arcadia, both of whom are called Amarillis. In The Faithful Shepherdess, however, ‘Amarillis’ is the character who tries to steal another’s beloved, and the name ‘Amoret’ is taken from a character in Book III of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, where she is a type of violated chastity. The transformation of Fletcher’s Amarillis so that she can impersonate Amoret is usually thought to allude to the creation of a false Florimell in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. There are also, however, parallels with Book III, and the central section of The Faithful Shepherdess draws on the story of the ‘rape’ of Amoret in Busirane’s castle. During the masque of Cupid in canto xii, a figure of Amoret takes part in the procession: Her brest all naked, as net yuory, Without adorne of gold or siluer bright, Wherewith the Craftesmen wonts it beautify, Of her dew honour was despoyled quight, And a wide wound therein (O ruefull sight) Entrenched deepe with knyfe accursed keene, Yet freshly bleeding forth her fainting spright, (The worke of cruell hand) was to be seene, That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene. At that wide orifice her trembling hart Was drawne forth, and in siluer basin layd, Quite through transfixed with a deadly dart, And in her blood yet steeming fresh embayd.96

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This ‘Amoret’ is, however, revealed to be false, and Britomart discovers the real Amoret, bound to a pillar, when she enters Busirane’s chamber: And her before the vile Enchaunter sate, Figuring straunge characters of his art, With liuing bloud he those characters wrate, Dreadfully dropping from her dying hart, Seeming transfixed with a cruell dart, And all perforce to make her him to loue. (2O5v–6r; III.xii.31)

As Susan Frye argues, Britomart (active chastity) and Amoret (passive chastity) actually serve as critical examinations of Elizabeth I’s uses of the discourses of chastity: ‘To the extent that they participate in the queen’s chastity, they are targets. And to the extent that they participate in the patriarchal definition of chastity, they are vulnerable.’97 Drawing on this set of political and sexual associations, The Faithful Shepherdess rewrites Spenser’s ‘Amoret’, and wounds to the chaste female body are transferred into discourses surrounding emergent Spenserian nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth. In The Faerie Queene Amoret’s wounds, caused by the poet’s ‘love’ for her, are presented twice; Fletcher’s Amoret is stabbed twice by the man who claims to love her: the first time he thinks that she may be unchaste, and the second time he believes that she is the ‘false’ Amoret. Both sets of wounds are sexualised, if not figurative rapes, and in both works Amoret is magically healed. In The Faerie Queene Busirane reverses the spell and ‘the wyde wound, which lately did dispart | Her bleeding brest, and riuen bowels gor’d | Was closed vp, as it had not bene bor’d […] As she were neuer hurt’ (2O6v–7r; III.xii.38). The first time Amoret is wounded in The Faithful Shepherdess, the Sullen Shepherd throws her down the well and she is rescued and healed by the River God; the second time she is healed by Clorin and the Satyr. On both occasions her healing is dependent on her chastity. The River God remarks, ‘If thou bee’st a virgin pure, | I can giue a present cure’ (F3v; 3.1.381–2), while the second healing depends not only on Amoret’s chastity, but also on the absence of Cloe, whose lustful nature might interfere with the healing process. The threat of rape has already been invoked elsewhere. Cloe famously claims that ‘It is Impossible to Rauish mee, | I am soe willing’ (F1r; 3.1.212–13), and the Sullen Shepherd regrets not having tried to rape Amoret: ‘if she had denied | Alone, I might haue forcd her to haue tried | Who had bene stronger’ (E4r; 3.1.128–30).

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He instead accosts the eager Cloe, ‘Now lust is vp, alike all women be’ (E4r; 3.1.135), and, later, Amarillis. The threat of rape is nonetheless most strikingly depicted in the sexualised violence towards Amoret. I have already argued for the importance of the suggestion of rape in The Widow’s Tears; like Chapman, Fletcher dramatises the threat of sexual violence and makes the tragicomic structure of his play dependent on it. The healing of the sexualised wounds (including the injuries Alexis suffers as he tries to prevent the Sullen Shepherd from ravishing Cloe) is dependent on the maintenance of chastity, and it is through the imposition of chastity that the play moves towards its tragicomic conclusion. The comic potential of tragicomedy is also apparent in Fletcher’s depiction of sexual violence. In contrast to the grotesque and bloody descriptions of Amoret in The Faerie Queene, the wounding of Amoret in The Faithful Shepherdess is potentially tragic, but its treatment is almost farcical. The exchange between Perigot and Amoret that culminates in his attack is in stark contrast to their last conversation at the start of Act One, when the lovers seemed happy and united. Entering, Amoret says: Many a weary stepp in yonder path Poore hopless Amoret twice troden hath, To seeke her Perigot, yet cannot heare, His voyce my Perigot, shee loues thee deare: That calles. p e r . See yonder where shee is how faire. Shee showes, and yet her breath infects the Ayer. a m o . My Perigot. p e r . Here. a m o . Happye. p e r . Haplesse first: It lights, on thee, the next blowe is the worst. a m o . Stay Perigot, my loue, thou art vniust: p e r . Death is the best reward. thats due to lust; Exit Per: (F3r; 3.1.337–46)

The play’s usual poetic style contains elaborate vocabulary and complicated allusion; its disturbance is clear in the simple diction of this dialogue. Speeches are progressively shorter, and in the crucial section in which Amoret and Perigot see each other, their four-line exchange spans a single pentameter line, Amoret’s horribly ironic ‘Happye’ juxtaposed with Perigot’s ‘Haplesse first’. The last lines parody the convention in early modern dramatic verse by which lovers finish each other’s rhymes. After the wounded Amoret is thrown into the fountain, Act Three ends with the scene-stealing appearance of the urbane and courtly River God,

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who rises up with Amoret in his arms. The sequence contains some of the play’s most luscious verse, and the River God’s regular, seven-syllable couplets also provide comic relief after the tragically farcical run-up to Perigot’s violence: Heres a Mortall almost dead, Falne into my Riuer head, Hallowed so with many a spell, That till now none euer fell. Tis a Feamale young and cleare, Cast in by some Rauisher, See vppon her brest a wound, On which there is no playster bound[.] (F3v; 3.1.371–8)

Bliss argues that the tone in Act Four shifts towards tragedy, seeing the second stabbing as ‘less hysterical and improbable than the first’, and drawing attention to the play’s ‘increasingly somber tone’.98 This analysis, however, underestimates the complexity of Fletcher’s technique. Rather than the tone becoming more sombre as a whole, potentially tragic scenes and exchanges are juxtaposed with highly comic ones. Perigot’s anguished confusion is emphasised, but the character’s hyperbolic language remains unchanged from that in the earlier scenes. When he stabs Amoret for the second time, the repetition of the act makes it seem farcical, but its tragic aspect is not dispelled. The play’s treatment of tragic behaviour in an ironic manner is encapsulated by the Satyr’s comment when he finds Amoret: ‘Yet more blood’ (H3v; 4.4.184). In some ways The Faithful Shepherdess was, in the early Jacobean period, a dead end; the ‘pastoral tragicomedy’ was neglected until the 1630s, when The Faithful Shepherdess was reinterpreted in the context of the obsession of Queen Henrietta Maria’s court with Platonism. As we have seen, however, this play is not an isolated one-off, but one of a sequence of plays attempting to address issues of desire in a politicised tragicomic form, and to develop a distinctive juxtaposition of various sources and traditions. The dictates of chastity are imposed in the last scenes by Clorin, leading the play towards its tragicomic conclusion, and averting the dangers caused by the sexuality of Perigot and the Sullen Shepherd. The play’s emphasis on chastity also, however, gives rise to both comic and tragic situations throughout. Pan is worshipped as the god of chastity, but is simultaneously a figure associated with desire and disorder; Amoret is chaste, but is repeatedly subjected to sexualised violence; Cloe tries to reject chastity, but circumstances require her to remain a virgin. The play carefully, and wittily, underlays its tragicomic

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plot with variously tragic and comic allusions, and its references to Ovidian poetry serve to undercut its main narrative thrust, making its version of tragicomedy more complex and multivalent. conclusion Why, then, did the play fail? The contexts within which it was originally performed suggest that the company felt that the time was right for this kind of drama. Plays drawing on the classic exemplars of English pastoral romance, such as Mucedorus, The Isle of Gulls and Cupid’s Revenge, had succeeded in performance, as had other tragicomic plays such as The Malcontent and The Widow’s Tears. The Malcontent had successfully incorporated material from Guarini, and Daniel’s Italianate tragicomedy had met with royal approval in Oxford. This climate seems to have encouraged the Queen’s Revels company to think that the intelligentsia, or would-be intelligentsia, who attended the Blackfriars theatre would be ready and willing to applaud a pastoral tragicomedy which combined Italian and Spenserian models. Moreover, there was a good chance that such a play might catch the eye of the Master of the Revels and be presented at court, as was later the case with The Widow’s Tears and Cupid’s Revenge. As Beaumont suggests, arguing that it was Fletcher’s ‘happe to throvv avvay, | Much vvit, for which the people did not pay, | Because they saw it not’, the Blackfriars audience in 1607–8 seem simply to have been confused.99 They seem to have expected the play to be more like Mucedorus, or to accord with Michael Drayton’s idea that pastoral features those worthy ‘to be called base, or low ’ with a language ‘poor, silly, & of the coursest Woofe in appearance ’.100 Perhaps the pastoral tragicomedy’s fault in the eyes of the audience was that it was not pastoral enough, but too witty, too allusive, and too high-blown. Fletcher’s assertion in ‘To the Reader’ that the audience misjudged the play, expecting it ‘to be a play of country hired Shepheards, in gray cloakes, with curtaild dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another’ (¶2v; lines 5–7), becomes a wail of disappointment and disbelief rather than mere petulance. The attempt to naturalise Italian pastoral tragicomedy failed, but the Queen’s Revels’ other attempts to develop English tragicomedy succeeded. Hired by the King’s Men around 1609, after that company had regained the Blackfriars theatre, Beaumont and Fletcher set to work in an attempt to combine the popularity of Cupid’s Revenge with the lessons

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learnt from The Faithful Shepherdess. The pair also had an impact on their new colleagues. The repertory of the King’s Men when the theatres reopened included the tragicomic Philaster and Cymbeline – both of which rework the stabbing of Amoret – together with revivals of Pericles and Mucedorus. The new tragicomedies reinterpreted many of the preoccupations of the Queen’s Revels’ version of the form, such as the concern with the relationships between sexuality and political structures, and used many of the same sources. The place of English tragicomedy, together with the future of the King’s Men after the uncertainties of the plague years, looked to have been assured, but it was the interplay between satyr and shepherd in the Queen’s Revels tragicomedies that fuelled the emergence of the genre.

chapter 4

‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’: tragedy and the text

Why, all this while I ha but plaid a part, Like to some boy, that actes a Tragedie, Speakes burly words, and raues out passion: But, when he thinkes vpon his infant weaknesse, He droopes his eye.1

This final chapter turns to the most prestigious and, at times, most problematic of early modern dramatic genres: tragedy. The performance of tragedies by the children’s companies is often downplayed or overlooked, but within the repertory of the Children of the Queen’s Revels they form a substantial and intriguing body of drama. At the Blackfriars the Queen’s Revels performed Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, Daniel’s Philotas, Marston’s Sophonisba, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge and Chapman’s The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron. At the Whitefriars they revived Cupid’s Revenge and revised Bussy D’Ambois, which seems to have been performed in tandem with its sequel, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois; other tragedies in this period include The Insatiate Countess, seemingly revised by Barksted and Machin from an early version by Marston, and Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk. Although the other Jacobean children’s companies performed tragedies – the early Children of Paul’s repertory included Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and the King’s Revels played John Mason’s satirically Marlovian play The Turk – the preponderance of tragedies in the Queen’s Revels repertory is unusual. As in their pioneering performance of tragicomedy, it seems that the Queen’s Revels were trying to outdo the adult companies in scope and ambition.2 This ambition may, in fact, have led them into trouble in their early days. In the third edition of Marston’s The Malcontent, published in 1604, we find a new prefatory induction, written in the style of the metatheatrical exercises associated with the children’s companies, but performed by the King’s Men. The induction dramatises a conversation between gallant 134

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habitue´s of the Blackfriars (played by William Sly and John Sinklo), who incongruously attempt to sit on the Globe stage, and the King’s Men’s actors, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and John Lowin (playing themselves). The purpose of the induction is to allow the King’s Men to lay their claim to The Malcontent, a play which was originally performed at Blackfriars. Asked how the King’s Men acquired the play, ‘Condell’ replies: c u n . Faith sir the booke was lost; and because twas pittie so good a play should be lost, we found it and play it. s l y . I wonder you would play it, another company having interest in it? c u n . Why not Maleuole in folio with vs, as Ieronimo in Decimo sexto with them. They taught vs a name for our play, wee call it One for another.3

The King’s Men allege that their theft of The Malcontent is justified, because the Children of the Queen’s Revels had already purloined one of their plays. ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’ is a tantalising description of the stolen play in performance at the Blackfriars, contrasted with a description of the adult performance of The Malcontent at the Globe (‘Maleuole in folio’, performed by the famous Richard Burbage). Its identity has been disputed: the leading contenders are either The Spanish Tragedy or, as John Reibetanz and Lukas Erne have argued, The First Part of Jeronimo, apparently a burlesqued version of a prequel to Kyd’s tragedy.4 Whatever the identity of the play, the phrase ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’ conjures a vivid image of a boy actor playing a tragic hero, comically described in textual terms as being shrunk to the size of a small-format book. It is perhaps no coincidence that the textual trace of Hieronimo haunts many children’s companies’ plays. In Eastward Ho, as we saw in Chapter Two, Quicksilver is given an extended quotation from Don Andrea’s opening speech; he also alludes directly to Hieronimo in another of his recycled ‘play-scraps’: ‘be rul’d’, he tells Golding, ‘turne gallant, Eastward hoe, talyre, lyre, ro, Who calls Ieronimo? speake here I am’.5 Similarly, in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, the aspiring actor and grocer’s apprentice Rafe has played the title role in amateur performances of Mucedorus and ‘should haue playd Ieronimo with a shooe-maker for a wager’.6 In Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock, the foolish Sir Abraham Ninny hopes to woo Lucida with lines plagiarised from Kyd’s play, only to find that all the other characters present know The Spanish Tragedy as well as he does.7 As a paradigm for the hero of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Hieronimo casts a shadow over the Queen’s Revels’ forays into the tragic form. Their first tragedies were performed around 1604, not long after the theft of

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‘Hieronimo’ from the King’s Men. It seems likely that the success of The Malcontent – a revenge tragedy twisted to tragicomic purposes – convinced the managers of the Queen’s Revels that the rapidly maturing and increasingly adept company was capable of playing tragedies. At the moment when Richard Burbage became ‘Maleuole in folio’, therefore, the seventeen-year-old Nathan Field became ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’, taking the lead role in Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois. This was to become one of his most famous roles, and the extent to which Field was identified with the play is perhaps reflected in the fact that it appears in the repertory of the King’s Men after he became a shareholder in that company.8 In addition to the playfulness of its invective, the phrase ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’ highlights some of the ambiguities associated with the performance of tragedies by the children’s companies. It also alerts us to another important issue: the intense textuality of the Queen’s Revels plays. Between 1603 and 1613 the Queen’s Revels seem to have been content to have their plays printed. With the exception of The Coxcomb, a perennial stage favourite which was not printed until 1647, all the extant plays which can be securely associated with the company were in print by 1618, and the majority had been printed by the end of 1613.9 Moreover, a high proportion of their plays are printed with the kinds of apparatus generally associated with authorial involvement, such as prefatory verses and epistles. Some dramatists were heavily involved with the printing process: in a preface to The Malcontent, Marston writes, ‘I have my selfe [. . .] set forth this Comedy’, and in an extant letter Chapman negotiates with the censor over the printing of his Byron plays.10 In the Queen’s Revels’ plays, and in the tragedies in particular, publication is not placed in opposition to performance; the publication of dramatic texts is merely an example of the plays’ extreme mutability. This mutability is also demonstrated in many forms of textual variation, ranging from practices in the playhouse – for instance, the redaction of plays into cue scripts or plots, revision for revival or the substitution of new prologues and epilogues – to external forces such as censorship.11 As recent scholarship has recognised, textual instability was a condition of the early modern theatre. Perhaps paradoxically, given that tragedy is often characterised as immutable or universal, this genre seems to have been particularly susceptible to revision, reliant on fashion and changing audience taste. Generic instability left its mark on the plays as they were performed, and also on the texts marketed to readers: variant printed texts exist for some of the best-known and most popular tragedies of the age, including The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet,

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Othello, King Lear, Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece and Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois. Critics have generally assumed that the central questions in this textual and generic instability surround the author rather than the company. For instance, in his analysis of the relationship between the two texts of King Lear, Richard Knowles attacks the work of ‘bitextual critics’, arguing that they risk allowing material ‘contaminated’ by other hands to be accepted as Shakespeare’s: ‘Editors of Shakespeare usually try to represent his works, not the artefacts of his acting company.’12 In the context of an analysis of the repertory of a theatre company, however, my precise interest is in the plays of the Children of the Queen’s Revels as ‘artefacts of [the] acting company’, as the product of an often challenging collaborative dynamic. We should also bear in mind that in the early modern period revision was not only associated with authorial endeavour. Donald Lupton, writing in 1632, asserts that actors ‘are as crafty with an old play as bawds with old faces: the one puts on a new fresh color, the other a new face and name’, substituting company authority where we might expect to find authorial integrity.13 My focus, therefore, is on malleability and mutability in the tragedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres, demonstrated in both the general instability of dramatic texts and the peculiar instability of tragedy as a genre. Between 1603 and 1613 the nature of tragedy was questioned repeatedly. This generic anxiety has two sources. Firstly, as noted above, the Queen’s Revels tragedies were anomalous from the start, in that the genre only rarely formed part of the children’s companies’ repertories, and plays such as Sophonisba or Bussy D’Ambois posed a sustained challenge to the adults’ plays. Secondly, in the later years, tragicomedy was an increasingly attractive option for dramatists. By 1609, it was well on its way to becoming the dominant genre, stimulating variant texts and experimental practices in tragedy as companies either refurbished their old tragedies in order to accommodate tragicomedy’s popularity, or commissioned new tragedies which were more flexible and generically complex. In the Queen’s Revels tragedies performed before 1609, we can trace successive attempts on the part of the Queen’s Revels to accommodate tragedy as a genre appropriate to the children’s company, and, subsequently, to refigure the performance texts for a reading audience. Daniel’s Philotas (1604–5) is a closet tragedy revised for the commercial stage – motivated, Daniel claimed, by financial necessity – and later printed in ways which attempt to efface its problematic performance. Marston’s

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Sophonisba (1605–6) is a play which even in performance works to textualise its exemplary heroine, and which subsequently attempts to ‘stage’ tragedy in a printed form. Chapman’s The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608) is a tragedy of contemporary politics which was censured in performance and censored in print. In Philotas the company appropriates the elite mode of closet drama, adapting it to the requirements of the commercial stage; in Sophonisba tragedy is carefully tailored to the character and capabilities of the Queen’s Revels company; in Byron the growing autonomy of the juvenile actors placed company and dramatist in peril. In the tragedies performed between 1609 and 1613, on the other hand, we find that the character of tragedy itself is in a state of flux, and that traces of this problematic generic development can be found in the plays themselves. In Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk and Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, we find an uneasy presentation of tragedy in plays apparently printed in the wake of unsuccessful performances. Elsewhere, however, in plays such as The Insatiate Countess and Cupid’s Revenge, we can see the development of a new formulation of tragedy which was being shaped in reaction to the growing popularity of tragicomedy. In an important essay on children’s tragedy, R. A. Foakes argues that these plays ‘show tragedy converting itself into tragi-comedy [. . .] the children’s theatres seem to have given a lead in showing how sex and violence could be exploited, and in building a play out of a debate or clash of ideas’.14 This is true, but I suggest that there is also a more complex negotiation between tragicomedy and different versions of tragedy. This negotiation centres on the issue of truth (which was often held to be characteristic of tragedy), on the incorporation of sexual and comic material, on verbal texture and tone, and – in particular – on the plays’ final scenes. The conclusion of a play is all-important in creating tragic effect, and it is also a point at which the distinction between tragedy, comedy and tragicomedy was drawn. As I will describe in further detail below, early modern genre theorists argued that comedy began with trouble and ended joyfully, while tragedy began calmly and ended in bloodshed; a surprisingly happy ending after a tragic build-up is characteristic of the narrative structure of tragicomedy. I suggest, therefore, that the need to rejig the conclusions of tragedies was related to the new popularity of the mixed-mode play. This process is particularly clear in plays which have been subjected to revision, and the chapter therefore concludes with a detailed examination of textual variation in the two extant texts

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of Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois. This play provides a bridge between Blackfriars and Whitefriars: one of the first tragedies performed at Blackfriars, it was revised for performance in tandem with its sequel, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, at Whitefriars around 1611.15 While the first text of Bussy D’Ambois left its mark on the tragedies that followed it at Blackfriars, the revised play is representative of the way in which tragedy could accommodate tragicomedy while retaining its own generic identity. In yoking together generic and textual issues, this chapter also aims to build bridges between traditional literary criticism, performance criticism and textual criticism. In her recent account of the relationship between the two texts of Bussy D’Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, Katherine Rowe notes that one of the effects of textual variation is to illuminate ‘the complex interplay between dramatic convention, audience expectation, and changing social forms’.16 The development of genre is just one part of a process aimed at producing successful plays in a competitive industry. Attention to the performance context – the repertories of the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres – alerts us to the pressures which created the plays in the first place: the dynamic interaction between audience taste, commercial acumen and literary innovation. Awareness of textual issues allows us to conceptualise the relationship between the performance ‘text’ and the printed plays that stand in for and replace it, and the differing pressures that are brought to bear in the transfer from performance to print. blackfriars Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, apparently the first tragedy performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at Blackfriars, is an eminently commercial political tragedy, centring on the bravura role of Bussy himself. The Queen’s Revels’ next tragedy, Philotas, is perhaps less obviously commercial, but its avant-garde genre and politically risque´ subject matter was perhaps intended to appeal to the intellectual and social pretensions of at least some of the Blackfriars audience. Philotas is, as noted above, liminal in generic terms, being the only known example in the Jacobean period of a play with closet origins that was performed before a paying audience. Daniel seems always to have been interested in generic experimentation, as his pioneering tragicomedies also demonstrate, and Philotas – a closet play made public – is no exception.17

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One particularly marked example of this experimentation is Daniel’s use of a chorus. Addressing the readers of Sejanus his Fall (King’s Men, 1603; published 1605), Jonson confesses that his play is ‘no true Poe¨me [. . .] in the want of a proper Chorus, whose Habite, and Moodes are such, and so difficult, as not any, whome I haue seene since the Auntients, (no, not they who haue most presently affected Lawes) haue yet come in the way off’.18 Although Sejanus was performed before Philotas, it was not printed until 1605, and it is therefore probable that Jonson refers to Daniel as one who has ‘most presently affected Lawes’. In spite of Jonson’s comments, Daniel uses the chorus in a sophisticated manner, making much of its potential ambiguity and presenting it as a fluid and multivocal dramatic device. At the end of each of the first three acts, the ‘chorus of the vulgar’, made up of three Greeks and a Persian, speaks as a unity and represents an undifferentiated multitude. Act Four, however, concludes with a dialogue between ‘Graecian and Persian’, who debate Philotas’s situation and the respective legal-political cultures of Greece and Persia.19 As the chorus becomes dialogic, the potential unreliability of the observers who comment on political situations is underlined. The play concludes with another dialogue, this time between the Chorus and the Nuntius, and their dual interpretation of Philotas’s death leaves open certain ethical-political questions.20 Despite his confident handling of such tricky devices as the chorus, Daniel was deeply ill at ease with the public presentation of Philotas. In 1605, faced with the accusation that Philotas was intended to comment on the Essex rebellion, he claimed that the play was based on three acts of a tragedy written before the events of 1601, and that it did not attempt to make specific political comment, but to present ‘the universall notions of ambition and envie the perpetuall arguments of bookes & tragedies’.21 The performance of Philotas was, Daniel claimed, the result of his poverty, which forced him to ‘doo a thing vnworthy of mee, and much against my harte, making the stage the Speaker of my lynes’.22 The play’s position in the company’s commercial enterprise is complicated: rather than being commissioned by the company’s shareholders, it may have been forced upon them by their financially challenged licenser. In any case, the play does not seem to have received many performances at the Blackfriars; in a letter to Robert Cecil, Daniel volunteers to ‘finde the meanes to let it fall of it self, by wtdrawing the booke and mee to my poore home, prtending some other occasion, so ytthe suppressing it by authoritie might not make the world to ymagin other matters in it then there is’.23 The reluctant playwright seeks to efface both himself and his

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‘booke’, trying to avoid the public circulation of gossip that would attend its overt suppression. Unsurprisingly in this context, Philotas was printed from the first in such a way as to obscure the public theatre associations of the text and to elide its dramatic status. The first edition was published in a 1605 octavo volume titled ‘CERTAINE | SMALL POEMS | LATELY PRINTED: | with the Tragedie of Philotas. | Written by SAMUEL DANIEL’. In addition to the dramatist’s name, the volume title-page also gives a Latin motto: ‘Carmen amat, quisquis carmine digna gerit’ (‘Whoever does deeds worthy of Poetry, loves Poetry’); a separate title-page for Philotas itself credits ‘SAM: DANIEL’.24 The inclusion of the poet’s name and a Latin tag is similar to Jonson’s practice in his quarto editions; Daniel, however, places his play within a group of mainly nondramatic texts (Jonson was not to follow this example until 1616).25 In addition, nowhere in the octavo does he mention the company or performance venue; although he provides ‘The Names of the Actors’, this is a list of characters, unlike the actor lists that Jonson was later to provide. The 1605 text is prefaced with a signed epistle ‘To the Prince’, which discusses the consequences of the staging of Philotas, but in only the vaguest terms: And therefore since I haue out liud the date Of former grace, acceptance, and delight, I would my lines late-borne beyond the fate Of her spent line, had neuer come to light. So had I not bene tax’d for wishing well Nor now mistaken by the censuring stage Nor, in my fame and reputation fell. Which I esteeme more then what all the age Or th’earth can giue. But yeares hath don this wrong, To make me write too much, and liue too long. (2A6v; lines 99–108)

Daniel’s argument here is similar to Jonson’s statement in the preface to Volpone: ‘I know, that nothing can bee so innocently writ, or carried, but may be made obnoxious to construction; mary, whilst I beare mine innocence about me, I feare it not.’26 Daniel lacks Jonson’s confidence, however, and subsides into wistful regret. Philotas was reprinted in 1607, in two independent volumes issued by the publishers responsible for the 1605 Poems. In one of these editions, a duodecimo issued by Edward Blount, it is grouped with the ‘Panegyricke Congratulatorie’, ‘certaine Epistles’ and A Defence of Rhyme.27 It was

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printed, according to editor Laurence Michel, from the 1605 edition, and shows no signs of revision. The other edition, an octavo issued by Simon Waterson, adds to the 1605 Poems ‘Musophilus’, The Queen’s Arcadia and ‘A Funerall Poeme vpon the Death of the [. . .] Earle of Deuonshire’.28 Ironically, given Daniel’s appeal to Charles Blount in the aftermath of the Philotas affair to let ‘not now an Earle of Devonshr. overthrow what a L. mountioy hath donne’, in Waterson’s volume a play commenting on Essex’s political life is brought into textual contact with a eulogy for one of his adherents.29 Waterson’s volume shows extensive signs of revision throughout, especially in Cleopatra, to which Daniel adds new characters among other revisions. The reworking of Philotas is not so extensive, but includes the deletion of ‘The Names of the Actors’ and the replacement of lines 41–120 of the Epistle to Prince Henry with twelve new lines.30 As John Pitcher has argued, in his persistent revision of texts, Daniel is ‘treading water between script and print’.31 He treats the theatrical text of Philotas as if it were a circulating poetic manuscript, offering to ‘withdraw’ it and limit its public circulation. The desire to limit the circulation of his works and to control their dissemination through revision is characteristic of Daniel, for whom printed plays are not permanent records of performance but texts which can be rewritten: words on a page. The mark of Daniel’s control over his plays and poems is his ability to alter them as he pleases: ‘What I haue done, it is mine owne I may | Do whatsoeuer there withall I will | I may pull downe, raise, and reedifie.’32 Daniel’s attitudes towards Philotas in performance and in print are both paralleled and contradicted in the performance and publication histories of other early tragedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Marston, for instance, is far more positive about the performance of his plays, but still needs to justify both the performance of tragedy by the Queen’s Revels and the translation of performed tragedy to print.33 In an address to the reader which is appended to the printed text of Sophonisba, Marston writes: After all, let me intreat my Reader not to taxe me, for the fashion of the Entrances and Musique of this Tragidy, for know it is printed onely as it was presented by youths, & after the fashion of the priuate stage. Nor let some easily amended errors in the Printing afflict thee since thy owne discourse will easily setvprightany [sic] such vneuennes.34

The problems of publication are, for Marston, linked inextricably with the possible shortcomings of the play in performance: it is ‘printed onely

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as it was presented’. Describing the actors as ‘youths’, Marston highlights their indeterminate status. No longer prepubescent children, they are moving towards the professional stage, but they do not yet possess its techniques. This hybrid status informs the dramaturgy of Sophonisba. The play’s complex speeches demand real virtuosity from individual performers, particularly those playing Sophonisba and Syphax, but Marston also draws on the collective performance traditions of the children’s companies and on the resources of their indoor theatres. For instance, at the beginning of Act One Scene Two Sophonisba enters ‘in her night attyre’ to prepare for her wedding night, accompanied by her maid, Zanthia. The intimacy of the scene is underlined by the direction that the waiting women enter ‘with Tapers’ (B1r; 1.2.0.1–2), the means by which the indoor theatre was itself lit. Sophonisba’s girdle and shoes are removed by Zanthia, and the text dictates that the ‘Ladies lay the Princes in a faire bed, and close the curtaines’ (B1v; 1.2.32.1); the curtains are either those of the discovery space at the rear of the stage or those of a movable bed.35 At this point we find the following direction: Enter Foure boyes antiquely attiered with bows and quiuers dauncing to the Cornets, a phantastique measure, Massinissa in his night gowne led by Asdruball and Hanno followed by Bytheas and Iugurth, the boyes draw the Curtaines discouering Sophonisba to whom Massinissa speakes. (B1v; 1.2.35.1–5)

The stage spectacle draws on the physical skills of younger members of the company, and uses the musical resources associated with the Blackfriars theatre. When the curtains are drawn, the boy actor playing Sophonisba is revealed, and the audience’s gaze, with that of Massinissa, is directed towards him. Another stage direction requires that he reaches into the bed, and he ‘drawes a white ribbon forth of the bed as from the waste of Sopho’ (B1v; 2.1.40.1–2). This concern with the theatrical presentation of the ‘female’ body is typical of Sophonisba; a later stage direction, for instance, reads, ‘Syphax his dagger twon about her haire drags in Sophonisba in hir night gowne petticoate’ (D2v; 3.1.0.1–3). The audience is repeatedly teased with Sophonisba’s sexuality, but their voyeuristic satisfaction is never fulfilled: as Genevieve Love argues, ‘theatrical effects and action function more in service of what does not happen than what does’.36 The bridal night itself is disrupted by the appearance of Carthalon, ‘his sword drawn, his body wounded, his shield struck full of darts’ – the stage direction draws a direct contrast with Massinissa ‘being reddy for bedde’ (B2r; 1.2.65.1–2) – and the news of Scipio’s attack. It also parallels

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two bodies, the bleeding body of Carthalon, whose arrival shifts the play’s focus from marriage to war, and that of Sophonisba herself. In later scenes the audience’s gaze remains focused on Sophonisba, but her physical body becomes progressively more elusive. In order to protect herself from Syphax, she is forced to resort to a bed trick on two occasions. On the first, she replaces herself with the body of Syphax’s slave, Vangue; on the second, she allows the witch Erichtho to take her place. Erichtho enters ‘in the shape of Sophonisba, her face vailed and hasteth in the bed of Syphax’ (F1v; 4.1.211.1–2), and, immediately before the act break, ‘Syphax hasteneth within the Canopy as to Sophonisbas bed ’ (F2r; 4.1.216.1). A bass lute and treble viol play during the break, and at the beginning of the next act ‘Syphax drawes the curtaines and discouers Erichtho lying with him’ (F2r; 5.1.0.2–3). The stage echoes with Erichtho’s laughter as Syphax calls for a light and realises that he has encountered the ‘rotten scum of hell’ instead of the ‘heauen’ of Sophonisba’s bed (F2v, E3v; 5.1.2, 4.1.76).37 When Scipio demands that Massinissa surrender Sophonisba to him, Sophonisba poisons herself, and at the end of the play all that remains is her still-virginal corpse, which is carried on to the stage and addressed by a sorrowful Massinissa: Thou whom like sparkling steele the strokes of Chance Made hard and firme; and like wild fier turnd The more cold fate, more bright thy vertue burnd, And in whole seas of miseries didst flame. On thee lou’d creature of a deathlesse fame Massinissa adornes Sophonisba. Rest all my honour: O thou for whom I drinke So deepe of greefe, that he must onely thinke, Not dare to speake) that would expresse my woe, Small riuers murmur, deepe gulfes silent flow, My griefe is here, not here, heaue gently then, Womens right wonder, and iust shame of men. (G3v; 5.4.49–59)

Even though her actions in the play are, in the main part, passive, Massinissa’s speech recasts his dead wife as a weapon forged in the heat of war and turned against tyranny; the stage business, in which he ‘adorns’ Sophonisba’s corpse with the crown with which Scipio has just ‘adorned’ him, underlines her exemplary status. The play’s visual spectacle thus supports the main narrative theme of the play: Sophonisba, ‘lou’d creature of a deathlesse fame’ and the ‘Wonder of Women’, is to be admired, desired and objectified. In print, moreover, Sophonisba is effectively turned into an exemplary text; becoming a literary monument to her

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own excellence, her story can be read in the same way as those of the virtuous heroines of Thomas Heywood’s later compilation, Gunaikeion (1624). The status of its heroine as monument is reflected in the play’s highly mediated printed state. As well as taking responsibility for the text, Marston surrounds it with textual apparatus: in addition to the afterword and the exceptionally detailed stage directions, we find an address to the reader, an argument and an epigraph. In the address Marston also foregrounds the problems of writing historical tragedy; he has not, he writes: laboured in this poeme, to tie my selfe to relate any thing as an historian but to inlarge euery thing as a Poet, To transcribe Authors, quote authorities, & translate Latin prose orations into English black-verse [sic; the 1633 edition reads ‘blank Verse’], hath in this subiect beene the least aime of my studies. (A2r; page 34)

This statement may have been prompted by Jonson’s treatment of Sejanus, a printed text that erases a collaborative theatrical text even as it simultaneously creates a dialogic relationship between the play and its classical sources.38 Marston’s approach to Sophonisba in print also contrasts with Daniel’s treatment of Philotas. Where Daniel, like Jonson, seeks to erase the wider collaborative circles to which the play originally belonged in performance, Marston actively negotiates with the fact of his tragedy’s performance, and with the specifics of that performance, presenting the tragedy in print ‘after the fashion of the priuate stage’. Chapman’s Byron was also tailored for performance by the Queen’s Revels. It picks up the subject matter of Bussy, which by 1608 had been transferred to the Children of Paul’s, and pursues the Queen’s Revels’ tragedies’ interest in matters of conspiracy and rebellion. Like Philotas and Sophonisba, the printed text is marked by negotiation, in this case with the censor. In his dedicatory epistle to Sir Thomas Walsingham, Chapman foregrounds the effects of the play’s suppression and censorship, describing them as ‘these poore dismembered Poems’.39 He addresses Walsingham as one who can vouch for the plays’ worth, ‘hauing heard your approbation of these in their presentment’ (A3r; lines 5–6); as with Sophonisba, the printed play is situated in relation to its earlier performance. Some of Chapman’s troubles may have been caused by the changing nature of the Queen’s Revels company. As they grew older, the actors seem to have gained a greater degree of involvement in the plays

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performed – we recall Edward Kirkham’s comment that by 1608 the Children ‘were Masters themselues’40 – and in Chapman’s accounts of his play’s censorship the issue of their agency becomes central. In a letter to an unnamed recipient (probably Edmund Tilney or George Buc), Chapman goes further into the circumstances of Byron’s production. Notably, he tries to distance himself from the version of the play performed at Blackfriars: ‘Yf the two or three lynes you crost, were spoken; My vttermost to suppresse them was enough for my discharge; To more then wch no promysse can be rackt by reason; I see not myne owne Plaies; Nor carrie the Actors Tongues in my Mouthe.’41 Chapman argues that the fault did not lie in his script – allowed by the censor with minor revisions – but in the actors’ collective refusal to attend to censorship. His reluctance to be associated with the play as it was performed receives some support from the account of the French ambassador, Antoine Lefe`vre de la Boderie. De la Boderie focuses in the first place on the actors, complaining that not only have they contravened his original prohibition against their play, they have introduced even more offensive material: ‘the Queen and Madame de Verneuil, the former treating that lady very ill verbally and giving her a slap on the face’. He relates that he immediately consulted the Earl of Salisbury, and complained ‘that not only were those members of the troupe contravening the prohibition made against them but they were adding to it things not only more serious, but which had nothing to do with the Marshal de Biron, and furthermore were all false’. He later, however, holds the ‘author’ to be the ‘principal culprit’.42 This uncertainty may explain the somewhat haphazard revisions and excisions in the version finally printed. A scene showing Byron at the court of Elizabeth I in The Conspiracy of Byron appears to have been replaced with a summary of the dialogue by D’Aumont and Crequi (F4v– G3v; 4.1). If this is a replacement for a cut section, it may indicate that Chapman attempted to revise the play, either in the process of production or (probably more likely) when producing a coherent reading text. Other offensive sections seem, however, to have been simply excised. The sequence in The Tragedy of Byron which offended de la Boderie – the queen slapping the king’s mistress on the face – is not included in the printed text. Something similar was, however, present at some point in the text’s history; at the end of this scene, which in the quarto opens very abruptly, King Henry remarks, ‘This show hath pleased me well, for that it figures | The reconcilement of my Queene and Mistris’ (L1v; 2.1.129– 30). John B. Gabel argues that the material added by the actors consisted

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of both the lost quarrel and the extant masque; there is obviously something missing in the printed text, but the masque scene is usually thought to be ‘authorial’, contradicting this theory.43 We should not, however, have preconceptions about the writing ability of actors. Their contributions to the extant versions of plays are often dismissed as ‘interpolations’, but what we know about actors who also wrote plays should help to dispel this idea – they include, after all, Robert Armin, Nathan Field, Ben Jonson, William Rowley and William Shakespeare. In the plays performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars theatre, tragedy is revealed as a flexible genre, open to various forms of experimentation. Philotas attempts to reconstitute closet drama for the Blackfriars’ intellectually self-conscious audience, using the rarely performed generic marker of the chorus; Sophonisba works with the skills of its performers and the resources of their theatre; Byron is reworked by its increasingly autonomous actors with satiric political intent. This generic mutability is reflected in the plays’ textual instability. To rework John Pitcher’s comment about Daniel, the tragedies tread water between stage and print. Although they bear the marks of their performance – in the case of Byron’s ‘dismembered’ texts, the physical scars – the printed texts stand at a remove from their original staging. They are not merely texts to be read, however, as each refers, in different ways, to the authority of performance and the fact of their performance by the children’s company, whether in an attempt to efface that performance or to transfer its effects into the new medium. whitefriars The tragedies performed by the Whitefriars Queen’s Revels company continue to engage with the textual and generic issues I have examined when considering the Blackfriars repertory. They are also, however, marked by an increasing anxiety about the nature of tragedy. Genre theory often characterises tragedy as constant or archetypal. Tragedy is, like other structural genres such as comedy and tragicomedy, intrinsically teleological, its full meaning only revealed at its conclusion. In early modern plays, of course, the conclusion is usually fatal. We need think only of the human cost at the end of Hamlet, the agonised death of Faustus, or the carnage-strewn final acts of the tragedies of Webster or Ford. Picking up on Theodore Spencer’s statement ‘Death [. . .] was tragedy’, Michael Neill writes that the genre ‘catered for a culture that was in the throes of a peculiar crisis in the accommodation of death – one that

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reflected the strain of adjusting the psychic economy of an increasingly individualistic society to the stubborn facts of mortality’.44 The deaths at the end of tragedy are thus intrinsic to the genre’s relationship with its early modern audiences. Neill’s interpretation is shared by some seventeenth-century commentators; in his 1656 hard-word dictionary Glossographia, Thomas Blount writes that the ‘beginning of a Tragedy is calme and quiet, the end fearful and turbulent’.45 There is a remarkable consistency in the way in which dictionaries define tragedy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Florio (1598) describes tragedy as a kind of play that ‘beginneth prosperously and endeth vnfortunatelie or sometimes doutfullie, and is contrarie to a comedie’, John Bullokar (1616) as ‘a play or Historie ending with great sorrow and bloodshed’, and Henry Cockeram (1623) as ‘A Play or Historie beginning very friendly, but ended with great slaughter of bloud’.46 Cockeram provides a further correlation with Neill’s and Spencer’s idea of the genre by defining ‘Tragidized’ as ‘Killed’ (K8v). Despite this apparent fixity of meaning, tragedy seems to have become notably unstable in the early seventeenth century, both in performance and in print. As noted above, a number of early modern tragedies exist in more than one state, and even some plays for which only one early text survives, including Macbeth and Sejanus, often show signs of having been revised. A number of plays described in Henslowe’s Diary as having been ‘mended’ or ‘altered’ for revival also seem to be tragic in form: these include The Spanish Tragedy, Doctor Faustus, Cardinal Wolsey and Tasso.47 As ideas about tragedy changed, the genre itself shifted to take these changes into account; plays were fine-tuned so that companies could ensure that a text continued to have the desired effect on its audiences. As Roslyn Lander Knutson writes, plays ‘grew old, not in an aesthetic but in a generic sense’; additions therefore took the shape of ‘new parts that exploited currently fashionable motifs in the genres to which the revived plays belonged’.48 As plays were reworked on the stage, so this generic instability was reflected in printed texts deriving from these new versions. The version of Doctor Faustus printed in 1616, for instance, seemingly incorporates the additions commissioned by the Admiral’s Men in 1602.49 It is possible to refine Knutson’s theory in relation to Jacobean tragedy. Towards the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, there seems to have been a widespread anxiety surrounding the tragic form. This discomfiture centred on tragedy’s teleological narrative structure and on the supposed need for it to follow a factual narrative. In Glossographia, for example, Blount writes that ‘The subject of a Comedy is often feigned,

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but of a Tragedy it is commonly true and once really performed’ (2R4r). Tragedy’s generic uncertainty is demonstrated in two plays performed by the Queen’s Revels company around 1611–12, both of which fulfil tragedy’s need for a factual plot and are simultaneously edgy about the genre’s function. Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk dramatises the careers of the pirates John Ward and Simon Dansiker, who were notorious public figures at the time the play was written; the incorporation of factual material, however, places strain on the play’s tragic form. The play is subtitled The Tragicall Liues and Deaths of the Two Famous Pyrates Ward And Dansiker, and its emphasis on generic characteristics continues in the prologue, which emphasises the gory activities of the pirates: Our subiect’s low, yet to your eyes presents Deeds high in bloud, in bloud of Innocents: Transcends them low, and your ¨ınvention calles To name the sinne beyond this blacke deed falles. What heretofore set others pennes aworke, Was Ward turn’d Pyrate, ours is Ward turn’d Turke.50

Contrasting A Christian Turned Turk with other versions of the story, the prologue also draws attention to the play’s dramatic high point, the scene in which Ward converts to Islam. As Lois Potter notes, Ward’s conversion was a highly topical scandal in 1612, and the prologue’s assertion about the play’s subject matter brings to bear the full weight of cultural anxiety encapsulated in ‘turning Turk’.51 The concluding lines of the play, ‘His monument in brasse wee’le thus ingraue, | VVard sold his country, turn’d Turke, and died a slaue’ (I4v; 16.325–6), imply that the pirate’s treachery, conversion and death are intrinsically linked, an inevitable process. Ward was not, however, dead in 1612; he was not killed by the Turks, but died of the plague in 1623. Therefore his death – the event which seals the play’s tragic narrative – was a convenient and dramatically satisfying fiction. The historical facts are commented on in the scene of judgement in hell at the end of Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil Is In It, played by Queen Anna’s Men shortly after the first performances of A Christian Turned Turk. Pluto asks, ‘Is Ward and Dantziker then come’, and is told that Dansiker, who died in 1611, has arrived, but that ‘Ward is not ripe for damming yet’.52 Although A. J. Hoenselaars argues that moral didacticism lies behind Daborne’s manipulation of historical fact, the play’s problematic emphasis on truth can be more closely associated with contemporary genre

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theory, as a comparison with some earlier tragedies reveals.53 A Warning for Fair Women, usually dated in first performance to the late 1580s but probably revived in the late 1590s by the Chamberlain’s Men, contains an induction sequence in which personifications of History, Comedy and Tragedy fight for control over the ensuing drama, a fight which Tragedy eventually wins.54 In the induction, tragedy is defined in neo-classical terms, concerned with portraying the political machinations of the highborn in lofty and affecting language. The play itself, however, focuses on the actions of ordinary people: ‘The most tragicall and lamentable murther of Master George Sanders of London Marchant, nigh Shooters hill’, as the title-page of the printed quarto puts it.55 When Tragedy reappears in the epilogue, she again focuses on the uneasy juxtaposition of the play’s ‘true’ subject matter and generic convention: Perhaps it may seeme strange vnto you al, That one hath not reuengde anothers death, After the obseruation of such course: The reason is, that now of truth I sing, And should I adde, or else diminish aught, Many of these spectators then could say, I haue committed error in my play.56

Adherence to one of the old ‘rules’ of tragedy, that the subject matter should be taken from real life, caused the play to deviate from the 1590s norm of the revenge tragedy. This departure from generic convention is caused by the desire to attract an audience by following the narrative of a recent scandal, but it has the effect of reconfiguring the tragic genre in which A Warning for Fair Women participates. The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, performed by Queen Elizabeth’s Men around 1588– 92 and published in 1594, is similarly preoccupied with the ‘truth’ of the genre; it is introduced by a dialogue between Poetry and Truth, and Truth orchestrates the tragedy. In A Christian Turned Turk, a chorus describes the conversion ceremony, which is displayed in a dumb show, and states: Here could I wish our period, or that our Pen Might speake the fictions, not the acts of Men. The deeds we haue presented hitherto, are white Compar’d vnto those blacke ones we must write[.] (F2v; 8.1–4)

As noted above, the chorus is itself a generic marker for tragedy, albeit one rarely used on the commercial stage. Despite his bluster in the preface to Sejanus, Jonson experiments with a chorus in Catiline, a King’s Men play

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which is closely contemporaneous with A Christian Turned Turk. It is therefore notable that Catiline seems to have failed in performance, a fact which suggests that audiences remained ambivalent towards highly classicised tragedy.57 In A Christian Turned Turk, the chorus serves to emphasise problems of genre. Its presence and its focus on the requirement to tell the truth highlight particular aspects of tragedy, but these are contradicted by the tragic narrative structure itself, which paradoxically forces on the play a fictitious conclusion. In Sophonisba, we recall, Marston argued that he aimed not ‘to relate any thing as an historian but to inlarge euery thing as a Poet’; Daborne’s play, which deals with contemporary events rather than classical history, has no choice but to engage with questions of truth, despite the tragedy’s literary trappings. In The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, also performed around 1611, we can trace a similar unease with certain aspects of tragedy. In a dedicatory letter to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, printed with the play in 1613, Chapman discusses the presentation of factual material in drama: And for the autenticall truth of eyther person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a Poeme, whose subiect is not truth, but things like truth? Poore enuious soules they are that cauill at truths want in these naturall fictions: materiall instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to Vertue, and deflection from her contrary; being the soule, lims and limits of an autenticall Tragedie.58

Like Marston, Chapman divides the duty of the poet from that of the historian. The question of ‘things like truth’ and the status of his ‘naturall fictions’, however, are highly problematic. Chapman, like Daborne, deals with very recent history, and he also follows Daborne in presenting an uneasy mixture of fact and fiction. Bussy was a historical figure, as were Chatillon, Guise, King Henry, and Monsieur, but the history of Clermont D’Ambois (Bussy’s younger brother) is a fiction, and the play situates real historical figures in a theatrical form – the tragedy of revenge – that was already well established, with its own narrative drive and conventions. The plot of The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois turns on the ethically intriguing but dramatically problematic figure of the revenger who refuses to take revenge. Clermont D’Ambois is distinguished by his refusal to play to the gallery, his reluctance – so unlike Bussy himself – to do anything spectacular until goaded into it. As Alexander Leggatt comments, ‘The tensions that surround and finally destroy Clermont D’Ambois may not be those we normally associate with a tragic hero.’59 Furthermore, the

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dissimilarity between stoic Clermont and fiery Bussy may have been ironically underlined in performance. Given that Nathan Field was noted for his performance of Bussy, and that most of the principals in the Revenge also appeared in the first play, it seems likely that Field also played Clermont. The trouble with Clermont, and Chapman’s refusal to make him the conventional hero of revenge tragedy, is underlined by his relationship with Guise. Guise is one of Bussy’s enemies in the first play, and he is also a demonic figure in plays such as Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (Strange’s Men, 1593) because of the historical Duke of Guise’s involvement in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants in 1572. With this dramatic background in mind, the extended dialogue between Baligny and Clermont seems to be structured in such a way as to shock an audience. Baligny asserts that Guise would be ‘a true tenth Worthy [. . .] did not one act onely blemish him’, to which the seemingly naive Clermont asks ‘One act? what one?’ (D3v; 2.1.198–200). Baligny equivocates and Clermont continues to question him, before Baligny informs him, ‘To satisfie you, twas the Massacre’ (D3v; 2.1.204). Astonishingly, Clermont’s reply is dismissive: ‘The Massacre? I thought twas some such blemish’; Baligny, evidently surprised, exclaims, ‘O it was hainous’ (D3v; 2.1.205–6). Clermont then subjects him to a series of sophistic arguments, arguing that ‘manly reason’ should not be disturbed by Guise’s actions and comparing the Massacre with the Trojan War: This is the Beastly slaughter made of men, When Truth is ouer-throwne, his Lawes corrupted; When soules are smother’d in the flatter’d flesh, Slaine bodies are no more then Oxen slaine. [. . .] Had faith, nor shame, all hospitable rights Been broke by Troy, Greece had not made that slaughter. Had that beene sau’d (sayes a Philosopher) The Iliads and Odysses had beene lost; Had Faith and true Religion beene prefer’d, Religious Guise had neuer massacerd. (D3v–D4r; 2.1.216–19, 239–34)

Although Guise is repentant in The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, Clermont’s trivialisation of the Massacre and his assertion of the ‘truth’ of Roman Catholicism cannot have been intended to make him engaging to a (nominally) Protestant London audience. The sequence underlines Clermont’s unworldliness and lack of political acumen, and also his complete faith in Guise, preparing the audience for his eventual suicide

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after his patron’s murder. It does not, however, make him attractive, and his reasoning here is highly dubious, associating the Massacre with a civil conflict caused by lust. Clermont himself may be a ‘naturall fiction’, but his facile rejection of the charges against Guise demonstrates the uneasy relationship between historical truth and ‘things like truth’. The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and A Christian Turned Turk both seem to have met with a frosty reception from their theatrical audiences. A Christian Turned Turk was published in 1612 with a preface ‘To the Knowing Reader’ which defended this ‘oppressed and much martird Tragedy’ against the ‘silken gulls and ignorant Cittizens’ who had criticised it on the stage (A3r; page 151). Chapman, meanwhile, told Howard that: Howsoeuer therefore in the Scaenicall presentation, it might meete with some maligners, yet considering, euen therein, it past with approbation of more worthy iudgements; the Ballance of their side (especially being held by your impartiall hand) I hope will to no graine abide the out-weighing. (A3v; lines 17–22)

Chapman figures Howard as the ideal reader of his unfairly maligned text, hoping that he can influence other readers by joining with the ‘worthy iudgements’ who appreciated the play in the theatre. Both plays may, in fact, have been published as part of a strategy aimed at rehabilitating as literature plays which had failed on the stage, evident in the quarto editions of plays such as Catiline, The Faithful Shepherdess or The Knight of the Burning Pestle.60 I suggest that the Whitefriars audience’s ambivalent reaction to plays such as A Christian Turned Turk and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois was caused in no small degree by the popularity of tragicomedy. After their experiments with tragicomedy for the Queen’s Revels, Beaumont and Fletcher embarked upon a series of successful tragicomedies performed by the King’s Men, including Philaster and A King and No King. Furthermore, Shakespeare, the King’s Men’s resident dramatist, chose this time to dabble in the form himself, writing The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, all of which are tragicomic in form. The revised versions of a number of early Jacobean tragedies have connections with tragicomic texts. Gary Taylor suggests that the revision of King Lear was contemporaneous with the writing of plays such as Cymbeline, tracing similarities between the language of Lear’s revisions and that of the tragicomedies.61 The songs in the Folio Macbeth are found also in Middleton’s The Witch, a tragicomic play first performed around 1615.62 Heavily sexual and tragicomic tragedies, such as Cupid’s Revenge, were the popular successes in the Queen’s Revels’ Whitefriars period, and both the The Revenge of

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Bussy D’Ambois and A Christian Turned Turk seem to have struggled on the stage. We might compare the repertory of the King’s Men in the same period; Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy was wildly successful, while Catiline was a theatrical flop. In comparison to the fluid genre of tragicomedy, ‘straight’ tragedies may have seemed stiflingly old-fashioned to the more modish elements in the Blackfriars and Whitefriars audiences. We can see something of this movement towards generically flexible, sexualised tragedy in another Whitefriars play, The Insatiate Countess, recently dubbed a ‘sex tragedy’ by Martin Wiggins.63 The extant text of this play seems to be derived from the draft papers of a revision by William Barksted and Lewis Machin of a play originally written by Marston.64 Marston’s draft was probably written around the same time as, or shortly after, the writing and performance of Sophonisba, the last complete play he is known to have written; the plays may originally have been intended as companion pieces, each portraying in its central character an extreme of female behaviour.65 Barksted and Machin, on the other hand, do not appear in the London theatre scene until 1607–8, and the revision is most likely to have been carried out around 1611–12, after the rise of tragicomedy as a popular genre.66 The play opens with a striking stage image, as the recently bereaved Countess is ‘discouered’ in the Whitefriars theatre’s large discovery space, ‘sitting at a Table couered with blacke, on which stands two blacke Tapers lighted, she in mourning’.67 The reverent tableau is immediately disturbed, however, by the entrance on the main stage of three young men, Roberto, Rogero and Guido. Guido exclaims: What should we doe in this Countesses darke hole? She’s sullenly retyred, as the Turtle: Euery day has beene a blacke day with her since her husband dyed, and what should wee vnruly members make here? (A2r; 1.1.1–4)

The play shatters its own tragic mood with a vein of mordant bawdy. Although Rogero tries to play the part of the ardent lover, likening Isabella to the ‘Euening-starre’ (A2r; 1.1.6), Isabella’s outlook is closer to that of Guido. In an aside to the audience, she refuses to mourn her husband: I I I I

waile his losse! Sinke him tenne cubites deeper, may not feare his resurrection: will be sworne vpon the holy Writ morne thus feruent cause, he di’d no sooner[.] (A2v; 1.1.42–5)

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Forthright language is thus used to add tension to the plot of the tragedy, establishing Isabella as a scene-stealing tragicomic villain. Similarly, the play’s comic subplot draws on tragic and tragicomic structures to complicate its own generic character. Thais and Abigail are married to the citizens Mizaldus and Claridiana, who are intent on continuing a feud originally begun by their grandfathers. The tragic potential of this civic strife is highlighted as Rogero tells Claridiana that their ‘dissentions may erect a faction | Like to the Capulets and Montagues’ (A4v-B1r; 1.1.186). It is symptomatic of the play’s focus on bawdy in its comic and tragic plots that each husband hopes to outdo his rival by cuckolding him. Through their friendship, however, Thais and Abigail are able to remain chaste in the face of their husbands’ ludicrous desires. They deploy a bed trick – familiar to audiences from tragicomic plays such as Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well and Marston’s own tragedy for the Queen’s Revels, Sophonisba – and each husband unwittingly sleeps with his own wife. Although the bed trick is used here for comic purposes, in the context of a plot which has notably tragic resonances, its happy conclusion cannot have been assumed.68 Although it is difficult to tell just how thoroughly Barksted and Machin revised The Insatiate Countess, it seems likely that this focus on the sexual was at least one of the reasons for the play’s performance alongside the likes of Cupid’s Revenge. Another aspect of the text suggests that at least part of the play’s generic make-up was exaggerated in revision. In one particularly interesting piece of textual reworking, we find the addition of quotations from earlier poems, which according to Giorgio Melchiori seem to have been ‘scarcely legible additions scrawled either in the margin or between the lines of the manuscript’.69 Particularly prominent are lines from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies (A3r, 1.1.55, 73–4; D2v, 2.3.58–65; D3v, 2.3.122–3), and Barksted’s own Ovidian poems Hiren and Mirrha (A4r, 1.1.124; K1v, 5.2.230–1). Direct quotation and other verbal emendation are found throughout the play, even where structure and dialogue are left intact, suggesting that the revisers were concerned with the overall verbal texture and tone of the play. The revision of the play may therefore have been calculated to suit the changing nature of tragedy in the early Jacobean period, increasing its sexual content and incorporating queasily comic effects into tragic structures.

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In this context I intend now to take another look at the relationship between the two extant texts of Bussy D’Ambois: the 1607/8 quarto (hereafter QA) and the 1641 quarto (hereafter QB).70 QA was performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels around 1604, and by the Children of Paul’s around 1605–6; QB, I suggest, represents the play as it was revised for performance at Whitefriars around 1611–12. Influenced by tragicomedy, the rewriting of Bussy has the important effect of making the play more comic at some crucial points, notably in its additions to the rather incongruous rivalry between Bussy and Monsieur for Tamyra. Similarly, at Henry’s court in Act Three, the king invites the courtiers to a banquet of reconciliation at which he expects them to ‘sacrifice | Full cups to confirmation of your loues; | At which (faire Ladies) I entreat your presence’ (QA E2v–E3r; 3.2.128–30). In the revised text he continues, telling the Duchess that he hopes she ‘will take one carowse | For reconcilement of your Lord and servant’ (QB E3v; 3.2.131–2). This leads into a brief discussion between the Duchess, Monsieur, Bussy and Tamyra: d u c h e s . If I should faile my Lord, some other Lady Would be found there to doe that for my servant. m o n s . Any of these here? d u c h e s . Nay, I know not that. d ’ a m b . Think your thoughts, like my Mistresse, honour’d Lady. tamy. I think not on you Sir, y’are one I know not. d ’ a m b . Cry you mercy Madam. m o n t s . Oh Sir, has she met you? (QB E3v; 3.2.133–8)

The additional lines contrast the knowing malice of the Duchess with the studied indifference of Tamyra and the innocence of Montsurry. Although he argues that the additions are ‘not necessary’, Nicholas Brooke acknowledges that they ‘would be likely to help on the stage’, their ironic comedy also giving lines to otherwise silent women.71 As the plots against Bussy thicken during the third act, we find a series of revisions and additions. QA has a soliloquy from Monsieur in which the audience are made aware of his misogynistic dislike of Tamyra and his growing hostility towards his prote´ge´: m o n s . O the vnsounded Sea of womens bloods, That when tis calmest, is most dangerous; Not any wrincle creaming in their faces,

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When in their hearts are Scylla and Charibdis. Which still are hid in monster-formed cloudes, Where neuer day shines, nothing euer growes, But weeds and poisons, that no states-man knowes; Not Cerberus euer saw the damned nookes Hid with the vailes of womens vertuous lookes: I will conceale all yet, and giue more time To D’Ambois triall, now vpon my hooke; He awes my throat; else like Sybillas Caue It should breath oracles; I feare him strangely, And may resemble his aduanced valour Vnto a spirit rais’d without a circle, Endangering him that ignorantly rais’d him, And for whose furie he hath learn’d no limit. Enter D’Ambois. m o n s . How now, what leap’st thou at? (QA F1r; 3.2.284–301)

QB includes most of the above soliloquy – only lines 293–5 and the first half of 296 are omitted – but breaks it up with a series of interpolated passages. After the first nine lines of the soliloquy, QB adds lines illuminating Monsieur’s fear of Bussy and his desire to strike quickly; this sequence opens with a development of the devilish and explosive associations which Bussy has gathered in the Prince’s mind: But what a cloud of sulphur have I drawne Up to my bosome in this dangerous secret? Which if my hast (with any spark) should light Ere D’Ambois were engag’d in some sure plot I were blowne up. (QB F2r; 3.2.300–4)

Monsieur orders his officious steward, Maffe´, to bar the door to anyone but Montsurry or Guise, at which point Maffe´ begins to equivocate in a manner familiar from his earlier appearances in the play. Eventually, he departs, grumbling about Bussy’s former treatment of him: m a f f e . I goe my Lord. I had my head broke in his faithfull service, I had no suit the more, nor any thanks, And yet my teeth must still be hit with D’Ambois. D’Ambois my Lord shall know. —— m o n s . The devill and D’Ambois. Exit Maffe. How am I tortur’d with this trusty foole? (QB F2v; 3.2.343–7)

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In addition to providing comic relief in the jarring lack of communication between master and servant, the revision also implies that there are parallels between Monsieur’s dislike for Bussy and Maffe´’s hatred. Since the steward has been holding a grudge against Bussy since the opening of the play, the additions have the effect of undermining Monsieur still further and making his resentment against Bussy seem merely petty. Monsieur finally gets a moment to himself, and eventually, after some further additional lines, finishes the soliloquy from QA: Grant thou great starre, and angell of my life, A sure lease of it but for some few dayes, That I may cleare my bosome of the Snake I cherisht there, and I will then defie All check to it but Natures, and her Altars Shall crack with vessels crown’d with ev’ry liquor Drawn from her highest, and most bloudy humors. I feare him strangely, his advanced valour Is like a spirit rais’d without a circle, Endangering him that ignorantly rais’d him, And for whose fury he hath learnt no limit. (QB F2v–F3r; 3.2.353–63)

Maffe´’s delay in closing the door has meant, however, that Bussy has been able to access Monsieur after all. Concealing his true feelings, Monsieur greets Bussy with his habitual ‘My sweet heart!’, and only later becomes overtly vicious (words and passages altered from QA are highlighted in bold type): d ’ a m b . O royall object. m o n s . Thou dream’st awake: Object in th’empty aire? d ’ a m b . Worthy the browes of Titan, worth his chaire. m o n s . Pray thee what mean’st thou? d ’ a m b . See you not a Crowne Empale the forehead of the great King Monsieur? m o n s . O fie upon thee. d ’ a m b . Prince, that is the Subject Of all these your retir’d and sole discourses. m o n s . Wilt thou not leave that wrongfull supposition? d ’ a m b . Why wrongfull? to suppose the doubtlesse right To the succession worth the thinking on. m o n s . Well, leave these jests, how I am over-joyed With thy wish’d presence, and how fit thou com’st, For of mine honour I was sending for thee. d ’ a m b . To what end?

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m o n s . Onely for thy company, Which I have still in thought, but that’s no payment On thy part made with personall appearance. Thy absence so long suffered oftentimes Put me in some little doubt thou do’st not love me. Wilt thou doe one thing therefore now sincerely? d ’ a m b . I, any thing, but killing of the King. m o n s . Still in that discord, and ill taken note? How most unseasonable thou playest the Cucko, In this thy fall of friendship? d ’ a m b . Then doe not doubt, That there is any act within my nerves, But killing of the King that is not yours. (QB F3r–v; 3.2.370–94)

The revised version heightens our sense of Monsieur’s hypocrisy; his protested affection for Bussy and his avowed desire to see him are ironically juxtaposed with his prolonged and frantic attempts to bar Bussy’s entry. Moreover, the substitution of ‘Prince’ for QA’s ‘Sir’, and the repetition of the phrase ‘killing of the King’ seem to be deliberate reminders of the extent of Monsieur’s perfidy. In addition, as Rowe notes, QB’s references to sulphur and gunpowder, and its language of intrigue, uncomfortably recall events such as the Gunpowder Plot.72 The addition of the exchange between Monsieur and Maffe´ therefore creates a jarring mixture of tones similar to that found in contemporaneous comictragedies such as Cupid’s Revenge and The Insatiate Countess. In a similar vein, a short passage is added to the start of Monsieur’s and Bussy’s stagey flyting (insults thrown in turn in a formalised manner, in a kind of verbal duel). This is probably because the sequence was popular on stage; in The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois the audience is teased with the possibility of a rematch between Monsieur and Clermont D’Ambois. The first exchange between Monsieur and Clermont seems to be designed to underline the differences between the brothers, as Clermont steadfastly refuses to rise to Monsieur’s steady stream of insults. When he eventually retorts, however, it is to repeat a crucial line spoken by Bussy in the earlier play, the same line which is repeated in the revised version of Bussy D’Ambois – ‘But killing of the King’: m o n s . Or did the slie Guise put thee Into my bosome, t’vndermine my proiects? I feare thee not; for though I be not sure I haue thy heart, I know thy braine-pan yet To be as emptie a dull piece of wainscot As euer arm’d the scalpe of any Courtier;

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The revision of Bussy D’Ambois therefore seems to be, as critics have argued, closely entwined with the writing of The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois. This linguistic correspondence must have been amplified if, as I speculated above, both Bussy and Clermont were played by Nathan Field; Field is also sometimes thought to have been involved with the revision of Bussy D’Ambois, a practical man of the theatre to Chapman’s poet.73 The modulation of Monsieur’s part in the first play and the exchange with Clermont in its sequel also underline the fact that both plays are concerned, on one level, with male friendship.74 In Bussy D’Ambois the friendship between Monsieur and Bussy is soured by Bussy’s relationship with Tamyra, leading eventually to Bussy’s murder at the hands of hired assassins; in The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois Clermont’s relationship with Guise is all-consuming and eventually leads to his suicide after the death of his friend. The most crucial revision to Bussy D’Ambois, however, occurs in the final act. The conclusion of a play is all-important in creating tragic effect, as shown by Daborne’s incorporation of Ward’s fictitious death in A Christian Turned Turk or Beaumont and Fletcher’s changes to their source story in Cupid’s Revenge. We are also reminded of the importance of death in these plays, as the tragic narrative moves to its conclusion. In the later version of Bussy D’Ambois, the basic trajectory of the plot is unchanged, but the manner in which death is encountered, and the surrounding characters’ reactions to it, are modulated. The crucial change is one of tone. The obvious strategies open to a playwright were either to make the ending more uncertain, moving closer to tragicomedy, or to make it even darker, in effect more tragic. Ironically, the incorporation of tragicomic material in the revised version of Bussy D’Ambois actually has the latter effect: the conclusion of QB is even more dismal than that of QA. This is achieved partly through the addition of darkly ironic dialogue. At the start of Act Five, Tamyra is dragged on stage by her husband Montsurry – in a fit of vengeful fury at her affair with Bussy – with her priest and confidant Friar Comolet following. In QA this entrance is followed by a lengthy, philosophically tinged speech from Comolet, but QB inserts a new exchange between the three characters:

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t a m y . O Help me Father. f r i e r . Impious Earle forbeare. Take violent hand from her, or by mine order The King shall force thee. m o n t s . Tis not violent; come you not willingly? t a m y . Yes good my Lord. (QB H3r; 5.1.1–4)

As Brooke notes, the last lines are deeply ironic, and the addition also heightens the Friar’s all-too-human helplessness in the face of Montsurry’s barely veiled violence. Similarly, later in the scene QB adds Tamyra’s plaintive call to the Friar for help, and the Friar’s horribly mistaken response: t a m . Father. f r i e r . I warrant thee my dearest daughter He will not touch thee, think’st thou him a Pagan; His honor and his soule lies for thy safety. (QB H3v; 5.1.42–4)

This exchange matches the last for irony; the Friar’s weakness is that he believes in the kind of innate virtue which has no place in the play’s politic world, and this is intensified by QB’s additions. The scene’s conclusion, in which Montsurry tortures Tamyra on a rack and the Friar dies from shock, is largely unaltered in QB. Act Five, Scenes Two to Four, which comprise the play’s conclusion, are, however, the most heavily amended, and an entire scene is relocated. QA follows the exits of Montsurry and Tamyra with the appearance of the Friar’s ghost to Bussy, the conjuring of Behemoth, and the deception of Bussy by Montsurry. Monsieur and Guise then appear ‘above’, where they discuss their revenge in philosophical terms. The climactic, but ultimately unheroic death of Bussy, when he is shot by a group of hired murderers after winning his duel with Montsurry, follows; Montsurry forgives Tamyra but urges their separation, and the Friar’s ghost speaks the last lines: My terrors are strook inward, and no more My pennance will allow they shall enforce Earthly afflictions but vpon my selfe: Farewell braue relicts of a compleat man: Looke vp and see thy spirit made a star, Ioine flames with Hercules: and when thou setst Thy radiant forhead in the firmament, Make the vast continent, cracke with thy receit, Spred to a world of fire: and th’aged skie, Chere with new sparkes of old humanity. (QA I4v; 5.3.261–70)

162

Children of the Queen’s Revels

The first version of Bussy ends, therefore, with an assertion of the prophetic power of the supernatural and the immortal glory of Bussy himself. In QB the dialogue between Monsieur and Guise appears as Act Five, Scene Two, immediately after the exits of Montsurry and Tamyra. An added exchange with the murderers, in which Monsieur instructs them, ‘When he is entred, and you heare us stamp, | Approach, and make all sure’ (QB I2v; 5.2.57–8), highlights the complicity of both men in Bussy’s death. Whereas no exit is specified in QA, QB specifies that Monsieur and Guise exit after the added lines. They reenter in the final scene (eventually making their appearance on the balcony), and an additional line in which they urge on the murderers, ‘Why enter not the coward villains?’ (QB K1r; 5.4.40), implicates them fully. Additional lines spoken by Monsieur to Guise after the murder – ‘Come let’s away, my sences are not proofe | Against these plaints’ (QB K3r; 5.4.184–5) – provide another reminder of Monsieur’s hypocrisy and his desire not to see the full consequences of his actions. In QB both Monsieur and the Guise are instructed to exit at this point, and they are not on stage for the play’s final exchange between Tamyra and Montsurry.75 In the same sequence extra lines for the Friar’s ghost and Tamyra stress the supernatural being’s powerlessness; QB also resituates the Friar’s images of Bussy’s fiery afterlife to immediately after Bussy’s death. The last lines of the play are given instead to Montsurry, which is consistent with the ironic twist of many of QB’s revisions. The last lines of a play are conventionally given to the on-stage character with the most authority; in terms of social rank, and in the absence of Monsieur and Guise, that character is Montsurry. However, Montsurry has forfeited his moral authority in his torture of Tamyra and his complicity in Bussy’s murder, and as the conclusion of the play his order of separation to Tamyra is horribly bleak: Now turne from me, as here I turne from thee, And may both points of heavens strait axeltree Conjoyne in one, before thy selfe and me. (QB K3v; 5.4.218–20)

Under the influence of tragicomedy the play resists a conventional tragic conclusion; this version of Bussy, with its final image of eternal separation, also resists any consolation that tragedy might bring, and any sense that society can be rebuilt in its aftermath.

Tragedy and the text

163

conclusion The tragedies performed by the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres engage with questions fundamental to the genre’s character and structure. They also show how those questions impacted on the afterlives of these plays in print, when generic instability provoked a concomitant textual instability. Although Aristotelian tradition held that tragedy was the most prestigious of dramatic genres, it was nonetheless subject to commercial dictates of various kinds. In the tragedies performed at Blackfriars, we find the Queen’s Revels staging ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’, appropriating a genre which was not generally associated with the children’s companies. This productive tension between genre and company composition leads to the incorporation of neo-closet tragedy within a commercial repertory in Philotas, the complex tragic spectacle of Sophonisba, and the wayward political improvisation of Byron. The company’s tendency to allow its dramatists to publish their plays also allows us to consider the ways in which the authors of these tragedies attempted to reconstitute the genre in print, negotiating in a complex manner the problems caused by performance and the gap between performance and print. In the tragedies performed at Whitefriars, we find the Queen’s Revels picking up various characteristics of the Blackfriars repertory, notably the intense sexual material presented in Sophonisba and in the original version of Bussy D’Ambois. Their tragedies in this period are also, however, affected by the increasing popularity of tragicomedy. The prominence of sexualised, ironic comic-tragedy exemplified by the popular Cupid’s Revenge led to the problematic performance and publication of plays such as The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and A Christian Turned Turk, and the revision of The Insatiate Countess and Bussy D’Ambois. Adopting one possible tactic, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois and A Christian Turned Turk attempt to stress conventional generic markers for tragedy, such as factual subject matter and the chorus, though their subject matter – recent history and current events – can be contained only uneasily within the narrative structures of tragedy. Finding another way out of the problem, the revised versions of The Insatiate Countess and Bussy D’Ambois enter into dialogue with tragicomedy, creating a fluid and darkly ironic new guise for the older genre.

Conclusion

Who writes and thinkes to please the generall tast, Where eyes and eares are fed, shal find he hath plast His worke with the fond Painter, who did mend So long, that striuing to please others, gaue no end To his owne labours; for vs, and if not all We know we haue pleased some, whose iudgements fall Beyond the common ranke, to whom we humbly yeeld Our selues and labours[.] 1

The epilogue to Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk highlights a number of the issues with which this study has engaged. Like most epilogues, it suggests the power of the audience over both playwright and company, in its attempt to control the behaviour of the play’s spectators through flattery and cajoling them into joining their applause with the discerning and gentle (in both senses) element. In its analogy between dramatist and painter, it embodies the early modern theatre industry’s insistent intermingling of aesthetics and commerce, also evident in the ways in which companies commonly marketed and commissioned their plays in terms of literary conventions such as genre. It also, however, suggests something of the persistently experimental quality of the company’s plays, its tendency to risk works such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Cupid’s Revenge or Epicoene which are, in their various ways, more extreme plays than any other performed in the period. Above all, it insists on collaboration within the company. Daborne, a Queen’s Revels patentee, links his own ‘labours’ as dramatist with that of the actors who embody his play and who share his responsibility in what is presented. I began this study with a history of the Chapel/Queen’s Revels Children at the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres and an account of their repertory. In doing so I have also made a case for the utility of a repertory approach to early modern drama. The Queen’s Revels plays were created not only by the dramatists, but also through the ideas and desires of the 164

Conclusion

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company’s shareholders, licenser, patrons, actors and audience. The repertory system of production, organised around playing companies, created an environment in which texts and ideas were circulated between people from vastly different professions and backgrounds. Companies reacted to the plays performed alongside their own, with influences and sources bouncing back and forth between adult and children’s companies alike, just as plays occasionally moved from one theatre to another. As we have seen, the production of plays such as The Faithful Shepherdess or Bussy D’Ambois was predicated not only on authorial whim, but also on commercial exigency and on the relationship between individuals within companies. Influential patrons such as Anna of Denmark could find their literary tastes reflected, while the predilections of a paying audience were both mocked and feared. Shareholders might preserve plays which were seen as having been abandoned by their authors, as Walter Burre credits Keysar with protecting The Knight of the Burning Pestle, or they might take plays to other companies, as Kirkham appears to have done with Bussy D’Ambois and The Fawn. Company members such as Nathan Field and William Barksted could contribute to the writing of plays as well as to their performance. Focusing on the company and on interaction between the plays they performed provides us with a snapshot of the way in which particular genres or narratives and attitudes towards them from authors or audiences were shifting even within a comparatively short space of time. The commercial need for freshness and innovation, to see plays ‘new vamped’, propelled changes within the drama and in the constitution of the theatre repertory. I have also demonstrated the central place of the Queen’s Revels company in the development of dramatic form during the years 1603–13. In the case of tragicomedy, I have argued that the Queen’s Revels created a ‘new’ commercial genre through the incorporation of various source texts – notably Guarinian ‘pastoral tragicomedy’, Spenserian pastoral and Lylyan tragical comedy – into their repertory. In the case of comedy and tragedy, we can see the Queen’s Revels’ experimentation with preexisting genres and, in particular, the ironic reworking of their codes and cliche´s. In the Queen’s Revels comedies, the conventional ‘happy ending’ is repeatedly interrogated and made laughable: excessive repentances in Eastward Ho unsettle the basis on which comic reconciliation is formulated, marriage is made to be a punishment in Your Five Gallants, and Epicoene concludes with a memorable anticomedic coup de the´aˆtre. Tragedy, a genre normally associated with the adult companies, was incorporated into the Blackfriars repertory, and plays were tailored to the

166

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capabilities of the juvenile actors and the tastes of their audiences. At the Whitefriars theatre the Queen’s Revels’ dramatists were forced to engage with the company’s own generic innovation, as the popularity of the tragicomedy they fostered began to affect audiences’ expectations of tragedy. Even after the Queen’s Revels vanished as an independent organisation, their plays stayed in textual and theatrical circulation. As noted in Chapter Four, the majority of their plays were in print by the end of 1613, and they continued to appear in new editions over the following years. In the course of the seventeenth century, some of their works were absorbed into the emergent print canons associated with Jonson (1616), Marston (1633) and Beaumont and Fletcher (1647), following the pattern of the incorporation of Philotas into Daniel’s editions of his works. In the theatres, at least some of their plays moved to the Lady Elizabeth’s Men: Eastward Ho and The Dutch Courtesan, for instance, took on new associations when they were performed in repertory with Bartholomew Fair or A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Others later became staples in the repertories of the King’s Men, Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men and Beeston’s Boys. Successful plays such as Bussy D’Ambois and Cupid’s Revenge continued to thrive on the Caroline stage, while The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Faithful Shepherdess were recuperated in ways which their writers and original performers may not have envisaged. The Scornful Lady, by that time a King’s Men play, was apparently the last to be performed at court before the outbreak of the Civil War; Henry Herbert records that ‘On Twelfe Night, 1641, the prince had a play called The Scornful Lady, at the Cockpitt, but the kinge and queene were not there; and it was the only play acted at courte in the whole Christmas.’2 The Caroline period had seen a revived interest in children’s companies. A short-lived Children of the Revels was established at the Salisbury Court as a training ground for the King’s Men, and Beeston’s Boys (also known as the King and Queen’s Young Company) was a hybrid company, containing a greater number of young actors than Caroline companies generally supported.3 During the Civil War the professional children’s company was no longer viable, and despite a final flourish with the nursery theatres, the model did not survive long into the Restoration, when the theatre industry looked to actresses as a new dramatic novelty. However, the dramatic modes pioneered by the Children of the Queen’s Revels were to dominate drama in the late seventeenth century, even as plays such as Epicoene, The Faithful Shepherdess and Bussy D’Ambois found new life in its theatres.

Appendix A: The Chapel/Queen’s Revels repertory (Summary)

Dates of first performance by the Chapel/Queen’s Revels are given for all plays, with known revivals listed separately (e.g., entries for The Coxcomb c.1608 and 1612). The fourth column records whether performances in that year were revivals (Love’s Metamorphosis, for instance, was first performed by the Chapel company as a revival, having been performed c.1590 by the Children of Paul’s); there may have been any number of unrecorded revivals. For further details, see Appendix B.

Title

Author

Date

Revival?

First published

Love’s Metamorphosis Cynthia’s Revels Liberality and Prodigality The Poetaster All Fools May Day Sir Giles Goosecap The Gentleman Usher ‘Jeronimo’

Lyly

1600

Yes

1601

Jonson Unknown

1600 1601

No Yes

1601 1602

Jonson Chapman Chapman Chapman

1601 c.1601 c.1601 c.1602

No Possibly No No

1602 1605 1611 1606

Chapman

c.1602

No

1606

Unknown (possibly Kyd) Marston Day Marston

c.1603

Yes?

1605?

c.1603 c.1604 c.1604

No No No

1604 1608 1605

Chapman Chapman Marston

c.1604 1604–5 1604–5

No Yes No

1607/8 (A Text) 1605 1606

The Malcontent Law Tricks The Dutch Courtesan Bussy D’Ambois All Fools The Fawn

167

Appendix A

168

Title

Author

Date

Revival?

First published

Philotas The Widow’s Tears The Case is Altered Monsieur D’Olive Eastward Ho

Daniel Chapman

1604–5 1604–5

No No

1605 1612

Jonson

c.1605–8

Yes

1609

Chapman

c.1605

No

1606

Chapman, Jonson and Marston Marston Sharpham Day Middleton

1605

No

1605

1605–6 c.1606 1606 1606

No No No No

1606 1607 1606 Lost

Beaumont

c.1607

No

1613

Middleton

c.1607

No

c.1608

Beaumont and Fletcher Fletcher

1607–8

No

1615

c.1608

No

c.1609

Middleton

c.1608

Yes

1608

Beaumont and Fletcher Chapman

c.1608

No

1647

1608

No

1608

Unknown Jonson Chapman Beaumont and Fletcher Field

1608 1609–10 c.1610 c.1610

No No Yes No

Lost 1616 1611 1616

c.1610

No

1612

Sophonisba The Fleer The Isle of Gulls The Viper and her Brood The Knight of the Burning Pestle Your Five Gallants Cupid’s Revenge The Faithful Shepherdess A Trick to Catch the Old One The Coxcomb Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron ‘The Silver Mine’ Epicoene May Day The Scornful Lady A Woman is a Weathercock

The repertory (Summary)

169

Title

Author

Date

Revival?

First published

The Insatiate Countess

Marston, revised by Barksted and Machin Chapman (and Field?) Chapman

c.1611

Possibly

1613

c.1611

Yes

1641 (B Text)

c.1611

No

1613

Field

c.1611

No

1618

Daborne

1611

No

1612

Chapman

1611–12

Yes

1612

Beaumont and Fletcher Beaumont and Fletcher Chapman

1612

Yes

1647

1612–13

Yes

1615

1613

Yes

1612

Bussy D’Ambois The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois Amends for Ladies A Christian Turned Turk The Widow’s Tears The Coxcomb Cupid’s Revenge The Widow’s Tears

Appendix B: The Chapel/Queen’s Revels repertory (Data and analysis)

All Fools (c.1601?; 1604–5) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Performed at court 1 January 1605 (see Appendix E); Q1605: ‘Presented at the Black | Fryers, And lately before | his Maiestie’. May originally have been written c.1601, or have been an adaptation of Admiral’s Men’s All Fools but the Fool (1599). ES, vol. 3, 252; Parrot, Comedies, vol. 2, 709; Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 243–5. Editions: 1605 Amends for Ladies (c.1611) Dramatist: Field Provenance: Q1618: ‘acted at the Blacke-Fryers, | both by the PRINCES Seruants, and | the Lady ELIZABETHS’ (presumably the short-lived Porter’s Hall playhouse). This was probably a revival, and original performance is usually ascribed to Whitefriars, c.1611 (Peery, Plays of Nathan Field, 143). Cameo appearance of Moll Cutpurse, a central figure in the Prince’s Men’s The Roaring Girl (c.1610), supports this dating. Editions: 1618, 1639 Bussy D’Ambois (c.1604; c.1611) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1607/8: ‘often presented at Paules’; generally thought that this came after earlier performances at Blackfriars c.1604 (Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 252–5). The part of Bussy was (according to 1641 prologue) first played by Nathan Field. Probable that Bussy and The Fawn were taken to Paul’s by Edward Kirkham in early 1606, and that Bussy was reclaimed by Queen’s Revels and performed with its sequel at Whitefriars c.1611. Later property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 118). Stationers’ Register: 3 June 1607 Editions: 1607/8, 1641 The Case is Altered (c.1605– 8) Dramatist: Jonson Provenance: Q1609: ‘sundry times Acted by the | Children of the Blacke-friers’. Probably first performed c.1597–8 by Chamberlain’s Men; there are allusions to ‘that witty play of, the Case is altered’ in Nashe’s 1599 Lenten Stuff (K2v). Often 170

The repertory (Data and analysis)

171

thought that references to Antonio Balladino in 1.1 are interpolations; Chambers (ES, vol. 3, 357) dates revision to after 1605. See also Mack, ‘Ben Jonson’s Own “Comedy of Errors”’. Stationers’ Register: 26 January 1609 Editions: 1609 A Christian Turned Turk (1611) Dramatist: Daborne Provenance: Based on Newes from Sea, Of two Notorious Pyrats Ward [. . .] and [. . .] Danseker (1609), and draws on news of Ward’s conversion in 1610 and of the execution of Dansiker in 1611 (Maxwell, ‘Notes’; Potter, ‘Pirates and “turning Turk”’, 130–1). Daborne’s role as patentee for Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars makes it likely that the play was written for them. Stationers’ Register: 1 February 1612 Editions: 1612 The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1608) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1608: ‘Acted lately in two playes, at the | Blacke-Friers’. French ambassador complained about performances of a play about Marshal Biron during Lent 1608 (Margeson, Byron, 276–7), and a letter from Sir Thomas Lake indicates performance in early March (ES, vol. 2, 53–4). Q1625 (‘Acted lately in two Playes, at the | Blacke-Friers, and other publique Stages’) may indicate late Jacobean revival. Stationers’ Register: 5 June 1608 Editions: 1608, 1625 The Coxcomb (c.1608) Dramatist: Beaumont and Fletcher Provenance: Court performance by Queen’s Revels October–November 1612 (see Appendix E). Chambers (ES, vol. 3, 224) argues that the original date lies between 1608, when Baudouin’s French translation of The Curious Impertinent from Don Quixote was published, and 1610, when Jonson’s The Alchemist, which refers to ‘a Don Quixote’ and ‘a Knight o’ the curious coxcombe’ (K4v; 4.7.40–1) was performed. Probably performed at Blackfriars and retained in Whitefriars repertory. Later property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 110). Stationers’ Register: 4 September 1646 Editions: 1647 (collection) Cupid’s Revenge (1607– 8) Dramatist: Beaumont and Fletcher Provenance: Court performances by Queen’s Revels 5 January 1612, 1 and 9 January 1613 (see Appendix E); Q1615 credits Queen’s Revels. Savage (‘Date’) convincingly places first performances in 1607–8. Later property of Lady Elizabeth’s Men and Beeston’s Boys ( JCS, vol. 1, 194, 337). Stationers’ Register: 24 April 1615 Editions: 1615, 1630, 1635

172

Appendix B

Cynthia’s Revels (1600) Dramatist: Jonson Provenance: Q1601: As it hath been sundry times | priuately acted in the Black- | Friers by the Children | of her Maiesties | Chappell ’; F1616: ‘Acted, in the yeere 1600. | By the then Children of Queen | ELIZABETHS | Chappell ’. Stationers’ Register: 23 May 1601 Editions: 1601, 1616 (collection), 1640 (collection) The Dutch Courtesan (c.1604) Dramatist: Marston Provenance: Q1605: ‘AS | IT WAS PLAYD IN THE | Blacke-Friars, by the Children | of her Maiesties Reuels ’. Stationers’ Register entry of 26 June 1605 suggests performance before this date; use of Montaigne places it after publication of Florio’s translation in 1603. May have been performed at court at Greenwich on 29 July 1606 (see Appendix E). Later property of Lady Elizabeth’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 195). Stationers’ Register: 26 June 1605 Editions: 1605, 1633 (collection) Eastward Ho (1605) Dramatist: Chapman, Jonson and Marston Provenance: 1605 editions: ‘playd in the | Black-friers. | By | The Children of her Maiesties Reuels’. Usually thought to have been performed in early to mid-1605. See Van Fossen, Eastward Ho, 4–11, 218–25; Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 249. Later property of Lady Elizabeth’s Men (Van Fossen, Eastward Ho, 39). Stationers’ Register: 4 September 1605 Editions: 1605 (three editions) Epicoene (1609–10) Dramatist: Jonson Provenance: F1616: ‘Acted in the yeere 1609. By | the Children of her Maiesties | REVELLS’. Since the theatres were closed for most of 1609 owing to precautions against the plague, it was probably first acted in either December 1609 or early 1610. Granting of the royal patent on 4 January 1610 might indicate performance after this date. Later property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 122). Stationers’ Register: 20 September 1610 Editions: 1616 (collection), 1620, 1640 (collection) Note: In his 1816 edition of Jonson, William Gifford claimed to have seen a 1612 text (Greg, Bibligraphy, vol. 1, 442–3). The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1608) Dramatist: Fletcher Provenance: Jonson told Drummond in the winter of 1618–19 that ‘Flesher and Beaumont, ten yeers since hath written the Fathfull Shipheardesse a Tragicomedie well done’ (HSS, vol. 1, 138). Suggests, with Fletcher’s reference to ‘the infection’ in dedicatory verses to Sir Walter Aston (¶1r; Bowers, vol. 3, 493

The repertory (Data and analysis)

173

[line 4]), that it was first performed in plague-disrupted seasons c.1608. The undated quarto was probably issued between December 1608, when its publishers are first recorded working together, and May 1610, when dedicatee Sir William Skipwith died. Although no company is named in the first quarto, ascription to the Queen’s Revels is uncontroversial (ES, vol. 3, 222). Later property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 110–11). Editions: Undated (c.1609), 1629, 1634 The Fawn (1604–5) Dramatist: Marston. Provenance: Q1606A: ‘DIVERS | times presented at the blacke Fri- | ars, by the Children of the Queenes | Maiesties Reuels’. Draws on Florio’s Montaigne (1603), and unlikely to have been performed before reopening of theatres was permitted on 9 April 1604. Property of Paul’s from early 1606; probably taken there by Edward Kirkham. See Finkelpearl, John Marston, 223–4; ES, vol. 3, 432. Stationers’ Register: 12 March 1606 Editions: 1606 (two editions), 1633 (collection) The Fleer (c.1606) Dramatist: Sharpham Provenance: Q1607: ‘often played in the | Blacke-Fryers by the Children of | the Reuells’. Written as a response to or replacement for The Fawn, which was taken to Children of Paul’s c. early 1606. Stationers’ Register: 13 May 1606 and 12 November 1606 Editions: 1607, 1610, 1615, 1631 The Gentleman Usher (c.1602) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Generally attributed to Chapel/Queen’s Revels via Chapman’s sustained association with them. Possibly performed as late as 1603, although often thought to be c.1602 (Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 246–8; Smith, Gentleman Usher, xv). Editions: 1606 The Insatiate Countess (c.1611) Dramatist: Marston, revised by Barksted and Machin Provenance: Q1613 variant title-page: ‘sundry times Acted at the | White-Friers, by the Children of the Reuels’. Since Marston probably retired from the theatre c.1606 (see Appendix C), his part of the play cannot be dated any later. Links between Barksted and Machin and the King’s Revels have led some to assign the play to this company, but the only company described as ‘The Children of the Revels’ is the Children of the [Queen’s] Revels (see title-pages of The Isle of Gulls [1606] and The Fleer [1607]). By 1609/10 Barksted was a member of the Queen’s Revels company. Editions: 1613, 1631

174

Appendix B

The Isle of Gulls (1606) Dramatist: Day Provenance: Q1606 title-page: ‘often playd in the blacke | Fryars, by the Children of | the Reuels’. Performed c. 16 February 1606. Letter from Sir Edward Hoby to Sir Thomas Edmondes, dated 7 March 1606, describes action taken against the play in the context of events of 15–17 February 1606 (Birch, Court and Times, 60–1). Editions: 1606, 1633 ‘Jeronimo’ (c.1602–3) Dramatist: Kyd? Provenance: Induction to third quarto of The Malcontent, written for King’s Men, accuses the Blackfriars company of stealing a play from them, in return for which they stole The Malcontent: ‘Why not Maleuole in folio with vs, as Ieronimo in Decimo sexto with them’ (A4r). ‘Ieronimo’ is generally thought to be either Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (Hunter, Malcontent, xxviii), though this play is thought to have belonged to the Admiral’s/Prince Henry’s Men, or the anonymous First Part of Jeronimo. With the Warres of Portugall, and the Life and Death of Don Andraea, published 1605 and perhaps based on a prequel by Kyd (Reibetanz, ‘Hieronimo’; Erne, Beyond The Spanish Tragedy, 14–46, especially 21–3). Stationers’ Register: 6 October 1592 (Spanish Tragedy); none (First Part of Jeronimo) Editions: ?1592, 1594, 1599, 1602, 1603, 1611, 1615, 1618, 1623, 1633 (Spanish Tragedy); 1605 (First Part of Jeronimo) The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607) Dramatist: Beaumont Provenance: Publisher Walter Burre addresses prefatory letter to Robert Keysar, Queen’s Revels shareholder c.1606–1610. Allusions to The Travels of the Three English Brothers (Queen Anna’s Men, acted and printed 1607) argue against earlier date. Later date, 1610, has been proposed (see Taylor, ‘Lady Arabella Stuart’), but performance in 1607 fits Citizen’s complaint, ‘This seuen yeares there hath beene playes at this house [. . .] you haue still girds at Citizens’ (B1r; Induction, lines 6–8). Later property of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men and Beeston’s Boys ( JCS, vol. 1, 250, 337). Editions: 1613, 1635 (two editions) Law Tricks (c.1604) Dramatist: Day Provenance: Q1608 names ‘the Children of the Revels’, a company name used on the title-pages of The Isle of Gulls (1606) and The Fleer (1607), both of which name venue as Blackfriars. If current dating to 1604 is correct (Crow, Law Tricks, v; ES, vol. 3, 285–6), it cannot have been first performed by King’s Revels company. Editions: 1608

The repertory (Data and analysis)

175

Liberality and Prodigality (1601) Dramatist: Unknown Provenance: Q1602: ‘As it was playd before her Maiestie’. Seems to be a children’s company play, and Chapel Children performed at court on 6 January and 22 February 1601, and 6 January, 10 January and 14 February 1602. (Paul’s performed there 1 January 1601, so identification is not completely secure.) See SPC, 363; Shapiro, Children of the Revels, 259. Editions: 1602 Love’s Metamorphosis (1600) Dramatist: Lyly Provenance: Q1601: ‘First playd by the Children of Paules, and now | by the Children of the Chappell’. Stationers’ Register: 25 November 1600 Editions: 1601 The Malcontent (c.1603) Dramatist: Marston, with additions for King’s Men by Webster Provenance: References in third quarto Induction indicate prior performance by a children’s company at Blackfriars; draws on the ‘Dymock’ translation of Il Pastor Fido published in early 1602 (Hunter, Malcontent, xli–xlvi). Chambers’s date of early 1604 is probably too late (ES, vol. 3, 432). Later property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 123); performed by them in revised form in 1604. Stationers’ Register: 5 July 1604 Editions: 1604 (three editions) May Day (c.1601; c.1610) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1611: ‘diuers times acted at the Blacke Fryers’; unlikely to be King’s Men, given opening stage direction: ‘Chorus Iuuenum cantantes & saltantes’ (A2r). Internal evidence in allusions to plays of 1599–1601, but references to The Gull’s Hornbook may suggest later revision or original performance after 1609. See ES, vol. 3, 256; Parrott, Comedies, vol. 2, 731–2; Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 245. Although Tricomi rejects this conclusion, a revival c.1610 might be conjectured on the basis of the publication of the play in 1611; The Widow’s Tears was revived around this time and published in 1612. Editions: 1611 Monsieur D’Olive (c.1605) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1606: ‘sundrie times acted by her | Maiesties children at the Blacke ¼ | Friers’. Composition usually dated to the first half of 1605 (Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 249). Wallace dates to October–December 1601 and claims to have ‘solid’ evidence, but he does not say what it is (‘Children of the Chapel’, 75). Editions: 1606

176

Appendix B

Philotas (1604) Dramatist: Daniel Provenance: Performed publicly before Daniel was called before Privy Council in early 1605, and Daniel’s association with Queen’s Revels in 1604–5 makes it the most likely company (Michel, Tragedy of Philotas, 36–7). Stationers’ Register: 29 November 1604 Editions: 1605 (collection), 1607 (two different collections), 1611 (collection), 1623 (collection) The Poetaster (1601) Dramatist: Jonson Provenance: Q1602: ‘As it hath beene sundry times priuately | acted in the Blacke Friers, by the | children of her Maiesties | Chappell’; F1616: ‘Acted, in the yeere 1601. | By the then Children of Queen | ELIZABETHS | Chappell ’. Stationers’ Register: 21 December 1601 Editions: 1602, 1616 (collection), 1640 (collection) The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (c.1611) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1613: ‘often presented at the | priuate Play-house in the WhiteFryers’. Parrott’s suggested date of 1610–11 is widely accepted (Parrott, Tragedies, 571; Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 260–1). Stationers’ Register: 17 April 1612 Editions: 1613 The Scornful Lady (c.1610) Dramatist: Beaumont and Fletcher Provenance: Maxwell argues that internal allusions, including references to the separate binding of the Apocrypha and Jonson’s Epicoene, point to 1610 (Studies, 17–28). Q1616 statement, ‘As it was Acted (with great applause) by | the Children of Her Maiesties | Reuels in the BLACKE | FRYERS’, may refer to performances in revival at the short-lived Porter’s Hall playhouse in Blackfriars. Later property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 114). Editions: 1616, 1625, 1630, 1635, 1639 ‘The Silver Mine’ (1608) Dramatist: Often assigned to Marston; another possibility might be John Day Provenance: Play performed at Blackfriars in March 1608 on subject of King James’s silver mine is described in letters by Signet clerk Sir Thomas Lake (ES, vol. 2, 53–4) and the French ambassador (Margeson, Byron, 276–7). Publication: Lost Sir Giles Goosecap (c.1602) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1606 title-page reference to Children of the Chapel places it in Blackfriars repertory of 1600–3. Parrott (Comedies, vol. 2, 890) dates between autumn 1601 and early spring 1603 on basis of references to Queen Elizabeth and

The repertory (Data and analysis)

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to French embassy headed by Charles Duke of Biron in September 1601. Tricomi (‘Dates’, 246–7) associates it with play about the ‘ko¨niglichen Wittwe aus Engellandt’ seen by party of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin Pomerania, at Blackfriars on 18 September 1602 (see Chambers, ES, vol. 2, 46–7). Later property of Children of the Revels at Salisbury Court ( JCS, vol. 1, 301). Stationers’ Register: 10 January 1606 Editions: 1606, 1636 Sophonisba (1605–6) Dramatist: Marston Provenance: Q1606: ‘sundry times Acted | at the Blacke Friers’. Editions of The Fawn (1606) refer to a ‘Tragedy [. . .] which shall boldly abide the most curious perusal’ (A2v), which in some copies has a marginal note ‘Sophonisba’ (Blostein, The Fawn, 71). Stationers’ Register: 17 March 1606 Editions: 1606, 1633 (collection) A Trick to Catch the Old One (c.1608) Dramatist: Middleton Provenance: Q1608 second issue: ‘often in Action, both | at Paules, and the Black- | Fryers. | Presented before his Maiestie on | New-yeares night last ’. See Greg, Bibliography, vol. 1, 395–6; ES, vol. 3, 439; Watson, Trick to Catch the Old One, xii. Previously owned by Children of Paul’s, and appears in repertory of Queen’s Revels when Edward Kirkham rejoins them. Stationers’ Register: 7 October 1607 Editions: 1608, 1616 The Viper and her Brood (1606) Dramatist: Middleton Provenance: Middleton claimed to have delivered ‘quendam librum lusiorium tragicum vocatum the vyper & her broode’ to Robert Keysar on 7 May 1606 to satisfy a debt. Keysar, however, denied that the play had been delivered. See Hillebrand, ‘Thomas Middleton’s The Viper’s Brood’; Eccles, ‘“Thomas Middleton a Poett”’. Sometimes identified with The Revengers’ Tragedy (see Schoenbaum, Middleton’s Tragedies, 166–7; Holdsworth, Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies, 106–7). Publication: Lost The Widow’s Tears (1604–5) Dramatist: Chapman Provenance: Q1612: ‘often presented in the blacke and white Friers’. First performed 1604–5; revived c.1611 and performed at court 27 February 1613. ES, vol. 3, 256–7; Parrott, Comedies, 797–8; Tricomi, ‘Dates’, 250. May later have been property of King’s Men ( JCS, vol. 1, 118). Stationers’ Register: 17 April 1612 Editions: 1612

178

Appendix B

A Woman is a Weathercock (c.1610) Dramatist: Field Provenance: Q1612: ‘acted before the King in | WHITE-HALL. | And diuers times Priuately at the | White-Friers, By the Children of her | Maiesties Reuels’. Court performance probably took place either Christmas 1609–10, or 13 December 1610/2 February 1611 (see Appendix E). Stationers’ Register: 23 November 1611 Editions: 1612 Your Five Gallants (c.1607) Dramatist: Middleton Provenance: Q title-page: ‘often in Action | at the Black-friers.’; SR entry: ‘as it hath ben acted by the Children of the Chappell’. Internal evidence may suggest performance in late 1607 (CA, 313), which accords with use of Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607) as a source (Colegrave, Critical Edition, 20). Stationers’ Register: 22 March 1608 Editions: Undated (c.1608)

Appendix C: Biographical summary

This appendix comprises brief notes on all those connected with the Children of the Chapel/Children of the Queen’s Revels; in some cases more detailed discussion can be found in the main text (see Index). Abbreviated references to sources are given at the end of each entry. For Actor Lists see Appendix D. Allen, Richard, fl. 1609. Actor c.1609 (Epicoene, also in The Coxcomb list). JCS, vol. 2, 344. Anna of Denmark, 1574–1619. Patron 1604, 1610. Queen Consort, wife of James VI and I. Also patron of adult company; sponsor/designer of court masques. Barroll, Anna of Denmark. Attewell, Hugh, c.1592–1621. Actor c.1609 (Amorous La Foole in Epicoene, also in The Coxcomb list). Later Prince Charles’s company. Subject of an elegy by William Rowley which describes him as a ‘little man’. Eccles, ‘Actors I’, 39; JCS, vol. 2, 351–3; Riddell, ‘Some Actors’, 295–6. Barksted, William, c.1590–