Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642 (Early Modern Cultural Studies)

Localizing Caroline Drama

This page intentionally left blank

Localizing Caroline Drama Politics and Economics of the Early Modern E nglish Stage, 1625– 1642

Edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Far mer

LOCALIZING CAROLINE DRAMA

© Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7282–8 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7282–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Localizing Caroline drama : politics and economics of the early modern English stage, 1625–1642 / edited by Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7282–6 (alk. paper) 1. Theater—Economic aspects—Great Britain—History— 17th century. 2. Theater—Political aspects—Great Britain— History—17th century. I. Zucker, Adam, 1972– II. Farmer, Alan B. PN2592.L54 2006 792.0941'09032—dc22

2006042961

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For our teachers

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

ix

Foreword R. Malcolm Smuts

xi

Acknowledgments Introduction Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer 1. Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser

xvii 1

17

2. Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure in 1630s Theater Kathleen E. McLuskie

43

3.

69

Reading Triumphs: Localizing Caroline Masques Lauren Shohet

4. Exeunt Fighting: Poets, Players, and Impresarios at the Caroline Hall Theaters Martin Butler 5. The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin Richard Dutton

97 129

6. A Beast So Blurred: The Monstrous Favorite in Caroline Drama Mario DiGangi

157

7. Dancing Masters and the Production of Cosmopolitan Bodies in Caroline Town Comedy Jean E. Howard

183

viii

Contents

8. The “Turks,” Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado Benedict S. Robinson

213

List of Contributors

239

Index

243

List of Tables and Figures

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 3.1 3.2

The Caroline Canon of Classic Plays Undiscovered Classics in Caroline England Restoration Reprints of Pre-Civil War Drama Masques of 1637–1638 Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle and Davenant’s Britannia Triumphans 5.1 The Publication of James Shirley’s Plays, 1637–1640

31 33 36 84 89 139

Figures 1.1 Playbook Reprint Rates in Elizabethan and Jacobean England 1.2 The Dynamics of the Market for Professional Plays 1.3 Playbook Reprint Rates in Caroline England 1.4 Medium- and Long-Term Reprint Rates for Playbooks in Caroline England 1.5 Short-Term Reprint Rates for Playbooks in Caroline England 3.1 Sketch by Inigo Jones for First Scene of Britannia Triumphans 3.2 Sketch by Inigo Jones for Final Scene of Britannia Triumphans 7.1 The Dancing Master in Newcastle’s The Variety 7.2 John Playford’s The English Dancing Master

19 20 23 25 26 71 74 187 193

This page intentionally left blank

Foreword

W

ork done on Caroline drama has traditionally had a strongly historicist character, even as far back as the 1930s. Historians have taken note: Stephen Orgel’s studies of the Caroline masques and Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis probably attracted more attention from historians than all but a handful of books by literary scholars on the early seventeenth century written in the 1970s and 1980s.1 This historical orientation may simply reflect the fact that the years 1625–1642 were always regarded as a low point in the history of English drama but a period of mounting excitement, building up to the explosive climax of 1642, in the nation’s political history. Whatever the cause, it means that investigations of the Caroline theater have tended to shed more light on connections between historical and literary research than work on the celebrated age of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the younger Jonson. The appearance of the present collection therefore provides an opportunity to reflect on the current state of an interdisciplinary frontier. Two features of these essays seem to me particularly striking: the great variety of historical approaches they display, and the absence of the preoccupation with high politics and ideology that dominated this field as recently as fifteen years ago. It is not just that these essays have abandoned the old whig narrative of steadily growing political conflict, as Zucker and Farmer point out in their introduction, but that over half of them do not seem especially concerned with politics at all, while those that do examine political themes avoid sweeping claims about ideological trends of the period. Instead of challenging traditional ideas about drama’s connection to political history, as Butler and others did in the 1980s, these authors simply ignore the old orthodoxy as they focus on other concerns. I believe this reflects a sea change in thinking about the period that extends well beyond the rejection of an oversimplified political narrative. For what the so-called “whig” interpretation had come to provide was not merely an account of politics but a way of integrating social, economic, and cultural history within an overarching story of revolutionary

xii

Foreword

conflict. This grand synthesis owed less to S. R. Gardiner, the Victorian founder of whig political history, than to twentieth-century historians and literary scholars who extended his interpretations into areas he had never studied. Especially in the decades before and after the Second World War, they linked the contest between Crown and Parliament to an array of social, economic, and cultural trends that allegedly contributed to the formation of a basic antagonism between a parasitic reactionary court and an increasingly modern country. This expansion of the concept of a mid-century revolution was certainly influenced by Marxism, most notably in the writings of historian Christopher Hill and several distinguished literary scholars, from Raymond Williams to the Cultural Materialists of the 1980s. But it was never a Marxist monopoly. Liberal scholars like Lawrence Stone and conservatives like H. R. Trevor-Roper also participated eagerly in debates over the nature of the revolutionary crisis. The preoccupation with revolution and its causes was not driven by any particular ideology, so much as by an intellectual fashion for large systems of historical explanation and a belief—amounting almost to an article of faith—that the political upheavals of the century’s middle decades must have been produced by some fundamental realignment in the deep structures of English society. Whether that realignment stemmed from the rise of capitalism and class conflict, the emergence of centralized absolutist states with large bureaucracies, or something else was for many years a matter for keen debate. But the conviction that deep subterranean forces drove the course of historical change went largely unchallenged. This fascination with concepts of deep historical causation affected not just historians of seventeenth-century England but practitioners of other disciplines and scholars in other parts of the world. It is at least obliquely related to the proliferation of social scientific theories like functionalism and structuralism, as well as the large historical claims advanced by European theorists like Michel Foucault, which so deeply influenced literary scholarship in the 1980s. Under this climate of thought, challenges to one meta-narrative usually took the form of a rival meta-narrative of at least comparable range and scope. Scholars who eschewed large ideas might earn respect for the thoroughness of their research but they tended to seem unexciting by comparison with more intellectually ambitious colleagues. In studies of seventeenth-century England the vogue for deep explanation was almost always associated with a partisan bias in favor of puritan, parliamentary, and popular forces against those associated with Stuart kings and their courts. Even conservatives castigated the

Foreword

xiii

Stuarts as inept reactionaries whose bungling produced an unnecessary period of violent instability in England’s otherwise un-revolutionary history. This bias did have whig roots, not so much in the liberal historiography of Gardiner and his successors as in generations of polemics against the supposed abuses of kings and courtiers, going back to the seventeenth century itself. This is especially clear, for example, in the vituperation critics heaped on Queen Henrietta Maria’s circle for its allegedly hypocritical sexual values, in contrast to upright puritans like Milton.2 This criticism echoed, no doubt often unconsciously, a tradition of misogynist attacks on aristocratic and court women who presumed to “meddle” in politics by exploiting the social codes of elite society to ally themselves with powerful men. Elizabethan love poetry did not inspire the same hostility because Elizabeth herself had become the subject of a golden legend, as the great unifier of Protestant England. But the French Catholic wife of Charles I was an entirely different story. The problem with interpretations of dramatic history developed within this framework of assumptions and prejudices was not only that they unfairly stereotyped a generation of dramatists and playgoers, but, more seriously, that they deterred scholars from asking more precise questions about the theater’s place in early Stuart society because everyone assumed they already knew the answers. In some ways this began to change around 1980, as revisionist historians challenged the whig political narrative.3 But for a number of reasons the revisionists did not have the same galvanizing effect on cultural history as they did on studies of politics. As political historians, committed to what was in many ways a traditional empiricist methodology of careful archival research, their arguments did not seem immediately relevant to the work most literary scholars were doing in that period. Moreover revisionism developed as a skeptical and reactive movement that advanced its positions through precisely documented attacks on whig claims.4 Even while whig interpretations were being refuted, whig questions and problems, like the nature of early Stuart parliaments and political causes of the Civil War, were therefore subtly reinforced. But since political causation was now being conceived more narrowly and rigorously, it was not always easy to see how literary and cultural analysis might fit into a revisionist framework. The almost simultaneous rise of new historicism and British cultural materialism created further problems, since these movements were committed to methodologies with pronounced theoretical dimensions and a penchant for using textual analysis as a basis for expansive historical claims.5 Scholars wanting to integrate the currently fashionable methodologies in English and

xiv

Foreword

History therefore needed to contend not just with disciplinary differences, but also with a huge divergence in intellectual temperament. The one point of contact was provided by a raging debate among historians over whether the early Stuart period was characterized by a climate of political “conflict” or “consensus.” This issue could be addressed by reading plays and other works of literature as vehicles for political arguments, the approach taken by Orgel and Butler, as well as most of the essays in several interdisciplinary collections that appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s.6 Useful and illuminating as this work undoubtedly was, it did not fulfill the potential for a wider dialogue between historians and scholars of literature, on all aspects of the period’s cultural history. Twenty years on, the situation has improved, through convergent developments in both disciplines. Many historians have reacted against the narrowly political focus of early revisionism, by insisting that politics itself needs to be studied more broadly, with reference to perceptions, rhetorical strategies, and systems of cultural representation as well as to narratives of events. A few have begun to read poems and plays and to borrow methods of literary analysis.7 Literary scholars have become somewhat less preoccupied with theory and more suspicious of large arguments erected on the basis of impressionistic evidence. Some have even begun working alongside historians in the archives. New fields have developed—the history of the book, the history of manuscripts, and the history of reading—along the frontier between History and English, drawing practitioners from both sides. Although we have still not achieved a fully interdisciplinary cultural history of the seventeenth century, the goal seems less remote today than at any time in the last twenty years. If and when this history emerges, however, it will lack the spurious coherence of the old synthesis. Although the seventeenth century in England was a time of significant change in economic, social, political, religious, and cultural life, it now seems extremely doubtful that all the changes of the period can ever be connected to a single meta-narrative. The way forward lies in an approach that begins by investigating different developments on their own terms and for their own intrinsic interest, before attempting to trace relations between them. This is what the present collection does. It offers not a single history of English drama between 1625 and 1642 but a number of histories—of dramatic taste, critical discourses, and theaters as business enterprises, as well as political themes in plays—which connect with each other in rich and complex ways. There are a number of ways in which one can imagine historians fruitfully engaging with this collection. The study of theaters as

Foreword

xv

businesses and social institutions has an obvious relevance to wider histories of “the commercialization of leisure”8 and the development of urban and metropolitan economies oriented around the demands of wealthy consumers. A recent review article surveying new work on British towns and cities by historian Robert Tittler has, in fact, already stressed the point that studies of drama need to be taken more seriously by historians in this field.9 Work on dramatic satires of social fashions has the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of metropolitan social and economic culture. There is, for example, an obvious affinity between several of the essays in this volume and Linda Levy Peck’s recent work on luxury goods and shopping in the Stuart metropolis.10 Studies of plays can also continue to contribute to richer and more subtle investigations of political culture. As historians become more aware of the importance of political language, and the enormous variety of cultural vehicles through which political ideas were expressed, they should become more receptive to sensitive work on the politics of drama. A healthy skepticism, shared by several essays in this collection, about exaggerated claims of political relevance will tend to increase confidence in more carefully constructed and solidly grounded political readings of some plays. Not all drama was political and even when dramatists did address controversial issues they were not necessarily taking sides in a polarized controversy. Nevertheless drama remained one of the vehicles through which people in seventeenth-century England worked out political ideas. Without incorporating the theater, histories of political culture will always remain incomplete. The collapse of an older synthesis of theatrical and political history does not have to mean that historians and specialists in the drama will hereafter go their separate ways. It should instead open new perspectives and new challenges for more complex and subtle exchanges between the two disciplines. This collection shows how students of drama have fruitfully incorporated historical data and historical methods into their work. One can only hope that more historians will begin to join the conversation. R. Malcolm Smuts

Notes 1. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, eds., Inigo Jones and the Theater of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

xvi

Foreword

2. For a corrective see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. Although revisionism can occur in any field of scholarship, in this context the term refers to a specific group of historians, led by Conrad Russell, J. S. Morrill, Mark Kishlansky, and Kevin Sharpe, who launched an attack on whig interpretations of the English Revolution in the late 1970s and 1980s. 4. This was especially true of Conrad Russell in, for example, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) and The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 5. It is no coincidence that Stephen Greenblatt sometimes collaborated with Natalie Zemon Davis, a historian of France immune from the influence of changing currents in English historiography. The fondness of many literary scholars for historians Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill—for which they were roundly castigated by other historians—may have partly reflected a temperamental affinity. Hill and Stone liked bold ideas and big arguments but were not as concerned with meticulous attention to detail and chronology as the revisionists. Hill was also deeply committed to interdisciplinary work and the use of literature as historical evidence. Their kind of history therefore provided a better “fit” for new historicism. Unfortunately they were also two of the revisionists’ chief targets. 6. See, for example, Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker eds., The Politics of Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 7. See, for example, Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8. J. H. Plumb, The Commercialisation of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (Reading: University of Reading Press, 1973). Although mainly applied to the eighteenth century, the concept has an obvious relevance to the seventeenth as well. 9. Robert Tittler, “Recent Writing on Early Modern British Urban History (c. 1540–1720),” in the electronic journal History Compass (www. history-compass.com). 10. Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Acknowledgments

T

he editors would like to acknowledge all those whose names are missing from the list of authors here but whose ideas and efforts have shaped this book, among them: David Scott Kastan, Fran Dolan, Joseph Black, Ivo Kamps, and Julie Sanders. We would also like to acknowledge the members of the “Localizing Caroline Drama” seminar, led by Kate McLuskie, at the 2004 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, whose wide-ranging interests are both the background and the hopeful continuation of the project presented in this book. Among our truly remarkable authors, who have made the process of editing this volume a sheer delight, special thanks are due to Jean Howard, for coming up with the idea, and Kate McLuskie, for immediately letting herself be dragged into the fray. We extend our thanks as well to the many institutions (and the people who compose them) that have provided support, both financial and intellectual, for our editorial work: the English departments of Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and The Ohio State University; the Henry E. Huntington Library; and the W. M. Keck foundation. Special thanks to Diane Naylor for her generosity and assistance in reproducing images from the Chatsworth archives. And a last grateful acknowledgment to our inquisitive, always supportive friends and loved ones, especially Heather Abel, for all of whom we repeat one final time: Charles translated into Latin is Carolus.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer

T

he essays in this collection present a series of short-focus views of England’s theatrical culture between the years 1625 and 1642. Taken as a composite, they establish a new wide-angle shot of texts and institutions too often overlooked by historians, teachers, readers, and contemporary directors of English drama. In fact, the period of theater history explored here may be the only one better known for its abrupt conclusion than for its constituent parts. The sudden blackout of London’s stages ordered by the Long Parliament in September of 1642 has probably occasioned more debate in recent years than the entire works of Jasper Mayne, Thomas Nabbes, and Shackerley Marmion combined.1 But the writers gathered here believe that London’s thriving theatrical scene during the reign of Charles I deserves to be widely studied as something other than the prelude to an interruption. Though it has in the past been seen even by its more generous critics as a kind of rusting, wobbly trestle bridge connecting the glorified age of Shakespeare to that of Dryden, Etherege, and Wycherly, the late 1620s and 1630s might better be understood as a moment in which theater in England began to come into its own as an integrated economic, social, and political institution. It is this specifically Caroline integration that the individual essays in this collection seek to characterize. As they do so, they reframe in sharp detail Caroline theatrical culture’s appealing mixture of radical and royalist politics, its polymorphous eroticism, its commercial innovations, its theological controversies, and above all its intense engagement with social formations both old and new. Although we are organizing the work presented here with reference to a political chronology, we would like to emphasize from the outset that there are good reasons beyond court politics to study as its

2

Adam Zucker and Al an B . Farmer

own field of inquiry the drama produced during the reign of Charles I. The late 1620s and 1630s were, simply put, a critical moment in the history of theater in England. Some fifty years had passed since the opening of the first public theaters in London, and whole generations of actors, writers, audiences, and producers had come and gone. It is, perhaps, the pressing consciousness of this accruing history that made the agents of Caroline theatrical culture so different from their predecessors.2 As the essays in this collection make clear, with the period’s consolidating sense of tradition came increasingly self-aware modes of innovation and repetition in most facets of theatrical production: at the level of form and representation, older genres like comedy and tragicomedy began to take on new social, theological, and political material; at the level of physical infrastructure, new theaters were opened (both in London and in Dublin) to take advantage of an increasingly diverse audience with a wide array of tastes; at the level of print, new publishing patterns helped promulgate the notion of a dramatic canon; and at the level of commerce in general, a new set of authors began to write under economic conditions thoroughly different from those that structured the careers of Shakespeare and of Henslowe’s hired hands. In short, the settled, urban theatrical tradition we know today was quickly developing during the reign of Charles I, and with it, an increasingly privileged—and increasingly institutionalized—place for drama was staked out in society at large. In an effort to characterize the influential social and physical places of Caroline drama, the authors here have adopted what we are calling a “local” view of texts, theaters, and markets for plays. This means that the essays that follow tend to feature close readings, site-specific histories, careful reevaluations of theater history, and arguments that are wary of the grand narratives of twentieth-century historiography.3 To localize drama in this fashion is to read inductively through the cultural artifacts left to us, to build up larger arguments out of the small bits of history and literature that fascinate us, and to question constantly the guiding premises that have dominated past analysis of plays and masques written during Charles I’s reign. We asked our authors to write with specificity as their starting point and to move from their smaller discoveries, interpretations, and theories toward larger claims about the period and its theatrical culture. We asked our authors, in other words, to set aside what they already knew about the period so that they (and our readers) might look again at material that has too often suffered from a kind of globalizing, formulaic dismissal.4 That dismissal for many years took the form of a collective shudder of disgust. Plays written during the age of Charles I have been called

Introduction

3

many contemptuous names over the years: “a body of literature which Time has justly submerged”; “the expression of a clique, of a mere excrescence upon English society as a whole”;5 and “readable in doses, not too large.”6 The original audience for this “excrescence” has fared little better in the eyes of many theater historians. They have been accused of “lubricity,”7 of “effeminacy in deportment,”8 and of the more general crime of being “fickle and shallow.”9 Disdainful language like this dominated historicist criticism of the Caroline theater from the end of nineteenth century through the first seventy-five years of the twentieth. Mapping what they took to be the great changes of the age back onto the plays and masques of the 1620s and 1630s, Alfred Harbage and others read the development of The Drama into a microcosm of whiggish history. The story is a familiar one: the effete, immoral sludge of the Stuart court—the so-called decadent manners and behaviors that were presumed to have inspired a Puritan Revolution—began to seep into the hardy ship that Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries had built.10 With private indoor theaters making their mark in a steadily developing West End and the Frenchified tastes of Henrietta Maria infecting the air at Greenwich (these critics argued), the agents of theatrical culture began to cater to an increasingly elite and increasingly degraded audience. Playwrights, especially those courtly amateurs identified by Harbage as Cavaliers, reflected and contributed to the profligate tenor of their times. Incest, adultery, Catholicism, and disastrously ornate and unpleasant verse tarnished a theatrical scene hitherto graced by the universal human truths staged for diverse audiences by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and, on his kinder days, Jonson. With the exception of a few unfortunate triumphs by Ford, Caroline drama became something better left unread and unperformed, interesting only as a staging ground for a lukewarm battle between radical puritanism on the one hand and courtly Neoplatonism on the other. The elite, in the most amorphous sense of the word, had ruined the theater of the (similarly amorphous) masses.11 It is perhaps unsurprising that a body of literature read in an earlier time with such florid, downright lubricious disapproval would turn out to have great appeal in our own. The same mixture of erotic and political energies that moralizing critics found so distasteful has begun to catch the eye of modern scholars interested in the generative links between sexual relations and governmental ones in the early modern period; between the consolidation of English nation as a political body and the consolidation of English subjects as material, gendered bodies;12 and, in more general terms, between political and theatrical discourses broadly defined. In a similar vein, the wide reach of the

4

Adam Zucker and Al an B . Farmer

plays’ settings and economic narratives has drawn scholars interested in the ongoing exchanges between Islamic and Christian cultures shaping England’s emerging mercantilist project in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.13 Gestures toward the bitter contests between groups variously identified—or traduced—as Arminians, Puritans, Papists, and Jesuits have inspired research on the complex theological engagements of Caroline drama.14 Even the detailed depictions of the day’s manners, the dramatized niceties disdained by generations of critics, have become the subject of studies on the connections between social process and political allegiance; between emerging class differences and urban development; and between theatrical culture and the consolidation of a metropolitan elite that would dominate stagings of London for years to come.15 What is lacking from the list above (a list that covers much of the material presented in this collection) is the one subject that, twenty years ago, changed the ways in which Caroline drama was read: the conflict between royalist and opposition parties in England that came to a head in the Civil War. It was this conflict that Martin Butler placed at the center of his influential and still-illuminating study of Caroline plays, Theatre and Crisis. Butler made one of the earliest powerful cases against the “decadence” tradition of Caroline criticism by revealing the often confrontational political engagements of the plays of the 1620s and 1630s—not only in those written by the presumably more civic-minded authors like Richard Brome, but also in those by playwrights directly associated with court or royalist circles like James Shirley and John Suckling. With this approach, Butler became one of the first play-readers since the members of the Long Parliament to take Caroline theaters seriously as critical, potentially revolutionary public spaces.16 Most of the authors gathered here do the same. Yet few of the essays in this collection (Martin Butler’s included) have taken up the familiar terms of Theatre and Crisis. This is a rather unusual turn of events. As Malcolm Smuts remarked at a recent conference seminar in which many of the papers here first appeared, it would have been nearly impossible to read Caroline plays twenty-five or thirty years ago without thinking of them in terms of an approaching calamity. This was due in no small part to the ways in which historians had written the reign of Charles into a strict teleological narrative: each failure to call Parliament, each arbitrary attempt to raise money through royal prerogative, and each Laudian reform worked to alienate further a misguided king and court coterie from his patient, but slowly angering subjects. Throughout the 1630s, if not the 1620s and before, the two camps identified by Butler in his study

Introduction

5

of Caroline plays—royalist and oppositional—slowly but surely drew apart, developed coherent politics and theologies, and eventually raised armies against one another. The wars of the 1640s, in other words, and even the Glorious Revolution of 1688, had been understood for many years as the products of a progressive, unified set of inevitable missteps, flawed policies, and missed opportunities for reconciliation. This version of the origins of the English Civil War has repeatedly been held up for revision over the past two decades. Smooth narratives of long-term causes and cumulative effects have been challenged in books by Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, and Glenn Burgess among others; each has inserted a set of complicated and often indeterminate variables into a historiography formerly dominated by the tendency to divide 1630s England into sets of antagonistic rivals: Laudians versus Puritans; City versus Country; Court versus City; and in the marquee match-up, bourgeois revolutionaries versus aristocratic reactionaries. These pairs, and others like them, are both expressive of and determined by the teleological impulse of history writing itself: if there was a Civil War in England, then the opposing sides therein must have been taking shape for decades preceding it. But the work of the revisionist (and post-revisionist) historians of the past several decades has revealed that at the level of the individual archival case study—for example, at the level of diaries and local court documents—it is often very difficult to determine who, in the mid-1630s, could be called a Royalist as distinct from a member of an organized Opposition; who (besides Laud) was a Laudian; who was a Puritan; and who along any ideological spectrum could have imagined raising an army against the king before 1640. Though the looming conflict still holds sway over political histories of the 1620s and 1630s, especially in the postrevisionist work of Ann Hughes and others, the assumption of ideologically coherent oppositional parties or communities is no longer the starting point for historical analysis of the period. Local studies, in other words, have begun to reframe our broadest understandings of conflict and change during the reign of Charles I.17 While the historiography of the 1620s and 1630s has undergone an illuminating transformation in the years since Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, and while the study of early modern drama itself has been invigorated over the same stretch of time by the engagements of (and debates occasioned by) different modes of historicism and materialism, English theatrical culture of the Caroline period is only just beginning to be revisited in a concerted, motivated fashion. Localizing Caroline Drama joins with several other recent books refocusing attention on

6

Adam Zucker and Al an B . Farmer

a period of theater history finally unburdened of the limiting controversies of orthodox political history.18 The rich, fascinating output of Brome, Shirley, Davenant, Nabbes, and their peers, the stages in and around London that they wrote for, and the print market which disseminated and preserved their plays are all becoming knowable as something other than part symptom, part cause of the decline of the glorious Elizabethan polity. The essays here find in local interests and case studies the pieces to what is shaping up to be an entirely new kind of Caroline puzzle: a puzzle defined, in fact, by its occasionally unwieldy pieces, rather than by the picture one might want to see on the cover of the box. This is not to say that the scholars gathered in this collection dismiss the very notion of broad conflicts and historical narratives, be they political, religious, socioeconomic, or otherwise: far from it. Indeed, each writer here has a well-deserved reputation for his or her commitment to reading the texts and practices of the early modern theater with an eye on historical debate and ideological process. Some are known as feminist critics, some as interpreters of religious culture, some as political critics, some as historians of sexuality—and more than one might actually be considered all of these at once. None of them abandons these commitments for the sake of some sort of micro-empiricist vision of the Caroline Age. Though they (and we as editors) emphasize the local throughout, none of us would argue that a small enough field of vision might render a perfect reproduction of a lost moment in time. Rather, like recent productive work on the everyday objects, acts, and relationships of early modern material culture, the essays here demonstrate that careful attention paid to smaller things can be rewarded with new perspectives on critical theory, social process, aesthetic technique, and historical narrative. This novelty results in part from the ways in which local studies can reveal flaws in hasty or overly general arguments: most of the essays that follow put pressure on one or another long-held assumption about Caroline drama. At the same time—and perhaps more importantly, in our eyes—new perspectives are also generated by the work of synthesis that this collection as a whole challenges its readers to do. To return to our puzzle analogy, it is not so much that the pieces presented here can be arranged into an inevitably authentic picture of Caroline drama and its historical engagements. Instead, these pieces ask to be sorted through and added to; they stake out new territory and point the way toward further study. Our hope for all this is that the picture on the cover of our puzzle’s box will be redrawn again and again, and the history of Caroline England and its drama can remain alive, relevant, and close to our own.

Introduction

7

All this being said, the work of synthesis in a collection of essays is inevitably left to its editors. And as the first readers of these pieces en masse, we were delighted (if not a bit surprised) by the ways that the interpenetration of their local readings jolt into life critical and historical approaches to Caroline drama that have in the past suffered from what might politely be called discursive enervation. There are three types of essays in this volume: readings of plays and masques; histories of individual theaters; and discussions of print publication’s role in Caroline theatrical culture. Despite their disparate approaches, it will rapidly become clear that in their particular responses to our editorial directive to localize, these essays all demonstrate the ways in which individual plays, spaces, commercial practices, and social relationships define and produce the contested, integrating field of Caroline drama as a whole, both for us as readers and critics, and for the cultural agents who brought it into being in the first place. The collection begins with an essay that looks to seventeenthcentury stationers’ stalls to chart the emergence of an increasingly selfconscious commercial field of theatrical culture in Caroline England. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser’s “Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England” takes for its subject an intriguing development in the publication of drama during the 1630s, a decade which saw an astonishing increase in the total number of plays printed. Identifying for the first time a division in the Caroline book trade between new plays from the London theaters and “classic” plays by such authors as Marlowe, Lyly, and Shakespeare, and noting the tendency of publishers to emphasize the stylistic and narrative differences between these two types of plays, Lesser and Farmer argue that our own canon of early modern drama was profoundly shaped by the effects of the printing boom of the 1630s. Whereas most critics have located in the Jonson and Shakespeare folios the nascent transformation of drama into a high literary institution, Farmer and Lesser reveal that the buyers and sellers of individual play quartos in the 1630s created a canon of drama based less on the figure of the author than on the distinctive style, form, and theatrical practices of a “Golden Age” of English theater spanning roughly from 1590 to 1610. The Caroline book trade, in other words, helped to create the very notions of theatrical periodization that enable us to speak of “Elizabethan,” “Jacobean,” or “Caroline” drama. The next two essays in the collection take up different facets of this transformation so as to offer a warning to critics who look strictly to topical reference for the key to the relation between dramatic texts and historical process. Kathleen E. McLuskie’s piece, “Politics and

8

Adam Zucker and Al an B . Farmer

Aesthetic Pleasure in 1630s Theater,” suggests that the lingering divide in dramatic criticism between political or historical interpretation on the one hand and aesthetic interpretation on the other occludes the complex status of plays produced under the shifting commercial practices of Caroline theaters, practices which made little distinction between politics and pleasure. McLuskie uses Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches as her case study, critiquing our received narrative about its original production—that is, that it took place under the auspices of a Laud-hating earl of Pembroke—by holding up the assessment of a contemporary audience member that the play, far from being a salvo fired in the direction of Arminianism, was little more than a “merrie and excellent” collection of songs and dances. McLuskie explores elements of the Caroline moment that make these judgments possible at all, judgments that are built up in part around the play’s localized depiction of witchcraft, and in part around the codes of theatrical culture settling into place in the 1630s. To similar effect (albeit in a much different context), Lauren Shohet uses the term “localizing” as a springboard to question the tendency in modern cultural history to limit the semiotic range of Caroline masques by reading them as highly local occasional literature. She argues that strictly topical readings unnecessarily flatten the generative process of reception and interpretation, insofar as they assume that a producer’s intentions and an audience’s response could neatly coalesce around a given political narrative or allegorical reference. Shohet encourages us to look beyond the locale of a masque’s performance, and to think instead of the life of the masque as a printed object, as a work imbricated in the networks of literary form and reference that compose genre, and ultimately as a material location of shared political knowledge and debate. The institution of the Caroline print-shop, as much as the court and Banquet Hall, becomes visible in Shohet’s work as a crucial element in the dissemination of performed political culture, whatever its effects. The following two essays remind us of the day-to-day labor that was invested in Caroline stages themselves. Martin Butler’s revealing study of the business maneuvers of those who sought to profit from hall theaters like Salisbury Court, and Richard Dutton’s investigation of Shirley’s sojourn to Dublin to write for the St. Werburgh Street theater both point toward the rich vein of theater history that has yet to be mined for the Caroline period, and both expand our notion of drama’s place in the 1630s. Butler’s essay focuses on the machinations of theater managers—most centrally, Richard Gunnell and Richard Heton—as they try to clear space for themselves in Caroline London’s

Introduction

9

crowded theater scene. Our notion of these men as powerful “impresarios” is put to the test as Butler brings newly discovered archival evidence to bear on the question of how particular spaces like the Cockpit and Salisbury Court theaters became institutional sites in theater history. Individual and commercial antagonisms are shown to be crucial—and crucially unpredictable—forces upon the consolidating scene. At stake in Butler’s essay is the history of London’s West End itself. The neighborhood has developed a reputation in recent scholarship of the Tudor and Stuart period for its concentration of fashionable indoor playhouses, but Butler’s detailed study reveals the ways in which local, deeply contingent commercial practices interfere with the neat classification schemes we use to characterize both the social conflicts and the economic structures of Caroline drama. The emerging West End suddenly becomes knowable as a site of productive contest and collaboration, rather than as a unified, coherent space of elite culture.19 Richard Dutton’s essay makes visible the crucial fact that the locations of English drama during the Caroline period were hardly limited to London. Dutton examines the St. Werbergh Street theater in Dublin, an indoor hall built up with Wentworth and his retinue in mind, as part of the larger colonial project taking place in 1630s Ireland. James Shirley—one of the era’s most accomplished writers of Town comedy and tragicomedy—spent several years there plying his trade, but the theater failed to thrive. The kinds of plays that were popular in places like the Blackfriars and the Cockpit seem to have fallen flat in Dublin, a situation, Dutton argues, that suggests that the social relations in and around London’s West End scene were both distinct to and critical for the successes of particular plays and playing companies. Though Shirley’s plays were a commercial flop in Ireland, the history of the St. Werbergh Street theater is an instructive example of the ways in which the agents of theatrical culture—playwrights, businessmen, printers, and audiences—continued to spread outward from London during the Caroline period. The literal locations of English culture and entertainment were beginning to proliferate along with a nascent empire’s diversifying political and economic reach. The final three essays in the collection look to unfamiliar texts in order to introduce some of the evocative shapes and engagements of Caroline plays themselves. Mario DiGangi’s “A Beast So Blurred: The Monstrous Favorite in Caroline Drama” and Jean E. Howard’s “Dancing Masters and the Production of Cosmopolitan Bodies in Caroline Town Comedy” reevaluate a few of the notorious social,

10

Adam Zucker and Al an B . Farmer

sexual, and political interests of the period’s three most prominent theatrical genres. DiGangi reads plays by Killigrew, Massinger, and Shirley as exemplars of the newly widespread tendency in 1620s and 1630s tragedy and tragicomedy to critique mechanisms of sovereignty and kingship by imagining disruptive relations between kings and beloved male courtiers. Though this was hardly an unheard of theme on the early modern stage, DiGangi locates a distinctly Caroline mode of political investigation in the royal favorites that appeared on stage following the death of James and the assassination of Buckingham: the disruptive potential of the same-sex favorite becomes less a function of his status as a distracting, Ganymede-type plaything, and more a function of his ability to manipulate heteroerotic alliances to his own political ends. In defining this representational shift, DiGangi’s essay stakes out new territory for a narrative convention often read by older moralizing critics and cultural historians alike as an essentially uniform plot device. Jean Howard likewise opens up for local analysis a commonplace of Caroline comedy: its abiding interest in the fashionable pursuits of the consolidating urban elite that was coming to be known as the Town. In her examination of Shirley’s then-controversial play The Ball, Howard argues that increasingly popular forms of French dancing—reviled as devilish in the 1630s by radical Protestants like Prynne and dismissed as fatuous by a more modern set of puritanical scholars—were deeply meaningful social practices that made English bodies civil by putting them in decidedly foreign postures. By isolating dancing as a privileged element within the complex web of behaviors too often lumped together under the flat heading of “manners,” and by then situating that element within interlocking sexual, economic, and political relations of the day, Howard’s essay exemplifies the ways that close study of a single play and a single practice can shed new light on the patterns of genre and the social world that produces them. Benedict S. Robinson’s essay, “ ‘The Turks,’ Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado,” looks even further afield, to one play’s imagined encounters between forms of Christianity and Islam in the marketplaces of Tunis. Pointing to the ways in which The Renegado demands that its audience identify with a Jesuit priest and other representatives of Catholicism against their Islamic antagonists, Robinson critiques the long-held assumption that Massinger’s politics were parliamentarian (ergo, antiroyalist) and his theology heavily Protestant (ergo, anti-Catholic). Rather than simply arguing the opposite side of these dichotomies, however, Robinson reads the play in light of the religious controversies of the 1620s and 1630s, showing

Introduction

11

how the representation of Islam helped the reforming theologies associated with Arminius and Laud posit a religious other against which a unified Christian polity, unhindered by the doctrinal fractures between Protestant and Catholic, might be defined. Religion finds its productive place alongside economic and political history in Robinson’s analysis of Massinger’s work, and the combination helps reveal the theological inflections of England’s precolonial commercial exchanges with the Ottoman Empire. Each of these readings is built around a critical transformation. The materials of what was once dismissed as “decadence” are repositioned by Jean Howard as elements in a formative social process. The staged relationships once considered evidence of degraded perversion are redefined by Mario DiGangi as a facet of the erotics of political intervention. Rudimentary theological and political divides meant to explain the origins of a vast upheaval are reassessed by Benedict Robinson as a series of shifting fractures and allegiances made meaningful beyond their moment in the contexts of commerce and crusade. These revelatory transformations are all the result of one rather straightforward interpretive shift, a shift away from reading Caroline drama as little more than the precursor to closure and to cataclysm. Indeed, if there is something besides Charles I that binds together the elements of theatrical culture under consideration in this book, it is that they have all been misrecognized at one time or another as essentially prerevolutionary in context and in content. In terms of chronology, this is true. In terms of practice and meaning both for us and for its original audiences, it is not. To localize Caroline drama is not to obscure its place at a fascinating crossroads in history, nor is it to deny the theater its role in the larger social conflicts of its time and ours. As the following essays make abundantly clear, however, reading locally helps bring to light provocative material rendered invisible by centuries of useless disgust and neglect. With a grateful nod to our authors here and to those elsewhere who have argued for a similar reassessment, we offer this book.

Notes 1. For an excellent recent discussion of the debate over the closing of the theaters, see David Scott Kastan’s “ ‘Publike Sports’ and ‘Publike Calamaties’: Plays, Playing, and Politics,” in Shakespeare After Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 201–20. 2. On this point, see Michael Neill, “ ‘Wits most accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 341–60.

12

Adam Zucker and Al an B. Farmer

3. For a more detailed discussion of localization as a mode of historicist criticism, see Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). The diverse approaches represented in the present collection contradict as often as they correspond with the methodology Marcus lays out, but we share with her the sense that deploying a rhetoric of place to frame analysis can illuminate the ways in which the multiple sites of early modern drama— both material and imagined, historical and textual—collaborate with one another to produce meaning for audiences and critics. 4. There is a healthy (if somewhat scattered) critical tradition that has periodically labored against this dismissal, including the work of the following scholars, who have deeply influenced our own thinking on the subject: Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Julie Sanders, Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999); Ira Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993) and Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992); James Bulman, “Caroline Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd edn, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 344–71; R. J. Kaufmann, Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Michael Neill, ed., John Ford: Critical Re-visions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds., The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (New York: Routledge, 1992). 5. The first two quotations here are representative of Alfred Harbage’s odd tendency to insult the objects of his fascination, the plays by amateurs associated with Charles I’s court. See his seminal Cavalier Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 2, 257–58. 6. This is Felix Schelling’s assessment of Richard Brome’s plays in particular, in his Elizabethan Drama, 1558–1642, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1908), 2:275. 7. Johannes Adam Bastiaenen, The Moral Tone of Jacobean and Caroline Drama (1930; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1966), 2. 8. Ibid. 9. Dorothy Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), 150. See also Clifford Leech, Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Other Studies in Seventeenth Century Drama (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), where he suggests, “It is difficult not to take an ex post facto view, but the Caroline audience seems like a community of people waiting for its own dissolution, sipping its hemlock daintily” (161). 10. For a version of this narrative mapped onto a slightly earlier period, see Hanson T. Parlin, A Study in Shirley’s Comedies of London Life (Austin: University of Texas, 1914): “The Jacobean drama deserted the broader

Introduction

11.

12.

13.

14.

13

interests of national life and character for the narrower function of amusing a courtly circle. In passing from the patronage of the public to that of the court, the drama lost in vitality and human significance. For the genuine study of human personality in the earlier plays, artists like Beaumont and Fletcher substituted the clever plotting of artificial romantic story; instead of copious richness and careless strength of the great Elizabethans, the Jacobean playwrights had nothing better to offer than a more finished art; the healthy directness and buoyancy of the earlier drama declined, and the tone of Jacobean plays is frequently suggestive of the profligacy and moral taint of the rich and leisured class” (6). See, for example, Schelling, Elizabethan Drama: “It was not the least of the gathering misfortunes of the years in which England was drifting into civil war that the questions involved between Puritan and Cavalier should have resulted in arraying class against class. The theater, still—though in a limited sense—the mirror of its age, reflected this cleavage, which was parting farther and farther the tastes, pursuits, and ideals of the two, alike in the coarseness and cynicism of its comedies and in the heroic inanities of inferior tragicomedy” (2:305). For more recent (and considerably more evocative) Marxian readings of the transition under consideration here, see Joe Lee Davis, The Sons of Ben: Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), and Walter Cohen, “Prerevolutionary Drama,” in McMullan and Hope, The Politics of Tragicomedy, 122–51. See the essays compiled in Clare McManus, ed., Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Jane Farnsworth, “Defending the King in Cartwright’s The Lady-Errant (1636–37),” Studies in English Literature 42 (2002): 381–98; Julie Sanders, “Caroline Salon Culture and Female Agency: The Countess of Carlisle, Henrietta Maria, and Public Theatre,” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 449–64; and Sophie Tomlinson, “She that Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture,” in McMullan and Hope, The Politics of Tragicomedy, 189–207. In addition to the essay by Benedict Robinson included here, see Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Along with the seminal work of Martin Butler in Theatre and Crisis, see Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Zachary Lesser, “Marlowe’s Jew Goes to Church: Nicholas Vavasour and the Creation of Laudian Drama,” in Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),

14

Adam Zucker and Al an B. Farmer

81–114; and Alan B. Farmer, “Play Reading, News Reading, and Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News,” in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 127–58. 15. Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis is especially good on the subject of the Town. See also Matthew Steggle, “Brome, Covent Garden, and 1641,” Renaissance Forum 5 (2001); Paul W. Miller, “The Historical Moment of Caroline Topographical Comedy,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 32 (1990): 345–74; Adam Zucker, “Laborless London: Comic Form and the Space of the Town in Caroline Covent Garden,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5 (2005): 94–119; and Jean Howard’s contribution to this collection. 16. See Rick Bowers, “Players, Puritans, and Theatrical Propaganda, 1642–1660,” Dalhousie Review 67 (1987–1988): 463–79, for a discussion of Parliament’s actions against playing between 1642 and 1649. 17. The historians who have contributed to the debate at hand are legion, and we have barely skimmed the surface here of the ideas that motivate them. Recent introductory overviews of the historiography are given in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., The English Civil War (New York and London: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), especially the editors’ introduction (1–31); Peter Lake, “Retrospective: Wentworth’s Political World in Revisionist and Post-Revisionist Perspective,” in The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, ed. J. S. Merritt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 252–83; Glenn Burgess, “On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 609–27; Peter Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 34–58. For a more pointed post-revisionist survey of the debate, see Ann Hughes, The Causes of The Civil War, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1998). Other work which deeply informs our own understanding of the Caroline period includes Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York: Longman, 1993). For highly local studies, see the essays in the two collections edited by R. C. Richardson, Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), and The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects (Stroud: Sutton, 1997). For a related analysis of the role of cultural production in early modern politics, see R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a

Introduction

15

Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 18. Books being prepared for publication at the same time as this one include Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders, eds., The 1630s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming) and Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 19. For local histories of the developing West End that emphasize its diversity, see Jeremy Boulton, “The Poor Among the Rich: Paupers and the Parish in the West End, 1600–1724,” in Londinopolis, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 197–225; R. Malcolm Smuts, “The Court and Its Neighborhood: Royal Policy and Urban growth in the Early Stuart West End,” Journal of British Studies 30 (1991): 117–49.

This page intentionally left blank

1

Canons and Cl assics: Publishing Drama in Caroline Engl and Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser

O

ne of the arguments of this collection as a whole is that a distinctive culture of drama developed in Caroline England. The publication of playbooks in the 1630s both provides important evidence for this development and was, in fact, one of the driving forces behind it. Caroline dramatic culture, in other words, took shape not only in theaters but also in bookstalls. In many ways, playbooks in this period differed significantly from those printed earlier, and there are many stories one could tell about the publication of drama in Caroline England, from the rise in author attributions on title pages, to the simultaneous rise in theater attributions, to the increased use of prefatory material such as dramatis personae, actor lists, dedications, and commendatory verses. Such changes in the material appearance of playbooks reveal a great deal about the theatrical culture of Caroline England: the creation of the professional dramatist as a literary author within, rather than against, the commercial theater; the growing rivalries among playing companies and theaters, such as that between the Phoenix and the Blackfriars; and the construction of social divisions among theatrical audiences.1 In this essay, we focus not on the material appearance of playbooks—as most previous studies have done—but rather on the fundamental issues of their publication itself: how plays were brought to market and why; how often they were printed; how successful they proved once on the market.2 While these issues might initially seem to concern more purely “economic” and less “cultural” aspects of play publication, we will argue that they reveal a crucial element of

18

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

Caroline theatrical culture. In the 1630s, the market for printed drama from the professional theater underwent an unprecedented division in which new plays were split from a group of “classic” plays first published decades earlier. Shaped by the activities of both publishers and book-buyers, and by the exchange of numerous play quartos rather than the attempt to forge a literary dramatist in singleauthor folio collections, this bifurcation in the playbook market resulted in the creation of the first canon of early modern English drama.3

The Popularity of Playbooks in Elizabethan and Jacobean England To understand the radical transformation of the publication of playbooks in Caroline England, we first need to examine how the market for printed professional drama had functioned since its creation around 1590. As we have argued at length elsewhere, playbooks were a highly successful segment of the early modern book trade, providing respectable profits at unusually low risk because plays were in high demand with retail customers. Our earlier articles focused on the pre-Caroline period, and we will simply summarize our findings here.4 In order to assess the popularity of any class of books, we should consider four criteria of market performance: total number of editions published, market share (total editions as a proportion of a relevant population of books), reprint rate (the percentage of all first editions that reached a second), and profitability (the potential profits of an edition relative to other books). Because each of these criteria illuminates distinct aspects of “popularity” in the book trade, and because they do not always neatly align, we must evaluate them in dynamic relation to each other if we want to get a full sense of the economic performance of a class of books. Only then can we understand the “structures of popularity” according to which different kinds of books were published and consumed. The most distinctive aspect of the market performance of playbooks was their remarkably high reprint rate compared to other books. As figure 1.1 shows, from 1576 to 1625 plays were reprinted at more than twice the market average of other “speculative” books—that is, books intended for retail sale (39.9 percent versus 18.1 percent).5 And these reprints themselves performed impressively, with almost three-quarters of them reaching a further edition inside twenty years. Playbooks were also reprinted more than twice as often as one

Canons and Cl assics

19

45% Total: 39.9%

First reprinted in 6–20 years

40%

First reprinted in 0–5 years

35% 30% 25% 20%

19.7% 20.2%

15%

Total: 18.1%

Total: 19.3% 2.5% 16.9%

5.7% 12.4%

10% 5% 0% Professional Plays, 1576–1625

Sample of Speculative Books

Sermons in English, 1576–1625

Figure 1.1 Outperforming the Market in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Reprint rates of first editions of pre-Caroline professional plays versus speculative books and sermons (1576–1625)

particular class of books that scholars have traditionally considered to be quite popular: sermons.6 What these figures indicate is that bookbuyers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England were eager to buy plays, since a stationer’s decision to republish a play can be taken to indicate that the previous edition had sold out (or was about to do so) and that the stationer believed there was enough continued demand for another edition. Because of this popularity with retail customers, plays were less risky investments for stationers because they were far more likely to turn a profit than other books. For the first half-century of professional-play printing in England, a publisher stood a far greater chance of earning the increased profits accruing from reprints with a play than he did with the average book. Playbooks were reprinted more frequently than other books partly because plays were, in one important sense, less ephemeral. For instance, if a sermon was not reprinted in the “short term” (within five years), it was highly unlikely ever to be reprinted. Once this shortterm window passed, only 2.4 percent of all first-edition sermons reached a second edition in the “medium- to long-term” (within six to twenty years). Retail books in general do not look much different, as figure 1.1 shows. Professional plays, by contrast, continued to find

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

20 20 18

Second-plus editions

16

First editions

14 12 7.0 10.2

10 4.9 8.1

8 6

2.5 5.3

4 0.5 2

4.3 2.1

2.2

1.1 1.9

0 Period 1: 1576–1597

Period 2: 1598–1613

Period 3: 1614–1628

Period 4: 1629–1640

Period 5: 1641–1649

Period 6: 1650–1660

Figure 1.2 The Dynamics of the Market for Professional Plays: Average number of first and second-plus editions published per year (1576–1660)

success even beyond the short-term window: 19.7 percent reached a second edition in the medium- to long-term. In other words, playbooks were just as likely to be first reprinted after five years as within five years. And even in the short term, the reprint rate for professional plays (20.2 percent) outpaces the entire twenty-year rate for retail books in general and for sermons in particular. Plays not only repaid their publishers’ investments more quickly than other books, but they also remained profitable far longer. The trade in playbooks, like most markets, was a dynamic one characterized by periods of expansion and contraction; these fluctuations affected the publication of both of the two categories of playbooks that will be central to this essay: new plays (first editions) and reprints (second or later editions, which we will call “second-plus editions”). Figure 1.2 shows that the trends in the publication of playbooks per year divide that market into six distinct periods: 1576–1597: an initial period of low production 1598–1613: a boom of expansion and sustained high production, with almost five times as many editions per year 1614–1628: a period of gradual contraction, with production levels generally still above those of 1576–1597 1629–1640: a second boom, with the highest edition totals of the entire early modern period

Canons and Cl assics

21

1641–1649: a sharp contraction, with a drop in edition totals to levels not seen since the 1580s 1650–1660: an expansion to levels slightly above those of 1614–1628 The market share of playbooks varied from 1.3 percent and 1.5 percent in the first and third periods, to 4.2 percent and 3.4 percent in the two boom periods.7 As these figures for market share show, playbooks were more prevalent in the book trade than recent scholarship has supposed, but they still comprised less than a third of the market share of sermon-books.8 Even in the two boom periods of playbook publication, more than twice as many sermons were published. Contrary to what one might have supposed, then, a higher market share did not necessarily correlate with a higher reprint rate; playbooks and sermon-books appear to have had different structures of popularity. Different kinds of books sold in different ways and depended on different business strategies from publishers. Not only did the level of consumer demand vary for distinct classes of books, but so too did the nature of that demand: some books were topical and found an intense but short-lived interest, while others sold more slowly and steadily. Another key factor in determining structures of popularity was supply, the availability of different kinds of manuscripts. Sermons, for example, were always in plentiful supply to publishers, since preachers were producing new ones every week, and with a market share of around 10 percent, they were readily available to retail customers as well. After expanding rapidly from the 1570s to the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the market for sermons was stable, reliable, and sizeable; it exhibited far less fluctuation than the playbook market and had a reprint rate of almost exactly the market average. But many other structures of popularity were possible. Coranto newsbooks, for instance, were never reprinted, and yet were clearly a popular class given their impressive market share from their development in the early 1620s until their suppression in 1632. Each edition of a serial newsbook, after all, was rendered obsolete once the next issue was published, and so we should not take their lack of reprinting as evidence of their unpopularity. Nor was popularity necessarily dependent on high profitability. Given the economics of book production in early modern England, shorter books cost less to produce but also led to lower profits; longer books required greater investment, and so carried greater risk, but they also offered the possibility of greater rewards. And yet ballads, which, at a half-sheet to one sheet in length, yielded among the lowest profits per copy of any book in

22

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

the trade, were among the most frequently published classes of books.9 What, then, was the structure of popularity for playbooks in Elizabethan and Jacobean England? Playbooks were of median length, and thus their profit per copy was fairly typical for the book trade as a whole. They were in high demand with book-buyers, as evidenced by their reprinting at more than twice the market average. If publishers knew enough about the book trade to realize that, on the one hand, playbooks yielded a reasonable profit and, at the same time, were far more likely to sell out than other books, then they must have been extremely attractive investments. But playbooks were also in limited supply to both publishers and customers (at least compared to sermons). The basic economics of theatrical production meant that playing companies simply did not stage as many plays as preachers delivered sermons, and so there could never have been as many professional plays printed as there were sermons, no matter how great the demand for playbooks among retail customers. In fact, from 1614 to 1628, the supply of playbooks seems to have greatly contracted, until only one new play was published in both 1624 and 1625, and none at all in the following three years. In Caroline England, however, the trade in playbooks abruptly picked up again, and more were published than ever before (see figure 1.2). But this trade, which had long functioned according to one structure of popularity, now fissured into two. The division would have lasting effects on the cultural status of Renaissance drama.

The Caroline Paradox In Caroline England, the structure of popularity for playbooks changed radically, as first editions were no longer reprinted at anywhere near the same rate as they had been in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Of the 122 professional plays first printed between 1626 and 1640, only eleven (9.0 percent) were reprinted within twenty years, a rate less than a quarter that of pre-Caroline professional plays and only half that of speculative books in general (see figure 1.3).10 Should we therefore conclude that printed plays in the Caroline period became far less popular? Not if stationers’ own investment decisions are any guide to popularity. Based on the total number of editions published, the Caroline period was the apex of early modern English printed drama. From 1629 to 1640, the supply of playscripts seems to have rebounded strongly, and play publishers nearly tripled their output compared to the preceding fifteen years, with both first editions and second-plus editions per year reaching their highest levels

Canons and Cl assics

23

45% 40%

First reprinted in 6–20 years

35%

First reprinted in 0–5 years

30% 25% 20%

Total: 18.1%

15% 10% 5%

Total: 9.0%

5.7% 12.4%

Total: 15.7% 2.8% 12.9%

5.7% 3.3%

0% Professional Plays, 1626–1640

Sample of Speculative Books

Sermons in English, 1626–1640

Figure 1.3 Underperforming the Market in Caroline England: Reprint rates of first editions of Caroline professional plays versus speculative books and sermons (1626–1640)

for the entire early modern period (figure 1.2). In fact, publishers brought out more first editions from 1629 to 1631 (21) than they had in the previous ten years combined (19). In the late 1630s, the publication of plays rose to even higher levels, and in 1640, stationers published the most professional playbooks (29) and the most new professional playbooks (24) of any single year before the Restoration. As a proportion of the entire trade, moreover, plays were also rising rapidly. The market share of playbooks more than doubled from the previous period of contraction and approached the highest levels of the first boom period. Since both market share and reprint rates can function as indexes to popularity, we are left with a seeming contradiction. Plays seem to have become less popular in the Caroline period if judged by reprint rates, and yet according to two other measures of popularity—editions per year and market share—plays were as popular as ever in the 1630s, if not more so. How can we explain this “Caroline paradox”?

Long-Term Cause: The Civil War In the long term, the disruption to and transformation of the book trade caused by the Civil War played a large part in reducing the likelihood of a Caroline playbook being reprinted.11 Such a claim might

24

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

seem surprising in light of recent arguments that have stressed the continuing importance of drama during the Civil War and Interregnum.12 As these arguments have rightly pointed out, the Parliamentary ordinance of September 2, 1642, commanded that the performance of “publike Stage-plays shall cease and be forborne,” but it said nothing about the publication of plays; stationers were not ordered to stop printing drama, nor did they.13 But most of the dramatic publications from this period were not plays from the professional stage; rather, they were various forms of nonprofessional drama, as well as semi-dramatic political pamphlets written in dialogue. As figure 1.2 shows, while drama in general may have continued to be printed, stationers in the 1640s were investing in professional plays less often than they had in any period since the 1580s. In fact, the 1640s stand out as a distinct moment in the publication of professional playbooks, one with a small corpus of plays brought out by an even smaller number of stationers. From 1641 to 1649, fewer professional plays were published than in the year 1640 alone, an average of only three per year, one-sixth the average during the Caroline boom. And while a wide range of publishers had brought out plays during the Caroline period, the plays of the 1640s were largely the product of a single publisher with a particular political agenda. Three-quarters of the professional plays published during the Civil War period (1642–1649) were by the authors John Suckling, William Cavendish, and William Davenant, all active royalists who had taken part in the Army Plot of 1641; other playbooks published in this period include one each by John Denham and Jasper Mayne, both of whom had established royalist sympathies. Further, most of these plays were published by Humphrey Moseley, a stationer with strong royalist connections who was, of course, also responsible for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.14 The Civil War market for printed professional plays, therefore, was small and heavily centralized in one royalist stationer specializing in known royalist authors. Moseley and other stationers were almost completely uninterested in professional plays printed during the Caroline period, or indeed, from any period before the war. Of the 335 playbooks first printed through 1641, only three—Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman Hater (1607) and Thierry and Theodoret (1621), and John Suckling’s Aglaura (1638)—were reprinted during the Civil War, all by Moseley. Plays had been more successful than other kinds of books in the pre-Caroline period in part because of their long “shelflife,” because plays, unlike other books, were just as likely to be reprinted after five years as within five years. As figure 1.4 shows,

Canons and Cl assics

25

0.45 38.8%

0.4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2

19.7% 15.4%

0.15 0.1

5.7%

0.05 0 1576–1625

1626–1640

First Editions

1576–1625

1626–1640

Second-Plus Editions

Figure 1.4 The Effects of the Civil War on the Market for Professional Plays: Medium- and long-term reprint rates (within six to twenty years) of first and secondplus editions

however, the number of first editions reprinted in the medium- to long-term dropped from 19.7 percent in the pre-Caroline period to 5.7 percent for those first printed from 1626 to 1640. The corresponding reprint rates for second-plus editions also fell precipitously from 38.8 percent to 15.4 percent. The outbreak of war in 1642 thus diminished the comparative advantage of a long shelf-life that had previously distinguished professional plays from other books. Plays in the 1630s were now very unlikely to be reprinted after five years. Indeed, the effects of the Civil War were so powerful that even the market for second-plus editions, which had been consistently marked by a very high reprint rate (72 percent), experienced a sharp decline. A rupture of this kind had never before occurred in the market for professional plays, and when publishers were bringing out new plays in the 1630s, they certainly had no idea of what was just over the horizon. Part of the Caroline Paradox can thus be explained by this unforeseen disruption in the professional playbook market.15

Short-Term Cause: The Split in the Playbook Market Much of the reduction in long-term reprint rates, then, can be attributed to the effects of the Civil War on the book trade, and even within

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

26 0.4 0.35

33.3%

Second-plus editions

0.3

First editions

28.1%

0.25 0.2

20.2%

0.15 0.1 0.05

2.0%

3.7% 4.2%

0 1576–1625

1626–1635

1636–1640

Figure 1.5 The Emergence of Two Markets for Professional Plays: Short-term reprint rates (within five years) of first and second-plus editions

the short-term window, the reprint rates of those plays printed after 1635 were also necessarily affected by the war. Before then, however, the situation was much different, since from 1626 to 1635 the Civil War could have had no effect on the reprinting of plays within five years of publication. And here we see that a real distinction emerged between first editions and second-plus editions, a distinction that suggests the formation of an early modern dramatic canon. As figure 1.5 shows, during this early Caroline period, the shortterm reprint rate of second-plus editions (28.1 percent) was consistent with that of the pre-Caroline period (33.3 percent). But of the fifty-one first editions published from 1629 to 1635, only James Shirley’s The Wedding reached a second edition within five years, a sharp downturn from the pre-Caroline period when one in every five new plays did. When we remove the effects of the Civil War, therefore, we see a significant divergence in the playbook market: no real change among second-plus editions but a precipitous drop in the reprinting of first editions. The Civil War thus cannot account for the entirety of the Caroline paradox: in this early period we still see the strange combination of low reprint rates for first editions and increasing investment in them. We must search elsewhere for the causes behind this transformation in the market for plays. We can imagine two possible explanations for this change, which we will call the “glut theory” and the “profitable firsts theory.” The glut theory would hold that new plays simply were not selling well and that stationers were making poor business decisions: there were

Canons and Cl assics

27

more new plays published than customers were willing to buy. The overall demand for plays may have stayed constant, but as publishers brought out an unprecedented number of new plays, too many playbooks were chasing after these customers. Indeed, customers may have actually lost interest in new plays for some reason, perhaps because the drama of the Caroline period was simply uninteresting to them. Whatever the precise dynamics of supply and demand, publishers in the early 1630s, according to this theory, either did not realize that new plays in general were selling poorly, or if they did realize this, they continued to flood the market with new plays anyway, expecting sales to return to pre-Caroline levels. What this “glut theory” cannot explain, however, is why stationers continued to invest in new plays late into the 1630s. Clearly this continued investment was not driven by short-term reprint rates. Perhaps it was driven by ignorance of the market, but while stationers in the early 1630s may not have immediately perceived the trends in the market for new plays, by the late 1630s they would presumably have begun to recognize that first editions were not selling well. In fact, though, from 1637 to 1640 they brought out more new plays than ever, with 1640 marking the single highest year for the entire preCivil War period. And many of the stationers investing in plays in the late 1630s were the same ones who had invested in plays in the early 1630s; surely these publishers would have been aware of the sales of their own playbooks. John Waterson, for example, published five new plays from 1630 to 1634, and four others from 1637 to 1639; Francis Constable brought out four first editions in the early 1630s and four more in 1640; William Cooke published four plays by James Shirley in the early 1630s and fifteen more plays, including eleven by Shirley, in the late 1630s (usually working in partnership with Andrew Crooke). For all these reasons, the theory that publishers were unwisely investing in poorly selling new plays seems difficult to maintain. The other possible explanation for the Caroline paradox, the “profitable firsts theory,” is that new plays were earning profits and selling well, but not well enough to be reprinted. A stationer typically needed to sell about 60 percent of a first edition before beginning to realize a profit,16 but simply because a playbook reached this “profit point” did not mean that the publisher would necessarily choose to reprint it. The decision to reprint was based primarily on the publisher’s estimation of future sales of a subsequent edition, which depended on his assessment of a variety of factors, including the pace of past sales, especially of recent sales; the topicality of the play and its possible application to current cultural trends or political controversies; and its possible success in stage revivals. Even if a book sold out its

28

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

entire press run, a publisher might still decide not to reprint it if the edition had sold so slowly as to make its future sales seem precarious. This is apparently what happened to Thomas Heywood’s The Golden Age (1611), The Brazen Age (1613), and The Silver Age (1613). By 1632 all three were “now out of Print,” and Heywood hoped they would be reprinted following the publication of his two Iron Age plays, but they never were.17 On the other hand, a publisher might decide to reprint a play even before it reached its “profit point” if the edition was selling rapidly enough to make the prospects of a future edition seem promising; it took time, of course, to compose and print all the sheets of an edition, and if a play seemed to be selling quickly, a publisher would want to ensure that the subsequent edition would be ready for sale before the first edition sold out. We might well wonder, for example, whether William Aspley was reprinting below the “profit point” in 1605, when he published three editions of Eastward Ho!, which had gained notoriety because of its topical satire of King James and his courtiers, or in 1604, when he published three editions of The Malcontent. Since the decision to reprint was not mechanistically determined by past sales, we should not assume too quickly that lack of reprinting necessarily denotes commercial failure. The sudden dip in five-year reprint rates for first editions, therefore, should not automatically be taken as an indication that new plays had become unpopular with book-buyers in Caroline England or that they had become bad publishing investments, for it is possible that they were selling well enough to remain profitable even without being reprinted. Similarly, while professional plays in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were reprinted more than twice as often as sermons, we should not necessarily conclude that sermons were unpopular, since from 1576 to 1625, more than four times as many new sermonbooks were printed (973) as new professional playbooks (208). Since structures of popularity varied, success for some types of books translated into high reprint rates, while success for others translated into high market share (even without high reprint rates). And the transformations in playbook publishing demonstrate that the structure of popularity for a single class of books could change over time, as the book trade and the wider culture changed.

The Early Modern Canon of Printed Plays In Caroline England, we thus see the emergence of a division within the market for printed professional plays. Where once both first

Canons and Cl assics

29

editions and second-plus editions—both new plays and older plays— had been reprinted at very high rates, now these two kinds of books performed differently. Judging by their total editions and market share, new plays as a class seem to have been as popular as ever in this period, if not more so. But, based on their reprint rate, virtually no individual members of this class stood out from the pack; given that only six of the 122 first editions of plays printed from 1626 to 1640 reached a second edition before the Civil War, and none a third, it appears that only rarely did any specific new play sell much better than any other. This is one way for popularity to be structured, but not the only one, of course, and it marks a significant shift from the earlier structure of popularity for playbooks, which involved high levels of reprinting. But while the market for first editions was changing, the market for second-plus editions in the early Caroline period—when the Civil War could have played no role in the market—continued to follow the traditional structure. Something had changed in the market for playbooks that specifically affected only new plays. Part of this change involved the production of playbooks. Not only did the two types of plays function differently once they were on the market, but they also took different paths to the market. The market for first editions was dominated by one group of publishers, and the market for second-plus editions by a different group of publishers, with very little overlap between the two. Those publishers who specialized in first editions brought out almost no second-plus editions, while those who specialized in second-plus editions published almost no firsts. Each group of publishers, moreover, tended to work with others in the same group; jointly published plays were usually produced by two or more stationers pursuing the same specialty, rarely by stationers crossing this specialization divide.18 While the division between publishers of first editions and publishers of second-plus editions had been developing gradually over the previous decade, only after 1625 did this division correspond to a divergence in the sales of these two types of playbooks. In the Caroline period, the book trade was fundamentally split—both in production and consumption— between the markets for new plays and for older plays. This division both signaled and contributed to the development of an early modern canon. This canon was defined by a group of “classic” plays that were distinct—both in their style and in the way they functioned in the market—from new plays of the Caroline period. Of course, there had always been reprints and, therefore, “old” plays, but a canon is more than a collection of old books. Rather, a canon arises from a complex social process of inclusion and exclusion by which

30

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

some small group of texts is distinguished from and raised above the larger mass of texts.19 Such a principle of inclusion and exclusion could only obtain once these classic plays were considered not merely chronologically older than but also fundamentally different from another group of plays. In other words, while there had always been old plays, in the Caroline period what had earlier been a mere fact of chronology had now become an important division among two kinds of playbooks—both in the functioning of the market and in the minds of stationers and, so they imagined, of their customers. Two distinct but dialectically defined markets for plays were thereby created.20 On the one hand, there was a relatively homogeneous market for new playbooks, in which the demand was spread roughly evenly across all first editions (if it were not roughly evenly spread, more of these plays would have been reprinted). In other words, the demand for first editions was determined more by the desire for novelty, for a new playbook rather than for any particular playbook. On the other hand, there was a more heterogeneous market for classic plays, in which a select group of the plays first printed in earlier periods were reprinted in the 1630s. In other words, the demand for second-plus editions was determined mainly by the desire for particular titles. When the eighth edition of Doctor Faustus (1628), the seventh of Richard III (1629), or the twelfth of Mucedorus (1631) was reprinted in yet a further edition in the 1630s, stationers were recognizing a demand for these specific playbooks, not merely for the latest performance at the Blackfriars or the Red Bull.21 Conversely, no particular new play attracted this same kind of widely shared interest. The demand for new plays seems to have been determined by the desire for the latest performance at the theater or the latest book in the stationer’s shop; unlike with classic plays, therefore, the interest in any particular new play was necessarily temporary (as novelty always is) and quickly shifted to other, newer playbooks. It is this dialectic between two types of playbook that forms the structure of a canon: a small group of particular texts (certain second-plus editions) distinguished from and raised above the general mass of Caroline first editions and other Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Looking at the titles that made up this Caroline canon, we can see that the period of, roughly, 1590 to 1610 might have been seen as the “Golden Age” of early modern drama. For example, thirty-eight plays were printed in their third edition or higher from 1626 to 1641. All of these plays were written between 1587 and 1613, and all but seven were first published then. If we consider third-plus editions to indicate long-held and widely shared popularity in the book trade, then

Canons and Cl assics

31

Caroline publishers—and presumably readers—favored plays written around the turn of the century, plays more than twenty years old. Publishers and readers favored Shakespeare, who wrote more than a quarter of these plays, above all other playwrights, but authors as a whole did not dominate this canon: thirteen of the thirty-eight plays were anonymous in their third-plus editions, including six of the ten top-sellers (see table 1.1). Table 1.1 The Caroline Canon of Classic Plays: Plays printed in a third or higher edition from 1626 to 1641 Author, Title

Composition Date

First Publication Date

Editions, 1626–41

[Anon] Mucedorus and Amadine [Kyd, Thomas] The Spanish Tragedy Shakespeare, William 1 Henry IV Shakespeare, William Richard III Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus [Heywood, Thomas] 1 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody [Heywood, Thomas] How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad Shakespeare, William Richard II [Heywood, Thomas] 1 & 2 Edward IV [Anon] Wily Beguiled Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet [Dekker, Thomas] The Shoemaker’s Holiday Shakespeare, William Hamlet Dekker, Thomas 1 The Honest Whore [Anon] The Merry Devil of Edmonton Heywood, Thomas The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare, William Pericles Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Philaster Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher The Scornful Lady Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher The Maid’s Tragedy Shakespeare, William The Taming of the Shrew Rowley, Samuel When You See Me, You Know Me [Heywood, Thomas] 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody Sharpham, Edward The Fleer [Sharpham, Edward] Cupid’s Whirligig Wilkins, George The Miseries of Enforced Marriage Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher A King and No King [Anon] Arden of Faversham Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare, William The Merry Wives of Windsor [Haughton, William] Englishmen for My Money

1590 1587 1597 1592 1592

1598 1592 1598 1597 1604

10th–14th 10th 8th–9th 7th–8th 7th–8th

1604

1605

7th–8th

1602 1595 1599 1602 1596 1599 1601 1604 1602 1607 1608 1609

1602 1597 1599 1606 1597 1600 1603 1604 1608 1608 1609 1620

6th–7th 6th 6th 4th–6th 5th 5th 5th 5th 4th–5th 4th–5th 4th–5th 3rd–5th

1613

1616

3rd–5th

1610 1592 1604

1619 1594 1605

3rd–5th 4th 4th

1605 1606 1607 1606

1606 1607 1607 1607

4th 4th 4th 3rd–4th

1611 1591 1596 1597 1598

1619 1592 1600 1602 1616

3rd–4th 3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd

Continued

32

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

Table 1.1 Continued Author, Title

Composition Date

First Publication Date

Editions, 1626–41

[Anon] The Fair Maid of the Exchange Marston, John The Insatiate Countess Fletcher, John The Faithful Shepherdess Barry, Lording Ram Alley Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Cupid’s Revenge Jonson, Ben Catiline Cooke, Jo[shua?] Greene’s Tu Quoque

1602 1607 1608 1608

1607 1613 1610 1611

3rd 3rd 3rd 3rd

1608 1611 1611

1615 1611 1614

3rd 3rd 3rd

Source: Dates of composition are from Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd ed., rev. Samuel Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Square brackets indicate author is not named on play title page.

Of course, it took time for a play to reach a third edition, and so naturally third-plus editions would tend to be older plays. But the typical third edition printed between 1591 and 1625 was published only seven years after its first edition, a gap far shorter than the twenty-one years for Caroline third editions. Even second editions were “older” than they had been. More than two-thirds of the second editions published from 1626 to 1640 (22 of 32, including the second folios of both Shakespeare and Jonson) were written during this Golden Age. Fourteen of these had waited more than two decades since their first edition, whereas not a single second edition before 1626 had seen a gap this long. And, in fact, we know from other evidence that plays from this Golden Age were being purposely sought out by publishers: a fair number of the Caroline first editions similarly seem like conscious attempts to recover a lost play from this earlier age. Plays like The Jew of Malta, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Wit Without Money, Hoffman, and The Wise Woman of Hogsdon were all printed for the first time about twenty to forty years after they had been written and debuted on stage.22 In all, there were twenty-one such plays printed during the Caroline period, including the dramatic collections of John Lyly and John Marston. By contrast, in the entire pre-Caroline period, not a single play had been first published twenty or more years after its composition, and only four (Othello, Englishmen for My Money, The Four Prentices of London, and King Leir) had been first printed after fifteen or more years. It seems clear that publishers in the 1630s were aware of the development of this canon and were hoping to capitalize on it by finding the next “undiscovered classic” (see table 1.2).23 Publishers were not trying to hide the age of these undiscovered classics; in fact, they were calling attention to it repeatedly in the

Canons and Cl assics

33

Table 1.2 Undiscovered Classics in Caroline England: Plays first printed from 1626 to 1641 more than nineteen years after date of composition Author, Title

Composition Date

Publication Date

Lyly, John Six Court Comedies Marlowe, Christopher The Jew of Malta Marston, John Works [Chettle, Henry] Hoffman Heywood, Thomas The Royal King and the Loyal Subject H[eywood], T[homas] 1 The Fair Maid of the West Heywood, Thomas The Wise Woman of Hogsdon Dekker, Thomas 2 The Honest Whore Chapman, George Caesar and Pompey R[owley], W[illiam] A Shoemaker a Gentleman Dekker, Thomas Match Me in London Rowley, William A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed Fletcher, John The Night Walker Heywood, Thomas 1 The Iron Age Heywood, Thomas 2 The Iron Age Chapman, George, and James Shirley Chabot, Admiral of France Fletcher, John, and William Shakespeare The Two Noble Kinsmen Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Wit Without Money Fletcher, John Monsieur Thomas “B.J.F.” [Fletcher, John] The Bloody Brother (Rollo, Duke of Normandy) Shirley, Henry The Martyred Soldier

1583–1593 1589 1599–1605 1602

1632 1633 1633 1631

1602 1604 1604 1605 1605 1608 1611

1637 1631 1638 1630 1631 1638 1631

1611 1611 1612 1612

1632 1640 1632 1632

1612

1639

1613

1634

1614 1615

1639 1639

1617 1618

1639 1638

Source: Dates of composition are from Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd ed., rev. Samuel Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Square brackets indicate author is not named on play title page.

prefatory matter they included in these books. Their epistles and dedications not only highlight that these plays derive from an earlier era of drama but also draw a consistent contrast between them and the new plays of the Caroline period. In his address to the reader of Lyly’s Six Court Comedies (1632), for instance, the publisher Edward Blount claims that he has rescued these great works from the ravages of time: Reader, I haue (for the loue I beare to Posteritie) dig’d vp the Graue of a Rare and Excellent Poet, whom Queene Elizabeth then heard, Graced, and Rewarded. These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a Churchyard . . . A sinne it were to suffer these Rare Monuments of wit,

34

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser to lye couered in Dust, and a shame, such conceipted Comedies, should be Acted by none but wormes.24

In his dedication to Marston’s Works (1633), the publisher William Sheares writes that the playwright “was not inferiour unto any in this kinde of Writing, in those dayes when these [plays] were penned, and I am perswaded equall unto the best Poets of our times.” Further, Sheares implies that Marston surpasses contemporary playwrights because he “hath professed himselfe an enemie to all such as stuffe their Scenes with ribaldry, and lard their lines with scurrilous taunts and jests.”25 Thomas Heywood’s address to the reader of 2 Iron Age similarly notes that his play was “long since Writ, and suited with the Time then,” and while he admits to some doubt about “how they may been receiued in this Age,” this is only because dramatic taste has degraded: “nothing but Satirica Dictaeria [satirical sayings], and Comica Scommata [comical, scoffing jibes] are now in request.”26 In the prefatory matter to A Shoemaker a Gentleman, the printerpublisher John Okes characterizes the earlier drama as having a pleasingly direct style when compared to the sophistication of Caroline plays: the play, “though written many yeares since, ought not therefore to be slighted: I confesse we have better for Language in these our exquisite and refined Times, yet for the matter and Subject, none of a more delightfull and pleasant Style.”27 This distinction in style was drawn repeatedly. The publisher of the second edition of A Mad World My Masters (1640) alerts readers that “some lines . . . doe answer in meetre [i.e., rhyme]” but that, when the play was written and first performed, “meetre was most in use, and shewed well upon the conclusion of every Act & Scene.”28 The nearly identical epilogues to The Royal King and the Loyal Subject (1637) and The Martyred Soldier (1638)—both printed by John Okes—treat the same subject in ironically rhyming verse: “We know (and not long since) there was a time, / Strong lines were not lookt after, but if rime, / O then ’twas excellent . . . .”29 Okes’s epistle to A Shoemaker a Gentleman might serve as an epitome for the attitudes publishers expected readers to take toward these undiscovered classics, and perhaps toward this canon as a whole: “when others fade and are out of date, yet this doth endure to the Last: I know it may come short of that accuratenes both in plot and style that this witty age doth with greater curiosity acquire, I may thus excuse; that as Plaies were then, some twenty yeares agone, it was in the fashion.”30 In other words, these plays are not merely older than but significantly different from Caroline plays, and while they may fall

Canons and Cl assics

35

short of contemporary drama in the nicety of form and language (together with the scurrility and ribaldry) favored by a “witty age” of “greater curiosity,” they surpass them in a direct and unrefined style appreciated by numerous playgoers and readers. To sum up, we see the development of an early modern dramatic canon in the Caroline period for three reasons: first, certain plays were selling differently than others, as the market for playbooks bifurcated into classics that continued to be reprinted and new plays that were almost never reprinted; second, stationers themselves acted differently toward these two types of plays, with some specializing in new plays and others in classic plays; third, publishers thought differently about these classic plays, as indicated by the prefaces to their undiscovered classics, and they both expected and tried to persuade customers to think the same way. In the future, then, when we talk about Caroline drama, we must remember that a large portion of the “Caroline drama” available to Londoners during the reign of Charles I was not written in the Caroline period. Attempting, as traditional literary history has usually done, to derive the cultural characteristics of a literary period solely from the literary works newly written or published in that period leads us to miss crucial cultural developments caused by the reprinting and reading of older works; similarly, interpreting the meanings of plays (or other texts) solely in the circumstances of their composition or first performance, as early modern historicist criticism has tended to do, ignores the important meanings texts could take on in later moments, for instance the moment of their initial publication. The Caroline canonization of the Golden Age of English plays exemplifies the new histories that become available to us when we reject both of these ingrained tendencies.31 Produced by the division in the market for playbooks in Caroline England, together with the impact of the Civil War on the reprinting of plays, this canon of Golden Age plays had a profound effect on the later development of the canon of English drama. Looking at the reprinting of pre-Civil War drama in the period from 1660 to 1700, we can see that these two historical processes—neither of them necessary or inevitable—helped to determine which plays from the Renaissance stage would survive into later generations and which would be forgotten. Already by the 1660s, the plays of Caroline England had been largely lost to history. Twenty-five plays first printed before the Civil War were reprinted in the Restoration (along with the Shakespeare and Jonson folios). By this time, the Golden Age canon that emerged in the Caroline period had changed significantly. Whereas six of the

36

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser

Table 1.3 Restoration Reprints of Pre-Civil War Drama: Plays printed before 1642 and reprinted from 1660 to 1700 Author, Title

Composition Date

First Publication Date

Editions, 1660–1700

[Anon] Mucedorus and Amadine A[rmin], R[obert] The Valiant Welshman Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Philaster Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher The Maid’s Tragedy Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher A King and No King Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher The Scornful Lady Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Wit Without Money Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher The Elder Brother Brome, Richard The Northern Lass Fletcher, John The Night Walker Fletcher, John Rollo, Duke of Normandy (The Bloody Brother) [Fletcher, John] Rule a Wife and Have a Wife Heywood, Thomas Love’s Mistress J[onson], B[en] Catiline Jonson, Ben Works Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus Massinger, Philip, and Thomas Dekker The Virgin Martyr Shakespeare, William Hamlet Shakespeare, William Othello Shakespeare, William Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies S[hirley], J[ames] Love Tricks (The School of Compliment) Shirley, James The Wedding Shirley, James The Grateful Servant [Shirley, James,] revised by Mr Rivers The Traitor S[hirley], J[ames] The Constant Maid† Webster, John The White Devil Webster, John The Duchess of Malfi

1590 1612 1609 1610 1611 1613 1614 1625 1629 1611

1598 1615 1620 1619 1619 1616 1639 1637 1632 1640

16th–17th 2nd 7th–9th 6th–8th 6th–8th 9th–11th 2nd 4th–5th 2nd–3rd 2nd

1617 1624 1634 1611 1598–1611 1592

1639 1640 1636 1611 1616 1604

3rd 2nd 3rd 4th–5th 2nd 10th

1620 1601 1604

1622 1603 1622

4th 6th–9th 4th–6th

1590–1611

1623

3rd–4th

1625 1626 1629 1631 1638 1612 1614

1631 1629 1630 1635 1640 1612 1623

3rd 3rd 3rd 2nd 2nd 3rd–4th 3rd

Note: † A separate issue of this play in 1661 is titled Love Will Find Out the Way and attributed to “T.B.” Source: Dates of composition are from Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd ed., rev. Samuel Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Square brackets indicate author is not named on play title page.

ten most popular classic plays printed in the Caroline period had been anonymous (see table 1.1), only Mucedorus survived to see further editions after the Restoration. In general, as the Caroline canon of classic plays was whittled down during the Restoration period, we see a shift away from favorite titles, which had dominated the earlier canon, and toward favorite authors. These authors were overwhelmingly Elizabethan and Jacobean; the notable exception is James Shirley, who has five plays on the list (see table 1.3). In fact, these

Canons and Cl assics

37

favorite authors are basically those that our modern canon of Renaissance drama would lead us to expect: Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, and Marlowe, in addition to Shirley. A playbook customer in the 1630s, however, might well have anticipated seeing a somewhat different list of names—the names of plays, not authors. But while the Caroline and the Restoration canons do not exactly align, there is a real connection between them. The emergence of the Caroline taste for novelty on the one hand and classics on the other, along with the disruptive effects of the Civil War, made it highly unlikely that Caroline first editions would be reprinted. Therefore, when all pre-Civil War drama was narrowed down to a select group of authors in the Restoration, these authors were largely from the Golden Age, while Caroline dramatists were decidedly marginal. Is it merely coincidental that the same could be said of our canon today, or were the foundations of our canon laid in the early modern book trade?

Notes 1. For discussions of these trends, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 39 (2000): 77–165. On the rivalry between playing companies at the Phoenix and Blackfriars theaters, see also Peter Beal, “Massinger at Bay: Unpublished Verses in a War of the Theatres,” Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 190–203. 2. For the purposes of this essay, we restrict “playbooks” to plays from the professional theater, as opposed to the various forms of “non-professional” drama, including masques, Lord Mayor’s pageants, and university or closet drama. Further, we will of necessity be considering extant plays only, although some entire editions of playbooks must certainly have been lost to history; nevertheless, our analysis (which we do not have space to detail here) of entries in the Stationers’ Register alongside the extant archive makes clear that lost plays are extremely unlikely to affect the arguments we set forth here about trends in the publication of plays. For this analysis, see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 1–32, 29–30. 3. In stressing the role of the book trade in canon formation, our argument is much closer to that of William St. Clair in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), than it is to models of canon formation that highlight the role of ideological state apparatuses such as schools; see, for example, John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). This is not to deny the importance of arguments like Guillory’s, which examines the effects of educational regimes of

38

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser literacy beneficial to dominant classes, but rather to suggest that there is more than one variety of canon, and more than one way that canons are created. See Farmer and Lesser, “Popularity”; and Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book Trade,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 206–13. Due to the effects of rounding, in figure 1.1, the short-term and mediumto long-term reprint rates for sermons in English do not appear to equal the total reprint rate listed above the column. Our figures for play publication are derived from W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939–1959), and A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, eds., Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 2nd ed., rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991). Our figures for speculative books are derived from a statistically significant six-year sample of the STC. This sample takes account of all entries in the years 1590, 1600, 1610, 1620, 1630, and 1635 that represent books published for retail sale, but excludes duplicate or mistaken entries, variants, and printed documents not intended for sale, such as proclamations, university act verses and theses, or visitation articles. For more on these methodological issues, see Farmer and Lesser, “Popularity,” 13–18; and Farmer and Lesser, “Structures,” 211. Our analysis of sermons is based on sermon-books not texts; we consider collections of sermons to be one book, as we do with plays. For a discussion of our methodology for counting sermons, see Farmer and Lesser, “Popularity,” 31–32. Figures for market share are necessarily based on the extant archive of all speculative books; since the shortest books, such as ballads or broadsheets, were the most likely to disappear, the actual market share of playbooks (and indeed of all books of more than a couple sheets) was almost certainly lower than the figures we can now derive. Market share is not available after 1640 because of the transformed conditions of book publication; see D. F. McKenzie, “Printing and Publishing 1557–1700: Constraints on the London Book Trades,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume IV, 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 553–67; and D. F. McKenzie, “The London Book Trade in 1644,” in Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 126–43. For a discussion of recent assessments of market share, see Farmer and Lesser, “Popularity,” 1–2, 13–14. Indeed, it is a general rule in the early modern book trade that sheetlength varies inversely with the number of (surviving) printed editions. For instance, there were about twice as many speculative books printed of less

Canons and Cl assics

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

39

than four sheets as there were of forty sheets or longer. These figures are based on our analysis of the sheet-lengths of all speculative books printed in 1590, 1600, 1609, 1610, 1611, 1620, and 1630; we derived these sheet-lengths from ESTC (the English Short Title Catalogue online database developed by RLG) and Early English Books Online ⬍http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home⬎. In those years, there were 768 books of less than five sheets; 570 books of five to nine-and-a-half sheets; 326 of ten to fourteen-and-a-half sheets; and so on. The reprint rate for sermons also declined somewhat, from 19.3 percent to 15.7 percent, but unlike with playbooks, this decline is not statistically significant. On the post-1641 book trade, see McKenzie, “Printing”; and McKenzie, “London.” Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), appendix I, 289–91. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols. (London: H.M.S.O., 1911), 1:26–27. On Moseley’s publishing career, see Paulina Kewes, “ ‘Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books . . .’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections,” Publishing History 38 (1995): 5–21. Following the end of the war, stationers resumed publishing plays (see figure 1.2), but even then they did not reprint Caroline first editions in any real numbers. As the market for printed professional plays began to recover from the devastation of the 1640s, publishers focused mainly on plays that had never before been printed and on traditional best-sellers that pre-dated the Caroline period. Caroline first editions fit neither of these two categories, and so the disruptions of the Civil War virtually ensured that they would not be reprinted before the Restoration. On the printing of plays in the Interregnum, see also David Scott Kastan, “Performances and Playbooks: The Closing of the Theatres and the Politics of Drama,” in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167–84. Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422, 389. Thomas Heywood, “To the Reader,” The Second Part of the Iron Age (London, 1632), sig. A4r. Even if there was not enough perceived demand to justify a reprint, however, the demand for out-of-print books might still generate high prices on the second-hand market; see David

40

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Al an B . Farmer and Zachary Lesser McKitterick, “ ‘Ovid with a Littleton’: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11 (1997): 184–234, esp. 207–08. Publishers who specialized in first editions brought out 113 first editions, against only eleven second-plus editions; the stationers most active in this market included the booksellers William Cooke, Andrew Crooke, John Waterson, Francis Constable, and the printer John Okes. Those publishers specializing in second-plus editions brought out seventy-five reprint editions, against only six first editions; among the most active stationers in this market were the booksellers John Wright, Sr., Nathaniel Butter, Richard Meighen, Hugh Perry, Richard Hawkins, and the printer John Norton, Jr. Within these totals are forty-nine playbooks published jointly by more than one stationer, and the same trend holds for these publications. Those playbooks produced by two or more stationers specializing in first editions were overwhelmingly first editions (29 of 31), while those produced by stationers specializing in second-plus editions were overwhelmingly second-plus editions (9 of 10). Three first editions and five second-plus editions were published jointly by one stationer who specialized in new plays and another who specialized in second-plus editions. See John Guillory, “Canon,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 233–34. Compare also Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of literary production and its two subfields of restricted and large-scale production (The Field of Cultural Production [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 29–73); our analysis of Caroline play publication does not exactly align with Bourdieu’s study of literary production beginning in the late nineteenth century, but it similarly relies on the division of the field into two dialectically related subfields. Even if the “glut theory” is true, we still see the same division into two markets and thus the development of a canon, but in this scenario new plays would seem to have attracted very little interest at all, while classic plays continued to appeal to readers. As we have argued elsewhere, printed drama had a “relative independence” from the stage, and while theatrical revivals may occasionally have led to reprints of plays, this group of classics testifies at least as much to the ongoing demand for these plays as books as to the possibility that they continued to be performed on stage. Further evidence for the relative independence of printed drama from the stage is that stationers began again to publish drama in the 1650s while the public theaters were still closed. See Farmer and Lesser, “Popularity,” 11–13, 26. For a discussion of the continuing demand for Shakespeare in print in the 1630s, see Thomas L. Berger, “Looking for Shakespeare in Caroline England,” Viator 27 (1996): 323–59. In some cases, such as The Jew of Malta, which was initially entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594, it is possible that the Caroline edition is

Canons and Cl assics

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

41

actually a reprint of an earlier, now-lost first edition. But such cases are surely few, and even in these hypothetical cases, the playbook in question would represent another very “old” second edition, and our point about the remaining undiscovered classics would still hold. On the publication of The Jew of Malta in 1633, see Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81–114, esp. 81 n.3. While publishers may have been hoping to find a best-seller among these undiscovered classics, these old plays performed economically far more like the new plays of the Caroline period: only three of the twenty were reprinted before 1700. This publishing effort may not have succeeded, therefore, but it nonetheless testifies to the division in the market. Edward Blount, “To the Reader,” in John Lyly, Sixe Court Comedies (London, 1632), sig. A5r. William Sheares, “The the Right Honovrable, The Lady Elizabeth Carie, Viscountesse Fawkland,” in John Marston, The Workes . . . Being Tragedies and Comedies, Collected into one Volume (London, 1633), sigs. A3v–A4r, emphasis added. Heywood, “To the Reader,” sig. A4r, emphasis added. John Okes, “The Printer to the honest and High spirited Gentlemen of the never decaying Art, called the Gentle Craft,” in William Rowley, A Shoo-maker a Gentleman (London, 1638), sig. A3r. John Spencer, “The Printer and Stationer to the Gentle Reader,” in Thomas Middleton, A Mad World My Masters (London, 1640), sig. A4r. “The Epilogue to the Reader,” in Thomas Heywood, The Royall King, and the Loyall Subject (London, 1637), sig. I3v; see also “To the Reader of this Play now come in Print,” in Henry Shirley, The Martyr’d Souldier (London, 1638), sig. K2v. Okes, “The Printer,” sigs. A3v–A4r. On this drawback of traditional literary historicism, see St. Clair, Reading Nation, 2–4; on the meanings printed plays could take on in historical situations far removed from their composition or initial performance, see Lesser, Renaissance Drama.

This page intentionally left blank

2

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure in 1630s Theater Kathleen E. McLuskie

T

he claims of 1630s drama on critical attention have shifted in recent years. Earlier generations of critics either deplored its decadent decline from the high point of Shakespearean drama or admired its representation of a dynamic prerevolutionary moment in which the theater was able to act as the voice and imaginative staging ground of the political turmoil leading to the English Civil War. The editors of this volume have rightly recommended that the theater of the 1630s should be seen as more than a “prelude to an interruption.” However removing the shadow of the Civil War from our scrutiny of 1630s theater only brings into brighter focus the vexed critical relationship between politics and drama in the period. That relationship is not uniquely problematic for the discussion of 1630s theater: it is endemic to the practice of literary interpretation of drama more generally. Our encounters with old plays always take place at a remove in time from the event or events that constituted their originary moment, and the locus of criticism always lies in the historical gap between an effect in the theater and the resulting affect in a later reader or audience—between a play and its afterlife. That gap presents particularly perilous terrain when the play’s subject matter is deemed to belong more to the world of the play’s originating moment than to the experience and consciousness of its later audience. Writing of the witches in Macbeth, for example, Dr Johnson took special measures to rescue them from the contemptuous incredulity of his supposedly enlightened audience. Conflating historical awareness into aesthetic judgment, he claimed as axiomatic that In order to make a true estimate of the abilities and merit of a writer it is always necessary to examine the genius of his age and the opinions of his contemporaries.1

44

K athleen E. McLuskie

Johnson was thus able to claim both that Shakespeare’s belief in witches belonged to a “system that was then universally admitted” and that the poet was able to turn that system “to his advantage” in a way that “was far from overburthening the credulity of his audience.” The system of belief to which he referred was further supported with the reminder that it was endorsed not by credulous fools and infants but by the serious scholarly interest of King James VI and I. If the king of England and Scotland “believed” in witchcraft, the issue of the original audience’s “belief” seemed to be solved.2 In our own historical moment, the tension between aesthetic judgment and historical meaning has been differently resolved. As Frederic Jameson has argued, the individual text functions as a symbolic act, encoding the discursive constitution of a given social and historical formation.3 Aesthetic judgment is folded into the complex truth of history and the individual dramatic text is rendered paradigmatic, revealing in its narratives and themes, in the tensions among its characters, the very essence of the social dynamic that informed the culture as a whole. This continuing tension between aesthetic judgment and historical meaning always informs discussions of dramatic texts, either as the founding locus of aesthetic appreciation, informed by historical knowledge, or as the authenticating exemplar of a syncretic cultural history. Our desire to address 1630s theater as “an integrated economic, social and political institution,”4 on the other hand, demands that we break free of these competing historical judgments in order to reconsider the dynamic connections between the social relations of theater and the drama that they produced. This task is particularly pressing for 1630s theater since few of its dramatic texts have escaped from their history into the canon of the modern classic repertory. The burden of history lies heavy upon them. Both their specificity as individual cultural objects and the locus of their dynamic interaction with history are deformed as a result. Questions of historical reading are given particular purchase when applied to the case study of a text that is surrounded by documentary evidence of both its production and reception. Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood’s play The Late Lancashire Witches has received critical attention because it not only deals with the historically resonant theme of witchcraft but is itself based on prior historical events. It was also accompanied by evidence of interest that marks it out from the surrounding repertory. It was produced at the Globe theater in the summer of 1634. In July the King’s Men petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to prevent the performance at the Salisbury Court of

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

45

a play which they complained was “intermingleing some passages of witches in old playes.”5 The play was seen in August by one Nathaniel Tomkyns who wrote a letter to his kinsman with a full description and commentary on what he had witnessed.6 These three documented historical events—the King’s Men’s complaint against another company, the performance of the play itself, and Tomkyns’s letter—have been brought together to produce a narrative of cause and effect that has been widely repeated and is, in its own terms, extremely persuasive.7 Herbert Berry’s discovery of Tomkyns’s account allows him to tell a story of a direct relationship between the commercial business of making theater and a highly placed patron, Lord Pembroke, who is assumed both to have intervened in the embargo on another company’s play and to have made available to the playwrights classified legal material from the case. In seeking a motive for this intervention, Berry emphasizes Pembroke’s pursuit of his own political ends in his conflict with Archbishop Laud, conflating the possible commercial benefits that the playing company gained from dramatizing the case of the Lancashire Witches, and their patron’s particular political aim. The requirements of production—new dramatic material—are seamlessly linked to questions of reception—the presumed impact of the play’s performance on political maneuvering. This seamless connection is disrupted, however, by Nathaniel Tomkyns’s account of the play. In some ways, the record of his experience is helpfully corroborative. It confirms details of the performance, adding useful information such as that Mrs Generous was dressed as a cat in the scene where the miller cuts off her hand, and that birds and cats both fly out of the (presumably different) pies at the wedding feast. His final judgment, however, locates the play’s performance entirely in the realm of aesthetic pleasure and indicates that any particular political implications were lost on him: And though there be not in it (to my good vnderstanding) any poeticall Genius, or art, or language or iudgement to state or tenet of witches (wch I expected) or application to vertue but full of ribaldrie and of things improbable and impossible; yet in respect of the newnesse of ye subiect (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the ende of odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter, and is mixed with diuers songs and dances, it passeth for a merrie and excellent new play.8

A merry and excellent new play, in other words, is enjoyable because of its entertainment value and the comedy of its “odd passages and fopperies.” The play’s topical implications—the newness of the

46

K athleen E. McLuskie

subject—helped generate its pleasurable qualities, which Tomkyns experienced as being distinct from an “application to virtue” or a “judgement to state or tenet of witches.” In Berry’s narrative, Tomkyns’s assessment need not disrupt the critical argument about the play’s political significance. His distinction between the pleasures of theater and serious contemporary concerns with witchcraft is one which is still recognized in modern critical discourse. Berry concludes his account of the play’s political significance with the observation that “whatever the play’s instigation and however grim some of its statements could be made to seem on stage, the King’s Men played it as its writers saw to it they could— for the fun and not the message.”9 The “message” of court politics is set against the commercial demands of “fun.” The values implied in that distinction place the commercial character of early modern theater in opposition to its capacity for artistic coherence and dramatic integrity. As Heywood’s biographer Arthur Melville Clark puts it: “of all the dramatists Heywood was the most compliant with the public and yielded with an easy acquiescence and a whole hearted surrender.”10 Berry’s account of the context for The Late Lancashire Witches polarizes the political, the aesthetic, and the commercial as modes of historical explanation. The political message implied in Pembroke’s interventions becomes a kind of secret, known only to modern historians and available, if at all, only to the initiated political elite in its audience. Unlike Middleton’s Game at Chess, the closest analogy to direct political intervention in the business of playing, The Late Lancashire Witches does not involve an explicit narrative of political events, and its political particularity has to be imputed from other knowledge about the significance of witchcraft in the political rivalries of courtly faction.11 For Berry, the evidence of official intervention in the affairs of the King’s Men raises political questions about the play’s significance which are then extended to its subject matter. A similar account of the play’s historical meaning is offered in Alison Findlay’s more directly allegorical reading, in which she claims that “Brome and Heywood are using the play to satirise the changes of direction in spiritual politics instigated by Laud and the High Commission.” Findlay refers in particular to the episodes where the witches cause the wedding fiddlers to play out of tune, which she sees as a comment “on the failure of Laudian reforms to make a new beginning in the English Church,” and she reads the sequence of tasting wine from a London tavern called the Mitre as a reference to “religious agitation in the capital.”12 Once again, the immediate and

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

47

obvious aesthetic effect is occluded behind assumptions about a larger political meaning. The assumption that the play deals with more than its manifest content is most clearly articulated by Heather Hirschfield: Writing a play about a contemporaneous event, the playwrights had to address not only a witchcraft scare but a host of other political and cultural issues, particularly the reach of the Caroline government into the provinces and the changing sociocultural status of the Stuart theater.13

Hirschfield’s reading of the play is less dependent than Berry’s or Findlay’s on particular relations of court politics, and she mediates her account of its political impact through the dramatists’ concern for the state of the theater as well as that of the nation. Her emphasis on Charles I’s reissue of his father’s Book of Sports offers an interesting thematic connection between the play and elite concern about the need for recreation among “the meaner sort who labour hard all the week.” Her complex argument is that Heywood and Brome, because of their commitment to the professional stage, were also committed to its freedom from official interference. As a result, even if they had accepted Pembroke’s commission (for which there is no evidence) they wrote a play that refused “to deliver a definitive statement about the witches’ existence or guilt”: Heywood and Brome’s comic relief serves a purpose: by turning witchcraft into a “home-spun medley,” the dramatists expose the self interest that motivates both superstitious belief in and empirical skepticism of witchcraft—and the way that these seemingly exclusive epistemologies collude in witchcraft regulation.14

Hirschfield’s reading is more complex than Berry’s or Findlay’s in that it does not polarize the “fun” and the “message.” Nevertheless, in common with most interpretative readings of plays, she assumes that “comic relief serves a purpose” beyond “fopperies to provoke laughter.” These instrumental approaches to 1630s theater all search for meaning in the ability of plays to present or to suggest particular conclusions—about witchcraft or politics or the tension between high church and puritan attitudes to recreation. The narrative and theatrical effects of the play are either put to one side, in a separate realm of “fun,” or allegorized so that the fun either becomes a vehicle for the message or is subsumed into a larger politics of recreation in which the fun itself is part of the message.

48

K athleen E. McLuskie

Tomkyns’s account of the play, on the other hand, recognizes the possibility of a play that did not lend itself to interpretation. He was sufficiently politically aware to expect that he might find “judgement to state or tenet of witches”; he was sufficiently aesthetically aware to look for “poeticall genius, or art or language.” What he saw, however, was “odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter . . . divers songs and dances . . . a merrie and excellent new play.” These three quite distinct ways of responding to a play—the political, the aesthetic, and the immediate pleasures of theater—are clearly separated in Tomkyns’s account. This may have been, in part, because the critical discourses that surrounded plays were vigorously constructing such distinctions in the 1630s for both political and aesthetic purposes. Tomkyns’s distinction between what he expected and what he actually experienced illustrates the key challenge of dramatic criticism: the need to link the immediate pleasures of theater to a claim for its value and significance. That challenge had been addressed by dramatic criticism from the time of Aristotle and was reiterated in the anti-theatrical tracts and apologias that accompanied the early development of theater. These heated debates addressed the ethical, artistic, and social value of theater,15 but by the 1630s, the debate had shifted from one over theater itself to a more localized contest between different kinds of theater and the particular pleasures they could offer. As Michael Neill has noted, “the naive didactic and explanatory elements” of earlier commentary were “replaced by a critical engagement with the tastes of the audience.”16 The sheer volume of the 1630s commentary, however, shows that audience taste could not be taken for granted.17 The prologues and epilogues that surrounded plays seemed rather to be negotiating and establishing the taste that would ensure their acceptance. Their discussions of taste turned on and often conflated two distinct ideas. One was the link between taste and social status and the other the tension between tradition and innovation. Both were linked to unacknowledged commercial considerations. The increasingly intense commercial competition among playing companies and theaters made it important to differentiate the desired audiences for different theaters while the mixed repertory of revivals and new plays that sustained the expanding theatrical market needed careful aesthetic justification. In Shirley’s prologue to “The doubtfull Heire, which should have been presented at the Black-Friers,” for example, he teases his audience at the Globe with an ironic apology for appearing to neglect their taste: “No Bawd’ry, nor no Ballads . . . No Clown, no squibs, no Divell’s in’t; oh now / You Squirrels that want nuts, what will ye

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

49

do?”18 Since he was addressing an audience who had paid to see his play, the joke about the usual taste of a Globe audience served to reassure and flatter his actual audience’s more sophisticated discrimination. The prologue does this by insisting on the aesthetic qualities of the play, which offers something more refined than bawdry and ballads and rises above the immediate theatrical pleasures of clowning, squibs, and devils. Once the play is over, the epilogue takes a more collusive tone, offering its audience some terms for their appreciation of the play: Pray tell me your opinion of the Play, Is the plot currant? may we trust the wit? ... Are the lines Sterling? do they hold conceit?19

The difference between the defensiveness of the prologue and the collusive tone of the epilogue suggests that the experience of the play itself could turn the taste of the Globe audience from bawdry and ballads to sophisticated discussions of plot, wit, and conceit. The rhetoric of taste exemplified by the prologue drew on literary distinctions between the different kinds of writing that had been established earlier in the century. By the 1630s, the dramatists could play with those distinctions and make them part of the pleasure of playgoing. As Zachary Lesser has shown, the discourse of refined taste could be used to sell printed plays by addressing purchasers as distinct from playgoers.20 That same discourse seems to have been extended into the theater itself by the 1630s, closing the gap that separated published literary art from theater. The literary construction of taste was also used to develop an appreciation of innovation in the theater, the constant renewal of the repertory that was necessary to keep it, in the words of Shirley’s epilogue, “currant” and “Sterling.” In order to do so, playwrights drew on the conventional mapping of taste onto playing places that had been established in the early years of the hall theaters, but they also offered a more sophisticated account of the relations between taste and social status. The extended Praeludium to the 1638 revival of Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess presents a quartet of audience types identified in schematic social terms as a courtier, a lawyer, a citizen, and a country gentleman.21 The familiar opposition between select and popular theaters is indicated by the citizen’s decision at the end of the Praeludium to “go to th’ Bull, or Fortune, and there see / A Play for two pense, with a Jig to boot” (p. 8). However the sketch also points to a more complex set of oppositions between new and old

50

K athleen E. McLuskie

styles of drama that does not depend upon the stage where they are played. The country gentleman remembers how “I heard a fellow / Once on this Stage cry, Doodle Doodle Dooe, / Beyond compare; I’de give the other shilling / To see him act the Changeling once again” (p. 5). His taste for remembered theatrical pleasures is contemptuously dismissed by the Inns of Court man: Your judgements are ridiculous and vain As your Forefathers, whose dull intellect Did nothing understand but fools and fighting; ’Twill hardly enter into my belief That ye are of this Age, sure ye are Ghosts. (p. 5)

The differences between these characters involve not only their respective levels of wealth and status, or the particular venues they frequent, but also their appreciation of new artistic trends.22 The lawyer, Sparke, sums up the fashionable theatrical innovation as a move from the pleasures of physical theater and clowning to those of intellectual wit. He explains that “The Motly Coat was banish’d with Trunk Hose, / And since their wits grew sharp, the Swords are sheath’d” (p. 5). The fashion in theater, he attests, has followed the fashion in clothes and the more refined social mores of a new audience for art. The distinction between “the fun” and “the message,” between “poeticall genius, or art or language” and “odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter” was being firmly established in the discourses surrounding productions of 1630s plays. Those distinctions, however, were not necessarily the most productive for the commercial well-being of 1630s theater whose repertory also included revivals of old plays. Spark’s contrast between old plays associated with the Motley Coat and Trunk Hose and new plays that dealt in wit was not borne out by the repertory of the playing companies. For the playing companies, revivals offered the commercial advantage of an opportunity to reuse the backlist. That commercial calculation had to be mitigated by creating a sense that an audience’s new and refined taste made the revival especially appropriate. Admiring the King’s Men’s 1634 revival of The Faithful Shepherdess, Shackerley Marmion wrote: When this smooth Pastorall was first brought forth, The Age twas born in, did not know it’s worth. Since by thy cost, and industry reviv’d, It hath a new fame, and new birth atchiv’d.23

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

51

Heywood himself drew on and complicated this discourse in his prologue to the 1633 Cockpit revival of The Jew of Malta. He emphasized the continuity of taste by invoking Marlowe as “the best of Poets in that age” and Richard Perkins as the just, albeit modest, inheritor of Edward Alleyn’s reputation. Alleyn himself, described as “Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue,” was seen to exemplify the continuity of an ancient theatrical tradition.24 Such was the dynamic nature of theater that an old play (with some updating) could become new; a new audience’s taste could be admired for recognizing the worth ignored in earlier times. In their efforts to secure market share, playwrights surrounded their plays with commentary in which they attempted to construct a differentiated audience that would appreciate different styles of drama in different venues. And when the plays were taken from the backlist, the audience was both admired for its mature awareness of the continuities of the theatrical tradition and flattered by a sense of the complex taste that allowed previous failures to be appreciated by a more discerning crowd. The construction of these standards of taste and value supported the development of a commercial theater in that they helped define the aesthetic locus within which plays could be judged. By insisting on an artistic value for plays that was distinct from the physical pleasures of clowning and fighting, and by asserting the continuity of artistic values in plays that were revived, the commentary on Caroline drama extended the theater’s interests beyond particular performance events. But at the same time, while theatrical performance was the main source of the companies’ commercial success, the meaning of plays was also the most difficult to circumscribe. Surrounding performance events with apologias and local instructions to audiences may have been in part an attempt to avoid the dangers of being misunderstood. The danger for playing companies was that the “wit” that was admired as a mark of sophisticated aesthetic collusion between audience and playwright could equally encourage a particularity of interpretation that might bring the play into disrepute. Theophilus Bird’s 1639 prologue to Ford’s The Lady’s Trial, for example, deplored the alleged fashion for “wit”: Wit, wit’s the word in fashion, that alone Cryes up the Poet, which though neatly showne, Is rather censur’d often-times than knowne. He who will venture on a jest, that can Raile on anothers paine, or idlely scan Affaires of state, oh hee’s the onely man.25

52

K athleen E. McLuskie

Bird’s gloss on “wit” extends its application from verbal and narrative dexterity to cruel personal attack and, most dangerous, idle animadversions on “affaires of state.” The aesthetic qualities of artistic innovation could, in the hothouse atmosphere of particular theater events, be turned to the equally collusive and possibly equally pleasurable slurs on individuals. Tomkyns’s expectation that the play he saw might include “judgement to state” suggests that topical meaning, providing the pleasure of being in the know, was one possibility for a visit to the theater. Playing companies, however, had good reasons to avoid such particularity. One was that the play might attract unwelcome censure from those being glanced at. The other was that particular satire limited the repeatability and thus the commercial life of the play concerned. This commercial need to keep plays in the repertory was further compromised by the propensity of the regulating authorities to call in plays that were deemed to be offensive. Even plays from the backlist were not exempt from this kind of attention. When, in October 1633, Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, disallowed the King’s Men’s revival of The Tamer Tamed, he extended his regulatory range to include old plays that might be read with new political meanings: All ould plays ought to bee brought to the Master of the Revells, and have his allowance to them for which he should have his fee, since they may be full of offensive things against church and state; ye rather that in former time the poetts tooke greater liberty than is allowed them by mee.26

Affairs of state, however, were one of the themes accorded high value in the admiration of earlier drama. Heywood’s prologue to A Challenge for Beauty (1636) praised the great traditions of English drama in contrast to the more immediately local concerns of newer plays: For where before great Patriots, Dukes and Kings Presented for some hie facinorious things, Were the Stage-Subiect; now we strive to flie In their low pitch, who never could soare hie: For now the common argument intreats, Of puling Lovers, craftie Bawdes or cheates.27

Herbert’s political anxieties about discussions of affairs of state and Heywood’s emphasis on the aesthetic values of plays that dealt with “Patriots, Dukes and Kings” were both mediated but not completely

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

53

controlled by commercial considerations. Heywood’s insistence on transcendent themes protected the plays from unwelcome political reading. It also gave an aesthetic value to the commercial promise that a repertory of old plays provided. In 1637, the King’s Men used official influence to protect their repertory not only from other companies but from “the Company of Printers & Stationers [who] had procured, published & printed diverse of their bookes of Comaedyes, Tragedyes Cronicle Historyes, and the like which they had (for the speciall service of his Majestye & for their owne use) bought and provided at very Deare and high rates.”28 Protecting their plays was a necessary commercial move, but the repertory also needed the discursive insistence on its value in order to make that value legible for a discerning audience. Aesthetic questions about fit subjects for drama were implicated in the commercial realities of playing. Both were constantly compromised by the intervention of censorship and by the need for a commercial theater to work within an existing regulatory framework that had economic consequences. Similarly, though Herbert’s interest in relicensing old plays was driven in part by concern to maximize his income, he also had political reasons to keep the theater from complaints about over-particular implications. As Richard Dutton has shown, Herbert’s mix of political and commercial considerations were expressed in terms that moved the discussion into the realm of the aesthetic. He shows how Herbert’s disapproval of The Tamer Tamed and The Magnetic Lady was put in terms of uncleanness or prophaness. Dutton suggests, however, that in key cases Herbert drew attention to “sexualised discourse (which in and of itself was of little interest to the censors) as a smoke screen for oblique political commentary (character assassinations) which was actually more likely to attract the attentions of the licensing authorities.”29 Dutton identifies the source of the anxiety over these plays as arising from alleged direct references to Henrietta Maria and her court, which had left the Revels office vulnerable to reprimand from the Court of High Commission under Archbishop Laud himself. Herbert’s high-minded statements about church and state were animated by a concern for his own political survival, and his response is a useful reminder of the extent to which 1630s politics were as much about faction and particular interest as they were about “high facinorious things.” But Herbert was not acting merely hypocritically. His various statements about plays and the responses they elicited from both writers and playing companies indicate the extent to which political, artistic, and commercial considerations were entangled in the aesthetic discourse of the commentary that surrounded 1630s theater.

54

K athleen E. McLuskie

The conflict between Herbert and the King’s Men over The Magnetic Lady turned on an opposition between the poet, whose play allegedly involved “uttring some prophane speaches in abuse of Scripture and wholly thinges,” and the players, who insisted, somewhat disingenuously, that those lines were merely what they had “found penned, for them to act and playe.”30 Their attempt to blame Jonson was rejected by “my lords Grace of Canterbury” who “layd the whole fault of their play . . . upon the players” rather than on either “the poett” or Herbert, who had allowed the play.31 The players, ever alert to the commercial implications of censorship, were quick to endorse the political context in which they had to operate. Negotiating with Herbert over the changes to Shirley’s The Ball, Christopher Beeston assured him that many things which I found faulte withall should be left out, and that he would not suffer it to be done by the poett any more, who deserves to be punisht; and the first that offends in this kind, of poets or players, shall be sure of publique punishment.32

Herbert, on the other hand, also seems to have presented himself as an artistic as well as a political judge. Only a year later Shirley was being admired as “a patterne to other poetts” in his “beneficial and cleanly way of poetry.” Herbert’s notes suggest that his role in protecting “the quality, which hath received some brushings of late” was not only that of a censor, protecting the public from offensive matter, but also that of artistic guide, encouraging the poets to “imitate the original for their own credit, and make such copies in this harmless way, as shall speak them masters of their art, at the first sight, to all judicious spectators.” He adds, complacently, “I have entered this allowance, for direction to my successor, and for example to all poetts, that shall write after the date hereof.”33 This interweaving of aesthetic and regulatory judgments reveals the extent to which a functioning commercial theater was required to drive a wedge between the product of the early modern stage and the processes that brought it into being. The commentary dealt, for the most part, with the subject matter of the plays and the artistic effects they could provide for their audience’s refined (or robust) pleasure. In doing so it marginalized and obfuscated the political and commercial relations that were required to bring a play to or keep it on the stage. The product of a play performance had to be made available in terms that would not hinder its consumption either in the original moment of its production or in a subsequent revival. Factors that affected such

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

55

consumption included dangerous political particularity, a dynamic relationship with other plays and the traditions of taste that they established, together with the fit or lack of fit between the product and an audience’s expectations. The playwrights and other commentators who managed the relationship between product and market used the current discourses of taste, novelty, and tradition to construct the aesthetic terms in which their plays would be received. Nevertheless, this construction of audience taste need have no decisive commercial impact on attendance at one kind of play or another. The mockery of inappropriate audiences and the theaters that they were alleged to frequent did not prevent Tomkyns from visiting the Globe when it was attracting a great concourse of people. He was also content to praise “a merrie and excellent new play” even when it did not provide more high-minded pleasures. The divisions and oppositions of critical discourse regarding the Caroline theater protected the playing companies from unwelcome regulatory attention and extended the range of ways that an audience could be engaged. His comments reveal the kind of eclecticism that was required to sustain the full range of theatrical activity. Companies continued to produce the merry and the traditional, even as they valorized the serious and the new. * * * This dynamic context of taste, chronology, topicality, and commercial pressure all complicate the relationship between the 1634 production of The Late Lancashire Witches and the surrounding evidence of its production and its reception. Tomkyns’s overall judgment of the “merrie and excellent new play” suggests that he had internalized current aesthetic values, but he also speaks of the conditions of the play’s production. He saw the play “at the globe,” where he was surprised to find “a greater apparance of fine folke gentmen and gentwoemen then I thought had bin in town in the vacation.” Summer performances at the Globe were part of the King’s Men’s regular pattern of theater use, and Tomkyns’s surprise has more to do with the population of London during the vacation than the numbers or quality of people at the Globe. What is particularly noteworthy here is that the play was “acted by reason of ye great concourse of people 3 dayes togither.”34 The play’s topicality was being exploited to the full, but in the absence of more evidence, it cannot be assumed that this topicality had particular political implications. This potential topicality, however, did have to be managed in order to protect the company and the playwrights against unwelcome

56

Kathleen E. McLuskie

accusations of intervening in the processes of the law or of touching on sensitive political issues. Consolidating discourses of dramatic criticism readily provided the means to do so. Brome and Heywood’s prologue goes through some familiar moves in order to keep the audience’s focus on the aesthetic pleasures the play has to offer, insisting first on the play’s local appeal: Corrantoes failing, and no foot post late Possessing us with Newes of forraine State, No accidents abroad worthy Relation Arriving here, we are forc’d from our owne Nation To ground the Scaene that’s now in agitation. (2–7)35

In one sense this is an entirely traditional gesture, valorizing the local and domestic over the foreign and exiguous material for the drama and suggesting a modest circumscription of the play’s range.36 On the other hand, the statement could equally be used to deny or divert attention away from a quite explicit political scandal. A year before the performance of The Late Lancashire Witches, Ben Jonson’s prologue to A Tale of a Tub made an apparently similar claim: “No State-affaires, nor any politique Club / Pretend wee in our Tale, here, of a Tub.”37 Yet the record book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, clearly records that Jonson’s play had been precisely the focus of unwelcome courtly attention. He had allowed the play but only the condition that the part of Vitru Hoop be “wholly strucke out . . . by commande from my lorde chamberlin; exceptions being taken against it by Inigo Jones, surveyor of the kings works.”38 A Tale of a Tub was subsequently played at court but, as Herbert tersely noted, it was “not likte.”39 The same statement, in other words, might be used both to flatter an audience in general and to obscure a particular reference to current affairs. The effectiveness of these discursive maneuveres was far from guaranteed.40 The Late Lancashire Witches in its prologue invites the audience to collude in shared knowledge—“The Project unto many here well knowne; / Those Witches the fat Iaylor brought to Towne” (8–9)— and in its epilogue denies any right to intervene in the questions the play might raise. It claims that We represent as much As they have done, before Lawes hand did touch Vpon their guilt; But dare not hold it fit, That we for Iustices and Iudges sit. And personate their grave wisedomes on the Stage

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

57

Whom we are bound to honour; No, the Age Allowes it not. (2809–15)

The epilogue drives a gap between the Lancashire Witches’ case and its dramatic representation. It insists that the play can have no influence on the final legal judgment but asks nevertheless that the audience deliver “favourable censure” on the performance. In doing so, the playwrights establish a clear distinction between judgment of a topical event and their audience’s aesthetic judgment. Of the first they indicate “the Age / Allowes it not”; the second is a matter of the shape and scope of their narrative: “Should we goe further with ’em? Wit forbid” (2818). The dramatists were entering into a debate about witchcraft and using a particular case. It is unlikely that they were completely unaware of its potential political resonances. However both the prologue and epilogue carefully delineate the limits of their interest. They use the familiar artistic trope of humility to apologize for “An argument so thin, persons so low” (10) but also warn their audience to “Expect no more than can from such be rais’d / So may the Scaene passe pardon’d, though not prais’d” (12–13).41 This excursus around some of the dynamic factors affecting the theater of the 1630s gives some indication of the layers of evidence that lie between “a dramatic text and the social and historical formation of which it was a part.” What Nathaniel Tomkyns reviewed as “a merrie and excellent new play” entered a dramatic marketplace in which the very terms of his critical appreciation were being negotiated in the process of constructing an aesthetic discourse that could provide a locus of activity separate from the instrumental arenas of law and politics. As we have seen, these discursive maneuveres did not completely protect plays from unwelcome official attention; nor can the reading of one spectator foreclose discussion of the play’s significance in the political debates of the time. The cultural importance of both play and commentary, however, lies in its illustration of the discursive processes that located 1630s theater in a separate realm of aesthetic pleasure with its own canons of judgment. Those canons of judgment had to be sufficiently flexible to incorporate the whole repertory and the assorted venues used by the theater companies in order to render the plays fit for commercialized consumption by a discerning public. Summary critical judgments, however, cannot explain or account for the particular nature of the individual dramatic text and its theatrical effects. For Tomkyns, the “odd fopperies and passages to provoke laughter” militated against the serious treatment of the “tenet of witchcraft,” but by setting them in opposition to one another,

58

K athleen E. McLuskie

Tomkyns illustrates the fundamental gap between theatrical effect and interpretation. The eclectic consumerism created by the commentary on 1630s theater obscured not only potentially dangerous political readings, it also obfuscated the process of creating the moment-bymoment pleasures that the dramatists created on the stage. In creating those theatrical pleasures, Heywood and Brome, in common with many other dramatists in the 1630s, were adapting existing genres and well-tried formulae to new requirements. “The newness of the subject” that Tomkyns admired disguised the extent to which Brome and Heywood were recycling material from earlier treatments of domestic drama and the world turned upside down. The “tenet of witchcraft” that provided their play’s material followed familiar comic accounts of the disorder that witches could bring.42 Heywood and Brome not only recounted tales of their witches’ effects on, for example, the Seely household, they also brought those effects onto the stage. Introducing that motif, the young gentleman Arthur lists the reversals of expected relations of deference: The good man, in all obedience kneels vnto his son, Hee with an austere brow commands his father. The wife presumes not in the daughters sight Without a prepared courtesie. The girle, shee Expects it as a dutie; chides her mother Who quakes and trembles at each word she speaks, And what’s as strange, the Maid she dominiers O’re her yong mistris, who is aw’d by her. The son to whom the Father creeps and bends, Stands in as much feare of the groome his man. (276–85)

This list provides the framework for the later scene in which Doughty observes the family’s disarray. As Arthur has indicated, inferiors do rule their expected betters, but their parody of authoritarian behavior involves comic reversals that neither draw on nor lead to any exploration of the origins or consequences of this behavior. Contemporary views of appropriate family relations are subsumed into their potential for comic reversal. As Arthur observes in his first account, the Seely household, like the theater itself, “breeds pitty, and in others wonder; / So in the most part laughter” (287–88). Similarly, the plot of Mrs Generous’s engagement with witchcraft redeploys the trope of agonized marital confrontation that Heywood had used in his earlier domestic dramas. On hearing that his wife may be a witch, Squire Generous is given an extended poetic sequence with which to track his emotionally charged movement from suspicion to

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

59

certainty. The representation of his horror, however, takes the form of abstract invocations and familiar collocations: his blood “is turn’d to ice” (1704); he is a “meere Marble statue” (1709); the earth and the moon will leave their spheres (1724–27). His high flown rhetoric and his wife’s speech of passionate repentance are mitigated by their servant Robin’s mocking asides and the whole scene is framed by the absurd context of Mrs Generous’s transformation from a horse. Mrs Generous later explains to her witch companion that “Some passionate words mixt with forc’t tears / Did so inchant his eyes and eares” (2046–47). Her pretended repentance draws on familiar tropes in order to be convincing, and the dramatists similarly provide set pieces that are intended to affect their audience. The task of turning their narrative into a play is accomplished by accumulating localized theatrical effects. The “poeticall Genius, or art, or language” that Tomkyns missed in the play was subsumed within the “things improbable and impossible.” The task of the dramatists was to turn a received narrative of witchcraft into theatrical pleasure. They did so by drawing on a theatrical repertory of established devices. By the 1630s, the professional theater practice of collaboration and revivals had established the “scene” as the unit of dramatic construction.43 Witchcraft, as much as any other theatrical trope, could be extrapolated into moveable units such as the “passages of witches in old playes,” which the King’s Men alleged were spoiling their market, or the entertainment in Oxford, which showed “The witches of Lancashire over against ye Kings Head, their Tricks, Meetings.”44 There is no doubt that the diverse resources that the dramatists were able to draw on were carefully integrated into the theatrical texture of the play.45 The various narratives of the three main social groups are all linked by the effects of witchcraft, and witchcraft also provides the principal source of theatrical display. The set pieces of the disorder in the Seely household, the chaotic wedding of Lawrence and Parnell, and the skimmington ride that exposes Lawrence’s impotence are all the effects of witchcraft and are viewed and commented on by the skeptical squires. The conflict between Whetstone and the gallants is resolved in the magic display of the gallants’ supposed fathers, and the tale of the soldier and the miller is linked to the main action by exposing Mrs Generous as a witch through the hand that the soldier cut off in his battle with the witches. Where the evidence of the witches’ transformations cannot be shown on stage, it is narrated by the characters and then brought on stage through such symbols as the magic bridle that Mrs Generous used to turn Robin into a horse or

60

K athleen E. McLuskie

the stage action where Goody Dickinson abducts the boy after chasing him about the stage. Much of this action can be left to the ingenuity and skill of the performers. One intriguing stage direction instructs “Enter an invisible spirit. J. Adson with a brace of greyhounds” (836);46 another indicates “A Spirit (over the doore) does some action to the dishes as they enter” (1120–22). When the witches’ actions have physical results, they are enacted through simple stage tricks like Mall’s pail which moves by itself (1005) or the food stolen from the wedding which is pulled onstage for the witches’ feast. The muddled, out-of-tune music that had been the sign of witchcraft in The Witch of Edmonton and The Masque of Queens is used again at the Seely wedding where the musicians first play “Selengers Round” (1385); then “As they beginne to daunce, they play another tune, then fall into many”(1386–87); and finally “Every one a severall tune” (1393).47 The strange and magical character of the witches’ action is partly a matter of display, but it is further reinforced by the witches’ speeches that poetically conjure up the world of village belief. At their first meeting, they call up their familiars who appear as “foure Spirits” (538) and are sent off on their tasks as the witches dance: Now upon the Churles ground On which we’re met, lets dance a round; That Cocle, Darnell, Poppia wild, May choake his graine, and fill the field. (542–45)

At their banquet, the evidence of the witches’ power in producing the magic food is extended by their conversations about how they had made their way to the meeting: Meg What Beast was by thee hither rid? Mawd A Badger nab. Meg And I bestrid A Porcupine that never prickt. Mal The dull sides of a Beare I kickt. (1546–50)

The list of associations between witches and animals is then seamlessly linked back to the main narrative with a comic, and bawdy, reference to Mrs Generous’s arrival, riding on her servant Robin who has been transformed into a horse: Mal I know how you rid Lady Nan, Mrs Generous Ha, ha, ha, upon the knave my man. (1551–52)

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

61

This integration of the witchcraft displays with the main narrative is an important part of the play’s overall aesthetic effect. The witches’ initial motivation is “More for our myrth now then our gaine” (527); their action in disordering the Seely household will simply “beget / Wonder and sorrow ’mongst our foes, / Whilst we make laughter of their woes” (551–53). However as their action draws in the whole community and their discovery becomes inevitable, the tone of the play changes to one of suspense and anxiety. Though there are further episodes of comic witchcraft in the skimmington ride (1880–2014), the magical appearance of the gallants’ true fathers (2086–181), and the violent attack on the soldier in the mill, the boy’s escape from the witches’ feast begins the action that will lead to the witches’ capture and trial. Once Squire Doughty makes the decision to act as witch-finder, the tricks and comedy of the witches’ action is given the coherence of cause and effect. Theatrical display is brought back under narrative control, and the play ends with each group of characters rearticulating their experience of witchcraft within the sequential framework of events necessary for legal action. The witches are brought in by “Constable, and Officers” (2681), and though they “charme together” (2686–87), “under hands of lawfull authority, [they] doe loose their power; / And all their spels are instantly dissolved” (2631–33). The play’s finale sums up the accusations of witchcraft and links the four plots: Doughty Bantam Boy Robin Miller Soldier Seely Lawrence

Well say, stand out Boy, stand out Miller, stand out Robin, stand out Soldier, and lay your accusation upon ’em. Speake Boy doe you know these Creatures, women I dare not call ’em? Yes Sir, and saw them all in the Barne together, and many more at their Feast and Witchery. And so did I, by a Divellish token, [I] was rid thither, though I rid home againe as fast without switch or spur. I was ill handled by them in the Mill. And I sliced off a Cats foot there, that is since a hand, who ever wants it. How I and all my family have suffered you all know. And how I were bewitched my Pall. here knowes. (2706–18)

Although it uses more of the material from the original case,48 the final scene ties the play’s events to a narrative of discovery and punishment made familiar through the multiple accounts of witchcraft.49 The dramatists offer the pleasure of closure to an audience that has

62

K athleen E. McLuskie

just witnessed a series of loosely connected scenes of trickery and fantastic display. In doing so, they corroborate expectations of a seamless movement from crime to capture that is (and was) aesthetically satisfying and ideologically safe. The whole of the action had been kept safe by the presence of the sane and responsible figures of the local gentry, Squires Doughty and Generous. Their initial skepticism is replaced by Doughty’s conviction that the disorder is indeed generated by witchcraft, and at the end he asks the witches “have you knowne so many of the Divels tricks, and can be ignorant of that common feate of the old Iugler; that is to leave you all to the Law, when you are once seized on by the tallons of Authority” (2693–97). The witchcraft that had provided the narrative drive of the play’s action had to be assimilated into the larger narrative of legal process with its faith in the law to reveal the truth and even to disempower the working of the devil. Simultaneously, the play becomes a coherent artistic whole that would have satisfied Herbert’s desire for plays to reveal their writers as “masters in their art . . . to all judicious spectators.”50 The play, though, does leave open the possibility of an alternative reading of the ending. Mall continues the laughter that had characterized the witches from the beginning, and Mrs Generous summarizes the law’s perennial problem by refusing to corroborate accusation with confession: “I will say nothing, but what you know you know, And as the law shall finde me let it take me” (2726–27). Mrs Generous’s refusal to confess keeps the playwrights on the technically correct side of their perceived prohibition against intervening on a case that was still sub judice. However, the epilogue makes clear that their concern was with aesthetic coherence: And there we leave ’em, as their Divels did, Should we goe further with ’em? Wit forbid; What of their storie, further shall ensue, We must referre to time, our selves to you. (2817–20)

The aesthetic closure offered by the dramatists may seem unsatisfactory to the modern critic in search of the “genius of the age” or the discursive condition of a given social and political formation.51 The limits of “a merry and excellent new play” are also palpable when it is set against the original accusations brought against the witches. They were accused not merely of the witchery and feasting described by the miller’s boy or even the crime of consorting with the devil but of multiple murders. Margaret Johnson was accused of the “killing

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

63

and murder of one Henry Heape junior of Marsden, husbandman by bewitching”; Mary and John Spencer were “convicted and remained attainted because they had killed and murdered one Henry Roberts of Cliviger by bewitching.” They were also alleged to “have felonously ravaged and destroyed the body of John Leigh of Cliviger,” and Jennet Hargreaves was arrested because “she had killed and destroyed a child in the womb of one Ellena Robinson by witchcraft.”52 The seriousness of these allegations and the human loss involved in sickness, death, and still-birth could not be contained by an essentially comic narrative. They are simply left out of the play and may not even have been known by the dramatists themselves. In the event, the dramatists were probably wise to keep clear of the controversies over meaning and create a closed world of explanation that rounded off the sequence of comic scenes. Their aim was wit and pleasure, and they were working under the pressures created by the aesthetic demands of genre as much as the regulatory forces of censorship and official scrutiny. From the perspective of an autonomous commercial theater, their judgments seem sound. The play ran for three days and had an afterlife in the eighteenth-century theater. The “fun” of a comic (or tragic) conclusion reinforced the “message” of a world that made sense and separated the narratives of art from the inchoate inconsequentiality of events. In doing so, the play demonstrated the success of 1630s commercialization whose explanatory discourse of aesthetics isolated the drama from a particular discourse of current affairs and replaced it with the pleasures of familiar narratives and theatrical tropes. The gap between dramatic representation and the “truth” of the Lancashire witch case is itself an indication of the extent to which explanatory narratives of all kinds were being separated into discrete discursive arenas in seventeenth-century England. The distinction that the dramatists made in their prologue and epilogue between the purviews of the theater and the law reflected similar distinctions between evidence, judgment, and jurisdiction made by the officials in the law case. Evidence of witchcraft was being moved away from hearsay and deposition and into the realm of scientific proof, determined, in this case, by William Harvey, the king’s physician. Judgment and jurisdiction were also challenged by John Bridgeman, bishop of Chester, who perhaps anxious to protect his own position, questioned the competence of the Northern judges to arrive at an appropriate conclusion: Conceit and malice are so powerful with many in these parts, that they will easily afford an oath to work revenge upon their neighbor, and it

64

K athleen E. McLuskie was offered to be deposed by Mary Fisher, widow, . . . that if Dicconson . . . would have given the accuser Robinson 40 s. before the arraignement, neither he nor his son, would have said anything against her . . . The like will be testified by others, but such evidence being, as lawyers speak, against the King, I thought it not meet without further authority to examine.53

Modern historians of witchcraft have seen these moves to evidencebased judgment and the influence of the centralizing state as part of a teleological move from superstition to skepticism. James Sharpe, for example, suggests that “government handling of the 1633–4 accusations demonstrates just how sceptical central authority, the upper reaches of the church, and possibly educated opinion in general had become about malefic witchcraft by that date.”54 A similar assumption of skepticism about witchcraft also informs other recent research that offers accounts of the economics of the Pendle area of Lancashire, and indeed the personal family dynamics of the individuals involved as competing explanations of the events in Lancashire.55 All of these competing accounts of the case offer particular narrative explanations that order and give varied priority to local maneuverings, the opposition of different factions, and the tensions among different regions of the country. This process of turning events into complex narratives, however, is one of the legacies of 1630s theatrical writing. By insisting on a value for theater that went beyond the immediate pleasure of “fools and fighting,” the commentary on the theater of the 1630s articulated separate arenas of meaning and artistic value in plays. The commercial requirements of a repeatable repertory and the need to stay clear of censorship demanded that meaning be firmly contained within a narrative that had no immediate purchase on particular, local politics or personal sensitivities. As Tomkyns’s commentary shows, the discursive separation of playgoers’ expectations into meaning (tenet of witchcraft), artistic value (poetical genius), and theatrical pleasure (songs and dances) seems to have been entirely successful. However, those terms, in spite of being repeated in judgments of plays to this day, cannot do justice to the dynamic effect of theater. Heywood and Brome were careful to circumscribe “their authority to examine,” but as dramatists they also used the traditions and capacity of the theater to represent the events of the case (and then some) in all their comic and pathetic particularity. The resulting gap between the effects of staged witchcraft and the explanatory narrative with which they are surrounded creates the locus of interpretation.

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

65

That locus of interpretation can be filled in a variety of ways. In spite of the best efforts of playing companies and playwrights, it was often filled in the 1630s by claims about political particularity. In subsequent times it has often been interrogated for evidence of shifts in what Dr Johnson called “the genius of the age or the opinions of contemporaries,” looking most often for the shifts in the direction of the modern world. Both of these approaches do scant justice to drama’s cultural significance because they reduce plays to mere meaning, only one of the possibilities that Tomkyns looked for in theater. If we are to understand the particular cultural role of The Late Lancashire Witches in shaping contemporaries’ experience, we must stand back from the teleologies of growing skepticism as much as from the political teleologies of the ensuing Civil War. We then might see instead the ways that 1630s theater corralled performance into narrative, organized varied theatrical pleasure within the protocols of taste, and differentiated taste along the lines of social status and city venues. I have suggested that it did so in order to create a safe commercial space in which theater could flourish and could foster dramatic works that both provided Tomkyns with “a merry and excellent new play” and (via analogous processes in the printing industry) carried the intriguing dramatic narrative of the Lancashire witches into our own time.56

Notes 1. Samuel Johnson, “Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth,” in Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (New York: Penguin, 1989), 43. 2. Evidence that King James’s view of witches changed when he came to England or that the King’s Men’s repertory was not significantly determined by their royal connections offers historical knowledge irritatingly in excess of the literary need to explain the play. See Christina Larner, “James I and Witchcraft,” in The Reign of James VI and I, ed. Alan G. R. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1973), 74–90; Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare without King James,” in Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 23–69. The persistence of the connection between Macbeth and James I is evident in Stephen Orgel, “Macbeth and the Antic Round,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 143–53. 3. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981; reprint, London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 76–77. 4. Zucker and Farmer, “Introduction,” in this volume. 5. See N. W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 189.

66

K athleen E. McLuskie

6. See Herbert Berry, “The Globe Bewitched and El Hombre Fiel,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984): 211–30. 7. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 146–47. Berry’s narrative has been contested by Heather Hirschfield, “Collaborating across Generations: Thomas Heywood, Richard Brome, and the Production of The Late Lancashire Witches,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 339–74. 8. Berry, “The Globe Bewitched,” 212–13. 9. Ibid., 221. 10. Arthur Melville Clark, Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), 209. 11. See Margot Heinemann, “Middleton’s Game at Chess: Parliamentary Puritans and Opposition Drama,” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 232–50. For a full discussion of the role of different paradigm spectators, see A. R. Braunmuller, “ ‘To the Globe I rowed’: John Holles sees A Game at Chess,” English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990): 340–56. 12. Alison Findlay, “Sexual and Spiritual Politics in the Events of 1633–34 and The Late Lancashire Witches,” in The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, ed. Robert Poole (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 159, 161. 13. Hirschfield, “Collaborating across Generations,” 341. 14. Ibid., 353, 355, 357. 15. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkley: University of California Press, 1981), 80–132. 16. Michael Neill, “ ‘Wits most accomplished Senate’: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters,” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978): 352. 17. Ibid., 350 n.34, for statistics on the increasing number of plays accompanied by a prologue. 18. James Shirley, “A Prologue at the Globe to his Comedy call’d The doubtfull Heire,” in Narcissvs, or, The Self-Lover (London, 1646), 154. 19. Shirley, “Epilogue to the Same Play There,” in Narcissvs, or, The SelfLover, 155. 20. See Zachary Lesser, “Walter Burre’s Knight of the Burning Pestle,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 22–43. 21. Thomas Goffe, The Careless Shepherdess (London, 1656), 1–8. See also Gerald Eades Bentley, ed., The Seventeenth-Century Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 28–37. 22. See the discussion of the distinction between “style” and wealth in Neill, “ ‘Wits,’ ” 344–45, and Lesser, “Walter Burre’s,” 24–25. 23. Shackerley Marmion, “Unto his worthy friend Mr Ioseph Taylor,” in John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepherdesse (London, 1634), sig. A3r. 24. Thomas Heywood, “The Prologue to the Stage at the Cockpit,” in Christopher Marlowe, The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (London, 1633), sig. A4v.

Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure

67

25. Theophilus Bird, “Prologve,” in John Ford, The Ladies Triall (London, 1639), sig. A4v. 26. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 182. 27. Thomas Heywood, A Challenge for Beauty (London, 1636), sig. A3r. 28. Gurr, Playing Companies, 382. 29. Richard Dutton, “ ‘Discourse in the players, though no disobedience’: Sir Henry Herbert’s Problems with the Players and Archbishop Laud, 1632–34,” Ben Jonson Journal 5 (1998): 37–62, 51. 30. Letter from John Pory to Viscount Scudamore, November 17, 1632. Quoted in Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 176n. 31. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 184. 32. Ibid., 177. 33. Ibid., 180. 34. Berry, “The Globe Bewitched,” 212. 35. Laird H. Barber, ed., An Edition of The Late Lancashire Witches by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome (New York and London: Garland, 1979). 36. Compare the prologue to Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (London, 1612), sig. A4v: “Our Scene is London, ’cause we would make knowne / No Countries mirth is better then our owne.” 37. Ben Jonson, A Tale of a Tub, in The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, 3 vols. (London, 1640–1641), 3:68. 38. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 179. 39. Ibid., 186. 40. Note Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 41–73, on the contingent nature of official interest in plays and my account of the way that, for example, Eastward Ho was stripped of its political particularity by the time of its revival in 1614. Kathleen E. McLuskie, “Making and Buying: Ben Jonson and the Commercial Theater Audience,” in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Julie Sanders with Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 134–54. 41. Compare the prologue to Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness (London, 1607). 42. Compare Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton (London, 1658), act four, scene one, where Banks attributes his serving people’s lust and his own infatuation with a dun cow to witchcraft. 43. See Kathleen McLuskie, “Collaboration,” in The Revels History of Drama in England, Volume IV, 1613–1660, ed. Philip Edwards, Gerald Eades Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie, and Lois Potter (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 169–82. This aspect of collaborative writing is vividly clear in the current, 2005 RSC production of Sir Thomas More where the set pieces of the second half of the play are only just held together by the power of Nigel Cook’s performance as Thomas More.

68

K athleen E. McLuskie

44. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968), 3:73–74. Barber, An Edition, 20–38, provides a useful summary of plays using witchcraft and magic on the English stage. 45. See Barber, An Edition, 92, for a helpful diagram of the links between the different plots. 46. Ibid., 160a. 47. See Dekker, Ford, and Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, and Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens (London, 1609). 48. Both the boy’s story of his fight with the devil and Peg’s decisive revelation that she had concourse with the devil in the form of her familiar, Mamilion, are taken from the witches’ court depositions. The play also picks up the telling detail that the devil’s flesh was cold, though Peg here asserts that he pleased her well, “like a proper man” (2754). 49. For the construction of witchcraft as narrative, see Marion Gibson, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 50. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 180. 51. See Dr Johnson’s and Frederic Jameson’s requirements discussed earlier. Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and TwentiethCentury Representations (London and New York: Routledge 1996), 241, is also particularly critical of the dramatists’ failure to deal with the real dynamics of the witch hunt. 52. Quoted in translation from K.B. 29/283 in Barber, An Edition, appendix 1, 221–23. 53. Quoted in Barber, An Edition, 60. 54. James Sharpe, “Introduction: The Lancashire Witches in Historical Context,” in Poole, The Lancashire Witches, 5. 55. See John Swain, “Witchcraft, Economy and Society in the Forest of Pendle,” in Poole, The Lancashire Witches, 73–87; Jonathan Lumby, “ ‘Those to whom evil is done:’ Family Dynamics in the Pendle Witch Trials,” in Poole, The Lancashire Witches, 58–69. 56. See Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser’s essay in this volume (chapter 1).

3

Reading Triumphs: Localizing Caroline Masques Lauren Shohet

“Locality” in Caroline Masque The Caroline court masque Britannia Triumphans (1638) opens with “a curtain flying up [to] discover . . . the first Scene[,] wherein were English houses of the old and newer forms, intermixt with trees, and afar off a prospect of the City of London and the river of Thames, which, being a principal part, might be taken for all Great Britain.”1 The ensuing masque, scripted by William Davenant, composed by William Lawes, and designed by Inigo Jones, was commissioned by King Charles as the Twelfth Night masque of 1638. As summarized by its scriptor, the masque depicts how “Britanocles, the glory of the western world[,] hath by his wisdom, valour, and piety . . . reduc’d the land . . . to a real knowledge of all good a[r]ts and sciences [, which] . . . Fame . . . hath already spread . . . abroad [and] . . . should now at home . . . [so] that . . . the large yet still increasing number of the good and loyal may mutually admire and rejoice in our happiness” (265–66). Celebrating the monarch’s wisdom and virtue through the “mutual” “rejoicing” of king and subject, this device undertakes court masque’s characteristic fêting of royalist order. Antimasque disorder prances and is then banished as the golden “Palace of Fame” opens to reveal Britanocles in the person of King Charles: “Britanocles the great and good appears, / His person fills our eyes, his name our ears, / His virtue every drooping spirit cheers!” (286). These features of Britannia Triumphans show why this masque, and indeed Stuart masques generally, often have been taken as straightforward propaganda for absolutism.2 Masque critics of the past few decades have extended earlier work on how the masque

70

Lauren Shohet

proclaims royal power to examine more thoroughly masques as occasions for scripting everyone present, willy-nilly, into not merely celebrating but actually enacting royalist order: as stage blocking arranges all eyes around the monarch; as choreography shapes masquers’ movements into harmonious figures presided over by the king; as the musical setting does indeed “fill our ears” with the name “Britanocles” as a five-part chorus carols it to us, perforce “cheering” our “drooping spirits” when the music modulates from a-minor to A-major upon the word “cheers.”3 In the last few decades, masque has occupied a larger role than previously within the study of Stuart drama both because of its importance to the ideological criticism that has interested students of how aesthetics and power underwrite one another, and because recent critical moves toward “local” analyses of Caroline drama have found particular purchase on the genre of masque. Such localist interpretive tools as reading a given text against the political questions current in its season of performance or examining the political profiles of participants in a given occasion have proven especially well suited for reading texts from this genre that was so often enacted at the centers of Stuart power. For example, Martin Butler reads the list of masquers in the 1640 Salmacida Spolia to show that this king’s masque pointedly brought together courtiers on different sides of a political divide—“almost two-thirds of the male masquers were either moderate critics or future opponents of the king”—so that the somatic relationship among masquers as they dance refracts some kind of rapprochement, or at least relationship.4 Critics like Tom Bishop, David Lindley, and James Knowles have investigated other masques to show how local disagreements among what Knowles calls the “polycentric élite” of Stuart political culture can be encoded in masques.5 In addition to such analysis of what participants’ identities reveal, techniques of local reading focused on the symbolic vocabulary of particular masques have revealed specific political subtexts in a masque’s symbolism, such as the repudiation of an erstwhile court favorite under legal investigation in 1615, royal intentions of nonintervention in the Bohemian succession crisis of 1621, or reflection upon gentry-residence laws renewed in 1633.6 Thus the Caroline court masque provides an exemplary place to evaluate both what recent emphasis on local interpretation has revealed, and what has proved limiting about ways we have constructed “the local.” The locality that has interested us in the world of masque—and I would suggest that this is true of local interpretation more generally in studies of Caroline drama—has remained tightly tied to the immediate intentions of masques’ producers, even as we

Reading Triumphs

71

Figure 3.1 Sketch by Inigo Jones for first scene of Britannia Triumphans. Image reproduced by permission of the Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. Photograph: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art.

have broadened our notions of how those producers may be plural (including more artisans than the scriptor, including more political interests than the monarch’s). Furthermore, we have been constrained by the questionable assumption that masque receivers interpreted local references in ways that were bounded by particular ways of framing those occasions. And we have continued to think about masque receivers only in terms of an elite courtly audience, even though a much broader population read masque scripts, discussed accounts of their performances, and participated in non-court events that intertextually evoked courtly scripts.7 With this outline of some benefits and costs of how we have construed the “local” in mind, we might return to Inigo Jones’s sketch for the first scene of Britannia Triumphans to note that centered in its perspectival proscenium is a middle-distance view of St. Paul’s Cathedral (see figure 3.1). Surviving designs show this location featured prominently on the back shutter of the set.8 To be sure, the sequence of the masque’s six backdrops admits of quite conventionally absolutist, court-centered parsing: this first London scene is succeeded by the disorder of “a Horrid Hell” and a “Giant’s Castle”; then Britanocles’ heroic-mythic “Palace of Fame” locates the

72

Lauren Shohet

monarch’s power to re-order the disorderly in an Ideal realm beyond time; finally, after a return to the London scene, Charles’s mythic and terrestrial realms fuse in the maritime scene of a “Haven with a Citadel,” a marvel of peace and prosperity. At the same time, however, the set’s location of St. Paul’s in the center backdrop of the Britannia Triumphans offers a provocative figure for non-absolutist ways that masques enter public discourse—and are subject to unruly interpretation—far more than we have recognized. For St. Paul’s is a richly heterogeneous sign in early modern England. It is not only a seat of the Laudian church and an admired architectural anchor of Caroline London (likely the resonances Jones would have wished us to hear), but also a prime location for the uncontrolled dissemination of information, a site where the unemployed congregate to seek work, a venue to solicit prostitutes, a place to buy books: a “thoroughfare and meeting place.”9 A 1620s observer called St. Paul’s “the great Exchange of all Discourse” and remarked that . . . [there is] no business whatsoever but is here stirring.”10 So at the same time that Britannia Triumphans’s London backdrop emphasizes and links Jones’s two preeminent architectural works, as Orgel and Strong note (seating spectators at a Jones-designed court masque, with the Jonesdesigned west portico of the cathedral before their eyes, emphasizing Jones as the designer of all we contemplate), and at the same time that this centerpiece offers what Orgel and Strong call a “symbol . . . of [the] High Church Laudian reform” (2:668) that incrementally affirmed links between absolutist models of Church and State throughout the 1630s, St. Paul’s also marks the unruly proliferation that characterizes urban culture. One valence of the cathedral in the 1630s may well have been High Laudian ceremonialism, but, as the Privy Council lamented in 1632, such assertions of mastery were not always audible to those they ostensibly controlled: “children use [the cathedral, for play] . . . till darke night . . . hence cometh principally that inordinate noyse, which many tymes suffereth not the preacher to be heard in the Quyre.”11 It is this kind of unruly proliferation I would like to emphasize in suggesting that one heretofore under-investigated “locale” that generates meaning in masques is the unpredictable (and sometimes positivistically unrecoverable) venue of reception. I am particularly interested in ways that masques communicate across a courtly boundary that was significantly more permeable than we usually acknowledge, and in the transactional quality that this dialogic participation lends to whatever assertions a masque may essay. Although in some ways Caroline masques indeed constitute “recondite revels,” as Roy

Reading Triumphs

73

Strong calls them, they also represent political authority in diverse ways and—interestingly—as open to contestation.12 In this essay, I shall show that Caroline political authority was not assumed to be safely secured by the magical powers of divine right, that masques did not entirely represent it as such, and that this topic was raised not only in court masques.13 I am particularly interested in moving beyond what masque producers may have intended their masques to assert to include what receivers may have made of them. As Roger Chartier reminds us, even in politically constrained societies, “principles of coherence [are] far from being brutally dictated”; rather, readers (and audiences) draw upon a “complex of skills, conventions, and perceptions that ma[k]e up the resources and the constraints by means of which they apprehend.”14 I suggest that recovering some of that “complex” of interpretive resources—hearing the range of conversations the masque can sponsor—requires a broad notion of both masque events and masque receivers. To examine masque in its historical context, we should consider not only audiences present at court performances, but also commercial print accounts of private masques, intertextual glimpses of some kinds of masques within others, and conversations among more and less private forms of masque. Reframing our considerations of Caroline masque in this way reveals masque working in a more diffuse and more complex nexus of elite and quasi-public culture—helping us understand not only the masque, but also the political and cultural categories that Caroline drama refracts and enacts. Imagining the printed page, the receiver’s imagination, and more generally the “interpretive horizon” of Caroline masque as themselves “local” can draw together the scrupulous, positivist historical research of the kinds of local reading we already are practicing with a perhaps less verifiable, but in the end equally important, notion of reception as a locus—a place situated in history, but not completely or reductively determined by history—where meanings are made.

The View from St. Paul’s Lingering another moment in the nave of St. Paul’s as we contemplate Britannia Triumphans reveals the range of ways that highly topical images can operate: how, that is, counting a locale of reception amongst our “localities” multiplies the interest of what we can see. A prominently monarch-centered element of Britannia Triumphans is its emphasis on naval might and maritime glory—this in the winter of 1637–1638, when Ship Money was at its most contentious

74

Lauren Shohet

(we remark in our role as local readers). When spectators entered the masquing hall, they were presented with the ornamental arch that would frame ensuing scenes. This “ornament” contained a tableau of “Naval Victory” (“a woman . . . with one hand holding the rudder of a ship”) and “Right Government” (“a man bearing a scepter with a hand and an eye in the palm, and in the other hand a book . . . his foot treading on the head of a serpent”) presiding over bound captives, in niches whose pillars subtend “a large frieze with a sea triumph of naked children . . . and young tritons . . . and other maritime fancies” (266). Over the course of the masque, the succession of scenes that fill in this proscenium frame closes with a “haven with a citadel,” “whence the sea-nymph Galatea came waving forth[,] riding on the back of a dolphin . . . to the midst of the sea.” Once there, she lauds Britanocles specifically as a naval ruler—“So well Britanocles o’er seas doth reign / Reducing what was wild before, / That fairest sea Nymphs leave the troubled Maine, / And haste to visit him on shore” (288)—in a song that sets this first stanza in a bluntly orderly four-square rhythm that reinforces the solidity of this “reign” “on shore.”15 Notably, it is this final scene of the haven with a citadel, framed by the iconographic Right Government and Naval Victory, that remains during the many hours of dancing that follow Galatea’s exit, occupying more time than the rest of the masque (see figure 3.2): “After this some ships were

Figure 3.2 Sketch by Inigo Jones for final scene of Britannia Triumphans. Image reproduced by permission of the Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. Photograph: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art.

Reading Triumphs

75

discerned sailing afar off several ways, and in the end a great fleet was discovered, which passing by with a side wind tacked about, and with a prosperous gale entered into the haven. This continued to entertain the sight whilst the dancing lasted” (289). Not only does Britainnia Triumphans emphasize that Charles is a grand ruler with a powerful navy, then, it also uses the greatest amount of stage-time, and the most stunningly spectacular special effects, for the “great fleet” that moors in the masque hall while the court dances. It’s hard to miss that amassing such a “great fleet” was precisely the goal of the contentious Ship Money taxes. In one line of interpretation, then, the masque’s conjuring of a marvelous fleet to adorn courtly revelry offers the theatrical magic of making royal desires manifest—just as absolutist theory seeks to do. From a tower in an earlier scene’s “Palace of Fame,” Fame had invoked Britanocles by singing: What to thy power is hard or strange? Since not alone confined unto the land; Thy sceptre to a trident change! And straight unruly seas thou canst command! (284–85)

In the local context of winter 1637–1638, the wonderful ships that Britanocles “can command” in the masque hall meld with the power of the new ships he has willed for the navy: theatrical wonders of the masque hall and military wonders of the navy—as well as political wonders of exacting unwelcome taxes—figure one another. Of course, this also can be a bit of a joke. Everyone in the room knows precisely “what to [Charles’s] power is hard or strange”: actually collecting Ship Money. And the invisible labor that makes those ships tack about so impressively can contrast with balefully impressed sailors (in a local reading interested in dissenting interpretation) as much as it can subsume them (in a more ideologically determinative local analysis.) In either case, the London cityscape of the masque’s first and fifth scenes notably precedes the commanded seas of the sixth. While making London the precursor to the idealized scenic endpoint can on the one hand reduce the city’s significance to mere intermediate materiality soon to be transcended by royal perfection, this enscenement also offers quite a different interpretation of the relationship between monarch and city when it presents—twice!—the financial source, the literal precondition, of that “great fleet” as the view from a street in London, and the Great Britain for which it “might be taken” (267). In this way, we can read the masque performance not only to assert monarchal potency, but also to display political relationships as interdependent negotiations (here, among monarch, gentry, and City).

76

Lauren Shohet

The print account of this masque—a quarto published around the time of performance by Thomas Walkley, available for purchase “at his shop at the flying Horse neere Yorke house”—describes the scenery for audiences broader than those who saw the court performance.16 Davenant’s verbal description invokes a diverse set of cultural markers for what constitutes the kingdom: “English houses of the old and newer forms,” “trees,” “the City of London,” “the river of Thames” (267). The picture of the kingdom here notably features suburban and urban London, not a throne. Furthermore, the description emphasizes the polity’s plurality when it mixes traditional English architecture, newer (and more international) urban style, botany, geography, and the heteroglossia of “the City of London” itself. Indeed, to press the point, we might note that Davenant’s suggestion that readers take London and the Thames as synecdoche (“which, being a principal part, might be taken for all Great Britain”) offers an explicit semiotic counterpart to the absolutist synecdoche that the king is the state (an alternative articulated in the claim that “Britanocles . . . hath . . . reduced the land . . . to a real knowledge of all good a[r]ts and sciences” [265, emphasis added]). The St. Paul’s that Jones centers in his London sketch offers critics our own useful synecdoche for the multivocality of early modern urban Britain. Print receivers of Britannia Triumphans may not have had the cathedral in their minds’ eyes, since Davenant’s description does not mention the cathedral—and in fact we cannot be certain how precisely the masque’s sets rendered Jones’s designs for the performance audience—but St. Paul’s still serves our purposes because it is a pinnacle of wider urban practices, not an exception to them.17 As our 1620s observer remarks, St. Paul’s is a typical site of messy, real-life negotiation among imperfectly regulated individuals: visiting St. Paul’s is “the other expence of the daie after Playes[,] Taverne, and a Bawdie house”18 On the level of civic and ecclesiastical institutions— as well as the quotidian individual level of seeking entertainment, drinking, and fornicating—St. Paul’s serves as an emblem rather than an exception for the coalition of interests required for a functioning polity. Financially, for example, the significant repair the cathedral required in the 1630s was funded by not only by the archbishop and the king, but also by other communities in the diocese, the universities, the City, parochial clergy, lay collections, and farther-flung English cities.19 The Lord Mayor’s show presented two months before Britannia Triumphans, Londini Speculum, emphasizes the breadth of the undertaking when Opsis (“Sight”) points out London’s “Cathedrals, Temples new reparing / An act of true

Reading Triumphs

77

devotion, no man sparing / His helping hand; and many, ’tis well knowne, / To further Gods house have forgot their owne.”20 Particularly interesting for our present project of considering how representations of power are negotiated in Caroline England is the uncontrolled circulation of information common to these taverns, playhouses, bordellos, and cathedrals—with St. Paul’s emblematizing the practice, as we espy in the early modern locution “Paul’s-walker” to denote a gossipy man-about-town. As David Zaret notes, “a confluence of oral reports, scribal bills, and printed pamphlets flowed through both sacred and profane meeting places”: “taverns, inns and alehouses, and churches and churchyards.”21 Cranky court observer Francis Osborne emphasizes that St. Paul’s is a primary place where gossip and information cross among courtly and non-courtly communities: the principall Gentry, Lords, Courtiers and men of all professions not meerely Mechanick [would] . . . meet in Pauls Church by eleven, and walk in the middle Ile till twelve, and after dinner from three, to six; during which time some discoursed of Businesse, others of Newes . . . And these Newesmongers, as they called them, did not only take the boldnesse to weigh the publick but most intrinsick actions of the State, which some Courtier or other did betray to this Society.22

Official restriction, then, by no means prevented discussion of matters of state. Osborne’s remark reminds us that we often may misunderstand as reality the polemical assertions of exclusive monarchal privilege that merely articulate policy. This reality of multivocal practice that runs alongside more rigid official proscriptions is cognate with Glenn Burgess’s claim that we have misunderstood Stuart assertions of absolutism more generally to name a practice when they actually negotiate a theory.23 And, relatedly, I would suggest that we have misunderstood absolutism as semiotically intrinsic to the genre of masque, when in fact masques can represent multiple models of authority in conversation—a conversation of great urgency for understanding both drama and politics, as well as their relationship, in Caroline England.

The Canny Masque These conversations about representing authority take place within masques, among masques, and between masques and texts in other genres. Within Britannia Triumphans, for example, the figures of “Action” and “Imposture” debate questions of immediate import for the project of masque representation. When Action tells Imposture to

78

Lauren Shohet

“make up your history” (268), this imperative concedes that representations are, or can be, constructed (“ma[d]e up”) as much as they are reported. The queen’s masque that followed Britannia Triumphans in February 1638, Luminalia, makes a similarly selfconscious gesture about masque’s operations when a chorus sings that “all this isle their triumphs now express / Not to beget, but show their happiness.”24 Luminalia acknowledges the theory that masquing can create “triumphs” (dramatic shows, political ascendancy) as much as express them. That is, Luminalia anticipates and demonstrates Jonathan Goldberg’s 1983 view that seventeenthcentury critics could analyze ideological aesthetics just as modern-day critics do.25 Although the chorus rebuts the Goldbergian conclusion in Luminalia, the remark acknowledges masque’s potential to coerce a politics of awe—an acknowledgment that surely compromises the possibility of experiencing such awe as consuming. In addition to sponsoring such conversations about the semiotics of the masque, masques frequently represent a variety of political models that should surprise us if we equate masques with straightforward absolutism. Caroline court masques often contain oppositional figures whose critiques are never precisely refuted. Such speakers as Britannia Triumphans’s Imposture, the puritan “scourge” Momus in Coelum Britannicum (1634), or the proto-Labour tradesmen’s wives in The Triumph of Peace (also 1634) offer cogent critiques of various masque characteristics. Britannia Triumphans’s “Imposture” warns against trusting the very specularity that masque epitomizes: “every thing but seemes, / And borrowes the existence it appears / To have: Imposture governs all” (5). Similarly, in Coelum Britannicum, Momus sounds much like real-life critics of the court, reassuring any courtly “Lady not competently stock’d [the] way [of virtue]” that “she shall not on the instant utterly despaire, if shee carry a sufficient pawne of handsomenesse” (10).26 Relatedly, in the Triumph of Peace, tradesmen and tradesmen’s wives who have contributed to the spectacle argue against those who would reserve entry to the performance for the better-born. They claim that labor grants ownership: the Property master’s wife insists that “My husband is somewhere in the works; I’m sure I helped to make him an owl and a hobby horse, and I see no reason but his wife may be admitted in forma paperis, to see as good a masque as this.”27 These masques tend to let drop the matters brought up by their scripted critics (which an absolutist view would characterize as overwhelming dissent with spectacle), but by the time the masque moves on, alternative points of view have been loosed on the masque stage—and the printed page.

Reading Triumphs

79

The self-consciousness with which masques reflect upon their genre suggests a particularly skeptical side of these events when we consider interrelations among court masque, household masque, civic masque, and city pageant. There has been some self-sustaining tautology, I believe, in the generic divisions we have assigned among these forms of entertainment. That is, our relatively narrow view of what Stuart masque must have been supports our choices of what texts belong in the discussion; conversely, isolating a subset of masque events overemphasizes one strand of the political aesthetics we find. Hence we have minimized or excluded from masque theory events like repetitions of a masque (whole or partial) in court and non-court events, courtier-sponsored masques taking place outside the court, middling-sort household masques, and most generally what David Norbrook calls the “oppositional tradition” of masquing.28 When we do acknowledge complexity in masques, we generally treat these masques as exceptions: Milton is such a brilliant poet that his Ludlow masque blows apart the form in the same way that his other works challenge their genres; political crisis is so advanced in 1640 that efforts like Salmacida Spolia’s to produce masques that represent dissent lead to “a breakdown in the form of the masque as a whole.”29 Cross-reading different entertainments of the mid-Caroline era—and, importantly, remembering that receivers of that era did so themselves— yields a more complete view of the conversations and transactions that make masque, and Caroline drama more generally, richer than we have thought. Negotiation and complexity become more the rule than the exception. Reframing our expectations of the genre lets us see individual masques in mutually enriching dialogue with a dynamic tradition—or more properly, multiple dynamic traditions—rather than maverick outliers whose eccentricities only underscore the genre’s essential narrowness. The clearly visible, often playful, scripting of authority through conventional flattery emerges more fully when we entertain different forms of masque and pageant than if we take the court masque in isolation. Fame’s praise of the king in Britannia Triumphans, for instance, might seem to offer an overwhelmingly royalist moment in that masque; the king is the “treasure of our sight, / . . . the hopeful morn of every day, / Whose fair example makes the light, / By which heroic virtue finds her way” (284). Yet such places look less inherently absolutist, less specialized for monarchal purposes, when we see similar addresses annually to Lord Mayors, or to the world-upsidedown “ruler” of Inns-of-Court carnival in the 1636 Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour. The 1637 Londini Speculum (scripted by Thomas

80

Lauren Shohet

Heywood), for example, addresses the mayor presiding over the scene thus: This Structure (honour’d Sir) doth title beare Of an Imperiall Fort, apt for that spheare In which you now move, borrowing all her grace, As well from your owne person, as your place For you have past through all degrees that tended Unto that height which you have now ascended. (100)

Not only crowned heads and their scepters, then, but citizen-mayors and their offices can “ascend through degrees” to stores of “grace” sufficient for lending to “Imperiall Forts.” Similarly, the printed book of The Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour refers to the Inns-of-Court student designated “Lord of Misrule” for the carnival season of 1636, one Vivian, with standard courtly phrasing—“A Masque presented by His Highness at his Palace in the Middle Temple”—and the Prince d’Amour’s Master of Ceremonies refers to the Lord of Misrule’s “subjects” and “State” in just the same terms we find in actual court masques.30 The similarity of tropes of flattery among court, countryhouse, and civic events—the honoree as source of virtue, illumination, transformation—accrues, at least potentially, to a self-conscious repertoire of tools for a recognized project. This need not merely suggest that non-courtly pageants imitate royal events.31 Rather, their ubiquity shows a culture that understands “this is how we make an authority figure.” We might note a converse, similarly playful, theatricality in Queen Henrietta Maria’s appearance at the “Palace of the Middle Temple” for the Prince d’Amour’s festival. This ostensible avatar of French absolutism “was pleasd to grace the entertaynment by putting of [f] majesty to putt on a citizens habitt,”32 showing that pleasures of performatively tweaking social-political hierarchy run both ways. Such canniness frames representations of concerns about power, creating events that acknowledge authority’s provisionality even while they celebrate the status quo.33 When Arion in Heywood’s 1632 Londini Artium refers to the mayor as a “Great and God like Magistrate” (39), for instance, he sounds as sycophantically absolutist as the 1634 Coelum Britannicum’s invocation of the king and queen as “the Brittish Stars [to whom] this lower Globe / Shall owe its light, . . . [who] alone dispence / To’th’World a pure refined influence.”34 But the very similarity of panegyric tropes used in the Heywood civic pageant and the Carew royal masque—cited for hereditary, monarchal, lifelong

Reading Triumphs

81

power on the one hand, and elected, civic, annual office on the other— invokes a diversity of authoritative modes that is in some tension with the ostensible inevitability of authority the rhetoric appears to celebrate. In the dedicatory epistle that opens the print version of Londini Speculum—which, interestingly, establishes a continuum between monarchal and mayoral authorities, whom it respectively terms “greatest” and “lesse” “Magistrates”—Heywood discusses the research he undertook to establish the precedent for mayoral yearly election: “And for the Antiquity of your yearely Government, I read that the Athenians elected theirs Anually . . . and so of the Carthagians, the Thebans, &c” (91). This invocation of Athens, democratic on the level of “greatest Magistrates,” to support emphatically only one half of the status quo (mayoral tenure, but not lifetime monarchy) likewise involves some tension, or perhaps whimsy. There are many examples of masques and pageants invoking-whilerebutting the variety of means to power that bring a critical repertoire of political models into play. In Heywood’s 1631 London Jus Honorarium, Honour tells the newly elected Lord Mayor: “that Swoord / Collar, and Cap of Maintenance, / These are no things, that come by chance” (pp. 22–23). This raises “chance” as one path to power, even as it dismisses its relevance in this case. Similarly, this pageant’s dedication to the new Lord Mayor lauds his self-evident preeminence in terms that invoke illegitimate roads to rule even as they panegyrically rebut them in the present instance: “worthily was your so free election (without either emulation, or competitorship conferred upon you) . . . that none ever in your place was more sufficient or able . . . more truly to discern . . . more advisedly to dispose . . . more maturely to dispatch” (15). In addition to discussing the roots and routes of mayoral succession, moreover, Honour raises the multiplicity of authoritative modes in a speech that explicitly analyzes royal potency: “If Kings arrive to my profection [perfection], / Tis by Succession, or Election” (23). With his “if,” Honour concedes that kings may not achieve honor. Moreover, when his speech invokes alternative political modes of heredity (“succession”) and something more democratic (“election”), Honour evokes the variety of potential political models.

Think Locally, Read Generically The mode of rhetorical analysis we have been wielding shares a close attention to detail with other kinds of local reading. The implied backdrop of the present project is somewhat different, however.

82

Lauren Shohet

Where most local readings draw upon the historicity of a specific event (enactment of a law, indictment of an individual, declaration of a foreign policy), I am interested in drawing more upon the historicity of other texts and, in a particularly conceived way, of the historicity of genre. This section of my essay looks at ways that certain masques reflect upon their masque-ness: the conversation they sketch out about representation, interpretation, and negotiation. I connect this trait in masques to more general Caroline conversations about the power of genre, books, and reading. I grant that my model of historicity might initially resemble conventional intertextuality: might, that is, share some emphases with the “literary” readings of Stuart entertainments, deracinated from performance circumstances, that made masques look like nothing more than poems manqués, the dullest texts in a seventeenth-century poet’s Collected Works, before Stephen Orgel’s 1965 study reinvigorated our understanding of the genre.35 But my project here is quite different from such pseudoliterary vacating of masque texts in that I wish to reconstruct the interpretive parameters within which historically situated receivers operated—remembering that, as Hans Robert Jauss remarks, “in the triangle of author, work, and public the last is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions.”36 My aim, then, is not to remove masques from their moment in history. I do not propose that we read masques only as a body of work united by an anachronistically conceived author. Rather, my “historicity” is twofold. First, I wish to consider how contemporary receivers may have thought about given entertainments in relation to other entertainments at the same point in time. Second, I wish to multiply the “moment in history” to plural “moments” in history: to acknowledge not only a single performance, but also the subsequent availability of printed masques to be read, as well as the reanimation of earlier masques through intertextual conversation, as historical events. To read locally is not to treat the masque only as drama à clef whose meaning is fixed once we find the right key. On the contrary, by noticing how contemporary readers were positioned to cross-read different texts and to self-consciously read texts through and against the habits of their genre, we can understand interpretation itself as an historical act of consequence—an act essential to Caroline political and cultural shifts that extend beyond the masque. Many facets of Caroline England demonstrate that issues of interpretation, of how to “read” representations, are central to debates ranging from doctrinal to political to aesthetic. Indeed, discussions of literal reading, and the books upon which reading is practiced, loom

Reading Triumphs

83

large in the era. Examples abound of contemporaries’ emphasis on rhetorical interpretation as both contentious and essential—from 1628 debates on the Petition of Right that propose “Let us look into the words and see what they are[;] what is ‘sovereign power’?”37 to the 1634 Star Chamber trial of polemicist William Prynne, where prosecution and defense alike highlight the volatile interpretability of books. Prynne’s counsel Holborne remarked that Prynne “did not bethinke himself, what interpretation theire might bee made of his writings”; Star-Chamber councilor Lord Cottington riposted that an author must be aware that “hee doth not accompanye his booke, to make his intencion knowne to all that reades it.”38 Other contemporary writers also point out that literary habits and readerly hermeneutics have political consequences. Parliamentarians and Royalists alike, for example, often position reading as central to the republican cause. Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) remarks that reading “in some sort usefully” entails the “incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder” “cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned,” requiring “much arguing, much writing, many opinions” in the “generall and brotherly search after truth” that constitutes a virtuous republic.39 From the monarchal side, Thomas Hobbes laments that “as to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy[,] one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans.”40 (As Roger Chartier remarks, books may or may not make revolutions, but the ways they are read assuredly can.)41 My suggestion in the present essay is that masques belong among the texts we examine when we analyze these crucial debates about books, interpretation, and how they shape history. Having invoked Britannia Triumphans, Luminalia, Londini Speculum—two court masques and a city pageant of fall-winter 1637–1638—let us remain in those years. In part, my purpose is to use a chronological focal point as a usefully arbitrary limitation to cut against other, perhaps overly determinative or under-theorized, ways of forming textual clusters. Moreover, with 1637 marking the most difficult year to date for collecting Ship Money (according to Kevin Sharpe), as well as the year that Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton were sentenced on very high-profile charges related to their publications, 1637–1638 certainly serves as a period for intense conversations about both politics and books.42 Interestingly for a study of masque in these contexts, 1637 is also the year of first publication of Milton’s 1634 Ludlow masque. As part of my focus on masque reception, and on broadening the kinds of audiences we consider, I propose we use the new print availability of that text in 1637 to designate the Milton text as, in some ways, a

84

Lauren Shohet

Table 3.1 Masques of 1637–1638 Year

Title

Scriptor

Venue

Publisher

1637

A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle

Milton

Country house Humphrey masque Robinson (performed 1634)

1637

Masque at Hunsdon

Heywood

Country house masque

Thomas Slater (included in Heywood’s Pleasant Dialogues and Drammas)

1637

Microcosmus

Nabbes

City masque (Salisbury Court Theater)

Charles Greene

1637

Londini Speculum

Heywood

Mayor’s show

John Okes (printer)a

1638

Britannia Triumphans Davenant

King’s masque

Thomas Walkley

1638

Luminalia

Davenant

Queen’s masque

Thomas Walkley

1638

Springs Glorie

Nabbes

City masque (Salisbury Court Theater)

Nicholas Fussell (publisher), Charles Greene (bookseller)

1638

Porta Pietatis

Heywood

Mayor’s show

John Okes (printer)

Note: a Separate publishers not given for Lord Mayor’s shows; presumably, the sponsoring guild (Haberdashers for Londini Speculum; Drapers for the 1638 Porta Pietatis) was considered the publisher and initial source for copies.

“1637 masque.” The years 1637–1638 also saw the performance and publication of varied other entertainments, including those in table 3.1. Toward widening the kinds of historicity admissible as “local moments,” we also might note that several of these masques, and likewise several major political events of 1637 and 1638, evocatively encompass a recent past. Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton were arrested in 1634, so their sentencing in 1637 concluded a process that had become public three years earlier. Ship Money was collected periodically, with debates about the 1637 levy discussing previous filings. Congruently, the Ludlow masque’s publication followed upon a 1634 performance and ensuing manuscript circulation. Indeed, insofar as 1638 saw the resumption of Whitehall masques after a three-year hiatus, as Davenant remarks (“There being now past three yeers of Intermission, that the King and Queenes Majesties have not made Masques with shewes and Intermedii” [265]), 1638 court masques imaginatively return participants to the 1635 season. We find similar gestures in city entertainments; in the 1637 Londini Speculum,

Reading Triumphs

85

St. Katherine reminds spectators of previous Lord Mayor’s shows she has patronized: “Oft have I on a passant Lyon sate / And through your populous streets beene borne in state: / Oft have I grac’d your Triumphes on the shore” (94). In all these cases, I suggest, relationship with the recent past is part of the 1637–1638 moment. That relationship is often, moreover, about a recent history of specifically readerly experiences: of reading the accounts of Star Chamber prosecution (the way for the broad public who became invested in the Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton cases to learn of these closed proceedings),43 of reading the privately presented Ludlow masque. (The composer’s print dedication claims that demand generated by the masque’s manuscript circulation prompted publication: the text had been “so much desired, that the often copying of it hath tir’d my pen to give my severall friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessitie of producing it to the publick view.”)44 Many of the masque texts themselves published in 1637 and 1638 represent books, reading, and their cultural uses. As noted earlier, the icon of “right government” presiding over the proscenium of Britannia Triumphans holds books in one hand. The same masque introduces Merlin as “the great devourer of mysterious books” (192), and indeed casts a primary contrast between antimasque and masque as the distinction between the “mock romansa” whose readerly mode it associates with arcane “mysteries” and the true virtue celebrated by the alternatively read masque chorus of “our own modern poets” (287). (One assumes that Davenant counts as assisting in Fame’s work of spreading word of true virtue “at home” [265], in part by means of the books Walkley publishes.) Books play a prominent role in Microcosmus, a “morall maske” scripted by Thomas Nabbes that in 1637 was “Presented with generall liking, at the private house in Salisbury Court.”45 Microcosmus shows the conversion of a figure named Physander from what we might call sensual folly to right temperance. Introduced as “a perfect man” and promised an ideal wife, Bellanima, Physander first is tempted by Sensuality, the Senses, and Humours gone awry. When Temperance and the love of Bellanima heal Physander, the couple rebuffs the masque’s “malus genius” “with Bookes in their hands” (sig. F3r). Thus where Britannia Triumphans presents books for “Right Government”—for the ends of the polity—Nabbes’s “moral mask” presents books for personal probity. In the Ludlow masque, the Elder Brother’s remark that the Lady is well “principled” “in vertues book” similarly tropes morality in terms of books and reading.

86

Lauren Shohet

A laudatory epistle by William Cufaude prefixed to the print version of Microcosmus highlights negotiation among both genres and audiences—readerly and theatrical, popular and elite—as central features of this masque. The poem commends Nabbes: . . . thou dost make by thy Poetick rage A Schoole of Vertue of a common Stage. Methinks the ghosts of Stoicks vexe to see Their doctrine in a Masque unmasqu’d by thee. Thou mak’st to be exprest by action more, Then was contein’d in all their Bookes before. (sig. A4v)

Cufaude expresses surprised admiration for Nabbes’s re-mediation of classical books into the more popularly accessible drama of the “common Stage.” The “unmasquing” of bookish “doctrine” may adduce to a sense of masque as recondite. But, Cufaude claims, Nabbes uses an elite genre to popularize equally elite Classical philosophy—on the stage of a professional theater, no less. This suggests that the masque (indeed, genre as such) is dynamic. An elite genre could not popularize elite content, that is, unless it were capable of transformation rather than mere translation. Yet, in Cufaude’s terms, Nabbes succeeds in the formal project of “unmasquing” “masque” by means of masquing. Hereby Microcosmus also enacts the substantive project of “unmasking” Stoic doctrine for a broad audience. (And here we see another challenge to our habitual associations: the Stoicism we often associate with anti-courtly republicanism is disseminated through the genre we generally equate with courtliness.) Cufaude’s claim that Nabbes’s masque actually surpasses Stoic books (“expres[sing] by action more / Then was contein’d in all their Bookes before”) further suggests a dynamic relationship between masque and book: that masque does not merely stage book knowledge, but transforms it. Physander’s and Bellanima’s acquisition of these books between the beginning of the masque and their final appearance, when their books are literally at hand, suggests that we might even read Cufaude’s laudatory comment “Thou mak’st to be exprest by action more, / Then was contein’d in all their Bookes before” to sustain a reading of “before” that understands the books themselves to have been retrospectively transformed by Nabbes’s staging of their content. The Stoic books, in this reading, contained less “before” than they do “now”: masque rehearsal has rejuvenated those always-available tomes. Even if we don’t take the “before” quite that far, the masque certainly has placed them as active doctrine into

Reading Triumphs

87

the hands of the masquers Physander and Bellanima. Likewise, it has made the books more publicly “available” in the sense of renewing their interest to the masque’s receivers (readers as well as audience). Microcosmus is interesting not only for its depictions of books, but also for its relationship to other masques of its day, and for the ways this challenges our assumptions about masque’s court-centeredness. As a masque of temperance and chastity, Microcosmus shares thematic features with Milton’s Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, with Davenant’s court masque Luminalia, with Heywood’s Lord Mayor’s show Porta Pietatis, with Heywood’s country-house Mask at Hunsdon, and with Nabbes’s own theatrical masque Springs Glorie. Faith, hope, and especially love (variously emphasized as charity or chastity—two virtues involving right use of the world that are far more similar in seventeenth-century usage than in ours) as the way to a happy life of temperate virtue are prominent in these different but significantly overlapping venues of city pageant, court masque, city masque, and country-house masque. The “Gate of Piety” for which Porta Pietatis is named displays what Piety names “the three prime Vertues Theologicall, / Faith, Hope, and Love” (115). Similarly, Heywood’s Hunsdon masque introduces its nine masquers as “the three Charitees,” the three “beauties,” and the three “Vertues Theologicall, / Faith, Hope, and Love” (146). Luminalia is not as tightly focused on chastity as Nabbes’s or Milton’s texts, but does emphatically culminate in a song “to the King and Queene” that praises the ideal married state: “Though Men the blessed state of Angels praise / Cause not perplex’d with what we sexes call / Yet you by such a humane diff’rence raise / Your virtue more, because ’tis conjugall” (709). Thus, whereas we usually associate such claims in a queen’s masque with a courtly cult of Neoplatonism, we equally could link it to contemporary explorations of married chastity (“chastity” not in the sense of sexual abstinence, but rather in the Reformist sense of properly directed desire).46 Conversely, the picture of temperance that emerges from cross-reading these entertainments makes it appear less the specifically Reformist or emergent-bourgeois virtue we often imagine. This picture yields not a binary contest between Francophile display at court and disgusted puritan response to such foreign decadence, but rather a culture involved in common conversations about proper uses of the world. Relatedly, these entertainments’ shared interest in properly wielded hetero-erotic love as the key to virtuous happiness shows that the Neoplatonic love we often describe as an esoteric obsession of Queen Henrietta Maria’s actually participates in

88

Lauren Shohet

much broader cultural negotiations of gender, companionate marriage, and ethics: a discussion that includes Neoplatonic, high church, Catholic, Reformist, and Neostoic strains. (Do Charles and Henrietta Maria, in the years after Buckingham’s death, offer less an avatar of modern-day models of married love than, say, Milton’s Adam and Eve?). These different inflections of related ethical philosophies reveal a dialogue taking place across social boundaries—not only, as previously has been argued, as vectors of social fragmentation. Their commonalities also suggest that we rethink our designations of poetic iconoclasm and forgettable cliche. For instance, Milton’s famous country-house masque for the exalted Bridgewater family and the much lesser-known public masque Microcosmus both make temperance the key to salvation. We often take temperance as a remarkable, republican, protobourgeois interest of Milton’s. But Nabbes’s Physander remarks, “Temperance, to thee I owe my after life” (sig. F3v), and Microcosmus lauds prudent judgment as the basis of happiness, characterizing Prudence as “thou vertue of the mind, by which / We do consult of all that’s good or evill / Conducing to felicity” (sig. F3v). This individual mental process, judiciously evaluating the best use of the world, relates to such moments in Milton’s Ludlow masque as the Lady’s invocation of “the freedom of [her] mind” which enables her to argue, against Comus’s carpe diem claims, for the “holy dictate of spare Temperance.”47 In this comparison, Milton’s “masque of chastity” does not seem oxymoronic (as Maryann Cale McGuire has argued), but rather of a piece with its decade.48 Court masques also share these tropes. Britannia Triumphans discriminates between temperate and ascetic use of the world when this masque’s Imposture remarks that There are Sir of this rigid sect, and much They governe too, that thinke the Godwit and The Rayle were meant the Eagles food, and men Design’d to feed on Salads in a meade, As if we were created but a great And larger kinde of Frogs. (271)

Milton’s Comus, of course, casts similar imprecations upon ascetics (“Doctors of the Stoick Furr”) who would spurn nature’s plenty and instead “in a pet of temperance feed on Pulse, / Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but Freize” (720–21); in this text, Milton’s Lady responds by extolling a temperate via media that imagines

Reading Triumphs

89

Nature as a “good cateress.” Congruently, the celebration of feminine virtue that critics often associate with the rarified milieu of the queen also plays out both in the Ludlow masque’s invocation of the nymph Sabrina to assist the Lady in preserving her chastity, and in Microcosmus’s Bellanima summoning Temperance to heal Physander so that Bellanima herself can live out her destiny. Sabrina “loves” “maidenhood . . . and will be swift / To aid a virgin such as was herself / In hard-besetting need” (855–57). Hence she liberates the Lady from Comus’s spells so that the Lady can take her place in the Bridgewaters’ dynastic masque, able now to “triumph in victorious dance / O’er sensual folly, and intemperance” (974–75)—then eventually, one day, to chastely wed. Just as Sabrina aids Milton’s Lady, Temperance helps Nabbes’s Bellanima, who implores Temperance: “Pitty then sweet Lady, / And from your treasure of instructions / Prescribe a powerfull medicine that may quicken / [Physander’s] cold defects . . . / . . . To a chast wife / Preserve (now ’tis reform’d) her husbands life” (sigs. F1v–F2r). Intertextual echoes between the Ludlow masque and Britannia Triumphans’s “mock romanza” strike a lighter note. Davenant’s antimasque romance, in deliciously doggerel couplets, serves as the masque’s example of bad art sponsored by the less-than-Stuart tastes of ages past (here figured as Merlin). Davenant’s giant carries an “oaken twig” that parallels the wand of Milton’s Comus; these rods respectively menace Milton’s coolly virtuous Lady and Davenant’s hapless dwarf and maiden (see table 3.2). Invoking Milton’s masque, Davenant’s giant seems to know he’s in the same genre; his verse sounds even worse against the backdrop of Comus’s. Court entertainment might here be mocking Miltonic verse by reducing it to its rudest outlines, but this moment’s location in an antimasque of bad art also can serve to situate the Ludlow masque on

Table 3.2 Milton’s Masque at Ludlow Castle and Davenant’s Britannia Triumphans Masque at Ludlow Castle Comus (“in his hand a silvered rod”): . . . if I but wave this wand, Your nerves are all chain’d up in Alabaster, And you a statue, or as Daphne was Root-bound, that fled Apollo. (657–60)

Britannia Triumphans

Giant: If I but upward heave my oaken twig, I’ll teach thee play the tomboy, her the rig.

90

Lauren Shohet

the same side as the masque aesthetic (in distinction to antimasque burlesque) of Britannia Triumphans. (Might such echoes also offer one reason for the 1637 publication of Milton’s 1634 masque, in which case either honorific or satiric invocation accrues to the poetic capital attendant upon print dissemination?) Indeed, all these kinds of relations among 1637–1638 masques can signal either intentional intertextuality or less self-conscious trading in common tropes. Distinguishing between these options is not of particular interest for our focus on reception, since receivers themselves might evaluate the question of explicitness differently. More significant for our present purposes is considering the broader masquing culture, and the culture more broadly impacted by masquing, that is revealed when we listen for conversations among entertainments. Indeed, reexamining theater history suggests a more significant continuum among Caroline court masques, household masques, and pageants than we usually acknowledge. For example, Heywood’s 1633 Lord Mayor’s pageant Londini Emporia refers to its show as an “Anti-maske”; the playwright Nabbes, as we have seen, presented “masques” at the theater in Salisbury Court; and Heywood’s 1636 play Loves Maistresse sports the alternative title “The Queens Masque.”49 Furthermore, divisions of labor among masquers and antimasquers change in the 1630s, breaking down distinctions between gentlemen and professionals, elite and popular, that we habitually use to separate the masque from other forms of drama. Comic antimasques were presented by “Gentlemen of qualitie” in the 1638 Luminalia; King Charles famously participated in masques as a dancer, where his father merely observed; Queen Henrietta Maria’s speaking roles in court entertainments was much remarked (and famously criticized). Audiences also were broader than we sometimes imagine. Courtier John Pory indicates that servants were habitual spectators who took up more space than could be spared, reporting that “my Lord Chamberlain saith, that no chambermaid shall enter [the 1633 Temple of Love], unless she will sit cross-legged on the top of a bulk.”50 Indeed, Charles directed that the new hall for the 1638 masques be built specifically to house greater “capacity of spectators.”51 But perhaps the greatest breadth of audience, and the greatest potential for inter-masque discussion, emerges in print. Entertainments were printed with greater regularity in the 1630s than they had been since 1615, with all major court and City events appearing immediately. Masque quartos appear to have been affordable and widely available, and they show up broadly enough in postRestoration publishers’ catalogues to indicate wide dissemination of

Reading Triumphs

91

texts for major entertainments.52 As for minor events, Heywood’s remark on publishing the text of the Hunsdon house masque suggests that reading these entertainments was likewise commonplace: Heywood advises his “General Reader” that “For such as delight in Stage-poetry, here are also divers Dramma’s, never before published: Which though some may condemne for their shortnesse, others againe will commend for their sweetnesse.”53 The printed books of masques and pageants regularly include text omitted in performance, indicating that the genre had some integrity apart from reportorial function. For instance, the “water show” portion of Londini Speculum contains a speech of Mercury’s that was deleted in performance, apparently because the lines Heywood provided took longer to deliver than the amount of time it took for the barge to reach its destination: “These few following Lines may . . . be added unto Jupiters message . . . which though too long for the Bardge, may perhaps not shew lame in the booke, as being lesse troublesome to the Reader than the Rower” (95). The charm of this scriptor’s aside to the reader creates a relationship that further separates the book’s role from mere reportage. It invites the reader to reflect upon differences between the performance occasion and the readerly one, to contemplate relationships among readers, scriptors, producers, spectators. In print, major entertainments and minor ones, court masques and city pageants, quartos of individual masques and masque texts included with a writer’s poetic oeuvre (such as Carew’s much-printed octavo Poems and a Maske) spread out from their places of initial presentation to present opportunities for ever-widening cross-reading, re-reading, mis-reading, gossip: conversation. In 1637–1638 entertainments, then, representations of books and evocations of generic habits reveal a complex, nuanced, variable understanding of the conversations that constitute reading—both in the literal sense of reading books and in the figurative sense of interpreting genre. Like other aspects of these masques and pageants, these representations show a mix of sincerity and playfulness, sketching out a range of possible significances more than firmly fixing determinate meaning. In various ways, these texts foreground questions of reception: of how traditions are transmitted, and how they are used. This should remind us that, finally, words matter when they are read or heard as much as when they are written, whether those words are in masques, parodies, or proclamations. Using texts of any kind to examine the past demands that we grant their receivers the same agency in how they read those words that we assume for ourselves.

92

Lauren Shohet

Notes *This essay was completed with the assistance of a Folger Library Fellowship and the marvelous resources and staff of that library. I also am grateful for Alan Farmer’s valuable suggestions as the essay took form, and for the responses of Katherine Rowe, Edmund Campos, and Scott Black to its earlier versions. 1. James Maidment and W. H. Logan, eds., The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1872–1874), 2:267. All subsequent citations of Britannia Triumphans are from the second volume of this edition, and will be cited in the text by page number alone. 2. See for instance Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). 3. Murray Lefkowitz, ed., Trois Masques à la cour de charles Ier d’Angleterre (Parks: Edition du centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1970), 212–15. For a reading of masques enacting absolutist order, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 4. Martin Butler, “Politics and the Masque: Salmacida Spolia,” in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59–74, 65. 5. James Knowles, “The ‘Running Masque’ Recovered: A Masque for the Marquess of Buckingham (c. 1619–20),” English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 79–135, 79. See also Peter Holbrook, “Jacobean Masques and the Jacobean Peace,” The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 67–87. 6. For these examples, see Martin Butler and David Lindley, “Restoring Astraea: Jonson’s Masque for the Fall of Somerset,” ELH 61 (1994): 807–27; Butler, “Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 369–404; Lawrence Venuti, “The Politics of Allusion: The Gentry and Shirley’s Triumph of Peace,” in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from “English Literary Renaissance,” ed. Arthur Kinney and Dan Collins (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 293–316. Illustrating the range of “occasional” readings, Leah Marcus reads the same 1615 masque as the Butler and Lindley essay within the different framework of evolving Jacobean financial relationships with the City of London. See Leah Marcus, “City Metal and Country Mettle: The Occasion of Ben Jonson’s Golden Age Restored,” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David Bergeron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 26–47.

Reading Triumphs

93

7. As both a skilled practitioner and canny critiquer of local interpretation, Leah Marcus is perhaps best positioned to serve as a touchpoint for what previous localist practice achieves and elides. I welcome Marcus’s observation that, as localist readers, “instead of striving or a single holistic interpretation of a text, we may find ourselves marking out a range of possibilities or identifying nexuses of contradiction,” and her remark that this practice “can be—and should be—a suspension of our ruling methodologies . . . in favor of a more open and provisional stance toward what we read and the modes by which we interpret.” But even as she argues for localist reading as “continual negotiation between our own place . . . and the local places of the texts we read,” however, Marcus’s model of those past “places” remains intentionalist in ways that elides reception. See Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 38, 36. 8. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973), 2:668–69. 9. Quoted in David J. Crankshaw, “Community, City and Nation, 1540–1714,” in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604–2004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 45–70, 53. 10. Crankshaw, “Community, City and Nation,” 53. 11. Quoted in ibid., 57. 12. Roy Strong, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens, and Whitehall Palace (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 7. 13. Political historians like Glenn Burgess have carefully unpacked the transactional quality of absolutist claims, showing that we must understand Stuart political rhetoric as relational in nuanced ways that militate against taking assertions out of their complex contexts; masque criticism— indeed, theater history more generally—has not fully assimilated this work. See Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 14. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 4. 15. Lefkowitz, Trois Masques, 226. 16. Inigo Jones and William Davenant, Britannia Trivmphans (London, 1637). 17. Indeed, another surviving drawing for the scenery, by John Webb, shows a building whose outlines still code as St. Paul’s, I believe, but much less clearly and emphatically. Orgel and Strong remark that this drawing could be either a reproduction or an alternative to Jones’s (2:670). 18. Quoted in Crankshaw, “Community, City and Nation,” 53. 19. Ibid., 54–60. Crankshaw also notes that contributing or withholding funds from the St. Paul’s work was sometimes contentious, and moreover that it sometimes was interpreted as assent or dissent from Laudian or crown policy.

94

Lauren Shohet

20. David M. Bergeron, ed., Thomas Heywood’s Pageants: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1986), 100. All further citations of Heywood’s works are from this edition. 21. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103, 105. 22. Francis Osborne, Historical Memoirs on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1658), 2:64–65. 23. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy. 24. Davenant, Luminalia, in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 2:707. Luminalia hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 25. Goldberg, James I. 26. Compare this to, say, Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 27. In Lefkowitz, Trois Masques, 82. 28. David Norbrook, “The Reformation of the Masque,” in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94–110. 29. Butler, “Politics and the Masque,” 70. For this view of Milton’s Ludlow masque, see for instance Maryann Cale McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983) and Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s “Comus” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). 30. In Lefkowitz, Trois Masques, 125, 126. The Master of Ceremonies’ lines here read, “Although his [i.e. the Prince d’Amour’s] greatness is not taught to bow, / His subjects fear he will do homage now, / Which he esteems no less’ning to his State.” 31. For a related discussion of relationships between Jacobean masques and Lord Mayor’s pageants, see Nancy Wright, “ ‘Rival Traditions’: Civic and Courtly Ceremonies in Jacobean London,” in Bevington and Holbrooke, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, 197–217. 32. Account by Sir Henry Herbert, Charles’s Master of Ceremonies, cited in Lefkowitz, Trois Masques, 114. 33. My notion of “canniness” is indebted to conversations with Scott Black. 34. Thomas Carew, Coelum Britannicum (London, 1634), 4. Mercury speaks the lines cited. 35. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). 36. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 19. 37. Robert C. Johnson, Mary Frear Keller, Maija Jansson Cole, and William B. Bidwell, eds., Commons Debates, 1628, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977–1978), 3:494. The cited Commons speech is discussed in Burgess, Absolute Monarchy, 64.

Reading Triumphs

95

38. S. R. Gardiner, ed., Documents Relating to the Prosecution of William Prynne in 1634 and 1637, (London, 1877), 14, 16. 39. Milton, Areopagitica, in Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Patterson, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1938), 4:310, 341. Subsequent quotations of Milton texts are from this edition. 40. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 225. 41. Roger Chartier, “Do Books Make Revolutions?,” in The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 67–91. 42. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 43. These accounts were not generally licensed for English print publication. Instead, they circulated widely in manuscript newsletters, by word of mouth, and in print accounts smuggled in from Holland (A Breife Relation of Certain speciall, and most materiall passages, and speeches in the Starre-Chamber, occasioned and delivered June the 14th, 1637, at the Censure of those three worthy Gentlemen, Dr. Bastwicke, Mr. Burton, and Mr. Prynne, As it hath beene truly and faithfully gathered from their owne mouthes by one present at the said Censure, 1638, which has no printer or publisher given, but probably was printed in the Netherlands). 44. John Milton and William Lawes, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (London, 1637), sigs. A2r–A2v. 45. Thomas Nabbes, Microcosmus, a Morall Maske (London, 1637). 46. See for instance Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 47. Milton, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, vol. 1, part 1, 85–123, lines 663, 786. Subsequent references to this text will give line numbers only. 48. McGuire, Milton’s Puritan Masque. 49. Thomas Heywood, Londini Emporia, or Londons Mercatura (London, 1633), sig. B3v; Heywood, Loves Maistresse: or, The Queens Masque (London, 1636). 50. Letter to Puckering, January 3, 1632/3. Court and Times of Charles the First, ed. Thomas Birch, 2 vols. (London, 1848), 2:214. 51. Quoted in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, 2:265. 52. Humphrey Dyson’s record of book purchases show that he purchased two 1630 masques for 2d each. (Information from Francis Johnson, “Notes on English Retail Book-prices, 1550–1640,” The Library, 5th ser., 5 [1950]: 83–112). Bookseller Francis Kirkman’s 1671 advertisement of texts for sale includes all the court masques and city pageants cited in this essay. See Kirkman, Nicomede, a Tragi-Comedy . . . Together with an Exact Catalogue of all the English STAGE-PLAYS printed, till this

96

Lauren Shohet

present Year 1671. For more data on publication and readership of Stuart masques, see my essay “The Masque as Book,” in Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Ian Moulton. (Brussels: Brepols, 2004), 143–68. 53. Thomas Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma’s [sic], ed. W. Bang (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1903), 25.

4

Exeunt Fighting: Poets, Pl ayers, and Impresarios at the C aroline Hall Theaters Martin Butler

In comparison with the complex histories of the Elizabethan and

Jacobean theater companies, the story of Caroline playing is a relatively settled affair. In the 1630s, theater business in London appears at last to have fallen into a regular pattern, suggesting that this was a time of comparative economic stability. Throughout the decade, five companies performed, acting at six playhouses (the King’s Men alternating between the Blackfriars in winter and the Globe in summer), and although companies sometimes moved between theaters, the size and geography of the theatrical marketplace had entered a steady state. Within this topography, broad social and aesthetic differentials are evident between the three hall theaters (the Blackfriars, the Drury Lane Cockpit, and the Salisbury Court in Whitefriars) and the three arena playhouses (the Globe, Fortune, and Red Bull). The halls were small in size and serviced the more expensive end of the market, whereas the amphitheaters performed to larger and more diverse audiences, and their repertoire tended to be conservative and robust. However, this topographical divide masks several underlying distinctions, the most important of which was the structural difference between the organization of the King’s Men and the other four companies. The King’s Men were run by a group of actor-sharers who owned their two playhouses and organized their business on the basis of collective decision-making. This helped them to prosper, for it created a long-term association between company and theater, allowing the actors to determine their theaters’ affairs. Elsewhere the situation was more fluid, for the economies of house and playing company did not map onto one another so neatly. The activities of the other theaters

98

Martin B utler

were controlled by their owners and managers, whose financial investment was represented by the physical fabric of the buildings. The will of the companies, on the other hand, was generally determined by their actor-sharers, who coexisted with the managers with varying degrees of harmony. It was, of course, in the interests of both owners and players for their theaters to succeed, and often the owner had a stake in the company or the players had a stake in the house. Still, there was always potential for conflict between the two groups—over commercial interest, economic control, aesthetic policy, or simply personality—and company priorities were similar to but not necessarily identical with those of the managers. The long period of Caroline stability has been seen as a time in which managers started to prosper at the expense of players, and the owners of the houses began to eclipse the companies. In particular, Andrew Gurr’s insightful analysis of the whole period argues that in this decade the theatrical market was increasingly being dominated by men who not only controlled individual companies or theaters but had an interest in both.1 Gurr argues that these men used their combination of interests to achieve a stranglehold on the commercial theater, responding proactively to change, moving companies unpredictably between venues, and making and breaking troupes at will. As a symptom of manager power, he points to the fact that although the number of playhouses remained constant during the decade, all the companies except the King’s Men shifted from theater to theater, sometimes as frequently as every three years. As we shall see, these movements were in fact less systematic than they appear, but while (as Gurr stresses) “no single cause could have ruled these shifts from place to place,”2 they do suggest an adjustment in the balance of power toward the managers. Another straw in the wind is the reemergence in the 1630s of children’s troupes, the ethos of which was generally more managerial. The clearest example of a prospering manager is Christopher Beeston, who built the Cockpit theater in 1616 and for many years ran it as an autocratic family business. He became a dominant presence in the last years of the Caroline theater, setting up his own company of “Beeston’s Boys” in 1637, and successfully passing the whole enterprise to his son William at his death in 1638. Gurr argues that Beeston’s activities at the Cockpit in the 1630s were helped by a continuing interest that he possessed in the Red Bull; this allowed him to coordinate his activities across hall and amphitheater stages and become one of the most powerful men in Caroline theater. A comparable, if less fully achieved, state of affairs seems to have developed at the Salisbury Court playhouse, which opened in 1629,

Exeunt Fighting

99

the last new theater to be built in London before the Civil War. Richard Gunnell, who was the codeveloper with William Blagrave, had been a leading actor at the Fortune, and Gurr argues that he used his continuing influence at that house to support the Salisbury Court’s activities, notably by exchanging companies between the two houses in 1631 and 1634. After Gunnell’s death in 1634, his successor as manager, Richard Heton, moved toward an even more autocratic style. He left behind a collection of notes (now in the British Library) known as “Heton’s Papers,” dated 1639, which set out plans for a new patent for the company. This patent would have invested him as sole “governor” of both theater and troupe, and removed the actors’ independence, making them little more than employees of the playhouse.3 And another rising personality was William Davenant, who attempted to found his own new theater in Fleet Street, and who, when in 1640 Beeston’s Boys got into political hot water, was helicoptered into the Cockpit as the company’s governor. The careers of these men typify a general shift within Caroline theater toward centralized managerial practices, and toward a greater dependence of companies on playhouses. Control was being consolidated more unambiguously in the hands of a few powerful individuals, who used their spending power and commercial savvy to respond flexibly to the market. The activities of the managers in moving companies between theaters also helped (Gurr argues) to blur the distinction, which on the surface seems so absolute, between halls and amphitheaters. Whether the comparative stability of the market enabled the managers to flourish or was itself brought about by their increasing dominance is a moot point. These managers Gurr calls “impresarios,” and the style of activity with which they were associated the “impresario system.” The phrase is, of course, anachronistic, for the word “impresario” first entered the language in the eighteenth century in connection with the management of opera companies (the closest word in early modern usage was “emprise,” which was etymologically related but had a chivalric sense: “a difficult undertaking”). Undoubtedly practices already were in place before 1642 that anticipated the impresarios of a later time: Beeston, Gunnell, Heton, and (putatively) Davenant combined investments in bricks and mortar with hands-on involvement in the companies that played in their houses. The risk of such a term, though, is that it suggests that this development was inevitable, implying that the underlying tendency of pre-Civil War theater was toward an ever-increasing managerialism, and that conditions were set against the autonomy of the companies. In this essay I want to test the impresario system and examine how fully it was emerging as the

100

Martin B utler

dominant institutional mode before the Civil War. Of our four candidates, Beeston comes closest to impresario status, but (as we shall see) there are reasons to suppose that even he was not operating unilaterally. More generally, outside Beeston’s orbit, we shall find that down to 1642 the theatrical economy, for all its appearance of homogeneity, remained comparatively mixed. If some ambitious managers tightened their grip on London stages, there continued to be a trade-off between companies and theaters, conditioned by the various and changing opportunities of the commercial market, and by the occasional but powerful intervention of the court. In this climate some managers might prosper, but managerialism was still only one element in the mix. I shall particularly suggest that there were two principal developments that bore onto one another. The rise of ambitious managers like Beeston was paralleled by the emergence of a theatrical market that put the playhouses in increasingly direct competition, introducing a new and more urgent note of economic rivalry. I shall test the impresario model by focusing on the Salisbury Court playhouse. This story deserves to be revisited because new sources have come to light which need to be taken into account, but also because the Salisbury Court has never been as thoroughly studied as the other playhouses, and its full history significantly modifies our sense of the larger texture of relationships between the theater managers and the companies. Although Gunnell and Heton look like managers intent on turning themselves into impresarios, we shall find that neither of them was ever in quite as strong a position as on the surface they appear. In particular, Heton’s managerialism, distinctive though it looks, was not an a priori ambition or a predetermined ethos but an attitude that crystallized haphazardly in response to changing circumstances, his plans being provoked as much by short-term necessity as by strategic foresight. Moreover, I shall suggest that the Salisbury Court story shows that ever-encroaching managerialism was not inherently a recipe for success; rather, Gunnell and Heton’s choices had unpredictable and sometimes counterproductive results. The Salisbury Court did not move forward confidently but experienced a stream of new initiatives and false starts, and these show the difficulties the new theater had in finding its place in the market. They illustrate the limits of managerial power, and how much changing economic conditions hindered as well as helped the managers. * * * The Salisbury Court has attracted little attention because few plays can be associated with it, because its playwrights had lower profiles

Exeunt Fighting

101

than those at other theaters, and because its history was so disrupted, with four companies working there in twelve years of operation. Moreover, it occupied a vulnerable space on the edge of the fashionable market dominated by the Blackfriars and the Cockpit. It had a smaller capacity and profits than its rivals, and during its time it twice exchanged troupes with the Fortune and the Red Bull, a circumstance which troubles our usual sense that in the 1630s hall and amphitheater houses had polarized into opposed kinds of operation. In fact, when Gunnell and Blagrave founded the company in 1629, they probably had little expectation of crossing these boundaries, for it was established as something quite distinct: a boys’ troupe, the Children of the Revels (this is the name as it appears in the earliest documents; later allusions are to “the Company of the Revels” or “the Company of His Majesties Revels,” but never to the King’s Revels as such, which has become the form used today). Evidently Gunnell and Blagrave meant their playhouse to provide an alternative to the fare found at the other halls and arenas. Historians have been surprisingly reluctant to acknowledge the troupe’s distinctive identity. In volume 1 of The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941), G. E. Bentley deduced from references to “children” in the scattered records that it was not a standard adult company, but contained a disproportionately large number of boys. He speculated that it was similar to the company that Beeston founded in 1637, which consisted of a core of experienced adult actors but had up to twelve boys and called itself “The King and Queen’s Young Company.”4 Subsequently Bentley supplemented this with information from two suits in the Court of Requests in June and October 1632, between Blagrave and Gunnell, respectively, and their financial partner, Christopher Babham, which provide a detailed account of the theater’s early years. These suits were found in the Public Record Office in 1910 by C. W. Wallace, though one has disappeared since he saw them. Fortunately, Wallace transcribed both and his papers are now preserved in the Huntington Library, though the transcripts have never been printed in full. These transcripts, rediscovered by Bentley, do imply that the troupe was indeed composed substantially, if not entirely, of boys.5 Against this, Gurr’s later discussion of the Salisbury Court revives the earlier interpretation, and argues that Gunnell’s troupe was probably a company of youths “stiffened” with older players from the adult companies. Gurr suggests that Gunnell had “a core of five or six experienced players,” including the clown Timothy Read, who was a boy at the Cockpit in 1626, Christopher Goad and John Young (also from the Cockpit), and William Cartwright, who worked with Gunnell at the Fortune in the

102

Martin B utler

1620s, and that he “made the numbers up with young players.”6 Herbert Berry’s account in English Professional Theater 1530–1660 (2000) moves the troupe even closer to the adult model. He says the Company of the Revels was “ostensibly made up of children like the long-defunct company of the name that had been at the Whitefriars playhouse, but [was] actually made up mainly of men.”7 Yet the lawsuits do suggest that the troupe was originally composed of fourteen boys. Christopher Babham was an associate in the original agreements to build the Salisbury Court and establish the company, but he fell out with his partners when the poor cash flow caused both him and Gunnell to default on their commitments (the company was unable to start performing as early as they intended because of the plague closure in April-November 1630, and that summer they were in real financial hardship). Babham says the intention was “to train and bring up certain boys in the quality of playing,”8 but in July 1630, when the plague was at its height, Gunnell took the boys out of London and lodged them with his family at Hackney. Babham complained that when they returned to him one was dead, some had taken to beggary and theft, and the rest were ill-dieted and poorly clad (an account which gives no hint of any adult players like Cartwright). Moreover, the sharers’ plan for the playhouse, as stated in the documents, was to create a theatrical nursery which would perform publicly and prepare plays for court but also provide “a supply of able actors to your Majesty’s servants of the Blackfriars when there should be occasion.” Whether this notion, that boys would be trained as actors at Salisbury Court before going on to adult careers elsewhere, was any more than a pious intention it is hard to be sure, but it does have some support from Blagrave’s dispute with Babham over ownership of the promising young actor Stephen Hammerton, whom they bought out of apprenticeship to a draper, and who would emerge in the late 1630s as one of the King’s Men’s stars. In addition, Blagrave and Gunnell seem to have retained the young Cambridge playwright and Son of Ben Thomas Randolph as house dramatist, and he produced some customized work, including at least two plays and a “Preludium” for the playhouse opening. A poem by Randolph’s friend William Heminges (son of the financial manager of the Blackfriars) poked fun at him for writing “vile things for pygmies.”9 The Babham documents suggest that the plan was to break the Caroline mould represented by the adult troupes, and establish a company of new blood at Salisbury Court, similar in composition to Paul’s Boys or the Blackfriars Boys a generation earlier, the direction of

Exeunt Fighting

103

which would have been firmly in the hands of Gunnell and Blagrave, the housekeepers. Support for the notion that the Children of the Revels developed a distinctive profile for itself—when, after November 12, 1630, it was eventually allowed to play—can be gleaned from the repertoire that it accumulated during its single year at the new playhouse. Only two plays can be definitely linked to it, Randolph’s The Muses’ Looking Glass and Amyntas. These require casts dominated by young boys, and present themes appropriate to their talents. Amyntas is a polite but occasionally comical pastoral involving intricate love relationships and a strong vein of parody. There are five complex female roles and a witty boy who pokes fun at would-be lovers, plus several older lovers whose follies are mocked. A sharp generational divide is made between youthful parts and older characters who could easily be caricatured by boy players. The Muses’ Looking Glass is even more obviously designed for boys. This is an educational satire, praising the Aristotelian mean and defending the innocence and moral seriousness of the stage, and it takes the form of a presentation mounted for the benefit of two puritans who are offended at the opening of a new playhouse, but who end the afternoon converted to the opinion that plays can, after all, be lawful recreations. There is no plot, but a series of short, self-contained episodes that depict contrasting virtues and vices. Altogether thirtyfour speaking parts are called for, plus an unspecified number of female virtues who dance the concluding masque. Such cast requirements are quite unlike the construction of plays for adult troupes: the performance would have been a series of individual “turns,” with no one star but an overall company style. Although both plays are appropriately brisk, their language is decent and inoffensive. In contrast to the often shocking adventurousness of plays performed by the Jacobean boys’ companies, there is nothing here that would sound unsuitable in the mouths of children. To these two attested plays can be added several others that probably belonged to the boys’ repertoire, fitted as they are for children’s performance. One, Shirley’s Changes, or Love in a Maze, has “the Company of His Majesties Revels” on the title page, though the date is problematic.10 It too is strongly divided between three older parts and the rest of the characters, who are all young men and women in troubled amatory affairs that in some respects recollect those in Amyntas. There are four central female roles, plus a witty page who is disguised as a woman, and two would-be lovers who are mocked. Again, events conclude with a masque. The boys also revived two old plays, Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap from ca. 1602 and Beaumont’s

104

Martin B utler

The Woman Hater, or the Hungry Courtier from 1606 (named in Randolph’s “Preludium” as the play performed when the theater first opened after the plague).11 Both of these were originally staged by Jacobean boys’ companies, and they share the usual vogue for caricature and broad humors comedy. Sir Giles Goosecap in particular would have needed staging by boys. It has five female roles, plus three witty pages and a singer. There are three roles showcasing the humors of eccentric old men, and the adult character Furnifall, described as “my good little old lord” (3.1.176), also sounds like a boy’s part. Such plays would readily have fitted the repertoire of a troupe of youths, while avoiding the railing, scurrility, and sexual innuendo often associated with the Jacobean boys’ companies. Several other plays from around this time could be speculatively linked with the Salisbury Court. Two are by Randolph, for if he was retained as house dramatist, some of his other plays that are difficult to place may also have been intended for the Children of the Revels. Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery is an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Ploutos which probably has its roots in Cambridge drama and which, in its surviving form, has been worked over by a later hand. Still, it is a full-scale play calling for a large cast, and with its semi-allegorical debates, comic turns, and episodic plot, it has affinities with The Muses’ Looking Glass. Another curious piece is The Drinking Academy, which, at a mere 900 lines, seems unlike any other professionally produced play of the period. It has only seven roles, all male, and shows an absurdly penurious miser, his prodigal son, and foolish servant being rooked by a group of rogues using devices borrowed from Jonsonian comedy. This could come from Randolph’s university period, though it might equally well have been devised for the boys. More substantial is Brome’s The City Wit, a play of ca. 1629–1630 which Bentley tentatively linked to the Salisbury Court. There are eight parts for women or boys, and its loosely episodic construction showcases a series of comic turns. The hero performs a tour-de-force of disguises; there is a part with eleven songs for a witty singing boy; other characters include an Amazonian woman, a hen-pecked husband, and a pedantic schoolmaster; and events end with a masque. It is easy to see this kind of play as an attractive component in the repertoire of a lively boys’ troupe. Then there is Thomas Jordan’s Money Is an Ass, usually dated to 1635 but probably written five years earlier, and which Lucy Munro has argued belongs to the original Salisbury Court repertoire.12 It is half the length of a normal play, and of its twelve parts two are female, four are witty boys, one is a servant, one a caricature of an old usurer,

Exeunt Fighting

105

and four are walk-ons. It has an amusing wooing plot overlaid with a lightly allegorical structure: the prodigal gallants Featherbrain and Penniless successfully win the daughters of the usurer Clutch by disguising themselves as Gold and Jewel, while avoiding the slanders of his servant Calumny and defeating their rivals Money and Credit. The setting is contemporary but it lacks any troublesome political commentary, and its humor is broad without being obscene. And one also wonders about Shirley’s A Contention for Honor and Riches, a dramatic but pageant-like dialogue on a moral theme for seven speakers and four mutes, published in 1633 with no indication of where it was performed. Perhaps this should also be associated with Gunnell’s boys, especially if the company gave performances that combined several entertainments in one afternoon. It is striking that all the plays that can be linked with the Salisbury Court were lively comedies, often with moral themes, loose or episodic structures, and nothing that could have drawn censure for offensiveness or topicality. The indications are, then, that in 1630–1631 the Children of the Revels were established at Salisbury Court with a profile and repertoire that were significantly different from those of any other current troupe, harking back to styles of performance more in vogue a generation earlier, though in a form adapted to the politer tastes of Caroline theatergoers. But they had been playing there for barely a year when, in December 1631, a new troupe was brought over from the Fortune playhouse and freshly licensed as the Prince’s Men, while the boys apparently transferred to the Fortune.13 Here one might suppose their skills would have been strained, for the amphitheater showcased performance styles and catered for audience tastes that were less refined than those catered for by their accumulated repertoire. It is hard to imagine Amyntas or The Muses’ Looking Glass finding much of an audience at Golding Lane. Perhaps the skills of child performers were more widely appreciated than we suppose: Lucy Munro has drawn attention to a special prologue written by Thomas Heywood around this time for a “young witty lad” playing Richard III at the Red Bull.14 Still, this sounds like a one-off, and the residency of the Children of the Revels at the Fortune is the only example in the whole period of a children’s troupe performing at an amphitheater. Only one new play can be connected with them in these months, William Heminges’s The Coursing of the Hare (licensed for the Fortune in March 1633, but now lost), and it is striking that this is the point at which Randolph’s connections with the professional stage ceased (as Heminges was his friend, perhaps an attempt was made to recruit him as the new company playwright).15

106

Martin B utler

As we shall see, when the company can next be analyzed in detail there had been significant changes, which suggests that, once at the Fortune, the boys did not long retain their original form. Conversely, the Prince’s Men (who eventually became notorious for their exaggerated acting style) would seem to be out of their element in the small, roofed auditorium at the Salisbury Court. Although the adults stayed at this theater for some time, they could not have taken over the boys’ repertoire, for neither the casting patterns nor the themes would have suited them. The plays that Shackerley Marmion wrote for them in 1632 (Holland’s Leaguer and A Fine Companion) mark a shift in the theater profile, being much bolder and cruder than Randolph’s; the only other text that might be associated with them at this time is Edmond Ironside, an anonymous play from the 1590s which they perhaps revived.16 Eventually, but perhaps unsurprisingly, at some later point the process of migration was repeated in spades. By 1634 the Company of the Revels had returned to the Salisbury Court, the Prince’s Men had moved to the Red Bull, and the Red Bull company transferred to the Fortune. Gurr sees this state of flux as testament to Gunnell’s drive and ambition, and particularly to a double interest in the Salisbury Court and Fortune that permitted him to exchange companies at regular intervals,17 but this assumes that such movements between playhouses were intentionally planned and economically useful. If the boys’ repertoire was as distinctive as I have argued, then moving them to the Fortune and filling the Salisbury Court with the Prince’s Men was a radical departure: such a maneuver might suggest difficulty rather than forward planning. The crucial question is whether this merry-go-round was designed by Gunnell or dictated by factors outside his control. There are several reasons why we might see Gunnell as much less the master of events, and his actions as responses to short-term exigencies rather than calculated strategy. First, his control of the Salisbury Court was less secure than the impresario model suggests. The Babham papers indicate that Gunnell was in difficulty in 1630–1632 and that the venture had proved risky. Not only did plague prevent it from opening when planned, but the costs of keeping the company going and servicing the rental without any income caused hardship. In September 1630 Gunnell decided to sell Babham his interest in the playhouse (four shares out of nine), though he resumed it the following spring when Babham was unable to meet the payments. Seven months later, in September 1631, Gunnell again sold two shares to Babham, though they came back into his possession in the summer when Babham defaulted for a second time, after which

Exeunt Fighting

107

the partners commenced court actions against each other. These tortuous deals and cash flow problems indicate that during the theater’s first year of operation Gunnell’s involvement was under pressure, and they suggest that the exchange of the Prince’s Men for the Company of the Revels in December 1631 may not have been a planned move but an exigency brought about by financial crisis.18 Perhaps the boy company had failed to take off in the way that the partners had planned, and a move toward a new repertoire was inevitable. If Gunnell was the managerial brains behind the troupe, his artistic and commercial choices seem not to have succeeded. Furthermore, it is not clear how far Gunnell was acting autonomously, for if the whole enterprise benefited from his friendships at the Fortune, it was even more directly aided by its close connection with the Revels office. William Blagrave, who held four shares in the Salisbury Court, was deputy to the Master of the Revels, and Sir Henry Herbert himself held the ninth share. These circumstances perhaps explain the decision to name the boys the “Company of the Revels,” and they supplement the account of the troupe’s origins given in the Babham papers. In 1629, Sir George Gresley mentioned in a letter that the earl of Dorset had let some property “unto the Master of the Revels to make a playhouse for the Children of the Revels.”19 This not only suggests that the enterprise had official sanction, but it underlines the hand of the Revels office, with Herbert and Blagrave controlling five-ninths of the investment.20 The earl of Dorset was the ultimate landlord of the property, and although he distanced himself from the project by subletting the lease,21 he did periodically involve himself in the theater’s affairs: particularly, in December 1631 he was responsible for arranging for the newly incoming adult company to receive the patronage of the infant Prince Charles (born in May 1630).22 Of course, as the owner of the land it was in his interest to ensure the theater’s prosperity, but in acquiring the patronage of Henrietta Maria’s son he was also fulfilling his political role as head of the queen’s household, supplying the new prince with players who were one of the status symbols held by all members of the royal family (and, in an unusual move, the Prince’s Men would in 1634 join the court for part of its summer progress).23 It is tempting to conjecture that Gunnell was not the real power at Salisbury Court; he may have been the agent through whom decisions taken at the Revels office were enacted. The second question mark concerns the events surrounding the Company of the Revels’s eventual return to the Salisbury Court. It is an optical illusion that the Caroline companies moved between

108

Martin B utler

playhouses in a systematic and regular way (“the traditional three-year intervals”).24 We happen to know about the state of play in 1634 because of the survival of Thomas Crosfield’s diary for that year, which supplies many details of names for the first time, but it does not follow that the companies moved into these new arrangements during that period. In fact, Richard Brome’s answer to a lawsuit brought against him by Heton in 1640 (discussed further below) indicates that the transfers happened before 1634. He says Gunnell “inveigled” him to join the Salisbury Court company as playwright eighteen months before he signed his three-year contract with them, at which time he was working with the Prince’s Men at the Red Bull and was “very well entertained and truly paid without murmuring or wrangling.”25 Since Brome signed his contract in July 1635, he must in January 1634 have already been well settled at the Red Bull, and this in turn means that the Prince’s Men had been established at that playhouse by the end of 1633 at the latest, and probably for somewhat longer. In that case, their residency at the Salisbury Court was for less than two years, making the turnover of companies more unsettled than on the surface it appears. It is also evident from Heton’s “Papers” that the Prince’s Men’s departure was forced onto Gunnell and not planned by him. Looking back on this period from 1639, Heton says that “whereas my lord of Dorset had gotten for a former company at Salisbury Court the Prince’s service, they, being left at liberty, took their opportunity of another house, and left the house in Salisbury Court destitute both of a service and a company.”26 Heton’s account of this episode was probably colored by his later experiences of difficulties with actors (discussed further below), but his statement is validated by the testimony of the Prince’s player William Bankes, who says independently in a separate lawsuit of February 1635 that the move from Salisbury Court came about when Ellis Worth and Andrew Kane, leaders of the Prince’s Men, “quarrelled with the housekeepers of the said house at Salisbury Court and did break off from the said company and settled themselves at the playhouse called the Red Bull.”27 Evidently the changes of 1633 were provoked by Worth and Kane, and not planned by Gunnell. The poaching of Brome from Prince’s Men by Gunnell early in 1634 is further testimony to bad blood between the companies, and the fact that his successor Heton signed Brome for three years in July 1635 suggests that his intention was to prevent the Company of the Revels from moving around any more and keep them at Salisbury Court for the foreseeable future. Given what we know about the Prince’s Men’s origins, one wonders whether they

Exeunt Fighting

109

could have left the Salisbury Court without some kind of permission from the Revels office. Notably, their original authorization to perform (December 1631) laid down that they should act “in their new playhouse in Salisbury Court (and not elsewhere within the cities of London or Westminster),” so that their move to the Red Bull was directly against the terms of their license.28 It certainly looks as though Gunnell was the losing partner, and that his influence over activity beyond the Salisbury Court was limited. The question then arises of what identity the Company of the Revels had when they reappeared at the Salisbury Court in 1633. At this point, the picture clarifies, since for the first time we have detailed actor-lists: beside Crosfield’s diary, names are supplied by the cast-list for Nathanael Richards’s tragedy Messallina (ca. 1634–1636), by the 1640 lawsuit which gives details of Brome’s contract, and by a list of twenty-eight actors who visited Norwich in March 1635, which may be the roster of the Company of the Revels or perhaps a conflation of their personnel with men from an unknown touring troupe.29 This gives us twelve core names: the eight in Crosfield’s diary30 (five of whom were at Norwich and four in the Messallina list), and four more from Brome’s contract31 (all of whom were at Norwich). Of these twelve, one was a leading actor at the Fortune in 1634,32 two were exPrince’s Men who would have played at Salisbury Court in 1632–1633,33 one was with the King’s Men until at least 1631,34 four were associated with the Queen’s Men,35 and four are unknown in previous records.36 In addition, Messallina names five other actors: one was an adult from the Prince’s Men, three were children, and one was an adult unknown in any other record.37 It is likely that these included some of the fourteen who were with Gunnell and Blagrave in 1630, especially those previously unmentioned. But it is also clear that the character of the company had changed. Many of the players were youthful, and the proportion of boys must have been striking, but a tranche of older actors had also been recruited and the troupe now had around nine mature adults, something closer to the Caroline adult norm. Strikingly, although Brome’s Queen and Concubine and The Antipodes both make jokes in passing about the “Children of the Revels,” all the records after 1631 refer to a Revels “Company” rather than “Children,” and in his 1640 narrative Brome says that at the time of his original transfer in 1635 the company was then “in the infancy of their setting up and first playing at Salisbury Court,” as if 1634–1635 marked a new start, not the continuation of an established operation.38 It appears that the Company of the Revels as it existed in 1634 had turned into a different enterprise from its original scheme:

110

Martin B utler

certainly the plays that can be associated with it during 1634–1636 show far less customization for boys than do those of 1630–1631.39 If not completely refounded, the company had been restructured, and had moved in directions unintended in 1630. Not only did the players leave the Fortune after only a comparatively limited residency, they were no longer performing the distinctive style and repertoire which they had been set up to offer. It looks very much as though Gunnell’s original initiative had failed, and that when his players returned to the Salisbury Court their profile had substantially been redrawn. * * * So the Company of the Revels’s story between 1629 and 1636 was more eventful than it appears on the surface. The troupe changed in character and composition, and these shifts must have been in some respect a consequence of the experience of the Fortune. They mark the impact on the company of playing for a different kind of audience and theater. At the same time, the operations of the theater and its managers’ decisions had been significantly dictated by circumstance: the movement between playhouses was not something that they benefited from or even planned. How, then, does this story extend into the latter part of the period, when the attitudes of the manager seem even more driven? Gunnell died in 1634,40 and his successor, Richard Heton—a man without any previous background in theater—has been seen as a more forceful individual who was from the beginning intent on consolidating his authority. This view rests on Heton’s “Papers” and their proposals for relicensing the company under a new structure. It is important, though, to put these plans in context, and take stock of the conditions out of which they came. Heton’s intensely managerial ideas crystallized in response to the specific circumstances of the second half of the decade, and it is not even clear whether he ever put them fully into effect. The period after 1636 presents a quite different pattern of activity, the catalyst for change being the long plague closure of 1636–1637. This hiatus was successfully weathered by the King’s Men, but caused a radical reshuffle amongst the other companies, in the course of which Beeston broke the Queen’s Men at the Cockpit and established a new company on the model already described, consisting of a few experienced actors surrounded by a team of youths. The impact at Salisbury Court was just as far-reaching. The Company of the Revels disappeared from the records during the plague, and when the theater reopened in October 1637 it was home to a new Queen’s Men,

Exeunt Fighting

111

combining the core of the old Revels company with imported actors who were rendered homeless by developments elsewhere. There had clearly been major fragmentation at Salisbury Court. Two of Heton’s old company joined Beeston,41 one perhaps went to the Red Bull,42 three may have joined the Fortune (since their names continue to appear in the registers of the Fortune’s parish, St Giles Cripplegate),43 and three simply disappear.44 The troupe that replaced them consisted of six adults who remained from the Revels Company, plus four exiles from Beeston’s old Queen’s Men, all actors of long service whom, said Sir Henry Herbert, “I disposed of . . . to Salisbury Court, and joined them with the best of that company.”45 Heton’s subsequent account of this process emphasizes how chaotic the changes were, and how much they called into question the stability of the company relationships enshrined in the existing licenses: “When her Majesty’s servants were at the Cockpit, being all at liberty, they dispersed themselves to several companies, so that had not my Lord of Dorset taken care to make up a new company for the Queen, she had not had any at all.”46 What particularly emerges from these changes is that the profiles of the Cockpit and Salisbury Court troupes were reversed. Heton now led a substantially adult company, while Beeston had a troupe of youths that mirrored the Company of the Revels as it existed before 1636. In effect, Beeston had stolen Gunnell and Heton’s clothes. He was occupying the place in the market that had previously been staked out by the Salisbury Court. One puzzle surrounding these changes is the authority by which they came about. Given how far the new arrangements advantaged Beeston (of which more shortly), the obvious explanation is that the initiative was his. The fact that eight of Beeston’s experienced players were stranded—four of whom went to the Salisbury Court, and four disappeared temporarily from the record (perhaps because they left London to take their chances at Ogilby’s new playhouse in Dublin)47—suggests that he was ruthlessly disposing affairs to his own benefit. Shortly after, Blagrave’s widow claimed in a petition to the House of Lords that Beeston, “being master of the said playhouse,” took “occasion to quarrel with the company to the end he might have a company that would take what he would be willing to give them.”48 The situation that she describes superficially resembles events at the Salisbury Court in 1633, when Gunnell fell out with the Prince’s Men, but in practice this change would have been more fundamental, since if Beeston was creating a new company rather than just moving troupes around, he could not do it without official sanction.49 Moreover, he acted high-handedly, for he took two players each from

112

Martin B utler

the King’s Men, Prince’s Men, and Salisbury Court, and could only have done so with support from the center. He already had his new company ready with plays for Whitehall in February 1637, in the middle of the plague closure, and he took the risk of briefly opening at the Cockpit in May, while the closure was still in place (rather as, in the plague summer of 1630, the Salisbury Court had staged trial performances before they were officially allowed to open).50 Beeston was careful to state that he was “commanded to erect and prepare a company of young actors for their Majesties’ service,” and Herbert reiterates this, saying “Mr. Beeston was commanded to make a company of boys, and began to play at the Cockpit with them the same day.”51 If this was so, who did the commanding? Herbert’s ex post facto summary, and the flaunting of his authority, does not make it sound as though the commands were his. More likely, Beeston had powerful friends, and there are two obvious candidates. One is Henrietta Maria, whose involvement came through her role as patron of the Cockpit company from 1625 to 1636. On February 20, 1637 (in a warrant recently discovered by Karen Britland in the papers of the queen’s treasurer, Sir Richard Wynn), she granted Beeston £30 “in consideration of his charges and pains in breeding and keeping [the boys] all the time of the sickness.”52 This was the day before Lord Chamberlain Pembroke swore Beeston in as governor to the company, and indicates that the queen endorsed the changes in spite of their effect on the players licensed in her name. The other obvious candidate is Pembroke himself, whose increased involvement in Cockpit affairs was noted by John Orrell.53 Pembroke was to issue the inhibitions of 1637 and 1639 forbidding any one else to print or act Beeston’s plays; he allowed the company’s tickets of privilege and signed the warrants confirming Beeston and his son as its “governors”; he commissioned a design from Inigo Jones for scenery at the Cockpit; and, in the crisis of 1640, he ordered the company to be closed down and reopened, then set Davenant over them as governor—in which process he described them as “a company of players or actors authorized by me (as Lord Chamberlain to his Majesty).”54 As Lord Chamberlain, Pembroke had overall responsibility for the affairs of London’s players, but it looks as though he was taking an unusually close interest in the establishment of this troupe. A new elite theatrical pairing had been established between the King’s Men at Blackfriars and the King and Queen’s Young Company at the Cockpit, the latter operation based on an intimate understanding between courtier and playhouse manager. If Beeston was acting as impresario, he could do so only because of a hand-in-glove relationship with great authorities at Whitehall.

Exeunt Fighting

113

What were the consequences of these changes for the Salisbury Court? In the period down to 1636, the Salisbury Court and Cockpit had coexisted in a friendly way, for several links attest to their cooperation. In addition to his four shares in the Salisbury Court, Blagrave had a share in the first Queen’s Men playing at the Cockpit: this must have ensured he wanted both theaters to thrive.55 Beeston backed Blagrave in his dispute with Babham over the Salisbury Court boy Stephen Hammerton, and he had a share in Hammerton with Blagrave.56 Beeston was also happy to loan James Shirley to help Blagrave and Gunnell build up the Salisbury Court repertoire, even though Shirley was the contracted Cockpit playwright. Of the nineteen plays that Shirley wrote between 1626 and 1636, Changes is the only one given to any other theater. But with Blagrave dead and Shirley in Ireland, these connections had gone, and with Beeston’s company occupying the niche previously held by the Salisbury Court, a more directly competitive relationship had developed between the two playhouses, and one, moreover, in which Beeston benefited from a powerful backer at court. Perhaps it is because of this that we find Heton attempting at this time to exploit his links to the site owner, the earl of Dorset. Heton’s “Papers,” outlining his plans for a new patent, state that it was Dorset who made sure that a new company was put together for the queen in 1637, and amongst Henrietta Maria’s household papers there is indeed a warrant (also not previously recorded) dated October 10, 1637, to pay £50 to Dorset “to be disposed and distributed by him among such of our comedians as he shall find actual retained and remaining in the foresaid company [of the Salisbury Court].”57 Heton’s “Papers” further allude to another petition, now lost, that he presented to Dorset concerning the company’s affairs, and his draft patent proposes that ultimate authority over where the company shall play should belong either to the Master of the Revels or to “one of the Lord Chamberlains.”58 It looks as though Heton—who was a member of the queen’s household—was trying to maintain a working relationship with Dorset (the queen’s chamberlain) that mirrored the alliance that Beeston had with Pembroke. There is no indication of whether Heton eventually got what he wanted. Still, Dorset’s continuing interest in the company’s affairs is suggested by the fact that, after the theaters closed in 1642, his niece, Lady Isabella Sackville, took some of the Salisbury Court players into her household and employed them in private theatricals.59 There are, though, plenty of signs that these years with the second Queen’s Men were unexpectedly eventful. The Salisbury Court must

114

Martin B utler

have struggled to survive the plague closure, for the gratuity that was procured from the queen was solicited after the theaters had reopened, and the wording of Dorset’s warrant—“such of our comedians as he shall find . . . remaining”—implies that even this late the company’s personnel were still in flux. Heton himself said that he had “disbursed good sums of money for the maintaining and supporting the said actors in the sickness time, and other ways to keep the said company together, without which . . . the company had been utterly ruined and dispersed.”60 However, as we have seen, the membership changed, and Heton further complained that, in the period after the reopening, the players “many times threatened” to leave Salisbury Court for another playhouse, a repetition of Gunnell’s difficulties when the Prince’s Men left the same theater ca. 1633. Presumably this meant a potential loss of players either to the Fortune or the Bull, though Heton adds that some “treated upon conditions for the Cockpit.”61 The one employee whose affairs we know about in detail is Richard Brome, and his tale involved both a loss of trust with Heton and “treat[ing]” with the Cockpit. In 1640, Brome claimed that as soon as the plague took hold in May 1636 the theater attempted to cancel his three-year contract (signed in July 1635).62 In August, with no income, he turned to Beeston, who lent him £6 on promise of a play. This provoked Heton into trying to draw him back, with an interim contract and an offer of £10. But this deal also collapsed, and Brome reapplied to Beeston, only coming to terms when the Salisbury Court players asked Sir Henry Herbert to mediate a further revised contract. When the Salisbury Court began playing again in October 1637, Brome’s original contract had just nine months to run, and in 1638 Heton offered him a new and tighter contract, now for seven years.63 But Brome and Heton still disagreed over how far the original promises had been fulfilled and what each needed to do to make up the deficit of plays and salary. Presumably Heton felt that despite his bad relations with Brome he could still extract some of the backlog. In the event, Brome complained that “divers of the company did so slight . . . [his new] plays and used such scornful and reproachful speeches” about him that he was forced in April 1639 to jump ship to the Cockpit (now run by Beeston’s son William), the new contract having been verbally agreed but not signed. I suggest that it was probably at this moment, and in response to this particular set of circumstances (rather than as a manifesto of long-nurtured ambitions), that Heton began drawing up the proposals which survive in his “Papers” for a new company patent that would put his power on firmer ground.64

Exeunt Fighting

115

Heton’s “Papers” focus on issues arising from disputes between players and theater owners. His plans were designed to ensure that the company would not take themselves off to other playhouses, and he alludes to a recent history of disagreement over terms of service. His patent would have tied the company to the playhouse for seven years, situated him as the “governor” running all its affairs, and ensured that the name “Queen’s Men” was attached to the Salisbury Court and could not be transferred elsewhere. The third document attempts to sell the new articles to the players by spelling out the financial gains they would receive in comparison with previous agreements. However, the first document is more revealing, for it is written from the housekeepers’ point of view and dwells on how the company, by threatening to move its service, had effectively held the theater to ransom. While there is nothing that upsets the traditional reading that sees this proposal as testifying to Heton’s ambition, it is evident that his ideas were reactive, and came out of the combination of internal and external threats arising at that moment. Indeed, at this time dangers were apparent on several fronts. One was the commercial challenge posed by William Davenant, who had ambitious plans to build a Fleet Street amphitheater which would have shown “action, musical presentments, scenes, dancing and the like.”65 This passed under the privy seal in March 1639, and John Freehafer has suggested that Davenant hoped to poach trade from Beeston’s Cockpit.66 In fact the Salisbury Court would have been the playhouse most affected, for while the amphitheater was intended for half a mile to the east of the Cockpit, it was virtually on the Salisbury Court’s doorstep. Heton complained in his “Papers” about “one that hath got a grant from the King, for the building of a new playhouse which was intended to be in Fleet Street, which no man can judge that a fellow of our company, and a well-wisher to those that owe the house, would ever be an actor in.”67 In the event, Davenant’s permission to build in Fleet Street was later withdrawn (probably for reasons to do with city planning), but his general permission to develop any site that could be agreed upon with the Commissioners remained.68 The greater danger must have come from William Beeston, whose liaison with Brome had not only removed the playwright in whom the company had invested, but threatened their operations by creating a dispute over ownership of Brome’s repertoire. A singular struggle took place over The Antipodes, which Brome wrote for Christopher Beeston during the plague closure but which the Salisbury Court claimed under the 1635 contract. The Queen’s Men did end up

116

Martin B utler

staging play at Salisbury Court in 1638, but Brome had his revenge by printing the play in March 1640, with a waspish note pointing out that it was “intended for the Cockpit stage in the right of my most deserving friend Mr. William Beeston, unto whom it properly appertained,” and that the published text contained “more than was presented upon the stage, and left out of the presentation for superfluous length (as some of the players pretended).” He also brought out The Sparagus Garden, which had been the big Salisbury Court hit of 1635, with a dedication and commendatory verses drawing attention to his personal success.69 Meanwhile, in August 1639 the earl of Pembroke issued an order protecting forty-five plays owned by Beeston against performance by anyone else, including numerous plays by Shirley, Ford, and Heywood that had been the core Cockpit repertoire before the last plague closure. Since these plays were originally performed by the old Queen’s Men, the target of this order could only be Heton’s new company. Beeston and Pembroke had established the principle that plays belonged to the playhouse rather than the company, and the effect was to disable the new Queen’s Men from claiming any plays which might originally have been licensed under their name. Heton’s need to tie the company to the theater might be further seen as a response to this maneuver. It appears, then, that 1637–1639 was a time of intense competition between Heton and Beeston, and that the Salisbury Court was the theater that bore the brunt of Beeston’s 1636–1637 initiatives.70 So it is hardly surprising when in February 1640 Heton and the Queen’s Men commenced a complaint in the Court of Requests against Brome for breach of contract, narrating a long history of broken promises and requiring him to fulfill his agreements. In their view, Brome was “by and through the persuasions and enticement of . . . William Beeston . . . employed to defeat your subjects of such benefit and profit as shall or may accrue and come unto them by . . . Brome’s study and performance,”71 and they demanded that he be made to supply the three plays for which, on their reckoning, he was in debt. For his part, Brome replied in March 1640 that the company had unfairly stopped his salary and treated him unprofessionally. His plays had been “cavilled at and rejected and himself discharged and left at liberty,” and now the company “out of malice and evil will only molest and vex this defendant with suits of law, intending to crush and ruin him.”72 This is the context, I wish to suggest, out of which came a remarkable and hitherto unnoticed exchange of public insults between the Salisbury Court and Cockpit. This was initiated by gibes against Brome that we find in an anonymous “Praeludium” printed in 1656

Exeunt Fighting

117

with Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess, and which seem to be an attempt to discredit him. The Careless Shepherdess, a pastoral play from the 1620s, was revived at some point during the Queen’s Men’s residency at Salisbury Court, with a new induction—the Praeludium— being a dialogue between Thrift, a citizen, Landlord, a country gentleman, Spruce, a courtier, and Spark, a lawyer. The topic is theatrical taste, and in the conversation a separation emerges between Spruce and Spark, who are men of sophistication and wit, and Thrift and Landlord, who come to Salisbury Court in hope of seeing clowns and fighting. Having been rebuked by the other two for their tastes, Thrift takes his custom off to the Bull or the Fortune, while Landlord stays for the play, but only so he can leer at the ladies. This trifle has sometimes been attributed to Brome, on the basis of an allusion to The Antipodes. The induction ends with a prologue that warns the audience against expecting the pastoral’s shepherds to be dressed in elegant courtly style: Faith, gentlemen, such solecisms as these Might have done well in the Antipodes. (p. 9)73

In fact, the dialogue also contains another, previously unidentified Brome allusion, in Landlord’s reminiscences about a play he once saw at Salisbury Court: I heard a fellow Once on this stage cry, Doodle, doodle, doo, Beyond compare; I’d give the other shilling To see him act the changeling once again. (p. 5)

This comment has often been taken as a reference to Middleton and Rowley’s famous tragedy, but The Changeling belonged to Beeston (it was named in the 1639 protection order) and could not have been staged here. The play in question was Brome’s Salisbury Court play The English Moor (1637), the plot of which involves the humiliation of a usurer, Quicksands, by his servant, Buzzard. Buzzard disguises himself as Quicksands’s secret bastard, a “changeling” simpleton, and in the noisy climactic scene he wanders around the stage shouting “Hay toodle loodle loodle loo,” much to Quicksands’s shame.74 The common thread of these allusions is, of course, their hostility. The Antipodes is indeed all about “solecisms,” but the prologue sounds dismissive of the play itself, while it is no praise to The English Moor to say that its humor is admired by men such as Landlord. So the

118

Martin B utler

Praeludium is unlikely to have been written by Brome, for it singles out his plays as examples of the kind of drama from which the Salisbury Court wished to dissociate itself. And in another respect it ranges itself against him: its admiration for amateur dramatists. Brome was notoriously hostile to the amateurs. He wrote a satire on Aglaura and lampooned Suckling in The Court Beggar, and the prologue to The Damoiselle (1638) snipes away at Davenant. But the Praeludium lines up behind gentlemen writers. Thrift notes that the professionals’ “trade” is in decline, and Spark jeers them for growing dull while the amateurs put on buskins for recreation and “free and well-meant charity” (p. 6). The two prologues take up the same theme, one beginning “Must always I a hearer only be? / Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” (p. 7), the other rebuking those who dismiss the amateurs: He knows there is a snarling sect i’th’town That do condemn all wit except their own. Were this play ne’er so good, it should not take; Nothing must pass that gentlemen do make. (p. 9)

Since Brome was a leader of the “snarling sect,” there is a neat symmetry between the Praeludium’s repudiation of his plays and its defense of amateur drama. The Praeludium can readily be understood as a symptomatic commentary on the emergence of the amateur playwright at the end of the period. But I suggest that it particularly belongs to early 1640, during the lawsuit and the time of acutest tension between Heton and Beeston, and falls into place as part of the ongoing commercial rivalry between their playhouses. It attempts to reposition the Salisbury Court as a theater for gentlemen, putting blue water between its plays and the vulgar drama of the Bull and Fortune, and it takes swipes at the former house playwright and critic of the amateurs who was now identified with the Cockpit. And there is, I think, a text that looks like a specific response to this: the extraordinary conclusion to Brome’s The Court Beggar, staged at the Cockpit early in May 1640. This play hits out with remarkable directness at courtly playwrights, monopolists, and the Scottish business, and it ends with a unique epilogue in which the blunt countryman Swaynwit steps forward and delivers a long polemic on theatrical affairs addressed directly to the audience. Swaynwit pours scorn on plays by amateurs who pay to have their plays acted, and suggests that frequently they are not their own work

Exeunt Fighting

119

but have been bought from university men. Then follows an apology for Brome himself:75 But this small poet vents none but his own, and his by whose care and directions this stage is governed, who has for many years, both in his father’s days and since, directed poets to write and players to speak till he trained up these youths here to what they are now: aye, some of ’em from before they were able to say a grace of two lines long to have more parts in their pates than would fill so many dryfats. And to be serious with you, if after all this, by the venomous practice of some, who study nothing more than his destruction, he should fail us, both poets and players would be at loss in reputation. (sig. S8v)

This is usually read as Brome’s critique of Whitehall and Blackfriars taste, but it is striking that he speaks for Beeston as well as himself, while his concern to warn the audience about a “venomous practice” against this playhouse suggests something more specific than enmity between professionals and amateurs. In early 1640 the manifest “venomous practice” was the Salisbury Court lawsuit.76 This is glanced at in the prologue’s words, “Troth, gentlemen, let me advise ye, spare / To vex the poet full of age and care” (sig. N4v)—which echo Brome’s complaint in the lawsuit, quoted earlier, about being maliciously “vexed” by Heton—and it is explicitly invoked in the play when one of the characters offers “Here’s a trim business towards, and as idle as the players going to law with their poets” (sig. P4r). If the Praeludium was spoken at the Salisbury Court as part of an attempt to discredit Brome, the epilogue to The Court Beggar looks like Brome’s attempt to retaliate. I suggest, then, that at the turn of the decade a state of barely concealed antagonism existed between the two houses, and that Heton was rebranding his theater in response to Christopher Beeston’s innovations and the still unresolved fall-out from the 1636–1637 closure. Attacking the Cockpit’s new playwright in the courts and on the stage, and seeking to promote the Salisbury Court as a venue for amateur drama of a kind more usually associated with the Blackfriars, Heton was attempting some far-reaching and risky maneuvers.77 And one wonders, in this new climate, how viable his strategy would have been. As far as we can tell, the Salisbury Court does seem to have prospered once the Queen’s Men were reformed. In the three years to 1640, Herbert’s ninth share in the theater brought him £97 on average, which indicates an annual house profit of around £870.78 But with Brome gone and Beeston laying claim to the old Queen’s Men repertoire, Heton must have been under pressure to find new plays for

120

Martin B utler

his company and acutely aware of the difficulty of maintaining his hold on the market. His “Papers” include provisions to employ a regular playwright, and perhaps he hoped to recruit Shirley in Brome’s place, for he obtained The Gentleman of Venice (licensed October 1639) and The Politician from him. But when Shirley returned from Ireland in April 1640, he went to the Blackfriars, to replace Massinger (who died in March), and there is no indication that the Salisbury Court managed to attract the services of any other experienced playwright. Instead, as the Praeludium seems to foreshadow, all the plays that can be associated with the theater in its final years were amateur pieces, and by largely untried writers: Heminges’s The Fatal Contract, Richard Lovelace’s The Scholars, Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, William Rider’s The Twins, and (possibly) John Gough’s The Strange Discovery.79 With the exception of Heminges, none of these was an experienced playwright, and their works hardly seem a thrilling output. The Blackfriars had cornered the market in plays of this stamp, and if this repertoire is the consequence of Heton’s decision to take the Salisbury Court down this road, it did not augur well for the future.80 * * * To summarize, there were at least five phases of activity during the Salisbury Court’s brief life: an innovative boys’ company that lasted less time than its backers must have hoped; a temporary sojourn by an adult company more suited to playing at an amphitheater; a mixed company of boys and adults, cut short by the plague closure; a standard Caroline adult company on the model of the King’s Men and the old Queen’s Men; and a move toward a new repertoire focused on amateur plays. This eventful history does broadly coincide with Gurr’s picture of a theatrical market in which the activities of managers loomed increasingly large, for the changes in the Salisbury Court profile reflect the impact of decisions taken by Gunnell and Heton at critical junctures. But the series of rather contradictory initiatives which the theater experienced does not inspire confidence in the managers’ judgment, and the full story suggests that managerial will was only one aspect of the picture. Gunnell and Heton were a long way from establishing themselves as effective impresarios, and in many respects the continuing volatility of the market was against it. The truculence of the players, changing signals from the court, the difficulty of establishing a viable profile, competition from rival enterprises, and sheer bad luck all contributed to a disruptive life at the Salisbury

Exeunt Fighting

121

Court. Heton’s attempt to acquire gubernatorial powers and to lock the company down to the theater was a consequence rather than a cause of this situation. These disruptions at the Salisbury Court were not isolated events but were symptomatic of underlying tendencies in the Caroline theatrical world. With five companies performing at six playhouses, Caroline theater looks prosperous and stable, but the detailed story is more uncertain. In the years to 1636, the migrations of troupes between the Salisbury Court, Fortune, and Red Bull meant that activities beyond the Blackfriars and Cockpit remained unpredictable. Some of these changes did reflect managerial choice, but detailed analysis shows how much they were provoked by the players themselves, by financial exigency, and by shifting royal policy. After 1636, the picture was more settled, but at the cost of an increasingly competitive relationship between the hall theaters, as the Salisbury Court began to be squeezed by Christopher and William Beeston’s operation at the Cockpit. It is also notable how far these uncertainties were brought about by a renewed resurgence of plague. The second half of James’s reign had largely been plague-free, but in the Caroline years the plague returned virulently, with inevitable consequences for the playhouses. There were long plague outbreaks in 1625, 1630, and 1636–1637, more were to come in 1640 and 1641, and another was already on the horizon in 1642, when the playhouses were closed for political reasons: the parliamentary order of September 1642 is notable for using apocalyptic language of the kind that was associated with responses to plague.81 These were circumstances that managers could not plan for, but their impact ran deep: arguably the events that had the greatest long-term effect at Salisbury Court were the suspensions of playing in 1630 and 1636–1637. In this perspective the relatively small size of the theater and its narrower operating margins may have been crucial, as well as the fact that there had not been time to pay off the initial capital investment. During both closures, Gunnell’s and Heton’s options were seriously restricted by a shortage of reserves, a situation which did not, as far as we can tell, affect the other companies so drastically. Another aspect to this story is the tension it reveals between the emerging commercial self-determination of the playhouses and their residual identity as institutions protected by and associated with the court. With the establishment of the Salisbury Court and the consequent presence of three permanent hall playhouses in London, there seems to have been an attempt to link these more elite theaters with the major companies licensed under the names of members of the

122

Martin B utler

royal family (as Gurr points out, the amphitheater companies were not afforded the same consideration).82 Thus, during 1629–1636, the King’s Men and Queen’s Men had long and stable associations with the Blackfriars and the Cockpit, while the Salisbury Court was always home either to the Company of the Revels or to the new Prince’s Men. After the plague closure, the companies were reorganized, but since the three hall playhouses survived, the principle of association by licensing was retained: the King’s Men remained at Blackfriars, the Queen’s Men were reconstituted at Salisbury Court, and the Cockpit hosted the new King and Queen’s Young Company. During 1637–1642, then, the association between the main royal companies and the elite hall playhouses seems even more emphatic. Yet while this arrangement looked coherent and logical, it was not enforced evenhandedly. The Blackfriars and Cockpit theaters benefited from their association with the royal troupes, but the support that Heton had from Whitehall was less consistent, nor was his connection with Dorset as advantageous as Beeston’s friendship with Pembroke. At the same time the patterns of court licensing were at odds with the reality of commercial competition between the playhouses, whose rivalry for an audience share increasingly cut across the fiction of happy joint service to a royal master and mistress. The Blackfriars, Cockpit, and Salisbury Court hosted the three main royal companies, but when they were not making their occasional visits to Whitehall, they were competing for much the same body of spectators, as is shown by the loss of goodwill between Beeston and Heton at the end of the decade. This rivalry can only have been rendered more acute by the permanent presence of a third hall playhouse in a market previously divided between two. It has long been understood that the Caroline period was a time when the focus of the theater economy shifted decisively from the amphitheaters to the halls, where the most wealthy and prestigious audiences were to be found. Perhaps, though, we have not adequately acknowledged the side-effect of this development, that there was a rise in the temperature of business at the halls. The emergence of new kinds of theatrical antagonism can be seen in the poaching, oneupmanship, and jostling for position that were increasingly apparent between Beeston and Heton: in the modern jargon, relations between the Cockpit and the Salisbury Court were “robust.” Had performances not been completely suspended in 1642, these quarrels might have evened out over time, though Beeston’s acquisition of a commanding repertory for his playhouse and Heton’s move toward refreshing the Salisbury Court repertoire for a third time in twelve

Exeunt Fighting

123

years does suggest that this story had not finished and that the following decade would have seen further changes in profile. Such a state of affairs suggests a market in the process of becoming more vigorous but less differentiated: brands had to be defended more urgently when other theaters were trying to reach the same spectators or occupy similar space. Whether there was enough room in 1640s London for three hall playhouses to coexist is something that we cannot test, given the brief time that all the theaters had left ahead of them. What we can say is that it was not only the activities of the managers that distinguished this last decade, but the arrival of a market where the theaters were more immediately in competition with one another than they had ever been before.

Notes 1. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). The following summary is based on passages scattered throughout Gurr’s book; it is difficult in a short space to do justice to the subtlety and detail of his account. 2. Ibid., 138. 3. N. W. Bawcutt, “Documents of the Salisbury Court Theater in the British Library,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 179–93. See also Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968), 2:684–87; hereafter cited as JCS. 4. Bentley, JCS, 1:282. 5. Extracts are printed by Bentley in “The Salisbury Court Theater and Its Boy Players,” Huntington Library Quarterly 40 (1976–1977): 129–49. He makes use of them in his revisionary account of the troupe in The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume IV, 1613–1660, ed. Philip Edwards, Gerald Eades Bentley, Kathleen McLuskie, and Lois Potter (London: Methuen, 1981), 105–8. The suit of Blagrave versus Babham (June 1632) is preserved in the Public Record Office under the reference REQ–2–681. The suit of Babham versus Gunnell, October 22, 1632, was seen by Wallace under the reference REQ 524 (13 part 1), but is now missing. For the full transcript, see Huntington Library, C. W. Wallace Papers, Box 9, Folder 13B. 6. Gurr, Playing Companies, 149, 156. 7. Herbert Berry, “Playhouses 1550–1660,” in English Professional Theater 1530–1660, ed. Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 649. 8. Quoted from the Wallace transcripts. Here and throughout this essay, all spellings have been modernized and abbreviations silently expanded. 9. Bentley, JCS, 6:96.

124

Martin Butler

10. Changes was licensed in January 1632, by which time the Company of the Revels had left the Salisbury Court, though the title page refers both to this company and this theater. Clearly there is some kind of error here. Most authorities hold that Shirley wrote the play for the Salisbury Court with the intention that it would be performed by the Company of the Revels, but that the boys moved out early and it was staged by the Prince’s Men. Alternatively, the designation of the theater could be wrong, if the boys took it with them to the Fortune. 11. See Gerald Eades Bentley, “Randolph’s Praeludium and the Salisbury Court Theater,” in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 781. Edmond Malone mentions that according to Herbert’s Office Book The Muses’ Looking Glass was staged somewhere in the summer of 1630, but it could not have been in London since all the playhouses were closed (and the play itself was not licensed for performance until November 25, 1630, two weeks after the Salisbury Court first opened). Perhaps the boys put on previews at some venue in Hackney, in preparation for their subsequent opening. This tactic—whether for rehearsal or publicity—was imitated by Beeston in the 1637 plague closure. 12. I am grateful to Dr Munro for allowing me to cite her views here; they were presented in a paper at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in New Orleans, 2004. Money Is an Ass is known to have been written before Jordan turned fifteen, and Bentley, believing him to have been born ca. 1620 dated it ca. 1635; the current view is that he was probably born rather earlier (see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), so the play might have been part of the original Salisbury Court repertoire. Jordan and several of the other players named in the printed cast list turn up in Company of the Revels lists in 1635. 13. I say “apparently” because the only evidence that the boys were playing at the Fortune in 1632–1633 is the punning reference in the prologue to Shackerley Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer (performed by the Prince’s Men in December 1631) that the Salisbury Court had been “forsook of late / By the inhabitants, since made fortunate / By more propitious stars.” There is no hard information about activity at the Fortune beyond the record of Heminges’s play, cited further below, which mentions the playhouse but not the company. 14. In the paper cited in note 12; see Thomas Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas (London, 1637), sig. R4r. 15. Randolph’s last play, The Jealous Lovers, was staged at Trinity College, Cambridge, in March 1632. 16. Alternatively, this could have been part of the Salisbury Court repertoire after the Prince’s Men left. 17. Gurr, Playing Companies, 428. 18. This uncertainty is also suggested in the querulous tone of Prince’s Men’s prologues and epilogues to Changes and Holland’s Leaguer.

Exeunt Fighting

125

19. Bentley, JCS, 1:283–84 n.; Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, English Professional Theater, 653. 20. One extraordinary advantage was the influence it gave Blagrave over the licensing of plays performed at his own playhouse. In 1635 he himself licensed Henry Glapthorne’s The Lady Mother for performance at Salisbury Court. 21. Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, English Professional Theater, 649. 22. Bawcutt, “Documents,” 186; Bentley, JCS, 2:84. 23. Bentley, JCS, 1:310. 24. Gurr, Playing Companies, 138; and compare “the usual stint of three years,” 427. 25. Ann Haaker, “The Plague, the Theater, and the Poet,” Renaissance Drama, new ser., 1 (1968): 301. 26. Bawcutt, “Documents,” 186; Bentley, JCS, 2:684. 27. Bentley, “The Troubles of a Caroline Acting Troupe: Prince Charles’s Company,” Huntington Library Quarterly 41 (1977–1978): 236. Bentley lists other signs of instability in the Prince’s Men at this time. Gurr has a different account in Playing Companies, 428. 28. Bentley, JCS, 1:302. 29. Bentley, JCS, 1:286–88, argues at length that the list combines names from two companies. Gurr (Playing Companies, 429–30) takes it as supplying the full Revels list, though there is some logic in Bentley’s point that twenty-eight would have been extraordinarily large for a touring troupe. However, several of the previously unknown names do turn up in 1668 in the actor list for Jordan’s Money Is an Ass, so they could have been at Salisbury Court in 1630. 30. John Young, Edward Gibbs, Timothy Read, Christopher Goad, Samuel Thompson, George Stutville, John Robinson, and Curtis Greville. 31. The two William Cartwrights, Edward May, and William Wilbraham. 32. William Cartwright senior. 33. Stutville and May. 34. Greville. 35. Goad, Read, Wilbraham, and Young. 36. Gibbs, Thompson, Robinson, and Cartwright junior. 37. William Hall; John Barrett, Thomas Jordan, and Matthias Morris; and Richard Johnson. Bentley suggests Johnson may have been a provincial player who also went under the alias Richard Whiting (Bentley, JCS, 2:618). Two of the children (Barrett and Jordan) were also present at Norwich. 38. Haaker, “The Plague,” 301. 39. Brome’s The Sparagus Garden and The Queen and Concubine; Glapthorne’s The Lady Mother; Richards’s Messallina; Thomas Rawlins’s The Rebellion; and perhaps (depending on its date) the anonymous play The Wasp. 40. Blagrave disappears from the record in 1636, and may have died in the plague. 41. Gibbs and Stutville. Stutville may have left somewhat earlier, as his name is in the cast-list for Nabbes’s Hannibal and Scipio, published in 1637 as

126

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

Martin B utler a Cockpit play; though the situation is confusing since Herbert says there was a one-off performance of the play at the Salisbury Court by the Prince’s Men in 1636, in payment of a debt incurred by Gunnell, presumably before his death (Bawcutt, “Documents,” 199). As Bawcutt notes, it is very hard to make sense of this. Jordan. Goad, Hall, and Barrett. Thompson, Johnson and Morris. Perhaps they died in the plague, though some might have gone to the new St. Werbergh Street theater in Dublin with the company that John Ogilby said he took there from London in 1637. See Allan H. Stevenson, “James Shirley and the Actors at the First Irish Theater,” Modern Philology 40 (1942): 149. N. W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 201. The four from the old Queen’s Men were Perkins, Sumner, Sherlock, and Turner. Heton’s surviving six were (according to the 1640 lawsuit against Brome) Young, May, Greville, Wilbraham, Read and Cartwright junior. Bawcutt, “Documents,” 186. Suggested in Stevenson, “James Shirley,” 147–60. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 216. The petition probably dates from ca. 1640. A warrant was granted as “governor” of the new company on February 21, 1637; the boys had performed two plays at court on February 7 and 14. See note 11. Bentley, JCS, 1:327; Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 216. National Library of Wales, Wynnstay MS 181, fol. 15v. Duplicate of the declaration of the account of Sir Richard Wynn for the year ended Michaelmas 1636; declared July 6, 1637. I am very grateful to Karen Britland for giving me this extract, and for the references in note 59. John Orrell, The Theaters of Inigo Jones and John Webb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 63. Bentley, JCS, 1:334. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 216. As Blagrave’s widow complained in 1640, the validity of the share lapsed once the old Queen’s Men dissolved, and she received no income from the Cockpit after 1636. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 176–77. Public Record Office, LR 5/66, unfoliated (warrants 1634–8). Dorset dated his receipt of the money December 18, 1637. I am grateful to David Smith for giving me this reference. There is also a duplicate in Wynnstay MS 182, fol. 14v. Bentley, JCS, 2:686. See Hilton Kelliher, “A Hitherto Unrecognized Cavalier Dramatist: James Compton, Third Earl of Northampton,” British Library Journal 6 (1980): 158–87; William D. Wolf, “Lord and Lady Northampton and Queen Henrietta’s Men: An Approach to the Castle Ashby Plays,” Theater Research International 8 (1983): 17–22.

Exeunt Fighting 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

127

Bawcutt, “Documents,” 187. Ibid., 186. Haaker, “The Plague,” 303. The contracts proposed for the actors in Heton’s “Papers” were also for seven years. There is a dating problem with Heton’s three documents. The only one to be dated, the “Instructions touching Salisbury Court playhouse,” is fixed in September 1639, but the “Instructions for my patent” say that the company has been performing at the Salisbury Court for a year and a half, which, if we calculate it from the establishment of the new Queen’s Men in October 1637, points to a date of April 1639. Perhaps Heton drew up the “Instructions for my patent” in response to the crisis with Brome in April, then added his explanatory “Instructions touching Salisbury Court playhouse” six months later. Alternatively, if all three documents belong to September 1639, it follows from the “Instructions for my patent” that Heton drew up the old set of “Articles” (which we no longer have) with the company in April 1638, and that the September 1639 plans were a revision of these. Or Heton may simply have forgotten how long the new company had been there: though this seems less likely, as the old “Articles” must have been dated. Bentley, JCS, 6:305–06. John Freehafer, “Brome, Suckling, and Davenant’s Theater Project of 1639,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10 (1968–1969): 367–83. Bentley, JCS, 2:684. Freehafer argues that the October indenture rescinded the March patent, and so showed that a successful campaign had been mounted against Davenant. But the indenture merely varied the patent, and while it withdrew permission for building in Fleet Street (and anywhere else without the warrant of the earl of Arundel), the general permissions for Davenant’s venture remained in place, with the site to be agreed upon at a later date. The earl of Arundel was named not because he was an opponent of the project (as Freehafer supposes) but because he was one of the Commissioners for new building in London, who were charged with general oversight of the capital’s architectural development. Arundel is already named under these terms in the text of the first warrant: see the full text in Thomas Rymer, ed., Foedera, 3rd ed., 10 vols. (London, 1737–1745), vol. 9, part 2, 247–48. The other details of the two documents focus on quality control: that the construction should be in brick and stone, not wood, and that it should not be used as a device to conceal the building of any dwelling. These are not sinister exceptions, but characteristic requirements in relation to the building standards that Charles was seeking to maintain as part of his attempt to exert control over development in London. Richard Brome, The Antipodes (London, 1640), sig. L4v; Brome, The Sparagus Garden (London, 1640).

128

Martin Butler

70. Beeston may also have been experimenting with spectacular scenery at this time, for John Orrell has argued that Inigo Jones’s design for a perspective set “for ye cokpitt for my Lord Chamberalin 1639” was structured for the architecture of the Drury Lane Cockpit rather than the Cockpit theater at Whitehall (Theaters of Inigo Jones, 60–63). If so, he was perhaps stealing another of Heton’s ideas: the published text of Thomas Nabbes’s Microcosmus (a Salisbury Court play written two years earlier) has elaborate instructions for scenery. Davenant’s intention of having scenes at his Fleet Street amphitheater also hints at the commercial possibilities that all managers may have been considering. 71. Haaker, “The Plague,” 299. 72. Ibid., 305. 73. References are to Thomas Goffe, The Careless Shepherdess (London, 1656). See also G. E. Bentley, ed., The Seventeenth-Century Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 28–37. 74. Richard Brome, Five New Plays (London, 1659), 84, 67–71. 75. Richard Brome, Five New Plays (London, 1653). 76. Freehafer assumes Brome was referring to the threat of Davenant’s amphitheater and eventual takeover of the Cockpit, but the timing does not fit and it necessitates him having to argue that the epilogue was an addition to the play jointed on after the first performances. The fact that it was The Court Beggar which got the Cockpit closed down in May 1640 and William Beeston replaced by Davenant as manager (see my Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 220–27) indicates that the epilogue was not a reaction to Davenant but to a threat from another source. 77. The Praeludium also includes a joke at the expense of the King’s Men’s leading actor, Joseph Taylor. 78. Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 208. 79. None of these plays can be precisely dated, so some might have been performed earlier than the period I am discussing: but the correspondence between the Praeludium’s defence of amateur drama and the number of non-professional writers whose plays can be linked to the Salisbury Court is striking. 80. It is also striking how infrequent were the company’s appearances at court. The only court record for the second Queen’s Men is a payment for seven plays during the season 1638–1639. By contrast, the King’s Men played twenty-two times in the same season, twenty-one times in 1639–1640, and sixteen in 1640–1641. On the other hand, the records for the Cockpit company are equally thin. 81. Butler, “The Condition of the Theaters in 1642,” in The Cambridge History of British Theater, Volume 1: Origins to 1660, ed. Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1:440–41. 82. Gurr, Playing Companies, 137.

5

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin Richard Dutton

John Ogilby’s enterprise in building and running a theater in

St. Werburgh Street, Dublin, in the years immediately prior to the English Civil War has attracted very little attention in Britain. And when scholars have deigned to notice it, they have often been dismissive and inaccurate. The Cambridge Guide to World Theater is typical, for instance, in snubbing it: “Theaters were built in Dublin, the first in 1637 . . . It was a colonial theater: touring English companies gave English plays.”1 As we shall see, it was built before 1637; it may well have been in good part a colonial theater, but it did not house touring companies. Gordon Braden, in his essay on James Shirley for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, passes over his involvement with the theater in a sentence: “He then left for Dublin, where in St. Werburgh Street John Ogilby had established the first English theater outside of London; Shirley was its mainstay, as prolific as ever, until 1640.”2 It was not, in fact, the first English theater outside London, and just how prolific Shirley was at this time is not that easy to determine.3 G. E. Bentley is more accurate but chose not to discuss it separately in his magisterial Jacobean and Caroline Stage, only touching on it (half a page) as it affected Shirley.4 The very fact that Shirley was involved in this enterprise, rivaled only by Philip Massinger as the leading dramatist of the era, ought surely to have attracted attention; that it has stirred little interest outside his limited circle of admirers speaks volumes about the critical standing of Caroline theater in general.5 Sandra A. Burner does redress the balance somewhat in the fullest and most informed account of Shirley’s time in Dublin, but her focus is mainly on the dramatist’s circle of acquaintance and patronage, rather than the theater itself. And she treats the whole episode as an

130

Richard Dut ton

unfortunate misdirection in his career, closing on the aptness of dedicating The Opportunity to the captain of the ship which finally returned him to England. In this she is probably not wrong, but her approach has hardly encouraged further interest in the theater itself.6 But if Ogilby’s enterprise has largely been ignored by students of English Caroline theater history, it has received significant attention from historians of early Irish theater. William Smith Clark’s pioneering The Early Irish Stage (1955) has been followed, in particular, by the recent work of Alan J. Fletcher—both his monograph, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (2000) and his superb assemblage of documentation, Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (2001)—and of Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theater, 1601–2000 (2002).7 All of these have examined Ogilby’s venture as the colonialist project it was. I want to look at it from a rather different perspective, one which reintegrates it with— or at least calls for it to be considered alongside—English Caroline theater. It so happens that we know, or can at least infer, a considerable amount about the repertoire performed in St. Werburgh Street—plays specially written to be performed there as well as revivals from the London stage—in the period from 1635 to 1641. And a high proportion of the plays known or suspected to have been played there have survived, which is not always true elsewhere. Moreover, we know: that this project was specifically encouraged by the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Thomas Wentworth, later earl of Strafford; that it had at its heart, in Shirley, one of the most accomplished and experienced dramatists alive at the time; that furthermore Ogilby himself was created Master of the Revels for Ireland in 1638, so that—in a move foreshadowing Restoration theater in London—the management and licensing authority of the company and theater were one and the same; that as a result the company had no competition, nor was it apparently constrained from playing works from the repertoire of London companies.8 In short, they had an unparalleled opportunity to fashion a theater and a repertoire with hardly any of the external constraints upon them that the London companies had to work under. All they had to do was please a paying audience. Sadly, this seems to have been more difficult than they must have anticipated.

St. Werburgh Before Shirley’s Arrival Ogilby’s playhouse was evidently an indoor one, on the model of the Blackfriars or the Cockpit/Phoenix: John Aubrey called it “a pretty

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

131

little theater.”9 Unnecessary ink has been spilled over the question of when it was built and began to operate.10 It was almost certainly built by 1635, and was definitely in operation by mid-1636 because in the months after this (up to late November), while Wentworth was in England, Lancelot Bulkeley, archbishop of Dublin, saw fit to have it closed down. As Wentworth subsequently reported to his friend and ally in the king’s service, William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury: “But what long of the Provost, and what long of a Playhouse lately sett up and allowed by me / which out of Purity of Zeale ye Primate dureing my being in England had prohibited, least it might, forsooth, have brought a punishment of ye Plague upon us, his Grace is very angry with me and saith yat I neither care for Church nor Church men where my owne Ends come in question.”11 Unfortunately, we know very little about what may have been played there that so disquieted Archbishop Bulkeley. The evidence is tenuous in the extreme. But it may not be entirely coincidental that in the years 1635–1641 at least four plays were published or sold in Dublin—and probably more: Thomas Randolph’s Aristippus, James Shirley’s The Royal Master and The Opportunity, and Henry Burnell’s Landgartha. Two of these, as we shall see, were certainly performed at St. Werburgh Street: there must be a good chance that the others were too. In London it does seem likely that actors and booksellers mutually reinforced each others’ efforts.12 The first play sold in Dublin in this period (“Dublin, Printed by the Society of Stationers, Printers to the Kings most Excellent Majesty”) was Thomas Randolph’s Aristippus, a one-act student satire, with Jonsonian touches.13 This had never been played professionally in London but was invariably printed as “Presented in a private shew,” a formula preserved in the Dublin edition and so revealing nothing. In the early days of the new theater, however, someone may have felt that this irreverent praise of alcohol, which could readily be adapted with ad hominem gibes (the surviving manuscript is far more pointed than the printed text) would suit a young audience in the new theater, such as the scholars at Trinity College. By the same token, however, it may only have been selected for “a private shew” by the young men in Wentworth’s entourage at Dublin Castle (Wentworth encouraged amateur theatricals there from the start of his tenure as Lord Deputy in 1633)—or, of course, not performed at all: it was very popular in print, going through five London editions between 1630 and 1635. I think it is likely that copies of The Fair Maid of the Exchange were also sold in Dublin around 1637. The evidence for this is tied up with Shirley’s distinctive publishing arrangements at this time, which

132

Richard Dut ton

I consider further below. But I mention it here because it has features in common with Aristippus. The Fair Maid of the Exchange, anonymous but often ascribed to Thomas Heywood, is far more likely to have been staged professionally. It is a London city comedy in which brothers from the gentry vie for the hand of the merchant’s daughter of the title, and was advertised as “With the merry humours, and pleasant passages of the Cripple of Fanchurch.” This is unlike the sophisticated tragicomedies and comedies of upper-class manners which apparently predominated in St. Werburgh Street later. But like Aristippus it was not licensed to any London company; indeed, from 1607 it had been printed as “Easily played by eleven persons,” with the doubling of parts conveniently outlined. These two plays could have been convenient stop-gap items for the theater, at a time when the freedom to “borrow” items from the London-licensed repertory was not assured. That changed, almost certainly as a consequence of Ogilby being designated Master of the Revels for Ireland on February 28, 1638.14 Another tiny glimpse of theatricals pre-1637 is to be found in the diary of Sir Richard Boyle (later earl of Cork), where he records that he and his family were invited to dinner by Wentworth on Twelfth Night 1636: “we saw a tragedy in the parliament [house] & which was tragical, for we had no suppers.”15 Here again we have no idea whether the tragedians were professional actors, or members of the Lord Deputy’s household, organized perhaps by Ogilby, who had first joined Wentworth’s household in 1633 as a dancing master, tutor, and occasional amanuensis. But our strongest item of evidence about early staging in St. Werburgh Street is “A Prologue and Epilogue at the ‘New house’ ” in the Notebook of John Clavell.16 Given the subject-matter of this item, there seems little doubt but that the “New house” was indeed Ogilby’s theater, and since Clavell is thought to have left Ireland for good on or around June 17, 1637, it must relate to a performance there before then. But it does not relate to anything Clavell himself had written; rather, it announces an unnamed play as one performed to applause in London (it could even have been The Fair Maid of the Exchange): “what we now present / Hath passed our English stage, with high content” (1–2). The rest of the prologue tries to make a virtue of this, the praise of discerning palates adding to the value of what is offered. In the years after Wentworth reopened the theater, items from the London repertoire—and more specifically that part of the indoor theater repertoire aimed at the gentry and those who self-selectively thought of themselves as “judicious”—were regularly part of the fare Dubliners were offered. The epilogue is even

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

133

more revealing about the presumed audience: We as industrious planters have fenc’d in This little plot upon your land (’twere sin To be ingrateful). As our profits spring To you, our lords, we’ll thankful tribute bring.

The theater is explicitly compared to the British plantations which continued to be imposed on the Irish in this period. But the analogy expects to find a positive response, certainly from the “New English” within the Dublin Pale, perhaps even more specifically from those employed under Wentworth to carry through this policy. Nor is there any mincing of words about the motive: they are looking to make a profit here. The more the “little plot” profits, the richer the fare they will bring to the audience. Possibly this already displays doubts, which were to become increasingly evident, about the financial viability of the enterprise.

Shirley’s Arrival in 1637 Almost everything else we know, or can conjecture, about what was performed at Ogilby’s theater relates in some form or other to James Shirley. Shirley first arrived in Ireland, in all probability, on November 23, 1636, on the ship that brought Wentworth back from consultations with King Charles.17 He already knew Ogilby and the possibility of employment in Dublin must have been more attractive than might otherwise have been the case, because the London theaters were locked into a prolonged closure by the plague. Several acting companies were on the point of breaking up, including the one to which he had most consistently been attached, the Queen’s Men. Nothing positively connects Shirley with the Dublin theater until the performance of his own The Royal Master on New Year’s Day, 1638. But it is clear that he was not idle. He made a brief return visit to England in the spring of 1637, where it seems likely that he recruited several professional actors for Dublin; most of those who ventured there had connections with the Fortune or Red Bull theaters or with the Queen’s Men.18 It may well be that Shirley also made arrangements with publishers about plays of his already written, or planned to be written, which he was at liberty to print; I consider this further below.19 And we may suppose that Shirley drew on his theater contacts to acquire some of the play texts that the St. Werburgh Street company was to use. Some of these like The Fair Maid of the Exchange

134

Richard Dut ton

were accessible in print, but others, such as Thomas Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, were not and it is difficult to see how they were acquired without some negotiation, and possibly payment.

St. Werburgh plays not originally written by Shirley A flavor of the repertoire that Shirley and Ogilby put together is probably provided by the nine prologues and epilogues written by Shirley for performances in Ireland, which he published in Narcissus, or The Self-Lover (1646). These are “A Prologue for Mr. Fletchers Play in Ireland,” “A Prologue to the Alchimist Acted there,” “A Prologue there to the Irish Gent.,” “A Prologue to a Play there; Call’d No wit to a Woman’s,” “A Prologue to another of Master Fletcher’s Playes there,” “A Prologue to a play there; Call’d The Toy,” “To another Play there,” “To a Play there called the Generall” and “To his own Comedy there, called Rosania, or Love’s Victory.”20 Four of these— The Irish Gentleman, The Toy, The General and “another Play”—have either been lost or remain unidentified.21 It is possible that The Irish Gentleman is an alternative title for the (lost) Merchant of Dublin, which John Aubrey tells us Ogilby himself wrote for his theater, though Shirley’s prologue refers to “soule-enriching Poesie / Transported hither” (51–52) rather than to a native author.22 It would be interesting, however, to know when either item of explicitly Irish subject-matter was introduced. The Alchemist is the least debatable item; Shirley offers it as a “Master-piece of Comedie” (23), honoring the deceased Jonson’s name, which dates the performance after his death in August 1637; it was probably after Ogilby’s commission as Master of the Revels for Ireland gave some legal cover for the piracy of works still under London license.23 This appointment was not formally sanctioned by the king in London until the Restoration, and one wonders whether anyone there even knew about it at the time. Technically it did not infringe the licensing authority of Sir Henry Herbert, which only applied in England. But it did open up ambiguities about the status of London-licensed plays (secured for the company which owned them against piracy) in Ireland. It is unlikely, however, that anyone would have challenged Ogilby’s—or rather Wentworth’s—authority in Dublin, under which the St. Werburgh company staged several “classics” and Shirley revised several plays, including some of his won. These included the three other items identified from the prologues which clearly derived from London repertoires. No wit to a Woman’s

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

135

is almost certainly Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (first staged ca. 1611), which was not then in print; when it was finally printed in 1657, it contained a clear reference to 1638 (“I . . . should not be able to put down a Schollar now in One thousand six hundred thirty and eight”), giving rise to the strong presumption that Shirley revised the play at this date for Dublin performance.24 What else he changed in this romantic comedy we have no way of knowing— nothing, for example, points to an Irish location—but it is interesting that it contains a scene involving pyrotechnics and elaborate stage effects: Loud musick a while. A Thing like a Globe opens of one side o’ th’ Stage, and flashes out Fire, then Sir Gilbert that presents the part, issues forth with Yellowhair and Beard, intermingled with stroaks [sic] like wilde flames, a three-forked Fire in’s hand; and at the same time, Air comes down, hanging by a cloud, with a Coat made like an Almanac, all the Twelve Moons set in it, and the Four Quarters . . . (Act 4, pp. 92–93).

Shortly thereafter, as a character announces “The Flame of Zeal . . .,” a stage direction reads “FIRE.” This kind of staging was traditionally associated with the repertoire of the Red Bull and the Fortune in London, outdoor amphitheaters rather than Phoenix-style indoor theaters, as the St. Werburgh Street theater clearly was.25 We know that some of the actors Shirley recruited were from the Red Bull and the Fortune, and he himself was to make a foray—unique for him—into the use of such stage effects in St. Patrick for Ireland. This may suggest one way in which Ogilby and Shirley tried to make their company distinctive, even as they stayed within the well-established modes of London theater. We do not know which plays of John Fletcher they performed, though the prologue to the first labels it a comedy (line 6). But the instance of No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s does prompt the reasonable suspicion that these, too, might have been plays which Shirley reworked. Here, circumstantial evidence around dates of publication may be suggestive. The Night Walker, or The Little Thief was published in 1640 by Andrew Crooke and William Cooke who singly or jointly published all of Shirley’s plays printed between 1632 and 1640; they printed it as by Fletcher, but Sir Henry Herbert’s much earlier licensing entry (May 11, 1633) records it as “a play of Fletchers corrected by Sherley . . . for the queen’s players.” The evidence is less tangible for Wit Without Money, but it too was published in 1640 by Crooke

136

Richard Dut ton

and Cooke, and if Shirley had revised it (in Dublin or earlier) it would explain how a text should become available to them at this time. Rosania, or Love’s Victory, eventually published in 1653 as The Doubtful Heir, is the only one of Shirley’s own plays mentioned among the prologues, but it too raises significant questions when we come to consider how many other of his plays may have been written, adapted, or performed there. We can date it after 1638 from references in the prologue to Suckling’s Aglaura and Killigrew’s Claricilla, but it is a reworking of The Coronation, as Robert Forsythe long ago demonstrated, though a substantial reworking, certainly at a verbal level.26 The Coronation (licensed by Sir Henry Herbert on February 6, 1635, for the Queen’s Men) is usually taken to be Shirley’s own work, though the 1640 text—again published by Crooke and Cooke, who perhaps ought to know—declares it to be by Fletcher. Very possibly it is another of the revisions to earlier works that Shirley is known to have made in the 1630s.27 Why then should Shirley have reworked what may well already have been a revised play? The answer would seem to be so as to have a serviceable new play, both for Dublin and for London: Herbert licensed it (under the title Rosania)on June 1, 1640 for the King’s Men, whom by then Shirley had joined as “ordinary poet,” following the death of Massinger. Shirley had not written for them before, and was not free to bring to them the many plays he had published shortly before this—which I discuss further. But he— and Herbert—presumably felt The Doubtful Heir was a sufficiently distinct work from The Coronation to warrant a new license, not infringing the interests of the legatees of the Queen’s Men in the earlier play. It is entirely fitting, even in this instance where it seems irrefutable that Shirley wrote the play in Dublin, with an expectation of its first performance there, that its precise status and presumed audience should be so problematic: it was not entirely original but based on the template of a very conventional London play (even if that may have been his own work), and it was clearly fit again for performance by a leading London company as soon as he was in a position to offer it to them. This is symptomatic of something we find of almost everything else by Shirley (the big exception is St. Patrick for Ireland) which either was written in and for Dublin, or may well have been, and it should put into perspective the otherwise very knotty question of which other plays by Shirley may also have been performed there. The fact is that Shirley’s mind seems to have been on London, and the possibilities of London performance, virtually all the time that he was in Dublin.

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

137

Shirley’s Plays at St. Werburgh This is even true of The Royal Master, a play once thought to have been written to open the St. Werburgh Street theater, and certainly much celebrated for its Irish connections.28 It does seems to have been the play that marked Shirley’s arrival as the “ordinary poet” or resident playwright of the Dublin company, though the first known performance was not, in fact, at the theater, but at Dublin Castle, before the Lord Deputy himself. But it is likely that it would have been given an airing/rehearsal in the theater before that, probably late in 1637, as the wording of the 1638 title page perhaps suggests: “As it was acted in the new theater in Dublin AND Before the Right Honorable the Lord Deputie of Ireland, in the Castle.” At all events, the play has nothing about it which is distinctively Irish. Indeed, in dedicating the published version to the earl of Kildare (the dedication dates from spring 1637), Shirley emphasizes his aspiration for it to be performed in London when the theaters reopen there, and actually says nothing about Dublin performances: “this Poeme, tis new, and never yet personated, but expected with the first when the English Stage shall be recovered from her long silence, and her now languishing scene changed into a welcome returne of wits and men” (sig. A2r). His expectation may well have been fulfilled, since we know it was licensed for performance in London on April 23, 1638, which was unlikely to have happened without clear expectations of a production.29 All of this suggests that Shirley at this stage saw no essential difference between writing for Dublin and for London. In pushing for the play’s Dublin provenance, Alan Fletcher suggests: “In setting forth the machinations of Montalto, the King of Naples’ favourite, against the Duke of Florence, suitor to the king’s sister Theodosia, Shirley would . . . have been concocting a familiar mixture of sexual and political intrigue in high places, and salting it with ad hominem observations of the sort that cannot have been lost on Wentworth and his circle.”30 But they would not have been lost on the court and its hangers-on in London either. The published version of the play does indeed make much of its Dublin premiere, with not only the dedication to Kildare, but ten sets of commendatory verses by nine of Shirley’s Irish acquaintances. These were written at least six months later (those by Drury Cooper and William Markham both mention the death of Ben Jonson), and after its production: “They give us a good listing of writers and aesthetes centered on the Court of the Lord Deputy.”31 One of these was Ogilby. Another was Richard Bellings, described by Christopher Morash as “a prominent Catholic,

138

Richard Dut ton

later Secretary to the Supreme Council of the Catholic Confederation in the 1640s, and its envoy to Pope Innocent X.”32 Shirley had many Roman Catholic associates, including the group who surrounded Queen Henrietta Maria at court, and is widely suspected to have been Catholic himself. The resonances of those associations were probably very different in the Irish Protestant Pale from what they had been in the ambiguous religious culture of the Caroline court, and we may wonder whether Shirley’s close association either with “the Court of the Lord Deputy” or with such particular elements within it was entirely helpful to the business of building up the theater as a commercial operation. But the fact remains that The Royal Master itself, like The Doubtful Heir, could readily pass for one of Shirley’s plays for the Queen’s Men at the Phoenix, if we knew nothing of its circumstances. The same can be said of The Gentleman of Venice, licensed in London on October 30, 1639. When it was eventually published in 1655, the title page announced it as “Presented at the private house in Salisbury Court by her Majesties Servants.”33 And this is corroborated in a notation in a Houghton Library copy of the play at Harvard University: “Acted at Salisbury Court 30 Oct. 1639.”34 Her Majesty’s Servants would be the new Queen’s Men, put together by the earl of Dorset, Richard Heton, and others in the wake of Christopher Beeston’s decision to wind up the old the Queen’s Men.35 Nothing tells us whether this play was performed in Dublin or not, though the precedent of The Royal Master may suggest that Shirley was looking for productions in both locations. The same speculation surrounds The Politician, also published in 1655 as “Presented at Salisbury court by Her Majesties servants.” It also extends to The Constant Maid, published in 1640 but not assigned to any company or theater; it is often assumed to have an Irish provenance because it shared a publisher that year with St. Patrick for Ireland. A 1661 edition, under the title Love Will Finde Out the Way, assigns it to the Queen’s Men at the Phoenix (i.e. the original Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men), and this conforms with speculation on other grounds that this may have been another of those plays (either originally by Shirley or not) which he took to Ireland and revised to the point where, on his return, he was able to get it published, if not perhaps performed, as his own work.36 Any of these plays fulfils all our expectations of late Caroline London drama. None of them mentions Ireland or points to specifically Irish issues.37 Allan Stevenson was the first to draw attention to the significant number of Shirley’s plays which were first published while he was in,

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

139

Table 5.1 The Publication of James Shirley’s Plays, 1637–1640 Play

Hyde Park The Lady of Pleasure The Young Admiral The Example The Gamester The Duke’s Mistress The Royal Master The Ball The Maid’s Revenge The Coronation Love’s Cruelty The Opportunity The Humorous Courtier The Constant Maid St. Patrick for Ireland

Licensed

Apr. 20, 1632 Oct. 15, 1635 Jul. 3, 1633 Jun. 16, 1634 Nov. 11, 1637 Jan. 18, 1636 Apr. 23, 1638 Nov. 16, 1632 Feb. 9, 1626 Feb. 6, 1635 Nov. 14, 1631 Nov. 29, 1634 May 17, 1631 [under the title The Duke]

SR Entry

Publication Date

Apr. 13, 1637 Apr. 13, 1637 Apr. 13, 1637 Oct. 18, 1637 Nov. 15, 1637 Mar. 13, 1638 Mar. 13, 1638 Oct. 24, 1638 Apr. 12, 1639 Apr. 25, 1639 Apr. 25, 1639 Apr. 25, 1639

1637 1637 1637 1637 1637 1638 1638 1639 1639 1640 1640 1640

Apr. 28, 1640

1640

Apr. 28, 1640 Apr. 28, 1640

1640 1640

or shortly after he returned from, Ireland; he argued that Shirley himself was responsible for these publications and that these works represent a large part of the repertoire in Dublin.38 Above is a complete list of them (table 5.1), including (where available) details of their London licensing for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, entries in the Stationers’ Register, and date of publication, so that the complete history is apparent. For the sake of completion we should add The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (licensed, April 29, 1635; SR entry, October 24, 1638; publication date, 1639) and The Night Walker, or The Little Thief (licensed May 11, 1633; publication date, 1640). The Tragedy of Chabot was licensed as by Shirley, though published as by Chapman and Shirley, so that the date of licensing probably reflects what most scholars deduce from the style: a revision by Shirley of an earlier play by Chapman. The Night Walker we have already discussed. It is apparent that it was a regular part of Shirley’s arrangement with the Queen’s Men that he should “correct” earlier works to which they had the rights, of which (as we have seen) The Coronation may well have been one. The ownership and printing rights to such works would have been a matter for negotiation (see note 19). All of these works, saving only The Royal Master, The Doubtful Heir, and St. Patrick for Ireland, can clearly be associated with Queen

140

Richard Dut ton

Henrietta Maria’s Men before their dissolution. They were certainly not written for performance in Dublin, though they may well have been produced there, with or without revision. Several circumstances argue for Shirley’s personal involvement in their publication, notably a significant number of the author’s own dedications in these volumes, and the continuity of the publishing arrangements, which included The Royal Master and The Doubtful Heir, for the Dublinwritten works.39 Virtually everything of Shirley’s printed between 1637 and 1640 was published by Andrew Crooke or William Cooke or (the great majority of cases) the two of them together. For the first three, Hyde Park, The Lady of Pleasure, and The Young Admiral, Shirley supplied dedications—to, respectively, the earl of Holland, Richard Lovelace, and George, Lord Berkeley—which suggests both his determination to keep his name current in courtly circles in London and also his personal involvement in the publication. All three were licensed for print on April 23, 1637, while Shirley was back in England: it seems reasonable to infer that he handled this in person at an early stage of negotiations with Crooke and Cooke.40 Three of the later plays also had dedications: The Maid’s Revenge, dedicated to Henry Osborne, a recent visitor to Dublin though with potential influence in London; Love’s Cruelty, dedicated to Endymion Porter’s sons, George and Charles, clearly flagging Shirley’s imminent return to royalist circles in London; and The Opportunity, which in its dedication to Captain Richard Owen plainly announces that he is back (and relieved to be so).41 The Humorous Courtier contains no dedication but does offer “A Catalogue of such things as hath been published by James Sherley. Gent.,” the overwhelming majority of them by Crooke and/or Cooke; neither of them published anything by him again. This looks very much like a conscious termination of longstanding arrangements, coinciding with the return from Ireland. The Constant Maid and St. Patrick for Ireland were both published instead by Richard Whitaker, without dedications. None of this actually tells us whether any of these plays were performed in Dublin, though there would be an obvious synergy between tidying papers for the press and preparing them for production. And given their readiness to stage London-licensed plays by Jonson, Fletcher, and Middleton, behind Ogilby’s authority, there seems no obvious reason why Shirley should not stage his own— except the risk of offending Christopher Beeston: he controlled a good deal of London theatrical patronage, and Shirley would not want to get on the wrong side of him.42 But features of the publishing arrangement between Shirley, Crooke, and Cooke appear to tie in

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

141

with the selling of plays by Dublin booksellers during this period, and this may tell us something. Between 1632 and 1637, William Cooke had published solo all of Shirley’s plays that saw print—five in all, plus the masque, The Triumph of Peace. Andrew Crooke only enters the picture when Shirley departs for Ireland, and there is strong circumstantial evidence—first assembled by Allan Stevenson—that this would be because he had bookselling connections, including two of his brothers, in both London and Dublin.43 The next two plays that we know were sold in Dublin in this period were both by Shirley and both appeared—in addition to their London imprints—with alternate Dublin title pages. That of The Royal Master announces itself: “Printed by T. Cotes, and are to be sold by Thomas Allot and Edmond Crooke, neare the Castle in Dublin. 1638” (the London equivalent: “Printed by T. Cotes, and are to be sold by Iohn Crooke, and Richard Serger, at the Grayhound in Pauls Church-yard, 1638”); that of The Opportunity declares: “Printed for Andrew Crooke, and are to be sold at the Castle Gate in Dublin. 1640.” It seems reasonable to infer that there was an arrangement between Andrew Crooke and those involved with the bookshops that the latter should take a specially-tailored portion of the print-runs specifically for sale in Dublin.44 This is intriguing. The Royal Master is one of the few plays unequivocally performed in Dublin before it was performed anywhere else (though it was almost certainly subsequently performed in London). The title page (both London and Dublin versions) make a good deal of the fact that it was performed before Lord Deputy Wentworth—it was a distinctive work, and it is not surprising that Crooke and his associates should have anticipated a sale in both cities.45 The Opportunity is very different: one of the Queen’s Men plays, advertised in both versions as having been performed at their Phoenix theater. We have no evidence that it was ever performed in Dublin at all. But as with Aristippus, it is a fair inference that it might well have been. This, tenuous as it is, is the strongest evidence we possess that Shirley’s London plays may have been performed in St. Werburgh Street. In fact only one copy of the Dublin imprint of The Opportunity has survived, which is now in the Huntington Library, suggesting the possibility of a very small print-run. So it is not unreasonable to suppose that there may have been separate Dublin imprints for other Crooke/Cooke Shirley plays, no copies of which have survived at all. And not only Shirley plays: this is where The Fair Maid of the Exchange comes in. When it was reprinted in 1637, it was to be sold at the Greyhound in Paul’s Churchyard, where Andrew Crooke had

142

Richard Dut ton

his shop—suggesting that it might well be another work traded in both London and Dublin. As we have already noted, Wit Without Money was published by the Crooke/Cooke partnership—a partnership which essentially existed only to publish plays either by Shirley or revised by him. Whether its ascription to Fletcher was a mistake or not, we may again suspect a Dublin sale. There is also the intriguing case of Fletcher’s The Bloody Brother, published in 1639 by Thomas Allot and John Crooke. Here again, there are grounds to suspect sales in both London and Dublin, and if so the possibility of performance in the latter. The long and the short of all this is that we shall probably never know how many, or precisely which, of Shirley’s plays—or those of any other London dramatists—were performed in Dublin. But in one sense this does not matter. We probably know enough to say that— with the singular exception of St. Patrick in Ireland—Shirley himself made little effort to forge a distinctive style or subject matter for the theater there. And none of the plays by dramatists other than him which we can, however remotely, associate with Dublin shows any sign of this either. The two other Shirley plays which we know made their debut in Dublin, The Royal Master and The Doubtful Heir, are in fact indistinguishable in that sense from the dramas of political intrigue and the comedies of manners which had been his stock-in-trade in London in the years immediately before he moved to Dublin, and which he published in this period. And this is unsurprising, because it is clear— as I have demonstrated—that Shirley always intended that they should be performed in London; indeed, this was very probably the principal venue he had in mind as he wrote them. In terms of Ogilby’s theater, this adherence to London fashions and formulae, whether in imported plays or newly written ones, may well have been a tactical mistake.

Shirley’s Lack of Success in Dublin One unmistakable thing to emerge from the prologues Shirley wrote for St. Werburgh is that the theater never attracted the audiences its sponsors must have anticipated. As Alan Fletcher notes, “[f]ive of his nine extant Prologues . . . rail at low audience turn out.”46 That to The Irish Gentleman gently chides the country for not doing more to nourish the arts of civilization, but that to No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s more bluntly (if wittily) complains: We are sorrie, Gentlemen, that with all paines To invite you hither, the wide house containes No more. . . .

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

143

... Ile tell you what a Poet says, two yeare He has liv’d in Dublin, yet he knowes not where To finde the City: he observ’d each gate, It could not run through them, they are too strait: When he did live in England, he heard say That here were men lov’d wit and a good Play; That here were Gentlemen, and Lords; a few Were bold to say, there were some Ladies too: This he beleev’d, and though they are not found Above, who knowes what may be under ground: But they doe not appeare . . . (72–74, 78–88)

The prologue to the second of Fletcher’s plays carries a Jonsonian taunt about the low tastes of many audiences, in evident disappointment at the failure of the law term to generate new customers: Are there no more? and can this Muses sphere At such a time as this, so thinne appeare? We did expect a Session, and a Traine So large, to make the Benches crack againe. ... Were there a Pageant now on foot, or some Strange Monster from Peru, or Affrick come, Men would throng to it; any drum will bring (That beats a bloudlesse prize, or Cudgelling) Spectators hither; nay, the Beares invite Audience, and Bag-pipes can doe more than wit. (101–4, 115–20)

The prologue to The General conversely bemoans the vacation, and the failure of visiting soldiers to visit the theater more often: But they [the actors] mean To be reveng’d upon’t, and change their Scene A while to th’Countrey, leave the Town to blush, Not in ten days to see one cloak of plush. (177–80)

We can certainly find parallel complaints in London plays of the era, and it may be a mistake to take these too seriously. But taken together the note of disappointment and perhaps anxiety runs high. If the law term did not generate extra business from the educated elite, as it evidently did in London, and if the officers of the garrison did not make up the numbers, the situation must have been precarious. It cannot

144

Richard Dut ton

have helped that Parliament did not meet in Dublin between 1635 and 1639. William Clark describes seventeenth-century Dublin as “a city of 20,000 or upwards,” less than one-tenth the size of London at the time, and the play-going gentry must have formed only a fraction of those—a small base from which to fill three or four hundred seats on a regular basis.47 Wentworth’s immediate entourage could not supply the numbers, and indeed the theater’s associations with the divisive Lord Deputy may have been off-putting to some in themselves—a situation which could only have got worse as the political situation deteriorated. Strafford (as by then he was) finally left Ireland in November 1640, for eventual trial and execution. It seems reasonable to infer that St. Patrick for Ireland was a deliberate attempt on Shirley’s part, in these circumstances, to write a play calculated to attract a local audience, possibly without regard for any further performances in London.48 Indeed, of all his plays mentioned here, it is the only one for which there is no evidence— either in licensing, or in being revised, or in title page details of company and venue—of any London performance.49 Yet it is a remarkable enough play, albeit perhaps not to conventional Caroline tastes. As Alan Fletcher notes, Shirley “chose to dramatize an exclusively Irish topic, doubtless in hope of stirring broader local interest. His treatment of St Patrick too suggests an attempted widening of audience scope, and perhaps acknowledges for the first time an Old English presence in the city as much as the New English one centered on the castle. The saint first enters with all the ceremony of Roman religion, amidst a procession of priests singing in Latin and accompanied by an angel who, bearing a banner and cross, seems like a stray from some ancient Catholic mystery play. Clearly, the religious toleration implicit here would have appealed to any Catholics in the audience.”50 Yet as John P. Turner stresses: “He seems to be more interested in St. Patrick as a Christian character than as a Catholic one. St. Patrick’s activities as a bishop are only lightly touched upon and, most significantly, Shirley omits any reference at all to Patrick’s visit to the Pope in Rome . . . The playwright is clearly celebrating the triumph of Christianity over paganism, and the subsequent change in Ireland from tyrannous, benighted barbarism, with accompanying bad government, to the civilized and supposedly learned and compassionate government predicted in V. iii. 11–20.”51 If the play might have appealed to the local Catholic gentry with whom the commendatory verses to The Royal Master suggest Shirley associated, its message must surely also have been acceptable to the Lord Deputy’s

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

145

Anglican entourage, not least since the emphasis on ceremonialism is equally redolent of the Church of England reforms instigated by Wentworth’s friend and ally, Archbishop Laud. Yet if the play appeals in subject-matter to the elite of the Old and New English, it does so in a theatrical style more commonly associated with a much more popular audience. As Turner summarizes: “A number of miracles and ‘surprizing scenes’ take place throughout the play. Dichu is paralyzed and then cured at his conversion; Rodamant is killed by poison and then revived by Patrick; the saint leads some of the characters safely from Milcho’s house, which the officer has set aflame; Milcho commits suicide by jumping into the flames; Archimagus is swollowed [sic] up by the earth and sent to hell; and finally, at the climax of the play, St. Patrick banishes the snakes (perhaps actors costumed gaudily and spectacularly like snakes or some sort of mechanical devices operated from the trap like rod puppets). They disappear into the same trap used a short time later for Archimagus’ disappearance.”52 The pyrotechnics here remind us of those used in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, and it may be significant that the only extant English saint’s play of the era which bears comparison with Shirley’s is Thomas Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr, licensed in 1622 to the Revels company at the Red Bull.53 The snakes are reminiscent of a scene in The Valiant Welshman, a Fortune play published in 1615. Here again, Shirley may have been drawing on the expertise of the Red Bull and Fortune actors he had helped recruit, in this case to spectacular effect. Whether this succeeded in drawing audiences is doubtful. The prologue opens in a resigned mode: “We know not what will take; your pallats are / Various and many of them sick I feare” (1–2) but builds to promise: St. Patrick whose large story cannot be Bound in the limits of one Play; if ye First welcome this, you’ll grace our Poet’s art, And give him Courage for a second part. (25–28)

No second part seems to have been written. The title of the lost Tragedy of St. Albans may just suggest that Shirley’s experience with the patron saint of Ireland encouraged him to do something in a similar vein with the first English martyr. But his time in Ireland was running out: he sailed to England mid-April 1640, with Captain Richard Owen.54

146

Richard Dut ton

Exit Shirley, Enter Burnell at St. Werburgh This was not quite the end of the line for the St. Werburgh Street theater, since we know it staged at least one more new play. Henry Burnell’s Landgartha has the distinction of being the earliest extant play by an Irishman, putting it at the head of that formidable tradition of drama that runs from Congreve through Goldsmith and Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw, Synge and O’Casey, to Beckett, Friel, and beyond. This is the fourth and last of the plays certainly published in Dublin at this time, but also the only one for which there was no parallel London publication. Burnell’s self-styled tragicomedy is based on ancient Scandinavian history, derived from Saxo Grammaticus. It concerns the conquest of Fro (or Frollo), king of Sweden, by King Reynar of Denmark, who is helped by the Lady Landgartha, a female warrior from Norway; Reynar marries Landgartha, but then abandons her for another woman, Vraca (Frollo’s daughter); at the end of the play they are reconciled, but she refuses physically to consummate their resumed marriage. William Clark recognized that, despite its Scandinavian setting, the play does contain “local Irish color,” mainly in the person of Marsisa, “an humorous gentlewoman” who is related to Landgartha.55 She wears “an Irish Gowne tuck’ed up to mid-legge, with a broad basket-hilt Sword on, hanging in a great Belt, Broags on her feet, her hayre disshevell’d, and a payre of long-neck’d big-rowll’d Spurs on her heels.”56 Her Amazonian cross-dressing adds a comic touch to this, but there is no mistaking her Irish identity, which is further confirmed by touches of brogue in her dialect (“Herselfe dare not deny it, sir” [sig. E3v]). Catherine M. Shaw was the first to suggest that this was more than simply local color, imported to leaven the antimasques associated with the wedding masque of Reynar and Landgartha. Marsisa serves to set the bearings of the play’s allegory. If she is clearly Irish, her comic partner, Hubba is equally clearly English, identities which by “a low comic parallel to Landgartha and Reyner respectively” transfer to the play’s principal characters.57 In the masque, moreover, Reyner is described as “Of Troian race,” with “the Royall bloud of Danes,” and is oddly said to rule over “a fair Ile” (sig. F2r). This invokes the mythical foundation of Britain (rather than Denmark) by Brute the Trojan, commonly invoked in relation to the union of the crowns of England and Scotland in the person of James I; it also reminds the audience that royal Danish blood flows in the veins of James’s son, Charles I, whose mother was Anne of Denmark.

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

147

So the play, discreetly but in the end quite legibly, is an allegory of Anglo-Irish relations, to which Shaw ventures to apply quite detailed particulars: the overthrow of Frollo represents the triumph of (Catholic) Christianity, first in Ireland and then, with Ireland’s aid, in England; so the initial union between Reyner (England) and Landgartha (Ireland)—celebrated in the masque—figures the historic bonds between the two islands, but these are disrupted by Reynar’s adultery with the daughter of his old foe (England’s adoption of the Protestant faith). Overlying this general history she perceives more specific references to Charles I’s treatment of Ireland, not least in the question of plantations, while the rebellions Reynar faces in his separation from Landgartha figure the threat he faces from the Covenanters in Scotland. His warrior wife helps him to overcome this threat, which leads to their partial reconciliation.58 At the time of the play’s first performance (the title page tells us this was St. Patrick’s Day 1640), the threat of the Covenanters was still not resolved, and might even affect Ireland if they allied with the Presbyterian settlers in Ulster; Lord Deputy Wentworth was trying to raise military taxes and troops to send a force into Scotland on the king’s side, which may even be alluded to in the play’s explanation for its less than magnificent masque: for now ’t can be no more, For want of fitting Actors here at Court; The Warre and want of Money, is the cause on’t. (sig. E2r)

Thus in the ending of the play Burnell, from one of the Catholic Old English families in Ireland, might be said to be urging the Irish gentry (in particular) to support Charles in his struggle with extreme Protestants (including, perhaps, those in his own Parliament) as a basis for an honorable reconciliation between the two islands. It cannot be a full marriage because differences of religion still stand between them, yet it offers hope for the future. Alan Fletcher ignores this larger picture, noting that the first performance coincided with the summoning of Parliament to Dublin Castle, and argues that “the central theme of Landgartha addressed directly the concerns of one of the bills that had been transmitted to the parliament, the Act for the Repealing of the Statute of Bigamy, and thus anyone attending parliament may have been curious to see how the play chose to resolve the issue.” In Landgartha’s defense of her “bigamous” husband, “the play adopted a clear stance on an impending and real political debate, and might even be viewed as an

148

Richard Dut ton

attempt to sway its outcome.”59 Fletcher’s micro-reading hardly precludes Shaw’s macro one. There is ample evidence that English audiences read multiple layers of allegory into the plays they saw.60 And Burnell—who clearly knew his Jonson well61—offers a coded acknowledgement that his Irish audience had done just that, in an afterword to the printed text.62 “Some (but not of best judgements) were offended at the Conclusion of this Play, in regard Landgartha tooke not then, what she was perswaded by so many, the Kings kind night-imbraces. To which kind of people (they know not what they say) I answer (omitting all other reasons): that a Tragi-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both: which Decorum I did my best to observe, not to goe against Art, to please the over-amorous. To the rest of the bablers, I despise any answer.” Clearly there had been objections to the ending, which Burnell answers (just as Jonson would have done) in aesthetic terms: his definition of a tragicomedy might not satisfy everyone, but it allows him to address the nature of his ending without raising any considerations other than dramatic/generic ones. Yet in parenthesis, “(omitting all other reasons),” he in effect admits that there are extra-literary explanations he might also have given. There is nothing untoward or subversive about this, as Ogilby doubtless noticed in performing his function as Master of the Revels. However we read the allegory, the play is frank (within suitable codings) about Anglo-Irish relations but hardly disloyal. Both in its support for a strict line against bigamy and its recognition of the need to support the king against rebels, it would not have been out of line with Wentworth’s own thinking.63 Looked at in the context of the St. Werburgh Street theater and its repertoire, what stands out about Landgartha is that it is unmistakably written for that audience, in that theater—something we can hardly say about any of the other plays that either were definitely played there, or may have been. Its only rival in that regard is St. Patrick for Ireland, and it may just be that Shirley’s lead in writing that play paved the way for Burnell. This is not to say, of course, that Burnell succeeded in pleasing everyone: on the contrary, the title page claims it was greeted “with good applause,” but the afterword shows that there were those who disapproved of the ending, while the prologue reveals that an earlier play by Burnell, now lost, had not been well received at all—which is why the prologue appears carrying a battleaxe. But all of this at least suggests that Burnell caught their attention and provoked their interest, something for which we find little evidence in respect of Shirley’s work in Dublin, at least after The Royal Master.

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

149

Conclusion If we look for reasons for this, it has to be said that the most likely one is that Shirley showed little interest (at least until it was effectively too late) in cultivating localized attention: his eye was always really on London. What those chiding, disenchanted prologues repeatedly say is that the company has brought sophisticated London ware to the Dublin market, only to find that there are insufficient buyers with the discrimination to appreciate what is on offer. This has all the hallmarks of a classic failure of market research; in that it lasted so long, it also speaks of insularity, possibly arrogance. Much recent work on early modern theater history has emphasized how distinctive and nicheorientated specific companies and theaters were.64 We can no longer generalize too casually about “popular” and “elite” theaters, for example: the Globe and the Red Bull did not cater for the same social mixes. Even the indoor theaters used by the boy companies in the early 1600s, while probably more socially homogeneous, offered distinctive fare—Paul’s Boys offered more in the way of city comedy, while the Blackfriars Boys became notorious for their court-orientated satires. These distinctions were never absolute, but it does seem that companies thrived (or not, as in the case of Paul’s Boys) by catering to specific tastes and clienteles. In the Caroline era the London market seems to have become quite settled in its ways, with the Blackfriars and Cockpit/Phoenix indoor theaters virtually monopolizing the court audience and the lion’s share of the newest and most fashionable plays, particularly tragicomedies and comedies of manners. This was the kind of theater Shirley knew best, and which he seems mainly to have tried to recreate in Dublin, partly because his mind was never far from the prospect of returning to London—though with some concessions to other modes suggested by the use of occasional pyrotechnics and elaborate stage effects. But there seems to have been a basic miscalculation: the Dublin audiences did not lap up what the London audiences had, or at least not in sufficient numbers. In London, the audience, which was specifically of the court, was probably never large enough in itself to sustain substantial theatrical enterprises; but it was augmented by those who wanted to emulate the court’s tastes and values, to share vicariously in its pleasures. Possibly that is what was lacking in St. Werburgh Street. The John Clavell epilogue and the printed text of Shirley’s The Royal Master both emphasize how closely it was associated with the New English of Wentworth’s entourage and of the plantations; not until St. Patrick for Ireland and Landgartha do we find any evidence of plays that

150

Richard Dut ton

might specifically have addressed the interests and concerns of the (Catholic) Old English, who formed the majority of the indigenous gentry and who perhaps before then saw no reason to identify with what the theater offered. Whether the change of emphasis represented by these plays made a difference and pulled in more patrons, we have no way of knowing. It was at all events too late; hostilities broke out in Ireland in October 1641. In 1661, after the Restoration, Ogilby petitioned Charles II to be reconfirmed in his post as Master of the Revels for Ireland, “which after his great preparacions and disbursements in building a new Theater stocking and bringing over a Company of Actors and Musitians and settling them in Dublin fell to utter rueine by the Calamities of those times to the utter undoeing (by the Damage of Two Thousand pounds att least) of your peticioner.”65 The grammar of the passage makes it the post which “fell to utter rueine” but that is perhaps synecdoche for the “new Theater,” which certainly fell into disuse and decay. Ogilby’s petition was, however, successful and he went on to be the driving force behind the much more successful Smock Alley theater, besides a number of other lucrative enterprises.66 In the wider perspective of Caroline theater, the failure of the St. Werburgh Street operation is instructive. Compared with the London companies it had all the advantages of monopoly conditions, and a freedom from licensing constraints which seems to have meant that they could stage any play to which they had access. And yet they could not make it succeed. Pace Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will not necessarily come. Wit, sophistication, and an understanding of court intrigue, which Shirley’s plays possess in abundance, are not bound to flourish when uprooted from the culture in which they were nurtured. And we should certainly hesitate today to follow Shirley’s prologues in blaming the audience for this. St. Patrick for Ireland and Landgartha too belatedly show a genuine interest in Ireland and its culture, which might just have made a going concern of St. Werburgh Street, if the civil wars had not intervened.

Notes 1. Martin Banham, ed., The Cambridge Guide to World Theater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 493. 2. Gordon Braden, “James Shirley,” in Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 58 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1987), 249–66, 252.

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

151

3. Several theaters built on London models had appeared outside the English capital, and even outside England, before 1635, including one at Knowsley, Lancashire (1590s), near the Stanley estate; one at Gdansk in Poland (1610) modeled on the Fortune; and one that was used by the Children of Bristol from 1618. 4. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968), 5:1069. 5. It would not be right to suggest that no serious work was done on Shirley’s time in Ireland. Allan H. Stevenson, in particular, produced a string of articles in the 1940s which did much to establish the factual situation: “James Shirley and the Actors of the First Irish Theater,” Modern Philology 60 (1942): 147–60; “Shirley’s Years in Ireland,” Review of English Studies 20 (1944): 19–28; “Shirley’s Publishers: The Partnership of Crooke and Cooke,” The Library, 4th ser., 25 (1944–1945): 140–61; “Shirley’s Dedications and the Date of His Return to England,” Modern Language Notes 61(1946): 79–83. But none of this generated wider interest elsewhere. 6. Sandra A. Burner, James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 113–38. 7. William Smith Clark, The Early Irish Stage (1955; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); Alan J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), and Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theater, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. They certainly performed Jonson’s The Alchemist, which was still licensed to the King’s Men, as well as works by Fletcher and, in all probability, Middleton, which would still have been held under license. The licensing system operated by the Master of the Revels in London gave companies exclusive right to perform their plays in London and, at least in theory, in the English provinces. 9. John Aubrey, “Brief Lives,” chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey between the Years 1669 and 1696, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898) 2:101n. 10. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 487–89, 601 n.10. 11. Strafford Letter Books, July 10, 1637, quoted in Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 331. I have preserved the old spelling but silently modernized u for v, etc. 12. Roslyn Knutson has argued that there was a close correlation between the revival of London plays more than a year old and their publication, the one advertising the other. See Roslyn L. Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991),12–13, 81. It is not clear that the sequencing in Dublin was

152

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

Richard Dut ton so deliberate, but it makes sense that there would be a particular market for playgoers who wanted a tangible reminder of a show. ESTC dates this edition as “1635?” It appears to have been part of the project of the Stationers’ Company of London to build up an Irish stock, on the same basis as their much more successful English stock. See Mary Pollard, Dublin’s Trade in Books 1550–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 36–39. I am grateful to Steven Galbraith for bringing this reference to my attention. Interestingly, Andrew Crooke—who, as we shall see, was closely associated with the publication of Shirley’s plays at this time in London and Dublin—acquired the rights to Aristippus in 1637. But there is no record of his ever having published it. See Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 262; Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 486–87. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 414. Ibid., 440–41. The Notebook also contains Clavell’s masque, “Introduction to the Sword Dance” (1632), written for Lord Barry. See J. H. P. Pafford, “John Clavell, 1601–43. Burglar, Highwayman, Poet, Dramatist, Doctor, Lawyer,” Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset 32 (1986): 549–62. Stevenson, “Shirley’s Years in Ireland.” See Stevenson, “James Shirley and the Actors,” 149–52; Clark, Early Irish Stage, 27; Burner, Literary Coteries, 119. The best evidence we have for Shirley’s rights in the printing of his own plays derive from comparison of what we know of Richard Brome’s contracts with the Salisbury Court company. No restrictions were mentioned in his first contract of July 1635, but after renegotiation in August 1638 he was required to get permission from the company before publishing his plays. See Anne Haaker, “The Plague, the Theater, and the Poet,” Renaissance Drama, new ser., 1 (1968): 283–306; and Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 91, 96. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 442–47. References are to this text, in which all the items are through-lineated. Suggestions that The General might be an early version of the earl of Orrery’s Altermera, or The General, written in 1661 to entertain Charles II, are implausible to say the least. See Clark, Early Irish Stage, 58–60. Aubrey, “Brief Lives,” 2:102. Sir Humphrey Mildmay saw The Alchemist in London in 1639, so it was still actively in the King’s Men’s repertoire; see Yoshiko Kawachi, Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), 234. Act three, p. 77. Quotations are from the Huntington Library Copy as it appears on Early English Books Online. I have in mind works like Thomas Heywood’s Ages plays for the Red Bull in the early 1610s. Our knowledge of what was actually being performed there in the 1630s is minimal. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 437–48.

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

153

26. See Robert S. Forsythe, The Relation of Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 213–20. 27. See N. W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 179, 194. All details of the London licensing of Shirley’s plays, both for performance and print, are taken from here. 28. See Burner, Literary Coteries, 119; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 272–73. 29. Who might have produced it and where is a moot point. The old Queen’s Men had been wound up, and their Phoenix theater taken over by Beeston’s Boys. But The Royal Master does not appear in a list of their known plays (see further below), nor is it associated with the King’s Men. Perhaps the likeliest company to have picked it up is the new Queen’s Men, who operated at the Salisbury Court. See the discussion of The Gentleman of Venice. 30. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 272. 31. Burner, Literary Coteries, 124 and ff. 32. Morash, History of Irish Theater, 7. 33. This is reproduced in Wilson F. Engel’s edition of the play (Salzburg, 1976), 1. 34. Burner, Literary Coteries, 190. 35. See note 29, and Martin Butler’s essay in this volume (chapter 4). 36. Burner, Literary Coteries, 192. 37. All of these imponderables explain why those who have written on this subject vary so much on their view of which Shirley plays were written in Dublin for Irish audiences. Alan Fletcher focuses on what most regard as the irreducible three—The Royal Master, The Doubtful Heir, and St. Patrick for Ireland—which he describes as “certainly written for initial performance in Dublin,” though as I have pointed out even the first two of those have problematic features (Drama, Performance and Polity, 272). Christopher Morash agrees on these three, but adds The Politician, “written by Shirley for the theater in 1639” (History of Irish Theater, 5). Sandra Burner accepts those four, but adds The Gentleman of Venice and The Constant Maid (Literary Coteries, 119). Gordon Braden accepts all of these as either probable or possible and adds The Humorous Courtier (perhaps the same play as The Duke). His list also reminds us of the lost Tragedy of St. Albans, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1640; it is not implausible that writing on the Irish national saint should prompt Shirley also to write on the first English martyr (Braden, “James Shirley,” 249). Another lost play, Look to the Lady, was also entered, but the title does not even invite speculation as to when it might have been written. See Edward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of the Stationers of London 1554–1640, 5 vols. (London: Privately printed, 1875–1894), 4:385. 38. Stevenson, “Shirley’s Publishers,” 141–46, 155–61. 39. I discuss The Constant Maid and St. Patrick for Ireland further below.

154

Richard Dut ton

40. It is unlikely that these licenses would have been granted (we know that the business was conducted by Thomas Herbert, Sir Henry’s deputy) if Shirley did not have the rights to them. This further suggests either that he had a contractual right, or that he had come to an understanding with Beeston. 41. See Burner, Literary Coteries, 128–30. 42. It is worth noting (since I have not seen it elsewhere commented upon) that the publication of Shirley’s plays for the Queen’s Men may well have contributed to the highly unusual order issued by Lord Chamberlain Pembroke on behalf of Beeston’s Boys on August 10, 1639. Following the death of Christopher Beeston in October 1638, his son, William, appears to have been concerned to protect his inheritance. The order forbids the other London companies from performing plays to which he held the licensing rights on behalf of his company. Of the forty-five plays listed, a quarter have figured in this account of Shirley, as either by him or revised by him: Hyde Park, The Lady of Pleasure, The Young Admiral, The Example, The Maid’s Revenge, The Coronation, Love’s Cruelty, The Opportunity, The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France, The Night Walker, or The Little Thief, and Wit Without Money. Shirley plays published earlier than our time-frame also figure: The School of Compliment, The Witty Fair One, and The Wedding, so that the full list is virtually onethird of all those protected (See Kawachi, Calendar, 235). Normally speaking, the publication of a play did not affect its performing copyright, which remained with the company to which it was licensed. Is it possible that the anomalous situation in Dublin, with the company there known to be staging plays still under London license (many now widely available in print) made the younger Beeston fear that the protection of licensing arrangements in general was in danger of collapsing? 43. Stevenson, “Shirley’s Publishers,” 155. The Thomas Allot mentioned in several citations was the younger brother of Robert Allot, a bookseller who until his death in 1635 had been Andrew Crooke’s master. Stevenson was under the impression that Thomas “may have been a nephew, though not a son, of Robert Allot,” but see Pollard, Dublin’s Trade, 7. 44. The evidence here would be very much neater if the London imprint proclaimed that The Opportunity was to be sold at the Greyhound, like The Royal Master. But it actually says that it is to be sold at the sign of the Greene Dragon. There were in fact two London imprints, both in 1640. The first gives both Crooke and Cooke as publishers; the second has a change in the title page, showing only Crooke as the publisher (though both mention the Greene Dragon). This would seem to be the point— around the time Shirley returned to England—when the Crooke/Cooke partnership fell apart, and this may have had a bearing on other matters too. Crooke published nothing more by Shirley; Cooke, on his own, published only The Humorous Courtier. 45. The London version in fact has two variant title pages, perhaps suggesting significant sales.

The St. Werburgh Street Theater, Dublin

155

46. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 274. 47. Clark, Early Irish Drama, 19. His figures are drawn from Sir J. T. Gilbert, History of the City of Dublin (Dublin, 1854), vol. 1. 48. See Albert Wertheim, “The Presentation of James Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland at the First Irish Theater,” Notes and Queries, new ser., 14 (1967): 212–13. 49. See John P. Turner, Jr., ed., A Critical Edition of James Shirley’s “St. Patrick for Ireland” (New York and London: Garland, 1979), 45. All quotations are from this edition. 50. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 274. 51. Turner, ed., Critical Edition, 64. 52. Ibid., 77. 53. Ibid., 60. 54. Stevenson, “Shirley’s Dedications,” 82. 55. Clark, Early Irish Drama, 39. 56. Henry Burnell, Landgartha (Dublin, 1641), sig. E2r. Quotations are from the Harvard Library Copy as it appears on Early English Books Online; it is not paginated. 57. Catherine M. Shaw, “Landgartha and the Irish Dilemma,” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 13 (1978): 26–39, 33. 58. Ibid., esp. 34–37. 59. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 275–76. 60. See Albert H. Tricomi, “Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and the Analogical Way of Reading Political Tragedy,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85 (1986): 332–45; and Dutton, Licensing, xi–xviii. 61. The prologue of the play is delivered by an Amazon with a battle-axe, in a clear allusion to the armed prologue of Jonson’s Poetaster. At the very end the text announces “with the allowance of the Master of Revels,” as all the plays of the Jonson 1616 folio do. 62. This is the fifth of the play texts known to have been sold in Dublin at this time. Indeed, it is described on the title page of the only known edition as “Printed in Dublin.” 63. Shaw, “Landgartha,” 34–35; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, 276–77. 64. I have in mind such works as Andrew Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Knutson’s The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company; and Sally-Beth MacLean and Scott McMillin, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 65. Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 486. 66. See Clark, Early Irish Drama, 47–70; Aubrey, “Brief Lives,” 2:102–04.

This page intentionally left blank

6

A Beast So B lurred: The Monstrous Favorite in C aroline Drama Mario DiGangi

stellionatus, a beast so blurred, so spotted, so full of foul lines that they knew not what to make of it. —Lord Bishop of Norwich to House of Lords, May 15, 1626, reporting John Eliot’s speech against the duke of Buckingham Of Brittish beasts the Buck is king, His game and fame through Europe ringe, His horne exalted, keepes in awe The lesser flocks; his will’s a lawe. Our Charlemaine takes much delight In this great beast so faire in sight With his whole heart affects the same And loves too well Buck-King of Game. —“Upon the Duke of Buckingham” (anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript poem)

T

he satirical poet’s implication that Charles I took erotic pleasure in the favorite he “love[d] too well” has not found much support in the work of early modern literary critics and historians. Instead, the dominant view holds that Charles’s love for Buckingham, while intense and sincere, was “not physically expressed,” as Kevin Sharpe writes in his authoritative The Personal Rule of Charles I.1 According to Sharpe, Buckingham played the role of “charismatic elder sibling” to Charles, who came to “admire and love” him. Charles regarded their bond as a “relationship of equals” and received more emotional

158

Mario DiGangi

fulfillment through Buckingham’s friendship than through his initially strained and distant marital relationship with Henrietta Maria. Whereas Buckingham was the last and greatest in a series of handsome young favorites enjoyed by King James, he was the only man Charles ever loved, for, in Sharpe’s strikingly unqualified assessment, “almost immediately after the death of Buckingham, Charles and his wife genuinely fell in love.”2 In his important biography Buckingham, Roger Lockyer similarly rejects the possibility of an erotic bond between Charles and Buckingham. After James’s death, Charles assured Buckingham that he would “no less cherish” him than his father had.3 Yet Lockyer is quick to explain that Charles did not “cherish” his favorite sexually, and that Buckingham was fortunate therein, for James had limited his favorites’ political power by reducing them to “playthings—young men whose company relieved the tedium of both work and leisure, as well as satisfying his emotional needs.” Unlike his father, Charles treated Buckingham not as a sexual companion but as a policy-making minister.4 I do not intend to argue that Charles and Buckingham had a sexual relationship; nonetheless, I hope to demonstrate that the association between favoritism and sexual transgression remained an important political issue under Charles, as it was under James. During the Caroline period, the association between favoritism and sexuality shifts, as the familiar image of the favorite as an erotic plaything or Ganymede is displaced by a more sinister image of the favorite as a sexually corrupt, ambitious politician—a figure that conveys resentment at the king’s patronage of the vastly influential duke. Significantly, however, this sinister typology of favoritism does not simply reflect topical concern about Buckingham’s ascendancy, as it continues to appear in dramatic texts written, performed, and published after Buckingham’s death.5 Perhaps even more surprising, given the longstanding homoerotic archetype of the favorite as Ganymede, in Caroline drama the favorite’s abuse of power is predominantly associated with his illicit manipulation of heteroerotic relations. A comprehensive analysis of favoritism in Caroline drama has never to my knowledge been undertaken, despite the appearance of favorites, often as central characters, in no fewer than thirty plays written between 1625 and 1640. The Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama lists forty-five printed plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which characters identified as “Favourite(s)” appear: of these, two are Elizabethan plays, Marlowe’s Edward II (1592) and Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595); four are

A BEAST SO BLURRED

159

Jacobean plays composed between 1617 and 1621; and three are plays from the 1650s.6 Hence the great majority of the plays deemed to contain a favorite come from the Caroline period.7 Localizing the politics of Caroline drama thus requires an understanding of its significant, albeit long overlooked, interest in favoritism. Such an understanding needs first to account for the decline of the Ganymedean favorite and the emergence of what I will call the “monstrous” favorite—a figure often imagined in terms of grotesquely excessive influence, treachery, and violence—in literary and political discourse from the late 1620s. Having examined the discourse of the monstrous favorite, I will consider how in tragicomedies and tragedies by Philip Massinger, Thomas Killigrew, and James Shirley the monstrous favorite uses the power derived from same-sex intimacy to manipulate heteroerotic alliances for his own advancement. An analysis centered on the connection between sexual and political disorder in these plays, I will argue, yields valuable insight into the ideological conflicts being waged in Caroline England over the exercise and extent of royal authority.8 By the time Charles took the throne in 1625, the Ganymede had become familiar as the dominant type of the favorite. During the second half of James’s reign, sexual scandals at court and concern over Buckingham’s ascendancy spurred a “marked growth” of manuscript libels, among which are poems that employ the Ganymede myth to allege sodomitical relations between King James and his favorite.9 One such poem, “The King’s Five Senses,” describes the harmful influence of favorites with “smooth or beardless chin / As may provoke or tempt to sin.”10 In this model of favoritism popularized by Marlowe’s Edward II, a monarch’s infatuation with an attractive young man weakens his judgment and saps his political strength. While some seventeenth-century commentators did allege that Buckingham physically enchanted Charles as well as James, most contemporary scholars maintain that after his favorite’s assassination Charles successfully distanced himself from his father’s legacy of sexual scandal. For corroboration, these scholars typically cite a particularly noteworthy development such as the apparent blossoming of romantic love between Charles and Henrietta Maria after 1628; the crown’s vigorous prosecution and conviction of the earl of Castlehaven for sodomy in 1631; or the celebration of the court’s moral reformation in masques like Thomas Carew’s 1634 Coelum Britannicum.11 Through the thin veil of classical mythology, Carew’s masque alludes to the banishment of homoerotically alluring young

160

Mario DiGangi

pages from the Caroline court: Ganimede is forbidden the Bedchamber, and must only minister in publique. The Gods must keepe no Pages, nor Groomes of their Chamber under the age of 25, and those provided of a competent stocke of beard.12

Michael Young quotes this passage as evidence that Charles, having purged “[h]omosexuality” from his court, “became conspicuously heterosexual and uxorious” and actively promoted his marriage as a model of domestic love.13 Since the notion of discrete homosexual and heterosexual identities did not exist in seventeenth-century England, however, homosexuality could not be “forbidden” the court as easily as Carew’s masque forbids Ganymede the bedchamber, and Charles could not have achieved a “conspicuously heterosexual” identity, whatever the sincerity of his affection for Henrietta Maria. Given the common early modern typology of passionate men as effeminate, Charles’s “uxorious” behavior might instead have served to confirm rather than refute suspicions that he was susceptible to the erotic charms of a wayward partner, whether favorite or wife. In fact, Privy Councilors complained that Charles spent too much time alone with Henrietta Maria “as their new-found passion settled into a loving partnership.”14 The touted banishment of Ganymede from Charles’s court following Buckingham’s death might therefore be understood to reflect not an eradication of the symbolic legacy of favoritism altogether, but the growing obsolescence of a distinctly homoerotic figuration of favoritism associated with James.15 The image of the favorite that dominated the Caroline era was that of an envious, venomous minister whose horrific greatness could not be adequately conveyed by recourse to the familiar figure of the alluring Ganymede.16 By splitting the figure of the favorite into two characters, William Davenant’s tragedy Albovine (1628, pub. 1629) vividly illustrates how Caroline writers located political disorder not in the homoeroticism of favoritism but in the favorite’s self-serving manipulation of homoerotic and heteroerotic alliances.17 At the beginning of the play, King Albovine adopts the captive solider Paradine as his “Minion, [who] sleepes in his bosome.”18 Court observers marvel that the “Captive captivates the Conquerour”: “the Royall foole greets him with such / Ravenous kisses, that you would thinke, he meant / To eate his lips” (sig. B2r). Indeed, Albovine fawns on Paradine as his “chiefe Trophy” and frets that he is “in love too

A BEAST SO BLURRED

161

violent. / My embraces crush thee, thou art but yet / Of tender growth” (sig. B3r). Even though the king’s exaggerated affection for Paradine evokes the Ganymede typology of favoritism, Albovine’s tragic demise springs from his dotage not on Paradine but on Rhodolinda, a female captive whom he marries, thus arousing the jealousy of her favorite, Hermegild. The Machiavellian Hermegild hatches a complex revenge scheme in which Paradine is tricked into a sexual encounter with Rhodolinda and then reluctantly enlisted in their conspiracy to kill the king. To convince Paradine that the king has rescinded his favors, Hermegild claims to be the new object of royal affection: He hath of late, hung thus— Upon my neck; untill his amorous weight Became my burden: and then lay slabbering o’re My lips; like some rhumatick Babe. This sport My serious braine abhor’d. ’Twas my wonder (Since you are cal’d his Minion) he could ere Affect my looke. (sig. K4r)

Craftily undermining the homoerotic bond between the king and his favorite and exploiting his intimacy with the queen, Hermegild treacherously seizes political power; Paradine, however, ultimately remains loyal to the king. The monstrous favorite in Davenant’s tragedy, then, is not the king’s minion, who represents the residual figure of the Ganymede, but the queen’s minion, who violently dislocates both heteroerotic and homoerotic alliances in his bid for power. Whereas Albovine distinguishes the Ganymede from the monstrous favorite, certain manuscript libels against Buckingham from the late 1620s attack the excessive influence of the monstrous favorite through a demonization of the Ganymede figure. Attributing terrible powers to Ganymede’s archetypal beauty, a “Satyre on the D.[uke] of B.[uckingham]” complains that the “Brittaine crownetts and the clergie’s bookes, / Were vail’d or burnt at’s Ganimedian looks.”19 Perhaps recalling the Ovidian tale of Ganymede’s flight to heaven, the poem suggests that through his privileged intimacy with the monarch Buckingham did not transcend the sublunary world so much as he embodied it, being “[a] little world, that deem’d to sore more high / Then his horizon, or the fleeting skie.” Another manuscript libel, an “Epitaph” sonnet on Buckingham’s death, evokes Ganymede by introducing its subject as “Fortune’s darling, king’s content.” Containing no fewer than 14 epithets encapsulating the duke’s

162

Mario DiGangi

notorious crimes—“The flatterer’s deitie of state, / Advancer of each money-mate”—the poem ends with a biting couplet: “All this lies underneath this stone, / And yet, alas! heere lies but one.”20 Despite its opening image of a Ganimedean “darling,” the poem achieves its satirical edge not by expressing disgust at same-sex desire but by facetiously marveling that a single man could embody so many political vices. In other Caroline representations of Buckingham, the Ganymede figure disappears altogether. Such texts make recourse to the paradoxical language of “greatness” to suggest that the duke used his access to the king’s body to engulf the nation in his pervasive evil. In the manuscript poem “Upon the Dukes Goeing into Fraunce,” the ambiguity of “great” signifies the favorite’s ability to collapse sexual and political boundaries: And wilt thou goe, great duke, and leave us here Lamenting thee, and eke thy pupil deere, Great Charles: O who shall then the scepter sway And kingdoms rule, when thou art gone away?21

The “great duke” appropriates the scepter of the “Great Charles,” here reduced to a mere pupil. Unnaturally, the bodily presence of the duke has become essential to the “rule” not only of the king and kingdom, but also of unspecified “kingdoms.” In Sir Francis Hubert’s narrative poem The Life of Edward II, the king confesses in similarly hyperbolic terms the danger of countenancing a great favorite: This Error did my government disfashion That Gaveston unworthily was grac’d And made too great a monster, huge and vast; Who in his growth being unproportionall Became offensive to himselfe and all.22

This discourse of offensively great favoritism comes to fruition in Sir Edward Peyton’s antiroyalist tract The Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuarts (1652). According to Peyton, boundless self-conceit “made the duke swell like a toad to such a monstrous proportion of greatness in vast thoughts, as multiplying to an ocean from the rivers of pride, power, and ambition, he sate as a gyant on the shoulders of King James.”23 Peyton suggests that the monstrously reproductive power of the “swell[ing]” and “multiplying” duke poisoned both same-sex and heteroerotic relations at court, for

A BEAST SO BLURRED

163

James authorized Buckingham to seduce “many gentile and noble virgins.” Buckingham’s sexual predations later tainted Charles’s court, where “sin was hatched from an egg to a dragon, to devour holiness of life; insomuch, that the masks and playes at Whitehal were used onely for incentives of lust: therefore the courtiers invited the citizens wives to those shews, on purpose to defile them in such sort.”24 However exaggerated or fabricated Peyton’s account of royal debauchery might be, it articulates a culturally resonant connection between the same-sex intimacy of favoritism and the monstrous violation of heteroerotic alliance imagined as favoritism’s consequence and sign. Perhaps the most striking attributions of monstrosity to Buckingham appear in the “tart and harsh” speech Sir John Eliot delivered to Parliament on May 10, 1626, to conclude a series of charges brought against the favorite by the House of Commons.25 Evoking the horror of sodomy, the crime not to be named, Eliot claims that Buckingham has committed offenses so heinous that they went without name in ancient times—offenses of collusion and deceit, crimes in themselves so odious and uncertain as the ancients knew not by what name to term them and therefore they expressed them in a metaphor, calling them stellionatus from a discolored beast so doubtful in appearance as they knew not what to make it.26

Eliot employs a similarly oblique line of attack when, having adduced various parallels between Buckingham and Sejanus, he announces that he will refrain from mentioning Sejanus’s “veneries and venefices.” According to one parliamentary diarist’s transcription, in a subsequent attempt to justify these accusations Eliot explained that by “veneries and venefices” he meant Sejanus’s “lechery with Livia” and “poisoning of Drusus” but that he did not mean to imply that Buckingham was guilty of comparable crimes. Finally, in his original speech Eliot charges that Buckingham’s “attempts go higher to the person of his sovereign, making in that his practice in such a manner and with such effects as I fear to speak it, nay, I doubt to think it, in which respect I’ll leave.” Quoting Cicero—“Ne gravioribus utar verbis quam [rei] natura fert aut levioribus quam causae postulat” [“Nor do I use harsher words than nature has made, nor lighter ones than the case demands”]—Eliot concludes that “[t]he examination with your Lordships will show you what it is. I need not name it.”27 Along with his vague references to Buckingham’s “attempts” and “practice” against “the person” of the king, Eliot’s avoidance of “words harsher

164

Mario DiGangi

then those nature has made” again raises the specter of unnatural sodomy, which, at least in this political arena, remains literally unnamable.28 In Eliot’s intimations of sodomy, the favorite’s dangerous intimacy with the king is manifested not as a particular sexual practice but rather as a violation of sexual, social, economic, and political order itself. As the Parliamentary diarist Sir Richard Grosvenor recognized, Eliot shrewdly implies that the duke’s crimes were so monstrous that even Cicero, “an excellent orator, had not words to explain so much. This was delivered as though something more in that not yet discovered.”29 Renaissance beast lore can help to discover Eliot’s use of the stellion to indict Buckingham’s monstrous practices. According to Edward Topsell’s History of Serpents (1608), stellions are “envious and subtile” lizards that deliberately devour their shed skin to prevent human beings from using it for medicinal purposes.30 Topsell provides an English translation of Andrea Alciati’s emblem “In fraudulentos”: The little Lyzard, or Stellion starred in body graine In secrete holes, and graves of dead which doth remaine, When painted you it see, or drawne before the eye, A symbole then you view of deepe deceit and cursed envy: Alas, this is a thing to jealous wives knowne too well, For whosoever of that Wine doth drinke his fill Wherein a Stellion hath beene drencht to death, His face with filthy lentile spots all ugly it appeareth, Here-with a Lover oft requites the fraude of concubine, Depriving her of beauties hiew by draught of this same wine.31

The smallness of this furtive monster belies the potency of its venom.32 In Alciati’s emblem, the stellion’s “deep deceit and cursed envy” describes both the sexual treachery of the adulterous husband and the vengeful treachery of the jealous wife. Eliot and his interlocutors might well have recognized in the stellion a figure for the interlaced crimes he “discovered” within Buckingham: betrayal, envy, deceit, and, despite Eliot’s protests to the contrary, filthy “veneries and venefices.” Eliot, of course, was careful to portray King Charles as the victim, not the authorizer, of Buckingham’s crimes. Late Jacobean and Caroline plays go further in representing the culpability of princes who empower and advance monstrous favorites. Yet unlike those Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies that localize dramatic interest in the patron’s intense desire for a favorite,33 Caroline plays emphasize how the favorite strategically uses his position to fashion or disrupt

A BEAST SO BLURRED

165

heteroerotic alliances. Favoritism is thus understood not as a homoerotic relationship in competition with heteroerotic relationships, but as a social and affectional relationship between men that provides access to women’s sexuality and to their disposal in marriage. Favoritism, in short, creates the conditions for the destabilization and dislocation of the foundational institutions of early modern social order. Revealing the disorderly effects of favoritism, Caroline playwrights scrutinize their ultimate cause: the royalist ideologies that justified the institution of favoritism and shaped its practices. The spectacular abuses of the monstrous favorite provided Caroline playwrights with a dramatically compelling way to address what Martin Butler calls “the Caroline dilemma.” English subjects, Butler argues, were caught between their “reverence for kingly authority” and their “perception that Charles was not conforming to type” in allowing himself to be abused by wicked servants or misled by his personal affections.34 According to the manuscript libel that serves as the epigraph to my essay, the king’s devotion of “his whole heart” to Buckingham lamentably endows the “will” of a rapacious courtier with the agency of a “law.” But even after Buckingham’s death, the figure of the monstrous favorite could be deployed to critique the abuses of a system of rule in which the personal will of a single man might have the power of law. In the five plays I discuss, the monstrous favorite is a figure of sexual and political mediation who functions to convey the abuses and failings of royal will. Massinger’s The Maid of Honor (1621, pub. 1632), Killigrew’s Claricilla (1636, pub. 1641), and Shirley’s The Royal Master (1637, pub. 1638) are tragicomedies in which a favorite, taking advantage of his patron’s excessive affection, attempts to seize greater power through an unauthorized marriage into a noble or royal family.35 Although the favorites are clearly the villains of these plays, the monarchs are faulted for shortsighted and preemptory assertions of royal prerogative that slight truly loyal subjects and fuel the ambitions of their grasping ministers.36 In two other plays by Shirley—The Duke’s Mistress (1636, pub. 1638), a tragicomedy, and The Traitor (1631, pub. 1635), a tragedy—a favorite with a blood claim to the throne plots to seize power by exacerbating the political disorder unleashed by his prince’s indulgence of heteroerotic desire. These plays represent sexual passion for women as the symptom of a misgoverned royal will that enables an ambitious favorite to exploit his closeness to the center of power. By considering a variety of sexual scenarios in which Caroline playwrights place the monstrous favorite, I ultimately wish to suggest their recognition of the productive use to

166

Mario DiGangi

which this charged figure of political and erotic mediation could be put in exploring dramatically the problem of royal will. Massinger’s The Maid of Honor provides a particularly clear illustration of how the abusive sexual mediation of a favorite could be rendered as a symptom of misgoverned royal will. From the very start of the play, King Roberto’s favorite, Fulgentio, is defined in terms drawn from the conventional Jacobean discourse of the favorite as Ganymede or parasite.37 Labeled in the dramatis personae as a “mignion,” Fulgentio is also derided by courtiers as a “catamite” and “caterpiller in the state” (1.1.272, 2.2.94). These conventional epithets serve unambiguously to establish the king’s folly in bestowing such great political privilege on a man whose wickedness seems transparent to all but himself. Like the king, Fulgentio believes that as the recipient of royal favor he necessarily acquires an unimpeachable honor; as “a man in grace,” he expects to “challenge awe, and priviledge by his place” (2.1.57–58). Fulgentio’s attempt to use his status as favorite to coerce a marriage vow from the chaste Camiola, however, earns only her scornful appraisal of his manhood: “I am doubtfull whether you are a man, / Since for your shape trimmd up in a Ladies dressing / You might passe for a woman” (2.2.137–39). More than a dig against courtly finery, Camiola’s mockery of Fulgentio’s inappropriate “shape” interprets the outward signs of royal favor in terms of a typically feminine bodily excess that she herself has eschewed; deflating the favorite’s masculine posturing, she reduces his elevated political “place” to the purely ornamental function of a court lady “trimmed up” for display. When King Roberto reprimands Camiola for rejecting his favorite, she explains, in pointedly political terms, why the king should regard Fulgentio as nothing more than a source of personal enjoyment: Say you should love wine, You being the king, and cause I am your subject, Must I be ever drunke? Tyrants, not Kings, By violence, from humble vassals force The liberty of their soules. I could not love him, And to compel affection, as I take it, Is not found in your prerogative. (4.5.61–67)

As the distinction between “lov[ing] wine” and being “ever drunke” suggests, the king cannot force his subjects to love what he loves without transforming the affection that should obtain between subject and king and between husband and wife into a destructive and deforming

A BEAST SO BLURRED

167

force. By negating the favorite’s sexual privilege over female subjects, Camiola thus articulates the need to limit royal prerogative.38 Ultimately, Camiola urges the king to pardon his favorite but “to his merits love him, and no further” (5.2.284): that is, to value him for his personal virtues, not for the political position he occupies. Although the abuses of favoritism are finally reformed in The Maid of Honor, Massinger’s emphasis on Fulgentio’s corrupt mediation of the “love” between king and subject largely defines the institution of favoritism itself as a means by which the king might impose his “passionate will” upon his subjects’ liberties (4.5.93). Unlike King Roberto, who willfully encourages a favorite’s predatory marital ambitions, the kings in Killigrew’s Claricilla and Shirley’s The Royal Master inadvertently provoke disorder by obstructing the marital (and hence political) ambitions of the favorites they nonetheless immoderately love and reward. To the degree that each play explores the political crisis precipitated by a sovereign’s mismanagement of patronage relationships and marital alliances, it is important to note that despite their associations with the court, neither Killigrew nor Shirley blindly endorsed its policies or moral postures. For instance, in The Parson’s Wedding Killigrew treats the fashionable cult of Platonic love “as the subject of bawdy humour and derision”; and even in an overtly celebratory masque, The Triumph of Peace, Shirley “registers a potential criticism of the royal government,” however muted or disguised that criticism might be.39 Through a critical focus on favoritism, Claricilla and The Royal Master expose a central contradiction of early modern kingship as a form of rule based on traditional, ostensibly fixed standards of value such as bloodline and hereditary succession, as well as on the sovereign’s wavering affections and subjective measurements of desert. In these plays, the contradiction becomes evident when a sovereign cherishes and indulges his favorite, yet refuses to authorize his marriage into the royal family. Realizing that their power rests upon the shifting ground of royal affection, these favorites seek at great cost the security and permanence that seem to be promised by a connection to the royal blood.40 A passage from Samuel Harding’s tragedy Sicily and Naples (1640, pub. 1640) effectively captures the favorite’s resentment at his dependence upon royal caprice: It is The pride of Princes to be thought Gods here On earth, daring to mock omnipotence, To create them favorites, set them aloft

168

Mario DiGangi In their own sphere till remote kingdoms gaze At their prodigious height, then in an instant Shoot them from thence, like falling meteors.41

Given this perspective, it is easy to understand why Henry Wotton measured Buckingham’s success in terms of his survival in the precarious role of favorite under two monarchs. After King James died, Wotton explains, Buckingham was “secondly seized of favour, as it were by discent (though the condition of that estate be no more than a Tenancie at will, or at most for the life of the first Lord) and rarely transmitted.”42 The favorites of Claricilla and The Royal Master attempt to seize through unauthorized marital alliances the security of power that Buckingham uniquely achieved through the “discent” of royal favor. In Claricilla, a willfully shortsighted monarch fails to appreciate the precariousness of his situation as the patron of favorites who are determined to escape from the uncertainty of a “tenancy at will.” At the beginning of the play, the favorite’s recognition of the paradoxical insecurity of his otherwise supremely privileged position is suggested by the treachery of Silvander, who has used his intimacy with the King to usurp his throne and abduct his daughter Claricilla. The King’s loyal subjects restore order by defeating Silvander and rescuing Claricilla, but when Claricilla scorns the new favorite Seleucus as a “Hireling” and rejects his courtship as “insolent,” he, like Silvander, schemes to depose the King and to marry his daughter against her will.43 Responding with immoderate passion to the news of Seleucus’s unauthorized courtship, the King fails to regain his favorite’s loyalty either by threatening punishment or promising reward. First, the King’s heated reprimand of his favorite’s “impudence” and “ingratitude” gives Seleucus the opportunity to protest that he is being treated unjustly, not even “heard ere condemn’d”; in a melodramatic turn, Seleucus even offers to commit suicide as proof of his “faith and readiness to serve” (3.3.23, 27, 39, 41–42). When Seleucus reveals that the King’s nephew Melintus has also courted Claricilla without permission, the easily mollified King affirms his complete faith in his “friend” and promises that he will “ever have an interest” in his love (3.3.79). Having won his master’s trust, Seleucus goes forward with his scheme, and loyal subjects must once again rescue their monarch from a favorite who attempts to seize the princess and the kingdom. Seleucus’s nearly successful attempt to secure power through an unauthorized marriage into the royal family exposes a troubling contradiction in the practice of favoritism, and by extension, in the

A BEAST SO BLURRED

169

principles of personal monarchy. As political theorist Edward Forset explains in A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606), a king must be allowed to “follow and feed his fantasies, give scope unto them, suffer them to prevaile with him.”44 By giving scope to his fantasies, however, the sovereign might encourage the courtly aspirants empowered by his love to “follow and feed” fantasies of their own. In Killigrew’s play, Melintus articulates this danger, berating Seleucus as a hungry dog who will not be satisfied with scraps when a more tempting dish is in view: “Know in the best of all thy ills, thy love, thou art a Traitor; else thou durst not hope this Princess would be food for servants; and though thy fawning on thy Masters feet hath been cherish’d so that thou hast left the Crums there, and are now set by him, snatching at his own dish” (2.3.86–90). The king might set his favorite by his side and address him in the equalizing language of affectionate friendship, yet he thereby erases neither the favorite’s awareness of his dependent status nor his craving for the royal alliance that would repair that status.45 In The Royal Master, a king’s overconfidence in the effectiveness of favoritism as a means of sustaining and rewarding loyalty blinds him to his discontented favorite’s designs to marry into the royal family. Although the King of Naples believes himself to be in possession of the love and gratitude of his favorite, Montalto, observant courtiers marvel at the “witchcraft” that seems to cloud the King’s senses and to keep him “so strangely” enamored of such a monstrous “colossus” and “Protean favourite.”46 As the courtiers recognize and as his name suggests, Montalto aspires to “mount high,” to transform himself into something greater than a favorite, and his aspirations are fueled by resentment that the King should have overlooked him in promising his sister Theodosia to the Duke of Florence. To obtain Theodosia for himself, Montalto proceeds to shatter this dynastic alliance between Naples and Florence by convincing the King that the Duke and Theodosia have betrayed his trust. Shrewdly masking his true intentions, Montalto feigns gratitude when, as a reward for his services, the King offers him the noblewoman Domitilla for his bride: [Y]ou are too bountiful. In you I kneel both to my king and father: But my aspiring will be satisfied To be your servant still; in your grace I Enjoy the bride my heart affects. Let me Grow old with duties here, and not translate My affection, till my weary soul throw off The burden of my dust. (4.1, p. 159)

170

Mario DiGangi

Montalto voices the traditional rhetoric of loyal service, at the same time affirming his personal devotion by addressing his master as a father and by evoking imagery of conjugal bliss and erotic satisfaction to convey the joy of receiving the King’s grace. This language disarms the King, encouraging him to believe that the favorite’s “aspiring will be satisfied” by occupying the symbolic roles of son and spouse to the monarch, when what Montalto actually seeks is a direct connection with the royal blood through marriage. Despite his protests to the contrary, Montalto desires precisely to “translate [his] affection”: to use the power derived from the King’s love to escape the dependence on that love that defines—and delimits—the favorite’s power. Although Montalto ultimately fails, his skillful manipulation of the King’s affections exposes the danger of a prince’s inability to see that, from the favorite’s perspective, the bonds of favoritism might seem to operate as constraints. So far, I have examined plays in which favorites attempt to use the access and privilege that derives from royal affection to secure even greater power through advantageous marriages. In The Maid of Honor, Claricilla, and The Royal Master, the kings themselves are devoted entirely to their favorites; unmarried and sexually uninvolved with women, they are, as Camiola says of King Roberto, “[a]bstemious from base and goatish loosenesse.”47 By contrast, the princes in Shirley’s The Duke’s Mistress and The Traitor indulge in passion for women, thus making themselves vulnerable to their favorites’ treacherous manipulations of erotic and political alliances. The Duke’s Mistress, a tragicomedy presented at court in 1636, “carefully rehabilitates faith in the integrity of the royal will” by allowing the Duke to repent his erotic lapses and to retain his power.48 A tragedy, The Traitor depicts the fall of a sexually predatory Duke at the hands of a disloyal favorite who seeks his throne and a discontented gentleman who resists his tyrannical will. Shirley’s sexually errant dukes might seem quite remote from King Charles, who conspicuously displayed a “preoccupation with ordered self-control” in personal comportment.49 Nonetheless, the presence in these plays of the mediating figure of the favorite prompts us to understand the prince’s indulgence of heteroerotic passion as a manifestation of misgoverned royal will responsible for social and political disorder.50 In The Duke’s Mistress, the Duke of Parma asserts his political prerogative through the maintenance of an adulterous relationship, the disorderly consequences of which provide his favorite and kinsman Leontio with a method and a motive for seeking his demise. Leontio secretly loves the neglected duchess, Euphemia, and consoles her with

A BEAST SO BLURRED

171

the hope that the Duke will renounce his lustful ways. News of Leontio’s rebuke, however, only incenses the Duke to assert his right to pursue whatever he desires: “Presumes he on his blood, above our favour? / Dares he but in a thought control our pleasure?”51 The Duke retaliates against his favorite’s insolent wish to “control [his] pleasure” by treating Euphemia even more cruelly, provoking Leontio openly to declare his love to her. Euphemia remains loyal to her husband, but her virtuous example exacerbates the discontented favorite’s resentment and seals his determination to procure the Duke’s downfall. Although unrequited desire might motivate Leontio’s treachery, the Duke’s vicious behavior provides him with a plausible pretext for usurping his kinsman’s throne: the restoration of justice to the state. Persuading a captain to assassinate the Duke, Leontio can thus evoke sympathy for his cause by comparing himself to a galley slave desperately trying to unchain himself from an oar. Despite his disastrous misgovernment of marital and political affairs, the Duke is spared a tragic fall because Euphemia’s chastity and the captain’s loyalty undermine Leontio’s schemes and ultimately inspire the Duke to reform his ways. Destroyed by his own plot, Leontio confesses that “[l]ust and ambition” led him astray; however, he also blames his “misfortunes” on the “license” he took from the example of the Duke’s indulgence of “wanton blood”—his neglect of princely and conjugal duties (5.4, p. 271). The Duke’s Mistress ultimately upholds the sanctity of the Duke’s status as husband and prince by celebrating the unwavering devotion of a wife and subject and by implying the rightness of the royalist axiom that “[s]ubjects must know their place, and trust the duke (or king) to know his.”52 Nonetheless, through its depiction of the disorderly consequences of the Duke’s errant sexuality, the play also reveals the dilemma of subjects who are simply required to trust, by an act of faith or will, in the moral and political probity of their prince’s affections. Another sexually errant prince, the Duke of Florence in The Traitor, meets the bloody death his counterpart in The Duke’s Mistress is spared, because his inability to control the urgings of his “youthful blood” fatally betrays him to the machinations of his cousin and favorite Lorenzo.53 As “great in favor as in blood,” Lorenzo uses his unrivaled access to the throne to manipulate and imperil the Duke by inciting his lust for Amidea, sister of the honor-obsessed gentleman Sciarrha (2.1.102–03). The favorite’s plot to usurp a prince who cannot master his own blood succeeds in part through his skill at deploying the political and sexual discourses of blood. When affirming his loyalty to the Duke, for instance, Lorenzo attributes rumors of his

172

Mario DiGangi

treachery to the common people’s envy of a favorite who not only enjoys the prince’s love but who can also boast that the same royal “purple” flows in his veins (1.2.58, 66). When goading Sciarrha to take revenge upon the Duke, however, Lorenzo renounces the access his royal blood gives him to a sovereign power that he describes as a threat to freedom and justice: Heaven knows I’ve no particular design To leap unto a throne. I will disclaim The privilege of blood. Let me advance Our liberty, restore the ancient laws Of the republic, rescue from the jaws Of lust your mothers, wives, your daughters, sisters—(2.1.139–44)

Lorenzo aims not to reform the ducal system, of course, but to use his intimacy with the Duke to “leap unto a throne” of his own. “Prepare your blood / For amorous game,” Lorenzo goads the Duke as he leads him into Sciarrha’s trap; “Thou mak’st my spirit caper in my veins,” the Duke giddily replies, displacing his sexual excitement about Amidea onto the favorite who has orchestrated his assassination (4.1.383–84, 387). Shirley compellingly depicts the danger of the favorite’s privileged access to the wanton prince’s body through a grimly humorous monologue in which Lorenzo confesses to a bizarre, sexually evocative, ritual. Every day, he symbolically “kill[s] a prince” by stabbing a portrait of the Duke, “[w]hich though it bleed not, [he] may boast a murder” (5.2.22–23): an ingenious method for inuring himself to any scruples that might arise when the time comes actually to shed his prince’s blood. Acknowledging that the powerful appeal of the Duke’s “youth,” “beauty,” and “charms” might otherwise have dampened his resolution, Lorenzo conflates the pleasure of erotic intimacy with the pleasure of sadistic violence when, in the act of stabbing the painting, he muses that “the duke should feel me now” (5.2.28, 35, 37). The sign of affection and grace that any favorite might be expected to desire of his prince—“He smiles, he smiles upon me”—Lorenzo twists into a grotesque fantasy of physical violation: “I will dig / Thy wanton eyes out, and supply the dark / And hollow cells with two pitch-burning tapers” (5.2.45–47). Thanks to the countless imaginary performances of this violent consummation of his bond with the Duke, Lorenzo does not hesitate to strike in earnest when the opportunity arrives. Significantly, Lorenzo arranges for the assassination to take place at Sciarrha’s

A BEAST SO BLURRED

173

home, to which he has lured the Duke with the promise of consummating his desire for Amidea. To preserve his sister’s chastity and punish the Duke’s lust, however, Sciarrha has already killed Amidea and placed her body in a dark room where the Duke might unknowingly undertake a grotesque seduction as the final act of his life. The Duke’s horrifying molestation of Amidea’s corpse complexly symbolizes his fatal embrace of a duplicitous, degenerate favorite as well as the collapse of the bonds of chaste love and mutual obligation that should bind prince and subject. As the agent of such poisoned intercourse between prince and subject, Lorenzo finally meets his death at Sciarrha’s hands. Tragically, it is only by destroying his own family, particularly by negating any chance of forming an advantageous marital alliance through his chaste sister, that Sciarrha manages to rescue the state from the violence of rapacious royal will. As I hope to have shown, the tragicomedies and tragedies of the 1620s and 1630s reveal the persistence of an association between favoritism and sexual transgression, even during the years in which Charles ruled without a favorite. Rather than use favoritism to construct James as homosexual and Charles as heterosexual, we need to understand how Caroline playwrights strategically deployed the same-sex intimacy of favoritism in the service of a political critique. In these plays, the representation of the monstrous favorite allows for a different perspective on the problems of monarchical government than in the Elizabethan and Jacobean representation of the favorite as a Ganymede. In Marlowe’s Edward II, for instance, the aristocratic opposition readily identifies the seductive favorite as the source of the king’s weakness: they correctly predict the disastrous consequences of government based on the indulgence of passion and the counsel of parasites, and they use persuasion and coercion to oppose these destructive influences. Caroline tragedies and tragicomedies instead emphasize the opacity of the prince’s desires—he simply loves the favorite, often without justification or reason. As a result, subjects find themselves in frighteningly unmoored, vulnerable positions, unable to intervene effectively in a political process based on what Henry Wotton, referring to Charles’s affection for Buckingham, called the “secret of high inclinations.”54 By focusing on the monstrous favorite’s self-serving manipulation of the heteroerotic alliances that undergird social and political order, Caroline playwrights generate critical reflection on the problem of royal will: namely, the king’s reliance on inscrutable affections or “high inclinations” to govern the baffling network of alliances and affiliations that comprise the political nation. The lack of a distinction between heterosexual and homosexual

174

Mario DiGangi

identities in the period only contributes to perception of the favorite’s monstrously elastic agency, in that he could embody fears of any kind of alliance, no matter the precise sexual configuration. A “beast so blurred,” the monstrous favorite is an elusive figure, but one that provided Caroline subjects with compelling imaginative access to the occluded operations of royal will through which they struggled to comprehend their distant king.55

Notes 1. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 46. 2. Ibid., 5, 48, 170. 3. Quoted in Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London: Longman, 1981), 234. 4. Ibid., 464, 465. 5. In his informative essay “Favourites on the English Stage,” Blair Worden surprisingly asserts that after the early 1600s favoritism “though a regular theatrical subject, is never again quite so dominant a one: not even during the supremacy of Buckingham” (in The World of the Favourite, ed. J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], 172). Beyond citing Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence and Ford’s The Broken Heart as typical of a dramatic trend to “capture the ethical ambivalences of power,” Worden has little to say about Caroline representations of favoritism. 6. Thomas L. Berger, William C. Bradford, and Sidney L. Sondergard, eds., An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45. 7. Even so, the Index provides only a partial list of Caroline plays featuring favorites. For instance, it does not include Lodowick Carlell’s The Deserving Favorite (1629, pub. 1629), presumably because the text of the play does not overtly identify the title character as a “favorite.” 8. Of the more than forty late Jacobean and Caroline plays I examined while researching this essay, approximately fifteen provide support for the argument about the monstrous favorite that follows. To indicate the range of subject positions occupied by the favorite in Caroline drama, however, I want to sketch here a broad typology of favoritism in other plays. In several plays referenced by the Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama, favoritism appears as an issue of peripheral importance: Thomas Goffe’s Orestes (1617, pub. 1633); the anonymous The Costly Whore (1620, pub. 1633); J. W.’s The Valiant Scot (1626, pub. 1637); Aston Cokain’s Trappolin Suppos’d a Prince (1633, pub. 1658); and Alexander Brome’s The Cunning Lovers (1638, pub. 1654). Three plays—Thomas Heywood’s A Maidenhead Well Lost (1633, pub. 1634),

A BEAST SO BLURRED

175

and Carlell’s Osmond the Great Turk (1637, pub. 1657) and The Passionate Lover (1638, pub. 1655)—feature Machiavellian politicians who resemble the monstrous favorites I will discuss further below, yet are not specifically characterized through the language of favoritism. John Denham’s The Sophy (1641, pub. 1642) falls outside the purview of my study since its otherwise monstrous favorite does not manipulate sexual alliances. (Interestingly, the favorite in Robert Baron’s Mirza [1655, pub. 1655], a later play based on the same historical material, does use a concubine to manipulate the king). Other plays feature favorites who are atypically farcical, as in Carlell’s The Fool Would Be a Favorite (1637, pub. 1657), or atypically virtuous, as in Carlell’s The Deserving Favorite (1629, pub. 1629); John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632, pub. 1633) and The Broken Heart (1630, pub. 1633); William Strode’s The Floating Island (1636, pub. 1655); Joseph Rutter’s 2 The Cid (1638, pub. 1640); and Thomas Nabbes’s The Unfortunate Mother (1639, pub. 1640). Significantly, most of these plays give the virtuous favorite a relatively minor role. Finally, because I aim to explore the link between same-sex favoritism and unauthorized heteroerotic relationships, I exclude plays that configure favoritism as an opposite-sex relationship. In William Davenant’s The Fair Favorite (1638, pub. 1673), the eponymous favorite is mistress of the king. Nine plays feature aristocratic women who have male favorites: Thomas May’s Julia Agrippina (1628, pub. 1639); Richard Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange (1631, pub. 1657); James Shirley’s The Humorous Courtier (1631, pub. 1640) and The Opportunity (1634, pub. 1640); Aurelian Townshend’s Tempe Restored (1632, pub. 1631); Nathanael Richards’s Messallina (1635, pub. 1640); John Suckling’s The Sad One (1637, pub. 1659); William Heminges’s The Fatal Contract (1639, pub. 1653); and the anonymous Lady Alimony (1659, pub. 1659). 9. Curtis Perry, “ ‘If Proclamations Will Not Serve’: The Late Manuscript Poetry of James I and the Culture of Libel,” in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 211. See also Thomas Cogswell, “The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 212; Alastair Bellany, “ ‘Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse’: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 299–310; and Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 254–61. In his account of Buckingham’s short-lived popularity after the failure of the Spanish Match in 1623, Thomas Cogswell cites the claim in the anonymous Cabala (1624) that a “triumviri” ruled the kingdom, “whereof

176

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Mario DiGangi Buckingham was the first and chiefest, the Prince second, and the King the last” (“The People’s Love,” 220). Linda Levy Peck describes the “increased span of the seventeenth-century favourite’s control, ranging from law, matters of state, diplomacy and war to foreign plantations, colonies and trade” (“Monopolizing Favour: Structures of Power in the Early Seventeenth-Century English Court,” in Elliott and Brockliss, The World of the Favourite, 60). Quoted in Bellany, Politics, 259. On Charles and Henrietta Maria, see Sharpe, Personal Rule, 170–72, and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 175; on the Castlehaven trial, see Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 111–12, and Bellany, Politics, 261–62; on the reformation of morality, see Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 147, and Curtis Perry, “The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1078. Quoted in Michael B. Young, King James and the History of Homosexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 110. Ibid., 108. Sharpe, Personal Rule, 171. If what provoked during James’s reign was the favorite’s presence in court, what sometimes provoked after Buckingham’s death was the absence of a favorite—or, rather, the fear among some that the queen was fulfilling the role of leading the king astray. In an account of the political impact of Henrietta Maria’s theatrical activities, Julie Sanders remarks that William Prynne spoke for those who “feared that the Queen sought to convert the nation [to Catholicism] by seducing it through her feminine wiles and her erotic performances” (Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome [Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999], 33). Describing the intertwined attacks on Marian devotion and Henrietta Maria during the 1630s, Frances E. Dolan argues that “at the heart of the debates about both Henrietta Maria’s and the Virgin Mary’s authority and influence was proximity to power and, more dangerous, intimacy”: critics alleged that through his affection and dependency, Charles relinquished control to his wife (Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], 122, 124). G. F. Sensabaugh describes Henrietta Maria’s Platonism as “a system of manners and morals” that challenged puritan orthodoxies about love and marriage (The Tragic Muse of John Ford [1944; reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965], 105–51). On the rise of the queen’s faction at court during 1635–1637, see Sharpe, Personal Rule, 537–41; on her power to bestow “social and political favor” on male courtiers, see R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of

A BEAST SO BLURRED

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

177

a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 194–96. That the Ganymede figure could be imaginatively linked with monstrosity, however, is indicated by Henry Peacham’s 1612 emblem “Crimina gravissima,” a strikingly original composite representation of Ganymede as a “foule Sodomitan.” Henry Peacham, Minerva Brittana or a Garden of Heroical Devises (London, 1612), 48. On Davenant’s “searching and incisive” examination of courtly politics through the topics of love and passion, see Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 61–68, 75–82. William Davenant, The Tragedy of Albovine, King of the Lombards (London, 1629), sig. B2r. Quoted in F. W. Fairholt, ed., Poems and Songs Relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham . . . (London, 1850), 49. On manuscript libels against Buckingham, see Marotti, Manuscript, 107–10, and Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616–1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 51–66. Quoted in Fairholt, Poems and Songs, 65. Ibid., 9. Francis Hubert, The Life of Edward II, in The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert, ed. and intro. Bernard Mellor (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1961), 47. Composed between 1597–1600, Hubert’s Edward the Second circulated in manuscript until 1628, when two editions were surreptitiously printed; in 1629 Hubert himself published a revised version. Although we cannot know when specific verses were written or revised, Hubert’s portrait of Gaveston as a monster “huge and vast” would have resonated for Caroline readers. Paul Hammond observes that, unlike Michael Drayton’s Piers Gaveston Earle of Cornwall (written 1593–1594 and revised under James), Hubert’s poem “has no interest” in homoeroticism but rather “focuses on the dangers of kings led astray by evil counsel” (Figuring Sex, 126). My argument about the residual representation of the favorite as Ganymede gains support from the performance and publication history of Marlowe’s Edward II, which continued to be performed (between 1609 and 1619) and published (in 1622) in the later Jacobean period, but not during the Caroline period (Charles R. Forker, ed., Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994], 99). Edward Peyton, The Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuarts . . . (1652), in Secret History of the Court of James the First, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1811), 360. Peyton, Divine Catastrophe, 353, 369. William B. Bidwell and Maija Jansson, eds., Proceedings in Parliament, 1626, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991–1996), 3:288. Ibid., 3:220. I borrow the title and epigraph of my essay from the somewhat differently worded report of Eliot’s speech presented by the Lord Bishop of

178

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Mario DiGangi Norwich to the House of Lords on May 15, 1626 (Bidwell and Jansson, Proceedings, 1:460–61). Jonathan Brown argues that Eliot’s comparison of Buckingham to the stellion epitomizes the “excesses” of the hostile rhetoric to which Rubens’s allegorical painting, Glorification of the Duke of Buckingham (1627), constitutes a response (“ ‘Peut-on Assez Louer Cet Excellent Ministre?’ Imagery of the Favourite in England, France, and Spain,” in Elliott and Brockliss, The World of the Favourite, 226). Bidwell and Jansson, Proceedings, 3:223, 295, 222, 289 n.8, 222. Similarly, Francis Osborne writes that King James’s lascivious kissing of his favorites in public “prompted many to image some things done” in private “that exceed my expressions no less then they do my experience” (quoted in Perry, “Access,” 1073). Even defenders of favoritism might prudently decline to probe the depths of royal affection. Henry Wotton, for instance, “briefely set downe” Charles’s affection for Buckingham “without looking beyond the vaile of the Temple . . . into the secret of high inclinations, since even Satyricall Poets, (who are otherwise of so licentious fancie) are in this poynt modest enough to confesse their ignorance” (Henry Wotton, A Parallel betweene Robert late Earle of Essex, and George late Duke of Buckingham [London, 1641], 2). Writing under James, Edward Forset allegorically compares a prince’s favorites to “the fantasies of the Soule, wherewith he sporteth and delighteth himselfe; which to doe (so the integritie of judgement, and Majestie of State be reteyned) is in neither of both reproveable. Which of us is there that doth not (especially in matters rather pleasing than important) follow and feed his fantasies, give scope unto them, suffer them to prevaile with him, reckoning it a great part of his contentment to have them satisfied? I will refraine to presse the application farther than the well taught Subjects will of themselves conceive” (A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique [London, 1606], 15). Bidwell and Jansson, Proceedings, 3:294. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents (London, 1608), 277. Ibid., 278. Cf. Andrea Alciati, Emblemata [Lyons, 1550], trans. and annotated Betty I. Knott (Aldershot, England: Scolar, 1996). In Albovine, Davenant aptly compares treacherous favorites to small worms: Wise Favourites doe walke I’th darke, and use false lights. Nay, oft disguise Their breadth and stature; seeme lesser then they are: For know, the slender Worme, or nimble Grig, May wriggle downe into th’oblique and low Descent o’th narrow hole; whilst th’oregrowne Snake Peepes at the brimme, but ne’re can view the bottom. (sigs. E1r–E2v)

33. Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 100–133. 34. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 90.

A BEAST SO BLURRED

179

35. Written in 1621, Massinger’s The Maid of Honor introduces characteristics of the favorite that develop into the monstrous figure of later Caroline tragedy, particularly after Buckingham’s death. The oppositional stance to royal absolutism evident in Massinger’s portrayals of favoritism throughout the 1620s is discussed in Albert H. Tricomi, Anticourt Drama in England, 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 156–64; Margot Heinemann, “Drama and Opinion in the 1620s: Middleton and Massinger,” in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 239–40, 253–61; Ira Clark, The Moral Art of Philip Massinger (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 87–92, and Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 45–46; and Robert Y. Turner, “Giving and Taking in Massinger’s Tragicomedies,” Studies in English Literature 35 (1995): 376–79. While strictly not a “Caroline” play, The Maid of Honor was popular throughout the 1630s, and according to its editors “may have remained in the repertory of successive companies at the Phoenix or Cockpit for about 18 years” (Philip Massinger, The Maid of Honor, in The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], 1:113). In the interests of space, I have omitted discussion of two other Massinger plays relevant to the argument of this essay: The Great Duke of Florence (1627, pub. 1636) and The Duke of Milan (1621, pub. 1623). 36. Martin Butler observes a “powerful sentiment” during the 1630s that “men of real worth and fidelity are being deliberately, calculatedly excluded and abused, while the basest parasites are graced as though they only were faithful and true” (Theatre and Crisis, 209). He supports this point through an analysis of favoritism in a play called The Wasp (1630). 37. DiGangi, Homoerotics, 112–24. 38. See Lawrence Venuti’s astute discussion of the “discontinuous characterization of tragicomedy” in The Maid of Honor, which allows characters such as the king and Camiola to articulate ideological positions in conflict with their social stations. Venuti observes that Camiola’s resistance to Roberto expresses an ideology of “bourgeois individualism” that conflicts with her earlier stance as the protector of “an aristocratic code of honor” (Our Halcyon Dayes: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989], 80, 84). 39. Sharpe, Criticism, 24; Venuti, Halcyon Dayes, 197. Ira Clark argues that, although a monarchist, Shirley typically identifies threats posed to political order by irresponsible princes and the corrupt ministers they authorized (Professional, 120–21). 40. Another play that might be considered in this light is Davenant’s tragedy The Unfortunate Lovers (1638, pub. 1643), in which a “politick stout ambitious favorite” named Galeotto schemes to marry his daughter to the Duke Altophil: “By his alliance so confirme my family, / That I shall

180

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

Mario DiGangi need to feare no change of time, / No angrie fate . . .” (William Davenant, The Unfortunate Lovers [London, 1643], dramatis personae, 3). Seeking to ruin the Duke’s mistress, Galeotto slanders her chastity, for which treachery the prince banishes him (12). Galeotto then helps a neighboring king conquer the prince and finally tries to coerce the prince himself into marrying his daughter. Samuel Harding, Sicily and Naples, or, The Fatall Union: A Tragoedy, ed. Joan Warthling Roberts (New York: Garland, 1986), 1.4, p. 67. Wotton, A Parallel, 2. Thomas Killigrew, Claricilla, ed. William T. Reich (New York: Garland, 1980), 2.3.75, 1.2.108. Forset, Comparative Discourse, 15. Wheareas Killigrew’s king tries to obstruct his favorite from marrying into the royal family, T. D.’s The Bloody Banquet (1639, pub. 1639) and Samuel Harding’s Sicily and Naples explore the tragic results of a king allowing an untrustworthy favorite to marry into the royal family. In The Bloody Banquet, the king inadvertently encourages rebellious thoughts in his favorite, Mazeres, when he permits him to court his daughter. Regarding the princess as his path to the crown, Mazeres ends up destroying the royal family through his schemes to possess her. In Sicily and Naples, when the king promises his niece to his favorite, the favorite plots to kill the king and to legitimize his seizure of power through this royal marriage. James Shirley, The Royal Master, in William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, eds., The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, 6 vols. (1833; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 1.1; 4:107, 110. Massinger, The Maid of Honor, 2.2.172. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 42. Sharpe, Personal Rule, 191. Shirley would continue to depict the consequences of monarchical disorder via the figure of a sexually scheming favorite. In The Politician (1639, pub. 1655), the King of Norway marries the widow Marpisa but also courts Albina, the wife of his minion, Gotharius. As the queen’s lover, Gotharius plots to murder the king’s sole heir and to take control of the kingdom. The Politician corroborates Martin Butler’s claim that “plays about princes in love provided useful devices to enable discussion of the problem of a king whose resources and popularity were, in the late 1630s, coming to look increasingly limited . . .” (Theatre and Crisis, 56). James Shirley, The Duke’s Mistress, in Gifford and Dyce, Dramatic Works, 1.1; 4:204. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 44. James Shirley, The Traitor, ed. John Stewart Carter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3.2.78–79. Wotton, A Parallel, 2.

A BEAST SO BLURRED

181

55. I wrote this essay at the invitation of Alan Farmer and Adam Zucker, whose vision and dedication in putting this volume together has never failed to impress. For helpful responses to this piece at several stages of its development, I would like to thank Nicholas Radel, participants in the 2004 Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Localizing Caroline Drama” (under the exemplary leadership of Kate McLuskie), and my friends in the New York City Renaissance reading group. Research for this essay at the Folger Shakespeare Library was generously supported by a George N. Shuster Fellowship from Lehman College.

This page intentionally left blank

7

Dancing M asters and the Production of Cosmopolitan Bodies in Caroline Town C omedy Jean E. Howard

In James Shirley’s The Ball (1632),

1

staged for the Queen’s Men at the Phoenix, a French dancing master named Frisk asserts that he will teach the cynic, Barker, to “dance with all de grace of de body for your good, and my profit” (3.1.45–46).2 A moment later, struggling to teach the novice dancer the basic five-step cinquepace, Frisk enjoins Barker to “stand upright” and to observe the proper “posture of de body,” later reproving him: “hah, you go too fast! You be at Dover, begar, and me be at Greenwish” (3.1.52, 56, 62–63). Eventually, his legs proving recalcitrant, Barker storms away, swearing to be revenged on his friend, Lord Rainbow, who has urged him to submit to the dancing master’s instruction. In this essay I will unpack the complicated social meanings encoded in this exchange. Why, exactly, is it a French dancing master who is instructing Barker and other Londoners on the art of dancing? Why is Frisk so insistent that Barker stand upright, strike a proper posture, and not dance too fast? Why is the cynic so reluctant to engage in dancing lessons, and why does he feel so humiliated by his brief stint as Frisk’s tutee? In exploring these questions, I will argue that London comedies such as The Ball helped to adumbrate new standards of mannerly conduct and bodily deportment for West End audiences. Broad adoption of such practices, though they came to compose a new standard for elite conduct, did not happen without contestation and controversy,

184

Jean E. H oward

however, in part because they were associated with Continental norms and in some quarters with Charles’s French queen, Henrietta Maria, a woman whose love for dancing, theater, and French refinement generated considerable antagonism. William Prynne’s famous attack on women actors as “notorious whores,” for example, is assumed to refer to the queen’s participation in the rehearsals and performance of Walter Montague’s eight-hour court entertainment, The Shepherd’s Paradise, in January 1633.3 Prynne was equally hard on dancing, finding it “scandalous” and delight in dancing “a badge of lewde lascivious women and strumpets.”4 In Shirley’s The Ball, performed in 1632 before the Prynne firestorm hit but well after the queen’s fondness for dancing and masquing had become known, the French dancing master functions, I will argue, not only as a general reference to courtly fashions, but as a crucial figure through whom to consider the consequences of foreign practices for English bodies and for status hierarchies within a particular metropolitan context.

Dancing and the Town Culture of 1630s West End London Caroline comedies, of which Shirley’s The Ball is just one example, were part of the development of what has been called “Town culture” in West End London in the 1620s and 1630s, a culture to which the dancing master was integral. As historians have used the term, “the Town” is a relational concept distinct both from court and city though never entirely separable from either. Putative membership in Town culture depended primarily on certain cultural markers such as wit and taste.5 Leisured, fashionable, and monied, those imagined to belong to the Town were more dependent on manners than bloodlines for their cultural distinction. Unlike their city counterparts, they were not primarily devoted to making money but to displaying the civilized life made possible through its possession. If one had to translate the Town into crudely demographic terms, it would have been composed primarily of sophisticated gentlemen who frequented the Inns of Court, country gentry in town for the season, wealthy merchants free to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and professionals; its geographical center was the West End, that is, the area north of the Thames and south of Holborn and stretching from Westminster in the West to the Inns of Court in the East.6 By the 1630s this area was becoming one of the most fashionable districts in greater London, and Caroline Town comedies often refer

Caroline Town C omedy

185

to the parks and important new social spaces within this emerging West End world. Many of the fashionable places around which the Town constituted itself displayed a cosmopolitan mixture of home-grown and foreign elements. A bellwether of things to come, the earl, of Salisbury’s exclusive shopping arcade, the New Exchange (opened in 1609 on the south side of the Strand), specialized in upscale consumer goods, many of them foreign in origin. For example, among the items on display in the china shop that Salisbury had especially fitted out for the official opening of the Exchange were a range of exotica including many kinds of porcelain China ware, glassware, and ostrich eggs.7 By the 1630s ambitious housing projects were undertaken in the area, the most famous being the earl of Bedford’s Covent Garden venture. Around a piazza laid out in the Italian manner, Bedford had a planned and uniform series of residences built, with an Inigo Jones church gracing the west side of the square.8 Continental fashions in architecture thus found an English home within the West End. When not promenading in the piazza at Covent Garden, West Enders could visit other sites of fashionability including Hyde Park, the Spring Gardens, and the Mulberry Gardens, both gardens part of what was to become St. James Park and partially open to the public. Among the attractions of the Spring Garden were orchards, lawns, bowling greens, a bathing pond, a butt for archery practice, part of James I’s menagerie of exotic beasts, and an ordinary.9 In the Mulberry Gardens James tried to establish a silk-growing industry. Hence the planting of the hundreds of mulberry trees from which the place took its name. Parts of the West End were thus versions of the Wunderkammer writ large, places where English eyes confronted what was new, exotic, and strange, but in settings woven into the fabric of daily life. To be part of West End Town culture required certain skills, many of which had to be learned, some of which were themselves regarded as foreign in origin. Without these skills, people lacked the cultural capital that would let them belong to the West End’s aristocracy of the tasteful and to move with ease and assurance through its fashionable spaces.10 In Shirley’s 1635 play, The Lady of Pleasure, a young scholar, Frederick, is brought to London by his aunt, Lady Aretina, who is appalled by his clothes, his manners, and even the way he holds his hat. He is immediately enjoined to forget Latin and Greek, the languages of the university, and learn French, the proper tongue for a gentleman about town. More importantly, he is to have a French tailor make him new clothes and teach him how to wear them, and he is to employ masters to instruct him in fencing, singing, dancing, and riding, as well as in

186

Jean E. H oward

French (4.2.46–47).11 Only under the tutelage of all of these has he any hope of becoming a gentleman fit for fashionable company. Of all these officers of cultural instruction, the French dancing master has a particular prominence within Caroline comedy. In many West End plays, skill in dancing is a key index of fashionable status, making the dancing master perforce important as the agent of instruction. In The Ball, the dancing master is Frisk; in Brome’s The City Wit (1630), it is Footwell, an identity assumed by a failing merchant turned dancing master; in Brome’s The New Academy (1635), it is Lightfoot, a specifically French identity assumed by the poor brother of a wealthy merchant; in Newcastle’s The Variety (1640), it is Galliard, a genuine Frenchman like Frisk. The popularity of the figure continued after the Restoration. In 1662 Samuel Pepys saw a play he called The French Dancing Master which critics have thought might be a reference to The Ball. Pepys praised the dancing master’s part as “the best in the world.”12 Dancing masters such as are found in the drama seem to have existed in some numbers within the actual social world of the West End. Records left by those who attended the Inns of Court suggest that gentlemen who enrolled there often spent as much time in the courtly trivium of fencing, dancing, and music as in learning law. Wilfrid R. Prest argues that many acquired private tutors to teach them these arts while others attended schools of dancing, fencing, and music scattered near the Inns.13 In the late 1620s and 1630s Shirley lived near the Inns of Court and was officially admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1634. Many of his friends and patrons had connections with the Inns, and he would have been familiar with their practices.14 Dancing masters were also an important feature of court society. Buckingham, for example, prided himself on his skillful dancing which he first learned in France. When in England, he kept several French dancing masters in his employ, along with a French barber, a French fencing master, and a French musician to give him singing lessons.15 One of his dancing masters, Barthelemy de Montagut, dedicated a dance treatise to him and went on to become a groom in Henrietta Maria’s Privy Chamber in 1630. He is the model for the figure of Galliard in Newcastle’s The Variety (figure 7.1).16 In the drama, the dancing master is always male, though his masculinity and that of his clients is sometimes disputed; he is usually French; and that alien status could make him either silly or attractive. Frisk’s comic French accent, for example, does nothing for his dignity, but that does not make him any less in demand. He offers a skill regarded as the cosmopolitan acquisition of men and women of fashion,

187

Figure 7.1 The Dancing Master in Newcastle’s The Variety is here depicted on the title page of Francis Kirkham’s The Wits, or, Sport upon Sport (London, 1662). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

188

Jean E. H oward

one that in the words of John Playford makes “the body active and strong, gracefull in deportment, and a quality very much beseeming a Gentleman.”17 The gentle person who obtained the services of a French dancing master was embracing fashionable practices associated with Continental sophistication and submitting his or her body to new disciplinary regimes. Whether the dancing master was associated with the court or the commercial schools of the West End, his purpose was to inculcate what both Jorge Arditi and Anna Bryson have identified as modes of civility that became increasingly important in regulating elite conduct as the seventeenth century progressed.18 A pan-European ideal, civility was nonetheless inflected differently in various national contexts. Concerned with propriety of behavior, civility involved techniques of self-presentation, including the mannerly control of the body, as well as regard for the sensibilities of others. As an ideal, it was linked to the courtesy tradition that had sprung up to regulate the behavior of courtiers, but civility had a slightly different social meaning. Especially in the English context, it did not necessarily refer to the behavior governing courtiers, but to the codes of conduct governing social interactions within “good” society, however variously defined.19 Bryson has argued that in the seventeenth century, civility became an ideal within urbane London culture, the West End equally with the court.20 Of course, the norms of civility were not established overnight; rather, their growing importance was the consequence of considerable cultural labor, some of it undertaken at the site of the stage. Shirley’s play, then, should not so much be read as an illustration of ideas about civil behavior, but rather as a performance text through which those ideas were constructed and given physical expression. The Ball is an unusually productive work through which to explore Caroline comedy’s representation of the French dancing master and his effect upon the polite society where his instruction was sought. I will focus first on Frisk’s role in molding social bodies and on the ambivalences specific to his identity as an alien, though one granted a major role in constructing fashionable forms of English identity. Simultaneously I will explore the recurring tension between emerging forms of status premised in part on the decorous deportment of the body that Frisk teaches and older forms of status based on land, title, or money. Alternatively assimilating and repudiating practices perceived as courtly and foreign, Shirley’s play attempts to define a mode of English fashionability not corroded by an improper embrace of French practices.

Caroline Town C omedy

189

The Ball and the Molding of Fashionable Bodies The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists Shirley’s The Ball as the first recorded use of the word “ball” to mean “a social assembly for the purpose of dancing” (2). The play’s commitment to emerging fashions is thus blazoned forth in its title; it boldly dramatizes a new social practice and those who take part in it. In fact, much of The Ball is taken up with “training exercises” as the men and women of the West End get themselves ready for this event that takes place in the house of a city merchant (location unspecified) which Lord Rainbow, the ball’s organizer, has rented for the occasion (5.1.1–5). So what happened at a ball? According to act five of Shirley’s play, the main activity was the dancing undertaken by the fashionable people who are Rainbow’s guests. There were, however, some preliminaries. First a golden ball descended from the ceiling, signaling the beginning of a short masque in which Venus and Diana struggle for control of Cupid (5.1. 247–302). This was followed by an antimasque danced by one of the characters dressed like a satyr. Then the golden ball was tossed into the assemblage. The import of catching the ball is not entirely clear, but probably it determined a temporary “king” or “queen” of the night’s revels or entitled the catcher to lead the first general dance.21 After this dancing, there was a banquet, and then more dancing. “The ball,” then, has two meanings. It refers both to the event at which the dancing and the masque occur and to the decorative ball that descends to signal the beginning of the festivities. The golden ball, in turn, suggests the fatal ball which Paris famously gave to Venus, instead of Diana or Juno, a choice that eventually precipitated the Trojan War. The masque alludes to this event when Venus says to the assembled gentlefolk: “These are all/ Met in honour of my Ball,/ Which Paris gave [on] Ida hill” (5.1.255–57). The reference underscores the competitive relationships that the ball incites—who is the fairest? who the most graceful dancer? who the favorite of Lord Rainbow, the ball’s patron?—as well as the possibility that the ball is a destructive or disreputable event. This possibility, as I will show further below, attends most of the fashionable practices that the play dramatizes, and not only the ball. Moreover, the fact that the ball as an event includes a masque, but no royalty in attendance, suggests that while the court serves as a point of reference throughout the play, its practices are being incorporated into a social milieu of “gentlepersons” whose orbit is particular to itself.

190

Jean E. H oward

A use of the word “bal” not recorded in the OED suggests something further about both the origins of this institution and the controversy it could occasion. In Robert Dallington’s “Method for Travell” (1605), which formed the preliminary to his View of France, he warned of some of the dangers of travel in that country. French wines, he asserted, might not agree with English constitutions; the French obsession with tennis could be dangerous for the bodies and purses of Englishmen; and French dancing, while much in request with the English, should be pursued sparingly. As a cautionary tale, he tells of a countriman of ours, well seene in arts and language, well stricken in yeares, a mourner for his second wife, a father of mariageable children, who with other his booke studies abroade, joyned also the exercise of dancing: it was his hap in an honorable Bal (as they call it) to take a fall, which in mine opinion was not so disgracefull as the dancing it selfe, to a man of his stuffe.22

It is not clear exactly in what this “bal” consisted. Maybe it was simply the generic name for a dance or dancing, or perhaps it referred to some kind of assembly for that purpose. In any case, the fact that it involved a fall suggests that Dallington’s countryman may have been engaging in dancing that required acrobatic leaps, such as the capriole, which some dancing masters warned against attempting in public, lest bad execution make one look ridiculous or even take a fall.23 What is most striking in this account, however, is Dallington’s outraged reaction to his countryman’s participation in such a frivolous pastime. While an “honorable ball” might be appropriate for a young man, a man of years and affairs should not be engaged in such an activity, whether or not he falls down doing it. Moreover, Dallington’s outrage is couched in the context of a more general diatribe about the dangers of French practices on English bodies, whether those practices involve drinking too much wine, playing too much tennis, or falling down while dancing. In Shirley’s play the ball is coded as a French practice. It is said to have been “transported hither by some ladies/ That affect tennis” (4.3.121–22). Tennis had long been associated with France, in Dallington’s report and elsewhere.24 In Shirley’s play, the “Frenchness” of the ball is heightened by the fact that all the preparations for it are overseen by the officious Frisk. He not only teaches everyone the dance steps they will need to know, but, taking “much trouble in my little head” (5.1.13), he arranges for perfuming the room where the dancing will occur and at Lord Rainbow’s direction

Caroline Town C omedy

191

has devised the masque for the ladies in which he himself takes the part of Cupid (4.2.104–34). While the “Frenchness” of the ball, as I will discuss further below, contributes to suspicions that it might be a scandalous or frivolous event, this same quality also enhances the ball’s fashionable cache. Those who will attend the ball know that they have to acquire some new and difficult skills and that only the French dancing master is able to impart to them. Scenes of dancing and dance instruction punctuate the play, revealing the effort necessary to school bodies into proper dancing postures and serving to separate those who can attain mastery of these skills from those who cannot—in effect creating a new kind of social distinction based on the ability to conform to French standards of bodily control. Importantly, these scenes also permit the stage itself to become a showcase for displaying both properly and improperly educated bodies. Martin Butler has argued that 1630s Town drama “was providing this [fashionable Caroline] society with models for its behaviour. Plays by Brome, Shirley and Davenant offered the audience images of themselves in parks, squares, taverns and gaming houses, supplying standards against which forms and codes of behaviour could be established, scrutinized and adjusted, and that these comedies of manners are among the best plays of the period is a measure of the importance of this function for the theaters.”25 I agree, but wish to underscore the importance of physical performance to the way in which the stage addressed the issue of the mannerly body. While the theater may not have been well-equipped to showcase a gentleman’s skills at horsemanship, it was suited for the display of dancing bodies. In fact, as scholars have long known, dancing was an integral part of the practices of the early modern stage.26 Jigs followed plays; dances occurred between acts in the hall theaters; and dances were incorporated into any number of dramas. In Antony and Cleopatra (1607), for example, Antony and Enobarbus lead a drunken dance aboard Pompey’s ship; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) rustics dance a Bergomask at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta; in Thomas Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women (1615) a pregnant woman disguised as a male page goes into labor as the result of over-vigorous dance instruction. In every case, stage dancing displays the physical skills of the trained actor whether he is flawlessly executing a stately measure or parodying dancing competence with deliberately ungainly displays. The dancing in The Ball is different from early instances of stage dancing in several ways. First, the dancing in this play is the conscious object of discussion from the play’s first scene when Monsieur Frisk makes his initial appearance and is characterized by a contemptuous

192

Jean E. H oward

bystander as “the court dancing weasel” (1.1.129). This description suggests that even though Frisk’s skills are much in demand, there is something perhaps a little contemptible or a little ridiculous about him and about his art. Throughout the play a subtle tension persists between embracing and denigrating the dance and the dancing master. Second, privileged forms of dancing are associated in the play, not with what is traditional, but with what is new and what must be learned, both in terms of steps and in terms of fashionable execution. In act two, scene two, during his first scene of instruction, Frisk repeatedly reproves the three assembled ladies for their graceless ways, saying that they “trot, trot, trot” (2.2.9) and will “be laughed when you come to de ball” (2.2.12–13), associating the graceless, unschooled body with social humiliation. Interjecting his instruction with a healthy dollop of French phrases (“plait-il,” “pourquoy,” “par ma foy,” “Allez, allez,” “fort bon”), Frisk repeatedly emphasizes the necessity of having erect posture. To Lucina he says: “look up your countenance, your English man spoil you, he no teach you look up” (2.2.29–30), while he castigates men who “dance lop, lop, with de lame leg as they want crushes, begore, and look for argent in the ground, pshaw!” (2.2.38–40). The elegant body is the erect body;27 moreover, it is a body committed to graceful movement. Frisk dislikes women who trot and men who lop when they dance, activities suggesting jerky movement and, in the man’s case, deformity. By contrast, Lucina is enjoined to “carry your body in the swimming fashion” (2.2.30–31), gliding, not trotting. What they dance is also important. Rosamond wants to practice the coranto, a rapidly executed courtly dance that had outpaced the galliard in fashionability by the second decade of the seventeenth century. It involved sets of couples who together circled the dancing hall with ever-quickening steps.28 It required skill and teamwork. Lucina, however, calls for a country dance, and it is “a new country dance” that the group eventually sets to practicing. Country dancing, often performed to popular tunes, typically was opposed to forms of courtly dancing because it emphasized rougher movements, groups of dancers rather than couples, and often bodies that bent parallel to the ground rather than being held elegantly erect.29 However, fashion can refunction popular practices for its own ends, and that is clearly what is happening here. The “new” country dances are obviously ones that alter received materials, making country dances into fashionable ones. In 1651 John Playford published the first dancing manual in English to transcribe actual dance steps. His treatise was entitled The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and Easie

Caroline Town C omedy

193

Figure 7.2 John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (London, 1651). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance. While most of the dances are traditional in nature, he does include at least one courtly dance, the pavane, and the title page to the treatise visually places the scene of dancing in a fairly elegant hall, rather than outdoors or in the midst of a rustic festival (see figure 7.2). The woodcut foregrounds a fashionably dressed man and woman gesturing decorously with their hands as they prepare to dance. Between them stands a naked Cupid, his bow and arrow stowed in a quiver on his back, and in his hands a stringed instrument like a fiddle or violin. Clearly, this Cupid is not promoting lascivious desire but controlled amour, the meeting of man and woman in patterned, decorous movement. Around the edges of the room, other couples seem poised to join the dance. Whatever the origins of the dances Playford has transcribed, the title page shows a scene of restrained fashionability. So, I assume, it is with the “new” country dances of The Ball. They may have country origins, but they are being inserted into a new performance context that elides their rustic origin. The play’s other scenes of dance instruction also emphasize grace and the difference between refined movements and crude. When Frisk attempts to instruct Barker, he tries to elicit “grace” from him

194

Jean E. H oward

(3.1.40) and castigates his rude movements as “horse-play, begar, for de stable, not de chamber” (3.1.41), stressing the desired distance of the dancing hall from the low matter of the stable. Later he says that Barker’s legs “have de poc, or something dat make ’em no vell, and frisk” (3.1.78–79). They are diseased legs, and decidedly not “frisk” like the dancing master’s own, nor like Lord Rainbow’s, who, once Barker departs in a huff, exits the stage dancing with Frisk as the dancing master also fiddles and cries “Allez, ha! Bon!” (3.1.92). This is a virtuoso performance emphasizing the skills both of the highest ranking man in the play, Lord Rainbow, and those of his frisky-footed, fiddling instructor. The scene also suggests that the properly schooled dancing leg, especially that of the man, might be an object of erotic desire. At one point, in playing a trick on a knight named Lamont, Lucina says that “I had a dream last night; methought I saw you/ Dance so exceeding rarely, that I fell/ In love––,” to which Lamont interjects, “In love with me?” And she replies, “With your legs, sir” (2.2.149–51). The fetishized body part here is the leg, opening the possibility that the skill of the dancing man may translate into erotic desirability and enhanced status. The scenes of dance instruction are among the most interesting in The Ball because they reveal the importance of a properly disciplined body to the acquiring of fashionable status. All the characters want to be at the ball and to have the dancing skills to acquit themselves there with honor. But these scenes also raise the important question of just who can acquire such a body. The availability of a dancing master who gives lessons seems to promise that anyone can learn the skill of dancing.30 However, it is culturally and politically important that some can not learn lest the art of elegant dancing become common and lose its function as a mark of cultural distinction. Barker is singled out, for example, as someone who cannot seem to learn to dance properly. In his first dancing lesson he storms off the stage. Later, urged to learn to dance by Honoraria, he apparently agrees to take part in the ball by dancing in the antimasque that is part of the evening’s entertainment. Unfortunately, he plays a satyr whose rough, animalistic movements merely accentuate the refinement of the other dancers. Though he vows to “do better shortly” (5.1.316), he becomes the butt of everyone’s laughter. Disdaining to love him, Honoraria cruelly says: I am not mad to love a satyr, For that’s thy best condition. Judgment all! How scurvily this civility shows in him. Faith, rail, and keep your humour still; it shows excellent. Does he not become the beast? (5.1.319–23)

Caroline Town C omedy

195

There is a brutishness about Barker that is revealed rather than overcome through his rough mode of dancing. Failing at civility, he rushes off vowing to revenge himself on his tormentors. His failure, however, is a necessary foil to the successful dancing of the others. The scenes of dancing and dance instruction are important in another way, namely, in underscoring the reliance of the would-be English dancers upon the skills of a Frenchman. To be part of sophisticated Town culture, English bodies must meet French standards, assume French postures. Many characters spend a good deal of time trying to master the skills Frisk teaches, no matter how comic his accent or how foreign his origins. To dance in the French fashion, and thus to avoid English rudeness, is mainly represented as a good thing—who, after all, would be Barker if he could be Rainbow, the man who cannot dance properly as opposed to Frisk’s best pupil? In fact, Lord Rainbow’s exalted rank—he is the play’s only titled character—seems to be confirmed by the fact that he dances so well. Perfect control of the body is thus “naturally” made to coincide with traditional forms of status. Nonetheless, Barker’s initial dismay at being forced to learn fashionable dances, along with the comic aspects of Frisk’s representation and the derogatory description of him as the “court dancing weasel,” all raise subtle questions about the consequences of Frisk’s cultural centrality. Might perhaps a passion for the foreign import, “the ball,” and wholehearted submission to the Frenchman’s tutelage do something undesirable to the ball’s enthusiasts—make the men less manly, the women more frivolous, and all of them less “English”? Is the “court weasel” perhaps bringing unwholesome influences into the Town from Henrietta Maria’s courtly ambit? These are the slightly scandalous questions the play cautiously invites and, especially in act five, delicately negotiates. In thinking about them, one must remember that Shirley was not an enemy of the court; in fact, quite the opposite. All of his plays but one were performed at the Phoenix or at Salisbury Court by the Queen’s Men; in 1633 in the dedication to Bird in a Cage, he was to make fun of Prynne, her sworn opponent; in the same year he was appointed Valet to the Chamber of Queen Henrietta Maria; in 1634 he helped to write the important masque, The Triumph of Peace, which Gray’s Inn presented at court. None of this suggests that he would adopt a satirical stance toward the court and its ways, and, in fact, Shirley has most often been read as a devoted royalist.31 But as Martin Butler has suggested, royalist politics did not necessarily preclude

196

Jean E. H oward

criticism of the court, not even for Shirley whom Butler sees as repeatedly criticizing the court’s monopolizing tendencies.32 The point, I think, is not to assume in advance the politics of Shirley’s representations. In this regard, it is important to remember that The Ball was initially subjected to some act of censorship on the part of the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert. He wrote: In the play of The Ball, written by Sherley, and acted by the Queens players, ther were divers personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the court, that I took it ill, and would have forbidden the play, but that Biston [Christopher Beeston] promiste many things which I found faulte withall should be left out, and that he would not suffer it to be done by the poett any more, who deserves to be punisht; and the first that offends in this kind, of poets or players, shall be sure of publique punishment.33

Despite the efforts of many critics, it is not clear which court figures were being ridiculed, not even which characters in the play were supposed to personate them.34 What is plain, however, is that Shirley was sufficiently familiar with the court to make fun of some of its members or of those in its penumbra and that in doing so he flattered his audience’s own knowledge of court matters. In fact, the play undoubtedly established its status as a fashionable entertainment in part by its circulation of scandal about court figures as well as by its attention to “the ball” as a new and exclusive form of entertainment. In both regards, Shirley’s play helped to articulate the defining features of Town culture and to negotiate its knowing, emulative, yet slightly uneasy relationship to the court. In The Ball the fashionable dancing which is so central to West End society has, then, both courtly and foreign affiliations. To dance swimmingly, to stand erect, to avoid lopping and hopping, these are all signs of belonging to a newly forming social group, one that takes its cue from the Continental and courtly models inculcated by the slightly ridiculous Monsieur Frisk, but that ultimately must find ways to maintain a porous but real difference from the social world above it. As is true with all social groups, exclusion is the necessary boundary of inclusion. Hence the importance of Barker, the man who can take dancing lessons but who finally cannot dance, his attempts at “civility” serving merely as occasions for mirth. Hence, also, the importance of another of the play’s most scorned figures, the putative traveler, Freshwater, who reveals in spades that not all emulation of

Caroline Town C omedy

197

things foreign (or courtly) is a good thing. This character, who in act one, scene one arrives in London with tales of his travels, might be supposed to have an especially privileged relationship to Continental sophistication. Rather than turning to a French dancing master who lives in London, Freshwater purports to have had direct access to all the cultural resources of France, Italy, and beyond. But as quickly becomes clear, Freshwater’s main function is to provide another potent example of someone who cannot make the cut in fashionable society. Unlike those who achieve French standards of sophistication, Freshwater’s proves to be a fraudulent cosmopolitanism. Travel abroad had a long history of being perceived as a source of contamination as well as a possible benefit to the English who undertook it and to the state they served.35 Dallington is typical when he warns Englishmen abroad not to grow corrupt in mind or manners or to lose their religious faith (sigs. B1v, B2v). The traveling self was frequently perceived as a permeable self that might improperly take the imprint of new surroundings. Dallington urges travelers to shed the clothing and manners of foreign lands when they arrive home since to do otherwise is “a notorious affectatio[n]” (sig. C1v). The proper goal of a traveler is “his ripening in knowledge, and the end of his knowledge is the service of his countrie” (sig. B1r). Learning languages while abroad is especially desirable, but gentlemanly skills such as riding and fencing are also valued (sigs. B2v, C1r). Almost from its inaugural moments, however, London comedy seized on the comic potential of the traveler. As early as Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of His Humor (1599), the “bad traveler”—in this case the ridiculous Puntavarlo—was used to demonstrate the affectation and the folly of those whose encounter with the foreign was a matter of self-aggrandizement and not of useful knowledge. In The Ball the putative traveler, Freshwater, is the epitome of the man who does it wrong. His presence underscores the tact required to imbibe foreign ways without becoming ridiculous, a tact he lacks. His name, moreover, hints at a truth he wants to hide, namely, that he has not actually crossed any salt water, in fact, has been no further than Gravesend and so is a total pretender to foreign knowledge. That does not stop Freshwater, however, from attempting to impress his stay-at-home countrymen with the sophistication he has supposedly acquired abroad and the new inventions he has encountered. In a parody of travelers’ narratives, he recounts hearing in Venice of chopinos made with such rare art, That, worn by a lady when she means to dance,

198

Jean E. H oward Shall, with their very motion, sound forth music, And by a secret sympathy, with their tread Strike any tune that, without other instrument, Their feet both dance and play. (1.1.141–46)

These fantastic magical shoes that both dance and play music would, of course, obviate the need for the wearer either to learn the arts of dancing or fiddling since the shoes would do both. Freshwater’s attraction to such a rare device is understandable, since he, too, would reap the benefits of travel without actually doing it, without learning the languages that would make it profitable, and without engaging in the rigorous dance instruction that would make magical chopinos unnecessary. Wanting the status that comes from foreign travel, he has disciplined neither his mind nor his body to the tasks it requires. Through Freshwater, the play mocks not only the short-cut approach to cosmopolitan accomplishments, but also an over-investment in foreign ways and a merely reflexive contempt for all things English. Coming to Lady Rosamond after an English painter has been doing her portrait, Freshwater reproves her judgment “to let an Englishman draw your picture,/ And such rare monsieurs in town” (3.3.35–36). In the 1630s, the artists Mytens, Van Dyck, and Hollar were all at work in London, and Freshwater may be imagining them as the proper standard of artistic reference.36 Elaborating further his desire to have a Dutchman paint her face, he says: “You must encourage strangers, while you live;/ It is the character of our nation, we are famous/ For dejecting our own countrymen” (3.3.39–41). “Dejecting” his countrymen, Freshwater has lost himself in the vacuous adulation of all things foreign even while lying about his exposure to them. His is a specious cosmopolitanism most hilariously revealed when, in the last act, he tries to impress several ladies with a farcically jumbled, but interminably lengthy account of European sites. Of Paris, for example, he says that it is “a pretty hamlet, and much in the situation like Dunstable; ’tis in the province of Alcantara, some three leagues distant from Seville, from whence we have our oranges” (5.1.40–42). Brushing aside the suggestion that Seville is in Spain not France, he continues: “Do not I know Paris? It was built by the youngest son of King Priam, and was called by his name; yet some call it Lutetia, because the gentlewomen there play so well upon the lute” (5.1.50–53). When overheard by Lord Rainbow, this remarkable rant exposes Freshwater for the charlatan he is. But the gap between the false cosmopolitan’s behavior and the sophistication to which he lays claim has been revealed in the details

Caroline Town C omedy

199

of his comportment long before this hilariously self-destructive speech. Queried by the cynic Barker about the source of the stench that emanates from his person, Freshwater says it cannot be his socks because he wears none (2.1.42), a clear offense against decorum in dress. Barker then declares it must be Freshwater’s breath and urges him to go home and perfume it. The would-be traveler does not take care to make his body inoffensive to others.37 Moreover, when addressed directly in French, he cannot reply (2.1.91–92). In a play that foregrounds the useful services of a French dancing master, Freshwater is a limit case, an example of how not to engage, or pretend to engage, with fashionable foreign ways. If acquaintance with Continental arts can in theory raise one’s status, a faked, slavish, or unskilled relationship to them can only render one foolish.

Manners, Civility, and Social Status In The Ball, many of the questions about how most appropriately to incorporate foreign and courtly practices into Town culture are brought to a head in the plot in which four men of the Town seek the hand of Lucina, the rich widow they all desire. This plot also reveals that manners and civil deportment can rival rank or wealth as forms of cultural distinction. Elegant dancing, a signature of the welldisciplined body, is part of a larger complex of behaviors distinguishing the truly civil from those whose high birth is their chief endowment. In this plot, birth and manners, new and old forms of status, vie for supremacy, chiefly in the persons of Bostock, a cousin of Lord Rainbow who is excessively proud of this connection, and Winfield, a man of moderate fortune who is a colonel in the army. These two men, along with several others, compete for Lucina’s hand. Wishing to winnow her suitors, Lucina plays a trick on all four of them, making each think he is her choice. When the trick is revealed, Bostock’s response is telling, and tellingly different from Winfield’s. Going to Lucina’s house, Bostock rails against her, braying away until he admits to exhaustion (3.4.50–51). This provides the opportunity for Winfield to step forward and strike Bostock. Although he too has been tricked and mocked by this witty widow, and although he urged the rest of the jilted suitors to come and rail against the cruelty of their beloved, Winfield uses the moment he has carefully orchestrated to separate himself from them. After striking Bostock, he rushes to defend Lucina, denouncing the “impudence” of the railers, bewailing the

200

Jean E. H oward

“dishonor” done the lady (3.4.61,65), and ending with the following declaration: Was ever civil lady so abus’d In her own house by ingrateful horse-leeches? Could your corrupted natures find no way But this to recompense her noble favours, Her courteous entertainments? Would any heathens [Have] done like to you? Admit she was So just to say she could see nothing in you Worthy her dearer thought, (as, to say truth, How could a creature of her wit and judgment Not see how poor and miserable things You are at best?) must you, impudent, In such a loud and peremptory manner, Disturb the quiet of her thoughts and dwelling? Gentlemen? Rather hinds, scarce fit to mix, Unless you mend your [manners], with her drudges. (3.4.80–94)

The language of Winfield’s self-serving speech is important. Praising the wit and judgment of this “civil lady,” he derides his competitors as dishonorable hinds, horseleeches, and heathens, terms designed to emphasis their “low” qualities and their lack of manners. Their railing at a lady in her own house proves his point. The striking contrast between Winfield’s behavior, however calculated, and that of the other three suitors immediately leads Lucina to say to her attendant: “This shows a nobleness, does’t not, Scutilla?” (3.4.95). Winfield’s manners have won him the lady’s approbation. The consequences of this encounter for Bostock’s status are dire. His social position has depended entirely on his claim to be Lord Rainbow’s relation, but his blood connection to nobility is not enough to insure his social status if he cannot also comport himself like an honorable man. Struck before witnesses by Winfield, he should retaliate, but does not, though he boasts to Lord Rainbow of having wounded Winfield. When his lie is discovered, Lord Rainbow denounces him for having besmirched the honor of an ancient family. Rainbow proclaims: “we inherit nothing truly/ But what our actions make us worthy of./ And are you not a precious gentleman?/ Thou art not worth my steel” (4.1.216–19). In short, a gentleman is as a gentleman does, and Bostock is forced to carry a letter to Lucina in which Rainbow disassociates himself from his cousin’s dishonorable actions. Bostock thus fails on two fronts. He is unmannerly to a lady and inattentive to the necessity of redressing affronts to his honor by

Caroline Town C omedy

201

other men. Noble blood alone is revealed as insufficient to make him an object of desire or a winner in the competition for social supremacy. Shirley uses Winfield, by contrast, to define the contours of proper masculinity. Stung by Lucina’s trick, he nonetheless restrained his anger and channeled it into the chastisement of his rival and an elaborate defense of the lady’s honor. In Winfield, Shirley embodies a model of civil behavior that differs from that of the satyr-like cynic, Barker, the ignoble Bostock, and the false cosmopolitan, Freshwater. Crucially, Winfield is also set apart from the play’s most privileged figure, Lord Rainbow, patron of the ball and an agile, avid dancer. Through the juxtaposition of Rainbow and Winfield, Shirley poses the most delicate questions concerning the Town’s proper relationship to the court and its fashionable foreign practices. Rainbow is the play’s only lord and the only figure (other than the court “weasel,” Frisk) who has an undeniable claim to be part of court society. Though scrupulous about certain points of honor and behavior (such as redressing his cousin Bostock’s insult to Lucina by sending her both a letter of apology and a rich jewel), Rainbow is not so scrupulous in sexual matters. He is a libertine of questionable bodily health. When two women, Honaria and Rosamond, reveal their interest in him, Rainbow insists that he cannot possibly choose between them and that they must decide which of them is the “fairest, wisest, sweetest” (1.2.162). That one will have his allegiance. He encourages both, but refuses to commit to either. At the ball, the women correct his presumption by having him draw lots for them, but presenting him with two blank papers, signifying their mutual withdrawal from his flirtatious advances. Chastened, Rainbow vows temperance and gives each a jewel saying that “hereafter I shall pay/ To your true virtues better service than/ So unnecessary trials” (5.1.228–30). The fact remains, however, that he shows no interest in marriage at any time in the play and has had to be rebuked into “temperance” by Honoria and Rosamund’s trick. Though Henrietta Maria and Charles presented themselves as a pattern of chaste love,38 Shirley’s presentation of Rainbow hints that not all courtiers were equally circumspect in sexual matters. Equally problematic are Barker’s hints that Rainbow’s body is also marked by a life of sexual liberty. Barker declares he will not flatter men like Rainbow “Whose bodies are so rotten they’ll scarce keep/ Their souls from breaking out” (4.1.37–38). Elsewhere, he warns Honoria away from Rainbow by claiming she would not be attracted to the lord’s person if she were “acquainted with his body” and knew

202

Jean E. H oward

about “his baths and physic” (3.3.101–2). Barker, of course, is not entirely to be trusted, since he himself wants Honoria, but the suggestion lingers that Lord Rainbow is not entirely “clean.” While Freshwater’s stench is easily discernible, the implied venereal imperfections of Rainbow are more hidden. The competing discourses surrounding Lord Rainbow thus point productively to part of what is at issue in the Town’s incorporation of fashionable court practices. Lord Rainbow is at once the epitome of fashionability and a libertine whose behavior subtly calls into question his social preeminence. He both is and is not a proper model for West End emulation. Moreover, because he is the ball’s chief promoter, suggestions of sexual impropriety persist around that institution, as well. While early in the play Rosamond proclaims that she “need not blush” (1.2.20–21) for staying all night in Lord Rainbow’s company if they are at a ball, her need to assert the innocence of a blushless face suggests that others might read such nocturnal adventures less charitably. In contrast, Winfield is suspicious of the ball and firm in his pursuit of marriage, not sexual dalliance. Through him the play articulates a standard of sexual conduct that embraces worldly sophistication and yet is distinct from Rainbow’s bantering and indiscriminate pursuits. When Lucina says she will marry Winfield if he will swear that he is “honest,” meaning sexually chaste, he refuses, saying that his age, nearly thirty, and his profession, that of a soldier, militate against his chastity. In fact, he takes offense at her question, challenging her thus: Why, look upon me, lady, and consider, With some discretion, what part about me Does look so tame you should suspect me honest? (4.2.88–90)

He offers his robust body as proof of sexual desirability and sexual experience. And he draws on the language of fashion to justify his behavior: We vow no chastity till we marry, lady; ’Tis out of fashion, indeed, with gentlemen To be honest and of age together; ’tis sufficient We can provide to take our pleasures, too, Without infection: a sound body is A treasure, I can tell you; yet if that Would satisfy you, I should make no scruple To swear; but otherwise you must pardon us, As we must pardon you. (4.3.103–11)

Caroline Town C omedy

203

Sexual experience, for men of mature age, is “in fashion,” with the proviso that in taking their pleasure, the gentlemen in question retain sound bodies. That he is, indeed, sound of body, Winfield is prepared to swear, providing a nice contrast to the reputedly corrupt body of Lord Rainbow. Winfield marks out a sphere of conduct in which manliness is defined in part by (hetero)sexual prowess, but where regard for the self and for others demands that sexuality be conducted in such a way that the body does not become diseased. He disciplines the body, not to chastity, but to health. By his honesty, moreover, he distinguishes himself both from “Some silkworm o’the City, or the Court” (4.3.138) who for Lucina’s estate would swear away his soul and vow a chastity he did not have. Not of the court or the city, Winfield represents the space between, the space of the Town, and he claims the status of a gentleman and a soldier (the terms by which he swears when pledging sexual fidelity to Lucina after marriage [4.3.154–55]). He has traveled abroad as a soldier and can speak French, as he demonstrates when exposing Freshwater’s linguistic deficiencies (2.1.91–96), but he lacks Freshwater’s indiscriminate passion for foreign practices and Monsieur’s Frisk’s slightly foppish dedication to the fashionable display of the body. Manly, experienced, and mannerly, Winfield emerges as a kind of ideal image of civil masculinity and a subtle challenger to the preeminence of Lord Rainbow. It is therefore extremely crucial what stance Winfield takes to the ball and to the dancing that defines it. Is the play’s central event to be shunned by people of sense and true propriety? Is the attention lavished on disciplining the body to undertake corantos and new country dances a misplaced affectation? Importantly, Winfield’s attitudes toward the ball are expressed and shaped through interchanges with Lucina, the witty woman whose hand in marriage he has successfully won. In part, his conversation with her signals the importance of women in emerging Town culture. Witty, wealthy, and strong in her opinions, Lucina banters with Winfield in a way that presages the wit combat between the Millamants and Mirabells of Restoration comedy. When Lucina, for example, tries to hold him to a standard of sexual behavior he finds ridiculous for an unmarried man of nearly thirty, Winfield counters by implying that women of mature age and robust constitution also engage in pastimes that might make them suspect and for which they might require “pardon”: As if you ladies had not your figaries [vagaries], And martial discipline, as well as we, Your outworks and redoubts, your court of guard,

204

Jean E. H oward Your sentries and perdus, sallies, retreats, [Parleys], and stratagems; women are all honest, Yes, yes, exceeding honest! Let me ask you One question—I’ll not put you to your oath; I do allow you Hyde Park, and Spring Garden,— You have a recreation call’d The BALL, A device transported hither by some ladies That affect tennis; what d’ye play a set? There’s a foul racket kept under the line, Strange words are bandied, and strange revels, madam. (4.3.112–24)

Winfield here claims that women are amatory warriors, just like men, and that their “honesty” may be in question as much as men’s. He names fashionable places, such as Hyde Park and the Spring Gardens, where women’s honesty might be endangered, but he does not quarrel with women’s attendance there. Rather, it is the institution of the ball which receives his greatest scrutiny. Drawing on the fact that it had been brought to London by tennis-loving ladies, he uses the language of tennis play to suggest the ball’s sexual disreputableness. According to Gordon Williams, “to play a set” was to have a sexual encounter and a “racket” often had phallic innuendoes.39 Winfield thus suggests that the ball, with its foreign origins and potentially sexualized practices, is perhaps not entirely “honest,” nor the women who affect it. Similar charges against the ball were to be even more explicitly rendered in Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure (1635), in which Sir Thomas Bornwell, who loves the country, castigates the extravagances of his city-loving wife, Aretina. That she spends too much money is not as bad, however, as being prodigal with her reputation. Her fame is most put at risk, he claims, by your revels in the night, Your meetings called the ball, to which appear, As to the court of pleasure, all your gallants And ladies thither bound by a subpoena Of Venus, and small Cupid’s high displeasure. ’Tis but the family of love translated Into more costly sin. There was a play on’t, And had the poet not been bribed to a modest Expression of your antic gambols in’t, Some darks had been discovered, and the deeds too; In time he may repent and make some blush To see the second part danced on the stage. (1.1.113–24)

Caroline Town C omedy

205

Shirley here clearly comments on his own prior play, hinting that it whitewashed the sexual “gambols” associated with balls. In a muted form, with his mention of the notorious family of love, he seems momentarily to be siding with Prynne and assuming that dancing incites lewdness and that women who love it might be whores. Winfield ultimately does not hold to this position, however, as Lucina sets about to redeem the ball from his censure. Crucial to his change of heart is the masque that precedes the general dancing. The masque sets Venus and Diana in competition. Venus, with Cupid in attendance, claims that the golden ball belongs to her (as in the story of Paris on Mount Ida) and that at Rainbow’s ball “wanton glances fly” and “Lords and ladies of the game” have breasts full of Venus’s flames (5.1.252–54). In a reversal of the Paris story, however, Diana emerges as queen of this assembly, casting out Venus’s “lascivious fire” and installing “modest thoughts” in all who participate (5.1.263, 266). Cupid finds that his bow is frozen in his hand. Very like the little Cupid displayed on the title page to Playford’s dance manual, this Cupid is not a very dangerous fellow. Diana even allows him to stay at the dance, provided that he “Throw [his] licentious shafts away” (5.1.298). That Cupid is played by Frisk, with his dark complexion and little beard (4.2.111–26), only heightens the non-threatening aspect of the love god. The French dancing master is here reduced to a shaftless cherub. The role undermines Frisk’s masculinity and diminishes the threat he poses to the members of West End society. In the end, Winfield is forced to concede that the ball is “an innocent and generous recreation” (5.1.371). Shirley’s final act perhaps protests a bit too much about the innocence of the ball, a surmise which his remarks in The Lady of Pleasure might support. This is because neither the impact of French fashions on Town culture nor the relative value of manners in determining social worth were issues with easy resolutions, and The Ball makes visible some of the social struggles that accompanied the emergence of these new modes of fashionability. On the one hand the play is a kind of advertisement both for this emerging cultural institution and for the offices of the French dancing master whose skills it requires. Yet the play also renders Frisk comic and acknowledges that the ball can be read as frivolous and slightly salacious should Venus gain the upper hand. With the complex shadings of which drama is uniquely capable, Shirley ranges his fashionable lovers across a spectrum that extends from the vacuous Freshwater to the witty Lucina to the vaguely promiscuous Rainbow, leaving the audience to construct its own understanding

206

Jean E. H oward

of what constitutes a desirable model of behavior for West End society. In this process, the reluctance of Winfield uncritically to embrace the ball only makes his final endorsement all the more important. As one whose origins are not courtly, and whose manners and wit win him the play’s marital prize, Winfield suggests that the Town can embrace courtly and foreign fashions without losing its own particularity. For at least some of its Drury Lane audience, the play must have been a powerful solicitation to eschew lopping and trotting and to embrace the new forms of bodily discipline and mannerly conduct through which Town culture was being performed into being.

Notes 1. Along with Shirley’s name, that of George Chapman appeared on the title page to the first edition of The Ball, which was printed at the same time as The Tragedy of Chabot Admiral of France, a definite ShirleyChapman collaboration. Scholars disagree as to whether Chapman had a hand in The Ball or whether, as G. E. Bentley argued, the attribution on the original title page is simply a mistake caused by the printer using the same setting of type for both play title pages (The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968], 5:1077–78). William Gifford, the play’s nineteenth-century editor, assumes the largest portion of the play is by Chapman. See William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, eds., The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, 6 vols. (1833; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1966), 3:3. Hanson T. Parlin, in A Study in Shirley’s Comedies of London Life (Austin: University of Texas, 1914), iii, argues that Shirley was its sole author, a view echoed by Thomas Marc Parrott, the editor of Chapman’s plays, in The Poems and Plays of George Chapman, The Comedies (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1914), 869–75. Robert Forsythe in The Relations of Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 408, puts forward the idea that the play was originally written by Shirley but revised by Chapman when it was censored for supposedly too closely personating lords and others of the court. I agree with Bentley, finding in The Ball all the hallmarks of Shirley’s style and preoccupations. The parallels between The Ball and Hyde Park, also written in 1632, suggest that in both these plays Shirley was experimenting with ways to dramatize the fashionable life of London’s growing West End culture. 2. All references to The Ball are from Parrott’s edition of Chapman (see note 1). 3. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (London, 1633), the table, sig. 6R4r. The first entry under Women-Actors is “notorious whores.” Several biographies of Henrietta Maria devote attention to her cultural enthusiasms. See Quentin Bone, Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers (Urbana:

Caroline Town C omedy

207

University of Illinois Press, 1972), and Alison Plowden, Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s Indomitable Queen (Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 2001). For a consideration of the full range of the queen’s cultural life at court, see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For discussion of the Prynne affair, see the important article by Sophie Tomlinson, “She That Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture,” in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (New York: Routledge, 1992), 189–207, and that by Kim Walker, “New Prison: Representing the Female Actor in Shirley’s The Bird in a Cage (1633),” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 385–400. Prynne’s book was in press before the first performance of Montague’s pastoral in January 1633, but rehearsals had been going on throughout the fall. Moreover, her part in The Shepherd’s Paradise was not Henrietta Maria’s first theatrical venture. In 1626 she and some of her court ladies acted in a French pastoral in which she had a speaking part and in which some of the women performed the parts of men and wore male attire. Shirley’s Bird in a Cage (London, 1633), which shows women performing a play, is famously prefaced by a satirical dedication to Prynne who was by this time in prison. 4. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix, the table, sig. 6N4v. Under Dancing, Prynne includes the following entries: “Delight & skil in Dancing, a badge of lewde, lascivious women & strumpets”; “The Devill danceth in dancing women”; “effeminate, mixt, lascivious dancing condemned by Scriptures, Councels, Fathers, Pagan and moderne Christian Authors, of all sorts, as an occasion of much sin and lewdnes.” 5. For his discussion of the development of wit and taste as markers of cultural status in West End London plays, I am especially indebted to the work of Adam Zucker, one of the editors of this volume, in his Ph.D. dissertation, “Comedies of Place: Space, Status and the Social Work of Comic Form in Early Modern England” (Columbia University, 2004). 6. A number of historians have written about the development of Town culture in West End London. They include Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), esp. 357–63, 385–98; Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. 141–80; and F. J. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in London and the English Economy, 1500–1700, ed. P. J. Corfield and N. B. Harte (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 105–16. Most stress the area’s connection to the influx of aristocrats and gentry coming into the city in the early seventeenth century to be near the court or to take part in “the season,” which increasingly dominated the elite social scene from fall to spring of each year. R. Malcolm Smuts, in “The Court and Its Neighborhood: Royal Policy and Urban Growth in the Early Stuart West End,” Journal

208

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Jean E. H oward of British Studies 30 (1991): 117–49, provides a useful corrective to the emphasis on the elite nature of West End residents. While acknowledging the upscale building projects that characterized the West End and the number of gentry and peers who began to live there, he also demonstrates that the population of the area remained very mixed, with many tradesmen and day laborers residing in cramped, far-from-luxurious housing. They would not have been, however, members of the Town, a cultural construct alluding only to those who met certain standards of fashionability. See Janette Dillon, “The Place of Accommodation: The Royal Entertainment at the New Exchange,” in Theatre, Court, and City 1595–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 109–23, for descriptions of the goods advertised as in the china shop. For a thorough discussion of Bedford’s Covent Garden undertaking, see Parish of St. Paul Covent Garden, vol. 36 of Survey of London, gen. ed. F. H. W. Sheppard (London: Athalone Press, 1970), esp. 19–150. For information on these places of resort, see Sir Walter Besant, London in the Time of the Stuarts (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1903), esp. 311–17, and Charing Cross: The Parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Part I, vol. 16 of Survey of London (London: Country Life Ltd., 1935), esp. 46, 47, 52, 53, 71, 72. Eventually the functions of the Spring Gardens were transferred in the eighteenth century to the Vauxhall Gardens south of the Thames. For an important discussion of the significance of the Vauxhall Gardens to eighteenth-century London, see Miles Ogborn, “The Pleasure Garden,” in Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 116–57. The idea of cultural capital is perhaps best developed by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), where he discusses the role of the French educational system in producing those who belong to such an elite status group and who possess that distance from economic necessity that allows them to develop aesthetic judgment and “taste.” James Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, ed. Ronald Huebert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 145. All references to the play are from this edition. Dana G. McKinnen, “A Description of a Restoration Promptbook of Shirley’s The Ball,” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 10 (1971): 25–28, 25. That McKinnen found a Restoration promptbook of Shirley’s play supports earlier speculation that it might be the work to which Pepys refers, though there were a number of other plays from the 1630s that also contained comic dancing masters as I have suggested earlier above. Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (London: Longman, 1972), esp. 24, 154.

Caroline Town C omedy

209

14. Sandra A. Burner, James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), esp. 41–84. 15. See B. Ravelhofer’s introduction to B. De Montagut’s Louange de la Danse, Renaissance Texts from Manuscript 3 (Cambridge: RTM, 2000), 11–13. 16. Ibid., 1–9, 21. 17. John Playford, “To the Ingenious Reader,” The English Dancing Master: or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the Tune to each Dance (London, 1651). 18. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and Jorge Arditi, A Genealogy of Manners: Transformations of Social Relations in France and England from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The foundational text for understanding the origins of the European revolution in manners is Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 19. Henry Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman, first published in 1622, shows in the English context the adaptation of the courtesy manual to the needs of an urbane, but not necessarily a courtly, class. See Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman 1634, intro. by G. S. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906). Peacham argues that nobility consists more in actions than in blood and devotes a great deal of his time to explaining how a gentleman should be educated. Beyond the traditional university subjects, gentlemen should attain a wide knowledge of poetry, music, antiquities, statuary, coins, paintings, and drawings. Using the Italian term virtuosi (105) to refer to gentlemen properly conversant with such things, he urges English readers to travel to France, Spain, and Italy where the “Gardens and Galleries of great men are beautified and set forth to admiration with these kinds of ornaments” (104). While travelers are to be keen observers of men and manners, they are also to learn how to converse knowledgeably about such matters or be taken for “idiots or rakehels,” just as they must understand heraldry and be proficient in all the physical exercises (running, riding, wrestling) that lead to graceful carriage and bodily health. Peacham’s book does not primarily prepare courtiers to serve a prince; rather, it shows how even merchants and doctors can attain the skills that will allow them to take part in an urbane society in which standards of civil conduct obtain and cultural “idiots” are excluded. 20. Ibid., esp. 113–15, 129–31. 21. At one point Frisk, praising Lord Rainbow’s skills at dancing, says “Oh, he dance finely, begar! He deserve the ball of de world” (2.2.37–38). This could mean that he deserves to give or be present at the best dancing occasion. It could also mean that he deserves to receive the literal golden ball that eventually features in the masque that precedes the general dancing at the ball itself.

210

Jean E. H oward

22. Robert Dallington, A Method for Travell. Shewed by Taking the view of France. As it stoode in the yeare of our Lord 1598 (London, 1605), sig. B4v. 23. B. De Montagut. Louange de La Danse, 155. 24. Dallington, in A Method for Travell (sigs. V1r–V1v), says that there are “infinite numbers of Tennis Courts throughout” France, in fact, twice as many as there are churches. See also Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 3:1372. 25. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 110–11. 26. See, in particular, Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), and Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 27. Skiles Howard convincingly argues that courtly dancing had long been distinguished from country dancing by its emphasis on erect posture and regular movement; see Courtly Dancing, esp. 1–25. What I find interesting in the 1630s is that paradigms for courtliness, as I will discuss, are being translated to contexts outside the direct influence of the court. 28. Ibid., 114–15. 29. Ibid., 2. 30. Frank Whigham, in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), argues that courtesy literature made aristocratic skills accessible to men of lower rank and paradoxically made imitable what were supposedly the inherent qualities of a privileged class. In The Ball, graceful deportment in the dance marks out privileged members of Town society, but the play makes very clear that such skills are teachable. It nonetheless, I argue, wants to cling to the idea that some people cannot learn them. 31. See, for example, Ira Clark’s view in Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992) that Shirley consistently praises the court and its effects on Town culture, admitting criticism of the court only to contain it. 32. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, esp. 166–180. I differ from Butler in that I do not feel the plays are political allegories or are constantly commenting on court politics. I am, in general, more interested than Butler in the cultural issues being negotiated in these Town comedies. Nonetheless, I agree with him when he argues that Caroline comedies written for the public stage are perfectly capable of indirectly criticizing the court and courtly ways. 33. N. W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 177. 34. Some characters’ names were changed during the composition or printing of the play, perhaps as a response to censorship. See Dana Gene McKinnon’s discussion of inconsistencies in the deployment of names in

Caroline Town C omedy

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

211

stage directions and speech headings, especially in acts four and five, in The Ball By George Chapman and James Shirley: A Critical Edition, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Illinois, 1965), xxiv–xxxi. See also the work of Sandra Burner who in James Shirley, 63, has proposed Rainbow, Barker, Frisk, and Bostock as the likely objects of Herbert’s remarks. The best introduction to seventeenth-century English travel abroad is John Stoye’s English Travellers Abroad 1604–1667, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). See also Alison Games, “Before the Grand Tour: The Domestication of Global Travel,” in Agents of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (forthcoming), chapter 1, who argues that travel nearly always was justified as preparation for service to the monarch or further state interests in the realms of trade and diplomacy. Burner, James Shirley, 86. Thomas Gainsford’s 1616 work, The Rich Cabinet, has annexed to it an Epitome of Good Manners, an extract from a treatise by John de la Casa, which argues that manners are as important as virtue in securing a place in the world and appends a long list of behaviors to avoid ranging from not talking too much to not yawning, grinding teeth, or thrusting your hands into your privities. See in particular Erica Veevers’s discussion of the royal pair’s evolving sense of the importance of their chaste conjugal union in Images of Love, esp. 14–47. Williams, A Dictionary, 3:1372–73.

This page intentionally left blank

8

The “ T urks,” Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado Benedict S. Robinson

No one seems to have had any doubts about Philip Massinger’s politics.

That politics has consistently been read in terms of commitment to war against Spain, critique of court favorites, and condemnation of unparliamentary taxation and excessive wresting of the prerogative. In many ways, this reading has remained unchallenged since the late nineteenth century, when S. R. Gardiner argued that “the political element in Massinger” consisted of support for the restitution of the Palatinate and a critique of Stuart prerogative politics—policies Gardiner associated with “Massinger’s patron,” the earl of Pembroke. Since Gardiner, political readings of Massinger—by Martin Butler, Jerzy Limon, Margot Heinemann—have all situated him among the “opposition” dramatists, as a parliamentarian and a supporter of the international Protestant cause.1 With the exception of the doubtful evidence of Pembroke’s patronage, this consensus rests on interpretations of a relatively small number of plays, perhaps most notably The Bondman and Believe As You List.2 Those interpretations are themselves susceptible to challenge in ways that might open up a more flexible sense of the political possibilities for the drama in the 1620s and 1630s. But it is also true that the Massinger canon—if such a thing exists—has been established in ways that seem to confirm this version of Massinger’s politics, leaving to the side plays that do not fit the mold. The Renegado, for example, although it has recently earned some attention because of an interest in English contacts with Islam, has remained decidedly at the margins of any “political” reading of Massinger. And yet, The

214

B enedict S. Robinson

Renegado has a great deal to tell us about Caroline politics: although it is not strictly a Caroline play, having been first performed in the spring of 1624, it was nevertheless published in 1630 and remained in repertory until the end of the 1630s, facts which give it a Caroline life, if not Caroline origins.3 More significantly, the play’s politics open importantly onto the Caroline scene: in some ways, it is in the Caroline period that The Renegado discovers its political relevance. Some time ago, Margot Heinemann argued that there was “no single polarized parliamentary or national opposition with a coherent policy” in the early Stuart period, but “shifting divisions of opinion and questioning among different groups and interests concerning the nature and use of power, in relation to a variety of political, religious, constitutional and social issues.”4 If this is true, we should not expect a consistent oppositional ideology to operate across all of these spheres and across a twenty-year career, especially the career of a professional playwright writing for the commercial stage. We should expect, at the very least, that the ideology of Massinger’s plays would be closely tied to the moments of their production, and to his ongoing and revisable assessments of each moment. We might also expect that the genres and topics with which Massinger was working would impose their own discursive and ideological requirements, that is, that a Roman tragedy like The Roman Actor and a Turkish tragicomedy like The Renegado would necessarily offer different perspectives on the world and different constructions of the “political.” This is not to say that there is no coherent politics to Massinger’s plays. But I do want to suggest that “the political element in Massinger” is not so single as some readings have taken it to be, and, further, that the disciplinary divisions that have kept readings of The Renegado separate from readings of Massinger’s politics need to be overcome. In particular, interpretations focused on the scene of domestic, “high” politics must learn from interpretations sensitive to questions of Turkish difference, and vice versa. English discourses about the “Turks” remain at the margins of any discussion of English politics, despite a significant Turkish presence in contemporary political theory, constitutional debate, and religious controversy.5 At the same time, current discussions of the representation of Islam in the early modern period still tend to abstract the question of English relations with Islam from the total English political scene in ways that diminish both areas of inquiry. I want to bring these two conversations together, to show how The Renegado’s Tunis opens up and complicates the scene of English politics. In this way, we will not only gain a fuller reading of Massinger, but will also be able to achieve a

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

215

more complex view of Caroline politics as well as a more powerful appreciation of the ways in which domestic conflicts and the effort to narrate the encounter with Islam collided with and complicated each other. * * * Before turning to The Renegado itself, I want to pose a few questions about a current reading of “the political element” in Massinger by looking at the play that has perhaps most consistently been at the center of such readings. Licensed for the stage on December 3, 1623 The Bondman invites a topical reading in its opening act: O shame! that we that are a populous Nation, Ingag’d to liberall nature, for all blessings An Iland can bring forth; we that haue limbs And able bodies; Shipping, Armes, and Treasure, The sinnewes of the Warre, now we are call’d To stand vpon our Guard, cannot produce One fit to be our Generall.6

The island in question is Sicily, not England; but at the end of 1623 an English audience would surely decode this as glancing at James’s refusal to offer military support for his daughter Elizabeth, forced into exile along with her husband the Elector Palatine by Habsburg armies in November 1620. English public opinion heavily favored military intervention on behalf of the Palatinate and the cause of an international Protestantism, which where threatened by Habsburg armies and the emperor’s policies of religious repression. But as early as 1619, James had made it clear that he would seek diplomatic rather than military action, hoping to mediate between the sides and broker a deal.7 As part of this project of reconciliation, he renewed his efforts to marry his son Charles to the Infanta of Spain.8 Far from fighting a resurgent Catholicism abroad, in the early 1620s James appeared to be preparing a toleration for English Catholics at home, as part of a marriage deal with Spain. In this context, the story of Sicily’s corruption, its unreadiness to face its Carthaginian enemies, must surely be read as an indictment of James’s policies and a warning to an England that has fallen off from the militarism of Elizabeth’s reign. For this reason, Massinger’s narrative has been read alongside material like the pamphlets of Thomas Scott, which urge a recalcitrant government to war and decry the

216

B enedict S. Robinson

Spanish influence at court. For Scott, war with Spain and the defense of the Palatinate are part of a global struggle against a Catholic antichrist, a war that is at once temporal and spiritual, political and holy: England must fight not so much to preserve itself as to defend the cause of the true faith. Scott’s arguments represent, as Peter Lake has argued, an extension into the political of a certain religious conception, one predicated on the understanding that this world is the scene of an ongoing spiritual war.9 Lake’s formula in effect defines what has been—especially in the wake of revisionism, with its antagonism to the notion of any definable political and constitutional opposition in the early Stuart period—the dominant conception of the 1620s “opposition”: that is, that the flashpoint for conflict between crown and parliament was religion. It was a militant Protestantism that sparked parliamentary sentiment, rather than a resistance to Stuart “absolutism.”10 The Bondman does not fit with this conception at all. It wholly lacks the religious zeal of someone like Scott. There is no suggestion that the approaching Carthaginian armies represent the forces of a different religion, and the play even seems to lack any specifically religious vocabulary at all.11 The one moment a religious rhetoric does enter the play, it appears only to be disavowed. In the play’s last lines, one of the rebellious slaves of the main plot, being sent (he thinks) to be hanged, asks only not to be twice executed, “At the Gallowes first, and after in a Ballad / Sung to some villainous tune” (5.3.245–46). What follows is a reference precise enough to give a firm terminus ad quem for the composition of the play: There are ten-grot-Rimers About the Towne growne fat on these occasions. Let but a Chappell fall, or a street be fir’d, A foolish louer hang himselfe for pure loue, Or any such like accident, and before They are cold in their graues, some damn’d Dittie’s made Which makes their ghosts walke. Let the State take order For the redresse of this abuse, recording ’Twas done by my aduice, and for my part I’le cut as cleane a caper from the Ladder, As euer merry Greeke did. (5.3.246–56)

Gracculo refers to a notorious event of October 26, 1623, when the floor of a house in the Blackfriar’s where a Jesuit priest was preaching collapsed, killing the priest and perhaps as many as ninety-five of those in attendance. The room was not, in fact, a chapel, but the rumor

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

217

quickly spread that it was; to a political Protestantism stifled by James, this looked like nothing less than divine judgment.12 The fact that the priest was a Jesuit only exacerbated Protestant paranoia. Regularly accused of infiltrating England to find converts, of conspiring to assassinate English monarchs, and of justifying Catholic rebellion, the Jesuits were without question the most vilified figures of supposed Catholic superstition and impiety. An order created as part of the Catholic Reformation, they operated in the forefront of the assault on the Protestant heresy and the defense of the Catholic faith, both in missionary work and in printed polemics, and as such earned the special hatred of committed Protestants.13 But in Massinger’s play, this event is called an “accident,” and Gracculo inveighs against the “ten-grot Rimers” who seek to capitalize on it. Even as it suggests a call to war against Spain, in other words, The Bondman seems to refuse English anti-Catholicism, refuses the religious rhetoric of militant Protestantism: this is not the language of “puritan opposition,” as Lake describes it, but something else, an opposition apparently couched wholly in terms of social and political relations, perhaps a parliamentary opposition, perhaps even a republican one, in the broad sense of the relevance of that term for England in the mid-seventeenth century that has recently been argued by David Norbrook.14 This apparent refusal of Protestant polemic can be traced throughout Massinger’s plays, even those that have been taken to comment most directly on the confessional conflict that was becoming the Thirty Years’ War. Massinger’s Believe As You List is perhaps a surprising case in point. That play, apparently originally conceived as a dramatization of Spain’s annexation of Portugal in 1580—an event that was long a rallying-cry for Protestant opposition to Habsburg plans for world empire—was censored and rewritten as the story of Antiochus, the exiled king of Asia, and his failed efforts to reclaim the kingdom seized from him by Rome. The story has long been understood to embody a barely-translated version of Protestant support for the pretender to the Portuguese crown, and—more importantly—for the dispossessed Elector Palatine, similarly thrust from his lands by Habsburg imperialism. Critics have thus linked the composition of Believe As You List in 1631 to resurgent hopes for a militant international Protestantism centering on the figure of Gustavus Adolphus, who was at that moment single-handedly reversing the Protestant losses of the 1620s.15 But this play, too, strikingly lacks a religious vocabulary: at no point is it suggested that Rome is anything other than an ambitious imperial power, nor is religious rhetoric used to rally the supporters of

218

B enedict S. Robinson

Antiochus. There is a priest at the center of the Antiochan conspiracy, but even he only occasionally and vaguely mentions his “goddess.” Moreover, he is by his own admission “libde,” castrated, and his obesity is continually a source of Falstaffian jokes: if anything, he embodies the kind of satire of the grotesque puritan body that Kristen Poole has traced (2.2.255).16 This play is concerned with political good faith: when the Carthaginian senator Amilcar refers to “the Punicq faith,” he means Carthage’s obligation to honor its former alliance with Antiochus, regardless of threats from Rome (2.2.49). The terms of the play cluster around the question of reason of state and its conflicts with a sense of legitimacy and the ethics of friendship: “what wee doe for the service of the republicq & propagation of Romes glorious empire,” the Roman legate Titus Flaminius asserts, “needes noe defence” (4.4.4–6).17 Religion is strikingly absent. Real anti-Catholicism, of course, was a highly sensitive subject even after the collapse of the negotiations for the Spanish Match and even when war with Spain was becoming a clear reality, as the case of Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess notoriously shows. But Massinger does more than steer clear of the censor. In these two plays, he avoids any link between politics and the divine, no matter how conventional or vague. The contrast with Middleton’s play is striking. This absence has something important to tell us about the political scene in the 1620s. Revisionist historiography has questioned the existence of any specifically political opposition in the early seventeenth century; the real source of conflict, it has argued, was religious, not political, and puritan, not constitutional. Consensus operated in English society except at moments of religious crisis, moments of panic over “papist” plots. If there was an opposition, it developed primarily as a response to the emergent Arminianism of the Caroline church. But the case of Massinger does suggest that there was an opposition to the policies of the late Jacobean and Caroline court that was not rooted in a powerfully Protestant sensibility. That is, we should perhaps not expect to find an absolute correlation between religious politics and constitutional thought, between forward Protestantism and parliamentarianism. In the confusions of late Jacobean and Caroline England, we might well expect to find reasons for suspicion of the Spanish Match that would not include intense anti-popery, reasons for lamenting supposed English pacifism that might not include the terms of a radical Protestant agenda. But it is not true that Massinger simply ignores religion in his plays: the seeming disconnect between religion and politics in The Bondman and Believe As You List needs to be linked to a reading of The

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

219

Renegado that discovers in that play a religious politics that might seem antithetical to Massinger’s anti-Spanish and parliamentarian commitments. It is in this context that the critical marginalization of The Renegado, and the question of the “Turks” more generally has blocked a full reading of “the political element” in Massinger, as well as of the contradictions and complexities of 1620s politics in general. I will read The Renegado as Massinger’s effort to think about religious difference on a global scale, taking in at once the long and fluctuating border between Christianity and Islam and the internal divisions of “the Christian” itself. This confrontation of confessional difference and the difference of the “Turk” opens up an important but hitherto ignored aspect of religious polemic in the 1620s and 1630s, one that reveals the centrality of the figure of the “Turk” to the effort to think about religious identity and difference in the early seventeenth century and in the early modern period more generally. And it opens up a surprising perspective on the relationship between religion and politics in Massinger’s work. * * * The Renegado has often been read as a fantasy resolving anxieties about England’s increasing contacts with the “Turks.” The play opens in a Tunisian marketplace, where two European merchants—in fact a disguised gentleman and his servant, as we later discover—offer wares whose metaphorical and literal sexiness suggest that there is something promiscuous about buying and selling, that in the marketplace commercial relations easily slide into other relations. Vitelli and his servant Gazet have unloaded their wares, “though brittle as a maydenhead at sixteene,” as Gazet remarks (1.1.2). These sexually vulnerable goods turn out to be pictures of promiscuous women, “Bawdes, and common Courtezans” (1.1.13). Not only does Gazet figure wares as maidenheads, but he turns out literally to be selling sex as well. Buying and selling are always promiscuous in The Renegado: the play continually sexualizes trade, drawing out the simultaneously mercantile and erotic associations of words like “commerce” and “commodity” in the seventeenth-century lexicon.18 When the Turkish princess Donusa—the sultan’s niece—decides to visit the market, we easily translate her desire to windowshop into a kind of voyeurism: I feele a Virgins longing to descend So far from mine owne greatnesse, as to be Though not a buyer, yet a looker on Their strange commodities. (1.2.114–17)

220

B enedict S. Robinson

In the erotically charged space of the Tunisian market, the promise of “strange commodities” incites “a Virgins longing,” even if Donusa demurely declines a more active role in her desire. The eroticism of the Tunisian market puts at risk forms of national, religious, and sexual identity. Gazet jokingly articulates the perverse flexibility this sexualized commerce encourages: “Liue I in England, Spaine, France, Rome, Geneua, / I am of that Countryes faith,” he announces: “I would not be confin’d / In my beliefe” (1.1.36–37, 32–33). The travels of a merchant enable a wandering from any fixed identity. Asked by Vitelli whether he will “turne Turke” in Tunis, Gazet responds, No! so I should loose A Collop of that part my Doll inioyn’d mee To bring home as she left it, tis her venture, Nor dare I barter that commoditie. (1.1.38–41)

But in the course of events Vitelli does consider turning Turk for Donusa, and he defends that decision by promising to use his newfound wealth “to redeeme a thousand slaues / From Turkish gallies, or at home to erect / Some pious worke” (2.6.32–34). The relationship begun in the market is itself a transaction, an exchange of identities that puts a price on what it means to be Christian or Muslim, and that is at several points figured as commerce: as Francisco warns Vitelli, “They steere not the right course, nor trafficke well, / That seeke a passage to reach Heauen, through Hell” (2.6.45–46). When Donusa arrives at Vitelli’s stall near the end of act one, she enters “vayld,” despite which or perhaps because of which Vitelli immediately recognizes her as being “of ranke and qualitie,” as a Turkish bystander puts it, and adjusts his sales pitch correspondingly: he silences Gazet’s loud “What doe you lacke?” and expatiates on his goods in elaborate language (1.3.99). Like a good salesman, he knows his market, but his words, instead of attracting attention to his goods, attract Donusa’s attention to him. “Hee speakes well,” she observes: “How mouingly could this fellow treat vpon / A worthy subiect, that findes such discourse / To grace a trifle” (1.3.109, 128–30). For all of his “Poeticall” language, Vitelli is inflating the value of the goods he has to offer just as Gazet had promised to do, dressing up “common Courtezans” as “The rarest beauties of the Christian world” (1.3.115, 137). In response, Donusa announces that she “instantly could shew you one, to theirs / Not much inferior,” and when Vitelli doubts her, she “Vnvailes her selfe” and asks “Can you match me

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

221

this?” (1.3.140–42). With this gesture, Donusa offers her own face as a sight more beautiful than the sexy pictures Gazet and Vitelli are peddling: that is, she offers herself as yet more “brittle” wares. The gesture of unveiling is clearly intended to attract Vitelli’s attention; in the remainder of the scene, Donusa engineers their first private meeting by breaking some of Vitelli’s wares and telling him to come to the palace to be reimbursed. The moment that Donusa makes herself visible to Vitelli is also a moment of self-commodification: Donusa’s desire almost seems to have been generated by the market, and her effort to act on that desire hints that she, too, is a kind of commodity, circulating in the marketplace and entering into potentially scandalous transactions with a Christian stranger. When Vitelli comes to the palace in act two, he receives from her a payment that well exceeds the value of his cheap wares: she offers him “baggs stuft full of our imperiall coyne,” or “Iems for which the slauish Indian diues / To the bottome of the Maine,” or “any honour in my guift / (Which is vnbounded as the Sultans Power)” (2.4.83–85, 88–89). Vitelli may not have come to Tunis seeking wealth, but his relations with Donusa generate the possibility of an almost limitless profit, a radically unbalanced exchange that turns him into “a Royall Marchant” (2.4.94). Donusa’s desire takes the form of a kind of commerce, but at the same time it supplements the terms of any commercial exchange, enabling a fantasy of endless, easy accumulation. The association of sex and commerce is not only figurative but material, both in the profit Vitelli receives from Donusa’s love and in the play’s evocation of the stories of a thriving Mediterranean sex trade. The event that has set the plot in motion is Paulina’s capture by the pirate and renegade Grimaldi, “the theefe that rauish’t your fayre sister from you,” as Francisco tells Vitelli, and “Sold to the viceroy [the] fayre Christian Virgin” (1.1.112, 115). By his own admission, Grimaldi has been both buyer and seller in this trade. His first speech in the play—in response to Gazet’s “What doe you lacke?”—is to demand “thy sister for a Whore,” and he goes on to envisage an economy of piracy in which “rauish’de Virgins / To slauerie sold for Coyne . . . feede our riots,” enabling the pirates “to wallowe in / All sensuall pleasures” (1.3.39, 74–75, 52–53). At the margins of the Ottoman Empire, Massinger’s Tunis is an intermediate space between world empires, presided over by a marketplace where sexualities and identities are for sale, where “a confluence of all nations / Are met together,” commingling promiscuously (1.2.111–12). Such “trafficke” was a serious anxiety in the seventeenth century. In a sermon delivered on the reconversion of an English renegade in

222

B enedict S. Robinson

1627, Henry Byam claimed that “many, and as I am informed, many hundreds, are Musselmans in Turkie, and Christians at home, doffing their religion, as they doe their clothes, and keeping a conscience for euery Harbor.”19 Byam warns his audience against the “baites and allurements,” the “enticements of pleasure, and worldly preferment” that seduce Christians to turn Turk (sigs. F1v, F4r). The “frailty and weakness” that sacrifices faith for pleasure signals a fracture within English Protestantism that is the real subject of all this preaching. Those who turn renegade in Africa, as Edward Kellet argues in a sermon delivered on the same occasion and published with Byam’s, are “such as are among vs, though not of vs; . . . Ambo-dexters, Nulli-fidians, such Amphibia, as can liue, both on Land and Water” (sig. F2r). North Africa was a particularly vexed site for thinking about the seductions of renegadism. Poised between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, the North African regencies were a kind of semiindependent border zone and a refuge for populations displaced from either. They were also notorious as the center of Mediterranean piracy. During the war with Spain in the late sixteenth century, Elizabeth encouraged English privateering; but after the peace treaty of 1604, a large population of English privateers was apparently left without legal means of support. According to Italian diplomatic dispatches and English printed texts, many of these privateers turned pirate in North Africa.20 Such forms of piracy posed a real ideological challenge for an England in the process of building a merchant empire: because plunder continued to be a legal aspect of merchant activity, and because the merchant marine was the mainstay of English sea power, the pirate who refused to constrain his activities within state-imposed limits represented a challenge to any nationalist narrative of English economic expansion.21 Piracy shadows a Francis Drake with a figure like John Ward who, in Robert Daborne’s play A Christian Turn’d Turke (1610), converts to Islam, exclaiming, “Beauty, command, and riches—these are the three / The world pursues, and these follow me.”22 The Renegado has been read as a fantasy solution to the problem of what it means to have commerce with the infidel: in Patricia Parker’s words, it “rewrites and rerights A Christian Turn’d Turke . . . through a plot that ends in the conversion to Christianity of its renegade and its Eve-like infidel enchantress.”23 It also ends with the end of all commerce. When Paulina is recovered and Donusa and Grimaldi are converted, the Europeans and the Turkish princess depart from Tunis in a narrative that silently elides the fact of continuing commercial relations between the Islamic and Christian worlds. The stage convention of the disguise enables the play to evoke anxiety over the

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

223

scene of cross-cultural “commerce,” but then dispels that anxiety through a kind of sleight of hand, a quiet forgetting of the entanglements produced by real markets. In this sense, The Renegado imaginatively frees England from its dependence on Islam at a moment when the most lucrative of English trades was in fact the Levant trade.24 I discuss the play’s engagement with Islam and with increasingly global, cross-cultural commercial relations more extensively elsewhere; here, I want to suggest that we misunderstand this play if we fail to connect its representations of commerce and cross-cultural contact to the fractures of religious politics in England. What has been read as a broadly English fantasy about commerce with the infidel should instead be read as a play that, as it imagines the Islamic east, marks sharp differences within Protestant England as well. Stories of piracy and renegadism seek to define forms of national and religious identity against the amphibious convert who moves too easily between worlds. In Massinger’s play, threats to religious, national, and racial identity are at once elicited and assuaged by the play’s redemptive plot; but if this ploy suggests a form of providence—regularly invoked in texts describing similar escapes from pirates—in The Renegado, providence has a human agent: Francisco, Vitelli’s spiritual adviser and a Jesuit who engineers the play’s ending. One of the most striking facts about The Renegado is that its conversions are explicitly conversions to Catholicism encouraged by a Jesuit, and yet these Catholics and even the Jesuit come in for no overt antiCatholic attack.25 Massinger’s apparent failure to engage antiCatholic sentiment is still more striking when we recognize that The Renegado was first performed during a resurgence of anti-Catholic polemic, the result of a political realignment that Thomas Cogswell has called the “blessed revolution.”26 In 1622 and 1623, to show his good faith in the marriage negotiations with Spain, James suspended enforcement of the penal codes against Catholics and worked to suppress anti-Catholic rhetoric.27 When the negotiations showed no signs of progress, Prince Charles and Buckingham traveled in disguise to Madrid in what seems to have been an effort to spur the negotiations with a flamboyant gesture. But in October 1623, they returned, convinced that the Spanish had no intention of finalizing the marriage, and set out to engineer one of the most rapid reversals in early seventeenth-century politics, forming a coalition with the forward Protestants in Parliament who were dedicated to maneuvering James into a war he did not want. One result of this new coalition was a flood of anti-Catholic literature that began to fill London’s bookstalls

224

B enedict S. Robinson

from the end of 1623.28 On April 6, 1624, James announced the failure of the negotiations; on April 23, he signed the Petition of Religion, which included the clause that no concessions to Catholics be made part of any future marriage treaty.29 Between these dates, with the course of English policy uncertain, Henry Herbert licensed The Renegado for the stage.30 The outlines of Massinger’s play may hint at these events: the arrival of Gazet and Vitelli in Tunis, disguised, recalls Charles and Buckingham’s disguised escapes to and from Spain, and the danger of Vitelli’s being seduced into conversion surely evokes the danger of a Catholic marriage. In April 1624, Donusa’s conversion and the final escape from Tunis invite being interpreted as a rewriting of the events of the summer and fall of 1623. Such a reading requires a full allegorical displacement of the play’s terms of difference, taking Islam as a stand-in for Catholicism and requiring us to forget the actual Catholicism of the main characters; but Protestant readers in England were equipped to make such substitutions by long-standing polemics conflating Islam and Catholicism as forms of false faith.31 In April 1624, moreover, there was a new reason to fear a Catholic marriage, this time not to the Spanish Infanta but to Henrietta Maria of France. In February, Henry Rich arrived in Paris to open discussions about such a match and quickly became confident of French interest. By early April rumors about the negotiations were circulating: sometime that month, William Bishop wrote to Louis XIII expressing “the pleasure and hope which we have conceived in the alliance of our Prince with Madame your sister.” The Petition of Religion, Roger Lockyer argues, was intended to hamper these negotiations by preventing the French from imposing the same conditions the Spanish had.32 The “blessed revolution” was barely under way and already a new Catholic marriage was on the horizon. In the ambiguous political moment of spring 1624, the question of anti-Catholicism was bound up with alternate visions for English policy and contested understandings of English identity.33 Moreover, in the 1620s and 1630s, anti-popery was no longer the ubiquitous rhetoric of English Protestantism but was itself a contentious subject. Against the once-universal anti-popery of English Protestantism, a new group of divines was increasingly emphasizing the continuities between England and Rome. They demanded a new spirit of moderation in handling doctrinal questions, and even altogether minimized the importance of doctrine in defining Christian identity, in favor of a new emphasis on the two sacraments shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, baptism and communion.34 These were the

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

225

hallmarks of a movement in the church most identified with William Laud. One of the central issues distinguishing Laudians from Calvinists was the question of the relationship between the Protestant and Catholic churches. On this hinged a whole vision of Christian identity, from the shape of Christendom to the nature of salvation. Calvinism envisioned salvation available only to an elect few, and restricted the true but “invisible” Christian church to those elect. Thus Matthew Sutcliffe claimed that “Popery is an heathenish and idolatrous religion”; in his De Tvrcopapismo, he even argued that Catholicism was Islam by another name.35 The Laudians condemned this kind of rhetoric, arguing that controversy clouded opinions and encouraged defections from the church, and that the Roman church was—as Richard Montagu wrote in 1625—“a true, though not a sound Church of CHRIST.” In this, Montagu was following that earlier anti-puritan, Archbishop Whitgift, who had insisted that “The Church of Rome is not as the Assemblies of Turks, Jews, and Painims.”36 As they narrowed the space between Protestant and Catholic belief, the Laudians emphasized the difference between Christianity and its others. Montagu condemned confessional conflict, lamenting that there were some who, out of a “furious zeale without discretion,” “professe, that Turks and Turcisme is to be preferred before, and rather embraced than Papists and Popery.”37 This misdirected zeal he discovered among both Protestants and Catholics. “The Roman Confessionists at this day,” he asserted, “doe not so extremely hate a Turke, a Jew, a Pagan, as they doe a Protestant; the one they will burne, but pity and commiserate the other.” The Protestant, similarly, “doth in his charity and affection preferre a Mahometan before him”: “It is an ordinary Apothegme, in some mens mouthes, (as it was once a cognizance in the Dutch mens caps) Better a Turk then a Papist, though the Papist believes all the Articles of the Creed.”38 The claim that the Dutch armies had carried flags bearing the crescent moon and the motto “Sooner Turks than Papists” was already, by the time Moutagu wrote, a common-place of irenic and anti-puritan sentiment.39 On the second day of the Hampton Court Conference, the bishop of London interrupted a discussion of the Thirty-Nine Articles in order to accuse the schismatics, as he called them, of believing that we ought rather to conforme our selues in orders and Ceremonies to the fashio[n] of the Turkes, then to the Papistes, which Position hee doubted they approued, because, contrary to the orders of the Vniuersities, they

226

B enedict S. Robinson

appeared before his Maiestie, in Turky gownes, not in their Scholastical habites.40

The ascetic gowns of the puritan divines become the sign of an internal Islamicization, and the Dutch war of resistance against Spain becomes evidence not of the vigorous defense of Protestantism but of a dangerous schismatic tendency. When Byam and Kellet preached at Minehead in 1627, they advanced precisely this mode of anti-puritan polemic: they used the occasion to attack Calvinist theology, to condemn the “puritans” of breaking the peace, and to lament the ongoing religious war on the continent. The complex politics of that moment can be registered when we realize that the renegade who is the subject of these sermons was admitted into the church “by the authority of the Lord Bishop of that Dioces,” as a prefatory note tells us—that is, by Laud, who was bishop of Bath and Wells from 1626 to 1628. Laud took a direct interest in the problem of renegadism, and in 1637, he and Joseph Hall cowrote the first penitential form for the reconciliation of a “Renegado,” an elaborate ritual that embodies a Laudian investment in ceremony and sacred spaces.41 In these sermons, anxiety about new contacts with Islam secures the idea of an integral “Christendom,” defined against the betrayals of renegades abroad and puritans at home. Byam, in particular, argues a series of standard Laudian points, claiming that good works must supplement faith, that doctrinal controversy alienates people from the church, and that repentance is not accomplished by inward contrition alone. His text is Revelation 2:4–5: “Thou hast left thy first loue. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and doe thy first workes” (sig. H2r). This text has clear relevance for the reconciliation of a renegade, but it also enables Byam to insist that redemption requires the performance of “workes.” The “common diuision of Repentance” in the English church includes “Contrition, Confession and Satisfaction,” but “many thinke it more common then safe, and in detestation of Auricular confession, . . . they cannot once endure the name of Confession or Satisfaction.”42 Throughout, Byam’s target is that grandfather of the puritans, Thomas Cartwright (sigs. K3r–K4v). “This is he who thinkes it more safe,” Byam writes, “for vs to conforme our indifferent Ceremonies to the Turkes, which are a farre off, than to the Papists, which are so neere” (sig. K4v). At this point we can see more clearly the rhetorical utility of the Turks in Byam’s polemic. Having rehearsed the standard Christian accusations against Muhammad, Byam goes on to identify “the Turke” as antichrist. As in Montagu—Byam cites Apello Cœsarem

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

227

(sig. K1r)—this claim is directed against the rhetoric of the papal antichrist. Only “the Turke” is the “Common enemie” of Christendom, even though the Christian nations still pursue “those wofull warres of ours . . . where one Member wounds another to the hazard of the whole body.”43 “O might I liue to see the time,” Byam laments, “when our Roberts, Godfreies, Baldwins would set foote in stirrop againe!”44 The fantasy of crusade is directed against both the Turkish “infidel” and those in England who deny the essential unity of all Christian churches.45 This Laudian context suggests an explanation for The Renegado’s endorsement of Francisco’s machinations. If, in the spring of 1624, the play perhaps invited a reading in terms of the threat of a Catholic match, as it circulated in print and in the stage repertory through the later 1620s and 1630s, it could have been read as evoking a Laudian understanding of global religious politics. The deliberate refusal of anti-Catholicism was one of the most controversial elements of the Laudian program, one that provoked the charge Montagu called “negative popery.”46 Montagu claimed that he was being called a crypto-Catholic because he endorsed points of Catholic theology without any balancing condemnation. “Negative popery” may provide a strategy for reading The Renegado. The play foregrounds the Catholicism of its characters, tempting a Protestant audience to derision or dismissal. But there is no voice in the play for articulating this critique: the reader is left to decide how to respond, with little explicit guidance. By emphasizing that the play’s resolution is achieved through “jesuiticial” manipulation, Massinger forces his audience to confront the problem of religious difference directly. Massinger’s play is so pervaded by what seem to be terms of Catholic devotion that his nineteenth-century editor William Gifford became convinced that the author was himself a Catholic: “The language and ideas of this play,” Gifford wrote, “are strictly Catholic.”47 I do not intend to pursue a reassessment of Massinger’s religious beliefs, because I have no confidence that his plays can be read as cryptic autobiographies or personal confessions. And yet, Gifford is right to observe that The Renegado repeatedly calls attention to the Catholicism of its central characters.48 The reconversion of Grimaldi, for example, begins by recalling his most egregious crime, one for which he feels he can never be forgiven. “Vpon a solemne day when the whole City / Ioyn’d in deuotion, and with barefoote steps / Pass’d to S. Markes,” we are told, “when all men else” were crying and repenting their past sins, Grimaldi, Whether in scorne of those so pious rites He had no feeling of, or else drawne to it

228

B enedict S. Robinson Out of a wanton irreligious madnesse, (I know not which) ranne to the holy man, As he was doing of the work of grace, And snatching from his hands the sanctifide meanes Dash’d it vpon the pauement. (4.1.19–33)

This is clearly a Catholic ceremony, centering on “the work of grace,” that is, the elevation of the host, the “sanctifide meanes.” That phrase brings with it a theology that—like both Catholicism and Laudianism— insists on the necessity of rituals, sacraments, sacred spaces, and sacred priests, for mediating the divine to the community of the faithful. It is a theology directly opposed to the doctrine that faith alone saves. Grimaldi’s act of desecration, on the other hand, strangely resembles puritan iconoclastic violence. In the late sixteenth century, Anthony Munday described an incident that closely resembles this episode: an Englishman in Rome stormed into St. Paul’s as Mass was being celebrated, dashed the consecrated wine to the ground, and tried to snatch the host before he was pulled down by the crowd.49 This one act haunts Grimaldi more than any of his other crimes. He raves, cannot bear mention of “The Church, or the high Altar,” and is tormented with “a strong beleefe he cannot receaue pardon / For this fowle fact, but from his hands against whom / It was committed” (4.1.12, 40–42). At this point Francisco approaches, dressed “in a Cope like a Bishop”: if Grimaldi’s crime resembles the kind of iconoclastic violence a radical Protestant might be tempted to commit at the elevation of the host, the figure who comes to expiate that crime—a Jesuit in a bishop’s cope—is a strangely overdetermined symbol of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. But Grimaldi recognizes or thinks he recognizes this figure. “In this reuerend habit,” he claims, he recalls “A deede of mine so fiendlike, that repentance, / . . . Can neuer wash off.” “All my thefts, my rapes,” he insists, “Are veniall trespasses compar’d to what / I offer’d to that shape” (4.1.73–80). Grimaldi is convinced that this act has so stained him that the mark will never wash off, but Francisco first announces forgiveness and then teaches him how to merit it: salvation, although freely given, must also be “purchased” by good works (4.1.86–87). The scene of Grimaldi’s redemption, in other words, is predicated on both eucharistic reverence and a theology of good works. But that does not necessarily make it Catholic: understood in the context of a Laudian insistence on ritual and on the necessity of works as well as faith, it is also perfectly Protestant. The Renegado provokes the accusation of

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

229

popery by its refusal to condemn aspects of Catholic faith, promoting the sense of a broad Christian unity. But this seeming inclusiveness should be understood as a redirected mode of exclusion. The Laudian vision of Christian unity includes all Christians except those to whom the appeal to sacramental practice looks idolatrous. In The Renegado, this exclusion is silent. No “puritan” figures are satirized. The strategy is rather to foreground sacramental ceremonialism, and allow the exclusion to operate at the level of the reader’s response. The relationship between this marvelous sacramentalism and a Laudian vision of Christendom is reinforced in the scenes of Donusa’s conversion. At the end of act four, Donusa and Vitelli are forced to choose: either Vitelli must convert to Islam, or both must die. Donusa undertakes to convert him, using a series of arguments familiar from other stories of renegadism, including the power of Islam, the pleasure of conversion, and the ease of the act. Vitelli responds with an equally conventional tirade against Islam’s “iugling Prophet” (4.3.115).50 These words guarantee his death, as the viceroy Asambeg announces, but they also begin to work a strange transformation in Donusa: “this is vnanswerable,” she responds; “there’s something tells me / I erre in my opinion” (4.3.138–39). When act five begins, Vitelli is planning a scaffold scene that will be at once conversion, marriage, and execution, and we see him consulting with Francisco about Donusa’s spiritual condition. Her renunciation of “Mahomet” is not enough to make her Christian: she “yet wants / The holy badge that should proclaime her fit / For these Celestiall Nuptialls” (5.1.22–24). That is, she needs to be baptized, and Vitelli is worried how this can be achieved. “In a case / Of this necessity,” he asks Francisco, “I would gladly learne, / Whether in me a layman, without orders, / It may not be religious, and lawfull / As we goe to our deaths to doe that office?” (5.1.28–32). Francisco tells him that midwives can perform baptism when necessary, and also invokes the example—right out of Tasso—of “Knights that in the Holy-Land fought for / The freedom of Hierusalem,” who, dying on the battlefield, would baptize each other with the sweat drawn from their helmets (5.1.35–40).51 The effort to redeem the Holy Land is mapped onto Vitelli’s effort to redeem Donusa and in turn onto every act of baptism, every ritual marking the passage from unbelief to true faith. The sacrament represents the effort to mark that transition, and to draw a firm line between Christian and infidel. On the scaffold, Vitelli anoints Donusa with the baptismal water, and she experiences a miraculous transformation: “I am an other

230

B enedict S. Robinson

woman,” she exclaims, till this minute I neuer liu’de, nor durst thinke how to dye. How long haue I beene blinde? Yet on the suddaine, By this blest meanes I feele the filmes of error Tane from my soules eyes. (5.3.121–25)

As she says a few lines later, “Let me kisse the hand / That did this miracle” (5.3.128–29). In the scene in which she debated with Vitelli the respective merits of their religions, Donusa was convinced of the truth of Christianity; but she does not experience that truth until this moment. The sacrament completes the process of conversion, and in this sense it seems to be, as Donusa calls it, a “blest meanes.” Ritual is an essential component of what it means to be Christian. This ritual emphasis permits a reintegrated vision of Christian identity and of the global extent of Christendom. At the same time, it draws another line within Protestantism, between those who assent to the power of ritual and those who insist on the priority of an inward faith prompted only by a contrite and repentant heart. This is not so much a doctrinal point as an imaginative rewriting of global religious politics, one that negotiates at once the boundary between Christendom and Islam and another, equally problematic boundary within Christendom. The sacrament performs an exchange of one identity for another, a conversion; that conversion, we are invited to think, brings to an end the seductions of having “commerce” with the infidel and the attendant threat of renegadism. The Renegado’s conversions detach its narrative from the erotic confusions of the market. Or so it seems: it is nevertheless also true that Francisco’s theology, according to which grace can be “purchased” by works, also preserves at its heart a kind of commerce, suggesting that commerce and conversion are versions of each other and that no act of turning can be once and for all time. Both the market and the scene of conversion suggest a fluidity of the self, the possibility of remaking the self, of “turning,” once, and perhaps again. Gazet’s joke in act one, scene one, may finally be the most sophisticated comment on the play, one that recognizes, without transcending, the pressure imposed on religious identity by the fact of “commerce” between religions. The Renegado opens up the question of politics in Massinger to perspectives left out of other political readings: “politics” here includes the problem of the market and of a new globalization of

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

231

commerce; the problem of renegadism and conversion; the threat of piracy and “Turkishness”; and—most broadly and most urgently—the question of Christendom, a question addressed at once to the difference of Christian from Turk and to multiple forms of confessional difference: Catholic, Calvinist, Laudian. Rather than pursue a reading of the play that attempts to fix its religious politics with absolute certainty, we should perhaps see it as seriously posing the problem of “the Christian” at a conflicted historical moment. It is also a play that may well have read differently in 1630, when it was first published, or in 1639, when William Beeston reserved his rights to it, than in 1624. If Caroline politics is marked by “shifting divisions of opinion and questioning,” as Heinemann has argued, then in this uncertain political terrain we should expect “the political element” in Massinger to be more multiple than we have recognized. We should perhaps also expect dramatic texts to be exploratory rather than doctrinaire, and to maintain uncertain and shifting relationships to the forms of political expression we have come to expect. To suggest that there may be a Laudian or anti-puritan context for reading The Renegado cuts against most contemporary readings of Massinger’s politics. But those readings have in some measure been produced by a canon of Massinger’s plays determined by a narrow vision of what constitutes the political: on the one hand, the narrowly defined world of high politics; and, on the other hand, a fundamentally binary vision of late Jacobean and Caroline politics, in which high church royalism already confronts parliamentary puritanism in a kind of preamble to revolution. In this vision, a Massinger who is both a reader of republican political theory and an anti-puritan seems to be an anomaly. The notion of “opposition,” which has governed the analysis of Caroline and late Jacobean politics, offers an exclusively binary vision of the political scene, and sidelines the possibility of a more multiple and fractured Caroline politics. We must remain open to the possibility that the political lines in the 1620s and 1630s were drawn in places we might not expect.

Notes For their generosity and guidance in responding to this essay, I’d like to thank David Kastan, Jean Howard, James Shapiro, and Zachary Lesser, as well as the editors of the volume, Alan Farmer and Adam Zucker. 1. S. R. Gardiner, “The Political Element in Massinger,” The New Shakspere Society’s Transactions, 1st ser., 4 (1875–1876): 316–19. See also Martin Butler, “Romans in Britain: The Roman Actor and the Early Stuart

232

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

B enedict S. Robinson Classical Play,” in Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment, ed. Douglas Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 139–70; Walter Cohen, “Prerevolutionary Drama,” in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (New York: Routledge, 1992), 136–37; Thomas C. Fulton, “ ‘The True and Naturall Constitution of that Mixed Government’: Massinger’s The Bondman and the Influence of Dutch Republicanism,” Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 152–77; Margot Heinemann, “Drama and Opinion in the 1620s: Middleton and Massinger,” in Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 237–65; and Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. chapters 3 and 4. On Massinger’s patrons, see the “General Introduction” to The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:xxxiii–xxxviii. The Renegado appears in 1639 in a list of plays that William Beeston protected for the exclusive use of his company, and so seems to have remained a valuable property: Edwards and Gibson, Plays and Poems, 2:7–9. Heinemann, “Drama and Opinion,” 238. The word “Turk” in the early modern period could identify someone either as ethnically “Turkish” or as Muslim, as the medieval word “Saracen” could alternately identify the Arabs and the Muslim world at large, and as the modern usage of “Arab” tends in practice to be synonymous with “Muslim,” marginalizing all non-Muslim Arabs or non-Arab Muslims. The figure of the “Turk” in the early modern period is the subject of my book manuscript, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave, forthcoming 2007); this essay derives from the fourth chapter. The Bondman, 1.3.12–18. All plays are quoted from the Edwards and Gibson edition. Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Thirty Years’ War, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 53. S. L. Adams, “Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624,” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 139–71; Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Brennan C. Pursell, “The End of the Spanish Match,” Historical Journal 45 (2002): 699–726. Peter Lake, “Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 805–25. See especially Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) and The Causes of the

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

233

English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); also, Glenn Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and “Was the English Civil War a War of Religion?,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (2000): 173–201. The play asks to be read in terms of Machiavelli’s discussion of the difficulties impeding the reform of a corrupt state. See Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), sections I.16, I.18, I.49, I.55 Alexandra Walsham, “ ‘The Fatall Vesper’: Providentialism and AntiPopery in Late Jacobean London,” Past and Present 144 (1994): 36–87. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Part III. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Parker, The Thirty Years’ War, 108–18. Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Massinger here is perhaps echoing Machiavelli, Discourses, III.41: “where one deliberates entirely on the safety of his fatherland, there ought not to enter any consideration of either just or unjust.” A full reading of the play should see it as more exploratory in its politics than I am suggesting. Its terms, like those of The Bondman, derive from the post-Machiavellian debates over “reason of state”; as such, I think it may leave open the question of intervention: it is clearly presented as the honorable course of action, but it is at the same time a dangerous one. Much as we mourn Antiochus’s fate, the fact of Roman power prevents other states from acting effectively to resist Rome. One’s ethical responsibility for an ally is here in explicit and perhaps insoluble conflict with the demands of self-protection. Compare the scene in Believe As You List where the Roman centurion Sempronius describes a “freshe courtesan” (4.1.15): “since I was a trader / in such com[m]oddities, I never saw / her equall” (4.1.19–21). The extent to which the early modern words for trade double as words for sex is underlined by Thomas Heywood’s The Captives, in which the “fflawed ware, and crackt comodityes” on offer are prostitutes in a brothel in Marseilles, an “open market, where sinnes sould, / where lust and al vncleanes, are Comerst, / as ffreely as Comodityes are, vended”: The Captives (Oxford: Malone Society, 1953), TLN 77, 106–08. Henry Byam and Edward Kellet, A Retvrne from Argier (London, 1628), sig. L1v. On this text, see further below. This is the narrative offered by John Smith; see Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation,” ELH 67 (2000): 50 n.11. See also Godfrey Fisher, Barbary Legend: War, Trade, and Piracy in North Africa 1415–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), and David D. Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, 1616–1642 (Andershot: Scolar, 1994).

234

B enedict S. Robinson

21. See Fuchs, “Faithless Empires,” and Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22. Daborne, A Christian Turn’d Turke, quoted in Three Turk Plays, ed. Daniel Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 7. 193–94. Drake himself—”the master thief of the unknown world”— could be a figure of ambivalence: see Kenneth R. Andrews, Drake’s Voyages: A Re-Assessment of their Place in Elizabethan Maritime Expansion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 81. 23. Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and its ‘Pauline’ Rerighting,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2 (2002): 1–34, 21. 24. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 25. I am aware of only one comparable instance of a Catholic priest appearing in a play without being marked as a Machiavel: The Noble Soldier, which, Zachary Lesser has argued, was itself being marketed to a Laudian readership. See Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 3. 26. Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, 281–83. 27. Ibid., 16–20, 29–53, and Lake, “Constitutional Consensus.” 28. For a summary of events in 1623–1624 correlated with stage history, see the “Chronological Table” in Limon, Dangerous Matter. Also, Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (New York: Longman, 1981), chapters 5 and 6, and Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origin of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 31–42. 29. Lockyer, Buckingham, 190. 30. Edwards and Gibson, Plays and Poems, 2:1. 31. On this, see my article, “The ‘Secret Faith’ of Spenser’s Saracens,” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 37–73. 32. William Bishop, quoted in Locker, Buckingham, 199; on the Petition of Religion and the French Match, see Adams, “Foreign Policy,” 157–58; and Limon, Dangerous Matter, chapter 3. 33. See Peter Lake, “The Significance of the Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1980): 161–78, and Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978). 34. See Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

235

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Alexandra Walsham, “The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists, and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1998): 620–51; and Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Rochester: Boydell, 1993). See Matthew Sutcliffe, The Petition Apologeticall of Lay Papists (London, 1606), sig. D4r, and De Tvrcopapismo (London, 1599). Compare Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 174–75. Montagu, Apello Cæsarem (London, 1625), sig. Q1r. See also Montagu, The Acts and Monuments of the Church Before Christ Incarnate (London, 1642), sigs. B2r–B2v, and Joseph Hall, The Olde Religion (London, 1628), sig. N7v. For Whitgift, see Richard Hooker, Tracts and Sermons, ed. Laetitia Yeandle and Egil Grislis, in The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977–1993), 5:288. Montagu, Apello Cæsarem, sigs. Q1r–Q1v. Montagu regularly cites puritans and Jesuits as the extremists of either side—paradoxically asserting that these two opponents are more alike than different. Laudians frequently represented puritans as Jews, for their supposed legalism and for their separation from the common body of English Protestants. See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Montagu, Acts and Monuments, sig. 2S2r. Erasmus mentions flags with the motto “Plutost Turcs que Papaux” in his Epistle to the Brothers of Lower Germany; see Franco Cardini, Europe and Islam, trans. Caroline Beamish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 147. William Barlow, The Svmme and Svbstance of the Conference (London, 1604), sig. E2r. “A Form of Penance and Reconciliation of a Renegado, or Apostate from the Christian Church to Turcism,” in Peter Hall, ed., The Works of Joseph Hall, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1837–1839), 12:346–50. The writing of this form is mentioned in the account of his diocese Laud offered to Charles in 1637: see Laud, The History of the Troubles and Tryal (London, 1695), sig. 4A4v. Byam and Kellet, Argier, sigs. K2v–K3r. This is not to say that the doctrine of faith and works is inimical to English Protestantism before Laud. The question is one of emphasis: the Laudians praise works without at the same time condemning Catholic errors. On this technique of subtly manipulating otherwise unremarkable points, or of turning the conventional into the polemical merely by not stating a few standard caveats, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed. Byam and Kellet, Argier, sigs. K1r–K1v. It was perhaps because of its resonance with this ideology of unity that Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (London, 1603) was so popular in the 1620s and

236

44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

B enedict S. Robinson 1630s, with editions appearing in 1621, 1631, and 1638. Knolles raises the problem of Christendom right from the first line of his letter to the readers, in which he contrasts “The long and still declining state of the Christian commonweale” with “The glorious Empire of the Turkes” (sig. B1r). The causes of Turkish greatness must be sought in the “small care” given to “the common state of the Christian Commonweale”: instead of “Christian compassion and vnitie” there is “distrust and implacable hatred,” such that the Christian nations “neuer could as yet . . . ioyne their common forces against the common enemie” (sig. A4v). Even the dedication to King James, which takes James’s Lepanto as precedent (sig. A3r), recalls that poem’s use of the specter of Turkish power to explore the problem of a divided Christendom. Knolles’s own sense of the necessity of unity may have been motivated by his status as either a recusant or a convert from Catholicism: see the introduction to Richard Knolles, trans., The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). Byam and Kellet, Argier, sig. K1v. This line completes a paragraph in which Byam returns to a controversy between Luther and the papacy, over the war with the Turks: on this, see my article, “The ‘Secret Faith’ of Spenser’s Saracens,” and Harvey Buchanan, “Luther and the Turks,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 47:1 (1956): 145–60. Compare William Page’s effort to redirect confessional conflict against “the common enemy”: “What a glorious sight would it be,” he asks, “to see the red Crosse once againe advanced as it was in the daies of Constantine? . . . And set aside for a while this private interest of Protestant, and Papist, and Grecian, and Lutheran, and Calvinist, and Arminian, and Socinian.” See the preface to Page’s translation of Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Oxford, 1639), sigs. 3*1v–3*2r. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 63–72. William Gifford, ed., The Plays of Philip Massinger, 4 vols. (London, 1813), 2:122. In the introduction Gifford claims that “a close and repeated perusal of Massinger’s work has convinced me that he was a Catholic,” and that the plays show “innumerable proofs” of the religion of their author (1:xliv). This inaugurated a line of speculation about Massinger’s religion: see T. A. Dunn, Philip Massinger (London: Thomas Nelson, 1957), 177–79, 184–91, and Donald S. Lawless, Philip Massinger and His Associates (Muncie, IN: Ball State University Press, 1967). Edwards and Gibson are unconvinced: Plays and Poems, 1:xlv. Some of these “Catholic” allusions could derive from Massinger’s sources. The most likely source for The Renegado is Cervantes’ play Los baños de Argel (The Prisons of Algiers); “The Captive’s Tale” from Don Quixote and one of the Novelas ejemplares, “El amante liberal,” also represent close analogues. See Edwards and Gibson, Plays and Poems, 2:2–4. Anthony Munday, The English Romayne Life (London, 1590), inserted woodcut following sig. J4r.

Caroline Politics and The Renegado

237

50. On anti-Islamic polemics, see Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960). 51. See Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 12.66–69: Tancred, having unknowingly killed Clorinda, the Saracen woman with whom he is in love, in her dying moments baptizes her with water from his helmet. In the English church, lay baptism was the subject of controversy: the outcome of the debate over lay baptism at the Hampton Court Conference was the rewording of a passage of the Book of Common Prayer so as to make clear that even emergency baptisms must be performed “by the Minister of the Parish, or any other lawfull Minister, that can be procured.” See Barlow, The Svmme, sigs. B4v, C3v–D1v; The Booke of Common Prayer (London, 1623), sig. C1r.

This page intentionally left blank

List of Contributors

Martin Butler is Professor of English Renaissance Drama at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (1984) and Ben Jonson’s Volpone: A Critical Study (1987), and has edited The Selected Plays of Ben Jonson, Volume 1 (1989), Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (1999), and the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cymbeline (2005). He is completing a book on The Stuart Masque and Political Culture 1603–41, and is a general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (forthcoming 2007). Mario DiGangi is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997), he has published articles on Renaissance drama in English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Quarterly, and has contributed chapters to several essay collections, including Ovid and the Renaissance Body (2001); Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800 (2003); Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama (2002); A Companion to Renaissance Drama (2002); and A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Comedies (2003). He is currently working on the Bedford Texts and Contexts edition of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Richard Dutton is Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is the author of many books on early modern drama and culture, including Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (1991) and Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (1996). He has edited “Women Beware Women” and Other Plays by Thomas Middleton (1999) and Jonson’s Epicene (2003) for the Revels Plays, of which he is a general editor. He is currently working on A Handbook on Early Modern English Theatre for Oxford University Press. Alan B. Farmer is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He has published essays in Shakespeare Quarterly and

240

L ist of Contributors

elsewhere on Renaissance printed drama, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News. In addition to coauthoring a book with Zachary Lesser on the publication of plays in Shakespeare’s England, he is currently completing a study of playbooks and newsbooks in the 1630s. Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University. The author of several books including Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration (1984), The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994), and, with Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), she has just completed a new book on London comedy entitled Theater of a City. A past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and one of the editors of The Norton Shakespeare, Howard has received numerous fellowships and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Most recently, she was the Avery Stanton Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library. Zachary Lesser is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (2004), as well as articles in ELH, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is currently working on two monographs, Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book Trade: Publishers, Readers, and Printed Drama (cowritten with Alan B. Farmer), and The Birth of Tragicomedy: Mixed Form, Mixed Politics in Renaissance Drama. Kathleen E. McLuskie is Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford upon Avon. She has written numerous articles on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights and is author of Renaissance Dramatists (1989), and Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (1993). She has edited Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1989), a collection of Plays on Women (1999), and a collection of essays on Shakespeare and the Modern Theatre (2001). She has taught at the Universities of Kent and Southampton. Benedict S. Robinson is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY, Stony Brook. He has published articles on religion, politics, and early modern culture, and has recently completed a book entitled Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spencer to Milton (forthcoming 2007). Lauren Shohet teaches at Villanova University. She is the author of Reading Masques: The Seventeenth-Century English Masque and

List of Contributors

241

Public Culture (Oxford, 2006), and numerous articles on Milton, Shakespeare, and contemporary reimaginings of the Renaissance. Malcolm Smuts is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His publications include Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (1987; reissued 1998), Culture and Power in England 1585–1685 (1998), and numerous articles on the cultural and political history of early Stuart England. Adam Zucker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has published articles on Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and on the Covent Garden plays of Richard Brome and Thomas Nabbes. He is currently completing a book entitled Comedies of Place: Cultural Competencies and Comic Form in Early Modern England.

This page intentionally left blank

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables

absolutism, royal, 69–70, 71–2, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 93n, 179n aesthetic pleasure, 8 audience taste and, 44, 48–52, 54–6, 57 historical and political meanings vs., 43–8, 52–3, 54–8, 60–3, 64–5 Aglaura (Suckling), 24, 118, 136 Albovine (Davenant), 160–1, 178n Alchemist, The (Jonson), 67n, 134, 151n, 152n Alciati, Andrea, 164 Alleyn, Edward, 51 Allot, Robert, 154n Allot, Thomas, 141, 142, 154n Amyntas (Randolph), 103, 105 Anne of Denmark, queen of James I, 146 antichrist, 216, 226–7 Antipodes, The (Brome), 109, 115–16, 117–18 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 191 Arditi, Jorge, 188 Areopagitica (Milton), 83 Aristippus (Randolph), 131, 132, 141, 152n Aristophanes, 104 Armin, Robert, 36, 145 Arminians, Arminianism, 4, 8, 11, 218, 236n see also Laudians, Laudianism Army Plot (1641), 24

Arundel, Thomas Howard, earl of, 127n Aspley, William, 28 Aubrey, John, 130–1, 134 audiences, theater, 117–19, 123 of hall vs. amphitheater playhouses, 49–50, 97, 105, 110, 117, 118, 122, 132, 149 of The Late Lancashire Witches, 8, 45–6, 48, 52, 55, 56–8, 61–2, 64, 65 of masques, 8, 71, 72–4, 76–7, 79, 82–5, 86–7, 90–1, 163 of St. Werburgh Street theater, 2, 9, 130, 132–3, 136, 142–5, 148–50, 153n social divisions and, 17, 55, 97, 118, 122, 132, 145, 149, 183–4, 191, 196, 205 tastes of, 3, 12n–13n, 48–52, 53, 54–5, 56, 57, 61–2, 105, 117, 118, 131, 132, 145, 149 authors, dramatic, 2, 17 aesthetic tastes shaped by, 48–52, 54–5, 57–8, 63, 64 amateur vs. professional, 4, 12n, 118–19, 120, 128n in Army Plot, 24 in Golden Age dramatic canon, 31, 31–2, 35–7 Herbert’s advice to, 54, 62

244

I ndex

Babham, Christopher, 101, 102, 106–7, 113, 123n Ball, The (J. Shirley), 10, 54, 139, 188–9, 190–205 authorship of, 206n censorship of, 195–6, 206n, 210n cynic in, 183, 193–5, 196, 198, 199, 201 dancing in, 183, 184, 186, 190, 191–5, 196, 197–8, 199, 201, 203–5, 209n, 210n false cosmopolitan in, 197–9, 200, 203, 205 proper masculinity as represented in, 200–1, 202–5 sexual libertine in, 201–2, 205 ballads, 48–9 printed, 21–2, 38n Bancroft, Richard, bishop of London, 225 Bankes, William, 108 baptism, 224, 229–30, 237n Barber, Laird H., 68n Bastiaenen, Johannes Adam, 12n Bastwick, John, 83, 84, 85 Beaumont, Francis, 13n, 24, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 103–4 see also specific plays Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647), 24 Bedford, Francis Russell, earl of, 185 Beeston, Christopher, 54, 99, 100, 111–12, 124n, 138, 140, 196 Brome and, 114, 115 Cockpit management of, 98, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119, 121, 154n court connections of, 112, 113, 116, 122, 154n Beeston, William, 98, 112 Brome and, 115, 116 Cockpit management of, 114, 115–19, 121, 128n, 154n, 231, 232n

Heton and, 114, 116, 118, 122, 128n Beeston’s Boys, 98, 99, 101, 110, 111–12, 122, 153n, 154n, 231, 232n Believe As You List (Massinger), 213, 217–19, 233n Bellings, Richard, 137–8 Bentley, Gerald Eades, 101, 104, 123n, 124n, 125n, 129, 206n Berkeley, George, Lord, 140 Berry, Herbert, 45, 46, 47, 102 Bird, Theophilus, 51–2 Bird in a Cage, The (J. Shirley), 195, 207n Bishop, Tom, 70 Bishop, William, 224 Blackfriars Boys, 102, 149 Blackfriars theater, 9, 17, 30, 37n, 48, 97, 102, 112, 121, 122, 130 amateur dramatists and, 119, 120 fashionable market dominated by, 101, 149 Blagrave, William, 111, 123n Cockpit shares owned by, 113, 126n as deputy to Master of the Revels, 107, 125n in founding of Company of the Revels, 99, 101, 102–3, 109 Bloody Banquet, The (T. D.), 180n Bloody Brother, The (Rollo, Duke of Normandy) (J. Fletcher), 33, 36, 142 Blount, Edward, 33–4 Bohemian succession crisis, 70, 215 Bondman, The (Massinger), 213, 215–17, 218–19, 233n Book of Common Prayer, 237 Book of Sports, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre, 40n, 208n Boyle, Richard, 132 Braden, Gordon, 129, 153n Brazen Age, The (Heywood), 28, 152n

Index Bridgeman, John, bishop of Chester, 63–4 Bridgewater family, 88, 89 Britannia Triumphans (Davenant), 69, 71–2, 71, 73–6, 74, 77–8, 79, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89–90, 89, 93n Britland, Karen, 112, 126n Broken Heart, The (Ford), 174n, 175n Brome, Richard, 4, 6, 12n, 36, 104, 115–20, 125n, 175n, 186, 191 amateur dramatists scorned by, 118–19, 128n Christopher Beeston and, 114, 115–16 Heton and, 108, 109, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 126n, 127n, 152n and politics of The Late Lancashire Witches, 8, 44, 45, 46–7, 56, 58, 64 Prince’s Men and, 108 Queen’s Men’s gibes at, 116–18 see also specific plays Brown, Jonathan, 178n Bryson, Anna, 188 Buckingham, George Villiers, duke of, 10, 88, 161–4, 179n, 186 Charles I’s relationship with, 157–8, 159–60, 162–4, 165, 168, 173, 175n–6n, 178n, 223, 224 James I’s relationship with, 158, 159, 161–3, 168 Bulkeley, Lancelot, archbishop of Dublin, 131 Burgess, Glenn, 5, 77, 93n Burnell, Henry, 131, 146–8, 149–50 Burner, Sandra A., 129–30, 153n, 210n Burton, Henry, 83, 84, 85 Butler, Martin, xi, xiv, 4–5, 8–9, 14n, 70, 92n, 128n, 165, 179n, 180n, 191, 195, 210n, 213

245

Byam, Henry, 221–3, 226–7, 235n, 236n Calvinists, Calvinism, 225, 226, 231, 236n Captives, The (Heywood), 233n Careless Shepherdess, The (Goffe), 49–50, 116–18, 119, 128n Carew, Thomas, 78, 80–81, 91, 159–60 Carlell, Lodowick, 174n, 175n Caroline drama: aesthetical pleasure vs. historical meaning of, 43–8, 52–3, 54–8, 60–3, 64–5 artistic innovation in, 1, 2, 48, 49–50, 55 censorship and regulation of, 52–6, 57, 63, 64, 67n, 125n, 195–6, 206n, 210n, 217 historiography of, xi–xii, xiii, xiv–xv, 1, 2–6, 10, 11, 12n–13n, 43, 97–100, 120–3, 129–30, 158–9, 174n, 213–15, 230–1 literary style of, 34–5, 49–50, 51–3, 103–5 periodization of, 1–2, 7, 11, 17, 20–1, 20, 35–7, 43 printing of, see playbooks, printed sense of tradition in, 2, 48, 49–50, 55, 63 Cartwright, Thomas, 226 Cartwright, William, Sr., 101–2, 125n Castlehaven, Mervin Touchet, earl of, 159 Catholics, Catholicism, 3, 4, 10–11, 88, 215–17, 218, 223–5, 227–9, 231, 234n in England, 176n, 215, 217, 224 in Ireland, 137–8, 144–5, 147, 150 Islam conflated with, 224, 225 J. Shirley and, 137–8, 144–5, 195 Massinger and, 227, 236n Cavendish, William, duke of Newcastle, 24, 186, 187

246

Index

Cervantes, Miguel de, 236n Chabot, Admiral of France (Chapman and J. Shirley), 33, 139, 154n, 206n Challenge for Beauty, A (Heywood), 52–3 Changeling, The (Middleton and W. Rowley), 117 Changes (J. Shirley), 103, 113, 124n Chapman, George, 33, 103–4, 139, 206n see also specific plays Charles I, king of England, 11, 12n, 47, 76, 127n, 133, 170, 215, 235n Buckingham’s relationship with, 157–8, 159–60, 162–4, 165, 168, 173, 175n–6n, 178n, 223, 224 Ireland and, 134, 146, 147, 148 marriage of, xiii, 87–8, 157–8, 159–60, 176n, 201, 211n, 224 masques and, 69, 72, 75, 80, 84, 90 political failures of, xii–xiii, 4–5 Charles II, king of England, 107, 150, 152n Chartier, Roger, 73, 83 Chettle, Henry, 32, 33 Christian Turned Turk, A (Daborne), 222 Cicero, 163, 164 City Wit, The (Brome), 104, 186 Civil War, English, 83, 99, 129, 150 historiography of, xi, xiii, xvin, 4–5, 11, 13n, 43, 65, 231 play publication and, 23–6, 25, 29, 35, 37, 39n Claricilla (Killigrew), 136, 165, 167–9, 170, 180n Clark, Arthur Melville, 46 Clark, Ira, 179n, 210n Clark, William Smith, 130, 144, 146 Clavell, John, 132, 149, 152n

Cockpit theater (Phoenix theater), 9, 17, 51, 97, 101, 126n, 130, 135, 149, 179n Beeston’s Boys at, 98, 99, 111, 112, 113, 122, 153n Christopher Beeston’s management of, 98, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119, 121, 154n Davenant as manager of, 99, 112, 128n Queen’s Men at, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 122, 138, 141, 153n, 183, 195 Salisbury Court rivalry with, 113, 116–19, 121, 122–3 William Beeston’s management of, 114, 115–19, 121, 128n, 154n, 231, 232n Coelum Britannicum (Carew), 78, 80–1, 159–60 Cogswell, Thomas, 175n–6n, 223 comedies, see Town comedies companies, see playing companies Company of the Revels, 101–11 actors in, 101–2, 103–4, 109–10, 111, 125n dissolution of, 110–11 at Fortune, 105–6, 107–8, 110, 124n founding of, 101–3, 106–7, 109 repertory of, 103–5, 110, 113, 116, 124n Revels office and, 107, 109 at Salisbury Court, 101–5, 106–8, 109–10, 120, 122, 124n Comus, see Ludlow Castle masque Constable, Francis, 27, 40n Constant Maid, The (J. Shirley), 36, 138, 139, 140, 153n Contention for Honor and Riches, A (J. Shirley), 105 Cooke, William, 27, 40n, 135–6, 140–2, 154n Cooper, Drury, 137 coranto newsbooks, 21, 56

Index Coronation, The (J. Fletcher and J. Shirley), 136, 139, 139, 154n Cotes, Thomas, 141 Cottington, Francis, 83 Coursing of the Hare, The (Heminges), 105 Court Beggar, The (Brome), 118–19, 128n Covenanters, Scottish, 147 Covent Garden, 185 Crankshaw, David J., 93n Crooke, Andrew, 27, 40n, 135–6, 140–2, 152n, 154n Crooke, Edmond, 141 Crooke, John, 141, 142 Crosfield, Thomas, 108, 109 Cufaude, William, 86 cultural materialism, xii, xiii–xiv Daborne, Robert, 222 Dallington, Robert, 189–90, 197, 209n Damoiselle, The (Brome), 118 Davenant, William, 6, 10, 24, 84, 87, 177n, 191 Brome’s snipes at, 118, 128n as Cockpit manager, 99, 112, 128n Fleet Street amphitheater project of, 99, 115, 127n, 128n royal favorites in plays of, 160–1, 175n, 178n, 179n–80n see also specific plays Davis, Natalie Zemon, xvin Dekker, Thomas, 31, 33, 36, 60, 67n, 68n, 145 Denham, John, 24, 175n Deserving Favorite, The (Carlell), 174n, 175n DiGangi, Mario, 9–10, 11 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 30, 31, 36 Dolan, Frances E., 176n Dorset, Edward Sackville, earl of, 107, 108, 111, 113–14, 122, 126n, 138

247

Doubtful Heir, The (Rosania) (J. Shirley), 48–9, 134, 136, 138, 139–40, 142, 153n Drake, Francis, 222, 234n Drayton, Michael, 177n Drinking Academy, The (Randolph), 104 Dublin, see St. Werburgh Street theater Dublin Castle, 131, 137, 147 Duke’s Mistress, The (J. Shirley), 139, 165, 170–1 Dutch Republic, 225, 226 Dutton, Richard, 8, 9, 53, 67n Dyson, Humphrey, 95n–6n Eastward Ho! (Chapman, Jonson, and Marston), 28, 67n Edmond Ironside (anon.), 106 Edward II (Marlowe), 158, 159, 173, 177n Eliot, John, 157, 163–4, 177n–8n Elizabeth, Electress Palatine, 215–16 Elizabeth I, queen of England, xiii, 33, 215, 222 English Dancing Master, The (Playford), 192–3, 193, 205 Englishmen for My Money (Haughton), 31, 32 English Moor, The (Brome), 117–18 Erasmus, Desiderius, 235n Every Man out of His Humor (Jonson), 197 Example, The (J. Shirley), 139, 154n Fair Maid of the Exchange, The (anon.), 32, 131–2, 133–4, 141–2 Faithful Shepherdess, The (J. Fletcher), 32, 50 Farmer, Alan B., xi, 7, 37n, 38n, 40n Fatal Contract, The (Heminges), 120, 175n

248

Index

favorites, royal, 157–81 in Caroline drama, 10, 11, 159, 160–1, 165–74, 174n–5n, 179n–80n compared to stellions, 157, 163, 164, 178n as Ganymedean erotic playthings, 10, 157–8, 159–60, 161–2, 163–5, 166, 173, 177n, 178n as monstrous manipulators, 158, 159, 160, 162–74, 175n, 176n, 179n–80n in royalist ideology, 165, 167–9, 173–4, 178n Findlay, Alison, 46–7 Fine Companion, A (Marmion), 106 Fletcher, Alan J., 130, 137, 142, 144, 147–8, 153n Fletcher, John, 13n, 24, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 134, 135–6, 140, 142–3, 151n see also specific plays Ford, John, 3, 51–2, 60, 67n, 68n, 116, 174n, 175n Forset, Edward, 169, 178n Forsythe, Robert, 136, 206n Fortune theater, 109, 111, 114, 121, 151n Company of the Revels at, 105–6, 110, 124n Gunnell’s ties to, 99, 101–2, 106, 107 J. Shirley’s recruitment of actors from, 133, 135, 145 reputation of, 49, 97, 101, 105, 110, 117, 118, 135 Foucault, Michel, xii Four Prentices of London, The (Heywood), 32 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, 215–16, 217 Freehafer, John, 115, 127n, 128n Gainsford, Thomas, 211n Game at Chess, A (Middleton), 46, 218

Games, Alison, 210n Gamester, The (J. Shirley), 139 Gardiner, S. R., xii, xiii, 213 General, The (anon.), 134, 143–4, 152n genre, 8, 10, 63, 148 of masque, 78–9, 80–1, 82, 86, 89–90, 91 see also Town comedies Gentleman of Venice, The (J. Shirley), 120, 138, 153n Gifford, William, 206n, 227, 236n Glapthorne, Henry, 125n Globe theater, 44, 48–9, 55, 97, 149 Goad, Christopher, 101, 125n, 126n Goffe, Thomas, 49–50, 116–17, 174n see also Careless Shepherdess, The Goldberg, Jonathan, 78 Golden Age, The (Heywood), 28, 152n Golden Age Restored, The (Jonson), 92n Gough, John, 120 Gray’s Inn, 186, 195 Great Duke of Florence, The (Massinger), 174n, 179n Greenblatt, Stephen, xvin Gresley, George, 107 Grosvenor, Richard, 164 Guillory, John, 37n–8n, 40n Gunnell, Richard, 8–9, 99, 100, 105, 106–9, 113, 123n Brome signed by, 108 financial difficulties of, 102, 106–7, 110, 120–1 in founding of Company of the Revels, 101–3, 109 Prince’s Men and, 107, 108–9, 111, 114, 126n Gurr, Andrew, 98, 99, 101, 106, 120, 121, 123n, 125n Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, 217

Index Habsburg Empire, 215, 217, 222 Hall, Joseph, 226 Hammerton, Stephen, 102, 113 Hammond, Paul, 177n Hampton Court Conference, 225–6, 237n Hannibal and Scipio (Nabbes), 125n–6n Harbage, Alfred, 3, 12n Harding, Samuel, 167–8, 180n Harsnett, Samuel, bishop of Norwich, 157, 177n–8n Harvey, William, 63 Haughton, William, 31, 32 Heinemann, Margot, 213, 214, 231 Heminges, William, 102, 105, 120, 124n, 175n Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I, xiii, 53, 107, 138, 186 marriage of, 87–8, 157–8, 159–60, 176n, 201, 211n, 224 masques and, 78, 80, 84, 89, 90, 184, 206n–7n Neoplatonism and, 3, 87–8, 176n royal absolutism and, 80 theaters supported by, 112, 113, 114 West End culture influenced by, 3, 183–4, 185 Herbert, Henry (Master of the Revels), 52–4, 62, 111, 112, 113, 114, 126n, 134, 151n, 224 J. Shirley’s plays licensed by, 120, 124n, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 139, 154n, 195–6 old plays relicensed by, 52–3 plays censored by, 52, 53–4, 56, 195–6, 206n, 210n, 217 Salisbury Court share owned by, 107, 119 Herbert, Thomas, 154n Heton, Richard, 8–9, 110–23 Beestons and, 114, 116, 118, 119, 122, 128n

249

Brome and, 108, 109, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 127n Dorset and, 113, 122 managerial ambitions of, 99, 100, 110, 115, 116, 119–21, 122–3 “Papers” of, 99, 108, 110, 113, 114–15, 120, 127n players’ relationship with, 109, 115, 120 Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery (Randolph), 104 Heywood, Thomas, 51, 52–3, 105, 116, 132, 152n, 233n civic pageants by, 76–7, 79–81, 83, 84–5, 84, 87, 90, 91 and politics of The Late Lancashire Witches, 8, 44, 45, 46–7, 56, 58, 64 printed plays of, 28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 91 royal favorites in plays of, 174n–5n see also specific plays High Commission, 46, 53 Hill, Christopher, xii, xvin Hirschfield, Heather, 47 Hobbes, Thomas, 83 Hoffman (Chettle), 32, 33 Holborne, Robert, 83 Holland, Henry Rich, earl of, 140, 224 Holland’s Leaguer (Marmion), 106, 124n Howard, Jean E., 9–10, 11 Howard, Skiles, 210n Hubert, Francis, 162, 177n Humorous Courtier, The (J. Shirley), 139, 140, 153n, 154n, 175n Hunsdon country house masque, 84, 87, 91 Hutchinson, Lucy, 94n Hyde Park (J. Shirley), 139, 140, 154n, 206n impresarios, see theater owners and managers

250

Index

Inns of Court, 50, 79, 80, 184, 186, 195 Ireland: Catholics in, 137–8, 144–5, 147, 150 Charles I and, 134, 146, 147, 148 see also St. Werburgh Street theater J. Shirley in, 8, 113, 120, 129–30, 133–45, 148–50 Irish Gentleman, The (anon.), 134, 142 Iron Age, Part One, The (Heywood), 28, 33, 152n Iron Age, Part Two, The (Heywood), 28, 33, 34, 152n Islam, 4, 10–11, 213, 214–15, 219, 222–3, 232n Catholicism conflated with, 224, 225 conversions and, 220, 222, 223, 226, 229, 230, 231, 235n see also Turks James I, king of England, 28, 47, 146, 217, 236n death of, 10, 158, 168 favorites of, 158, 159, 160, 161–3, 168, 173, 176n, 177n, 178n Spanish policy of, 215, 223–4 witchcraft beliefs of, 44, 65n Jameson, Frederic, 44 Jauss, Hans Robert, 82 Jealous Lovers, The (Randolph), 124n Jesuits, 4, 10, 216–17, 223, 227, 228, 229–30 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 32, 33, 40n–1n, 51 Johnson, Samuel, 43–4, 65 Jones, Inigo, 56, 69, 71–2, 71, 74, 76, 112, 128n, 185 Jonson, Ben, 3, 32, 37, 67n, 68n, 134, 137, 140, 148, 151n, 197 censored plays of, 53, 54, 56 folio of (1616), 7, 32, 35, 36, 155n see also specific plays

Jordan, Thomas, 104–5, 124n, 125n, 126n Kane, Andrew, 108 Kellett, Edward, 222, 226, 235n Kildare, George Fitzgerald, earl of, 137 Killigrew, Thomas, 10, 136, 159, 165, 167–9, 170, 180n King and Queen’s Young Company, see Beeston’s Boys King Leir (anon.), 32 King’s Men, 46, 102, 109, 120, 136, 151n censored plays of, 52, 53–4, 56 court performances of, 56, 128n economic stability of, 97, 98, 110, 122 older plays in repertory of, 44–5, 50, 52, 53, 59, 152n royal connections of, 65n, 112, 122 summer and winter theaters of, 55, 97 King’s Revels company, see Company of the Revels Kirkman, Francis, 95n, 187 Kishlansky, Mark, xvin Knolles, Richard, 235n–6n Knowles, James, 70 Knutson, Rosalyn, 151n–2n Lady Mother, The (Glapthorne), 125n Lady of Pleasure, The (J. Shirley), 139, 140, 154n, 185, 204, 205 Lady’s Trial, The (Ford), 51–2 Lake, Peter, xvin, 216, 217 Lancashire Witches case, 45, 47, 56–7, 61–4, 68n Landgartha (Burnell), 131, 146–8, 149–50 Late Lancashire Witches, The (Brome and Heywood), 44–8, 55–65 comic scenes in, 8, 45–6, 47–8, 57, 58, 60–2, 63

Index political topicality of, 45–6, 47, 48, 55, 56–7, 61, 62–3 staging of, 45, 46, 58, 59, 60–2 Tomkyns’s commentary on, 45–6, 48, 55, 57–8, 64, 65 traditional dramatic elements in, 58–9, 60, 63, 64 witchcraft in, 44–5, 46, 47, 57, 58–62, 64 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 5, 11, 46–7, 53, 54, 76, 131, 145 Pembroke’s conflict with, 8, 45 renegadism and, 225, 226, 235n Laudians, Laudianism, 4, 5, 46–7, 72, 93n, 145, 224–9, 234n Calvinists vs., 225, 226, 231, 236n negative popery and, 227–9, 235n see also Arminians, Arminianism Lawes, William, 69, 85 Lesser, Zachary, 7, 13n, 37n, 38n, 40n, 49, 234n libels, manuscript, 157, 159, 161–2, 165 Limon, Jerzy, 213, 234n Lindley, David, 70, 92n Lockyer, Roger, 158, 224 Londini Artium (Heywood), 80 Londini Emporia (Heywood), 90 Londini Speculum (Heywood), 76–7, 79–80, 81, 83, 84–5, 84, 91 London, see Town comedies; Town culture; West End London Jus Honorarium (Heywood), 81 Lord Mayor’s shows, 37n, 76–7, 79–80, 81, 83, 84–5, 84, 87, 90, 94n Louis XIII, king of France, 224 Lovelace, Richard, 120, 140 Love’s Cruelty (J. Shirley), 139, 140, 154n

251

Love’s Mistress (Heywood), 36, 90 Love Tricks (The School of Compliment) (J. Shirley), 36, 154n Ludlow Castle masque (Comus) (Milton), 79, 83–5, 84, 87, 88–90, 89, 94n Luminalia (Davenant), 78, 83, 84, 87, 90 Luther, Martin, 236n Lyly, John, 7, 32, 33–4, 33, 41n Macbeth (Shakespeare), 43–4, 65n Machiavelli, Niccolò, 233n Mad Word My Masters, A (Middleton), 33 Magnetic Lady, The (Jonson), 53, 54 Maid of Honor, The (Massinger), 165–7, 170, 179n Maid’s Revenge, The (J. Shirley), 139, 140, 154n Malcontent, The (Marston), 28 Malone, Edmond, 124n manuscript circulation: of libels, 157, 159, 161–2, 165 of Ludlow Castle masque, 84, 85 of newsletters, 95n Marcus, Leah, 12n, 92n, 93n Markham, William, 137 Marlowe, Christopher, xi, 3, 7, 31, 33, 36, 37, 51, 158, 159, 173, 177n see also specific plays Marmion, Shackerley, 1, 50, 106, 124n Marston, John, 32, 32, 33, 34 see also specific plays Martyred Soldier, The (H. Shirley), 33, 34 Marxism, xii, 13n Masque at Hunsdon (Heywood), 84, 87, 91 Masque of Queens, The (Jonson), 60, 68n masques, xi, 2, 3, 69–96 as absolutist propaganda, 69–70, 71–2, 77, 78, 80

252

Index

masques—continued antimasques in, 69, 85, 89–90, 146, 189, 194 books represented in, 85–7, 91 civic, 37n, 76–7, 79–81, 83, 84–5, 84, 87, 90, 95n court, 69–70, 71–2, 73–5, 76, 78, 79, 80–1, 83, 84, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 95n, 141, 159–60, 163, 167, 175n, 184, 195 genre of, 78–9, 80–1, 82, 86, 89–90, 91 household, 79, 80, 83–5, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 189 intertextuality of, 71, 73, 82, 89–90 local analyses of, 8, 70–1, 72, 73–4, 75, 81–3, 91, 93n political authority contested in, 73, 78–9, 80–1, 167 printed, 8, 37n, 73, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82–7, 90–1, 95n–6n, 141 in professional plays, 104, 146, 147, 190, 194, 204–5, 209n reception of, 8, 71, 72–4, 76–7, 79, 82–5, 86–7, 90–1, 163 scenery in, 69–70, 71–2, 71, 74–5, 74, 76, 93n, 128n see also specific masques Massinger, Philip, 36, 120, 129, 136, 145, 213–37 Catholicism and, 227, 236n militant Protestant polemic avoided by, 216, 217–19, 223, 231 parliamentarian politics of, 10–11, 179n, 213, 217, 218–19 “political element” in plays of, 213–19, 230–1 royal favorites in plays of, 159, 165–7, 170, 174n, 179n, 213 and war with Spain, 213, 215–16, 217, 218, 219 see also specific plays

Mayne, Jasper, 1, 24 McGuire, Maryann Cale, 88, 94n McKinnen, Dana G., 208n, 210n McLuskie, Kathleen E., 7–8 Merchant of Dublin (anon.), 134 Messallina (Richards), 109, 125n, 175n Microcosmus (Nabbes), 84, 85–7, 88, 89, 128n Middle Temple, 80 Middleton, Thomas, 46, 117, 134–5, 140, 151, 191, 218 see also specific plays Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 191 Mildmay, Humphrey, 152n Milton, John, xiii, 79, 83, 84, 87, 88–90, 89, 94n see also Ludlow Castle masque Money Is an Ass (Jordan), 104–5, 124n, 125n Montagu, Richard, 225–7, 235n Montague, Walter, 184, 206n–7n Montagut, Barthelemy de, 186 Morash, Christopher, 130, 137–8, 153n More Dissemblers Besides Women (Middleton), 191 Morrill, John S., xvin Moseley, Humphrey, 24 Mucedorus (anon.), 30, 31, 36, 36 Munday, Anthony, 228 Munro, Lucy, 104, 105, 124n Muses’ Looking Glass, The (Randolph), 103, 104, 105, 124n Nabbes, Thomas, 1, 6, 84, 85–7, 88, 89, 125n–6n, 128n, 175n Narcissus (J. Shirley), 134–6 Neill, Michael, 48 Neoplatonism, 3, 87–8, 176n New Academy, The (Brome), 186 Newcastle, William Cavendish, duke of, 24, 186, 187 New Exchange, 185

Index new historicism, xiii–xiv, xvin newsbooks, printed, 21, 56 newsletters, manuscript, 95n Night Walker, The (J. Fletcher and J. Shirley), 33, 36, 135, 139, 154n Noble Soldier, The (S. R.), 234n Noble Stranger, The (L. Sharpe), 120 Norbrook, David, 79, 217 Norwich, Samuel Harsnett, bishop of, 157, 177n–8n No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (Middleton), 134–5, 142–3, 145 Ogilby, John, 126n, 129, 133, 135 as Master of the Revels for Ireland, 130, 132, 134, 137, 148, 150 playhouse of, see St. Werburgh Street theater Okes, John, 34–5, 40n, 84 Opportunity, The (J. Shirley), 130, 131, 139, 140, 141–2, 154n, 175n Orgel, Stephen, xi, xiv, 72, 82, 93n Orrell, John, 112, 128n Osborne, Francis, 77, 178n Osborne, Henry, 140 Othello (Shakespeare), 32, 36 Ottoman Empire, 11, 221, 222 Owen, Richard, 130, 140, 145 Page, William, 236n Palatinate, restitution of, 213, 215–16, 217 Palatine, Frederick V, Elector, 215–16, 217 Parliament, English, 111 Long, 1, 4, 24, 124, 147 in revisionist historiography, xiii of 1626, 157, 163–4, 177n–8n theaters closed by, 1, 4, 11n, 14n, 24, 124 in whig historiography, xii–xiii Parliament, Irish, 144, 147–8

253

parliamentarian politics, 10–11, 83, 213, 214, 215–17 religion and, 216–17, 218, 231 Parlin, Hanson T., 12n–13n, 206n Parrott, Thomas Marc, 206n Parson’s Wedding, The (Killigrew), 167 Paul’s Boys, 102, 149 Peacham, Henry, 177n, 209n Peck, Linda Levy, xv, 176n Pembroke, Philip Herbert, fourth earl of (Lord Chamberlain), 90 Beestons’ relationship with, 112, 113, 116, 122, 154n The Late Lancashire Witches and, 8, 44–5, 46, 47 Pembroke, William Herbert, third earl of, 213 Pepys, Samuel, 186, 208n Perkins, Richard, 51 Petition of Religion, 224 Petition of Right, 83 Peyton, Edward, 162–3 Phoenix theater, see Cockpit theater piracy, 222, 223, 231 plague closures: of 1625, 121 of 1630, 102, 104, 106, 112, 121 of 1636–1637, 110–11, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 122, 124n, 125n, 126n, 133, 137 of 1640 and 1641, 121 playbooks, printed, 6, 17–41, 49, 53, 65, 103, 105, 116, 124n, 125n–6n, 138, 144, 154n, 158–9, 177n, 206n, 214 “Caroline paradox” and, 22–35, 25, 26, 40n in Civil War and Interrugnum, 20, 23–6, 25, 29, 35, 37, 39n in Dublin, 131–2, 141–2, 146, 147, 148, 152n, 155n in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, 18–22, 19, 20, 24–5, 25, 26, 26, 28, 32

254

I ndex

playbooks, printed—continued epistles and dedications in, 17, 32–5, 81, 85, 91, 116, 137, 140, 148, 195, 207n Golden Age canon of, 2, 7, 18, 26, 28–37, 37n–8n, 40n market share of, 18, 21, 23, 29, 38n of masques, 8, 37n, 73, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82–7, 90–1, 95n–6n, 141 of new vs. classic plays, 7, 18, 29–35, 40n numbers of, 7, 18, 20–1, 20, 22–3, 24–5, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37n, 90 profitability of, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26–7, 28, 29 reprinting of, 18–20, 19, 21, 22–9, 25, 26, 30–2, 35–7, 38n, 39n–40n in Restoration, 35–7, 36, 90–1 single-author collections, 7, 18, 24, 32, 33–4, 33, 35, 36, 155n stage revivals and, 27, 40n, 151n–2n and “structures of popularity,” 18, 21–2, 28–9 and supply of plays, 21, 22, 27 of undiscovered classics, 32–5, 33, 40n–1n Playford, John, 186–8, 192–3, 192, 205 playing companies: censorship and regulation of, 52–6, 57, 63, 64, 125n, 195–6, 206n, 210n, 217 older plays in repertories of, 40n, 44–5, 48, 49–51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 130, 151n–2n, 177n, 179n, 214, 227 organization of, 97–8 theater managers in conflict with, 98, 99, 100, 114, 115–16, 120, 121

theaters exchanged by, 98–9, 106, 107–8, 110–11, 121, 122 see also specific companies Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas (Heywood), 84, 124n Ploutos (Aristophanes), 104 Poems and a Maske (Carew), 91 Politician, The (J. Shirley), 120, 138, 153n, 180n Poole, Kristen, 218 Porta Pietas (Heywood), 84, 87 Porter, Endymion, 140 Pory, John, 67n, 90 Praeludium, see Careless Shepherdess, The “Preludium” (Randolph), 102, 104 Prest, Wilfred R., 186 Prince’s Men, 105–6, 112, 120, 122, 124n, 125n Gunnell and, 107, 108–9, 111, 114, 126n print: ballads, 21–2, 38n newsbooks, 21, 56 plays, see playbooks, printed sermons, 18–20, 19, 21, 22, 23, 28, 38n, 39n, 222 Privy Council, 72, 160 Protestantism, 10–11, 147, 230, 235n, 237n anti-Catholic rhetoric and, 217, 218, 223–5, 227 Laudians vs. Calvinists in, 225, 226, 231, 236n militant international, 213, 215–17, 218, 223–4, 231 see also specific Protestant groups Prynne, William, 10, 83, 84, 85, 176n, 184, 195, 204, 206n–7n publishers, 7, 19, 21–3 in Civil War and Interrugnum, 24, 39n “Caroline paradox” and, 26–8 of J. Shirley, 27, 131–2, 133, 135–6, 140–2, 152n, 154n

Index of masques, 84, 90–1 of new vs. classic plays, 29–35, 40n–1n puritans, puritanism, 78, 87, 176n, 217, 218, 225–7, 228, 231, 235n dancing and recreation as viewed by, 10, 47, 103, 184, 204, 206n–7n in plays, 103, 218, 229 in whig historiography, xii–xiii, 3, 5, 13n see also Protestantism Queen and Concubine, The (Brome), 109, 125n Queen’s Men (1625–1636), 109, 120, 126n Blagrave’s share in, 113 dispute over repertory of, 116, 119, 154n dissolution of, 110–11, 122, 133, 138, 139–40, 153n Henrietta Maria’s support of, 112 J. Shirley and, 113, 133, 136, 138, 139, 141, 154n, 183, 195–6 Queen’s Men (1637–1642), 127n, 153n actors in, 110–11, 114, 115, 116 amateur dramatists of, 118–19, 120 Brome’s dispute with, 115–19 court performances of, 128n Dorset and, 113, 114, 122, 138 J. Shirley and, 120 old Queen’s Men’s repertory denied to, 116, 119, 154n Randolph, Thomas, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 124n, 131 see also specific plays Rawlins, Thomas, 125n Read, Timothy, 101, 125n Rebellion, The (Rawlins), 125n

255

Red Bull theater, 30, 98, 105, 111, 114, 121 J. Shirley’s recruitment of actors from, 133, 135, 145 Prince’s Men at, 106, 108–9 reputation of, 49, 97, 101, 117, 118, 135, 149, 152n Renegado, The (Massinger), 10–11, 213–15, 218–31, 232n, 236n conversions in, 220, 222, 223, 224, 227–8, 229–31 eroticized marketplace in, 219–21, 230 Jesuit priest in, 10, 223, 227, 228, 229–30 negative popery in, 227–9 performance and publication of, 214, 231 sex trade and piracy in, 221, 222, 223 republicanism, 83, 86, 88, 217, 231 Revels office, 53, 107, 109 revisionist historiography, xiii–xiv, xvin, 5, 216 Rich, Henry, earl of Holland, 140, 224 Richard II (Shakespeare), 31, 158 Richard III (Shakespeare), 30, 31, 105 Richards, Nathanael, 109, 125n, 175n Rider, William, 120 Robinson, Benedict S., 10–11 Roman Actor, The (Massinger), 214 Rosania, see The Doubtful Heir Rowley, William, 33, 34–5, 60, 67n, 68n, 117 royalist ideology, 1, 4–5, 10–11, 24, 81, 83, 195, 213, 231 absolutism and, 69–70, 71–2, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 93n, 179n Britannia Triumphans and, 69–70, 71–6, 77–8, 79, 85 constitutional issues and, 213, 214, 218

256

Index

royalist ideology—continued monarchical prerogative and, 4, 165, 166–7, 170–1, 213 royal favorites in, 165, 167–9, 173–4, 178n; see also favorites, royal Ship Money and, 73–5, 83, 84 Royal King and The Loyal Subject, The (Heywood), 33, 34 Royal Master, The (J. Shirley): Dublin performance of, 133, 137–8, 139–40, 141, 142, 148, 149–50, 153n publication of, 131, 137–8, 139–40, 139, 141, 142, 144, 149–50, 154n royal favoritism represented in, 137, 165, 167, 168, 169–70 Rubens, Peter Paul, 178n Russell, Conrad, xvin, 5 Sackville, Isabella, 113 St. Clair, William, 37n St. Patrick for Ireland (J. Shirley), 135, 136, 138, 139–40, 139, 144–5, 148, 149–50, 153n St. Paul’s Cathedral, 71, 72, 73, 76–7, 93n St. Werburgh Street theater, 8, 111, 126n, 129–55 audiences of, 2, 9, 130, 132–3, 136, 142–5, 148–50, 153n building of, 129, 130–1 classic London plays performed in, 133–6, 140, 151n pyrotechnics in, 135, 145, 149 Wentworth’s involvement in opening of, 9, 130, 131, 132 Salisbury, Robert Cecil, earl of, 185 Salisbury Court theater, 8–9, 44–5, 84, 85, 86, 90, 97–128 Cockpit rivalry with, 113, 116–19, 121, 122–3 Company of the Revels at, 101–11, 120, 122, 124n

Prince’s Men at, 105–6, 107, 108–9, 111, 114, 120, 122, 126n Queen’s Men (1637–1642) at, 110–20, 127n, 128n, 138, 153n size of, 101, 106, 121 Salmacida Spolia (Davenant), 70, 79 Sanders, Julie, 176n Saxo Grammaticus, 146 Schelling, Felix, 12n School of Compliment, The (Love Tricks) (J. Shirley), 36, 154n Scott, Thomas, 215–16 Sejanus, 163 Sergier, Richard, 141 sermons, printed, 18–20, 19, 21, 22, 23, 28, 38n, 39n, 222 Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 3, 7, 31, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40n, 43–4 see also specific plays Shakespeare folios, 7, 32, 35, 36 Sharpe, James, 64 Sharpe, Kevin, xvin, 5, 83, 157–8 Sharpe, Lewis, 120 Shaw, Catherine M., 146, 147, 148 Sheares, William, 34 Shepherd’s Paradise, The (Montague), 184, 206n–7n Ship Money, 73–5, 83, 84 Shirley, Henry, 33, 34 Shirley, James, 4, 6, 33, 48–9, 54, 208n Catholicism and, 137–8, 144–5, 195 and Company of the Revels, 103, 105, 113, 124n dedications by, 130, 137, 140, 195, 207n Dublin prologues of, 134–6, 142–4, 145, 149, 150 in Gray’s Inn, 186, 195 in Ireland, 8, 113, 120, 129–30, 133–45, 148–50

Index King’s Men and, 120, 136 London players recruited by, 133, 135, 145 London plays procured by, 133–6 plays revised by, 135–6, 138, 139, 142 print popularity of, 26, 36–7, 36 publishers of, 27, 131–2, 133, 135–6, 140–2, 152n, 154n royal favorites in plays of, 10, 137, 159, 165–6, 167, 168, 169–73, 175n, 179n, 180n Town culture in plays of, 9, 185, 188–9, 190–205, 206n see also specific plays Shoemaker a Gentleman, A (W. Rowley), 33, 34–5 Shohet, Lauren, 8 Sicily and Naples (Harding), 167–8, 180n Silver Age, The (Heywood), 28, 152n Sir Giles Goosecap (Chapman), 103–4 Six Court Comedies (Lyly), 32, 33–4, 33 Smith, John, 233n Smock Alley theater, 150 Smuts, R. Malcolm, 4 Spain, 209n, 213, 215–16, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223–4, 226 Spanish Match, 175n–6n, 215, 218, 223–4, 227 Sparagus Garden, The (Brome), 116, 125n Spring’s Glory (Nabbes), 84, 87 Star Chamber, 83, 85 Stevenson, Allan H., 126n, 138–9, 141, 151n, 154n Stoicism, 86–7, 88 Stone, Lawrence, xii, xvin Strafford, earl of, see Wentworth, Thomas Strange Discovery, The (Gough), 120 Strong, Roy, 72–3, 93n

257

Suckling, John, 4, 24, 118, 136, 175n Sutcliffe, Matthew, 225 Tale of a Tub, A (Jonson), 56 Tamer Tamed, The (J. Fletcher), 52, 53 Tasso, Torquato, 229 Temple of Love (Davenant), 90 theater owners and managers: as impresarios, 98–100, 106, 108–9, 110, 111–12, 114–16, 120–1, 123 playing companies in conflict with, 98, 99, 100, 108–9, 110, 111, 114, 115–16, 120–1 see also specific owners and managers theaters, commercial, 7 audiences of, see audiences, dramatic closing of (1642), 1, 4, 11n, 14n, 24, 121 economic competition among, 8–9, 17, 48, 100, 115, 116–19, 120–1, 122–3 hall vs. amphitheater, 49–50, 97, 99, 101, 106, 110, 117, 118, 122–3, 132, 135, 149 intensification of royal connections to, 121–2 leisure and, xiv–xv, 47 masques performed in, 84, 85, 86 plague closures of, see plague closures see also specific theaters Thierry and Theodoret (Beaumont and J. Fletcher), 24 Thirty Years’ War, 70, 213, 215–16, 217, 226 Tittler, Robert, xv Tomkyns, Nathaniel, 8, 45–6, 48, 52, 55, 57–8, 64, 65 Topsell, Edward, 164

258

Index

Town comedies, 183–211 dancing masters in, 183, 186–9, 187, 190–2, 193–5, 196–9, 203, 205, 208n, 209n social spaces represented in, 184–5, 191, 203–4 Town culture, 9, 183–211 balls and, 188–91, 196, 203–5 courtly fashions and, 184, 186–8, 189, 192, 195–6, 199, 201–3, 205, 207n, 209n, 210n foreign practices and, 3, 10, 183–4, 185, 188, 189–91, 195, 196–9, 201, 203, 204, 205, 209n see also West End Toy, The (anon.), 134 Tragedy of St. Albans (J. Shirley), 145, 153n Traitor, The (J. Shirley), 36, 165, 170, 171–3 Trevor-Roper, H. R., xii Trinity College, Cambridge, 124n, 131 Triumph of Peace, The (J. Shirley), 78, 141, 167, 195 Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour, The (Davenant), 79, 80, 94n Turks, 219, 232n in English political and religious discourse, 214–15, 222–3, 225–7, 231, 235n–6n renegadism and, 220, 222, 223, 226, 229, 230, 231, 235n see also Islam Turner, John P., 144, 145 Twins, The (Rider), 120 Two Noble Kinsmen, The (J. Fletcher and Shakespeare), 32, 33 Unfortunate Lovers, The (Davenant), 179n–80n Valiant Welshman, The (Armin), 36, 145 Variety, The (Newcastle), 186, 187

Veevers, Erica, 211n Venuti, Lawrence, 179n Virgin Martyr, The (Dekker and Massinger), 36, 145 Walkley, Thomas, 76, 84, 85 Wallace, C. W., 101, 123n Wasp, The (anon.), 125n, 179n Waterson, John, 27, 40n Webb, John, 93n Webster, John, 36, 37 Wedding, The (J. Shirley), 26, 36, 154n Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford (Lord Deputy of Ireland), 134, 137, 138, 141 divisive policies of, 9, 133, 144–5, 147, 148, 149–50 and opening of St. Werburgh Street theater, 9, 130, 131, 132 West End, 3, 183–6, 189, 196, 202, 205, 206n dancing schools in, 186–8 parks in, 184–5, 191, 203–4 social diversity of, 9, 15n, 184–5, 207n see also Town comedies; Town culture whig historiography, xi–xiii, xvin, 3, 4–5, 12n–13n Whitaker, Richard, 140 Whitefriars theater, 102 Whitgift, John, archbishop of Canterbury, 225 Williams, Gordon, 204 Williams, Raymond, xii Wise Woman of Hogsdon, The (Heywood), 32, 33 wit, 49, 50, 51–2, 63, 150, 184, 199–200, 203, 205, 207n witchcraft, 8, 43–5, 62–4 King James and, 44, 65n in The Late Lancashire Witches, 44–5, 46, 47, 57, 58–62, 68n

Index Witch of Edmonton, The (Dekker, Ford, and W. Rowley), 60, 67n, 68n Witty Fair One, The (J. Shirley), 154n Wit Without Money (Beaumont and J. Fletcher), 32, 33, 36, 135–6, 142, 154n Woman Hater, The (Beaumont and J. Fletcher), 24, 103–4 Woman Killed with Kindess, A (Heywood), 67n Worden, Blair, 174n

Works, The (Marston), 32, 33, 34 Worth, Ellis, 108 Wotton, Henry, 168, 173, 178n Wynn, Richard, 112, 126n Young, John, 101, 125n Young, Michael B., 160 Young Admiral, The (J. Shirley), 139, 140, 154n Zaret, David, 77 Zucker, Adam, xi, 207n

259