Lord Chamberlain's Men Research Articles

The Distribution and Ordering of Speeches and Shakespearean Revision

The Distribution and Ordering of Speeches and Shakespearean Revision Matt Vadnais Sometime in 1599, the Lord Chamberlain's Men opened the Globe with what very well might have been a performance of Shakespeare's recently finished Henry V. Even if we assume that the roughly 3,000 Londoners who first filled Shakespeare's most famous theater did indeed see the final installment of his second tetralogy of history plays, we cannot be sure of what exactly they saw and heard. Like many of Shakespeare's plays, Henry V was printed in two, very different forms that complicate our understanding of how the play was originally written and/or played.1 The relationship between the 1600 quarto printing of THE CHRONICLE History of Henry the fift and the nearly-twice-as-long version printed twenty-three years later in the First Folio was understood by early readers in a relatively straightforward fashion. Critics including Alexander Pope have suggested that the shorter, less poetically accomplished Q1 text was written previous to the 1599 performance, and that at some point between the show's hypothetical opening of the Globe and Shakespeare's death in 1616 it was revised into the extended, polished form printed in the First Folio. However, this chronologically straightforward explanation was for the most part abandoned at the turn of the twentieth century as critics began to take more seriously the "diurese stolne, and surreptitious copies" denounced by Heminges and Condell in their introduction to the 1623 Folio (A3r). Thanks to the work of the loosely united group of critics referred to as the New Bibliographers, a critical narrative emerged in which the Folio text was understood to have been imperfectly derived—via piracy, memorial reconstruction, or some other unauthorized method—from an authorial copy of the text written prior to the opening of the Globe.2 [End Page 657] In the century since A.W. Pollard first introduced the idea of a "bad quarto," critical opinion has gradually re-evaluated the historical value of Shakespeare's early quartos. In the last two decades, critics have moved increasingly close to a consensus that Q1 best represents the play with which the Lord Chamberlain's Men hypothetically opened the Globe. However, in opposition to early readers, the most recent position simultaneously holds that the longer Folio printing best represents the play as it was written.3 As early as 1953, Leo J. Suschko suggested that the shorter Q1 text represented a performance version of the longer, literary Folio (42). The idea that the texts were both "good" but differed in purpose would languish for a few decades in the wake of the New Bibliographical certainty that Q1 Henry V was set from "a bad, or reported, text much abbreviated, often inaccurate and unmetrical, and published, we may be certain, without the authority and consent of the author or his Company" (Cairncross 68). Gradually, however, Suschko's schema found support from critics ranging from Andrew Gurr to Lukas Erne. Like Suschko before them, both critics have argued that, despite the performative value of Q1, the play Henry V was written in a form best represented by F, a text "of a length which actors found impossible to reconcile with the requirements of performance" (Erne 192). Such a schema constitutes a compromise that, when applied to Shakespeare's work as a whole, neatly cleaves the corpus of plays printed as variant texts in half, designating the longer Folio texts as the province of what Lukas Erne calls a "literary Shakespeare," while protecting the shorter texts as imperfect but vital proxies for the ephemeral "Shakespeare in performance" (20). Even as Lesser and Stallybrass argue convincingly that the categories of "literary" and "performative" are far from mutually exclusive and Janette Dillon cautions against "[a] model that puts playhouse and author on either side of text and demands commitment to the first at the price of total rejection of the second," the compromise that allows equal but different value to be ascribed to both "minimal"/ performance texts and their "maximal"/authorial cousins has enjoyed remarkable endurance and served to organize critical thinking regarding how these texts were written and performed (74). Central to this compromise is...

Shakespeare and the book trade

Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). xvi+302pp. ISBN 978 0 5217 6566 4.'Shakespeare was a man of the theatre who wrote plays for the stage, but he was also a dramatist and poet who wanted to be read and who witnessed his rise as a print-published author' (p. 1). Lukas Erne gets right to the point in the first sentence of his new monograph, a follow-up to his groundbreaking study Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003). Those who were won over by that earlier work will find much to admire in this new one; those who refused to give up a popular paradigm after reading Literary Dramatist may find it more difficult to hold on to after completing Shakespeare and the Book Trade; and those who have remained on the fence since 2003 should be convinced by Erne's expansion of his argument in 2013.The paradigm Erne challenged at the start of the 21st century was an entrenched one: Shakespeare was a playwright indifferent to the publication of his plays. The plays could best be understood in and through performance because he was only ever interested in the stage. While some plays were indeed printed, Shakespeare himself had nothing to do with the process. Besides, printed plays were nothing more than ephemera, quickly read and then discarded; they certainly were not worth collecting like other literary genres such as poetry. The trouble with this view, as Erne clearly demonstrated in 2003, is that it ignores considerable evidence that the plays of Shakespeare were actively read and collected in his time, that there appears to have been a concerted effort on the part of the Lord Chamberlain's Men to get many of the plays into print during the late 1590s and early 1600s, and that some of the longer quartos such as Hamlet and Henry V were issued with readers in mind. In Erne's new paradigm Shakespeare is a man of both the playhouse and the printing house.Literary Dramatist was focused primarily on textual matters. Book Trade is principally concerned with material ones. Erne investigates the 'publication, constitution, and reception of [Shakespeare's] quarto playbooks published from 1594 to 1622, along with his poetry books' (p. 7) and over five chapters and three appendices substantially builds on the case he first made a decade ago. In a comparative analysis of play quarto publication in Chapter 1, for example, he establishes that Shakespeare was by far the most popular playwright in print in early modern London, even more popular than Ben Jonson. A straight line has been drawn tracing Shakespeare's popularity with readers from the early 18th century to today. Erne corrects this view by demonstrating that he was also popular with readers in the first half of the 17th century; in other words, he became popular again in the early 18th century. This is one of the chapters in Book Trade that relies heavily on tables and statistics, which Erne admits will be off-putting to some readers, but the evidence is clearly laid out, the data commentary lucidly written, and the results hard to ignore.The focus of Chapter 2 is pseudepigraphy, the practice of misattribution. Between 1595 and 1622 ten playbooks were published with a false ascription to Shakespeare on the title page: five with some form of the whole name and five with initials like 'W.S.' or 'W.Sh.'. Erne argues that there was a method to this madness, as certain stationers were trying to cash in on Shakespeare's name. Sometimes this investment paid off; sometimes it did not. But such a strategy of misrepresentation was not employed for any other playwright. …

The Construction of a King: Waste, Effeminacy and Queerness in Shakespeare’s <i>Richard II</i>

Performance politics has been a part of the historical reception of Shakespeare's Richard II since its probable composition in 1595. Notably, critics commonly connect this play to a request made in February 1601 by a group of the Earl of Essex's supporters, asking the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare's acting troupe, to present a drama at the Globe theatre about the deposing and killing of Richard II. This drama might have been Shakespeare's history play. Essex's supporters apparently thought that staging such a play would generate favour for their aim to have Elizabeth replace key members of her royal government, given that it imagines a successful change in state authority. This request engages with an analogy between the historical depiction of Richard II's reign and Elizabeth's rule that regularly circulated at the very end of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, especially as the problem of Elizabeth's succession loomed large. Later in 1601, for instance, while Elizabeth reviewed historical documents about the reign of Richard II, she supposedly voiced the observation I am Richard II. Know ye not that? to her archivist William Lambarde, a well-known quotation that points to the ubiquity of the association between the medieval king and early modern queen. Such an association, at the very least, indicates the evocative cultural environment in which some of the first performances of the play would have occurred, although this type of political interpretation is, of course, not the only viable one.

Shakespeare in Company by Bart Van Es (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in Company by Bart Van Es Tim Fitzpatrick (bio) Bart Van Es . Shakespeare in Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 357 + 12 b/w illus. $45.00. This is an important book that ably treads the fine line between, on the one hand, explaining or even discounting the artistic work by recourse to a consideration of its conditions of production, and, on the other, consigning it to an autonomous decontextualized realm of "universality": There is inevitably a connection between the literary features of a work and the material conditions of its creation. Of course, lines of poetry are crafted by individuals, but they are also moulded by surrounding social contexts and tailored to specific practical demands. (37) The author claims, and makes his argument with considerable sophistication, that the strength of his approach lies in the welding of theater history to textual criticism—an approach that enables the development of a complex argument that, without minimizing their artistic and literary merit, places Shakespeare's plays in their historical context of production and delineates the ways in which they reflect that context: This book has set out a history of Shakespeare's writing that is based on his evolving material circumstances and institutional affiliations.... It could be said to bring together two separate stands of current thought on the playwright. On the one hand there is the work of theatre historians, doing more and more to uncover the practical realities of early modern performance.... On the other there is a more literary criticism that explores the classically informed wit of the playwright and connects him to a Renaissance culture of imitation. (309) At its center is the argument "that Shakespeare's decision to become a stake-holder in the theatre industry transformed and would continue to affect the way that he wrote his plays" (2). But Shakespeare was always, Van Es argues, writing "in company": initially in the literary company of other playwrights, with whose works the early plays are in intertextual dialogue; then in the company of actors when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men; then in the closer company of sharers and householders at their new fixed venue, the Globe; and finally again in the company of playwrights through collaboration and (again) intertextual links to the work in particular of Fletcher. Van Es stresses "the deep, fibrous intertextuality of Shakespeare's early work" (28); his suggestion that it is "often spectacularly imitative" (36) has important ramifications for reading characters such as Aaron in Titus Andronicus, or Richard III. He then links already well-attested stylistic developments around 1594 to the fact that at this time Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (81). He argues for the significance of an emerging interest in the mechanics [End Page 410] of a play's preparation for the stage in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream (79), a move to relational characterization (93), and evidence of writing for the skills and profiles of the performers of the company (98). "The company—its sharers, its hired men, and its apprenticed boy players taking women's and children's parts—were the matrix through which he could structure his thinking" (111). This put Shakespeare in a unique position among his contemporaries (125), a singularity further increased with the building of the Globe in 1599: "During these early years of the fellowship Shakespeare was singular as a playwright within a company of relative equals, but with the construction of the Globe the nature of this singularity would change" (146). The author's treatment of the Globe period (1599 until the long-postponed initiation of Blackfriars in 1608) concentrates on Shakespeare's relations with Robert Armin and Richard Burbage, and the extent to which their particular talents and "roles" fed into the plays: "More fully than any other player, Armin illustrates the effect of Shakespeare's position as a sharer and housekeeper. The two men were bound together in a close association that left its imprint on at least five plays" (193). Van Es argues that the initiation of the Blackfriars as a second performance venue in 1608 was another watershed, but...

<em>The Seven Deadly Sins</em> and Theatrical Apprenticeship

The manuscript 'plot' of the play The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins is a valuable document for theatre historians, but its date and company have been a matter of dispute. It was long thought to originate with Strange's Men in the early 1590s, but David Kathman argued in a 2004 article, using a variety of evidence including apprenticeship records, that it is actually from the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1597-98. Andrew Gurr argued for the traditional date in his 2007 article 'The Work of Elizabethan Plotters and 2 Seven Deadly Sins ', challenging the relevance of Kathman's new evidence and claiming that his redating of the plot results in various problems. However, Gurr's rebuttal is itself marred by errors and faulty reasoning, and does nothing to weaken Kathman's argument. In particular, Gurr's claims about London apprentices are refuted by a wide array of documentary evidence.

Dating <i>As You Like It</i>, Epilogues and Prayers, and the Problems of "As the Dial Hand Tells O'er"

The date of composition and early performance history of You Like It are uncertain. This is partly because these topics are intimately associated: questions of date, occasion, and venue entail one another in a circular manner. As the Dial Hand Tells O'er, a poem from a manuscript anthology put together by Henry Stanford, has been proposed as the play's epilogue and attributed to Shakespeare. The poem is dated 1598–99, mentions the Queen and Shrovetide, and has been linked to court performances of that year, specifically, to performances by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. You Like It has been singled out as the play for which the poem was written, for a first performance on a Shrove Tuesday, so that Shakespeare becomes the obvious candidate for authorship. However, if we move backward along this chain of logic, these links become much less certain. The poem turns out to be formulaic and not readily related thematically to the play: it is more a prayer than an epilogue, its date is problematic, and it could be associated with any one of several Shrovetide performances at court by a number of companies—Jonson is a more likely candidate for authorship than Shakespeare. Terminal prayers may have been as common at court and private performances as terminal jigs were in the amphitheater playhouses. Because there are no positive terms, we must resist the temptation to construct a single narrative out of such evidence as we have.

“Rich like a Lady”: Cross-Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London

Recent scholarly work on the signifying power of clothing in early modern London has analyzed its erotic potential, but scholars generally have focused on cross-gender, rather than cross-class dressing.1 Specifically, much critical attention has been paid to the cultural anxieties created by men cross-dressing to impersonate women on the stage.2 When literary critics have studied female dress during this era, they often have focused on the threat to male authority posed by women cross-dressing as men.3 Cross-gender dress is of obvious interest to literary scholars since it reflects the theatrical practice of the boy actor and the device of the cross-dressed female, two significant elements of the drama of this era. Early modern English drama, however, also represents the practice of cross-class dressing by which men and women who dressed in opulent clothes passed for persons of higher social status. Archival evidence suggests that-at least among the middling sort who appeared in sexual-transgression cases before the Bridewell Court-cross-class dressing was a more prevalent practice among actual women in early modern London than cross-gender dressing.4 The same overtly theatrical, erotically stimulating, and disturbingly deceptive techniques of costuming, which scholars have studied with respect to men on the early modern stage, were being used by women in off-stage performances.5The most thoroughly documented instances of female cross-class dressing in early modern London take place in the context of illicit sexual activity. For example, Elizabeth Reignoldes, wife of a saddler, appeared before the Bridewell Court in August 1599 to testify against Mistress Miller and Mistress Wilkinson, who were accused of bawdry. Reignoldes describes how:. . . when she came first to Mistress Millers house the said Mistress Miller caused this examinate [i.e., witness] to putt on a crimson damask petticote of white and redd and a great farthingale covered over with yellow cotton and a rough velvett gowne with a payre of satten sleeves cutt with a here trayne cutt and a rabata [a type of fashionable standing collar] imbrodered with white flowers of needlework with a border of gold buttons with a white zer [a type of hat] uppon her head at whiche tyme [she had sexual relations with one of the Lord Chamberlain's men and Mistress Miller received half of her payment] . . . And this examinate saieth further that Mistress Wilkinson did usually send for her this examinate to her house when any gentlemen or cittizens did come to her house and this examinate went and, when she came thither, the sayd Mistress Wilkinson would most comonly take her and lead her upp into a chamber where a gentleman should be staying using theis wordes saying, I have brought you a gentlewoman that wanteth for that she hath an old man to her husband, and then Mistress Wilkinson would go downe agayne . . . the gentleman had the use and carnall knowledge of this examinate's body and most comonly this examinate had 4 shillings, 5 shillings, 6 shillings or 10 shillings. . . . (Bridewell Hospital Court Minute Books IV, fol. 101) 6Since the records note that her husband is a saddler, Reignoldes is no gentlewoman but plays the role of one in order to service the Lord Chamberlain's men, gentlemen, or citizens at Mistress Miller's and Mistress Wilkinson's houses. The sumptuous clothing Reignoldes wore at Mistress Miller's house, which is described in particular detail in the testimony, falsified Reignoldes's rank through dress for the benefit of her potential partner. Likewise, Mistress Wilkinson's assertion to the gentleman client that Reignoldes was a gentlewoman in need of occupying (a euphemism for sexual activity) suggests another instance when Reignoldes performed as someone above her class. Both bawds seem intent to match their clients with a woman who appears to be of an equivalent social status to them-or at least one who can play that role successfully for them. …

Literary Traces in Bridewell and Bethlem, 1602–1624

The Minute Books of the Court of Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem Hospitals make reference to a number of persons associated with early seventeenth-century drama. The actor Christopher Beeston, a member of the earl of Worcester's men, and a former member of the Lord Chamberlain's men, stood accused at Bridewell on 5 November 1602 of raping Margaret White. Beeston denied the charge and brought ‘players’ to a subsequent hearing who ‘vehemently demeaned themselves to the governors’ and ‘much abused the place’. Subtle, in Jonson's The Alchemist, makes a brief topical reference to ‘an alehouse darker than deaf John's’, and entries in the Minute Books identify deaf John as a poor inmate of Bridewell. In Bartholomew Fair, Jonson has an allusion to ‘Whetstone’ at Bedlam. A 1624 census of Bethlem inmates confirms the identity of this character as William Whetstone, a notorious lunatic. Another Bethlem patient, John Gibbons, is recorded as owner of a playhouse on Bankside. This article identifies the playhouse concerned as the Hope.

"Bodied Forth": Spectator, Stage, and Actor in the Early Modern Theater

COMPARATIVE Volume 39 · No. 1 · Spring 2005 "Bodied Forth": Spectator, Stage, and Actor in the Early Modern Theater Jennifer A. Low Picture the original staging ofthese two death scenes: In BussyD'Ambois, the title character fights offa host of assassins, then turns to combat the man who has hired them. Upon conquering his enemy, Bussy grants mercy to him just as a pistol shot from an assassin standing offstage wounds him mortally. Amazed that his body is "but penetrable flesh," Bussy swears to die standing, like Emperor Vespasian, and then apostrophizes his sword: "Prop me, true sword, as thou hast ever done! / The equal thought I bear oflife and death / Shall make me faint on no side; I am up / Here like a Roman statue! I will stand / Till death hath made me marble. O, my fame, / Live in despite of murder" (5.4.78,93-98).l In contrast, the heroine of Romeo andJuliet rises from her catafalque only to learn, as the Friar gestures toward Romeo's body, that "A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents" (5.3.153-54).2 The Friar almost immediately leaves Juliet. Seeking a means ofsuicide, she finds Romeo's dagger: "Yea, noise? Then 2 Comparative Drama I'll be brief. O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath [stabs herselfl; there rust, and let me die" (5.3.169-70). Bussy's death is a public one—Monsieur and Guise look on from above—and his final speeches demonstrate his concern with his position in the social hierarchy rather than with his private life. The action foregrounds his wounded but upright bodywhich, because ofthe crowd of murderers, must necessarily be located at the forefront of the stage; similarly, because ofthe combat with Montsurry, he must be close to or at center stage. Although Bussy is surrounded by others, his opponent and the assassins would be sure to stand well out of reach of his sword. Turned to watch him, Montsurr/s face would reflect the audience's own interest in the extent ofBussy's injury. Tamyra and the shade ofthe friar might clutter up the visual tableau by approaching Bussy—or strengthen it by allowing Bussy to stand unimpeded until his death. Audience involvement would have been affected by two extra-dramatic factors: intensified, perhaps, by their proximity to the indoor stage of St. Paul's and distanced, perhaps, by the fact that the actors were children: the Children of Paul's. Produced by the Lord Chamberlain's Men almost a decade earlier, Romeo andJulietwas performed on the public stage. The tomb to which the stage directions refer several times would, logically, have been represented by the tiring-house, receding from the facade at the back of the large platform stage.3 Audiences might even have had to squint or lean forward to see Juliet's exact gesture in that shadowy recess. Aside from the prone bodies of Romeo inside and Paris just on the threshold, Juliet wouldhavebeen quite alone as she stabbedherself.Thevisual focus would have emphasized the narrowing perspective created by distance and detail : a significant but not broad gesture, staged in a visually uncluttered space, far back from the audience. Such staging would have pulled the audience in, forcing their involvement by making them strain to see the action. Both stagings enclose the death scene. Bussy's is enclosed by the watching actors who mirror for the audience their spectatorial involvement . The death scene is also enclosed mimetically (though not visually) by the scene's setting: Tamyra's closet, the small room where she has already received Bussy and the Friar as they rise through a trapdoor. The JenniferA. Low3 necessary staging suggests Chapman's enjoyment of visual paradox. Everything about Bussy's death emphasizes its public nature: his concern with fame, the watchers above, the presence of the tangentially involved assassins, the hero's steadfast insistence on dying on his feet (to impress whom if not those watching?); yet it occurs in a private place, the one in which Tamyra has engaged her lover in intimate acts and her husbandin intimateconversations.4Byhis theatricalmodeofdying,Bussy transforms Tamyra's private room into his showplace, the site ofhis...

Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter

What seems strange here is not the company's plan to start growing in the liberty of Blackfriars, but the claim that the Lord Mayor had recently banned playing inside the city. No papers survive to say when or even that such a ban was issued. The authority that normally sent out such orders was not London's mayor but the Privy Council, acting for the monarch. Yet the thirty-four petitioners-residents of the afflicted liberty-should have known what they were saying. They were led by Lady Elizabeth Russell, sister-in-law to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who chaired the Privy Council. The others included Richard Field, the printer from Stratford who had issued Shakespeare's narrative poems in 1593 and 1594. Though the claim that the Lord Mayor had banned playing in the city does echo twenty years of mayoral complaints to the Privy Council, it is distinctly mysterious. Just which Lord Mayor was it who took authority to initiate this unique ban on playing inside the city? Had the Privy Council, which had resisted Guildhall's pleas before, nothing to say about it and no say in it? Henry Carey, the first Lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain, and the Privy Council member who might have been most concerned, had died in July, some months before the petitioners set down their complaint. Burbage's new indoor playhouse was built for use by the company that Carey himself had set up in May 1594 as the Lord Chamberlain's Men. At the time of the petition, William Brooke, Lord Cobham, Carey's successor as Lord Chamberlain, was less interested in helping Carey's company, now the second Lord Hunsdon's; it may even have been Brooke's objection that, in the same year as the petition, made them change the

Shakespeare as literary dramatist

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Lukas Erne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 287. Cloth $60.00. Lukas Erne's book seeks to challenge certain fundamental assumptions about Renaissance (and, specifically, Shakespeare) publishing that have been repeated so many times that they have achieved status of truisms, invoked unthinkingly by generation after generation of scholars. The first of these assumptions is that Shakespeare's theater company actively discouraged publishing of play texts. Erne interrogates this supposition by examining publishing record and he seeks to demonstrate pattern whereby, at least during his time specifically as Lord Chamberlain's Men playwright, Shakespeare's plays were being brought to print (or, at least, entered in Stationers' Register) roughly two years after their first performances. Erne notes that plays were often brought to publication by stationers who had direct connections with theater-stationers such as James Roberts, who held monopoly for printing of playbills. He sees two year cycle as constituting coherent and deliberate strategy, aimed at generating publicity for old plays as they were being revived in theater-the published texts offering a way of securing free promotion for revival when playbook would have been sold in bookshops and advertised with title pages put up on posts in London (91). That Shakespeare's theater company were engaged in an ongoing battle with predatory publishers is myth of long-standing. But Erne has more recent historical assumptions in his sights here also. Over course of past decade or so, many commentators, drawing heavily on Foucault's seminal What is an Author?, have suggested that, because Renaissance lacked modern understanding of copyright, then concept of proprietary authorship is anachronous when applied to Renaissance writers.1 These scholars lay heavy stress on fact that so many playtexts in Renaissance period (especially before turn of century) were published without any indication of who their authors were. Erne challenges or nothing logic of this strand of scholarship, arguing forcefully (and convincingly) that, while Renaissance concepts of copyright certainly differ materially from those evolved over course of eighteenth century, this does not mean that authors did not have sense of proprietorship over texts that they wrote. He argues that the idea of copyright as right of author was very much present in Shakespeare's time, though it was not anchored in law until eighteenth century (8). As for gradual emergence of Shakespeare's name as signifying element on playtext title pages, Erne seeks to provide literary rather than theoretical explanation for this development, usefully challenging recent work by scholars such as Douglas A. Brooks. Noting that Shakespeare's name began to appear on title pages for first time in 1598 (and not 1600, as Brooks incorrectly states in From Playhouse to Printing House),'1 Erne argues that what prompted emergence of author from anonymity was his canonization as centrally important writer by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, published, precisely, in 1598. This is neat and interesting argument, but Erne himself recognizes one crucial flaw in his ingenious suggestion: Ql Love's Labour's Lost, Q2 and Q3 Richard II and Q2 Richard HI all appeared in 1598 and all included Shakespeare's name on title page. But it is touch unlikely that all four texts could have gone to press only after Meres's book was printed and circulated in very same year. This seems particularly unlikely in case of two editions of Richard H, published by Andrew Wise. Registering this problem, Erne is forced to fall back on conjecture: It may well be . . . that Wise found out about Palladis Tamia . . . before its appearance. After all, it would have been in publishers' and booksellers' best interest to be aware as early as possible of text which, by dealing with literary reputation, might have an effect upon their customers' future demand. …

Reconsidering <em>The Seven Deadly Sins</em>

This paper argues that the manuscript "plot" of a play called The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, now at Dulwich College, has been misdated by previous scholars. These scholars have generally assumed that the plot originated with some version of Strange's Men in 1590-92, based on the presence of Richard Burbage's name and the assumption that Edward Alleyn must have been involved. However, many of these fundamental assumptions are faulty, and I argue that the plot came to Dulwich not through Alleyn, but through the actor-bookseller William Cartwright sixty years later. Once the faulty assumptions are corrected, the evidence points strongly toward an origin with the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1597-98, the company for which Shakespeare was writing such plays as Much Ado and 1 & 2 Henry IV. This redating has farranging implications both for theatre history and for the biographies of the players involved, and it allows us to reconstruct one of the most important Elizabethan playing companies in unprecedented detail.

"That Reason Wonder May Diminish": "As You like It," Androgyny, and the Theater Wars

An oblique line in the anonymous play The Return from Parnassus, Part II, produced early in 1602 at St. John's College, Cambridge, implicates Shakespeare in the War of the Poets that had recently enlivened the London stage. This famous quarrel raged most explicitly between Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker, who-reviving a tradition as old as Aristophanes' The Frogs-satirically attacked one another in successive London stage productions between 1599 and 1601. But in a now famous passage from Parnassus II, an actor impersonating Will of the Lord Chamberlain's Men awards Shakespeare laurels in the dubious dramatic contest. Kempe begins, Few of the university [men] pen

Philip Henslowe, Simon Forman, and the Theatrical Community of the 1590s

FOLIOS 16V TO 18V OF PHILIP HENSLOWE S DIARY PUZZLE READERS. Sandwiched between the receipts and payments involving theatrical matters that typify his account book are five pages of oddities-medicinal recipes guaranteed to cure deafness, cataracts, and rabies; formulae for casting a child's horoscope; and magic spells, one of which, for the person in pursuit of a simple supper, promised to make a fowl fall down. It is in these pages that readers are especially reminded that much personal business actually informs the diary, and it is here that Henslowe comes to the fore of his account book as an individual cut wholly of Renaissance cloth. Astrological almanacs, as well as books of predictions, were common in Henslowe's day, when conjurers-in-earnest, side by side with quack psychics, attracted followings of workaday citizens who sought what wisdom could be derived from occult practices. At the time, perhaps the best-known astrologerconjurer was Simon Forman, whose surviving casebooks read like a social register of Renaissance London. The earl of Cumberland, the countess of Essex, and Lord Hunsdon (patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men) all consulted Forman at one time or another. Not least of all, another of Forman's clients was Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose playhouse and the father-in-law of Edward Alleyn, the actor who immortalized his own version of a conjurer in the character of Doctor Faustus on the stage of the Rose playhouse in the early 1590s. Henslowe's association with Forman was suggested in 1976 when A. L. Rowse published The Case Books of Simon Forman. Rowse then noted in passing that Henslowe had visited Forman on two occasions, but Rowse did not follow up on these notations.' Probably because Rowse's interest centered upon the general connection between the doubtful reputation of theatrical personnel with Forman's own questionable reputation, he overlooked the full importance of the Henslowe entries for theater historians. These deserve much greater attention. Forman's notes provide new and unique insights into the rapidly growing group of theater entrepreneurs of the 1590s, including the Burbages. They allow scholars to understand in greater complexity Henslowe's place within the theatrical community and to date part of Henslowe's diary for the first time. Furthermore, examination of the connection between Forman and Henslowe suggests a link between Forman and the character of Doctor Faustus which seems to have become lost in the discussion of Forman's influence on Ben Jonson's Alchemist. In addition to all this, Forman's casebooks provide unique evidence illustrating how the community of players who performed at the Rose and the Globe playhouses were tied into the culture of the occult.

Essex and Shakespeare versus Hayward

in the Lord Chamberlain's Men was arrested, and those persons in Essex's following who had suggested that a play of Richard II be staged on 7 February, although detained, were soon dismissed. Barroll thus concludes that Hayward, not Shakespeare or some other playwright, was the author of the work Elizabeth had in mind when she identified her own situation with that of a monarch threatened by a powerful and treasonous nobleman. Actually, Hayward himself had already established the parallel noted by the queen in her remark to Lambarde. In the dedicatory epistle to his history, Hayward addresses his patron, Essex, in Latin that, if somewhat oblique, still communicates his view of the earl's relationship to the monarch. apicyI Kai yevvaiozd-V: optimo et Nobilissimo (inquit Euripides) ex qua sententia tu primus ac solus fere occurrebas (illustrissime comes) cuius nomi si Henrici nostri fronte radiaret, ipse et laetior et tutior in vulgus prodiret. Magnus si quidem es, et presenti iudicio, etfuturi temporis expectatione: in quo, veluti recuperasse nunc oculos, caeca prius fortuna videri potest; Dum cumulare honoribus eum gestit, qui omnibus virtutibws est insignitus. Hunc igitur si laeta fronte excipere digneris, sub nominis tui vmbra (tanquam sub Aiacis clipio Teucer ille Homericus) tutissime latebit. Deus opt. max. celsitudinem tuam nobis, reique publicae diu seruet incolumem: quo nos vz. tam fide quam armis potenti tua dextra defensi, vitique, diutina cum securitate tum gloria perfruamur.

Observing the Lord's Supper and the Lord Chamberlain's Men: The Visual Rhetoric of Ritual and Play in Early Modern England

Previous articleNext article No AccessObserving the Lord's Supper and the Lord Chamberlain's Men: The Visual Rhetoric of Ritual and Play in Early Modern EnglandHUSTON DIEHLHUSTON DIEHL Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 221991Essays on Epistemological Transformations and Theater History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.22.41917275 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright © 1992 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Rape of Lucrece and Shakespearean Tragedy

Since its initial vogue during the lifetime of Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece has received short shrift from the general public and little more attention from critics and scholars. This relative neglect has done much to obscure the actual importance of the poem; for, quite apart from its intrinsic merits as poetry, The Rape of Lucrece constitutes one of the most explicit and illuminating documents which bear upon Shakespeare's development, and especially upon his coming of age as an artist. Written almost certainly during the year immediately preceding its registration on 9 May 1594, and hence in the interval between Shakespeare's apprentice experiments in the theater and his mature dramatic achievements with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the poem provides unique information about Shakespeare at a crucial point in his career. Frankly advertised, moreover, as a serious poem on a serious theme, it bears every evidence of having been undertaken by its author as a premeditated and highly self-conscious bid for recognition as a serious literary artist. Indeed, in the deliberate thoughtfulness of its conception and the conscientious care of its execution The Rape of Lucrece is one of the most laborious and studied works of art that Shakespeare ever produced. And as such, it affords a revealing index to the kind of thinking imposed on its creator at the time, and by the process, of its creation.