Lord Strange Research Articles

‘On Pleasures Past, and Dangers to Ensue’: Site-Specific Violence and the Post-Renovation Rose Repertory

ABSTRACT Models of early modern English theatre-making rely on fantasies of repetition. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playing companies leveraged a repertory system wherein a set stable of actors performed a different playtext up to six days a week. Such repetitions make available hauntological possibilities that attach to reoccurring bodies, props, costumes, and even architecture. This article considers the repertory of plays that repeated on the stage of the Rose theatre after renovations added a roof over the stage with its attendant pillars, which afforded the Lord Strange’s, Earl of Sussex’s, and Lord Admiral’s players a new spatial, vertical dimension. In a brief post-reno period of highly regular playing, I argue that the pillars came to regularly serve as trees, arbours, and other ecological features to facilitate a character’s death. In The Battle of Alcazar, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and a single comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the pillars make possible an accretion of hauntological resonances attached to their location on the thrust. This article explores the ways in which such dramaturgical repetitions, newly available in the Rose after the 1592 renovations, would have built up returner-audiences’ associations with specific architectural features.

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

The Marlowe corpus revisited

Abstract Following Dr Barber’s unfortunate criticism (Barber, 2018, Marlowe and overreaching: a misuse of stylometry. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34: 1–12), in which she, with an obvious lack of familiarity with them, subjected the Rolling Delta procedures used, to the caveats of Delta and traditional stylometry, this article makes use of an extended methodological framework and applies Rolling Delta to the target texts with a totality of reference texts. The outcome is different from the expected, since the author of Tamburlaine 1 and 2 emerges as stylistically also dominant in the anonymous play The Tragedy of Locrine, in Kyd’s closet play Cornelia, in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar and David and Bethsabe. In contrast, the official Marlowe corpus relates stylistically to contemporary authors, but not to the two Tamburlaines. Traditional scholarship and learning do not refute conjectures of misattributed Peele plays and there are also strong indications that plays associated with Lord Strange’s Men nominally became Marlowe plays when Henslowe acquired them in 1594 for his Admiral’s Men and printers made use of the cult of personality, in which the author’s death became an important factor in the marketing of printed playbooks. Otherwise, there is no documentary and empirical evidence that Marlowe wrote the plays in question. The canonization of the plays occurred only in the nineteenth century, and the Marlowe we have inherited—the poet, spy, atheist, homosexual, and so on—is almost entirely an invention of the twentieth century (Hooks, 2018, Making Marlowe. In Melnikoff, K. and Knutson, R. (eds), Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: University Press, p. 98).

"Your name shall liue / In the new yeare: as in the age of gold" Sir Thomas Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque, Performed at Knowsley Hall in 1641" and its Contexts

"Your name shall liue / In the new yeareas in the age of gold" Sir Thomas Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque, Performed at Knowsley Hall in 1641" and its Contexts Rebecca A. Bailey On Twelfth Night, 1641, James, Lord Strange, the future 7th Earl of Derby, and his wife Lady Charlotte de la Trémoille hosted a masque at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire. The principal masquer was Lord Strange's heir, Charles Stanley, and the masque itself was devised by Sir Thomas Salusbury, kinsman of the Stanleys, and head of a prominent family from North Wales in Lleweni, Denbighshire.1 In Stuart England, the elite genre of the Stuart court masque was something of a hybrid dramatic form (see Butler, Stuart; Ravelhofer; Shohet; Knowles). David Lindley, tongue in cheek, described the court masque as "an elaborate framework for an aristocratic knees-up" (Lindley x). Martin Butler further reminds us that "the masque aimed to bind the court together, represent the monarch to the political nation at large and stimulate confidence in the values with which the monarch sought to have his government associated" (Stuart 20). As Julie Sanders has argued, the provincial or regional masque is of special interest as it demonstrates the "fluid interplay" or "flow" between "amateur and metropolitan sites of performance," encouraging us to ask how these site-specific texts "reconnect us in vital ways with the complex and dynamic geographies of performance" ("Geographies" 134–35). Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque", which witnessed Lord Strange's children performing speaking roles, on one level smacks of amateur family dramatics, allowing us a rare glimpse into an intimate Derby family gathering. Yet, with prominent figures performing from leading North West families—such as the Molyneuxes of Sefton, Lancashire, and the Hoghtons from Hoghton Tower, Lancashire—one has to ask, how "private" [End Page 465] was this event? This is especially pertinent as masquing roles were also played by long-standing retainers from established gentry families, such as the Farington, Fox, and Tyldesley families of Lancashire. Indeed, a key aim of this essay is to tease out the Deleuzian rhizomatic logic at the heart of this performance, whereby "routes of identity" are "formed through connections and traverses" to create what Augé has pinpointed as an "organic sociality" (Deleuze and Guattari 262; Augé 94). Mike Crang in Cultural Geography elucidates Deleuze's term "rhizomatic" through the vivid image of "brambles" that "send out shoots to produce a tangle of plants each criss-crossing the other" (Crang 172). In the masquing space of Knowsley Hall, these entwined branches of identity reached London and beyond. As this essay uncovers, fascinating resonances exist between Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque" in Lancashire and court masques performed at Whitehall, such as Ben Jonson's and Inigo Jones's Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (1631), and William Davenant's and Inigo Jones's Britannia Triumphans (1638) (Jonson and Jones, Love's Triumph 319–42; Davenant and Jones). Of course, as 1641 dawned, such "routes of identity" were under especial scrutiny as the country teetered towards Civil War. The occasion of Salusbury's masque itself, "Twelfth Night," was famously a time of misrule, and the topsy-turvyness associated with this masquing occasion was fast becoming part of everyday life. Lord Strange, as the principal magnate of the North West, was a key figure in this growing national crisis. By the mid-1630s, Lord Strange had very deliberately removed himself from court, virtually retiring to his estates in Lancashire as a mark of his displeasure with Charles I's increasingly Laudian court. However, when the Bishops' Wars of 1638–40 broke out in Scotland, Lord Strange had rallied immediately to King Charles's standard, believing it to be "an honour to give honour to your sovereign" (James Stanley, "Letter" 22; on the Bishops' Wars see Fissel). Thus, Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque" offers an intrinsic insight into Lord Strange's own self-fashioning (of which the estate, the region, and the national landscape were each a part) at a moment of acute political anxiety. Employing a cultural-geographical approach allows us to consider the ramifications that this site-specific performance offers into the Stanley family, the region and the country...

Archives, Archaeology and the Playing Venues of the Earls of Derby

Archives, Archaeology and the Playing Venues of the Earls of Derby Julian Bowsher The Earls of Derby had long had minstrels, other musicians, and tumblers in their retinues (see also Graham's article in this issue), but by the 1530s the 3rd Earl also had a touring troupe of players, largely for customary aristocratic revels: various entertainments including banquets, dance, acrobatics, masques, and plays. The 4th Earl of Derby's Men subsequently became "one of the most prominent of the Elizabethan acting companies" (Manley and MacLean 19). They played at court in Greenwich, in Hampton Court's Great Hall, and at Windsor in January 1580/1 (Astington 230). There is no record of any performance in any other metropolitan venue. Derby's Men largely disappeared with the foundation of the Queen's Men in 1583, made up of players from existing companies. But Ferdinando, Lord Strange, the heir to the earldom, formed his own "Men" in about 1585, who toured company actors and tumblers across the country (see Manley and MacLean App. C for itineraries), but the company was also frequently invited to court from 1589 to 1593 (Astington 233–34). Ferdinando succeeded as 5th Earl in September 1593 but died in April the next year. His younger brother William, who succeeded as 6th Earl, was by all accounts even more enamored of theatre. Interestingly, there was a company referred to as "the players of the Countesse of Derby" (the widow of the 5th Earl) at Winchester in May 1594, but a week earlier the new "Earl of Darbeys" company had performed in Southampton (Manley and MacLean 325; see also MacLean's article in this issue); and in early May the new Derby Company was already on tour. It is in order to contextualize the history of performances by companies under the patronage of the family of the Earls of Derby, the Stanleys, that this article will survey and discuss the range of these and other playing spaces used in the period. In creating [End Page 383] an overview of performance spaces used by the Earls of Derby's various companies, the article draws on both "desktop" materials (existing theatrehistorical accounts and archival records) and evidence from archaeological excavations. Court The early modern English royal court, as John Astington has pointed out, "retained the mobile character of medieval kingship" and assembled at whichever "house" the monarch happened to be living in at any given moment (Astington 1). Royal patronage of the professional playing companies included "invitations" for command performances at court. These both provided up-to-date drama for the court and enhanced the reputation of the playing companies, who would have been well paid. Amongst the royal houses where players are known to have performed, there were several significant venues. Hampton Court was one of the most prominent royal houses in the London area. Henry VII took over the house from Cardinal Wolsey and greatly enlarged it (Thurley, Royal Palaces 114). The building included a great hall on the first floor, forming the north side of the inner court. It is a large cavernous space measuring approximately 108ft x 40ft (33m x 12.2m), with a high roof. It was the largest court theatre space before the Restoration; it survives, today, very much as it was first built. Although a smaller playing space, the great chamber, was added in the 1620s, a number of companies, including Lord Strange's Men, had performed here in the earlier period. Whitehall Palace on the river front at Westminster was the seat of Tudor power in the earlier sixteenth century. The original hall, or great hall, was a north–south building forming, as usual, one side (the west) of the chapel court, measuring 75ft x 40ft (23m x 12.2m). A great chamber, added later in Henry VIII's reign, formed the west side of the inner court, but on the first floor it measured c 65ft x 35ft (19.8m x 10.7m). Masques were performed in the hall in the 1570s, though by the 1580s the professional companies, such as those of the 4th Earl and Lord Strange, were performing in both the hall and the chamber. Greenwich Palace was downstream...

The 6th Earl of Derby's Touring Players

The 6th Earl of Derby's Touring Players Sally-Beth MacLean In May 1594, a new company of players appeared in the southern English provinces. Identified on the tour as Derby's Men, this troupe should be distinguished from the starry company patronized by Ferdinando Stanley, the 5th Earl of Derby, who had just died suddenly the previous month, under mysterious—and still controversial—circumstances. The leading actors in the 5th Earl's company were already in the process of reconstituting themselves under a new patron, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain; they were destined to achieve enduring fame as the company of Shakespeare (see further, Manley and MacLean 322–25; Daugherty "Assassination"). Others have suggested that the new Derby troupe was simply a "remnant" of the previous Earl's company (see e.g. Gurr 265; Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 126–27). In the circumstances arising from Ferdinando's unexpected and premature death, this seems unlikely. To quote from Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays: The animosity that existed between William Stanley and his brother's widow has been well documented through the bitter legal maneuvering and disputes that began even before Ferdinando's death and lasted for over a decade. Ferdinando's will stipulated that his estates were not to be divided but that they should pass intact to his widow for life and then to his eldest daughter Anne. Not surprisingly, as legitimate male heir to the earldom, William challenged his brother's wishes and a series of lawsuits ensued, with only a partial out-of-court settlement achieved by March 1595. In the midst of this immediate, very personal conflict, it is improbable that leading members of Ferdinando's company would have made an easy migration to the patronage of the brother whom he and his wife apparently held in some disdain (Manley and MacLean 326). [End Page 443] We know less about the new Derby's Men, though their patron was certainly William, younger brother of Ferdinando Stanley. William Stanley (bap.1561–d.1642) had spent much of the previous decade travelling on the continent, returning home in August 1587 to rejoin his family and divide his time between their estates and residences in Lancashire and London. In 1592 he was made governor of the Isle of Man (see further, Daugherty ODNB). Upon his brother's death he assumed the title of 6th Earl in mid-April 1594, only a month before his troupe was recorded at Southampton together with Lord Morley's players, most likely allowed to use the hall at the Bargate as their venue for the required performance before the mayor and council.1 The sharing of the £1 performance reward with another company is an interesting detail, not always reliably recorded in provincial civic records. Morley's and Derby's Men show up together several months later in East Anglia at King's Lynn as well, so we may wonder whether other appearances at Ipswich and Norwich during the same calendar year might have been this same group of actors, temporarily joined in order to launch the fledgling troupe under Derby's patronage.2 Edward Parker, Lord Morley, was William Stanley's cousin and a Lancashire neighbor at Hornby Castle. His troupe had experience in touring the provinces dating back to the 1580s, much of the time in the south, so perhaps William's immediate desire to begin formation of an acting troupe was spurred on by the expansion of cast members offered by the seasoned players in Morley's troupe.3 William Stanley was an enthusiastic heir to his family's long tradition of theatrical patronage (see further, MacLean, "Tradition" 205–26; more recently Manley and MacLean 12–36). Perhaps he was the most zealous of them all: his acting troupe first appears in the provincial records just after his succession to the title in 1594 until 5 February 1637, when they can still be traced at Doncaster in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Doncaster Chamberlain's Account, Doncaster Archives: AB6/2/163, p. 17, cited in Palmer 303). The rapid formation of this touring troupe under his patronage was probably motivated by several factors: family tradition, a...

Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays by Lawrence Manley, Sally-Beth MacLean

Journal Article Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays. Get access Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays. By Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Illus. Pp. xii + 476. $65.00 cloth. Roslyn L. Knutson Roslyn L. Knutson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 2, Summer 2016, Pages 282–285, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2016.0035 Published: 01 April 2016

Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+475.

<i>Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays</i>. Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+475.

The Portraiture of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Fifth Earl of Derby, and Shakespeare's Patron: A Note with a Query

The Portraiture of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Fifth Earl of Derby, and Shakespeare's Patron: A Note with a Query

Shakespeare: the 'lost years.'

Introduction Hoghton of Hoghton Tower Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford John Cotton of Tarnacre John Weever and the Hoghtons Shakespeare and Lord Strange's men The Shakespeare epitaphs and the Stanleys Thomas Savage of Rufford The phoenix and the turtle Shakespeare's religion Conclusion Appendices Notes Index -- .

Spenser's "Amyntas": Three Poems by Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Fifth Earl of Derby

Spenser devoted twelve lines of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe to a lament for Amyntas: ... the noblest swaine / That ever in an oaten quill: / Both did he other which could pipe maintaine, / And eke could pipe himselfe with passing skill (lines 440-43). Modern scholars have consistently identified Amyntas with Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange from 1572 to September 25, 1593 and Earl of Derby from the latter date until his death, April 16, 1594.1 Stanley's artistic patronage is best seen in his maintenance, from at least 1576 until his death, of a company of actors with which Shakespeare may have been associated.2 His contemporary reputation as a poet is supported beyond Spenser's claim by the appearance of his name in the list of noble personages whose works are supposedly represented in Belvedere, or, The Garden of the Muses (1600, sig. A5); here Stanley is listed with such better-known Elizabethan court poets as Oxford, Ralegh, and Dyer. To date, however, our only tangible proof that Stanley ever piped in an oaten quill has been the poem ascribed to him in a manuscript owned by Sir John Hawkins, who submitted the text to The Antiquarian Repertory (3 [London, 1780]: 133-38).3 On the merits of this verse, Alexander C. Judson concluded that Stanley indeed a poet (though no poem of consequence by him is known today).4 In what follows, I hope to bulwark Spenser's praise of Stanley by showing, first, that the Hawkins text is more consequential than Judson believed and, second, that it does not fully represent Stanley's muse, to judge from two heretofore unpublished poems, attributed to him in Cambridge MS Dd.5.75, fol. 32v and Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85, fols. 76v-77r. The title of the Hawkins text, SONNETT by FERDINANDO EARLE of DERBY, indicates a date of transcription after September 25, 1593, when Stanley succeeded to his father's title. The poem's aimless narrative and absurd style point, I believe, not to the author's incompetence, but to his conscious burlesque of the unlearned and homely pastoral stance. This burlesque was not aimed at the inverted syntax and archaic diction of Spenser's pastorals but, more probably, at the redundant style of such works as Abraham Fraunce's The Lamentations of Amyntas for the Death of Phillis (1587), or the celebration of rustic amours in Breton's Sweet Phillis if a sillie Swaine, or Sillie Shepheard lately sate, from Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591, sig. F4-4v, G1v-2). Breton's own lyric, beginning Fair in a morn (o fairest morn / was never morn so fair),''6 parodies these same forms in a manner quite similar to Stanley's in the Hawkins text. Both poems are written primarily in ballad stanza and concern a shepherd's futile love for a shepherdess named Phyllis. Both achieve their effect through the exaggerated use of the same rhetorical devices: 1 See Ronald B. McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe (Oxford, 1966), 4:150-51; Alexander C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1945), p. 6; Kelsie Harder, Nashe's Rebuke of Spenser, Notes and Queries 198 (1953): 145. 2 John Tucker Murray, English Dramatic Companies (1910; repr. New York, 1963), 1:75; E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), 2:118-26. 3 Ed. Francis Grose and Thomas Astle, 4 vols. (London, 1775-84), reprinted 1807-9. The Stanley verse was reprinted from the first edition in Thomas Park's enlarged revision of Walpole's A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1806), 2:46-51. 4 Judson, p. 5. 5 I have been unable to trace Hawkins's manuscript, which was probably destroyed in the fire which gutted his house in Westminster, along with his valuable collection of books and prints, in 1785 (Percy A. Scholes, The Life and Activities of Sir John Hawkins [Oxford, 1953], p. 157). 6 Printed in Englands Helicon (1600), sig. G4-5; manuscript versions in Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85, fols. lv-2r, and British Museum Additional MS 34,064, fols. 17v-18r.

The Playhouse at Newington Butts: A New Proposal

HE playhouse at Newington Butts is such a little-known theater that it can scarcely be said to exist at all for the average student of Elizabethan drama. Our knowledge of it is confined to a very few statements about its existence, none at all about its characteristics or proprietors. We know that Henslowe entered in his Diary some receipts for the Admiral's and Chamberlain's companies, which were playing there together for a week or so in June I594, and we-know that the Privy Council sent directives to the Surrey Justices to suppress illegal playing there in the summers of I580 and I586. We know also that among the Henslowe papers at Dulwich is an undated Privy Council warrant (Chambers conjectures I592) in which a petition from Lord Strange's men to abandon Newington Butts and return to the City was approved. But aside from these four items with their scanty facts, there has been little to go on. The presence of two companies at the Butts in I594 under Henslowe's auspices led Chambers to muse that possibly the theatre had come into Henslowe's hands by that time, and C. W. Wallace claimed in I9I3 to have seen a document which confirmed that the playhouse had disappeared by

XV.—The Purport of Shakespeare's Contribution to 1 Henry VI

There is a fairly general agreement among the critics that the First Part of Henry the Sixth was not originally written by Shakespeare, but was revised by him, that it is the play which Henslowe recorded as “new” on March 3, 1591/2, and frequently enough thereafter to attest that it was one of the most popular pieces of the day, and that it was this same popular piece to which Nashe referred in the always quoted passage in Pierce Penilesse (1592): “How would it have ioyed braue Talbot (the terror of the French), to think that after he had lyen two hundred yeare in his Toomb, he should triumph againe on the Stage and haue his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who in the Tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.” There seems no sufficient reason for doubting these natural conjectures. The play was included in the First Folio, which indicates that it was at least in part Shakespeare's work; it was not mentioned by Meres, which seems to imply that it was not fundamentally his; it was acted by Lord Strange's company, which would accord with its being revised rather than originally written by Shakespeare. It is such a play as, judging by the other notable successes of the time, would be immensely popular; and it answers perfectly to Nashe's reference.

Wife of Lord Strange

Wife of Lord Strange Get access Y. S. M. Y. S. M. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s1-XI, Issue 281, 17 March 1855, Pages 207–208, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s1-XI.281.207f Published: 17 March 1855