Philip Henslowe Research Articles

Volume 50 (2020)

Volume 50 (2020)

Roger Clegg, principal investigator, and Eric Tatham, developer. Reconstructing the Rose: 3D Computer Modelling Philip Henslowe’s Playhouse. Other

Roger Clegg, principal investigator, and Eric Tatham, developer. Reconstructing the Rose: 3D Computer Modelling Philip Henslowe’s Playhouse. Other

A Curious Synchronicity of Dates—How a Hypothetical Reconstruction of the Stage History of Two of Shakespeare’s Comedies Mirrors the Performance History of Lost Plays Recorded in Philip Henslowe’s Diary

It is possible—without recourse to Henslowe’s diary—to reconstruct a hypothetical stage history for Love’s Labour’s Lost. The terminus ante quem is provided by the 1598 quarto—which was the first play quarto to identify Shakespeare as the playwright on its title page. Additional information on that page suggests that the play was not new at the time of printing,1 and that it was modified in or around that year. Multiple analyses2 have placed it just after Comedy of Errors, which was probably performed at Grays Inn on Saturday, 28 December 1594.3 As part of the same winter festivities at Gray’s Inn, the Gesta Grayorum also describes a visit from ‘an Ambassador from the mighty Emperor of Russia … who came in Attire of Russia, accompanied with two of his own Country, in like Habit’. It has been speculated that this entertainment inspired the masque of Muscovites in Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.4

Organizational Culture and Quality of Services at IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo

This article mainly aims to find the right model for improving service quality and user satisfaction of State Islamic of Religious Higher Education Institutions (Pendidikan Tinggi Keaagamaan Islam Negeri - PTKIN) by involving the organizational culture of Service Quality. This study purposefully contributes to the development of the field of education management, especially those related to the causality model of organizational culture. The results showed that there was a positive direct effect on Organizational Culture and Service Quality on User Satisfaction of Islamic Higher Education Institutions IAIN Sultan Amai Gorontalo. The results of this study are in line with the theory put forward by Philip Henslowe which shows that the impression obtained from the level of knowledge and understanding of facts regarding people, products or situations) is largely determined by the culture of people producing goods and services, maintaining service quality and ensuring the fulfillment of user expectations.

Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of “Paradise Lost.” Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+479.

<i>Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of “Paradise Lost.”</i> Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+479.

Thomas Dekker Revealed in the Henslowe–Alleyn Papers

In current scholarship the obscurity of the early years of Thomas Dekker is akin to his opacity in Philip Henslowe's Diary, which awaits full analytical interpretation. While the Diary usefully tells us about Henslowe's theatre business, it also imparts interwoven stories about many playwrights whose works are being rigorously tested in today's theatres. In this essay Chi-fang Sophia Li offers a theatre-based critique of the early life of Dekker, when, she argues, he quickly became a ‘fully paid-up member’ of the theatrical community. Thus his theatrical strengths, productive potential, writing interests, collaborative patterns, earning power, and working relationships with Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Henry Chettle can be interpreted afresh. The Diary supplies frequent, intensive sightings of Dekker, whose biographical implications mutually inform a cultural life of Dekker's peers. This is the first attempt to elucidate in full Dekker's presence in the Henslowe–Alleyn papers alongside other historical and literary documents. Chi-fang Sophia Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. She has published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, English Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, and in Chinese in Review of English and American Literature. She gave public lectures for the anniversaries of Shakespeare's birth and death for the Globe Theatre on tour to Taiwan in 2014 and for the Shakespeare Exhibition in 2015 for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

"Original Practices," Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination: Staging "The Tragedy of Merry"

"Original Practices," Lost Plays, and Historical Imagination:Staging "The Tragedy of Merry" Emma Whipday and Freyja Cox Jensen In 1594, Thomas Merry murdered his neighbor, Master Beech, by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a hammer. Merry was condemned and hanged, along with his sister, Rachel, who was found to be complicit in the crime. The murder was reported in a news pamphlet—"a booke entytuled A True Discourse of a Most Cruell and Barbarous Murther Comitted by one Thomas Merrey" (August 29, 1594)—and in five broadside ballads published in August and September that year (Knutson and McInnis, "Thomas Merry (Beech's Tragedy)"). In 1600, William Haughton and John Day's "The Tragedy of Merry" (also called "Beech's Tragedy") was performed at the Rose, as documented in Philip Henslowe's Diary (Greg 1: 114). The fictionalized version of the crime played in the same South-wark neighborhood where the murder originally took place. Despite the evident hold of the murder upon the popular imagination, demonstrated both by the proliferation of ballads and pamphlets capitalizing on "news" of the murder and by the staging of Beech's death six years after the murder itself took place, the contemporary narratives of the murder are lost. None of the texts is extant: we find only their traces in records in the Stationers' Register, and in a series of entries in Henslowe's Diary. Yet one portrayal of the crime survives. In 1601, the play Two Lamentable Tragedies was published in quarto, attributed to Robert Yarrington (who appears to have been a scribe) (Hanabusa xv–xvi; Greg 2: 208–209). [End Page 289] The title page describes these two tragedies: The one, of the murther of Maister Beech a Chaundler in Thames-streete, and his boye, done by Thomas Merry. The other of a young childe murthered in a Wood by two Ruffins, with the consent of his Uncle (Yarrington). Two Lamentable Tragedies is unusual in representing two interlocking narratives: one set in Padua in the non-specific past, concerning the murder of a ward by his uncle, and the other, a "true crime," set in contemporary London—the tragedy of Thomas Merry. The two narratives are framed and interlinked by narrator-figures: Homicide, Avarice, and Truth. The relationship between the play performed at the Rose and the surviving playtext has been much debated (Hanabusa xxv–xxviii; Wiggins 305), but whether Yarrington's "Merry" narrative is some form of memorial reconstruction of Henslowe's play, or a separate play altogether, it would seem that both are based on Merry's crime. Indeed, it may be useful to borrow Barbara Hodgdon's term for the relationship between Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew, as "representing different stages of an ongoing theatrical 'commodity,'" of which the exact relationship, chronology, and authorship is impossible to determine (Hodgdon 36). As a later stage of the ongoing theatrical "commodity" of Merry's crime, Two Lamentable Tragedies seems to contain extensive traces of an earlier lost play, yet has itself neither a stage history, nor a recorded relationship with a known author, company, or space. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was never staged, or is even unstageable (Hanabusa xii–xiii). Two Lamentable Tragedies therefore presents unique opportunities for scholars interested in marginal genres, the possibilities for engaging with "lost" plays, and the role of performance practice as—and as a complement to—research, in the study of early modern drama, culture, and society. This article charts our explorations of these possibilities, a process that shared many of the concerns of Oliver Jones's work in Stratford discussed elsewhere in this special issue, but from a different perspective: Jones seeks to explore and reimagine a space, we, a text. We excerpted "The Tragedy of Merry" from the surviving text of Two Lamentable Tragedies, and, working with a company of professional actors and academics, staged our historical imagining of the play at University College London in March 2014.1 A second production, using a new cast of amateur actors with almost no prior experience of early modern drama, was staged at The Walronds in Cullompton, Devon, in...

Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance?: Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning

Editing for Performance or Documenting Performance?:Exploring the Relationship Between Early Modern Text and Clowning Stephen Purcell The complexity of the relationship between writing and performance on the early modern stage is particularly evident in its scenes of clowning. A performance tradition that relied upon a combination of scripted and unscripted speech, clowning resists documentation in printed form: indeed, printing turns it into something else entirely. As Richard Preiss has noted in his recent book on early modern clowning, [a] playbook is not a performance: it is the retrospective fantasy of one, abstracted from the play’s synchronic and diachronic stage lives, privileging certain voices over others, retroactively framing playgoing as a continuous, monological, readerly experience. (6) It might be helpful to think of the printed record of clowning scenes (and indeed of early modern drama more broadly) along the lines of the “geological metaphor” used by Michael Keefer in his 2007 edition of the play to describe the 1616 text of Doctor Faustus: as “the product of distinct phases of sedimentation and partial subduction” (20). Unlike those of a geological specimen, of course, the layers of sedimentation in a printed text are impossible to separate from one another. The metaphor is nonetheless useful to describe the multiple processes of scripting, performing, transcribing, copying, remembering, rescripting and reperforming that underlie the composition of an early modern playbook. In 2012, I undertook an exploration of the Doctor Faustus clown scenes in an open workshop with actors from The Pantaloons theater company. This was not an “excavation” of the text: there was no attempt to recover original practice. It was, rather, an attempt to gain an insight into the [End Page 5] structures underpinning such scenes, and to explore the ways in which layers of textual sedimentation might build up through a new process of scripting, improvisation, remembering, and rescripting. The workshop explored the differences between the clowning scenes of the two surviving texts of Doctor Faustus (1604 and 1616), and encouraged the actors to analyze the structure of one scene in particular before generating their own semi-improvised version of it. In order to approximate the process of memorial reconstruction and gain a practical sense of the differences between semi-improvised performance and textual accounts of it, I then asked the workshop audience to take notes and translate the resulting performance back into text. This article gives an overview of some of the ways in which the scene travelled through its various performative and textual forms, and speculates as to the relationship between clowning and text on the early modern stage and page. The texts of Doctor Faustus bear the traces of the play’s early performance history. The 1616 text, or B-text, is considerably longer than the earlier version, containing 676 additional lines. Recent scholarship has tended to conclude that the 1604 A-text is probably closest to the version of the play that was performed towards the end of Marlowe’s life (c. 1588), and that the B-text represents William Birde and Samuel Rowley’s revised version (for which Philip Henslowe recorded a payment in 1602). The B-text alone includes such episodes as Faustus’s rescue of Saxon Bruno from the Pope (3.1), and the three-scene sequence in which the knight humiliated by Faustus in 4.1, here named Benvolio, plots a revenge that subsequently backfires (4.1, 4.2, 4.3).1 The B-text also features two additional comic scenes, in which the clowns meet the horse-courser who was earlier cozened by Faustus (4.5), and then return in the subsequent scene to be humiliated at the court of the Duke of Vanholt (4.6). Curiously, though, despite the B-text’s greater overall length, the first clown scene, 1.4, is longer in the A-text. This first scene stages the meeting between the play’s primary clown, Robin, and Faustus’s servant Wagner. Wagner’s lines are substantially similar in both texts, but the A-text’s Clown is much more verbose than his equivalent in B. The second clown scene, 2.2, features a similar scenario in both texts—Robin has stolen one of Faustus’s books, and...

King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory by Igor Djordjevic

Reviewed by: King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory by Igor Djordjevic Tom Rutter (bio) Igor Djordjevic. King John (Mis)Remembered: The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and the Formation of Cultural Memory. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xii + 204. $109.95. It has become a critical commonplace that King John was a figure laden with significance for Elizabethan historical dramatists. Maligned by medieval commentators such as Matthew Paris, who wrote that hell itself was made fouler by the dead monarch, after the Reformation John could be seen on the strength of his quarrel with the Papacy as a kind of dry run for Henry VIII. John Bale, for example, would cast “noble kynge Iohan” as Moses to Henry’s Joshua, with the later king finally leading the English to “the lande of mylke and honye” (King Johan, ed. John Henry Pyle Pafford, Malone Society Reprints, 1931; 1097, 1103). In King John (Mis)Remembered, however, Igor Djordjevic offers a much more nuanced picture of John’s literary afterlife. For one thing, he brings together materials that have tended to interest different groups of critics: historical chronicles, the King John plays of George Peele and William Shakespeare, the Admiral’s Men plays about Robin Hood, and Samuel Daniel’s Jacobean historiography. For another, some of the plays he considers, such as the anonymous Look About You and Robert Davenport’s King John and Matilda, have largely failed to capture the interest even of aficionados of obscure early modern drama. This gives his book admirable range and ambition. Of crucial importance in Djordjevic’s account is the Dunmow Chronicle, a medieval text partially reproduced in John Stow’s Chronicles of England of 1580. This fragment offers a fanciful account of thirteenth-century history including a sympathetic portrayal of the feudal magnate Robert FitzWalter who, not coincidentally, was a major benefactor of the Augustine priory at Little Dunmow, Essex. In a version of history overlooked by other Elizabethan chroniclers, it attributes the baronial wars to a “discord” that arose “because of Mawde called the Faire, daughter to Robert Fitz Water, whome the King loued, but hir father woulde not consente” (The Chronicles of England, London, 1580; 242). Although ignored by Peele and Shakespeare, whose dramatic treatments of King John Djordjevic discusses in his second chapter, the Dunmow narrative evidently interested some [End Page 123] writers. One was Michael Drayton, who used it as the basis for his 1594 poem Matilda, and for a dialogue in Englands Heroicall Epistles; Djordjevic suggests that Drayton saw in the story “an English historical world-changing exemplum to rival the tragic power of Tarquin and Lucrece” (59). Another was Anthony Munday, who seems to have been the first dramatist to associate King John with Robin Hood (in his Earl of Huntingdon plays). As with Drayton, Djordjevic finds Munday in these plays using the story of John and Maud/Matilda as a means of figuring something bigger: “the role of a king’s overwhelming passions in the history of a nation” (84). While this treatment of Munday as a serious, historically aware dramatist rather than a theatrical hack is welcome, it does, however, involve a marginalizing of Robin Hood as merely a “device” (93) for the plays’ exploration of John’s kingship—a reading I find overstated given how insistently the frame narrative presents The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon as a play about Robin Hood. It also involves a marginalizing of Henry Chettle—not merely the reviser of Munday’s work, as Djordjevic has it (73), but apparently a substantial contributor to Part Two, for which the Admiral’s Men paid him twenty shillings in comparison to Munday’s fifteen (although Philip Henslowe’s records do not specify how the remaining balance was allocated) (Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2002; 87). As the reviser of Stow’s Survey of London, and a figure of notoriously uncertain religious sympathies, Munday fits much more neatly than Chettle into Djordjevic’s overall narrative. Djordjevic’s reading of Look About You characterizes it, like the Huntingdon plays, as...

Actors' Conversations at the Rose Theatres

Kingston's Rose Theatre was opened in 2008, inspired by the archaeology of Philip Henslowe's 1587 Rose. Peter Hall described the new space as ‘intimate yet epic … a modern theatre which has all the strengths of the past’. This article reflects on the relationship between players and playgoers in the two theatres, considering particular practitioners' discoveries and the audience experience in various modern theatre spaces which have been influenced by the architecture of the Elizabethan public playhouses. In reassessing the character of the theatre dialogue between actor and audience, the article challenges previously held notions about our Elizabethan counterpart.

John Cholmley on the Bankside

Because we know almost nothing about John Cholmley, Philip Henslowe’s financial partner in the building of the Rose playhouse, imaginative hypotheses have moved in to fill the void. In this essay I argue that Cholmley can indeed be found in the records, and that he was both more and less important to Henslowe than has previously been claimed. In the first section I offer what documentary records I’ve been able to find, accompanied by archeological information from the Museum of London. In the second section, I propose a hypothetical – and therefore fictional – narrative that takes the evidence from the first section into account in addressing the puzzles surrounding the 1587 Deed of Partnership between Cholmley and Henslowe, a document that has been until now all we have known of Cholmley.

Renaissance Drama: Future Directions

Previous articleNext article No AccessRenaissance Drama: Future DirectionsTIFFANY STERNTIFFANY STERN Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 402012What is Renaissance Drama? Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.40.41917506 Views: 40Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2012 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alice Leonard Error and the Text, (Jan 2020): 145–185.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35180-9_5Jeffrey Todd Knight Economies of Scale: Shakespeare and Book History, Literature Compass 14, no.66 (Jun 2017): e12393.https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12393

Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger Julie Sanders (bio) Joanne Rochester. Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. x + 172. $99.95. Joanne Rochester's study Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger is a very welcome addition to what she herself describes as the "growing literature on Caroline drama" (3). While acknowledging that her study of the inherent metatheatricality of Renaissance drama follows in a long tradition of exploring plays-within-plays in drama from this period, Rochester makes the case for the innovative nature of her approach, not only in terms of its focus on the woefully understudied figure of Massinger, but in her consideration of plays-within-plays and inset masques as conscious "enactments of spectatorship" (1). Three particular plays from Massinger's oeuvre form the backbone of her analyses: The Roman Actor (1626), The City Madam (1632), and The Picture (1629) (though there is also a very useful analysis of The Guardian (1633) in chapter 2). The two former plays on the list have perhaps enjoyed the most sustained critical focus of late, but The Picture, which recently enjoyed a successful restaging in the UK, is now coming firmly into view. Rochester's study is, then, well-judged in speaking to such timely interests. While the three-play focus may seem tight to the point of narrowness in a monograph-length study, this focus does allow her to offer sustained close readings, and she stresses that her discussion of particular plays has far wider implications and applications. [End Page 142] Massinger is, as she rightly observes, a key "transitional figure" whose career bridges the Jacobean and Caroline moments and involves extensive collaborations with other playwrights. He is also the producer of work within the compass of several distinct types of playing venue: Philip Henslowe's open-air amphitheater, the Rose, Christopher Beeston's indoor theater at the Cockpit, and in the context of the King's Men's extensive and flexible repertory at both the indoor, roofed Blackfriars and the open-air Globe. Describing The Roman Actor as Massinger's "most metatheatrical play" (15), Rochester uses it as a springboard for the volume as a whole. Though in date terms this play falls squarely within the confines of Caroline drama, the author argues that it has its roots firmly within a Jacobean aesthetic and ethos, and she compares it to other Jacobean Roman plays such as Ben Jonson's Sejanus. Exploring how the opening of the play superimposes a deserted Roman playhouse onto the crowded Caroline one of the actual performance venues, Rochester demonstrates in lively fashion how The Roman Actor dramatizes the King's Men's working practices and the vexed relationship that existed in the 1620s between commercial playhouses and the court. Though this is an entirely proficient and worthwhile chapter, Rochester is not exactly breaking new ground in interpreting The Roman Actor from this standpoint, and she rightly acknowledges the influence of the pioneering editorial work of Martin White in this regard. Nevertheless, this is a helpful case study in terms of providing a means of navigation through some of the less familiar material to follow. In chapter 2, she moves onto the category of "masques-within-plays." Noting that Massinger (like Shakespeare) wrote no official court masques, she indicates that he was nevertheless fascinated by the form. Providing useful background material on the masque genre and making enroute the significant observation that in the Caroline period the masque developed into a huge "diversity of venues and forms," (59) Rochester argues that the very dominance of the masque by this time allowed for its diversification. I admired the way in which, throughout, Rochester was constantly alert to the interactions of space, site, and form, and it is a very located and embedded picture of Massinger as a playwright that she offers us as a result. She also makes important distinctions between country-house masques, those performed for corporate and commercial contexts (such as Jonson's recently rediscovered 1609 Entertainment at Britain's Burse), and the court variety of the form that she identifies as Massinger's...

The Shoemaker’s Holiday (review)

The Shoemaker's Holiday Presented by the Rose Theatre Company and THEatre KIT at the Rose Theatre, Bankside, London. 30 Oct-1 November, 13-15 November 2008. Directed by David Pearce and Pepe Pryke. Costumes by Warren Rusher. Photos by Peter Kollar. With Gareth Bennett-Ryan (Firk), Robert Carretta (Simon Eyre), Kitty Chapman (Sybil), Greg Cheverall (Lincoln), Nicholas Kempsey (Hodge), Mike Evans (Hammon, Askew), Lucy Grainger (Margery), Ellie Hale (Jane), Suzanne Marie (Rose), Patrick Ross (Lacy/Hans), Warren Rusher (King of England, Lovell, Dodger, Warner, Servant), Andrew Southern (Sir Roger Oatley), James Tweedy (Rafe). Four hundred and nine years after its premier in 1599, Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday received its first postmodern revival at the recently opened Rose Theatre in Southwark on the site of the remains of the Elizabethan playhouse of the same name, just a short distance away from Shakespeare's reconstructed Globe on Park Street. It was a rare opportunity to see Dekker in performance, and the strategy of re-performing Dekker in the Rose space was clearly the Rose Theatre Trust's determination to keep attention on its historical site in order to attract funding for further excavation and restoration. Spectators had the opportunity to stand in the undercroft of a commercial building on Park Street, on a viewing platform pitched across the actual remains of Philip Henslowe's Rose, to watch Dekker's play of London life. As we approached the Rose on foot from New Globe Walk, we first saw a faux-Elizabethan playbill pasted to the wall outside the Rose entrance. Entering the site, we then heard contemporary pop songs that gradually modulated into Elizabethan music. Walking into the viewing platform that also served the performance as a bare stage, we saw the outlines of the Rose foundation marked out in red rope lights. The Trust's strategic setup--a theatrical prologue to this modern-dress production--prepared the audience (mostly scholars, students, and patrons of the Trust) for a mood change, attempting to register a sense of historicity in this performative space, as if commemorating symbiotic afterlives of Dekker and the Rose. The Shoemaker's Holiday didn't begin with festive merrymaking as the playbill promised: it recounted two love stories--Lacy-Rose and RareJane--located in Simon Eyre's shoe shop, which served as the backdrop in a civic London that valued plebeian virtues over blood. Rather, this production opened its first scene with a class confrontation between the Earl of Lincoln and Sir Roger Oatley, Lord Mayor of London, who disagreed on an unequal romance between Lacy (Lincoln's nephew) and Rose (Oatley's daughter). Lincoln's well-controlled RP and lush, black velvet cape and hat challenged Oatley's citizen status, accent, and Lord Mayor's outfit; in return, Oatley's sartorial register spurned upper-class snobbery. To disrupt this potential match with mutual scorn, Lincoln and Oatley enacted a strategic maneuver. Oatley shut Rose up at home, and her imprisonment was figured behind the metal fence that cordons off the historic Rose remains from public access. To protect Lacy from marrying the churl's daughter, Lincoln contrived to have Lacy appointed by the to fight in France. Yet Lacy isn't an obedient child: he disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker called Hans and seeks work at Eyre's shop in working-class London. In David Pearce's production Lacy was neither a truant nor a lovelorn nob as Benedict Nightingale observed in a review of John Dexter's 1981 National Theatre's production (theatre review in New Statesman, 26 June 1981), but an intelligent, comic entertainer who not only dared to venture his life upon the indignation of the King but also skillfully put on a sustained, convincing disguise, singing and mingling with a group of noisy shoemakers to pursue what his heart set upon. Onstage aristocratic Lacy abandoned all his silks and gay apparel, dressing down in a multi-colored work suit in order to flake class, trade, accent, and nationality. …

Documents of the Rose Playhouse

Part 1 Introduction: Henslowe and the scholars Philip Henslowe, citizen and dyer city, court and privy council players and playwrights editorial procedures - reading Henslowe, dates, monetary conversion. Part 2 The documents: references and abbreviations notes to the documents. Part 3 Appendix: statute regulating London wages statute regulating London prices statute regulating apparel.

Nationalism, the Black Legend, and the RevisedSpanish Tragedy

The repeated revival, adaptation, and publication of Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy mirrors the Spanish fashion characteristic of the English Renaissance, even as the play's multiple versions embody the Anglo‐Hispanic anxieties observable in the theaters as elsewhere in the early modern (or “precursor”) public sphere. The texts that collectively comprise The Spanish Tragedy respond to England's ongoing Spanish troubles by changing the terms of Kyd's argument. Whereas Kyd's “original,” in print by 1592, declines to participate in the outpouring of Hispanophobic sentiment characteristic of the moment in order to discover the “ethos of empire,” later redactions—including the 1602 edition, which features the famous “painter scene” sometimes ascribed to Ben Jonson, and the First Part of Hieronimo, printed in 1605 but probably related to the “Spanish Comedy” mentioned by Philip Henslowe in the early 1590s—shift the focus of the play, emphasizing Spain's ethnic difference. Incorporating the essentializing categories and rhetorical gestures associated with the Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty, Kyd's revisers reframe The Spanish Tragedy as a celebration of English and Portuguese nationhood. (E. G.)

Staging Invisibility in English Early Modern Drama

Sometime after 3 April 1598 Philip Henslowe laid out part of a 3.10s sum on 'a robe for to goo invisibell'. Not withstanding his good fortune in locating this elusive garment, stage conventions of invisibility are earlier and more varied than the robe itself. This study draws its treatment of invisibility from such appropriate English 'cycle' pageants as the annunciation and resurrection as well as the several appearance, ascension, and assumption plays. Further, the piece explores Alan C. Dessen's and Leslie Thomson's Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580-1642 entries under 'invisible' and 'vanish'. Finally, some attention is paid to contemporary wardrobe inventories, images, and performance accounts in speculation about what 'a robe for to goo invisibell' might have looked like.

"I desyre to be paid": Interpreting the Language of Remuneration in Early Modern Dramatic Archives

Remuneration--O, that's the Latin word for three-farthings. --Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost In the fall of 1602, Anthony Munday was writing similar work for two different bosses: plays for Philip Henslowe and a Lord Mayor's Show for the Merchant Taylors. Every year on 29 October, a Lord Mayor's Show celebrated the inauguration of the new mayor of London. His livery sponsored the show and commissioned scripted theatrical events, or pageants, from the city's leading playwrights. In Henslowe's Diary and all of the London liveries' financial records for the Lord Mayors' Shows (1535-1639), the language used to describe reveals different conceptions of remuneration for work done to produce drama. Henslowe's records regard work as payments or wages but livery records consider it service that yields rewards. Philippe Desan writes, essential question connected with the idea of work in any age has to do with an interpretation of the word (1) The liveries interpreted remuneration by searching their own and other liveries' financial records to discover the original prices paid for work on drama and thus to restrict prices. Not only did the liveries seek out original prices in order to substantiate current prices, but they also utilized their archives to try to identify the original Lord Mayor as one of their own and enjoy political prestige. The liveries' pageants attempted to convey accuracy in assessing financial and political value, as in Munday's 1611 pageant for the Goldsmiths, Chruso-thriambos. However, Munday's 1614 retraction in the Drapers' pageant, Himatia-Poleos, demonstrates the problems of determining worth from the archives, ultimately showing that value was relative when political worth and remuneration were considered. When pageant dramatists involved themselves in assessing financial worth, they experienced severe consequences, as in the 1604 jailing of Thomas Massey in Coventry. Using Munday's and Massey's reactions in art and life to the liveries' archival practices, I argue that far from resulting in a one-sided relationship of manipulating records, both sponsors and writers of drama emphasized and exploited the language of the archives to interpret the value of dramatic work and determine remuneration. This study distinguishes itself from previous pageant scholarship by closely reading nonliterary in addition to literary texts in order to elucidate the attention given to financial and political value in the production of Renaissance occasional drama. Richard Strier advocates this practice of dual reading in cultural history, which he sees as highly desirable and informative because it rids us of the distinction between 'monuments' and 'documents'--between works and texts. (2) He adds that few critics have examined the rhetoric of historical documents in a formalist way, (3) but that surprising insights emerge when such patterns in 'documents' are perceived. (4) One rhetorical pattern surfaces in reading financial records for dramatic work, namely, the difference between the descriptions of in theater documents and in livery documents. The theatrical records of Henslowe's Diary express a clear understanding that any work done for Renaissance drama, whether artistic or mechanical, in essence was an exchange of money for labor. (5) Henslowe gives no sense that any employee would have an obligation to him beyond having financial debts or being bound to his company. Therefore, money paid to Munday and his collaborators was, in the language of Henslowe's remuneration, layde out, as in these two entries: layde owt the 22 of desemb[er] 1597 ... to antony monday & mr drayton and a week later, Layd owt the 28 of desemb[er] 1597 to antoney monday toward his boocke. When not loaning earnest money for plays, Henslowe geve[s] Munday or pay[s] vnto antony mondaye in fulle payment for a playe. (6) Henslowe's to nonartistic workers reveal this same philosophy about remuneration. …

London's Early Modern Creative Industrialists

M s j ~ID-TWENTIETH-century analyses of the income streams of early modern professional writers came to three conclusions that still seem judicious: first, that drama was largely the only writing activity to yield a living income (and then generally only when the writer was also an actor or company sharer); second, that nondramatic writers depended more on patronage by court, gentry, or church than on support from merchants, assignments to publishers, or authorial sales of personal copies; third, that income was more often received either in kind or in the offer of other economic opportunities than as cash and can rarely be allocated to a specific text.' These positions depended on accounting records from key court patrons, authors' biographies, publishers' prefatory material, the Philip Henslowe and Richard Robinson papers, and, inevitably, on anecdote, often from within the body of the text being offered to a patron. They could perhaps now be supplemented after three advances in bibliography and historiography: the publication of early English books online, recent substantial editing of London corporation and livery company records, and (in the move away from new historicism's court-based narrative) a growing interest in alternative social capitals.

Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance Andrew McRae Beal, Peter and Grace Ioppolo, eds, Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Volume 11), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002; cloth; pp. vii, 247; RRP C$90; ISBN 071237712. In his contribution to this impressive collection of essays, Steven W. May imagines 'a palaeographer's paradise, a world that may be only a few decades away'. His vision is a manuscript version of Early English Books Online: an 'electronic Eden' in which anybody may access full facsimile texts of manuscripts from major archives across the world. The implications of such a shift, however, are far from obvious. While it would mean fewer scholarly road-trips, May argues that it would not spell the end of 'high-quality manuscript editing'; indeed, given the easier availability of manuscript material, it may even have an opposite effect, placing new demands on palaeographers, to interpret and contextualize what would strike many as a whole new world of Early Modern texts (pp. 214-15). At present, though, as this volume attests, the study of manuscripts continues to occupy a somewhat awkward, liminal position within the broader field of literary studies. Its practitioners uphold rigorous and exacting standards of scholarship, and consistently contribute to knowledge of the material contexts of writing and reading in the past. At times, though, one is left with a sense that they are rather struggling to make themselves heard. This volume contains essays by some of the world's leading experts on English Renaissance manuscripts. Contributors include Peter Beal, H. R. Woudhuysen, Arthur F. Marotti, Katherine Duncan-Jones and Harold Love, some of whom have devoted entire careers not only to the study of manuscripts, but also to the tricky project of convincing others that manuscripts matter. Their approaches, over the years, have ranged from raising editorial standards in the light of evidence drawn from manuscript sources (in the case, say, of Duncan-Jones), through the preparation of invaluable research aids for manuscript-centred research (in the case of Beal), to problematizing print-centred preconceptions of authorship and publication (in the case, perhaps most notably, of Love). Appropriately, this volume also demonstrates a considerable range of approaches across its eleven essays. Woudhuysen, for example, focuses his attention on a single-page manuscript fragment of Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia, which the professional scribe appears to have set aside when he realised that he had made an error in his transcription. It leads Woudhuysen, after a characteristically scholarly investigation, to argue that The Old Arcadia may have enjoyed a wider transmission than has previously been acknowledged, and [End Page 192] that this may have been precisely the author's intention. Hilton Kelliher engages, somewhat more traditionally, in the game of authorial identification, proposing an obscure Essex gentleman, John Mott, as the writer of the sprawling curiosity The Newe Metamorphosis. In perhaps the most ambitious contribution, meanwhile, Grace Ioppolo, working from the archive of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, challenges existing assumptions about the transition of play-texts from 'foul' to 'fair' copies, placing the author in a central position throughout the process. Some of the contributors are more determined than others to make claims that will be heard beyond the covers of this volume. Ioppolo pushes an analysis of a handful of documents about as far as it will stretch, proposing an argument that surely warrants development in a monograph; Kelliher, on the other hand, seems rather too content with the fruits of his biographical searches, and leaves his reader thinking that he might well have done more to reflect upon the culture in which the remarkable Mott almost managed to flourish. Marotti did something like this for one of Mott's contemporaries in John Donne: Coterie Poet (1986); Mott, though a less accomplished poet, in many respects offers a more interesting subject, given his position on the margins of Renaissance learning and power. Surely I am not the only reader who would like to know more about this. And then there are pieces that are so wonderful that one is left regretting that this volume is so determinedly oriented towards such...