Revels Office Research Articles

The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger

Reviewed by: The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger Janet Clare The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1'S Court Theatre. By W. R. Streitberger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; pp. 336. W. R. Streitberger's seminal 1978 article on the biography of Edmond Tilney, the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean Master of the Revels, pioneered a revived interest in the organization and development of the Revels Office and, in particular, its relationship to the nascent commercial theatre. Now, forty years later, Streitberger has written a comprehensive account of court revels—a narrative which encompasses biographies of the Masters and under-officers; the management and the evolution of the Revels Office; the production of masques, plays, tilts and jousts at court; and the patronage networks and alliances at court which shaped its entertainment. The study offers far more than an account of Elizabeth's court theatre, as Streitberger frequently backtracks to the reigns of Edward VI and Mary to chart the early careers of Elizabeth's officials and to better understand the constitution of the revels she inherited. The subject of the first chapter is Thomas Cawarden, who had been conferred Master of the Revels by Henry VIII in 1545 and served Elizabeth in that role for less than a year. Under Cawarden, the Queen's revels were "elaborate and exuberant," but hardly novel as Cawarden drew on the devices, effects, and themes of the festivities he had overseen during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. (As a reformer who had produced anti-Catholic revels at court during Somerset's protectorship, he was regarded with suspicion during the reign of Mary and spent some time under house arrest.) In contrast, Thomas Benger, Cawarden's successor—the subject of chapter 2—helped to negotiate Mary's accession and was knighted the day after her coronation. Serving as auditor to Princess Elizabeth's household at Hatfield House, though, Benger became implicated with John Dee and his allegedly black arts and spent some time in the Fleet prison. Benger's tenure of the revels under Elizabeth is presented as a period of mismanagement and escalating costs, although his innovative masques and triumphs—characterized by spectacle, surprise, and verisimilitude—forged a new style of court festivity. He was the first to use specially-designed, three-dimensional houses in his plays and, according to Streitberger, the first to use sophisticated lighting schemes. With no royal company to play at court, Benger responded by producing plays by boy companies—the children of the Chapel Royal and of Windsor Chapel and the children of Paul's and of Westminster School—although evidence of the plays they performed is relatively scant with only the texts of Damon and Pythias and Sapientia Solomonis extant. A crisis arose in 1572 following Benger's death and the pressing need to have revels for the French embassy of the Duke of Montmorency, charged with negotiating a marriage alliance between the Queen and the Duke of Alençon. During what Streitberger titles the interregnum of 1572–78, highly placed courtiers, including the Queen's cousin, the Earl of Sussex, were appointed to oversee entertainments, while the practices and processes of the Office were scrutinized by the Privy Council with the idea of reform. Cost cutting was the objective and to this end a number of reformatory memoranda recommend exercises such as using cloth no longer considered serviceable in the various royal wardrobes for revels, and establishing a yearly budget for revels that the queen "will not pass." Streitburger devotes two chapters to Tilney as Master of the Revels, focusing on the expansion of his powers and—as cost cutting led to the outsourcing of court entertainment to privileged companies—the transformation of the office. Tilney was a new kind of Master as his function changed from a deviser of inhouse entertainment to that of a producer and director of works produced by professional playwrights. Extensive work on the Elizabethan playing companies and on theatre censorship [End Page 521] means that readers will be more generally familiar with these sections of Streitberger's narrative. Still, local details are telling. In the early Jacobean...

The Thanes in Macbeth: Fealty and obedience to The True Lawe of Free Monarchies

The disaffection scene and the English court scene present a number of conundrums to scholars and are often cut or partially cut and moved by performance directors. Such cutting leaves many important aspects of contemporary kingship unexplored and risks diminishing our understanding of the final scene. In whom does Lennox confide and what do we learn from the confrontation between Macduff and Malcolm? Stage anonymity is another puzzle: excepting Ross and Macduff, the thanes are never addressed by name and no one outside of the theatre company could possibly know who's who until after publication of the Folio. Although scholars agree that Macbeth has been subject to any number of cuts and interpolations, we can only speculate about the content of the manuscript when first submitted to the Revels Office. Macbeth is partly a Scottish history play. But the underlying themes – the limits of kingship and subjects' rights – were certain to have alerted the Revels Office. By contrasting the legalities underlying the battlefield slaying of the reigning monarch at the end of Richard III with those at the end of Macbeth it appears that King James' contemporary writings have influenced but not dictated Shakespeare's historiography. This article examines whether these scenes, which clarify the rightful line of succession, are also the remnants of a lost fealty leitmotif.

Sir Thomas Benger: Ups and Downs of a Master of the Revels

WHEN Lord Protector Somerset fell from power in 1549, his steward of thirteen years, Sir John Thynne, also lost his position at court. After paying fines, forfeiting property, and twice spending time in prison, Thynne withdrew in the early 1550s to Wiltshire, where he dedicated himself to what would be his life's work, the building of Longleat House.1 Thynne's re-location made him more dependent than ever before on his London contacts in order to conduct his legal and business affairs there and to stay abreast of current events in Europe and at court. Because the ‘newsletters’ he received sometimes also reported not only on politics, but also on theatrical entertainments, they shed new light on masques devised by Sir Thomas Benger in the 1560s and on the impact of these entertainments on his career as Master of the Revels. Appointed to that office by warrant on 18 January 1560,2 Benger was immediately under pressure to produce shows appropriate for the celebration of the marriage on Sunday, 25 February of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, and Frances Newton, one of the chamberers of Queen Elizabeth's privy chamber. As one of the letters in the Thynne correspondence makes clear, Benger was up to the occasion. William Honing, who had also lost his position as Clerk of the Privy Council when Somerset fell but continued as one of the clerks of the Signet at this time,3 wrote to Sir John Thynne on 28 February. After noting that the couple solemnly married in the presence of the queen and most of the nobility, Honing reported that ‘that night we had a solempne maske & on shroftewesdaye night a handsom shewe of trivmphe in the hawle besides a fayre maske.’4 Presumably the masques to which Honing alluded included some of those that the accounts of the Revels Office document: one of Nusquams or Clowns for men, another of Actaeon and his hunters for men, and one of Diana and her nymphs for women.5 Honing adds to our knowledge of these court festivities by indicating that there was also a ‘triumph’, that is, ‘a masque-like revel that combined dramatic action with martial combat’6—a form of entertainment that was one of Benger's favourite courtly devices. From Honing's letter we now know that Sir Thomas Benger's career as Master of the Revels began on a high note, for Honing wrapped up his report of the masques by telling Thynne of their impact on Benger's reputation: ‘The newe Mr of the revelles … hath wonne his spurres by his gay devises.’

Forms of Oblivion: Losing the Revels Office at St. John's

This essay investigates the collective forgetting of the site of the Revels Office from 1560 to 1607: the Hospital and Priory of St. John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell. It argues that as a space of rehearsal and theatrical transaction for generations of city actors, the Great Chamber at St. John's deserves to be remembered. To that end, Sherman gathers draws on texts by John Stow, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, as well as on the Revels account books, the Loseley survey of lead, and artifacts unearthed in recent archaeological excavations. Together, these permit the partial reconstruction of a place central to Elizabethan drama. To explore why the Revels Office at St. John's has been occluded in our cultural memory, the essay discusses the theories of Paul Connerton, Mary Carruthers, and Maurice Halbwachs on collective forgetting. It concludes that different forms of oblivion have converged in producing this loss, ranging from willed displacement to shifting social frameworks to the erasure of labor for the sake of promoting the sprezzatura of performance.

Hamlet's dramatic arras

The suspense of Hamlet 3.4 has everything to do with what is behind the arras. Summoned to Gertrude's closet after staging The Mousetrap, Hamlet hears a noise behind the arras and, assuming it to b...

Chambers on the Revels Office and Elizabethan Theater History

Journal Article Chambers on the Revels Office and Elizabethan Theater History Get access W. R. Streitberger W. R. Streitberger Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 59, Issue 2, Summer 2008, Pages 185–209, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.0.0008 Published: 01 July 2008

The Earl of Sussex, the Revels Office, and London Commercial Theatre, 1572-1583

With the opening of at least nine new venues in and around London between 1575 and 1578, the commercial theatre industry underwent a remarkably rapid expansion. This expansion is linked to reforms introduced in the queen's Revels Office by Thomas Radcliff, 3rd Earl of Sussex, the Lord Chamberlain, and Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer. Sussex took direct control of the Revels Office between 1573 and 1579. Assisted at times by his cousins, Charles 2nd Lord Howard of Effingham and Henry 1st Lord Hunsdon, Sussex decreased the number of masks while sharply increasing the number of plays produced at court each year. Burghley, aided on occasion by Walsingham, closely oversaw the finance of the revels in this period. The creative and production costs associated with the new plays now being brought to court were outsourced to a select group of commerical companies, most patronized by relatives and friends of the queen who were also members of her Council. The Council used its power to insure that these companies were permitted to perform in venues in and around London to polish their performance skills before entertaining the queen. Income from these commercial performances underwrote the artistic and production costs that had been outsourced to these companies. The result was the highest quality entertainment at court for the lowest price, and it was in this quasi-capitalist, protectionist environment that the ‘legitimate’ theatre industry developed in and around London.

Popular Theatre and the Red Bull

Governing the Pen to the Capacity of the Stage: Reading the Red Bull and Clerkenwell by Lucy Munro: This essay introduces the Issues in Review section ‘Popular Theatre and the Red Bull’, which highlights new work on the Red Bull theatre and its Clerkenwell locality. It suggests ways in which this group of essays relate to current ideas about repertory approaches to early drama, and concludes with a look at the career of actor-dramatist Thomas Jordan at the Red Bull in the Caroline, Interregnum and Restoration periods. Multi-day Performance and the London Clerkenwell Play by Anne Lancashire: Although it has recently been suggested that the multi-day play performed at least occasionally at Clerkenwell, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, either was not a theatrical performance or was a single-day play performance repeated over several days, evidence strongly points to a multi-day biblical play. Possibly the play was performed with some regularity but was only Noted in royal records and/or chronicles when it was made use of, and therefore perhaps performed with greater elaboration, in response to special royal circumstances. When the Red Bull theatre was built in the same general area in the early seventeenth century, following the locating of the royal Revels Office there from 1560 to 1607-8, it was thus apparently continuing a tradition of Clerkenwell as a major London performance district. Playing the Man: Acting at the Red Bull and the Fortune by John Astington: The seventeenth-century playhouses of north-west London, especially the Red Bull, have suffered a bad press, from their own day to the present. This paper attempts to assess the basis of the evidence for their low reputation, through an examination of the companies which occupied them, their repertories, and their actors. While there are a number of indications of a somewhat populist and old-fashioned character in both repertory and acting style, there are balancing signs of high levels of performance and production in the companies which used the theatres, and of the acquisition of up-to-date and fashionable plays throughout the Caroline period. The difference in standards, as well as in audience, at the Red Bull in particular, has been overemphasised by modern historians and commentators, influenced as they have been by anecdotal comments on the theatres composed in the interregnum and Restoration. The Red Bull Repertory in Print, 1608-1638 by Marta Straznicky: Plays from the Red Bull repertory were not only published but identified as Red Bull productions in a surprisingly large number of quarto editions in the first half of the seventeenth century. The design, typography, and ownership of the Red Bull quartos suggests that, as reading material, the Red Bull plays were not identified with a strictly ‘low’ cultural or social sector. The position of these plays in early modern print culture thus contradicts the familiar rhetorical construction of Red Bull playgoers as unlettered, or even illiterate, and demands a reassessment of the social and educational make-up the audience for a ‘popular’ theatrical repertory.

The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives

The Revels Office and the Boy Companies, 1600–1613: New Perspectives

Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson by Matthew Steggle (review)

Forbidden Matter.Religion intheDramaofShakespeare andhisContemporaries. By GERALD M. PINCISS. Cranbury,NJ:Universityof Delaware Press;London:Associated University Presses. 2000. I42 pp. /25. One of the strikingfeatures of the last years of the twentieth century and the first months of the twenty-first has been the emergence of books on the religious controversiesof, roughly,Shakespeare'stime. These have come fromEarlyModern historiansand, somewhat laggardly,from literaryhistorians.Gerald Pincisswrites about six plays spanning forty years to demonstrate how they reflect the religious controversies of their times. His book opens with a brief (eight-and-a-half-page) account of religion and state censorship as it applied to plays. Pinciss, rightly quoting Richard Dutton's definitiveMastering theRevels (London:Macmillan, 991), agrees that the Revels Office was more permissive, even over religious material, than has often been assumed.Discussionof the sixplaysdoes show that 'playwrights could offera variety of views on mattersof religion, relyingon the intelligence and subtletyof the cleverermembers of theiraudience to applyor decode theirmessage fully'(p. 20). The word 'decode' ringsalarmbells, as allegorizingtexts can produce quite astonishingtheoriesof religiousconspiracy:yet Pincissdoes not often wander down that enticing alley. He disarminglynotes that (in spite of his book'stitle)none of the plays he dealswith caused controversy.He findsthat disturbancein response to Dr Faustuscomes from its theological indeterminacy. He may be right in his assumption that Marlowe must have been impressed deeply by 'the controversy between Calvinistsand Anti-Calvinists[. . .] duringhisyearsat Cambridge'(p. 38). What one misses in these seventeen pages on Marlowe is the experience of that play'snew high drama.The same istrueof the followingnineteen pages, a 'reading' of Measurefor Measure that finds clashing and ambiguous theological positions, and makesthe play, it mustbe said, seem a doctrinalmess. That is a position with which many would agree; but, again, interesting as his commentary is, there is no sense here thatMeasurefor Measure playssatisfyinglywell on the stage. Chapter4 compares Rowley's When You SeeMe You Know Meand Heywood's If You Know NotMe You Know Nobody,'prime examples of Protestant theater in the early Stuart years' (p. 58). Jonson's Bartholomew Fairshows the playwright'stolerance: Pinciss usefullyfollows through the suggestionsof sympathywith English Catholics in the play, alongside that for 'EstablishedChurch' and 'Puritan'figures,though his allegorizingof Grace Wellbornand her destinyis a little far-fetched.John Ford'sPerkin Warbeck is the last play in the volume, 'a Protestantcommentary on his own political world disguised as a chronicle history of the late fifteenth century' (p. io7). A final five-page 'Conclusion'summarizeswhat hasgone before.The fourteenpagesof notes (though not without errors)do make a useful survey of recent writing on the subjects.The sound of gunfire when Early Modern historians write about religion can be distressing,as can theirsense thatliteratureis a forbiddenand unchartedpartof the map where be dragons. Gerald Pinciss's short, rather charming and useful book comes as a refreshingcontrast. HERTFORD COLLEGE, OXFORD DAVIDDANIELL Warsof the Theatres: ThePoeticsof Personation in theAge of Jonson. By MATTHEW STEGGLE. (EnglishLiteraryStudies,75)Victoria, BC:EnglishLiteraryStudies. 1998. I48 pp. $I6. The book investigates English Renaissance satirical comedies representing living people between 1598and I640. Such 'personation',often ofplaywrightsthemselves, Forbidden Matter.Religion intheDramaofShakespeare andhisContemporaries. By GERALD M. PINCISS. Cranbury,NJ:Universityof Delaware Press;London:Associated University Presses. 2000. I42 pp. /25. One of the strikingfeatures of the last years of the twentieth century and the first months of the twenty-first has been the emergence of books on the religious controversiesof, roughly,Shakespeare'stime. These have come fromEarlyModern historiansand, somewhat laggardly,from literaryhistorians.Gerald Pincisswrites about six plays spanning forty years to demonstrate how they reflect the religious controversies of their times. His book opens with a brief (eight-and-a-half-page) account of religion and state censorship as it applied to plays. Pinciss, rightly quoting Richard Dutton's definitiveMastering theRevels (London:Macmillan, 991), agrees that the Revels Office was more permissive, even over religious material, than has often been assumed.Discussionof the sixplaysdoes show that 'playwrights could offera variety of views on mattersof religion, relyingon the intelligence and subtletyof the cleverermembers of theiraudience to applyor decode theirmessage fully'(p. 20). The word 'decode' ringsalarmbells, as allegorizingtexts can produce quite astonishingtheoriesof religiousconspiracy:yet Pincissdoes not often wander down that enticing alley. He disarminglynotes that (in spite...

MIDDLETON'S FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY HENGIST, KING OF KENT

WHEN Middleton's tragedy Hengist, King of Kent was first listed on one of the Revels Office slips, it appeared under its alternative title [The] Maior of Quinborough.1 Symon, the eponymous mayor, is the main character in the comic sub-plot. In the fifth act, a company of players arrives at Symon's house when he is expecting Hengist, now King. In conversation with other artisans, Symon comments on the political implications of plays:

The Early Tudor Revels Office

The Early Tudor Revels Office