5
When the Chamberlain’s Men first took up residence in the Theatre in 1594 their future must have looked as settled as that of any company of players could in the era. They had exclusive use of one of the few playhouses about the city, which was owned by the father of one of their leading players. They were one of only two companies invited to court for the Christmas Revels for each of the next five years. In Will Kemp they had the leading comedian of the day, a box‐office draw to rival Edward Alleyn, now with the Admiral’s Men at the Rose. In William Shakespeare they had one of the few proven playwrights of the day. The death or retirement from the stage of Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, John Lyly, and George Peele had left a notable gap in the market, while the fact that Shakespeare seems to have been able to bring much of his earlier work with him gave the company a real opportunity to build a viable repertory.
The only real shadow on the horizon was that the lease of the land on which the Theatre stood would expire in April 1597 and the landlord, Giles Allen, had so far avoided granting the ten‐year extension for which the original contract allowed. Possibly against the risk that he would never do so – but equally possibly as a speculative venture of his own – James Burbage came up with a new plan. On February 4, 1596 he purchased parts of the extensive Blackfriars precinct that was owned by Sir William More and set about building a new playhouse there. This was not in the same part of the complex as the earlier Blackfriars theatre, built by Richard Farrant for the Children of the Chapel. What Burbage purchased was “the Seven Great Upper Rooms, the rooms on the floor below, and the rooms to the west in the Duchy Chamber” (Smith, 155). As Irwin Smith has demonstrated, the “Seven Great Upper Rooms” included what had been used as the Parliament Chamber in the time of Henry VIII, a commodious structure, within which Burbage was to build a splendid new indoor playhouse, perhaps for the use of the Chamberlain’s Men (164–74).
This is not the place to discuss the playhouse he built, something I defer until the point in the narrative when the King’s Men (as by then the company had become) were actually able to use it – as they were not in 1596/7 (see p. 290). But something needs to be said about the business plan behind this development, and why it failed. The short answer for its failure is that some influential neighbors of the theatre objected to it in November 1596 on a string of very familiar grounds, including claims that this:
common playhouse … will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the same precinct, both by reason of the great resort and gathering together of all manner of vagrant and lewd persons that … will come thither and work all manner of mischief, and also to the great pestering and filling up of the same precinct, if it should please God to send any visitation of sickness … for that the same precinct is already grown very populous; and besides that the same playhouse is so near the church that the noise of the drums and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in time of divine service and sermons. (480)
And the Privy Council apparently agreed with them, though there is no record of their actual response. Embarrassingly, one of the signatories to the complaint was the company’s own patron, a role now taken by the second Lord Hunsdon, his father having died on July 23, 1596 (see p. 130). Timing here was almost certainly everything, since they temporarily lacked a powerful patron in the highest quarters. The only upside to the whole affair is that it may have played its part in creating the character we know as Falstaff, who took shape around 1596/7 (see p. 102).
Box 5.1 The Falstaff Issue and Use of the Blackfriars
It is widely known that Shakespeare originally called the character we know as Falstaff, Oldcastle. This identifed him with the historical Sir John Oldcastle, who was burned at the stake for the heresy of his Lollard (proto‐Protestant) views in the reign of Henry V. Although Shakespeare later disavowed that identification (see p. 7), the name was clearly Oldcastle in the version of 1 Henry IV first staged. It was changed before the play got into print, but unmistakable vestiges of the identity remain, as when Prince Hal addresses him as “my old lad of the castle” (1.2.41). It is also now well established that the change was made because of objections raised by the Brooke family, who held the family title of Lord Cobham; Oldcastle had held that title in the right of his wife, and Shakespeare’s depiction of Oldcastle as a drunken, debauched coward (he had in fact been a distinguished soldier) was presumably taken as a slur on the family (Gary Taylor, 1985; 1987).
The question is why Shakespeare should have caricatured Oldcastle in this way, especially since William Brooke, the tenth Lord Cobham, was Lord Chamberlain around the time I Henry IV was very probably written. He held the post from August 8, 1596 until his own death on March 6, 1597. Samuel Schoenbaum offers one common explanation, treating the whole affair very laconically: “It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s choice of a name was deliberately provocative, an act of retaliation against a dynasty hostile to the stage; but there is no evidence of the Cobhams’ puritanical leanings, and more likely the dramatist took the name, without a second thought, from his source play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. A second thought would have been advisable” (1987, 194).
Schoenbaum is right that neither William Brooke not his son, Henry, the eleventh Lord Cobham, who was also drawn into the business, has been shown to have any puritanical hostility to the stage. But the idea that it was a casual oversight – and one that no one else in the company, or indeed the Master of the Revels, picked up on – is equally implausible. I suggest another possibility, which I have not seen advanced before. It was in November 1596, while the elder Cobham was Lord Chamberlain (and a Privy Councillor), that neighbors of James Burbage’s Blackfriars theatre petitioned the Lords of the Privy Council to prevent its being used as a “common playhouse.” Most of the attention focused on this petition has been directed to the fact that it bears the signature of the younger Lord Hunsdon, by now patron of Shakespeare’s company.
I suggest, however, that attention ought first to be focused on the name which is not on the petition: that of William, Lord Cobham, himself though the document makes very plain that it could have been.
Humbly showing and beseeching your honours, the inhabitants of the precinct of the Blackfriars, London, that whereas one Burbage hath lately bought certain rooms in the same precinct near adjoining unto the dwelling houses of the right honourable the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord of Hunsdon, which rooms the said Burbage is now altering and meaneth very shortly to convert and turn the same into a common playhouse, which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble. (ES 4: 319–20; my emphasis)
Cobham’s signature was not on the letter purely because it was addressed to himself as one of the Lords of the Council (which Hunsdon would not become until he succeeded Cobham as Lord Chamberlain). Cobham was a long‐time tenant of Sir William More, the owner of the Blackfriars complex, occupying the south end of the upper floor of the Old Buttery as well as the Porter’s Lodge (Smith, 158). The Old Buttery actually adjoined the Parliament Chamber which Burbage was converting into the playhouse.1
Cobham had been incommoded by Richard Farrant’s first Blackfriars playhouse, so there can have been little doubt about his views on a second one (Smith, 149). And it seems that his fellow Lords of the Council had little difficulty sympathizing with him and granting the petition – thus blocking Shakespeare and his company from using the new Blackfriars theatre, if that is what they planned. This squares perfectly with Thomas Nashe’s comments after the first Lord Hunsdon’s death, quoted earlier: “in their old lord’s time they thought their state settled, it is now so uncertain they cannot build upon it” (see p. 129). The reference is surely not to all players, but specifically to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. “Their old lord” Hunsdon had interceded with the Lord Mayor to get them permission to perform at the Cross Keys in over the winter of 1594/5; himself a former tenant of Blackfriars and wishing to become one again, he had corresponded with Sir William More, in a way that suggests that he knew of and was probably supportive of the planned theatre: “understanding that you have already parted with part of your home to some that means to make a playhouse in it” (Smith, 162).
His death was a catastrophe for Shakespeare’s company. With their lease on the Theatre expiring, it blocked the possibility of a move to the Blackfriars.2 Patronage in the highest places was required for success in the London theatrical world, and just when they needed it they didn’t have it. The second Lord Hunsdon would acquire the same status as his father when he in turn became Lord Chamberlain, but in the meantime his influence was limited. He would not have had influence with the Lord Mayor to ensure them winter playing in a City inn. He may well have felt that he had no option but to support Cobham and his other neighbors when the petition was drawn up; indeed, without the influence to do anything, he may have felt free to voice his actual reservations about having a “common playhouse” in his own backyard.
It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare and his fellows should look for a way to get back at Cobham. Whether they did so while he was still in office, or after his death, is unclear, but there is evidence that no love was lost between the younger Lords Hunsdon and Cobham (White, 2002). The latter, Henry Brooke, eleventh Lord Cobham, may have been the one who required Oldcastle’s name to be changed. He was certainly the one who became identified with Falstaff. In February 1598 the Earl of Essex wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, jestingly asking him to tell their friend Sir Alex Ratcliff that “his sister is married to Sr. Jo. Falstaff” – rumor was linking Margaret Ratcliff with Brooke (Hotson, 1950, 148). And the Oldcastle association with Falstaff lingered for many years after (Dutton, 2016, 245–58). In part this may have been because Shakespeare’s company kept it alive. When Merry Wives was first printed, in 1602, the jealous Ford adopts the Cobham family name of Brook (“tell him my name is Brook – only for a jest”: 2.1.1.200–1) and this prompts Falstaff to a pun: “Such Brooks are welcome to me, that o’erflows such liquor” (2.2.143–5). In the folio text of 1623 the name has been changed to “Broome,” making nonsense of the pun, and so paradoxically calling attention to it, but proving that the original had been found as offensive as the use of Oldcastle. Lord Cobham’s disgrace and imprisonment for involvement in the Main Plot against King James in 1603 can only have perpetuated the Cobham/Falstaff identification, not least since it led to Cobham’s being stripped of the Order of the Garter (“degraded”), as happened to Shakespeare’s original Falstaff in 1 Henry VI.
We might see all this as a darker side of the links between patronage and playing that we considered earlier (see p. 124). The Admiral’s Men, the Chamberlain’s Men’s chief rivals, chose to capitalize on the scandal by staging their own two plays on Sir John Oldcastle, offering a much more respectful account of the Lollard martyr; this was, in part, how their repertories were formed, playing off each other’s successes (Knutson, 1991). But of course, however innocently, it helped to perpetuate the scandal. The Admiral’s Men may have demonstrated a more graceful allegiance to their own patron, Lord Howard of Effingham, who was created Earl of Nottingham, when they hired Anthony Munday to write two plays about Robin Hood, the legendary outlaw strongly associated with Nottingham (The Downfall and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington, both 1598). As ever, the functioning of the players and the conditions of their writers’ creativity, were highly defined by the Elizabethan world of patronage politics.
The mode of all this changed somewhat under James I, when all the companies were under royal patronage. But many of Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays seem tuned to matters associated with the royal family, whether or not (as with King Lear) they have been suspected of glancing directly at court politics (see p. 126). The issue has been well treated from different angles by David Bergeron (1985) and Alvin Kernan (1995). Cymbeline, for example, with its partially Welsh setting, has been plausibly associated with the formal creation of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales in 1610, while Prince Henry’s own players seem to have presented The Valiant Welshman (by “R.A.”) in the same context (Cull, 2014). Such plays may well have been read as supporting one courtly faction or another, but they doubtless also played on the audience’s fascination with the privileged and closed world of the court, into which the actors offered teasingly oblique access.3
The petitioners almost certainly did identify Burbage’s intentions, doubtless formulated on the back of his extensive knowledge of the players’ preferences: “all the players being banished by the Lord Mayor from playing within the City by reason of the great inconveniences and ill rule that followeth them, they now think to plant themselves in liberties” (Smith, 480). Liberties like the Blackfriars (and the Clink) were anomalous pockets of territory, mostly within the City walls but outside the control of the City of London authorities. In most cases their status derived from their former privileges as church property. The Blackfriars had been a Dominican priory until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Liberties thus had all the advantages of suburbs like Shoreditch, where the Theatre and Curtain stood, in being free of the Lord Mayor’s oversight; but they were as close to the population, and indeed to the quarters of some of the wealthiest citizenry, as the City inns – which, moreover, the Lord Mayor was doing his best finally to close down, something the petitioners noted. There would, therefore be little or no direct competition to the Blackfriars.
This is not to say, however, that the liberties were lawless.4 As Irwin Smith puts it: “In the course of time, as civil administration succeeded ecclesiastical, the inhabitants appointed their own justices to try petty offenders, their own porters and scavengers, and their own officers … to serve as civil magistrates” (1964, 114). Blackfriars did retain the ancient church privilege of sanctuary, protecting people from arrest for lesser crimes, including debt, which made it a haven for petty criminals. Yet despite this it was on the whole a prosperous, respectable neighborhood, one where aristocrats, courtiers, and successful businessmen chose to live. It was an ideal location for an upmarket theatre. Or would have been, but for the Privy Council.
This faced Lord Hunsdon’s Men (as they briefly were) with a real crisis. They could not use the Blackfriars; the Theatre lease was about to run out. They found a lifeline in the Curtain. Quite early in the life of the Theatre (1585) James Burbage had negotiated an agreement with the proprietor of the Curtain, Henry Lanman, to share the profits on their two properties on an equal basis (p. 99). They were only two hundred yards apart and serious rivalry between them could have been bad business for both. This agreement, though it ran out in 1592, probably established easy relations between the parties; if so, it paid off significantly at this critical time, because the Chamberlain’s Men now secured for themselves a long‐term lease at the Curtain.
Until very recently, with the exception of Newington Butts, we knew less about the Curtain than we do about any other Elizabethan playhouse, despite the fact that it was there virtually from the beginning and outlasted all the others. What has changed is that in 2011 parts of the foundations of the playhouse were unearthed by archaeologists, revealing most unexpectedly in 2016 that the external structure of the Curtain was rectangular, taking advantage of neighboring structures.5 And the galleries on its internal walls were straight, not curving around polygonal shapes such as those of the Theatre or the Globe. In both these respects it seems to have mirrored the kinds of inns that the players encountered on the road and in London, though it was probably larger (see pp. 39; 115ff). Unfortunately the archaeology has not been able to tell us anything about the size or disposition of the stage or its relationship to the tiring house. One unusual artefact to emerge is a small pottery “bird whistle” which, when filled with water, could be used to create bird noises, possibly echoing frequent references to such sounds in plays like Romeo and Juliet. For example:
her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
(2.2. 20–2)
Or again:
Juliet. It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree.
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale.
(3.5. 2–7)6
The Curtain seems hitherto normally to have catered for companies looking for a temporary London venue as part of their traveling circuit.7 Unlike the Rose and the Theatre it was never a base for players more‐or‐less permanently resident in London – until this crisis for the Chamberlain’s Men. The London‐resident players, by and large, are those whose plays have survived, giving us some clues as to the particular qualities of their home bases. So we have very little such evidence regarding the Curtain. Of course we must assume that the plays from the Chamberlain’s Men’s existing Theatre repertory could be played there without too much adaptation, or this new arrangement would hardly have been viable. The company’s stay at the Curtain lasted from around October 1597 to late 1599. But only one play survives which we can be categorically certain was written with the specific expectation of being played at the Curtain. This is Ben Jonson’s first play for the Chamberlain’s Men, Every Man In His Humour, the 1616 folio text of which assures us that it was first performed there in 1598. In fact we can date its first performance even more precisely, since there is a record of a German (“Almain”) dignitary who “lost 300 crowns at a new play called Every Man’s humour” on September 20, 1598 (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1598–1601, 97). The critics were not wrong when they said that theatres attracted pickpockets; they also attracted foreign nobility who carried irresponsible amounts of money with them.
Every Man In as then staged was as it appeared in the 1601 quarto text, with a setting in Florence, Italy, rather than in the London of the folio version, which is quite radically different. In fact the quarto text provides us with no surprises. Entrances and exits can all be effected with two stage doors; there are no calls for use of an upper stage or a trapdoor; there is no use of pyrotechnics or other spectacular stage effects; all of the props required would have been quite standard – a tankard, a letter, tobacco, swords, papers, a book – with the exception of a red herring (a pun on the name of the character, Cob) and a striking clock (doubtless the one that Brutus anachronistically heard in Julius Caesar the following year, by when they had moved it to the Globe: see p. 268).
The only stage direction which is at all out of the ordinary occurs in 1.3, following line 62, where Cob is marked to exit and then “Bobadilla discovers himself on a bench.” This is odd for a couple of reasons.8 Cob’s exit momentarily leaves the stage empty – unless Bobadilla has been on stage, silent and unobserved, throughout the scene. But there is no indication of that in the text. An empty stage usually marks the beginning of a new scene in successive staging and that is how this sequence is presented in the folio version of the play. But Jonson goes for something slightly different in the quarto version. “Bobadilla discovers himself” almost certainly means that he draws back a curtain to reveal himself; if so the reference might be to a so‐called discovery space, which it is generally agreed existed in the rear wall of the stage in at least some theatres (see pp. 96, 249). It could be used as a third entrance, or a place from which substantial properties (like beds) could swiftly be conveyed out on to the main stage. Or it could be somewhere that characters could be “discovered,” often seated or in bed, by the drawing back of the curtain, cloth or arras which covered the mouth of the space.
But in general there is much fuller evidence for the use of discovery spaces from the era of the Globe onwards than from earlier. It is clear, however, that from early times a curtain, often described as an arras, hung on the rear wall of the stage and afforded sufficient space for people to stand behind it – possibly even without the need for a recess within the wall itself or for an opening from the tiring house, such as a true discovery space requires. So in King John (circa 1594) Hubert orders the executioners “look thou stand / Within the arras” (4.1.1–2), and in the first quarto of Hamlet (1603) Corambis famously undertakes to “shroud myself behind the arras,” where he will be stabbed by Hamlet.9 Robert Greene’s old Queen’s Men’s play, published in 1594, contains this overloaded stage direction: Enter Friar Bacon drawing the curtains with a white stick, a book in his hand, and a lamp lighted by him, and the brazen head and Miles, with weapons by him (Sc.xi.0). Does this mean that Bacon emerges from behind the “curtains” in such a way as to reveal the “brazen head,” or does he simply “discover” the head? Either way there is no requirement for any depth of recess behind the curtains, which need to conceal from view – at most – one person, the head and a lamp, which could easily be on a small table. Dr Faustus, an equally early play, does seem to call for a discovery space, but this might derive from later staging practices than those for which Marlowe wrote (see p. 137 Note 12). No text that indisputably reflects pre‐1594 staging requires a discovery space.
To return to Every Man In His Humour: it is quite conceivable that Bobadilla might discover himself on a bench at the Curtain, simply by drawing back the arras. If so – if, that is, there was no actual space in the tiring house wall, and so no conventional way to enter but by the stage doors – it means that the actor playing Bobadilla had sat there through two and a half scenes. That seems unlikely on the face of it. But it might actually be the point of this quite unusual staging. It gives Bobadilla – the loud star‐turn of the play, a trumpeting miles gloriosus or braggart soldier – a sudden, unexpected and dramatic “entrance,” bellowing “Hostess! Hostess!” (63). But all in all, this one striking instance does not establish that the Curtain had a true discovery space, as distinct simply from a hanging arras.
There might, however, be more evidence for a Curtain discovery space if we accept Tiffany Stern’s contention that the second quarto version of Romeo and Juliet was staged there (2009c, 81ff). We have presumed that the first quarto version, (Q1) published in 1597, relates to the Theatre (see p. 96); but the substantially different second quarto, (Q2) published in 1599, might logically be a Curtain piece. There is some confirmation of this in John Marston’s Scourge of Villainy, where Luscus – who is obsessed by theatre – is said to steal all his conversation from Romeo and Juliet in performances at the Curtain.
Luscus: what’s play’d to day? faith now I know.
I set thy lips abroach [i.e. set them flowing], from whence doth flow
Naught but pure Iuliat and Romio.
Say, who acts best? Drusus, or Roscio?
Now I have him, that ne’er of ought did speak
But when of plays or players he did treat.
H’ath made a common‐place book out of plays,
And speaks in print; at least whate’er he says
Is warranted by Curtain plaudeties [applause].
(Scourge of Villainy, 1598, H4)
It is commonly assumed that significant parts of the last act of Romeo and Juliet might take place inside the discovery space, or around its entrance, leaving the bodies of Paris, Romeo, and Juliet within. And the Q2 text seems to sanction that when the Prince orders that they should “Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while” (5.3.216), while he establishes what has happened. This seems to be a direction to draw the curtain over the discovery space as a convenient way of removing the bodies from the stage, and is often quoted as such. But in Q1 the Prince says “Come, seal your mouths of outrage for a while” (K3), cutting off Old Montague, who has begun to lament the death of Romeo, in favor of finding out what has happened. The phrasing “your mouths” can hardly refer to an open discovery space. Indeed, the Q1 reading might also alert us to ambiguity in Q2: “Seal up the mouth of outrage” need not refer to a discovery space at all, but might similarly speak to ending expressions of distress. In short, the evidence for a discovery space at the Curtain is inconclusive at best. Discovery spaces may have been more a feature of the next generation of playhouses, which began with the Swan in 1596 (though the De Witt / van Buchell drawing shows nothing resembling one: see p. Frontispiece).
One feature of the Curtain which Tiffany Stern draws attention to is its close association with prize fencing matches, though the Theatre also had such associations. Students of fencing needed to demonstrate their art in public contests in order to progress in rank; these contests were very popular and the playhouses obviously made ideal arenas. Jonson seems to allude to this side of the Curtain’s trade when he makes Bobadilla a loud‐mouthed “expert” in swordsmanship. He tells tall tales of how “with this instrument … my poor rapier, [I] ran violently upon the Moors that guarded the ordnance and put them pell‐mell to the sword” (2.3.111–13) or “[u]pon my first coming to the city they assaulted me, some three, four, five, six of them together … at my lodging, and at my ordinary, where I have driven them afore me the whole length of a street in open view of all our gallants, pitying to hurt them, believe me” (4.2.31–5). He proceeds to brag about his ability to train others to be almost as good as himself, running off fashionable Italian terms for the various thrusts: “And I would teach these nineteen the special tricks – as your punto, your reverso, your staccato, your imbroccato, your passado, your montanto – till they could all play very near or altogether as well as myself” (55–8). This expands into a fantasy of annihilating an army of forty‐thousand strong by challenging them all to “single” combat, twenty at a time. The comedy shades into something more serious when Cob speaks of Bobadilla as “that fencing Burgullian” (Q, 3.5.12–13), an allusion to John Barrose, a Burdundian swordsman who had challenged all comers earlier that year and was hanged on July 10 for murdering a City official who tried to arrest him. And the subject turned deadly serious for Jonson himself only two days after the German nobleman lost his money. On September 22, 1598 he went out into Hoxton Fields, north of the City, and slew Gabriel Spenser in a duel (see p. 39).
One other play has a reasonable claim to have been staged by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Curtain, and that is Henry V. But the claim is a contentious one and it is unwise to hang too much on it. A version of the play was almost certainly staged in 1599, but the issues are which version and exactly when. If it was the version published in quarto in 1600 – without the prologue and choruses, without “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” and (historically correct) without the Dauphin fighting at the Battle of Agincourt – then indeed it might have been staged at any date in 1599; and that would have meant performances at the Curtain any time up until the Globe was opened, which cannot be dated more precisely than late summer/early autumn, though no later than September/October when Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar (see p. 267).
This is critical if it was the folio version of the play which was staged, containing the prologue and choruses. Critical because the chorus to Act 5 contains a famous reference to “the General of our gracious Empress,” imagining him returning home “Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword” (30, 32). It is widely believed that this refers to the Earl of Essex, who had been sent to Ireland to put down a serious rebellion.10 Unfortunately his expedition went disastrously wrong almost from the beginning and it would have been impolitic or worse to talk about it publicly any time after midsummer at the latest.
In terms of the theatres what is principally at stake is: does the famous “wooden O” invoked in the prologue refer to the Curtain or to the Globe (or indeed to a venue at court)? Is it an apology for old and unimpressive facilities which the company would prefer not to have had to use at all? Or is it calculated mock‐modesty about the company’s splendid new house on the Bankside? We simply do not know, though it is difficult to see how the line about “the General of our gracious Empress” could have been voiced in public as late as September 1599, since Essex’s campaign had failed disastrously and he returned to London against the Queen’s express orders, arriving on the 28th of that month. Nevertheless, people have, with equal facility, been able to read the “wooden O” reference either way. Of course, the discovery that the Curtain was rectangular rather than polygonal might seem to tilt the odds in favor of “the wooden O” being the Globe; but rich metaphors can embrace many forms of reality.
In other respects neither version of Henry V poses any new challenges in terms of stagecraft which would incline us to suppose that it was written for one of these playhouses rather than the other. Editorial tradition, which universally cleaves to the folio version as the original text, assumes that the Governor of Harfleur appears on the walls to surrender in 3.3, so requiring an upper stage. In fact both versions have a bare “Enter Governor,” which tells us nothing about the staging.
A Warning for Fair Women is a difficult play to date, but was published in 1599 as it “hath been lately diverse times acted by the right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his servants,” and thus might be a Curtain play. It does, however, contain many early stylistic features, including dumb shows (though Hamlet is evidence enough that dumb shows were far from dead at this date). In particular, A Warning is framed by heavy metatheatrical – and indeed melodramatic – elements. The play opens: “Enter at door History with a drum and ensign, Tragedy at another, in her one hand a whip, in the other hand a knife.” Later they are joined by Comedy. The point of this preamble is to establish the proper genre for the action to follow, and it is Tragedy who prevails. As History notes: “The stage is hung with black: and I perceive / The auditors prepared for tragedy” (A3r); Tragedy later refers to “these sable curtains” (C2v). It is not clear if there were equally distinctive stage decorations for comedy, history or tragicomedy, but such black hangings for tragedy were standard in public playhouses and seem to have been a feature also of the indoor private playhouses, though it is less often commented upon (see p. 300).11 The plot of A Warning is based on a famous murder in 1573, of which Arthur Golding published a prose account. Tragedy claims that this is a new style of drama, shunning the old conventions of revenge tragedy and concentrating on domestic violence in a familiar English setting. The claim to novelty may be belied by Arden of Feversham (pub. 1592), but it is not impossible that A Warning does indeed antedate it. Yet plays based on true‐life murders did latterly become a stock‐in‐trade for the Chamberlain’s Men, as we see with A Yorkshire Tragedy (circa 1605) and The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), both based on the same events in Yorkshire. A Warning for Fair Women could have been a straw in that wind, whether as a belated printing of an earlier play, with a recent playhouse revival, or as a new play in an old style.
The story of the play unfolds quite conventionally, except that the action is interrupted several times by dumb shows, introduced and commented on by Tragedy, in which the protagonists interact with abstract and mythological characters, like Furies, Lust, and Chastity – spelling out the moral misdirections and the inexorable process of divine retribution. Tragedy’s looming presence – “Tragedy expressing that now he goes to act the deed” – piles on the melodrama, which is stoked by very simple props and effects: “EnterTragedy with a bowl of blood in her hand”; “Here some strange solemn music like bells is heard within.” Gruesome and gory it may be, but it is all very elementary stagecraft, calling on no unusual resources. The bowl of blood is a useful reminder that the staging of violent deaths and wounds was often very realistic, using concealed bladders filled either with vinegar or possibly real (calves' or lambs’) blood. Three characters in The Battle of Alcazar – an Admiral’s Men’s play – are disemboweled on stage, and the direction on the surviving “plot” of the play calls for “3 vials of blood and sheep’s gather [liver, heart and lungs].” The Fair Maid of Bristow (a Chamberlain’s / King’s Men’s play, printed 1605) calls for nothing so extreme, but in the course of the murder: “Here he stabs his arm and bloodies Sentloe’s face, and plucks out Vallinger’s sword and bloodies it, and lays it by him.” Presumably the arm was where this substantial bladder of blood was concealed.
The ending of A Warning for Fair Women is the only other place where the staging calls for some comment. The murderer, George Browne, is brought to trial. It was evidently decided that the event should be treated with suitable gravity, so that a considerable presence of stage furniture was called for: “Enter some to prepare the judgment seat to the Lord Mayor, Lord Justice, and the four Lords, and one clerk, and a sheriff; who being set, command Browne to be brought forth.” This makes explicit something we may only have presumed: that with continuous staging it would sometimes be necessary for back‐stage personnel to move properties in open view of the audience.12 In this instance it ensures that something like half the cast – all, except the clerk, wearing impressive finery – would be seated in (probably tiered), awe‐inspiring judgment. Browne is found guilty and sentenced to death. At the end of the execution sequence the direction reads only “He leaps off.” We may infer that before Browne delivers a penitent’s speech, he has mounted a ladder, used as a makeshift gallows. (There is talk of proper gallows being built for his three co‐conspirators, but that was hardly practical on stage). The actor would have been wearing a concealed harness, familiar to this day, which would take the strain of the rope without the noose endangering him. But the simulation of sudden death would have been effective, and the horror of the whole plot is rubbed in when Browne is denied his last plea, which was to be spared having his body hung in chains, to rot and be pecked at by crows. This is not a style of drama we would normally associate with Shakespeare (the play is sometimes credited to Heywood) but neither is Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter, as we shall see. The Chamberlain’s Men were never tied to a single style. That point is further underscored if we consider what we know of a play called The Second Part of The Seven Deadly Sins.
David Kathman’s meticulous demonstration that the “plot” of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins13 relates not, as was long thought, to a company containing Edward Alleyn in the early 1590s but to the Chamberlain’s Men in 1597–8 is to my mind utterly convincing – certainly more convincing than any other that has been advanced.14 (On “back‐stage plots,” see p. 113). As such it offers us a unique insight into the inner workings and personnel of the company while it was based at the Curtain and around the time that Shakespeare was writing the Henry IV plays, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing. One thing stands out immediately: that while Shakespeare was making striking innovations in the forms of history plays and romantic comedies, the company was still staging traditional, even old‐fashioned, plays like this, a morality play which portrays the consequences of three of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, Sloth, and Lechery. (The other four, Pride, Gluttony, Avarice, and Wrath, had presumably been the subject of the lost 1 Seven Deadly Sins, to which this was a sequel.) Neither A Warning for Fair Women nor An Alarum for London may be quite the outliers in the company’s repertory they have hitherto seemed (see p. 203).
I start by recapitulating Kathman’s identification of the adult actors included in the “plot.” Their names are first given as they appear, then fleshed out if needs be, followed by the roles they played in each of the three sections (Envy, Sloth, Lechery) or the framing Induction:
As Kathman summarizes: “The first eight players in the above list – Bryan, Pope, Phillips, Burbage, Sly, Cowley, Duke, and Sincler – are all known to have been active with the Chamberlain’s Men in 1597–8, if we assume that Bryan remained with the company for at least a while after December 1596 [see p. 157]. The other three men on the list – Holland, Pallant, and Goodale – have links with the Chamberlain‘s Men and can be plausibly placed with that company in the late 1590s, and none is known to have been with any other company at the time” (25). I concur with this analysis in all respects, except for one small caveat. The role of Will Fool does seem to be allocated to John Duke in Sc.14. But the company contained the most famous fool/clown of his day, and his name was Will – Will Kemp. So, as Andrew Gurr suggests: “It makes obvious sense to see … Will Kemp playing the script‐free clown, whose presence was registered only as ‘foole’ in scenes 14 and 15” (2007, 79).15 On balance I agree with this, though I recognize that it renders John Duke’s name at this point an anomaly which I cannot explain unless Duke simply accompanied Will Fool.
The list is obviously deficient in the sense that it never openly names not only Kemp but also two of the other most senior members of the company, John Heminge and William Shakespeare; they were all sharers in the company and so entitled to the honorific “Master” which is carefully accorded Bryan, Pope, and Phillips. But this can be explained by the fact that, besides “Will Fool,” there are two roles in the Induction with no indication of who played them. These are King Henry VI and the poet Lydgate. Since they apparently remained on stage throughout the performance they were obviously substantial roles. But they were of less interest to the book‐keeper and others who would consult the “plot,” since they had no entrances and exits to track. Kathman suggests that Shakespeare might have played the king (an epigram in John Davies’ 1610 Scourge of Follysuggests that he had “played some kingly parts in sport”), while Heminge played the venerable poet, and Kemp played [Mercury] the trickster messenger of the gods, an ideal role from which to guy the other characters (2004a, 31).16 This is entirely plausible, though I do wonder if there might not have been an exploitable in‐joke in making Shakespeare the poet who presents the scenes of Envy, Sloth, and Lechery to the king. Kemp as Mercury does make perfect sense; if he also played Will Fool that gave him stage‐time sufficient to his status and appeal.
Such speculation aside, however, this still only gives us six sharers in the company – Bryan, Pope, Phillips, Heminge, Shakespeare, and Kemp – which is on the low side for a major company at this date. All but Phillips had by this date received money from court on behalf of the company, an important responsibility that normally fell to sharers; so too had Richard Burbage, in 1595. It seems inconceivable that he was not in fact a sharer, despite the inconsistency in the “plot” in not dubbing him “Master” – he had important and substantial roles as King Gorboduc and Tereus. (Possibly his initial was used to distinguish him from his brother, Cuthbert, who, though not an actor, had inherited the Theatre from their father and was always close to the company). Richard Cowley also received court payment on behalf of the company in 1601, so might also already have been a sharer by 1597/8 (see p. 141). All those mentioned in this paragraph were identified as sharers in the King’s Men in 1603, except Bryan and Kemp who left, and Pope who died. By then Will Sly had risen to be a sharer and so had Henry Condell, who – as Kathman argues with conviction – was on the point of transition from boy player to adult at the time of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins.
Identifying the boy players is more problematic because often only their first names are given. But again Kathman’s deductions ring true in a striking number of cases:
The identification of “Harry” with Condell and “Kit” with Beeston makes perfect sense. Both are named in Jonson’s list of the “principal comedians” in Every Man In His Humour, staged in 1598. As I have said, Condell would buy his way into a sharer’s position before 1603, while Beeston (remembered by Augustine Phillips as his “servant” in his 1605 will) moved by 1602 to be a member of Worcester’s Men and to a spectacular entrepreneurial career with that company when it became Queen Anne’s Men (p. 141, 164). Both, that is, were really too old to be called boys by 1597, being close to the end of their apprenticeships.17 Thomas Belt and Alexander (“Saunder”) Cooke were both apprenticed to John Heminge, in 1595 and 1597 respectively – an earlier discovery by Kathman himself (2004b). Cooke would go on to flourish with the company, appearing in Jonson’s cast‐lists for Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline, dying as a shareholder‐member in 1614. Nicholas Tooley, like Cooke, received a legacy in Phillips’ 1605 will as his “fellow,” and was certainly a shareholder in the King’s Men by 1619, making him a strong candidate for “Nick.” Robert Gough is an equally likely candidate for “Ro. Go.” He would be remembered in the 1603 will of Thomas Pope, would witness Phillips’ will, and be a shareholder in the King’s Men by 1619. The other identifications are more speculative, especially that of Edmund Shakespeare for “Ned.” This would be William Shakespeare’s brother (b. 1580), presumed to be the man of that name buried in St Saviour’s Church, Southwark, in 1607, as a “player.” Nothing else is known of him, though it would be logical that a player living in Southwark at that date might be with the King’s Men at the Globe.
Such speculations are not, in fact, necessary to make Kathman’s hypothesis any more secure. The overwhelming majority of identifications make perfect sense and draw the “plot” (to my mind) closer to 1597 than 1598, given that this is the last we ever hear of George Bryan as a player. He was a payee for the company at court in December 1596, but not in the list for Every Man In His Humour. One striking feature of the list is how many of the boy players had an adult career with the company: Condell, Cooke, Tooley, and Gough all flourished with them. That makes it all the more likely that the “Will” in the list, playing a small role as a child, might be one of the Williams – Ostler and Ecclestone – who were with the King’s Men from around 1610, though that does not square very readily with what we think we know of their earlier lives.
The “plot” of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins thus shows us a company with fourteen adult players (the ones named plus Kemp, Heminge, and Shakespeare), of whom seven or eight were sharers. The other six or seven would all have been hired men, but it seems certain that they were not just employed casually; all have multiple roles that may have helped to bulk up the presence on stage (attendants, captains) but also probably called for some professional accomplishment. One of them, John Sincler (or Sinklo) would appear in the Induction to Marston’s The Malcontent, alongside sharers like Burbage and Sly, as familiar members of the company (see p. 283). In addition to the adult players there were a surprisingly large number of boys, nine in all. Of these Condell and Beeston stand out for having been given roles of real substance, Ferrex and a Lord in the case of the former, Attendant, Soldier, and Captain of the latter. Indeed, Condell looks very comparable in his roles to Sly, who played Porrex to his Ferrex, while Beeston looks identical to most of the hired men. It seems reasonable to assume that both were on the brink of adulthood.
Of the younger boys Saunder Cooke seems to have the pick of the female roles, playing Queen Videna and Procne, wife of Tereus (Burbage) and sister of the Philomela (Robert Gough), whom her husband would rape. (This makes him the leading candidate to have created roles such as Beatrice in Much Ado and Rosalind in As You Like It.) Although it is impossible to be sure, without knowing the script, most of the other female roles seem to have been more decorative than demanding. “Will” has only the role of the small boy, Itis, and may have been the youngest of them all. “Vincent” is the most difficult of all to place, since no known actor of that name seems to fit the time frame. David Kathman does, however, recall the anecdote about Thomas Vincent who is mentioned as a “book keeper or prompter” at the Globe not long after this (27; see p. 179). Possibly he moved into that position after starting as a boy player. Here he only appears briefly as a musician. Many if not all boy actors had some facility with instruments; and we note that originally only two musicians were called for and this was increased to three, his only role. He would have been available as “call‐boy” to the book‐keeper for most of the play, as would “Ned” and “Will” (see p. 113).
The “plot” is marked by a determination to describe the action in a number (26) of self‐contained sections or scenes, rather than to tell the story. It helps us make sense of this, however, if we know something of the three tales incorporated by the play.