One unusual consequence of the change of reigns is that the licensing and censorship of one of the companies – the Children of the Queen’s Revels – was taken out of the hands of the Master of the Revels, Tilney, and given to the courtier poet and dramatist, Samuel Daniel. As we shall see, this was an unfortunate decision. But I suspect it helps to explain the curious circumstance whereby The Malcontent, a play written by John Marston (switching allegiance from Paul’s boys) for the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars came into the hands of the King’s Men at the Globe. Versions of the play – as performed both by the boys and by the adults – have survived, and a comparison of the two shows us a good deal about both operations.
The King’s Men made several decisions about how the play was to be adapted. They decided they needed an Induction to explain how and why they had taken over a play with which the audience might already be familiar in another venue. They judged that they could not match the music which accompanied performances at the Blackfriars, both before the show and during intermissions (see p. 300). As it happens, they had recently experimented along these lines. Ben Jonson, returning to their fold, had written a tragedy, Sejanus, in severely classical mode; it is the last play in which we have a record of Shakespeare performing. One breach of classical decorum, however, is that Jonson dispensed with the conventional chorus, and called for a Musicorum Chorus – chorus of musicians – between the acts instead. Thus the action would not have flowed continuously, as it usually did on the public stages, but more in the manner Jonson had been used to at the Blackfriars, with act‐breaks. For whatever reason, Sejanus was an unmitigated disaster. In dedicating it to a cousin of the king, Jonson wrote: “It is a poem that, if I well remember, in Your Lordship’s sight suffered no less violence from our people here than the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome” (2012m). One of the commendatory poems in the 1605 quarto of the play also recalled the event:
When in the Globe’s fair ring, our world’s best stage,
I saw Sejanus, set with that rich foil,
I looked the author should have borne the spoil
Of conquest from the writers of the age;
But when I viewed the people’s beastly rage,
Bent to confound thy grave and learned toil …
(p. 228, lines 1–6)
The sharers of the King’s Men had no interest in seeing The Malcontent subject to “the people’s beastly rage” and abandoned the inter‐act music of its “private” theatre staging. They were fortunate that this did not pose continuity issues. Where the boys’ plays had such breaks there was no problem about having actors on stage at the end of one act back on stage (but in a different locale) at the beginning of the next; but that was not possible with the continuous staging in the public theatres. The nearest example of such a problem in The Malcontent was between Acts 1 and 2; the protagonist, Malevole, is on stage in the last scene of the first and the first scene of the second. But he leaves the stage nearly thirty lines before the end of Act 1, which would be more than adequate for a turnaround, even if a change of costume had been called for.
The other consequence of losing the incidental music was that the running time of the show was now less than the Globe customers were used to. At some 1,908 lines it would play (at modern acting speeds) for a bare two hours – though some people believe that Elizabethan actors spoke quicker than we do today (Erne, 2003, 140–4). At all events, the decision was made to expand the text, in addition to the Induction (137 lines), by some 457 lines spread over eleven passages (Marston, 1975b, lii). That might give half an hour’s extra playing time. The Induction was written by John Webster, and the additions to the text seem to have been shared between Marston and Webster. A substantial part of those additions involved creating a fool’s part (Passarello) for Armin, since the boy companies had no tradition of clown roles (xlix).
As we have noted, the Induction uses the conceit of having members of the company come on to play “themselves” and discuss the production (see p. 158). The three who do so are Burbage (referred to familiarly as “Dick”), Condell and John Lowin. To them comes Will Sly, playing a gallant who “hath seen this play often [i.e. at the Blackfriars] and can give [the players] intelligence for their action: I have most of the jests here in my table‐book” (lines 14–16). In a neat metatheatrical twist Sly asks “Where’s Harry Condell, Dick Burbage and Will Sly?” (11–12), which all speaks to the celebrity culture now surrounding the Globe. The jest of Will Sly asking to speak to himself would hardly work if many of the audience had not recognized him.
As a gallant Sly had come prepared to sit on the stage, as they do at the Blackfriars (“We may sit upon the stage at the private house”: 2). The tire‐man who has accompanied him on stage is carrying a stool (presumably as stage property), and Sly assumes he can hire it: “I would have given you but sixpence for your stool” (7–8) – the going price of an onstage stool at the Blackfriars (see p. 295). Perhaps Sly is not quite the gallant‐about‐the‐theatre he pretends to be. When the tire‐man will not loan him the stool he assumes he is being protected from adverse audience reactions to his preening behavior – not simply because this was not the custom in public playhouses. Eventually Lowin convinces him that he has to go: “Good sir, will you leave the stage? I’ll help you to a private room” (125) – presumably one of the “gentlemen’s rooms” (see p. 240ff on sitting on the stage).
While Sly remains on stage, however, he pumps the actors on how they come to be performing this play, “another company having interest in it” (75–6). The Master of the Revels’s licence normally conferred a copyright of sorts on the company to which it was granted, at least in the London theatres. Companies could not just steal from each other, even when a play got into print. So unless the King’s Men had come to a private arrangement with the Blackfriars management, they had no right to perform The Malcontent. That may have happened or – I think the likelier – the change in the licensing of the Blackfriars boys opened up a gray area over performing rights, which the King’s Men exploited. Tilney, as Master of the Revels, would hardly object to their theft of a play for which he had not been responsible; in fact he would now get a fee for (re)licensing it. And Daniel had no immediate authority over the King’s Men. All that Condell evasively admits is that the play was “lost.” He also justifies it as a quid‐pro‐quo: “Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimo‐sexto with them?” (77–8). The reference is to paper sizes, folio big, decimo‐sexto small, like the respective actors.
Malevole is the chief protagonist of The Macontent. “Jeronimo” is something of a puzzle. The name is that of the central character in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, a play long in the repertory of the Admiral’s Men, not that of the Chamberlain’s Men.4 There was another play, called The First Part of Jeronimo or The Comedy of Jeronimo, but it never had anything like the reputation implied here. So what precisely the boys’ theft amounted to is difficult to assess. One thing is clear, however: both the Blackfriars boys and the King’s Men were acquiring revenge plays wherever they could. Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems to have rejuvenated this elderly genre, as we saw with Marston’s earlier work for Paul’s Boys (though they seem to have concentrated on city comedies in the new reign). Henry Chettle wrote a revenge play, Hoffman (circa 1602), for the Admiral’s/Prince Henry’s Men, though there is less evidence that they built any reputation with such plays, except for Kyd’s play. Nor, apparently, did the Blackfriars boys. This was one area where they could not keep up with the King’s Men, even if they did commission The Malcontent and steal “Jeronimo”; there is no wider evidence of them building on this part of the repertory. But the King’s Men certainly did. They very probably wanted The Malcontent to play it alongside Hamlet, which in so many respects it shadows. If they really had also secured The Spanish Tragedy, the great‐grand‐daddy of the genre, that would further compound their range; it was certainly consolidated again when they acquired The Revenger’s Tragedy (circa 1606) from Thomas Middleton. They were cornering the market in revenge plays, with the incomparable Burbage taking the lead in all of them. Sequels had long been a stock‐in‐trade of the theatrical repertory, a way of cashing in on success – 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, 1 and 2 Henry IV (with The Merry Wives of Windsor tacked on), 1 and 2 Sir John Oldcastle, and so on. But it was perhaps new to build a repertory, not around a single character, but around similar plot motifs and character‐types, showing off Burbage’s skills to the very best advantage (Knutson, 1991).
At around this time the management of the Children of the Queen’s Revels went down a very different commercial route. They began to focus on recent history and political satire. At a time when the Essex rebellion was still a very touchy subject (see p. 153–4), and there were tensions between the English and the Scots whom King James had brought south with him, this was an incendiary mix, which repeatedly brought them to the notice of the authorities. A play by their own licenser, Samuel Daniel, set the pattern; his Philotas (1604) was expressly accused of shadowing Essex’s downfall, and it is likely this – at least in part – which also got Chapman’s two‐part Byron plays (1608) into trouble. Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho! (1605) and John Day’s Isle of Gulls(1606) both satirized the Scots and got their authors into trouble. The company lost the Queen as its patron. They were henceforth known variously as the Children of the Revels or Children of the Blackfriars. There are signs that other playing companies worried that this policy might have consequences for the profession in general. Thomas Heywood concluded his Apology for Actors(written circa 1607–8) with this:
Now to speak of some abuse lately crept into the quality, as an inveighing against the state, the court, the law, the city, and their governements, with the particularizing of private men’s humours (yet alive), noblemen and others. I know it distastes many; neither do I any way approve it, nor dare I by any means excuse it. The liberty which some arrogate to themselves, committing their bitterness, and liberal invectives against all estates, to the mouths of children, supposing their juniority to be a privilege for any railing, be it never so violent: I could advise all such to curb and limit this presumed liberty within the bands of discretion and government. But wise and judicial censurers, before whom such complaints shall at any time hereafter come, will not (I hope) impute these abuses to any transgression in us, who have ever been careful and provident to shun the like. (G3v)
And I follow Roslyn Knutson in thinking that it was probably about the same time that Shakespeare added a famous passage to Hamlet, which only appears in the folio text:
HAMLET:
Do they [the visiting actors] hold the same estimation they did when I was in the City? Are they so followed?
ROSENCRANTZ:
No indeed, they are not.
HAMLET:
How comes it? Do they grow rusty?
ROSENCRANTZ:
Nay, their endeavour keeps in the wonted pace. But there is, sir, an aerie of children, little eyases [hawks], that cry out on the top of question; and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berratle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose‐quills, and dare scarce come thither.
HAMLET:
What, are they children? Who maintains’em? How are they escotted [maintained]? Will they pursue the quality no longer then they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players (as it is most like, if their means are no better) their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession.
ROSENCRANTZ:
Faith, there has been much to‐do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tar [incite] them to controversy. There was for a while no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.
HAMLET:
Is’t possible?
GUILDENSTERN:
Oh, there has been much throwing about of brains.
HAMLET:
Do the boys carry it away?
ROSENCRANTZ:
Ay, that they do, my lord – Hercules and his load too.
(2.2. 334–62; see Knutson,1995)
So the “ordinary poets” of two leading adult companies – Queen Anne’s Men and the King’s Men – went out of their way to condemn the practices of the Blackfriars management and the authors they employ. Shakespeare projects them as shortsighted, endangering the future livelihood of the boys who want to go on to be adult actors. He also suggests that they are keeping the gentry (“many wearing rapiers”) away from the public theatres, since they are scared of being satirized by the Blackfriars writers. He suggests that the Globe in particular is suffering – “Hercules and his load too” apparently refers to the sign or flag of the Globe, depicting Hercules carrying the world on his shoulders (Dutton, 1988).
Eventually the King himself lost his temper. The French ambassador complained about the Byron plays for an insulting depiction of the Queen of France (compounding the offense of their allusions to Essex) and shortly thereafter the company staged a play about a Scottish mine, with uncomplimentary references to James’s Scots favorites. On March 11, 1608 Sir Thomas Lake, the Secretary of State, wrote to the Earl of Salisbury as secretary of the Privy Council:
His majesty was well pleased with that which your lordship advertiseth concerning the committing [imprisonment] of the players that have offended in the matter of France and commanded me to signify to your lordship that for the others who have offended in the matter of the mines and other lewd words, which is the Children of the Blackfriars, that though he had signified his mind to your lordship by my Lord of Montgomery, yet I should repeat it again: that his grace had vowed they should never play more, but should first beg their bread, and he would have his vow performed. And therefore my Lord Chamberlain by himself, or your lordships at the table [the Privy Council], should take order to dissolve them and punish the maker [playwright] besides.6
The company was indeed dissolved and its licence was revoked; its goods were divided among the remaining management in July. The lease of the playhouse property was surrendered in August, and twelve years after James Burbage built the second Blackfriars playhouse, it became available for the use of Richard Burbage’s company, now the King’s Men. Whatever reservations the people of Blackfriars may have had about adult actors performing in their neighborhood, the fact that they now enjoyed the king’s own patronage must have overridden any objections.
Box 7.1 Court Masques
Elizabethan court masques had been truly amateur events, devised by courtiers or by institutions affiliated with the court. Under King James they became much more elaborate and extravagant affairs, scripted (often by Ben Jonson) and staged (usually by the architect and stage‐designer, Inigo Jones) by professionals. Queen Anne was the early driving force behind many of these shows, like the Masques of Blackness (1605) and of Queens (1609) in which she appeared herself, together with a group of her ladies. They were occasions for royal and aristocratic self‐display, with flamboyant costumes, Italianate stagecraft, elegant music, allegorical and mythological subject‐matter, and most particularly extensive dancing. The climax of any masque was the revels, when the masquers invited members of the audience to dance.
The aristocrats, however, did not otherwise perform: they did not speak or sing. But these increasingly sophisticated events required professional singing, often supplied by the gentlemen and boys of the Chapel Royal, and spoken roles, which were taken by unnamed members of the King’s Men. Jonson led the way with many of these developments. His first court masque, The Masque of Blackness, for example, had the Queen and her ladies appear in black make‐up, ‘negroes and the daughter of Niger’ (lines 34–5), who make their way to ‘Britania’ (205) because they have heard that it is ‘Ruled by a sun … whose beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Ethiop and revive a corse’ (207–9). Whoever the performers are, King James is always the centre of attention; the masque is a gift‐offering which celebrates his rule.5 This action requires three speaking roles, those of Oceanus, Niger and Ethiopia, to explain what was going on; these were taken by three of Shakespeare’s colleagues.
They must have been as astonished as members of the court were when they first saw Jones’s staging, based on technology he had seen in Italy: ‘an artificial sea was seen to shoot forth as if it flowed to the land, raised with waves that seemed to move, and in some places the billow to break, as imitating that orderly disorder which is common in nature’ (16–19). This was obviously a large and complex machine, occupying much of the stage – one observer called it an ‘engine’ – since it was capable of carrying the scallop shell on which the lady masquers appeared. There were also elaborate visuals: ‘the moon was discovered in the upper part of the house, triumphant in a silver throne, made in a figure of a pyramis; her garments white and silver, the dressings of her head antique, and crowned with a luminary, or sphere of light, which, striking on the clouds, and heightened with silver, reflected as natural clouds do by the splendor of the moon’ (171–4). Nothing like this had been seen on English stages before.
In the Masque of Queens Jonson credited Queen Anne with an important development: ‘some dance or show that might proceed hers, and have the place of a foil or false masque … I therefore now devised that twelve women in the habit of hags, or witches … should fill that part, not as a masque, but a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of gesture, and not unaptly sorting with the current, and whole fall of the device’ (7–14). And so what he called the ‘antimasque’ became a major component of this and most future masques. For Queen’s the King’s Men were required to produce twelve performers – probably mixed men and boys – to play the eleven ‘hags’ and their Dame, counterpointing the famous and virtuous women personated by the Queen’s party. Jones meanwhile added the scena ductilis to the machina versatilis (turning machine) used in earlier masques; this was a system of sliding flats which made possible instantaneous changes of scene, as when the antimasque of witches disappears: ‘the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing. But in the place of it appeared a glorious and magnificent building …’ (321–2).
The scena ductilis was used to even more striking effect in Oberon (1611), a masque to honor Prince Henry as Prince of Wales: ‘the discovery of each successive scene took the eye into the perspectival setting, at the furthest reach of which the Prince was enthroned’ (Lindley, Oberon, 717). ‘Then the whole palace opened, and the nation of fays [fairies] were discovered … and within, afar off in perspective, the knights masquers sitting in their several sieges [separate seats]; at the further end of all, OBERON, in a chariot, which to a loud triumphant music began to move forward, drawn by two white bears …’ (211–14; see p. 311). It was the first full demonstration of perspectival staging behind a proscenium arch in England, used to induce awe and wonder among spectators appropriate to a show of royalty; it gave a glimpse into the future of theatre. But nothing like this was seen on public stages in Shakespeare’s lifetime, or indeed before the closing of the theatres in 1642. The King’s Men turned out again in force for Oberon, being paid a total of £15, mainly for playing unruly satyrs, when the going rate was £1 per player (against the princely £40 Jonson was paid for devising it all; see ES 1:201, Note 1; 210). But their own playhouses were not suitable to stage such theatre, which was besides fabulously expensive; Oberon cost well over £1000. They perhaps borrowed the ‘dance of satyrs’ in the show for The Winter’s Tale (see p. 311), but in other respects Shakespeare and is fellows could only produce pale – if suggestive – shadows of what they saw at Whitehall, as in the masque of Amazons in Timon of Athens (1.2.120–56), the masque of Juno, Iris and Ceres in The Tempest (4.1), and the morris prepared by the schoolmaster and the country folk in The Two Noble Kinsmen (3.5), taken from Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (1613: see p. 314).
Notes
1 He and Henslowe jointly acquired the post of Master of the King’s Games of Bears, Bulls and Dogs – bear and bull‐baiting. It was profitable work.2 When James became King of England the currency was regularized on a scale of 12 Scots pounds to 1 English one. So this payment was worth approximately ₤30 English.3 The players are identified as “Fletcher and Mertyn [Martin Slater] with their company” in a letter of November 12, 1599 by George Nicholson to Sir Robert Cecil (ES, 2: 269). It tells us something that the affairs of players in a foreign country was deemed worth reporting to Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary.4 There have been attempts to argue that Shakespeare was responsible for the additions to the 1602 version of The Spanish Tragedy. See Bate and Rasmussen 2013: 207–11, 671–80. Also http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/arts/further‐proof‐of‐shakespeares‐hand‐in‐the‐spanish‐tragedy.html. This would imply that the Chamberlain’s Men had somehow acquired the rights to it, since he is unlikely to have done work like that for another company. We recall that The Funeral Elegy for Burbage hailed him in the role of Hieronimo; but that poem contains forged elements. I remain skeptical.5 All the masques cited here are edited by David Lindley in Jonson 2012: Blackness, 2:503–28; Queen’s, 3:281–331; and Oberon, 3:711–43. Citations are by line numbers.6 EPT, 515. Lake is under the impression that the infractions were by two separate companies, but all other evidence points to them being the same company, the Children of the Blackfriars. A residual company of “boys” (though some were now in their twenties) did emerge, with personnel from the Blackfriars and the short‐lived Children of the King’s Revels. They performed at the Whitefriars theatre and in 1610 got a new patent as Children of the Queen’s Revels. They had a star player in Nathan Field, but never posed the same threat to the King’s Men that the Blackfriars operation had.