How did the acquisition of the Blackfriars affect the nature of the plays the King’s Men would henceforth commission? It is commonplace to associate the indoor playhouse with the new vogue for romances or tragicomedies, plays which John Fletcher distinguished from tragedies and comedies in this way: “A tragi‐comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy. Which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy” (To the Reader, The Faithful Shepherdess). Fletcher and his early collaborator, Francis Beaumont, started by writing for the boy companies and quickly became associated with this genre – though The Faithful Shepherdess itself was a failure when it was staged at the Blackfriars in 1608. They wrote Philaster (circa 1610) and A King and No King (circa 1611) in this mode for the King’s Men, with great success; but when those plays were published, in 1620 and 1619 respectively, their title‐pages associate them both with the Globe, and not the Blackfriars.
Shakespeare also contributed to this new genre, though in his own distinctive mode. Indeed, his highly successful Pericles has some claim to be the earliest romance/tragicomedy (certainly the earliest one to be conspicuously successful), and that was a Globe play. Where Beaumont and Fletcher focused on issues of love and honor placed under extreme pressure (issues that were close to the heart of the gentry who perhaps formed the core of the Blackfriars audience, and resonated even more strongly in the 1630s), Shakespeare concentrated on families divided, children and wives lost, strange reconciliations under challenging circumstances. He followed Pericles with Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Henry VIII (staged as All is True) and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the latter co‐written with Fletcher, are not quite in the same mode but they have affinities.
But of these The Winter’s Tale and All is True were certainly staged at the Globe. The doctor/astrologer Simon Forman saw The Winter’s Tale at the Globe in May 1611 and probably saw Cymbeline there at some time the same year.15 All is True, described as a new play, was what was playing when the Globe burned down in 1613. This seems all the odder because some of the key events of the play – the trial of Katherine of Aragon – took place in the Parliament chamber in Blackfriars, the very space now occupied by the playhouse. And the text draws attention to the fact. Henry VIII says:
The most convenient place that I can think of
For such receipt of learning is Blackfriars;
There ye shall meet about this weighty business.
(2.2.137–8)
It was surely meant to be performed at the Blackfriars. But the only concrete evidence we have places it in the Globe. In short, the evidence we have is that tragicomedy was a genre that played as well, and at least as commonly, in the Globe as it did in the Blackfriars. And the plays we have mentioned here probably migrated between the theatres as readily as they migrated to court when they were called for there. We know with unusual specificity that The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale opened the Revels season of 1611/12 in November, while A King and No King followed the night after Christmas, another major date in the festive calendar; the following winter A King and No King and The Tempestappeared again, along with Philaster and Cardenio, a lost Shakespeare–Fletcher collaboration.
There is no doubt about there being a vogue for romances/tragicomedies, or that the company went out of its way to meet it. But it is doubtful if the acquisition of the Blackfriars playhouse was the key driver in this. As Leeds Barroll puts it “narratives that assume a straightforward linkage between the ‘romances’ and the ‘new Blackfriars playing space’ fail to do justice to the complexities of the historical record” (2005, 168). Both playhouses seem to have played their parts. One issue, however, may suggest a difference between them, and that is the use of descent machinery. As I have been at pains to show, the Globe either did not have descent machinery (at least, prior to 1608) or the writers of those of its plays which have survived made a deliberate decision not to use it. But from 1609 onwards, descents become a fairly regular feature of the company’s plays.