Let us begin to conclude this narrative of Shakespeare’s theatre with a reflection on the moment, probably in 1610, when the playwright first faced up to writing for an indoor playhouse, something he had never done in a career of twenty years or more. Of course, as we have observed, the Blackfriars in many respects tried to recreate the ambience of the great houses of the gentry and he had long experience of working in such places. Moreover, he was well used to performances by candlelight, which he would have found at the Inns of Court and at the court itself – though the latter put on a blaze of light that it seems the commercial playhouses could hardly afford to emulate. Nevertheless there are signs that he payed careful attention to writing for his new venue, taking his cue from someone with long experience of indoor playhouses.
Ben Jonson had written Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster for the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars shortly after that operation opened in 1600. And most recently he had written Epicene, or The Silent Woman for the Children of the Whitefriars, a company put together from remnants of the Blackfriars boys and the King’s Revels troupe – notionally a boy company, though most of them by now were young men. The King’s Men had commissioned Jonson to write one of their earliest new plays for the Blackfriars, if not in fact the very first of them. Jonson wrote them The Alchemist, a play specifically set in the Blackfriars precinct: all the action takes place in or just outside Lovewit’s house, “here, in the Friars” (1.1.17; 2012a) and the play abounds in local details (Jonson lived nearby), such as a gibe at Face for being an “apocryphal captain,/Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust/So much as for a feather” (1.1.127–9). There was a notable Puritan community in the district and they were leaders in the trade in feathers for the fashion industry.
In its close adherence to this single location the The Alchemist conformed to the classical unity of place, a most unusual choice for a Jacobean dramatist, though one that Jonson increasingly followed. He also followed the unity of time with an exactness that even Aristotle could hardly have contemplated, marking off the progress of the action with great deliberation. As Peter Holland and William Sherman put it, “The Prologue’s ‘two short hours’ for the performance come remarkably close to the play’s fictional time‐span” (Jonson 2012a, 545). And Jonson pins the date of the action just as precisely: November 1, 1610. Some have thought this was the day of its first performance at the Blackfriars, and it might have been. But this would have been difficult to predict, given the long‐running plague (which is also an issue within the play). The one context in which Jonson could be certain that a performance would take place on that set date was at court, where under King James November 1 was the usual first day of the Revels season – and court Revels continued, plague or no plague. We have no record of what plays the King’s Men put on in that court season of 1610/11 but there were fifteen of them, and I would not bet against The Alchemist having been the first.
The old Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, had died that August and been replaced by Sir George Buc. Jonson already knew him; they mixed in the circle of Sir Robert Cotton and both drew on his famous library (Sharpe, 1979, 195–221). Shakespeare also knew him, since Buc had approached him for information about an old play, of which he had acquired a copy (Nelson, 1998). Buc was doubtless anxious to make a good impression in his first season in charge of the court Revels and Jonson – well known at court for his masques, which he produced almost annually – would have been a strong choice to lead it off, as he was to do three years later, when Bartholomew Fair led off the 1614/15 Revels. All of this could only have given Shakespeare more of an incentive to learn what he could from Jonson.
Andrew Gurr argues that “Shakespeare’s Tempest … was almost certainly written while The Alchemist was in rehearsal” (1996, 80). And we know that Jonson’s play was ready by late summer (August/September) 1610 since it was alongside Othello in the repertory of the King’s Men at Oxford, on tour to escape the plague (Sutton, 2006). It is as if Shakespeare took his cue from these lines of Jonson: “I will teach you/How to beware to tempt a fury again/That carries tempest in hand and voice” (1.1.60–2). Where The Alchemistbarely moves outside Lovewit’s house, The Tempest is entirely confined to Prospero’s island (in a marked break from the wide‐ranging geographies of recent plays like Cymbeline and Thr Winter’s Tale). Jonson’s play is about con‐trickery centering on the figure of a (fake) alchemist – a magician of sorts; Shakespeare’s is about a magician with real powers, working his spells on a range of different characters (Levin, 1971). And The Tempest “seems to parody Jonson’s timing by matching the time of the plot immaculately not just to the time of a day but to the time of the performance … Both plays were written for afternoon performance at the Blackfriars” (Gurr, 80).
But there the similarities end. Jonson sticks by his commitment to a kind of realism in the sorts of characters he portrays and their speech, offering “deeds and language such as men do use/And persons such as comedy would choose” (Prologue to Every Man In His Humour, folio text, 9–10; 2012 h. See pp, 244; 308). The plot may operate with the finest artistry, but its raw materials are characters drawn straight from the streets of London. By contrast, Shakespeare presents us with airy spirits and a “servant monster” apparently spawned by a witch (3.2.3, 4 & 8); and they are located on a remote island, apparently in the Mediterranean but bearing touches of the Americas. The Alchemist calls for no music at all and the only scripted sound effect is “A great crack and noise within” as the alchemist’s supposed “works/Are blown in fumo” (4.5.54.1, 57–8), whereas:
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears.
(3.2.1369)
Caliban’s wonder surely echoes the effect of this play on the audience at the Blackfriars. And Alonso, King of Naples, seems to voice not only his own amazement but that of most people in the playhouse: “This must crave ‐‐/An if this be at all – a most strange story”; “These are not natural events; they strengthen/From strange to stranger”; “This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod” (5.1.116–17, 229–30, 244). “Strangeness” is a particular characteristic of Shakespeare’s late plays (though it is not uncommon in earlier works), possibly in response to qualities of the Blackfriars stage.
Jonson plays the alchemical trick of turning the base metal of everyday life into gold; Shakespeare turns “a most strange story” into a moving enactment of remorse, redemption and reconciliation, where “Prospero [did find] his dukedom/In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves/When no man was his own” (Gonzalo, 5.1.213–15). But at heart what both of them are doing is dramatizing the experience of theatre itself. For Jonson, acting is always a confidence trick, and his three principals are all actors: Subtle pretending to be an alchemist or cunning man, Dol playing the Queen of Faery, and Face, the con‐artist par excellence, who shifts from Captain to Lungs to Jeremy butler at a farcical pace. While they collaborate their “venture tripartite” is invincible, each bearing up the others’ credibility; they string along a dizzying succession of different dramas to satisfy each of the gulls they lure into Lovewit’s house. The return of Lovewit, however, confronts all these fantasies with a blunt common sense, exploding them all in fumo – only to leave us with a wry twist in which Lovewit’s restored mastery is seen to be a scenario which Jeremy/Face continues to control.
Prospero’s “so potent art” (5.1.50) is a very different medium, one confident that the audience will meet him halfway in sustaining a mystery. If they are being conned they know it and willingly share in a suspension of disbelief for the pleasure and emotional release it will bring. It is, perhaps literally, perhaps metaphorically, a collective act of faith, most majestic but also most vulnerable when – in an obseisance of sorts to Jonson – Prospero stages the masque of Juno, Ceres, and Iris to mark the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda (4.1.60–142). He calls it “Some vanity of mine art” and confirms to Ferdinand that the actors are indeed “Spirits, which by mine art/I have from their confines called to enact/My present fancies” (41, 120–2). On New Year’s Day 1611 the latest of Jonson’s masques, Oberon, was magnificently staged at court by Inigo Jones; as usual the speaking parts were performed by members of the King’s Men. So here Shakespeare likens his fellow actors (who of course also played the roles of Juno, Ceres, and Iris) to “spirits” summoned by “mine art.” Theatre is a piece of magic which entraps even the magician himself, which is why in the Epilogue Prospero has to invoke the power of prayer, the ultimate expression of faith:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer.
(13–16)
The rivalry between Shakespeare and Jonson brought out the best in both of them, and in these plays both of them produced supremely effective plays at polar opposites of theatrical style and philosophy. Both plays, we must assume, performed equally well at the Blackfriars playhouse for which they were written. But it is likely that they were transferred at times to the Globe and we know that they were both performed at court – The Tempest is recorded on November 1, 1611, while both it and The Alchemist were among the twenty plays the King’s Men put on over the Revels season of 1612–13, which included the wedding of James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine.20 Whatever the playhouse, the plays had to be transportable.
One of the advantages that the Blackfriars shared with the Globe was that it was closely adjacent to the Thames, which made the process of transporting the actors, costumes, and properties to court – especially to nearby Whitehall, where James usually stayed over Christmas – much easier than it had been from the Theatre or the Curtain. It was perfectly possible for them to perform as usual in the afternoon, ending around 5 p.m., and be set up to to appear at court after supper, around 9 p.m. The court, as have noted, was always a major factor in the flourishing of Shakespeare’s company, and it is in his late plays that we see some tangible effects of this. The Winter’s Tale, for example, contains “a dance of twelve Satyrs” (4.4.342.1), which was clearly borrowed (costumes and all) from the antimasque to Oberon, an entertainment in which numerous satyrs appear. The same play, notoriously, contains the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear.” This has generated much hilarity over the ages but also a serious debate over whether it could have been a real bear, brought in from one of the nearby bear‐baiting pits. The discussion has even been refined recently by the discovery that in 1609 King James was presented with two polar bear cubs, from a Muscovy Company expedition. Could it have been one of those – rather safer than a full‐grown fighting bear? It would still have been extremely difficult to control it.
We should consider that in Oberon Henry, the Prince of Wales, was brought on stage in a chariot pulled by two bears. There was no way that the safety of the heir to the throne was going to be compromised by the use of live bears: these were men in bear suits. And the coincidence of timing makes it extremely likely that the bear in The Winter’s Tale was also a man in one of those suits. Such a suit was presumably court property, though it is possible that the King’s Men might borrow or lease it by arrangement with the Revels Office, which cared for costumes used in court entertainments. But such questions lie behind Tiffany Stern’s wider questioning about these court/playhouse interactions: “was the masque [of satyrs] added specifically, and perhaps only, for a court performance of the play (like the one that took place on 5 November 1611) as a reprise of a loved event? In other words, is Masque of Oberons’s antimasque successfully and permanently melded into Shakespeare’s play, or is it only a temporary visitor there?” (2009a, 151). The fact is that we do not know. We only have a single version of all Shakespeare’s plays written after King Lear (1606) and can never be certain what venue or occasion that version was prepared for.21
Prospero’s prayer for release at the end of The Tempest is popularly and understandably thought to speak for Shakespeare himself. But the biographical evidence does not really bear this out. The Tempest was evidently written 1610/11. Shakespeare was still to write Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and (apparently) the lost Cardenio, which meant that he was still writing (in regular collaboration now with John Fletcher) until 1613 at least, possibly even 1614; Fletcher was the man who was to succeed Shakespeare as the company’s contracted “ordinary poet,” though he was never an actor or sharer in the company (but see E. Collins, 2007). Moreover in March 1613 Shakespeare finally bought a property in London, after a career spent in rented accommodation. And it was in the Blackfriars gateway complex, barely 200 yards from the playhouse (Schoenbaum, 272–5).
None of this speaks to a man urgently preparing to retire. But in fact he never seems to have lived in his Blackfriars property and it is difficult to locate him in any theatrical activity after 1614. In the will Shakespeare drew up shortly before his death in April 1616 there is no mention of his share in the King’s Men or his shares in either of their playhouses. He had evidently made a clean break by then, selling off all his holdings. We do not know who he sold the shares in the Globe and the Blackfriars to, but since no outsiders can be traced who might have acquired them, it seems likely that he sold them to colleagues, keeping it all in the company.
But what was left of the company that he co‐founded? There is some measure of this in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which was first performed in 1613/14, “privately, at the Blackfriars; and publicly at the Globe” (1623 title‐page). It is the first English play ever printed which included itemized details of its original cast and so gives us a snapshot of the company around the moment Shakespeare withdrew. John Lowin played Bosola; Richard Burbage played Duke Ferdinand; Henry Condell played the Cardinal; William Ostler played Antonio; John Underwood played Delio; Nicholas Tooley played Forobosco (Underwood and Tooley also played some of the madmen).22 For some of these roles a second name is given, evidently relating to a revival of the play circa 1621/2. So the dead Burbage was replaced by Joseph Taylor, who had transferred to the King’s Men from Lady Elizabeth’s Men – he was also to pick up other Burbage roles, including Hamlet. Condell was replaced by Richard Robinson; he had not died but this is perhaps a marker that, like Heminge (who does not appear here at all) he had retired from playing, though he remained in some capacity as a sharer. Robert Benfield, an addition to the company by 1616, replaced the dead Ostler.
Lower down the cast the information seems all to relate to the revival. John Rice is allocated the role of the Marquis of Pescara; he had left the King’s Men in 1611, still a boy, and may not have returned until 1619 (see p. 183, 186–7). Richard Sharpe is named as the Duchess, but had surely been too young for the role in 1613/14; we encountered him earlier in Herbert’s Protection List of 1624, when he was still on the point of becoming a sharer – he might well have played the Duchess in 1621/22. As noted earlier, it seems most likely to have been Richard Robinson, the company’s leading boy actors at that date, who created the role (see p. 187).
So in 1613/14 only Burbage and Condell of the original group that assembled in 1594/5 were still acting; Heminge had moved exclusively into management. These were the three Shakespeare was to remember with gold rings in his will. Richard Cowley was still officially with the company, but Webster does not credit him with a role. Bryan, Pope, Phillips, Kemp, Sly, and Fletcher had all died or left the company; even Armin had retired circa 1611. The Globe itself burned down on June 29, 1613. As Sir Henry Wotton wryly observed: “This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottled ale” (quoted in Schoenbaum, 1987, 276–7). This was in the middle of a performance of All is True (Henry VIII), with Lowin in the title role, which was fortuitous since it meant that all the company personnel were on hand to help save the essentials, including “allowed books,” plots, parts, costumes, and props. (This contrasts with the burning down of the Fortune in 1621, when the Revels Company lost all its plays and properties.) The experience evidently demonstrated the benefit of having two playhouses, and the sharers rebuilt the Globe, on a brick foundation and with a tiled, rather than thatched, roof; it was completed in less than a year, a testament to the value of what it was replacing.
But probably without Shakespeare’s involvement. His last work for the company, as far as we can tell, was The Two Noble Kinsmen, co‐written with John Fletcher, the only one of his plays published (though not until 1634) as only performed at the Blackfriars. And in it the theatre of the era completes a circuit, since the play tells the same tale of Palamon and Arcite, taken from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, as Richard Edwardes’ Palamon and Arcite, performed before Elizabeth at Oxford in 1566. It seems to have been staged late in 1613 or early 1614, and demonstrates the authors’ complete command of Blackfriars staging.
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play of ceremonial, of ritual, of chivalric display. It has what might be described as a carefully scheduled soundtrack, which must have been particularly effective in the enclosed confines of the Blackfriars, modulating between the music of courtly ceremony, song, country dancing, repeated sennets on the battlefield and the shrill of cornetts, outcries of passion from offstage. It opens with a spectacular procession:
Music. Enter Hymen with a torch burning; a boy in a white robe before, singing and strewing flowers. After Hymen a nymph, encompassed in her tresses, bearing a wheaten garland. Then Theseus between two other nymphs with wheaten chaplets on their heads. Then Hippolyta, the bride, led by Pirithous, and another holding a garland over her head (her tresses likewise hanging). After her Emilia, holding up her train. (B1)23
The situation is that at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the tone and mood are very different. It is reminiscent of some of Jonson’s court masques, notably his wedding masque, Hymenaei, of 1606. The text then prints the boy’s song, “Roses their sharp spines being gone.” Immediately there is another ceremonial, but contrasting, entry: “Enter three Queens in black, with veils stained, with imperial crowns. The first Queen falls down at the foot of Theseus; the second falls down at the foot of Hippolytta; the third before Emilia” (B1v).
Theseus agrees to defer his wedding to help the three queens bury their dead husbands, which can only be achieved by force of arms: “Cornetts. A Battle struck within. Then a retreat: Flourish. Then enter Theseus (victor); the three queens meet him, and fall on their faces before him” (C4). The stage of the Blackfriars was too small to handle battle scenes, all the more so when it had members of the audience sitting, standing, or reclining on it. So Shakespeare and Fletcher handle the violence of the play offstage, generating something of the tension of classical drama, which likewise did not portray violent acts. But here the soundtrack makes them almost tangible. The next scene begins: “Music. Enter the Queens with the hearses of their knights, in a funeral solemnity, &c” (C4v).
In the middle of the play a different tone is introduced, with various Maying activities. It appears first at the start of Act 3 (“Cornetts in sundry places. Noise and hallowing as people a‐maying”), when an angry confrontation between Palamon and Arcite is counterpointed by the repeated sounding of horns, from Theseus and Hippolyta engaged in the Maying offstage. We can, incidentally, talk confidently about “acts” in this play; they are the units of dramatic action, not a printer’s affectation. The Maying culminates in morris dancing, flagged by the direction: “Enter a Schoolmaster, four Countrymen: and [one dressed as a baboon]. Two or three wenches, with a Taborer” (G2). The taborer, who would almost certainly also have been playing a pipe, signals that we are in the festive mode of a Tarlton or Kemp (see p. 44 and Figure 2.1). But this is foolery that has been fully absorbed into the aesthetics of the court. The sequence had in fact been scripted by Fletcher’s former partner, Francis Beaumont, as the second antimasque in the Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, presented on February 20, 1613 at Whitehall as part of the festivities for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. It is introduced here like the dance of satyrs in The Winter’s Tale, suggesting the sexual passion that lies behind the wooing of Theseus and Hippolyta, and Palamon, Arcite, Emilia and the Jailor’s Daughter (p. 288). But its energy is not allowed to degenerate into a version of Kemp’s jigging.
By the fifth act ceremony and ritual reassert themselves, as the contest between Palamon and Arcite for Emilia takes on the form of a stylized Jacobean tourney, though here a tourney in deadly earnest. To a “flourish” of cornetts, “Enter Palamon and Arcite and their knights.” Arcite and his knights pray to Mars, falling on their faces and then kneeling. When he asks Mars for a sign “Here they fall on their faces as formerly, and there is heard clanging of armour, with a short thunder as the burst of a battle, whereupon they all rise and bow to the altar” (K4v). As they leave Palamon and his knights return and they repeat these rituals, but praying to Venus rather than Mars. When he asks for a sign: “Here music is heard. Doves are seen to flutter. They fall again upon their faces, then on their knees” (L1v). Doves were sacred to Venus; perhaps they were real doves, released behind the altar, perhaps it was an effect created by casting shadows on a screen.
They return to the conflict. Emilia enters to pray to Diana, goddess of chastity.
Still music of recorders. Enter Emilia in white, her hair about her shoulders, a wheaten wreath. One in white holding up her train, her hair stuck with flowers. One before her carrying a silver Hind, in which is conveyed incense and sweet odours, which being set upon the Altar, her maids standing aloof, she sets fire to it, then they curtsey and kneel. (L1v)
“Still” means that the recorders played throughout. As Emilia’s prayer progresses: “Here the Hind vanishes under the altar: and in the place ascends a rose tree, having one rose upon it” and shortly thereafter “Here is heard a sudden twang of instruments, and the rose falls from the tree,” symbolizing – despite her wish to remain a virgin – her imminent marriage.
The contest between Palamon and Arcite takes place offstage in the penultimate scene, which is repeatedly punctuated with cornetts, cries, shouts, and noises offstage, eventually announcing “Arcite, victory.” In the final scene Palamon is brought to the scaffold, his penalty for losing. But at the last moment he is saved by news that Arcite has been thrown from his horse, crushed and mortally wounded, thus leaving Palamon the winner of Emilia’s hand, by an inscrutable stroke of fate.
I have barely alluded here to the secondary plot of the Jailor’s Daughter, which is unremarkable in its staging, but offers as it were occasional respite from the intense stylization of the main story. The latter is perfectly attuned to the confined space of the Blackfriars auditorium, which doubtless reinforced its intensity as what I have described as the soundtrack is played out, with wooden cornetts heavily in evidence, but softer recorders at one poignant moment, repeated cries offstage, and crucially “a sudden twang of instruments” as Emilia’s rose falls. The demands on the stage are actually minimal: nothing that requires descent machinery, a discovery space or even a trapdoor, unless one was needed to effect the sudden vanishing of Emilia’s hind. The most remarkable effects are those involving the altar: the fluttering of the doves, the disappearance of the hind (which is, of course, alight), the growth of the rose tree, and the fall of the rose. All doubtless very effective in a small auditorium, as would be the “incense and sweet odours” carried in the hind.
One of the play’s most memorable pieces of staging seems to have been the one use of an upper stage: “Enter Palamon and Arcite above” (D1v); the next stage direction clarifies that they are in fact in prison, following Theseus’s victory. This is where they first catch sight of Emilia, love for whom shatters their long friendship. I call this memorable, because Jonson thought it worthy of parody in Bartholomew Fair. As M. C. Bradbrook observed: “The puppeteer shows two faithful friends Damon and Pythias falling out for love of Hero, and abusing each other … Bartholomew Fair, with its puppets leaning out of the booth, must visually have evoked the two prisoners [in The Two Noble Kinsmen] leaning out of their prison window: it testifies to the earlier show’s success, for Jonson would not waste his satire on a failure” (1976, 241). The joke for Jonson would doubtless have been all the sweeter if The Two Noble Kinsmen had been performed at court, so that the satire would be appreciated there when Bartholomew Fair led off the 1614/15 Revels season.
Court staging would in many respects have resembled that at the Blackfriars, though the surroundings would have been more lavish and the lighting brighter (see p. 2, 119). But is this a play that would have transferred comfortably to the Globe? There is nothing in it that precludes its being played there, but it is difficult to believe that the effects of the music, the smells and the miracles at the altar would be as intense on a much larger stage, in sunlight and the open air. Shakespeare and Fletcher had constructed something that would always be most comfortable and effective in small, élite auditoria.
It was now, rather than with The Tempest, that Shakespeare finally bowed out. He had mastered every kind of theatrical venue that the King’s Men would ever perform in, down to its dissolution in the Civil War. And he left them an unrivalled, time‐honored collection of plays, most of which were crafted and recrafted to suit any and all of those venues – a solid core in their repertoire and fortunes going forward. That was what the 1623 First Folio of his Comedies, Histories and Tragedies was to acknowledge when Heminge and Condell compiled it, “to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare” (Dedication to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, A2v). They were the last survivors of the 1594 company and had prospered more than any from its success. They knew that Shakespeare was a central factor in that success, not only an incomparable poet but a man who understood what worked on their stages.
It tells us everything that in the winter of 1604/5, the second of King James’s reign, when his players were called to perform at Whitehall a total of eleven times, eight of those plays were Shakespeare’s: Othello, Merry Wives, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry the Fifth, and The Merchant of Venice twice (apparently because Prince Henry missed the first performance: ES, 4: 171–2). One wonders what they had performed the previous year, the first of the reign – Hamlet? Much Ado? 1 Henry IV? As You Like It? There was a phenomenal back‐catalogue already to draw on. But, as is usually the case, that information has not survived. By the same token we do not know why Shakespeare chose to retire after The Two Noble Kinsmen. Possibly his looming fiftieth birthday was cause enough. His revels, however, had certainly now ended.
Notes
1 The “Secretary of Florence” was the personal representative of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, though he did not have full ambassadorial status. The habit of ambassadors and foreign royalty visiting playhouses gradually became more common. In 1610 Prince Frederick Lewis of Württemberg brought a large entourage to the Globe to see Othello; in 1621 the Spanish Ambassador, Count Gondomar, visited the Fortune in a major act of self‐display (Gurr, 2004b, 83–4).2 In 1609/10 the Duke of York’s (i.e. Prince Charles’) Men performed at court for the first time, and in 1611/12 they were joined by Lady (i.e. Princess) Elizabeth’s. But by then the Whitefriars (latterly Queen’s Revels) company was ailing. The total number resident in London at any one time never rose above five, was usually less, and none of the others ever again seriously rivalled the King’s Men.3 James Wright in Historia Histrionica speaks of the Blackfriars and the Globe in the 1630s as “a winter and a summer house” (B3; 1699). Roslyn Knutson has warned against taking this too literally and against the assumption that the Blackfriars was immediately the King’s Men’s primary playhouse (2002).4 It may even have been Henry Evans; such confusions of names were common enough. Evans was censured by the Court of Star Chamber in 1602 for his part in impressing the children of gentlemen to be trained as actors, an abuse of the powers associated with taking up children for the royal choirs He thereafter distanced himself from the Blackfriars management, though he retained an interest (ES, 2: 43–5).5 Troilus and Cressida did also appear with alternative front‐matter, apparently denying any public performance at all (“never staled with the stage, never clapper‐clawed with the palms of the vulgar”).6 Richard III, reprinted in quarto eight times between 1597 and 1634, was never associated with any playhouse. Nor was Hamlet, reprinted (the 1604 Q2 version) four times between 1611 and 1637. For such information see DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, created by Alan Farmer and Zachary Lesser (http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/).7 Thurles came onstage and stood, blocking the view of Essex and his lady in their box. Essex objected; Thurles ignored him. Essex attempted to push him aside and Thurles attacked him with his sword. The affair ended up in Star Chamber (Gurr, 2004b, 33–4).8 Dr Cohen is the driving force behind the third Blackfriars theatre, in Staunton, Virginia.9 On the rushes, see p. 180–1.10 The frontispiece of Francis Kirkham’s The Wits, Or Sport upon Sport (1662) shows an unnamed theatre with two candelabra hanging over its stage. They contain a total of sixteen candles. But this has no pretentions to realism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Kirkman.11 No play by Shakespeare was printed with act divisions prior to the 1623 First Folio, and even there the practice is patchy. Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear are fully divided into acts and scenes. Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, start out with a confident Actus Primus, Scena Prima – but no further divisions are marked. Hamlet marks as far as the second scene of Act 2 but then gives up. It is far from clear in most instances whether those who compiled the First Folio were attempting to mark Blackfriars practice or to emulate Ben Jonson, who consistently printed his plays in the classical manner, with act/scene divisions, most notably in the 1616 folio of his Works.12 The early modern cornet, often spelled “cornett” for distinction, was a woodwind instrument, a long conical pipe with finger holes, unrelated to the modern brass instrument.13 Pinning the precise number of sharers at any one time is not easy. Fifteen members of the King’s Men were granted black livery for the funeral of James I in March 1625; but only twelve are listed that June in the licence granted to the company by the new king, Charles. Moreover, the oldest of them, John Heminge and Henry Condell, were no longer playing by this date, though they appear on both lists. There were perhaps ten performing sharers at this date.14 In 1628 John Heminge had Byland and Henry Wilson arrested, describing both as “fidlers” (Cutts, 102). Notice that Byland, a member of the Drapers’ Company, was able to take on apprentice players, even though he was not a sharer in the acting company.15 The reference here is to Simon Forman’s Book of Plays, a manuscript that details four trips he made to the playhouse. The date and venue for Cymbeline are not explicit. But the other three plays – in addition to The Winter’s Tale he saw Macbeth and an otherwise unknown play about Richard II – were all at the Globe, and all in 1610/11 (Rowse, 1974, 308–11).16 Wells and Taylor say of this passage in Cymbeline that it “suggest[s] that as Shakespeare wrote he may have had in mind the audience and the stage equipment of the Blackfriars theatre … and stylistic evidence places the play about 1610–11” (1986, 1131).17 Among the items Henslowe bought for the Admiral’s Men was “a robe for to go invisible,” evidently a familiar convention, like the impenetrability of disguises in general (Henslowe, 325).18 Cited from Middleton, 2007 f. The same edition contains a version of Macbeth by Gary Taylor, with speculative reconstructions of Middleton’s work on/additions to the text (2007d).19 There is in fact one other possibility about the longest texts in the Shakespeare canon, including ones like Cymbelinewith spectacular effects. That is that they were versions prepared for court, where there were resources to stage virtually anything the players required. I explore this possibility in Dutton, 2016.20 I have already speculated that The Alchemist was first performed at court in the Revels season of 1610/11 and, if suspicions that Shakespeare responded directly to it are correct, The Tempest might have been too; see p. 310.21 Most of these appear only in the 1623 First Folio: Antony and Cleopatra, Coliolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII. Pericles (1609) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) each appeared in a single quarto. Cardenio has not survived at all.22 John Russell Brown suspects that Tooley’s allocation to Forobosco is a mistake for Malateste; he discusses all the castings and apparent errors in the text in Webster, 2009, 47–51.23 I am citing from the original 1634 quarto text because modern editors have a habit of tinkering with the stage directions to flesh out what they believe is going on.