Abstract
Evidence for repertory scheduling exists in diverse forms. Chapter 4 explores several examples of company and inter-company practices. Drawing on Henslowe’s records it shows how the Tamburlaine plays and spin-off and substitute plays were scheduled at the Rose; it then examines the cluster of Turk plays that straddled the end of the old century and the beginning of the new, as several new playhouses opened, thus altering the playhouse landscape. Key to the repertory system was the relationship between old and new plays: the longest-lasting companies, the Admiral’s/Prince’s Men and Chamberlain’s/King’s Men were crucial to the fortunes of the Turk play, and the revival of older plays from the 1580s and 1590s undoubtedly played a significant role. Repertory studies tend to be company focused; the chapter concludes with a discussion of how reading the data geographically adds to our understanding of the success of the Turk play.
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Notes
- 1.
See Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘Shakespeare’s Repertory’, in David Scott Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 346–361.
- 2.
See especially Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Peter Blayney’s analysis of the printing of drama divides the era into three periods and finds that 96 titles were printed between 1583 and 1602, rising to 115 for 1603–1622 and 160 between 1623 and 1642; see his ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in David Scott Kastan and John D. Cox, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 383–422, 384.
- 3.
It is all too easy to think of Marlowe’s as an ‘outdoor play’, simply because the first record we have of it is at the Rose; in all probability it was staged indoors, too, long before the 1630s.
- 4.
It is entirely possible of course that Marlowe presented a script unsolicited. We know nothing of the circumstances of Marlowe’s earliest involvement with the theatre.
- 5.
Anthony B. Dawson, ed., Tamburlaine: Parts One and Two (London: A & C Black, 1997). The phrase ‘our poet’ is probably conventional, and need not indicate a firm company affiliation for Marlowe; but equally it may do so, by the time of the publication of the octavo in 1590, though the title-page does not identify a company.
- 6.
Alternatively it has been argued that Thomas Kyd ought to share credit for the concept of the two-part play—in his case for the idea of a prequel; see Lukas Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 37–42.
- 7.
All of the octavos acknowledge that the play belonged to the Admiral’s Men; none of the title-pages identifies the playwright, but this was by no means unusual.
- 8.
See Peter Berek, ‘Locrine Revised, Selimus, and Early Responses to Tamburlaine’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama XXIII (1980), 33–54 and ‘Tamburlaine’s Weak Sons: Imitation as Interpretation Before 1593’, Renaissance Drama n.s. XIII (1982), 55–82; and Richard Levin, ‘The Contemporary Perception of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England I (1984), 51–70.
- 9.
The authorship of Selimus is not certain but Greene is the most likely candidate; see Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 17–18. All references to Selimus are to this edition.
- 10.
Ibid., 18.
- 11.
See Levin, ‘The Contemporary Perception of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, and Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 67–93.
- 12.
See Roy Battenhouse, ‘Protestant Apologetics and the Subplot of 2 Tamburlaine’, English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973), 30–43.
- 13.
Arnold Davenport, ed., The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter and Norwich (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 14–15; cited in Levin, ‘The Contemporary Reception of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, 53, italics original; Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience, 89.
- 14.
Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 49.
- 15.
See Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 139–143.
- 16.
Ben Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (London, 1640–1641), 587; quoted in Roslyn L. Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 55.
- 17.
Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company 1594–1613, 33.
- 18.
Roslyn L. Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 173n, speculates that the Tamburlaine plays may have been revived at the turn of the century.
- 19.
R.A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18.
- 20.
In Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays, 138–139, Manley and MacLean argue that this is a matter of Henslowe’s designation, that the 28 April 1592 entry may indicate that both parts of the play were performed on that day.
- 21.
Any discussion of the octavo text of 1590 must take into account the address by Richard Jones, which states that the play has been effectively censored by the printer. But this notwithstanding, the printed octavo presented the plays as a two-part narrative.
- 22.
See Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 52–123.
- 23.
Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 32. As she acknowledges, however, ‘one exception is the treatment of serials’.
- 24.
It is significant that neither Knutson nor Gurr identifies the Turk play as being particularly important to or prominent in the Admiral’s Men’s repertory.
- 25.
Henslowe’s use of the old-style calendar has been left uncorrected. For the sequences in full, see Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 23–33.
- 26.
Original correction in the Diary.
- 27.
Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613, 51.
- 28.
On this aspect of playhouse culture see Tiffany Stern, ‘“On each Wall / and Corner Poast”: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London’, English Literary Renaissance 36:1 (2006), 57–89, and the Conclusion to this study.
- 29.
Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 27.
- 30.
Omitted from this calculation is a second ‘ne’ for ‘elexander & lodwecke’, marked ‘ne’ on 14 January 1597 and again on 11 February; see Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 56.
- 31.
See Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, 52–123.
- 32.
Knutson, ‘The Repertory’, in Cox and Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama, 461–80; 468.
- 33.
Manley and MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays, 139.
- 34.
Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 36–37, 47–48.
- 35.
Scholars appear not to have resolved this confusion. Both Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 47–48, and Carol Chillington Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse rev. edn. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 100, give duplicated sequences for early July without comment. Henslowe provides entries for 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8 July (21v) and then for 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9, concluding on 18 July. It seems most unlikely the sequel was staged on 8 July, however, since ‘1 Tambercame’ does not precede it.
- 36.
Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse, 104.
- 37.
Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 54.
- 38.
Manley and MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays, 141; italic original.
- 39.
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 319, 328.
- 40.
See Knutson, ‘Shakespeare’s Repertory’.
- 41.
Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘Elizabethan Documents, Captivity Narratives, and the Market for Foreign History Plays’, English Literary Renaissance 26:1 (1996), 75–110; 96. Strange’s performance of Peele’s play is dependent on Henslowe’s ‘Muly Molocco’ being accepted as designating The Battle of Alcazar, as the play’s most recent editor, Charles Edelman argues and this study follows. See Edelman, ed., The Stukeley Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 24.
- 42.
If Soliman and Perseda had come into the Chamberlain’s hands in 1594, as has been speculated, then this would add another element to this cross-repertorial cluster, perhaps one which replayed a similar scenario from several years earlier, which might recur in 1605 with The First Part of Jeronimo; see Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 59, 67, 91.
- 43.
See David McInnis, ‘Marlowe’s Influence and “The True History of George Scanderbeg”’, Marlowe Studies 2 (2012), 71–85; Misha Teramura, ‘The Admiral’s Vayvode of 1598’, Early Theatre 18:1 (2015), 79–100; and Matthew Steggle, Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England: Ten Case Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 89–103.
- 44.
See also Roslyn Knutson’s entry for this play on www.lostplays.org.
- 45.
Steggle, Digital humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England, 101.
- 46.
Ibid.; Steggle cites T.W. Baldwin, Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), 248, for this possibility.
- 47.
Andrew Gurr, ‘A Black Reversal’, Shakespeare 4 (2008), 148–156.
- 48.
Tiffany Stern, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, 53; Stern cites Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 60.
- 49.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Appendix 5, 289–301, and Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Appendix 1, 201–273.
- 50.
Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, 182.
- 51.
And indeed the third, the Hope, which Henslowe built in 1614. However, this was a markedly less successful enterprise largely due it seems to the incompatibility of its intended dual roles, as both a playhouse and an animal-baiting arena. Nonetheless, it apparently was in use until 1642.
- 52.
Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, 197.
- 53.
John Astington, English Court Theatre 1558–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246–247.
- 54.
Knutson, ‘Shakespeare’s Repertory’, 348.
- 55.
See Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 56.
That the Turk play was certainly not an ‘outdoor’ play can be seen in the titles staged indoors; see Susan Dustagheer, ‘Appendix: List of Plays Performed at Indoor Playhouses, 1575–1642’, in Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds., Moving Shakespeare Indoors. Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 252–259.
- 57.
This is not to suggest that the King’s Men scheduled the same plays at their two playhouses; in all likelihood they did not. On the Tempest, for example, as being designed for the indoor playhouse, see Andrew Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989), 91–101. See also Gurr and Karim-Cooper, eds., Moving Shakespeare Indoors.
- 58.
Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 16.
- 59.
On Marlowe’s popularity in this period, see Lucy Munro, ‘Marlowe on the Caroline Stage’, Shakespeare Bulletin 27:1 (2009), 39–50.
- 60.
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 432–433. Gurr omits the last of these plays.
- 61.
The term is Andrew Gurr’s; see his Shakespearian Playing Companies, Chapter 5. For a recent debate on the significance of 1594 for theatre history, see the essays in a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly 61:4 (2010): Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘What’s So Special about 1594?’, 449–467; Andrew Gurr, ‘Venues on the Verges: London’s Theater Government, 1594–1614’, 468–489; Holger Schott Syme, ‘The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594 and its Aftermath’, 490–425; Leslie Thomson, ‘Staging on the Road: 1586–1594: A New Look at Some Old Assumptions’, 526–550; and Bart van Es, ‘Johannes fac Totum?: Shakespeare’s First Contact with the Acting Companies’, 551–577.
- 62.
Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans, 3.
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Hutchings, M. (2017). The Turk Play and Repertory Modelling. In: Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46263-3_4
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