Abstract
Two folios (7r–8v) of the diary of Philip Henslowe document the activities of Lord Strange’s Men during the first known long-term residence by any company at a London theater: an extended run at the Rose from February 19–June 22, 1592, during which the company offered 105 performances of 24–6 different plays (the number depends on how the titles of plays listed by Henslowe are interpreted) and a shorter series of 29 performances at the Rose between December 29, 1592 and February 1, 1592/93, when the company continued their existing repertory while mounting another two new plays.1 Apart from the performances of the Lord Admiral’s Men recorded by Henslowe during periods of 1594–97, there is no fuller record of the daily repertory of an early modern acting company than Henslowe’s account for Strange’s Men in 1592–93. His account provides a remarkable opportunity for reconstructing and “reading” repertory, the collective body of work representing the ambitions and style of the company.
“Much vertue in if”
(As You Like It)
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Notes
Dulwich College Archive (hereafter DCA): MS 7, ff. 7r-8v; transcriptions from the diary in this article are those of Sally-Beth MacLean, from Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), Appendix A.
See, for example, Paul Vincent, “Structuring and Revision in 1 Henry VI,” Philological Quarterly 84 (2005): 377–402.
William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), xxxiii.
Lukas Erne, “‘Enter the Ghost of Andrea’: Recovering Thomas Kyd’s Two-Part Play,” English Literary Renaissance 30 (2000): 339–72.
For the view that the manuscript is not a forgery, see David Fuller and Edward J. Esche, eds., The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe Volume V: Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2, and The Massacre at Paris with the Dear of the Duke of Guise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 296;
Arthur Freeman and Janet Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 2.1076; and Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1.2, 325. R. Carter Hailey based on examination of the paper of the leaf, suggests that the scene, if authentic, “was probably an insertion produced subsequent to the author’s initial draft” and could therefore “represent an addition for a revival” (“The Publication Date of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, with a Note on the Collier Leaf, ” Marlowe Studies: An Annual 1 [2011] : 35). Hailey also reopens the possibility of forgery by John Payne Collier on the grounds that Folger MS. X.d.59 (13), containing Marlowe’s translation of an elegy from Ovid’s Amores and, like the Massacre leaf, also once in the possession of Collier, is written on paper with the same watermark.
The latter identification is supported by Scott McMillin, “The Ownership of the Jew of Malta, Friar Bacon, and The Ranger’s Comedy,” English Language Notes 9 (1972): 251.
Arguments for connecting “mvlomvrco” with The Battle of Alacazar include David Bradley Prom Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 139;
Martin Wiggins, “Things That Go Bump in the Text: Captain Thomas Stukeley” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 98 (2004): 5–20; and
Charles Edelman, ed., The Stukeley Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 34–48.
The exact number of these lost plays is 16, 17, or 18 according to whether “Q Ierusallem’V’Ierusalem” and “the second pjarjte of tamber came”/“tambercame” are judged to be one play or two; see Roslyn Lander Knutson, “Henslowe’s Naming of Parts: Entries in the Diary lor Tamar Cham, 1592–3 and Godfrey of Bulloigne, 1594–5,” Notes and Queries 30 (1983): 157–60.
J. A. Giles, trans., Matthew Paris’s English History, 3 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852–54), 3: 339.
Ciarán Carson, trans., The Inferno (New York: Granta, 2002), 82; Henry’s heart was buried in Westminster Abbey near the tomb of Edward the Confessor.
William H. Sherman, “Travel and Trade,” and Roslyn Lander Knutson, “Playing Companies and Repertory,” both in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 109, 185.
See R. Crompton Rhodes, “Titus and Vespasian,” TLS, 1161 (April 17, 1924): 240. Among those who have suggested “tittus & vespacia” is connected with Titus Andronicus are E. K. Chambers, who conjectured it was “probably the play on which was based Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus”; (The Elizabethan Stage, 2.122), and Harold D. Fuller, who argued that “tituus & vespacia” was the lost source for the Dutch version of Titus Andronicus, Jan Vos’s Aran et Titus (1641), “The Sources of Titus Andronicus,” PMLA 16 (1901): 12–16). Besides Rhodes, early advocates lor the view that “tittus & vespacia”; was a siege of Jerusalem play include W.W. Greg, who found it “difficult to believe that the title could have been given to any play not connected with the siege of Jerusalem,” Henslowe’s Diary, 2 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1908), 2.155;
Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”: The First Quarto, 1594 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 10; and
Paul E. Bennett, “An Apparent Allusion to Titus Andronicus,” Notes and Queries 200 (1955): 422–4.
Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (1662), sig. Mmm3v. Fuller is quoted and “tittus & vespacia” is connected with Solymitana Clades by Dana F. Sutton in The Complete Plays: Thomas Legge, 2 vols. (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). Sutton does not discuss Morwen, Nashe, or Heminges.
See Joseph Quincy Adams, ed., Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623–1673 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 34.
See Legge, 11 4682–4700; Nashe, Christes Teares ouer Ierusalem, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1904–10), 2.64;
Heminges, The Jewes Tragedy 3.6.57–66, ed. Carol A. Morley The Plays and Poems of William Heminge (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006).
“Tittus & vespacia” may also have been indebted to the Coventry civic performances of “The Destruction of Ierusalem, ” a play commissioned in 1584 from John Smith (1563–1616), then a student at St John’s College, Oxford, performed that year and probably revived in 1591. See Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. R. W. Ingram (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 303–9, 332, 587; and Ingram, “Fifteen seventy-nine and the Decline of Civic Religious Drama,” The Elizabethan Theatre VIII (1982): 114–28.
For the possibility that the “Q Ierusallem’V’Ierusalem” of Lord Strange’s may be connected with the “nabucadonizer” that, according to Henslowe, debuted by the Admiral’s Men in 1596 and with a newly discovered manuscript play, The Destruction of Hierusalem (circa 1630s), see Grace Ioppolo, “The Clitherow Manuscript of the Destruction of Hierusalem,” English Manuscript Studies 18 (2013): 55–67. If “Q Ierusallem”/“Ierusalem” was indeed a Nebuchadnezzar play, then Lord Strange’s Men would (uniquely) have possessed separate plays on the destruction of both temples in Jerusalem. For an alternative identification of “Q Ierusallem”/“Ierusalem” as a Godfrey of Bulloigne play, see
Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue. Volume III 1590–1597 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 892.
On these traditions, see Stephen K. Wright, The Vengeance of Our Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989) ch. 6.
Heywood’s reference is noted in David McInnis, Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 71.
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© 2014 Lawrence Manley
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Manley, L. (2014). Lost Plays and the Repertory of Lord Strange’s Men. In: McInnis, D., Steggle, M. (eds) Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403971_10
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