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Copyright by Matthew Bran Davies The Dissertation Committee for Matthew Bran Davies certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The 2nd Earl of Essex and the History Players: the Factional Writing of John Hayward, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and George Chapman. Committee: ____________________________________ Frank Whigham, Supervisor ____________________________________ James Loehlin ____________________________________ J.K. Barret ____________________________________ Alan Friedman ____________________________________ Brian Levack The 2nd Earl of Essex and the History Players: the Factional Writing of John Hayward, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and George Chapman By Matthew Bran Davies, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2012 To my mother, For her impeccable timing The 2nd Earl of Essex and the History Players: the Factional Writing of John Hayward, William Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and George Chapman Matthew Bran Davies, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: Frank Whigham Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s last favorite and the last man she executed for treason, has been harshly treated by posterity. Given his leading role at court in what Patrick Collinson calls the “nasty nineties,” Essex has taken much of the blame for the divisive factional politics of Elizabeth’s final decade. However, leading recent efforts to salvage Essex’s reputation, historian Paul Hammer has uncovered a sophisticated bureaucracy operated by highly educated scholars and led by an intelligent, cultivated statesman. A considerable number of high-profile literary figures, moreover, willingly engaged with this ambitiously expanding Essex faction. This thesis proposes that evidence of interference by the censor and the Privy Council, sensitive to a politicized historiography promoting the Earl’s interests chiefly on London’s stages, discloses the presence of a loose, autonomous federation of authors associated with the Essex and post-Essex factions between 1590 and 1610. v This thesis considers the suspected works of an eclectic group of writers bonded by their ideological affiliations with Essex’s “radical moderatism”: civil lawyer John Hayward’s prose history of The Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII (1599); William Shakespeare’s second “tetralogy” (1595-99) dealing with the same historical period; Samuel Daniel’s closet drama of the downfall of the Greek general Philotas (1605); and innovative playwright George Chapman’s double tragedy set in France, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608). I situate these authors within the intellectual and public relations wing of the Essex circle in order to consider how they made contact with the center and with each other, and where they resided within the broader operation of the faction; what they offered and what they expected in return; how they shaped political thinking and how their dramaturgy developed as a consequence; whether they were attracted by the purse or the person; and to what extent they were artistically or ideologically motivated. In considering, finally, whether these writers worked in collaboration or alone, on message or off-the-cuff, as propagandists or political commentators, I illuminate the critically neglected role of the factional writer in early modern England. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 “A Lively Patterne of Things to Come”: John Hayward’s Dramatic Historiography 40 Chapter 2 “This is miching malicho; it means mischief”: Shakespeare and the Politics of Oblique Allusion 100 Chapter 3 Samuel Daniel and the Eloquence of Silence 169 Chapter 4 “Brave relics of a complete man”: George Chapman and the post-Essex Faction 230 Conclusion 305 Bibliography 318 Vita 361 vii Introduction In the popular imagination, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566-1601), resembles Errol Flynn, the dashing, headstrong, high-spirited, and reckless young aristocrat who, in the Michael Curtiz film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (Warner Brothers, 1939), loses his head for exploiting the romantic delusions of a grotesquely aging Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth. Until surprisingly recently, historians tended to endorse this Technicolor caricature, labeling Essex a schoolboy, a butterfly, a rotten apple,1 above all, a “favorite,” with all the unmerited and temporary preferment that loaded term implies. Given his lead role in what Patrick Collinson calls the “nasty nineties,”2 Essex, playing the debonair yet somewhat hysterical juvenile to Walter Raleigh’s sturdy leading man and Secretary Robert Cecil’s brilliantly scheming character actor, takes much of the blame for the divisive factional politics of Elizabeth’s final decade. A close intimate of Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton, and known for his fondness for the playhouses and the tiltyard, Essex has been tarred with the theatrical brush: a “playboy of the western world.”3 1 DNB V, p.89, cited in Hammer, Polarization of Elizabethan Politics (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 4; M.M. Reese, The Royal Office of Master of the Horse (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1976), 164; L.B. Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London: Random House, 2006), 191. 2 Patrick Collinson, "Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism" in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), 150. 3 J.B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth: 1558-1603 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1949), iii. A Victorian historian, Black was one of the first to reconsider Essex’s poor reputation. 1 Although historian Paul E.J. Hammer credits various crusaders with beginning the process of salvaging Essex’s reputation, he concedes that such efforts have been “piecemeal”4 and, building upon a considerable body of research and writing since the early 1990s, Hammer himself must take credit for shaping our evolving conception of Essex as a major late Elizabethan statesman, whose ideas and ideologies helped frame the early modern political landscape, and whose strikingly sophisticated bureaucracy is prototypical of the media-savvy, information-gathering party machines of modern politics. In his magisterial, if partial, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585-97 (1999), Hammer complains that “modern historiography has largely squeezed ideas and ideology out of the grand narrative of Elizabethan politics, boiling conflict down to matters of personality and rivalry over patronage.” Moreover, in spite of the “creative outpourings of politically aware writers such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Sidney,” he notes, “literary works have long been consigned to the margins of ‘history’ as ornaments, rather than serious expressions of political ideas.”5 Judging by the censorious attentions visited upon a number of authors suspected of promoting Essex’s ambitions and dissonant energies, both during the tempestuous last years of his career and in the decade following his execution in 1601, Hammer has a point. The four most prominent instances of government intrusion form the basis of this thesis. Three of these cases resulted in trials or interrogation. For writing The Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII (1599), a short, politic prose history with an offending dedication to 4 Hammer, Polarization of Elizabethan Politics 7. 5 Hammer, Polarization of Elizabethan Politics xi-xii. 2 Essex, civil lawyer John Hayward endured two interrogations and three years imprisonment in the Tower of London. The remounting of Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Globe the afternoon before Essex’s failed uprising of February 8 1601 -- which might or might not have staged the textually censored deposition of the King by Essex forebear, Henry Bolingbroke -- caused an actor from the Chamberlain’s Men to be brought before the Star Chamber to defend his company against treason charges. In 1605, four years after Essex’s death, Samuel Daniel, coterie poet and occasional closet dramatist, was hauled before the Privy Council for allegedly fashioning parallels between the political show trials of Philotas, Greek general to Alexander the Great, and Essex, Elizabeth’s former Knight Marshall. Three years later, George Chapman, innovative dramatist and Homeric translator, escaped interrogation and imprisonment only because he fled to Scotland, leaving three of his boy actors to carry the can: his double tragedy, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), which seemingly fused Essex, his French counterpart, Byron, and the furious Achilles into an amalgam of rebellious energies, got the Children of the Chapel evicted from their Blackfriars Playhouse and all playing in London suspended for three months. Although these authors avoided physical punishment, all of their offending texts, and/or those closely associated with them, suffered material expurgation, leaving their “poore dismembered poems” in various states of deformity. Other associates of Essex, who are only tangentially considered in this study, took evasive action in order to prevent arrest. Edmund Spenser’s A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, which championed Essex as Lord Deputy of Ireland, was written in 1598 but 3 went unpublished until 1633, three decades after the author’s death.6 In