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Download Download Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player- Playwright-Poet in Early Modern theatre ANTHONY ARCHDEACON Abstract: This paper focusses on a particular moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century which has been considered to be transitional in terms of how the profession of playwright was perceived. It explores the complex authorial identities of playwrights who were also simultaneously poets and stage actors, roles which both in different ways created tensions with the role of playwright. Via an examination of the stage figure of Nobody which became popular at this time on the London stage, this paper suggests that filling the multiple roles of poet, playwright and player often led to a conflicted relationship with the idea of authorship. Metadramatic readings of the anonymous 1606 playbook Nobody and Somebody appear to support this suggestion, and to indicate that the figure of Nobody could be emblematic of the tensions and conflicts experienced by the player-playwright-poet at this time. Contributor Biography: Anthony Archdeacon is an Assistant Professor teaching English for Academic Purposes at Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates. After spending some years working on curriculum and assessment in the UK, he has recently returned to his research specialism of early modern poetry and drama. He is particularly interested in the transition from the medieval period to the renaissance, in literature and ideas. Figure 1. Woodcut of Nobody from title page of Nobody and Somebody Archdeacon, Anthony. “Somebody and Nobody: the Authorial Identity of the Player-Playwright-Poet in Early Modern theatre.” Authorship 5.2 (2016): http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/aj.v5i2.3879 Copyright Anthony Archdeacon. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Archdeacon 2 When John Trundle printed the play Nobody and Somebody in 1606, we know that his shop in the Barbican had “the signe of No-body” hanging outside it. Though he had been at the shop since at least 1603, prior to 1606 it had been identified on publications as “in the Barbican, neere Long Lane end.” It is reasonable to assume, then, that the sign of Nobody, which remained until at least 1620, owed this distinctive shop branding to the 1606 playbook. The character of Nobody in the play had used a visual joke of being all legs / breeches, as illustrated in a woodcut image at the front of the playbook (see Figure 1). It seems most likely that a larger version of the book illustration image was adorning Trundle’s shop for the next fourteen years.1 Why Trundle thought this an apt sign for his shop is not certain—a jokey allusion to the status of appearing in print, perhaps, or a reference to the anonymity of the ballads and pamphlets which were his staple as a printer. The Nobody character of the play was a likeable, beneficent character, which was perhaps sufficient reason to use it. Trundle himself was not a nobody in the printing world, having a successful career throughout the reign of James I, and his name was probably more familiar to Londoners than many of the authors whose works he published.2 There was an allusion to him in the folio version of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour (1616), and he appeared to have been in Jonson’s mind in The New Inn (1629), when he gave the name of Trundle to a coachman who appears (Act 2, Scene 3) just after a joke about Nobody. If Trundle’s Nobody sign alluded to the people whose works he printed and sold, then the joke certainly worked well for playwrights, who at this time were typically less visible than the actors who performed in their plays. Nobody and Somebody itself demonstrated this: there was no mention of the author on the printed playbook, and despite its evident popularity both in London and later in Germany, there has never been any definite attribution. In contrast, the actors who played the popular comic role of Nobody were likely to have been well known: we know that John Green, for example, made the role his own and toured Europe with it.3 Richard Helgerson (1979) claimed of the late Elizabethan period that “in the theatre the professional dramatist was visible, if at all, only as an actor. And when, on rare occasions, his work got into print, it was likely to be anonymous” (205-6). Yet Helgerson (1992) would also suggest, as we will see below, that the Jacobean theatre saw the rise of authorial control and the decline of player-power, in which case Nobody and Somebody came at a transitional point. This essay will argue that the author or authors of this play used its plot to explore metadramatically the changing power-relations within the theatre. These changes were not simply explained in terms of authors becoming somebodies, whilst players became nobodies. The attitudes of playwrights towards authorship were complex and sometimes ambivalent, and the cultural shift was gradual, so to understand the metadramatic implications of the play we first need to look at how playwrights and players saw themselves, and how others saw them, in this period. The playwright nobody 1 Broadsheet pamphlets had featured a differently styled, impish Nobody character repeatedly during the sixteenth century: see Calmann. It seems unlikely, however, that the sign would have been based upon these more elaborately drawn figures. 2 Trundle is probably best known to modern readers for his role in printing the “bad” quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 3 When the company took the play on the road to the court in Graz, Germany, John Green gave as a gift to their host, the younger brother of the Archduke Ferdinand, a picture of himself dressed as Nobody, which suggests something of the status he had achieved. See Kramer, 85-95. Archdeacon 3 Marcy North has warned (1994, 2003) against simplistic assumptions about anonymity in the early modern period, and in particular the idea that the age of print brought a sudden shift from self-effacing medieval attitudes towards authorship to a more self-assertive individualism.4 As her research shows, there were still plenty of reasons for publishing anonymously, whether strategic or playful. With regard to playbooks, which were not a particular focus of North’s work, their anonymous publication is a particularly complex topic, involving multiple interlocking issues. These issues include the status of plays written for the new public theatres, the status of plays compared to poetry, the market for playbooks, the ownership of plays, the conventions of publishing and patronage, and even the fear of causing offence, especially to the authorities. The issue of social status related to the broader audience catered for by the public theatres, which had expanded rapidly in the decades after the opening of the first two purpose-built playhouses, the Theatre (1576) and the Curtain (1577). Having areas for a standing audience, these had much larger capacity than the all-seater private theatres situated within the walls of the City of London, and most importantly this meant they were much more affordable to the ordinary people. However, despite the expanded audiences in the 1580s, the few plays to reach print were usually royal entertainments or high-brow material such as translations of classical works, which had been performed in the private theatres. There was still no obvious readership for public theatre playbooks—in fact Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1584), which had been played by Leicester’s Men at the Theatre to the North-East of the City, seems to have been the only such play to get into print in this decade.5 The increasing popularity of public playhouses expanded the potential readership of playbooks but, these plays being more populist, they were correspondingly less exclusive. As a result, it seems that writers saw their identities as poets and as playwrights quite differently, and sometimes expressed embarrassment at the publication of their plays. A number of writers have explored this phenomenon in recent years, often describing it in terms of the valorisation of literariness over performance.6 Marston’s address to the reader prefacing The Malcontent (1604) bemoaning how “scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcibly published to be read” is a locus classicus. David Bergeron has observed how John Marston was seemingly torn between a belief that “comedies are writ to be spoken, not read” (97) and the imperative to publish. In the end, Marston would embrace authorship and publish, like Jonson, his own collected Works in 1633, shortly before his death. Thomas Heywood, like Marston a writer for the Red Bull (North-West of the City walls) and also a possible author of No-body and Some-body, seems to have had similar struggles with his authorial identity as a playwright.7 Benedict Scott Robinson has related how Heywood in the early years of his career “consistently articulated his commitment to performance over print” (365) but later became obsessed with a folio publication of his works. Robinson saw this as Heywood’s response to the “literary anti-theatricalism” (364) of the early Stuart period, though Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612) seemed to be responding to broader attacks on a theatrical profession which to Puritan detractors was the work of the Devil. Admittedly, Heywood emphasises the classical heritage of the theatre, but 4 See also the collection of essays edited by Starner and Traister (2011), which continue the exploration of anonymity in the period.
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