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Early Modern Theatre People and Their Social Networks Paul Brown

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Early Modern Theatre People and Their Social Networks Paul Brown Early Modern Theatre People and Their Social Networks Paul Brown Presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy De Montfort University January 2017 i Table of Contents Table of Figures .............................................................................................................. iii Abstract............................................................................................................................ iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... vi Note on Referencing ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 The Social Network .................................................................................................. 1 The Scope and Structure of the Thesis ..................................................................... 6 The Social Network in the Early Modern Theatre and the Case for Biography .... 12 Chapter One: The Intersection of Personal and Professional Lives in Drama, Evidence and Interpretation ..................................................................................................................... 19 What constitutes evidence? .................................................................................... 25 Non-theatrical Evidence ......................................................................................... 26 Theatrical Evidence ................................................................................................ 39 The Nature of Evidence .......................................................................................... 48 Chapter 2. The 1590s: The Social Networks of the 1594 Duopoly and Beyond ........... 53 The 1594 Duopoly .................................................................................................. 56 Rivalry in the Early Modern Theatre...................................................................... 68 Case Study: Richard Bradshaw .............................................................................. 81 Case Study: Anthony Munday................................................................................ 91 Chapter Three. The 1600s: The Re-emergence of the Boy Companies into a Competitive Marketplace ....................................................................................................... 102 The Boy Companies ............................................................................................. 104 The War of the Theatres ....................................................................................... 115 Shakespeare and the War of the Theatres............................................................. 136 Case Study: Nathan Field ..................................................................................... 145 Chapter Four. The Mechanics of Dramatic Collaboration ........................................... 158 Shakespeare and Collaborative Authorship.......................................................... 164 Collaboration by the Numbers.............................................................................. 170 Why did Playwrights Collaborate? ....................................................................... 185 Collaboration: Division of Labour ....................................................................... 200 Case Study: William Rowley ............................................................................... 210 Conclusion: The Impact of Social Networks on Drama ............................................... 223 Case Study: Will Kemp ........................................................................................ 226 Case Study: Joseph Taylor ................................................................................... 232 Appendix 1: Histriomastix Doubling Options .............................................................. 241 ii Appendix 2: Amended Attributions ............................................................................. 244 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 245 iii Table of Figures Table 4.1 Rates of Collaborative Authorship ........................................................................ 175 Table 4.2 Collaborative Plays by Data Source ...................................................................... 177 Table 4.3 Collaborative Drama by Company ........................................................................ 180 Table 4.4 Number of Collaborators Involved in Collaborative Plays ................................... 203 iv Abstract This thesis contributes new knowledge to an understanding of how people's social networks in the early modern theatre shaped the drama they created. By studying the lives of people working in the theatre, attending to biographical details not hitherto fully considered, it recasts received narratives of theatre history. Where theatre historians often tell stories of competition and combat, it finds evidence too for considerable amity across webs of relationships that are here called 'social networks'. This thesis offers new biographical facts about life events for the actor Richard Bradshaw and the actor-writer William Rowley. In addition, it endeavours to change the way historians think about collaborative playwriting in the period. Based on quantitative analysis, this thesis shows the rates of collaboration to be about half the rate of heretofore accepted estimates. Chapter One considers in detail the narratives that historians construct about the early modern theatre and the problems associated with them. It reviews the various classes of evidence used in later chapters and the uses to which such evidence can reasonably be put. Chapter Two explores an industry in expansion in the 1590s, re-examining the well-known duopoly narrative and reconsidering the various professional pursuits and diverse residences of actors and playwrights in the period. Chapter Three looks at the following decade, the 1600s, and the re-emergence of troupes of boy actors into an expanding and stabilising industry. Chapter Four shows how collaborative writing, though prevalent, was not as frequent as is usually thought; it also shows stark differences in rates of staging collaborative drama between companies. v Each chapter closes with a biographical case study of a theatre person whose life is considered in terms of their social network. An examination of such networks is then used to reshape the way we understand events in their life and broader currents that involve the entire early modern theatre industry. Thinking about who interacted with whom and why adds a new layer of complexity to our collective model of how this entertainment industry produced the period's extraordinary proliferation of highly valued plays. vi Acknowledgements Gabriel Egan is a force of nature. He is brilliant and generous and he has an energy that is as infectious as it is unrelenting. I have shamelessly exploited these traits while under his supervision and have accrued a debt that I cannot easily repay. I have learnt more from him than this thesis can show. Throughout my time at De Montfort my second supervisor, Deborah Cartmell, has been ceaselessly attentive and helpful in all things scholarly. I owe her special thanks for watching over me professionally in recent months. I am grateful to De Montfort University and its English Department's Centre for Textual Studies for funding my doctoral work. The CTS has been an enjoyable and stimulating place to study for the last three years. vii Note on Referencing Early modern quotations from literary works are taken from the earliest printed edition unless otherwise stated (as with the discussion of Hamlet's early versions in Chapter Three). Quotations of this sort have not been modernised other than the use of modern 's' for early modern long 's'. Quotations from surviving historical documents are similarly unmodernised. On first mention, every early modern play title is followed by the date of its first performance in brackets, thus: Love's Labour's Lost (1594-1595) or The Case is Altered (1597). For plays by Shakespeare, dates or date spans are taken from the Second Edition of the Oxford Complete Works (2005). For extant works not by Shakespeare dates are taken from Zachary Lesser and Alan B. Farmer's Database of Early English Playbooks (2007). For lost plays, dates are taken from the Lost Plays Database maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Matthew Steggle and David McInnis (2016). If another scholar's dates are contingent on the argument being presented (as in James P. Bednarz' version of the War of the Theatres in Chapter Three), then plays are presented with the dates of first production in brackets as assumed by those scholars. Where necessary, dates have been silently adjusted to recognize the New Year on 1 January. Numbers in play titles are given in Arabic numerals; where a play has more than one part its part number is also given in Arabic numerals. For example: 1 Henry 6 and 2 Sir John Oldcastle. References to all other sources are by parenthetical author-date-page citation, in which the date is that of the source's publication, and they are keyed to the single Works Cited list at the end of the thesis. In
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