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A Lost Jacobean Tragedy: Henry the Una (C 1619)

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A Lost Jacobean Tragedy: Henry the Una (C 1619) Early Theatre 13.1 (2010) Matthew Steggle A Lost Jacobean Tragedy: Henry the Una (c 1619) This article concerns a lost play whose title is partially preserved in ‘List D’ of British Library: Cotton MS. Tiberius E.X. Connecting together existing scholarly work on other plays on the list, and combining this with evidence from the computer database EEBO-TCP, the essay proposes a new complete title for the play; discusses its possible sources in Spanish history; and addresses anew questions of its date, company provenance, and even authorship. Fig. 1. The manuscript fragment (f 247). © British Library Board (Cotton MS. Tiberius. E.X.). The Play-list British Library: Cotton MS. Tiberius E.X. is a manuscript of Sir George Buc’s History of Richard III. The History is written on the recto of each sheet and, on some of the verso sides, there are various cancelled pieces of writing 65 EET13-1.inddT13-1.indd 6655 66/28/10/28/10 111:12:391:12:39 AAMM 66 Matthew Steggle Fig. 2. Enlargement of the manuscript fragment. © British Library Board (Cotton MS. Ti- berius. E.X.). which appear to be connected to Buc’s role as master of the revels, leading to the conclusion that Buc was reusing waste paper from the revels office in preparing the manuscript of the History. Among the revels documents thus serendipitously preserved are four lists of play titles, first published by Frank Marcham in 1925 and studied by, among others, E.K. Chambers.1 Cham- bers argues that the lists seem to describe plays which were under considera- tion for performance at court, and that they dated from some time fairly close to 1619. List D, reproduced above, is badly damaged by fire, probably by the Cot- tonian library fire of 1731. It contains fifteen play titles, and offers a number of tantalizing problems for investigators. The first and most obvious of them is — what is the date of this list? In particular, what is the date of the latest play on it? In a recent essay examining this problem, Gary Taylor argues that List D can, for various reasons, be dated to 1618–19. Absolute proof, though, is lacking, and it could be as late as 1622, the year of Buc’s madness and death.2 In as-yet unpublished work, however, Richard Dutton offers the alternative, and attractive, suggestion that this list might relate to the winter of 1616–17, when one company, the Prince’s Men, is known to have staged exactly fifteen plays at court, including A Fair Quarrel.3 For the purposes at hand, the exact date within this range of alternatives is not critical, but the reader should be aware that the ‘c 1619’ of my title simplifies a complex debate about the exact date of this record and of the plays it mentions. What is left of List D starts as follows, in Marcham’s transcription. Witt at the Bridegr … An ould Lawe . a … Henrye the vna … A ffaire Quarrell … r:–All’s Lost by Lust EET13-1.inddT13-1.indd 6666 66/28/10/28/10 111:12:391:12:39 AAMM A Lost Jacobean Tragedy 67 ‘If Mr. Marcham has read the manuscript rightly, I cannot identify the play’, comments Chambers of the fourth item on the list. Similarly, G.E. Bent- ley raises the possibility of palaeographical error, calling it ‘[t]his mutilated title — whatever it may have been in its perfect form, the last three letters are doubtful’.4 Although neither Chambers nor Bentley explicitly says so, the reason for their doubt is partly because the letters are difficult, but partly too because it seems impossible to think of any plausible play title that might start with these letters. As a result of its enigmatic partial title, the fourth play on the list has remained firmly unknown, and is referred to, when referred to at all, as Henry the Una. In recent years, Benjamin Griffin has described the record as ‘impossible to interpret confidently’.5 Since Bentley, there have been two significant, and hitherto unconnected, advances in scholarship relating to this list. The first was made by Tucker Orbison, who in 1971 published a record showing that in 1619 William Row- ley’s company, the Prince’s Men, performed at the Middle Temple a comedy, which seems to have involved extensive musical interludes, called The Bride- groom and the Madman. Orbison plausibly identified The Bridegroom and the Madman with the second title on List D.6 As well as giving a faint flavour of that lost play, Orbison’s record seems decisively to establish its company provenance. The second, independent advance is in the form of the Taylor/ Lavagnino Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, whose various contributing editors make several piecemeal adjustments to received wisdom about Wit at Several Weapons, The Old Law, and A Fair Quarrel, affecting issues includ- ing authorship, date, and company provenance. The combined effect of the changes made by the edition is to give a much more focussed sense of the homogeneity of the plays in the first section of List D. 7 The following table, then, shows the current best guesses as to title, authorship, company provenance, and date for the plays in the first section of List D. For the three plays with Middleton associations, these dates, author attributions, and company attributions are taken from the 2007 Collected Works; for The Bridegroom and the Madman, from Orbison; for All’s Lost by Lust, from the scholarship conveniently reviewed and summarized in David Nicol’s 2006 article on the play.8 EET13-1.inddT13-1.indd 6677 66/28/10/28/10 111:12:391:12:39 AAMM 68 Matthew Steggle Table 1. Plays in the fi rst section of List D. Company Play title Authorship provenance Date Wit at Several Weapons Rowley and Middleton Prince’s Men late 1613 Th e Bridegroom and the ? Prince’s Men perf. 1619 Madman Th e Old Law Rowley, Middleton, and Prince’s Men c 1618–199 Heywood Henry the Una ??? A Fair Quarrel Rowley and Middleton Prince’s Men late 1616 All’s Lost by Lust Rowley Prince’s Men 1618–20 Even in 1971, the first part of this list looked as if it was strongly linked to the Prince’s Men, although at that date Orbison could not be confident about the attributions to the company of either The Old Law or Wit at Several Weapons. All the same, Orbison proposed on that basis that Henry the Una might also be expected to have belonged to the Prince’s Men. Since 1971, this proposition has been strengthened by the independent contribution of the Middleton edition. We have, then, a date at which the play was available for performance — c 1619 — and an indication that the plays around it on the list were relatively current ones, suggesting that it too might be from the decade of the 1610s. We also have a possible company, the Prince’s Men. The next step, though, is to attempt to complete the title. The Missing Letters The database EEBO-TCP enables one to adopt a brute force approach to the question of the incomplete word, and to demonstrate, specifically, that there was at this date one (and, as far as one can tell, only one) meaningful phrase beginning ‘Henry the Una’. EEBO-TCP searches a corpus of, currently, 25,271 full-text transcriptions of early modern English printed books. It is, of course, by no means a complete record even of the books it includes, and its use is fraught with complexities, but it can certainly be considered a large and indicative sample of the extant corpus.10 For the task at hand, a particularly useful tool is the EEBO-TCP ‘variant spellings’ feature, which enables one to quickly and methodically account for all plausible variants of spelling including ‘Henry’, ‘Henrye’, and EET13-1.inddT13-1.indd 6688 66/28/10/28/10 111:12:391:12:39 AAMM A Lost Jacobean Tragedy 69 ‘Henrie’, in combinations both with ‘una’ and ‘vna’. An EEBO-TCP full-text search for ‘Henrye the vna*’, with variant spellings enabled, currently returns results from three distinct works.11 In each of them, ‘una’ is the start of the six-letter word ‘unable’. A note in Edward Grimeston’s translation of Pierre Matthieu’s History of Lewis the eleuenth (1614) refers to a ruler bearing this name: ‘D. Blanch being put away by D. Henry the vnable, was carried as it were a prisoner to Lescut in Bearne, by Gaston Earle of Foix her Brother-in-law, to the end she should not marry againe. The Spaniards write that her sister Elenor caused her to bee poysoned’.12 Thomas Heywood also uses the phrase in his tract about women, Gynaikeion (1624). For him, Henry the Unable is an example of a king who was also a procurer: Nay least this detestable sinne should want a countenancer, euen from royaltie, Lycosthenes in his Theater of Humaine life, tells vs of Henricus Rex Castalionensis, who shamed not to bee a Bawde to his owne Queene, you may reade further of him in the Spanish historie by the title of Henrie the Vnable.13 Thirdly, John Taylor, in the tract A Bawd included in All the Works (1630), uses the phrase in much the same context as Heywood does. Moreouer, great Emperours and Kings haue beene Bawdes [such as Tiberius, Domitian, and Heliogabalus] …. And of later yeeres a King of Castile, called Henry the vnable, because hee could not haue a childe by his wife to inherit after him, he kindly entreated one of his Lords to take the paines to beget an heire for him.
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