English Renaissance Drama, 1642-1660 by Heidi Craig a Thesis Submitted in Conformity with the Requiremen

A Play Without a Stage:

Heidi Craig

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

A Play Without a Stage:

English Renaissance Drama, 1642-1660

Heidi Craig

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of English

University of Toronto

2017

A Play Without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642 to 1660, focuses on the pro-

duction of early modern drama during the English Civil War and Interregnum, when

commercial playing was outlawed. Despite the prominence of book history as a method-

ology over the last three decades, the era of the theatre ban – when performance declined but dramatic publication ﬂourished – remains understudied. It is in this era, I argue, that

the genre, indeed even the critical ﬁeld, of early modern drama as we know it was created.

While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English Renaissance stage –

the theatres were closed, demolished, converted into tenements, and once famous actors

and playwrights, now unemployed, died in poverty – the professional drama of 1576-1642 not only lived on, but thrived, in print. In the absence of contemporary performances,

stationers presented pre-war plays as relics of an absent, idealized theatrical culture. The

theatre ban prematurely aged the genre of English drama, but at the same time, sta-

tioners began publishing previously unprinted Tudor and Stuart plays. These plays, at once new and old, were marketed in terms of novelty and ﬁnitude: they represented the

latest oﬀerings of a tradition that had drawn to a close. The era’s playbook publishers

capitalized on theatrical nostalgia, but also looked ahead to the moment when the store

ii of previously unprinted professional drama would run out. At that point, stationers turned to the project of anatomizing the whole corpus of English drama, printing the

ﬁrst dramatic anthologies and comprehensive dramatic catalogues in the 1650s. With chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia and anthologies, the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period and the critical conceptions of the theatre ban since the Restoration, A Play

Without a Stage argues that the death of contemporary English theatre gave birth to

English Renaissance drama. The seeds of this ﬁeld – that is, of the modern canon, the editorial and performance traditions, and Shakespeare’s supremacy in all – were planted not in the eighteenth century, but in the mid-seventeenth century.

iii Acknowledgements

My ﬁrst and greatest thanks are to my incredible supervisor Jeremy Lopez, who encouraged this project from the start and made the ﬁnal product immeasurably better.

He was an exemplary reader of the entire manuscript (many times over) – his mentor- ship, generous support, and guidance have been wonderful gifts. Thank you to also to my committee members Holger Syme and Marjorie Rubright, who were rigorous and creative interlocutors. Alan Galey and Lynne Magnusson oﬀered insightful commentary during my defense. Special thanks are due to my external examiner Marta Straznicky, for her illuminating reader’s report and questions during the defense. In addition to those named above, thank you to my wonderful teachers and colleagues at the University of Toronto who helped me at various stages of my degree: Sarah Star, Cristina D’Amico, Jeﬀ Espie,

Anthony Oliveira, Chris Laprade, Dan White, Chris Warley, Paul Stevens, Liza Blake,

Alex Hernandez, Audrey Walton, and Tom Keymer. My project took shape during the

Folger year-long dissertation seminar led by Jean Howard and Pamela Smith, and was greatly improved by conversations with them and with my fellow seminar participants, especially Katherine Walker, Jonathan Holmes, Andrew Miller, Ben VanWagoner, Aaron

Pratt and Dean Clement. At the Huntington Library, I had the opportunity to share ideas with many illustrious scholars in the California sunshine; thanks in particular to

Paulina Kewes, Heather James, Jack Lynch, Thomas Cogswell, Marjorie Swann, Elaine Hobby, Claire Bowditch, and Penelope Geng. Versions of chapters were presented at various conferences, after which they were improved by fruitful conversations with Laura

Estill, Marissa Nicosia, Eoin Price, Harry Newman, Emma Depledge, Rachel Willie, Musa

Gurnis, Claire Bourne, Catherine Clifford, Joshua McEvilla, Roze Hentschell, Stephen Watkins, and Richard Preiss. I gratefully acknowledge the generous support I received for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), le Fonds de recherche sociétéet culture du Québec, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship

iv Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library.

Thank you to my immediate and extended family for their continued love and support: my parents Sue and Ian, sisters Nadia and Julie, and Ben, Josephine and Harrison; and in-laws Francie and Lance Howard. My Toronto family supported me, loved me and literally kept me alive over the course of six years: thank you to Sheila and Tim

Casgrain, Judy and John Groves, Alynn Casgrain and David Upper, and Andrew and

Lindsay Groves. Love and thank you to my Uncle Andrew Craig who instilled a love of poetry in me. Erin O’Donnell was an ideal friend and roommate during my months in

California. And thank you to my big beautiful family spread out across Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and the USA: the Grechs, the Winders, the Henrys, the Rathies, the

Casgrains, the Groves, the Bartletts, the Listers, and the Howards. I am indebted to you all and I love you very much. Finally, all my love and thanks to my brilliant and beautiful husband Nathan Howard: my beloved is mine, and I am his.

v Contents

Introduction 1

1 Prologue: Perambulation around London in 1643, 1652, and 1657 . . . . 1

2 Theatrical Nostalgia ...... 8

1 Dead Theatre 31

1 1642-1648: Dramatic Abundance in “A Long Winter” ...... 34

2 1648-1656: “The Press Acts” and Printed “Relics” ...... 45

3 1652-1659: New and Old Plays ...... 54

4 Conclusion: Rotten Authors in Print, or Literary Drama ...... 60

2 “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-1660 62

1 Mucedorus in 1653: Anti-Theatrical Nostalgia ...... 65

2 Beaumont and Fletcher on the London Stage in 1647 and 1648 ...... 72

3 Interregnum Drolls, late 1640s-1655 ...... 82

4 The Sanctioned Performance of New Plays, 1653-1659 ...... 91

vi 3 Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660 98

1 Shakespeare’s Missing Stationers, 1642-1660 ...... 102

2 Shakespeare’s Interregnum Stationers: William Leake and Jane Bell . . . 118

4 Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 134

1 Serial Publication of Small Dramatic Collections ...... 137

1.1 The Picture of Dramatic Genre and Canon in New Plays . . . . . 141

2 Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language ...... 145

2.1 The Picture of Dramatic Genre and Canon in The English Treasury 152

3 “Exact and Perfect” Catalogues of English Plays in Print ...... 156

3.1 The Picture of Dramatic Genre and Canon in the Catalogues . . . 168

4 Conclusion: 1650s Dramatic Compendia after 1660 ...... 172

5 A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 177

1 Acts of Oblivion: Rhetorical conceptions of the Theatre Ban, 1660-1700 . 182

2 The Theatre Ban in the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries . . . 188

3 The Theatre Ban in Modern Criticism ...... 200

4 Epilogue: Dramatic Resurrection ...... 208

Works Consulted 211

vii List of Figures

5.1 Frontispiece to The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport (Francis Kirkman, 1662) . 179

viii Introduction

1 Prologue: Perambulation around London in 1643, 1652, and 1657

Overdone. But shall all our houses of resort in the suburbs be pulled down? Pompey. To the ground, mistress. Overdone. Why, here’s a change indeed in the commonwealth! What shall become of me?

-Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 1.2.93-97

Around 1643, an anonymous antiquary penned “Some notes for my Perambulation in and round ye Citye of London for six miles and Remnants of divers worthie things and men,” twenty-seven manuscript pages describing his circuits in and around the Lon- don suburbs of Southwark, Bermondsey, and Hackney. He describes the Tabard Inn, the Southwark landmark famous as the place where Chaucer’s pilgrims gather at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales. The antiquary quotes from The Canterbury Tales describing the Tabard, reproducing John Stow’s citation of Chaucer’s lines from the 1633 edition of his Survey of London (from which the antiquary drew extensively for his own survey), and adding new material from the Canterbury Tales on the Tabard as well.

The antiquary concludes with another literary historical anecdote about the Tabard, this one connected to early modern theatre. “The Tabard I ﬁnd to have been the re-

1 2 sort Mastere Will Shakspear Sir Sander Duncombe Lawrence Fletcher Richard Burbage Ben Jonson and the rest of their roystering associates in King Jameses time as in the large room they have cut their names on the Pannels.”1 James Shapiro argues that the anecdote represents “the only act of literary fellowship on Shakespeare’s part that we know of during” the Jacobean period.’2 In fact, the Tabard anecdote reveals less about Shakespeare’s actual activities in the Jacobean period, and more about the retrospective impression of Jacobean theatre from the perspective of the early 1640s. Moreover, the

Tabard episode is not “literary,” as it does not describe the contemplative activities of serious writers of English drama. It is rather, distinctly theatrical: describing the rowdy activities of prominent Jacobean playwrights and actors. We see Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and their fellow actors, Lawrence Fletcher and Richard Burbage “and the rest of their roystering associates,” waggishly carving their names into the Tabard’s walls.

The players’ act of leaving a physical record of their presence for posterity is echoed by the antiquary’s own intention in the “Perambulation.” He announces that his survey of

London is a deliberate work of remembrance, meant “only to notice those places and things that have been passed by or littled mentiond by those greate Antiquaries that have written of this noble Citye and ye which places are fast ruining as the Tabard

Inne and ye many houses of Priesthood old Monuments Halls Palaces and Houses of its greate Citizens and Lords and may be useful to searchers of Antiquitye in time to come.”

The antiquary’s reflection is a bulwark against loss, a verbal commemoration of physical places which “are fast ruining as the Tabard Inne” and other monuments, halls, palaces and houses. Such anxiety reflects the antiquary’s historical position. Though “the antiquary’s name does not appear in his notes,” Carlin explains, “it is clear from them, and from a page of personal reflections dated ‘November 1643,’ that he was an unmar-

1Martha Carlin discovered “Some notes for my Perambulation,” and its Tabard anecdote at Edinburgh University Library in 2012. 2James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 6. 3

ried royalist with an interest in the capital’s medieval monuments.”3 Fourteen months into the English Civil War that began on August 22, 1642, a Royalist antiquary with a

proclivity for English medieval history would ﬁnd many causes for alarm, as many of Eng-

land’s political and cultural institutions had been summarily dismantled. The situation

would only grow worse over the next seventeen years of war, revolution, and republican rule. In 1642, Parliament condemned Christmas, Easter and Whitsun as superstitious,

curtailed festive traditions and reoriented the ecclesiastical calendar around the Sab-

bath and monthly fasts. In June 1647, they formally abolished Christmas, Easter and

Whitsun, and other holy days altogether.4 Maypoles, that emblem of Chaucer’s “Merry

England” were banned.5 The medieval tradition of “swan upping” – where young swans were counted and marked to indicate ownership, with some assigned to the monarch and

others to the ancient London trade guilds – had come to an abrupt end. During the Civil

War, so the story goes, all the swans were killed by Cromwell’s soldiers, returning to

the Thames only with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.6 The antiquary’s desire to remember those places and traditions that are “fast ruining” reﬂects a widespread

anxiety about the general assault on England’s political and cultural traditions. But

while the antiquary’s anecdote of the Tabard Inn partly belongs to this general process

of remembering, it also reﬂects his particular interest in English theatre. The “Perambu-

lation” of 1643 wished to preserve for posterity the “many ancient places yet to be seen and fast falling in ruine and not noticed by others.” This included not only the priories

and palaces that played a role in England’s religious and military history, but also “those

Stews so long a source of proﬁtt to ye Maiers of London and Bishopps of Winchester, the

Bear Gardens and Playes.”

3Carlin, “The Bard at the Tabard,” Times Literary Supplement 24 September 2014: 15. 4B. S. Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies (OUP, 2012), p. 8. 5Capp, p. 9. On the maypole as a symbol of Chaucer’s England, see Leslie Hotson, “Maypoles and Puritans,” Shakespeare Quarterly 1.4 (1950): 205-207. 6This story is potentially apocryphal, but whatever its truth captures the roundheads’ reputation for joylessness. Helen MacDonald, “In Search of Post-Brexit England, and Swans,” New York Times Magazine 5 January 2017: 24-29. 4

On September 2, 1642, English Parliament outlawed public stage plays. The ordinance remained in eﬀect until August 22, 1660. Over the course of eighteen years, the cultural and physical landscape of English drama would change radically. The “Perambulation” of

1643 was an early instance of an effort to commemorate “the Bear Gardens and Playes,” those seemingly disreputable “stews” whose status as a “source of profit” became clearer once they disappeared. The antiquary’s account of the Tabard Inn as the site of Chaucer’s pilgrims and Shakespeare, Jonson and Burbage’s riotous activities signals that even the disreputable elements of English theatre could belong to the same tradition of English literature: there is no need to gild rowdy playwrights as “literary dramatists” in order to incorporate them into high culture. Many other reflections on the English dramatic landscape would follow as the eighteen-year prohibition destroyed English professional theatre. In “a whimsy written. . . about the end of the year [16]52,” the dramatist Richard

Flecknoe describes a recent walk around London: “passing on to Blackfriars and seeing never a play bill on the gate, no coaches on the place, nor doorkeeper at the playhouse door with a box like a churchwarden desiring you to remember the poor players, I cannot but say for epilogue to all the plays were ever acted there: ‘Poor house”’ this “epilogue” begins,

Where so oft in our father’s days, We have seen so many of Shakespeare’s plays, So many of Johnson’s, Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s Until I know not what Puritan teachers (Who for their tone, their language, and action Might ‘gainst the stage, make bedlam a faction), Have made with their Rayleighs, the players as poor As were the Fryers, and poets before.7

A decade into the prohibition on playing, Flecknoe is confronted on his London perambulation by a physical reminder of the absent theatre, the vacant Blackfriars. He

7Richard Flecknoe, Miscellania (Printed by T. R., 1653), p. 141. 5

nostalgically describes playgoing as the purview of an earlier generation of “fathers,” and laments the venue that formerly showcased “so many” plays of Shakespeare, Jonson,

Beaumont and Fletcher, now rendered silent, with the players reduced to penury. By

1652, many physical spaces of the theatre had disappeared along with the performances

they had staged. The second Globe was demolished in 1644 or 1645; tenements were in its place by 1655.8 On 16 July 1645 the Commons ordered that “The Boarded Masque

House at Whitehall, the Masque house at St James, and the Courts of Guard, be forth-

with pulled down, and sold away.” Apparently, the timber was not immediately disposed

of, but lay in piles for two years at Scotland Yard, prompting one commentator to spec-

ulate ominously that “timber of the late erected playhouse in White Hall” “lye in the posture of a very large Bonﬁre ready to welcome the King and his Nobles.” Players openly

ﬂouted the prohibition by staging illegal performances in the late 1640s. This activity

prompted Parliamentary edicts in 1647 and 1648 which proposed harsher punishments for

performing or going to plays, and also ordered that the remaining playhouses be “pulled down” (a contemporary expression that can mean both “dismantled on the interior” and

“levelled to the ground”).9 On 24 March 1649, Parliamentary soldiers pulled down the professional playhouses of Salisbury Court, the Phoenix (also known as the Cockpit) and the Fortune, all of which had formerly been used for illicit theatrical activity; Blackfriars was demolished in August 1655 to make room for tenements. The Hope Theatre, also called the Bear Garden, a dual-purpose theatre used for stage plays and bear baiting, was demolished in March 1656 to make room for tenements. Other losses attended the demolition of the theatres besides the destruction of the physical buildings. Because dramatic manuscripts were often housed in playhouses, it is likely that some unprinted

8An anonymous, handwritten note appended to a 1631 edition of John Stow’s Annals describes how The Globe was pulled down by Sir Matthew Brand, Monday, 15 April 1644, to make room for tenements. The note is potentially one of John Payne Collier’s many forgeries, but it is clear that by 1655 tenements existed in the place formerly occupied by the Globe. See Herbert Berry, “Folger MS V.b.275 and the Deaths of Shakespearean Playhouses,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1.10 (1998): 262-293. 9Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Harvard UP, 1928), p. 77, n. 167. 6

plays were lost forever when the theatres were pulled down.10Handwritten marginalia in a copy of John Stow’s Annals (1631) oﬀers a distressing account of the fate endured by

the bears of the Hope Theatre:

The Hope, on the Bankside, in Southwarke, commonly called the Bear Gar- den, a playhouse for stage-plays on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sat- urdays, and for the baiting of Bears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the stage being made to take up and down when they please. It was built in the year 1610, and now pulled down to make tenements, by Thomas Walker, a petticoat-maker in Cannon Street, on Tuesday, the 25 day of March, 1656. Seven of Mr. Godfrey’s bears, by the command of Thomas Pride, then high sheriﬀ of Surrey, were then shot to death on Saturday the 9 day of February, 1655 [i.e. 1656], by a company of soldiers.11

The cruel treatment of the bears by Parliamentary soldiers (distinct from their cruel

treatment at the hands of the entertainment industry) lends credence to the account of

the killing of swans. Only the Red Bull remained intact throughout the eighteen-year prohibition.12 It was continuously used for illegal entertainments (and frequently raided), and was still standing once playing oﬃcially resumed in 1660. By 1657, someone strolling around in Southwark or Drury Lane might come across the tenements built on sites of the Globe or Blackfriars, the empty shell of the Fortune, or a clandestine (or raided) performance at Red Bull, all vestiges of the ruined English professional theatre.

One would get a diﬀerent impression of drama in 1657 if one strolled into St Paul’s

Churchyard, the center of the English book trade. Reminders of the prohibition on theatre would be on display at the Prince’s Arms, the bookshop owned and operated by Humphrey Moseley, the most proliﬁc playbook station of the Interregnum. The title page to Moseley’s publication of James Shirley’s The Court Secret, (1653) declares

10Gary Taylor, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (OUP, 2007), pp. 51-2. 11Cited in Joseph Quincy Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration (Houghton Miﬄin, 1917), p. 337. 12On the cultural status of the Red Bull, see Marta Straznicky, “The Red Bull Repertory in Print,” Early Theatre 9 (2006):144-156. 7

the tragicomedy was “Never Acted, But prepared for the Scene at BLACK-FRIERS.” Moseley’s edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase (1652) is said to be printed for the “private Beneﬁt of John Lowin and Joseph Taylor,” aging, unemployed King’s Servants actors who were cast out of work by the ban. The title page to Philip Massinger’s Three New Plays (1655), subtly invokes the recent political and theatrical turmoil when it presents texts as they were performed by his “Late Majesties

Servants,” the grammatical fuzziness of “late” referring both to the late Charles I, pub- lically executed for treason on January 31, 1649, and the disbanded King’s Servants.

Alongside these poignant reminders of abortive theatrical eﬀorts, of suﬀering and unemployed theatre professionals, and of political upheaval, bookshops featured optimistic signs of English drama’s resilience during the ban. Massinger’s Three New Plays (1655) was part of a series of collected octavo editions of previously unprinted plays called “New

Plays,” which Moseley began issuing in 1653, others including Richard Brome’s Five

New Plays (1653), and Thomas Middleton’s Two New Plays (1657). Most of these plays were “new” only in terms of their publication history – Middleton’s More Dissemblers

Besides Women, included in his octavo collection, was first performed in 1614 – but such publications revealed the continued vitality of English drama, at least in print. Moseley also published John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655), which, as the first printed commonplace book composed exclusively of English dramatic extracts, testifies to the prestige and dignity of what Cotgrave calls the “English dramatic poem.”

Wandering from St Paul’s Churchyard to Thread-Needle Street, one would arrive at

Robert Pollard’s bookshop, at the sign of Ben Jonson’s Head. For a head to be employed as a shop sign, it has to be widely recognizable. While bookshops had signs featuring the

King’s Head, Pope’s Head, Saracen’s, Turk’s, and various animal heads, there is no trace of the Ben Jonson’s Head, or any other playwright’s head, before 1656. Jeﬀrey Masten argues that “it is culturally signiﬁcant that plays should, in 1656, be sold at the sign of a 8

playwright’s head. . . it seems that the idea of a playwright’s head as a sign arrives on the scene only after the closing of the theaters.”13 At the Ben Jonson’s Head, one might buy the ﬁrst edition of The Old Law (1656), a comedy by Middleton, William Rowley and

Thomas Heywood published by Edward Archer four decades after its ﬁrst production around 1618. Appended to the quarto of The Old Law was Archer’s compilation of “An Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the Plaies that were ever printed,” an alphabetical

list of over 650 titles of plays in print, an attempt to improve upon Richard Rogers

and William Ley’s “An exact and perfect Catologue of all Playes that are Printed,” an

alphabetical list of 500-odd English plays also compiled in 1656 and appended to Thomas

Goﬀe’s The Careless Shepherdess. A decade and a half into the prohibition, a mood of theatrical conclusion prompted such acts of dramatic memorialization. Paradoxically, these memorials kept drama alive in England. Resourceful stationers responding to demand ensured that drama continued to circulate in print; the familiar Ben Jonson continued to occupy space in book buyers’ imaginations thanks partly to Pollard’s sign; Rogers, Ley and Archer’s comprehensive dramatic catalogues oﬀered a bird’s eye view of the grand tradition of English plays, available for purchase at a local book shop.

2 Theatrical Nostalgia

“I shall be loved when I am lack’d.”

-Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 4.1.25

In 1642, English Parliament banned public performance with the following ordinance:

Whereas Public Sports do not well agree with Public Calamities, nor Pub- lic Stage- plays with the Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of 13Jeﬀrey Masten, “Ben Jonson’s Head,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), p. 160. 9

sad and pious Solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity: It is therfore thought ﬁt, and Ordained by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled, That while these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease, and be forborn.

September 2, 1642 has been called the best-known date in theatre history.14 August

21, 1660, when the theatres were restored, is a close second. But criticism has largely neglected the intervening eighteen years. Casual critical allusions to the ban usually

involve one or more of the following assumptions. The period represents a theatrical

and dramatic dead zone, an empty space separating the traditions of Renaissance and

Restoration drama. The theatrical prohibition of 1642 represented the decisive culmina-

tion of the long anti-theatrical campaign waged by Puritans. The producers of theatre and drama simply folded under the new law, and remained silent for next two decades un-

til the Restoration of the theatre. The theatrical and dramatic production that managed

to appear in this period espoused Royalist or Cavalier values. In modern criticism, such

clichs were and are conveniently slotted into conclusions or introductions of scholarship on, respectively, Renaissance or Restoration drama, the sturdy and readymade conclu-

sions replacing actual analysis of the vast variety of theatrical and dramatic activity in the

1640s and 1650s. Recognizing a critical opportunity, literary historians in the 1920s and

1930s sought to shed light on what one of them characterized as the “obscurest chapter

in the history of English literature.”15 T. S. Graves oﬀered evidence “that defenders of the stage were not so idle during the years 1642-1660 as is sometimes supposed.”16 Hyder

Rollins and Leslie Hotson made thorough use of the little-studied Thomason Collection

at the British Museum, producing encyclopedic taxonomies about little-known theatri-

14David Scott Kastan, “Performances and Playbooks: The Closing of the Theatres and the Politics of Drama,” Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England, eds. Steven Zwicker and Kevin Sharpe (CUP, 2003), p. 167. 15Hyder E. Rollins, “A Contribution to the History of the English Commonwealth Drama,” Studies in Philology XVIII (1921), p. 267. 16T. S. Graves, “Notes on Puritanism and the Stage,” Studies in Philology XVIII (1921), p. 141. 10 cal activity during the Interregnum.17 Louis B. Wright begins his 1934 article with an assertion that “all the world knows since the publication of studies by Professors Graves,

Rollins and Hotson that [English drama’s] light never went out completely between 1642 and 1660.”18 Taking his reader’s awareness of ongoing theatrical activity as a given,

Wright turns his attention to the publication and reading of playbooks between 1642 and 1660.

Wright may have overestimated the wide readership or the persuasiveness of his immediate critical predecessors, however. The critical commonplaces about dramatic and theatrical activity during the theatre ban have proven to be remarkably persistent. In 1996, Susan Wiseman lamented that critics typically regard the 1642 ordinance as the “inaugu- ration of a gap” between two “‘national’ dramas” of the Renaissance and Restoration. In such scholarship, she continues, the text of the 1642 ordinance often “replaces discussion of the period, standing in by synecdoche for eighteen years of largely unacknowledged and uninvestigated but immensely diverse dramatic and some theatrical activity.”19 Com- pounding the problem, even when critics seek to investigate the era’s drama, by over- turning some myths they invariably reinforce others. For example, Wright’s discussion of the “lively traﬃc in playbooks” during the ban rightly belies the familiar notion that the moment of the ban was a dramatic desert. However, his comment that “reading of plays was a diversion enjoyed by many an aristocrat and liberal citizen who had no sympathy with Puritan blue laws” reproduces the facile association between Puritanism and anti-theatrical attitudes.20

Over the last three decades, many critics, whose works inform my own, have illuminated

17Rollins, “A Contribution,” pp. 267-333 and Rollins, “The Commonwealth Drama: Miscellaneous Notes,” Studies in Philology 20.1 (1923): 52-69; Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (1928). 18Louis B. Wright, “The Reading of Plays during the Puritan Revolution.” The Huntington Library Bulletin 6 (1934): 73-108. 19Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (CUP: 1998), p. 1. 20Wright, p. 87. 11 the diverse theatrical and dramatic activity of the theatre ban era. Nevertheless, the old clichs about anti-theatrical Puritans completely silencing Royalist drama abound in general histories of English drama. There are several reasons why this clich persists: ﬁrst, it serves the turn of periodization. While the boundaries of the nebulous period known as

“long eighteenth century” seem to shift by the second, and the medieval period continues to encroach on the early part of the early modern period, the closure and restoration of the theatres provide a rare opportunity for satisfyingly sturdy and tidy chronological limits for literary and historical periods. My field of study, English Renaissance drama, is structured around the theatre ban. Yet few critics in my field have considered how the drama we study was itself transformed in this period. Much scholarship seems to assume that the prohibition on performance pushed thoughts of drama out of the English cultural imagination. The truth is precisely the opposite. Censoring something often produces the unintended effect of making it more desirable; this is the case with English drama between 1642 and 1660. The English theatre ban transformed the production of English drama on stage and in print; it prompted discourses about the value and nature of drama that lastingly shaped how drama was perceived in English culture. Indeed, many of the persistent critical clichs about this period date from the period of the theatre ban itself: the notion that the ordinance of 1642 marked the decisive end of a theatrical tradition; the persistent identification between Royalist politics and English drama on the one hand, and Puritanism and anti-theatricalism on the other. It is no coincidence that some of our field’s most durable chestnuts date to the moment of the theatre ban, for it is in this period that the field of English Renaissance drama was born.

The present study draws from and builds upon scholarship that illuminates and investigates English drama on the stage, on the page, and in the cultural imagination between

1642 and 1660. Most recent scholarship of this period investigates the political resonances of drama in this period and/or explores questions relating to dramatic medium. 12

An important precursor for all recent work on the politics of English drama in the 1640s and 1650s is Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (1984). Butler disposes of the axiom “that drama was protected and fostered by the court, and always strove for closer identification with it.” Instead, he demonstrates that much Caroline drama was actually a vehicle of incisive criticism of the court of Charles I. Butler also overturns the commonplace that the theatrical ordinance of 1642 represented the final culmination of a longstanding anti-theatrical campaign orchestrated by Puritans. Rather, he shows that the closure of the playhouses began as a routine precautionary measure, typically taken “when governments wished to disperse the people and maintain a tight rein of law and order,” such as during outbreaks of the plague, or periods of national mourning. Butler he explains, “the minds of MPs at this critical juncture were not set on a program of social and moral reform, but on the fundamental political necessity of establishing the security of London and the Kingdom, a security the theatres’ freedom was likely to disrupt.”21 The initial ordinance was framed as a temporary response to immediate turmoil; as the language of the edict itself made clear, it was only “while these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation do continue [that] Public Stage Plays shall cease, and be forborn.”(The renewed Parliamentary ordinances against theatre of 1647 and 1648 were a different matter, however. The godly language warning that stage plays attract “the high provocation of Gods wrath and displeasure,” and are not to be “tolerated amongst Professors of the Christian Religion” made plain their intension to prohibit performance permanently on the grounds of immorality.)22

Butler initiated a new critical tradition that turned a skeptical eye on the longstanding and ostensibly self-evident political associations of Royalism with Puritanism with anti-theatricalism. Other critics have built on Butler’s reassessment of the contemporary

21Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642 (CUP, 1984), esp. 1-24; 84-99, p. 136-140 and passim. 22On the diﬀerences between the ordinance of 1642 and the renewed ordinances of 1647 and 1648, see Wiseman, pp. 4-5. 13 political meaning of drama and its suppression. David Scott Kastan, ﬁrst observing the vagueness and slipperiness of the designation “Puritan,” comments that the “familiar homology between puritanism and anti-theatricality is, in any case, unsustainable. Not all Puritans were opponents of the theatre, and neither were all opponents of the theatre

Puritans.”23The two most extensive recent examinations of the politics of English drama in this period appeared three years apart, Dale Randall’s Winter Fruit: English Drama,

1642-1660 (1995) and Susan Wiseman’s Drama and Politics in the English Civil War

(1998). While useful as a sourcebook of information, Randall’s Winter Fruit reproduces older arguments about the Royalist politics of English drama which the work of But- ler and others sought to complicate. Wiseman comments that Randall “continues the naturalization of drama as royalist, with chapter titles like “The Sun Declining,” “The

Rising Sun,” explicitly basing themselves on royalist discourses.”24 In Drama and Poli- tics, Wiseman explicitly distances her methodology and conclusions from Winter Fruit.

Her New Historicist approach relies on a series of case studies to examine the relationship between drama and its contexts, the English Civil Wars and the English Republic. She aims to produce not a “taxonomy or survey” but rather to “investigate speciﬁc discur- sive contexts.”25 Wiseman builds upon Butler’s arguments about late-Caroline drama to show how non-Royalists co-opted drama for their own political agenda. In one chapter, she juxtaposes the Royalist closet drama The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I, Basely Butchered (1649) with the popular Republican closet drama The Tragedy of the

Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (1651). Wiseman’s chapter exempliﬁes her focus on new drama written between 1642 and 1660, the closet drama, pamphlet plays and semi-dramatic political dialogues that are (depending on the particular timing of their appearance and one’s political proclivities) properly speaking called Civil War, In- terregnum, Republican or Commonwealth drama. Wiseman does discuss the continued

23Kastan, “Performances and Playbooks,” p. 168. 24Wiseman, p. 14. 25Wiseman, p. xviii; p. 220. 14 circulation of pre-war plays after 1642. She argues that while these older plays did not necessarily adhere to a particular ideology, “the closure of the theatres served to intensify the politicized status of dramatic discourse: Civil War drama was sharply aware of its politicization as a genre and of a political readership.”26 While Wiseman is not chieﬂy interested in the reception of Renaissance drama after 1642, her comment captures how the theatre ban transformed the status of English plays. Not only did the theatre closures “intensify the politicized status of dramatic discourse,” it also drew attention to

English drama in other ways. Theatrical censorship prompted debates about the nature and value of drama.

In Drama and Politics, Wiseman foregrounds new drama of the Civil War and Interreg- num period, typically neglected in modern scholarship. Janet Clare extended Wiseman’s interest in new Civil War and Interregnum drama with Drama of the English Republic,

1649-1660 (2002). The volume contains the ﬁrst modern critical edition of the anonymous Republican closet drama The Tragedy of the Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero

(1651), James Shirley’s Cupid and Death (1653), and William Davenant’s proto-operas

The Siege of Rhodes (1656), The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). Clare’s excellent introduction oﬀers a comprehensive precis of the era’s dramatic activities.27 Rachel Willie’s Staging the Revolution: Drama, Rein- vention and History, 1647-72 (2015) also explores the complex political meanings English drama during the Civil War and Interregnum, and demonstrates how these meanings informed the Restoration stage.28

Wiseman’s work is in many respects the most important precursor for the present study.

This dissertation incorporates some of the lessons of New Historicism and relies on the

26Wiseman, p. 5. 27Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 1649-1660 (Manchester University Press, 2002). 28Rachel Willie, Staging the Revolution: Drama, Reinvention and History, 1647-72 (Manchester UP, 2015). 15 representative case study to illuminate an overlooked period. Like Wiseman, I push against the critical tendency to treat the period between 1642 and 1660 as a gap between two national dramatic traditions, Renaissance and Restoration.29Wiseman and I diﬀer, however, in the primary texts we study. Wiseman is interested in Civil War and Inter- regnum plays, i.e. plays newly composed in the 1640s and 1650s, precisely because they have been excluded by the gatekeepers of the English literary canon. By contrast, I am primarily concerned with the continued circulation of plays written for the professional theatre between 1575 and 1642 – works we now call Renaissance or early modern drama

– precisely because they are canonical. I shall argue that the theatre ban is a crucial moment in the afterlives of English Renaissance plays, one largely occluded, but one which placed them at the center of the English literary canon.

Wiseman departs from earlier scholars of the theatre ban in many respects, but she continues to frame dramatic activities chieﬂy in terms of the era’s major political, religious and military conﬂicts. Wiseman’s focus on English drama “of the Civil War” echoes

Rollins, Hotson, and Wright’s examination of “drama during the period of the Great

Rebellion,” of “the Commonwealth stage” and during the “Puritan revolution” – and even Dale Randall’s conception of the drama produced during the monarchy’s “winter.”

Wiseman’s study belongs to the same New Historicist moment as Lois Potter’s Secret Rites and Secret Writing, Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (1989), Nigel Smith’s Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (1994) and David Norbrook’s Writing the English

Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (1999), all of which investigate the

complex dynamics between English literature and politics in this period, and all of which at least touch on English drama. These critics tend to assume that, because the period

was highly fraught politically, its literature is ﬁrst and foremost politically inﬂected.

While A Play without a Stage, English Renaissance Drama, 1642-1660 is indebted to

29Wiseman, pp. 1-16. 16 these earlier works, I have attempted throughout to frame my analysis in terms of the theatre ban – not the “Great rebellion,” “Puritan Revolution,” “Civil War,” “Republic” or “Interregnum.” While these political events occupy the same temporal period as the theatre ban, I emphasize the latter because I wish to foreground how the prohibition on public performance altered the production, reception, and conceptions of English drama.

Of course, one cannot undertake a discussion of dramatic activity between 1642 and 1660 without regard to contemporary politics. The theatre ban coincided with, was directly caused by, and was continually analogized with the English Civil War, the regicide and creation of the English Republic. I duly explore the interaction between drama and wider politics in this period, drawing from and building on recent scholarship in this area.

However, I challenge critical interpretations that simply fold drama into wider analyses of contemporary politics, using drama simply as a means to understand the conﬂicts of the

Civil War and Interregnum. While the theatre ban is both causally and metaphorically related to contemporaneous English politics, it is also conceptually distinct from them.

In Richard Flecknoe’s “whimsy” written in 1652, his nostalgia for theatre is bound up with nostalgia for the political past (signalled by his aversion to “Puritan teachers”), but he also has a speciﬁc longing for theatre. Reﬂecting on a vacant Blackfriars, he wistfully recalls the playhouse “Where we so oft in our Father’s days, / We have seen so many of Shakespeare’s plays / So Many of Johnson’s / Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s.” When we examine dramatic commentary of the period, we see an interest in theatre and drama in their own right, and not simply as vehicles for political commentary.

Moving away from political readings of drama allows me to better focus on questions of dramatic medium. The theatre ban suddenly and enduringly transformed the material circulation and cultural status of English drama, and this transformed how people thought about English plays. My work unites the methodologies of theatre history and book history, building on earlier work in this period. General histories of the stage of- 17 ten imply that the theatre industry simply disappeared after 1642. Over the last few decades, this mistake has been corrected by the scholarship of Judith Milhous and Robert

D. Hume, who reveal the tenacity of actors who eked out their craft during the hiatus.30

In “Elizabeth Beeston, Sir Lewis Kirke, and the Cockpit’s Management during the En-

glish Civil Wars,” (2014) Christopher Matusiak explores the Beeston family’s continued (and ultimately abortive) investment in the Cockpit Theatre (also known as the Phoenix)

during the prohibition31 Other scholars have examined the eﬀects of the theatre ban on

the dramatic book trade, on dramatic reading and on the status of playbooks. Paulina

Kewes’s “Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books. . . ’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publica-

tion of Octavo Collections” (1995) and Adam Hooks’s “Booksellers’ Catalogues and the Classiﬁcation of Printed Drama in Seventeenth-Century England” (2008) respectively

discuss serialized playbook collections and printed book catalogue advertisements, two

new dramatic forms in print which emerged in the 1650s and which consolidated notions

of dramatic genre.32 Yet most previous scholarship on this period either examines theatrical activity in relative isolation from dramatic publication, or vice versa: critics either

draw attention to the plights of the actors and theatre managers; or explore how dra-

matic publication shaped conceptions of English drama. It is my contention, however,

that studying drama’s two mediums together oﬀers a clearer view of English drama’s

cultural meanings in this period. The absent or illegal stage and the printed page re- ciprocally inﬂuenced each other. The trials and tribulations of actors, theatre personnel

and the physical stages – whose successes were once highly visible, and whose declines

were highly visible after 1642 – necessarily aﬀected the ways in which people engaged

with drama on the page (as well as, obviously, on the stage itself). Printed drama was

30Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “New Light on English Acting Companies in 1646, 1648 and 1660” Review of English Studies 42 (1991): 487-509. 31Christopher Matusiak, “Elizabeth Beeston, Sir Lewis Kirke, and the Cockpit’s Management during the English Civil Wars.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 27 (2014): 161-191. 32Paulina Kewes, “‘Give Me the Sociable Pocket-Books. . . ’: Humphrey Moseley’s Serial Publication of Octavo Collections” Publishing History 38 (1995): 5-21; Adam G. Hooks, “Booksellers’ Catalogues and the Classiﬁcation of Printed Drama in Seventeenth-Century England,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society 102.4 (2008): 445-464. 18 characterized as the treasured “relic” of the stage, now idealized due to its absence.

Critics have extensively debated the relationship between theatre and drama, stage and page, and whether plays are best realized in performance or by reading. Of Shakespeare’s plays, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor famously argue that, “it is in performance that the plays lived and had their being. Performance is the end to which they were created.”33

Yet Julie Stone Peters argues that by the end of the sixteenth century “drama was

understood to play itself out in two arenas – on the stage and on the page.”34 Even

so, many have regarded drama’s twin mediums as fundamentally irreconcilable, a notion

expressed by Stephen Orgel’s memorable formulation, “If the play is a book, it’s not a play.”35 David Scott Kastan explains the stance more fully:

As it was played, it existed in the theatre, in the ephemeral sounds and gestures of dramatic action. The printed text can never be the play ’as it was played’. It is always, necessarily if tautologically, the play as printed, and as printed it ties its readers to the words on the page...Reading a play is not reading performance (the printed play as textualized drama) or even reading for performance (the printed play as potential drama); it is reading in the absence of performance...Text and performance are, then, not partial and congruent aspects of some unity that we think of as the play, but are two discrete modes of production. . . They are dissimilar and discontinuous modes of production.36

More recently, such oppositional views of page and stage have been described as anachronistic projections of contemporary views onto the past. As Straznicky explains, early modern audiences saw stage and page “in terms of interchange, complementarity, and congruence than of opposition or competition.”37 Richard Preiss similarly argues that,

33Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, eds, Shakespeare: The Complete Works (OUP, 1986), p. xxxix. 34Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480-1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (OUP, 2000), p. 8. 35Stephen Orgel, “What is an Editor?” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996), p. 23. 36David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (CUP, 2001), p. 8. 37Marta Straznicky, ed., The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), p. 4. 19

“while a useful precaution for us as modern editors, [Orgel’s statement] does not bear on the mentality of those early modern playgoers who were being invited to attend performances and then to buy texts of them as modules of a single cultural activity.”38

For those interested in the relationship between printed plays and performance, the theatre ban provides a useful test case, as the rare historical moment where one variable holds relatively constant and close to zero. In many ways, the theatre ban reveals the importance of printed plays. Far from eliminating English drama entirely, the suppression of the stage increased demand for printed drama, and dramatic publishing spiked in the

1650s. But the ban also reveals the inadequacy of text-centric conceptions of professional drama; if playwrights conceived of themselves as “literary dramatists” as much as men of the theatre, then one might expect them to continue writing plays for the press after

1642.39 The vast majority of them did not. The fact that professional dramatists by and large stopped writing plays after 1642 once the ban eﬀectively eliminated the professional theatre industry, reveals performance was a primary (though not the only) end to which professional plays were created; while the popularity of playbooks during the ban reveals how reading was a primary mode of engagement with plays.

The theatrical hiatus also reveals the fundamental association between stage and page in the minds of early modern audiences. Even as the suppression of the stage enabled printed drama to ﬂourish, printed drama continued to be marketed in terms of the absent stage.

Most Renaissance playbooks printed during the 1640s and 1650s continued to feature pre-

1642 performance attributions, with some referring to performances from the very distant past. For example, the title page to the reissue of Q3 of The Merchant of Venice (1652) presents the text “as it As it hath beene divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants,” a reference to pre-1603 performance, before the Chamberlain’s Servants

38Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (CUP, 2014), p. 57. 39On playwrights’ self-conception as literary dramatists, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (CUP: 2003). 20 became the King’s Servants. Few buyers of the 1652 quarto would have been present at this performance ﬁve decades prior; indeed, a decade into the ban, some younger readers potentially had no experience of public performance whatsoever. For these younger readers, such attributions to pre-1642 performance took on a cultural life and meaning of their own, beyond the level of the individual performances (now long silent), playing companies (now disbanded) and venues (now pulled down). The page was still tenaciously tied to the stage, even if for many performance had shifted from the actual to the absent and imagined.

Even where it seems the theatre ban enabled the press to unseat the stage as the main supplier of dramatic material, title pages and paratexts reveal that performance continued to inform understandings of English plays long after the stage went silent. The continued conceptual aﬃnity between stage and page well into the theatre ban reveals how tightly page and stage were connected the minds of early modern audiences. Prior to 1642, readers of playbooks were mostly spectators; reading plays was presented as an extension of watching them, and this notion in many cases continued to circulate after

1642.40 At the same time, the theatre ban made it easier to dissociate the two mediums, partly by prompting public discourses and debates about dramatic medium – what is a playbook without the stage? Is it better to read or see a play? What does it mean to read a playbook when one has not seen the performance, or any performance? – and partly because printed professional drama continued to circulate outside the context of professional performance. For the ﬁrst time, playbook readers are distinguished from spectators as a separate audience. As Straznicky explains,

Until the 1640s printed plays rarely address their readers (if they address readers at all) as an audience markedly diﬀerent from the play’s spectators. . . Reading never completely supersedes playgoing in pre-revolutionary

40On the notion of playreading as an extension of watching plays, see Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700 (CUP, 2004), p. 68. 21

printed drama. . . In the years after 1642, when playreading became the only legitimate form of theatrical pleasure, the individual reading act grew more and more to be imagined as a substitute for playgoing, rather than extension of it.41

The theatre ban marks a moment of ﬁssure: prior to 1642, early modern playbooks and performance were generally seen as two “modules of a single cultural activity”42 (a

closeness revealed by continued aﬃnity between the two mediums after 1642). Between

1642 and 1660, however, early modern drama on the stage and page were increasingly

treated as potentially separate cultural experiences. This separation laid the foundation for early modern plays’ reception after 1660, when we see divergent trajectories in their

performance and publication. For example, Restoration and eighteenth-century perform-

ers staged heavily adapted versions of Shakespeare’s plays at precisely the same moment

that editors were preoccupied with determining the “authentic” canon of Shakespeare in

print. This estrangement of dramatic publication from performance was made possible by the dissociation of stage and page during the ban. While pre-1642 notions of the

congruence between stage and page continued after 1642, with the theatre ban, a notion

emerged that stage and page are dissimilar modes of production, a view which lasted

after 1660 and continues to inform our understandings of drama.

The early modern perception of dramatic medium is of intrinsic interest. It is also in-

strumental in the story of how English plays became literature. Critics have oﬀered

various answers to the question of how and when English playbooks transitioned from

sub-literary “riffe raffes and baggage books” (to use Thomas Bodley’s oft-quoted characterization) to literature.43 Early on, scholars have identified the era of the theatre ban

41Straznicky, Privacy, pp. 68-70. 42Preiss, p. 57. 43On the “sub-literary” status of English drama, see Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, p. 31. The literary status of Shakespeare was most famously expressed by Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. A related debate involves whether the category of the literary as we now recognize it even existed in the early modern period, such that plays could be slotted into this pre-existing category of the literary. 22 as a crucial moment in the cultural elevation of English drama. Louis B. Wright ended his 1934 essay with a passage worth quoting at length, as it anticipates many of the later discussions about the origins and evolution of English drama’s literary status:

The focusing of attention upon the reading of plays, a natural result of the prohibition of acting, tended to increase the prestige of drama as literature. . . Play reading had become so well established during the ﬁrst four decades of the seventeenth century that, when Parliament made theatrical performances illegal, it was only natural that lovers of drama should resort to the booksellers for diverting plays. By that time, drama had come to occupy a literary position as honourable as that held by fashionable romances and non-dramatic poetry. The long course in drama reading which the Puritan revolution unwittingly induced as merely one more inﬂuence to strengthen the position of plays as good literature.44

Others followed Wright’s belief that the closure of the theatres led to English drama’s widespread acceptance as literature, thanks to the increases in dramatic publication and reading. In a 2003 article, David Scott Kastan remarks in passing that “paradoxically, the closing of the theatres helped to preserve the plays that made up the dramatic reper- toire (and arguably even ensured the successful transformation of drama into a literary form) by intensifying the market for published playbooks.”45 Yet simply existing in popular printed forms was no guarantee of literary status, as Bodley’s comments remind us. Paulina Kewes argues that the theatre ban freed playbooks from their stigmatizing associations with the unsavory stage, enabling their cultural elevation:

Although the Puritan authorities never succeeded in eradicating all theatrical activity, the oﬃcial ban on play-acting eﬀected a notable reversal in the man- As Adam G. Hooks puts it, “To classify early modern drama as either literary or subliterary presumes either that the category of the literary already existed in something resembling its modern form and that plays were a part of it, or that they had yet to attain that status but would eventually be incorporated into it.” Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade(CUP, 2016), pp. 28- 9. David Scott Kastan explores a similar question in “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisentein, eds. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist and Eleanor F. Shevlin (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), p. 110. 44Wright, pp. 107-8. 45Kastan, “Performance and Publication,” p. 176. 23

ner of transmission and consumption of plays. Play publishing boomed: the playbook replaced live performance; reading supplanted watching. Removed from the undigniﬁed sphere of theatrical production, plays began to acquire a new cultural respectability.46

Kewes correctly states that the ban transformed the transmission and consumption of plays, and consequently elevated English drama’s cultural status, but the process is not quite as she describes. Even after the theatres remained closed for nearly two decades, in the minds of most readers, the playbooks were never entirely “removed from the undigniﬁed sphere of theatrical production,” since playbooks continued to announce their theatrical origins. Ann Baynes Coiro makes a similar argument from a diﬀerent angle, arguing that, thanks to the publishing activities of the Civil War, print lost its stigma, enabling English playbooks to be accepted as poetry:

Two generations earlier, Ben Jonson had tried, without much success, to elevate masques and plays above theatre’s transitory materiality by printing them as ‘dramatic poems’. After the collapse of press censorship in 1642 and the resulting ﬂood of pamphlets and books, however, print had lost its stigma. And the combination of print’s dominance and the concomitant stage ban ﬁnally accelerated theatre’s alchemical change into dramatic poetry.47

Again, while I agree that the era of the theatre ban “ﬁnally accelerated theatre’s alchemical change into dramatic poetry,” it did not occur in quite the way that Coiro describes.

For one thing, the “the ﬂood of pamphlet and book publishing” in the Civil War was highly fraught in this period, certainly not highly and self-evidently respectable.

To be considered “literary,” an English play must first be printed. But a textual existence is not sufficient for a play to acquire a literary status. Nor did playbooks shed their associations with the theatre; and even if print lost its stigma, printed texts did not necessarily 46Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710, (CUP, 1998), p. 27. 47Ann Baynes Coiro, “Reading” in Early Modern Theatricality ed. Henry Turner (OUP: 2015), p. 535. 24 attain the level of poetry. But a remarkable comment in Edmund Gayton’s Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote (1654) reveals the how the theatre ban initiated processes that cemented English drama’s literary status. Though the stage is silent, Gayton writes, printed plays “stand firm, and are read with as much satisfaction as when presented on the stage they were with applause and honour. Indeed, their names now may very well be chang’d and call’d the works not plays of Johnson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cartwright and the rest, which are survivors of the stage.”48 Gayton’s comments reveal how theatrical nostalgia was the crucial factor in English drama’s literary elevation. In 1616,

Ben Jonson had been mocked for his presumption for printing his plays and calling them

Works. By 1654, when Gayton argued not only Jonson, but the plays of “Beaumont, Fletcher, Cartwright and the rest” – ‘the rest’ encompassing all of English professional drama? – were “works” of enduring cultural value. After the theatres closed, readers and stationers idealized the absent medium of the stage. Thanks to nostalgia, theatrical stigma was transformed into prestige: once viewed as undigniﬁed, from the perspective of 1654, the stage was something deserving of “applause and honor.” Playbooks were artifacts of this bygone era, treasured as the remnants of a theatrical culture that was now extinct: in Gayton’s words, the “survivors” of “our late stage.” The theatre ban settled the long-standing aesthetic debate about the value of English drama. The retrospective idealization of English professional theatre after 1642 conﬁrmed the literary status of English playbooks.

A Play without a Stage: English Renaissance Drama, 1642-1660 argues that the genre and critical ﬁeld of early modern drama as we know it was created during the era of the English theatre ban. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed English

Renaissance theatre – theatres were closed, demolished, converted into tenements and once famous actors and playwrights, now unemployed, died in poverty – the professional

48Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot (William Hunt, 1654), p. 273. 25 drama of 1576-1642 not only lived on, but thrived, in print. A Play without a Stage argues that the death of contemporary English theatre gave birth to English Renaissance drama.

The seeds of this ﬁeld – that is, of the modern canon, the editorial and performance traditions, and Shakespeare’s supremacy in all – were planted not in the eighteenth, but in the mid-seventeenth century.

My dissertation consists of ﬁve chapters. Chapter 1, “Dead Theatre,” explores how playwrights, players, stationers, and audiences grappled with the prohibition on playing and how theatrical nostalgia transformed the status of English plays. Though initially the

1642 ordinance banning theatre seemed temporary, by the late 1640s, it was evident that the theatres would not reopen. Contemporaries characterized the ban as the “death” of theatre, and the text provided the only life for the play after 1642. The press overtook the stage as the primary dispenser of dramatic novelty and excitement: dramatic publication increased, especially first editions of pre-1642 professional plays. These plays, at once new and old, were marketed in terms of novelty and finitude: they represented the latest offerings of a tradition that had ended. Novelty was an obvious selling point during this period of theatrical dearth, and the looming sense of dramatic conclusion encouraged buyers to buy new plays while they still could. The 1650s spike in dramatic publication was attended by an uptick in dramatic paratexts. In commendatory verses, epistles and dedications, commentators sought to articulate the nature and value of plays amidst the silence of the stage. Reading was commended as the best form of dramatic consumption, and the playbook was variously conceived as the “relic” or the “survivor” of the stage: a treasured remnant of the idealized, absent past. Frank Kermode defines literary classics as “old books that people still read.”49 The theatre ban transformed English plays into textual objects from another era – that is, it made them seem both older and more bookish – facilitating their widespread acceptance as literature.

49Frank Kermode, The Classic (Viking Press, 1975), p. 43. 26

My second chapter, “Playing the Old Play” examines illegal theatrical revivals and legal performances of new plays between 1642 and 1660, and illuminates the connections between drama and politics during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Modern critics often interpret the illicit performances of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays in the 1640s as gestures of royalist solidarity, owing to the Royalist politics of the dramatists and their plays. I argue instead that the performance of old plays – any old plays – was subversive thanks to their stage history – irrespective of content. By contrast, plays newly written by James Shirley and William Davenant in the 1650s were neutral because they did not have the same fraught associations with pre-1642 politics and culture. Though professional drama was not necessarily Royalist, many highlighted the undeniable fact that the Parliament which closed the playhouses also opposed the court and executed Charles I.

Royalist commentators claimed English drama as their own: indeed, the modern critical commonplace that early modern drama espouses royalist or absolutist values originates in this period. I examine speciﬁc instances of illegal performance – raided performances of Beaumont and Fletcher plays in the late 1640s, a disastrous performance of Mucedorus in 1655, and short comic playlets (“drolls”) excerpted from pre-war plays performed in the 1640s and 1650s – to reveal their complex cultural and political meanings. People continued to stage and see plays not only as a form of Puritan revenge, but because they liked plays, and because these activities provided a satisfying connection to the past. Tellingly, both supporters and opponents of the theatre respectively praised and objected to the continued performance of “old plays.” By contrast, I argue that the politically ambiguous plays of Shirley and Davenant were sanctioned for performance in the 1650s in large part because of their novelty.

Chapter 3, “Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660” addresses Shakespeare’s mysterious decline in print in this period, relative both to his dramatic contemporaries and to his own previous and future rates of publication. I argue 27 that unpopularity is an inadequate explanation for his decline. Rather, a combination of the quotidian trials and trends of the book trade – legal battles, political turmoil and concomitant rise in political publication, playbook stationers’ increased attention to ﬁrst editions, and the deaths of stationers likely to reprint Shakespeare – all contributed to

Shakespeare’s relative absence in print between 1642 and 1660. I also examine the three Shakespeare quartos published during the period: Merchant of Venice (Q3 1652) and

Othello (Q3 1655), both printed by William Leake, and Jane Bell’s King Lear(Q3 1655).

These plays function as one might expect any reprint of an older play: they capitalize on nostalgia even as they glance at contemporary events. Respectively coinciding with Par- liamentary debates surrounding the readmission of the Jews to England, and the recent English victory over the Barbary corsairs, Leake’s Merchant and Othello attempt to oﬀer

relevant commentary on contemporary political events. At the same time, the editions

feature decades-old performance attributions, and their title pages each feature a large

crown, the printer’s mark Leake began using after 1650, all which suggests that Leake was trading on Elizabethan and early Jacobean nostalgia. With her edition of King Lear,

Bell accidentally infringed upon the stationer Miles Flesher’s rights: she confused Lear

with King Leir, the chronicle play which she actually owned. I untangle the ongoing

confusions between Leir and Lear in the Stationers’ Register to reveal that, while mod-

ern critics typically contrast “old fashioned” Leir with supposedly timeless Lear, in the Interregnum the two plays were frequently confused, indicating that Shakespeare was

by then known as the author of old plays like Leir. I conclude with an examination of

the fourteen Shakespearean misattributions in the two comprehensive play catalogues

of 1656, arguing that they reveal the types of plays associated with Shakespeare in the

period: popular old plays, tragedies involving fathers and sons, history plays, and plays from big books. Despite little new print publication between 1642 and 1660, Shakespeare

and his plays were always around, but Shakespeare’s name and his plays had by this time

become separated. Old Shakespeare was a well-known dramatist – but for which plays, 28 exactly, was not always clear.

Chapter 4, “1650s Compendia of Early Modern Drama,” examines the emergence of three new dramatic forms in print in the 1650s: serialized collections of “new plays,” the commonplace book composed exclusively of dramatic excerpts, and the comprehensive catalogue of English plays in print. These forms reveal how, far from being a dead zone, the theatre ban sparked dramatic innovation. Deprived of new professional plays, resourceful stationers repackaged older compositions in new ways. Humphrey Moseley’s

New Plays collections of previously unprinted professional plays helped establish a new textual ﬁeld of drama. Moseley’s preoccupation with novelty ensured the survival of many plays that might be otherwise lost, and his regularized editions canonized new dramatists.

Theatrical dearth encouraged the preservation of English drama; the title of John Cot- grave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655), the ﬁrst dramatic commonplace

book and anthology, spotlights the volume’s conservatory function. Commonplacing was a key tool of humanist education; feeling that the “dramatic poem” was “lately too much

slighted,” Cotgrave produced a volume that asserted the genre’s prestige.50The next year

witnessed the ﬁrst two attempts to comprehensively catalogue English printed drama,

with William Rogers and Richard Ley’s “Exact and perfect Catologue of all Playes that

are Printed” (1656) and Edward Archer’s “Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the Plaies that were ever printed” (1656). Without an active theatre industry, for the ﬁrst time it

was possible to create a complete and ﬁxed corpus of English plays. These encyclopedic

lists oﬀer an overview of English drama, and assert that the genre is worthy of commem-

oration and enumeration. I read these three compendia as sites where notions of the genre and critical ﬁeld of Renaissance drama begin to come into being.

My ﬁnal chapter, “A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660” examines the

rhetorical and critical conceptions of the theatre ban from the Restoration to the present.

50John Cotgrave, The English Treasury of Wit and Language (Humphrey Moseley, 1655), A3r. 29

Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) mandated a policy of forgetting the two previous decades in the hopes of fostering reconciliation. The theatre ban was one of many events that contemporaries tried to blot out, and the few Restoration discussions of the ban are characterized by circumspection. Of course, such forced attempts at forgetting are bound to fail, as one must call to mind the very thing one wants to forget: even as the restored theatre claimed continuities with the pre-1642 stage, the theatre ban and its eﬀects exerted its ghostly presence on Restoration drama. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the revived anti-theatricalism of Jeremy Collier and his ilk revived fears of theatrical closure; but Collier’s Jacobite politics confused the previously clear associations between pro-Stuart politics and pro-drama attitudes. With the ascendancy of Shakespeare starting in the eighteenth century, many Shakespeare scholars simply ignored the ban: for them, the most important moment of theatrical conclusion was

Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The scholars who acknowledged the prohibition discussed it terms of Shakespeare: how the ban aﬀected the players of Shakespeare’s theatre company and the afterlives of his plays. Many nineteenth-century critics overlooked the ban, but the Romantic critics who advocated reading as the best way to engage with Shakespeare’s plays were in part “discovering” a way of encountering the plays that had its roots, and some powerful early iterations, in the time of the ban. In the 1920s and 1930s, despite the publication of Hyder Rollins, Leslie Hotson, and Louis Wright’s thorough, widely read taxonomic surveys of dramatic and theatrical activity during the prohibition, the old critical chestnuts about the theatre ban continued to persist in general criticism.

I conclude with an analysis of the role that the theatre ban has played in the ﬁeld of English Renaissance drama in the last century, as both a dramatic lacunae and an unforgiveable repudiation of theatre, which modern criticism has endeavored to remedy with scholarship that celebrates English drama.

As this introduction indicates, nostalgia for the theatre between 1642 and 1660 pro- 30 foundly inﬂuenced how English drama was perceived, both in the period itself and in the centuries that followed. The Royalists who were nostalgic for the old monarchial order co-opted English drama to their own political agenda, creating the myth of En- glish Renaissance drama’s royalist politics which endures in criticism to this day. By the late 1640s, the ostensibly temporary ordinance of 1642 was already recognized as a sharp conclusion to the professional theatre industry of the previous sixty years, whereby a wide variety of dramatic material written before 1642 was consolidated into a single category of “old plays.” Modern criticism continues to regard 1642 as the conceptual and chronological limit of Renaissance drama; the same coherent group of “old plays” represents the primary object of study in our own ﬁeld, but now we call it Renaissance drama. Playbooks, previously seen as the printed iterations of morally dubious contemporary drama, were now regarded as the venerable relics of the idealized, absent theatre.

Dramatic stationers capitalized on theatrical nostalgia, publishing playbooks, catalogues and commonplace books for readers whose appetite for plays was whetted by the theatre’s absence. The stationers’ eﬀorts, to be sure, were commercially motivated. But the texts they produced also ensured the survival of many plays in the early modern dramatic canon, and their presentation of the drama helped establish English Renaissance drama as a coherent ﬁeld, period and genre. Theatrical nostalgia made it possible for the anonymous antiquary visiting the Tabard Inn in 1643 to see the theatrical activities of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Richard Burbage as part of the same serious literary tradition as Chaucer. As this anecdote suggests, however, the birth of English

Renaissance drama as a coherent literary category did not entail that the dramatists be remade into reﬁned “literary dramatists.” Instead, the artistic achievement of the

“roystering associates” of the English stage was only loved when it was lacked. Chapter 1

Dead Theatre

“Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there needs none to be blamed.”

-Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1. 346.

Modern criticism typically regards the theatre ban as a monolithic period of eighteen empty years. Yet contemporary responses to the prohibition were not uniform in 1642, and the various attitudes continued to evolve as the theatre ban stretched into nearly two decades. Initially commentators saw the 1642 prohibition as a variation on one of the many closures related to outbreaks of the plague or public mourning enacted over the professional theatre industry’s sixty-six-year history: a temporary, pragmatic expedient in response to an immediate crisis. Many early responses are characterized by great uncertainty, vacillating between cautious hope that the playhouses would eventually reopen, as they always had before, and fear that they would remain closed. As years without a legal public performance turned into decades, it became increasingly clear that things would be diﬀerent this time. The extended closure destroyed the professional theatre industry that had endured for the last six decades. The theatre ban became

31 Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 32 an established fact: hope that theatre would resume was increasingly replaced with resignation to the new reality of England without public theatre. Many mourned the absent theatre and described the theatre ban as a form of death, a metaphor literalized by the rising body count of starving English actors, and, after the regicide in 1649, the fact that those who publicly executed Charles I also “killed” the theatres.

Despite, or, rather, because of the decline of commercial theatre, English professional drama thrived in print in this period. Playbook publishing spiked in the 1650s, as stationers capitalized on a public appetite for plays whetted by live theatre’s absence.

Instead of (or often in addition to), dwelling on the loss of theatre, many commentators celebrated the survival of English plays in print, ironically spurred by the ban itself. In his dedicatory poem to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, Comedies and Tragedies (1647),

Richard Brome remarks: “You that are worthy, may by intercession,/ Find entertainment at the next impression.” In his dedication to the same volume, Thomas Stanley notes the same irony, and conﬂates English printed plays’ material and cultural endurance:

They that silenc’d Wit Are now the authors to Eternize it; Thus Poets are in spite of Fate reviv’d, And Playes by Intermission longer liv’d.1

The press does not merely produce ephemeral “entertainment” as Brome would have it, but also ensures that the poets’ wit will be memorialized for eternity. The diﬀering opinions on the status of the printed play within a single collection capture the conﬂicting attitudes within a single moment of the theatre ban, and suggest how much ideas about plays evolved over eighteen years.

Texts provided the only legitimate life for plays between 1642 and 1660. This chapter

1Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (Humphrey Moseley and Humphrey Robinson, 1647), B4v. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 33 explores how this fact transformed the lives of dramatic producers and consumers and consequently the status of English plays. What did it mean to produce or read a printed play within this period of theatrical uncertainty and silence? Literate spectators became (or continued to be) readers; illiterate ones were largely excluded from consuming drama. Unemployed professional playwrights, players, and theatrical personnel changed careers, performed illegally, or died in penury. Contemporaries recognized that print had the potential to “revive” actors’ livelihoods as much as the plays themselves: some players became stationers, and others had playbooks printed on their behalf. Dramatic paratexts, long a feature of playbooks, proliferated in this period. They provided spaces for playwrights, actors and other readers to voice opinions about the nature of English drama. In paratexts and other arenas of dramatic commentary, some argued that printed plays fully revived English drama, or at least ensured the survival of English plays until playing resumed. The burst of “new” previously unprinted plays and the vibrant commentary that played out in dramatic paratexts revealed that the stage did not have a monopoly on dramatic novelty and excitement. Others argued that drama’s enforced shift from stage to page ensured not only its material endurance, but also its cultural respectability: drama’s exclusively literate audience could carefully study the text, away from the sensual distractions of the stage. Still others were less optimistic about the text’s ability to revive theatre, and described playbooks as the printed remains or “relics” of a theatrical culture that was extinct.

The rhetoric of dramatic publication is hence marked by the contrasting pressures of dramatic novelty and ﬁnitude. The continued production of the dramatic press oﬀered hope, energy and freshness that was a welcome contrast to the silence and sterility of the stage. The ban freed up previously unprinted plays for publication; yet stationers were well aware that without an active industry writing plays, the stock of their much vaunted “new” plays would eventually run out. Once the “last new plays” had all been Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 34 published (and stationers suggested by the 1650s they had), all English plays were now old plays, in terms of composition, performance and publication.

1 1642-1648: Dramatic Abundance in “A Long Win-

ter”

In the early 1640s, no one could have anticipated how long the playhouses would remain closed. Multi-year closures were not unprecedented: since the ﬁrst purpose-built theatre was constructed in 1576, the professional theatre industry had been interrupted for extended periods in in 1592-94, 1603-05, 1609-11, and more recently in 1632 and 1636-37.

To be sure, lengthy closures were supremely disruptive to the playwrights, actors and other personnel who worked within the industry. Shakespeare likely wrote Venus and

Adonis during the virulent plague outbreak of 1592-94, the routine closure forcing Shake- speare “to boil his pot by his pen,” as J. M. Robertson put it, and shift from writing drama to narrative poetry.2 The various petitions to resume acting during the 1636-1637 plague invoked players’ poverty and suﬀering during the interruption. After extended hiatuses, many companies folded altogether, and companies that remained intact would often see a reshuﬄing of theatrical conditions.3 Yet prior to 1642, the beleaguered theatre industry always returned, albeit sometimes the worse for wear.

Early reactions to the theatrical ordinance of 1642 display great uncertainty. There was no institutional memory of a gap of this kind – provoked by war rather than the plague or public mourning, and implemented by Parliament, not the London authorities

2J. M. Robertson, The Genuine in Shakespeare: A Conspectus (Routledge, 1930), p. 34. 3See Ellen MacKay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Cornell UP, 1991). Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 35

– or, after 1644, of this duration. Richard Brome’s description of the 1642 ban as “the epidemical ruin of the scene,” suggests how the plague closures were seen as a precursor to this one, and many initial responses to the 1642 edict echoed responses towards pre- war plague closures: people involved in theatrical production expressed frustration with the loss of livelihood, worried that the theatres would remain closed, but also expected that the theatres would eventually reopen, A pamphlet published in response to the

1641 plague closures,The Stage Players Complaint. A pleasant dialogue between Cane of the Fortune and Reed of the Friers, deploring their sad and solitary condition for the want of Imployment In this heavie and contagious time of the Plague in London

(1641) captures this uncertainty. Two stage clowns, Andrew Cane, of the Prince’s Men (nicknamed “Quick”), and Timothy Reed of the King’s Revels (“Light”), debate the fate of the theatres. After reminiscing about happier days “when my tongue have ranne. . . fast upon the scaene,” and “when my heeles have capoured over the stage”, Quick concludes that “(alas) we must looke for no more of these times I feare.”4 Quick’s view is not dismissed outright, even when recent plague closures (the last one for three months)

would suggest that they were unfounded. Light oﬀers various reasons why theatres

will indeed reopen, dwelling on the actor’s contribution to society: “in a word we are

so needful for the Common good, that in some respect it were almost a sinne to put

us down.” Quick remains unconvinced; and the pamphlet closes without anticipating either outcome. It ends, instead, with a prayer, that “From Plague, Pestilence and

Famine, From Battell, Murder, and Suddaine Death: Good Lord deliver us.” God, not

human agents, is responsible for the plague, and, consequently, the closures. Light and

Quick don’t wish that the City authorities would reopen the theatres: they acknowledge

that such provisions are needed in these times of “dangerous” sickness that “increaseth weekly.”5

4The Stage Players Complaint (Tho. Bates, 1641), A3r. 5The Stage Players Complaint, A4r-A4v. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 36

Theatrical pamphlets printed in the early days of the ban continued to vacillate between hope that the theatres would eventually reopen, and the worry that they would remain closed. In the anonymous publication The Actors Remonstrance or complaint for the silencing of their profession and banishment from their several play-houses (1643),

a spokesman for the profession laments that players are “languishing to death under the burthen of a long (and for ought wee know) everlasting restraint,” and complains

that they are “now condemned to a perpetuall, at least a very long temporary silence.”

Like The Stage Players Complaint, the speaker also asserts actors’ contributions to so-

ciety: the player’s work is the basis of an entire theatre industry composed of “house-

keepers,” “sharers,” “hired-men,” “fools,” “boys,” “door-keepers,” “music[ians],” “tire- men,” “tobacco-men,” and “poets.”6 Yet while the cheerful, fatalistic Stage Players

Complaint prays that the theatres will reopen, The Actors Remonstrance rails against

the human agents who have condemned actors to an uncertain future. This closure is

prompted not by the immediate and familiar danger of disease, but by an ideologically- inﬂected concern about “public calamity.” “Those powers who conﬁned us to silence,”

unfairly focus on “stage-plays, only of all public recreations are prohibited” while “the

exercise at the Bears College, and the motions of the puppets, being still in vigour.”The

pamphlet evokes the dire straits of unemployed actors: the ban has led to “the great

impoverishment and utter undoing of ourselves, wives, children and dependents” and has put the entire theatre industry out of work. After only a year of closure – well within

length of previous episodes – the author suggests that “such a terrible distress and dis-

solution hath befallen us, and all those that had dependence on the stage, that it hath

quite unmade our hopes of future recovery.”7 This description of the players’ total ruin is

belied somewhat by the author’s claim about players’ readiness to resume playing should the authorities remove the ban. It correctly predicts, however, the decimation of the

theatre industry as the prohibition endured for nearly two decades.

6The Actors Remonstrance (Edw. Nickson, 1643), pp. 6-7. 7The Actors Remonstrance, t.p., pp. 4, 6-7. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 37

Amid the uncertainty and anger about the theatre closures, and the profound disruption to the lives of theatrical personnel, there was hope that the press would allow English plays to live on in another way. In his commendatory poem to the Beaumont and Fletcher

ﬁrst folio, Richard Brome is somewhat ambivalent about print’s vitality, but suggests that publication ensures some measure of survival in anticipation of playing’s return:

In the ﬁrst year, our famous Fletcher fell, Of good King Charles who graced these poems well, Being then in life of action, but they died, Since the King’s absence or were laid aside, As is their poet. Now at the report, Of the King’s second coming to his court The books creep from the press to life not action; Crying onto the world, that no protraction May hinder Sacred Majesty to give Fletcher, in them, leave on the stage to live.8

The printing press kept English plays alive, but in a diminished form: “life not action” occupies a middle ground between the “life of action” of theatrical performance, and the total “death” of that tradition if both stage and press are inactive. In contrast to lively stage performance, the books slowly creep from the press, preserving Fletcher’s poems, but also announcing what Brome sees as the inevitable return of Charles I and stage. In

1647, Charles I returned from exile; there was still a sense that the king and Parliament might make a deal. The hope that England would return to its pre-1642 state is reﬂected in Brome’s description of the “King’s second coming to his court” which heralds the return of performance, which itself “cr[ied] onto the world” by dramatic publication, a stopgap measure until the moment when once again have “leave on the stage to live.”

Printed drama does not fully redeem, but only mitigates the loss of performance, and yet it also promises that the loss of theatre is not absolute. Brome’s expectation of the

8Richard Brome, “To the memory of the deceased but ever-living Author in these Poems, Mr. JOHN FLETCHER” in Comedies and Tragedies (1647), g1r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 38

“second coming” of the stage is the obverse of nostalgia – it expresses hope that playing will resume, along with the restoration of Charles I.

In the same folio, a dedicatory epistle signed by ten sharers of the King’s Men articulates another view of drama on the stage and in print in this period. The King’s Servants also stop short of characterizing the ban as permanent, but with fewer options for alternative employment, the actors are rather more pessimistic about their prospects. However, the fact that ten principal actors of a major playing company were able to unite and contribute to the folio belies such pessimism. It reveals that even five years into the prohibition, a significant portion of pre-1642 actors would be able to pick up where they left off should playing suddenly resume; indeed, as I demonstrate below, a significant portion of the King’s Servants staged illicit performances together in the late 1640s.9

Yet in their address to Philip Herbert, Earle of Pembroke and Montgomery, the actors

look nostalgically on happier days and bemoan the state of aﬀairs, unaware that their fortunes would precipitously fall in the coming years:

Bound to your Lordship’s most constant and diﬀusive Goodness, from which, wee did for many calme years derive a subsistence to ourselves, and protection to the scene (now withered, and condemn’d, as we fear, to a long Winter and Sterilitie).10

Still, once again the loss of theatre is not yet absolute – King’s Servants express tentative

“fear,” and their description of the hiatus as a “long Winter” maintains hope and antic-

ipation for a spring-like return of theatrical abundance. In the interim, the Beaumont

and Fletcher folio oﬀers itself as a cornucopia of drama. It bursts with fresh dramatic

content: thirty-ﬁve previously unprinted plays (more on those below) and thirty-seven

9See Chapter 2; see also Milhous and Hume, “New Light.” 10John Lowin, Joseph Taylor, Richard Robinson, Robert Benﬁeld, Eyllaerdt Swanston, Thomas Pol- lard, Hugh Clark, William Allen, Stephen Hammerton, and Theophilus Bird, “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to Philip Herbert, 1st Earl of Montgomery and 4th Earl of Pembroke, in Comedies and Tragedies (1647), A2r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 39 commendatory poems, two addresses to the reader, and one dedication, until then the most proliﬁc prefatory matter in printed professional drama.

The theatre ban transformed the socio-economically disparate dramatic audiences into an exclusively literate group. The reader no longer risked being associated with the theatrical mob, but instead was part of a smaller, literate audience who represented the new “judges” of English drama, as Thomas May put it in his commendatory poem to

James Shirley’s Poems &c. (1646):

Although thou want the Theaters applause, Which now is ﬁtly silenc’d by the Lawes, [. . . ] [. . . ] The Presse alone Can vindicate from dark oblivion Thy Poems, Friend; those that with skill can read, Shall be thy Judges now, and shall instead Of ignorant spectators, grace thy name, Though with a narrower, yet a truer Fame, And crown with longer life thy worthy pains.11

Conﬁned to print, English drama has a “narrower, yet truer fame,” and discards the vulgar praise of “ignorant spectators.” The most visible of the new “judges” of English drama were the authors of paratextual poems. These judges represent an incipient au- thorizing institution of English drama. A familiar feature of commercial drama, the use of dedications, epistles, and commendatory poems had gradually increased from the mid- sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. Lukas Erne argues that paratexts “endowed playbooks with literary cachet,” and that their increased use is reﬂective of “the process by which commercial drama was increasingly endowed with literary respectability in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”12 After 1642, there is a marked increase in dramatic paratexts – both in terms of individual volumes with paratexts and the num-

11Thomas May, “To my honoured Friend M. Ja. Shirley, Upon the printing of his Elegant Poems,” in Poems &c. (Humphrey Moseley, 1646), A5r. 12Lukas Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade (CUP, 2014), p. 99. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 40 ber of paratexts attached to individual volumes. Following Erne’s argument, the sheer increase in the numbers of paratexts would elevate English drama’s cultural respectability after 1642. But the printed paratext also provided a space to debate questions about the value of drama and the nature of the dramatic medium which were prompted by the theatre ban. Moseley clearly relished the opportunity to assert that his plays were complex, valuable texts that warranted sustained commentary by renowned literary and political

ﬁgures. The conversations within and across dramatic paratexts reveal how they became an important space for dramatic criticism, and this criticism lastingly shaped views of drama. For example, as Michael Gavin has demonstrated, the Royalist commentators who supplied the prefatory matter playbooks printed by Moseley are largely responsible for the impression that the dramatists were Royalist.13 My primary goal here is to explore their conceptions of dramatic medium. Moseley outdid his own record of thirty-seven commendatory poems established with the Beaumont and Fletcher folio when he printed a posthumous octavo collection of the plays of William Cartwright in 1651, with an unprecedented ﬁfty-three prefatory poems. As we shall see, though the copious prefatory matter bespeaks the prestige of Cartwright’s plays, and reveals the press as a supplier of engaging dramatic ideas, the volume was parodied for its excessive dramatic commentary.

The rise in paratexts after 1642 marks how the ban shifted dramatic commentary from the playhouse to the printing house. Where once dramatic criticism was produced in prologues and epilogues, now it occurred in extra-dramatic paratexts, at a clear remove form the original theatrical production. The rise in paratexts reveals how after 1642, drama was no longer something one did; English drama had become something to write about.

In the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, the playwright James Shirley describes the superiority of reading plays over watching them, and in so doing, reveals how the theatre ban

13Michael Gavin,The Invention of English Criticism, 1650-1750 (CUP, 2015), pp. 25-27. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 41 ensured English drama’s transformation into literature. Shirley reﬂects on the loss of the stage, but instead of lamenting its loss or anticipating its return, he advocates the printed text as a worthy substitute, suggesting that the silence of the stage improved dramatic reading:

And now Reader in this Tragical Age where the theatre hath been so much out-acted, congratulate thy owne happiness, that in this silence of the stage, thou hast a liberty to reade these inimitable plays, to dwell and converse in these immortal Groves, which were only shewd our Fathers in a conjuring glass, as suddenly removed as represented, the landscrap is now brought home by this optick, and the presse thought too pregnant before, shall be now look’d upon as greatest benefactor to Englishmen, that must acknowledge all the felicity of wit and words to this derivation.14

Shirley suggests that the forced transition from stage to page is nevertheless a fortuitous one – the elder generation of “fathers” were bewildered by ﬂeeting performance, but the current generation enjoys silent, careful perusals of the text. The “contrast between the

“conjuring glass” of the stage play and the “optick” of the playbook further specifies how the products of the press acquired a cultural status apart and above that of their staged counterparts once the latter were largely eliminated. The “conjuring” stage play was distracting, nearly magical ephemera, while the playbook is an “optick,” or a “scientific instrument for the educated,” employed by the studious reader.15 In performance, actors are largely in control of the dramatic experience, selecting what to stage and when, and the spectator watches the stage play flowing by in a single direction. The printed play affords the audience unprecedented “liberty” and immersion in the play, suggested by

Shirley’s spatial metaphors of dwelling and the “lanscrap” “brought home.” As Claire

M. L. Bourne argues, “Shirley’s metaphor of dwelling suggests” that unlike watching a performance, “reading can move in BOTH directions – readers always have ready, material access to what has come before, whether for reference, reﬂection, interpretation,

14James Shirley, “To the Reader,” in Comedies and Tragedies (1647), A3r. 15Baynes Coiro, “Reading,” p. 547. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 42 or some other use.”16The domestication of the landscape further indicates how ownership granted the reader new control over plays. When the text is “brought home,” the owner can select which plays to read and when, can control the rate and intensity of reading

– fast or slow, cursory or detailed - can read discontinuously, or in multiple directions.

Shirley’s reference to conversation in immortal groves also evokes the practices of classical learning. No longer a passive spectator overawed by the sensual spectacle of performance, the reader engages in active conversation with the edifying text. Later in the preface,

Shirley unites the reader’s experience of both immersion and control when he describes the eﬀects of dramatic reading:

You may here ﬁnd passions raised to that excellent pitch and by such insin- uating degrees that you shall not chuse but consent and go along with them, ﬁnding yourself at last grown insensibly the very same person you read, and then stand admiring the subtile tracks of your engagement.17

Reading produces intense self-identiﬁcation with the character (unmediated by the stage), but also allows for the critical distance required for careful study of the text, and which is not oﬀered by the bewitching conjuring glass of the stage.

Reading professional playbooks dates back nearly to the advent of professional theatre

– one might argue that playbooks aﬀorded readers such control over plays before 1642.

But Shirley indicates that only once the stage is silent and reading becomes the primary mode of engagement does English drama acquire a literary status. As we’ve seen, before

1642 plays on the stage and page are seen as two portions of a single cultural event; the ban made it easier to dissociate the two mediums, partly by prompting sustained public discourse on the nature of and relationship between page and stage, exempliﬁed by Shirley’s remarks. The estrangement of dramatic reading from performance facilitates

16Claire M. L. Bourne,”’High Designe’: Beaumont and Fletcher Illustrated,” English Literary Renais- sance 44.2 (2014), p. 291. 17Shirley, “To the Reader,” A3r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 43 serious, studious reading independent of the sensual, ﬂeeting distractions of the stage. The theatre ban also casts the dramatic printing press and its products in a new light.

The removal of one medium prompts people to value the remainder all the more: “the press thought too pregnant before” i.e. prior to 1642, “shall now be looked upon as the greatest benefactor to English men.” Hence while English playbooks had long existed, the theatre ban transformed the dramatic press into the most important producer of

English culture. Shirley here anticipates how printed Renaissance drama came to be regarded as the foremost literary genre in English, and indicates that the process was sparked by the elimination of the stage.

In his stationer’s address to the folio, Moseley also suggested that the play reached its full realization in print. He capitalized on drama’s near-exclusive existence in print. For the ﬁrst time, stationers dominated dramatic consumption: in addition to being the sole legal providers of dramatic entertainment, they shaped the conversation about dramatic consumption in ways that emphasized the authority and value of their dramatic medium.

When the theatres were open, playbooks were marketed as supplementary to the stage, as a way to relive the excitement of performance. Now, stationers could market their playbooks as the true realization of plays, as improvements over their ﬂawed theatrical iterations. Moseley, in his stationer’s address in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio explains:

One thing I must answer before it bee objected; ’tis this: When these Come- dies and Tragedies were presented on the stage, the actours omitted some scenes and passages (with the author’s consent) as occasion led them; and when private friends desir’d a Copy, they then (and justly too) transcribed what they acted. But now you have both All that was acted, and all that was not; even the perfect full Originals without the least mutilation.18

Print undoes the “mutilations” and “omissions” of the stage, and restores the “perfect,

18Humphrey Moseley, “The Stationer to the Readers,” in Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647), A4r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 44 full, original” text of the authors’ intention. Far from being an object of nostalgia, the play’s theatrical provenance is an inferior condition, an obstacle to dramatic enjoyment that can only be overcome through print. Moseley further capitalizes on the implications of stage plays’ migration into a new medium by excluding already printed plays, enabling him to play up the volume’s novelty:

You have here a new book; I can speak for it clearly, for of all of this large volume of comedies and tragedies, not one, till now, was ever printed before. A Collection of Plays is commonly but a new impression, the scattered pieces which were printed single, being then only republished together: Tis otherwise here.19

The primacy of a new medium transforms a multiplicity of old plays into “a new book,” a unified, commodified corpus. Amid the theatrical “winter,” which the King’s Servants alluded to in the same volume, Moseley’s textual drama blooms anew. But Moseley’s characterization of earlier collections as joining “scattered pieces” of already printed plays is patently untrue. As Moseley was well aware, half of the Shakespeare first folio

(1623), the volume on which he explicitly modeled the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, consists of previously unprinted material.20 Moseley’s knowing lie is of a piece with his tendency to exaggerate to sell more plays, but his emphasis on newness is a surprising rhetorical gesture, given that the volume features plays that would be uncontroversially old in terms of their composition and performance histories, including many comedies whose eﬀectiveness depended in their topicality, and whose relevance would have declined substantially from the initial moment of composition. It would be easy for Moseley to slip into the nostalgia expressed by the other contributors to the folio; his unexpected emphasis on novelty reveals how theatrical nostalgia represented a longing not only for plays, but for the process of theatre itself, in particular the constant generation of new

19Moseley, “The Stationer to the Readers,” A4r. 20On Moseley’s conscious emulation of Shakespeare F1, see Chapter 3. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 45 material. Moseley’s primary strategy in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio anticipates how printed drama was increasingly marketed as a source of dramatic novelty and excitement.

As the prohibition dragged on, the press supplanted the stage as the primary producer of English drama. But opinions diﬀered on the cultural meanings of the playbook – as remains, relics, or resurrections of the stage.

2 1648-1656: “The Press Acts” and Printed “Relics”

Until about 1648, contemporaries expected the “second coming” of both Charles I and the stage. Even though the Globe was demolished in 1644, and theatrical personnel had struggled, the physical spaces and human agents involved in the theatre had mostly survived, and indeed experienced a few minor victories. In 1646, the King’s Servants successfully petitioned Parliament for the back salary owed to them, and in 1647 and 1648 players began to stage illegal performances in the playhouses that still stood. Things took a turn for the worse around 1648, however. Doubtless thanks to players’ open

ﬂouting of the law, Parliament renewed the prohibition on playing twice in 1647 and twice more in 1648. The last and harshest edict, that of 9 February 1648, reintroduced the Elizabethan statue that made players into rogues and therefore subject to immediate arrest, and imposed new ﬁnes for spectators. This edict also ordered the demolition of the playhouses:

And it is further ordained that the Lord Mayor, justices of the peace and sheriﬀs of the City of London and Westminister and the counties of Mid- dlesex and Surrey. . . are authorized to pull down and demolish, to cause to be pulled down and demolished, all stages, galleries, seats and boxes, within their respective jurisdiction.21

21“An Ordinance for suppression of all stage plays and interludes,” 9 February 1647 (old calendar); 1648 (our calendar). Reproduced in Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, William Ingram, eds, English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660 (CUP: 2000), p. 133. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 46

On 24 March 1648, Parliamentary soldiers dismantled the interiors of Salisbury Court, The Phoenix (also known as the The Cockpit) and the Fortune. The most important theatre company of the period, the King’s Men also began to feel the worst of the lengthy interdiction; four principals who had signed the epistle to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio died within the next two years: Stephen Hammerton (c. 1614-1648), Richard Robinson (d. 1648), Thomas Pollard (d. 1649) and Richard Benﬁeld (d. 1649). Hammerton, the youngest sharer in the company in the 1640s, was a popular boy actor of female roles, and later a famous romantic lead. In 1699 James Wright described him as “at ﬁrst a most noted and beautiful woman actor, but afterwards he acted with equal Grace and

Applause, a Young Lover’s Part.”22, Contemporary reports of “Stephen,” identifiable by first name only, confirm his popularity. Shirley’s Epilogue to Suckling’s The Goblins announces “Oh if Stephen should be killed,/Or miss the lady, how the plot is spilled?”

Thomas Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding (performed 1641, printed in collection in

1664) similarly remarks: if “Stephen misses the Wench...that alone is enough to spoil the Play.”23 The details of Hammerton’s death are unclear; as he was in his late twenties or early thirties during the conflicts of the Civil War, perhaps he was one of the many actors who, as Wright claims, “went into the King’s Army, and like good Men and true, Serv’d their Old Master.”24 Amid the irreversible theatrical destruction and death, as well as quotidian suffering by those still standing, it became clear that what in the early 1640s had seemed like ailing English drama in retrospect was actually dying. The theatre ban began to be widely described as a form of death; dramatic paratexts both created and capitalized on nostalgia for the “dead” or “dying scene,” offering up the printed play as consolation.

22James Wright, Historia Histrionica (Wiliam Haws, 1699), p. 4 23James Shirley, “Epilogue” to Suckling’s The Goblins (Humphrey Moseley, 1646), p. 64; Thomas Killigrew,The Parson’s Wedding, in Comedies and Tragedies written by Thomas Killigrew (Henry Her- ringman, 1664) p. 140. For information on the popularity of Killigrew’s plays and Stephen Hammerton, see Victoria Bancroft, “Tradition and Innovation in The Parson’s Wedding” in Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage: New Perspectives ed. Philip Major (Routledge, 2016): 45-62. 24Wright, Historia Histrionica, p. 7. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 47

The movement from theatrical uncertainty to conclusion was paralleled in contemporary politics. While in 1647 it still seemed possible that Charles I and Parliament would arrive at an agreement, eventually it became clear to Parliament that cooperation with

Charles was impossible. The king was imprisoned in late 1648, and executed publicly on 30 January 1649. The regicide transformed Charles I into a martyr; the execution of a divinely-ordained king shocked the populace, even many who vehemently opposed his policies. Caroline relics represented an important focus for royalist energies after the regicide. A small industry sprang up to capitalize on the public’s aﬀection for the martyred king, selling items marketed as Charles’s hair, pieces of his clothing, and cloth dipped into the king’s blood.25 The book trade also got in on the game, issuing texts that announced a connection to Charles. Most famously, Eikon Basilike (1649) marketed as Charles’s ﬁnal mediations and “His farewell as a legacy to his deare children,” and which quickly became a bestseller.

The symbolism of the regicide – and the marketing opportunity aﬀorded by Caroline relics

– was not lost on the former and current producers of English drama. The prohibition on playing was frequently analogized to the regicide: English monarchy and English theatre were both killed oﬀ by Parliament. As if to reinforce this analogy, Parliament cracked down on surreptitious performance during Charles’s trial and shortly after his execution, conducting destructive theatrical raids in January 1649 and demolishing the

Fortune, Cockpit and Salisbury Court Theatres in March 1649. The Famous Tragedy of

King Charles I, Basely Butchered (1649) – a closet play that dramatized the Siege at

Colchester and the regicide – was printed with a Prologue that asserts the parallel fates of the playhouses and the king, both destroyed by the same villainous enemy:

25See Rachel Willie, “Sacriﬁcial Kings and Martyred Rebels: Charles and Rainborowe beatiﬁed” Etudes Epistemes, Special Issue on Regicide 20 (2011). See also Joad Raymond, “Popular Representa- tions of Charles I,” in Thomas N. Corns, ed., The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (CUP, 1999), pp. 47-73. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 48

Their thrones, then vile, and beastly ignorance Their bloodly Myrmidons, o’the table round Project, to raze, our theatres to the ground No marvel they lap bloud as milke and glory To be recorded, villains upon story ’For having killed their king, where will they stay That thorough God, and Majesty make way Throwing the Nobles, and the Gentry down Levelling all distinctions to the Crown.

Yet, though the Puritans levelled both playhouses and the social hierarchy, the Prologue celebrates the endurance of the printed text:

Though Jonson, Shakespeare, Goﬀe and Davenant Brome, Suckling, Beaumont, Fletcher and Shirley want The Life of action, and their learned lines Are loathed by the monsters of the times Yet your reﬁned souls can penetrate Their depth of merit.26

Despite the eﬀorts of the “monsters of the times,” print allows readers to continually

enjoy English plays, albeit in a diﬀerent form. despite the death of the “life of action.”

Similar to Shirley’s conception of dramatic reading as dwelling in immortal groves, Pro- logue describes studious readers’ sustained contemplation, in which they “penetrate” the

“depth of merit” of distinctly literary drama written by pre-1642 authors. The playbook

partly symbolizes royalist resistance, a victory against the murderous monsters who exe-

cuted Charles. Richard Lovelace’s commendatory verse to The Wild Goose Chase (1653) explicitly oﬀers the printed play of John Fletcher as an alternative to Charles I, casting

him as the “sun” that emerges after the king’s “eclipse”: “Unhappy murmerers, that still

repine/After th’ eclipse our sun does brighter shine./Recant your grief and your true joys

know/Your bliss is endless, as you feared your woe!”27 Sophie Tomlinson argues that

26“Prologue” to The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I, Basely Butchered(1649), A4r. 27Richard Lovelace, “On the best, last, and only remaining Comedy of Mr. FLETCHER,” The Wild Goose Chase (Humphrey Moseley, 1653), A1v-A2r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 49

“these lines conﬂate the political dissatisfaction of Royalist supporters at the death of Charles I with the dissatisfaction of would-be theatregoers, who will be cheered by the reappearance of Fletcher (“our sun”) in print.”28 The joys aﬀorded by Fletcher’s play will comfort those “unhappy murmerers” who still lament Charles I’s death.

Yet unlike bloodsoaked scraps of Caroline cloth, the playbook was not simply a symbol of Royalist destruction or endurance. Though the vocabulary of regicide was co-opted to describe theatre’s “demise,” and the endurance of printed “relics,” the theatre ban could and was considered to be a separate loss, and the survival of English plays in print was recognized to have cultural effects beyond contemporary political ones. That the playbook keeps the plays of “Jonson, Shakespeare, Goffe and Davenant,” in circulation is valuable in and of itself, beyond any royalist symbolism. The playbook was valued as a means to keep English plays alive, or the memory of English theatre alive. For example, in his commendatory poem to James Shirley’s The Cardinal (1652), John Hall’s reference to drama “rul[ing]” with “majesty and might” obviously associates plays with the monarchy, while his reference to “saints and martyr’d bodies” borrows from the specific iconography of the cult of Charles the martyr. But Hall employs the language of regicide to emphasize the significance to the theatre’s demise; the primary loss to be mourned is not Charles, but the “dying scene”:

When our English Drama was at height And shined, and ruled with majesty and might A sudden whirlwind threw it from its seat, Deﬂowered the Groves, and quenched the Muses heat. Yet as in Saints, and Martyr’d bodies, when They cannot call their blessed souls agen To earth; reliques, and ashes men preserve. And think they do but what, blest, they deserve: So I, by my devotion led, aspire To keep alive your noble vestal ﬁre,

28Sophie Tomlinson, ed., Fletcher, The Wild Goose Chase in Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance (Manchester UP, 2006), p. 320. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 50

Honour this piece, which shows sir, you have been, The last supporter of the dying scene.29

The complex image of the relic reveals that status of the playbook in the aftermath of theatre’s death is far from straightforward. On the one hand, the relic can be understood as sort of fossil – a material remnant of something is long dead. On the other hand, the relic contains supernatural qualities, allowing the dead object to live on in another way.

Hall here describes how printed “reliques” oﬀer a material focus for worship of the “dying scene,” evoking the religious connotations of relics, which function as objects of reverence, not simply remembrance.30

In the commendatory poem composed for Alexander Goughe’s publication of the anonymous professional play The Queen (1653), R. C. describes the text as “relic” without reference to contemporary politics. The relic functions as a locus of remembrance for the formerly living body of performance:

If Playes be looking glasses of our lives Where dead examples quickning art revives: By which the players dresse themselves, and we By them may forme a living Imagry [...] Is it unlawfull since the stage is down To make the press act: [...] the guiltles presse Weares its own innocent garments: its own dresse, Such as free nature made it: Let it come Forth Midwife Goughe, securely; and if some Like not the make or beautie of the play Bear witnes to ’t and conﬁdently say Such a relict as once the stage did own, Ingenuous Reader, merits to be known.31

29John Hall, “To the surviving Honour and Ornament of the English Scene, Iames Shirley” in Shirley, The Cardinal (Humphrey Moseley, 1652), A4v. 30On the distinction between relics in relation to remembrance and reverence, see Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Relics and Remains.” Past and Present 206 (2010): 9-36, esp. 12. 31R. C., “To Mr. Alexander Goughe upon his publishing The excellent Play call’d the Queen; or the Excellencie of her Sex,” in The Queen (Thomas Heath, 1653), A3r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 51

R. C. ﬁrst praises the “quickening art” of performance that “revives” “dead examples.” He then shifts to the current moment “when the stage is down,” which killed oﬀ performance’s “living imagery,” returning formerly-dead examples to their original state. The playbook is “such a relic as once the stage did own,” seemingly the lifeless fragment of a dead tradition. And yet R.C.’s remark that “the press act[s]” also suggests that the press is a source of lively action, supplanting the stage as that which quickens dead examples.

A slightly later example announces how the playbook can fully revive both the life of the play and the livelihood of disenfranchised actors. In 1656, the veteran King’s Servant actor Theophilus Bird paired with fellow unemployed actor Andrew Pennycuicke to publish John Ford and Thomas Dekker’s The Sun’s Darling. In their dedication to Thomas

Wriarthesley, Earl of Southampton, Bird and Pennycuicke describe how Southampton’s patronage and publication resurrects the play deprived of life on the stage:

By the Herodotus Reports that the Egyptians by Wrapping their Dead in Glasse, presents them lively to all posterity; But your Lordship will do more, by the Vivifying beames of your Acceptation, Revive beparents of this Orphan Poem, and make them live to Eternity. While the Stage ﬂorisht, the POEM liv’d by the breath of Generall Applauses, and the Virtuall Fervor of the Court; but since hath languish for want of heate, and now nerere shrunk up with Cold, creepes (with a shivering feare) to Extend it self at the Flames of your Benignity.32

Dramatic publication is not simply embalmment, a material preservation of the once- living body of performance. It fully resuscitates the play previously deprived of the

“breath of the general applause.”

The playbook abounded with life in another way: the copious paratextual matter increasingly appended to playbooks. Perhaps the most notorious example of mid-century dra-

32Theophilus Bird and Andrew Pennycuicke, “To the Right Honorable THOMAS WRIATHESLEY, Earle of Southampton, Lord WRIATHSLEY, of Tichﬁeld,” in John Ford and Thomas Dekker, The Sun’s Darling (Pennycuicke, 1656), A2r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 52 matic paratexts are the ﬁfty-three commendatory verses appended to Moseley’s posthumous publication of William Cartwright’s Comedies, Tragicomedies, With other Poems

(1651). Moseley himself supplied a poem for the octavo collection, in which he celebrated the number of contributors “As there are Shires in England, Weekes i’ th’ Yeere” who asserted its value:

’T hath past the Court, and University, (Th’ old standing Judges of good Poetry:) Besides, as many Hands attest it here, As there are Shires in England, Weekes i’ th’ Yeere.33

The paratextual authors supplant the “old” guard of critical discernment, the court and university, to become the new judges of good poetry. The lively conversations in and across paratexts stand in for the vibrancy of the theater. Contributors present a text- centric, literary (and royalist) conception of Cartwright’s plays in particular and English drama in general. Partly this conception is due to practical aﬀairs – as Martin Butler points out “several versiﬁers” in the Cartwright volume “can be shown to have been too young to have known the theatres before they closed in 1642, and they speak of ‘reading’ rather than ‘seeing’ the plays.”34 Some objected to the bloated prefatory matter in

Cartwright’s material, arguing that it falsely established cultural status through force of numbers. The prefatory matter to Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew (printed in 1652 by

James Young for Edward Dod and Nathanial Ekins) took aim at Moseley’s transparent tactics to overpraise the volume. The problem wasn’t so much each poem’s hyperbolic praise, which was in line with the conventions of the commendatory poem. Rather, it was the sheer number of poems that so rankled critics. A poem signed J. B. (likely Sir John Berkenhead) entitled “To Master RICHARD BROME, on his Comedie of A Iovial Crew or The Merrie Beggars” describes dramatic paratexts as soldiers marching relentlessly

33Humphrey Moseley, “The Stationer” in William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragicomedies, With other Poems (Humphrey Moseley, 1651), (4*6r). 34Butler, Theatre and Crisis, p. 9. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 53 toward the reader with their opinions: “Though I do know, there comes / A Shole, with Regiments of Encomiums, / On all occasions, whose Astronomy / Can calculate a Praise to Fifty-three.” J. B. continues that such profusion of guarantees is counterproductive:

“Here’s no such need: For Books, like Children, be / Well Christ’ned, when their Sureties are but three. / And those, which to twelve Godfathers do come, / Signify former Guilt, or speedy Doom.” Scores of commendatory poems only produce “bigger, not the better

Books,” and in any case are ineﬀectual, since “the Reader’s rul’d, not by their tastes, but’s own.”35 Yet J. B. belies his claim that books are “well-christened when their sureties are but three”; A Jovial Crew has ﬁve commendatory poems. Though the theatre remained

silent, the playbook teemed with a cacophony of voices in the paratexts.

Perhaps the strongest testament to the text’s ability to revitalize the dead stage appears

in Edmund Gayton’s Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixote (1654). Gayton mourns “our

late stage” and celebrates the endurance of playbooks, which, he explains,

Stand ﬁrm, and are read with as much satisfaction as when presented on the stage they were with applause and honour. Indeed, their names now may very well be chang’d and call’d the works not plays of Johnson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cartwright and the rest, which are survivors of the stage.36

The image of the “survivor of the stage” acknowledges the theatre’s demise, but suggests

that the playbook escaped alive. Unlike the relic, the survivor is not merely a fragment of a dead thing, but rather a living entity that has its own independent existence. Gayton

pronounces the theatre dead, but also declares that something diﬀerent has endured in

its place, indeed something of more lasting value. Acknowledging the loss that attended

the theatre ban, Gayton reveals how it also proﬁtably settled a prior aesthetic debate.

Forty years after Jonson attracted derision for naming his dramatic collection Works,

35J. B., “To Master RICHARD BROME, on his Comedie of A Iovial Crew or The Merrie Beggars,”in Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew (Edward Dod and Nathanial Ekins, 1652), A3r. 36Edmund Gayton’s Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixote, p. 273. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 54 the survival of texts by Jonson, Fletcher and others amid the death of theatre reveals that examples of English drama are not evanescent plays, but “works” that “stand ﬁrm.”

Gayton does not suggest that this was always the case; like Shirley’s description of how the ban meant that the dramatic press would “now look’d upon as greatest benefactor to

Englishmen,” Gayton’s emphasizes the transformation of English drama’s aesthetic and cultural status and locates it in the present moment of the theatre ban: “their names now may very well be chang’d and call’d the works not plays.” The theatre ban reveals the ephemerality of stage plays; the press ensured their survival, and transformed them into objects of criticism.

3 1652-1659: New and Old Plays

At the same time that some stationers created nostalgia for English theatre by marketing their texts as the remnants or survivors the stage, others capitalized on the rhetorical possibilities of drama’s near-exclusive existence in print. In 1647, the absence of playing enabled Moseley to market his collection of old Beaumont and Fletcher plays as a “new book.” He continued this strategy in his innovative octavo series, New Plays, which included Richard Brome’s Five New Plays (1653), James Shirley’s Six New Plays

(1653), Philip Massinger’s Three New Plays (1655), and Lodowick Carell’s Two New

Plays (1657). Of course everyone recognized such publications of previously unprinted

1642 drama were not actually “new” plays, but rather new books of old plays. In his edition of Richard Brome’s Five New Plays (1659) Alexander Brome justiﬁes his title, explaining that “We call them new, because till now they never were printed. . . they were all begotten and born. . . many years since; they then trod the Stage (their proper place) though they pass’d not the Press.”37 They are new in one, tentative sense related

37Alexander Brome, “To the Reader,” in Richard Brome, Five New Plays (A. Crook, 1659), p. 3r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 55 to print, but they are old in terms of composition and performance, the latter tellingly described as “their proper place.” Even as the title of Moseley’s New Plays series asserts a text-centric understanding of drama – plays are new in terms of their printed histories, not their composition or performance histories – the defensive explanation of such titles reveal that the performance-centric understanding of plays died hard.

Still, the decline of the stage enabled Moseley to deﬁne his texts primarily in terms of their print history, and call them “New Plays.” Moseley marketed his collections in terms of the opposite features of novelty and familiarity, allowing him to target two historically separate audiences. When the theatres were active, audiences had continually been divided between those interested in old, familiar fare and those who wanted a new play every day. Moseley’s new publications of old plays caters to both those who thirsted after new material, and those who preferred old favorites. While emphasizing his texts’ novelty,

Moseley also looks ahead to the moment when the press will no longer have anything new to oﬀer. Without an active professional theatre producing new compositions, the backlog of unprinted material will eventually run out. While many folio contributors are simply nostalgic for the absent theater, in the same volume Moseley creates pre-emptive nostalgia for the dramatic text. He cautions his reader that he or she should not hope for any other new texts: “you will ﬁnd here are no omissions, you have not only all I could get, but all you must ever expect.”38 The folio is to be treasured as the last new plays of Beaumont and Fletcher – or, rather nearly so. After claiming the volume has “no omissions,” in the passage that follows he admits there is one play missing, and appeals for its return:

One only play I must except (for I mean to deal openly) tis a comedy called the Wild Goose Chase, which hath been long lost, and I fear irrecoverable, for a person of quality borrowed it from the actors many years since, and (by the negligence of a servant) it was never returned; therefore I put this si quis,

38Moseley, “The Stationer to the Readers,” A4r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 56

that whosoever hereafter happily meets with it, shall be thankfully satisﬁed if he please to send it home.39

Remarkably, someone apparently heeded Moseley’s plea and returned the manuscript, and Moseley published the single-text folio of The Wild Goose Chase in 1652. The edition’s title page advertises that “a Person of Honour” (presumably the same “person of quality” to whom it was lent?) “Retriv’d” the text “for the publick delight of all the Ingenious” for the “private beneﬁt of John Lowin and Joseph Taylor,” two surviving veteran players of the King’s Servants.40 Moseley’s narrative is usually taken at face value,41 but his narrative of the loss and return of The Wild Goose Chase ﬁts in curiously well with his overall marketing strategy.

In the folio, Moseley draws readers’ attention to The Wild Goose Chase’s absence, tantalizing them with a single missing play from an otherwise complete canon: “One only play I must except...which hath beene long lost, and I feare irrecoverable.” Moseley doubts that the “long lost” play will be recovered; the folio is “all you must ever expect.” Moseley would have had a clear economic incentive to withhold a single play from an otherwise-complete collection, the belated publication would squeeze one more purchase out of those who had already bought the expensive folio. Even assuming that Moseley indeed lost the Wild Goose manuscript, his comments in the 1647 folio seem calculated to entice potential buyers in the event the manuscript should ﬁnally reappear. That The

Wild Goose Chase represents the missing title ampliﬁes the impression that Moseley’s story is too good to be true. A wild goose chase refers to a foolish, fruitless, or hopeless quest, an apt parallel with readers’ seemingly hopeless desire for this “irrecoverable” play.

Beaumont and Fletcher’s titular “wild goose,” the rake Mirabel initially fits the definition as the slippery, ostensibly unattainable object of Oriana’s affections. A satisfying

39Ibid. 40Fletcher (attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher), The Wild Goose Chase (Moseley, 1652), t.p. 41See for example, Kastan, “Performances and Playbooks,” pp. 173-4. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 57 union ends each narrative: In the play, Oriana after many stratagems ﬁnally acquires her “wild goose.” In the printing house, thanks to the manuscript’s miraculous recovery, and subsequent printing in folio, The Wild Goose Chase can be ﬁnally united to the larger

folio collection.

In the 1647 folio, “one only” play stands in the reader’s way from owning the entire

Beaumont and Fletcher canon. There is energy in a lacuna: it defers the sense of ﬁnitude

expressed by complete collections, and leaves open the possibility that something new

and exciting will emerge, altering our perception of the corpus. The publication of The

Wild Goose Chase in 1652 ﬁlled this lacuna, and in the process replaced the feeling of expectation with a sense of closure. In his prefatory matter for the 1652 volume, Moseley

repeats his strategy from the 1647 folio, highlighting the volume’s novelty, but framing it

terms of ﬁnality: the title page declares that it is “the Noble, Last, and Onely Remaines

of those Incomparable Drammatists.” The irrevocability of the adjectives “last,” and “only” reﬂects the era’s atmosphere of dramatic ﬁnitude: this play is the last new thing

from Beaumont and Fletcher that anyone will ever get.

The belated publication of The Wild Goose Chase in 1652 succeeded in keeping the memory of Beaumont and Fletcher’s theatre alive. It did not, in the end, succeed in

maintaining the bodies of the actors for whose beneﬁt it was printed: Taylor and Lowin

respectively died in 1652 and 1653. Of the ten King’s Servants signatories of the 1647

folio dedication, only Theophilus Bird survived into the Restoration; perhaps the sales

of The Sun’s Darling helped keep him alive. As Caroline actors died oﬀ in the 1640s and 1650s, there were few younger actors trained up to replace them. When the playhouses

ﬁnally reopened in 1660, because of the ban English theatre largely had to start from

scratch, and as a result the dramaturgy and performance were radically altered.

The characterization of the volume as the “last remains” conveys not only a sense of Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 58 theatrical ﬁnitude, but also a feeling of textual completeness. English drama had reached its terminus. Without an active theatre industry producing new plays, the backlog of previously unprinted professional would eventually run out. The press was enjoying its brief moment as the primary dispenser of dramatic novelty, but this could not last.

As they marketed their texts as the “last new plays,” stationers looked ahead to the moment when all pre-1642 plays reached the press, closing the novelty loophole oﬀered by the press. At this point all English professional plays would be old plays.

Of course, the concept of old plays existed while the theatres were active; Caroline dramatists reviving Elizabethan and Jacobean plays updated them in order to appeal to the tastes of Caroline audiences. In Shackerley Marmion’s A Fine Companion (1633),

Littlegood jokingly refers to dramatists’ attempts to make old plays relevant by writing a few new scenes: “Look you here comes the old Lecher, he looks fresh as an old play new vampt, pray see how trim hee is, and how the Authors have corrected him.”42 Richard Brome described one of his primary duties for the Salisbury Court as making “divers scenes in old revived plays for them.”43 Yet Marmion and Brome suggest that theatrical revivals infused new life into older plays. Lucy Munro (focusing on Marlovian revivals in the 1630s) argues that revivals of older plays in the Caroline period were marked by “by the contrasting pressures of nostalgia and continuity,” and had a “somewhat paradoxical status as works which exempliﬁed an older tradition but nonetheless continued to have life and vitality in performance.”44 There were also “old” plays in the Caroline book trade:

Zachary Lesser and Alan Farmer have recently argued that the Caroline playbook market distinguished between frequently reprinted Elizabethan and Jacobean “classics” and new Caroline oﬀerings. They argue that dramatic classics “had a relative independence from the stage” and therefore would not be lent an air of newness by revivals.45 Munro,

42Shackerley Marmion, A Fine Companion (Richard Meighen, 1633), 2.4.1-4. 43Cited by Ann Haaker, “The Plague, the Theatre, and the Poet,” Renaissance Drama 1 (1968), p. 305. 44Lucy Munro, “Marlowe on the Caroline Stage,” Shakespeare Bulletin 27 (2009), p. 40. 45Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Canons and Classics,” in Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 59 however, points out that, “Although [Lesser and Farmer] are probably right that there is no simple correlation between popularity in performance and in print, it is striking to note that a number of the plays in their lists of “The Caroline Canon of Classic Plays”

. . . were either printed with a current theatrical attribution in the Caroline period. . . or are known to have been revived between 1625 and 1642,” and so granting them new life.46 In any case, while the theatre was active, the potential for revival remained possible.

While individual old plays existed before 1642, the theatre ban prematurely aged English

drama as a genre. This occurred in two distinct phases, ﬁrst, by removing plays from

the revitalizing context of contemporary theatre, and second, by printing the backlog of previously unprinted plays. Though it was not immediately recognized as such, the

theatre ban which began in 1642 came to be understood as distinct break with the past.

Sapped of the vitality of performance, theatrical nostalgia supplanted the Caroline era’s

sense of theatrical continuity. Without theatrical revivals infusing new life into them, older plays simply seemed old. No longer the products of contemporary theatre, plays

came to seem like artefacts of the distant past. Deprived of an active industry producing

new plays, and of the vitality of theatrical revivals, freshly printed older plays could

still assert their novelty. But many of these smelled of mortality, and were frequently

described as the “remains,” “relics” and “survivors” of the dead stage. Moreover, without an active theatre, the store house of “new,” previously unprinted plays would run out.

Completeness would eventually become the primary way to market Renaissance plays:

hence Moseley published The Wild Goose Chase in a rare single-text folio, so that it

could be joined with the rest of the previously unprinted plays. As I discuss in Chapter 3, once hitherto unpublished works were printed, one could either collect all examples into

deﬁnitive authorial corpuses, or select particular texts and arrange them into dramatic

and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642, eds. Alan B. Farmer and Adam Zucker (Palgrave, 2006), p. 40, n. 21. 46Munro, p. 40. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 60 canons.

The ban also accelerated the aging of Caroline drama in particular, eliminating any divide between classic Elizabethan and Jacobean and new Caroline plays. Paratextual material for Caroline drama printed during the 1650s frequently highlights the plays’ seniority. The title page of Jasper Mayne’s Two Plays (1658, consisting of The City Match and

The Amorous War, composed around 1638) declares both plays are “long since written.”

The ﬁrst edition of The Queen, or the Excellency of Her Sex (1653) ﬁrst performed

around 1633, is marketed as “an Excellent Old Play.” In 1649, the prefatory poem to

The Famous Tragedie of King Charles (1649) joins icons of what Lesser and Farmer call the “Golden age of English drama” with the supposedly lesser lights of the Caroline

era: “Jonson, Shakespeare, Goﬀe and Davenant/Brome, Suckling, Beaumont, Fletcher

and Shirley want/The Life of action.”47 Far from stratifying the older Elizabethan and

Jacobean from newer Caroline dramatists, the poem instead suggests a uniﬁed genre of sixty years of pre-1642 English theatre, united partly through their shared fate of being

silenced by the ban. The theatre ban established the historical and aesthetic boundaries

of the genre we now call English Renaissance drama.

4 Conclusion: Rotten Authors in Print, or Literary

Drama

Thanks to the theatre ban, “old plays” deﬁned primarily though print were idealized

subjects of a distant lost age. Textuality and the appearance of age are key elements in

literary canonization. In John Earle’s memorable prefatory poem to the Beaumont and

Fletcher folio, he describes his readerly encounters with Beaumont, arguing that it is just

47“Prologue” to The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I, A4r. Chapter 1. Dead Theatre 61 a matter of time before the gatekeepers of canon formation recognize his literary value, which is described in classical terms:

We that better know, Will a more serious hour on thee bestow, Why should not Beaumont in the morning please As well as Plautus, Aristophanes? Who if my pen may as my thoughts be free, Were scurrill wits and buffons both to thee Yet these our learned of severest brow, Will deigne to looke on, and to note them too, That will defie our own, tis English stuff, And th’ Author is not rotten long enough.48

It is easier to idealize the cultural output of the distant past. Earle notes that even the classical authors enjoyed a “thriftier fame” in “their own times.” He looks ahead to the moment when Beaumont will be “rotten long enough” and so attain the same markers of cultural respectability that the dramatic ancients have in the seventeenth century: to be encountered chieﬂy in print, and to be read in the serious scholarly hours of the morning, when one’s intellectual faculties are at their sharpest. Earle imagines that “when thy name is growne/ Six ages older, [it] shall be better known,” overestimating the length of time needed to ensure Beaumont’s canonization.49 It only took eighteen years: the

theatre ban sped up the rate of decomposition of Renaissance dramatists, enabling their

enshrinement in an English literary canon. Renaissance plays continued to appear old

once the theatre was restored in 1660. John Downes called pre-1642 plays the “Principal

Old Stock Plays.” The perception that these plays belonged to an absent past was crucial to their continued literary canonization. As Dryden said of the rise of Jonson and other

pre-1642 dramatists: “Fame then was cheap, and the ﬁrst comer sped, / And they have

kept it since by being dead.”50 48John Earle, “On Mr BEAVMONT. (Written thirty yeares since, presently after his death.)” in Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647), c3v-c4r. 49Ibid. 50John Dryden, “Epilogue” to The Conquest of Granada, (Henry Herringman, 1672), V4r. Chapter 2

“Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-1660

Perhaps, some were so couzen’d as to come, To see us Weave in the Dramatique Loom: To trace the winding Scenes, like subtle Spies, Bred in the Muses Camp, safe from surprize: Where you by Art learn joy, and when to mourn; To watch the Plots swift change, and counterturn: When Time moves swifter then by Nature taught; And by a Chorus miracles are wrought; Making an Infant instantly a Man: These were your Plays, but get them if you can.

-Epilogue to Davenant’s First Day’s Entertainment (1656)

The English theatre ban of 1642 to 1660 never fully succeeded in silencing public performance. Playing “virtually ceased” between 1642 and 1646, during the ﬁrst English Civil

War,1 openly resumed in 1647 and 1648 during the lull in ﬁghting between the First and

Second Civil War (1648-49); and continued, to a lesser degree, throughout the 1650s. The discretion necessitated by illegal performances between 1642 and 1660 has left a spotty 1Milhous and Hume, “New Light,” p. 491.

62 Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166063 historical record, but we know that the Elizabethan comedy Mucedorus was revived, by amateurs, across South East England between September 1652 and February 1653, and that four Beaumont and Fletcher plays (The Scornful Lady, A King and No King,

Wit Without Money, and Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother) were performed illegally by erstwhile professionals in London in 1647 and 1648. In the late 1640s, the actor Robert Cox began staging playlets adapted from amateur interludes from the

Elizabethan period, as well as scenes drawn from the professional plays of Shakespeare,

Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shirley, among others; both forms came to be known as

“drolls.” This selection is doubtless only a small sample of illicit public performance in

England (to say nothing of private ones). The frequency of illicit performance in the later 1640s is indicated by the fact that Parliament renewed the ordinance against playing four times, on July 16, 1647, August 11, 1647, October 22, 1647, and February 9, 1648. With such a small sample, we are hard-pressed to say why these particular plays were chosen for illicit performance, much less whether they are representative of the types of plays staged illicitly in the late 1640s and 1650s. What we know about the revivals of these plays and playlets does, however, allow us to say two things. First, evidence for illicit performance during the Civil Wars and Interregnum derives largely from instances in which the theatrical event was disastrously interrupted. Successful clandestine performances remained secret, so they are mostly lost to history. Second, playing during the Civil Wars and Interregnum persisted in two recognizable, and discrete but related strains: an

“old-fashioned” Elizabethan “popular,” (i.e., non-elite) tradition, and professional plays by sophisticated, proﬁcient Jacobean and Caroline playwrights attached to the court.

This chapter explores illegal and sanctioned theatrical activity between 1642 and 1660.

The ﬁrst section examines John Rowe’s Tragicomedia (1653), which describes the collapse of a makeshift playhouse during a provincial performance of Mucedorus in February 1653.

Rowe’s account suggests how nostalgia shaped the act of performance as well as the Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166064 responses it elicited from both enthusiastic audiences and vigorous critics. In the second section, I examine the meaning of the illicit performances of Beaumont and Fletcher plays in the late 1640s. Modern critics typically regard these performances as pointed acts of

Royalist deﬁance. Indeed, they were subversive insofar as a performance of a play – any play – was illegal.2 I argue, however, that the political dimension of these performances was not oppositional in a direct sense, and that the subversive potential of Beaumont and

Fletcher plays did not derive primarily from their contents, but from their pre-war stage history, which made them a potent symbol of pre-1642 culture. In the third section, I turn to Interregnum drolls. These playlets were choppy, messy aﬀairs with little regard for narrative continuity, sometimes bordering on unintelligibility. I argue that the drolls’ incoherence bespeaks the widespread familiarity of the source plays: the compilers either assume that audiences can ﬁll in the required information for themselves, or else assume that the pleasure of watching favored scenes and characters will be enjoyable even devoid of context. The ideological preoccupations of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays and Cox’s drolls are elusive, but their cultural symbolism is clear: they are vestiges of the old order.

For some spectators, partaking in such performances was simply a matter of enjoying an old pastime, not a deliberate act of political resistance. “These were your Plays” as the Epilogue to Davenant’s First Day’s Entertainment puts it (quoted above), after describing familiar plots and dramatic techniques of old plays, and audiences wanted to “get them if they could.” For authorities, however, any symbol of the old order posed a threat to the nascent government.

The subversive potential of old plays, no matter their contents, is highlighted by the Commonwealth’s embrace of new plays after 1653, as I explore in the ﬁnal section. The

Commonwealth granted the most latitude to William Davenant, who tentatively staged a new style of drama, The First Day’s Entertainment, in 1653 and three government-

2For a challenge to modern critics’ assumptions about the royalist underpinnings of the drama between 1642 and 1660, see Wiseman, Drama and Politics, pp. 1-18. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166065 sanctioned proto-operas between 1656 and 1659: The Siege of Rhodes, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and The History of Sir Francis Drake. As the Epilogue to First

Day’s suggests, these plays were not like the old ones woven “in the Dramatique Loom” to which audiences were accustomed (and which audiences were hoping to see when they attended an illegal performance). They were diﬀerent, new entertainments that the authorities could live with, and that audiences would accept as a substitute. Davenant’s presentation of plays as a wholly new dramatic genre and theatrical tradition made them more palatable to the authorities. The novelty of such works, as much as their contents, allowed the Commonwealth to claim them as their own cultural products.

1 Mucedorus in 1653: Anti-Theatrical Nostalgia

In his Account book and Diary, Sir Henry Mildmay describes his outing “To a play of warre” on November 16, 1643, at which, he laconically and ominously remarks, “there was a disaster.” We do not know what play Mildmay is talking about, who performed it, or where he saw it. Most contemporary reports on theatrical activity in this period are snippets in newsbooks which oﬀer narrow glimpses into Londoners’ attempts to ﬂout or enforce the prohibition. Occasionally a report will identify the particularities of a performance – the play, players, and venue – but usually these details are not recorded. The most detailed account we have of a theatrical performance during the theatre ban

– John Rowe’s Tragicomedia (1653) – is in some sense the least representative: it is related in a lengthy sermon by a Puritan preacher, and describes a provincial performance mounted by amateurs, which is disrupted not by the authorities but by an accident. Rowe recounts how, during a performance of Mucedorus in the Oxfordshire town of Witney in February 1653, the ﬂoor of the makeshift playhouse collapsed, trapping and injuring dozens of spectators and actors and killing six people. And yet while this anecdote Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166066 does not provide us with a view of professional actors trying to continue to eke out a living in London during the ban, it is representative in many respects: it demonstrates the considerable risks involved in staging plays illegally between 1642 and 1660, but also suggests that playing was so widespread as to be mundane. Like Mildmay and many other theatrical commentators of the period, Rowe was compelled to write because of a theatrical disaster, a hint, perhaps, that the average illegal performance was not worth writing about. The sermon also reveals how nostalgia inﬂuenced both theatrical activity and responses to it: Rowe’s anti-theatrical arguments, as much as the players’ performance of Mucedorus, deliberately evoke the Elizabethan period.

Rowe reports that a touring group of provincial players staged Mucedorus several times across South East England between September 1652 and February 1653: players from the nearby parish of Stanton-Harcourt “had been Acting privately every week” since Michael- mas (September 29) and “began to act it in a more publick manner about Christmas,” after which they “Acted it three or four times in their own Parish, they Acted it likewise in severall neighbowring Parishes, as Moore, Stanlike, South-Leigh, Cumner.” Rowe’s account suggests that provincial (as well as city) authorities could turn a blind eye to illegal performance; the authorities’ leniency is further suggested by the fact that the

Stanton-Harcourt players requested permission from the local bailiﬀs to stage the play in the town hall. The request was denied; and the players instead used the local White

Hart Inn. Rowe relates how the performance attracted “great multitudes” of spectators: drawn by the sounds of drums and trumpet,3 three to four hundred happy men, women and children crammed into the venue, while “others in the Yard pressed sorely to get in.” The theatrical performance itself was almost beside the point; Rowe describes how the

“merry and frolick” spectators were so “exceeding jovial” that “the Players could hardly

3Tiffany Stern relates how, while the theatres were operational, “the interested Londoner” would “wait for the actors to parade through the city broadcasting the title of the play to be performed accompanied by drums and trumpets.” “On Each Wall / And Corner Post’: Playbills, Title-Pages, the Advertising in Early Modern London.” English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 57-85. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166067 get Liberty that they themselves might Act.” Mucedorus eventually began: in the play’s fourth act, the floor of the White Hart Inn collapsed, trapping and injuring at least sixty spectators and actors, and killing five or six people. Rowe vividly recounts how people

“cryed out for Ladders, and Hatchets to make their passage out, for the chamber falling, the doore of the under roome was so Blocked up that they could not get out there,” and poignantly relates the horriﬁc aftermath:

It was one of the saddest, and blackest nights that ever came on Witny. Sad it was to see Parents carry home their Children dead in their armes, sad it was to see so many bruised, hurt, and maimed, and some, as it were, halfe dead that were not able to help themselves, but were fain to be carryed away by their friends, some on their backs, some on chaires, sad it was to hear the pitteous cryes of those that were not there bemoaning their distressed friends. This was the sad end of this ungodly play.4

The Puritan Rowe unsurprisingly interprets the disaster as a sign of God’s wrath against

“ungodly” drama; he pinpoints the moment of collapse as a scene particularly oﬀensive to God:

It pleased God to put a stop to their mirth, and by an immediate hand of his owne, in causing the chamber to sink, and fall under them, to put an end to this ungodly Play before it was thought, or intended by them. The Actors who were now in action were Bremo a wild man courting, and solliciting his Lady, and among other things, begging a Kisse in this verse.

Come kisse me (Sweet) for all my favours past.5

God purposefully destroyed the stage, Rowe declares, “in the middest of these amorous passages between Bremo, and his Lady. . . yea, immediately before they expected the

4John Rowe,Tragi-comoedia being a brief relation of the strange, and wonderfull hand of God discovered at Witny, in the comedy acted there February the third, where there were some slaine, many hurt, and several other remarkable passages (Henry Cripps, 1653), ¶¶r. 5Rowe,Tragi-comoedia, 2*v. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166068 greatest pleasure, and contentment.” Rowe explains the scene’s particular immorality: the “Lady” Amandine is “in truth a young man attired in a woman’s Habit”; cross- dressing, of course, was a common target for anti-theatricalists; God pre-empted the two male actors from displaying lustful acts onstage.

Rowe claims not to have been present at the immoral event, but he nevertheless betrays a distinct journalistic interest in the performance and reveals intimate knowledge of the text of Mucedorus. He evidently had at a copy of the play at his elbow while writing

Tragicomedia: in the quotation above, Rowe’s reference to “Bremo a wild man” replicates the reference to the character in the text’s dramatis personae (complete with italics); Rowe’s quotation accurately reproduces the line’s words and punctuation. Rowe also reveals his investment in the narrative when he gradually dissolves the divide between the actors and characters of the play: beginning with a factual description of costumed and in-character actors, he goes on to describe “the man in womans apparrell lay panting for breath, and had it not been for Bremo his fellow Actor, he had been stiﬂed.” He then erases the distinction between actor and character, he notes that “Bremo having recovered himselfe a little, bare up the others head with his arm.” Rowe concludes with a description of “Bremo” (the character) helping “the Lady” who “had her beauty mar’d, her face being swollen by the hurt taken in the fall.” The person Rowe earlier described as the “man in womans apparrell” is now transformed into “the Lady,” complete with feminine pronouns. In an account that captured English drama seemingly at its worst

– illegal, bloody, and opposed by God – Rowe nevertheless conveys the excitement of theatrical performance and the seduction of dramatic narrative.

Strikingly, “old” is the ﬁrst adjective that the Puritan Rowe reaches for when characterizing Mucedorus, only later describing it as “scurrilous, impious, blasphemous,” and a

“wicked and ungodly Play.” As a straightforward pastoral comedy rooted in the earlier traditions of chivalric romance, the play’s genre broadly coded as nostalgic and old- Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166069 fashioned. Mucedorus was ﬁrst written and performed around 1590 and printed in 1598; Peter Kirwan argues the revised edition of 1610 made the play purposefully more formulaic in order to distinguish it from innovative Jacobean tragicomedies by Beaumont and Fletcher and others.6 Mucedorus was already regarded as an old play by the early years of the Stuart dynasty: it appeared even older in the decades that followed, not only because of the growing distance from the moment of its composition, but also because of its publication history. Mucedorus was the most-printed playbook of the seventeenth century, having reached a remarkable ﬁfteen editions by 1653. Rowe’s statement that

“this Play was an old Play, and had been Acted by some of Santon-Harcourt men many years since” suggests that the play’s more recent performance history also contributed to its wizened appearance. The anti-theatricalist Rowe has a clear sense of Mucedorus’s

oldness; it seems likely that players and spectators also saw the play in the same way.

Indeed, I’d suggest that the property of oldness represents Mucedorus’s prime appeal

for provincial players and spectators: as a straightforward chivalric, pastoral (the plot itself imbued with nostalgia), familiar thanks to its many reprints; frequently revived for

popular audiences “many years since” (and apparently a long-time favorite of provincial

players),7 everything about Mucedorus, from its contents to its composition, performance, and publication history, could be relied on to evoke a simpler, happier time.

Though Rowe’s references to the play’s oldness seem diﬀerent from his overt characterizations of Mucedorus’s immorality, the two descriptions are in fact related. The old

Elizabethan play, Rowe reminds his reader, contains mocking references to Puritanism.

He comments on “how remarkable was this that some of them that were called Puritans in the days of old had spent that very day in Oxford in fasting and prayer; and that the Lord by so eminent an hand should testify itself against such who were not only

6Peter Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (CUP: 2015), pp. 100-5. 7On the tradition of provincial performances of Mucedorus, see Richard Priess, “A Play Finally Anonymous,” The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. Douglas Brooks, (Lampeter, 2007), p. 127. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166070 oﬀers at Godly persons, but at religion itself.” The statement reveals the stakes and length of Rowe’s anti-theatrical grudge: in reviving an Elizabethan play, the performers of the 1650s co-opt the old play’s old heresies and jibes against Puritanism, a religion mocked for so long that its very name has become an anachronism, with those “who were called Puritans in the days of old” continually an object of derision within plays from the Elizabethan period to the present.

Rowe’s polemical critique is itself a throwback, reverting to arguments common when the theatre was legal and thriving. Janet Clare argues that his “sermon rehearses all the anti-theatrical arguments associated with fundamental Puritanism” such that “the entire piece resembles a parody of anti-theatrical polemic.”8 Rowe’s old-fashioned anti- theatricalism matched the rhetoric of the most recent renewal of the edict against playing issued on February 9, 1648. That ordinance introduced fines for spectators, and increased penalties for actors: fines and imprisonment for first offenses, whipping for second offenses. For all of Parliament’s interest in moral and social reform, the renewed prohibition betrayed an atavistic streak, justifying itself by invoking “the ancient Hea- thens” who “condemned. . . Acts of Stage-Plays, Interludes, and Common Plays,” as well as earlier English statutes: “Stage-Players, and Players of Interludes, and Common Play- ers shall be taken to be Rogues, and punishable within the Statutes of Thirty-nine Year of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the Seventh Year of the Reign of King James.”

These monarchical traditions were, of course, precisely the system of order Parliament was seeking to overturn, particularly the absolutism of James I, which both his son and

Parliament’s current enemy, Charles I, continued.

Along with his general debt to his Elizabethan anti-theatrical forebears, Tragicomedia has a speciﬁc antecedent, namely, the anti-theatrical pamphlet A Godly Exhortation

(1583), which the Puritan John Field wrote in response to the collapse of the Paris

8Clare, Drama of the English Republic, p. 8. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166071

Garden on January 13, 1583 during a Sunday bear-baiting.9 Rowe cites the events “Upon the 13 of January, Anno 1583” as an “instance so neere a kin to that of Witny,

that it may not be omitted,” and borrows many of Field’s locutions and arguments in

his account of the Witney catastrophe. For example, Rowe’s description of those who

“were carried in and led betwixt their friends, and so brought home to their houses with sorrowfull heavy hearts” from “foure of the Clock in the afternoone till nine at

night, especially over London bridge” is reminiscent of Field’s description of the Paris

Garden collapse in which spectators’ bruised bodies “from that time till towardes nine

of the clocke and past: and specially ouer London bridge, many were carried in Chayres,

and ledde betwixte theyr friendes, and so brought home wyth sorrowfull and heauy hartes.”10 Both writers see the playhouse’s collapse as divine retribution for immoral

pastimes,11 and both poignantly relate the spectators’ confusion and horror amid their

respective disasters. Rowe arguably heightens his narrative’s pathos: where Field reports

the “woefull screekes & cries, wch did even pierce the skies: children there bewailing the death and hurts of their parents, Parents of their children: wives of their Husbands, and

Husbands of their Wives,” Rowe directly quotes the outpouring of familial grief, relating

how there was “the Most lamentable cry, some crying one thing, some another, some

crying aid for the Lords sake, others crying Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy

on us, others cryed oh my Husband! a second, oh my Wife! a third, Oh my child! and another said, No body loves me so well as to see where my child is.”

It is no wonder that Rowe seized upon the Witney disaster as an opportunity to highlight

the horrors of stage plays. If the theatre ban did not render anti-theatricalists entirely obsolete, it diminished the urgency of their struggle. Fittingly, just as it rails against the

9Ironically, the anti-theatricalist John Field was the father of actor and playwright Nathan Field. See Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (CUP, 2009), pp. 59-61. 10Rowe, Tragicomedia, p. 44; John Field, A eGodly Exhortation (Robert Walde-Graut and Henry Carre, 1583), p. ciii. 11Field interprets the Paris Garden events as a “judgment of God,” and relates them “to all estates for their instruction concerning the keeping of the Sabbath day holy.” Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166072

“old play” that symbolizes the old order, Tragicomedia hearkens back to a moment when Puritan reformers could argue for the cosmic importance of their opposition. Both the act of performance and the response to it reveal nostalgia for an earlier time; for players and spectators of Mucedorus, the play recalled happier days when “merry and frolick” theatregoers, drawn to the playhouse by drum and trumpet, would enjoy (in order of importance) each others’ company, and a familiar old play. Rowe is attuned to at least one aspect of the “old play’s” cultural meaning, which, in being revived, also revived

(at least onstage) Elizabethan anti-Puritan sentiment. And in his ﬁerce denunciation of the “ungodly” play, which draws from Elizabethan anti-theatrical tracts, Rowe himself betrays his longing for an earlier moment when theatre was active, and anti-theatricalism was a site of moral authority.

2 Beaumont and Fletcher on the London Stage in

1647 and 1648

The happier period of theatrical activity recalled by the performance of Mucedorus was,

as it happened, also moment when monarchs reigned. There is nothing in Rowe’s account,

however, to suggest that the performance represented a display of Royalism: Tragicome- dia does not mention any conﬂict between crown and Parliament, referring instead the

play’s oﬀensiveness to Puritan values. This oﬀensiveness is, of course, related to the con-

ﬂicts of 1642-1660, but, in Rowe’s telling, the more relevant connection is the Elizabethan

version of anti-Puritan sentiment. The mirthful spectators seem similarly unconcerned with the potential political symbolism of the performance: it seems that they simply

liked plays and the sociability associated with theatrical performance. Rowe and the

spectators’ indiﬀerence to Royalism might be one reason why the memorable Witney Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166073 episode has received so little attention from modern critics, who tend to interpret dramatic activity between 1642 and 1660 as a form of Royalist resistance.12 By contrast, the illegal performances of four Beaumont and Fletcher plays in 1647 and 1648 – A King and No King, Wit Without Money, The Bloody Brother (Rollo Duke of Normandy) and

The Scornful Lady – have attracted attention from critics who interpret them as gestures of Royalist solidarity.13 Given the fraught status of the monarchy in this period, A King and No King is described as especially provocative; Dale Randall remarks that “the title itself might draw a crowd.”14

In support of their impression of the Royalist underpinnings of late 1640 performances of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, critics usually invoke the publication of the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647) by Humphrey Moseley, a prominent Royalist stationer. Many of the thirty-seven commendatory poems in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio enlist the duo in a Royalist agenda. In his commendatory poem, for example, Thomas Peyton fantasizes that the folio will entertain the apparently uniformly literate Royalist soldiers, who retain their refined artistic sensibilities even on the battlefield: “I’ll send thee to the army, they that fight/Will read thy tragedies with some delight.” Other poems are penned by prominent Royalists, such as the military commander Sir George Lisle, who was later martyred after his execution by Republicans in the Siege of Colchester in 1648. Moseley’s version of the dramatists presented in the folio would endure in criticism: Samuel Taylor

Coleridge famously dismissed them as “servile jure devino Royalists,” a view expanded by

John Danby in the 1950s and Lawrence B. Wallis, who saw Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays essentially as propaganda pieces for James I. More recently, critics like Gordon McMullan,

12See Ann Hughes and Julie Sanders, “Gender, Exile, and The Hague Courts in the 1650s,” in Monar- chy in Exile: The Politics of Legitimacy from Marie de Medicis to Wilhelm II, eds. Philip Mansel and Torsten Riotte. Palgrave Macmillan: 2001, p. 58; Randall, Winter Fruit, pp. 39-51. 13Hughes and Sanders, p. 58; Randall, p. 44; see also Lee Bliss, ed. A King and No King (Manchester UP, 2004), p. 33; Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671 (CUP, 1992), p. 36. 14Randall, p. 44 (Randall dates this event to October 1644, but all primary records indicate that it occurred in October 1647). Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166074

Philip Finkelpearl, and Lee Bliss have argued that, judging from the dramatists’ familial and social backgrounds, and especially the plays themselves, Beaumont and Fletcher were actually highly critical of the absolutism, corruption and the excesses of the court of James I.15 My intention here is neither to recover the political sympathies of Beaumont and Fletcher in their own time, nor their plays’ political resonances in the 1640s. The ideological preoccupations of A King and No King are elusive, and subtly critical of absolute monarchy.16 It may be that, while their plays are co-opted for royalism in the front matter of the 1647 folio, the commendatory poems are creating, as much as reﬂecting, a notion about Beaumont and Fletcher’s Royalism, in an attempt to justify the publication of plays by popular playwrights in the tumultuous moment of the late 1640s. Indeed, if Beaumont and Fletcher were thought to be critical of the Stuarts, perhaps the folio’s strained attempt to claim these playwrights for Royalism could suggest that they needed to be recuperated politically in order for Royalists to continue enjoying them.

In any case, no matter their earlier political associations, the theatre ban is the one moment when one can be sure that the performance of a Beaumont and Fletcher play – as an instance of any illegal public performance – was politically subversive. But I’d like to suggest that in the 1640s, the subversive potential of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays was not primarily related to the plays’ contents, or even to the provocative title of A King and No King. Strikingly, in a report covering a pre-emptive raid on a performance of A King and No King on October 5 or 6, 1647, the Parliamentarian newsbook Perfect

Occurrences mentions neither the authors’ nor the play’s politics, nor does it exploit

what appears to be the obvious subversion implied by King’s title. Instead, it dwells on the play’s stage history, its dramatists, and the spectacle of “young lords and other

eminent persons” humiliated by the raid:

15Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (U Mass Press, 1990), pp. 71-2; Coleridge, Danby and Wallis’s stances are summarized by Philip Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Princeton UP, 1994), passim; Bliss, p. 15. 16Bliss, pp. 26-29. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166075

A Stage Play was to have been acted in Salisbury Court this day (and bills stuck up about it), called A King and No King, formerly acted in the Black-Fryars, by his Majesties servants, about 8 years since, written by Fran- cis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The sheriffs of the City of London with their officers went thither and found a great number of people, some young lords and other eminent persons, and the men and women with the [money] boxes. . . fled. The Sheriffes brought away Tim Reade the Foole, and the people cryed out for their monies, but slunke away like a company of drowned Mice without it.17

The journal goes to curious lengths to elaborate on a speciﬁc instance of performance, the play’s last legal staging at Blackfriars “eight years since,” in 1639. The triumph of the raid partly derives from its suppression of a play associated by default with the

Stuart court, as it was performed by “his Majesties servants” when Charles I still reigned supreme. The journal’s similarly extraneous attribution to Beaumont and Fletcher links them, along with the performers of their plays, to Stuart culture. The journal relishes the disparity between a moment eight years ago, when a monarch-backed troupe performed legitimately, and the present moment, when players and elite spectators slink away like mice, cowed by the sheriﬀs of London.

The passage also indicates how players ﬂagrantly contravened the law: in a instance of nostalgic self-delusion, they behaved as they had before 1642, openly posting playbill advertisements in the hopes of attracting large, eminent audiences.18 Post-1642 players also threw playbills into carriages; another edition of Perfect Occurrences from 28 January

- 4 February 1648 comments that “tickets [i.e. playbills] were thrown into gentlemen’s coaches thus: ‘At the [Red] Bull this day you may have wit without money’, meaning

17Perfect Occurrences, 8 October 1647. 18In her article on playbill advertisements, Tiﬀany Stern argues indicates that “the interregnum put a stop to legitimate playbill-printing,” but, legitimate or not, the Perfect Occurrences issue of October 8 indicates that plays continued to be advertised by “bills stuck up.” Indeed, the title of Stern’s article derives from a line in an Interregnum poem by Robert Heath, in which he worries that his poetic collection Clarastella (1650) will be debased by having its title page posted “on each wall/And corner post close underneath the Play/That must be acted at Black-Friers that day,” although Heath may be referring to a pre-1642 practice. Stern, “On Each Wall,” p. 63. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166076 a play,” referring to a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher’s comedy Wit Without Money. Recognizing the subversive potential of theatrical endurance, the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus recounts the October 1647 raid on A King and No King by

emphasizing the play’s long history, but saying nothing about King’s title or contents:

Though the House hindred the Players this weeke from playing the old play, King and no King, at Salisbury Court, yet believe me,

He that does live, shall see another age, Their follies stript and whipt upon the stage.19

The endurance of A King and No King implies a threat to drama’s enemies: though pre-empted for the moment, the old play will continue to persist, and in “another age,” presumably in the near future, players will resume “playing the old play,” and dramatize the folly of anti-theatricalists. This prophecy seems to have struck a particular chord with at least one contemporary reader; the annotator “John ﬀowle” recopied the newsbook’s

ﬁnal couplet in the margins of a copy of Mercurius Pragmaticus 5-12 October, 1647, now at the Folger.20 The endurance of old theatrical practices is a form of political resistance, of course, but one directed primarily against the theatrical prohibition, not

Republicanism per se.

If political resistance were indeed the primary end of illegal performance, why not stage a play whose politics were clear? Such plays are alluded to in the satirical poem the “The

Players’ Petition” (1643), which requests the authorities’ permission to resume playing while lambasting the “heroic nine or ten” who control the Parliament and Army.21

19Mercurius Pragmaticus, 5-12 October, 1647. 20Mercurius Pragmaticus, 5-12 October, 1647, Folger Call Number: M1768.49, no 4. My thanks to Marissa Nicosia for drawing this to my attention. 21The poem is reproduced by Rollins in “A Contribution,” where he comments that “A late copy [of “The Players’ Petition] is in The Rump (1662) Part 1, pp. 32-34 whence it is reprinted in Hazlitt’s English Drama and Stage, pp. 272. Much earlier copies, hitherto apparently unknown, are preserved in MS Ashmole 47 fols. 132-33 (from which I quote) and MS Rawlinson poet. 71, fols 164-168,” p. 275, n.24. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166077

The collective speakers of the verse petition promise that, should the theatres reopen, they will exclude any incendiary material that might incite opposition to Parliament, citing three subversive plays in particular: “we vow/Not to act anything you disallow”

[. . . ] “Aspiring Cataline shall be forgot/Bloody Sejanus, or who ere would plot/Con- fusion to a State, the wars betwixt/The Parliament & just Henry the sixt.” The plays that are pre-emptively censored represent logical choices, given the current upheaval in war-torn England: Jonson’s Cataline and Sejanus dramatize the calamity of republican government; Shakespeare’s Henry VI dramatizes an English civil war, here provocatively described as a conﬂict between “Parliament” and a “just” monarch.

It is entirely possible that Cataline, Sejanus, or Henry VI, or other incendiary plays were indeed staged in order to rile Republicans and fortify Royalists. The contemporary reports quoted above suggest, however, that the illegal performances of Beaumont and

Fletcher plays did not provoke this response. Rather, these plays belonged to the other group of plays alluded to in “The Players’ Petition,” the ones not “disallowed” or specifically opposed by Parliament: the speakers of the poem hope that by staging relatively neutral plays, they can enjoy drama without attracting the ire of the government. Pro- ducers of printed drama also referred to the compromise of benign drama, even though playbooks were not banned in this period. In William Peaps’s “Address to the Reader” to his Love in its Ecstasy (composed c. 1634, printed 1649), he reassures the reader

(along with the authorities) that even though the play is printed in tumultuous times, its anodyne contents reflect the peaceful moment in which it was composed: “You may be confident there lyes no Treason in it nor State invective, (The common issues of this pregnant age). It is inoffensive all, soft as the milkie dayes in was written in.”22

That drama lovers regarded some Beaumont and Fletcher plays to be relatively neutral is

22William Peaps, Love in its Ecstasy (Mercy Meighen, Gabriell Bedell, and Thomas Collins, 1649), A2r. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166078 suggested by a contemporary report of an illicit performance of The Scornful Lady in 1647. In the satirical pamphlet The Ladies, A Second Time, Assembled in Parliament (1647), the all-female House of Commons is discussing the widespread revival of performance:

Whereupon was demanded what plaies they were, and the answer being given, that one of them was the the scornefull Lady, the house tooke it in high disdaine, as an absolute contempt of their power.

The ladies’ oﬀense at the revival of The Scornful Lady does not stem from anti-theatrical views – one lady admits to “liking “Franke Beaumonts Play[s] so well, setting his Scornful

Lady aside” – nor is there any suggestion that the play’s oﬀensiveness derives from its politics. Rather, within the context of the misogynist satire in which silly ladies debate silly topics in Parliament, the ladies’ objections to The Scornful Lady (presumably due to its unfavorable portrait of the mercurial titular Lady) imply the play’s relative

innocuousness within contemporary culture. The notion that this play could be politically

provocative is played for laughs; only ridiculous ladies could ﬁnd serious fault with such

a lighthearted comedy.

If players were to succeed in staging plays widely understood as both neutral and oﬀering

a satisfying link to the pre-war past, the plays they staged had to be widely known:

potentially the play’s contents, but especially its title, author(s) and performance history.

The Parliamentarian and Royalist references to the performance of A King and No King each dwell on the old play’s persistent circulation; in The Ladies. . . in Parliament, the

mere mention of The Scornful Lady’s title generates outrage, suggesting its familiarity.

Indeed, The Scornful Lady was the most-printed Beaumont and Fletcher play in the

seventeenth century; it had reached its ﬁfth edition by the 1640s. Frequent publication, as I have argued, contributed to the perception of a play’s oldness; the reports suggest

that Beaumont and Fletcher’s reputation in the 1640s was partly as the producers of

familiar, old plays. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166079

Yet Beaumont and Fletcher’s reputation as authors of familiar old plays potentially stands in tension with Moseley’s folio presentation of them as the authors of a “new book.” In the volume’s front matter, Moseley highlights that the volume consists of thirty-ﬁve “new,” previously unprinted plays. The volume deliberately excludes plays already printed in single text editions, including the four plays which we know were illegally performed in 1647 and 1648, A King and No King, The Scornful Lady, Wit Without Money, and The

Bloody Brother. Despite Moseley’s emphasis on novelty, however, many of the folio’s

commendatory poems praise the very plays – namely, the frequently reprinted old plays

– that are explicitly excluded from the volume. In his commendatory poem, Thomas

Stanley describes The Scornful Lady as a welcome tonic after reading Aspasia’s plight in The Maid’s Tragedy, with both plays reaching Q5 by 1647: “And when Aspasia wept, not

any eye, / But seemed to wear the same sad livery [. . . ] / But then the Scornful Lady did

beguile / Their easy grief, and teach them all to smile.” In “Upon Mr. John Fletcher’s

Plays,” Edmund Waller refers to The Scornful Lady as the height of the dramatists’ exasperating virtuosity: “when I venture at the Comick Stile/Thy Scornful Lady seems

to mock my toile.” The two poems conﬁrm The Parliament of Ladies’ intimation that

Scornful was reputed to be an exemplary light-hearted comedy. In the same folio, Robert

Herrick’s “Upon Master Fletcher’s Incomparable Plays” invokes A King and No King

(despite its absence from the folio, having reached its fourth edition by 1647) by praising “That high designe / Of King and no King (and the rare plot thine).”23 In 1647, after half a decade of war between King and Parliament, couched within the Royalist rhetoric of the folio, with the King currently in custody and his monarchy currently in limbo, the ambiguity implied by the title and contents of A King and No King begs to be

analogized in terms of contemporary political events. But Herrick celebrates the play’s aesthetic dimensions of design and plotting, and refrains from mentioning contemporary

politics. Claire Bourne has argued that The Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster and A King and

23Robert Herrick, “Upon Master Fletcher’s Incomparable Plays,” in Comedies and Tragedies (1647), F1r. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166080

No King cemented, early on, Beaumont and Fletcher’s “joint reputation for generating a pleasurable feeling of expectation through ingenious plotting.”24 Stanley, Herrick and

Waller’s commendatory poems’ suggest how the appeal of Moseley’s “new” folio was

actually staked on a small number of familiar, frequently reprinted plays that established

the dramatists as skilled authors of tragedy and comedy.

That Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays were seen primarily in aesthetic terms is suggested

by the moments when contemporary conﬂicts are invoked, explicitly or implicitly. The

commendatory poem by the prominent military leader Sir George Lisle nowhere mentions

the ongoing political conﬂict, or the war which claimed his life the following year. Lisle focuses only on Beaumont and Fletcher’s poetic power, and their place in the dramatic

tradition as heirs to Ben Jonson: “Thou strik’st our sense so deep, / At once thou mak’st

us Blush, Rejoyce, and Weep. / Great Father Johnson bow’d himself when hee / (Thou

writ’st so nobly) vow’d he envy’d thee.” The Royalist commander advertises himself as an admirer of a native dramatic tradition stretching from “Great Father Jonson” to Beau-

mont and Fletcher. Lisle’s aesthetic appreciation is not meant to be idiosyncratic, but

rather representative of a larger community of readers (which one imagines includes the

play-loving Royalist soldiers from Thomas Peyton’s commendatory poem): the drama-

tists strike “our sense so deep” making “us blush, rejoyce and weep.” This seemingly belletristic conception of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays seems at ﬁrst glance to be in

tension with Lisle’s overt Royalist aﬃliations. And yet, Royalists saw themselves as cus-

todians of English culture and literature: in Martin Butler’s memorable words, as far as

Royalists were concerned, they “were sensitive to the arts, and Puritans were ignorant blockheads.”25 Royalists, of course, did not have a monopoly on dramatic consumption, but this narrative was increasingly central to their propaganda and self-deﬁnition.

24Bourne, pp. 276-277. 25Butler, p. 9. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166081

Such determined belletrism was itself a political gesture, of course: Royalists’ regard for and protection of “high art,” supposedly above the fray of contemporary politics, was a means to distinguish themselves from Puritan blockheads. Michael Gavin similarly argues that, “elevated above the tastes of ’common men’ and the vulgar publications of the controversial press, royalist prefatory criticism was designed to mark an arena of literary discussion apart from political dispute as such.”26 Thanks to the Royalists’ paradoxically politicized appreciation of ostensibly apolitical art, clear-cut Royalist plays, such as the closet drama The Famous Tragedy of Charles I Basely Butchered (1649), which dramatized the siege of Colchester of 1648 and the regicide of 1649, were less frequently cited in Royalist prefatory criticism than the more neutral plays of, say, Beaumont and Fletcher. For supporters of drama, “playing the old play” was both more aesthetically satisfying and politically subversive than playing a new one; opponents of drama similarly recognized the political threat posed by the performance of old plays, even if their contents were relatively neutral.

It is worth noting that the property of oldness was used to describe both Mucedorus in

1653 (by John Rowe) and A King and No King in 1647 (by Parliamentarian and Royalist

newsbooks). It is true that, at the time, both plays possessed some of the attributes that

contributed to a play’s perceived age: written long ago, frequently revived and reprinted. Mucedorus’s old-fashioned plot reinforced the impression of its age; even by the 1610s,

the play functioned relatively unproblematically as a shorthand for old-fashioned drama.

The same cannot be said of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays in the 1640s, however: the

dramatists’ were known for their innovative narratives – the “high design” of their plots – which made their plays appear contemporary even long after they were ﬁrst composed

and staged; and in 1647 Moseley presented them as the authors of thirty-ﬁve “new” plays

26Gavin, p. 25. For an opposing view on the political underpinnings of royalist literary criticism, see David Scott Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” p. 121 and Ann Bayes Coiro, “Milton and Class Identity: The Publication of Areopagitica and the 1645 Poems,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 277. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166082 in the “new book” of the folio. Nevertheless, whereas in 1610 the popular Mucedorus was sharply distinguished from sophisticated, courtly Jacobean tragicomedies by Beaumont

and Fletcher, among others,27 by the late 1640s and 1650s, dramatic commentators

reached for the same adjective to describe both Mucedorus and A King and No King:

“old.” The determining factor was the theatre ban itself: because the ban represented a clear break with the dramatic past, the vast variety of dramatic activity from before

1642 was collapsed into a single category: plays from long ago, when the theatres were

active.

3 Interregnum Drolls, late 1640s-1655

One way players responded to the prohibition on drama and heightened penalties for

playing introduced in the late 1640s was to stage two kinds of abbreviated theatrical

performance, both of which were retrospectively called drolls (short for drollery). The ﬁrst type were short, narratively coherent playlets adapted from Elizabethan amateur in-

terludes. The second type were scenes extracted from commercial plays, spliced together

with lines and characters cut, often with little regard for narrative continuity. As an ab-

breviated, simpliﬁed dramatic form, the droll could be staged quickly, reducing the risk

that performances would be raided. The lack of elaborate costumes or props meant that, even if the drolls were raided (as indeed they were) actors wouldn’t lose their costly para-

phernalia. As Francis Kirkman puts it, drolls “were the ﬁttest for the actors to represent”

during the prohibition, “there being little cost in cloaths, which often were in great dan-

ger to be seized by the then souldiers, who as the poet says, Enter the Red Coat, Exit Hat and Cloak.” The fullest near-contemporary information about professional drolls

appears in Kirkman’s publications from the Restoration. The ﬁrst printed commercial

27Kirwan, pp. 100-105. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166083 droll was his single-text edition of Bottom the Weaver (1661); the droll focuses on the Bottom and the Mechanicals’ scenes, abbreviating A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a

comic, musical farce that can be staged in about an hour by nine players. Kirkman then

published two droll anthologies, The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport Part 1 (1662, published

with Henry Marsh, and reprinted 1672, henceforth 1 Wits) and The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport Part 2 (1673, henceforth 2 Wits). The ﬁrst anthology, 1 Wits features 27 dramatic shorts, 22 excerpts from commercial drama, and 5 amateur interludes. The volume draws heavily from Beaumont and Fletcher, with just over half (14 of 27) taken from one of the collaborators’ plays, including “The False Heir” from The Scornful Lady; “Forc’d

Valour” from A King and No King; and “The Landlady” from The Chances. Though they are not included in 2 Wits, considering the two volumes as single set (as Kirkman encourages us to do in the volume’s prefatory matter) Beaumont and Fletcher are still in ﬁrst place with 14 out out of 41 drolls. Amateur drolls are second, with ﬁve: four drolls in 1 Wits (“Simpleton the Smith”; “Bumpkin”; “Hobbinal”; “John Swabber”) and one in 2 Wits (“Oenone”). James Shirley and Shakespeare are tied for third place with three each, respectively with “Jenkins Love Course” from The School of Compliment; “A

Prince in Conceit” from The Opportunity; “Monsieur the French Dancing-Master” from

The Variety (with William Cavendish; and “The Bouncing Knight” from 1 Henry IV ;

“The Grave Makers” from Hamlet; in 2 Wits, “Bottom the Weaver,” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1 Wits and 2 Wits celebrate the form that kept English theatre alive

onstage during the ban. Marsh asks his reader to “Pray remember the Rump drolls”

a sentimental reference to performance during the Rump Parliament (1648–53). In the

follow-up volume 2 Wits, Kirkman states that drolls were the sole entertainment during

the ban:

When the publique theatres were shut up. . . then all we could divert ourselves with were these humours and pieces of plays, which. . . were only allowed us, Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166084

and that but by the stealth too, and under pretence of rope-dancing, or like.28

Kirkman himself may have performed in the drolls; in his autobiography he claimed that he performed during the interregnum “not only in private to entertain friends, but also on a public theatre.”29 But he credits “the incomparable Robert Cox” as the primary author, compiler and actor of the drolls. Gerald Langbaine described him as “an Excellent

Comedian that lived in the Reign of King Charles the ﬁrst, One, who when the Ring- leaders of the Rebellion and Reformers of nation supprest the stage, betook himself to making Drolls or Farces.”30 A collection of amateur drolls, Acteon and Diana (1656), was published posthumously in Robert Cox’s name after his death in 1655.

Critics have debated whether 1 Wits and 2 Wits are innocuous or politically provocative.

John James Elson, the modern editor of The Wits, argued in 1932 that “No contemporary political allusions occur in the drolls” and concludes that they “were designed to entertain, not to propagandize.”31 More recently, Dale Randall points to various “ar- resting” “thought-provoking” moments in The Wits that cannot help but be read as political commentary, such as the titles and contents of The Loyal Citizens and The

Lame Commonwealth, and especially the Philaster droll which involves the restoration of a dispossessed prince, which ends with the crowd shouting “Long may’st thou live brave prince, brave Prince, brave Prince.”32 Suﬃce to say, as with full-length entertainments, any performance of drolls in this period was subversive insofar as the medium was outlawed. Themes of rebellion, civil war, tyranny and civil war were landing in a much more charged cultural landscape than where they were conceived. And yet, though they do not always shy away from provocative content and titles, neither do the drolls fan the

28Francis Kirkman, The Wits, or Sport upon Sport, Part 2 (Francis Kirkman, 1672), A2v. 29Francis Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen (1673), p. 258. 30Gerald Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (George West and Henry Clements, 1691), p. 91. 31John James Elson, ed., The Wits (Cornell UP, 1932), p. 22. 32Randall, p. 155. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166085

ﬂames in what could be a prime vehicle of protest. Though they chop and scramble the source texts, the drolls in general do not add new material, remaining faithful to the original sources. Of course, as we’ve seen, such faithfulness to the politically innocuous cultural products of the pre-war era was itself a political gesture.

Some critics doubt that the professional drolls printed in 1 Wits and 2 Wits were ever performed on the illegal interregnum stage. (There is little doubt that Robert Cox performed amateur drolls during the Interregnum, and that Cox’s collection Acteon and

Diana, [1656], represented recent stage fare.)33 John Astington argues that “As literary products consisting (in part) of extracts from pre-war plays,” Kirkman’s Restoration droll collections “were a rather late arrival on the booksellers’ stalls, and they do not read as notably more ‘theatrical’ than the episodes in Wits Interpreter, for which no performing history was claimed.” As such, he suggests that “The Wits may largely be a further example of an anthology made for readers.”34 While I agree that the two volumes of The Wits are anthologies for readers, I disagree with Astington’s claim that the extracts are no more “theatrical” than the dialogues drawn from Wits Interpreter. Though both are fragments from longer plays, the form and function of the droll differs substantially from those of the commonplace dramatic extract. Extracts from The Wits Interpreter offer rhetorical models that need no wider context to be intelligble; they serve, as the title page promises, as “a sure Guide to those Admirable Accomplishments that compleat our English Gentry, in the most acceptable Qualifications of Discourse or Writing.” The drolls in The Wits by contrast do not serve as models of rhetorical emulation, and serve no explicit didactic purpose. Rather, they are designed chiefly to entertain: they emphasize theatrically effective comic moments, songs and dances; they are often nonsensical, but

33The title page to Acteon and Diana claims that the text was “Acted at the Red Bull with Great Applause”; Mercurius Democritus, 22-29 June 1653, reports how Cox was “to present a modest and harmless gig called Swabber,” John Swabber the Seaman, included in the collection Acteon and Diana when the theatre was raided. 34John Astington, “Dramatic Extracts in the Interregnum,” The Review of English Studies, 54.217 (2003), pp. 608-9. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166086 this lack of narrative clarity would be more forgivable when embodied by actors.35

The prefatory matter to 1 Wits and 2 Wits offers different perspectives on if and how the dramatic fragments were seen to stand in for the full-length plays from which they were drawn. In the first volume, Marsh states that drolls have little connection to their sources, and so are easily extracted. “He that knows a Play,” Marsh explains, “knows that Humours have no such fixedness and indissoluble connection to the design, but that without injury or forcible revulsion, they may be removed to an advantage.”36 A decade later, in the preface to 2 Wits, Kirkman offers another view of the relationship between the piece and the play from which it was taken, as well as with the collection into which it was incorporated, “These collections are the very soul of their writings, if the witty part thereof may be so termed.” Kirkman’s discussion of the “witty part” as the “soul” of play suggests how the droll distills the parent play: Holland and Michael

Dobson respectively argue that Shakespeare’s drolls “resonantly echo the complete texts to which they witness” and “iconically. . . stand in for the play” from which they were taken.37Echo and icon are appropriate characterizations of the drolls’ function, as they indeed are distorted, partial, isolated reﬂections of the original play. That the drolls are able to “stand in” for the original – indeed, in some cases, that they are intelligible at all

– depends on the viewer’s familiarity with the source. Many of the Interregnum drolls are jerky: they cut and splice together various scenes, lines and characters, and jump from one episode to the next sometimes with no explanation or background information. Even with the prefatory explicatory argument printed before the main text (and potentially

35Janet Clare and Laura Estill share my view that professional drolls were indeed performed on the Interregnum stage. See Janet Clare, “General Introduction,” Drama of the English Republic, pp. 21- 22; Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century Manuscripts (University of Delaware Press, 2015), pp. 78-79. 36Kirkman signed his name to this epistle in the second edition of 1672. 37Peter Holland, “Shakespeare Abbreviated,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Robert Shaughnessy (CUP, 2007), p. 26; Michael Dobson, “The Gravemakers,” The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, eds. Michael Dobson, Stanley Wells, Will Sharpe and Erin Sullivan (OUP, 2015), p. 172. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166087 read before a performance), some drolls border nonsense. While possibly due simply to sloppy composition, it seems more likely that the narrative gaps and muddles reﬂect compilers’ assumptions either that audiences were familiar enough with the source plays to ﬁll in the gaps, or that the pleasure of watching beloved characters on stage will be enjoyable even if the context is unclear.

This seems to be the case with the three Shakespearean drolls: “Bottom the Weaver” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (in individual edition of 1661 and reprinted in 2 Wits),

“The Bouncing Knight” from 1 Henry IV and “The Grave Makers” from Hamlet (both in 1 Wits). Both the selection of the source plays and each droll’s cuts and inclusions are consistent with what we know about the preferred Shakespeare plays and scenes in the seventeenth century. “Bottom the Weaver” preserves what the old Shakespeare

Allusion Books suggest were the most-invoked (and therefore most memorable) parts of the play: it retains most of Nick Bottom and the Mechanicals’ scenes, the play’s theatrically eﬀective songs and dances, and most of Puck’s lines, while reducing the parts of Oberon and Titania (here reduced to “Duke” and “Duchess” and merely the spectators of the mechanicals’ play) and omitting Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and

Helena entirely.38 For “The Grave Makers,” Cox chose a well-known, darkly comic scene

(drolls, short for drollery, acquired their name because they were usually comic) from Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s most familiar plays by mid-century.39 Cox ensured that

38Bottom is invoked in Fletcher’s Beggars’ Bush, and Nicholas Breton quotes a portion of his song in III.i of The Arbor of Amorous Devices. Puck’s promise to “put a girdle round about the earth” is echoed by Ferdinand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (III.i) and in Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (I.i.), and in Massinger’s Maid of Honor. Thomas Dekker invokes Titania’s seduction of Bottom the donkey at the start of IV.i in Shoemaker’s Holiday. John Taylor quotes Quince’s prologue, “if we offend, it is with our good will, we came with no intent, but to offend, and show our simple skill” in Sir Gregory Nonsense (1622, 1630). And John Gee’s New Shreds of the Old Snare (1624) refers to the cheapness of the play’s representation of light through the figure of Moonshine with this “Lanthorne.” “Pyramis and Thisbe” was also cited (both within the context of MND and on its own terms) by Edward Sharpham, Sam Rowlands, in The Night Raven (1620), and William Sampson, The Vow Breaker(1636). 39Measured in terms of allusions, the gravedigger scene was particularly well-known. Thomas Ran- dolph parodied the scene in Act IV scene iii of his popular comedy The Jealous Lovers (printed in 1632, 1634, 1640, 1646 and 1652). Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166088 audiences would connect “The Grave Makers” with Hamlet by retaining specific reference to the title character throughout the speech prefixes and dialogue. By contrast, Horatio is consistently rendered as “friend” and Ophelia is only referred to as “Lady.” The

Argument partly isolates “The Grave Makers” from Hamlet, and indeed the droll is intelligible as a stand-alone entertainment. Yet the consistent reference to now-famous title character forces the viewer to think of the eponymous play. A familiarity with

Hamlet enhances one’s experience of “The Grave-Makers”: understood separately, the droll is macrabre riddles and philosophizing; understood alongside it, it is a darkly comic riﬀ on the play’s primary thematic preoccupations.

The selections and omissions from “The Bouncing Knight,” drawn from 1 Henry IV are

also consistent with what we know about the reception of the source play. 1 Henry IV

was the most-printed Shakespeare play of the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century. Early

on, the scene-stealing Falstaﬀ became the play’s iconic character.40 There are more seventeenth-century references to Falstaﬀ and 1 Henry IV than to any other Shake-

spearean character or work (with Hamlet/Hamlet in second place) with many allusions

referring to the droll’s four distinct Falstaﬀ episodes, all from 1 Henry IV : Falstaﬀ’s

account of the Gadshill robbery, with his ever-increasing number of adversaries; followed

by the play extempore in which Falstaff and Hal take turns playing the king from; then Falstaff leading his piteous army recruits and his honor speech; finally Falstaff’s faking

his own death, and “resurrection” to deliver what he later claims was Hotspur’s fatal

wound. Some characters and episodes are left out entirely, most notably the title char-

acter of King Henry IV. The printed droll begins with an Argument, which outlines the Gadshill robbery that occurs before the droll’s ﬁrst episode: “A company of mad fellows

resolve to take purse, and to that purpose separate themselves, 4 in one company, 2 in

40A 1624 account on recent performance of the play elevated Falstaff to the title character, when it reported that “The First Part of Sir John Falstaff” was performed at Whitehall. See C. M. Ingleby et al. The Shakespeare Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions of Shakespeare from 1591 to 1700 (Chatto, 1879), p. 228. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166089 another, the four Rob and tame the true Men, the two Rob those four again. And then all meeting the 4 exclaim against the absent two, and other scenes of mirth follow.” The description of Prince Hal’s plot to rob Falstaff and the other thieves (the alternate title of “The Bouncing Knight” is “The Robers Rob’d” [sic]) helps us better understand the droll’s first episode, especially the humor of Falstaff’s ever-multiplying adversaries from two to “a hundred upon poor four of us.” The rest of the Argument, however, leaves out the requisite background information for the “other scenes of mirth that follow.”

The four atomized, context-less episodes abruptly shift from one to the next, with little narrative continuity. For example, Falstaff’s sudden entrance “as to the wars” is never prefaced by any information about the rebellion, but spectators would surely know about his self-serving military exploits. In the second episode, Falstaff responds to having his pocket picked, but there is no depiction or mention of Hal’s role in the scheme, lessening the irony of Falstaff’s criticism of the Hostess. In the third, Falstaff’s entrance “as to the wars” isn’t prefaced by any information about the rebellion and ensuing wars. This scenelet concludes with Falstaff’s honour speech and his exit, then abruptly shifts to

“Jack in fight falls down as he were dead,” and Hal’s meditations over his body. The transition is effective insofar as Falstaff states his doubts about the value of honor, and immediately acts dishonorably to save his hide. Falstaff tells Hal he is “afraid of this gunpowder Percy,” and takes responsibly for his death, yet Percy actually never appears in the droll, nor his is role explained. The audience never sees or learns who kills Percy, hampering the joke about Falstaff claiming responsibility for his death. Overall, these episodes make little narrative sense: the authors of “The Bouncing Knight” trust either that the audience will be able to fill in the required information for themselves, or that the pleasure of watching an uninterrupted pastiche of scenes centered on a well-loved character will be enjoyable even devoid of context. Commenting on the jerky amalgam of scenes in “The Bouncing Knight,” Janet Clare similarly comments that “Such a redac- tion obviously depends on a folkloric appreciation of the character, divorced from any Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166090 narrative framework.”41 “The Bouncing Knight” highlights what already by the early seventeenth century was understood as “Falstaffian”: physically, imaginatively, and ver- bally copious.42 These scenes stood out in people’s minds as particularly enjoyable or memorable. Moreover, the anti-Puritan strain of 1 Henry IV and Falstaff’s association with Puritanism may have given the play new relevance in the 1640s and 1650s.43 Some viewers may have appreciated hearkening back to the moment when mocking the

hypocrisy of Puritans was routine.

The other source texts must have been similarly familiar to droll audiences. Beaumont

and Fletcher, as the rest of this dissertation shows, were even more visible than Shake- speare on the Interregnum page and stage – having been frequently reprinted, recently

published in a large folio edition, performed on the illegal stage, and commonplaced and

extracted in miscellanies and commonplace books. “The False Heir,” extracted from

Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady is perhaps the least intelligible of all the drolls in The Wits. That The Scornful Lady was the dramatists’ most-frequently printed

quarto hints that viewers would have gotten the gist, their memories supplying the droll’s

shortcomings. A play’s reputation for oldness is often seen as a negative quality.44 Yet there is much evidence for the positive values associated with dramatic oldness in the

Interregnum. Old plays were cultural touchstones that were valued for different reasons by different people – for their familiar plots, beloved characters, as symbols of an earlier political moment, or simply as a vestige of a vaguely defined “past.” Their unifying quality was as old plays.

41Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic, p. 23. 42See Chapter 3 for more on Shakespeare’s reputation for oldness in the Interregnum. 43Kristen Poole discusses Falstaﬀ’s associations with Puritanism in Chapter 1 of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Non-Conformity in Early Modern England (CUP, 2000). 44For example, David Kastan argues that “Old” Shakespeare “seemed to many distant and old- fashioned” by the 1650s, one reason why he was not reprinted in the Interregnum (Shakespeare and The Book, p. 82. I address this question in Chapter 4. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166091

4 The Sanctioned Performance of New Plays, 1653-

1659

After multiple attempts to fully suppress theatre in the late 1640s, by 1653 the Common- wealth appeared to soften its stance on performance. On March 26, 1653, Parliament ordered James Shirley’s masque Cupid and Death (1653) to be staged before the Portuguese ambassador. The title page to the printed edition of Cupid and Death (also 1653) declared that the play was “As it was Presented before his Excellencie, The Embassadour of

PORTUGAL” but Shirley distanced himself from the production, stating in the volume’s preface that it was performed “without any address or design of the Author.” Wiseman comments that Shirley’s “denial may well be at least in part disingenuous: it seems likely that he would have known that his manuscript was being used.”45 No matter the sincer- ity of Shirley’s disavowal, however, other dramatic poets seem to have taken notice of the new leniency, and were ready to capitalize on it. In 1654, Richard Flecknoe published Love’s Dominion (1654), a closet drama described on its title page as being “Written for the REFORMED STAGE” and dedicated to Lady Elizabeth (Cromwell) Claypole,

Oliver Cromwell’s daughter. On May 23, 1656, William Davenant staged The First Day’s

Entertainment at Rutland House at his private London estate. Little is known of the event; the printed play (1657) indicates that it was performed with “Declamations and Musick.” Though this musical entertainment was staged illegally, evidently it met with little resistance from the authorities, judging from the fact that the Commonwealth soon sanctioned the performance of three more Davenant plays, each of which emphasized its musical component: The Siege of Rhodes was performed at Rutland House in Septem- ber 1656, and printed that year, its title page describing it as “Recitative Musick”; The

45Wiseman, pp. 122-123. The claim may reﬂect Shirley’s embarrassment at kowtowing to the new powers. (The second edition of Cupid and Death (1659) omitted the references to the March 1653 performance, instead only described it as “A Private Entertainment. Writen By J. S.”) Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166092

Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru was “Exprest by Instrumentall and Vocall Musick” at the Cockpit in Summer 1658, as the play’s 1658 title page declared; The History of Sir

Francis Drake was also “Exprest by Instrumentall and Vocall Musick” at the Cockpit in late 1658 or early 1659, and printed in 1659. Civic pageants also resumed in 1656; these were regularly staged prior to 1642 for Lord Mayor’s yearly procession after St Simon and St Jude’s day, as well as for visits from authorities and foreign dignitaries; after their resumption in 1656, they were performed in each of the remaining years of the 1650s.46 In 1657, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell commissioned new masques from three prominent Commonwealth poets for the weddings of Mary and Frances Cromwell, his two youngest daughters. Andrew Marvell wrote “Two Songs at the Marriage of the Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell,” Edmund Waller composed “On the

Marriage of Mts. Frances Cromwell wth Mr. Rich Granchild to the Earl of Warwicke.”

The Stationers’ Register records an epithalamium by William Davenant “to be sung in recitative musicke” for the wedding of Mary Cromwell, which has since been lost.

Critics have explored how these dramatist poets – especially Shirley and Davenant, with their previous ties to the Stuart Court – shaped their compositions according to Com- monwealth values. Wiseman discusses the “qualities in Cupid and Death which make it suitable for a republican court.”47 Janet Clare argues that Shirley and Davenant’s plays demonstrate how the former court dramatists “were striving to work within the cultural and aesthetic parameters of the newly modelled godly Commonwealth led by Oliver

Cromwell.”48 The cultural parameters of the new Commonwealth are clear: the authorities called for reformed, moral entertainments that bolstered national pride; the aesthetic parameters are less clear because they are chieﬂy deﬁned in the negative, as I discuss below. The critical conversation on Commonwealth drama has duly revolved around its

46Wiseman, pp. 171-188. 47Wiseman, p. 122. 48Clare, Drama of the English Republic, p. 1. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166093 avowed promotion of the Commonwealth’s moral and political values, and rightly so, as Davenant’s Cruelty of the Spaniards of Peru, for example, celebrated Cromwell’s colonial expansion. Yet, for many of these plays, dramatic reform was not primarily a matter of purging lascivious or otherwise oﬀensive contents from plays and of praising the Com- monwealth; Clare notes that Dryden “exaggerated the reformed and moral nature of Davenant’s entertainments,” other modern critics would follow suit.49 Yet, if Davenant’s

new works do not assiduously adhere to the cultural parameters of the Commonwealth, it

is more diﬃcult to say why the government authorised them. Clare argues that Davenant

successfully staged drama partly because his composite entertainments “defy classiﬁca-

tion.” “It can be assumed,” Clare argues, that the entertainments’ “indistinct generic identity, part debate, part opera, part masque, and part play, enabled them to circum-

vent the prohibition of 1642.”50 Though Clare is not explicit on this point, it is worth

articulating the system of dramatic classiﬁcation which Davenant evades: the genre of

professional plays produced before 1642, a category which only fully cohered after 1642 with the closure of the theatres. Although initially Davenant’s new plays were seen to

have an “indistinct generic identity,” they were distinctive insofar as they diﬀered from

previous oﬀerings, therefore could not be slotted into the same categories of organization.

Not all 1650s drama displayed Davenant’s ingenuity in departing from earlier dramatic

forms; as I discuss below, the wedding masques produced for Cromwell’s daughters largely reproduced the Stuart version. Yet while the moral and political contents and aesthetic

forms of 1650s drama vary widely, all the works sanctioned for performance in the Com-

monwealth share the same feature, one that has heretofore been under-theorized: they

are new. We’ve seen how opponents of drama objected to plays like A King and No King

because they were “formerly acted in the Black-Fryars, by his Majesties servants, about 8 years since” and therefore a symbol of the old order. New plays could be claimed as

49Janet Clare, “The Production and Reception of Davenant’s Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru,” The Modern Language Review 89.4 (1994), p. 832. See also Judy M. Park, “The Limits of Empire in Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes,” Mediterranean Studies 24 (2016): 47-76. 50Clare, “The Production and Reception,” p. 832. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166094 the cultural products of the Commonwealth, simply by virtue of their novelty.

The Commonwealth’s disparate attitudes toward old and new plays is suggested by its diﬀerent responses to two theatrical events from 1653. In that year, the authorities sanctioned a performance of Shirley’s Cupid and Death, and raided a performance of Claricilla, by Thomas Killigrew, another courtier playwright, one who, upon the restoration of the professional theatres in 1660, received one of the two theatrical patents from

Charles II, along with William Davenant. Claricilla is not overtly subversive, nor is

Cupid and Death a ringing endorsement of republican values; it was not expressly composed for republican performance, but rather was written shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, while Shirley was employed as a schoolmaster.51 One can compare the various political resonances of Cupid and Death and Claricilla’s politics,52 but I suggest that, for the Commonwealth, the most salient diﬀerence between these plays is that one was composed before and one after 1642. The title page to the anonymous Lady Alimony, a play published (and likely composed) in 1659,53 suggests how novelty was more likely

to be accepted by the authorities; it declares that the play is an “An Excellent Pleasant

New COMEDY. Duly Authorized, daily acted, and frequently Followed.” The veracity

of such claims aside – as Sophie Tomlinson points out, “despite being described on the

title-page of the quarto edition as ‘Duly Authorized’, Lady Alimony was not entered in the Stationers’ Register”54 – the title page makes a tacit connection between newness

and the play being duly authorized and daily acted. It is diﬃcult to imagine a similar

claim being made about an “old play.”

51Wiseman, p. 122. 52The recent critics of Killigrew’s Claricilla have attempted to redeem it from “charges of irrelevance and decadent frivolity.” See Eleanor Collins, “From Court to Cockpit: The Prisoners and Claricilla in Repertory,” in Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage: New Perspectives ed. Philip Major (Ashgate, 2012). 53See Randall, pp. 309-10; Deborah Payne, Patronage and The Dramatic Marketplace under Charles I and II,” The Year’s Work in English Studies 21 (1991): 137-52.; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale University Press, 1994), p. 90. 54Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (CUP: 2005), p. 263, n.1. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166095

Cromwell’s commission of wedding masques by Marvell, Waller and Davenant for his daughters Mary and Frances in 1657 is sometimes interpreted as a cultural about-face by the Protectorate. Holberton comments that “the boldest reading [of Marvell’s wedding masque and other songs] is Sherwood’s argument that they constitute a revival of the

Stuart court masque; low key, but unmistakably regal.”55 The decadent and immoral Stuart masques, of course, were a chief target of Republicans; the Parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britainicus of November 9-16, 1643 mocks how ‘in time [the Cavaliers] will go neere to put down all preaching and praying, and have some religious masque or play instead of Morning and Evening Prayer, it has been an old fashion at Court, amongst the Protestants there, to shut up the Sabbath with some wholesome piece of Ben Johnson or Davenant, a kinde of Comicall Divinity.”56 The Cromwellian masque wasn’t a straightforward resuscitation of Stuart cultural icons, however; as Holberton explains, “Such arguments miss the point that icons or cultural forms can never be revived simply. The Protectorate’s elite reused cultural materials that past kings had used. . . But it could not replicate the original ideological import of these materials any more than it could erase the regicide.”57 The key to reusing past cultural forms, while avoiding associations with Stuart court culture, was the composition of new exemplars within the older genre: the old court wedding masques of Jonson and Davenant made way for new masques by Waller, Marvell – and Davenant himself. The English Revolution faced a problem of cultural representation: attempting to sweep away the art and iconography of monarchy, the new government, as Wiseman explains, “needed to establish a cultural rhetoric, and lacked a rich repository of images.”58 Cromwell’s revival of the older artistic

form of the masque, renewed in the hands of the Republican Marvell (and the oppor-

tunists Waller and Davenant), can be seen as one attempt to reshape culture in the image

55Holberton, “’Soe Honny from the Lyon came’: The 1657 Wedding-Masques for the Protector’s Daughters,” The Seventeenth Century 20 (2005), p. 98, citing Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, pp. 115-17. 56Mercurius Britainicus, 9-16 Nov, 1643. 57Holberton, p. 98. 58Wiseman, p. 62. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166096 of the Commonwealth. Indeed, given the importance of artistic sensibility to Royalist self-identiﬁcation, one can imagine that the Puritans’ appropriation of the masque and play was more threatening to Royalist culture than merely attempting to suppress those artistic forms.

The political valences of dramatic novelty go a long way towards explaining the most famous example of theatrical accommodation in the Commonwealth, namely Davenant’s three musical entertainments, The Siege of Rhodes (sanctioned for performance in 1656);

The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (in 1658) and The History of Sir Francis Drake

(in 1659), as well as his First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House (staged for paying spectators without interference in May 1656). The contents of these plays are political;

prior to staging them, Davenant petitioned John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State,

and oﬀered economic, pragmatic, and ideological reasons why public drama should be

revived. Davenant urged Thurloe to grant him a license to perform plays to teach the citizenry morality; he promised to create support for England and English colonial expan-

sion partly by generating anti-Dutch and anti-Spanish sentiment. The licence granted,

Davenant fulﬁlled some of these promises: The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru viliﬁed

Spanish colonists, and Sir Francis Drake celebrated expansionist policy by dramatizing

its titular hero’s exploration in South America in 1572.59

But Davenant’s plays were also tolerated because they presented themselves as something

wholly new: not merely new compositions, but a new dramatic genre. The title of The

First Day’s Entertainment signaled the advent of a new theatrical tradition; Davenant avoids calling Siege, Cruelty and Francis “stage plays” and instead presents them as

the ﬁrst instances of the fresh genre of “recitative musique,” “expressed by instrumental

and vocal music,” and performed with the novelties of movable scenery and actresses.

59Clare, “Davenant’s Production of The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru,” The Modern Language Review 89.4 (1994). See also C. H. Firth, “Sir William Davenant the Revival of Drama during the Protectorate,” English Historical Review 18 (1903), pp. 319-21. Chapter 2. “Playing the Old Play”: Theatrical Performance, 1642-166097

Dramatic reform was partly achieved by literally re-forming English drama, reshaping the genre into something diﬀerent. Eoin Price and Ian Cuthbertson similarly argue that “A glance at the title pages of Davenant’s dramas. . . alerts the reader to fresh ways of thinking about theatre: their title pages advertise the visual and aural eﬀects created by new staging techniques....New kinds of theatrical experience call for new kinds of theatrical terminology.”60 This fresh take on drama was clearly acceptable to the authorities – both

The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and Sir Francis Drake are said to be “Represented daily at the Cockpit in DRURY-LANE, At Three Afternoon Punctually.” The political valences of the operas’ narratives should not be minimized – Davenant was certainly ingratiating himself with the current authorities – but genre and staging played a key role in the sanction of his operas. Seeing the new scenery, new actresses, and hearing the innovative recitative, a spectator would immediately recognize that Davenant’s work represented a new tradition, a clear break with the past. This impression has endured:

Davenant’s compositions of the 1650s are now recognized as the ﬁrst English operas.

The cultural and political changes that took place between 1642 and 1660 subverted the typical resonances of novelty and familiarity. While novelty is more likely than familiarity to be seen as subversive and threatening, counter-intuitively, in this period “old” plays were subversive while “new” ones were neutral, irrespective of content. Old plays evoked the past: the past had diﬀerent versions and emphases, depending on who was doing the remembering: it could be a happy or terrible moment when monarchy reigned; when hilarious or oﬀensive jokes about Puritans were routine; a mirthful or ungodly time when the theatres were open. These political and moral connotations of what were seen as “old plays” in the 1640s and 1650s have largely fallen away. Even today, however, we continue to regard them as a coherent group: we call it English Renaissance drama.

60Eoin Price and Ian Cuthbertson, ‘Public and Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 72. Chapter 3

Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660

By being seldom seen, I could not stir, But, like a comet, I was wondered at.

-Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, 3.2.46-7

The publication of Shakespeare’s plays plunged during the English Civil Wars and Inter- regnum (1642-1660), when commercial playing was outlawed. No Shakespeare plays were printed in the 1640s, and they were mostly excluded from the spike in dramatic publication in the 1650s. Between 1642 and 1660, only three Shakespeare quartos were printed

– The Merchant of Venice (Q3 1652, a reissue of Q3 1637), Othello (Q3 1655), both published by William Leake, and Jane Bell’s edition of King Lear (Q3 1655) – which together represent arguably the least-studied Shakespeare texts printed before the Restoration.1

1Lukas Erne describes Leake’s Merchant as “perhaps the least known of all of Shakespeare’s publications up to the Restoration.” Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, p. 130. This characterization

98 Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-166099

The few critics who comment on Shakespeare’s decline in this period mostly mention it in passing, characterizing it as an anomalous dip in his trajectory from the best-selling dramatist of the early seventeenth century to national poet in the eighteenth.2

But “unpopularity” is an inadequate explanation for the lack of Shakespeare publication between 1642 and 1660. The first part of this essay addresses Shakespeare’s decline in print in this period: I offer a systematic examination of the stationers who together held the rights to the thirty-eight plays in the modern Shakespeare canon but who, for various reasons, did not publish them. Partly, the quotidian matters of the English book trade – legal battles, political turmoil and concomitant publication trends, as well as the deaths of stationers – caused publication projects related to Shakespeare to be held up or post- poned. Partly, the era’s stationers who continued to print drama became more interested in first editions: with no opportunity to see new offerings at the playhouse, stationers judged that audiences would want “new” (that is, previously unprinted) playbooks. The focus on new plays indeed came at the expense of Shakespearean reprints; but it also ensured the survival of many works of the early modern dramatic canon. In the essay’s second part, I examine the two Interregnum stationers of Shakespeare, William Leake and Jane Bell, and their respective Shakespeare quartos. These plays function as one

applies equally well to Leake’s edition of Othello. As the sole woman publisher of Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, Jane Bell’s edition of Lear is studied more frequently. See Leo Kirschbaum, “How Jane Bell Came to Print the Third Quarto of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Philological Quarterly 17 (1938), pp. 308-11; and David Scott Kastan, “In Plain Sight: Visible Women and Early Modern Plays,” in Women Making Shakespeare: Text, Reception and Performance, ed. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Arden, 2014), pp. 51-53. 2Gary Taylor characterizes the year 1659 as the “nadir of Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation,” before examining Shakespeare’s rising stature from 1660 onward. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London, 1989), p. 12). In his magisterial survey of Shakespeare publishing in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Andrew Murphy brieﬂy mentions Interregnum Shakespeare publication, noting that though many important dramatic publications were issued in the period, “in the case of Shakespeare, however, the theatrical interregnum largely coincided with a signiﬁcant decline in publishing activity.” Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (CUP, 2003), p. 33. On Shakespeare’s status as the best-selling author of the early seventeenth century and his cultural dominance of the eighteenth century, see respectively Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade and Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (CUP, 1992). Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660100

might expect any reprint of an older play: they simultaneously glance at contemporary events while also trading on Elizabethan nostalgia. More speciﬁcally, each Shakespeare

quarto involves a more or less complicated problem about how to re-issue old plays (or

old books) in a new context. Leake’s reissue of Merchant coincided with Parliamentary debates surrounding the readmission to the Jews to England, while his Othello followed the remarkable English victory over the Barbary corsairs in 1655. At the same time that the editions oﬀer commentary on contemporary events, they also highlight the old plays’ connections to the past: the title pages to both editions feature decades-old performance attributions, as well as a large crown, the printer’s mark that Leake began using after

1650. With her edition of King Lear, Bell accidentally infringed upon rights of stationer Miles Flesher, having confused Shakespeare’s play with King Leir, the chronicle play that she actually owned. But Bell is not the only Interregnum stationer who confused the two plays. While modern critics typically contrast “old fashioned” Leir with Shake- speare’s supposedly timeless play, in the Interregnum, the confusion between the two titles suggests that Shakespeare was known as the author of old plays like Leir.

The publication and reprint rates of Shakespearean editions are the primary evidence for his waning popularity in the mid-seventeenth century. But critics have used other methods to measure Shakespeare’s reputation, for example, by counting not editions but allusions to and quotations of Shakespeare and his plays.3 While keeping in mind the fact that not all allusions are created equal, I conclude this chapter by examining selected textual and pictorial allusions to Shakespeare between 1642 and 1660, continuing to focus on his presence in print, rather than on the stage or in manuscript.4 I pay particular attention to the fourteen Shakespearean misattributions in the two comprehensive dramatic

3For example, G. E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Seventeenth Century Reputations Com- pared (U of Chicago P, 1945). 4See Chapter 2 for a discussion of Shakespearean drolls onstage; see Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays (U of Delaware P, 2015). Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660101

catalogues of 1656, William Rogers and Richard Ley’s “Exact and perfect Catologue of all Playes that are Printed” and Edward Archer’s “Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the

Plaies that were ever printed.” These misattributions reveal the types of plays associated

with Shakespeare in the period: popular old plays, tragedies involving fathers and sons,

history plays, and plays from big books. Despite little new publication, Shakespeare and his plays were always around in the Interregnum, but by this point, Shakespeare and his

plays were separate from one another. Old Shakespeare was a well-known dramatist –

but for which plays, exactly, was not always clear.

During the theatre ban, playbook publishers memorialized a dead theatrical tradition; their retrospective attention to pre-1642 plays helped consolidate “Renaissance drama”

as a distinct generic category. By focusing on ﬁrst editions of professional plays, the

period’s stationers expanded the textual ﬁeld of English Renaissance drama; Rogers, Ley

and Archer’s “exact and perfect” play catalogues of 1656 attempted to anatomize the whole corpus of English drama. Shakespeare was simply one part (albeit a large one) of

a ﬁeld that stationers were actively trying to map whole; because he had already been

frequently reprinted, it did not seem particularly urgent to conﬁrm his presence with

reprints. But Shakespeare was always around: his absence from mid-seventeenth century

stationers’ output stemmed from his ubiquity in mid-seventeenth-century culture.5

5Shakespeare the poet fared better in this period: John Benson published Poems: VVritten by Wil. Shakes-peare. Gent. in 1640. An elaborate octavo edition of Lucrece, with a continuation of the poem by John Quarles, was printed in 1655. Critics have discussed how these volumes helped establish Shake- speare’s poetic and political reputation, particularly as Benson and Quarles co-opted Shakespeare for their royalist agendas. Yet Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic reputations in the Interregnum were largely separate: this essay focuses on the former; criticism on the latter includes Megan Heﬀernan, “Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Aﬀect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare.” Shake- speare Quarterly 64 (2013), 71 - 98; David Baker, “Cavalier Shakespeare: The 1640 Poems of John Benson,” Studies in Philology 95 (1998), 152-173. Adam G. Hooks, “Royalist Shakespeare: Publishers, Politics and the Appropriation of The Rape of Lucrece (1655)” in Canonising Shakespeare: Stationers and the Book Trade, 1640-1735, ed. Peter Kirwan and Emma Depledge (Cambridge, forthcoming). Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660102

1 Shakespeare’s Missing Stationers, 1642-1660

Shakespeare’s ﬁrst folio (F1) of 1623 was a success: the large, expensive volume sold suﬃciently well to warrant a second edition (F2) nine years later in 1632. By contrast,

thirty-one years passed before the third edition (F3) was published in 1663/4. Compared

with the relatively rapid republication of F1, critics characterize the longer gap between

F2 and F3 as evidence of Shakespeare’s unpopularity during the Civil Wars and Inter-

regnum.6 But it appears that a legal battle was at least partly responsible for F3’s delay. Sixteen of the eighteen Shakespeare plays ﬁrst printed in F1 – The Tempest, Two Gen-

tlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well

That Ends Well, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, 1 Henry VI, Henry VIII, Coriolanus,

Timon of Athens, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline – were the subject of a bitter Chancery Court legal dispute that dragged from 1637 to 1661.7 On

one side were Mary Allot, the widow of Robert Allot, publisher of Shakespeare’s F2, and

Philip Chetwind, Mary Allot’s second husband, and eventual publisher of F3 (1663/4).

On the other side were the stationers Andrew Crooke, Robert Allot’s former apprentice,

and John Legate. The sixteen titles had been co-owned by Edward Blount and William Jaggard, publishers of F1. In 1630, Robert Allot acquired the rights to Blount’s share

of the sixteen plays; brothers Thomas and Richard Cotes held the rights to Jaggard’s

6For example, David Scott Kastan characterizes Shakespeare’s F2 as relatively quick reprint, and ascribes the longer gap between F2 and F3 to the reading public’s waning interest in Shakespeare (Shakespeare and the Book, pp. 63-4, pp. 79-84). It is true that, relative to (very few) other seventeen- century folio publications, Shakespeare’s F2 appeared quickly after F1 (compare Jonson’s F1 (1616) and F2 (1640) and Beaumont and Fletcher’s F1 (1647) and F2 (1679); and Shakespeare’s own F3 1663/4 and F4 1684). Of course, compared with the rapid and frequent republication of cheaper, smaller quarto editions, the nine years between Shakespeare’s F1 and F2 seems like a rather long time. 7Apart from these sixteen plays, the other two Shakespeare plays ﬁrst printed in F1, The Taming of the Shrew and King John, were not entered into the Stationers’ Register by Blount and Jaggard in 1623 and their rights therefore were not transmitted to Blount and Jaggard’s heirs. John Smethwick (see below) held the rights to The Taming of the Shrew by virtue of owning Taming of a Shrew; as for King John, Andrew Murphy notes that “John Dewe might have had a claim to the text, on the basis his having been the most recent publisher of a separate play, The Troublesome Reign of King John.” Shakespeare in Print, p. 44. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660103 portion; Allot and Thomas Cotes respectively published and printed Shakespeare’s F2 in 1632. When Robert Allot died in 1635, his share of the sixteen Shakespeare plays, as well as forty-ﬁve other titles, transferred to Mary Allot, and in 1636, she married

Chetwind. Normally upon marrying, a widow’s printing rights would transfer to her new husband, but Chetwind, a cloth-maker, was not a member of the Stationers’ Company. As a result, Mary Allot was forced by court order to forfeit her rights to all titles and copies, transferring them to Crooke and Legate on 1 July 1637 according to the following entry in the Stationers’ Register:

Master Legatt and Andrew Crooke Entered for their Copies by Consent of Mistriss Allot and by order of a full Court holden the Seauenth day of Nouem- ber [1636] last All the Estate Right Title and Interest which the said Master Allot hath in these Copies and parts of Copies hereafter following which were Master Roberte Allotts deceased.8

The matter did not end there, but rather was the beginning of an acrimonious legal dispute in which Mary Allot and Chetwind attempted to reclaim their printing rights.

Complicating matters further, the brothers Thomas (d. 1641) and Richard Cotes still held the rights to Jaggard’s share of the sixteen plays, as well as ﬁve or six titles from Thomas Pavier (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Pericles and potentially Titus Andronicus) all of which transferred to Richard Cotes’s widow Ellen

(or Eleanor) Cotes after his death in 1653.

Henry Farr reconstructs the history of the Allot/Chetwind copyrights and reveals the bitter litigation that plagued the Allot estate for more than two decades.9 In January

1662, Chetwind and Mary Allot petitioned for a restoration of their printing rights, remarking on “long and expensive twenty years’ suit in Chancery, to the utter ruin of

8Edward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. Volume 4 (London, privately printed, 1875-94), pp. 387-9. 9Henry Farr, “Philip Chetwind and the Allott Copyrights,” The Library 15 (1934), pp. 129-160. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660104 petitioners”:

1661-2. Jan. 17: Petition of Philip Chetwind and Mary his wife, late the widow of Robert Allott, stationer, deceased. Petitioners have paid more than 8000/. to clear the estate of Robert Allott, and have no means to reimburse themselves but by the printing and proﬁt of such original copies as he had purchased, which copies the petitioner Mary was before her second marriage persuaded to assign over in trust to John Legatt and Andrew Crook, stationers, under pretence (petitioner Philip not being free of the Company) that they would by their intermarriage forfeit their right to them. This trust has been the father of a long and expensive twenty years’ suit in Chancery, to the utter ruin of petitioners. They pray that some proviso may be inserted in the Bill. . . by which the widows and orphans of stationers, booksellers and printers, who are by law liable to pay the debts of their husbands and fathers, may enjoy the beneﬁt of their purchase.10

Farr comments that “[w]hatever the result of this petition may have been, Chetwynd appears to have attained some measure of success, for he published much more freely afterwards” – including Shakespeare’s F3 in 1663/4. Though she is nowhere mentioned in F3, Ellen Cotes, likely had an informal arrangement with Chetwind, as she had been a printer for him as early as 1653.11

The Allot-Chetwind/Crooke-Legate lawsuit (and the attendant business troubles of the stationers) did not occur in a vacuum, but over a politically tumultuous quarter-century that profoundly aﬀected the English book trade. The fall of the Star Chamber in 1641,

English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and Interregnum (1649-1660) caused crises in the English book trade which compromised the authority of the Stationers’ Company, disrupted distribution, and shrank markets.12 The era’s political and religious conﬂicts played out in print: scores of newsbooks, periodicals, sermons, polemical pamphlets, politically inﬂected closet drama and semi-dramatic dialogues appeared in support of both royalist

10Cited in Farr, p. 129. 11Murphy, p. 53; Farr, pp. 159-160. 12John Barnard, “London Publishing, 1640-1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation,” Book History 4 (2001), pp. 1-16. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660105

and republican agendas.13 Many of the era’s stationers – including Miles Flesher (or Fletcher) and Richard Cotes, both of whom held rights to Shakespeare’s plays – shifted

their attention away from literary publications and towards political and religious ones.

Flesher held the rights to Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear from 1642 until his death in 1664, yet he did not reprint any of them. His neglect of the titles is especially curious given that, unlike the automatic transfer of rights from dead stationers to their descendants, Flesher actively sought the titles to Shakespeare’s plays: he was clearly interested in Shakespeare at one point, but for some reason this interest faded. The date Flesher acquired four of his ﬁve Shakespeare’s titles – 14 September 1642 – points us towards one explanation. The ﬁrst Civil War broke out on 24 August 1642; Flesher’s publishing interests would shift radically over the next two decades.

Flesher purchased Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Taming of the Shrew from Francis Smethwick, who inherited them, along with fourteen other literary and devotional titles, from his late father John Smethwick. The younger Smethwick entered the eighteen titles into the Stationers’ Register on 24 August 1642, and transferred seventeen of them to Flesher two weeks later. Flesher was remarkably prosperous: with his partners John Haviland (d. 1638) and Robert Young (d. 1643), he owned lucrative patents for the printing of Bibles, grammars and common law books, which they printed on many presses housed in their many printing houses.14 His wealth is evidenced by a massive loan of 600 to Nathaniel Butter on 21 May 1639, in exchange for which Flesher secured the rights to King Lear and twenty-ﬁve other titles.15 Outliving his partners and

13For discussion of production of political texts during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, see Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (CUP, 1989); Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (Cornell UP, 1993); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994). 14Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403-1959 (Stanford UP, 1977), pp. 138- 144, see also Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (CUP, 2004), p. 32, n. 22. 15Blagden, p. 140. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660106

acquiring their assets, Flesher ably weathered the crises in the book trade, and prospered until his death in 1664. He published proliﬁcally and held various administrative posts

in the Stationers Company, and (with some struggle) managed to maintain his lucrative

patents.16 Flesher also displayed literary sensibilities: in his prefatory remarks to the

ﬁrst edition of Donne’s Poems (1633), he evocatively justiﬁed the inclusion of poetic fragments: “a scattered limbe of this Author hath more amiableness in it, in the eye of a discerner, then a whole body of some other [poet].”17 He reprinted Donne’s Poems in

1635, 1639, and 1649. But while scholars of early modern poetry know him as the ﬁrst printer of Donne’s poems, historians of the Civil Wars know Flesher as a “prominent royalist,” who “mainly produced religious and educational pamphlets.”18 Flesher’s political and religious publications came at the expense of his literary output: after publishing a modest eight plays in the 1630s, he printed no plays in the 1640s or 1650s, and was not mentioned in the imprint to the 1650 and 1654 editions of Donne’s Poems, the latter published by his son, James Flesher. Amid Flesher’s political publications, administrative duties and political aﬃliations, Flesher’s interest in literature appears to have fallen by the wayside. Flesher’s Shakespearean play publication may have been collateral damage of the English Civil Wars.

The Shakespearean publication of Richard Cotes was also sidelined by contemporary political turmoil. From his late brother Thomas (printer of F2), Richard Cotes inherited the rights to Jaggard’s share of the sixteen folio plays after 1641, as well as ﬁve or six

Shakespeare titles formerly held by Pavier – Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, 2

Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Pericles, and possibly Titus Andronicus. These titles also went unprinted during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. Unlike Flesher, Cotes did publish

16Ibid. 17John Donne, Poems, By J. D. (London 1633), A1V. 18Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 133; Amos Tubb, “In- dependent Presses: The Politics of Print in England During the Late 1640s,” The Seventeenth Century 27 (2012), p. 293. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660107

drama in the period, but he focused on nonprofessional plays, publishing a collection of four Latin university plays in 1648. Most arrestingly, Cotes published The Tragedy of

the Famous Orator Marcus Tullis Cicero (1651), the most signiﬁcant Republican closet

play of the period. Of course, one publication does not a staunch (or even sometime)

Republican make – Cotes’s involvement may simply have been an opportunistic move in the context of the new Commonwealth. But either explanation helps account for his

aversion to printing Shakespeare, who exempliﬁed the old guard cultural products that

the Commonwealth was trying to eradicate.

Though contemporary political upheaval turned Flesher and Cotes’s attention away from Shakespeare during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, in the Caroline period the stationer

John Norton actually capitalized on the political relevance of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Norton held the rights to Richard II, 1 Henry IV and Richard III, and over the course of a decade reprinted ﬁve editions of the three plays: two quartos of Richard III (Q7/1629 and Q8/1634), two quartos of Richard II (Q6/1632) and two quartos of 1 Henry IV (Q8 1632 and Q9 1639).19 Alan Farmer argues that Norton’s reprints “retained a certain political currency in Caroline England because they dramatized the dangers of civil war” and were ideologically consistent with proto-royalist politics.20 Given his record, it seems like likely that Norton would have continued to exploit the topicality and royalism of the history plays during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, but he died in 1640. Another potential

Interregnum stationer of Shakespeare was lost in 1641 with the death of John Smethwick.

Like Norton, Smethwick was an inveterate republisher of drama, and of Shakespeare quartos in particular: all of Smethwick’s dramatic publications were reprints, and in the 1620s and 1630s he did not publish playbooks by dramatists other than Shakespeare.

Upon acquiring the rights to Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The

19Alan B. Farmer, “John Norton and the Politics of Shakespeare’s History Plays in Caroline England,” in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, ed. Marta Straznicky (U Pennsylvania P, 2013), pp. 147-176. 20Farmer, “Norton,” p. 149. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660108

Taming of the Shrew as well as several other popular dramatic titles around 1607 from the late Nicholas Ling, Smethwick kept reprinting them over the next four decades,

including three quartos of Romeo and Juliet (Q3/1609, Q4/1623 and Q5/1637), three

quartos of Hamlet (Q3/1611, Q4/1625 and Q5/1637); the fourth quarto of The Taming

of the Shrew (1631) and the second quarto of Love’s Labours Lost (1631). Many of Smethwick’s single-text quartos were printed around the same time as F1 (1623) and

F2 (1632).21 While this replication potentially hints at one market for expensive folios

and another for more aﬀordable quartos, it mostly reveals Smethwick’s belief that the

market would support ever more Shakespeare. Had Norton or Smethwick lived past

1642, they may have continued to reprint Shakespeare quartos, or contemporary trends in the book market may have pushed them in other directions. We can never know if

they died just as their publication strategy was losing ground, or if their deaths changed

the landscape of Shakespearean publication. What is clear, however, is that Norton

and Smethwick’s heirs were uninterested in upholding their predecessors’ publication habits. Upon inheriting his father’s literary titles in 1642, Francis Smethwick quickly

transferred them to Miles Flesher. Like Flesher, Francis Smethwick appears to have been

more interested in non-dramatic publication; in 1642, the younger Smethwick published

Three Sermons by Church of England clergyman Henry Smith (c. 1560-1591). The

printer Thomas Warren married Norton’s widow, Alice Law Norton, and acquired all of Norton’s titles. Warren did not reprint the perennially popular Richard II, 1 Henry IV,

and Richard III, but did print two signiﬁcant publications for the prominent publisher

Humphrey Moseley: the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647) and Shirley’s Six New Plays

(1653).

Warren’s activities demonstrate that, despite the turn towards political and religious

21Smethwick was a member of the folio syndicate, therefore the single-text quartos issued around the same time as F1 (1623) and F2 (1632), do not represent an attempt to compete with the collections. Sonia Massai suggests Romeo and Juliet Q4 was meant as “pre-publicity” for F1. See Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (CUP, 2007), pp. 119-121. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660109

publication in the Civil Wars and Interregnum, stationers did continue to publish professional drama; after a lull in the 1640s, dramatic publication spiked in the 1650s. But

there was a discernable shift in the types of plays published, and here, too, Warren’s out-

put is emblematic: the title page to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio collection touted

its contents as “never printed before,”and the title of Shirley’s Six New Plays likewise highlighted its novelty. During the theatre ban, dramatic stationers focused on previously unprinted (or “new”) plays, and in so doing reversed the publication trends of the preceding decades. Old plays, as a class, were perennially popular while the playhouses were open: the professional theatre at its core was a repertory system, and roughly half of the professional playbook market between 1576 and 1641 was devoted to reprints or “second-plus” editions: out of 726 titles, 373 are first editions (51%) and 357 are second plus (49%).22 In the Caroline period, reprints of professional drama overtook first editions: with 167 second-plus editions (54%) and 140 first editions (46%) out of a total of 307. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser argue that “[i]n the 1630s, the market for printed drama from the professional theatre underwent an unprecedented division in which new [Caroline] plays were split from a group of ‘classic’ plays first published decades earlier.” This bifurcation in the market and the Caroline trend of reprinting

Elizabethan and Jacobean playbooks, they continue, “resulted in the ﬁrst canon of early modern drama” which, they argue, has many aﬃnities with our modern canon of early modern drama.23

But the theatre ban ended (or at least interrupted) the Caroline trend for dramatic republication, by both arousing demand for and facilitating the supply of previously unprinted plays. In the absence of an active professional theatre, the press became the

22My quantitative analysis here relies on DEEP: Database of Early English Plays, ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, last modified 6 January 2009. http://deep.sas.upenn.edu. 23Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, “Canons and Classics: Publishing Drama in Caroline England,” in Localizing Caroline Drama, 1625-1642, ed. Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 17-41, esp. 17-18, p. 37. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660110 primary source of dramatic novelty and excitement. The theatre ban eliminated any potential rivalry that caused playing companies to withhold texts from printing houses, and therefore freed up more plays for publication. Between 1642 and 1660, out of 165 professional plays, 126 are first editions (76%) and only 39 (24%) are second plus.24 In a moment when there was virtually no new professional drama being composed, and with a reliable roster of titles that had been printed and reprinted in the decades prior, playbook stationers changed their publishing strategy to focus on first editions. Remark- ably but unsurprisingly, new professional playbooks dominated the market at precisely the moment that the composition of new professional plays ebbed. By focusing on first editions, the era’s stationers ensured the survival of many important plays that otherwise may have been lost. The authorial canon of Thomas Middleton, for example, would be far different without the publishing activity of the Interregnum: the first editions of The

Widow (1652), The Changeling (1653), The Spanish Gypsy (1653), The Old Law (1656),

No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1657), More Dissemblers Besides Women (1657) and Women Beware Women (1657) appeared in this period. If Caroline republication of Eliz- abethan and Jacobean plays “resulted in the ﬁrst canon of early modern drama,” then the emphasis on ﬁrst editions during the theatre ban produced the second one, ensuring the presence of many important plays in our modern canon of early modern drama.

The publication output of Andrew Crooke exempliﬁes the interest in dramatic novelty during the theatrical hiatus. Crooke was one of Allot and Chetwind’s adversaries in the legal battle of 1637-1661, and he in fact published some of the contested Allot titles during the period in question, including Bishop Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety, one of the most frequently reprinted devotional texts of the seventeenth century.25 Crooke clearly wasn’t averse to reprints, but when it came to plays, he reﬂected the market’s preference for nov-

24Other scholars, such as Farmer and Lesser, count collections as a single play text. But because Moseley and others highlight the number of individual plays within their collections – for example, Six New Plays of James Shirley (1653) – I feel justiﬁed in counting each play in collections separately. 25Farr, p. 133. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660111 elty. He printed only one dramatic text in this period, Richard Brome’s Five New Plays (1659), an octavo collection of ﬁve previously unprinted plays. This volume imitated

Humphrey Moseley’s New Plays series: between 1653 and 1657, Moseley published ﬁve octavo collections of previously unprinted professional plays, including Brome’s Five New

Plays (1653; Crooke printed ﬁve diﬀerent new plays), Six New Plays by James Shirley (1653) and Three New Plays by Philip Massinger (1655). The serial collections were uniform in appearance: each featured a frontispiece portrait of the author, commendatory verse and stationer’s address, all which served to canonize the dramatist, and establish him, as Paulina Kewes explains, “as a central, unifying presence, which binds together and confers value upon a corpus of disparate and hitherto dispersed texts.”26 In terms of chronology, the novelty claimed by some of these “New Plays” was rather tenuous

– Moseley’s edition of Thomas Middleton’s Two New Plays (1657) included More Dis- semblers Besides Women, ﬁrst performed in 1614. Such claims were rather based upon previous unavailability in print. As Crooke and Henry Brome explain in their stationers’ address to his edition of Brome’s Five New Plays:

We bring what in these dayes you scarce could hope for, Five new Playes. We call them new, because till now they never were printed. You must not think them posthumous Productions, though they come into the world after the Author’s death: they were all begotten and born (and own’d by Him before a thousand witnesses) many years since; they then trod the Stage (their proper place) though they pass’d not the Press.27

Seventeen years into the theatre ban, with no active theatre industry generating new compositions, readers could “scarce hope for” new professional plays – making novelty a particularly potent marketing device. Like Moseley before him, against all odds, Crooke has produced not only one, but multiple new plays – or rather, new texts of old plays.

26Kewes, “Give me the sociable Pocket-books,’ “p. 11. See also Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” pp. 105-24. 27Andrew Crooke and Henry Brome, “The Stationers to the Reader,” in Five New Plays of Richard Brome (Crooke and Brome, 1659),a3v Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660112

He acknowledges that while Brome’s plays are old in terms of their composition and performance history, they are still novel because they “pass’d not the Press.”

By the 1640s, however, there was one dramatist who was old in every sense: Shakespeare.

His plays were “begotten and born” and had “trod the stage” “many years since” and they had certainly “passed the press”: Shakespeare was the most-printed and most- reprinted dramatist of the preceding ﬁfty years, with over three-quarters of all of his quartos (sixteen of twenty-one plays) reprinted within twenty years of their ﬁrst edition.28

Shakespeare had more second-plus editions than any of his contemporaries by the time

F1 appeared in 1623, and the two folios did not stem the tide of Shakespearean single text publication. By 1639, the thirty-eight plays now recognized as Shakespeare’s had been printed in seventy single-text editions, one quarto collection and two monumentalizing folios; 1 Henry IV had been printed a remarkable eleven times (nine quartos and 2 in folio); only Mucedorus was printed more. If publication contributed to a play’s apparent oldness, the consistently, repeatedly republished plays of Shakespeare must have seemed positively ancient to mid-century readers.29 David Scott Kastan ascribes the mid-century slump in Shakespeare play publication to the fact that “Old” Shakespeare “seemed to many distant and old-fashioned” by the mid-seventeenth century.30 But, far from seeming

“distant,” Shakespeare appeared old by virtue of his ubiquity in print.

28Erne, pp. 25-55. Zachary Lesser, “Shakespeare’s Flop: John Waterson and The Two Noble Kins- men” in Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography, ed. Marta Straznicky (U Pennsyl- vania Press, 2013), p. 177. 29Without a doubt Interregnum England was awash in Shakespeare books. Expensive folios were obviously built to last, and the myth of the cheap quarto has been challenged by critics who have demonstrated their high survival rate. For a characteristic articulation of the cheap quarto narrative, see T. A. Birrell, “The Inﬂuence of Seventeenth-Century Publishers on the Presentation of English Literature,” in Historical & Editorial Studies in Medieval & Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes, with Hans Jansen (Groningen, 1985), pp. 163-73. For the debunking of this myth, see Alexandra Gillespie and Joseph A. Dane. “The Myth of the Cheap Quarto,” in Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (CUP, 2009), pp. 25-45. Alan B. Farmer, “Playbooks and the Question of Ephemerality,” in The Book in History, The Book as History: New Intersections of the Material Text. Essays in Honor of David Scott Kastan, ed. Heidi Brayman, Jesse Lander, and Zachary Lesser (Yale UP, 2016), pp. 87-125. 30Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, p. 84. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660113

The emphasis on dramatic novelty during the theatre ban partly explains why the era’s stationers largely neglected Shakespeare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, stationers were in no

hurry to reprint Shakespeare’s historically less popular plays: the ﬁrst quartos of Much

Ado About Nothing (1600), 2 Henry IV (1600) and Troilus and Cressida (1609) marks

the ﬁrst and last time these plays were printed in single-text editions.31 But stationers were also largely uninterested in printing Shakespeare’s historically popular titles. George

Bedell and Mercy Meighan did not reprint The Merry Wives of Windsor after acquiring

it 7 November 1646 from Mercy’s late husband Richard Meighan, who was the last to

reprint the play in a single-text edition (Q3 1630), and who printed no plays whatsoever

after 1640. But Mercy Meighan and/or Bedell published thirteen dramatic editions in the Interregnum, eleven of them ﬁrst editions.32

The era’s interest in dramatic novelty is largely attributable to Humphrey Moseley.

The most proliﬁc dramatic stationer of the Civil War and Interregnum, Moseley single- handedly shaped the era’s ﬁeld of printed drama, both in terms of his own publications

and his inﬂuence over contemporary stationers, as we see in Crooke’s imitation of his New

Plays series. Moseley was also responsible for the most important dramatic text of the

period, the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647), which consisted entirely of previously

unprinted material: thirty-ﬁve “new” plays. The volume’s title page announces that its contents were “never printed before,” and Moseley also draws attention to this fact in

the ﬁrst line of his stationer’s epistle to the folio reader:

Gentlemen, Before you engage farther, be pleased to take notice of these particulars. You have here a new book; I can speak it clearly, for all this

31Much and 2H4 do not reappear in the Stationers’ Register after they were entered to Andrew Wise and William Aspley in 1600, and neither did T&C after it was entered by Richard Bonian and Henry Walley in 1609. 32All eleven were nonprofessional drama. The other two texts, both Bedell’s, were a collected edition of Thomas Goﬀe’s Three Excellent Tragedies (1656) which reprinted three plays already in quarto, and the fourth quarto of John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1656). As we shall see below, the title page misattributions to Goﬀe and Fletcher in this period suggest that Interregnum stationers were more interested in them than in Shakespeare. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660114

large Volume of Comedies and Tragedies, not one, till now, was ever printed before. A collection of Plays is commonly but a new impression, the scattered pieces which were printed single, being then onely Republished together. Tis otherwise here.33

Moseley promotes the newness of his collection by denigrating the supposedly recycled contents of other collections. Elsewhere, the folio encourages straightforward theatrical nostalgia, with authors of commendatory poems characterizing the text as the cherished remnant of the absent stage. Moseley’s emphasis on novelty reﬂects how, amid the theatrical dearth, stationers judged that a “new book” would be most enticing for buyers.

With his denigration of other dramatic collections, Moseley could be referring to any number of texts that reprinted material from single-text editions, including Ben Jonson’s

Works in folio (1616) and (1640). It seems most likely, however, that he is referring to Shakespeare’s folios. The paratextual matter to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio presents the volume as a successor to Shakespeare’s F1. In the 1647 folio, the dedicatory epistle to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery is signed by ten sharers of the King’s Servants, who declare they followed the example of the 1623 King’s Servants, who selected Philip (then Earl of Montgomery) and his brother William Herbert, Earl of

Pembroke as the patrons of F1. The 1647 King’s Servants are “directed by the example of some, who once steered in our quality and so fortunately aspired to choose your honor, joined with your now gloriﬁed Brother, Patrons to the ﬂowing compositions of the then expired Sweet Swan of Avon Shakespeare.” It is not just any Shakespeare, but the “sweet Swan of Avon,” the canonized poet of F1, that looms over the latter folio.

The King’s Servants attempt to appropriate Shakespeare’s cultural authority seemingly in order to justify the prestige presentation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays. But Moseley’s epistle betrays his ambivalent attitude towards Shakespeare: his “new book” is meant to surpass its textual predecessor, described as “but a new impression.” This

33Humphrey Moseley, “The Stationer to the Readers,” A4r. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660115

characterization is manifestly untrue: as Moseley would have known, half of the plays in Shakespeare’s F1 had never been printed. Yet beyond the obvious promotional value of

Moseley’s misrepresentation, his description of Shakespeare’s F1 conveys the ubiquity of

Shakespeare in print by 1647. Despite little recent publication, Shakespeare’s plays were

liberally “scattered” throughout the market.

Though for the most part Shakespeare did not align with Moseley’s publication philoso-

phy, he did dabble in Shakespearean publication. In 1655, he published John Cotgrave’s

English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655), the first printed commonplace book composed exclusively of dramatic excerpts. Out of around 1,700 extracts in the entire volume, Shakespeare is the most cited-author in this novel dramatic form with 154 extracts (Beau- mont and/or Fletcher second with 112).34 Perhaps Moseley saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the print market which he had helped to create, and encouraged Cotgrave to draw extensively from Shakespeare. The plays of old Shakespeare were a good fit for the commonplace format which – as a genre which recirculates older texts, and reshapes them to highlight conventional wisdom – values oldness.35 The English Treasury, however, does not attempt to capitalize on the selling power of Shakespeare or his contemporaries’ names: all excerpts are anonymized. Though Erne argues that Shakespeare’s name had obvious selling power by the first decade of the seventeenth century,36 mid-century stationers did not see his name as a surefire selling point. Moseley’s handling of The Two

Noble Kinsmen reveals his ambivalence about Shakespeare’s marketability. He acquired the rights to the Fletcher and Shakespeare title from John Waterson on 31 October 1646,

34G. E. Bentley, “John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language” Studies in Philology 40 (1943), 199-200. See also Joshua McEvilla, “An Online Reader of John Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language” http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cotgrave/. 35For discussion of the inherent nostalgia in the commonplace and miscellany genre (particularly in the mid-seventeenth century), see Adam Smyth, Proﬁt and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682 (Wayne State UP, 2004), p. 168-9; Estill, pp. 77-115. For discussion of commonplace genre as emblematic of the early modern appreciation for a conventional and common store of wisdom, see Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (Yale UP, 2000), p. 190. 36Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, p. 75. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660116

presumably with the intention of including it in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (he did not). Nor did he reprint Kinsmen in quarto: Lesser argues that the play ﬂopped when

Waterson ﬁrst published it in 1634, and book advertisement catalogues from 1660 reveal

that Moseley was still trying to unload the now twenty-ﬁve-year-old copies of the ﬁrst edi-

tion.37 In these advertisements, Moseley does not even bother mentioning Shakespeare, attributing Kinsmen to Fletcher only.

Moseley held rights to still other “Shakespeare” titles. In a Stationers’ Register entry of

9 September 1653, Moseley registered entered over forty plays in the Stationers’ Register, including four assigned to “Shakespeare”: “The merry Devill of Edmonton,” by “Wm: Shakespeare,” and “Henry ye. ﬁrst, & Hen: ye 2d.,” by “Shakespeare, & Davenport,”

and “The History of Cardenio. By Mr Fletcher. and Shakespeare.”38 Moseley’s interest in one of these “Shakespeare” plays was short-lived: he did not reprint The Merry Devil of Edmonton in the nineteen months that he held its rights. In an unclear chain of transfer, on 4 April 1655 the rights to Merry Devil were acquired by William Gilbertson from the widow of Francis Faulkner, who acquired the play from Arthur Jonson on 21

June 1624; Gilbertson printed Q6 of Merry Devil in 1655. Though he did not publish his other two “Shakespeare” titles, Moseley clearly maintained an interest in him, since on 29

June 1660 he registered three more plays “by Will: Shakespeare”: “The History of King Stephen”“Duke Humphrey” and “Iphis & Iantha, a marriage without a man.”39 Moseley never printed any of these “Shakespeare” plays either, and all ﬁve plays, all previously unprinted when Moseley acquired them, are now lost. In attempting to recover Moseley’s motivations, it seems signiﬁcant that most of the “Shakespeare” plays he acquired had never been printed, and the only previously printed play, Merry Devil, was either quickly

37Lesser, “Shakespeare’s Flop,” p. 178. 38Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640- 1708 Volume 1 (London, 1913-14), pp. 428-429. 39Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640-1708 Volume 2 (London, 1913-14), p. 271. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660117 transferred to (or else was reclaimed without conﬂict by) another stationer who quickly reprinted it. Moseley was interested in new Shakespeare, or whatever he thought of as Shakespeare, or could pass oﬀ as Shakespeare. When something he thought of as

Shakespeare turned out to be old, he either dropped it or let it fall. Given his track record, one can imagine Moseley planning an edition of Shakespeare’s New Plays. His inaction with the 1653 entries, and his acquisition of more Shakespeare titles in 1660 might reﬂect his desire to acquire more new titles before going to press, and issue a volume of Shakespeare’s Six New Plays instead of Three New Plays. But Moseley died in

1661, potentially another stationer whose death sidelined his publication projects related to Shakespeare.

During the theatre ban, stationers focused their attention on plays and playwrights who were previously unavailable or less prevalent in the book market: it did not seem particularly urgent to conﬁrm Shakespeare’s presence with yet another reprint, or even an edition of Shakespeare’s Two New Plays. Before Moseley published the Beaumont and

Fletcher folio in 1647, eighteen plays (in forty editions) by Beaumont and Fletcher had been printed. The folio collection, and Moseley’s single-text folio edition of Fletcher’s

The Wild Goose Chase (1652, attributed to the duo) made thirty-six more Beaumont and/or Fletcher plays available in print for the first time, fully tripling the dramatists’ canon in print from eighteen to fifty-four titles. Moseley’s New Plays series made available new works from Brome, Shirley, Massinger, Lodowick Carrell, and Middleton, and each volume represented their respective professional dramatist’s first collected edition.

Moseley never published two New Plays editions from the same playwright: after issuing a dramatist’s collection, he moved on. Other stationers focused on previously unavailable plays, whatever their author’s previous presence in print, such as Crooke’s own version of Brome’s Five New Plays (1659). Stationers’ motivations were obviously commercial: new plays offered stationers an obvious marketing opportunity, enabling them to high- Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660118 light their volumes as fresh offerings amid theatrical dearth. Whatever their intentions, however, by seeking out previously unprinted material mid-seventeenth century stationers also sowed the seeds for a wide, prolific field of renaissance drama. Moseley’s serial octavo collections canonized a new group of professional dramatists and transformed their authorial canons; the first editions printed by Moseley and other stationers assured the survival of many plays, including canonical ones. Three plays from the current edition of The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama were first published in this period:

Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize (ﬁrst printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647),

Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (ﬁrst printed by Moseley in 1653) and Middle- ton’s Women Beware Women (ﬁrst printed in Moseley’s edition of Middleton’s Two New Plays of 1657). Without the prohibition on playing, and the concomitant rising interest in dramatic novelty, these might have been three more Jacobean plays forever lost to history, rather than mainstays of the modern canon of early modern drama. During the theatre ban, Shakespeare’s loss was Renaissance drama’s gain.

2 Shakespeare’s Interregnum Stationers: William Leake

and Jane Bell

Despite the turn towards dramatic novelty, about one quarter (39 titles) of the 165 professional plays printed between 1642 and 1660 were reprints, including three by Shakespeare:

Q3 Merchant of Venice (1652, a reissue of Lawrence Hayes’s Q3 1637) and Q3 Othello

(1655) both published by William Leake, and Q3 King Lear (1655) published by Jane Bell. Caught between a novelty-obsessed playbook market and the prevalent royalist and theatrical nostalgia of the era, each Interregnum Shakespeare quarto represents a problem of how to reissue old plays (or books) in new context: either how to highlight Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660119

an old play’s history while also making it appear topical, or else how to publish a play that has grown so old that even stationers were confused about its identity.

Leake’s two Shakespeare quartos are simultaneously backward-looking and focused on

the present: the appearance of Merchant of Venice and Othello seem related to political events in the 1650s, just as each text draws attention to its respective play’s age. Leake

acquired Lawrence Hayes’s rights to Merchant sometime between Hayes’s death in 1637

and the Q3 reissue of 1652, though the transfer was not recorded in the Stationers’

Merchant Q3, and there must have been a suﬃcient number of copies to bother reissuing them with a new cancel title page. This suggests comparatively poor sales of Merchant in

the late 1630s and 1640s; but the new title page suggests that Leake envisioned renewed

interest in the old play. Lukas Erne argues that the Merchant reissue was related to

vigorous Parliamentary debates in the early 1650s about the readmission of the Jews to England.40 Likewise, contemporary political events may have prompted Leake’s belated

publication of Othello. Leake waited sixteen years to make use of his rights to the play,

acquiring the rights to “Orthello [sic] the more of venice a Play’’ on 25 January 1639 from

Robert Mead and Christopher Meredith. By contrast, when Leake acquired Beaumont

and Fletcher’s A King and No King, Philaster, and The Maid’s Tragedy in the same transfer of 1639, he published them early and often, issuing reprints of Philaster in 1639

and 1652, of A King and No King in 1639 and 1655 and of The Maid’s Tragedy in 1641

and 1650.41 Leake eventually came around to printing Othello in 1655, the same year

as a celebrated English victory over Barbary corsairs. On 28 April 1655, the English admiral Robert Blake destroyed a ﬂeet of Barbary corsairs (also called Barbary pirates

or Ottoman pirates) of the Dey of Tunis at Porto Farina on the Tunisian Coast.42 The

40Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, pp. 130-134. 41Leake may have falsiﬁed some of his imprints: “Q1650” of The Maid’s Tragedy was probably actually printed in 1660, “Q1652” of Philaster was probably printed 1661. See Claire M. L. Bourne, “High Designe:’ Beaumont and Fletcher Illustrated,” English Literary Renaissance 44 (2014), 276, n. 4. 42Jeremy Black, The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: Renaissance to Revolution, 1492-1792 Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660120

corsairs had been a serious cause of commercial and maritime destabilization in England and other Christian countries since the mid-sixteenth century. In 1625 Charles I’s ﬂeet

suﬀered a crushing blow after Barbary Corsairs captured thousands of English seaman, an

event which Nabil Matar argues was an important factor in the outbreak of the ﬁrst Civil

War.43 Admiral Blake’s victory over the Barbary corsairs in 1655 was widely celebrated by contemporaries abroad and at home. The seaman John Weale declared “A piece of

service hath not been paralleled in these parts of the world,” and the victory inspired

many triumphalist (and racist) encomiums.44 Along with Othello’s status as a seafaring

Moor, the ﬁgure of the Barbary corsair as foreign menace appears in the play’s ﬁrst scene, in which Iago informs Brabantio that as a result of Desdemona’s secret marriage to Othello, “you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans,” (1.1.

113-15). “The Barbary horse” Othello’s children with Desdemona will be “coursers,” war-horses with a pun on “corsair.”45

Erne, noting the orthographical updates of Leake’s Merchant reissue – “Iewe” becomes

“Jew,” and the 1637 date of impression becomes 1652 – argues that “Leake may have

counted on the updated title page to convey the impression that his book – even though

containing an old play by a dead dramatist – constituted a relevant intervention into a lively debate of the moment,” and concludes that Leake’s “objective was to pass oﬀ

(CUP, 1996), p. 86. 43Nabil Matar, “The Barbary Corsairs, King Charles I and the Civil War,” The Seventeenth Century 16 (2001): 239-258. 44J. R. Powell, ed. “The Journal of John Weale 1654-1656,” The Naval Miscellany, IV, Navy Records Society (1952), p. 109; Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary (London, 2010), pp. 225-6. 45Blake’s victory may have encouraged the belated publication of another old Moor play, Lust’s Do- minion (1657). First staged in 1600 by the Admiral’s Men, Francis Kirkman printed it for the ﬁrst time nearly sixty years later, attributing it to Christopher Marlowe. Critics have oﬀered various other explanations for the belated publication of Lust’s Dominion: See Charles Cathcart, “You will crown him King that slew your King’: Lust’s Dominion and Oliver Cromwell,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 11 (1999), 264-274; Hugh Mackay, “Lust’s Dominion and the Readmission of the Jews,” Review of English Studies 59 (2008), 542-567. See also Matthew Birchwood, Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640-1685 (D.S. Brewer, 2007). Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660121

the remnants of an old edition as a new one.”46 But while Leake potentially tried to make his playbooks appear new in order to assert the play’s topicality, he makes little

eﬀort to make the play itself seem new. The same can be said of his edition of Othello:

even as they assert their topical relevance, Leake’s two Interregnum Shakespeare quartos

highlight their connections to the pre-war past. The title pages of Merchant (1652) and Othello (1655) each feature a decades-old performance attribution, respectively claiming

to be “As it hath beene divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants,”

and “As it hath beene divers times Acted at the Globe, and at the Black-Friers, by

his Majesties SERVANTS.” Leake’s Merchant reissue replicates the performance attribu-

tion on Hayes’s Q3 1637, which in turn replicates the attribution on Merchant Q1 1600. Hayes’s deliberate emphasis on Merchant’s Elizabethan provenance was a common tactic

in 1637; as Lesser and Farmer explain, Caroline publishers of pre-1625 reprints did “not

try to hide the age of their dramatic classics, in fact, they were calling attention to it

repeatedly in the prefatory matter they included in these books.”47 Thomas Berger similarly argues that Caroline reprints of Shakespeare plays strove to “recapture an earlier,

simpler world.”48 With his ﬁfty-ﬁve-year old Elizabethan attribution on Merchant Q3

1652, and the ﬁfty-one-year-old Jacobean attribution on Othello Q3 1655 – the latter referencing a performance by “his Majesties SERVANTS” in a moment when both the monarch and his players were dispatched – Leake continues to invoke the halcyon days of “Merrie England.”49

Leake’s changes to earlier quartos of Merchant and Othello also potentially provoke a

46Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, pp. 130-134. 47Farmer and Lesser, “Canons,” pp. 32-33. 48Thomas L. Berger, “Looking for Shakespeare in Caroline England,” Viator 27 (1996), 337. 49Andrew Gurr characterizes nostalgia for Elizabeth I’s Merrie England’ as a Romantic concept, but nostalgia for Elizabethan England dates to the Jacobean period. See Andrew Gurr, “Shakespeare’s Globe: A History of some Reconstructions and Some Reasons for Trying.” In Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (CUP: 1997), pp. 27-8. Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (CUP: 1997), pp. 153-187. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660122

nostalgic response. Unsurprisingly, on his reissue of Merchant, Leake replaced Hayes’s imprint and printer’s mark with his own, but their particularities are notable: a large

crown, Leake’s printer’s mark, occupies about a third of the title page, and the new

imprint, “Printed for William Leake, and are to be sold at his shop at the sign of the

Crown in Fleetstreet,” directs buyers to another crown, on Leake’s shop sign. The same pictorial crown and imprint also appears on the title page of the 1655 Othello.

Commonwealth and Protectorate iconography, of course, consciously rejected the symbols

of royalty.50 Leake’s crown seems like a deliberate provocation when one discovers he

began working under its sign only after 1646, and started using a crown as his printer’s

mark only in 1650, the year after the regicide (His previous mark, an ornamented coat of arms, is visible on Topicks in the Laws of England (1646). Leake’s crown ﬁrst appears

on Man Become Guilty (1650) and then intermittingly on texts such as Philaster (1652),

A King and No King (1655) and Othello (1655). Leake’s crown is a diadem or open

circlet, a style worn by medieval English kings – and occasionally Elizabeth I – rather than the capped or arched crown favored by James I and Charles I.51The capped style

is visible on the title page woodcut to A King and No King (1619), which features an

image of a king either being crowned or uncrowned by a hand descending from clouds.

In the post-regicide era, Leake’s edition of A King and No King removed this ambiguous

image of kingship, and replaces it with a sturdier one, the old-fashioned crown on King, Merchant and Othello further connecting his playbooks to England’s Golden Age.

Examining the titles in Leake’s book list advertisement appended to Merchant Q3, Adam

Hooks notes that the list mostly includes recently published titles, and that “the only titles that had been published more than ﬁve years earlier were plays,” such as editions

50Laura Lunger Knoppers, “The Politics of Portraiture: Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style,” Re- naissance Quarterly 51 (1998), pp. 1282-1285. 51The diadem is visible in two royal portraits: “Queen Elizabeth I” (artist unknown), 1592, Parham House and “Queen Elizabeth with a Fan,” 1590s, private collection. The capped crown is worn by James I in the portrait by Paul van Somer, “King James I of England” c. 1620 (The Royal Collection) and is visible in Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I and his Family. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660123

of Philaster (1639), A King and No King (1639), and The Maid’s Tragedy (1641). In a list appended to a playbook, it makes sense to list plays (of any age) in order to

target readers and buyers of plays.52 But Leake’s advertisement of newer non-dramatic

material indicates that he was no antiquarian: he sought to harness the speciﬁc nostalgic

potential of plays. Curiously, the title page to Q3 Othello describes the text as the “fourth edition” – that is, one quarto later. The confusion suggests how, as they published texts

many decades after their ﬁrst performance and publication, Interregnum stationers could

mistake one old text – or old play – for another.

A similar confusion between old texts and old plays also contributes to the convoluted textual history of Jane Bell’s third quarto of King Lear (1655). Bell unwittingly vio-

lated Miles Flesher’s rights to the play, as Leo Kirschbaum demonstrated in his 1938

reconstruction of the play’s textual history. Bell had recently acquired the rights to the

popular anonymous play The True Chronicle History of King Leir from Richard Oulton, but printed Flesher’s Lear instead.53 The source of the Lear/Leir confusion is partly, as

Kirschbaum and later David Scott Kastan demonstrate, related to the Stationers’ Reg-

istry’s system of entrance on the basis of title. On April 22, 1640, Oulton acquired the

rights to “Lear and his 3 daughters.” This Lear was actually Leir; the change in spelling obliterated the sole distinction between the two plays in the Stationers’ Register.54 When Bell acquired Oulton’s titles, she had no way of knowing that her Lear was actually Leir; and violated Flesher’s rights by accident. This is where the story ends for Kirschbaum and Kastan. But another stationer seems to have confused Leir and Lear in 1655, a fact that is suggestive of the status of King Lear, and Shakespeare, in the mid-seventeenth century.

52Hooks, “Booksellers’ Catalogues and the Classiﬁcation of Printed Drama in Seventeenth-century England,” p. 452. 53Kirschbaum, p. 311. 54Kirschbaum, p. 310, Kastan, “In Plain Sight,” pp. 51-2. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660124

To disentangle the Leir/Lear confusion, it is necessary to return to the Stationers’ Regis- ter entries for King Leir, which reveal two distinct lines of provenance. On 14 May 1594,

“The moste famous Chronicle history of Leire kinge of England and his Three Daugh-

ters” was entered to Edward White. For reasons that remain unclear, the next relevant

entry, eleven years later, does not involve White: on 8 May 1605 Simon Staﬀord ﬁrst entered and then transferred “The Tragecall history of kinge Leir and his Three Daughters”

to John Wright. When reconstructing the play’s textual history, Kirschbaum dismisses

White and Wright’s seemingly rival claims: “We need not go into the bewildering prob-

lem of the 1605 entry vs. the 1594 one.”55 But addressing this problem provides insight

into how Lear could be confused with Leir. Richard Knowles oﬀers a detailed explanation about the rival Leir claims, related to proliferation of diﬀerent manuscripts, with

the result that both White’s and Wright’s various heirs legitimately claimed ownership

of Leir over a sixty-year period.56 There are two distinct chains of transfer for Leir:

ﬁrst, Edward White – Mistriss White – Edward Aldee – Widdow Aldee –Richard Oulton (at which point Leir became Lear)– Jane Bell. Second: John Wright (via Staﬀord) –

Edward Wright – William Gilbertson. In the second chain, the last transfer occurred

on 4 April 1655 when “The Tragicall history of Kinge Leire, & his 3. Daughters” (note

the spelling) was transferred from Edward Wright to William Gilbertson. It is unclear

whether Bell’s Q3 1655 Lear appeared before or after Wright transferred Leir to Gilbert- son in April of that year. The most plausible scenario seems to be that Bell’s edition of

Lear prompted Wright to reassert his rights in Leir, and that Wright and Gilbertson saw

Bell’s Lear as an opportunity to respectively sell and buy Leir. If Wright was threatened by Bell’s publication, this would imply that he thought that her Lear was actually Leir, or at least that two plays were similar enough to attract his attention. Bell’s confusion mirrors Wright’s: she published Lear thinking it was the play she held the rights to, which was actually Leir, and he conﬁrmed his entry in Leir because he thought Bell’s

55Kirschbaum, p. 310. 56Richard Knowles, “How Shakespeare Knew King Leir,” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002), pp. 30-32. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660125

Lear was actually Leir. William Gilbertson’s acquisition of Leir on 4 April 1655 is also notable; on the same day he entered The Merry Devil of Edmonton (previously entered by Moseley as “Shakespeare’s” in 1653), as well as Venus and Adonis, The Shoemaker’s

Holiday, Dr. Faustus and many other titles. Gilbertson was in the business of Shake- speare and dramatic classics: though modern critics since Edward Capell have echoed his characterization of King Leir as a “silly old play”57 far removed from Shakespeare’s

classic work, the play ﬁt into Gilbertson’s publishing agenda.

What does this suggest about the meaning of Lear in the Interregnum? Modern critics

persistently characterize Leir as an “old play” in an eﬀort to distinguish it from Lear. The quality of oldness is not chronological– by this measure, of course, Lear is also “old” – but

rather used to distinguish what to us seem to be two very diﬀerent plays – timeless Lear

in contrast to fusty Leir. This distinction is then projected onto the past: seventeenth-

century readers saw Leir as an “old-fashioned” play, in contrast to the more innovative Lear. Bell and Wright’s confusions – not merely as ordinary readers but as better-

informed stationers – suggest that the supposedly obvious distinction between the two

plays was less clear in the Interregnum. Lear and Leir were potentially interchangeable

and certainly a source of confusion. Shakespeare was author of old plays – like King Leir

– and old books – like King Lear Q2 (“1600” – actually 1619) which Bell used as her copy text.58 Upon acquiring Lear and his 3 daughters, Bell succeeded in her aim to print

an old play; she just printed the wrong one. The confusion surrounding Lear and Leir

can be interpreted as a sign of Shakespeare’s stature in the Interregnum. It is not that

Bell was attempting to capitalize on the selling power on Shakespeare’s name. Rather,

57Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, ed. Edward Capell, 10 vols. (London, 1768), vol. 1, p. 55. Edmond Malone called King Leir “the old play,” Shakespeare, Plays & Poems, ed. Malone, 10 vols. (London, 1790), vol. 1, p. 353. In his Introduction to The History of King Lear, Stanley Wells imagines Shakespeare’s “easy familiarity” with “the old play” Leir, having seen it “performed long before” (OUP, 2009), p. 11. Knowles refers to Leir as “old play,” throughout “How Shakespeare Knew King Leir.” 58Kastan, “In Plain Sight,” p. 53. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660126

Shakespeare’s name by this time had become strongly associated with particular types and titles of plays, and stationers like Bell assigned these sorts of plays to him even if he wasn’t actually responsible for them. Old Shakespeare had become a recognizable category of organization and collection.

Bell’s confusion suggests that, by the Interregnum, once vivid recollections of plays and the playwrights had grown increasingly hazy. Playwrights could be famous, and known for certain types of plays, all while they were separated from the speciﬁc plays they wrote.59 Such a separation occurs in the miscellany The Wits Interpreter (1655) by

John Cragge, for example.60 The volume features an elaborate engraved frontispiece with authorial portraits of Shakespeare, Jonson, Sidney and Spenser, among others.

Shakespeare and Jonson’s presence in the volume ends there, however: despite their portraits, extracts from their plays are not represented among the ﬁfty-one dialogues drawn from thirty distinct plays by dramatists such as Shirley, Massinger and Fletcher.61 We have already seen how the King’s Servants of 1647 invoke “the sweet swan of Avon,”

Shakespeare of the folio, in order to justify the prestige presentation of Beaumont and

Fletcher’s plays in folio. In The Wits Interpreter, Shakespeare and Jonson are called upon to confer value upon the non-dramatic, the non-literary, in the cheap, popular format of the miscellany.62 Adam Smyth notes that, along with Shakespeare, Jonson, Sidney and Spenser, the frontispiece to Wits Interpreter also features portraits of “T.

More,” “Ld. Bacon,” “Straﬀord” and “Richlieu,” which he argues are “names to evoke

59Lois Potter, interpreting the belated misattribution of Lust’s Dominion to Christopher Marlowe in 1654 argues that Marlowe’s “name and his plays had by this time become separated.” Examining one confused Commonwealth allusion to The Jew of Malta, Potters comments that though The Jew of Malta was well-known, knowledge of the particularities of the plot had grown vague by the mid-seventeenth century. Potter, “Marlowe in the Civil War and Commonwealth: Some Allusions and Parodies” in A Poet and a Filthy-Playmaker: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. K. Friedenreich, R. Gill and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York, 1988), pp. 72-82. 60This text is traditionally assigned to John Cotgrave, but Joshua McEvilla has provided persua- sive evidence that John Cragge was responsible. See McEvilla, “John Cragge’s The Wits Interpreter,” accepted and pending publication in The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. 61Astington, “Dramatic Extracts in the Interregnum,” p. 601. 62This characterization of the miscellany is from Smyth, p. 75. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660127

an imprecise and largely non-literary sense of respectability.”63 By the mid-seventeenth century, Shakespeare and Jonson’s authorial personas could have a life independent of

their actual texts – indeed, of even their genres, or literature altogether.64

The old Shakespeare allusion books abound with evidence that Shakespeare continued to ﬁgure in public discourse and in the cultural imagination in the mid-seventeenth century;

clearly publication rates alone cannot tell the whole story about a dramatist’s place in the

cultural imagination.65 Other critics have analyzed the many mid-seventeenth century allusions to Shakespeare and his contemporaries in various printed texts such as dramatic paratexts, commonplace books, miscellanies, literary works;66 I cite here only a few striking examples. In some cases, for example, other dramatists had parodied Shakespeare to the extent that the parody had superseded the original, consigning it to the distant past. For example, Thomas Randolph’s included a version of Hamlet’s gravedigger scene in Act 4 scene 3 of his popular comedy The Jealous Lovers (printed in 1632, 1634, 1640, 1646 and 1652).67 In 1640, Abraham Wright pronounced that Randolph’s version was an improvement on what was only a “good scene” by Shakespeare. Though Hamlet wasn’t

reprinted in the 1640s or 1650s, a version of one of its most-famous scenes was continu-

ously circulating in the interregnum. Such forms of parody also “prematurely” aged the

63Smyth, Profit and Delight, p. 75. 64Cragge included “Cardinal Richelieu’s Key, his manner of writing Letters by Cyphers.” pp. 123-4, 125-7. 65Frederick James Furnivall, et al. The Shakespeare Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591 to 1700 2 vols. London, Chatto & Windus, 1970; C.M. Ingleby, ed. Shakspere Allusion-Books (Pub. for the New Shakspere Society by N. Trbner, 1874). 66In addition to Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson, see also, Smyth, Profit and Delight; Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts, esp. 77-114. On Shakespeare’s poetic reputation in the mid-seventeenth century, see Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern Eng- land (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 67Randolph’s version parodies Hamlet’s lofty philosophizing when Asotus addresses a poet’s skull in the presence of a sexton: I scorn thy lyrick and heroic strain Thy tart Iambick and Satyrick vein Where by thy querks and tricks? Show me again The strange conundrums of thy striking brain, Thou Poets skull, and say, what’s rime to chimney. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660128 original texts. As James Shapiro explains, parody “depends upon an acknowledgement of temporal distance and difference. Dramatists recalled predecessors, and that very act of recollection potentially signaled the datedness of what came before.”68 Particularly tantalizing, perhaps, are allusions from the supposed “nadir” of Shakespeare’s posthumous reputation that seem to anticipate his later cultural dominance. For example, Shake- speare is by far the most-cited author in John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and

Language (1655), a commonplace book composed exclusively of extracts from English drama.69

There are several problems with analyzing allusions to determine the popularity of Shake- speare and his contemporaries, however. The ﬁrst stems from our longstanding critical preoccupation with Shakespeare, which has resulted in texts whose chief aim is to con-

firm our sense of his longstanding cultural preeminence. The Shakespeare Allusion Books offer plenty of evidence that Shakespeare continued to function as a cultural touchstone in the mid-seventeenth century.70 Yet the allusion books exhibit confirmation bias: by focusing exclusively on allusions to Shakespeare in the seventeenth century, the compilers unsurprisingly find evidence which confirms their preexisting beliefs about his superiority.

Because we lack comparable “allusion books” for his contemporaries, we cannot say if in terms of allusions Shakespeare exceeded, matched or fell behind his contemporaries.71 To be sure, there are plenty of mid-seventeenth century allusions to Shakespeare’s con-

68James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (Columbia UP, 1991), p. 9-12. 69Gary Taylor has recently argued that, due to his extensive collaboration, Middleton was actually the most-cited author in Cotgrave’s English Treasury. Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (OUP: 2007), p. 52. Looking at lead dramatists, however, Shakespeare remains in first place. 70Of course, because the allusion books are a product of institutional forces founded on notions of Shakespeare’s preeminence, they exhibit confirmation bias: by focusing exclusively on allusions to Shake- speare in the seventeenth century, the compilers unsurprisingly find evidence which confirms their pre- existing beliefs about his superiority. 71It is not my intention to attempt to catalogue all allusions to all dramatists between 1642 and 1660. Even in his meticulous study, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations Compared, Bentley refrained from attempting to collect all seventeenth-century allusions to Jonson. As Frost notes, “whereas almost all Shakespeare allusions are collected, many Jonson allusions must remain unrecognized; yet even on the basis of present evidence Bentley believed Jonson to be more frequently referred to and more widely admired during the seventeenth century.” p. 82. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660129 temporaries. Some of the stances they seem to reveal seem unfathomable to us now – such as when Thomas Goffe is mentioned in the same breath as Jonson, Shakespeare and

Davenant as one of the great pre-war dramatists, or that William Cartwright has commendatory poems praising his work than Shakespeare.72 As critics have noted, analyzing dramatic allusions to determine the relative popularity of plays and dramatists raises many problematic questions: what counts as an allusion? Do all allusions have the same meaning or function? If not, how does one compare one allusion with another? What are the relative merits of counting allusions versus counting editions? Does frequency of allusion and ample praise necessarily imply that a dramatist is read widely and enjoyed by the general public?73 W. W. Greg observes that “there is a diﬀerence between texts that readers (including other writers) actually respond to and texts that readers admire for ‘theoretical reasons.”’74

Keeping these critiques of allusions in mind, I conclude by analyzing Shakespeare’s presence in the ﬁrst two comprehensive catalogues of English drama, both printed in 1656.75

72“The Prologue to the Gentry” in The Famous Tragedy of Charles I (1649) lists: “Jonson, Shake- speare, Goffe, and Davenant, / Brave Suckling, Beaumont, Fletcher, Shirley.” 73Such questions have been debated at least since the publication of G. E. Bentley’s landmark study Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (1945). Bentley meticulously compared seventeenth century allusions to the two dramatists, concluding that Jonson’s reputation stood higher than Shakespeare’s. W. W. Greg soon countered that rates of publication must also be taken into consideration. Greg also argued that frequent allusions to Jonson the dramatist, and to Shakespeare’s characters suggested that while “writers might praise and quote Jonson; it was Shakespeare that people read.” (W. W. Greg, “Shakespeare and Jonson”, Review of English Studies XXII (1946), p. 58). David Frost summarized critiques of Bentley’s method and its conceptual underpinnings. Critics objected “that allusions are not all equally important (Sisson, Harbage), or that Bentley’s definition of an allusion,” namely, a direct quotation of a full line of verse “is too rigid,” and “undoubtedly excludes some genuine echoes.” Frost cites Harbage’s distinction between “an allusion to a performance,” which “implies many spectators, whereas a commendatory poem leaves the number of readers in doubt.” As for the fact that Jonson is cited more frequently in commendatory poems than Shakespeare (178 citations versus 54) Harbage argued that this “tells us more about the peculiar customs of commendatory verse’ than about popularity.” On the subject of commonplacing, Frost points out Baldwin Maxwell’s suggestion “that Jonson’s poems are more frequently found copied into commonplace books simply because the popularity of Shakespeare’s meant that they, unlike Jonson’s, were readily accessible in print!.” Frost, “Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16.1 (1965), pp. 81-89, p. 81, n. *. 74Greg, “Shakespeare and Jonson”, Review of English Studies XXII (1946), p. 58. Erne also discusses the differences between “a writer’s writer” and a “reader’s writer” in Shakespeare and the Book Trade, p. 54-5. 75See Chapter 4 for an extensive analysis of these two catalogues. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660130

William Rogers and Richard Ley’s “Exact and perfect Catologue of all Playes that are Printed” was appended to their edition of Thomas Goﬀe’s The Careless Shepherdess

(1656) and Edward Archer’s “Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the Plaies that were

ever printed” was appended to his edition of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Heywood and

William Rowley’s The Old Law (1656). Because they are in single volumes, the authorial allusions in the catalogues do not exhibit the same problems as allusions that are dis-

persed across a range of texts. Each authorial reference is a clear-cut allusion, each has

the same meaning (identifying a play’s author), and, therefore, all allusions are commen-

surate with one another. In the two catalogues, Shakespeare is by far the author to whom

the most plays are misattributed, with fourteen titles. Beaumont and/or Fletcher are a distant second with ﬁve misattributions. One might guess that the compilers were at-

tempting to capitalize on the selling power of Shakespeare’s name, the same motive Erne

ascribes to the stationers responsible for the Shakespearean misattributions on the title

pages of ten editions printed between 1584 and 1633 – making him the only dramatist to have plays misattributed to him in these years.76 Though it is tempting to similarly

interpret the catalogues’ misattributions as a rare sign of Shakespeare’s commercial dom-

inance in the Interregnum, the misattributions must be traced to a diﬀerent cause. For

one thing, as I explore in Chapter 4, the comprehensive catalogues are informational in

ways that compromise their commercial function. In order to provide an “exact and perfect” overview of English drama, moth-eaten Tudor texts such as John Heywood’s Four

Ps (1545, last printed in 1569) are listed alongside more recent and presumably vendible publications. All titles are organized in a reference-friendly alphabetical order, not according to salability, as they are in shorter book catalogue advertisements. But even if the compilers’ misattributions derived from pecuniary motives, Shakespeare would not be the obvious choice. He was far from the best-selling dramatist in 1656; we’ve seen how Moseley did not even bother to mention him when advertising Kinsmen in his book

76Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, pp. 56-81. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660131

catalogues. Between 1642 and 1660, no title pages misattribute plays to Shakespeare, but over the same period a dozen title pages misattribute playbooks to Fletcher, Beaumont,

Chapman, Marlowe, Jonson, T. G. (probably Thomas Goﬀe) and S. R. (probably Samuel

Rowley).77

Critics often dismiss the two comprehensive catalogues because of their persistent errors:

misspellings of playwrights, and play titles, and misattributions.78 In fact, the catalogues

are mostly accurate, and sometimes surprisingly so. For example, Archer’s catalogue

includes the ﬁrst attribution of The Tragedy of Mariam to Elizabeth Cary. I suggest that,

because the errors in the catalogues actually deserve our attention, precisely because the “exact and perfect” catalogues make explicit claims about their correctness, and because

they get so much right. In the case of original misattributions (i.e. those not derived

from early printed editions), many are due to simple mechanical errors, while others are

due to obvious confusions between plays and playwrights with similar-sounding names. Rogers and Ley assign Massinger’s Bondman to Fletcher (who wrote Bonduca); Archer

assigns The Iron Age to the wrong Thomas (Dekker instead of Heywood); the anonymous

Every Woman in Her Humour is ascribed to Jonson. Many of the errors, in other words,

do not come out of nowhere, but reveal the types of plays associated with particular

playwrights. The associations simultaneously reveal real knowledge and real vagueness about who wrote what.

The same is true of the Shakespeare misattributions in the two catalogues. They derive

either from 1) a speciﬁc earlier tradition that linked Shakespeare to the play: an early playbook attribution, a performance history with Shakespeare’s company,79 and/or from

77Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, p. 61. 78Greg, A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. Supplementary to A List of English Plays (New York, 1969), p. ii, also “Authorship attributions in the early play lists, 1656-1671” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions 2 (1946), 303-330; Hooks, “Booksellers,” p. 459; MacDonald P. Jackson, Determining The Shakespeare Canon (OUP, 2014), p. 14. 79As Kirwan points out, because Shakespeare occupied a central position in the Chamberlaine’s/King’s Servants, it seems likely titles not strictly written by him would be assigned to him in virtue of being Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660132

2) Shakespeare’s wider cultural associations in the period, much like the misattribution of a Humour play to Jonson. In the ﬁrst category we can place The Puritan Widow,

Thomas Lord Cromwell (rendered as “Cromwells History” in Archer’s catalogue), John K.

of England, both parts (the catalogues replicate or expand early playbooks’ attributions

to “Shakespeare”, “W. S.” or “W. Sh.”), Mucedorus and The Merry Devil of Edmon- ton.80 In the second category we have popular anonymous plays (Mucedorus, The First

Part of Jeronimo and The Spanish Tragedy, The Merry Devil of Edmonton and Arden

of Faversham)81; history plays (Edward II, Edward III, Edward IV ); revenge tragedies

involving fathers and sons (The Spanish Tragedy, The Tragedy of Hoﬀman), a play from

a large folio collection (Beaumont and Fletcher’s Chances). All the misattributions potentially reﬂect the types of plays associated with Shakespeare in the mid-seventeenth

century. If at least some of these plays were seen by some as Shakespeare’s – at least by

the compiler and the reader who toke the “exact and perfect” catalogues at their word

– this would change our impression of how historical readers experienced Shakespeare in mid-seventeenth century print culture. Shakespeare’s Mucedorus attribution, for example, makes him responsible for the most-reprinted quarto in the seventeenth century, and for a text that by the 1610s was regarded as a paradigmatically old play, “popular but unfashionable,” as Peter Kirwan puts it.82

Popular but unfashionable is an apt description of Shakespeare’s reputation in print culture between 1642 and 1660. He was largely excluded from a playbook market that was preoccupied with novelty; the stationers most likely to reprint his plays either died, became more interested in non-dramatic works, or had their stakes tied up in legal disputes.

performed by his company. Kirwarn, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha, pp. 72-3. 80For the Shakespearean attributions for The Merry Devil of Edmontonand Mucedorus, see Peter Kirwan, “The First Collected Shakespeare Apocrypha,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62 (2011), 594-601. 81In Archer’s catalogue, Shakespeare’s name is listed next to The Arraignment of Paris, but W. W. Greg demonstrated that Archer actually intended to attribute the following entry, Arden of Faversham, to Shakespeare, but accidentally misaligned the entries. W. W. Greg, “Shakespeare and Arden of Feversham,” Review of English Studies 21 (1945): 134-36. 82Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha, pp. 99-106. Chapter 3. Missing Shakespeare: English Renaissance Drama in Print, 1642-1660133

When stationers published Shakespeare in his period, they emphasized his plays’ links to the past while also asserting their topicality. The confusions in the Stationers’ Reg- ister and misattributions in the catalogues indicate that even stationers couldn’t recall if Shakespeare was responsible for Lear or Leir, and they were quick to ascribe popular old plays like Mucedorus and The Spanish Tragedy to popular old Shakespeare. In the Interregnum, Shakespeare’s ubiquity transformed him into an accessible category of dramatic organization at the same time that it drove stationers to publish new plays by other dramatists. In other words, Shakespeare’s oldness allowed English drama to be renewed; out of a Shakespearean dearth grew the lush ﬁeld of early modern drama. Chapter 4

Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s

Ay, in the catalogue you go for men, As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept All by the name of dogs. The valued ﬁle Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous nature Hath in him closed; whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike.

-Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.1. 104-113

Three new dramatic forms in print emerged in the 1650s. Humphrey Moseley’s dramatic series New Plays consisted of small octavo collections by diﬀerent dramatists, printed in bibliographically uniform editions with formulaic titles that alluded to their genre and novelty. John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655) was the

ﬁrst printed commonplace book composed exclusively of dramatic excerpts, and also, therefore, the ﬁrst dramatic anthology. William Rogers and Richard Ley’s “Exact and perfect Catologue of all Playes that are Printed” (1656) and Edward Archer’s “Exact and perfect Catalogue of all the Plaies that were ever printed” (1656), represented the

134 Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 135

ﬁrst attempts to comprehensively catalogue English printed drama. Although the small collection series, the dramatic commonplace book/anthology and the comprehensive catalogue of printed plays have disparate functions, each form follows the same structural logic. They unite parts of English drama – portions of individual authorial canons, dramatic excerpts, or play titles – in order to present a view of English drama as a whole: the period, genre, and ﬁeld of what we now call Renaissance drama.

Building on earlier critics’ insights on each individual printed form, I interpret the three forms together as diﬀerent versions of the characteristic dramatic form of the 1650s, what

I call the dramatic compendium. Kewes has argued that Moseley’s New Plays series asserted its dramatists’ authorial status and established their authorial canons.1 Kastan argues that Moseley’s regularized dramatic and poetic editions “invented English literature” by “produc[ing] a recognizable series of the best writing of his generation.”2 My interest in the New Plays is wider than Kewes’s argument about its eﬀect on individual dramatists, and narrower than Kastan’s claims about the series’ eﬀect on a general category of “English literature.” I argue that the New Plays series consolidates the “play” as a distinct generic category, the series’ texts implicitly functioning as a proto-anthology of English drama. What is implicit in the New Plays is explicit in Cotgrave’s English

Treasury, the ﬁrst commonplace books composed exclusively of dramatic extracts. Most critics treat The English Treasury as a commonplace book, albeit one notable for its exclusive focus on drama, and for its appearance during the theatre ban.3 But as a com-

1Kewes, “Give me the Sociable Pocket Books. . . ,”’ pp. 10-11. 2Kastan focuses on Moseley’s series of poetic works by Milton, Waller, Carew, and others; though they share some features (octavo format, frontispiece portrait) the poetry series is separate from the dramatic one (they are not, for example, called “New Poems”) and are therefore outside the scope of this chapter. Kastan, “Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature,” p. 114. 3See G. E. Bentley, “John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language and the Elizabethan Drama,” Studies in Philology 40 (1943): 186-203; Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts, pp. 79-80; Joshua McEvilla, “An Online Reader of John Cotgrave’s The English Treasury of Wit and Language” http://shakespeareauthorship.com/ Accessed 17 September 2016. John Astington, “Dramatic Extracts in the Interregnum,” The Review of English Studies 54. 217 (2003): 601-14; Martin Wiggins, “Where to Find Lost Plays,” in Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, eds. by David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 255-78. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 136

monplace book, The English Treasury simply continued practices that had long antedated the ban: dramatic commonplacing motivated by theatrical nostalgia,4 commonplacing as

a way of asserting English drama’s edifying value.5 I am more interested in Cotgrave’s

actual innovation: his devotion to a single genre. Following Jeremy Lopez, I argue the

volume represents the ﬁrst anthology of English drama.6 The physical consolidations of English drama in the dramatic series and anthology occurred in the abstract in the

two comprehensive catalogues of English drama of 1656. Critics have mostly neglected

the two catalogues. Adam Hooks, however, has examined the contemporaneous non-

comprehensive book catalogue advertisements of William Leake and Andrew Crooke. By

classifying printed drama (notably, only professional drama, as Hooks observes) separately under the heading of “plays,” Hooks argues these catalogues “transformed printed

drama into a distinct generic ﬁeld that has continued to inﬂuence how we think of, and

indeed constitute, the category of early modern drama.”7 Yet it is misguided to look to

non-comprehensive book catalogue advertisements for such insights; these catalogues – which favor popular titles, and are organized by saleability – above all reﬂect commer-

cial considerations, not rigid conceptions of genre. By contrast, by listing all texts, not

just the popular ones, and organizing them in a non-hierarchal alphabetical order, Rogers

and Ley and Archer’s comprehensive catalogues are less commercially eﬀective than their

non-comprehensive counterparts. Rather, the catalogues function as encyclopaedias of drama, and as such illuminate how incipient notions of the genre, canon and ﬁeld of

English drama were created in the 1650s. In the chapter’s ﬁnal section, I demonstrate

how the dramatic compendia of the 1650s lastingly inﬂuenced dramatic criticism in the

restoration and beyond, to our own critical moment.

4Laura Estill, for example, argues that The English Treasury exempliﬁes theatrical nostalgia of the 1650s, as it oﬀered theatre-starved readers a way to enjoy plays in another form, see Estill, p. 77-114. 5Bentley argues that the all-drama volume bespeaks of drama’s “popularity, prestige, and dignity” in the 1650s, Bentley, “John Cotgrave,” p. 198. 6Jeremy Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (CUP: 2014), p. 45. 7Hooks, “Booksellers,” p. 445-464. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 137

1 Serial Publication of Small Dramatic Collections

Three strikingly similar dramatic collections were published in 1652. The collections, all in quarto, had virtually identical title pages (likely printed from the same typesetting) which featured the same title (Comedies, Tragi-Comedies & Tragædies), had the same layout, typeface, fleur-de-lis printers’ mark, and imprint.8 Paulina Kewes mentions “the nonce-collections of Chapman and Marston (both 1652)” among the “isolated instances” which “never amounted to a single publisher’s bibliographically standard series” (8), but the addition of the John The contents were also similar: each volume was a nonce- collection, that is, a gathering of previously published texts issued together under a new title page. On the title page, the sole difference on each title page was the particular dramatist identified – George Chapman, John Marston, or John Ford. Each volume offered a sample of its respective dramatist’s corpus in print. Chapman’s Comedies, Tragi-

Comedies & Tragædies collected six quartos printed between 1598 and 1608.9 Marston’s collection gathered eight quartos published from 1602 to 1631.10 Ford’s Comedies, Tragi-

Comedies & Tragædies drew together six quartos published between 1629 and 1639.11

Though the title page does not identify a publisher, Richard Hearne likely assembled the texts and printed the initial title pages.12

The three editions of Comedies, Tragi-Comedies & Tragædies of 1652 have received little critical attention, in part due to the lack of extant copies. Because only one copy of each collection survives, critics speculate that Hearne bound the volumes with title

8Robert E. Brettle, “Bibliographical Notes on Some Marston Quartos and Early Collected Editions.” The Library 4th Series, Vol VIII (1927), pp. 347-348. 9The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, An Humorous Day’s Mirth, All Fools, Monsieur D’Olive, The Gentleman Usher and Bussy D’Ambois. 10The Malcontent, What You Will, The Dutch Courtesan, The Wonder of Women, or Sophonisba; Parasitaster, or The Fawn, Antonio and Mellida, Antonio’s Revenge and The Insatiate Countess. 11The Lover’s Melancholy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Broken Heart, Love’s Sacrifice, Perkin Warbeck, The Fancies Chaste and Noble and The Lady’s Trial. 12See Martin Wiggins, with Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533-1642 Vol. 5 (OUP: 2015), p. 21, p. 107, p. 125, p. 163, p. 179. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 138 pages for a single client, perhaps the seventeenth century antiquarian Walter Chetwynd of Ingestre in Staffordshire.13 Moreover, critical attention to the volumes is further compromised by the fact that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Marston and Chapman collections, like many seventeenth century nonce-collections, were broken up into single-texts and bound (and often sold) individually.14 Acquiring Marston’s Comedies, Tragi-Comedies & Tragædies from the Devonshire Library in 1914, the Hunt- ington Library broke up the volume and sold the plays separately;15 the only known copy of the Chapman collection was also broken up.16 Only a copy of the Ford collection survives intact, at the National Library of Scotland. Though destructive according to current archival standards, the nineteenth and early-twentieth century efforts to separate dramatic collections into their constituent parts illuminates the opposite tendency in dramatic publishing of the 1650s: namely, to join discrete parts of English plays together into cohesive dramatic texts. The nonce-collections of Chapman, Marston and

Ford of 1652 plays may have been a unique production for one antiquarian, but the motivations underpinning the collection series were far from idiosyncratic, as evidenced by the extensive serial collection launched the next year by Humphrey Moseley.

13Greg was among the first to speculate that the Marston and Chapman editions were bound with a new title page for a single person (Greg was unaware of the Ford collection, and consequently it was omitted from his Bibliography). While acknowledging Greg’s hypothesis, Benedict Robinson speculates that the editions may have had a larger print run by “stationer who, having acquired old quartos of John Marston’s and George Chapman’s plays, bound them together and printed a general title page for each volume,” and indicative perhaps that a collection of old quartos was more marketable than each one individually. Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42.2 (2002), pp. 361-380. p. 371. The shared characteristics of the Ford nonce collection make it clear that it represents a companion to Chapman and Marston’s collections. Marion Linton also supposes that one only set of copies was published, and observes that the “arms, and the signature on the last page of Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice are those of the seventeenth century antiquary Walter Chetwynd of Ingestre in Staffordshire [. . . ] perhaps a clue to the identity of the collection for whom all three volumes were bound. Marion Linton, “National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library Copies of Plays in Greg’s “Bibliography of the English Printed Drama,” Studies in Bibliography 15 (1962), pp. 91-104. p. 104 n. 3. 14See also Arthur Freeman, “Octavo Nonce Collections of John Taylor.” The Library(1963) s5-XVIII (1): 51-57. 15Brettle, pp. 347-8. 16Linton, p. 104. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 139

In 1653, Moseley published two collections of plays by Richard Brome and James Shirley, respectively entitled Five New Plays and Six New Plays. Moseley’s editions were biblio-

graphically uniform: previously unpublished texts printed in octavo, with formulaic titles

(“New Plays” preceded by the particular number of plays), both featuring an engraved

portrait of the author, and a title page that, in order of prominence, featured the title (a given number of “New Plays”), the dramatist’s name and the publishers’ information.

Moseley printed his two collections amid a ﬂurry of publishing activity. On September

9, 1653, he entered over forty plays into the Stationers’ Register of plays: ten by Philip

Massinger, four by Thomas Middleton, four by Henry Shirley, three by “Shakespeare,”17

two each by Richard Brome, Lodowick Carlell, William Rowley and one each by Thomas Dekker, James Shirley, John Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, John Ford, William Davenant,

among others.18 (The Brome and James Shirley plays entered in the Stationers’ Reg-

ister on 9 September were not among those printed in the dramatists’ respective New

Plays of 1653). Moseley’s two New Plays were evidently successful, as he followed the Brome and Shirley collections with similarly uniform collections: Three New Plays by

Philip Massinger (1655), Two New Plays by Lodowick Carlell (1657), Two New Plays by

Thomas Middleton (1657). The Carlell and Middleton editions consisted entirely of plays

that Moseley entered on 9 September 1653, the Massinger collection featured one entered

on that date, A Very Woman. The market appeal of Moseley’s play series is further suggested by eﬀorts to imitate it: in 1659 Andrew Crooke published another volume of Five

New Plays by Richard Brome, with ﬁve diﬀerent plays. Moseley’s mass publication of

new plays in octavo diﬀered from Hearne’s one-oﬀ nonce-collections in quarto. Yet, like

Hearne before him, Moseley united a sampling plays from one dramatist into a single vol-

ume, and then, in turn united those collections, through bibliographically uniform texts with formulaic titles, into a larger corpus. Kewes observes that in each individual New

17See Chapter 3 on Moseley’s Shakespeare publication. 18See Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers Vol. 1 (London : Priv. Print., 1913-14), pp. 428-9. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 140

Plays volume, “the author, immortalized in each booklet’s engraved frontispiece, emerges as a central unifying presence which binds together and confers value upon a corpus of disparate and hitherto dispersed texts.”19 But this is also true of earlier folio collections.

Moseley’s real innovation was to collect the collections. To paraphrase Kewes, the serial collection binds together disparate and dispersed texts from multiple dramatists into a single dramatic corpus. “The central, unifying presence” of the series is indicated by its title; the New Plays are uniﬁed by novelty and by genre.

The New Plays’ series emphasis on novelty is not surprising; Chapter 3 demonstrates how dramatic stationers in the 1640s and 1650s pivoted from publishing market-tested reprints to new plays in the wake of the theatre ban. The ﬁxation with dramatic novelty helps us understand the particular authors selected for the series: the plays of Brome,

Shirley, Massinger, Carlell all been active in the 1620s and 1630s, during the second half of English commercial drama. While older Elizabethan and early-Jacobean dramatists had been continually reprinted in the decades prior, there had been fewer opportunities publish and reprint the more recent late-Stuart dramatists: Brome, Shirley, Massinger,

Carlell had a sizable number of previously unprinted plays, and none had previously been printed in collection. Middleton is slightly older than his New Play peers, since he was active in the ﬁrst decade of the seventeenth century. Yet he too produced many notable plays in the 1620s (he died in 1627), and a substantial portion of his dramatic corpus remained unprinted by the 1650s.20

19Kewes, “Give me the Sociable Pocket Books,” p. 11. 20Indeed, most of Middleton’s canon remains unprinted, as I discuss below. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 141

1.1 The Picture of Dramatic Genre and Canon in New Plays

Apart from the fact that they were new, we might draw various other connections between the plays of Shirley, Brome, Carlell, Massinger and Middleton which might have led Moseley to bundle them together in uniform volumes: the acting companies or venues for which they wrote, the types of plays, their associations with professional theatre, as opposed to the rival courtly amateur dramatists of the 1620s and 1630s exempliﬁed by the plays of John Suckling.21 Yet the texts themselves emphasize another link: genre.

Each volume in Moseley’s series prints its title, New Plays, above and in larger type than the particular dramatist’s name, theatre company or venue in which it was performed. The texts give prominence to dramatic genre over and above any particular author or conditions of performance. If individual collections eﬀect the canonization of their particular authors, we might say that series collections eﬀect the canonization of

“plays.” The subordinate status of the New Plays authors illuminates the motivations behind Moseley’s emphasis on genre. In his note to the reader in Nicomede (1671), the stationer Francis Kirkman places Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson ﬁrst as the most proliﬁc (and therefore, most popular) authors of the “last age,” followed (in order) by Shirley, Heywood, Middleton and Rowley, Massinger, Chapman, Brome, and

Davenant. Gerald Langbaine in An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) calls

Shirley “Chief of the Second-rate Poets,” and states that Middleton, Thomas Heywood, Rowley, Day and Webster “were in those days” accounted of “Poets of the second Magni- tude” relative to Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher. Kirkman and especially Langbaine are often cited as key ﬁgures in the canonization of early modern drama that began in the long eighteenth century. It is clear, however, that Kirkman and Langbaine are referring to processes of dramatic canonization, and hierarchical arrangement within that canon, which occurred before 1660, which is the period described as the “last age” and

21See Butler, pp. 100-118. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 142

“those Days” from the perspective after 1660. Moreover, while the dramatic canon of the “last age” was partly shaped by dramatic attitudes before 1642, many of those attitudes

only became visible with the publication of dramatists after 1642, such as the New Plays

series. By bundling together a group of “second-rate” poets and marketing them as part

of a uniﬁed series of “plays,” Moseley ingeniously added value to each lesser dramatist. Printed independently, a collected edition of, say, Philip Massinger or Lodowick Carlell

might appeal only to those few Massinger or Carlell fanatics. While it is true, as Kewes

puts it, that each collection initiated the establishment of the individual dramatic canons

of the playwrights they featured,22 these would still be the individual canons of second-

rate dramatists. Taken together, however, the collections of second-rate dramatists oﬀer a broader view of dramatic genre. The series establishes not only individual authorial

canons of second-rate dramatists but also establishes a multi-author canon of “Plays,”

which appeals to those who like plays.23 Yet, no matter his motivation, Moseley’s em-

phasis on plays as plays had another eﬀect: to foreground “plays” as a coherent category of organization and collection.

The New Plays series displays a restraint beﬁtting the secondary stature of its authors.

Moseley had previously attracted scorn for his hyperbolic praise of a middling playwright

when he appended 54 commendatory poems to William Cartwright’s octavo collection Comedies and Tragedies (1651).24 But, compared with the handsome folio editions of

Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher, or the plump Cartwright octavo, the New Plays series

is more modest in both form and content. The “smaller and less digniﬁed” format

of the octavo,25 the uniformity of the ﬁve volumes, and the volumes’ relatively modest

22Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, p. 184. 23Peter Berek similarly notes Moseley’s emphasis on “plays” over authorship or performance history in the New Plays series, concluding that this emphasis reveals an understanding of plays primarily as commodities: “Moseley and his colleagues seem to have thought that plays sold because they were plays,” seeing them as “readerly and commercial, not commemorative.” Berek, “Defoliating Playbooks,” SEL (2016), pp. 407-8. 24See Chapter 1. 25Kewes, “Give Me the Sociable Pocket Books,” pp. 5-6. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 143 prefatory matter (spaces where convention permits hyperbole) all discourage any attempt to assert the excellence or singularity of any dramatist in particular.26 Such modesty is visible in the the second volume of Richard Brome’s Five New Plays (1659), printed by Andrew Crooke. The stationer defensively acknowledges Brome’s reputation as a mere disciple of “our great Laureate” Ben Jonson: “there are a sort. . . who think they lessen this Author’s worth when they speak the relation he had to Ben. Johnson. We very thankfully embrace the Objection, and desire they would name any other Master that could better teach a man to write a good Play.” In his commendatory poem,

“To the surviving Honour and Ornament of the English Scene, Iames Shirley” printed before The Cardinal in Six New Plays, the poet John Hall makes a rather modest claim for Shirley’s reputation: “This I dare assert,” “when men have nam’d / Iohnson (the

Nations Laureat,) the fam’d / Beaumont, and Fletcher, he, that wo’not see / Shirley, the fourth, must forfeit his best ey.” While mid-seventeenth century commentators may have debated whether Jonson, Shakespeare, or Beaumont and Fletcher (often taken as one) was the best English dramatist, few placed Shirley in the top three.

As fourth-best dramatist (at the very best), Shirley would not be commemorated in a large, handsome folio volume that consolidated all or virtually all of his plays. Nor would there be any eﬀort to publish the complete authorial canons of those even further down on the authorial ladder, such as Massinger, Middleton, Carlell or Brome. The absence of large collections for these dramatists would have lasting eﬀects on our present picture of early modern drama. For example, Gary Taylor observes that because Middleton’s

“works had not been collected” soon after his death, “they were particularly susceptible to chance destructions in. . . social cataclysms” such as the demolition of the playhouses

(which stored many manuscripts) in the 1640s, and the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed many books and manuscripts.27 Taylor estimates that around half of

26Benedict Robinson similarly argues that the New Plays “do not monumentalize their texts, nor do they insist on the laureate status of their authors.” Robinson, p. 372. 27Gary Taylor gives diﬀerent reasons for the absence of a large Middleton collected edition. He suggests Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 144 the dramatic canons of Middleton and Massinger have survived.28 Nevertheless, the New Plays series did ensure the survival of plays important within both individual authorial canons and in the modern canon of early modern drama, such as Middleton’s Women

Beware Women, Shirley’s The Cardinal, Massinger’s The Guardian. Moseley’s New Plays also lastingly shaped our pictures of Middleton, Massinger and Shirley, quite literally – the frontispiece portraits produced for the New Plays editions became the iconic portraits of their respective authors. The frontispiece portrait of Middleton from Two New

Plays (1657) for example, is prominently featured at the beginning of the Oxford edition of Middleton’s Collected Works (2007). With its frontispiece authorial portrait and a handful of commendatory poems, each individual collection of the New Plays asserts the value of its respective dramatist. The overall eﬀect of this, however, is less about establishing the laureate status of any particular author, than to confer value to a uniﬁed group of authors of a particular class of texts, “plays.” Moseley did not publish the complete

(or even large) collected works of the second-rate dramatists. Instead, Moseley’s New Plays series oﬀered dramatic breadth over depth. Individual contributions of second-rate dramatists matter less than the picture they present taken together of “plays.” In the

New Plays series, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Despite Shirley’s middling poetic stature among English dramatists, the dramatist still has a superlative position as “the last supporter of the dying Scene,” that is, the last important professional dramatist before the theatrical closures of 1642. The context of the theatre ban helps us understand the timing and appearance of the small series collections of the 1650s. As we’ve seen, the prohibition on playing whetted the public’s appetite for dramatic texts and eliminated any rivalry that might cause theatre companies to withhold that, unlike in-house dramatists like Shakespeare and Fletcher, Middleton’s plays were dispersed across a number of different companies, and it was therefore harder for stationers to acquire the printing rights. While this is true for the fifteen years after Middleton’s death in 1627, such issues would become less pressing after the closure of theatres, when hard-up theatre companies were selling off scripts. Gary Taylor, “Lives and Afterlives,” Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, pp. 51-2. 28Ibid. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 145 plays from the latter. The New Plays series exemplifies how stationers satisfied demand for dramatic novelty. It is worth noting that, for all Moseley’s emphasis on novelty, the New Plays of the 1650s reproduced old plays from the 1620s and 1630s, written by dramatists now mostly long dead; had he wanted to print genuinely “new plays,” Moseley could have gathered new closet drama composed during the war or interregnum. But Moseley presented collections of professional drama for readers nostalgic for plays “as they have often been acted” “with great applause,” as they were described on the title page to

Massinger’s Three New Plays. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, commendatory poems in the New Plays and other texts stoked nostalgia for the theatrical past, for example, by referring to them as “reliques” of a bygone era.29 Because the New Plays series emphasized genre over and above a particular dramatist or theatre company, Moseley encouraged and enabled a generalized nostalgia for “plays” as they had been staged in the theatre.

2 Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language

The anthological function of Moseley’s New Plays series was implicit: by printing portions of different authors’ dramatic canons, and uniting these disparate collections through bibliographically uniform editions, Moseley offered an overview of “plays.” Soon after these initial experiments, Moseley published a text, John Cotgrave’s English Treasury of Wit and Language (1655) that confirmed the anthological functions only hinted at in the

New Plays. Like the New Plays, The English Treasury negotiated between selection, abbreviation and abundance: choosing one genre, selecting particular plays or dramatic

29Hall’s prefatory poem to Moseley’s edition of Shirley’s Six New Plays (among others) describes the playbook as the treasured “relic” of the absent theatrical past. In Shirley’s dedication to William Paulet Esquire to The Sisters in Six New Plays (1653), he oﬀers the playbook as a consolation “in this age, when the Scene of Drammatick Poetry is changed into a wilderness.” Aston Cockayne’s prefatory poem to Brome’s Five New Plays describes how reading will keep drama alive: “then we shall still have Plays!” See Chapter 1. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 146

fragments, and gathering multiple examples of fragments to create commercially successful texts that (perhaps inadvertently) convey a wider idea about English drama as

a whole.30While the standardization of Moseley’s series implies that its various authors

belong to a single genre and canon of “plays,” Cotgrave physically unites 1,701 dramatic

fragments into a single, manageable 16cm x 10cm anthology: “the best and most” examples of “the English dramatic poem,” as Cotgrave puts it, presented “in small compass.”

Cotgrave’s volume was the ﬁrst commonplace book composed exclusively of English dra-

matic excerpts. Consistent with the long tradition of commonplacing within which he

was working, Cotgrave handles his dramatic sources as means to an end: the goal is to convey a wide range of edifying chestnuts (organized topically under alphabetical head-

ings moving from “[Of) Accident” to “[On] Youth”) for the reader’s moral and rhetorical

improvement. Critics have pointed out how the commonplace tradition highlights the

anachronism of our modern preoccupation with overall structure, unity and narrative in early modern literature. Commonplace books supposedly reveal how early modern

readers regarded plays not as “uniﬁed artistic wholes, but as sources to be dismantled,

changed, and mined for wit, wisdom and song.”31 At ﬁrst glance, Cotgrave seems to

exemplify the typical early modern reader who valued drama as a repository of useful

fragments that can be exported for a range of practical uses, and that need not – indeed should not – encapsulate the larger play. He forgoes contextual clues and omits identify-

ing features that might evoke the source play – replacing identifying speech preﬁxes and

names in the dialogue with generic terms such as “1,” “2” and “Man,” “Sir,” “Lady” –

to better highlight the passage’s universal moral and rhetorical application.

30Cotgrave did not necessarily set out to create the ﬁrst anthology of English drama; he and Moseley were doubtless attempting to capitalize on the popularity of printed miscellanies and commonplace books in the mid-seventeenth century. On the mid-seventeenth century popularity of commonplace books, see Smyth, Proﬁt and Delight. 31Laura Estill, Dramatic Extracts; see also Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England, (Palgrave, 2002), p. 100. Critics have also commented how Shakespeare anticipated such commonplacing, and wrote fragments that might be easily lifted out and applied in everyday situations. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 147

And yet, even as he cannibalizes plays for useful snippets, in The English Treasury Cotgrave betrays misgivings about dramatic fragmentation, describing his process of extraction as a ﬂawed yet necessary solution to information overload in the age of print.

Citing King Solomon’s complaint about the “weariness of the ﬂesh” when confronted with all manuscript books in existence, an exasperated Cotgrave exclaims, “How much is that wearinesse increased since the Art of Printing has so inﬁnitely multiplied large and vast volumes in every place?” “Extractions” he explains, “are therefore the best conversers of knowledge.” Cotgrave’s explanation reveals a typically early modern response to an unmanageable glut of knowledge through various processes of textual digestion.32

Neither his practical solution to this problem, nor the expression of his desire to convey “knowledge” (i.e. the moral wisdom and rhetorical excellence couched within plays, not knowledge of the plays themselves), however, should be interpreted as Cotgrave’s lack of interest in uniﬁed artistic wholes. For Cotgrave apologizes for the losses that attend his extractions: “if [extracts] seem to lose their native vigour or beauty in the transplanting, I hope it is reasonably recompensed in the more usefulnesse of the method they are now in.” Cotgrave recognizes that extraction, which highlights a passage’s utility, sacriﬁces drama’s “native vigor or beauty,” his reference to un-extracted drama’s “native” vigor or beauty revealing an unease with his comparatively “alien” treatment of drama.

The English Treasury, then, reluctantly oﬀers the extract at the expense of the entire play in order to highlight drama’s “usefulness.” Nevertheless, at the same time that he shatters plays into useful fragments, Cotgrave oﬀers another kind of dramatic whole in The English Treasury: an overview of the genre and canon of English drama. He achieves this through an important departure from the commonplace tradition. Unlike earlier printed commonplace books, Cotgrave’s volume is not a miscellany, consisting of poetic, dramatic and prose extracts gathered from classical and vernacular traditions.

32Along with extraction, other methods included the creation of catalogues and indices. See Ann Blair, Too Much to Know (Yale UP, 2010). Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 148

It is generically and culturally homogeneous, drawing only from English drama. The text delivers on the Latin motto on its title page, “Varietas delectat, Certitudo Prodest,”

(“variety is delightful, but certainly more proﬁtable”), but the book’s variety stems from a multitude of sources, not a multiplicity of genres. Like any commonplace book, each individual passage in The English Treasury potentially contributes to the reader’s moral wisdom or rhetorical skill. Drawing exclusively from a single genre, and presenting extensive examples of that genre (239 works from at least 58 dramatists in 1,701 extracts),33

Cotgrave oﬀers another kind of knowledge: a coherent, wide-ranging picture of a single class of texts: “the English dramatic poem.”

Cotgrave himself describes how he sacrificed full pictures of individual plays to present a larger overview of their type. He acknowledges that the reader “mayst not reasonably expect the abstracted Quintessence, of betwixt three and foure hundred Poems in this small compasse (which yet may be large enough for an essay) for I find that an absolute impossibility.” He will not attempt to distill an entire play into one or a handful of representative quotations, let alone attempt to do this hundreds of times over. (His suggestion that such work “may be large enough for an essay,” however, implies that such a distillation might be worthwhile.) “But I can assure thee,” he continues, “that what is herein couched, is a great part of the best, and generally taken out of the best,” reiterating the title page claims that the volume is “collected out of the most and best of our English dramatic poems.” The text offers an overview of genre (“our English dramatic poem”) is represented by a quantitative and qualitative (“most and best”) canon of English drama, printed in one text “in small compass.”34 The English Treasury, in other words, is an anthology of drama – the very first.

33Numbers from Joshua McEvilla, “An Online Reader of John Cotgrave’s ‘The English Treasury of Wit and Language” http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cotgrave/. 34On qualitative vs quantitative canons of drama, see Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998). Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 149

The English Treasury has attracted relatively little critical attention, “probably” Anne Isherwood argues, “because the anthologist identiﬁed neither the writers nor the sources of the extracts.”35 In response to this seeming lacuna, most attention to Cotgrave’s text has been devoted to recovering his sources. Over the centuries, early readers such as the eighteenth-century antiquarian William Oldys, and modern critics G. E. Bentley, Martin Wiggins and Joshua McEvilla, have painstakingly recorded the sources for the

1,701 excerpts in The English Treasury. They’ve shown that Cotgrave quotes most frequently from Shakespeare (154 excerpts), Beaumont and Fletcher (112), Jonson (111), and Chapman (111), followed by Fulke Greville (110), Webster (104), Shirley (85), Mid- dleton (78), Marston (69), Dekker (63), Davenant (59), Massinger (49), Daniel (49), Ford (42), Suckling (41), Nabbes (38), Tourneur (30), William Rowley (23). The two most-cited plays are Fulke Greville’s closet plays Alaham and Mustapha, respectively with 63 and 48 extracts. Overall, Cotgrave quotes from 58 dramatists and 239 diﬀerent plays (with the sources of 18 extracts still unidentiﬁed).36 Critics have drawn several conclusions from this breakdown. The frequent citation of Shakespeare, Beaumont and

Fletcher and Jonson seems to conﬁrm our sense that these three loomed the largest in the mid-seventeenth century cultural imagination. The authorial breakdown in The En- glish Treasury also echoes the distribution of plays in earlier authorial collections. Just as large folio volumes consolidated virtually all plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and Beau- mont and Fletcher, The English Treasury devotes the most space to the three dramatists.

Indeed, there is a direct connection between printed collections and Cotgrave’s volume:

Bentley suggests that the availability of large numbers of plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher in single texts likely contributed to their frequent quotation. By contrast, though individual “second-rate” dramatists were not commemorated in complete collections, and do not dominate Cotgrave’s text, there was still a desire to make these artists

35Anne Christine Isherwood, “Cut out into little stars”’: Shakespeare in Anthologies” Unpublished PhD dissertation, King’s College London, 2014. 36Bentley, pp. 200-1; McEvilla, http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cotgrave/. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 150 available in print – not necessarily because of their particular authorship, but because they belonged to a genre that, in its staged iteration, had been largely destroyed. Though

Cotgrave printed more individual excerpts from Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson, the bulk of The English Treasury consists of the 55 other poets “of the second magnitude”: truly the “most and best.”

Bentley, noting the relative unpopularity of Chapman and Fulke Greville in print in the

1650s, argues that the didacticism of Chapman and Greville’s tragedies led Cotgrave to cite them frequently.37 Bentley also notes the “strikingly contemporary character of the volume.” A third of the plays were composed after 1625, and only four were printed before 1600. Cotgrave prefers Caroline writers to Elizabethan ones: he excludes

Kyd, Lyly, Greene, Peele and Gascoigne entirely; he included only one quotation from

Marlowe.38 Bentley observes anomalies in the list: “the number of quotations from

Webster and from Marston is much greater than one would expect from the occurrence of their names in the works of Cotgrave’s contemporaries or from the records of the appearance of their plays on the stage in the reign of Charles I. Neither, however, had been forgotten in Cotgrave’s time.”39 Yet Cotgrave is arguably creating, as much as reﬂecting, a collection of dramatists who were not “forgotten” in the mid-seventeenth century. Indeed, his volume ensured the survival of at least parts of texts that would be otherwise be totally lost: Martin Wiggins has identiﬁed eighteen extracts in The English

Treasury that likely represent the only surviving traces of plays.40 Wiggins argues that

“cultural artefacts usually survive because they are perceived as having merit, or because they are useful in some other way.” By printing a range of dramatic excerpts for everyday application, Cotgrave insured at least a modicum of survival for several texts.

37Ibid, p. 201. 38Ibid, pp. 198-9 39Ibid, p. 201. 40Martin Wiggins, “Where to Find Lost Plays,” Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England, eds. David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 255-78. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 151

While most of the extracts are drawn from printed professional plays, a signiﬁcant portion of The English Treasury is drawn from non-professional and/or unacted drama – Fulke

Greville’s closet drama, the eight extracts from the university play Lingua, for example – or plays in manuscript, as Joshua McEvilla has recently revealed.41 The arduous efforts of such critics (particularly before the digital era) are praiseworthy.42 Their analysis offers insight into at least one reader’s sense of the most popular, or available or didactic texts, a view potentially shared (or persuasively conveyed) to his readers. Yet, few critics have seriously contemplated the fact that made their heroic scholarly feats possible in the first place: Cotgrave’s deliberate omission of his sources. The tradition of commonplacing had ample precedent for either acknowledging or omitting one’s sources,43 and it could be that Cotgrave was simply inclined to follow the latter precedent. No matter his intention, however, by omitting his specific sources, it is unlikely that most readers would realize that, say, Shakespeare was the most-cited dramatist, Alaham the most-cited play, or that Cotgrave preferred Caroline to Elizabethan writers. Cotgrave’s reader is never encouraged to perceive this particular dramatist or that particular play or period as a particularly worthy supplier of sententiae. Similar to Moseley’s emphasis on “plays” over and above any particular author in the New Plays, by removing identifying features,

Cotgrave presents a general image of genre. It is not this or that particular author or play, but the “English dramatic poem” that functions as a fount of moral wisdom and rhetorical prowess. Such framing suggests that what holds true for the excerpts also holds true for the excerpts that are not included. An anthology is “the best or most noteworthy examples of their type”: earlier critics have focused on identifying the examples, but Cotgrave through his omissions actually encourages us to focus on the type.

41As Joshua McEvilla revealed that at least 21 extracts were cited from manuscript versions McEvilla, http://shakespeareauthorship.com/cotgrave/overview.htm. 42As Wiggins notes of his own eﬀorts, “in the absence of the modern digital tools I used, this was an act of almost unimaginable scholarly heroism, or geekery,” p. 277. 43Robert Allot, for example, cited his excerpts’ authors in England’s Parnassus(1600), the ﬁrst printed commonplace book composed exclusively of English poetic extracts. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 152

2.1 The Picture of Dramatic Genre and Canon in The English

Treasury

While he is mum on particularities, Cotgrave offers a clear vision of the English drama as a genre: through means both implicit and explicit, Cotgrave asserts the edifying value of drama; he emphasizes its poetic identity as well as its origins in the stage; he treats dramatists as emblems of the happier past; and claims English drama for royalism. Cot- grave’s exclusive reliance on English drama in his commonplace book powerfully asserts the genre’s value as a source of moral wisdom and rhetorical exempla. Commonplacing was a tool of humanist pedagogy, in which students copied down excerpts from classical and respected vernacular texts to advance their moral and rhetorical instruction. The commonplacing of English drama as been interpreted as a sign of its gradual acceptance into “literary” culture.44The first instances of dramatic commonplacing in manuscript appear in the medieval period; we see a sharp rise in dramatic in print and manuscript commonplace books in the 1590s,45 as well as the first commonplace markers in English printed drama.46 The citation of dramatic extracts in print continued to rise through the 1630s and 1640s, partly due to the rising popularity of miscellanies of all stripes, which occasioned more opportunities to cite drama, partly due to individual volumes including more dramatic material.47 Until the 1650s, however, in commonplace books

English drama always shared space with other genres, jockeying for space with its more

44In the last two decades, scholarship on commonplacing in general and dramatic commonplacing in particular has ﬂourished following the seminal article by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Past and Present 129. 11 (1990): 30-78. See also Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Clarendon Press, 1996); Margreta de Grazia, “Shakespeare in Quotation Marks,” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post- Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 57-71; Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England (CUP, 2005); Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare 1590-1619,” in A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Blackwell, 2007). 45Estill, p. 1. 46Peter Stallybrass and Zachary Lesser, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Pro- fessional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), pp. 371-420. 47Adam Smyth, Proﬁt and Delight. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 153

“respectable” counterparts,48 and often compared with classical examples in order to bolster its credibility.49 The English Treasury can be understood as the culmination of

English drama’s rising cultural status during the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century:

for the ﬁrst time, a text asserts that English drama can stand alone, in its own right, as

a source of ediﬁcation.

Perhaps as part of this eﬀort to present English drama as a serious, respectable genre,

Cotgrave emphasizes its poetic identity. He exclusively refers to the genre as the “English

dramatic poem.” He overwhelmingly cites dramatic verse, and, when citing passages

that appeared in prose in their original contexts, transforms them into blank verse.50 Commonplacers frequently took liberties with their text,51 but converting all extracts

into verse was by no means the standard. (Indeed, in the contemporaneous miscellany

The Wits Interpreter (1655), the compiler John Cragge converts all his verse extracts

into prose.)52Broadly speaking, the social and generic signiﬁers of verse are more elevated than those of prose; by citing mostly verse, and disguising prose as verse, Cotgrave shifts

English drama to the “serious” end of the artistic spectrum. In tracing English drama’s

path from subliterary to literary form, critics often single out moments that seem to

jettison drama’s theatrical origins and elevate its textual ones: emphasizing dramatic

authorship over a theatrical collaboration, an audience of literate elites over squalid

48In 1600, a compiler (likely Robert Allot) issued England’s Parnassus, a commonplace book consisting entirely of excerpts from English poets, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Spenser and Drayton. The volume testifies to vernacular literature’s growing prestige, but even so, as Bentley explains, Allot “showed a marked preference for the non-dramatic over the dramatic,” quoting from non-dramatic poets far more than dramatists, and focusing on Shakespeare and Marlowe’s poems rather than their plays. 49Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia (1598) included English dramatic excerpts alongside English translations of classical poetry. 50Cotgrave’s preference for verse did shape his selections, however. Bentley argues that “in spite of the disguised prose, the great majority of the passages really are verse. Judging from the average in those checked, one concludes that not more than four or five percent of the quotations are disguised prose.” 51Bentley argues Cotgrave’s changes “were usual practices among the writers of commonplace books” and that he “seems to have had a respect for his sources which was neither greater nor less than was usual among his contemporaries,” p. 191. 52Joshua McEvilla has recently proven that Wits Interpreter, traditionally assigned to Cotgrave, is actually the work of John Cragge. Joshua McEvilla, “John Cragge’s The Wits Interpreter,” The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 154 spectators.53 I suggest that Cotgrave’s consistent reference to the “English dramatic poem” and focus on dramatic verse signals his desire to incorporate English drama into literary culture. Yet I also suggest that this incorporation does not require the suppression of English drama’s theatrical identity. For Cotgrave, English drama’s literary value is firmly rooted in its origins in “the English scene.” (That is, in theory, if not in practice, since as we have seen Cotgrave also anthologizes closet drama). The “framers” of “dramatic poems,” he explains in the volume’s preface, “were the most fluent and redundant wits that this age (or I think any other) ever knew.” Not only are they clever

English writers, but they are “many of them so able schollers, and linguists, they have culled the choicest Flowers out of the great number of Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and French Authors, (Poets especially), to embellish and enrich the English scene withal, besides almost a prodigious accrewment of their own luxuriant fancies.” Far from there being any contradiction between drama’s literary and theatrical identity, the stage of the

“English scene” is where English dramatists appropriate the best classical and continental writing and make it available for English audiences.

Cotgrave speaks of the contributions of English dramatists in the present tense: they are

“the most ﬂuent and redundant wits that this age (or I think any other) ever knew.”

Yet, as Cotgrave was well aware, many of his authors were deprived of a platform by the theatre ban – or else they were dead altogether. Despite his emphasis on the continued relevance of English drama, The English Treasury is a nostalgic compendium of English drama. Commonplace books by their very nature have a retrospective bent; because they re-present material from pre-existing sources, they invariably evoke the earlier period in which texts ﬁrst appeared and circulated. But Adam Smyth, writing of miscellanies

(which, like commonplace books, reprint older material) printed in the 1650s, argues that “nostalgia was often more than a consequence of the mechanics of verse circulation

53Erne revisits the debate surrounding the relationship between literariness and theatricality in the introduction to the second edition of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, p. 4. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 155 and miscellany compilation.” During the political and cultural turmoil of the Common- wealth, he explains, “the contemporary seems to have become a dirty word,” and printed miscellanies from this decade “make a point to distance [themselves] from the present, and instead connect with a sense of the past.”54 Writing from the perspective of what he calls “these much distracted times,” Cotgrave’s text hearkens back to a happier moment when diﬀerent political and, especially, artistic movements reigned. With a militaristic metaphor that evokes the Civil Wars, the last of which ended four years prior, he presents

English dramatists on the front lines of the continuing cultural battle. “My Authors fear no colours, they have stood the Worlds Gun-Shot, and passed the Pikes already, and that with no mean reputation, for sure they have given away many more faire hits then they tooke.” Kate Rumbold argues that Cotgrave’s “valiant authors are seemingly rallied to a royalist cause.”55 Despite this highly politicized opening salvo, however, and headings including ‘kingship,’ ‘tyranny’ and ‘rebellion,’ Cotgrave in general refrains from citing sharply oppositional content. In his preface he primarily laments drama’s downfall, not royalism’s: “indeed the dramatic poem seems to me. . . to have been lately too much slighted.” He continues that drama is vilified “not only by such, whose talent falls short in understanding, but by many that have had a tolerable portion of wit, who through a stiffe and obstinate prejudice” have “lost the benefit of many rich and useful observa- tions.” The anti-drama prejudice of those lacking understanding (Puritan blockheads?) has filtered down into wittier populations, and Cotgrave hopes his volume will convince them of drama’s value. Neither anti-theatricalism nor impassioned defenses of drama were anything new, of course. But such defenses acquired urgency during the theatre ban, when drama was particularly vulnerable. Cotgrave was imagining a class of literary texts, the English dramatic poem, precisely when English drama was most maligned. This class of texts was culturally valuable, with dual poetical and theatrical identities,

54Smyth, p. 168. 55Kate Rumbold, “Shakespeare Anthologized,” Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnet (Edinburgh UP, 2011), p. 90. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 156 and functioned as latent royalist symbol, but also as a clear emblem of a more vibrant artistic period. The English theatre ban, one might say, provided perfect conditions to construct the ﬁrst anthology of English drama.

3 “Exact and Perfect” Catalogues of English Plays

in Print

Moseley and Cotgrave’s respective presentations of the whole period, genre and field of drama through textually unified dramatic fragments was a by-product of their efforts to publish commercially successful texts. In 1656, two texts appeared that represented, in an abstracted form, what was happening in these other mid-seventeenth century textual reproductions of early modern drama, but unlike Cotgrave and Moseley’s volumes, their compendious function made them relatively useless from a commercial point of view. In 1656, Richard Rogers and William Ley (henceforth Rogers) published “An exact and perfect Catologue of all Playes that are Printed,” an alphabetical list of 502 printed plays, and appended it to their edition of Thomas Goffe’s pastoral drama The Care- less Shepherdess (1656). This attempt to catalogue the entire field of printed drama, indeed any English genre in print, was unprecedented. This effort was followed-up a few months later by Edward Archer’s “An Exact and perfect CATALOGUE of all the

PLAIES that were ever printed,” an alphabetical list of 651 play titles appended to their edition of Massinger, Middleton and Rowley’s comedy The Old Law (1656). The Old

Law’s catalogue claims to improve upon the earlier list’s exactness and perfection, claiming to be “more exactly printed then ever before.” Much like The English Treasury, the comprehensive catalogues represent both an ongoing and a new tradition in dramatic publication. Critics have rightly understood the comprehensive catalogues as extensive, Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 157

genre-speciﬁc versions of book list advertisements, which that English stationers began regularly inserting into their volumes starting in the 1640s and 1650s, as a reaction to

various book trade crises.56 Drama-speciﬁc catalogues may also have received an added

impetus from the ban. Playbooks were likely sold at playhouses;57 once the theatre ban

shuttered the playhouses, printed drama catalogues may have arisen to supplement the loss of a lucrative venue to advertise and sell playbooks.

The two comprehensive catalogues, however, diverge signiﬁcantly from non-comprehensive

book list advertisements in several respects in terms of their content, form, presentation,

and consequently, their function. Non-comprehensive book list advertisements have a purely commercial function. They tend to focus on popular texts or authors, or upcom-

ing or recent volumes,58 or, in the case of drama, plays written for the commercial theatre.

By contrast, in their quest for comprehensiveness, Rogers and Archer’s catalogues feature

texts that rarely appear in other book lists: Tudor interludes like John Heywood’s Four Ps (1545), vernacular translations of classical drama like John Studley’s translation of

Seneca’s Agamemnon (1566).59 Demand for such plays would be low: commercial plays

had eclipsed Tudor interludes and classical translations on the playbook market starting

in the 1580s. There is no reason to believe that there was any renewed interest in say,

Jasper Heywood’s translation of Thyestes in the 1650s. By the late sixteenth century,

56John Barnard argues that the inclusion of book catalogue advertisements in printed books represents an innovative response to various crises in the book trade: the collapse of the Star Chamber in 1641 and subsequent flood of unauthorized booksellers into the marketplace, the Civil Wars between 1642 and 1651, which interfered with distribution networks, and the Printing Act of September 1649, which initiated two-years of tight press censorship, renewed press censorship in 1655-1658. John Barnard. “London Publishing, 1640-1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation,” Book History 4 (2001): 1-16. See also Hooks, “Booksellers,” 445-464; Kastan, “Performances and Playbooks,” pp. 167-9; Stern, pp. 137- 41; Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Boydell Press, 2004), p. 216. 57Performances encouraged spectators to buy playbooks at bookstalls, and Tiffany Stern argues playbooks were likely among the “small books” that were sold at playhouses. Stern, “Watching as Reading,” in How To Do Things with Shakespeare, ed. Maguire (Blackwell, 2008), p. 140. 58Lindenbaum, p. 381. 59Jane Bell’s included Like Will to Like (1568) in her book list appended to Q3 of King Lear (1655), but in general most booksellers didn’t devote advertising space to seventy-plus year old playbooks. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 158 mid-century Tudor translations of Seneca already seemed old-fashioned with their fusty fourteeners.60 The texts themselves – most of them last printed between 1560 and 1590 – would seem as archaic as their contents by 1656. If they indeed had all the listed titles in their invention (and I think this need not be the case), Rogers and Archer likely acquired or inherited this long-unsold inventory from earlier booksellers; perhaps they advertised the titles in their catalogues as a last-ditch effort to unload these seventy-plus year old playbooks. In non-comprehensive book catalogues, stationers do indeed list older, less popular texts in order to sell them off, but they do not feature them prominently in their lists.61 Novelty is accentuated, with texts “Now in the Press” or “Lately Printed,” given pride of place under their own separate headings.62 For the most part, texts are arranged according to combination of print format, genre, and date of publication and/or author in order to give prominence to the newest, most salable stock, or facilitate a buyer’s search for a particular type of volume, genre, or author.63 For instance, Bedell and Collin’s book catalogue advertisement from Goffe’s Three Excellent Tragedies (1656) divides texts first by genre, then by print size in descending order : “Books in folio,” “Books in quarto,”

“Plays” (the category itself subdivided according to print format from largest to smallest), “Books in Octavo” and “Books in 12 and 24.”64 In the non-comprehensive book catalogues, the most expensive formats are given precedence; non-dramatic material in folio and quarto outranks dramatic material, but dramatic editions outrank non-dramatic material in octavo and below.

60My thanks to Andrew Miller for this point. 61For example, Humphrey Moseley was still advertising 30-year old copies of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen in 1660. Zachary Lesser, “Shakespeare’s Flop,” Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography ed. Straznicky (U Penn Press, 2013), p. 178. 62Lindenbaum, p. 381. 63For instance, Bedell and Collin’s book catalogue advertisement from Goffe’s Three Excellent Tragedies (1656) divides texts first by genre, then by print size in descending order : “Books in folio,” “Books in quarto,” “Plays” (the category itself subdivided according to print format from largest to smallest), “Books in Octavo” and “Books in 12 and 24.” The most expensive formats are given precedence; non-dramatic material in folio and quarto outranks dramatic material, but dramatic editions outrank non-dramatic material in octavo and below. 64For example, in several of his catalogues, Humphrey Moseley gives prominence to Beaumont and Fletcher’s 1647 folio; listing it first among the “Poems” section, in some cases advertising the fact that it “contai[ns] 34 playes and a masque.” Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 159

By contrast, in the comprehensive catalogues of 1656, the entries are organized alpha- betically – not the most eﬀective way to advertise one’s stock. While Bedell and Collins display their most expensive and prestigious folio editions, not only do Rogers and Archer do not mention any of their texts’ print format, they actually exclude collected editions altogether, listing instead individual plays from the collections, even if those plays were not available in single-text editions.For example, the catalogues list Antony and Cleopatra,

Macbeth, and Measure for Measure, which in 1656 were only available in Shakespeare’s

ﬁrst and second folio (1623 and 1632), which the catalogues do not list. The comprehensive catalogues also list individual entries from, to name a few, Beaumont and Fletcher’s folio, Richard Brome and James Shirley’s respective octavo collections Five New Plays and Six New Plays (both 1653). The comprehensive catalogues mention none of these collected editions. Apart from the two comprehensive catalogues, I have found no other instances of an individual play title listed without also naming the collected work in which it appears.65 Rogers and Archer presumably had the collections in their bookshops – at the very least, one volume from which they could copy out the individual titles. The omission of the collected works could be read as marketing strategy – a buyer interested in say, Antony and Cleopatra, would not ﬁnd it in any bookshop, and instead might be directed to purchase the expensive Shakespeare folio. But the omission also prevents a potential buyer from learning about and coveting a prestigious collected edition; presumably someone scanning what claims to be a comprehensive list of plays would be interested in volumes that contain multiple plays. If the comprehensive catalogues were designed primarily to sell playbooks, Rogers and Archer fail to replicate many of the obvious marketing strategies exploited by other stationers. They list many very old, very unpopular titles; they mix old titles among more recent, popular ones through an organi- zational system (alphabetized play titles) that does not take into account their salability;

65If mentioning an individual title within a larger collection, other book catalogues usually specify the collection from which it is taken, presumably to facilitate purchase. For example, Bedell and Collins’ catalogue appended to Goﬀe’s Three Excellent Tragedies (1656) lists Jonson’s “The Divels an Asse, by Ben. Johnson. in Folio” ﬁrst in the “Playes” section of the book catalogue. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 160 and they omit the titles of the expensive, exciting collected editions. But these lists are not primarily commercial; instead, they are informational. As alphabetical, ostensibly complete lists of texts under a single heading, the comprehensive catalogues are encyclopaedias of drama. As such, they create a cultural feeling about “English plays” as a whole.

Rogers and Archer’s catalogues advertise their encyclopedic functions, and here too they are distinct from non-comprehensive book list advertisements. Apart from the two comprehensive dramatic catalogues of 1656, no other seventeenth-century book list advertisement claims to be “exact and perfect.”66 I found one slightly later example of the expression deployed to describe a list within the context of an advertisement. Joseph

Bennet’s A true and Impartial account of the most material passages in Ireland since De- cember, 1688 (1689) contains the following advertisement: “AN exact and perfect List of their Majesties Royal Fleet, now actually at Sea. . . . Printed for John Amery,. . . to be sold by Randal Taylor, near Stationers-Hall, price 2 d.” This advertisement is aimed at the reader of war pamphlets, for whom a complete enumeration of English ships would be of interest. The claims about exactness and perfection are meant to make the list appealing for purchase, not the items, which are not necessarily for sale. “Exact and perfect” lists were interesting in their own right, as encyclopedic repositories of information. The reference potential of Rogers and Archer’s catalogues is underscored by their alphabetical arrangement, a standard arrangement in early modern reference works.

Rogers and Archer clearly envisioned that the encyclopedic catalogues would be selling points for potential buyers of The Careless Shepherdess and The Old Law. The title page of The Careless Shepherdess announces that the playbook comes “with an Alphabetical catalogue of all such Plays that ever were Printed. The title page of The Old Law

66I came to this conclusion after surveying the hundred-odd book list advertisements in Peter Linden- baum’s appendix, and my own extensive survey. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 161 declares that the text appears “Together with an exact and perfect catalogue of all the plays, with the Authors Names.” I have surveyed hundreds of title pages of texts printed with book catalogue advertisements, and, as far as I can tell, The Careless Shepherdess and The Old Law are the only two seventeenth century texts to mention the inclusion of the catalogues on their title pages. A title page serves as an advertisement for a printed book, conveying features and information designed to encourage purchase: the quality of the copy, attribution to a well-known author, and in the case of playbooks, a popular or prestigious performance history. As a rule, catalogues that functioned primarily as advertisements were not themselves advertised on title pages of the volumes to which they were appended. Catalogues with non-promotional functions were more likely to be featured. For example, the title page to Joseph Mede’s Diatribae Pars IV (1652, printed by John Clark) mentions “a Catalogue of the Texts and Epistles,” eﬀectively a table of contents that functions as a navigational aid to the text. The title page fails to mention

“A Catalogue of all the Books published by the Author, and Printed for John Clark Under Peter’s Church in Corn-hill,” a book list advertisement appended to the back of the same volume.67 Exactness, perfection and alphabetical organization are merits for catalogues designed to amass, record, organize, and convey large amounts of data. The plays to which these catalogues are appended advertise their encyclopedic function as complete and easy-to-consult references of English drama.

That Rogers and Archer sensed a complete list of printed plays would interest readers reﬂects various cultural trends associated with the early modern period. William

West explores early modern Europe’s fascination with encyclopaedism, arguing that encyclopaedias constituted a “singular entity” that possessed “almost utopian claims for comprehensiveness, compression, and speed of access”; they were seen to “to re-present

67Clark employs the term “catalogue” not only, as he does here, for single-author catalogues, but for multi-author book list advertisements, such as in “A Catalogue of Some Books Printed for and sold by John Clark at the Entrance Unto Mercer-Chappel at the lower end of Cheapside” appended to his publication of Thomas Horton’s Zion’s Birth-Register (1656). Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 162 every thing that exists in a (more) manageable form for detached study and manipula- tion.”68 The desire to “re-present everything that exists” in a manageable form reflects the related trend of early modern “info-lust,” which as Ann Blair explains, was a fix- ation to “encompass all knowledge” in an effort to stave off another “cultural trauma suffered through the loss of ancient learning.”69 The desire to safeguard knowledge was combined with a feeling of information overload, as print exponentially expanded the number of texts and things to know (recall Cotgrave’s citation of Solomon). The printed reference list provided the solution to both issues: pared-down yet extensive, the format efficiently amassed information in an orderly fashion, and transmitted this information to posterity.70 The notion that printed books could forestall cultural loss was applied to the preservation of printed books themselves. In his Catalogue of English Printed Books

(1595), the ﬁrst printed catalogue of English books, Andrew Maunsell characterized himself as a “remembrancer” and declares that his catalogue was designed to “draw to your memories Books that you coulde not remember.”71 Maunsell’s volume has a commercial dimension of course – forgotten books are not salable, as he reminds the stationers to

68William West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (CUP, 2002) pp. 14-19. 69Blair, pp. 6-13. 70The catalogue was a favoured tool of early modern English historiography; examples abound of catalogues that reduce centuries of England’s royal, sacred and military history into manageable an itemized lists; see Chloe Wheatley. A True Chronology of all the Kings of England from Brute, the first king unto our most sacred King Charles mo[n]arke of ye whole yies (1635), a broadside catalogue of monarchs listed in chronological order; John Philipot’s Perfect collection or catalogue of all knight batchelaurs made by King James since his coming to the crown of England (1660), lists the names of knights according to the date they were granted their knighthood. William Graves’s The History of the Church of Great Britain from the birth of our Saviour untill the year of our Lord, 1667 with an exact succession of the bishops and the memorable acts of many of them (1674), follows its ecclesiastical history with “A Catalogue of the Bishops of England and Wales,” a chronological succession of England’s bishops since the fifth century. 71“Remembrancer” could be a person (“a memoirist, a chronicler”) or artefact (“a reminder; a me- mento, souvenir”); the term was a favoured title for historical compendiums and informational lists. OED 3. b.: “used in the title of a book, journal, or pamphlet.” See, for example, The Nomenclator, or Remembrancer of Adrianus Iunius.., conteining proper names and apt termes for all thinges (1585); Britain’s Remembrancer, containing a Narration of the Plague lately past (1628) A Remembrancer of Excellent Men (1670) (a catalogue raisonne of English worthies); Many Civil War catalogues were entitled with some variation of “England’s remembrancer”: John Vicar’s published several named Englands remembrancer, or, A thankfull acknowledgement of Parliamentary mercies (Wing nos. V302, V303; V307, V308). Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 163 whom he primarily directed his book.72 Yet he also frames himself as a custodian of the nation’s learning, which is stored up in books. He is motivated by seeing “so many sin- guler bookes, not only of diuinity, but of other excellent Arts, after the first Impression, so spent & gone, that they lie euen as were buried in some few studies.”73 Enumera- tive bibliography is a means to preserve England’s cultural and intellectual inheritance: if nothing else, the titles will survive. In their address to the reader, the booksellers

Gabriel Bedell and Thomas Collins similarly reveal their (non-comprehensive) printed book advertisement catalogue’s dual commercial and mnemonic functions:

Courteous Reader, YOV may please to take notice, that here are some few Playes worn out of print, which we purpose to reprint; and there are several other Books in the Note also grown scarce, and but small numbers left. The reason of this intimation, or printed Catalogue, is to perpetuate the memory of the said Books and Copies belonging to your Servants, G. B. and T. C.74

The address is obviously part sales pitch; the booksellers intend to memorialize not all books, but only the ones “belonging to your servants,” either those they have for sale, or “playes worn out of print,” which they promise to reprint. Their warning about some titles’ scarcity encourages buyers to obtain dwindling stock while they can; their reference to out-of-print titles might spark buyers’ interest in them. But Bedell and Collins’ desire to “perpetuate the memory” of particular books also suggests a conception of plays as something other than mere commodities: they are worth remembering for their own sake.

The longstanding impulse to conserve England’s knowledge, culture and books in printed catalogues was ampliﬁed in moments of perceived cultural destruction. The widespread

72Because, as Maunsell puts it, Men “cannot aske for what they neuer heard of, and the Booke-seller cannot shew that at he hath not.” 73Maunsell, “To the Worshipful the Master, Wardens, and Assistants of the Company of Stationers.” Catalogue of English Printed Books (London: 1595). 74Gabriel Bedell and Thomas Collins, “Address to The Reader” in Goﬀe’s Three Tragedies (1656). Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 164 destruction of texts during the Reformation prompted the ﬁrst instances of literary cataloguing, by the antiquarians John Bale and John Leland, who compiled massive bio- bibliographies of English authors. Trever Ross explains that “The very act of record- ing. . . presumed the need for such a register. Were it not for the catalogues, it seemed, all of these long-dead authors would have been left to oblivion.”75 The desire to shore up cultural ruin with textual records helps us understand the particular appearance, timing and singularity of the encyclopedic dramatic catalogues of 1656. The catalogues function as cultural and bibliographical bulwarks, a way to counter the extensive theatrical and dramatic loss that had occurred over the last fourteen years. The lists’ preterite verb tenses convey the pastness of English drama.76 Lists, like collected works, are mnemonics and monuments to the past; the theatre closures provoked a desire to exhaustively compile and preserve an earlier generation of artistic output increasingly distant in memory.

The prohibition on playing not only motivated, but also enabled the conditions for the catalogues’ creation. By 1656, it was clear that the ostensibly temporary order issued in

1642 had effectively ended English professional drama on the stage. Such a conclusion facilitates the lists’ claims of exactness and perfection: a definitive, ostensibly fixed list of something is only possible once one can be sure there are no new examples. By contrast, after the theatre resumed in 1660 dramatic catalogues could no longer assert their comprehensiveness with confidence. For example, in 1688 Gerard Langbaine published

“A new catalogue of English plays containing all the comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, opera’s, masques, pastorals, interludes, farces, &c. both ancient and modern, that have ever yet been printed, to this present year 1688.” His speciﬁcation of “yet printed” in-

75Ross, p. 61. 76We might see parallels between the comprehensive dramatic catalogues and the posthumous single- author dramatic collection. Shakespeare’s folio mourns the dead dramatist, and offers his texts as consolation: celebrates both “the memory of my beloved author” and “What he hath left us.” The catalogues convey an air of finitude that gestures to another “death,” of the stage, and also celebrates the enduring presence of plays in print. I examine this mood of theatrical finitude at length in Chapter 1. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 165 dicating that there are still more to come, and “to this present year 1688” indicating that its claims of comprehensiveness had an expiration date. It should be said that while the rhetorical presentation of “exact and perfect” catalogues implied a closed system, their contents belied such an impression, as they included plays written after 1642. Nev- ertheless, whatever actual contents of the catalogue, that the rhetorical and structural presentation of the catalogues reflect the contemporary mood of dramatic conclusion.

That English professional theatre came to an abrupt and conclusive an end in the midst of its popularity also helps to explain the lists’ appeal. There were no comparable attempts to anthologize or comprehensively catalogue any other English genres in the seventeenth century. The ﬁrst attempt to comprehensively catalogue all early modern sonnet sequences occurred in 2015, with John Burton’s Online Catalogue of Early Modern Sonnet

Sequences, which identiﬁes 59 distinct sonnet sequences published in England between

1560 and 1633.77 Burton’s visual representation of the catalogue is a bell curve: gradual rise from 1540 to 1570, a sharp spike between 1570 and 1595 followed by a sharp decline after 1600, then more gradual ebbing until 1640. There would be little reason to attempt an “exact and perfect” catalogue of sonnet sequences in, say, 1650. On one hand, interest in sonnet sequences had gradually dwindled, making such a list less appealing. On the other hand, ebbing interest in the sonnet would not preclude the publication of one more sequence that would invalidate this hypothetical “exact and perfect” catalogue.78 The

77Burton builds on the earlier but still modern efforts of cataloguing sonnet sequences. As he explains, “Sidney Lee’s Elizabethan Sonnets (1904) is the first attempt at an anthology of the sonnet sequence form. In his introduction he describes the work of the English sonneteers as largely without merit, and omitted Shakespeare’s sonnets from the collection. His collection includes fifteen love sequences. While Lee remained sceptical of the merits of the general output of English sonneteers, Holger M. Klein’s two-volume English and Scottish sonnet sequences of the Renaissance attempts to bring together those sequences Lee excluded. Although remaining unwilling to publish Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence with those of his contemporaries, Klein’s collection brings together a further eight love sequences, bringing the total number of those sequences collected and published in the last one hundred years to twenty-three. However, the number of thematically linked groups of sonnets far exceeds even this number. The present research has identified 59 distinct sonnet sequences published in England between 1560 and 1633.” John Burton, https://sonnetsequences.com/. 78Two editions of the salacious Restoration serial publication The Wandering Whore (1660-63) are also advertised as “bonus” catalogues on their title page. The title pages announce that the text is Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 166 sudden, definitive end to English theatre, in other words, made a complete reckoning of drama not only possible, but also interesting to readers.

Among book catalogue advertisements, the comprehensive catalogues’ unique features – their claims of exactness and perfection, being mentioned on their respective volumes’ title pages – suggests that they were interesting to readers in their own right. To be sure, the catalogues are not the prime attraction, but rather function as bonus features to bolster sales of their attached books. The prepositions that signal the catalogues’ inclusion signal the lists’ subordinate status: The Careless Shepherdess is presented “With an Alphabeticall Catologue” and The Old Law is published “Together with an exact and perfect Catalogue.” Though stationers conceived and marketed the catalogues as being of secondary interest to the playbooks, eventually the fascination generated by comprehensive catalogues surpassed that of their respective plays. Especially in the case of

Goﬀe’s Careless Shepherdess, modern critics focus on the paratextual catalogue, not on the text of this rather straightforward pastoral. The volume is more interesting as bibliography than as literature. There is also evidence to suggest that early modern readers also found the catalogues more interesting than the plays to which they were appended.

For example, a copy of The Careless Shepherdess held at the Folger Shakespeare Library is bound with the catalogue placed before the play text; in a copy at the Huntington Library (the one digitized for EEBO), it is placed after the text. Moreover, Archer’s speedy imitation of Rogers’s comprehensive catalogue also suggests that this type of list supplemented “With an additional list” and then “With a more perfect list” “of the names of the crafty bawds, common whores, wanderers, pick-pockets, night-walkers, decoys, hectors, pimps and trappan- ners”, a veritable who’s who of the London underworld. The list’s intelligibility doesn’t depend on being read in tandem with The Wandering Whore (or vice versa) yet its inclusion is designed to enhance the reader’s experience of the dialogue. Both the dialogue and catalogue could be read either way depending on the reader’s proclivities: the dialogue could either repel or titillate; the catalogue, ostensibly a tool to help upstanding London citizens avoid such notorious characters, could enable rather than hinder vice. In either case, the bonus catalogue is oﬀered as an informational aid, as well as a potential commercial directory of London prostitutes and conmen. Likewise, the comprehensive dramatic catalogues facilitate the sale of playbooks, but also serves as an informational guide to them, whether one intends to buy them or not. Just as a list of bawds should interest a reader of The Wandering Whore, it isn’t surprising that publishers would foresee that a catalogue of English plays would entice potential buyers of playbooks. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 167 would entice early modern book buyers.

The catalogues’ retrospective function, beﬁtting the contemporary mood of dramatic

ﬁnitude, as well as their function as bonus features for playbooks help explain Rogers and Archer’s particular choice of play to which to append their catalogues. Goﬀe’s Careless Shepherdess is a nostalgic pastoral that explores themes of loss and return.

Middleton, Massinger and Rowley’s Old Law in particular pays homage to oldness and to the English dramatic past. The play concerns the resuscitation of an superannuated law which sentences old people to death (an “old law” in two respects). The elderly are supposedly executed – at ﬁrst to the glee of the younger generation who inherits property early, and then to their sorrow once they realize all the wisdom and companionship that has been prematurely lost. In the end, the chastened younger characters learn to venerate old people, having experienced a simulacrum of their demise. A sudden loss of something old and undervalued leads characters to think more fondly of it – an apt description of the catalogues’ commemoration of English drama. The Old Law moreover references an earlier dramatic tradition. As the clown Gnotto plans to oﬀ his old wife and marry a younger one, he happily notes “there will be charges saved too, the same rosemary that serves for the funeral will serve for the wedding,” echoing Hamlet’s objection to Gertrude’s hasty wedding to Claudius, where King Hamlet’s funeral banquet thriftily doubles for the marriage celebration. Gnotto parodies Horatio’s famous lines from The Spanish Tragedy when he discovers that his still-living old wife will prevent his new marriage: “Oh music!

No music, but prove most doleful trumpets! Oh bride! No bride, but thou mayest prove a strumpet! Oh venture! No venture, I have for one now none! Oh wife! Thy life is sav’d when I hoped it had been gone!”. Moreover, both texts memorialize things that are not quite gone: just as The Old Law’s characters hold funerals for characters not yet dead, the dramatic catalogue venerates absent drama in a way that also aﬃrms its endurance in print. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 168

That Goﬀe’s The Careless Shepherdess and Middleton, Massinger and Rowley’s The Old Law were by “second-rate” authors also helps explain why Rogers and Archer added the

catalogues as added enticements to buy. We have already seen Middleton, Rowley, and

Massinger listed among Kirkman’s second-tier dramatists of the “last age” in Nicomede

(1671), and Langbaine’s description of how Middleton and Rowley “in those days” were regarded as “Poets of the Second magnitude.” While he is mostly forgotten today,

Thomas Goﬀe was mentioned among the most important dramatists of the prewar stage,

in a passage that laments their collective downfall thanks to the theatre ban: “Jonson,

Shakespeare, Goﬀe and Davenant, / Brome, Sucklin, Beaumont, Fletcher, Shirley, want /

The life of action, and their learned lines/Are loathed by the Monsters of the times.” The authors of The Old Law and The Careless Shepherdess, then, were recognizable symbols

of pre-war culture, but lesser lights in the pantheon of English dramatic greats. Rogers

and Archer foresaw that buyers drawn to playbooks by the icons of English pre-war

drama would appreciate a deﬁnitive catalogue of the genre, and appended it to plays by second-tier dramatists to provide buyers with an added incentive to buy.79

3.1 The Picture of Dramatic Genre and Canon in the Cata-

logues

The little critical work on the comprehensive dramatic catalogues mostly focuses on

the factual (in)accuracy of their individual entries: they are recognized as useful yet ultimately ﬂawed resources for information about lost English plays and authorial at-

79As for the cataloguers themselves, I have little to speculate about: Greg speculated that George Pollard, a stationer who owned the Ben Jonson’s Head, and who was associated with Kirkman, compiled the Archer catalogue. Archer published an English translation of Balbani’s Italian Convert (1655); Cox’s Acteon and Diana (1656); A sermon preached in the French church, in London on the 29. day of August 1652 (1654); Turner’s Mikrokosmographa. A description of the little- world (1654); Francis Warham’s Free-grace alone exalted in man’s conversion (1657); and Abraham Wright’s Five Sermons (1656). Richard Rogers was responsible only for The Careless Shepherdess, while his partner William Ley was a proliﬁc publisher of pro-parliament texts. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 169 tribution.80These critics, much like previous critics of the New Plays and The English Treasury, miss the forest for the trees: they examine portions of individual authorial canons or dramatic extracts mostly in isolation, but the compendia ask to be studied for their overarching views of drama. It is misguided to focus on the validity of individual entries in the catalogues (though it should be said that the entries are overwhelmingly correct) as the comprehensive catalogues do not simply relate information about individual plays. Rather, they present a cultural idea about drama as a whole, as an enduring, rich, large, diverse genre.

Rogers and Archer’s catalogues each encompass a wide variety of plays written over the preceding 143 years. In each catalogue about 90% of titles (around 450 in Rogers, 540 in

Archer) derive from plays produced for the commercial theatre between 1575 and 1642.

This includes popular Elizabethan titles by Kyd, Lyly, Gascoigne, and Peele (all of whom, recall, Cotgrave excluded from The English Treasury): Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592) [called “Hieronimo” in both catalogues], Lyly’s Endymion (1591) and Galathea (1592),

Gascoigne’s The Glass of Government, Green’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594), and Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1595). The catalogues also listed sophisticated Ja- cobean commercial drama such as Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1619),

The Custom of the Country (1647) and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling (1653). The catalogues also list plays by “courtly” amateur Caroline dramatists (like Suckling’s

Aglaura (1639) and by Caroline professional dramatists such as Shirley’s The Witty Fair

One (1633) and The Cardinal (1653) and Brome’s Antipodes (1640) and The Jovial Crew

(1652). Note that the catalogues duly list professional drama printed after 1642. Apart from professional drama, about 50 entries, or 10% of the catalogues – a small, but sig-

80For example, see Greg, A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. Supplementary to A List of English Plays (New York: Haskell, 1969), p. ii. See also Greg, “Authorship attributions in the early play lists,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions Vol. p. II Part. 4, (1942-5): 303-330. Adam Hooks, “Booksellers’ Catalogues”, p. 459, Kirwan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha; MacDonald Jackson, Determining the Shakespeare Canon (OUP, 2014). Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 170 niﬁcant portion – is drawn from a wide range of non-professional plays composed before 1575 and after 1642. They include amateur Tudor interludes (such as Like Will to Like

[1568]), vernacular translations of classical drama (such as John Studley’s translation of Seneca’s Agamemnon [1566]), and university drama (e.g. Gammer Gurton’s Needle

[1575]). They list pre- and post-professional amateur plays such as Damon and Pithias, (1571) and Cox’s Acteon and Diana (1656), respectively. They include closet drama composed before 1642, such as The Tragedy of Mariam (1616) (with Archer the ﬁrst to attribute the text to Elizabeth Cary) and closet drama composed after 1642, such as

Cosmo Manuche’s The Just General (1652). Among the oldest titles is the anonymous

Interlude of Youth (written c. 1513, first printed 1530), and the catalogue includes recent texts first printed in 1656, such as Goffe’s The Courageous Turk (1656). The list includes plays with overtly royalist politics, such as The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I, Basely

Butchered (1649) or Henry Birkhead’s Cola’s Fury (1646) which dramatizes the plight of Catholics in Ireland during the Civil War. The list also features texts with overtly republican politics, such as Marcus Tullius Cicero (1651), a closet play often discussed with The Tragedie of King Charles I for their near contemporaneous co-option of drama from opposing political views. We see a wide array of texts gathered under a single heading of “plays”: texts with diverse theatrical and textual backgrounds; acted and unacted; amateur, courtly and professional; native plays; translations of classics and of vernacular drama; plays old and new; royalist and parliamentarian plays, and others from across the political spectrum; the serious, silly and sophisticated. While a “valued

file” of English plays would distinguish such texts, the comprehensive catalogue “writes all alike” to create an overarching, unified view of the grand, rich, longstanding tradition of English drama. Because the list confers unity upon its entries, any quality associated with particular subgenres of plays is potentially now attributable to the genre of English drama in general. Recent Civil War drama belongs to the same venerable tradition of Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 171 dramatic political critique as The Interlude of Youth (1530).81 Trevor Ross argues that early modern literary compilations frequently “harmoniz[ed] any possible differences or competing values among the works it celebrates,” and that such expressions of cultural unity were particularly urgent in moments of cultural crisis.82 Without ascribing deliberate eirenic socio-political intentions to Rogers or Archer, their catalogues’ chronological and political inclusiveness suggests that “English play” is a cultural production belonging to different sorts of people, at different times, not, as it would later be, professional theatre strongly associated with royalism. The list unites seemingly disparate texts: the earthy native comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1575) is categorized with sober translations of Senecan drama, like Thomas Newman’s Octavia, printed in Tenne Tragedies of Seneca (1581). One might argue that any list that asserted affinities between “serious” classical translations and seemingly ephemeral texts signalled the widespread acceptance of the English drama as literature. One might also argue that such an association would debase “serious” dramatic literature. I argue, however,that “English play” is established as a voluminous, flexible category that embraces a vast canon of plays from the last century and a half.

To be sure, this a canon of plays – not of authors. The catalogue is organized alpha- betically by play title, and while dramatists and subgenres are occasionally omitted, the existence of a play is signaled by its title. By contrast, in his comprehensive catalogue of

1671, Francis Kirkman organized its entries according to dramatist, beginning with the most popular (Shakespeare), then proceeding to the most proliﬁc (Jonson and Fletcher).

This is also a canon of printed plays: inclusion in the catalogue depends on publication, as Rogers and Archer respectively catalogue “all plays that are printed” and “all the plays that were ever printed.” This focus on printed plays has a practical dimension of

81Eleanor Rycroft includes The Interlude of Youth among “Histories and Political Dramas” in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama ed. Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (OUP, 2013), p. 465. 82Ross, p. 2. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 172 course: a stationer can only sell plays in print. It must be reiterated, however, that the catalogues focus on plays in print, not playbooks: as we have seen, individual plays from collected editions, like Measure for Measure, and The Custom of the Country are listed, but the collections from which they were respectively taken, the Shakespeare folio and the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, are not. Though the catalogues define the plays chiefly through publication they resist the commodification of plays. Upon discovering evidence of proudly owned but little-read playbooks, Stephen Orgel remarks that playbooks are

“all about possession, books as objects, not as texts.”83The catalogues suggest a diﬀerent attitude, however. Rogers and Archer present plays not as books to own, or even, really as plays to read – but rather, as titles to know. One could not own, properly speaking, a book called Antony and Cleopatra in 1656, but one could know that the play belongs to a corpus of English drama in print. The contents of “exact and perfect” catalogues, therefore, represent not so much a bookseller’s entire inventory of particular playbooks to buy, but rather an authoritative canon of all English plays in print. A literary canon is an accretive list of printed works (to read and to know about), not of particular editions for purchase. Canonization, as much as commodiﬁcation, is predicated on publication.

The catalogues assert that printed plays belong to the realm of English culture, not commerce.

4 Conclusion: 1650s Dramatic Compendia after 1660

The three dramatic compendia in print emerged during the theatre ban and can be understood in response to this moment’s pressures and opportunities. Incidentally or deliberately, implicitly or explicitly, all three of the new printed forms asserted the value of English plays when they were maligned, ensured a modicum of plays’ survival in print

83Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (OUP, 2015), p. 62. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 173 when they were removed from the stage, and issued texts comprising of dramatic fragments in which renaissance drama was presented as a whole period, genre and ﬁeld. With no active theatre industry creating new plays, resourceful stationers like Moseley found fresh ways of repackaging old material, in the novel format of the all-drama commonplace book, or an innovative drama series of older texts that audaciously called itself New Plays. Capitalizing on the availability of and desire for unprinted plays, Moseley’s

New Plays ingeniously published “second-rate” dramatists as part of a larger series with literary pretensions, created a generic field of English literary drama in the process. By compiling The English Treasury, Cotgrave sought to recuperate drama’s reputation by printing it within the respectable format of the commonplace book, and in the process created the first dramatic anthology of the “most and best” of English drama. A mood of dramatic finitude motivated and enabled the creation of Rogers and Archer’s encyclopedic catalogues of drama in the 1650s, and made them interesting to readers.

It is striking that the first all-drama commonplace book, the first dramatic anthology, and the first comprehensive catalogue of drama emerged in a period of prolonged theatrical silence. It is equally striking how few comparable compendia exist for any other English genre. No other English genre was exclusively commonplaced or comprehensively cata- logued in the seventeenth century. By contrast, interest in another popular Elizabethan genre, the sonnet sequences, simply faded away: as Christopher Warley puts it, “by the end of the seventeenth century, Renaissance sonnet sequences, a dominant form at the

Elizabethan fin-de-sicle, had largely dropped from the British literary landscape, and for much of the eighteenth century, no one liked them much at all.”84 The first anthology of English Renaissance sonnet sequences was Sidney Lee’s two-volume anthology Eliza- bethan Sonnets (1904);85 the first complete collection of English sonnet sequences was

84Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (CUP, 2005), p. 24. 85Ibid, p. 199, n. 41. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 174

compiled in 2015.86 If Parliament had suddenly outlawed sonnet sequences, we might see a diﬀerent history of their anthologization. Of course, there are many reasons why early

modern plays were continually anthologized and reprinted over the last 350 years, and

not Elizabethan sonnet sequences. But, although diﬀerent motivations for producing an-

thologies would later arise, the first efforts to anthologize of English drama were partly a response its abrupt loss on the stage. These first compendia provided the model for later

anthologies and bibliographies of drama, which continue to inﬂuence our own scholarly

practice. The logic of Moseley’s New Plays anticipates how English renaissance drama

was published and read after 1660, in collections that oﬀered dramatic breadth (samples

of many diﬀerent dramatists’ canons) rather than depth (complete authorial canons). Suzanne Gossett argues that, “after the Restoration publishers emphasized completeness

rather than novelty in their collections.”87 But turning away from the so-called “triumvi-

rate of wit” of Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher, we get a diﬀerent picture.88 After 1660,

there was little eﬀort to compile the complete works of authors of the “second magnitude.” As Gary Taylor points out, a reader in the Restoration “could ﬁnd virtually all

of Jonson or Fletcher or Shakespeare in one book. By contrast, Middleton’s work – like

Marlowe’s, or Dekker’s, Webster’s, Ford’s – was scattered in separate cheap individual

editions.”89 By 1826, along with Marlowe, “the only other ‘second-tier’ sixteenth- and

early seventeenth-century playwrights who had complete editions of their works were Marston, Chapman, Ford and Massinger,” as Thomas Dabbs notes.90 But, portions of

authorial canons from diﬀerent second-tier dramatists were continually represented in

uniﬁed collections, as we see in anthologies such as Robert Dodsley’s milestone anthol-

86Burton, https://sonnetsequences.com/. 87Suzanne Gossett, ed. Pericles (Arden: Third Series, 2004), p. 36. 88On the triumvirate of wit, see Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation, p. 10. 89Gary Taylor, “Thomas Middleton: Lives and Afterlives,” The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (OUP, 2007), p. 52. Of course, as Taylor points out, many factors could impede compiling a complete collection – for example, while stationers publishing Shakespeare or Beaumont and Fletcher’s work could acquire virtually all of the plays from the same single source, the King’s Servants, Middleton’s plays were scattered among many companies (49). 90Thomas Dabbs, Reforming Marlowe: The Nineteenth Century Canonization of a Genre (Bucknell UP, 1991), p. 47. Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 175

ogy, A Select Collection of Old Plays. One can draw a line from Dodsley to modern anthologies such as The Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama, which features

a sampling of plays by “second-rate” (which by now means non-Shakespearean) renais-

sance drama.91Yet we do not read The Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama

because we are interested in dramatists “worse than” Shakespeare. Rather, we want an overview of English dramatic activity and of dramatic genre that can only be achieved

by reading a sampling of a wide variety of dramatists – precisely the experience oﬀered

by Moseley’s New Plays.

Cotgrave’s assertion of English drama’s edifying value anticipates such attitudes after the Restoration, which eventually narrowed to the promulgation of Shakespeare’s plays in

secondary education in the eighteenth century.92 Rogers and Archer’s expansive view of

English drama directly inﬂuenced Francis Kirkman’s comprehensive catalogues of 1661

and 1671 and Gerard Langbaine’s seminal works of dramatic bibliography and criticism, Momus Triumphans, and An Account of the English Dramatick Poets,93 all of which fea-

ture dramatic material composed outside the context of the professional theatre industry

of 1576 to 1642. Rogers and Archer also promulgated a text-centric deﬁnition of English

plays. Such a deﬁnition evinces how the theatre ban shaped conceptions of drama: for

the last fourteen years, the dramatic text was the only legitimate way to engage with English drama: a play reached its full realization in print; if a play was to “exist” in a

context where performance was not possible, it must be printed. This is largely how we

study drama today: what we call the ﬁeld of early modern drama is actually the ﬁeld

of texts that have survived in print.94 In many cases, the dramatic compendia provide

91See Jeremy Lopez, Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (CUP, 2014). 92Michael Dobson notes that “the earliest known instance of which is the production of Julius Caesar mounted in 1728.” The Making of the National Poet (OUP, 1992), p. 3. 93Adam Hooks argues that Leake and Crooke’s non-comprehensive catalogues influenced Kirkman and Langbaine, but the comprehensive catalogues (which he does not mention) are a clearer antecedent. See Hooks, “Booksellers Catalogues” and Selling Shakespeare (CUP, 2016). 94See David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, ed. Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2014), pp. 255-78; and The Lost Plays Database (https://www.lostplays.org). There are a few in- Chapter 4. Dramatic Compendia of the 1650s 176 the only evidence we have for lost plays; titles in the dramatic catalogues and quotations in The English Treasury offer tantalizing glimpses of plays otherwise lost.95 Or else, the compendia prevented particular plays from being lost by ensuring their survival in print, such as the many previously unprinted texts in Moseley’s New Plays. The dramatic compendia of the theatre ban, which tend to present the drama in fragments, are an integral part of the process whereby renaissance drama came to be conceived of as a whole period, genre and field. Not only do they represent a key moment in English drama’s acquisition of a literary status; they also exemplify how the prohibition on theatre propelled drama to become the foremost literary genre in English.

stances of manuscript plays that were not printed in the 17th century, but here too their textual survival ensured their status as objects of study. 95Wiggins, “Where to Find Lost Plays,” 255-78. Chapter 5

A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660

“Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.”

-Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.1. 90

In 1661, Henry Marsh and Francis Kirkman published The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport

Part 1 (1662, henceforth 1 Wits), a dramatic anthology of what Marsh calls “Rump drolls,” that is, short interludes and extracts from early modern professional drama performed during the era of the Rump Parliament (1648–53). In the follow-up anthology, The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport Part 2 (1673, henceforth 2 Wits), Kirkman describes how drolls provided the sole form of entertainment during the theatrical prohibition:

“When the publique theatres were shut up. . . then all we could divert ourselves with were these humours and pieces of plays, which. . . were only allowed us, and that but by the stealth too.” He celebrates the way that drolls kept English theatre alive; the lack of alternative entertainment meant that playlets featured the best actors and attracted large, appreciative paying audiences: ““I have seen the Red Bull playhouse, which was a

177 Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 178 large one, so full, that as many went back for want of room as had entered. . . they were then acted by the best comedians then and now in being.” Apparently drolls provided the livelihoods for otherwise unemployed actors: “these small things were as proﬁtable and as great get-pennies to the actors as any of our late famed plays.” Marsh and

Kirkman in 1 Wits and 2 Wits respectively describe the wide appeal of drolls “ﬁtted for the pleasure and content of all persons, either in court, city, country or camp” and

“shewn for the merriment and delight of wise men, and the ignorant.” The frequently- reproduced frontispiece portrait to 1 Wits (ﬁgure 1) depicts a lively Interregnum stage populated with seven characters from well-known Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline plays: Falstaﬀ and Hostess Quickly from 1 Henry IV, “Changeling” from Middleton and Rowley’s eponymous play of 1622, Bubble from John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1614), the French Dancing M[aster]r from Shirley and William Cavendish’s The Variety (1632),

Clause the beggar from Fletcher’s Beggar’s Bush (acted before 1622, printed 1647). S.

P. Cerasano notes that the depicted theatre is of a style “used much earlier than the Restoration,” and appears to be a “structure very like the private, indoor playhouse, the

Cockpit-in-Court used in the 1630s, and that spectators in the gallery above the stage and surrounding it are dressed in what appears to be attire from the late 1640s.1

1S. P. Cerasano, “Must the Devil Appear?: Audiences, Actors, Stage Business,” A Companion to Renaissance Drama ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Wiley, 2002), p.196. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 179

Figure 5.1: Frontispiece to The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport (Francis Kirkman, 1662) Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 180

Critics have questioned the veracity of Kirkman’s basic claims about the performance of drolls during the Interregnum.2 To me, however, the truth of his claims matters less

than the nostalgic portrait of illegal Interregnum performance Kirkman crafts from the

perspective of the Restoration. Kirkman’s image of inclusive, accessible drama (even if

illegal) was perhaps meant to contrast with the reality of Restoration drama. As Rachel Willie and Emma Depledge note, “with only two playhouses in operation for most of

the period 1660-1700 (reduced to one from 1682 to 1695), and admission prices radically

increased when compared to the Jacobean and Caroline playhouses, the restored the-

atres. . . remained inaccessible to many.”3 Kirkman assures his supposedly sophisticated

Restoration readers that the texts were popular in their own time, when the options were few: “as meanly as you may now think of these drolls. . . these being all that was permitted

us, great was the conﬂuence of the auditors.” Kirkman’s rather rosy retrospective por-

trait of the interregnum performance is belied by contemporary accounts of such activity.

As we have seen, actors were mostly consigned to penury, or else risked ﬁnes, arrest and bodily harm to perform illicitly. It seems unlikely that clandestine performances would

be performed in well-appointed theatres such as the one depicted in 1 Wits frontispiece,

with a curtained entrance and lit by candelabras and candles. Perhaps partly due to this

incongruity, the frontispiece to 1 Wits has become a straightforward icon of early modern

theatre. Bruce Smith describes it as a “nostalgic celebration of great moments of the pre-Civil War stage” in which “famous characters from the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and

Caroline stage cavort on a stage platform.”4 But, whatever the reality of Interregnum

performance, the prefatory matter to 1 Wits makes it clear that the frontispiece is meant

to represent the Interregnum stage. While this post-1642 tradition nostalgically draws

on the pre-1642 tradition for its sources, in Kirkman’s Restoration text, illicit theatrical activity during the theatre ban is itself made the object of nostalgia.

2John Astington, “Dramatic Extracts in the Interregnum,” The Review of English Studies 54.217 (2003), pp. 608-9. See also Chapter 2. 3Private email conversation. 4Bruce Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture, p. 226-7. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 181

Smith’s transposition of interregnum performance to early modern performance exem- pliﬁes the general erasure of the theatre ban from dramatic criticism. Many modern histories of the Renaissance or Restoration stage respectively end or start by quoting the

September 1642 ordinance, allowing it to stand in for an entire eighteen-year period. But this was not always the case, as the example of The Wits makes clear, and now criticism is once more moving away conceptions of the theatre ban as a blank space between two national dramatic traditions.5 Partly because critical treatment of the theatre ban varies wildly from outright neglect to exaggerated attention, whether or not a commentator acknowledges the theatre ban reveals much about their motives and historical moment.

For example, in 1 Wits and 2 Wits Kirkman’s invocation of the theatre ban bespeaks how theatrical nostalgia plays a role in the construction and reception of anthologies.6 If

Kirkman was lying about performance, he could have claimed that the drolls were staged on, say, the Caroline stage. But he understood that, whatever the truth was about the performance of drolls, the idea of the theatre ban was an eﬀective way to evoke theatrical nostalgia, which put people in the mood to buy and read anthologies. This chapter traces the evolution of rhetorical and critical conceptions of theatre ban, moving from the Restoration, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concluding with a survey of criticism from the last hundred years. As we shall see, Kirkman’s invocation of the ban was rather anomalous in a political moment largely preoccupied with forgetting the previous two decades, but it reﬂected his personal goal, to sell anthologies. In general, commentators invoke or neglect the theatre ban to bolster their own economic, political, aesthetic or scholarly priorities.

5Wiseman, p. 1. 6see Chapter 4. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 182

1 Acts of Oblivion: Rhetorical conceptions of the

Theatre Ban, 1660-1700

Charles II was restored to the throne on May 29, 1660; commercial theatre was restored three months later. Charles II issued two theatre patents to William Davenant and

Thomas Killigrew on August 21, 1660, granting them a duopoly on all professional theatre in London. (He issued another short-lived licence to George Jolly on December 24.)7 The theatre patents do not explicitly refer to the theatrical suppression of the last eighteen years. The August patent states that theatrical reform renders theatre closures needless: we hold it not necessary, the patent states, “to suppress the use of theatres, because we are assured that if the evils and scandals in the plays that are now or have been acted were taken away, the same might serve as innocent and harmless divertissements for many of our subjects.” The patent implicitly acknowledges the evils of earlier plays by assuring that they have now been excised. While such an acknowledgement is perhaps a concession to anti-theatricalists, it is also clear that theatrical reform pre-empts their objections. In any case, the theatre ban is never actually mentioned. The theatre patents exemplify the national mandate of reconciliation through circumspection. Upon his restoration, Charles II and Parliament issued The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660), which granted amnesty to all who had acted against Charles I or his supporters, except for regicides, and implemented a national policy of forgetting. The act stated that the king’s subjects were to “bury all seeds of future discords and remembrance of the former,” while Charles

II promised to similarly bury the memories of wrongs committed against his royal house. The period between 1 January 1637/8 and 24 June 1660 were to be placed, as the Act put it, “in utter oblivion,” as if they had simply never happened. Such a policy of forgetting could never truly work, of course, as subjects were forced to call to mind the very thing

7Leslie Hotson, “George Jolly, Actor Manager: New Light on the Restoration Stage,” Studies in Philology 20.4 (1923), pp. 422-443. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 183

that should be blotted out. The Act of Oblivion was also undermined by a countervailing impulse to oﬃcially remember the conﬂicts of the previous two decades: for example, the

date of the regicide, January 30, was observed each year with oﬃcial events in churches

throughout England.8 Critics have extensively studied the competing tendencies in the

early Restoration to forget and remember (either deliberately or inadvertently) the last two decades.9 Jonathan Sawday describes how the oﬃcial position of oblivion produced

a “historical chasm” which was problematic for notions of continuity: “was History,”

contemporaries wondered, “to be considered as starting again, or was it still a continuum

of ordered change?”10

When the politically expedient strategy of oblivion was applied to the speciﬁc issue of

the theatrical activity of the last twenty years, it produced the same paradoxes and

problems. Restoration commentators invariably referred to drama of “the last age” –

that is, of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline era, in terms that eﬀectively erased the intervening period. Interregnum stationers had commercial and political motives

for framing the ban as a theatrical dead zone: playbooks could be marketed as the

treasured relics of the absent stage. After the Restoration, the ban continued to be

framed as a void, but now this tactic reﬂected the political eﬀort to establish unbroken

political and cultural continuities between the reigns of Charles I and II. Such an eﬀort is evident in the theatrical patents granted in 1660. The December patent notes Charles

II’s intention “to allow such public presentations of Tragedies and Comedies as have been

formerly permitted by our royal predecessors.” The phrase erases Charles II’s immediate,

8David Cressy, Bonﬁres and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicising Milton: Spec- tacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (University of Georgia Press, 1994) and Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661,(CUP, 2000). 9Paulina Kewes sums up critical analyses of various eﬀorts to remember and forget “Acts of Re- membrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England.” Ed. Lorna Clymer, Ritual Routine and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern and European Cultures (U Toronto P, 2006), p. 105. 10Jonathan Sawday, “Re-Writing a Revolution: History, Symbol and Text in the Restoration,” The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992) p. 171, p. 173. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 184 republican, predecessors, and promises to resume the pattern of activity set up by his royal forebears. The August and December patents establish the customs of the pre- war theatre as a model, asking that ticket prices be set according to what has “been accustomely given” and “been customably given and taken in.” The patent’s promise to dispel the “extraordinary licentiousness that has been lately used in things of this nature” leaps over the last twenty years in order to claim those scurrilous pre-war plays were “lately used.”

Try as it might, however, some of the two patents’ wording betrays the impossibility of burying the recent past. Though it attempts to erase the period of republican authority, the speciﬁcation of “royal predecessors” in the December patent also implies that there is another, non-royal, predecessor. The request in both patents that future plays eliminate

“any matter of profanation, scurrility or obscenity” is conciliatory to the puritans who shuttered theaters. It acknowledges the validity of anti-theatrical complaints which partly led to the ban, and promises to reform theatre, a politically expedient gesture in this time of reconciliation.” The December patent’s recommendation that the theatres employ

“such new decorations as have been formerly used” is a strange intermingling of old and new. To paraphrase Sawday, the historical chasm proposed by oblivion makes it unclear whether stage history starts again (implied by the newness of the decorations) or whether it belongs to a continuum of change (implied by the fact they have been formerly used).

The two theatrical patents simultaneously deny that the last two decades existed while also insisting that they would shape drama in the future.

The muted, euphemistic rhetoric advocated by the Act of Oblivion is unsurprisingly present in the royal patent issued by the same governing body. It is also evident in less obviously political dramatic commentary. In A Short History of the English Stage

(1664) Richard Flecknoe, himself cast out of work by the ban, oﬀer a rather tepid account of it: “For us, we began before them, and if since they have out-stript us, tis because Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 185 our stage has stood at a stand these many years; nor may we doubt, but now we shall soon outstrip them again, if we but hold on as we begin.” Robert Shimko observes that

Flecknoe’s “cautiously neutral image of drama at a standstill (with no reference to it being suppressed) passes over an opportunity to cast blame on the Puritan opposition for closing the theatres and is as close as Flecknoe comes to describing the state of English theatre during the interregnum.”11 For Flecknoe, the interruption is of secondary interest, important only insofar as it explains why theatre produced by the French (“them”) is now superior to that by the English (“us”). And yet, Flecknoe’s vision of a theatrical void is also ripe with potential: the standstill represents a moment of rest that will enable English drama “to soon outstrip” the French. In the early days of the revived theatres, Flecknoe expresses how the ban allowed for the creation of a refreshed, novel dramatic tradition. Other Restoration commentators were similarly terse. “I shall only say,” Thomas Killigrew begins in his prefatory remarks to his Comedies and Tragedies

(1664), “If you have as much leisure to Read as I had to Write these Plays, you may, as I did, ﬁnd a diversion; though I wish it you upon better terms then Twenty Years

Banishment.” “Banishment” refers literally to Killigrew’s exile in Italy, France and The

Hague between 1642 and 1660 while in the service of Charles I and Prince Charles, but his reference to the leisurely writing of plays also suggests his exile from the professional theatre. Killigrew’s description is more provocative than Flecknoe’s – the politically- loaded phrasing of “banishment,” his speciﬁc reference to a debilitating period of “twenty years” – but by prefacing his comments with “I shall only say” he makes it clear that he withholds the most damaging commentary.

Flecknoe and Killigrew’s descriptions of a theatrical void are belied by their own activity in this period. Flecknoe composed and printed new plays throughout the 1650s; Kil- ligrew’s Clarcilla was illegally staged in England in 1652, and he composed plays that

11Robert Shimko, “Who is the Historical Theatre Historian?” Querying Diﬀerence in Theatre History eds. Scott Magelssen, Ann Haugo (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), p. 36. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 186 were performed by Charles II’s (then the Prince of Wales) troupe on the continent. But the dramatic activities of 1642 to 1660 clashed with the narrative of continuity proposed by the rhetoric of oblivion. This caused a form of cultural conservatism which was anticipated during the theatre ban itself.12 In a dedicatory poem to Brome’s Five New

Plays (1653), Aston Cockayne looks forward to the time when the theatres would be restored and “learn’d Jonson” will “reassume his seat,/Revive the Phoenix by a second heat.” Cockayne envisions similar resurrections of Shakespeare, Davenant, Massinger and

Shirley, with no mention of contemporary dramatists. Michael Dobson comments that

“presciently, [Cockayne] imagined a restored theatre which would be ﬁrst and foremost a place for the revival of England’s native dramatic classics, and only secondarily a venue where living playwrights might resume their interrupted careers.”13 The early Restora- tion playhouses were dominated by plays of the pre-war era, but in an ironic twist, the plays that asserted the continuities between the Caroline and Restoration period were, generally speaking, not new Caroline plays. The favored plays were the Elizabethan and Jacobean plays staged at Charles I’s court and kept in his personal library.14 Caroline drama was marginalized, and – unsurprisingly since the goal was to forget the period entirely – interregnum drama was completely excluded. Of course, practical realities would dispel the dramatic continuities between the Caroline and Restoration periods: most dramatists and actors of the Caroline period had died in the intervening period, and the theatre now featured actresses and changeable scenery.

The notion of dramatic continuity was diﬃcult to swallow for another reason: it threatened to overshadow the next generation of professional dramatists. In the The Defence of Poesy (1668), Dryden describes the staleness of pre-war drama: “We acknowledge

12On the cultural conservatism of the Restoration, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671 (CUP, 1992). 13Dobson, “Adaptions and Revivals”, Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre ed. Deb- orah Payne Fisk (CUP, 2000), p. 40. 14On the aﬃnities between Caroline and Restoration dramatic stages on stage and page, see Lesser and Farmer, “Canons and Classics,” pp. 39-41. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 187

[pre-war dramatists] our Fathers in wit, but they have ruin’d their Estates themselves before they came to their children’s hands. There is scarce an Humour, a Character,

or any kind of Plot, which they have not blown upon: all comes sullied or wasted to

us.” Dryden concludes by calling for a fresh dramatic idiom: “This therefore will be a

good Argument to us either not to write at all, or to attempt some other way.”15 By the Caroline period there was already a sense that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists

and actors outshone their theatrical descendants.16 This sense of belatedness was com-

pounded once now sixty-year-old plays were resurrected for the Restoration stage after a

twenty-year hiatus. Dryden, without invoking the ban speciﬁcally, describes the break in

generational terms, encouraging the children of drama to leave their aged fathers behind and forge their own path.

Thirty years later, in his dedicatory poem to Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1694), Dry-

den speaks of how Restoration dramatists, initially overshadowed by their predecessors, ﬁnally superseded them:

WELL then; the promis’d hour is come at last; The present Age of Wit obscures the past: [. . . ] Theirs was the Gyant Race, before the Flood; And thus, when Charles Return’d, our Empire stood [. . . ] Our Builders were, with want of Genius, curst; The second Temple was not like the ﬁrst: Till You, the best Vitruvius, come at length; Our Beauties equal; but excel our strength.

The flood of the ban killed off dominant, clumsy “giants” – Dryden specifically invokes

Fletcher and “Great” Jonson – allowing more reﬁned Restoration artists to develop different poetic forms, themes and plots within the new theatrical conditions. Yet because

15Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy, pp. 64-5. 16See Jeremy Lopez, “Alleyn Resurrected,” Marlowe Studies 20 (2011), p. 167.; Lesser and Farmer “Canons and Classics.” Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 188 they were essentially creating a theatrical tradition from scratch – or at least, had no immediate mentors – it took time for the Restoration artists to hone their craft. “Our

Builders were, with want of Genius, curst/The second Temple was not like the ﬁrst.”

Any attempt to reproduce pre-war drama after the Restoration –rebuilding the second temple to look like the ﬁrst – invariably paled in comparison. Yet dramatists eventually came into their own: the “You” being addressed, William Congreve, born in 1670, is the ultimate benefactor of the dramatic ﬂood, which while destructive also cleared space for something new. This metaphor was applied to the events of 1642 and 1660 more widely: in “Upon Appleton House” (1650, printed 1681) Andrew Marvell describes post-war Eng- land as “A levelled space, as smooth and plain/As cloths for Lely stretched to stain.” The war is devastating, but its aftermath is rife with creative possibility, indicated by

Marvell’s reference to Peter Lely’s blank canvases. Dryden’s biblical invocation of the

ﬂood presents postdiluvian English drama as another tabla rasa. The logic of oblivion, however, also suggested that English history and drama simply picked up where they had left oﬀ: after all, the plays of Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare continued to appear on stage and in bookstalls alongside the newer work of Congreve and other Restoration dramatists. Just as the spectre of Charles I and the regicide haunted the reigns of Charles

II and James II, English drama’s fathers, and the ban that killed them oﬀ, continued to loom over Restoration drama.

2 The Theatre Ban in the Long Eighteenth and Nine-

teenth Centuries

The late-seventeenth century ushered in a period of renewed forthrightness about the events of 1642 to 1660, suggested by Dryden’s metaphor of the ﬂood. Three monarchs Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 189 and one Glorious Revolution later, memories of the period were growing increasingly distant, and the policy of oblivion was less pressing. Commentators freely noted (or asserted) the political dimensions of the theatre ban. Gerard Langbaine’s seminal The

Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1698) oﬀers short biographies and bibliographies of Renaissance and Restoration dramatists, emphasizing where possible their royalist connections. Sir John Suckling was in “in Five Sieges, Three Battles, &c. he was at the Expence of 12000 l. to raise a Troop for the King.” Cosmo Manuche was a

“Major in the King’s Army, in the late Civil War” and his tragedy The Just General was prepared “for the Stage, but was not ever acted.” In his entries for James Shirley, William

Davenant and Aston Cockayne, Langbaine does not mention anything about how events of the 1640s or 1650s aﬀected their careers. The entry for Richard Flecknoe skips over the intervening period between the two monarchies entirely, stating that “This memorable

Author liv’d in the Reign of both the Charles’s,” as does Thomas Killigrew’s entry, who is described as “celebrated Wit in the Reigns of the Two K. Charles’s.” Langbaine does not omit the period entirely, however, and acknowledges at least two instances of theatrical activity during the ban. His entry for Abraham Cowley refers to a several private performances of The Guardian “during the Prohibition of the Stage”; the entry for Robert Cox describes how “On the Suppression of the Stage he made several Drolls, and, with his Companions, Acted them by stealth, both in London and the Country Towns: He Acted the chief Parts himself, and so very naturally, that at Oxon he gain’d great Applause.” Langbaine’s invocation of the dramatists’ activities in the royalist army is based on fact, but the implication is clear: drama was largely a royalist pursuit.

James Wright’s Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage (1699) makes a similar connection between English drama and royalist politics during the war and interregnum. Where Langbaine relies on facts about individual dramatists, however,

Wright makes sweeping generalizations: “When the Stage was put down and the Rebel- Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 190

lion raised,” he explains, most actors “went into the King’s Army and like good men and true, serv’d their Old Master, though in a diﬀerent capacity.” Not only are the theatre

ban and the rebellion inseparable, Wright also seems to suggest that the theatre ban

preceded and caused the rebellion, reversing the usual chronology. Wright’s royalism and

dramatic tastes might have been inﬂuenced by his father, the clergyman, author and dramatic commonplacer Abraham Wright (1611-1690).17 Like Langbaine, Wright recounts

instances of illegal performance, but unlike him, Wright also describes the governmental

raids, and identiﬁes puritans as enemies of drama. The looming regicide provides the

atmosphere for illicit theatrical activity: Wright states that “In the winter before the

king’s murder, [players] ventured to act some plays with as much caution and privacy as could be, at the Cockpit.” Wright’s claims about the supposedly “private” of perfor-

mance are belied by the subsequent raid; the actors, he explains “continued undisturbed

for three or four days; but at last, as they were presenting the tragedy of The Bloody

Brother. . . a party of foot-soldiers beset the house, surprised ‘em about the middle of the play, and carried ‘em away in their habits.” The raid is a prologue to the king’s murder,

acted out by the same villains. Historia Histrionica is often cited as if it were a factual,

eye-witness account of the theatre ban, but it is highly unlikely the ﬁve-year-old Wright

(c. 1644-1717) had ﬁrst hand knowledge of the 1649 raid on The Bloody Brother. His-

toria Histrionica is a nostalgic celebration of Medieval, Renaissance, Interregnum, and Restoration drama, written by someone too young to have actually experienced most of

what he is nostalgic for. Wright is among the ﬁrst theatre historians proper: he draws not

from personal experience but from others’ reports, and quotes from documents produced

long before he was born – essentially the conditions that scholars work in now.18 Unlike modern scholars, however, like Langbaine before him, Wright recognizes that the theatre ban was not simply an empty space between two theatrical traditions, but a key moment in English drama’s evolution, with its own theatrical production and consumption.

17See Laura Estill, pp. 81-86. 18Richard Schoch, Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900 (CUP, 2016). Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 191

Wright’s account of the royalist underpinnings of drama has proven to be remarkably resilient. Three centuries later, his narrative is still taken at face value by many mod-

ern critics, rankling others who wish to complicate the familiar binary of drama-loving

royalist and anti-theatrical puritan.19

Before writing Historia Histrionica, which praised drama between the medieval period

and Restoration, Wright wrote Country Conversations. . . Chieﬂy of the Modern Come-

dies (1694), in which he expresses his dismay with “modern” English drama of the 1690s.

He argues that “Plays should be (and have always been in the best Reform’d and most

Civilized Times) Moral Representations, but now most of our New Comedies are become the very Pictures of Immorality.”20 Michael Cordner includes Wright in what he calls

“a rich crop of anti-theatrical invective” that was produced in the 1690s. Just as the

Restoration did not banish hatred of the Stuarts, the restoration of the theatres did

not quell anti-theatrical attitudes. And once again, the people who opposed monarchy and theatre were often one and the same. The many clergymen who objected to the

ungodly Stuart reigns cited theatre as a “symptoms of national apostasy.” Such atti-

tudes simmered throughout the 1660s, 70s and 80s, and after the Glorious Revolution of

1688, King William III espoused the national reformation of manners. He promoted the

prominent anti-theatrical clergyman Edward Stillingﬂeet, who in the 1690s inspired the formation of Societies for Reformation of Manners, groups which quickly spread around

the country. As Cordner explains, “Their primary obsession was with public rather than

private vice” and “theatres [featured] prominently on their list of targets. By 1694 they

were petitioning William and Mary ’That the public Play-Houses may be suppressed.”’21

The best known anti-theatrical polemic of the 1690s is Jeremy Collier’s A Short View

19Wiseman, p. 11-2. 20Wright, Country Conversations . . . Chieﬂy of the Modern Comedies (1694). 21Michael Cordner, “Playwright versus Priest: Profanity and the Wit of Restoration comedy,” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre ed. Fisk (CUP, 2000), p. 212. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 192 of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). Collier’s work was seen to belong to a tradition of anti-theatricalism that stretched back to the the pre-war era:

Charles Gildon called Collier a “Younger Historio-Mastix” in the tragedy Phaeton: or,

The Fatal Divorce (1698),22 and indeed, Collier’s was the ﬁrst book-length assault on drama since Prynne’s hysterical work of 1633. Although he shared his contemporary Stillingﬂeet’s aversion to theatre, Collier did not share his politics. Collier was a staunch

Jacobite: he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of William III and Mary II, wrote against the new regime, and publicly supported persons involved in an assassination plot against William III. Collier’s popular polemic unleashed a torrent of pro- and anti- theatrical writing. Some supporters of the theatre grimly prophesized that Collier’s attacks would lead to another extended hiatus. The poet laureate Nahum Tate (famous for his Restoration adaptation of King Lear) worried that his “A Proposal for Regulating the Stage & Stage-Players” would be “valuable only in case it is decided not to suppress the theatres entirely.” A character in George Farquhar’s novel, Adventures of Covent- Garden (1698), predicted that “in the battel between the church and the stage,” “the

Theatre must down.”23

As the opposing politics of the Williamite Stillingfleet and Jacobite Collier suggest, it was difficult to characterize the ideology that underpinned the anti-theatrical campaigns at the turn of the eighteenth century, once the conflicts of Puritan versus Royalist shifted to

Whig versus Tory. Stillingﬂeet’s anti-theatricalism clearly gained traction from William

III’s national reformation of manners, reﬂecting the many cultural and political aﬃnities between puritans and Whigs.24 Some critics of Collier cast doubt on his political loyalties because of his denunciation of a favored Stuart pastime.25 Cordner explains how Collier’s

22Gildon, Phaeton: or, The Fatal Divorce. A Tragedy (London, 1698), Cir. 23George Farquhar,Adventures of Covent-Garden (1698). 24Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy (CUP, 2000), pp. 12-13. 25Jennifer Airey, “’I must vary shapes as often as a player’: Susanna Centlivre and the Liberty of the British Stage” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research (28:1) (2013), p. 47. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 193 defence of the assassination plot against William III vindicated the notion “that anti- theatricalism and regicide went hand in hand,” no matter that Collier was advocating for another person to be king. Cordner continues that “Propagandists for the post-1660 playhouses were adept at associating anti-stage invective with insurrection and regicide, citing as proof the undeniable fact that the Parliament which closed the playhouses had also executed Charles I.”26 In a strange turn of aﬀairs, anti-theatricalism continued to be linked with treason, but could now be linked with pro-Stuart politics. In a recent essay,

Jennifer Airey demonstrates how both Whig and Jacobite camps were associated with both pro- and anti-theatricalism in the early eighteenth century. She argues that some

“Whig authors linked a love of masquerade, acting, and disguise with a dangerously Jacobite or Jesuit aesthetic,” and clung to “a longstanding Protestant anti-theatrical association of theatre and masquerade with Catholic ritual and superstition.”27 Mean- while, Airey explains, the turn of the century playwright Susanna Centrelivre “positions the theatre as a bastion of Whig political doctrine and the guardian of individual liberties,” and “implicitly reject[s] anti-theatrical discourse as the by-product of tyrannical, absolutist, or Jacobitical thought.”28

Even though it became increasingly difficult to define the politics underlying turn-of-the century drama (and anti-theatricalism), the association between anti-theatricalism and regicide remained current. This notion (and its counterpart, royalist nature of English drama) was continually reiterated in dramatic criticism of the long eighteenth century, especially the portraits presented by Langbaine and Wright. For example, Thomas Whin- cop’s “A List of All the Dramatic Authors, with Some Account of their Lives” (1747) throughout conflates politics and drama between 1642 and 1660, noting how “during the

Usurpation, the Stage, as well as the State, seem’ed to be under an Interregnum, and was

26Cordner, p. 209. 27Airey, pp. 49-50. 28Ibid, p. 55. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 194 restored to greater splendor than ever after the Return of Monarchy.” Whincop occasionally alludes to dramatic events associated with republicans, such as the young Oliver

Cromwell’s performance in Lingua at Cambridge, and Richard Flecknoe’s dedication of

Love’s Dominion to Cromwell’s daughter Elizabeth Claypole. Mostly, however, Whincop highlights drama’s royalist aﬃliations: Alexander Brome is described as a “Poet in the royal cause”; Lodowick Carlell as a “Groom of the Privy Chamber to King Charles I and

King Charles II.” Whincop cites Langbaine’s Lives and Characters of the English Dramat- ick Poets as an authority on Samuel Shepherd, commenting that “as Mr Langbaine says, the author was more to commended for his Loyalty than his Poetry.” Whincop’s “List of

All the Dramatic Authors, with Some Account of their Lives” followed in the footsteps of Langbaine and others, whose extensive bio-bibliographies of English dramatists were eventually integrated into the ﬁrst collective national biographies.29

At the same time, however, dramatic criticism was narrowing its focus onto a single ﬁgure: Shakespeare. Along with the countless Shakespeare editions and biographies published in this period, general histories of the English stage also tended to orient themselves around Shakespeare, in sometimes surprising ways. In his autobiography An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740), the actor and playwright describes the “two critical advantages” enjoyed by Restoration theatre companies. First, the novel appearance of actresses on the public stage attracted new audiences. Second, Cibber imagined that after “so long Interdiction of Plays, during the Civil War, and the Anarchy that followed it,” “what eager appetites from so long a fast must the guests of those times have had to that high and fresh variety of entertainments which Shakespear had left prepar’d for em.” The suppression of the theatres is framed entirely in relation to the reception of Shakespeare’s plays: it is a “fast” that primed audiences for the banquet of Shakespeare. Cibber misrepresents the early Restoration repertory – of any pre-war

29Hooks, Selling Shakespeare, p. 15, pp. 136-177. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 195 dramatists, it would be more accurate to say that Beaumont and Fletcher supplied the “variety of entertainments.” But it does convey the rise of “Shakespeare exceptionalism” in the eighteenth century, in which, as Peter Kirwan explains, a “clear and value-laden distinction is made between Shakespeare and his contemporaries.”30 Mid-seventeenth century commentators described how the ban “worked to the stationers’ gains” by increasing the demand for printed drama. By the eighteenth century, commentators stated that the ban increased demand for Shakespeare alone.

In the nineteenth century, with the continued dominance of Shakespeare and ascendency of reader-centric approaches, the theatre ban fell further from view, as a moment after Shakespeare’s “own time,” and as an event of theatre history.31 Ironically, however, the

Romantics’ lack of interest in theatre led them to overlook the very period in which dramatic consumption aligned with their own. When Romantic critics advocated the superiority of reading over watching early modern plays, especially the plays of Shakespeare,32 they unwittingly rehearsed arguments voiced during the 1640s and 1650s. Coleridge’s view that “the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from. . . the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish,” recalls James Shirley’s description in 1647 of stage as a disorienting “conjuring glass” with performances “as suddenly removed as represented,” and his appreciation of the “silence of the stage” which gives audiences “liberty to reade these inimitable plays, to dwell and converse in these immortal Groves.” Both describe the same overwhelming sensuality of performance

30Kirwan, p. 72. 31Lukas Erne defines Shakespeare’s own time’ as ending either in 1616 (at his death), or 1622 (just before his resurrection in the First Folio). Shakespeare and the Book Trade, p. 6. 32Though Coleridge, Hazlitt, Byron, Scott, and Browning argued that reading was the best way to consume early modern drama (see Straznicky, “Introduction,” The Book of the Play (UMass Press, 2006), p. 2), Jonathan Bate complicates what he calls “the clich” that “Romantics didn’t like the stage” by invoking Coleridge’s admiration of Edmund Kean’s performances of Shakespeare, Hazlitt’s apologies for the stage, and Lamb’s account of metadrama (Jonathan Bate, review of Janet Heller’s Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt and The Reader of Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1990), Shakespeare Quarterly 43: 2 (1992), p. 233. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 196 which diminishes the “spiritual” or “immortal” effects of drama. In his commendatory poem to the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647), John Webb describes how the playbook enables readers to step into the roles vacated by actors: “The Presse shall give to ev’ry man his part,/ And we will all be Actors; learne by heart.” Webb’s conception of the reader-as-actor anticipates Charles Lamb’s comparison of reading and watching King Lear in 1848: “On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities. . . while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear.”33 While Webb sees the reader’s role as mediated by the stage (the reader is the actor) and Lamb sees the reader as the unmediated character (“we are Lear”), both suggest that reading a play offers a deeper, more active engagement of drama than simply watching it would. While their motivations differ (Shirley and Webb are likely making a virtue of necessity), both Interregnum and Romantic commentators advocate the text as the drama’s legitimate medium – “legitimate” in the normative sense for Romantic readers, and in the normative and legal senses for readers between

1642 and 1660. Romantic thinkers were “discovering” a way of encountering plays that actually had its roots, and some powerful early iterations, in the time of the ban. Marta

Straznicky argues that the notion that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were best encountered through reading became so entrenched that throughout much of the twentieth century early modern drama was taught as a “species of poetry,” its study

“fundamentally estranged from performance.”34 While such approaches to Shakespeare’s plays are often traced to the Romantics, both are the spiritual descendants of readers of the theatre ban.

At the same time that Romantics were advocating reader-centric approaches to Shake- speare, nineteenth century theatre historians continued to reproduce James Wright’s narrative of English drama’s royalism, and to it added the contemporary element of

Shakespearean exceptionalism. Edmond Malone’s “Historical account of the rise and

33Qtd. by Straznicky, Book of the Play, p. 3. 34Straznicky, Book of the Play, p. 2. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 197 progress of the English stage” in Volume III of Malone and James Boswell’s Variorum Shakespeare (1821), is explicitly organized around Shakespeare, as he explains in the section’s preamble: “The history of the stage as far as it relates to Shakespeare naturally divides itself into three periods”: the period before Shakespeare began working; the period of his career as an actor and dramatist; and the period after his death. Having discussed the ﬁrst two periods, Malone then proceeds to “take a transient view of the stage from the death of our great poet to the year 1741, still with a view to Shakespeare and his works.”35 Examining the period between 1616 and 1741 (a strange span for those of us trained to think of drama before 1642 and drama after 1660 as strictly separate traditions), Malone discusses the theatre ban in relation to how it aﬀected the actors who performed in the King’s Servants. He cites Wright throughout: in reference to the actor John Lowin, for instance, Malone remarks that “Wright mentions in his Historia

Histrionica that ‘before the wars he used to act the part of Falstaﬀ with mighty applause.”’36 Malone also reproduces Wright’s poignant account (later debunked) of the death of King’s Servant-turned-soldier Richard (Dick) Robinson’s at the hands of General

Harrison:

In the Civil Wars he served in the King’s Army, and was killed in an engagement by Harrison, who was afterwards hanged at Charing Cross, Harrison refused him quarter, after he had laid down his arms and shot him in the head, saying at the same time ‘cursed is he that doth the work of the Lord negligently.’

Malone reiterates the by-now familiar aﬃnity between the theatre ban and the Puritans’ rise to power. He notes that the Exhibition of plays” were “forbidden sometime before the death of Charles I,” implicitly connecting the two events; and elsewhere comments that plays “were in those Presbyterian times scandalous.” More intriguingly, Malone

35Variorum, Volume III, p. 223. 36For example, see Variorum III, “Historical account of the rise and progress of the English stage” p. 207; p. 220; p. 517. E.g. Collier, Annals of the English Stage, pp. 478-90. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 198 remarks that “An ordinance for the suppressing of all stage plays and interludes was enacted 13 February 1647-8 and Oliver and his Saints seem to have been very diligent in enforcing it.”37 Malone’s chronology is perhaps surprising; he later mentions the year

1642 in passing as a moment “when the theatres were shut up.” Malone seems to make a ﬁne-grained distinction – between the temporary shuttering of the physical playhouses in 1642 and the total suppression of public performance in 1647 – which was mostly lost in later criticism but which has made a resurgence in the last thirty years.38

James Wright’s lasting inﬂuence is also evident in John Payne Collier’s History of English

Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare (1831) and Annals of the Stage (1879), which used Malone’s Variorum as a foundational text. Collier reproduces Historia Histrionica’s by now familiar association of English drama and royalist politics. Collier describes actors as royalist soldiers during the civil war, citing a 1640s satirical pamphlet which suggested that the restoration of the theaters would benefit the Parliamentary army: “Captain Trigg and the rest of the players who are now in service would doubtlessly return to their callings, and much lessen the king’s army.”39 Collier expands on his two predecessors by providing more instances of illegal performance and raids on theatrical activity. He discusses the raided performance of A King and No King, giving two different dates for the event, one in 1644 (a typographical error) and 1647 (confirmed by newsbooks). This error has been continually reproduced in criticism, most recently in Dale Randall’s Winter

Fruit (1995).40 Collier’s Annals of1879 marked the last signiﬁcant attention to the ban for the next forty years. In 1921, Hyder Rollins cited the persistence of Collier’s mistake as evidence of the era’s neglect: since then, “nobody, apparently, has been suﬃciently

37Annals, Vol II, p. 92, note 6. 38As Martin Butler and Susan Wiseman have shown, the 1642 ordinance suggested that the ban would be temporary (though it did target “stage plays,” not simply the playhouses); while the 1647 ordinance indicated the ban was to be permanent. 39John Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare Vol 2, (1831), p. 109. 40Randall, p. 44. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 199 interested in the period” and “[a]s a result, such a slip as Collier’s in giving two dates for a surreptitious stage-performance has caused endless perplexity and confusion: almost every writer on the drama calls attention to the discrepancy; but nobody has made an eﬀort to check up the sheets.”41

Once interest in the theatre ban was renewed in the 1920s, criticism continued to rely heavily on James Wright. Rollins complains that George C. D. Odell’s recent “history of the so-called dramatic interregnum” in Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (1920)

“runs to only three and a half pages, and fully half of it is quoted from James Wright’s

Historia Histrionica.”42 Wright was persistently inﬂuential; in 1996, Susan Wiseman remarked that his royalist assertions and others of their ilk “from the post-war era have been taken as truth by many subsequent theatre historians. . . It is easy to see why James

Wright in the Restoration wrote that the stage was royalist, but the extent to which twentieth-century criticism has so whole heartedly endorsed royalist readings is extraordinary.”43 Lukas Erne has noted how the alliterative expressions that Thomas Bodley used to describe playbooks — “riffe raff” and “baggage books” – are so “memorable that they prove irresistible for modern scholars, who make them central to their account of the early status of playbooks.”44 The same might be said of the continual citation of Wright’s claim about players, “good men and true” serving their “their Old Master, though in a different capacity,” which is central to many critics’ accounts of English drama’s politics.

Rather than taking Wright’s belated, nostalgic, political account of the late-seventeenth century at face value, much of the criticism of the last hundred years has attempted to recover what the theatre ban meant in its own time.

41Hyder Rollins, “A Contribution to the History of the English Commonwealth Drama.” Studies in Philology 7 (1921), p. 267. 42Ibid, p. 267. 43Wiseman, p. 11. 44Erne, Shakespeare and The Book Trade, p. 195. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 200

3 The Theatre Ban in Modern Criticism

E. K. Chambers’s seminal work of theatre history, The Elizabethan Stage (1923) has little to say about the theatre ban. Chambers ends Vol. 1 by reproducing “that dignified ordinance of 2 September [1642] which waved frivolity aside, what time the nation girded itself for matters of moment.” Like in so many other histories of English Renaissance drama, the ordinance gets the last word. Chambers does acknowledge that plays were performed during the official prohibition, but remarks that “I need not here attempt to trace the faint flutterings of the mimetic instinct which survived this ordinance and even that, final and more detailed, of 9 February 1648.” Contemporaries of Chambers recognized the lack of critical attention to the era’s “faint flutterings” as an opportunity.

In 1921, as we’ve seen, Hyder Rollins criticized George C. D. Odell’s meagre criticism on interregnum drama, much of it recycled from Wright. Rollins characterized Interregnum drama as “[p]erhaps the obscurest chapter in the history of English literature,” declaring that “our knowledge has advanced very little since the early researches of Edmond Malone and his successor, John Payne Collier.”45 Rollins helped to remedy this problem with two articles, “A Contribution to the History of the English Commonwealth Drama”

(1921) and “The Commonwealth Drama: Miscellaneous Notes” (1923). He claims to offer “not a definitive history,” but rather “a modest contribution to such a history, which may help some later student in dealing finally with the subject.”46 Rollins even points out a specific archive for his hypothetical student, noting that, to date, nobody has made “a serious study of the huge collection of news-books, pamphlets, and single sheets amassed during the years 1640-1660 by the London printer George Thomason” at the British Museum, which is “inevitably the ultimate source for a historical account of the Commonwealth stage.” Rollins himself made use of this archive, and as a critic

45Rollins, “A Contribution,” p. 267. 46Ibid, p. 267-8. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 201

bringing new documents to light, he quotes directly and extensively from mid-seventeenth century newsbooks, pamphlets and ballads. Rollins focuses on the stage and performance:

he discusses illicit theatrical production in London and the provinces, performances on

the continent, the renewed theatrical activity “with little or no concealment” in 1647,47

the renewed ordinances, drolls, rope-dancing, Davenant’s operas, the lives of the actors, the demolition of the various theatres, and various theatre raids. Like his predecessors,

Rollins continues to frame drama as a royalist enterprise, commenting that, “from a

political point of view, [the closure of the theatres] was entirely just, for the hostility of

the players to Parliament, their loyalty to the King, was notorious. Without question,

the stage would have been used to foment discontent and rebellion against Parliament.”48 Despite his critique of others’ overreliance on James Wright, Rollins cites Wright’s old

chestnut about the player-turned-soldiers, and claims that “majority of the actors, as

well as many of the playwrights” took up arms for the King during the war.49 Rollins at one point states that, “No satisfactory history of the Commonwealth drama can be written until someone has made a thorough study of the enforcement of the laws against actors in the provinces.” The statement reveals Rollins’s taxonomic ideal: though he himself only oﬀers a few examples of provincial playing and enforcement,50 he hopes his partial survey will be expanded.

The challenge posed by Rollins to produce a “thorough study” and make use of the

Thomason Collection was soon taken up by Leslie Hotson. In 1922, Hotson began his dissertation on drama of the Commonwealth and Restoration, for which he “took an extensive and careful search” through the Thomason Collection and related archives at the British Museum. This project became a book-length monograph, The Common- wealth and Restoration Stage (1928). Hotson cites Rollins throughout, and remarks that

47Ibid, p. 297. 48Ibid, p. 271. 49Ibid, p. 271-3. 50Ibid, p. 304. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 202

“Mr. Rollins has performed a notable service in re-awakening interest in the period.”51 Hotson oﬀers a taxonomy of theatrical infractions and enforcement during the theatre ban. Much like Rollins, Hotson includes lengthy direct quotations from the documents of the Thomason Collection. His meticulous study verges on the encyclopedic, yet Hot- son concedes that much was omitted: “so voluminous were the documents discovered that the mere reading of them was a serious task, and their reproduction in extension quite out of the question.”52 Hotson maintains many of Rollins’s interests – theatrical infractions and enforcement – and follows Rollins in many of his conclusions. Hotson describes English drama as a royalist pastime; and notes that “the locus classicus” for details about the player-actors in the King’s Army “is the often-quoted Historia Histri- onica,” before quoting it anew.53 The main objective for both Rollins and Hotson was to shed light on an obscure moment in theatre history. As such, in many cases, they simply reproduce mid-seventeenth-century documents from the Thomason Collection, and let the documents speak for themselves.

The meticulous eﬀorts of Rollins and Hotson would be starting points for later criticism on the theatre ban. My introduction outlines twenty- and twenty-ﬁrst-century criticism on

English drama between 1642 and 1660, which variously explores the relationship between drama and politics, the eﬀect of the theatre ban on publication and dramatic reading, illegal performance and so on. I will not reiterate my engagement with those critics here.54 Rather, by way of conclusion I will outline how the period between 1642 and 1660

ﬁgures in our ﬁeld more generally. As the decisive endpoint to a longstanding theatrical tradition, the ban established the aesthetic and chronological limits of what we now call renaissance drama, transforming it into a coherent genre associated with a discrete historical period. One can imagine an alternative reality in which the English professional

51Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, p. vii. 52Ibid, p. viii. 53Ibid, p. 13. 54See Introduction. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 203 drama which began in 1576 was not interrupted by an extended hiatus in 1642. English drama might have continued to evolve, by, say, allowing actresses on the professional stage, incorporating moveable scenery and other technological innovations, increasing ticket prices and reducing theatrical spaces so that English was increasingly patronized by elite audiences, and relying on certain genres (bawdy comedies and heroic tragedies) and particular narrative and poetic features (unambiguous plots and tidy heroic verse) that catered to this elite audience. But the abrupt conclusion to English professional theatre in 1642 prevented these particular changes from being incorporated to the “early modern” dramatic tradition; instead, they would come to be the defining features of Restoration drama. Early modern drama would be defined as a popular tradition that attracted socio-economically diverse audiences who watched all-male casts performing wholesome and satirical comedies, and ambiguous, pessimistic, politically-inflected tragedies.55 The years between 1642 and 1660 provide a clear barrier between what we see as the two distinct, coherent traditions of Renaissance and Restoration. Of course, such a picture of the coherent genre of early modern drama belies its variety, as it inevitably evolved during its sixty year run. Marlowe’s bombastic “mighty line,” celebrated in the 1590s, was anachronistic by the early seventeenth century; end rhyme iambic pentameter went from serious- to insincere-sounding within the span of Shakespeare’s own career; Mucedorus and The Maid’s Tragedy are two very different kinds of plays. But the sharp conclusion of the theatre ban confined all this variation into a single pre-1642 tradition.

A particular conclusion changes the meaning of the thing – a life, a war, a literary tradition – that has ended. A regular morning is suddenly imbued with meaning if one is hit by a bus at noon; conversations, events and actions are remembered diﬀerently by the survivors than if the regular day had proceeded like all the other regular days.

55For an extended analysis of the diﬀerences between the dramatic idioms of the Renaissance and Restoration, see Wendy Griswold, Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theater, 1576-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 104-108. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 204

When something is unexpectedly cut short, we reshape our impression of its features and achievements. The premature death of the twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe in

1593 transformed what might otherwise be his early plays into his last ones; had Shake- speare died in 1593, we might celebrate Titus Andronicus as his masterpiece, instead of an immature theatrical spectacle that contained hints of his later greatness. The field of “English Renaissance Drama, 1576-1642” is organized around and defined by its moment of conclusion. The closure of the theatres is such a potent finale in our collective critical imaginations, that, even with our longstanding preoccupation with Shakespeare, 1642 has supplanted 1616 as the end of the Shakespearean era. Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean

Stage, 1574-1642 ends not with the biological death of its eponymous playwright, but with the death of theatre in 1642. (That the era of “the Shakespearean stage” begins before Shakespeare actually starts his career is a subject for another monograph.) The ban immediately transformed ideas about drama in the 1640s and 1650s, and these ideas were consciously or involuntarily incorporated into ideas about English drama in the Restoration, eighteenth century, to our own moment, even in cases where the new ideas aimed to reject and replace earlier ones. Yet the lasting repercussions of the theatre ban on the ﬁeld of early modern drama are rarely considered in the ﬁeld itself. The theatre ban is the black hole around which scholars of early modern drama orbit.

All criticism is autobiographical. Marjorie Garber describes the presentist narcissism of even historical or historicist criticism; we as scholars, she explains, are interested in “the fantasy space of ‘early modern’ England, the England of Elizabeth and James, in which we are busily discovering all kinds of behaviors and social practices, from colonialism to imperialism to transvestism to sodomy, that make it the mirror of today.”56 Much of the work of early modern scholarship is devoted to describing and accounting for what we see as foreign attitudes in the early modern period, a moment when early modern

56Marjorie Garber, “Shakespeare as Fetish,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.2 (1990), pp. 242-250. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 205

drama was seen as merely entertaining “light-color summer stuffe” or sub-literary “riffe raffes” and “baggage books.”57 Other work aims to reveal the similarities between early

modern and modern preferences, where readers recognized Shakespeare as a “literary

dramatist” and bought enough of his texts to make him the bestselling playwright in

the seventeenth century.58 Still, no matter the specific cultural resonances of plays – as riff-raff or literature – we share crucial affinities with the early modern people who

enjoyed plays, ﬁlled the London theatres, and bought playbooks at bookstalls. The anti-

stage invective of Anglican killjoys such as Stephen Gosson, or hysterical Puritans such

as William Prynne represented a vocal minority, the lunatic fringe of a commercially and

artistically successful theatre industry that hummed along for six decades.

But if the early modern period is the mirror of our times, the era of the theatre ban is

the fun house version, a period so distorted that we struggle in vain to see ourselves.

It is the one moment where English drama is not valued (whether as entertainment or literary treasure), but something to be banned, discarded and silenced. It is the one

moment when Shakespeare is not regularly printed (as either a best-selling dramatist or

anchor of the literary canon) but is rather a despised old dramatist. Scholars describe

the theatre ban as a historical aberration too strange to be properly understood, and

instead quickly dismissed as an empty void: “Almost no publication, almost no performance, almost no biography, almost no criticism.”59 The twenty-year theatrical hiatus

so confused dramatic tastes that Shakespeare emerged from the ban with a reputation

as an “ignorant and archaic rustic.”60 As people who have devoted our lives to the study

of early modern drama, we are uncomfortable with the one moment in history which so explicitly repudiates the value of what we study, and as such, in our work we push

57Middleton, Epistle to The Roaring Girl (1611), A3r; Thomas Bodley, Letter to Thomas James, dated 1 January 1612, in G. W. Wheeler, ed. Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, First Keeper of the Bodleian Library (Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 219-222. 58Erne, Shakespeare and the Book Trade, p. 167. 59Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, p. 12-3. 60Dobson, Making of the National Poet, p. 18. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 206 against it, endeavour to show the errors of those who closed the theatres. Gary Taylor argues that all criticism since 1660 represents an eﬀort reverse the cultural aberration of the theatre ban, to undo the damage done to English drama and Shakespeare between

1642 and 1660:

The whole subsequent history of Shakespearean criticism, scholarship, interpretation, and performance, is a history of the retrieval, analysis, and syn- thesis of what seemed lost by 1659. . . .Shakespeare and Jonson, the preferred reading of Charles I, returned from exile with Charles II, like all the monarchy’s other retainers and favorites. Their relative neglect during the preceding years was treated as a literary interregnum, a discontinuity regarded by them, and by almost all subsequent critics, as no less deplorable and unnatural than its political counterpart. And every succeeding age has re-enacted this process of corrective nostalgia. The ﬁrst scholarly monograph devoted entirely to Shakespeare, published in 1726, was called Shakespeare Restored. Two and a half centuries later, one of our most distinguished and respected Shakespeare scholars defended his own works in an article entitled “Shakespeare Restored — Once Again!” The work of restitution never ends.61

One cannot be nostalgic for something that is not gone; the continual re-enactment of “this process of corrective nostalgia” depends on the prohibition doing away with drama in 1642. Such nostalgia informs the late-twentieth century lecture hall: Marjorie Garber asks what is it about Shakespeare “that calls up this nostalgia for the certainties of truth and beauty – a nostalgia that, like (I would contend) all nostalgias, is really a nostalgia for something that never was?...That Shakespeare is the dream-space of nostalgia for the aging undergraduate (that is to say, for just about everyone) seems self-evidently true, and, to tell the truth not all bad. He is. . . the fantasy of originary cultural wholeness, the last vestige of universalism.”62 The pre-1642 theatre is a prelapsarian space, where apprentices and monarchs gathered to hear Shakespeare’s “universal” poetry. Since 1660, we’ve tried to perform, edit, study and write ourselves back into the popular early modern theatre: to speak, again and again, and so undo theatrical nothingness of the ban. In

61Taylor, Shakespeare Reinvented, p. 12-3. 62Garber, p. 243. Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 207 other words, the theatre ban is prime mover for all subsequent scholarship of Shakespeare and early modern drama. The theatre ban created the conditions in which everyone would subsequently work; it was the event that made such work possible. No one after

1642 could see an early modern play as it was originally staged; it is precisely this loss that makes the “work of restitution,” all of our work of recovery, possible and necessary. Taylor and Dobson’s long range histories of Shakespeare’s ascendency amount to cultural histories of our ﬁeld, whether one call it “Shakespeare Studies” or “English Renaissance

Drama.” Both begin in 1660, the moment when Shakespeare began his long journey up from the nadir to the centre of the English literary canon.

But the dramatic commentators who, starting in 1660, ﬁrst sought to correct the “deplorable and unnatural” neglect of Shakespeare and Jonson did not suddenly spring up fully formed in 1660, like Venus in the shell. William Davenant, who played a large role in restoring Shakespeare to the stage and page after 1660, was alive and dramatically active between 1642 and 1660. Davenant’s composition and staging of new drama palatable to

Cromwell’s government seems to have been an act of political expediency. Yet, though

Davenant was a political opportunist, his patronage of Shakespeare after 1660 did not merely reﬂect a cynical attempt to ingratiate himself with Charles II. Davenant, after all, relished the rumors that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. Given his later embrace of Shakespeare, it seems likely that Davenant’s appreciation of Shakespeare was in hiber- nation during the ban, covertly preparing for a more overt action after the theatres were restored. The same must be true for many others alive during the theatrical prohibition who helped resurrect Shakespeare after 1660.

More importantly, the so-called dramatic “nadir” of the theatre ban era was itself a moment of deliberate and sustained dramatic restitution, as this dissertation has shown.

Drama lovers in the 1640s and 1650s recognized the devastating cultural losses that resulted from the theatre ban. They set out to salvage drama through publication (of Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 208 plays never before printed, of comprehensive catalogues of drama, of commonplace books of dramatic quotation) and through performance (of illegal plays and drolls). They also attempted to salvage drama’s reputation, creating paratexts and new printed forms that asserted its value. The theatre ban imitated processes that conﬁrmed the high cultural status of drama, as well as processes that ensured the survival of many texts that would be studied in the coming centuries. To put it in the simplest terms, we study English Renaissance drama for three reasons, the same reasons that motivated the

“ﬁrst” commentary on English renaissance drama in the Restoration: because we think it is good and important, because something exists to study, and because it is obscure enough that it can sustain an entire ﬁeld of study. English renaissance drama’s goodness, existence, and obscurity were forged in the crucible of the theatre ban.

4 Epilogue: Dramatic Resurrection

Strolling in London in 1659, one would see signs of English drama’s destruction and resilience; the demolished theatres, plucky illegal performers, and a surge of playbooks from the bookstalls. If one time-travelled to London in 2017, strolling around one would see evidence of English drama’s incredible resurrection in the theatres, in bookstores and in scholarly institutions. This resurrection is perhaps best exempliﬁed by the rebuilt Third Globe in Southwark, completed in 1997 or three-and-a-half centuries after Sir Matthew

Brend pulled it down to make room for tenements in 1644. Andrew Gurr’s rousing, optimistic closing lines to Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe conveys the vast hopes and ambitions couched within the Third Globe, the vitality and excitement of “Shakespeare in performance, in a replica of his original working conditions.” The experiment of the

Third Globe, Gurr explains, “is aimed at retrieving some of the vital features of the essential Shakespeare, features of the plays which have been out of sight for the last four Chapter 5. A Cultural History of the Theatre Ban after 1660 209 centuries. If it works, we shall have rediscovered some of the ﬁnest artefacts England has ever produced.” The resurrection of the Globe is a metaphor for the entire ﬁeld of

Renaissance drama, which also aims to “retrieve some of the vital features of” Eliza- bethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama, the “features of the plays which have been out of sight for the last four centuries.” The death of English drama between 1642 and 1660 is what enabled its triumphant resurrection 350 years later; the theatre ban put dramatic features “out of sight,” allowing us to continually “retrieve them” through scholarship and performance.

Of course, the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries could never be fully recovered. For a time-traveller, the familiar sights of Bankside and Shakespearean performance at the Globe would be vastly outweighed by the differences.63 As C. Walter Hodges puts it: “We can rebuild the second Globe, but we cannot revive the Elizabethan actors, the world in which they lived, the financial and personal conditions under which they were organized, their audience, their times. We cannot reconstruct the form and pressure of the world that Shakespeare inhabited. . . Theatrical experience is like a waterfly – it lives and dies its own complicated life within a day, within a few hours of performance. If anyone seeks to reproduce a theatrical success, it starts to wither in the hand that plucks it from the past...The Globe can never be as it was. Let us accept that, but not let that it delay us. . . .Let the Globe be rebuilt for the sake of the theatre that we and others are making now, all over the world. . . the practical experience of this new-old theatre is something that scholarship and the continuing life of the stage everywhere cannot afford to ignore.”64 The working conditions of early modern dramatists and actors, and the viewing conditions of early modern spectators, can never be recovered. Early modern

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