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The Private Theaters in Crisis: Strategies at Blackfriars and Paul’S, 1606–07

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The Private Theaters in Crisis: Strategies at Blackfriars and Paul’S, 1606–07 ABSTRACT Title of Document: THE PRIVATE THEATERS IN CRISIS: STRATEGIES AT BLACKFRIARS AND PAUL’S, 1606–07 Christopher Bryan Love, Ph.D., 2006 Directed By: Professor Theodore B. Leinwand, Department of English This study addresses the ways in which the managers and principal playwrights at second Paul’s and second Blackfriars approached opportunities in the tumultuous 1606–07 period, when the two troupes were affected by extended plague closures and threatened by the authorities because of the Blackfriars’ performance of offensive satires. I begin by demonstrating that Paul’s and Blackfriars did not neatly conform to the social and literary categories or commercial models typically employed by scholars. Instead, they were collaborative institutions that readily adapted to different circumstances and situations. Their small size, different schedules, and different economics gave them a flexibility generally unavailable to the larger, more thoroughly commercial adult companies. Each chapter explores a strategy used by the companies and their playwrights to negotiate a tumultuous theatrical market. The first chapter discusses the mercenary methods employed by the private children’s theaters. Occasionally, plays or play topics were commissioned by playgoers, and some performances at Paul’s and Blackfriars may even have been “private” in the sense of closed performances for exclusive audiences. In this context, I discuss Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Blackfriars, 1607), in which Beaumont uses the boorish citizens George and Nell to lay open the private theaters’ mercenary methods and emphasize sophisticated playgoers’ stake in the Blackfriars theater. The second chapter discusses the ways private-theater playwrights used intertextuality to entertain the better sort of playgoers, especially those who might buy quartos of plays. Here I explore John Marston’s The Wonder of Women (or Sophonisba) (Blackfriars, 1606) and Francis Beaumont’s The Woman Hater (Paul’s, 1606–07), private-theater plays with related titles and shared features that premiered within a year of each other at rival playhouses. The final chapter discusses the crosscurrents between tragedy at the public and private theaters and the ways playwrights looked to opportunities such as the King of Denmark’s visit in the summer of 1606. In this context I discuss Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (King’s Men, 1606), a highly Italianized version of Hamlet that originally may have been composed for Paul’s, for whom Middleton wrote almost exclusively during the 1603–06 period. THE PRIVATE THEATERS IN CRISIS: STRATEGIES AT BLACKFRIARS AND PAUL’S, 1606–07 By Christopher Bryan Love Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor Theodore B. Leinwand, Chair Professor Kent Cartwright Professor Donna B. Hamilton Professor Laura J. Rosenthal Professor Franklin J. Hildy © Copyright by Christopher Bryan Love 2006 Acknowledgements This project is (as all such projects are) the culmination of a long journey, and I have accumulated many debts along the way. I must begin by expressing the deepest of gratitude to the chair of my advisory committee, Ted Leinwand, for his guidance, meticulous editing, and patience with my many false starts. Kent Cartwright always asked hard questions and made this study the better for it, and Donna Hamilton offered important encouragement and advice. I also owe much to Frank Hildy and Laura Rosenthal, who dedicated precious time to seeing the project through to completion and offered challenging and constructive comments. I am also grateful to Roslyn Knutson and the Folger Institute for the 2003 seminar “Theatrical Commerce and the Repertory System in Early Modern England.” These meetings provided a rich environment in which I expanded my knowledge of theater history and found inspiration for parts of this study. Indeed, I must generally thank the Folger Shakespeare Library, without which this project would have been much more difficult to complete. Along the way I profited from many important friendships, but I especially want to acknowledge the support of Tim Helwig, Magdelyn Hammond, Helen Hull, Brandi Adams, Meg Pearson, and Allyson Fetterhoff. When I moved away from campus, these friends went above and beyond, helping me gather sources, ferrying documents and books for me, and giving me places to stay. To them I am eternally grateful. I also want to acknowledge some of the people and institutions that paved the way for this project. In doing so, I greatly increase my risk of being haunted by egregious sins of omission—but silence on the important influences I now have in mind is unthinkable. My experiences with the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, then headed by Gary Taylor, have been important to me. And I especially want to thank Richard Rand at the University of Alabama, to whom I will always be deeply indebted for investing considerable time in helping a lowly master’s student find a home in a doctoral program. I also want to thank Nina Levine at the University of South Carolina for introducing me to many aspects of historical criticism during my undergraduate years. Finally, I must thank my family for their love and patience (among other things). No debt could ever be greater than mine to them. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements....................................................................................................... ii Introduction: St. Paul’s, Blackfriars, and the London Theatrical Marketplace, 1599– 1609............................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Mercenary Methods: The Private Theaters and Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle....................................................................................... 84 Chapter 2. Private-Theater Intertextuality: John Marston’s The Wonder of Women (Sophonisba) and Francis Beaumont’s The Woman Hater, Exceptional-Woman Plays at Blackfriars and Paul’s, circa 1606–07 .................................................................. 152 Chapter 3. Reading the Market: Thomas Middleton and the Composition of The Revenger’s Tragedy, circa 1606 ............................................................................... 250 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 299 iii Introduction St. Paul’s, Blackfriars, and the London Theatrical Marketplace, 1599–1609 This study contextualizes plays written for the children’s companies at St. Paul’s and Blackfriars in the first decade of the seventeenth century, with particular focus on the tumultuous years of 1606–07, when these troupes were threatened by the authorities for performing dangerous satire; forced to cope with persistent outbreaks of the plague; and faced with the prospect of competition from a thoroughly commercial boy company at Whitefriars. It is an effort further to map out the place of the private theaters in a Jacobean entertainment industry in which the interests of playwrights, playing companies, patrons, and playgoers converged in a rich and varied drama. In my analysis I explore the ways particular plays from 1606–07 functioned in the Paul’s and Blackfriars repertories, focusing on the forces shaping the composition, acquisition, and performance of play-texts. In the process, I hope to offer new insights into the methods of operation employed by Paul’s and Blackfriars, and new insights into works often neglected by scholarship. From at least the earliest years of the sixteenth century, the masters of the choristers at St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars cultivated among their charges a dramatic tradition that included performances at Court. Beginning in the 1580s, however, these officials, often working with other theatrical entrepreneurs, organized their choristers into semi-professional troupes that produced 1 plays before paying audiences at small indoor venues called “private” theaters. These companies achieved a measure of success during John Lyly’s heyday, but after encountering difficulties they both had ceased operations by around 1590–91.1 New versions of these companies, often called “second Paul’s” and “second Blackfriars,” emerged in 1599–1600, and during the first decade of the seventeenth century they were significant players on the London theatrical scene. Second Paul’s opened around 1599, organized by Master of the Choristers Edward Pearce, who generally worked in conjunction with a single playwright/stage manager but seems never to have relinquished control of his choristers’ dramatic activities.2 On the heels of Paul’s apparent success, the second Blackfriars troupe was organized in 1600 by entrepreneur Henry Evans, Master of the Choristers Nathaniel Giles, and other partners. Shares of this enterprise were sold and resold over the years, and control of the troupe shifted several times. As with their predecessors, second Paul’s and second Blackfriars produced plays at indoor private theaters that were significantly smaller than the “public” amphitheaters of the adult companies. These physical differences seem to have been accompanied by operational differences: later start times, higher admission prices, and fewer performances per week. Although some
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