The Seven Deadly Sins</Em>
Early Theatre 7.1 (2004) David Kathman Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins Among the Henslowe-Alleyn papers at Dulwich College is a document long prized by theatre historians: the handwritten ‘plot’ of a play called The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins (Dulwich College MS XIX), apparently designed to be hung on a peg backstage at a playhouse. The text of this play does not survive, but it is usually thought to be identical with Richard Tarlton’s ‘famous play of the seauen Deadly sinnes’, referred to in 1592 by Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe.1 The plot is extremely valuable for its scene-by-scene descrip- tion of the play’s action, which lists the characters and (most of) the players who played those characters in each scene. There are twenty players’ names in all: Mr. Brian, Mr. Phillipps, Mr. Pope, R. Burbadg, W. Sly, R. Cowly, John Duke, Ro. Pallant, John Sincler, Tho. Goodale, John Holland, T. Belt, Ro. Go., Harry, Kit, Vincent, Saunder, Nick, Ned, and Will. In addition, two major roles (King Henry VI and Lydgate) and several minor ones are not accompanied by any player’s name. Since this is the most complete cast list we have for any performance of a pre-restoration play, it has often been used as evidence in reconstructing the history of Elizabethan playing companies, as well as the careers of the individual players named therein.2 One problem is that the company which performed this play is nowhere named in the plot. For more than a century, most theatre historians have assumed that the company in question was some version of Lord Strange’s Men performing in the early 1590s.
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