Theatres, 1600–1625 29 3 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 48 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660 66

Home , A Shoemaker a Gentleman, John Waterson, Richard Meighen, The Court Secret

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton International Advisory Board: Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford; Jean Howard, Columbia University; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Katie Larson, University of Toronto; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading; Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield; Adam Smyth, University of London; Steven Zwicker, Washington University, St Louis. Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share a historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.

Titles include: John M. Adrian LOCAL NEGOTIATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONHOOD, 1570–1680 Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox DIPLOMACY AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Bruce Danner EDMUND SPENSER’S WAR ON LORD BURGHLEY James Daybell and Peter Hinds (editors) MATERIAL READINGS OF EARLY MODERN CULTURE Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 James Daybell THE MATERIAL LETTER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (editors) THE CULTURE OF TRANSLATION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AND FRANCE, 1500–1660 Maria Franziska Fahey METAPHOR AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA Unchaste Signification Andrew Gordon WRITING EARLY MODERN LONDON Memory, Text and Community Jane Grogan THE PERSIAN EMPIRE IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE WRITING, 1549–1622 Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (editor) THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF PURITAN WOMEN, 1558–1680 Katherine Heavey THE EARLY MODERN MEDEA Anders Ingram WRITING THE OTTOMANS Turkish History in Early Modern England

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0001 Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 15501650 James Knowles POLITICS AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE COURT MASQUE Katherine R. Larson EARLY MODERN WOMEN IN CONVERSATION Monica Matei-Chesnoiu RE-IMAGINING WESTERN EUROPEAN GEOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA David McInnis MIND-TRAVELLING AND VOYAGE DRAMA IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (editors) LOST PLAYS IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Patricia Pender EARLY MODERN WOMAN’S WRITING AND THE RHETORIC OF MODESTY Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (editors) MATERIAL CULTURES OF EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S WRITING Jane Pettegree FOREIGN AND NATIVE ON THE ENGLISH STAGE, 1588–1611 Metaphor and National Identity Fred Schurink (editor) TUDOR TRANSLATION Natasha Simonova EARLY MODERN AUTHORSHIP AND PROSE CONTINUATIONS Paul D. Stegner CONFESSION AND MEMORY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Penitential Remains Adrian Streete (editor) EARLY MODERN DRAMA AND THE BIBLE Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625 Mary Trull PERFORMING PRIVACY AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Early Modern Research Centre at the University of Reading and The Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0001 ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication

Eoin Price Tutor in English Literature, Swansea University, UK

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0001 © Eoin Price 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49491-7

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the Uk is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978-1-137-49492-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-349-69741-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Price, Eoin, 1986– Title: Public and private playhouses in Renaissance England : the politics of publication / Eoin Price, Tutor in English Literature, Swansea University, Uk. Description: New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Series: Early Modern literature in history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037960 | ISBN 9781137494917 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Theatrical companies – England – London – History – 16th century. | Theatrical companies – England – London – History – 17th century. | Renaissance – England. | Theater – England – London – History – 16th century. | Theater – England – London – History – 17th century. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare. Classification: LCC PN2589 .P75 2015 | DDC 792.09421/09032 – dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037960 www.palgrave.com/pivot DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924 For Dad in memory of Mum

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0001 Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes and Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1 1 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600 12 2 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625 29 3 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 48 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660 66

Works Cited 75 Index 90

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0001 Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my work at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. As a PhD student at the Institute, I was lucky to have been supervised by Martin Wiggins, who knows more than anyone about Renaissance drama; no one has done more to influence the way I think about theatre history. I also thank Michael Davies, who taught me when I was an undergraduate and Master’s student at the University of Liverpool, for instilling in me a love of Renaissance drama: without him, this may not have been possible. The thesis from which this book originates was examined by Michael Cordner and Michael Dobson: I thank them both for their guidance and encouragement. Later, Pete Kirwan and John Jowett offered perceptive advice which helped me conceive of this project as a book and later still, during the final stage of the writing process, Harry Newman and Elizabeth Sharrett provided generous and incisive comments. Erin Sullivan also offered helpful advice on a range of issues and has been an inspiration. At Palgrave Macmillan, Ben Doyle and Tomas Renė guided me through the publication process. The series general editors, Andrew Hadfield and Cedric Brown, also offered valuable advice which has improved the final book. Many others deserve my thanks, including Cassie Ash, Catherine Clifford, Victoria Jackson, Andy Kesson, Sarah Olive, José A. Pérez Díez, Will Sharpe, and Yolana Wassersug. I also thank the librarians of The Shakespeare Institute for their friendly support and expertise. I completed the book at Swansea University, where I now

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0002 vii viii Acknowledgements work: I owe thanks to my colleagues (in particular, Liz Herbert McAvoy) for helping me to settle in my new post. Closer to home, I thank Georgie Lucas for her love and support, both intellectual and emotional. I look forward to walking with her in Oxwich Bay and Rhossili. We are lucky to live near a beautiful place. Above all, I thank my parents. I began work on this project shortly after losing my mum: writing and thinking in some sense helped me come to terms with my loss. This is fitting, since it was my mum who taught me how to write and think. My dad sustained me through the worst of times. The book is dedicated to them both, with love.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0002 Notes and Abbreviations

Renaissance texts are cited in modern spelling throughout, thus eliminating the apparent discrepancy between citations from writers whose work is available in modern editions and those whose work is either unedited or available only in older editions. All dates displayed parenthetically refer to publication. Publication dates are taken fr o m W. W. G r e g: A Bibliograpy of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols (London: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1939–1959). The book makes use of the following abbreviations: DEEP Database of Early English Playbooks ELR English Literary Renaissance ES The Elizabethan Stage OED Oxford English Dictionary REED Records of Early English Drama SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0003 ix

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter establishes the central focus of the book: how, in the early years of the seventeenth century, indoor playhouse performances by boy companies came to be called ‘private’, in contrast to outdoor ‘public’ playhouse performances by adults. Theatre historians have long acknowledged this distinction but without subjecting it to sustained scrutiny; as a result they have obscured, or sought to explain away, the complex meanings of these important terms. The Introduction situates the book in relation to the subjects of theatre history, book history and intellectual history. It promises to overturn established thinking by offering fresh perspectives on commercial theatre culture, the printing and marketing of playbooks, and the intellectual concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the English Renaissance.

Keywords: book history; politics; private; public; Renaissance drama; theatre history

Price, Eoin. ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004   ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

In 1604 Valentine Simmes printed three editions of John Marston’s successful indoor theatre tragicomedy, The Malcontent, the third of which contained an Induction and other additions written by John Webster. The Induction was designed for performance at the Globe and featured members of the King’s Men playing themselves. It begins with a tire-man telling Will Sly ‘The gentlemen will be angry if you sit here’. Sly responds, ‘Why? We may sit upon the stage at the private house’ (A3v). The joke depends upon the audience being aware of a difference between supposedly ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of commercial theatre. Indeed, in the early seventeenth century a number of writers alluded to a ‘public/private’ division. In the 1603 Hamlet, Gilderstone, as he is named in that edition, speaks of the ‘principal public audience’ of adult companies being turned to the ‘private plays’ of boys; Marston’s Sophonisba, printed in 1606, contains an author’s note that refers to the ‘fashion of the private stage’, and by the end of the decade Thomas Dekker had incorporated references to ‘private’ playhouses in four of his pamphlets.1 In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the notion of ‘private’ commercial drama – that is, indoor performances by boy companies – had become a feature of theatrical discourse. Indoor commercial boy company drama had existed within London from 1575 until 1590 but there is no evidence of anyone referring to a commercial playhouse performance as ‘private’ in the sixteenth century, even though it was common to refer to outdoor commercial performance as ‘public’. What had changed, and how did commercial theatres come to be called by the apparently paradoxical name of ‘private’? This book is the first sustained examination of how these vitally important yet deeply complicated terms were used in relation to the vibrant theatre business of Renaissance London. The contradiction of calling a playhouse venue ‘private’ has not entirely escaped the attention of theatre historians. E.K. Chambers noted that the ‘public/private’ division was ‘inessential’ and that ‘performances in all the houses were public in the ordinary sense’, although he also used the terms as chapter headings; other influential scholarly accounts likewise posited the division in chapter titles or subheadings.2 The terms have remained in use, despite their apparently contradictory nature, in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, although they are perhaps less prominent than they once were, partly because, as Chambers noted, commercial drama, whether at indoor or outdoor venues, might be thought as public. For example, Stephen Orgel differentiates between

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004 Introduction 

‘public’, commercial drama, and ‘court or private theatre’, the latter of which he defines as‘ a playhouse commissioned by and created for a particular person or group, not ... like the Blackfriars’ (Illusion 6).3 The availability of other terms such as ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’, or ‘amphitheatre’ and ‘hall’ – the latter two advocated by Andrew Gurr as ‘better indicators of [a theatre’s] character’ – has led to a decline in critical usage (Playgoingg 14). Indeed, some critics have rejected the critical value of the terms since they have sometimes been used to imply an extreme divide between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ forms of theatre, or as Alfred Harbage called them, ‘the Theatre of a Nation’ and ‘The Theatre of a Coterie’.4 This is not always the case: Robert Weimann, writing on the subject of ‘popular’ traditions in Renaissance theatre, acknowledged a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the style of Harbage, even as he criticised the rigidity of Harbage’s approach (246–247).Walter Cohen likewise posited the distinction in his book on ‘public’ theatre, the title of which evokes Harbage’s ‘Theatre of a Nation’ nomenclature (266). However, many other critics such as Martin Butler and Gurr have argued against these sharp distinctions, and have tended to eschew the reliance on public/private division.5 One might, of course, argue just the opposite – that the amphitheatre and hall playhouses are ‘private’ because they are enclosed and command an entrance fee, in contrast to the marketplace drama of earlier generations – but the point remains the same: sharp distinctions between indoor and outdoor theatres are problematic. It has been said, then, that there are difficulties with using ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the writing of theatre history. The words can be misleading and risk encoding unsafe assumptions about the theatres and their audiences. Mark Bayer uses the terms in his recent study of the Fortune and the Red Bull as part of a wider argument about social stratification in the theatres, but while he makes an interesting case there is reason to be suspicious about the popular/elite binary.6 So, the general decline in usage is not in itself a significant problem: the words suggested by Gurr are more precise and less ideologically loaded and therefore better suited to scholarship. However, this ideological baggage is precisely what makes them worthy of study. The turn towards more neutral descriptors like ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ has inadvertently obscured the complex uses that ‘public’ and ‘private’ served to Renaissance playgoers and playmakers. While some scholars have puzzled over the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England emergence of ‘private’ into theatrical discourse, they have, ultimately, drawn blanks. William A. Armstrong suggested that the term ‘may have been designed merely to suggest a degree of exclusiveness and superiority’, but some subsequent studies have proven more reserved about coming to conclusions.7 Irwin Smith noted that ‘[t]he origin of the term “private house” or “private playhouse” is not fully understood’ (130) and in the first edition of The Shakespearean Stage, Gurr similarly stated that there ‘is no obvious reason’ for the indoor theatres of seventeenth-century London to be called private (83). Gurr has come to modify this view more recently as evinced by the changes he has made to subsequent editions of The Shakespearean Stage: in the fourth and most recent edition, he stated that the term ‘must’ have originated for this reason (142). Gurr has offered a discussion of the terms when others have relegated the issue to the footnotes of theatre history.8 He has elsewhere suggested that ‘private’ was a construction used by the seventeenth-century boy companies to imply freedom from the Master of the Revels, the licenser of ‘public’ performances.9 However, these explanations are in need of re-examination: the idea that ‘private’ is associated with snobbery looks less attractive when viewed in its wider context, and the suggestion that the term was used to circumvent licensing is also in need of reappraisal. This book instead suggests that the process by which ‘private’ entered into the theatrical vocabulary was more complex. There has not been a thorough investigation of the use of ‘private’ and, its osten- sible opposite, ‘public’ in the language of Renaissance theatre and there needs to be in order to challenge received assumptions. Standard accounts of theatre history, from Chambers to Gurr, have been unable fully to acknowledge the variety and vitality of the terms: indeed, the perceived familiarity of these concepts may well have obscured many of their specific historical connotations.10 A renewed historical sensitivity to the language of theatre culture is therefore necessary. This book, then, addresses the elaborate web of meanings created from these important but historically contingent terms by examining evidence from a range of interlocutors including dramatists, theatre impresarios, booksellers and legislators. In doing so, it contributes to the study of theatre, book and intellectual history. In its detailed analysis of a range of documentation – for example, anti-theatrical writing, Privy Council correspondence, royal proclamations and, especially, title pages – it is influenced by Tiffany Stern who has shown

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004 Introduction  that the careful, imaginative study of theatrical documents can help counter dominant assumptions about the way Renaissance theatre was conceived.11 While recent archaeological and archival discover- ies have enabled scholars to learn more about the physical spaces of the Renaissance theatres – in turn leading to fresh insights about the staging of plays – this book argues that interpretation is at least as important as discovery.12 Many of the sources consulted in this study have been available for decades but have been afforded little attention, or viewed through the lens of suspect critical assumptions. This book reexamines the evidence to offer new ways of thinking about these theatre spaces: it assesses how they were conceived of by the people who built them, worked in them, attended them and wanted them shut down. Much of the evidence drawn upon in the following chapters derives from printed playbooks and thus the book joins a wider conversation about the print market in early modern England. The marketing of printed playbooks has become a significant sub-field of early modern bibliography. Unsurprisingly, given the cultural centrality afforded to him, Shakespeare is the prime subject of many such studies, as shown by recent work from Lukas Erne, and the contributors to the special edition ‘Shakespeare for Sale’ edited by Adam G. Hooks.13 This book, however, takes a holistic view by considering the wider corpus of printed playbook material. In this, it follows the pioneering work of Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser whose electronic resource DEEP, Database of Early English Playbooks, has helped make the study of early modern play publication easier.14 In contrast, however, this book considers ‘public’ and ‘private’ to be important terms worthy of extended investigation: Farmer and Lesser suggest that the terms are ‘best avoided’ and implicitly unworthy of study (‘Vile Arts’ 107). The process of analysing playbook advertisement involves considering the roles played by stationers, including printers, publishers and booksellers. Consequently, the book enters into dialogue with new work by Marta Straznicky and the contributors to Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliographyy as it likewise investigates the different ways in which bookmakers invested in the marketing of the texts they produced.15 In addition to title pages, the book also addresses the complex rhetorical forms of playbook prefatory material, thereby participating in the growing interest in Renaissance paratexts.16 Above all, the book is influenced yb Lesser’s brilliant work on the political implications of printed playbooks.17 Lesser locates the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England precise context of a play’s publication and shows how playbook title pages and prefatory materials participate in wider polemical debates. In a similar vein, paying close attention to the way the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ are used by playbook producers can yield new insights into the politics of theatre culture. By attending to these political meanings the book also aims to contribute to the study of intellectual history. Recent work on the public/ private boundary in Renaissance culture, heavily influenced by Jürgen Habermas, has tended to favour a theoretical approach.18 Indeed, critics have begun to consider the phenomenon of the Renaissance playhouses in the light of Habermas; Paul Yachnin has argued that plays enabled audiences to think about contested notions of publicity and privacy in new ways.19 But, while useful, modern theoretical models do not always effectively correspond to historical evidence. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century people did not use terms like ‘public sphere’ and Conal Condren has warned that contemporary criticism has too often conflated modern and early modern attitudes to the public and private.20 This book privileges historical evidence over modern theorising in order better to understand the variety of contexts in which the terms were used. The book also makes the case for the importance of theatre to studies of political history. Addressing the way people thought about theatre is one way of addressing how people thought about politics: the claims made about ‘public’ or ‘private’ drama are often political. Indeed, historians such as Peter Lake, Thomas Cogswell and Alastair Bellany have provided examples of how political figures like George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, endured fraught interactions with the politicised audiences of the early modern playhouses.21 This book does not address any single flashpoint, but rather suggests that politics pervaded English theatre culture. The book offers a broader chronological range than many other studies of Renaissance theatre. Too often the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, in which Shakespeare worked, takes prec- edence in literary and theatre history accounts. Chapters 1 and 2 accord that period due attention, not least because it coincides with the emergence of ‘private’ as a descriptor for commercial playhouse performance, but Shakespeare is only one of a number of authors under scrutiny. Indeed, some of the most intriguing examples refer to boy company plays, or plays at theatres such as the Cockpit (discussed in Chapter 3), which have received far less attention than the King’s

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004 Introduction 

Men’s Blackfriars theatre or the Globe. The book also addresses the comparatively understudied early Elizabethan period: the first chapter considers plays such as Richard Edward’s Damon and Pithias which were performed at non-commercial venues, as well as those played at commercial playhouses, and it focuses attention on the indoor theatres of the 1570s and 1580s. Chapter 3 deals with the Caroline theatre which, despite fine work by Butler, Adam Zucker, Farmer, and others, is too often treated as a barren, post-Shakespearean landscape, rather than a place of vitality and creativity.22 Standard accounts of Renaissance drama often use 1642 as a terminal date, but this book ends by examining the period between the closing of the theatres and the Restoration, as Renaissance plays continued to be performed at commercial playhouses, albeit illegally. The book is divided into three chapters and an epilogue. The chapter divisions are determined by events from theatre history, so the opening chapter discusses the period in which commercial theatre began in London and the second chapter examines the emergence of the term ‘private’ in relation to the second set of indoor boy company performers. The third chapter has a less precise start date, but it takes as its focus the accelerated use of the term ‘private’ on indoor theatre playbook title pages around the end of the 1620s. The epilogue details the period of theatre closure and finishes at the start of the Restoration, when a new chapter of theatre history was about to begin. These theatrical moments do not coincide with regime changes, but they do occur close to monarchic transitions. So, the first chapter deals with Tudor – and, more specifically, Elizabethan – theatre, the second starts near the end of the Elizabethan regime before addressing the Jacobean period, the third discusses the Caroline period, and the epilogue attends to the civil war and its aftermath. The first chapter considers the sixteenth-century theatrical usage of ‘private’ and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that the term was used to refer to commercial playhouse performance in this period. Next, it addresses the earlier emergence of two important signifiers – ‘public’ and ‘common’ – which were used in the sixteenth century to refer to performances; it then refocuses on the use of ‘private’ as a commercial term in the early years of the seventeenth century. The second chapter assesses those early years in greater detail and debunks the argument that ‘private’ was primarily used to circumvent censorship. It then pays attention to the continued use of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England the terms throughout the Jacobean period, as they seemingly waxed in and out of favour. The third chapter considers the theatrical and political environment of Caroline England, in which indoor theatres were seemingly established as the dominant venue for plays and in which ‘private’ became used with greater frequency. It also attends to occasions in which the terms are used in an ostensibly contradictory manner and argues that such oddities can yield valuable insights into theatrical culture. The epilogue examines the meaning of the words at the very end of the Caroline era. It then addresses the changes they underwent in the following decades of theatre closure and how they began to fall out of use in the Restoration. As a whole, the book argues that ‘private’ emerged due to a variety of complex social, political and theatrical forces. In examining these forces it offers new perspectives which overturn established thinking about the commercial theatre, the printing and marketing of playbooks, and the intellectual concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the English Renaissance.

Notes

 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, E3r; John Marston, Sophonisba, G3v; Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sins (London: 1606), D2r; Jests to Make You Merry (London: 1607), F3r; Lantern and Candlelightt (London: 1608), L1r; The Gull’s Hornbook (London: 1609), E2v.  E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. 4, p. 356. See also, G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1961), vol. 6.  For other distinctions between ‘public’, commercial theatre and ‘private’ non-commercial drama, see Siobhan Keenan’s discussion of ‘private and occasional drama’ in, Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 74–79. The potentially ‘public’ nature, even of ostensibly private forms of drama, such as closet plays, has been addressed by Marta Straznicky, in Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).  Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Macmillan, 1952), which builds on work in his Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). For reservations about public/private after Harbage see Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, ‘Vile Arts: The Marketing of English Printed Drama, 1512–1660’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 39 (2000), pp. 77–165 (107). For a similar quibble see Steven

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004 Introduction 

Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 170.  Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 293–306; Gurr, Playgoingg, p. 303. In The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Ann Jennalie Cook also argued against Harbage, although her work is in turn countered by the critics listed above.  Mark Bayer, Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2011). See also, Bayer, ‘The Curious Case fo the Two Audiences: Thomas Dekker’s Match Me in London’, in Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, ed. by Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 55–70.  William A. Armstrong, ‘The Elizabethan Private Theatres: Facts and Problems’, The Society for Theatre Research Pamphlet Series (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1958).  Sometimes literally: Farmer and Lesser (p. 107), Mullaney (p. 170), and Orgel (p. 6) all make points about the meaning of ‘private’ in theatrical discourse in footnotes or endnotes.  Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 56–57, pp. 337–338; and The Shakespearean Stage, 4th edition, pp. 66–67.  A number of invigorating studies have sought to reconsider ostensibly familiar terms in order to reveal otherwise obscured historical meanings. See, for example, Andy Kesson and Emma Smith, ‘Introduction: Towards a Definition of Print Popularity’, in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, ed. by Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 2–15 and Andy Kesson, ‘Was Comedy a Genre in Early Modern England?’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 54 (2014), pp. 213–225. See, also, Tiffany Stern’s work on the idea that plays encompass ‘two hours traffic’: ‘Time for Shakespeare: Hourglasses, Sundials, Clocks, and Early Modern Theatre’, Journal of the British Academy, 3 (2015), pp. 1–33.  Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern Englandd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  See, for example, Julian Bowsher and Pat Miller, The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark: Excavations 1988–90 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2009); Eva Griffith, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c. 1605–1619) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).  Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatistt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; rev. 2013); Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Adam G. Hooks, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare for Sale’, Philological Quarterly, 91 (2012), pp. 139–150.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

 For an early, representative example of their work, see Farmer and Lesser, ‘Vile Arts’. On DEEPP see, Farmer and Lesser, ‘Early Modern Digital Scholarship and DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks’, Literature Compass, 5 (2008), pp. 1139–1153. See also: DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, ed. by. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser http://deep.sas.upenn.edu [accessed 18 May 2015].  Marta Straznicky, ed. Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Bibliography (Philadelphia; Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For a different approach to the study of early modern stationers, see Peter W.M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).  See for example, Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, eds, Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).  Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also, Alan B. Farmer, ‘John Norton and the Politics of Shakespeare’s History Plays in Caroline England’, in Shakespeare’s Stationers, pp. 147–176.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge; Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991). For examples of recent work in the Renaissance period, see Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Mary Trull, Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy, ed. by Angela Vanhaelen and Joseph P. Ward (New York: Routledge, 2013).  See, for example, Paul Yachnin, ‘Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England’, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe, pp. 81–95 and ‘Performing Publicity’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 28 (2010), pp. 201–219. For an overview of criticism on privacy and Renaissance theatre see Eoin Price, ‘The Politics of Privacy and the Renaissance Public Stage’, Literature Compass, 12 (2015), pp. 1–11.  Conal Condren, ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early-Modern England’, Intellectual History Review, 19 (2009), pp. 15–28.  Thomas Cogswell and Peter Lake, ‘Buckingham Does the Globe: Henry VIII and the Politics of Popularity in the 1620s’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 60 (2009), pp. 253–278; Alastair Bellany, ‘The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004 Introduction 

Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 200 (2008), pp. 37–76.  Butler, Theatre and Crisis; Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer, eds, Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0004 1 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600

Abstract: Chapter 1 debunks one of the standard scholarly assumptions about the indoor playhouses: that they were described as ‘private’ in the sixteenth century. It shows that although ‘private’ might be used to refer to domestic performances and academic drama, it was not used in relation to the first set of Elizabethan indoor theatres. Instead, the chapter advances a more complex argument which accounts for the varying ways in which ‘public’ and ‘common’ were applied to sixteenth-century commercial playhouses. In doing so, it contextualises the early seventeenth-century emergence of the term ‘private’ in the discourse of commercial theatre. For the second set of indoor companies, the term appeared an attractive way of differentiating themselves from the ‘public’ playhouses.

Keywords: academic drama; book history; Elizabethan drama; private; public; theatre history

Price, Eoin. ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600 

On 16 May 1559, the recently crowned Queen Elizabeth issued a royal proclamation ‘Prohibiting Unlicensed Interludes and Plays, Especially on Religion or Policy’. It declared that ‘The Queen’s majesty straightly forbid[s] all manner [of] interludes to be played either openly or privately’, unless the performance was licensed by the appropriate authorities (Hughes and Larkin 2: 115). Almost ten years later to the day, the City of London produced a precept which called upon ‘Innkeepers, table-keepers, taverners, hall-keepers, or brewers’ to resist staging plays ‘either openly or privately’ until the last day of September. The precept elaborated that the subjects should not allow performances ‘within his or their mansion house, yard, court, garden, orchard, or other place or places whatsoever’ within the City or in its liberties and suburbs (Chambers, ES 4: 267). This order was amended in the Act of Common Council of London, issued on 6 December 1574. The Act banned ‘public shows’ within the liberties of the City and affirmed that no performances should take place without the prior perusal of the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen. It made an exception, however, for ‘plays, interludes, comedies, tragedies or shows ... played or showed in the private house, dwelling, or lodging of any nobleman, citizen, or gentleman’ provided that there was no money collected from the auditors, and reserving the right of the Lord Mayor and Alderman to define what constituted a ‘private place’ for performance.1 What this demonstrates is that from the earliest stages of Elizabeth’s reign, national and local authorities acknowledged ‘open’ and ‘private’ forms of playing and attempted to control both. This sort of distinction existed earlier, but was not articulated so clearly or frequently. On 6 August 1549 Edward VI issued a proclamation ‘Prohibiting Plays and Interludes’ which forbade ‘any kind of interlude, play, dialogue, or other matter set forth in form of play, in any place, public or private within this realm’, although it did not elaborate on what it meant by ‘public’ and ‘private’ (Hughes and Larkin 1: 478–479). Mary’s 18 August 1553 proclamation ‘Offering Freedom of Conscience; Prohibiting Religious Controversy, Unlicensed Plays, and Printing’ banned unauthorised preaching in ‘other places both public and private’, but did not specifically mention playing in the same framework (Hughes and Larkin 2: 6). An earlier proclamation, from the Henrician period, ‘Limiting Performance of Interludes and Plays’ noted that plays performed in ‘the houses of noblemen or of the Lord Mayor, Sheriffs, or Aldermen ... gentlemen, or of the substantial and said commoners or head parishioners of the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England same city’ were permissible, but it did not call such performances ‘private’ (Hughes and Larkin 1: 342).2 These kinds of performance came to be called ‘private’ regularly in the Elizabethan period and were often contrasted with ‘open’ or ‘public shows’ but there are no records referring to plays performed on the London commercial stage as ‘private’ until the start of the seventeenth century. This chapter, then, contests the widespread assumption that sixteenth-century commercial playhouses were described as ‘private’. Instead, it advances a more complex argument which takes into account the varying ways in which ‘public’ and ‘common’ were applied to commercial theatres. In doing so, it contextualises the first recorded references to ‘private’ commercial performance and provides a fresh perspective on the emergence of that important term. The title pages of early Elizabethan plays often allude to indoor domestic performance. It was relatively common at this time for title pages to provide playing instructions, presumably to help the reader should they wish to perform the play. The title page of Thomas Preston’s Cambyses (1569), printed by John Allde, includes a chart which suggests the play may be performed by eight, William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feastt (1570), also printed by Allde, indicates ‘Seven may easily play this interlude’, while New Custom’s (1573) title page, printed by William How for Abraham Veale, suggests only ‘four’ are needed to play it success- fully.3 These plays, and others like them, implicitly encourage ‘private’ performance, but there is one title page which made an explicit statement. Nathaniel Woodes’ The Conflictf o Conscience, printed in 1581 by Richard Bradock, contains a title page which divides ‘The Actors names ... into six parts, most convenient for such as be disposed, either to show this comedy in private houses, or otherwise’. The ‘private houses’ are evidently the sort of domestic environment that the 1574 Act of Common Council declared permissible. Straznicky has drawn attention to such spaces as the site of private play readings, but there is no evidence that this particular play was ever performed and it was not a commercial play, so there is no suggestion that ‘private house’ might mean a hall playhouse, as it could do in the seventeenth century. 4 Yet although ‘private’ was not used in a commercial performance context in the sixteenth century, it could refer to other forms of non- commercial drama, beyond the household. The only other sixteenth- century playbook title page to use the word ‘private’ offers another possible avenue of interpretation. Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pithias

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600 

(1571) printed, according to the title page, by Richard Jones, announces that the play was performed before the Queen by the Children of the Chapel and that the prologue contained within it is a new addition ‘somewhat altered for the proper use of them that hereafter shall have occasion to play it, either in private, or open audience’. ‘Private’ here refers not to a past performance but to a potential, future performance. The publication predates the indoor commercial theatre by four years so it cannot refer to the Blackfriars or Paul’s playhouses, although it is not inconceivable to think that the Chapel Royal Boys, then under the stew- ardship of William Hunnis, might have sought a regular playing space at this time. The play was published again in 1582, when indoor commercial theatres were indeed established, and although there are minor title page alterations the text seems simply to be following the earlier edition. It is far more likely that the title page refers to another form of performance such as at one of the universities: indeed, the play had been performed at Merton College, Oxford on 21 January 1568 (Elliott 2: 848). University plays might be said to be performed ‘privately in the master’s lodging, or publicly in the college hall’ (Elliott 2: 608). The Records of English Drama (REED) volume for Oxford does not include any references to ‘private’ performances prior to the publication of Damon and Pithias, but the Cambridge volume does offer some examples. Statutes from Trinity College Cambridge, dated 1559–1560, demonstrate how ‘nine domestic readers’ were made responsible for staging plays ‘in the hall privately or publicly’ (Nelson 2: 1113).5 Later, in 1573, statutes at Gonville and Caius College forbade attendance of performances outside of the college but permitted plays performed ‘privately’ within the college (Nelson 1: 267).6 The terms continued to be used in the seventeenth century at both universities. The title pages of academic plays sometimes affirm this distinction: so for example, Caesar and Pompeyy or Caesar’s Revenge (1607) claims to have been ‘Privately acted by the students of Trinity College in Oxford’ and Thomas Randolph’s Trinity College Cambridge entertainments Aristippus and The Conceited Pedlarr were printed together in a 1630 collection with the title page declaration: ‘Presented in a private show’.7 Indeed, academic play title pages also frequently declare public performances: examples include the second part of The Return from Parnassus (1606) which was ‘Publicly acted by the students in Saint John’s College in Cambridge’ and Jasper Fisher’s Fuimus Troes (1633) which was said to have been ‘Publicly represented by the gentlemen students of Magdalen College in Oxford’. The

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England title page of Damon and Pithias might be referring to this tradition within the universities, to a court performance, or it could be referring to the sort of performance evoked by The Conflict fo Conscience, but it does not seem to refer to a commercial theatre venue. The play’s editor, Ros King, notes that the play was also performed twice at Hampton Court over the Christmas of 1564–1565 and later, perhaps, at Lincoln’s Inn, before its documented performance at Merton College, but she also shows that the play was known to the fellows of Edwards’ alma mater, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She concludes by gesturing towards the range of potential non-commercial playhouse venues: ‘[t]here is no way of knowing how many other schools, colleges or households took up the invitation of the printed title page to perform it for “private audience”’(King 92). There is also an intriguing reference to ‘private’ theatrical business in Henslowe’s diary. In March 1598 Henslowe recorded a payment ‘for carrying and bringing of the stuff back ga ain when they played [as] in Fleet Street private and then our stuff was lost’ (Foakes, Henslowe 88). Paul Menzer, using this as evidence that the Admiral’s Men sometimes performed in the City of London, suggests that the event in question might be a private performance as permitted by the Act of Common Council (‘Tragedians’ 177). It could, however, refer to a rehearsal: the entry immediately preceding it records how Henslowe lent five shillings ‘unto the company for to spend at the reading of that book at the Sun in New Fish Street’ (Foakes, Henslowe 86). An earlier entry, dated 8 January 1598, shows that Henslowe lent 30 shillings ‘unto the company when they first played Dido [a lost play, rather than Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage] at night’, and this, given the timing of the play, and the fact that it is listed as the ‘first’ performance, may also refer to a rehearsal (Foakes, Henslowe 86). Indeed there were various kinds of rehearsal that might be required: plays had to be vetted by the Master of the Revels in order to be performed commercially, but they would also need to be rehearsed if they were to be played at court. Records show that in November 1574, the Master of the Revels, Thomas Blagrave, authorised payment relating to the ‘perusing and reforming’ of a play by Richard Farrant (Feuillerat 238). Records also show that, in 1579/80, Edmund Tilney, his successor, sanctioned travel costs for ‘the examining and rehearsing of divers plays’ (Feuillerat 326). Equally a playwright would have to have his play read in a rehearsal prior to the play receiving commission from the company, and of course there was also rehearsal as it is more usually understood: the company rehearsing their parts to learn them by heart,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600  a process described as ‘private’ by Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey (4).8 It is possible then that Henslowe here referred to a form of rehearsal and it is true that such forms were described as ‘private’. In 1609 the King’s Men were rewarded for their ‘private practise’ in the time of infection, and another document from the same period notes that since ‘public playing within the City’ was banned due to plague, the King’s Men ‘practised privately for his Majesty’s service’.9 So ‘private’ was used in a theatrical context in the sixteenth century and could symbolise a variety of different performances or events. However, there is no evidence that the term was used in relation to the indoor theatres at this point. There are numerous references in legal proceedings to both St Paul’s and Blackfriars as being a ‘house’, but there are none that describe either as a ‘private house’. The St Paul’s venue, ostensibly in the almonry house, was regularly referred to as a ‘house’: Sebastian Westcott bequeathed the ‘use of the almonry house of the said Cathedral Church of St Paul where I now dwell’ (Erler 153). On 30 November 1580 Richard Farrant left ‘the lease of [his] house in the Blackfriars in London’ to his wife Anne Farrant (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 393); Anne Farrant sublet the ‘house in Blackfriars’ to William Hunnis and John Newman around 19 September 1581 (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 394), and William More, explaining why he had seized the playhouse property, argued that Farrant ‘pretended ... to use the house only for the teaching of the Children of the Chapel but made it a continual house for plays, to the offense of the precinct’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 402). The last quotation is particularly interesting in that its language evokes arguments used against the outdoor theatres: namely that they cause offence and that they stage frequent performances. More was biased: he had a vested interest in reclaiming the property and criticising plays enabled him to do this, but there is some corroborating evidence that indoor and outdoor playing might be elided in the period. Stephen Gosson, in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), wrote that ‘In plays ... those things are feigned that never were, as Cupid and Psyche played at Paul’s and a great many comedies more at the Blackfriars and in every playhouse in London’ (D4v), thus emphasising the regularity of performance, and grouping the indoor theatres with the outdoor playhouses. Indeed, on 12 November 1589 the Privy Council issued an order in response to anti-Marprelate plays, or as the document called them, ‘common plays and interludes in and about the City of London’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 311). The order called upon the Archbishop

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor and the Master of the Revels to take action in censoring such plays before they were ‘presented publicly’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 312). The document does not specify particular theatres although there is evidence that such plays were performed in the suburbs at the Theatre and the Curtain, and within the city at playing inns. However at least one of the plays, The May-Game of Martinism, ostensibly written in whole or part by Thomas Nashe, can be linked to the Children of Paul’s.10 It might be possible then, that the 1589 Order conflated indoor and outdoor playing; calling both forms ‘public’. This information is at least useful in demonstrating that although the indoor playhouses had an association with educational practices, which might be seen as ‘private’, they were also seen as commercial and, according to some, debased and unwholesome. John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, each printed in 1584, included dual prologues – one addressing a Blackfriars audience, and one addressing the court – and this seems to be an attempt to draw upon the cachet of court performance (also advertised on the title pages). However, the fact that there are two distinct prologues – and, in the case of Campaspe, epilogues – offers a reminder that the playhouse is not the court; it is less rarefied a location than Whitehall Palace, where the two plays were also performed. Lyly has been viewed as an elite, coterie author, but Andy Kesson has offered a valuable corrective by showing how Lyly had mass appeal.11 There is more evidence to suggest that the first set of Elizabethan indoor theatres were thought of as ‘common’, rather than ‘private’, and this may in turn support Kesson’s efforts to counter the view of Lyly as a fusty elitist writing for a tiny, privileged audience. Even so, critics continue to attempt to apply the ‘private’ label on the earliest indoor theatres; some critics have suggested that a petition dated November 1596 might allude to an indoor theatre as ‘private’. The appeal details the complaints local residents made about James Burbage’s attempt to use his recently acquired Blackfriars property as a playhouse. The residents objected that Burbage ‘meaneth very shortly to convert the same into a common playhouse’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 507) thereby threatening all manner of inconveniences. The petition also asserted, ‘there hath nor at any time heretofore been used any common playhouse within the same precinct’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 508). Herbert Berry has argued that ‘the first Blackfriars was not a “common playhouse” because it was meant for private performances by children’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 508) and Keith Sturgess offers a similar

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600  interpretation, noting that ‘common’ and ‘public’ were synonyms (2). But these readings run against the grain of the available evidence which suggests that the notion of commercial drama as ‘private’ had not been established at this point: crucially, the word ‘private’ is not used here. Sturgess recognises the possibility that the residents ignored or had forgotten about the original Blackfriars (it had closed 12 years earlier) and this would appear more plausible, although he also alludes to another petition from 1618–1619 which does include the word ‘private’. This document will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, but the word cannot reliably be transposed on to the 1596 petition: just because ‘private’ was explicitly used in 1618 does not mean that it was implied in 1596. None of this proves that ‘private’ was not used to refer to indoor theatres in the sixteenth century; but it is the best conclusion that can be made given the available evidence. Sturgess’ point about ‘common’ and ‘public’ acting as synonyms also deserves some attention, although the terms might be thought synonymous they were often used in very different ways. When the petitioners called Burbage’s playhouse ‘common’ they did not just mean ‘public’. They used a term which had acquired powerful pejorative connotations over decades of use. It is important, therefore, to investigate some of the myriad ways in which ‘common’ and ‘public’ were used in the conceptualisation of commercial drama in order to illuminate the semantic environment from which ‘private’ emerged into the discourse of commercial theatre. First, though, a caveat: ‘public’ and ‘common’ were sometimes used interchangeably. The Act of Common Council declared that the ‘public or common collection of money’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 76) at plays ought to be banned and John Northbrooke, writing in 1579, argued that playing was permissible provided ‘that it be not made a common exercise, publicly, for profit and gain of money, but for learning and exercise sake’ (L2v). Furthermore, ‘common’ was not inherently pejorative. There are numerous instances in which ‘common’ can have extremely positive connotations. A number of Privy Council letters objected to playing infringing on ‘common prayer’ and many writers consider plays to be a threat to the well-being of the ‘common wealth’. A patent for Leicester’s Men dated 10 May 1574 permitted performance ‘except during time of common prayer, or of plague in London’ and on 13 April 1582 the Lord Mayor wrote to the Privy Council acknowledging their request to restrain plays on holidays for the same reason.12 On 3 November 1595 the Lord Mayor wrote to Lord Burghley to object to the proposed construction of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England the Swan, noting ‘no kind of exercise, being of itself corrupt & profane, can well stand with the good policy of a Christian Common Wealth’ (Chambers, ES 4: 317) and in The Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597), Thomas Beard, arguing that the Romans abandoned the practice of playing due to its vicious qualities, suggested that actors were debarred from ‘bearing any public office or dignity in the commonwealth’ (167). Furthermore, the notion of the ‘common stage’ can be a neutral term, or one which is at least not straightforwardly negative, as when Abraham Fleming alluded, in an epitaph, to men ‘upon the earth’ being like ‘Players in an interlude, upon a common stage’; or as when Thomas Nashe referred to ‘Ned Allen on the common stage’ in Strange News (1592).13 It is also true that ‘public’ could be used in a negative context: in 1579 Stephen Gosson criticised the ‘public theatres’ for ‘pleasing wantons’; however, ‘common’ was used in a pejorative way far more frequently, and ‘public’ more usually had positive connotations (Gosson, Ephemerides L7v). ‘Public’ emerged as a term used in the restriction of plays as early as the Henrician period – a minute of the seventh session of the Convocation, dated 14 February 1542, observed that ‘The bishops advised a petition to the King, to correct the public plays and comedies which are acted in London, to the contempt of God’s Word’ – but the term did not seem to have much further use until after the advent of the commercial theatres, especially in comparison with ‘common’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 23). In April 1542, the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, issued 20 injunctions, the 17th of which forbade ‘common plays games or interludes’ in churches or chapels.14 On 6 February 1545 the Guildhall issued a proclamation for the abolition of interludes in London which condemned ‘sundry interludes and common plays’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 30), and the Edwardian proclamation issued on 6 August declared that ‘Common players of interludes and plays’ often performed pieces which ‘contain matter tending to sedition’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 35). On 28 April 1551 Edward VI issued a second proclamation appertaining to drama. It said that ‘common players or other persons’ should not play ‘in the English tongue, any manner interlude, play or matter’ without ‘special licence to show for the same in writing under His Majesty’s sign, or signed by 6 of His Highness’ Privy Council’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 36). By the mid-point of the sixteenth century ‘common’ had become a regular presence in dramatic legislation and elsewhere it was implicitly or, indeed, explicitly condemnatory, as when Thomas White delivered his sermon from Paul’s Cross to the plague-ravaged London

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600  of November 1577: ‘Look but upon the common plays in London and see the multitude that flocketh to them and followeth them: behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monument of London’s prodigal- ity and folly’ (Chambers, ES 4: 197).15 In particular, legislation sought to restrict or prohibit ‘common interludes’ and ‘common players’ and this was true in the provinces as well as the capital. In the Corporation Common Council minute book for Gloucester there is a record dated 3 November 1580 which demonstrated that restraint against ‘common players of interludes’ had been ordered (Douglas and Greenfield 306–307). The Council did, however, permit the Queen’s Men to perform some interludes and made allowances for players under the command of a ‘baron of the parliament or of higher calling or degree’; thus differentiating between patented and unauthorised, ‘common’ performers (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 234). Examples like this have caused William Ingram to note that ‘common player’ was not a general synonym for ‘stage player’ but rather referred to unauthorised players, or ‘Rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’, as the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds called them.16 In 1615, John Cocke wrote an essay ‘A Common Player’ in which he did not appear to make this differentiation: he attacked the very essence of playing, even alluding to patented players: the ‘chief ornaments of his Majesty’s Revels’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 179–180). He ended his essay with a caveat – ‘in the general number of them, many may deserve a wise man’s commendation’ – before once again reasserting the disreputable nature of players: ‘and therefore did I prefix an epithet ofcommon , to distinguish the base and artless appendants our City companies’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 180). Cocke later reevaluated his opinion and attested that he meant only to refer to unlicensed players, but his essay is a reminder that ‘common’ had associations with the base and lewd and could be used to critique plays and performers.17 Indeed, although Ingram is correct that the specific term ‘common player’ seems almost always to refer to unpatented players, performances by licensed companies were often described as ‘common’. In 1583 the Queen’s Men wrote to the Privy Council to request that they be allowed to play at indoor venues inside the city during the winter. The Corporation of London replied: ‘it is not convenient that they present before her Majesty such plays as have been before commonly played in open stages before all the basest assemblies in London and Middlesex’ before directing the players to the Act of Common Council which

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England authorised them to play at ‘private houses’ rather than commercial theatres (Chambers, ES 4: 300). Here the playing of the Queen’s Men is disparaged as ‘common’ and associated with baseness: the Corporation knew they could not ban outdoor commercial performances but they did not miss a chance to criticise them. ‘Common’ was a term often used by anti-theatrical campaigners who wanted to stress the negative features of commercial playing. On 13 September 1595 the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London wrote to the Privy Council requesting that plays at the Theatre and Bankside be closed down: they referred to the ‘common exercise of stage plays’ (Chambers, ES 4: 318), a phrase they also used in another letter dated 28 July 1597 (Chambers, ES 4: 321). As previously discussed, it is also instructive that the Blackfriars petitioners should refer to Burbage’s proposed theatre as a ‘common playhouse’, the term is dismissive and disparaging in that context. ‘Public’ does not have quite the same connotations so it is important to caution against conflation of ‘public’ and ‘common’. In 1597 the Privy Council ordered the magistrates of Middlesex and Surrey to forbid performances and opened their decree by condemning the ‘very great disorders committed in the common playhouses’. It then announced that ‘no plays shall be used within London or about the city or in any public place during this time of summer’ (Chambers, ES 4: 322). Notably, although the ‘common’ theatres are explicitly condemned, the sanctity of the ‘public’ place(s) is upheld. ‘Common’ serves a pejorative function in this text, but ‘public’ has positive connotations: it is the thing which must be protected. ‘Public’ is also often associated with authority – in the sixteenth century the notion of public office resonated in ways which were profoundly positive; the ‘public good’ and the virtues of active, public service were frequently exhorted by the political rhetoric of classical humanism.18 As such, ‘public’ could be used as a form of advertisement for plays. In 1584, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London was printed by Roger Ward with a title page declaring that the play had been ‘publicly played’. Wilson’s play was an early example of a printed version of an outdoor commercial play, but in the 1590s more followed, and other title pages offered similar strategies. Richard Jones’ 1590 edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine claimed the plays were ‘showed upon stages in the City of London’ and Cuthbert Burby’s 1596 edition of Edward III stated it was ‘sundry times played about the City of London’. Yet ‘publicly’ proved to be a more popular formulation and was associated with plays by a range of different writers including George Chapman

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600 

(The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598; An Humorous Day’s Mirth, 1599), Marlowe (Edward II, 1594), Ben Jonson (Every Man Out of His Humour, 1600; Every Man In His Humour, 1601), and Shakespeare (Richard II, 1597; Romeo and Juliet, 1597; 2 Henry IVV, 1600; Much Ado About Nothingg, 1600; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1600). In total there were 27 commercial theatre plays printed in Elizabeth’s reign with title pages declaring their public performance (including plays which were reprinted); there were 116 adult commercial plays printed in the same period (again, including reprints).19 While ‘public’ was a viable way of advertising plays, it was only used on the title pages of around one-fifth of the amphitheatre plays which made it into print during this period. Importantly, however, ‘public’ was seen as a positive term: why else would it be used to advertise plays? In contrast, there are no examples of ‘common’ occurring in this way on playbook title pages.20 The term ‘open’, used to advertise Damon and Pithias, was not used on any other title pages and it may be that it lacked the strong positive connotations of ‘public’ and carried with it too many negative associations.21 For example, in 1601 Elizabeth I famously complained about the frequent performances of Shakespeare’s Richard III by alleging that the play was performed ‘forty times in open streets and houses’ (Chambers ES 2: 327). As Stephen Orgel notes, Elizabeth’s reference to ‘open streets’ constitutes ‘a fantasy whereby the whole city became a stage for a continued performance’ (Authenticc 86). Elizabeth seizes on the negative sense of ‘open’ to suggest a kind of illicit and dangerous exposure: ‘public’ may be used pejoratively, but it does not have the same negative charge. It would be extremely useful to know who wrote title pages, and the question will come under further scrutiny in the forthcoming chapters of this book, but it seems safe to say that ‘publicly’ was used by several agents. If, for example, it was the stationer who was responsible, then there were evidently a number of stationers who used the term, likewise if it was the playwright, or indeed if it were a member of the theatre company: the Queen’s, Chamberlain’s, and Admiral’s Men are just three of the companies whose plays are associated with the term. In other words, ‘publicly’ was not the expression of an individual or a small group, it can be associated with a variety of agents. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the notion of outdoor commercial playing as ‘public’ was firmly established; yet although the positive senses of the term continued to resonate it could still be used in a hostile fashion. The diverse inflections of the term can be demonstrated

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England by an examination of Privy Council letters written in the first two years of the seventeenth century. In 1600, proposals to build a new theatre, the Fortune, were met with criticism from the Privy Council who, in a letter to the Justices of Middlesex, attacked the ‘public and vain building[s]’ used for playing (Chambers, ES 4: 327–328). Yet on 15 May of the same year the Privy Council wrote a letter to the Justices of Surrey noting that the Queen had permitted a French acrobat to perform at the Swan, which they call a ‘public place’ (Chambers, ES 4: 329); and on 22 June 1600 they released an order detailing the abuses of ‘common stage plays’ in which they admit the value of ‘public’ playing provided there is proper regulation in place (Chambers, ES 4: 331). On 10 May 1601 the Privy Council reminded the Justices of Middlesex that performances should be vetted to ensure they are fit to be ‘publicly showed’ (Chambers, ES 4: 332). In these three cases, ‘public’ is used to verify and authorise performance; but in 1601 the Privy Council used the word in a negative context in two letters sent on 31 December. In the letter to the Justices of Middlesex and Surrey they state that their order to limit outdoor playing to two theatres had been ignored and ‘no day passeth over without many stage plays in one place or other within and about the city publicly made’, thus equating ‘publicly’ with illegal and undesirable performance (Chambers, ES 4: 333). In the letter to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London they described the ‘inordinate resort and concourse of dissolute and idle people daily unto public stage plays’ before charging the owners of unauthorised theatres ‘not to permit any more public plays to be used, exercised or showed from hence forth in their said houses’ (Chambers, ES 4: 334). Ultimately, however, ‘publicly’ was a term of authority: on 9 April 1603 the Privy Council announced the right of the King, Queen and Prince’s Men to ‘publicly ... exercise their plays in their several and usual houses’ (Chambers, ES 4: 336). ‘Public’, then, was a term which evolved over several decades, it could be used pejoratively but very often had strong positive connotations. It was used by a variety of different people – writers, Privy Councillors, and stationers for example – and was often used very differently to ‘common’, a term from which it seems to have emerged and diverged. Yet ‘private’ was, in a theatrical context, relatively untainted by criticism. ‘Public’ had many positive associations but it had negative senses too: ‘private’ does not seem to have had nearly as many. In A Very Fruitful Exposition of the Commandments (1583) Gervase Babington, then domestic chaplain to Henry Herbert, the second earl of Pembroke, offered an

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 ‘Public’, ‘Private’ and ‘Common’ Stages, 1559–1600  unusual perspective on performances in ‘private houses’. He claimed that if plays ‘be dangerous on the day time, more dangerous on the night certainly: if on a stage, and in open courts, much more in chambers and private houses’ (Babington V7r). But opinions like Babington’s are hard to find; on the other hand many commentators on the stage, including those who condemn playing, make allowances for private performances. For example, Northbrooke’s treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes (1579) is critical of commercial drama but acknowledged that non-commercial performance ‘for learning and exercise sake’ was ‘toler- able for scholars’ (L2v). In 1592 the Oxford playwright William Gager responded in a letter to John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, with whom he was engaged in an argument about the value of playing, by distancing academic drama from the commercial stage. Gager noted that commercial performance occurred frequently but academic playing only occasionally, and that the professional actors played ‘on the public theatre, not of the city only, but of the whole world’, in contrast to academics who played ‘in a private house, and to a few men of understanding’ (Gager, ‘Letter’ 182). The title pages of several Gager plays declare, in Latin, that they were publicly performed (Ulysses Redux, 1592; Meleagerr and Hippolytus, printed in collection in 1592 under the title Meleager) although this is of course very different to the ‘public’ commercial performances in the London suburbs; the audience at any university play was presumably thought to include only ‘men of understanding’. It is notable though that Gager rejects the word ‘public’ in his letter, in a rhetorical act aimed at convincing an obstinate opponent: it is a recognition that ‘private’ with its cognates ‘exclusive’ and ‘select’ was harder to pin down with criticism. This is perhaps ironicg iven that, in the wider political landscape, the word ‘private’ was frequently and unfavourably contrasted with ‘public’. The idea that the publicg ood should come before private profit was a political commonplace; privacy was regularly associated with corruption. Linda Levy Peck observes that ‘the definition of corruption as the use of public office for certain if not all private ends’ was frequently invoked in the period.22 Nonetheless, in the world of the early seventeenth-century theatre, ‘private’ provided an appealing way to market plays. The first recorded instance of ‘private’ in a commercial theatre context occurs on the title page of Cynthia’s Revels (1601) which was said to have been ‘sundry times privately acted in the Blackfriars by the Children of her Majesty’s Chapel’. The edition is significant not only for its use of

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

‘privately’ but also because it is the first title page to refer to a specific indoor theatre: the Blackfriars (‘Vile Arts’ 85). It seems that there was a concerted attempt to market the playhouse, as well as the play (or to use the playhouse as a way of affirming the qualities of the play), for from this point on many title pages began to identify their playing venue(s). The second set of indoor theatres thus appears to have forged an identity for themselves, part of which was predicated on the term ‘private’. Reading ‘private’ in the light of ‘common’ and ‘public’ problematises accounts such as Gurr’s which accept snobbery as the explanation of this use; it suggests instead that the terminology of the theatre was the site of a cultural and political battleground. ‘Public’ remained in use throughout the period of commercial drama in London, as later chapters of this book will demonstrate, but ‘private’, which had its own positive connotations, appeared as an attractive alternative. It is not possible to identify a specific reason or reasons for the appearance of ‘private’ and the next chapter will address some of the attempts to do so. Instead, it is more accurate to say that ‘private’ emerged as a form of identity made available by the existence of ‘public’.

Notes

 English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660, ed. by Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 73–76.  The proclamation announces that plays performed ‘in the open streets of the said city’ were permissible. It therefore acknowledges the term ‘open’ but does not use ‘private’.  The practice of title page part division began to wane afterTh e Conflict fo Conscience, as observed by Gabriel Egan, ‘“As it was, is, or will be played”: Title-Pages and the Theatre Industry to 1610’, in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. by Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 92–110. However, many playbooks throughout the period featured character lists. For detailed discussion, see, Tamara Atkin and Emma Smith, ‘The Form and Function of Character Lists in Plays Printed before the Closing of the Theatres’, Review of English Studies, 65 (2014), 647–672.  Marta Straznicky, ‘Introduction: Plays, Books, and the Public Sphere’, in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. by Marta Straznicky (Amherst and London: University of Massachusetts

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Press, 2005), pp. 1–19. See also, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, passim.  REED: Cambridge, ed. by Alan H. Nelson (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1989), vol. 2, p. 1131. The original document is in Latin, but the terms ‘privatim’ and ‘publice’ are used: vol. 1, p. 209.  REED: Cambridge, ed. by Alan H. Nelson (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1989), vol. 1, p. 267. This document is also in Latin; the word ‘privatas’ is used.  There are two issues of Caesar and Pompey. The first, dated 1606 contains no performance details. The second issue, quoted above, is from 1607. It exists in two slightly different forms although the quotation cited differs only in terms of spelling.  Tiffany Stern and Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 4. See also, pp. 57–59. Stern has also written illuminatingly on these subjects in Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), especially pp. 22–123.  Both examples are quoted by Stern, Rehearsal, p. 93, but appear in Collections Volume VI: Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamberr ed. by David Cook and F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Malone Society: 1962), pp. 47–48.  See, Martin Wiggins in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 830, p. 836.  Andy Kesson, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), passim. Kesson counters assumptions about Lyly’s elitism established by the title of Edward Blount’s 1632 collection of Lyly plays, Six Court Comedies and continued, in the twentieth century, by G.K. Hunter’s John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1962).  Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 272; p. 288.  Fleming, An Epitaph, or Funeral Inscription, Upon the Godly Life and Death of the Right Worshipful Master William Lambe (London: 1580); Thomas Nashe, Strange News, Of the Intercepting Certain Letters (London: 1592), G1r.  E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, (London: Oxford University Press, 1903), vol. 2, p. 191. Chambers cites David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, vol. 3, (London: 1737), p. 864.  Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 197. The sermon was attributed to T.W. on the title page, and Chamber’s assertion that this means Thomas White rather than Thomas Wilcox has been accepted.  William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in London (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 84; English Professional Theatre, p. 62.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

 On Cocke’s reneging see Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, fourth edition, p. 103.  See, for example, Marrku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 18–53; Richard Cust, ‘The “Public Man” in Late Tudor and Early Stuart England’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere, pp. 235–258.  This total is confirmed yb DEEP: Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser, DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, [accessed 18 May 2015].  The word ‘common’ appears on two sixteenth-century title pages, but not in relation to theatre or performance. John Philip’s Patient and Meek Grissel (1569) features a cast list containing the character ‘Common people’; the other example comprises the word in its title: Common Conditions (1576).  The word ‘open’ is used on the title page of the two quartos of Soliman and Perseda (often attributed to Kyd) but it refers to the revelation of plot details, rather than the nature of the play’s performance. The first quarto was probably published in 1592 and the second was published in 1599.  Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 184. For further work on the negative connotations of ‘private’ see, David Harris Sacks, ‘Private Profit and Public Good: The Problem of the State in Elizabethan Theory and Practice’, in Law, Literature, and the Settlement of Regimes, ed. by Gordon J. Schochet (Washington D.C.: The Folger Institute, 1990), pp. 121–142 (p. 130). On the distrust of privacy as a concept, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 192.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0005 2 The Emergence of the‘ Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625

Abstract: Chapter 2 examines in detail the arguments advanced by theatre historians to explain why early seventeenth-century indoor playhouses were described as ‘private’. It exposes unsupportable claims that the term was used to circumvent censorship: in fact, the plays bearing ‘private’ on their title pages were censored by the Master of the Revels. The chapter demonstrates that the term had a much wider range of meanings than theatre historians have acknowledged. It resists generalised claims and instead charts the various ways in which both ‘public’ and ‘private’ were used throughout the Jacobean period, thereby attesting to their significance and complexity. In doing this, it considers title page advertisements and offers new ways of thinking about how playbooks and theatre spaces were marketed.

Keywords: book history; Elizabethan drama; Jacobean drama; private; public; theatre history

Price, Eoin. ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006   ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

Cynthia’s Revels, which made explicit reference to indoor ‘private’ performance, was entered in the Stationers’ Register to Walter Burre on 23 May 1601 and printed later that year by Richard Read. On 21 December 1601, another Jonson play, Poetaster, was entered into the register to Matthew Lownes, and was printed in 1602 by Richard Bradock with a title page that read ‘As it hath been sundry times privately acted in the Blackfriars, by the Children of her Majesty’s Chapel’. This locution is identical on both title pages and is only differentiated yb spelling and italicisation, although the title pages differ in terms of layout, decorative elements, and feature differing Latin insignia, taken from Juvenal and Martial respectively. Ben Jonson is identified as the author on both title pages. It is not clear whether ‘privately’ had been used in a commercial theatrical context at this point, or whether the Cynthia’s Revels title page gave birth to the idea, but it evidently had an effect, hence the ppa earance of the Poetaster title page. Indeed, two similar title pages soon followed. On 7 June 1602 Dekker’s Blurt Master Constable was entered in the Stationers’ Register to Edward Allde and published later that year by Henry Rocket. The title page claimed the play was ‘sundry times privately acted by the Children of Paul’s’. Later in the year another Dekker play, Satiromastix, was printed by Allde for Edward White. It was the first play title page to make the claim for both public and private commercial performance: ‘As it hath been presented publicly, by the Right Honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his Servants; and privately, by the Children of Paul’s’. This chapter examines in detail the arguments advanced to explain the emergence of ‘private’ commercial performances in the early seventeenth century. It charts the various ways in which both ‘public’ and ‘private’ were used throughout the Jacobean period, thereby attesting to their significance and complexity. Andrew Gurr has written that ‘[p]lays like Blurt Master Constable ... were using the term “private” overtly to deny the need for the Master’s licence’ since, as he elsewhere argues, the Master of the Revels only had control over ‘public’ performances (Shakespearian 338).1 Siobhan Keenan makes a similar point: ‘The two boy companies ... appear to have been exempt from the need to have a royal license, at least initially, perhaps because it was traditionally claimed that their indoor performances were “private” ’ (Acting Companies 29–30). This is essentially a development of an older suggestion, by W.J. Lawrence, that the term ‘private house’ derived from attempts to circumvent the Act of Common

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625 

Council, which allowed ‘private’ performance (30–31). Lawrence’s argument was flawed because he assumed (as does Keenan) that the term was used in a commercial context in the sixteenth century, when, as shown, there is no evidence that this is true; but his central premise lives on in Gurr’s formulation. Gurr’s argument can itself be called into question, as will be demonstrated. However a reading of the legal documentation relating to George Chapman’s lost play The Old Joiner of Aldgate illustrates that ‘private’ could be used to evade attempts at ‘public’ censure. The play caused controversy because performances of it at the St Paul’s playhouse ran concurrently with a court case which it was also satirising, and there was some concern that the play might be part of an attempt to influence the ruling. The lawsuits involved heiress Agnes Howe, who was pursued by a range of suitors, and began in the ecclesiastical courts before moving to the Star Chamber. The Attorney General’s bill dated 6 May 1603 alleged that John Flaskett, one of the suitors, paid Chapman to produce a play which was in turn sold to Thomas Woodford and Edward Peers ‘to be played upon the open stages in divers playhouses within the City of London’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 315). Woodford and Peers are not known to have associations with other playhouses at this time, so it is not clear why the plural was used, but it serves to emphasise the public nature of the performances, as does the adjective ‘open’. Indeed, this is reiterated in an exaggerated claim from the same document: Flaskett ‘suffer[ed] her name to be so traduced in every playhouse’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 315; emphasis added). Chapman responded carefully on 19 May 1603 by denying any wrongdoing, and Woodford added on 23 May that the play had been licensed by the Master of the Revels and was ‘played by the Children of Paul’s in a private house of a long time kept, used, and accustomed for that purpose’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 316). Chapman was interrogated again on 30 May and again denied that there was any conspiracy to undermine the court of law and that, notably, he ‘never saw the same [play] acted and played publicly upon a stage’(Wickham, Berry and Ingram 315). C.J. Sisson has observed: The publicity of the insult was the onus of the accusation and the words ‘publicly upon a stage’ may well be Chapman’s saving clause here. Woodford, it may be observed, is careful to insist that the play was acted ‘in a private house’ and not in a public theatre. The distinction between the two classes

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

of theatres, indicated by these adjectives, was very misleading, for public and private theatres were at this time at least equally open to spectators on payment. But evidently it could still be urged in a court of law that the distinction was valid. (63–64) More recently, Mary C. Erler has advanced a similar argument claiming that Woodford intended ‘to stress the private rather than the public nature of the production in order to minimize the amount of scandal generated by the play’ (Erler 394). It should be noted though that this use was not normative. Chapman and Woodford were defending themselves in a legal case and so their terminology was necessarily dexterous and shaped to answer a specific allegation. Furthermore, the fact that the play was licensed by the Master of the Revels contradicts the argument that ‘private’ was used to exert freedom from licensing. Woodford stresses the ‘private’ nature of the St Paul’s playhouse even as he reveals the existence of a license for the play. Richard Dutton asserts that Edmund Tilney licensed the plays of all three companies involved in the Poetomachia: the Chamberlain’s Men, the Children of the Chapel and Paul’s Boys (315). Indeed, there is evidence that Poetaster, one of the plays to bear the adjective ‘private’ on its title page, suffered at the hands of the censor. The 1602 edition ends with an address to the reader which claimed that because ‘the Author’ was ‘restrained’ by ‘Au t h o r i t y’ an apology could not be printed (N1v). Furthermore, the fact that the 1616 Folio prints a different address in its place, preceding an ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ said to be ‘only once spoken upon the stage’, has caused Richard Dutton to argue that the play was censored.2 M.J. Kidnie suggests ‘if Poetasterr remained in the company’s repertory after Jonson wrote the Apologetical Dialogue, this claim ... suggests that the dialogue was prohibited on stage’ (452). Even if these claims are inaccurate, Poetasterr was evidently viewed by the censor: the 1616 text ends with a cast list for the play, stating it was ‘first acted, in the year 1601 by the then Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel’, a n d that it was performed ‘with the allowance of the Master of the Revels’ (Works G4v). The boy companies were not exempt from censorship and it seems that the texts of Poetasterr did not attempt to propagate that image. It is therefore unlikely that ‘private’ was used on its title page to convey that message, or indeed on any other title page. For example, Satiromastix acknowledged both ‘public’ and ‘private’ performance; in doing so it was evidently recognising the authority that the Master of the Revels had over the play.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625 

Although attempts to flaunt avoidance of censorship are not plausible, the emergence of the term on these title pages is still intriguing. The other standard explanation – snobbery – has already been chal- lenged, and it is impossible and, indeed, reductive to reach a single all- encompassing explanation to account for this phenomenon. However there are questions that can be asked that might shed more light upon the term. If it could be known who wrote these title pages, it might suggest something more specific about their author’s motivations. To consider the options is to acknowledge the power of the title page as a medium of expression and advertisement: the space of the page was valuable in many respects and a number of agents would have had an interest in occupying it with words and images. It is therefore important to consider these agents in order to gain a sense of the more specific cultural environment in which the word was used. Modern scholarship has tended to assume that stationers were responsible for the wording of playbook title pages. As Lukas Erne has argued ‘the first people who had a vested interest in the rise of dramatic authorship were not the playwrights themselves but the London printers, publishers and booksellers eager to render respectable and commercially profitable what was initially an enterprise with little or no prestige’ (Literary Dramatist 33). More specifically it is often the ‘publisher’ – the stationer who paid for the production of the book – who is attributed with the wording, since he had the most invested in its success. Peter Blayney has demonstrated how hazardous playbook publication was, which substantiates the notion that a publisher would want control over the wording.3 Indeed, in their influential essay on playbook title pages, Farmer and Lesser assume that the publisher is responsible for the title page (‘Vile Arts’ 78–79). Burre, then, may have conceived the term himself, hoping to hit upon a new marketing trick to help his text stand out from the crowd or he may have tapped into the theatrical language of the time. The title page of Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, which Burre published in 1600, said that the play was ‘sundry times publicly acted by the right honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants’, and it might be that Burre instinctively reversed the term for this, the first indoor theatre play that he published. Alternatively he may have picked up on the play’s intrinsic social and theatrical commentary. In the Praeludium, which is delivered by three of the children, one boy begins to imitate the playhouse audience and their customs. He delivers a long speech while smoking tobacco, before

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England engaging in a discussion with the other boys, on the practice of sitting on the stage. The ‘better-gathered gallant’ (l. 106–107) he imitates is apparently unaware of the practice, and replies:

Away, wag! What, wouldst thou make an implement of me? ’Slid, the boy takes me for a piece of prospective, I hold my life, or some silk curtain come to hang the stage here. Sir Crack, I am none of your fresh pictures, that use to beautify the decayed and dead arras, in a public theatre (ll. 117–120). The words are put in the mouth of a child actor imitating an ignorant gallant, but the gallant, unaware of some indoor theatre customs, is nonetheless conscious of the difference between Blackfriars and the ‘public’ theatre(s). The third boy, still imitating the ‘better-gathered gallant’, claims that the ‘judicious’ (l. 138) part of society would not ‘derive their best grace with servile imitation from common stages’ (ll. 144–145). This,g iven the ‘public theatre’ jibe and the indoor venue of the production which the gallant fictively watches, and the boy actor literally participates in, is an attack on the outdoor playhouses. Notably, Jonson does not say, at any point, that the play or its venue is ‘private’, but Burre might have expounded what was implied within the play. The locution on the title page of Poetaster follows Cynthia’s Revels exactly, so presumably (if the ‘publisher’ theory is correct) Lownes followed Burre, perhaps inspired or compelled by the unique combination of playhouse and ‘privately’. Equally, there are other candidates: the title page might be the work of a theatre owner, manager or associated person. Tiffany Stern has argued that playbills and title pages shared similar functions. Stern suggests that playbills would be written by performers rather than stationers, as they had more riding on their success, and that a prompter or stage- keeper might be charged with the responsibility of producing the copy for a playbill (Documents 49). Perhaps they could exert some influence over the composition of title pages, or perhaps publishers used playbills as a template when working on a title page. The idea is speculative, but the acknowledgement of Blackfriars on the title page is suggestive and if the title pages were written by a single author, or a group of authors working collaboratively, then this would explain the identical wording on Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster. It might also help to explain the corre- sponding emergence of the same term ‘privately’ in relation to plays at St Paul’s. If Blackfriars was seen to be advertised as ‘private’ then it would make sense for the proprietors of St Paul’s to follow, particularly

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625  during the War of the Theatres. Farmer and Lesser have demonstrated that title page theatre attributions became increasingly frequent after Cynthia’s Revels and that between 1601 and 1607 all 14 commercial theatre attributions related to indoor playhouses. This in turn led them to conclude that the rivalry between the boy companies was at least as important as that between the boy and adult companies (‘Vile Arts’ 87–88). The ys mmetry of the title page attributions: two for Blackfriars, two for Paul’s, testifies to the emergent rivalry of the companies and their playhouses. Another possibility is that the playwright was responsible for the title page locutions. Stern is among the latest to propose that playwrights may have written title pages, but although her conjecture is couched as an afterthought, there may be a more persuasive case to be made for authorial involvement in title pages, at least in some instances (Documents 61–62).4 It might be that Jonson, who was famously concerned with the transition of his plays into print, selected the Latin mottos and ensured that he was given billing as the plays’ author: perhaps he also penned the section relating to their performance. The Juvenal quotation, present on the title page of Cynthia’s Revels, also features on the title page of Every Man In His Humour, which was printed earlier in the same year. It may be that Burre was responsible since he published both plays, but the use of Latin is likely to be an authorial indicator and it was typical of Jonson to use references from Roman satire.5 The quotation –‘ Quod non dant Proceres, dabit Histrio./Haud tamen inuideas vati, quem pulpit pascunt’ – has been translated by David Bevington, the editor of Every Man In as ‘“A n actor will give you something that no great man will...You need hardly feel envious towards the poet who gains his living from the stage”’.6 It is unclear precisely how this epigraph relates either to the ‘private’ attribution of Cynthia’s Revels or the ‘public’ attribution of Every Man In, so perhaps this is evidence of two minds working independently; Jonson including the Latin and Burre eager to find a way of capitalising on the play’s performance. Eric Rasmussen and Matthew Steggle provide a different translation for the Juvenalian epigraph which offers a way of thinking about the link with the title page performance attribution: ‘Rewards that the leaders do not give, the actors will ... but you will not envy a prophet whom the public stages nourish’.7 If this translation is accepted, then the epigraph seems to work against the ‘private’ attribution of Cynthia’s Revels (by implying it is in fact ‘public’) and in concord with the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

‘public’ attribution of Every Man In. Alternatively, perhaps Rasmussen and Steggle are too creative in adding the ideologically loaded adjective ‘public’ to their translation when it is not explicitly invoked by Juvenal. Nonetheless, if Jonson was responsible for the ‘private’ tagline then it would still fit with general critical perceptions of his career and his artistic and theatrical proclivities. It also fits with the tenor of Cynthia’s Revels which, as previously mentioned, attacks the outdoor theatres. Dekker, the author of the other two plays in question, is also a candidate for the authorship of the performance details on the title pages of his plays; he went on to use similar terms on a number of occasions. Ultimately, although some cases look stronger than others, it is not possible to prove who wrote the title pages. Indeed, it might be that title page construction was a collaborative project, with several different parties attempting to exert their influence.Th e publisher would presumably have had the final word and in the case of the four plays mentioned, Burre, Lownes, Rocket and White seemingly agreed that the term would be of use on the title pages of the playbooks for which they were responsible. This small group of playbooks suggest something of the term’s vitality, as evidenced further by its occurrence in plays, pamphlets and other documentation. The OED notes that the phrase ‘private plays’ was used for the first time in print in Q1 Hamlet (1603); the first instance of ‘private house’ (meaning a theatre) occurred in Q3 The Malcontent (1604); and ‘private play-house’ was used for the first time in Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook (1609), although in fact Dekker had previously referred to a ‘private play-house’ in The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606) and in Jests to Make You Merryy (1607).8 The phrase ‘private stage’ is not recorded in the OED but it seems that the first reference in print occurs in Marston’s note at the end of his Sophonisba (1606).9 It is usually assumed that Q1 Hamlet refers to the War of the Theatres when it speaks of ‘private plays’. As Grace Ioppolo states, ‘this reported version may imperfectly represent Shakespeare’s first attempt, after the play had originally been composed, to mock his private-theatre competition, which later found fuller and more satiric expression in the Folio text’ (145). In the Folio, Rosencrantz speaks of the ‘eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question’ (2.2.337–338) and that ‘so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose-quills’ (2.2.340–341). Roslyn Knutson had argued that although the Q1 text does refer to the War of the Theatres, the F text represents

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625  a revision, occurring around 1606–1608 and referring to how the boy companies were ‘most tyrannically clapped’ (2.2.339) by the authorities for their controversial satires.10 Knutson’s thesis has led to objections, but the two texts evidently refer to the boy companies in some way.11 Thus F notes how the boy companies ‘berattle’ the adult companies by applying that unwelcome epithet ‘common’ to the outdoor playhouses. In 1610 Robert Keysar, one of the two managers of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, referred to ‘all the private playhouses within the City of London’ in a lawsuit he brought against the King’s Men, who responded by acknowledging the ‘three private playhouses in the City’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram, 318). Evidently theatre managers of indoor and outdoor companies recognised the term. However, not everyone saw the indoor theatres as ‘private’. The Attorney General’s bill concerning The Old Joiner of Aldgate is an example of how an indoor theatre might be seen to be public, or ‘open’ as the document states, but there are other examples. On 4 February 1604 the Children of the Queen’s Revels were granted a patent which licensed the company to play at Blackfriars or ‘any other convenient place’ provided that ‘no such plays or shows shall be presented before the said Queen, our wife, by the said children, or by them anywhere publicly acted’ without the approbation of Samuel Daniel (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 514). Here the commercial performances are contrasted with the court, so perhaps ‘publicly’ is used simply to mark that difference, but there is another document, dated 1608 but relating to events in April 1602, which uses the word ‘published’ to refer to indoor commercial performance. Henry Evans, detailing an agreement made with Edward Kirkham, William Rastall and Thomas Kendall, noted how ‘interludes, plays or shows shall be played, used, shown or published in the great hall and other rooms situate in the Blackfriars’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 513). ‘Published’ is an interesting word; the etymology of which is ‘to make public’. Julie Stone Peters has demonstrated that in sixteenth and, especially, seventeenth-century Europe, ‘publication’ could be used to refer to performance as well as print, and marked a contrast between commercial theatres and the ‘private theatres in courts and private homes’(238). Yet this example, ostensibly referring to a space often designated as ‘private’, suggests that, at least on some level, there was an understanding that indoor commercial playing was ‘public’. Sometimes this was done for polemical reasons. Francis Beaumont wrote a dedicatory poem to John Fletcher which was included

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England amongst the preliminaries of Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1610). It asked:

Why should the man, whose wit ne’er had a stain, Upon the public stage present his vain, And make a thousand men in judgement sit, To call in question his undoubted wit (A4v).12 Fletcher’s play was not well received by its original indoor theatre audience so Beaumont deliberately called the theatre ‘public’ to stress the injudicious nature of the auditors. A similar tactic was used a few years later by Walter Burre, the publisher of Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613), who suggested, in a commendatory address, that the play had failed theatrically because it had ‘a privy mark of irony about it’ (A2r) which the audience had failed to understand.13 Similarly, the point Beaumont makes in his poem is that the audience was at fault for failing to understand the play, and ‘public’ was a term which allowed him to draw attention to the generality of the spectators (although it should be said that Beaumont does not refer to a specific theatre, butj ust ‘the public stage’). Indoor playgoers were often characterised as ‘select’ by playwrights, or ‘this choice selected influence’ as Marston referred to them in the ‘Introduction’ to Jack Drum’s Entertainmentt (1601): Beaumont attacked this notion with his ‘public’ reference.14 Beaumont could have used ‘common’ with its generally pejorative connotations, but ‘public’ is a more precise opposite to ‘private’, and so accentuated the subversive nature of his statement. It also accords well with his later phrase, ‘This second publication’ (A4v), which refers to the book which, when read, will make the reader aware of the play’s quality, and of the indiscretion of its original theatre audience. At the other end of the spectrum, Robert Armin’s address ‘To the Friendly Peruser’, appended to the book of his play The Two Maids of Mortlake (1609), makes a curious comment which appears to reverse the associations of ‘public’ and ‘private’ evoked by Beaumont. Armin myste- riously claims that he was ‘requested both of Court and City’ to show the play ‘in private’ but decided to have it ‘printed...in public’ so it might be enjoyed by a wider audience (¶2r ). This reference is a puzzle: it is not clear whether Armin was requested to do anything, though it is interesting that he wrote the play for the Children of the King’s Revels, and not the King’s Men, with whom he was an actor. There is no evidence that the Children of the King’s Revels played at court and, in any case, the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625  company ceased to exist after the plague outbreak of 1608–1609, meaning that there would not have been time for it to be performed there. It may be that the ‘private’ reference suggests manuscript circulation rather than performance – similar to how Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ were said to be circulated among ‘his private friends’ – but it is also clearly an advertising strategy, designed to pique the reader’s interest, and may, indeed, be a rhetorical sleight of hand rather than any kind of accurate record of real events.15 It is, however, a reminder of how ‘public’ and ‘private’ could be mobilised to a variety of ends. Ultimately, these meanings, it seems, are atypical, and instead the public/private division developed throughout the first decade of the seventeenth century. The adjective ‘public’ continued to be used to describe outdoor commercial drama. Dekker also refers to public playhouses in Jests To Make You Merryy and The Gull’s Hornbook, and in a note ‘To the Readers’ appended to Sejanus, His Falll (1605) Jonson stated that the printed version of his play differed from ‘that which was acted on the public stage’ (A2v): Sejanus was performed at the Globe, a ‘public’ playhouse. Thomas Heywood opened his defence of acting, An Apology for Actors (1612), by saying:

Amongst many other things tolerated in this peaceable and flourishing state, it hath pleased the high and mighty princes of this land to limit the use of certain public theatres, which since many of these over-curious heads have lavishly violently slandered, I hold it not amiss to lay open some few Antiquities to approve the true use of them (B1r). The treatise includes a lengthy discussion on classical theatre. The Romans are said to have ‘edified theatres and amphitheatres: for in their flourishing commonwealth, their public comedians and tragedians most flourished’ (C1r). There are numerous references to various kinds of ‘public’ drama, from the classical to the contemporary and including commercial references – the book as a whole is keen to defend commercial playing – and academic drama: Heywood referred to the ‘comedies, histories, pastorals and shows publicly acted’ (C3v) by students at Cambridge (where Heywood was himself briefly a student). Other seventeenth-century writers alluded to the ‘public’ theatre of the classical world: Barnabe Barnes wrote of ‘the disposition of the Aediles Curules towards the furnishing and setting forth of public plays and shows’ (C1v); and Philemon Holland’s translation of Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of Roman history describes a ‘public show’ in an amphitheatre (B2r).16

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

But although ‘private’ joined ‘public’ in becoming a viable part of seventeenth-century theatrical discourse, the terms were not used on the title pages of newly printed plays between 1602 (after the publication of Satiromastix, which used both terms), and 1611. ‘Publicly’ appeared on the title page of the university play The Return from Parnassus, or The Scourge of Simonyy (1606) although, as previously mentioned, the term had a very specific academic context. The only other play title pages to include the term were reprints of earlier plays: Q3 1 and 2 Edward IVV (1605), Q4 Richard III (1608) and Q3 Romeo and Juliett (1609). In 1612 Q3 Edward III was printed, but more notably so were Nathan Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock and Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk. The title page of the former stated that the play was performed ‘privately’; the latter was ‘publicly acted’. A Woman is a Weathercock was printed by William Jaggard and published by John Budge; A Christian Turned Turk was printed by Nicholas Okes and published by William Barrenger. In 1613 the title page of Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois announced that the play had been ‘often presented at the private play-house in the Whitefriars’ (it was printed by Thomas Snodham for John Helme); in 1614 Robert Tailor’s The Hog Hath Lost His Pearll was printed by John Beale for Richard Redmer with a title page claiming it was ‘Divers times publicly acted, by certain London prentices’; and The Hector of Germanyy was printed in 1615 by Thomas Creede for Josias Harrison with the title page declaration: ‘As it hath been publicly acted at the Red Bull, and at the Curtain, by a company of young-men of this City’. In the period between Satiromastixx and A Woman is a Weathercock a number of plays were printed for the first time, yet neither ‘public’ nor ‘private’ were selected for inclusion on their title pages. It might have seemed, in 1602, that ‘private’ would become a major way of marketing the printed playbooks of indoor plays, but this was apparently not to be. Yet around 1612 both terms came back into fashion, at least for a period. Just as the emergence of ‘private’ coincided with the inclusion of ‘Blackfriars’ on a title page, so its reemergence corresponded with the inclusion of ‘Whitefriars’. Weathercock was said to have been ‘acted before the King in Whitehall and divers times privately at the Whitefriars, by the Children of her Majesty’s Revels’. This was the first time that a Whitefriars attribution appeared on a title page even though the theatre had been in operation since at least 1607 (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 550). Several Whitefriars plays had made it into print prior to Field’s play, but although Edward Sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligigg (1607), The Dumb

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625 

Knightt (1608) by Gervase Markham and Lewis Machin, Armin’s The Two Maids of Mortlake (1609), John Mason’s The Turk (1611) and Lording Barry’s Ram Alleyy (1611) were ostensibly played there, none mention the playhouse, instead attributing an acting company: the Children of the King’s Revels. Weathercock, then, was not the first Whitefriars play to be printed and it was not the first to attribute performance to the Children of the Queen’s Revels: title pages had done so since Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605). The fact that The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois did not advertise its performers strengthens the suggestion that the reemergence of ‘private’ was not connected to the playing company. The title page did however claim that the play was performed at the Whitefriars. It does seem, then, that ‘private’ was used to forge a link with the Whitefriars. Both plays were written by different authors and both books were produced by different sets of stationers, so there is no obvious way of linking them other than by playhouse attribution. In between the publication of Weathercock and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois another Whitefriars play was printed with a playhouse attribution on its title page, but this one did not describe the theatre as ‘private’. Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1612) was said to be ‘often presented in the Black and Whitefriars’; after The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois came The Insatiate Countess (1613) which stated simply that it had been ‘Acted at Whitefriars’. In 1618 Field’s Amends for Ladies was printed with the title page claim that it had been ‘acted at the Blackfriars, both by the Prince’s servants, and by the Lady Elizabeth’s’ when other evidence points towards it being a Whitefriars play.17 So although there is an intriguing link between Weathercock and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, there is good reason for caution when attempting conclusions: if referring to Whitefriars as ‘private’ was a strategy, it was not one which was implemented rigorously. Indeed, whoever included ‘Whitefriars’ on the title page of Weathercock would not necessarily have known that they were the first to do so; nor would it have been obvious that the precise locution ‘private play-house’ favoured by The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois had never been used before on a title page. It is notable, however, that ‘public’ also began to reappear on title pages during this time. In 1612 Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk was printed with the title page locution: ‘As it hath been publicly acted’. The play had been entered into the Stationers’ Register to Barrenger on 1 February 1612. The entry read: ‘A book called, A Christian Turned Turk, or the tragical lives and deaths of the 2 famous pirates Ward and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

Danseker, as it hath been publicly acted, written by Robert Daborne, gentleman’.18 The play is often considered to be a Whitefriars play: Lucy Munro includes it among the repertory of the Children of the Queen’s Revels noting that ‘Daborne’s role as patentee for the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars makes it likely that the play was written for them’ (171).19 Kelly Steele, who includes the play among the repertory of the Whitefriars, adds ‘While there is no concrete evidence explicitly naming the Queen’s Revels as A Christian Turned Turk’s intended company, neither is there a compelling reason to doubt this attribution which has been generally accepted by scholars’ (121–122). However, some scholars have proposed that the play can be linked to the King’s Revels or indeed the King’s Men: if the latter is true it would make the title page conform to standard practices.20 If the play is indeed a Globe play, then the suggestion that it was ‘publicly acted’ is less unusual; if it is an indoor play then it is odd that it should be referred to as ‘public’, yet those critics who cite the title page have not considered this potential oddity as worthy of comment. Although there is no concrete evidence for any playhouse or playing company, it is possible to question Steele’s assertion and the standard attribution. Steele has stressed evidence of Daborne’s commitment to the Queen’s Revels and cites his preface ‘To the Knowing Reader’ as evidence of his care for ‘the much-suffering Actors’ (A3r). Yet as Chambers notes, later documentation from Henslowe’s papers demonstrates how Daborne wrote regularly for the Lady Elizabeth’s Men but was ‘prepared at any moment to sell a play to the King’s if he [could] get a better bargain’ (Chambers, ES 4: 270). Perhaps Daborne, as a patentee, was loyal to the Queen’s Revels company; but the epistle, a rhetorical device, does not constitute firm evidence of a deep, personal commitment. The Henslowe evidence is more intriguing as it details Daborne’s actual dealings and reveals a different picture: a man prepared to sell his play to the highest bidder and who clearly had experience of writing for outdoor theatres; in December 1613 Daborne wrote to Henslowe to tell him he would ‘make as good a play for your public house as ever was played’ (Greg, Henslowe Papers 79). Although it is true that Daborne was not a patentee of the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, there is evidence of other playwrights who were strongly affiliated with one playing company, who then chose to write for a different company. Armin is one example, and, in a slightly later period, Philip Massinger wrote The Great Duke of Florence for the Queen’s Men when he was principal dramatist for the King’s Men. Although Daborne was evidently associated with the Queen’s Revels, he may have found

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625  it profitable to write for another company rather than putting all of his eggs in one basket, especially given the precarious nature of that basket: some theatre troupes had short lifespans and this is especially true of boy companies. Furthermore, and perhaps most compellingly, internal evidence complicates the notion that A Christian Turned Turk was written for Whitefriars: the play does not make use of the distinctively large Whitefriars discovery space. It does contain some of the vertical action characteristic of the playhouse’s repertory, but equally could be staged at an outdoor theatre such as the Globe. If Daborne’s play was written for an outdoor theatre then the title page attribution is unproblematic, although it is interesting that it marks the reemergence of ‘public’ on playbook title pages. If it is indeed an indoor play then the attribution is unusual, particularly given that Weathercock and The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois were both described as private. There is one other play, definitely performed at the Whitefriars, with a title page describing it as ‘publicly’ acted, but the circumstances surround- ing that performance were very different. A letter from Sir Henry Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon provides details of how Robert Tailor’s The Hog Hath Lost His Pearll was performed at the theatre in February 1613 (Chambers, ES 3: 496).21 The performers were, as the title page testifies, ‘London prentices’ and therefore amateurs, and the Whitefriars venue was ostensibly not in use, hence their ability to perform in it. As such, the signification of the performance as ‘public’ is a way of affirming a difference between an amateur performance in a commercial venue and one in a domestic setting. In 1615 another amateur play performed at a commercial theatre was printed: the title page of Wentworth Smith’s The Hector of Germany described its amateur cast as having ‘publicly acted’ the play. Smith’s play was, in fact, performed at outdoor commercial theatres; but the example still helps to differentiate these performances from ‘private’, domestic, amateur performances such as those instigated by Sir Edward Dering at his country house in Surrenden. In 1649 Francis Quarles’ The Virgin Widoww was prefaced with a note by the stationer Richard Royston which attested that the play had been ‘sometimes at Chelsea privately acted (by a company of young Gentlemen) with good approvement’ (A2r).22 This would be the more ordinary fashion for an amateur performance, but The Hog Hath Lost His Pearll and The Hector of Germanyy demonstrate that amateur performances could be seen as public.23 Gurr has suggested that adjectival use of ‘public’ and ‘private’ became ‘fuzzier’ around 1606 when the boy companies came under the authority

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England of the Master of the Revels, and when the formal distinction between ‘private’, unlicensed, and ‘public’, licensed drama was eradicated (Shakespeare Companyy 160). This argument has already been contested but it is also worth clarifying and further investigating the ramifications of Gurr’s ‘fuzzier’ comment.24 The next chapter will deal in more detail with some of the supposedly inconsistent, fuzzy, examples in the Caroline period, but it is important to address the Jacobean issue first. Chambers notes that in late 1613 plans to erect a new playhouse or to convert the Whitefriars theatre into a ‘public’ playhouse were contemplated, but the move was blocked by the Privy Council (Chambers, ES 2: 517).25 The issue suggests at once a distinction – the playhouse is either ‘public’ or ‘private’ – and yet also a sense of transition between the two distinctions, although it should be noted that the Privy Council do not actually use either term in their act (Atkinson 165–166). However, in a petition written in late 1618 or early 1619 Blackfriars residents did mention the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ in relation to transition, and in a way which might be described as adjectivally fuzzy. The officers of the parish, led by William Gouge, attempted to convince the authorities to close the Blackfriars playhouse. They began by drawing attention to the 1596 order preventing James Burbage from moving the Chamberlain’s men into his newly acquired property. The complaint recalled, but subtly changed, the phrasing of the 1596 petition, so ‘Burbage is now altering and meaneth very shortly to convert and turn the same into a common playhouse’ and became ‘the owner of the said playhouse doth, under the name of a private house ... convert the said house to a public playhouse’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 522). The petition indicates that the residents thought that ‘private’ was an inappropriate, disingenuous term and that the theatre was in fact ‘public’; but whether this represented a wholesale rejection of the term or an objection to its specific use in a particular set of circumstances is unclear. Does the petition mean to say that Blackfriars had become ‘public’ because it allowed frequent performances? Paul Menzer and Ralph Alan Cohen suggest that the ‘public/ private’ distinction may, initially, have been used to indicate the age of the performers and cite the 1619 petition as evidence: they claim the only conversion that occurred was that boy companies were replaced by adults (Menzer and Cohen 12 n. 8). However, ‘public’ seems more likely to be a reference to the increased frequency of performance rather than a comment on the age of the actors: the boy companies

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625  played less regularly than the adult troupes.26 ‘Convert’ is perhaps the key word, indicating a transition, and thus upholding a distinction between the formerly ‘private’ and the currently ‘public’. Yet the terms are also somewhat woolly: the notion that an indoor theatre might only be ‘private’ in certain circumstances is interesting but it does not seem to have had much support: the 1618/19 petition is not normative and, crucially, was unsuccessful in its objectives. In January 1619 the Corporation of London ordered the closure of the theatre, but it remained open and on 27 March 1619 the King’s Men had their patent renewed to account for the performance at ‘their private house situate in the precincts of the Blackfriars within our City of London’ (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 523). Ultimately, the ‘private’ nature of the King’s Men’s indoor commercial playhouse was reaffirmed by the highest authority: the King.

Notes

 Gurr makes similar observations earlier in the book, pp. 56–57; pp. 337–338; and in The Shakespearean Stage, 4th edition, pp. 66–67; p. 95.  Jonson, The Works of Benjamin Jonson (London: 1616), F6r. See Dutton, Mastering the Revels, p. 139.  Peter W.M. Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 383–422.  The third chapter of this book will advance an argument for Thomas Heywood’s authorial contribution to three title pages.  Robert S. Miola, ‘Creating the Author: Jonson’s Latin Epigraphs’, Ben Jonson Journal, 6 (1999), 35–48. Miola makes clear that the Latin mottos on Jonson title pages ‘certainly seem’ to be authorial, even if the other title page features are not (36).  Every Man In His Humour, ed. by David Bevington, in The Cambridge Edition fo the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. 1, ed. by David Bevington, pp. 111–227 (p. 123).  Cynthia’s Revels, ed. Rasmussen and Steggle, p. 439.  He also referred to a ‘private house’ in Lanthorne and Candle-lightt (1608). OED first-use attributions are not reliable, of course, but they help give a general impression of how the terms were being used.  By contrast the OED records that the phrase ‘private theatre’ first occurred in print much later, in William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1633). Why this was, when ‘public theatre’ was used throughout the same period, is unclear, but ‘private house’ or ‘private playhouse’ was seemingly the preferred term.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

 Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 103–126.  For objections to the argument, see R.A. Foakes, ‘Book Review: Roslyn Lander Knutson. Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001’, Early Theatre, 6 (2003), 119–121 (120).  The quarto is undated but was certainly in print by 1610. Subsequent citations are taken from this edition.  On the text, and Burre’s specialism as a printer of theatrically unsuccessful plays, see Zachary Lesser, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, ELR, 29 (1999), 21–43.  John Marston, Jack Drum’s Entertainmentt (London: 1601), A2r. It should also be noted, for balance, that the tendency to praise the audience is not limited to the plays of the indoor theatres. Note, for example, how the epilogue to Arden of Faversham refers to its outdoor amphitheatre audience as ‘Gentlemen’ and asks them to ‘pardon this naked tragedy’ (l. 14): Anonymous, Arden of Faversham, in A Woman Killed with Kindness and Other Domestic Plays, ed. by Martin Wiggins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–68.  Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London : 1598), Oo1v–Oo2r.  Indeed, this is not a new development; there are numerous references to classical ‘public’ theatre in the sixteenth century.  Lucy Munro lists it amongst the Whitefriars repertory, suggesting that the 1618 title page refers to the Porter’s Hall playhouse and to a revival: Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertoryy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 170. As Chambers notes, the epistle to Weathercock ‘makes it clear that the play was at least planned, and probably written, by the end of 1611’ which supports the notion of a Porter’s Hall performance as revival, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3, p. 313.  A Transcript of the Stationers’ Register, 1554–1640, vol. 3, p. 215.  The attribution is also accepted by Daniel Vitkus in the introduction to his edition of the play: Three Turk Plays From Early Modern Englandd (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 1–53 (pp. 23–24).  Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, vol. 4, p. 271; Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 96.  Chambers established the exact date of the performance as 21 February 1613.  See the epilogue to this chapter for further examples.  Michael Dobson has demonstrated the great range of amateur performances from Dering onwards: the performances he details are variously described as ‘public’ or ‘private’: Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 The Emergence of the ‘Private’ Theatres, 1600–1625 

 Farmer and Lesser also comment on the ‘inconsistency of early modern usage of the terms’, ‘Vile Arts’, 107.  Lloyd Edward Kermode repeats this information in the introduction to his recent edition of The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, in Three Renaissance Usury Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 1–78 (pp. 47–48).  See, Munro, p. 61; Knutson, p. 19.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0006 3 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640

Abstract: Chapter 3 charts the increased frequency with which the term ‘private’ became associated with the indoor theatres of Caroline London. It then examines a number of examples which appear to resist the standard ‘public/private’ division by referring to indoor playhouse performance as ‘public’. Some of these examples have been misread by critics and seem more likely to uphold, rather than contest, the established distinction, but those examples which do challenge the ‘public/private’ dichotomy deserve greater attention. Some critics have claimed that such examples suggest the inconsistency and irrelevance of the terms, but this chapter argues precisely the opposite. Through close analysis of three Thomas Heywood playbook title pages, the chapter posits that Heywood critiqued politicised ‘public/private’ boundaries.

Keywords: book history; Caroline drama; politics; private; public; Thomas Heywood

Price, Eoin. ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 

The terms‘ public’ and ‘private’ were used on the title pages of numerous adult commercial theatre plays in the later Jacobean period. A Fair Quarrel (1617) by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley was advertised as ‘acted before the King and divers times publicly by the Prince his Highness’ Servants’ and in 1622 two plays were said to be ‘publicly acted’: Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyrr and Herod and Antipaterr by Markham and William Sampson. In 1623 Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi became only the second playbook title page to bear both terms: it claimed to be ‘Presented privately, at the Blackfriars; and publicly at the Globe’ and was printed by Nicholas Okes for John Waterson. Other plays printed around this time advertised Blackfriars and Globe performances, but they did not use the terms. The title page of Othello (1622) proclaimed that it had been ‘divers times acted at the Globe, and at the Blackfriars, by his Majesty’s Servants’, and the 1622 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philasterr was similarly advertised: both were printed by Okes and published by Thomas Walkley. The Malfi title page affirmed a distinction that had existed for just over two decades, and yet it would be six years before either term was used on the title page of a newly printed play. A fourth quarto of Romeo and Juliett was printed in 1623; a sixth edition of Heywood’s Edward IV plays was printed in 1626, but in 1629 John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy was printed by Felix Kingston for Henry Seile. The title page declared: ‘Acted at the private house in the Blackfriars, and publicly at the Globe by the King’s Majesty’s Servants’. Thereafter title pages used ‘private’ and especially the locution ‘private house’ with increased frequency. This chapter further establishes evidence for the prominence of the ‘private’ theatres but having done so it then examines intriguing and unusual instances in which printed playbook title pages refer to indoor performances as ‘public’. It ends by considering how some of these examples can be seen as resisting the standard ‘public/private’ division, but argues that such challenges testify to the prominent position the terms occupied in the politicised culture of Caroline theatre. In 1629 Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actorr was printed by Bernard Alsop and Thomas Fawcet for Robert Allot. The title page announced that the play had ‘divers times been, with good allowance acted at the private play-house in the Blackfriars, by the King’s Majesty’s Servants’. The following year two plays by William Davenant were entered into the Stationers’ Register on 10 January 1630 to John Waterson. The Cruel Brotherr was printed later that year by Augustine Matthews, and The Just Italian by Thomas Harper: both describe Blackfriars as a ‘private’ house.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

On 26 February 1630 John Grove entered James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant into the Stationers’ Register. It was printed by Alsop and Fawcet and its title page declared that the play was ‘lately presented with good applause at the private house in Drury-Lane’. The theatre in question was the Phoenix or Cockpit, and this was the first title page to describe it as a ‘private house’. Massinger’s The Renegado was also printed in 1630 by Matthews for Waterson and it referred to the ‘private play-house in Drury Lane’. Other Cockpit plays were printed and again, some referred to the venue as a ‘private house’. Dekker’s Match Me in London was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 8 November 1630 to Seile and was printed by Alsop and Fawcet, and Shirley’s Love Tricks was entered on 25 February 1631 to Francis Constable and was printed by Elizabeth Allde. There are more examples throughout the decade, usually in relation to the Blackfriars or the Cockpit, although some, such as Shakerly Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguerr (1632) and James Shirley’s Changes (1632), refer to Salisbury Court. The plays were produced by two different stationers: John Beale printing for Grove in the first instance and George Purslowe for William Cooke in the second. Changes was the first play that William Cooke published, but it was the beginning of a long-standing working relationship with Shirley’s plays. Many of these publications referred to their theatre venue as ‘private’: The Witty Fair One (1633), The Maid’s Revenge (1639) and The Humorous Courtier (1640) were all published by Cooke. Cooke also collaborated with Andrew Crooke on several Shirley publications, a number of which refer to ‘private’ theatres: Hyde Park (1637), The Lady of Pleasure (1637), The Young Admirall (1637), The Example (1637), The Gamesterr (1637), The Duke’s Mistress (1638), The Balll (1639), Chabot, Admiral of France (1639), cowritten with Chapman, TheC oronation (1640), The Night Walkerr (1640), which was written by Fletcher but revised by Shirley, and The Opportunityy (1640). In addition Cooke and Crooke collaborated on Fletcher’s Wit Without Money (1639), another ‘private house’ play. Crooke also acted as sole publisher of some plays, of which one, Shirley’s Love’s Crueltyy (1640), refers to ‘the private House in Drury Lane’. A number of plays with ‘private’ attributions in this period were thus printed by Cooke or by Crooke (or indeed, by both). Nonetheless, there were enough ‘private’ attributed plays published by other stationers, and associated with other writers, to indicate that the term had found new levels of title page popularity. Around 1610, when Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess was first printed, Beaumont had written a commendatory poem disparaging the ‘public

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640  stage’ and its audience. In 1629 the play was printed again, by a different publisher, Richard Meighen, and advertised as ‘newly corrected’, although Beaumont’s preface remained unchanged (it did, however, occur earlier in the list of preliminaries). Meighen issued another edition in 1634, again containing Beaumont’s prefatory poem, but this time the edition contained new information on its title page: ‘Acted at Somerset House before the King and Queen on Twelfth Night last, 1633. And divers times since with great applause at the private house in Blackfriars, by his Majesty’s Servants’. The book evidently capitalised on the recent court performance, and on a commercial revival. It revelled in the success of a play which, when first staged, had proven unpopular. Indeed, it is notable that the title page compiler chose to include the fashionable ‘Private House’ reference.1 This is also true of Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, first printed in 1613 without a playhouse or playing company attribution, by Walter Burre, a specialist in the publication of unsuccessful stage plays.2 The second edition, printed in 1635 by Nicholas Okes for ‘I.S’ (presumed to be John Spencer), proclaimed that the play was ‘now acted by Her Majesty’s Servants at the private house in Drury Lane’. Furthermore, the title pages of two other playbooks – Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap (1636) and Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (1640) – differed from their respective earlier editions (in 1606 and 1608) by using the term. In total there were 42 first editions of commercial plays printed between 1629 and the closing of the theatres in 1642 which carried the term on their title pages. An additional 22 were printed between 1643 and 1660. Three further plays – Fletcher and Massinger’s The Elder Brotherr and Sir John Suckling’s Aglaura and Brennoraltt – were first printed in the period in editions that did not mention the term on their title pages, but were reprinted in editions that described their venues as ‘private’.3 In contrast only six first edition plays referred to ‘public’ performance between 1629 and 1642 with a further two printed between 1643 and 1660. Of these, four unequivocally refer to indoor performance. Five ‘public’ attributed plays were reprinted during this period (The Virgin Martyrr was printed twice, in 1631 and 1651): of these, one unambiguously refers to an indoor playhouse. Shirley is the playwright most frequently associated with ‘private’ playhouse attributions: 18 plays written by him in whole or part were printed in quarto form between 1629 and 1660. Five were printed in octavo form in 1652 and were followed by the octavo collection Six New Plays printed in 1653 comprising the five plays from the previous year plus The Court

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

Secret, a play that did not claim ‘private’ performance as it had, according to its title page, never been acted. No other playwright had even nearly as many plays associated with the term, although a range of other writers were also associated, including Massinger, Davenant, Thomas Nabbes and Henry Glapthorne. Not all Shirley play title pages used the term: The Bird in a Cage (1633) and The Arcadia (1640) advertised performance at the Phoenix but did not describe the theatre as a private house; The Royal Master (1638) advertised performance ‘in the New Theatre in Dublin: and before the Right Honourable the Lord Deputy of Ireland, in the Castle’, and both The Constant Maidd (1640) and the first part ofSaint Patrick for Irelandd (1640) were printed without performance details. Nonetheless a high percentage of Shirley’s plays used the term on title pages. Shirley was a prolific dramatist, and many of his plays made it into print in single editions; other prolific dramatists such as Fletcher, Beaumont and Massinger were at something of a disadvantage in that a significant proportion of their plays published in this period were printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, and this collection did not print individual play title pages.4 It might be that Shirley had an influence over the composition of his title pages, and that he wanted to associate his plays with the positive connotations of ‘private’, although equally it could reflect an effort on the part of Cooke and Crooke, joint or sole publishers of so many Shirley plays. Michael Neill has written on how the Caroline indoor theatres attempted to configure their audiences as privileged and judicious wits; this in turn led to drama becoming fashionable among the court and Inns of Court.5 This culture manifested itself in a variety of ways: in encomiastic poetry and dedications, in prologues and epilogues, and, although Neill does not mention it, through title pages. Title page attributions like those on so many Shirley plays were a way of asserting this sort of culture while simultaneously advertising the playbook. By the mid-point of the 1630s ‘private’ had become well-established and even dominant, as evinced by the low number of ‘public’ playhouse references. Yet four title pages from this period unambiguously referred to an indoor theatre as ‘public’, and there are two further ambiguous examples. It is important to understand how this might have happened, especially given the apparent popularity of ‘private’ in the advertising of indoor commercial plays, and the relative infrequency of ‘public’ on Caroline title pages. To do so is to delve deeper into the evidence, to ask further questions about title page composition, to consider in more detail the performance history of the plays in question, and finally, to evaluate

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640  the potential meanings of ‘public’, especially in relation to ‘private’. This process should begin with the ambiguous examples, since it is not at all clear as to whether they actually refer to indoor theatres. In 1608 Chapman’s controversial Byron plays were printed by Nicholas Okes for the publisher Thomas Thorpe, and were sold at the shop of Laurence Lisle.6 The title page read: ‘Acted lately in two plays, at the Blackfriars’. In 1625 a second edition was printed, again by Okes, and again published by Thorpe. This time the title page text was written in italics, with slight spelling variation and capitalisation, and contained an intriguing addition: ‘and other public stages’. Farmer and Lesser list this as an example of inconsistent usage of the term; however this mysterious and ambiguous attribution warrants more than the footnote it is granted (‘Vile Arts’ 107). First, it does not incontrovertibly refer to an indoor playhouse: ‘and other public stages’ might well be interpreted as meaning ‘and other stages, which are public’ rather than as implying that the Blackfriars is ‘public’. Second, the identity of those ‘other’ stages (the plural is suggestive of more than one other stage) is unknown. The Annals of English Drama lists the Queen’s Revels under ‘auspices’ but does not provide further information and in an appendix to The Shakespearean Stage Gurr lists the play as performed at the Blackfriars, but does not suggest any other venue. Munro records the play amongst the Chapel/ Queen’s Revels repertory but considers the possibility, based on the Q2 title page, that there may have been a late Jacobean revival (171). John Margeson notes the fact that the edition was the only one of Chapman’s plays to be reissued in the author’s lifetime is a possible indicator of ‘renewed interest after a revival’, although he also states that the only evidence of a later production is the inclusion of the title in a list of plays at the Lincoln Inn Fields theatre, dated 1668 (53). If there was a revival, it is not clear where it was, although if the title page addendum is taken on face value then the play must have been revived at a theatre other than the Blackfriars. If this is the case then an outdoor theatre is a possible venue. Another possibility is that the addition is a fictive embellishment designed to evoke a sense of the popularity of the play. The title page links the play with Blackfriars – a well-established theatre now often associated with elite tastes – but also suggests the play has appeal to a wider ‘public’ audience. The play need not have been revived, and it need not have been performed at multiple theatres. It is striking, however, that this unusual locution bears a resemblance to another title page published 13 years later. Henry Shirley’s

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

The Martyred Soldier (1638) proclaimed to have been ‘sundry times acted with a general applause at the private house in Drury Lane, and at other public theatres by the Queen’s Majesty’s servants’. The critical difference is that in the 1638 text the Cockpit is explicitly referred to as ‘private’ and is seemingly differentiated from the ‘other public theatres’. This interpretation is supported by the performance history of the play. Initially performed at the Cockpit, it was called in and licensed with amendments, which were not observed. Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, noted on the 23 August 1623 ‘for to every cross they added a stet of their own’ (Bawcutt 52). This understandably enraged Herbert who confiscated the play; yet five days later he was evidently persuaded to part with it by Richard Gunnell of the Palsgrave’s Men, provided the amendments were observed. The Fortune Theatre, the home of the Palsgrave’s Men, had been destroyed by fire in 1621 and the company’s playtexts were also incinerated so Gunnell apparently acted quickly to try and secure a new play for the recently rebuilt Fortune.7 Bentley also asserts that the manuscript of the play was in the possession of John Kirke, who had connections with the Red Bull, and this opens up another possible venue (Bentley 4: 1062). There is evidence then, that the play may have been performed at indoor and outdoor playhouses. The title page locution could be seen as a less usual way of configuring the ‘public/private’ division posited earlier on the title pages of Satiromastix, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Lover’s Melancholy. There is, strangely, a familial link between the two texts. The Martyred Soldierr was entered in the Stationers’ Register to John Okes, the son of Nicholas, the printer of the Byron plays. John Okes printed The Martyred Soldierr and it was advertised as available for wholesale purchase at Francis Eglesfield’s shop. Could it be that John Okes borrowed the title page locution from a text previously printed by his father? It seems a stretch, especially given the interval between the two publications, but an argument for Okes’ authorship of The Martyred Soldier’s title page is strength- ened by an examination of the word ‘Theatres’ as used on Renaissance playbook title pages. The word occurs on just five other title pages, and so was an unusual and distinctive choice. Of those five uses one refers specifically to a title, John Tatham’s The Fancies Theatre (1640), and two refer to the name of a playhouse: the New Theatre in Dublin.8 The title page of The Jew of Malta (1633) revealed the play had been ‘Played before the King and Queen in his Majesty’s Theatre at Whitehall’. Only two title pages used the word ‘theatre’ to refer non-specifically to commercial playhouses: The Martyred Soldier, and William Rowley’s A Shoemaker A

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 

Gentleman (1637). Both texts were printed by John Okes and entered to him in the Stationers’ Register; John Cowper was listed as the bookseller of the Rowley play. The title page of A Shoemaker A Gentleman claimed the play was ‘sundry times acted at the Red Bull and other Theatres, with a general and good Applause’: it bears more than a passing resemblance to that of The Martyred Soldier, especially considering the idiosyncratic use of ‘Theatres’. It seems likely that John Okes provided the title page wording for both plays, which makes the resemblance to the Byron text mysterious. It could be a coincidence, or it might be that the Byron title page was written by Nicholas Okes, who had printed both editions. This might be unusual because Thorpe was ostensibly the publisher and therefore seems most likely to have taken responsibility for the title page composition, but perhaps Okes added the extra information on the second edition: he had seemingly acted as publisher of other texts prior to the printing of the 1625 edition, so perhaps had experience in writing title pages.9 Even if this speculation is correct it does not explain how or why John Okes used that particular locution, and it was not repeated by him or anyone else. Ultimately, the relationship between the title pages, if there is one, remains mysterious and the exact meaning of these locutions is not provable. However, the evidence assembled here is strong enough to counter Farmer and Lesser’s assumption: it is certainly possible that both title pages acknowledge a difference between ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of theatre as opposed to conflating them. There are some examples, however, which make explicit reference to indoor playhouses as ‘public’ and they too, deserve extended considera- tion. The earliest of these is Lodowick Carlell’s The Deserving Favourite (1629).10 The play was printed by William Stansby for Matthew Rhodes and its title page declared that it ‘was lately acted, first before the King’s Majesty, and since publicly at the Blackfriars by his Majesty’s Servants’. There were a number of playbook title pages across the Renaissance period that referred to court and commercial drama, but only two of the others described the commercial performances as ‘public’: one of them, Love’s Mistress (1636) will be discussed in detail later; the other, A Fair Quarrell (1617) referred to an outdoor commercial performance, and so is not problematic. In 1605 Chapman’s All Fools became the first play title page explicitly to advertise a commercial venue as well as acknowledging court performance: it noted that the play was ‘Presented at the Blackfriars, and lately before his Majesty’. Before this, title pages drawing upon the cachet of court performance mentioned the playing company, but not the commercial theatre, although some of Lyly’s

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England plays did make reference to indoor playhouse venues: Sappho and Phao contained one prologue ‘at the Court’ and one ‘at the Blackfriars’ and Campaspe included prologues and epilogues which differentiate between court and Blackfriars performance. Adult company plays performed at court followed a similar pattern, although it was not until 1608 that King Learr advertised performance ‘before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall’ and ‘usually at the Globe’. In 1612 Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock became the first title page to refer to both a court performance and a ‘private’ commercial performance, so there was a precedent which the author of The Deserving Favourite title page either ignored or did not know about. It is once again worth thinking about the title page author: the main contenders being the publisher and the playwright. Although Stansby was a well-established printer, Matthew Rhodes was only an occasional publisher of dramatic material. The only other play he published was Herod and Antipater which was advertised as ‘divers times publicly acted (with great applause) at the Red Bull, by the Company of his Majesty’s Revels’. This is not unusual since the Red Bull was an outdoor theatre, but it does contextualise The Deserving Favourite. Since Rhodes did not usually work with plays he may have been unfamiliar with the terminology of the theatre and the typical distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’. It is noticeable that he uses the term ‘publicly’ on both title pages. Perhaps Rhodes was a man who saw all commercial theatre as ‘public’ in contrast to other stationers more accustomed to the business of play publication. When the play was printed again, in 1659, for Humphrey Moseley, it retained the court attribution on its title page but referred to Blackfriars as a ‘Private house’. Four years earlier Moseley also published Carlell’s two-part play The Passionate Lovers (1655) with a title page that advertised court performance but which also referred to Blackfriars as a ‘Private House’. This could be said to reflect the proclivities of Mosley, but other publishers followed similar patterns. In 1633 Marmion’s A Fine Companion was printed by Augustine Matthews for Richard Meighen, declaring on its title page that the play was ‘Acted before the King and Queen at Whitehall, and sundry times with great applause at the private house in Salisbury Court’ and in 1639 Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia was printed by Richard Bishop for Daniel Pakeman, with a title page advertising that the play was ‘Acted at the Court before their Majesties: and at the Private House in Drury Lane’. Meighen was well-established in the playbook trade but Pakeman was in a similar position to Rhodes in that he rarely published or sold drama: Glapthorne’s play is the only playbook he published, but his title page attribution follows both Moseley and Meighen.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 

So Rhodes’ decision (presuming it was his decision) to refer to Blackfriars as ‘public’ in relation to the court was not followed by other publishers or writers. The title page could be credited to Rhodes’ relative ignorance of the playbook business, and perhaps of theatre more generally, and this might be true also for the author, who was inexperienced in the business of playbook publication: The Deserving Favourite was the first of Carlell’s plays to make it into print. The title page proclaims Carlell’s status in a peculiarly elaborate manner: Carlell is said to be a ‘Gentleman of the Bowes, and Groom of the King and Queen’s Privy Chamber’. ‘Gent.’ was a reasonably common way to attribute author status, and was associated with a range of writers including Marlowe, Chapman, Middleton, Fletcher, Beaumont, Shirley, and Massinger; but The Deserving Favourite is the only play which claimed to be authored by a gentleman of the bows. Samuel Daniel was sometimes referred to as ‘one of the Grooms of the Queen’s Majesty’s Privy Chamber’, as in the 1607 edition of his Certain Small Works, and texts by William Alexander – The Monarchic Tragedies (1604) – and Thomas Carew – Poems (1640) – also claimed that their authors were members of the Prince’s or King’s Privy Chamber, but in all of these cases the plays in question were not performed on commercial stages: they were either closet plays, or court pieces such as masques. This makes the ‘public’ theatre reference especially curious: the title page went to unusual lengths to advertise Carlell’s status and linked the play to the court, but instead of calling Blackfriars ‘private’ which might draw upon this cachet, it called the playhouse ‘public’, in a way which perhaps jarred. Stationers must have made bad decisions sometimes. Perhaps the incongruous title page is evidence of an ill-advised or poorly thought- through scheme: certainly it was not followed by later editions. However, the ‘public’ reference could be seen as a having a distinct rhetorical design: the title page shares links with other elements of the text. In the dedication Carlell wrote that the play ‘was not designed to travel so far as the common stage’ (A2r). As demonstrated, ‘common’ was not necessarily synonymous with ‘public’, and it has more distinctively pejorative overtones: Carlell ostensibly means ‘commercial’ when he says ‘common’, but his aim is to malign such performances in order to increase the prestige of his text. If the strategy was to market the play as exclusive and prestigious, then ignoring the performance history would have been an option: Q1 The Knight of the Burning Pestle is one famous example of a title page that did not acknowledge its theatrical origins, even though the stationer’s address admitted, and attempted to account for, its theatrical failings. Yet

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England advertising the commercial, ‘public’ stage history of the play might serve a particular function by offering a sharp differentiation between court and commercial venues. ‘Public’ can have a derogatory function, but is not as loaded as ‘common’, making it a more appropriate word to appear on a title page: it would surely be dangerous to print something derogatory on such an important and visible form of advertisement. The ‘Printer’s Epigrammatical Epistle’ appended to the text claimed that the play was ‘drawn to the press’ without the author’s knowledge, although it is unsafe to believe everything an epistle or dedication says: perhaps Carlell had designs on commercial performance; perhaps he had knowledge of the play’s impending publication, as his writing a dedication might suggest (A2v).11 Indeed, in the dedication he said the play was ‘pressed for a great journey, almostt without my knowledge’ (A2r; emphasis added). It might be, then, that Carlell knew of the plans to print the book; if so, perhaps he contributed a title page as well. However, if this was Carlell’s strategy, it was not one his plays repeated. The reprint of The Deserving Favourite and the two parts of The Passionate Lovers referred to Blackfriars as ‘private’, and his other two-parter Arviragus and Philicia (1639) did likewise. Perhaps it is more likely that Rhodes read the material given to him, including the dedication, and decided that a ‘public’ attribution might be a good way to advertise the play. A commercial performance could be described as ‘public’ in comparison to the court, although it is striking that other title page composers decided not to use this construction. The other three playbook title pages to refer to indoor commercial performance as ‘public’ ought to be considered together. The plays were all written by Thomas Heywood, performed at the Cockpit, and published between 1633 and 1635. The first of them, The English Traveller, was entered into the Stationers’ Register to Nicholas Okes on 15 July 1633 and was ‘Printed by Robert Raworth: dwelling in Old Fish Street, near Saint Mary Maudlin’s Church 1633’. The title page declared that the play was ‘Publicly acted at the Cockpit in Drury Lane: By Her Majesty’s Servants’. On 25 June 1634 A Maidenhead Well Lostt was entered to Nicholas Okes in the Stationers’ Register and was printed by him ‘for John Jackson and Francis Church’ to be sold ‘at the King’s Arms in Cheapside’. It had a similar title page locution: ‘publicly acted at the Cockpit in Drury Lane’. Then, on 30 September 1635 Love’s Mistress was entered in the Register to John Crouch, although the title page reveals it was not printed until 1636. The text was printed by Raworth, published by Crouch and sold by Jasper Emery. Its title page claimed the play ‘was three times presented before their two Excellent

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 

Majesties, within the space of eight days in the presence of sundry foreign ambassadors. Publicly acted by the Queen’s Comedians, at the Phoenix in Drury-Lane’. Although Raworth was involved with the printing of two of these texts, and two of them were entered to Okes in the Register, the two constants between all three plays are the author and the playing venue. The fact that they contain the same locution and were printed within two years of each other is also highly suggestive. Together they represent a coherent mini-campaign, especially if seen in the context of Heywood’s career in print and on stage. It cannot be proven that Heywood wrote these title pages, but a strong case can be made: a case which illuminates the complex political rhetoric of ‘public’ indoor Caroline drama. Heywood had an ambivalent attitude towards the printing of his plays: he displayed concerns over the transmission of his texts into print, but, as Benedict Scott Robinson has shown, he also attempted to have some of his plays printed in collection in the 1630s.12 Douglas Brooks has commented on how Heywood’s long-standing relationship with Nicholas Okes ‘may have given him a new sense of control over the material fate of his plays’ (201). Okes’ name appeared in the Stationers’ Register for two of the three plays mentioned. Additionally Farmer and Lesser note that Heywood ranks second (behind Jonson) in terms of most title pages bearing Latin insignia, and that most of these title pages date from the 1630s (‘Vile Arts’ 99).13 They conclude that Latin was used to develop literary authority: its association with authorship suggests that Latin mottos might be selected for inclusion on a title page by the writer. Indeed, the motto ‘aut prodesse solent aut delectare’ appears on all three of these title pages, as it did on seven other Heywood texts from 1632 to 1638: it became a kind of signifier of Heywood’s authorship. Furthermore, Heywood is attributed as the author of all three of these plays and this too suggests an attempt to develop literary authority and might be an example of Heywood’s influence on the composition of the title page. Indeed, it has been argued that Heywood became more interested in the printing of his plays in the 1630s so perhaps he also became more interested in the title pages. It is notable also that there were a number of theatrical and cultural impulses in the period which Heywood sought to respond to in his writing: the title pages appear to be an extension of this, and it is possible therefore that Heywood wrote them. Closer inspection of all three title pages and the plays which they advertise helps to provide some flesh to the bones of this hypothesis, and it is useful to consider the theatrical and cultural climate in which

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

Heywood was working, in which the plays were printed, and to which the title pages appear to respond. The first of the three to be printed, The English Traveller, contains an address to the reader in which Heywood claimed that the play came ‘accidentally to the press’ (A3r). Even if this is true it did not stop him from writing the preface and a separate dedication to Sir Henry Appleton. Heywood’s prefaces often make this sort of claim, and there is reason to treat them with scepticism: Joseph Loewenstein notes that a similar statement made by Heywood in a preface to his play The Rape of Lucrece (1608) is ‘a trifle disingenuous’ (51). Indeed, there is generally good reason for a sceptical attitude towards the literality of claims made in prefatory matter. As Michael Saenger states, ‘Information contained in front matter is often unreliable; marketability is the constant, not honesty. Advertising a text often means misrepresenting it’ (20). So, despite Heywood’s protestation, it is likely that he had knowledge of the play’s publication. As Martin Wiggins observes, Heywood makes claims such as those stated in the preface to The English Travellerr with ‘suspicious frequency’ and many of Heywood’s prefaces were demon- strably the first part of the book to be published: indeed, it is also clear that the printers often worked directly from Heywood’s own authorial manuscripts (Wiggins ‘Note’ xxxvii). Richard Rowland goes further in arguing that Heywood ‘chose hastily but wisely and from a presumably huge stock’ to have the play printed in order to answer William Prynne, whose Histriomastix (1633) had vigorously attacked the stage, and ‘the fashionable and unscrupulous literati of the Caroline court’ who criticised the commercial theatre, and in particular the Red Bull, for which Heywood wrote many plays (229). Indeed, Red Bull drama received criticism over several decades. In 1612 Webster wrote disap- provingly of the playhouse being ‘so open and black a theatre’ lacking ‘a full and understanding auditory’; later, Jasper Mayne and Abraham Cowley were amongst those to poke fun at the playhouse, which was often associated with ‘drums, trumpets, battles, and heroes’.14 Heywood answered such criticisms with a play that claimed, in its prologue, to ‘use no drum, nor trumpet, nor dumb show/No combat, marriage, not so much today/As song, dance, masque, to bombast out a play’ (A2v), and yet which also stated, on its title page, that it was ‘publicly’ acted. Rowland’s critique of the play is persuasive, but it is telling that it involves a presumption of Heywood’s involvement in the publication process: Rowland sees Heywood as having hand-picked the play for publication.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640 

If this is correct, then it is surely possible that he might have written the title page in a deliberate riposte to critics of amphitheatre drama and to the representation of indoor theatres as ‘private’. Brooks notes that The English Traveller was the ‘closest any of Heywood’s plays came to having the bibliographical prestige bestowed on Jonson’s dramatic output’: it was the only of his plays to use both continuous printing and to include a Latin epigraph on its title page (201).15 This too, can be seen as supple- menting the hypothesis: even though the play was printed in a literary style, it celebrates its roots in commercial drama and associates ‘public’ theatre with the sort of prestige normally reserved for ‘private’ drama or literature. The Latin motto, derived from Horace’s Ars Poetica, urges the reader to think about the play as profiting, as well as delighting. Heywood seems keen to remind his readers that plays can have wider intellectual benefits; p‘ ublic’ drama can instruct, as well as entertain. The title page of A Maidenhead Well Lost, printed the following year, contains a similar locution, but the preface also provides compelling evidence that Heywood thought of his play in terms of ‘public’ performance. In an address ‘To the Reader’ Heywood noted that the play ‘hath been frequently and publicly acted’ (A3r). The reader address demonstrates that Heywood used the word in relation to indoor commercial playing; the occurrence of this word in both preface and title page is suggestive. The effect is similar to that ofThe English Traveller’s title page, but the content of the preface helps to illuminate the more precise context of the term’s use. Heywood criticised Prynne’s ‘horrible’ Histriomastix which he says has ‘damned all such to the flames of Hell’ (A3r). Prynne’s lengthy tract attacked both ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of drama. Prynne made allowances for what he saw as genuinely ‘private’ drama used for educative purposes:

Stage-plays may be privately read over without any danger of infection by ill company, without any public infamy or scandal, without giving any ill example, without any encouraging or maintaining of players in their ungodly profession, or without participating with them in their sins; but they can neither be compiled, beheld, or acted, without these several unlawful circumstances which cannot be avoided (Cccccc2v).

But he was also critical of academic plays which he said were ‘seldom acted or penned for any of the ends, the uses here recorded, but only for entertainment, for mirth and pleasure sake’ (Cccccc3r). Prynne’s objection, then, is to drama as entertainment rather than specifically

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England commercial drama – his infamous criticism of female actors as whores drew the wrath of Queen Henrietta Maria, who acted in court masques – and this applies equally to ‘public’ and ‘private’ theatre plays. In reality, however, ‘public’ drama, often denigrated by indoor theatre playwrights, was more in need of a spokesperson than the ‘private’ playhouses. This was an appropriate moment, for Heywood, the staunchest defender of the stage, to respond to Prynne’s objections. Heywood’s reference to A Maidenhead Well Lost being ‘frequently and publicly’ acted is a deliberate, rhetorically subversive manoeuvre which is in turn echoed by the title page attribution. As David Bergeron has argued, Heywood’s prefatory pieces ‘provide[s] a ringing defense of the theater’, but, as A Maidenhead Well Lostt demonstrates, Heywood was meticulous in the way in which he constructed that defence (181). Heywood defended his vision of a particular kind of theatre: in answering Prynne, he was also able to address the long-standing distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ theatres promulgated by a range of indoor theatre writers. Indeed, The English Traveller, A Maidenhead Well Lost, and Love’s Mistress need to be seen in the context of Heywood’s feud with Davenant, Carew and other elite writers, as well as in relation to Prynne. Rowland notes that between October 1633 and the autumn of 1635 – around the time that all three plays were published – Heywood had been compiling material for The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635), an enormous and eccentric cluster of ideas written in poetic form (334). Among the contents of this book is a passage aimed at Davenant and his circle, attacking their elitist attitudes to drama. The argument is part of a quarrel that Rowland dates back to 1629, when Davenant’s The Just Italian was poorly received by its Blackfriars audience. Davenant’s apologists, Carew amongst them, criticised the audience and both the Red Bull and the Cockpit theatres for their collective lack of wit and taste. This resulted in a response by Massinger who traded insults with Carew’s camp before Heywood entered the argument by strongly rebuking Davenant’s propaganda.16 Heywood’s title pages can be said to engage in this debate by realigning commercial drama with the ‘public’ and not with the condescending attitudes of writers like Davenant. Many of Davenant’s play’s title pages described their Blackfriars venue as ‘private’: The Cruel Brother (1630), The Just Italian (1630), The Platonic Lovers (1636), The Wits (1636), and The Unfortunate Lovers (1643) are all examples. Heywood did not want to be associated with drama of this sort, even though the Cockpit was equally likely to be described as ‘private’ on title pages. Shirley, who Gurr

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 ‘Private’ and ‘Public’ Indoor Theatres, 1625–1640  describes as the ‘chief victim of the Carew attack’ (Playgoingg 212), was, as demonstrated, the writer most frequently associated with ‘private’, but he did not seem to object in quite the same way. All this may also help to explain the final title page. Love’s Mistress was Heywood’s most upmarket play and the title page stresses the great success that it had at court, where it was played three times in the space of eight days before the King and Queen. The play raises questions over two predominant ways of reading Heywood’s attitudes to drama. On the one hand he has been seen as a social climber, and on the other a populist writer. The title page of Love’s Mistress allows Heywood to be both at once. Although it had some resemblance to that of The Deserving Favourite, the effect was very different; The Deserving Favourite does not seem to be part of an overarching strategy of any kind, whereas Love’s Mistress can be seen as the culmination of a careful rhetorical campaign. Furthermore, the paratexts to The Deserving Favourite implicitly denigrated commercial performance whereas the prefatory material to Love’s Mistress did not: there is plenty of approbation for royal figures, but no sense that commercial theatre was coming under any sort of attack. In a letter to the reader, Heywood stated that the play had ‘passed so many tests of approbation’ A2r-v that it needed little apology: it is an act of obsequiousness, not unlike that displayed in the dedication of The Deserving Favourite, but it is achieved without an attack on the ‘public’ or ‘common’ stage. Additionally, and as with A Maidenhead Well Lost, it appears that Heywood incorporated a ‘public’ theatre reference in his introductory material, although in Love’s Mistress the allusion is more oblique. Heywood provided a prologue, ‘to this play, the first time it was presented on the stage’, which described the audience ‘entering hither at our public gate’ thus perhaps denoting the space of the Cockpit as ‘public’. Heywood is now often associated with the Red Bull playhouse, usually characterised, unfairly, as a plebeian theatre, although he wrote for several playhouses: the Cockpit is obviously one; Blackfriars and the Globe are others. Rowland has described him as ‘a scholarly man’ who deployed his learning ‘more or less consistently for an unashamedly commercial theatre’ (17). Heywood wrote approvingly of the ‘public’ theatre in An Apology for Actors, and his successful history play Edward IVV, which was published in two parts, went through six editions from 1599 to 1626: the title page of each edition described the play as having been publicly performed. In contrast, none of Heywood’s plays are described as ‘private’ on their title pages.17 It is possible that this demotic figure

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England might have wanted to continue to be associated with ‘public’ theatre even as he wrote for the Cockpit, indeed even as he wrote his most courtly pieces. The evidence assembled is intended to make the point that, given his association with the publication of his plays, and given his theatrical inclinations, Heywood may be considered as a possible title page author; however even if he was not responsible, the points addressed here about the distinctive use of ‘public’ in relation to indoor theatre still stand up to scrutiny. It is easy to dismiss these title pages as aberrations, or to ignore them completely, but these inconsistencies do not mean that the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ had no value; it means their value and meaning was contested: evidence of conflicting uses is evidence of the vitality of the terms. Seen within the larger context of Caroline theatre, the three Heywood title pages are striking and subversive.

Notes

 When the play was published again, in 1656, by different stationers (George Bedell and Thomas Collins), it followed the 1634 title page locution, varying only in spelling choices.  On which, see Lesser, ‘Walter Burre’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle’, 21–43.  The first edition of The Elder Brotherr was printed in 1637, the second in 1650. The first editions fo Aglaura and Brennoraltt were printed in 1638 and 1642 respectively but both were printed, along with Suckling’s The Goblins in the collection Fragmenta Aurea in 1646, 1648 and 1658. The Goblins was also referred to as ‘privately’ performed.  Some other collections did: Jonson’s Works (London: 1616) for example, the aforementioned Shirley octavo Six New Plays, and indeed, Massinger’s 1655 collection Three New Plays (London: 1655).  Michael Neill, ‘“Wits most accomplished Senate”: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theatres’, SEL, 18 (1978), 341–360. T he title page says ‘to be sold at the Tiger’s Head in Paul’s Churchyard’, which was Lisle’s shop: R.B. McKerrow, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557–1640 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1910), p. 177. Blayney has noted that the bookseller information alerts the buyer as to where a book may be purchased wholesale: it is not to say that the book could onlyy be bought from Lisle’s shop: Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, p. 390.  See Bawcutt, pp. 45–46 and p. 144. Also, Bentley, vol. 1, pp. 148–149.  The plays in question are James Shirley’s The Royal Masterr and Henry Burnell’s Landgartha (1641). The Elizabethan playhouse, The Theatre, was

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never named on title pages: it was demolished in 1599, two years before the first title page reference to a specific theatre, and nine years before its successor, the Globe, became the first outdoor playhouse to be so named, on the King Lear (1608) title page. ‘Stage’ or ‘Stages’ was also rare, but more frequent: see Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1590), Peele’s David and Bathsheba (1599), Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girll (1611) and Joseph Rutter’s translation of Pierre Corneille’s The Cidd (1637) for examples from commercial drama.  For example, in 1613 Middleton’s pageant The Triumphs fo Truth was entered into the Stationers’ Register in Nicholas Okes’ name, and was printed by him. Indeed, Okes had experience in publishing several other pageants prior to 1625. Okes ostensibly also published plays such as Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London (1632).  The play is cited by Farmer and Lesser (p. 107) and Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, (p. 160) as an example of title page inconsistency.  Further commentary on the disingenuous nature of prefatory material follows in the discussion of Thomas Heywood.  Benedict Scott Robinson, ‘Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections’, SEL, 42 (2002), pp. 361–380.  Heywood has 20 title pages to Jonson’s 25.  John Webster, The White Devill (London: 1612), A2r; and Bentley, vol. 6, pp. 238–247 (more specifically, p. 244, p. 245, p. 246). Eva Griffith rightly cautions against overstating the bad reputation of the Red Bull (p. 16) but it is clear that Heywood was responding to attacks against the theatre at this time. For a balanced assessment of the Red Bull’s reputation (from the Renaissance, to the present day), see Rory Loughane, ‘Reputation and the Red Bull Theatre, 1625–1642’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), pp. 29–50.  Continuous printing is a technique described by Greg as ‘when each new speech, instead of (as is usual) beginning a fresh line of print, follows on from the last, with the speaker’s name (or prefix) within the line’ (Greg, vol. 1, xviii).  For Rowland’s account see pp. 334–340.  This includes A Challenge for Beautyy (1636); performed at Blackfriars and the Globe, and A New Way to Please You (1656), cowritten with Rowley and Middleton and performed at Salisbury Court, in addition to the aforementioned Cockpit plays.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0007 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660

Abstract: The epilogue investigates the rapidly changing uses of the term ‘private’ in the period immediately before, during, and after the closure of the theatres in 1642. Since ‘public’ entertainments were officially banned, drama had to become ‘private’ in order to survive. This privacy was bifurcated: on the one hand, ‘private’ referred to household performances, as it had done in the sixteenth century; on the other, it also referred to illegal, unlicensed performances at commercial theatres. The ‘public/private’ theatre division which emerged in the early seventeenth century made less sense in the changing culture of the English Republic and the new indoor theatres erected in the early Restoration, which rendered the older outdoor and indoor venues obsolete, also served to confine the terms to theatre history.

Keywords: civil war drama; English Republic; private; public; Restoration; theatre history

Price, Eoin. ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics fo Publication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660 

In a curious prologue included in the collection The Fancies Theatre, John Tatham alludes to the transfer of theatre companies that occurred around Easter 1640 in which the Prince’s Company, formerly of the Fortune playhouse, swapped with the Red Bull players. It is unclear if Tatham’s prologue was actually performed, or if it was associated with a specific play, although it is apparently addressed to an audience at the Red Bull. It begins by decrying the audience at the Fortune, in what is probably a combination of flattery of the Red Bull playgoers and bitterness at the Fortune, for expelling them from the playhouse:

For some peculiar profit; she has ta’ne A course to banish modesty, and retain More din, and incivilityy than hath been Known in the Bearward’s Court, the Beargarden. Those that now sojourn with her, bring a noise Of rabbles, apple-wives and chimney-boys, Whose shrill confused echoes loud do cry, Enlarge your commons, we hate privacy (H2v). Gurr has written of these lines: ‘Crowds affirm their collective spirity b vocal expression of their shared feelings. The audience, as an active participant in the collective experience of playgoing, had no reason to keep its reactions private’ (Playgoing 53). But here, ‘privacy’ is associated with mannerliness and conformity and is rejected only by the boisterous ‘rabbles’. Tatham’s prologue implied that ‘privacy’ ought to be the norm and that the protestation of the Fortune playgoers was ‘confused’ and misguided. He ends the prologue with an address to the Red Bull ‘Gentlemen’:

Only we would request you to forbear Your wonted custom, banding tile, or pear, Against our curtains, to allure us forth. I pray take notice these are of more worth, Pure Naples silk, not worsted; we have ne’re An actor here has mouth enough to tear Language by th’ears; this forlorn hope shall be By us refined from suchg ross injury. And then let your judicious loves advance Us to our merits, them to their ignorance (H3r). These auditors were apparently noted for their own displays of dissent, but were asked to ‘forbear’ this ‘custom’ and to act judiciously, and presumably, quietly, and privately. Tatham’s prologue promoted a version of theatre and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England theatre-going which was ‘private’, and upbraided the outdoor theatre audiences for their unwillingness to embrace this notion. Tatham is more careful and respectful in his criticism of the Red Bull audience, but his point is the same: all playhouses should embrace ‘privacy’. In the Caroline period indoor theatres became increasingly associated with the term ‘private’, but whereas Heywood sought to reimagine the indoor theatres as ‘public’, Tatham playfully suggests that outdoor theatre audiences should behave more privately. Within two years of the publication of The Fancies Theatre, Tatham got his wish, but not, perhaps, in the way he had hoped. On 2 September 1642, the playhouses, both ‘public’ and ‘private’, were closed. An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons stated:

And whereas public sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage plays with the seasons of humiliation, this being an exercise of sad and pious solemnity ... it is therefore 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 forborne (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 132).

For the purpose of this decree all commercial theatre was configured as ‘public’, presumably to differentiate from‘ private’, non-commercial, and therefore, legal performances. However, in ordinances issued on 22 October 1647 and 9 February 1648, ‘common’ was used instead of ‘public’, perhaps to emphasise the disreputable nature of such performances (Wickham, Berry and Ingram 132–133). After the theatres closed, drama had to become ‘private’ in order to exist. Indeed, there is evidence of a move in the direction of ‘private’, non-commercial performance even before the theatres closed: in 1641 the short political dialogue Canterbury his Change of Diet was printed with a title page describing it as ‘privately acted near the palace yard at Westminster’. Margot Heinemann suggests that performances of such dialogues may have taken place ‘in private houses or barns’ (Heinemann 247) but Butler, specifically citing the Canterbury pamphlet, argues that its ‘verve and theatricality’ means it is ‘almost certain to have achieved stage realisation’ (Butler 240), perhaps, surreptitiously, at an outdoor theatre. Unlike Bentley, who dismisses the possibility that the piece was acted (5: 1229), Wiggins does not entirely discount the possibility that a ‘daring impresario’ might have staged the pamphlet as ‘an unlicensed afterpiece’ (Transfer of Powerr 104), but concludes that there is ‘no firm evidence nor any good grounds’ to make the supposition. Indeed, the title page alludes, not to a commercial

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660  theatre, but to a venue ‘near the palace yard at Westminster’. It is possible that ‘privately’ may have been used to give the text a touch of political intrigue by conjuring the image of a surreptitious performance. Ultimately the mannerly privacy advocated by Tatham’s prologue gave way to the privacy of the civil war era, and interregnum drama; although this privacy was itself bifurcated. On the one hand it referred to performances which were not officially sanctioned, but were legal nonetheless, such as those performed at large houses; on the other it referred to illegal performances, played covertly at otherwise-disused theatres. The first of these two senses is reflected in the marketing of playbooks: in 1646 James Shirley’s masque The Triumph of Beautyy was published by Humphrey Moseley with a title page which declared the piece was ‘personated by some young Gentlemen, for whom it was intended, at a private recreation’; in 1657 Fancy’s Festivals by Thomas Jordan was advertised as ‘privately presented by many civil persons of quality’; Thomas Meriton’s The Wandering Lover (1658) was ‘Acted several times privately at sundry places by the author and his friends with great applause’; the second quarto of Shirley’s Cupid and Death (1659) was described as ‘A Private Entertainment’ on its title page, and his collection containing Honoria and Mammon, and The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses (1659) was ‘nobly represented by young Gentlemen of quality, at a private entertainment of some persons of honour’. But ‘privacy’ could also refer to covert performances. Bentley cites an extract from A Perfect Diurnall for 17–24 December 1649 under the date of 20 December, which describes ‘some actors privately playing near St. John’s Street’: the actors were then seized by the authorities (6.231–232). Bentley notes that the performance may have taken place at a house but that there are further examples of performances at the Red Bull (which was near St John’s Street, as title pages regularly testified) around this time, and that the reference probably alludes to the theatre rather than a house. Much later, in 1699, James Wright reflected on the actors of this period: ‘When the Wars were over, and the Royalists totally subdued; most of ’em who were left aliveg athered to London, and for a subsistence endeavoured to revive their old trade, privately’ (B4v). Wright revealed that the remain- ing actors came together in one company to act Fletcher and Massinger’s The Bloody Brother at the Cockpit ‘with as much caution and privacy as could be’ (B4v) although, despite their ‘privacy’, t h e y were discovered, and arrested. In this case, ‘privacy’ obviously did not refer to the practice of playing at gentlemen’s homes (although Wright does provide further

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England evidence of ‘private’ performances at Holland House in Kensington) but to covert and illegal activities.1 It has some positive associations: it is used in relation to ‘caution’, and Wright does not seem condemnatory of the players, but it does not have the same meaning as that of the ‘private’ performances detailed by the title page of The Wandering Lover, or in the stationer’s preface to Quarles’ The Virgin Widow. In the early sixteenth century, ‘private’ had represented the only form of lawful performance but ‘private’ performances also came to denote unlawful, secret practices. In a preface to The Court Secret, which was printed in 1653 as part of Six New Plays, James Shirley noted that his play ‘happened to receive birth when the stage was interdicted and wanted the public seal which other compositions enjoyed’ (A3r). In this instance, Shirley seems prepared to admit that his ‘other compositions’ had the ‘public seal’ even though they were frequently advertised as ‘private’, but though he claims The Court Secret was never performed, many other plays were staged during that time of prohibition. These plays, lacking the seal of public approval, were, in a sense, private. Nonetheless, the extent to which these performances can be described as ‘private’ is up for debate. The plays of this period lacked official authorisation and had to be staged with a degree of care, but they essentially operated in the same way that the playhouses did before the theatre ban: they were advertised, and they attracted a paying audience. Indeed, Leslie Hotson was moved to describe illegal performances at venues like the Red Bull, the Fortune, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court as conducted in ‘quite an open and public manner’ (24). Janet Clare notes that, on 6 October 1647, playbills advertised a Salisbury Court performance of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No Kingg and on 3 February 1648, bills were ‘thrown into gentlemen’s coaches’ (3–4) to publicise a Red Bull production of Fletcher’s Wit Without Money. Despite numerous injunctions designed to stop playhouse performance and regular theatre raids, theatre performances continued. When Wit Without Moneyy was performed again at the Red Bull, on 30 December 1654, it was interrupted by soldiers, causing a contemporary commenta- tor to remark that the actors had ‘not so full liberty as they pretended’ (Hotson 55). Performances at the Red Bull were seemingly so regular that the interruption came as a shock. Indeed, the December raid did not deter Red Bull actors: they were interrupted again, on 14 September 1655. The account of this raid is especially interesting as it reveals that auditors paid ‘five shillings apiece’; it also remarks that the audience

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660  included ‘an abundance of the female sex’ (Hotson 56). Such comments suggest the publicness of illegal playhouse performances. After the Restoration of Charles II, numerous theatre troupes formed at playhouses which had been in operation since before the playhouse ban. Indeed, by March 1660 John Rhodes obtained a formal license for his company (which included the young Thomas Betterton) to perform at the Cockpit; in June 1660, a license was granted for William Beeston’s company at Salisbury Court, and on 14 August 1660, Michael Mohun’s Red Bull players submitted to the authority of the Master of the Revels, Henry Herbert.2 Yet seven days later, Charles II granted a warrant to Davenant and Thomas Killigrew which enabled them to ‘erect or hire at their charge, as they shall think fit, two houses or theatres with all convenient rooms and other necessaries thereunto appertaining, for the representation of tragedies, comedies, plays, operas, and all other entertainments of that nature in convenient places’ (Thomas 12). After a short time playing in theatres built in the first half of the seventeenth century, Davenant and Killigrew moved their companies to new playing venues, which they thought better equipped to produce new forms of drama, as well as reworked versions of Renaissance plays: Davenant’s company would perform at Lincolns Inn Fields and Killigrew’s at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The Red Bull proved a particularly durable theatre – more plays were performed there during the English Republic than at any other playhouse and Samuel Pepys saw productions there in the early 1660s – but outdoor theatres fell from fashion and the indoor theatres, like the Cockpit, were also rejected in favour of newer indoor spaces. As those old theatres fell into disuse so too did the language used to describe them; the move indoors seemingly erased the desire to think of the playhouses in terms of a ‘public/private’ division. When Wright reflected back on the early years of the Restoration, he thought about all of the plays as being ‘publicly’ performed. Thus, he noted that ‘the King’s Players acted publicly at the Red Bull for some time’ before moving indoors, first to the Vere StreetTh eatre and then to the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane (C1r). Furthermore, he makes reference to performances ‘on the public stage by Sir William Davenant at the Duke’s Old Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ (C1r-C2v). Wright describes performances at outdoor and indoor playhouses as ‘public’ perhaps because they enjoyed the public seal of Royal approval, unlike the surreptitious shows performed during the Republic. But even during the Republic, some performances were officially licensed. Suseman Wiseman

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England notes that Davenant’s operas, which were staged at the Cockpit in the late 1650s, made him ‘the only professional dramatist permitted to stage plays commercially and publicly in the entire period 1642–1660’ (138). The operatic nature of these productions ostensibly offered ‘a solution of some sort to a theatrical problem’ (Wiseman 163), which meant they could be licensed for performance, even though, in fact, they were heavily politicised. But a glance at the title pages of Davenant’s dramas, 1 The Siege of Rhodes (1656; 1659), The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), and 1 Sir Francis Drake (1659) alerts the reader to fresh ways of thinking about theatre: their title pages advertise the visual and aural effects created yb new staging techniques. So, 1 The Siege of Rhodes is said to be ‘Made a representation by the art of prospective in scenes, and the story sung in recitative music’ and The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru is ‘Expressed by instrumental and vocal music, and by art of perspective in scenes’. New kinds of theatrical experience called for new kinds of theatrical terminology. Davenant’s operas and the printed texts they spawned pointed the way towards a new era of dramatic writing and rewriting. But while the Restoration did usher in change, it also looked back- wards. Michael Dobson has well described the double task handed to the royal theatre companies of Restoration England: ‘to celebrate the coronation of a new monarch and the establishment of a wholly new regime, but also to create the impression that the previous royal govern- ment had never really fallen’ (National Poet 22). Remnants of the older theatre tradition remained throughout the years of theatre prohibition and in the new age of licensed performance. In 1655, the Blackfriars theatre – once the most prestigious playhouse in the country – was demolished; yet a number of plays were printed that year advertising Blackfriars performance. Indeed, three octavo collections described the theatre as ‘private’: five of the six Shirley plays printed in collection were said to have been ‘acted at the private house in Blackfriars with great applause’, the two parts of Lodowick Carlell’s The Passionate Lovers used the same locution, and Massinger’s Three New Plays used similar phrasing.3 The following year the fourth quarto of The Faithful Shepherdess advertised the now demolished venue as a ‘private house’ on its title page and in 1658 Massinger’s The City Madam was printed for the first time, some 26y ears after its first performance: it too, referred to Blackfriars as a ‘private house’. The term ‘public’ was also used on some title pages in this period. In 1657, Thomas Jordan’s Red Bull comedy Tricks of Youth was printed under the title The Walks of Islington and

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008 Epilogue: Privacy and Drama, 1640–1660 

Hogsdon. The play had been one of the last great commercial successes before the playhouse ban: the title page announced it was ‘publicly acted 19 days together, with extraordinary applause’. This may be an advertiser’s overstatement, but it suggests a degree of nostalgia for the licensed entertainment of the pre-civil war stage. Two years later, a much older play, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, written by John Day and Henry Chettle at the turn of the century, was printed for the first time; its title page described it as ‘divers times publicly acted by the Prince’s Servants’. Book producers evidently thought the terms useful ways of marketing the plays, but while the gesture to public approval remained (as it does today) a useful way of advertising products, the ‘public/private’ distinction would not endure. Over time, the complex meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ have become obscured. This book has attempted to bring them back into view. In doing so, it participates in a study of theatre history which began before the end of the seventeenth century. In Historia Histrionica, Wright makes two references to ‘the private house in Salisbury Court’ and then notes that ‘the Blackfriars, Cockpit, and Salisbury Court were called Private Houses, and were very small to what we have now’.4 The past tense offers a poignant reminder of how far removed Wright is from the historical reality of the period he is trying to describe. The theatres he mentions no longer exist and while he correctly identifies them as ‘private’, like later historians he seems puzzled by the term. The playhouses are to him a site of curiosity and wonder but their customs no longer align with contemporary attitudes. The fascination with the Renaissance theatres and, in particular, the indoor playhouses, has only grown in the twenty-first century. Indoor Renaissance-style theatres have opened, with success, in Staunton, Virginia at the American Shakespeare Centre, in 2001 and at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, in 2014.5 Yet the passage of time has made it harder to understand how such theatres were debated, marketed, denigrated, and celebrated in their own time. The current critical tendency to use more neutral terms like ‘indoor’ and ‘outdoor’ has distinct advantages but a side effect is that the vibrancy and controversy of more ideologically loaded notions like ‘public’ and ‘private’ has been concealed. The words do not hold the same significance today and their full range of meanings will never be reclaimed, but this book has argued that they formed an important part of the politicised culture of Renaissance playmaking, playgoing, play printing, and play reading.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0008  ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England

Notes

 Wright, C1r.  David Roberts, Thomas Betterton: The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 46; David Thomas, ed. Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 8–9. Indeed, both Michael Dobson and Martin Wiggins indicate that theatrical activity resumed from late 1659. See, Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 17; Martin Wiggins, ‘The King’s Men and After’, in Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, ed. by Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 23–44 (p. 44).  All three editions were published by Humphrey Moseley, though the Shirley plays were joint published with Humphrey Robinson.  Wright, B2r, B3r, B4r.  For essays relating to indoor theatres inspired by the opening of the Staunton Blackfriars, see, Paul Menzer, ed. Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage; for essays inspired by the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, see Andrew Gurr and Farah Karim-Cooper, eds. Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0009 Index

Act of Common Council, 13, title page attributions, 25–26, 14, 16, 19, 21, 30–31 34–35, 40, 41 Admiral’s Men, 16 The Blind Beggar of Bethnal ‘public’ performance, 23 Green (Day and Chettle), Against Dicingg (Northbrooke), 73 19, 25 Burbage, James, 18–19, 22, 44 amateur performance, 14, 25, 46, 69 Caesar and Pompey, 15, 27 in playhouse, 43, 45 Cambyses (Preston), 14 American Shakespeare Centre, Canterbury his Change of Diet, 73, 74 68–69 Appleton, Sir Henry, 60 Carew, Thomas, 62, 63 Armin, Robert, 42 Poems, 57 The Two Ladies of Mortlake, Carlell, Lodowick 38–39, 41 Arviragus and Philicia, 58 The Deserving Favourite, Babington, Gervase, 24–25 55–58 Beaumont, Francis, 52, 57 The Passionate Lovers, 56, 58, 72 A King and No Kingg (with Chamberlain’s Men, 32, 44 Fletcher), 70 ‘public’ performance, 23, The Knight of the Burning 30, 33 Pestle, 38, 51 Chapman, George, 31–32, 57 Philasterr (with Fletcher), 49 All Fools, 55 preface to The Faithful The Blind Beggar of Shepherdess, 37–38, 50–51 Alexandria, 22 Beeston, William, 71 Byron plays, 53–55 Blackfriars (First), 15, 17, 18–19, Chabot, Admiral of France 56 (with Shirley), 50 Blackfriars (Second), 3, 7, 18, Sir Giles Goosecap, 51 22, 24, 53, 63, 65 An Humorous Day’s Mirth, 23 petition, 22, 44 The Old Joiner of Aldgate, as ‘private’, 25, 30, 34, 45, 49, 31–32 50, 51, 56, 58, 62, 72, 73 The Revenge of Bussy as ‘public’, 37, 55, 57 D’Ambois, 40, 41, 43

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0010 Index 

The Widow’s Tears, 41 Certain Small Works, 57 Charles II, 71 David and Bethsheba (Peele), 65 Children of the Chapel (First DEEP: Database of Early English Blackfriars), 15, 17 Playbooks, 5, 10, 28 Children of the Chapel (Second Dekker, Thomas, 2, 36, 39 Blackfriars), 32, 35, 53 Blurt Master Constable, 30 ‘private’ performance, 30, 32 Match Me in London, 9, 50 Children of the King’s Revels, 38, 40, pamphlets, 2, 8, 36, 39 41 The Roaring Girll (with Middleton), Children of Paul’s (First), 18 65 Children of Paul’s (Second), 32, 35 Satiromastix, 30, 32, 40, 54 ‘private’ performance, 30, 31 The Virgin Martyrr (with Massinger), 49 Children of the Queen’s Revels, 37, Dering, Sir Edward, 43 41–42, 53 The Dumb Knightt (Markham and ‘private’ performance, 40 Machin), 40–41 The Cidd (Corneille), 65 Cocke, John, 21 Edward VI, King of England, 13, 20 Cockpit playhouse, 6, 52, 65, 71, 72 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 13, 15, as ‘private’, 50, 51, 54, 56, 63, 69, 73 23 as ‘public’, 58–64, 70 Enough is as Good as a Feastt (Wager), 14 The Conflict of Conscience (Woodes), Evans, Henry, 37 14, 16, 26 Corporation of London, 21–22, 45 The Fancies Theatre (Tatham), 54, court performances, 3, 16, 18, 37, 38, 51, 67–68, 69 55–58, 62–64 Farrant, Anne and Richard, 16–17 before Elizabeth I, 15 Field, Nathan before Charles I and Henrietta Amends for Ladies, 41 Maria, 51, 54, 56, 59, 63 A Woman is a Weathercock, 40, 56 before James I, 40, 49, 56, 63 Fletcher, John, 52, 57 Cowley, Abraham, 60 The Bloody Brotherr (with Massinger), Cupid’s Whirligigg (Sharpham), 40 69 Curtain playhouse, 18, 40 The Elder Brotherr (with Massinger), 51 Damon and Pithias (Edwards), 7, The Faithful Shepherdess, 38, 50, 72 14–16, 23 A King and No Kingg, see under Davenant, William, 52, 71 Beaumont The Cruel Brother, 49, 62 The Night Walkerr (with Shirley), 50 feud with Heywood, 62–63 Philaster, see underr Beaumont The Just Italian, 49, 62 Wit Without Money, 50, 70 operas, 72 Fortune playhouse, 3, 54, 67 The Platonic Lovers, 62 as ‘public’, 24, 70 The Unfortunate Lovers, 62 Fumius Troes (Fisher), 15 The Wits, 62 Daborne, Robert, 41–43 Gager, William, 25 A Christian Turned Turk, 40, 41–43 Glapthorne, Henry, 52, 56 Daniel, Samuel, 37 Argalus and Parthenia, 56

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0010  Index

Globe playhouse, 2, 7, 56, 63, 65 Jordan, Thomas as ‘public’, 39, 42–43, 49 Fancy’s Festivals, 69 Gosson, Stephen Tricks of Youth, 72 Ephemerides, 20 Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 17 Kendall, Thomas, 37 Gouge, William, 44 Killigrew, Thomas, 71 Gunnell, Richard, 54 King’s Men, 2, 6–7, 38, 42 lawsuit, 37 Hampton Court, 16 patent, 44–45 The Hector of Germanyy (Smith), 40, 43 ‘private’ performance, 17, 49, 51 Henry VIII, King of England, 13, 20 ‘public’ performance, 24, 49, 55 Henslowe, Philip, 16–17, 42 King’s Players, 71 Herod and Antipaterr (Markham and Kirke, John, 54 Sampson), 49 Kirkham, Edward, 37 Heywood, Thomas An Apology for Actors, 39, 63 Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 41–42 A Challenge for Beauty, 65 Landgartha (Burnell), 64 defence of public theatre, 39, 58–64, Leicester’s Men, 19 68 Lord Mayor, 13, 18, 19, 22, 24 Edward IVV plays, 40, 49, 63 lost plays The English Traveller, 58, 60–62 Cupid and Psyche, 17 feud with Davenant, 62–63 Dido, 16 Four Prentices of London, 65 The May-Game of Martinism The Hierarchy of Blessed Angels, 62 (Nashe?), 18 Love’s Mistress, 55, 58, 62–63 The Old Joiner of Aldgate, see under A Maidenhead Well Lost, 58, 61–63 Chapman A New Way to Please You (with The Lover’s Melancholyy (Ford), 49, 54 Middleton and Rowley), 65 Lyly, John, 27 The Rape of Lucrece, 60 Campaspe, 18, 56 use of Latin, 59 Sappho and Phao, 18, 56 Histriomastixx (Prynne), 45, 60–61 Six Court Comedies, 27 The Hog Hath Lost His Pearll (Tailor), 40, 43 Marlowe, Christopher, 16, 57 Hunnis, William, 15, 17 Edward II, 23, 40 The Jew of Malta, 54 illegal performances, 69–71 Tamburlaine, 22, 65 Inns of Court, 16, 52 Marmion, Shakerly A Fine Companion, 56 Jonson, Ben Holland’s Leaguer, 50 Cynthia’s Revels, 25, 30, 34–36 Marston, John Every Man in His Humour, 23, 33, 35–36 The Dutch Courtesan, 41 Every Man Out of His Humour, 23 The Insatiate Countess (with Machin Poetaster, 30, 32, 34 and Barkstead), 41 Sejanus, 39 Jack Drum’s Entertainment, 38 use of Latin, 35, 59, 61 The Malcontentt (with Webster), 2, 36 Works, 32, 64 The Martyred Soldierr (H. Shirley), 54

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0010 Index 

Mary I, Queen of England, 13 Queen Anne’s Men Massinger Philip, 52, 57, 62 ‘public’ performance, 24 The Bloody Brother, see underr Fletcher Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men The City Madam, 72 ‘private’ performance, 51, 54 The Elder Brother, see underr Fletcher ‘public’ performance, 54, 58 The Great Duke of Florence, 42 The Renegado, 50 Rainolds, John, 25 The Roman Actor, 49 Ram Alleyy (Barry), 40 Three New Plays, 64, 72 Randolph, Thomas, 15 The Virgin Martyr, see underr Dekker Rastall, William, 37 Master of Revels, 4, 16, 18, 30–32, 44 Red Bull, 31, 54, 55, 60, 62, 67, 71 Blagrave, Thomas, 16 illegal performances, 69–70 Hebert, Sir Henry, 54, 71 as ‘public’, 40, 56, 72 Tilney, Sir Edmund, 16, 32 reputation, 63–64, 65, 68 Mayne, Jasper, 60 Red Bull Revels Company, 56, 67 Middleton, Thomas, 57 rehearsal, 16–17, 27 A Fair Quarrel (with Rowley), 49, 55 The Return From Parnassus, 15, 39 A Mad World My Masters, 51 Rowley, William A New Way to Please You, see under A Fair Quarrel, see underr Heywood Middleton The Roaring Girl, see underr Dekker A New Way to Please You, see under The Triumphs of Truth, 65 Heywood Mohun, Michael, 71 A Shoemaker A Gentleman, 54–55 The Monarchic Tragedies (Alexander), 57 Salisbury Court, 65, 70, 71 More, William, 17 as ‘private’, 50, 56, 73 Shakespeare’s Globe, 73, 74 Nabbes, Thomas, 52 Shakespeare, William, 5–7 Nashe, Thomas, 18, 20 Edward III, 22 New Custom, 14 Hamlet, 2, 36 Newman, John, 17 King Lear, 56, 65 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 23 Palsgrave’s Men, 54 Much Ado About Nothingg, 23 Paul’s playhouse, 15, 17, 35 Othello, 49 as ‘private’, 31–32, 34 Richard II, 23, 40 Peers, Edward, 31 Romeo and Juliet, 23, 40, 49 Phoenix playhouse, see underr Cockpit The Second Part of Henry IVV, 23 Porter’s Hall, 46 sonnets, 39 Prince Charles’ Men, 41, 49 Shirley, James, 57, 64, 70, 72, 74 ‘public’ performance, 73 The Arcadia, 52 Prince Henry’s Men The Bird in a Cage, 52 ‘public’ performance, 24 Chabot, Admiral of France, see under Privy Council, 4, 17, 19–22, 24, 44 Chapman public sphere, 6 Changes, 50 The Constant Maid, 52 Queen’s Men, 21–22, 23 Cupid and Death, 69

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0010  Index

Shirley, James – continued Lownes, Matthew, 30, 34, 36 frequency of ‘private’ attributions, Matthews, Augustine, 49, 50, 56 51–52 Meighen, Richard, 51, 56 Honoria and Mammon, 69 Moseley, Humphrey, 56, 69, 74 Love Tricks, 50 Okes, John, 54–55 The Royal Master, 52, 64 Okes, Nicholas, 40, 49, 51, 53, 55, Saint Patrick for Ireland, 52 58–59, 65 Six New Plays, 51, 64, 70 Pakeman, Daniel, 56 The Triumph of Beauty, 69 plays printed by Cooke or Crooke, 50 Soliman and Perseda (Kyd), 28 Purslowe, George, 50 Somerset House, 51 Raworth, Robert, 58–59 stationers Read, Richard, 30 Allde, Edward, 30 Redmer, Richard, 40 Allde, Elizabeth, 50 Rhodes, John, 71 Allde, John, 14 Rhodes, Matthew, 55–58 Allot, Robert, 49 Rocket, Henry, 30, 36 Alsop, Bernard, 49, 50 Seile, Henry, 49, 50 Barrenger, William, 40, 41 Simmes, Valentine, 2 Beale, John, 40, 50 Snodham, Thomas, 40 Bedell, George, 64 Stansby, William, 55, 56 Bishop, Richard, 56 Thorpe, Thomas, 53, 55 Blount, Edward, 27 Veale, Abraham, 14 Bradock, Richard, 14, 30 Walkley, Thomas, 49 Budge, John, 40 Ward, Roger, 22 Burby, Cuthbert, 22 Waterson, John, 49, 50 Burre, Walter, 30, 33–36, 38, 46, 51, 64 White, Edward, 30, 36 Church, Francis, 58 Stationers’ Register, 30, 41, 49–50, Collins, Thomas, 64 54–55, 58–59, 65 Constable, Francis, 50 Suckling, Sir John Cooke, William, 50, 52 Agluara, 51, 64 Cowper, John, 55 Brennoralt, 51, 64 Creede, Thomas, 40 Fragmenta Aurea, 64 Crooke, Andrew, 50, 52 The Goblins, 64 Crouch, Johm, 58 Swan playhouse, 20 Eglesfield, Francis, 54 as ‘public’, 24 Emery, Jasper, 58 Fawcet, Thomas, 49, 50 Theatre, the, 18, 22, 64 Grove, John, 50 The Theatre of God’s Judgements (Beard), Harrison, Josias, 40 20, 27 Helme, John, 40 Theatre Royal, 71 How, William, 14 Three Ladies of London (Wilson), 22 Jackson, John, 58 title page authorship, 23, 33–36, 56–58, Jaggard, William, 40 58–67 Jones, Richard, 15, 22 The Turk (Mason), 41 Kingston, Felix, 49 Lisle, Laurence, 53, 64 university drama, 15–16, 25, 39

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0010 Index 

The Virgin Widoww (Quarles), 43, 70 Westcott, Sebastian, 17 Westminster, 68–69 The Wandering Loverr (Meriton), 69, Whitefriars playhouse, 46 70 as ‘private’, 40–41 War of the Theatres, 35, 36 as ‘public’, 41–44 Webster, John, 60 Whitehall, 18, 40, 54, 56 The Duchess of Malfi, 49, 54 Woodford, Thomas, 31–32 The Malcontent, see under Marston Wright, James The White Devil, 65 Historia Histrionica, 69–70, 73

DOI: 10.1057/9781137494924.0010