A Companion to Renaissance Drama

EDITED BY ARTHUR F. KINNEY

Blackwell Publishers

A Companion to Renaissance Drama Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post- canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new ﬁelds of study and provid- ing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new direc- tions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the ﬁeld.

1 A Companion to Romanticism Edited by Duncan Wu 2 A Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Herbert F. Tucker and Culture 3 A Companion to Shakespeare Edited by David Scott Kastan 4 A Companion to the Gothic Edited by David Punter 5 A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare Edited by Dympna Callaghan 6 A Companion to Chaucer Edited by Peter Brown 7 A Companion to English Literature from Edited by David Womersley Milton to Blake 8 A Companion to English Renaissance Edited by Michael Hattaway Literature and Culture 9 A Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas N. Corns 10 A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry Edited by Neil Roberts 11 A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature Edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne 12 A Companion to Restoration Drama Edited by Susan J. Owen 13 A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Edited by Anita Pacheco Writing 14 A Companion to Renaissance Drama Edited by Arthur F. Kinney 15 A Companion to Victorian Poetry Edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Authony Harrison 16 A Companion to the Victorian Novel Edited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing A Companion to Renaissance Drama

EDITED BY ARTHUR F. KINNEY

First published 2002

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A companion to Renaissance drama / edited by Arthur F. Kinney. P. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture) Includes index. ISBN 0-631-21959-1 (alk. paper) 1. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism – Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. English drama – 17th century – History and criticism – Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Renaissance – England – Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Kinney, Arthur F., 1933– II. Renaissance drama. III. Series. PR651 .C66 2002 822¢.309 – dc21 2001043979

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Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper To the memory of Walter T. Chmielewski and for Alison, Mika, and Ben Chmielewski

Contents

List of Illustrations xi Notes on Contributors xii Acknowledgments xviii

Introduction: The Dramatic World of the Renaissance 1 Arthur F. Kinney

PART ONE The Drama’s World 11 1 The Politics of Renaissance England 13 Norman Jones

2 Political Thought and the Theater, 1580–1630 25 Annabel Patterson

3 Religious Persuasions, c.1580–c.1620 40 Lori Anne Ferrell

4 Social Discourse and the Changing Economy 50 Lee Beier

5 London and Westminster 68 Ian W. Archer

6 Vagrancy 83 William C. Carroll

7 Family and Household 93 Martin Ingram viii Contents

8 Travel and Trade 109 William H. Sherman

9 Everyday Custom and Popular Culture 121 Michael Bristol

10 Magic and Witchcraft 135 Deborah Willis

PART TWO The World of Drama 145 11 Playhouses 147 Herbert Berry

12 The Transmission of an English Renaissance Play-Text 163 Grace Ioppolo

13 Playing Companies and Repertory 180 Roslyn L. Knutson

14 Must the Devil Appear?: Audiences, Actors, Stage Business 193 S. P. Cerasano

15 “The Actors are Come Hither”: Traveling Companies 212 Peter H. Greenﬁeld

16 Jurisdiction of Theater and Censorship 223 Richard Dutton

PART THREE Kinds of Drama 237 17 Medieval and Reformation Roots 239 Raphael Falco

18 The Academic Drama 257 Robert S. Knapp

19 “What Revels are in Hand?”: Performances in the Great Households 266 Suzanne Westfall

20 Progresses and Court Entertainments 281 R. Malcolm Smuts

21 Civic Drama 294 Lawrence Manley Contents ix

22 Boy Companies and Private Theaters 314 Michael Shapiro

23 Revenge Tragedy 326 Eugene D. Hill

24 Staging the Malcontent in Early Modern England 336 Mark Thornton Burnett

25 City Comedy 353 John A. Twyning

26 Domestic Tragedy: Private Life on the Public Stage 367 Lena Cowen Orlin

27 Romance and Tragicomedy 384 Maurice Hunt

28 Gendering the Stage 399 Alison Findlay

29 Closet Drama Marta Straznicky 416

PART FOUR Dramatists 431 30 Continental Inﬂuences 433 Lawrence F. Rhu

31 Christopher Marlowe 446 Emily C. Bartels

32 Ben Jonson 464 W. David Kay

33 Sidney, Cary, Wroth 482 Margaret Ferguson

34 Thomas Middleton 507 John Jowett

35 Beaumont and Fletcher 524 Lee Bliss x Contents

36 Collaboration 540 Philip C. McGuire

37 John Webster 553 Elli Abraham Shellist

38 John Ford 567 Mario DiGangi

Index 584 Illustrations

Plate 1 Sir Thomas More and his family 94 Plate 2 Cornelius Johnson, The family of Arthur, Lord Capel 95 Plate 3 Male and female roles: hunting and spinning 97 Plate 4 A family meal 98 Plate 5 A wife beats her husband with a bunch of keys: a “riding” occurs in the background 103 Plate 6 The world turned upside down 104 Plate 7 A page from Heywood’s foul papers of The Captives 166 Plate 8 Title-page illustrations from Henry Marsh, The Wits (1662) 197 Plate 9 Richard Tarlton, from a drawing by John Scottowe 207 Plate 10 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: engraving by Simon Van der Passe 486 Plate 11 Elizabeth, Lady Falkland: by Athow from a painting by Paul van Somer 494 Plate 12 Lady Mary Wroth 497 Contributors

Ian W. Archer is Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Keble College, Oxford. He is the author of The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London, and of various articles on the history of the early modern metropolis. He is currently working on charity in early modern England, and is the General Editor of the Royal Histori- cal Society Bibliographies on British and Irish History.

Emily C. Bartels is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University (New Brunswick) and author of Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe, which won the Roma Gill Prize for the Best Work on Christopher Marlowe in 1993–4. She has also written articles on Shakespeare, representations of the Moor, and early English imperialism, and is currently at work on a book, Before Slavery: English Stories of Africa.

Lee Beier was a Lecturer in History at Lancaster University until 1990. Currently he is Professor of History at Illinois State University. He is the author of Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640.

Herbert Berry is Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Saskatchewan. He has published many pieces about playhouses in London during Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline times.

Lee Bliss is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama and of Francis Beaumont, is editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare Coriolanus, and has written articles on Renaissance dramatists, the genre of tragicomedy, and Renaissance retellings of the Griselda story, and a bibliographical study of the First Folio text of Coriolanus. Notes on Contributors xiii

Michael Bristol is Greenshields Professor of English Literature at McGill University. He is author of Big Time Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s America/America’s Shakespeare, and Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England.

Mark Thornton Burnett is a Reader in English at the Queen’s University of Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (1997), the editor of The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1999) and Christopher Marlowe: Complete Poems (2000), and the co-editor of New Essays on “Hamlet” (1994), Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (1997), and Shake- speare, Film, Fin de Siècle (2000). He is currently completing Constructing “Monsters” in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture for Palgrave.

William C. Carroll is Professor of English at Boston University. Among his books are Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (1996) and Macbeth: Texts and Contexts (1999), and he is editor of the forthcoming third edition of the Arden Shakespeare The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

S. P. Cerasano, Professor of English at Colgate University, is working on a biogra- phy of the Renaissance actor-entrepreneur Edward Alleyn. With Marion Wynne- Davies she has co-edited Renaissance Drama by Women (1995) and Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama (1998). The author of numerous articles on Renaissance theater history, she also served as a curator of the Edward Alleyn exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London in 1994.

Mario DiGangi, Assistant Professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY, is the author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997). His essays on Renaissance drama and lesbian/gay studies have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Textual Practice, GLQ, and Shakespearean International Year- book, and he has contributed to many anthologies including Marlowe, History, and Sexuality (1998), Shakespeare: The Critical Complex (1999), Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry (2000), and Essays to Celebrate Richard Barnﬁeld and Ovid and the Renaissance Body (both forthcoming). His current project, “Pricking out a Living,” explores the erotic representation of working women on the Renaissance stage.

Richard Dutton is Professor of English at Lancaster University where he has taught since 1974. His principal research interests in early modern drama, censorship, and authorship are all reﬂected in his latest book, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (2000). He has recently completed an edition of Ben Jonson’s Epicene for the Revels series, of which he is a general editor. He is presently editing Volpone for the new Cambridge Ben Jonson and, with Jean Howard, compiling four Companions to Shakespeare for Blackwell. xiv Notes on Contributors

Raphael Falco is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County. He is the author of Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renais- sance England and Charismatic Authority in Early Modern English Tragedy.

Margaret Ferguson is Professor of English at the University of California at Davis. The author of Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry, she has co-edited Rewrit- ing the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe as well as collections of essays on Milton and on postmodernism and feminism. She has also co- edited a critical edition of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and has recently completed a book on female literacy and ideologies of empire in early modern England and France.

Lori Anne Ferrell is Associate Professor and Co-Chair of the Program in Religion at Claremont Graduate University and Claremont School of Theology, and is on the faculty in early modern studies at the Center for the Humanities, Claremont Gradu- ate University. She is the author of Government by Polemic (1998) and co-editor, with David Cressy, of Religion and Society in Early Modern England (1996) and, with Peter McCullough, of The English Sermon Revised (2000). She is currently working on a book entitled Graspable Art: The Promise of Mastery and the Protestant Imagination in England, 1570–1620.

Alison Findlay is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Lancaster Uni- versity. She is the author of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994) and A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama for Blackwell (1998). In addition, she is co-director of a practical research project on early modern women’s drama, which has published an award-winning video Women Dramatists: Plays in Performance 1550–1670 (1999), and she has co-authored a book on Women and Dramatic Produc- tion 1550–1700 (2000). She is currently working on the plays of Richard Brome.

Peter H. Greenﬁeld is Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound. He is the editor of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama and of the records of Glouces- tershire, Hampshire, and Hertfordshire for the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project.

Eugene D. Hill, Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1987) and of numerous essays on Elizabethan tragedy. He co-edited Tudor England: An Encyclopedia (2001).

Maurice Hunt, Professor of English and Head of the English Department at Baylor University, is the author of Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (1990) and Shakespeare’s Labored Art (1995) as well as the editor of “The Winter’s Tale”: Critical Essays (1995) and two volumes in the MLA Teaching World Literature series on Romeo and Juliet Notes on Contributors xv and The Tempest and other late dramatic romances. He is currently editing the MLA New Shakespeare Variorum edition of Cymbeline.

Martin Ingram is a Fellow, Tutor, and University Lecturer in Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford. His publications include Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987) and numerous articles on crime and the law, sex and marriage, religion and popular culture. He has also published on the history of climate.

Grace Ioppolo is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. She is the author of Revising Shakespeare and the forthcoming Shakespeare and the Text and is the editor of Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes. She has published numerous articles on the transmission of Renaissance play-texts and is currently working on the construction of authorship in the Renaissance.

Norman Jones is Professor of History at Utah State University. With interests in the connections among religion, law, and politics, his research spans the century after Henry VIII launched the Reformation. His works include Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age, God and the Money- lenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England, and The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation, as well as numerous articles.

John Jowett is an Associate General Editor of Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works (forthcoming). He was an editor of The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (1986) and of Richard III for the Oxford Shakespeare (2000). He has written numerous articles on textual theory and practical issues of editing and is presently working on cultural memory and the representation of news on stage. He is currently editing Timon of Athens and co-editing a Reader in Textual Theory.

W. David Kay is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He is the author of Ben Jonson: A Literary Life (1995) and the editor of John Marston’s The Malcontent for the New Mermaids (1999). With Suzanne Gossett he is editing Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! for the forthcoming Cam- bridge edition of Jonson’s works.

Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History at the Uni- versity of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Director of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies; the founding editor of the journal English Literary Renaissance; and Adjunct Professor of English, New York University. He has edited The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Ford, and Rowley for the New Mermaids (1998) and, most recently, Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments from manuscripts and ﬁrst quartos for Blackwell (1999). xvi Notes on Contributors

Robert S. Knapp is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. He is the author of Shakespeare: The Theater and the Book (1989) and is currently writing a book entitled Circe’s Rod: Shakespeare and the Disciplines of Culture.

Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, is the author of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001) and The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (1991) as well as numerous articles.

Lawrence Manley, Professor of English at Yale University, is the editor of London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (1986) and the author of Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995). His current project is Reading Repertory, a study of Shake- speare’s plays in relation to non-Shakespearean plays in the company repertories with which Shakespeare’s name is associated.

Philip C. McGuire, Professor of English at Michigan State University, is the author of Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences (1985) and Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays (1994) and co-editor of Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension (1979). He chaired the seminar on “Rethinking Collaboration” at the 1999 meeting of the Shakespeare Asso- ciation of America.

Lena Cowen Orlin is Research Professor of English at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is the author of Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (1994) and Elizabethan Households (1995) and editor of Material London ca. 1600 (2000).

Annabel Patterson is Karl Young Professor of English at Yale University. Her most recent book is Early Modern Liberalism (1997). She has just completed Nobody’s Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History, which focuses on the eighteenth century.

Lawrence F. Rhu is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He has written a book on Torquanto Tasso’s narrative theory and numerous essays on Renaissance literature.

Michael Shapiro is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, and the director of the Sheldon and Antia Drobny Interdisciplinary Program for the Study of Jewish Culture and Society. He has also held visiting positions at Cornell, Reading, and Tamkang Universities. He is the author of Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays (1977) and Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages as well as numerous essays. He is the founding artistic director of the Revels Players, an amateur acting troupe devoted to early classic theater. Notes on Contributors xvii

Elli Abraham Shellist is a poet and doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois- Chicago. He is currently working on the relationship between mediocrity and villainy in Renaissance drama.

William H. Sherman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (1995). He edited “The Tempest” and its Travels (2000) with Peter Hulme and is currently editing The Alchemist with Peter Holland for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson.

R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His publications include Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (1987, 1999) and Culture and Power in England (1999).

Marta Straznicky is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. She has published articles on early modern women playwrights and is currently completing a book on women’s closet drama in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

John A. Twyning is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (1998).

Suzanne Westfall is Associate Professor of English and Theatre at Lafayette College. She is the author of Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels and the editor, with Paul Whitﬁeld White, of the forthcoming Theatrical Patronage in Shakespeare’s England. In addition to her work in early modern theater, she directs plays and teaches acting for the Lafayette Theatre.

Deborah Willis is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and Cultural Studies. She is the author of Malevolent Nature: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (1995) and articles on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Renaissance culture. She is currently working on a project about witch-families in early modern England. Acknowledgments

One of the great pleasures of editing such a book as the Blackwell Companion to Renais- sance Drama is to work with so many informed and cooperative scholars; this book is far richer because of their insights and their suggestions, too, along the way. This Companion was ﬁrst conceived by Andrew McNeillie, my editor at Blackwell, and I am grateful to him for entrusting the project to me. I want also to thank my other editor, Emma Bennett, my superb copyeditor (whose patience seems unlimited), Fiona Sewell, and my colleague for research, Walter T. Chmielewski. Introduction: The Dramatic World of the Renaissance Arthur F. Kinney

One of the most familiar lines in all Renaissance English drama is Jaques’ observa- tion in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that “All the world’s a stage.” He goes on to remark further that “all the men and women [are] merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances. / And one man in his time plays many parts” (II.vii.138–41). In a time when theater was without rival as a public art form, and at a time when during the Feast of Corpus Christi, local craftsmen and townspeople donned the costumes of biblical characters to perform local theater throughout the cities, towns, and villages of England, such a comment would surprise no one. Not only playgoing was popular; so was playacting. People did play roles. They learned Latin at grammar school by acting Plautus for comedy and Seneca for tragedy. They learned to debate as different characters – often historic ones – and as proponents of differing perspectives. At the university and at the Inns of Court, they were reminded that preaching and practic- ing law also required a kind of drama, a staged performance. From village street and village parish to the great manor halls and Whitehall Palace in London – not to mention the public theaters like the Theatre and the Curtain, the Globe and Rose and Fortune; or the private London theaters such as Blackfriars – theater was so commonplace a cultural practice that it must have been in the blood of every person in London. And they, too, played differing roles – in their personal lives, in their married lives, in their social lives, in their political and religious lives. A man could act the role of carpenter at one moment and angry Puritan at another, could be an endearing husband and disciplinarian father by turn. In the Renaissance, all the world was a stage and all actions – from private prayers (as we see in Claudius in Hamlet) to staged narratives (as we see in Hamlet’s advice to the players, his reaction to the speech about Priam and Hecuba, and his own revised play called “The Mousetrap”) – were essentially enactments or re-enactments. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges for understanding life in the Renaissance and the theater of the period, but it is essen- tial to our understanding. Life was not unconscious living so much as it was, often, conscious and continuous performance. 2 Arthur F. Kinney

Consequently, every space was potentially a playing space, a space for drama, so that the city streets and alleys in Thomas Middleton or the pastoral countryside in Robert Greene were inherently dramatic possibilities where life could be lived as enactment. More panoramic dramas – such as Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, moving from the battlefield to the court to the private arbor in the family garden, or, even more, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus moving from the private study at the university to the political court of the Holy Roman Emperor and the papal court itself – show how no known environment was exempt from dramatic possibility and por- trayal. Hamlet’s line to the players that they must hold “the mirror up to nature” because that is all they can do, nature being so various and so vital, may come as a metaphor to us but would have been a commonplace to those in the Renaissance. Indeed, Tudor and Stuart England made great cultural use of the mirror – in fact as well as tropically by way of metaphor. They used glass to attempt to reflect themselves; they used steel in mirrors to gain a new perspective, often thought ide- alistic; and in both instances, they elaborated on an earlier notion of the mirror as the soul, as God’s reflection within the self. When Shakespeare’s Richard II shatters the mirror at his deposition, he is shattering (at least from his point of view) his own divinity and his divine claim to rule; when Greene’s Friar Bacon uses his magical mirror to call up visions, he is imitating, parodying, and perhaps even denouncing the Godly use of the mirror: it is what makes his magical glass magical rather than godly. Actual imagined space in the theater, then, acts as a metaphor by linking the actions performed in it to actions in the lives of playgoers by analogy. In a time when theater was the only widespread public medium for commentary on religious, political, and social life (the analogy to the proclamations of kings and queens read out in market squares by heralds), theater was also especially powerful in the messages it could convey and the results it might incur – something else Shakespeare has por- trayed, in the funeral orations of Brutus and Antony for Julius Caesar. What drama cannot do, in fact, is to rest on what might appear in life to be discrete, unconnected incidents and events. By isolating and then connecting scenes, working through the disjunctions of place and of varied characterizations, the playwright and actors are required to imply a kind of causality, to give to acting, and to the stage, a continuous narration that makes sense, conveys meaning, perhaps instills belief or action, as Cinna the poet learns at the cost of his life in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In this sense, all the world is potentially a stage rather than an actual one, for it provides all the material – and the possible agency – for drama but lacks the uncluttered sequential- ity necessary to produce developing meaning and significance. Isolated, Hamlet’s solil- oquy “to be or not to be” emphasizes the despair and hopelessness common to all our lives, but its significance depends on what has prompted it, what has come before, and its consequences, what happens after such thoughts. It binds thought to action, as Hamlet tells the players to “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” In this way, plays “show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Conversely, such plays, enacting life Introduction 3 as re-enactment, cannot help but show the age to the time, reveal through words and action the real significance (at least for the playwright) of the world about them. That world is, in the hands of Dekker and Middleton, the world of Tudor and Stuart England; or, in the hands of Marlowe and Greene, clearly analogous to it. Thus all the world of Renaissance England is potentially a stage, and the stages of such plays the very world the playgoers inhabit. What is true of space is also true of time, the other dimension in which all of us live and move and have our being. Just as playwrights could transform the bare plat- forms and stages of street and public theaters and work with the artificial scenery of great halls and private performances by word and action, so they could transform time with equal flexibility. Soliloquies happen in what we might call normal time, taking as long to pronounce them on the stage as in life itself, the unfolding of such speeches mutually shared by actor and audience. But time might also be expanded, as it is in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair when different events, happening at the same time, are nevertheless presented in sequence so that the audience is privy to only a part of the action going on at any one moment. Conversely, time on the stage could be condensed in its re-enactments: Simon Eyre’s whole career and much of his life is performed for us by Thomas Dekker’s art in less than two hours. Or time could be multiple: Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus opens in real time, Faustus’s discussion with his students, his meditation on the shortcoming of human knowledge, and the appearance of Mephistophilis all occurring in “real” or shared time with the audience while the following scenes follow the dizzying pace of twenty-four years before, once more, action is slowed down at the end of Faustus’s life and the last few minutes, actually staged in real time, seem to us to be in expanded time, so long, dreary, and irrevocable is the outcome we have both seen anticipated and forestalled. Thus both space and time rest initially (for the playwright) and finally (for the playgoer) on acts of imagination: the bare stages and flexible times need the trust, belief, and finally complicity of the audience in order to complete the dramatic re- enactments, to make them work. Plays performed on physical stages (or in the streets or before pageant wagons or in the classrooms) need performances in the mind too. The success of dramatic performance depends on concurrence, or what a later critic would call the “suspension of disbelief.” But as the authors of the following chapters continually demonstrate, the enactments on the stages of theaters and in the stages of the mind found a third re-enactment, as reinforcement, in the world the theater played to, the world the audience lived in daily. Renaissance drama first spoke power- fully to its audiences because it talked to them, through metaphors, of themselves, presented (as Macbeth sees in the performance of the witches) “lies like truth.” Such is the case, for example, with the anonymous play Arden of Faversham, performed and re-enacted for more than three decades of the English Renaissance. “THE TRAGEDIE of Arden of Faversham & blackwill” was entered into the Stationer’s Register on April 3, 1592, and, somewhat later that year, published by Edward White. The play follows closely an account of an historic event published in the Breviat Chronicle for 1551: 4 Arthur F. Kinney

This year on S. Valentine’s day at Faversham in Kent was committed a shameful murder, for one Arden a gentleman was by the consent of his wife murdered, wherefore she was burned at Canterbury, and there was hanged in chains for that murder and at Faversham (two) hanged in chains [one of them Arden’s man-servant, Michael Saunderson, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered], and a woman burned [Elizabeth Stafford, Alice Arden’s day-servant], and in Smithﬁeld was hanged one Mosby and his sister [Susan] for the murder also.

The play might have first been written about the time of the event, when the execu- tions of those involved stretched from London across Kent to Canterbury, within possible sight of a quarter of England’s population, or it might have drawn on later accounts in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles printed in 1577 and 1587, fixing the sensational story indelibly in the cultural memory. Just as intriguing and problematic as the date of composition and early performance of this play, though, is what it is primarily about. Martin White, in the introduction to his fine edition of the play for the New Mermaids (1982, 1990, xvii–xviii), first pointed this out:

At the end of the play, Arden lies dead; eventually murdered in his own parlour, and his body dumped on his own land. From one point of view it is the mutilated corpse of a cuckolded husband, killed at the instigation of his wife. From another point of view, however, it is the body of a rapacious landowner, whose death was not only desired, but brought about, by men driven to desperate measures by his avariciousness.

There is abundant evidence within the play to establish either reading as the central one, and White resolves this matter by arguing that they represent, respectively, issues of private and public morality that work mutually within the play to reinforce each other. That is surely possible for us today; but as the writers in this collection demonstrate, it was less likely to be the case in the Renaissance. The 1551 murder occurred during the reign of Edward VI; the 1592 play was performed under Elizabeth I; and the concerns in these periods were very different. The ﬂashpoint during the reign of Edward was the rapid accumulation of private property following the recent dissolution of the monasteries, and the fact that Arden was implicated in such historic acts might have ﬁrst suggested a much earlier play – or the same play with much earlier performances. The dissolution of church lands occurred largely between 1536 and 1540, advanc- ing rapidly through the creation in 1536 of the royal Court of Augmentations, which gave to Henry VIII a means to isolate and control both the litigation and adminis- tration of lands which he had taken over from the church. “Having seized the lands of the monastic clergy,” C. John Sommerville writes,

Henry found a way to expropriate the lands held by the non-monastic or “secular” clergy as well, or at least to loosen their grip on it. In 1536 he began requiring bishops to yield up the London palaces which were symbolic of their former political power, Introduction 5

promising to compensate them with assets of equal value. By the end of his reign [in 1547] 187 ecclesiastical manors had been traded for others which were found to be noticeably inferior (1992, 25).

What followed was a landrush. David Knowles recounts “the eagerness . . . of a wealthy and land-hungry class, who had hitherto been able to buy only occasionally and locally, and who now saw an avalanche of desirable properties about to descend into the lap of the fortunate, and could only hope that by approaching Henry or Cromwell with all speed they might be among those in the running for a bid” (1976, 282–3).1 There were three sorts of landgrabbers – local landowners wanting to extend their holdings; courtiers in high favor; officials of the Court of Augmentations itself. John Stow’s account of Arden links him with the first two possibilities. As one of the clerks for Edward North, clerk of Parliament, Arden was copying out parliamentary acts for Henry VIII by 1537; by 1539 he was under-steward to Sir Thomas Cheyne, lord warden of the Cinque Ports (who appears in the play), and married to North’s stepdaughter Alice. (At the time of their marriage, Arden was forty; Alice was sixteen.) Arden accumulated offices. Around 1540 he was appointed king’s collector of customs for Faversham; by 1543 he was also the king’s comptroller for Sandwich; he was rumored to be the agent provocateur at these ports for North and for the Privy Council. Arden also accumulated land. He bought the site of the virtually demolished Faversham Abbey from Cheyne and moved into the gatehouse (the site of the murder). He bought another nine acres from the former abbot; ten acres in Thornmead; the manor of Ellenden; and some lands in Hernhill in 1543. By 1545 he also owned the manor of Otterpool in Lympne and Sellindge, formerly held by Sir Thomas Wyatt; lands in the parish of Saltwood; property in the suburbs of Canterbury that had once belonged to the archbishop; Flood Mill and Surrenden Croft; and a further 300 acres by intimidating one Walter Morleyn. Arden would then seem a prime candidate for the sort of landowner that Robert Crowley condemns in The Way to Wealth (1551) as “Men without conscience. Men utterly void of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands” (p. 132). He is the sort of man Crowley further condemns for rack-renting, engrossing, and enclosing land for profit, driving normally peaceful, God-fearing tenants to extreme and desperate measures. If so, Crowley argues in An Informacion and Peticion (1548), “if any of them perish through your default, know then for certain that the blood of them shall be required at your hands. If the impotent creatures perish for lack of necessaries, you are the murderers, for you have their inheritance and do not minister unto them” (White, 1982, 1990, xx). This is exactly Holinshed’s portrait of Arden of Faversham when he remarks about the St. Valentine’s Day Fair held at the time of Arden’s death that:

The fair was wont to be kept partly in the town and partly in the Abbey, but Arden, for his own private lucre and covetous gain, had this present year procured it to be wholly kept within the Abbey ground which he had purchased, and so reaping all the 6 Arthur F. Kinney

gaines to himself and bereaving the town of that portion which was wont to come to the inhabitants, got many a bitter curse (White, 1982, 1990, 110).

Earlier Holinshed notes that “Master Arden had wrested a piece of ground on the backside of the Abbey of Faversham [from Master Greene, a character in the play], and there had blows and great threats passed betwixt them about that matter” (White, 1982, 1990, 105). Holinshed gives the history a moral lesson, making contemporary events thematic, like grammar-school lessons and church sermons of the time. But under Elizabeth I, when Arden of Faversham was published and doubtless again performed, such grabbing of property was no longer an issue. Men had made peace with a land long barren of monasteries – while domestic issues of marriage were gaining rapidly in importance under the newly aggressive strictures of Puritans taking hold after the Reformation of the 1560s and 1570s. So how might we account for the publication of Arden (indeed, its first extant registration) in 1592 as enactment and re-enactment? We know that in that year Abel Jeffes rushed a pirated text of Arden of Faversham into print before Edward White could get out his publication; and that White demanded that the Stationer’s Company call in all of Jeffes’ copies and destroy them and confiscate the rest of the edition. Clearly Arden of Faversham had (once again, perhaps) become a hot property itself, its performance and its narrative staging the world of the English Renaissance. Just as the original conception can be traced back to histories from 1551 onwards, so now we can sense cultural concerns by publications of a somewhat later time. Arden’s performances in 1592 may have re-enacted a more recent narrative published in 1591, Sundrye strange and inhumaine Murthers, lately committed. As the title-page acknowledges, the work contains two stories. The first, “of a Father that hired a man to kill three of his children neere to Ashford in Kent,” leads to a moral conclusion similar to that of Holinshed’s and Stow’s accounts of Arden and the end of the anonymous play:

Thus may you see how murtherers are ouertaken, and their actions opened by them- selues, yea if there were no body to accuse the murtherer, the murthered coarse wold giue euidence again him. It hath bene a meane appointed by the Lord to discerne the murtherer, that when hee approched, the dead carkasse would at some issue or other bleede: many haue by this miraculous worke of the Lord bene discouered, when the proofe hath bene onely bare suspition. (sig. A4v)

The bleeding corpse of Arden is what wrings a confession from his wife Alice; but her tracks, and those of her accomplices, which showed up in the snow and remained along with a trail of blood after they dragged the body out of doors, is the provi- dential act of God that punishes the wicked. As different as the tale of Arden and the father of the pamphlet are, they work toward a common end and share a common, morally instructive purpose. Indeed, the woodcut on the title-page which shows a dog snifﬁng out a half-hidden corpse, also illustrates a kind of providentialism. Nevertheless, it is the second account in this pamphlet that comes even closer to Arden and so may have prompted its staging (or revival). This is “of master Page of Introduction 7

Plymouth, murthered by the consent of his owne wife: with the strange discouerie of sundrie other murthers. Wherein is described the odiousnesse of murther, with the vengeance which God inﬂicteth on murtherers.” Page ﬁnally meets his end on February 11, 1591, we are told, but not until many attempts have been made on his life, just as Arden of Faversham focuses on nine attempts on Arden’s. One poisoning affects Page the same way Clarke’s poison, which Alice places in Arden’s broth, affects him:

But God who preserueth many persons from such perrils and dangers, defended still ye said M. Padge from the secret snares & practises of present death, which his wife had laid for him, yet not without great hurt vnto his body, for still the poison wanted force to kil him, so wonderfully did almighty God woorke for him, yet was he compelled to vomit blood and much corruption, which doubtles in the end would haue killed him, and that shortlye. (sig. B2v)

Mistress Page, like Alice Arden, and George Strangwich, like Alice’s accomplice Mosby, attempt to recover their losses:

But to prosecute and that with great speed to perform this wicked and inhuman act, the said mistriss Page and Strangwidge omitted no opportunity: they wanted no means nor friends to perform it for their money, whereof they had good store, and more than they knew how to employ, except it had been to better uses. For she on the one side practiced with one of her servants named Robert Priddis, whom as she thought nothing would more sooner make him pretend the murdering of his master than silver and gold, wherewith she so corrupted him, with promise of sevenscore pounds more, that he solemnly undertook and vowed to perform the task to her contentment.

As matters turn out, Page is murdered in his bedroom rather than his parlor by Priddis and a second assassin Tom Stone; much as in Arden of Faversham the murderers stran- gle their victim, lay him in bed (as Arden is laid in the ﬁeld) and break his neck, while Mrs. Page, like Alice Arden, feigns complete ignorance. But then blood is discovered on the corpse, as with Arden, and, murder at last established, the true criminals are discovered and executed. Had the story of Thomas and Alice Arden not already been known and in wide circulation, the story of Master and Mistress Page might seem to be a source for the anonymous play. But it may have been decisive in two ways. It may have caused an earlier play to be revived or a play then being performed to be published as well. And it may have suggested the title-page of the play which would draw on both stories, one reinforcing the other for proﬁt:

THE / LAMENTA- / BLE AND TRVE TRA- / GEDIE OF M. AR- / DEN OF FEVER- SHAM / IN KENT. / Who was most wickedlye murdered, by / the meanes of his disloyall and wanton / wyfe, who for the loue she bare to one / Mosbie, hyred two desperat ruf- / ﬁns Blackwill and Shakbag, / to kill him. / Wherin is shewed the great mal- / lice and 8 Arthur F. Kinney

discimulation of a wicked wo- / man, the vnsatiable desire of ﬁlthie lust / and the shamefull end of all / murderers.

Like the strange and inhuman murder in Plymouth in 1591, the murder in Faver- sham in 1551 has now become the story of a wicked woman subject to pride and lust. The story that might ﬁrst have been that of a wealthy and merciless landlord has now become, in a new age, what Catherine Belsey (1982) has called it, “Alice Arden’s crime.” The world as stage reﬂects the potentiality of the staged world, and earlier space and time transform to meet the world Arden of Faversham plays to. Yet even that may not be the whole story of Arden of Faversham. It would seem to account for the 1592 publication and, one assumes, performances around that time, but what of the publications of Q2 in 1599 and Q3 in 1633? It may well be that the initial shift of attention historically recurred. The years 1593–6 were especially hard ones for the English economy: drought and poor harvests threatened life in the countryside and food supplies in the cities. At such a time, the complaints of Greene and Reede about their low wages and the danger of starvation could take center stage. This was apparently not the case in 1633, however. That reprinting of the play coin- cided with, perhaps capitalized on, the publication of a ballad claiming to be Alice Arden’s confession. The pendulum had swung once more, back to Alice Arden’s crime, rather than that of her husband. Touching two continuing concerns of the Renais- sance – economy and marriage, excessive wealth and cuckoldry and murderous wives – Arden of Faversham was itself guaranteed a long and active life as a mirror held up to nature, as a re-enactment of the world of the audience, in which dramatic metaphor and trope – a “lie like truth” – helped to illuminate and even manage the playgoers’ world as they watched the world of the actor. This is not a matter necessarily of normal time, nor of expanded, condensed, or multiple time, but of contextual time. As the following chapters display, shifting contexts for Renaissance drama allow shifting meaning to those dramatic texts, while the texts themselves, mirroring the world around them outside the theater walls, provide a kind of lying that might be the greatest of truth-telling. The space of dramatic performance merges with the spaces of daily human performance. Jaques’ witness to the whole world as a stage, then, in which all men and women are merely players, is a commonplace of the Renaissance, but so is his word “merely,” which could, then as now, mean “simply,” but which then also meant “entirely.” Either way, the line sep- arating text and context dissolves. The causes and consequences of this more lasting dissolution, the very foundation of Renaissance English theater, is the unifying subject of the book that follows.

Note

1 Knowles (1976) is an abridgement of Knowles (1959). Introduction 9

References and Further Reading

Belsey, Catherine (1982). “Alice Arden’s crime,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 13, 83–102. Knowles, David (1959). The Religious Orders in England, III: The Tudor Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, David (1976). Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sommerville, C. John (1992). The Secularization of Early Modern England. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Martin, ed. (1982, 1990). Arden of Faversham. London and New York: A. C. Black and W. W. Norton.