John H. Astington

The Development of Shakespeare's theater

Eight essays from a seminar of the Shakespeare Association of America in Montreal (no date) discuss the development of the entire theatre profession between the accession of Elizabeth and the English Civil War. Among the topics are how companies formed and stayed together, the temporary performance

Buckingham's Patronage and The Gypsies Metamorphosed

Standard accounts of the masque in British culture between 1600 and 1640 have tended to give primary attention to those presented at court at the festival seasons of Christmas and Shrovetide. Thematically, they have concentrated on the artists who had a major responsibility in making themBen Jonson and Inigo Jones (with less attention to musical composers and choreographers, whose contributions to the entire event must have been of great importance, but of whom we know less). Politically, they have taken the masques function of encomium and endorsement of the monarch as a sign of crisis, growing to its most ironic excess in Salmacida Spolia , written by William Davenant, presented in January and again in February of 1640. What C. V. Wedgwood emblematically identified as “the last masque” in fact happened twice. C. V. Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion (London: Collins, 1960).

The Globe, the Court and Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure was written within the first twenty-one months of King James’s reign, and probably first was seen on the stage when the Globe re-opened in the later summer of 1604, prior to the play’s recorded performance before the king at Whitehall Palace on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December. The long closure of the Globe, first for the death of Queen Elizabeth and then for the serious plague which immediately followed in 1603 and 1604, suggests on the one hand that Shakespeare would have had more leisure to write; on the other, that there would have been no compelling need for him to provide new plays when his company was largely inactive and had the prospect of remaining so. Court patronage provided welcome oases within this stretch of theatrical desert, and it has understandably fed suppositions that the grandly named King’s Men had a rather closer relationship with their monarch than did any players in the old queen’s reign. The payment of thirty pounds to Burbage on behalf of his fellows in February 1604 ‘for the mayntenance and releife of himselfe and the rest of his company being prohibited to prsente any playes publiquelie in or neere London’, ‘by way of his Maties free gifte’, particularly in the absence of similar payments to the other companies, may be taken as a sign of special favour. And if the company as a whole was favoured, their leading dramatist, ‘the King’s Playwright’ as he has been dubbed by Alvin Kernan, is quite likely to have responded with entertainment which reflected the new ruler’s theoretical interests in the properties of government and the procedures of the law.

Macbeth and the Rowe Illustrations

acted the title role in his own play; while Juby identified the playwright as Robert Greene, presumably recalling the notorious pamphleteer-playwright. With the exception of the riddling references to Shakespeare in A Groatsvorth of Wit, printed in 1592, the conjunction of George a Greene and Titus Andronicus in December 1593 andJanuary 1594 ow seems to mark the earliest independe tly verifiable event in Shakespeares theatrical career, antedating by almost a year the formal record of his activities at court on 26 and 28 December 1594.41 To Shakespeares biography we may now also add an occasion in 1599 or thereafter during which Shakespeare provided a detailed response to a bibliographic query posed by a contemporary bibliophile and theater aficio ado, George Buc.

The "Unrecorded Portrait" of Edward Alleyn

ARLOWE EVIDENTLY THOUGHT, CONVENTIONALLY ENOUGH, that Tamburlaine wielded his sword with his right hand and arm, conforming to the symbol of human and divine power that is a commonplace of graphic and literary expression in the Renaissance with traditional roots in medieval, classical, and biblical habits of thought. Shakespeares delicate and tender prince, inheritor of Norway and Denmark, similarly would have worn his sword on his left hip, to be drawn by reaching across the front of the body. Thus, if the portrait of Tamburlaine which appears in Richard Knolless The Generall Historie of the Turkes2 is, as has been claimed, a picture of Edward Alleyn in his habit as he lived-or as he lived as Tamburlaine on the stage-it is surely very odd that his sword is worn on his right, obliging him to draw and wield it with his left hand (see Fig. 1). None of the Tamburlaine legends suggest he was a southpaw, nor does anything known about Alleyn elsewhere give any hint of this possibly interesting detail. (Do left-handed actors point, beckon, and gesture with the left hand favored over the right? The Dulwich portrait of Alleyn, a rather more trustworthy witness to his appearance, seems to indicate that his favored expressive hand was his right.) Left-handed swordsmanship was evidently common enough for Saviolo to devote a chapter of his treatise to it,3 but the whole issue in Alleyns case is probably a canard. There is a simpler explanation for the curious position of the sword in the Knolles picture. If an engraver were to copy a conventional portrait of a warrior directly onto a copper plate without making any adjustment to what he saw or without thinking carefully about the result, the print from the engraving so made would reverse the original entirely: the head would face the opposite direction, and the sword, absurdly, would be worn on the right. If this is what Lawrence Johnson, the engraver for Knolless book, did, then the question becomes not how well he remembered Alleyn or whether the actor sat for him, and so on, but what graphic source he used. For the other portraits in the book, he certainly copied many pictures very closely, and he usually reversed them in doing so. His source for Tamburlaine may have been a picture of Alleyn, although I find this unlikely. This paper will explore the places in which he had certainly been looking to compose the series of illustrations for Knolles and in doing so will offer what I take to be a more plausible interpretation of the Tamburlaine plate. The claim that a portrait of Alleyn would be tucked away in a large learned folio on Turkish history published in 1603 is on the face of it a strange one. The claim was

Malvolio and the Eunuchs: Texts and Revels in Twelfth Night

... a good practise in it to make the steward beleeue his Lady widdowe was in Loue w th him by counterfayting a lett r John Manningham He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. 1 Corinthians, 7, 32-3 Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day. But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth. 1 Timothy, 5, 5-6 Fashionably enough, the central farcical scene of Twelfth Night concerns an act of reading. What Malvolio reads and how he reads it have significant connections both with other events in the play, and with the wider world of seventeenth-century English society. The letter he finds invites him to join the festive rituals of love - to disguise himself, to smile, and to become a wooer, on the expectation of ending the revelling with epithalamium and marriage. This model for human conduct - the argument of romantic comedy - is in fact endorsed by a secondary text hidden within the first, as we shall see. But Malvolio, reading the words eagerly in the light of his predisposition, sees no subtleties, let alone the gaping trap. The festival in which he has already begun to take part is not the affirmative and sustaining one he imagines, but a punitive, defaming, mocking ritual aimed at him, his pride, pretensions, and authority. His reading — or misreading — marks his entry to a festive world, and festivals, like texts, are ambiguous. Particularly his treatment at the hands of the plotters forms a suggestive inverse ritual to set against those patterns which are traced by the energies of misplaced and baffled erotic desire, eventually untangled and fulfilled.

Lumpers and Splitters

Darwin, writing in this instance to the botanist Hooker about the classification of genera and species in plants, is normally credited with the division, since taken up in other contexts, between those who prefer precise and minute distinctions and those seeking larger organizing categories. The world needs both, Darwin suggests, and perhaps further suggests that each of us needs to entertain both modes of thought: without his fine observation of the varieties of Galapagos finches larger theories may never have arisen in the form for which he is now famous. So, in early modern studies, editorial theory in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by lumpers, given to dismissing variant dramatic texts as “bad,” and producing as the best products of their work, for example, Kenneth Muir’s King Lear (1952), or, at the late extreme, Harold Jenkins’s Hamlet (1982), both for the Arden Shakespeare series. Splitters moved decisively into the field in the 1980s, giving us two texts of King Lear in the Oxford Shakespeare (1982), while the latest Arden Hamlet appeared as three texts in two distinct volumes (2006). The splitting of Hamlet could further continue by including plays for which we no longer have the texts, and one other text deriving from touring players in Germany. E. K. Chambers thought that earlier allusions to Hamlet or Hamlet, 1588–96, as well as later allusions to non-Shakespearean “Hamlet” lines, 1608–1620, were all to one unitary play, eventually owned by Shakespeare’s company, and thus the source text for Shakespeare’s version(s).2

Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (review)

after all, keyed to a world in which matters of rank, deference, and subordination were all-important” (147). Shakespeare scholars have worked hard to recuperate early modern gender ideologies and to understand the age’s ethnocentrism, but the crucial role of service has not received the same attention. Neill makes his reader feel the oppressiveness of early modern hierarchies as they weigh on all the play’s characters, not simply Iago. Neill carries this theme into his commentary. His note for 3.3.9, where Cassio describes himself as Desdemona’s “true servant,” explains the phrase’s resonance: “The nuances of Cassio’s language here will be difficult for a modern audience to catch: true servant is essentially a routine courtesy, but one complicated by awareness of Cassio’s subordinate role as an officer in the service . . . of a general.” In other commentary notes, Neill brings in stage directions from Q that help us visualize the action; even more important, he refers to contemporary performances. The note to 4.2.87, “Is’t possible?” for example, suggests that this reiterated phrase can be used to “taunt the audience” and observes that “In Sam Mendes’s 1997 production the line provided the cue for a despairingly tender and lingering embrace, broken violently on ‘I cry you mercy then.’” Neill’s straightforward glosses are refreshingly clear and frequently illuminate the text in new and intriguing ways. The edition concludes with six appendices. Appendix A on dating concurs with Honigmann’s argument for a date, 1602–3, somewhat earlier than previous editors suggested. Appendix C provides a complete translation of Cinthio’s novella from Gli Hecatommithi. Linda Phyllis Austern contributed Appendix D, a historic overview of the play’s music, which is followed by Appendices E (“Alterations to Lineation”) and F (“Longer Notes”). A user-friendly index completes the volume. Like any good edition, the Oxford Othello bears the stamp of its editor. Michael Neill, who has grappled with the play’s controversies for many years, writes authoritatively yet with unusual candor and sensitivity. This edition of Othello may not be for all time, but it will certainly dominate the field for years to come.

English Court Theatre 1558-1642

List of illustrations and acknowledgements Preface List of abbreviations Introduction 1. The royal administration 2. Royal palaces 3. Royal theatres 4. Artists and artisans 5. Royal audiences 6. Royal occasions Conclusion Appendix: performances at court 1558-1642 Notes Select bibliography Index.