The tragedians of the city? Q1 Hamlet and the settlements of the 1590s

Shakespeare Quarterly

Volumn 57, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 162-182

  Menzer, Paul ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61149419873     PISSN: 00373222     EISSN: 15383555     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2006.0064     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (Oxford; Oxford UP, 1939-59), l:197(a). All title page quotations and dates of play publication are taken from Greg's bibliography and are cited by volume and entry number. Quotations of title pages follow Greg's conventions of typeface and lineation, including the use of vertical bars (|) to indicate line breaks
2. Andrew Gurr, "Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter," Shakespeare Quarterly 56 (2005): 51-75, esp. 52
3. The proposed date for Hamlet's first performance appears in Roslyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company, 1594-1613 (Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1991), 81. Throughout this essay, "City" with a capital "C" refers to the area under the control of the Lord Mayor. Importantly, it indicates London exclusive of the suburbs
4. W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1955), 307
5. Blayney writes, "The primary purpose of an imprint was . . . to inform retailers where a book could be purchased wholesale. . . . a potential customer who knew about the imprint might correctly deduce that the distributor's shop would be the one most likely to have copies in stock-but that was merely incidental" (390). See Peter W. M. Blayney, "The Publication of Playbooks," in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 383-422, esp. 390
6. Tiffany Stern,"'On each Wall and Corner Poast': Playbills, Title-Pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London," English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 57-89
7. Greg, Bibliography, 1:113, cites"?1591" as a publication date for Fair Em
8. Greg, Bibliography, l:94-95(a)
9. see Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Parts I and II; Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts; The Jew of Malta; Edward II, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), ix
10. On the evidence that Tamburlaine was performed at the Rose, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 232
11. Gurr (Shakespearian Playing Companies, 232) speculates that the Admiral's Men were "most likely" at the Theatre, "if not at one of the London inns," based partly upon his interpretation of the mysterious and possibly apocryphal stage accident-an onstage shooting-of 16 November 1587. The account of the shooting can be found in Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram, eds., English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 277
12. For the presence of the Admiral's Men at the Theatre in 1591, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 2:136
13. r
14. Quoted in Chambers, 4:305
15. Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, 274
16. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queens Men and Their Ploys (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 49
17. Gurr places them at Burbage's Theatre in 1592-93, largely on the grounds that they could not have been at the Rose, according to Henslowe's diary; see Shakespearian Playing Companies, 270
18. John Stow, A Survey of London: Reprinted from the Text of 1603, intro. Charles Lethbridge Kingford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:5
19. H. De Vocht, éd., A Knack to Know an Honest Man, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1910), v
20. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961), 25
21. Fred Lapides convincingly assigns the play to the Admiral's Men; see "The Raigne of King Edward the Third": A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition, ed. Fred Lapides (New York, London: Garland, 1980), 39-41
22. for a thorough review of the authorship question, dating, and stage history, see 1-63. S. Schoenbaum, in Annals of English Drama, 975-1700: A Supplement to the Revised Edition (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1966), 5
23. tentatively assigns the play to Pembroke's Men, citing MacD. P.Jackson's claim in"'Edward III,' Shakespeare, and Pembroke's Men," Notes and Queries 210 (1965): 329-31
24. Arvin H. Jupin reviews theories about the possible date of Mucedorus in A Contextual Study and Modern-Spelling Edition of "Mucedorus," ed. Arvin H. Jupin (New York: Garland, 1987), 1-5; esp. 1
25. Greg, Bibliography, l:197(a). Formatting of this title page reproduces that used by Greg
26. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopaedia (Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1986), 172-75, s.v. "City of London."
27. David J. Johnson, Southwark and the City (Oxford UP, 1969), 153
28. Quoted in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols, 3 vols. (London; John Nichols and Son, 1823), 1:38-60, esp. 56-58
29. Quoted in The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, ed. John Nichols, 4 vols. (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828), 1:337-376, esp. 337, 375
30. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (London; Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), 382
31. Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 129
32. Cynthia Wall, "Grammars of Space: The Language of London from Stows Survey to Defoe's Tour," Philological Quarterly 76 (1997): 387-411, esp. 390
33. Manley, Literature and Culture, 144
34. John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Create Britaine (London, 1676)
35. quoted in Lawrence Manley, ed., London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1986), 43
36. James Howell, Londinopolis (London, 1657)
37. London's sprawl continually threatened facile notions of exclusivity and integrity. Therefore, a perceptual civic sense became increasingly strident, as the suburbs, with their casual laborers and unaffiliated artisans, outstripped the City of London in growth so that, as Howell complained, "the suburbs of London are much larger than the body of the City, which make some compare her to a Jesuit's hat, whose brims are far larger than the block" (Londinopolis, quoted in Manley, London in the Age of Shakespeare, 47)
38. Quoted in Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300-1660, 3 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), vol 2, part 1, 67 (2.1:67)
39. Quoted in Wickham et al., 299-300; emphasis added. The inns were in high demand for prize-playing in the 1570s and 1580s. The Bel Savage and the Bull appear frequently as fight sites in the records of the Masters of Defence of London, a guild of teachers of fencing; see Herbert Berry, The Noble Science: A Study and Transcription of Sloane Ms, 2530, Papers of the Masters of Defence of London, Temp. Henry VIII to 1590 (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1991)
40. and O. L. Brownstein, "A Record of London Inn-Playhouses from c. 1565-1590," SQ 22 (1971): 17-24
41. Gurr argues that Howard, and. Carey agreed to license two companies-the Admiral's and the Chamberlains-and may have forbidden them to play in the City although no record of such an agreement exists. The new arrangement would have settled a persistent struggle over City playing between Guildhall and the Privy Council. According to Gurr, this new deal deferred to the Lord Mayor by permitting no plays in the City whatsoever, and he concludes categorically that "the inns had been closed as places for staging plays seemingly by 1596 and certainly before 1598, when the duopoly was in full swing" ("Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter," 58)
42. Wickham, however, argues that performances at inns were not in the yard but in interior halls; see Early English Stages, 2.1:186-96
43. See also Gurr,"Henry Carey's Peculiar Letter."
44. In The Best Actors in the World: Shakespeare and His Acting Company (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 2002)
45. The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England: Thomas Platter and Horatio Busino, ed. Peter Razzell (London: Caliban Books, 1995), 26-27
46. Journals of Two Travellers, 31-32
47. The relevant phrase "as for instance in our hostelry, which was visited by players almost daily" reads "wie dann auch vast alletag in unser losament die spielleüt sindt" in Thomas Platter, Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankrekh, Spanien, England und die Niederlande 1595-1600, ed. Rut Keiser, 2 vols. (Basel, Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag, 1968), 2:795
48. In this light, we might revisit Platter's record of another trip to see a play; "On another occasion not far from our inn, in the suburb at Bishopsgate, if I remember, also after lunch, I beheld a play in which they presented diverse nations and an Englishman struggling together for a maiden" (Journals oj Two Travellers, 27)
49. Chambers (2:400) read this account as a reference to a performance at the Curtain, which was a few hundred yards north of Bishopsgate. Gabriel Egan suggests that Platter may have meant the Boar's Head, which was near Platter's inn but farther from Bishopsgate than the Curtain; see "Thomas Platter's Account of an Unknown Play at the Curtain or the Boar's Head," Notes and Queries 245 (2000): 53-56, esp. 54
50. On the obscure performance history of Dido, Queen of Carthage, see H.J. Oliver, ed.,"Dido Queen of Carthage" and "The Massacre at Paris," by Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968), xxxi-xxxii
51. John Cordy Jeaffreson, éd., Middlesex County Records (Old Series), 4 vols. (London: Greater London Council, 1972-75), 2:47
52. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. "sometimes," 2b:"At one time; in former times, formerly"
53. Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991), 112
54. Quoted in Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Governmental Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia UP, 1908), 193
55. See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 396
56. See David Kathman, "Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater," SQ 55 (2004): 1-49
57. and "Citizens, Innholders, and Playhouse Builders, 1543-1622," Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 44 (2005): 38-64