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The Chimera of Amalgamation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Andrew Gurr
Andrew Gurr
Affiliation:
Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Reading.
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Extract

One of the features of the growth of playing in London in the late 1580s shows itself in the size of casts needed for some of the new plays composed around 1590. The history plays in particular laid exceptional demands on the numbers in the companies playing in London. Presumably this was one result of the foothold for performing to large audiences that the new amphitheatres had given the players. But it raises many questions about the organization of the companies. Did they enlarge the companies for the occasion with hired men, using casual if stagestruck labour hanging around the playhouses, or did they take on extra sharers? There is no evidence that this happened. The number of sharers in the leading companies, apart from the uniquely-large Queen's Men, who were allotted twelve players in 1583 but split into two in about 1590, when most of the companies had eight or ten players. Which came first, the larger companies or the larger plays? Did different companies join forces to stage them? Did they, after performance in London, take these large plays on tour? The conventional assumption about that, based largely on the evidence of the ‘bad’ and shortened quarto texts of the early plays, is that the ‘large’ plays were cut down to the ‘bad’ quarto size to allow the plays to be taken on tour. So were the large plays written only for London audiences? The writing of plays for large casts was a short-lived phenomenon, starting at the end of the 1580s and dying by 1594. What changed the conditions in that year? I believe we can address these questions most sharply by considering one of theatre history's more intriguing chimeras, the so-called ‘amalgamated company’ that is thought to have occupied Henslowe's Rose through the early 1590s.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 85 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1993

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References

Notes

1. Recent bibliographical analysis, and particularly studies of the casts needed for these quartos, indicates that most of the ‘pirated’ quartos were composed to be read, not played. See for instance Kathleen, trace, ‘Reconstruction and adaptation in Q Henry V’, Studies in Bibliography 44 (1991), 228–53Google Scholar, King, T. J., Casting Shakespeare's Plays. London actors and their roles, 1590–1642, Cambridge, 1992, p. 87Google Scholar, and Gurr, Andrew, ed. Henry V, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 222–3.Google Scholar

2. Bradley, David, From text to performance in the Elizabethan theatre. Preparing the play for the stage, Cambridge, 1992Google Scholar; King, T. J., Casting Shakespeare's Plays.Google Scholar

3. The Elizabethan Theatre and the Book of Sir Thomas More, Ithaca, 1987, p. 57.Google Scholar

4. Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols, Oxford, 1923, II. 120.Google Scholar

5. Greg, W. W., Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, 2 vols, Oxford, 1931, I. 111–13.Google Scholar

6. The Elizabethan Stage, IV.305.Google Scholar

7. Malone Society Collections VI.27; Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. Dasent, J. R., n. s. 32 vols, London, 1890–1907, XX (1900) 328.Google Scholar

8. McMillin, Scott, ‘Building Stories: Greg, Fleay, and the Plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 4 (1989), 53–62.Google Scholar

9. The few of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Jeronimo, and TamarCham, performed by Strange's in 1592 and 1593, all appear in Henslowe's records after 1594 as Admiral's plays.

10. See the author's ‘Three Reluctant Patrons and the Early Shakespeare’, SQ 44 (forthcoming).Google Scholar

11. Sussex, died on 14 12Google Scholar 1593. Strange died on 16 April 1594, soon after succeeding to the earldom of Derby.

12. Evidence about the companies touring is far from complete. Ten volumes of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) are now out, and an eleventh is on its way, but the records for many counties, towns and great houses are still unexplored. Malone Society Collections (MSC) have some records, and J. T. Murray's two-volume work published in 1910 still gives some usefully broad coverage. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (ES), has some summary notes. The notes supplied in the text refer to the REED volumes for particular towns and counties. MSC covers Ipswich and Kent. It might be added that where Chambers states that ‘therlle of Darbys players and … the Lorde Admirals players, the ij amongste’ were together at Ipswich 7 March 1594. (ES II. 120n), this entry is not in MSC.

13. There are records of at least one former Admiral's player performing on the continent in the period 1591–4. Richard Jones is recorded playing at Arnhem in 1592 along with Robert Brown, John Bradstreet and Thomas Sackville. The same four players were named on a passport issued by the Lord Admiral on 10 February 1592 for travel in Zeeland, Holland and Friesland. On the strength of this passport Willem Schrickx believes that they were all the Lord Admiral's players (Foreign Envoys and Travelling Players in the Age of Shakespeare and Jonson, Wetteren, 1986, pp. 122, 185–93), and that they travelled as its remnant group through these years. I would question this reading. The Admiral was, after all, one of the chief authorizers of passports for travel, especially in wartime. There was no value to the players in using his name overseas except for a passport. An English patron's name and licence had no value in securing permission to play outside England. Brown toured regularly on the continent from the later 1580s. He is recorded as playing at Leiden on 7 October 1590, before Alleyn left the Admiral's for Strange's. In later years Brown and Sackville do seem to have had strong associations with the post-1594 Admiral's company, since after 1596 they are recorded as playing Faustus, The Jew of Malta and other plays from the Admiral's repertoire in the Low Countries and Germany (Schrickx, , Foreign Envoys and Travelling Players, pp. 195–8, 209–14).Google Scholar But there is no evidence that they held to the Admiral as a patron. Brown, after playing at the court of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, eventually settled at Kassel, where at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Margrave Maurice built him a theatre, the Ottoneum, the shell of which still exists.

14. See Levin, Richard, ‘The Contemporary Perception of Marlowe's Tamburlaine’, MRDE I (1984), 51–70.Google Scholar The earliest mentions of Tamburlaine were: 1587 Greene, Robert, PerimedesGoogle Scholar; 1587–8 Greene, Alphonsus of Aragon 4.3 (G2v); 1588–9 Peele, George, Battle of AlcazarGoogle Scholar (1.2.214–5); 1589 Greene, , MenaphonGoogle Scholar (F2r); 1589 Peele, , Farewell to Norris and DrakeGoogle Scholar (A3r); c.1590 George a Greene (1.1.46–9); 1591 The Troublesome Raigne of King John (A2r); 1591 Greene, Farewell to Folly (A4r); 1592 Nashe, Thomas, Strange NewsGoogle Scholar (F4r); c.1592 Selimus (xxvi.2344–6); 5 May 1593 the ‘Dutch Church libel’; 1593 Harvey, Gabriel, A New Letter of Notable ContentsGoogle Scholar (D3r, D4r) (the reference to ‘smiling at his tamberlaine contempt’ seems to allude to Marlowe's death); 1593 Nashe, , Christ's Tears over JerusalemGoogle Scholar (A4r); and 1593 Drayton, Michael, Idea (172–3).Google Scholar There then occurs a gap of nearly three years, up to 1596 Nashe, , Have With You to Saffron WaldenGoogle Scholar (S4v); 1597 Hall, Joseph, VirgidemiarumGoogle Scholar; 1597 Pistol in 2 Henry IV, 2.4. 164–5; 1597 E.S., The Discovery of the Knights of the Post (C2v); 1597 Donne, , The CalmeGoogle Scholar (33); 1598 Jonson, , Every Man In His HumourGoogle Scholar (3.2.16–22); c.1599 Marston, , HistriomastrixGoogle Scholar (Act 5); 1599 Dekker, , Shoemaker's HolidayGoogle Scholar (5.4. 51–4); 1599 Dekker, , Old FortunatusGoogle Scholar (1.1. 187–95); 1599 Marston, , Antonio and MellidaGoogle Scholar (Induction); 1600 The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (G2r); 1601 Dekker, , SatiromastixGoogle Scholar (4.2. 28–9, 4.3. 169–71); 1601 Dekker, , Blurt Master ConstableGoogle Scholar (A3r). Given such a frequency of references, 14 in six years, followed by another 13 in five years, the absence of any mention between 1593 and 1596 is striking. Given a year or so's time-lag for writing and for memories fading, the gap matches the likelihood that Tamburlaine was absent from the London stage between 1591 and 1594.

15. The other striking point about Marlowe's plays is that they all seem to have ended up with the new Admiral's Men. The two of his plays first performed by Strange's, and the Admiral's plays of 1590, plus Dido, all appear in the post-1594 Henslowe records. Even Edward II, published as a Pembroke's play in 1594, seems from its later history to have gone to the Henslowe stable. Since all Shakespeare's plays, including those recorded as performed by Strange's or Sussex's at the Rose before 1594, ended up with the other company, it may be that the plays as well as the players were distributed with some concern for even shares.