The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Kevin A. Quarmby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317035558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his subjects. Traditionally deemed 'Jacobean disguised ruler plays', these works include Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marston's The Malcontent and The Fawn, Middleton's The Phoenix, and Sharpham's The Fleer. Commonly dated to the arrival of James I, these plays are typically viewed as synchronic commentaries on the Jacobean regime. Kevin A. Quarmby demonstrates that the disguised ruler motif actually evolved in the 1580s. It emerged from medieval folklore and balladry, Tudor Chronicle history and European tragicomedy. Familiar on the Elizabethan stage, these incognito rulers initially offered light-hearted, romantic entertainment, only to suffer a sinister transformation as England awaited its ageing queen's demise. The disguised royal had become a dangerously voyeuristic political entity by the time James assumed the throne. Traditional critical perspectives also disregard contemporary theatrical competition. Market demands shaped the repertories. Rivalry among playing companies guaranteed the motif's ongoing vitality. The disguised ruler's presence in a play reassured audiences; it also facilitated a subversive exploration of contemporary social and political issues. Gradually, the disguised ruler's dramatic currency faded, but the figure remained vibrant as an object of parody until the playhouses closed in the 1640s.

Chapter 1
The Disguised Ruler on the Elizabethan Stage

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Marston’s The Malcontent and Middleton’s The Phoenix are often presented as the ultimate expressions of disguised ruler drama. From this perspective, Duke Vincentio, Duke Altofronto and the Prince/Phoenix are archetypal disguised rulers, written specifically for a Jacobean playgoing audience. As playwrights, Shakespeare, Marston and Middleton thus become the principal exponents of very overt political commentary on the nation’s new Scottish monarch. This argument results in an occasionalist focus on James’s accession as the sole catalyst for subsequent disguised ruler play activity. Such a reading effectively denies the importance of another, earlier Shakespearean disguised ruler – King Henry in Henry V – who travels among his Agincourt troops on the eve of battle gleaning personal insight and knowledge. Because Henry V resides within Shakespeare’s Elizabethan canon, and does not fit an anxiety-inducing model of Jacobean surveillance, its disguised ruler is ignored or dismissed by new historicist critics as an inconvenient aberration.1 This myopia is unfortunate, since Henry’s exploit echoes similar episodes in plays from the 1580s and 1590s that dramatize kings and princes disguising themselves for personal or political ends. Many of these plays engage with a folktale narrative popularized in ballads, pamphlets and provincial revelries the nation over: the legend of Robin Hood.2

Henry V is likewise significant because it combines two distinctive subgenres of history-based drama. These generic categories – the ‘comical histories’ and the ‘Chronicle Histories’ – are differentiated by their respective source material, the first medieval and mythical, the second more recent in its historicized Tudor bias. The subgenre to which Henry V most obviously belongs is the ‘Chronicle Histories’, a grouping more highly regarded because of its generic association with Shakespeare’s First Folio. The ‘Chronicle Histories’ based their narratives on sixteenth-century historiography disseminated in the Tudor Chronicles of writers such as Edward Hall, Richard Grafton, Raphael Holinshed and John Stow.3 These chroniclers periodized the reigns of the English monarchs, celebrating certain historical ‘facts’ and, in the process, legitimizing the dynastic pretensions of their royal patrons. When repeated in Shakespearean drama, these Chronicle ‘facts’ helped create a collective cultural awareness and English national consciousness. As Peter Saccio states, this process ‘etched upon the common memory’ a selective, Tudor-biased sense of medieval history that remains with us today.4 The Tudor Chronicles therefore influenced the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (c. mid-1580s) and Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (c. 1589), the anonymous manuscript (possibly Shakespeare’s, possibly Samuel Rowley’s) Thomas of Woodstock (c. 1592), Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (c. 1592), the Shakespeare collaboration King Edward III (c. 1592–1593), Shakespeare’s First and Second Tetralogies (c. 1590–1599), King John (c. 1596), and (later) Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII (c. 1613).5

The ‘Chronicle Histories’ developed alongside the ‘comical histories’. These ‘comical histories’, which incorporate their historical protagonists into fantastic comedy narratives based on medieval myth and legend, include Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589), Greene’s George a Greene (c. 1590) and George Peele’s Edward I (c. 1591). Unlike the ‘Chronicle Histories’, which derived their historicized narratives from the Tudor Chronicles, the ‘comical histories’ owed their fanciful adventures to the medieval chronicle tradition. Ivo Kamps thus describes the ‘comical history’ plays as less concerned with the ‘transient stream of human incidents’ underlying the Tudor dynastic past, and more with quasi-historical or mythical events designed as lessons about the present.6 The medieval chronicles often foregrounded instances of localized and secularized social unrest within a framework of royal romance and wooing adventurism. Eventually superseded by the Tudor Chronicles, these folkloric medieval chronicles influenced English drama from the 1560s until the decline of the history plays in the late 1620s.7 Thus, Henry V’s appearance in 1599 marks a generic crossroads between the ‘Chronicle Histories’ and ‘comical histories’, when several history plays present disguised rulers as romantic and mythical individuals, who are also pragmatically political in their illicit actions.

Both the ‘comical histories’ and the ‘Chronicle Histories’ rely on a shared English consciousness to supply ‘real’ royal characters and events. The ‘comical histories’ were, as their wooing narratives suggest, best suited to the representation of romantic adventures and themes based on medieval mythology. One relevant recurring theme, dating back to twelfth-century balladry, is often associated with Arthurian romance and with Robin Hood: the ‘king and subject’ meeting of a disguised ruler with his lowly countryman.8 Although generally arising from some chance encounter or prior disagreement, this meeting’s inevitable resolution guarantees recognition of the king’s flexibility and the subject’s deep-seated loyalty.9 This ‘king and subject’ theme perpetuates the myth of an unmediated line of communication between a monarch and his people. It thus confirms the hegemonic predominance of an accessible, all-seeing royal authority. Conversely, it also highlights underlying tensions among the nation’s aggrieved though silent masses.10

An early example of the ‘king and subject’ theme appears in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode (traceable to c. 1450, although possibly of twelfth-century origin).11 Published repeatedly throughout the sixteenth century, the Geste cycle was particularly popular in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign. In the ‘Copland’ edition of A Mery Geste of Robyn Hoode (c. 1560), the ‘king and subject’ meeting and resolution occurs when the King borrows ‘monkes wede’ for himself and five of his best knights (1467–9ff.).12 Disguised as a wealthy abbot, the King and his retinue, thus ‘clothed in gray’ (as ‘Grey-Friars’ of the English Franciscan Order), ride into Nottingham Forest to entice Robin Hood out of hiding (1485–90ff.). This late-medieval disguised ruler immediately suggests similar monk’s and friar’s costumes worn by later stage monarchs. Robin Hood’s popularity in ballads and pamphlets ensured that the mythical heritage of such disguises was easily recognizable to early modern audiences. The Geste cycle also confirms this long folkloric tradition, with the Robin Hood legend illustrating the benefit (for a king if not necessarily his subjects) of royal disguise.

Analysis of the wealth of incidental evidence in English parish records, made available through the REED project, confirms the enduring interest in Robin Hood throughout the Elizabethan era.13 These documents also highlight widespread social problems associated with secular pageants and community fairs. Parish records indicate, for example, that raucous behaviour and other trouble regularly accompanied local ‘theatrical’ re-enactments of the Robin Hood stories.14 Since these lowly, localized community revelries are inevitably ephemeral, few formal accounts remain. These same records nonetheless link Robin Hood with varied rural pursuits, including festivities and drunken riotousness. The Robin Hood legend, as Peter Happé argues, was thus ‘etched upon the common memory’ of English society.15

In dramatic form, the outlaw’s adventures provide a commonplace focus for two lost plays, the anonymous Robin Hood and Little John (1594) and William Haughton’s Robin Hood’s Penn’orths (1600), as well as the anonymous (possibly Anthony Wadeson’s) Look About You (1600).16 Likewise, Robin Hood is central to Anthony Munday’s tragic play, The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (c. I598), its Munday/Henry Chettle sequel, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (both published 1601), and numerous other sixteenth-century plays.17 Indeed, the legend is even discernible in a play written perhaps a decade before Henry’s Agincourt adventure – Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. With its ‘comical history’ narrative, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay stresses the value of disguise and secretly acquired knowledge, while presenting royal subterfuge that features the Lincoln green costume of England’s favourite subversive character.

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: Royal Disguise and Fool’s Motley

Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589, Strange’s[?], published 1594), a fanciful tale based in thirteenth-century England, features Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward I and son of Henry III.18 Reprinted almost every decade up to 1700, the play has a complicated and vague early history. It was originally performed sometime between 1589 and 1591, possibly by Strange’s Men at the Rose, or by the Queen’s Men at the Theatre in Shoreditch.19 It appeared again in 1593, this time definitely performed by Strange’s Men at the Rose, and was revived by the Queen’s company in 1594 in collaboration with Sussex’s Men, again at the Rose.20 Two years after their transfer to the newly-built Fortune, the Admiral’s Men revived the play for a December 1602 performance at court, with an additional (lost) Prologue and Epilogue by Middleton (presumably written sometime before The Phoenix).21 Despite the vagueness of Friar Bacon’s early performance history, this catalogue of revival and revision demonstrates its continued dramatic appeal. The play’s longevity appears linked to its use of English moral and mythical themes that suited the nationalistic fervour (and national unease) that followed the failed Spanish Armada invasion of 1588.22 Jingoistic patriotism was at its height and Friar Bacon became reassuringly topical for a nation uncomfortably aware of its queen’s age, her lack of a natural succ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
• 1 The Disguised Ruler on the Elizabethan Stage
• 2 The Malcontent: A Play in Two Forms
• 3 Measure for Measure: Conventionality in Disguise
• 4 The Phoenix and The Fawn: Law, Morality and the Medievalism of Disguise
• 5 Disguised Ruler Afterlives: The Spectre of Terrorism
• Afterword: The Sting in The Wasp’s Tail
• Bibliography
• Index