Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood

Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse

Grace Ioppolo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134300051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book presents new evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton composed their plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences. Grace Ioppolo argues that the path of the transmission of the text was not linear, from author to censor to playhouse to audience - as has been universally argued by scholars - but circular. Extant dramatic manuscripts, theatre records and accounts, as well as authorial contracts, memoirs, receipts and other archival evidence, are used to prove that the text returned to the author at various stages, including during rehearsal and after performance. This monograph provides much new information and case studies, and is a fascinating contribution to the fields of Shakespeare studies, English Renaissance drama studies, manuscript studies, textual study and bibliography and theatre history.

1 ‘As good a play for y^r publiqe howse as euer was playd’

Dramatists and authorship

In his 1971 book The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, G. E. Bentley claimed to examine the ‘normal working environment circumscribing the activities of those literary artists who were making their living by writing for the London theatres’.¹ In fact, he depicted as normal an antagonistic working environment in which dramatists lacked ‘respect’ from their employers and ‘control’ over their texts, as well as the ability to negotiate their terms and conditions inside and outside the playhouse, particularly with such entrepreneurs as Philip Henslowe. Bentley concluded that only eight early modern dramatists could be categorised as ‘regular professionals’ or ‘attached dramatists’, and even they were kept from participating or collaborating in the playhouse transmission and performance of their plays.² In effect, Bentley helped to establish the view, recently re-emphasised by Orgel, that the majority of professional dramatists were enslaved, in theory if not in practice, in a theatrical industry that minimised or negated their own interests and concerns and ‘contaminated’ their texts.³

However, the archival records, particularly authors’ contracts, bonds, memoranda and correspondence, on which Bentley sometimes selectively drew, show that the ‘normal’ working environment allowed for dramatists to set out their own terms or to accept or renegotiate those offered by employers, actors, censors and other colleagues.⁴ This point is made even clearer when these records are studied alongside dramatic manuscripts themselves. Dramatists and those using their texts worked with and not against each other in the most financially and artistically productive, and cost- and time-efficient, ways possible. By necessity, these relationships between dramatists and theatre personnel were not antagonistic but co-operative throughout the transmission of these texts from author to acting company to censor to audience. In fact, this type of collaboration of authors in the various stages through which their texts moved was routine and widespread, and not confined to only a handful of privileged dramatists. Many dramatists were apparently on short- or long-term contracts with acting companies that gave them the kind of status or authority that Bentley confers upon only eight. It is with this type of collaboration in mind that the majority of London dramatists wrote their texts.

Henslowe and dramatists

The rich theatrical archive of Henslowe (c. 1555–1616) and his son-in-law and business associate Edward Alleyn (1566–1626) held at Dulwich College, London, does not, in fact, support Bentley’s arguments that Henslowe and other employers showed ‘no undue respect’ to dramatists and refused to allow them to exert ‘control’ over their texts.⁵ Henslowe’s Diary offers his financial accounts for his various theatrical businesses from 1592 to 1608, and his other papers, including contracts, correspondence, indentures, bills, receipts and leases, cover the period up to his death in 1616. Alleyn’s papers begin in the late 1590s and continue until his death in 1626. As proprietors of the Rose, Fortune, Hope and other theatres (from which they received a percentage of admission fees), and bankers to or investors in the Lord Admiral’s, Lord Strange’s, Earl of Worcester’s and Prince Henry’s Men, among others,⁶ Henslowe and Alleyn dealt with dramatists on a daily basis. They also conducted theatrical business with many of the leading political and ecclesiastical figures from the 1580s to the 1620s, including monarchs and their families, chancellors, privy councillors and courtiers, church leaders, London civic officials and government censors.⁷ All in all, Henslowe and Alleyn dealt with the entire range of national and local officials who authorised, patronised, supported, remunerated, attacked, banned, suppressed, or merely watched and heard seemingly every aspect of theatre in the early modern period, including the employment of dramatists.⁸ These same officials were almost certainly applying the same standards and regulations to the other leading companies with which they had dealings, particularly the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which together with the Lord Admiral’s Men were specifically named in 1598 by the Privy Council as the two companies allowed to act at court,⁹ a duopoly that lasted twenty-five years.¹⁰

Henslowe’s and Alleyn’s papers demonstrate that dramatists as well as actors, company managers, theatre owners and other personnel lived in a highly interrelated theatrical business world. These men often moved casually, capriciously or shrewdly among companies, theatres and professions in a seamless way over short or long periods of time. Many of those who began their careers in the Elizabethan theatre often continued in the same or different capacities in the Jacobean and early Caroline theatres. Scholars usually regard acting companies as being composed of at least six actor-sharers, including two responsible for financial management, several boys and hired men, a book-keeper, tireman (i.e. costumer), gatherer (playhouse money collector) and other personnel to take care of stage business.¹¹ However, dramatists also figure as company members, regardless of whether they were sharers. All these theatre personnel, including dramatists, seem to have negotiated, exploited or accepted the same practices and methods, adapted by necessity to later demands or interests of audiences, playing spaces and employers, with which they began their careers. In fact, the careers of three dramatists, Robert Daborne, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, who figure prominently in this and the following chapter, can briefly demonstrate here the artistic and financial interdependence and interconnection of the theatrical business throughout the early modern period. These examples should not be considered unique or anomalous.

Daborne began his theatrical career as a manager for at least one boys’ company, the Queen’s Revels, and possibly another, the King’s Revels.¹² He later worked as a dramatist for an adult company, the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, among whom were actors who had worked as boys for the companies Daborne had previously managed. Later, Daborne also attempted to become a theatre entrepreneur. Heywood similarly worked and had financial interests in various professions in the theatre industry. A ‘covenanted’ actor for the Lord Admiral’s Men, he also wrote for them and later for Derby’s Men, and even later became a sharer in yet four other companies: Earl of Worcester’s, Queen Anne’s, King’s and Queen Henrietta’s Men, for all of which he also wrote plays. Heywood thus acted or wrote plays performed at the Rose, the Curtain, the Fortune, the Red Bull, the Phoenix and the Globe, among other theatres, eventually working for the theatrical entrepreneur, and his old friend, Christopher Beeston, who built the Phoenix Theatre in 1617. For the previous twenty years Beeston had worked as an actor, beginning his career as a servant to the actor Augustine Phillips, who had worked for Lord Strange’s Men and then the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men and was an original sharer in the Globe Theatre. Beeston worked under Henslowe for Worcester’s Men, and later for Queen Anne’s Men, for whom he became a manager, and then for Prince Charles’s Men. Beeston also later employed Brome, who may have begun his theatre career as a servant to Ben Jonson in the age of James I. Brome signed exclusive contracts to write plays for the actors and theatre owners of the Salisbury Court Theatre twenty years later in the age of Charles I. Not surprisingly, Brome wrote at least three plays, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), and the non-extant The Apprentice’s Prize and The Life and Death of Sir Martin Skink, with Heywood.¹³

These connections, partly documented by Henslowe’s and Alleyn’s personnel histories, suggest a remarkably interrelated, interdependent and financially competitive theatrical world from the 1590s to the closing of the theatres. Surely some, if not many, of these personnel borrowed or adapted the successful practices of the entrepreneurs for whom they had worked, including Henslowe and Alleyn. The financial records of the other great entrepreneurs, James, Cuthbert and Richard Burbage, with whom Henslowe and Alleyn were most directly in competition, do not survive. Yet that dramatists such as Daborne could threaten in 1613 to take a play to another company if not paid a higher rate from Henslowe, his contractor, implies that Henslowe had to adjust to market competition for dramatists’ plays. Indeed, Henslowe probably helped to standardise dramatists’ salaries as well as their working conditions as early as the 1590s, by which time everyone already seemed to know everyone else and how they worked and, more importantly, how much they were paid. Such competition did not end with Henslowe and Daborne, for Brome not only discussed other companies’ rates and offers when negotiating the terms of his 1635 and 1638 exclusive contracts but later sold plays to those competitors, resulting in a lawsuit for breach of promise from his contracted employers. Henslowe’s and Alleyn’s papers especially provide extensive, detailed, dated and unique information, much of which has not yet been fully interpreted or investigated, about the daily, weekly or annual employment terms and working conditions of dramatists.¹⁴ These documents, therefore, should be scrutinised much more closely in order to understand the standard or ‘normal’ conditions, practices and ‘environment’ of dramatists, especially in confirming the extent of authors’ authority and ‘control’ within the playhouse.

‘Memorandum tis agreed’: Dramatists’ contracts and salaries

As plays were performed in repertory, in a six-week period, with performance usually six days a week, a play may have been performed only once.¹⁵ An acting company had to have on hand a large supply of new plays, as well as old ones that could be revised into something that looked new, in order to satisfy their regular, returning audiences. G. E. Bentley calculates that professional London dramatists wrote at least 900 plays between 1590 and 1642, most of which no longer survive.¹⁶ Henslowe’s potential inventory numbers over 325 plays,¹⁷ thus constituting over one-third of the plays that Bentley calculated were written during a fifty-two-year period.¹⁸ For most of his career Henslowe was acting as agent or intermediary for acting companies; however, he later bought plays himself, retaining financial control and possession of them unless he resold them at a profit to acting companies.¹⁹ Alleyn also bought plays himself that he resold to the Admiral’s Men or to other companies or entrepreneurs. As Roslyn K. Knutson shows, the Admiral’s Men especially built up a large repertory of new and old plays from 1597 to 1603, noticeably increasing their commissioning of new plays in 1599 and 1600.²⁰

E. K. Chambers argued that 1594 to 1598 marked ‘a period for which Henslowe records plays only and not authors’.²¹ However, entries in the Diary suggest that before 1597, not 1599, Henslowe was earning income from the performance of plays at his playhouses, not from contracting dramatists to write those plays. Thus he lists play titles only before 1597. Prior to that time he was apparently advancing companies the money to buy plays for their sole use and profit. Henslowe apparently first inventoried the plays he had purchased in his ‘Note of all suche bookes as belong to the Stocke, and such as I have bought since 3d of March 1598’ with twenty-nine play titles listed.²² Judging from entries in the Diary for some of these titles, Henslowe wrote out this list some months after 3 March, and thus after 25 March when the new year traditionally started. Hence this list dates from 1598, not 1599, and appears to suggest that he only began buying plays himself, on his own behalf or for others, from 1597. In fact, the first record in the Diary of direct dealing with dramatists occurs on 23 December 1597, when he advanced Ben Jonson 20 shillings (£1) for a play ‘he was to writte for vs before crysmas next’.

From 1597, then, in addition to Jonson, Henslowe contracted Antony Munday, Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Michael Drayton, Samuel Rowley, William Bird, Nathan Field, Philip Massinger and Robert Daborne, among many others, to write new plays or to make ‘addicians’ to or ‘mend’ or ‘alter’ existing plays.²³ Henslowe’s Diary shows that his payment to a dramatist or a group of collaborators for a new play in the late 1590s ranged from £5 to £7, but by the 1610s the price had risen to £20. In a 1613 letter, Daborne warns Henslowe that he could collect £25 from another company for his new play rather than the £20 Henslowe had offered,²⁴ although this may have been an idle threat.

The increase from £5 to £20 over fifteen years may not reflect simply the costs of inflation or of an increasingly successful theatre business but the change in status of dramatists in general. In the earlier period, plays and acting c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 'As good a play for yr publiqe howse as euer was playd': dramatists and authorship
• 2 'You give them authority to play': dramatists and authority
• 3 'The fowle papers of the Authors': dramatists and foul papers
• 4 'A fayre Copy herafter': dramatists and fair copies
• 5 'Plaide in 1613': authorial and scribal manuscripts in the playhouse
• 6 'It sprang from ye Poet': Jonson, Middleton and Shakespeare at work
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index