Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England

Ten Case Studies

Matthew Steggle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317150787
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book establishes new information about the likely content of ten lost plays from the period 1580-1642. These plays' authors include Nashe, Heywood, and Dekker; and the plays themselves connect in direct ways to some of the most canonical dramas of English literature, including Hamlet, King Lear, The Changeling, and The Duchess of Malfi. The lost plays in question are: Terminus & Non Terminus (1586-8); Richard the Confessor (1593); Cutlack (1594); Bellendon (1594); Truth's Supplication to Candlelight (1600); Albere Galles (1602); Henry the Una (c. 1619); The Angel King (1624); The Duchess of Fernandina (c. 1630-42); and The Cardinal's Conspiracy (bef. 1639). From this list of bare titles, it is argued, can be reconstructed comedies, tragedies, and histories, whose leading characters included a saint, a robber, a Medici duchess, an impotent king, at least one pope, and an angel. In each case, newly-available digital research resources make it possible to interrogate the title and to identify the play's subject-matter, analogues, and likely genre. But these concrete examples raise wider theoretical problems: What is a lost play? What can, and cannot, be said about objects in this problematic category? Known lost plays from the early modern commercial theatre outnumber extant plays from that theatre: but how, in practice, can one investigate them? This book offers an innovative theoretical and practical frame for such work, putting digital humanities into action in the emerging field of lost play studies.

Chapter 1
Thomas Nashe and Robert Mills, Terminus & Non Terminus (1586–1588)

Readers of the work of the prose satirist, poet, and occasional professional-theatre dramatist Thomas Nashe have long been intrigued by a reference to a “Show” put on during his career at St. John’s College, Cambridge. According to Nashe’s mock-biographer Richard Lichfield, Nashe, while a student,

florished in all impudencie toward Schollers, and abuse to the Townsmen; insomuch, that to this daye the Townes-men call euerie vntoward Scholler of whome there is great hope, a verie Nashe. Then being Bachelor of Arte, which by great labour he got, to shew afterward that he was not vnworthie of it, had a hand in a Show called Terminus & non terminus, for which his partener in it was expelled the Colledge: but this foresaid Nashe played in it (as I suppose) the Varlet of Clubs; which he acted with such naturall affection, that all the spectators tooke him to be the verie same … .¹

This chapter looks to offer a new and more detailed reconstruction of Terminus & Non Terminus, using material from EEBO-TCP as well as a hitherto under-examined manuscript source. Unlike all the other plays in the study, Terminus & Non Terminus was not a commercial-theatre piece, and this makes it something of an outlier to the others. However, Nashe was a future commercial-theatre playwright, and Terminus & Non Terminus seems, as this chapter will discuss, to have informed at least one later professionally acted drama. Indeed if we accept the recent conjecture of Katherine Duncan-Jones, the play that it later informed had, as one of its lead actors, Shakespeare himself.² For these reasons to do with its commercial-theatre affinities, as well as for the search techniques which can help explicate it, Terminus & Non Terminus does indeed earn a place in this book.

Lichfield’s Account

The allusion to the play with which we started appears as part of a mock-biography in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Gentleman (1597), a pamphlet attributed to Richard Lichfield, barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge, a figure who is traceable in Cambridge archives from 1593 onwards.³ In 1596, Nashe had mock-dedicated to Lichfield his satirical pamphlet Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), claiming that Lichfield had already translated Pierce Penniless into the “macaronical tongue”. The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, which appeared the following year, is seemingly a sarcastic reply to that dedication. As Benjamin Griffin documents, Lichfield seems to have had an interest in satire and in satirical entertainment, since he went on to be mentioned by name in The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (1598). This satirical comedy is the first in the Parnassus trilogy, a set of plays best known today for their highly circumstantial satirical gossip about London writers and playwrights. Like Terminus & Non Terminus, these plays also emerged from St. John’s College, Cambridge.⁴ Furthermore, many years later, Lichfield was mentioned again in yet another Cambridge University comedy, this time being personally satirized in Thomas Randolph’s Aristippus (1627). Thus, as a figure associated with Cambridge University and connected to satirical comedy, Lichfield would seem reasonably well placed to know about Nashe’s involvement in university drama. Nashe’s biographer Charles Nicholl observes that Nashe several times in his writing alludes to university amateur drama. Working solely from the information so far given, Nicholl offers some guesses at the content of Terminus & Non Terminus:

the play was probably in Latin, and undoubtedly satirical. The title is puzzling, almost Beckettian: ‘The End and Not the End’. One wonders who Nashe’s ‘partener in it’ was, presumably the main author as he and not Nashe was expelled for it. Could it possibly be Everard Digby, the mutinous fellow of St. John’s, who was indeed expelled in 1587?⁵

Nicholl’s account represents the current state of knowledge and conjecture about the play in relationship to Nashe’s career.

Mills’s Account

However, a little-known manuscript poem offers a second avenue of approach to Terminus & Non Terminus. The poem is by Robert Mills (fl.1582–1593), a contemporary of Nashe’s at St. John’s.

What is known about Robert Mills’s life can be summed up very briefly. “Robert Mylles” matriculated in Lent Term 1582/3 as a pensioner at St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1584 “Robert Mills Lincolnensis” – that is, from the county of Lincolnshire – was elected to a Lady Margaret scholarship at St. John’s, and in 1585 Mills was one of eleven scholars from the college to contribute Latin verses on a theme from Ecclesiasticus for a presentation manuscript. Among the other contributors to that manuscript was Nashe, who had matriculated at St. John’s in October 1582, and who also gained his scholarship in 1584.⁶ Mills completed a BA in 1586–1587, and is next heard of back in Lincolnshire, in the market town of Stamford. There he was appointed Master of Stamford Grammar School, an appointment which “lay in the hands of the Alderman of Stamford and the Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge”.⁷ The dates of Mills’s tenure as schoolmaster are uncertain, but there are records of his presence in the town in 1592 and 1593, when “Robert Mylnes m^r of y^e free Schole in Stamford” is mentioned in parish records in connection with a daughter’s baptism and another daughter’s burial. By 1594, another schoolmaster was in post, and nothing further can be said about the start, or the end, of Mills’s time as headmaster, nor about his subsequent career, if any.⁸

Poems by Mills, including the one in question, are preserved in a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson Poetical 85 (hereafter, RP 85). RP 85 is a particularly rich anthology of lyric poems, “the best such miscellaneous collection in England between Tottel’s in 1557 and England’s Helicon in 1600 or the Poetical Rhapsody in 1603”.⁹ RP 85 has been known since the eighteenth century, and Mills was often stated to have been its compiler, although the more recent consensus ascribes the collection to another of Nashe’s generation of St. John’s graduates, the future courtier and writer John Finet.¹⁰ RP 85 has been studied in recent years by scholars including Hilton Kelliher, Arthur Marotti, Steven W. May, Joshua Eckhardt, and Randall Anderson, and my concern here is not to offer a fresh approach to the manuscript as a whole, but rather to use it to contextualize Mills’s allusion to Terminus & Non Terminus.¹¹

RP 85 records a large number of lyrics which one would expect to be restricted to elite courtly circulation, including poems attributed to Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney. But it also records poems by and addressed to a number of people who were members of St. John’s College in the 1580s. On the one hand, this is interesting in that it shows how close the two worlds are for Finet and the others: Arthur Marotti comments that through the miscellany “we can detect the young compiler’s movement from the court to the university and back again”.¹² Equally, the student literary circle itself is unusually well documented in RP 85. That such a literary circle existed, centered upon St. John’s, is not in itself surprising, since as Steven W. May observes, “[a]t least 200 students resided at St. John’s during [Abraham] Fraunce’s tenure, amounting to more than 10% of the university population at the time.” It was strongly associated with literary production of all sorts, in English and Latin, and it had a flourishing tradition of college drama. But what is unusual about RP 85 is that it documents the interactions within that circle, leading to May’s observation that “These are companion poems, written in rivalry with or imitation of one another; they testify to a common scribal community.”¹³

Towards the end of the book, there appears a series of lyrics attributed to Robert Mills. Mills contributes, for instance, Ware the Water, a mock-heroic retelling of an incident in which “a certayne companye of youthese (schollers in Cambridge)” managed to overturn their rowing boat while messing around on the river. He also gives a serviceable verse translation of that notorious piece of erotic verse, Ovid, Amores 1.5. ¹⁴

The poem in question here is addressed by Mills to his “prety pinckanye” John Finet, regretting the fact that they are apart and that Mills is now living the humdrum life of a schoolmaster in Stamford. Indeed, Mills compares himself to a “wretch exylde from native countrey”.¹⁵ Mills goes on to reminisce about his time at St. John’s, celebrating the richness of the students’ cultural lives.

O what playes merimentes, conceytes, and pleasure abounded?

O what Musicale arte? and how manye plausible Antik Antiques?

Neuer a day did pass but good recreatione vsed.

Neuer a nyghte did pass but we good company haunted

Neuer an howre did pass but some toy still we deuysed

[Marginal note:] certayne shewes / of his owne mak / ynge

wherin hi[m] / selfe was princi / pall actor:

See how I sitt in royall Chayre enthronissed emprer:

Se how I frowne lyke a prince agaynste Lord Terminus Ireful:

Se how I smyll to see the Iestes of merye Doleta:

Goulden dayes, when Lord Non Terminus hyghly tryvmphed

Now for a scepter I wott I sway a twygg to my subiects

[Marginal note:] being school / maister at St< > / forde:

A Ferula for a sworde from for a crowne a bald grey [interlined] (nightcapp:

[Marginal note:] A / night / capp:

Like to Dionisius throwne downe from throane to a threshould.¹⁶

As Steven W. May has observed, the allusion to “Lord Terminus” and “Lord Non Terminus” indicates that Mills is referring to the same entertainment that Lichfield entitles Terminus & Non Terminus. His poem provides information about the show’s content and dramatis personae, and also changes our sense of its authorship. In claiming a share in the authorship of Terminus & Non Terminus, Robert Mills joins the group of writers thought to have collaborated with Nashe, a brief list whose principal ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Text
• Introduction
• 1 Thomas Nashe and Robert Mills, Terminus & Non Terminus (1586–1588)
• 2 Richard the Confessor (1593)
• 3 Cutlack (1594)
• 4 Bellendon (1594)
• 5 Thomas Dekker, Truth’s Supplication to Candlelight (1600)
• 6 Thomas Heywood and Wentworth Smith, Albere Galles (1602)
• 7 Henry the Una (c. 1619)
• 8 The Angel King (1624)
• 9 Henry Glapthorne, The Duchess of Fernandina (c.1630–1642)
• 10 The Cardinal’s Conspiracy (bef. 1639)
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index