Locating the Queen's Men, 1583–1603

Material Practices and Conditions of Playing

Holger Schott Syme, Andrew Griffin, Helen Ostovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754666615
• eBook ISBN: 9781317103653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Locating the Queen's Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on early modern England's most prominent acting company, from their establishment in 1583 into the 1590s. Offering a far more detailed critical engagement with the plays than is available elsewhere, this volume situates the company in the theatrical and economic context of their time. The essays gathered here focus on four different aspects: playing spaces, repertory, play-types, and performance style, beginning with essays devoted to touring conditions, performances in university towns, London inns and theatres, and the patronage system under Queen Elizabeth. Repertory studies, unique to this volume, consider the elements of the company's distinctive style, and how this style may have influenced, for example, Shakespeare's Henry V. Contributors explore two distinct genres, the morality and the history play, especially focussing on the use of stock characters and on male/female relationships. Revising standard accounts of late Elizabeth theatre history, this collection shows that the Queen's Men, often understood as the last rear-guard of the old theatre, were a vital force that enjoyed continued success in the provinces and in London, representative of the abiding appeal of an older, more ostentatiously theatrical form of drama.

PART 1
IN AND OUT OF LONDON

Chapter 1
On the Road and on the Wagon

Barbara D. Palmer

This essay proposes to supplement the account of the Queen’s Men’s Midlands and north-eastern touring offered by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean in The Queen’s Men and Their Plays. When that invaluable study was published in 1998, over half of the Cavendish and a third of the Clifford manuscripts were yet to be read. With that task now completed, as well as the rest of the West Riding and Derbyshire REED collections, the picture of northern provincial touring by professional troupes has acquired a context. Besides these new data, this essay also makes some assessment of known playing venues and playing conditions, including the ‘keep’ provided to professional players by the Clifford and Cavendish households. Finally, this essay looks at King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay with an eye to what properties, costumes, and spectacle would have been asked of the Queen’s Men were these three plays their repertory on provincial tour.1

The payments table below (see Appendix I) was compiled as part of a larger study, but I use it here to make four points.2 First, these data, which I believe to be representative when sufficient records spanning sufficient time survive, argue that provincial tours were a given mode of economic survival and profit for the professional company, whether based in the provinces or in London. Second, travelling professional players, at least in this part of the country, played towns and great houses with nearly equal frequency (the slight shortfall in house visits can be dismissed as household stewards’ occasional ‘hoc anno’ lump sums). Third, they actually could plan for playing in these towns and great houses: repeat visits are regular and the turn-away rate at most ten per cent, in only one instance without significant payment ‘not to play’. Fourth, they could count on playing ‘their exits and their entrances’ on a very familiar world’s stage: the rectangular great hall, some larger, some smaller but all about twice as long as wide, well-lighted, heated, roofed, often panelled, painted, and decorated with wall hangings.

Players on tour could count on a large rectangle, which for the sake of argument let us ‘average’ at 25 feet wide by 40 feet long; with maximal lighting from daylight (if the play were after dinner), large windows, fireplace(s), wall sconces, other candlelight, and torches; several doors, a screen, a screens passage, an elevated gallery, a ‘below’ under the gallery, gallery columns, and other potential features for exits, entrances, concealment, and blocking; and, perhaps, performance bonuses such as the ‘decorative’ elements of hangings, carvings, plaster ceilings, friezes, and the dais with its ‘settings’.3 Several known performance spaces survive for the Clifford and Cavendish households, whose payments to travelling professional players are documented in a remarkable cache of account books largely now at Chatsworth.

The seat of the Cliffords, Earls of Cumberland, was Skipton Castle, at the farthest reach of the West Riding. Travelling troupes played in its early fourteenth-century interior great hall, which overlooks the Conduit Court with the castle’s protected well water source. The hall is 28 feet wide by 50 feet long with a door to the lord’s withdrawing room and chamber at the dais end and two more entrance/exit doors at the opposite end. A solar or bay window was added in the late 15th century and, in the absence of a documented gallery, seems to have served as a musicians’ alcove overlooking the Conduit Court. The alcove measures nine feet wide by six feet deep, opposite a fireplace of the same width but half the depth.

The Cavendish seat, or at least that of its redoubtable matriarch Bess, was Hardwick Old Hall, with its commodious great hall of 36 feet wide by 52 feet long, but her New Hall high great chamber tops out at 33 feet wide by 66 feet long, a size which may have been designed to accommodate larger audiences rather than larger entertainments. Four huge windows, each about eight feet wide, provide fine natural light, and the fireplace is nearly fifteen feet. The dais end is a stage set by itself, richly decorated with the State, a plasterwork frieze of Diana surrounded by her court, and, around the chamber, the Flemish tapestries of Ulysses, Apollo and the muses, a female lute player, and other opulent, classical, and subtly feminist decoration which Bess bought in 1587.

Accommodation at great houses such as Skipton or Hardwick was of no little economic impact to a professional troupe. Players normally were provided with dinner and supper, although the Cliffords often fed them breakfast as well. They ate in the hall – that is, not in the parlour with the intimate family nor below stairs with inferior servants but with other respectable ‘straungers’, gentlemen, and visitors. When they arrive, several of the players on occasion either eat at or are accounted to the steward’s board, which suggests some conference among senior players, troupe road manager, and household steward. The steward also provides them with the occasional special dish in addition to the regular ‘messes’ served in the hall – by way of quality, one can draw the obvious comparison between the sophisticated fare of an aristocrat’s great hall menu and ‘pub grub’. The Clifford and Cavendish accounts do not yield specifics on the players’ accommodation – that is, which room or rooms they occupied – except that they were housed indoors in ‘a chamber’, for which a pound of candles is provided in one Clifford entry. Lighting for the plays is a separate line item not under the charge of the pantry steward. A second (as yet unique) Clifford entry for 26 January 1612–1613 provides three bushels – presumably 180 pounds – of coal, wood having grown scarce throughout the country, for the players, almost certainly to heat their chamber. Besides the players’ room and board, whatever horses they brought to a great house also were accommodated, at a rate worth at least a shilling a day.

Touring clearly was profitable, particularly when travelling players performed several plays at a great house. For the sake of this present experiment, let us imagine that the Queen’s Men took three plays on the road, a repertory of King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Having conned McMillin and MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and Their Plays prior to arranging this tour, the company has chosen these three texts because each can be covered by 14 nimble actors, including the three boys whose costumes still fit. Moreover, all three texts intersperse small groups among larger on-stage gatherings; and they also allow numerous roles to disappear or be suppressed. Both of these characteristics, the Queen’s Men have learned, allow the flexibility needed for playing on tour, when actors can fall ill, accidents happen, wardrobes malfunction, and playing conditions shift rapidly. Further, these texts largely depend on actors’ clearing the stage to signal a changed locale, announcing their staging locales as they play, or identifying stage sites by their characteristic presence in them, economical techniques to inform audiences without extensive setting and property apparatus.

Although common sense dictates that touring troupes must have used wagons to transport costumes, properties, and other necessaries, English documentary records seldom support common sense. What needed to be carried on tour, whatever the means, by way of costumes, properties, and spectacle can be abstracted from the three texts, which I am assuming have become very familiar to this essay’s readers. The first observation one makes about King Leir is its 32 scenes, each marked by a change of locale, but one also notices that on the whole this is a very bare play. Settings are announced, departures to settings are described rather than presented, small groups and the alternation of groups carry the play with numerous comings and goings and direct audience address to inform as well as to span the numerous comings and goings. Disguisings which either swap costumes on stage or scale down noble finery to country habits of course advance Leir’s plot, but they also make for easier performance away from the fixed London playhouses’ tiring rooms and helping hands.

Textually specified costumes for King Leir call for two palmers’ disguises; boots with spurs; Cordella’s ‘costly robes’ and her costume change into ‘meaner habit’ as she heads off to church; Gonorill’s ‘new fashioned gowne’; ‘playne country’ disguises for Cordella and Gallia, and for Mumford as ‘Roger/ Our man’; two mariners’ sea-gowns, one a ‘good strong motly gaberdine cost … xiiij. good shillings at Billinsgate’ and the other ‘good sheeps russet’; two sea-caps; Leir’s ‘good gown’ and cap; Perillus’s ‘good cloke’ and ‘new dublet’; whatever is required to signify soldiers, the watch, and ‘captains’ both of the watch and military, the latter in pants but no doublets. Some distinction also seems to have been made between ‘English’ and ‘French’ clothing, particularly in the ‘shaghayrd’ messenger-murderer’s insistence that his apparel is all English and nothing of the French. The greatest costume challenge would seem to be ‘men and women halfe naked’, which suggests several female upper-body costumes sufficiently realistic to make Mumford’s day. What is striking about the play’s costumes, however, is how often the text draws attention to them and how often they are altered or exchanged, either in part or whole, during the play, which again suggests a flexibility useful for touring.

With one exception, Leir’s properties are all small hand properties, carried on, carried off, and recycled among the actors as the action demands. The text calls for two riding wands; several letters with seals, which can be circulated during the performance, torn up by Ragan at the end, and recycled into the materials to draw lots for the next performance; four purses of money; two books; two daggers; a country basket; perhaps a beacon (which instead may be ‘a light, off’); two swords for the captains; two pots for the drunken watchmen, which can be recycled from the banquet earlier; a rope or chain to bind the town’s chief; and whatever armour, weapons, and banners outfit the two ‘armies’.

The banquet table (‘O my Lord, a banquet, and men and women! … She [Cordella] bringeth him to the table.… Perillus takes Leir by the hand to the table.… Leir drinks.… They eat hungerly, Leir drinkes’) poses less of a problem on the road than it does in the fixed playhouse, for there is scarcely a great hall or guild hall in England without a table in place. Unlike The Tempest, where the banquet can be made to disappear but the table has to be carried out, this table apparently stays put – or at least is not blessed with a direction for its removal. If Cordella is literally identifying ‘a banquet’ course, the table shows such dessert foods as fruits, tarts, egg pies, cheeses, jellies, and cakes, ‘holding fullness in one half of the dishes and shew in the other, which will be both frugall in the spender, contentment to the guest, and much pleasure and delight to the beholders’.4 In short, a normal great household banquet already was part stage-dressing, artifice, and make-believe; Leir’s reference to ‘sauory meat’ may be to sweetmeats; and the Henslowe inventory item ‘ij marchepanes’ may have found a textual home. Nor would Leir’s other ‘special effects’ have strained the Queen’s Men’s ingenuity. Thunder and lightning, especially when as here a brief sign from the heavens ‘of divine displeasure’5 rather than King Lear’s protracted descent into cosmic madness, are ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• half-Title Page
• General Editor’s Preface
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Tables of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Locating the Queen’s Men: An Introduction
• Part 1: In And Out Of London
• Part 2: The Repertory On Page And Stage
• Part 3: Figuring Character
• Part 4: From Script To Stage
• Bibliography
• Index