Dublin is not a city noted for a reticence to signpost its cultural, literary, and theatrical heritage. It may be a surprise, then, to find that the discreet, medieval Werburgh Street has no visible recognition of its crucial theatrical legacy. The street’s Church of Ireland building does have two exterior plaques: one acknowledges the contribution of one of the heroes of the 1798 uprising, Lord Edward Fitzgerald; the other commemorates the baptism of the nineteenth-century composer and pianist, John Field. But there is no reference anywhere in the short street to the Werburgh Street Theatre. It may be suggested that this precursor of Smock Alley is ignored because of its characteristics (from an Irish perspective) of British otherness. The Theatre was, after all, set up and run between 1636 and 1639 by the English Royalist, John Ogilby. Ogilby’s chief dramatist was James Shirley (1596–1666), previously the chief dramatist for the Queen Henrietta’s Men in London and a writer as English as they come. Alan Fletcher, indeed, notes the British nationality and connections of staff in this performative space, the first “permanent” playhouse in Ireland, and depicts the Werburgh project as an imperial eyesore, an unnatural, “vice-regal” blemish on a previously indigenous dramatic tradition.1 The provenance of Werburgh Street’s Theatre is not sufficiently Irish for Fletcher’s sustained critical attention. The English otherness of the Werburgh Theatre does not, however, account for its apparent rejection from Dublin’s mainstream nostalgia industry. Less than a mile away from present-day Werburgh Street, likenesses of Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith stand proud at the front of Trinity College. These statues represent writers who, although born in Ireland, made their disparate contributions in Britain, not in their homeland. Fidelity to an Irish birth and to an Irish-based oeuvre, it seems, is not essential when a literary figure is being claimed for Dublin’s cultural heritage.
The best-known figure from the Werburgh Street Theatre is James Shirley; by contrast, Ogilby has never enjoyed a substantial literary reputation. Shirley may be considered a writer blessed with the merits either of social sensitivity or of stylistic felicity in the manner of Burke or Goldsmith, but he is unknown outside specialist circles. Within these narrow fields of interest, Shirley is not, and has not been, considered to be a particularly critical or important writer. This—at least partly—explains why commuters through Werburgh Street are entitled to have no inkling that a theater once stood there. For a long time, its chief dramatist has been denounced as ideologically bland and toothless. John Dryden, in the poem, Mac Flecknoe (first published in 1682), castigates Shirley as one of the rightly “neglected Authors” whose unwanted books (“Reliques of the Bum”) clog up the “Dusty Shops” in the “Realms of Nonsense.”2 This pioneering master of “Tautology” is irrelevant, worthy only of obloquy. Dryden’s ire is expressed scatologically—Shirley’s output is directly compared to excrement, material to be vacated and buried with all haste. In the early years of the Williamite reign, Robert Gould renewed the onslaught on “Shirley! The Scandal of the Ancient Stage.” The antediluvian writer’s work “lies in Duck-lane Shops forlorn.”3 Shirley has become redundant through time, it is implied. He is a dinosaur, “Ancient,” and ignored, not fit to be remembered on heritage plaques.
Turning to the twentieth century, we can observe that a critic such as Nicholas Robins offers a detailed but no more penetrating opinion of Shirley’s written output. Robins continues Dryden and Gould’s dismissive tone, making the sweeping comment that Shirley possesses “a definite talent for irrelevance; inconsequence flourishes entertainingly in the language of the comedies.”4 The comic plays of Shirley are, in Robins’s view, good fun but not particularly serious. This is not an unusual view. What is unusual is the context in which the views are expressed: Robins was writing to publicize a series of staged readings of Shirleian plays at London’s Globe Theatre. His piece betrays a reluctance to assert the significance of Shirley to pre-Restoration drama. Shirley is being undersold. It is not the business of this chapter to attempt to rescue for Shirley long-overlooked writerly abilities; rather, I argue that one of his plays offers a dense and critical reading of the society it supposedly “mirrors.” Hide Parke (1632) is neither inconsequential or irrelevant. Its subtle portrayal of a horse race dominates a fracturing, cynical canvass. The dramatic landscape created offers a dystopian image of the play’s environs, particularly of Caroline London.
The basic plot components of Hide Parke are simply laid out. Three strands of action are resolved ultimately at the comedy’s conclusion: a witty young maiden, Carol, is sought by three suitors, Fairfield, Rider, and Venture, with Fairfield eventually succeeding; Julietta, another less vocal maiden, is pursued by a lusty Lord Bonville, who is supposedly “converted” into virtue through his prey’s virtuous posturings; and Mistress Bonavent is reunited with a long-lost husband. It is a structure that has been deemed to be comically insubstantial. The two noisiest personalities, Carol and Fairfield, have been approvingly compared to Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, and to Congreve’s Millament and Mirabell.5 G. K. Hunter employs a formalist approach when accounting for the play’s Shirley-transcending popularity: he praises the play’s “brilliantly sharpened contemporary dialogue” and “extraordinary sophistication of theatrical technique.”6 But this effective proficiency, as Hunter sees it, results only in the manufacture of innocuous drama—Shirley provides mere flattering humor for the leisure classes of London in 1632. Another critic, Julie Sanders, enlists feminist discourses of absence to read Hide Parke in a positive light. Sanders sees the milieu of the play as a space of female—“feminocentric”—agency, a realm where domineering parents are “very noticeably absent.”7 This is a sort of socially constructive feminism, in which the play is seen to offer an almost gynomorphic potential for its female personalities. The play is regarded as approving youth’s liberated choices. Sanders goes on to praise Shirley’s “empathy with women.”8 Shirley, in Sanders’s formulation, is not necessarily leading some sort of emancipatory vanguard, but he does notice a new-found female disposition of optimism; he refracts a new confidence shown by female followers of Queen Henrietta in particular, an assertiveness celebrated in the play. The rosy insights of Sanders are important, but they ignore a major component of the play—the horse race. The benignity of Shirley’s vision of Hyde Park society has to be questioned when it becomes apparent, through close textual analysis, that this is a race predicated upon the practice of dissimulation and oppression, manipulation and treachery.
In the horse race that forms the set piece of Act Four, Venture competes against a “Iockey,” ignominiously losing, unable even to complete the course. The race—which is relayed to the audience from behind the stage—has been read as an effort to invest the dramaturgy with additional realism. The equine competition itself attracts great attention. Indeed, it often overshadows other aspects of the play. W. A. Neilson elevates the race above the play’s other plot elements, asserting that the “value” of Hide Parke is predicated entirely upon its “minutely realistic study of fashionable life, especially of the horse racing in the park.”9 Theodore Miles is less approving: he complains that the race serves only to interrupt “the forward motion of the action completely.”10 For Miles, the race is an unhelpful, irrelevant stunt—its significance lies only in its capacity to distract the audience away from the Shirleian plot’s “central” thrust. The remarkable aspect of these critical dismissals is their shared failure to see that the race is fundamentally ensconced within Hide Parke’s rhetoric. The novelty factor of the race—in fact, no similar dramatic episode is extant before Hide Parke—does detract from any inherent seriousness that the play may possess.11 It makes the race appear to stand out, in terms of the period’s racing culture and in terms of the gaming dialectics of the play, as a unique and isolated affair. To date, the Shirleian race has not been assessed in the light of other representations of early modern racing. Nor has the contemporary reputation of racing in the Park been addressed. A properly nuanced reading of Hide Parke, therefore, needs to acknowledge the intricately embedded relationship between racing and the Hyde Park of the time. Racing was a seedy business in 1632. It is a seedy business in this play. This encourages a less benign interpretation of Shirley’s drama. His is not an innocuous world but, rather, a flawed environment; via the corrupted horse race, moreover, an audience is directed to locate in the constructed park all their negative energies and projections.
Hide Parke held a prominent position in seventeenth-century culture. The play was licensed, in the customary manner, by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on April 20, 1632.12 Almost certainly, it was performed by Shirley’s then usual acting troupe, the Queen Henrietta’s Company, at the Cockpit (sometimes called the Phoenix), during that year’s Spring season.13 Almost exactly five years after the performance license, the play was registered at the Stationers’ Company by Andrew Crooke and William Cooke, the go-ahead having been given by Herbert’s deputy, Thomas Herbert.14 Not every Caroline play made its way into print, so there must have been some confidence in the play-text’s marketable potential. More tellingly, the play was protected by Beeston’s Boys’ Company during 1639 (although no evidence survives to confirm that a 1639 performance occurred).15 It is clear, then, that the play held abundant interest for the commercial agents of pre-Interregnum theater.
Sandra Burner believes that the play occupied such a position because it flattered its audience: Hide Parke “offers without much critical comment an intimate glimpse of the interests and pleasures of a monied, leisure class,” she writes.16 There is a paradox in Burner’s claim. A “glimpse” can never be “intimate”; it will be necessarily fleeting and impressionistic. Burner’s faith in the mimetic qualities of Shirley’s art is questionable, since Shirley can hardly faithfully reproduce a carefree, bourgeois London. On the contrary, it is this chapter’s contention that Shirley’s play exposes fissures within the society that Burner claims the play only flatters. Hide Parke takes an actual space—Hyde Park—and appropriates it as a blank page on which all manner of affectations and inequalities are exposed. The equine elements in the play are also taken from “real” animals in the Park, but the animals’ malleability is shown to be exploited by sinister elements within the cultural fabric. In Shirley’s world, animal potential is harnessed for malevolent, fiscally and sexually motivated intent. In this playworld, the cynical material and metaphorical appropriation of horse power is taken to symbolize the ungainly exploits of the Park’s participants.
The chapter focuses on three main contexts of the play: the historical Hyde Park, the construction of characters in the play, and the horse race and its complicated nuances. In the first main section, it is argued that the Park itself was, in 1632, a space that had a history of discord—not all sections of society could share in the kingly generosity of its opening. The second main section examines the egocentric dynamics of the play’s characters. These characters often couch their material desires in equine language, underscoring their essentially unregenerate dispositions. The set piece of the play is the flawed horse racing episode. The final main part of the chapter, then, explicates the evidence for the race’s corruption. This is necessary because criticism has failed to attend to the race’s shabby undercurrent. I go on to discuss the cultural implications of Shirley’s representation, focusing on a 1658 document that indicates that contemporaries of the dramatist did indeed take note of the inequity of the race’s outcome. Particular light is also shone on a 1668 revival of the play—a revival that, according to Samuel Pepys, employed real horses. At the very least, this anecdote serves to stress the importance of equine discourse to Shirley’s horse-centered extravaganza.
Appropriating Hyde Park, the Place
At one stage during Hide Parke, the predatory Lord Bonville lures Julietta into a hidden cranny in the eponymous Park. The young woman expresses discomfort at being led away by this social superior: you will “lose your sport,” she says to the Lord. Bonville strives to avoid this obvious brush-off:
I would
Goe farther for a little sport, you meane
The horse race.17
There are two very different tones mobilized in this extract of the Lord’s speech. There is a huge disparity between the conniving innuendo—with “sport” initially referring to sexual gamesmanship—and the cognizant acknowledgment that Julietta refers pointedly only to the horse race. The comma ushers in a sweeping change of pitch. The first part of the quotation showcases Bonville’s arrogant overoptimism, as the Lord assumes mistakenly that Julietta is also engaging in a discourse of sexually loaded sporting metaphors. After the comma, it might be assumed that an actor’s voice would become animated with mock frustration—you mean the horse race! A few lines later, Bonville vents his unconsummated ire on the Park, the site of his failed seduction:
This place, the place were good enough
If you were bad enough, and as prepar’d
As I, there have been stories that some have
Strucke many deere within the Parke.18
The repetition of the noun, “place,” forces the reader or listener to concentrate on the location being represented on stage. The Park itself cannot motivate humorous, sexual contrariness. If Julietta was a female who would engage in illicit sex with the Lord, then the Park’s nooks could facilitate such activity. The character’s choice—or, rather, the necessary actions of the theatrical virgin-type—is to opt out of hedonistic sexuality.
The Park itself does not provoke such moral meanderings. The Park is a locus free for interpretation. Londoners will do unto the Park as they will. Julietta will not partake in the game. The Lord and Julietta are mismatched because their desires are not coterminous. They are in competition: one is a hunting predator; the other is fighting to remain on the path of maidenly security. The harshness of this chase is underscored by the Lord’s relation of deer-stealing allegations. Julietta disregards these stories, merely castigating such activity as “Foule play.” This caustic rejection of inequitable sexual chasing, couched through the metaphors of masculinist field activity, prepares the way for the play’s most spectacular display of unethical transaction—the horse race. The virgin ignores the stories, scornfully spurning the love-chase japery. Julietta, however, is also rejecting contemporary material praxis concerning the Park. The Lord refers to events in 1619 when poachers were executed for stealing deer from the Park.19 Bonville’s speech hints at the fraught history of Hyde Park, one that is rooted in the conflicts of post-Reformation England. The criticism that seeks to paint Hide Parke as a simplistic celebration of the location, Hyde Park, therefore approves Julietta’s perspective, ignoring the space’s immersion in contestation and crisis.
Hyde Park became a regal property in 1536. Henry VIII seized the Park, exploiting the opportunity afforded by the monastical dissolutions.20 This Tudor appropriation of the Park, however, was not really a tyrannical gesture, as the then presiding resident, the Abbot of Westminster, was compensated with the possession of the Berkshire priory of Hurley.21 But the fact is that monarchical ownership of Hyde Park depended on the sectarian fissures of the Reformation. John Norden’s celebration of Middlesex, from 1593, pays tribute to the greenery to be found within the county. With evident nationalistic pride, Norden writes that “there are in all that Region [France] but two Parkes: In MYDDLESEX are ten of hir MAIESTIES.”22 Norden stresses that Elizabeth I is the sole owner of these open spaces. The parks of Middlesex, Hyde Park included, are exclusively for “princely delights,” he states. Rather than fresh, accessible areas of boundless recreation, these spaces are restrictive, existing only for the disposal of the courtly, ruling elite and their favored associates. It was a perk that was facilitated through connivance with the divisive, sectarian policies of the 1530s.
The deer-stealers of 1619 were executed because they violated the Protestant establishment’s privilege; they were interlopers on privatized ground. English men and women were not free to use the Park for their own ends. The lower classes, and even the middling sort, were excluded. A visual representation of this exclusion is apparent in the 1610 translation of William Camden’s description of Britain. There, an illustration depicts Hyde Park as a distinctively rectangular terrain—there are no straight lines in nature, so this rigidity of outline serves to construe the Park as unnatural and contrived.23 The area is surrounded by tall, thin lines: it is a fenced-off, even policed area. The sealed right angles of the Park contrast sharply with the curvaceous wanderings of the Tyburn Stream.24 The Camden illustration, therefore, seems to act almost as a protest against the forced caging of nature’s bounty, an incarceration that deprives all but the courtly elite.
The characters of the play, Hide Parke, do not suffer from such exclusion. Lacy urges the company to retreat to the Park: “weele to Hide Parke together!”25 His frenetic excitement is suggested through the exclamation mark (which is noticeable, because exclamation and question marks often do not appear where they may be expected to in the Hide Parke Quarto). No nonaristocratic character in any pre-1632 drama can call for an excursion to Hyde Park. Such an exhortation would have been pointless. An act of 1632 made it possible for all to enjoy Hyde Park, since a Stuart initiative opened the place to the public. Charles I’s act is viewed in two contrary ways: one indulgent view sees the opening as an act of graceful, regal benevolence; the other regards it as a cynical course of action, a derisory attempt to stave off unpopularity.26 The Park thus changed from being a locale of aristocratic/royal exclusivity and became a space for emergent bourgeois consumerism. E. H. Sugden carefully describes how Hyde Park “became a fashionable resort” where “cakes and cream were provided for visitors at the Cake House.”27 Crucially, Sugden also describes the Park’s “Ring”—“a circular drive about 90 yards in diameter,” which was used “for horse, foot and coach-races.”28 Now, if foot or horse racing symbolizes anything, it is competition. This notion of sporting performance and rivalry—previously associated with Hyde Park only in terms of aristocratic endeavors—can be linked to Sugden’s detail about the selling of dainty delicacies. Both indicate a move toward mercantile pursuits. It is crude, but helpful, to read this opening up of trading opportunity as being symbolic of rural society’s gradual change from inherited privilege to supposed meritocracy.
The position of Hyde Park at the time, after the opening, is paradoxical. It is a rural area, physically detached from London. It is now, however, sharing in the financial norms of London’s nascent capitalism. It is both like London and not like London. This paradox is amply illustrated by the frontispiece to a 1641 pamphlet, The Apprentices of Londons Petition.29 This short (one quarto quire) polemic complains bitterly about the alleged favoring of immigrant workers over native English citizens. Hyde Park is not mentioned in the body of the text, but it is clearly marked on the frontispiece’s woodcut. The Park is discovered lying far to the west of London. (This removal from the capital is given some topographical legitimacy by the meticulous map reconstruction work of J. N. P. Watson.)30 Hyde Park, in this woodcut, is afforded some status as a working place. The Park is not socially cut off from London. Apprentices, to follow the logic of the pamphlet’s propaganda, are seen to be concerned about what happens to their fellow nationals in Hyde Park, as well as in London itself.
The duality of Hyde Park—not London, but like London—causes a problem for Martin Butler’s reading of the play. Butler concentrates on the rural milieu of the Park as seen in Shirley’s drama. He argues that the Park is fresh and bucolic, distanced from the mean-spirited pressures of Caroline London: “Hyde park, a green world in urban London, is both country and town, nature and art . . . a cultivated nature,” he states.31 It is anachronistic, however, to think of Hyde Park as being “in urban London”—it is now, but it was not in 1632. But it is the spirit of Butler’s interpretation of the play’s milieu, not the technicality, that seems removed from the drama’s cynicism. Butler sees the play as offering a healing ground, a fusion between pastoral relaxation and urban energy. It is a place where upper-class Londoners will be reconciled to the “harmonized” wonders of the Caroline political order. Butler does stress that these notions are grounded in wishful thinking. Yet an acknowledgment that the Park’s healing properties are “made” will not suffice. Yes, Hyde Park is geographically distinct from London, but its society is prone to the same shark-baiting as the capital. The characters of Hide Parke are susceptible to the comparably amoral urges as the London (and Italian and Spanish) types we see represented in other plays of the period. The characters are not rural drop-outs; they are chic urbanites who express their desires in animalistic language. An assessment of the equine echoes in the dialogue will get to the heart of this unseemly interior.
Equine Echoes: Corrupting Characters in Hide Parke
Characters in Hide Parke react to the circumstances they find themselves in to pursue a lust-filled agenda. Mistress Bonavent is pertinent in this respect; she is constructed in a manner that verges on the grotesque and is represented as a stereotypical stage widow. Her husband has been lost at sea. The wife has honored a commitment to remain single until seven years of enforced separation has elapsed. A replacement, Lacy, has been set up. This younger substitute will marry Mistress Bonavent on the stroke of the seven-year anniversary. There is a loyalty to the letter rather than to the spirit of the original nuptial contract. There is no Griselda-like devotion to the missing husband. Bonavent does return to the scene of the action, unheralded and unannounced. He is disguised as an old, now redundant soldier, managing to bluff his way into the fringes of his own household, where he sees the preparations for the second marriage of his wife.
It seems, initially, that Bonavent will comment on the action from the margins, that he will serve as a type akin to The Revenger’s Tragedy’s Vindice—a figure that castigates the lechery of the players while upholding a supposedly distant objective. Bonavent, however, is drawn rudely into the epicenter of the action. Lacy insists aggressively that the sly newcomer dances. Bonavent does dance, to the amusement of the others. The would-be sophisticated commentator becomes an unwilling jester. Riled at the affront, Bonavent exclaims: “Wheres my sword, sir, I have bin your hobby-horse.”32 Bonavent frames his disgust in equine language; he has become a horse-like sot, exploited by the crowd for their vicious humor. Mistress Carol confirms that Bonavent has appeared like a hobby-horse: “You danc’t something like one.”33 The violent potential of the moment threatens to stray beyond comedic norms; an easing of the dramatic tension is thereby required, and it is into such a role that Lacy conveniently steps. It is at this point that he emits his exclamation, imploring the fractious crowd: “Prethee stay, weele to Hide Parke together!” Although the overt threat of violent discord has subsided, tensions are allowed to fester below the surface. The activities in the Park only delay the hostilities.
But Bonavent does get his revenge. He pays a bagpiper to play a jig. The underlying idea is to humiliate Lacy by forcing him to dance in a humiliating way, thus removing the kudos gained when Bonavent was made a laughing stock. Lacy aggressively resists the affront, drawing his sword. Again, the situation is defused, but not before Bonavent’s compromised egotism is revealed: he speaks of his fear of being “tam’d and suffered.”34 Like a horse—or, like a scolding female who has been molded into submission to patriarchy—Bonavent has been put down. Registers of equine management and of gendered separatism underscore his castigation by the cackling social gathering. Bonavent is a figure who wants to be the tamer, not the tamed. Neither Bonavent or Lacy can be described as an ultimate “winner” of the hobby-horse game. Neither can control the equine metaphors. Bonavent does manage to possess his wife again, but it is not a triumphant reclamation. The improbability of the plot works to stress the artificiality of the marriage reunion: it is only in a far-fetched comedy that a husband would return after seven years, just one day short of the remarrying deadline. Mistress Bonavent is seen to have had other desires.35 The society of Hyde Park has accepted the outsider, Bonavent, back into its bosom—but this is because of the rigid necessities of comic convention, not because of some collective virtue among the figures represented on stage. The Hide Parke horse race is set up by and run for these characters; it thus unfolds in a richly communicative landscape of dissolute activities and specious disingenuousness.
An anecdote from the Barrington family archives uncannily echoes Lacy’s call for restorative mustering at Hyde Park. A letter from Sir Thomas Barrington to his mother, written in the same month that Hide Parke was first performed (April 1632), conveys a self-effacing story about poor horsemanship. It seems that Barrington had recently fallen off a horse, causing some amusement for the family. A nephew remarks that Barrington fell because he had a large, heavy head. Barrington asks his Mother to “lett my nephew Meux know I answar for my heavy head, that if it were the cause of his horse’s stumbling so often, without all doubt then his head must needes be extreamly light, else his horss could never have caryed him so suer.”36 The nephew mocks the uncle’s dubious equitation skills; the uncle can only make fun of the nephew’s light (and therefore empty) head to account for the better horsemanship of the youth. This is pure familiar banter, the story indicating that Puritan families were not necessarily composed of the dour, humorless hypocrites we see painted in Jonsonian and Middletonian plays. Barrington, with mock pomposity, offers to heal the rift with “Meux.” “When he [the nephew] comes to London I have provided before hand Holborne and Hide parke to be at his service to reconsile him,” Barrington writes.37 A trip to the delights of Hyde Park will reinvigorate the nephew’s respect for the uncle in this light-hearted episode. But such a mirthful and recuperative construction of the place is conspicuously lacking from Hide Parke, the play. Unlike the Barrington anecdote, which whimsically plays up the levity of an uncle’s ineptitude, Hide Parke finds in whimsy more socially destabilizing implications. For, in Shirley’s drama, it is issues of adult consequence (mediated through finance, marriage, and sexuality) that are brought to the fore.
Another episode from the Barrington Family Letters, this time from May 1632, shows how fractious the adult world of the historical Hyde Park could be. Lady Judith Barrington writes to her mother about a row involving Queen Henrietta and “one Mrs Kimpton, of some 800li a year her husband’s estate”—a very public altercation in Hyde Park. On the latter’s back, the Queen “espyed one of her gounes that she had lately lost.”38 After an almighty to-do, it was established that Kimpton was innocent—her clothes were her own, not cast-offs from some royalty-robbing crime. The resolution of the incident is highly dramatic, and laden with political weight:
The kinge [Charles I] cryed her [Kimpton] pardon, would have her brought to kiss the queen’s hands, but she would not. He offred to knight her husband but she refused that also, but parted fairly, a poor recompence for so publike a disgrace, yet the king did nobly in itt.39
Few other contemporary commentators would agree that the spontaneous handing over of a knighthood is “noble,” for the more lasting impression is Kimpton’s refusal to be directed by the monarch. The female agency is impressive: Mrs. Kimpton’s intervention prevents her husband from becoming a “Sir.” Gender roles are changing. And they are altering the gendered landscape of early modern England—as Sanders notes in her study of Hide Parke. The refusal of subjects to accept, without question, the healing offered by the monarch is a progressive move, a step away from the autocracy of previous eras. This is, however, a far-reaching development in English history. Kimpton’s rejection of kingly direction presages the future for Hyde Park and for England. This seemingly invulnerable site will not be a blissful bower but a locus for ideological division and rupture.
The character, Carol, is constructed as an uncooperative shrew in Hide Parke. She is determined and literary-minded. She self-fashions herself as a learned proponent of female independence: she “will goe studie Poetry, / A [on] purpose, to write verses in the praise / Of th’Amazonian Ladies.” “Amazonian Ladies” may seem like an oxymoron: these legendary ciphers of anti-masculinity do not in any way correspond with Renaissance ideals about what constitutes a “lady.” Carol only respects wives who “beate their husbands.” This figure represents the new anxieties about women who will not slot neatly into the preordained systems of patronage and marriage. As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford have shown, many women in the period chose to lead fulfilled lives outside of the confines of marriage. It is necessary to acknowledge, as Mendelson and Crawford assert, that “independent women” of the seventeenth century “left few traces of their ideas about their lives and their choices.”40 If this argument rings true, then it can be assumed that women of the Caroline period chose singularity in greater numbers than conventional historical practice allows for.
So, the anti-masculinist posture of Carol would represent, for a contemporary audience, a plausible representation of a common mode of single woman. It would be misrepresenting Shirley’s play to assert that Carol’s “conversion” to acceptance of nuptial bonding is inevitable and preordained. Many women in the period—between 10 and 20 percent, social historians believe—chose to stay single for their entire lifespan.41 Carol, a shrewish type, may have also winded up single at the play’s conclusion. She is a lively, wittily configured character. Work by Linda Levy Peck has shown that young, single women of high social class frequently visited theaters—including the Cockpit—during the early 1630s.42 There is an obvious appeal, then, for such a formidable female type—the transvestite playing Carol had a splendid and loud part. Carol attracts three suitors: Fairfield, Rider, and Venture, and all three of them have names suggestive of field sports. Carol professes to reject love: “I had rather hear the tedious tales / Of Hollinghead, then any thing that trenches [focuses] / On Love,” she states dogmatically.43 This, to an extent, is a meta-theatrical statement of intent from the dramatist—the weighty, historical style of a previous generation’s theater is dismissed as dull and boring. Instead, we are provided with a present-day place that is free of historical baggage—only contemporary needs and urges are addressed. This fixation on the present is, in itself, a criticism of the hedonism of the racing set in Charles I’s Hyde Park. The horse race, together with the dialectics of the love chase, exist almost ahistorically. Carol actually spends the entire play “trenching” on love—her courtship is negotiated through equine discourse.
The mode of relentless competitiveness continues throughout the play. Racing language is used continuously by characters as they maneuver through their dissembling policies. Rider, for example, gives Carol a diamond, erroneously believing that her acceptance of the jewel signifies consent for marriage. The play does not make Rider’s reaction apparent, but Carol illustrates his agitated mood: “must you presently / Bound like a ston’d horse,” she asks.44 Rider can only reply limply in the third person: “Shee’s a very Colt.”45 Each compares the other to a horse, stressing the idea that a failure of communication has taken place: the characters talk at, not to, each other. Venture receives a similar horsey insult. Having had his advances on Carol brushed off, he mutters an old proverb. “There be Dogges / And Horses in the world” is a philosophical acceptance of one’s place in life, a world-weary acknowledgment that luck and/or status is not distributed equally among social subjects.46 Carol rubs salt in the metaphorical wound, telling Venture that the animals will “kepe you company.” The battle unfolding here (between Carol and her suitors) is made all the more arresting by the ways in which each opponent endeavors to visit on the other a slur of animality. It is as if the most aggressive equine name-calling will win the fight for superiority. Eventually, Carol does agree to a proposal of marriage from the third suitor, Fairfield. Still, however, the language of horse domination is privileged, suggesting the centrality of controlling anxieties to the play’s rhetorical constitution. Carol offers the victor her hand, asking “ist a match?” The word “match” may have differing connotations here. It is a love “match,” in one sense—the two participants in the engagement are equal partners in affection. But “match” reveals a deeper level of implication—a horse race. When horse racing was in its infancy—i.e., before Queen Anne’s reign—races were almost always between just two animals. Every horse race was a “match.”47 The point here is simple: the equine register alerts us to the fact that Carol and Fairfield will still be competitors within marriage. Neither party has won the contest of equine-like wills. Hyde Park has failed to institute its supposed healing processes on the warring amatory combatants. Their innate animality, it is implied, rests unregenerate, despite the conventional union of comedy. Rather than being suitably banished, the linguistic appurtenances of the horse and horsemanship remain active and divisive.
Nuances of the Horse Race
The divisive potential of the imagery of the Hide Parke horse race has not been seized on by critics. Ben Lucow’s book, James Shirley, serves as an excellent guide to the dramatist. However, Lucow, like many other writers on Hide Parke, does not engage adequately with the linguistics of early modern horse racing when discussing the episode. Lucow briefly refers to “thoroughbreds”—but the thoroughbred racehorse had not been invented in Shirley’s day.48 A much more telling anachronism is the description of one of the participants in the race, for Venture is described as a “gentleman jockey.”49 This is surely an oxymoron. A “jockey” is “A professional rider in horse-races,” already a usage in seventeenth-century England (OED 5.a). Venture may be a “gentleman” in social terms, but he is no “jockey.” Venture’s rival in the race, conversely, is a professional “Iockey.” Lucow chooses not to recognize that these two riders are competitors with unequal chances, the disparity in their abilities being highlighted by their names’ linguistic differences. Venture’s name sounds like “adventurer,” one who roams, perhaps like a romance figure, or perhaps like a rakish gallant. Similar to an ancient Roman, the Carol-seeking Venture is looking for masculine credibility. Having been compared to a horse by his would-be catch, he now seeks to control the metaphorical reins and assert mastery. In the Rome of antiquity—and in Stuart London—horse racing served to provide, as Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth state, “for men about town opportunities to impress girlfriends.”50 The “Iockey,” in contradistinction, has no name—he is distinguished only by his professional title. The adjective also had negative connotations in Caroline England, since “jockey” could also apply to “A strolling minstrel or beggar; a vagabond” or “A crafty or fraudulent bargainer; a cheat” (OED 2; OED 3. b). As an adverb, “jockey” could mean anything involving “trickery, cheat[ing], play[ing] tricks with” or “act[ing] fraudulently” (OED 1. a; OED 1. b; OED 1. C; OED 1. d). These definitions would surely have alerted contemporary consumers of Hide Parke to the possibility that the “Iockey” is hardly a trustworthy type: his character is essentially determined, in fact, by the negative associations inscribed in his name.
The “Iockey’s” otherness is underlined by Venture, who dismisses his opponent’s chances with swaggering overconfidence:
A Iockey, a Iackanapes a horse-backe rather,
A monkey or a Masty dogge would shew
A Giant to him, and I were Alexander
I would lay the world upon my mare.51
This bodies forth another early modern nuance of the adjective “jockey,” a term “applicable (contemptuously) to any man of the common people” (OED 1. a). Class prejudice, then, as well as sizeism, are apparent in Venture’s arrogant remarks.52 The “Iockey” who deals with horses for money is even less significant than those types of animal on display in the seventeenth-century metropolis—monkeys and mastiff (“masty”) dogs. This alterity of the “Iockey” and his colleagues is crucial to an understanding of the possibility for corruption in Shirley’s horse race. Immediately before it, the “Iockey” conspires with a group of nameless associates:
1. What dost thinke Iockey [?]
2. The crack oth’field [is] against you.
Io[ckey]. Let em crack nuts.
1. What weight.
2. I thinke he [Venture] has the heeles.
3. Get but the start.
Io. However if I get within his quarters let me alone.
1. Mounts Chevall.53
These anonymous figures are differentiated from the main figures not only by their anonymity but also by their language: their predilection for monosyllables, abbreviations, and ungrammatical phrases (“oth’field,” “em”) contrasts with the polished language of the leisure classes in the play. It is significant, I think, that the “Iockey” is not working in isolation—these disreputable individuals clearly have a say in the running of the race. There is even a hint that they have an influential agency: the third man orders the riders to mount their horses—in French. Such use of French—a rare example of non-English terms in this most English of plays—also demarcates the “Iockey” and his confidants from the rest.
Later, the triumph of the “Iockey” is celebrated with bagpipe playing, the Scottish instrument again signifying the professional rider’s detachment from mainstream English society.54 There is only one other instance of a stage direction calling for bagpipes in early modern drama.55 There, in Captain Thomas Stukeley, an anonymous Elizabethan work that eventually appeared in print in 1605, they are played to represent “the enemies charges.”56 These enemies are the Irish, traditional opponents of the English, just like the French and Scottish. The sound of the bagpipes in Hide Parke, then, does not draw attention to musical harmony. Instead, it summons uneasy feelings of social tension and even national conflict. Who are these other men that seem so implicated in the race? No critic has hazarded a guess at their identity or role, other than Henry W. Wells, who refers to them as “the chief riding masters [who] are French.”57 But there is no clue (in the play or in contemporary material practice) to suggest that these figures are either French or riding masters. They are not participants in the race—as we have seen, early modern races were between two mounted men on horses. The fact is that the text does not tell us who these figures are; this enigma is significant.
The audience may well wonder at the identity and purpose of these quick-talking characters who are invested with no agency other than to interfere in the horse race. The audience neither sees nor hears the majority of its business. The intrigue is compounded by an obfuscating stage direction (“Confused noyse of betting within, after that a shoute”), which ensures that we have limited access to information that would clarify the subterfuge of the race’s dealings.58 Also, the horse race actually occurs off stage. Theatrical necessity—fairly concrete evidence suggests that the Cockpit stage measured only twenty-three by fifteen feet—prevented Shirley’s Queen’s Men’s company from showing the horse race on stage with live horses.59 Instead, a retrospective commentary by Lord Bonville tells us how the race has unfolded. He explains that the “Iockey” has won the race, despite a sluggish start, because Venture fell, flying “Vault ore his Mare.”60 Bonville, however—whose lusty barricading of the virtuous Julietta confirms his moral dubiety—is inevitably an unreliable witness. He has himself successfully invested money on the outcome of the race—so this figure in the drama would not draw attention to anything that would render the result invalid. He has an interest in perpetuating the concealment of the race’s corruption because he has financially backed the winning “Iockey”—necessarily, then, his account of the off-stage action cannot be considered to be above suspicion. Bonville’s description of Venture’s fall as a “tricke” alerts us to the notion that Venture’s trip may not be so innocent.61
Such a suspicion is compounded when the victorious “Iockey” meets again with his colleagues. Reveling in his success, the “Iockey” says “I told you if I came within his quarters.”62 The unusual stress pattern shines primarily on the winner’s first three syllables: “I told you.” Via this emphasis, one must conclude that foul play is being insinuated. In the oral fables of horse racing, a dirty trick is often mentioned. This involves bringing down the stronger, leading horse from behind with the legs of the trailing, inferior animal. (Before blanket television coverage necessitated the development of more subtle cheating methods, jockeys were, until comparatively recently, often accused of carrying out such acts.) In Hide Parke, because we do not see what happens off stage, we are forced to speculate and to manufacture a fantasy in which the other, professional “Iockey” brings down Venture by dishonorable means. James Bulman writes about Hide Parke in typically benign terms, contrasting its milieu with the commercial, urban harshness of Jacobean drama and figuring it as a place where “characters repair . . . to make all odds even.”63 The scheming “Iockey” and his co-directors instigate, however, a frustration of any creation of equity in the Park. Venture is pitched against mysterious, unjust opposition. Instead of the odds being even for him, they are adversely loaded, bolstering the pejorative elaboration of Venture as one of the “Dogges and Horses” of Shirley’s world.
Interestingly, an editorial intervention has made Venture’s defeat seem more laughter-causing than it should be. Gifford and Dyce, in their 1833 edition of Shirley, offer the following stage direction: “Enter VENTURE covered with mud.”64 This urges the reader to picture an obviously comic, visual tableau of Venture’s defeat. There is some justification, however, for proposing that Renaissance audiences thought it amusing that a gentleman could fall off a horse. Even antiquity’s great riding master, Xenophon—articulated to early modern England through John Bingham’s 1623 translation—asserts that poor horsemanship can be comic. To boost morale, a mass, mobile army of Greek followers of Cyrus the Younger indulge in dangerous horse races on a slope. There, “many of them tumbled from the height downeward one vpon another [. . .] here you might heare great cries, laughter, and incouragements.”65 Clearly, the Xenophon tract depicts equine mishaps as erroneous but simultaneously offering an outlet for comparatively light relief from martial hardships. Venture’s fall, in this regard, could be read as comic mishap of comic proportions. Horse riding in the period when Xenophon was most widely read—the Renaissance—was, as Thomas S. Henricks says, a means of self-fashioning: “the horse presents a very public display of the self.”66 Marcia Vale, usefully stating the obvious, tells us that mastership of the horse “was perhaps the single most important accomplishment for a gentleman.”67 Competency at riding was seen as an essential social attribute. Henricks goes on to elaborate the flip side of the equine potential for masculinist self-satisfaction: “the possibilities for indignity are spectacular.”68 Judged against these arguments, it would seem as if Venture might indeed suffer from such an indignity; nevertheless, it remains that his visual misery is a fiction of the nineteenth-century editorial tradition, telling us more about Shirley’s editors than the play’s original performances. The original Quarto does not state that Venture enters “covered with mud.” It simply includes the stage direction “Enter Venture”—there is no mention of mud or any other outward sign of defeat.69
Hide Parke’s Quarto text does not demand a comic response at this point. Gifford and Dyce—and their derivative editorial successors—do not put their interventionist “covered with mud” into square brackets, so readers without access to the 1637 Quarto are unable to recognize that this stage direction has been tampered with by a noncontemporary hand. Recent comment on editorial processes by M. J. Kidnie becomes relevant here. Borrowing the terminology of Roman Ingarden, Kidnie argues that the ancillary nebentext (extradialogic, performance enabling apparatus, including stage directions) remains “an element of the literary dramatic text as integral as dialogue [the haupttext].”70 Stage directions should not be tampered with any more than the words intended for speech, she contends. Kidnie goes on to state that “any alteration an editor may choose to make to the staging of a script will inevitably embed critical interpretation in the dramatic text.”71 This is precisely what has happened, I would suggest, with Hide Parke. Critics have been misled by an overzealous editorial intervention, an initiative that argues for an incident that is not specified in the original text. Finally, Kidnie points out that “the editor’s staging choices, embedded in the script as text, impact on all subsequent literary interpretations.”72 If a new edition of Hide Parke was to be prepared now, it would be pertinent for the editor to “roll back” the Victorian interpolations.73 Then, it would be more evident that Venture’s fall is profound and symbolic, not crudely diverting.
The potential for double-dealing in the horse race was evident to one seventeenth-century reader of Shirley. The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, by Edward Phillips (better known for writing a hagiographic account of the life of his uncle, John Milton), was published four times in the 1600s, but has subsequently been largely forgotten.74 The first edition dates from 1658. It is a long book that offers a miscellany of resources designed to enable men—as the subtitle says—to pick up women at locations such as Hide Park . . . and other eminent places. Lists of salient adjectives, witty conceits, jokes, and telling proverbs are provided, together with instructive expositions on letter-writing and rhyming techniques. Toward the beginning of the work, advice on conduct at the races is offered. It stipulates the kinds of linguistic stratagems young men should deploy at such socially coded events. Arrestingly, the samples of “the general terms of which [racing jargon] Art” are lifted from the Shirley play that was written sixteen years previously.75 Phillips has borrowed the dialogue from Shirley with some alterations: for example, Shirley’s verse mutates into Phillips’s prose; Venture becomes an anonymous “Gent”; and the losing horse acquires a name (“Crop”). The Venture-figure’s lines are also noticeably changed. Compare the two variants of the vainglorious posturing:
Shirley’s Venture:
I would lay the world upon my Mare.76
Phillips’s “Gent”:
Pish . . . I’de lay the World upon my Mare, that she shall run with
the Devil for a hundred pieces.
Phillips has added an extra clause. Both writers acknowledge the sexuality involved in the “laying” of a horse that is gendered as female, but Phillips pushes this erotic discourse further than his predecessor. There is a more destabilizing edge to the bestial discourse in Phillips, for the later writer introduces the specter of the diabolical. Phillips’s “Gent” has a “Mare” that will “run with the Devil,” inviting the suggestion that the “Gent” entertains a fallacy that a superior equine performance will be midwived through some sort of Faustian pact. “Mare” has a latent meaning that enhances this possibility. An early modern “mare”—a concept known to known to the philosopher, Francis Bacon—was a demon that sat on a victim’s chest at night, causing feelings of suffocation (OED 21). This is a physically felt extension of a nightmare. A “mare” could also, simply, refer to a “hag”—so there is a gendering imperative in the echoes of this demonic term, aggravating male concerns at being “run away with” or being “ridden” by an uncontrollable female (OED 3). As Wendy Doniger points out, as a legacy from folk histories of the Middle Ages, “mare” had the misogynistic connotations that “bitch” possesses today.77 Horses, as well as people, were thought to suffer from these nonequine “mares.” This discourse of blurring, of animality, only serves further to remove any veneer of human nobility from Hyde Park’s racing culture, as represented by both Phillips and Shirley.
As Rossell Hope Robbins explains, the demonic adjective differs in etymology from the equine version of “mare.”78 The spelling is the same, however: this linguistic link in Phillips, coupled with the reference to the Devil, although jokey, is sufficiently powerful to underline the unknowable, uncomfortable dimensions of Hide Parke’s horse race as perceived by Shirley’s appropriator. It is impossible, of course, to ascertain the methods Phillips used to acquire such knowledge of the play. The variants may imply memorial failure from having seen a pre-1642 performance, or, perhaps Phillips knowingly amended text from the Quarto of Hide Parke. The medley of Hide Parke quotations in The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence may offer a clue to some other version of the Shirley play, but one element is made clear by comparing Phillips’s extracts to the Shirleian original: Phillips is not merely plagiarizing his predecessor. The Miltonic biographer had a reputation for cribbing from other authors. It is well known, for instance, that Phillips’s Generall Dictionary of 1658 borrows heavily from Thomas Blount’s earlier Glossographia (1656).79 Two twentieth-century editors of another work by Phillips go so far as to say that “Phillips plagiarized outrageously.”80 Phillips praises Shirley, “especially for his Dramatick poetry” (albeit superficially and expedientially), in two of his works.81 It may appear that this esteem has led Phillips to plunder Hide Parke for the sake of easy effect. Phillips’s text does not do that; instead, it offers a critique of Shirley. It interrogates the corrupt horse race of the play. The diabolic rhetoric of Phillips’s “Gent” points to the preponderance of aggressive self-interest that the seedy horse race symbolizes in Shirley’s text. The foul play of the “Iockey” and his beaten opponent, Venture, was apparent to Edward Phillips. It may be surmised with some confidence that the suspicions of other seventeenth-century playgoers were aroused by the elusive nature of the “facts” about the dramatized race report.
Hyde Park was not, of course, the only location for Caroline racing. This, Shirley’s play acknowledges, with a reference that Ray Livingstone Armstrong calls “the earliest reference to the Newmarket Cup.”82 The novel value of the notice of this particular racecourse immediately confers significance on it. Ben Lucow remarks that the reference to the Newmarket races is restricted to a construction of a realistic milieu and goes on to denigrate the Newmarket allusion as “innocuous.”83 But the mention of “Headquarters” (as the equine-centered town is known to followers of today’s horse racing industry) is not so “innocuous.”84 The relation comes in a ballad that Venture sings to entertain the female characters, prior to his own defeat. It is a song “madst of’t horses.”85 The ballad eulogizes contemporary equine stars, horses that have unattractive names such as “herring Shotten,” “spit in’s arse,” and “freake.” The coarse names may hint at the rough underbelly of horse racing, as seen in the play.86 There is a potentially jarring contrast between the unappealing animal names and the uplifting hymn of reverence for “Bay Tarall that won the cup at Newmarket.” The unpleasing names inhibit any audience’s motivation to celebrate Newmarket and its racing with Venture. The novel value of the reference immediately confers a significance to the Newmarket allusion.
In 1632, Newmarket was synonymous with monarchical leisure. The continuing involvement of British royalty with the town may be summarized by simply citing the title of R. C. Lyle’s book—Royal Newmarket.87 James I loved the Newmarket races so much that he had a house built near the course.88 Charles I is known to have ridden in competitive races there.89 Despite Stuart efforts, Newmarket’s renown was never focused on monarchical order and bucolic restraint: it was an unpalatable place with an insalubrious reputation. Peter May, an indulgent critic of the town’s history, concedes that early Stuart Newmarket was marred by “excessive betting, heavy drinking, bribery, cheating.”90 This formulation reverberates powerfully with the Hyde Park we witness in Act Four of Shirley’s drama. Newmarket’s shady renown extended throughout the seventeenth century. A ballad from the 1680s bemoans a stereotypically dishonest jockey.91 Given May’s description of a lawless Newmarket, it is little wonder that English kings often received criticism for dallying at the races. The negative remarks about James I’s predilection for attending the races so often with the Duke of Buckingham perhaps tells us more about then current attitudes toward Buckingham’s perceived pro-Spanish leanings than it does about Newmarket.92 Similarly, when Antony Weldon attacks the long-dead James for Newmarket dalliances, it is part of a republican discourse rather than some attack on race-going itself. Indeed, it is instructive to read Laura Thompson’s account of Weldon’s polemic, since a conservative distaste for the latter’s iconoclasm is apparent in the writing of a racing patron who is—typically for the genre of writing—Royalist. Newmarket is a politically loaded space and, at best, a distraction from quotidian realities of government.
The reference to Newmarket, then, establishes an ambience of political malaise and sets up an echo of a monarchy that would rather gamble on animals than grapple with the twin perils of Catholicism and Puritanism. A ghostly Newmarket casts a critical light on Hyde Park: the park is, like Newmarket, the Sussex town, a locus for indulgent waste and for cheating. In it, broader issues of political import and consequence are dangerously overlooked. There is no direct criticism of Charles I—it is well-known that Shirley was supportive of the Stuart Monarchy throughout his career. Douglas Brooks rightly calls him “unabashedly Royalist.”93 It is the nature of the characters’ interactions and the shadowy flavor of their gambling that casts aspersions on the financial trustworthiness of frequenters of Hyde Park. This is no rosy world of spiritual healing, but an appetitive environment of gamesters who are both sexual and fiscal in orientation.
Conclusion
At the office all morning. After dinner, to the King’s playhouse to see an old play of Shirley’s called Hide parke, the first day acted, where horses are brought upon the stage, but it is but a very moderate play; only an excellent Epilogue spoke by Becke Marshall.94
Samuel Pepys saw this performance of Hide Parke on July 11, 1668. He was sufficiently aroused with excitement about the revival to see the first performance—even for a seasoned theatergoer like Pepys this indicates considerable commitment. But he was clearly disappointed—his remarks limit themselves to the horses and the input of the actress, Rebecca Marshall. In the Pepysian viewpoint, the animals share equal theatrical status with women. This interpretation of the status of these tenets of the play neatly links the theme of equine racing with the theme of sexual gamesmanship. Horses are exploited and appropriated within the genre of Restoration comedy. It is a mediated appropriation of Shirleian social commentary, but it is one that advances and elaborates the linkage between courtship and gambling in the 1632 original.
Within Pepys’s report, the three main strands of this chapter can be rethreaded—problems of place, a fractious community, and the corrupt horse race. Hyde Park developed a whole new history between 1632 and 1668. The one-time bastion of aristocratic privilege had been sold off by the Parliamentary regime during the Interregnum decades. It had been the place where an attempt was made to assassinate Cromwell (where the Protector himself nearly saved his enemies the trouble by falling from a coach at high speed), and it was eventually the site of a triumphant reopening: a nostalgic act of 1661 that was contrived to show Englishwo/men that the Stuart good times were back. This subsequent history ensures that Hyde Park, the material location, sparks off different associations for this new generation of playgoers. There can be no feel-good factor at a 1668 performance: too many queasy memories are enshrined within its very name.
The presence of Charles II at another 1668 performance of Hide Parke may give the impression that there was an effort made to instill some nostalgic utopian element into Restoration life at that point. Hide Parke, however, is not a play that guarantees positivity. London was not a thriving capital in 1668, since a series of disasters had hit the metropolis. Judy A. Hayden assesses the mood of English drama in the late 1660s.95 She argues that original drama had begun to stop attacking the follies of Puritanism; now, the focus was on the malaise within the once prayed-for regal establishment. Hayden writes that “there were many who had not erased the memory, and who, no doubt, drew frightening parallels to the Civil Wars and Interregnum as they pondered whether the country had arrived at ’41 again.”96 The Restoration dream was fading: there had been a devastating plague in 1665; the Great Fire demolished much of London (and, apparently, frightened the elderly Shirley and his second wife to death) in 1666 (ODNB); naval skirmishes with the Dutch had been disastrous; and the Chancellor, Clarendon, fell in 1667. As Maurice Ashley puts it, Royalist England “had awoken from its dream of Restoration bliss into a day of political realities.”97 It is noticeable, in this connection, that Pepys’s favorite part of the Hide Parke revival featured a commodity that was unavailable to the pre-1642 theater: female actors. The very conjuring of the name Rebecca Marshall opens up a world of salacious gossip, amoral meanderings, and every other Restoration sex cliché. Marshall was an actress who experienced slanging matches with Nell Gwyn, alleged that she was sexually assaulted by “one Mark Trevor” after a performance, and once claimed that Sir Hugh Middleton “ran up close to her and claps a turd upon her face.”98 This female actor is constructed in scatological terms—she is connected to the essential, bestial unifier of excretion. Marshall represents all the aggressive, sordid sexuality that the period is renowned for. The epilogue that Pepys so enjoyed is not extant. Hide Parke was now a different play for a different time.99 The essential amorality of the locale Shirley figures, however, remains, in 1668, still symbolically resonant.
It cannot be established that “real” horses were brought onto the stage in 1668, but Pepys’s notice of them asserts the primacy of the play’s discourse of the selfish harnessing of equine power. The problem in Hide Parke is that we cannot be sure who is holding the reins. We cannot hear evidence through the “Confused noyse” of the gambling chicanery. This speaks to the England of the late 1660s. One survivor of the era, Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), vented his spleen on the financial mysteries of London in the aftermath of the Great Fire:
London was in four years rebuilt, with so much beauty and magnificence, that we who saw it in both states, before and after the fire, cannot reflect on it without wondering where the wealth could be found to bear so vast a loss as was made by the fire, and so Prodigious an expense as was laid out in the rebuilding / it. This did demonstrate that the intrinsic wealth of the nation was very high, when it could answer such a dread charge.100
Burnet is fixated on the monstrous arrogance and profligacy that answered the Fire’s punishment. There is a thinly veiled outrage that money suddenly appears to rebuild the city; previously, this had been hidden, depriving the common good. Financial chicanery is endemic, as it is in Hyde Park, as represented in Hide Parke. The horses on the 1668 stage were conspicuous for Pepys (whether they were really on stage or not)—they comment obstreperously on the concealed dealings of the late-seventeenth-century metropolis. Taxpayers in London, like gamblers in the nearby Park, do not recognize the ways in which their money is used and abused. The revival of Hide Parke may have been intended as a tonic, a celebration for the bruised Royalists of 1668, but it actually serves merely to remind its audience of the quagmire of exploitation and mismanagement that had plagued London, before, during, and after the Civil Wars. The threefold problems of place, sexual compromise, and fiscal dishonesty are all exposed in the canvas of Hide Parke.
In Saint Patrick for Ireland (published in 1640), one of Shirley’s Werburgh Street plays, Rodamant, the servant of the pagan priest Archimagus, develops a lustful desire for his king’s (nameless) wife. This simplistic figure ruminates on the tactics needed by such a challenged suitor to a mighty noblewoman: “I have knowne as simple a fellow as I hath been in love with her horse, nay that ha been bedfellowes in the same litter, and in that humour he would have been leap’d, if the beast could have been provok’d to incontinencie.”101 On one level, this fantasy of copulation between the highest woman in the land and one of its lowest servants is a Phillips-like bestial discourse. The unnatural relationship between a man and an “incontinent,” unchaste horse is like an imagined relationship between a lowly subject and his married queen. The most striking note of irony, however, lies in the absurdity of equine cooperation with a degenerate human—bestial sex will occur “if the beast could have been provok’d to incontinencie.” Horses do not willingly participate in sexual relations with amorous humans. Horses only perform for humans, whether it is dancing, jumping, or racing, because of human dominion over them. Tropings of the horse in early modern culture are rarely equine-centered. These tropings nearly always engage with human society—it is the males and females in Shirley’s plays who are constructed and shaped, in part, through their appropriation of equine metaphor. In the Dublin theater, as on the London stage, the Shirleian project is to exhibit the selfish, often corrupting, interests of privileged members of society. The horses are pawns for these individuals, as the many horse-based metaphors in Shirley’s play are pawns for a dramatist who enlists equine allusions in a dramatic discussion about dishonesty, domination, and manipulation.
Notes
1. Alan Fletcher, Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 273.
2. John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, or a Satyr (London, 1682; Wing D2303), A4v, A2r.
3. Robert Gould, The Playhouse, in The Works of Mr. Robert Gould, 3 vols. (London: W. Lewis, 1709), II, R3v.
4. Nicholas Robins, “Thou Flattering World, Farewell! A Caroline Connoisseur: The Sly Properties of James Shirley, Metropolitan Play-Maker,” Times Literary Supplement, October 11, 1996, 20.
5. By, for example, Gordon Braden, “James Shirley,” in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, 300 vols. plus (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1978– ), LVIII (Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers), 264.
6. G. K. Hunter, English Drama, 1596–1642: The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 416.
7. Julie Sanders, Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999), 50, 49.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. W. A Neilson, “Ford and Shirley,” in A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English Literature, 15 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–27), VI, 202.
10. Theodore Miles, “Place-Realism in a Group of Caroline Plays,” Review of English Studies, 18 (1942), 432.
11. On the innovation of the horse race’s depiction, see R. S. Forsythe, The Relations of Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1914), 354.
12. Henry Herbert, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 174.
13. G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–68), V, 1122.
14. Edwin Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Stationers’ Register, 5 vols. (London and Birmingham: Privately Published, 1875–94), IV, 355; Herbert, 321.
15. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 227.
16. Sandra Burner, James Shirley: A Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988), 64.
17. James Shirley, Hide Parke (London, 1637; STC 22426), F4r. Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from the play are taken from the Henry E. Huntington Library copy of the Quarto. Because close textual analysis features in parts of this chapter, and because no critical edition, bibliographical, or textual study of the text has appeared yet, the Huntington copy was collated with the two British Library copies and with the National Library of Wales copy. No textual variants, however, were found.
18. Ibid.
19. The executions were well-reported at the time, see Fran C. Chalfont, Ben Jonson’s London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 204.
20. Michael Hanson, 2,000 Years of London: An Illustrated Survey (London: Country Life, 1967), 86.
21. Hazel Thurston, Royal Parks for the People: London’s Ten (London: David and Charles, 1974), 17.
22. John Norden, Specvlvm Brittannie: The First Parte, an Historicall, and Chorographicall Discription of Middlesex (London, 1593; STC 18635), C4v. “Hyde parke” can be located on the map inserted into the beginning of the volume, at position “F16.”
23. William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1610; STC 4509), map between Mm3v and Mm4r.
24. The Tyburn now flows underground through Hyde Park; the Serpentine Lake, which now dominates the center of the space, is an artificial construction. See The Hutchinson Guide to the World (Oxford: Helicon, 1998), 601.
25. Shirley, C4v.
26. William B. Bolton paints the opening as a mark of kingly generosity: “Without any pressure at all he [Charles I] admitted his subjects to share the pleasures of the royal demesnes, and by generously throwing open its gates to the public dedicated Hyde park to the enjoyment of the people “for ever.”” William B. Bolton, The Amusements of Old London, 2 vols. (London: Nimmo, 1901), II, 124. Hazel Thurston sees a less benevolent motivation, sourly commenting that “public admittance to the park” is evidence only of the Stuart proclivity for being “always on the lookout for some means of alleviating . . . unpopularity.” Thurston, 17.
27. E. H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 259. See also, Miles, 438. On the fashion and gaiety of the Ring, see also Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, Hyde Park: Its History and Romance (London: E. Nash, 1908), 73–74.
28. Sugden, 259.
29. The Apprentices of Londons Petition (London, 1641; Wing A3586).
30. J. N. P. Watson, Horse and Carriage: The Pageant of Hyde Park (London: Sportsman’s Press, 1990), 14.
31. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 179.
32. Shirley, C4v.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., H2r.
35. A reviewer of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1987 performance of Hide Parke notes that the widow’s desires were represented as being firmly set on Lacy, not the husband: “Pippa Guard (Mistress Bonavent) chokes back most movingly her disappointment at having to give up Lacy for her retired husband,” Paul Taylor, Review of Hide Parke by James Shirley, The Independent, April 17, 1987, 29.
36. Arthur Searle, ed., The Barrington Family Letters, 1628–32 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1983), 237.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 245.
39. Ibid., 246.
40. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 166.
41. Amy M. Froide, “Old Maids: The Lifecycle of Single Women in Early Modern England,” in Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane, eds., Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 90.
42. Linda Levy Peck, “The Caroline Audience: Evidence from Hatfield House,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 476.
43. Shirley, C1v.
44. Ibid., D3v.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. See Thomas S. Henricks, Disputed Pleasures: Sport and Society in Pre-Industrial England (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 108–9. Most historians assume that absolutely every horse race of the period was a two-horse “match.” Peter Edwards, however, has allowed me access to his notes from little-known manuscripts of the period that indicate that, albeit rarely, three or more horses were ridden in some races.
48. Ben Lucow, James Shirley (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 74.
49. Ibid.
50. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 728.
51. Shirley, G1r.
52. Because racehorses carry small weights in races, jockeys need to be very short and thin; indeed, jockeys have always been proverbially tiny. The shortness of the professional jockey was conveyed well in a rehearsed reading of the play at the Globe Education Centre in the summer of 2004, when the diminutive actor playing the jockey was towered over by every other actor.
53. Ibid., G4r
54. Ibid., H1r. “The title “Iockey” does sound like “Jocky,” which is a (sometimes pejorative) term for anyone from Scotland. I have, however, been unable to locate exterior evidence that would confirm that Scottish citizens were though of as “Jocks” before the eighteenth century.
55. “A bagpipe is called for twice” in Renaissance drama, Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 164.
56. Captain Thomas Stukeley (London, 1595; STC 23405), E3v.
57. Henry W. Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1939), 185.
58. Shirley, G4r.
59. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162; R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage (London: Scolar Press, 1985), 64–67.
60. Shirley, G4v.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., H1r.
63. James Bulman, “Caroline Drama,” in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, eds., The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 358.
64. James Shirley, Hide Parke, in William Gifford and Alexander Dyce, eds., The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, 6 vols. (London: Murray, 1833), II, 520.
65. Xenophon, The Historie of Xenophon: Containing the Ascent of Cyrus into the Higher Covntries (London, 1623; STC 26064), L4v.
66. Over thirty publications of Xenophon’s works are extant from the 1530 to 1700 period in England (STC 26064–75, Wing X3–20), illustrating the appeal of the classical writer on equine matters; Henricks, 107.
67. Marcia Vale, The Gentlemen’s Recreations: Accomplishments and Pastimes of the English Gentleman, 1580–1630 (Ipswich: Brewer, 1977), 86.
68. Henricks, 107.
69. Shirley, H1r.
70. M. J. Kidnie, “Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare’s Drama,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 462.
71. Ibid., 467.
72. Ibid., 468.
73. A new, critical edition of Shirley’s complete plays is—at last—being prepared for Oxford University Press.
74. The work’s bibliographical history is briefly but neatly summarized in the “Preface” to R. C. Alston’s facsimile edition, Edward Phillips, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972).
75. All of these borrowings from Shirley appear in Edward Phillips, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (London, 1658; Wing P2066), B3v.
76. Shirley, G1r.
77. Wendy Doniger, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 109.
78. Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (London: Bookplan, 1959), 340–41.
79. Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, or a Generall Dictionary (London, 1658; Wing P2068); Thomas Blount, Glossographia, or a Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words (London, 1656; Wing B3334).
80. Daniel G. Calder and Charles R. Forker, eds., Edwards Phillips’s “History of the Literature of England and Scotland” (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1973), 3.
81. Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets (London, 1675; Wing P2076), Dd4v. See also, Calder and Forker, eds., 53, where Phillips describes Shirley as being “next in rank after the triumvirate” of Fletcher, Jonson, and Shakespeare.
82. Ray Livingstone, ed., The Poems of James Shirley (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941), 64.
83. Lucow, 75.
84. For a splendid, anthropology-based description of Newmarket in the early part of this century, its class-based divisions of labor, and its immersion in the horse racing industry, see Rebecca Cassidy, The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
85. Shirley, G2r-v.
86. Peter Edwards, however, tells me that there was something of a fashion for giving coarse names to favored racehorses during the period: One well-regarded colt was called “Spotted Dick.”
87. R. C. Lyle, Royal Newmarket (London: Putnam, 1945).
88. Henricks, 108.
89. Peter May, The Changing Face of Newmarket: A History from 1600–1769 (Newmarket: Peter May Publications, 1984), 25.
90. May, 25.
91. Tom D’Urfey, “The Call to the Races at Newmarket,” in J. W. Ebsworth, ed., The Bagford Ballads, 4 vols (Hertford: S. Austin, 1876–78), I, 80–88. The ballad curses a jockey who has deliberately lost on a horse that could have readily won a race if ridden to its best potential.
92. Laura Thompson, Newmarket: From James I to the Present Day (London: Virgin, 2000), 21.
93. Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150. On Shirley’s Royalism, see also Burner, 123, 197; James Sherley [sic], An Ode Upon the Happy Return of King Charles II, to his Langvshing Nations (London, 1660; Wing S3380A); and Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education at the University of Oxford, ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols (London: Rivington, 1813–20), III, 738.
94. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London: Bell, 1970–83), IX, 260.
95. Judy A. Hayden, “From Caroline Tears to Caroline Laughter: Re-Historicizing the Restoration of Charles II,” English, 49 (2000), 109–26.
96. Hayden, 124. See also Nigel Smith and Maureen Bell, who point out that “The Great Fire of London (September 2–6, 1666) ushered in a year of shame and failure for the English, as plague and fire were followed by humiliation in the second Dutch War.” Nigel Smith and Maureen Bell, “Andrew Marvell and the “Femina Periculosa”: The Poet’s Connections with the Underground Press,” Times Literary Supplement, January 26, 2001.
97. Maurice Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 137.
98. On the incident with Gwyn, and for a useful overview of Marshall’s career, see Philip Highfill, Kalman Burnim and Edward Langhams, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), X, 106–8. On the accusation of aggressive assault by Trevor, see David Thomas, ed., Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History: Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 185. Regarding the “turd” incident, see ibid, 186.
99. On the change that the introduction of actors such as Gwyn and Marshall brought to English comedy at this point, see Sandra Richards, The Rise of the English Actress (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 18.
100. Earl of Dartmouth and Earl of Hardwicke, eds., Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833), I, 478–79.
101. Shirley, Saint Patrick for Ireland (London, 1640; STC 22455), D2r.