So many seemingly disparate pieces fell together so neatly in the winding up of the Blackfriars boys and the return of their theatre to Richard Burbage’s control that it would be easy to suppose some behind‐the‐scenes planning, conceivably involving the Master of the Revels. Only a month after Burbage retook possession, the Blackfriars precinct (along with several others) ceased to be a liberty and became formally part of the City of London, under the authority of the Lord Mayor and the Common Council (see p. 84, 197–8). Its playhouse was thus apparently open to all the unwelcome supervision that James Burbage had sought to avoid when he first built the Theatre outside the City walls. In fact there is no evidence that the City authorities tried to impose themselves in that way. On the other hand this change may have helped to persuade the playhouse’s neighbors that its activities would be properly regulated.
Within the King’s Men, however, the reacquisition of the Blackfriars theatre posed as many questions as it offered opportunities. If they moved their operation to it, as they had apparently planned to do in 1596/7, what would happen to the Globe? This was a matter of no small consequence, since the housekeepers of the Globe – who by this date included the Burbage brothers, Shakespeare, Heminge, Condell, and Sly – had invested significant capital in it. The only other adult players currently permanently resident in London, Prince Henry’s Men and Queen Anne’s Men, had their own playhouses, the Fortune and the Red Bull, so there was little prospect of leasing it.
Moreover, there is good evidence that the Globe had proved to be a very profitable enterprise, as the events of 1613 were to confirm (see p. 315). One detail seems particularly telling. Since reopening an embassy in London in 1603 Venetian ambassadors had been in the habit of visiting the playhouses: “Giustinian [in post January 1606 to November 1608] went with the French ambassador and his wife to a play called Pericles, which cost Giustinian more than 20 crowns. He also took the Secretary of Florence” (Chambers, 1930, 2: 335). Ambassadors carried the dignity of the state they represented, so it was a mark of the growing respectability of the playhouses –and of the Globe in particular, the first playhouse known to have had such a visitation – that three of them should have been at a performance together.1 Twenty crowns, moreover, translated to something more than £5, making it highly likely that Giustinian had hired the Globe’s entire lords’ rooms as a personal suite. This would surely only be done at at a fashionable and successful playhouse. Why abandon such success for the Blackfriars, which was about to lose its protection as a liberty?
No sooner, however, had the King’s Men finally secured the potential use of the Blackfriars than it was denied them by another sustained visitation of the plague. The playhouses did not reopen until December 1609 at the earliest, and they were closed again for the second half of 1610 (Barroll, 2005, 159). In January 1609 the king presented the company with £40 “for their private practice in the time of infection,” and £30 again the following winter; those Revels seasons they performed twelve and thirteen times at court respectively (ES, 4: 175–6). This still represented far less than they would have made if the playhouses had been open, but it is a measure of how far ahead of their rivals the King’s Men now stood. No other company received free gifts or performed more than five times in either season. Indeed, the Prince and Queen’s Men and the Children of the Whitefriars between them did not perform as often as the King’s Men.2
One possible benefit of this break in playing is that they were able to give detailed thought to how they would manage with two playhouses. It might hypothetically have been possible to expand and split the company, occupying both houses, in friendly competition with each other; that would have been most profitable to the householders, though it would have required a major investment in new costumes, properties, and plays. But it would also have required approval by the authorities, which might well not have been forthcoming.
In fact the company did resolve to continue with both houses, but playing a summer season at the Globe (April/May–September, on evidence relating to the 1630s) and the rest of the year at the Blackfriars.3 Why they should have done this is far from clear. It was a phenomenal extravagance, of a kind which would not be seen again until the subsidized theatres of the twentieth century. It may be relevant that when the boys had performed there, they were only expected to do so “the full time six months in every year” – the winter months (Smith, 514). Could it be that the Blackfriars got hot and stuffy in the summer months, with packed bodies, candles, and the windows closed to keep out sounds of traffic and trade? This arrangement would certainly give the King’s Men the opportunity to air it out during the summer months, and anyway it meant that they would always have somewhere to play if something should happen to one of the playhouses. The memory of losing the lease on the Theatre and having to fall back on the Curtain must have haunted them, and it was to prove wise policy when the Globe was destroyed by fire in 1613.
This solution involved a striking, if perhaps necessary, act of generosity on the part of Richard Burbage. He set up for the housekeepers of the Globe a similar consortium for the Blackfriars. But where earlier they had paid to join, here they were given free shares, only having to contribute to the upkeep of the building and to the annual rent on the lease of £40 – so that what they lost in profits at the Globe they would make up in profits at the Blackfriars, and vice versa. There were initially seven equal housekeeper shares in the Blackfriars consortium: one each for the Burbage brothers, and for Shakespeare, Heminge, Condell, and Sly; and one for someone named Thomas Evans. The suspicion is that this was a placeholder for Henry Evans, a figure involved in the management of the Blackfriars boys since their reemergence in 1600.4 If so, the further suspicion has to be that his share was a prearranged reward for expeditiously wrapping up the boys company and surrendering their lease (which provoked litigation from other members of the management: EPT, 517–21).
One other convenience arose from the winding up of the Blackfriars boys. Some of the boys themselves became available to join the King’s Men, whose sharer ranks were thinning. Of those named in the 1603 patent (see p. 279), Phillips had died some while back, and perhaps been replaced by Nicholas Tooley, named as his “fellow” in Phillips’ 1605 will. But William Sly died only days after becoming a housekeeper in the Blackfriars and Lawrence Fletcher about a month later. These were replaced in the company by William Ostler and John Underwood from the Blackfriars boys – but almost certainly no longer in boy roles. Both had been performing since at least Jonson’s Poetaster (1601). Tooley, Ostler and Underwood all appear in the cast‐list for Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) with the King’s Men.
We might presume that maintaining the two venues would pose the company problems in respect of which plays to perform where. As we have seen, transferring The Malcontent from the boys’ repertory to the Globe involved significant changes, which took time and money. The King’s Men certainly kept on the Blackfriars consort of musicians, who continued to play for up to an hour before performances and again during the intermissions to keep the lighting trimmed (see p. 300). So we might expect that plays written for the Globe would have to be cut at the Blackfriars, to give a manageable playing time. By the same token, we might have assumed that some plays were better suited, either by style or subject matter, for one house (or its audience) than the other. But actually the evidence on this is far less clear cut than we might have anticipated.
Pericles and Troilus and Cressida were the last two Shakespeare plays published in his lifetime; both were printed in 1609 and both title pages speak of performance at the Globe.5 None of the plays written after that date was printed until the 1623 First Folio, which says nothing about where they were staged. Othello, certainly written by 1604 but not printed before 1622, tells us that it had been played at both the Globe and the Blackfriars, but not whether the text reflects adaptations from one to the other. Similarly the 1631 Taming of the Shrew, not printed until the First Folio, names both playhouses. Love’s Labour’s Lost, reprinted in 1631, also mentions both playhouses; it offers the version of the play first printed in the Folio, but that differs little from what appeared in a 1598 quarto – which obviously relates to staging before either playhouse was in operation. From 1608 onwards reprints of Richard II associated it with performance at the Globe, as do those of Romeo and Juliet from 1609, and those associations continue into the 1630s – with no mention of the Blackfriars.6 But some of that may simply be inertia: printers always preferred to work, as far as possible, from an earlier printing. For example, all twelve editions of Mucedorus printed with title‐pages between 1610 and 1656 pronounce it to be “as it was acted before the Kings Majesty at Whitehall, on Shrove Sunday night. By his Highness’ servants usually playing at the Globe.” The reference to the actual court performance (in either 1609 or 1610) would have been meaningless to most people within a few years, while “his Highness’ servants” no longer existed by 1656, nor did the Globe – but the printers churned out the same old formula. Amid all this imperfect information, the fact remains that The Two Noble Kinsmen (printed 1634; coauthored with John Fletcher) is the only play by Shakespeare exclusively associated textually with the Blackfriars.
* * *
Before pursuing this further, let us consider the physical characteristics of the Blackfriars, in part to assess the challenges of moving from one stage to another. Scholars broadly agree that the hall James Burbage constructed out of the seven existing rooms he bought in the Blackfriars complex measured 66 ft long by 46 ft wide (just over 20 m × 14 m), less than half the total floorspace of the Globe. The size of the stage is far less certain. There were certainly boxes on either side of the stage (and possibly also behind it), “and somewhere there was a tiring house” adds Herbert Berry, a laconic reminder of how imperfect our information is (2002, 156). The entire audience was to be seated. The pit lay before the stage but was here supplied with benches for even the lowest‐paying (six‐penny) entrants, while there were tiered galleries all around the remaining three sides of the auditorium for those prepared to pay more. Whether there were two tiers or three (as at the Globe) is less certain. Marston’s reference in The Dutch Courtesan, written for the Blackfriars boys circa 1604/5, to “my worshipful friends in the middle region” (5.3.160–1; Marston, 1975a) is sometimes thought to support the argument for three, but options would have been restricted by the need to retain the use of the high Tudor windows of both long sides of the room for lighting. Seated bodies take up more space than standing ones, and since everything started with dramatically reduced floorspace, the pressure to squeeze in as much seating as possible must have been intense. The size of the stage must have been a trade‐off between that pressure and the need for sufficient space to mount impressive productions.
If the galleries were as wide as those at the Fortune (12' 6"; 3.81 m) there would barely be 21 ft (6.40 m) left for the width of the stage; by the same token, if the stage reached out halfway along the length of the hall (33 ft; 10.06 m), that might allow for a stage of 22 ft (6.71 m), with 11 ft (3.36 m) to contain the tiring house (but only 33 ft for the lowest‐priced seating on the floor of the auditorium). Irwin Smith calculated that 22 ft was the absolute minimum depth necessary to stage the battles, masques, and other setpieces of plays like Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (circa 1610, pub. 1619) and Massinger’s The Roman Actor (pub. 1629), both printed as Blackfriars plays (1964, 306–8). Smith, however, assumed that there were no boxes adjacent to the stage, so that there would be much greater width; records, however, of a contretemps in 1632 between a Captain Essex and the Irish peer, Lord Thurles, make it clear that there were boxes immediately adjacent to the stage.7 But they were not necessarily 12'6" deep – reducing them to, say, 8' (2.44 m) would give an extra 5' (1.52 m) of usable stage, 26' across (nearly 8 m). Even this, however, does not allow for the one factor which distinguished the Blackfriars from the Globe, the more preponderant presence of spectators (like Lord Thurles) on the stage itself. I shall consider the wider implications of this shortly, but for now want simply to point out that spectators on stools (and others standing or reclining) on the stage must have reduced the usable space even further. Smith had assumed that, without galleries to the side, two rows of stools on each wing of the stage would have accommodated them. With the galleries, however, they have to be accounted for in other ways, and Ben Jonson’s testimony (see below) suggests that they were not neatly tucked away in the wings. All in all, Ralph Alan Cohen’s estimate of usable acting space as 25' by 25' (approx. 7.6 m square) seems like a reasonable best guess (2009, 214).8
The presence of the spectators on the stage is the feature of the Blackfriars which elicited most comment. As we have seen, there were almost certainly spectators on other stages too, even in public playhouses (see p. 240ff). But given the narrow confines of this stage they were a particular issue. In the Prologue to The Devil is An Ass, staged in 1616, Jonson tartly comments:
The Devil is an Ass. That is today
The name of what you are met for a new play.
Yet, grandees, would you were not come to grace
Our matter with allowing us no place.
Though you presume Satan a subtle thing,
And may have heard he’s worn in a thumb‐ring,
Do not on these presumptions force us act
In compass of a cheese‐trencher. This tract
Will ne’er admit our vice because of yours –
Anon, who, worse than you, the fault endures
That yourselves make? When you will thrust and spurn,
And knock us o’ the elbows; and bid, turn;
As if, when we had spoke, we must be gone,
Or, till we speak, must all run into one,
Like the young adders, at the old ones mouth?
(1–15; Jonson, 2012d)
The litany of thoughtless behavior by the ironically‐named “grandees” is painfully plausible. You come to grace the play, but allow the actors no room to perform, forcing us to act in confines as narrow as those of a wooden trencher used to serve cheese. Our Vice will not be able to get on, because of the vices you yourself commit – when you will push and kick, and jostle our elbows and, when someone calls you, you turn around. It’s as if you expect us to get off as soon as we have spoken, and until then we are all forced to stand in one small space.
The behavior of onstage gallants is most famously satirized in Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Horn‐Book (1609), Chapter 6, “How a Gallant should behave himself in a Playhouse.” It is worth quoting at some length for some of the doubtless acute observation of actual playhouse activity. Do note that he describes the practice of sitting on stage (to which he devotes almost the whole chapter) as one common to both public and private playhouses. We noted earlier that the evidence as to whether members of the audience sat on the stage at the Globe (and if so, when) is ambiguous; and Dekker continues that ambiguity here – he may be entirely sincere or he may be mocking those “gulls,” like Will Sly’s character in the Induction to The Malcontent, who do not understand the different conventions of public and private theatres (see pp. 283–4). But there is no ambiguity about the Blackfriars, which became the playhouse most celebrated (or notorious) for the practice.
Sithence [since] then the place is so free in entertainment, allowing a stool as well to the farmer’s son as to your Templar [inns of court lawyer]; that your stinkard has the selfsame liberty to be there in his tobacco‐fumes, which your sweet courtier hath; and that your car‐man [carter] and tinker claim as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to give judgment on the play‘s life and death, as well as the proudest Momus [Greek god of ridicule] among the tribe of critic: it is fit that he, whom the most tailors’ bills do make room for, when he comes, should not be basely, like a viol, cased up in a corner.
Whether therefore the gatherers of the public or private playhouse stand to receive the afternoon’s rent; let our gallant, having paid it, presently advance himself up to the throne of the stage; I mean not into the lords’ room [see p. 234ff], which is now but the stage’s suburbs; no, those boxes, by the iniquity of custom, conspiracy of waiting‐women and gentlemen‐ushers that there sweat together, and the covetousness of sharers, are contemptibly thrust into the rear; and much new satin is there damned, by being smothered to death in darkness.
But on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea, and under the state of Cambyses himself [Persian king, subject of an early bombastic play], must our feathered ostrich, like a piece of ordnance [artillery], be planted valiantly, because impudently, beating down the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality. For do but cast up a reckoning, what large comings‐in are pursed up by sitting on the stage. First, a conspicuous eminence is gotten; by which means the best and most essential parts of a gallant, good clothes, a proportionable leg, white hand, the Persian lock, and a tolerable beard, are perfectly revealed.
By sitting on the stage, you have a signed patent to engross [monopolize] the whole commodity of censure; may lawfully presume to be a girder [sneerer], and stand at the helm to steer the passage of scenes; yet no man shall once offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of an insolent, over‐weening coxcomb [conceited simpleton]…
By sitting on the stage, if you be a knight, you may happily get you a mistress; if a mere Fleet‐street gentleman, a wife; but assure yourself, by continual residence, you are the first and principal man in election to begin the number of “We three” … [i.e. to show yourself a fool].
By sitting on the stage, you may, with small cost, purchase the dear acquaintance of the boys; have a good stool for sixpence; at any time know what particular part any of the infants present; get your match lighted; examine the playsuits’ lace, and perhaps win wagers upon laying ’tis copper [i.e. cheap alternative to gold], etc. And to conclude: whether you be a fool or a justice of peace; a cuckold or a captain; a Lord Mayor’s son or a dawcock [jackdaw, chattering fool]; a knave or an under‐sheriff; of what stamp soever you be; current or counterfeit; the stage, like time, will bring you to most perfect light and lay you open. Neither are you to be hunted from hence; though the scarecrows in the yard hoot at you, hiss at you, spit at you, yea, throw dirt even in your teeth: ’tis most gentlemanlike patience to endure all this and to laugh at the silly animals. But if the rabble, with a full throat, cry “Away with the fool!” you were worse than a madman to tarry by it; for the gentleman and the fool should never sit on the stage together.
Marry, let this observation go hand in hand with the rest … Present not yourself on the stage, especially at a new play, until the quaking Prologue hath by rubbing got colour into his cheeks, and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that he’s upon point to enter; for then it is time, as though you were one of the properties, or that you dropped out of the hangings, to creep from behind the arras [hanging tapestry], with your tripos or three‐footed stool in one hand, and a teston [coin] mounted between a forefinger and a thumb in the other; for, if you should bestow your person upon the vulgar when the belly of the house is but half full, your apparel is quite eaten up, the fashion lost, and the proportion of your body in more danger to be devoured than if it were served up in the counter amongst the poultry. Avoid that as you would the baton [cudgel]. It shall crown you with rich commendation to laugh aloud in the midst of the most serious and saddest scene of the terriblest tragedy, and to let that clapper, your tongue, be tossed so high that all the house may ring of it … for by talking and laughing, like a ploughman in a morris [morris‐dance], you heap Pelion upon Ossa, glory upon glory; as first, all the eyes in the galleries will leave walking after the players, and only follow you …
Before the play begins, fall to cards; you may win or lose, as fencers do in a prize, and beat one another by confederacy, yet share the money when you meet at supper: notwithstanding, to gull the ragamuffins that stand aloof gaping at you, throw the cards, having first torn four or five of them, round about the stage, just upon the third sound, as though you had lost … Now, sir; if the writer be a fellow that hath either epigrammed [satirized] you, or hath had a flirt at your mistress, or hath brought either your feather or your red beard, or your little legs, etc. on the stage; you shall disgrace him worse than by tossing him in a blanket, or giving him the bastinado [beating] in a tavern, if, in the middle of his play, be it pastoral or comedy, moral or tragedy, you rise with a screwed and discontented face from your stool to be gone; no matter whether the scenes be good or no; the better they are, the worse do you distaste them. And, being on your feet, sneak not away like a coward; but salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spread either on the rushes, or on stools about you; and draw what troop you can from the stage [after] you; the mimics [actors] are beholden to you for allowing them elbow‐room …
Marry, if either the company or indisposition of the weather bind you to sit it out, my counsel is then that you turn plain ape; take up a rush, and tickle the earnest ears of your fellow gallants to make other fools fall a laughing; mew at passionate speeches; blare at merry; find fault with the music; whew at the children’s action; whistle at the songs …
Dekker’s basic point is that pride of place on the stage is open to anyone with money; class and intelligence are not requirements, and are indeed conspicuous by their absence. The typical gallant on stage will arrive just as the show is beginning, to make the strongest impression he can with his splendid clothing; he will face down ridicule from the rest of the audience; he will be a constant critic and fool; he will respond inappropriately and loudly in the course of the play; and if he takes offense at some supposed affront from the author he may leave as conspicuously as possible. Dekker also hints at inappropriate familiarity (“dear acquaintance”) between these moneyed gallants and the boy actors (see p. 188).
There is no doubt that these gallants on stage – there were perhaps no more than ten of them at a performance – were indulged for the extra sixpence they paid to get a stool. Cokes in Bartholomew Fair wonders if the puppets have “none of your pretty, impudent boys now, to bring stools, fill tobacco, fetch ale, and beg money, as they have at other houses?” (5.3.49–51; 2012b). Such services probably did not exist at the Hope (and certainly not at puppet shows); at this date they were most widely associated with the Blackfriars, where the King’s Men’s may have continued the practice of the boy actors attending to these elite customers. Dekker blames “the covetousness of sharers” for allowing all this to happen – here doubtless meaning the housekeepers, to whom such income flowed.
In allowing this section of the audience on stage the indoor theatres recreated the effect which we have repeatedly seen in early modern staging, especially in colleges and at court, whereby the majority of the audience saw a privileged minority as it were through the action of the play. And that association may have been entirely deliberate. Dekker specifically notes that “the throne of the stage” is no longer “the lords’ room” (“which is now but the stage’s suburbs” – an insignificant backwater), nor those prime boxes, the “gentlemen’s rooms” (which he suggests are now used for rather sordid assignations); it is “on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea … [that] our feathered ostrich, like a piece of ordnance, [must] be planted valiantly.”9
The indoor auditoria became known as “private houses,” though they were in reality no more “private” than the outdoor playhouses. But they simulated something of the atmosphere of performances in the homes of aristocrats and gentry such as we saw associated with the early parts of Shakespeare’s career – and such as those nearby in the Blackfriars precinct itself (see pp. 135, 198). Such venues had never been entirely left behind; whenever the King’s Men had to tour because of plague in London (as they did in 1610) or they played in the city houses of aristocrats they would have reencountered the old status‐driven arrangement of the audiences. The critical difference here was that privileged status was conferred entirely on the basis of ability to pay, not social or institutional rank. So, in Dekker’s listings, farmers’ sons, stinkards, and tinkers were as likely as lawyers, knights, and courtiers. Yet again we see the early modern theatre strung between an older, hierarchical world of social obligation and deference and a modern one governed by markets and economic opportunism.
Also as in the houses of the nobility, lighting was a significant issue. Although there has been speculation that the King’s Men may have performed in the evenings there is no evidence of this – and significant indication that, as at the Globe, they performed in the afternoons, at least in part to allow audiences to get home at a reasonable hour. When in December 1618 neighbors of the playhouse complained of the great crush of coaches it attracted and the disruption they caused, they specified: “These inconveniences falling out almost every day in the winter time (not forbearing the time of Lent) from one or two of the clock till six at night” (EPF, 523). Nevertheless, even though the chambers which James Burbage converted into the playing space doubtless had the kinds of classic Tudor high windows that we associate, say, with the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace or with Middle Temple Hall, these would rarely have cast direct light on the stage, but at best allowed a diffuse light to filter down over the room in general (Graves, 2009, 538). And in the depths of winter even that was gone by four o’clock.
Candlelight was an essential precondition of playing at the Blackfriars. But we should not assume that this even began to approximate to the levels of lighting we are accustomed to today. Our best evidence comes from the indoor Salisbury Court playhouse in 1639, where a mix of wax and tallow candles was used at a cost of 5 shillings a day. Depending on the mix of (more expensive) wax and tallow, R. B. Graves calculates that this paid for between two and four dozen candles daily, of which he observes “—a fair quantity, one would think, but in actual brightness not equivalent even to the power of one 60‐watt light bulb” (2009, 535). 10 And these candles were not even concentrated over the stage but spread throughout the room: there was no equivalent of modern spotlights and footlights. It has been hypothesized that stage lighting might have been intensified with reflective cloths, screens, or mirrors such as may well have been used in the elaborately staged – and fabulously expensive – masques at court. But there is no actual evidence of that level of intervention in the moment‐by‐moment lighting of plays in commercial playhouses. It is perhaps best to bear in mind that the human eye adapts quickly to even the lowest levels of light, so that the mix of filtered sunlight and candlelight – a mix which would modulate as time passed through performances – may well have offered an acceptable medium for performance. Given the record of the playhouse between 1610 and 1642, when it was indisputably the most successful theatre of the era, there seems little doubt of this.
Within that medium the actors continued to use the conventions they imported from the Globe to represent the lighting conditions within the fictions they staged. The quarto text of Othello (1622), for example, which tells us that it was played at both houses, goes out of its way to emphasize that the opening scenes occur at night: “Enter Brabantio in his night‐gown, and servants with torches” (1.1.159.1); “Enter Othello, Iago, and attendants with torches” (1.2.0; the formula recurs later in the scene for “Cassio with officers”); “Enter Duke and Senators, set at a table with lights and attendants” (1.3.0). The torches and lights symbolized night; they did not enact it. Similarly, when Iachimo in Cymbeline emerges from the trunk to spy on the sleeping Imogen he tells us that the flame of a taper he carries “Bows towards her” (2.2.20). The motion of a flame is something an actor could hardly control – this is something he tells the audience to see. We believe that the play was performed at the Globe (where Simon Forman probably saw it: see p. 320, Note 15); but we might suppose that so recent a play was transferred to the Blackfriars. In the former playhouse many spectators would be too far away to see the flame at all; in the latter it would be one light among many. But the key in both moments is a suspension of disbelief, created here by the magic of the spoken word, in which light and dark are whatever the theatrical conventions say they are.
In his satirical plague pamphlet, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, Thomas Dekker describes nightfall in the City: “all the city looked like a private playhouse, when the windows are clapped down, as if some … dismal tragedy were presently to be acted” (1606, sig. D2). The suggestion seems to be that it was a convention to play tragedies entirely by candlelight, without the addition of light from outside. This was perhaps on a par with the convention of hanging the stage with black cloth for tragedies; I can, however, find no clear instance of that convention mentioned at the Blackfriars, though it certainly comes up in plays for Paul’s boys (see p. 203 and p. 228, Note 11). The critical issue here is that neither of these conventions involved changes to either decoration or lighting during the course of a performance: they were a fixed convention from the outset, not manipulated during intense moments to heighten the mood.
One clear consequence of the indoor lighting, however, was that performances had to be interrupted occasionally to allow the candelabra to be lowered and the wicks of the candles to be trimmed, to avoid hot wax falling dangerously. This meant that plays were staged with predictable intermissions for the first time in an adult commercial playhouse, thus imposing something resembling an act‐by‐act, rather than scene‐by‐scene, structure. We shall observe this shortly in the text of The Tempest, one of the few plays by Shakespeare to have come to us marked as it was probably staged at the Blackfriars.11 A detail in the folio (1623) text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, seems to reflect the changed conditions. At the end of what it marks as Act 3 it gives the direction “They sleep all the act.” This refers to Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius, who are all asleep at this point. There is no stage direction in the comparable point in the quarto text, for the simple reason that one is not necessary – it is obvious that they do not leave the stage, since the fairies enter immediately, to be followed shortly by Theseus and Hippolyta. But in the folio version there is clearly meant to be a break between Act 3 and Act 4, and normally the stage would have been cleared at the end of the former. Instead, in a little metatheatrical gesture, the lovers are directed to remain on stage, asleep, until the next act starts.
As they did so, we may assume that music played. The consort of musicans assembled by the Blackfriars boys was retained by the King’s Men (see p. 174). Their duties included offering a concert of music for up to an hour before the play began, and also playing much more briefly between the acts. When Frederic Gerschow, secretary/tutor to the Duke of Stettin‐Pomerania, saw the boy actors at the Blackfriars in 1602 he noted: “For a whole hour before the play begins there is a delightful performance with musical instruments, organs, lutes, bandores [large bass string instruments, to be plucked], mandolins, violins and flutes” (Gurr, 2004a, 80, in his own translation from the German.) John Marston’s Blackfriars play, Sophonisba (pub.1606), calls variously for “cornets, organ, and voices,” “organs, viols and voices,” “organ and recorders play to a single voice” (B. R. Smith, 1999, 221). Philip Rosseter, a musician who became part of the management of the Children of the Whitefriars in 1609, published Lessons for Consorts that same year, all arranged for a broken consort of bandora, cittern, lute, flute, and treble and bass viol – “broken” in this context meant mixing multiple families of instruments, such as woodwind and strings. This precisely matched the six instruments prescribed in Thomas Morley‘s First Book of Consort Lessons (1599) and we might hazard a guess that these were the instruments used by the core consort at the Blackfriars. But contemporary accounts of the music played while the boys were resident there all describe use of one or more organs, while some also mention cornet and hautboys, which cannot reliably be placed in the Globe before 1608. 12 There is no knowing how much doubling of instruments went on, but it is quite possible that the King’s Men inherited as many as nine musicians in total with the new playhouse.
We can in fact be even more specific than this if we look to 1624 and Sir Henry Herbert’s “Protection List” of that year, which gives us a rare insight into the body of adult males employed by the Kings Men at that time, including their musicians. That December Sir Henry, the Master of the Revels, listed twenty‐two people who “are all employed by the King’s Majesty’s servants in their quality of playing as musicians and other necessary attendants.” He separately added two others to the list, making twenty‐four. This list was to prevent those named from being “arrested, or detained under arrest, imprisoned, pressed for soldiers or any other molestation” and was backed by the Lord Chamberlain (Herbert, 158). England was going war with Spain and there was a serious risk that those employed by the King’s Men might be pressed into service. The sharers themselves, as “the King’s Majesty’s servants” – by then approximately twelve in number – were Grooms of the King’s Chamber and so exempt from impressment. 13 But these twenty‐four were separately distinguished as “musicians and other necessary attendants,” hired men, who would have been vulnerable without this protection.
The list repays attention because we can identify, or at least make informed guesses about, a surprisingly large number of the twenty‐four and their functions – only five of them escape even provisional identification. And with this information we can make some reasonable inferences about what similar lists in the 1590s or 1610 might have looked like. Only one of the nineteen more‐or‐less identifiable was not a performer, either a musician or an actor – Edward Knight, the company’s book‐keeper, who heads the list (see p. 177ff). Perhaps the other four were employed in occupations that left less of a record, such as stage‐keeper and tiremen (see p. 180, 169).
The most useful analysis of the list is that made by John P. Cutts, a musicologist, who concludes:
of the twenty‐four people mentioned in the 1624 Protection List the following seven can definitely be identified as musicians: Ambrose Byland (violinist), Henry Wilson (violinist and lutentist), William Saunders (violinist and wind instruments), William Tawyer (trumpeter), Edward Shackerly (instrument unknown), Jeffery Collins (instrument unknown) and Nicholas Underhill (trumpeter); and there is a possibility that four more were musicians too: William Chambers (singer), George Rickner (trumpeter?), John Rhodes (instrument unknown) and Alexander Bullard (recorder player; trumpeter?). (1966, 104)
This, then, (with Knight) accounts for up to twelve of the twenty‐four. Some of these names are familiar from elsewhere. In the 1623 folio text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when the mechanicals enter in the final scene the direction reads “Tawyer with a trumpet before them” (5.1.125.0). Nicholas Underhill had been a boy player, apprenticed to the Ambrose Byland (or Beeland) who is the first on the list named by Cutts. 14 Cutts identifies Underhill as a trumpeter by association with other trumpeters in his family, but there is evidence that he was certainly a violinist. Both he and Byland performed as violinists in James Shirley’s 1634 masque, The Triumph of Peace (Gurr, 2004a, 219, 245). But it is entirely possible that Underhill was proficient with both instruments, which would have been used in different contexts. He is probably the “Nick” who played Barnavelt’s wife in the 1619 Fletcher/Massinger play, Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, as well as the role of Shackle in The Soddered Citizen (1630) and minor roles (officer, attendants) in Believe as You List (1631). Such an adaptable performer would have been very useful to the company. By the same token, George Rickner, identified by Cutts as a possible trumpeter is almost certainly the “Geo. Rick” marked out to play a servant in The Honest Man’s Fortune (1625).
Of those Cutts does not mention, we can certainly identify the following: Richard Sharpe who, with Edward Shackerly, was one of the two not on the general list; he was a player on the point of becoming a sharer in the company, which he remained until 1632 (see p. 183, 314–15). He presumably had not yet been sworn into the king’s service and so needed protection. William Patrick is on record as acting as a senator in The Roman Actor (1626) and in various minor parts in Believe As You List (1631). William Mago similarly had small parts in Massinger’s Believe As You List, as did William Gascoyne, while George Vernon, formerly a boy player apprenticed to John Lowin, is recorded as playing small roles in The Roman Actor and John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628). Robert Pallant was another boy player, apprenticed to John Heminge in 1620, who may have played the role of Cariola in The Duchess of Malfi circa 1621/2 (Bentley, 1941–68, 2: 519). Finally, the quarto text of The Two Noble Kinsmen identifies Thomas Tuckfield as an attendant in a revival of the play circa 1625 (Shakespeare and Fletcher, 1989, 5.3.0.2n). So at least seven on the list are on record as non‐sharer actors (one still formally an apprentice), to add to Cutts’ seven probable and four possible musicians (among whom Underhill and Rickner also acted). Thus, with Knight, perhaps as many as nineteen are identified.
The Blackfriars broken consort, as we have noted, used an eclectic mix of instruments from various families. But they would not have used trumpets, which were not employed at this time in musical ensembles. Their role was to announce ceremonial entrances and exits, to give signals on the battlefield – all of which might have been highly resonant in an indoor theatre. And there is no mention in the list of drummers, who were similarly traditionally called for in ceremonial and martial scenes. Unless their use proved overpowering indoors, there must have been at least two of them, as there would be trumpeters. They also had other, offstage functions, connected with publicising the company’s performances (see p. 174–5). It is very likely, in fact, that most of the people named under the Protection List, except perhaps the core consort of musicians, would have performed multiple functions around the playhouse. If that consort used the regular number of six instruments (to which we may add up to the three other instruments known to have been used at the Blackfriars but not earlier at the Globe – cornets, hautboys and organs), that would mean that Shakespeare’s company perhaps employed sixteen or so hired men at the Theatre, the Curtain, and the Globe, in the days before they acquired use of the Blackfriars. They were used primarily as actors in lesser roles, or in a range of smaller‐scale musical positions (they certainly needed lutenists, as well as trumpeters and drummers, even before they took on the consort), but also to be available for other functions offstage. These figures may not account, however, for those like tiremen and gatherers, who may not have been deemed “necessary attendants” in Herbert’s view – though it would not have been easy to cope without someone who knew his way around all the costumes.
How did the acquisition of the Blackfriars affect the nature of the plays the King’s Men would henceforth commission? It is commonplace to associate the indoor playhouse with the new vogue for romances or tragicomedies, plays which John Fletcher distinguished from tragedies and comedies in this way: “A tragi‐comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy. Which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy” (To the Reader, The Faithful Shepherdess). Fletcher and his early collaborator, Francis Beaumont, started by writing for the boy companies and quickly became associated with this genre – though The Faithful Shepherdess itself was a failure when it was staged at the Blackfriars in 1608. They wrote Philaster (circa 1610) and A King and No King (circa 1611) in this mode for the King’s Men, with great success; but when those plays were published, in 1620 and 1619 respectively, their title‐pages associate them both with the Globe, and not the Blackfriars.
Shakespeare also contributed to this new genre, though in his own distinctive mode. Indeed, his highly successful Pericles has some claim to be the earliest romance/tragicomedy (certainly the earliest one to be conspicuously successful), and that was a Globe play. Where Beaumont and Fletcher focused on issues of love and honor placed under extreme pressure (issues that were close to the heart of the gentry who perhaps formed the core of the Blackfriars audience, and resonated even more strongly in the 1630s), Shakespeare concentrated on families divided, children and wives lost, strange reconciliations under challenging circumstances. He followed Pericles with Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Henry VIII (staged as All is True) and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the latter co‐written with Fletcher, are not quite in the same mode but they have affinities.
But of these The Winter’s Tale and All is True were certainly staged at the Globe. The doctor/astrologer Simon Forman saw The Winter’s Tale at the Globe in May 1611 and probably saw Cymbeline there at some time the same year.15 All is True, described as a new play, was what was playing when the Globe burned down in 1613. This seems all the odder because some of the key events of the play – the trial of Katherine of Aragon – took place in the Parliament chamber in Blackfriars, the very space now occupied by the playhouse. And the text draws attention to the fact. Henry VIII says:
The most convenient place that I can think of
For such receipt of learning is Blackfriars;
There ye shall meet about this weighty business.
(2.2.137–8)
It was surely meant to be performed at the Blackfriars. But the only concrete evidence we have places it in the Globe. In short, the evidence we have is that tragicomedy was a genre that played as well, and at least as commonly, in the Globe as it did in the Blackfriars. And the plays we have mentioned here probably migrated between the theatres as readily as they migrated to court when they were called for there. We know with unusual specificity that The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale opened the Revels season of 1611/12 in November, while A King and No King followed the night after Christmas, another major date in the festive calendar; the following winter A King and No King and The Tempestappeared again, along with Philaster and Cardenio, a lost Shakespeare–Fletcher collaboration.
There is no doubt about there being a vogue for romances/tragicomedies, or that the company went out of its way to meet it. But it is doubtful if the acquisition of the Blackfriars playhouse was the key driver in this. As Leeds Barroll puts it “narratives that assume a straightforward linkage between the ‘romances’ and the ‘new Blackfriars playing space’ fail to do justice to the complexities of the historical record” (2005, 168). Both playhouses seem to have played their parts. One issue, however, may suggest a difference between them, and that is the use of descent machinery. As I have been at pains to show, the Globe either did not have descent machinery (at least, prior to 1608) or the writers of those of its plays which have survived made a deliberate decision not to use it. But from 1609 onwards, descents become a fairly regular feature of the company’s plays.
So in Cymbeline there is the extended vision of Posthumous, which is given with detailed stage directions:
Solemn music. Enter, as in an apparition, Sicilius Leonatus, father to Posthumous, an old man, attired like a warrior; leading in his hand an ancient matron, his wife, and mother to Posthumous, with music, before them. Then, after other music, follows the two younger Leonati, brothers to Posthumous, with wounds as they died in the wars. They circle Posthumous round, as he lies sleeping. (5.4.29 SD)
His family laments what has happened to Posthumous and call on Jupiter to relieve him:
Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees. (92 SD)16
Later Jupiter demands “Mount, eagle, to my palace crystalline” and Ascends (113 and SD). It is a theatrical tour de force, drawing on extended music, rolling of cannonballs offstage for thunder, fireworks or a banner quickly drawn across the stage for lightning, and what was very likely an impressive “squib” for the thunderbolt. Amid all this Jupiter descends upon an eagle, on which he later re‐ascends.
This differs in two particulars from what we have observed earlier at the Globe: the length, variety and/or complexity of the music called for, and the descent machinery. As I shall suggest, these are characteristic of plays expressly written for the Blackfriars. Yet, at 3264 lines, Cymbeline is over 50 percent longer than the 1908 lines of The Malcontent as the boys staged it at the Blackfriars; it is even 30 percent longer than the 2531 lines with which The Malcontent was staged at the Globe. This seems odd if we assume that Blackfriars performances also included music. We may note that Simon Forman says nothing at all about Jupiter or a descent in his record of the play as he saw it. Is it likely that he would overlook such a spectacular scene? (see p. 320, Note 15). But he says nothing, either, about anyone being pursued by a bear, or Hermione’s statue “coming to life,” in The Winter’s Tale. Who can say why he recorded – or omitted – precisely what he did? This does, however, leave open the possibility that Cymbeline was not staged at the Globe as the text we have prescribes. Spectacular as the descent might be, it is not strictly necessary. If Hymen could simply enter as he does in As You Like It (5.4), or Pericles have his vision of Diana without a scripted descent (5.1), Jupiter could certainly make an impressive entrance without pulleys.
There is yet another possibility, but before exploring that it is time to look at plays from this period that have survived in texts very probably intended for Blackfriars performance. Of Shakespeare’s plays two in particular suggest themselves: they are within 100 lines of the length of the original Malcontent and they both call for descents. One of them quite explicitly calls for a wider range of music than we have encountered with any earlier play. These are The Tempest and, more surprisingly, Macbeth. Latterly I shall look at a play that somehow defies the length constraints; possibly the pre‐show concert was not a feature of every performance. The Two Noble Kinsmen is some 2800 lines long, but undoubtedly a Blackfriars play.
The Tempest is 2015 lines long and contains some of the most detailed stage directions of any Shakespeare play, a great majority of them involving sound of one kind or another. It opens with “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard ” (1.1.0 SD). In the second scene, “Enter Ferdinand; and Ariel, invisible, playing and singing” (1.2.377 SD);17 when his song reaches the word “burden” [refrain], the direction is Burden, dispersedly (385 SD) – it is picked up by other supposed spirits, probably in the tiring‐house. In Act 2, “Enter Ariel playing solemn music” (2.1.185 SD) and again “Enter Ariel, with music and song” (298 SD). In the next scene, “Enter Caliban with a burden of wood. A noise of thunder heard” (2.2.0 SD) and “Enter Stephano, singing” (41 SD). When Stephano and Trinculo try to sing together, Caliban recognizes “That’s not the tune” and Ariel obliges: “Ariel plays the tune on a tabor and pipe” (125 SD). When Prospero turns his magic on the king and his party “solemn and strange music; Prospero on the top, invisible” and “Enter several strange shapes, bringing in a banquet, and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations; and inviting the king etc. to eat, they depart” (3.3.17 SD and 19 SD). But then “Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes” (52 SD). The masque which Prospero’s spirits stage in Act 4 starts with “Soft music” (4.1.59 SD) and shortly “Juno descends” (72 SD), apparently taking nearly thirty lines of dialogue before she alights; as the masque turns to dancing, “Enter certain reapers, properly habited. They join with the nymphs in a graceful dance, towards the end whereof Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish” (139 SD). In the next scene, Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban receive less courtly treatment: “A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds, hunting them about, Prospero and Ariel setting them on” (256 SD). As Prospero pursues his course with Alonso and the others, “Ariel sings and helps to attire him” (5.1.87 SD), changing his “magic robes” (5.1.0 SD) for his finery as Duke of Milan. The last piece of theatrical magic is “Here Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda, playing at chess” (172 SD).
As Gurr and Ichikawa observe: “Its off‐stage music, its songs, its two spectacles (a banquet visited by a harpy and a masque), its lack of fights or fireworks, the large proportion of scenes that call for few players on stage, in later years all became standard features of the plays written for indoor venues” (2000, 38). Yet the play is almost on a par with The Devil’s Charter in exploiting its playhouse’s resources – the discovery space, saved till the end (as usual, little happens within it, Ferdinand and Miranda speak from its mouth); a trap – perhaps more sophisticated than the one at the Globe – allowing the banquet to vanish “with a quaint device.” The trap may also explain how the nymphs, reapers and goddesses of the masque “vanish heavily.” (Smoke would be a useful accessory here, and they certainly knew how to use it). There is no conventional use of an upper stage scripted, but Prospero appears at one point “on the top,” which seems to point to an even higher spot above the tiring house, possibly a lantern in the ceiling of the building, a genuinely commanding height. The musicians are called upon to provide Solemn and strange music and soft music, to accompany dancing, and possibly to provide the strange, hollow, and confused noise, while noise‐effects men behind the scenes are kept busy with the thunder and the sounds of hunters, and lightning flashes either with fireworks or with banners. And of course there is the descent, splendid with Juno in her chariot pulled by her sacred peacocks (“Her peacocks fly amain”: 4.1.74).
When we turn to Macbeth there are two features which point to the version as we have it being prepared for the Blackfriars. One is the remarkable brevity: at 2084 lines it is over a thousand lines shorter than Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, or Hamlet, the length that we associate with the indoor theatre. It is one of very few Shakespeare plays, and the only tragedy, that can comfortably be performed within the traditional “two hours” traffic of the stage even today. More tellingly, however, it is apparent that the play has been revised. The play originally dates from circa 1606, since it has allusions to the Gunpowder Plot of the year before; and Simon Forman records having seen it at the Globe on April 20, 1611, presumably in its original form (Rowse, 1974, 308).
But in 3.5 and again in 4.1 the text calls for songs for Hecate and the three witches, only the titles of which are given in the printed version, “Come away, come away” (3.5.36) and “Black spirits” (4.1.44). Those songs are given in full in Thomas Middleton’s tragicomedy, The Witch (circa 1615–16). And it is reasonable to infer that someone – possibly Middleton himself – incorporated them into a revised version of Shakespeare’s play, perhaps at about the same time, giving us the version of the text that we now have. When we look, in particular, at “Come away, come away” in its full original setting we see that it accompanies both a descent and an ascent: “A spirit like a cat descends” (3.5.47.0) and Hecate departs with that spirit:
Now I go, now I fly,
Malkin, my sweet spirit, and I.
O, what a dainty pleasure ’tis
To ride in the air
When the moon shines fair.
(59–63)18
The truncated version we have in the Shakespeare text has Hecate saying “My little spirit, see,/Sits in a foggy cloud and stays for me” (34–5). There is no other explanation of the “little spirit,” so it is reasonable to suppose that the whole sequence with Middleton’s spirit cat was reproduced there, with descent and ascent. And this marks the play as we have it, like The Witch, as probably a Blackfriars one.
I did, however, mention yet another possibility, which further complicates all this guesswork. That is that the Globe might have been adapted (perhaps in the extensive plague breaks of 1608–10), the more readily to allow effects from Blackfriars‐orientated plays to be achieved in the amphitheater. As the company contemplated how to make best use of two playhouses, it would certainly have made sense to ensure that as much of their repertoire as possible could be played in both venues. That is, descent machinery might have been installed and some provision made to house the musicians – answering the question of how the consort were employed during the summer months, when it would seem they exclusively used the Globe. In the Prologue to the folio version of Every Man In His Humour (1616) Jonson derides how the “creaking throne comes down the boys to please” in plays other than his own, making it seem like a traditional feature of popular theatre. But, as we have seen, the surviving record of the Globe’s repertoire, and certainly of Shakespeare’s plays, makes no demands on such a facility until after the company’s acquisition of the Blackfriars. Such texts may therefore actually reflect solely Blackfriars, or they may indicate that the Globe installed equipment for descents around this time.19
Housing for the musicians is an issue in itself. So long as the King’s Men used the Theatre, Curtain, or Globe there was no call to make special provision for them – trumpeters and drummers would perform on stage, or within the tiring house, as would those who played an occasional flute or lute. But once they had the Blackfriars and its consort separate provision would have to have been made. Indeed, we might assume that there was already such provision in the playhouse as they acquired it from the boys. But some new thinking might have been necessary at the Globe, if indeed the consort also served there in some capacity.
There are several references in the era to “music houses” or “music rooms,” in both public and private playhouse, though none in a public playhouse earlier than circa 1610. Antonio’s Revenge (circa 1600), for example, requires that “While the measure is dancing, Andrugio’s Ghost is placed betwixt the music houses” (5.5.17.2–3 SD). This was at the Paul’s playhouse where, as E. K. Chambers puts it, “there was at the back of the stage a ‘musick tree,’ which apparently rose out of a ‘canopie’ and bore a ‘music house’ on either side of it” (ES, 2: 557). Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (? 1613), the only play specifically known to have been written for the Swan, contains the direction “there is a sad song in the music‐room” – but see p. 10 (5.4.0 SD; 2007b). And Jasper Mayne specifically praised Jonson, after his death, that “Thou laidst no sieges to the music room” (Jonsonus Virbius, 1638).
This last strongly suggests that music rooms might be on the same level as upper stages which, in addition to permitting windows or balcony scenes, were sometimes used to represent the battlements of a besieged town or castle. So, for example, “Richard appeareth on the walls” (3.3.61.3–4) and talks to Northumberland in Richard II, and “Enter Henry the Sixth and Richard, with the Lieutenant, on the walls” in Richard III (5.6.0 SD). In The Devil’s Charter, as we saw, the action could be much more athletic and involve the use of scaling ladders. Mayne’s point is that Jonson did not write plays that called for such derring‐do – and as a result did not disturb the musicians in the music room. But he may indirectly be telling us that when plays did call for such action they cleared the music room temporarily for those purposes. That would mean that they would not have to disturb the spectators in the lords’ rooms, which were also apparently on the same level as the upper stage, who would however have an unusually good view of the action. In respect of the Blackfriars, however, it should be said that there is no evidence of lords’ rooms being used after the King’s Men took over: Dekker’s joke that the fashion of the gentry for sitting on the stage had rendered them theatrical “suburbs” may have been only too apt (see p. 295, 298). They may still have been there but ceased to have pride of place, making them less worthy of mention. This may also have made it easier to install a music room on that level.
Let us begin to conclude this narrative of Shakespeare’s theatre with a reflection on the moment, probably in 1610, when the playwright first faced up to writing for an indoor playhouse, something he had never done in a career of twenty years or more. Of course, as we have observed, the Blackfriars in many respects tried to recreate the ambience of the great houses of the gentry and he had long experience of working in such places. Moreover, he was well used to performances by candlelight, which he would have found at the Inns of Court and at the court itself – though the latter put on a blaze of light that it seems the commercial playhouses could hardly afford to emulate. Nevertheless there are signs that he payed careful attention to writing for his new venue, taking his cue from someone with long experience of indoor playhouses.
Ben Jonson had written Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster for the Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars shortly after that operation opened in 1600. And most recently he had written Epicene, or The Silent Woman for the Children of the Whitefriars, a company put together from remnants of the Blackfriars boys and the King’s Revels troupe – notionally a boy company, though most of them by now were young men. The King’s Men had commissioned Jonson to write one of their earliest new plays for the Blackfriars, if not in fact the very first of them. Jonson wrote them The Alchemist, a play specifically set in the Blackfriars precinct: all the action takes place in or just outside Lovewit’s house, “here, in the Friars” (1.1.17; 2012a) and the play abounds in local details (Jonson lived nearby), such as a gibe at Face for being an “apocryphal captain,/Whom not a Puritan in Blackfriars will trust/So much as for a feather” (1.1.127–9). There was a notable Puritan community in the district and they were leaders in the trade in feathers for the fashion industry.
In its close adherence to this single location the The Alchemist conformed to the classical unity of place, a most unusual choice for a Jacobean dramatist, though one that Jonson increasingly followed. He also followed the unity of time with an exactness that even Aristotle could hardly have contemplated, marking off the progress of the action with great deliberation. As Peter Holland and William Sherman put it, “The Prologue’s ‘two short hours’ for the performance come remarkably close to the play’s fictional time‐span” (Jonson 2012a, 545). And Jonson pins the date of the action just as precisely: November 1, 1610. Some have thought this was the day of its first performance at the Blackfriars, and it might have been. But this would have been difficult to predict, given the long‐running plague (which is also an issue within the play). The one context in which Jonson could be certain that a performance would take place on that set date was at court, where under King James November 1 was the usual first day of the Revels season – and court Revels continued, plague or no plague. We have no record of what plays the King’s Men put on in that court season of 1610/11 but there were fifteen of them, and I would not bet against The Alchemist having been the first.
The old Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, had died that August and been replaced by Sir George Buc. Jonson already knew him; they mixed in the circle of Sir Robert Cotton and both drew on his famous library (Sharpe, 1979, 195–221). Shakespeare also knew him, since Buc had approached him for information about an old play, of which he had acquired a copy (Nelson, 1998). Buc was doubtless anxious to make a good impression in his first season in charge of the court Revels and Jonson – well known at court for his masques, which he produced almost annually – would have been a strong choice to lead it off, as he was to do three years later, when Bartholomew Fair led off the 1614/15 Revels. All of this could only have given Shakespeare more of an incentive to learn what he could from Jonson.
Andrew Gurr argues that “Shakespeare’s Tempest … was almost certainly written while The Alchemist was in rehearsal” (1996, 80). And we know that Jonson’s play was ready by late summer (August/September) 1610 since it was alongside Othello in the repertory of the King’s Men at Oxford, on tour to escape the plague (Sutton, 2006). It is as if Shakespeare took his cue from these lines of Jonson: “I will teach you/How to beware to tempt a fury again/That carries tempest in hand and voice” (1.1.60–2). Where The Alchemist barely moves outside Lovewit’s house, The Tempest is entirely confined to Prospero’s island (in a marked break from the wide‐ranging geographies of recent plays like Cymbeline and Thr Winter’s Tale). Jonson’s play is about con‐trickery centering on the figure of a (fake) alchemist – a magician of sorts; Shakespeare’s is about a magician with real powers, working his spells on a range of different characters (Levin, 1971). And The Tempest “seems to parody Jonson’s timing by matching the time of the plot immaculately not just to the time of a day but to the time of the performance … Both plays were written for afternoon performance at the Blackfriars” (Gurr, 80).
But there the similarities end. Jonson sticks by his commitment to a kind of realism in the sorts of characters he portrays and their speech, offering “deeds and language such as men do use/And persons such as comedy would choose” (Prologue to Every Man In His Humour, folio text, 9–10; 2012 h. See pp, 244; 308). The plot may operate with the finest artistry, but its raw materials are characters drawn straight from the streets of London. By contrast, Shakespeare presents us with airy spirits and a “servant monster” apparently spawned by a witch (3.2.3, 4 & 8); and they are located on a remote island, apparently in the Mediterranean but bearing touches of the Americas. The Alchemist calls for no music at all and the only scripted sound effect is “A great crack and noise within” as the alchemist’s supposed “works/Are blown in fumo” (4.5.54.1, 57–8), whereas:
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears.
(3.2.1369)
Caliban’s wonder surely echoes the effect of this play on the audience at the Blackfriars. And Alonso, King of Naples, seems to voice not only his own amazement but that of most people in the playhouse: “This must crave ‐‐/An if this be at all – a most strange story”; “These are not natural events; they strengthen/From strange to stranger”; “This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod” (5.1.116–17, 229–30, 244). “Strangeness” is a particular characteristic of Shakespeare’s late plays (though it is not uncommon in earlier works), possibly in response to qualities of the Blackfriars stage.
Jonson plays the alchemical trick of turning the base metal of everyday life into gold; Shakespeare turns “a most strange story” into a moving enactment of remorse, redemption and reconciliation, where “Prospero [did find] his dukedom/In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves/When no man was his own” (Gonzalo, 5.1.213–15). But at heart what both of them are doing is dramatizing the experience of theatre itself. For Jonson, acting is always a confidence trick, and his three principals are all actors: Subtle pretending to be an alchemist or cunning man, Dol playing the Queen of Faery, and Face, the con‐artist par excellence, who shifts from Captain to Lungs to Jeremy butler at a farcical pace. While they collaborate their “venture tripartite” is invincible, each bearing up the others’ credibility; they string along a dizzying succession of different dramas to satisfy each of the gulls they lure into Lovewit’s house. The return of Lovewit, however, confronts all these fantasies with a blunt common sense, exploding them all in fumo – only to leave us with a wry twist in which Lovewit’s restored mastery is seen to be a scenario which Jeremy/Face continues to control.
Prospero’s “so potent art” (5.1.50) is a very different medium, one confident that the audience will meet him halfway in sustaining a mystery. If they are being conned they know it and willingly share in a suspension of disbelief for the pleasure and emotional release it will bring. It is, perhaps literally, perhaps metaphorically, a collective act of faith, most majestic but also most vulnerable when – in an obseisance of sorts to Jonson – Prospero stages the masque of Juno, Ceres, and Iris to mark the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda (4.1.60–142). He calls it “Some vanity of mine art” and confirms to Ferdinand that the actors are indeed “Spirits, which by mine art/I have from their confines called to enact/My present fancies” (41, 120–2). On New Year’s Day 1611 the latest of Jonson’s masques, Oberon, was magnificently staged at court by Inigo Jones; as usual the speaking parts were performed by members of the King’s Men. So here Shakespeare likens his fellow actors (who of course also played the roles of Juno, Ceres, and Iris) to “spirits” summoned by “mine art.” Theatre is a piece of magic which entraps even the magician himself, which is why in the Epilogue Prospero has to invoke the power of prayer, the ultimate expression of faith:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer.
(13–16)
The rivalry between Shakespeare and Jonson brought out the best in both of them, and in these plays both of them produced supremely effective plays at polar opposites of theatrical style and philosophy. Both plays, we must assume, performed equally well at the Blackfriars playhouse for which they were written. But it is likely that they were transferred at times to the Globe and we know that they were both performed at court – The Tempest is recorded on November 1, 1611, while both it and The Alchemist were among the twenty plays the King’s Men put on over the Revels season of 1612–13, which included the wedding of James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine.20 Whatever the playhouse, the plays had to be transportable.
One of the advantages that the Blackfriars shared with the Globe was that it was closely adjacent to the Thames, which made the process of transporting the actors, costumes, and properties to court – especially to nearby Whitehall, where James usually stayed over Christmas – much easier than it had been from the Theatre or the Curtain. It was perfectly possible for them to perform as usual in the afternoon, ending around 5 p.m., and be set up to to appear at court after supper, around 9 p.m. The court, as have noted, was always a major factor in the flourishing of Shakespeare’s company, and it is in his late plays that we see some tangible effects of this. The Winter’s Tale, for example, contains “a dance of twelve Satyrs” (4.4.342.1), which was clearly borrowed (costumes and all) from the antimasque to Oberon, an entertainment in which numerous satyrs appear. The same play, notoriously, contains the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear.” This has generated much hilarity over the ages but also a serious debate over whether it could have been a real bear, brought in from one of the nearby bear‐baiting pits. The discussion has even been refined recently by the discovery that in 1609 King James was presented with two polar bear cubs, from a Muscovy Company expedition. Could it have been one of those – rather safer than a full‐grown fighting bear? It would still have been extremely difficult to control it.
We should consider that in Oberon Henry, the Prince of Wales, was brought on stage in a chariot pulled by two bears. There was no way that the safety of the heir to the throne was going to be compromised by the use of live bears: these were men in bear suits. And the coincidence of timing makes it extremely likely that the bear in The Winter’s Tale was also a man in one of those suits. Such a suit was presumably court property, though it is possible that the King’s Men might borrow or lease it by arrangement with the Revels Office, which cared for costumes used in court entertainments. But such questions lie behind Tiffany Stern’s wider questioning about these court/playhouse interactions: “was the masque [of satyrs] added specifically, and perhaps only, for a court performance of the play (like the one that took place on 5 November 1611) as a reprise of a loved event? In other words, is Masque of Oberons’s antimasque successfully and permanently melded into Shakespeare’s play, or is it only a temporary visitor there?” (2009a, 151). The fact is that we do not know. We only have a single version of all Shakespeare’s plays written after King Lear (1606) and can never be certain what venue or occasion that version was prepared for.21
Prospero’s prayer for release at the end of The Tempest is popularly and understandably thought to speak for Shakespeare himself. But the biographical evidence does not really bear this out. The Tempest was evidently written 1610/11. Shakespeare was still to write Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and (apparently) the lost Cardenio, which meant that he was still writing (in regular collaboration now with John Fletcher) until 1613 at least, possibly even 1614; Fletcher was the man who was to succeed Shakespeare as the company’s contracted “ordinary poet,” though he was never an actor or sharer in the company (but see E. Collins, 2007). Moreover in March 1613 Shakespeare finally bought a property in London, after a career spent in rented accommodation. And it was in the Blackfriars gateway complex, barely 200 yards from the playhouse (Schoenbaum, 272–5).
None of this speaks to a man urgently preparing to retire. But in fact he never seems to have lived in his Blackfriars property and it is difficult to locate him in any theatrical activity after 1614. In the will Shakespeare drew up shortly before his death in April 1616 there is no mention of his share in the King’s Men or his shares in either of their playhouses. He had evidently made a clean break by then, selling off all his holdings. We do not know who he sold the shares in the Globe and the Blackfriars to, but since no outsiders can be traced who might have acquired them, it seems likely that he sold them to colleagues, keeping it all in the company.
But what was left of the company that he co‐founded? There is some measure of this in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which was first performed in 1613/14, “privately, at the Blackfriars; and publicly at the Globe” (1623 title‐page). It is the first English play ever printed which included itemized details of its original cast and so gives us a snapshot of the company around the moment Shakespeare withdrew. John Lowin played Bosola; Richard Burbage played Duke Ferdinand; Henry Condell played the Cardinal; William Ostler played Antonio; John Underwood played Delio; Nicholas Tooley played Forobosco (Underwood and Tooley also played some of the madmen).22 For some of these roles a second name is given, evidently relating to a revival of the play circa 1621/2. So the dead Burbage was replaced by Joseph Taylor, who had transferred to the King’s Men from Lady Elizabeth’s Men – he was also to pick up other Burbage roles, including Hamlet. Condell was replaced by Richard Robinson; he had not died but this is perhaps a marker that, like Heminge (who does not appear here at all) he had retired from playing, though he remained in some capacity as a sharer. Robert Benfield, an addition to the company by 1616, replaced the dead Ostler.
Lower down the cast the information seems all to relate to the revival. John Rice is allocated the role of the Marquis of Pescara; he had left the King’s Men in 1611, still a boy, and may not have returned until 1619 (see p. 183, 186–7). Richard Sharpe is named as the Duchess, but had surely been too young for the role in 1613/14; we encountered him earlier in Herbert’s Protection List of 1624, when he was still on the point of becoming a sharer – he might well have played the Duchess in 1621/22. As noted earlier, it seems most likely to have been Richard Robinson, the company’s leading boy actors at that date, who created the role (see p. 187).
So in 1613/14 only Burbage and Condell of the original group that assembled in 1594/5 were still acting; Heminge had moved exclusively into management. These were the three Shakespeare was to remember with gold rings in his will. Richard Cowley was still officially with the company, but Webster does not credit him with a role. Bryan, Pope, Phillips, Kemp, Sly, and Fletcher had all died or left the company; even Armin had retired circa 1611. The Globe itself burned down on June 29, 1613. As Sir Henry Wotton wryly observed: “This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottled ale” (quoted in Schoenbaum, 1987, 276–7). This was in the middle of a performance of All is True (Henry VIII), with Lowin in the title role, which was fortuitous since it meant that all the company personnel were on hand to help save the essentials, including “allowed books,” plots, parts, costumes, and props. (This contrasts with the burning down of the Fortune in 1621, when the Revels Company lost all its plays and properties.) The experience evidently demonstrated the benefit of having two playhouses, and the sharers rebuilt the Globe, on a brick foundation and with a tiled, rather than thatched, roof; it was completed in less than a year, a testament to the value of what it was replacing.
But probably without Shakespeare’s involvement. His last work for the company, as far as we can tell, was The Two Noble Kinsmen, co‐written with John Fletcher, the only one of his plays published (though not until 1634) as only performed at the Blackfriars. And in it the theatre of the era completes a circuit, since the play tells the same tale of Palamon and Arcite, taken from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, as Richard Edwardes’ Palamon and Arcite, performed before Elizabeth at Oxford in 1566. It seems to have been staged late in 1613 or early 1614, and demonstrates the authors’ complete command of Blackfriars staging.
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play of ceremonial, of ritual, of chivalric display. It has what might be described as a carefully scheduled soundtrack, which must have been particularly effective in the enclosed confines of the Blackfriars, modulating between the music of courtly ceremony, song, country dancing, repeated sennets on the battlefield and the shrill of cornetts, outcries of passion from offstage. It opens with a spectacular procession:
Music. Enter Hymen with a torch burning; a boy in a white robe before, singing and strewing flowers. After Hymen a nymph, encompassed in her tresses, bearing a wheaten garland. Then Theseus between two other nymphs with wheaten chaplets on their heads. Then Hippolyta, the bride, led by Pirithous, and another holding a garland over her head (her tresses likewise hanging). After her Emilia, holding up her train. (B1)23
The situation is that at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the tone and mood are very different. It is reminiscent of some of Jonson’s court masques, notably his wedding masque, Hymenaei, of 1606. The text then prints the boy’s song, “Roses their sharp spines being gone.” Immediately there is another ceremonial, but contrasting, entry: “Enter three Queens in black, with veils stained, with imperial crowns. The first Queen falls down at the foot of Theseus; the second falls down at the foot of Hippolytta; the third before Emilia” (B1v).
Theseus agrees to defer his wedding to help the three queens bury their dead husbands, which can only be achieved by force of arms: “Cornetts. A Battle struck within. Then a retreat: Flourish. Then enter Theseus (victor); the three queens meet him, and fall on their faces before him” (C4). The stage of the Blackfriars was too small to handle battle scenes, all the more so when it had members of the audience sitting, standing, or reclining on it. So Shakespeare and Fletcher handle the violence of the play offstage, generating something of the tension of classical drama, which likewise did not portray violent acts. But here the soundtrack makes them almost tangible. The next scene begins: “Music. Enter the Queens with the hearses of their knights, in a funeral solemnity, &c” (C4v).
In the middle of the play a different tone is introduced, with various Maying activities. It appears first at the start of Act 3 (“Cornetts in sundry places. Noise and hallowing as people a‐maying”), when an angry confrontation between Palamon and Arcite is counterpointed by the repeated sounding of horns, from Theseus and Hippolyta engaged in the Maying offstage. We can, incidentally, talk confidently about “acts” in this play; they are the units of dramatic action, not a printer’s affectation. The Maying culminates in morris dancing, flagged by the direction: “Enter a Schoolmaster, four Countrymen: and [one dressed as a baboon]. Two or three wenches, with a Taborer” (G2). The taborer, who would almost certainly also have been playing a pipe, signals that we are in the festive mode of a Tarlton or Kemp (see p. 44 and Figure 2.1). But this is foolery that has been fully absorbed into the aesthetics of the court. The sequence had in fact been scripted by Fletcher’s former partner, Francis Beaumont, as the second antimasque in the Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn, presented on February 20, 1613 at Whitehall as part of the festivities for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. It is introduced here like the dance of satyrs in The Winter’s Tale, suggesting the sexual passion that lies behind the wooing of Theseus and Hippolyta, and Palamon, Arcite, Emilia and the Jailor’s Daughter (p. 288). But its energy is not allowed to degenerate into a version of Kemp’s jigging.
By the fifth act ceremony and ritual reassert themselves, as the contest between Palamon and Arcite for Emilia takes on the form of a stylized Jacobean tourney, though here a tourney in deadly earnest. To a “flourish” of cornetts, “Enter Palamon and Arcite and their knights.” Arcite and his knights pray to Mars, falling on their faces and then kneeling. When he asks Mars for a sign “Here they fall on their faces as formerly, and there is heard clanging of armour, with a short thunder as the burst of a battle, whereupon they all rise and bow to the altar” (K4v). As they leave Palamon and his knights return and they repeat these rituals, but praying to Venus rather than Mars. When he asks for a sign: “Here music is heard. Doves are seen to flutter. They fall again upon their faces, then on their knees” (L1v). Doves were sacred to Venus; perhaps they were real doves, released behind the altar, perhaps it was an effect created by casting shadows on a screen.
They return to the conflict. Emilia enters to pray to Diana, goddess of chastity.
Still music of recorders. Enter Emilia in white, her hair about her shoulders, a wheaten wreath. One in white holding up her train, her hair stuck with flowers. One before her carrying a silver Hind, in which is conveyed incense and sweet odours, which being set upon the Altar, her maids standing aloof, she sets fire to it, then they curtsey and kneel. (L1v)
“Still” means that the recorders played throughout. As Emilia’s prayer progresses: “Here the Hind vanishes under the altar: and in the place ascends a rose tree, having one rose upon it” and shortly thereafter “Here is heard a sudden twang of instruments, and the rose falls from the tree,” symbolizing – despite her wish to remain a virgin – her imminent marriage.
The contest between Palamon and Arcite takes place offstage in the penultimate scene, which is repeatedly punctuated with cornetts, cries, shouts, and noises offstage, eventually announcing “Arcite, victory.” In the final scene Palamon is brought to the scaffold, his penalty for losing. But at the last moment he is saved by news that Arcite has been thrown from his horse, crushed and mortally wounded, thus leaving Palamon the winner of Emilia’s hand, by an inscrutable stroke of fate.
I have barely alluded here to the secondary plot of the Jailor’s Daughter, which is unremarkable in its staging, but offers as it were occasional respite from the intense stylization of the main story. The latter is perfectly attuned to the confined space of the Blackfriars auditorium, which doubtless reinforced its intensity as what I have described as the soundtrack is played out, with wooden cornetts heavily in evidence, but softer recorders at one poignant moment, repeated cries offstage, and crucially “a sudden twang of instruments” as Emilia’s rose falls. The demands on the stage are actually minimal: nothing that requires descent machinery, a discovery space or even a trapdoor, unless one was needed to effect the sudden vanishing of Emilia’s hind. The most remarkable effects are those involving the altar: the fluttering of the doves, the disappearance of the hind (which is, of course, alight), the growth of the rose tree, and the fall of the rose. All doubtless very effective in a small auditorium, as would be the “incense and sweet odours” carried in the hind.
One of the play’s most memorable pieces of staging seems to have been the one use of an upper stage: “Enter Palamon and Arcite above” (D1v); the next stage direction clarifies that they are in fact in prison, following Theseus’s victory. This is where they first catch sight of Emilia, love for whom shatters their long friendship. I call this memorable, because Jonson thought it worthy of parody in Bartholomew Fair. As M. C. Bradbrook observed: “The puppeteer shows two faithful friends Damon and Pythias falling out for love of Hero, and abusing each other … Bartholomew Fair, with its puppets leaning out of the booth, must visually have evoked the two prisoners [in The Two Noble Kinsmen] leaning out of their prison window: it testifies to the earlier show’s success, for Jonson would not waste his satire on a failure” (1976, 241). The joke for Jonson would doubtless have been all the sweeter if The Two Noble Kinsmen had been performed at court, so that the satire would be appreciated there when Bartholomew Fair led off the 1614/15 Revels season.
Court staging would in many respects have resembled that at the Blackfriars, though the surroundings would have been more lavish and the lighting brighter (see p. 2, 119). But is this a play that would have transferred comfortably to the Globe? There is nothing in it that precludes its being played there, but it is difficult to believe that the effects of the music, the smells and the miracles at the altar would be as intense on a much larger stage, in sunlight and the open air. Shakespeare and Fletcher had constructed something that would always be most comfortable and effective in small, élite auditoria.
It was now, rather than with The Tempest, that Shakespeare finally bowed out. He had mastered every kind of theatrical venue that the King’s Men would ever perform in, down to its dissolution in the Civil War. And he left them an unrivalled, time‐honored collection of plays, most of which were crafted and recrafted to suit any and all of those venues – a solid core in their repertoire and fortunes going forward. That was what the 1623 First Folio of his Comedies, Histories and Tragedies was to acknowledge when Heminge and Condell compiled it, “to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare” (Dedication to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, A2v). They were the last survivors of the 1594 company and had prospered more than any from its success. They knew that Shakespeare was a central factor in that success, not only an incomparable poet but a man who understood what worked on their stages.
It tells us everything that in the winter of 1604/5, the second of King James’s reign, when his players were called to perform at Whitehall a total of eleven times, eight of those plays were Shakespeare’s: Othello, Merry Wives, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry the Fifth, and The Merchant of Venice twice (apparently because Prince Henry missed the first performance: ES, 4: 171–2). One wonders what they had performed the previous year, the first of the reign – Hamlet? Much Ado? 1 Henry IV? As You Like It? There was a phenomenal back‐catalogue already to draw on. But, as is usually the case, that information has not survived. By the same token we do not know why Shakespeare chose to retire after The Two Noble Kinsmen. Possibly his looming fiftieth birthday was cause enough. His revels, however, had certainly now ended.