“1594” Roundtable Transcript

On January 26, 2011, authors from Shakespeare Quarterly’s special issue “1594”—Andrew Gurr, Holger Schott Syme, Leslie Thomson, and Bart van Es—participated in a roundtable on the issues raised by their essays and the importance of this year to Shakespeare studies and theater history. The transcript of their discussion appears below, and we welcome your comments and reactions.

Mimi Godfrey
Managing Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly

I’d like to invite our authors to step forward in the blogosphere and tell us a little about yourself—your name, affiliation, and the title of your essay.

Bart van Es

Just to do the introduction bit. I’m Bart van Es, from the University of Oxford. My essay, “‘Johannes fac Totum ?’: Shakespeare’s First Contact with the Acting Companies,” questions the orthodoxy that Shakespeare started out as a player.

Holger Syme

Hi all,

To do Mimi’s bidding—I’m Holger Syme; I teach at the University of Toronto (a couple of doors down the corridor from Leslie); and my essay (“The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594 and Its Aftermath”) concerned itself with the mismatch between what many theater historians have told us about who succeeded when and how in the theater world of the 1590s and what the archival record actually has to say about the issue.

I agree with Leslie: evidence and its (ab)uses is very much a core concern of my essay, and does seem to be a common theme across most, if not all, of the essays in this volume.

Leslie Thomson

As Holger has indicated, I’m at the University of Toronto. In my article, “Staging on the Road, 1586–1594: A New Look at Some Old Assumptions,” I tried to assemble enough material[em]playing companies, extant plays (probably) belonging to those companies, and some certainty that those companies were performing in the provinces between 1586 and 1594—in order to call into question the idea that provincial performances were necessarily, or even typically, short and brutish. Did I succeed? Time will tell, I suppose.

Although the announced focus for this forum is “1594,” that year is not a concern of my article—or of Bart van Es’s, for that matter. What all of the articles in this issue do have in common, however, is that they attempt to interpret evidence that is often minimal at best, or to fill gaps in that evidence with guesses. Moreover, we are all engaged in calling into question previous interpretations of evidence or absences. And because all the articles show these kinds of analyses in action, they seem to me to provide “case studies” that raise questions about what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Bart van Es

Hello, Leslie—
It is true that my article is not about 1594, but I do believe that year is important (and wrote about it some time back in the TLS). I think Ros’s and Holger’s work in these essays is amazing, but I’d still like to make the case for the importance of the year.

Holger Syme

I agree that the year is important, though I think what Ros and I would say is that it’s not necessarily important for the reasons that have traditionally—or in the past decades—been suggested. The coming into being of the Chamberlain’s Men was certainly a key event (even if they may not have settled into their near-final shape immediately), though it may have been more significant for literary history than for theater history.

Mimi Godfrey

Bart, a good deal of your work lies in your careful unpicking of that familiar quotation from Green’s Groatsworth of Wit—the reference to “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Tell us more about what we didn’t know, or didn’t understand, about this mocking allusion to Shakespeare.

Bart van Es

What I’m trying to do is contextualize that quotation in various ways:
1) highlighting that it is the sole basis of the orthodox idea that Shakespeare started out as a player;
2) picking apart the meaning of key phrases in it (such as “fac totum” itself, which is generally used of servants and turncoats and never for a “universal genius”);
3) painting a picture of the world around that quotation, which I suggest shows Shakespeare no different from other poet-playwrights who acted, like Heywood and Jonson.

Mimi Godfrey

Does this take Shakespeare off the pedestal of Bardolatry to some extent? (Or are we simply reluctant to let go of our more romantic picture of Shakespeare being swept up into the world of the theater, and only later turning to writing?)

Holger Syme

I thought the critique of the orthodoxy in your essay was very sharp and long overdue. But I was wondering about your point about Jonson, and particularly Heywood. How much do we really know about their career paths? How do we know they were playwrights/poets first? Certainly historically, it would have been unexceptional, wouldn’t it, for actors to also write plays (though few reached print).

Bart van Es

Well, we certainly know that both Jonson and Heywood acted. If people are happy to concede that Shakespeare was a player in the same sense that Jonson was a player, then I’ll certainly accept that. But they were very different from those who were players first and then occasional writers (such as Kemp). I think Shakespeare’s poetry and education puts him in a very different camp from the conventional player.

Holger Syme

I agree, Bart, that Shakespeare was a better poet than Kemp. We really know too little about most other actors’ education to make that distinction, though.

What I’m primarily concerned with is the issue of sequence in your argument. I don’t mind the idea that Shakespeare was always more of a writer than a player. The evidence can be read either way, I think. But I’d like to see more evidence that anyone else started out as a poet and then became an actor. Why make Shakespeare play at all, if his job is to write? (Heywood, notably, bound himself to Henslowe as a player; only his playwriting isn’t mentioned in the contract.)

Bart van Es

The contract is for Heywood to be a covenant servant, a hired man, and probably primarily an actor. That is what I suggest may have happened with Shakespeare in 1592. In 1594 he became a sharer. Like Heywood in 1600, he thereafter writes only for one company.

Holger Syme

Heywood, Richard Alleyn, Charles Massey, and Samuel Rowley are treated in identical terms in the 1598 contracts. All they say is that they cannot act for anyone else. But how do those documents tell us anything about Heywood’s “primary” identity? Was he a player first, a poet first, primarily a player initially while writing on the side (or vice versa), et cetera?

The connection between being a sharer and authorial exclusivity seems compelling to me, but also commonsensical: a sharer-author could obviously make more money writing for his own company than selling his plays, for a one-time fee only, to a competing company. A mere hired player, even if on a long-term contract, doesn’t have the same financial incentive to be faithful.

Bart van Es

Sure. Again, if you think of Shakespeare in the same way as you think of Heywood, then I’m happy. This is a humanist educated writer of learned plays and not a “common player.” What I’m objecting to is exactly that romantic phantom that Mimi mentioned: the traveling player who was somehow a remarkable upstart, very different from other writers, in 1592 when he is called an “upstart crow.” That kind of thing was said of Kyd, Munday, and Jonson, so it’s not a marker of some remarkable outsider status.

I don’t really agree that we know too little. The moralities and reports about them give us a pretty good sense of the output of the companies, as opposed to the material they imported from poets.

Holger Syme

Oh, yes. That part I agree with: Shakespeare was no more of an outsider than many others, poets or players. But he was also not necessarily less of an outsider than some of his fellow players who didn’t become writers. The “common player” image could clearly be employed strategically by people like Greene in order to suggest social and intellectual divisions that often simply didn’t exist.

Leslie Thomson

Sorry, folks. My dog’s not in this fight.

Bart van Es

But I guess the “dog” might be the larger question of how we read evidence (as you and Holger have been saying). I guess a lot of this is a matter of how far you take your skepticism. Of course, Andrew’s famous account of the establishment of a duopoly is a theory rather than a hard fact of history. But, whatever the underlying mechanism, taking the long view, 1594 would prove pivotal. From that point on, a duopoly of some sort was certainly the official position for many years. The February 1598 letter to the Master of the Revels and the Justices of Peace for Middlesex and Surrey confirms that the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s were the only authorized performers in London: all other companies were to be suppressed. Those companies were also linked to official theaters. This is clear from the June 1600 Privy Council order to the Lord Mayor and the Justices that all but the two licensed playhouses should be closed. At this point these were the Globe (for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) and the Fortune (“now in hand to be builte” by Edward Alleyn).

Of course it’s absolutely right that those orders were not implemented. But they did set a baseline that accorded privilege to London’s preeminent companies. Other things confirm this change in the marketplace. As Holger says, 1594 saw the virtual invention of the printed play. Suddenly, a large body of dramatic manuscripts came into publishers’ possession. While companies’ attitudes to the publication of their playtexts were more variable than we sometimes imagined, it remains highly likely that manuscripts were sold because troupes of players were under pressure and beginning to leave London. Henslowe’s reports about Pembroke’s Men have to count for something. Sure, survival of evidence is very piecemeal, but the companies left without a court commission do not appear to have purchased new plays after the creation of the duopoly: in the Annals of English Drama, there are no new plays listed for outfits other than the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s. With the exception of Pembroke’s short-lived venture at the Swan, this remains true until the reemergence of the boy players in 1599. The pattern of play distribution across companies is thus very different after 1594 from that which existed earlier. At court, the dominance of the two companies is likewise total. So in major ways the year did involve a reshaping of the theatrical map.

Andrew Gurr

Andy Gurr, here. I’m keen to hear what folk think about the 1594 date. After browsing through Roslyn’s article about the spread so far beyond 1594, I still suspect that the key question in many people’s minds must be what happened in May 1594, when the Bard had his fellow-Stratfordian Richard Field publish his second long poem, dedicated to Southampton, and then found himself pushed into the new company with his plays. Henslowe noted the new company performing his older plays in that month. How benign was the Bard over this transfer of his plays and probably his role as a player into the new company? This is a part of what lies behind the emphasis on 1594 as a key date for theater history. I’d welcome anything that challenges and speculates about what was going on in that time.

Mimi Godfrey

Welcome, Andy.

Andrew Gurr’s essay is “Venues on the Verges: Londons Theater Government between 1594 and 1614.” He has published several books on the early acting companies and has edited two Shakespeare plays and others by Beaumont and Fletcher. Currently, he is helping to complete the New Variorum edition of The Tempest.

Bart van Es

Hello, Andrew—
For me, the most crucial thing is Shakespeare’s appearance as a sharer. As you know, I’m very skeptical about his having started out as a player. So for me this is the moment where (like Heywood in 1600) he makes a crucial decision about where affiliations lie. I think this changes the way he works as a writer. Most obviously (in spite of Lucas Erne’s thesis), I think Shakespeare ceased to take a primary interest in print. Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) had been printed to the highest standards by one of London’s foremost literary publishers. These were authorial publications for which Shakespeare provided a personal dedication to his patron. After joining the Chamberlain’s, Shakespeare would never bring out poetry in this way again and quite possibly he ceased to play any part in the print publication of his work. This was a pattern of career development quite different from that of his contemporaries: poets such as Drayton and Chapman continued to publish poetry even as they worked as playwrights. For Shakespeare the common features of the life of the poet-playwright that he had hitherto shared (print publication, the search for patronage, co-authorship, composition for multiple companies) dropped away. They were replaced by a more intense concentration upon the interaction of characters upon the stage. I think Shakespeare also changed the way in which he wrote drama, but that’s a bigger claim that I’m currently trying to substantiate in a book.

Holger Syme

Hi, Andy—
I think before we can talk about how Shakespeare felt or reacted to events (which we may not be able to do in any meaningful way at all anyway), we need to question what those events were. How do we know anyone was “pushed”? How do we know the plays were “his”? How do we know that they all became part of the new company’s repertory? I’m not aware of any evidence concerning agency or details about any of this.

Mimi Godfrey

Bart, could you talk some more about how Shakespeare “changed the way in which he wrote drama”?

Bart van Es

Dear Mimi—
Yes, though that is not something easy to do within the space limits of a blog forum. I think that for the first time Shakespeare has certainty about the identity of the actors for whom his writing—not just for the first performance but for many years in the repertory. The kind of distinctiveness you get in post-1594 plays: the tall Helena, the dwarfish Hermia, the diminutive Snug; the whole fact of the farce rehearsal. These are signs of a closeness to the actors that we do not have in Shakespeare’s earlier plays.

Holger Syme

I disagree on multiple counts, Bart.

1594 can only become pivotal—in retrospect—if we assume the 1598 order to reflect a four-year old policy. There’s no evidence for this. On the other hand, it follows on the heels of the upheavals of summer 1597, which might actually have produced a desire to control playing in London more tightly. I don’t know of any evidence for such a desire on the part of the Privy Council in or around 1594.

We have no evidence that links company failure to an increased volume of publication. That’s a historiographical assumption. We don’t know that the Queen’s Men failed (at all). We don’t know what happened to Pembroke’s Men—they were alive and well a year later, after all.

Court success is one thing, and obviously important, but it’s not evidence for anything that happened in London. There were at least three and, soon after 1594, four playhouses up and running: what did they stage (how could they operate) if there were only two companies?

The Annals is about the least reliable source of theater-historical evidence in existence. We’ve lost so many of the plays in Henslowe, and there’s such a steady trickle of unattributed plays being published throughout our period that it’s simply impossible to say that “other companies” didn’t commission plays.

Bart van Es

You make many convincing points. Playhouses, though, were used for other purposes: fencing, baiting, clowning, archery competitions, et cetera, et cetera. And there is a difference between playhouses that accommodate traveling companies and those that involve permanent residence. There’s a big change there with the Rose after 1594, surely?

Holger Syme

Well, that’s the orthodox view. I’d say that we really, truly, don’t know that to be the case. For all we know, if the plague hadn’t interrupted them, Strange’s Men would have continued on at the Rose for years after 1592/3. And since we have no records, we also have no idea what was going on at the Curtain and the Theatre, let alone the Inns (or Newington Butts). Obviously other entertainments also took place in the theaters, but I find it hard to believe that they could have sustained themselves on a diet of fencing and dancing on a regular basis.

Bart van Es

Very interesting, Holger. I remember finding your paper revelatory at the SAA. My view now is that there were, after 1594, two dominant London companies but that, as before, other companies drifted into the capital and used its theaters (which might at other times be used for other activities). London in this way was a destination for traveling players. Sometimes those companies stuck, as did the partially newly formed Worcester’s in 1600 or Lady Elizabeth’s thereafter. Government action to stop these things, certainly, was often weak.

Holger Syme

I’d argue that Pembroke’s may have “stuck,” too, in the mid-nineties.

But yes, you’re right: we don’t know if there were other residential companies, though it seems to me that there’s at least some evidence. The way the Admiral’s Men’s takings decline quickly after 1594 says something. Langley’s idea to build a particularly opulent theater sits oddly with the notion that it would be a venue for whoever happens to come along.

The main bee in my hive-like bonnet is the tendency to read what goes on at court as evidence for what goes on in London, and I just don’t see why we should trust that connection. I’m happy to buy the story that Carey and Howard set up their companies as the providers of Christmas entertainments. But that’s a totally different narrative than one that posits the wholesale reorganization of troupes, including the reassignment of things that were people’s properties (not the Crown’s and not those of individual Councillors).

Mimi Godfrey

Hi, Leslie—
I’m a medievalist, so I found your essay tremendously interesting because of your use of REED work and your own analyses of play texts to look at provincial touring by London companies. As with much of the work in this issue of SQ, you’re deconstructing a lot of long-held attitudes about theatrical activity at the end of this century—down to the micro level of how we understand words like scaffold or stage.

Leslie Thomson

Looking through Harbage’s Annals and seeing “Lost,” “Lost,” “Lost,” is truly dispiriting. As Holger says in his article, “What has survived may be neither the most popular drama nor representative of what has vanished.” For someone like me who relies primarily on stage directions to draw inferences about staging practices and possibilities, it is necessary to hope that the extant plays provide a reasonably accurate picture. But even the term “stage direction” is not contemporary. As to the physical space, while the Fortune plans and other documents tell us some things about the buildings, we know much less about the stage itself—although the Rose excavation told us some useful things. One of my main interests is discovery scenes, but the only evidence for a so-called discovery space (another term not used in Shakespeare’s day) is stage directions and dialogue that theater historians have interpreted in different ways. I envy Andy, Holger, and Bart—all those documents and records!

Mimi Godfrey

A question for Andy—
How different was James and Richard Burbage’s involvement with creditors than was that of other playwright-builders or anyone doing construction in this period? I wondered if the consciousness of “venture capitalists,” as you call them at one point, or “loan sharks” at another, was all that unique to the Burbages?

Andrew Gurr

A comment on Holger’s comment about sequence. True, we have only the patches of evidence, but it’s also true that we know almost nothing about what Shakespeare was up to, as a player, before May 1594, and that he was pushing himself as a poet with his two epyllions. So it seems right to try guessing not only what was in his mind when he joined the Chamberlain’s, but what outside pressures, especially from the two Privy Councillors, he might have been subjected to when he joined them. And there is that curiously neat divide of the plays between the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s, all of Marlowe’s (well, almost all) going to Henslowe, and all of the Bard’s to the other company. I like the idea, and that’s all it can be, that Tilney was the instrumental figure in all the reshuffle. But why did Shakespeare allow himself to be pushed?

That raises Mimi’s question, too. Like everyone else at the time, the Burbages as a family were regular, or irregular, users of loan sharks for their building projects. And that involved heavy rates of repayment, as other plays (Englishmen for My Money, for instance) did testify. So why did they turn instead in 1599 to their fellow players for the necessary cash? I do find the timing of The Merchant of Venice and Shylock a remarkable coincidence in its match with the loss of use for the Blackfriars.

Holger Syme

Does it matter that four of Marlowe’s plays became part of the Admiral’s Men’s repertory? In terms of revenue, they became practically negligible within a year or so. And what do we really know about the plays Shakespeare wrote before the Chamberlain’s Men came into being? Did they ever perform the Henry VI plays? How do we know that? And again, how do we know anyone pushed Shakespeare anywhere? Why would we even assume that?

Mimi Godfrey

Our time is nearly up, but I’d like to ask you all to tell us what your next projects are—or if you’re expanding on the researches in these essays (as I believe Bart is).

Bart van Es

It’s been fun, Mimi.
Yes, as you say, mine is part of a larger project: a book called Shakespeare in Company that should be out in 2012 with Oxford University Press. It looks at the implications of Shakespeare’s position as sharer through the whole of his association with the Chamberlain’s / King’s men and compares his position (financially and artistically) with his contemporaries. It’s a history of Shakespeare’s plays through his material circumstances (really a book-length attempt to answer the question you asked earlier). I should say that I’m being very generously funded by a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Leslie Thomson

With my term as department chair finally over in June (Holger will be succeeding me), I’m planning to return to my project on staged “discoveries”—of disguises and scenes—in plays of the period. But before that there’s the SAA meeting, at which I find myself leading a double seminar on—guess what?—“Lacunae in Theater History,” and what we do with them.

Holger Syme

I have an essay forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey next year (or the year after?) that addresses in a bit more detail how little we know about the early years of the Chamberlain’s Men and the fortunes of Shakespeare’s plays originally written for other companies. The essay suggests that there is as much evidence for the argument that Pembroke’s Men continued performing some of the early histories as there is for the notion that all those plays became the Chamberlain’s Men’s property.

Beyond that, I’m working on a book-length project on the 1590s, partly trying to develop an alternative view of London’s theater world (a rethinking of London through the perspective provided by REED, as a place inhabited by three or four, possibly more, playing companies, fecund and varied); partly trying to think about usually marginalized playwrights (especially Chapman and Dekker) as pioneers in the print market for plays.

Andrew Gurr

I have a piece coming out in the International Shakespeare Yearbook that tries to relate the non-English characterization of Shylock to the collapse of the Burbage Blackfriars project, and the possible local applications of his money-lending business to what happened to the Chamberlain’s Men’s Burbage financiers in 1596. More idle speculation, of course.

Leslie Thomson

Thanks Mimi et al., for all the work this must have involved.

Holger Syme

Thank you, Mimi and the team! This was fun.

Mimi Godfrey

That’s all the time we have for today!

Many thanks to our authors, who were so generous with their time and energy. It’s been a great pleasure to read your comments and learn more about your work. I’m delighted that we could bring you all together today—it’s been a great way to keep the conversation going.