REVELS ACCOUNTS

The following accounts appear to be extant:

(a) Early Tudor Period.

(i) Accounts of Richard Gibson.

Brewer, ii. 1490; iii. 35, 1548; iv. 418, 837, 1390, 1392, 1415, 1603, 3073, gives abstracts of a series of accounts, ranging from 1510 to 1530, some or all of which are presumably taken from Miscellaneous Books of the Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer, 217, 228, 229.

(ii) Accounts of John Bridges.

It appears from extracts given by Kempe, 69, that some accounts of John Bridges between 1539, when he became Yeoman of the Revels, and 1544, when Cawarden became Master, are at Loseley.

(iii) Accounts of Sir Thomas Cawarden.

Many of these are at Loseley, often in more than one copy. Kempe, 69, gives a few extracts for the last years of Henry VIII, and the most important documents for the next three reigns, ranging from 1547 to 1559; are printed by A. Feuillerat in Materialien, xxi and xliv, with accompanying warrants and other subsidiary documents. From 1547 to 1550 the accounts are mainly office copies of ‘particular’ books, setting out the details and cost of each individual revel, airing, or the like; but for 1550–55, and again for 1555–9, the ‘particular paye bookes’ are brought together with summaries in two great ‘Certificates’ (Loseley MSS. 62 and 63), which relate to the Tents as well as the Revels. The second of these includes, as well as money accounts, inventories of the office stuff and notes of its employment in masking and other garments during 1555–60, and a similar record for 1550–5 is in Loseley MS. 112. These Certificates, although signed by the Clerk, Clerk Controller, and Yeoman, are not audited. Probably they are office copies of Original Accounts prepared for audit.

(b) Elizabethan Period.

Eleven Original Accounts of the Masters or Acting Masters of the Revels, with annotations by the Auditors, are in R. O. Audit Office, Accounts Various, 3, 907 (formerly 1213). They relate to the periods: (i) Feb. 1571–May 1572; (ii) June 1572–Oct. 1573; (iii) Nov. 1573–Feb. 1574; (iv) March 1574–Feb. 1575; (v) March 1576–Feb. 1577; (vi) Feb. 1578–Oct. 1579; (vii) Nov. 1579–Oct. 1580; (viii) Nov. 1580–Oct. 1581; (ix) Nov. 1582–Oct. 1583; (x) Nov. 1584–Oct. 1585; (xi) Nov. 1587–Oct. 1588. It will be seen that a regular annual system, starting with the opening of the season for revels at All Saints in each year, was ultimately adopted. All these accounts were printed in P. Cunningham, Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (1842, Sh. Soc.), but (ii) imperfectly and (xi) from an unaudited duplicate in the same bundle. These vagaries are corrected in the text of Feuillerat (1908, Materialien, xxi), who also gives an account for Nov. 1587–Oct. 1589 from Lansd. MS. 59, f. 38, which in part duplicates (xi), and much illustrative matter, including an estimate in some detail of the expenditure from Christmas 1563 to Shrovetide 1565 from S. P. Dom. Eliz. xxxvi. 22. The Audit Office series of Declared Accounts for the Revels is imperfect, but contains two, printed by Feuillerat, for the years 1581–2 and 1583–4, for which there are no Original Accounts. The Pipe Office series appears to be complete.

(c) Jacobean Period.

There are only two Original Accounts, for 1604–5 and 1611–12, which are printed by Cunningham. The Pipe Office Declared Accounts are complete. I have not examined those of the Audit Office. The Original Accounts for 1604–5 and 1611–12, and especially the former, have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. The facts are as follows. They were printed in 1842 by Peter Cunningham, then a clerk in the Audit Office, who described them as a separate discovery from the Elizabethan bundle, which he also printed. Twenty-six years afterwards, in 1868, he attempted to sell them to the British Museum, stating that he had found them some thirty years before ‘under the vaults of Somerset House—far under the Quadrangle in a dry and lofty cellar, known by the name of the “Charcoal Repository”’. Their official character was realized, and they were sent to the Record Office, and placed amongst the papers known as Audit Office, Accounts Various, 3, 908 (formerly 1214), with a note that Mr. E. A. Bond, Keeper of the Manuscripts in the British Museum, ‘saw reasons for doubting the genuineness of one, at least, of these papers, from the peculiar character of the writing and the spelling’. It is probable that Bond had in mind, wholly or mainly, the play-list of the 1604–5 book, which does use some spellings, such as ‘Shaxberd’ and ‘aleven’, which are unusual although by no means unparalleled, and is, moreover, in a style of handwriting sufficiently different from the rest of the document to have at first sight a suspicious air. But it is an integral part of the book, occupying ff. 2, 2^v of its three small folio sheets, with other matter both on ff. 1, 1^v, and on ff. 5, 5^v, which form the second half of its sheet, and therefore, if a forged insertion, it occupies a long blank conveniently left by the original scribe just where, according to Revels practice, such a list ought to come. Bond’s scepticism was shared by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, and although the grounds of it did not extend beyond the play-list in the 1604–5 account, the acceptance of this as a forgery naturally reflected some suspicion upon the corresponding list for 1611–12. The position, however, called for some reconsideration when, in A Note on Measure for Measure (1880) and subsequently in the fifth edition (1885) of his Outlines (ed. 9, ii. 163, 309), Halliwell-Phillipps called attention to evidence that Malone, at some date before his death in 1812, and therefore before Cunningham was born, was acquainted at least with the substance of the 1604–5 list. The Bodleian contains a number of Malone’s note-books, which are believed to have been purchased from Mr. Rodd, a London bookseller, in 1838, and contain material collected after the issue of Malone’s Shakespeare of 1790 with a view to a second edition ultimately produced by Boswell in 1821. With them were a bundle of loose scraps, which have since been mounted and bound as a supplementary volume. One of these scraps (Malone MS. 29, f. 69^v) consists of a list of plays headed ‘1604 & 1605 Ed^d. Tylney’, which substantially agrees with the list in the Revels book, even to the unusual spelling ‘Shaxberd’, although it is clearly not a transcript of the Revels list, but merely an abstract of this, or a similar document, in an unknown hand other than Malone’s. One of the plays named in the Revels book, The Spanish Maze of Shrove Monday, is omitted. No use of the scrap had been made by Boswell, although he prints (Variorum, iii. 360) extracts made by Malone from the Elizabethan Revels books, together with a letter of 7 Nov. 1591 from Sir William Musgrave, of the Audit Office, inviting Malone to inspect them, and an official memorandum on the ‘State of the Books of Accounts and Records of the Master of the Revels, still remaining in the Office for Auditing the Public Accounts in 1791’. It is, I think, inconceivable that, if the Jacobean as well as the Elizabethan books had then been discovered, no reference should have been made to them either by Musgrave or Malone, and the most probable explanation of the Bodleian scrap is that the Jacobean books turned up later, and that an abstract of the 1604–5 list was then prepared for the use of Malone. It is true that in that case the Jacobean books would naturally have been added to the ‘proper presses’ which Musgrave says that he had provided for the Elizabethan ones, whereas Cunningham found the two sets apart. But as Cunningham also says that he had redeemed the Elizabethan bundle from ‘a destructive oblivion’, it is possible that Musgrave’s successors had been neglectful. Moreover, although the 1604–5 list does not appear in the 1821 Variorum, it is difficult to see on what other grounds Malone can have stated of Othello (Variorum, ii. 404), ‘We know that it was acted in 1604’. Probably, indeed, he had seen the list, before he abandoned in a note of 1800 to Dryden’s Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy his earlier opinion that Othello was one of Shakespeare’s latest plays. Further, there is similar indirect evidence that he had also come across the 1611–12 list. In 1808 he privately printed and in 1809 published an Account of the ... Tempest, written ‘some years ago’. The chief object of this was to fix an inferior date by Shakespeare’s use of a pamphlet of 1610. The superior date he took for granted, saying (p. 31) ‘That it was performed before the middle of 1611, we have already seen’, and adding the foot-note ‘Under a former article’. There was no former article, but in the preface Malone describes the essay as making ‘a part of the Disquisition concerning the order of the plays in an enlarged form’, and no doubt the former article would have been included in the disquisition, had Malone ever completed his own work. Boswell, reprinting the essay in Variorum, xv. 414, altered the foot-note to refer to the essay on the Chronological Order of Shakespeare’s Plays in ‘vol. i’. This is in fact in vol. ii, but though Boswell here states (ii. 465) that there is evidence that the Tempest ‘was produced in 1611’, he does not give any evidence beyond the pamphlet of 1610. Probably he did not know everything that Malone knew. But how did Malone arrive at ‘the middle of 1611’, since the 1604–5 list does not take us beyond 1 Nov. 1611? I suppose he assumed that public production preceded performance at court. Later in the essay (Variorum, xv. 423) he says that the play ‘had a being and a name in the autumn of 1611’.

Since Halliwell-Phillipps’s discovery the prevalent view, suggested by him, has been that if the lists, or at any rate that of 1604–5, are forged, the forger had before him a genuine original. More recently, however, the matter has been fully investigated by Mr. Ernest Law, who stimulated the Record Office to a minute examination of the 1604–5 document, including chemical and microscopical tests of the ink conducted by Professor J. J. Dobbie at the Government Laboratories. As a result, Mr. Law’s own view that the list is genuine is confirmed by such high palaeographical authorities as Sir George Warner of the British Museum and Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte, Mr. Scargill-Bird, and other officers of the Record Office, as well as by Professor Feuillerat, than whom no one knows the Revels documents better, and Professor Wallace. Mr. Law set out the evidence and the whole history of the case in Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries (1911). His view was controverted in a review and a number of subsequent communications in the Athenaeum for 1911 (i. 638; ii. 101, 131, 421) and 1912 (i. 469, 654; ii. 142) by a writer using the signature ‘Audi Alteram Partem’, whose rather amazing contentions Mr. Law disposed of in the same periodical (1911, ii. 297, 324, 388; 1912, i. 390, 470) and in More about Shakespeare Forgeries (1913). A recent controversy between Mrs. C. C. Stopes, Mr. Law, and Sir E. M. Thompson (T. L. S. 2, 23, 30 Dec. 1920; 27 Jan., 10, 24 Feb. 1921) has led to no different result.

I do not think that, in view of the palaeographical investigation, it is any longer possible to reject the genuineness of the 1604–5 list, and although that of 1611–12 has not been so minutely tested, it is pretty obviously of a piece with the ‘Book’ of which it forms a part, and had it stood alone, probably no suspicion would have fallen upon it. In fact, it would really be more plausible—although this also is not in the least plausible—to take the whole documents as forgeries, than to take the lists as forged insertions in genuine accounts.

It must be added that there are some singular things about the substance of the books, with which Mr. Law does not seem to me quite to grapple. On the whole, that of 1604–5 is rather less perplexing than that of 1611–12. But the scribe has been oddly confused about his dates. On f. 1^v he has written ‘iij^o’, instead of ‘ij^o’ for the regnal year. And at the top of f. 2 he has apparently written ‘1605’ and then corrected it to ‘1604’. The Queen’s Revels are called by their obsolete name of ‘The Boyes of the Chapell’, which is odd in an official document, but so they are, much later, in the Treasurer of the Chamber’s account for 1612–13. It is more important that, while the Treasurer of the Chamber records payments for two plays to the Queen’s Revels, one on 1 Jan. and the other on 3 Jan., the Revels list omits the play on 3 Jan. altogether, and instead records a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost by the King’s men ‘betwin Newers Day and Twelfe Day’. No complete explanation of this is possible. The most that can be said is that there is independent evidence of a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Jan. 1605, but at a date after and not before Twelfth Night. This is derived from two letters. The first is from Sir Walter Cope to Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, preserved at Hatfield (Hist. MSS. iii. 148) and printed by Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 83:

‘I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players juglers and such kinde of creaturs, but fynde them harde to fynde; wherfore, leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, and sayes ther ys no new playe that the Quene hath not seene, but they have revyved an olde one cawled Loves Labore lost, which for wytt and mirthe he sayes will please her excedingly. And thys ys apointed to be playd tomorowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons, unless yow send a wrytt to remove the corpus cum causa to your howse in Strande. Burbage ys my messenger ready attendyng your pleasure.’

The letter is undated, but endorsed ‘1604’. Cecil’s title was Viscount Cranborne from 20 Aug. 1604 to 4 May 1605. A second letter, from Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain on 15 Jan. 1605 (S. P. D. Jac. I, xii. 13) gives within near limits the date of the performance. Carleton says,

‘It seems we shall have Christmas all the yeare and therefore I shall never be owt of matter. The last nights revels were kept at my Lord of Cranbornes, where the Q. with the D. of Holst and a great part of the Court were feasted, and the like two nights before at my Lord of Southamptons. The Temples have both of them done somewhat since Twelftide but nothing memorable, save that it was observed on Friday last at night the greatest part of the femal audience was the sisterhoode of Blackfriers.’

Mr. Law (More about S. F. 50) rightly rejects the suggestion of ‘Audi Alteram Partem’ that the ‘last night’ referred to was necessarily 14 Jan., the night before the date of Carleton’s letter; but I think he is wrong in taking it as the last night of Christmas. This, of course, was traditionally Twelfth Night, the day in 1605 of Jonson’s Mask of Blackness. But surely Carleton’s whole point lies in the exceptional prolongation of the Christmas festivities of this year beyond Twelfth Night, and I feel clear that all the revels he here refers to fell between 6 and 15 Jan. On 7 and 8 Jan. came Hen. V and E. M. O. Putting the facts together, we get a performance, either at Southampton’s house or Cranborne’s, between 8 and 15 Jan. of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which the Queen had not seen before. It is not therefore at all likely that there had been another performance of the same play at court between 1 and 6 Jan. It is true that the Queen might by some accident have missed such a performance. But that would not have prevented the Treasurer of the Chamber from paying for it, whereas he would not pay for a performance ordered as part of an entertainment given by Southampton or Cranborne. Nor would it have been the duty of the Revels Office to attend such a performance, which makes it rather mystifying that they should have confused it with the second Queen’s Revels performance at court some days earlier, which it would have been their duty to attend. The vagueness of the phrase ‘betwin Newers Day and Twelfe Day’, suggesting that the list was prepared retrospectively from memory, when the account was made up in the autumn of 1605, may perhaps help to explain an error. On the other hand, a forger, presumably knowing nothing of Cope’s letter, which first came to light in 1872, could hardly have guessed at a revival of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1605.

The discrepancies between the Revels list of 1611–12 and the corresponding accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber are rather numerous. The Revels list records thirteen plays from 1 Nov. to 25 Feb. ‘before the Kinges Maiestie’, including two which, although, I suppose, ordered for the King, were in fact only given before the Queen and Prince. The Treasurer paid for only ten plays as before the King, and for many others before the younger members of the royal family only, with which the Revels would not normally be concerned. The two records agree as to 1 and 5 Nov., 26, 27, and 29 Dec., and 2, 23, and 25 Feb. On 28 Dec. the Treasurer notes a play by the Prince’s men which the Revels list does not. On 1 Jan. the Revels list notes a play by the King’s men, which the Treasurer does not. The play on 5 Jan. is assigned by the Treasurer to the King’s men, and by the Revels list to the Whitefriars. The plays on 12 and 13 Jan. appear from the Revels list to have been joint performances by the King’s and Queen’s men, but the Treasurer notes the play on 12 Jan. only, assigns that to the Duke of York’s men, and refers to Henry but not to the Queen as present. He also paid for one play by the King’s men before Henry, of which he does not give the date, and which may be that of 13 Jan. Both records note a play by the Duke of York’s men on 24 Feb., but while the Revels list does not indicate that James was absent, the Treasurer treats the performance as one before the royal children only. I do not know that all this is beyond the blundering of the clerks concerned, especially perhaps the Clerk of the Revels, at a time when the functions of the office in relation to court plays had become trivial. On the other hand, I am not clear that plays ordered by the Queen and paid for out of her privy purse, instead of by the Treasurer of the Chamber, may not sometimes have been produced under Revels Office auspices; if so, some of the discrepancies might be thus accounted for. But obviously the facts necessitate some caution in the use of the 1611–12 list.