From Tuesday through Thursday, November 18th-20th, we should have seen Crack Me This Nutte, Barnardo and Fiametta, and Wonder of a Woman, all recent plays. The first had opened as a new play the previous September 5th and enjoyed some success. In 1601 it would be revived. The second play had had its premiere several weeks earlier, on October 30th, and was not as successful as the first. The third piece also had opened recently, on October 16th, and it too had excited only a moderate response. On Friday, a week after its premiere, we would have had the chance to hear A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies once again. It was to continue in the repertory for another year, with a total of nine performances, making it an average success. Finally, on Saturday, November 22nd, at the end of our two-week visit, Seleo and Olempo was on the bill, a play which had opened initially the 5th of the previous March. This performance, its eighth, would bring it near the end of its run of ten performances. On February 19, 1596, a little less than a year after its opening, the play would leave the boards, its prompt-book lost in the dust of the Rose playhouse.
Thus, in two weeks we could have seen eleven performances of ten different plays at one playhouse. On no day would we have found the theater repeating the play of the day before. Among the plays the majority, six of the ten, would have been new works, produced since the return of the company from its summer tour. Two others were carry-overs from the previous spring and two were older plays which had been revived. Nor would these plays have appeared regularly in the succeeding weeks. If we had remained in London for two additional weeks, we should have found some repetition of the plays we had already seen as well as some plays that would be new to us.
Again there would be eleven performances in two weeks.[4] Five performances would repeat works of the previous fortnight’s bill. The remaining six performances would have been divided among five plays: a new play for two performances; another play which had opened that autumn; two parts of a play from the previous spring, whose performances, like those of Tamberlaine, would have been arranged on successive days; and a play which would appear once and disappear. Altogether, in four weeks we should have been able to see fifteen different plays, only five of which would be repeated, and one of which would attain three performances. Most of the plays would be less than one season old, a few, holdovers from the previous season, and only two or possibly three could be considered “old” plays. Of the fifteen, two would have been completely new plays, and, in fact, the only play to have had three performances in four weeks would have been a recent addition to the repertoire, A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies.
The alternation of the plays was irregular. The choice of play from day to day must have followed the exigencies of the moment. Over an extended period, on the other hand, a broad pattern may be observed. A new play or revival usually opened to a good house despite the doubling of admission prices. Several days or a week later a second performance would be given, and then, depending on the enthusiasm of the audience response, the play would be repeated several times a month at first, then less frequently, the intervals between performances becoming longer and longer until the play would be presented once a month. Within a year or a year and a half, it would fade from the theater. Such was the usual course. Naturally, a popular work would continue longer and be revived more often, whereas a “flop” would leave the boards almost immediately.
In the total winter season from August 25, 1595, through February 28, 1596, of which we have considered four weeks, the company gave one hundred and fifty performances of thirty different plays. Eighty-seven performances, or 58 per cent of the total, were of the fourteen new plays produced that season. Five performances, 3.3 per cent, were of one play, The Jew of Malta, revived that season. Forty-six performances, or 30.7 per cent, were given by the eight plays from the previous season which were less than a year old, counting from December 1, 1594. Only twelve performances, 8 per cent, were of the seven plays which were more than a year old. This distribution, which is similar for all the seasons covered by Henslowe’s records, emphasizes how dependent the company was on the continuous addition of new plays to its stock in order to maintain itself in London.
The sheer volume of production is staggering. How strenuous the demands must have been upon the actors! Although we are familiar with the extensive repertory which an opera singer must command, at least it is a repertory which in large measure has assumed classical limitations. The Elizabethan actor, on the contrary, had to remember the old and learn the new at the same time. He had to retain the lines of the older plays, for not only might he wait weeks and months between performances of a particular play, but occasionally he might be asked to give a single performance of a long neglected play.[5] He also had to commit to memory an amazing number of new plays each season. In the three-year period from June 5, 1594, to July 28, 1597, a leading actor of the Lord Admiral’s company, such as Edward Alleyn or Thomas Downton, had to secure and retain command of about seventy-one different roles, of which number fifty-two or fifty-three were newly learned.
The manner in which the acting companies secured new plays has been fully discussed by Greg and Chambers[6] so that a brief summary will suffice. Sometimes the actors would buy a finished book, as evidenced by the purchase of Strange News Out of Poland for £6 on May 17, 1600. However, the more usual way of dealing with the impecunious poets who supplied them with scripts was for the Admiral’s men to approve a plot outline of a play, upon which approval they would pay the playwright or playwrights an advance. As portions of the book were received, further advances were given until the entire work was submitted and full payment, usually £6 in this period, was made. Although the names of a large number of playwrights appear in Henslowe’s records, most of the new plays performed by the Admiral’s men came from the pens of less than a dozen men.[7]
Three different types of relationships seem to have existed between actors and the playwrights. In one type Shakespeare and Heywood, actors of their companies, presumably wrote for their own fellows exclusively. In another Ben Jonson went free-wheeling in his passage from one company to another and back again. Between these extremes was a man like Dekker who generally confined his writing to the Admiral’s men, at least at this time, although he did write occasionally for other companies.
Upon receipt of the play from the author, the actors put it into production without much delay. Of the eighty-eight new plays presented during this period by the Admiral’s men, Henslowe records data on the purchase of both the book and properties for twenty-eight of them.[8] Only one, Polyphemus, shows a substantial lapse between the final payment for the script on February 27, 1599, and the purchase of “divers thinges” for production on October 5, 1599. Since the purchase of these “divers thinges” only totaled 8s., the play may very well have been produced earlier, the later entry relating to properties or costumes which were added to the production. Of the twenty-seven other plays, the time between final purchase of the manuscript and the first indication of production extends from three to fifty-one days, the average duration being a little over twenty days. That many of the payments were for costumes which had to be tailored indicates that the time lapse was even less than the records show. For example, the longest delay, fifty-one days, came between the purchase of Brute on October 22nd and the payment for “cottes of gyantes” for the same play on December 12, 1598. Probably the order for the coats had been placed considerably earlier.