SECTION VI.
ON THE PLAYS BY OTHER AUTHORS ACTED BY SHAKESPEARE'S COMPANY.
During Shakespeare's career, 1589-1611, we only know of some two dozen plays having been produced by his "fellows," in addition to the three dozen included in his works; and of these, about two-fifths are anonymous, and have been at some time or other ascribed, in whole or part, to the great master. It is evident that he had the management of the playwriting for his house pretty nearly in his own hands, and that his method was the polar opposite to that of which we know most, viz., Henslowe's. While the latter employed twelve poets in a year, who produced for the Admiral's men a new play every fortnight or so, the Chamberlain's company depended almost entirely on two poets at a time, and produced not more than four new plays a year. Hence the explanation of the vastly higher character of the Globe plays as compared with the Fortune: hence also the explanation of the small pay and needy condition of the latter, and their jealousy of the rapid advancement in wealth and position of Shakespeare, who had virtually a monopoly of play-providing for his company. It would be out of place to discuss at length the plays written for it by Jonson, Dekker, &c., but fuller notice of the anonymous plays is due to the reader. They have, strange to say, never yet been treated as a complete group; and yet surely as much may be learned by considering Shakespeare's theatrical surroundings, the plays in which he acted, and which he probably had more or less suggested, supervised, or revised, as by elaborately working out the debtor and creditor details of his malt-bills. I will treat of these plays in nearly chronological order.
1590.
Fair Em is the earliest play we certainly know of as acted by Lord Strange's company. It is alluded to by Greene in his address prefixed to his Farewell to Folly. He quotes as abusing of Scripture, "A man's conscience is a thousand witnesses," and "Love covereth the multitude of sins," and says these words were used by "two lovers on the stage arguing one another of unkindness." Greene's tract was written and entered S. R. 1st June 1587, but not published till 1591, when the address which mentions his Mourning Garment (S. R. November 2, 1590) was added. Fair Em dates, therefore, late in 1590. It was probably written by R. Wilson, and is certainly not a romantic, but a satirical play; else why should Greene have been offended at it?
In Sc. 14 of The Three Ladies of London, produced before 1584, Wilson uses the expression, "I, Conscience, am a thousand witnesses," and in his Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, acted at Court, Christmas 1588-9, Sc. 2, "Love doth cover heaps of cumbrous evils." In order to explain the nature of the satire in Fair Em, it is necessary to investigate a hitherto unnoticed identification of Worcester's 1586 company with the Admiral's, of the highest importance for stage history as determining the actors in Marlowe's early plays. On Twelfth Day 1585-6, "the servants of the Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain" acted at Court, i.e. the players of Lord Charles Howard, who held both these offices. Mr. Halliwell (Illustrations, p. 31) confused this Chamberlain with Lord Hunsdon, and takes the entry to refer to two companies. I sent him a correction of these and many other blunders, which he has never rectified, years ago—a fact which I should not notice had he not publicly complained that, with one or two exceptions, of whom I am not one, he had received no help of this kind. Of this Admiral's company in the plague year, 1586, there is no trace in London; but in that year, and that year only, a company travelled under the protection of the Earl of Worcester. They were licensed for this travel on 14th January, and were at Leicester in the course of the year (Shakespeare Society's Papers, iv.); their names were R. Browne, J. Tunstall (Dunstan), E. Allen, W. Harryson, T. Cooke, R. Jones, E. Browne, R. Andrews; all of whom were licensed, together with hired men, T. Powlton and W. Paterson, "Lord Harbard's man," i.e. a member of the company of Herbert Earl of Pembroke: a scratch company evidently, but containing names of celebrated London actors. In 1587 and 1588, the Admiral's men acted in London publicly, and at Christmas 1588-9 at Court. On 3d January 1588-9, Alleyn and Jones (acting evidently for the company) dissolved partnership, and Alleyn bought up their properties and play-books. In November the Admiral's men were playing about the City, and not at the Curtain, where they had probably produced Tamberlain, Faustus, Orlando, Alcazar, and Marius and Sylla; and in their Court performance on 23d December were reduced to showing "feats of activity." In 1590 R. Brown and Jones went abroad and acted at Leyden in October. They returned, and on December 27 and February 16 the Admiral's men acted at Court for the last time before the reconstitution of their company in 1594. Already R. Brown, J. Broadstreet, T. Sackville, and R. Jones had obtained a pass from Lord C. Howard, the Admiral, their patron, to travel to Germany by way of Holland, and a company acted there till 1617 under Sackville. Jones returned to England and joined the reconstituted Admiral's company under Allen in 1594. Alleyn had never relinquished the title of Admiral's servant, even when in Lord Strange's service in 1593. Putting these facts together, can there be any doubt that the service under Worcester was merely temporary, and that in the list of 1586 we have that of the principal actors in the Admiral's company? Mr. R. Simpson, to whom we owe so much as a discoverer of problems to be solved, and so little for their solution, rightly stated that Fair Em was a satirical play, and that Manvile (or Mandeville, the lying traveller) meant Greene, and Mounteney the aspiring Marlowe. He was wrong in identifying Valingford with Shakespeare—he was Peele (valing, an old castle or peele—Camden)—and doubly wrong in making William Conqueror Kempe. Robert of Windsor, his travelling name, points to Robert Browne; and it was to Browne's company that Marlowe and Peele had been attached, not to Kempe's. The names William Conqueror and Marquess Lubeck were probably names of characters which had been acted by Browne and Jones, perhaps in the play of William Conqueror, which was on the stage as an old play in 1593. Fair Em of Manchester is no doubt, as Mr. Simpson says, Lord Strange's company of players.
1622 [often, but wrongly, dated c. 1591].
The Birth of Merlin, or The Child hath Found his Father, was published in 1662 as "written by W. Shakespeare and W. Rowley." Rowley probably revised the play for a revival c. 1622, but in the main it is manifestly by another hand. The comic scenes with Joan Goto't may be Rowley's, but the serious parts are palpably Middleton's. I owe the suggestion of his authorship to Mr. P. A. Daniel. A ballad on the subject was entered on 10th May 1589, S. R. In ii. 3b iii. 6 we have some very interesting imitations of Shakespeare. Cutting out the Rowley additions in iii. 1. 4, I would ask the reader to carefully compare the remaining parts of ii. 3b, beginning with Aurel. "Artesia, dearest love," iii. 2. 3. 5. 6, with such passages of Shakespeare as they call to memory: e.g. iii. 2, "This world is but a mask," &c., with As You Like It, ii. 7. 139, &c., and iii. 3. 1-6 with Lear, iii. 2. 1-9. Compare especially the definition of a crab as "a creature that goes backward" in ii. 3, with Hamlet, ii. 2. 206, "if like a crab you could go backward." Crab as the name of an animal does not occur elsewhere in Shakespeare. I believe the early plays on this subject, Vortiger, 4th December 1596, and Uter Pendragon, 29th April 1597, in Henslowe's Diary, to be alluded to by Jonson in his Prologue to Every Man in his Humour, 1601—
"To make a child now swaddled to proceed