Abstract
Among the many lost plays identified by title in Henslowe’s Diary are at least five that relate to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. They are (ordered chronologically as they appear in the Diaryv “Chinon of England” (1595/6), “Vortiger” (1596), “Uther Pendragon” (1597), “The Lyfe and Death of Arthur, King of England,” (1598) and “Trystram of Lyons” (1599). (There is another title, “Hengist,” recorded once in June 1597, but this is probably the same play as “Vortiger”.) No scholar, to my knowledge, has seriously commented on these plays together. Typically Arthurian and early drama studies pause to mention some or all of them, then follow with “Nothing whatever is known of this piece” or some such phrase.1
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Notes
See, for example, Elisabeth Michelsson, Appropriating King Arthur: The Arthurian Legend in English Drama and Entertainments 1485–1625 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 1999), 116–17;
Gertrude Marian Sibley, The Lost Plays and Masques 1500–1642 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10, 26; the exception (I’m happy to say!) is the Lost Plays Database website (edited by Roslyn Knutson and David McInnis) which offers an excellent summary of what is known about “Chinon”. The quotation is from W. W. Greg with reference to “Tristram” in Henslowe’s Diary, 2 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904–8), 206.
Multiple editions, contemporary comment, reading lists and other evidence show the considerable popularity of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and John Bouchier’s Arthur of Lyttle Britain in Elizabethan England among all classes. There were several top-selling ballads on King Arthur, including Falstaff’s favorite, “When Arthur first in court” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.28), The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn., gen eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, rpt. 2008). (All subsequent Shakespeare references are to this edition.) Arthur and his father King Uther Pendragon appeared in the major chronicles of Holinshed and Stow, in the influential ecclesiastical histories of John Bale and John Foxe; their historicity was defended in polemical works by John Leland, Richard Robinson and Gabriel Harvey; their arms and chivalry celebrated in military pamphlets by William Segar among others; and put to verse in The Faerie Queene, Chester’s Life and Death of Arthur and other poems, court masques and several royal entertainments such as the one at Kenilworth in 1578. Stephen Gosson mentions the Knights of the Round Table as a major source of material for plays in Plays Confuted in Five Acts. Arthurian tales also generated much criticism by Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, and others, as I’ll report later. The best overview and documentation for this paragraph’s discussion remains Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and the Table Round (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932), especially chapters 2 and 3.See also Michelsson, Appropriating King Arthur;
Jean Wilson, Entertainments of Elizabeth (Totawa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980);
Tessa Watts, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
See chapters on Lord Berners by Joyce Boro and on John Leland by Philip Schwyzer in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, eds. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
John Pitcher also has a nice reflection on the topic in “Tudor Literature” in The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), chapter 2.
Sibley (Lost Plays, 10), I think, is mistaken is assuming that “Arthur’s Show” refers to the Admiral’s Arthur. Others, notably Michelsson (Appropriating King Arthur, 117) follow this suggestion. For more on “Arthur’s Show,” see Richard Robinson, Life, Acts, and death of the Noble, Valiant, and Renouned Prince Arthure, King of great Brittaine (London, 1582). The pageant is discussed in Millican, Spenser, 55–64; and in Lawrence Manley “Fictions of Settlement: London 1590,” Studies in Philology 88 (Spring 1991): 201–24.
For the Elizabethan controversy, see Millican, Spenser, chapter 3. Holinshed discusses Arthur in book 5 of volume 2 of the 1587 edition of The Chronicles (London 1587); Foxe first discusses King Arthur in book 2 of the 1570 edition. In the 1593 edition, the tales of Arthur’s military valor were “more worthy to be joined with the Iliades of Homere, then to have place in any Ecclesiasticall hystorie” (Acts, [1593], 113). Both Holinshed and Foxe are easily accessible online. Drummond on Jonson, in Conversations: “For a heroic poem, he said, there was no such ground as King Arthur’s fiction.” Online at http://www.archive.org/stream/conversationsbeOOjonsgoog. Jonson reportedly stated that Philip Sidney had intended to transform The Arcadia into the stories of King Arthur. See also Geoffrey Bullough, “Pre-Conquest Historical Themes in Elizabethan Drama,” in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory of G. N. Garmonsway eds. D. A. Pearsall and R. A. Waldron (1969; rpt London: Bloombury 2013), 289f.
For best overview of the heroic romance, see Brian Gibbons, “Romance and the Heroic Play,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 207–36.
Julia Briggs, “Middleton’s Forgotten Tragedy Hengist, King of Kent,” Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 479–95, 488; see also Michelsson, Appropriating King Arthur, 234–6.
W. W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: Being documents supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907), 90 (Appendix 1.i.29 and note 29).
Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 2.
I owe the reference to Helen Moore, “Shakespeare and Popular Romance,” in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, eds. Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 92–111, 96–7.
Two detailed accounts record the speeches and describe the pageantry: William Segar’s Honor, Military and Ciuill (noted earlier) and George Peele’s Anglorum Feriae, England’s Holidays (1601?). See also Roy C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 208–9; and Michelsson, Appropriating King Arthur, 107–12.
The quote is from a transcript of the text of the speech recorded in G. C. Williamson, George, Third Earl of Cumberland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 108–9. See Strong 208–9, who includes an appendix listing the evidence of the Accession Day Tilts from the 1580s. Clifford’s first entry was in the mid-1580s. Michelsson (Appropriating King Arthur, 104–12) diverges from Strong in suggesting Clifford represents King Arthur rather than Uther Pendragon, but this might have been presumptuous before the Queen. Perhaps Clifford wanted just a close enough association with Arthur to generate the right tone of martial valor and magnificence.
This may have been Hathway’s first single-authored script for Henslowe, who typically paid novice playwrights less that the going rate of £6 for new plays (Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 60). On May 2, £3 was expended on “a Robe for the playe.” See Greg, Henslowe’s Diary, 1.86–7.
Charlotte D’Evelyn, “Sources of the Arthur Story in Chester’s Loves Martyr,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 14 (1915): 75–88.
James Merriman, The Flower of Kings: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in England between 1485 and 1835 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 35.
See Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
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White, P.W. (2014). The Admiral’s Lost Arthurian Plays. In: McInnis, D., Steggle, M. (eds) Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403971_9
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