Brute Parts: From Troy to Britain at the Rose, 1595–1600

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see A View of the State of Ireland: From the First Printed Edition (1633), ed. Andrew Hadfleld and Willy Maley (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 44.Google Scholar

On secondhand playbooks, see Roslyn L. Knutson, “The Commercial Significance of the Payments lor Playtexts in Henslowe’s Diary, 1597–1603,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 117–63. Greg believed Day’s “Boocke” was unfinished (Diary, 2.195).Google Scholar

Gieg, Diary, 2.195; Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1934), 216;Google Scholar

Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 62. E. K. Chambers noted that “[t]he prices paid by the Admiral’s and Lord Worcester’s men between 1597 and 1603 ranged lrom£4 to £10 10s.; a lee ol£6 maybe taken as about normal”: The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 1.373; qtd. in Knutson, “Commercial Significance,” 117. Elsewhere in the Diary, Henslowe explicitly records different parts with plays’ titles, as with Dekker and Drayton’s “Civil Wars of France”, ff. 50v, 51v, 52v.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

As the antiquarian John Layer wrote: “I could never learn how these hills came to be called Gogmagog hills, unless it were from a high and mighty portraiture of a giant w^ch the schollars of Cambridge cut upon the Turf or superficies of the earth within the said trench”. Qtd. in W. M. Palmer, John Layer (1586–1640) of Shepreth, Cambridgeshire: A Seventeenth-Century Local Historian (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1935), 110. For the restrictions against “plays and games”,Google Scholar

see Alan H. Nelson, REED: Cambridge, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 1.269–72. Nelson suggests that “plays” in this context may not necessarily indicate stage plays (2.1218).Google Scholar

In 1599, for example, see Clare Williams, trans., Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 165–6. See also Holinshed, Historie, 4.17[9]4.Google Scholar

See Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 180–200.Google Scholar

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Greg, Diary, 2.195–6; Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 238n. The main argument for lumping is that no earlier records give the title “Brute Greenshield”. Of course, that is not quite proof: several days earlier, Henslowe recorded payments for the licensing of “a boocke called the 4 kynges” (f. 54), the first and only entry of that title in the Diary. Google Scholar

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The identification of this play with Dido, Queen of Carthage by Marlowe and Nashe has been rejected on the grounds that no “tome of Dido”, such as that recorded in a properties inventory of March 1598, appears in the extant play: see Greg, Diary, 2.190 and Henslowe Papers (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907), 116n. For the opposite view, see Andrew Gurr, “The Great Divide of 1594,” Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. Brian Boyd (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 30–1. The January 8 performance is specifically recorded by Henslowe as having taken place “at nyght”, suggesting to some that it must have been a private performance, perhaps even at court: see Gurr, “Great Divide”, 31; Gurr, Shakespeare’s Opposites, 231n. It is possible the play may also have been performed at the Rose.Google Scholar

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See, recently, Martin Wiggins, in association with Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue. Volume 3, 1590–1597 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 284, 286 andGoogle Scholar

David Mann, “Heywood’s Silver Age: A Flight Too Far?” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 26 (2013): 185–9.Google Scholar

British Library Add. MS 10449, fol. 5; transcribed in W. W. Greg, Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), vol. 2, document V. Lineation will refer to Greg’s transcription. For Greg’s commentary, including arguments for identification, see Dramatic Documents, 1.138–43.Google Scholar

If, that is, the extant “platt” for 2 Seven Deadly Sins dates from the late 1590s, as David Kathman has suggested: “Reconsidering The Seven Deadly Sins,” Early Theatre 7.1 (2004): 13–44. For Andrew Gurr’s counterargument and Kathman’s rebuttal, see “The Work of Elizabethan Plotters, and 2 The Seven Deadly Sins,” Early Theatre 10.1 (2007): 67–87, and “The Seven Deadly Sins and Theatrical Apprenticeship,” Early Theatre 14.1 (2011): 121–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604–1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 78–85. During the parliamentary debates surrounding the name “Britain”, the argument of its etymological connection with Brute was raised and dismissed.Google Scholar

See James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, 7 vols. (London, 1861–74), 3.194 (“he would be King of Britany — as Brutus and Arthur were, who had the style and were kings of the whole island”); and April 23, 1604, Journals of the House of Commons: Volume 1 (London, 1802), 955 (“A mere Fiction, Brittaine to take the Name of Brutus”). Google Scholar

Parry, “Ancient Britons”; Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under fames VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000);Google Scholar

Lisa Hopkins, “We were the Trojans: British National Identities in 1633,” Renaissance Studies 16 (2002): 36–51. On the idea of Britain in earlier literature, see the essays inCrossRefGoogle Scholar

Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Matter of Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).Google Scholar