On the number of playgoers, see Appendix II to Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge, 1984). The names of playwrights in Henslowe’s records for 1598 (plus Shakespeare’s) are corroborated in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (London, 1598). Among “the best for tragedy,” Meres includes Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Dekker, and Jonson. And the “best for comedy” include Shakespeare, Heywood, Munday, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathaway, and Chettle. Meres also praises the Earl of Oxford’s comedies. And while there’s limited evidence that other aristocrats flirted with playwriting (Fulke Greville wrote sensitive closet drama at this time and the Earl of Derby wrote some comedies in the summer of 1599 for the company he patronized at the Boar’s Head Inn), there’s no evidence that Oxford, Derby, or other noblemen were ever part of what was necessarily a tight-knit group of practicing playwrights.
On topicality in Shakespeare’s plays, see David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Robert J. Fehrenbach, “When Lord Cobham and Edmund Tilney ‘were att odds’: Oldcastle, Falstaff, and the Date of 1 Henry IV,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1986), 87–102; Barbara Freedman, “Shakespearean Chronology, Ideological Complicity, and Floating Texts: Something Is Rotten in Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 190–210; and Gary Taylor, “William Shakespeare, Richard James and the House of Cobham,” Review of English Studies 38 (1987), 334–54. For more on Cobham, see especially David McKeen, A Memory of Honour: The Life of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, 2 vols. (Salzburg, 1986); Paul Whitefield White, “Shakespeare, the Cobhams, and the Dynamics of Theatrical Patronage,” in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitefield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge, 2002), 64–89; and James P. Bednarz, “Biographical Politics: Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Oldcastle Controversy,” Ben Jonson Journal 11 (2004), 1–20.
The standard authorities on Elizabethan censorship are Richard Dutton’s two books, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City, 1991) and Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York, 2000); and Janet Clare, “Art made tongue-tied by authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester, 1990). See, too: Andrew Hadfield, ed., Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (New York, 2001).
On Shakespeare and patronage, in addition to the many fine essays in Paul Whitefield White and Suzanne R. Westfall, eds., Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, see: Peter Davison, “Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597,” in Grace Ioppolo, ed., Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (Newark, 2000), 56–71; Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, The Life of Henry, Third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s Patron (Cambridge, 1922); and G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London, 1968). On the Shakespeare coat of arms, see C. W. Scott-Giles, Shakespeare’s Heraldry (London, 1950), Chambers, Facts and Problems, as well as Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare. On the playwrights and their collaboration, in addition to Henslowe’s Diary and Rutter’s Documents of the Rose Playhouse, see: J. M. Nosworthy, “Notes on Henry Porter,” Modern Language Review 35 (1940), 517–21; and Leslie Hotson, “The Adventure of the Single Rapier,” Atlantic Monthly 148 (1931), 26–31. And on Philip Henslowe, see: Bernard Beckerman, “Philip Henslowe,” in Joseph W. Donohue Jr., ed., The Theatrical Manager in England and America (Princeton, 1971), as well as S. P. Cerasano, “The Patronage Network of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2000), 82–92.
WINTER
1. A Battle of Wills
For Whitehall Palace’s architecture and treasures, I’ve drawn on the detailed accounts of Platter, Hentzner, Waldheim, and other foreign tourists, as well as Simon Thurley, Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240–1698 (New Haven, 1999), and his The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (New Haven, 1993); Ian Dunlop, The Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I (London, 1962); Sir Oliver Millar, The Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods 1649–51 (London, 1972), and his Tudor, Stuart, and Early Georgian Pictures in the Collection of H. M. the Queen (London, 1963); G. S. Dugdale, Whitehall Through the Centuries (London, 1950); the London County Council Survey of London, the Parish of St. Margaret, Westminster—Part II, vol. 1, Neighborhood of Whitehall (London, 1930); and Henry Glapthorne’s little known but wonderful White-Hall: A Poem (London, 1643). On Elizabeth’s movement from palace to palace, see Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, as well as John Astington, English Court Theatre and Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony (Amherst, 1999).
For Shakespeare’s relationship with Kemp, I draw heavily on David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge, 1987). See, too, Kemp’s own Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder: Performed in a Dance from London to Norwich (London, 1600); as well as H. D. Gray, “The Roles of William Kemp,” Modern Language Review 25 (1930), 261–73; Joseph Allen Bryant Jr., “Shakespeare’s Falstaff and the Mantle of Dick Tarlton,” Studies in Philology 51 (1954), 149–62; George Walton Williams, “The Text of 2 Henry IV: Facts and Problems,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976), 173–82; John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1943); and Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated and Other Essays (New York, 1949). For the jig, see Charles R. Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig (Chicago, 1929). For the reference to the chanting of Kemp’s jig, see “Satire 5” in Everard Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), ed. D. Allen Carroll (Chapel Hill, 1974). See, too, Melissa D. Aaron, “The Globe and Henry V as Business Document,” Studies in English Literature 40 (2000), 277–92. For the anecdote about Shakespeare, Burbage, and the citizen’s wife, see The Diary of John Manningham, Robert Parker Sorlein, ed. (Hanover, N. H., 1976).
For the revised epilogue to the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, I’ve consulted A. R. Humphries, ed., The Second Part of King Henry IV (London, 1966); Giorgio Melchiori, The Second Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge, 1989); René Weis, Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford, 1998); and Matthias A. Shaaber, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Second Part of Henry the Fourth (Philadelphia, 1940). Despite the long-standing editorial consensus that the epilogue as printed contains either two or three distinct speeches (and the suggestion by older editors that one of the speakers is Shakespeare himself), critics and biographers of Shakespeare have ignored its significance.
2. A Great Blow in Ireland
For Essex’s Apology, see Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, An Apology of the Earl of Essex… Penned by Himself, in Anno 1598 (London, 1603). For Essex’s poetry, see Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia, 1991) as well as his “The Poems of Edward DeVere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex,” Studies in Philology (1980). The standard work on Essex at court is Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999). Older biographical accounts of Essex include E. A. Abbott, Bacon and Essex (London 1877); G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (New York, 1937); Robert Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex (New York, 1971); and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England (London, 1986). Lytton Strachey’s wonderfully engaging though dated Elizabeth and Essex (London, 1928) is still worth reading.
For the life of Elizabeth I, I’ve drawn on Carole Levin, “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994); Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford, 1993); Clark Hulse, Elizabeth I: Ruler and Legend (Urbana, 2003); Georgianna Ziegler, ed., Elizabeth I: Then and Now (Washington, D.C., 2003); David Loades, Elizabeth I (London, 2003); Alison Plowden, Elizabeth Regina: The Age of Triumph, 1588–1603 (London, 1980); and Julia M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, 1998). For her writings, see Lea
h S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds., Elizabeth I Collected Works (Chicago, 2000), and G. B. Harrison, ed., The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I (Westport, Conn., 1981).
For the careers of Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, see Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1960) and his Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1955); as well as Michael A. R. Graves, Burghley: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (London, 1998). And for the lord admiral’s life, see Robert W. Kenny, Elizabeth’s Admiral: The Political Career of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham 1536–1624 (Baltimore, 1970).
The literature on Elizabethan Ireland is vast. For contemporary accounts on which I draw, in addition to Acts of the Privy Council and various State Papers for England and Ireland, see: Sir James Perrott, The Chronicle of Ireland 1584–1608, ed. Herbert Wood (Dublin, 1933); Fynes Morison, An Itinerary (London, 1617; reprint, 4 vols., Glasgow, 1907); William Farmer, “Annals of Ireland from the Year 1594 to 1613,” ed. C. Litton Falkiner, English Historical Review 22 (1907), 104–30; 527–52; Robert Payne, A Brief Description of Ireland (1589), reprint. in Irish Archaeological Society 1 (1841), 1–14; John Dimmok, A Treatice of Ireland, transcribed by J. C. Halliwell, ed. Richard Butler, Irish Archaeological Society (Dublin, 1842), 1–90; Anon., The Supplication of the Blood of the English Most Lamentably Murdered in Ireland (1598), ed. Willy Maley, Analecta Hibernica, 36 (1994), 3–91; vol. 6 of John O’Donovan, ed., Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters (Dublin, 1856; 3 ed., reprint 1990); M. J. Byrne, trans., The Irish War of Defence 1598–1600: Extracts from the ‘De Hibernia Insula Commenatarius’ of Peter Lombard, Archbishop of Armagh (Cork, 1930); M. J. Byrne, ed. and trans., Ireland Under Elizabeth: Chapters Towards a History of Ireland in the Reign of Elizabeth. Being a Portion by Don Philip O’Sullivan Bear (Dublin, 1903); and Thomas Gainsford, The True and Exemplary and Remarkable Life of the Earle of Tirone (London, 1619).
For modern discussions of Elizabethan Ireland, see David B. Quinn’s The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, 1966), as well as his “‘A Discourse on Ireland’ (circa 1599): A Sidelight on English Colonial Policy,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 47 (1942): 151–66; Alfred O’Rahilly, The Massacre at Smerwick (1580) (Cork, 1938); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001); John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis (Manchester, 1997); Lindsay Boynton, The Elizabethan Militia: 1558–1638 (London, 1967); Anthony J. Sheehan, “The Overthrow of the Plantation of Munster in October 1598,” The Irish Sword 15 (1982–83), 11–22; Richard Bagwell, Ireland Under the Tudors (London, 1890); Andrew Hadfield, “‘The Naked and the Dead’: Elizabethan Perceptions of Ireland,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge, 1996), 32–54; and Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge, 1993).
For the military background of Essex’s campaign, see especially L. W. Henry, “Contemporary Sources for Essex’s Lieutenancy in Ireland, 1599,” Irish Historical Studies 11 (1958–59), 8–17; Cyril Falls, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London, 1950); C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army (2 ed., Oxford, 1966); Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Suffolk, 1993); G. A. Hayes-McCoy, “The Army of Ulster, 1593–1601,” The Irish Sword 1 (1949–53), 105–17; and Paul E. J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (New York, 2003). For military conscription from the public playhouses in 1602, see Isaac Herbert Jeayes, ed., The Letters of Philip Gawdy (London, 1906).
3. Burial at Westminster
For Westminster Abbey itself and Henry V’s tomb, see Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 2 vols. (5 ed., New York, 1882); Lawrence E. Tanner, The History and Treasures of Westminster Abbey (London, 1953); and James Hamilton Wylie, The Reign of Henry the Fifth, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1919).
On Edmund Spenser’s life, his writings about Ireland, and his death and funeral in London, see: Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Os-good, Frederick Morgan Padelford, and Ray Heffner, eds., The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 11 vols. (Baltimore, 1932–49); Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford, 1997); Alexander C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1945); Richard Rambuss, “Spenser’s Lives, Spenser’s Careers,” in Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography, eds. Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David A. Richardson (Amherst, 1996), 1–17; Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (London, 1994), and his Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (New York, 1997); Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford, 1997); A. C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1990); Herbert Berry and E. K. Timings, “Spenser’s Pension,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 2 (1960), 254–59; Roderick L. Eagle, “The Search for Spenser’s Grave,” Notes & Queries 201 (1956), 282–83; Lisa Jardine, “Encountering Ireland: Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and English Colonial Adventures,” in Representing Ireland, 60–75; and William Wells, ed., Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, compiled by Ray Heffner, Dorothy E. Mason, and Frederick M. Padelford (Chapel Hill, 1972).
For Shakespeare’s relation to Spenser, see volume 2 of Edmond Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (London, 1821); the entry in The Spenser Encyclopedia; James P. Bednarz, “Imitations of Spenser in A Misummer Night’s Dream,” Renaissance Drama 14 (1983), 79–102; and Patrick Cheney, “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, Spenser’s National Epic, and Counter-Petrarchism,” English Literary History 31 (2001), 331–64. Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge, 1997), and David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford, 1997) are also helpful.
4. A Sermon at Richmond
For Richmond Palace, in addition to traveler accounts, I’ve drawn on Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England; Ian Dunlop, Palaces and Progresses of Elizabeth I; and Stephen Pasmore’s Richmond Local Historical Society Paper, The Life and Times of Queen Elizabeth I at Richmond Palace (London, 1992).
For the epilogue itself, see William A. Ringler and Steven W. May, “An Epilogue Possibly by Shakespeare,” Modern Philology 70 (1972), 138–39. It was discovered in 1972, when Steven May came upon it in the commonplace book of Henry Stanford, who served the lord chamberlain. See, too, Steven W. May, ed., Henry Stanford’s Anthology (New York, 1988); and Juliet Dusinberre, “Pancakes and a Date for As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003), 371–405. On Elizabethan dramatic prologues and epilogues, see Tiffany Stern, “‘A small-beer-health to his second day’: Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theater,” Studies in Philology 101 (2004), 172–99.
On transportation from Richmond to London: the experience of Thomas Platter, who visited Richmond with some friends in October 1599, showed that it was possible to return in an afternoon. Platter’s party had arrived at Richmond by coach. Platter writes that his party was “invited to lunch at court. But we were afraid we should be kept too long and unable to return to London the same day as we desired, we made our excuses and took our lunch in the village in an inn. After the meal we returned by coach quietly back to London to our former hostelry.” It would not have taken any longer for Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders to return to London in the afternoon.
On Lancelot Andrewes, see his Ninety-Six Sermons (London, 1629); vol. 11 of J. P. Wilson and James Bliss, The Works of Lancelot Andrewes 11 vols. (London, 1841–54); F. O. White, Lives of the Elizabethan Bishops (London, 1898); and Paul A. Welsby, Lancelot Andrewes, 1555–1626 (London, 1958). And on preaching at court, including Rudd’s sermons to Elizabeth, see Peter E. McCullough’s excellent Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998).
5. Band of Brothers
F
or the practice of affixing playbills to posts, see the prologue to A Warning for Fair Women (London, 1599). For how plays were advertised see Tiffany Stern’s forthcoming The Fragmented Playtext in Shakespearean England. For the text and a discussion of Shakespeare’s debt to the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, see Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, eds., The Oldcastle Controversy: “Sir John Oldcastle, Part I” and “The Famous Victories of Henry V” (Manchester, 1991).
For Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and Ireland, see, in addition to Gary Taylor’s edition of the play: Andrew Murphy, “Shakespeare’s Irish History,” Literature and History 5 (1996), 38–59; D. Plunckett Barton, Links Between Ireland and Shakespeare (Dublin, 1919); Joel B. Altman, “‘Vile Participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 1–32; Michael Neill, “Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories,” in Putting History to the Question (New York, 2000), 339–72; Nick de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theater of War (Aldershot, 1998); Charles Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary (London, 2000); Anthony Dawson, “The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 54–67; Jonathan Baldo, “Wars of Memory in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996), 132–59; Harold H. Davis, “The Military Career of Thomas North,” Huntington Library Quarterly 12 (1949), 315–21; Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley, 1956); Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray’s collection, Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture (Basingstoke, 1997), especially Andrew Murphy, “ ‘Tish Ill Done,’: Henry the Fifth and the Politics of Editing,” 213–34. And for “Calen o Custore me,” see Clement Robinson, A Handful of Pleasant Delights (London, 1584). On textual issues and censorship, see Annabel Patterson, “Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988), 29–62. See, too, John Norden, A Prayer for the Prosperous Proceedings and Good Success of the Earle of Essex and His Companies, in Their Present Expedition in Ireland Against Tyrone (London, 1599). And for John Florio’s dictionary entry, see his Queen Anne’s New World of Words (London, 1611).
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