3 January, 1596 - Chinon of England

Here's what the Admiral's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: y^e 3 of Jenewary 1595 ... ne ... R at chinone of Jngland ... l^s

In modern English: 3^rd January, [1596] ... New ... Received at Chinon of England ... 50 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play! Chinon of England is lost, but its title tells us that it was an Arthurian romance about a fool who becomes a knight.

You will look in vain for Chinon in the pages of the classic Arthurian legends, such as Mallory's Morte d'Arthur; the only source for his story is a romance by an obscure writer named Christopher Middleton, entitled The Famous History of Chinon of England. A few days from now, on 20 January, this book will be registered with the Stationers, and it will ultimately be published in 1597, a year after the play's premiere. Perhaps the author of the play read this text in manuscript before it was published. Or perhaps the romance is a novelization of the play; indeed, perhaps Christopher Middleton was himself the play's author too. Either way, let's take a look at Middleton's tale of Chinon and imagine it performed at the Rose.

The story of Chinon

Chinon of England (1597)

The full title of Christopher Middleton's 1597 romance gives a good impression of its plot: The famous history of  Chinon of England, with his strange adventures for the love of Celestina, daughter to Louis, King of France; with the worthy achievement of Sir Lancelot du Lac and Sir Tristram de Lyones for fair Laura, Daughter to Cador, Earl of Cornwall; being all knights of King Arthur's Round Table.

Chinon begins his story as the son of the Earl of Cornwall. Despite his illustrious heritage, his is a fool; the exact nature of his foolishness is never explained by Middleton, but everyone laments "that so well-fashioned a body should contain so ill-formed a mind".

Sir Lancelot, a Knight of the Round Table, falls for Chinon's beautiful sister, Laura. To win her love, Lancelot goes on chivalric quests in France, and, at a tournament, kills the son of the Sultan of Babylon. But the Sultan is enraged and invades France, capturing Celestina, daughter of King Louis.

Costume design by Inigo Jones
for the character of Oberon
in a 1610 masque

Chinon, meanwhile, arrives in France, "greedy of glory, but unfit to find it". After travelling through a forest, he becomes a hero when he defeats a giant serpent (it is disappointing that Middleton never explains why Chinon suddenly loses his foolishness; the character is simply "by the power of provident heaven raised from that dejection"). Chinon goes on to rescue Sir Lancelot, Sir Tristram, and Sir Triamore from a cave where they have been imprisoned.

At this point, Oberon, King of the Fairies appears (you might remember him from Huon of Bordeaux a couple of years ago, and he may also be appearing in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream on the other side of London at this time). Oberon shows the knights a sword in a stone. The other three knights fail to pull it out, but Chinon succeeds. Oberon rewards him with armour and "a little ill-favored elvish dwarf" to be his squire.

Celestina must now be rescued from the Sultan, so Chinon and Triamore travel to Babylon. The Sultan is in love with Celestina, but she is resisting him. Triamore disguises as an enchantress who can cast love spells, and while the Sultan is distracted, Chinon captures him, enabling Celestina to be rescued.

The Knights of the Round
Table, from the Compilation
arthurienne de Micheau
Gonnot (1470)

The heroes bring the Sultan to England as a prisoner, and Chinon becomes a knight of the Round Table, giving his father much delight: "discoursing to his old father the story of their travails", his "very words breeds new life in the dried sinews of his old limbs".

Middleton then goes on to tell another tale, this time about Chinon rescuing a maiden named Cassiopeia from a witch who has turned her father into a bear. It's a complicated story in which Chinon appears only infrequently; Martin Wiggins thus proposes in his Catalogue of British Drama that it may not have appeared in the play.

Reputation

We don't know much more about Chinon of England than what we can read in Middleton's romance. However, an interesting nugget appears in a 1654 book by Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixote. In it, Gayton makes some observations on the weaknesses of English theatre, one of which is its tendency to portray events that are impossible to stage and can only be rendered by bringing on a Chorus figure to describe them, "or [by] the descending of some god, or a magician". He singles out Chinon as an example, along with some other plays from the Rose: "as in the plays of Bungay, Bacon, and Vandarmast, the three great necromancers, Dr Faustus, Chinon of England, and the like". It's not known which part of the story of Chinon was unstageable, but Martin Wiggins suspects it was the battle with the serpent.

Gayton may sneer, but Chinon of England has attracted a good-sized crowd to the Rose today for its very first performance. Perhaps it will become a new blockbuster for the Admiral's Men?

FURTHER READING

Chinon of England information

• Christopher Middleton, The Famous History of Chinon of England (1597).
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 223.
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1027.
• Paul Whitfield White, "The Admiral's Lost Arthurian Plays," in Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England, edited by David McInnis and Matthew Steggle (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 151.
• David McInnis, "Chinon of England", Lost Plays Database (2015).

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

Comments?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!