25 June, 1596 - Troy

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 22 of June 1596 ... ne ... R at troye ... iij^ll ix^s 

In modern English: [25^th] June, 1596 ... New ... Received at Troy ... £3 and 9 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play! Troy is lost, as is so often the case,  but its title tells us that its subject was the Trojan War and other clues in the historical record hint at more specific details. Let's investigate what the audience might have seen on stage today...

The tales of Troy

It is hard to know what a play called Troy might have included, as the Trojan War is a huge and complex set of legends comprising countless tales, There is the judgement of Paris, in which the Trojan prince wins Helen of Troy as a reward for selecting Aphrodite in a divine beauty competition. There is Paris's abduction or seduction of Helen, and his taking of her back to Troy. There is Menelaus's persuading of the Greek kings to unite and take Helen back.

Achilles drags the body of Hector around
the walls of Troy; from Biagio
d'Antonio's The Death of Hector (1490s)

There is the becalming of the Greek fleet at Aulis and Agamemnon's sacrifice of his own daughter in return for a wind. There are the ten years of battle around the beseiged Troy, with contests between the noble Trojan Hector and the almost indestructible Achilles. Ultimately, there is the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles, and, later, Achilles' own death, struck by an arrow fired by Paris. 

There is the climax of the war, in which the Greeks pretend to go home, but leave a giant wooden horse, supposedly an offering to be brought by the joyful Trojans into the their city but in fact stuffed with Greek soldiers who creep out at night and begin the sacking of Troy.

And then there are all the tales of the aftermath, such as Agamemnon's death at the hands of his wife on his return, her death at the hands of her son Orestes, and also of the adventures of Odysseus during his ten-year journey home, as recounted in the Odyssey.

Aeneas's Flight from Troy
by Federico Barocci (1598)

And those are only the original Greek stories. Also popular in English culture was the medieval tale of Troilus and Cressida, about lovers divided by the war. And so too were the legends about the Trojan refugees: Aeneas, whom the Romans believed to be their ancestor, and Brutus, whom the Britons believed to be the founder of London.

We cannot know how much of this material appeared in the play of Troy, but there are hints in the historical evidence.

The play

Detail from The Siege of Troy
by Biagio d'Antonio (1490s)

In 1598, Henslowe listed the props at the Rose playhouse, which contained "one great horse with his legs". Could this be the wooden horse?  If, so, it must surely have been made for Troy.

In 1612, the actor-playwright Thomas Heywood (who would later write his own two-part play about Troy called The Iron Age) wrote An Apology for Actors, a rebuttal of anti-theatrical campaigners. In it, he celebrates the power of the actor to "move the spirits of the beholder to admiration" and offers various examples of heroic stage characters to illustrate his point. We have already encountered Heywood's recollection of the two Hercules plays at the Rose, but in another of his examples, he describes how powerful it is 

to see a soldier shaped like a soldier; walk, speak, act like a soldier; to see a Hector, all besmeared with blood, trampling on the bulks of kings; a Troilus returning from the field in the sight of his father Priam, as if man and horse even from the steed's rough fetlocks to the plume on the champion's helmet had been together plunged in a purple ocean.

If Heywood is recalling an actual stage scene here, he must have seen two Trojan heroes soaked in blood from the battlefield: Hector, trampling on the bodies of the Greek kings that he has defeated, and Troilus returning to his father the king. Perhaps that play was Troy; certainly, no such scenes exist in any surviving Renaissance play about Troy. On the other hand, Troilus wouldn't be riding a horse onstage, so this description isn't fully convincing as an accurate memory. And other lost plays are possible, as we'll see.

A fight between Hector and Ajax, from 
the title page of Thomas Heywood's
The Iron Age (c.1613)

The other fragments of evidence consist of references in Henslowe's Diary to several other lost plays about Troy, all of which were written in 1599 by Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle. The first is an adaptation of Troilus and Cressida (it may have inspired Shakespeare`s own version, written a few years later). The second is Troy's Revenge, with the Tragedy of Polyphemus, which must have told the tale of Odysseus' voyage home, including his battle with the eponymous Cyclops; the title implies that the hero's toils were represented as divine revenge for his role in Troy's fall. Finally, Agamemnon, which appears to have been originally called Orestes' Furies, must have told the tale of Agamemnon's return and of the cycle of revenge that befell his family.

The sacking of Troy, from the title
page of Thomas Heywood's The
Second Part of the Iron Age (c.1613)

All of this suggests that the Admiral's Men were creating a gigantic multi-play narrative of the Trojan War and its aftermath. In his catalogue of British drama, Martin Wiggins proposes that Troy might have been included among them, and might have included the sacking of the city and the wooden horse, since no other play among the cycle appears to have dramatized that important material.

Troy would certainly have fitted well with the repertory of the Rose, because plays about sieges were always popular there, such as Jerusalem and The Siege of London. But whatever the exact subject matter of Troy, today's premiere was a great success, with a full house.

FURTHER READING

Troy information

• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1037. 

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?

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