10 December, 1596 - Captain Thomas Stukeley

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 11 of desembȝ 1596 ... ne ... R at stewtley ... xxxx^s 

In modern English: [10^th] December, 1596 ... New ... Received at Stukeley ... 40 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men performed another new play! It has been a only a few days since we welcomed Vortiger to the repertoire, and now we must welcome Captain Thomas Stukeley. And in a rare turn of events, this play actually survives for us to read today, albeit in a rather muddled form. The play's authorship is uncertain, but most scholars who have worked on it suspect the presence of Thomas Heywood, one of the most prolific playwrights of the period.

Who was Thomas Stukeley? 

Captain Thomas Stukeley was a maverick English mercenary who had many adventures in Europe and Africa. Most famously, he travelled to Morocco to fight alongside the forces of King Sebastian of Portugal as they supported Abd el-Malik's quest to reclaim his throne from the usurper Muly Mahamet. This venture resulted in the loss of his life at the Battle of Alcazar, where a cannonball took off his legs as he was deserting his troops. You can read an authoritative survey of his life in Charles Edelman's introduction to The Stukeley Plays (2005).

Title page of the 1605 text
of the play

If this story sounds familiar, it's because you are remembering the early years of Henslowe's Diary, back in 1592, when Lord Strange's Men were the players at the Rose and performed a play called Muly Molocco that may have been the same play as the extant Battle of Alcazar by George Peele. You might also recall that more recently, the Admiral's Men were performing a play entitled Mahamet, which might have been the same play under yet another title. 

In The Battle of Alcazar, Stukeley plays a relatively small role. This new play, however, focuses entirely on him, and is best thought of as an overlapping prequel that portrays Stukeley's adventures before the battle, and then ends with an alternative depiction of the battle and of Stukeley's death.

As with so many of the surviving plays of the Rose, the playtext of Captain Thomas Stukeley is messy and often incoherent. Scenes appear to be missing, and, bizarrely, one scene appears twice, the second time rewritten in Irish dialect.  Nonetheless, the overall plot of the play is fairly clear, and it depicts Stukeley as an heroic and dashing chaser of glory. 

The play

The title page of Captain Thomas Stukeley, published in 1605, sums up the essence of its plot: "The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, with his marriage to Alderman Curtis's daughter and valiant ending at the Battle of Alcazar" .

The play begins in the 1550s, with our eponymous hero as a young law student in London, known more for spending freely than for studying. He marries Nell, daughter of a  wealthy family; her father is concerned about Stukeley, calling him "very wild, a quarreler, a fighter, / Ay, and I doubt a spend-good too" (sc. 1), but Stukeley wins Nell because she loves him and because her former suitor, Vernon, acknowledges his inferiority to Stukeley and withdraws his claim.

Now extremely wealthy, Stukeley is not content to remain in England, but rather seeks glory in foreign adventures. He raises an army to fight in Ireland against the rebels challenging English rule. There, he defeats an Irish army in the town of Dundalk after what the stage direction calls "a good pretty fight" (sc. 11). But things are tense in the English camp; Vernon is among the soldiers there and leaves because he doesn't want to be around Stukeley. 

King Philip II of Spain

Stukeley decides to next seek his fortunes in Europe; in the Spanish city of Cadiz, he is is arrested for not paying harbour taxes, but gets away with it by charming the Governor's wife (who "never saw a fairer gentleman"; sc. 13) and then King Philip of Spain himself into forgiving him.

Meanwhile, Vernon is suffering similar problems with Spanish bureaucracy and Stukeley nobly helps him too. Stukeley learns from Vernon that he is no longer rich: Nell and her family have died and have left him nothing. But you can't keep Stukeley down. He has won the favour of the King of Spain and is confident in his abilities: "Tom Stukeley lives, lusty Tom Stukeley, / Graced by the greatest King of Christendom!" (sc. 17). And Vernon ponders their contrasting successes in life, comparing himself to a colewort (a kind of cabbage):

In Ireland there he braved his governor,

In Spain he is companion to the King;

His fortune mounts and mine stoops to the ground,

He as the vine, I as the colewort grow. (sc. 17)

King Sebastian of Portugal

King Philip hires Stukeley as an envoy to Rome, but doesn't tell him about his devious plan to conquer Portugal. Philip is pretending to support the young King Sebastian of Portugal's intent of intervening in a Moroccan civil war; Sebastian has decided to support Muly Mahamet in his war against his brother Abd el-Malik and Philip is pretending to support him in turn. But he is only doing so because he thinks Sebastian's foolish enterprise will result in his death, leaving a gap for Philip to invade Portugal. 

Stukeley finds out about Philip's duplicity, and decides to support Sebastian's venture in Morocco, raising an army of Italian soldiers. He and Sebastian are delighted to see a portent at this moment: as the stage direction specifies, "with a sudden thunder-clap the sky is on fire and the blazing star appears, which they, prognosticating to be fortunate, depart very joyfully" (sc. 20). Unfortunately, they have interpreted the omen incorrectly; it is anything but a fortunate sign. 

And so, we have now caught up with the events of the older plays, as the Battle of Alcazar begins. Stukeley and Sebastian join with Muly Mahamet and fight the armies of Abd el-Malik under a blazing sun that "so heats our armour with his beams / That it doth burn and sear our very flesh" (sc. 25). At the end of it all, Sebastian, Muly Mahamet and Abd el-Malik are all dead.  

1629 Portuguese illustration of the Battle of Alcazar

Meanwhile, who should Stukeley meet amid the battle, but his old rival Vernon? They are both wounded to the death, and vow to meet again in heaven; as Stukeley says, "we two / Were so ordained to be of one self heart, / To love one woman, breathe one country air, / And now ... we both shall die one kind of death" (sc. 28). And so they do, but not in the way they expect, for the Italian soldiers are angry at the foolhardy enterprise Stukeley has led them into, and stab the two men to death. 

That's the final scene in the published text. But scholars suspect that the last two scenes were somehow reversed during printing, as the penultimate scene provides more conventional closure: Abd el-Malik's brother orders the burial of the Christians who fought for him, and orders the body of Muly Mahamet to be flayed, stuffed, and paraded as a warning to would-be usurpers. In the last lines, he proposes that,

     in memorial of this victory,

For ever after be this fourth of August

Kept holy to the service of our gods,

Through all our kingdoms and dominions. (sc. 29)

If you would like to read Captain Thomas Stukeley, the most readable text is Charles Edelman's modern-spelling edition, which can be found in his anthology The Stukeley Plays (2005).

What we learn from this

From this play we learn, once again, that popular plays at the Rose never die; they just get recycled. It's not clear what happened to the old plays (or play, singular?) of The Battle of Alcazar, Muly Molocco and Mahamet, but for unknown reasons they are no longer being performed at the Rose. Captain Thomas Stukeley appears to be an attempt at reviving popular material by reworking it into a different form. Instead of a focused play about the participants in the Moroccan civil war and the resulting battle, Thomas Heywood created instead a sprawling, episodic play about a glamorous English hero.

It is fascinating to consider that Edward Alleyn, the charismatic leading actor of the Rose, may have played different characters in these plays. In The Battle of Alcazar, he is believed to have played the flamboyantly evil Moor Muly Mahamet. But in Captain Thomas Stukeley, the role of Muly Mahamet is much smaller, and we may presume that Alleyn instead played the flamboyantly heroic Stukeley.

Despite all these good omens, however, the Admiral's Men must be disappointed with the reception of the premiere of Captain Thomas Stukeley. The 40 shillings received as the box office are not at all impressive for an opening night, and suggest that the subject of the Battle of Alcazar might have already been played out. 

FURTHER READING

Captain Thomas Stukeley information

• Charles Edelman (ed.), The Stukeley Plays (Manchester University Press, 2005)
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154-5, 224
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1049.

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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