3 February, 1597 - Osric

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

Henslowe writes: 3 | tt at oserycke ... | 01 | 09 

In modern English: 3^rd [February, 1597] ... total at Osric ... £1 and 9 shillings [i.e. 29 shillings]

Today, the Admiral's Men performed Osric, a play that we have not before seen at the Rose. Henslowe does not describe it as "new", so it must be an older play that the company has drawn from the archives.

Effigy of Osric, King of Hwicce, in Gloucester
Cathedral. Photo: Andrew R. Abbot, CC BY-SA 3.0

Like so much of the Admiral's Men's repertory, Osric is lost and we do not know what it was about. Several of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had kings named Osric, but, as Martin Wiggins concludes in his catalogue of British drama, none of them is associated with any interesting stories. The identity of this play's protagonist thus remains a mystery.

The box office for Osric is unremarkable and does not suggest that it had been greatly missed during its long absence from the Rose. 

FURTHER READING

Osric information

• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 867.
• Roslyn L. Knutson, "Osric", Lost Plays Database (2019), accessed January 2021.

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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