13 April, 1597 - Time's Triumph and Fortune's

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

Henslowe writes: 13 | tt at times triumpe and fortus | 01| 05

In modern English: 13^th [April, 1597] | total at Time's Triumph and Fortune's | £1 and 5 shillings [i.e. 25 shillings]

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a play that we have not seen before at the Rose! Time's Triumph and Fortune's is not marked as a new play, so it must be an old one from the archives. But this is another of those strange days when a play is performed only once and never repeated.  

Father Time in a detail from Poussin's
A Dance to the Music of Time (1634-6)

The title is strange too; it's not even clear if it is complete. It could mean 'The Triumph of Time and of Fortune'. Or there might be a word missing; in his catalogue of British drama, Martin Wiggins wonders whether it is related to a mysterious lost play called The Second Part of Fortune's Tennis of which no first part is been recorded; Time's Triumph and Fortune's Tennis certainly sounds right. However, Wiggins continues that such a title would be illogical, because if Time triumphs, it must be because its implacable inevitability defeats the temporary reversals of fortune; he thus proposes that Time's Triumph and Fortune's Fall would be more logical as well as alliterative. Logic and Renaissance drama don't always mix, however...

For some reason, the scholarship on this lost play makes no mention of Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto, or, the Triumph of Time (1588), a tale of two friends torn apart by jealousy and a daughter separated from her father, which Shakespeare transformed into The Winter's Tale around 1610. Could there be a connection? 

Whatever its subject matter, Time's Triumph and Fortune's has received an unspectacular audience on this, its one appearance, and will never be seen again. 

FURTHER READING

Time's Triumph and Fortune's information

• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 228.
• Roslyn L. Knutson, "Time's Triumph and Fortune's", Lost Plays Database (2019), accessed April 2021. 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1022.

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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