Henslowe writes: 3 | ne | tt at frederycke & basellia ... | 02 | 02
In modern English: 3rd [June, 1597] ... new ... total at Frederick and Basilea ... £2 and 2 shillings [i.e. 42 shillings]
Today, the Admiral's Men performed a new play! Frederick and Basilea is another lost play ... except not quite.
The title of Frederick and Basilea tells us nothing about the play, because there is no known story with characters of those names. But one element of the play survives in the form of a theatrical document known as a 'plot': that is, a list of entrances. The 'plot' doesn't tell us a great deal about the play itself, but it does tell us something about the inner workings of the Rose playhouse.
Only a few of the mysterious documents known as 'plots' survive, but it seems likely that every play performed in an English Renaissance playhouse would have had one created for use during performance. You can look at a facsimile of the 'plot' here. It is essentially a list of every entrance made by the characters during the play. Here is a short section of it, very heavily modernized and reformatted for readability:
Enter Frederick, Basilea (Richard Allen, Dick). To them, King (Mr Juby). To them, Messenger (Black Dick). To them, Sebastian, Heraclius, Theodore, Pedro, Philippo, Andreo, Thamar (Mr Allen, Sam, Mr Martyn, Leadbetter, Dutton, Pigg). To them, Leonora (Pigg).Enter Frederick, Basilea (Richard Allen, Dick). To them Philippo (Dutton). To her, King, Frederick (Mr Juby, Richard Allen).Enter Myrton-Hamec, Sebastian, Pedro, Lords (Thomas Towne, Mr Alleyn, Ledbetter), Attendants.Enter King, Theodore, Frederick (Mr Juby, Mr Martyn, Richard Allen). To them, Philippo, Basilea (Edward Dutton, his boy), Guard (Thomas Hunt, gatherers). To them, Messenger (Black Dick). To them, Sebastian, Myron-Hamec, Leonora, Pedro, Andreo (Mr Alleyn, Thomas Towne, Will, Ledbetter, Pigg), Guard (gatherers).
And so on. What is the purpose of such a document? In Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Tiffany Stern reconstructs how performances were facilitated by 'plots'. Each actor memorized his 'part', that is, his characters lines and their cues which needed to be memorized. There was a prompter standing close to the doors, following the script, ready to help out anyone who dropped a line. And the 'plot' was there to help actors remember which scenes they were in and when they needed to get ready. Each of the surviving 'plots' has a hole in the top indicating that it was hung up on a hook backstage during performances.
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| Detail from The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (anonymous, 1511) |
But the 'plot' does give us a glimpse of the actors who performed the plays in Henslowe's Diary. 'Mr Alleyn' is Edward Alleyn, the leading actor of the company; he is playing a character called Sebastian. Richard Allen was no relation. 'Mr Martyn' may be Martin Slater, of whom we will hear more in a few weeks: remember his name! Edward Juby was an important figure in the company and is mentioned in many Henslowe documents. 'Sam' is Samuel Rowley, a playwright as well as an actor. Various boys play the female roles, including Dick and 'Pigg' (John Pigge). And there are adult actors who aren't dignified with first names and may have been 'hired men' (who were not sharers in the company's profits): Leadbetter, Dutton, and 'Black Dick', who may have been the young Richard Perkins, who went on to be a popular leading actor.
This play stretched the company's limitations. There is a lot of doubling, with several actors playing multiples characters. And the 'plot' also reveals what the company did when a play required a lot of non-speaking characters onstage: they dragged on the 'gatherers', that is, the people responsible for collecting the money.
So, although its 'plot' teaches us very little about the play of Frederick and Basilea, we do learn a lot about the backstage personalities and activities in the Rose. Meanwhile, in the counting room, Henslowe can see that today was not a very successful premiere, with the playhouse just over half full.
FURTHER READING
Frederick and Basilea information
- Carol Chillington Rutter, Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester University Press, 1984), 111-13.
- David Mateer, "Edward Alleyn, Richard Perkins and the Rivalry Between the Swan and the Rose playhouses". Review of English Studies 243 (2009): 61-77.
- Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1078.
- David McInnis, "Frederick and Basilea", Lost Plays Database (2015), accessed June 2021.
Information on 'plots'
- Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201-31
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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