Henslowe writes: ye 17 of septmbȝ 1595 ... ne ... R at the worldes tragedy ... iijll vs
In modern English: 17th September, 1595 ... New ... Received at The World's Tragedy ... £3 and 5 shillings.
Today, the Admiral's Men performed a new play! And once again it is now lost and deeply mysterious. The first mystery is its title: Henslowe records it today as The World's Tragedy, but two weeks from now he will begin to record it as The New World's Tragedy instead. Why?
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| Walter Raleigh attacking Trinidad in 1595, by Theodore de Bry (1595) |
An alternative possibility, raised by Martin Wiggins in his catalogue of British drama, is that the play really was called The World's Tragedy, in which case it could have been about Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Wiggins proposes that it might have became known as The 'New' World's Tragedy if it had been heavily revised after a few performances. This is an intriguing idea but applying Occam's Razor leads me to prefer the simpler explanation; I will thus assume that this was a play set in the Americas.
Tragedies of the New World
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| Tlaxcalan image of Hernán Cortés meeting the Aztec ruler Moctezuma in 1519 |
But perhaps the tragedy was that of the European settlers. In his edition of Renaissance travel plays, Anthony Parr suggests that The New World's Tragedy might have been about the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke. In 1587, English colonists had attempted to settle on the coast of what is now North Carolina, but when a follow-up voyage returned the following year, they were gone, and their fate has been the subject of speculation ever since. The story certainly has dramatic potential, since a 1937 play entitled The Lost Colony has been performed almost every summer at Roanoke for over eighty years.
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| Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America (1596) |
We'll probably never know which, if any, of these theories is correct. This is frustrating, because it would be fascinating to know how the playwright of the English Renaissance might have dramatized the New World on popular stage. At least three such plays are known to have existed (the others are The Conquest of the West Indies and A Tragedy of the Plantation of Virginia), but none has survived.
Whatever tale was told at the Rose today, it attracted a huge audience, resulting in a very successful premiere.
FURTHER READING
The New World's Tragedy information
- Anthony Parr, ed., Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester University Press, 1996), 3.
- Donald Beecher and Henry D. Janzen, eds., A Margarite of America (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
- David McInnis, "New World's Tragedy, The", Lost Plays Database (2009).
- Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1009.
- Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2015), 181.
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?
Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!
