28 June, 1594 - Galiaso

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 26 of June 1594 ... ne ... R at galiaso ... iij^ll iiij^s

In modern English: [28^th] June, 1594 ... New ... Received at Galiaso ... £3 and 4 shillings

Today is St Peter's Eve, a time for evening bonfires that echo those of Midsummer's Eve. On this special day, the Admiral's Men have premiered a new play: Galiaso. Unfortunately, the play is lost, and we have no clue what it was about - or rather, we have too many clues! Galeazzo is a name shared by many historical and fictional figures from Italy, while a galleass is a kind of Spanish warship. Which of these things was the subject of the play at the Rose? I don't know, but let us survey the possibilities and see if any of them spark our imaginations!

An Italian tale?

Galeazzo II Visconti, Duke of
Milan ; not a nice man, but he
does look rather fabulous.

Of the many Italians named Galeazzo, scholars have suggested several whose lives could have made for a good play. In her article on Galiaso for the Lost Plays Database, Roslyn L. Knutson notes that several members of the Visconti dynasty of fourteenth-century Milan were named Galeazzo and some were interestingly nasty rulers, fond of torture and unpleasant executions.

There are also three Galleazi in the tales of Matteo Bandello, an Italian writer whose stories were a common source for English dramatists hunting for plots. Perhaps the play was based on one of these tales, although they all seem to be lacking a certain something (links are provided to a facsimile of John Payne's 1890 translation): 

Story 1.18, “Galeazzo carries off a damsel from Padua, and then through jealousy kills both her and himself.” Young Galeazzo's mum is angry that he has a secret girlfriend, so she has the girl kidnapped and sent to a nunnery; then mum feels bad and reunites the lovers, but Galeazzo is paranoid that his girlfriend might have been admired by other men while she was gone (even though she was in a nunnery...) and so he kills her and himself. 

Galleazzo Maria Sforza, Duke
of Milan and subject of
tales by Bandello

Story 3.35, “Duke Galeazzo Sforza maketh Cagnuola his privy councilor, finding him just and firm in his judgments.” Galeazzo sentences Cagnuola to death when he refuses to make a corrupt judgement in favour of one of the Duke's mistresses; Cagnuola would rather die than give an unlawful judgement and goes to the block, but just before the axe falls, the Duke reveals that it was all a test of his honesty, and promotes him. 

Story 4.14, “A shrewd device of Duke Galeazzo Sforza to hoodwink one of his councilors, whose wife he enjoyed amorous-wise.” Galeazzo is having an affair with the wife of one of his councilors, but as he is leaving her bedroom he bumps into the husband, who has unexpectedly come home. Galeazzo gets away with it by pretending he was visiting to ask the husband about an important case. (A deeply underwhelming ending, in my opinion!)

Here's another possibility. In his Catalogue of British Drama, Martin Wiggins points to a passing reference in story 2.33 of William Painter's anthology The Palace of Pleasure (1566), in which one Galleazze Fogase is propelled into a city to bribe the enemy army: they thrust him "into the mouth of a cannon, tying his head unto his knees and causing him to be carried by the violent force of gunpowder into the city"; Wiggins notes that this is similar to a scene in The Jew of Malta in which Barabas is thrown over the city walls; it seems a bit harder to stage, though... 

Wiggins also mentions the Italian poet Torquato Tasso's unfinished Galealto, King of Norway, later revised into King Torrismondo. This might seem a stretch, but, as we'll see, the Admiral's Men's repertory contains a number of Tasso connections; stay tuned.

The defeat of a galleass?

A Spanish galleass, from Ships Through the Ages
by Frederick Leonard King (1934)

But maybe the title does not refer to a person at all. A galleass was a kind of heavy warship powered by sails and oars. Several of them fought among the Spanish Armada, and shortly after its defeat, Thomas Deloney published "A joyful new ballad declaring the happy obtaining of the great Galleazzo wherein Pedro de Valdez was the chief".  The ballad in fact celebrates the taking of two of the Armada's ships: Pedro de Valdez's Nuestra Señora del Rosario, which it calls "the great Galleazzo", and Hugo de Moncada's galleass San Lorenzo, captured by the English after it ran aground off Calais.

One fact adds to this possibility. The ballad praises Charles Howard, the "Lord High Admiral" of the English. By 1594, Howard was the patron of the Admiral's Men. So, if the great galleass was indeed the subject of the play, the actors would have been glorifying their own patron's heroic defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Summary

We have learned many random interesting things today, but we still don't have a firm idea of what Galiaso was about. Nonetheless, the play had a very successful premiere, attracting a large audience to the Rose.


FURTHER READING

Galiaso information

• Matteo Bandello, The Novels of Matteo Bandello, 6 vols., trans. Thomas Payne (Villion Society, 1890)
• William Painter, "The Thirty-Third Novel", in The Palace of Pleasure, vol. 3, ed. Joseph Jacobs (David Nutt, 1890)
• Thomas Deloney, The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Clarendon Press, 1912), 469-73, 596-7
• Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 293-6, 327-29
• Roslyn L. Knutson, "Galiaso", Lost Plays Database (2012). 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 958.

 

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!