Henslowe writes: ye 26 of Julye 1594 ... R at godfrey ... xlvijs
In modern English: 26th July, 1594 ... Received at Godfrey ... 47 shillings
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The death of Godfrey of Bouillon.
From a thirteenth century manuscript of William of Tyre's Histoire d'Outremer |
It's hard to say. In the future, Henslowe will often list a Godfrey and occasionally a Second Part of Godfrey, which would imply that he is distinguishing two different plays, Part 1 and Part 2. But in his catalogue of British Drama, Martin Wiggins proposes that all of these entries refer to Part 2; his logic is that the company will never perform Godfrey and The Second Part one after the other, as one might expect them to if the plays were paired together. He therefore thinks that the Second Part was a self-contained play and that Henslowe was simply inconsistent in how he titled it.
Both the first and second parts of Godfrey of Bouillon are lost, of course, so we will probably never know which one was staged today. All we can say is that Godfrey, whether it was Part 1 or Part 2, told some kind of story about battles with the Turks in Jerusalem, and that it was extremely successful today, with above-average box office, similar to the one received by Belin Dun yesterday.
FURTHER READING
Godfrey of Bouillon information
- Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 960.
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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