30 July, 1594 - The Merchant of Emden

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 30 of Julye 1594 ... ne ... R at the marchant of eamden ... iij^ll and viij^s

In modern English: 30^th July, 1594 ... New ... Received at The Merchant of Emden ... £3 and 8 shillings.

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a new play, The Merchant of Emden. This is yet another lost play, but we know something about its story, thanks to the existence of a ballad entitled "A Most Sweet Song of an English Merchant born at Chichester", which tells the story of an escape from death in Emden town. The ballad is known to have been in existence as early as March, 1594, so the play was most likely an adaptation of it.

Emden; a detail from Georg
Brand's Civitates Orbis
Terrarum

Emden is a trading city in northern Germany with a large port, and thus a likely destination for an English merchant. The ballad itself is about 'scaffold marriages' - that is, the custom in some parts of Europe that if a woman offers marriage to a man about to be executed, his life will be spared.

Let's take a look at the story told by the ballad. If you would like to hear it being sung, you can, thanks to the English Broadside Ballad Archive!

The song of the merchant

The ballad tells of a Chichester man who kills a German in Emden, "through quarrels that did rise" and is sentenced to beheading. The authorities build a scaffold for his execution in the marketplace, and all the townsfolk come to watch, dressed in black.

But when the merchant is brought onto the scaffold, the women of the town notice that he is very handsome, and think it a pity that he must die; after all,

His stockings were of silk,
As fine as fine might be;
Of person and of countenance
A proper man was he.

The Emden merchants also want him to live, but their offers of compensatory money to the authorities are turned down by the Duke. Meanwhile, the Englishman himself is full of remorse:

With heart I do repent
This most unhappy deed;
And for his wife and children small,
My very soul doth bleed:

He announces that he will bequeath money to the family of the murdered man, on the sole proviso that they promise to speak well of Englishmen.

The onlookers are moved by his penitence, so much so that ten maidens of Emden offer to marry the Englishmen, citing the law that if a woman offers to marry a condemned man his life will be spared. Indeed, they fight over who will marry him:

'Brave Englishman', quoth one,
''Tis I will beg thy life';
'Nay', quoth the second, 'It is I,
If I must be thy wife!'
''Tis I', the third did say;
'Nay', quoth the fourth, ''Tis I!'.
So each one after other said,
Still waiting his reply.

The Englishman nobly turns them down, explaining that he could never marry a woman with whom he was not in love. Instead, he insists, "To  Christ my love I give, / My body unto death", and he gives money to each of the young women.

But as the executioner prepares his weapon, another young women professes her love to the merchant: running onto the scaffold to kiss him, she tells him that even if he dies, she wants him to die in her arms. When he asks her how she can possibly love him after only just seeing him, she says, "Tis not by long acquaintance sir, / Whereby true love doth grow."

The maiden of Emden rescues the Englishman with marriage; from a late seventeenth-century text of the ballad in the Pepys Collection

The merchant is apparently convinced by this statement, and accepts the woman's offer of marriage. The crowd cheers as the maiden approaches the Duke and begs him to spare the man's life. The Duke agrees, the man is pardoned, and the couple marry the same day. And so...

To England came he then,
With this his lovely bride,
A fairer woman never lay
By any merchant's side,
Where I must leave them now
In pleasure and delight.

Hooray! Love, death, and gratuitous English patriotism! This is all good dramatic stuff that is easy to imagine onstage. Still, it doesn't quite feel like an entire play; in his catalogue of British Drama, Martin Wiggins points out that the ballad probably inspired only the last scene of the play, not the entire story. Perhaps the merchant in the play had some other adventures before his climactic rescue on the scaffold.

What went wrong?

The Merchant of Emden had a very successful premiere, receiving the usual high box office of a debut performance. But something must have gone wrong, because this play will never be performed again.

Why? Did the crowd hate it? Did it include some kind of political commentary that resulted in censorship? We will probably never know, and the failure of The Merchant of Emden must remain another of the unanswered mysteries of Henslowe's Diary.

FURTHER READING

 

The Merchant of Emden information

• "A Most Sweet Song of an English-Merchant Born in Chichester" (c.1594), English Broadside Ballad Archive,30069
• Roslyn L. Knutson, "The Merchant of Emden", Lost Plays Database (2012). 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 961.

 

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!