27 December, 1594 - The Siege of London

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 26 of desembȝ 1594 ... R at the sege of london ... iij^ll iij^s 

In modern English: [27^th] December, 1594 ... Received at The Siege of London ... £3 and 3 shillings.

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a play that we have not yet seen at the Rose. Sadly, The Siege of London is lost, and, although its title clearly indicates its subject matter, we do not know who was depicted besieging the city.

In the 1590s, London was still surrounded by impressive defensive walls, built to keep out invading armies. History records few actual sieges of the city, but there were at least two that could have made for good theatre, and do indeed appear in surviving plays from the same period.

The battle between Edmund Ironside and Canute, from the Chronica
Majora  of Matthew Paris (14th century)

In 1016, Canute, the Danish prince aspiring to be king of England, besieged London. This siege is dramatized in a scene of the anonymous play Edmund Ironside, in which Canute tells his soldiers, "Assault the city, batter down the walls, / Scale all the turrets, rush the gates asunder!" (III.ii). However, Edmund Ironside, leader of the English resistance, charges out with his own soldiers to repulse the Danes. It is possible that this scene may have been performed at the Rose a couple of years ago: Edmund Ironside may be the same play as the enigmatic Tanner of Denmark. The siege takes up only one scene, but perhaps today's play expanded on it - it's easy to imagine a patriotic audience enjoying such a story.

Thomas Neville's siege of London, from a
1391 French manuscript

The other siege took place during the Wars of the Roses in 1471, when  Lancastrian forces led by Thomas Neville, the Bastard of Fauconberg, encircled the city and made several attempts to storm it, in the hope of rescuing King Henry VI from imprisonment in the Tower. He failed, though, and ended up with his head on a spike atop the bridge. These events appear at the beginning of Thomas Heywood's hard-to-date play King Edward IV, in which one of Neville's officers tells the men,

Look, lads: for from this hill ye may discern
The lovely town which we are marching to:
That same is London ye look upon ...
Look how the town doth 'tice us to come on
To take out Henry VI there prisoner;
See how St Katherine's smokes: wipe, slaves, your eyes,
And whet your stomachs for some good malt pies.

We can only guess which of these sieges was staged at the Rose today; no further clues are provided by its appearance in Henslowe's 1598 list of props owned by the theatre, which includes an enigmatic "wheel and frame in The Siege of London". But whatever the siege, it drew a huge crowd, almost filling the theatre. This happy success would have been due in part to the holiday period, as Londoners were able to attend the theatre in greater numbers.

FURTHER READING

 

Siege of London information

 

• Michael Hicks, "Neville [Fauconberg], Thomas [called the Bastard of Fauconberg]", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 213.
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 862.

 

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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