21 February, 1595 - The Mack

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 21 of febreary 1594 ... ne ... R at the macke ... iij^ll 

In modern English: 21^st February, 1595 ... New ... Received at The Mack ... £3

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play, The Mack! Unfortunately, this lost play is very mysterious. It also probably wasn't very good, since the company will never perform it again.

Detail from The Triumph of Deathby
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1562)

Mack was a card game of the period, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that it was often linked to the game of Maw; for example, the dictionary quotes George Tuberville's Book of Falconry (1575) which describes some common pastimes: "To check at chess, to heave at Maw, at Mack to pass the time." In his catalogue of British drama, Martin Wiggins proposes that The Mack was thus connected with The Set at Maw, another card-related play in the repertory of the Admiral's Men.

Sadly, the rules of the game of Mack are lost in the mists of time, so we cannot speculate on what the play might have been like. And even more sadly, the players will never again perform The Mack, despite the large crowd that attended its premiere. Something about it must not have worked.

FURTHER READING

The Mack information

• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 990.

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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