3 June, 1595 - The Seven Days of the Week

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 3 of June 1595 ... ne ... R at the vij dayes of the weacke ... iij^ll x^s 

In modern English: 3^rd June, 1595 ... New ... Received at The 7 Days of the Week ... £3 and 10 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a new play, The Seven Days of the Week. This play is lost and its title is, quite frankly, puzzling. How could a play be about the days of the week?

One possibility is that this was an anthology play telling seven short stories, each associated with a different week. Anthology plays were quite common in this period; we saw one a few years ago in Henslowe's Diary entitled Four Plays in One. It's hard to imagine what the stories could be about though; how exciting could a play about Wednesday really be? Perhaps it is significant that the seven days of the week were traditionally associated with the seven planets, which are in turn associated with Greco-Roman deities. Could the stories have been about the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and the Sun?

19th-century Italian bracelet illustrating each of the seven days of
the week with a portrait of the deity associated with it.
From the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 

Another possibility is raised by Martin Wiggins in his catalogue of British drama: perhaps the play dramatized the creation of the world by God over the course of a single week. In support of this, Martin Wiggins notes the existence of an Eve costume in Henslowe's inventory. But it seems less likely, since humans did not appear on the earth until after the seventh day, and it's also difficult to imagine how such things as the creation of light and darkness, or the separation of land from sea could be staged in an Elizabethan theatre.

We'll probably never know what The Seven Days of the Week was, but its premiere today attracted a huge audience that nearly filled the theatre.

FURTHER READING

The Seven Days of the Week information

• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1003.

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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