17 September, 1595 - The New World's Tragedy

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 17 of septmbȝ 1595 ... ne ... R at the worldes tragedy ... iij^ll v^s 

In modern English: 17^th September, 1595 ... New ... Received at The World's Tragedy ... £3 and 5 shillings.

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a new play! And once again it is now lost and deeply mysterious. The first mystery is its title: Henslowe records it today as The World's Tragedy, but two weeks from now he will begin to record it as The New World's Tragedy instead. Why?

Walter Raleigh attacking Trinidad in 1595, by
Theodore de Bry (1595)

The simplest explanation is that the title was always The New World's Tragedy and that Henslowe misunderstood it at first. If so, this play may have dramatized one of the many calamitous events that had occurred during the exploration of the Americas over the preceding century. Perhaps by coincidence, the New World was a hot topic in September 1595 because less than a fortnight earlier, on 5 September, Sir Walter Raleigh had returned from his failed attempt to find the fabled city of El Dorado in South America.

An alternative possibility, raised by Martin Wiggins in his catalogue of British drama, is that the play really was called The World's Tragedy, in which case it could have been about Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Wiggins proposes that it might have became known as The 'New' World's Tragedy if it had been heavily revised after a few performances. This is an intriguing idea but applying Occam's Razor leads me to prefer the simpler explanation; I will thus assume that this was a play set in the Americas.

Tragedies of the New World

What might a New World's Tragedy have been about? The invasion of the Americas by European powers in the late 15th and 16th centuries involved innumerable tragedies and catastrophes, any of which might have been seized upon by a dramatist.

Tlaxcalan image of Hernán Cortés meeting the Aztec
ruler Moctezuma in 1519

In his book on the representation of America in English Renaissance drama, Gavin Hollis wonders whether the tragedy might have been that of an indigenous society. Anti-Spanish plays were very popular at this time, so the tragic fall of an empire such as the Aztecs or the Inca at the hands of duplicitous Spaniards might have appealed to English audiences, given their own narrow escape from invasion in 1588.

But perhaps the tragedy was that of the European settlers. In his edition of Renaissance travel plays, Anthony Parr suggests that The New World's Tragedy might have been about the 'Lost Colony' of Roanoke. In 1587, English colonists had attempted to settle on the coast of what is now North Carolina, but when a follow-up voyage returned the following year, they were gone, and their fate has been the subject of speculation ever since. The story certainly has dramatic potential, since a 1937 play entitled The Lost Colony has been performed almost every summer at Roanoke for over eighty years.

Thomas Lodge's A Margarite
of America (1596)

Or perhaps the tragedy was not historical at all. Martin Wiggins suggests a fictional source: Thomas Lodge's prose romance A Margarite of America (not published until 1596, but conceivably related to a lost play, since Lodge was a dramatist - his Edward I might have appeared at the Rose only a week ago). Lodge was an adventurer along with being a writer, and during a failed attempt to navigate the Straits of Magellan in 1591, he wrote his tale of Margerite, a princess who marries a cruel king, and is ultimately murdered by him. If one takes the title as referring to the play's setting, then characters are in America (specifically Peru if one interprets the king's city of Cusco as Cuzco); but in all honesty, the text itself makes no mention of America, and the title may instead refer to the place where Lodge wrote it.

We'll probably never know which, if any, of these theories is correct. This is frustrating, because it would be fascinating to know how the playwright of the English Renaissance might have dramatized the New World on popular stage. At least three such plays are known to have existed (the others are The Conquest of the West Indies and A Tragedy of the Plantation of Virginia), but none has survived.

Whatever tale was told at the Rose today, it attracted a huge audience, resulting in a very successful premiere.

FURTHER READING

The New World's Tragedy information

• Anthony Parr, ed., Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester University Press,  1996), 3.
• Donald Beecher and Henry D. Janzen, eds., A Margarite of America (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005). 
• David McInnis, "New World's Tragedy, The", Lost Plays Database (2009). 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1009.
• Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2015), 181.

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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