20 May, 1596 - Phocas

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 19 of maye 1596 ... ne ... R at tragedie of ffocasse ... xxxxv^s

In modern English: [20^th] May, 1596 ... New ... Received at Tragedy of Phocas ... 45 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play! Sadly, The Tragedy of Phocas is yet another lost play, but the title informs us that it was a tale from 7th century Byzantine history. Phocas was a lowly army officer who led a revolution, became emperor, turned tyrannical, and was ultimately overthrown himself.

As David McInnis shows in his article for the Lost Plays Database, we can speculate on how Phocas's story may have been dramatized by looking at other retellings of his story by Elizabethan writers. Overall, summaries of Phocas's life makes him sound like a rather generic exemplar of the wheel of fortune (the usurper usurped), but perhaps the playwright was able to make the play more distinctive by focusing (ha!) on Phocas's strengthening of the power of the Pope, which was his one significant act as emperor.

The stories of Phocas

A coin depicting Emperor Maurice

In 602, the Byzantine Empire was ruled by Emperor Maurice. According to William Covell in his Polimanteia (1595), a prophetic dream warned Maurice that he would be killed by "a servant of his named Phocas", so he

sent for the Captain Philippic to come out of prison, and demanded of him if there were not one named Phocas; the other answered that there was such a one, a centurion, ambitious and fearful. Whereupon the Emperor said, alleging an old proverb to that end, "If he be a coward, he is a murderer." (50)

This Phocas, writes Richard Rainoldes in his Chronicle of All the Noble Emperors of the Romans (1571), was "a base centurion and a Thracian" who was created emperor during a "seditious uproar" (165). Some Elizabethan texts portray Maurice as a holy man in contrast with Phocas. Covell claims that when Phocas slew Maurice's wife and children in front of his eyes before preparing to behead him, the defeated emperor "spake often in this manner: 'O Lord thou art just and so are all thy works'" (51).

Phocas depicted in Rainoldes'
Chronicle (1571)

Phocas's reign was one of tyranny. Rainoldes itemizes his crimes thus: "he took away other men's wives from their husbands, he made much of wicked persons, he wasted the Roman Empire of their riches and treasures, he lived at Rome in all beastly drunkenness, and suffered the Roman Empire to be spoiled [by] the Persians, of the Huns" (165).

Phocas did, however, make one decision with far-reaching historical effects: he decreed that the Roman Pope, at that time Boniface III, was "universal bishop" over all other Christian bishops, quashing a similar claim by the Patriarch of Constantinople. For the rabid anti-Catholics of the 1590s, this was the beginning of Roman Catholic tyranny; for example, Thomas Bell in his Survey of Popery (1596) fulminates, "whosoever either calleth himself 'universal priest', or desireth so to be called, is for his intolerable pride become the precursor of Antichrist, and that because in his proud conceit he prefers himself before all other". Since Boniface obtained his power from "the bloody and cruel tyrant Phocas (who ravished many virtuous matrons and murdered the good Emperor Mauritius with his wife and children)", Bell concludes that this was the moment when "the Beast of the Revelation began to prepare the way for Antichrist" (187-88). It is possible, then, that the playwright may have presented Phocas and the Pope as twins of megalomaniacal evil (it's also possible though, that there was a bit more nuance...).

A coin depicting Heraclius

Perhaps, then, the audience cheered when Heraclius usurped Phocas and brought about his tragic end. Either way, his end would most likely have been gruesome: Rainoldes claims that when Heraclius's men captured Phocas and brought the defeated emperor before him, "immediately the men of war cut of his legs and arms, and cut off his privities, and last of all his head. This was the end of that tyrant" (165).

Box office

The story of Phocas sounds like a crowd-pleaser, but, as so often with this season's premieres, the box office is disappointing. On an ordinary day, it would represent a good-sized audience, but in previous years a debut performance would have filled the theatre. The Admiral's Men are struggling to draw large audiences to their new plays.

FURTHER READING

Tragedy of Phocas information

• Richard Rainoldes, A Chronicle of all the Noble Emperors of the Romans (1571)
• Thomas Bell, The Survey of Popery (1595)
• William Covell, Polimanteia, or, The Means, Lawful and Unlawful, to Judge of the Fall of a Commonwealth Against the Frivolous and Foolish Conjectures of this Age (1595)
• David McInnis, "Phocasse (Focas)", Lost Plays Database (2011), accessed May 2020. 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1056.

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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