Here's what the
Admiral's Men performed at the
Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...
Henslowe writes: 19 | ne | tt at gvido | 02 | 00
In modern English: 19th
[March, 1597] ... New ... Total at Guido ... £2 [i.e. 40 shilings]
Today, the Admiral's Men performed a new play!
Guido is, unfortunately, lost, and its subject matter is impossible to know, although interesting guesses can be made.
Guido is a very common name in Italy, and it is thus very difficult to pin down a likely subject for this play. In
his article for the Lost Plays Database, David McInnis lists numerous possibilities, but none seems more likely than any other.
However, there may be a clue in
Henslowe's 1598 inventory of props, which includes "1 tomb of Guido". This suggests that a tomb was important enough to the story that a special prop needed to be built. In his catalogue of British drama, Martin Wiggins identifies two famous Guidos whose stories involve tombs.
 |
| Cenotaph of Guido Tarlati in Arezzo Cathedral |
The first was Guido Tarlati, the Bishop of Arezzo and leader of the Ghibelline faction in the conflicts with the Guelphs in 14th-century Italy. He was excommunicated by Pope John XXII and a standoff occurred when he refused to let his successor as bishop enter Arezzo. His tomb in the cathedral is a spectacular creation, attributed to Giotto by Giorgio Vasari in
Lives of the Artists. However, it is hard to see why the tomb would be needed as a prop if Guido was simply buried in it.
 |
Guido Cavalcanti
in a painting by
Cristofano dell'Altissimo |
Wiggin's second suggestion is a little more convincing. The 13th-century poet Guido Cavalcanti features in a story in Boccaccio's
The Decameron (Day 6, Story 9), which portrays him as a philosopher who questions God's existence. While Guido meditates in a graveyard, a group of young men approach him and mock his atheism. He replies, "Gentlemen, in your own house you may say whatever you like to me," and then vaults over a tombstone and runs away. The young men are baffled until one of them explains the joke: Guido is saying they ought to live in a graveyard because they are as ignorant as the dead. It's not much of a story (indeed, not much of a joke), but conceivably it could have been one scene in a longer play about Guido's life as a poet amid the conflicts between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Wiggins points out that there is precedent at the Rose for stories about Italian poets, as we have seen in
Tasso's Melancholy.
Whatever the play was about, Henslowe has been preparing it for a while.
Another section of the diary records that last week, on the 7th March, he lent his son more than £4 to buy "silks and other things for
Guido". And Guido himself seems to have had a special costume: listed in
Henslowe's 1598 list of apparel is "1 cloth cloak of russet with copper lace, called Guido's cloak".
All of this work has not produced any great success, however. The box office is only 40 shillings, well below what one might expect of a premiere. The prospect of a new play about Guido, whoever he was, is not enough to attract punters in great numbers.
What's next?
There will be no blog entry tomorrow because 20 March was a Sunday in 1597 and the players did not perform. Henslowe's Diary ... as a Blog! will thus return on the 21st. See you then!
FURTHER READING
Guido information
- Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1353), translated by G.H. McWilliam, 2nd edtn. (Penguin, 1995), 466-8
- Giorgio Vasari, "Giotto", in The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568), translated by Gaston C. du Vere (Macmillan, 1912).
- David McInnis, "Guido", Lost Plays Database (2011), accessed March 2021.
- Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1062.
Henslowe links
Comments?
Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!
