29 August, 1595 - Longshanks

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 29 of aguste 1595 ... ne ... R at longe shanke ... xxxx^s 

In modern English: 29^th August, 1595 ... New ... Received at Longshank ... 40 shillings.

Portrait of Edward I in
Westminster Abbey

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play: Longshanks! The title tells us that it was about King Edward I of England, who carried the nickname 'Edward Longshanks' owing to his long legs. This was a perfect role for Edward Alleyn, the strikingly tall leading man of the Admiral's Men. We know that he even wore a special costume for it, for "Longshanks' suit" appears in Henslowe's 1598 inventory of costumes.

 Edward I was famed for fighting in the Crusades and for his wars with the Welsh and the Scots. His reputation today is often a negative one, due to the iron first with which he subjugated England's neighbours, earning him the nickname "The Hammer of the Scots". But Elizabethan Londoners would have seen him as a hero, and the play of Longshanks was most likely a work of jingoistic English patriotism. Alleyn, famed for his role as the conqueror Tamburlaine, would have enjoyed the chance to play another such character.

It is possible that the text of the play survives. In 1593 there appeared in bookshops a play by George Peele entitled The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First, Surnamed Edward Longshanks, and some scholars propose that this is the same Longshanks play that appeared at the Rose today. The obvious argument against this is that Henslowe's diary entry, two years later, describes Longshanks as a new play, and there was certainly nothing unusual about a company creating a play on the same topic as one of their rivals. Furthermore, Martin Wiggins, in his catalogue of British drama, points out that in a future diary entry, Henslowe will call the play Prince Longshanks, which might suggest that it was a prequel about Edward's adventures during the Crusades, before he became king. Still, the Rose's play could have been a heavily revised version of Peele's play that Henslowe thus regarded as new.

We cannot know which of these theories is correct, but let's try to imagine what the play of Longshanks might have been like.

Edward Longshanks in history and legend

King Edward I reigned from 1272-1307. As his nickname indicates, he was tall; Andy King quotes the medieval scholar Nicholas Trevet's description of him as

long of arm in proportion to a supple body; no-one was more apt to the use of the sword, which he wielded with a wiry vigour. His belly protruded and the length of his legs kept him from being unseated by the jumping and galloping of the most spirited horses.

Edward's reign was full of potential stories for dramatists. His exploits in the Ninth Crusade accomplished little but could have been made to sound impressive, and he notably killed an assassin who had been sent to murder him with a poisoned dagger.

The Stone of Destiny under 'King
Edward's Chair' in Westminster, before it
was returned to Scotland in 2002.

But his most infamous achievements were the imposing of England's will upon its neighbours. In Wales, Edward sent conquering armies, built castles, and encouraged English settlement to maintain his power. And in Scotland, he attempted to enforce English political control, resulting in a war that persisted after his death. It was Edward who took the Stone of Destiny, the coronation stone of the Scottish kings, and placed it in Westminster Abbey. It was also Edward who ordered the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

Understandably, Edward tends to be portrayed in a negative light in modern representations of his reign; typical examples can be seen in the William Wallace movie Braveheart (1995) or the Robert the Bruce movie Outlaw King (2019), in which Patrick McGoohan and Stephen Dillane respectively portray Longshanks as a terrifyingly stern and cruel tyrant. 

But Elizabethan Englishmen had a more positive view of King Edward; his expansion of English strength was seen as a positive thing. We can see this in George Peele's Edward I, which may not be same play as Longshanks, but it does shows how one dramatist staged his story.

If the play was Peele's Edward I

The 1593 title page of Peele's play sums up its contents: The famous chronicle of King Edward the First, surnamed Edward Longshanks, with his return from the Holy Land; also, the life of Llewellyn, rebel in Wales; lastly, the sinking of Queen Eleanor, who sunk at Charing Cross and rose again at Pottershithe, now named Queenhithe.  As you can tell, this play has some rather weird moments.

Edward I begins with Longshanks returning from the Crusades to discover that he is now king, his father having died. Edward is portrayed as an heroic conquering monarch: as his ship arrives at Dover, Eleanor, the Queen Mother, admires him in language reminiscent of the grandiloquent rhetoric in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine:

Veering before the wind, ploughing the sea,
His stretched sails filled with the breath of men
That through the world admires his manliness.
And lo, at last, arrived in Dover Road,
Longshanks your king, your glory and our son,
With troops of conquering lords and warlike knights,
Like bloody crested Mars o'erlooks his host,
Higher than all his army by the head,
Marching along as bright as Phoebus' eyes. (Scene 1)

Despite his military prowess, Edward is no tyrant, like Tamburlaine, but a virtuous monarch. And all seems congenial for him at the beginning of the play: he is a hero; he has a queen, Eleanor of Castile; and he has a daughter, Joan of Acre. However, Edward has three problems to deal with.

Satirical 1562 portrait of John Balliol
as an illegitimate king.

Problem number 1 is the Scots. During the Great Cause - a succession crisis in Scotland - Edward is asked to adjudicate and he elects John Balliol to be king. Balliol swears fealty to England, but later decides to rebel, "To shake off England's tyranny betimes, / To rescue Scotland's honour with his sword" (scene 10). Edward quashes his rebellion, and Balliol swears fealty again. And then rebels again. I have to say: this plotline is rather perfunctory.

Problem number 2 is more interesting: the rebellion of the Welsh prince Llywelyn (based on Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last of the sovereign Welsh princes). Llywelyn's fiancée, Eleanor de Montford (yes, there are three characters called Eleanor in this play - it's quite confusing), is being held captive by King Edward. Llywelyn hears a prophecy from a harp player that "a Welshman shall be king / And govern merry England" (Scene 3), and is inspired to lead a rebellion.

Heroic sculpture of Llywelyn ap
Gruffudd in Cardiff

Llywelyn tricks King Edward into returning Eleanor de Montford to him, but he is disappointed when the Welsh soldiers offer fealty to England so long as the Prince of Wales will always be a Welshman; Edward achieves this aim by summoning his pregnant Queen Eleanor to Wales, where she gives birth to Prince Edward, whom the King makes Prince of Wales.

Peace notwithstanding, Llywelyn still dreams of being King. Things get rather weird at this point. As Llywelyn and his men await reinforcements up in the mountains, they pass the time by pretending to be Robin Hood and his Merry Men, with Eleanor as Maid Marian. As far as I can tell, this is primarily because Elizabethan audiences loved Robin Hood plays, which would have been familiar from their May Day festivities - such much so that the stage direction assumes the actors will know what to do:  "they are all clad in green, etc., and sing, etc." (scene 8).  In this guise, Llywelyn and company rob travellers and are joined by a comedy friar named David who becomes their Friar Tuck figure and carries with him a trusty staff named Richard. I told you it was weird. But also accompanying them incognito is Llewellyn's nemesis, Mortimer, the Earl of March, an English lord in love with Eleanor.

All of this feels like the setup for some exciting drama, but to be honest, it fizzles out. When King Edward is travelling through the area, he and Llewellyn fight a single combat, and Edward wins but lets his rival go free. Edward then discovers Mortimer, and puts him in charge of routing the rebels while he deals with the Scots. In the ensuing battle, "Llewellyn is slain with a pikestaff", Mortimer wins Eleanor, who is not especially pleased about the whole thing, and Friar David sadly retires 'Richard' by hanging him up on on a tree.

Edward and Eleanor in a 14th-
century manuscript

Problem number 3 is Edward's Queen, Eleanor of Castile, and this is where the play gets even weirder. Eleanor is normally portrayed in legend as a paragon of virtue, but Peele instead follows a couple of popular ballads that present her as an evil, power-hungry adulteress who wants to hold the English "in a Spanish yoke" (Scene 1).

Things start off badly in Wales when Eleanor is unimpressed by the simple presents given her by the Welsh barons, and when Edward offers to satisfy her any request in order to make it up to her, she demands that all Englishmen shave their beards and all Englishwomen cut off their breasts. King Edward persuades her to withdraw this demand when he announces that she and he will be the first to adhere to the new rule.

Later, Eleanor becomes jealous of the Lady Mayoress of London and kills her with a poisonous snake. God is not impressed by this and there is "thunder and lightning when the Queen comes in", insisting to her daughter Joan that she is innocent of the crime (scene 18). Eleanor cries "gape, earth, and swallow me, and let my soul / Sink down to Hell if I were author of / That woman's tragedy". And to her surprise, the earth does exactly that, and Eleanor falls down a kind of wormhole that spits her out in Pottershithe (now Queenshithe, an ancient Saxon landing place by the Thames).

Charing Cross, Edward's memorial to Eleanor,
in John Norden's 1593 map of London

Eleanor returns to the palace, repentant and dying. Uncertain what to make of these events, King Edward and his brother Edmund disguise as friars to hear her confession. Things get awkward when Eleanor confesses to adultery with Edmund, and admits that Joan is in fact the daughter of a friar, not Edward. A devastated Edward sentences Edmund to death and when Joan hears the news of her parentage, she dies from grief. But despite his disappointment, Edward erects in Eleanor's honour "a rich and stately carved cross" at Charing Green (scene 23); this is of course Charing Cross, which was still standing in 1593; it is now gone, but its name lives on in a railway station.

At the end of the play, everything gets tied together, after a fashion: Edward prepares to ride off to quash yet another rebellion by Balliol, Mortimer enters with Llewellyn's head and the play ends on a mournful note as Joan's widower, Gloucester, contemplates these deaths:

All pomp in time must fade and grow to nothing;
Wept I like Niobe, yet it profits nothing.
Then cease my sighs, since I may not regain her,
And woe to wretched Death that thus hath slain her. (Scene 23)

Haigiographical accounts of English supremacists are not really what the United Kingdom needs right now, but if you do feel the urge to read Edward I, you can find a fully annotated edition by Frank S. Hook in The Dramatic Works of George Peele (Yale University Press, 1961).

What we learn from this

Edward I and his son,
the future Edward II

Longshanks (at least in the rendition by Peele) feels like a mixing together of many different genres that we have seen at the Rose so far. The similarity of its poetic style with Tamburlaine has already been noted, but we've also seen Robin Hood appearing in George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, and English military heroes such as Talbot in Henry VI. If the theory is correct that Longshanks was about Edward's earlier adventures during the Crusades, this would echo a lot of the other plays in the repertory, such as Godfrey of Bouillon and Mahamet.

But for audiences at the time, the biggest connection with other plays would have been with Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which had been staged by the Earl of Pembroke's Men around 1592. It tells the story of the son of Longshanks and his catastrophic rule, so that Longshanks might have been seen as a prequel to that play - and a model of a better king.

The premiere of Longshanks was disappointing, though; despite all these promising signs, it attracted a relatively small audience.

FURTHER READING

Longshanks information

• Frank S. Hooks, ed. "Edward I", in The Dramatic Works of George Peele (Yale University Press, 1961), vol. 2.
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1007.
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 216.
• Andy King, Edward I (Penguin, 2016).
• Roslyn L. Knutson, "Longshanks", Lost Plays Database (2018).

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

16 August, 1594 - Mahamet

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 14 of aguste 1594 ... R at mahomett ... iij^ll v^s

In modern English: [16^th] August, 1594 ... Received at Mahamet ... £3 and 5 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a play that Henslowe called Mahamet (an Elizabethan variant on the name Muhammad). This is its first appearance in the Diary, and Henslowe records a very high box office, the kind normally seen only at premieres. And yet he does not mark the play as "ne" (new), which indicates that the players were instead bringing back a old play that was received very well by the audience.

No play called Mahamet survives today, but most scholars suspect it was connected to a surviving play called The Battle of Alcazar by George Peele. This features an enjoyably evil villain named Muly Mahamet, who was one of the most famous roles of Edward Alleyn, star of the Admiral's Men.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because two years ago, one of the most popular plays at the Rose was Muly Molocco, a play about which one could say exactly the same thing: it too might have been The Battle of Alcazar, or else a prequel or an imitation of it. For the sake of convenience, then, here is the description of The Battle of Alcazar that I originally posted for Muly Molocco; apologies for the repetition.

If the play was The Battle of Alcazar...

1629 Portuguese illustration of the Battle of Alcazar

The title page of George Peele's play advertises it as The Battle of Alcazar, fought in Barbary between Sebastian King of Portugal and Abdelmelec King of Morocco; with the death of Captain Stukeley. It begins with Abd el-Malik (called Abdelmelec or Muly Molocco in the play) reclaiming his rightful throne by deposing the vicious usurper Muly Mahamet. Muly Mahamet escapes into the wilderness but survives to raise an army with the aid of King Sebastian of Portugal and the English Catholic adventurer Captain Thomas Stukeley. A great battle takes place at Alcazar (modern El-Ksar el-Kebir) in 1578. During the battle, Abdelmelec dies but his younger brother Seth props up his dead body as if alive, and this encourages the troops; the fleeing Muly Mahamet is then killed when his horse throws him in a river. The play ends with Muly Mahamet, King Sebastian and Stukeley all dead, Seth as King of Barbary, and Muly Mahamet's body stuffed as a warning to future usurpers.

In the play's final lines, Seth honours the dead King Sebastian:

And now my lords for this Christian king:
My lord Zareo, let it be your charge
To see the soldiers tread a solemn march,
Trailing their pikes and ensigns on the ground,
So to perform the princes' funerals.

Just for curiosity value, here's a clip from Battle of the Three Kings, a very obscure 1990 film about the Battle of Alcazar. It's apparently an Italian-Moroccan-Soviet-Spanish co-production. The clip is worth watching for a glimpse of F. Murray Abraham and Harvey Keitel looking rather surprised to be there.

 

If you would like to read The Battle of Alcazar, the most readable text is Charles Edelman's modern-spelling edition, which can be found in his anthology The Stukeley Plays (2005).

 

If the play was a lost one named Mahamet...

If Mahamet was not The Battle of Alcazar itself, it might have been a different play about the same characters - perhaps a prequel or imitation focused more closely on the character of Muly Mahamet.

Alternatively, the play might have had nothing to do with any of this, and could have been about some other Mahamet.  Intriguingly enough, Henslowe's inventory of props includes an enigmatic reference to "old Mahamet's head", which implies the existence of an entirely unknown play in which an aged Mahamet comes to a sticky end.

FURTHER READING

 

Mahamet information

• Roslyn L. Knutson and David McInnis, "Mahomet", Lost Plays Database (2014). 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2012), entry 812.

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

24 January, 1594 - Titus Andronicus

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

Henslowe writes: ne ... R at titus & ondronicus the 23 of Jenewary ... iij^ll viij^s

In modern English: New. Received at Titus Andronicus, 24^th January ... £3 and 8 shillings

Today, Sussex's Men performed a play by William Shakespeare! This is only the second Shakespeare play that we have seen in Henslowe's Diary so far (the other was The First Part of Henry VI, one of the Rose's most popular plays last year). Now, the company is offering Titus Andronicus, a gruesome tragedy set in a fantastical version of Ancient Rome. This play is on the fringes of Shakespeare's canon (parts of it may have been written by another playwright, George Peele, and its extremely violent plot encourages Shakespeare's more squeamish fans to dismiss it as early hackwork) but the Rose audience was not interested in such fussiness, and they packed the playhouse to see it.

The large audience may have been because Titus Andronicus was a brand new play. At least, Henslowe thought it was new, since he marked it as "ne" in the Diary, an annotation that normally means a performance was a premiere. There is in fact some uncertainty as to whether Titus Andronicus really was new when it was staged today, but the performance certainly achieved the high box office typically associated with premieres.

Whether or not the play was a new one, today may have been a transformative moment at the Rose. According to one theory, the arrival of Titus Andronicus marks the moment at which Sussex's Men were joined at the Rose by members of Pembroke's Men (the company to which Shakespeare belonged). Certainly, Titus is written for an unusually large number of actors, whereas George a Greene (the only surviving play from earlier in the season) requires a much smaller number. So, even if Shakespeare himself was not among the new arrivals, the Rose audience may have seen the performances there suddenly become bigger and more spectacular.

Was Titus really new?

Title page of the 1594 quarto
publication of Titus Andronicus

Henslowe labels Titus Andronicus "ne", but there are reasons to suspect that it was actually about two years old. As you may recall from last year, one of the plays of Lord Strange's Men, A Knack to Know a Knave, seems to allude to the opening scene of Titus. Does that prove Titus was written first, or could there be another explanation?

Complicating matters further is the puzzling title page of the 1594 printed text. It describes the play has having been performed by Derby's Men (another name for Strange's Men), Pembroke's Men and Sussex's Men. Does this refer to the three companies working together (which may have been what was happening at the Rose) or does it refers to performances by each company in succession (which is also plausible).

The debate is complex, but if we are trying to imagine today's performance, it boils down to the question: was this a famous old play being performed at the Rose to an audience that already knew it, or was it a new and unknown work? It's hard to be sure, but the difference must have affected the atmosphere in the Rose before the show began. If you would like to read more about the debate, an excellent up-to-date summary is provided by Jonathan Bate in his 2018 revised edition for the Arden Shakespeare.

Adding to the complication is the question of authorship. Stylistic analysis by modern scholars suggests that Act 1 was written by George Peele (whom we've already met as the possible author of Muly Molocco). Perhaps these two puzzles are related: Titus Andronicus could be a rewriting by Shakespeare of an earlier play by Peele, so drastic that Henslowe considered it a new play.

The story

Titus Andronicus is famous for one thing: violence. Although Shakespeare was not averse to extreme violence in his other plays (think of the onstage eyeball-gouging in King Lear, for example, or the assassination of Julius Caesar), the sheer number of horrific events in Titus Andronicus means that any plot summary sounds rather comical. Although the play does at times introduce a warped form of humour during some of its most gruesome moments, productions that are brave enough to take it seriously often reveal Titus to have a majestic and sombre quality that belies its surface trashiness.

(Just for fun, I'll illustrate this synopsis with woodcuts from 17th century printed versions of a ballad of Titus Andronicus. Its exact relationship with the play is unclear, but it was most likely inspired by it, not vice versa. If you like, you can listen to the ballad being sung thanks to the English Broadside Ballad Archive.)

The triumphal entrance of Titus into Rome;
illustration from the Roxburghe Collection's copy
of a ballad of Titus Andronicus (late 17th century) 

The play begins with Rome in crisis after the Emperor has died and his two sons - the virtuous Bassianus and the evil Saturninus - are vying for power. Into this maelstrom arrives Titus Andronicus, an aged general returning to Rome after a long war against the Goths during which most of his sons have been killed. He has brought to Rome the captive Queen of the Goths, her three sons, and a Moor named Aaron, who is her secret lover. Titus ritualistically executes one of Tamora's sons in front of her. It is a violent act that will breed a cycle of vengeance.

Titus's deference to tradition is one of the seeds of his tragedy. The senate of Rome elects Titus emperor but he declines the honour and instead follows custom in nominating Saturninus, the eldest son of the dead emperor. He even submits when Saturninus demands to marry Titus's daughter, Lavinia despite her existing betrothal to Bassianus. Titus's decisions infuriate his sons, who help Bassianus and Lavinia escape, and end up fighting their father, who kills one of them. And yet Saturninus then spurns Titus anyway, deciding that Tamora is a better match for him, and he marries her, to Titus's horror.

The 'Peacham drawing', an illustration from the 16th or early 17th century that depicts characters from Titus Andronicus. It's the only illustration of a scene from Shakespeare created during his own lifetime.

Things get nastier when Tamora uses her new position of power to exact revenge upon Titus. With the assistance of Aaron the Moor, Tamora's two remaining sons, Chiron and Demetrius, kill Bassianus and rape Lavinia, cutting off her hands and tongue to prevent her from communicating their guilt; they also capture two of Titus's sons and frame them for Bassianus's murder, so that the Emperor imprisons them. When Titus and his family find the brutalized Lavinia, they are shocked to the core, but are unable to act, as they do not know who the perpetrators were.

At this point, Shakespeare begins blending genres to dazzling effect: the violence increases, but to a degree that becomes almost farcical. Aaron informs Titus that the Emperor will free his two accused sons if Titus sends him his own severed hand. Titus permits Aaron to cut off his hand and take it. But the Emperor's response is to return Titus's hand accompanied by the decapitated heads of the sons. Seeing this, Titus laughs. "Why does thou laugh?" asks his brother Marcus, "It fits not with this hour." Titus replies, "Because I have not one more tear to shed."

Lavinia names her attackers; illustration from the
Pepys Collection's copy of a ballad of Titus
Andronicus (1680s)

The turning point comes when Lavinia manages to communicate with her father. Using a page from Ovid's Metamorphoses about the rape of Philomel, and writing in sand with a staff, she identifies Chiron and Demetrius as her abusers. Titus resolves to be revenged on them and their mother, and to overthrow the Emperor by inviting the Goths to invade. His task is made easier when Aaron is forced to flee after Tamora gives birth to a dark-skinned child that is obviously his and not the Emperor's; refusing to kill the baby, Aaron utters a powerful speech about black being better, and escapes into the wilderness with his newborn child.

Titus and Lavinia kill Tamora's sons: illustration from
the Pepys Collection's copy of a ballad of Titus

Andronicus (1680s)

Meanwhile, Titus plots revenge and pretends to be mad. In order to torment him, Tamora and her sons dress up as the spirits of Revenge, Murder and Rape and haunt his house. But Titus captures Chiron and Demetrius and slits their throats, while Lavinia catches their blood in a bowl. As they die, Titus tells them that he will make their flesh and bones into pies. an idea drawn from the Greek legend of Thyestes.

Tamora and Saturninus eat the pies: illustration from

the Pepys Collection's copy of a ballad of Titus

Andronicus (1680s)

The play thus ends in full-on grand guignol, as the Emperor, Tamora, and various Roman and Goth envoys gather for a banquet at Titus's house, humouring his 'madness' when he arrives dressed as a cook. Titus serves meat pie to his guests, and as they eat, he suddenly announces the crime done to his daughter and kills her for the sake of honour. He then reveals that the pie is made from Tamora's sons. In a flurry of violence, Tamora, the Emperor, and Titus murder each other.

Titus's son Lucius becomes the next Emperor and resolves to bring peace. He sentences Aaron - who has been captured  - to death by being buried up to his neck in earth. The unrepentant Aaron says, "If one good thing I did in all my life, / I do regret it, to my very soul." And in the play's closing lines, Lucius recommends that Tamora's body be left to be eaten by birds:

As for that heinous tiger, Tamora,
No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weeds,
No mournful bell shall ring her burial;
But throw her forth to beasts and birds of prey:
Her life was beast-like, and devoid of pity;
And, being so, shall have like want of pity.

And on that bleak note, this exhausting play ends.

The play today

Titus Andronicus is rarely staged, but of all the plays we've looked at in this blog so far, it's the one of which you have the best chance of seeing on the stage some day. It was largely ignored after the seventeenth century, as its violent content clashed with the tastes of more refined eras. But in 1955, Peter Brook staged a groundbreaking RSC production starring Laurence Olivier. This paved the way for many other productions that experimented with different ways of dealing with the play's challenges. If you'd like to look at images from different productions, the Designing Shakespeare website from Royal Holloway University is a great way of doing so. Some productions go for a camp comedy approach, but others find ways to extract gravitas and profoundity from the play. This trailer for the 2017 RSC production seems to be going for the latter approach:





Two major films also exist. In 1985, Jane Howell filmed Titus Andronicus as a studio-bound TV movie for the BBC's complete works of Shakespeare project. It is  one of the better films in the series, and draws special attention to the presence of Titus's grandson, Young Lucius, who is presented as an innocent child increasingly traumatized by what adults are capable of doing to each other.

In 2000, Julie Taymor created a big-budget cinematic adaptation, called simply Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins as Titus, Jessica Lange as Tamora, and Alan Cumming as Saturninus. It borrows several ideas from the BBC film, most notably the idea of framing the story through the eyes of Young Lucius, but Taymor expands the concept further by framing the film through the eyes of a small boy playing violent games with his toys, and by making the world of the play a mishmash of costumes and settings from different historical periods, blurring ancient Rome with the twentieth century.

Taymor's film is full of imaginative visuals - such as Young Lucius buying wooden hands for Lavinia at a puppet shop - and interesting acting choices - for example, Harry Lennix finds ways to make Aaron the Moor a strangely moving and tender figure by the end. The film isn't perfect, but it contains many moments that deftly juggle the play's comedy and tragedy, and many others that give it an epic grandeur.

What we learn from this

Titus Andronicus looks quite unusual amid the rest of Shakespeare's works, but if we think of it as a Rose play it looks less incongrous. As we saw last year, violence was a popular component of the repertories of the performers at the Rose, and although a lot of that violence involved fight scenes rather than gore, horror has not been absent from the stage, if our hypotheses about the plot of Titus and Vespasian are correct.

But the most striking thing that comes out of reading Titus as a Rose play is its close relationship with Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, the most popular play of last year. The mixture of comedy and tragedy is similar (although The Jew is more consistently comic throughout), and Shakespeare's inspiration from Marlowe is very obvious. In my description of the play, I quoted Barabas's gloriously sadistic speech about his violent hobbies, but Shakespeare's Aaron has a speech that seems designed to outdo his predecessor's: he boasts,

Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves
And set them upright at their dear friends' door,
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
"Let not your sorrow die though I am dead."
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed,
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (V.i)

It's interesting to imagine these words being spoken at the Rose theatre, where, less than a year earlier, the audience had seen the Marlowe play that had inspired them. And very soon, The Jew of Malta will return to the Rose, so that the two plays will be performed in tandem. Stay tuned...

What's next?

For some reason, there are no records of any performances tomorrow (a Friday) or over the weekend. Henslowe's list becomes elliptical from this point on, and it's hard to be sure whether there really were no performances on some days, or whether he simply failed to record them. Either way, Henslowe's Diary ... as a Blog! will return on 28th January.

FURTHER READING

Titus Andronicus information

• Scott McMillin, "Sussex's Men in 1594: The Evidence of Titus Andronicus and The Jew of Malta", in Theatre Survey 32.2 (1991): 214-23
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 928.
• Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean, Lord Strange's Men and their Plays (Yale University Press, 2014), 106-10.
• Jonathan Bate, ed. Titus Andronicus, revised edition (Bloomsbury, 2018)

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

21 February, 1592 - Muly Molocco

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

Henslowe writes: R at mvolmvrco the 20 of febreary ... xxix^s

In modern English: Received at Muly Molocco the [21^st] of February, 29 shillings

Although Henslowe wrote 20 February, this is likely a mistake since there was a law against performing on Sundays; he presumably meant to write the 21^st.

So, today, Lord Strange's Men performed a play called Muly Molocco. Now, I know what you're thinking - how does anyone get "Muly Molocco" from "mvolmvrco"? The answer is that Henslowe will list the same play many more times in the coming months, and will spell it many other ways, including "mvlo mvllocco", "mvlomvlucko" and "mvlemvloco". Henslowe's crazy spelling is one of the unsung glories of English literature; there was no standardized spelling in Elizabethan times, but even so, his exceptionally bizarre ways of writing even the simplest word are endlessly astonishing.

"Muly" (or "Mulai") was a title for members of the nobility of Barbary (modern Morocco). "Muly Molocco" refers to the historical figure of Abd el-Malik, a sixteenth century prince of the Barbary royal family who was wrongly skipped over in the succession to the throne, and who returned from banishment with a Turkish army to reclaim his crown.

No play called Muly Molocco survives today, so the one performed by Lord Strange's Men may, like so many Elizabethan plays, simply never have been printed. However, some scholars think the play  survives under a different title, because George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar features Abd el-Malik as a character, and occasionally refers to him as Muly Molocco.

If the play was The Battle of Alcazar...

1629 Portuguese illustration of the Battle of Alcazar

The title page of George Peele's play advertises it as The Battle of Alcazar, fought in Barbary between Sebastian King of Portugal and Abdelmelec King of Morocco; with the death of Captain Stukeley. It begins with Abd el-Malik (called Abdelmelec or Muly Molocco in the play) reclaiming his rightful throne by deposing the vicious usurper Muly Mahamet. Muly Mahamet escapes into the wilderness but survives to raise an army with the aid of King Sebastian of Portugal and the English Catholic adventurer Captain Thomas Stukeley. A great battle takes place at Alcazar (modern El-Ksar el-Kebir) in 1578. During the battle, Abdelmelec dies but his younger brother Seth props up his dead body as if alive, and this encourages the troops; the fleeing Muly Mahamet is then killed when his horse throws him in a river. The play ends with Muly Mahamet, King Sebastian and Stukeley all dead, Seth as King of Barbary, and Muly Mahamet's body stuffed as a warning to future usurpers.

In the play's final lines, Seth honours the dead King Sebastian:

And now my lords for this Christian king:
My lord Zareo, let it be your charge
To see the soldiers tread a solemn march,
Trailing their pikes and ensigns on the ground,
So to perform the princes' funerals.

Just for curiosity value, here's a clip from Battle of the Three Kings, a very obscure 1990 film about the Battle of Alcazar. It's apparently an Italian-Moroccan-Soviet-Spanish co-production. The clip is worth watching for a glimpse of F. Murray Abraham and Harvey Keitel looking rather surprised to be there. Abd el-Malik is played by Massimo Ghini.

 

If you would like to read The Battle of Alcazar, the most readable text is Charles Edelman's modern-spelling edition, which can be found in his anthology The Stukeley Plays (2005).

 

If the play was a lost one named Muly Molocco...

Muly Molocco may have been a new play intended to capitalize on the popularity of The Battle of Alcazar. If so, it presumably told a similar story but perhaps focused more on the character of Abd el-Malik. For example, it may have been a prequel, showing his banishment and his return.

What we learn from this

The subject matter of today's play has little in common with yesterday's, except for one connection: you may recall that John of Bordeaux was set during a war with the Turks, and Muslim armies are even more the focus in this play. However, here the Moroccan Moors are not simply generic enemies; the audience is encouraged to sympathise with Abdelmelec against the cruel Muly Mahamet and the European Catholics who support him.

We also learn from The Battle of Alcazar that audiences liked exotic spectacle, onstage battles, and grand speeches by ambitious characters. The following stage directions (which I've adjusted for clarity) capture the visual and auditory excitement of the play:

The trumpets sound, the chambers are discharged [i.e. the cannons are fired]. Then enter at one door the Portuguese army with drum and colours: King Sebastian, Christophero de Tavora, the Duke of Avero, Stukeley [...]. At another door the Governor of Tangier and two Captains. From behind the curtains to them Muly Mahamet and his wife Calipolis in their chariot with Moors, one on each side, attending Young Mahamet. (Scene 3.4)

Imagine all the colourful and gloriously different costumes of these warriors of multiple nationalities. And imagine the excitement of onstage battles with cannons booming:

Alarums within; let the chambers be discharged, then enter soldiers to the battle and let the Moors fly. Skirmish still, then enter Abdelmelec in his chair. (5.1)

And the play is full of soaring speeches from the various participants in the battle, speeches designed for actors with powerful lungs:

Ride, Nemesis, ride, in thy fiery cart,
And sprinkle gore among these men of war,
That either party eager of revenge
May honour thee with sacrifice of death;
And having bathed thy chariot wheels in blood,
Descend and take to thy tormenting hell
The mangled body of that traitor king
That scorns the power and force of Portugal! (4.2)

Speeches like this are full of the "high astounding terms" that Christopher Marlowe admired in his play Tamburlaine, and it was Tamburlaine that inspired this genre of exotic and spectacular battle plays; we'll see more of them in the near future.

FURTHER READING

Muly Molocco and Battle of Alcazar information

• Charles Edelman (ed.), The Stukeley Plays (Manchester University Press, 2005)
• Roslyn L. Knutson, "Muly Molocco", Lost Plays Database (2011). 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vols. 2 and 3 (Oxford University Press, 2012-13), entries 811 and 918.
• Sally-Beth MacLean and Lawrence Manley, Lord Strange's Men and their Plays (Yale University Press, 2014), 75-8.

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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