Vol. 10 No. 22 · 8 December 1988
pages 7-8 | 3139 words
Canterbury Tale
Charles Nicholl
- Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury by William Urry, edited by Andrew Butcher
Faber, 184 pp, £12.95, May 1988, ISBN 0 571 14566 3
- John Weever by E.A.J. Honigmann
Manchester, 134 pp, £27.50, April 1987, ISBN 0 7190 2217 7
- Rare Sir William Davenant by Mary Edmond
Manchester, 264 pp, £27.50, July 1987, ISBN 0 7190 2286 X
William Urry’s researches on Marlowe have been available in bits and pieces, and his ‘forthcoming book on the Marlowes in Canterbury’ was mentioned by one of Marlowe’s biographers, A.D. Wraight, as long ago as 1965. Here at last it is, seven years after Urry’s death, edited from drafts by his former colleague Andrew Butcher. The text runs to less than a hundred pages, but there are ample appendices and source-notes, and anyway these hundred pages of dense documentary detail are worth a thousand of theorising.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 8 · 20 April 1989
From Roy MacGregor-Hastie
To say that Sir William Davenant ‘was primarily responsible for re-introducing Shakespeare’s work to starved theatregoers’ after the Restoration (LRB, 8 December 1988) is to play ‘Rare Will’s’ game. He would have liked to have been given the monopoly of Shakespeare production in 1660, and when he moved out of accommodation in Salisbury Court to a new theatre in Portugal Row, Lincoln’s Inn Fields he tried to persuade Charles II to give it to him; he put on a lot of royal slush in 1661 to celebrate the King’s forthcoming wedding in the hope of gaining royal favour. Luckily for the stage Charles II gave his patronage to Tom Killigrew, whose playhouse opened on 7 May 1663 – the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Davenant had to be content with the fitful support of James – at what came to be known as the Duke’s House. The King divided the Shakespeare repertoire between the two playhouses: Killigrew got Othello, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Davenant was given Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet. The division was made on the grounds that Davenant had the best male actors (including Thomas Betterton), Killigrew the women, now allowed on stage. Most of the best playwrights of the day wrote for Killigrew.
Roy MacGregor-Hastie
Kobe, Japan
