Which play was performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?

Letters

Vol. 25 No. 18 · 25 September 2003

From Frank Kermode

Nobody seems to have been bothered by Blair Worden’s article ‘Which play was performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, which attacked the established view that the play commissioned by the friends of Essex on the eve of his rebellion was Shakespeare’s Richard II (LRB, 10 July). But we still need answers to the following questions.

1. Are we to suppose that Shakespeare’s company, already the owners of his five-year-old play on the subject, now commissioned another, based on John Hayward's book?

2. Hayward’s book was published in February 1599, and continued to be in demand. Could Shakespeare's colleague, Augustine Phillips, have plausibly described a dramatised version of Hayward as ‘long out of use’ in his testimony before Chief Justice Popham in February 1601?

3. Are there any comparable instances of such instant dramatisation?

Frank Kermode
Cambridge

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Vol. 25 No. 19 · 9 October 2003

From Blair Worden

I am mystified by Frank Kermode's letter (25 September). The whole point is that the performance (as all the sources and critics agree) was 'commissioned' not by Shakespeare's company but by followers of Essex. I discussed at length Augustine Phillips's statement that the play was 'long out of use'.

Blair Worden
Souldern, Oxfordshire

From Frank Kermode

Blair Worden has completely missed my point. If the representatives of Essex were asking Shakespeare's company to put on a play based on Hayward, the company must already have been in possession of that play; i.e. they had, sometime in the fairly recent past, commissioned it. Since the play can hardly have existed before Hayward had written his book, that commission must have been made between February 1599 and February 1601. But on that date it was described, by the company's spokesman, as 'old and long out of use'. I know there was a rapid turnover of plays, but a lapse of something under two years hardly accords with Augustine Phillips's words.

I thought I had made the questions clear, but since Worden addresses points I never made (and which, as he suggests, would be foolish) it is evident that I failed. Perhaps this note will make the issues more intelligible.

Frank Kermode
Cambridge

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Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003

From Blair Worden

Frank Kermode thinks it obtuse of me not to have sensed that, when he referred to the events of February 1601, he meant to refer to earlier ones (Letters, 9 October). If my interlinear antennae have now met the challenge of his letters, then I think he supposes (1) that a play could only be performed – whatever the initiative or purpose behind the performance, and whether the performance were public or private – if the performers had secured ownership of the text by payment to the author or authors; (2) that Shakespeare's company, having paid out for his Richard II in 1595, would have been unlikely to pay for another (albeit very different) play on the same era 'five' (four?) years later. Even if we accept (1), (2) does not follow. In early 1599, in that aftermath of the Hayward publication during which the dramatisation was performed, Richard's reign was a sensationally topical subject. In 1611, when it had long ceased to be so, the company 'commissioned' a further play on the same reign (the one recorded by Simon Forman). An alternative interpretation of Kermode's statements is that he thinks that Shakespeare's company would not have affronted him by commissioning a play about Richard II by someone else. If so I point again to the 1611 production, and add that, if the play of 1601 was Shakespeare's, his companion Augustine Phillips spoke affrontingly of it.

Blair Worden
Souldern, Oxfordshire

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Vol. 25 No. 21 · 6 November 2003

From Frank Kermode

I doubt if any great number of the LRB's readers cares much about the difference of opinion between Blair Worden and me (Letters, 23 October), but I'll risk one more word. The supporters of Essex knew that Shakespeare's company had a play about Richard II that it suited them to have performed at a particular moment when that King's reign was, as Worden puts it, 'a sensationally topical subject'. On that point we agree, and so must anybody who has any interest in the topic. I remarked, innocently, that whatever play they had in mind must earlier have been commissioned by the company; Worden is anxious about my use of the word 'commissioned', uncertain whether it should be in quotes to demonstrate his belief that it should be used only in relation to the Essex initiative, a preference he does nothing to explain. Why, if the company already had a play based on Hayward, less than two years old, should they claim that it was 'old and long out of use'? Failure to deal with this simple issue is my chief complaint against Worden.

The play we are talking about, whether by Shakespeare or another, was indisputably in the control of Shakespeare's company; otherwise it would have made no sense for the Essex people to approach them. The circumstances of the 1611 play are, as he says, quite different, and they are also quite irrelevant. Shakespeare's play had then been in print (complete with the deposition scene) for three years. Worden's 'alternative' interpretation – that I supposed his friends would not insult Shakespeare by commissioning a play on the subject by somebody else – is, I'm afraid, wildly off the mark. What his interpretation needs is some explanation of why his suppositional new play about Richard could be said, as it were in court, to be old and long out of use.

Frank Kermode
Cambridge

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Vol. 25 No. 22 · 20 November 2003

From Peter Womack

Frank Kermode needn't worry (Letters, 6 November): his spat with Blair Worden is drawing a crowd, even if the spectators are reluctant to come between the pass and fell-incensed points of mighty opposites. I wonder, though, whether the dispute in its present form is strictly necessary. Worden is convinced that the play about Richard II performed on the eve of the Essex rising was not Shakespeare's; Kermode is not convinced that it wasn't. Both speak as if the question has a definite answer one way or the other; they seem to share the assumption that a play is a fixed and authorially controlled text which must be performed as written or not performed at all. But there is not much reason to suppose that Renaissance theatre scripts had any such integrity. Plays were readily adapted, doctored, cut or supplemented – especially, it seems, successful plays such as Hamlet, Doctor Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy.

So if Worden is right in saying that the deposition of Richard II was an irresistibly hot topic in early 1599, it is at least possible that the Lord Chamberlain's company would exploit it by adapting their existing and successful version of the story, rather than by embarking on a complete new one (especially at a time when they had other preoccupations, like building the Globe). A hybrid text – Shakespeare somewhat Haywardised – would be consistent with the assorted references in state papers, as well as with what we know about Elizabethan theatre practice. It would also mean that when Augustine Phillips said the play was old, it was true but not the whole truth. But as he was being asked about a payment he had accepted from a man who was now going to be hanged for treason, he would be careful, wouldn't he?

Peter Womack
University of East Anglia