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BOY. Sir, he is not here.

- The Magnetic LadyInduction 10-12.

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated the processes by which the dichotomy of a Shakespeare “Canon” and “Apocrypha” was created, culminating in Brooke’s

Shakespeare Apocrypha.Critical treatment of the disputed plays is still influenced by the essential framework, constitution and language of Brooke’s edition. These processes are detailed in order that we might reconsider the plays historically, consciously moving beyond the later discourses that group them in a negative relationship to Shakespeare. This chapter returns to the circumstances of the plays’ original production in order to pursue a different approach to the question of how “Shakespearean” the plays may be.

Marcus offers a useful starting point, noting that “we characteristically identify canonical writers with a name that stands for the sum of their work, and of their authorial identity imagined as a clearly delimited body, as in ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Marlowe’” (Unediting180). That is, the authorial name signifies both the historical individual and the corpus of work, and the work takes on the authority invested in the authorial name by historical tradition.1_{Marcus describes this as an authorial “effect”.}

“Watching ‘Marlowe’ meant watching a theatrical event balanced on the nervous razor

1_{As noted in books on the anti-Stratfordian question, such as Shapiro’sContested Will: Who}

Wrote Shakespeare?The subtitle here is particularly fascinating; “Shakespeare” is nominally an amorphous concept, a body of work as undefined as the various anti-Stratfordian positions themselves. Yet Shapiro’s choice of “Shakespeare” also underlines the insinuations of

fraudulence and conspiracy that characterise the authorship dispute; for in a literal sense, one can only “write” an “author” if the author is himself a fiction.

edge between transcendent heroism and dangerous blasphemy – transgression not only against God but also against cherished national goals and institutions” (42).2

Marcus’s “Marlowe effect” is a phenomenon that perhaps best manifests itself retrospectively, constructed according to the critical overview of a completed canon. For early modern audiences watchingDido, Queen of Carthage, for example, Marcus’s description may have been somewhat puzzling. Once the effect is established, though, Marcus argues that subsequent critical and adaptive work acts to sustain it, to keep “Marlowe” sounding like “Marlowe”. “In order to keep the ‘Marlowe effect’ alive, to keep Marlowe sounding like himself even after his physical demise . . . non-authorial revision functioned to heighten, not to destroy, an aura of authorial ‘authenticity’ in the theatre” (Unediting56). “Marlowe” is thus a composite construct, rooted in an historical individual but maintained and adapted by subsequent agents, that nonetheless gives the impression of a distinctive voice, one that Robert Weimann suggests represents in

Tamburlaine“the most forceful articulation of the early Elizabethan dramatist’s sense of his own authority and entitlement” (56). Yet the expressers of this personal self also include Nashe, his collaborator onDido, and the revisers involved in the 1616 text of

Faustus.3_{“Marlowe” transcends an individual, becoming a discursive site where various}

agents are strategically arranged in order to create a particular textual or performative “effect,” and Marcus suggests it was the theatrical company who controlled this author- effect.

2_{This is, of course, only one critic’s view of Marlowe and, as J.T. Parnell states, “It would be a}

bold or foolish critic who claimed objective access to the ‘real’ Marlowe and the definitive meanings of his plays and poems.” (1). The point is rather to consider how meaningcanbe construed, rather than what it universallyis.

3_{The extent of Nashe’s involvement inDidois uncertain: Bowsher suggests that “it seems to have}

been finished off or edited by Thomas Nashe” (33), but his exact contribution is unclear. Bevington and Rasmussen argue that Marlowe collaborated on the A-text ofFaustus, though refuse to commit to a single candidate (72); and Henslowe paid William Birde and Samuel Rowley for revisions which are assumed to be those preserved in the B-text.

Recent work in repertory studies provides a framework in which to explore the relationship between author and collaborative environment in regard to the apocryphal plays. This work, as exemplified by that of Andrew Gurr, Roslyn Knutson, Scott McMillin and Lucy Munro, takes a primarily historical perspective that prioritises the material circumstances of production in the creation of drama.4_{While not explicitly concerned}

with authorship, these studies offer a social context that uses company rather than author as the organisational framework for a body of work. As Munro argues, repertory study has become “increasingly attractive [because of] the influence of post-structuralist uncertainty regarding the place of the author;” (3) the company remains a solid,

historical body in a period of uncertainty over the definition of authorship. T. Rutter, however, notes the problem of integrating Shakespeare, “who effectively represents the notion of author as individual genius” (126) into this model; and it is telling that Knutson and Gurr’s titles refer to “The Shakespeare Company” or “Shakespeare’s Company”. This latent bias can, however, be an advantage for study of the disputed plays. While the titles are inevitably designed to sell books, they remind us that the company is itself, in a sense, “Shakespearean”, and thus the works produced by the company are also implicity “Shakespearean”. Neither Gurr or Knutson mean by this that Shakespeare either owned the company or wrote the whole of its repertory, but they acknowledge Shakespeare’s unique role within this company as a sharer and resident dramatist, and the impact of the company and its repertory upon Shakespeare’s own work. Whether writing to the talents and resources of a particular group of actors, fitting plays to the requirements of

4_{T. Rutter provides an excellent overview of work in the field. I distinguish this movement from}

its predecessors, exemplified by e.g. Alfred Harbage’s 1952Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions

and Bernard Beckerman’sShakespeare at the Globe(1962) by its deliberate attempt to recast the repertory as analternativeorganising paradigm to authorship, rather than as contextualisation

forauthorship. Harbage provides useful discussion of several of the disputed plays, but is concerned throughout to underline the distinction between Shakespeare’s plays and the remainder of the repertory, rather than the shared strategies. Beckerman casually stigmatises all non-Shakespearean Globe plays as “hack plays . . . soap opera and grade-B westerns” (1) and “the weaker plays of the Globe” (61), treating them as contextual material for Shakespeare’s “magnificent dramas” (1).

the company’s performance space or responding to the other drama performed by the company and its competitors, Shakespeare’s plays are in turn shaped by those facets.

To dissociate the author from his environment in an author-centred canon is thus misleading, creating the impression of a career formed in artistic isolation rather than within a network of connected, and often opposing, forces. Within this paradigm, I argue, those apocryphal plays that belonged to the “Shakespeare Company” have an important role to play in discussion of the Shakespeare canon: they both influence and are influenced by Shakespeare’s plays, and contribute to a company repertory that is “Shakespearean” inasmuch as Shakespeare operates as a major governing figure in the writing, performance and representation of the plays.5_{In this, I follow the important}

work of de Grazia and Stallybrass, who argue that “the choice of [Shakespeare’s] name may reflect not his authorship, in any traditional sense, but rather his centrality to the company in multiple capacities (as playwright, actor, shareholder), not to mention his distinctive loyalty to that company for which he wrote exclusively” (275-76).6

Five of Brooke’s apocryphal plays were part of the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men’s repertory during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and these will be the test cases for this chapter. The anonymousMucedorusis usually dated to the 1580s and was first published in 1598 with no company attribution, but the third quarto of 1610 – which includes new

additions – was avowedly performed “By his Highnes Seruantes vsually playing at the Globe.” The 1602 quarto ofThomas, Lord Cromwell(first performed c. 1599) claims it

5_{See also Loewenstein, who vindicates Jaggard from deliberate misattribution inThe Passionate}

Pilgrimby arguing that “a Jacobean stationer’s ‘Shakespeare’ might be very nearly generic”, a standard descriptor for “quality love poetry” (60). Bednarz offers a counter-argument that the name was also used to distinguish variant stories (253), but this does not detract form Loewenstein’s basic thesis regarding poetry.

6_{See also Foucault, whose note on Ann Radcliffe argues that her founding of the Gothic horror}

novel shows that “her author function exceeds her own work.” (114) There is a danger of over- generalisation, of course, as in the common twenty-first century use of “Shakespearean” as a shorthand for all early-modern language, which implicitly and anachronistically institutes Shakespeare as the generator of discourses that preceded and authored him.

was “sundrie times publikely acted by the right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants,” and the 1613 second quarto updates this to the “Kings Maiesties Seruants.” Both quartos attribute the play to “W.S.”The London Prodigal(performed c. 1604; printed 1605) was “plaide by the Kings Maiesties seruants,” andA Yorkshire Tragedy

(performed c. 1605; printed 1608) “acted by his Maiesties Players at the Globe.” Both feature explicit attributions to Shakespeare. Finally,The Merry Devil of Edmonton(first performed c. 1602) boasts that it was “sundry times acted, by his Maiesties Seruants, at the Globe, on the banke-side” on the 1608 first quarto and all subsequent publications.

MucedorusandMerry Devilare also attributed to Shakespeare in the Charles I “Shakespeare, Vol. 1” volume discussed in the Appendix.

These plays range from the mid-Elizabethan to the early Jacobean, from domestic tragedy to city comedy, chronicle history to romance. Yet all avowedly shared the same stage and company in the first decade of the seventeenth century.7_{The aim of}

this chapter is not to establish precisely what Shakespeare’s involvement with the plays was: writer, reviser, adaptor, actor, selector, advisor, commissioner, mentor; the possibilities are multiple and ultimately unprovable. Rather, operating under the reasonable assumption that the company, particularly its sharers, were invested in and responsible for the company’s entire output, this chapter explores how these plays interact with the concerns and themes of Shakespeare’s contemporaneous plays.

Our evidence for the plays is textual, and inevitably influenced by the

intervening agencies of printers and publishers. We cannot confidently state whether the Shakespearean association was first articulated before or by print. However, the

7_{A note of caution is necessary at this point. If we are to mistrust title-page evidence in respect}

of authorship, there is no logical reason to unquestioningly accept the company attribution either. Kirschbaum, arguing thatMucedorusis a “bad quarto” (1), distrusts the company

assignation on this basis. However, company attribution was a more established and consistently used form of identifying ownership of plays, and academic consensus accepts the attribution of these five plays to the Chamberlain’s-King’s Men. Knutson demonstrates an overwhelming verification of title page company ascriptions by other evidence (“Evidence” 65-67).

compiling ofMucedorusandMerry Devilin anthologies and bookseller lists as Shakespeare’s despite not being printed as such is at least indicative that the

Shakespeare attribution had a discursive rather than a publisher-determined basis. The very fact of each of the five plays coming to be associated with Shakespeare proves that the possibility of the Shakespeare effect existed; that the onstage distinctions between “Shakespeare” and “not-Shakespeare” were blurred enough not to preclude the Shakespeare attachment being articulated in print.

The subordination of the apocryphal plays in later textual criticism, as shown in Chapter One, was a posthumous phenomenon. There is no historical reason to believe that the plays were any less important than others in the company’s repertory at the moment of their first performance. Regardless of their later fortunes, the plays

represent a commercial and artistic investment that demands attention. The moment of first performance was identified by the Oxford Shakespeare as a pivotal moment in the production of plays, the moment at which an ever-shifting text was first “fixed”.8_A

textualComplete Worksbased on a series of performative moments offers a paradigm- shifting attempt to socialise the canon, while at the same time limiting that canon according to the parameters set by attribution studies focusing on the individual author. Paradoxically, the Oxford project rehistoricises the plays while simultaneously

continuing to separate them from their historical context. By removing canonical restrictions imposed after the plays’ original production, this chapter reasserts the importance of the apocryphal plays at their moment of first performance and

publication (including their relation to the repertory of the rival theatres), arguing that

8_{See Stern, who emphasises the importance of the moment of first performance for bringing}

together disparate material artefacts and actor development for the first time to create a unified product (Rehearsal113-21).

they contributed to and were shaped by a “Shakespeare effect”, the authorial presence of Shakespeare.9