Publishing Misfortunes: Recording Performance at the Inns of Court

This essay investigates the motivation behind the print publication of The Misfortunes of Arthur, privileging its functionality as a record of court performance rather than the political significance of its circulation. Examination of the playbook’s distinctive and extensive paratextual apparatus reveals the authors’ involvement with print publication. In considering the bibliographic presentation of the dumbshows, this essay finds overlooked parallels between Misfortunes and Stuart court masques and thus repositions the role which Misfortunes, and Inns drama more broadly, played in the developing relationship between early modern English print and performance.

Staging Arthur

In 2019, the author of this essay directed a rehearsed, script-in-hand performance of Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur in Gray's Inn Chapel. This essay records the rehearsal process, staging, and design. It explains the choice of this play for revival and how text-cutting shaped the way the story was to be told. The author also discusses the play’s language, including echoes of it in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and asks what staging this play tells us about the relationship between Inns of Court drama and the wider world of English professional theatre and, more generally, European theatre of the time.

El Quijote, ‘The Prince of Purpoole’ y Gesta Grayorum

This paper establishes connections between Don Quixote’s inns and the origins of English theatre, especially with London’s Inns of Court and the possibility that the character of Don Quixote and his world are inspired by ‘The Prince of Purpoole’ and his imaginary kingdom, created during the Christmas celebration at Gray’s Inn in 1594. Gesta Grayorum offers an account of the Festivities during that year.

Hidden Music in Early Elizabethan Tragedy

In modern times, scholars have widely regarded early Elizabethan tragedy, like Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561/62) and its successors at the Inns of Court, as verbose and unlyrical. Those criticisms may reflect an incomplete understanding of the original performance tradition, however. Like Senecan tragedies from this period, those plays include act-ending choruses, mostly in pentameter and in various stanza configurations. This study proposes that in the English tragedies, at least, those choruses were very likely sung, most probably to tunes from the emerging repertoire of metrical psalms. These findings would significantly affect the character of such plays and how they are perceived by scholars and audiences alike.

A Career at the Inner Temple: Thirty Years On

The author of this article Margaret Clay looks back on her long tenure as Librarian at the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court libraries serving barristers, judiciary, and students on the Bar Course. She recalls the selection process she experienced and proceeds to discuss the introduction of automation to the Library, a high priority in the early days. She explains the various relocations of parts of the Library's print collection (made necessary by periodic changes in the priorities of the parent organisation) and traces the development of electronic services: from CD-ROM databases to web-based services and onward to social media. She outlines the initiatives in reader services and other areas entered upon during her tenure and, in conclusion, looks forward to the future of the information service she was instrumental in setting up. Margaret retired in 2020.*

New ways of looking into handwritten miscellanies of the seventeenth century: the case of “Spes Altera”

A large number of copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2 circulated in handwritten miscellanies from the second quarter of the Seventeenth Century. Eleven of those copies have significant variant readings that have led critics to put forward different hypotheses regarding their nature and quality. Most critics, taking into account stylometric analyses, have regarded them as early drafts of Shakespeare’s printed version, and have agreed on their poor quality.By paying due attention to the text’s context of production and reception, we have reached a different conclusion regarding both the nature and quality of the handwritten versions of Sonnet 2. In our view, they are the product of a conscious rewriting on the part of some educated member of the universities or Inns of Court. Close reading of the manuscript copy text (Spes Altera, Bellasys Ms, c.1630), and a line by line comparison with the 1609 Q text, suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of its adapter at increasing the poem’s metrical regularity and structural coherence.