Decoding Misfortunes: Advice to Elizabeth I and Her Subjects

This article positions Misfortunes within the context of drama and literature offered as counsel. Such contextualization demonstrates that the play drew upon Senecan drama, mirror for princes texts, and the Inns play Gorboduc in order to more authoritatively offer counsel about counsel itself to Elizabeth I, her court, and readers of the play in print. Considering both Misfortunes’s wider circulation in print and in a recent performance by The Dolphin’s Back, this article argues that the play’s counsel had value beyond its application to the queen. We can fully decode the play’s political messages only by looking across these different contexts.

Introduction. Changing Fortunes: Reviving and Revisiting The Misfortunes of Arthur

The dramatic mixture of Arthurian legend and Senecan tragedy inspired the revival of The Misfortunes of Arthur in 2019, a play originally written by lawyers at Gray’s Inn and performed before Elizabeth I in 1588. A small but significant body of scholarship has highlighted the play’s function as a vehicle for offering monarchic counsel. As the essays in this Issues in Review demonstrate, however, there are alternative ways of approaching Misfortunes through its theatricality, its dramatization of Inns ideology, its composition, and its publication. This introduction outlines why the play merits further attention.

The Introduction of Admission Fees in London: Fencing Prizes, Bearbaiting Arenas, and Speculative Origins

Medieval performers gathered coins during a show from people assembled to see them. By 1570, performers throughout London collected admission fees before a show as a condition of entry. When, how, and by whom were admission fees introduced? Based on the research of David Kathman, I argue that travelling players brought the admission fee system to London in the late 1530s, after which animal baiting entrepreneurs and the fencing brotherhood adopted and refined it. In conclusion, this essay offers a speculative origin for the admission fee system in the practice of shrine keeping.

Sourcing Misfortunes: Translation and Tragedy

From its first review to recent scholarship, critics have derided and dismissed the use made of translation in The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588). This essay reconsiders how the play approaches imitation by examining its translations from Senecan tragedy and Lucan’s De Bello Civili (ca 61-5 CE). With particular emphasis on Misfortunes’s ghost sequences and Oedipal echoes, this approach reveals the play’s engagement not just with the pedagogy and politics of Elizabethan England but also with innovations in dramatic form.

Walking with Vigilance: Middleton's Edge in The Triumphs of Truth

Scholars have frequently regarded Thomas Middleton's mayoral shows as exemplary for their moral dramatic structure. More recently, Tracey Hill has remarked upon their critical edge. Taking Middleton’s first show, The Triumphs of Truth (1613), as its primary focus and drawing upon selections from his other civic writings, this article examines the ways that Middleton's attention to the peripatetic nature of these events establishes a moral and critical reflection that is uniquely captured in the printed books he and other pageant writers saw through to publication. While arguing that this aspect of Middleton’s shows represents his unique contribution to the genre, the essay also explores the influences of Munday and Dekker, whose shows precede Middleton’s. Middleton does not entirely reinvent the genre but instead reminds the mayor and reader to walk with vigilance during both the live and imagined event.

‘M[aster] Monkesters schollars’: Richard Mulcaster, Physical Education, and the Early Modern Boy Companies

This article reconsiders the pedagogical theories of leading Elizabethan teacher Richard Mulcaster in the light of early modern boy company repertories. Focusing on Mulcaster’s teachings relating to the skilled, moving body, the article traces his connections to the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Blackfriars to suggest that the boy company stage became a site that explored boys’ physical skills. The early modern boy company repertories, the article ultimately suggests, positioned their young actors as ‘Mr Mulcaster’s scholars’.

The Name of Grim: Tracing the Character of Grim the Collier in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Theatre

Grim the Collier is a curious comic character who receives little critical attention. Grim appears in three key plays, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets, herbals, and ballad culture. This article examines, and rejects, Grim as a potentially useful figure for environmental awareness. I dispel legends about the basis of this character, and examine how the labile significance of the name ‘Grim’ implicates it in networks of superficial similarity between devils, colliers, and racialized black skin. These networks link to the proverb that underlies most early modern depictions of Grim: ‘like will to like quoth the devil to the collier’.

Editorial

This editorial discusses content for Early Theatre issue 24.2 (December 2021) as well as future plans for the journal.

‘To kill harmless cattle': Animal Victims and The Witch of Edmonton

The Witch of Edmonton (1621) is often viewed as a sceptical portrayal of witchcraft that offers a sympathetic view of the accused, but its accurate depiction of animal victims in events leading to accusations remains overlooked. This essay argues that witchcraft in early modern England was largely an animal crime. Following its source text, Henry Goodcole’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, A Witch (1621), and earlier prose accounts, The Witch of Edmonton illustrates the centrality of human-animal relations to the gendered dynamics and discourse of early modern witchcraft.

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.