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Spying and surveillance in the early modern state and stage

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SPYING AND SURVEILLANCE
IN THE EARLY MODERN STATE AND STAGE

by

Robert David Stefanek

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Robert David Stefanek
ii
Dedication

To Leah and Frances, with love.
iii
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Bruce Smith, and my committee members,
Rebecca Lemon and David Lloyd, for their help at every step of the way. Thank you also
to Sherry Velasco, Cynthia Herrup, and John Carlos Rowe for serving as committee
members at different stages of the project. Thank you to my colleagues at USC for your
friendship and support. Peter de Bolla and David Hillman at King’s College, Cambridge,
and Tim Cribb at Churchill College, Cambridge, were incredibly helpful with
performance spaces, performances, and other information, as well as hospitality. Heather
James offered invaluable suggestions on an early version of a paper that would grow into
Chapter 3. Material from Chapters 1 and 2 will appear in the 2012 issue of Quidditas, the
Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. Thank you to the
anonymous readers for their helpful comments. To anyone I have forgotten, please accept
my apologies along with my thanks.
A Merit Dissertation Fellowship from the USC Department of English and a
Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the USC Graduate School provided time and
financial assistance that helped me research and write this dissertation. An International
Summer Field Research Award from the USC Graduate School allowed me to conduct
invaluable research on performance spaces throughout England.
iv
Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Abstract

Introduction: “The Mousetrap”

Chapter One: “As a diverting of worse inconveniences, and secret
actions”: The Henriad in the Provinces

Chapter Two: “A neighbour, hedges haue eyes, and high-wayes
haue eares”: The Queen’s Men in the Town Hall

Chapter Three: “Th’obseru’d of all obseruers”: Student-Spies on the
University Stage

Chapter Four: “The olde fantastical Duke of darke corners”:
Theatricality, Surveillance, and Sovereignty in Court
Theatre

Conclusion: “Watford, then wilderness”

Bibliography

ii

iii

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vi

1

18

73

116

165

220

232
v
List of Figures

Figure 1: The Theatre and the Panopticon

Figure 2: Known performance locations of liveried companies after
1550

Figure 3: Burghley’s map of the area around the Kent sands in north
Lancashire

Figure 4: Exterior of York Common Hall, today called the Guildhall

Figure 5: Interior of the York Guildhall by J. Halfpenny (1807)

Figure 6: Title page of the quarto of The True Tragedie (1594)

Figure 7: Architecture of the theatre in Queens’ College Hall,
Cambridge

Figure 8: Title page of the first quarto of Hamlet (1603)

Figure 9: Ground Plan of the Royal Palace of Whitehall by John
Fisher (1680)

Figure 10: The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533)

Figure 11: Engraving of Old London Bridge by Claes Van Visscher
(1616)

12

53

57

81

81

95

127

154

178

184

228

vi
Abstract

This dissertation argues that the theatre of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe,
Thomas Middleton, and their professional and amateur contemporaries was used by
different authorities throughout early modern England to conduct surveillance on
audiences comprised of suspect classes, including political rivals, recusant Catholics,
radical Protestants, and economic dissidents. I argue furthermore that the architecture of
theatres was designed with an eye towards audience surveillance and control. This project
is organized by different performance locations throughout England—towns, the
universities, and the court—and analyzes a variety of sources, including court, civic, and
university records, political, scientific, and philosophical treatises, maps, architecture,
painting, prose works, and poetry.
This dissertation deepens our understanding of how Shakespeare and his
contemporaries achieved the central place in our culture that they occupy today, while
critiquing Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the modern surveillance state and his rigid
distinctions between the disciplinary strategies of different epochs. By considering plays
in their historical conditions of performance throughout England, I theorize that meaning
is a complex interaction involving not only play texts and actors, but also audiences and
theatre architectures. I also offer an approach that opens the study of early modern drama
in a way that is inclusive of the dramatic experiences available to the entire English
population, not just the portion residing in London.
1
Introduction

“The Mousetrap”

In “The Mousetrap,” the play-within-the-play in Hamlet, playing becomes an opportunity
for spying and surveillance. The political backdrop hangs thick in the air during the
performance at the Danish court: the recent death of King Hamlet, the accession of
Claudius and his “hastie marriage”
1
to Gertrude, the threat of war with Norway. The
ostensible purpose of the play is to allow Hamlet to ease his nagging doubts about the
truth of the Ghost’s tale by spying on Claudius’s reaction to a scene that evokes the scene
of Claudius’s apparent murder of King Hamlet:
Ile haue these Players
Play something like the murther of my father
Before mine Vncle, Ile obserue his lookes,
Ile tent him to the quicke, if a doe blench
I know my course. (G1)

The performance is an attempt to make a window into Claudius’s soul: “the play’s the
thing / Wherein Ile catch the conscience of the King” (G1). Hamlet serves as playwright,
chorus, and director for his play. Hamlet’s instructions to the players to “sute the action
to the word, the / word to the action” (G4) are often understood as a preference for a
naturalistic acting style, and they may be. But for the play to elicit the response that
Hamlet hopes, it is also necessary that the players’ representation of the murder be as
unaffected and lifelike as possible. Hamlet’s instruction that “in the very torrent tempest,
and as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance,

1
William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare.
Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect
Coppie (London: I. R. for N. L., 1604), E3
v
. Future references are cited in the text.
2
that may giue it smoothnesse” (G3
v
) may refer equally to the torrent, tempest, and
whirlwind of passion created in the court as to the experience of the players in
discharging their roles. For the performance, Hamlet chooses a position next to Ophelia
from which he can observe both the play and Claudius’s reaction to it. He enlists
Horatio’s help, instructing him to “Obserue my Vncle” and “giue him heedfull note”
(G4
v
). Horatio positions himself at a separate vantage point on the opposite side of the
theatre, allowing Horatio and Hamlet to effectively triangulate Claudius between them.
Claudius’s response to the poisoning of the King onstage is confirmation for
Hamlet of the story he has heard from the Ghost. What Horatio has seen is less certain:
Hamlet: O good Horatio, Ile take the Ghosts word for a thousand pound. Did’st
perceive?
Horatio: Very well my Lord.
Hamlet: Vpon the talke of the poysning.
Horatio: I did very well note him. (H3)

Horatio has very well perceived and noted the king’s response to the play, but he leaves
his interpretation of that response unspoken. The audience at the performance of Hamlet
is likewise uncertain at this moment: it is not until the following scene that they will spy
upon Claudius’s confession, moments before Hamlet enters room, and gain the
unambiguous confirming evidence that Horatio, and Hamlet for that matter, never
receive. Claudius’s response to the play is made ambiguous by the play itself. Claudius,
notably, does not react to the preceding dumb show, perhaps because he is distracted, but
perhaps because the dumb show omits one crucial detail. While Hamlet has promised
“something like the murther of my father,” he only fulfills this to a point: while the
Player King dies of poisoning through the ear, the murderer, Lucianus, is not the Player
3
King’s brother, but his nephew. Hamlet’s play is hence also a thinly veiled threat that he
will murder Claudius.
The performance of “The Mousetrap” does not only subject Claudius to
observation by Hamlet and Horatio. It facilitates the surveillance of Claudius by his entire
court: the monarch was always a focal point of a court performance, even more so than
the play itself, and everyone present onstage and in the court audience are observing
Claudius’s reaction to the play and wondering what it imports. But the performance also
produces layers of surveillance that enmesh everyone in attendance, replicating the
atmosphere of the Danish court and kingdom throughout Hamlet. When Hamlet chooses
a position from which to observe Claudius’s reaction to the play, he refuses a seat next to
his mother Gertrude in favor of one next to Ophelia. Polonius, who is a sort of bumbling
spymaster for Claudius as well his Master of the Revels, observes this and exclaims to
Claudius and Gertrude, “O ho, doe you marke that” (H1), misinterpreting it as proof that
love of Ophelia is the cause of Hamlet’s lunacy. At the court performance of “The
Mousetrap,” as with every other moment, Hamlet is aware that he is being watched by
Polonius, Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, and perhaps others, and he
evades that surveillance by dissembling madness and flirting with Ophelia. But while he
is supposed to be watching Claudius, here as elsewhere he gets increasingly preoccupied
not with thoughts of murder and revenge, but with his mother and her sexuality. His
vision wanders with his attention, and says he to Ophelia: “looke you how cheerefully my
mother lookes, and my father died within’s two howres” (H1).
4
Hamlet’s Denmark is in many ways like early modern England, and the scene of
“The Mousetrap” brings together many of the worlds that exist in both. Perhaps most
obviously, “The Mousetrap” is staged at court, evoking the plays and masques performed
in the English court, which were assertions and celebrations of political power in which
the monarch and her or his reception of the play was at least as much of a spectacle as the
dramatic performance itself.
2
Meanwhile, the traveling players that arrive at the Danish
court to Hamlet’s warm reception and perform “The Mousetrap” evoke the traveling
players that traversed the English countryside, and sometimes played at court as well.
Third, the preponderance of students at the Danish court evokes the students of
Cambridge and Oxford, who acted in university plays as part of their grooming to play
important roles in the English church and state, and yet were often perceived as
ambivalent in their intentions and as potential sources of instability.
These are the worlds—those of traveling players, the universities, the court—that
this dissertation will inhabit. One other thing, along with theatricality, that ties together
these worlds is their associations, both in Hamlet’s Denmark and in early modern
England, with spying and surveillance. These terms have related and at times overlapping
usages today, so it will be helpful to distinguish between them. “Spy” is a much older,
fourteenth-century word that comes from the Old French espie and espier. Beginning in
the fifteenth century, “spy” became a verb stem that gave rise to a number of now-lapsed
combined forms, such as spy-all, spy-fault, spy-maiden, spy-hole, spy-house, spy-tower,
spy-window, which suggests that spying became an increasingly common activity in this

2
See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975).
5
period. “Spy” refers to a person who engages in spying or espionage, or to the act of
spying itself, meaning to covertly or clandestinely observe a person, group, or place on
behalf of a government or other body.
3
I use “spying” to refer to a practice targeting those
suspected of being engaged in specific illegal or seditious activities or, more generally,
political activities whose aims are contrary to one’s own. “Surveillance” is a turn-of-the-
nineteenth-century word from the French surveiller, meaning to watch over. It means
watching or supervising a person, prisoner, or group, often for the purpose of direction,
control, or superintendence.
4
I use it to refer to a practice targeting individuals and
especially groups of whom one may be suspicious but does not necessarily believe are
currently engaged in specific illegal or seditious activity. Surveillance is then, properly
speaking, an anachronistic term when applied to early modern England, but it is still one
that I believe accurately fits disciplinary practices in the period.
Spying and, more broadly, the history of intelligence networks in early modern
England are well-trodden ground.
5
Spying, espionage, and counterespionage were usually
in the context of the religious and political struggles of the period, as intelligence
networks operated by the English Protestant state confronted networks operating in

3
OED, “spy, n.”; “spy, v.”; “spy-, comb. form.”

4
OED, “surveillance, n.”

5
For the history of early modern intelligence networks, see, among others: Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary
Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925);
Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern
Espionage (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005); Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret
Services, 1570-1603 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Alison Plowden, The Elizabethan Secret Service
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); and John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991) and Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001).
6
concert with the Catholic powers on the Continent, most often Spain or Rome. Radical
Protestantism increasingly posed a threat to and drew the watching eyes of the state as
well. To understand the form taken by intelligence networks in the period, it is helpful to
have a conception of the early modern English state. Michael J. Braddick, who is
influenced by Weberian ideas of state formation, argues that there is a ‘state’ in early
modern England in the sense “that there was a coordinated and territorially bounded
network of agencies exercising political power, and this network was exclusive of the
authority of other political organisations within those bounds.” Braddick argues that the
term ‘state’ is both reasonable in terms of modern social theory and would have been
comprehensible to increasing numbers of contemporaries. And yet, unlike modern large
bureaucratic governments, “the centre of the early modern state was small. The privy
council consisted of a dozen or so people, the court a few dozen more, and parliament a
few hundred.” The state consisted of institutions that were empowered by social prestige
alongside more bureaucratic institutions.
6
It is within this framework that early modern
intelligence networks operated. Or, as David Riggs aptly puts it, “Spy work flourished in
the nooks and crannies of the patronage system.”
7
The monarch did not directly oversee
intelligence networks. Rather, intelligence networks were operated by prominent
courtiers and Privy Councilors including Leicester, Burghley, Walsingham, Essex, and
Salisbury, who used them to pursue the monarch’s interests as well as their own. Servants
spied for—and on—their masters, lesser courtiers passed secrets to higher courtiers, and

6
Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). The quotations are from 9 and 26.

7
David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2004), 140.
7
so on up chain of patronage.
8
As Braddick notes, common informers were perhaps the
most loosely connected agents of the state: informers could bring misdemeanors to the
court qui tam, meaning they could claim a share of the fines for infringements or enter
into a composition with offenders under license from the court. Informing came to
provide a significant income for some individuals, which led to acute suspicion that these
people were acting out of self-interest rather than the public good.
9

Poets and playwrights also operated within the patronage system, and
unsurprisingly, many of the`m were spies. Among names that are lesser known today, the
Scottish poet William Fowler spied for Walsingham, Anthony Munday was an
intelligence agent watching English Catholics at Rome, William Vaughan spied in Italy,
while Matthew Roydon went to Scotland.
10
More famously, Christopher Marlowe was
apparently sent to spy on English Catholics at Rheims, and perhaps spied on suspected
Catholics during his days at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, as well. Marlowe’s
activities on the Continent earned him the suspicion of university authorities who were
set to deny him his M.A. until the Privy Council intervened on his behalf:
Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone
beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine, Their Lordships thought good to
certefie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaved him
selfe orderlie and discreetlie wherebie he had done her Majestie good service, &
deserved to be rewarded for his fathfull dealinge: Their Lordships request that the
rumor thereof should be allaied by all possible meanes, and that he should be

8
Ian Arthurson, “Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation,” Nottingham
Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 147; Haynes, Invisible Power; and Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe,
140.

9
Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 41.

10
John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1942), 1:83-4.
8
furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement: Because it was
not her Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters
touching the benefitt of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant
in th’affaires he went about.

The letter was signed by the Lord Archbishop, John Whitgift; the Lord Chancellor,
Christopher Hatton; the Lord Treasurer, William Cecil; the Lord Chamberlain, Henry
Carey; and the Comptroller, James Crofts.
11
Some believe that Marlowe’s intelligence
work and perhaps some duplicitous dealings on his part are behind his murder in a tavern
in Deptford. Thomas Kyd was tortured into turning Queen’s evidence against his
roommate Marlowe when the two ran afoul of the law in connection with the Dutch
Church libel signed by “Tamburlaine,” effectively turning Kyd into a spy on his friend in
the latter’s final days.
12
Ben Jonson attended a supper with Gunpowder Plot conspirators
and volunteered what he knew to Robert Cecil and the Privy Council after the plot’s
discovery. But he was also dogged by spies himself while in prison in the wake of the
Isles of Dogs scandal.
13
In “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” part of the appeal of the private
supper for Jonson is that “we will have no Pooly, or Parrot by.”
14
Parrat was an informer
at Newgate Prison during Jonson’s time there; Robert Poley was a government agent

11
PRO Privy Council Registers PC2/14/381.

12
For various treatments of Marlowe’s life, death, and intelligence career, as well as their connection with
Kyd, see Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe; Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe;
as well as Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1940); Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt
Brace and Company, 1992); and Roy Kendall, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through
the Elizabethan Underground (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003); among others.

13
Mark Eccles, “Jonson and the Spies,” The Review of English Studies 13:52 (1937): 385-97.

14
Ben Jonson, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” in The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, ed. by H. J.
C. Grierson and G. Bullough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 155-6.
9
involved both in the plot to entrap and eliminate Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and in the
events surrounding the death of Marlowe, and also spied on Jonson during his stay at
Newgate.
15
Jonson’s experiences motivated the epigram “On Spies”:
SPIES, you are lights in state, but of base stuffe,
Who, when you’haue burnt your selues downe to the snuffe,
Stinke, and are throwne away. End faire enough.
16

John Bossy argues that the philosopher Giordano Bruno was working for Walsingham
while in residence at Salisbury Court with the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau,
Seigneur de Mauvissière, and was the spy “Henry Fagot” that disrupted the
Throckmorton plot.
17
Meanwhile, nobly- and royally-patronized playing companies like
Leicester’s Men and the Queen’s Men, and perhaps others including the Admiral’s Men
and the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, were engaged in a number of intelligence activities
during their travels.
18

Early modern surveillance practices, and particularly their connection with the
theatre, are much less studied than spying and intelligence networks. Surveillance has
occasionally been applied to practices at some of the locations this dissertation will
consider. James McConica, for one, uses it refer to disciplinary strategies at Oxford.
19

John Michael Archer has identified a “culture of surveillance” integral to sovereignty at

15
See Nicholl, The Reckoning.

16
Ben Jonson, “On Spies,” in The Workes of Beniamin Jonson (London: Will Stansby, 1616), Vuu2
v
.

17
Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair.

18
Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).

19
James McConica, “Elizabethan Oxford: The Collegiate Society,” in The History of the University of
Oxford, vol. 3, ed. by James McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), esp. 652-66.
10
court.
20
Surveillance has been considered thematically as it concerns early modern drama
and literature, most comprehensibly by Curtis C. Breight, but also by others, including
Archer.
21
However, this dissertation is to my knowledge the first concerted consideration
of surveillance in the theatre of early modern England, one that furthermore considers
how theatre and surveillance were imbricated in the governmental, educative, and
colonial apparatuses of the early modern English state. One of my running arguments is
that surveillance and theatre were interconnected components of early modern
sovereignty. In his genealogy of the modern surveillance state, Discipline and Punish,
Michel Foucault makes what is in my view an overly rigid distinction between the
disciplinary strategies of different epochs. Only with the Modern age does Foucault
recognize surveillance as a component of power, as represented by the architectural
model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
22
Foucault identifies a spectacular form of
power in place in the Renaissance, as represented by the architectural image of the
scaffold and its public, ceremonial executions. Along with executions, the scaffold or
stage was frequently used as a model of royal power itself. “We princes,” said Elizabeth,
“are set on stages, in the sight and viewe of all the world duely observed.” Said James:
“A King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people

20
John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

21
Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1996); and Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence.

22
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage, 1995).
11
gazingly doe behold.”
23
We will discuss these images in more detail in Chapter Four, but
as we will see, there is a duality to them that Foucault misses: while Foucault perceives
the spectacular element of the audience watching the ceremonial performance of the
execution or monarch, in both cases the performer (the state power executing the criminal
in the first case, the monarch in the second case) are also positioned where they can
survey the audience and observe the effect of their performance. So while Foucault is
correct that surveillance only becomes fully articulated and centralized as a disciplinary
strategy in the modern period, I argue that surveillance nonetheless was an emergent and
integral component of early modern power, although the relationship between early
modern surveillance and the modern surveillance state perhaps does not follow a linear or
even coherent model.

23
Both Elizabeth and James are qtd. in Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 42.
12

Figure 1: The Theatre and the Panopticon. A sketch of The Swan theatre, after
Johannes De Witt (c. 1596), left, and a Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham
(1791), right.

However, it is the theatre, not the scaffold, that is the better model for early
modern power, as it better encapsulates its dynamics of theatricality, spectatorship, and
often layered surveillance. As we will see in Chapter One, the construction of theatres
was advocated by both Montaigne and Elizabeth’s Privy Council because of the
ideological and surveillance potential of dramatic performances. Early modern plays,
whether they were performed in public, open-air amphitheatres like the Rose or the
Globe, or on temporary stages erected in town, college, or palace halls, were played in
the round. In such architectures, the actors onstage are positioned at one focal point.
However, the audience and actors had a view of one another and their reception of the
plays that does not exist in modern proscenium (or “end-on” or “end-stage”) theatres. As
13
Tiffany Stern notes, “In the indoor and outdoor theatres of the time, spectators and actors
clearly saw each other and borrowed reactions from one another.”
24
If we include the
actors onstage in our consideration of the visual dynamics of the theatre, a second focal
point is introduced, in the center of the theatre. Particularly in the case of court theatre,
when the monarch was often situated at this position, but also at moments with the
groundlings, commoners, or students positioned here in other theatres, there is power
associated with being situated at the center. But this positioning also makes one and one’s
response to the play the focal point of the surveillance of the entire theatre.
Plays themselves could facilitate surveillance of audiences. Particularly in the
case of performances by liveried players, whose plays helped carry their noble and royal
patrons’ messages to the provinces, plays performed an educative and even colonial
function that attempted to inculcate ideals that might lead audience members to become
self-surveilling. But plays also provided an opportunity to survey audiences, particularly
at moments when some audience members’ responses might betray resistance to the
message of the play. Plays and performances also possessed ambiguities and discursive
instabilities which could introduce alternative meanings that differed from the official or
intended ones, and these too could elicit responses for observation. One phrase that will
frequently appear as a touchstone in this dissertation is Francis Bacon lauding Elizabeth
for “not liking to make Windowes into Mens Hearts and Secret Thoughts, Except the

24
Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York: Routledge, 2004), 26.

14
Abundance of them did overflow into Ouvert and Expresse Acts and Affirmations.”
25

However, given the potential of theatre to elicit momentary responses that might betray
one’s secret thoughts, it is not so clear that such windows were never made. And yet,
using theatre for surveillance was not always effective or reliable. As Michel de Certeau
argues, those who are having a culture imposed on them, be they Amerindians colonized
by the Spanish or ‘common people’ having consumer culture imposed on them today,
always have tactics available to them to subvert this culture by using it in ways its
producers do not intend or understand.
26
Audience members aware that their responses
were subject to supervision could, like Hamlet during “The Mousetrap,” perform
responses that evaded surveillance.
The first two chapters of this dissertation will look at the activities of state-
sponsored playing companies and their travels around England. Chapter One situates the
uses of theatre for surveillance throughout England within the broader context of the
crown’s attempt to extend and consolidate its control by engaging in a colonial project
within its own territory, one fractured not only by religion, but also economics, local
histories, regional identities, and language. With frequent reference to the plays of
Shakespeare’s Henriad on tour with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the provinces, I

25
Francis Bacon, “Certain Observations, Upon A Libell, Published this present year, 1592. Intituled; A
Declaration Of the True Causes, Of The Great Troubles, Presupposed to be intended, against the Realm, of
England,” in Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces, Of The Works, Civil, Historical,
Philosophical, & Theological, Hitherto Sleeping; Of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon Baron of Verulam,
Viscount Saint Alban. According to the best Corrected Coppies. Together, With His Lordships Life, ed. by
William Rawley (London: Sarah Griffin, 1657), 127. For clarity I have removed the excessive commas found
in the original.

26
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1984).
15
argue that the crown used liveried companies to perform plays that colonized both space
and memory, and also to survey regions and populaces during their travels and their
performances. Chapter Two moves from the general to the specific. It exams one
conjectured performance, that of the under-read The True Tragedie of Richard the Third
by the Queen’s Men in the York Common Hall. The performance facilitates the
surveillance of an audience that remained largely Catholic and was loyal to Richard’s
memory through its ideologically-fragmented representation of Richard as alternately a
surveilling villain and a noble king, while self-consciously highlighting its own
(re)writing of history.
Chapter Three turns to the surveillance at plays performed at the universities of
Cambridge and Oxford. With reference to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, I argue that
students were ambivalent figures who, in contrast to the ideal of the withdrawn,
contemplative scholar, were often perceived as wandering, malcontent figures whose
religion and political loyalties were suspect, and who were often employed as spies by
the crown or its Continental rivals. Next, I turn to the three Parnassus plays, written and
performed by students at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and analyze how their satire of
the malcontent and potentially treasonous student brings the students onstage and in the
audience under heightened scrutiny. Finally, I turn to performances of Hamlet at
Cambridge and Oxford that throw into relief the preponderance of students in the play
who are threats to the state and are the agents and objects of spying and surveillance.
Chapter Four considers spying and surveillance at court plays. Using court records,
palace architecture, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Francis Beaumont’s and John
16
Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, I show that the court and court performances alike had a
competitive culture of surveillance. Looking at performances of George Peele’s The
Arraignment of Paris and Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, I argue that plays staged
within this culture exploited the potential of theatre architecture to focus the audience’s
attention onto the sovereign. Finally, I analyze how the 1604 performances at Whitehall
Palace of Middleton’s The Phoenix and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which
feature very different representations of a surveilling ruler, bring James’s own
surveillance practices under the scrutiny of his court. The conclusion will briefly consider
the London stage and situate it in this broader national context of playing, education,
colonization, spying, and surveillance.

A Note on Texts

It may seem pedantic that I have chosen to quote primary sources from original rather
than modern editions wherever possible. However, since I am working with texts such as
The True Tragedie and the Parnassus plays for which no complete, scholarly, modern-
spelling editions exist, I was faced with a choice: One, I could use modern editions where
available, and use original editions where not (in which case, while Shakespeare’s
Hamlet announces, “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound,”
dressed up in modern spelling and punctuation, the Queen’s Men’s Richard is left to
proclaim, “Ile strike whillst the yron is hote,” which unfairly makes the former seem
17
more immediate to modern eyes). Two, in the interest of clarity I could myself modernize
passages from original editions, and in the process, like all editors, risk introducing errors
and closing down interpretations. Three, I could adopt the practice I have here and open
myself to charges of pedantry. I have chosen the third. However, I have still referred to
modern editions where available.

18
Chapter One

“As a diverting of worse inconveniences, and secret actions”:
The Henriad in the Provinces

In “On educating children,” Montaigne offers a brief and yet remarkable defense of the
theatre from its detractors. It centers on traveling players and the opportunity their
performances present to the rulers of commonwealths for maintaining peace and stability,
including through the surveillance of the populace gathered for the play:
And I have ever accused them of impertinencie, that condemne and disalowe such
kindes of recreations, and blamed those of injustice, that refuse good and honest
Comedians, (or as we call them) Players, to enter our good townes, and grudge
the common people such publike sportes. Politike and well-ordred
commonwealths, endevor rather carefully to vnite and assemble their cittizens
together; as in serious offices of devotion, so in honest exercises of recreation.
Common societie and loving friendship is thereby cherished and increased. And
besides, they cannot have more formall and regular pastimes allowed them, then
such as are acted and represented in open view of all, and in the presence of the
magistrates themselves: And if I might beare sway, I would thinke it reasonable,
that Princes should sometimes, at their proper charges, gratifie the common
people with them, as an argument of a fatherly affection, and loving goodnes
towards them: and that in populous and frequented cities, there should be Theatres
and places appointed for such spectacles; as a diverting of worse inconveniences,
and secret actions.
1

Montaigne makes a surprisingly explicit connection between playing and religious
services (“serious offices of devotion”) as both being instruments of social control. He
posits a direct relationship between theatrical performances and “Politike and well-ordred
commonwealths,” provided the former are under the control of the ruler and therefore

1
Michel de Montaigne, “On educating children,” in The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie
Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne, Knight of the noble Order of St. Michaell, and one of the
gentlemen in Ordinary of the French king, Henry the third his chamber, trans. by John Florio (London: Val.
Sims for Edward Blount dwelling in Paules churchyard, 1603), I2. I have also referred to Michel de
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. by M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 2003).
19
“formall and regular.” The usefulness of playing is such that Montaigne advocates that
major towns have purpose-built theatres or at least structures readily appropriated for the
purposes of such entertainments. Plays help strengthen and secure the power of the ruler
by forging a sense of community and common identity, because they physically “vnite
and assemble their cittizens together” in a single place, and because they offer that
audience a shared experience. These feelings of commonality extend to the ruler, who by
virtue of offering a play fosters feelings of “fatherly affection” and “loving goodness”
that strengthen his or her rule. Along with creating “common societie,” plays also act as a
deterrent to “worse inconveniences, and secret actions”: not only disorderly behavior, but
also sedition and conspiracies that threaten the ruler’s power. They accomplish this first
by providing a distraction for idle hands. But plays and theatres are also useful because
they allow the ruler to conduct surveillance on the audience. Montaigne advocates that
such spectacles “are acted and represented in open view of all, and in the presence of the
magistrates themselves.” The architecture of the spaces in which such spectacles take
place affords excellent sightlines not only of the play but of the entire audience. Each
audience member is able to perceive her or his neighbors’ reaction to the play, and more
importantly, the magistrate can survey the entire audience.
Elizabeth’s Privy Council shared Montaigne’s vision of political theatre. In
instructions to the City of London in 1572, around the time Montaigne began his Essais,
it advocated that
certein persones to haue in there howses, yardes, or back sydes, being overt &
open places, such playes, enterludes, commedies, & tragedies as maye tende to
20
represse vyce & extoll vertwe, for the recreacion of the people, & thereby to
drawe them from sundrye worser exercyses [my emphasis].
2

Like Montaigne, the Elizabethan government perceived the theatre as an Ideological State
Apparatus that could create or impose order on audiences.
3
It ideally performed an
educative function by creating a common ideology (extolling “vertwe”) and laying the
groundwork for the creation of a nation-state, but it at the least provided a distraction for
its audiences. The many types of “vyce” that the Elizabethan government sought to deter
included idleness, but also Popery, Puritanism, and plotting revolution against the crown.
But the crown also recognized the usefulness of theatre for assembling the people in an
“overt & open” architecture whose sightlines afforded the opportunity to survey the
people and their reaction to the play, thereby deterring them from “sundrye worser
exercyses.” The Elizabethan government went on to implement and extend this vision of
political theatre on a truly national scale, creating companies of “good and honest
Comedians” bound to it through noble and royal patronage. These companies toured the
provinces, attempting to “represse vyce & extoll vertwe,” both by their plays and by
conducting surveillance on the populace during their travels and their performances.
The Elizabethan government was faced with an England that was not territorially,
ideologically, or politically unified. As Michael J. Braddick notes, “In all, the centre of
the early modern state was small. The Privy Council consisted of a dozen or so people,
the court a few dozen more, and parliament a few hundred.” The small size of the state,

2
Printed in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 4:269.

3
For the idea of the ideological state appratus, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2001), 85-126.
21
and particularly of the crown government, meant that rather than centralized control the
crown often relied on ad hoc arrangements in which the enforcement of edicts was
delegated to local authorities.
4
This lack of centralized control meant that the crown
struggled to impose order on and consolidate control over a fractious territory composed
of regions with disparate identities, histories, and languages. The power struggle between
Catholics and Protestants also was far from settled, particularly early in Elizabeth’s reign.
The Elizabethan government faced a particularly large problem in the north, a region that
clung to a Catholic identity and from which plots and rumors of plots frequently
emanated in which an uprising of English Catholics, usually acting in concert with an
invasion by one or more of the Catholic powers on the Continent (most often Spain),
aimed to put Mary Stuart on the throne. Sometimes, as in the case of the 1569 Northern
Rebellion, these threats materialized. But as Michael C. Questier illustrates in his study of
Catholic communities in early modern England, the situation was rather more complex. It
was not just the north that still clung to a Catholic identity, and the problems posed by
Catholicism were ideologically and territorially dispersed. Questier points to recent local
studies of the Reformation in the English provinces that support his view that “the split
between a supposedly more backward/conservative/Catholic North and a more
progressive/Protestant South has been overdone”; rather, much of the country remained a
muddle of the two. A sizeable portion of the English population remained Catholic,
including approximately 20 percent of the aristocracy. Questier also challenges the notion
that English Catholicism was a monolithic or stagnant presence, arguing rather that it was

4
Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). The quotation is on 26.
22
variegated and readily adaptable.
5
Many or even most Catholics were not disloyal or
involved in conspiracies, or posed any serious threat to the power of the state.
6
But this
meant that it was difficult to discern the Catholic from the treasonous Catholic. The
Elizabethan government increasingly faced a threat from radical Protestantism as well,
particularly in cities and towns across the country.
But religion was far from the only source of friction in early modern England. As
Questier notes, Catholicism as an explanation for discontent could be unreliable, as
“aggressive politicised Catholicism could sometimes appear to be glossing and
representing popular political disquiet.”
7
The Prayer Book Rebellion in Devon and
Cornwall in 1549, just nine years before Elizabeth came to the throne, was anti-
Reformation. But it was also pro-Cornish identity, language, and autonomy, and anti-
nascent capitalism and anti-gentry. Rebels resisted the imposition of the English-
language Book of Common Prayer. (As the English travel writer and physician Andrew
Borde stated, “In Cor[n]wall is two speches, the one is naughty englyshe, and the other is

5
Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992), presents a similar argument that Catholicism in England was not a decadent
or decayed institution, but rather a living and vibrant institution that had to be murdered by the
Reformers, and that this constituted a violent rupture in religion and society.

6
See Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic
Patronage and Religion, c. 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). As Questier notes
of the county he uses as his case study of Catholic kinship and patronage networks, “Put bluntly, what it
means, according to Christopher Haigh, is that many English counties were more like Lancashire than
everyone has thought.” Questier is referring to Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor
Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

7
Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England, 41.

23
Cornyshe speche.”
8
) They also resisted inflation and the enclosure of common lands, all
the while chanting “Kill all the gentlemen.” The same year saw Kett’s Rebellion in
Norfolk, in which insurgents, incensed by moves by the aristocracy to enclose commons
and convert them into sheep pasture to supply the region’s cloth industry, and further
motivated by the region’s rampant economic inequality, spent weeks tearing down
enclosures, slaughtering sheep, and occupying Norwich. Kett’s Rebellion was if anything
even more disconcerting to the fledgling Protestant state, not only because Norwich was
the second-largest city in England and in much closer proximity to London, but also
because the revolt aimed at restoring commoners’ feudal rights was primarily Protestant
in character.
9

Playing was one of the sources of disorder that threatened the reign of Elizabeth
by ideologically and territorially fracturing England. Radical Protestantism used attacks
against ‘abuses’ of the theatre to gain notoriety and win adherents to its cause.
10

Meanwhile, much of the popular drama that still persisted throughout the country in the
early Elizabethan period was inassimilable for the Protestant state, particularly the

8
Andrew Borde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge. The whych dothe teache a man to
speake parte of all maner of languages, and to know the vsage and fashion of all maner of countreys. And
for to know the moste parte of all maner of coynes of money, the whych is currant in euery region. Made
by Andrew Borde, of Physycke Doctor. Dedycated to the right honorable & gracious lady Mary Doughter of
our souerayne Lorde king Henry the eyght ([London: William Copland, 1555]), B2
v
.

9
For the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion, see Records of Early English Drama: Norwich, ed. by
David Galloway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), xvi-xvii; Barrett L. Beer, Rebellion and Riot:
Popular Disorder in England during the Reign of Edward VI (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2005);
Julian Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); Anthony
Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008); and Stephen K.
Land, Kett’s Rebellion: The Norfolk Rising of 1549 (Ipswich: The Boydell Press, 1977).

10
Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 26.
24
mystery cycles, whose collective organization remained close to the spirit and restrictions
of Catholicism.
11
The Corpus Christi play was threatening not simply because it was a
Catholic tradition, but also for the way in which it could destabilize the Protestant,
national England that the Elizabethan state was attempting to create. As Robert Weimann
argues of the Secunda Pastorum, which shifts the dramatic action from Yorkshire to
Palestine, these plays created a unity in which “The mythical or legendary past and the
temporal present are related to each other through a dramatic method expressive of a
theater in which people present their own history while telling the story of the Bible.”
12

Mystery plays were threatening because they presented a local history in which a
Catholic past was conjoined with the temporal present; they destabilized locality and
identity, hearkening back to a regional Catholic past in the face of the state’s efforts to
cultivate a national Protestant present and future. In the Secunda Pastorum, Yorkshire is
overlaid onto Palestine, not London or the rest of England. These plays hence drew the
ire of the central government. Elizabeth issued a proclamation dated 16 May 1559
prohibiting unlicensed interludes and plays and instructing those authorized to license
plays to
permyt none to be played wherin either matters of religion or of the gouernaunce
of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated, beyng no meete
matters to be wrytten or treated vpon, but by menne of aucthoritie, learning and
wisedome, nor to be handled before any audience, but of graue and discreete
persons.
13

11
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social Dimension
of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. and trans. by Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1978), 98.

12
Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, 90.

13
Qtd. in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:263.
25
This was an effort to suppress these plays by subjecting them to the surveillance of the
censor, but it met with limited success. Eight years later, a letter dated 27 May 1567 from
the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of York to the bailiff and burgesses of Wakefield
summarizes the ongoing concerns of the Elizabethan state with the mystery plays and
attempts to control their content, decreeing that in the
plaie commonlie called Corpus Christi plaie...no Pageant be used or set furthe
wherin the Ma[jes]tye of God the Father, God the Sonne, or God the Holie Ghoste
or the administration of either the Sacramentes of baptisme or of the Lordes
Supper be counterfeyted or represented, or anythinge plaied which tende to the
maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of
god [and] or of the realme.
14

The mystery plays required repeated efforts at suppression because the London-based
crown had limited ability to enforce its edicts in the faraway provinces, and because the
plays were not a moribund medieval institution but were, like Catholicism itself, a living
tradition that had to be murdered.
But these initial efforts at suppression also met with limited success because they
targeted the plays themselves while ignoring something else that made them a threat: the
players. While many of these plays were put on by guilds—a formation which itself had
its origins in a feudal, Catholic past—others were performed by traveling amateur and
professional players whose social and geographic mobility were perceived as a threat by
the Elizabethan state, and also helped them elude the eyes of authorities. The
‘invisibility’ of these ‘vagabond’ players is suggested by the lack of extant records for

14
Printed in Harold C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval
Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 48, and qtd. in Louis Montrose, The Purpose of
Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 25.
26
many traveling groups: while this is to a large extent reflective of the incompleteness of
the archive, it also reflects their untraceability. But their Protean shape-shifting,
particularly their transgression of social boundaries, also made them a threat. As
Giovanni Florio’s Montaigne remarked, “as enterlude-plaiers, you shal now see them on
the stage, play a King...but they are no sooner off the stage, but they are base rascals,
vagabond abjects, and porterly hirelings, which is their naturall and originall condition.”
15

Players, like the plays they performed, destabilized identity and locality.
These qualities led to the inclusion of players in legislation attempting to restrict
other categories of itinerants similarly perceived by the state as threatening. The 1572
Vagabonds Act classified as “Roges Vacabonds or Sturdy Beggers...all Fencers
Bearewardes Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of
this Realme or towardes any other honorable Personage of greater Degree” as well as
those which “shall wander abroade and have not Lycense of two Justices of the Peace at
the leaste, whereof one to be of the Quorum.”
16
Robert Weimann suggests that one reason
players were associated with vagabonds was because many vagabonds likely attempted to
make their living by acting.
17
Regardless, as Paolo Pugliatti argues, while the groups
associated under the Vagrancy Act had several common denominators, the state’s
underlying concern with vagabonds, players and beggars alike, was with disguise,

15
Qtd. in Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, 53.

16
Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:269-71, reprints portions of the Act.

17
Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, 53.

27
simulation, and impersonation.
18
It was not simply the instabilities in identity and locality
that made traveling players and other vagabonds threatening, but what these untraceable
people might say. As Dermot Cavanagh notes, the groups targeted by the Act were
explicitly equated with rumor, a politically-threatening form of disorderly speech and a
discourse whose perpetual untraceability legitimizes the continual surveillance and
restraint of speech.
19
The concerns about the speech of Catholics in general would have
been particularly worrisome in the case of vagabond, covertly or overtly Catholic
“Comon Players in Enterludes.” Seen in this light, the 1559 proclamation prohibiting
unlicensed interludes and the 1572 Vagrancy Act as it applied to players can be seen as
two phases of the same effort: while the earlier legislation targets speech that could be
considered seditious, the later targets the speakers.
The Vagrancy Act curtailed players’ destabilizing movements and identities as
part of a broader effort to impose order on society. It imposed an identity on them by
criminalizing ‘masterless’ players while creating a class of players who secured
patronage and thereby ‘belonged’ to a noble household. Given the Act’s more general
targeting of persons “whole and mightye in Body and able to labour, havinge not Land or
Maister, nor using any lawfull Marchaundize Crafte or Mysterye whereby hee or shee
might get his or her Lyvinge,” the Act further distinguished nobly-backed players as
laboring members of a legitimate profession, as opposed to the ‘idle’ players who lacked
patronage. It also subjected the movements of players to the surveillance of Justices of

18
Paola Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), esp. 2-3.

19
Dermot Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play (Houndmills:
Basingstoke, 2003), 82-91.
28
the Peace (“The English justices were the antennae of the monarchy”
20
), tying to a fixed
locality all but those players who were authorized to travel. In its efforts to criminalize
vagabondage and thereby impose identities on and restrict the mobility of subjects, the
Act brought the full violence of the state upon offenders. A first offense brought one to
“bee presentlye commytted to...Gaole...or...Prison” until the next sessions, and if
convicted
ymmedyatlye he or shee shalbe adjudged to bee grevouslye whipped, and burnte
through the gristle of the right Eare with a hot Yron of the compasse of an Ynche
about, manifestinge his or her rogyshe kynde of Lyef, and his or her Punyshment
receaved for the same.

A second offense made one a felon; a third brought death.
21
Pugliatti notes that
subsequent versions of the poor law seem to have underestimated the fact that the public
was not ready to see all performers and beggars as criminals, unlike certain vagrant
beggars. As she suggests, however, this was perhaps not so much an erroneous
interpretation on the part of the crown as it was an attempt to “impose on playing the
same prejudice which applied to beggary and vagrancy.”
22
The punishments meted out to
the vagabond player were the crown’s effort to inscribe the label of “vagabond” and its
corresponding prejudices on the body of the offender for all to see.
One corollary of the Vagrancy Act was the wider emergence of companies
possessing royal patents that carried the name and wore the livery of their noble patrons.

20
Walter Makey, The Church of the Covenant, 1637-1651: Revolution and Social Change in Scotland
(Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1979), 6, qtd. in Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England,
367.

21
Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:269-71, reprints portions of the Act.

22
Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England, 4-5.
29
There was nothing novel about the nobility patronizing touring groups—one group, the
Court Interluders, dated back to the reign of Henry VII and survived the Vagrancy Act by
at least a year.
23
But mandating that companies ‘belong’ to a noble household was new.
As Louis Montrose argues,
The distinction of liveried actors from rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars was
an attempt to accommodate the professional players to the status categories and
social controls of a traditional, hierarchical, and deferential society. At the same
time, however, it also implied an emergent understanding of the peculiar
conditions of professional playing.
24

The first patent was awarded in 1574 to Leicester’s Men, whose career spanned from at
least their first mention in Yorkshire in 1559 to their patron’s death in 1588. They were
joined by other groups, including in 1576 by Lord Howard’s Men, who later became the
Lord Admiral’s Men, and by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. The traveling group
par excellence of the later Elizabethan period, however, was the Queen’s Men, who were
assembled in 1583 by Francis Walsingham in consultation with Edmund Tilney, the
Master of the Revels, to ensure that the group possessed not only the best players in
England, but also players cooperative with authority, to tour under the Queen’s name. To
this end, the troupe was largely drawn from the best of Leicester’s Men.
25
The Admiral’s

23
Chambers The Elizabethan Stage, 2:77-85.

24
Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 55.

25
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, xiii-xv. The extent of Walsingham’s
involvement in the formation of the Queen’s Men is disputed—Andrew Gurr, in The Shakespearian
Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1996), 197, argues that “He never showed much
interest in players, though, and is unlikely to have been the one who initiated the idea.” However, as
Stephen Budiansky points out in Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the
Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), 37, Walsingham supported poets, writers,
the study of civil and international law, and voyages of discovery and the search for the Northwest
Passage when he could afford it and when they had suitable political and propaganda potential for
30
and Chamberlain’s Men in turn were apparently culled from the Queen’s Men in 1594.
26

All involved in the formation and patronage of these companies were Protestant and
Tudor partisans: Leicester, Walsingham, and the Lord Admiral, Charles Howard, were
Privy Councilors; Howard also commanded the English fleet against the Spanish
Armada, while the two Lord Chamberlains under whose names that grouped toured,
Henry Carey and his son George, helped defeat the Northern Rebellion. The patent
system was not perfect: regional differences and frequent changes of mayor made the
interpretation of patents inconsistent, while the prevalence of forgeries allowed multiple
companies used the ‘same’ patent.
27
Nonetheless, it represented a major change in
playing in the provinces.
Bound as they were to the nobility, the crown used these companies in an
essentially colonial project in the provinces. Walter D. Mignolo, writing of the role of
Renaissance thought in the European colonization of the Americas, provides a useful
framework for considering the activities of liveried players. Mignolo argues that the
colonization of the Americas was accomplished through the colonization of language,
memory, and space, including by the imposition of discursive formations like history and

advancing the English and Protestant causes. (Robert Hakluyt dedicated the first edition of The principal
nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nation to him.) He also intervened on the
Queen’s Men behalf when they were attacked by his fellow Puritans in London.

26
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 209.

27
Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 1:337-8 and Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 37-9. As
Gurr notes, forgeries sometimes allowed London companies to have a duplicate traveling group or to
allow a traveling group to divide to cover more territory (and hence earn more money), common practices
of dubious legality. Other forgeries were designed to rip off the authorized companies. It was hard for
local authorities to discern whether the patent they were presented with was authentic or a forgery, so
the authority of a patent was rarely questioned.
31
maps.
28
There are important differences between the colonial processes in England and in
the Americas—notably, in the Americas, Europeans sought to impose strictly alphabetic
writing and European discursive genres upon Amerindian cultures that had neither. The
colonization of language is less of a concern for our purposes, although playing perhaps
could be seen, like the Book of Common Prayer, as part of a broader effort to unify the
country linguistically. However, liveried companies were clearly engaged in the
colonization of memory and space. The usefulness of theatre in colonial applications was
well known to Europeans. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English used a
variety of ceremonies and other symbolic gestures to inaugurate colonial authority in the
Americas.
29
Theatre was subsequently used to extend and confirm power in a variety of
ways: Cortés used political theatre and dramatic gestures to maintain power over his own
fractious supporters and to consolidate his victory over the Aztecs; Spanish friars adapted
Nahua participatory public rituals to Christian themes for conversion; French
missionaries used performance to convert indigenous inhabitants, inculcate European
norms, and occasionally terrify spectators.
30
It was no stretch for the Elizabethan
government to put political theatre to use internally in an effort to consolidate and extend
its control over a fractured territory that was in places and at times antagonistic to its rule.

28
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003).

29
Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).

30
Susan Castillo, Performing America: Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786 (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
32
Liveried players attempted the colonization of memory by suppressing and co-
opting local popular dramatic traditions. One reason that earlier Tudor efforts to suppress
the mysteries and moralities proved ineffectual was that there was nothing put in their
place. The liveried companies changed that. While much of the popular drama, and
particularly the mystery cycles, that still existed throughout the country in the early
Elizabethan period was inassimilable for the Protestant state and hence needed to be
suppressed, the morality play was an exception. It was a form highly adaptable to
economic, social, and political shifts, including the shifts from feudalism to emergent
capitalism, from a lay to a professional theatre, and from regional, Catholic ideologies to
the new national, Protestant, humanist ideology.
31
This is clear from the indebtedness to
the morality tradition of plays like Doctor Faustus, Old Fortunatus, The True Tragedie of
Richard the Third, and Richard III. In this way, traveling companies fit within the
broader appropriation of popular and liturgical ceremony and drama by the Elizabethan
government as part of the ideological apparatus of the state. One prominent form of
appropriation was Elizabeth’s royal progresses and ceremonial entries, in which royal
power was asserted through the performance of plays and pageants.
32
As David M.
Bergeron notes in his study of these forms drama,
By definition civic pageants are political events. They involve the presence of the
ruler—either sovereign or mayor—they utilize public monies of city or guilds,
they take place in the public arena, and they celebrate national and civic virtues.

31
Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre, 98. Weimann goes on to qualify his
point: “This change, which in the long run helped to perpetuate the popular tradition until Shakespeare’s
time, is not, however, sufficiently linear or indeed coherent to permit its reduction to one schematic
formula.”

32
Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 25-6.
33
Such street shows function as part of the political discourse of the realm. The
pageants celebrate political power even as they confirm such power.
33

In these progress entertainments and royal entries, Elizabeth was variously apotheosized
as Deborah, Phoebe, the Fairy Queen, Chastity, Peace, or the Fortress of Perfect Beauty.
(Spenser’s The Faerie Queene appears as a natural outgrowth of this milieu.) She is the
Truth that sets men free.
34

Traveling players also brought Truth to the provinces, helping expand the crown’s
authority by performing plays intending to ideologically as well as territorially unify the
country. It is generally believed that Leicester’s Men, due to their patron’s Puritan
leanings, upheld a rigorously Protestant dogma in their plays.
35
But the primary way that
these troupes brought Truth was in the form of the chronicle history play, with which
they sought to impose on their audiences an official discourse of history that was not
simply pro-Protestant (and anti-Catholic), but also nationalist and royalist in orientation.
As Walter Cohen argues, the chronicle history furthered absolutist consolidation by
exploring and justifying the fitness of the monarchy to rule while expressing, enacting,
and securing the successful adaptation of the monarchy to the changing social and

33
David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2003), 5.

34
Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 64.

35
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 192. Gurr qualifies this position with the
acknowledgement that a dearth of surviving playtexts or even titles performed by the company forces this
to remain only a supposition. However, he finds plausible arguments such as Paul Whitfield White’s in
Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 173, and qtd. in the same passage in Gurr, that “after an initial period of outrage
and resistance, many Protestant leaders in the church and in the civil government came around to
accepting playgoing as suitable recreation and recognising once again its power as a medium of shaping
public opinion.” And as Gurr infers, “In any case it is almost inconceivable that the players themselves
would not have known what their patron stood for, and supported it in their plays.”
34
political relations of the period.
36
The chronicles were themselves sponsored by the
Tudors in the wake of the Wars of the Roses to portray those wars in a favorable light and
secure their claim to the throne.
37
Liveried companies continued these efforts by putting
plays based on the chronicles onstage before the largely illiterate masses. The Queen’s
Men were the first company to undertake the form extensively,
38
and they used it to help
fashion a national, Protestant identity through the performance of a patriotic, pro-Tudor,
anti-Catholic vision of history. According to Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean,
Leicester and Walsingham would have seen the Queen’s Men as an avenue for bringing
theatre back into the service of Protestant ideology and the ‘truth’ of Tudor history by
presenting “the plain, unvarnished substance of history in a form appealing to all the
people” as a part of a broader Protestant drive for substantial truth and plain speech.
39

(Although plays should perhaps avoid straying too close to the truth. As Ralegh wrote in
the preface to his History of the World, “who-so-euer, in writing a moderne Historie,
shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth.”
40
) The
Admiral’s Men carried with them history plays inherited from the Queen’s Men as well

36
Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 150, 187, and 218-53.

37
Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1990), 3-4.

38
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 33.

39
McMillin and Maclean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 33. David Riggs, The World of Christopher
Marlowe (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2004), 197, and Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing
Companies, 211, make similar observations.

40
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his
Contemporaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 135. The Ralegh quote is also found in this
passage.
35
as Marlowe’s Edward II (and a history of another sort by Marlowe, the Massacre at
Paris). Shakespeare undertook the form with relish while writing for the
Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, writing two tetralogies on the period leading up to and
involving the Wars of the Roses, The Life and Death of King John (an adaptation of the
Queen’s Men’s play on the same subject), and a play on Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII.
These plays advertised themselves as ‘true’ to their audiences, both in performance, as
we will see, as well as in print: the Queen’s Men performed plays entitled The True
Tragedie of Richard the Third and The True Chronicle History of King Leir; the subtitle
of Henry VIII is All is True. By performing these plays, liveried companies were co-
opting popular dramatic traditions in an attempt to replace local histories and the
‘disorderly’ speech represented in, among other places, the Corpus Christi plays.
The plays of the Henriad, performed by the Chamberlain’s Men not only on the
London stage but throughout the provinces, are a useful point of entry for many of the
ideas of surveillance and colonization that this and later chapters will explore. For one,
the plays are at times self-conscious about their status as an extension of the Tudor
project of chronicling. In 1 Henry IV, Hotspur is anxious about his representation in the
future historical record, and asks Northumberland and Worcester, “Shall it for shame be
spoken in these daies, / Or fil vp Chronicles in time to come” that they “put down
Richard” and planted “this thorne, this canker, Bullingbroke?”
41
Later, when Vernon

41
William Shakespeare, The History of Henrie the Fourth; With the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the
King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir Iohn
Falstalffe (London: P. S. for Andrew Wise, 1598), B4. Future references are cited in the text. I have also
referred to William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. by David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson
Learning, 2002).
36
looks for a flattering image to describe the tenor of Hal’s offer of single combat, he tells
Hotspur that Hal “Spoke your deseruings like a Chronicle” (I4). The Chorus in Henry V
is even more direct about the play offering a re-presentation of history and the chronicles.
In the prologue, the Chorus refers to his fellow actors as “The flat vnraysed Spirits”
unworthy of their subject matter, and yet requests the audience to “let us, Cyphers to this
great Accompt, / On your imaginarie Forces worke,” and instructs them to “Peece out our
imperfections with your thoughts.”
42
The actors are “cyphers” or signifiers that work as
intermediaries between the truth of history and the audience’s judgement. Like Theseus
during the mechanicals’ performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Chorus
instructs the audiences that any inadequacies in that representation can be amended by
imagination. The Chorus returns repeatedly throughout the play to be an intermediary
between representation and truth, facilitating the decoding of the player-ciphers by the
audience’s imaginary forces so they arrive at the ‘proper’ judgement of historical events.
Before the fifth act, the Chorus requests of the audience:
Vouchsafe to those that haue not read the Story,
That I may prompt them: and of such as haue,
I humbly pray them to admit th’excuse
Of time, of numbers, and due course of things,
Which cannot in their huge and proper life,
Be here presented. (i6)

The Chorus, on one hand, is explicit about bringing the chronicles to those “that haue not
read” them, particularly the illiterate masses unable to read them. The Chorus is also even

42
William Shakespeare, The Life of Henry the Fift, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623),
h1. Future references are cited in the text. I have also referred to William Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed.
by T. W. Craik (London: Cengage Learning, 1995); act and scene divisions are in reference to this edition.
37
more direct that the play before them is a re-presentation of history comprised of and
defined by its exclusions, compressions, and simplifications. This is a repetition of an
earlier moment in the play, when before the fourth act the Chorus offers an apology:
O for pitty, we shall much disgrace,
With foure or fiue most vile and ragged foyles,
(Right ill-dispos’d, in brawle ridiculous)
The Name of Agincourt: Yet sit and see,
Minding true things, by what their Mock’ries bee. (i2)

This is on one hand a theatrical ploy: lower the audience’s expectations so that they may
only be pleasantly pleased when the performance is better than advertised. It is the same
trick that Harry pulls over the duration of the Henriad, creating and manipulating
purposefully low expectations, and then profiting off the gap between the lowered
expectations and reality (or a different representation of himself, at any rate). But the
Chorus is also explicitly instructing audiences around the country to receive the play as
‘true,’ regardless of the obvious inadequacies of its representations.
Besides bringing ‘truth’ to the provinces, history plays had other potential merits
as well. Thomas Nashe, in his satirical defense of playgoing in Pierce Penilesse His
Supplication to the Diuell, argues that attending the performances of chronicle histories is
one of two manners, along with foreign wars, by which the state can prevent homegrown
revolutions. He has different rationales depending on the class of the people in
consideration. Of commoners, he says (anticipating Falstaff’s “cankers of a calme world,
and a long peace” (H3) in 1 Henry IV):
There is a certaine waste of the people for whome there is no vse, but warre: and
these men must haue some employment still to cut them off: Nam si foras hoslem
non habent, domi inuenient, If they haue no servuice abroad, they will make
mutinies at home. Or if the affayres of the State bee such, as cannot exhale all
38
these corrupt excrements, it is very expedient they haue some light toyes to busie
their heades withall, to cast before them as bones to gnaw vpon, which may keepe
them from hauing leisure to intermeddle with higher matters.
43

On the other hand, he says that the threat posed by idle “men that are their owne masters”
can be mitigated by distracting them with plays, wherein
the subiect of them (for the most part) it is borrowed out of our English
Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant actes (that haue lien long buried in
rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes) are reuiued, and they themselves raysed
from the Graue of Obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open
presence.
44

Along with the colonization of memory, players were also useful for the
colonization of space in a number of ways. For one, the plays they performed did not
only represent history in ideologically useful ways, but they represented territory in
ideological useful ways as well. While today we often think of histories and maps as
distinct discursive formations, they were not entirely distinct in early modern period. In A
Defense of Rime, the poet, playwright, and historian Samuel Daniel links the two:
Nor must we thinke, viewing the superrficiall figure of a region in a Mappe, that
wee know strait the fashion and place as it is. Or reading an Historie (which is but
a Mappe of Men, and dooth no otherwise acquaint us with the true Substance of
Circumstances then a superficiall Card dooth the Seaman with a Coast never
seene, which alwayes prooves other to the eye than the imagination forecast it),
that presently wee know all the world, and can distinctly iudge of times, men, and
maners, iust as they were.
45

What makes the comparison seemingly incongruous is that thinking of history as a
“Mappe of Men” presents it in primarily spatial rather than temporal or chronological

43
Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Diuell (London: Abell Ieffes for Iohn Busbie,
1592), H1
v
.

44
Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, H1
v
-H2.

45
Qtd. in Rackin, Stages of History, 143.
39
terms. However to Daniel, while maps and histories may present themselves as ‘true,’
they have an underlying unity as (fundamentally inaccurate) representations relying on
projection and abstraction. It is, of course, their distortions as much as their accuracies
make them powerful instruments for control. Mignolo’s argument of cartographic maps is
equally applicable to Daniel’s “Mappe of Men”:
maps are and are not the territory. They are not, because they do not reflect any
essential reality of the shape of the earth or of the cosmos. They are because, once
they are accepted, they become a powerful tool for controlling territories,
colonizing the mind and imposing themselves on the members of the community
using the map as the real territory.
46

In Henry V, Fluellen makes a similar association as Daniel. It is occasioned by
Gower’s justification of Harry’s order to kill the prisoners, to which Fluellen initially
objected. Now convinced, Fluellen is inspired to equate Harry with “Alexander the pig”
(i4
v
), beginning with the formal similarities of their birthplaces when viewed on a map
before moving to the formal similarities of their personal histories:
I tell you Captaine, if you looke in the Maps of the Orld, I warrant you sall finde
in the comparisons betweene Macedon & Monmouth, that the situations looke
you, is both alike. There is a Riuer in Macedon, & there is also moreouer a Riuer
at Monmouth, it is call’d Wye at Monmouth: but it is out of my praines, what is
the name of the other Riuer: but ’tis all one, tis alike as my fingers is to my
fingers, and there is Salmons in both. If you marke Alexanders life well, Harry of
Monmouthes life is come after it indifferent well, for there is figures in all
things...as Alexander kild his friend Clytus, being in his Ales and his Cuppes; so
also Harry Monmouth being in his right wittes, and his good iudgements, turn’d
away the fat Knight with the great belly doublet: he was full of iests, and gypes,
and knaueries, and mockes, I haue forgot his name. (i5)

Fluellen has trouble remembering proper names: it is up to Gower to supply Falstaff’s
name, just as it was up to him to supply the name of Alexander’s birthplace; nor can

46
Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 237.
40
Fluellen remember the name of the river running through Macedon. Instead, Fluellen
only conceives in “figures”: he only knows Falstaff by his physical presence and the form
of his speech.
47
Maps also use figures and indeed allow Macedon to appear quite like
Monmouth to Fluellen’s imagination. Both have proximity to meandering lines
representing rivers, and all rivers presumably have fish in them, if not specifically
salmon. But maps and Fluellen alike are blind to differences in time, history, and
populations that distinguish Alexander’s Macedon from Harry’s Monmouth. In a
similarly superficial way, the “figures” of Harry and Alexander appear identical to
Fluellen in that they are both responsible for the deaths of their friends, irrespective of the
difference in circumstances, of Alexander’s drunken rage versus Harry’s sober
judgement. As Dermot Cavanagh argues, Fluellen’s potentially absurd analogy between
Alexander and Harry clarifies around this one detail, blurring the boundary between the
circumstances and making the most emphatic sign of Harry’s reformation ambivalent.
48

But the analogies between Macedon and Monmouth, Alexander and Harry have the effect
of justifying, at least in Fluellen’s mind, not only the order to kill the prisoners, but also
Harry’s rule and his conquest of France: he has gone from believing Harry’s order “tis as
arrant a peece of knauery marke you now, as can bee offert in your Conscience now”—
echoing William’s earlier suggestion that the King bears responsibility for the casualties
of war if his cause is not good—to believing “there is good men porne at Monmouth”
(i4
v
-i5).

47
Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, 146.

48
Cavanagh, Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play, 146.
41
While Fluellen’s comparisons between Monmouth and Macedon (and between
Harry and Alexander) may strike us as a reductio ad absurdum, plays enacted a similar
strategy by projecting disparate geographic spaces onto the blank space of the platform
stage. Players and playwrights were adept at using “figures” to represent both territory
and people. This is especially the case in history plays, which represent not only persons
but specific localities from the past. These forms of representation coexisted elsewhere
apart from the stage during the early modern period. Choreographies, descriptions, and
surveys were related genres that could collect local histories, family names, and
genealogies alongside topography, and they could exist in a number of forms, including
mapbooks, prose discourses, and poems.
49
The reason for their overlap in dramaturgy is
that, as Henry S. Turner asserts, the epistemological presuppositions of the playwright
were more similar to the contemporary surveyor, engineer, mason, and carpenter than the
modern author. Turner argues that there was a “geometric turn” in early modern
developments in technology, applied mathematics, and pre-scientific thought that
extended to a variety of artisanal trades, including mapmaking and theatrical
representation, that used a “plot” to designate schematic diagrams and working drawings.
Hence, there was a fundamental congruence between a platform stage and a map—
between geometrical and poetic projection.
50

49
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 105-47 and esp. 131-3.

50
Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-
1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. 1-40.
42
Maps were not simply representations of territory, but they were also instruments
of control over the territory they represented. The first detailed survey of England and
Wales, Christopher Saxton’s book of maps, was commissioned by Elizabeth’s
government in its efforts to express and consolidate its territorial control.
51
Tamburlaine
similarly evokes a map of the world to announce his global ambitions:
I will confute those blind Geographers
That make a triple region in the world,
Excluding Regions which I meane to trace:
And with this pen reduce them to a Map.
Calling the Prouinces, Citties and townes
After my name and thine Zenocrate:
Here at Damascus will I make the Point
That shall begin the Perpendicular.
52

Like Daniel, Tamburlaine reveals maps (here, a T-O map) as exclusionary, fundamentally
untrue representations that are instruments of control. By using his ‘pen’—his sword—to
not only expand the map, but also to rename its features after himself and Zenocrate and
re-center it on himself (indeed, on his sword point), Tamburlaine claims possession of the
world. In 1 Henry IV, a map of Britain is physically produced onstage by the rebels as a
sign of possession. It is divided, Mortimer assures the others,
Into three limits very equally:
England from Trent, and Seuerne hitherto,
By South and East is to my part assigned:
Al westard, Wales beyond the Seuerne shore,

51
Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 107-47.

52
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and
woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny, and terrour
in Warre) was tearmed, The Scourge of God. Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses, as they were sundrie
times shewed vpon Stages in the Citie of London. By the right honorable the Lord Admyrall, his seruauntes
(London: Richard Ihones, 1590), D8. I also referred to Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. by
J. S. Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981); and Christopher Marlowe,
Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two, ed. by Anthony B. Dawson (London: A & C Black, 1997).
43
And al the fertile land within that bound
To Owen Glendower: and deare coose to you
The remnant Northward lying off from Trent. (F1)

The map is the one the rebels hope to create and rule. It is a sign of possession over not
only people and regions, but also the topography it represents. Hotspur feels his part
inadequate and half-glibly vows to reroute the Trent to increase his share, as if moving a
river were as easy as changing the location of a fence on a survey plot. This leads to a
debate amongst the rebels that is only resolved when Glendŵr cedes to Hotspur, “Come,
you shal haue Trent turnd” (F2), before Hotspur drops the point, having won the
argument.
Playwrights did not only evoke maps in their plays, but also used their skills as
“plotters” to participate in the crown’s mapping project by turning the platform stage into
a map that represented England’s territory in the crown’s image as surely as they remade
its history, recentering the map on Henry V, on Richmond, on Henry VIII, on Elizabeth.
The Henriad maps places throughout England as well as in Wales and France. It
represents specific locations (the English and French royal palaces, Warkworth castle, the
Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, Westminster Abbey) as well as cities and regions
(Shrewsbury, Coventry, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Southampton, Agincourt). Like
Fluellen’s equation of Macedon and Monmouth, these locations are rendered formally
similar on the space of the platform stage. At the opening of Henry V the Chorus expands
the map even further, asking the audience, “Suppose within the Girdle of these Walls /
Are now confin’d two mightie Monarchies” (h1), the entirety of the kingdoms of England
and France. At one point, the Chorus even transforms the playhouse into a vessel to
44
transport the audience between the kingdoms so that the audience may survey them
‘firsthand’:
The King is set from London, and the Scene
Is now transported (Gentles) to Southampton,
There is the Play-house now, there must you sit,
And thence to France shall we conuey you safe,
And bring you backe: Charming the narrow seas
To give you gentle Passe: for if we may,
Wee’l not offend one stomacke with our Play. (h3)

Whether or not any stomachs are offended by it, the voyage the Chorus takes the
audience on is no longer a voluntary one: “there you must sit.” As Harry conquers the
stage, he conquers the territories it has represented throughout the play and joins them
under his banner: “God for Harry, England, and S. George” (h5). The Chorus ‘shows’ the
audience the territories Henry unites under his rule, in order to (ostensibly) unite the
audience in admiration of Henry—and Elizabeth, who lay claim to the same territories
and was engaged in an effort to subdue Ireland. The play reinforces this territorial
unification by constructing a “Mappe of Men” to supplement its geographic
representations, first by bringing together the four captains, the Welsh Fluellen, the Irish
Macmorris, the Scots Jamy, and the English Gower, as representatives of their respective
countries united under Henry to fight at Agincourt, and then by staging Henry’s
‘conquest’ of Katherine that completes his conquest of the territory and crown of France.
As Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield point out, “The scene of the four captains
seems to effect an effortless incorporation, one in which, as Philip Edwards has pointed
out, the Irish Macmorris is even made to protest that he does not belong to a distinct
nation”; they also, like Edwards, “see the attempt to conquer France and the union in
45
peace at the end of the play as a re-presentation of the attempt to conquer Ireland and the
hoped-for unity of Britain.”
53

Liveried companies also colonized space on a much more local level: the spaces
in which they performed, including marketplaces, churches, and town and college halls. 1
Henry IV shows an awareness of the importance of such spaces. On the morning of the
Battle of Shrewsbury, in response to Worcester’s accusation that Henry has exploited
Worcester’s and his allies’ friendship in pursuing the crown, Henry says:
These things indeed you haue articulate,
Proclaimd at market Crosses, read in churches,
To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine colour that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poore discontents,
Which gape and rub the elbow at the newes
Of hurly burly innouation. (I2
v
)

Henry does not deny Worcester’s charges or legitimate his usurpation of the throne,
either here or elsewhere in the play. Instead, his indignation is directed at the way that
Worcester and his allies have sought to legitimize their own rebellion by airing their
grievances against Henry in important social and symbolic spaces—as monarch, his
spaces— including market crosses, the economic center of towns, and churches, their
ecclesiastic centers. Using these spaces, Henry charges, the rebels lend ethos to their
accusations and to their rebellion, making them pleasing to the eyes of the fickle masses
and poor down-and-outs, like a huckster in a marketplace, a charlatan priest at a pulpit, or
an actor in a theatre.

53
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V,” in Alternative
Shakespeares, ed. by John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 206-27. They are referring to
Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 74-86.
46
The Elizabethan government, using liveried companies, also exploited these
spaces, not to foment rebellion, but to extend its control. Part of the crown’s strategy in
suppressing the mysteries and moralities was to use the Vagrancy Act to create a
vacuum—both aurally and physically—in the communal, potentially subversive outdoor
spaces in which the mysteries were performed. (Vagabonds in general exercised their
activities out of doors, in streets, markets, and fairs.
54
) Into this vacuum the Elizabethan
government inserted its own authorized players, speaking an official discourse from
scaffolds in marketplaces or courtyards. As Cohen notes, with medieval drama performed
in these locales, which ordinarily served other purposes, “No physical distance or barrier
separates peasant drama from agricultural labor, liturgical drama from clerical ceremony,
or urban drama from the economic, social, and cultural relations of the marketplace. The
medieval audience did not enter the world of the theater; the theater entered the world of
the audience.”
55
Liveried players were not simply co-opting and replacing popular
players; they were occupying, surveilling, and claiming for the crown a space which was
central to people’s social, economic, and religious lives.
In the marketplace, liveried companies were colonizing a space which had, as
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue, complex social and ideological functions. They
argue that during fairs the marketplace was a transgressive, carnivalesque, potentially
subversive space that could also be a place of “licensed release” that functioned as a form
of social control: it could function both as a catalyst and site of actual and symbolic

54
Pugliatti, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England, 2-3.

55
Cohen, Drama of a Nation, 35.
47
struggle. Fairs subverted bourgeois ideology by mingling work and pleasure, trade and
play, but they were not necessarily opposed to that ideology as they played a crucial part
in the formation and transformation of local socio-economic relations and the state.
Indeed fairs were as much an agent of transformation as of “popular tradition,” since they
brought together the exotic and the familiar, the villager and townsman, the professional
performer and the bourgeois observer, positioning the subordinate classes as the object of
their superiors’ “respectable gaze” and creating the possibility of identification and even
a sort of alliance between the “official” objects of display and the “disobedient and
rebellious subjects.”
56
The possibilities of identification between subject and ruler in a
marketplace during a fair were the same as those that Montaigne argues exist in a theatre
during a play. In performing on a scaffold in a marketplace, liveried companies were
themselves the “official” objects of display attempting to create an alliance with the
subjects. They were also another “respectable gaze,” at times working in concert with and
at other times competing with the respectable gaze of local civic and religious authorities.
It was this use of liveried players to survey and colonize space and memory in the wake
of the Vagrancy Act that allowed the Elizabethan government to succeed in finally
suppressing popular Catholic drama, where previous efforts relying simply on
criminalization had failed. In the process, Elizabeth finally succeeded, as part of
increased efforts in the wake of the Catholic Rebellion of the North in 1569, in

56
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “The Fair, the Pig, Authorship,” in The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 27-79.
48
suppressing a dramatic tradition that had been under assault by the Tudors since the reign
of Elizabeth’s father.
57

The Elizabethan government also used liveried players to survey and colonize
indoor spaces. In a marked shift, the patents of traveling companies began giving them
authority to play indoors, “within anie town halls or moute halls or other conveniente
places within the liberties and freedoms of any cittie, vniversitie, towne or boroughe
whatsoever within our realmes and domynions.”
58
The shift indoors for traveling players
was one that in some ways anticipated London’s more gradual shift from open-air to
indoor theatres.
59
It was a general trend, as traveling groups continued to perform
outdoors on occasion. Indoor locations offered several advantages over outdoor locations,
including protection from inclement weather and the ability for players to charge
admission.
60
But for the crown’s purposes, the major advantage was the ability to
colonize other important spaces. Leicester’s Men were apparently encouraged by their
patron to perform in churches and proselytize on behalf of the Reformed faith.
61
As early
as 1554, the Catholic sympathizer John Christopherson showed an awareness of the role

57
Cohen, Drama of a Nation, 126; and Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 25. As Montrose notes, under
pressure from either state or ecclesiastical officials, the cycles ceased in Norwich after 1564, in York after
1569, in Chester after 1575, in Wakefield after 1576, and in Coventry after 1579.

58
Qtd. in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 1:337.

59
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 40.

60
A similar assertion is made by, among others, McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays,
67, and Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 40.

61
Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 46-
7. Keenan notes that almost half of the clear records of professional players performing in churches are by
Leicester’s Men.
49
of musicians and players in the propagation of Protestant doctrines in his Exhortation to
all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion (1554):
At which tyme also ye devil, for ye better furtheraunce of heresy, piked out two
sorts of people, that shuld in tavernes and innes, at commen tables, and in open
streets set forward his purpose, as wel as false preachers dyd in the pulpet: that is
to say, minstrels and players of enterludes.

The one to singe pestilente and abhominable songes, and the other to set forth
openly before mens eyes the wicked blasphemye, that they had contrived for the
defacing of all rites, ceremonies, and all the whole order, used in the
administration of the blessed Sacramentes.
62

In likening “minstrels and players of enterludes” with “false preachers,” Christopherson
makes the same connection between theatre and religion, albeit in a less positive light, as
Montaigne (and presumably Leicester) did when he linked the “honest exercises of
recreation” provided by players with “serious offices of devotion.”
The spaces most often used for performances increasingly came to be the town
and college hall. College halls will be discussed in Chapter 3. Town halls were important
symbolic spaces for liveried players to colonize. As Robert Tittler argues, the town hall
was the seat the civic administration, and as such represented whatever degree of
autonomy and independence a town possessed from other authorities, including royal. It
was also representative of the power of the oligarchies within the town responsible for
financing their construction or acquisition. Town halls were used by civic elites as
instruments to extend their own control and influence over the commoners and to foster
deference to their rule. They stood both symbolically and often spatially as a counterpart

62
Qtd. in Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 44.
50
to the more spontaneous and potentially disruptive popular space of the Bakhtinian
marketplace. Representative
of the restrained, disciplined, and bourgeois values of contemporary ruling élites,
the hall looked out on the spontaneous and potentially disruptive activities of the
market-place below. It stood between order and disorder, hierarchy and inversion,
some forms of contemporary cultural activities accessible to all and, especially by
the seventeenth century, some emerging forms of cultural activity accessible
chiefly to the wealthy, literate, and more sophisticated.
63

The patents’ inclusion of these halls amongst the Crown’s “realmes and domynions” is a
clear claim of possession over them, and civic authorities may have viewed liveried
groups performing in town halls as an attack on their authority at its symbolic center.
This, as much as the increasing Puritanism in towns that is often blamed, may explain
why civic authorities increasingly prevented these players from performing, even if these
antagonisms did not fully surface during Elizabeth’s reign.
The peregrinations of liveried players were themselves part of the colonization of
space. They can be seen as a form of surveying, which was another form of “plotting.”
Patricia Seed argues that surveying was a “ceremony of possession” that was integral to
the establishment of English colonial authority in the Americas.
64
As Bruce R. Smith
recounts, throughout early modern England on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday
before Ascension Thursday, people in villages, towns, and cities would proclaim
sovereignty over their place in the world through a practice known as “beating the
bounds,” among other names. This was a form of communal drama in which the people

63
Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. 1500-1640,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). The quote is on 131. Tittler refers to Bakhtin’s discussion of the
marketplace, which can be found in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 153-4.

64
Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 23-4.
51
made a ritual procession along the boundaries of their parishes while ringing bells and
praying for blessings. The royal progresses, Smith argues, were a form of beating the
bounds on a national scale.
65
Progresses were a prolonged ceremonial procession that
included plays and pageants at stops along the way. They allowed the sovereign to see
and be seen, and in the process proclaim and assert sovereignty over the kingdom. They
had the added benefits of allowing the sovereign to visit neglected provinces and win
additional loyalty and support.
66

Liveried companies functioned as something of an extension of the royal
progress, “beating the bounds” on an even larger scale. The licenses they carried
presumed that they would carry the crown’s message to the nooks and crannies of the
realm; they hence participated in a sort of ideological mapping of England. All the while
they acted as ambassadors that expanded the influence and visibility of their patrons and
the crown. Leicester’s Men, who were the preeminent theatre company of their day and
were awarded the first patent, established a model that other companies would follow:
they served their patron by carrying his name and livery throughout the country, favoring
(and perhaps instructed to follow) routes where their patron’s name would carry greater
weight or where their patron sought to publicize their power.
67
The Queen’s Men, whom

65
For “beating the bounds” and its connection to the royal progress, see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic
World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1999), 31-7.

66
Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 15.

67
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 185 and 187; and Keenan, Travelling Players in
Shakespeare’s England, 9, quoting Sally-Beth MacLean, “Tour Routes: ‘Provincial Wanderings’ or
Traditional Circuits?,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 10. The traveling records for
companies, including Leicester’s Men, the Queen’s Men, the Lord Admiral’s/Prince’s/Palatine’s Men, and
52
we will encounter in more detail in Chapter Two, in particular functioned as an extension
of the royal progress, carrying Elizabeth’s colors on a truly national scale, and often
dividing in two to spread their influence as far and wide as possible.
68
They frequently
toured the southeast and East Anglia, and traveled most years to the Midlands, southwest,
and north, including the recusant bastion of Yorkshire. In 1589 they even toured Ireland
and Scotland, and were to perform at the wedding of James VI and Anne of Denmark had
unfavorable weather not held Anne at Oslo and delayed the wedding. McMillin and
MacLean speculate that in the southwest the Queen’s Men were making an especial effort
to visit towns and residences often missed by royal progresses, particularly in the
politically troubled decade of the 1580s during which Elizabeth did not go on progress at
all; meanwhile in the north the troupe functioned as royal emissaries and observers on the
road and in private households along the way in a region notoriously resistant to
intervention from the south, especially in matters of religion.
69
The Admiral’s and
Chamberlain’s Men both toured as well, even after they became more firmly established
in London playhouses. It is interesting to note that, while the Chamberlain’s Men toured
four of the first nine years of the company’s existence, after they came under royal
patronage and became the King’s Men, they increased both the extent and duration of

the Lord Hunsdon’s/Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, are collected in Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2,
and Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies.

68
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 44.

69
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, esp. 37-83.
53

Figure 2: Known performance locations of liveried companies after 1550. Printed in
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 40, and copyright REED.

54
their tours, traveling every year from 1603-15.
70
Richard Helgerson observes that the
initial editions of Saxton’s maps included royal arms that not only proclaimed the source
of their authority, but also proclaimed royal sovereignty of over the kingdom and its
individual provinces.
71
Players traveling while wearing noble or royal livery can be seen
as a physical manifestation of the royal arms on a map, proclaiming sovereignty and
possession over the land they traversed it by seeing and being seen.
As is suggested by the Chorus in Henry V, surveying quickly becomes an
opportunity to conduct a variety of intelligence work. While surveying the French and
English camps at Agincourt, the Chorus takes the audience:
From Camp to Camp, through the foule Womb of Night
The Humme of eyther Army stilly sounds;
That the fixy Centinels almost receiue
The secret Whispers of each others Watch. (i2)

Traveling players would be well positioned to attend to any “secret Whispers” of
conspiracy and dissent along the way. In surveying the provinces and the spaces in which
they performed, these companies also served as the eyes and ears for their patrons.
Traveling players were members of an itinerant class, which also included servants,
merchants, priests, and minstrels, whose status and mobility made them useful as spies
going back at least to the Wars of the Roses.
72
In a society preoccupied with policing
identity, their livery and licenses gave them access and cover to spy upon suspect

70
Alan Somerset, “‘How Chances it they Travel?’: Provincial Touring, Playing Places, and the King’s Men,”
Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 53.

71
Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 111-2.

72
Ian Arthurson, “Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation,”
Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 144.
55
individuals and populaces in towns and noble households throughout the country. In a
society preoccupied with policing locality, their official status granted them immunity
from the vagabond laws and allowed them to move freely and rapidly on the roads and
through the ports of England.
73
Walsingham, Leicester, Essex, and Salisbury helped form
and patronized playing companies, and they possessed intelligence networks in which
players could operate.
74
McMillin and MacLean have detailed the intelligence functions
performed by companies such as Leicester’s and the Queen’s Men: They could act as
messengers, as Will Kemp did while a member of Leicester’s Men in an instance that
made its way into the records only because it was (predictably) botched,
75
illustrating that
old adage of never sending a clown to do a spy’s work. Traveling players could also be
used to glean information about recusants or foreign visitors, and give the impression of a
watchful monarch whose men ‘ranged’ over the land, attending to the nation through her
travelers. Even if they passed along no information, these companies could mask the
actual size and constitution of the spy networks by attracting attention to the ‘wrong’
travelers and allowing the real spies to operate more easily.
76

73
As Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 45, notes, sixteenth-century England’s roads were quite
heavily used and generally sufficient for the travelers and goods that traversed them; they also had inns
with accommodations and food along the way. No part of the country was more than two week’s travel
from London, and coastal shipping provided ready transport between coastal towns and the docks on the
Thames.

74
Walsingham helped form the Queen’s Men in consultation with Edmund Tilney, the Master of the
Revels. See McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, xiii-xv.

75
The story is related, among other places, in Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 191, and
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 28.

76
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 27-9.
56
But given their abilities as “plotters,” traveling players could also survey the
country, mapping both specific localities as well as entire regions as part of the crown’s
mapping of the provinces. Burghley commissioned Saxton’s maps, but he also kept a
private atlas in the period leading up to the Spanish Armada.
77
The maps are startling in
their specificity. His map of north Lancashire, of the area around the Kent sands, records
and even exaggerates and emphasizes the location of beaches that could be used for a
Spanish landing. It marks rivers and roads, as well as signal beacons; it also includes
administrative districts that are crucial in mustering troops, as well as parks in which they
could camp; it marks the location of towns, castles, camps, and even individual
households. Of particular interest are the black crosses marking the location of Catholic
households. Far from simply mapping topography, it is a map of communication and
transportation routes, of defense strategies, and of ideology and loyalty. It was this
project in which liveried players could participate, mapping entire provinces in their
travels on the roads between stops, and mapping specific localities in each country house
and in each town, guild, or college hall, chapel, marketplace, inn, or courtyard in which
they performed.

77
My thanks to David George, editor of the REED: Lancashire, for calling my attention to the existence of
this map.
57

Figure 3: Burghley’s map of the area around the Kent sands in north Lancashire.
Note the black crosses marking the residences of Catholics. The British Library
(Royal MS. 18. D.III, f.82.)
58
Theatrical performances were an ideal opportunity for the surveillance of
audiences. The reception of liveried players and their plays by different audiences around
the country, given the political projects in which they were engaged, would be useful
information for their patrons. Plays were staged in “overt & open” architectures which, as
Montaigne and the Privy Council realized, usefully assembled a large portion of the
populace of a town or university or of a noble household in the country not only for
distraction or moral edification, but for surveillance. This surveillance was facilitated by
the ambiguities of the plays these companies performed, particularly history plays. While
history plays attempted to present the ‘truth’ of history in ways ideologically useful to the
Elizabethan government, in performance they could take on alternative or unintended
meanings. One reason for this, as Walter Cohen notes, was the internal contradictions that
resided within the material basis of the theatre:
the public theaters constituted part of both the base and the superstructure, their
function in one conflicting with their role in the other. However aristocratic the
explicit message of a play, the conditions of its production introduced alternative
effects. The total theatrical process meant more than, and something different
from, what the dramatic text itself meant. The medium and the message were in
contradiction, a contradiction that resulted above all from the popular
contribution...any drama of state performed in the public theater automatically
converted a heterogeneous and, it seems, largely popular audience into judges of
national issues, a position from which most of its members were excluded in the
world of political affairs.
78

Liveried companies received little or no financial support from their patrons and
depended on heterogeneous audiences of mixed class, religion, and ideology for their
livelihoods. The temptation to ‘play to the audience’ would always persist. Even if played
‘straight,’ however, the history plays performed by these companies could elicit varied

78
Cohen, Drama of a Nation, 183.
59
responses from audiences because they were often ambiguous or ambivalent in their
meaning and presentation. A large reason for this, as Andrew Hadfield argues, is that
literature intended to fashion a national identity was an emergent and inchoate form: “no
one in the Tudor period was sure how to write such a literature or confident as to what it
was supposed to do”; hence, “It is not always necessary—or possible—to insist on a
definitely clear and distinct reading, aligning the text with one specific range of
meanings.”
79
And yet, as Phyllis Rackin argues, the discursive instabilities that made the
theatre, playwright, and player ambivalent sources of subversive behavior could be used
in the history play as an unequaled instrument of social control.
80
Players could exploit
these instabilities by scrutinizing audiences for signs that they were interpreting the
performance in ways hostile to the nationalist, Protestant ideology being offered them, as
a gauge of potential trouble in the region at a later date. Stagekeepers and players offstage
could survey audience reactions from behind the scenes. But players onstage, like a
preacher at a pulpit, also would be able to scan the audience to see the effect of their
performance.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the plays performed by these companies in
London and throughout the provinces are filled with representations of spying and
surveillance. The plays of the Henriad, again, are a useful point of entry. In 1 Henry IV,
while we never see Henry’s spies, we are repeatedly made aware of their activities on the
margins of the play. At one moment, Blount arrives with information of the rebels’

79
Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 19 and 10.

80
Rackin, Stages of History, 111.
60
meeting at Shrewsbury that he thinks pressing enough that his “lookes are full of speed”
(G2). However, upon hearing the intelligence Henry disparages it as stale news that he
has already been made aware of and has acted upon, “For this aduertisement is fiue daies
old” (G2). The rebels themselves are aware that they are constantly subject to the
operations of Henry’s spies. Hotspur’s description of Henry as “this thorne, this canker
Bullingbrooke” (B4) employs images that suggest his use of spying. (In a related use of
botanical imagery to suggest spying or surveillance in Measure for Measure, Lucio says
in reference to his constant presence at the Friar-Duke’s side, “I am a kind of Burre, I
shal sticke.”)
81
Hotspur later charges that Henry has “Sought to intrap me by intelligence”
[i.e., by intelligencers] (I1).
Hotspur is perhaps particularly bitter about this because he is unable to thrive in
Henry’s new world order defined by political scheming and spying upon his political
rivals. His loud-mouthed, bombastic rants mark him not only as a representative of a
residual chivalric discourse, but also as a particularly vulnerable target for Henry’s spies.
While still in Henry’s court, Worcester’s unclasping of his “secret booke,” the plan for
their rebellion, is delayed for nearly sixty lines because of Hotspur’s inability to keep his
mouth shut. Hotspur is too busy imagining “some great exploit” and apprehending “a
world of figures” of “bright honour,” while insulting “this vile polititian Bullingbrooke”
(B4
v
-C2)—loudly, we imagine—to heed the unseen eyes and ears of Henry’s court.
Worcester finally breaks off discussion and sends the conspirators to their home counties

81
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.
Published according to the True Originall Copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), G3
v
. Future
references are cited in the text. I have also referred to William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. by
J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1967).
61
to raise armies. He tells Hotspur his task in Scotland will be easy “for diuers reasons /
Which I shall send you written” (C1
v
) because he knows they will never remain secret if
he attempts to tell Hotspur in person. Hotspur’s father, Northumberland, shares
Worcester’s concern of Hotspur: “Before the game is afoote thou still letst slip” (C1
v
).
Hotspur’s lack of secrecy extends to his poor choice of confidants. He believes that he is
exercising sound, secretive judgement in his misogynistic refusal to divulge the plot to
Lady Percy because she is a woman:
I know you wise, but yet no farther wise
Then Harry Percies wife, constant you are,
But yet a woman, and for secrecy
No Lady closer, for I well beleeue
Thou wilt not vtter what thou dost not know. (D1
v
)

The irony is that it is Hotspur who cannot keep counsel; it is he, not his wife, who is the
open vessel. Lady Percy’s questions about the conspiracy are provoked by Hotspur’s
nearly divulging it in his sleep. Hotspur’s dismissal of his wife’s secrecy is all the more
ironic because the scene has opened with Hotspur reading a letter from an anonymous
person whom Hotspur has misjudged in his decision to confide in: “What a pagan rascall
is this, an infidell! Ha you shall see now in very sinceritie of feare and cold heart, will hee
to the King, and lay open all our proceedings?” (C4
v
). Hotspur has not only misjudged
the respondent’s willingness to join his conspiracy, but he has possibly laid open the plot
to someone who fears the King (and his spies) so much that he is willing to reveal the
plot.
It is Henry’s spies, or even the threat of them, that force the conspirators into open
rebellion before they have a chance to draw their full strength. In Northumberland’s letter
62
to Hotspur announcing his absence at the coming battle due to illness, he tells his son that
he must nonetheless commit to action, “Because the king is certainly possest / Of al our
purposes” (H1). Henry might know because of the letter writer from the earlier scene, but
either way, Northumberland is sure that by this time Henry’s intelligence apparatus must
have sniffed out the plot. Worcester responds to Northumberland’s absence by describing
the rebellion as a secret space which has been opened up to not only Henry’s spies, but all
of England:
For wel you know we of the offring side
Must keepe aloofe from strict arbitrement,
And stop al sight-holes euery loop from whence
The eie of reason may prie in vpon vs,
This absence of your fathers drawes a curtain
That shewes the ignorant a kind of feare
Before not dreamt of. (H1
v
)

The imagery recalls the theatrical arras concealing the discovery space at the back of the
stage; Northumberland’s absence draws the curtain on the rebels, revealing their true size
and composition. It is fear of Henry’s spies that later leads Worcester to hide from
Hotspur “The liberal and kind offer of the king” (I3
v
), and hence commit them all to a
losing cause:
Supposition al our liues shall be stucke full of eyes,
For treason is but trusted like the Foxe,
Who neuer so tame, so cherisht and lockt vp,
Will haue a wilde tricke of his ancesters,
Looke how we can, or sad or merely,
Interpretation will misquote our lookes,
And we shall feed like oxen at a stall,
The better cherisht still the nearer death. (I3
v
)

63
Worcester justifiably feels that if they surrender they will be for the rest their lives
subjected to Henry’s spies, which he describes as disembodied eyes watching their every
move, looking for the slightest pretence to eliminate them at a later date.
Harry, like his father, is proficient at intelligence work. In Henry V, he confronts
and arrests three traitors, Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, who are working in concert with
the French in a plot against Henry’s life. The scene provides little explanation in its own
right—the audience can only follow the action because the Chorus has prepared them for
it at the beginning of the act—and the seemingly-miraculous discovery of the plot causes
the rebels to believe it was an act of divine revelation (an association between human and
divine intelligence that we will also see in Doctor Faustus and Hamlet in Chapter Three
and in Measure for Measure in Chapter Four). Scroop says, “Our purposes, God iustly
hath discouer’d”; says Cambridge, “God be thanked for preuention” (h4). Harry publicly
accepts this narrative, and extends it into a sign of divine favor for his war in France:
We doubt not of a faire and luckie Warre,
Since God so graciously hath brought to light
This dangerous Treason, lurking in our way,
To hinder our beginnings. (h4)

Despite this interpretation, the plot is actually discovered, no doubt, by human spies,
intelligencers, and informants. In the same way, discoveries of plots against Elizabeth
were often ascribed to divine providence, despite their being uncovered by intelligence
networks carefully monitoring threats against her. In a sense, divine providence becomes
a metaphor for the unseen, watchful human intelligence networks that enable these
discoveries.
64
But Harry extends his intelligence apparatus in a direction that his father never
does: rather than simply targeting political rivals amongst the nobility, Harry also
conducts surveillance on the commoners whom he seeks to win over with his glittering
reformation. In 1 Henry IV his band of thieves—who, like a perverse band of Robin
Hoods in buckram, steal from the poor as well as from the rich and the crown—are also a
band of spies. They include Poins, who passes along intelligence from Gadshill of the
location, movement, and timing of potential targets: “to morrow morning, by foure a
clocke early at Gadshill, there are pilgrims going to Canturburie with rich offerings, and
traders riding to London with fat purses...if you will go I will stufte your purses full of
crownes” (B1). Gadshill also passes information directly to Harry, as when he tells of the
King’s money headed to the exchequer and of the number guarding it immediately before
the robbery. We see how he comes by such intelligence when, while at an inn, he spies
upon two carriers as they discuss the goods they have to deliver, then tries to sift them for
further information, asking them “what time doe you meane to come to London?” (C2
v
).
The carriers offer evasive responses, clearly suspecting his intent. Gadshill also gains
information through the inn’s Chamberlain, who exploits his position to eavesdrop on the
conversations and movements of travelers at the inn and then sell the information to the
Prince’s band:
it holdes currant that I tolde you yesternight, ther’s a Frankelin in the wilde of
Kent hath brought three hundred Markes with him in golde, I heard him tell it to
one of his company last night at supper, a kinde of Auditor, one that hath
abundance of charge too, God knowes what, they are vp already, and cal for
Egges and butter, they wil away presently. (C2
v
)

65
Elizabethan spies were usually commoners lured into performing intelligence work for
the nobility by a combination of desperation and aspirations to climb in the social
hierarchy. Harry’s spy-thieves include members of the elite classes who use their
intelligence work in an explicitly classist enterprise against the commoners. As Gadshill
tells Chamberlain:
I am ioyned with no footlande rakers, no long-staffe pennie strikers, none of these
mad mustachio purplehewd maltworms, but with nobilitie, and tranquilitie,
Burgomasters and great Oneyers, such as can hold in such as will strike sooner
then speak, and speake sooner than drinke, and drinke sooner then pray, and yet
(zoundes) I lie, for they pray continuallie to their Saint the Common-wealth, or
rather not pray to her, but pray on her, for they ride vp and downe on her, and
make her their bootes. (C3)

Gadshill lays bare the class exploitation of a network of spy-thieves who prey upon
commoners and the commonwealth. (He also distances them from vagabond bands of
drunken, armed thieves despite their being a band of, well, wandering, drunken thieves.)
But the deeper, more subversive truth is that the commonwealth itself is an idea created
by the nobility merely so that they can exploit the commons to increase their own wealth.
Their “Saint the Common-wealth” recalls England’s Catholic past, as well as the
dispossession of the church’s lands at the hands of the king and the nobility in the days of
Henry VIII. It perhaps also obliquely recalls the Catholic past of a theatre that is itself
being repurposed by plays like 1 Henry IV.
Harry’s predation upon the commoners is not limited to his spying upon them in
order to rob them. Rather, it extends to conducting firsthand surveillance of commoners
in order to better exploit and rule them. In 2 Henry IV, Warwick describes Harry’s
activities amongst the commoners as if he were conducting surveillance of foreigners:
66
The prince but studies his companions,
Like a strange tongue wherein to gaine the language:
Tis needfull that the most immodest word,
Be lookt vpon and learnt; which once attaind,
Your highnesse knowes comes to no further vse,
But to be knowne and hated.
82

This has been Harry’s project from the start. In 1 Henry IV, Harry dupes the commoners
into believing he shares their feelings of commonwealth and brotherhood. At a tavern in
Eastcheap he tells Poins:
I haue sounded the verie base string of humilitie. Sirrha, I am sworne brother to a
leash of drawers, and can call them all by their christen names, as Tom, Dicke,
and Francis, they take it already vpon their salvation, that though I be but prince
of Wales, yet I am the king of Curtesie, and tel me flatly I am no proud Iacke like
Falstalffe, but a Corinthian, a lad of metall, a good boy (by the Lord so they call
me) and when I am king of England I shall command all the good lads in
Eastcheape. They call drinking deepe, dying scarlet, and when you breath in your
watering they cry hem, and bid you play it off. To conclude, I am so good a
proficient in one quarter of an houre that I can drinke with any Tinker in his owne
language, during my life. I tell thee Ned thou hast lost much honour, that thou
wert not with me in this action; but sweete Ned, to sweeten which name of Ned, I
giue thee this peniworth of sugar, clapt euen now into my hand by an
vnderskinker, one that neuer spake other English in his life then eight shillings
and sixe pence, and you are welcome, with this shrill addition, anon, anon sir;
skore a pint of bastard in the half moone, or so. (D2)

Harry is a kind of analogue for traveling players. He moves from locale to locale, playing
a role at each stop. In the process, he creates personal identification and feelings of
loyalty between the crown he represents and every Tom, Dick, and Francis he performs
before. But during his performances, Harry is spending his time sounding—playing upon,

82
William Shakespeare, The Second part of Henrie the fourth, continuing to his death, and coronation of
Henrie the fift. With the humours of sir Iohn Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll. As it hath been sundrie
times publikely acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants (London: V. S. for
Andrew Wise and William Aspley, 1600), H2
v
. I have also referred to William Shakespeare, King Henry IV,
Part 2, ed. by A. R. Humphreys (London: Thomson Learning, 2005).
67
speaking to, plumbing the depths of
83
—“the verie base string of humilitie.” In his
surveillance of the commoners, he becomes fluent in their “strange tongue”: their
drinking language (“dying scarlet”) as well as the language they use to conduct business
(“anon, anon sir”). But he does not in the process come to share in their feelings of
brotherhood. He describes his role as a battle or perhaps another theft, an action in which
Poins has “lost much honour” by not participating. Rather, his aim is to one day
“command all the good lads in Eastcheape,” or anywhere else he travels to, performs, and
conducts surveillance.
Harry proceeds to rehearse this command with the apprentice drawer Francis.
Harry highlights the absurdity and exploitation of the apprentice system that constrains
Francis: “Fiue yeare, berlady a long lease for the clinking of pewter; but Frances, darest
thou be so valiant, as to play the cowarde with thy Indenture, and shewe it a faire paire of
heeles, and run from it?” (D2
v
). Harry must know full well that Francis cannot simply
flee his apprenticeship, as doing so would make him a masterless vagabond who is
viewed by the state as an enemy. Harry construes Francis’s leaving his apprenticeship as
a theft in which Francis would rob his master—poetically described as “this leathern
Ierkin, cristall button, not-pated, agat ring, puke stocking, Caddice garter, smothe tongue,
spanish pouch”—of his labor. This is a joke that potentially turns dark by the end of the
play: if Francis has taken Harry’s advice, he may be amongst the “discarded, vniust
seruingmen, yonger sonnes to yonger brothers, reuolted tapsters, and Ostlers, tradefalne”
that comprise the cannon fodder “good inongh to tosse” (H3) in Falstaff’s army, fighting

83
OED, “sound, v.
1
, 2b, 7”; “sound, v.
2
, 2.”
68
in Harry’s and his father’s war. But at this moment, Harry exploits his place in the social
system and his knowledge of the apprentice drawer’s deferential business language to
pray the prank in which he and Poins force Francis to say little more than “anon,” even
when asked his age or when offered a thousand pounds for the sugar he has given Harry.
Harry then draws the maliciously unfair conclusion that Francis’s behavior is a product of
his intelligence rather than his place in a social system which divides his obligations
between his future sovereign, his customers, and his master: “That euer this fellowe
should haue fewer wordes then a Parrat, and yet the sonne of a woman” (D3). By
degrading Francis as being of questionable humanity, Harry justifies their respective
places in the social system and the later use of Francis’s class as pawns on the battlefield.
We see the fruition of Harry’s surveillance of commoners in Henry V. He has
succeeded in bringing to France the “good lads” from Eastcheap, as well as the rest of his
kingdom, as represented by the English Gower, the Welsh Fluellen, the Irish Macmorris,
and the Scots Jamy, and has united them at Agincourt to fight under his banner, “God for
Harry, England, and S. George” (h5). Before the battle he gives a speech that attempts to
once more create the impression that he is a member of a “band of brothers” in which
class and social distinctions are at least for the moment unrecognized, if not erased: “For
he to day that sheds his blood with me, / Shall be my brother: be he ne’er so vile, / This
day shall gentle his Condition” (i4). However, this speech comes after another act of
surveillance of the commoners, one in which he disguises himself in Erpingham’s cloak
to move amongst the common soldiers and discern whether they are ready to fight on his
behalf. He looks the part, as Williams later describes him: “Your Maiestie came not like
69
your selfe: you appear’d to me but as a common man: witnesse the Night, your Garments,
your Lowlinesse” (i5
v
). In this guise he encounters the soldiers Bates, Court, and
Williams. Court refers to Bates as “Brother Iohn Bates” (i2
v
), suggesting that a
brotherhood already exists amongst the trio that Harry will attempt to insinuate himself
into, both in the ensuing scene and with the speech that follows. Harry overhears Bates
and Williams express their misgivings about the upcoming battle. When Harry engages
the soldiers in conversation, he attempts to assert their common humanity:
I thinke the King is but a man, as I am: the Violet smells to him, as it doth to me;
the Element shewes to him, as it doth to me; all his Sences haue but humane
Conditions: his Ceremonies layd by, in his Nakednesse he appeares but a man;
and though his affections are higher mounted then ours, yet when they stoupe,
they stoupe with the like wing. (i2
v
)

Of course, the King’s argument here is tautological, unbeknownst to his interlocutors, as
the first and third person pronouns refer to the same person. But he attempts to assert
“Ceremonies”—recalling the “Maiestie” he earlier tells the Dauphin he laid by in his
youth (h2
v
)—as the sole distinguishing characteristic between king and other humans.
However, the soldiers initially are resistant to Harry’s attempt to insinuate himself
into their brotherhood, and insist rather on the absolute disparity between king and
commoner. As Anne Barton argues, the scene has many antecedents in Elizabethan
drama, but it differs from its antecedents in that it ends in a quarrel rather than
understanding between king and commoner.
84
It is also a scene that anticipates the
encounters between the disguised Duke and Lucio in Measure for Measure that leave the

84
Anne Barton, “The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History,” in The Triple Bond:
Plays Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. by Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1975), 92-117.
70
Duke lamenting the “Back-wounding calumnie” (G1
v
) to which those in positions of
power are exposed. Here, Bates critiques the classism of war, saying of the king: “I
would he were here alone; so should he be sure to be ransomed, and a many poore mens
liues saved” (i2
v
). While Harry suggests that Bates loves “him not so ill, to wish him here
alone: howsoeuer you speake this to feele other mens minds” (i2
v
), Harry has in fact
received an honest response, as it is he and not Bates who is feeling other men’s minds.
Bates, Court, and Williams are amongst those who have the least stake in the coming
battle and yet are in the most peril.
Harry’s surveillance has the effect of discerning the loyal subject from the
potentially rebellious subject. Despite his initial resistance, Bates is ultimately determined
“to fight lustily” for Harry. Williams gives no such assurance. He continues to insist on
the absolute class, social, and power distinctions between monarch and common soldier
in the face of ‘Harry le Roy’s’ assertion that he “will neuer trust his word after” (i3) if he
lives to see the King ransomed. Williams’s retort unmasks the ideas of brotherhood and
commonwealth that Harry has labored to construct:
You pay him then: that’s a perillous shot out of an Elder Gunne, that a poore and
a priuate displeasure can doe against a Monarch: you may as well goe about to
turne the Sunne to yce, with fanning in his face with a Peacocks feather: You’le
neuer trust his word after; come, ’tis a foolish saying. (i3)

The encounter leaves Harry seething about the “Idoll Ceremonie” which leaves him to
drink “poyson’d flatterie” (i3) and ranting, in language reminiscent of his view of Francis
the Drawer, about the idyllic life and “vacant mind” of the “wretched Slaue” whose
“grosse braine little wots, / What watch the King keepes, to maintaine the peace” (i3).
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield argue that “Henry indicates a paradox of power
71
only to misrecognize its force by mystifying both kingship and subjection. His problem is
structural, since the same ceremonies or role-playing which constitute kingship are the
means by which real antagonisms can masquerade as obedience.”
85
Henry even issues a
challenge to Williams which is only half in jest, and which he has Fluellen discharge after
the battle. The challenge proves to be a cruel trick that has put Williams, unbeknownst
himself, in mortal danger for treason: should he see it through, he would be threatening
the life of his sovereign. In resolving the quarrel, Harry reasserts control over the
potentially rebellious subject: Williams is let know he was—and, perhaps, may be
again—the object of royal surveillance, and he is forced to sue for pardon from Harry.
Harry further subjects and commodifies Williams by attempting to buy him off, a gesture
repeated by Fluellen and accompanied by a lecture on obedience.
Harry is not the prince of the people he is sometimes supposed to be. In 1 Henry
IV, his father bases his power on his invisibility from the sight of his countrymen: “By
being seldome seene, I could not stirre / But like a Comet I was wondered at” (F4
v
).
Meanwhile, he fears his son, like Richard II before him, is mingling “his royaltie with
capring fooles” and “being dayly swallowed by mens eyes” (F4
v
). However, Harry is, if
anything, hiding in plain sight, and swallowing men with his eyes. His father does not
realize that Harry represents a different model of kingship. He is, on one hand, a monarch
on display, but he is also a monarch who is constantly performing roles that resist
interrogation. Hal’s shape-shifting and the apparent ease with which he moves amongst
the commoners and between the worlds of the tavern, court, and battlefield have

85
Dollimore and Sinfield, “History and Ideology,” 218.
72
tremendous appeal for audiences and critics alike. But it also allows him to move beyond
his father, who dogged his rivals amongst the nobility with his spies, and engage in a
more generalized surveillance of the commoners. It is a model of kingship that is more at
home in early modern England than it is in pre-Reformation England. Staging such an
image of Harry in London and throughout England is an assertion of royal power and an
effort to make that model of kingship palatable to audiences, while colonizing memory
and territory. But Harry also becomes a sort of analogue for the activities of liveried
companies themselves, easily moving between different locales (the town hall, the
university, the court, the London stage), inhabiting them, playing different roles in them,
all the while observing, watching, listening. These performances constitute the subject
matter of the remaining chapters. Considering the politics of these performances goes a
long way towards explaining how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, and how the theatre
of Shakespeare and his contemporaries came to occupy the place of cultural importance
that it inhabits today.
73
Chapter Two

“A neighbour, hedges haue eyes, and high-wayes haue eares”:
The Queen’s Men in the Town Hall

To consider the dynamics of surveillance and colonization discussed in Chapter One, this
chapter will situate The True Tragedie of Richard the Third in performance by the
Queen’s Men at the York Guild Hall, known in the period as the Common Hall. Such a
performance, admittedly, can only be a hypothetical one. As with all civic records in the
period, the information from the York records concerning traveling players or drama in
general is not as detailed as we would like: the date of a record’s entry does not
necessarily correspond to the date of the event recorded, the performance location is only
sporadically given, and the play’s title or subject matter is never recorded. Hence, The
True Tragedie, or any other play in the repertory of the Queen’s Men for that matter,
cannot be tied for certain to York or the Common Hall. We do know that the Queen’s
Men performed in the Common Hall on at least five occasions, in 1584, 1587, 1596,
1599, and 1602, and that they visited York at least nine times in their career, performing
under the auspices of either the City or of York Minster, and on occasions performed
multiple times during a visit under the auspices of both.
1
Given the number of
performances by the troupe in York, it is probable that the True Tragedie was staged in
York at some point, and perhaps in the Common Hall. Nonetheless, what follows should
be considered as a model for the performances of traveling players in town halls

1
The performance records for the Queen’s Men in York can be found in Records of Early English Drama:
York, 2 vols., ed. by Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1979).
74
throughout the period rather than an actual, historical performance for which we have
concrete evidence.
York makes a particularly interesting case study for surveillance by traveling
players as part of a broader project of colonizing memory and space. York makes a
fascinating setting because it encapsulates many of the dynamics discussed in Chapter
One. It was one of the largest towns in England outside London, and served as a
provincial capital alongside Bristol, Norwich, Exeter, and Newcastle. It had a large
degree of autonomy from the crown by virtue of its having one of the most developed
civic administrations in the country, and the Common Hall was the symbolic and political
focal point of this autonomy.
2
York was also a northern bastion of recusancy located far
from the crown government in London. All of these facts made York a particular object
of interest for the crown, but also impeded the crown’s ability to assert control or even
get an accurate picture of what was going on in York. York was also associated with a
series of rebellions against the Tudors. There was the Lambert Simnel rebellion early in
the reign of Henry VII. In 1537, the city allowed the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace
rebellion, a popular uprising protesting England’s break with Rome, to enter the city to be
blessed by the archbishop. The Northern Rebellion of 1569—put down with the aid of
two future Lord Chamberlains, Henry and George Carey—sought to replace Elizabeth
with the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots.
3

2
Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c. 1500-1640
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 40.

3
REED: York, 1:ix-x.
75
The Queen’s Men are also important to study, both because of their royal
patronage and because of their national notoriety. In the study of early modern English
drama, most of the attention goes to London-based groups like the Admiral’s Men and
the Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, due to both a geographic bias and because
of these companies’ associations with names like Marlowe and Greene in the case of the
former and Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton in the case of the latter. However, ninety
percent of the population of early modern England lived outside London, and while they
might know the London-based groups from their occasional visits, the Queen’s Men were
the traveling group par excellence. As Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean note in
their study of the company, “the Queen’s Men, from the beginning of their career in 1583
to their final year, 1602-3, were quite simply, the best known and most widely travelled
professional company in the kingdom.” Audiences in places like York would have been
more familiar with their plays than with plays by Shakespeare or his London-based
contemporaries. At the same time, as we noted in Chapter One, when the Queen’s Men
visited a city like York, they constituted a royal visitation to the city. They traveled most
years to the north, including to Yorkshire, where, as McMillin and MacLean note, the
troupe functioned as royal emissaries and observers on the road and in private households
along the way in a region notoriously resistant to intervention from the south, especially
in matters of religion.
4
The Queen’s Men functioned as an extension of the royal
progress, carrying the Elizabeth’s colors on a national scale. When they presented

4
Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), esp. 37-83.
76
themselves to civic authorities to request permission to play, they would have been
wearing Elizabeth’s red livery and would have presented their royal patent.
York had an at times ambivalent relationship with traveling players in general. In
1582, for instance, the city limited performances by visiting players, at least those in the
Common Hall, to two: “once before the Lord maior and aldermen &c. and thother before
the commons.”
5
The civic elites hence wanted to make sure that any performances were
first approved by them before going before the eyes of the commoners. Yet, the city was
seemingly deferential most of the time to visits by the Queen’s Men, as their visits to
York were at least as lucrative as their stops elsewhere. Only once, in August 1598, was
the company paid not to play, perhaps because of the plague.
6
York’s resistance to
visiting players was not due to puritan leanings or anti-theatrical prejudices, as the
resistance to visiting players seemingly was in many other towns. York once had an
active local dramatic tradition with roots in the popular Catholic drama suppressed by the
Tudor government. The town once put on a yearly Creed Play, including before Richard
III in 1483.
7
There is possible evidence that in the time of Henry VIII, monks in York
used mystery plays to advance a religious and political agenda contrary to Henry’s own,
drawing the attention of the monarch. In an apocryphal letter to an unknown Justice of
the Peace in York, Henry sought the suppression of such practices:
Trusty and well-beloved, we greet you well. And whereas we understand by
certain report the late evil and seditious rising in our ancient city of York, at the

5
REED: York, 1:399.

6
REED: York, 1:481.

7
REED: York, 2:xv-xvi.
77
acting of a religious interlude of St. Thomas the Apostle, made in the said city on
the 23
rd
of August now past; and whereas we have been credibly informed that the
said rising was owing to the seditious conduct of certain papists who took part in
preparing for the said interlude, we will and require you the from henceforward ye
do your utmost to prevent and hinder any such commotion in future, and for this
ye have my warrant for apprehending and putting in prison any papists who shall,
in performing interludes which are founded on any portions of the Old or New
Testament, say or make use of any language which may tend to excite those who
are beholding the same to any breach of the peace.
8

York also had one of the last Corpus Christi plays, a tradition which lasted for almost two
hundred years and survived the banning of the Corpus Christi festival in 1548 until its
last performance in 1569, which was not coincidentally the same year as the Northern
Rebellion.
The local dramatic condition in York was suppressed by the combination of
factors explored in Chapter One, which included the visitations of companies like the
Queen’s Men. Yet, York’s dramatic tradition was not entirely extinguished. In 1609, it
was one of the few towns in England outside of London that attempted to establish a
permanent playhouse of its own, in an apparent effort by some to deter visiting players.
Siobhan Keenan argues that York would have been a good candidate for a playhouse, due
to its having a large, drama-hungry population of 10,000 or more from which to draw
spectators and a wealthy community from which to raise investment capital.
9
But a local
playhouse offered other advantages as well. The petitioners request permission

8
The letter is printed in the REED: York, 2:649-50. The letter, originally printed by James Orchard Halliwell,
ed., Letters of the Kings of England, Now First Collected from Royal Archives, and Other Authentic Sources,
Private As Well As Public (London: H. Colburn, 1848), 1:354, is said to have been found in the MS
collection of York Documents, Rawlinson’s Collection in the Bodleian Library, although a search by the
REED: York editors found no such manuscript.

9
Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002),
158-9.
78
to erect A Theater or playhowse within this Citty wherin such as have bene borne
and brought vpp therin should imploye ther laborious expenses for the
maintenance therof which might be A meanes to restrayne the frequent
Comminge thervnto of other Stage plaiers.
10

It is unclear whether the theatre was ever constructed or, if it was, if it ever saw a play
staged. Nonetheless, the very existence of this document is significant. The justification
for the theatre is that it will help reestablish a local dramatic tradition by providing a
space for local players—i.e., those who were born, raised, and learned their trade in
York—to practice their craft. It would hence help satisfy the local appetite for drama
while also forming a bulwark against “other” groups, particularly the royal companies to
which the city grew increasingly resistant during the reign of James, preventing their
presence in town, and specifically the Common Hall and York Minster. It was hence a
bulwark against the colonization of memory and space that also served to keep prying
eyes out. It also could help, as Montaigne suggests, reassert local community and
strengthen the power of the local magistrates while allowing them to conduct their own
surveillance of audiences.
York has an additional advantage that makes it useful for considering the
opportunities for surveillance during a performance: the Common Hall is still standing,
located behind the Mansion House at St. Helen’s Square, on the east bank of the River
Ouse.
11
The original hall was bombed during an air raid on 26 April 1942, demolishing

10
REED: York, 1:530-1.

11
The description of the York Guildhall is based on personal inspection as well on An Inventory of the
Historical Monuments in the City of York, Vol. 5: The Central Area (London: Royal Commission on Historical
Monuments, 1981), 76-81; McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 74-6; Herbert
Cescinsky and Ernest R. Gribble, Early English Furniture and Woodwork, vol. 1 (London: The Waverly Book
79
the roof and interior and blowing out the windows, but the hall that reopened on 21 June
1960 is a faithful restoration of the original and possesses enough surviving and vestigial
evidence to reconstruct the hall as it existed in the Elizabethan era.
12
The hall is part of a
complex of buildings: at the west end sit the Committee rooms, including the Inner
Chamber and an adjacent two-storey block to the north; at the east end were a group of
service buildings, since removed, including a kitchen, buttery, and pantry. Besides their
primary purposes, service buildings at town halls were variously used as storerooms,
ammunitions depots, and holding cells for prisoners at the assizes.
13
Town halls were
multipurpose structures that were readily adaptable for staging plays, and the Common
Hall is no different. The lower part of the hall’s magnesian limestone walls survived the
bombing, preserving the original dimensions, which measure 93 feet long by 43 feet
wide; the restored roof rises to a height of 31 feet 1 inch.
14
The roof is markedly lower in
pitch than many other surviving guildhalls and college dining halls, a feature which
requires the support of ten large wooden octagonal pillars with stone bases arranged in
two rows of five, “forming, in effect, a hall with nave and aisles.”
15
The hall is divided on

Company LTD, 1922), 61 and 64-5; and J. Halfpenny, “Inside the Guild-Hall,” a portrait of the interior
published in 1807 and located in the York Art Gallery.

12
The original structure dates to the fifteenth century. Work began in 1446 on an arched gateway, known
as Common Hall Gates, which led to Coney Street and had a small room over it. This building was
demolished in 1726. Construction on the hall itself began in 1449 and took fifty years to complete. See An
Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York, 77.

13
See Tittler, Architecture and Power, esp. 13-4 and 39-40.

14
According to Cescinsky and Gribble, Early English Furniture and Woodwork, 61, the original roof’s
approximate height was 30 feet.

15
Cescinsky and Gribble, Early English Furniture and Woodwork, 64.
80
each side into six bays, each having a three-light window, and large five-light windows
on the east and west ends. It once had a screens passage with an upper gallery above the
east end, a dais enclosed by a wooden screen with doors at the west end, and an open
fireplace in the middle. The hall has a central entrance through the east wall, entrances to
the screens passage through corresponding doors at the east end of the north and south
walls, doors on opposite ends of the west wall granting access to the medieval Committee
Rooms, and a door on north wall on the second bay from the west end. The hall has an
intriguing feature that may have been particularly useful for security purposes. Through
the two-storey block at the west end of the hall is accessed Common Hall Lane, which
opens to the staith on the Ouse at the west end of the hall, runs under the north aisle of
the hall, and emerges at an entrance on the east face of the hall, the top of which is just
visible above street level today.
16
Common Hall Lane allows access to a variety of
compartments and cellars under the hall and its adjoining buildings, including the cellar
under the hall also accessibly by a stairway embedded in the east wall. This perhaps
provided a secret space for the civic authorities who owned and operated the hall to
discuss their observations of the play and the audience while a performance was in
progress.
17

16
Today Common Hall Lane continues underground east of the Guildhall and emerges through steps to
the yard behind the Mansion House.

17
The head of the stairway to the cellar embedded in the east wall is marked by a two-light window; it
was once accessible through a small entrance between this window and the main entrance.
81

Figure 4: Exterior of York Common Hall, today called the Guildhall. Photograph by
Robert D. Stefanek.

Figure 5: Interior of the York Guildhall by J. Halfpenny (1807). York Art Gallery.
82
As a general rule, we do not have the sort of detailed information about stage
construction and seating arrangements for town halls that we have for college halls,
which we will discuss in Chapter Three, or for palace halls, which we will discuss in
Chapter Four. Therefore, we are on more speculative ground with the Common Hall than
we will be later on. McMillin and MacLean conclude that most halls used by the Queen’s
Men allowed purpose-built stages at the low or high ends or staging in the center with the
audience seated or standing around. While confirming evidence has apparently not
survived at York (unless the “bordes” listed amongst items damaged at a 1592
performance refer to timbers used for stage construction), given the city’s size, dramatic
tradition, and frequent visits by traveling players, it seems reasonable to speculate that
stages were built for performances in the Common Hall as well. As town halls are,
broadly speaking, architecturally similar to college dining halls, the stages erected in the
latter may serve as a model for those erected in the former: a platform stage 5-6 feet in
height, with galleries constructed surrounding the stage along the walls to allow for
elevated seating on forms or benches and standing underneath.
18
However, a simpler
arrangement may have been necessary to accommodate a traveling company arriving
with little or no advanced notice. McMillin and MacLean are unable to generalize about
the amount of seating available for performances in town halls but speculate that

18
The general features of the stages erected in college halls, as well as seating and security arrangements,
is based primarily on Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages,
1464-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); as well as Records of Early English Drama:
Cambridge, 2 vols., ed. by Alan H. Nelson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); and Records of
Early English Drama: Oxford, 2 vols., ed. by John R. Elliott et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2004).
83
scaffolding, hall benches, forms, and trestles were available at tour stops.
19
There is
evidence to support this was this case at least on occasion in Gloucester, Nottingham, and
Exeter. And yet, actual chairs may have been rare and remained seats of honor, while
benches could themselves be in short supply at some halls.
20

Within this architecture, performances could readily exploit the potential of
theatre to conduct surveillance of audiences. McMillin and MacLean assert that the
Common Hall provided “an open and flexible space with excellent sight lines for
performance.”
21
Overall this is true: the hall presents an “overt & open” place which the
audience can easily view the play, and the Queen’s Men onstage and the civic authorities
on the dais or on the galleries along the sides and above the screens can survey the
audience (and each other). However, the ten octagonal pillars present an interesting
challenge: construct the galleries along the walls, bringing the pillars into the field of
vision of those on the galleries and partially obstruct their view of the stage, or construct
the galleries in front of or between the pillars, narrowing the space available for
performance. Either way, the pillars would have been a hindrance for the (un)fortunate
ones seated or standing behind them and under the galleries, who in turn would have been
obstructed from the sight of the players and the civic authorities.
While York was generally welcoming to the Queen’s Men, any performance of
The True Tragedie in the Common Hall would have likely met with particular resistance

19
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 67-83.

20
Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, 21 and 29.

21
McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays, 74-5.
84
by the northern, recusant audience, which in turn would have allowed for opportunities
for the Queen’s Men to survey the audience’s reactions for signs of resistance not only to
the play itself, but to the crown and its colonizing mission as well. Any history play
concerning England’s dynastic conflicts in the preceding two centuries would produce an
interesting dynamic given York’s varied history during that period. The city supported
the usurpation of Bolingbroke in 1399 but sided with Northumberland and Archbishop
Scope against him in 1405; it remained largely neutral in the Wars of the Roses and
sometimes welcomed both factions into the city, as when it welcomed Edward IV in
triumph. However, a history play like The True Tragedie that portrays Richard in such
negative light would find a particularly resistant audience. There was an enduring
friendship between Richard and the City of York that dated back to his days as his
brother Edward IV’s lieutenant in the north, and as the Duke of Gloucester, Richard spent
much of the decade before his succession in York. This period established great
friendship and loyalty between the city and Richard, particularly amongst the mayor,
alderman, and guilds, but also the ecclesiastical authorities and many of the commoners.
The city received both Edward and Richard during their brief exile in 1470, and this
goodwill carried over beyond Richard’s reign, and factored in Henry VII—the Richmond
who kills Richard at the end of The True Tragedie—having to return to York two years
after the Battle of Bosworth Field to quell the Lambert Simnel rebellion.
22

The True Tragedie reflects many of the themes we saw in Chapter One, including
with the plays of the Henriad. In The True Tragedie, Richard shares the Elizabethan and

22
Paul Murray Kendall, Richard the Third (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1956), 154-62; and REED:
York, 1:ix-x.
85
Jacobean mistrust of freely moving people as sources of rumor or, more generally, news,
information, and narratives that are competing with the official ones crown attempts to
disseminate. Richard arrests Lord Gray, who has been accompanying the young king
Edward V towards his coronation. To ensure the secrecy of the act, Richard seeks to
control the movement of both people and of information along highways:
therefore I charge and command straightly, that euerie high way be laid close, that
none may be suffered to carrie this newes before we our selues come, for if word
come before vs, then is our pretence bewraid, and all we haue done to no effect. If
any aske the cause why they may not passe, vse my authoritie, and if he resist
shoote him through.
23

The punishments Richard metes out to vagabonds might strike many in the audience as
more immediate, but not necessarily more severe, than those faced by vagabonds in their
day. Richard also recognizes the importance of symbolic spaces, and exploits them to
stage public theatrical demonstrations that help him seize control of the narrative of
events that the populace receives. We learn from his Page:
how well Doctor Shaw hath pleased my Lord, that preached at Paules Crosse
yesterday, that proued the two Princes to be bastards, whereupon in the after
noone came downe my Lord Mayor and the Aldermen to Baynards Castle, and
offered my Lord the whole estate vpon him, and offered to make him King, which
he refused so saintly, that if it had bene offered once more, I knows he would
haue taken it, the Duke of Buckingham is gone about it, and is now in the Guild
Hall making his Oration. [D3
v
]

Richard places his minions in prominent spaces around London to plead his case as part
of a theatrically-based strategy to help himself to the crown. St. Paul’s Cross sat outside

23
The True Tragedie of Richard the third: Wherein is showne the death of Edward the fourth, with the
smothering of the two yoong Princes in the Tower: With a lamentable ende of Shores wife, an example for
all wicked women. And lastly, the coniunction and ioyning of the two noble Houses, Lancaster and Yorke.
As it was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players (London: Thomas Creede, 1594), C4
v
. Future references
are cited in the text. I have also referred to the excerpts of the play printed in The True Tragedy of Richard
III, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 3, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1960), 317-45.
86
London’s most important ecclesiastical space and was itself a battlefield in the English
Reformation. The Guildhall, as the administrative and ceremonial center of the City of
London, was its most important civic space. Meanwhile, Richard stages a theatrical
performance of his own before the Lord Mayor and alderman at Baynards Castle, which
once stood on the Thames at London’s western boundary as a strategic and symbolic
counterpart to the Tower of London on the city’s eastern boundary. There is, of course,
an irony at this moment. The Queen’s Men themselves are at this moment in a guild hall
giving their officially-sanctioned version of events. As we will see, the play concludes
with them making an oration of their own on behalf of Elizabeth before the York
audience. Whether any in the audience catch the irony, and whether it has any effect on
their reception of the play, is unclear, but this moment does provide one opportunity for
the Queen’s Men to spy any reactions in the audience that indicate resistance to their
presence in the Common Hall or to the historical narrative they are offering the audience.
As we will see, however, it is impossible to miss the Queen’s Men exploitation of the
symbolic importance of the Common Hall at the end of the play.
Like the plays of the Henriad, The True Tragedie participates in the crown’s
ideological mapping of England as surely as the Queen’s Men participated in the crown’s
territorial mapping of England. The True Tragedie systematically turns the wooden
rectangular platform stage of the Common Hall into a map of the kingdom. The audience
joins the young Edward’s abortive coronation progress in Ludlow, Shropshire, and
continues with it to Northampton. There it is intercepted by Richard and Buckingham
before proceeding to Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, and ultimately to the Tower of
87
London. The audience is with Richmond as he arrives in England, having come from
Brittany via Milford Haven in Wales, then proceed to Atherstone, Warwickshire and
Lichfield, Staffordshire, en route to encountering Richard at Bosworth Field in
Leicestershire. The play hence surveys much of central and western England and Wales,
regions that desert Richard to support Richmond, while conveniently avoiding the north,
where Richard draws his strength. This elision helps create unity at the end of the play
when Richmond is hailed by his full style as king, “Henry the seuenth, by the grace of
God, King of England, France, and Lord of Ireland” (H4
v
), and then the audience is
exhorted in the epilogue to be loyal to his descendent Elizabeth: “Then England kneele
vpon thy hairy knee, / And thanke that God that still prouides for thee” (I2). Hence, the
stage that has represented various regions throughout the play is at the play’s end unified
to represent all of England (and Wales), and the audience represents all its subjects.
The True Tragedie also participates in the colonization of memory by attempting
to impose as ‘true’ a royally-sponsored version of history on a York audience with a
differing local history of the events depicted in the play. This imposition of a historical
narrative upon a resistant audience, along with the ambiguities and instabilities within the
text and the performance of The True Tragedie, produces a dynamic which would
facilitate surveillance of the Common Hall audience by the Queen’s Men. The True
Tragedie even begins with a prologue that is a dialogue between Truth and Poetrie that
attempts to persuade the audience that its status as poetic representation does not
undermine its being a truthful representation of history, in a manner that anticipates the
Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V. The prologue begins with a testy interaction in which
88
Truth is condescending towards Poetrie, because Poetrie can make only “Shadowes”
upon a stage. Truth vows to make up for the inadequacies of poetic representation by
supplying “bodies” to it:
Truth: Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes,
Therefore depart and giue Truth leaue
To shew her pageant.
Poetrie: Why will Truth be a Player?
Truth: No, but Tragedia like for to present
A Tragedie in England done but late,
That will reuiue the hearts of drooping mindes. (A3)

The exact meaning of the passage is slightly ambiguous, as there is a sort of double pun
in it. “Shadowes” could refer to the Queen’s Men themselves: “shadowes” was a
common trope for actors in early modern England. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Theseus defends the acting of the mechanicals by saying, “The best, in this kinde, are but
shadowes: and / the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them”; Puck echoes this in
the epilogue as he begins his own apology for the acting of the Chamberlain’s Men, “If
we shadowes haue offended.”
24
Here, the passage can be taken as meaning that the
“shadowes” supplied by Poetrie will be amended not with imagination, but because Truth
will supply an inner body of truth to the poetic representations of the actors. But the
passage can also be taken as meaning that the ambiguous “shadowes” of Poetrie’s
representations will be made true because Truth will supply them bodies: the physical
bodies of the Queen’s Men. Either way, the end result is the same: Truth will make the
players of the Queen’s Men not simply empty forms or apparitions or contingent
representations, but embodied representations of historical Truth. When Poetrie finally

24
William Shakespeare, A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted, by
the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants (London: Thomas Fisher, 1600), H1
v
and H4.
89
asks Truth, “What maner of man was this Richard Duke of Gloster?” (A3
v
), Truth’s reply
authorizes the performance of the actor playing Richard as a ‘true’ representation of the
historical person: “A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed, withall, / Valiantly
minded, but tyrannous in authoritie” (A3
v
). By the conclusion of the epilogue, Poetrie and
Truth are reconciled and the following performance of The True Tragedie becomes
“Truthes Pageant,” for which Truth asks Poetry, “Wend with me” (A4).
Along with the figure of Truth, the other source for the truth of the historical
representations of The True Tragedie is the Tudor-sponsored chronicles on which the
play is based. In the prologue Truth contextualizes the action that follows with the
background of the Wars of the Roses “as the Chronicles make manifest”—manifest in the
sense of being clearly revealed to the eye, mind, or judgement.
25
Truth relates the
narrative of the usurpation of “vertuous” Henry VI’s crown by Richard Plantagenet
(father of the King at the opening of the play, Edward IV) and of the demise of George of
Clarence, accused “Falsly of Treason” and “cruelly murthered by Richard Glosters
Duke” (A3-A3
v
). Later, when Rivers is arrested by Richard and Buckingham on
fabricated charges of treason, Rivers appeals to the chronicles to maintain his innocence:
“The Chronicles I record, talk of my fidelitie, & of my progeny, / Wher, as in a glas thou
maist behold, thy ancestors & their trechery” (C3
v
). By mentioning his progeny, Rivers is
not only referring to chronicles extant in his day, but he may also be anachronistically
referring all present, onstage and in the audience, to the ‘true’ portrayal of the fidelity of

25
OED, “manifest, adj. and adv.”
90
his lineage and the treachery of Richard’s that will be recorded in the chronicles written
during the reign of the Tudors.
Even more remarkable is a moment later in the play, following the murder of the
two princes in the Tower, the young Edward V and Duke of York. Myles Forest, who
acts as a middle man between Terrell and the murderers, Slauter and Denton, tells Terrell
how ‘he’ has disposed of the bodies (in actuality, how he has directed Slauter and Denton
to dispose of them): “I haue conueyd them to the staires foote among a heape of stones,
and anon ile carry them where they shall be no more found againe, nor all the cronicles
shall nere make mention what shall become of them” (F1
v
). Here, then, a play that is
being presented as ‘true’ to its audience points to a lacuna in the chronicles and then fills
it by supplying perpetrators and bodies. This is not a trivial point: while Richard III is
often blamed for the murder of the princes in the tower, no conclusive proof has ever
been found that Richard in fact ordered them. Among the other perpetrators proposed by
historians are Buckingham and one Henry VII.
26

The True Tragedie broadly follows the same narrative as Shakespeare’s later
telling—both plays had a common source in the chronicles, and Shakespeare clearly drew
on The True Tragedie when writing Richard III—and both plays, of course, cast Richard
as a villain. There are at least two differences between the plays, however. One, as we
shall see, while both plays clearly draw on (and co-opt) the morality play tradition
suppressed by the Tudors, Shakespeare’s Richard is cast as Vice, but the Queen’s Men’s

26
For one treatment of the controversy, see Kendall, Richard the Third, 317-8 and 465-95. In a more
recent treatment, Alison Weir, The Princes in the Tower (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), concludes
that the evidence overwhelmingly points to Richard. Weir not unjustly calls Kendall “Richard III’s
revisionist biographer.”
91
Richard (perhaps inadvertently) gets cast as Everyman. Two, the Queen’s Men’s
representation of Richard repeatedly insists on his status not simply as a villain, but as a
spying and surveilling villain. Richard performs the role of spy himself in his very first
scene of the play, that of Edward IV’s deathbed reconciliation of Hastings and Marcus
(i.e., Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset). Richard is a silent, almost ghostly presence
onstage for the entire scene. From the stage directions it is unclear whether he is even
visible to the other characters: “Enter Edward the fourth, Lord Hastings, Lord Marcus,
and Elizabeth. To them Richard” (A4). “To them” is ambiguous; it may indicate that
Richard simply joins the other four after their entrance, or that he approaches from a
different entrance. But Richard’s silence in this scene, and others’ silence towards him,
suggests that he enters unseen by others, observing the alliance between Hastings and
Marcus that will make both an eventual obstacle to the throne. Some have argued that
Richard’s silence is evidence that Richard’s inclusion in the stage direction is an error,
and perhaps even evidence that the 1594 edition of the play is a ‘bad quarto’ based on a
memorial report. However, J. Dover Wilson argues that there is confirming evidence in
the play to show that Richard is present at the death of Edward IV and that the stage
direction is not an error.
27
It also seems plausible that the person entrusted by Edward
with being the Protector to his son and the minority king would be important enough to
be present at such a moment.
Richard constructs a seemingly vast spy network on which his power is
dependent, and his downfall is marked by its crumbling. As we have already seen, it is

27
J. Dover Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 1594,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 3:4 (1952): 300-1.
92
capable of securing the movement of people and information on the roads surrounding
London. He also uses his court as a surveillance apparatus, a theme to which we will
return in Chapter Four. Richard denies Stanley’s request to retire to his country house so
that he can keep a watchful eye on him. However, Richard’s response also reveals that
his spy network is geographically limited, or at least has become so, as Stanley’s country
house is beyond the range of Richard’s spies: “Ay sir, that you might be in Cheshire and
Lancashire, then should your Postes passe inuisible into Brittaine, and you to depart the
realme at your pleasure” (F4
v
). Later in the same scene, he is caught unawares by the
marriage agreement between Elizabeth and Richmond and by the defections of Blunt and
Oxford. He exclaims,
may this be true, what is our prison so weake, our friends so fickle, our Ports so ill
lookt too, that they may passe and repasse the seas at their pleasures, then euerie
one conspires, spoyles our Conflex, conqueres our Castles, and Armes themselues
with their owne weapons vnresisted? (G2)

The night before encountering Richmond, his network is so collapsed that Richard no
longer has reliable intelligence even about his own inner circle: “In company I dare not
trust my friend, / Being alone, I dread the secret foe” (H1
v
). Richard’s increasing
paranoia at the end of the play is a product not only of his guilt over his murderous path
to the throne, but also of the loss of his once near-absolute control over information
regarding his enemies.
Before it collapses, the power of Richard’s spy network is best illustrated in a
scene in which Richard deploys it not only to target Shore’s wife, but also to place the
entire populace of London under surveillance. In the process, the former is reduced to
destitution and the latter to a state of paranoia. The staging of the scene also drafts the
93
Common Hall audience into the play, making them objects of Richard’s surveillance as
well. Based on the historical Elizabeth “Jane” Shore, the character referred to even by
herself as “Shore’s wife” (relentlessly insisting on her place in the social and gender
hierarchies) is a contradictory presence in the play. Her role in the play struck the printer
or the compositor of the quarto as prominent enough to merit inclusion on the title page:
“With a lamentable ende of Shores wife, an example for all wicked women.” While this
subtitle may reflect how the compositor or perhaps the printer, Thomas Creede, viewed
Shore’s wife’s character, the aptness of this description is another matter. While she is
perhaps ‘wicked’ as an adulterer, with how much free choice she enters into the affair
with Edward is uncertain. As a commoner and a subject, it is unclear the extent to which
Edward is able to compel her sexual submission. Likewise, she is constrained by a system
that treats women as property to be transferred by and between fathers and husbands;
certainly, her husband is knowing and complicit in her affair with the king and thought it
futile to resist, a protest she voices using a suitably bawdy pun: “yea my owne husband
knew of my breach of disloyaltie, and yet suffered me, by reason hee knew it bootlesse to
kicke against the pricke” (E1-E1
v
). Shore’s wife does raise anxieties in the play through
her transgressions of social and gender hierarchies: to Lodowick, Shore’s wife is she
“that could command a King,” something she seemingly confirms with her admission
that “For tho he was King, yet Shores wife swayd the swoord” (E2). However, the play
repeatedly stresses how she used her influence while Edward was king in a way that was
anything but wicked, aiding her fellow commoners Lodowick, the Citizen, and Morton:
“I where neede was, there was I bountifull, and mindfull I was still vppon the poore to
94
releeue them” (E2). More to the point, the description of Shore’s wife on the title page of
the quarto aligns the play with Richard’s view of her, whereas the play itself makes her
something closer to a martyr. The exact source of Richard’s vitriol towards Shore’s wife
is left unclear by the play. Along with her affair with his brother Edward IV, Richard
accuses Shore’s wife of being involved with Elizabeth and Hastings in a conspiracy
against him, as well as of having an affair with the latter:
thou and that accursed sorceresse the mother Queene hath bewitched me, with
assistance of that famous strumpet of my brothers, Shores wife: my withered arme
is a sufficient testimony, deny it if thou canst: laie not Shores wife with thee last
night? (D4)

Richard’s instance that the conspiracy involves witchcraft, along with the patently absurd
attempt to rewrite his lame arm as proof of it, serves only to undermine the credibility for
the Common Hall audience of charges which are otherwise largely true.
95

Figure 6: Title page of the quarto of The True Tragedie (1594).

However, using his spy network Richard is able to impose this narrative on
Shore’s wife with his London audience (and, apparently, the title page of the quarto). He
directs his Page:
goe from me to the Bishop of London, and see that she receiue her open penance,
let her be turnd out of prison, but so bare as a wretch that worthily hath deserued
that plague: and let there be straight proclaimation made by my Lord the Mayor,
that none shall releeue her nor pittie her, and priuie spies set in euerie corner of
the Citie, that they may take notice of them that releeues her: for as her beginning
was most famous aboue all, so will I haue her end most infamous aboue all. (E1)

96
Richard imposes this narrative by first making her a theatrical object of display that
endures the shame of open penance and a public proclamation by the ever-pliable Lord
Mayor. (In one of the many ironic moments of the play, the York mayor who is likely
seated on one of the galleries surrounding the Common Hall stage is hence aligned with a
Lord Mayor onstage who is a ready accomplice to royal tyranny. Such a moment not only
furthers the Queen’s Men’s project of eroding civic authority that is one of their motives
for playing in town halls, but it also potentially undermines the extension of royal
authority that they are trying to effect.) Richard further imposes this narrative on Shore’s
wife by dispatching “priuie spies” to watch her every move and interaction, which also
allows him to gauge the audience’s reception of the ‘play’ of her that he orchestrates.
The scene that follows is not only a representation of an individual being spied
upon, but also of an entire populace under surveillance. It (perhaps unintentionally)
evokes the mystery play tradition the Queen’s Men are co-opting, as the story of the
“wicked” Shore’s wife recalls the story of the Apostle Peter denying Christ three times
before the cock crows: she is denied aid three times by those for whom she was a savior
when she had influence as the mistress of King Edward. The scene also shows how
successful Richard is in imposing his narrative upon Shore’s wife by using spies to
ensure the populace is at least in outward conformity with it, regardless of alternative
narratives they may privately hold. But the staging of the scene exploits the conventions
of drama, and potentially the architecture of the theatre erected in the Common Hall, to
draft the audience into the frame of the play, making them no longer citizens of
97
Elizabeth’s York but of Richard’s London.
28
By making them objects of Richard’s
surveillance, the scene attempts to turn the York audience against Richard, but it may
also inadvertently call attention to the spying and surveillance to which they potentially
are being subjected to at the hands—or rather, eyes and ears—of the Queen’s Men.
Although the stage directions of the quarto do not call for it (stage directions in the quarto
of True Tragedie, as with most printed plays, are sparse), we might imagine the Queen’s
Men opening the scene with extras representing Richard’s “priuie spies set in euerie
corner of the Citie” fanning out around the Common Hall, hiding behind the pillars,
ascending the galleries, positioning themselves in the dimly-lit corners, perhaps even
hiding amongst the audience. This activity in the hall would create a stir amongst the
audience as Shore’s wife enters, their eyes and ears only partially attending to the action
onstage amid the murmurs and shuffles of movement reverberating off the hall’s
magnesian limestone walls as the audience moves to accommodate the spies (or resists
them, in the case of audience members who are momentarily confused or who are
hesitant to give up their unobstructed vantage point and move behind one of the pillars).
The audience members view their neighbors with confusion and annoyance, perhaps even
with suspicion. As the movement in the hall quiets, the spies dissolve amongst the
citizens, making each member of the audience take on an indeterminate status that
replicates the mood onstage.

28
As Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York: Routledge, 2004), 28, notes,
Shakespeare similarly drafts spectators as part-actors in the plays they are observing, as in scenes with
armies.
98
Regardless of whether or not spies fan out across the hall at the opening of the
scene, the presence of Richard’s spies watching the characters onstage and the ‘London’
citizenry in the audience is felt throughout the scene. Shore’s wife first encounters
Lodowick, whose lands she helped restore when she was Edward’s mistress. Lodowick
enters as one living in a state of terror, wondering at the killing of many peers and the
usurpation of the young King by Richard, and noting that “The Commons murmure at it
greatly” (E1
v
). As he says this, Lodowick perhaps gestures at the audience, making the
phrase into a pun and exploiting the murmuring in the Common Hall at the moment—the
residual noise from the entrance of Richard’s spies, or at very least the low level murmur
of an audience not watching a play in rapt silence—and morphing it into the hushed tones
of those who, like him, do not feel free to openly express criticism of Richard because of
fear they are being monitored by his spies. However sympathetic he may be to Shore’s
wife’s plight, Lodowick is unable to speak or act in accordance with his sympathies:
I cannot deny but my lands she restored me, but shall I by releeuing of her hurt
my self, no: for straight proclamation is made that none shall succour her,
therefore for feare I should be seene talke with her, I will shun her company and
get me to my chamber, and there set downe in heroicall verse, the shameful end of
a Kings Concubin, which is no doubt as wonderfull as the desolation of a
kingdome. (E2)

The fear Richard’s spies instill in Lodowick does more than make him forsake a starving
friend and wish himself secluded from their prying eyes. Even more remarkably, it is
enough to make Lodowick vow to enshrine in “heroicall verse” a narrative of Shore’s
wife’s he knows from firsthand experience is partial at best. Sidney called “Heroicall”
99
poetry “not onely a kinde, but the best, and most accomplished kinde of Poetry”
29
;
Lodowick is willing to employ it to disseminate and immortalize Richard’s narrative of
the past, and perhaps even distribute it in print. Lodowick’s vow is clearly disingenuous
and likely intended to produce a laugh. But the laughter produced may be an ironic
Rabelaisian laughter. Lodowick unwittingly undermines the synthesis between Truth and
Poetrie established in the prologue, and in the process may unintentionally draw greater
scrutiny on the historical narrative being presented by the Queen’s Men.
30
Just as the
‘truth’ about Shore’s wife becomes not about what ‘really happened’ but rather what
Richard can force the people of London to publicly proclaim, first by imposing a
narrative through a public display and then forcing its acceptance through spies, some in
the audience may question whether the Queen’s Men are likewise attempting to foist a
narrative on Richard and York and enforce its acceptance by themselves acting as spies.
Shore’s wife next encounters the Citizen, the life of whose condemned son she
once intervened to save. The Citizen enters with another to whom he refers as
“neighbour,” apparently discussing the merits of the new king:
No men no lawes, no Princes no orders, alls husht neighbour now hees king, but
before he was king how was the tems [Thames] thwackt with ruffians? what fraies
had we in the streets? Now he hath proclaimed peace betweene Scotland and
England for sixe yeares, to what end I know not, vsurpers had neede to be wise.
(E2
v
)

The Citizen’s praise of Richard’s rule might well be genuine: while his occupation is
uncertain, his hassling Morton in an earlier scene over a debt suggests he is a merchant or

29
Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London: Henry Olney, 1595), G1.

30
For the ambivalence of laughter in Rabelais, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by
Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
100
lender, and a stable reign, peace with England’s northern neighbor, and crime-free streets
would be good for business. But the earnestness of his praise is subsequently called into
question. When he encounters Shore’s wife and her request for aid, his response shows an
awareness of spies who are potentially lurking all about: “A neighbour, hedges haue eyes,
and high-wayes haue eares” (E2
v
). The Citizen gives a variation on a proverb, whose
other forms include “walls have ears” or, in Chaucer, “feeld hath eyen and the wode hath
eres.”
31
The line also recalls Richard’s earlier order that “that euerie high way be laid
close, that none may be suffered to carrie this newes before we our selues come” (C4
v
).
While the Citizen’s response is proverbial, it also is a reminder of the spies, ‘real’ or
imaginary, lurking behind the pillars that have become hedges and at the entrances that
have become highways. The Citizen initially does not recognize Shore’s wife in her
deplorable condition until she reveals her identity (or perhaps, he refuses to recognize her
until she insists that he do so); when he finally does, his disavowal of her is no less
remarkable than Lodowick’s:
Who are thou Shores wife? Lye still purse, neighbour I would not for tewntie
pounds haue giuen her one farthing, the proclamation is so hard by king Richard.
Why minion are you she that was the dishonour to the King? The shame to her
husband, the discredit to the Citie? Heare you, laie your fingers to worke, and get
thereby somewhat to maintaine you. O neighbour I grow verie choloricke, and
thou didst saue the life of my sonne, why if thou hadst not, another would: and for
my part, I would he had bene hangd seuen yeeres ago, it had saued me a great
deale of mony then. But come let vs go in & let the quean alone. (E2
v
)

Like Lodowick, the Citizen’s response, including the remarkable (and comic) public
declaration that he would rather his son had lost his life than had it saved through her aid,

31
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knights Tale, in The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2000), 522.
101
is not driven by simple hypocrisy. Rather, as his repeated address to his neighbor makes
clear, it is a paranoia-induced performance for anyone who may be scrutinizing his
actions, the neighbor included. But this performance also casts doubt on the sincerity of
his admiration of Richard. In an atmosphere in which people fear an unseen audience of
spies, even express acts of loyalty become unreliable indicators of one’s private
thoughts—although actions need not be sincere to strengthen the ruling régime.
Shore’s wife is denied a third time by Morton, who had attained his position as a
servingman to the recently-deceased Hastings through her aid and who earlier accounted
her “the deerest friend that euer I had” (B3
v
). Morton also enters speaking of the disquiet
amongst commoners brought about by Richard’s usurpation, the rumors of the murder of
the princes in the Tower, and the coming war between Richard and his former ally
Buckingham. Morton disavows any interest in the conflict between two members of the
nobility, but is frightened enough to flee the country: “but let them agree as they will, for
the next faire winde ile ouer seas” (E3). It is a moment that resonates with Court’s and
William’s disavowal to the disguised Harry of any interest in the conflict with the French
in Henry V. Like the Citizen, Morton initially fails or refuses to recognize Shore’s wife,
and upon recognizing her refuses her aid and insists on Richard’s narrative, calling her
“A foole, and euer thy owne enemy” (E3). But unlike the other two, Morton (likely after
a surreptitious glance around the Common Hall) reveals his inner thoughts in a
confidential whisper: “In troth mistresse Shore, my store is but small, yet as it is, weele
part stakes, but soft I cannot do what I would, I am watcht” (E3). Francis Bacon lauded
Elizabeth for “not liking to make Windowes into Mens Hearts and Secret Thoughts,
102
Except the Abundance of them did overflow into Ouvert and Expresse Acts and
Affirmations.”
32
With Morton’s admission, we glimpse the paradox of such a policy:
Morton’s heart and secret thoughts are in contradiction with his acts and affirmations.
This ambiguity pervades interpersonal interactions and creates suspicion and mistrust
amongst the populace, which in turn can be exploited by the ruling régime for the control
of a population. But it also means that there are foes of the ruling régime that remain
hidden, performing their obedience while waiting for an opportunity to emerge. This is
clear in Morton’s response to Shore’s wife’s final plea for aid: Morton first declares in an
audible, performative manner, “What should I releeue my Kings enemy?” before
continuing in another confidential whisper, “Sownes I would with all my heart, but for
yonder villaine, a plague on him” (E3).
“Yonder villaine,” perhaps emerging from behind a pillar or from the audience
after lurking menacingly on the margins of the stage for the entire scene, is Richard’s
page. His appearance at this moment is not a coincidence. He is one of Richard’s spies
that have been spying upon the London populace—and the York audience drafted into
that populace—for the entire scene, and is privy to all that has transpired between Shore’s
wife and Lodowick, the Citizen, and Morton. The Page is well suited to spying on the
audience for Richard. He has an official function in Richard’s court which gives him
cover for his activities: he is, as the stage direction announcing his first entrance

32
Francis Bacon, “Certain Observations, Upon A Libell, Published this present year, 1592. Intituled; A
Declaration Of the True Causes, Of The Great Troubles, Presupposed to be intended, against the Realm, of
England,” in Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces, Of The Works, Civil, Historical,
Philosophical, & Theological, Hitherto Sleeping; Of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon Baron of Verulam,
Viscount Saint Alban. According to the best Corrected Coppies. Together, With His Lordships Life, ed. by
William Rawley (London: Sarah Griffin, 1657), 127. For clarity I have removed the excessive commas found
in the original.
103
specifies, the “Page of his chamber” (B3
v
). In this light, the Page is perhaps an analogue
to the Queen’s Men. He also has a shadowy side to his character that lends itself to
spying, which he underscores at an earlier moment by entering with four watchmen and
saying, “Why thus by keeping company, am I become like vnto those with whom I keepe
company” [D3
v
]. The Page, as we will see with Horatio in Chapter Three, has a highly
observational quality at times. At one point he is silently onstage for over 200 lines,
observing discussions of Richmond’s alliance with the Duke of Brittany and Lady
Margaret, Richard’s conference with Stanley and subsequent imprisonment of his son
George as collateral, and the arrival of a messenger telling of the peers’ consent to the
marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth (although the outburst he provokes from Richard
when he finally asks to know the content of the message is another motivation to keep
silent) (F2
v
-G1
v
).
The Page demonstrates his qualifications to spy on Shore’s wife and the audience
for Richard in his first scene, when he shows what he has learned as a spy on Richard’s
political enemies. He initially appears to be a minor character and a simple servant: he
comes onstage with Richard only to be immediately dismissed without speaking a word,
along with the rest of Richard’s train, so that Richard may confer privately with Catseby;
he returns a little later to announce the arrival of a messenger from Buckingham. But he
returns a third time to privately confer with Richard when everyone else has left the
scene:
Richard: What hearest thou about the Court?
Page: Ioy my Lord of your Protectorship for the most part, Some murmure, but
my Lord they be of the baser sort.
104
Richard: A mightie arme wil sway the baser sort, authority doth terrifie. But what
other newes hearest thou?
Page: This my Lord, they say the yong king is comming vp to his coronation,
attended on by his two vnkles, Earle Riuers & Lord Gray, and the rest of
the Queenes kindred.
Richard: A parlous bone to ground vpon, and a rush stifly knit, which if I could
finde a knot, I would giue one halfe to the dogs and set fire on the other.
Page: It is reported my Lord, but I know not whether it be true or no, that the
Duke of Buckingham is vp in the Marches of Wales with a band of men,
and as they say, hee aimes at the Crowne.
Richard: Tush a shadow without a substance, and a feare without a cause: but yet
if my neighbours house bee on fire, let me seeke to saue mine owne, in
trust is treason, time slippth, it is ill iesting with edge tooles, or dallying
with Princes matters, Ile strike whillst the yron is hote, and Ile trust neuer
a Duke of Buckingham, no neuer a Duke in the world, further then I see
him. And sirrha, so follow me. (C1
v
)

Clearly, this is no ordinary page. In a single briefing he has given Richard three vital
pieces of intelligence which he uses to plot his rise to the throne. First, the Page tells
Richard of possible dissent to his Protectorship amongst the “baser sort,” which later
inspires efforts to impose order upon them by terrorizing and surveilling the commoners.
(The murmuring quality the Page ascribes to their speech, which Morton later ascribes to
the speech of the “Commons,” particularly suggests overhearing the hushed
conversations of those who are aware of potential spies around them.) Second, he relates
the progress of the young King towards his coronation in London and the composition of
his train, which Richard uses to formulate his plot to intercept and usurp Edward. Third,
the Page tells of rumors of Buckingham’s designs on the crown, from which comes
Richard’s resolution to remove Buckingham when his usefulness in helping him to the
crown is up.
But the Page’s role is rather more complex: he is not only a spy on the audience
and Richard’s rivals for his lord, but he is also a double agent spying on Richard and his
105
rivals for the audience. He assumes this role in his first scene, immediately after giving
Richard the intelligence report. He briefly defies Richard’s order as he exits, “And sirrha,
so follow me” (C1
v
), watching Richard move offstage and out of eyesight and earshot,
and perhaps looking for any other hidden auditors, before turning to address the audience.
He marvels to them at the recent friendship between Richard and Buckingham, “who had
wont to loue one another so well as the spider doth the flie,” before giving the audience
information they would not otherwise know:
but this I haue noted, since he hath had the charge of Protector, how many noble
men hath fled the realme, first the Lord Marcus sonne to the Queene, the Earle of
Westmorland and Northumberland, are secretly fled: how this geare will cotten I
know not. (C1
v
)

Earlier in the scene the Page gave Richard information that allows him to plot his rise to
the throne; here he gives the audience the first inklings of dissent and conspiracy that will
eventually topple Richard. In a later report, he confirms to the audience what other
characters only hear rumors of:
all those of the Queens kinred that were committed to Pomphret Castle, hee hath
caused them to be secretly put to death without iudgement: the like was neuer
seen in England. He spares none whom he but mistrusteth to be a hinderer to his
proceedings, he is straight chopt vp in prison. The valiant Earle of Oxford being
but mistrusted, is kept close prisoner in Hames Castle[D3
v
]

One function of the Page’s spying, then, is to help fill out the ‘true’ character of
Richard given in the prologue, revealing the full extent of Richard’s tyranny that he hides
from his rivals and the general populace using his intelligence apparatus. In doing so, he
exposes himself and the audience to that tyranny. He ends his first report to the audience,
But what do I medling in such matters, that should medle with the vntying of my
Lordes points, faith do euen as a great many do beside, medle with Princes
matters so long, til they proue themselues beggars in the end. Therfore I for feare
106
I should be taken nipping with any words, Ile set a locke on my lips, for feare my
tongue grow too wide for my mouth. (C1
v
-C2)

The consequences are not trivial for the Page if he is overheard speaking with the
audience: Richard has shown himself willing to kill to protect his secrecy. The Page’s
fear his tongue will grow too wide for his mouth alludes simultaneously to the fear he
will be caught divulging information and that he will lose his life, perhaps by
strangulation by hanging, for so doing. With each report, the Page exposes the audience
to the same mortal danger, within the conventions of drama at any rate, if they are caught
unawares by Richard’s other spies. This also perhaps functions as a reminder to the
audience to themselves avoid engaging in “worse inconveniences, and secret actions.”
This bond of mutual danger creates a rapport between the audience and the Page,
one he cultivates with his successive reports to them. But this rapport potentially becomes
subversive of the historical narrative the play presents, creating an instability which
facilitates surveillance of the audience by the Queen’s Men. The Page has such privileged
access to Richard because he is, as the stage direction introducing his first entrance
indicates, the “Page of his chamber” (B3
v
). This role means not simply that he is a
personal servant, but that he has privileged access to Richard’s privy chamber, and with it
Richard’s privy thoughts, even in his darkest moments:
Where shall I finde a place to sigh my fill,
And waile the griefe of our fore troubled King?
For now he hath obtained the Diademe,
But with such great discomfort to his minde,
That he had better liued a priuate man, his lookes are gastly,
Hidious to behold, and from the priuie sentire of his heart,
There comes such deepe fetcht sighes and fearefull cries,
That being with him in his chamber oft,
He mooues me weepe and sigh for company,
107
For if he heare one stirre he riseth vp,
And claps his hand vpon his dagger straight,
Readie to stab him, what so ere he be. (G4)

Divulging the contents of the “priuie sentire of his heart” to the audience is a massive—
and personally dangerous—violation of Richard’s confidence in the Page. (We might
recall Hamlet’s anger at Rosencrantz’s and Guildenstern’s efforts to spy on him and
“plucke out the hart of my mistery.”
33
) But while the Page is fearful to be alone with
Richard, he is also genuinely sympathetic to the King in his plight. He gives the audience
a portrait that differs from that of the tyrannous Richard that is presented in the rest of the
play: this Richard is remorseful and fearful, in anguish both for the path he has taken to
get the crown and for the mortal danger in which it places him. Richard is certainly more
sympathetic to the commoners amongst the audience at this moment in his wishes to be a
“priuate man” than Harry is during his rant of the “vacant mind” of the “wretched Slaue”
in Henry V. As David Riggs notes, Richard is a variation on the Marlovian prototype
whose atrocities are a byproduct of his heroic quest for personal honor: “If only for a
moment, the hero sees beyond human history into eternity and discovers that he must
measure the sweet fruition of an earthly crown against the Christian absolutes of sin and
damnation.”
34
It is largely through the Page’s reports that Richard takes on such
resonances, as well as resonances with something much older: the Everyman of the
morality play tradition. The Page’s spying ultimately allows Richard to be viewed as a

33
William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare.
Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect
Coppie (London: I. R. for N. L., 1604), H4.

34
David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 87-90.
108
tragic, even sympathetic figure who is wronged, particularly by his subjects. Perceiving
the desertion of the commoners to Richmond, the Page laments,
A Richard, now do my eyes witnesse that they end is at hand, For thy commons
make no more account of thee then of a priuate man, yet will I as dutie bindes,
giue thee aduertisements of their vniust proceedings. My maister hath lifted out
many, and yet hath left one to lift him out of all, not onely of his Crowne, but also
of his life. But I will in, to tell my Lord of what is happened (G4).

Particularly in York, a city already sympathetic to Richard, this image of ungrateful
commoners turning against their benefactor undermines the prologue’s ‘true’ portrait of
Richard as a tyrant and once more awakens suspicions that he is not only the victim of
deserting commoners, but of his own play.
The rapport between the Page and the audience becomes most subversive in the
Page’s final scene, after the defeat of Richard at Bosworth. Richard enters into battle
resolving to if necessary “keepe my Crowne and die a King,” and vows to remain silent
on his behalf: “These are my last, what more I haue to say, ile make report among the
damned soules” (H3). This move potentially relinquishes control his memory to the
Tudors chroniclers. However, after the battle the Page is approached by a character
named Report, a manifestation of the historical record as well as a carrier of news.
Report’s request of the Page even sounds like that of one readying to compose the title
page of a Tudor chronicle or history play: “How may I know the certain true report of
this victorious battell fought to day, my friend what ere thou beest, tel vnto me the true
report, which part hath wonne the victorie, whether the King or no?” (H3). The Page
outlines the ‘facts’ of Richmond’s victory and Richard’s defeat, along with the nobles
109
killed fighting on his side and the execution of Catsby. But he then moves to ensure the
“true report” recorded in history contains something of Richard’s conduct and character:
But stay Report, & thou shalt heare me tell the briefe discourse. And how the
battell fell then knowe Report, that Richard came to fielde mounted on horsback,
with as high resolue as fierce Achillis mongst the strudie Greekes, whom to
encounter worthie Richmond, came accompanied with many followers...worthie
Richard that did neuer flie, but followed honour to the gates of death, straight
spurd his horse to encounter with the Earle, in which encountry Richmond did
preuaile, & taking Richard at aduantage, then he threw his horse and him both to
the ground, and there was woorthie Richard wounded, so that after that he nere
recouered strength. But to be briefe, my maister would not yeeld, but with his
losse of life he lost the field. Report farewell. (H3-H3
v
)

The Page’s poignant discourse is clearly not the words of someone who is happy to have
just escaped a tyrant. He represents Richard as a noble anachronism who is, like Achilles
(and Hotspur), brave, honorable, and undaunted, not so much defeated as struck down by
an adversary when caught at a disadvantage. Richard as the Greek Achilles is not so
much unworthy as he does not “fit” the English narrative of its past that the Tudors wish
to construct: in the next scene Richmond will be compared with Caesar, Hector, and
Cicero, Romans and Trojans with whom the English claimed a lineage. The Page, then, is
not simply a double agent spying for both Richard and the audience, but he is also a
double agent through which a counternarrative of Richard emerges out of Tudor
historiography.
These ideological instabilities could produce an ambiguous response amongst the
Common Hall audience at the conclusion of The True Tragedie. Immediately upon
securing his victory over Richard, Richmond moves to secure control over the historical
narrative:

110
Now seeing that each thing turnes to our content,
I will it be proclaimed presently, that traytrous Richard
Be by our command, drawne through the streets of Lester,
Starke naked on a Colliers horse let him be laide,
For as of others paines he had no regard,
So let him haue a traytors due reward. (I1-I1
v
)

There is a historical resonance here: Richmond, as Henry VII, hired chroniclers to portray
his reign in a good light and to popularize the Battle of Bosworth Field—a necessary bit
of propaganda given his tenuous claim to the throne. The legitimacy of Richmond’s reign
rests on the narrative of an illegitimate, traitorous Richard, so that is what Richmond
proclaims. But after the Page’s narrative of Richard’s valiant struggle to Report in the
previous scene, this likely sits a bit uncomfortably with at least a portion of the audience.
The recent allusions to the Iliad may also cause these lines to evoke for some (albeit with
a reversal in roles) the specter of Achilles parading the body of Hector in a futile effort to
deface the charmed body. At the very least, Richmond behaves in power no better than
Richard did, introducing an ambiguity to his character like that in Harry. The first two
lines of Richmond’s proclamation explicitly assert his victory as authorizing him to seize
control of the narrative of Richard and label him as a traitor. He proceeds to attempt to
impose that narrative on Richard and the citizens of Leicester as Richard did with Shore’s
wife and the citizens of London, using public proclamation and display. And as with
Shore’s wife, making Richard an object of display will also present an opportunity to
perform surveillance on the audience in Leicester by watching their reaction to the
spectacle and by terrifying them into accepting that narrative.
This same tactic is used on the Common Hall audience as the play concludes, this
time with not Richard’s or Richmond’s spies but the Queen’s Men themselves as the
111
observers. Much like the scene with Shore’s wife, the ambiguous response of the
audience to the conclusion of The True Tragedie presents an opportunity for surveillance,
particularly before a potentially restive audience in the York Common Hall. Upon
Richmond’s narrative rests not only the legitimacy of his reign, of course, but of the
entire Tudor dynasty he inaugurates, culminating in Elizabeth. It is the narrative of that
lineage which is accordingly laid out for the audience as the final scene turns into an
epilogue—begun by an anonymous messenger who is perhaps performed by the same
actor who played the Page. As I noted above, the stage in the Common Hall, on which
has been plotted action in different localities across the country, comes to stand for the
entire unified country of England, and the York audience is made to stand in for all its
inhabitants. The audience is told of the reign of Richmond, now Henry VII, and his
successors (while quickly glossing over the reign of the Catholic Mary).
When the epilogue arrives at Elizabeth—spoken now by another Queen Elizabeth,
the consort of Edward IV—her ability to impose order is emphasized in a manner
reminiscent of the Citizen’s earlier praise of Richard: “Worthie Elizabeth, a mirrour in
her age, by whose wise life and ciuill gouernement, her country was defended from the
crueltie of famine, fire and swoord, warres, fearefull messengers” (I2). Some editors wish
to revise the line to read “war’s fearful messengers,” despite it coming at the end of a
play filled with “fearefull messengers” deployed to deceive, terrify, and survey the
populace. The epilogue proceeds:
This is that Queene as writers truly say,
That God had marked downe to liue for aye.
Then happie England mongst thy neighbor Iles,
For peace and plentie still attends on thee:
112
And all the fauourable Planets smiles
To see thee liue, in such prosperitie.
She is that lampe that keeps faire Englands light,
And through her faith her country liues in peace:
And she hath put proud Antichrist to flight,
And bene the meanes the ciuill wars did cease.
Then England kneele vpon thy hairy knee,
And thanke that God that still prouides for thee. (I2)
35

The argument proceeds from the ‘truth’ of Elizabeth as God’s chosen ruler, the Protestant
who has brought England peace by protecting it from “proud Antichrist” (Philip II of
Spain) and from the “ciuill wars” of religion and succession, and concludes with an order
to kneel in acceptance and submission. But while the prologue promised the ‘truth’ of
Richard, those in the audience resistant to the historical narrative being presented to them
may have perceived a very different play, one in which ‘truth’ is produced by the ruling
powers, disseminated using an intelligence network, and enforced using spies. To some,
these lines spoken by the Queen’s Men in the Common Hall may even ironically recall
Buckingham’s oration in the Guildhall on Richard’s behalf. It is an appeal for direct
loyalty to the Queen made in front of not only loyal subjects but also those who may be
resistant to her reign: dissident Catholics, radical Protestants, and the civic authorities in
whose seat of power the appeal is being made.
The epilogue continues by extolling “The good she hath done, since she came to
the Crowne,” including gaining renown with other Christian princes, bringing peace with

35
Examining these lines, Lewis F. Mott, “Foreign Politics in an Old Play,” Modern Philology 19:1 (1921): 66,
believes that they were written to be spoken at court in the presence of Elizabeth in the wake of the
Armada. This is perhaps the case, but it does not preclude the lines from having been spoken during a
performance in York, where they would have made a remarkable piece of political theatre.
113
the Turk, and aiding Protestants in Geneva, France, and Flanders. Because of these
virtues comes a final warning to the audience:
For which, if ere her life be tane away,
God grant her soule may liue in heauen for aye.
For if her Graces dayes be brought to end,
Your hope is gone, on whom did peace depend. (I2)

With these lines, the audience comes directly under the scrutinizing gaze of the Queen’s
Men. While the scene of spying upon Shore’s wife brought the audience within the frame
of the play, here the actors break that frame and enter the world of the audience. This is a
not-so-subtle threat directed at any in the audience who might support a rebellion aimed
at placing one of Elizabeth’s rivals on the throne: Elizabeth’s rule, like Richmond’s, has
inaugurated a period of peace and prosperity in England; her assassination exposes the
country to civil war, tyranny, and conquest by the Turk or the Catholic powers on the
Continent.
As the epilogue is spoken, the Queen’s Men look around the Common Hall. They
scan the room to read the reactions of commoners in the room, straining hardest to see the
faces obscured by the pillars and in the shadowy corners past the scaffolding. They look
up to the galleries to see any glimmer of nervousness flashing across the faces of the
mayor and aldermen, who may resent this appeal for a national, Protestant identity that
undermines their own power over the commoners. The mayor and aldermen in turn look
at the Queen’s Men, with suspicion and perhaps a note of disbelief, and also scan the
commoners to see if they have been swayed by this appeal. For their part, the attention of
the commoners has for the second time been drawn to one another with suspicion,
looking around the hall this time to see which of their neighbors is loyal to Richard and
114
York’s past, and which are loyal to Elizabeth and England’s present. The moment is
passing, giving a brief glimpse into the secret thoughts of the audience. The audience
soon breaks into applause at the play’s conclusion, simultaneously giving their public
assent to the Queen’s Men’s performance and to the reign of Elizabeth. This is on one
hand an outward sign of conformity that is disruptive of any conspiracy that may exist in
the Common Hall or in York, as dissident and loyal subject respond in like manner. But
the true thoughts of the audience remain hidden. Like Lodowick, the Citizen, and
Morton, the audience are performing acceptance of a narrative and loyalty to a monarch
before her representatives. For their part, the Queen’s Men, unlike the disguised Harry
before Agincourt, are unable to entirely evade the suspicion of the audience, so they
cannot know whether the applause they receive is “poyson’d flatterie.”
Or this, anyway, is how the performance most likely concludes. But there is
another possibility. The York REED records an entry dated 24 July 1592 agreeing “That
the Quenes players shall haue iij li. vj s viij d given them forthe of the Common
Chamber” for a performance of an unspecified play at an unspecified location. The record
immediately following states:
And wheras the doores, lockes, keyes, wyndowes, bordes, benches & other
buildinges of the Common Hall are greatlye impared and hurte and diverse of the
same broken, shakne, Lowse & Ryven vp by people reparinge thither to se and
heare plays [<..>], It is theirfore nowe agreed by theis presentes That no Players
shalbe permitted to playe anye manner of playes either in the same Common Hall
or in St Anthonye Hall at anye tyme or tyme hereafter.
36

It is of course entirely speculative that the Queen’s Men played in the Common Hall in
1592, that they chose The True Tragedie, and that the record of the damage to the hall is

36
REED: York, 1:449.
115
related to this performance. While the prohibition against playing in the Common Hall
seems to have lasted until July 1596, that the Queen’s Men were the company who
performed on this date argues that they were not involved. Most likely, any performance
of The True Tragedie in York ended with polite or even vociferous, but yet ambivalent,
applause. But we might like to think that perhaps on this occasion the commoners in the
audience, feeling squeezed between the gazes of their civic masters and of representatives
of their royal master, reacted differently: order dissolves into chaos as the audience revolt
against rulers, play, and town hall alike, sending the Queen’s Men fleeing the building
and the mayor and aldermen seeking the protective shelter of Common Hall Lane.
116
Chapter Three

“Th’obseru’d of all obseruers”:
Student-Spies on the University Stage

The world of Hamlet is teeming with university students and spies. That spying pervades
the play has been noted before, but the prominence of students has received scant
attention. This connection between students and spying is worth our attention because
making many of the characters students is one of Shakespeare’s major changes from the
stories he used as sources for his play.
1
In a story with which many in Shakespeare’s
audience would have been familiar from other tellings, what is brought to the story by
populating the court with students? Although the Hamlet story itself has antecedents
stretching back at least to Saxo Grammaticus and the thirteenth century, the Denmark of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet feels in many ways like Shakespeare’s England, from the traveling
players wandering the countryside to the anxieties about the succession of the current and
future monarchs. The prominent role of students at court in Elsinore are among these
similarities: Shakespeare bringing Hamlet home from one of the “studious universities”
makes him a peculiarly English version of tragic prince of Denmark, as it was largely an
English phenomenon to have gentry and nobility educated at the universities.
2
Denmark
had, like England, become a Reformed state in the recent past.
3
Having students return

1
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, introduction to Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (London: Cengage
Learning, 2006), 70.

2
Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 64-5.

3
The Reformation in Denmark was officially implemented in 1536 by King Christian III after a struggle that
included a civil war, called the Count’s Feud or the Count’s War, from 1534–6.
117
from Wittenberg and Paris—focal points of the Reformation on the Continent—and
involved prominently in the government of the state would make them important agents
of ensuring the future of the Reformation in Denmark, just as the graduates of Cambridge
and Oxford played so prominent a role in the post-Reformation government of
Elizabethan and Jacobean England. However, students were also prominent targets of
Catholic missions, and were hence potential agents of a revolution that sought to topple
to Protestant state.
The students in Hamlet’s Denmark, like those in early modern England, not only
inhabit a world of religious and political conflict, but also play a large part in creating
that chaos. The students who descend on Elsinore from their universities to witness old
Hamlet’s funeral and Claudius’s marriage to the Gertrude are almost universally restless;
they are disruptive to their family and the state; they bring with them ghosts, quarrels,
and ultimately death and a new regime. The anxieties about students in the case of
Hamlet and Laertes necessitate their supervision; those chosen to spy upon Hamlet are
two of his friends from school, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This points to another
prominent though perhaps surprising function of students in the play, that of performing
intelligence activities in service of the state: Marcellus and Barnardo are sentinels;
Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern engage in spying. Except for Horatio, as Peter
Thomson notes, these students “have no meaningful existence outside their function as
observers. Shakespeare has created them in order to have them watch.”
4
While spying
was seen as necessary by the state, that fact made student-spies no less ambivalent, as

4
Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Theatre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 128.
118
their service was often either compelled by force or motivated by financial reward rather
than duty, and there always existed the possibility that a spy was a double agent working
for the enemy. In sharp contrast to the ideal of the withdrawn, contemplative student, the
world of Hamlet reflects the general unease about students as a source of rioting and
disorder, perhaps even sedition and rebellion, that was present in early modern England.
Furthermore, these anxieties were embedded in the English universities themselves, and
were amplified by both the importance of Cambridge and Oxford to the state and their
status as sites of social, political, and ideological conflict.
With the Reformation in England, the universities presented enormous difficulties
to an emergent nation-state that was previously tied, as were the universities themselves,
to the broader transnational Catholic community. Universities were, in Althusser’s term,
Ideological State Apparatuses central to the functioning of the early modern English
state, yet as with other ISAs they were relatively autonomous and therefore not wholly
reliable.
5
While useful to the state, they could also be sites of resistance to its aims.
Hence, the state sought to control the universities by aligning them with an emergent
English, Protestant identity and binding them to the new ruling class—much as they
sought to do with the provinces, as we saw in Chapters One and Two. Rather than simply
reform the existing colleges, new colleges were founded that would be explicitly
Reformist in character and hence sympathetic to the emerging nation-state, including
Trinity (1546) at Cambridge and Christ Church (1546) and St. John’s (1555) at Oxford.
These colleges enjoyed royal patronage along with their large endowments and often

5
See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-126.
119
superseded the colleges that were previously dominant.
6
Trinity College especially was
founded as a well-endowed, royally-backed, and explicitly Reformist institution, and
money was redirected to it from St. John’s, which was then the dominant college at
Cambridge.
7
To strengthen the bonds between the universities and the new regime, the
state became more deeply involved in the government of the universities.
8
After the break
with the Catholic Church, Henry VIII increasingly and capriciously demanded the
conformity of the universities, stunning them into a state of ready compliance.
9
In 1549,
Edward VI presented the universities with a new set of statutes to bring them under closer
control.
10
The chancellor of the universities, once elected by convocation by the
universities themselves, became by the reign of Elizabeth effectively a royal nominee
often drawn from the ranks of the Privy Council.
11
At Oxford, the position was occupied
by such luminaries as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord
Chancellor; and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. The chancellors at Cambridge
included William Cecil, Lord Burghley; Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and Robert
Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. Though not a chancellor, Sir Francis Walsingham was closely

6
Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 13.

7
James Bass Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1884), 81-6.

8
See Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, esp. 6-7 and 42-5.

9
See Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 10. He refers to the “terrorism” of the rule of Henry VIII.

10
See Charles Edward Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1927), 82-7;
and Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 109-15.

11
Penry Williams, “Elizabethan Oxford: State, Church and University,” in The History of the University of
Oxford, vol. 3, ed. James McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 401.
120
involved in both Cambridge and especially Oxford.
12
Hence, while the universities
expanded and in many ways flourished, they had become, like playing companies, reliant
on the patronage and protection of the state and the ruling class to an unprecedented
degree, with the expectation of their active unqualified support for state policies in
return.
13
These trends continued under the Stuarts.
14

Tied as they were to the English state, the universities were adapted to perform
ideological, political, and social functions in its service. Under Catholicism, the
universities were aligned with a non-English, universal community; after the break they
underwent a process of “Englishing.”
15
One of the primary functions of the universities
was the education of the clergy, and they became ideally suited to a new function: the
theory and defense of the national, Reformed church as well as of the nationalist
Protestant state.
16
The curriculum of the universities was overhauled to suit the changing
social function of the universities; in particular, the M.A. program on astronomy,
geography, and cosmography, the cornerstones of expansionist state systems, was

12
Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1925), 3:438-40. As Read points out, “On the whole Oxford fared better at
Walsingham’s hands than did his own alma mater Cambridge.”

13
See Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 250; and Claire Cross, “Oxford and the Tudor State from the
Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of Mary,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, ed. by
James McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 117.

14
The Stuarts issued royal instructions and demanded increasing conformity, often in response to
religious conflict. See V. H. H. Green, A History of Oxford University (London: Batsford, 1974), 57; and
Kenneth Fincham, “Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4,
ed. by Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 181. Both are specifically referring to Oxford, but
the situation at Cambridge would have been much the same.

15
See Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 49-51.

16
James McConica, “Elizabethan Oxford: The Collegiate Society,” in The History of the University of
Oxford, vol. 3, ed. by James McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 732.
121
intended to equip students for work in the military and diplomatic sectors.
17
In this the
universities were remarkably successful, producing the likes of Richard Hakluyt, Edmund
Spenser, Philip Sidney, William Camden, Edward Coke, John Foxe, and Richard Hooker
to serve as poets, cartographers, historians, jurists, and theologians who fashioned the
imaginative superstructure of the emerging English nation-state.
18
While the state became
increasingly involved in the government of the universities, the graduates of the
universities became increasingly involved in the government of the state. Under
Elizabeth, university graduates were prominent amongst the commoners and peers that
for the first time comprised the Privy Council.
19
By the second-half of the sixteenth
century, the universities became major instruments of overhauling the social order. While
medieval society was graduated, society now became even more sharply divided between
the “gentlemen”—from the level of prosperous yeomen on up—and the rest, the great
majority of society. While the universities were originally institutions of the education of
the poor, they increasingly became institutions for the education of the gentry. In the
process, the universities became major instruments in creating and reinforcing that social

17
Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-Industrial Britain, 1500-1700
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), argues that university curriculums do not exist in a vacuum and
instead adapt with the society of which they are part. For M.A. programs and expansionist state systems,
see David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2004), 159-60.

18
See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1994); also John Dougill, Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and
Undoing, of ‘The English Athens’ (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 33-4.

19
Stephen Budianski, Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of
Modern Espionage (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), 43. Walsingham himself was educated at King’s
College, Cambridge, before enrolling at Gray’s Inn.
122
structure.
20
Universities became so vital to the functioning of the state that they came to
be commonly referred to as the eyes of the kingdom.
21

The performance of drama at the universities played a prominent role in the
pedagogical and hence social and ideological mission of the universities.
22
Of course,
plays also provided entertainment; many plays were performed during the Christmas
season, when more affluent students could afford to travel home while poorer scholars
were forced to remain. Plays could serve as a distraction to the remaining students—
perhaps like Lucifer showing a play of the Seven Deadly Sins to a despairing Faustus.
But acting allowed students to practice Greek and Latin, along with oration and
“action”—important for future careers in service of the state.
23
Given the importance of
the universities, academic drama was not insulated from broader social and political
considerations. As with the professional stage, the university stage provoked attacks from
its opponents, including Puritans and townspeople, and subsequent defenses by its

20
See Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, esp. 33.

21
To cite just a few examples: Giles Fletcher, in his epistle “To the Reader” affixed to Christs victorie, and
triumph in Heauen, and earth, ouer, and after death (Cambridge: C. Legge, 1610), 214, calls the Island of
Britain “the very face, and beautie of all Europe, in which both true Religion is faithfully professed without
superstition, and (if on earth) true Learning sweetly flourishes without ostentation: and what are the two
eyes of this Land, but the two Universities.” John Bramhall, in The serpent salve (N.p.: n.p., 1643), 214,
warns that if England were to be subjected to the Pope “The two eyes of the Kingdome, the Universities,
shall be put out.” Edward Chamberlayne, in The second part of the present state of England (Savoy
[London]: T. N. for John Martyn, 1671), 282, says that “In the beautiful Fabrick of the Kingdom of England,
the Two Eyes are the Two Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, those Two Nursuries or Seminaries of
Learning and Religion.”

22
Theatrical performances were frequent at both universities. At Cambridge, evidence of dramatic activity
at Trinity, King’s, St. John’s, Queens’, Jesus, Christ’s, and Clare Hall colleges appears frequently in the
records; Christ Church, Magdalen, and St. John’s were the main theatrical centers at Oxford. See Boas,
University Drama in the Tudor Age, 348.

23
Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, 349-50.
123
supporters.
24
Stephen Gosson argued, “So subtill is the devill, that under the colour of
recreation in London and of exercise of learning in the Universities, by seeing of playes,
he maketh us to join with the Gentiles in their corruptions.”
25
Many university plays were
in Latin, which also drew the ire of Puritans, who saw the insistence upon Latin in the
universities, in law, and in medicine as a sinister bit of popery on the part of the ruling
elite.
26
The court also took an active, and often protective, interest in university drama:
the Privy Council provided funding for the university stage, on the occasion of royal
performances during progresses and perhaps on other occasions as well. In July 1584,
Leicester, while chancellor of Oxford, specifically exempted university plays from
prohibitions against playing:
As I...thinke the Prohibition of common Stage Players verie requisite, so would I
not have it meant thereby that the Tragedies, Comodies, and shews of Exercises
of Learning in that kind used to be set forth by Universitye men should be
forbedden, but accepting them as commendable and great furderances of Learning
do wish them in any wise to be continued at set times and increased, and the
youth of the Universitye by good meanes to be incouraged in the decent and
frequent setting fourth of them.
27

The Privy Council might even request that students bring their plays to the court, as in
December 1592, when Burghley requested they come to supply the place of the Queen’s

24
See Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, 220-51.

25
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in fiue Actions, Prouing that they are not to be suffred in a Christian
common weale, by the waye both the Cauils of Thomas Lodge, and the Play of Playes, written in their
defence, and other obiections of Players frendes, are truely set downe and directlye aunsweared. By Steph.
Gosson, Stud. Oxon (London: Thomas Gosson, [1582]); qtd in G. C. Moore Smith, College Plays Performed
in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 12.

26
Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 76.

27
Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, 89-90 and 191-2. The quotation from Leicester’s statues is on
192.
124
Men: “her Majesties owne servantes, in this time of infection, may not disport her
Highnes with theire wonted and ordinary pastimes.” On this instance, however, neither
university felt it could satisfy the request.
28

Vital as they were to the emerging nation state, bound to it by patronage and
institutional control, and yet being sites of potential conflict, the universities were
intended to be controlled, ordered environments. The university and college codes sought
to create an undergraduate that was a decorous, modest, soberly attired youth who was
confined to the college.
29
Hence, the scholarly ideal was not inherent to universities or
scholarship, but rather was fostered by the state to achieve its social and ideological ends.
The ideal of control was reinforced by the very architecture of the universities: colleges
were built in quadrangles and surrounded by walls, with the intention of keeping
townspeople out and students in. The interiors of the colleges, their libraries, halls,
chapels, even their gardens, were secluded from prying eyes beyond the walls. Of course,
the architecture of the colleges was grandiose and often beautiful. However, as Hugh
Kearney notes, “the object of the colleges was not freedom but control and to lose sight
of this fact amid the splendours of college architecture is to risk being blinded by
sentimental nostalgia.”
30

28
Qtd. in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1996),
65.

29
Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 391.

30
Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 22.
125
Likewise, theatrical performances at the universities were held in environments
that assumed order. Plays were most often staged in the college halls
31
; although their
primary purpose was for dining, these halls were multifunctional structures that offered a
controlled, hierarchical environment. Though the halls could vary quite a bit in size,
32

they shared common architectural features: They were rectangular in shape and were
divided into bays on either side, and at the upper end had a dais along with one or two
doors that granted limited access directly from the Master’s Lodge. At the lower end
were doors that allowed access for students and everyone else of lower rank; these doors
were usually separated from the body of the hall by a screens passage, which had two
openings that allowed access to the hall.
33

When a play was to be performed, the college quite literally built a theatre in the
hall. Primarily using records at Queens’ College, Cambridge, Alan Nelson has recovered
this structure. The theatres featured a stage 5-6 feet in height at the upper end of the hall,
stagehouses on either side that had openings used for entrances and exits during
performance, and galleries along the walls for elevated seating. The theatre would be

31
Alan H. Nelson, in Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464-1720
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62, lists the college halls at Cambridge that were used for
performance and are still extant—Christ’s, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Gonville and Caius, Jesus,
Magdalene, Peterhouse, Queens’, St John’s, and Trinity—and their modifications or change in function.

32
The hall at Queens College, Cambridge, is about 27 feet wide by 44 feet long from the upper end wall to
the screens, while Trinity College hall measures 40 feet wide by 85 feet long, nearly three times the area.
The hall at Christ Church College at Oxford, at 39 feet 9 inches, is nearly the identical width as Trinity
College hall, but at 114 feet 4 inches in length is a third again as long; it has no screen.

33
This description of the general features of college halls is largely taken from Nelson, Early Cambridge
Theatres, esp. 5. Information on hall architecture, dimensions, and history can also be found in Records of
Early English Drama: Cambridge, 2 vols., ed. by Alan H. Nelson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1989); and Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, 2 vols., ed. by John R. Elliott et al. (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2004).
126
erected in advance of the Christmas season, a royal visit, or other occasion during which
plays would be staged, after which the timbers would be dismantled and stored for later
use. Access to performances was controlled, and seating was hierarchical. Most
spectators, including members, students, and townspeople, entered through the screen and
depending on their rank sat in the galleries on the lower end of the hall or were located on
the floor, seated on benches or perhaps standing. Spectators of higher dignity, including
the president of the college, noblemen, doctors, and other dignitaries, entered in the upper
part of the hall and sat in galleries located near the stage. If the monarch were present,
she or he would be seated either on the stage itself or a centrally located gallery, where
she was prominently positioned to be seen as well as see.
34
Such a position made the
monarch a privileged spectator, close enough that, during a performance of Palamon and
Arcyte at Christ Church hall during her visit to Oxford in August 1566, Elizabeth was
fully audible as she interrupted the play to give candid responses and speak to the actors
and the audience.
35
As on this occasion, the plays could also exploit the theatre
architecture and the monarch’s prominent positioning for political ends: Palamon and
Arcyte ended with the Goddess forbidding the heroine from leading a virgin life, which
was met with enthusiastic applause from the entire audience. Elizabeth reportedly was

34
For college theatre architecture, see Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, esp. 16-37. According to Nelson,
Elizabeth was seated in a gallery when she attended a performance in 1564 at King’s College Chapel,
Cambridge.

35
James R. Elliott, Jr., “Drama,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, ed. by Nicholas Tyacke
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 646-7.
127

Figure 7: Architecture of the theatre in Queens’ College Hall, Cambridge. Alan
Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, 31.

128
gracious to the play’s author, one Mr. Edwardes, but upon meeting his tutor the next day
half-jokingly told him that he had not whipped Edwardes enough as a boy.
36

However, students at these performances often eluded the intended control and, as
with the professional theatre, could engage in rowdy, even violent and destructive
behavior. Colleges often had anxieties over theatrical performances, as shown in the
statutes of 1573-4 at Gonville and Caius that only approved of private performances
during the day, so as to prevent the “great influx of scholars or others” and mitigate “the
danger of crowds” accompanying public performances in the evening.
37
The records at
Cambridge and Oxford contain numerous accounts of disturbances during performances:
smoking and drinking; crushes at the doors of already-full performances causing damage
to halls, even injury and death; students attacking the stagekeepers responsible for
guarding the hall during the performance. Unwanted students from rival colleges often
attempted to enter plays, and often threw stones at hall windows when they were denied
admittance. There were even riots between rival colleges, including between Christ
Church and St. John’s at Oxford during Christmas 1607/8 and between Trinity and St.
John’s at Cambridge in February 1609/10.
38
Thomas Nashe claims that a “Shewe” made
of Richard Harvey at Peterhouse College called “Duns furens. Dick Haruey in a frensie”
so enraged the target of its satire

36
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 114.

37
Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, 75.

38
The REED: Cambridge and REED: Oxford contain many references to this rioting and disorder. Nelson,
Early Cambridge Theatres, esp. 55, 64-5, 69-71, and 74, complies many of these, and does Smith, College
Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge, 45-8. Elliott, “Drama,” 644, describes the sequence of the
riots between Christ Church and St. John’s.
129
Whereupon Dick came and broke the Colledge glasse windowes; and Doctor
Perne (being then either for himselfe of Deputie Vice-chancellour), caused him to
be fetcht in, and set in the Stockes till the Shew was ended, and a great part of the
night after.
39

The formal order of conduct published for a performance at Trinity College hall on 23
September 1629 before the Chancellor of the university and several foreign ambassadors
is revealing in the sheer litany of abuses it seeks to contain, demanding of students and
townspeople with and without the performance:
That noe tobacco be taken in the hall, nor any where else publikely: & that neither
at their standing on the Regent walke before named, nor before the Comoedy
begin, nor all the tyme thereof, any rude, and immodest exclamations be made,
nor anye humminge, hakeinge, whistlinge, hisseinge, or laughinge be vsed, nor
any stampinge, or knockinge, nor any such other uncivill, or vnschollerlike, and
boyish demeanor vppon any occasion: nor that any clapping of hands be had,
vntill the Plaudite at the end of the Comoedy, except the Chancellor, or the
Embassador, & the best of quality there, doe apparantly begin the same.
40

The students in the audience at this performance, hence, were not only seated in a way
that highlighted their inferiority to their betters, but they were also expected to be
deferential in their response to the play. Although these orders of conduct are unusually
elaborate, they are not unique. During Elizabeth’s second visit to Oxford in 1592, an
order was issued that forbid students for whom there was not space inside the theatre,
under pain of imprisonment and other punishment, from making “outcries or undecent
noyse” outside the theatre.
41

39
Thomas Nashe, Haue with you to Saffron-walden. Or, Gabriell Harueys Hunt is vp (London: Iohn Danter,
1596), N.

40
REED: Cambridge, 1:620-1, qtd. in Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, 40-1.

41
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 150-1.
130
The disorderly, often riotous and unruly behavior of students at plays was neither
isolated nor limited to the theatre. Rather, it is set against a backdrop of student perceived
by society as an ambiguous, even threatening population. Scholars were frequently
complained of as being disrespectful, materialistic, vain, drunken, disorderly, and
entitled
42
; scholars could also be violent, unlawful, and murderous, even amongst the
upper social strata, graduates, and masters of arts.
43
Wandering, begging students were
included alongside “Fencers Bearewardes Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels” and
other ‘masterless’ men in the 1572 Vagrancy Act: “all such scholars of the universities of
Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being authorized under the seal of the
said Universities...shall be...declared to be vagabonds.”
44
Students were perceived then,
quite apart from the scholarly ideal, as a rather dissolute lot.
These anxieties about students are prominently reflected in perhaps the most
famous depiction of a scholar in early modern England: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
Faustus is a vagabond of sorts and disruptive to the social order: after making his pact
with Mephistopheles, he proceeds to wander the Continent rather aimlessly, wreaking
havoc on the papal court and playing pranks on those he encounters in the emperor’s
court and in the countryside. Marlowe’s Faustus shares these associations of

42
Dr. Cauis for one voiced these complaints of students at Cambridge during his visit in 1558; see
Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 98-9. See also 390-8 for the complaints of the behavior of
students at Cambridge in the 1570s, when it had become particularly dissolute and not in keeping with
the expectations of the statutes.

43
See McConica, “Elizabethan Oxford,” 660-1.

44
Qtd. in Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, 205-6. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4:269-71,
reprints portions of the Act, but not those pertaining to students.
131
vagabondage and knavery with the historical Johann or John Faustus.
45
This disorderly
behavior of the student population has its roots, in part, in class conflict: students
perceived themselves as being underemployed and exploited by the economic system,
forced as they were to choose between either the service of often miserly patrons or civic
or church positions they saw as beneath their education and status. We can glimpse this
social conflict in the interaction between the Knight and Faustus: on the one hand, a
representative of a nobility that is contemptuous of both scholars and scholarly
knowledge (albeit knowledge that in this instance is also demonic in origin); on the other,
a representative of a scholarly class that is presumptuous enough to “abuse a Gentleman”
and who feels that its learning and abilities do not receive the appropriate amount of
respect from the nobility.
46
But in Faustus we can also see a scholar searching for a more
munificent patron: having found Wittenberg miserly in recompense to his learning at the
university, he sets off to the courts of the Emperor and the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt.
Even with this demonic knowledge, however, Faustus finds himself, like the graduates of
Cambridge and Oxford, unable to escape the system of patronage itself.
As scholarly knowledge did not allow them to adequately advance in a social
order that the universities helped reinforce, many students were not only discontent with

45
See David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, introduction to Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616),
by Christopher Marlowe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 4.

46
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus. As it hath bene Acted by the Right
Honorable the Earle of Nottingham his seruants (London: V. S., for Thomas Bushell, 1604), E1. Future
references are cited in the text. I have also referred to Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-
Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1993).
132
their lot in society but also deeply skeptical of what they were being taught in the
universities. Faustus’s quest for demonic knowledge has its origins in such discontent:
Sweete Anulatikes tis though hast rauisht me,
Bene disserere est finis logicis.
Is, to dispute well, Logickes chiefest end
Affoords this Art no greater myracle. (A2
v
)

Faustus’s complaint is that scholarly dispute is an end in itself. Indeed, university
disputations in which students were required to participate and might be expected to
argue either side were often criticized as pointless exercises in logical gymnastics of the
sort parodied in the following scene, in which Wagner “disputes” with the two scholars
about Faustus’s whereabouts.
47
However, such disputations could breed skepticism, even
a dangerous moral relativism, as they seemingly have in Faustus. Along with logic,
Faustus rejects philosophy, law, physic, and divinity; in the process, he is not only
rejecting the university curriculum suited to the state’s ends, but also the ideal of the
scholar who sacrifices social position and material wealth in favor of knowledge itself—
an ideal created by the state in part because it makes the student readily-exploitable in its
service. More dangerously, Faustus rejects the cosmology taught by the universities: the
“diuine Astrologie” (C3) Mephistopheles presents him with is identical to the Ptolemaic
model endorsed by the universities. Faustus feels “deceiued” by Mephistopheles’s
explanations (C2
v
) and contemptuously discards them: “Tush, these slender trifles
Wagner can decide, / Hath Mephastophilus no greater skill?” (C3).

47
As has been noted numerous times, Faustus’s scholarship is shoddy. Rather than Aristotle, he is quoting
Ramus, the logician admired by some—particularly by many Puritans, including the Puritan Stupido in the
Pilgrimage to Parnassus—but derided by others for his oversimplification of Aristotle.
133
Most dangerously of all, of course, Faustus is skeptical of religion. While he
abjures Christ and sells his soul to Lucifer, Faustus’s tragedy lies as much his remaining
religiously ambiguous throughout the play. He flirts with atheism and thinks “hell’s a
fable” (C2) (and perhaps, but not necessarily, heaven as well), but his use of ceremony
and Latin in his conjuring has Catholic resonances. And yet, he travels to Rome
specifically to abuse the Pope—even attaining the status of something of a Protestant
anti-hero in the B-Text.
48
Christopher Marlowe also carried many of these associations,
as we can see from the infamous Baines Note. According to Richard Baines:
He affirmeth that Moyses was but a Juggler...That the firste beginnynge of
Religion was only to keep men in awe...That Christ was a Bastard and his mother
dishonest...That if ther be any God or any good Religion, then it is in the Papists
because the service of God is performed with more ceremonyes, as elevation of
the masse, organs, singinge men, shaven crownes, &c. That all protestantes ar
hipocriticall asses...That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christe, that he
leaned alwayes in his bosum, that he used him as the synners of Sodoma...That
the Angell Gabriell was bawde to the holy Ghoste because he brought the
salutation to Marie.
49

The charges against Marlowe include a vague association of atheism, Catholicism, as
well as other heretical views. Marlowe’s religious ambiguity, like that of many students
in early modern England, was seen as potentially seditious to the Protestant state. The
earlier dependence of Cambridge and Oxford on the Catholic Church made them, like
Faustus’s Wittenberg, not only focal points of the Reformation but also sites of its

48
Clifford Davidson, “Doctor Faustus at Rome,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 9 (1969); qtd in
Bevington and Rasmussen, introduction, 47.

49
BL Harley MS.6848 ff.185-6. Constance Brown Kuriyama transcribes the Baines Note in Christopher
Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 226-8.
134
contestation.
50
As we have seen, this is what underlies many of the efforts to draw the
universities closer to the state (including during the return to Catholicism under Mary).
Yet despite this increasingly close connection, the universities maintained a relative
degree of intellectual freedom important to their functioning—freedom which also
encouraged experimentation with unorthodox, even potentially seditious ideas.
51
The
religious character of both universities remained mixed amongst Catholics, Protestants,
and Puritans, with Catholics being more prominent at Oxford, and Puritans being more
prominent at Cambridge.
52
Each alternative to the mainline Protestant establishment
under Elizabeth and James presented problems, as dissent to the state religion was dissent
to the state itself.
The presence of Catholics made both universities places where England’s enemies
abroad attempted to foment rebellion. English recusants fled to Catholic universities at
Louvain and Douai and English colleges at Rome and Rheims, sometimes returning with

50
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 60, argues that the sweeping changes of the Reformation
were likely felt more strongly by the universities than most: no institutions at the time depended more on
the Church, as none owed more to the special jurisdiction and privileged immunities secured by the
clergy.

51
For the role of university education in encouraging skepticism, particularly in terms of religion and
resulting in atheism and conflict between Conformists and Puritans at Marlowe’s Cambridge, see Riggs,
The World of Christopher Marlowe, 90-6.

52
While there is dissent, this is the general consensus amongst university historians, including Mallet, A
History of the University of Oxford; Mullinger, The University of Cambridge; Jennifer Loach, “Reformation
Controversies,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, ed. by James McConica (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986), 363-96; and Nicholas Tyacke, “Religious Controversy,” in The History of the
University of Oxford, vol. 4, ed. by Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 569-619. Curtis,
Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 191, challenges this paradigm, as does Williams, “Elizabethan
Oxford,” 422, who argues that “Oxford, then, was scarcely less puritan than Cambridge in the reign of
Elizabeth.”
135
the Jesuit missions.
53
The Jesuits also targeted the universities directly: they had
established a recusant network at Cambridge as early as 1581, and they insinuated
themselves into the colleges at both universities, sometimes as scholars or gentleman
commoners.
54
Most famously, Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion studied at Oxford,
the former twice taking the Oath of Supremacy, the latter becoming friends of both
Leicester and Cecil before crossing the sea and then returning and ultimately being
executed in service of the Jesuit mission.
55
Along with Campion, Gregory Martin, James
Fenn, and Thomas Stapleton were amongst the Catholics of Marian Oxford that later
went on to play such a prominent role in recusant life that the Privy Council complained
in 1581 that “most of the seminarie Priests which at this present disturbe this Churche
have ben heretofore schollers of that Universitie.”
56
Francis Throckmorton of Hart Hall,
Oxford, was amongst the recusants who headed to the Continent and were ultimately
executed after their return to England in connection with plots, advanced by the Duke of
Guise, to overthrow Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne.
57
When the Catholic threat
subsided, Puritans who were in equal disregard of the law replaced Catholics as the
object of attention, as their efforts to achieve power at the universities could lead to

53
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 135.

54
Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, 140-1.

55
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 136-7.

56
Loach, “Reformation Controversies,” 78.

57
John Bossy, Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 84-
5; and Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, 141. As Riggs, 130, notes, “The seminary at Rheims
received protection and support from the Duke of Guise. The Duke, who would become the lurid villain of
Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, shamelessly used the English College to advance the political fortunes of his
cousin Mary, Queen of Scots,” recalled in the play at 21.105-8.
136
changes in university studies and organization.
58
Puritanism could even create a backlash
amongst those who deplored its spread at the universities, leading some to become
Catholic or voice Catholic sympathies as a gesture of defiance and dissent.
59
This could
extend to things that carried a whiff of Puritanism, including the austere, rigorously
disciplined life at the universities. Students were not seen as only a riotous, wandering,
discontented lot: they were seen as a potential source of rebellion.
The universities were hence subject under successive regimes to purges and
counter-purges attempting to weed out Catholics or Protestants.
60
Under Mary the purges
of Protestants included spectacular executions. Under Edward and Elizabeth, the purges
of Catholics took a more subtle tact involving the use of surveillance. Both continued the
policy of visitations to which Henry VIII had subjected the universities in an effort to
ensure ideological conformity
61
; Elizabeth added to this the Oath of Supremacy.
However, neither approach was foolproof and invited evasion as much as conformity.
62

One letter writer to Burghley complains of those who outwardly conform and “come to

58
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 137-8, and Green, A History of Oxford University, 56.

59
Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt Brace and
Company, 1992), 95.

60
For the purges of Protestants under Mary, see Green, A History of Oxford University, 45; for Elizabeth’s
purges of Catholics from her ascension to well into the 1570s and beyond, see Nicholas Tyacke,
introduction to The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1-24.

61
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, esp. 88-90; also James McConica, “The Rise of the
Undergraduate College,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3, ed. by James McConica (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986), 50 and 54.

62
Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 104-7.
137
church,” but in secret “do much harm in corrupting of youth” and “lurk in colleges, more
in number and more dangerous than is commonly thought.”
63

Students were also subjected to more generalized surveillance regimes. According
to James McConica, a collegiate society was created “in which the principles of constant
surveillance, delation erected into a principle of government, and extended application of
corporal punishment were quite visible.”
64
The colleges founded before the Tudors, such
as New College and Magdalen at Oxford, underwent periodic scrutiny conducted by the
head of the house and one of the fellows, which was to be an unsparing examination both
of the general society as well as the conduct and performance of each individual scholar.
This scrutiny included the reading of the statutes to remind everyone of their obligations.
Students were also subject to secret accusations, and were required to respond to the
charges of their unknown accusers. Efforts were made to mandate the registration of
students at the colleges and order all scholars living in the towns to move into colleges
and halls. Confined within the walls, the entire college, including fellows, disciples,
ministers, and servants, were subject to the fearful obedience to the president of the
college. Each student was placed under the supervision of their tutor, even sharing a room
with him, and attendance at lectures became more closely scrutinized. The B.A. course
regimented each day,
65
which enabled students to be closely and constantly watched by
the senior members, the president, vice-president, and the deans by ordering the

63
Qtd. in Nicholl, The Reckoning, 96-8.

64
McConica, “Elizabethan Oxford,” 654.

65
For a description of the day-to-day experience of a university student during Marlowe’s time at
Cambridge, see Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, 78-9.
138
movement of students in space and time. The movement of students beyond the college
walls was likewise closely restricted: undergraduates were required to have special
license of their dean or logic lecturer to venture into the town alone and were prohibited
from entering the homes of laypersons; recreation in the fields could only be taken in
groups of three who were expected to come and go as a group—and hence survey each
other. Fellows could be absent for no more than forty days, disciples and probationers for
no more than twenty. Even the simple dress of students was strictly prescribed,
particularly when leaving the college walls so as to make them stand out and clearly
distinguish them from townsmen.
66
These restrictions on dress must have chafed many
students.
67
Faustus promises: “Ile haue them fill the publike schooles with skill [for
“silks”], / Wherewith the students shalbe brauely clad” (A3
v
). Faustus dislikes the dress
codes as an outward sign of the poverty imposed upon scholars, but such dress made
students easy to identify and therefore watch. Surveillance at universities was perhaps
most fully brought to bear on potential dissidents: children of politically significant
recusant parents were brought to Oxford so that they could be reeducated within the
established church.
68

66
For the efforts at confining, surveying, and restricting the movement and even dress of students, see
McConica, “The Rise of the Undergraduate College,” 48-51; and McConica, “Elizabethan Oxford,” 652-7.
See also Dougill, Oxford in English Literature, 35.

67
See Mullinger, The University of Cambridge, 389-90; also John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of
Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 1:51-3.

68
Steven Porter, “University and Society,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, ed. by Nicholas
Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 27, citing John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850
(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975), 162; also Lawrence Stone, “Social Control and Intellectual
Excellence: Oxford and Edinburgh 1560-1983,” in Universities, Society, and the Future, ed. by Nicholas
Phillipson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 3-30.
139
Faustus likewise can be understood as a student under surveillance. At
Wittenberg, Faustus’s religious questioning marks him as a potential threat (and one that
is, at times, quite literally invisible to those around him). The surveillance to which he is
subject takes a divine form, in the figures of the Good and Evil Angels seemingly
watching his every move and ready to appear when a moment of crisis arises, as well as
the devils that appear in order to threaten him whenever he waivers in his commitment to
Lucifer. At the moment at which Faustus was being written and performed, the
discourses of angelic intelligences and divine vision and intellection were being
subsumed into the new discourse of “intelligence” that included the “eyes” of statecraft,
the “Argus eyes” of spies and “privy intelligences.” Hence, this divine surveillance could
also double for the surveillance of suspicious eyes of both crown and Continental
Catholic powers watching religiously ambiguous students at universities like Wittenberg,
Cambridge, and Oxford.
69

The surveillance of students included the use of spies, often recruited from
amongst their own ranks. In the absence of either a standing army to fight in or
employment opportunities based on merit rather than patronage, students were amongst
the groups who were susceptible to being recruited for intelligence work.
70
Malcontent
students, and especially those in which economic need was combined with religious

69
Patricia Parker, “Othello and Hamlet,” 76. Parker argues that this shift has occurred by the moment of
Hamlet, as seen in Hamlet’s response to Claudius that “I see a Cherub that sees them” (K2
v
). If this shift
was not complete when Doctor Faustus as originally written, it was well underway. It is also worth noting
that the date of publication of the A-Text of Doctor Faustus is 1604, which is after the composition of
Hamlet.

70
Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services, 1570-1603 (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1992), 46-7.
140
skepticism or Catholic sympathies, were potential recruits for the Catholic powers
seeking the overthrow of the Protestant state to spy on their fellow students. But the
marginalization of scholars also made them highly exploitable by the state in the
intelligence networks operated by Walsingham, Leicester, Burghley, Essex, and
Salisbury who, as we noted above, were already heavily involved in the operation of the
universities. Scholars were recruited to perform counter-intelligence on the Jesuits and
other recusants, closet papists, and prospective converts to Catholicism, amongst other
tasks.
71
To draw merely from the ranks of poets, William Fowler, Anthony Munday,
William Vaughn, Matthew Roydon, and, most famously, Christopher Marlowe are
amongst the university students suspected of spying for the government.
72
John Bossy
has even argued that as prominent a scholar as Giordano Bruno was a spy for
Walsingham working in the household of the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau,
Seigneur de Mauvissière, who was in residence at Salisbury Court, and helped disrupt the
Throckmorton plot.
73

Faustus, too, not only reflects the anxiety about students and is the target of divine
surveillance, but is also a spy himself. As John Michael Archer argues, the play traces
Faustus’s course, and perhaps Marlowe’s, from university student to spy. Faustus’s
pursuit of magic—another secretive activity that, like spying, involves hidden knowledge
and cryptic writings—stands for both scholarship and spying. Faustus desires to have the

71
Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, 140-1.

72
See Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, esp. 1:83-4. The Scottish poet William
Fowler spied for Walsingham; Anthony Munday was an intelligence agent watching English Catholics at
Rome; William Vaughan spied in Italy; Matthew Roydon went to Scotland.

73
See John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
141
spirits, among other things, “reade mee straunge philosophie, / And tell the secrets of all
forraine kings” (A3
v
); he goes to Rome to spy upon the pope in his privy chamber, and he
realizes the spy’s fantasy of becoming “inuisible, to do what I please vnseene of any
whilst I stay in Rome” (D2).
74
Later, Faustus heads to the court of the Holy Roman
Emperor and of the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt. In a sense, Faustus is, like we saw in
Chapter One with the Chorus in Henry V, facilitating spying and surveillance on the
audience’s behalf: while few will travel to the Continent, let alone let alone its centers of
power, Faustus gives the audience a glimpse into the courts and privy chambers of the
powerful.
The surveillance of students extended to their attendance at theatrical
performances, which is unsurprising given their potentially violent and destructive
behavior on these occasions as well. As with the universities in general, theatrical
performances presented not only the threat of a potentially unruly student population, but
an architecture useful for the surveillance of that population. By being seated above the
students, spectators of higher rank—and especially the monarch, if present—were placed
at ideal vantage points from which to see not only the performance but also to survey the
audience; in the monarch’s case, she or he was also placed in an ideal place to be seen by
the audience, making everyone aware of her or his watchful gaze.
75
Along with the

74
John Michal Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 72-3.

75
Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, is again the best source for information on the materials,
construction, labor, and practices involved in transforming college halls (and other spaces, including
chapels and churches) into performance spaces. We have much more information for the construction of
theatres in college halls for Cambridge than we do for Oxford; as the editors of the REED: Oxford volume,
142
seating arrangements, college authorities exploited the opportunities for crowd control
presented by the architecture of the halls, including the limited entrances supplemented in
some cases by secret passages and additional entrances constructed specifically for a
performance. These areas were manned by a network of students acting as doorkeepers,
gatekeepers, stairkeepers, keepers of passages, and most visibly, stagekeepers dressed in
light defensive guard, including visors, and carrying torches useful both for guiding
audience members through dim passages and as weapons. Predictably, of course,
stagekeepers so attired often succeeded only in provoking the very violence they sought
to forestall. Watchmen were also employed to keep an eye on the hall windows during a
performance, and presumably also the students within and without the hall who might be
responsible for breaking them.
76
In such an environment students at a performance,
particularly those watching the performance from the floor, could not help but be aware
of being the focal point of an architecture, a security plan, and eyes watching them from
all sides, including eyes that they could not see from their vantage point, but who could
surely see them.
A performance of Club Hall in 1599 at Clare Hall, Cambridge, illustrates one of
the possibilities for control offered by this environment. The play was a satire of
townspeople and especially prominent civic officials. The college made a point of

2:608, note, “For want of sufficiently detailed evidence, perhaps the only way to reconstruct a typical
Oxford college theatre is to assume a substantial similarity to the typical academic theatre at Cambridge.”

76
Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, compiles references to the riotous and disorderly behavior of
spectators and especially students, as well as the security plans enacted by colleges in response to that
behavior and threats of vandalism, in the REED: Cambridge, including 1:36, 1:44, 1:55, 1:59-60, 1:69-70,
1:87, 1:115, and 1:140-1. Smith, College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge, 46-8, also records
some of these.
143
inviting townspeople to the performance, including the mayor, his associates, and their
wives—which in itself should have put the townspeople on their guard. As Thomas Fuller
describes the scene,
A convenient place was assigned to the Towns-folk (rivetted in with Schollars on
all sides) where they might see and be seen. Here they did behold themselves in
their own best cloathes (which the Schollars had borrowed) so livelily personated,
their habits, gestures, language, lieger-jests, and expressions, that it was hard to
decide which was the true Townsman, whether he that sat by, or he who acted on
the Stage. Sit still they could not from chafing, go out they could not for
crowding, but impatiently patient were fain to attend till dismissed at the end of
the Comedy.
77

Hence, while performances in college theatres could provoke riot and disorder, they
could also make audience members squirm under the scrutiny of the performers and the
surrounding spectators. However, more often than not it was the students rather than
townspeople who were the objects of suspicion in the theatre and hemmed in on all sides.
The plays performed and written for this environment often show an awareness of
these conditions and exploit them. The three Parnassus plays, written by students at St.
John’s College, Cambridge, and presumably performed in the college hall, are
particularly adept at this. The first play in the trilogy, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, is a
fairly innocuous affair. It concerns two students, Philomusus and Studioso, who
undertake a pilgrimage to Parnassus, which sometimes represents the Bachelor of Arts
degree, sometimes Cambridge University, and sometimes both. The play opens with the
aged Consiliodorus giving his son Philomusus and his nephew Studioso advice as they
are about to embark on their journey: “Let schollers be as thriftie as they maye, / They

77
Thomas Fuller, History of the University of Cambridge (London: n.p., 1655), qtd. in Boas, University
Drama in the Tudor Age, 330-1; also Graham Chainey, A Literary History of Cambridge (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1986), 31.
144
will be poore ere theire last dyinge daye. / Learninge and pouertie will euer kiss.”
78

Consiliodorus counsels them to work industriously, avoid flatterers, shirk pleasures, and
not expect financial reward, as Parnassus is an end in itself. The “beardless” Philomusus
and Studioso have a healthy respect for the wisdom of old age (“Counsell coms kindlie
from a heade thats graye” (1.33)) and move willingly from the tutelage of (i.e.,
submission to and supervision by) one old man to that of the grey heads at Cambridge.
The play, then, is a useful glimpse into the ideologies of scholarship and
patriarchy that allow the universities to function, and to an extent can be seen as
upholding those ideologies. Over the course of their pilgrimage, Philomusus and Studioso
must withstand the perils of the lands of Logique, Rhetorique, Poetrie, and Philosophie.
They encounter Madido, who is critical of the scholarly ethos and the violence belying it,
of “schoolmaisters that take passingers & sit all day whippinge pence out of there tayls;
these men tooke mee prisoner, & put to death at leaste three hundred rodes ypon my
backe” (2.232-5). Next they encounter Stupido, an anti-intellectual Puritan who calls
learning a “popish ornament” but expresses a fondness of Marprelate tracts, unauthorized
catechisms, and Ramus—the logician whose quotation is substituted for Aristotle in
Faustus’s opening soliloquy. The anti-intellectualism of Puritans like Stupido was the
bitter expression of a sect that sought to redefine society as one in which godliness rather
than gentlemanly style was the criterion.
79
While Faustus renounces Ramus, the
“pulinge/plodding puritane” Stupido’s embracing of Ramus is potentially a renunciation

78
The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. by J. B. Leishman (London: Nicholson and
Watson, 1949), 1.74-6. Future references are cited in the text.

79
Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 76.
145
not only of the universities but of the entire religious and social system in England. As
Kearney notes:
Ramism was thus something more than an educational movement concerned with
reforming the curriculum and teaching methods. Its sponsors, its implications, its
general background had radical overtones, and the appearance of Ramism in the
curriculum or in a student’s notes is tantamount to finding revolutionary doctrines
being taught in a religious seminary.
80

After encountering Stupido, Philomusus and Studioso complete their pilgrimage
by first resisting Amoretto, a lover of Ovid, and finally Ingenioso, who attacks the
ideology of the self-denying scholar that is useful for producing an easily-exploitable
population of scholars:
Ingenioso: Come not there [Parnassus], seeke for pouertie noe further, its too farr
to goe to Parnassus to fetche repentance.
Philomusus: Though I foreknowe that doultes possess the goulde,
Yet my intended pilgrimage Ile houlde.
Studioso: Within Parnassus swells all sweet contente,
Nor care I for those excrementes of earth
Ingenioso: Call youe gold and siluer the excrementes of earth? If those be
excrements, I am the cleanest man vpon the earth, for I seldome sweate
goulde. (5.591-600)

The play is not entirely unproblematic: as with other pilgrimages, Philomusus and
Studios must walk a straight and narrow line, this time between the Amorettos and
Ingeniosos on one side, whose critique of the austere and self-sacrificing ideal of
scholarship could be tinged with Catholic sympathies, and the Stupidos on the other side,
whose challenge to university curriculum has clear Puritan leanings. Furthermore, after
each test one of the pilgrims confesses to being nearly swayed, and their final rejection of
each tempter is not depicted onstage, but rather takes place offstage, in the space between

80
Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen, 53.
146
acts. Nevertheless, Philomusus and Studioso ultimately hold firm to their ideals, and the
play concludes as the two students arrive at Parnassus, having commenced in their B.A.
With the First and Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, however, the theme
of the Pilgrimage appears to have been hijacked by another playwright writing in a much
more satirical vein.
81
The First Return engages in a conceit in which the students
standing on the floor and under supervision at the performance are initially mocked for
their condition. Yet, as the play progresses it attempts to elicit sympathy for them,
potentially to subversive ends. As the play opens, the Prologue cannot even get his first
word in his address to the audience—“gentlemen”—out of his mouth before being
interrupted by the Stagekeeper. Stagekeepers, you will recall, were responsible not only
for the management of plays but also for controlling students in the audience; this
stagekeeper now apparently feels the need to control a student onstage.
82
The
Stagekeeper interrupts for two reasons. First, he objects to the flattery in which he
believes the Prologue is about to engage:
Howe, gentle saye youe, cringinge parasite?
That scrapinge legg, that doppinge curtisie,
That fawninge bowe, those sycophants smoothe tearmes
Gained our stage muche fauoure, did they not?
83

81
On the authorship of the Parnassus plays, see J. B. Leishman, introduction to The Three Parnassus Plays
(London: Nicholson and Watson, 1949), 26-34. He concludes that the three plays are most likely the work
of two authors, one who wrote Pilgrimage and a second who wrote the First and Second Returns.

82
The Stagekeeper’s interruption of the Prologue is a gag that recalls that of a play written by a former
university student, Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament, in which Will Summers refuses to
vacate the stage after delivering his prologue and instead remains onstage to mock the rest of the play.
See Thomas Nashe, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed.
by J. B. Steane (New York: Penguin, 1985), 146-207.

83
The Return from Parnassus, Part 1, in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. by J. B. Leishman (London:
Nicholson and Watson, 1949), 1-4. Future references are cited in the text.
147
More immediately, the Stagekeeper does not believe the audience is worthy of such terms
as “gentle”:
Sirra be gone, you play noe prologue here,
Call noe rude hearer gentle, debonaire.
Wele spende no flatteringe on the carpinge croude,
Nor with gold tearmes make each rude dullard proude. (14-7)

The scene achieves its comedy by exploiting the architecture of the theatre. The
Prologue, looking above the stage, intends to direct his address to the gentlemen and
university officials seated there. The Stagekeeper directs his insults to the groundling
students below, directing with it the gaze of their superiors seated above. While comedic,
this moment also calls attention to the flattery the students in the play and in the audience
will need to earn their livelihoods; it also calls attention to the inherent dishonesty of the
flattery that is at the core of the relationship of students with their patrons and employers.
As the play progresses, students are represented as being a potentially dangerous
group: as they flee Cambridge at the start of the second act they lack the money to settle
their debts with the Draper, Tayler, and Tapster of the town, and they proceed to wander
the country like vagabonds, in and out of employment. The satire of the play is driven in
part by the scholars’ overstating their poverty while being greedy in their expectations.
Ingenioso complains of one patron’s meager reward: “while I stood by dreaminge of the
goulde of India: he drew mee out twoo leane faces, gaue mee fidlers wages, and dismiste
mee” (1.1.368-70). Studioso laments that “the worlde is badd, and wee schollers are
ordayned to be beggars” (1.1.371-2) and looks forward to day “When schollers weare noe
baser liuorie / Nor spend there dayes in seruile slauerie” (2.1.765-6). The scholars appear
ignorant of the truly destitute in society who are much worse off than they are. They
148
compare their own labor to “seruile slauerie” while desiring status and material goods, to
which they feel entitled because of their scholarly pursuits. In short, they become
embodiments of the Puritan critique of the universities.
However, this satire also contains a social critique that is sympathetic to the social
and economic position into which scholars are thrust as they leave the universities,
having to perform the same demeaning and disingenuous maneuvers as the Prologue in
order to scrape together a livelihood. Only the absurd Luxurio, a possible stand-in for
Gabriel Harvey, seems to be contented with his lot, writing ballads for his boy to perform
and comparing himself to Homer. The rest of the students feel like Studioso: cozened by
the arts (and the ideology of scholarship), which in exchange for their youth and many
hungry days and sleepless nights “onlie helps our fortunes to there waine” (1.1.86-95).
Ingenioso, a Nashe-like figure whose critiques of the poverty and exploitation of scholars
in the Pilgrimmage are shown to be true, must endure philistine and miserly patrons and
eventually turns to the more lucrative but socially ambivalent profession of pamphlet
writer. He and Luxurio frequently compare their writings to bodily waste, and in a sense
they are: pamphlets are not intended to be productive, but rather are written quickly for
immediate consumption and are soon discarded. Studioso and Philomusus are forced to
find employment that they see as below their standing: Philomusus as a sexton and clerk
working for and exploited by the illiterate Perceual, Studioso as a tutor to the awful, dull
son of the Mincks family. Their lot is so poor that Consilidorus, their father and uncle, is
worried that he will not be able to rely on his son’s and nephew’s support in his old age.
149
As the play concludes, Ingenioso resolves to remain in England, attempting to
make a living on his wit and his pamphlets. But Studioso and Philomusus set their sights
abroad:
Studioso: To Rome or Rhems Ile hye, led on by fate.
Where I will ende my dayes, or mende my state.
Philomusus: And soe will I; heard hearted clyme farewell,
In regions farr Ile thy vnkindness tell. (5.3.1560-3)

The effect of this moment in the college hall is startling. Despite its satire of students, the
play has offered a largely sympathetic portrayal of the scholars, only to pull the rug out
from under the audience at the end. Both Rome and Rheims had colleges for English
Catholics; both were sites of intrigue that actively plotted rebellions to overthrow
Elizabeth and reestablish Catholicism in England. Many in the audience, particularly the
students, would sympathize with the social and economic plight that drives Philomusus
and Studioso abroad. Some in the audience likely knew of students, perhaps themselves,
who had gone abroad, perhaps on government service, perhaps because of Catholic
sympathies. Most were likely aware of the rumors concerning the potentially duplicitous
activities of another Cambridge graduate, Christopher Marlowe, in Rheims. The exact
intentions of Studioso and Philomusus are unclear, perhaps even to themselves; at the
very least, they are seeing if a different social order is more kind to scholars and
threatening to give England’s Catholic enemies abroad intelligence about England’s
unkindness to its own.
As this moment settles upon the hall, the play ends with a request from Ingenioso,
Philomusus, and Studioso:

150
Ingenioso: What euer schollers
Studioso: discontented be
Philomusus: Lett none but them
All: giue vs a Plaudite. (5.3.1570-1)

Although the play is a satire, there is very real tension in the hall at this moment.
84
Do the
three receive applause? From whom? The three have asked for applause exclusively from
scholars in the audience who are similarly discontented with their lots—perhaps scholars
who, like them, are considering seeking better fortunes abroad. One cannot applaud
privately; it is an ostentatious, public act. The three students onstage are in effect asking
malcontents in the audience to out themselves in full view of their fellow students as well
as college and university authorities. Their appeal may be met with total silence, but this
is an unlikely violation of theatrical decorum. If their appeal elicits a mixed response, it
has the effect of drawing a veritable line through the audience. Of course, the most likely
result is that performers succeed in eliciting applause from the vast majority of the
audience, but if so, that applause shifts the ambiguity of the student onto the entire
audience. While applause is public, the underlying motive of each audience member’s
applause is not. Is one applauding the actors, but not the play? This on one hand would be
a type of complicity, but it would also be an act of flattery. Is one applauding to
commiserate in scholarly discontent? Or, is one’s applause a renunciation of the current
social order? We might imagine a nervous edge to the conclusion of the comedy, the

84
Leishman, introduction, 49-50, argues, “One may, perhaps, even go so far as to declare that, in what
has commonly been called formal satire, we have...one more example of the Middle Ages re-acting and
re-asserting themselves against the Renaissance, protesting, not merely against fashions brought in from
overseas, but also against the first consequences of the rise of Capitalism—against that vast exploitation
of the unfortunate by all manner of unscrupulous speculators which the decay of the old order and the
relation of old prohibitions had made possible. Doubtless, too, the scholar’s eye for public abuses had
been sharpened by personal disappointment and by a more sober estimate of his own prospects of
advancement.”
151
audiences’ eyes flickering over one another as they applaud, attempting to read their
fellows’ thoughts. The students on the floor particularly must be hyperaware of the gaze
of mistrusting college authorities looking down on them from above and of townspeople
in their midst; and of the armed but outnumbered stagekeepers ready for the first sign of
trouble.
The Second Return begins by diffusing the immediate threat posed by the end of
the First Return. Philomusus and Studioso find Rome or Rheims no more generous, and
indeed the Catholic parts of the Continent treat their scholars much the same: in the
Prologue, Momus relates how “These same Philomusus and Studioso haue beene
followed with a whip and a verse like a Couple of Vagabonds through England and
Italy.”
85
Of course, this does not dismiss the critique of the earlier play; it merely
suggests that Protestant England and Catholic Italy are equivalent. The space between the
performances of the two plays, the year that has elapsed in which both the satire and
potentially seditious conclusion of the First Return has hung in the firmament, is also
intriguing. The Prologue to The Second Return reminds the audience of that fact, in case
anyone has forgotten. Momus continues the Prologue by telling the audience that
The Pilgrimage to Pernassus, and the returne from Pernassus, haue stood the
honest Stagekeepers in many a Crownes expence for linckes and vizardes:
purchas’d [many] a Sophister a knock with a clubbe, hindred the buttlers box, and
emptied the Colledge barrells. (38-42)

Although this is likely a joke, or at least an exaggeration of any disturbances caused at
the performance of the previous play, there is at least the suggestion that the earlier satire

85
The Return from Parnassus, Part 2, in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. by J. B. Leishman (London:
Nicholson and Watson, 1949), 36-8. Future references are cited in the text.
152
of the exploitation of scholars was met with drunkenness, violence, and rioting by an
audience sympathetic to the plight of the scholars onstage. In the Second Return,
Philomusus and Studioso have returned to England, but having given up finding a
legitimate place in the social order, they resolve to seek employment as “Cony-catchers,
Baudes, or any thing, so we may rub out” (1.4.423-4). First, aided by the smattering of
French they picked up in Rheims, they pretend to be a French physician and his man but
receive only a groat for their services. Later, they attempt careers as actors for the public
stage and then as fiddlers, effectively justifying the inclusion of scholars amongst other
miscreants in the Vagabond acts. As the play concludes, the scholars renounce society
once again, this time to become shepherds on the downs of Kent—a rejection that, while
in favor of a bucolic ideal rather than a potentially seditious alternative, is in its own way
no less revolutionary. (Unless we read this as a movement out of a university play and
into a mystery play like The Second Shepherd’s Play, in which case, as we saw in
Chapter One, this is a revolutionary move.)
The anxieties about students in early modern England and in their onstage
representations in Doctor Faustus and the Parnassus plays highlight the anxious presence
of students in Hamlet. Hamlet was primarily staged at the Globe, but if we are to believe
the claims of the First Folio’s title page it was also, like the Parnassus plays, staged
before audiences of university students at both Oxford and Cambridge.
86
Although the
validity of this claim is uncertain, it is intriguing because Hamlet shares with the

86
Frederick S. Boas, Shakespeare and the Universities and other Studies in Elizabethan Drama (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1923); Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies; Mallet, A History of the University of
Oxford; and the REED: Cambridge all discuss the inconclusive evidence as to whether Hamlet was staged
in Cambridge and, if so, if the performance was put on at the University or in the town.
153
Parnassus plays a portrayal of students as ambiguous, potentially threatening figures. As
they leave their universities and descend on Denmark for the funeral of old Hamlet and
the marriage of the Claudius with Gertrude, the students are often restless and transient,
and they proceed to wreak havoc: they are rude, quarrelsome, violent, even murderous.
Some, like Hamlet, share the feeling of the students in the Parnassus plays that they
“lacke aduauncement.”
87
Unsurprisingly, this likewise makes them potential spies; rather
than going to Rome or Rheims, some of the students in Hamlet are exploited or
compelled by the state to spy in its service. But this also makes students objects of
suspicion and hence targets of spying. Above all else it is Hamlet, the student returned
from Wittenberg, who occupies and exploits his position as both the protagonist and
central perceiver of the play as well as the central object of the suspicious gaze of
everyone in the play and in the audience. The ambiguity of Hamlet’s character, which
makes it so difficult for other characters and the audience to discern his true thoughts and
intentions, is a trait he shares with the other students in the play.

87
William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke. By William Shakespeare.
Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect
Coppie (London: I. R. for N. L., 1604), H4. Future references are cited in the text. I have also referred to
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Cengage Learning, 2006);
and also William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New
York: Norton, 1997), 1659-1759.
154

Figure 8: Title page of the first quarto of Hamlet (1603).

As Peter Thomson notes, Hamlet has an unusual tendency to expose its characters
as actors, and it exploits the tension between seeming and watching.
88
Many of the
students in the play perhaps have a theatrical background like that of the students at
Oxford and Cambridge. Polonius for one is a former student who, like the Parnassus
actors, played in the university and, at least according to himself, “was accounted a good
Actor” (H1). He now performs a function something like the Master of the Revels in

88
Thomson, Shakespeare’s Theatre, 125-9.
155
Claudius’s court, and is even described as “Lord Chamberlain” in the 1676 quarto.
Hamlet appears to have a theatrical background as well, and he fancies himself a
serviceable enough playwright to pen lines that will fit seamlessly into The Murder of
Gonzago. The students in the play, then, are good at acting, and especially seeming. Early
in the play, Hamlet draws a distinction to his mother between “seeming” and “being” in
reference to his grief for his dead father: “Seemes Maddam, nay it is, I know not
seemes...I haue that within which passes showe / These but the trappings and the suites of
woe” (B4
v
). And yet, Hamlet later shows himself adept at seeming mad, which is a
strategy both for self-preservation and to evade the surveillance to which he is
increasingly subjected. As Thomson notes, “Of the various synonyms for acting,
‘seeming’ is the least attractive. It sounds unpleasant, and it implies the wish to gain an
unfair advantage by pretence, to deceive for personal profit.”
89
As the Parnassus plays
make clear, the livelihood of scholars depended on seeming and flattery, often in their
most deceptive and mercenary of forms. It is no surprise then that spying and being spied
upon are frequent activities of the students that descend on Elsinore, as spying is
predicated on exactly this theatrical dynamic of seeming and watching that is central to
the experience of being a student.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are student-spies charged by Claudius to spy on
Hamlet. We cannot discern their true feelings towards Hamlet or the extent of their
complicity with Claudius’s plots, and in a sense both are irrelevant. Ostensibly, they are
indeed friends of Hamlet who are concerned with h`is apparent descent into madness and

89
Thomson, Shakespeare’s Theatre, 125.
156
who can honestly protest after his cold treatment of them, “My Lord, you once did loue
me” (H3
v
). However, they are also subject to the power of Claudius and Gertrude, and
knowingly say when asked to spy on Hamlet:
Both your Maiesties
Might by the soueraigne power you haue of vs
Put your dread pleasures more into command
Then to entreaty. (E3)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are compelled to exploit their friendship with Hamlet, to
continue to seem to be his friends even as they spy on him for Claudius and Gertrude.
Hamlet’s experience is accordingly of friends who “play vpon mee” and “would plucke
out the hart of my mistery” (H4). After they receive their instructions to watch Hamlet,
they are dismissed first by Claudius, “Thanks Rosencraus, and gentle Guyldensterne,”
and next by Gertrude, “Thanks Guyldensterne, and gentle Rosencraus” (E3). This may be
staged alternately as Gertrude wishing to ensure that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
receive equal courtesy, or as Claudius having mixed up the two. If the latter, it reinforces
the sense throughout the play that though Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are educated,
they are exchangeable and largely faceless—qualities that make them useful as spies and
also expendable. (Indeed, the two often complete each other’s thoughts, and they are
exchanged easily enough for the place of another student, Hamlet, at the chopping block
in England.) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not entirely incompetent spies: they know
that Hamlet is keeping them at bay “with a craftie madnes” (G1). Ultimately, however,
they are unsuccessful spies.
Although because of his age it may be less obvious to think of him as so,
Claudius’s councilor Polonius is another student-spy who watches Hamlet. Polonius’s
157
speech, contrary to his ‘brevity is the sole of wit’ adage, is prolix and platitudinous, a trait
he shares with other satirical portraits of scholars including Gullio from the Parnassus
plays, Wagner in Doctor Faustus, and Tim, the Cambridge student in Middleton’s A
Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Polonius almost wholly concerns himself with devising
scenarios for spying upon others or actually performing the role of spy himself. He twice
spies upon Hamlet, once along with Claudius as Hamlet speaks with Ophelia, once alone
as Hamlet speaks with Gertrude. Polonius is unscrupulous, as he is not above using his
own daughter to enable his spying upon the prince, even instructing her on how to seem
lonelier to Hamlet than she perhaps is:
reade on this booke,
That show of such an exercise may cullour
Your lowlines [loneliness]; we are oft too blame in this,
Tis too much proou’d that with deuotions visage
And pious action, we doe sugar ore
The deuill himselfe. (G2)

Polonius also sends Reynaldo to spy upon his son in Paris after freely giving Laertes
leave to return. True to his theatrical background, Polonius provides Reynaldo both with
a scenario for spying as well as his dialogue. Polonius seeks information about any vices
into which Laertes might have fallen as well as “what Danskers are in Parris” (E1) with
whom Laertes potentially associates. Polonius, as it turns out, is not a very good spy. He
instructs Reynaldo to circulate rumors which will make any information he gains about
Laertes unreliable because they slander Laertes with the very vices Polonius wishes to
detect. His spying on Hamlet and Ophelia fails to yield the desired intelligence, that of
Hamlet’s love for Ophelia being the cause of his madness, while in his final act of spying,
on Hamlet with Gertrude, he shares with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern an inability to
158
perform the first responsibility of a successful spy: avoid detection. Consequently, he
shares these spies’ fate.
Hamlet is himself a spy, albeit one working on his own behalf. He devises “The
Mousetrap” scene to spy upon Claudius (and Gertrude), as we saw in the Introduction. He
also spies upon the praying Claudius, although he misreads the scene, as he comes in
after Claudius makes the admission of guilt that he has been seeking, and he leaves
before Claudius admits that his apparent penance is infelicitous. But part of the
complexity of Hamlet’s character is that, while he is as the protagonist of the play cast as
the central observer, he is also the central object of the suspicious gaze of everyone in the
play. Hamlet is subjected to almost constant surveillance by Claudius, and he is hyper-
vigilant to that fact. Hamlet realizes the threat he poses to Claudius as the rightful and
displaced heir to the throne, while his experience as a student at Wittenberg perhaps
makes him used to being an object of suspicion. Certainly he is tuned into the flattery and
disingenuousness of fellow students and their potential employment as spies. He is
constantly suspicious of Polonius, and he immediately suspects the intentions of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern upon their first meeting and questions the reasons for their
appearance: “were you not sent for? is it your owne inclining? is it a free visitation?
come, come, deale iustly with me” (F1
v
). Hamlet is also suspicious of Horatio upon first
meeting him, doubting Horatio when he says that his return is motivated by Hamlet’s
father’s funeral rather than Gertrude’s wedding, and challenges him, “I prethee doe not
mocke me fellowe studient” (C2). Hamlet initially trusts neither Horatio nor Marcellus
with the content of his conference with the Ghost, and he repeatedly insists (with some
159
prompting from “this fellowe in the Sellerige” (D4
v
) that they swear to secrecy of what
they have seen, “As you are friends, schollers, and souldiers” (D4)—three things Hamlet
mistrusts, and with good reason, throughout the play.
Hamlet’s self-consciousness of being the target of spying leads to his seeming
madness, which at times appears to cross the line into an actual madness produced by his
being an object of constant surveillance. This is perhaps clearest in the scene of Hamlet’s
“To be, or not to be” (G2) soliloquy which, as others have noted, is not properly speaking
a soliloquy at all: Polonius and Claudius have set themselves behind the arras as Hamlet
enters the stage, while Ophelia is either on the side of the stage or just offstage. While
some suggest that Hamlet sees Polonius and Claudius hiding themselves as he enters, this
is not indicated by the stage directions or by an aside, nor is it necessary to the scene. It is
enough that Hamlet suspects that he might be watched; that he later asks Ophelia of the
whereabouts of her father and threatens the life of Claudius suggest this is so. As Hamlet
readies to deliver his soliloquy, he likely moves to the front and center of the stage, the
middle of the college hall—the focal point of the theatre. Ophelia will later refer to
Hamlet as “Th’obseru’d of all obseruers” (G3), calling attention to Hamlet’s status at the
moment and throughout the play as the object of three levels of spying: a human level in
the form of Claudius and Polonius behind the arras, the meta-theatrical level of the
audience surrounding him on all sides, and a divine (or supernatural) level of the heavens
potentially watching from above, as well as the Ghost potentially watching from below.
The soliloquy is in the manner of a scholarly disputation, as Hamlet weighs the
arguments for and against both suicide and revenge. These arguments hinge on the
160
questionable reality of this divine surveillance watching over humanity. Hamlet
entertains an atheistic outlook and frankly questions the existence of God and an afterlife;
like Faustus he entertains the possibility that “hell’s a fable.” His conclusion, at least for
the moment—“Thus conscience dooes make cowards” (G2
v
)—echoes the sentiment
attributed to another student, Christopher Marlowe, “That the firste beginnynge of
Religion was only to keep men in awe.”
The more immediate threat to Hamlet, of course, is the earthly spies who at this
moment are “seeing vnseene” (G1
v
), scrutinizing his actions and deciding his fate from
behind the arras. The scene has opened with Claudius inquiring into what intelligence
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have gained about why Hamlet “puts on this confusion,”
which is a threat in its “turbulent and dangerous lunacie” (G1). Hamlet’s situation is akin
to that of the students in the audience at the conclusion of the First Return from
Parnassus: ambivalent in his intentions, potentially violent, and therefore hemmed in and
closely watched. He immediately suspects Ophelia is acting as Claudius’s agent, as he
has others in the past; the recognition calls into question her honesty and moves his
feelings for her (as with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) at least for the moment into the
past tense: “I did loue you once” (G2
v
). He sees through the seeming loneliness Polonius
has had her put on and accuses her of being an actress as well as a whore: “I haue heard
of your paintings well enough, God hath giuen you one face, and you make your selfes
another, you gig & amble, and you list [for “lisp”] you nickname Gods creatures, and
make your wantonnes ignorance” (G3). As the scenes with the traveling players show,
Hamlet, true to his university upbringing, knows how to recognize good as well as bad
161
acting. Sensing the possibility that he is himself onstage before an audience he cannot
see, Hamlet attempts to redirect attention onto Ophelia, first by denying having given her
the gifts she attempts to return, then by launching into his “get thee to a Nunry” tirade.
Ophelia is placed on the defensive, as Hamlet suggests (or reveals) before her father and
her king that she has slept with Hamlet, and she plays into Hamlet’s seeming madness:
“O what a noble noble mind is heere orethrowne!” (G3). Claudius is left unsure whether
Hamlet is mad or not: he first says that Hamlet’s speech, “though it lackt forme a little, /
Was not like madnes” (G3
v
), but by the conclusion of the scene he seems convinced
otherwise, saying “Madnes in great ones must not vnmatcht [for “vnwatcht”] goe” (G3
v
).
Hamlet evades Claudius and Polonius for the moment, but receives for his efforts only
the promise of more spying, as Polonius orchestrates another scene in Gertrude’s
chamber. Hamlet’s status as an object of constant scrutiny is inescapable.
There is perhaps one student-spy that, despite his vigilance, Hamlet does not
detect: Horatio. He is Hamlet’s one friend in the play, the only one he seemingly trusts.
Horatio is so much in Hamlet’s confidence that he serves as Hamlet’s second set of eyes
during “The Mousetrap,” as Hamlet trusts Horatio’s judgement of Claudius’s reaction as
much as his own:
Obserue my Vncle, if his occulted guilt
Doe not it selfe vnkennill in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we haue seene,
And my imaginations are as foule
As Vulcans stithy; giue him heedfull note,
For I mine eyes will riuet to his face,
And after we will both our iudgements joyne
In censure of his seeming. (G4
v
)

162
However, as we have seen Horatio does not begin the play in Hamlet’s confidence.
Somehow, offstage, Horatio has insinuated himself into Hamlet’s trust in the intervening
scenes, a difficult feat given Hamlet’s distrust of everyone, including his friends
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Horatio is an interestingly marginal figure for much of the
play, absent for large portions of the action and yet present at crucial junctures and quick
to respond to Hamlet’s summonses. When he is onstage he is often quiet for long
stretches, silently observing the action; it is often questionable from the play text whether
Horatio even really is onstage, or when he is intended to exit. All this gives Horatio a
highly observational quality, but it also raises the question of what exactly he is doing in
these scenes.
In the second quarto, the scene in which Ophelia appears mad to sing her songs
begins with a stage direction calling for Horatio’s entrance along with that of Gertrude
and a Gentleman. The Gentleman gives a report of Ophelia’s declining mental state,
while Horatio is only given three lines early in the scene and does not have a clearly
marked exit. The editors of The Norton Shakespeare assign these three lines to Gertrude,
but dispense with the anonymous Gentleman and assign his lines to Horatio, making him
a courtier who is also attending on Gertrude and giving her intelligence. After Ophelia
has sung her songs and exits distractedly with “Sweet Ladyes god night, god night,”
Claudius sends someone after her with the command, “Follow her close, giue her good
watch I pray you” (K4
v
). Whom Claudius is directing is not specified, and the editors of
The Norton Shakespeare again infer that it is Horatio who at this point exits—he has no
163
further lines in the scene.
90
If this is how the scene is staged, it has a strong effect on
Horatio’s character: he becomes someone whom Claudius plausibly trusts with watching
his dead councilor’s daughter, and perhaps also one whom he trusts to watch Hamlet.
If Horatio is assigned to watch Ophelia, he does not perform the role very well:
when Ophelia returns later in the scene to distribute her flowers it is without Horatio, and
Ophelia is soon drowned. But Horatio certainly has served Claudius before as a sentinel,
so his serving Claudius in other capacities cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, Horatio’s
story about his presence in Denmark does not add up. He claims to have returned for
Hamlet’s father’s funeral, which was a month or two before. And yet in their first scene
together Hamlet acts as though this is his first encounter with Horatio, asking him, “But
what in faith make you from Wittenberg?” Horatio initially responds with the artful
dodge, “A truant disposition good my Lord” (C1
v
).
91
Hamlet’s suspicion suggests that he
may suspect, at least initially, that Horatio has been summoned like Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. Horatio becomes even more ambiguous in the final scene, when he
promises to relate the narrative of the preceding events:
And let me speake, to [th’]yet vnknowing world
How these things came about; so shall you heare
Of carnall, bloody and vnnaturall acts,
Of accidentall iudgements, casuall slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning, and for no cause
And in this vpshot, purposes mistooke,
Falne on th’inuenters heads: all this can I
Truly deliuer. [O2]

90
Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, 4.5.

91
Certainly, these inconsistencies in Horatio’s character may be a product of the complex writing,
performing, and publishing history of the play, but this does not suggest a resolution for them.
164
Horatio’s description is entirely composed of acts without subjects that may equally
apply to Claudius, Laertes, or Hamlet. The ambiguity of Horatio’s promise has been
unsatisfying to many critics and has inspired some sequels in which Horatio has been
Norway’s agent all along.
92
If nothing else, Horatio may be hedging his bets to secure a
place in the court of Fortinbras, and hence may be an opportunist equally willing to serve
whoever happens to be on the throne. In the end, we are left with the possibility that
Horatio is perhaps a double or even triple agent, hiding in plain sight. This is of course
speculative, but that is also the point: Horatio is so effective at escaping detection that it
becomes unclear exactly where his allegiances lie. The one thing that is certain is that
Horatio is the one student-spy in the play that eludes detection: by Claudius, by Hamlet,
by the audience, or perhaps all three.

92
Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, n. 5.2.364-9.
165
Chapter Four

“The olde fantastical Duke of darke corners”:
Theatricality, Surveillance, and Sovereignty in Court Theatre

The mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe at the court of Theseus in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream gives a seemingly ordered, hierarchical vision of court
theatre. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was itself performed at the English court, in 1604
at Hampton Court and perhaps, in what would be an interesting bit of meta-theatre, in
1595-6 at Richmond Palace for the wedding of Elizabeth Carey and Thomas Berkeley.
Pyramus and Thisbe does more than “ease the anguish of a torturing hower” on the night
of the nuptials of the three noble couples.
1
The play, like the wedding ceremonies
themselves, is intended to glorify Theseus and his new bride Hippolyta, while the others
in attendance are honored not only by their attendance but by their proximity to Theseus:
Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, and, depending on if you believe the quarto
or the folio, Philostrate, the Master of the Revels, or Egeus, the father of Hermia. Theseus
is set as if on a stage, and from it he gives what is in fact the primary performance of the
evening. He is performing the role of the munificent ruler who is offering the wedding
banquet and the play; the rest of the court audience watches Theseus at least as intently as
they are watching Pyramus and Thisbe, and take their cues from Theseus’s response to
the play. The collective response of the audience not only asserts Theseus’s power, but it
asserts noble community and their superiority over the mechanicals onstage. Theseus at

1
William Shakespeare, A Midsommer nights dreame. As it hath beene sundry times publickely acted, by
the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants (London: Thomas Fisher, 1600), G3. Future
references are cited in the text. I have also referred to William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
ed. by Harold T. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979).
166
times makes a big show of munificence in accepting the performance of the mechanicals
(colorfully called the “rabble” in the 1600 quarto): “Our sport shall be, to take what they
mistake. / And what poore duty cannot doe, noble respect /Takes it in might, not merit”
(G4). But Theseus and the rest of the noble audience also disparage the performance:
they mock the elocution of Quince’s prologue that “doth not stand vpon points” (G4
v
),
Bottom’s malapropisms and garbled lines, and the lack of artifice in the play. They
vacillate between pity and scorn for the players; they degrade their humanity by calling
them “Hard handed men” whose “simplenesse” is soon recharacterized as
“wretchednesse orecharged” (G3
v
-G4); they bestialize them as “Colte,” “Asses,” “fox,”
and “goose” (G4
v
-H2). They assert their power by constantly interrupting, commenting
upon, mocking, and resuming “This palpable grosse Play” (H3
v
).
This, anyway, is the image of court theatre that emerges from Stephen Orgel’s
essay The Illusion of Power. Orgel argues that court theatre was in the most direct way a
political entity: dramas “were expressions of the age’s most profound assumptions about
the monarchy” and “celebrations of royal power and assertions of aristocratic
community.” They achieved their effect through a combination of architecture and optics.
The monarch was positioned at a place of prominence: Elizabeth was at times seated
directly onstage, but both Elizabeth and James were most often seated at the center of the
theatre, particularly with Inigo Jones and the introduction of perspective scenery. Both
arrangements asserted hierarchy by seating the rest of the audience in proximity to the
monarch according to rank. They also gave monarchs power by positioning them where
their reception of the play could be viewed by all others in attendance. In the latter
167
arrangement, James stood to the focal point of the theatre—the literal and symbolic
center of power.
2

While Orgel’s vision works as an ideal of sorts, there was quite a bit more going
on at a court performance. The performance of Pyramus and Thisbe at Theseus’s court is
not so much a celebration of royal power and an assertion of aristocratic community as it
is an attempt to reclaim and reassert both after the proceeding events of the play. The
irony, of course, is that for most of the play the lovers themselves have been observed
with a combination of sympathy and scorn by an unseen audience of spirits in the
Athenian woods. Asks Puck to Oberon, “Shall wee their fond pageant see? / Lord, what
fooles these mortals bee!” (E1
v
). That order has returned at all to the Athenian court has
nothing to do with Theseus and everything to do with Oberon who, using a combination
of surveillance and fairy juice, creates the order that Theseus merely sanctions. Although
Theseus’s court appears hierarchical at the moment, it has been far from it for most of the
play. Not only have the nobility been acting less than noble— fighting, dueling, barking
like spaniels—but they have been in open defiance of Theseus’s power. Lysander and
Hermia flee Athens (closely followed by Demetrius and Helena) to avoid Theseus’s
judgement that Hermia choose between the cloister of a nunnery or a grave for defying
her father Egeus’s will that she marry Demetrius. Hippolyta perhaps too has been
resistant: she is often performed as not sharing Theseus’s eagerness for their nuptials—

2
See Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1975). While Orgel notes that the new perspective stages were developed
largely for court masques, they were used for plays as well. Orgel does not hazard a guess as to how often
Elizabeth was seated on the stage or in the middle of the theatre, but E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan
Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 1:228, says, “I think it may be taken that this seating, with
the sovereign in the middle of the floor and directly opposite the stage, was that ordinarily employed.”
168
she is, after all, a spoil of war—and as silently disapproving of his handling of the lovers’
quarrel. So while the court audience is watching Theseus’s performance of the munificent
monarch, they are also perhaps scrutinizing him to attempt to read his inner thoughts, to
see if the potential tyrant is still lurking within. Pyramus and Thisbe would perhaps draw
additional scrutiny towards Theseus’s rule and perhaps allow a glimpse of his mind, were
its actors not so comically inept: while its parodying of Romeo and Juliet has been often
noted, the death of two star-crossed lovers is a possibility for Lysander and Hermia as
well after Theseus’s initial judgement. Theseus is in turn intently watching the rest of the
court audience to make sure that they are adhering to their new roles as loyal spouses and
subjects. The earlier disorder, presumably, could reappear at any moment. The dynamic
at the court performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, hence, was one of layered surveillance,
not of simple spectatorship of the monarch.
This dynamic of surveillance at court plays takes a more complex form in another
representation of a court performance: the wedding masque in Beaumont and Fletcher’s
The Maid’s Tragedy. Interestingly, the play was also performed at court for a wedding, as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is often supposed to have been. It was played by the King’s
Men to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in the Great
Hall at Whitehall Palace in 1612-3. The play is an ironic and perhaps darkly humorous
choice for a wedding celebration, as we will see. In the masque scene, the King again sits
at the center of power, and he is like Theseus performing for all to see the role of a
munificent monarch giving an honorable wedding gift to Amintor and Evadne. Amintor
was engaged to Aspatia, but at the insistence of the King he has instead married Evadne,
169
the sister of Amintor’s friend Melantius. The King ostensibly makes the substitution “To
honour” Melantius, who has recently returned to the Rhodesian court from his heroic
service in foreign wars.
3
Amintor readily accedes to the substitution of Evadne—he
declares himself longing “to loose my lusty youth / And grow olde in her armes” (B3)—
and the two perform for the role of the court, again, the roles of loyal subjects and
newlyweds. The King in turn watches their performance and the response of the rest of
the court. There is the unfortunate side spectacle of the scorned Aspatia, sitting at the side
of her father Calianax, clearly despondent and suicidal for all to see as a result of the
King’s interference. The masque even heightens the focus on Aspatia at one moment,
during a song which asks Hymen to “Bring in the virgins euery one / That greeue to lie
alone” (Q2: B4). But no matter; the overall image is of a King in seeming absolute
control of his court.
Onstage the masque is seemingly formulaic, as are all masques, according to
Strato: “they must commend their King, & speake in praise of the assembly, blesse the
Bride and Bridegroome, in person of some God, they’r tied to rules of flatterie” (Q2: A2).
The court, of course, is tied to the same rules. However, something is not quite right
almost from the start of the performance of The Masque of Night, and Night sets the
uneasy mood of the performance by lamenting how she is “Gaz’d on vnto my setting

3
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maides Tragedy. As It Hath Beene diuers times Acted at the
Blacke-friers by the Kings Maiesties Seruants (London: Richard Higgenbotham, 1619), B2. Future
references are cited in the text and are from this edition (Q1) unless otherwise stated. I have also referred
to Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, ed. by T. W. Craik (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), and where Craik follows the reading from the 1622 edition (Q2) I have followed
suit and note this in the citation. Q2 is Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maides Tragedy. As It
Hath Beene diuers times Acted at the Blacke-friers by the Kings Maiesties Seruants. Newly perused,
augmented, and inlarged, This second Impression (London: Francis Constable, 1622).
170
from my rise / Almost of none, but of vnquiet eyes” (Q2: B2
v
). Night and Cynthia open
the masque by promising a show of their powers to the courtly audience. It is a fitting
show for the occasion, both because a masque showing the joys of the night is
appropriate for a wedding and because it is staged in the court of a King that views
himself as possessing godlike, absolutist powers—as the King’s brother Lysippus says,
“the breath of Kings is like the breath of gods” (B1). Night and Cynthia begin by raising
Neptune and then Aeolus, and Aeolus is commanded to release Favonius and his other
“milder” winds, saving the rebellious Boreas. But Boreas escapes, creating a storm that
churns the seas and threatens the mortals on ships. It is unclear whether Boreas is ever
recaptured, and the masque ends with Night and her powers dissolving into Day. The
masque hints that the coming wedding night might not go as planned, and it also suggests
the folly of attempting to exert godlike authority: just as the gods onstage threaten ruin by
their inability to constrain Boreas, perhaps a godlike King in the audience threatens ruin
by his inability to control his subjects, or his passions.
Watching the masque, Evadne may only be able to perform her role so well; her
face might betray anxiety, visible to the King and the rest of the court audience, and she
might even shoot the King disbelieving looks as the plot of the masque unfolds. This is
the night, after all, that Evadne will have to inform Amintor that he is already a cuckold,
that she will never sleep with him because she is the King’s mistress, and that her
marriage to Amintor is simply a sham to give cover for the affair and the appearance of
legitimacy to the King’s bastard children. Later this night the songs from the masque will
ring out in full irony. The First Song wishes:
171
Ioy to this great company
and no day,
Come to steale this night away
Till the rights of loue are ended
And the lusty Bridegroome say,
Welcome light of all befriended. (C2
v
)

There will be no rites of love this night for the bridegroom Amintor, and there will be in a
sense no day for the courtly audience until the end of The Maid’s Tragedy, when
Amintor, Evadne, the King, and Aspatia all lay dead. When Evadne later this night
incredulously asks, “A maidenhead Amintor at my yeares?” (Q2: D4), the Second Song is
revealed as even more ironic, in its asking Night to:
Stay, Stay, and hide
the blushes of the Bride.
Stay gentle night, and with thy darkenesse couer,
the kisses of her louer.
Stay and confound her teares and her shrill cryings,
Her weake denials, vowes and often dyings,
Stay and hide all,
but helpe not if she call. (Q1: C2
v
-C3; Q2: B4)

The bride’s lover is not the bridegroom, but the King, and it is under the cover of night
that they have pursued and will continue to pursue their affair. While even a keen
observer—one keener than “dull Amintor” (D4), as Evadne will later call him—will not,
of course, be able to discover the entire truth by the dynamic in the court theatre, she or
he may scrutinize the King at the center of the room with increasing skepticism of the
absolutist fantasy played out offstage and on, as well as the King’s intentions in offering
such a masque. The King, in turn, watching the masque and the eyes of the court on him,
may begin to doubt the success of a masque that not so much presents the Rhodesian
court’s highest ideals of itself as it attempts to create its sustaining myth.
172
Michael Neill notes that the masque scene in The Maid’s Tragedy has either
perplexed critics or been ignored as a long, seemingly needless digression from the action
of the play, despite the links between its imagery and the rest of the play.
4
But the
masque is also central because it shows itself to be a miniature of the Rhodesian court
world. The disorder and threat of death onstage overhang the Rhodesian court. They are
waiting just outside the theatre door, where the doorkeeper Diagoras attempts, with
limited success, to keep out all the young gallants attempting to squeeze and cajole their
way in. Calianax complains, “Diagoras looke to the doores better for shame: you let in
all the world, and anone the King will raile at me” (Q2: [A4
v
]). Diagoras’s job is not an
enviable one:
Knock within.
Diagoras: hark, hark, there, there, so, so, codes, codes. What now?
Melantius: (within) Open the dore.
Diagoras: Who’s there?
Melantius: [within] Melantius.
Diagoras: I hope your Lord-ship brings no troope with you, for if you doe, I must
returne them. [Opens the door.] Enter Melantius and a Lady.
Melantius: None but this Lady sir.
Diagoras: The Ladies are all plac’d aboue, saue those that come in the Kings
troope, the best of Rhodes sit there, and theres roome.
Melantius: I thanke you sir: [To the Lady] when I haue seene you placed madam, I
must attend the King, but the maske done, Ile waite on you againe. Exit
Melantius [and the] Lady [at the] other dore [, which Diagoras opens].
Diagoras: [To those within] Stand backe there, roome for my Lord Melantius,
pray beare backe, this is no place for such youthes and their truls, let the
dores shut agen: I, do your heads itch? Ile scratch them for you: [Shuts the
door.] so now thrust and hang! [Knocking within] againe, who i’st now, I
cannot blame my Lord Calianax for going away, would he were here, he
would run raging amongst them, and breake a dozen wiser heads than his
own in the twinckling of an eye: [To those within] what’s the newes now?

4
Micheal Neill, “’The Simetry, Which Gives a Poem Grace’: Masque, Imagery, and the Fancy of The Maid’s
Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama 3 (1970): 111-35. These links are particularly the symmetry of inversions of
opposites, including love and death, marriage and adultery, and appearance and reality.
173
[A Voice] within: I pray you can you helpe mee to the speech of the maister
Cooke?
Diagoras: If I open the dore Ile cooke some of your calues heads. Peace rogues.—
[Knocking within] againe,—who i’st? (Q1: B3
v
-B4; Q2: [A4
v
]-B1)

Diagoras thinks it at least necessary to ask the war hero Melantius whether he has
brought an army with him, although what one doorkeeper could do at this point to
prevent a coup against a king and his court so vulnerably assembled is unclear.
Meanwhile, the crush of every young gallant and his lady attempting to get through the
doors both to see the King and to be seen by all others in attendance threatens to set off a
riot and perhaps wreak damage to the hall. But these squabbles are not limited to young
gallants: later in the scene, violence nearly erupts again when Calianax, displacing his
anger at the King for substituting Evadne in place of his daughter, repeatedly insults the
virtue of Melantius’s mistress and nearly provokes a duel he will surely lose, prefiguring
Aspatia’s own suicidal challenge to Amintor.
The masque scene is also central to the play because it exhibits the culture of
theatricality and surveillance that persists in every interaction in the Rhodesian court.
Everyone, not just the King, seems to be performing before the rest of the courtly
audience to hide their true inner thoughts, while attempting to read in others’
performances their secret thoughts. Melantius arrives at the court from foreign wars at the
start of the play professing himself to be a plainspoken soldier “poore in words” (B3).
But he is a quick student of court theatrics, and has already learned to dissemble by the
time he confronts Evadne with her affair with the King, causing her to remark, “Brother,
the Court has made you wittie, And learne to riddle” (G2
v
). Amintor refuses to take
revenge on the King and instead resigns himself —and at times, almost seems to readily
174
accede—to the role the King would have him play before the courtly audience. He says to
Evadne, “When we walke thus intwind let all eyes see, / If euer louers better did agree”
(D4
v
). He consents to Evadne and the King continuing their affair as long as it is kept a
secret, in words that echo Falstaff’s thoughts on honor: “me thinkes I am not wrong’d, /
Nor is it ought, if from the censuring world / I can but hide it—reputation / Thou art a
word, no more” (D4). And yet, Amintor also finds the theatricality and surveillance of
court disorientating to the point of madness. At one moment, the recognition that
everyone may be acting and that all appearances may be deceiving threatens to break
down his sanity when he encounters Melantius:
I wonder much Melantius.
To see those noble lookes that make me thinke,
How vertuous thou art, and on the sudden
Tis strange to me, thou shouldst haue worth and honour,
Or not be base and false, and treacherous,
And euery ill. (E2
v
-E3)

Eventually, the entire court does reveal itself to be nothing more than a set of
contradictions. The King’s substitution of Evadne for Aspatia does not honor Melantius,
as the King has already dishonored Melantius by taking his sister as a mistress. The King
tells Amintor he chose him for the sham marriage because “I beleeue thee honest, as thou
wert valiant”; as Amintor bitterly responds, “Gods take your honesty againe, for I / Am
loaden with it!” (F2). But the greatest paradox is in the King’s rule itself, as Calianax
simply puts it: “The King may doe this, and he may not doe it” (E1
v
).
It is this court culture of theatricality and surveillance, as much as the King’s
corruption, on which his power founders. The King’s power depends on his ability to
keep his affair with Evadne secret from the rest of his court through his own
175
performance, as well as Evadne’s and Amintor’s, and his ability to correctly read in his
subjects’ performances their inner thoughts. He fails at both. Amintor proves to be a
terrible actor when playing the role of the honorable, loving husband. His overacting at
one point prompts a warning from Evadne: “You doe it scuruily, twill be perceiu’d”
(E3
v
). Later, despite his belief that “Mens eyes are not so subtill to perceiue / My inward
miserie, I beare my griefe / Hid from the world” (Q2: F1), Melantius immediately
discerns that Amintor is troubled and pries out his secret, which leads in turn to
Melantius’s plot in which he forces Evadne at sword point to renounce the affair and
agree to kill the King. And yet, the King is somehow fooled by Amintor’s overacting,
accusing him at one point of the treasonable offense of sleeping with his own wife and
threatening to break off the affair with Evadne. The King is subsequently fooled by
Melantius’s performance in a Mousetrap-style inquisition in a banquet scene in which the
King, informed by Calianax, accuses Melantius to his face about his regicidal plot. The
King finds Melantius’s performance completely convincing:
Calianax
I cannot trust thus, I haue throwne out words,
That would haue fetcht warme bloud vpon the cheekes
Of guilty men, and he is neuer mou’d,
He knowes no such thing.
Calianax: Impudence may scape, when feeble virtue is accus’d.
King: A must if he were guilty feele an alteration
At this our whisper, whilst we point at him,
You see he does not. (I1)

Just as the King’s inability to accurately read the performance of The Masque of Night
allowed his overreach to continue, so his inability to read the performances of his
subjects at court allows Melantius’s plot to succeed.
176
While neither A Midsummer Night’s Dream nor The Maid’s Tragedy present an
exact image of the English court, the English court had more in common with its
Athenian and Rhodesian counterparts onstage than it would perhaps care to admit. For
one, the English court was similarly prone to disorder and violence. This disorder
stemmed from the very architecture of English palaces. As David Starkey notes, “palace
buildings created a more binding framework for behaviour than any ordinance”—what
has been called the Newtonian principle of court history.
5
Things might not have been so
bad if all palaces followed the orderly ground plan of Hampton Court, the only surviving
Tudor palace, in which a neat succession of increasingly exclusive halls and chambers
lead from the palace gate to the sovereign’s private living quarters. It is unfortunate, then,
that the primary residence of the English monarch was not Hampton Court but Whitehall,
which was in the words of the venerable E. K. Chambers “an extensive and irregular
pile,”
6
sprawling across many acres and eventually growing to perhaps in excess of two-
thousand rooms before its fiery destruction in 1698.
7
From this architecture stemmed the
disorganized structure of the court itself. David Loades notes that in some respects the
court was “a highly amorphous entity, and the succession of ordinances and household
books which were issued between 1445 and 1604 bear witness to the constant struggle to

5
David Starkey, “Introduction: Court History in Perspective,” in David Starkey et al., The English Court:
from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, 2-3. In the passage, Starkey notes that “This fact was first
understood by the late Hugh Murray Baillie. He pointed out that in every major European monarchy a
distinctive pattern of palace layout corresponded to a distinctive national court etiquette and
organization.”

6
Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 1:8.

7
Kevin Sharpe, “The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625-1642,” in David Starkey
et al., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London and New York: Longman,
1987), 229.
177
impose order, definition, and above all economy upon an organism which was always
threatening to get out of control.” The sprawling ground plan also created a court whose
Great Chamber and outer passages were constantly thronged by petitioners, as well as by
poor seeking food from the Almonry who infiltrated the palace rather than waiting at the
gate as they were supposed to. And yet, there was very little security at such a
labyrinthine court, as Loades notes: “protection against the ‘privy assassin’ was well nigh
impossible, and scarcely attempted.” Courtiers threatened the entire security of the court,
including that of the monarch, by arguing, dueling, and occasionally murdering one
another in squabbles over patronage, politics, and real or imagined violations of the
aristocratic code of honor. Cardinal Wolsey believed “not so much that courtiers were
thieves but that they were destructive hooligans, who were treated with too much
indulgence by their seniors.”
8

8
David Loades, The Tudor Court (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987), esp. 44-188; the quotations are
on 38, 89, and 94-5, respectively. See also Simon Adams, “Faction, clientage and party: English politics,
1550-1603,” in Leicester and the Court (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002),
14 and 20-2.
178

Figure 9: Ground Plan of the Royal Palace of Whitehall by John Fisher (1680).

The English court had the same culture of theatricality and surveillance as the
Rhodesian court of The Maid’s Tragedy. The idea that power in early modern England
was inherently theatrical has become a commonplace. The court is often understood as a
kind of theatre in which national affairs and state power were symbolized in rituals
involving the monarch.
9
“We princes,” said Elizabeth, “are set on stages, in the sight and
viewe of all the world duely observed.” Said James: “A King is as one set on a stage,
whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold.”
10
The stage
motif gives the monarch power by placing him or her in a privileged position from which

9
John H. Astington, English Court Theatre, 1558-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.

10
Both Elizabeth and James are qtd. in Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 42.
179
to be seen; but it simultaneously undercuts that power by partially ceding control over the
royal image by making it an object of scrutiny by subjects and inferiors.
11
Audiences
attempted to read the royal performance and through it glimpse the royal mind—
Cardinal Wolsey advised Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber to “Have a vigilant and
reverent respect and eye to his Grace” to know the king’s pleasure
12
—but could also
potentially misinterpret the performance. But if the ruler was set on a stage, she or he was
also ideally positioned to watch the entire audience, who was in turn performing before
the ruler. Castiglione advised his courtier to exploit this dynamic in order to overcome
wicked councilors and gain a position of confidence from which to offer good advice by
using dress and accomplishments to attract the ruler’s eyes, and thereby “continuallye
keepe that mynde of his occupyed in honest pleasure: imprintynge not wythstandynge
therin alwayes beesyde (as I haue said) in companie with these flickeringe prouocations
some vertuous condicion, and beeguilinge him with a holsome craft.”
13
This theatricality
became oppressive to the point that people at court, beginning with the monarch,
increasingly sought privacy and secrecy. Francis Bacon, in a work he dedicated to Prince
Charles after he fell out of favor with King James, called Henry VII a “Wise Prince” for

11
Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan
Theatre (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 85-6.

12
The passage from Cardinal Wolsey’s Eltham Ordinances is qtd. in Starkey, “Introduction,” 7.

13
The quotation comes from Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation: Baldesar Castiglione, The Courtyer of Count
Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes. Very necessary and profitatable for yonge Gentilmen and
Gentilwomen abiding in Court, Palaice, or Place, done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby (London: Wyllyam
Seres, 1561), Nn3. Even more aptly for our purposes, George Bull’s Penguin edition translates the passage
as follows: “he will be able to keep the prince continually absorbed in innocent pleasures, while also, as I
have said, always accompanying these beguilements with emphasis on some virtuous habit, and in that
way practising a healthy deception” (my emphasis). See Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed.
and trans. by George Bull (London: Penguin, 2003), 288-9.
180
his “keeping of Distance, which indeed hee did towards all; not admitting any neare or
full Approach, neither to his Power or to his Secrets.”
14
The growing desire for privacy
and secrecy can be witnessed in the growth of the Secret or Privy Chamber in the Tudor
dynasty, a space of privileged access open only to the monarch’s closest advisors and
staffed by trustworthy servants, and the further retreat under the Stuarts into the
Bedchamber.
15
In the Basilikon Doron James advised his son Henry, “Let them that haue
the credite to serue in your Chalmer, be trustie and secret; for a King will haue need to
vse secrecie in many things.”
16
It can be seen elsewhere, as in Elizabeth’s establishment
of her own “pryve kitchyn” apart from the “Great ketchin,” and in the increasing
tendency of monarch and courtier alike to “dyne in corners and secret places” rather than
the communal setting of the Hall.
17

The theatricality and increasing secrecy of court created what John Michael
Archer has called a “culture of surveillance” crucial to sovereignty at court.
18

Surveillance was embedded into the court beginning with its architecture, as surely as

14
The quotation comes from Francis Bacon, The Historie Of The Raigne Of King Henry The Seuenth.
Written By the Right Honourable, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban (London: W. Stansby for
Matthew Lownes, and William Barret, 1622), Hh3
v
.

15
The development of the Privy Chamber and the Bedchamber can be found in Chambers, The
Elizabethan Stage, 1:7-17; Neil Cuddy, “The revival of the entourage: the Bedchamber of James I, 1603-
1625,” in David Starkey et al., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London and
New York: Longman, 1987), 173; and Simon Adams, “The Court as an Economic Institution: The Court of
Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603),” in Leicester and the Court (Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press, 2002), 120.

16
James I, Basilicon Doron, in Political Writings, ed. by Johann P. Sommerville Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 51. Future references are cited in the text, with the title abbreviated (BD).

17
Loades, The Tudor Court, 63. The final quotation is from the Household Ordinances, 153, qtd. in Loades.

18
John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
181
was disorder, in its guarded and increasingly exclusive succession of chambers, including
guard or watching chambers. The monarch ruled court by creating and monitoring
divisions, and also used the court for the surveillance of political rivals. A sudden
withdrawal from court without leave was regarded with suspicion, while in times of crisis
the trusted nobility were sent “down to their countries” to keep them in good order while
the untrustworthy were kept under surveillance at court. Mary insisted Elizabeth obey her
summons to court in January 1554 despite the Elizabeth’s repeated excuses. Once on the
throne, Elizabeth kept her possible successor, Catherine Grey, in the Privy Chamber to
keep a close eye on her (and feared a conspiracy in her own Privy Chamber when
Catherine eluded her vigilance by clandestinely marrying Edward Seymour, Earl of
Herford, against her wishes), and her summoning the Earls of Northumberland and
Westmorland in 1569 forced them into open rebellion.
19
This culture of surveillance was
also embedded in the patronage system. Prominent courtiers and Privy Councillors,
including Leicester, Burghley, Walsingham, Essex, and Salisbury, operated intelligence
networks on behalf of the monarch. Servants spied for—and on—their masters, lesser
courtiers passed secrets to higher courtiers, who in turn passed them onto the monarch, all
with the hopes of favors in return.
20
Meanwhile, diplomacy developed alongside
organized espionage, and foreign ambassadors and particularly chamber ambassadors

19
Loades, The Tudor Court, 85; and Pam Wright, “A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female
Household, 1558-1603,” in David Starkey et al., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil
War (London and New York: Longman, 1987), 168.

20
Ian Arthurson, “Espionage and Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation,”
Nottingham Medieval Studies 35 (1991): 147; Alan Haynes, Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret
Services, 1570-1603 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); and David Riggs, The World of Christopher
Marlowe (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2004), 140.
182
sent to and from the court were ideally placed to conduct intelligence work.
21
Francis
Bacon, the nephew of Burghley and the brother of a spy, perhaps summed up the
dynamic at court best in his Essays, where he advised scrutinizing anyone you speak with
like a Jesuit, attempting to read their hidden thoughts while looking askew so as to not
appear to be doing so:
It is a point of Cunning; to wait vpon him, with whom you speake, with your eye;
As the Iesuites giue it in precept: For there be many Wise Men, that haue Secret
Hearts, and Transparant Countenances. Yet this would be done, with a demure
Abasing of your Eye sometimes, as the Iesuites also doe vse.
22

We might glimpse something of the optical dynamics and culture of surveillance
at court in Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait The Ambassadors.
23
The two young
ambassadors (and hence, perhaps spies) stare firmly at the viewer. On the left stands Jean
de Dinteville, French ambassador to England in 1533; the person on the right is often
taken to be his friend Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, and on several occasions the
ambassador to the Emperor, the Venetian Republic, and the Holy See. De Dinteville in
particular is dressed ostentatiously to draw attention to himself; his dress and pose
anticipate Holbein’s later portrait of Henry VIII, which adorned the Privy Chamber at

21
For chamber ambassadors, see Starkey, “Intimacy and Innovation: The rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485-
1547,” in David Starkey et al., The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London and
New York: Longman, 1987), 85. Chamber ambassadors had the same physical intimacy with and
performed the same service for the monarch as they did in their home courts. Arthurson, “Espionage and
Intelligence from the Wars of the Roses to the Reformation,” 142, notes the co-development of espionage
and diplomacy in England going back to 1514 and Cardinal Wolsey. John Bossy, in Giordano Bruno and the
Embassy Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), argues that none other than Giordano Bruno,
while in residence at Salisbury Court with the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de
Mauvissière, was the spy “Henry Fagot” who disrupted the Throckmorton plot.

22
Francis Bacon, “Of Cunning,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill And Morall, Of Francis Lord Verulam,
Viscount St. Alban. Newly written (London: Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), R4
v
. I have also referred
to Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. by John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1985).

23
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533), The National Gallery, London.
183
Whitehall.
24
And yet, the men and the portrait hide as much as they show. The men’s
faces project confidence, but their blank expressions hide their inner thoughts. De
Dinteville carries an ornate sheathe containing a hidden dagger, and the handle of a rapier
is just visible beneath his robe; de Selve holds his robe closed, as if obscuring what is
underneath. The objects on the table behind them show they are men concerned not only
with being watched, but with closely observing and measuring the world around them:
two globes (one terrestrial, one celestial), a quadrant, a torquetum, a polyhedral sundial, a
book of mathematics and a compass. Even the musical objects—the lute, case of flutes,
and the psalter—are, like music itself, concerned with proportions and relationships in
time and space. While the portrait suggests ambassadors who reveal only what they wish
to while closely observing the viewer, the anamorphic skull, that odd momento mori at
the bottom of the portrait, assumes a third party observing the ambassadors and their
viewer from the side, perhaps without any of their knowledge, like Bacon’s Jesuit. In the
top left corner, barely visible in the folds of the curtain, is a crucifix; the curtain itself
hides the rest of the background, which is, based on the floor mosaic, the interior of
Westminster Abbey. Taken together, these perhaps suggest another, divine layer of
surveillance observing all.

24
The original was destroyed along with the rest of Whitehall in the 1698 fire, but a cartoon made by
Holbein hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a copy of the original made by an
anonymous hand hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
184

Figure 10: The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533). National Gallery,
London.

The culture of the court was not left outside the theatre door of a court
performance. As with The Maid’s Tragedy, English court audiences were not immune
from the fractious and unruly behavior that marked their counterparts at the universities,
town halls, and in the London public theatres.
25
Courtiers and foreign ambassadors alike
were obliged or insulted based on the proximity of their seat to the monarch’s, with
ambassadorial disputes frequently hinging on whether a legation believed its seating
accorded sufficient honor. (James “found that an easy way to insult the Venetians was to

25
Astington, English Court Theatre, 162 and 172-9.
185
seat them farther than the Spaniards from the royal box.”
26
) The culture of surveillance
persisted as well, while occupying an architecture that assembled the entire court in one
room and facilitated surveillance amongst the audience. While court performances were
held in a number of palaces, for the rest of this chapter I will focus on plays which, like
The Maid’s Tragedy, were staged in the primary residence of the English monarch,
Whitehall Palace. The Great Hall at Whitehall is known to have measured 100 feet by 45
feet, which made it similar in size to the Hall at Hampton Court, which measures 115 feet
by 40 feet. Palace halls were designed by architectural theorists of the period with an eye
towards housing dramatic performances, such were their importance to the life of a
court.
27
Court theatres were built in the same way that theatres were built in halls in
towns, colleges, and the country houses of the nobility and gentry around the country,
raised on wooden frameworks with scaffolds and degrees.
28
We may use the design of the
theatres at Cambridge recovered by Alan Nelson that we saw earlier as a guide: at one
end of the hall was constructed a platform stage 5-6 feet in height, with stagehouses on
either side for entrances and exits during performances; galleries may have been
constructed surrounding the stage along the walls to allow for elevated seating.
29
Theatre
capacity ranged from around 100 in the smallest rooms used for performance, such as
those in St. James’s Palace, to several times that in the halls of Whitehall, Greenwich,

26
Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 11.

27
Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 7.

28
Astington, English Court Theatre, 75-6.

29
See Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464-1720
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
186
Richmond, and Hampton Court.
30
The room was evenly lit with candles, as performances
were at night usually beginning around 10 o’clock. The monarch was most often seated
on a raised chair in the center of this architecture. The rest of the audience of courtiers,
ambassadors, and other dignitaries were located in proximity to the monarch according to
rank, with their seats oriented towards the royal seat.
31
The visual and power dynamics
facilitated by this architecture were also more complex than is often understood. While
the primary spectacle was not the play itself, but the monarch and his or her reception of
the play, the architecture also allowed lesser courtiers to watch greater ones, and the
monarch to watch everyone else. If anything, those seated at the margins were best
positioned to survey the total effect.
32

During a court performance, plays could exploit the theatre architecture and court
culture to create a web of surveillance enmeshing the entire audience. They could
accomplish this by directly addressing the monarch,
33
or by actively incorporating the
monarch into the frame of the play. One play that did the latter was George Peele’s The

30
Astington, English Court Theatre, 162.

31
Orgel, The Illusion of Power, 10-1; Astington, English Court Theatre, 75-124; Chambers, The Elizabethan
Stage, 1:213-34; and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), 82-111.

32
Astington, English Court Theatre, 95, concurs with this vision of the political and spectatorial dynamics
of a court play: “Court theatres generally were not made to give the best possible view of the stage to the
greatest number of people; the 1605 Oxford theatre was regarded with suspicion because it did precisely
that. Audiences at court came to see the entertainments, naturally, but they also came to watch the
monarch watch, and to register their own presence at such an occasion. Lesser members of the court
watched the greater, and so on. The seating, turned towards the royal seat as much as to the stage,
reflected a double spectatorial function, through in effect display and observation at court assemblies
mush have been complex and many-layered.” Loades, The Tudor Court, 169-72, notes the presence of
resident ambassadors at court entertainments, who possessed their own intelligence networks and spies.

33
Montrose, The Purpose of Playing, 158-9. It was also common for plays staged at the country houses of
the nobility during the summer royal progress to directly address the monarch.
187
Arraignment of Paris, which was performed in the Hall at Whitehall in 1584 by the
“Children of her Chappell.” The play stages the story of Venus, Juno, and Pallas Athena
vying for the golden apple (or in this case, the golden ball). The goddesses agree to let
judgement fall to the next mortal they come across; Paris, being he, awards the ball to
Venus, winning her gratitude (and with it, Helen) and incurring the others’ wrath (and
with it, the destruction of Troy). Not content, Juno and Pallas appeal to Diana, who
agrees to redeliberate the matter (but does not commute the sentence on Troy.) But when
Diana returns her judgement, she turns not to the goddesses onstage but to the “Nymphe
Eliza a figure of the Queene” the governor of “An auncient seat of kinges, a seconde
Troie.”
34
At a court performance no figure is needed, and Diana awards the golden ball
directly to Elizabeth with the following words:
This peereles nymphe whom heauen and earth beloues,
This Paragon, this onely this is shee,
In whom do meete so manie giftes in one,
On whom our countrie gods so often gaze,
In honour of whose name the Muses sing.
In state Queene Iunos peere, for power in arms,
And vertues of the minde Mineruaes mate.
As fayre and louely as the queen of loue:
As chast as Dian in her chast desires.
The same is shee, if Phoebe doe no wronge,
To whom this ball in merit doth belonge. (E3-E3
v
)

By bringing Elizabeth into the frame of the play, the two spectacles at a court play are
unified. Every eye in the court, including those of the boy actors, is focused on Elizabeth
at this moment; the “countrie gods” gazing on Elizabeth may refer to the nobility
surrounding her in the theatre. She occupies the center of attention and power, but her

34
George Peele, The Araygnement of Paris. A Pastorall. Presented before the Queenes Maiestie, by the
Children of her Chappell (London: Henrie Marsh, 1584), E3. Future references are cited in the text.
188
power is also circumscribed in this moment. Elizabeth has no lines to speak, and has
nothing to do but accept the ball. (Unless we imagine an Elizabeth mischievous enough
to reject it.) With the ball she accepts a certain image of herself and her queenship,
although it is one she herself cultivated. But the moment also gives her an opportunity to
in turn survey the face of every courtier and foreign ambassador in attendance for any
sign of dissent (while perhaps avoiding the eyes anyone that knows her desires are less
than chaste, if that be the case). Any dissent comes with a tacit warning, from the play
and perhaps through it from Elizabeth. Paris has just left the stage, returning to Troy with
foreboding of the death and destruction he has brought with a choice other than
Elizabeth. Any dissenters who object to Diana’s choice face a similar risk: English
courtiers to their own “seconde Troie”; foreigners, perhaps, to their homelands.
Thomas Dekker’s Old Fortunatus, also staged in the Hall at Whitehall by the
Admiral’s Men at Christmas 1599-1600, not only directly addresses Elizabeth, but also
directly engages the rivalries between the courtiers and ambassadors of different
nationalities within the audience. The court performance begins with the sort of flattery at
which Strato sneers in The Maid’s Tragedy. A prologue features two old men, one
English, one Cypriot, traveling to “the temple of Eliza.”
35
Encountering the court
audience, the latter mistakes the countenance of Elizabeth for the moon and those of the

35
Thomas Dekker, The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus As it was plaied before the Queenes Maiestie
this Christmas, by the Right Honourable the Earle of Nottingham, Lord high Admirall of England his
Seruants (London: S. S. for William Aspley, 1600), A1
v
. Future references are cited in the text. I have also
referred to Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus, in Thomas Dekker, ed. by Ernest Rhys (London: Ernest Benn,
1949), 287-386.
189
rest of the court for stars, and both are dazzled into inarticulacy. But eventually, the
Second Old Man is able to continue:
I weepe for ioy to see so many heads
Of prudent Ladies, clothed in the liuerie
Of siluer-handed age, for seruing you,
Whilst in your eyes youthes glory doth renue:
I weepe for ioy to see the Sunne looke old,
To see the Moone mad at her often change,
To see the Starres onely by night to shine,
Whilst you are still bright, still one, still diuine:
I weepe for ioy to see the world decay,
Yet see Eliza flourishing like May. (A2)

The flattery here is potentially unstable, not to mention excruciatingly uncomfortable:
Elizabeth was self-conscious about aging in front of her court, and at age sixty-six was
manifestly not “flourishing like May.” It may inadvertently emphasize not the stability
brought on by Elizabeth’s enduring youth, but the instability occasioned by her age,
imminent mortality, and lack of an heir. Perhaps for some, it may inadvertently align her
with the foolish, aged Fortunatus himself, and call into question the praise for Elizabeth
with which the play ends.
The main action of the play tells the tale poor, old Fortunatus, who is met by the
goddess Fortune and offered a choice of wisdom, strength, health, beauty, long life, and a
purse containing unlimited gold; he chooses the last, with predictable results visited on
him and his sons, Andelocia and Ampedo. While the first two acts of the play tell the
well-known story of Fortunatus, the final three acts, which were conceived by Dekker as
he expanded the earlier play The First Part of Fortunatus (which was itself based on the
German tale of Fortunatus) for a court performance, turn an eye on the court audience.
After Fortunatus’s death, his son Andelocia takes possession of the purse and carries it to
190
England and the court of Athelstane, the first king to unite all of Britain under his rule.
His servant Shadow is dragged along and he reluctantly assents, with a dig at the courtly
audience: “If I must, the Fates shall bee seru’d: I haue seene many clownes Courtiers,
then why not Shaddow?” (F1). But the play does not limit its foils to English courtiers,
but includes any Scottish and French courtiers and ambassadors in attendance. Athelstane
sets his beautiful yet proud and disdainful daughter Agripyne to steal the purse from
Andelocia. In their plot to recover it, Andelocia and Shadow disguise themselves as Irish
coster-mongers and sell Agripyne along with the Scot courtier Montrose and the French
courtier Longaville apples that put horns on their heads. Montrose and Longaville later
vengefully kill Andelocia, along with Ampedo.
With the play’s conclusion, attention is again squarely set on the courtly audience.
A subtext of Old Fortunatus is a debate between Vice and Virtue, mediated (not
impartially) by Fortune. Vice reigns for the play, with the aid of Fortune, but the debate is
rejoined at the end of the play. Fortune pleads Vice’s case, reminding Virtue of the horns
clapped by Vice on Agripyne, Montrose, and Longaville, “to approue that English,
French and Scot, / And all the world els, kneele and honour Vice; / But in no Countrie,
Vertue is of price!” (L2). Virtue does not deny to Vice that many in those countries have
“bowd knees to thee,” but maintains that there is also “some diuiner breast” in those
countries in which virtue flourishes (L2). The debate unresolved, Fortune attempts to
refer judgement to the entire court; Vice assents, but Virtue appeals directly to Elizabeth.
The implication is clearly that the English, Scot, and French courtiers and ladies in
attendance are, like their counterparts onstage, a mix of vice and virtue, and that only
191
Elizabeth is free from vice. With this appeal, the eyes of the players and the entire
audience are again drawn to Elizabeth; Vice flees upon taking sight of Elizabeth, and
Fortune proclaims Virtue the victor. Virtue then addresses Elizabeth:
Vertue alone liues still, and liues in you,
I am a counterfeit, you are the true,
I am a Shaddow, at your feete I fall,
Begging for these, and these, my selfe and all.
All these that thus doe kneele before your eyes,
Are shaddowes like my selfe, dred Nymph it lyes
In you to make vs substances. O doe it,
Vertue I am sure you loue, shee woes you to it.
I read a verdict in your Sun-like eyes,
And this it is: Vertue the victorie. (L2
v
)

The remarkable thing here is the way that Elizabeth’s role is completely circumscribed by
the play and players. The Arraignment allowed Elizabeth the choice of whether to accept
the golden ball; Fortunatus affords her no choice at all. Although Fortune has already
awarded her the victory, Virtue wishes Elizabeth to proclaim it herself. And yet, she will
not let Elizabeth speak. (Elizabeth was known to give commentary, sometimes biting, on
the action of plays; we might imagine that Dekker, afraid that Elizabeth will scan the
courtly audience and sardonically award the victory to Vice, wishes to prevent her from
marring the play.) Instead, with Elizabeth now onstage before all, Virtue seizes the image
of Elizabeth for her own purposes, reading her victory in her countenance and
particularly in the eyes of the mute queen before her. Or rather, Virtue does not so much
read Elizabeth’s mind as she dictates what is there.
Court plays could also facilitate surveillance amongst the court audience in more
subtle ways, such as by placing an image of the monarch onstage for scrutiny. To explore
this, I wish to consider two performances staged within a year of one another early in the
192
reign of James in the Hall at Whitehall Palace: Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix,
performed in February 1604 by the Children of Paul’s, and William Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure, performed 26 December 1604 by the King’s Men. Both plays
feature rulers that, while not direct representations of James, reflect James’s theory of
absolute kingship while disguising themselves to undertake the surveillance of their
realms, but to very different effect. It is perhaps worthwhile, then, to first consider
James’s theory in some detail. James set out his absolutist theory of kingship in two
works written in Scotland in 1598 and published in England in 1603 concurrent with his
accession to the throne, the Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies.
According to James, a king is “a little GOD” made by him “to sit on his Throne, and rule
ouer other men” (BD 12). And he rules accordingly. The king is the only earthly source
of the law, and he is meant to frame his law according to God’s. Parliament is merely
“the Kings head Court” to be used for “making of good Lawes,” and is only convened
and makes laws at the king’s pleasure, which for James “would be but seldome” (BD
21).
36
As James sets out in The Trew Law, the king is explicitly “aboue the law, as both
the author and giuer of strength thereto,” although he ought to conform to it as an act of
goodwill and to set an example for the rest of the commonwealth. He may also choose to
overturn the law at any time for reasons which he is under no obligation to reveal:
And where he sees the lawe doubtsome or rigorous, hee may interpret or mitigate
the same, lest otherwise Summum ius bee summa iniuria: And therefore generall
lawes, made publikely in Parliament, may vpon knowen respects to the King by

36
See also James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, in Political Writings, ed. by Johann P. Sommerville
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 74. Future references are cited in the text, with the title
abbreviated (TL).
193
his authoritie bee mitigated, and suspended vpon causes onely knowen to him.
(TL 75)

In the Basilikon Doron, while James’s king is ultimately inscrutable, his virtue is
paradoxically ensured by his being an object of surveillance, human as well as divine.
The tension between being at once secret and inscrutable, and being set in plain sight,
runs throughout the treatise. The king is like all other men watched at all times by God,
“which should move all godly and honest men, to be very warie in all their secretest
actions...since the deepest of our secrets, cannot be hidde from that all-seeing eye” (BD
3). But the king’s being a public figure also makes him an object of surveillance. The
king is
vpon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes
are attentiuely bent to looke and pry in the least circumstances of their secretest
drifts: Which should make Kings the more carefull not to harbour the secretest
thought in their minde, but such as in the owne time they shall not be ashamed
openly to auouch. (BD 4)

James acknowledges, with more than a hint of annoyance, that the stage motif functions
as a check on misrule because the prying eyes of the people may be able to detect the
king’s thoughts, so it is best not to have any thoughts that one would prefer remain hid.
James even gives his son instructions on how to act that are not unlike Hamlet’s
instructions to the players: “for as the tongue speaketh to the eares, so doeth the gesture
speake to the eyes of the auditour. In both your speaking and your gesture, vse a naturall
and plaine forme, not fairded with artifice” (BD 53). But while the stated purpose of
using “a naturall and plaine forme” is to make the ruler’s secret good intentions easy to
interpret and to avoid the audience misinterpreting something sinister, the unstated
corollary to these instructions is that they also provide a blueprint for masking complex
194
and dubious intentions behind a seemingly transparent facade. This annoyance of having
one’s secret thoughts pried into by the public while professing to have nothing to hide is
also the genesis of the1603 English and Scottish editions of Basilikon Doron. The
original 1599 edition was comprised of only seven copies, all intended solely for the eyes
of Prince Henry; the multiple copies were a redundancy in case the others were damaged
or destroyed. However, portions of the treatise were leaked—James complains of it being
“vented, and set foorth to the publike view of the world” (BD 4)—so James had the 1603
edition released to a “Hydra of diuersly-enclined spectatours” in order to clear up
misconceptions caused by the inaccurate pirated excerpts (BD 9). James believes that
“bookes are viue Idees of the authours minde” (BD 9) and that this one,
since that it was first written in secret, and is now published, not of ambition, but
of a kinde of necessitie; it must be taken of all men, for the trew image of my very
minde, and forme of the rule, which I haue prescibed to my selfe and mine. (BD
11)

And yet, while James believes the book is, like the royal performance, easy to interpret—
he maintains, “I speak so plainely” (BD 6)—he still felt compelled to add a long
explanatory epistle explaining his secret intentions.
But James’s king is not simply set on a stage, an object of both divine and public
surveillance. A subtext to the Basilikon Doron is that his absolutist monarch is also a
surveilling ruler. He is to conduct surveillance of his court: “Bee a daily watch-man ouer
your seruants, that they obey your lawes precisely: For how can your lawes bee kept in
the countrey, if they be broken at your eare?” (BD 37). He is also supposed to conduct
surveillance of his Parliament and his courts: “delite to haunt your Session, and spie
carefully their proceedings; taking good heede, if any briberie may be tried among them,
195
which cannot ouer seuerely be punished” (BD 45). The view of James’s king is not
limited to these institutions, however, and he is to undertake as wide a surveillance of the
country as possible:
for the better reformation of all these abuses among your estates, it will be a great
helpe vnto you, to be well acquainted with the nature and humours of all your
Subiects, and to know particularly the estate of euery part of your dominions; I
would therefore counsell you, once in the yeere to visite the principall parts of the
countrey, ye shal be in for the time. (BD 31)

James’s surveillance takes on the religious overtones of “reforming” his subjects by
coming to know their “nature and humours.” This surveillance is crucial to his exercise of
law, which takes into account not only the act itself, but the author’s intentions and
motivations: “mixe Iustice with Mercie, punishing or sparing, as ye shall finde the crime
to haue bene wilfully or rashly committed, and according to the by-past behauiour of the
committer” (BD 22). We have already encountered Francis Bacon lauding Elizabeth for
“not liking to make Windowes into Mens Hearts and Secret Thoughts, Except the
Abundance of them did overflow into Ouvert and Expresse Acts and Affirmations.”
37
But
the Basilikon Doron is ambiguous as to whether a ruler should be such a passive observer
of his subjects’ external actions and speech, or if judging his subjects’ intentions
necessitates making windows into their secret thoughts in order to justly enforce the law
and reform his subjects.

37
Francis Bacon, “Certain Observations, Upon A Libell, Published this present year, 1592. Intituled; A
Declaration Of the True Causes, Of The Great Troubles, Presupposed to be intended, against the Realm, of
England,” in Resuscitatio, Or, Bringing into Publick Light Severall Pieces, Of The Works, Civil, Historical,
Philosophical, & Theological, Hitherto Sleeping; Of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon Baron of Verulam,
Viscount Saint Alban. According to the best Corrected Coppies. Together, With His Lordships Life, ed. by
William Rawley (London: Sarah Griffin, 1657), 127. For clarity I have removed the excessive commas found
in the original.
196
The Phoenix and Measure for Measure both engage with James’s legal theories
and his vision of a ruler that is at once surveilling and under surveillance. Both plays also,
by representing rulers that undertake the disguised surveillance of their realms, fulfill
James’s unstated wish he be able to go offstage, away from the prying eyes of the people.
However, the similarities between the plays largely end there: while The Phoenix is an
allegorical comedy that basically endorses the surveillance methods used by the title
character, Measure for Measure, while still operating within the conventions of a
comedy, betrays a lot more unease about Duke Vincentio’s surveillance of Vienna. In a
perceptive reading of the two plays, Ivo Kamps argues that while Measure for Measure
may appear to show the dark side of Renaissance culture’s oppressive strategies and The
Phoenix the side the welcomes and realizes the need for management of public anxiety,
the differences between the plays are “only differences in degree. The basic premise of a
ruler who conducts his affairs by means of guile and deception was not nearly as
distasteful to Jacobean audiences as it is to us.”
38
While I accept Kamps’s basic
premise—there are certainly many ‘positive’ examples of Machiavellian rulers on the
early modern stage—I maintain that there are stark differences between the two plays.
The distinction between the methods used by Phoenix and Duke Vincentio is largely that
made by Bacon: Phoenix’s surveillance takes the form of passively observing his subjects
and allowing their hearts and thoughts to reveal themselves through their speech and

38
Ivo Kamps, “Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule: The Phoenix and Measure for Measure,” Studies
in Philology 92:2 (1995): 248-73. The quotations are from 250 and 257. Kamps refers to Stephen
Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in
Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18-47.
197
actions, but Vincentio’s surveillance is aimed at peering directly into his subjects’ souls
and then using the intelligence gained therein to manipulate them according to his whims.
The differences between the performances, and the increasingly scrutiny James
experiences during the latter, were heightened by the plays being performed in close
proximity to one another, and indeed in the same room.
At the opening of The Phoenix, Ferrara suffers from all manner of abuse, largely
because of misgovernance characterized by a lack of surveillance by its ruler, the aged
Duke. In his opening lines, the Duke warns his court, “there’s as much disease, though
not to th’ eye, / In too much pittie, as in Tyrannie.”
39
But rather than himself
exemplifying the mean between the two, the old Duke seems to have ruled with the
former, as the audience will soon learn. Not only is he blind to the abuses in his realm,
but he is also blind to treason percolating in his own court. The Duke’s dynasty is at a
vulnerable moment at the outset of the play. His body is failing, and he continually and
perhaps too publicly reminds his court of his old age and imminent death: “We know
wee’re old, my daies proclayme me so: / Fortie-fiue yeres, I’ue gently ruld this
Dukedome... I know that life / Has not long course in me” (A2). The Duke has, not
coincidentally, reigned for the same duration as Elizabeth. But unlike the situation at the
close of Elizabeth’s reign, the Duke’s succession is clear in the person of his son and heir,
the Prince Phoenix. As Kamps notes, Middleton easily could have tapped into
successional anxieties if he wanted to, but in choosing the phoenix chose an image of

39
Thomas Middleton, The Phoenix, As It hath beene sundry times Acted by the Children of Paules, And
presented before his Maiestie (London: E. A. for A. I., 1607), A2. Future references are cited in the text.
198
enduring stability.
40
Middleton also seemingly wished to align the title character of a play
to be performed at court with the new English king. Phoenix is younger than James, but
he is promising, as the Duke is quick to proclaim: “I haue a Sonne / Whome I dare boast
of.” His flattering courtiers are quick to concur. Infesto continues the Duke’s sentiment:
“Whome we all do boast off, / A Prince elder in vertues then in yeares”; Lussurioso
hastens to add: “His iudgement is a Father to his youth” (A2
v
). Like the King in The
Maid’s Tragedy, the Duke is a ruler set on a stage who is a poor audience of the
performances before him; perhaps like Elizabeth with the Essex debacle, the Duke at the
end of his reign can no longer detect or prevent trouble in his own court. He is unable to
see through his courtiers’ flattery, even when it is immediately followed by Lussurioso’s
and Proditor’s suggestion that he send his young son and only heir abroad to finish his
education. Lussurioso presumably wishes Phoenix out of the way so that he and Infesto
can continue gambling away their lordships to merchants and sleeping with young
married women of the gentry class. But Proditor wishes to kill the Duke and seize power
while Phoenix is abroad.
Phoenix is not as naive as his predecessor. He ostensibly assents to his father’s
wishes, requesting that he only travel with his trusted friend Fidelio rather than with a
large retinue so as to better survey foreign territories:
I do intreate no more,
For that’s the benefit a priuate Gentleman
Enioyes beyond our state, when he notes all,
Himselfe vnnoted. (A3)

40
Kamps, “Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule,” 254.
199
But rather than traveling abroad, he secretly decides to undertake the travel—or
surveillance—of his native Ferrara. Knowing that he is soon to come into power, Phoenix
wishes “to look into the heart & bowels of this Dukedome, and in disguise, marke all
abuses readie for Reformation or Punishment” (A3
v
). In the ensuing action of the play,
Phoenix, along with Fidelio, undertakes what is in the context of the play an
unproblematic surveillance of Ferrara, and one that adheres to Bacon’s maxim. Their
surveillance uncovers abuses at every level of society, including those—the court, the
law, and the country—that James advised personally surveilling. They discover a Captain
who wishes to sell his faithful new wife (Fidelio’s widowed mother) as chattel, and the
sexual intermingling of the classes in the form of a wealthy Jeweller’s wife who pays an
impoverished Knight (of whom we are repeatedly reminded, perhaps with a glance at the
English nobility, “No Gentleman sir, hee’s a Knight” (D1
v
)) for sex in exchange for
pleasure, social prestige, and access to the court. They find abuses in the legal system,
including the Justice Falso, who solicits bribes, employs thieves, and, upon coming into
control of the dowry of his niece (Fidelio’s betrothed) forces her to choose between his
incestuous offer of marriage or single life so that he can keep the dowry either way. They
meet the lawyer Tangle, who preys on his clients and tangles the courts with his legal
maneuverings designed to draw out cases indefinitely. They also discover the corruptions
at court that elude the old Duke: the gambling away of lordships to the merchant class
and sexual intrigues of Lussurioso and Infesto, and the treasonous thoughts of Proditor,
who hires Phoenix, disguised as a mercenary, to kill the Duke.
200
Phoenix accomplishes this all without provoking any of the anxieties with his
surveillance that Duke Vincentio will in ten months’ time. A primary reason for this is
that Phoenix never invades his subjects’ secret thoughts and never strays into projection,
but rather, as with Bacon’s maxim, waits for the minds and hearts of his subjects to make
themselves manifest in actions and speech. The disguises that Phoenix and Fidelio adopt
are suitable to such a passive mode of observation: common travelers, a scrivener, a
country gull. But even when Phoenix disguises himself as a mercenary youth and
presents himself to Infesto, he lets Proditor do all the talking:
Proditor: Come hither Phoenix.
41

Phoenix: What makes your honour breake so earely?
Proditor: A toy, I haue a toy. Phoenix: A toy my Lord.
Proditor: Before thou layest thy wrath vpon the duke,—
be aduiz’d. Phoenix: I, I, I warran you my Lord.
Proditor: Nay, giue me my words honour, heare me,
Ile striue to bring this Act into such forme,
And credite amongst men, they shall suppose
Nay verily beleeue the Prince his sonne,
To be the plotter of his Fathers murther.
Phoenix: Oh that were infinitely admirable!
Proditor: Then if his sonne meet death as he returnes,
Or by my hired Instruments turne vp,
The generall voice will crie—O happy vengeance!
Phoenix: O blessed vengeance! Proditor: I, ile turn my braine
Into a thousand vses, Tire my inuentions,
Make my blood sicke with studie, and mine eye
More hollow then my heart, but I will fashion,
Nay I will fashion it,—Canst counterfet?
Phoenix: The Princes hand, more truly, most direct,
You shall admire it. Proditor: Necessarie mischiefe.
Next to a woman, but more close in secrets
Thou’rt all the kinred that my breast vouchsafes,
Looke into me anon,—I must frame, and muse, and
fashion— Exit.

41
This is an obvious error, probably by an absent-minded Middleton: Proditor does not know the identity
of the disguised prince before him.
201
Phoenix: Twas time to looke into thee, in whose heart
Treason growes ripe, and therefore fit to fall. (G3
v
)

The scene goes out of the way to show that the plot is entirely Proditor’s: it is his “toy,” a
product of his invention that he will “striue” to bring “into such forme” that he “must
frame, and muse, and fashion.” Phoenix says only enough to draw out Proditor, but does
not seek to manipulate or entrap him by suggesting the plot itself or by suggesting details
or alternatives.
Using what he has learned with his surveillance, Phoenix concludes the play by
exploiting the theatricality of power to stage a drama at court to reveal what he has
learned and reform Ferrara. But he does it without manipulating subjects or assigning
them roles in the way that Vincentio will; their speech and actions are of their own
accord. Rather than simply casting off his disguise, Phoenix remains for a time ‘offstage’
by remaining disguised as the mercenary youth and accompanies Proditor to court, while
he has Fidelio suddenly ‘return’ from abroad, bearing a letter from him detailing the
abuses of the realm. The drama does succeed in creating amongst those at court the
perception that they are being watched everywhere and at every moment. When Fidelio
reads Lussurioso’s and Falso’s trespasses, they respond by tacitly acknowledging their
guilt and wondering at the sources of Phoenix’s knowledge: “How could the Prince heare
that?” (I3); “Can a man doe nothing i’the Countrey but tis told at Court? there’s some
busie informing knaue abroad, a my life” (I4). When Proditor’s treason is revealed,
Phoenix still does not cast off his disguise, but rather, as Kamps notes, elects to dramatize
202
the part of the conscience-stricken mercenary unable to lift his hand against the duke
42
:
“Oh guiltie, guiltie...I am the man...I haue no power to strike....I confesse it, he hyred me”
(I2
v
). And yet, rather than confessing his guilt, Proditor continues to deny it until Phoenix
finally casts off his disguise and forces him to acknowledge it. But when Proditor then
throws himself onto the ground in subjection—“Tread me to dust, thou in whom wonder
keepes, / Behold the Serpent on his bellie creepes” (I4)—Phoenix cuts off the
performance—“Ranckle not my foote, away” (I4)—because the performance, with its
transparently religious imagery, is manifestly disingenuous to everyone in attendance and
does not display a truly penitent soul. Instead, Phoenix summarily banishes Proditor,
while declaring that the rest “are vnder reformation, and therefore vnder pardon” (I4
v
),
exercising justice in a way that James would approve. By the end of the play, Phoenix has
so thoroughly surpassed (and awed) the Duke that he abdicates in favor of his son, in a
tidy epigram:
To thee let Reuerence all her powers engage,
That art in youth a myracle to age.
State is but [blindnesse, thou] hadst piercing Art,
We onely saw the knee, but thou the heart.
To thee then power and Dukedome we resigne,
Hee’s fit to raign, whose knowledge can refine (I4).

The old Duke acknowledges his limited ability to see into his subject’s hearts, and
perhaps, in only seeing “the knee,” his being taken in by the flattery and protestations of
loyalty of those closest to him. But in the final line he also argues that the proper use of
knowledge gained through surveillance is to “refine” subjects, echoing Phoenix’s earlier
declaration that his subjects were under “reformation.” The religious overtones would not

42
Kamps, “Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule,” 256.
203
be missed, nor would they have been when even the incorrigible Tangle is purged, with
the help of Quieto, and proclaims: “Haile sacred patience, I begin to feele I haue a
Conscience now, Truth in my words, Compassion in my hart, & aboue al, in my blood
peaces musick, Vse me how you can, You shall find me an honest-quiet man” (K2
v
).
Phoenix’s surveillance has succeeded not only in reasserting the rule of law, but in
causing his subjects to internalize the law and his surveillance of them. In reforming his
subjects, he causes them to grow a conscience.
The Phoenix hence is basically supportive of James’s view of an all-seeing yet
benign ruler using his surveillance and the law to “reform” his subjects and his realm.
And yet, it demurs on the possibility that James will make windows into his subjects’
secret thoughts, in favor of using the power of “piercing Art” only as far as viewing and
passing judgement on subjects’ thoughts when they manifest as actions and speech. The
play is a critique, as Patrick J. Cook argues, of James’s determination announced in the
Basilikon Doron, “to install from above a patriarchal-absolutist ideology that his cleverer
predecessor had studiously avoided enunciating too clearly,” and offers instead “an acute
analysis of the kingdom, the family, and the self, in all of their complex inter-
connections.”
43
But as Alan C. Dessen argues, the play is an allegory—the characters’
names underscore this—in which Phoenix and the audience undergo a process of
education while uncovering and then reforming abuses in Marriage, the Law, Justice, the

43
Patrick J. Cook, “Beggary/Buggery and Oedipal Conflict in Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix,” Early
Modern Literary Studies 12:2 (2006): 3.2.
204
Court, the Nobility, the Gentry, and the Citizenry.
44
The primary audience at a court
performance is, of course, the monarch seated at the center of the theatre. By maintaining
an allegorical mode, the play attempts to exploit the architecture of the theatre to instruct
James—or perhaps, ‘refine’ and ‘reform’ him—without criticizing him too directly. The
play gives James, at the outset of his reign, a program for securing his power and
reforming his realm, and perhaps his court, with a less intrusive and morally troublesome
form of surveillance. James’s reception of that allegory is being watched by hundreds of
eyes all around him, whom are trying to see past his external response into his own
thoughts and intentions. James for his part likely tries to maintain a facade of not being
touched too close to home, to not allow any contrary thoughts he may hold to be put on
display for his entire court.
The Phoenix’s critique of James is subtle, and would not be thrown into full relief
until later that year, on 26 December 1604, during the performance of Measure for
Measure. Measure for Measure gestures even more strongly at James—it was, for one,
performed by his own company, the newly rechristened King’s Men—and is taken by
many as including complimentary references to James’s writings on kingship, while
giving in Angelo a representation of James’s views on tyranny.
45
But the play’s
engagement with these writings is more complex than is often understood. The Phoenix

44
Alan C. Dessen, “Middleton’s The Phoenix and the Allegorical Tradition,” Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900 6:2 (1966): 291-308. Dessen, 293, argues that the allegory is as follows: “Phoenix manages to
uncover abuses in Marriage (the Captain), Law (Tangle), Justice (Falso), the Court (Proditor), the Nobility
(Lussurioso and Infesto), the Gentry (the Knight), and the Citizenry (the Jeweller’s Wife).”

45
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
171; and Josephine Waters Bennett, Measure for Measure as Royal Entertainment (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1966), 11.
205
formed an invisible yet inevitable backdrop in the Hall at Whitehall Palace during
Measure for Measure, when Vienna’s Duke Vincentio announces a similar project of
disguising himself to “Visit both Prince, and People.”
46
But the similarities between the
plays largely end there. The Duke’s disguised surveillance is conducted not as an heir in
anticipation of his accession, but as a sitting ruler (even though he cedes power—
nominally, it turns out—to Angelo). His surveillance is not intended to uncover Vienna’s
abuses, as he knows full well of, and has been complicit in, their existence. The Duke
admits at one point, “’Twould be my tiranny to strike and gall them, / For what I bid them
doe” (F2), and Pompey sardonically claims that abuse is so rampant that “If you head,
and hang all that offend that way but for ten yeare together; you’ll be glad to giue out a
Commission for more heads” (F3
v
). Here too, the play gestures strongly at James. While
James advised his son to “mixe Iustice with Mercie,” he also warned that if
ye kyth your clemencie at the first, the offenses would soone come to such
heapes, and the contempt of you grow so great, that when ye would fall to punish,
the number of them to be punished, would exceed the innocent; and yee would be
troubled to resolue whom-at to begin: and against your nature would be
compelled then to wracke many, whom the chastisement of few in the beginning
might haue preserued.

But James admits to, like Vincentio, being too lenient early in his reign:
But in this, my ouer-deare bought experience may serue you for a sufficient
lesson: For I confesse, where I thought (by being gracious at the beginning) to
win all mens hearts to a louing and willing obedience, I by the contrary found, the
disorder of the countrie, and the losse of my thankes to be all my reward. (BD 22-
3)

46
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies.
Published according to the True Originall Copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), F2. Future
references are cited in the text. I have also referred to William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. by
J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1967); and William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in The Norton
Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 2021-90.
206

However, the Duke’s surveillance is not intended solely at reforming Vienna’s
inhabitants—if it is intended to reform them at all—as was Phoenix’s surveillance of
Ferrara. The play does not end, after all, with the Duke continuing Angelo’s strict
enforcement of the letter of the law. The Duke’s surveillance also goes deeper than
Phoenix’s, and intends precisely at making windows into men’s hearts and secret
thoughts. Using what he learns, the Duke does not so much bring about his subjects’
reformation as he actively manipulates them as he sees fit. The total effect—the much
more ambivalent portrait of the Duke and his alignment with James, and the earlier
performance of The Phoenix in the same room—all bore down on James as he sat at the
focal point of the theatre.
The Duke evokes James most strongly when he voices anxieties about the way
that the theatricality of early modern power makes him an object of display:
I loue the people,
But doe not like to stage me to their eyes:
Though it doe well, I doe not rellish well
Their lowd applause, and Aues vehement:
Nor doe I thinke the man of safe discretion
That do’s affect it. (F1)

The Duke’s misgivings about theatricality do not stem from mere humility. He
acknowledges on one hand the political usefulness of being set on a stage before the
people’s eyes and the way that it empowers the ruler. But he also recognizes that
theatrical power is inherently unstable because the audience is performing as surely as is
the ruler. The Duke’s surrogate Angelo shares these misgivings:
o place, o forme,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit
207
Wrench awe from fooles, and tye the wiser souls
To thy false seeming? (F5)

The performances of subjects before the ruler are prone to being disingenuous, and can
take in even wise rulers and threaten their power. This is particularly the case in a culture
as paranoid about being watched as Vienna’s. Isabella is so suspicious of the male gaze
(with good reason, as it turns out) that she enters a cloister seeking “a more strict
restraint” (F2
v
), and chooses an order in which she may only meet with men in the
presence of the prioress, and then either may be seen but not heard, or heard but not seen,
but never both. Claudio’s offense is the lack of a public ceremony—as he explains to
Lucio, Juliet “is fast my wife, / Saue that we doe the denunciation lacke / Of outward
Order” (F2)—and he complains bitterly to the Provost of being paraded through the
streets after he is condemned: “Fellow, why do’st thou show me thus to th’ world?”
(F1
v
). But the theatrical power of rulers is also destabilized because it subjects the ruler’s
image to the scrutiny and approbation of their subjects, who may ‘misinterpret’ the
performance of the ruler. The Duke laments after a disguised encounter with Lucio:
O Place, and greatnes: millions of false eies
Are stucke vpon thee: volumes of report
Run with these false, and most contrarious Quest
Vpon thy doings: thousand escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dreame,
And racke thee in their fancies. (G2)
47

47
These lines may be misplaced, and may have originally been part of the Duke’s soliloquy at the end of
Act 3. See Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in The Norton Shakespeare, n. 4.1.56. However, if the lines
are not misplaced, they show the Duke still obsessing over his interaction with Lucio at a later moment.
208
But setting the ruler on a stage also limits the ruler’s powers and prevents tyranny, which
the Duke acknowledges in his excuse that it “’Twould be my tiranny” to personally and
visibly punish the abuses he allowed for so long.
Disguising himself and taking himself offstage is an act of wish fulfillment on the
part of a Duke that, like James, fantasizes about avoiding the eyes “attentiuely bent to
looke and pry in the least circumstances of their secretest drifts.” Rather than as a
traveler, scrivener, or country gull, the Duke chooses to disguise himself as a friar, and he
wishes to not only look the part, but to play it as well: he asks another friar to “Supply me
with the habit, and instruct me / How I may formally in person beare / Like a true Frier”
(F2). As his choice of disguise suggests, he wishes to do more than allow “his lookes lie
leuell” (A4) to observe the unfeigned actions and speech of his subjects, as did Phoenix.
His disguise allows him to open a window directly into his subjects’ hearts and secret
thoughts—or rather, their souls. The soul the Duke most wishes to peer into is Angelo’s.
In ceding power, he instructs Angelo to “inforce, or qualifie the Lawes / As to your soule
seemes good” (F1), and later reveals that he has undertaken his disguise in part “to
behold his sway”:
Lord Angelo is precise,
Stands at a guard with Enuie: scarce confesses
That his blood flowes: or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see
If power change purpose: what our Seemers be. (F2)

The Duke mistrusts the sincerity of Angelo’s puritanical austerity, but he also perceives it
as a threat to his power. James himself complained of “Puritanes, and rash-headie
Preachers, that thinke it their honour to contend with Kings, and perturbe whole
209
kingdomes” (BD 5). In the Duke’s philosophy of law, like James’s, authority stems from
the moral uprightness of the ruler. For James, a tyrant was one “that cannot rule and
dantone his owne proper affections and vnreasonable appetites...that in his owne person
and heart, feareth not and loueth not the Diuine Maiestie”; the tyrant “thinketh his people
ordeined for him, a prey to his passions and inordinate appetites, as the fruites of his
magnanimitie” (BD 12 and 20).
As N. W. Bawcutt notes, the severity of Vienna’s laws and his own hypocrisy
aside, Angelo’s philosophy of law relies on an impersonal standard that is much closer to
our own: as he tells Isabella, “It is the Law, not I, condemne your brother” (F4). The
Duke’s philosophy relies on a personal standard in which a judge may only enforce laws
if the judge is not guilty of the same offense as the offender (a vision which also,
uncoincidentally, makes the law more exploitable to serve his ends).
48
This is why the
Duke is so quick to put down Friar Thomas’s concern that he wishes to disguise himself
as a friar because of “the dribling dart of Loue” (F2), and why the Duke is so preoccupied
with Lucio’s slanders against his integrity and his sexual escapades: they are a direct
assault on his authority to rule. It is also why he perceives Angelo as a potential threat: if
Angelo is more moral and less subject to the weaknesses of the flesh than the Duke, it is
he whom should rule Vienna. By installing in his place the inexperienced Angelo—who
asks for “some more test, made of my mettle” (F1) before being given such authority—
the Duke sets up his political rival to fail while placing himself in a position from which
to secretly observe it. He does not use his disguise to directly observe Angelo, but rather

48
N. W. Bawcutt, “‘He Who the Sword of Heaven Will Bear’: The Duke Versus Angelo in Measure for
Measure,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 89-97.
210
for something arguably better. By gaining access to Vienna’s prison, he can observe the
souls of those judged by Angelo, and thereby can not only see into Angelo’s soul but can
conduct a more generalized surveillance of Vienna. His disguise allows him to serve as
confessor to Claudio, Juliet, and Mariana, and also gives him freedom to move around
the prison and secretly eavesdrop on conversations. As Steven Mullaney has observed, in
Vincentio’s Vienna—and perhaps in James’s England—thoughts are subjects, despite
Isabella’s protestation to the contrary.
49

The Duke uses his disguise to do more than see through his subjects’
performances to gain near-absolute knowledge of Vienna: he uses it to remove himself
and his exercise of power from the scrutiny of his subjects, and exploiting the knowledge
gained from his surveillance, he exerts near-absolute control. But not without perhaps
provoking a considerable amount of unease amongst the Whitehall audience, which in
turn would have been directed at James. A Catholic friar was always ideologically
fraught on the English stage—Marlowe’s Mephistopheles is dressed as a Franciscan friar.
Like Mephistopheles, the Friar-Duke interferes with the salvation of his subjects. He
administers reconciliations to Claudio and Juliet that lack efficacy because they are
administered by a charlatan, and he keeps Isabella ignorant that her brother lives,
ostensibly “To make her heauenly comforts of despaire / When it is least expected”
(G3
v
). But the Friar-Duke raises more immediate concerns with his interference in
temporal events. At a performance in James’s court in December 1604, the Duke’s
disguise might have recalled two plots from the previous year: the Main Plot to replace

49
Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 106.
211
James with his Catholic cousin Arabella Stuart, and the Bye plot to kidnap James and
force him to repeal anti-Catholic legislation. The Friar-Duke plays the part of the stateless
and perhaps spying Catholic clergyman. He describes himself as “a brother / Of gracious
Order, late come from the Sea / In speciall businesse from his Holinesse” (G1
v
), and
claims immunity from Vienna’s laws when Escalus orders his arrest and torture:
The Duke dare
No more stretch this finger of mine, then he
Dare racke his owne: his Subject am I not,
Nor here Prouinciall. My businesse in this State
Made me a looker on here in Vienna. (G5
v
)

Despite Friar Peter’s assertions to the contrary, the Friar-Duke is a “temporary medler”
(G4
v
)—a meddler in temporal affairs. He attains a godlike position as the unseen, yet all-
seeing, all-controlling center of power; he becomes, in Lucio’s ironic phrase, “the olde
fantastical Duke of darke corners” (G3
v
). He manipulates his subjects to suit his ends,
extending his power over the most intimate details of his subjects’ lives, including with
whom they sleep and whom they marry. He shows himself, as with Barnardine, able to
toy with their life and death, and even extends his power over his subjects beyond their
deaths, when he has Ragozine’s corpse decapitated to make use of his head. Kamps
argues that Measure for Measure and The Phoenix both dramatize Marx’s twofold
assessment of religion as both an oppressive ideological tool and something that fills a
need for the people, or in other words, both “Shakespeare and Middleton make visible,
concrete, and accessible a substitute figure for the otherwise inscrutable Christian God.”
50

But Middleton’s is a New Testament God, a largely passive observer of human events

50
Kamps, “Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule,” 259.
212
until the day of judgement; Shakespeare’s is an Old Testament God, an active and at
times jealous and fickle meddler in human events.
The total effect is to render most of his subjects completely docile and exploitable
to his designs. We see this with Isabella and Mariana, but this is perhaps most powerfully
witnessed in the Provost. The Friar-Duke attempts to get the Provost to act by making
repeated claims of possessing privileged information about the Duke’s mind and his
whereabouts. At one moment, the Provost stands amazed when the friar standing before
him produces what he claims is a secret letter from the Duke, the contents of which even
Angelo is unaware, and then orders the Provost to defy Angelo by executing Barnardine.
The Friar-Duke forces him into action by suggesting that his order is backed by divine
providence, comparing the rising sun to the star announcing the birth of Christ: “Looke,
th’vnfolding Starre calles vp the Shepheard; put not your selfe into amazement, how
these things should be; all difficulties are but easie when they are knowne” (G3). By the
following scene, the Provost has been rendered completely pliable to the Friar-Duke’s
will: his actions, his job, and his life are entirely in the Friar-Duke’s hands. And yet,
crucially, he still has the paradoxical Christian experience of having free will and having
freely chosen his submission: he protests to the Friar-Duke, “I am your free dependant”
(G3
v
).
The Duke’s powers reach their height in the final scene. His transformation is
complete: he has completely removed himself from the stage and rendered himself
invisible, inscrutable, and all but omnipotent. He stages a civic pageant to greet his
supposed reentry into Vienna, of the sort of ceremonies that marked the progresses and
213
royal entries of Elizabeth and James.
51
It is a political drama: its purpose is to awe the
audience, to confirm the Duke’s authority and undermine Angelo’s. It is also very
different from the drama staged by Phoenix, because rather than relying on the revelation
of the knowledge he gains from his surveillance to achieve the dramatic effect, the Duke
exerts total control over the performance. He requests that any who “craue redresse of
iniustice” to “exhibit their petitions in the street,” and summons an audience of “men of
sort and suite” (G4) to meet him at the gates of the city. He then proceeds to choreograph
every move, down to the blaring trumpets announcing his arrival. He assigns roles to
Friar Peter, Isabella, and Mariana, and through Friar Peter has Isabella and Mariana set
on a stage: “Come I haue found you out a stand most fit, / Where you may haue such
vantage on the Duke / He shall not passe you” (G4). He has Isabella exploit her position
to address Angelo, to “Accuse him home and home” (G3
v
), and even controls the manner
in which she does so, much to her consternation. She laments to Mariana:
To speak so indirectly I am loath,
I would say the truth; but to accuse him so
That is your part, yet I am aduis’d to doe it,
He saies, to vaile full purpose. (G4)

For the second time in the play—the first time being when she pleads for her brother’s
life before Angelo—the Isabella who would prefer to abjure the sight of and speech with
men is forced to turn actor before them.

51
David Bergeron, in English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2003), 5, provides a useful framework for considering the Duke’s civic pageant: “By
definition civic pageants are political events. They involve the presence of the ruler—either sovereign or
mayor—they utilize public monies of city or guilds, they take place in the public arena, and they celebrate
national and civic virtues. Such street shows function as part of the political discourse of the realm. The
pageants celebrate political power even as they confirm such power.” Bergeron, 64, later notes that in
Elizabeth’s reign, she was deified and brought with her religious or mystical powers, the Truth that set the
people free.
214
The star of the Duke’s pageant is, unbeknownst to himself, Angelo. The Duke
begins the drama by drawing the audience’s eyes to Angelo, taking his hand to give a
public show of his favor that ostensibly reveals his own inner thoughts:
Giue me your hand,
And let the subject see, to make them know
That outward curtesies would faine proclaime
Favours that keepe within: Come Escalus,
You must walk by vs on our other hand:
And good supporters are you. (G4)

He turns the three of them into an emblem—supporters are the figures beside a shield that
hold it up.
52
They position themselves at the back of the Whitehall stage, and as they
watch Isabella’s and Mariana’s performances the Duke leads Angelo to believe that they
are merely spectators, using words reminiscent of Robin Goodfellow: “Doe you not smile
at this, Lord Angelo? / Oh heauen, the vanity of wretched fooles. / Give vs some seates”
(G5). However, Isabella and Mariana only occupy a side stage, and when the Duke leaves
Angelo to pass judgement on them, Angelo is left front and center on the main stage.
When the Duke reappears in his friar disguise, he positions himself, no doubt, at the
center of the Whitehall stage. The Duke’s pageant becomes a miniature of the theatre at
Whitehall, and he himself occupies the place analogous to James’s. And yet, to heighten
the effect, he remains for a while longer the invisible center of power and allows his
drama to play out in a much more indirect manner than does Phoenix, letting Angelo
believe for a moment that he will escape, letting Isabella and Mariana despair that their
appeals and the tarnish to their reputations they incur while making them are fruitless,
and letting himself be at the point of arrest and torture before Lucio pulls down his hood.

52
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in The Norton Shakespeare, n. 5.1.18.
215
When the Duke is spectacularly revealed as himself, his drama has its intended
effect on Angelo and, we assume, the Viennese audience. Angelo perceives himself as
the object of divine surveillance, and gives what appears to be a spontaneous speech
instructing the audience how to perceive his downfall that is in fact demanded by the
conventions of the Duke’s drama:
O, my dread lord,
I should be guiltier then my guiltinesse,
To thinke I can be vndiscerneable,
When I perceiue your grace, like powre diuine,
Hath look’d vpon my passes. (G5
v
)

The Duke allows Angelo to give the sort of scaffold speech that Phoenix would not allow
from Proditor, perhaps because it is sincere, but also because it reminds the audience that
the Duke may be watching them at any moment. The other moment in the drama that
appears to be spontaneous—Isabella kneeling to take Mariana’s part pleading for
Angelo’s life—is also elicited by the Duke, who dares Isabella not to do so by saying to
Mariana:
Against all sence you doe importune her,
Should she kneele downe, in mercie of this fact,
Her Brothers ghost, his paued bed would breake,
And take her hence in horror. (G6)

The Duke concludes his drama by reordering the stunned Vienna has he sees fit. He lets
Angelo keep his life, contrary to his own wishes, but forces him to marry Mariana; he
brings Claudio back to life, shrouded like another Lazarus, but with the condition that he
“right” his wrongs to Juliet; he pardons Barnardine and Lucio, heightening the latter act
by first declaring he “cannot pardon” him (G6) while simultaneously ‘degrading’ Lucio
by forcing him to marry Kate Keepdown; and he asks Isabella to permanently abandon
216
her desire to withdraw into the convent by assume a new role he has chosen for her, that
of his wife. The Duke concludes his drama with a promise to reveal what else he has kept
concealed, if he sees it fit to do so: “So bring vs to our Pallace, where wee’ll show /
What’s yet behinde, that meete you all should know” (G6
v
).
But while Vienna is made pliable to his will, the effect of his drama on the
Whitehall audience is less clear. The Duke remains a troubling figure to the end. As
Robert Zaller argues, “The Duke gratifies himself in almost every way a tyrant can,
except for the shedding of blood.”
53
While the play does not openly critique James’s
views on kingship, the praise it offers them is, as the title perhaps suggests, measured at
best. While the play resolves, as comedies do, in a state of near-harmony under the
Duke’s new surveilling, absolutist regime, there cracks around the edges that suggest
alternative outcomes. The play waivers on the edge of tragedy in a way that The Phoenix
never does: Angelo nearly ruins all by going ahead with Claudio’s execution despite
believing he has slept with Isabella, and the Duke needs the fortuitous death of Ragozine
to supply a stand-in head for Claudio’s when Barnardine proves unfit for execution. The
conclusions of the two plays are also markedly different. James wrote that the only
remedy to quiet those who “iudge and speake rashly of their Prince” was to rule justly
and
to temper and mixe your seuerity with mildnes, that as the vnjust railers may be
restrained with a reuerent awe; so the good and louing Subiects, may not onely
liue in suretie and wealth, but be stirred vp and inuited by your benigne
courtesies, to open their mouthes in the iust praise of your so well moderated
regiment. (BD 30-1)

53
Robert Zaller, “‘Send the Head to Angelo’: Capital Punishment in Measure for Measure,” The Upstart
Crow 24 (2004): 69.
217
The Phoenix concludes with such praise for the wisdom of the new Duke of Ferrara and
the reformation of his subjects. The Duke of Vienna achieves precisely the opposite
effect as that sought by James. From those from whom he anticipates vocal praise he gets
only silence. Isabella’s silence to the Duke’s repeated requests for her hand in marriage
has been often remarked upon.
54
Whatever the possibilities left open by the play text, it
seems that at James’s court, with a Duke clearly aligned with him in a number of ways, it
is unlikely that Isabella is openly defiant of the Duke at this performance. But her silence
repeats that of Angelo, Claudio, and Barnardine, as well as Juliet and Mariana. Only
Mariana, with Isabella pleading on her behalf, has had a suit granted by the Duke. For the
others, whether their silence is composed of joy, awe, or horror is unclear. Barnardine’s
silence is of a more defiant quality. He earlier channels his inner Bartleby by preferring
not to be executed, and he remains a living reminder of the Duke’s tyranny: “the absent
Duke” has allowed him to languish in prison, untried for nine years on charges for which
Angelo quickly found “vndoubtfull proofe” (G2
v
). As Craig A. Bernthal notes,
Barnardine has refused to play his part and thereby legitimate the process
55
; as Zaller
argues, Barnardine has shown himself too insensate to feel fear, and “In pardoning him,
the Duke sentences him to discover it, and thus to become his true subject.”
56
This silent
void is filled only by Lucio who, far from being “restrained with a reuerent awe,” refuses
to keep his peace in the face of the Duke’s increasingly angry yet futile attempts to

54
Philip C. MacGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 63-96.

55
Craig A. Bernthal, “Staging Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Measure for Measure,” Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900 32:2 (1992): 262-3.

56
Zaller, “‘Send the Head to Angelo,’” 69.
218
silence him. Rather than “iust praise” of the Duke, Lucio challenges him to the end,
objecting to the cruelty of his punishment and attempting to override the Duke’s will: “if
you will hang me for it, you may: but I had rather it would please you, I might be
whipt...I beseech your Highnesse doe not marry me to a Whore...Marrying a punke my
Lord, is pressing to death, Whipping and hanging” (G6-G6
v
).
The sounds that greet the end of the Duke’s drama—the Duke’s voice alternating
between demanding, imploring, and irritated notes, Lucio’s constant interruptions, and
the others’ silence—would be most meaningful to James as they reverberated around the
Great Hall. The memory of the very different ending to The Phoenix would also be
recalled. Bernthal sees Measure for Measure as also evoking the events surrounding the
Main and Bye plots, in which James pardoned Markham, Grey, and Cobham and stepped
in as actor, director, and playwright during Ralegh’s spectacular trial after Ralegh’s own
magnificent performance, and providing a “fictional nexus that allowed audiences to
interrogate and interpret” them.
57
Certainly there are similarities, but regardless of
whether the play is meant to evoke so specific a context, it does provide a fictional nexus
for interpreting James’s surveilling, absolutist tendencies. It suggests not only that
absolutism is constantly threatened by caprice, but also that it relies on the moral integrity
of the ruler. Whatever the Duke’s motives, reforming his subjects is not one of them, and
the Duke’s final, seemingly incongruous proposal to Isabella may only serve to confirm
Friar Thomas’s and Lucio’s earlier suspicions about the Duke’s character. The uneasy
reception of James’s accession and the publication of the Basilikon Doron are in the

57
Bernthal, “Staging Shakespeare,” 247-69.
219
Duke’s Vienna at the end of Measure for Measure. And while we unfortunately do not
have a record of how James or the rest of the audience responded to the play, this unease
must have surround James in the Whitehall Theatre, and was conveyed to James, seated
at the theatre’s focal point. James in turn is surveying his court’s response to the play and
his own reception of it. But how many Angelos and Claudios surround him with their
souls laid bare? How many obstinate Lucios and Barnardines, and how many inscrutable
Isabellas? Unlike Oberon in the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier that
year, James has no fairy juice to control his subjects, nor can he keep his exercise of
power invisible to them. Later that same Christmas season, James and his court would see
a performance of Othello, and in Iago a much less ambivalent portrayal of a surveilling
presence pulling strings behind the scenes. If any of this gave James pause, it was brief.
Or maybe James took a very different lesson. Barely fifteen months later, James would
disguise himself and lurk in the dark corners during the show trial of the Jesuit priest
Henry Garnet, who was soon to be executed in connection with the Gunpowder Plot.
220
Conclusion

“Watford, then wilderness”

This dissertation grew out of a question: why was there a connection between early
modern playwrights, including Marlowe, Jonson, and Kyd, and the world of early modern
spying? This led, predictably, to the espionage and counterespionage that were part of the
power struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, both within England and between
England and its rivals on the Continent. But it also increasingly led to questions about the
surveillance practices of the early modern English state, practices which were part of a
broader colonial project throughout England as a nationalist, Protestant, and emergent-
capitalist state sought to extend and consolidate its control. These included, as we have
seen, bringing the universities and playing companies alike under the direct authority and
supervision of members of the Privy Council, and using universities and playing
companies to in turn conduct surveillance of potentially suspect populations around the
country. Given the importance of drama in England going back at least to the medieval
period, it was an easy leap for the state to use drama as one part of its colonial and
surveillance projects. I know that I have only scratched the surface of this topic, and a
more thorough investigation awaits.
However, I believe at this point that we can conclude, against Foucault, that
surveillance was a component of early modern power. It perhaps took its most
recognizable form, at least to modern eyes, at the universities, which were run something
like a modern prison: students were subjected to constant supervision at the hands of
221
university authorities, their tutors, and one another; their dress and decorum were
restricted to make them readily identifiable as students; their movement was ordered in
both space in time, and their ability to move alone or beyond the college walls greatly
restricted. But there is something we can identify as surveillance at other locations as
well. At the court, there were similar efforts to restrict the movement, dress, and decorum
of courtiers and particularly servants, but as we saw, the dynamic of early modern power
that Foucault characterizes as spectatorial and I characterize as theatrical made this
surveillance more layered and dispersed, enveloping even the monarch, and hence was
less top-down than modern surveillance. But I also think that we can see the surveying
conducted by traveling liveried companies as a form of surveillance, albeit again one less
recognizable to modern eyes. “Surveillance” from “survey” is a tempting but false (or at
least indirect) etymology, but they are related practices in the early modern period. Not
only were players involved in a sort of ideological mapping with their playing, but the
information that they gained in their travels potentially helped fill out the detailed spy
maps of Burghley’s that we saw in Chapter One.
The broader endpoint of this dissertation, however, is this: playing places matter.
In the field of early modern English drama, we sometimes get fixated on the texts of
plays and the playwrights behind them, perhaps because they are seemingly the most
concrete things that we have. Texts, of course, only capture one moment in the fluid,
unstable life of a play. Plays were changed from performance to performance, passages
added and cut, lines forgotten by actors or extemporized by clowns.
1
Playwriting was a

1
See Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (New York: Routledge, 2004).
222
collaborative process, and plays were frequently revised at a later date, sometimes by
their original playwright or playwrights, and sometimes by altogether new ones. The
status of the play texts that have survived is also often debatable, as descending from
‘fair’ or ‘foul’ copies, memorial reconstructions, and so forth. The alternate texts of
Doctor Faustus, Hamlet, and King Lear are perhaps only three of the most famous
examples of problems that extend to all texts of early modern plays. These dynamics
decenter the authority of the playwright and play text alike.
Authority, then, perhaps rests more properly in the performance of a play than in a
play text or playwright. Or, more properly speaking, in the multiple performances of a
play. Despite this, many studies continue to use plays and playwrights as their organizing
principle. Andrew Gurr, Scott McMillin, and Sally-Beth MacLean have suggested the
possibilities of studies organized by playing companies, and this dissertation is
thoroughly indebted to their work even where it departs from them.
2
I hope that this
dissertation suggests the possibilities of another, complementary approach to the study of
early modern drama, one that takes performance spaces as its organizing principle. This
means taking into account not only the social and political climate of England as a whole,
but also the local social and political climate that is specific to the audience of the town,
university, castle, or country house in which a play is performed. It also means taking
into account the architecture of a performance space, its entrances, exits, and seating

2
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1996); The
Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Shakespeare’s
Opposites: The Admiral’s Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Scott
McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
223
arrangements, but also its sightlines, acoustics, and even its smells.
3
These all play their
part in the meaning-making of an individual performance.
Writing this dissertation has led me to formulate what I believe is a new
methodology that attempts to consider a play in its historical conditions of performance,
one that takes into account play texts, staging possibilities, playing companies, theatre
architecture, audience seating, composition, and sensory experience, and political and
social contexts. I know that it is imperfectly realized in my first attempt: among other
self-criticisms, the considerations of staging in specific architectures could often be more
fully developed, and the social and political moment at which a given performance takes
place often could also be more precisely pinpointed. There are also some inherent
problems with the methodology, mostly stemming from the dearth of evidence.
Particularly with civic records of performances, but also with records from the London,
court, and university stages, we rarely have the information we would want concerning
what plays were performed and when, where, and by whom they were staged. It is only
with rare instances, as with the performances of the Parnassus plays at St. John’s and the
court performances of The Phoenix and Measure for Measure, and a few others, that we
have reasonably specific dating. This was particularly an obstacle in Chapters One and
Two, when we would love to know when and where plays like Henry V and The True
Tragedie were performed, but this is something we will likely never know. There is also
the problem posed by the limited number of playing spaces that have survived: the Globe,

3
For an investigation of acoustics, see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England:
Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). For an examination of the
smell of early modern plays in performance, see Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of Gunpowder” (paper
presented at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, 22 April 2005).
224
Rose, Swan, and Blackfriars playhouses in London, the entirety of Whitehall Palace
saving the Banqueting House, and many of the town halls and country houses used for
performances in the period have disappeared, usually with only the thinnest of surviving
evidence.
But there is the even more fundamental problem of considering audience
responses to performances when there are few records of this, even pertaining to
performances before Elizabeth or James. In Chapter Four, for example, we encountered
Ivo Kamps’s assertion that audiences of The Phoenix and Measure for Measure would
not have been nearly as troubled as modern audiences about depictions of rulers who use
guile and deception.
4
I opposed that argument using internal evidence of ‘audience’
responses in Measure for Measure, and one could point to external evidence, such as
execution scaffold scenes that produced narratives counter to the ones intended by the
state, but there are limits to this sort of analysis. The best that can be done, which is the
approach I have attempted here, is to historicize a performance as much as possible, to
consider the multiple and at times contradictory responses likely to be produced within a
given audience, and to hope that one is not imposing her or his own twenty-first-century
perspective too much. I had a conversation on this very problem with David George,
editor of the REED: Lancashire, and he advocated allowing oneself a relative amount of
leeway in this sort of analysis, and it is an approach I have followed. But here as
elsewhere, we often lack the clear, confirming evidence we desire, and each new piece of
knowledge we gain seemingly comes with the recognition that there is something else

4
Ivo Kamps, “Ruling Fantasies and the Fantasies of Rule: The Phoenix and Measure for Measure,” Studies
in Philology 92:2 (1995): 248-73.
225
that has been lost to time. This lack of certainty is often frustrating, but it is also one of
the things that attracted me to the study of early modern theatre and culture in the first
place.
Despite these problems, I think a methodology considering how architecture and
audiences participate in the meaning of performances also opens up the field of early
modern drama in wonderful ways. I have spent this dissertation suggesting how plays and
theatre architectures could be used to facilitate spying on and surveillance of audiences
and their responses to dramatic performances, but this methodology could be used in a
variety of contexts. Simply put, the meaning of a play changes based on the space in
which it is performed. Hamlet is a different play depending on whether it is performed at
Cambridge and Oxford, as we have seen, or the Globe, the court, or, as with the first
performance of the play for which we seemingly have a definitive record, onboard a
ship.
5
The discursive instabilities I highlighted in The True Tragedie might not be
exposed to nearly so subversive an extent in a place like Leicester, the city near Bosworth
Field through which Richard’s body is dragged at the end of the play, as they are in York.
Should Henry V have been performed in the Norwich New or Common Hall on one of
the Chamberlain’s Men’s visits to the city, the figure of Sir Thomas Erpingham would
have been given the chance to command the English longbowmen at Agincourt under the
hammerbeam roof that was his gift.
While this dissertation has focused on performances outside of the London stage,
this methodology also could be fruitfully brought to bear on the public theatres of

5
Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, introduction to Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (London: Cengage
Learning, 2006), 98.
226
London, and initially it was my plan to include a chapter here as well. Tiffany Stern
suggests that an actor in blackface—such as Othello, or Aaron in Titus Andronicus—
would have evoked for audience members who arrived at the theatres in Southwark via
London Bridge the heads of traitors, often parboiled and tarred to prevent decay, that
were over the gatehouses.
6
These characters hence could have functioned, to quote
Montaigne once more, “as a diverting of worse inconveniences, and secret actions.”
7
In
one of the more famous cases, Richard II apparently was not perceived as a potentially
subversive play until a performance of it was commissioned at the Globe on the eve of
the Essex revolt. The allies of Essex that commissioned that fateful performance must
have been observing the audience’s responses in an attempt to discern whether their
rebellion would receive popular support. The staging of Cade’s Rebellion in 2 Henry VI
at the Rose Theatre in Southwark would have been just a few hundred yards from the
epicenter of the historical rebellion once it arrive in London from Kent. The staging of a
popular revolt, particularly one that is initially sympathetic to the participants before
turning so completely against them, may have exposed divided loyalties amongst the
socially heterogeneous audiences at the Rose. Each performance of 2 Henry VI at the
Rose could perhaps be seen as not only ceremonially staging Cade’s Rebellion in order to
suppress it, but also as reincorporating Southwark into royal hands anew during each
performance. A performance of Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, also at the Rose, would

6
Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare, 9.

7
Michel de Montaigne, “On educating children,” in The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie
Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne, Knight of the noble Order of St. Michaell, and one of the
gentlemen in Ordinary of the French king, Henry the third his chamber, trans. by John Florio (London: Val.
Sims for Edward Blount dwelling in Paules churchyard, 1603), I2.
227
have provided an opportunity to conduct surveillance on potentially religiously-mixed
audiences with its ideologically ambiguous representation of the St. Bartholomew’s Day
massacre of Protestant Huguenots at the hands of Catholics, and subsequent counter-
massacre of Catholics at the hands of Huguenots. In an open-air theatre like the Rose,
even things outside the theatre could influence the meaning of the play. As Brian Walsh
recently argued, the otherwise quotidian chiming bells of parish churches, including
nearby St. Mary Overie, would during a performance of the Massacre at Paris evoke the
chiming of bells that precipitate the historical massacre.
8
This would have been an effect
that lingered for audience members hearing the chiming of parish bells long after they left
the performance and the playhouse.

8
Brian Walsh, “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and the Sensation of Religious Violence,” (paper presented at
the annual meeting of The Renaissance Society of America, Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC, 22 March
2012).
228

Figure 11: Engraving of Old London Bridge by Claes Van Visscher (1616). Notice
the spike heads of traitors over the Southwark gatehouse. St. Mary Overie or St.
Saviour Church, present day Southwark Cathedral, is in the foreground; the Rose
was located about a quarter mile west.

Beyond the performances of individual plays, the study of the London stage as a
whole would benefit from being more adequately considered in a national context than it
often is. As we, along with Andrew Gurr, noted before, the London-based companies’
gradual shift from open-air to indoor theatres was not so much an innovation as it was a
national trend arriving at the political center.
9
But before the London-based companies
established permanent outdoor playhouses, they often performed in different playhouses.
It might be possible to see performances of the Henry VI plays staged in different
playhouses around London, including The Theatre in Shoreditch as well as the Rose, as

9
Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies, 40.
229
undertaking something of the sort of colonization, mapping, and surveillance on a smaller
scale that we saw with liveried players traveling the provinces. Playhouses themselves
were seemingly mobile: the timbers of The Theatre were covertly taken down and hauled
across the Thames under the cover of night for use in the construction of the Globe on
Bankside. Meanwhile, performances at the Inns of Court, the ‘third university,’ including
the performance of Twelfth Night at Middle Temple Hall on 2 February 1602, might also
be fruitfully considered alongside the environment at plays at Cambridge and Oxford.
While I hope to explore these performances and others like them, it was also a
conscious choice to focus on plays outside the London stage. “Watford, then wilderness”
is a bias that became inscribed on early modern theatre studies as it was inscribed on
English geography. In the words of Coriolanus, “There is a world elsewhere.”
10
Ninety
percent of the population of early modern England lived outside the capital. When they
went to see a play, it would not have been in the Globe or the Rose, but instead in a
marketplace or inn yard, a church or a country house, and increasingly, in a town, guild,
or college hall. The play may have been one by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, or
Jonson, taken on the road by the Chamberlain’s or the Admiral’s Men. Traveling, like
court performances, was one of the expectations that came with noble or royal patronage.
The plague during London summers may have been every bit as convenient a fiction for
sending liveried players on the road as were the occasional court performances used to
justify their performances in London the rest of the year. But a play seen by people

10
William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Coriolanus, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, &
Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623),
bb4.
230
outside London more likely would have been performed by the Queen’s Men, students at
Cambridge or Oxford, or any of the galaxies of regional touring groups whose names and
repertories have been lost to us because their plays were never printed or performed on
the London stage. These worlds must also be considered, not only for what they can tell
us about the more often studied London stage, but also so that the study of early modern
theatre is inclusive of the dramatic experiences available to the entire English population,
not just the portion residing in London.
I have one more concluding thought. Ben Jonson famously declared of
Shakespeare, “He was not of an age, but for all time!,”
11
articulating a perception of the
timelessness of his work that persists to this day (despite Shakespeare’s fall from grace
among some Classical critics). Shakespeare has since become for all places as well, put to
a variety of cultural, educative, and colonial uses in India, Africa, and elsewhere, and
staged in many languages besides English.
12
I would suggest that the cultural importance
of Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries that persists to this day has its roots not,
of course, in their supposed timelessness, but also not exclusively in the political
purposes to which their work was later put. Rather, I would suggest that the construction
of this cultural importance began with the political purposes to which their plays and their
theatre were put in their own day, not only in London and the court, but also in the

11
Ben Jonson, “To the memory of my beloued, The AVTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: AND what he hath
left vs,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True
Originall Copies (London: Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623), A4
v
.

12
See, for instance, the collection of essays in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial
Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
231
colonial, spying, and surveillance applications to which they were put throughout
England.
232
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation argues that the theatre of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and their professional and amateur contemporaries was used by different authorities throughout early modern England to conduct surveillance on audiences comprised of suspect classes, including political rivals, recusant Catholics, radical Protestants, and economic dissidents. I argue furthermore that the architecture of theatres was designed with an eye towards audience surveillance and control. This project is organized by different performance locations throughout England--towns, the universities, and the court--and analyzes a variety of sources, including court, civic, and university records, political, scientific, and philosophical treatises, maps, architecture, painting, prose works, and poetry. ❧ This dissertation deepens our understanding of how Shakespeare and his contemporaries achieved the central place in our culture that they occupy today, while critiquing Michel Foucault's genealogy of the modern surveillance state and his rigid distinctions between the disciplinary strategies of different epochs. By considering plays in their historical conditions of performance throughout England, I theorize that meaning is a complex interaction involving not only play texts and actors, but also audiences and theatre architectures. I also offer an approach that opens the study of early modern drama in a way that is inclusive of the dramatic experiences available to the entire English population, not just the portion residing in London.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Stefanek, Robert David (author)

Core Title Spying and surveillance in the early modern state and stage

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/27/2012

Defense Date 05/03/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Architecture,early modern English literature,English Renaissance literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,Shakespeare,spying,surveillance,Theatre

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Smith, Bruce R. (committee chair), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Lloyd, David C. (committee member), Velasco, Sherry (committee member)

Creator Email robertstefanek@hotmail.com,stefanek@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-75462

Unique identifier UC11288218

Identifier usctheses-c3-75462 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-StefanekRo-1049-0.pdf

Dmrecord 75462

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Stefanek, Robert David

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA