The Soddered Citizen

Last updated February 28, 2019

The Soddered Citizen is a Caroline era stage play, a city comedy now attributed to John Clavell. The play was lost for three centuries; the sole surviving manuscript was rediscovered and published in the twentieth century.

City comedy, also known as citizen comedy, is a genre of comedy in the English early modern theatre.

John Clavell (1601–1643) was a highwayman, author, lawyer, and doctor. He is known for his poem A Recantation of an Ill Led Life, and his play The Soddered Citizen. His life is mainly split into two parts: his early life in England, where he grew up, lived as a highwayman, and started his reformation, and the latter part of his life in England and Ireland where he was a lawyer and physician.

History

The Soddered Citizen was produced onstage, most likely in 1630, by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register in 1632, but no edition was printed in the seventeenth century. Thereafter, the play was thought to be lost; it was known only by its title, and widely attributed to Shackerley Marmion. The manuscript surfaced in 1932, when its owner, Lt. Col. E. G. Troyte-Bullock, brought it to the British Museum for examination. It was studied by scholar John Henry Pyle Pafford and published in 1936.^[1]

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1630.

The King's Men was the acting company to which William Shakespeare (1564–1616) belonged for most of his career. Formerly known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they became The King's Men in 1603 when King James I ascended the throne and became the company's patron.

Blackfriars Theatre was the name given to two separate theatres located in the former Blackfriars Dominican priory in the City of London during the Renaissance. The first theatre began as a venue for the Children of the Chapel Royal, child actors associated with the Queen's chapel choirs, and who from 1576 to 1584 staged plays in the vast hall of the former monastery. The second theatre dates from the purchase of the upper part of the priory and another building by James Burbage in 1596, which included the Parliament Chamber on the upper floor that was converted into the playhouse. The Children of the Chapel played in the theatre beginning in the autumn of 1600 until the King's Men took over in 1608. They successfully used it as their winter playhouse until all the theatres were closed in 1642 when the English Civil War began.

The manuscript, now kept in the collection of the Wiltshire Record Office, is written in the hand of a professional scribe, and bears notations in five other hands; one of them is the hand of Edward Knight, the prompter and "book-keeper" of the King's Men. John Clavell's signature occurs twice in the manuscript, providing clear clues to the author's identity; it may have been Clavell's personal copy of the work, though the manuscript also shows signs that it went through at least the initial stages of preparation for use as a theatrical promptbook.^[2] Notations indicate the identities of some actors and their roles in the King's Men's staging.

Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre public building in Chippenham, England

Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre is a building in Chippenham, Wiltshire, England, which serves as a focal point for heritage services relating to Wiltshire and Swindon. It is funded by Wiltshire Council and Swindon Borough Council. It has purpose-built archive storage and research facilities and incorporates the local studies library, museums service, archaeology service, Wiltshire buildings record and the conservation service. These services were formerly housed in separate locations in Trowbridge and Salisbury and are now together under one roof. The centre opened to the public on 31 October 2007 and is being marketed as a "passport to the past" for those interested in Wiltshire and Swindon history.

Edward Knight was the prompter of the King's Men, the acting company that performed the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, and other playwrights of Jacobean and Caroline drama.

Characters

The play has thirteen speaking parts, four assigned to boy players in female roles. Clavell, the amateur or neophyte dramatist, helpfully loaded his play with copious stage directions — 80 in the text's 2826 lines.^[3] The manuscript also contains a list of dramatis personae, a rare feature in dramatic manuscripts of the era. The actors were:^[4]

Boy player refers to children who performed in Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for the adult companies and performed the female roles as women did not perform on the English stage in this period. Others worked for children's companies in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys.

Role	Actor
Wittworth	Richard Sharpe
Doctor Makewell	Robert Benfield
Undermine	John Lowin
Modestina	William Trigg
Miniona	John Thompson
Mountain	Curtis Greville
Shackle	Nicholas Underhill
Sly	John Honyman
Brainsick	Thomas Pollard
Hodge	John Shank

Additionally, Pollard and Shank doubled small roles, as did Alexander Gough and Anthony Smith. Sharpe spoke the play's Prologue and Epilogue during performances.

Alexander Gough, also Goughe or Goffe, was an English actor in the Caroline era. He started out as a boy player filling female roles; during the period of the English Civil War and the Interregnum (1642–1660) when the theatres were closed and actors out of work, Gough became involved in the publication of plays.

King's Men personnel were the people who worked with and for the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men from 1594 to 1642. The company was the major theatrical enterprise of its era and featured some of the leading actors of their generation — Richard Burbage, John Lowin, and Joseph Taylor among other — and some leading clowns and comedians, like Will Kempe and Robert Armin. The company benefitted from the services of William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger as regular dramatists.

Plot

The play is set in the milieu of London goldsmiths, with characters named Undermine and Mountain. Its protagonist, Wittworth, is a melancholic whose romantic pursuit of the heroine, Modestina, provides the driving force of the plot. Wittworth's physician, Doctor Makewell, treats him with a radical approach: the delirious Wittworth is led on a pretended passage through Hell, in which Modestina acts the ghost of a love-lorn girl and Makewell is a spell-casting devil at Hell's gates. Wittworth witnesses a masque of seven dancers, "all in Shrowdes," and joins with them to dance in "an antick mockway." Doctor Makewell treats Wittworth with a potion concocted of "an Opiate, of Laudanum, and Diescordium, mixt with Besar stone and Amber."

Masque courtly entertainment with music and dance

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment that flourished in 16th- and early 17th-century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio. A masque involved music and dancing, singing and acting, within an elaborate stage design, in which the architectural framing and costumes might be designed by a renowned architect, to present a deferential allegory flattering to the patron. Professional actors and musicians were hired for the speaking and singing parts. Often the masquers, who did not speak or sing, were courtiers: the English queen Anne of Denmark frequently danced with her ladies in masques between 1603 and 1611, and Henry VIII and Charles I of England performed in the masques at their courts. In the tradition of masque, Louis XIV of France danced in ballets at Versailles with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully.

The Doctor's treatment is successful; Wittworth and Modestina are happily united at the end of the play.

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References

↑ J. H. P. Pafford and W. W. Greg, eds., The Soddered Citizen, Malone Society Studies and Reprints, London, H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1936.
↑ Robert K. Turner, Jr., "Act-End Notations in Some Elizabethan Plays," Modern Philology Vol. 72 No. 3 (February 1975), pp. 238-47.
↑ William B. Ling, "'Precious Few': English Manuscript Playbooks," in: A Companion to Shakespeare, David Kastan, ed., London, Blackwell, 1999; p. 429.
↑ Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1594–1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pressm 2004; pp. 217-46.

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[1] J. H. P. Pafford and W. W. Greg, eds., The Soddered Citizen, Malone Society Studies and Reprints, London, H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1936.

[2] Robert K. Turner, Jr., "Act-End Notations in Some Elizabethan Plays," Modern Philology Vol. 72 No. 3 (February 1975), pp. 238-47.

[3] William B. Ling, "'Precious Few': English Manuscript Playbooks," in: A Companion to Shakespeare, David Kastan, ed., London, Blackwell, 1999; p. 429.

[4] Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1594–1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Pressm 2004; pp. 217-46.