The Spanish Viceroy

Last updated

The Spanish Viceroy
Date premieredDecember 1624

The Spanish Viceroy is a problem play of English Renaissance drama. [1] Originally a work by Philip Massinger dating from 1624, it was controversial in its own era, and may or may not exist today in altered form.

Contents

History

1624

In December 1624, the King's Men got into trouble with Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, because they performed a play, The Spanish Viceroy, without first obtaining Herbert's license. This step was bound to get them into trouble: Herbert's job was to oversee and censor every play acted in the London theatres, and he was zealous in doing his job, maintaining his authority, and collecting his fees.

The outcome was unsurprising, given the way the system of control worked. On 20 December 1624, the King's Men provided Herbert with a "submission", a written apology, signed by each actor who had taken part in the offending performance. The cast included Robert Benfield, George Birch, John Lowin, Thomas Pollard, John Rice, Richard Robinson, William Rowley, John Shank, Richard Sharpe, Eliard Swanston, and Joseph Taylor. (Herbert copied the submission into his office book in 1633, a sign of the importance he assigned to it.)

1628

On 6 May 1628, another Massinger play was duly licensed, a work titled The Honour of Women. This second play had no immediately obvious connection with The Spanish Viceroy; the connection between them would only appear a quarter-century later. The Honour of Women is one of the plays that was destroyed in the kitchen of John Warburton. (His cook mistook his manuscript collection for scrap paper, and used it up lighting fires and lining pie pans. Some 50 manuscripts, many of them unique copies of plays, were destroyed.)

1653

On 9 September 1653, stationer Humphrey Moseley entered a large number of plays into the Stationers' Register; one of the dramas he registered on that date was titled The Spanish Viceroy, or the Honour of Women. This would appear to indicate that Massinger reworked his 1624 Spanish Viceroy into a new form, which was licensed for performance in 1628 as The Honour of Women.

Moseley, however, had a habit of skimping on registration fees by deliberately confusing titles and subtitles, and registering two plays for the price of one. [2] He did this for The Lovers' Progress , The Bashful Lover , The Guardian , and A Very Woman , other plays in the Massinger canon. So there is no guarantee that Spanish Viceroy and Honour of Women were the same play after all. Scholars have been divided on the issue of whether these titles refer to one play, or two. [3]

Gondomar and Osuna

Early critics developed the argument that The Spanish Viceroy was a play about the Count of Gondomar, the diplomat who had served as Spain's ambassador to England to 1622. The King's Men had made a sensation in August 1624 with their staging of Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess , with its satiric portrayal of Gondomar. In this view, the King's Men attempted to repeat their controversial success of August 1624 with a similar play in December.

There is some reason to think that controversial plays like A Game at Chess were backed by interested factions at Court, and that the King's Men would not have staged such plays without some measure of official support.[ citation needed ] (Officials supported plays on controversial subjects when it was in their interest to do so, as with Sir John van Olden Barnavelt and The Late Lancashire Witches .) By this reasoning, the actors dared to stage the unlicensed Spanish Viceroy because they had protection from some segment of the Jacobean power structure.

The Gondomar hypothesis regarding The Spanish Viceroy is, however, speculative, with no firm evidence to support it.

A more modern and perhaps more plausible hypothesis suggests that The Spanish Viceroy was about Pedro Giron, Duke of Osuna, who had served as the viceroy of Sicily and Naples. Osuna was suspected of planning to set himself up as king of an independent kingdom. He was recalled to Spain in 1620, and put on trial; he died in prison. [4] Osuna's story would have been of current interest in 1624, and could have suited the English public's anti-Spanish mood.

A Very Woman

Neither The Spanish Viceroy nor The Honour of Women has survived under its original title. Yet commentators also developed the hypothesis that The Spanish Viceroy exists in an altered form, as the extant 1634 play A Very Woman . [5] This is one of Massinger's collaborations with John Fletcher, and the play does feature a Spanish viceroy of Sicily as a supporting character. Yet plays are normally named after their protagonists, or on rare occasion the protagonists of their comic subplots; they are not named after supporting characters. This makes A Very Woman seem an unlikely candidate for The Spanish Viceroy.

A Very Woman also has nothing to do with the Count of Gondomar or the Duke of Osuna.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Massinger</span> English playwright (1583–1640)

Philip Massinger was an English dramatist. His finely plotted plays, including A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The City Madam, and The Roman Actor, are noted for their satire and realism, and their political and social themes.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1624.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Warburton (officer of arms)</span> English antiquarian, cartographer and officer of arms (1682–1759)

John Warburton (1682–1759) was an antiquarian, cartographer, and Somerset Herald of Arms in Ordinary at the College of Arms in the early 18th century.

Humphrey Moseley was a prominent London publisher and bookseller in the middle seventeenth century.

The Renegado, or The Gentleman of Venice is a late Jacobean stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger and first published in 1630. The play has attracted critical attention for its treatment of cultural conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim North Africa.

The Beaumont and Fletcher folios are two large folio collections of the stage plays of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The first was issued in 1647, and the second in 1679. The two collections were important in preserving many works of English Renaissance drama.

The Guardian is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Philip Massinger, dating from 1633. "The play in which Massinger comes nearest to urbanity and suavity is The Guardian...."

A Very Woman, or The Prince of Tarent is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger and John Fletcher. It was first published in 1655, fifteen and thirty years after the deaths of its authors.

The Bashful Lover is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger. Dating from 1636, it is the playwright's last known extant work; it appeared four years before his death in 1640.

The Bondman is a later Jacobean-era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger, first published in 1624. The play has been called "the finest of the more serious tragicomedies" of Massinger.

The Parliament of Love is a late Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by Philip Massinger. The play was never printed in the seventeenth century, and survived only in a defective manuscript – making it arguably the most problematical work in the Massinger canon.

The Unnatural Combat is a Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy written by Philip Massinger, and first published in 1639.

The Lovers' Progress is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. As its multiple titles indicate, the play has a complex history and has been a focus of controversy among scholars and critics.

The Faithful Friends is an early seventeenth-century stage play, a tragicomedy associated with the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. Never printed in its own century, the play is one of the most disputed works in English Renaissance drama.

<i>The Scornful Lady</i>

The Scornful Lady is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and first published in 1616, the year of Beaumont's death. It was one of the pair's most popular, often revived, and frequently reprinted works.

Thomas Walkley was a London publisher and bookseller in the early and middle seventeenth century. He is noted for publishing a range of significant texts in English Renaissance drama, "and much other interesting literature."

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.

The Deserving Favourite is a Caroline era stage play, a tragicomedy written by Lodowick Carlell that was first published in 1629. The earliest of Carlell's plays "and also the best," it is notable for its influence on other plays of the Caroline era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augustine Matthews</span>

Augustine Matthews was a printer in London in the Jacobean and Caroline eras. Among a wide variety of other work, Matthews printed notable texts in English Renaissance drama.

References

  1. ↑ Richard Dutton, Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000; pp. 12–13, 40, 49–50, 58.
  2. ↑ E. H. C. Oliphant, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher: An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1927; pp. 94–96.
  3. ↑ James Phelan, On Philip Massinger, E. Karras, 1878; pp. 55–56.
  4. ↑ Geoffrey Bullough, "The Game at Chesse How It Struck a Contemporary," Modern Language Review Vol. 49 No. 2 (April 1954), pp. 156–63; see p. 160 n. 1.
  5. ↑ F. G. Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of English Drama, 1559–1642, Reeves and Turner, 1891; pp. 227–8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.