Amurath III and The True Tragedy of Richard III

Dating the plays of (and relating to the plays of ) Shakespeare is an endlessly interesting pursuit.  There are few that can be dated with perfect certainty.  Perhaps none.

Elizabethan theater managers had no time or inclination to establish what was the first day a play was ever performed.  That kind of record keeping — outside of government records — was a century or more in the future.  Even government records rarely concerned themselves with the titles of plays shown before the Court or city officials, much less with whether the performance was the premiere of the play.  Payments out of the Court funds were made for “a play” or “an interlude” performed on such and such a date.  As a result of these facts, attempts to date plays tend to depend heavily upon textual evidence.

In the August 1921 number of the journal Modern Philosophy, an article by Lewis F. Mott appeared entitled “Foreign Politics In An Old Play” [link][1].  The old play was The True Tragedy of Richard III, a precursor to Shakespeare’s own Henry VI plays and his The Tragedy Of Richard The Third.  Mr. Mott’s paper dates the earlier True Tragedy from references in the epilogue on Queen Elizabeth in the only printed quarto of 1594:

And through her faith her country liues in peace:

And she hath put proud Antichrist to flight,

And bene the meanes that ciuill wars did cease.

Then England kneele upon thy hairy knee,

And thanke that God that still prouides for thee.

The Turke admires to heare her gouernment,

And babies in jury, sound her princely name,

All Christian Princes to that Prince hath sent,

After her rule was rumord foorth by fame.

The Turke hath sworne neuer to lift his hand,

To wrong the Princesse of this blessed land.

Twere vaine to tell the care this Queene hath had,

In helping those that were opprest by warre :

And how her Maiestie hath stil bene glad,

When she hath heard of peace proclaim'd from far.

Ieneua, France, and Flanders hath set downe,

The good she hath done, since she came to the Crowne.

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.[2]

The line “And she hath put proud Antichrist to flight” Mott interprets to celebrate England’s victory over the Spanish Armada in early 1588.  Of course, “the Antichrist” was a frequent metaphor for the Catholic church which had excommunicated the Queen and called upon her citizens to overthrow her.  It certainly did not have to refer only to the Armada.  The date of the play, then, is hardly established.  We must look to further evidence in order to narrow down the reference.

However much Spain had very worldly reasons for wanting to conquer England, the Bull of Excommunication by the Vatican[3] could only have encouraged it to play the part of the conquering hero over the heretic.  Hence, the Pope being the Antichrist, Spain was its obedient servant.

The references to the Turk, however, tend to support a date after the Armada.  The first edition of Richard Haklyut’s enormously popular Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation was published in 1589.  It included numerous official letters regarding the relations between the English and the Turk.  Before Haklyut’s volume the general population (playwrights among them) knew little about the state of relations.  After it, Englishmen celebrated the greatness of their country especially as it related to the courtesies extended by the Russian and the Turk.

William Harborne had become the first credentialed ambassador to “La Porte” (Constantinople) in 1583.  By the time he was replaced by Edward Barton, in August of 1588, a good many letters of friendship had passed back and  forth between the merchants and government officials of the two countries.  Still, none that appeared in Haklyut, it could be argued, expressly stated that:

The Turke hath sworne neuer to lift his hand,

To wrong the Princesse of this blessed land.

Add to these facts, however, that the text of The True Tragedy of Richard III is stylistically very much in line with what was being written to the mid to late-1580s, and it is not difficult to understand why the case for 1588-9 was considered superior to any other dates.

So then, when Professor Mott honed this information, in his 1921 paper, the shock it created was not because verities were shattered.  The further piece of evidence he presented — a letter from the Turkish Sultan, Amuranth III, to Queen Elizabeth dated the “15th of this blessed month Ramazan, (i.e. September) 1589” (too late to have appeared in The Principle Navigations)[4] — which included the following:

Wherefore, if you shall sincerely and purely continue the bond of Amity and Friendship with our high Court, you shall find no more secure Refuge or safer Harbor of good Will or Love. [see full letter here]

Being a careful scholar, Mott quite properly issues a disclaimer: “This letter, of course, the writer of the play may or may not have seen.”  What could be said, at the very least, was that “The person who penned that final speech was either especially familiar with foreign affairs, or he had been exceedingly well coached.”

---

[1] Mott, Lewis F.  “Foreign Politics In An Old Play”.  Modern Philology, Volume XIX, August I92I, Number 1.  65.

[2] Anonymous.  The True Tragedy Of Richard The Third; To Which Is Appended The Latin Play Of  Richardus Tertius, by Dr. Thomas Legge. Both Anterior To Shakespeare's Drama. London: The Shakespeare Society, 1844. 71-2.

[3] Bull of “damnation and excommunication of Elizabeth Queen of England and her adherents,” 5^th of  the Kalends of March, 1570.

[4] Mott’s footnote on his source reads “Richard Knolles, The Turkish History (1687) I, 708.”  This and other matters of provenance will be dealt with in another post.

• Thomas Churchyard in The Merry Wives of Windsor. June 04, 2018. “The idea of this stratagem, &c. might have been adopted from part of the entertainment prepared by Thomas Churchyard for Queen Elizabeth at Norwich:…”
• Shakespeare Authorship, March the 17th and Social Media. May 13, 2018.  “This is how international financial transactions had been accomplished for centuries until the 16th century and beyond.  The traveler had to carefully make arrangements ahead or be stranded and extremely vulnerable at some point in his trip.”
• Edward de Vere's Memorial For His Son, Who Died at Birth May 1583.  July 5, 2017.  "The brief Viscount Bulbeck being the son of the renowned poet and playwright Edward de Vere, we might have hoped to have the text of the father’s own memorial poem.  As far as traditional literary history is concerned, no such poem has yet been discovered."
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.