Virtual Grub Street: Edward de Vere and Marlowe’s Dido of Carthage.

Title pages of quarto plays can be sources of considerable information. Generally, it is wise to check that information against other sources. Publishers were not particularly concerned to provide carefully vetted information. They sought to fill the pages with claims that potential readers would find attractive. They bought their manuscripts from less than scrupulous sources who knew what they wanted.

Until the late 1590s title pages do not inform the reader of the name of the playwright as the rule. In the case of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, however, published in 1594, the year after the highly popular young playwright’s violent death, the name on the title page was sure to guarantee a bestseller.[1]

As so often is the case, however, the date bore no particular relationship to the date of composition. While it is not clear who provided the text to Thomas Woodcocke, the publisher, Thomas Nashe was making side-money, at the time, as opportunity arose, by providing publishers with works by others whose copy he possessed but whose permission he did not clearly possess. This might explain why his name also appeared on the title page.

Philip Henslowe’s dairy mentions the play in 1597 without indication that he possessed the rights. He could simply have owned the rights to the play[2] in 1594, nevertheless, as the old plays of Marlowe were among the most popular he owned, and saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit by having it published with the author’s name by way of advertisement.

Henslowe came to the theater with an idea that would serve him well. He had purchased the rights to a large library of old plays and the lease to the Rose Theater. With those resources vital for players’ companies, he went to the Admiral’s men and Lord Strange’s men and offered to take over the logistics of their productions for a considerable fee.

The title page also provided a second bit of information meant to increase its popularity even further. It advertised the play as having been “Played by the Children of Her Maiestie's Chappell”. Readers loved to buy plays that had been considered worthy to present before royalty and/or the mightiest noblemen of the realm.

Dido, then, might be suspected of being an old play. It has been noticed more than once that the play is by no means Marlowe at his best. The blank verse is weak. The lines are almost entirely end-stopped. There is more rhyme than Marlowe ever plied in his mature work. Those who wish to see it as a late play thus published in 1594 tend to explain that he must have had an off day. No one seems to think that the traits are due to the later revision by Nash.

Another smaller group of scholars note that the Children of the Chapel did not perform plays between 1584 and 1599. If the Children did, indeed, perform the play, it seems it would have to have been during the year 1584 or before. Marlowe received his B.A. from Cambridge in 1584. He would have to have written the play while finishing up college.

What never seems to have been noticed is that John Lyly and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, were running the Blackfriars where the Children played for at least their last two years. Complaints from Elizabeth’s puritan subjects that it was sacrilege for the Chapel Children to perform secular plays in the royal chapel had convinced her and her councilors to move their productions to the Blackfriars where Richard Farrant, the Master of the Children, had wangled a lease in 1576.[3]

The arrangement fell apart upon Farrant’s death in 1580. His widow felt she needed to receive more for the royal court to continue to sub-lease the Blackfriars. She received it. The owner felt he was being cheated and went to court to void the lease.

A year or so into the battle, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, purchased the lease. Being in debt, and unable to provide for his secretary, John Lyly, the Earl signed it over leaving Lyly the manager of the portion of the Blackfriars leased for the plays.[4] Adjacent spaces had also been leased as I’ve mentioned elsewhere.[5]

Lyly was associated with the Boys of St. Paul’s cathedral school, at the time, and the two boys companies were combined. At some point, Paul’s chose not to officially include their boys in theater, under the Paul’s name, and the two companies were combined and called “Oxford’s Boys”. The Children of the Chapel sometimes performed alone under their own name. Outside of their theater activities at Blackfriars, each group was still attached to the schools and chapels as Paul’s Boys and Children of the Chapel.

Meanwhile, Vere and Lily were busily reading scripts looking for material to buy for their venue. Lily’s own plays were foremost. In 1584, the Children of the Chapel played George Peele’s Arraignment of Paris, and, apparently, Christopher Marlowe’s Dido. The final play before the courts awarded the Blackfriars lease back to the original owner of the property appears to have been Ulysses and Agamemnon[6] performed by the “Oxford’s Boys”. I have suggested that the player’s speech in Hamlet — long understood to be a reply to Marlowe’s Dido — was originally an epilogue to the play.

The troublesome raigne of John, king of England is almost entirely in the style of Peele with some “changes” appearing to be by Shakespeare. Several touches strongly suggest it was written for a large children’s company. It would not seem to have been played before the theater was foreclosed. De Vere, I suggest, having purchased it, Shakespeare felt free to rewrite it for later adult performance as he chose.

Blackfriars under Vere and Lyly was an historical effort and an historical two years for Elizabethan theater.

[1] Farmer, John S. The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594). “Written by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nash. gent.” Tudor Facsimile Texts (1914). Title page.

[2] Greg, William W. Henslowe’s Diary (1904). I.83.

[3] Wallace, Charles William. The Evolution of the English Drama Up to Shakespeare (1912). 129. “…1576 when Richard Farrant, Master of the children of Windsor, for the purpose of training the Chapel boys in her Majesty's service, as he declared at the time, and likewise of getting some financial benefit from the frequent rehearsals, leased the old Revels Office building in the Blackfriars precincts and proceeded to convert it into the first private theatre of London…”

[4] Wallace, 169. “he bought the Blackfriars lease of Henry Evans, and after keeping it himself a little while made a present of it to Lyly, in or about June, 1583.”

[5] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Capulet, Capulet & Paroles (2020). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LLDM91P

[6] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare) Book 1). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T