D— W— R— and Pericles as Tudor Theatrical Revue.

I recently posted my “William J. Rolfe vs. the Orthodoxy on Shakespeare’s Pericles” at my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Group, in which I ventured

While the older plays that were the basis of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and a number of others, all were written by the younger Shakespeare, the older portion of Pericles is less certainly so.  

In a reply by D— W— R—, in the comment section, the following:

I am convinced that the apparent stylistic differences within the play are a conscious part of the structure of the play which celebrates the evolution of English Drama. In fact that is the point of the play. Pericles was almost certainly written for the Garter feast of 1608 and honors the contributions of Philip and Mary to the Theater. Mary's son Philip is one of the two inductees that year. Their mutual friend Edward Dyer died in the previous year vacating the office of Chancellor of the Garter and was replaced by Herbert cousin John. The play was registered on May 20, the exact date of the Garter induction at Windsor, but was probably performed at Cecil House either as part of the festivities in early May celebrating the elevation of Robert or at a party apparently organized to celebrate the departure of the Garter prog[r]ess on the 18th.

Garter feast. Partying with the elevated Lord Treasurer. (Well, we've all gotten elevated from time to time.) Theatrical revue. 'From where do “Garter progresses” depart?' I could not help but wonder.

Robert Cecil was indeed appointed Treasurer on May 6, 1608. Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, was indeed invested with the garter on May 20, 1608, at Windsor castle. The play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was indeed registered with the Stationers' office on the same date. The rest not only is not documented, to the best of my knowledge, but is improbable.

Why Philip would be considered, as of 1608, to have made signal contributions to the theater, is not clear. His brother, William, was the literary son. Philip was the sportsman and widely understood to read no more than he absolutely had to. He inherited the management of the King's Players when William retired, at the ascension of Charles I, in 1626, and he inherited the office of Lord Chamberlain.

If such festivities as D— imagines did in fact occur neither he nor I would seem to know of any description of them. Or that they included the performance a play. If festivities did occur — as may well have been the case given Cecil's appointment — D— thinks they occurred before the Garter ceremony which raises the question as to why the specific date Pericles was entered in the Stationers' records is to any point.

Still more problematical, I suspect, is the question as to when  anything else written in Tudor times “celebrated the evolution” of any genre of English literature. Literary surveys in book or on stage are a much later cultural phenomenon.

Two other serious improbabilities would seem to argue against D—'s theory. If Philip saw a Shakespeare play around May 20, 1608, celebrating his and his mother's patronage, he somehow forgot to forward it for inclusion in the First Folio. It did not appear until the Third Folio, of 1664, long after Philip had died.

The first two quarto editions did appear in 1609, in the midst of plenty of accolades and observations from those who saw the play, with both title pages announcing “As it hath been divers and sundry times acted by his Maiesties Servants, at the Globe on the Banckside.” There was never mention of performances before King or Court such as publishers loved to be able to announce and scribblers to scribble about. Performances before the royal family or the chief nobles of the realm were a great help to sales and gossip. The accolades never included reference to Philip, Earl of Montgomery, or his mother, Mary Sidney, as the inspirations for the play. No dedicatory letters or verses marked the production out from any other Globe play.

Ben Jonson would later write:

                                     ...a moldy tale,

         Like Pericles, and stale

As the shrive’s crusts, and nasty as his fish,

         Scraps out of every dish

Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub,

         May keep up the Play Club.

Admittedly, the comment came some 20 years after the early 17^th century performances (whenever precisely they may have been) and 1609 quartos but the text of the play is filled with signs of being still older.

I submit that Shakespeare's “Greek” plays all were among his earliest.¹ As I show in my Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589² , the plot of Titus and Vespasian (the original of Titus Andronicus), for example, is drawn from his early go to sources (Seneca and Ovid) and the then tremendously popular Greek novel Aethiopica by Heliodorus. But the names of the characters taken from Aethiopica all are changed for all their story is a close but much darker version of the original.

Thomas Underdowne’s translation of the Aethiopica (1569, 1587) remains the go to English version to this day. The dedication to the translation was “To the Right Honourable Edwarde Deviere LORD BOULBECKE, EARLE of OXENFORD.”

As I have explained at some length, in my Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal³ [], the main source of Pericles is said by some to have been published by Laurence Twine circa 1576. Others claim the book was written by Laurence's more famous brother Thomas Twine. One of Thomas's less known works is The Breviary of Brytayne (1573) It is dedicated to “Edward Deviere Lorde Bulbeck, Erle of Oxenford, Lorde great Chamberlayne of England”. It seems that the way to improve one's chances to become a source for a Shakespeare play was to dedicate something to Edward de Vere.

Shakespeare when young simply changed the names of Greek characters from their original sources as opposed to his later practice of keeping the names of main characters. Likely this was because he didn't like the foreign sound of the names — thought they would turn-off an audience. In the case of a name like Apollonius (and numerous other Greek names) surely we have an additional reason at our fingers ends. Like so many Greek names, it has too many syllables to fit comfortably into blank verse. Consider the other names in the version of the original story by Twine: Ligozides, Dionisiades, Athanagoras, etc. And the actors wouldn't even know how to pronounce them.

In the end, he chose to go to Italian novellas and English chronicles for his plots. The original names of the characters were much easier to pronounce and clumsy Italian names could be fitted to blank verse by simply removing the final letter.

Oh! And did he take the name Pericles from Sidney's Arcadia? Doesn't matter either way for present purposes, really.

1 And all were received via Latin sources rather than Greek likely because he was not fluent in the latter language.

2 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022).  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WC94FGW

3 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”

• A Brief Bio of William Cecil Until his Creation as Baron of Burghley. June 11, 2023. “The king heard of the matter and sent for him.”

• Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”

• Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used. August 9, 2022. 'Our first foray “staring intently into” the texts of Robert Greene has noted that his work utilized far fewer feminine endings than Shakespeare’s.'

• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.