satirized James in person, the author was probably John Marston. The other, which provoked the ambassador to protest by its allusions to the domestic arrangements of the French king, was Chapman's Byron.[1] A general inhibition of plays was now ordered, but De La Boderie correctly anticipated that James's anger would soon be mollified, especially as the four other London companies had offered an indemnity which he estimates at what seems the incredibly high figure of 100,000 francs. He thought that similar episodes would be prevented in future by refusing allowance to plays whose subjects were taken from contemporary history. This may, in fact, have been the solution adopted, as a standing order against the representation of any 'modern Christian King' on the stage is quoted in 1624.[2] Clearly, however, it left the even more dangerous resources of allegory and of historical parallel still open to the 'seditious' playwright.[3] The Revels boys seem again to have been in trouble in 1610 owing to an offence taken by Lady Arabella Stuart at a passage of Ben Jonson's Epicoene, which she seems to have misunderstood.
The Paul's boys vaunt their abstention from libels in the prologue to their Woman Hater of 1606. But it must not be supposed that the dramatic indiscretions were limited to a single company. Even the King's men themselves, though probably without any intention to offend, sometimes misjudged the limits of what was permissible. The Earl of Northampton haled Ben Jonson before the Privy Council for his Sejanus of 1603. On 18 December 1604 a Court gossip
- ↑ Cf. ch. xii (Chapel).
- ↑ Sir Edward Conway to the Privy Council, 12 Aug. 1624 (Chalmers, Apology, 500, from S. P. D. Charles I, clxxi. 39), 'His Majesty remembers well there was a commandment and restraint given against the representing of any modern Christian Kings in those stage-plays'. This was written about the performance of Middleton's A Game of Chess, reflecting on the Spanish policy of James I, by the King's men; cf. M. S. C. i. 379. Other post-Shakespearian indiscretions were a performance of a play on the Marquis D'Ancre by an unnamed company in 1617 (M. S. C. i. 376), and one of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt by the King's men in 1619 (Bullen, O. E. P. iv. 381, from S. P. D. James cx. 37); cf. Gildersleeve, 113.
- ↑ This work is not directly concerned with the literary content of stage-plays. But I may be allowed to express the opinion that the search for the 'topical' in Elizabethan drama has been pushed beyond the limits of good sense. Thus I agree with P. W. Long, The Purport of Lyly's Endimion (M. L. A. xxiv. 164), that there is little ground for the elaborate theories of a dramatization of Elizabeth's personal amours propounded successively by N. J. Halpin, Oberon's Vision (Sh. Soc. 1843), G. P. Baker, Lyly's Endymion (1894), xli, and R. W. Bond, Works of Lyly (1902), iii. 81. Similarly the conjectures of R. Simpson in his School of Shakespeare (1878) and elsewhere, and of Fleay, and of most of the writers, other than Small, on the 'war of the theatres' require handling with the utmost caution.
