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Richard Brome and the Salisbury Court Contract

Eleanor Clare Collins
1In 1635 Brome signed a contract drafted on the 20 July with the King’s Revels company, which committed him to producing plays exclusively for their Salisbury Court theatre. Not only did the contract specify Brome’s fidelity to the company, it aimed to determine the annual rate at which he was to write plays: he agreed “for the terme of three years […] with his best Art and Industrye [to] write everye yeare three plays and deliver them to the company of players there acting for the time being”.n10038 In return, Brome would receive a regular payment of fifteen shillings a week, and an extra day’s profit from the theatre for every new play. Brome’s contractual binding has had a resounding impact on the understanding of theatrical operations in the 1630s; professional arrangements of this formality, between a company and a dramatist, are otherwise undocumented. The agreement has prompted a varied response of speculation and analysis over the years, and invited considerable critical attention. It provides valuable insight into the conditions under which Brome worked and wrote, and offers a substantiated model of management and playwriting in the theatres.2Yet the contract itself no longer exists. Its particulars are drawn from a requests proceedings bill of complaint filed on 12 February 1640 by the occupants of Salisbury Court at that time - the second incarnation of Queen Henrietta’s Men, who were managed from 1634 by Richard Heton. The bill of complaint and the answer that Brome made to it a few weeks later provide evidence of a long dispute that took place concerning Brome’s satisfying the contract’s terms of delivery. The documents reveal antagonisms and pressures in the daily operation of theatrical life that are able to corroborate our knowledge of the imperatives of theatrical troupes, their managers, and dramatists of the period, and they narrate crucial details of the demands and expectations of these professional agents. Despite the fullness of the court records, recent work that draws upon these documents has tended to relegate the available detail, and the full implications of the case - the specifics of its circumstances - are left unrealised.n10039 In theatre history the contract has been assumed to reveal “actual, customary relations between a playwright and an acting company”: it is taken as read, generalised across the profession, and considered exemplary of standard theatrical practice.n10040 A fresh account is urgently called for at this critical juncture, without which the current and ongoing revaluation of Brome’s importance to theatre history would remain incomplete. This analysis of the contract aims to provide a new interpretation of the evidence, and resituate Brome’s contract as a local rather than a paradigmatic example, specific to its own individual circumstance.*3Lacking an original, written and signed contract from which to work, establishing the status of the court records as evidence is an important preliminary step. The story of the contract - of its clauses, variations and interpretations - is convoluted in itself, but this confusion is exacerbated by the nature of its telling. The memorial accounts of the complainants and defendant cover events that spanned years, were delivered in court-hearings spread across weeks, and then transcribed. No direct access to factual verification is available. The bills are highly charged, argumentative exercises in the legal discourse of the time. Each is carefully crafted, pre-emptive of its opponent’s defence, and works towards an explicit agenda of compensation: debts are demanded, either in terms of money, or in undelivered plays. Heton and the company claimed that Brome had broken the terms of his contract and was, by 1638, in arrears of the agreement by four plays. Furthermore, Brome had not observed the article of the contract that forbade him to “write any playe or pt of a playe [for] anye other players or playe howse”.n10042 While Brome had been required to “applie all his studdye and Endevours theerein for the Benefitte of” the Salisbury Court company, he stood accused of delivering one of the company’s promised plays to Christopher and William Beeston at the Cockpit theatre, where it would be performed by Beeston’s Boys.n100434In contrast, Brome argued that Heton and his Salisbury Court players were in breach of contract, having failed to pay him the one day’s profit that he was owed from the second play that he had delivered. He argued that this play had been performed “neere or aboute the time of [the company’s] restraint from playing” - a period of enforced closure for the theatres during the onset of plague. From this, he claimed to have suffered a loss of “ffive pounds and vpwards”.n10044 Yet Brome’s case narrates a scenario of escalating hardship, as his situation was to worsen when the plague increased “here in and aboute London”.n10045 Brome objected that his weekly payments of fifteen shillings also ceased during the time that the Salisbury Court theatre was closed. The company argued that this suspension of salary was routine - “in such Cases [it was] vsuall” - but for Brome this provided evidence of an attempt to “fraudulently deceive and defraude” him.n10046 Brome’s defence argues that, “in that hard sadd and dangerous tyme”, he was “left in such distres and want” that necessity drove him to offer the play to William Beeston at the Cockpit, who rewarded him with a £6 advance.5Heton retained an active interest in Brome, however, and the play was eventually given to the Salisbury Court company according to their initial agreement. For his next play Brome was paid “with severall small sumes and pettie dribling payments”, but when his weekly wages remained suspended in plague-time, he was “enforced” to deal with Beeston again.n10047 This time, the Salisbury Court company sought the intervention of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels. Herbert determined that Brome should be paid the lesser, though regular, sum of six shillings a week, in addition to £5 for every new play, but by 1638 the Salisbury Court company claimed that Brome had failed to deliver four of the nine plays promised by the contract.6Despite this breach, Heton and Brome both renewed their contracts in 1638. The revised contract specified that Brome’s salary would rise to twenty shillings a week, but also ensured his fidelity to the company over a much longer period: once more, Brome agreed to supply the company with three plays each year, but this time for an extended term of seven years. This raised the total number of plays that Brome was expected to contribute to the Salisbury Court repertory from nine to twenty-one. In addition, the new contract required Brome to produce the plays that he owed from the prior agreement. Once more, the court case suggests that he failed to do so. By the end of the year he was in arrears by one new play, and the Heton complaint records that, by this time, Brome had “wholly applie[d] himself unto the said Beeston and the Companie of players Acting at the playhouse of the Phoenix [or Cockpit] in Drury Lane”.n10048 Yet Brome continued to deny the charges. He argued that he had fulfilled his contractual obligation by composing two new plays for Heton - one around September 1639 and another before Easter - but said that both efforts had been dismissed by Heton and his troupe. Brome’s defence suggests that the company “did so slight” his new plays, were “scornefull” of his work, and “Cavelled at and reiected” his labours to such an extent that he left their service, understanding that they “tooke occasions daily to weary [him] from and out of their ymployment”.n10049*7The evidence relating to Brome’s contract is unique in theatrical annals of the Caroline period: there are no other documents that provide such intimate knowledge concerning the impact of theatrical business arrangements upon individuals and companies. Henslowe’s Diary provides a catalogue - an occasional glimpse of detail - but these court proceedings, as self-consciously tailored to the occasion as they are, disclose a wealth of particulars and contain a narrative of their own that is specific to conditions of production at this particular moment in time, for both Brome and Heton.8The problem that has surrounded previous readings of the contract lies in the subordination of the evidence to other, more dominant and broadly sweeping narratives that govern theatre history as a whole. These accounts appropriate the general outline of the case, told above, but have not delved any deeper into the context surrounding the contract’s premises, or its practical necessity. Brome’s contract has been interpreted as symptomatic of changing modes of theatrical production into the Caroline period, and the development of the theatre profession into an established business that met demand with supply under regulated and assured conditions. In this scenario, Brome has become exemplary of the condition of the 1630s dramatist, bound beneath an increasingly impresarial and disinterested management.n10050 Andrew Gurr has previously described the impresario system as “an autocratic form of rule imposed on a profession which had grown into being by means of a long tradition of collaborative and democratic practices”.n10051 In this trajectory, Heton and Beeston represent the latter stages of an emergent trend, following on from Philip Henslowe’s early precedent. These entrepreneurs depended upon the economic welfare of their businesses and, as a result, had vested interests in the productivity of playwrights.n10052 Yet their behaviour has contributed to the perception of the decline of drama into the 1630s - a lessening of the quality and vibrancy found in the organic, competitive and thriving theatrical marketplace of the 1580s and ’90s, and that created the environment in which Shakespeare was to realise his genius. In the 1630s, a period that stands accused of nurturing a drama of derivation and decadence, the theatrical managers with their mercantile approach become “entrepreneurs rather than players, individualists in commerce, not stars in the teamwork of performance”.n10053 The implicitly repressive impact of “hard-nosed” and “strong-minded” management upon a profession otherwise “collaborative” is common, and is inextricably linked to enduring tensions between the values of art and commerce.n10054 9Of more concern is the way that, according to this narrative, Brome’s contract is treated in current criticism as representative of routine theatre practice. The contract has become a matter of “custom” in these interpretations, and resurfaces repeatedly as an explanatory model invoked to account for the behaviour of a variety of early modern dramatists including Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley.n10055 As a contract’s purpose was to regulate dramatic output, Brome’s contractual precedent provides a justified means of explaining discernible patterns in production, a company’s regular licensing of plays, and the fidelity of playwrights to particular troupes.n10056 10This makes sense in principle, but need not suggest that the existence of a definite contract should be inferred from the observance of what may resemble contractual behaviour. Knowledge of Brome’s contract survives to us only as a direct consequence of its breaking: the problem was that he had failed to exhibit contractual behaviour. The only other precedent for this kind of contract was made between Lawrence and John Dutton, Thomas Goffe and Rowland Broughton, evidence of which exists, again, as a result of its breach.n10057 A lawsuit of 26 January 1572/3 records that Broughton failed to deliver the eighteen plays that he had confidently promised in the contract, over a period of one year. Broughton’s case is an extreme example, but the failure of the contract system to work before Brome’s case is important. To apply a method of theatrical practice to other companies and playwrights on the basis of the only two known, and failed, examples, is clearly counterintuitive.11In these two cases, an understanding of the specifics is crucial and cannot be ignored. The remainder of this analysis examines the professional and personal circumstances surrounding the making and breaking of Brome’s contract, and sets out evidence for its particularity to Brome’s private situation, offering insight into the conditions under which Brome worked and the concerns that he faced beyond 1635 to 1640. It provides a context for the recurring need of both Brome and Heton to commit to an arrangement already proven inadequate and vexed. Most crucially, it explores the full implications of what the contract meant to Heton and the contract-holders, what it meant for Brome, and what it can mean to our current understanding of theatrical conditions of production in this period.*12Brome’s contract had clear implications for his professional relationship with the company for which he wrote, but the formulation of contracts was the prerogative of the theatre manager. It should not be neglected that the arrangement had significant and potentially further-reaching consequences for Richard Heton. Heton’s first and most pressing responsibility was to the economic success of the theatrical enterprise he had inherited from his predecessor, Richard Gunnell. This entailed the careful management of the theatre, the players, the company’s relations with Herbert, Master of the Revels, and of the repertory itself: a portable corpus of plays that could be performed at a variety of venues, revised, recycled and sold in print. The recognition of repertory as the primary asset of theatrical troupes is important to defining Brome’s relationship to the Salisbury Court company, for the establishment of the contract constituted a form of repertory strategy in itself. Theatres required a large stock of drama in order to maintain a theatrical schedule that rotated plays daily, and only ran plays across consecutive days on rare occasions.n10058 For Heton, securing the services of a dramatist to stock his playhouse with current drama was crucial, for it enabled the consistent accumulation of a repertory. Binding a playwright by contract to perform this task was the most certain - and perhaps dogmatic - means of guaranteeing that his company were provided with enough fare to keep them visible in a marketplace dominated, at least in reputation, by the King’s Men and the first Queen Henrietta’s Men.n10059 13Even so, the value and status of new plays in the 1630s was more complicated than it may have been in the 1590s. By the 1630s, revivals were an increasingly conspicuous component of the commercial repertories, which drew on a large body of old plays in order to provide a full week’s entertainment. The dynamics of the repertory system had changed drastically since the 1590s, in not otherwise which Andrew Gurr observes that “the Admiral’s in their 1594-5 season, performing six days a week, offered their audiences a total of thirty-eight plays, of which twenty-one were new to the repertory, added at more or less fortnightly intervals”.n10060 In contrast, Herbert’s records of plays licensed for the Salisbury Court between 1634 and 1642 suggest that they introduced only five new plays to the repertory in this time, though a proportion of licences have clearly been lost.n10061 Revivals came to represent an asset of accumulating value over this period, as was reflected by the King’s Men’s protection of their plays from performance at the Red Bull in 1627.n10062 New plays were already granted automatic protection for a company by their licensing, but by this time the need to protect the performance rights of old plays had also become both pressing and necessary.14Although revivals constituted a proportionately larger company asset, Roslyn Knutson has argued that new plays still continued to constitute the “commercial fuel of the repertory”.n10063 They were, as Knutson suggests, “comparatively expensive to acquire and produce”, involving the play’s purchase, licensing, and the realisation of its performance in properties and costume.n10064 Yet they commanded considerable reputation in the theatrical marketplace, drawing crowds and commanding higher entry prices.n10065 This circumstance was also reflected in the conditions of both the 1635 and 1638 contract, which promised that Brome was to “haue the Benefitte of one dayes proffitte of playeinge such newe playe as hee should make […] (the ordinary Chardges of the howse only deducted)”, in addition to his weekly payments.n10066 Tiffany Stern has observed that this “benefit” system was common from 1617, and suggests that the playwright would receive profits from a performance following the play’s premier, as the first performance functioned as a kind of audition for the play in which its appeal and potential for success were tested.n10067 Either way, there was clearly money available to reward dramatists for new plays, which offers some reflection of their continued worth for companies into the 1630s. Brome’s services for the Salisbury Court company were justly sought after: he appeared a sound and necessary investment, and Heton clearly anticipated that Brome would be instrumental to establishing the success of the Salisbury Court repertory. Heton embarked on “many Parleyes and treaties”, “Inticements and Inveaglements”, to convince Brome to pledge his services to the company.15The importance of new plays to a commercial repertory may have justified Heton’s contractual approach, but this managerial tactic remains unusual in that it was a method of assurance typically used to exercise control over players, rather than dramatists. Philip Henslowe, Francis Langley and Richard Gunnell had all contracted actors to their playhouses, without whom daily performances could not take place.n10068 The potentially volatile behaviour of troupes of actors and the immediate damage that their defection from a theatre could cause to its business had made itself felt over the years.n10069 Heton himself complained that “for their owne benefite companies of [his] Actors have removed from their residence, and dispersed themselves into severall places, soe that noe certaine place of abode is knowne where they may be found”.n10070 He enforced strict measures designed to pre-empt the unreliability of the players.n10071 Yet to subject playwrights to the same, protracted obligations was exceptional. Henslowe, who managed his dramatists through regular commissions and advances, explicitly avoided this process in 1597 when he enforced bonds from Thomas Heywood - a player and dramatist at the Rose - demanding only his loyalty as an actor.n10072 Heton’s fervent extension of contractual ties to his newly procured dramatist is conspicuous in this context. His efforts to fix Brome’s relationship definitively to the company appear excessively strict in this context, and highly defensive.16Yet Heton’s reactive attitude was amply justified once his professional circumstances are taken into account, for it is clear that he was experiencing difficulties that ran beyond the insufficient delivery of contracted plays. His company were young - as Brome notes, “in the Infancie of theire setting upp’.n10073 They had yet to establish themselves, and Heton had yet to establish his own authority over his elusive troupe of actors, amongst whom “many differences and disturbances” and “generall discontents” were arising.n10074 Furthermore, Heton and the Salisbury Court company had already attracted the attention of rival companies and of Sir Henry Herbert on a number of occasions. In 1634 the King’s Men complained to Herbert that other companies were “intermingleing some passages of witches in old playes” in imitation of their Late Lancashire Witches. A month later, presumably after the prohibition on “witch” plays had been lifted, the King’s Revels at the Salisbury Court licensed “An ould play, with some new scenes, Doctor Lambe and the Witches” - which may have been responsible for the King’s Men’s competitive concern.n10075 This protection of the King’s Men would have cost the Salisbury Court enterprise in terms of missed opportunities: the restriction of a topical play was a commercial blow that would not have aided their establishment in these early years. In February 1635 the actors at the Salisbury Court then performed a play in which, controversially, an actor dressed in “a church Robe with the name of Jesus upon it” represented “a Flamen a priest of the Heathens”, for which the owner of the robe (“Cromes a broker in long lane”) was temporarily imprisoned.n10076 17Although the Salisbury Court company was only indirectly affected by these events, Sir Henry Herbert remained uncomfortably close to Heton throughout this period and intervened at several points in Heton’s operations. In 1637 Herbert appears to have prompted the formation of the new Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Salisbury Court, “disposing” of some of the Cockpit’s best actors to Heton at the breaking of Beeston’s company.n10077 Matthew Steggle has recently suggested that the departure of two of Heton’s players - George Stutville and Edward Gibbs - to Beeston’s new company in 1637 may have been similarly assisted by Herbert’s intervention.n10078 Heton was also still paying off debts owed to Herbert by Richard Gunnell. In May 1636 Herbert’s office-book records suggest that Herbert “had the benefit of the second day of Hannibal and Scipio - played at [the] Sal. Court […] as a satisfaction for a debt due by Gunnel”.n10079 To add further pressure, Herbert was also a private speculator in Heton’s enterprises company, owning a ninth-share of the Salisbury Court theatre.n10080 The onset of the six-month plague closure in 1636/7 must have introduced extra financial strain, aside from prompting Brome’s eventual defection to Beeston at the Cockpit and setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the Brome/Heton court case in 1640. Again, Herbert’s intervention was necessary when settling the 1638 dispute between Brome and Heton: “taking the trouble” upon himself, Herbert specified that Heton should continue weekly payments (albeit reduced) “Vntill such tyme as the sicknes should cease”.n1008118Herbert’s interventions were required, in all likelihood, by Heton’s own inexperience. Like Philip Henslowe, Heton lacked a theatrical background, and in this he was at a distinct disadvantage. Christopher Beeston and Richard Gunnell both laid claim to a previous career in playing, and were familiar with the daily pressures of performance and the theatre profession at its most fundamental level. The skills and acumen that Henslowe had developed over years, and at the dawning of the profession, were neither readily available nor self-evident to Heton, who by 1638 appears to have been struggling to maintain credibility in the eyes of both Herbert and of his company members. When Heton invited Brome back to work for Queen Henrietta’s Men following the plague closure of 1637, an element of desperation is clearly felt. Brome’s defence records that members of Heton’s company “did earnestly solicit” him to return to the Salisbury Court, and Heton paid William Beeston for the play that Brome had promised Beeston, buying the playwright back to his service.n10082 The court case alleges that Brome submitted to their “perswasion” on the basis of their “promises of better vsage afterwards, and partly vpon threates of suites and troubles”.n10083 For Heton, Brome was still clearly indispensable. In these extreme circumstances, contractual binding continued to offer the surest means of control over Brome. It represented a last resort in a theatrical arrangement that had already proved an expensive and unsuccessful mistake, but this arrangement was one that Heton, in his weakening situation, felt compelled to prolong.*19Committing to Heton’s contract entailed a set of very different concerns for Richard Brome, though the circumstances under which he agreed to the arrangement were equally specific. Brome’s reasons for accepting the terms of the contract were also highly persuasive, though in his court defence he takes care to emphasise that he was both wary and reluctant of accepting Heton’s proposition. Brome’s defence reads that Gunnell and his company at the Salisbury Court had originally approached Brome, and that “vpon theire specious pretences and promises of reward and bountifull retribucon and love did intice and Inveagle” him away from working at the Red Bull, where he had been “truly paied without murmuring or wranglinge”.n10084 Brome had been without complaint while under Gunnell’s management. He wrote “divers Playes” for the company which “proved very fortunate and succesfull”, including The Sparagus Garden, which Brome inferred from the company’s “bookes and writings” to have been worth “One thousand pounds and vpwards” to the company.n10085 Until this time there had been no mention of a contract, but Brome’s relationship to the company changed when, after his initial success and Gunnell’s death, the company “did firste intreate and perswade” Brome to agree to a fixed annual delivery rate of three plays, for three years.20Brome was sceptical of Heton’s new demands. He said that he was “vnwilling to vndertake” the arrangement, as he considered the terms to be “more then hee could well performe”.n10086 According to Brome’s defence, the company assured him that they “neither should nor would exact nor expect from [Brome] the […] composicion of any more playes […] [than he] could or should bee able well and conveyniently to doe”.n10087 The clause acted only as assurance that Brome would “dedi[cate] all his labour and playes totally vnto their sole profitts”.n10088 The expectation that “hee would write for noe other Company” meant that other avenues of revenue were now closed off to Brome, including spontaneous collaborations such as the opportunistic Late Lancashire Witches, which Brome had written with Thomas Heywood for the King’s Men the previous year. The contract pre-empted any possibility for “shopping around” the companies for the best price a play would fetch, which seems to have been an integral part of earlier theatrical environments.n10089 Indeed, Brome’s later recourse to Beeston as a buyer of plays exhibits this strategy at its most obvious. Brome’s proclaimed reluctance to agree to Heton’s terms suggests that the exclusive commitment to one company was essentially undesirable, and not something into which Brome entered lightly.21Related to the issue of collaborative work is also the question of which kind of “labour” on Brome’s behalf would satisfy the terms of Heton’s contract. There was certainly room for interpretation here, for Heton’s expectations are worded in the court proceedings in terms of whole plays, whereas Brome argued that in fact he had made up the work that he owed from “divers scenes in ould revived playes […] and many prologues and Epilogues to such playes of theires, songs, and one Introduccon”.n10090 These endeavours “amounted to asmuch tyme and studdy” as the number of plays that he was accused of owing would have taken to write.n10091 The repertory system valued the revision of old plays that could then be newly revived, but Heton did not appear to acknowledge the importance of this repertory strategy. It is unclear, according to the strict terms of Heton’s requirements, whether a play produced collaboratively by Brome would have satisfied the Salisbury Court’s demands that Brome devote all his time and labour to writing for them: the contract is singular in its focus, and necessarily author-driven. Either way, the apparent rejection of the composition of new scenes, the revision of plays and addition of prologues and epilogues as valid work limited Brome’s options further. These projects, which had always been important factors in the functioning of competitive repertories, were not accommodated by the contract. Heton appeared to demand new plays or nothing: there were to be no additional projects on the side that would reap extra credit.22Furthermore, Brome relinquished the opportunity of any other form of freelancing to generate extra money when he agreed to the revised contract of 1638. This stated that he “should not suffer” any of his plays “to be printed by his Consent or knowledge […] without the Licence” of the Salisbury Court company.n10092 Heton’s strict control of Brome’s texts, as well as the plays in performance, meant that all of Brome’s works remained the sole property of the company. This contractual clause may have significant implications for Brome’s posthumous reputation in print, which is, even now, in the process of recovery. Yet some of Brome’s plays did circulate in quarto form, and Brome must have had a certain amount of input into their publication, as the end-note to the “Courteous Reader” of The Antipodes suggests. This play, which had been illegitimately promised to Beeston while Brome was contracted to Heton, makes direct reference to Brome’s intentions for its destination: it was written “for the Cockpit stage, in the right of my most deserving friend, Mr. William Beeston, unto whom it properly appertained”.n10093 How much control the Salisbury Court company actually had over the publication of Brome’s works is unclear; nothing arises on the subject in the court records. Yet Heton’s demands for control over publication are conspicuous at a time in which Brome’s contemporaries were actively involved in fashioning literary reputations in print.n10094 The contract’s conditions demanded that Brome abide by rules that appear essentially unrepresentative of both the means by which the profession had established itself, and the direction in which it was continuing to develop.23Brome agreed to these rules, even if he did not faithfully observe them. Despite its stringency, Heton’s contract offered a state of security to Brome that was uncommon in a theatrical profession characterised by instability and unrest.n10095 Heton had agreed to pay Brome a weekly sum that would ensure relative financial stability and a measured, reliable income, as well as reward Brome with lump sums for the delivery of a new play. This was a strategy that is previously undocumented. Advances were routinely given to playwrights to sustain them whilst preparing new material, but a regular wage to ensure fidelity radically altered the prospects of dramatists who might otherwise depend on occasional successes in order to sustain themselves.24For Brome, the benefits of such a system obviously outweighed the disadvantages. The familiar epithet coined by Alexander Brome in the 1659 publication of Five New Plays, “Poor he came into th’ world, and poor went out” has now been corroborated by the archival work of Eleanor Lowe, which has identified Brome’s signature in a series of rent books of the Charterhouse Hospital.n10096 By the end of his lifetime, Brome was dependent upon the Charterhouse’s weekly pension. This is important evidence, and corroborates the suggestion of the 1640 court records that Brome’s poverty was not restricted to the later period of his life. Brome claimed that his situation was desperate at several times during his obligation to Heton, including the occasion on which he fell ill in 1639 and wrote to the Salisbury Court company for “some weekly meanes at that tyme to supply his necessitie”.n10097 He was persistent in his approach, and “two or three tymes weeke after weeke importune and solicite them with Letters”.n10098 Brome felt entitled not only to recompense but also to charity, and feared that Heton’s lawsuits would “Crush and Ruyne him”.n10099 Despite his initial reservations about the contract’s conditions, Brome clearly needed the income that the role of a salaried playwright would afford. In this situation, Heton’s offer promised to revolutionise the condition of the professional dramatist. It was an arrangement that compromised Brome’s professional options and challenged the limits of his productivity, but twice proved too extraordinary to refuse.*25The contract that had aimed to stabilise Brome’s rate of payment and patterns of production failed, ultimately, because the conditions for playing themselves remained unstable: plague still halted business for months on end, with no guarantee of the theatres’ reopening. Brome repeatedly argued that it was nothing but “the stopage of his weekly means” that had “enforced” him to break contract with Heton.n10100 It was Brome’s ambitions for the contract’s full potential that guaranteed sufficient security for him - he said that he “expected the due and true performance and payment of the said ffifteene shillings weekly”, regardless of plague. It was a regular, agreed sum, and Brome claimed that there was “noe excepcon at all either in the said treatie Agreement or Articles”.n10101 Yet Heton and the company were operating according to a different model - one that claimed historical precedence in the “vsuall” suspension of payment in plague closures. Whether this was true, Sir Henry Herbert clearly felt that Brome was to be compensated according to the agreement that he had entered into. If it was standard practice to halt payments during plague closure, it is clear that this was no “usual” case. 26The fact that the contract has not survived is itself important to this narrative of special cases. Heton’s failure to keep hold of the physical contractual documents points either to his professional naivety, or to the possibility that the safeguarding of such articles was not a common priority within the theatrical profession. Heton complained bitterly in the court case that the “Artickles and writeings” of the 1638 contract had been “casually lost & mislayed or are Come to the hands of the said Brome”, leaving him with no material basis for legal prosecution.n10102 C. J. Sisson has also noted, in reference to Langley’s bonds with his players in 1600, that the evidence suggests “the court was reluctant to deal with contracts of this nature, either because of their intangible quality, or because they were beneath the dignity of the court, or for both reasons”.n10103 Unless the nature of theatrical contracts had been radically formalised, it is likely that this continued to be the case into the 1630s. In addition, Heton claimed that “the witnesses which should proue the truthe of the premisses are some of them late dead and the rest of them gone beyonde seas or into places remote”.n10104 This inconvenience, which could have been rather helpful to either Brome or Heton, derived from a dispute of testament in which no external referent could be called upon, and reveals either an amateur’s trust on the part of Heton, or a cautious prudence on the part of Brome. Neither of these possibilities are out of place in the context of the contract’s circumstances of formation and breach.27Brome’s contract is repositioned here as an exceptional measure, rather than a manifestation of standard and accepted theatrical practice. Both Brome and Heton were under considerable duress, and depended on the contract according to very different personal and professional agendas. It was as a result of the distance between these motivations and priorities that the contract failed, unable to bridge each agent’s financial requirements during the suspension of normal business in plague closure: Heton found that his attempt to fix Brome’s relation to the Salisbury Court theatre and regulate his output were eventually undermined by Brome’s unconditional need for a weekly allowance. As the very specific nature of the circumstances surrounding this contract unfolds, it is clear that we must remember, and continue, to look to the detail. The professional relationship that Brome held with Heton was not paradigmatic; their relations were neither as “actual” nor as “customary” as has previously been assumed.n10105 This does not undermine the value of the 1640 court proceedings, which remain some of the most revealing pieces of extant evidence on which conditions of playing can be evaluated. Through them it is possible to attain a sense of the particular that adds both nuance and intensity to broader conceptions of playing conditions in the 1630s - in this case, a richer sense of the means and conditions under which Brome sought to establish himself as a professional dramatist.


n10038   he agreed “for the terme of three years […] with his best Art and Industrye [to] write everye yeare three plays and deliver them to the company of players there acting for the time being”. For a full transcript of the depositions and a discussion, see Ann Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, Renaissance Drama n.s.1 (1968), 283-306, see especially p. 297). [go to text]

n10039   are left unrealised. With the clear exception of Ann Haaker’s work on the contract, cited above. [go to text]

n10040   it is taken as read, generalised across the profession, and considered exemplary of standard theatrical practice. G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941-1968), Vol. III, p. 53. [go to text]

n10042   a playe [for] anye other players or playe howse”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 297. [go to text]

n10043   by Beeston’s Boys. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, pp. 297-298. [go to text]

n10044   From this, he claimed to have suffered a loss of “ffive pounds and vpwards”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 302. [go to text]

n10045   when the plague increased “here in and aboute London”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 302. [go to text]

n10046   for Brome this provided evidence of an attempt to “fraudulently deceive and defraude” him. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 303. [go to text]

n10047   he was “enforced” to deal with Beeston again. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 304. [go to text]

n10048   Acting at the playhouse of the Phoenix [or Cockpit] in Drury Lane”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, pp. 299-300. [go to text]

n10049   “tooke occasions daily to weary [him] from and out of their ymployment”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, pp. 304-5. [go to text]

n10050   disinterested management. See, for instance, G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), Vol. V, p. 1068: “the regularity of his [Shirley’s] composition of plays for the Cockpit suggests that he may have had a contract with Christopher Beeston similar to that of Richard Brome”. [go to text]

n10051   collaborative and democratic practices”. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 9. [go to text]

n10052   the productivity of playwrights. K. E. McLuskie and Rebecca Rogers, ‘Who Invested in Early Modern Theatre?’, Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 41 (2002), 29-61; see p. 38. [go to text]

n10053   individualists in commerce, not stars in the teamwork of performance”. Gurr, Playing Companies, p. 16. [go to text]

n10054   is inextricably linked to enduring tensions between the values of art and commerce. Gurr, Playing Companies, pp. 431-2. [go to text]

n10055   Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley. Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Vol. III, p. 308; Vol. IV, pp. 754-5; Vol. I, p. 227. [go to text]

n10056   the fidelity of playwrights to particular troupes. For further analysis of the patterns of playwright production in consideration of ‘contractual behaviour’ see Eleanor Collins, ‘Richard Brome’s Contract and the Relationship of Dramatist to Company in the Early Modern Period’, Early Theatre, 10 (2007), 116-128; see pp. 121-22, which establishes a wider context for the particularity of Brome’s contract from a repertory perspective. [go to text]

n10057   as a result of its breach. Benbow, Mark R. ‘Dutton and Goffe versus Broughton: a disputed contract for plays in the 1570s’, REED Newsletter (1981), 3-9. [go to text]

n10058   and only ran plays across consecutive days on rare occasions. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 103. [go to text]

n10059   by the King’s Men and the first Queen Henrietta’s Men. Shackerly Marmion positioned the King’s Men at the “vast” Globe and the Queen’s Men at the “high” Phoenix as the “two great Lawrels” that “over-top[ped]” the Salisbury Court in his play, Holland’s Leaguer (1631). If the number of court performances given by the King’s and Queen’s Men can be read as indicative of either success or reputation, these two companies certainly appeared before royalty more frequently than any other. [go to text]

n10060   added at more or less fortnightly intervals”. Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, p. 103. [go to text]

n10061   though a proportion of licences have clearly been lost. The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, ed. by N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 185-211. The licence entry for The Sparagus Garden is lost, for instance, as are those for all of Brome’s plays in this period with the exception of a play entered as Florentine Frend and another titled The Lovesick Courtier, which may refer to The Lovesick Court. Herbert’s records are notoriously difficult owing to their survival only as transcripts made by a variety of editors at different times, and the subsequent loss of the original documents. It is impossible to estimate how many licences have been lost – or were simply never recorded by Herbert – but to suppose that tens of licences have disappeared and that the companies were introducing new plays to the repertory at the rate of the Admiral’s Men in 1594-5 is tenuous. [go to text]

n10062   performance at the Red Bull in 1627. Kathleen McLuskie, “The plays and the playwrights: 1613-1642”, in The Revels History of Drama, 8 vols (London: Methuen, 1988), IV, pp. 127-154; see p. 154. [go to text]

n10063   “commercial fuel of the repertory”. Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594-1613 (Fayeteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), p. 39. [go to text]

n10064   involving the play’s purchase, licensing, and the realisation of its performance in properties and costume. Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, pp. 35-6. [go to text]

n10065   drawing crowds and commanding higher entry prices. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), Vol. II, p. 532; Tiffany Stern, “‘A Small-Beer Health to His Second Day’: Playwrights, Prologues, and First Performances in the Early Modern Theater”, Studies in Philology 101 (2004), 172-199; see pp. 184-5. [go to text]

n10066   in addition to his weekly payments. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 297. [go to text]

n10067   potential for success were tested. Stern, ‘Small-Beer Health’, p. 172. [go to text]

n10068   without whom daily performances could not take place. Susan Cerasano, ‘The ‘Business’ of Shareholding: The Fortune Playhouses, and Francis Frace’s Will’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, II (1985), 231-252; see p. 248. [go to text]

n10069   its business had made itself felt over the years. It was his actors’ departure from the Admiral’s Men at the Rose to join Pembroke’s Men at Langley’s Swan that prompted Henslowe to enforce bonds from his players when they returned; see Henslowe’s Diary 2nd edn., ed. by R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 238-41. [go to text]

n10070   for their owne benefite companies of [his] Actors have removed from their residence, and dispersed themselves into severall places, soe that noe certaine place of abode is knowne where they may be found”. Peter Cunningham, Shakespeare Society’s Papers, 4 vols (London, 1844-9), Vol. IV, pp. 95-100. [go to text]

n10071   He enforced strict measures designed to pre-empt the unreliability of the players. Cunningham, Shakespeare Society’s Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 95-100. [go to text]

n10072   Thomas Heywood - a player and dramatist at the Rose - demanding only his loyalty as an actor. Heywood agreed “not to playe any where public about London” besides the Rose. See Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. II, p. 161. [go to text]

n10073   as Brome notes, “in the Infancie of theire setting upp’. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 301. [go to text]

n10074   and “generall discontents” were arising. Cunningham, Shakespeare Society’s Papers, Vol. IV, p. 97. [go to text]

n10075   the King’s Men’s competitive concern. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, p. 189. [go to text]

n10076   was temporarily imprisoned. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, p. 191. [go to text]

n10077   some of the Cockpit’s best actors to Heton at the breaking of Beeston’s company. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, p. 201. [go to text]

n10078   may have been similarly assisted by Herbert’s intervention. Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 107. [go to text]

n10079   “had the benefit of the second day of Hannibal and Scipio - played at [the] Sal. Court […] as a satisfaction for a debt due by Gunnel”. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, p. 199. [go to text]

n10080   owning a ninth-share of the Salisbury Court theatre. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, p. 208. [go to text]

n10081   Herbert specified that Heton should continue weekly payments (albeit reduced) “Vntill such tyme as the sicknes should cease”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 304. [go to text]

n10082   and Heton paid William Beeston for the play that Brome had promised Beeston, buying the playwright back to his service. Heton also promised Brome £10 “in hand in Recompence”, see Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 304. [go to text]

n10083   “promises of better vsage afterwards, and partly vpon threates of suites and troubles”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 303. [go to text]

n10084   where he had been “truly paied without murmuring or wranglinge”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 301. [go to text]

n10085   which Brome inferred from the company’s “bookes and writings” to have been worth “One thousand pounds and vpwards” to the company. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 301. [go to text]

n10086   as he considered the terms to be “more then hee could well performe”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 301. [go to text]

n10087   the company assured him that they “neither should nor would exact nor expect from [Brome] the […] composicion of any more playes […] [than he] could or should bee able well and conveyniently to doe”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 302. [go to text]

n10088   as assurance that Brome would “dedi[cate] all his labour and playes totally vnto their sole profitts”. Haaker,‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 302. [go to text]

n10089   which seems to have been an integral part of earlier theatrical environments. Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, p. 20. [go to text]

n10090   “divers scenes in ould revived playes […] and many prologues and Epilogues to such playes of theires, songs, and one Introduccon”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 305. [go to text]

n10091   would have taken to write. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 305. [go to text]

n10092   This stated that he “should not suffer” any of his plays “to be printed by his Consent or knowledge […] without the Licence” of the Salisbury Court company. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 298. [go to text]

n10093   “for the Cockpit stage, in the right of my most deserving friend, Mr. William Beeston, unto whom it properly appertained”. The Antipodes (London, 1640). [go to text]

n10094   Brome’s contemporaries were actively involved in fashioning literary reputations in print. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-15; Benedict Scott Robinson, ‘Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 42 (2002), 361-380. [go to text]

n10095   a theatrical profession characterised by instability and unrest. See Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theater (London: Cornell University Press, 1991), especially pp. 97-116. [go to text]

n10096   the archival work of Eleanor Lowe, which has identified Brome’s signature in a series of rent books of the Charterhouse Hospital. Eleanor Lowe, ‘Confirmation of Richard Brome’s Final Years in Charterhouse Hospital’, Notes & Queries, 54:4 (December 2007), 416-418. [go to text]

n10097   “some weekly meanes at that tyme to supply his necessitie”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 304. [go to text]

n10098   “two or three tymes weeke after weeke importune and solicite them with Letters”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 304. [go to text]

n10099   “Crush and Ruyne him”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 305. [go to text]

n10100   break contract with Heton. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, pp. 304-5. [go to text]

n10101   “noe excepcon at all either in the said treatie Agreement or Articles”. Haaker,‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 303. [go to text]

n10102   leaving him with no material basis for legal prosecution. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 300. [go to text]

n10103   “the court was reluctant to deal with contracts of this nature, either because of their intangible quality, or because they were beneath the dignity of the court, or for both reasons”. C. J. Sisson, ‘Notes on Early Stuart Stage History’, The Modern Language Review, 37 (1942) 25-36; see p. 34. [go to text]

n10104   “the witnesses which should proue the truthe of the premisses are some of them late dead and the rest of them gone beyonde seas or into places remote”. Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’, p. 300. [go to text]

n10105   as has previously been assumed. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Vol. III, p. 53 (see above, paragraph 2). [go to text]

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