Sharp, amusing and provocative, Professor Andrew Hadfield and Paul Franczak gave us a Shakespeare feast on Sunday at the Mermaid, a well-told story full of unknown history and amuse-bouches to open the literary part of the Rye Festival.
There is little doubt that the Chamberlain’s Men visited Rye (with their creaking wagon of stage costumes, props and actors?) in late August of 1597 – exactly five hundred years ago.
The big questions, the Macguffin if you like, were left by our experts tantalizingly unanswered – was Shakespeare with them? and did Rye’s young dramatist John Fletcher (see pictures below) meet up with him?
The Chamberlain’s Men were the drama company Shakespeare worked for, writing and acting; they went on tour that summer because Royal decree had closed down all theatres in London – either for an outbreak of plague, or as an act of blanket censorship against a play that had greatly wounded the establishment (the offending play titled “The Isle of Dogs” written by Ben Johnson and performed by another of the theatre companies).
The evidence of their presence in Rye is a discovered entry in the town accounts, a payment of twenty shillings to the Chamberlain’s Men on the 27th of that month, the day after a new Mayor was elected (John Fowtrell, the landlord of The Mermaid).
Was it Fowtrell who brought them to Rye as a offering to the town? And did they perform not only in public but also inside private houses? There would almost certainly have been some private sponsorship involved since even then the sum of one pound could have barely covered their expenses.
Rye was in recession that year and unable to afford grand gestures. The harvests had been bad and the river silted up. Only the narrow and low draught boats of the herring fleet were able to set sail, with the town’s main cross-channel passenger traffic most likely diverted to Dover.
Maybe their visit also had political undertone: the Warden of the Cinque Ports, Cobham, had long been the butt of jokes in many London plays. Did the actors come down to the south coast to add insult to injury? In which case might the reward of twenty shillings have been payment to persuade them to go away?
More questions are left unanswered over the plays the Chamberlain’s Men could have performed. Was it Love’s Labours Lost? The Merrie Wives of Windsor? Or possibly Henry IV Part One? The historical pieces on the Wars of the Roses were particularly popular at that time of uncertainty, with Queen Elizabeth approaching the end of her reign without an heir. Was there to be another drawn-out war of succession?
For all the open questions (the essential tease of history), this was a highly entertaining and informative occasion, the result of much recent and painstaking research by Andrew and Paul, and Paul’s wife, Rosie – research now accepted by Shakespeare scholars. They have surely left Rye with the obligation to publicize more openly her connection with the greatest writer of all time – and also to find some budding young historian or biographer who will fill a major gap in the bibliography by writing an account of John Fletcher’s life!
Photos : Rye News Library