Cleander
Historical Records
Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert
Malone's transcriptions from Herbert's office book contain two records relating to "Cleander". The earlier of the two appears in a list compiled by Malone of Herbert's licensing entries related to Massinger's plays:
- The Tragedy of Cleander, May 7, 1634. Acted by the king's company. This play is lost.
- (Malone 3:230; Bawcutt #294)
The second record is cited as evidence that Queen Henrietta attended performances at the Blackfriars playhouse:
- "The 13 May, 1634, the Queene was at Blackfryers, to see Messengers playe."—The play which her majesty honoured with her presence was The Tragedy of Cleander, which had been produced on the 7th of the same month, and is now lost, with many other pieces of the same writer.
- (Malone 3:167; Bawcutt #295)
It's unclear from Malone's entry whether Herbert's office book specified that the play performed on 13 May was "Cleander" or whether this was Malone's inference.
Theatrical Provenance
Performed by the King's Men in 1634.
Probable Genre(s)
Tragedy.
Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues
See "For What It's Worth" below.
References to the Play
(Information welcome.)
Critical Commentary
The majority of scholarly commentary on "Cleander" concerns whether it should be identified with "The Wandering Lovers", licensed in 1623, and the extant play The Lovers' Progress, printed in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio; this discussion is summarized in the entry for "The Wandering Lovers".
Dyce, rejecting the argument for lumping, opined that any play titled "The Tragedy of Cleander" "doubtless treated of the Cleander who was an officer of Alexander the Great, and who was put to death for offering violence to a noble virgin and giving her as a prostitute to his servants" (Dyce I.lxxix).
Bentley changed opinions in the course of publishing The Jacobean and Caroline Stage. By the time Volume 3 was published in 1956, his position was that "The Wandering Lovers" (licensed in 1623), "Cleander" (licensed in 1634), and The Lovers' Progress (printed in 1647) represented the same play, originally written by Fletcher and subsequently revised by Massinger. However, in the earlier Volume 1 (1941), he had been persuaded by Dyce's arguments that any play called "The Tragedy of Cleander" would have depicted a subject from classical history (JCS, 1:124).
Wiggins allows the possibility that "The Wandering Lovers" of 1623 may be a lost play and assigns it a separate entry (#2076); however, "Cleander" of 1634 is assumed to be identical with The Lovers' Progress (#2077).
For What It's Worth
One piece of evidence adduced in favor of lumping "Cleander" and The Lovers' Progress is that Massinger's play was apparently being performed by the King's Men at the Blackfriars in May 1634 shortly after being licensed and that on 21 May 1634 Sir Humphrey Mildmay reported in his diary (British Library, MS Harley 454) attending "the play Called Lasander & Callista, beinge a poem" (Bentley, JCS 2:676, 3:360). Since Lysander and Calista are main characters in The Lovers' Progress (the narrative source for which was translated into English in 1627 as A tragi-comicall history of our times, under the borrowed names of Lisander, and Calista), it has been assumed that Mildmay saw Fletcher's play and that this should be identified with the play licensed on May 7. However, if this is true, it's curious that Mildmay reported a different title than that under which the play was licensed just two weeks prior. Bentley (2:676) suggests that "Mildmay's title may indicate the one used on the playbills for this performance, or it may indicate his familiarity with the French romance of the same name on which the play was based." But as a separate issue, scholars have sometimes found "The Tragedy of Cleander" to be somewhat awkward as a plausible title for The Lovers' Progress, a play that does include a character named Cleander who dies, but one who is killed in Act 4, while the actual ending of the play is more characteristic of a tragicomedy than a tragedy.
If they were in fact two distinct plays, there is certainly no shortage of possible historical Cleanders who might provide the subject of a tragedy. A play that depicted the death of Alexander's officer Cleander, as Dyce suggested, could have found a narrative source in Quintus Curtius' Histories of Alexander, translated into English in 1553. As Quintus Curtius relates, Cleander was originally sent to murder Parmenion, the father of Philotas (whose attempted assassination of Alexander is the subject of Samuel Daniel's tragedy) before being executed himself for his sacrilegious offenses. Separately, Herodotus and Aristotle both mention the Cleander who was a tyrant of Gela for seven years before being assassinated by a citizen named Sabyllus.
Pace Dyce, perhaps the most likely candidate for a "Tragedy of Cleander" would be Marcus Aurelius Cleander, a favorite of the emperor Commodus, whose story was told in Dio Cassius (Roman History 73.12–13), Herodian (History of the Empire 1.12–13) and the Historia Augusta ("Life of Commodus", 6–7) among classical sources and repeated often in early modern texts. Antonio de Guevara's Chronicle, conteyning the Liues of Tenne Emperours of Rome (1577, pp. 186–91), for example, tells of how Commodus met Cleander as a slave, who was "so handsome in swéeping, seruing, and pleasing his maister, that not many yeares after, he did not onely make him frée, and marrie him with his daughter, but also did aduance him to the office of Clarke of the kitchin." Rising through the ranks to Captain of the Guard by flattery, Cleander "affirmed to wishe nothing, that Commodus wished not, either to allowe any thing that hée said not: but aduouched also that he did not thinke or dreame, but that which Commodus did dreame and thinke: and with these and suche like lyes and flatteries, hee wan the hart of Commodus, and obteyned seruice of the whole Empire." Eventually Cleander resents his subordinate status and plots to assassinate Commodus and usurp the throne for himself. During a year of famine and pestilence, Cleander arranges to bring supplies of wheat to Rome, so that he could take credit for disbursing it to the hungry citizens. However, the plan does not unfold as expected and the citizens riot against Cleander and such violence ensues between the rioters and Cleander's defenders "that scarsly a streate was to be founde in Rome, that was not bathed with bloud: either any place great or litle, that was not filled with dead bodies." Meanwhile, Commodus remains oblivious as none of his advisors have the courage to share the news, until his sister Fadilla pleads for intervention. "Commodus hearing these matters, & dismaid with feare, forthwith commaunded Cleander to come vnto his presence: and at the instante of his appearance, commaunded his head to be cut off, which being set vpon a lance, and carried about Rome, immediatly the whole multitude was pacified." Told in various early modern sources, the story of Cleander was a tragedy of self-interested ambition punished.
It may also worth noting that around the same time, the King's Men were performing another tragedy featuring a character named Cleander. This was The Conspiracy: A Tragedy, written by Henry Killigrew initially for the marriage of Charles Herbert and Mary Villiers in January 1635, but the play was publicly performed at Blackfriars by November of that year (JCS, 4:691). The main plot of the play concerns a conspiracy to restore the usurped King Cleander to his rightful throne and ends with the funerary rituals for the dead usurper. Is there any chance that Malone misinterpreted the date and the attribution to Massinger in his transcription of the 1634 license?
Works Cited
Site created and maintained by Misha Teramura, University of Toronto; updated 14 March 2025.