Angel King

Anon. (1624)

Historical Records

Dramatic Records of of Sir Henry Herbert

J. O. Halliwell-Phillips transcribed a number of Sir Henry Herbert's licensing records and compiled them in various scrapbooks now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Amongst them is the following transcription of plays from 1624, which includes:

For the Palsg: comp: -- A new P. call: The Angell King 15 Oct. 1624 - 1 ^li.

(Folger Shakespeare Library, MS W.b.156 ("Fortune"), p149. Reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library)

In 1996, N. W. Bawcutt published new records deriving from hitherto overlooked transcriptions and cuttings from the Ord manuscript, made by its previous owner (i.e. previous to Halliwell-Phillipps) the nineteenth-century scholar Jacob Henry Burn (Beinecke Library, Osborn d1):

The Angill King, a New Play, allowed 15 Oct 1624    1l.
For the Palsgraves Company.

(Jacob Henry Burn, "Collection towards forming a history of the now obsolete office of the Master of the Revells", [1874]. James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Reproduced with permission).

Theatrical Provenance

Palsgrave's Company at the Fortune

Probable Genre(s)

Unknown (Harbage); doppelganger comedy (Fleay)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

"The story of Robert, King of Sicily, I suppose" (Fleay, BCED, 2.327).

Fleay is alluding to a tale which survives in many versions, typified by the very popular medieval English poem Robert of Cisyle. In this tale, a proud king wakes up to find, to his surprise, that no-one regognizes him any more, while his place has been taken by an angelic doppelganger.

Later English-language versions of the tale include a prose narrative by Leigh Hunt, published in A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (1848); and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Sicilian’s Tale", a narrative poem within the hugely successful collection Tales from a Wayside Inn (1863). "The Sicilian's Tale", in turn, prompted a large number of further versions and the poem was well known at the time that Fleay was writing.

One obvious potential problem with Fleay's argument is that the eponymous character in the medieval poem is not the angel, but the man he usurps. Indeed, the medieval English poem never uses the exact phrase "the angel king".

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

This is one of a group of at least fifteen new plays licensed by Herbert between July 1623 and November 1624 for the Palsgrave’s Company, formerly the Admiral's Men. In 1621, their theatre, the Fortune, had burnt down, and three years later they were still attempting to recover from the destruction not merely of their venue but also, it is thought, of their stock of playbooks. This concentration of new writing for one company, fifteen plays in little over a year, is unparalleled in Herbert's records. Fourteen of the fifteen are lost, the survivor being Thomas Drew's The Duchess of Suffolk. As far as one can tell, the post-fire licensings represented an attempt to rebuild a working repertory. (See Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites, 47; Bentley, 1.149; Bentley, 5.1327-8)

This particular play attracted almost no attention prior to the LPD apart from Fleay's uncharacteristically diffident suggestion as to its source. Sibley and Bentley both quote Fleay's sentence without evaluative comment or addition.

In work arising from the LPD, Steggle argues in support of Fleay's case by locating other instances of versions of the Robert of Sicily story which use the phrase "The Angel King". In particular, he adduces two separate dramatizations of the Robert of Sicily story, both recorded in the nineteenth century, and both of which are entitled "The Angel King". In addition, he finds early modern continental versions of the Robert of Sicily story, many of which refer to the angel using variants of the relevant phrase. In particular, two seventeenth-century Spanish plays - El Rey Angel, and El Demonio en la Muger, y Rey Angel de Sicilia - actually use the phrase in their titles. Steggle argues that the texts he adduces show

…firstly, that the story remains current in seventeenth-century Europe, and secondly that the angel is often referred to at this date in variants of the phrase "the Angel King". Additionally, El Rey Angel, and El Demonio en la Muger, y Rey Angel de Sicilia… show that the title The Angel King has not just nineteenth-century but also seventeenth-century warrant as an appropriate one for a dramatization of the story of Robert of Sicily. (142)

If this identification is accepted, then The Angel King becomes "one of the large number of Renaissance plays inheriting and remaking the materials of medieval romance" (143). It also becomes a play about doppelgangers, joining a small group including Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors. Steggle also notes the existing suggestion, made by Donna B. Hamilton among others, that the story of Robert of Sicily lurks in the imaginative hinterland of King Lear.

For What It's Worth

Suggestions welcome.

Works Cited

Robert of Cisyle in Edward E. Foster, ed., Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, 2nd edn (1997; Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007); cited from the online version at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/cisylefr.htm

Site created by David McInnis, University of Melbourne; updated 30 March 2016.