Cox of Collumpton

William Haughton, John Day (1599)

Historical Records

Payments to Playwrights (Henslowe’s Diary)

F. 31 (Greg I.59)

          The 1 of novmb[er] 1599

W. Haughton receiued of m^r.

Hunslowe in parte of payement. of the

the tragedie of John Cox the some

of ... [iij] 20^s.

Willyam Haughtonn receyued of m^r Hinchloe in part

of payment of the Tragedy of Cox of Collunpto[n]

the som of ... 20^s

          pd & quite. John Daye

F. 65 (Greg I.113)

Lent vnto Robart shaw the 1 of novmb[er] 1599

to lend vnto w^m harton in earneste of a

Boocke called the tragedie of John cox some of ... xx^s

F. 65^v (Greg I.114)

Lent vnto w^m harton & John daye at

the appoyntment of Thomas dowton in earnest

of a Boocke called the tragedie of cox of

collinste^r the some of ... xx^s

          the xiiij^th of nouember 1599

Receued of m^r phillipp Hinchlow to pay

to William hauton & Jhon day for the

tragedy of Cox of Collomton the

som of three pownd receued  ... iij^li

                              ^{in full}

Simon Forman's Notebooks

Simon Forman saw "Cox of Collumpton" at the Rose playhouse on 9 March 1600 and wrote a description of it in his casebooks (MS Ashmole 236, fol. 77v).



(Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 236, fol77^v, reproduced with permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford)


The following is copied from Cerasano (pp. 157-8):

“Item the plai of Cox of Cullinton & his 3 sonns henry peter and / Jhon on S^t Markes dai Cox him selfe shote an Arrowe thorow / his vnkells head to haue his Land & had it and the same dai 7 yers / on M^r Jaruis shot cox throughe the hed & slue him. and on saint / markes dai a year after his older sonn henry was drowned / by peter & jhon in his Xan [Christian] fate. and on S^t Markes dai a year after peter & Jhon both slue them sellues for peter be / ing fronted w^th the sight of a bear viz a sprite apering to Jhon & / him when they sate vpon deuisioⁿ of the land^es in likenes of a bere / & ther w^th peter fell out of his wites and way lyed in a darke / house & beat out his braines against a post & Jhon stabed him self / & all on S^t Markes dai & remember how m^r hammons sonn / slue him & where he way sleying of his father his father entreating / for m^ercy to his sonn could find no mercy whervpon he p^romised / that his sonn should betray him selfe by laughing & so he did / was executed for yt/ 1600 9 of march at the Rose”

Theatrical Provenance

In 1599, when paying Haughton and Day for "Cox of Collumpton" the Admiral’s Men were anticipating the move to their soon-to-be-built playhouse, the Fortune, in Middlesex; they were also looking across Maid Lane at their competition in the form of the Chamberlain’s Men, newly moved from Shoreditch to the Globe.

The play was still in production on 9 March 1600 (a Sunday), when Simon Forman saw it at the Rose and recorded a reaction to it in one of his casebooks (see below).

Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy (Harbage)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Greg cited John Payne Collier as having identified the play with “a murder committed at Collumpton in Devonshire,” but Greg himself ws “not aware of any record thereof” (II, item #188, p. 207).

References to the Play

See Simon Forman's commentary on the play, above (Historical Records).

Critical Commentary

Cerasano discusses Forman’s visit to the Rose in detail. She provides a transcription from the casebook (see above) and a context of theater history. She points out that "Cox of Collumpton" would have been “fairly new” when Forman saw it (157) and in a note to that observation she adds that, “[g]iven the time required to rehearse and mount the production, Forman might well have attended one of the earliest performances …” (157n). Cerasano describes Forman as not having “any particular critical insight” into the plays he saw, or he might “have noticed some relationship between the bear in Cox of Collumpton and that in The Winter’s Tale" (which he saw in 1611) or “some similarity between Cox’s Peter, who dashes his brains out against a post, and Bajazeth in Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, one of the most popular plays of the period” (158).

Traister comments on Forman’s visit to the Rose, calling the play Cox of Cullinton, a.k.a., Cox of Collumpton, but provides no further information or transcription beyond the citation of MS Ashmole 236, fol. 77v.

Rowse reads the date of the performance seen by Forman as 4 March 1600 (26).

Pitcher addresses the interrelationship of stage business in the playing of bears across "Cox," Mucedorus, and The Winter’s Tale. He finds particularly fruitful the echo of a bear-spirit in added scenes to the 1610 quarto of Mucedorus, where the clown, Mouse, claims to have just seen a bear that was really “some Diuell in a Beares Doublet” (I.ii; qtd in Pitcher, 50).

Knutson observes that “Forman was fascinated more by the coincidence that the murders all occurred on St. Mark’s Day than by the murders themselves” (27); she appends a note to a summary of Forman’s synopsis in which she adds two points: (1) Forman’s apparent interest in family murders, implied by his digression to the Hammon father-son murders, and (2) Mucedorus, Chamberlain's Men, Q1598, as a theatrical precedent for the Admiral’s Men, should they have decided to dramatize that bear (36n).

Gurr connects "Cox of Collumpton" with the cluster of true-crime plays in the Admiral’s repertory for 1599, describing it as one of two “plainly journalistic accounts of sensational murders in London” although it is not apparently set in London (38). In the Appendix (item 137), Gurr repeats Henslowe’s entries, footnoting Forman’s entry using Cerasano’s date of 9 March 1600 for the show and providing a transcription of Forman’s entry (Gurr's transcription has minor typographic differences from Cerasano's).

For What It's Worth

Race, offering a contrarian opinion, argues that the entries by Forman in his casebooks, including that for "Cox of Collumpton" are forgeries by John Payne Collier, abetted by Peter Cunningham: “My suggestion is that when Collier and Cunningham were engaged on the Shakespeare accounts they challenged one another to produce a nonsense story, and this was Collier’s effort” (14). He is particularly hard on "Cox" as a theatrical piece, asserting that “the plot is so fantastic that it is perfectly clear that the play could never have been put on the stage” (13), and that “as a narrative it reaches the depths of illiteracy” (14).

St. Mark’s Day, 25 April, is an unlucky day. Fairly obviously, this is true for the Cox family, but it is also true elsewhere in early modern belief, where St. Mark’s Day functions almost as a secondary Halloween, six months apart from it in the calendar. Traditionally, St. Mark’s Eve is a night when one can see visions identifying which neighbours are to die in the next twelve months. On the day itself it was considered unlucky to work, and in particular unlucky to work the land. Early beliefs around St. Mark’s Day are conveniently collected in, for instance, Robert Chambers's Book of Days http://www.thebookofdays.com/months/april/25.htm and William Hone's Every-Day Book (1869), 261-3. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gWcKAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA262

Hone's account includes the following description:

This was a great fast-day in England during the rule of the Romish church. An old writer says, that in 1589, "I being as then but a boy, do remember that an ale wife, making no exception of dayes, would needs brue upon Saint Marke's days; but loe, the marvailous worke of God! whiles she was thus laboring, the top of the chimney tooke fire; and, before it could bee quenched, her house was quite burnt. Surely," says this observer of sainted seasons, "a gentle warning to them that violate and profane forbidden daies"… On St Mark's day blessings on the corn were implored. According to a manuscript of Mr. Pennant's, no farmer in North Wales dare hold his team on this day, because they there believe one man's team that worked upon it was marked with the loss of an ox. A Yorkshire clergyman informed Mr. Brand, that it was customary in that county for the common people to sit and watch in the church porch on St. Mark's Eve, from eleven o'clock at night till one in the morning. The third year (for this must be done thrice,) they are supposed to see the ghosts of all those who are to die the next year, pass by into the church. When any one sickens that is thought to have been seen in this manner, it is presently whispered about that he will not recover, for that such, or such an one, who has watched St. Mark's Eve, says so. This superstition is in such force, that, if the patients themselves hear of it, they almost despair of recovery. Many are said to have actually died by their imaginary fears on the occasion. (Hone, 261-2)

This complex of ideas is clearly relevant to our play. As is implicit in Hone's account, too, St. Mark’s Day lay also on one of the fault lines of the Reformation. Henry VIII abrogated the observance of St. Mark’s Day, and there were at least two separate provincial disputes in the 1530s arising from controversy over whether or not to obey Henry’s instructions in this respect (Shagan, Popular Politics, 57-9).

Works Cited

Cerasano, S. P., “Philip Henslowe, Simon Forman, and the Theatrical Community of the 1590s.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 44 (1993): 145-58.

Chambers, Robert. The Book of Days (1869), etext at Hillman’s Hyperlinked and Searchable Book of Days, http://www.thebookofdays.com

Forman, Simon. MSS Ashmole 236, fol. 77v (Division of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library).

Gurr, Andrew. Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Hone, William. The Every-day Book: Or, Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements. [London]: [William Tegg], 1868. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gWcKAAAAIAAJ

Knutson, Roslyn L. “Toe to Toe Across Maid Lane: Repertorial Competition at the Rose and Globe, 1599-1600,” in June Schlueter and Paul Nelsen (eds) Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Madison & Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 21-37.

Pitcher, John, “‘Fronted with the Sight of a Bear’: Cox of Collumpton and The Winter’s Tale.” Notes and Queries, 41 (1994): 47-53.

Race, Sydney, “Simon Forman’s ‘Bocke of Plaies’ Examined.” Notes and Queries, 203 (1958): 9-14.

Rowse, A. L. Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974.

Shagan, Ethan H. Popular Politics and the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Traister, Barbara Howard. The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Site created and maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; updated, 7 February 2012. Additions by Matthew Steggle.