Dead Man's Fortune, The

Anon. (?1590)

Historical Records

Knowledge of this play and its production is based solely on the manuscript titled "The plotte of the deade mans fortune" now held in the British Library (Ms. Add. 10449). It is reproduced in Greg, Papers, 133-35. (Internet Archive)

Theatrical Provenance

Because the plot is undated, scholars have been unable to agree on a theatrical provenance. Greg's opinion that it had to belong to Strange's men or the Admiral's men before 1594 (Papers, 133), perhaps even as early as 1590 (Dramatic Documents, 19), is echoed by Gurr (71) and Bradley (232). However, McMillin offered a contrarian argument that Dead Man's Fortune belonged to Pembroke's men in 1592-3. Knutson agrees with McMillin. The most stable fact in any of these arguments is that the plot must belong to a time when the players named in it belonged to the same company. Those players are [Richard] Burbage, [Richard] Darloe, Robert Lee, and "b samme." A tire-man is also called for in the plot, but as McMillin observes, "Darlowe, Lee and 'samme' are silent on the matter [of company affiliation], and the tire-man is no help at all" (243).

Probable Genre(s)

Romantic Comedy (Harbage)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

No source for the story has been identified, but a reasonably comprehensive account of the action of the play may be inferred from the skeleton version of scenes and character entries it records. Greg so inferred, offering a description of the romance plot, featuring lovers and jealous fathers, and a course of true love somewhat smoothed by magical intervention. In summarizing the narrative of the main plot (below), he stressed that "the details of the action and motives suggested are of course conjectural" (Dramatic Documents, 95):

"Laertes and Eschines, befriended by the magician Urganda, are suitors to Allcyane and Statyra, whom, however, their fathers, Tesephon and Allgerius, destine for the wicked rivals Carynus and Prelior. Laertes first makes the acquaintance of the fathers (I. iii), while on Urganda's advice Eschines takes a disguise as Bellveile (II. ii). The rival pairs of suitors appear before the ladies and their fathers to prefer their suits, and renouncing their chosen lovers they [the ladies] are committed to prison (II. iv). Here they overhear a plot by the wicked suitors (III. i), and with the help of the Jailor are able to summon their lovers (III. ii), thus defeating their fathers' plan of marrying them off under the influence of a drug administered in their meat (III. iii). While, however, Tesephon and Allgerius are congratulating themselves on the success of their plot, news is brought by a messenger that their daughters have died, and Urganda … then accuses them of poisoning the meat, and has them arrested by an officer named Euphrodore (IV. i). Next Urganda visits Carynus and Prelior and by means of a magic mirror (IV. ii) drives them mad (IV. iii). The last act opens with a scene (added later to the Plot) in which Urganda restores the ladies to their true lovers (V. i). There follows a spectacular entry, in which, before King Egereon, the condemned fathers are brought out to execution. Carynus and Prelior follow, but the catastrophe is interrupted by another magic show, in which three antic fairies dismiss the executioner and free the victims (V. ii), whereupon Urganda enters with the united couples (V. iii) and the play ends in mutual reconciliation."

A chief interest of the play is its interwoven secondary plot, which owes something to the Italian commedia dell' arte: it includes a leading figure called Pantaloun, around whom a domestic intrigue unfolds. His wife, Aspida, has a lover, Validore, and the household servants, the maid Rose and Pantaloun's man Peascod, are involved in the dynamics of jealousy and deceit. Attempts to link this action with the scenarios of Flaminio Scala ("The Jealous Old Man," for example) are not entirely compelling, although the analogies are of interest.

References to the Play

Information welcome.

Critical Commentary

Much of the critical commentary on the plot has focused on three issues: provenance, casting, and the plot as one of seven in their apparent roles as aids to performance. Greg's Dramatic Documents is the foundational commentary, but McMillin and Bradley have modified and expanded Greg's comments substantially.

Provenance: As addendum to Theatrical Provenance (above), it must be said that Greg's arguments on the date and company affiliation of Dead Man's Fortune are grounded in a belief so deeply embedded in scholarship on theater history as to be unassailable. And yet it has no basis in fact; it is actually contradicted by facts. The belief is that, following an argument between John Alleyn and James Burbage at the Theater in 1590 or '91, personal and professional relations between the Alleyns and Burbages were so polarized that the families' two star-powered players, Edward and Richard, would not have played together in the same company. As a result of this belief, Burbage is sought elsewhere among companies from 1590 to 1594 whenever Alleyn can be located with Strange's men or the Admiral's men. (The contradiction: Henslowe records the Admiral's men [and presumably Alleyn] playing with the Lord Chamberlain's men [and presumably Burbage] at Newington in June 1594). The consequences for the plot of The Dead Man's Fortune, which names Burbage as a player yet appears to have once belonged to Alleyn, is that the date of the manuscript must precede the alleged family quarrel.

Casting: The plot identifies five performers, one by title, a "tyre man" playing an attendant in one scene, and the others by name: [Richard] Burbage, [Richard] Darloe, Robert Lee, and "b samme."

Burbage: Greg, aware of the potency of the name "Burbage" in any theatrical document, laments that "it is very unfortunate that we cannot determine with any certainty which character [Burbage] played" (Dramatic Documents, 100). Burbage's surname appears once in the plot in a late scene (Greg's assigned IV. i); the name is followed immediately by the call for a messenger. This proximity, which in the plots often identifies a player and role, leads to the unpopular deduction that Burbage played the messenger. Greg, after professing an inability to assign a part to Burbage, suggests that he might have played Urganda, the magician (Dramatic Documents, 44; 95). But there are problems with that casting. Urganda's magic certainly has an important place in The Dead Man's Fortune, but the character, drawn from the Amadis and Palmerin romances, is an enchantress, "Urganda the Unknown," a generally beneficent protrectress of the chivalric heroes. If Greg is right about the casting, then, he is unlikely to be right about the date; Burbage was twenty-one in 1590, and past his days of taking female roles. If indeed he played Urganda the performance connected with the plot is likely to have taken place in the middle 1580s. Bradley also rejects Greg's suggestion. Adding "Munday's derivative romances" to the sources of Urganda's trickery, he notes that "it would be unusual for a Plotter to name a boy by his surname" (97). He suggests that Burbage might have played Eschines, the successful lover who takes on a disguise. Bradley posits further that Burbage, in the disguise of Bellveile, masquerades briefly as that messenger. McMillin is interested in Burbage's name in the plot as a clue to company affiliation; he believed, as do most scholars, that Burbage was the lead player in the newly formed company of Pembroke's men in late autumn 1592 (Gurr, 270). (For players' biographies, start with Nungezer and Eccles.)

Darloe, Lee, "b samme," and the tire-man: Darloe's name appears twice in the plot and once in the margin (twice abbreviated to "Dar"), always as an attendant; Darloe (also, "Darlowe") married in January 1590 (Eccles, "Elizabethan Actors I: A-D," 45) and thus may be assumed to be in his early twenties at the time. Lee, like Darloe, is named three times including the marginal note; once with his Christian name is given. He too is an attendant, and possibly that messenger no one wants to assign to Burbage. Born in 1569, Lee would have been 21 in 1590 (Eccles, "Elizabethan Actors III: K-R," 296). The name, "b samme," appears four times in the plot. In three instances the name appears in the same places as the names of Darloe and Lee (in the margin simply as "sam"); once it appears with no other players named. Who "b samme" was is still a mystery. Greg suggested several boys named Sam, as well as Samuel Rowley (Dramatic Documents 48-9). Greg noted further that "samme" might have played Validor's man and Euphrodore, parts that "in no way force us to interpret the 'b' as 'boy'" (48). The tire-man appears once in the margin. McMillin supposes he might have been needed also in the crowded "marginally-added scene toward the end" (238).

Plots as Performance Documents: The opinions on this topic are too many and complex to be summarized here. Suffice it to say that the long-standing idea that plots were hung in the tiring-house to assist players' entrances to the stage and exits has received much scrutiny and tweaking without much progress in an explanation of the many differences the plots manifest. In contrast to the vexed issue of consistency (or lack of it), Tribble argues that it is sufficient to perceive the plot as one of many components in the distributed cognition of putting on a play (145-7). Regarding the plot of The Dead Man's Fortune, Greg, Bradley, and McMillin work from the assumption that it was written at some stage of blocking the action for performance at a time when the Plotter did not need to identify the casting in more detail. Greg declared that the plot had a "rather primitive character" (Dramatic Documents, 94), but it is in fact clearly written and laid out. The theatrical annotations in the plot give details of its other properties and some costumes. The title of the play is not clearly explicable from what the plot reveals about its action, but it probably is bound up with a final revelation involving a stage property: "Enter the panteloun & causeth the chest or truncke to be broughte forth." The puzzle of the dead man and his fortune no doubt was resolved when it was opened, in the last moments of the play. Bradley focuses on a few peculiarities of this plot: for example, the "'literary' muddle" the Plotter gets into "when trying to organize the sequential entrance and exit of three fairies" in the final scene (77). He also addresses the marginalia, with particular interest in the call for the tire-man (95-7, 100). McMillin examines the plot to determine the number of players needed to put the play on; his conclusion is that the plot suggests a company of "eighteen—four boys, three supernumeraries, and eleven capable men" (239). This conclusion leads him to propose the company of Pembroke's men, which he presumed had fewer players than Strange's men in 1592-3 (241-2).

For What It's Worth

Knutson's interest in The Dead Man's Fortune is as a second possible comedy in the repertory of Pembroke's men, otherwise heavy in tragedy and tragical histories (the other comedy was The Taming of A Shrew). Seeking an answer as many scholars before her have to the apparent collapse of Pembroke's tour in the late summer of 1593, she claims that the repertory cannot take the blame. She discusses details of the narrative of The Dead Man's Fortune to argue for a lively and audience-pleasing entertainment.

McMillin, responding to Greg's assignment of the role of King Egereon to a supernumerary, disagrees: "Kings, even late-arriving kings, do not usually walk on in Elizabethan plays"; he assigns the role to "an experienced actor" (239). In a note he adds that "in an Elizabethan repertory company the royal costumes, expensive and used in various plays, would have been fitted to leading actors" (239.n8).

Works Cited

Bradley, David. From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Eccles, Mark. "Elizabethan Actors I: A-D." Notes & Queries 236.1 (1991): 38-48; "Elizabethan Actors II: E-J." Notes and Queries 236.4 (1991): 454-61; "Elizabethan Actors III: K-R." Notes & Queries 237.3 (1992): 293-303; "Elizabethan Actors IV: S to End." Notes and Queries 238.2 (1993): 165-76.

Greg, W. W. Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Knutson, Roslyn L. "Pembroke's Men in 1592-3, Their Repertory and Touring Schedule." Early Theatre 4.1 (2001): 129-38.
McMillin, Scott. "The Plots of The Dead Man's Fortune and 2 Seven Deadly Sins: Inferences for Theatre Historians." Studies in Bibliography 26 (1973): 235-43.
Nungezer, Edwin. A Dictionary of Actors. New York: Greenwood Press, 1929.
Scala, Flaminio. trans. H. F. Salerno, Scenarios of the Commedia dell' Arte. New York, 1967.
Tribble, Evelyn. "Distributing Cognition in the Globe." Shakespeare Quarterly 56.2 (2005): 135-55).

Site created by John Astington, University of Toronto; updated by Roslyn L. Knutson 7 August 2010.