French Doctor

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Historical Records

Performance Records

Playlists in Philip Henslowe's diary

Fol. 10 (Greg, I.19)

ye 18 of octobʒ 1594

. . . . . . . . . .

Res at the frenshe docter

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxijs

Fol. 10 (Greg, I.19)

ye 28 of octobʒ 1594		Res at the frenshe docter	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvs
ye 18 of novmbʒ 1594	————	Res at the frenshe docter	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxvijs

Fol. 11 (Greg, I.21)

ye 3 of Jenewary 1594	. . . . . . . . .	Res at the frenshe docter	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxjs
ye 30 of Jenewary 1594		Res at the frenshe docter	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xviijs
ye 7 of febreary 1594		Res at the frenshe docter	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxjs

Fol. 11 ^v (Greg, I.22)

ye 24 of febreary 1594	. . . . . . . .	Res at the frensh doctor	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxxxiiijs
ye easter mondaye 1595		Res at the ffrenshe doctor	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . liijs
ye 3 of may 1595		Res at the frenshe docter	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xjs

Fol. 12 ^v (Greg, I.24)

ye 2[3]4 of maye 1595

. . . . . . . . . .

Res at the frenshe docter

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxijs

Fol. 13 (Greg, I.24)

ye 19 of septmbʒ 1595

. . . . . . . . . .

Res at the frenshe doctor

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvjs

Fol. 21^v (Greg, I.42)

ye 4 of July 1596

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Res at frenshe dacter

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiiijs

Fol. 25 (Greg, I.49)

ye 29 of octobʒ     1596     Res at the frenshe docter

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvs

ye 9 of novmbʒ 1596

. . . . . . . . . .

| Res| at the frenshe docter

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiiijs

Payments

Purchase of the play from Edward Alleyn in Philip Henslowe's diary:

Fol. 96 (Greg. I.153)

pd at the apoyntment of the companye the }

18 of Janewary 1601 vnto E Alleyn for iij boockes }

w^ch were played called the french docter the } vj^li

massaker of france & the nvtte the some of }

Theatrical Provenance

The Admiral's men brought "The French Doctor" to the stage of the Rose in October 1594 and continued it into the autumn season of 1596-7. However, any clarity about its pre-October provenance is complicated by the fact that Henslowe did not mark the play "ne" at its debut in his records (autumn, 1594). Theater historians consequently assume that the play was in revival.

But where had it been when new, and with which company?

Harbage, under the heading "1590, Addenda," lists "The French Doctor" with more than several dozen plays that appear in Henslowe's diary in playlists for Strange's men (1592-3) and the Admiral's men (1594-5) without that distinguishing "ne" (Harbage includes also "Hester and Ahasuerus)". He thus implies a pre-1590 debut for each item, though he assigns each to the company that performed it in Henslowe's 1592-4 records.

Wiggins, Catalogue, #833 focuses on Edward Alleyn as the key to the pre-1594 provenance of "The French Doctor" (see also #785 for a broader treatment of the Admiral's non-"ne" plays in 1594-5). Offering several scenarios for the stage life and company/player ownership of "The French Doctor" before October 1594, he is comfortable only with the conclusion that the play had been in Alleyn's hands for some time before its sale to the Admiral's men in 1602.

See Critical Commentary for more on issues of provenance.)

Probable Genre(s)

Comedy? Harbage

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

See Critical Commentary for scholarly thinking on plays and narratives related to "The French Doctor" if its title is a mask for some other play.

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

Malone offers no comment on this play (p. 296). Collier, seeking an extant play that featured a French doctor, associates The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypol with "The French Doctor" (p. 43, n1).

Fleay, BCED follows Collier's logic to a different play, suggesting that "The French Doctor" was "[p]robably" Thomas Dekker's lost "Jew of Venice" (I, Dekker, #3; II, Anon., #137). Pursuing the Dekker connection, Fleay suggests further a connection with the German play, The Righteous Judgment of a Girl Graduate, or The Jew of Venice."

Greg II adds "The Venetian Comedy," a play sharing the 1594-5 repertory of the Admiral's men with "The French Doctor," to the brew of plays in some way duplicating one another (p. 170, #57). Influenced (apparently) by Fleay's linking of "The French Doctor" with Dekker's "Jew of Venice," Greg offers this explanation: "If then VC ["the Venetian Comedy"] and FD ["The French Doctor"] were identical, they must have contained the story of the Jew of Venice, and were presumably the same as Dekker JV ["Jew of Venice"]."

Knutson applies the concept of duplication to plays "with similar characters or with similar titles" (Repertory, p. 49). She sees these duplications not as "mistakes in the diary for one seminal text and/or versions, revisions, or thefts of a single text" (as Fleay's duplications imply), but as evidence that companies copied "the subject matter and genre of popular offerings" in their own repertory and that of their competitors (Repertory, p. 50). As an example, she examines the scheduling of two plays staged by the Admiral's men along with "The French Doctor": "The Wise Man of West Chester" and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in 1594-5 when the three appear "to have formed a trio ... in the sense that one play or another was offered in twenty-eight of the thirty-two weeks" from late September 1594 through June 1595 ("Marlowe Reruns," p. 37). To this confluence, she adds closely related scheduling in October 1596 ("The French Doctor," Doctor Faustus) and the revivals of friar/doctor plays in 1602-3, now including a "Friar Bacon."

Gurr tentatively assigns "The French Doctor" a date of 1593 (p. 210); commenting on its age, he observes that the "relatively small initial takings also suggest that it was not new" (p. 210, n.26).

Wiggins, Catalogue #833, questions the genre of the play; he points out that, based on doctor characters generally, this French doctor "may have been either a comic figure or a poisoner."

For What It's Worth

Folk Tradition

There is a definable pattern in English folk drama for the character of doctor. As Richard F. Hardin explains, folk-play doctors "have a medicine that will bring the dead to life; they brag about their achievements, travels, or high fees; they use an often preposterous medical jargon" (p. 59). Hardin sees this folk character as cultural ancestor of the phenomenon tagged by Philip C. Kolin as "the essentially comic fifth-act physician" in Elizabethan plays (p. 71; Kolin, The Elizabethan Stage Doctor as a Dramatic Convention, 1975). Citing parallels in non-Shakespearean drama, Hardin includes All Fools by George Chapman (1599) in which a doctor named Pock claims that his "pedigree comes 'Out of France'" (p. 66).

Commercial Value

Although an old play in October 1594, “The French Doctor” continued to have significant commercial value.

1. Its receipts for the dozen performances in the 1594-5 season averaged a respectable 26s per show.

2. Its receipts for two shows in the 1595-6 season and two more at the start of the 1596-7 season dropped to an average of 15s, but the very fact that it continued to be staged suggests another category of value: playability. That is, after having been retired in September 1595, it could be revived months later (July 1596) for a single show.

3. Its commercial value was further demonstrated in the autumn of 1596. The season at the Rose started late: October 27 (compared to June 15 in 1594 and August 25 in 1595). Further, the Admiral’s men did not introduce a “ne” play for more than a month (“Vortigern,” December 4, also called "Valteger"; comparatively, in June 1594 and August 1595, they had a new play up in about a week). The company therefore was relying on nine plays from its old repertory to begin its season, one of which was “The French Doctor.”

4. Five years later (January 1602), "The French Doctor" was still a valuable enough property for the Admiral's men to buy it from Edward Alleyn, along with another old play (“Crack Me This Nut,” which also had last been on stage in 1596-7) and even older but more recently revived Massacre at Paris (c. November 1601).

Works Cited

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

Hardin, Richard F. "Playhouse Calls: Folk Play Doctors on the Elizabethan Stage." Early Theatre 5.1 (2002), 59-76.

Knutson, Roslyn L. The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company, 1594-1613. Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 1991.

— — —. "Marlowe Reruns." In Marlowe's Empery. Ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan. Cranbury, NJ: Univeristy of Delaware Press, 2002. 25-42.

Site created and maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; updated 17 June 2019.