French Doctor

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Historical Records

Performance Records (Henslowe's Diary)

F. 10 (Greg, I.19)


ye 18 of octobʒ 1594                  Res at the frenshe docter                xxijs

F. 10v (Greg, I.20)


ye 28 of octobʒ 1594                 Res at the frenshe docter                 xvs


ye 18 of novmbʒ 1594               Res at the frenshe docter                 xxvijs

F. 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

F. 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

F. 12 v (Greg, I.24)


ye 2[3]4 of maye 1595                   Res at the frenshe docter                    xxijs

F. 13 (Greg, I.24)


ye 19 of septmbʒ 1595                  Res at the frenshe doctor                  xvjs

F. 21v (Greg, I.42)


ye 4 of July 1596                                Res at frenshe dacter                        xiiijs

F. 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 to Edward Alleyn for Playbooks

F. 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. See Critical Commentary and For What It's Worth for issues of provenance.

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 his distinguishing "ne" (he 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 when Henslowe was entering performances and payments in his diary (in the case of the Admiral's men, a pre-1590s version of the company is not considered identical to the 1594 version).

Wiggins, Catalogue focuses on Edward Alleyn as the key to the pre-1594 provenance of "The French Doctor" (#833; 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.

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

Collier, seeking an extant play that featured a French doctor, associated The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypol with "The French Doctor" (p. 43, n1).

Fleay, BCED followed 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 suggested further a connection with the German play, The Righteous Judgment of a Girl Graduate, or The Jew of Venice."

Greg II added "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 offered 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, 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 competitor (Repertory, 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, 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 play a date of 1593 (210); commenting on its age, he observes that the "relatively small initial taking also suggest that it was not new" (210, n26).

Wiggins, Catalogue 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" (#833).

For What It's Worth

Scholars agree that "The French Doctor" had a stage history before its introduction to the Rose by the Admiral's men in October 1594, but they do not further comment on its commercial value to the company. They mention its low receipts for the opening several performances in the autumn of 1594 and lengthy run, but not its respectable average of 26s for 1594-5. These receipts fall to an average of 15s for the two performances in the 1595-6 and 1596-7 seasons, but these performances suggest another kind of value: playability despite many months of being retired (the July 4th performance in 1596, and the two performances in the initial weeks of the autumn season of 1596-7). Additionally, the autumn season of 1596-7 is notable for starting late (compared to the seasons of 1594-5 and 1595-6) and for the number of weeks (7) before the Admiral's men brought a new play to the stage. "The French Doctor" was thus in the company at the season's start of the Admiral's most readily staged holdings. Also, more than five years later, "The French Doctor" was a viable enough commercial piece for the Admiral's men to buy it from Edward Alleyn, along with another old play (which had also not been on stage since 1596-7) and even older but more recently revived Massacre at Paris.

Works Cited

Collier, John Payne, ed. The Diary of Philip Henslowe, from 1591 to 1609. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845.

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

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

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

Site created and maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; updated 16 June 2019.