Black Joan

Anon. (1598?)

Historical Records

Henslowe Papers

Greg, Papers, 118:

Under Henslowe's title, "The Enventary tacken of all the properties for my Lord Admeralles men, the 10 of Marche 1598" is:

Item, j frame for the heading in Black Jone.

Greg, Papers, 121:

Under Henslowe's title, "A Note of all suche bookes as belong to the Stocke, and such as I have bought since the 3d of March 1598" is:

Blacke Jonne.

Theatrical Provenance

Although "Black Joan" does not appear in lists of performances in Henslowe's Diary, its presence in the inventories confirms acquisition and performance by the Admiral's Company. However, Greg presumed that it had a prior history with Pembroke's players (Greg, II, 186-7). It shares specific features with a set of plays also thought to come to the Admiral's company in July-November 1597 in the wake of the brouhaha over "The Isle of Dogs." Those features include (1) appearing for the first time in Henslowe's records and (2) being listed one after another in the inventory of playbooks. In addition to "Black Joan," those plays are "Hardicanewtes", "Borbonne", "Sturgflaterey", "Friar Spendleton", and "Branhowlle", (Greg, Papers, 121).

Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy (?) (Harbage, 64-5).

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

None known.

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

(See For What It's Worth below for highly speculative criticism of this play).

For What It's Worth

Witchcraft

For reasons which remain unclear, it has been suggested that this was a witchcraft play. H. W. Herrington, for example, posits a “dramatic vogue” for witchcraft plays in the late 1590s (478), and, after discussing Mother Redcap, writes:

Earlier in the same year [1597] Henslowe notes a performance of "The Witch of Islington." By the next year had been written "Black Joan." The former was either an out-and-out witch play, or else such a play with political bearings. The latter, in all probability, was a witch play also. If we may judge from the titles and the growing realism of dramatic treatment, they were of a kind far closer to actual life than those hitherto considered. (478)

Purkiss also suggests a mini-vogue for witch plays at this time, and speculates that the play may have influenced Shakespeare's Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI (197 n.28).

However, in the second reference to the play ("Blacke Jonne") the spelling would seem to indicate "John" rather than "Joan". This might be said to undermine the suggestion that the entries refer to a witchcraft play; although witches were not exclusively female, of course.

It is also unclear why "Black Joan" (if indeed the title is "Joan" and not "John") should refer to a witch. There is no OED evidence to support an association between "black, adj." and "witchcraft"; the earliest example of "black magic" (from the French, magie noire) in the OED comes from 1871; Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) has a definition of "Goetie" as "the black Art; divelish Magick or Witchcraft" which it cites from Thomas Blount's Glossographia or a Dictionary, but this is from 1656. "Black" is used to connote criminality in the case of the eponymous highwayman of the lost Black Dog of Newgate, Parts 1 and 2 (1602, 1603); to connote ghostliness (or criminality again, if the Robin Hood connection is accepted) in the lost Black Bateman of the North, Parts 1 and 2 (1598); and possibly to connote disaster of some kind in the lost The Black Wedding (1653). In none of these cases does it suggest an association with witchcraft (though it just possibly may in the lost The Black Lady of 1622).

'j frame for the heading'

With regards to the 'frame for the heading', G. B. Harrison suggests that this refers to 'a piece of stage machinery to produce the illusion of a beheading' (103). This would not be for the execution of a witch, if the play is indeed a witchcraft play: witches were hanged or, if the play is a historical one set before the witchcraft acts of 1542 and 1563, burnt.

In the context of stagecraft, Fiona Martin discusses the possible performance of the beheading in this play:

[O]nstage decapitations appear to have been a rare occurrence during the early modern period; Owens draws attention to the possibility that there may have been onstage beheadings that we do not know about, because the plays have been lost (139), while it is also possible that beheadings were performed yet not specified in the stage directions. Such a possibility is suggested by Henslowe's diary, for example (Owens 139): in an inventory of properties dated 10 March 1598, one of the items listed is “j frame for the heading in Black Jone” (Rutter 137), a play no longer extant. This entry appears to confirm the possibility that a particular apparatus for the staging of beheadings did exist at that time, and that the action presumably took place onstage; unfortunately, the diary affords no further details of such equipment. (Martin 65)

Another interpretation of the "heading" might be as "pillory" or "stocks", an alternative form of "frame" which could easily be presented on stage and which could retain the association with a "transgressive woman" character-type.

Alternatively, "heading" could literally refer to a heading: a "title board" of the type discussed by Tiffany Stern in "Watching as Reading".

Works Cited

Harrison, G. B. Introducing Shakespeare (3rd ed.). London: Pelican, 1966. Print.

Herrington, H. W. “Witchcraft and Magic in the Elizabethan Drama”. The Journal of American Folklore 32.126 (1919): 447–85. Print. Web.

Martin, Fiona. “‘Morbid Exhilarations’: Dying Words in Early Modern English Drama.” PhD dissertation. University of Waikato, New Zealand. 2010. Print. Web

Owens, Margaret E. Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005. Print.

Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. Milton Park: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Stern, Tiffany. "Watching as Reading: The Audience and Written Text in the Early Modern Playhouse." How To Do Things With Shakespeare. ed. Laurie Maguire. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 136-59. Print.

Site created and maintained by Simon Davies, University of Sussex, 13 May 2011; updated David McInnis 30 May 2011.