Clorys and Orgasto

Anon. 1592

Historical Records

Performance Records

Playlists in Philip Henslowe's diary

A single record of performance survives in Henslowe’s accounts for early 1592 (new style):

Fol. 7 (Greg I, 13)

	Rd at clorys & orgasto the 28 of febreary 1591	. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	xviijs

Theatrical Provenance

The sole record of this play is its appearance in the playlists of Lord Strange's men at the Rose playhouse during the first run of theirs recorded at that venue. Philip Henslowe began to list the plays performed at his playhouse (the Rose) on 19 February 1592, heading that list with the name of the company in residence: Strange's men. "Cloris and Ergasto" (the title as modernized by Wiggins, Catalogue, #878) is entered for 28 February and not entered again.

Probable Genre(s)

Harbage guesses that the play was a pastoral; Wiggins. Catalogue, #878 follows suit, adding that the names of the title characters are "standard pastoral names."

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Information welcome.

References to the Play

Information welcome.

Critical Commentary

Manley and MacLean note that this play is one of several "[e]specially vexing" in that the title is "difficult to match to extant sources or stories" (127).

Wiggins, Catalogue, #878 dates this play in 1591 within a range of 1576-92. In its entry, he provides an explanation for dating plays that appear in Henslowe's lists for 1592-3 without the mark of "ne" and for which currently extant documents provide no further clues to the maiden run of the play. He uses the number and pattern of performances of these plays in Henslowe's records as a guide to their stage debut: the fewer performances in Henslowe, the earlier the date of that play's first staging. (Wiggins's fullest explanation of his reasoning is in the entry for "Clorys and Orgasto" (#878).

For this play specifically, Wiggins notes that it is given just one performance; he therefore considers it the most likely play in the company's repertory at this time to have been in production for some time already and thus by February 1592 to be at "the fag end" of a possibly successful run. Even so, he allows that it might be one of those which were experiencing "the last gasp of an ignominiously brief stage life."

Works Cited

Site created and maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; updated 1 November 2018.