Palamon and Arcite

Anon. (1594)

Historical Records

Henslowe's Diary

F. 10 (Greg, I.19)

ye 17 of septemb[er] 1594			R[d] at palamon & arsett . . . . . . . . ljs
ye 16 of octob[er] 1594			R[d] at palaman & arset . . . . . . . . . xxvijs

F. 10^v (Greg, I.20)

ye 27 of octob[er] 1594				R[d] at pallaman & harset . . . . . . . . xxxxvijs
ye 9 of novemb[er] 1594				R[d] at palamon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xijs

Theatrical Provenance

Performed by the Admiral's Men as a 'ne' play at the Rose in September 1594, receiving three subsequent performances in October and November.

Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy (?) (Harbage), chivalric romance. (See, "For What It's Worth" below.)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

The source of the play's story was almost certainly The Knight's Tale, the first of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's source, Boccaccio's Teseida, whose heroes are named Palemone and Arcita, seems to have been less well known in England: Speght's 1598 edition of Chaucer's Workes failed to mention the Boccaccio source, as Francis Thynne points out in his Animadversions (p. 34).

References to the Play

(Information welcome.)

Critical Commentary

Richard Edwards's Palamon and Arcite (1566)

Another, earlier (yet also lost) play called Palamon and Arcite was written by Richard Edwards and performed at Oxford before Queen Elizabeth over the course of two evenings, September 2 and 4, 1566. Collier speculated that the Admiral's Men's Palamon and Arcite may have been an "alteration" of this earlier play. (Collier, Henslowe's Diary, p. 41) However, the current critical view no longer favors this hypothesis. According to Gurr: "As a 'ne' play, [the Admiral's Men's] dramatisation of Chaucer's tale is unlikely to have been Richard Edwards's play of that name [...] A play with the same name as another Edwards text, Damon and Pithias [by Chettle], was staged at the Fortune in 1600 [...] It was quite usual for more than one writer to dramatise a famous story" (208; see also King 84).

A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595)

The Admiral's Men's play is occasionally cited in discussions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which also draws on The Knight's Tale and was probably composed some time shortly after 1594. Taylor finds it "likely that both companies were offering the public a Theseus play at about the same time" (119). Thompson, drawing a parallel with the two Troilus plays at the turn of the century, suggests that the Admiral's Men's play might have been "the 'straight' version" of The Knight's Tale "which inspired a slightly burlesqued reply" (30).

For What It's Worth

<Enter any miscellaneous points that may be relevant, but don't fit into the above categories. This is the best place for highly conjectural thoughts.>

Works Cited

Collier, J. Payne, ed. The Diary of Philip Henslowe. London, 1845.

Gurr, Andrew. Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

King, Ros. The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001.

Taylor, Gary. "The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays," William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. 69–144.

Thompson, Ann. Shakespeare’s Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1978.

Thynne, Francis. Animadversions Upon Speght’s First (1598 A.D.) Edition of “Chaucers Workes”. Ed. G.H. Kingsley. London, 1865.

Site created and maintained by Misha Teramura, Harvard University; updated 27 June 2012.