Projector Lately Dead

Anon. (1634)

Historical Records

Henry Burton's polemical tract A Divine Tragedy is, essentially, a catalogue of cases where God has visited gruesome punishments upon enemies of puritanism. In particular, Burton offers a long and hostile account of the death of Charles I's Attorney-General William Noye, including an allegation that his death was made into a play:

Being opened after his death, ther was not a drop of bloud found in his body, for he had voided al out before, his false malicious hard heart with inward fretting & vexing was so consumed & shrinked up, that it was like an old rotten leather purse or meere scurfe, the Physicians never seeing the like before, his flesh and kidnies were as black as an hat, his intrails (except his lungs onely) all putred; and his carkas a miserable spectacle, but no stone that could trouble him was found about him: his funerall according to his desire was so private, that there were hardly Gentlemen enough to carry him to his grave, but that some came in by accident. His clients the Players, for whom he had done knight-service, to requite his kindnes, the next Terme following make him the subject of a merry Comedy, stiled; A Projector lately dead; wherein they bring him in his Lawyers robes upon the Stage, and openly dissecting him, find 100. Proclamations in his head, a bundle of old motheaten records in his maw, halfe a barrell of new white sope in his belly, which made him to scoure so much, and yet, say they, he is still very black & foule within. And as if this voiding of all his owne blood, & publike disgrace on the Stage were not sufficient to expiate the wronged Gentlemans bloud & infamy: himselfe in his last will layes a brand on his owne son and heire...

(Burton, A Divine Tragedy, 45-46.)

The play is also mentioned in a contemporary letter to the Virginian aristocrat John Winthrop. In the judgement both of Bentley and of Noy's biographer Jones, this letter is derived from Burton rather than being an independent witness. (See Bentley, 5.1398).

Possible sources and analogues

See For What It's Worth.

Critical Commentary

Bentley suggests that the play might have not have existed, and that the description of it might be wishful thinking by Burton. Harbage, too, reports the possibility this might be a ghost title. Noy's biographer Jones is reluctant to accept this argument, suggesting that it might have been a “minor production” of some sort.

William Noy (1577-1634), lawyer and MP, was Charles I's Attorney-General. He was from a Cornish gentry family, and studied at Exeter College, Oxford before training as a lawyer. Thereafter he established himself both as a legal intellectual, and as a politician, being appointed Attorney-General in 1631. He was in the thick of many of the political controversies of the early 1630s, being particularly associated, in the public mind, with the various new forms of indirect taxation developed by Charles so as to raise money without calling a parliament. Noy was involved in the development of forest fines; in the Ship Money tax; and, in particular, in the widely disliked soap monopoly. (Hart; Jones). Noy died on 9 August 1634, so that the play took place (according to Burton) in Michaelmas Term of that year.

This play was a specimen of anti-projector satire. Projectors are frequent satirical targets in Caroline drama, as in, for instance, Richard Brome's The Court Beggar (1640) in which a central character, driven mad by excessive pursuit of monopolies, appears attired in legal papers with a windmill on his head, and is only cured by the removal of all his patents; or James Shirley's The Triumph of Peace (1634), which contains an antimasque of projectors. This play can be compared to these and other anti-projector plays.

A particularly useful analogue is

•Anon. A Description of the passage of Thomas late Earle of Strafford over the river of Styx, with the conference betwixt him, Charon, and William Noy [S.l. : s.n.] 1641.

This pamphlet dialogue features William Noy as a speaking character. Seven years after his death, he is in hell, talking to the Earl of Strafford, newly arrived there. Noy even features on the woodcut title-page, as illustrated at still, seemingly, wearing the long robes of a lawyer, as he was costumed in the lost play: and even in hell, Noy is still a projector, trying to establish the right to tax all those travelling over the River Styx.

Works Cited

Burton, Henry. A divine tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of Gods judgements upon Sabbath-breakers, and other like libertines, in their unlawfull sports. [Amsterdam: J.F. Stam, 1636].
Butler, Martin. Theatre and Crisis 1632-42. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Hart, James S., Jr. ‘Noy , William (1577–1634)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2009 accessed 10 May 2010
Jones, W. J. ‘“The Great Gamaliel of the law”: Mr Attorney Noye’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 40 (1976–7), 197–226.
Ward, Jenny. ‘Brugis, Thomas (b. in or before 1620, d. in or after 1651)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 10 May 2010

Page maintained by Matthew Steggle. Last edited 3 September 2010.