Richard Crookback
Historical Records
Payments to Playwrights (Henslowe’s Diary)
F. 106v (Greg I.168)
Lent ^ vnto bengemy Johnsone at the a poyntment of E Alleyn } & wm birde the 22 of June 1602 } in earneste of a Boocke called Richard } xli crockbacke & for new adicyons for } Jeronymo the some of }
Henslowe Papers
Greg, Papers (MS. I. 27, Art. 26, p. 49)
Autograph note, Robert Shaa (Shaw) to Philip Henslowe, 8 November 1599:
- mr Henshlowe we haue heard their booke and lyke yt their pryce is eight poundes, wch J pray pay now to mr wilson, according to our promysse, J would haue Come my selfe, but that J ame trobled wth a seytation.
- yors Robt Shaa
[on the back of Shaa's note, also in his hand]
1. Sce Wm Wor; & Ansell & to them ye plowghmen
2. Sce: Richard Q. & Eliza: Catesbie, Louell, Rice ap Tho: Blunt, Banester
3. Sce: Ansell Dauye Denys Hen: Oxf: Courtney Bourchier & Grace to them Rice ap Tho: & his Soldiors
4. Sce: Mitton Ban : his wyfe & children
5. Sce: K Rich : Catesb : Louell. Norf. Northumb : Percye
[6. C. and Q. Eliza. 7. Dauye. C. Daugr (in Memoirs, omitted in Papers). 9. C. Milton.]
Theatrical Provenance
Presumably performed by the Admiral's Men at the Fortune, possibly in late summer 1602, although the lack of evidence makes it impossible to ascertain whether the play was indeed ever completed or performed.
Wiggins argues that though Jonson started writing the play in late June, "its absence from William Playstowe's 4 August acquittance to Philip Henslowe, relating to plays licensed probably in July, suggests that it was not by then complete."
Probable Genre(s)
History (Harbage).
Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues
The history of Richard III had remained very popular throughout the Tudor era, which means Jonson had quite a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic sources he could look at.
As Donaldson (183) usefully summarises, Jonson:
would have been familiar with Shakespeare's Richard III (probably completed by 1593) and the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard the Third, published in 1594 but probably composed a few years earlier [...]. He may also have known the Latin play Ricardus Tertius by Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College, Cambridge, acted c. 1579. He certainly studied with close attention Thomas More's influential but unfinished account of the life of Richard III, as his heavy markings in his personal copy of the 1566 Louvain edition of More's Omnia Latina opera reveal [...]. It was More who had given fullest currency to the traditional portrait of Richard III which Jonson (to judge at least from the title of this lost play) seems to have inherited.
References to the Play
There may be a reference to the play in the memorandum from Shaw to Henslowe quoted above. As Donaldson (183—184) argues, if the memorandum and the note are roughly contemporary, the former "could refer to an earlier play on the subject of Richard III which the Lord Admiral's Men had in their repertoire, which Jonson's play was designed to replace or update. If the memorandum is of a later date, it may conceivably refer to Jonson's own play. The evidence is tantalizingly inconclusive."
On balance, however, the memorandum is more likely to have referred to Robert Wilson's 1599 "Henry Richmond, Part 2", rather than Jonson's lost play: see the entry for Henry Richmond, Part 2.
Anther potential reference to "Richard Crookback" is to be found in a jest-book compiled by the Caroline playwright Robert Chamberlain.
- Sundry mistakes spoken publickly upon the Stage.
- IN the Play of Richard the third; the Duke of Buckingham being betraid by his servant Banister, a Messenger comming hastily into the presence of the King, to bring him word of the Dukes surprizall, Richard asking him what newes he replyed:
- My Liege, the Duke of Banister is tane,
- And Buckingham is come for his reward.
- Chamberlain, A new booke of mistakes (1637), D1v.
What this excerpt clearly indicates is the existence of an otherwise unknown Richard III play in which Banister features as a character (on Banister, see Henry Richmond, Part 2). This could be Jonson's play, although there are also other possible candidates, for instance, Wilson's "Henry Richmond, Part 2", the anonymous and undated "Richard III, or the English Prophet", or even the hypothetical 1 Henry Richmond (see Wiggins, who quotes these lines both in the entry for this play and for "Richard Crookback").
Critical Commentary
Donaldson (183) suggests that the play may have never been completed or performed, possibly because of Jonson's illness in 1602.
Wiggins (entry 1337) argues that Jonson's probably wanted to outshine Shakespeare and wonders "whether he was trying to do it by being like Shakespeare or by doing something distinctly his own", with the latter possibility striking Wiggins as "more plausible at this stage in his career", when he was developing Sejanus His Fall and would be soon start working on Volpone. That "Richard Crookback" must have been significantly different from Shakespeare's Richard III is also made likely in Wiggins's view by the potential commercial logic behind the investment the Admiral's Men were making. It would have been commercially unwise to commission a play that was too similar to one the Lord Chamberlain's Men might easily revive "as spoiler tactic and, at best, split the market".
In addition, Wiggins connects the Admiral's Men's decision not to revive "Henry Richmond" and rather commission a new play focusing on Richard III to the company's "ongoing response to the Lord Chamberlain's Men's development of the history play in the late 1590s, when Shakespeare effectively discontinued the 'tragical histories' of earlier in the decade and substituted a mode of 'comical history' in the Henry IV plays", a tendency that is apparent in the production of the Lord Admiral's men of the last years of the sixteenth century (with such plays as Look about You", Sir John Oldcastle and The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green.
As the emergence of tragicomedy was close in 1602, Wiggins hypothesises that "Richard Crookback" might "have attempted to steer the history play further down the mixed genre route, comical-tragical-historical, with Richard perhaps conceived as a prototype for Volpone", with the result that "Jonsons's Richard could well have turned out more similar to Shakespeare's than he bargained for".
The relationship between Jonson's and Shakespeare's plays may also have been, in Wiggins's interpretation, the cause of the play's exclusion from the 1616 Folio, which looks like an anomaly, insofar as "Richard Crookback" was neither an early play nor a collaborative effort, as were all the other plays he suppressed from the Folio. Could Jonson, wonders Wiggins, "have deemed it a simple failure, perhaps too much like Shakespeare, too little like himself, and so worthier of burial than praise?"
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
Site created and maintained by Domenico Lovascio, University of Genoa; updated 14 April 2017.