Richard the Confessor

Historical Records

Performance Records (Henslowe's Diary)

In a listing headed as follows:

"In the name of god Amen begninge the 27 of

desember 1593 the earle of susex his men

Res at Richard the confeser the 31 of desembʒ 1593 . . .	……….	xxxviij^s
Res at Richard the confeser the 16 of Jenewarye 1593 [i.e., 1594]	……….	xj^s

Theatrical Provenance

Sussex's Men at the Rose Playhouse. The play is not marked "ne". No other records of it are known apart from these two performances by Sussex's Men, one earning a very respectable 38 shillings,the second taking only 11 shillings.

Probable Genre(s)

History (Harbage)
Saints play (Wiggins, Steggle)

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

The life of St. Richard of Chichester (c.1197-1253), a twelfth-century British saint famous, primarily, for continuing to practise his ministry as a bishop even when Henry III had deprived him of all the assets of the bishopric. For a brief online overview of St. Richard's life, see Huddleston: for a more specific discussion of early modern accounts of St Richard, see Steggle.

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

For discussion of the run by Sussex's Men of which these performances formed part, see the LPD entry on The Fair Maid of Italy.

Malone assumed that Henslowe makes an error in recording the play with this apparently nonsensical title. Joseph Ritson disagreed, citing John Wilson's anthology The English Martyrology (1608) to conclude that Malone "does not know that there is such a personage as Richard the Confessor: whereas there are no less than Four Confessors of that name, any of whom might have been, and one certainly was, the hero of the above play." (Ritson, 29).

Collier, seemingly unaware of Ritson's work, makes a different guess:

[p]robably an error, although afterwards repeated, unless it were a play upon a story not historical. It might be in some way connected with the preceding entry of a play called Buckingham, which perhaps was founded upon the rise and fall of that favourite and dupe of Richard III. (31).

Collier's guess that this might have been a play about Richard III was widely influential.

W. C. Hazlitt, also seemingly unaware of Ritson's work, believed the play must have dealt with the reign of King Edward the Confessor:

A play recorded by Henslowe under the doubtless erroneous title of Richard the Confessor, as having been performed by the Earl of Sussex's men, December 31, 1593. It immediately precedes a notice of the presentation of William the Conqueror. (70)

F. G. Fleay (BCED, 2.298) proposed that Richard the Confessor was simply a variant title for another, extant, play: "Query Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany." Fleay offers no supporting evidence.

Greg (2.158)rejects both Fleay's and Hazlitt's interpretations, and adds, "Nothing whatever is known of this play." Harbage, nevertheless, continues to list the genre as "History".

Wiggins and Steggle both independently argue that the eponymous character is St Richard of Chichester, a thirteenth-century bishop-saint. See Wiggins serial number 917.

Steggle adduces numerous other early modern uses of the phrase Richardus Confessor, and its variants, to describe St. Richard. He was one of the relatively few saints whose feast-days survived into the protestant liturgical calendar, something which made him "one of the elite group of prominent Elizabethan saints," and distinguishes him from the three other, comparatively obscure, Saint Richards discussed by Ritson. Steggle discusses the early modern reception of St. Richard of Chichester, and links Richard the Confessor to other extant and lost plays about British saints including Rowley's A Shoemaker, a Gentleman and the anonymous and lost England’s First Happiness, or The Life of St. Austin.

For What It's Worth

Works Cited

Hazlitt William Carew, ed., A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1892). Joseph Ritson, Cursory Criticisms on the Edition of Shakspeare published by Edmond Malone (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1792). Huddleston, Gilbert. "St. Richard de Wyche." The Catholic Encyclopedia 13 (1912) online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13043b.htm.

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