Hard Shift for Husbands, or Bilbo’s the Best Blade

Samuel Rowley (1623)

Historical Records

29 October 1623:

For the Palsgrave's Players: a new Comedy, called, Hardshifte for Husbands, or Bilboes the best blade, Written by Samuel Rowley.

(Adams, Herbert, 26; Bentley, 5.1011).

A New Com: Hardshipe for Husbands, or Bilboes the best blade, containing 13 sheets, written by Sam. Rowley alld Oct 29, 1623

(Bawcutt, 146, using the Burn transcript of the Office-Book).

Theatrical Provenance

For the Palsgrave's Company.

Probable Genre(s)

Comedy (per Herbert's record); marriage comedy

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Anon., The Damosel's Hard Shift for a Husband (1675).

References to the Play

None known

Critical Commentary

This play is only known from the entry in Herbert's lost Office-Book, variously transcribed. The first part of its title has been given in at least three substantively different forms in different sources. Earlier sources tend to modernize to "Hard Shift for Husbands"; Bentley consistently refers to it as "Hardshifte for Husbands"; and Bawcutt prefers "Hardshipe [i.e. Hardship] for Husbands", the variant form in which the title is given by the nineteenth-century scholar Jacob Henry Burn in his recently rediscovered notes from the Office-Book (Bawcutt, 146). Burn's account also adds the descriptive phrase "containing 13 sheets", omitted by other sources.

This was one of at least fourteen new plays licensed by Herbert between July 1623 and November 1624 for the Palsgrave’s Company, whose writers included Samuel Rowley, Dekker, Ford, Gunnell, and Drew. This concentration of new writing for one company, unparalleled in Herbert's record, is plausibly linked by Bentley to the Fortune Theatre fire of 1621, which may have destroyed the company’s existing stock of playbooks. It would be a repertory worthy of study in its own right, but unfortunately thirteen of the fourteen are lost.

In particular, two of the other plays in this group were written by Samuel Rowley: Richard III, or the English Profit (July 1623) and A Match or No Match (April 1624). In her Oxford DNB article on Samuel Rowley, Susan Cerasano notes that these are dates of licensing, and that in all three cases "their dates of composition are unclear".

For What It's Worth

"Hard shift for husbands" wouldn't mean "Hard work inflicted on husbands". An EEBO-TCP search collects twenty examples of the phrase "hard shift for", and in almost all of them it is clear that the "for" means "in order to gain" rather than "inflicted upon". The same applies to the results of an EEBO-TCP search for the phrase "hardship for" - it tends to mean "hardship for the sake of", rather than "hardship inflicted upon".

Thus, whatever reading one makes of the original words, this seems to have been a marriage comedy. It featured at least two witty women, who had to adopt desperate measures to obtain husbands.

The Damosel's Hard Shift for a Husband (1675) is a broadside ballad whose existence is recorded in Bruce Olsen's Broadside Ballad Index, http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/ballads/17thc_index.html. It is not currently accessible in any online form. It sounds like a possible intertext for the play under discussion, and would repay further investigation. Furthermore, its existence might lean one towards retaining "Hard shift" or "Hardshift", rather than "Hardship", as more likely to be the correct title of this lost play.

Bilbo blades are swords made in Bilbao, Spain, prized in the seventeenth century for their excellence. At the moment, one cannot guess how this phrase relates to the action of the play.

Works Cited

Cerasano, S. P. ‘Rowley, Samuel (d. 1624)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2010 accessed 21 Dec 2010

Site created and maintained by Matthew Steggle, Sheffield Hallam University; updated 21 December 2010.