Wise Man of West Chester, The: Difference between revisions

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==Probable Genre(s)==
==Probable Genre(s)==


Magician play; Harbage identifies it as "Pseudo-History," on the assumption that ''Wise Man'' is ''John a Kent and John a Cumber'' (see [[#Critical Commentary|Critical Commentary]]);  
Magician play; Harbage identifies it as "Pseudo-History" on the assumption that ''Wise Man'' is ''John a Kent and John a Cumber'' (see [[#Critical Commentary|Critical Commentary]]);  
[[category:magicians]]
[[category:magicians]]
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<br>

Revision as of 11:55, 3 February 2012

Anon. (1594)


Historical Records

Henslowe's Diary


F.10v (Greg I.20)

ye 2 of desember 1594 ................ ne ..... Rd at the wise man of chester ................ xxxiijs
ye 6 of desember 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wiseman of weschester ................ xxxiiijs


F. 11 (Greg I.21)

ye 29 of desember 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wissman of weschester ................ iijli ijs
ye 16 of Jenewarye 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wiseman of weaschester ................ iijli
ye 23 of Jenewary 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wiseman of wescheaster ................ iijli vjs
ye 4 of febreary 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wysman of weschester ................ iijli iiijs
ye 12 of febreary 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wisman of weschester ................ liijs


F.11v (Greg I.22)

ye 19 of febrey 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wisman of weschester ................ xxxxvjs
ye 28 of febreary 1594 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman of weschester ................ xxxixs
ye 25 of Aprrell 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wissman ................ xxxixs
ye 26 of Aprrell 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisseman of weschester ................ iijli
ye 6 of may 1596 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wiseman ................ xxxxs
ye 15 of may 1596 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wisse man of weschester ................ xxxxiiijs


F.12v (Greg I.24)

ye 26 of maye 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at weschester ................ xxxjs
ye 4 of June 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman of weschester ................ xxijs
ye 11 of June 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wissman of weschester ................ xxxxvijs
ye 26 of aguste 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman of wescheaster ................ xxxixs
ye 9 of septmber 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wise man ................ xxxxiiijs


F.13 (Greg I.25)

ye 29 of septmber 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wiseman ................ xvs
ye 6 of october 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman ................ xvijs
ye 19 of october 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman ................ xvijs
— mr pd— ................ ..... ..... Rd at weschester ................ xxs


F.14 (Greg I.27)

ye 29 of desember 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman of weschester ................ xxijs
................ ..... ..... Rd at the wissman of weschester ................ xviijs


F.14v (Greg I.28)

ye 4 of febreary 1595 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wissman of weschester ................ xxijs


F.15v (Greg I.30)

ye 17 of aprrell 1596 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman of weschester ................ xxxs
ye 30 of aprrell 1596 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wisman ................ xs


F.21v (Greg I.42)

ye 8 of June 1596 ................ ..... ..... Rd at the wisman of weschester ................ xxs
ye 7 of July 1596 ................ ..... ..... Rd at wisman of weschester ................ xvjs


F.27 (Greg I.53)

[July 1597] ..... 8 .................... tt at wismane of weschester ............... 01— 00— 01-00-03


F.27v (Greg I.54)

[July 1597] ..... 12 .................... tt at wismane of weschester ............... 00— 18— 00-01-00
(marginal note: "marten slather went for the company of my lord admeralles men the 18 of July 1597")
[July 1597] ..... 18 .................... tt at wisman ............... 01— 10— 00-00-00


F.93v (Greg I.148)

pd at the apoyntment of the 19 of septmber
1601 for the playe of the wysman of weschester
vnto my sonne E Alleyn the some of ............... xxxxs


Theatrical Provenance

The Wise Man of West Chester was performed at the Rose playhouse by the Admiral's players beginning on 2 December 1594; its initial entry carries Philip Henslowe's enigmatic "ne." Its purchase in 1601 makes it second among the nine playbooks sold by Edward Alleyn to the company in the early years of the Fortune playhouse.

Probable Genre(s)

Magician play; Harbage identifies it as "Pseudo-History" on the assumption that Wise Man is John a Kent and John a Cumber (see Critical Commentary);

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

None known.

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

The presiding critical question about The Wise Man of West Chester is whether its title is merely a variant of the extant John a Kent and John a Cumber by Anthony Munday. If it is, the play is not lost. Scholarly discussion of this question focuses on three issues: play titles, dates, and commerce.

Play Titles

From the time Dulwich College put Henslowe's diary into the hands of scholars, theater historians have tried to match titles in Henslowe's records with extant plays. That was not always the case with Wise Man. Malone, who first saw Henslowe's manuscript, did not identify Wise Man with John a Kent, but he may not have known that a copy of John a Kent existed. He misread Henslowe's title as "the wise men of chester" (Malone, 3.304), and editions of the diary by Collier, Greg, and Foakes make the correction. Collier also did not make the identification in his 1845 edition of the diary. In fact, he noted that Wise Man "was a new play" (Collier, 45). He too may not have known about John a Kent then, but in 1851 he published the first edition of John a Kent, exploring thoroughly its provenance, dramatist, and subject matter without making a connection to Henslowe's Wise Man.

File:WisemanHD.png
Henslowe's diary, f. 10v (Henslowe-Alleyn)

Fleay appears to be the first to specify a link between the two plays in A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642 (1891). He entered The Wise Man of West Chester in his list of anonymous plays, noting the purchase of its script by the Admiral's players on 19 September 1601 (Fleay, 2.303); for further commentary, he referred the reader to the entry for John a Kent and John a Cumber. In that entry, Fleay stated, "I have no doubt that it [John a Kent] is the same as The Wiseman of West Chester produced by the Admiral's men at the Rose 2nd Dec. 1594" (Fleay, 114). He gave no reason for his lack of doubt. Greg thought Fleay was "almost certainly right" in making the identification.
Even so, opinion did not harden into fact. St. Clare Byrne, editor of the Malone Society Reprint of John a Kent and John a Cumber, acknowledged the scholarly interest in linking Munday's play with The Wise Man of West Chester as well as Randal Earl of Chester. She thought the relationship of the plays, through serial revision, was "by no means impossible" but saw "no secure basis for speculation" (x). Ashton was for many years the lone voice arguing for the discrete identity of Wise Man.

Date

At the entry for Munday's play, Fleay gave the date of the manuscript as 1595, emphasizing that the date was not necessarily "the date of production". Greg too pointed out the 1595 date of the manuscript (John a Kent), adding that it could not "be the original" because Wise Man had been in production for some months. He suggested then that the manuscript might be a revision. He apparently wanted to account for the item in inventory, "Kentes woden leage," which logically belonged to The Wise Man of West Chester if it had a character named Kent or from Kent. However, inconveniently, the Munday play in the manuscript extant has no episode in which John a Kent makes use of a wooden leg (Greg, II.172).

Shapiro briefly cooled speculation on the link between the two plays by rereading the date of the manuscript of John a Kent as 1590. This date gladdened the hearts of those intent on a competition among such magician plays c. 1590 as Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, but it necessarily loosened the relationship of the Munday manuscript as in some way current with the debut of The Wise Man of West Chester on the stage at the Rose.

John-a-KentDate.jpg
The date on the manuscript of John a Kent

Ioppolo has re-read the Munday date and decided that it is "1595." Gurr cites Ioppolo on the date. Jackson is primarily interested in John a Kent because the date of the manuscript enables him to argue for a mid- to late-1590s date for Sir Thomas More on the basis of Munday's handwriting and use of feminine endings. He rejects 1590 and 1595 in favor of 1596, a position to which Greg had gravitated. Relatively indifferent to the identity of Wise Man, Jackson considers it "possible ... that the Admiral's Men's play was merely influenced in some way by John a Kent or vice versa" (¶9).


Company Commerce

Accepting the identification of The Wise Man of West Chester as John a Kent and John a Cumber, Gurr defines the personality of the Admiral's players at the Rose in 1594-5 in terms of disguise plays. He argues that an early exemplar of that disguise dramaturgy was Wise Man a.k.a. (for him) John a Kent. Gurr reinforces the identification of the two plays by changing the name of Wise Man to The Wise Men of West Chester, and he indexes it by its revised name (Shakespeare's Opposites, 317; see also Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, 140, 152, and 307).

Gurr relies on the familiar logic that plays of similar subject matter must necessarily be the same or versions of the same play, but he is aided in this by Ioppolo, who rereads the date on the Munday manuscript and reverts to 1595 (101). And he offers a new argument that the book-keeper (or scribe) commonly known as Hand C, whose hand appears in various notations including "prompt-directions" (St. Clare Byrne, vii), "belonged" to the Admiral's company in the sense that he was "a loyal worker for Alleyn through more than a decade" (106, n.27). The inference, clearly, is that Hand C's hand confirms the Admiral's ownership of John a Kent and strengthens the case of Wise Man as the Munday play.

Ashton was for many years the lone voice arguing for the discrete identity of Wise Man. His investment in that independence, however, is colored by his desire to assign John a Kent to the repertory of Shakespeare's company (which he calls "Strange's Company"): "Munday was ... an experienced man of the theater [; and possibly in 1594] he was engaged to write for Strange's Company and … his first effort for them was John a Kent, designed to compete with one of the most popular plays [i.e, Wise Man] being presented by the companies under Henslowe's management" ("Date," 230).

Knutson also argues for the discrete identity of Wise Man. She is primarily resisting the urge among scholars to identify plays with similar subjects or leading characters as the same or as versions of one another. She calls attention to the habit of adult playing companies to duplicate the successful offerings of their competitors with similar offerings of their own. Countering the implicit preference among scholars for a play by Munday (John a Kent) to an anonymous one (Wise Man), she points out that as a discrete play in the repertory of the Admiral's players, Wise Man an exemplar of "journeyman plays of the period [that] were outstanding commercial properties" (9).
Syme, taking Wise Man at face value as a discrete play, refers to it often in his argument that plays not by Marlowe, Peele, or Kyd were the bread-and-butter of commerce at the Rose. He uses the play also to challenge popular scholarly assumptions that the most popular plays in a company's repertory were likely to be published.

For What It's Worth

Greg thought that the existence of "Kentes woden leage" in the inventory taken by Henslowe in March 1598 (Foakes, 320) reinforced the argument that Wise Man was John a Kent masquerading under another title (II.172). He solved the problem of there not being a need for such a wooden leg in the Munday manuscript by suggesting the latter was a revision that edited out the episode with the leg. Other than the assumption that the "wise man" of Wise Man must be in some sense "Kent," there is nothing to link that property with the anonymous play.

Works Cited

Ashton, J. W. "The Date of John A Kent and John A Cumber." Philological Quarterly 8.3 (1929): 225-32.
Collier, John Payne, ed. The Diary of Philip Henslowe, from 1591 to 1609. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845.
Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
— — —, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company 1594-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
Ioppolo, Grace. Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Jackson, MacDonald P. "Deciphering a Date and Determining a Date: Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber and the Original Version of Sir Thomas More." Early Modern Literary Studies 15.3 (2011). EMLS
Knutson, Roslyn L. "Play Identifications: The Wise Man of West Chester and John a Kent and John a Cumber; Longshanks and Edward I." Huntington Library Quarterly 47.1 (1984): 1-11.
Malone, Edmond. The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare. 21 vols. London: R. C. and J. Rivington, 1821.
St. Clare Byrne, Muriel, ed. John a Kent and John a Cumber. Malone Society Reprint, 1923.
Shapiro, I. A. "The Significance of a Date." Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 100-5.
Syme, Holger Schott. "The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594." Shakespeare Quarterly 61.4 (2010): 490-525.



Site created and maintained by Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas at Little Rock; updated 2 February 2012.