Henslowe's receipts averaged £1 13s., amounting to £3 1s. on the first night and £3 10s. on each of the next two, and thereafter fluctuating greatly, from a minimum of 5s. to a maximum of £3 8s. This last was at the production of the one 'new' play of the season, Titus Andronicus, on 24 January. The enterprise was brought to an abrupt termination by a renewed alarm of plague, and a consequent inhibition of plays by the Privy Council on 3 February. Titus Andronicus was played for the third and last time on 6 February, and on the same day the book was entered for copyright purposes in the Stationers' Register. The edition published in the same year professes to give the play as it was played by 'the Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Servants'. I suppose it to have passed, probably in a pre-Shakespearian version, from Pembroke's to Sussex's, when the former were bankrupt in the summer of 1593 (cf. infra), and to have been revised for Sussex's by the hand of Shakespeare. If so, it is a plausible conjecture that certain other plays, which were once Pembroke's and ultimately came to the Chamberlain's men, also passed through the hands of Sussex's. Such were The Taming of A Shrew, The Contention of York and Lancaster, and perhaps the Ur-Hamlet, 1 Henry VI, and Richard III. There is no basis for determining whether any of Shakespeare's work on the York tetralogy was done for Sussex's; but it is worth noting that one of their productions was Buckingham, a title which might fit either Richard III or that early version of Henry VIII, the existence of which, on internal grounds, I suspect. Of Sussex's other plays in this season, one, George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, was published as theirs in 1599; another, Marlowe's Jew of Malta, probably belonged to Henslowe, as it was acted in turn by nearly every company which he financed; and of the rest, God Speed the Plough, Huon of Bordeaux, Richard the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Friar Francis, Abraham and Lot, The Fair Maid of Italy, and King Lud, nothing is known, except for the entry of God Speed the Plough in 1601 and an edifying tale related about 1608 by Thomas Heywood in connexion with an undated performance of Friar Francis by the company at King's Lynn.[1]
At Easter 1594 Henslowe records another very brief season of eight nights between 1 and 9 April, during which the Queen's and Sussex's men played 'together'. This suggests to Dr. Greg that the companies appeared on different nights, but to me rather that they combined their forces, as they seem to have already done at Coventry in 1591. Henslowe's
- ↑ Cf. App. C, No. lvii.
