Shakespeare
& The Rose
William Shakespeare’s involvement with The Rose – both as an actor and as a playwright – came at the very beginning of his career, and the earliest surviving record naming any of his plays is to be found in Philip Henslowe’s Diary.
William Shakespeare
oil on canvas, circa 1610
NPG1 © National Portrait Gallery, London
Titus Andronicus
In his Diary, The Rose’s owner Philip Henslowe recorded takings of £3 and 8 shillings on Thursday 24 January 1594 for a performance by Lord Sussex’s Men of a play he called “titus & ondronicus”. There is little doubt that this refers to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, his first tragedy, written in collaboration with the older, more experienced playwright George Peele.
This is the first record by name of any play written by Shakespeare.
A second performance followed the next week, on Tuesday 29 January, where Henslowe took £2 (worth very roughly about £2,000 in today’s money). He received the same amount again when the play was acted for a third time the week after that, on Wednesday 6 February.
That same day Titus was entered into the Stationer’s Register, and was published later that year. Just one copy of this first quarto edition of the play now survives, and was only rediscovered – to general amazement – in the possession of a postal worker in Sweden in 1904. It is now in Washington, D.C., in the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Henry the VI, part one
Another Rose play that Shakespeare worked on was what we now call Henry VI, part one – although his involvement in co-writing it is likely to have come only after its initial performances at the playhouse.
On 3 March 1592, Henslowe recorded takings of £3 and sixteen shillings and eight pence for the first performance of a new play that he called “Harry the vj”, acted by Strange’s Men. Over the following three months, up until the middle of June, they performed it at The Rose a further thirteen or fourteen times, and twice more in January 1593.
The play’s original authors were not recorded, but it is highly likely that Thomas Nashe wrote the first act, and at least one other collaborator wrote the rest. Recent scholarship, using computer-aided statistical linguistic analysis, has identified this co-writer as probably either Christopher Marlowe or Thomas Kyd.
It seems that at some later stage Shakespeare then retro-fitted this Harry the VI to act as a prequel to the pair of plays about King Henry VI that he had already written sometime in 1591-92 for performance elsewhere by Pembroke’s Men, adding one scene in Act 2 and rewriting much of Act 4 to fit in with them.
The play now called Henry VI, part two was first published in 1594 as The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, and Henry VI, part three in 1595 as The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke. The pair were published together for the first time in 1619, under the title The Whole Contention, as part of Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard’s ‘False Folio’ of ten of Shakespeare’s plays.
The Rose play Henslowe had called Harry the VI was only published for the first time in the 1623 ‘First Folio’ edition of William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies – now in its rewritten form with Shakespeare’s additions and alterations, and with no mention of Thomas Nashe or any other co-writer – when all three Henry VI plays were presented together as a trilogy for the first time in print, and first given the titles that we know them by today.