King John and Matilda
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King John and Matilda is a Caroline era stage play, a historical tragedy written by Robert Davenport.[1][2] It was initially published in 1655; the cast list included in the first edition provides valuable information on some of the actors of English Renaissance theatre.
No certain information survives on the play's date of authorship or earliest production. Scholars generally date the play to c. 1628–29, though dates as early as 1624 and as late as 1634 have been proposed. The title page of the first edition states that the play was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre; the actors in the cast list belonged to that company. The troupe staged a revival of Davenport's play c. 1638–39, perhaps a decade after its initial appearance.
The 1655 quarto was published by actor-turned-stationer Andrew Pennycuicke. The volume includes an epistle addressed "To the knowning Reader" that is signed with the initials "R. D." This has been taken by some commentators to indicate that Davenport was still alive when the play was printed. The epistle opens with a notable and sometimes-quoted line, "A good reader helps to make a book; a bad injures it."
The volume also bears Pennycuicke's dedication of the work to Montague Berty, the 2nd Earl of Lindsey.
Sources
Caroline drama tends to show a lack of originality and a dependence on the precedents of earlier plays. This tendency is manifested to an extreme in King John and Matilda. The play bears a strong resemblance to The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington, the second of Anthony Munday's two Robin Hood plays (1598; printed 1601) – to the point that Davenport's work has been called a mere rewrite of Munday's play.
Davenport's character Hubert, the repentant henchman, resembles the character of the same name in Shakespeare's King John.
The cast
For Queen Henrietta's Men, only five cast lists survive. (The others are for The Fair Maid of the West, Hannibal and Scipio, The Renegado, and The Wedding.) The 1655 quarto's cast list yields this information:
| Role | Actor |
|---|---|
| King John | Michael Bowyer |
| Fitzwater | Richard Perkins |
| Old Lord Bruce | Anthony Turner |
| Young Bruce | John Sumner |
| Chester | "M. Jackson" |
| Oxford | Christopher Goad |
| Leister | John Young |
| Hubert | Hugh Clark |
| Pandulph | William Allen |
| Brand | William Shearlock |
The cast list contains three peculiarities. It includes three female characters of the play, Matilda, Queen Isabel, and the Lady Abbess, but does not identify the actors who filled the roles. This might be regarded as doubly curious, since Pennycuicke had been a boy actor taking female roles in the final phase of English Renaissance drama, before the London theatres were closed in 1642 at the start of the English Civil War. By his own claim, Pennycuicke was the last performer to fill the role of Matilda, which must have been in the 1638–39 revival.
The second peculiarity is that the cast list offers praise for two, but only two, of the actors. It states that Perkins's "action gave Grace to the Play," and that Shearlock "performed excellently well."
Thirdly, the list includes a mystery man. All the actors are titled "Master" – from "M. Bowyer" to "M. Shirelock." Yet the "Master Jackson" who played Chester is otherwise unknown in the records of the Queen's Men. The company did have a member named Robert Axell, whose name was sometimes rendered "Axall" or "Axen" in the flexible orthography of the seventeenth century. It has been suggested that "Jackson" might be a corruption of "Axen," indicating Robert Axell.[3]
Like other cast lists of the period, this one is not perfect; it neglects the characters Richmond, Lady Bruce, and George Bruce.