III. "Else-Where"

From the characterization of Gertred, who behaves much like her counterpart in the play's sources, one might infer that Ql preceded the later printings of Hamlet—the assumption being that the more closely a particular version adheres to its sources, the earlier the text is apt to be.³⁷ In any event, focusing on Gertred as a step toward unraveling the relationship between the various Hamlet texts suggests that wherever else besides "the Cittie of London" and the "Vniuersities" Ql may have been played, it especially lent itself to performance where ideas about the sacred nature of celibacy and the faithful widow lingered longest. Indisputably, on its surface Ql holds the queen to a very narrow standard of chastity. Although in all three texts the Dutchesse/Player Queen brands a remarrying widow a murderer—"A second time, I kill my Husband [Ql : Lord that's] dead, / When second Husband kisses me in Bed" (Q2/F1TLN 2052-53; Q1CLN 1327-28)—the Dutchesse's explicit death wish is unique to Ql: "When death takes you, let life from me depart" (CLN 1321).³⁸ Subject to so demanding a code, Gertred's guilt does not lie in when she remarried or whom she remarried; that she remarried at all condemns her. By attempting to reform the lusty widow and prodigal mother, by presenting the audience with a good woman gone wrong—"her sex is weake" (Q1CLN 1566)— then showing her the error of remarriage and aligning her with her son, Ql depicts a queen well suited to audiences dedicated to the old religion and its values, one who could be considered a "Catholic" Gertred.

Keith Wrightson, discussing the general survival of Catholic beliefs and practices in the 1580s and '90s, quotes a Puritan estimate that three out of four English subjects were '"wedded to their old superstition still."'³⁹ However exaggerated, given Puritan animosities, that ratio may offer some leads to the locations of "elsewhere," both before and after the publication of Ql. Whether one favored formal Catholic doctrine or simply craved familiar rites and rituals, nostalgia for the past lent itself to antireform sentiments prepetuating the esteem in which the ideal of celibate widowhood was held. Such sentiments, though shared by people of many shades of Christian belief, were inevitably Catholic in origin, and most likely to appeal to Catholics. Between 1594 and 1603 the Lord Chamberlain's Men are known to have traveled no further north than Cambridge;⁴⁰ thus a conservative surmise as to Ql's possible prepublication enactment sites would be confined to those counties in the south and midlands most closely tied to their Catholic past. According to Roland G. Usher, Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester, Cornwall, and southern Wales (Monmouth and Glamorgan) were all heavily Catholic (thirty to forty percent) in 1603.⁴¹

Candidates for "else-where" would include the first four counties, all accessible from London and Oxford, where the the title page claims Q1 had been performed.⁴² Within those counties, the towns of Gloucester, Worcester, and Leominster had hosted theatrical performances by the Queen's Men between 1583 and 1603. In the last decade of the century, Worcester's Men had also played at Gloucester and Leominster.⁴³ Could not the Chamberlain's Men have played at one or more of these towns as well?

Also, not without interest is Ql's postpublication history. If the travels of the play were to a marked extent dictated by its affinity with audiences favoring traditional ways of thinking, it would appear likely that Ql was played in the north, the area of England historically most reluctant to abandon Catholicism. Durham and York were important sites of the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace; a generation later the peasantry supported the rising of the northern earls—Thomas Percy, seventh earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth earl of Westmorland—in another attempt to restore Catholicism. During Elizabeth's reign York could claim more of its sons ordained abroad as priests than any other county; Lancashire, the runner-up, harbored the most recusants.⁴⁴ The Corpus Christi play lingered until the 1580s in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,⁴⁵ until the end of the century in the Lake District and Lancashire,⁴⁶ and until 1605 in Kendal, Westmorland.⁴⁷ Westmorland and Cumberland border one of the ecclesiastical divisions of Lancashire, the deanery of Furness; in these counties, as in nearby Durham and Northumberland, many remained if not strongly recusant—a choice that by 1581 nominally entailed impoverishment and imprisonment—minimally Anglican, privately Catholic.⁴⁸

Of course, whether Ql was acted in the north and, if so, by whom are matters for speculation.⁴⁹ Even so, it may be helpful to explore one possibility regarding Ql's provenance by juxtaposing our knowledge of attitudes toward widows against some facts and theories concerning provincial performance. Most companies traveled at least during the summers; outbreaks of plague between 1603 and 1609 compelled the King's Men to travel in 1606, perhaps for as long as half the year. In August of 1606 and again in 1619, the King's Men toured as far afield as Leicester. Between 1609 and 1612 three records attest to their touring further north and west to Shrewsbury, and twice they continued north to Stafford. In 1615 they played at Nottingham and Congleton.⁵⁰ While we might expect that, as Shakespeare's company grew measurably more successful, they would have been spared arduous tours to remote locations, the reverse is true. Or rather, as Alan Somerset proposes, touring may have been something of a vacation, and not just a summer one, that paid for itself, as well as a service to the realm which King James expected of "his" players and which the provinces keenly anticipated.⁵¹ REED editor Sally-Beth MacLean concurs: "The appearance, for the first time, of Congleton in Cheshire on the 1615 circuit underlines the addition of a northwestern route through Shrewsbury, which figures frequently in the schedule of the King's Men from 1603 onwards.'"⁵² Regrettably, the titles of the plays the King's Men Performed in the north have not survived, and we have no record of any northern productions of Hamlet. Yet its performance is not precluded: records are scant, and frequently either the names of the acting companies or the names of the plays performed or both are missing from the municipalities' records.⁵³ If "strowling" was not necessarily a risky, unpleasant experience that obliged players "to trauel vpon the hard hoofe from village to village for chees & buttermilke,"⁵⁴ the King's Men themselves might have taken Ql Hamlet north.

What northern audiences and authorities, by no means monolithic, would have expected of strollers and whether the First Quarto would have succeeded remain subjects for inquiry, but we can be reasonably assured that for nonconformists who remained attached to Catholicism, as opposed to nonconformists of the Puritan persuasion, playgoing was no sin;⁵⁵ northern venues inhospitable to Puritan reform persisted in welcoming players well into the 1630s.⁵⁶ Thanks to data from the Records of Early English Drama project, we are aware of players traveling north to Carlisle in Cumberland—some thirty-four troupes between 1602 and 1639—and performing at York, Kendal, Durham, Newcastle, and numerous towns and manors in Lancashire, tours in part made possible by the patronage of various noble households (Lowther, Curwen, Howard, and Clifford) that supplemented the payments of town officials.⁵⁷ For example, unidentified plays were performed for Richard Shuttleworth in Lancashire's Gawthorpe Hall by Lord Derby's Men in 1609; by Lord Dudley's Men and Lord Mounteagle's Men in 1610, 1612, and 1616; by Lord Stafford's Men (twice), Derby's, and an unknown company in 1617; and by Queen Anne's Men and an unknown company in 1618. The Clifford-family accounts from 1607 to 1639 show the fourth earl of Cumberland and his son Henry, Lord Clifford, being visited by these and other troops of strolling players at their three family seats in the north: Londes-borough, slightly east of York; Skipton Castle, not far from Gawthorpe Hall; and Hazelwood Castle, midway between Londesborough and Gawthorpe. Aside from providing room and board, the earl paid £1-£2 to hear a play, and his guests may have added tips; even when he declined performances, he tipped 10s-13s.⁵⁸ Gratuities such as these produced further impetus for northern touring. It is true that we have no record of the King's Men going north. But after publication, once in the public domain, Ql need not have been performed by the King's Men. Rather, any number of companies that customarily toured the north could have played it. Furthermore, the publication of Q2 would not have abrogated the usefulness of Ql to the King's Men or to any other acting company. The First Quarto is still praised for its theatrical energy despite its pedestrian and often mangled verse; if nothing else, this version of Hamlet is fast-moving.

Janis Lull, who accepts the memorial-reconstruction theory, finds that Ql's reporter/author(s), preferring an earlier feudal ethic, were capable of "selectively forgetting parts of Hamlet that allude to Protestant ideology."⁵⁹ Catholic references common to all the Hamlet texts are less problematic in Ql, which seems theologically more of a piece than the other versions of the play. Most Ql spectators are less bound to feel a Reformation sensibility at war with so important an element as the purgatorial Catholic Ghost, in part because the depiction of the reformed Gertred that an audience most immediately apprehends, the Gertred of the text's surface, is one more aspect of a version of Hamlet endorsing an older order of things: the soundness of Pauline doctrine, the wisdom of widowed celibacy. Admittedly, some Catholic playgoers might have preferred a more ambiguous queen on whom they could project the utmost moral deformity, that is, a Gertrard/ Gertrude; moreover, to entertain a hypothesis privileging the representation of a single character in order to solve the mystery of an unsupported claim, "acted … else-where," requires an act of faith. Nevertheless, if only for lack of sufficient external evidence about Ql, textual critics may find these conjectures useful, Gertred being a focal point of Hamlet's psychic life, and the title-page claim having yet to be disproved. Alan Somerset submits that an important benefit of traveling may have been to free the actors from taking chances on the success of new plays. Instead the actors needed to perform only those plays sure to please.⁶⁰ To go a step further, I submit that just as actors may have been typecast, or roles created to suit the talents of specific actors, so playtexts may have been chosen or adapted to "fit" specific audiences. Of course, reforming the lusty widow may not have been a deliberate ploy but rather the inadvertent result of cuts meant to achieve dramatic economy. In such a case we might conclude that if a Catholic audience liked Ql, the (un)reformed Gertred is a prominent part of why they liked it. On the other hand, in light of Gertred's construction and emplotment, together with the selective exercise of forgetting Protestant concepts, it is worth considering the hypothesis that the ideology of Ql Hamlet was strategically finetuned for performance before a particular audience in particular regions.

Notes

My thanks to Professors Alan Dessen, Guy Hamel, and especially Paul Werstine for their responses to an early draft of this paper, written for the session chaired by Kathleen Irace, "Revision and Adaptation in Shakespeare's Two- and Three-Text Plays," at the 1994 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Albuquerque, New Mexico. I am also indebted to my friends Professors Thomas Moisan and Susan Baker for reading my revisions and adaptations.

¹ See, for example, Kathleen Irace, "Origins and Agents Ql Hamlet" in The Hamlet First Published (Ql, 1603): Origins, Form, Intertextualities, Thomas Clayton, ed. (Netwark: U of Delaware P; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 90-122, esp. 106. Steven Urkowitz finds a more harmonious and trusting relationship between the queen and Hamlet in Ql than in the alternative texts; see '"Well-sayd olde Mole': Burying Three Hamlets in Modern Editions" in Shakespeare Study Today: The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Lectures, Georgianna Ziegler, ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 37-70, esp. 48-49.

² See, for example, Giorgio Melchiori, "Hamlet: The Acting Version and the Wiser Sort" in Clayton, ed., 195-210, esp. 201; Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and William Montgomery, "Hamlet" in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 396-423, esp. 398; and Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1991), 136.

³ Philip Edwards, editor of the New Cambridge Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), describes Ql as a "bad" quarto: "a corrupt, unauthorised version of an abridged version of Shakespeare's play" (9) and claims, more specifically, that Ql "inherits the cuts and changes made in the early playhouse transcript, and demonstrates that the transcript was in progress towards the Globe's official promptbook. … [Perhaps] it reflects the shortened acting version of Shakespeare's own theatre" (30). In his "Narratives About Printed Shakespearean Texts: 'Foul Papers' and 'Bad' Quartos" (Shakespeare Quarterly 41 [1990]: 65-86), Paul Werstine argues against just such a practice of textual constructivism by which scholars mistake dubious hypotheses of origin for historical fact.

⁴ G. R. Hibbard mentions all but the omission of the rebellious mob in the introduction to his Oxford edition of Hamlet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1-130, esp. 67-74.

⁵ The fact that the Privy Council reprimanded Cambridge in 1593 for the ineffectuality of its efforts to suppress dramatic performances within five miles of the university bespeaks play production despite the Council's decree (Alan H. Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, 2 vols. [Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 1989], 1:348). Moreover, Hibbard's persuasive explanation of the unsuitability of the names Polonius and Reynaldo for performance at Oxford goes some way toward affirming the title-page performance claims for that university as well (74-75). But see Ioppolo's suggestion to the contrary (135-36). Certainly a play about students on leave from their university who intrigue to catch a murderer before he catches them could hardly fail to appeal to a student audience.

⁶ See Bryan Loughrey, "Ql in Recent Performance: An Interview" in Clayton, ed., 123-36; and Michael Muller, "Director's Notes [on Hamlet, Quarto 1]" in the program for the Shakespeare in the Park 1992 production, Fort Worth, Texas, 12.

⁷ Vivien Brodsky claims that widows comprised a little over a third of brides marrying by license as opposed to banns in late Elizabethan London (fewer widows may have married by banns); see "Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations" in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Keith Wrightson, eds. (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 122-54, esp. 128. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, studying marriage records for both sexes, determined that about thirty percent of mid-sixteenth-century English marriages were remarriages; see The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), 258. Richard L. Greaves, surveying Elizabethan society overall, estimates death in the first fifteen years of marriage at thirty percent and remarriages of bride or groom at twenty-five percent; see Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981), 191.

⁸ For the most recent study of this extensive body of material, see the first three chapters of Elizabeth Thompson Oakes's 1990 Vanderbilt University dissertation, "Heiress, Beggar, Saint, or Strumpet: The Widow in Society and on the Stage in Early Modern England." Three earlier dissertations treat widowlore: Linda Bensel-Meyers, "A 'Figure Cut in Alabaster': The Paradoxical Widow of Renaissance Drama" (University of Oregon, 1985); Roger Alfred MacDonald, "The Widow: A Recurring Figure in Jacobean and Caroline Comedy" (University of New Brunswick, Canada, 1978); and Katherine Harriett James, "The Widow in Jacobean Drama" (University of Tennessee, 1973). Also see Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethans at Home (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1957), 498-516; Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1956), 121-32 and 257-58; and Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman: A Panorama of English Womanhood, 1540 to 1640 (London, New York, and Houston: Elsevier Press, 1952), passim.

⁹ This classification scheme is best known from Measure for Measure (1604), but Morris Palmer Tilley cites its appearance both earlier and later in Peele's Old Wives' Tale (c. 1590) and Rowley's All's Lost by Lust (1633); see A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1950), 404, M26.

¹⁰ Quotations of Shakespeare plays other than Hamlet follow The Riverside Shakespeare, e d. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Quotations of Hamlet follow The Three-Text Hamlet: Parallel Texts of the First and Second Quartos and First Folio, ed. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman (New York: AMS Press, 1991).

¹¹The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 164 (11. 2077-80). Upon My Husband's Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe, Louise Mirrer, ed. (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992), demonstrates the continuity of attitudes towards widows between the medieval and early modern periods.

¹² Fulvius Androtius, S.J., The Widdowes Glasse, trans. I.W.P. (London, 1621), esp. 290. Androtius's tract is appended to a tract by Leonard Lessius, S.J., The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons, reprinted in vol. 214 of English Recusant Literature 1558-1640, ed. D. M. Rogers (Ilkley and Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1974).

¹³ The ceremony of the mantle and the ring is described by Androtius on pages 341-48. According to Roger Alfred MacDonald, the ceremony is also alluded to in an anonymous 1525 play titled The Twelve Merry Jests of the Widow Edyth (65).

Androtius finds parallel practices honoring chaste widows in pagan Rome:

… when a widdow died, her head was adorned with a Crowne of Continency, and to [i.e., so] caryed in solemne triumph to her graue.

The said Romans did also attribute another honour to the Continency of Widdowhood, which was, That on the wedding day, there were no women suffered to come neere, much lesse to touch the Bride, but only such as had beene the wiues of one husband, to wit, such as had beene but once marryed; comanding all that had beene twice marryed (yea though they were Widdowes) to keep aloofe of, as prophane, impure, and fortelling of an euill fortune to the happynes of marriage.

(322-23)

¹⁴ In The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons, Lessius, expounding Paul's dictum that to marry is to have "trouble in the flesh" (1 Corinthians 7:28), depicts marriage as an inevitable disaster for both sexes (94-130).

¹⁵Tasso's Dialogues: A Selection, with the "Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue, " trans. Carnes Lord and Dain A. Trafton (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982), 81. Also see Margaret Lael Mikesell's "Catholic and Protestant Widows in The Duchess of Malfl," Renaissance and Reformation 19 (1983): 265-79, esp. 266-67.

¹⁶Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640, ed. Joan Larsen Klein (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1992), xi. Klein notes that this much-reprinted treatise was also translated into French, German, Italian, and Castilian.

¹⁷ Quoted in Klein, ed., 97-122, esp. 120 and 121, n. 110.

¹⁸ Androtius, 336-37.

¹⁹ From "The Epistle Dedicatory" to The Treasure of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons by the translator, I.W.P.

²⁰ Androtius, 332.

²¹The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. F. L. Lucas, 4 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 4:38-39.

²²The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), 6:404.

²³ "Letter to Lady Ralegh, the night before he expected to be put to death, 1603" in Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Writings, ed. Gerald Hammond (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1984), 276.

²⁴Sir Walter Raleigh's Instructions to His Son and to Posterity, 2d ed. (London, 1632); rpt. in Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne, ed. Louis B. Wright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1962), 22.

²⁵ Quoted in Mikesell, 268.

²⁶ G. B. Shand makes this point in an unpublished paper he kindly shared with me, "Queen of the First Quarto," delivered at the 1991 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Vancouver, Canada.

²⁷ I conflate Q2 and F thus (Q2/F1) when they duplicate each other aside from differences in line arrangement, capitalization, or spelling.

²⁸ Steven Urkowitz, "Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean Characters in the Earliest Texts" in Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle, eds. (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1988), 292-304, esp. 300.

²⁹ Quoted in Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982), 196.

³⁰ Hull, 196.

³¹ Recall that for Carolyn G. Heilbrun, writing in the 1950s, Gertrude is "strongminded, intelligent, succinct, and, apart from this passion [her refusal to abjure sexuality], sensible" ("The Character of Hamlet's Mother," SQ 8 [1957]: 201-6; rpt. in Heilbrun's Hamlet's Mother and Other Women [New York: Columbia UP, 1990], 9-17). Leslie A. Fiedler categorizes Gertrude as one of Shakespeare's "'antiwomen,' subverters of the role assigned to them by men who seek to naturalize their strangeness to a patriarchal world" (The Stranger in Shakespeare [New York: Stein and Day, 1972], 74); and Lisa Jardine calls Gertrude one of Shakespeare's "strong" women, a congener of Desdemona, Cleopatra, and Webster's Duchess of Malfi (Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare [Sussex: The Harvester Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983], 69).

³² Shand, 12.

³³ If Ql's Hamlet is still in his teens, Gertred's protectiveness toward a son new to adulthood is all the more understandable. In Ql, Yoricke's skull "hath bin here this dozen [not twenty-three] yeare, / … euer since our last king Hamlet / Slew Fortenbrasse in combat" (Q1CLN 1987-89, my emphasis); however, the gravedigger says nothing about his length of service as sexton or the day of Hamlet's birth.

³⁴ The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: U of Wisconsin P, 1969), AAiii.

³⁵ For an early refutation of Gertrude's adultery, see John W. Draper, The Hamlet of Shakespeare's Audience (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1938), 109-26, esp. 112-14.

³⁶ Mullaney, "Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607," SQ 45 (1994): 139-62, esp. 151. In the First Quarto, Hamlet expresses horror that "lust shall dwell within a matrons breast" (Q1CLN 1547), a sentiment that, like its Q2/F1 counterpart, invites Mullaney's reading of an obscene maternal desire thwarting filial mourning.

³⁷ Steven Urkowitz advances this argument ('"Well-sayd olde Mole'" in Ziegler, ed., 48). Recognizing the early quality of Gertred, though not of Ql as a whole, Philip Edwards agrees with George Duthie that Gertred may well be "a recollection of the old play of Hamlet" (25).

³⁸ Juliet actively and Richard II's Duchess of Gloucester passively enact the widow's suicide, a European version of sati.

³⁹ Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1982), 200. He explains that what these traditionalists, particularly the poor, missed most were protective rituals, without which they felt vulnerable and frightened (201). Q2 and F, but not Ql, remind their audiences of such rituals when the Ghost deplores having died "Vnhuzled, disappointed, vnanueld" (Q2/F1TLN 762), i.e., without the Eucharist or the annointing essential to extreme unction. If the average person felt the loss of these rituals—communion in its Roman Catholic form and extreme unction—more than the loss of purgatory, a theological abstraction, it is conceivable that a censor or adapter alert to predictable social irritants may have cut this line from a text apt to be played for an audience dominated by Catholic sympathizers while allowing the Ghost's allusion to his abode, an integral part of the play, to stand. By the same token, could not state- or self-censorship explain the omission of Laertes's insurrection from a text to be played in an area known for its history of Catholic rebellion?

⁴⁰ See "Map 6" in Sally-Beth MacLean's "Tour Routes: 'Provincial Wanderings' or Traditional Circuits?" Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 1-14, esp. 6-7.

⁴¹ See Ronald G. Usher's "Map of the Distribution of Catholic Laymen, 1603" in The Reconstruction of the English Church, 2 vols. (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1910), 1:135; and "Note B—Number of Catholic Laity, 1600," which includes the official report of the Anglican bishops in 1603 on Catholic recusants (157-59). Although Usher's conclusions have been questioned (see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 [New York: Oxford UP, 1976], 96, n. 36), they have not been superseded.

⁴² Although to date REED has found no evidence of the Lord Chamberlain's Men having played in any of these four counties, or, indeed, in any county that Usher estimates as more than fifteen percent Catholic, it should be noted that the REED project is ongoing and that MacLean's maps are part of a progress report rather than a definitive statement.

⁴³ See "Map 4" and "Map 5" in MacLean, "Tour Routes," 6-7.

⁴⁴ Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), 279 and 275. Bossy notes that William Allen's family belonged to the Lancashire gentry and that under Allen's direction the English college at Douai dedicated itself to educating missionary priests (12).

⁴⁵Records of Early English Drama: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ed. J. J. Anderson (Toronto, Buffalo, London: U of Toronto P, 1982), xi.

⁴⁶ Sally-Beth MacLean, "Players on Tour: New Evidence from Records of Early English Drama," The Elizabethan Theatre 10 (1988): 55-72, esp. 62.

⁴⁷Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (Toronto, Buffalo, London: U of Toronto P, 1986), 18-19.

⁴⁸ In The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 Bossy provides a map showing the distribution of Catholics in 1641-42, in which recusant households exceed twenty percent only in the Welsh county of Monmouth and in the two northern counties of Lancashire and Durham (404).

⁴⁹ Such speculations are complicated by the lack of any evidence for specific performances of Ql, despite the general claims of its title page. Additionally, Janette Dillon reminds us that if Ql is the memorial reconstruction of a performance, "it may in fact be further removed from performance than either the Second Quarto or the Folio texts by virtue of being subject to two degrees of intervention (memory and print) rather than one" ("Is There a Performance in this Text?" SQ 45 [1994]: 74-86, esp. 82).

⁵⁰ Chambers, 1:78; and Yoshiko Kawachi, Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), passim. Kawachi charts the travels of the King's Men further: in 1624 they were at Skipton Castle in Craven District; in 1629 and 1631 in York; in 1634 in York and Doncaster; in 1635 in Newcastle; and in 1636 and 1638 again in York. The reference to Congleton is from MacLean, "Tour Routes."

⁵¹ Alan Somerset, '"How Chances it they Travel?': Provincial Touring, Playing Places, and the King's Men," Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 45-60, esp. 60 and 53-54. Somerset corrects Gerald Eades Bentley's contrary statistics in The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 ([Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984], 177-84), finding that players were welcomed over ninety-five percent of the time (50).

⁵² MacLean, "Tour Routes," 10.

⁵³ MacLean, "Players," 66.

⁵⁴ From Thomas Dekker's Lanthorne and Candlelight (1608), quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1923), 1:332.

⁵⁵ The propriety of playgoing for priests has, however, been questioned. In his discussion of the theatergoing habits of London Catholics, Alfred Harbage quotes an interchange between Father Harrison and Father Thomas Leke, the one ordering the other to desist from attending the theater (though not necessarily from seeing plays at more respectable venues such as the court). Leke wrote in his own defense, '"Wee knowe, that most of the principal Catholicks about London doe goe to playes, and all for ye most part of my ghostly children do knowe that I sometimes goe, and are not scandalised.' To which Harrison rejoined: t̀he Catholicks that use to playes are the young of both sexes, and neither matrons, nor graue, or sage man is there seen'" (Shakespeare's Audience [New York and London: Columbia UP, 1941], 72). Harbage doubts the validity of Harrison's observations; in any case, to insist on a distinction between playgoing juniors and stay-at-home seniors would seem less feasible in counties where theater's chief association was religious and where sources of entertainment were few. More likely, then as now, the whole community turned out when the Royal Nonsuch came to town.

⁵⁶ MacLean, "Tour Routes," 10-11.

⁵⁷ MacLean, "Players," 63-64.

⁵⁸ Kawachi, passim; and Lawrence Stone, ed., "Companies of Players entertained by the Earl of Cumber-land and Lord Clifford, 1607-39" in Collections V (Oxford: The University Press for the Malone Society, 1959 [1960]), 17-28, esp. 19-20. Stone reprints the Bolton Abbey manuscripts in which the play's titles are not recorded.

⁵⁹ Lull, "Forgetting Hamlet: The First Quarto and the Folio," in Clayton, ed., 137-50, esp. 149.

⁶⁰ Somerset, 59-60.

Source: "The First Quarto of Hamlet: Reforming Widow Gertred," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 398-413.