SOURCE: Bergeron, David M. “Patronage of Dramatists: The Case of Thomas Heywood.” English Literary Renaissance 18, no. 2 (spring 1988): 294-304.

[In the following essay, Bergeron contends that in Heywood's time, the support of dramatists through patronage had not yet been replaced by support from theater audiences.]

Werner Gundersheimer, writing on the subject of Renaissance patronage, asks whether Shakespeare's awareness of how the political and social order of European society was reflected in the system of patronage may have “led him to prefer the support of the London crowds to that of a single patronus[.] If so, we may view his career less as a product of, than as a departure from and perhaps a challenge to, the traditional relationships that define patronage in the Renaissance.”¹ I do not think that Shakespeare's dramatic career represents any kind of challenge to the system of Renaissance patronage; instead, I think that the terms had changed through the natural process of the building of permanent theater buildings and the establishment of secure acting companies. After all, the group with which Shakespeare worked was first known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men and then triumphantly in 1603 as the King's Men, servants of the royal household. In many ways, one might argue, this situation reflects precisely the system of patronage well-established in Renaissance societies.

In what follows I want to touch on some of the major groups that served as patrons of English drama and then move to the case of Thomas Heywood in the 1630s, the last full decade of dramatic activity before the theaters were closed in 1642 by an Act of Parliament, led by Puritan forces. One should first acknowledge theatergoing, paying audiences as major patrons of drama—the “London crowds” that Gundersheimer refers to. Numbers vary, depending on the time, but fairly reliable estimates suggest that 25-30,000 Londoners went to the theater in a given week at the peak of theatrical activity. Even allowing for slight exaggeration, we nevertheless know that the crowds had to go regularly in order to keep the several theaters operating. In a sense such audiences freed dramatists and actors from dependence on a single patron. That is certainly true but not the whole story.

With the advent of theater buildings, however, dramatists became beneficiaries of the support of thousands of people; and for several decades that system worked well, making it possible for the first time in English history to be a professional theater person—that is, one who made his living in the theater. What is more difficult to ascertain is how much these audiences influenced what dramatists and acting companies served up to them; that is, how directly did such patronage affect the art produced? Did dramatists try to create taste among such a large group of patrons, or did they often follow the path of least resistance and offer sure-fire dramas destined to please the audience? The answer to both questions is probably “yes.” Paying audiences may be the most obvious source of patronage of drama; but as we move along the list of possible patrons, matters get more complicated.

The court supported drama in various ways, from Elizabeth's royal patent to Leicester's Men in 1574 to James' placing all acting companies under royal patronage in 1603. Such actions by the sovereign offered one of the vital ingredients of patronage: protection. Such protection solidified the position of acting companies against ongoing attacks by Puritans and others. Only a vulnerable kingship under Charles I led to Puritan triumph in Parliament. Glynne Wickham suggests in one of his volumes of Early English Stages that the royal protection of James was the ultimate form of censorship.² Perhaps, but I know of no evidence that truly bears out that assertion. Obviously any system of patronage could lead to the abuse of censorship, but that does not mean that it in fact did. James seems not to have interfered with or censured dramatic productions more than Elizabeth did. It was, after all, the function of the Master of the Revels to keep a wary eye on all dramatic activities.

In addition to protection, the court offered something equally valuable: money. Court performances added handsomely to the coffers of acting companies. The typical payment for a performance at court was £10, at least in the early seventeenth century. Based on records in Chambers' Elizabethan Stage, I calculate that the King's Men between 1603 and 1613 earned slightly over £1277 from the court—that is, nearly the amount of money that it took to rebuild the burned Globe Theatre in 1614.³ The Court not only paid for performances; it also paid the King's Men for not being able to perform in public because of the plague. At least three payments made during the 1603-1613 period helped sustain the company when it could earn no income from public audiences, as in the payment in February 1610 of £30 to John Heminges “for himselfe and the reste of his companie being restrayned from publique playinge W^thin the citie of London in the tyme of infeccon duringe the space of sixe weekes in which tyme they practised pryvately for his ma^tes service” (Chambers, IV, 176). I can think of no more compelling evidence of patronage than such a payment: the Court makes up for lost income. The King's Men had much reason to be grateful that they were servants of the royal household: the Court protected and paid.

The twelve principal trade and craft guilds of London provided dramatists with employment and substantial pay for writing and producing Lord Mayor's Shows, one of the primary forms of civic pageants, designed to honor the new mayor on the occasion of his inauguration. Many other kinds of artists, such as painters, musicians, and even some well-known actors, also benefitted from the patronage of the guilds. Guild sponsorship of drama goes back at least to the fourteenth century and the beginnings of the great Corpus Christi drama and extends unbroken through the seventeenth century. The guilds' financial support of drama is a subject as yet inadequately treated. Because of records from places like York, Chester, and others, we know much about the financial arrangements between guild (patron) and dramatist (artist) in the period from the late fourteenth century through the sixteenth. London guild records offer a rather full account of payments and preparations for civic pageants, starting with the Midsummer Shows of the sixteenth century, eventually the annual Lord Mayor's Show in the middle of that century, and continuing until theater activities ceased in 1642. One could safely argue that patronage by the guilds reached a wider array of artists than did that of the court. In any case, dramatists and actors were not dependent on a paying audience in theater buildings; they benefitted from the largess of the court and the London guilds.

Typically, the dramatist appeared before a committee of the guild and presented his plan for the pageant. If accepted, the dramatist might then be in charge of a wide range of duties, sometimes including seeing that the text of the pageant got printed. On occasion the artist and the guild disagreed about the value of the services rendered. A few examples will suffice. The first Lord Mayor's Show of the Jacobean period was in 1604, the previous year's having been cancelled because of the plague. Although no text survives, details of expenditures from the Haberdashers' Guild accounts exist. Here we learn that Ben Jonson wrote the pageant and received £12 “for his device, and speech for the Children.”⁴ Anthony Munday received £2 “for his paines”—presumably a sketch for the pageant that lost out to Jonson in Jonson's only excursion into Lord Mayor's Shows. From this moment, Jonson moved into court entertainment, principally the masque, and Munday produced several civic pageants, starting with the 1605 Lord Mayor's Show. With the 1609 pageant Munday received payment of £20 (p. 77). But the records also show considerable disagreement between Munday and the Ironmongers Guild over the quality of the pageant, the guild refusing his request for an additional £5 (p. 77).

In the 1613 pageant, The Triumphs of Truth, the most costly of the mayoral shows, Thomas Middleton and Munday both received generous payments. Munday received £149 “for the devyse of the Pageant and other shewes, and for the appareling & fynding of all the personages in the sayd shewes (excepting the Pageant) and also for the Portage and Carryage both by land and by water” (p. 87). And Middleton got £40 “for the ordering overseeing and wryting of the whole Devyse & alsoe for the appareling the personage in the Pageant” (p. 87). In 1617 the Grocers again chose Middleton to write the pageant; but both Munday and Thomas Dekker received payments for their “paines”: Munday £5 and Dekker £4. Even if one lost in the competition, the pay from the guild was attractive. The records of Philip Henslowe show that dramatists received somewhere between £3 to £5 for their plays at the end of the sixteenth century. Thomas Dekker received a total of £8 for Old Fortunatus in 1599. the payments coming in four installments.⁵ Thus in the 1617 pageant Munday and Dekker received as much as many of their counterparts in the regular theater for full-scale plays. If one asks why so many of the major dramatists of the period wrote Lord Mayor's Shows, a ready answer is the attraction of money. The examples cited here could be multiplied many times, but the point remains: the guilds served effectively as patrons of drama, offering lucrative employment to dramatists and others associated with mounting these increasingly complex theatrical spectacles in the streets of London.

The final major group of drama's patrons that I want to single out is a relatively large number of noblemen or wealthy citizens who in various ways supported drama. In the Elizabethan period noblemen served as sponsors of the acting companies: the Earl of Leicester's company, for example, received the first royal patent in 1574. The precise relationship between noble patron and the actors is often difficult to determine, but we do know that protection provided by the noblemen was necessary. As I have pointed out elsewhere, at least fourteen women can be designated as patrons of drama, determined on the basis of dedications of dramatic texts to them.⁶ Shakespeare's fellow actors gathered the play texts for the great Folio edition of 1623; and they chose to dedicate the volume to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery. William was Lord Chamberlain in 1623, and Philip would shortly succeed him. The dedication makes clear their interest in and support of Shakespeare. William Herbert, we may recall, gave Jonson an annual stipend for books; and Jonson dedicated Catiline (1611) to him.

Text dedications provide one of the principal means for understanding patronage of drama by noblemen. Out of roughly 600 dramatic texts printed from Elizabeth's reign to 1642, some 200 contain dedications, the number of such dedications doubling with each successive reign. Dedications single out, for example, the earls of Hertford, Somerset, Dorset, Rutland, Middlesex, Holland, Carnarvan and Peterborough, as well as Pembroke and Montgomery. This partial list reflects the status and support that the dramatists sought.⁷ Even allowing for the sometimes formulaic nature of the dedications and granting that sometimes the dramatist clearly did not know the patron, I find impressive the number of noblemen sought out for recognition or gratitude. In a time of well-established traditions of paying audiences and solid court support, dramatists nevertheless reach out to another group, the nobility, for patronage. Instead of ending such a practice when James put all companies under royal patronage, dramatists increasingly sought out noble patrons, at least on the basis of text dedications. I doubt that the issue was primarily money, although occasionally it was; rather, dramatists probably desired status and legitimacy for their texts and themselves. With increasing numbers of play texts being printed, dramatists sought a status for them as literature. Having a noble dedicatee seems part of that pattern.

Having briefly examined paying audiences, the court, the guilds, and noblemen as patrons of drama, I turn finally to Thomas Heywood, and specifically to his drama of the 1630s. Here we will find evidence of all these groups, especially the guilds and noblemen. Heywood's career in the theater spanned a fifty-year period, from 1590 to 1640; in several ways his career was more diverse than, say, Shakespeare's, as he worked with a wide variety of dramatic forms and with various acting companies. Because some of his plays were performed in the 1630s, he obviously received support from audiences. His play Love's Mistress had court performances, being first performed at court in 1634 to celebrate the king's birthday. Thus Heywood benefitted from these groups of patrons. Although enjoying the monetary rewards of theatergoing audiences, Heywood, like other dramatists, did not overlook other sources of patronage; dramatists thus did not radically depart from systems of patronage seen elsewhere in Renaissance societies.

In the 1630s Heywood wrote seven Lord Mayor's Shows, his only excursion into this form of civic pageantry. Guild records again reveal something about the negotiation between the dramatist and the guild committees. The proposals for the pageants were typically submitted jointly by Heywood and his artificer Gerard Christmas. Payment of £200 for the 1631 show, Londons Ius Honorarium, comes in fact to Christmas with no separate entry for Heywood. Presumably Christmas paid Heywood some portion of this handsome sum. In 1635, Heywood collaborated with John Christmas, Gerard's son, to underbid the team of John Taylor and Robert Norman who had insisted on a payment of £190. But Heywood and Christmas submitted a proposal for the pageant to the Ironmongers with a price tag of £180. So the negotiations went throughout the 1630s. The guilds provided lucrative incomes to dramatists and others involved in staging these pageants. The frustrating problem is that the guild records do not clearly show exactly what Heywood earned. One infers that it was obviously sufficient to keep him eager to have his projects accepted.⁸

If the records do not specify Heywood's income, his pageant texts do nevertheless reveal much about his dealings with the guilds, offering a useful perspective on how one dramatist dealt with his patron. For example, in the 1631 text Heywood praises the guild members for understanding what he proposed. He informs us that he appeared before the Masters, Wardens, and committees of the Haberdashers and made his proposal. In 1633 Heywood negotiated with the Clothworkers. In describing the working arrangement, Heywood commends the committee's “affability and courtesie, especially unto my selfe being at that time to them all a meere stranger, who when I read my (then unperfect) Papers, were as able to judge them, as attentively to heare them” (pp. 64-65). Because the guild had its own reputation to think about, as Heywood notes, they were inclined to be generous in expenditure and concerned about the dramatist's conception of the pageant. Apparently Heywood appeared before his prospective patrons with a sketch or outline (his “unperfect” papers); they heard him out and then decided to employ him for the mayoral pageant. In Heywood's pageant texts one catches a glimpse of the workaday world of a dramatist trying to sell his wares, secure a patron, and survive financially.

In the 1630s Heywood also sought the patronage of citizens and noblemen, although again it is impossible to know the precise form that such patronage may have taken. Six of Heywood's plays contain dedications to patrons. Fair Maid of the West, part 2 (1631), The Iron Age, part 1 (1632), and Heywood's additions to Marlowe's Jew of Malta (1633) have dedications to his friend Thomas Hammond of Gray's Inn. Heywood claims that Fair Maid has passed muster with everyone, including Charles I and his queen Henrietta Maria. He suggests that Hammond is willing to pay for the pleasure of this drama, unlike those whom Juvenal complains about who want to enjoy but do not want to pay.⁹ In a prefatory epistle to the Jew of Malta, Heywood writes of Hammond: “Sir, you have been pleased to grace some of mine owne workes with your curteous patronage; I hope this will not be the worse accepted; … none can clayme more power or priuiledge than your self [over me].”¹⁰ Similar ideas also prevail in The Iron Age. The implication seems fairly clear that Heywood may have received financial support from Hammond.

Heywood dedicates part 2 of The Iron Age to Thomas Mainwaring. Interestingly, Heywood comments on Mainwaring's presumed enjoyment of the play: “I much deceiue myselfe, if I heard you not once commend it, when you saw it Acted; if you persist in the same opinion, when you shall spare some sorted houres to heare it read, in your paynes, I shal hold my selfe much pleased.”¹¹ Unlike the situation of patronage from guilds, this search for support comes after performances and focuses instead on publication of the play text as a book. The dedication of The English Traveller (1633) to Sir Henry Appleton includes recognition of apparently close family ties between the Heywoods and Appletons. Heywood writes: “Neither Sir, neede you thinke it any vnderualuing of your worth, to vndertake the patronage of a Poem in this nature, since the like hath beene done by Roman Laelius, Scipio, Macaenas, and many other mighty Princes and Captaines, Nay, euen by Augustus Caesar himselfe.”¹²

This conscious reference to earlier patterns of patronage puts Heywood squarely in line with well-established systems of patronage: the argument hinges on precedence. This point Heywood pursues in the dedication of Love's Mistresse (1636) to Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord Chamberlain. Heywood begins by noting the favorable reaction that this play has enjoyed at court: “It having pleased Her Most Excellent Majestie to grace this (though unworthy) Poem so often with her Royal presence, I was imboldened the rather (though I dare not commend) yet to commit it to your Noble Patronage” (Heywood, V, 83). Having cited precedents for such patronage, Heywood concludes: “If your Honor shall dayne the acceptance of a playne mans love, an obseruance in this Presentment, as you grace the worke, so you shall much incourage the Author” (p. 84). Sackville, who had received dedications of other literary works from Camden, Davenant, Drayton, and Southwell, certainly represents an ambitious target for patronage. As Lord Chamberlain, Sackville presumably helped to get the play performed in the first place.

The nobleman who seemed to have the most to do with the final decade of Heywood's career was Henry Carey, Earl of Dover. Carey was the grandson of Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain, made Baron of Hunsdon in 1619 and finally Earl of Dover in 1628. By 1641, he became Speaker of the House of Lords. Several writers, including Henry Peacham, dedicated books to Carey; Heywood dedicated Englands Elizabeth (1631) and Pleasant Dialogues and Drammas (1637) to him. The latter includes additional evidence of Heywood's connection to the Earl.

In dedicating Englands Elizabeth to the Earl, Heywood makes special mention of the earl's grandfather, “the most constant Friend and faithful Assistant in all her [Elizabeth's] troubles and dangers.”¹³ Heywood follows this statement with an exposition of the Lord Chamberlain's service. He says of the Earl of Dover: “It hath pleased your Lordship to censure fauourably of some of my weak labours not long since presented before you, which the rather encouraged mee, to make a free tender of this small peece of service” (sigs. A7v-A8). And he closes: “wishing to you and to all your Noble Family, not onely the long fruition of the blessings of this life present; but the eternall possession of the Ioyes future” (sig. A8v). Obviously some kind of knowledge of patron and artist precedes this 1631 publication, for this dedication seems both a statement of gratitude for past support and a plea for future patronage.

That curious collection entitled Pleasant Dialogues and Drammas (1637) contains a dedication to Henry Carey, an anagram on his name, and speeches spoken in his honor on the occasion of dramatic performances—including a masque. These items give ample testimony to Heywood's desire for patronage from the Earl. Heywood describes his collection as he dedicates the text to Carey: “This is a small Cabinent of many and choyse, of which none better than your Noble selfe can judge, some of them [the items] borrowing their luster from your own vertues, vouchsafe therefore (great lord) their perusall, being devoted to your sole patronage, whilst the presenter wishing unto you and all yours, a long fruition of terrestriall graces.”¹⁴ By 1637 Heywood enjoyed a well-established relationship with this patron. One may therefore readily understand the theme of the anagram on Carey's name: “Ever raigne rich … / … in your blest posterity / You shall raigne rich” (p. 264). This serviceable if undistinguished verse nevertheless makes its point: indebtedness to Carey and hope for future patronage.

Heywood also wrote prologues and epilogues to the performances of plays at the Earl of Dover's home in Broadstreet in London. One assumes that these took place sometime in the mid-1630s. Thus Heywood not only dedicates books to his patron; he also offers entertainment for some kind of dramatic performances. The first included in Pleasant Dialogues is a Prologue and Epilogue spoken at a play performed in the Christmas season, perhaps 1635. Hospitality speaks, “a frollick old fellow: A Coller of Brawne in one hand, and a deepe Bowle of Muscadel in the other” (p. 242). He complains about the decline of entertainment; fortunately, the earl's household welcomes all with generous society. Hospitality says: “But harke, a Cock crowd, and I heard a Swan / Ecchoing to him, that here did live a man, / Noble, and of that high and ancient straine, / To call back Hospitality againe” (p. 243). The Swan, Heywood notes, forms part of the earl's heraldry, and the Cock, the countess'. The Epilogue also describes the household as one where “hospitality hath grace.”

Similar themes pervade the Prologue and Epilogue, given at a dramatic performance at the Earl of Dover's London house on Candelmas night in an unspecified year. The speaker refers to the auspicious union of the Earl and Countess, and praises them:

In this blest state both of you, and yours, now stand
As first dispos'd, so strengthened by that hand
Which as it makes, protects; you have begun
To grace the City with your presence: run
That happy course still: you and your lov'd wife
Have to dead hospitality given new life.

(p. 244)

The Epilogue wishes that countless blessings “and the Courts best grace, / Attend the great Lord of this place.” Doubtless Heywood hopes that the Earl's bounty may extend to him, as presumably it already has.

For Henry Carey, Heywood on New Year's Day, probably 1637, prepared a masque, a fragment of which remains. This was Heywood's only attempt at this, another dramatic form. Given the speeches that Heywood had already written for the Earl and the dramatic performances, the preparation of a masque seems a logical extension. The performance took place at the Earl's house at Hunsdon; and the masque itself, we infer, contained the nine Muses. Once more alluding to the heraldry of the Earl and Countess, Heywood makes much of the swan and cock. The speaker says: “Long may your bounty last, and we rejoyce, / To heare both City and the Country voyce / Your hospitality” (p. 246). The figure Truth actually presents the masquers in a speech filled with mythological allusions. This fragmentary masque illustrates another way in which Heywood sought to serve his patron, Henry Carey.

The case of Thomas Heywood in the 1630s makes clear that systems of patronage, familiar in the Renaissance, remained intact; they had not been set aside by a paying theatergoing audience. Rather, here in the last decade before theatrical activity ceased, we find a dramatist reaching out to all the principal groups of patrons for support. Heywood's relationship with Henry Carey, Earl of Dover, intensifies and gives striking evidence of at least this dramatist's desire for noble patronage. Heywood's situation is not unique. Instead of radical departure from systems of patronage, the dramatists represent an expansion of those systems so that even with theaters established and flourishing and with occasional support from the court or guilds, dramatists nevertheless seek and secure the patronage of noblemen, the oldest pattern of patronage.

Notes

1. “Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Stephen Orgel and Guy Lytle (Princeton, N.J., 1981), p. 23. Gundersheimer's essay appears on pp. 3-23.

2. Early English Stages 1300 to 1660 (New York and London, 1963), II, 94. Thomas Middleton's A Game of Chess (1624) shows how one dramatist, writing on topical matters, did not suffer prior censorship. Indeed, this highly controversial play about the proposed Spanish marriage of Prince Charles was licensed by Sir Henry Herbert. Only after several performances and protest from the Spanish Ambassador did James shut down the play. The King's Men under James's patronage successfully performed this play without government censorship; the forbidding of production came only after controversy and political pressure.

3. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), IV, Appendix B, pp. 168ff.

4. A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London 1485-1640, ed. D. J. Gordon and Jean Robertson (Oxford, 1954), p. 63. All quotations of guild records will come from this Malone Society Collections III.

5. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 126-28.

6. “Women as Patrons of English Renaissance Drama,” in Patronage in the Renaissance, pp. 274-90.

7. See Virgil B. Hetzel, “The Dedication of Tudor and Stuart Plays,” Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, 65 (1957), 74-86. Although as I make clear in my study of women patrons, Heltzel's view needs to be modified slightly, his study remains a good place to begin investigation of the topic.

8. For further information see my Introduction in Thomas Heywood's Pageants: A Critical Edition (New York, 1986). Quotations will be from my edition.

9. Heywood quotes Juvenal. See Fair Maid of the West, ed. Robert K. Turner, Jr. (Lincoln, Neb., 1967), p. 93.

10. The Jew of Malta (1633), sig. A3v.

11. The Iron Age (1632), sig. A3v.

12. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. R. H. Shepherd (1874; rpt., New York, 1964), IV, 3.

13. Heywood, Englands Elizabeth (1631), sig. A5v-A6.

14. Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Dramma's, ed. W. Bang, Materialien zur Kunde des älteren Englischen Dramas (Lovain, 1903). All quotations will be from this edition of Heywood's 1637 work.