Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo

      “All write Playes”

      Walter Mountfort, sick and impoverished, faced ruin. Following several years in Persia as a clerk for the East India Company, Mountfort had endured a perilous yearlong voyage back to London in April 1633.¹ A few days after his return, workers unlading the cargo for which he was responsible had opened two containers meant to carry bales of expensive raw silk, and out spilled only rocks and dirt. Blame quickly fell upon the clerk. The Company secured warrants, searched houses, cross-examined witnesses, threatened to involve Star Chamber, and withheld wages—desperately needed wages. Mountfort first cast blame on corrupt fellow clerks. He then maintained that he had purchased the bales and resold them, but the court doubted him. It did not help that a shadow had long lain across Mountfort: since he began working for the Company in 1615 he frequently attracted charges of fraud, embezzlement, and, on one occasion, plotting to murder a rival clerk in a bar brawl. In June he begged for back wages to feed his family. He fell ill, and his wife had to appear before the court in his place. Prospects, for Mountfort, were bleak.

      It was during this trial that Mountfort found the strength to stop by one of his old haunts: the Red Bull playhouse. There he delivered to the Prince Charles’s Men a manuscript with ink fading from exposure to salty ocean air and runny from sea spray, and margins grubby from being thumbed by fingers caked in oakum and tar. Scrawled on the pages in the accountant’s hand was The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife, a city comedy about the East India Company and its employees, written during Mountfort’s voyage. While he was writing the play, the idea had occurred to him that actors might stage it; now, in financial straits, Mountfort desperately needed the money he could get from selling it. Despite this, though, he evidently did not wish to go into the theater business, for he continued to sue for a return to his employment with the East India Company. The actors looked his play over and thought it warranted paying Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, for a license. When Herbert returned the play, the actors invited this playgoer, now playwright, to rewrite around the Master’s censorship. Mountfort revised his play and then left it in the hands of the company’s bookkeeper.

      Mountfort’s specific experience was unique, but his broader narrative—the narrative of a playgoer who translated his love of the theater into writing a play and attempting to have a professional company stage that play—was not. In 1635, shortly after graduating from Oxford, John Jones took his tragicomedy Adrasta to a professional company of players.² Jones believed deeply that the life of drama lay in action, and he was eager to share his play with the London playgoing public; it was not written (originally) for readers or staging at the university. The company rejected it—because, Jones suspected, his poetry was not quite good enough—but Jones, still enamored of the theater, made some revisions and published Adrasta.

      Gentleman-highwayman John Clavell had been out of prison for two years when he wrote a comedy for the King’s Men in 1630.³ Though he had written poetry—most importantly, the flattering poem to King Charles that resulted in his pardon—The Soddered Citizen was his first attempt at playwriting. Before his imprisonment, Clavell had often attended plays at the Blackfriars and so knew something of drama. The King’s Men staged his play, and while he never again wrote for them, he remained on good terms with the company and even befriended their regular playwright, Philip Massinger.

      Like Clavell, Barnabe Barnes could often be found in both the audience of the theaters and the inside of a prison.⁴ Celebrated (and ridiculed) as the most experimental sonneteer of the age, Barnes was fascinated with all things Italian, from Italian history to Italian literature to Italian poisons. Eight years after being convicted for attempted murder by means of mercury sublimate, Barnes—who had escaped jail and remained at liberty—penned a fantastic play of devils, Machiavellian politics, Catholicism, and murder